Can't say that I've had any problems with Starforce recently, but a few years back a Starforce-protected game did trash a CD-ROM I had at the time. On the first run of the game (I think it was Broken Sword III) there was a kind of "seek of death" sound, and the drive never worked again. Yeah, it was an old drive, but it worked great up until that exact moment.
I don't know what the current state of Starforce is, and I'm assuming they've improved its compatibility. What I have a problem with is the arbitrary installation of a device driver into a system without any form of notification to the user, no explanation of the risks involved, and no way to back out of it.
Software developers really should have a legal declaration that accompanies their software, in which each major component is declared with an explanation, and an inventory of the files that comprise it.
I bought the download because that's straight cash going to Brad Wardell and his employees. Their profit margin is way higher that way; I'd rather the people who _made_ the game get the profit instead of retailers that do nothing but progressively marginalize PC software more and more.
Given RockStar's track record, this is an honest mistake to make.
If the game advocates violence as a way to solve the problem, count on lawsuits shortly thereafter. While I'm normally offended by barratry, I can't say I'd do much else in a case like this than laugh at the idiocy of anyone who'd try to make money off of schoolyard violence.
Maybe we don't have control over the raw execution path, but we do have control over the command line parameters that control the VM's garbage collection behavior, and engage crazy things like "concurrent collection". Guess you've never really looked at those. And I guess you've also written all of your own memory handling for your C app or your app is stateless, so you can avoid those nasty malloc degradings over time.
Hard real-time is tough, to be sure, but having such a constraint on 1% of your application doesn't seem like a good justification for writing the entire thing at the assembly level (you did mean _raw_ execution path, did you not?). And even then...what if the OS decides to "disappear" a few of your pages for you? You're in the layer cake. Deal with it. App behavior has far more to do with its performance and responsiveness than its environment does.
Cripes. You might want to do a tiny bit of fact checking before posting such nonsense. The JVM can and does return memory to the operating system, subject to parameters that you can easily set on the command line. There's a pair of thresholds (low and high) on the ratio of free space to total heap size. When free space drops below the low threshold, the VM will get more memory from the operating system (up to the MX limit). Conversely, when free memory rises _above_ the high threshold, the overall heap size will _shrink_, and memory is _returned_ to the operating system. Look up -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio.
The default high limit used to be 70% -- memory would only be returned to the OS after the heap was measured to be 70% free. Many people will observe their app and say "it doesn't return the memory". It does, but you have to be aware of how this is done.
You can tighten up this up and have your application run much closer to its "true" size. But do you really want that? You have to study the app in its live environment and understand where the time and memory are going. It can be a good idea, and sometimes it's not.
Hallucinating as a result of insanity (or whatever) is clearly something that's been done a million times in film etc.
The patent office needs to figure out that a _storytelling device_ that's been used a zillion times in other mediums shouldn't be patentable for the _sole reason_ that it's being manifested in a game.
By the logic of this patent I should be able to patent a red herring if it's presented in a video game instead of a book.
Not so fast. The WoW effect has been to suck a heck of a lot of revenue away from other titles. Remember that every copy of WoW out there is pulling $13 or something like that from each customer, each month.
I buy far fewer games since buying WoW. How about you?
Yeah, but the player party doesn't have to "follow the aggro", so why should monsters? We're interested in giving a little intelligence to the opposition. Unless forced to by a spell of some kind, monster players should be able to pick their targets at will, just like players pick their targets.
I am not sure if player characters ever get tagged with something like Torment, which draws aggro to a Warlock's voidwalker. I guess the effect on a player character would be to prevent you from shifting targets until the spell lapses...
The "aggro" stuff is a crude approximation for monster intelligence -- I smack whatever is causing me the biggest problem, damage-wise or healing-wise...
You don't have to raise or lower abilities. Everything in WoW (and other games) gets controlled by random variables. All you have to do is tweak the thresholds and distributions of those variables and you can get anything you want.
Blizzard has complete access to the statistics that show them _exactly_ what the success rate in PvP of 23 Warlock vs. 23 Paladin is, for example, and also to things like hours of play for a given account. Player comments on success rates are necessarily anecdotal in nature, and pretty much irrelevant. Skill is a factor -- I don't mind admitting that I pretty much suck at PvP, haven't done it much, and have had my butt kicked by lower level characters on occasion. Should I complain? Nope! My 43 warlock has good survivability overall -- in parties I am very often the last one left standing.
All the "play balance" issues boil down to tweaking the probability knobs such that the _outcomes_ are where you want them to be -- even odds, as a rule. I've always wondered if this kind of continuous tweaking was just happening in the background, automatically...when an exploit is discovered that imbalances outcomes in the game, the probabilities are tweaked.
Of course, the other factor in all of this is FUN. If your probability of success (living) is nailed to 50% in encounters, the game is equitable but it ain't fun to play. And all this class and PvP stuff is completely irrelevant for those of us who just prefer PvE. In that frame, the whole notion of classes is just sort of stupid, and for those of us who particularly enjoy solo play.
I've always thought the notion of classes was just sort of dopey. I'd prefer a more complex system of skills, where certain skills are mutually exclusive. You can't be a master of good magic and a master of evil magic at the same time. But you might be a master of evil magic and a pretty damn good swordsman. But if you learn the sword your entire combat stance and set of reactions is wrong for unarmed combat, and you take severe penalties for doing that.
I wouldn't mind if characters could become "good at everything", subject to contradictory skills. It's fine with me. And for PvP -- you can be good at everything, but you sure as hell aren't going to have time to USE it in a PvP fight;) You might have a hundred spells and attacks, and you're only going to have time to fire off ten of them.
A jack-of-all-trades class can take a bit of a skill hit too, relative to the specialist. But that is a choice we as players should be able to make -- be general, or be really good at one thing.
One other thing. I think it would be cool if, in WarCraft, you get have a "posse". As a warlock (or any class), I've got my main pet, but it would sure be cool to be able to have a little menagerie of possibly less effective pets or people. I don't control what they do, but they're there!
And another thing;) I have always wondered if Blizzard would get smart and have a couple of dungeon instances where players could _volunteer_ to control monsters. You'd have the equivalent of your party, somewhere in the dungeon, controlled by other players...and it wants you dead. And it's just as smart as you are. Let players in the dungeons as the dungeon masters, and structure it enough that it can work.
The WoW UI is certainly capable of allowing the player to "become" a dungeon monster for a while. The right to "play monster" should probably be earned by completing a given dungeon...and earn some measure of PvP honor. Alliance players could play monster in Horde dungeons, and vice versa.
It's only a processor. I am pretty sure that Apple is going to consider x64 architectures, and they're pretty nice. AMD's Opteron is very fast.
I think this is good all-around. If Apple makes OS X available for PC hardware, that will induce some serious competition for Microsoft, which they desperately need to have. I'll buy a copy for sure, just to have a very friendly, very cool, very good-looking Unix desktop.
Apple will still be able to easily keep carving out its niche. They'll be making hardware that works best and most seamlessly with their own Apple hardware. They'll be able to inch into the PC world and take on the Dells by offering something _different_. PC prices have dropped to the point where they're pretty much commodity, and if Apple has proven anything over the past five years it's that style MATTERS. For a few hundred bucks more you can get a "real Apple" that can do everything your regular old ugly-ass PC can do, plus play super nice with lots of nice new Apple toys.
Developers are going to have a YEAR to put a -march flag in their build and recompile. I don't see that one killing anyone. If you wrote a boatload of endian code, let's pause for a sec while I laugh at you for being that stupid.
Apple could subvert and change the entire PC world with this one, particularly by being perceived as better and different.
Re:Good Riddance.
on
Voom No More
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· Score: 3, Informative
Gee thanks, moron sales guy. Good thing people like you were pounding the nails into the coffin; now we can all go back to watching shitty cable and shitty satellite quality. I hope you enjoy pushing turd products, 'cause that's where your career is headed.
I dumped DirecTV and got Voom based on picture quality. Voom has the best technology right now, period. Their price point is also pretty damn good.
Voom's own HD programming was not all that interesting, with the exceptions of the travel channel and the Rave music channel, both of which were excellent. Where Voom was/is the best is delivery of all the other stuff.
For each of HBO, Showtime, Starz, Max, etc...the full HD feeds for both coasts are available. Every channel that had an HD version is carried -- ESPN HD, Discovery, TNTHD, etc...That's a lot of good HD content, and you pretty much don't want to go back to watching the conventional crap afterwards. DirecTV's crap-ass HD offering: ONE HBO HD channel, ONE Showtime HD channel, ESPNHD, Discovery HD. Oh, and please pay an extra $11 for that. Wahoo. Yeah, we're all MUCH better off without Voom.
One thing that isn't mentioned very often is that Voom's SD channels are of _substantially_ higher quality than other satellite systems. SciFi, a channel that needs HD more than anybody else, is quite watchable in SD on Voom. Not so on DirecTV, where it looks like a bag of colored lego with rainbow blocking MPEG distortion so painful that if you threw up on the screen watching it, you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the puke and the image. (Once upon a time DirecTV's PQ was actually decent. Those days are long gone, and they're the reason I switched to Voom).
What I still can't figure out is exactly why Voom failed in the market, given that the product was dramatically superior to everything else out there, in cost and performance. Talk about a marketing failure!
I guess when Voom started out it was really pricy and unreliable. By the time I got my Voom box, the service was reliable, the price was WAY cheaper than anything else, and I've been completely satisfied from day one (with the except of an HD DVR -- I still use a plain old SD Tivo for that, and it works fine with Voom).
Well, fuck it. Summer's here anyway, and my spiffy Samsung DLP will just stay dark more often. I'll probably get skin cancer, and it'll be James Dolan's fault.
Don't stop there with your economic analysis. If this guy was sending tens of millions of spam messages a day, how much was he costing companies and people, all over the country? $450,000 is small beans compared to what the economy as a whole is saving by having this turd in jail. Good riddance. 9 years sounds about right to me.
This guy woke up every morning and crammed 10 million people's mailboxes full of porn and offensive bullshit. He did it when it's against the law, and knowing it is an immoral activity.
Screw him, and let's move on to the next one. Hopefully we'll see the same result.
Where do I start? First, the plane's either got and airworthiness certificate or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it shouldn't be flying. Only a certified A&P (airframe and powerplant mech) can provide one. All ten of your neighbour's "landings" should appear in the FAA's database; all such incidents are recorded. Sure you got that number right? It's hard to believe that he's kept his license in that situation.
Second, having been cut off in the pattern and "tailgated", believe me when I say these things happen. As with just about everything else in life, it turns out that personal judgement matters a great deal.
Third -- manufacturers will usually do a better job of making an airplane. A particularly talented and dedicated home builder with the right personality type can do a better job than a manufacturer, but it's somewhat rare. One of the best sites is Dan Checkoway's (http://www.rvproject.com), if you want to learn about the building process.
Fourth, properly maintained airplanes last a _long_ time. There are plenty of planes in regular use from the 50s and 60s, although airframes that old are getting dodgier as they approach 50 years of age. There's been a wave of new models lately (Cirrus, Diamond) that are pretty desirable, and are resulting in a reduction in the values of certain "classic" planes.
I'm on Pair too. I've had a domain there for almost ten years now. My catch-all receives about 20,000 spams a day, on average. I pull them all down; my bayesian filter hasn't had a false positive in months and it's pretty rare for a spam to get through it.
Most of them are generated by zombies. If Pair wants to keep burning cash on that kind of bandwidth because they choose to do nothing when it comes to handling strange looking mail servers, it's their money.
Seems to me that we've been on the defensive for far too long. It's always been assumed that the public airwaves have to be censored into some transient notion of acceptability. Those who want to view programming as originally created need to pay to get it, through cable, satellite, and so forth.
What we need is a movement that will force the information sanitization types to pay for what _they_ want...censorship. Why shouldn't they be the ones who have to subscribe to censorship services?
A simple black box, connected to an appropriate service, can censor the TV picture and sound at will. Good old private industry can provide the censorship. Everybody's happy!
Oh, wait. As if it was about controlling what _they_ see. It's really about controlling what the rest of us do with our lives...
What this really points to is the need to have a common framework that a variety of classifiers can operate within. Consensus classification, using diverse techniques, creates a statistical highwire for the would-be spammer to walk. Significant computation can be engaged to calculate email contents that have higher probabilities of fooling bayesian classifiers; fooling two radically different techniques with a single message is pretty hard.
I want to be able to think up a new trait or technique, push it into the framework on a "trial" basis and be able to see the results of it.
Having a domain that's been out there for some time now, I receive about 7k to 12k spam messages a day. Most of these are from zombied PCs broadcasting mail to a random name at an email address. Recently my bayesian classifier has been giving spam scores on these as low as 40%. I have my threshold set at 50%, I think, and I may be lowering it again.
These messages hold hundreds of non-words, together with creatively "uglified" versions of common spam words. The trait I'd like to check for is "ratio of words never seen in ham"; seems like a nice and sensible thing to look for.
Without having a ton of history available and a framework, it's difficult to proceed.
To be honest, I also live in fear of losing my current, finely-tuned bayesian filter...which hasn't given me a false negative in months, and only delivers a few false positives a day.
Neural networks probably represent a better way of combining probabilities gained from multiple techniques. Bayesian stuff works pretty damn well, but we may need to give it a little more "traction" into the problem...
Another poster pointed out that Borland's Delphi 5 had these features in 1999. This is true, of course...it predates both the provisional and actual filing of this patent.
For those interested...the documentation for Delphi 5 (including notes on the TODO feature) can be found here:
It doesn't have to be a vacuum. You could just lower the pressure in there. If the pressure inside the balloon is lower than outside, some form of structural device (like lightweight tent poles) would be needed to hold back outside pressure.
As the balloon rises and outside air pressure drops, it would "invert" on the way up at the point where inside pressure exceeded outside pressure.
The fuel issue is interesting. If you packed it with hydrogen (I know, Hindenberg blah blah), you could just burn some of that as fuel once you reached a high enough orbit. You'd be lowering your overall mass by throwing away the "buoyancy" stuff you don't need any more. I don't know how much hydrogen you'd have in terms of reaction mass, though. Probably not all that much. You could keep some or most of it if you wanted to retain most of your buoyancy on the way down.
The multiple state thing is probably the best way to go for coming down (and going up). Get down to the 100,000 foot level and get picked up by a big balloon specialized to the 0-100,000 foot altitude band.
I use iTunes too, for the AAC format, which totally kicks ass. I haven't really done listening tests on ogg to see how that compares, but AAC is so much better than MP3 that my MP3 library is somewhat unlistenable at this point.
I have a pair of Studiophile BX8 reference monitors and an Echo audio card, so I get to hear all the crap that MP3 puts in there.
Downloadable music has exactly no appeal to me. If I can't buy the raw bits, there's no point to it. Fifteen years from now, is there going to be a new compression format? Of course. My old CDs can be re-ripped and re-compressed.
My car player only does MP3, but AAC is a way better format. I can create both, and I can create the possible quality of MP3 for that environment.
Raw bits let me create unprotected digital files and use them any way I want, and this is exactly what God intended us to do with information, dammit.
In the more distant future, bitmap textures are probably going to become somewhat obselete. The shader languages supported by high-end cards can do a ton of procedural texture generation during rendering, which is a much better place to do it. I expect that someday we'll see shader libraries, just like we see in the static rendering world, that can produce most of the textures needed.
Of course, textures themselves are a poor substitute for dynamically generated geometry, in most cases. If you're looking at a brick wall, there's the texture of the actual bricks (each physical brick), and that's best handled with procedural textures. Then there's the interlocking nature of the bricks themselves, with the mortar, which is optimally handled by dynamic geometry generation or depth maps.
Smooth interpolation between bitmap -> procedural -> geometry texturing is where we'll end up eventually. Shader languages are the way to go.
I want voting machines done RIGHT as much as the next technology guy -- no back doors, bad counting, etc etc...
We all bitch about them, and at the same time we don't talk much about the error rate of paper-based voting.
In fact, I have no idea what kind of error rate that is. How do we measure voting accuracy and error rates in a democracy that provides anonymous ballots?
Once upon a time Microsoft had their "QuickView" code, that sort of did this.
But that's not the real problem we're facing. The real problem we're facing is the _assumption_ by operating systems that the programs executed by a user should have the same rights and capabilities as that user.
In general, every executed program should be run inside a sandbox and subject to fairly severe limits on the resources it is allowed to use. On a per-program basis we can grant additional resources and rights. This isn't too onerous -- people do it all the time with ZoneAlarm and so forth. Of course, it's another opportunity to make a bad decision, but at least you can make it.
It used to be that when you ran a program you had a good idea of what it would do. As a user on the system you would effectively "vouch" for that programs effects.
Things are more complicated now. Programs run other programs. There's more complexity than even a sophisticated user can ever encompass.
We need process-level security and sandboxing in our OSes. Unix can do a "run as" as can NT...but this is exactly the wrong approach. Every _program_ is an individual. You need to treat them as untrusted guests by default. In an average XP users session I have dozens of entities (programs) running, each of which should be running inside of its own security model.
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Can't say that I've had any problems with Starforce recently, but a few years back a Starforce-protected game did trash a CD-ROM I had at the time. On the first run of the game (I think it was Broken Sword III) there was a kind of "seek of death" sound, and the drive never worked again. Yeah, it was an old drive, but it worked great up until that exact moment.
I don't know what the current state of Starforce is, and I'm assuming they've improved its compatibility. What I have a problem with is the arbitrary installation of a device driver into a system without any form of notification to the user, no explanation of the risks involved, and no way to back out of it.
Software developers really should have a legal declaration that accompanies their software, in which each major component is declared with an explanation, and an inventory of the files that comprise it.
I bought the download because that's straight cash going to Brad Wardell and his employees. Their profit margin is way higher that way; I'd rather the people who _made_ the game get the profit instead of retailers that do nothing but progressively marginalize PC software more and more.
Given RockStar's track record, this is an honest mistake to make.
If the game advocates violence as a way to solve the problem, count on lawsuits shortly thereafter. While I'm normally offended by barratry, I can't say I'd do much else in a case like this than laugh at the idiocy of anyone who'd try to make money off of schoolyard violence.
Well, Bush's policy statements don't involve any science. Tit for tat, my good man.
Maybe we don't have control over the raw execution path, but we do have control over the command line parameters that control the VM's garbage collection behavior, and engage crazy things like "concurrent collection". Guess you've never really looked at those. And I guess you've also written all of your own memory handling for your C app or your app is stateless, so you can avoid those nasty malloc degradings over time.
Hard real-time is tough, to be sure, but having such a constraint on 1% of your application doesn't seem like a good justification for writing the entire thing at the assembly level (you did mean _raw_ execution path, did you not?). And even then...what if the OS decides to "disappear" a few of your pages for you? You're in the layer cake. Deal with it. App behavior has far more to do with its performance and responsiveness than its environment does.
Cripes. You might want to do a tiny bit of fact checking before posting such nonsense. The JVM can and does return memory to the operating system, subject to parameters that you can easily set on the command line. There's a pair of thresholds (low and high) on the ratio of free space to total heap size. When free space drops below the low threshold, the VM will get more memory from the operating system (up to the MX limit). Conversely, when free memory rises _above_ the high threshold, the overall heap size will _shrink_, and memory is _returned_ to the operating system. Look up -XX:MaxHeapFreeRatio.
The default high limit used to be 70% -- memory would only be returned to the OS after the heap was measured to be 70% free. Many people will observe their app and say "it doesn't return the memory". It does, but you have to be aware of how this is done.
You can tighten up this up and have your application run much closer to its "true" size. But do you really want that? You have to study the app in its live environment and understand where the time and memory are going. It can be a good idea, and sometimes it's not.
Hallucinating as a result of insanity (or whatever) is clearly something that's been done a million times in film etc.
The patent office needs to figure out that a _storytelling device_ that's been used a zillion times in other mediums shouldn't be patentable for the _sole reason_ that it's being manifested in a game.
By the logic of this patent I should be able to patent a red herring if it's presented in a video game instead of a book.
Not so fast. The WoW effect has been to suck a heck of a lot of revenue away from other titles. Remember that every copy of WoW out there is pulling $13 or something like that from each customer, each month.
I buy far fewer games since buying WoW. How about you?
Yeah, but the player party doesn't have to "follow the aggro", so why should monsters? We're interested in giving a little intelligence to the opposition. Unless forced to by a spell of some kind, monster players should be able to pick their targets at will, just like players pick their targets.
I am not sure if player characters ever get tagged with something like Torment, which draws aggro to a Warlock's voidwalker. I guess the effect on a player character would be to prevent you from shifting targets until the spell lapses...
The "aggro" stuff is a crude approximation for monster intelligence -- I smack whatever is causing me the biggest problem, damage-wise or healing-wise...
You don't have to raise or lower abilities. Everything in WoW (and other games) gets controlled by random variables. All you have to do is tweak the thresholds and distributions of those variables and you can get anything you want.
;) You might have a hundred spells and attacks, and you're only going to have time to fire off ten of them.
;) I have always wondered if Blizzard would get smart and have a couple of dungeon instances where players could _volunteer_ to control monsters. You'd have the equivalent of your party, somewhere in the dungeon, controlled by other players...and it wants you dead. And it's just as smart as you are. Let players in the dungeons as the dungeon masters, and structure it enough that it can work.
Blizzard has complete access to the statistics that show them _exactly_ what the success rate in PvP of 23 Warlock vs. 23 Paladin is, for example, and also to things like hours of play for a given account. Player comments on success rates are necessarily anecdotal in nature, and pretty much irrelevant. Skill is a factor -- I don't mind admitting that I pretty much suck at PvP, haven't done it much, and have had my butt kicked by lower level characters on occasion. Should I complain? Nope! My 43 warlock has good survivability overall -- in parties I am very often the last one left standing.
All the "play balance" issues boil down to tweaking the probability knobs such that the _outcomes_ are where you want them to be -- even odds, as a rule. I've always wondered if this kind of continuous tweaking was just happening in the background, automatically...when an exploit is discovered that imbalances outcomes in the game, the probabilities are tweaked.
Of course, the other factor in all of this is FUN. If your probability of success (living) is nailed to 50% in encounters, the game is equitable but it ain't fun to play. And all this class and PvP stuff is completely irrelevant for those of us who just prefer PvE. In that frame, the whole notion of classes is just sort of stupid, and for those of us who particularly enjoy solo play.
I've always thought the notion of classes was just sort of dopey. I'd prefer a more complex system of skills, where certain skills are mutually exclusive. You can't be a master of good magic and a master of evil magic at the same time. But you might be a master of evil magic and a pretty damn good swordsman. But if you learn the sword your entire combat stance and set of reactions is wrong for unarmed combat, and you take severe penalties for doing that.
I wouldn't mind if characters could become "good at everything", subject to contradictory skills. It's fine with me. And for PvP -- you can be good at everything, but you sure as hell aren't going to have time to USE it in a PvP fight
A jack-of-all-trades class can take a bit of a skill hit too, relative to the specialist. But that is a choice we as players should be able to make -- be general, or be really good at one thing.
One other thing. I think it would be cool if, in WarCraft, you get have a "posse". As a warlock (or any class), I've got my main pet, but it would sure be cool to be able to have a little menagerie of possibly less effective pets or people. I don't control what they do, but they're there!
And another thing
The WoW UI is certainly capable of allowing the player to "become" a dungeon monster for a while. The right to "play monster" should probably be earned by completing a given dungeon...and earn some measure of PvP honor. Alliance players could play monster in Horde dungeons, and vice versa.
It's only a processor. I am pretty sure that Apple is going to consider x64 architectures, and they're pretty nice. AMD's Opteron is very fast.
I think this is good all-around. If Apple makes OS X available for PC hardware, that will induce some serious competition for Microsoft, which they desperately need to have. I'll buy a copy for sure, just to have a very friendly, very cool, very good-looking Unix desktop.
Apple will still be able to easily keep carving out its niche. They'll be making hardware that works best and most seamlessly with their own Apple hardware. They'll be able to inch into the PC world and take on the Dells by offering something _different_. PC prices have dropped to the point where they're pretty much commodity, and if Apple has proven anything over the past five years it's that style MATTERS. For a few hundred bucks more you can get a "real Apple" that can do everything your regular old ugly-ass PC can do, plus play super nice with lots of nice new Apple toys.
Developers are going to have a YEAR to put a -march flag in their build and recompile. I don't see that one killing anyone. If you wrote a boatload of endian code, let's pause for a sec while I laugh at you for being that stupid.
Apple could subvert and change the entire PC world with this one, particularly by being perceived as better and different.
Gee thanks, moron sales guy. Good thing people like you were pounding the nails into the coffin; now we can all go back to watching shitty cable and shitty satellite quality. I hope you enjoy pushing turd products, 'cause that's where your career is headed.
I dumped DirecTV and got Voom based on picture quality. Voom has the best technology right now, period. Their price point is also pretty damn good.
Voom's own HD programming was not all that interesting, with the exceptions of the travel channel and the Rave music channel, both of which were excellent. Where Voom was/is the best is delivery of all the other stuff.
For each of HBO, Showtime, Starz, Max, etc...the full HD feeds for both coasts are available. Every channel that had an HD version is carried -- ESPN HD, Discovery, TNTHD, etc...That's a lot of good HD content, and you pretty much don't want to go back to watching the conventional crap afterwards. DirecTV's crap-ass HD offering: ONE HBO HD channel, ONE Showtime HD channel, ESPNHD, Discovery HD. Oh, and please pay an extra $11 for that. Wahoo. Yeah, we're all MUCH better off without Voom.
One thing that isn't mentioned very often is that Voom's SD channels are of _substantially_ higher quality than other satellite systems. SciFi, a channel that needs HD more than anybody else, is quite watchable in SD on Voom. Not so on DirecTV, where it looks like a bag of colored lego with rainbow blocking MPEG distortion so painful that if you threw up on the screen watching it, you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the puke and the image. (Once upon a time DirecTV's PQ was actually decent. Those days are long gone, and they're the reason I switched to Voom).
What I still can't figure out is exactly why Voom failed in the market, given that the product was dramatically superior to everything else out there, in cost and performance. Talk about a marketing failure!
I guess when Voom started out it was really pricy and unreliable. By the time I got my Voom box, the service was reliable, the price was WAY cheaper than anything else, and I've been completely satisfied from day one (with the except of an HD DVR -- I still use a plain old SD Tivo for that, and it works fine with Voom).
Well, fuck it. Summer's here anyway, and my spiffy Samsung DLP will just stay dark more often. I'll probably get skin cancer, and it'll be James Dolan's fault.
Don't stop there with your economic analysis. If this guy was sending tens of millions of spam messages a day, how much was he costing companies and people, all over the country? $450,000 is small beans compared to what the economy as a whole is saving by having this turd in jail. Good riddance. 9 years sounds about right to me.
This guy woke up every morning and crammed 10 million people's mailboxes full of porn and offensive bullshit. He did it when it's against the law, and knowing it is an immoral activity.
Screw him, and let's move on to the next one. Hopefully we'll see the same result.
Where do I start? First, the plane's either got and airworthiness certificate or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it shouldn't be flying. Only a certified A&P (airframe and powerplant mech) can provide one. All ten of your neighbour's "landings" should appear in the FAA's database; all such incidents are recorded. Sure you got that number right? It's hard to believe that he's kept his license in that situation.
Second, having been cut off in the pattern and "tailgated", believe me when I say these things happen. As with just about everything else in life, it turns out that personal judgement matters a great deal.
Third -- manufacturers will usually do a better job of making an airplane. A particularly talented and dedicated home builder with the right personality type can do a better job than a manufacturer, but it's somewhat rare. One of the best sites is Dan Checkoway's (http://www.rvproject.com), if you want to learn about the building process.
Fourth, properly maintained airplanes last a _long_ time. There are plenty of planes in regular use from the 50s and 60s, although airframes that old are getting dodgier as they approach 50 years of age. There's been a wave of new models lately (Cirrus, Diamond) that are pretty desirable, and are resulting in a reduction in the values of certain "classic" planes.
I'm on Pair too. I've had a domain there for almost ten years now. My catch-all receives about 20,000 spams a day, on average. I pull them all down; my bayesian filter hasn't had a false positive in months and it's pretty rare for a spam to get through it.
Most of them are generated by zombies. If Pair wants to keep burning cash on that kind of bandwidth because they choose to do nothing when it comes to handling strange looking mail servers, it's their money.
Seems to me that we've been on the defensive for far too long. It's always been assumed that the public airwaves have to be censored into some transient notion of acceptability. Those who want to view programming as originally created need to pay to get it, through cable, satellite, and so forth.
What we need is a movement that will force the information sanitization types to pay for what _they_ want...censorship. Why shouldn't they be the ones who have to subscribe to censorship services?
A simple black box, connected to an appropriate service, can censor the TV picture and sound at will. Good old private industry can provide the censorship. Everybody's happy!
Oh, wait. As if it was about controlling what _they_ see. It's really about controlling what the rest of us do with our lives...
What this really points to is the need to have a common framework that a variety of classifiers can operate within. Consensus classification, using diverse techniques, creates a statistical highwire for the would-be spammer to walk. Significant computation can be engaged to calculate email contents that have higher probabilities of fooling bayesian classifiers; fooling two radically different techniques with a single message is pretty hard.
I want to be able to think up a new trait or technique, push it into the framework on a "trial" basis and be able to see the results of it.
Having a domain that's been out there for some time now, I receive about 7k to 12k spam messages a day. Most of these are from zombied PCs broadcasting mail to a random name at an email address. Recently my bayesian classifier has been giving spam scores on these as low as 40%. I have my threshold set at 50%, I think, and I may be lowering it again.
These messages hold hundreds of non-words, together with creatively "uglified" versions of common spam words. The trait I'd like to check for is "ratio of words never seen in ham"; seems like a nice and sensible thing to look for.
Without having a ton of history available and a framework, it's difficult to proceed.
To be honest, I also live in fear of losing my current, finely-tuned bayesian filter...which hasn't given me a false negative in months, and only delivers a few false positives a day.
Neural networks probably represent a better way of combining probabilities gained from multiple techniques. Bayesian stuff works pretty damn well, but we may need to give it a little more "traction" into the problem...
ARC caches fairly handily outperform LRU. When LRU is appropriate they adapt towards it. When frequency is important they adapt towards that.
Another poster pointed out that Borland's Delphi 5 had these features in 1999. This is true, of course...it predates both the provisional and actual filing of this patent.
t es /pro.html
/ in dex.html
For those interested...the documentation for Delphi 5 (including notes on the TODO feature) can be found here:
http://info.borland.com/techpubs/delphi/v5/upda
Borland's press release announcing the Delphi 5 product in July 1999 is listed here:
http://www.borland.com/news/press_releases/1999
Preview is showing spaces in those URLs, so check'em before you click.
It doesn't have to be a vacuum. You could just lower the pressure in there. If the pressure inside the balloon is lower than outside, some form of structural device (like lightweight tent poles) would be needed to hold back outside pressure.
As the balloon rises and outside air pressure drops, it would "invert" on the way up at the point where inside pressure exceeded outside pressure.
The fuel issue is interesting. If you packed it with hydrogen (I know, Hindenberg blah blah), you could just burn some of that as fuel once you reached a high enough orbit. You'd be lowering your overall mass by throwing away the "buoyancy" stuff you don't need any more. I don't know how much hydrogen you'd have in terms of reaction mass, though. Probably not all that much. You could keep some or most of it if you wanted to retain most of your buoyancy on the way down.
The multiple state thing is probably the best way to go for coming down (and going up). Get down to the 100,000 foot level and get picked up by a big balloon specialized to the 0-100,000 foot altitude band.
I use iTunes too, for the AAC format, which totally kicks ass. I haven't really done listening tests on ogg to see how that compares, but AAC is so much better than MP3 that my MP3 library is somewhat unlistenable at this point.
I have a pair of Studiophile BX8 reference monitors and an Echo audio card, so I get to hear all the crap that MP3 puts in there.
iTunes is good, but could be better...
Downloadable music has exactly no appeal to me. If I can't buy the raw bits, there's no point to it. Fifteen years from now, is there going to be a new compression format? Of course. My old CDs can be re-ripped and re-compressed.
My car player only does MP3, but AAC is a way better format. I can create both, and I can create the possible quality of MP3 for that environment.
Raw bits let me create unprotected digital files and use them any way I want, and this is exactly what God intended us to do with information, dammit.
iTunes -- Who Cares.
In the more distant future, bitmap textures are probably going to become somewhat obselete. The shader languages supported by high-end cards can do a ton of procedural texture generation during rendering, which is a much better place to do it. I expect that someday we'll see shader libraries, just like we see in the static rendering world, that can produce most of the textures needed.
Of course, textures themselves are a poor substitute for dynamically generated geometry, in most cases. If you're looking at a brick wall, there's the texture of the actual bricks (each physical brick), and that's best handled with procedural textures. Then there's the interlocking nature of the bricks themselves, with the mortar, which is optimally handled by dynamic geometry generation or depth maps.
Smooth interpolation between bitmap -> procedural -> geometry texturing is where we'll end up eventually. Shader languages are the way to go.
I want voting machines done RIGHT as much as the next technology guy -- no back doors, bad counting, etc etc...
We all bitch about them, and at the same time we don't talk much about the error rate of paper-based voting.
In fact, I have no idea what kind of error rate that is. How do we measure voting accuracy and error rates in a democracy that provides anonymous ballots?
Once upon a time Microsoft had their "QuickView" code, that sort of did this.
But that's not the real problem we're facing. The real problem we're facing is the _assumption_ by operating systems that the programs executed by a user should have the same rights and capabilities as that user.
In general, every executed program should be run inside a sandbox and subject to fairly severe limits on the resources it is allowed to use. On a per-program basis we can grant additional resources and rights. This isn't too onerous -- people do it all the time with ZoneAlarm and so forth. Of course, it's another opportunity to make a bad decision, but at least you can make it.
It used to be that when you ran a program you had a good idea of what it would do. As a user on the system you would effectively "vouch" for that programs effects.
Things are more complicated now. Programs run other programs. There's more complexity than even a sophisticated user can ever encompass.
We need process-level security and sandboxing in our OSes. Unix can do a "run as" as can NT...but this is exactly the wrong approach. Every _program_ is an individual. You need to treat them as untrusted guests by default. In an average XP users session I have dozens of entities (programs) running, each of which should be running inside of its own security model.