Season 1 was heart stopping from first to last. The battles and pressures were relentless. The show matched the beat of its percussive sound track. Recently, that has not been the case.
...volkswagons full of backup tapes is that? Does someone have a VWDU (VW-Data Units) to Football Fields conversion charts? Also, are we talking about European football where they kick a ball with the foot, or US Football where they play with a foot shaped ball?
Getting your stuff RIGHT with Verizon is very hard. Billing problems, account setting issues other hassles are painful. Once you've got the service you wanted and you're actually paying the right amount for it, however, it is fantastic in terms of reliability and pretty good in terms of clarity.
FWIW I use them for cell phone, family cell phones, and have two EVDO PC cards for DSL-esque cellular networking.
Right now, getting that tracking information would require a subpoena -- and probably a warrant specifying each person's records. A bank, other the other hand, must report by default all transactions of a certain kind -- and nearly all transactions are easily accessed through well defined court "controlled" (lol) mechanisms.
Even more important than the income taxation issues, are the money transfer ones.
When money changes hands, banks and other institutions must report on both sides of the transaction. In game, at present, that doesn't happen. In could transfer in-game assets to someone as payment. In simplistic sense, I could hand "dirty" cash to someone and they could pay me in "game" assets. When I sell those assets, I now have "clean" money. The the cash could then be paid in small quantities to individuals to transfer smaller sets of funds back to the main player as in-game assets.
You could complicate that and hide it behind a few more cutouts, but that's the essential way to do money laundering like this. Of course, it could also be done as a massive number of people getting cash (say, $200 each) to buy in game assets then each transfer those assets to a counterpart in a similar pool of people at the far end, who sell the assets and now have the cash. They in turn buy other assets and repeat the transaction in reverse to a different member of the original pool and you close the circle. The more 'steps' it takes in the process, the harder to track.
You can (and people do) do the same thing in real life but the assets themselves either don't exist (which can be ultimately caught) or else are expensive and cumbersome enough to make the friction expensive. In virtual worlds it can be scripted and kept purposely obscured by a random seeming level of interaction among a large volume of players.
If these economies are going to be getting "real" then the controls on them will have to as well.
...I turned on the feature Kam recommends in XP SP2 -- took a bit to find it, as I had to dl a monitor definition for my laptop first -- and set at 134% (something like 120dpi) it works nearly perfectly on my laptop. The only application I've seen that doesn't handle it well is Trillian -- and graphically that thing is a pain in the ass. Firefox doesn't adjust its font size, but looks fine. I think it has its own setting that I just haven't remembered where to find.
Interesting. I wonder, if that will also change the size of the window title bars, buttons, and other non-font windows objects. What good would a big font be inside a small button or title bar?
Where is the RF geek who is going to figure out exactly how much extra power you'd need to but through that jamming at say, 200 feet. Increasing the power of the transmitter through some simple mod, or soldering on an antenna connector and using something from a 1970's movie about CB's and trucks seems like the clear call of the day!
...sad, however, that I would be forced to use a Mac to achieve it. I admit to being one of the few people on the planet who just don't care for the Mac. I own two -- one a fairly recent model running OS X, and side by side with a roughly similar powered PC I just didn't enjoy the Mac.
There are some things Vista could have that would really draw me in. Sadly, I can't seem to find out if any of these are part of the product or not. In posting this, I'm hoping someone can either answer or point me to an answer for some of the questions.
Number one on my Windows Vista wish list is that they virtualize the screen more.
What I want is actually very simple. I want to tell Windows - in one place - that my screen resolution is not 72dpi, but is in fact 125dpi. Once that is accomplished, all Windows elements should be scaled to that result.
For any application which does not specify drawing size, but rather specifies pixels - the new AERO graphics engine should do a simple calculation "X pixels * (125 / 72) = Y pixels" and draw it as Y. For fonts and other "vector" based drawing objects, this should be even easier as the curve calculations are already based on this kind of math.
If this is done properly, an 8pt font will take up the same physical area on a high resolution monitor as it does on a low resolution monitor. What's more, it will fit properly in buttons because the number of pixels on the button have been properly sized and should match.
Some people may WANT that optimized screen real estate. That's easily handled. They just need to set the DPI setting on back to 72, and their ultra-sharp tiny little fonts will be right back again. The only thing that could suffer - in theory - is looking at pictures. If something is supposed to be 10 pixels, it ends up being 17.36 for me. Rounding is where you get the "fuzzy" aspect.
Why does this matter? Right now, I'm looking at a 19" monitor which is optimized for 1280 by 1024 pixel resolution. The laptop is more extreme. It's a 17" monitor that is 1920 by 1080. Making some simple assumptions that the pixels are square and aligned uniformly (which they are not, actually) the two monitors come out to about 86 and 125 pixels per inch respectively.
LCD screens are not like the bulky old "tube" based screens. The pixels aren't projected onto a phosphor screen; they are actual hardware - like little light bulbs. If you decrease the display resolution, you're getting less crisp representation at each point than you would at the optimize resolution because the dots themselves cannot change size. They must therefore be approximated.
Where this becomes a problem is that many aspects of the Windows screen are designed to be a set number of pixels in height or width. The unit of measure is in pixels, not inches. This includes fonts, title bars, buttons, icons, and all kinds of other things. Much of the time, Windows doesn't know how many of those pixels fit on a linear inch of screen space on my screen. What people don't realize is that the old standard has been to assume about 72dpi for screen resolution. That means on my laptop, with nearly twice that resolution, things tend to be on half the ideal size.
Right now, we use solar power which has been biologically turned into chemical energy, used to power the growth of at least one, and probably several life cycles, then deposited as waste product from the end of life and digestion of micro organisms and finally stored in the ground for a really long time.
It seems to me, if we can get half as clever as the natural biology in the first place, we should be able to skip a few of those steps. Since there has to be some energy loss at each step, we should have some hope of catching up. Of course, there is the disadvantage of not having millions of years worth of solar energy compressed into each unit of chemical energy, but that's the way it goes.
They don't innovate EVERYTHING -- most things they just piss in to change the recipe enough to add to their value. They do innovate though -- they've understood how to people at their desktops work better than anyone else for a very long time. They've also innovated in terms of taking product leverage for license revenue higher than anyone in history. It pisses many of us off on a daily basis, but they have taken it to a new art form.
They are neither all evil nor all good -- they're too big for their own good. They're bogged down in their own size, and they're desperate to keep up a revenue stream that's unsustainable in the long term.
It is neither brave nor new. It is the same old tyranny of wealthy cowards relying on fear mongering for personal and corporate gain.
Want to be really scared? Go re-read Huxley's book and realize that the world he describes would be quite welcomed by a majority in many countries today.
"Brave New World" has lost its shock factor, and "1984" isn't nearly paranoid or intrusive enough.
...as "formalized business practice". It absolutely has some value. As does support contract availability, and advanced technology.
Again, as I said the value and reality of each of those is measured by the buyer. For some, support contracts and formal businesses hold no value. For some, the so called "advanced technology" represents vendor lock in. It is all about perspective and need.
How much you give up depends on your needs of course. It still leaves plenty of competitive space for commercial products however. Is support, higher end functionality, and formalized business practice worth paying 40-60% more for? In many cases it will be. It remains up to the vendor to make the case. Is their higher end functionality really "higher end"? Is their support good enough to justify it's cost? Is that corporation surrounding your purchase adding value?
Open Source is just another kind of competitor. Commercial software vendors want to keep Open Source software as a low-end option only, and avoid it being considered competitive at the high end. Since they can't change what the OSS community does, their only choice is to continue to innovate at a faster pace that can only be supported by all that money. Sounds good to me.
Ah, capitalism remains safe from the invading threat of commie open source once again. My faith is restored.
I have Verizon's EV-DO broadband for my laptop. For $60/mo I have 'unlimited' access that in most places is about comparable to average home DSL service. It sounds expensive, but if you consider that I travel -- take off hotel access fees, airport access fees, starbucks/borders/other hotspot fees -- or the hassle of war driving -- and it starts looking very good.
I use it several days a week. It still has downsides - like all cheap service it suffers from "Gravity Well" syndrome. Inbound data is free, fast, and cheap. Output data is difficult, slow, and expensive.
My point is, I'm already using the cell networks for more data than voice. A lot more. I could (if I wanted) make voip calls over the cell networks but why? It's just as cheap to do it by cell phone "out of band".
What I really really wish for -- what would be WAY better -- is if telcos and wireless telcos would make use of DUNDi lookups. That would allow those of us with VOIP phones to receive calls which never transit the public networks. The cell carrier would check the DUNDi service and see that when dialing my number they could bypass the public network and just connect with a voip call directly.
Most don't do this now. Even though it would save them money on cross-connection (after all, they have to connect to the PSTN as well) they're more afraid of being bypassed themselves then of spending the extra money.
As a result, I have to pay a monthly fee essentially for the address routing which is my PSTN telephone number.
..as we alternate year over year with using Sulfur in odd numbered years and Baking Soda in the even number years. This would also enhance the general SMELL of the place, keeping it fresh and preventing food odors from mixing on a global basis.
Nothing we have any science to support suggests that the Earth is facing danger within the next million years. The people on it, however, could be in danger from such things. The Earth itself, however, is not sentient and thus does not care. We are just the latest dominant species to make a mess of the place and for all that the mess is remarkably large, we are a small and recent footnote overall. This fairly short period of what we consider reasonable weather won't last any more than any other narrow range of climate has lasted. Meteors will come, solar flares will come, things will change. Earth will still be here.
The marketplace. The reason for x86 compatibility is that consumers don't want to trade in old software. Even OS/2 had a dos box (called the Penalty Box by those who tried to use it). x86 compatibility held back 32 bit computing for a decade.
Postini isn't perfect, but it's good. It blocks something like 99% of the spam. Best of all for a small shop like mine with just a few mailboxes, the constant barrage of attempted deliveries each day never get on that network pipe I'm paying for. They don't busy my server with oddball filtering schemas or neural network comparisons (which is one technique I tried that was effective but processor intensive). Everything is very peaceful now my servers.
For example, one thing MAN seems to have in greater degree than almost any other creature is an ability to be flexible in many fronts. Humans, for example, may have been more aggressive. They may have been more flexible in terms of diet. They may are clearly flexible in their mating choices -- it seems not even other species are safe.
Neanderthal may have been really great at getting along with each other and keeping house but too passive or not curious enough to survive against the more aggressive and curious humans.
There are all kinds of things at play, and brain size alone doesn't cover enough ground.
The thing about nukular bombs is, well, one quintillion or five -- it no longer really matters. On the hugeness scale, once you past that first quintillion you're pretty much off the charts into the "really fsking huge" end of the spectrum. It's like calling someone a complete fscking idiot. Really, once you get past fscking idiot, the "complete" part doesn't add much does it? I don't know very many partial idiots, and no partial fscking idiots. Anyway, back to really fscking huge bombs -- that one bomb pretty much ruins all the need to measure any bigger.
....and lets face it, the population of the world has grown substantially since the 18th century, and hiring enough pirates to equal the per capita ratio of pirates to non-pirates in an attempt to resolve global warning would be very very costly.... we can just use some of those old, useless nukes and blow the shit out of a magma cap on some unnecessary hunk of rock out in the Pacific ocean. Just blowing the crap out of the cap on one of those volcanoes should do the trick. Maybe at a rate of one volcano per year we can consume all the fuel we like and even burn all our trash! Hell, toss in an extra couple of lava flows per year and we can go back to aerosol deodorants!
Slashdot Mirror
Season 1 was heart stopping from first to last. The battles and pressures were relentless. The show matched the beat of its percussive sound track. Recently, that has not been the case.
...volkswagons full of backup tapes is that? Does someone have a VWDU (VW-Data Units) to Football Fields conversion charts? Also, are we talking about European football where they kick a ball with the foot, or US Football where they play with a foot shaped ball?
Getting your stuff RIGHT with Verizon is very hard. Billing problems, account setting issues other hassles are painful. Once you've got the service you wanted and you're actually paying the right amount for it, however, it is fantastic in terms of reliability and pretty good in terms of clarity.
FWIW I use them for cell phone, family cell phones, and have two EVDO PC cards for DSL-esque cellular networking.
I'm using firefox 2 & adblocker. I haven't seen an ad in months.
Right now, getting that tracking information would require a subpoena -- and probably a warrant specifying each person's records. A bank, other the other hand, must report by default all transactions of a certain kind -- and nearly all transactions are easily accessed through well defined court "controlled" (lol) mechanisms.
Even more important than the income taxation issues, are the money transfer ones.
When money changes hands, banks and other institutions must report on both sides of the transaction. In game, at present, that doesn't happen. In could transfer in-game assets to someone as payment. In simplistic sense, I could hand "dirty" cash to someone and they could pay me in "game" assets. When I sell those assets, I now have "clean" money. The the cash could then be paid in small quantities to individuals to transfer smaller sets of funds back to the main player as in-game assets.
You could complicate that and hide it behind a few more cutouts, but that's the essential way to do money laundering like this. Of course, it could also be done as a massive number of people getting cash (say, $200 each) to buy in game assets then each transfer those assets to a counterpart in a similar pool of people at the far end, who sell the assets and now have the cash. They in turn buy other assets and repeat the transaction in reverse to a different member of the original pool and you close the circle. The more 'steps' it takes in the process, the harder to track.
You can (and people do) do the same thing in real life but the assets themselves either don't exist (which can be ultimately caught) or else are expensive and cumbersome enough to make the friction expensive. In virtual worlds it can be scripted and kept purposely obscured by a random seeming level of interaction among a large volume of players.
If these economies are going to be getting "real" then the controls on them will have to as well.
...I turned on the feature Kam recommends in XP SP2 -- took a bit to find it, as I had to dl a monitor definition for my laptop first -- and set at 134% (something like 120dpi) it works nearly perfectly on my laptop. The only application I've seen that doesn't handle it well is Trillian -- and graphically that thing is a pain in the ass. Firefox doesn't adjust its font size, but looks fine. I think it has its own setting that I just haven't remembered where to find.
Here's the information according the one of the developers.
0 2/dpi-scaling-in-windows-vista.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/kamvedbrat/archive/2006/12/
Interesting. I wonder, if that will also change the size of the window title bars, buttons, and other non-font windows objects. What good would a big font be inside a small button or title bar?
Where is the RF geek who is going to figure out exactly how much extra power you'd need to but through that jamming at say, 200 feet. Increasing the power of the transmitter through some simple mod, or soldering on an antenna connector and using something from a 1970's movie about CB's and trucks seems like the clear call of the day!
Surely someone here can do the math...
Guess that makes me fairly odd.
There are some things Vista could have that would really draw me in. Sadly, I can't seem to find out if any of these are part of the product or not. In posting this, I'm hoping someone can either answer or point me to an answer for some of the questions.
Number one on my Windows Vista wish list is that they virtualize the screen more.
What I want is actually very simple. I want to tell Windows - in one place - that my screen resolution is not 72dpi, but is in fact 125dpi. Once that is accomplished, all Windows elements should be scaled to that result.
For any application which does not specify drawing size, but rather specifies pixels - the new AERO graphics engine should do a simple calculation "X pixels * (125 / 72) = Y pixels" and draw it as Y. For fonts and other "vector" based drawing objects, this should be even easier as the curve calculations are already based on this kind of math.
If this is done properly, an 8pt font will take up the same physical area on a high resolution monitor as it does on a low resolution monitor. What's more, it will fit properly in buttons because the number of pixels on the button have been properly sized and should match.
Some people may WANT that optimized screen real estate. That's easily handled. They just need to set the DPI setting on back to 72, and their ultra-sharp tiny little fonts will be right back again. The only thing that could suffer - in theory - is looking at pictures. If something is supposed to be 10 pixels, it ends up being 17.36 for me. Rounding is where you get the "fuzzy" aspect.
Why does this matter? Right now, I'm looking at a 19" monitor which is optimized for 1280 by 1024 pixel resolution. The laptop is more extreme. It's a 17" monitor that is 1920 by 1080. Making some simple assumptions that the pixels are square and aligned uniformly (which they are not, actually) the two monitors come out to about 86 and 125 pixels per inch respectively.
LCD screens are not like the bulky old "tube" based screens. The pixels aren't projected onto a phosphor screen; they are actual hardware - like little light bulbs. If you decrease the display resolution, you're getting less crisp representation at each point than you would at the optimize resolution because the dots themselves cannot change size. They must therefore be approximated.
Where this becomes a problem is that many aspects of the Windows screen are designed to be a set number of pixels in height or width. The unit of measure is in pixels, not inches. This includes fonts, title bars, buttons, icons, and all kinds of other things. Much of the time, Windows doesn't know how many of those pixels fit on a linear inch of screen space on my screen. What people don't realize is that the old standard has been to assume about 72dpi for screen resolution. That means on my laptop, with nearly twice that resolution, things tend to be on half the ideal size.
Right now, we use solar power which has been biologically turned into chemical energy, used to power the growth of at least one, and probably several life cycles, then deposited as waste product from the end of life and digestion of micro organisms and finally stored in the ground for a really long time.
It seems to me, if we can get half as clever as the natural biology in the first place, we should be able to skip a few of those steps. Since there has to be some energy loss at each step, we should have some hope of catching up. Of course, there is the disadvantage of not having millions of years worth of solar energy compressed into each unit of chemical energy, but that's the way it goes.
They don't innovate EVERYTHING -- most things they just piss in to change the recipe enough to add to their value. They do innovate though -- they've understood how to people at their desktops work better than anyone else for a very long time. They've also innovated in terms of taking product leverage for license revenue higher than anyone in history. It pisses many of us off on a daily basis, but they have taken it to a new art form.
They are neither all evil nor all good -- they're too big for their own good. They're bogged down in their own size, and they're desperate to keep up a revenue stream that's unsustainable in the long term.
It is neither brave nor new. It is the same old tyranny of wealthy cowards relying on fear mongering for personal and corporate gain.
Want to be really scared? Go re-read Huxley's book and realize that the world he describes would be quite welcomed by a majority in many countries today.
"Brave New World" has lost its shock factor, and "1984" isn't nearly paranoid or intrusive enough.
...as "formalized business practice". It absolutely has some value. As does support contract availability, and advanced technology.
Again, as I said the value and reality of each of those is measured by the buyer. For some, support contracts and formal businesses hold no value. For some, the so called "advanced technology" represents vendor lock in. It is all about perspective and need.
FSM bless the free market system.
...for that 40-60% you give up something.
How much you give up depends on your needs of course. It still leaves plenty of competitive space for commercial products however. Is support, higher end functionality, and formalized business practice worth paying 40-60% more for? In many cases it will be. It remains up to the vendor to make the case. Is their higher end functionality really "higher end"? Is their support good enough to justify it's cost? Is that corporation surrounding your purchase adding value?
Open Source is just another kind of competitor. Commercial software vendors want to keep Open Source software as a low-end option only, and avoid it being considered competitive at the high end. Since they can't change what the OSS community does, their only choice is to continue to innovate at a faster pace that can only be supported by all that money. Sounds good to me.
Ah, capitalism remains safe from the invading threat of commie open source once again. My faith is restored.
I have Verizon's EV-DO broadband for my laptop. For $60/mo I have 'unlimited' access that in most places is about comparable to average home DSL service. It sounds expensive, but if you consider that I travel -- take off hotel access fees, airport access fees, starbucks/borders/other hotspot fees -- or the hassle of war driving -- and it starts looking very good.
I use it several days a week. It still has downsides - like all cheap service it suffers from "Gravity Well" syndrome. Inbound data is free, fast, and cheap. Output data is difficult, slow, and expensive.
My point is, I'm already using the cell networks for more data than voice. A lot more. I could (if I wanted) make voip calls over the cell networks but why? It's just as cheap to do it by cell phone "out of band".
What I really really wish for -- what would be WAY better -- is if telcos and wireless telcos would make use of DUNDi lookups. That would allow those of us with VOIP phones to receive calls which never transit the public networks. The cell carrier would check the DUNDi service and see that when dialing my number they could bypass the public network and just connect with a voip call directly.
Most don't do this now. Even though it would save them money on cross-connection (after all, they have to connect to the PSTN as well) they're more afraid of being bypassed themselves then of spending the extra money.
As a result, I have to pay a monthly fee essentially for the address routing which is my PSTN telephone number.
..as we alternate year over year with using Sulfur in odd numbered years and Baking Soda in the even number years. This would also enhance the general SMELL of the place, keeping it fresh and preventing food odors from mixing on a global basis.
Nothing we have any science to support suggests that the Earth is facing danger within the next million years. The people on it, however, could be in danger from such things. The Earth itself, however, is not sentient and thus does not care. We are just the latest dominant species to make a mess of the place and for all that the mess is remarkably large, we are a small and recent footnote overall. This fairly short period of what we consider reasonable weather won't last any more than any other narrow range of climate has lasted. Meteors will come, solar flares will come, things will change. Earth will still be here.
The marketplace. The reason for x86 compatibility is that consumers don't want to trade in old software. Even OS/2 had a dos box (called the Penalty Box by those who tried to use it). x86 compatibility held back 32 bit computing for a decade.
Postini isn't perfect, but it's good. It blocks something like 99% of the spam. Best of all for a small shop like mine with just a few mailboxes, the constant barrage of attempted deliveries each day never get on that network pipe I'm paying for. They don't busy my server with oddball filtering schemas or neural network comparisons (which is one technique I tried that was effective but processor intensive). Everything is very peaceful now my servers.
For example, one thing MAN seems to have in greater degree than almost any other creature is an ability to be flexible in many fronts. Humans, for example, may have been more aggressive. They may have been more flexible in terms of diet. They may are clearly flexible in their mating choices -- it seems not even other species are safe.
Neanderthal may have been really great at getting along with each other and keeping house but too passive or not curious enough to survive against the more aggressive and curious humans.
There are all kinds of things at play, and brain size alone doesn't cover enough ground.
The thing about nukular bombs is, well, one quintillion or five -- it no longer really matters. On the hugeness scale, once you past that first quintillion you're pretty much off the charts into the "really fsking huge" end of the spectrum. It's like calling someone a complete fscking idiot. Really, once you get past fscking idiot, the "complete" part doesn't add much does it? I don't know very many partial idiots, and no partial fscking idiots. Anyway, back to really fscking huge bombs -- that one bomb pretty much ruins all the need to measure any bigger.
....and lets face it, the population of the world has grown substantially since the 18th century, and hiring enough pirates to equal the per capita ratio of pirates to non-pirates in an attempt to resolve global warning would be very very costly.... we can just use some of those old, useless nukes and blow the shit out of a magma cap on some unnecessary hunk of rock out in the Pacific ocean. Just blowing the crap out of the cap on one of those volcanoes should do the trick. Maybe at a rate of one volcano per year we can consume all the fuel we like and even burn all our trash! Hell, toss in an extra couple of lava flows per year and we can go back to aerosol deodorants!