Mac Mini computer. output DVI if I use the VGA cable, with a vga-dvi converter I get 1380x12?? the normal widescreen setup If I use a DVI to HDMI adaptor so i should get a pure HD picture the tv downgrades to 1220x10966 or some weird ass size and since it's not a normal resolution for the display the TV hums slightly and text becomes unreadable.
If I use the cheap older cable I get a better picture than with the fancy new cable? something isn't right with that. I know it's not a pure HD source but it shouldn't hurt the end user in such a way.
Not to be mean but this isn't so much a cable issue as it is a user issue. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to set whatever output resolution you desire, even over HDMI. FWIW the video portion of HDMI is identical to DVI-D.
LCDs, even those that are HDTVs are fixed pixel displays, meaning they have one resolution they can display and only one resolution they can display. While they have scaler hardware to convert various resolutions to that one resolution they're actually capable of you will ALWAYS get the best picture quality if you set your output resolution to match identically with your displays "native resolution"... if I were a betting person I would put money on your display being 1366x768 as that's a popular 720p LCD native res. while it may not be sexy for PC output matching the resolutions properly will get you the best quality.
Jon Stewart isn't any better or worse than Dateline.
Dateline is a newsy show designed to appeal to emotion, not logic.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is a newsy show designed to appeal to a liberally-oriented laugh track, not logic.
The difference is that The Daily Show doesn't hide what they are... Dateline masquerades as a "real" news broadcast dedicated to delivering facts over entertainment when that's not the case... IMO that makes all the difference in the world. I have no problem with entertainment/news shows but they shouldn't be pretending that they're something they're not.
I became an Xbox Live subscriber in 2004, since then I have seen a small hand full of scheduled outages for upgrades which were planed on non-peak hours and announced well in advance... I have also seen a few unplanned outages none of which lasted more than a few hours and the total number of which I can count on 1 hand.
Whatever happened on the 22nd was substantial and unlike anything the XBL service has seen before... and it came at a very bad time considering that week saw probably a 10-20% boost in membership all at once combined with most of the support staff on vacation.
it was a "perfect storm" so to speak and hardly typical of the XBL service.
Don't get me wrong, I've been quite aggravated with the inability to reliably login for more than a few minutes at a time, especially considering it happened during a week were my plans were basically to kick back and relax with my favorite game. But at the same time I'm not going to troll around claiming that XBL is a piece of junk that never works... because that's not even close to the case.
Maybe I'm not understanding this correctly... but doesn't the RIAA want people to listen to these songs on the radio so they go out and buy the cd?
It doesn't make sense to me either. I'm thinking that they either A. Expect most of the customers get their music from MTV anyway, or B. radio stations will pony up and everything will be the same as it is now + more cash for the RIAA.
Personally I'm hoping the Radio Stations retaliate by blowing off the mass produced RIAA garbage and going with lesser known indy artists instead.
And all three brands have lockout mechanisms to keep the little guy off the platform. Imagine an independent game developer who has a PC-based prototype of a game that allows four players holding gamepads to play at once. It works great with TV output, but I am not convinced that most potential customers know how to connect a PC's video card to a TV. So on which platform should this game be published?
Download XNA Express for free, tweak the game to run on Xbox 360 hardware, and either hock it to a publisher to front the necessary QA and clean up for XBLA distribution or run it in the next game design competition where MS will take care of that for you. You could also purchase a basic Wii dev kit for $2000 (or if your cheap, pirate some GC dev tools and run your code on a hacked console) and hock your game to Nintendo's upcoming WiiWare service.
There are opportunities for "the little guys" to get published on home consoles. I'd say the barrier for entry today is probably the lowest it's been since the Atari days. You might not be competing with the Halos and Orange Boxes of the world but there's certainly a good home for the "little guys" on XBLA, WiiWare, and PSN...
We'll I haven't played any of HL2 so I don't know exactly how "well crafted" the story telling experience is (FWIW I do plan on making orange box on the 360 my next gaming purchase) but both Bioshock and The Darkness offered worlds where you were free to explore (more so in TD than BS). Both games also had very well crafted story telling IMO.
The worlds weren't as expansive as say Oblivion on GTA but you were still mostly free to go around and do as you please.
I'm the same way... I had a $100 gift card to Best Buy... and did nothing with it for nearly 6 months because there wasn't a damn thing in the store that I wanted to buy.
I eventually spent it when my house got hit with lightning and I needed to buy a new router.
I've listening/viewing quite a few pod casts though. the only DVD media I buy these days are video games and the occasional Anime. TV, Movies and Music I crave new and interesting content but there's NOTHING out there that even remotely piques my interest... it's quite sad really.
Though I'm sure my apathy towards these mediums is getting put on a chart somewhere that says I'm not buying because I'm "stealing" instead. Even if the *AA realizes that they're not really losing as much money towards piracy as they say they are it's in their best interests in parading those lines. Congress will just keep giving them more and more power to bully the consumers.
If you give the console gamers the option of a keyboard/mouse that doesn't mean you're FORCING them to use it... I could somewhat understand why MS didn't want keyboard and mouse on the Xbox 1, but at this point in the game there's no reason they can't open up that kind of support for 3rd parties should they so desire to offer the option.
I had a keyboard and mouse on my Dreamcast back in the Day and Playing Quake III, UT, and Outtrigger was nice. Not to mention great games like Rez also supported the mouse and were much much easier to play using that instead of an analog stick.
As for backbreaking... Well maybe a console FPS with keyboard and mouse would be a good excuse to buy a Lapboard.
The IT Manager. Because of a skills shortage most of them are Know-It-Alls who are desperate to hold on to their phony-balony job. They are trying to learn the job faster than those around them so no one finds out the truth (they probably have a book called 'Computers' on their desk) and they manage to create a process mess by ignoring good practice and established procedures so that they can be the one the invented the 'new' system.
They are naturally terrified of the 'Twentysomething Whizzkid', who has forgotten more than they will every know, but they speak the same language as the 'Entitled' CEO, so because he understands them, he assumes they know what they're talking about - but it's definitely a case of ass-u-me.
...it...it's like you work here! How is that possible? I was fairly certain that I was the only sane one.
up in NH during icy/snowy weather they will set most traffic lights at an intersection to flashing yellow for the higher speed traffic directions and flashing reds for the lower speed traffic directions.
This allows the higher speed traffic to just go through the intersection with caution and without fully stopping since attempting to stop on ice + intersections can lead to quite a few accidents.
Most of the traffic lights around here run on sensors rather than timers anyway since there are so few cars on the road.
I looked into MythTV as well, it certainly a great system and I wouldn't mind it for myself though I think the level of expertise required to use and configure it are above that of the person I'm giving this to. SageTV on the other hand is comparable to TiVo in terms of ease of use.
As for Linux in general...
I've already made my new-years resolution to get Ubuntu up and running on one of my laptops, and I've made the decision to go XP to Linux as my upgrade path for my other computers... over the last year or so I've been slowly weening myself off of Windows exclusive apps so when I'm ready to ditch XP I wont have to learn a whole suite of new applications as well. At this point the only non Linux apps I still use are Photoshop and Premiere... and while I'm anxious to try Cinelara for video editing, the GIMP is a rather weak replacement for Photoshop IMO. I've also got a Zune (I only bought it recently, and only because it was dirt cheap) so I'll need to figure out how I can use that with Linux as well since in it's stock configuration it seems mostly useless without the accompanying windows app to feed it files and settings.
I considered it but after looking at the details and weighing the differences there were a few determining factors
I already own a SageTV Windows License
Some of my hardware is not Linux compatible
I have no experience with Linux beyond popping in an Ubuntu Live CD and saying "this is neat"
The cost of a Linux SageTV License + new compatible hardware is considerably more than a Windows license, and this is a project that needs to be done and working before Christmas since I'll be gifting it. So while I might otherwise use it as a good opportunity to get my feet wet with Linux I don't have the luxury of time to learn the ropes.
What's to stop someone from fooling the monitoring software into thinking that you never use the OS... hows that for data?
Personally I want to know where to sign up for this... I'm building a SageTV box and really couldn't care less if they monitor the usage of that thing.
While I don't AGREE with this reasoning it's probably the main reason why we let these "criminals for life" back into society.
The Jails are so overcrowded that most in prison get to go free long before their term is fully served to make room for fresh criminals.... Hence we're letting a lot of people go back out into society that we know or feel probably shouldn't and hence lists of sex offender and denying these people voting rights.
IMO this of course is related to larger issues of imprisoning non-dangerous "criminals"
Personally I've always felt that Prison should only be a place for those who pose a physical threat to others, beyond that prison turns non-violent criminals into violent criminals, it drains the tax dollars and it pushes violent criminals back out into society simply because they've been in prison for a while and kept their nose clean while there.
No matter how you "classify" it I see it this way: Demos have saved me hundred of dollars if not thousands over the last decade in games that I would have wasted money buying, and at the same time allowed me to discover new games that I otherwise wouldn't have paid any mind to.
As a console gamer demos have never been "free" for me and IMO they're well worth the cost of a magazine or XBL subscription to get because of what they provide in aiding my purchase choices.
I couldn't care less if they're an "advertisement", they're f*cking useful, and worth spending a little on to save a whole lot more down the road.
FWIW I also purchased the BMW Films DVD ADVERTISEMENT because I enjoyed watching it. It's one thing to stand by your convictions, it's another to have convictions that stand in the way of your own enjoyment or benefit for no good reason.
Forget giving it away... why change the specs to suit MS? If they really want their OS on the platform they would be well served to streamline it enough to fit and run properly. Heck the Xbox consoles at their core run a highly customized version of WinNT and they only take up a few MB why do they need 2GB for the OLPC?
Is it really that "simple"? Demo's are more than just advertisements, they're the equivalent of a software test drive:
Spend 15 minutes with the Game for free and determine if it's worth spending $60 to play more
Would you consider going to a car dealership and taking a car for a test drive "advertising". I'm not talking about the sales pitch before and after the drive, I'm not talking about what brought you to the dealership in the first place but the actual test drive... How is a demo any different than that?
Nevermind the fact that playing a demo is such a good tool in the purchase decision process that console gamers last generation (and even this generation) are more than willing to buy magazines with bonus discs for the privilege.
Xbox Live Silver Accounts Now Wait a Week for Demos
Why Not:
Xbox Live Gold Accounts Now Get Demos a Week Early
Everyone keeps taking about them eroding the Silver experience instead of making Gold worth while, aside from the fact that this is the way XBL has worked for over a year now and nothing about the delivery schedule has changed they're actually adding a feature to the Silver accounts in that they now have the ability to see the Gold content they don't yet have access to where before they could not (but still had to wait for it)
If the person who wrote the title actually knew what they were talking about it would read:
Xbox Live Silver Accounts Now Get to See What They've Been Missing
As much as I'd like to see them implement some new features for gold like group chat, a clan system, Marketplace discounts or some other perk, I think the the fact that Gold subscribers getting things EARLY as a perk being twisted into pessimism is rather ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
LCDs, even those that are HDTVs are fixed pixel displays, meaning they have one resolution they can display and only one resolution they can display. While they have scaler hardware to convert various resolutions to that one resolution they're actually capable of you will ALWAYS get the best picture quality if you set your output resolution to match identically with your displays "native resolution"... if I were a betting person I would put money on your display being 1366x768 as that's a popular 720p LCD native res. while it may not be sexy for PC output matching the resolutions properly will get you the best quality.
I became an Xbox Live subscriber in 2004, since then I have seen a small hand full of scheduled outages for upgrades which were planed on non-peak hours and announced well in advance... I have also seen a few unplanned outages none of which lasted more than a few hours and the total number of which I can count on 1 hand.
Whatever happened on the 22nd was substantial and unlike anything the XBL service has seen before... and it came at a very bad time considering that week saw probably a 10-20% boost in membership all at once combined with most of the support staff on vacation.
it was a "perfect storm" so to speak and hardly typical of the XBL service.
Don't get me wrong, I've been quite aggravated with the inability to reliably login for more than a few minutes at a time, especially considering it happened during a week were my plans were basically to kick back and relax with my favorite game. But at the same time I'm not going to troll around claiming that XBL is a piece of junk that never works... because that's not even close to the case.
Personally I'm hoping the Radio Stations retaliate by blowing off the mass produced RIAA garbage and going with lesser known indy artists instead.
There are opportunities for "the little guys" to get published on home consoles. I'd say the barrier for entry today is probably the lowest it's been since the Atari days. You might not be competing with the Halos and Orange Boxes of the world but there's certainly a good home for the "little guys" on XBLA, WiiWare, and PSN...
Or you could go all High Fidelity and order them autobiographically.
We'll I haven't played any of HL2 so I don't know exactly how "well crafted" the story telling experience is (FWIW I do plan on making orange box on the 360 my next gaming purchase) but both Bioshock and The Darkness offered worlds where you were free to explore (more so in TD than BS). Both games also had very well crafted story telling IMO.
The worlds weren't as expansive as say Oblivion on GTA but you were still mostly free to go around and do as you please.
I'm the same way... I had a $100 gift card to Best Buy... and did nothing with it for nearly 6 months because there wasn't a damn thing in the store that I wanted to buy.
I eventually spent it when my house got hit with lightning and I needed to buy a new router.
I've listening/viewing quite a few pod casts though. the only DVD media I buy these days are video games and the occasional Anime. TV, Movies and Music I crave new and interesting content but there's NOTHING out there that even remotely piques my interest... it's quite sad really.
Though I'm sure my apathy towards these mediums is getting put on a chart somewhere that says I'm not buying because I'm "stealing" instead. Even if the *AA realizes that they're not really losing as much money towards piracy as they say they are it's in their best interests in parading those lines. Congress will just keep giving them more and more power to bully the consumers.
If you give the console gamers the option of a keyboard/mouse that doesn't mean you're FORCING them to use it... I could somewhat understand why MS didn't want keyboard and mouse on the Xbox 1, but at this point in the game there's no reason they can't open up that kind of support for 3rd parties should they so desire to offer the option.
I had a keyboard and mouse on my Dreamcast back in the Day and Playing Quake III, UT, and Outtrigger was nice. Not to mention great games like Rez also supported the mouse and were much much easier to play using that instead of an analog stick.
As for backbreaking... Well maybe a console FPS with keyboard and mouse would be a good excuse to buy a Lapboard.
up in NH during icy/snowy weather they will set most traffic lights at an intersection to flashing yellow for the higher speed traffic directions and flashing reds for the lower speed traffic directions.
This allows the higher speed traffic to just go through the intersection with caution and without fully stopping since attempting to stop on ice + intersections can lead to quite a few accidents.
Most of the traffic lights around here run on sensors rather than timers anyway since there are so few cars on the road.
yeah I was actually planning on going XP Home... but I figured
Free Vista > $$$ XP Home
I looked into MythTV as well, it certainly a great system and I wouldn't mind it for myself though I think the level of expertise required to use and configure it are above that of the person I'm giving this to. SageTV on the other hand is comparable to TiVo in terms of ease of use.
As for Linux in general...
I've already made my new-years resolution to get Ubuntu up and running on one of my laptops, and I've made the decision to go XP to Linux as my upgrade path for my other computers... over the last year or so I've been slowly weening myself off of Windows exclusive apps so when I'm ready to ditch XP I wont have to learn a whole suite of new applications as well. At this point the only non Linux apps I still use are Photoshop and Premiere... and while I'm anxious to try Cinelara for video editing, the GIMP is a rather weak replacement for Photoshop IMO. I've also got a Zune (I only bought it recently, and only because it was dirt cheap) so I'll need to figure out how I can use that with Linux as well since in it's stock configuration it seems mostly useless without the accompanying windows app to feed it files and settings.
- I already own a SageTV Windows License
- Some of my hardware is not Linux compatible
- I have no experience with Linux beyond popping in an Ubuntu Live CD and saying "this is neat"
The cost of a Linux SageTV License + new compatible hardware is considerably more than a Windows license, and this is a project that needs to be done and working before Christmas since I'll be gifting it. So while I might otherwise use it as a good opportunity to get my feet wet with Linux I don't have the luxury of time to learn the ropes.What's to stop someone from fooling the monitoring software into thinking that you never use the OS... hows that for data?
Personally I want to know where to sign up for this... I'm building a SageTV box and really couldn't care less if they monitor the usage of that thing.
While I don't AGREE with this reasoning it's probably the main reason why we let these "criminals for life" back into society.
The Jails are so overcrowded that most in prison get to go free long before their term is fully served to make room for fresh criminals.... Hence we're letting a lot of people go back out into society that we know or feel probably shouldn't and hence lists of sex offender and denying these people voting rights.
IMO this of course is related to larger issues of imprisoning non-dangerous "criminals"
Personally I've always felt that Prison should only be a place for those who pose a physical threat to others, beyond that prison turns non-violent criminals into violent criminals, it drains the tax dollars and it pushes violent criminals back out into society simply because they've been in prison for a while and kept their nose clean while there.
No matter how you "classify" it I see it this way: Demos have saved me hundred of dollars if not thousands over the last decade in games that I would have wasted money buying, and at the same time allowed me to discover new games that I otherwise wouldn't have paid any mind to.
As a console gamer demos have never been "free" for me and IMO they're well worth the cost of a magazine or XBL subscription to get because of what they provide in aiding my purchase choices.
I couldn't care less if they're an "advertisement", they're f*cking useful, and worth spending a little on to save a whole lot more down the road.
FWIW I also purchased the BMW Films DVD ADVERTISEMENT because I enjoyed watching it. It's one thing to stand by your convictions, it's another to have convictions that stand in the way of your own enjoyment or benefit for no good reason.
Forget giving it away... why change the specs to suit MS? If they really want their OS on the platform they would be well served to streamline it enough to fit and run properly. Heck the Xbox consoles at their core run a highly customized version of WinNT and they only take up a few MB why do they need 2GB for the OLPC?
Rise of the Robots Highest Scoring Robot Fighting game EVAR!
Is it really that "simple"? Demo's are more than just advertisements, they're the equivalent of a software test drive:
Spend 15 minutes with the Game for free and determine if it's worth spending $60 to play more
Would you consider going to a car dealership and taking a car for a test drive "advertising". I'm not talking about the sales pitch before and after the drive, I'm not talking about what brought you to the dealership in the first place but the actual test drive... How is a demo any different than that?
Nevermind the fact that playing a demo is such a good tool in the purchase decision process that console gamers last generation (and even this generation) are more than willing to buy magazines with bonus discs for the privilege.
The Title: Why Not: Everyone keeps taking about them eroding the Silver experience instead of making Gold worth while, aside from the fact that this is the way XBL has worked for over a year now and nothing about the delivery schedule has changed they're actually adding a feature to the Silver accounts in that they now have the ability to see the Gold content they don't yet have access to where before they could not (but still had to wait for it)
If the person who wrote the title actually knew what they were talking about it would read: As much as I'd like to see them implement some new features for gold like group chat, a clan system, Marketplace discounts or some other perk, I think the the fact that Gold subscribers getting things EARLY as a perk being twisted into pessimism is rather ridiculous.