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Thats when I knew Nintendo lied to us about saying the amount of ROM space was the main culpret behind not having bigger games.

The NES has had bankswitching since the CNROM days. The limiting factor during the "ROM shortage" was the cost of replicating mask ROMs with larger capacity; at the time, Nintendo didn't want to price Game Paks at 80 USD MSRP. Cost was also the issue in Square's decision to publish Final Fantasy VII for a CD-based system instead of the Nintendo 64; what Square wanted to do with the game couldn't be accomplished in the 128-Mibit (16-MiB) N64 carts that were affordable to replicate.

Hence: To draw an illegitimate profit from; to speculate on; to put upon.

Back in the halcyon days of RC5-56 and the DES Challenges, computers didn't make a distinction between idling and crunching, so it was a great idea to use those spare cycles for something (remotely) productive. But this is no longer true: modern-day power-sucking CPUs do have circuitry that lets them idle and cool off when the processor is just running NOPs. Thus, keeping a number cruncher running 24 hours a day will stress your processor, requiring full ventilation and running up your power bill.

somebody worked this out when i started the e2 distributed.net team.

the figures

Geek N.: A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.

--An excerpt from a definition of geek.

As far as overlap between car and computer geeks go, I can see alot of it. I've got a number of friends in my "circle" who are car geeks as well as computer geeks.

Depending on your definition of the term "geek" -- I'd consider myself a quasi car-geek, only because I don't fix everything on my car. I do stuff like suspension work, brake work (pads, rotors, adjustments, etc), and routine maintenance, but generally avoid any internal engine work (or, for that matter, anything that would involve dropping the engine or transmission).

That being said, I love cars. I simply think that they're neat machines that are fun to operate. I'm a particular fan of (what I define as) sports cars. My definition is a general adherance to the British (European) sports cars of earlier days. Lightweight (2500 LB or under is a MUST), inexpensive, purpose-built (no/few frills), RWD, and typically low-powered. I track my car (I'm cheap as well, so my "sports car" is both a track car and daily driver), and will tweak it as needed. Part of my car geekiness moves away from mechanical upgrades, and focuses on fixing the driver to make the car go faster...this a bastardization of an old axiom from my autocrossing days. I've now given up autocrossing entirely to persue track driving. I'm only able to do it a handful of times per year, since it can get quite expensive -- but I often will be on-track with my computer geek comrades.

--Turkey

If you look at the purpose and design of the US government, you will see that it is quite pragmatic, and can stand on its own virtues without needing Christian principles. A lot of countries around the world use similar forms of government complete with rights and all, and they're definitely not all Christian. Their arguments were aimed toward helping people live together in peace and prosperity without oppressing anybody. Sure, you can find arguments in the Bible that support America's principles, but you can also find a great many against, and the same holds true for other major religions. Could it be that America was founded on practicality?

I don't know if you're kidding or not, but if you aren't, look at dilbert.com and read through the comic archive. The boss in the comics has pointy hair, is technically and socially innept and is part of the reason his company is failing.

It's now a derogatory term used to mock those in management who don't know their arse from their face, i.e. are totally useless and only there because nobody has the guts to fire or demote them (see also, the peter principle and the dilbert principle)

I don't know if you're kidding or not, but if you aren't, look at dilbert.com and read through the comic archive. The boss in the comics has pointy hair, is technically and socially innept and is part of the reason his company is failing.

It's now a derogatory term used to mock those in management who don't know their arse from their face, i.e. are totally useless and only there because nobody has the guts to fire or demote them (see also, the peter principle and the dilbert principle)

It seems Nokia released some phones with movieOS in them.

I have to agree with the article about Nobuo Uematsu's sophistication. Most of his work was done under constraints much greater then that of current composers. As Mr. Mirapaul points out; gaming music is getting better in part due to the properties arising from DVDs. Some of Mr. Uematsu's scores were done in 8 bits! Like a great sonnet writer Nobuo Uematsu used those constraints to their fullest extent.

Of his oeuvre I think "One Winged Angel" is the most highly lauded. I remember wanting the music so badly I Napstered it to be sure the quality was good then gulp plunked down $40 for the four CD set. --and at 53 I buy precious little music anymore (well, at least before iTunes that is). I consider it money well spent now.

Great game, great music.

This text was nuked from Everything2> and deleted from Wikipedia.

Media in the past often touted the Internet as a child porn heaven. It was repeatedly claimed that Internet users are constantly bombarded with child pornography in their spam, on seeminly innoculous pages, among the search results for "Britney Spears" or "Pokemon" and on P2P, masquerading as vanilla porn. But the facts do not support these assertions. Seek, and ye shall find. Don't and you won't.

But as another saying goes, if it exists, it must be somewhere on the Internet. And yes, this is true for child porn as well. The continuing attempts to eradicate online child pornography made it more difficult to find, but not impossible. Still, it usually requires considerable Internet search skills and experience, otherwise users are trapped into countless pop-up ads and surrounded by images of 35+ year old "lolitas" with pigtails. This article is a collection of techniques for finding child pornography on the Net. I will probably scorned by both paedophiles (for indirectly helping law enforcement) and "normal people" alike, but freedom of speech is paramount to me. Let the knowledge spread!

Disclaimer: I am against rape, violence and coercion, whether applied to children or to adults. I realise that child porn sometimes harms the children involved. But bits and pixels are not humans. No additional harm is being done. Downloading and posession of child porn is legal in many countries. IANAL. YMMV.

Sources of child porn

Child porn was de facto and de jure allowed before 1980s. There have been numerous porn magazines featuring photos of naked children and photos of children having consensual sex with other children and with adults. These magazines operated completely in the open and even solicited photos from their readers' families. These magazines, of course, were closed a long time ago and there is no place to buy the back issues today. But many images from these magazines were scanned and are now distributed on the BBSes and on the Net. For example, the most known series of hardcore scans from print magazines such as Lolita, called LL (Little Lolita) is well-represented online.

There are different laws regarding child pornography in countries all other the world. For example, in Japan child erotica was legal all the way until 1999. It was not usually exported officially, but scanners again filled this niche. One of the best known series, called Black Cat Scans (named after the scanner), available in many places online, features photos of beautiful young (early teens) girls from Russia and other countries made by Japanese photographers. One of the Black Cat Scans models, a beautiful 12 year-old girl called Laika even had an online cult following with a virtual church set up in one of the Usenet newsgroups. Other well-known series include MCLT (My Collection of Lolitas and Teens) by Atom, Yossy Scans and others.

Another abundant source of softcore child erotica is the nudism subculture. Nudists have no qualms about child nudity and hundreds of thousands of photos and videos featuring nude teenagers and kids are freely available. Banning such images is probably impossible without effectively outlawing the entire nudist subculture.

When American courts worked out the differences between art and child pornography, a new generation of legitimate softcore child pornography sites blossomed on the Web. Photos of Next Door Lolitas, Astral Nymphets, Natural Angels, Little Virgins and, of course, Most Erotic Teens appeared online, open to any person with a valid credit card. These sites can be thought about as Playboy with kids, offering viewers a lot of stylish sexual innuendo, but none of the blunt smut that usually characterises porno. And the best thing is that t

I believe a recent verdict in federal court found that explicit instructions on capital crimes are themselves capital crimes.

I believe a recent verdict in federal court found that explicit instructions on capital crimes are themselves capital crimes.

I believe a recent verdict in federal court found that explicit instructions on capital crimes are themselves capital crimes.

Once a person has been introduced to the inevitability of the evolution of smarter-than-human intelligence, they can no longer claim ignorance, and either accept it or go into denial like most people because the future shock is too much for old belief systems to handle, or too fantastic for bitter cynics who didn't get their promised flying cars.

--

Please turn off microsoft smart quotes. They don't mix well with slashdot, or anything else for that matter.

It is nice to see that in addition to sending spam, he was indited for identity theft and hijacking (or spoofing) the return address.

This is a good precedent for anyone who has dealt with a Joe Job before. (myself included... three thousands bounced messages in two weeks... and counting). That said i think the time, and fine are excessive and don't fit the crime. a week of time total and $50/bounce would be fine by me.

To this page on E2 I wrote on The Pronunciation of Punctuation in Unix. Note that it is slanted toward my own experience in the scruz geek crowd.

USB is also "hot swappable," which means users no longer need to reboot their computers when they want to plug or unplug their USB-enabled devices.

Give the author a computer dictionary, hot plugging. Hot swappable means you won't fry your computer when the power is on and you plug a device in or remove it. I expect there are many devices out there that you still have to reboot after you plug them in (for windows at least), heck, just installing some software does that.

This won't prevent spam at all...

It'll just force all spam to be joe jobs.

Read the link. This is not an improvement. For the poor victim of a joe job becomes a casualty in the war on spam...

Doesn't your copyright expire as soon as you do?

No-- currently seventy years after your death in the US. IANAL.

Best impact point: South Pole. Glacial melting may be an issue, but that'll give us time to evacuate and minimize casualties.

You mean Second Impact?

Didn't bother to search the web did we?

Everything 2 says this

0%. In Windows 9x (at least), for example, you can run "strings" on some of the networking utilities to get at the BSD copyright statements.

That is so wrong in every sense.

If you say "20 times cheaper", you're actually saying the price is -19 * (or in other words, you get paid 19 times the amount you are now paying for the use) because "one time cheaper" already refers to a 100% discount. This is a very common and a very annoying misconception.

Read more on the subject.

I am a reel big fan of yogurt enemas and chili chips LONG LIVE MY DICK!

If you don't know WTF we're on about, haul yourself over here.

Hi Carolyn. How are things? :-)

There is real content on the web, especially if you're willing to pay. Encyclpedia Britannica, for instance. I also ran across a URL the other day that was free, but seemed to have a lot of interesting information (if perhaps sometimes of dubious origin. This is the first article I read, regarding aerospike engines..

There is plenty of good scientific content (I think it's a bit much to lump it in as geekery related to computers;) on the web at sites like fas.org, newscientist.com and many more technical examples (spie.org for instance).

There is a ton of sports, travel and hobby related info on the web. It pays to do a little research before believing any given opinion, but you can usually shortly arrive at a pretty good understanding of a given topic.

I was also pleased to see the recent release of a bunch of MIT courseware to the web. More colleges and universities should follow that lead!

In the shadow of the worlds tallest five story building and a pyramid shaped aquarium with a submarine next to it, who wouldn't fear big brother?

OK, thanks for your contribution to /. misinformation.

MS has used considerable amounts of BSD code in the past, and still does so, for a recent example(last week) see:
http://www.deadly.org/article.php3?sid=20030927090 008

You can also just do a strings of the ftp command on windows, for more details:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=BSD%20Cod e%20in%20Windows

The original windows TCP/IP stack was lifted directly from BSD too... and I'm sure there are many other examples that we will never know of.

Oh, and there was zlib too, because when a hole was found in zlib MS Office and quite a few other MS products had to be patched:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-860328.html

They have even publicly said that they think the BSD license is great, obviously as long as others use it and they can take advantage of it, I can't recall MS ever releasing anything under the BSD or any other open source license(no, "shared source" is _not_ open source).

Still, as Theo says, if MS uses BSD/public-domain code it's great, that is the point of the BSD license, to improve the sorry state of the software quality in our world, if MS uses BSD code to make their software suck less, great that is what people that releases code under the BSD license want, to make software suck less, not to push any stupid political agenda.

Best wishes

\\Uriel

Again, working at an ISP, we cannot dictate what a user can or should not receive. He should have installed filters.

I think he was having email spoofed to look as though it were coming FROM him, so that people were bitching about him sending it, when he wasn't. I believe this is referred to as a Joe Job.

Here's a great step-by-step procedure for wiping your backside

Philip Kahn created Turbo Pascal

Nope, wrong. the post about Anders Heijelsbeg was correct. Kahn and Co just put an IDE on A.H's compiler then and marketed it very well, to thier mutual benefit.

One explanation of the wonder that was... TV's Frank.

Actaully, the actor has since moved onto working behind the scenes in such shows as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and the wonderful Invader Zim. Anyway - the character was mostly one of a parody of a stupid mad scientist sidekick. Most of the larger bittorrent sites will have a few MST3k movies available... see most any of the pre-624 episodes to see him in action. He was a great character. :^)

Ryan Fenton

Pretty easy to find with google, see here. Really, and people say creationists don't check things out. Yow.

Mmmhmmm...

There's 168 star trek: TNG episodes total.

Each episode is about 45 - 50 minutes long, IIRC.

A "well encoded" DVD will fit not much more than 2 hours per layer. Since a layer change would be acceptable, but not a side change, during an episode, that's no more than about 5 episodes a side, or about 10 episodes a disc.

That leaves us with a 17 disc _minimum_ requirement, which doesn't leave much room for enhacements. I agree, 48 is a bit much, but perhaps they want art on each disc for readability purposes? That leaves only 14 "extra" discs.

Either way, since a pressed DVD costs less than $5 CDN to produce (evidenced by WalMart crap movies sales) even at 48 discs, that's a hefty premium for an already paid-up show.

as a matter of fact, i have heard of deming.

another interesting japanese industry-related topic is Kaizen, which american businessmen tried to adopt at one point.

Troll is a provocative posting, designed to start a flame. Attack on ideal is not a troll per se. I can argue that open source is inherently flawed model and it would be ok. But if I carefully craft my post to elicit a predictable aggressive reaction from other users, it is a troll. The difference is in purpose. For example, see this clever troll. If it didn't have that ending and just was a bit more balanced, it would be a normal post. But the author wanted to start a flaming discussion, so he intentionally provoked with his post. Be careful in your moderations, if you are not sure, don't moderate that particular post.

Mod parent up.

British parents seem to be so worried about their little girls being deflowered by the big scary paedophiles, and the tabloids (most notably the Daily Mail) are feeding on this.

The Internet is getting the short end of the stick here. We have TV ads saying that parents should continually look over their kids' shoulders to see what they are doing, and that NOONE is trustworthy enough even to talk to online.

Mother: What are you doing?
Kid: I'm talking to a friend I met on the internet using ICQ.
(Wave of panic spreads over parent, thinking that ICQ is some kind of dating program)
Mother: Get off that computer! NOW!

The instinctive reaction is to believe the tabloid bollocks about there being 1 paedophile online for every 5 other users or some shit like that and then tarring all net users with the same brush.

Parents...GET THE FUCK OVER IT!

Don't be too sure that most /. 'ers are little Bolsheviks. Just as with most things in this great country, the majority is mostly silent and the minority is mostly overly loud. I call it the Small Groups Screaming Loudly syndrome. It is a basic tenet of propagandism

I seem to remember from way back that Nintendo had patented the design of it's D-pad.

A quick search turned up this note of the history of the NES controller:

Yokoi designed something simple that evolved into what is known as the D-pad. Nintendo then proceeded to patent the design of the D-pad.. As a result, a dispute rose up between Nintendo and Sega when Sega used the D-pad design in their Genesis console

This explains why Sony and Microsoft are unable to copy Nintendo's D-pad design - they'd have the stuffing sued out of them. Instead:

Sony hid the middle part of rocker underneath the case. Unfortunately their design makes your thumbs bleed after using it for an hour or two.

Microsoft came up with the circle-with-raised-compass-points design. Unfortunately it's error--prone in that you often hit the diagonals when you don't mean to.

FYI, my ideal controller would have:

* Nintendo's D-pad
* Sony's analog sticks
* Sony's buttons
* Sony's DualShock control layout on the front-face (the controls are placed about perfectly for me).
* Microsoft's Controller-S case and extra-long cable (I find it the most comfortable to hold for long periods of time - just not the best to USE).

The Arabic in the Quran is more complex than ordinary "colloquial" arabic. The difference is like Shakespeare to vernacular english. Saying the Quran has grammatical errors is like saying Shakespeare has grammatical errors; a good deal of modern language is based on the grammar introduced by both.

People point to its structure and form as a sign that it couldn't have been written or created by Muhammad(pbuh) as he was illiterate and had no history of poetry. Speaking of which, there is an open challenge in the Qur'an to anyone who disbelieves in it, to try writing a chapter in Arabic on their own, and try emulating the style. So far as I know, nobody has been able to emulate it.

And to rebut:

• Like I said earlier, the Arabic is much more complex. Were God to send down messages and laws, He would probably use some big vocabulary words to get His meaning accross perfectly
• The "other men" theory seems pretty weak to me. All the people who opposed Muhammad, ie Pagans, Christians, Jews, who lived in Mecca and medina tried to prove him wrong. They followed him around to see where he could be getting his revelations from, and they turned up empty-handed.
  
• See this disproval of The Satanic Verses

This is an excellent opportunity for the RIAA to leverage a private currency. They could control the cost per unit in US$, and actually charge sub 1 cent prices for certain independant artists, to encourage sales.

There was a good bit on Kuro5hin about this a little while back.

IMHO, the point is: if it was better to employ americans, companies would do so...

There are a helluva lot of great engineers out of work right now, and the offshore problem is just another factor in their not getting back into the job market, or worse, leaving it for other pastures.

Seems so. Read up here to check. :-)

For one thing - this is strong stuff we're talking about - incineration is garuanteed. If it breaks up that might sound like an imporovement - but the it's like being shot with a shotgun. It may be loaded with pellets, or it may be loaded with solid rounds. You may spead the impact a little, but its the kinetic energy that'll kill you - and you still get all of that.

Not scared yet? Let's put this in perspective.

according to its website the Golden Gate bridge weighs 380,800,000 kg and spans 1966m. That's probably comparable to the weight/length ratio for a space elevator. It uses hi-tech materials, but it has to support its own weight across its entire length, and its going to be long! According to Nasa (google cache) the elevator is likely reach 36,000,000m. That's 18,311 times the length of the GGB

So taking the golden gate bridge as a guide, we can estimate the total weight of the cable at 18,311 x 380,800,000kg = 6.97 x 10^12. Seven gigatonnes - lighter than I expected.

How hard is it going to hit? Well, at least terminal velocity. I say "at least because the upper reaches will be going faster and have to be slowed by the atmosphere. Also the cable will be considerably denser than a human, so we can reckon it's terminal v as being rather more than a human's. Human terminal v is about 50m/s so let's go with that for the time being. We're being conservative..

Kinetic energy = 0,5 x mass x velocity x velocity
= 6.97294 x 10^12 x 50 x 50 / 2
= 8.716175 x 10^15 joules

And to put that in perspective, one megaton comes to about 4.184 x 10^15 Joules.

So if the cable came crashing down it'd release about 2 Megatons of kinetic energy - either as heat as it burnt up, or as shockwaves on impact.

Doesn't sound like much? Well, the Hiroshima bomb is reckoned as being 20 killotonnes yeild. So 200 hundred hiroshima bombs going off in a ring around the equator in fairly rapid succession.

and it it hits faster than that... well that's a square term. 100m/s give you 4 time the energy or 800 hiroshima bombs. 200m/s (not unreasonable) gives 16 times - 3,200 x hiroshima.

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see a space elevator. Just let's bear in mind that this is dangerous

This is a running joke that has been going on for a very long time. BSD's imminent death has been greatly exaggerated more than once, and this joke is poking fun at that fact.
On Slashdot, this has evolved into a troll, which you can find information about in quite a few places.

Everything2 has some general information on "BSD is dying".

Wikipedia has this to say about BSD is dying:

*BSD is dying
Quite frequently (especially for BSD-related stories) a comment will be posted providing dubious statistics and many links detailing the forthcoming death of the BSD operating system. With its bogus statistics and inflammatory language the original "*BSD is dying" troll was enormously successful, and was still guaranteed to generate responses years after it first appeared. Unsurprisingly many variants of this troll were created: Slashdot/VA Linux/Linux/Beos/Apple is dying. None were as successful as the original.

I'm not convinced that this is the case, however, because there are some earlier examples of this joke (not the troll necessarily, but off-color remarks).
The earliest reference I can find was in 1992, and may be one explaniation of the phenomenom: Responses to survey on the death of BSD
There was an article in an online magazine in 1999 that said some disparaging things about BSD's license that may have something to do with phenomenom.
I could not find the article, but it is mentioned here: Debian wants to use FreeBSD kernel

There is also a * is dying page.

clickety

In my opinion, the answer can be summed up nicely by Chuck Palahniuk's quote: When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

The fact is that that we can only escape into the past... the future no longer offers escapist fantasies. It's going to be more like 1984 than like 2001, and in our hearts, we all know it.