Obviously he would use cheaper 2GB memory modules as 16GB is more than enough for his use. I mentioned the 9010 vs the 9010B as is would allow for raid. If he's not interested and just wants a big "drive", use the 6 slot B model which is just over $200. Drop some cheap ram in it and go.
With 2GB modules, he's looking: 350+220X2=$790. Or with the 6 slot model, about $600. More than a SSD, but not hugely so.
And you'd be amazed. My computer shows an average of nearly a million I/O hits to my memory and hard drive a day. Unless he's very careful, he can end up bricking that SSD in a few months by getting one setting wrong.
The advantage of physical ram, though, is that it almost never wears out. I've booted up 30 year old computers and the ram still works. SSDs if used for this purpose will burn out in weeks or months, because they're not capable of withstanding that sort of (ab)use for very long. SSDs also have long write times compared to their read times. Much faster than a hard drive, of course, but nothing like a ramdisk. When you need to beat on it a hundred thousand times a day, nothing beats good old ram.
I suggest he take a look at the ANS-9010. This is going to work great for his uses. I've seen them for around $350 new, and then you just drop in a couple of hundred dollars worth of memory. It also has built-in raid so he can get a bit more bandwidth if he needs to. For this sort of swap file/temporary memory space application, it's fantastic.
The best solution then is a physical ramdisk/ramdrive. The capacity isn't huge(8-16GB as a rule), but the speed is easily equal to any SSD and you can beat on it forever without worrying about it running out of write cycles.
The best option though that I know of is where the competition runs in rounds. If you reset everyone every 3 or 6 months, it allows for a "winner" and prizes and so on as well as a fresh start for new players. With 2 or 3 games cycling, it never gets old. A good example of this in action is Planetarion. It's still going along despite being horribly dated in many ways. Because it's fun, cheap, and more importantly, there's no ability to become entrenched and powerful.
Games need an ending. The best example of this that I know of was Astronest. You all started fresh and there was a deadline - on X day, at X time(usually 3-4 months in the future), the top 20 players (and their allies) would be forced to defend themselves versus the entire rest of the players. It was always close and always a hard fight, but then it was over. People cried, people bragged, prizes were had, and then another round would start.
I've been playing Astro Empires for a while now as a fun diversion and it's honestly pretty lame as they throw old players in with new ones and so you get situations where 1 million+ fleets are next door to 20 day old newbies. And nothing ever resets. It's fun, but it's also boring and useless in many ways. When there's no ending, there's no point, really.
**** Then you have EVE online where character evolves real-time regardless of whether you play or not. (or even whether you are subscribed if you queue enough stuff). It is also very economy-oriented game and majority of that action takes place outside gameplay time.
It kind of sucks because you can never, ever catch up to veteran from day 1. **** Well, in a way you can. It only takes two people and 4-6 months of training one "class" of ship to really be able to punk all but the biggest and baddest ships out there. But with cloaks and such, it's easy to pick your targets. Obviously you're not going to street race some guy in a Ford F40 with your Civic, but that aging BMW might be possible to get close to with a few aftermarket mods...;)
In real terms, since the game itself is free to purchase, spend $40-60 up front that you would normally pay for the game itself on extra game cards. Use 2-4 of them to buy a 6 month or so old character to begin with. This saves you the initial grind for about the same cost and you can jump right into the game in hours instead of months. It's the initial six months that suck in the game. After that, there's much less that separates the older players from the younger ones.
NOTE - they recently changed it, though, so that unpaid/inactive accounts stop training immediately - they don't continue any more while you are away. This, as expected, has generated a huge storm of complaints, but they are turning a blind eye to it.
NOTE 2 - CCP, the company that runs the game are without a doubt some of the most anal and useless toads when it comes to customer service and bug fixes. They do what they want and simply never listen to the players or admit anything is wrong unless it's made major news. Just expect to play it as if support is essentially never an option and you're completely on your own. And I do mean completely. Think Wizards of the Coast support levels. Just don't even bother 99% of the time barring obvious stuff like getting stuck.
But the game *is* fantastic once you ignore the company's irksome nature. It's without a doubt the best online game out there because literally anything you want to do is allowed and possible as soon as you step out of the newbie areas. Make money, make a guild, screw players over, lie, cheat, steal, bribe, or be a good guy(are there any left?) and hunt these scum down. Whatever you want to do... the company in charge pretty much ignores it unless you're literally breaking the game or doing real-life illegal acts.
And that's why I still like it after all of these years. Most other games like it force you to be good, play along, and are as boring as a stick of chewing gum that you've been chewing for an hour. At least with this one you can head out to the bad areas and, well, BE as bad as you can manage to be. That's kind of refreshing, actually, given the idiocy and nannying that most games now suffer from.
But, seriously. Am I the only one that finds that site's "sources" to often be questionable? Maybe legal, maybe not, but certainly not smelling very clean.
First, they didn't out their source: This guy isn't their source, he's the guy that lost the phone. Their source found the device...
Am I the only one who thinks that the "found" is likely what didn't happen?
Exactly how hard would it be to take the thing in a dimly lit bar from a guy who is playing with it(who wouldn't?) while drinking a few too many beers?
Out of mod points:) , but I thought I'd like to comment on this. Everyone is going on about the analysis and not about the actual problem itself of people being unwilling to properly learn. It's one thing, as you pointed out, to copy notes and try to figure stuff out together, and even that works well in computing. Often you'll see different work but with a tricky section or two that's similar between two students - I'd not consider this to be a big deal, really. But cut-and-paste of entire sections obviously is not even tying.
I think quite a lot of it actually is a difference with younger people and students in general. They seem to be afflicted more and more with a sense of cutthroat pragmatism, a desire for instant gratification, and no work ethic at all. In short, they act as if instead of working or struggling for anything, they sat on their butts and played console games all day long. The concepts of, say, writing a handwritten letter(or even when and why it's appropriate) let alone proper conduct in general are just not important to them. So they get to college where all of those rules still(or suddenly DO) apply and they have no idea why it's important NOT to cheat since they've been doing it all their lives and getting away with it.
My last job in fact, we had things like this happen all of the time. New employees would do inane things like logging in from home before they came to work, not bothering to log out/lock up/etc, and doing crappy things like taking entire boxes of snacks from the kitchen stores.
Steam store page for AC2 tells you that it has 3rd-party DRM and requires a permanent internet connection. Other titles on steam has this too.
**** Well, this is a change in Steam's policies(or they're just caving to UBIsoft here). UBIsoft is just simply not worth messing with.
And my point before was that previous titles by Ubisoft that have had the DRM removed suddenly work pretty much like normal software. Sure, it has bugs and stuff, but nothing worse than the other guys. But add the DRM back into the equation and your computer suffers. It's just not worth it.
Still, the designs of internal combustion engines are such that it takes an enormous amount of junk in the air to actually destroy them while they are still running.(don't count on it restarting necessarily - heh) A simple filter change between flights would probably suffice. The engines are also much cheaper to fix and repair than jet engines.
There's a reason that the Coast Guard doesn't use jet engines in Alaska and when it's gathering data in hurricanes. Jet engines are fast and efficient, but unfortunately, they require lots of expensive upkeep and aren't nearly as resistant to damage as conventional designs.
That all said, I bet that they could get some of these old workhorses out into service. It might take you several stops to get around, but it's better than not flying at all.
Will their shareholders feel the same way when Ubisoft titles have the reputation of being flaky, hard to play, and prone to technical malfunction?
Ubisoft actually makes decent enough games that function well once the DRM is removed. Steam requires them to remove it all and the titles that you can order via Steam run fine and don't mess up your system.
The issue is that Ubisoft is run by people who actually still believe the nonsense of the 1980s about piracy and how to combat it - ie - a bigger bat. They are essentially doing the modern day equivalent of those code books and look-up wheels that were printed on special paper. It just serves to make everyone angry.
Here's the deal, though. They never *ever* will change. The President of the company is one of those asshats who will never change his mind about anything as long as he's making money doing what he's doing. We all know the personality type. And how pointless it is to even try to talk to them. To his dying day, he will believe that he can win versus piracy and that he is free to use any method at his disposal to accomplish it.
Also, the DRM is not a simple check like Steam and other services go through, but it's rootkit-level stuff that's actually harder to remove than most viruses. One game that I removed a year or so ago was particularly aggressive in that it would replicate itself just like a virus. I had to physically yank the drive and drop in in an external case.
Just say no to these guys. It isn't even about the economics or ethics any more. It's that if you want your machine to run properly, don't ever install anything from them on it.
Apparently, though, propeller-driven aircraft are fine. Mostly due to the lower altitudes, but also because they are basically modified automobile engines and have far greater tolerances for abuse. I also suspect that most of them have or can be modified to fit an air filter.
You heard it here first, Sony advance to the head of the shitlist. Microsoft loses its crown after so many years at the top.
**** It seems as if people are finally realizing what many of us have known for almost a decade. Now we just need to wean them of their unhealthy Apple obsession. Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Disney - probably the most anti-consumer giants out there that try to put on a polished and friendly image despite being about as cooperative and nice behind the scenes as a mafia thug.(and Toyota seems to be gunning for spot #5 - sigh...)
Now, to be honest, they're no worse than Pfiser or GE or ADM or many of the others out there. But the "We're your friend - we care" BS is, well, I personally find it to be extremely grating and almost verging on patronizing as if we're idiots. At leas the other corporations they are up-front and honest about making money and not caring. I can at least respect them in a way for that. But if I hear another happy PS3 or IPhone ad, I think I'll puke.
The only reliable level that is acceptable is to use the same game the same engine, and just make new custom levels for it. Anything more than that will end you up in hot water for sure.
There also are a large number of people that are running some sort of media server/etc on their PC to the PS3(TVersity and the like) IME, they just make things a whole lot worse come patch-time.
Yeah FF13 is known to have a lot of glitches. I always wait for the "best hits" version to come out of any game. By then, it's pretty well stable.(and $20 usually - heh)
Maybe it has something to do with the fact the I never played around with "install other OS", never opened the hood to replace the hard drive, never tried to jailbreak it...
This. The number of people who have tweaked, altered, hacked, or done things to their machines and games on the PS3 as well as their home PCs is enormous. My guess is that they have installed TVersity or some other media streaming application onto their machine and/or altered the machine in some way and well, big surprise... it gets confused and "breaks". Mine is a first generation "Fat" model - the 20GB one that can even play PS1 games(I've given it a much larger HD but that's all).
No issues, no glitches, no problems. Of course, the ones with software emulation have more issues to begin with with PS2 games, and that's also likely a cause. There's a reason the hardware-based PS3s are so coveted. They work and I've never had a problem, either, running any game.(aside from PS2 games from Japan - I really wish they would remove the region check for PS2 games)
Oh - hacking the region check/verification also will break the PS3 once it connects online. But that's kind of "duh" obvious.
Yet that's apparently why the "easy to read" one is such a horrendous mess. Because it doesn't easily fit into two dimensions like that. IF you map it in three dimensions, though, it also can fit exotic matter as well.
This was on Slashdot a few weeks ago. And it shows us that the periodic table is without a doubt in need of a major revision from what we've always assumed to be correct.
http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt.html Dozens of (the major) alternate versions are listed here as well. I personally like the Dufour Periodictree myself, as it has a nice symmetry to it that's similar to the circular one.
If it runs Windows you'll end up getting viruses. If it runs something Apple you'll pay for updates (or monthly fees). If it runs Linux you'll have to spend an insane amount of time with it to make it right.
At least with this you get to choose which of the three you want to deal with, whereas with a real life relationship, well, you might get all three at once.
History books a hundred years from now will likely read:
"And the great social and information experiment known as the Internet was brought down by the lawyers and copyright laws. The companies that ran it essentially made it strangle itself to death."
(An aside comment by myself:) I hate to see what the lawyers will turn our world into in another 30 or 40 years. I think maybe China's idea of doing away with it all might not be so awful after all. I guess only time will tell which way of dealing with it is correct.
Most colleges now use two sites for their online coursework. MathLab and Math XL. Both cost to join. Of course, you need to be in a class to get actual homework assignments(so no assignments - no big deal). But they do have full online tutoring, examples, and so on for you to review from the book. Some textbooks also have similar programs or access to them in a CD in the back.
Log in, select "I am studying on my own and need to select a textbook" Then search for the author. Go to course home at the top.
There are study plans, coursework, sample tests, and the text of the book online.
For $50 or so, nothing's better to get you up to speed. When you are done with one course, start the next. Each enrollment is good for a full year.
My main point about this wasn't so much as it being a full-re-write or whatever Microsoft's marketing and PR department says, but that as long as it tenaciously holds on to legacy code and doesn't excise it completely will be unable to move forward and compete. But this means a new format, new bios, new memory allocation methods, new i/o mapping, and so on. Much of that "legacy code" is actually the interface between the OS and the older hardware, which is why 90%+ of all crashes and bugs occur. The OS asks the crappy hardware to do something it doesn't want to or is too slow to do and boom - you're back to square one.
Note - this also means a total re-working of motherboard designs to have more speed and better interfaces as well. We're essentially using recycled 1980s technology and tweaking it. It works fine, but it's just about hit a wall. For instance, find me a motherboard with actual PCIe 16X X2 specs. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2056 This seems to be the only one I could find, but what's next? It's hit a wall. (and any devices you use on the machine share that PCI bus - as do all motherboards for PCs)
So what happens when we have to get around that "wall" in five or ten years? As I see it, Microsoft has no game plan for the true next generation of computers.
A better solution would be to just block that root server. If China doesn't want to play along nicely, well, they can turn into their own mega-LAN all they want.
In fact, I'd do one better take ALL of their internet access outside of China offline for them - just flat out cut the connection so that their entire country is in the dark. No news, no information, no business, no nothing. Not even their government and military has any information(aside from maybe a modem or two or satellite new feeds I guess)
I'd give them about two months before the people in power weren't any more.
So saying we need IPR to make a profit in the future is the equivalent of saying we need more taxes and we need to give corporations in other countries a lot of the proceeds or we're fscked.
And you wonder why companies are moving, no RUNNING as fast as they can to the one place left on the planet(China) where none of this applies?
Also how hard would it be to make one of these to carry a person? If Virgin Galactic is going to charge $200,000 to carry someone to the edge of space, wouldn't it be cooler to ride a balloon to space and then parachute back to earth?
***** A more rational though less fancy method would be to use the balloon to carry the entire ship up and launch it from there. The fuel savings and faster acceleration might actually enable them to obtain a reasonable orbit for a few minutes or hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously he would use cheaper 2GB memory modules as 16GB is more than enough for his use. I mentioned the 9010 vs the 9010B as is would allow for raid. If he's not interested and just wants a big "drive", use the 6 slot B model which is just over $200. Drop some cheap ram in it and go.
With 2GB modules, he's looking: 350+220X2=$790.
Or with the 6 slot model, about $600. More than a SSD, but not hugely so.
And you'd be amazed. My computer shows an average of nearly a million I/O hits to my memory and hard drive a day. Unless he's very careful, he can end up bricking that SSD in a few months by getting one setting wrong.
The advantage of physical ram, though, is that it almost never wears out. I've booted up 30 year old computers and the ram still works. SSDs if used for this purpose will burn out in weeks or months, because they're not capable of withstanding that sort of (ab)use for very long. SSDs also have long write times compared to their read times. Much faster than a hard drive, of course, but nothing like a ramdisk. When you need to beat on it a hundred thousand times a day, nothing beats good old ram.
I suggest he take a look at the ANS-9010. This is going to work great for his uses. I've seen them for around $350 new, and then you just drop in a couple of hundred dollars worth of memory. It also has built-in raid so he can get a bit more bandwidth if he needs to. For this sort of swap file/temporary memory space application, it's fantastic.
The best solution then is a physical ramdisk/ramdrive. The capacity isn't huge(8-16GB as a rule), but the speed is easily equal to any SSD and you can beat on it forever without worrying about it running out of write cycles.
The best option though that I know of is where the competition runs in rounds. If you reset everyone every 3 or 6 months, it allows for a "winner" and prizes and so on as well as a fresh start for new players. With 2 or 3 games cycling, it never gets old. A good example of this in action is Planetarion. It's still going along despite being horribly dated in many ways. Because it's fun, cheap, and more importantly, there's no ability to become entrenched and powerful.
Games need an ending. The best example of this that I know of was Astronest. You all started fresh and there was a deadline - on X day, at X time(usually 3-4 months in the future), the top 20 players (and their allies) would be forced to defend themselves versus the entire rest of the players. It was always close and always a hard fight, but then it was over. People cried, people bragged, prizes were had, and then another round would start.
I've been playing Astro Empires for a while now as a fun diversion and it's honestly pretty lame as they throw old players in with new ones and so you get situations where 1 million+ fleets are next door to 20 day old newbies. And nothing ever resets. It's fun, but it's also boring and useless in many ways. When there's no ending, there's no point, really.
****
Then you have EVE online where character evolves real-time regardless of whether you play or not. (or even whether you are subscribed if you queue enough stuff). It is also very economy-oriented game and majority of that action takes place outside gameplay time.
It kind of sucks because you can never, ever catch up to veteran from day 1. ;)
****
Well, in a way you can. It only takes two people and 4-6 months of training one "class" of ship to really be able to punk all but the biggest and baddest ships out there. But with cloaks and such, it's easy to pick your targets. Obviously you're not going to street race some guy in a Ford F40 with your Civic, but that aging BMW might be possible to get close to with a few aftermarket mods...
In real terms, since the game itself is free to purchase, spend $40-60 up front that you would normally pay for the game itself on extra game cards. Use 2-4 of them to buy a 6 month or so old character to begin with. This saves you the initial grind for about the same cost and you can jump right into the game in hours instead of months. It's the initial six months that suck in the game. After that, there's much less that separates the older players from the younger ones.
NOTE - they recently changed it, though, so that unpaid/inactive accounts stop training immediately - they don't continue any more while you are away. This, as expected, has generated a huge storm of complaints, but they are turning a blind eye to it.
NOTE 2 - CCP, the company that runs the game are without a doubt some of the most anal and useless toads when it comes to customer service and bug fixes. They do what they want and simply never listen to the players or admit anything is wrong unless it's made major news. Just expect to play it as if support is essentially never an option and you're completely on your own. And I do mean completely. Think Wizards of the Coast support levels. Just don't even bother 99% of the time barring obvious stuff like getting stuck.
But the game *is* fantastic once you ignore the company's irksome nature. It's without a doubt the best online game out there because literally anything you want to do is allowed and possible as soon as you step out of the newbie areas. Make money, make a guild, screw players over, lie, cheat, steal, bribe, or be a good guy(are there any left?) and hunt these scum down. Whatever you want to do... the company in charge pretty much ignores it unless you're literally breaking the game or doing real-life illegal acts.
And that's why I still like it after all of these years. Most other games like it force you to be good, play along, and are as boring as a stick of chewing gum that you've been chewing for an hour. At least with this one you can head out to the bad areas and, well, BE as bad as you can manage to be. That's kind of refreshing, actually, given the idiocy and nannying that most games now suffer from.
Awesome :)
But, seriously. Am I the only one that finds that site's "sources" to often be questionable? Maybe legal, maybe not, but certainly not smelling very clean.
First, they didn't out their source: This guy isn't their source, he's the guy that lost the phone. Their source found the device...
Am I the only one who thinks that the "found" is likely what didn't happen?
Exactly how hard would it be to take the thing in a dimly lit bar from a guy who is playing with it(who wouldn't?) while drinking a few too many beers?
Out of mod points :) , but I thought I'd like to comment on this. Everyone is going on about the analysis and not about the actual problem itself of people being unwilling to properly learn. It's one thing, as you pointed out, to copy notes and try to figure stuff out together, and even that works well in computing. Often you'll see different work but with a tricky section or two that's similar between two students - I'd not consider this to be a big deal, really. But cut-and-paste of entire sections obviously is not even tying.
I think quite a lot of it actually is a difference with younger people and students in general. They seem to be afflicted more and more with a sense of cutthroat pragmatism, a desire for instant gratification, and no work ethic at all. In short, they act as if instead of working or struggling for anything, they sat on their butts and played console games all day long. The concepts of, say, writing a handwritten letter(or even when and why it's appropriate) let alone proper conduct in general are just not important to them. So they get to college where all of those rules still(or suddenly DO) apply and they have no idea why it's important NOT to cheat since they've been doing it all their lives and getting away with it.
My last job in fact, we had things like this happen all of the time. New employees would do inane things like logging in from home before they came to work, not bothering to log out/lock up/etc, and doing crappy things like taking entire boxes of snacks from the kitchen stores.
Steam store page for AC2 tells you that it has 3rd-party DRM and requires a permanent internet connection. Other titles on steam has this too.
****
Well, this is a change in Steam's policies(or they're just caving to UBIsoft here). UBIsoft is just simply not worth messing with.
And my point before was that previous titles by Ubisoft that have had the DRM removed suddenly work pretty much like normal software. Sure, it has bugs and stuff, but nothing worse than the other guys. But add the DRM back into the equation and your computer suffers. It's just not worth it.
Still, the designs of internal combustion engines are such that it takes an enormous amount of junk in the air to actually destroy them while they are still running.(don't count on it restarting necessarily - heh) A simple filter change between flights would probably suffice. The engines are also much cheaper to fix and repair than jet engines.
There's a reason that the Coast Guard doesn't use jet engines in Alaska and when it's gathering data in hurricanes. Jet engines are fast and efficient, but unfortunately, they require lots of expensive upkeep and aren't nearly as resistant to damage as conventional designs.
That all said, I bet that they could get some of these old workhorses out into service. It might take you several stops to get around, but it's better than not flying at all.
Will their shareholders feel the same way when Ubisoft titles have the reputation of being flaky, hard to play, and prone to technical malfunction?
Ubisoft actually makes decent enough games that function well once the DRM is removed. Steam requires them to remove it all and the titles that you can order via Steam run fine and don't mess up your system.
The issue is that Ubisoft is run by people who actually still believe the nonsense of the 1980s about piracy and how to combat it - ie - a bigger bat. They are essentially doing the modern day equivalent of those code books and look-up wheels that were printed on special paper. It just serves to make everyone angry.
Here's the deal, though. They never *ever* will change. The President of the company is one of those asshats who will never change his mind about anything as long as he's making money doing what he's doing. We all know the personality type. And how pointless it is to even try to talk to them. To his dying day, he will believe that he can win versus piracy and that he is free to use any method at his disposal to accomplish it.
Also, the DRM is not a simple check like Steam and other services go through, but it's rootkit-level stuff that's actually harder to remove than most viruses. One game that I removed a year or so ago was particularly aggressive in that it would replicate itself just like a virus. I had to physically yank the drive and drop in in an external case.
Just say no to these guys. It isn't even about the economics or ethics any more. It's that if you want your machine to run properly, don't ever install anything from them on it.
Apparently, though, propeller-driven aircraft are fine. Mostly due to the lower altitudes, but also because they are basically modified automobile engines and have far greater tolerances for abuse. I also suspect that most of them have or can be modified to fit an air filter.
You heard it here first, Sony advance to the head of the shitlist. Microsoft loses its crown after so many years at the top.
****
It seems as if people are finally realizing what many of us have known for almost a decade. Now we just need to wean them of their unhealthy Apple obsession. Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Disney - probably the most anti-consumer giants out there that try to put on a polished and friendly image despite being about as cooperative and nice behind the scenes as a mafia thug.(and Toyota seems to be gunning for spot #5 - sigh...)
Now, to be honest, they're no worse than Pfiser or GE or ADM or many of the others out there. But the "We're your friend - we care" BS is, well, I personally find it to be extremely grating and almost verging on patronizing as if we're idiots. At leas the other corporations they are up-front and honest about making money and not caring. I can at least respect them in a way for that. But if I hear another happy PS3 or IPhone ad, I think I'll puke.
The only reliable level that is acceptable is to use the same game the same engine, and just make new custom levels for it. Anything more than that will end you up in hot water for sure.
There also are a large number of people that are running some sort of media server/etc on their PC to the PS3(TVersity and the like) IME, they just make things a whole lot worse come patch-time.
Yeah FF13 is known to have a lot of glitches. I always wait for the "best hits" version to come out of any game. By then, it's pretty well stable.(and $20 usually - heh)
Maybe it has something to do with the fact the I never played around with "install other OS", never opened the hood to replace the hard drive, never tried to jailbreak it...
This. The number of people who have tweaked, altered, hacked, or done things to their machines and games on the PS3 as well as their home PCs is enormous. My guess is that they have installed TVersity or some other media streaming application onto their machine and/or altered the machine in some way and well, big surprise... it gets confused and "breaks". Mine is a first generation "Fat" model - the 20GB one that can even play PS1 games(I've given it a much larger HD but that's all).
No issues, no glitches, no problems. Of course, the ones with software emulation have more issues to begin with with PS2 games, and that's also likely a cause. There's a reason the hardware-based PS3s are so coveted. They work and I've never had a problem, either, running any game.(aside from PS2 games from Japan - I really wish they would remove the region check for PS2 games)
Oh - hacking the region check/verification also will break the PS3 once it connects online. But that's kind of "duh" obvious.
Yet that's apparently why the "easy to read" one is such a horrendous mess. Because it doesn't easily fit into two dimensions like that. IF you map it in three dimensions, though, it also can fit exotic matter as well.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/03/05/163226/First-Creation-of-Anti-Strange-Hypernuclei
This was on Slashdot a few weeks ago. And it shows us that the periodic table is without a doubt in need of a major revision from what we've always assumed to be correct.
http://www.meta-synthesis.com/webbook/35_pt/pt.html
Dozens of (the major) alternate versions are listed here as well. I personally like the Dufour Periodictree myself, as it has a nice symmetry to it that's similar to the circular one.
If it runs Windows you'll end up getting viruses. If it runs something Apple you'll pay for updates (or monthly fees). If it runs Linux you'll have to spend an insane amount of time with it to make it right.
At least with this you get to choose which of the three you want to deal with, whereas with a real life relationship, well, you might get all three at once.
History books a hundred years from now will likely read:
"And the great social and information experiment known as the Internet was brought down by the lawyers and copyright laws. The companies that ran it essentially made it strangle itself to death."
(An aside comment by myself:)
I hate to see what the lawyers will turn our world into in another 30 or 40 years. I think maybe China's idea of doing away with it all might not be so awful after all. I guess only time will tell which way of dealing with it is correct.
Most colleges now use two sites for their online coursework. MathLab and Math XL. Both cost to join. Of course, you need to be in a class to get actual homework assignments(so no assignments - no big deal). But they do have full online tutoring, examples, and so on for you to review from the book. Some textbooks also have similar programs or access to them in a CD in the back.
Log in, select "I am studying on my own and need to select a textbook" Then search for the author. Go to course home at the top.
There are study plans, coursework, sample tests, and the text of the book online.
For $50 or so, nothing's better to get you up to speed. When you are done with one course, start the next. Each enrollment is good for a full year.
My main point about this wasn't so much as it being a full-re-write or whatever Microsoft's marketing and PR department says, but that as long as it tenaciously holds on to legacy code and doesn't excise it completely will be unable to move forward and compete. But this means a new format, new bios, new memory allocation methods, new i/o mapping, and so on. Much of that "legacy code" is actually the interface between the OS and the older hardware, which is why 90%+ of all crashes and bugs occur. The OS asks the crappy hardware to do something it doesn't want to or is too slow to do and boom - you're back to square one.
Note - this also means a total re-working of motherboard designs to have more speed and better interfaces as well. We're essentially using recycled 1980s technology and tweaking it. It works fine, but it's just about hit a wall. For instance, find me a motherboard with actual PCIe 16X X2 specs. http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2056 This seems to be the only one I could find, but what's next? It's hit a wall. (and any devices you use on the machine share that PCI bus - as do all motherboards for PCs)
So what happens when we have to get around that "wall" in five or ten years? As I see it, Microsoft has no game plan for the true next generation of computers.
A better solution would be to just block that root server. If China doesn't want to play along nicely, well, they can turn into their own mega-LAN all they want.
In fact, I'd do one better take ALL of their internet access outside of China offline for them - just flat out cut the connection so that their entire country is in the dark. No news, no information, no business, no nothing. Not even their government and military has any information(aside from maybe a modem or two or satellite new feeds I guess)
I'd give them about two months before the people in power weren't any more.
So saying we need IPR to make a profit in the future is the equivalent of saying we need more taxes and we need to give corporations in other countries a lot of the proceeds or we're fscked.
And you wonder why companies are moving, no RUNNING as fast as they can to the one place left on the planet(China) where none of this applies?
Also how hard would it be to make one of these to carry a person? If Virgin Galactic is going to charge $200,000 to carry someone to the edge of space, wouldn't it be cooler to ride a balloon to space and then parachute back to earth?
*****
A more rational though less fancy method would be to use the balloon to carry the entire ship up and launch it from there. The fuel savings and faster acceleration might actually enable them to obtain a reasonable orbit for a few minutes or hours.