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Coca-Cola, Inc. announces it is discontinuing its "New Coke" line of products.

New Coke was renamed to "Coke II" in 1990. Apparently, Coca-Cola Co. still sells Coke II in some metropolitan areas.

Tetanus On Drugs. It will do your head in! Just when you think it is letting you relax, the spins and the fuzzies come back in, and then the zoom snaps into overdrive.

BBBbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!

I still cant play Mario on the Genesis

Yes you can. You can play as Mario Andretti in racing, or you can play as Mario Lemieux in hockey.

Oh, you wanted to play as Nintendo's Mario character. In that case, try this ROM for the Genesis.

And wrote to my parents and friends an e-mail about this. It's extremely rare for me to say "Please forward" in anything I send. (Forgive me if you think this to be karma-whoring...)

Reading Slashdot every day sometimes makes me want to shoot every corporate and government entity on the planet as I figure out what they are doing to the US public every day. The DMCA, if you didn't already realize, is already doing some heavy damage, and it is highly unconstitutional: The DMCA in plain English.

Here's some of the latest abuses of the DMCA:

Writing a eBook convertor for the blind (the Sklyarov case): 1 2
No DVD software player for Linux and no research on cryptology
Blocking anti-Scientology sites

If you think that's scary, that's not even the icing on the cake! The newly-proposed law going to the Senate right now, the SSSCA, funded by the RIAA and the MPAA, is like the DMCA on crack. Passing it is suicide to all things technological!

The SSSCA in plain English: 1 2 3

The SSSCA (now the CBDTPA) is in the Senate

If this new CBDTPA gets passed, computers several years from now will not be the computers we have today. They will be limited pieces of hardware, hard-coded to prevent you from doing "bad things". They will monitor your activities. And this will affect everything from car stereos to TVs to anything else "computer related". If it has a format or something to "protect", it will be affected. This includes you and the way you use computers!

How can you make things secure, if you don't have the tools to test security? This is on par with banning crowbars because they can be used to break into a home, instead of arresting the robbers that use them.

So, what can you do about it? The ACLU actually isn't paying much attention to this one, because it's not really their realm. The real freedom fighter in cases like these is the EFF. The EFF is a well-known organization that some people have called "the ACLU for technology". Many computer techs are members. Wil Wheaton was one of the Star Trek guests on a "Weakest Link" special episode, who chose the EFF as his donating organization. (He won them $10,000 on that show.)

The EFF is truly the only line of defense for this. Voting doesn't work. Petitions don't work. The only thing that works (unforunately) is money, and fighting the system with its own laws. The RIAA and MPAA "donated" over $50 million dollars to both political parties! We need to fight back and donate to the EFF! I just donated my dues to the EFF today, because they are going to need it now.

Please forward this to all of your friends! Donate to the EFF now!!!

Me too, until I got a Cease and Desist order from the Tetris company!

As long as you don't call it TETRIS®, you should be fine. Games in and of themselves cannot be copyrighted, and falling tetrominoes aren't patented in the US or the EU. Call it something weird like BinaryBlocks Game or freepuzzlearena or something, and The Tetris Company will have no grounds for a trademark lawsuit. Sorry Henk...

Forget his physical age, he's obviously still a kid in his head, and his intelligence is/was a loaded gun. so expect to see him going down for a while, to make a good example to all terr^H^H^H^Hhackers that the United States Government will not tolerate this attack on the Freedom and way of life of its good, peaceful, law abiding, citizens. Erm... Yeah.

If this manages to hit mainstream news, I'd like to see how many references to 9-11 / terrorists this can draw. It's a tough one, sure, but The People don't need opinions, that's what mainstream news is for! And the more references to a BIG SIMPLE REDNECK COMPATABLE political notion it contains, the better.

Ali out. [ at london d0t c0m ]

One final note: 212.84.98.242 is driving my firewall mad, I'm a bit too lame/ill equipped atm to investigate.

Ummm... This can't happen in the United States of America. The junk fax law prohibits sending unsolicited advertisements to mobile phones: "It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States ... to make any call [other than emergency or opt-in] using any automatic telephone dialing system ... to any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call" (47 USC 227).

The same section of law prohibits sending spam to a fax machine, which is defined so as to include any computer that has a modem.

The patent offices are supposed to hire experts to go over patent claims and reject bogus claims; this makes it fair for everyone. Other patent offices do this; why can't the USPTO?

Because Congress siphons off the USPTO's filing fee revenues and uses them to balance the budget instead of letting the USPTO use them to hire more competent examiners.

Remember if I can hear it I can copy it, through my Soundblaster Live it's as simple as record what you hear.

Not if the app turns on the Secure Audio Path in WinME and WinXP, which turns off all the card's digital outputs, including what-you-hear.

Try to explain how to install and use DJGPP to a teen.

I have. Twice. Once to my friend Josh Kearney (who was 16 at the time) and once to somebody else on AIM (who was 19 at the time). It's easy: unzip all zipfiles, set up the environment variables in autoexec.bat or msconfig (depending on Windows version), restart the computer, and then from any command prompt type rhide to enter the IDE. RHIDE can manage project files (.gpr), has a text editor with overlapping windows, and can trace your code with the GDB engine.

It took me [when I was 15] about a week or two of work to figure out how GCC works.

I told them gcc -Wall foo.c bar.c baz.c -o foo.exe and that was it.

Now, yes, I know GCC is not a complete suite of tools. I'm saying the tools bundled with GCC [like the cygwin or mingw packages] don't include useful guis or anything.

RHIDE is an IDE for GCC, and it looks like the GUI of the old text-mode Borland IDE. So what if it runs in text mode rather than pixel mode? Or are you talking integrated resource editors?

Personally I am a fan of simple edit boxes. I like the color highlighting and the API popups. Anything else [macros for example] are just not features I would use to enter text into a box

RHIDE has relatively simple, relatively Windows-like edit boxes with syntax keyword highlighting. To get help on a function of a library whose Info docs are installed, place the cursor on the function and press Ctrl+F1.

Both [MSVC and free(beer) lcc-win32] include clean and simple gui editors that make project management simple.

So does RHIDE.

Packages like mingw or cygwin [which are the types of OSS packages most zealots here support] are complete from a compiler point of view but they lack editors and other useful integrated tools [resource editors for example].

RHIDE doesn't include a Win32 resource editor, but it doesn't include ResEdit (Mac OS Classic resource editor), whatever Mac OS X uses, or Glade (GTK+ resource editor) either. You can get resource editors separately. Both MinGW and Cygwin include windres, a Windows resource compiler.

If you object primarily to the separate download locations of the various components (compiler, ide, and resource editor), feel free to package your own distro of Cygwin software and recommend it to other developers.

If my isp ever told me i'd have to pay for a business conection, i would call em up, tell them in no uncertain terms where they can shove their tos, and that they just lost a customer.

• downgrade to dial-up,
• switch from broadband provided by the local cable monopoly to broadband provided by the local phone monopoly (provided you live downtown and haven't canceled them too), or
• switch to a different broadband provider (costing $200,000 US to move house).

The Genesis original [of Toaplan's Zero Wing] is already portable, with the [handheld Genesis-compatible] Nomad.

• Sega handheld units are notorious for low battery life. Yes, I have enough light in my bedroom to play GBA games (other than the non-gamma-corrected Castlevania).
• I have a GBA. I don't have a Nomad. When I find Nomad units on eBay for $60 plus shipping, how do I pay for eBay items without going through PayPal?
• I've only played the ROM (Toaplan is dead; no plaintiff, no judge), not the cartridge. Where can I get a cartridge? eBay gave zero relevant results when searching for 'zero wing' (lots of MS Gundam "Wing Zero" action figures), 'sega zero wing' (mostly AYBABTU t-shirts), and 'genesis zero wing' (zero results).

When Toaplan died, who bought Toaplan's IP? Perhaps they would be willing to license the Zero Wing franchise for a GBA homebrew Special Edition of the game; I'd be more than willing to write much of the code.

XBox has parental locking features built in. All a parent has to do is turn it on, and hey presto - no kid can play that game.

Then what's the point of the Xbox if parents are going to lock their kids away from the only game worth playing? Then it becomes an expensive ($330) DVD player. To succeed, a game console needs to penetrate households, and this means it needs launch titles. Currently, GameCube has a better set of launch or near-launch titles (Monkey Ball, Smash Bros 2, etc).

How many people did you see pirating N64 games? Hardly anyone has the ability to write to a cartridge, so if these papers took their input from a cartridge piracy would not be easy.

Nintendo 64 piracy was hard because every official cartridge in a territory had an identical "key" chip. The mechanism by which the Nintendo cartridge lock/key system (used on NES, Super NES, and N64) works is patented (until about 2005), and it relies on a program that's copyrighted (effectively forever), letting Nintendo go after backup devices.

Game Boy Advance, on the other hand, has no encryption and no lockout. The only checks its BIOS does are checks for the Nintendo logo (legal to reproduce under Sega v. Accolade) and a simple checksum on the ROM header. Its cartridge interface (multiplexed address bus and data bus) has the Intellivision's system as prior art. And you can get a development kit with a cartridge writer and a flash cartridge that holds 256 megabits (enough for four to eight official ROMs or even more independently produced ROMs) for under $200. Go to gbadev.org for details.

Don't steal games. Just because piracy is easy doesn't mean you should do it. Instead, download games released under a free software (or even just free-beer) license. In the future, I will be releasing some free GBA games here.

Actually, it's also used (in GBA mode) as the "sound cpu".

You're confusing the GBA with the Sega Nomad. I have written some software for the Game Boy Advance. The technique of letting a second cheap CPU handle some sound chores is common on Sega Genesis and necessary on Super NES (which has very little bandwidth between the sound side and the CPU side of the system), but in Advance mode, the GBA completely cuts power to its GBZ80 processor.

Read more about the GBA hardware here.

[Use a UNIX-spec system's pipes to capture the audio]

Too bad the player doesn't run under *BSD or GNU/Linux, and Wine doesn't support the Secure Audio Path API. (If it did, it would be branded a circumvention device under the DMCA and relegated to the non-US distributions.)

Pipe the songs through the virtual audio cable

Windows ME and Windows XP have a Secure Audio Path that disables all of a sound card's digital outputs or the driver doesn't get signed. No pipe for you, sorry.

Sound blaster live cards (and probably many others) have the ability to record anything that plays through the soundcard to a wav file.

In order for Windows to consider a sound card when an application opens a Secure Audio Path, it has to have a driver signed by Microsoft, and that driver must turn off all cleartext digital outputs (waveout->wavein, ->file, ->spdif, etc.) while the Secure Audio Path is open. (Read More...)

The rub is that people will have to get the new one, since the GBA's screen is horrible.

It's not horrible, just dark. The gamma of the Game Boy Advance display is 4. Gamma-correcting a game's graphics before running it on the hardware will fix the display, especially if you have a cover light or a worm light. The Doom Advance developers knew this and cranked up the brightness, and the game looks wonderful (even though it may look washed out in magazines that assume that all screenshots have a gamma of 2.2 like a CRT). The fact that Castle of the Moon 1.0 didn't gamma correct is a bug that may be fixed in later printings.

Gamecube's launch in North America was full of sub-par remake titles (a few fun multiplayer games, but no system sellers), which are now having to compete with a very impressive PS2 selection.

If Super Monkey Ball isn't a system seller, Super Smash Bros. Melee (whose box unfortunately looks nothing like this) surely is.

seems to me that $20,000 is an awful lot to pay for the ability to reliably run softmodems in linux ... with the prevalence of high speed connections these days

Not all areas have high-speed connections (on the order of 200 kbps or more), especially rural areas. Would you rather have your company pitch in $20,000 to fund development of portable softmodem code for its employees' laptops or pay $200,000 per employee to move their families to an area where consumer broadband is available?

What about Internet gaming? It would be no problem for me to get seven friends with at least a 17" monitor and a permanent Internet connection.

What if you and your friends live in an area that doesn't get cable modem service or DSL service? In that case, you would have to spend upwards of $200,000 per family to pack up and move to an area that offered high-speed connections. I'd rather pay $1000 for two 25" TVs, two N64 systems, six extra controllers, and two copies of Super Smash Bros. than $1.6 million to upgrade everybody to DSL.