Oh please. The PSX beat the N64 because of the CD drive. Developers didn't like the capacity limitations of the N64's cartridge (just look at the number of multi-cd games for the PSX). And since the PSX used a standard CD format it was very easy to pirate the games -- people could/can pickup PSX games for next to nothing.
I was a sales critter just as the N64 was coming out and I was recommending the PSX because of the capacitity of the CD and the price of the games (PSX == A$80, N64 == A$120). Since then every script kiddie and their parents have gotten into backyard games printing. Sony would like to hang each and every one of them, but they're the reason that the Playstation has such a stranglehold on the console gaming community -- at least here in Australia.
Speaking of Australia, between the Xbox price crash, this new PS3 announcement and the release of the GameCube come the 17th nobody really believes that Sony aren't going to drop the price of their PS2 below A$400 so they should just hurry up and do it. I know I'll buy one when it happens.
Learning is not the sole responsibility of the teacher. I'll spend time explaining things better when students stop asking the question "Why did you fail me?"
I'm so glad that I dumped my old Yahoo email address a week or so ago. That old address was in so many places. If it wasn't spam it was a virus. And when I started using the vacation system a few weeks before I turned the account off what wasn't spam or a virus was an "message undeliverable" message.
I wonder how many responses to Klez emails bounce back with an "address unknown" error?
Fine, you try explaining quantum theory to someone who can't program their VCR.
"I can't understand it therefore it's boring" is not a valid argument. It's not even an interesting theory. Communication is two-way, or has a generation or two of TV, radio and newspapers turned us all into leaches?
There's a difference between never using or enjoying the graphics and only occasionally using them. Remember, the cute graphics can be used to show off the software to potential new participants. Also, the graphical client minimises to the tray.
I'm fairly sure some of these problems were fixed ages ago. Originally when the GUI client was minimised it still drew the graphics. IIRC that's no longer the case. So if you want it to work quicker, run it in the background and use the blank screen saver. Otherwise, of course drawing cute graphics takes time.
Not true. My new overpowered portable looks like it will manage a WU every 5 hours. It only cost A$4,500. A desktop costing nearer US$1,000 should be able to turn one over at about the same rate.
When I first hooked up with S@h (I started the S@h Yahoo club) it took my upgraded PC a week full time to do a unit. My previous work PC could manage one every three or four days depending on how many nights I left it on.
I tried out one of those Pikachu tamagotchi things a while back, but it's an awfully useless thing to have clipped to your belt. My keyring is so full of keys that nothing plastic survives on it for very long. I carry around a TRGpro, so if someone wants me to play their game anywhere it better damn well work on a grayscale Palm with OS 3. And quite frankly, a little PalmOS app that could read and interact with a save game from a standard flash card (CF for me, MMC/SD for most other new Palm owners) wouldn't be too hard to write. Oh, that's right, none of the games consoles use standard flash RAM...
With WAP, and decent security, and digital rights management, I could, say, have a service to subscribe to get messages for all the goals my football team makes.
With SMS and no security and no digital rights management many people can do this already.
..last week saw my work being bombarded by that annoying Outlook exploit and automated warning messages that were being sent to the wrong person because the From: line is taken from the infected person's contact list. And our student labs pick up at least a dozen viruses every day (usually about 3 or 4 different ones). Yeah, it's hype.
Beige gave way years ago. Remember when everything that was trying to be funky came out teal? Well, orange is the new teal. If you want to be funky and new at the moment, but not actually be risky and innovative, then go for orange.
If MS accellerates the release of Xbox games in Australia and very quickly moves popular titles into a bracket like this then they'd probably stand more chance of market penetration down under. For pretty much every console game (and movie/video/DVD) Australia seems to be the last English-speaking country to get it. If Microsoft started doing simultaneous worldwide releases for its games it would actually have something that no other games console had.
I tell you, if I was s developer that had signed a contract to only develop for the Xbox I'd be mighty worried that the world outside the US (yes, there is one) wouldn't even know I existed.
If the also brought the price of the games down to A$29.95 then I'd cave in and buy one. It's easy to resist a cheap console when the games are so damn expensive. I think I'll drop by a pawnbroker on the way home from work and see what the average price for a secondhand Xbox game is at the moment...
If Drivespace had been updated to support Fat32 I'd still be using it -- mostly for installed applications though, not my data.
There was a single hardware accellerated disk compression product at one stage but it never took off as a concept, which is a shame.
I love disk compression as a concept - it's so twisted. I think I managed to get about 800MB out of a 630MB hard drive using Drivespace 3. Makes uninstalling it tricky;)
"Zip Folders" are really the closest thing that survived, but I never bought the Win98 Plus pack. These days I mostly use RAR for compression and I do it manually. Perhaps I should investigate something like Rarissimo.
I bought a 20 Gig drive a couple of years back and it's still doing fine, a couple of Gig left, and it's got pretty much everything I've downloaded or created since, ooo, the early 90s. I'm just upset that I deleted my collection of DOS games I bought in Hong Kong and Malaysia some time around 1990 in a fit of morality. My.MOD/.S3M and.JPG collection (all on floppy disks) went around the same time. Mind you, all of that put together would still only add a couple of hundred meg to my collection.
A friend burns CDs like there's some sort of deadline. I've only just got myself a CD burner. Maybe if I downloaded MP3s through work I might run out of space a bit faster, but the 20gig I mentioned at the top of this comment is an IDE drive in a removable bay with a USB connection. If I need more storage I just buy another cheap drive and another tray.
At work, and I am fairly new here so I might get this wrong, we currently have about 6Gig of network storage for students which is more or less full, but our solution is simply to have Zip drives in every PC. Students have a quota and really their data is their own problem. Staff have 30Gig to play with and 5 is still free. And 9 of that is a backup of the Ghost images of the student labs that I made when I arrived.
Speaking of backups, it's been my experience that hard drive space is useless without the same amount of backup space available. DDS3 tapes only go up to something like 12/24 Gig if they haven't changed in a year or so, meaning that cheap and easy backup really ends at 20Gig. Personally, my 20Gig hard drive is more or less the backup, with data burnt to CD the same time it's moved from my portable's 4Gig to the 20Gig drive. But burning CDs isn't the best solution for stuff that changes frequently. (Although it seems to be the best option for Mac-oriented graphics designers who have to live in an otherwise PC-only corporate enviroment.)
My interest in retro gaming also probably helps keep my storage requirements low. Recently I burnt an 8Mbyte Dreamcast image that had an Atari 2600 emulator and over 100 (Public Domain) ROMs.
And I mean, who needs 120TB of random access storage? Seriously. I mean, sure it's nice to be able to skip instantly to a particular chapter of a movie, but how often do you do it, really? And the "Random" button on any given MP3 player is fun, but if you had to listen to the tracks in a particular order it wouldn't be the end of the world (imagine a DDS3 MP3 player - that's 12 days of music, solid, and it would probably be able to be smaller than the original Sony Walkman).
I have IE 6.0.2600.whatever running on Win98SE. However, I also have F-prot anti-virus and the Proxomitron filtering proxy. F-prot spotted the exploit immediately an proxomitron stopped the link from activating anyway. (I hate javascript pop-ups.) I never got the the bit where I would be pressing the back button.
A friend of mine did the audio for that. I used to play the normal Doom game just with the audio mod. The rocket sound was the best, using the dropship crash as the sample, complete with that peice of metal bouncing around at the end.
I should encourage him to put that sort of old stuff up on his website. He needs a good reason to update it.
Meanwhile, my only contribution to data packs for existing games are a pair of DOS Monopoly packs based on the Star Wars Ep1 and Pokemon boards.
A patent wrongly denied on a useful product does not stop anyone producing that product. A patent wrongly approved on a useful product can result in good people going out of business, suppression of ideas, price fixing and even the total lack of production of said useful product even when someone was producing it before the patent was issued.
You do not not to be issued a patent to be able to produce something and/or do business. If you've invented something, just start producing it -- don't wait for a government backed monopoly first.
If the patent office can't understand something, it should deny the patent.
If the patent office doesn't have the resources to properly investigate the patent, it should deny it. If a single company submits too many patents, they should be denied.
Why is the default to allow a patent if it can't be proven not to be original, useful and non-obvious?
For me it's not the price it's the fact that I live in a highly light-polluted city. From my back yard on the average night I could probably only see the 20 brightest stars. Maybe 50.
I'd also love to get into alternative power, but my property is filled with tall trees, meaning I can use neither solar panels (shade) nor wind turbines (turbulence).
The city has turned me into a collector, not a creator.
Hmm, so what you're saying is that all of that crappy merchandise took up arms, cornered all the old issues of TMNT, and set them afire?
Don't be a twit. What he's saying is that a dark and astute commentary is unlikely to reach as many people because their first (and second, and third...) exposure to the brand will be a tedious, unenlightended experience that they won't wish to pursue.
The TMNT work after the comic books and RPG is homogenised mainstream crap - dumbed down by Hollywood execs that think comics are only for kids. "Ooo, a popular comic book, lets make a kid's movie out of it".
According to the article, the 10% decrease in music sales in 2001 was caused mostly by Internet file swapping.
Yeah, the soundtrack to Glitter didn't sell well because people were trading copies on-line. Please, the reason music sales are declining is that the singers are being chosen for their ability to dance. Or that people have finally realised that they've been buying singles for the video clip.
Of course, if publishers had realistic expectations of sales and the advertising/marketing for any given book was more likely accurate rather than a complete lie and if most high profile reviewers weren't in the pockets of the publishing houses then maybe this wouldn't be so much of a problem.
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I was a sales critter just as the N64 was coming out and I was recommending the PSX because of the capacitity of the CD and the price of the games (PSX == A$80, N64 == A$120). Since then every script kiddie and their parents have gotten into backyard games printing. Sony would like to hang each and every one of them, but they're the reason that the Playstation has such a stranglehold on the console gaming community -- at least here in Australia.
Speaking of Australia, between the Xbox price crash, this new PS3 announcement and the release of the GameCube come the 17th nobody really believes that Sony aren't going to drop the price of their PS2 below A$400 so they should just hurry up and do it. I know I'll buy one when it happens.
Learning is not the sole responsibility of the teacher. I'll spend time explaining things better when students stop asking the question "Why did you fail me?"
I wonder how many responses to Klez emails bounce back with an "address unknown" error?
"I can't understand it therefore it's boring" is not a valid argument. It's not even an interesting theory. Communication is two-way, or has a generation or two of TV, radio and newspapers turned us all into leaches?
There's a difference between never using or enjoying the graphics and only occasionally using them. Remember, the cute graphics can be used to show off the software to potential new participants. Also, the graphical client minimises to the tray.
I'm fairly sure some of these problems were fixed ages ago. Originally when the GUI client was minimised it still drew the graphics. IIRC that's no longer the case. So if you want it to work quicker, run it in the background and use the blank screen saver. Otherwise, of course drawing cute graphics takes time.
When I first hooked up with S@h (I started the S@h Yahoo club) it took my upgraded PC a week full time to do a unit. My previous work PC could manage one every three or four days depending on how many nights I left it on.
I tried out one of those Pikachu tamagotchi things a while back, but it's an awfully useless thing to have clipped to your belt. My keyring is so full of keys that nothing plastic survives on it for very long. I carry around a TRGpro, so if someone wants me to play their game anywhere it better damn well work on a grayscale Palm with OS 3. And quite frankly, a little PalmOS app that could read and interact with a save game from a standard flash card (CF for me, MMC/SD for most other new Palm owners) wouldn't be too hard to write. Oh, that's right, none of the games consoles use standard flash RAM...
I think you'll find that USB is 10 times faster than Bluetooth.
..last week saw my work being bombarded by that annoying Outlook exploit and automated warning messages that were being sent to the wrong person because the From: line is taken from the infected person's contact list. And our student labs pick up at least a dozen viruses every day (usually about 3 or 4 different ones). Yeah, it's hype.
Not to mention the Rest of the World. Down Under the new season of the X-files hasn't even started yet.
Beige gave way years ago. Remember when everything that was trying to be funky came out teal? Well, orange is the new teal. If you want to be funky and new at the moment, but not actually be risky and innovative, then go for orange.
I tell you, if I was s developer that had signed a contract to only develop for the Xbox I'd be mighty worried that the world outside the US (yes, there is one) wouldn't even know I existed.
If the also brought the price of the games down to A$29.95 then I'd cave in and buy one. It's easy to resist a cheap console when the games are so damn expensive. I think I'll drop by a pawnbroker on the way home from work and see what the average price for a secondhand Xbox game is at the moment...
There was a single hardware accellerated disk compression product at one stage but it never took off as a concept, which is a shame.
I love disk compression as a concept - it's so twisted. I think I managed to get about 800MB out of a 630MB hard drive using Drivespace 3. Makes uninstalling it tricky ;)
"Zip Folders" are really the closest thing that survived, but I never bought the Win98 Plus pack. These days I mostly use RAR for compression and I do it manually. Perhaps I should investigate something like Rarissimo.
A friend burns CDs like there's some sort of deadline. I've only just got myself a CD burner. Maybe if I downloaded MP3s through work I might run out of space a bit faster, but the 20gig I mentioned at the top of this comment is an IDE drive in a removable bay with a USB connection. If I need more storage I just buy another cheap drive and another tray.
At work, and I am fairly new here so I might get this wrong, we currently have about 6Gig of network storage for students which is more or less full, but our solution is simply to have Zip drives in every PC. Students have a quota and really their data is their own problem. Staff have 30Gig to play with and 5 is still free. And 9 of that is a backup of the Ghost images of the student labs that I made when I arrived.
Speaking of backups, it's been my experience that hard drive space is useless without the same amount of backup space available. DDS3 tapes only go up to something like 12/24 Gig if they haven't changed in a year or so, meaning that cheap and easy backup really ends at 20Gig. Personally, my 20Gig hard drive is more or less the backup, with data burnt to CD the same time it's moved from my portable's 4Gig to the 20Gig drive. But burning CDs isn't the best solution for stuff that changes frequently. (Although it seems to be the best option for Mac-oriented graphics designers who have to live in an otherwise PC-only corporate enviroment.)
My interest in retro gaming also probably helps keep my storage requirements low. Recently I burnt an 8Mbyte Dreamcast image that had an Atari 2600 emulator and over 100 (Public Domain) ROMs.
And I mean, who needs 120TB of random access storage? Seriously. I mean, sure it's nice to be able to skip instantly to a particular chapter of a movie, but how often do you do it, really? And the "Random" button on any given MP3 player is fun, but if you had to listen to the tracks in a particular order it wouldn't be the end of the world (imagine a DDS3 MP3 player - that's 12 days of music, solid, and it would probably be able to be smaller than the original Sony Walkman).
Wow, that was a long post.
I have IE 6.0.2600.whatever running on Win98SE. However, I also have F-prot anti-virus and the Proxomitron filtering proxy. F-prot spotted the exploit immediately an proxomitron stopped the link from activating anyway. (I hate javascript pop-ups.) I never got the the bit where I would be pressing the back button.
I should encourage him to put that sort of old stuff up on his website. He needs a good reason to update it.
Meanwhile, my only contribution to data packs for existing games are a pair of DOS Monopoly packs based on the Star Wars Ep1 and Pokemon boards.
You do not not to be issued a patent to be able to produce something and/or do business. If you've invented something, just start producing it -- don't wait for a government backed monopoly first.
If the patent office doesn't have the resources to properly investigate the patent, it should deny it.
If a single company submits too many patents, they should be denied.
Why is the default to allow a patent if it can't be proven not to be original, useful and non-obvious?
I'd also love to get into alternative power, but my property is filled with tall trees, meaning I can use neither solar panels (shade) nor wind turbines (turbulence).
The city has turned me into a collector, not a creator.
The TMNT work after the comic books and RPG is homogenised mainstream crap - dumbed down by Hollywood execs that think comics are only for kids. "Ooo, a popular comic book, lets make a kid's movie out of it".
Look up "Brand Dilution".
Of course, if publishers had realistic expectations of sales and the advertising/marketing for any given book was more likely accurate rather than a complete lie and if most high profile reviewers weren't in the pockets of the publishing houses then maybe this wouldn't be so much of a problem.