Posts by fluffy

Does anyone have video of this broadcast?

It sounds much more awesome than the usual kind. I'd watch the news more often if they were always reading from a script in the parking lot.

@ Andy S

That gimmicky method of doing 3D isn't really true 3D, and only works if you have everything in carefully-controlled motion. It's called the Pulfrich effect; basically it works by inducing lag into one eye. It was a pretty common gimmick in the 90s, but really what you can do with it is pretty limited. It'd work really good for side-scrolling rails shooter games, for example (and actually it should work on most of those games without any modifications at all!), but not for FPSes or anything else which isn't in constant horizontal motion with parallax effects.

How is this any more effective than 2D image spam?

By now, my spam filter is very well-trained to disregard emails which are nothing but an image when the headers have been tagged in various ways by SpamAssassin. (It's especially helpful that most of these messages use a nonstandard MIME multipart encoding, which bogofilter is similarly trained very nicely on.)

Good spam filters don't need to care about the unique signature of each image; there's so much more useful information in a message than just what's "visible."

Taken absolutely literally...

If we take the introduction to the story completely literally, that doesn't really say anything about whether astronauts are drunk at lift-off or not; no astronaut has actually headed for the stars yet (at least not as far as the public knows).

A better pronunciation

How about "ER-ah-nees"? That is probably closer to the original Greek pronunciation anyway.

I have tried one

I am still unimpressed.

So what did I get last night?

My brand-new 60GB PS3 arrived yesterday and as soon as I hooked it up, it downloaded firmware 1.90. US model, here. Did I just luck out and happen to update my system at the right time to win the lottery? I hope so, because dang that was a slow download.

Simple workaround

I have a playlist which I use for the stuff I specifically want on my iPod. My other playlists are smart playlists which are managed automatically. Unlike most anal-retentive sods who like to complain about iTunes as the synchronization interface to the iPod, I don't feel like manually picking and choosing what music to listen to, and use smart playlists to make my life easier. For those few things that I do want specifically available, I use a single manual playlist, which I can manage by drag-and-drop and even - get this - when my iPod isn't hooked up.

SO DIFFICULT.

PS3 is now even cheaper than the equivalent 360

So you can get a 360 31337 + HD-DVD player for $680 then add another $200 for the HD-DVD drive, and that's a better deal than $500 for the equivalent PS3? (Okay the Elite has more hard drive but as another commenter pointed out, you can upgrade that yourself, and $380 is rather a lot to pay for a 120GB drive.)

So basically it'll look like crap on BOTH platforms

Making a cross-platform game which runs on both Windows and Symbian isn't really that big a deal. I would hope that the Windows build at least rendered at a decent resolution and framerate.

Refreshingly honest security researcher

After all the recent news about security researchers who either want to auction off their work to the highest bidder or who want to cause harm to the companies in question, it's really refreshing to see a security researcher who retains the old values of guarded disclosure and gentle escalation, with Internet safety as his motivation rather than fame or money.

Inanimate objects hate being anthropomorphized

I'm pretty sure Pluto doesn't really care what some specks of carbon on a lump of rock thousands of millions of miles away calls it. Or about anything else, for that matter.

Everyone still misses the point to this release

Apple isn't releasing Safari on Windows to get marketshare for Safari, they're releasing it to get people to develop for the iPhone and to have a way of doing site compatibility testing without needing a Mac. They're marketing it as an alternate browser for Windows but it's really just a way to make the Internet experience better for Mac and iPhone users.

uTube's site could use some optimization anyway

When they first filed the suit, all of their badly-optimized HTML and client-side-resized images meant that the total bandwidth was about 1.5MB per pageview, meaning they were serving up at least 70GB/day for no good reason. If they were a competent organization, they would have optimized their site pretty quickly, and then done what they could to cash in on the false popularity, and then just let a happy accident be. Instead, their first response was to make a court case, and THEN started to cash in on it, and only now is their site actually bandwidth-optimized.

The fact they did it backwards wouldn't be so distasteful if it weren't for their decision to continue with this lawsuit.

Where the Foleo still wins out:

The Foleo has Bluetooth so that you can use a cellphone as a modem for the device, which is supposed to be its common use case (hence why the Foleo is billed as a "smartphone companion"). I'd definitely get one of these Asus devices if it had Bluetooth instead of a camera though.

I want to like the Foleo, but US$500 is just too much for such a single-purpose device, especially since it has no real PIM capability of its own. My main complaint in phones is the lack of decent PIM, especially when it comes to keeping my work and home PCs in sync. Currently I've merely settled for a Treo 650 because it gets sync right, but so much about it is terrible, while Sony Ericsson's low-end phones actually get everything perfect EXCEPT sync.

Why is it that today's "smart" devices still can't do what the original PalmPilot got right 10 years ago?

Bob's legacy still lives on in Windows

There were actually TWO things born from Bob: the "assistant" metaphor, and the Comic Sans font, which was created to make the assistants' text seem friendlier. We can rest easy that thanks to peoples' bad taste in typography, we'll always have a reminder of Bob's existence.

The Best Buy here is at least decent about it

They don't have an in-store kiosk, but whenever I've told the cashier that the website price was $10 lower they've always been good about just accepting that. They also realize how ludicrous it is that if you were to buy something online for instant pickup you'd get a lower price than if you were to come in and browse for a while. You'd think they'd want to encourage browsing.

Re "the human eye cannot detect that many colors, only a fraction of them"

Although the human eye can't detect that many colors simultaneously, it has extremely fine dynamic contrast, and so until there's a monitor which can adjust its contrast based specifically on what the user is looking at, the human eye is capable of perceiving a far wider gamut than any monitor while also able to differentiate fine differences between colors on a narrow gamut. If the color differences weren't perceptible then this lawsuit would have never come up.

At least the MacBook displays dither; my 23" HP monitor at home doesn't even do that, and so gradients get terrible banding. Though it sounds from the description like the MacBook's dithering is positional, rather than temporal; temporal dithering would take advantage of the inherent lagginess of LCD to make the dithering much less noticeable. (It's actually a form of temporal dithering which allows LCDs to produce more than two shades to begin with, but there's a limit to how effective it can be within a single refresh, especially as refresh times get pushed down further and further to try to offer a more CRT-like viewing experience.)

It's only fair, really

considering that a big part of one of the bigger Simpsons season finales (the "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" two-parter, and also its "138th Episode Spectacular" followup) had a lot of jokes parodying the O. J. Simpson case.

I had nothing to do with this

> "Kiefer Sutherland Fluffy Poodle Fluffy 動画 - MICKEY.TV"

Heck, I'll give them *real* passwords for chocolate

I'll happily give away a real password to my account. Of course it'll be a password from a year ago, since we have a 3-month password change policy and I have such a weird memory that I can remember most of my vaguely-pronounceable line noise (probably because I use mnemonics to memorize it to begin with).

Am I also weird for remembering the license plate numbers of my family cars growing up?

I thought Dr. Juan was smarter than this

The only "evidence" Juan cites for possible human telepathy is non-cited anecdotal evidence about people coincidentally thinking about someone else when something is happening to them, but considering that most people have things happening to them all the time, getting an inkling of something non-specific is pretty meaningless.

Right now I'm thinking of my mother, and she's at her computer writing an article. That may or may not be true, but she's a science journalist so the chances of that being true are pretty high. If I were to call her and ask what she was doing, and she said she was at her computer, working on an article, would that be evidence of telepathy? Not really!

ISD as a medical term for asexuality?

This sounds a lot like the various descriptions I hear for asexuality (as per asexuality.org), which has taken a life of its own as yet another sexual orientation (with of course a large community springing up around it).