I have heard that before, but what exactly does that mean? I mean is Nintendo just doing a bit of a marketing trick by not calling it Gameboy or are they going to release a GameboySP2 in the next half year and basically screw up all customers who just bought a NintendoDS?
It's a marketing thing with two goals in mind. First, DS sounds a little more mature than "Gameboy" in an attempt to capture the nebulous "old gamer" market. Secondly, if the DS completely tanks, not sticking the Gameboy moniker on it means Nintendo can save their ass. They'll simply say: "oh, the DS wasn't a Gameboy successor anyway. Here's the real Gameboy SuperAdvance you were looking for."
The only thing it requires a network connection for is the initial activation, and thats no more odious than Microsoft's current required activation practices, and I bet you've got Windows on your PC. (Or did you leech or crack your copy of it, mr. high and mighty?)
Or maybe he's running Windows XP Professional, which doesn't require any activation. Or not running Windows at all. But the point is that the vocal majority on/. shifted from "Software with activation suxx0rs and is wrong" to "Must play Half Life 2" once the shiny new game came out. It gives the impression that many/. posters' principles change when cool new toys roll around, which is the same as having no principles at all.
Gotta call bullshit on this one. There is no "maximum" bitrate. You can go as high as you want, and get it extremely close to beig lossless.
Really? That's interesting since the MP3 format spec pegs the maximum bitrate of an MPEG-1 layer 3 frame at 320kbit/sec. I'm curious as to how one gets higher.
Don't pay your electric bill and you'll see just how rechargeable it is. In addition, what happens when the rechargeable battery wears out? Are we looking at another Apple "just buy another iPod" deal?
Sony will surely sell replacements. Remember, the PSP's battery is external to the unit and plugs into a power port like an AC adapter might. Time will tell if consumers are happy having to strap them to their bodies, however.
I wouldn't misunderestimate the Sony/EA relationship.
But EA already has two launch titles slated for the DS from its Madden and Tiger Woods franchises. If the DS sells and the games sell, it's a sure bet they'll continue to support it - in addition to the PSP if necessary. Back in the Genesis/SNES days EA was willing to back more than one console; I'm sure they'd do it again if there's money to be made.
Doom 3 looks great, but really isn't all that fun. It's mindless and repetitive and didn't really turn out to be a great game after all. It was some awesome eye candy, but so is porn and it's cheaper.
But Doom 3 doesn't require a registration server to install. Porn requires a different sort of server. Either is more fun than sitting around waiting for Valve's servers to respond.
Like any other Red Hat.0 release, the Fedora guys have added a bunch of new stuff (udev and SELinux, for starters) but the migration isn't going to be entirely smooth. I'm still getting over/media/cdrom replacing/mnt/cdrom, for example. But this new stuff isn't going away, so it's nice to get a handle on it now and watch the bugs get sorted out just like they've always been in the past.
I don't use Gnome or KDE, so I don't know what's changed on that side of things. But the rest of my system runs roughly the same as before. I haven't noticed any significant speed or stability issues. All-in-all I consider it a worthwhile upgrade, but one will need to be ready for several significant changes. Read the Fedora README for a good summary of them, as usual.
Documented where? And don't say "do a Google search". The government needs to know that information will still be around in 50 years. And they need to store it themselves.
Documented in an ISO standard back in 1986. All any government needs to do is store a hard copy of the JFIF format and source code along with their backups and re-implementation won't be a big concern even 50 years from now.
The real issue here isn't physically storing data. The issue is, will anyone know WTF a JPEG is in 50 years, and how to read one? Or a Visio Diagram? Or a.xyz file? I was surprised at how little the article talked about the National Archives initiative to solve this very problem.
JPEG is an open, documented, standard file format. People will be able to read them in 50 years just as easily as we can read old ASCII documents from 20+ years ago. Anyone can implement a JPEG reader, so people will continue to do so for compatibility even if a better lossy image format rolls around.
Undocumented, proprietary formats will slowly rot and fade away as the companies that make them evolve into something else or disappear entirely. It's the ultimate price of vendor lock-in.
Is that an actual bug in Firefox or does it have to do with slashdot's horrible code? I've read it spun both ways
Slashdot's HTML doesn't help. But if one can fix it by forcing Firefox to re-render (with the font resizing trick, quite often) then it's mostly Firefox's fault for not rendering it right the first time.
Officially the release is about 2-3 times a year according to: http://fedora.redhat.com/about/
The official word is 2-3 times a year. Historically, all of Fedora's releases have been 6 months apart. Before that, Red Hat's "desktop" releases were 6 months apart going back to Red Hat 6, at least. I expect when the next Fedora testing/release schedule is published, the next date will be 6 months from this one.
The dissapointing thing is how often Fedora major releases come out. Makes the lives of those of us who have to keep up with it quite difficult. We just got used to FC2 and now FC3's out!:-)
But I've been wondering two things: Why is it so popular that they can't manage all the pre-orders? Nintendo has gone on record saying it's not going to replace the GBA, nor directly compete with it. So it's not just people buying the next-gen (unless, that's what they think it is). Is it the style factor, the wireless connectivity? The hope that it will become so much more?
It's not the official Gameboy replacement because Nintendo knows it's a risk. But it plays GBA titles along with DS ones, which makes it a de-facto GBA successor. Wireless capability, a fast ARM9 CPU, good battery life and the Nintendo brand add to the appeal - even though the quality of the launch lineup is uncertain.
But since the GBA compatibility is there, it's not as vital for the DS to blow people away with its launch titles either. As with most new consoles, it's the promise of future titles that gets people to buy them now.
Yes, but Lucas did say that he was trying to bring the original films more in-line with the prequels. He's just adding consistency by making all of it really childish and stupid.
Seriously, I have half a mind to buy some bootleg DVDs of the original trilogy out of Hong Kong. If Lucas is intent on stealing my childhood, I might as well steal them back.
If you must get the original films, please support the preservationists and download the free Laserdisc rips. That way the HK bootleggers don't get your money either.
I'd never heard of shred, so I checked it out, and found this interesting tidbit in the man page:
CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this assumption.
This is quite true, which is why shred is generally more effective when used on an entire device (/dev/hdb,/dev/fd0, etc.) rather than on a single file on a filesystem. Even then, however, it may not be completely effective if the drive's firmware has moved your data around behind-the-scenes. But it's probably good enough for a lot of people depending on just how valuable the deleted data is.
Why wouldn't Osama Bin Laden support Bush? Bush's inaction afforded Osama a chance to attack, Bush's attack on Iraq afforded Osama a chance to escape capture and Bush's ineffectiveness in Iraq affords Osama a chance to recruit a lot more disgruntled Shiites to his cause. Sounds like he'd welcome 4 more years of the same.
Hopefully they come up with something better than "long long long" before the advent of widely available 128-bit processors, eh?.
At least "long long long" won't break any old code - which is preferable to adding a new reserved word which might. Though everyone will typecast it to something like int128 or u_int128 anyway, so it's not a big deal.
Because your desktop would be a slow, bloated piece of cr*p, where each simple application would consume about 80MB??
Nono, each application would run from the same Java runtime. It would bloat up to fill 1GB of RAM and run very very slowly. And, just as you're getting work done, a NullPointerException would take down the entire desktop. Assuming one can set all the proper CLASSPATHs to get the damn thing running in the first place.
mp3s don't even *have* a header. A lot of them have special first frames that contain a seektable, or maybe an ID3v2 tag, but that's about it. If the file has a seektable you've got a good chance to hopping anywhere inside it. But if you've got a VBR mp3 without one, you're in for a lot of hurt.
The whole mp3 format is a big kludge. I'm often amazed that it works at all.
For 195$, this is a cheap alternative to a portable DVD player. This feature alone might get me to buy one, not to mention it also plays games.
Unfortunately, you'll need to re-buy your movie library since the PSP won't be able to play existing DVDs. Considering how much I've spent on my DVD library, I think an actual portable DVD player would be the better deal.
The PS hit it so big because so many adults who didn't play games started playing them. Those same adults are turned off by portables.
It's probably more accurate to say that all the teens who grew up playing Super Nintendo grew into college-aged kids and moved to the Playstation. Now they're all adults and have moved to the Playstation 2. Given the sales figures, it's likely this same group also owns a lot of Gameboys. Whether they'd gravitate toward the PSP instead remains to be seen. But given that Nintendo is also targeting their DS to a wider demographic than before makes it hard to say which portable an older market will prefer - assuming this demographic is willing to pay for portables at all.
If people like the poster above think that the president is going to affect whether a case brought by New York will continue, what makes you think they don't also believe he controls their lives?
Near as I can figure, most people ascribe powers (and potential powers/accomplishments) to a presidential candidate in order to justify their support for him rather than the other way around. They'll say, "I'm for candidate X because candidate X will do Y!" when what they mean is "I was already for candidate X, and I will always be for candidate X, and you should be for candidate X too because of Y."
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... people put WAY too much weight on the power of the presidency.
The presidency is a sporting event. People don't seriously expect the president to directly affect their lives for better or worse, they just want to see their favorite team win. If it were all about issues and results, nobody would take it nearly as personally as they do now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a marketing thing with two goals in mind. First, DS sounds a little more mature than "Gameboy" in an attempt to capture the nebulous "old gamer" market. Secondly, if the DS completely tanks, not sticking the Gameboy moniker on it means Nintendo can save their ass. They'll simply say: "oh, the DS wasn't a Gameboy successor anyway. Here's the real Gameboy SuperAdvance you were looking for."
Or maybe he's running Windows XP Professional, which doesn't require any activation. Or not running Windows at all. But the point is that the vocal majority on /. shifted from "Software with activation suxx0rs and is wrong" to "Must play Half Life 2" once the shiny new game came out. It gives the impression that many /. posters' principles change when cool new toys roll around, which is the same as having no principles at all.
Really? That's interesting since the MP3 format spec pegs the maximum bitrate of an MPEG-1 layer 3 frame at 320kbit/sec. I'm curious as to how one gets higher.
Sony will surely sell replacements. Remember, the PSP's battery is external to the unit and plugs into a power port like an AC adapter might. Time will tell if consumers are happy having to strap them to their bodies, however.
But EA already has two launch titles slated for the DS from its Madden and Tiger Woods franchises. If the DS sells and the games sell, it's a sure bet they'll continue to support it - in addition to the PSP if necessary. Back in the Genesis/SNES days EA was willing to back more than one console; I'm sure they'd do it again if there's money to be made.
But Doom 3 doesn't require a registration server to install. Porn requires a different sort of server. Either is more fun than sitting around waiting for Valve's servers to respond.
I don't use Gnome or KDE, so I don't know what's changed on that side of things. But the rest of my system runs roughly the same as before. I haven't noticed any significant speed or stability issues. All-in-all I consider it a worthwhile upgrade, but one will need to be ready for several significant changes. Read the Fedora README for a good summary of them, as usual.
Windows XP Professional requires no activation, internet or otherwise.
Documented in an ISO standard back in 1986. All any government needs to do is store a hard copy of the JFIF format and source code along with their backups and re-implementation won't be a big concern even 50 years from now.
JPEG is an open, documented, standard file format. People will be able to read them in 50 years just as easily as we can read old ASCII documents from 20+ years ago. Anyone can implement a JPEG reader, so people will continue to do so for compatibility even if a better lossy image format rolls around.
Undocumented, proprietary formats will slowly rot and fade away as the companies that make them evolve into something else or disappear entirely. It's the ultimate price of vendor lock-in.
Slashdot's HTML doesn't help. But if one can fix it by forcing Firefox to re-render (with the font resizing trick, quite often) then it's mostly Firefox's fault for not rendering it right the first time.
The official word is 2-3 times a year. Historically, all of Fedora's releases have been 6 months apart. Before that, Red Hat's "desktop" releases were 6 months apart going back to Red Hat 6, at least. I expect when the next Fedora testing/release schedule is published, the next date will be 6 months from this one.
Six months. It's always six months. You need to download them sooner, perhaps. ;)
It's not the official Gameboy replacement because Nintendo knows it's a risk. But it plays GBA titles along with DS ones, which makes it a de-facto GBA successor. Wireless capability, a fast ARM9 CPU, good battery life and the Nintendo brand add to the appeal - even though the quality of the launch lineup is uncertain.
But since the GBA compatibility is there, it's not as vital for the DS to blow people away with its launch titles either. As with most new consoles, it's the promise of future titles that gets people to buy them now.
Yes, but Lucas did say that he was trying to bring the original films more in-line with the prequels. He's just adding consistency by making all of it really childish and stupid.
If you must get the original films, please support the preservationists and download the free Laserdisc rips. That way the HK bootleggers don't get your money either.
This is quite true, which is why shred is generally more effective when used on an entire device (/dev/hdb, /dev/fd0, etc.) rather than on a single file on a filesystem. Even then, however, it may not be completely effective if the drive's firmware has moved your data around behind-the-scenes. But it's probably good enough for a lot of people depending on just how valuable the deleted data is.
Why wouldn't Osama Bin Laden support Bush? Bush's inaction afforded Osama a chance to attack, Bush's attack on Iraq afforded Osama a chance to escape capture and Bush's ineffectiveness in Iraq affords Osama a chance to recruit a lot more disgruntled Shiites to his cause. Sounds like he'd welcome 4 more years of the same.
At least "long long long" won't break any old code - which is preferable to adding a new reserved word which might. Though everyone will typecast it to something like int128 or u_int128 anyway, so it's not a big deal.
Nono, each application would run from the same Java runtime. It would bloat up to fill 1GB of RAM and run very very slowly. And, just as you're getting work done, a NullPointerException would take down the entire desktop. Assuming one can set all the proper CLASSPATHs to get the damn thing running in the first place.
The whole mp3 format is a big kludge. I'm often amazed that it works at all.
Unfortunately, you'll need to re-buy your movie library since the PSP won't be able to play existing DVDs. Considering how much I've spent on my DVD library, I think an actual portable DVD player would be the better deal.
It's probably more accurate to say that all the teens who grew up playing Super Nintendo grew into college-aged kids and moved to the Playstation. Now they're all adults and have moved to the Playstation 2. Given the sales figures, it's likely this same group also owns a lot of Gameboys. Whether they'd gravitate toward the PSP instead remains to be seen. But given that Nintendo is also targeting their DS to a wider demographic than before makes it hard to say which portable an older market will prefer - assuming this demographic is willing to pay for portables at all.
Near as I can figure, most people ascribe powers (and potential powers/accomplishments) to a presidential candidate in order to justify their support for him rather than the other way around. They'll say, "I'm for candidate X because candidate X will do Y!" when what they mean is "I was already for candidate X, and I will always be for candidate X, and you should be for candidate X too because of Y."
The presidency is a sporting event. People don't seriously expect the president to directly affect their lives for better or worse, they just want to see their favorite team win. If it were all about issues and results, nobody would take it nearly as personally as they do now.