This is all I could find online, but there was definitely a gay computer game produced several years ago, in the early 1990's, for the Macintosh: GayBlade. It is a traditional fantasy roleplaying game, obviously with a gay-friendly twist. Never seen it, never played it, would like to play it....
This game Poly-Play is fairly well known within the MAME community, as it is one of only three (of the thousands MAME supports) ROM games that are freely available! So, it is often one of the first games tried by a new MAME user.
Poly-Play is judged to no longer have a copyright at all, because it was state-developed and the old Soviet state no longer exists.
Another game is Robby Roto, a game whose programmer was ingenious enough to get a clause in his contract in which copyright control reverted to him after the game stopped selling! When this happened (unfortunately sooner than later, as the game was a flop), he got full copyright control of his ROM, and generously donated it for free non-commercial use.
The third game is Gridlee, a fun little game that is a favorite at California Extreme. I'm not sure of the story behind this one, but this ROM was also freed by the original developers of the game.
I have benefited from stock options in the past: not enough to be wealthy, but enough to give me a pool of savings to last the year-plus I have been out of work so far.
However, I favor stock option expensing, even though it would most likely reduce the number of options that are awarded to employees (since the company would have to bear an increased accounting cost for each option that is awarded). The reason is that it is more honest. The profit from exercising stock options comes out of the pockets of the stockholders who were suckered into paying full price for the stock! As a stockholder, I am annoyed that optionholders can "stealth" themselves from company expense reports, as is currently done.
Microsoft has a truly good idea, that I read about a while ago: issuing real shares of stock, not just options. This neatly avoids the entire debate regarding the accounting of stock options. Employees would be paid in real shares of stock, in addition to cash. This has all the benefits of encouraging employees to take a stake in company performance, as options do, and motivates employees to want to make the stock price rise.
Issuing real shares of stock would easily be accountable, and would also have added the benefit of being fair to all employees, not just the few who got in early and got the coveted "below-a-dollar" options....
I often wonder why the keyboard driver isn't programmed to do that by default: aUTOMATICALLY tURN oFF cAPS lOCK wHEN tHE sHIFT kEY iS pRESSED.
My grandmother's old manual typewriter did this! When you pressed Shift, it mechanically turned off Caps Lock, so once you released the Shift key, you were back to lowercase letters.
BTW, Caps Lock was in the middle of the far left column of keys, right where it is now. So, there is precedent for having the Caps Lock key in this location (not Ctrl, as some would like to see placed there instead).
And finally, this keyboard happened to have no "1" key, and you were expected to type a lowercase "L" instead - starting a horrible habit! To this day, you can recognize documents typed by those who are not computer literate, as they will have things like "l999" in them for years/numbers....
I think that it's a good thing to make an attempt at setting the standards early, even before the technology is practical. This will help avoid the fragmentation and "format wars" that have hurt other industries.
While this is (for now) extreme overkill for the home, it will be good to have a standard for such things as digital movie theatres and digital IMAX. If/when such things become mainstream, a standard would help keep distribution costs down.
Mozilla/Thunderbird also has trouble completely blocking all server contact in email, as it evidently doesn't sandbox the email environment enough (images may be blocked, but stylesheets and other external URL's can still leak through, last I checked).
BTW, there is a workaround if you use Mozilla/Thunderbird: set your View/Message Body As settings to "Simple HTML", or better yet, "Plain Text". This works 100%!
I like that terminology a lot! It is really sad that greedy vultures seize control of old companies that once had innovative inventions but are now nearly out of business. The vultures then gain control of a large amount of intellectual property, and they can exploit the patent system to shake protection money out of everybody else. A catchy phrase that enters pop culture is the first step towards making Joe Sixpack aware of these problems, and hopefully this will lead to some political pressure for patent law reform.
It's agreed that the patent system is corrupt and is one of the primary reasons behind the decline of the software industry in the US, but I'm preaching to the choir here.
More to the point, Compression Labs was a videoconferencing company. Their patents covered compression of moving video data. That is what they concentrated on doing, and where most of their intellectual property lies. Still images were of minor concern to them. It would be a major stretch to get their patents to also apply to still images. I don't think they have much of a legal leg to stand on, especially considering how Forgent waited so long before filing these lawsuits (as others have mentioned).
I used to work at Compression Labs in the past, and this saddens me. I don't like seeing a good company's reputation go down in flames. I do hope that Forgent loses, and loses big, in these lawsuits....
Real made easy instant download link for CarTalk
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
Real considers CarTalk to be such an important customer that they made a special download page just for them! It is an easy instant download, with no clutter or advertisements.
Now why can't Real just put up this page for everybody? Sadly, if you visit the main site at real.com, you still get the maze of high-pressure sales offers for their "pro" and subscription versions.
BTW, I have found that you can change "rppr" field of the above URL to whatever you want (instead of "cartalk.com") but it can't be left blank. Real will probably put in referrer checking, to prevent people from publishing this link everywhere, so use it while you can....
IBM has had "QBIC", Query By Image Content, for some time now. From what I read, this allows the user to specify some overall image-processing attributes of desired images, and hopefully the database will find images that meet the description. However, this applies to the domain of flat images, and not 3D shapes. Still, it's informative to know that this concept is not new, and has been around since at least 1996 or so.
Both are small Kuiper Belt objects. Quaoar was mentioned on Slashdot before.
It's nice to find these mini-planets and give them names. The area beyond Pluto is fascinating, all the more reason why the New Horizons probe should be launched. I hope that Bush's single-minded fixation on Mars doesn't cause this project to be scrapped....
A game that plays like Zelda 1, with an extensive overworld, lots to do, dungeons with puzzles, items that open up new areas, backtracking to old areas and finding more things you couldn't get to before, and so on? And, to top it all off, a very dark and brooding theme with an overarching plotline?
Silicon Knights has already made this game!
Blood Omen 1, for PSOne and other platforms. It came out in 1996. The first - and many say the best-playing - in the Legacy Of Kain series.
The game has its warts (most noticeably the clumsy controls and almost-nonexistent AI), but if you're into Zelda-style games and/or dark-themed games in general, it is not to be missed!
And a remake of Blood Omen 1 on a modern platform would be just sweet....
I also posted a rant about RealPlayer
on
Real's Reality
·
· Score: 1
Back when it was last mentioned a few times ago on Slashdot, I also posted a rant about RealPlayer. It was back in 2001 or so, targeting RealPlayer 8.
The version of RealPlayer I ranted about, RealPlayer 8, was probably a low water mark for them. Horrible indeed.
Recently, I installed RP 10 and it is actually a bit better and friendlier! Not 100% ethical yet, but getting closer. Here's an update to my earlier rant:
I used Gopher to get classes in college. Without it, it would have been nearly impossible to get into the high-demand classes!
This was at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, between 1992 and 1998.
A friend of mine showed me the basic technique, and I wrote some scripts to do it.
Every hour, the school updated the list of classes that were open, and published them via Gopher. Classes were full, but because people added and dropped classes constantly during the frantic first week or so of each quarter, high-demand classes would occasionally open up.
I made a script that called the Gopher client with the equivalent of "lynx --dump" every hour, and grepped that for classes I needed. If it found a match, it emailed me. If I checked my email often enough, I had a chance. Back then, the dream was to have an emailable pager, so you wouldn't be tied to checking email! I never did get around to rigging up a more complicated setup to use an analog modem to dial an old-style numeric pager, but some people did.
Without Gopher, I might still be there, trying to get the one or two critical classes needed to graduate...!
I haven't tried this, but have thought about it, and realized that it would be easy to parallelize chess. Each CPU thrown at the problem would allow better chess to be played.
Chess is basically a decision tree. Computer chess programs work by looking at future moves and evaluating them relative to each other. Each position of the board has a certain fixed number of possible moves that can be made from that position.
So, to assign a chess problem to N CPU's, look at the position of the board. See how many moves can be made. Assign each CPU a move, and have the CPU continue to evaluate based on the new board position resulting from that move. If you still have unused processors, then repeat this step another iteration (assign each CPU a board position that is two moves ahead, or three, and so forth). Continue to allocate CPU's until all are busy. If the number of CPU's isn't enough to cover all the possible moves, then have one CPU back off and just evaluate the board from its current position.
Basically, you are doing a breadth-first recursion to distribute the task among several CPU's. Then, each CPU runs as a conventional chess program from there, evaluating the tree of possible moves from its position.
This is a common technique, to my knowledge, and it is scalable to millions of CPU's (assuming sufficient network bandwidth)!
A dialup ISP that I once used in the past had a very good word they used to describe their service:
Unmetered
Their service was billed as unmetered, not unlimited!
This gave customers the correct impression that they wouldn't need to watch the clock, without leading them to believe that they could abuse the connection by leaving it connected 24/7. In fine print, they said something like this: "Unmetered does not mean unlimited. We expect you to hang up when you are not actively using your computer."
This was for dialup service, so keeping a phone line open still cost the ISP money even when no data is flowing. One of the most expensive things for a dialup ISP was the sheer number of phone lines required, and every customer that sat on a line blocked another customer from using that line.
With broadband, there is no per-customer line cost like this, but the total bandwidth consumed becomes substantial. Customer abuse becomes that of overconsuming bandwidth, not of staying on 24/7.
Perhaps the description of unmetered could still apply? Internet providers would then not be falsely advertising their services as "unlimited".
Unfortunately, the Para Para fad died out in Japan around the same time the home game came out, so only one home game was made. Because of the extremely low difficulty level, and the inability to edit your own "steps", it gets boring quickly.
The game uses a very unique controller! It is a set of 5 infrared sensors that are placed in a semicicle on the ground, and they detect your hand movements by noticing when your hands pass over them. In this way, the game notices when you extend your arms in various directions.
Because only one home game was released, there was little demand for the controllers. Konami actually overproduced the controllers! They can be found for as little as 500 yen (roughly $5)!
Unfortunately, shipping to the US is a killer, as you must go through third-party services since Japanese typically pay through internal bank transfers (an option unavailable to those outside Japan). A very good service that I would recommend is Rinkya.
I have PPP and two controllers. Despite its problems, PPP is still a very good game. The background graphics are incredible and hypnotic, and all of the songs are good (if you like Eurobeat and J-Pop). The actual game disc itself is harder to find than the controllers. If you can find it, get it!
BTW, the controller is a standard USB device, and it will show up properly. However, the sensors will not register, as evidently it has some kind of lockout! If I had access to a USB bus sniffer, I would try to see what it is that prevents the controllers from working. If somebody were to reverse-engineer it, it would be great, because there would be all kinds of fun applications for these controllers!
A lot of people, including myself, are former IT workers who have found other non-IT jobs to make ends meet. Personally, I now have a job that I like, because it's in one of my hobbies (pinball)! It's filling orders for pinball parts. I do this, and various other things, and now get to set my own hours (as long as the work gets done and I hit the post office each day before it closes)!
I thought about my close friends, and realized the numbers break down pretty much into thirds! 30% of people are completely unemployed, 30% of people have held on to their IT job, and 40% of people have moved on to other jobs that are not in the IT industry. So, that's 70% unemployment if you consider non-IT jobs as being "unemployed"....
Got this photo from somewhere, I forgot. It's great. Somebody went up to the RealNetworks building and slapped a big handwritten "BUFFERING" sign over their logo!
Does anybody know where this picture was originally from? I'd like to link back to the source, but haven't found it online anymore.
I made this rant in response to a frustrating experience trying to install RealPlayer 8. They have improved since that time (I think that version 8 was a low water mark for them).
They still haven't figured out how to stop loading delays caused by buffering. The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys! Or in this case, the secret is to download the data at maximum speed from the previous 15-or-so seconds of content, and start the client playing immediately, and by the time the buffer fills, the client will be caught up to the current live content. Real still hasn't done this! (In fairness, it might be patented: the old SurferNETWORK was the first to figure it out, and they might have patented it.)
These are common only in the UK, it seems. I can't find one for sale in the US at all, except for specialty clocks like the ones that have little weather stations in them, or tiny travel clocks.
I'd love to find a normal alarm clock, in the normal alarm clock form factor, with a 24-hour display. I can't count the number of times I have accidentally set the time to AM when I meant PM, or vice versa....
I've taken to using my cellphone as an alarm clock, since it has this feature of 24-hour clock display. Works great for me.
The new "Lord Of The Rings" game is out, and it's available for roughly $4,000.00 from local distributors. It's said to be the best Stern pinball game to date (Stern is the only pinball manufacturer still standing).
It's the perfect antidote to looking at video screens all day. Pinball is popular here in the Bay Area because so many people stare at monitors all day and don't want to be entertained simply by staring at another monitor!
And, in a dark room, the gentle twinkling of the pinball machine's lights (when it isn't being played) is almost like a Christmas tree....:)
That's true. The purpose of ZMODEM is to transfer data as fast as possible, on a fairly modern system with clean phone lines, plentiful memory for buffering, and fast I/O that doesn't block. On a modern system, ZMODEM is the best character-based protocol out there (there were a few that were more advanced or had special purposes, like BiModem, but they are irrelevant now that everything now uses packet-based data and TCP/IP).
The purpose of Kermit is to be 100% compatible with pretty much every piece of technology, going all the way back to the earliest mainframe computers!
Different character set (ASCII, EBCDIC, UTF-8, etc.)? Kermit will translate the data as it is transferred.
Strange record length requirement (data must be transferred in units of 80 bytes or so, and can't be addressed as individual characters)? This was common on mainframes. Kermit will pad data as required to make this work.
Limited I/O that can't use the comm port and storage device at the same time? This was common on old DOS PC comm programs that could not multitask. Kermit will delay as needed in order to let data be stored before continuing with the communications, and synchronize this with the other side so that data is not lost.
Noisy phone line? Kermit will do complete error correction, without stalling or aborting the transfer (as ZMODEM was known to do).
Low memory for buffering? Kermit will do handshaking to ensure that the other side doesn't send data until the current data has been fully processed, minimizing the need for memory to buffer data.
Alien directory structure (VAX, etc.)? Kermit includes a mini-OS that can be used interactively to browse directories and initiate file transfers, and it abstracts the local storage conventions of the system's OS into a simple hierarchy that is the lowest common denominator. As an example of what this means, have you ever done a "ftp" into an old DOS system, and found yourself unable to change drive letters, because FTP (being a UNIX-based program) has no concept of drive letters? Kermit to the rescue here.
Now that computers and protocols are beginning to become standardized, thanks in part to the popularity of the Internet, the need for Kermit is fading. Still, it's good to read about interesting uses of Kermit such as this. Kermit joins the old DOS shareware program "Compushow" as having The Right Stuff....:)
It is becoming increasingly more common these days to use wrappers for binary-only modules.
The last time this came up on Slashdot, I thought about it for a while, and posted this here: http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_m sg/1247 8
(I wish I hadn't posted this as "Anonymous", but O'Reilly's registration system was nitpicky at the time....)
Anyway, a quick summary:
Companies these days are including binary-only modules in the kernel by using wrappers. Here's how it works:
1) Kernel already exists, Open Source and covered by GPL.
2) A wrapper module is written, also Open Source, to link into the kernel. It is written by the company writing the binary-only module, but released under the GPL. This module contains an API that is called by the binary-only module.
3) A binary-only module is written. It is closed source, and not covered by the GPL. The only linkage this module has is to the kernel is via the wrapper module.
Normally the GPL wouldn't allow the linkage of the binary-only module (the LGPL does, but that's not relevant here). However, since the GPL allows the original author of the copyrighted material to re-licence it later as needed for different uses (this is another way for authors of GPL software to make money), this can be done! Since the author of the wrapper module is friendly to the binary-only module, the wrapper would be licenced as GPL to the rest of the world, but not to the binary-only module.
Not only does the wrapper module form a legal barrier against the GPL, but it also serves as a technical barrier against evolving kernel API changes. If the kernel functions change, then glue code can be written within the wrapper module to take care of this, without needing to change the binary-only module at all!
This seemed to be effective for me. Does anybody else see a problem with this idea of using wrappers, or would it work well in all circumstances?
Slashdot Mirror
This is all I could find online, but there was definitely a gay computer game produced several years ago, in the early 1990's, for the Macintosh: GayBlade. It is a traditional fantasy roleplaying game, obviously with a gay-friendly twist. Never seen it, never played it, would like to play it....
This game Poly-Play is fairly well known within the MAME community, as it is one of only three (of the thousands MAME supports) ROM games that are freely available! So, it is often one of the first games tried by a new MAME user.
Poly-Play is judged to no longer have a copyright at all, because it was state-developed and the old Soviet state no longer exists.
Another game is Robby Roto, a game whose programmer was ingenious enough to get a clause in his contract in which copyright control reverted to him after the game stopped selling! When this happened (unfortunately sooner than later, as the game was a flop), he got full copyright control of his ROM, and generously donated it for free non-commercial use.
The third game is Gridlee, a fun little game that is a favorite at California Extreme. I'm not sure of the story behind this one, but this ROM was also freed by the original developers of the game.
I have benefited from stock options in the past: not enough to be wealthy, but enough to give me a pool of savings to last the year-plus I have been out of work so far.
However, I favor stock option expensing, even though it would most likely reduce the number of options that are awarded to employees (since the company would have to bear an increased accounting cost for each option that is awarded). The reason is that it is more honest. The profit from exercising stock options comes out of the pockets of the stockholders who were suckered into paying full price for the stock! As a stockholder, I am annoyed that optionholders can "stealth" themselves from company expense reports, as is currently done.
Microsoft has a truly good idea, that I read about a while ago: issuing real shares of stock, not just options. This neatly avoids the entire debate regarding the accounting of stock options. Employees would be paid in real shares of stock, in addition to cash. This has all the benefits of encouraging employees to take a stake in company performance, as options do, and motivates employees to want to make the stock price rise.
Issuing real shares of stock would easily be accountable, and would also have added the benefit of being fair to all employees, not just the few who got in early and got the coveted "below-a-dollar" options....
I often wonder why the keyboard driver isn't programmed to do that by default: aUTOMATICALLY tURN oFF cAPS lOCK wHEN tHE sHIFT kEY iS pRESSED.
My grandmother's old manual typewriter did this! When you pressed Shift, it mechanically turned off Caps Lock, so once you released the Shift key, you were back to lowercase letters.
BTW, Caps Lock was in the middle of the far left column of keys, right where it is now. So, there is precedent for having the Caps Lock key in this location (not Ctrl, as some would like to see placed there instead).
And finally, this keyboard happened to have no "1" key, and you were expected to type a lowercase "L" instead - starting a horrible habit! To this day, you can recognize documents typed by those who are not computer literate, as they will have things like "l999" in them for years/numbers....
I think that it's a good thing to make an attempt at setting the standards early, even before the technology is practical. This will help avoid the fragmentation and "format wars" that have hurt other industries.
While this is (for now) extreme overkill for the home, it will be good to have a standard for such things as digital movie theatres and digital IMAX. If/when such things become mainstream, a standard would help keep distribution costs down.
There is another company that claims to do this, ReadNotify.
It looks to be exactly the same kind of service as Didtheyreadit.com.
I first became aware of this company by reading Mozilla's bug report 28327 - http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28327 (cut/paste URL and open in new window).
Mozilla/Thunderbird also has trouble completely blocking all server contact in email, as it evidently doesn't sandbox the email environment enough (images may be blocked, but stylesheets and other external URL's can still leak through, last I checked).
BTW, there is a workaround if you use Mozilla/Thunderbird: set your View/Message Body As settings to "Simple HTML", or better yet, "Plain Text". This works 100%!
I like that terminology a lot! It is really sad that greedy vultures seize control of old companies that once had innovative inventions but are now nearly out of business. The vultures then gain control of a large amount of intellectual property, and they can exploit the patent system to shake protection money out of everybody else. A catchy phrase that enters pop culture is the first step towards making Joe Sixpack aware of these problems, and hopefully this will lead to some political pressure for patent law reform.
It's agreed that the patent system is corrupt and is one of the primary reasons behind the decline of the software industry in the US, but I'm preaching to the choir here.
More to the point, Compression Labs was a videoconferencing company. Their patents covered compression of moving video data. That is what they concentrated on doing, and where most of their intellectual property lies. Still images were of minor concern to them. It would be a major stretch to get their patents to also apply to still images. I don't think they have much of a legal leg to stand on, especially considering how Forgent waited so long before filing these lawsuits (as others have mentioned).
I used to work at Compression Labs in the past, and this saddens me. I don't like seeing a good company's reputation go down in flames. I do hope that Forgent loses, and loses big, in these lawsuits....
Real considers CarTalk to be such an important customer that they made a special download page just for them! It is an easy instant download, with no clutter or advertisements.
http://www.real.com/freeplayer/?rppr=cartalk.com
Now why can't Real just put up this page for everybody? Sadly, if you visit the main site at real.com, you still get the maze of high-pressure sales offers for their "pro" and subscription versions.
BTW, I have found that you can change "rppr" field of the above URL to whatever you want (instead of "cartalk.com") but it can't be left blank. Real will probably put in referrer checking, to prevent people from publishing this link everywhere, so use it while you can....
IBM has had "QBIC", Query By Image Content, for some time now. From what I read, this allows the user to specify some overall image-processing attributes of desired images, and hopefully the database will find images that meet the description. However, this applies to the domain of flat images, and not 3D shapes. Still, it's informative to know that this concept is not new, and has been around since at least 1996 or so.
H TM
http://wwwqbic.almaden.ibm.com/
http://www.seyboldreports.com/SRDP/0dp9/D0901006.
This reminds me of Quaoar.
Both are small Kuiper Belt objects. Quaoar was mentioned on Slashdot before.
It's nice to find these mini-planets and give them names. The area beyond Pluto is fascinating, all the more reason why the New Horizons probe should be launched. I hope that Bush's single-minded fixation on Mars doesn't cause this project to be scrapped....
A game that plays like Zelda 1, with an extensive overworld, lots to do, dungeons with puzzles, items that open up new areas, backtracking to old areas and finding more things you couldn't get to before, and so on? And, to top it all off, a very dark and brooding theme with an overarching plotline?
Silicon Knights has already made this game!
Blood Omen 1, for PSOne and other platforms. It came out in 1996. The first - and many say the best-playing - in the Legacy Of Kain series.
The game has its warts (most noticeably the clumsy controls and almost-nonexistent AI), but if you're into Zelda-style games and/or dark-themed games in general, it is not to be missed!
And a remake of Blood Omen 1 on a modern platform would be just sweet....
Back when it was last mentioned a few times ago on Slashdot, I also posted a rant about RealPlayer. It was back in 2001 or so, targeting RealPlayer 8.
http://krellan.com/rant/real.html
The version of RealPlayer I ranted about, RealPlayer 8, was probably a low water mark for them. Horrible indeed.
Recently, I installed RP 10 and it is actually a bit better and friendlier! Not 100% ethical yet, but getting closer. Here's an update to my earlier rant:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/krellan/16344.htm l
I look forward to trying the Open Source versions of the player (Helix, etc.)....
I used Gopher to get classes in college. Without it, it would have been nearly impossible to get into the high-demand classes!
This was at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, between 1992 and 1998.
A friend of mine showed me the basic technique, and I wrote some scripts to do it.
Every hour, the school updated the list of classes that were open, and published them via Gopher. Classes were full, but because people added and dropped classes constantly during the frantic first week or so of each quarter, high-demand classes would occasionally open up.
I made a script that called the Gopher client with the equivalent of "lynx --dump" every hour, and grepped that for classes I needed. If it found a match, it emailed me. If I checked my email often enough, I had a chance. Back then, the dream was to have an emailable pager, so you wouldn't be tied to checking email! I never did get around to rigging up a more complicated setup to use an analog modem to dial an old-style numeric pager, but some people did.
Without Gopher, I might still be there, trying to get the one or two critical classes needed to graduate...!
I haven't tried this, but have thought about it, and realized that it would be easy to parallelize chess. Each CPU thrown at the problem would allow better chess to be played.
Chess is basically a decision tree. Computer chess programs work by looking at future moves and evaluating them relative to each other. Each position of the board has a certain fixed number of possible moves that can be made from that position.
So, to assign a chess problem to N CPU's, look at the position of the board. See how many moves can be made. Assign each CPU a move, and have the CPU continue to evaluate based on the new board position resulting from that move. If you still have unused processors, then repeat this step another iteration (assign each CPU a board position that is two moves ahead, or three, and so forth). Continue to allocate CPU's until all are busy. If the number of CPU's isn't enough to cover all the possible moves, then have one CPU back off and just evaluate the board from its current position.
Basically, you are doing a breadth-first recursion to distribute the task among several CPU's. Then, each CPU runs as a conventional chess program from there, evaluating the tree of possible moves from its position.
This is a common technique, to my knowledge, and it is scalable to millions of CPU's (assuming sufficient network bandwidth)!
A dialup ISP that I once used in the past had a very good word they used to describe their service:
Unmetered
Their service was billed as unmetered, not unlimited!
This gave customers the correct impression that they wouldn't need to watch the clock, without leading them to believe that they could abuse the connection by leaving it connected 24/7. In fine print, they said something like this: "Unmetered does not mean unlimited. We expect you to hang up when you are not actively using your computer."
This was for dialup service, so keeping a phone line open still cost the ISP money even when no data is flowing. One of the most expensive things for a dialup ISP was the sheer number of phone lines required, and every customer that sat on a line blocked another customer from using that line.
With broadband, there is no per-customer line cost like this, but the total bandwidth consumed becomes substantial. Customer abuse becomes that of overconsuming bandwidth, not of staying on 24/7.
Perhaps the description of unmetered could still apply? Internet providers would then not be falsely advertising their services as "unlimited".
As somebody else said, Konami does make a home version of Para Para Paradise.
h tml
& desc=%a5%d1%a5%e9%a5%d1%a5%e9+%a5%d1%a5%e9%a5%c0%a 5%a4%a5%b9&acc=jp&&f=0x12&at=true&alocale= 0jp
http://www.konamijpn.com/products/parapara/index.
Unfortunately, the Para Para fad died out in Japan around the same time the home game came out, so only one home game was made. Because of the extremely low difficulty level, and the inability to edit your own "steps", it gets boring quickly.
The game uses a very unique controller! It is a set of 5 infrared sensors that are placed in a semicicle on the ground, and they detect your hand movements by noticing when your hands pass over them. In this way, the game notices when you extend your arms in various directions.
Because only one home game was released, there was little demand for the controllers. Konami actually overproduced the controllers! They can be found for as little as 500 yen (roughly $5)!
http://search.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/search?sb=desc
(Good luck with this URL, Slashdot may mangle it)
Unfortunately, shipping to the US is a killer, as you must go through third-party services since Japanese typically pay through internal bank transfers (an option unavailable to those outside Japan). A very good service that I would recommend is Rinkya.
http://www.rinkya.com/
I have PPP and two controllers. Despite its problems, PPP is still a very good game. The background graphics are incredible and hypnotic, and all of the songs are good (if you like Eurobeat and J-Pop). The actual game disc itself is harder to find than the controllers. If you can find it, get it!
BTW, the controller is a standard USB device, and it will show up properly. However, the sensors will not register, as evidently it has some kind of lockout! If I had access to a USB bus sniffer, I would try to see what it is that prevents the controllers from working. If somebody were to reverse-engineer it, it would be great, because there would be all kinds of fun applications for these controllers!
That's absolutely correct!
A lot of people, including myself, are former IT workers who have found other non-IT jobs to make ends meet. Personally, I now have a job that I like, because it's in one of my hobbies (pinball)! It's filling orders for pinball parts. I do this, and various other things, and now get to set my own hours (as long as the work gets done and I hit the post office each day before it closes)!
I thought about my close friends, and realized the numbers break down pretty much into thirds! 30% of people are completely unemployed, 30% of people have held on to their IT job, and 40% of people have moved on to other jobs that are not in the IT industry. So, that's 70% unemployment if you consider non-IT jobs as being "unemployed"....
Got this photo from somewhere, I forgot. It's great. Somebody went up to the RealNetworks building and slapped a big handwritten "BUFFERING" sign over their logo!
http://www.krellan.com/rant/real.html
(at bottom of page)
Does anybody know where this picture was originally from? I'd like to link back to the source, but haven't found it online anymore.
I made this rant in response to a frustrating experience trying to install RealPlayer 8. They have improved since that time (I think that version 8 was a low water mark for them).
They still haven't figured out how to stop loading delays caused by buffering. The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys! Or in this case, the secret is to download the data at maximum speed from the previous 15-or-so seconds of content, and start the client playing immediately, and by the time the buffer fills, the client will be caught up to the current live content. Real still hasn't done this! (In fairness, it might be patented: the old SurferNETWORK was the first to figure it out, and they might have patented it.)
What would be great is a 24-hour clock display!
These are common only in the UK, it seems. I can't find one for sale in the US at all, except for specialty clocks like the ones that have little weather stations in them, or tiny travel clocks.
I'd love to find a normal alarm clock, in the normal alarm clock form factor, with a 24-hour display. I can't count the number of times I have accidentally set the time to AM when I meant PM, or vice versa....
I've taken to using my cellphone as an alarm clock, since it has this feature of 24-hour clock display. Works great for me.
Here is a real-world example of anti-SCO stigma:
m l
http://damagestudios.com/jobs.php
This was mentioned on Slashdot before:
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/09/11/1437206.sht
Here's the link that was pointed out in the other article:
:)
http://calvin.nanovox.com/1990/01/ch900110.gif
I loved how SETI has named the project BOINC, and also immediately thought of the Calvin And Hobbes reference
Why not buy a pinball machine?
:)
The new "Lord Of The Rings" game is out, and it's available for roughly $4,000.00 from local distributors. It's said to be the best Stern pinball game to date (Stern is the only pinball manufacturer still standing).
http://www.sternpinball.com/LordoftheRings.htm
It's the perfect antidote to looking at video screens all day. Pinball is popular here in the Bay Area because so many people stare at monitors all day and don't want to be entertained simply by staring at another monitor!
And, in a dark room, the gentle twinkling of the pinball machine's lights (when it isn't being played) is almost like a Christmas tree....
That's true. The purpose of ZMODEM is to transfer data as fast as possible, on a fairly modern system with clean phone lines, plentiful memory for buffering, and fast I/O that doesn't block. On a modern system, ZMODEM is the best character-based protocol out there (there were a few that were more advanced or had special purposes, like BiModem, but they are irrelevant now that everything now uses packet-based data and TCP/IP).
:)
The purpose of Kermit is to be 100% compatible with pretty much every piece of technology, going all the way back to the earliest mainframe computers!
Different character set (ASCII, EBCDIC, UTF-8, etc.)? Kermit will translate the data as it is transferred.
Strange record length requirement (data must be transferred in units of 80 bytes or so, and can't be addressed as individual characters)? This was common on mainframes. Kermit will pad data as required to make this work.
Limited I/O that can't use the comm port and storage device at the same time? This was common on old DOS PC comm programs that could not multitask. Kermit will delay as needed in order to let data be stored before continuing with the communications, and synchronize this with the other side so that data is not lost.
Noisy phone line? Kermit will do complete error correction, without stalling or aborting the transfer (as ZMODEM was known to do).
Low memory for buffering? Kermit will do handshaking to ensure that the other side doesn't send data until the current data has been fully processed, minimizing the need for memory to buffer data.
Alien directory structure (VAX, etc.)? Kermit includes a mini-OS that can be used interactively to browse directories and initiate file transfers, and it abstracts the local storage conventions of the system's OS into a simple hierarchy that is the lowest common denominator. As an example of what this means, have you ever done a "ftp" into an old DOS system, and found yourself unable to change drive letters, because FTP (being a UNIX-based program) has no concept of drive letters? Kermit to the rescue here.
Now that computers and protocols are beginning to become standardized, thanks in part to the popularity of the Internet, the need for Kermit is fading. Still, it's good to read about interesting uses of Kermit such as this. Kermit joins the old DOS shareware program "Compushow" as having The Right Stuff....
It is becoming increasingly more common these days to use wrappers for binary-only modules.
m sg/1247 8
The last time this came up on Slashdot, I thought about it for a while, and posted this here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_
(I wish I hadn't posted this as "Anonymous", but O'Reilly's registration system was nitpicky at the time....)
Anyway, a quick summary:
Companies these days are including binary-only modules in the kernel by using wrappers. Here's how it works:
1) Kernel already exists, Open Source and covered by GPL.
2) A wrapper module is written, also Open Source, to link into the kernel. It is written by the company writing the binary-only module, but released under the GPL. This module contains an API that is called by the binary-only module.
3) A binary-only module is written. It is closed source, and not covered by the GPL. The only linkage this module has is to the kernel is via the wrapper module.
Normally the GPL wouldn't allow the linkage of the binary-only module (the LGPL does, but that's not relevant here). However, since the GPL allows the original author of the copyrighted material to re-licence it later as needed for different uses (this is another way for authors of GPL software to make money), this can be done! Since the author of the wrapper module is friendly to the binary-only module, the wrapper would be licenced as GPL to the rest of the world, but not to the binary-only module.
Not only does the wrapper module form a legal barrier against the GPL, but it also serves as a technical barrier against evolving kernel API changes. If the kernel functions change, then glue code can be written within the wrapper module to take care of this, without needing to change the binary-only module at all!
This seemed to be effective for me. Does anybody else see a problem with this idea of using wrappers, or would it work well in all circumstances?
Am I the only person who looks at something announcing "DRM support" and shudders?
It would make my day if XFree86's Direct Rendering Manager was renamed to another acronym. Perhaps DREM?
With all the political debate these days about Digital Restrictions/Rights Management, we very much need another acronym that is not so overloaded!