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Ok here are some internet resources to back up my statements regarding difficulty programming at the initial launch:

Wikipedia:
"Developers also complained about the system being difficult to develop for, with little in the way of reference material from Sony for its exotic architecture." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2

If you don't like the history reference, then change it at Wikipedia...

Booty Project:
"Think back to the PS2's launch: it took several years for developers to really figure the system out." - http://www.bootyproject.org/show_article.asp?id_ar ticle=5416

Anyways, my two cents Mr. Anonymous. PS2 was hard to develop for when it launched. It got better. Middleware and game engines solved a lot of this... oh yah, and developers got smarter using the harder.

I think OS-tans (OS girls) are pretty cute:
http://www.bootyproject.org/show_article.asp?id_ar ticle=4882
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan

2k-tan with Firefox-tan:
http://www.ferricorp.com/misc/vector/wall_browsers _eng.jpg

What's even weirder is that some people are starting to worship her.

http://www.video-fenky.com/archives/000229.html
http://otakubooty.bootyproject.org/show_article.as p?id_article=4896

If they thought the breasts were preposterously large in video, wait'll they get a load of this!

Heh heh... forget porn... they should do an Amazing Nurse Nanako marathon...

I would have to say that being chased by Sinistar ranks among the all-time scariest moments in video game history that I've ever experienced. There were a few monents in Doom that came close, but nothing else as remotely scary comes to mind....

God, I miss Sinistar. And, thanks to its 49-direction custom joystick, it's something that will never really be duplicated in the home, MAME or no MAME.....

http://www.bootyproject.org

"And I still really need to get Star Blazers"

Some things are more important than karma. So here goes...

Star Blazers 0WNZ J000 B|TC|-|Z!!!!!11!!1!!!!!

... uh.yeah.

http://www.bootyproject.org

"And I still really need to get Star Blazers"

Some things are more important than karma. So here goes...

Star Blazers 0WNZ J000 B|TC|-|Z!!!!!11!!1!!!!!

... uh.yeah.

http://www.bootyproject.org

My '97 Ford Escort has a speed regulator that won't let me get over 107Mph or so

I used to drive a car equipped with a device that wouldn't let me go over 80mph. It was called the "engine". and yes, it was a Ford....

http://www.bootyproject.org

I my experience teaching older people and newbies about computers, I always find that it's worth it to start with the "basics"... ie, the concepts of windows (the windows on the screen, not Windows(tm), moving the mouse, etc.

People sometimes get a little frustrated with slow progress at first (because it's a while before they can get to the "fun stuff") but I think it turns out to be well worth it.

Also, I've noticed a sign that things aren't going well is when your "students" have to resort to rote memorization. For example, my mom writes down every single step I tell her. If I say "go to the File menu, and then pick Print" she has to write it down in excruciating detail, ie, "move mouse pointer to the word 'file', press left mouse button, move mouse down to word 'print', press left mous button, etc..."

And she wonders why her progress is so slow. You can't really begin to be productive with a computer until the basics (moving the mouse, pulling down menus, etc) are intuitive.

Of course, we were all newbies at one point. And old people don't have the benefit of having grown up with all sorts of electronic gizmos like us. Come on... how many of you had your paths into the computer world paved by Ataris and NES's? Hehee...

http://www.bootyproject.org

getting rich off gullible audiophiles

Or perhaps more accurately, "getting off rich audiophiles" :P

http://www.bootyproject.org

LOL. Hahaha that made me laugh out loud. OMG, thanks for the laugh, I was in the middle of an all-night coding spree for werk... damn stupid deadlines... :-P

http://www.bootyproject.org

My dad gave me the Intensor for Christmas, and I brought it back to my dorm. The best game to play it on was Hydro Thunder, for the DC, but as you said, one could only play it for a few minutes before being very, very uncomfortable. On the plus side, the girls on our floor seemed to like it a LOT, usually blushing and excusing themselves from the room.

Ah... the "Intensor", so that's what it was called. They should have just called it the NadBuster(tm) or BallRumbler(tm) or something! :)
http://www.bootyproject.org

I was at E3 in '98, and I remember trying out some subwoofer-equipped gaming chairs. I believe they were from the same company that is producing these subwoofer-equipped vests, but I'm not sure... anyway, the funny thing about the chairs was that the subwoofer was located directly under your 'nads!

It was not pleasant experience. Sort of a gentle vibration might be kinda cool but this chair delivered a rather jolting effect... when I fired the machine gun in the demo game they had hooked up, I instantly regretted it. :)

I couldn't help but think that spending more than a few minutes in them without seriously damaging your reproductive system. It was one of those products where I was like, "umm... someone actually thought this was a good idea, and was able to convince enough investors as well in order to actually get this thing MADE?".

Usually, before purchasing any product, one of the little checks I run through in the back of my mind is, "will this damage my reproductive capabilities?". I think a good rule for potential product manufacturers to follow might be, "will this damage the reproductive capabilities of others?"

Might have felt nice if you were a girl though, I dunno. :)

http://www.bootyproject.org

I've heard of other devices using similar schemes. I remember reading (as a Slashdot quickie, perhaps? Maybe ~12 months ago? not sure...) about a Eastern European hospital using an Atari 800 as a data acquisition/display device.

Also, I witnessed first-hand a bicycle shop that used an NES cartridge to aid in wheel adjustment. There was a sensor thingamabob that would measure the true-ness of a wheel as it spun... the sensor thingamabob was connected to an NES cartridge which was plugged into an NES (obviously) that displayed the results on a TV screen.


http://www.bootyproject.org

1. DAE: Basically impossible/undesireable due to high CPU usage. I would bet good money that NO game has ever used this method. Any takers? :)
2. Synchronize analog CD audio playback to the game (like NiN on Q1). A lot of early PlayStation games did it this way, like Ridge Racer and Tekken. This also has downsides though on PC's... game stutters between tracks; some people have their WAV volume set much differently from CD volume, and some people just don't have their CD audio cables connected to their sound cards. Also, music tracks are easily rippable this way, and you really can't fit much music on the disc.
3. Stream the music data off of the CD. Not as DAE though... just as regular files, in some easily decompressible format such as MP3. Almost all console games with prerecorded music do it this way, although with hard disk space being as plentiful as it is now, I don't think many PC games do it... I think most PC games just save compressed music to the hard drive...

"I've seensome games use DAE to cache their in game music. ITs not common, but its sometimes done, and its also legitimate."

Are you sure it's streamed in via DAE and not just streamed in as regular data? See my other post on this thread... DAE != regular data. Just because they're streaming data (even audio data) in doesn't mean they're using DAE.

In fact, I really doubt they'd want to use DAE. High error rate, high CPU utilization, absolutely no control over bitrate, no ability to interleave other game data (for example, terrain data, etc) with the audio.


http://www.bootyproject.org

What good would a CD-ROM be if you couldn't pull data off a CD? Repeat after me: Audio CD's are just 1's and 0's.

LOL. Not quite. Audio data is arranged COMPLETELY differently from other data (files, etc) on a CD. Pulling audio data from a CD, pulling regular ISO 9660 data from a CD, and having the CD read audio data and run it through the DAC and out through an analog connection are three ENTIRELY different opreations from a hardware standpoint.

"It is true that audio CDs use all 2352 bytes per block for sound samples, while CD-ROMs use only 2048 bytes per block, with most of the rest going to ECC (Error Correcting Code) data. The error correction that keeps your CDs sounding the way they're supposed to, even when scratched or dirty, is applied at a lower level.

All of the data written to a CD uses CIRC (Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code) encoding. Every CD has two layers of error correction, called C1 and C2. C1 corrects bit errors at the lowest level, C2 applies to bytes in a frame (24 bytes per frame, 98 frames per block). In addition, the data is interleaved and spread over a large arc. (This is why you should always clean CDs from the center out, not in a circular motion.)"
--from this cool faq

Like I said... a ton of CDROM drives used to NOT support DAE. DAE is an extra feature purposely included by hardware manufacturers. From a technical standpoint they could EASILY stop including this feature (if laws forced them to do so).

"Don't worry about the hardware manufacturers of CD-ROM's, worry about a new format to replace CD-ROM's that carries copy protection bullshit in with it"

Well... I agree with you 100% there... you're right... like you say they're already building all sorts of digital protection into new digital TV's... I just wonder WHY they never went after (in a legal sense) the DAE feature on CDROM's. Made sense to me... not that that would be right... it just seems like the logical step of attack. *shrug*


http://www.bootyproject.org

I don't really care if companies like Roxio will stop making ripping-friendly software... as a zillion other posters have pointed out, we can always use other software (or other OS's, if need be).

Here's the thing, though, that's scary. When will they start going after the HARDWARE makers? If I was an bastard record company exec, I would go after the CD-ROM drive manufacturers and fight against the digital audio extraction (DAE) feature. Because without that, you can't rip songs directly from a CD. Sure, you could do an analog rip, but that's a pain in the ass (and usually sounds like ass).

Are there any uses for DAE, besides ripping music? It's seems to me that's pretty much it's sole purpose... used to be, in the days of 8x (and lesser) cd-rom drives, a lot of drives didn't even support DAE and they worked fine for everything but ripping.

So, to me, based on the $#$%#$ evil laws that we have in America it would be hard to defend the inclusion of the DAE feature. Not saying that's right, but basically, from a functional standpoint... DSS:DVD = DAE:CD. You know what I mean? Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong in a legal sense. I hope I am. :)

One good thing: the hardware manufacturers WILL fight efforts by the RIAA, et al, to defend their hardware's ability to rip music... because as another poster pointed out, ripping/burning/downloading music is pretty much the only new "killer app" for PC's these days.


http://www.bootyproject.org

Yeah... that's so true. If you try to explain to people that the internet is more than the web and typically you get met with blank states at best. Now, with AOL and MSN, we're actually stepping backwards... not only do they think web=internet, they think AOL+MSN=web. It's just like TV to them now. It doesn't occur to them that they could actually be a part of it... help make the web cool... they're just mindless consumers... maybe they think they could put a baby picture or two up on the web, at most... :/

Ah well... maybe it's also just sour grapes... maybe I'm just bitching because the once super-cool world of computers and the 'net has now been "invaded" by the mainstream and now it doesn't feel special or different anymore?

I guess this happens to most little sub-cultures... like rock-and-roll... "raves"... even sports... they just get kinda commericialized and absorbed. They can still live on though, no matter how fucked-up and corporate large parts of them become. No matter how many albums NSync sells, rock and roll is far from dead. I guess that's how the spirit of the 'net will have to be... (did that analogy make any sense to anyone but me??!) :P

http://www.bootyproject.org

So, the web was non-commerical for about a year and a half?

Huh?

http://www.bootyproject.org

Around 1995 is when I disovered the internet I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. A place where people could share ideas and information that was centered around the world, a place where anyone could be a publisher. Best of all, it wasn't tainted by big stupid money and advertisements. It was just like... a cerebral connection between people with similar interests or that just wanted to share information.

Then the web got all commercial. Nowadays it's a freaking ad-fest. Most major sites are whored out to major corporations at least to some extent. Which really depressed me for a long time. I watched the internet being ruined by commercialism.

The really sad part is that the average Joe on the street has already become dissillusioned about the internet. People are actually turning AWAY from the internet at this point. Do you know how many 30 and 40-somethings I know that have "tried" the Internet and found it stupid? To them, the internet is AOL or MSN. Just more chances to have their eyeballs spammed with ads and do a little shopping- in other words, just like the rest of our capitalist world except less convenient to use (compared with TV or opening up a magazine). In their eyes... the internet is absolutely nothing special... basically just TV, with hyperlinks, and added technical annoyances. Plus everyone's sick of hearing about the dot-com thing, which is a huge turn-off. They don't know or care about the rest of the internet, the real communities of people and the intellectual potential out there...

Which sucks, obviously. But then I realized... the cool part of the internet is still THERE! All that commerical bullshit floating on the surface doesn't prevent people from using the internet the way it was meant to be used... for sharing information and ideas and fun, not a fucking online version of tabloid magazines and shopping malls (not that buying things online isn't cool).

In fact... I realized it's all the money coming in from mass media that's actually helping the cool part of the net... paying for more bandwidth, driving the PC pricewars, etc.

So what I'm saying is, while it sucks that 50% of the clicks are concentrated on such a small number of huge-corporate-monolith sites... but you know what... fuck those people who are supplying those clicks. They're the stupid, mass-media brainwashed masses... not the type you really WANT contributing to Slashdot... or any other worthwhile online (or offline) endeavor. Let's just be glad their dollars are helping to fund things like broadband access and so on. We can still use the internet how it was meant to be used.

(Of course... we still need to be vigilant. The money pouring in from the corporate whores could have a polluting effect on the "cool" parts of the internet, too... witness things like the DCMA... etc..)

Exactly.
http://www.bootyproject.org

"I'd gladly see Pizza Hut ads on all our rockets if it PAID FOR MORE MISSIONS. It's not like the scientific results are tainted by commerical money."

...yet.

http://www.bootyproject.org

I don't know, but after U 571 and Saving Private Ryan, it wouldn't surprise me if the film was another pro US self contratulatory backslapping session, passing itself off as historical and pissing off a lot of people who know it to be severely factually incorrrect.

First of all, I didn't see U571, but how could you say that about Saving Private Ryan? It showed a lot of bad things about the US, too... cowardly US soldiers (like the journalist guy who cowered in the stairs while his squadmate was getting stabbed), US soldiers shooting Germans after they'd surrendered, and... well just look at the main "quest" the protagonists were on... it turned out to be a stupid waste of many lives to save ONE SINGLE private, all for basically public relations purposes.

And yes, it also showed heroic American soldiers. And yes, it showed the Americans winning and taking the beach. Well guess what? That did happen. So WTF pisses you off about it?

Look, I hate movies that just blindly portray America as the hero too. But I have to totally disgree with your lumping of Saving Private Ryan into that category.

http://www.bootyproject.org

"Well the only fact is that it is the US population that pays for these movies, hence they are written for that population"

Actually, a large portion of a movie's profits come from other countries these days. There are 6 billion people in the world, and only 0.25 billion of them live in America.

"What movie would be a blockbuster if the US was just a sidelined existance. A movie where the US troops screw up"

You moron. Wasn't the U.S. defeat at Pearl Harbor a huge American screw-up? Americans were totally unprepared for that attack.. ignored obvious signs of approaching planes on radar... I can't believe you are idiotic enough to trash "Pearl Harbor" because it doesn't show U.S. troops screwing up/losing. The freaking movie is named after, and is based on, the most humiliating, incompetant, and psychologically damaging defeat in our memory.

...Unless maybe you count the Vietnam war. Yeah, not like we've made any movies about that war. Uh, dude. There have probably been 25 of those made.

Also, for other random examples of U.S.-made war movies that show the U.S. in a bad light, how about "Dances With Wolves" (American slaughter of Native Americans" or "Three Kings" (Gulf War)?

It's true, for a long time Hollywood turned out nothing but war movies glorifying the U.S. exclusively. But for the past 10-15 years or more, the trend has definitely been to the opposite.

I mean... Even "Saving Private Ryan"... showed the US as the "good guys", but also showed lots of bad things about them too... the futile nature of the mission to save Pvt Ryan, Americans shooting Germans after they'd surrendered, cowardice in some American soldiers...

http://www.bootyproject.org

Let's hope it's actually a shot-by-shot analysis, not a frame-by-frame analysis. At ~24fps, and ~30sec, that would be uh... a lot of screenshots.

Or, maybe it really is a frame-by-frame analysis, and TheOneRing.Net has such a fat pipe that they're attempting some sort of reverse-Slashdot attempt!

http://www.bootyproject.org

Playing Gollum, a character infinitely less creepy and annoying than himself, would be quite a strech for Paul Reubens. Would he be up to it?

http://www.bootyproject.org

Well, it sounds like this worm only affects you if you've already been compromised by the other one- it enters through the same backdoor.

I mean, yeah, I agree with you- not a good idea to rely on benevolent virii to have a secure system, lol, but this "benevolent worm" is only gonna affect those who couldn't or didn't secure their own systems "the old-fashioned way" :-P

http://www.bootyproject.org

If I had mod points, I would mod you up simply because of the fact that you used "Aha" as a verb.

http://www.bootyproject.org

Hrm, so it's not nit-picking, but rather the fact that a change in someone's hair color is a sign of a larger problem; some faithlessness to the book?

I would agree with that, however... it does seem to me that they are staying true to the spirit of the books. The larger themes and "feel" seem to be there, at least in the snippets that have been released so far.

Remember, it's not the tines on Galadriel's fork or Boronir's hair color that made the books so wonderful in the first place. It was the amazing characters, and the amazing adventures and stories.

For example, Elijah Wood probably isn't fat enough to be a hobbit, even though Frodo was not as fat as most hobbits (and indeed, shed quite a few pounds during the journey). However, I love the choice of him as Frodo. From the pictures I've seen so far, he looks perfect for the role. That look in his eyes... it's just how I always imagined Frodo looking. A mixture of inner strength and scared shitlessness... as he embarks on a quest that he has no hope of surviving, no idea of how to accomplish, and yet the world is resting on his shoulders. To me, that's more important than details like eye color or hair color or whatever.

Now, there are a few thing that have disturbed me, from what I've heard of the second trailer... Gandalf is described as "panicky", and apparently the Nine here a whispered "my precioussssss" in the Mines of Moria. Now, Gandalf was many things, but never panicky. And the Nine never heard Gollum speak in Moria... but we can assume he was following the Nine at the time, so this "embellishment" can be somewhat understood.

Anyway, agree that changing things from the book is a Bad Thing, but I'm not going to sweat little details like hair color. Now genuine, big changes like Gandalf's character, etc, I have a tougher time swallowing, and don't like.

http://www.bootyproject.org

But there is no blond human in the nine. Boromir and Aragorn are BOTH black haired, read the description of Boromir in Rivendell

Seriously, why do you even care about such a small detail? I mean, if you were going to be any more nit-picky, next thing you'll be complaining that Galadriel's fork has the wrong number of tines on it in the scene where the party eats dinner with the Elves. Or something like that.

Even the uh, "augmented" love story between Aragorn and Arwen... it doesn't bother me too much, as long as it doesn't change the main focus of the movie. I don't like it, but... it's a pretty minor detail.

If you're going to bitch about every little difference between LOTR (or any book) and the movie version... well, seriously... you know you're going to be dissappointed 100% of the time. Just stay away from the movies, and do us a favor and be quiet about it. It will be easier on all of us, including you.

http://www.bootyproject.org

erm yeah I think you're probably right, now that you mention it :)

http://www.bootyproject.org

What was he, a double agent or defector or something? If he was giving the interview in English for your hometown, I'll assume you live in an English-speaking country. So why was your hometown hero flying a German warplane?

Perhaps your "hometown hero" was a double-agent who secretly flew missions for the Germans as well, and had covered up his secret so well all these years, until accidentally letting it slip during your interview with him. Too bad you let such an awesome scoop wind up on the cutting-room floor. Nice move, Cronkite. :P

Erm... eh... or I could always just put down the crack pipe. Yeah, maybe that would be better.


http://www.bootyproject.org

I agree with you... it is most definitely the answer for live streams! You're right, I guess live streams will get more rpevalent as time goes on....


http://www.bootyproject.org

1. Cache data. Of course, for a cache to be useful, we'd have to cache a lot of data, and keep it for a while. Well... now we basically have a proxy server. As a web designer, lemme tell ya... they cause nothing but a pain in the ass. Proxy servers screw up the web servers' usage stat log (which is the basis by which many websites make money, through ad impressions) and the prozy server's cache often gets stale. A good example of proxy servers making everyone's life hell would be AOL's proxy servers. This raises issues similar to the reasons why Slashdot doesn't cache linked pages locally (see the FAQ)
2. If you don't want to cache data, then I guess we have to cache requests. The MMR could hold onto each user's request for, say, X seconds and weed out the dupe requests. Problem is, unless you have an incredible number of simultaneous requests, the odds of a dupe request is incredibly tiny, mathematically speaking. Also, this would obviously add a disgusting amount of latency to the user's experience

Can you say Vector Unit? The PS2 has 2 Vector units especialy made for 3D calculations. In essence you can do 4 floating point operations in 1 cycle. The 300MHZ*4*2 + 300MHZ = 2.7Ghz 4 = 4 operations per cycle. 2 = 2 Vector units. 300MHZ = the main CPU. /PS2 - Developer

Well, the Athlon (3dNow) and PentiumIII and IV (SSE and SSE2) have vector SIMD instructions as well. I don't know the specs offhand, but I think they can each operate on like 4 floating-point numbers at once... so thats like an effective... what... 4ghz or so worth of floating-point ops from a 1ghz PC, using your kind of math?

So the PS2 is still outgunned in terms of horsepower, and you haven't even solved the issue of the PS2's paltry (by render farm standards) 32MB of RAM yet.

Plus you'd.... uh... kind of have to write (or at least port) your own rendering software to run on the PS2. But hey... hopefully someone will prove me wrong... show me your PS2 render farms guys! :-)

http://www.bootyproject.org

Multicasting saves a huge bundle on the backbones and keeps broadband users happy

How is multicasting the future? OK, the way I understand multicasting it is... suppose everyone in my area (could be a neighborhood, office building, etc) wants to watch the same streaming video over the 'net. Rather than all 100 of us streaming copies of the same exact data from the live rock concert in Uruguay (or whatever the video is), we use multicasting... so the provider streams only ONE copy of the data, and a switch way way way downstream multiplexes the data out to multiple users. Thus saving a ton of bandwidth and server resources.

Um, that sounds really good, but it kinda relies on everyone wanting the same streaming video at the same time. So in that case, how is watching the video over the 'net any cooler than watching it on TV? Part of the coolness of getting... well, anything off of the net is being able to get it when you want it. I'm not sure how multicasting could work without totally defeating the purpose of the 'net.

Probably the way to go is local, mirrored servers (with the mirroring transparent to the user), like Akamai is doing. Dunno if they're making any money or not, but this seems like the way to go as far as saving bandwidth, improving access time, and still retaining the "give me my data when I want it"-ness of the net.

If there's a place for multicasting, it's probably in the online gaming world, somewhere way down the road (since in this case everyone HAS to have the same data at the same time, in order to keep the game world consistent). Although... setting up game servers would then be quite a technical challenge... part of the success of online gaming is that anybody with a sweet connection can set up their own Quake/Tribes/Unreal server....

http://www.bootyproject.org

Of course, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This applies to their dreams of creating a sample-based music world as well. :-P
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As a lot of posters have already pointed out, removing free tablature is actually going to hurt budding muscians, and will actually rob the recording industry of musical talent in the future.

"So", the outraged Slashdotters say. "The RIAA is just shooting themself in the foot! By nipping tomorrow's musicians in the bud, they're just depriving themselves of musicians they can make money off of tomorrow!"

Tempting argument, but that assumes the recording industry wants musicians tomorrow. I, for one, feel that they're just moving towards a sample-based recording industry. There are already trillions of hours of recorded music out there; they don't need to go through the inefficient process of actually finding musicians who can play music anymore. It's far more efficient for them to just licsense samples from their back catalogs to people who want to create "new" "music".

This business model also has the added bonus of keeping pesky start-up labels out of the game, because they obviously don't have huge catalogs of samplable, licensable music to rely upon for income.

Holy fucking shit... this post started out as a very sarcastic attempt at humor, but then it actually started to make sense while I was writing it! Help! Calgon, please take me away!!!

http://www.bootyproject.org

you can actually build a rendering farm on the cheap!

Ah, no. Not even close. Sorry. You're confusing real-time graphics with pre-rendered graphics, here. When you render graphics with a 3d modeling/rendering app like Lightwave or 3DSMax (for example) the CPU is doing all of the rendering computations when you render your final image.

Your 3d-accelerated hardware (the PS2's obvious strength) is used by LW or 3DS for real-time previews while you're creating and animating your scene. But when you're rendering your image, your shiny GeForce5 with 256MB memory and a 600MHZ GPU is nothing but a fancy slot-warmer. It does nothing. Your GeForce5-equipped machine is not going to render any faster than an identical PC with a S3 Virge chip.

Also, rendering is a true memory hog. Anyone doing serious rendering has at least 128MB of memory, if not 256 or 512MB. The PS2 has 32MB on board making it less than useless.

I'm sure the PS2's CPU is pretty powerful, especially for the floating-point operations needed for 3D rendering, but... it's only 300MHZ. I seriously doubt it's going to render faster than a 800mhz Athlon that you can buy for like $100 these days.
So, in summary, "no."


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That's almost a good idea, and it made me laugh when I read it, but your decompressor would surely take more than one bit, wouldn't it? So the total size of the decompressor plus the compressed file would certainly be greater than the original file (this was a key part of the original challange).

http://www.bootyproject.org

This would have been more impressive if it was posted a couple of weeks ago, before I'd played Black&White, which lets me seamlessly zoom from several thousand feet in the air down to one of my worshipper's nasal hair follicles if I so desire.

http://www.bootyproject.org

He will, however, notice the difference when the Word is first loading, and this is when most users will experience frustration

I don't even know about that... even the "evil and bloated" MS Word loads in less than a second on my 800mhz Athlon. I mean... winword.exe is an 8MB file. With around 40MB/sec of throughput on an IDE drive, that doesn't take very long to load, and I don't think SCSI would show much improvement.

OK, OK, before someone nitpicks, I'm sure that 8MB winword.exe loads plenty of other shared libraries, too... so total disk i/o is probably more than 8MB... but the whole thing still loads in less than a second. :)

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"not would they even benefit from them considering how fast IDE drives are now."

Well... I should say, they wouldn't "benefit noticeably". I mean, yeah... sure, your favorite bloated office suite will load a teeny bit faster with SCSI. And your swap file will be faster, too. But if you spend the money on RAM instead, you'll hardly use the swap file anyway. :)


http://www.bootyproject.org

The disk was the bottleneck 700MHz ago, and it is now... just get yourself a 500MHz CPU for $80 and spend the money you saved on SCSI-3 hardware.

I have to totally disagree with this (although I agree with everything else you said). Even the tasks performed by a typical "HARDCORE" user don't require SCSI... not would they even benefit from them considering how fast IDE drives are now. SCSI only helps when you have many users thrashing the disk at once, or if you absolutely need more throughput than the 45 MB/sec or so of real-world performance that modern IDE drives give you.

Essentially, unless you're running a server (many users) or doing work with digital video (needs extreme, interrupted bandwidth) SCSI is a very expensive and not-too-useful luxury. You'd be better off spending all the extra money on RAM. :)


http://www.bootyproject.org

...so did you survive the flight?

http://www.bootyproject.org

For the past week or so, my DSL ISP (Speakeasy) has been kinda saturated. I had three weeks of great service after I signed up, but in the last week or so my bandwidth has been shot to hell and I've been seeing packet loss. There's no packet loss between me and the gateway though so I can only assume it's congestion on their end... I think a lot of other ISP's are being saturated with Northpoint refugees too.

Well, consolidation is kinda scary but at least the survivors should be better off financially. I'm sure Speakeasy and the others are making some nice bucks from this. At least Speakeast is doing something about it... they'll have another OC-3 going up shortly, they say. Hmmm...maybe I'll just get my own OC-3 after I win the lottery. :)


http://www.bootyproject.org

Yes. The book will become a reality.. or maybe April 1st will be... /Geggibus "Ignore him"

Yeah, after I saw the headline my first thought was to check the date and make sure it wasn't April 1st! :)
http://www.bootyproject.org

Does anyone else find it slightly disturbing that NASA would name a computer "HAL"? 2001 anyone?


http://www.bootyproject.org

Basically we're at the point now where web sports broadcasts are like meatspace sports broadcasts. In meatspace, if you want the broadcasts for your home team, you can more or less do it on local radio or local television for free. If you want to watch out-of-town games, you pay for cable or satellite access so you can watch games on ESPN or DirecTV or whatever. I mean, come on... (as other posters have noted) if you only want to hear your home team's games... why are you getting it over the web anyway? Just turn on the radio. :)

You have to remember how this works from a business perspective. No matter how many people listen to a radio broadcast, it costs the station the same amount of money to broadcast it. That's NOT the case with a RealAudio broadcast because each user consumes additional bandwidth and additional CPU time on the broadcaster's side!

Still, it would be nice if we could get to the point where online advertisers and businesses could have deals where the advertisers basically pay per online viewer... that way hopefully as the amount of users increases, the amount of ad revenue would increase at the same rate as the bandwidth/cpu costs and then maybe online broadcasts could be free again? I think the only thing holding this back as cluelessness/skittishness on the part of the advertisers....


http://www.bootyproject.org