Sorry, fuckup on my part. It's not from 2004, it's from 2007. I know it's outdated, but I can't afford a PC upgrade. The point was more that PS/2 allowed me to do something, but USB doesn't.
Well, at least when I do upgrade I'll be back to powering on my computer through the keyboard, thanks for the info:)
Remember when USB first came out? At first, nothing really used it. You'd see printers support it as an option, right next to the old parallel port; you'd see a few USB mice and keyboards, often packaged with a PS/2USB converter. But now, you have to look long and hard to find a computer *without* USB, and finding legacy PS/2 keyboards or parallel cables is rather difficult.
The USB/PS2 thing causes some issues in certain scenarios. For example, mine.
I have a 2004-era motherboard, and it has a very useful feature: turn on PC via PS/2 keyboard. Can't do it with a USB keyboard. My old keyboard -- USB, actually, but connected through a PS/2 adapter -- died and I bought a new one. Unfortunately, it doesn't do jack shit with the adapter.
So, now I have to bend, open the case door and push the button on the computer case to turn on the PC. You might say it's not a big deal, and it isn't, but compared to a very quick keypress before, it's much more inconvenient.
I have no idea if newer motherboards can indeed power up the computer through a USB keyboard...
Adblock Plus (isn't everyone?): I was under the impression (read on slashdot, so YMMGV) that Adblocking on opera was sub-par (still requested the ad, and just hid it, etc... rather than blocking it completely)? Since seeing the ads is the smallest part of why I use ABP, and I'm more interested in blocking the scumbags from tracking me, then this, if true, doesn't do me much good.
Not true. What's blocked is blocked.
Also, one curious thing: Opera has had blocking capabilities under the hood since version 6.02, which was out in April 2002, so that's a whole nine and a half years now. I think Opera was the first web browser that allowed you to block certain URLs natively.
works quite well. At home I use AdMuncher, at work I use the list above. Never had any problems with it. It's not as advanced as ABP, but at least it allows you to unblock stuff easily - I could personally never figure out how do to that with ABP, but I could just be stupid.
NoScript: See ABP.
Yeah, that one isn't really there. You can turn off JS entirely for a site - it's all or nothing.
PasswordMaker: This is a biggie at the moment. It's great for keeping a different password for every site without having to store them in "the cloud" or transfer much between machines.
Well... "PasswordMaker solves all of these issues. It is a small, lightweight, free, open-source tool for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, iPhone, Opera, PHP, Windows, OS/X, Linux, Flock, Yahoo! Widgets, Android, Python, and many other platforms & systems."
It's a widget, though.
Or you could use the built-in Opera Link functionality. Auto-sync everything important, including passwords.
DownThemAll would be nice too, but honestly, I use that infrequently enough that I could just fire up ChromeFox when I need it. But the other three are really tying me to this albatross.
Kind of. Open the Links panel (Tools, or Ctrl+Alt+L), filter what you want, select, download. Again, not as advanced as this extension, but it's there.
And still Mozilla doesn't get a clue that some of the recent changes are driving away users. Amazing.
Asa Dotzler personally stated that he's responsible for designing a Firefox for one billion active users.
I wouldn't say it's Mozilla as such. It's just a few people on the top, unattached to reality and earning a ton of cash. Not much different from any other company.
In mozilla.dev.usability, during the discussion about removing version numbers, Asa Dozler said that nobody knows shit and he's personally creating a Firefox that will double the userbase, all the way to one billion users. That's his plan, and that's what the rapid release cycle is all about.
This is all a genius masterplan - how can you not see?
(Also, the 3.6x branch will eventually get silently auto-updated to Firefox 28, or whatever the current version will be at that time. They plan on doing that, too.)
Here in Brazil, tablets are extremely expensive: you don't get a netbook for the price of a tablet... you get a notebook. Mind you, desktops are cheaper than notebooks over here.
It's like that in many markets across the world. For example, where I live, the P1000 Galaxy Tab - which I think is the oldest and cheapest model - sells at the equivalent of $1000. It is only marginally cheaper than the iPad 2 (the first iPad ever sold here; arrived a month ago to 2-3 stores in the entire country). Something tells me they won't sell many of either.
Well, 2005 and 2006 were still "ancient" when it comes to downloads. Surely things had changed a bit over the last two or three years...?
I'm aware that consoles dominate, I'm just curious about how much; likewise, I'm curious about what the next-gen consoles will do to PC gaming, because I think we've more or less reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of PC graphics, and the next gen of consoles will catch up to "more than good enough for anyone".
400k of a $60 game is still $24M, and I wouldn't be so sure that they spent more on development of the PC version. Okay, the revenue wasn't $24M, it was lower, but it still made them a profit. If you already have the game (which today is the engine and the content), a port shouldn't be that expensive to make and is always going to make you some money. No point in not doing it.
1) Only track the US, and there might be differences in console vs. PC game sales in the rest of the world
2) Don't include online purchases and digital downloads
I guess we'll never know.
However, it's not like you can make more money ignoring the PC and concentrating on consoles alone, so abandoning PC development is never going to be a smart move.
The last time I checked the numbers, console and handheld games sales accounted for something like 7x the sales of PC games in the U.S. (about $1 billion a year for PC games, and $7 billion for console and handheld games) And that gap has been widening for years. So which do you think they're going to prioritize?
Where do those numbers come from? Do they include just a couple of major retailers of boxed games? What about digital downloads (like Steam)? What about the entire world and the growing Chinese market?
I'm not trolling or trying to stir trouble; I'm just genuinely interested, because my google-fu had failed me.
Haven't played them yet (and don't know when I will - probably not before September), but I bought them because the developer actually priced them HONESTLY - usually there's a $1 = 1â parity on Steam, but this package was 1.99â. In fact, that's even cheaper than $2.99! Mind asplodes!
So, essentially, the guy got my money because he isn't a greedy, obnoxious jerk who thinks that it's fine to charge European customers 40% extra. That's damn rare, and deserves an applause. And money, too.
Their RSS reader used to be the best until someone had a seriously dumb idea - to start storing items into a bunch of small files, instead of keeping giant consolidated MBX archives as it used to be. That's the unfortunate result of previously pairing the RSS storage with the email storage, as they wanted every email to be separately stored so that AV can scan and kill bad stuff easily.
As the end result, someone who likes his RSS and is subscribed to lots of high-frequency channels can easily get hundreds of files per day. That can translate to tens of thousands per month.
That... Just isn't very good for your common file system. Just because NTFS can handle a lot of files doesn't mean that it should.
I solved it in a hacky way - I created a TrueCrypt drive in a big file and placed Opera's email/RSS store there, since I didn't want to repartition my drives at work. I'll check the amount of files next week, but I'll be damned if it's below half a million.
It gets worse. Over here, you do your C exams *ON PAPER*. That's right - you write your code with a pencil. And god forbid that you miss a semi-colon or get the program logic wrong - things that you could easily spot if you used, you know, a computer to do your programming exam.
Actually, in my times, we learned BASIC in elementary school (too late for LOGO) and kids loved it. Even a lot of girls did. BASIC was easy and fun. Give those kids C, as it happens now, and you scar them for life. Even at college the mandatory C class was way too much to grasp for grown-ups...
(I soldered and did Laplace transforms in high school, by the way, but it was a technical high school.)
See, ages ago, we had kids being taught LOGO and BASIC. That worked splendidly. Write some stuff, see a turtle draw, or make an infinite '10 print "hello": 20 goto 10' loop.
Then came along Pascal, usually in high school, although it wasn't unheard of to see it in the final levels of elementary school. It was a bit more of a nuisance, with all the begins and ends, and the semicolons too, but it was still somewhat manageable for the kids.
But then someone had a serious brainfart and decided that kids be "taught" C and even C++. Suddenly there were all these strange symbols ("teacher, why is 'and' called '&&' here and why and how is '&&' different than '&'?") and stdio.h includes and god damn pointers, which extremely few children managed to grasp because they had no idea how memory and processors work. No, they were supposed to learn what a keyboard is, then how to translate a number into binary/hexadecimal and back, and then they were immediately thrown into curly braces and pointer hell.
I have no idea what it's like in the USA, but over here it fucked up everything. If you make it hard for the kids and drown them in hardcore idiocy to the point of them being sickened by IT classes, then you can't expect that they learn how to code.
Me? I started with BASIC on the ZX Spectrum in the early eighties. Had the Speccy had something more difficult, I'd have been a librarian right now.
One word. Lego.
Building new stuff never gets old for someone who has a passion to create.
I weighed my Lego collection some time ago - I've got a solid 14.3 kg of Lego bricks. I'm in my thirties and I *still* buy new Legos and play with them; have done so for over two decades now. It's not such a great comparison:)
I don't know... He's announcing Minecraft for other platforms, which worries me a bit. If he continues working on the game, but really WORKING on the game, in a year it could be awesome. I'm just not convinced that's going to happen:(
At first I was oblivious to what Minecraft was. Then I bought it. Then I played it for a while. Then I figured out there was nothing to really DO in the game. Okay, I know it's a giant sandbox and you can build stuff, but after a while, you kind of get bored of building stuff...
About a month ago, I found Terraria. The game has been in development for less than half a year, and it has more depth and more things to do, especially in multiplayer, which is just pure fun.
Any updates to Minecraft are much welcome, both in SP and MP. Hopefully there will be more crafting stuff and more things to do. Maybe it's just me, but when I play Terraria, I get this weird thought in my head - "this is what Minecraft should have been". Somehow I feel that Notch got a boatload of money and then semi-abandoned the game...
The developers worry about Silverlight and WPF, not.Net in general..Net will still have its place for desktop apps and it will still be used as a server-side web platform. Silverlight and WPF have nothing (well, almost nothing, to the point of being inconsequential) to do with that.
Doing a little forensics on the solutions file for the visual studio project, we can see that the username the hackers users on his Windows box is "jam3s". There are several strings in the solutions file that reference this username:
So, are we dealing with jamtrees that jam some sweet jazz music, or are those trees that produce jam (and if so, which flavour)?
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, fuckup on my part. It's not from 2004, it's from 2007. I know it's outdated, but I can't afford a PC upgrade. The point was more that PS/2 allowed me to do something, but USB doesn't.
Well, at least when I do upgrade I'll be back to powering on my computer through the keyboard, thanks for the info :)
Remember when USB first came out? At first, nothing really used it. You'd see printers support it as an option, right next to the old parallel port; you'd see a few USB mice and keyboards, often packaged with a PS/2USB converter. But now, you have to look long and hard to find a computer *without* USB, and finding legacy PS/2 keyboards or parallel cables is rather difficult.
The USB/PS2 thing causes some issues in certain scenarios. For example, mine.
I have a 2004-era motherboard, and it has a very useful feature: turn on PC via PS/2 keyboard. Can't do it with a USB keyboard. My old keyboard -- USB, actually, but connected through a PS/2 adapter -- died and I bought a new one. Unfortunately, it doesn't do jack shit with the adapter.
So, now I have to bend, open the case door and push the button on the computer case to turn on the PC. You might say it's not a big deal, and it isn't, but compared to a very quick keypress before, it's much more inconvenient.
I have no idea if newer motherboards can indeed power up the computer through a USB keyboard...
Asa Dotzler will design a Firefox for five billion users!
Why not Sir Dieter Rams? I mean, the designs are basically his...
Adblock Plus (isn't everyone?): I was under the impression (read on slashdot, so YMMGV) that Adblocking on opera was sub-par (still requested the ad, and just hid it, etc... rather than blocking it completely)? Since seeing the ads is the smallest part of why I use ABP, and I'm more interested in blocking the scumbags from tracking me, then this, if true, doesn't do me much good.
Not true. What's blocked is blocked.
Also, one curious thing: Opera has had blocking capabilities under the hood since version 6.02, which was out in April 2002, so that's a whole nine and a half years now. I think Opera was the first web browser that allowed you to block certain URLs natively.
I found that the Adblock list for Opera
works quite well. At home I use AdMuncher, at work I use the list above. Never had any problems with it. It's not as advanced as ABP, but at least it allows you to unblock stuff easily - I could personally never figure out how do to that with ABP, but I could just be stupid.
NoScript: See ABP.
Yeah, that one isn't really there. You can turn off JS entirely for a site - it's all or nothing.
PasswordMaker: This is a biggie at the moment. It's great for keeping a different password for every site without having to store them in "the cloud" or transfer much between machines.
Well... "PasswordMaker solves all of these issues. It is a small, lightweight, free, open-source tool for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, iPhone, Opera, PHP, Windows, OS/X, Linux, Flock, Yahoo! Widgets, Android, Python, and many other platforms & systems."
It's a widget, though.
Or you could use the built-in Opera Link functionality. Auto-sync everything important, including passwords.
DownThemAll would be nice too, but honestly, I use that infrequently enough that I could just fire up ChromeFox when I need it. But the other three are really tying me to this albatross.
Kind of. Open the Links panel (Tools, or Ctrl+Alt+L), filter what you want, select, download. Again, not as advanced as this extension, but it's there.
And still Mozilla doesn't get a clue that some of the recent changes are driving away users. Amazing.
Asa Dotzler personally stated that he's responsible for designing a Firefox for one billion active users.
I wouldn't say it's Mozilla as such. It's just a few people on the top, unattached to reality and earning a ton of cash. Not much different from any other company.
SN1987A results were consistent with neutrinos moving at c
But why are they moving at c, if they have mass? :/
Yogscast, Jesse Cox and TotalBiscuit also have Diablo III footage.
Yogscast vids start here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4qmrZEF-rE
Ah, but you are so wrong!
In mozilla.dev.usability, during the discussion about removing version numbers, Asa Dozler said that nobody knows shit and he's personally creating a Firefox that will double the userbase, all the way to one billion users. That's his plan, and that's what the rapid release cycle is all about.
This is all a genius masterplan - how can you not see?
(Also, the 3.6x branch will eventually get silently auto-updated to Firefox 28, or whatever the current version will be at that time. They plan on doing that, too.)
Here in Brazil, tablets are extremely expensive: you don't get a netbook for the price of a tablet... you get a notebook. Mind you, desktops are cheaper than notebooks over here.
It's like that in many markets across the world. For example, where I live, the P1000 Galaxy Tab - which I think is the oldest and cheapest model - sells at the equivalent of $1000. It is only marginally cheaper than the iPad 2 (the first iPad ever sold here; arrived a month ago to 2-3 stores in the entire country). Something tells me they won't sell many of either.
Well, 2005 and 2006 were still "ancient" when it comes to downloads. Surely things had changed a bit over the last two or three years...?
I'm aware that consoles dominate, I'm just curious about how much; likewise, I'm curious about what the next-gen consoles will do to PC gaming, because I think we've more or less reached the point of diminishing returns in terms of PC graphics, and the next gen of consoles will catch up to "more than good enough for anyone".
400k of a $60 game is still $24M, and I wouldn't be so sure that they spent more on development of the PC version. Okay, the revenue wasn't $24M, it was lower, but it still made them a profit. If you already have the game (which today is the engine and the content), a port shouldn't be that expensive to make and is always going to make you some money. No point in not doing it.
Okay, so it seems that the stats:
1) Only track the US, and there might be differences in console vs. PC game sales in the rest of the world
2) Don't include online purchases and digital downloads
I guess we'll never know.
However, it's not like you can make more money ignoring the PC and concentrating on consoles alone, so abandoning PC development is never going to be a smart move.
The last time I checked the numbers, console and handheld games sales accounted for something like 7x the sales of PC games in the U.S. (about $1 billion a year for PC games, and $7 billion for console and handheld games) And that gap has been widening for years. So which do you think they're going to prioritize?
Where do those numbers come from? Do they include just a couple of major retailers of boxed games? What about digital downloads (like Steam)? What about the entire world and the growing Chinese market?
I'm not trolling or trying to stir trouble; I'm just genuinely interested, because my google-fu had failed me.
Opera has had "paste & go" (even as a keyboard shortcut) since version 7.0, which came out in January 2003.
Opera really spoils you, doesn't it?
Haven't played them yet (and don't know when I will - probably not before September), but I bought them because the developer actually priced them HONESTLY - usually there's a $1 = 1â parity on Steam, but this package was 1.99â. In fact, that's even cheaper than $2.99! Mind asplodes!
So, essentially, the guy got my money because he isn't a greedy, obnoxious jerk who thinks that it's fine to charge European customers 40% extra. That's damn rare, and deserves an applause. And money, too.
Their RSS reader used to be the best until someone had a seriously dumb idea - to start storing items into a bunch of small files, instead of keeping giant consolidated MBX archives as it used to be. That's the unfortunate result of previously pairing the RSS storage with the email storage, as they wanted every email to be separately stored so that AV can scan and kill bad stuff easily.
As the end result, someone who likes his RSS and is subscribed to lots of high-frequency channels can easily get hundreds of files per day. That can translate to tens of thousands per month.
That... Just isn't very good for your common file system. Just because NTFS can handle a lot of files doesn't mean that it should.
I solved it in a hacky way - I created a TrueCrypt drive in a big file and placed Opera's email/RSS store there, since I didn't want to repartition my drives at work. I'll check the amount of files next week, but I'll be damned if it's below half a million.
It gets worse. Over here, you do your C exams *ON PAPER*. That's right - you write your code with a pencil. And god forbid that you miss a semi-colon or get the program logic wrong - things that you could easily spot if you used, you know, a computer to do your programming exam.
Actually, in my times, we learned BASIC in elementary school (too late for LOGO) and kids loved it. Even a lot of girls did. BASIC was easy and fun. Give those kids C, as it happens now, and you scar them for life. Even at college the mandatory C class was way too much to grasp for grown-ups...
(I soldered and did Laplace transforms in high school, by the way, but it was a technical high school.)
Well, at least it's like that where I live.
See, ages ago, we had kids being taught LOGO and BASIC. That worked splendidly. Write some stuff, see a turtle draw, or make an infinite '10 print "hello": 20 goto 10' loop.
Then came along Pascal, usually in high school, although it wasn't unheard of to see it in the final levels of elementary school. It was a bit more of a nuisance, with all the begins and ends, and the semicolons too, but it was still somewhat manageable for the kids.
But then someone had a serious brainfart and decided that kids be "taught" C and even C++. Suddenly there were all these strange symbols ("teacher, why is 'and' called '&&' here and why and how is '&&' different than '&'?") and stdio.h includes and god damn pointers, which extremely few children managed to grasp because they had no idea how memory and processors work. No, they were supposed to learn what a keyboard is, then how to translate a number into binary/hexadecimal and back, and then they were immediately thrown into curly braces and pointer hell.
I have no idea what it's like in the USA, but over here it fucked up everything. If you make it hard for the kids and drown them in hardcore idiocy to the point of them being sickened by IT classes, then you can't expect that they learn how to code.
Me? I started with BASIC on the ZX Spectrum in the early eighties. Had the Speccy had something more difficult, I'd have been a librarian right now.
One word. Lego.
Building new stuff never gets old for someone who has a passion to create.
I weighed my Lego collection some time ago - I've got a solid 14.3 kg of Lego bricks. I'm in my thirties and I *still* buy new Legos and play with them; have done so for over two decades now. It's not such a great comparison :)
I don't know... He's announcing Minecraft for other platforms, which worries me a bit. If he continues working on the game, but really WORKING on the game, in a year it could be awesome. I'm just not convinced that's going to happen :(
At first I was oblivious to what Minecraft was. Then I bought it. Then I played it for a while. Then I figured out there was nothing to really DO in the game. Okay, I know it's a giant sandbox and you can build stuff, but after a while, you kind of get bored of building stuff...
About a month ago, I found Terraria. The game has been in development for less than half a year, and it has more depth and more things to do, especially in multiplayer, which is just pure fun.
Any updates to Minecraft are much welcome, both in SP and MP. Hopefully there will be more crafting stuff and more things to do. Maybe it's just me, but when I play Terraria, I get this weird thought in my head - "this is what Minecraft should have been". Somehow I feel that Notch got a boatload of money and then semi-abandoned the game...
The developers worry about Silverlight and WPF, not .Net in general. .Net will still have its place for desktop apps and it will still be used as a server-side web platform. Silverlight and WPF have nothing (well, almost nothing, to the point of being inconsequential) to do with that.
But this is Slashdot, and that's Soulskill...
Size of main page:
111.421 bytes
Number of inline elements:
172 (3.563.734 bytes)
That's with ad blocking turned on.
Without it, the page is over 4 megabytes.
Jesus...
Doing a little forensics on the solutions file for the visual studio project, we can see that the username the hackers users on his Windows box is "jam3s". There are several strings in the solutions file that reference this username:
So, are we dealing with jamtrees that jam some sweet jazz music, or are those trees that produce jam (and if so, which flavour)?