I wanted to short SCOX stock when it was at 12. I believe that their house of cards will eventually crumble, when the copyrighted code is eventually revealed in court records. Linux will be quickly patched to remove any tainted code, and life will go on for everybody else as normal... except SCO. Their huge loss in the court case will tank them. Good riddance, I say!
This is just my belief. I'm not sure if it will actually come to pass, but I'm willing to bet money that it will. Unfortunately, my Etrade account wasn't ever set up to handle margin trading (which is a requirement to short stocks). I put in the margin application as soon as I realized this. I only hope that the SCOX bubble can last as long as it takes for Etrade to upgrade my account! Then I can short SCOX out, just like pouring water in a SCO Unix computer....:)
As strange as it may seem, I'm rooting for Microsoft in this case.
This patent needs to be invalidated, for the good of everybody.
If Microsoft loses this case, it's only a matter of time until Eolas goes after every other browser ever made.
Eolas is right up there with that streaming-video patent company shaking down porn sites. They are among the worst examples of a shell company set around a dubious patent, attempting to make money by shaking down an entire industry.
Eolas needs to be defeated, or its precedent will contribute to the end of all true invention in the USA, as true inventors are afraid of doing anything new for fear of being accused of infringing someone else's patent.
Eolas has patent #5,838,906, which basically covers any browser that can support plugins (including applets).
That's not good. What will happen to Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and so on? Will Eolas pretty much go after all browsers ever made? Will this succeed in killing Java, since Java relies upon a plugin? Maybe that's why Microsoft chose to settle, to create legal precedent that they could use to help block Java?
Microsoft got around this patent in later versions of MSIE by making "plugins" directly part of the operating system, and not part of the browser. The browser merely calls an operating system routine, and does this for all embedded objects. The browser doesn't take any special action to invoke a plugin, thus dodging the patent. The operating system thus manages plugins, not the browser.
But how will third-party browsers, such as Mozilla and Opera, survive? They rely on plugins, since they can't conveniently change the operating system to suit themselves. Will all plugin code now have to be integrated into the browser, making it even more bloated? When a new version of Flash or RealAudio comes out, for example, will it have to be compiled directly into the browser, requiring everybody to re-download the entire browser to stay up to date with plugins?
Supporting plugins is a mind-bogglingly obvious thing, but try telling that to the Patent Office.
What's ironic is that the USPTO itself relies upon this patent! Many early patents have not yet been typed in, so only the scanned images are available. These scanned images are in TIF format, a good format for high-resolution black-and-white drawings, but a format that is rarely supported internally by browsers and thus requires a plugin to display! Without the so-called "invention" of this patent, the Patent Office itself wouldn't be able to show early patents!
I hope this patent extends to only browsers. I hope that Eolas doesn't go after the individual authors of plugins, or worse yet, all people who use plugins on their pages at all. It would be ironic if Eolas sues the Patent Office:)
That stinks. I too have been burned by that before. For whatever reason, a site would refuse my input, or the site would be down entirely. When I go to try again, the entire page is erased!
I've gotten into the habit of hitting ^A^C before submitting any form with a large text field. This copies the entire contents of the text field into your clipboard. If the browser messes up and deletes the form, then I'm saved by the clipboard. I can then just type ^V to paste it back in.
For really long posts, in which there's a danger of the browser crashing during the middle of my typing, I open up Notepad and paste the entire text into that! Every so often, I save what I have written, and then just paste the final product into the text field when I'm ready to submit.
Was your joystick a "force feedback" joystick that requires its own power source to operate?
Some of those joysticks flop down to one side when they are not powered on. That is because the auto-centering of the joystick is actually powered by the force feedback system, and it can't auto-center without power.
That sucks that you got a clueless drone on the other end of the tech support line, though.
Wow. Post something that's not a "me too" post or a "oh i miss this game" post, and it immediately gets modded down.
Maybe I should just have said "ditto"?
Honestly, there's a lot of people who didn't like the frustrating nature of those games. There's a reason why that style of game is rarely seen these days! I have karma to burn, though, and will not be afraid to stand up and say this.
I played a little of the first Full Throttle game when it first came out, and didn't like it at all.
I could never get the main character to do anything except say "I'm not putting my lips on that!". Terrible, clumsy, and frustrating interface.
Honestly, I'm glad they canceled the sequel!
I know it's a trend now to tell everybody how good the old LucasArts click adventures were. I've never been one to follow trends. I'm going to honestly say that I didn't like that style of game at all. Not everybody waxes nostalgic about these games....
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/index .s html
Hehe, it was originally made to see what was taking up all the room on an 80MB hard disk:)
There's various software available based on this concept, most working like "du", except that you get the results graphically. You typically see a large picture on screen of what directories and files are taking up the most space. It looks like a piece of Mondrian artwork, with the size of rectangles corresponding to the size of space taken, so it is easy at a glance to see what is hogging all of the disk space. It can be drilled down, of course, by clicking to zoom in.
A quick Google search revealed SequoiaView:
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
Unfortunately this only runs on Windows, but I'm sure there are similar Linux programs available.
I use Rayovac Renewal rechargeable alkaline batteries for pretty much every device I own that uses batteries. It's very efficient and has paid for itself many times through the years I've been using them.
I chose Rayovac Renewal because it was the first rechargeable alkaline battery made. My grandfather actually picked it up before me, and he's usually the last to touch a new invention! He does like to be efficient and save money, though.
The batteries do wear out over time, though. I have a few bad batteries mixed in with my good batteries, and so sometimes I put in newly recharged batteries and they don't last as long as they should. If I had it to do over again, I would number each battery in sequence when they were purchased, so I would know which batteries are getting old and could throw them out. Now, I have no real way of knowing which are old and which are new, because they all look the same.
Rayovac Renewal puts out the full 1.5 volts per battery (AA, AAA, etc.).
Avoid Energizer Accu! I learned this the hard way. They only put out a lousy 1.2 volts per battery! That's just 80% of the voltage you're supposed to be getting. This is borderline fraud!
Devices that have strict voltage requirements, like digital cameras, just will not run at all with Energizer Accu. It might be tolerable for flashlights and old radios, which can be a little dimmer/quieter while still working fine, but for any modern electronic device it will cause problems.
Devices with Energizer Accu will run for a very short time, if at all, as their voltage starts at 80% of normal and not at 100%. So, if the device requires something like 75% of rated voltage in order to function correctly, you will only have 5% of headroom with Accu versus 25% for a normal battery. So, assuming that batteries drop voltage at the same rate, your device will fail five times faster with Accu!
Accu does have one advantage, though. They do make a "9-volt" (really 7.2V) rechargeable battery. Rayovac Renewal does not make this battery, to my knowledge, so I am forced to use Accu for various devices that require a 9V battery.
If they made a true 9V Rayovac Renewal battery, it would make me happy!
I also think it is ridiculous to have so many 127.x.x.x addresses for localhost. I did find them useful in one circumstance, though.
At a previous company, I was working with an embedded system that consisted of multiple computers connected via an internal LAN. The system would appear to the outside world to have a single IP address.
The problem was that people installing this embedded device would choose any possible IP address, including "reserved" IP addresses for use behind their own firewalls. So, what IP addresses could I use for our device's internal LAN?
127.x.x.x, of course:)
I configured Linux to use a smaller subnet size for "lo", localhost. I told it to use 127.0/16 for localhost, instead of 127/8. Linux is great at doing this, and will gladly confine localhost to using this smaller range of addresses! All machines on our internal LAN were configured like this.
This freed up many other addresses. Our device's internal LAN could then use the next subnet up: 127.1/16! The nodes on our internal LAN had addresses like 127.1.0.1, 127.1.0.2, and so on. Worked very well. All machines could communicate.
And, it never conflicted with any addresses that our customers would choose, since these 127.x.x.x addresses never went outside the case of our embedded device! A good solution, and one that was only possible due to the massive wastage long ago of deciding to use the entire 127/8 subnet for localhost.
So, in a way, I'm glad they decided to do this long ago....
Actually, that Mage poster you mentioned makes perfect sense.
The setting of Mage is one in which the Technocracy has indeed won, and mages are forced to band together in small groups and struggle to survive while the Technocracy controls the world at large. People as a whole don't believe in magic anymore. The Technocracy has won the culture war.
So the poster does make sense, fitting in the overall storyline of Mage. This is something far bigger: WW is ending the world entirely (Armaggedon), not merely just making it difficult for mages to live in.
Something that can aim a beam of light without needing a moving part could be very useful for holographic storage.
I hope this development can help with improving holographic storage. Someday, the hard drive will reach its limit, and people will grow tired of the noise and reliability problems....
I must not understand something that's going on here.
With all this SCO-Linux controversy, why not simply remove the disputed code?
Since the 2.6 kernel is on the verge of being formally released (taken out of beta), the 2.6 kernel could form a fresh start, being SCO-free.
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to clone the disputed code, doing things a slightly different way, to replace whatever functionality would be lost by the removal of all SCO-disputed code.
The hard part would be is if SCO had patents on the disputed code. Then the functionality would have to go "non-US", like MP3 encoders and DVD players already have to do.
Does anybody know for sure why this hasn't been done already?
To all Slashdotters who live in the SF Bay Area, this can already be seen, and has been seen by probably thousands of people by now. It's been a failure!
At the Arby's fast food restaurant in San Jose, on Stevens Creek Blvd. (just west of Valley Fair), you can see the remains of a prototype automated ordering system. This must have been a prototype, because I've never seen it (or even heard of it) at any other Arby's.
It runs on IBM CGA displays, in pure text mode (80x25, colored). It uses touchscreens. It looks to have been installed around 1985 or so (I remember seeing a copyright notice somewhere that said that).
The idea was that you would touch items that you wanted to order. It worked fairly well. There's lots of combinations of various screens to press, but not so many that it would be confusing. At the end of your order, you could see the total amount of money you had to pay.
Then, the human interaction comes in. The touchscreen displays are on a countertop, angled towards the customer, but over the countertop are conventional fast-food ordering cash registers. After getting to the final screen, you just kind of awkwardly stood around, and a clerk would come over and eventually take your money. Then you get an order number and wait for your food, as always.
It seems strange to have this hybrid system. If a person is going to end up confirming your order and taking your money anyway, the computer doesn't save much time at all, or really make it any easier. Some people were confused by the computers. Getting a custom order, such as getting lettuce and tomato put on a Big Montana (which disappointingly comes bare by default), was impossible using just the computer systems. Many people simply ignored the computers and gave their orders directly to the clerk! They didn't mind this at all, and in fact preferred it over having to go through the computer.
The system is somewhat in ruins now. After 18 years, many of the screens have worn out, and in fact are turned off. Sometimes they flash odd colors. The last I remember the system fully working was over a year ago. Needless to say, all order taking at this Arby's has been returned to being done in the old fashioned way!
So attempts to automate fast food are nothing new... maybe someone older than me can post about the "Automat" systems of the 1960's?
Will the designers of Freenet be available on call, to be expert witnesses when the first Freenet child porn case happens in the US?
The US is overzealous when prosecuting both computer cases and child porn cases. When the two overlap, it's a recipe for disaster. Frequently, everything remotely computer-related that you own will be confiscated, all the way down to kitchen appliances, never to be returned. This happens even if you are later found not guilty!
And, again even if you are found not guilty, your name will still appear on public records searches, as having been involved with the case. This will all but blacklist you from any job that does a background check (an increasing number of jobs these days).
How do I know? This happened to an old acquaintance of mine. He used to have a promising white-collar job. Now the last I have heard of him, he lives on a crowded houseboat with several other people, and works as a clerk in a hardware store, to make ends meet. Even though he was acquitted in his court case, he'll never work a good-paying job again.
So, when the cops see connections coming from your IP address, kiss your ass goodbye. The people frequently selected for jury service in the US barely know how to turn a computer on, let alone how it works. This is done intentionally, so that prosecutors in computer cases can play up the "evil scary hacker" stereotype and go for the maximum sentence. (see Mitnick)
No way would a jury know that Freenet is a shared system, where people voluntarily donate unused storage space in their computer, in exchange for being able to access the same on other people's computers. Never mind that the data is encrypted, and not even the name of the files are known, so you have no way of knowing what other people have used Freenet to store on your computer. All they will see is connections coming from your IP address to the IP address of the one accused of child porn....
So, will the designers of Freenet be available as expert witnesses? Frequently in legal cases in the US, an expert witness is needed to state the obvious, which has already been said by the defendant. Somehow, speaking the truth does not matter in a court case, unless it is being said by a person with an impressive background. It is a shame, but it's how the system works.
Since it's an event that hasn't happened yet, "coming soon" is appropriate. It's not really known what games will be there until people actually bring them, so it's hard to have more concrete information on the show until it actually starts.
BTW, if you come to the show, keep in mind that it's at San Jose Convention Center's Parkside Hall, not the Convention Center itself! It is a really nasty terminology that I wish they'd change. Every year, some people get lost. The Convention Center (the big building where major conventions happen) knows nothing about the California Extreme show, unfortunately. If you end up going there, you'll just get dirty looks from the staff.
Parkside Hall is just behind the Tech Museum. That's the best way to get there. Just forget about the Convention Center entirely. Go to the Tech Museum and walk outside the building, around the back, and go in the alley there. Walk around the building until you reach an entrance that looks like an open courtyard with many vehicles in there. They will most likely be loading/unloading games. The doors to the event are there. That's the best entrance to use, by far.
It's confusing to find, but it's a great building once you're there! Lots of power and no glare on the games. These are two problems that have plagued other buildings with similar shows....
This kind of thing, server consolidation, seems inevitable as the player population of certain online games dwindles.
I wonder what's going to happen to games that have player-owned infrastructure, such as buildings and property? I don't know if this game, Asheron's Call 2, has this. Everquest 2 is supposed to have this, though. Other games might also have this already. I wonder what will happen when the inevitable conflict occurs: one player owns land on a server, another different player owns the same land on a different server, and those two servers get merged together.
Has this happened to other games before? If so, what was the outcome? Do they randomly determine which player gets the resources, auction it off, or just give it to the player that's played the longest or reached the highest level? It seems that merging servers would be the fastest way to lose players and finish an online game completely off, as they anger players by taking away the resources they have earned.
I played Golden Tee a few times, and found it to be an OK game. It didn't hold my interest. This was even when the machine was on free play, so I could experiment with it as much as I wanted. It just didn't entertain me.
It is clear that Golden Tee is part of a new genre of games, like Deer Hunter, that were often criticized by the gamer community but surprised everybody by how incredibly well they sold. They make money hand over fist. The reason they sell well is because they are targeted to non-gamers.
Golden Tee is often found in bars, not arcades. I've never seen an arcade with a Golden Tee, but I rarely see a bar without one. Like those countertop touchscreen games, it is designed to be played by people who don't often play what we think of as normal games. People who don't really like or use computers that much. In other words, Joe Sixpack.
These games form a new genre: mainstream games. They should be classified as such, and not sports games. Even though they may feature sports content, the target audience is completely different, and the overall feel of the game is completely different from a conventional sports game.
For instance, because it's targeted at people with little or no experience with standard video games, these mainstream games play very slowly and often don't take any action at all unless the player initiates the action. For instance, Golden Tee will just sit there until you roll the trackball.
You probably already have a mainstream game installed on a Windows computer near you: Solitare. My partner's aunt, who hates computers and detests using them, loves to play Solitare in spite of what she normally thinks about computer games. Solitare is clearly reaching its intended audience. I'd consider that a mainstream game!
I don't know if it can write to NTFS. NTFS is like the.DOC file format of Word: as soon as someone gets close to figuring it out, Microsoft changes it slightly, so nobody else can be truly compatible. BitKeeper has nothing on Microsoft.:)
I've looked at Phat but haven't actually used it. Has anyone tried it with NTFS? In a recent kernel, there was support for NTFS write support, but it was marked "experimental" and "dangerous". Maybe Phat does it anyway....
Microsoft has been doing this ever since they started barring OEM's from providing full versions of the OS on the CD's supplied with a new computer.
To reinstall the OS now, the entire hard drive must be wiped, returning it to the exact state it was when it left the factory. This is a very shrewd anti-Linux move by MS. They have effectively made it impossible for people to repartition and reinstall Windows in a way that coexists with Linux, or any other OS for that matter.
The thing to do is to make Linux install itself using the existing Windows filesystems already on the disk! The distribution Phat Linux is designed for just this, I have heard.
It installs to an existing FAT32 or NTFS partition, and Linux is represented as a directory on a Windows drive! This is a good way to let people try out Linux without risking their Windows installation.
What would be wonderful is a distribution that is standalone on a CD like Knoppix, and if the user likes what they see on the CD, they can also choose to install it to their hard drive in a Windows-safe way like Phat Linux. It will be great when we see a distribution like this, and it will really reduce people's fear of having Linux run on their computer. When they lose their fear of Linux, and are ready to take full advantage of it, they will then be ready to run it completely from its own partition.
In fact, as an in-joke, it is common to call T3's RPG mode "RGP mode":)
About the RPG mode:
At various points in the gameplay, the ball will be held on the playfield and you will be required to play this mini-game in the backglass. There are 5 targets on the left side of the backglass, and a rotating cannon on the right. You fire the ball out of the cannon in an attempt to hit the targets. This is homage to the T2 pinball machine (made in 1991), which had a similar setup on the playfield itself.
It's good to have some action in the backglass. Recently, games have been made cheaper by just having a single flourescent light fixture in the backglass, instead of multiple smaller lights that would flash in pretty patterns. However, T3 has a retro-style backglass, that looks very sharp and impressive, which is good.
They are trying to make the games simpler and more mechanically reliable. Notice that there are no sensors at all in the rotating cannon! There's also no mechanism to feed the ball into the cannon. Instead, the ball is just expected to naturally roll into the cannon, since the bottom of the mini-game area is sloped this way. It seems to work quite well! Because the ball has to have a lot of airtime as it travels across the backglass, it is extremely lightweight (like a ping-pong ball, not a pinball). There were some concerns that the ball would roll back into the cannon slowly or get caught on something, since it is so lightweight. In the T3 machine I've played, however, it worked perfectly, which is good!
I really hope Sony hires the author of Bleem... he's already proven he can do the job!
Hiring him (Randy Linden) would do good toward restoring some of Sony's goodwill in the gamer community that they lost while harassing him earlier. Now that Sony seems to have a true need for emulation, they should let this guy do what he's good at!
This would explain why so many open Mozilla bugs are going unfixed, even after dozens of votes and months of waiting.... I don't blame them.
At the last company I worked at, people were somewhat paralyzed by fear over losing their jobs to really concentrate on fixing bugs. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing is happening at AOL/Mozilla. It seems to be happening throughout the entire IT industry in Western countries.
It would make my day if a company would make a solid guarantee, such as "We will have 0 layoffs this quarter if we make over $X in sales or hit milestone X on our project", and stick to this guarantee. It would give employees a goal to shoot for, instead of being kept in the dark with that sword hanging over them.
What I do at sites like NYTimes is to use a generic login that can be shared with many other people. This will help with concerns of privacy and being tracked.
Start with username "nospam", password "nospam". Enter bogus information when registering the account, and use a throwaway email address. If that username/password is already taken, advance to the next one: username "nospam2", password "nospam2", and so on.
At NYTimes, I registered this, and currently use the following:
nospam2/nospam2
This works great. If this should ever stop working, hopefully someone will register nospam3/nospam3. I'm glad to see this is becoming a standard. At several sites now, I can just try nospam/nospam, maybe nospam1/nospam1, then nospam2/nospam2, and so on. Often, I get in, or just create the account if it hasn't been already created.
Try this the next time you get nagged for registration when trying to read a newspaper:)
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted to short SCOX stock when it was at 12. I believe that their house of cards will eventually crumble, when the copyrighted code is eventually revealed in court records. Linux will be quickly patched to remove any tainted code, and life will go on for everybody else as normal... except SCO. Their huge loss in the court case will tank them. Good riddance, I say!
:)
This is just my belief. I'm not sure if it will actually come to pass, but I'm willing to bet money that it will. Unfortunately, my Etrade account wasn't ever set up to handle margin trading (which is a requirement to short stocks). I put in the margin application as soon as I realized this. I only hope that the SCOX bubble can last as long as it takes for Etrade to upgrade my account! Then I can short SCOX out, just like pouring water in a SCO Unix computer....
As strange as it may seem, I'm rooting for Microsoft in this case.
This patent needs to be invalidated, for the good of everybody.
If Microsoft loses this case, it's only a matter of time until Eolas goes after every other browser ever made.
Eolas is right up there with that streaming-video patent company shaking down porn sites. They are among the worst examples of a shell company set around a dubious patent, attempting to make money by shaking down an entire industry.
Eolas needs to be defeated, or its precedent will contribute to the end of all true invention in the USA, as true inventors are afraid of doing anything new for fear of being accused of infringing someone else's patent.
Eolas has patent #5,838,906, which basically covers any browser that can support plugins (including applets).
:)
That's not good. What will happen to Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, and so on? Will Eolas pretty much go after all browsers ever made? Will this succeed in killing Java, since Java relies upon a plugin? Maybe that's why Microsoft chose to settle, to create legal precedent that they could use to help block Java?
Microsoft got around this patent in later versions of MSIE by making "plugins" directly part of the operating system, and not part of the browser. The browser merely calls an operating system routine, and does this for all embedded objects. The browser doesn't take any special action to invoke a plugin, thus dodging the patent. The operating system thus manages plugins, not the browser.
But how will third-party browsers, such as Mozilla and Opera, survive? They rely on plugins, since they can't conveniently change the operating system to suit themselves. Will all plugin code now have to be integrated into the browser, making it even more bloated? When a new version of Flash or RealAudio comes out, for example, will it have to be compiled directly into the browser, requiring everybody to re-download the entire browser to stay up to date with plugins?
Supporting plugins is a mind-bogglingly obvious thing, but try telling that to the Patent Office.
What's ironic is that the USPTO itself relies upon this patent! Many early patents have not yet been typed in, so only the scanned images are available. These scanned images are in TIF format, a good format for high-resolution black-and-white drawings, but a format that is rarely supported internally by browsers and thus requires a plugin to display! Without the so-called "invention" of this patent, the Patent Office itself wouldn't be able to show early patents!
I hope this patent extends to only browsers. I hope that Eolas doesn't go after the individual authors of plugins, or worse yet, all people who use plugins on their pages at all. It would be ironic if Eolas sues the Patent Office
That stinks. I too have been burned by that before. For whatever reason, a site would refuse my input, or the site would be down entirely. When I go to try again, the entire page is erased!
I've gotten into the habit of hitting ^A^C before submitting any form with a large text field. This copies the entire contents of the text field into your clipboard. If the browser messes up and deletes the form, then I'm saved by the clipboard. I can then just type ^V to paste it back in.
For really long posts, in which there's a danger of the browser crashing during the middle of my typing, I open up Notepad and paste the entire text into that! Every so often, I save what I have written, and then just paste the final product into the text field when I'm ready to submit.
Very recommended....
Was your joystick a "force feedback" joystick that requires its own power source to operate?
Some of those joysticks flop down to one side when they are not powered on. That is because the auto-centering of the joystick is actually powered by the force feedback system, and it can't auto-center without power.
That sucks that you got a clueless drone on the other end of the tech support line, though.
Wow. Post something that's not a "me too" post or a "oh i miss this game" post, and it immediately gets modded down.
Maybe I should just have said "ditto"?
Honestly, there's a lot of people who didn't like the frustrating nature of those games. There's a reason why that style of game is rarely seen these days! I have karma to burn, though, and will not be afraid to stand up and say this.
I played a little of the first Full Throttle game when it first came out, and didn't like it at all.
I could never get the main character to do anything except say "I'm not putting my lips on that!". Terrible, clumsy, and frustrating interface.
Honestly, I'm glad they canceled the sequel!
I know it's a trend now to tell everybody how good the old LucasArts click adventures were. I've never been one to follow trends. I'm going to honestly say that I didn't like that style of game at all. Not everybody waxes nostalgic about these games....
I like the idea of treemaps.
x .s html
:)
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/inde
Hehe, it was originally made to see what was taking up all the room on an 80MB hard disk
There's various software available based on this concept, most working like "du", except that you get the results graphically. You typically see a large picture on screen of what directories and files are taking up the most space. It looks like a piece of Mondrian artwork, with the size of rectangles corresponding to the size of space taken, so it is easy at a glance to see what is hogging all of the disk space. It can be drilled down, of course, by clicking to zoom in.
A quick Google search revealed SequoiaView:
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
Unfortunately this only runs on Windows, but I'm sure there are similar Linux programs available.
I use Rayovac Renewal rechargeable alkaline batteries for pretty much every device I own that uses batteries. It's very efficient and has paid for itself many times through the years I've been using them.
I chose Rayovac Renewal because it was the first rechargeable alkaline battery made. My grandfather actually picked it up before me, and he's usually the last to touch a new invention! He does like to be efficient and save money, though.
The batteries do wear out over time, though. I have a few bad batteries mixed in with my good batteries, and so sometimes I put in newly recharged batteries and they don't last as long as they should. If I had it to do over again, I would number each battery in sequence when they were purchased, so I would know which batteries are getting old and could throw them out. Now, I have no real way of knowing which are old and which are new, because they all look the same.
Rayovac Renewal puts out the full 1.5 volts per battery (AA, AAA, etc.).
Avoid Energizer Accu! I learned this the hard way. They only put out a lousy 1.2 volts per battery! That's just 80% of the voltage you're supposed to be getting. This is borderline fraud!
Devices that have strict voltage requirements, like digital cameras, just will not run at all with Energizer Accu. It might be tolerable for flashlights and old radios, which can be a little dimmer/quieter while still working fine, but for any modern electronic device it will cause problems.
Devices with Energizer Accu will run for a very short time, if at all, as their voltage starts at 80% of normal and not at 100%. So, if the device requires something like 75% of rated voltage in order to function correctly, you will only have 5% of headroom with Accu versus 25% for a normal battery. So, assuming that batteries drop voltage at the same rate, your device will fail five times faster with Accu!
Accu does have one advantage, though. They do make a "9-volt" (really 7.2V) rechargeable battery. Rayovac Renewal does not make this battery, to my knowledge, so I am forced to use Accu for various devices that require a 9V battery.
If they made a true 9V Rayovac Renewal battery, it would make me happy!
About "donating" addresses:
:)
I also think it is ridiculous to have so many 127.x.x.x addresses for localhost. I did find them useful in one circumstance, though.
At a previous company, I was working with an embedded system that consisted of multiple computers connected via an internal LAN. The system would appear to the outside world to have a single IP address.
The problem was that people installing this embedded device would choose any possible IP address, including "reserved" IP addresses for use behind their own firewalls. So, what IP addresses could I use for our device's internal LAN?
127.x.x.x, of course
I configured Linux to use a smaller subnet size for "lo", localhost. I told it to use 127.0/16 for localhost, instead of 127/8. Linux is great at doing this, and will gladly confine localhost to using this smaller range of addresses! All machines on our internal LAN were configured like this.
This freed up many other addresses. Our device's internal LAN could then use the next subnet up: 127.1/16! The nodes on our internal LAN had addresses like 127.1.0.1, 127.1.0.2, and so on. Worked very well. All machines could communicate.
And, it never conflicted with any addresses that our customers would choose, since these 127.x.x.x addresses never went outside the case of our embedded device! A good solution, and one that was only possible due to the massive wastage long ago of deciding to use the entire 127/8 subnet for localhost.
So, in a way, I'm glad they decided to do this long ago....
Actually, that Mage poster you mentioned makes perfect sense.
The setting of Mage is one in which the Technocracy has indeed won, and mages are forced to band together in small groups and struggle to survive while the Technocracy controls the world at large. People as a whole don't believe in magic anymore. The Technocracy has won the culture war.
So the poster does make sense, fitting in the overall storyline of Mage. This is something far bigger: WW is ending the world entirely (Armaggedon), not merely just making it difficult for mages to live in.
Something that can aim a beam of light without needing a moving part could be very useful for holographic storage.
I hope this development can help with improving holographic storage. Someday, the hard drive will reach its limit, and people will grow tired of the noise and reliability problems....
I must not understand something that's going on here.
With all this SCO-Linux controversy, why not simply remove the disputed code?
Since the 2.6 kernel is on the verge of being formally released (taken out of beta), the 2.6 kernel could form a fresh start, being SCO-free.
I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to clone the disputed code, doing things a slightly different way, to replace whatever functionality would be lost by the removal of all SCO-disputed code.
The hard part would be is if SCO had patents on the disputed code. Then the functionality would have to go "non-US", like MP3 encoders and DVD players already have to do.
Does anybody know for sure why this hasn't been done already?
To all Slashdotters who live in the SF Bay Area, this can already be seen, and has been seen by probably thousands of people by now. It's been a failure!
At the Arby's fast food restaurant in San Jose, on Stevens Creek Blvd. (just west of Valley Fair), you can see the remains of a prototype automated ordering system. This must have been a prototype, because I've never seen it (or even heard of it) at any other Arby's.
It runs on IBM CGA displays, in pure text mode (80x25, colored). It uses touchscreens. It looks to have been installed around 1985 or so (I remember seeing a copyright notice somewhere that said that).
The idea was that you would touch items that you wanted to order. It worked fairly well. There's lots of combinations of various screens to press, but not so many that it would be confusing. At the end of your order, you could see the total amount of money you had to pay.
Then, the human interaction comes in. The touchscreen displays are on a countertop, angled towards the customer, but over the countertop are conventional fast-food ordering cash registers. After getting to the final screen, you just kind of awkwardly stood around, and a clerk would come over and eventually take your money. Then you get an order number and wait for your food, as always.
It seems strange to have this hybrid system. If a person is going to end up confirming your order and taking your money anyway, the computer doesn't save much time at all, or really make it any easier. Some people were confused by the computers. Getting a custom order, such as getting lettuce and tomato put on a Big Montana (which disappointingly comes bare by default), was impossible using just the computer systems. Many people simply ignored the computers and gave their orders directly to the clerk! They didn't mind this at all, and in fact preferred it over having to go through the computer.
The system is somewhat in ruins now. After 18 years, many of the screens have worn out, and in fact are turned off. Sometimes they flash odd colors. The last I remember the system fully working was over a year ago. Needless to say, all order taking at this Arby's has been returned to being done in the old fashioned way!
So attempts to automate fast food are nothing new... maybe someone older than me can post about the "Automat" systems of the 1960's?
Will the designers of Freenet be available on call, to be expert witnesses when the first Freenet child porn case happens in the US?
The US is overzealous when prosecuting both computer cases and child porn cases. When the two overlap, it's a recipe for disaster. Frequently, everything remotely computer-related that you own will be confiscated, all the way down to kitchen appliances, never to be returned. This happens even if you are later found not guilty!
And, again even if you are found not guilty, your name will still appear on public records searches, as having been involved with the case. This will all but blacklist you from any job that does a background check (an increasing number of jobs these days).
How do I know? This happened to an old acquaintance of mine. He used to have a promising white-collar job. Now the last I have heard of him, he lives on a crowded houseboat with several other people, and works as a clerk in a hardware store, to make ends meet. Even though he was acquitted in his court case, he'll never work a good-paying job again.
So, when the cops see connections coming from your IP address, kiss your ass goodbye. The people frequently selected for jury service in the US barely know how to turn a computer on, let alone how it works. This is done intentionally, so that prosecutors in computer cases can play up the "evil scary hacker" stereotype and go for the maximum sentence. (see Mitnick)
No way would a jury know that Freenet is a shared system, where people voluntarily donate unused storage space in their computer, in exchange for being able to access the same on other people's computers. Never mind that the data is encrypted, and not even the name of the files are known, so you have no way of knowing what other people have used Freenet to store on your computer. All they will see is connections coming from your IP address to the IP address of the one accused of child porn....
So, will the designers of Freenet be available as expert witnesses? Frequently in legal cases in the US, an expert witness is needed to state the obvious, which has already been said by the defendant. Somehow, speaking the truth does not matter in a court case, unless it is being said by a person with an impressive background. It is a shame, but it's how the system works.
Needless to say, I won't be running Freenet....
Since it's an event that hasn't happened yet, "coming soon" is appropriate. It's not really known what games will be there until people actually bring them, so it's hard to have more concrete information on the show until it actually starts.
BTW, if you come to the show, keep in mind that it's at San Jose Convention Center's Parkside Hall, not the Convention Center itself! It is a really nasty terminology that I wish they'd change. Every year, some people get lost. The Convention Center (the big building where major conventions happen) knows nothing about the California Extreme show, unfortunately. If you end up going there, you'll just get dirty looks from the staff.
Parkside Hall is just behind the Tech Museum. That's the best way to get there. Just forget about the Convention Center entirely. Go to the Tech Museum and walk outside the building, around the back, and go in the alley there. Walk around the building until you reach an entrance that looks like an open courtyard with many vehicles in there. They will most likely be loading/unloading games. The doors to the event are there. That's the best entrance to use, by far.
It's confusing to find, but it's a great building once you're there! Lots of power and no glare on the games. These are two problems that have plagued other buildings with similar shows....
This kind of thing, server consolidation, seems inevitable as the player population of certain online games dwindles.
I wonder what's going to happen to games that have player-owned infrastructure, such as buildings and property? I don't know if this game, Asheron's Call 2, has this. Everquest 2 is supposed to have this, though. Other games might also have this already. I wonder what will happen when the inevitable conflict occurs: one player owns land on a server, another different player owns the same land on a different server, and those two servers get merged together.
Has this happened to other games before? If so, what was the outcome? Do they randomly determine which player gets the resources, auction it off, or just give it to the player that's played the longest or reached the highest level? It seems that merging servers would be the fastest way to lose players and finish an online game completely off, as they anger players by taking away the resources they have earned.
I played Golden Tee a few times, and found it to be an OK game. It didn't hold my interest. This was even when the machine was on free play, so I could experiment with it as much as I wanted. It just didn't entertain me.
It is clear that Golden Tee is part of a new genre of games, like Deer Hunter, that were often criticized by the gamer community but surprised everybody by how incredibly well they sold. They make money hand over fist. The reason they sell well is because they are targeted to non-gamers.
Golden Tee is often found in bars, not arcades. I've never seen an arcade with a Golden Tee, but I rarely see a bar without one. Like those countertop touchscreen games, it is designed to be played by people who don't often play what we think of as normal games. People who don't really like or use computers that much. In other words, Joe Sixpack.
These games form a new genre: mainstream games. They should be classified as such, and not sports games. Even though they may feature sports content, the target audience is completely different, and the overall feel of the game is completely different from a conventional sports game.
For instance, because it's targeted at people with little or no experience with standard video games, these mainstream games play very slowly and often don't take any action at all unless the player initiates the action. For instance, Golden Tee will just sit there until you roll the trackball.
You probably already have a mainstream game installed on a Windows computer near you: Solitare. My partner's aunt, who hates computers and detests using them, loves to play Solitare in spite of what she normally thinks about computer games. Solitare is clearly reaching its intended audience. I'd consider that a mainstream game!
Wow, thanks for telling me this. My knowledge was out of date. I had never heard of TopologiLinux.
Looks like there's starting to be 3 major classes of Linux distributions:
I searched the forums on Sourceforge but wasn't able to find any mention of Microsoft either intentionally changing or not changing the format.
http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/ntfs/help/table. html
According to this link, they do say that Microsoft does at least bump the version number with each major new release of Windows, though.
I don't know if it can write to NTFS. NTFS is like the .DOC file format of Word: as soon as someone gets close to figuring it out, Microsoft changes it slightly, so nobody else can be truly compatible. BitKeeper has nothing on Microsoft. :)
I've looked at Phat but haven't actually used it. Has anyone tried it with NTFS? In a recent kernel, there was support for NTFS write support, but it was marked "experimental" and "dangerous". Maybe Phat does it anyway....
Microsoft has been doing this ever since they started barring OEM's from providing full versions of the OS on the CD's supplied with a new computer.
To reinstall the OS now, the entire hard drive must be wiped, returning it to the exact state it was when it left the factory. This is a very shrewd anti-Linux move by MS. They have effectively made it impossible for people to repartition and reinstall Windows in a way that coexists with Linux, or any other OS for that matter.
The thing to do is to make Linux install itself using the existing Windows filesystems already on the disk! The distribution Phat Linux is designed for just this, I have heard.
http://www.phatlinux.com/
It installs to an existing FAT32 or NTFS partition, and Linux is represented as a directory on a Windows drive! This is a good way to let people try out Linux without risking their Windows installation.
What would be wonderful is a distribution that is standalone on a CD like Knoppix, and if the user likes what they see on the CD, they can also choose to install it to their hard drive in a Windows-safe way like Phat Linux. It will be great when we see a distribution like this, and it will really reduce people's fear of having Linux run on their computer. When they lose their fear of Linux, and are ready to take full advantage of it, they will then be ready to run it completely from its own partition.
The newsgroup rec.games.pinball (RGP) has been full of information and chatter about this game.
m es.pinball
:)
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=T3+group:rec.ga
In fact, as an in-joke, it is common to call T3's RPG mode "RGP mode"
About the RPG mode:
At various points in the gameplay, the ball will be held on the playfield and you will be required to play this mini-game in the backglass. There are 5 targets on the left side of the backglass, and a rotating cannon on the right. You fire the ball out of the cannon in an attempt to hit the targets. This is homage to the T2 pinball machine (made in 1991), which had a similar setup on the playfield itself.
It's good to have some action in the backglass. Recently, games have been made cheaper by just having a single flourescent light fixture in the backglass, instead of multiple smaller lights that would flash in pretty patterns. However, T3 has a retro-style backglass, that looks very sharp and impressive, which is good.
They are trying to make the games simpler and more mechanically reliable. Notice that there are no sensors at all in the rotating cannon! There's also no mechanism to feed the ball into the cannon. Instead, the ball is just expected to naturally roll into the cannon, since the bottom of the mini-game area is sloped this way. It seems to work quite well! Because the ball has to have a lot of airtime as it travels across the backglass, it is extremely lightweight (like a ping-pong ball, not a pinball). There were some concerns that the ball would roll back into the cannon slowly or get caught on something, since it is so lightweight. In the T3 machine I've played, however, it worked perfectly, which is good!
I really hope Sony hires the author of Bleem... he's already proven he can do the job!
Hiring him (Randy Linden) would do good toward restoring some of Sony's goodwill in the gamer community that they lost while harassing him earlier. Now that Sony seems to have a true need for emulation, they should let this guy do what he's good at!
This would explain why so many open Mozilla bugs are going unfixed, even after dozens of votes and months of waiting.... I don't blame them.
At the last company I worked at, people were somewhat paralyzed by fear over losing their jobs to really concentrate on fixing bugs. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing is happening at AOL/Mozilla. It seems to be happening throughout the entire IT industry in Western countries.
It would make my day if a company would make a solid guarantee, such as "We will have 0 layoffs this quarter if we make over $X in sales or hit milestone X on our project", and stick to this guarantee. It would give employees a goal to shoot for, instead of being kept in the dark with that sword hanging over them.
What I do at sites like NYTimes is to use a generic login that can be shared with many other people. This will help with concerns of privacy and being tracked.
:)
Start with username "nospam", password "nospam". Enter bogus information when registering the account, and use a throwaway email address. If that username/password is already taken, advance to the next one: username "nospam2", password "nospam2", and so on.
At NYTimes, I registered this, and currently use the following:
nospam2/nospam2
This works great. If this should ever stop working, hopefully someone will register nospam3/nospam3. I'm glad to see this is becoming a standard. At several sites now, I can just try nospam/nospam, maybe nospam1/nospam1, then nospam2/nospam2, and so on. Often, I get in, or just create the account if it hasn't been already created.
Try this the next time you get nagged for registration when trying to read a newspaper