unless I'm mistaken he wasn't on a P2P it was simply an open folder on the schools private network...
In your analogy he didn't show up to some party he simply stayed at home and left his front door open.
This sort of thing starts bringing into question the definition of digital trespassing. Just because it's good common practice to lock down your shares (just like locking down your front door or your car) doesn't necessarily mean that you're distributing the data in there, or even intended to distribute the data.
Lets put this in physical terms... if I left my front door unlocked with a CD sitting on a table inside the door and someone came into my house, duplicated the cd and left would I be responsible for that? What if they scanned a book or took a picture of an art-print? The person had to trespass onto my property to get the file. How is that any different on a LAN? if someone has to access your server without your permission to copy the file why should I be responsible when it's the other person breaking the law? What if I leave my door open because I've lost my keys? What if I leave my share open because I'm not savvy enough to password protect it. Maybe I feel safe from that kind of danger in my neighborhood maybe I feel safe from that kind of danger on my LAN.
AFAIK there is no law that states I need to offer protection from theft for my copy righten material nor did anyone enter into a legal contract with the **AA to provide that kind of protection.
I don't know much about the history of unions nor do I know what kind of tacts they may or may not use on a large scale. I do know that my father was a union carpenter in Boston for many years and he spoke highly of it, and I do know that I currently work in a union job shop that makes aircraft parts (roughly 450 employees).
I myself am not a union worker, I'm an engineer/software developer. There are probably 60 people total at our company that are office workers in sales/engineering/management that are not union, only the shop floor workers are.
Some of the negative things I've seen the union do:
-Block the lay-off/firing of dead weight employees that have statistically cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars due to simply being able to perform their job like 90% of the other workers in the shop. I've also seen them bring legal retribution to the company when they fired them anyway and forced them to bring the employee back.
-I've seen them hold meetings encouraging (borderline ordering) union workers to vote for X candidate in local and national elections
-When the shop floor falls behind in production and decides to re-open Saturday to make up for it (which can happen for weeks at a time across a few months) union official demand that X% of office workers work on Saturdays as well regardless of whether there is work for them to do, and despite the fact that while most shop floor workers are getting paid time and a half office workers are salary and don't get paid so much as a dime extra for their time. Saturday work days are optional for shop floor workers and typically there is an overabundance of volunteers suggesting that they don't have a problem coming in for the extra cash.
-I've seen union officials keep the company from switching to a more suitable insurance plan that not only would offer more coverage but be slightly cheaper (the insurance company was phasing out the old plan and making a good offer on the new one to entice people to switch) simply because the old plan better suited them despite the fact that the new plan was better suited for a vast majority of the other workers in the shop.
Some of the negative things I've seen the union do:
-fight to keep bonus plans reasonable and generally increasing on a year-to-year basis
-fight for higher overall wages of the union workers (which are actually lower then our non-union sister plants)
On a whole most of the office workers don't seem to have a problem with anyone but the union reps (for forcing Saturday labor etc.), yet I constantly catch bits of conversations from the shop floor workers who seem to constantly carry an "us vs them" mentality against anyone who works in the office.
Also we're the only company in our field that is unionized, we've been losing more and more business on a yearly basis because our competitors are able to produce similar products at prices lower then our labor rate/scrap product ratio alone. As a result we started outsourcing labor last year just to stay competitive, we haven't laid anyone off in the process but we had numerous threats of violence (including a man in the parking lot who called in to tell us that he had his rifle trained at the head of the HR department) when we cut back the number of people needed for overtime work. Even after outsourcing our company hasn't had any mass layoffs in the last 15 years.
I went into this company with a positive view of unions from my father's years of praise... after 3 years my view is dramatically less impressed. I see it as just another corrupt systems like so many other corrupt systems we deal with on a daily basis.
I can't speak for unions in general, but at my small company in my small NH town we don't have any million dollar salary CEOs, nor do the engineers make all that much more then the shop floor staff. We don't have the best management but on a whole I genuinely feel that most of the management make what they feel are the best decisions for the company. I can honestly say that from my first hand dealings with my company's union I think my company would be much better off without them, and in the future I will probably avoid any company that uses union labor based on my experience here.
It was very interesting, while I knew that the porn industry was fairly in-tune with technology the article left me with the impression that they drive tech advances more then we realize... The one bit on open source software really caught my eye:
Another red light best practice is to look for vendors that use open source. Since sites are open 24/7 (late-night hours are extremely profitable on the red light Web), "if we ever run into critical issues we need them solved now, not two hours from now," says Bodog's Ayre, who has learned that if he wants his people to be able to fix something, they need to have access to the source code.
"We absolutely could not get a couple of our vendors to address an issue that was crippling us," says Ayre. "Under peak loads, the entire site became nonresponsive. We had no choice but to decompile the systems in question and fix the problem ourselves. This was probably one of the biggest drivers pushing us to adopt open-source solutions for our most critical systems."
Probably one of the best arguments for a corporate adoption of open source software I've ever heard. I know, at least at my company, we're in constant struggle with our software vendors to fix bugs that are critical to us but maybe not critical to their other clients. This is particularly frustrating when we have the knowledge necessary to fix the problem ourselves... just no access to the source.
I'm against incarceration. Prisons don't rehabilitate people.
I agree, though at the same time it's not necessarily the job of the government to rehabilitate people (and I'd be skeptical about what they would rehabilitate people into if they did). The idea of prison is to keep people from harming others in society. For someone like a spammer, locking them up while keeping them from harming others could be done in much better ways. Simply keeping him away from computers for X years would be more appropriate.
I've heard many people refer to prison as "criminal college" and I believe it. Junk email sucks, but we're not doing ourselves any favors if this guy comes out of jail ready to rape and pillage.
In terms of rehabilitation I can think of many jobs they could have criminals perform as an alternative to being locked up. Certainly some form of community service or even choosing to serve the country in the military in place of their sentence not only has the potential of serving the public but also making them into a better person by the time they're done serving their time. Of course these options should be available on a case by case basis.
How many people do you really think come to your website thinking, "Today I am going to join a community!"? Joining a community is not something people carefully plan out doing, it's something that happens if they try it out for a while and like it.
I don't think anyone does that, but I do think people might visit my site a number of times to read through the content and eventually think to themselves "I'm spending a lot of time here, maybe I should register so I can start participating in the discussion". Registering only annoys a visitor once, Captchas instead of registration annoys your visitors every time they post. Likewise I think one form of validation or the other works better for different sites depending on the types of visitors.
They way I look at it, if someone can't trust me with their email address then I can't trust them not to spam me.
I suppose it depends on the kind of visitors you have on your site, if you attract a lot of "passers by" that just happen to catch one article or blog entry and feel compelled to add something to the discussion then leave and never come back, then I suppose a Captcha would be more appropriate. If you're building a community forum where your visitors are likely to be repeat customers then IMO a more formal registration is appropriate.
Maybe I'm alone but I've never considered email validation to be in any way annoying... failing a Captcha 3 times in a row because not even I can tell what letters are being displayed I consider to be very annoying.
You give script your email address, it sends you an email and you follow a validation link within the email. Implementing this on my website where I had a captcha before got rid of 100% of the spam.
There are also other little dirty tricks you can do to ensure it's a human on the other end, one of my favorites is to check the referrer URL when accepting a comment... if it's not being referred from my entry forum then it just happily throws the request away. Even if it's not spam it's probably something malicious anyway.
Another thing I used to use that worked really well in conjunction with registration is "approving" any account in which the first post doesn't contain any links or any words on a "spam list". If the first post of the newly registered account contains any links or spam words at all, it's held for moderation and must be approved manually. A vast majority of the legit people leaving comments for the first time wont be including any links or talking about viagra on a tech site, no links or spam words means they've been validated as "not spam" and if they've included links it only takes a human a few seconds to qualify if the account should be canceled as spam or approved as a non-spam account. This one obviously takes some man power so it only really works on smaller sites. It might be easy for a spam bot to counteract this but the way it validates is not apparent, not to mention this is already after an email has been validated.
Normally I'd agree but TFA noted that NONE of the machines featured a high score. I would think that at least _ONE_ of them would unless it was a mandated "feature" to not include one. Particularly considering that most of these machines are electro-mechanical as opposed to the modern "video" arcade machines. Heck even US and Japanese video arcades in the early days didn't save the scores when the power went out.
It just seems particularly odd because unlike modern games where you either compete directly against another player or work to unveil a storyline classics like this were all worked on the motivation of using your skill to get the highest score possible. Not saving or even displaying the high score just seems too vital a feature to have left out for technical reason... even stranger when you consider it was left out on every game made mechanical or video.
Looking through the pictures on wired it would seem the manuals included full schematics for the game, I really hope these guys plan on scanning and publishing them online... some eprom dumps (where applicable) would be sweet too.
On the subject of military manuals: Looking through the pictures on Wired it appears that the manuals actually included full electrical schematics for each of the games... I'd be curious if this group plans on scanning and hosting these online. I know I'd be very interested in recreating some of these games, or at very least taking a peek at how they were built.
I love arcade machine... as well as old soviet tech. so this stuff is very interesting to me.
The note about there being no high score list on any of them I think was rather intriguing. it kind of falls in line with the whole communism ideal. Also interesting that these were (at least in some cases) distributed by the military. I wonder if they were also developed by the military.
*sigh*.... it will never happen, the way it's designed you can't execute code from the HD-DVD drive. You will never see an Xbox 360 HD-DVD game.
In the NEXT NEXT generation that might be different, but for this generation: when was the last time a console got an add-on drive for "more advanced" games that didn't completely flop? Aside from the inherent technical limitations MS would have to completely ignore video game history to let this happen. They might make some bad decisions but they're not THAT dumb.
I've had orders simply vanish before.. once with newegg.com and another time with deepdiscountdvd.com. with Newegg I had entered some of my credit card info in wrong... it accepted it without problem, I got an order confirmation email but apparently it failed when they attempted to charge the card. They never contacted me and checking my profile weeks later didn't even have the order listed at all. I called with the order number and had to reorder everything over the phone (it was about 20 something items too because I was building a new machine, and some of the parts were no longer in stock... very frustrating). But even checking my spam filters I never got notification that the order had failed or been kicked out.
Similarly with DDDVD the item I ordered was found to be out of stock, so they just canceled the order and never notified me. Calling them up I asked "why didn't I get an email about it" them: "Well we didn't charge you" me: "no, you didn't, but knowing you couldn't deliver it I would have bought it somewhere else."
hmm it certainly looks like the kind of app I'm looking for.
I had a student license of Premiere in college and did some editing with that. I've been looking for a cheap or free video editing software to do basic editing tasks like cutting moving and shaping multiple video and audio layers with a few effects and other basic tools. At some kind of middle ground between Premiere and the hand-holding video editors the come bundled with cameras and OSs.
Reading through he product page and seeing the screenshots Cinelerra certainly seems capable but are there any Windows binaries available? I have Linux on a couple of machines but none of them are even close to capable of doing Video editing, my workhorse is running XP. Maybe I'm missing something but I didn't see any windows binaries available anywhere for this app.
+1 for Paint.NET
I use Photoshop at home on my main computer but I use Paint.net on all my other computers including my work computer (my company doesn't want to buy photoshop).
I tried GIMP but didn't really like it, Paint.NET is incredibly easy to use and has most of the features that most people need most often. Paint.NET also passed the the test of being easy enough that my mother could use it. Where Photoshop and GIMP both failed. While it doesn't even come close to the features offered by Photoshop it's good enough for the tasks that most people need it for. That and unlike GIMP I've never had problems with crashes or anything else.
Now if someone could point me towards an Open Source/Free alternative to Adobe Premiere (video editing) I'd be in heaven.
Yes. When will games start showing up in Wii Ware?
This is my biggest question. VC games are great but when I've got half of my favorite classics in the original cart form and emulators for half of the consoles I own it doesn't really excite me all that much.
I want to know when we can buy Wii Sports/Wii Play like mini-games from the VC.. I'd love to download a simple fun cheap party game from the Wii shopping channel and play it from the internal memory on the Wii Remote. There are loads of original titles on the XBLA why not the Wii?
BZZZZT sorry, try again, thanks for playing though
Sorry, I didn't mean to come off like a jack-ass but this is a very common misconception. You're absolutely right that they can't run unsigned code, but unfortunately most games only sign the executables... This leaves some games VERY open to things like wall hacks or other modifications of the content itself.
Why don't you ask Bizarre Creation how they liked trying to deal with the people racing the neon green 600HP E class cars with infinite lateral grip online. (I wont incriminate any of my friends but the guys over at 360gamesaves.com will know all about this stuff)
Thankfully most of the people who have figured out how to hack these games have kept to themselves about it. No one has released a "tool" for Joe Script Kiddy to just go on and ruin everyone's game... YET. It doesn't mean it wont happen, and thankfully it's not a problem right now. But it might become one, the potential is there, all it takes is one guy who wants to experiment and make an ISO patcher and no you'll be dealing with gamers who can see through walls and jump 30ft off the ground in no time.
The Linux hack works the same way... they modify some of the content code on one of the discs (I believe it's an exploit dealing with the shader on the King Kong Kiosk Disc) to execute their own code and launch Linux.
I'd agree, If Blizzard were to make a new MMO I would assume they'd probably make something for the 360/PS3 platforms where they could grow an entirely new userbase without sacrificing their current ones.
Despite the fact that WoW has been out for quite some time I think most of the users would feel the game was being abandoned before it's time if they turned out another MMO. Starcraft on the other hand is long overdue for a new addition to the franchise. The advancements in technology alone give them a lot of room to improve.
while I don't know about the aesthetic tastes of the typical Japanese consumer the Xbox 360 was designed by Hers Experimental design lab in Japan. And it won the Good Design Award in Japan in 2006.
What is it about the console you find so appalling?
hmm after posting that I had another thought... I suppose it might be possible to have XBMC send a high frequency signal over the analog audio outputs, high enough that it wouldn't be audible. you could then filter it and feed it into the XERC or similar device. It would be a pretty dirty hack so I'm not sure how reliable this method would be but it's another possibility and much more simple then the alternative I proposed above.
I'm a close acquaintance with the maker of the XERC. I say acquaintance as I've never met him in person being that we live half way around the world apart. Pablot (who designed the XERC) and SICKDimension (who mass produces/sells them) work with me on both Xbox-Scene.com and Nintendo-Scene.com and I speak with them nearly on a daily basis.
Anyway, I'm fairly familiar with how they work. The XERC (and similar devices) essentially get their power from the PSU's standby line, they have an IR receiver and when the receiver gets a particular signal it shorts the contacts on the power button. The XERC goes a bit further and allows you to configure dip switches on your modchip as well as control any installed decorative case lights (leds, cathodes, etc.) or whatever else. It's a fairly simple concept if you know how to program an MCU.
The problem with using it to power on at X time is that there is no good way to notify the XERC when to power on. I think in order to do that you would need the aide of a modchip. They can be designed to support a parallel or I2C port, and they actually use those to control Character LCD screens (see the Xecutuer3, Xenium, or SmartXX modchips). Though it would seem that each chip does it slightly different and the software (like XBMC) is required to make provisions for each and every one of them. It would require quite a bit of coordination between the XBMC team, modchip developers and the makers of devices like the XERC. Also those chips that use a parallel interface as opposed to I2C (Xenium is the only I2C based chip IIRC) would likely have to either use this to control the timer chip or an LCD, and chances are most of the people interested in having that kind of functionality on their Xbox are probably the same people who use the LCD feature.
... or you could just leave the console on all the time.
Some usb 'freeview' dvb cards can do SD tv fine (though not HD) using usb 1.1 . They work by splitting the mpeg transport stream and only sending single channel streams down the usb bus. one such card is the Avermedia AverTV DVB-T USB2.0 (capable of sending either single channel down usb 1.1 OR full transport stream down usb 2.0) - nice little gadget - driver is in vanilla kernel.
I am trying to get a nice minimal xbox 1 distro compiled which will run Mythtv on top of (X)DirectFB (which supports xbox nvidia chip) installed on an 80gb drive = nice mythtv (frontend/backend) running on xbox 1! Its tricky as the memory is only 64mb and you need mysql running along with X/qt (now all I need is someone to hack the led/power/eject/timer pic controller code so that it can be set to wake up and record programmes)
Wow, I didn't know such a product existed, the word from the XBMC team AFAIK, has always been that USB1.1 just didn't have the bandwidth to run a USB capture card, and really the USB ports are the only viable I/O interface available on the console.
I wonder if the teams is aware of such a product, if they are then I would suspect there is some other reason for not using it to ad DVR/PVR support (too processor/ram intensive, too complicated to get driving running in the Xbox environment, etc.). If they're not aware of it, well... maybe someone should tell them. I know I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I could use it with my XBMC setup.
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unless I'm mistaken he wasn't on a P2P it was simply an open folder on the schools private network...
In your analogy he didn't show up to some party he simply stayed at home and left his front door open.
This sort of thing starts bringing into question the definition of digital trespassing. Just because it's good common practice to lock down your shares (just like locking down your front door or your car) doesn't necessarily mean that you're distributing the data in there, or even intended to distribute the data.
Lets put this in physical terms... if I left my front door unlocked with a CD sitting on a table inside the door and someone came into my house, duplicated the cd and left would I be responsible for that? What if they scanned a book or took a picture of an art-print? The person had to trespass onto my property to get the file. How is that any different on a LAN? if someone has to access your server without your permission to copy the file why should I be responsible when it's the other person breaking the law? What if I leave my door open because I've lost my keys? What if I leave my share open because I'm not savvy enough to password protect it. Maybe I feel safe from that kind of danger in my neighborhood maybe I feel safe from that kind of danger on my LAN.
AFAIK there is no law that states I need to offer protection from theft for my copy righten material nor did anyone enter into a legal contract with the **AA to provide that kind of protection.
I don't know much about the history of unions nor do I know what kind of tacts they may or may not use on a large scale. I do know that my father was a union carpenter in Boston for many years and he spoke highly of it, and I do know that I currently work in a union job shop that makes aircraft parts (roughly 450 employees).
I myself am not a union worker, I'm an engineer/software developer. There are probably 60 people total at our company that are office workers in sales/engineering/management that are not union, only the shop floor workers are.
Some of the negative things I've seen the union do:
-Block the lay-off/firing of dead weight employees that have statistically cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars due to simply being able to perform their job like 90% of the other workers in the shop. I've also seen them bring legal retribution to the company when they fired them anyway and forced them to bring the employee back.
-I've seen them hold meetings encouraging (borderline ordering) union workers to vote for X candidate in local and national elections
-When the shop floor falls behind in production and decides to re-open Saturday to make up for it (which can happen for weeks at a time across a few months) union official demand that X% of office workers work on Saturdays as well regardless of whether there is work for them to do, and despite the fact that while most shop floor workers are getting paid time and a half office workers are salary and don't get paid so much as a dime extra for their time. Saturday work days are optional for shop floor workers and typically there is an overabundance of volunteers suggesting that they don't have a problem coming in for the extra cash.
-I've seen union officials keep the company from switching to a more suitable insurance plan that not only would offer more coverage but be slightly cheaper (the insurance company was phasing out the old plan and making a good offer on the new one to entice people to switch) simply because the old plan better suited them despite the fact that the new plan was better suited for a vast majority of the other workers in the shop.
Some of the negative things I've seen the union do:
-fight to keep bonus plans reasonable and generally increasing on a year-to-year basis
-fight for higher overall wages of the union workers (which are actually lower then our non-union sister plants)
On a whole most of the office workers don't seem to have a problem with anyone but the union reps (for forcing Saturday labor etc.), yet I constantly catch bits of conversations from the shop floor workers who seem to constantly carry an "us vs them" mentality against anyone who works in the office.
Also we're the only company in our field that is unionized, we've been losing more and more business on a yearly basis because our competitors are able to produce similar products at prices lower then our labor rate/scrap product ratio alone. As a result we started outsourcing labor last year just to stay competitive, we haven't laid anyone off in the process but we had numerous threats of violence (including a man in the parking lot who called in to tell us that he had his rifle trained at the head of the HR department) when we cut back the number of people needed for overtime work. Even after outsourcing our company hasn't had any mass layoffs in the last 15 years.
I went into this company with a positive view of unions from my father's years of praise... after 3 years my view is dramatically less impressed. I see it as just another corrupt systems like so many other corrupt systems we deal with on a daily basis.
I can't speak for unions in general, but at my small company in my small NH town we don't have any million dollar salary CEOs, nor do the engineers make all that much more then the shop floor staff. We don't have the best management but on a whole I genuinely feel that most of the management make what they feel are the best decisions for the company. I can honestly say that from my first hand dealings with my company's union I think my company would be much better off without them, and in the future I will probably avoid any company that uses union labor based on my experience here.
I've heard many people refer to prison as "criminal college" and I believe it. Junk email sucks, but we're not doing ourselves any favors if this guy comes out of jail ready to rape and pillage.
In terms of rehabilitation I can think of many jobs they could have criminals perform as an alternative to being locked up. Certainly some form of community service or even choosing to serve the country in the military in place of their sentence not only has the potential of serving the public but also making them into a better person by the time they're done serving their time. Of course these options should be available on a case by case basis.
... just some thoughts
They way I look at it, if someone can't trust me with their email address then I can't trust them not to spam me.
I suppose it depends on the kind of visitors you have on your site, if you attract a lot of "passers by" that just happen to catch one article or blog entry and feel compelled to add something to the discussion then leave and never come back, then I suppose a Captcha would be more appropriate. If you're building a community forum where your visitors are likely to be repeat customers then IMO a more formal registration is appropriate.
Maybe I'm alone but I've never considered email validation to be in any way annoying... failing a Captcha 3 times in a row because not even I can tell what letters are being displayed I consider to be very annoying.
What ever happened to email validation?
You give script your email address, it sends you an email and you follow a validation link within the email. Implementing this on my website where I had a captcha before got rid of 100% of the spam.
There are also other little dirty tricks you can do to ensure it's a human on the other end, one of my favorites is to check the referrer URL when accepting a comment... if it's not being referred from my entry forum then it just happily throws the request away. Even if it's not spam it's probably something malicious anyway.
Another thing I used to use that worked really well in conjunction with registration is "approving" any account in which the first post doesn't contain any links or any words on a "spam list". If the first post of the newly registered account contains any links or spam words at all, it's held for moderation and must be approved manually. A vast majority of the legit people leaving comments for the first time wont be including any links or talking about viagra on a tech site, no links or spam words means they've been validated as "not spam" and if they've included links it only takes a human a few seconds to qualify if the account should be canceled as spam or approved as a non-spam account. This one obviously takes some man power so it only really works on smaller sites. It might be easy for a spam bot to counteract this but the way it validates is not apparent, not to mention this is already after an email has been validated.
Normally I'd agree but TFA noted that NONE of the machines featured a high score. I would think that at least _ONE_ of them would unless it was a mandated "feature" to not include one. Particularly considering that most of these machines are electro-mechanical as opposed to the modern "video" arcade machines. Heck even US and Japanese video arcades in the early days didn't save the scores when the power went out.
It just seems particularly odd because unlike modern games where you either compete directly against another player or work to unveil a storyline classics like this were all worked on the motivation of using your skill to get the highest score possible. Not saving or even displaying the high score just seems too vital a feature to have left out for technical reason... even stranger when you consider it was left out on every game made mechanical or video.
Looking through the pictures on wired it would seem the manuals included full schematics for the game, I really hope these guys plan on scanning and publishing them online... some eprom dumps (where applicable) would be sweet too.
On the subject of military manuals: Looking through the pictures on Wired it appears that the manuals actually included full electrical schematics for each of the games... I'd be curious if this group plans on scanning and hosting these online. I know I'd be very interested in recreating some of these games, or at very least taking a peek at how they were built.
"Fun Size"?
I love arcade machine... as well as old soviet tech. so this stuff is very interesting to me.
The note about there being no high score list on any of them I think was rather intriguing. it kind of falls in line with the whole communism ideal. Also interesting that these were (at least in some cases) distributed by the military. I wonder if they were also developed by the military.
I forgot to forget things and now my brain is full... now I can't remember anything!
*sigh*.... it will never happen, the way it's designed you can't execute code from the HD-DVD drive. You will never see an Xbox 360 HD-DVD game.
In the NEXT NEXT generation that might be different, but for this generation: when was the last time a console got an add-on drive for "more advanced" games that didn't completely flop? Aside from the inherent technical limitations MS would have to completely ignore video game history to let this happen. They might make some bad decisions but they're not THAT dumb.
I would definitely support a payment scheme like that if it were available.
I've had orders simply vanish before.. once with newegg.com and another time with deepdiscountdvd.com. with Newegg I had entered some of my credit card info in wrong... it accepted it without problem, I got an order confirmation email but apparently it failed when they attempted to charge the card. They never contacted me and checking my profile weeks later didn't even have the order listed at all. I called with the order number and had to reorder everything over the phone (it was about 20 something items too because I was building a new machine, and some of the parts were no longer in stock... very frustrating). But even checking my spam filters I never got notification that the order had failed or been kicked out.
Similarly with DDDVD the item I ordered was found to be out of stock, so they just canceled the order and never notified me. Calling them up I asked "why didn't I get an email about it" them: "Well we didn't charge you" me: "no, you didn't, but knowing you couldn't deliver it I would have bought it somewhere else."
hmm it certainly looks like the kind of app I'm looking for.
I had a student license of Premiere in college and did some editing with that. I've been looking for a cheap or free video editing software to do basic editing tasks like cutting moving and shaping multiple video and audio layers with a few effects and other basic tools. At some kind of middle ground between Premiere and the hand-holding video editors the come bundled with cameras and OSs.
Reading through he product page and seeing the screenshots Cinelerra certainly seems capable but are there any Windows binaries available? I have Linux on a couple of machines but none of them are even close to capable of doing Video editing, my workhorse is running XP. Maybe I'm missing something but I didn't see any windows binaries available anywhere for this app.
+1 for Paint.NET
I use Photoshop at home on my main computer but I use Paint.net on all my other computers including my work computer (my company doesn't want to buy photoshop).
I tried GIMP but didn't really like it, Paint.NET is incredibly easy to use and has most of the features that most people need most often. Paint.NET also passed the the test of being easy enough that my mother could use it. Where Photoshop and GIMP both failed. While it doesn't even come close to the features offered by Photoshop it's good enough for the tasks that most people need it for. That and unlike GIMP I've never had problems with crashes or anything else.
Now if someone could point me towards an Open Source/Free alternative to Adobe Premiere (video editing) I'd be in heaven.
I want to know when we can buy Wii Sports/Wii Play like mini-games from the VC.. I'd love to download a simple fun cheap party game from the Wii shopping channel and play it from the internal memory on the Wii Remote. There are loads of original titles on the XBLA why not the Wii?
BZZZZT sorry, try again, thanks for playing though
Sorry, I didn't mean to come off like a jack-ass but this is a very common misconception. You're absolutely right that they can't run unsigned code, but unfortunately most games only sign the executables... This leaves some games VERY open to things like wall hacks or other modifications of the content itself.
Why don't you ask Bizarre Creation how they liked trying to deal with the people racing the neon green 600HP E class cars with infinite lateral grip online. (I wont incriminate any of my friends but the guys over at 360gamesaves.com will know all about this stuff)
Thankfully most of the people who have figured out how to hack these games have kept to themselves about it. No one has released a "tool" for Joe Script Kiddy to just go on and ruin everyone's game... YET. It doesn't mean it wont happen, and thankfully it's not a problem right now. But it might become one, the potential is there, all it takes is one guy who wants to experiment and make an ISO patcher and no you'll be dealing with gamers who can see through walls and jump 30ft off the ground in no time.
The Linux hack works the same way... they modify some of the content code on one of the discs (I believe it's an exploit dealing with the shader on the King Kong Kiosk Disc) to execute their own code and launch Linux.
I'd agree, If Blizzard were to make a new MMO I would assume they'd probably make something for the 360/PS3 platforms where they could grow an entirely new userbase without sacrificing their current ones.
Despite the fact that WoW has been out for quite some time I think most of the users would feel the game was being abandoned before it's time if they turned out another MMO. Starcraft on the other hand is long overdue for a new addition to the franchise. The advancements in technology alone give them a lot of room to improve.
while I don't know about the aesthetic tastes of the typical Japanese consumer the Xbox 360 was designed by Hers Experimental design lab in Japan. And it won the Good Design Award in Japan in 2006.
What is it about the console you find so appalling?
hmm after posting that I had another thought... I suppose it might be possible to have XBMC send a high frequency signal over the analog audio outputs, high enough that it wouldn't be audible. you could then filter it and feed it into the XERC or similar device. It would be a pretty dirty hack so I'm not sure how reliable this method would be but it's another possibility and much more simple then the alternative I proposed above.
I'm a close acquaintance with the maker of the XERC. I say acquaintance as I've never met him in person being that we live half way around the world apart. Pablot (who designed the XERC) and SICKDimension (who mass produces/sells them) work with me on both Xbox-Scene.com and Nintendo-Scene.com and I speak with them nearly on a daily basis.
... or you could just leave the console on all the time.
Anyway, I'm fairly familiar with how they work. The XERC (and similar devices) essentially get their power from the PSU's standby line, they have an IR receiver and when the receiver gets a particular signal it shorts the contacts on the power button. The XERC goes a bit further and allows you to configure dip switches on your modchip as well as control any installed decorative case lights (leds, cathodes, etc.) or whatever else. It's a fairly simple concept if you know how to program an MCU.
The problem with using it to power on at X time is that there is no good way to notify the XERC when to power on. I think in order to do that you would need the aide of a modchip. They can be designed to support a parallel or I2C port, and they actually use those to control Character LCD screens (see the Xecutuer3, Xenium, or SmartXX modchips). Though it would seem that each chip does it slightly different and the software (like XBMC) is required to make provisions for each and every one of them. It would require quite a bit of coordination between the XBMC team, modchip developers and the makers of devices like the XERC. Also those chips that use a parallel interface as opposed to I2C (Xenium is the only I2C based chip IIRC) would likely have to either use this to control the timer chip or an LCD, and chances are most of the people interested in having that kind of functionality on their Xbox are probably the same people who use the LCD feature.
I wonder if the teams is aware of such a product, if they are then I would suspect there is some other reason for not using it to ad DVR/PVR support (too processor/ram intensive, too complicated to get driving running in the Xbox environment, etc.). If they're not aware of it, well... maybe someone should tell them. I know I'd buy one in a heartbeat if I could use it with my XBMC setup.