From my experience, about 80% of the time you can "fix" the red rings (temporarily) by unplugging the power brick from the wall and console, letting it cool down and reset by waiting for the amber light to go off, then wait another couple minutes, then plug it back in. Most of the time, the Xbox will then start up correctly from my experience. But maybe I'm just lucky.
The "broken" Xbox we have at work, we just leave on 24/7.:)
Something went wrong on landing. The pilots took control away from the auto-pilot. All the passengers walked away. Maybe they're not "heroes" in the way that someone who runs into a burning building to rescue a kid is a "hero," but let's throw the guys a bone, eh?
Except isn't most power during the hours we're talking about (overnight) usually already running at their minimum base load required to keep the grid going? There's very, very little demand for power at 2:00 AM, and because the system requires a minimum load, you're talking about literally free power. As in, "if you didn't use this power, it would just go into the ground" power. That's why cities don't mind running huge grids of streetlights during those hours.
I'd like you to prove that shutting off, say, 50% of corporate computers overnight would have some measurable impact on power station fuel usage, averaged across the power grid as it's currently implemented. Frankly, I doubt it has any impact on "saving power" whatsoever. But maybe you know more about the problem than I do.
(Obligatory: the real way to cut emissions from power plants is to build more efficient power plants, say, nuclear plants.)
Do cars in real life ever explode? Have you ever witnessed this, or even do you know someone who has? Sure, cars can burn very quickly if a fuel line is ruptured, but you're talking about an explosion that would throw the car in the air... I don't think that happens.
And, frankly, I've heard the opposite of your advice several times. Cars burn, they do not explode.
There was an NFL player, Sean Taylor, killed recently by a completely non-fatal wound to his leg, and his life might have been saved if somebody at the scene knew how to tie a tourniquet or raise the limb. (The primary cause of death was blood loss.)
Despite how "common sense" these things are, there are a lot of people who simply do not know what to do with a wounded person.
I frequently need to remote-in from home, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, before my company can get upset about people leaving their computers on, they'd first have to turn off the VPN and confiscate everyone's SecurID, because they're basically just giving us all the message "leave it on all the time!" now.
Hell, tell the accounting department they need to be home by 6:00 on the last day of the month/quarter, or else you'll turn off the network. See how they react.
On behalf on virtually everyone, I'd just like to say: Who the hell gives a crap?
Geez, if you can't cope with the fact that somebody *slightly* and *accidentally* misrepresented which "project" wiktionary is, you really need to step back and examine your life. Get over yourself.
There is a deep, complex, and intriguing story behind the monster attack that is currently taking place (and has been for the last few months) as a viral marketing/alternate reality game on the internet, but is not essential to understanding the movie itself. Though, it does involve the main characters from the movie and does revolve around the monster attack and the story behind the monster attack - the monster was actually following the tanker seen in the beginning (hence why it attacked New York) and is related to the job that Rob was leaving to Japan for (Slusho - numerous placements of Slusho merchandise are in clear sight throughout the movie).
Yes, well, I want to spend an hour and a half watching a monster movie. I don't want to spend 80 hours of my life reading dozens of websites to get a story that could have been explained, in the movie, in two minutes.
Where does the monster come from? Outer space possibly, all I know is that in the Coney Island footage toward the end where Beth is saying how great her day was you can clearly see in the background, that is if you weren't paying attention to Beth, something very large fall from the sky and into the water.
I keep seeing this mentioned, and I swear to God it's not in the version I saw. I wonder if there's two edits of the film going around. Someone actually mentioned the 'thing falling from the sky' before I went into the theater, so I was specifically looking for it. I don't know, maybe I'm totally nuts, but I was looking specifically for it, and it wasn't there.
like I replied to another poster, though, that still doesn't explain crap. What happened in the three weeks after it fell and before it attacked, for instance? If the thing falling was even the monster at all. They could have thrown us a bone and put in a news clip talking about investigating the meteor that fell or something.
No, I heard a radio caller mention that before I saw the movie, and I can definitely say that was NOT in the edit of the movie I saw. I watched that scene very carefully looking for it. In any case, it still doesn't resolve any questions, since the old footage was like 3 weeks before the attack... even if I had seen that, what was going on for those 3 weeks?
Well, if you had said the word Steadicam I would have known that, but since you didn't I just assumed you, like 99% of people, had no clue what the difference between a steadied hand-held camera and a non-steadied one looks like. You can't fault me for that.
I heard someone say that on the Adam Corolla radio show before I went to see the movie, and when that scene came up in the movie I squinted really damned hard and I didn't see any meteor/comet. Maybe some cuts of the movie have it, I dunno, but the one I watched definitely didn't unless it was specifically designed to be extremely hard-to-notice.
My question has always been: how come giant monsters are never mammals? Barring King Kong, I guess. the Japanese have several dinosaurs, a lobster, robots, and even the personification of smog. I'd like to see like a giant tiger-looking monster that's 80' tall eating people.
The Steadicam is a quite old invention in Hollywood used so that the camera has freedom of movement (much more-so than being on rails), but also remains steady with no vibration the entire time. Even reality TV shows like Cops use Steadicams to improve the camera work.
Recent movies like I Am Legend and Cloverfield have dispensed with the Steadicam and been filmed with just plain ol' hand-held camcorders with no kind of image stabilization. In I Am Legend, it's not so much an issue because the camera doesn't move nearly as much as it does in Cloverfield. This is an "artistic" choice to make the show look more "gritty", like the amateur camcorder footage of car accidents on the local news. It's a fine effect, but it shouldn't be used for an entire movie.
I'll paste the text here, but I'm still thinking of going back and revising it.
---
The one sentence review: Cloverfield is unfortunately kind of disappointing, and bring your Dramamine if you're sitting close to the screen.
Look, I like kaiju movies. I like serious Godzilla, the Godzilla of the 50s and 90s. I like crazy Godzilla, the Godzilla of every other decade. Yes, even Godzilla's Revenge. (What? It's funny... don't look at me like that.) I like crazy Gamera, and I believe honestly that Gamera truly is friend to all children. I like the serious Gamera of the 90s, which are still pretty crazy when you think about them, just with more gruesome effects. I even like Garuda, even though it's not really in the same genre.
I'm also the first person to proudly say that despite its name, kaiju movies are an American invention, damnit. Even if you don't think King Kong counts, there's still this awesome little flicked named The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which not only fits the genre's conventions perfectly, but was released a year and change before the original Godzilla and had special effects by Ray Harryhausen and was written by Ray Bradbury and you really can't beat that.
So what I'm getting at here is you'd think I'd enjoy Cloverfield simply by default, and I didn't really. It had some moments that were truly worthwhile, but the film as a whole just didn't gel for me for whatever reason. And it didn't help that...
Spoilers Ahead... the monster sucked! All I can say about the monster is that it's a good thing the cast and crew kept it such a tight-lipped secret, because if they'd released photos of it I think it would have hurt their chances at the box office. Yes, gentle viewers, New York was being destroyed by a monster that not only had killer lice, but literally could not stand upright. Being one hundred feet tall? Scary. Waddling around on flippers? Not scary. The two even out to give the general reaction, "eh." When the reaction to the main character of your film is "eh" (and let's face it, people go to kaiju films to see the monster), then you got problems.
The second problem is that Cloverfield doesn't explain anything. Where does the monster come from? I dunno. Why is it in Manhatten? No clue. How come when the little killer lice bite you your head explodes? Shrug. I'm ignoring the questions that apply to all monster/horror movies, such as: "how come weapons that can penetrate 20 thick reinforced concrete are useless against fleshy creature?" and "why the hell are they just standing there gaping when they're in mortal danger?" Even Spielberg's War of the Worlds gave a BS explanation for the alien's presence. (They buried the spaceships a million years ago, then teleported into them under cover of a thunderstorm... God that movie sucked.)
Cloverfield also makes use of the new popular technique to make movies and TV shows look "more real" by not using a steadicam at all. Actually, the entire movie is a first-person viewpoint from a camcorder held by one of the characters, which flashbacks provided by the un-erased parts of the tape he was recording on, so that when the camera jogs or skips you see a few minutes of what it recorded a couple weeks before the events of the movie. I thought that was pretty clever. I'm not a huge hater of the hand-held camera look like a lot of people are, but I do want to warn you if you're going to see the movie that this camera movies. There are several-minute long scenes of it pointing randomly downwards while the characters are running. There's one shot where the camera falls 40 to the ground. (I want to know what model that is, damn it's durable.) Unlike, say, I Am Legend or Battlestar Galactica which are filmed with hand-held cameras that are held pretty steady, the camera in Cloverfield really, really moves. I sat too close to the screen, don't make the mistake I did.
So, in short, despite some exciting moments, I think the negatives of Cloverfield outweight the positives and I left the theater pretty disappointed.
What bothers me the most is how much hype it gets. I work for a company that has had a "MapReduce" implementation (used internally) for as long as Google has, and we're not getting drooled over by the tech press. I'm sure tons of companies that have had to solve similar problems have already made this tool, even though the languages and syntax involved might change between implementations, it's nothing all that great.
My point wasn't that Bioshock was the most innovative game in history, just that it's really stupid to judge a game's value based on a demo without even playing it. That's like watching a movie trailer and then instantly judging how good the movie is.
I was in the same situation as you. I finally gave up when the G5 became intolerably slow and bought a Dell desktop and a HP tablet, both market segments that Apple refuses to acknowledge... I'm a reverse-switcher.
Nah, I'm done with it. Considering how I feel after finishing the main quest, I doubt anything in the side quests is really going to blow me away, and I have a whole stack of unfinished games to play instead.
It wasn't criminally bad, but they could have learned a lot from, say, Oblivion on how to do it. Oblivion's map/inventory interface was better in pretty much every way, and it's a couple years old now.
Slashdot Mirror
From my experience, about 80% of the time you can "fix" the red rings (temporarily) by unplugging the power brick from the wall and console, letting it cool down and reset by waiting for the amber light to go off, then wait another couple minutes, then plug it back in. Most of the time, the Xbox will then start up correctly from my experience. But maybe I'm just lucky.
:)
The "broken" Xbox we have at work, we just leave on 24/7.
Assuming he's telling the truth.
I don't know about you, but I think normal-sized tigers are pretty scary, and I think a 80' tall tiger would be proportionally more scary.
Something went wrong on landing. The pilots took control away from the auto-pilot. All the passengers walked away. Maybe they're not "heroes" in the way that someone who runs into a burning building to rescue a kid is a "hero," but let's throw the guys a bone, eh?
Except isn't most power during the hours we're talking about (overnight) usually already running at their minimum base load required to keep the grid going? There's very, very little demand for power at 2:00 AM, and because the system requires a minimum load, you're talking about literally free power. As in, "if you didn't use this power, it would just go into the ground" power. That's why cities don't mind running huge grids of streetlights during those hours.
I'd like you to prove that shutting off, say, 50% of corporate computers overnight would have some measurable impact on power station fuel usage, averaged across the power grid as it's currently implemented. Frankly, I doubt it has any impact on "saving power" whatsoever. But maybe you know more about the problem than I do.
(Obligatory: the real way to cut emissions from power plants is to build more efficient power plants, say, nuclear plants.)
I'm going to ask you a 100% serious question.
Do cars in real life ever explode? Have you ever witnessed this, or even do you know someone who has? Sure, cars can burn very quickly if a fuel line is ruptured, but you're talking about an explosion that would throw the car in the air... I don't think that happens.
And, frankly, I've heard the opposite of your advice several times. Cars burn, they do not explode.
There was an NFL player, Sean Taylor, killed recently by a completely non-fatal wound to his leg, and his life might have been saved if somebody at the scene knew how to tie a tourniquet or raise the limb. (The primary cause of death was blood loss.)
Despite how "common sense" these things are, there are a lot of people who simply do not know what to do with a wounded person.
I frequently need to remote-in from home, you insensitive clod!
Seriously, before my company can get upset about people leaving their computers on, they'd first have to turn off the VPN and confiscate everyone's SecurID, because they're basically just giving us all the message "leave it on all the time!" now.
Hell, tell the accounting department they need to be home by 6:00 on the last day of the month/quarter, or else you'll turn off the network. See how they react.
On behalf on virtually everyone, I'd just like to say: Who the hell gives a crap?
Geez, if you can't cope with the fact that somebody *slightly* and *accidentally* misrepresented which "project" wiktionary is, you really need to step back and examine your life. Get over yourself.
There is a deep, complex, and intriguing story behind the monster attack that is currently taking place (and has been for the last few months) as a viral marketing/alternate reality game on the internet, but is not essential to understanding the movie itself. Though, it does involve the main characters from the movie and does revolve around the monster attack and the story behind the monster attack - the monster was actually following the tanker seen in the beginning (hence why it attacked New York) and is related to the job that Rob was leaving to Japan for (Slusho - numerous placements of Slusho merchandise are in clear sight throughout the movie).
Yes, well, I want to spend an hour and a half watching a monster movie. I don't want to spend 80 hours of my life reading dozens of websites to get a story that could have been explained, in the movie, in two minutes.
Didn't they already make that movie? Iron Giant?
If anyone's close to the limit on Cenarion Circle and wants to get rid of some gold, I have a few alliance characters who could really use it. ;)
Where does the monster come from? Outer space possibly, all I know is that in the Coney Island footage toward the end where Beth is saying how great her day was you can clearly see in the background, that is if you weren't paying attention to Beth, something very large fall from the sky and into the water.
I keep seeing this mentioned, and I swear to God it's not in the version I saw. I wonder if there's two edits of the film going around. Someone actually mentioned the 'thing falling from the sky' before I went into the theater, so I was specifically looking for it. I don't know, maybe I'm totally nuts, but I was looking specifically for it, and it wasn't there.
like I replied to another poster, though, that still doesn't explain crap. What happened in the three weeks after it fell and before it attacked, for instance? If the thing falling was even the monster at all. They could have thrown us a bone and put in a news clip talking about investigating the meteor that fell or something.
No, I heard a radio caller mention that before I saw the movie, and I can definitely say that was NOT in the edit of the movie I saw. I watched that scene very carefully looking for it. In any case, it still doesn't resolve any questions, since the old footage was like 3 weeks before the attack... even if I had seen that, what was going on for those 3 weeks?
Well, if you had said the word Steadicam I would have known that, but since you didn't I just assumed you, like 99% of people, had no clue what the difference between a steadied hand-held camera and a non-steadied one looks like. You can't fault me for that.
I'll have to re-watch Saving Private Ryan.
Even a total snob will like Life if Beautiful, City of Gold, Fargo and probably Goodfellas.
I heard someone say that on the Adam Corolla radio show before I went to see the movie, and when that scene came up in the movie I squinted really damned hard and I didn't see any meteor/comet. Maybe some cuts of the movie have it, I dunno, but the one I watched definitely didn't unless it was specifically designed to be extremely hard-to-notice.
Population density = terror.
My question has always been: how come giant monsters are never mammals? Barring King Kong, I guess. the Japanese have several dinosaurs, a lobster, robots, and even the personification of smog. I'd like to see like a giant tiger-looking monster that's 80' tall eating people.
Saving Private Ryan used hand-held cameras, but with a MAJOR difference: They were attached to Steadicam setups: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steadicam
The Steadicam is a quite old invention in Hollywood used so that the camera has freedom of movement (much more-so than being on rails), but also remains steady with no vibration the entire time. Even reality TV shows like Cops use Steadicams to improve the camera work.
Recent movies like I Am Legend and Cloverfield have dispensed with the Steadicam and been filmed with just plain ol' hand-held camcorders with no kind of image stabilization. In I Am Legend, it's not so much an issue because the camera doesn't move nearly as much as it does in Cloverfield. This is an "artistic" choice to make the show look more "gritty", like the amateur camcorder footage of car accidents on the local news. It's a fine effect, but it shouldn't be used for an entire movie.
I just posted a review on my blog: http://blakeyrat.com/2008/01/19/cloverfield/
... the monster sucked! All I can say about the monster is that it's a good thing the cast and crew kept it such a tight-lipped secret, because if they'd released photos of it I think it would have hurt their chances at the box office. Yes, gentle viewers, New York was being destroyed by a monster that not only had killer lice, but literally could not stand upright. Being one hundred feet tall? Scary. Waddling around on flippers? Not scary. The two even out to give the general reaction, "eh." When the reaction to the main character of your film is "eh" (and let's face it, people go to kaiju films to see the monster), then you got problems.
I'll paste the text here, but I'm still thinking of going back and revising it.
---
The one sentence review: Cloverfield is unfortunately kind of disappointing, and bring your Dramamine if you're sitting close to the screen.
Look, I like kaiju movies. I like serious Godzilla, the Godzilla of the 50s and 90s. I like crazy Godzilla, the Godzilla of every other decade. Yes, even Godzilla's Revenge. (What? It's funny... don't look at me like that.) I like crazy Gamera, and I believe honestly that Gamera truly is friend to all children. I like the serious Gamera of the 90s, which are still pretty crazy when you think about them, just with more gruesome effects. I even like Garuda, even though it's not really in the same genre.
I'm also the first person to proudly say that despite its name, kaiju movies are an American invention, damnit. Even if you don't think King Kong counts, there's still this awesome little flicked named The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms which not only fits the genre's conventions perfectly, but was released a year and change before the original Godzilla and had special effects by Ray Harryhausen and was written by Ray Bradbury and you really can't beat that.
So what I'm getting at here is you'd think I'd enjoy Cloverfield simply by default, and I didn't really. It had some moments that were truly worthwhile, but the film as a whole just didn't gel for me for whatever reason. And it didn't help that...
Spoilers Ahead
The second problem is that Cloverfield doesn't explain anything. Where does the monster come from? I dunno. Why is it in Manhatten? No clue. How come when the little killer lice bite you your head explodes? Shrug. I'm ignoring the questions that apply to all monster/horror movies, such as: "how come weapons that can penetrate 20 thick reinforced concrete are useless against fleshy creature?" and "why the hell are they just standing there gaping when they're in mortal danger?" Even Spielberg's War of the Worlds gave a BS explanation for the alien's presence. (They buried the spaceships a million years ago, then teleported into them under cover of a thunderstorm... God that movie sucked.)
Cloverfield also makes use of the new popular technique to make movies and TV shows look "more real" by not using a steadicam at all. Actually, the entire movie is a first-person viewpoint from a camcorder held by one of the characters, which flashbacks provided by the un-erased parts of the tape he was recording on, so that when the camera jogs or skips you see a few minutes of what it recorded a couple weeks before the events of the movie. I thought that was pretty clever. I'm not a huge hater of the hand-held camera look like a lot of people are, but I do want to warn you if you're going to see the movie that this camera movies. There are several-minute long scenes of it pointing randomly downwards while the characters are running. There's one shot where the camera falls 40 to the ground. (I want to know what model that is, damn it's durable.) Unlike, say, I Am Legend or Battlestar Galactica which are filmed with hand-held cameras that are held pretty steady, the camera in Cloverfield really, really moves. I sat too close to the screen, don't make the mistake I did.
So, in short, despite some exciting moments, I think the negatives of Cloverfield outweight the positives and I left the theater pretty disappointed.
What bothers me the most is how much hype it gets. I work for a company that has had a "MapReduce" implementation (used internally) for as long as Google has, and we're not getting drooled over by the tech press. I'm sure tons of companies that have had to solve similar problems have already made this tool, even though the languages and syntax involved might change between implementations, it's nothing all that great.
My point wasn't that Bioshock was the most innovative game in history, just that it's really stupid to judge a game's value based on a demo without even playing it. That's like watching a movie trailer and then instantly judging how good the movie is.
I was in the same situation as you. I finally gave up when the G5 became intolerably slow and bought a Dell desktop and a HP tablet, both market segments that Apple refuses to acknowledge... I'm a reverse-switcher.
Nah, I'm done with it. Considering how I feel after finishing the main quest, I doubt anything in the side quests is really going to blow me away, and I have a whole stack of unfinished games to play instead.
It wasn't criminally bad, but they could have learned a lot from, say, Oblivion on how to do it. Oblivion's map/inventory interface was better in pretty much every way, and it's a couple years old now.