I personally go for the huge screen and surround sound experience.
Who doesn't have surround sound in their home?
In fact I will say unequivically that the basic, relatively low end surround sound system I have in my entertainment room sounds drastically better than what I've heard at any theaters (which usually have such delicious features as "blown speaker rattling away"). Video wise I find the almost constant lack of focus in theaters (staffed by expert 16 year olds that would be rather off trying to score a boob feel), coupled with the fact that the projector physically bounces around (yeah a micro-number of theaters have digital projectors, but most have large physical contraptions that cause the projected image to bounce around by inches), highly irritating. While it's "big", the quality of the video is generally terrible.
Add to that some woman who keeps kicking on the back of your chair, the pack of teens intoxicated with gang power being loud and hoping for some lone wolf to confront them, and the important guy who has to receive cell phone calls (he might need to do an emergency phone meeterectomy). Oh, I shouldn't forget grossly overpriced food and drinks, long lines, and crowded little chairs. Wow, what an experience.
I would definitely rather stay home, or go to a friend's house, and the only draw of theaters nowadays is the artificial limit that it only plays there for the first X months.
(as a sidenote I have always thought "luxury theaters" could be a draw - theaters with actually good video and sound, a good seating arrangement, and with staff that actually enforce good behaviour [kicking out the asswipes]. I would happily pay significantly more for such a venue)
As a sidenote, I'd love to know where Mr. Hook gets an Authenticode code signing certificate for $20. In the real world I've seen prices like $400 / year, and there is an onerous organization validity check that transpires (not "a college student with $20")
but they have proven very useful for combining the document style of web apps with the power of embedded Win32 controls.
I meant to say they have proven very useful in intranet/corporate sites. Many firms have combined the benefits of web apps with the power of ActiveX controls to great effect.
Yeah, it sounds obvious, but I'm sure he's just shocked at how disturbingly easy it is to create malicious code using ActiveX.
ActiveX is little Win32 applications that can be embedded in container objects (such as IE, or a Delphi app, or a Word document, etc), exposing an interface for external manipulation by the container. Obviously whatever a Win32 application can do an ActiveX control can do, as an ActiveX control is simply a variation of the same. Anyone who is surprized by this is either stunningly naive, or brand new to computing - this was well known and well debated back in the latter half of the 90s. ActiveX controls have little use for the internet at large (except for things like Windows Update), but they have proven very useful for combining the document style of web apps with the power of embedded Win32 controls.
Of course Mr. Hook's feigned surprize is a little hard to take - so if the user has low enough settings, and then if the user explicitly chooses to install the control, the user's machine can be hijacked. How does this differ from a site saying "Download app1.exe and run it". My god, the user can download app1.exe and run it and it could format their machine!
I'm neither here nor there on the topic, and of course we should scientifically know as much as we can, and respond accordingly (not in some pathetic quest to turn the Earth into a static const, but rather to ensure that we're having a controlled impact). All I will say is that there are a lot of believers who will latch onto a cause like global warming with the slightest of pretense -- any reason to clutch a ban and decry the man is perfect.
The most remarkable thing to consider regarding these types of stories is the fact that, more often than not, the hackers are incidentally detected (e.g. they send an email saying "give me money or I go public!").
How many of these incidents happen with no one the wiser. Just guessing, but I'd wager at least 10 major silent exploits for every 1 publicized event. How many employees of Big Corporation are doing a ZIP of the company database onto a USB key "just in case", and how many servers are silently owned month after month.
Would that be the scientific study "The Day After Tomorrow" by the esteemed author Mr. Roland Emmerich. I believe he also penned the research tomes as "Independence Day" (about the threat mankind faces from satellite hacking aliens), as well as the well worn and oft debated theory vehicle "Stargate" (which presented evidence that Egyptian artifacts are actually courtesy of very unpleasant aliens. Aliens!).
The Earth has gone through quite a few ice ages and then reversals -- right now I believe we're in the reversion from a mini ice age. While humans do have a lot of impact on our planet, it is remarkable how we think that the Earth is a static const, when in reality it's a volatile dynamic variable.
Re:Extended Play Rocked. X-Play SUCKS!
on
G4 Drops TechTV Name
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh how much I agree. I'm not really a console gamer, but the casual entertaining way that he presented what was largely console games made for a very enjoyable watch, and when nothing better was on (most always) my wife and I would watch it. We can't stomach the new, hipper version.
A week or so back I commented on how much the show has gone downhill, and in return was scored -1 Flamebait for it -- apparently I offended the sensibilities of the sort of sad little nerd that thinks any "untouchable" girl is "H0t!". That Morgan is, and this is obviously subjective personal opinion, a paper-bagger, and she certainly wouldn't get attention in any food court across the land. Make her inaccessible, and thus a convenient substitute for real female companionship, and suddenly she's the hottest thing around to dungeon nerds across the land. Screensavers a couple of years back had a host who was entirely plain - she wasn't ugly but at a bar she'd be the cute girl's ugly friend - and she commented several times about how people need to stop sending proposals. Give me a break...
Yet JPEG2000 has been available in preliminary form, and finally in release form, for years. JPEG2000 includes a number of advances over traditionally JPEG, including a vastly superior compression scheme for some types of images.
So how many JPEG2000 images do you see day to day?
The reality is that it sees almost no adoption in the industry because JPEG is "good enough", and is such a prolific standard that people stick with it: They know that it'll be supported in every browser and application (hell I could read JPEGs on my Atari ST 20 years ago. It was a ridiculous slow process or extracting to a ST format first, watching the extraction percentage slowly click up on a tiny JPG, but it was there). 30% just isn't enough of an advantage to exist people to bother with the hassle.
No they aren't. There are a thousand other ways to get on the 'net annonymously, which is fine with me.
Yet strangely there is a growing problem of child porn surfers cruising neighbourhoods looking for open relays (which is _truly_ anonymous. There are few options as anonymous as wirelessly connecting to a network far from where you live. Most anonymity on the net is nothing but a myth). In Toronto the police happened upon a guy spanking it whlie his laptop with kiddy porn (gathered via a wireless connection he hijacked) sat in the passenger seat. Two weeks ago a seedy looking middle-aged fellow sat in his car in front of my house (I run a WAP, though it's as secure as they get) trying to do something - I doubt he was trying to download the latest CD. He took off when I stepped outside. If you can't see this as a problem then you are naive.
Spam is bad, and warezing can be arguably destructive in a white collar IP society, but I think it's ridiculous to mix child porn in with those -- it is a world more evil and destructive, and it's patrons truly are the scourge of our planet.
I WPA and MAC-filter my router not because I'm hoarding my bits, but because I'm not going to help the scum of the world get their fix. Given the child porn angle I consider it gross negligence for people to offer up anonymous internet access.
Uh, what are you willing to bet? I'll bet that he makes some laughable amount, unless it gets enough media attention (which it won't) that someone like GoldenPalace buys it to get mentioned in the news (they've been very effective doing that). No one wants to advertise on some morons head, and this "Advertise on Me" thing is so late 90s -- Astounding that people think this is new when this was all done extensively during the.COM boom.
15K of imaginary money - I find it astounding that this must be the 40th or so major Ebay story (from people selling livers to Eminem's childhood house to a city in California to a piece of toast with Jesus on it), each time with the bidding reaching unprecedented levels, and each time people repeat the current price as it is real money: It almost never is, instead being a line of bogus bidders. When Ebay gets a whiff of one of these BS auctions they start authenticating bidders, but before then it's just fantasty money.
Go create yourself a new account and bid $1,000,000 dollars.
So it is on the back of water vendors to supply water in a disaster situation? Shouldn't this be the domain of government? If you have a problem with vendors jacking up their prices (to be fair a lot of them probably went through very rough economic times for a period following) based upon the simple rules of supply and demand, then complain that the government trucks didn't show up with loads of water and undercut them out of business.
In any case it's hardly like people were dying of thirst - people wanted the luxury of immediate satiation of their thirst. Most of them went very little time at all without water, and it's only by our luxurious first world measures that someone can act as if they're on the cusp of death because they went a couple of hours without a bottle of water.
The home electronics market is enormously competitive -- if a company "pocketed the excess" they'd be out of business pretty quickly.
Of course that's presuming that "excess" is anything above production costs - even if it costs only $1 to make a product, if it cost $1 billion to research then you have to recoup that cost.
What a college/univ degree gets you is accomplishment. It means you went and did something based on objective(for the most part) criteria.
It would be fair for some people and some situations to say that a degree was pursued to avoid actually going out and "doing something" (i.e. getting a job, living in your own place, being an adult). While there are a tremendous number of people who worked incredibly hard for their degrees, there are a lot of people who coasted through in a four year party in an attempt to try to keep high school going. Actually those people using start off with a year or two of "liberal arts" to prolong it even further.
If someone went from high school into real work (e.g. a real respectable job), either as an employee or as an entrepreneur, I would certainly say that is "doing something" and showing tremendous initiative.
The "street smarts" team is largely staffed with real estate agents, so given the limited breadth of that team I'm really not expecting much from them.
Of course they could have taken candidates from the vast army of non-degree holding successful entrepreneurs, however that's a group of people that wouldn't be interested in doing Trump's thinly veiled 60-minute ego-featuring cross promotion show.
So true. I actually bought HL2 through Steam last night, and was suprized to see "Half Life - Source" and "Counterstrike - Source" in my game list. My obvious thought was that they had released the source, though of course in reality they had updated those games with the new engine (which is pretty cool, and proves that they had a pretty good architecture).
Re:G4, the MTV of tech
on
Inside TechTV/G4
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Saying that the programming stinks and you're not interested in watching is one thing, but when you talk about actively boycotting parties they are involved with you're legitimate turning consumer choice into mere thuggery -- they don't have programming that you don't like, therefore they shouldn't exist and you'll do your best to annihilate them. To make a lame parallel, you seem to subscribe to the Bin Laden philosophy.
Don't watch the show. If they really don't cater to anyone anymore (I personally don't watch it - I use to love the game show with that nerdy guy who looks sort of like Alton Brown, but the new version with the kinda scary looking woman [but with boobs!] is just terrible) then the rating monitors will measure accordingly and they'll change their programming or go off the air, and if there really is a market for truly geek TV then someone else will come in to fill the void.
If Gish were published by, say, Nintendo, gamers of the world and gaming magazines would be singing it's praises like there's no tomorrow.
This is taking it a little bit too far. I downloaded, installed and played some GISH, and my wife played a bit of it as well. While it has some neat gameplay, and the graphics are half decent (what's the deal with the sound though? Is it off by default? Neither my laptop or desktop had any sound from the game), it grew tiring extremely quickly - I have little motivation to continue in it, and after 43 minutes of the 90 minutes I'm pretty much done with it, as is my wife (who normally loves that style of game).
These guys and/or gals have done a tremendous job with few resources, but I think the opposite of what you're saying is true -- if this were published by a big company you wouldn't have given it a second look. As it is you overlook deficiencies because it's the little guy against the man.
While you're probably aware of grid computing from a perspective of "huge server farm at research organization X", I think the more practical use is corporations that often have 10s of thousands of extremely powerful workstations. These PCs are extraordinarily underused, and if there was some secure, reliable method of distribution processing across them (transaction calculations, actuarial processing, whatever) then that would be extremely valuable.
Interestingly a Russian trawler (actually a spy ship) purportedly did aim a laser at a Canadian military helicopter in 1997. This incident was pretty much brushed under the carpet (just as the recent findings regarding Chinese spying in Canada will undoubtedly be).
Slashdot Mirror
I personally go for the huge screen and surround sound experience.
Who doesn't have surround sound in their home?
In fact I will say unequivically that the basic, relatively low end surround sound system I have in my entertainment room sounds drastically better than what I've heard at any theaters (which usually have such delicious features as "blown speaker rattling away"). Video wise I find the almost constant lack of focus in theaters (staffed by expert 16 year olds that would be rather off trying to score a boob feel), coupled with the fact that the projector physically bounces around (yeah a micro-number of theaters have digital projectors, but most have large physical contraptions that cause the projected image to bounce around by inches), highly irritating. While it's "big", the quality of the video is generally terrible.
Add to that some woman who keeps kicking on the back of your chair, the pack of teens intoxicated with gang power being loud and hoping for some lone wolf to confront them, and the important guy who has to receive cell phone calls (he might need to do an emergency phone meeterectomy). Oh, I shouldn't forget grossly overpriced food and drinks, long lines, and crowded little chairs. Wow, what an experience.
I would definitely rather stay home, or go to a friend's house, and the only draw of theaters nowadays is the artificial limit that it only plays there for the first X months.
(as a sidenote I have always thought "luxury theaters" could be a draw - theaters with actually good video and sound, a good seating arrangement, and with staff that actually enforce good behaviour [kicking out the asswipes]. I would happily pay significantly more for such a venue)
As a sidenote, I'd love to know where Mr. Hook gets an Authenticode code signing certificate for $20. In the real world I've seen prices like $400 / year, and there is an onerous organization validity check that transpires (not "a college student with $20")
Bah.
but they have proven very useful for combining the document style of web apps with the power of embedded Win32 controls.
I meant to say they have proven very useful in intranet/corporate sites. Many firms have combined the benefits of web apps with the power of ActiveX controls to great effect.
Yeah, it sounds obvious, but I'm sure he's just shocked at how disturbingly easy it is to create malicious code using ActiveX.
ActiveX is little Win32 applications that can be embedded in container objects (such as IE, or a Delphi app, or a Word document, etc), exposing an interface for external manipulation by the container. Obviously whatever a Win32 application can do an ActiveX control can do, as an ActiveX control is simply a variation of the same. Anyone who is surprized by this is either stunningly naive, or brand new to computing - this was well known and well debated back in the latter half of the 90s. ActiveX controls have little use for the internet at large (except for things like Windows Update), but they have proven very useful for combining the document style of web apps with the power of embedded Win32 controls.
Of course Mr. Hook's feigned surprize is a little hard to take - so if the user has low enough settings, and then if the user explicitly chooses to install the control, the user's machine can be hijacked. How does this differ from a site saying "Download app1.exe and run it". My god, the user can download app1.exe and run it and it could format their machine!
I'm neither here nor there on the topic, and of course we should scientifically know as much as we can, and respond accordingly (not in some pathetic quest to turn the Earth into a static const, but rather to ensure that we're having a controlled impact). All I will say is that there are a lot of believers who will latch onto a cause like global warming with the slightest of pretense -- any reason to clutch a ban and decry the man is perfect.
The most remarkable thing to consider regarding these types of stories is the fact that, more often than not, the hackers are incidentally detected (e.g. they send an email saying "give me money or I go public!").
How many of these incidents happen with no one the wiser. Just guessing, but I'd wager at least 10 major silent exploits for every 1 publicized event. How many employees of Big Corporation are doing a ZIP of the company database onto a USB key "just in case", and how many servers are silently owned month after month.
How hard would it be to shield the tiny amount of electronics that would exist in a gun?
...there has been a good bit of discussion...
Would that be the scientific study "The Day After Tomorrow" by the esteemed author Mr. Roland Emmerich. I believe he also penned the research tomes as "Independence Day" (about the threat mankind faces from satellite hacking aliens), as well as the well worn and oft debated theory vehicle "Stargate" (which presented evidence that Egyptian artifacts are actually courtesy of very unpleasant aliens. Aliens!).
The Earth has gone through quite a few ice ages and then reversals -- right now I believe we're in the reversion from a mini ice age. While humans do have a lot of impact on our planet, it is remarkable how we think that the Earth is a static const, when in reality it's a volatile dynamic variable.
Oh how much I agree. I'm not really a console gamer, but the casual entertaining way that he presented what was largely console games made for a very enjoyable watch, and when nothing better was on (most always) my wife and I would watch it. We can't stomach the new, hipper version.
A week or so back I commented on how much the show has gone downhill, and in return was scored -1 Flamebait for it -- apparently I offended the sensibilities of the sort of sad little nerd that thinks any "untouchable" girl is "H0t!". That Morgan is, and this is obviously subjective personal opinion, a paper-bagger, and she certainly wouldn't get attention in any food court across the land. Make her inaccessible, and thus a convenient substitute for real female companionship, and suddenly she's the hottest thing around to dungeon nerds across the land. Screensavers a couple of years back had a host who was entirely plain - she wasn't ugly but at a bar she'd be the cute girl's ugly friend - and she commented several times about how people need to stop sending proposals. Give me a break...
Who'd want to...
Yet JPEG2000 has been available in preliminary form, and finally in release form, for years. JPEG2000 includes a number of advances over traditionally JPEG, including a vastly superior compression scheme for some types of images.
So how many JPEG2000 images do you see day to day?
The reality is that it sees almost no adoption in the industry because JPEG is "good enough", and is such a prolific standard that people stick with it: They know that it'll be supported in every browser and application (hell I could read JPEGs on my Atari ST 20 years ago. It was a ridiculous slow process or extracting to a ST format first, watching the extraction percentage slowly click up on a tiny JPG, but it was there). 30% just isn't enough of an advantage to exist people to bother with the hassle.
No they aren't. There are a thousand other ways to get on the 'net annonymously, which is fine with me.
Yet strangely there is a growing problem of child porn surfers cruising neighbourhoods looking for open relays (which is _truly_ anonymous. There are few options as anonymous as wirelessly connecting to a network far from where you live. Most anonymity on the net is nothing but a myth). In Toronto the police happened upon a guy spanking it whlie his laptop with kiddy porn (gathered via a wireless connection he hijacked) sat in the passenger seat. Two weeks ago a seedy looking middle-aged fellow sat in his car in front of my house (I run a WAP, though it's as secure as they get) trying to do something - I doubt he was trying to download the latest CD. He took off when I stepped outside. If you can't see this as a problem then you are naive.
Spam is bad, and warezing can be arguably destructive in a white collar IP society, but I think it's ridiculous to mix child porn in with those -- it is a world more evil and destructive, and it's patrons truly are the scourge of our planet.
I WPA and MAC-filter my router not because I'm hoarding my bits, but because I'm not going to help the scum of the world get their fix. Given the child porn angle I consider it gross negligence for people to offer up anonymous internet access.
No, I'll bet he makes a fortune.
.COM boom.
Uh, what are you willing to bet? I'll bet that he makes some laughable amount, unless it gets enough media attention (which it won't) that someone like GoldenPalace buys it to get mentioned in the news (they've been very effective doing that). No one wants to advertise on some morons head, and this "Advertise on Me" thing is so late 90s -- Astounding that people think this is new when this was all done extensively during the
15K of imaginary money - I find it astounding that this must be the 40th or so major Ebay story (from people selling livers to Eminem's childhood house to a city in California to a piece of toast with Jesus on it), each time with the bidding reaching unprecedented levels, and each time people repeat the current price as it is real money: It almost never is, instead being a line of bogus bidders. When Ebay gets a whiff of one of these BS auctions they start authenticating bidders, but before then it's just fantasty money.
Go create yourself a new account and bid $1,000,000 dollars.
So it is on the back of water vendors to supply water in a disaster situation? Shouldn't this be the domain of government? If you have a problem with vendors jacking up their prices (to be fair a lot of them probably went through very rough economic times for a period following) based upon the simple rules of supply and demand, then complain that the government trucks didn't show up with loads of water and undercut them out of business.
In any case it's hardly like people were dying of thirst - people wanted the luxury of immediate satiation of their thirst. Most of them went very little time at all without water, and it's only by our luxurious first world measures that someone can act as if they're on the cusp of death because they went a couple of hours without a bottle of water.
The home electronics market is enormously competitive -- if a company "pocketed the excess" they'd be out of business pretty quickly.
Of course that's presuming that "excess" is anything above production costs - even if it costs only $1 to make a product, if it cost $1 billion to research then you have to recoup that cost.
What a college/univ degree gets you is accomplishment. It means you went and did something based on objective(for the most part) criteria.
It would be fair for some people and some situations to say that a degree was pursued to avoid actually going out and "doing something" (i.e. getting a job, living in your own place, being an adult). While there are a tremendous number of people who worked incredibly hard for their degrees, there are a lot of people who coasted through in a four year party in an attempt to try to keep high school going. Actually those people using start off with a year or two of "liberal arts" to prolong it even further.
If someone went from high school into real work (e.g. a real respectable job), either as an employee or as an entrepreneur, I would certainly say that is "doing something" and showing tremendous initiative.
The "street smarts" team is largely staffed with real estate agents, so given the limited breadth of that team I'm really not expecting much from them.
Of course they could have taken candidates from the vast army of non-degree holding successful entrepreneurs, however that's a group of people that wouldn't be interested in doing Trump's thinly veiled 60-minute ego-featuring cross promotion show.
So true. I actually bought HL2 through Steam last night, and was suprized to see "Half Life - Source" and "Counterstrike - Source" in my game list. My obvious thought was that they had released the source, though of course in reality they had updated those games with the new engine (which is pretty cool, and proves that they had a pretty good architecture).
Saying that the programming stinks and you're not interested in watching is one thing, but when you talk about actively boycotting parties they are involved with you're legitimate turning consumer choice into mere thuggery -- they don't have programming that you don't like, therefore they shouldn't exist and you'll do your best to annihilate them. To make a lame parallel, you seem to subscribe to the Bin Laden philosophy.
Don't watch the show. If they really don't cater to anyone anymore (I personally don't watch it - I use to love the game show with that nerdy guy who looks sort of like Alton Brown, but the new version with the kinda scary looking woman [but with boobs!] is just terrible) then the rating monitors will measure accordingly and they'll change their programming or go off the air, and if there really is a market for truly geek TV then someone else will come in to fill the void.
Whoops, I was actually talking about Wik in that post. Still haven't tried Gish.
If Gish were published by, say, Nintendo, gamers of the world and gaming magazines would be singing it's praises like there's no tomorrow.
This is taking it a little bit too far. I downloaded, installed and played some GISH, and my wife played a bit of it as well. While it has some neat gameplay, and the graphics are half decent (what's the deal with the sound though? Is it off by default? Neither my laptop or desktop had any sound from the game), it grew tiring extremely quickly - I have little motivation to continue in it, and after 43 minutes of the 90 minutes I'm pretty much done with it, as is my wife (who normally loves that style of game).
These guys and/or gals have done a tremendous job with few resources, but I think the opposite of what you're saying is true -- if this were published by a big company you wouldn't have given it a second look. As it is you overlook deficiencies because it's the little guy against the man.
While you're probably aware of grid computing from a perspective of "huge server farm at research organization X", I think the more practical use is corporations that often have 10s of thousands of extremely powerful workstations. These PCs are extraordinarily underused, and if there was some secure, reliable method of distribution processing across them (transaction calculations, actuarial processing, whatever) then that would be extremely valuable.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not, but both the US and Canadian pilots were affected by the exposure.
Interestingly a Russian trawler (actually a spy ship) purportedly did aim a laser at a Canadian military helicopter in 1997. This incident was pretty much brushed under the carpet (just as the recent findings regarding Chinese spying in Canada will undoubtedly be).