And you can be sure that defendants who have spent their hard-earned money will be near the bottom of the list
I'm not sure where court ordered payments go, but I'd surprised if they were at the bottom.
Indeed...
judgment creditor n. the winning plaintiff in a lawsuit to whom the court decides the defendant owes money. A judgment creditor can use various means to collect the judgment. The judgment is good for a specified number of years and then may be renewed by a filed request. If the defendant debtor files for bankruptcy, the judgment creditor will have priority (the right to share in assets) ahead of general creditors who are not secured by mortgages or deeds of trust and do not have judgments. However, if the bankrupt person has no assets, this becomes an empty advantage.
Hmmm...it looks like they come ahead of most creditors. Secured debts are first... bank mortgages, bond holders... then judgement creditors... then everyone else. That's not too bad really.
Agreed... the high res pack for Serious Sam is a delight.
Diablo II, Master of Orion II, Dungeon Keeper etc are all fine games that would be fine as they are with some updated resolution. 800x600 was a LONG time ago.
I think that anyone who thinks there is a single "odds" for people on the earth being hit by this satellite doesn't understand orbital mechanics.
Sort of like the odds for being bitten by a rattlesnake tomorrow. If you live in the arizona desert and work at the zoo the odds are quite a bit higher than if you are a lawyer in alaska.
Still an aggregate odds does exist as a single number. Divide all the people who will be bitten tomorrow by the world population... and you get a number.
What that number means exactly... that's harder to say. It does mean that we shouldn't worry much about it, unless we there is a justifiable reason to think we do.
Your brain is you more than anything else. If someone's brain forced them to do something, then their brain should be punished.
Why? If we accept that actions are a function of brain-state, then "Punishment" presumably works by altering the brain-state to one where it will in future decide the desired course of action.
If we can bring about the desired brain-state with a pill instead of 30 years of incarceration, why not skip the incarceration and take the pill instead.
In any case, prison has proven to be a very blunt, ineffective, and expensive tool to bring about desirable changes in peoples brain chemistry.
Ted Bundy might have been utterly insane, but we can't leave people like that free on the street.
Right. But putting him in a cage isn't working either.
Hopefully modern neuroscience will find ways to fix people like that.
Bingo.
The only problem is that once you can change somones personality directly at will... you can change someones personality directly at will.... there is potential for real evil there. If you thought designer babies were immoral... how about designer personalities applied to existing people, altering who they fundamentally are.
In any case... your right... we can't have criminals walking the streets...putting them in cages is barbaric and ineffective... but perhaps altering their personalities isn't ethical either, and puts us on a very slippery slope to very evil ends.
I mean... sexual orientation is brain-chemistry too. We could potentially alter it... or being enthusiastic about math... or social awkwardness... if we can change a sociopath, we can change regular people. Next centuries... "extreme makeover" might not just be new hair, clothes, and some plastic tits... you might get a few new personality traits, alter how you feel about exercise and diet... oh... and an unshakable loyalty to Nike, the shows sponsor.
How about a more realistic comparison between an internal SATA drive at around 50 MBps to a fast cable download of around 50 Mbps.
I have a 50Mbps broadband service, and to suggest that it is even in the same league as a local hard drive is complete nonsense.
Your hard drive actually delivers 50MB/s uninterrupted. For your internet service to deliver you 50Mbps they actually need the source to be able to send it to you at that rate reliably.
Even with 50Mbps, you tube still stutters and buffers on a bad day.... despite the content usually being less than 1Mbps.
Unless your remote hard drive is in your ISPs data center, the comparison is absurd. The internet will be slower, often much slower, and routinely inconsistent.
Then, the cable is only 8 times slower, and is fast enough for most tasks.
Even assuming it was simply 1/8th the speed. A file copy that takes 7.5 seconds locally... takes full minute to the cloud. If it takes 7.5 minutes locally... there goes an hour.
50Mbps... A 3.2GB Quantum fireball hard drive from 1996 does nearly 80Mbps. To get down to 50 we have to go back to when hard drives were measured in megabytes, Windows 3.11 was shiny, and most of us ran DOS and had a 386 or 486 CPU.
I gave it a go just for interest sake and I was pleasantly suprised even though I went in with extreme sketicism. Are all the criticism valid? To a certain degree but onlive achieves about 95% of the goal it claims to achieve and its no where near as bad as the haters claim.
But its nowhere near as good as running a local copy either.
The mouse lag to me was most noticeable when in the main starting screen with the game mode select but it dropped to barely noticable once I actually got into the main game (Played Just Cause 2 and Arkham Asylum). I am not sure if it would be playable for competitive online FPS like Call of Duty but for a single player 3rd person action game it was completely fine and way better then I thought it would be.
Input lag is killer. RTS and FPS titles simply do not cope well with it. Some titles and genres its much less of an issue.
As for compression, its actually not that noticeable once you are playing. If you stop and really pay attention you can notice some compression here and there but its not like you are playing via youtube. Again way better than I thought.
Yep, that's true enough. "Are playing the game, or examing the frame"? If you are immersed in the game its relatively easy to be satisfied by the lower resolution.
The real problem of onlive is more with their business model than with their tech (which I am sure will be completely fixed to 100% given a year or two).
No. Their technical problems relate to the speed of light through a wire. This will not be completely fixed within a year or two.
My kids were playing DDR on our new HTDV the other day, and couldn't get anywhere. We switched the TV into game mode which shaved off a few dozen milliseconds of latency on the display, and they were scoring perfects all over the place again.
There is simply no way they will be able to shave latency down to what you can get it running locally. You've added 2 stages of compression decompression to the loop, and the transit time from data-center to the local unit, x2 as any input has to go up that wire.
It's great for what it is, and for some titles, and genres, and with some hardware it will deliver an adequate, even excellent experience.
It will not replace local gaming ever. Full stop.
Gamers who can afford hardware to run games locally aren't going to be satisfied by it. Its not going to work on a plane, or a boat, or on dialup, or on an island, or on ADSL "lite" or for people with unreliable internet connections...
It might find a niche though. I don't have anything against them.
I'd be beyond mortified if we ever had to use a service like this to play a title... its ok as long as its just an option. I think that is the reason most of the haters really hate it... they lose any control at all. And if the company goes under or decides to pull the title (or even just loses rights to the title the way netflix just lost "Starz" content... then you have absolutely nothing.
Worse, the developers are salivating over this business model -- zero piracy, zero cracks, its the perfect DRM... the gamer never gets the game.
So gamers are (rightfully) terrified that they'll ram this model down our throats as the only model as soon as they possibly can.
This i think is the real source of the backlash against it.
If your daughter comes home with a well crafted bird house she made in wood shop do you mock her for not successfully mating two endangered species in it?
Do you tell her that without a baby Ivory-billed woodpecker bald eagle hybrid living inside she might as well have just taped the whole thing together?
I think you've missed the point "case modding" which is the skill that was on display here. This was a pretty ambitious case mod all things considered. Even if it wasn't an avian crossbreeding experiment.
I'm confused as to whether you're drastically underestimating the danger of a firearm or wildly overestimating the danger of a laser.
As I replied to the AC, I was significantly understating the danger of a firearm.
Getting shot in the leg is not equivalent to a burn from holding your leg perfectly still while someone points a laser at you.
The assumption is that the laser goes in the eye, not the leg.
You can not negate the danger of a firearm by closing your eyes or wearing protective glasses.
That's not really the point. The public doesn't generally walk around with their eyes closed or with protective goggles on so the the threat from a laser shouldn't be minimized that way.
These are high enough power to do INSTANT permanent damage to your eye at long range... so if your thinking "ow, that's bright, i should close my eyes... its way to too late".
Perhaps a more apt analogy would be a BB gun with a great range and fire rate, but extremely small and light projectiles. If they hit someone's eye they are going to do damage, and if you keep shooting something in exactly the same spot it'll do damage. Not a perfect analogy mind you, but a lot closer to the real danger presented here.
Yeah, that's better. Thanks.
Still I think I'd rather be at a football game with jerk firing a bb gun randomly accross the field at the other spectators than a laser.
BB guns might be understating though... you can't realistically take out the driver of a car with a bb gun, or blind a pilot... or wreck a satellite...
If you think getting shot in the arm or leg isn't direct lethal damage, then that's a sure sign that everything you know about firearms was learned from television.
Lol, well said. That's a fair comment... I should have specifically said non-lethal even non-life-threatening gunshot wound to the arm or leg.
You are absolutely right that, for example, opening a large artery could very rapidly and easily be fatal.
No. This guy is at most, plugging and unplugging connectors that were designed to not be plugged in the wrong socket.
Its a case mod. Nothing more nothing less. But as case mods go, its a pretty ambitious one, and well beyond the skill of most of the people here... probably including you.
This needs zero skill.
The devil is in the details.
This case mod element requires a fair bit of skill. Or did you think the motherboard tray in the average mini-ATX case has the space and screw hole mountings to simultaneously accommodate a PS3 and Xbox mainboard pre-drilled and ready to go? That the optical drives just slide right into a 5 1/4" drive bay and come with appropriate face plates? That the consoles come with all the ports for controllers, networking, usb devices, video outputs come on headers attached to standard full height PCI brackets.
And even in its complete state, he notes a number of remaining issues...
He needs to extend the xbox sync button to the outside of the case, as well as the disc eject buttons. In particular the ps3's touch screen buttons have proven difficult to extend. And he noted the cooling still needs improvement.
But hey "zero skill" right? You could do the whole project on your lunch break with a screw driver?
You need much more skill to fix a car engine
You need different skills. And you'll find plenty of articles about people modding engines on sites devoted to news for gear heads.
Nice hobby. Why it's on slashdot?
Good question. Does case modding belong on slashdot? That's the only question that's even sligtly relevant. Personally... I think it fits in with the theme here well enough.
Did you actually read the full article and see what was involved? It was a ton of work, and well beyond the skill of most of the people here. It was exactly what it claimed to be. An impressive case mod.
If you don't find case-modding interesting, fine, to each their own.
If you think case-modding itself isn't a subject worthy of slashdot, that's fine too... but I'd argue that it has a place here as news for nerds.
So.. you're saying someone who is building a $200 pc, intends to use it as a high-end gaming/cad/other-niche-use machine?
No, I'm saying they do more than browse the web. If you can't think of anything in between browsing the web and hard-core gamer plus autocad, that's not really my problem.
I cannot think of a low-end use that would be ill suited for linux.
There is a difference between being ill-suited for linux, and well suited for linux. Just because you can get by on linux doesn't make it the best tool for the job.
My wife likes intellivision games, so we bought the "intellivision lives!" emulator. You pop the disk in and it runs.
On linux, sure we can get it working, and I even did...I installed jzintv from the tarball copied the intellivision BIOS and ROM files from the CD to the appropriate folders, fiddled with some command line switches to get the screen and sound the way we wanted and then created some bash scripts to launch the particular roms my wife enjoys.
Did linux work? Sure it did. Would I say it was the best tool for the job? Hardly.
Now I enjoyed doing it, that's what makes me who I am, and that's why I have linux on a laptop for the family to use. But Windows would be simpler and easier, and if I didn't specifically enjoy fiddling with linux on it, it would make more sense to put windows (back) on it.
Just because you have the money, doesn't mean you _need_ to waste it.
In my opinion, building a computer from scratch for $200 is the waste. All that research and scrounging around and mail-in-rebates, and the time taken to find the parts and assemble them, install and OS, etc. What was the point? It makes sense when building a high performance gaming system... but a $200 box to do low-end things?
Face it, that's what someone does because someone LIKES doing it. Normal people who want a decent computer for $200 buy a used one on craiglist... this one took one minute of searching...
Dell Vostro Intel Core2 Duo - $200 Dell Vostro 220 Desktop (Tower Only)... excellent condition, Business Vista 64-bit just installed, complete with drivers and antivirus, activated! Intel Core2 Duo CPU E7300 2.66GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive. You provide monitor, keyboard & mouse, you're ready to go! Two (2) DVD Drives, one is DVD-ROM and the other is DVDRW so it's easy & fast to do copies, etc.
I can probably talk him down to between $150 and $180, no taxes... "for low-end use" it will be perfectly fine.
re consoles: To buy something more expensive
Xbox 360 starts at $175 Wii starts at $150 PS3 starts at $250 which is only a bit more, but you get a blu-ray player out of it too.
and less capable?
Why? Were they planning on running AutoCAD or some other niche use? I only suggested consoles in response to the argument that were just browsing the web and sending email with the unit attached to the TV. What "capabilities" are you looking for now?
Since when is "follow a youtube video tutorial" that you presumably have to locate yourself the definition of "no trouble at all"?
To me that sounds more like "I didn't work, so I had to go look for a solution..." worse the solution was involved enough that someone made a video tutorial out of it..."
She is happy. It works for her.
Lets see, it runs pretty mediocre and several features simply don't work. She's happy and it meets here expectations... thing is though... her expectations are pretty low. When she can accept without blinking that having to watch a video tutorial just to get it working poorly that's a pretty clear indicator of where her expectations are.
Furthermore she sounds pretty tech savvy to me though,... "normal people" tm? Not so much.
The main characters in all six Star Wars films are R2D2 and C3P0. Kasdan tried to get away from it in Empire Strikes Back, which is everyone's favorite, so it's understandable why this fact is so conveniently overlooked.
Neither had any real part in episode one. They were not the main characters. Its absurd on its face to suggest that they were.
And even in later episodes, they were not the main characters, they were the comic relief. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo were the main characters... they had conflict and character development. The two droids... not so much.
I love how everyone becomes an expert film critic when bashing Star Wars episodes 1-3.
Including you?
The fact of the matter is, if the prequels would have lived up to contemporary critical standards they would have felt out of place next to episodes 4-6.
They still feel out of place.
The same goofiness we hate about Jar-Jar Binks was central to C3P0. We just have fond childhood memories of C3P0 which blind us to how annoying he really was.
JarJar just stands out in the prequels as a focal point for what is wrong with them. JarJar as "C3P0 2.0" is just fine, albeit unfortunate. But the movies failings go far beyond the pointless annoyance of JarJar. C3P0 actually had some good lines.
I'm sure you would have been just ecstatic if Michael Bay made episodes 1-3. They would do everything 'right' and by doing so fail to actually hold all six movies together as a single cinematic experience.
I hate Michael Bay movies.
But Lucas wasn't trying to redefine what Star Wars was -- he was just finishing a project he started a long time ago.
Then make a good movie. eps 1 to 3 sucked.
You mentioned Batman... good example. The original with Keaton and Nicholson was perfectly fine.
While many people would have liked Batman Begin's style re-envisioning of the series.
Continuing it in the same style doesn't mean its going to be terrible though.
Lucas could have made eps1-3 in the style of the originals without making them suck.
Batman Returns was awful. But Batman II with Walken and DeVito was just fine. I'd have been fine with a Batman Begin's prequels... I'd have been fine with a Batman II style prequel... but we got Batman Returns... no... what we got was even worse.
Hayden Christensen may have been a wholly mediocre actor, but so was Mark Hamill. Wouldn't it have felt weird for 1-3 to have stellar acting/writing and then move on to the ridiculousness in 4-6? I say keep it ridiculous the whole way through, which is just what Lucas did.
Yes Hamill wasn't the best actor. But Christensen's problem wasn't his acting, it was his script and direction. It was Batman Returns not Batman II.
It didn't continue the sillyness... it was just bad.
I completely agree with this. The SW eps. 1-3 were clearly made for children.
Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlaying star systems is in dispute. Hoping to resolve the matter with a blockade of deadly battleships, the greedy Trade Federation has stopped all shipping to the small planet of Naboo.
Yep... way to engage the young'uns. The movie doesn't even have a main character.
My kids don't enjoy it at all, and if we throw it on they wander in and out paying attention to only the major fight scenes. These are kids who will watch The 10th Kingdom from start to finish in one sitting.
The problem with Star Wars I to III is that they are bad movies. Full stop. They don't satisfy anyone and they are chock full of bad decisions, bad acting, bad scripting, bad direction, they're just bad. And they are stuffed with CGI to the point of distraction.
And the CGI additions to the later episodes do nothing to make them better, they extend the movie and add nothing, except distraction. If they'd been in the original movie, they should have been cut out by a good editor.
And where do they go for help? Let me guess: you are the center of your own little linux universe??
Its not a bad thing, I am the center of one too... but remove yourself from the universe and one by one your family, friends, and neighbors will run into problems they can't fix, unless one of them happens to have the nerd-gene too. But "normal people" tm don't... to use linux they need someone like us in their sphere of friends.
Umm - my daughter uses I-Tunes on her Ubuntu machine. She's 17, and had no problem installing it and getting her ipod working.
Really? Just downloaded and installed right? Everything works perfect...
What works Apple Account login, Album Art Work Gathering, Album and Song view's, MP3's MP4's WMA's, visualization, equalizer, iTunes store, ping, genius
What does not iPhone etc.,cd's, Radio, Podcast, Preferences
What was not tested N/A
Additional Comments
doesnt respond repeatedly, but soon response. distnoted.exe every so often encounters a fatal problem but still runs itunes
The "what doesn't work" is pretty substantial... iphones "ETC"? preferences? Podcast? Yeah, that sounds terrific. And the additional comments to the effect that the program stops responding repeatedly, and reports application crash errors... yeah.
All followed by a page of comments complaining of all kinds of problems.
Linux is great at things its great at. Running windows applications is not one of those things. It ranges from usable to useful.
Good deal. Things are getting better, and your post is evidence of that.
But I'd still cringe if someone said "hi, I bought a new multi-function printer... now make it work with linux".
If you research first, and buy intelligently, sure... but to just wander into a Staples or Costco and come home with something and expect it to work... we're not there yet, your experience notwithstanding.
You are already looking at outliers, most people simply buy their computers rather than build them.
Outliers within outliers.
Even among the group of people that build their own computers, its still heavily skewed towards people who own windows. The number of people who are exclusively linux is -that- small. I'm a linux user myself, but I don't personally know anyone who is linux exlclusive.
Not to mention how many of those people who run windows actually use it more than just a web browser and email client?
Nice try. We're talking people who build computers from parts. They do more than browse the web.
But back on the subject of mouse and keyboard though, they are cheap as chips, and people can still use their tv as a display device if they wished.
If they are cheap as chips then include them in the budget. And as for the TV... you need an HDTV if you want to be able to read the screen... if you've got an HDTV... maybe you can afford more than $200 for a computer.
In any case, if you just want to browse the web, send email, and use a TV as a monitor... I'd by a console.
Are you seriously suggesting forcing developers to develop for multiple, independent platforms?
No he didn't suggest that at all. So the rest of your argument is irrelevant.
All he said was the console manufacturer shouldn't be allowed to pay a developer to prevent them from releasing on another console.
If the console developer doesn't wish to release on a particular platform that's entirely up to the developer. He just can't accept a bribe from the console manufacturer to help him to come to that decision.
An intolerant white christian state, with no gay marriage?
A smaller government. A government based on the founders' principles of minimalistic, well defined roles.
Sure that too. But that's a plank all platforms pay lip service to. Mostly its the white christian state with no gay marriage that makes them the butt of the jokes though.
You are assuming the former computer was running windows,
If you've got a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse... why yes I am assuming that they were running windows previously. Are you really suggesting that the odds are that I'm wrong? Lol.
some people have been using linux exclusively for well over a decade.
Sure. And some people might have found a working monitor keyboard and mouse in the company recycling room too. But we can leave all such statistical outliers aside don't you think? Most people with spare peripherals including a monitor, keyboard, and mouse had a computer running windows.
Slashdot Mirror
And you can be sure that defendants who have spent their hard-earned money will be near the bottom of the list
I'm not sure where court ordered payments go, but I'd surprised if they were at the bottom.
Indeed...
Hmmm...it looks like they come ahead of most creditors. Secured debts are first... bank mortgages, bond holders... then judgement creditors... then everyone else. That's not too bad really.
Agreed... the high res pack for Serious Sam is a delight.
Diablo II, Master of Orion II, Dungeon Keeper etc are all fine games that would be fine as they are with some updated resolution. 800x600 was a LONG time ago.
I think that anyone who thinks there is a single "odds" for people on the earth being hit by this satellite doesn't understand orbital mechanics.
Sort of like the odds for being bitten by a rattlesnake tomorrow. If you live in the arizona desert and work at the zoo the odds are quite a bit higher than if you are a lawyer in alaska.
Still an aggregate odds does exist as a single number. Divide all the people who will be bitten tomorrow by the world population... and you get a number.
What that number means exactly... that's harder to say. It does mean that we shouldn't worry much about it, unless we there is a justifiable reason to think we do.
Your brain is you more than anything else. If someone's brain forced them to do something, then their brain should be punished.
Why? If we accept that actions are a function of brain-state, then "Punishment" presumably works by altering the brain-state to one where it will in future decide the desired course of action.
If we can bring about the desired brain-state with a pill instead of 30 years of incarceration, why not skip the incarceration and take the pill instead.
In any case, prison has proven to be a very blunt, ineffective, and expensive tool to bring about desirable changes in peoples brain chemistry.
Ted Bundy might have been utterly insane, but we can't leave people like that free on the street.
Right. But putting him in a cage isn't working either.
Hopefully modern neuroscience will find ways to fix people like that.
Bingo.
The only problem is that once you can change somones personality directly at will... you can change someones personality directly at will.... there is potential for real evil there. If you thought designer babies were immoral... how about designer personalities applied to existing people, altering who they fundamentally are.
In any case... your right... we can't have criminals walking the streets...putting them in cages is barbaric and ineffective... but perhaps altering their personalities isn't ethical either, and puts us on a very slippery slope to very evil ends.
I mean... sexual orientation is brain-chemistry too. We could potentially alter it... or being enthusiastic about math... or social awkwardness... if we can change a sociopath, we can change regular people. Next centuries... "extreme makeover" might not just be new hair, clothes, and some plastic tits... you might get a few new personality traits, alter how you feel about exercise and diet... oh... and an unshakable loyalty to Nike, the shows sponsor.
How about a more realistic comparison between an internal SATA drive at around 50 MBps to a fast cable download of around 50 Mbps.
I have a 50Mbps broadband service, and to suggest that it is even in the same league as a local hard drive is complete nonsense.
Your hard drive actually delivers 50MB/s uninterrupted. For your internet service to deliver you 50Mbps they actually need the source to be able to send it to you at that rate reliably.
Even with 50Mbps, you tube still stutters and buffers on a bad day.... despite the content usually being less than 1Mbps.
Unless your remote hard drive is in your ISPs data center, the comparison is absurd. The internet will be slower, often much slower, and routinely inconsistent.
Then, the cable is only 8 times slower, and is fast enough for most tasks.
Even assuming it was simply 1/8th the speed. A file copy that takes 7.5 seconds locally... takes full minute to the cloud. If it takes 7.5 minutes locally... there goes an hour.
50Mbps... A 3.2GB Quantum fireball hard drive from 1996 does nearly 80Mbps. To get down to 50 we have to go back to when hard drives were measured in megabytes, Windows 3.11 was shiny, and most of us ran DOS and had a 386 or 486 CPU.
I gave it a go just for interest sake and I was pleasantly suprised even though I went in with extreme sketicism. Are all the criticism valid? To a certain degree but onlive achieves about 95% of the goal it claims to achieve and its no where near as bad as the haters claim.
But its nowhere near as good as running a local copy either.
The mouse lag to me was most noticeable when in the main starting screen with the game mode select but it dropped to barely noticable once I actually got into the main game (Played Just Cause 2 and Arkham Asylum). I am not sure if it would be playable for competitive online FPS like Call of Duty but for a single player 3rd person action game it was completely fine and way better then I thought it would be.
Input lag is killer. RTS and FPS titles simply do not cope well with it. Some titles and genres its much less of an issue.
As for compression, its actually not that noticeable once you are playing. If you stop and really pay attention you can notice some compression here and there but its not like you are playing via youtube. Again way better than I thought.
Yep, that's true enough. "Are playing the game, or examing the frame"? If you are immersed in the game its relatively easy to be satisfied by the lower resolution.
The real problem of onlive is more with their business model than with their tech (which I am sure will be completely fixed to 100% given a year or two).
No. Their technical problems relate to the speed of light through a wire. This will not be completely fixed within a year or two.
My kids were playing DDR on our new HTDV the other day, and couldn't get anywhere. We switched the TV into game mode which shaved off a few dozen milliseconds of latency on the display, and they were scoring perfects all over the place again.
There is simply no way they will be able to shave latency down to what you can get it running locally. You've added 2 stages of compression decompression to the loop, and the transit time from data-center to the local unit, x2 as any input has to go up that wire.
It's great for what it is, and for some titles, and genres, and with some hardware it will deliver an adequate, even excellent experience.
It will not replace local gaming ever. Full stop.
Gamers who can afford hardware to run games locally aren't going to be satisfied by it. Its not going to work on a plane, or a boat, or on dialup, or on an island, or on ADSL "lite" or for people with unreliable internet connections...
It might find a niche though. I don't have anything against them.
I'd be beyond mortified if we ever had to use a service like this to play a title... its ok as long as its just an option. I think that is the reason most of the haters really hate it... they lose any control at all. And if the company goes under or decides to pull the title (or even just loses rights to the title the way netflix just lost "Starz" content... then you have absolutely nothing.
Worse, the developers are salivating over this business model -- zero piracy, zero cracks, its the perfect DRM... the gamer never gets the game.
So gamers are (rightfully) terrified that they'll ram this model down our throats as the only model as soon as they possibly can.
This i think is the real source of the backlash against it.
If your daughter comes home with a well crafted bird house she made in wood shop do you mock her for not successfully mating two endangered species in it?
Do you tell her that without a baby Ivory-billed woodpecker bald eagle hybrid living inside she might as well have just taped the whole thing together?
I think you've missed the point "case modding" which is the skill that was on display here. This was a pretty ambitious case mod all things considered. Even if it wasn't an avian crossbreeding experiment.
I'm confused as to whether you're drastically underestimating the danger of a firearm or wildly overestimating the danger of a laser.
As I replied to the AC, I was significantly understating the danger of a firearm.
Getting shot in the leg is not equivalent to a burn from holding your leg perfectly still while someone points a laser at you.
The assumption is that the laser goes in the eye, not the leg.
You can not negate the danger of a firearm by closing your eyes or wearing protective glasses.
That's not really the point. The public doesn't generally walk around with their eyes closed or with protective goggles on so the the threat from a laser shouldn't be minimized that way.
These are high enough power to do INSTANT permanent damage to your eye at long range... so if your thinking "ow, that's bright, i should close my eyes... its way to too late".
Perhaps a more apt analogy would be a BB gun with a great range and fire rate, but extremely small and light projectiles. If they hit someone's eye they are going to do damage, and if you keep shooting something in exactly the same spot it'll do damage. Not a perfect analogy mind you, but a lot closer to the real danger presented here.
Yeah, that's better. Thanks.
Still I think I'd rather be at a football game with jerk firing a bb gun randomly accross the field at the other spectators than a laser.
BB guns might be understating though... you can't realistically take out the driver of a car with a bb gun, or blind a pilot... or wreck a satellite...
If you think getting shot in the arm or leg isn't direct lethal damage, then that's a sure sign that everything you know about firearms was learned from television.
Lol, well said. That's a fair comment... I should have specifically said non-lethal even non-life-threatening gunshot wound to the arm or leg.
You are absolutely right that, for example, opening a large artery could very rapidly and easily be fatal.
More like a machine gun that only shoots you in the arm or leg. That's would be ok to carry around right?
No. This guy is at most, plugging and unplugging connectors that were designed to not be plugged in the wrong socket.
Its a case mod. Nothing more nothing less. But as case mods go, its a pretty ambitious one, and well beyond the skill of most of the people here... probably including you.
This needs zero skill.
The devil is in the details.
This case mod element requires a fair bit of skill. Or did you think the motherboard tray in the average mini-ATX case has the space and screw hole mountings to simultaneously accommodate a PS3 and Xbox mainboard pre-drilled and ready to go? That the optical drives just slide right into a 5 1/4" drive bay and come with appropriate face plates? That the consoles come with all the ports for controllers, networking, usb devices, video outputs come on headers attached to standard full height PCI brackets.
And even in its complete state, he notes a number of remaining issues...
He needs to extend the xbox sync button to the outside of the case, as well as the disc eject buttons. In particular the ps3's touch screen buttons have proven difficult to extend. And he noted the cooling still needs improvement.
But hey "zero skill" right? You could do the whole project on your lunch break with a screw driver?
You need much more skill to fix a car engine
You need different skills. And you'll find plenty of articles about people modding engines on sites devoted to news for gear heads.
Nice hobby. Why it's on slashdot?
Good question. Does case modding belong on slashdot? That's the only question that's even sligtly relevant. Personally... I think it fits in with the theme here well enough.
Did you actually read the full article and see what was involved? It was a ton of work, and well beyond the skill of most of the people here. It was exactly what it claimed to be. An impressive case mod.
If you don't find case-modding interesting, fine, to each their own.
If you think case-modding itself isn't a subject worthy of slashdot, that's fine too... but I'd argue that it has a place here as news for nerds.
So.. you're saying someone who is building a $200 pc, intends to use it as a high-end gaming/cad/other-niche-use machine?
No, I'm saying they do more than browse the web. If you can't think of anything in between browsing the web and hard-core gamer plus autocad, that's not really my problem.
I cannot think of a low-end use that would be ill suited for linux.
There is a difference between being ill-suited for linux, and well suited for linux. Just because you can get by on linux doesn't make it the best tool for the job.
My wife likes intellivision games, so we bought the "intellivision lives!" emulator. You pop the disk in and it runs.
On linux, sure we can get it working, and I even did...I installed jzintv from the tarball copied the intellivision BIOS and ROM files from the CD to the appropriate folders, fiddled with some command line switches to get the screen and sound the way we wanted and then created some bash scripts to launch the particular roms my wife enjoys.
Did linux work? Sure it did. Would I say it was the best tool for the job? Hardly.
Now I enjoyed doing it, that's what makes me who I am, and that's why I have linux on a laptop for the family to use. But Windows would be simpler and easier, and if I didn't specifically enjoy fiddling with linux on it, it would make more sense to put windows (back) on it.
Just because you have the money, doesn't mean you _need_ to waste it.
In my opinion, building a computer from scratch for $200 is the waste. All that research and scrounging around and mail-in-rebates, and the time taken to find the parts and assemble them, install and OS, etc. What was the point? It makes sense when building a high performance gaming system... but a $200 box to do low-end things?
Face it, that's what someone does because someone LIKES doing it. Normal people who want a decent computer for $200 buy a used one on craiglist... this one took one minute of searching...
I can probably talk him down to between $150 and $180, no taxes... "for low-end use" it will be perfectly fine.
re consoles:
To buy something more expensive
Xbox 360 starts at $175
Wii starts at $150
PS3 starts at $250 which is only a bit more, but you get a blu-ray player out of it too.
and less capable?
Why? Were they planning on running AutoCAD or some other niche use? I only suggested consoles in response to the argument that were just browsing the web and sending email with the unit attached to the TV. What "capabilities" are you looking for now?
I've read it. It was also in the top 10 in the full article.
New receivers do A/V passthrough to TV via HDMI, and have inputs for RCA, Component, and HDMI.
I've got a fairly entry level onkyo receiver with like more hdmi inputs that i have a need for.
All my devices connect to the receiver and I have one HDMI cable from the receiver up to the TV.
DVD player, PVR, and PC are connected to receiver via hdmi. Wii via component/rca.
Since when is "follow a youtube video tutorial" that you presumably have to locate yourself the definition of "no trouble at all"?
To me that sounds more like "I didn't work, so I had to go look for a solution..." worse the solution was involved enough that someone made a video tutorial out of it..."
She is happy. It works for her.
Lets see, it runs pretty mediocre and several features simply don't work. She's happy and it meets here expectations... thing is though... her expectations are pretty low. When she can accept without blinking that having to watch a video tutorial just to get it working poorly that's a pretty clear indicator of where her expectations are.
Furthermore she sounds pretty tech savvy to me though, ... "normal people" tm? Not so much.
-sigh-
Batman II is Batman Returns and is fine.
I meant Batman and Robin as the turd sandwich.
Sorry for the confusion.
The main characters in all six Star Wars films are R2D2 and C3P0. Kasdan tried to get away from it in Empire Strikes Back, which is everyone's favorite, so it's understandable why this fact is so conveniently overlooked.
Neither had any real part in episode one. They were not the main characters. Its absurd on its face to suggest that they were.
And even in later episodes, they were not the main characters, they were the comic relief. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo were the main characters... they had conflict and character development. The two droids... not so much.
I love how everyone becomes an expert film critic when bashing Star Wars episodes 1-3.
Including you?
The fact of the matter is, if the prequels would have lived up to contemporary critical standards they would have felt out of place next to episodes 4-6.
They still feel out of place.
The same goofiness we hate about Jar-Jar Binks was central to C3P0. We just have fond childhood memories of C3P0 which blind us to how annoying he really was.
JarJar just stands out in the prequels as a focal point for what is wrong with them. JarJar as "C3P0 2.0" is just fine, albeit unfortunate. But the movies failings go far beyond the pointless annoyance of JarJar. C3P0 actually had some good lines.
I'm sure you would have been just ecstatic if Michael Bay made episodes 1-3. They would do everything 'right' and by doing so fail to actually hold all six movies together as a single cinematic experience.
I hate Michael Bay movies.
But Lucas wasn't trying to redefine what Star Wars was -- he was just finishing a project he started a long time ago.
Then make a good movie. eps 1 to 3 sucked.
You mentioned Batman... good example. The original with Keaton and Nicholson was perfectly fine.
While many people would have liked Batman Begin's style re-envisioning of the series.
Continuing it in the same style doesn't mean its going to be terrible though.
Lucas could have made eps1-3 in the style of the originals without making them suck.
Batman Returns was awful. But Batman II with Walken and DeVito was just fine. I'd have been fine with a Batman Begin's prequels... I'd have been fine with a Batman II style prequel... but we got Batman Returns... no... what we got was even worse.
Hayden Christensen may have been a wholly mediocre actor, but so was Mark Hamill. Wouldn't it have felt weird for 1-3 to have stellar acting/writing and then move on to the ridiculousness in 4-6? I say keep it ridiculous the whole way through, which is just what Lucas did.
Yes Hamill wasn't the best actor. But Christensen's problem wasn't his acting, it was his script and direction. It was Batman Returns not Batman II.
It didn't continue the sillyness... it was just bad.
I completely agree with this. The SW eps. 1-3 were clearly made for children.
Yep... way to engage the young'uns. The movie doesn't even have a main character.
My kids don't enjoy it at all, and if we throw it on they wander in and out paying attention to only the major fight scenes. These are kids who will watch The 10th Kingdom from start to finish in one sitting.
The problem with Star Wars I to III is that they are bad movies. Full stop. They don't satisfy anyone and they are chock full of bad decisions, bad acting, bad scripting, bad direction, they're just bad. And they are stuffed with CGI to the point of distraction.
And the CGI additions to the later episodes do nothing to make them better, they extend the movie and add nothing, except distraction. If they'd been in the original movie, they should have been cut out by a good editor.
F CowboyNeil does my typing.
?
And where do they go for help? Let me guess: you are the center of your own little linux universe??
Its not a bad thing, I am the center of one too... but remove yourself from the universe and one by one your family, friends, and neighbors will run into problems they can't fix, unless one of them happens to have the nerd-gene too. But "normal people" tm don't... to use linux they need someone like us in their sphere of friends.
Umm - my daughter uses I-Tunes on her Ubuntu machine. She's 17, and had no problem installing it and getting her ipod working.
Really? Just downloaded and installed right? Everything works perfect...
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=21302
The "what doesn't work" is pretty substantial... iphones "ETC"? preferences? Podcast? Yeah, that sounds terrific. And the additional comments to the effect that the program stops responding repeatedly, and reports application crash errors... yeah.
All followed by a page of comments complaining of all kinds of problems.
Linux is great at things its great at. Running windows applications is not one of those things. It ranges from usable to useful.
Good deal. Things are getting better, and your post is evidence of that.
But I'd still cringe if someone said "hi, I bought a new multi-function printer... now make it work with linux".
If you research first, and buy intelligently, sure... but to just wander into a Staples or Costco and come home with something and expect it to work... we're not there yet, your experience notwithstanding.
You are already looking at outliers, most people simply buy their computers rather than build them.
Outliers within outliers.
Even among the group of people that build their own computers, its still heavily skewed towards people who own windows. The number of people who are exclusively linux is -that- small. I'm a linux user myself, but I don't personally know anyone who is linux exlclusive.
Not to mention how many of those people who run windows actually use it more than just a web browser and email client?
Nice try. We're talking people who build computers from parts. They do more than browse the web.
But back on the subject of mouse and keyboard though, they are cheap as chips, and people can still use their tv as a display device if they wished.
If they are cheap as chips then include them in the budget. And as for the TV... you need an HDTV if you want to be able to read the screen... if you've got an HDTV... maybe you can afford more than $200 for a computer.
In any case, if you just want to browse the web, send email, and use a TV as a monitor... I'd by a console.
Are you seriously suggesting forcing developers to develop for multiple, independent platforms?
No he didn't suggest that at all. So the rest of your argument is irrelevant.
All he said was the console manufacturer shouldn't be allowed to pay a developer to prevent them from releasing on another console.
If the console developer doesn't wish to release on a particular platform that's entirely up to the developer. He just can't accept a bribe from the console manufacturer to help him to come to that decision.
Do you know what the TEA Party wants?
An intolerant white christian state, with no gay marriage?
A smaller government. A government based on the founders' principles of minimalistic, well defined roles.
Sure that too. But that's a plank all platforms pay lip service to. Mostly its the white christian state with no gay marriage that makes them the butt of the jokes though.
You are assuming the former computer was running windows,
If you've got a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse... why yes I am assuming that they were running windows previously. Are you really suggesting that the odds are that I'm wrong? Lol.
some people have been using linux exclusively for well over a decade.
Sure. And some people might have found a working monitor keyboard and mouse in the company recycling room too. But we can leave all such statistical outliers aside don't you think? Most people with spare peripherals including a monitor, keyboard, and mouse had a computer running windows.