If you really need a box for your old XBox games, get an XBox (for prolly >$100 by then).
Yeah, well, see, that means two game consoles instead of one. Which means getting one of those stupid little splitter boxes to hook it into the TV/Receiver. Which means less visual quality and more cables. Dumb.
Backwards compatability wasn't like a primary reason to buy a Playstation 2, but it's certainly a consideration - being able to play Xenogears and Final Fantasy IX on my PS2 makes me happy, even if it is only a small part of the console's functionality.
I have been away for a few days, sorry I didn't reply. I did go ahead and order a battery charger that was $49.99 + shipping. It looked from the picture and sounded from the description to be a charger specifically for the canon es900, but when it arrived, it too was a "universal" charger. I was not happy, but it did charge my battery, and it came with a car adapter, so I guess it's cool. But, if it hadn't been able to charge my battery, rest assured that there would have been a charge-back (no pun intended) to my credit card.
Yeah, i found that page, too. It is a different color hyperlink, which means I have been there. That's another problem with google link farms. That page has the words ES900 on it just to generate more hits. That battery charger is a "universal" charger, which "automatically adjusts for each battery size." It's not specifically for the canon ES900. Not to mention that it's 36 british pounds, times two plus cross-atlantic shipping means that it will cost $85 and get here in August.
Even if you usually get a higher pay as a PhD it's usually not enough to counterbalance the 4 or 5 year lost of pay while doing your PhD.
On the contrary, where I go (went) to school (Virginia Tech), almost all the Ph.D. students I know are having their education paid for either by scholarships, grants, or a company for which they have assigned an agreement to work for. I know several people who went to co-op during the time period they were working on their M.S., and the companies liked them enough that they're paying them low-scale salary to go back to school and get their Ph.D. (so, these people are getting $35k/yr to sit around blacksburg and do their own research).
I'm sure this isn't all that common, but in the engineering / tech field, there are a lot of people who have someone else footing the bill for their brain full of knowledge.
...
Unfortunately, my degree (in History) is good for being a teacher (which is ok with me, I like teaching - High School world history here I come). If you want to do anything else with a history degree, you probably need a doctorate, or multiple doctorates. Those people you see on the history channel in Turkey digging up roman cities? Yeah. The guy that's talking to the camera probably has 3 doctorates (History, Classical Studies, Archeology, Sociology, Humanities, etc), and the people in the back sifting through the dirt or staking out finds - the ones that look like peons - are probably either working on a doctorate or doing post-doctorate research. Yeah. That's what I want to do, but... not bloody likely.
It was time to do that at least a year ago. It's pretty much impossible to find good information on any popular consumer product and this is a problem that's been around for a long time.
This actually got to me in the past few days. I tried to go online to find a charger for the battery that goes with a Canon ES900 8mm camcorder (because I bought the battery and realized I have no way to charge it). Most of the links on google were of the variety: "Take database of every known camcorder. Make each model number a link to a site".
Yeah, that's what we did in the end. But, we told him he had to stop with the abandonware server, and he said he wasn't doing anything illegal, and if we turned him off, he'd sue.
Yeah, and that's another problem with the whole reporting copyright violaions... consolidation of video game holdings. Think how many titles are owned by Electronic Arts, or Atari. If we went to atari and were like, someone's distributing xYZ game, i'm sure the most common reaction would be, "Do we own that?!"
Yes, it's illegal. I agree with you, though. At netmar, we had some guy who set up basically an abandonware server. We noticed it because of the huge jump in bandwidth, and we looked - all the stuff was like DOS versions of lemmings and stuff.
So, we called the feds (who have a computer crime department), and we started trying to get in touch with publishers and distributors for the games.
Know what?
No one cared.
We're still waiting for a call back from the feds, 2 years later. They told us to fill in a submission form on a website, which we did. And we never got any callbacks from any distributors or publishers either.
This is what makes you jaded to things like abandonware. If the company still owns the copyright, but isn't selling the product, what do you do? What if the company is unwilling to protect their copyright? What does that say about the laws?
~Will
Re:NCR, all too familiar. Lots of companies fading
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I thought about that too, but, if you knew my father in law, he's the kind of guy you don't point out stuff to, because... like, he's socially inept when not conducting business, and he's intellectually leaps and bounds ahead of... well, pretty much everyone.
~Will
Re:NCR, all too familiar. Lots of companies fading
on
The 3Com Saga
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My father in law works for Unisys.
Unisys' real strength at this point is that they employ smart people at the consulting level. They don't really innovate. However, they are a big name in the business, and when you need a solution to a problem and you want it done yesterday, regardless of the cost, you call Unisys. They can move the technological earth for you.
Amusing anecdote.
A couple of years ago, when my not-yet-then father in law was working his way up the consulting chain, he ended up being the go-to guy for MBNA's head office. If you don't know who they are, someday look at where your credit card offers come from in the mail - chances are 1 of 3 comes from Wilmington, Deleware. That's MBNA - they are the elite of the super-rich credit card companies. So anyway, MBNA used to use Sprint for their internet connection. And we're talking massive bandwidth - this is for credit card processing, so it's multiple fiber pipes, OC-3 size each, if not bigger - and they have to be up 5 nines percent or better. So, this is a multi-hundred-million dollar contract with Sprint.
So, one day, MBNA's connection goes down. And they're losing money, to the tune of something like ten thousand dollars a second. My father in law, who's name is Mike, is called in. They're on the phone with sprint, and nothing's happening - sprint promises to look into the problem and do line testing, and call them back within 24 hours. This is obviously unacceptable. Everyone's running around, mass chaos, cats sleeping with dogs, etc. The scenario ends with the C.E.O., the VP of something, and Mike, and a few more underlings of both MBNA and Unisys in a confrence room. The CEO has the VP call sprint, and work his way up to talking to the highest guy he can get ahold of in their tech department. He asks how long it will be, gets an answer, and hangs up the phone. He looks at the CEO and says, "They say it will be 12 hours".
The CEO looks at Mike, and says, "Switch it to AT&T."
Mike calls AT&T (through Unisys channels - and when Unisys calls, people listen). AT&T has locals there in 10 minutes, and people on planes from New York in 20. They move heaven and earth have it up and running in 2 hours.
Anyway, all that is to say, Unisys isn't dead - they've just shifted into a different market - being the power behind the consulting. From what I've seen, though, they (and a lot of other companies out there) tend to hire people, use them for a few years, and let them go before they get too many raises.
Not to mention that dell switches are incredible. I swear by them. The 24 port 10/100 ones sometimes are on sale for ~$100 (i think), and they're almost as cheap as the crappy advent ones, and as good as switches costing 3x the cash. Mmmm... autosensing uplink on every port. Mmmm... 2.4 Gbps backplane. Mmmm rackmountable.
I lived in Memphis for 15 years (and still occasionally pine for it - if you haven't been there, it's a great place).
One thing you have to realize: Memphis is the only thing in the area. I mean, there's 1.5 million people in Memphis + suburbs (germantown / collierville / cordova / millington / olive branch). But, outside of this like 20 mile diameter circle, there's pretty much nothing. And I mean nothing. The nearest "big" cities are... Little Rock, Arkansas - 3 hours away, Nashville - 3.5 hours away, St. Louis - 5? hours away, Jackson, Mississippi - 2 hours away and not very big.
So, Memphis handles a lot of area for a lot of local traffic. Now, Memphis is ALSO roughly in the geographic center of the lower 48. In two day's truck ride, the only places you can't ship something to from Memphis are Miami, Florida; Friendship, Maine, and the left coast. FedEx has their hub in Memphis for a good reason, as does Northwest Air.
So, the Memphis postage and parcel systems handle a TON of stuff. Probably literally, per hour.
While there's some truth to that, there is also a major problem:
PC games don't port well to consoles, and vice versa.
I'm sorry, but it's just a reality. PC games are made to utilize the mouse. Console games are made to utilize the controler. I've never, ever played a PC game on a console that played well (quake 3 on dreamcast anyone?). On a console, it is laborious to put in any data, even naming your characters in final fantasy, while this task (and a multitude of others) are easy on a PC. Not to mention the whole mouse thing. Moving your little cursor around the screen on a console is annoying and time consuming, and nigh impossible without a good analog stick. On a mouse it's second nature. The only port that was even playable was knights of the old republic, and even its interface on the PC was really annoying (compared to a similar game like NWN). And it's not even genres. Games developed for the console stay on the console. For instance, Splinter Cell. Playable on console, unplayable on PC. You had to click a mouse button to go forward. That works for airships in FF9 wher the button is the X on the controler, but not when it's on the mouse.
I wouldn't be too worried. Console and PC games are so vastly different, and created around a different concept of human-computer interaction, that I think it will be a while before the ability to port your game to PC is a huge factor. It will remain what it is now - a way to get a little more revenue without much work, but that only fills a niche market and isn't a major part of the revenue model.
To study religion is not the same thing as to want to be employed by it. The bulk of religion scholars want to be academics, not clergy, and they tend to study things like violence and religion, exploitation and religion, nationalism and religion, war and religion, mental illness and religion, history of religious conflict...
Not to mention that most of the people who are practicing clergy didn't get their theology degree from any school you or I have heard of, and most of these schools are unacredited (for example: bob jones university). Also, check out Bill Schnoebelen's Biography - he's the fundie that Jack Chick always quotes when dealing with anything about the occult (quote-unquote). This guy got his theology masters from some school of theology, but it wasn't oxford or chicago. It was a catholic school, and he got his degree before he was "saved" and while he was a wiccan, a mormon, a mason, a gnostic, a catholic, and a UFO watcher simultaneously.
You mean you do not consider this standard Highschool material?
Exactly.
For everyone looking at the latin virus explanation post and going "HOLY CRAP!!!1!", it's really not that bad. This is honestly 2nd year high school latin at best, and probably stuff that you'd hit in 1st semester latin at a university. I know when I took greek, first semester was all about declining nouns - the prof. wanted to get that down before we went to tenses, which are harder.
I hope this helps, if not to explain it, to at least show that what he's doing is not that bad.
In English, we conjugate verbs all the time - it's second nature. It allows us to understand that "are our children learning?" is correct, when "is our children learning?" is not, because in this case, "children" is plural, and "children" is also the subject (remember, to find the subject of a question, you have to turn it into a statement, i.e. "are our children learning? -> "our children are learning").
Well, in Latin and Greek, the same thing is done with nouns. You conjugate nouns. Except that it's called declining nouns. Verbs conjugate, nouns decline, and difficult students decline to conjugate.
So, in Latin, when you say, "The boy built the tower" and "The boy gave the tower a roof" and "The tower fell down", the word for tower is spelled differently, because of where it's used in the sentence. In the first case, it's the direct object, receiving the action of the verb. In the second case, it's the indirect object, describing something about the direct object (which is roof). In both of these cases, you could say that the tower is in the objective case. Latin and Greek just call that accusative. In the third example, the tower is the subject of the sentence, which is just called the nominative case.
And there are other cases, which do get a little more in depth, like the genitive case. But, if you think about it, genitive is from the greek genesis, meaning a begining, and the genitive case is used with nouns "comming from" somewhere, whether it's actual travel, or an abstract idea like love comming from god (there's a lot of genitive in the greek new testament).
Keep in mind that this isn't as foreign as it sounds to English speakers. We do it on a limited basis with pronouns: He gave me the ball, vs. I gave the ball to him.
So that's really all there is to it. When the virus guy is posting about declinations, all he means is ways to decline nouns. We group them into first, second, thrid, etc, based on how they decline, much the way people group verbs when they study a foreign language. And the concept of gendered nouns is very much still in use - spanish and french still have masculine and feminine nouns, as do a host of other languages, and german has neuter nouns as well.
It's not that bad. Give those dead languages a fair chance.
That's akin to one of the questions that I can never get answered. If god loves us and wants us to be happy, why did he give us the choice to sin in the garden of eden. If he is all-knowing, he would have known that adam/eve would eat the apple. If the consequences of this action offend god, why did he give us the choice.
If god wants us all in heaven to celebrate with him, why does he give us the choice.
Out of curiousity, were you here then? I mean, your user ID is 600,000+. I was just wondering if it's a new account, and you used to post as someone else.
I remember the whole 9 yards, where they took it down, and a bunch of folks were clammering that they shouldn't take it down, and it would be the a triumph of free speech. And then it was like, who are we kidding? We've all read op clambake, and we know what they do to people who screw with them.
To this point in Microsoft's history, they have done NOTHING that I can think of out of the kindness of their hearts. Everything can be written up as enough to get by with as much money as they can take from customers and carry to the bank.
I can think of two things:
1.) Supporting a $100 O.S. for 6 years with official updates and patches. Quite a deal, one that you certainly won't see from redhat.
2.) Allowing pirated copies of windows XP to install service pack 2. A clip from the article: "Microsoft group product manager Barry Goffe told ComputerTimes that [...] it was more important to keep user safe than to be 'concerned about the revenue issue.'"
But, for further reference (for anyone who's reading this thread), UT2004 does NOT run fine on my backup card, a GeForce 2 MX200/32MB. With all the textures turned down fairly low, it works... ok. But, even at that, it's not too good.
So, if you expect to play doom3 with a geforce2, expect to be looking at 640x480.
Maximum PC this month had a feature on the new GeForce FX 6800, and then had a blurb on the new year's games, and the hardware they expected to be needed.
For Doom3, they recomended a GeForce FX 5800 + or an ATI 9800+, w/ 2.8 or 3Ghz proc (quoting from memory).
But for reference, they also said that you'd need a GeForce FX 5700 to play UT2004, and it works fine on the geforce4 ti4200 I used to have before it went titsup. So, YMMV. You'll probably want a 9800 ATI to take full advantage, but if you've got something 9200 or 9600 level, you're going to be able to play it, just don't expect full detail.
One thing's for certain: The guy does an excellent job of keeping up Google's mysterious aura. When asked if the number of servers was 10k or more like 100k, he said "over 10k". When asked about future technologies and directions for the company, he always answered vaguely ("I can't comment on specifics").
This is pretty cool. The aura that google has that no one knows how it works, and no one knows where it is, and no one knows what it's doing... That's a pretty cool public image to have for something used as much as google is. I just wonder if investors are going to want to know more about what's going on.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really need a box for your old XBox games, get an XBox (for prolly >$100 by then).
Yeah, well, see, that means two game consoles instead of one. Which means getting one of those stupid little splitter boxes to hook it into the TV/Receiver. Which means less visual quality and more cables. Dumb.
Backwards compatability wasn't like a primary reason to buy a Playstation 2, but it's certainly a consideration - being able to play Xenogears and Final Fantasy IX on my PS2 makes me happy, even if it is only a small part of the console's functionality.
~Will
I have been away for a few days, sorry I didn't reply. I did go ahead and order a battery charger that was $49.99 + shipping. It looked from the picture and sounded from the description to be a charger specifically for the canon es900, but when it arrived, it too was a "universal" charger. I was not happy, but it did charge my battery, and it came with a car adapter, so I guess it's cool. But, if it hadn't been able to charge my battery, rest assured that there would have been a charge-back (no pun intended) to my credit card.
~Will
Yeah, i found that page, too. It is a different color hyperlink, which means I have been there. That's another problem with google link farms. That page has the words ES900 on it just to generate more hits. That battery charger is a "universal" charger, which "automatically adjusts for each battery size." It's not specifically for the canon ES900. Not to mention that it's 36 british pounds, times two plus cross-atlantic shipping means that it will cost $85 and get here in August.
See?
a
A
Even if you usually get a higher pay as a PhD it's usually not enough to counterbalance the 4 or 5 year lost of pay while doing your PhD.
On the contrary, where I go (went) to school (Virginia Tech), almost all the Ph.D. students I know are having their education paid for either by scholarships, grants, or a company for which they have assigned an agreement to work for. I know several people who went to co-op during the time period they were working on their M.S., and the companies liked them enough that they're paying them low-scale salary to go back to school and get their Ph.D. (so, these people are getting $35k/yr to sit around blacksburg and do their own research).
I'm sure this isn't all that common, but in the engineering / tech field, there are a lot of people who have someone else footing the bill for their brain full of knowledge.
Unfortunately, my degree (in History) is good for being a teacher (which is ok with me, I like teaching - High School world history here I come). If you want to do anything else with a history degree, you probably need a doctorate, or multiple doctorates. Those people you see on the history channel in Turkey digging up roman cities? Yeah. The guy that's talking to the camera probably has 3 doctorates (History, Classical Studies, Archeology, Sociology, Humanities, etc), and the people in the back sifting through the dirt or staking out finds - the ones that look like peons - are probably either working on a doctorate or doing post-doctorate research. Yeah. That's what I want to do, but... not bloody likely.
~Will
It was time to do that at least a year ago. It's pretty much impossible to find good information on any popular consumer product and this is a problem that's been around for a long time.
This actually got to me in the past few days. I tried to go online to find a charger for the battery that goes with a Canon ES900 8mm camcorder (because I bought the battery and realized I have no way to charge it). Most of the links on google were of the variety: "Take database of every known camcorder. Make each model number a link to a site".
I hate google link farms.
Yeah, that's what we did in the end. But, we told him he had to stop with the abandonware server, and he said he wasn't doing anything illegal, and if we turned him off, he'd sue.
Yeah, and that's another problem with the whole reporting copyright violaions... consolidation of video game holdings. Think how many titles are owned by Electronic Arts, or Atari. If we went to atari and were like, someone's distributing xYZ game, i'm sure the most common reaction would be, "Do we own that?!"
Yes, it's illegal. I agree with you, though. At netmar, we had some guy who set up basically an abandonware server. We noticed it because of the huge jump in bandwidth, and we looked - all the stuff was like DOS versions of lemmings and stuff.
So, we called the feds (who have a computer crime department), and we started trying to get in touch with publishers and distributors for the games.
Know what?
No one cared.
We're still waiting for a call back from the feds, 2 years later. They told us to fill in a submission form on a website, which we did. And we never got any callbacks from any distributors or publishers either.
This is what makes you jaded to things like abandonware. If the company still owns the copyright, but isn't selling the product, what do you do? What if the company is unwilling to protect their copyright? What does that say about the laws?
~Will
Yeah, I thought about that too, but, if you knew my father in law, he's the kind of guy you don't point out stuff to, because ... like, he's socially inept when not conducting business, and he's intellectually leaps and bounds ahead of ... well, pretty much everyone.
~Will
My father in law works for Unisys.
Unisys' real strength at this point is that they employ smart people at the consulting level. They don't really innovate. However, they are a big name in the business, and when you need a solution to a problem and you want it done yesterday, regardless of the cost, you call Unisys. They can move the technological earth for you.
Amusing anecdote.
A couple of years ago, when my not-yet-then father in law was working his way up the consulting chain, he ended up being the go-to guy for MBNA's head office. If you don't know who they are, someday look at where your credit card offers come from in the mail - chances are 1 of 3 comes from Wilmington, Deleware. That's MBNA - they are the elite of the super-rich credit card companies.
So anyway, MBNA used to use Sprint for their internet connection. And we're talking massive bandwidth - this is for credit card processing, so it's multiple fiber pipes, OC-3 size each, if not bigger - and they have to be up 5 nines percent or better. So, this is a multi-hundred-million dollar contract with Sprint.
So, one day, MBNA's connection goes down. And they're losing money, to the tune of something like ten thousand dollars a second. My father in law, who's name is Mike, is called in. They're on the phone with sprint, and nothing's happening - sprint promises to look into the problem and do line testing, and call them back within 24 hours. This is obviously unacceptable. Everyone's running around, mass chaos, cats sleeping with dogs, etc. The scenario ends with the C.E.O., the VP of something, and Mike, and a few more underlings of both MBNA and Unisys in a confrence room. The CEO has the VP call sprint, and work his way up to talking to the highest guy he can get ahold of in their tech department. He asks how long it will be, gets an answer, and hangs up the phone. He looks at the CEO and says, "They say it will be 12 hours".
The CEO looks at Mike, and says, "Switch it to AT&T."
Mike calls AT&T (through Unisys channels - and when Unisys calls, people listen). AT&T has locals there in 10 minutes, and people on planes from New York in 20. They move heaven and earth have it up and running in 2 hours.
Anyway, all that is to say, Unisys isn't dead - they've just shifted into a different market - being the power behind the consulting. From what I've seen, though, they (and a lot of other companies out there) tend to hire people, use them for a few years, and let them go before they get too many raises.
~Will
Not to mention that dell switches are incredible. I swear by them. The 24 port 10/100 ones sometimes are on sale for ~$100 (i think), and they're almost as cheap as the crappy advent ones, and as good as switches costing 3x the cash. Mmmm... autosensing uplink on every port. Mmmm... 2.4 Gbps backplane. Mmmm rackmountable.
~Will
I lived in Memphis for 15 years (and still occasionally pine for it - if you haven't been there, it's a great place).
... Little Rock, Arkansas - 3 hours away, Nashville - 3.5 hours away, St. Louis - 5? hours away, Jackson, Mississippi - 2 hours away and not very big.
One thing you have to realize: Memphis is the only thing in the area. I mean, there's 1.5 million people in Memphis + suburbs (germantown / collierville / cordova / millington / olive branch). But, outside of this like 20 mile diameter circle, there's pretty much nothing. And I mean nothing. The nearest "big" cities are
So, Memphis handles a lot of area for a lot of local traffic. Now, Memphis is ALSO roughly in the geographic center of the lower 48. In two day's truck ride, the only places you can't ship something to from Memphis are Miami, Florida; Friendship, Maine, and the left coast. FedEx has their hub in Memphis for a good reason, as does Northwest Air.
So, the Memphis postage and parcel systems handle a TON of stuff. Probably literally, per hour.
~Will
While there's some truth to that, there is also a major problem:
PC games don't port well to consoles, and vice versa.
I'm sorry, but it's just a reality. PC games are made to utilize the mouse. Console games are made to utilize the controler. I've never, ever played a PC game on a console that played well (quake 3 on dreamcast anyone?). On a console, it is laborious to put in any data, even naming your characters in final fantasy, while this task (and a multitude of others) are easy on a PC. Not to mention the whole mouse thing. Moving your little cursor around the screen on a console is annoying and time consuming, and nigh impossible without a good analog stick. On a mouse it's second nature. The only port that was even playable was knights of the old republic, and even its interface on the PC was really annoying (compared to a similar game like NWN). And it's not even genres. Games developed for the console stay on the console. For instance, Splinter Cell. Playable on console, unplayable on PC. You had to click a mouse button to go forward. That works for airships in FF9 wher the button is the X on the controler, but not when it's on the mouse.
I wouldn't be too worried. Console and PC games are so vastly different, and created around a different concept of human-computer interaction, that I think it will be a while before the ability to port your game to PC is a huge factor. It will remain what it is now - a way to get a little more revenue without much work, but that only fills a niche market and isn't a major part of the revenue model.
~Will
He should have sold short at the beginning of the month, it's dropped from about $6 to $4.80 where it is now.
I made some and lost some on my stock simulator on scox. In real life, it's probably hard to find anyone willing to short it to you right now.
~Will
To study religion is not the same thing as to want to be employed by it. The bulk of religion scholars want to be academics, not clergy, and they tend to study things like violence and religion, exploitation and religion, nationalism and religion, war and religion, mental illness and religion, history of religious conflict...
Not to mention that most of the people who are practicing clergy didn't get their theology degree from any school you or I have heard of, and most of these schools are unacredited (for example: bob jones university). Also, check out Bill Schnoebelen's Biography - he's the fundie that Jack Chick always quotes when dealing with anything about the occult (quote-unquote). This guy got his theology masters from some school of theology, but it wasn't oxford or chicago. It was a catholic school, and he got his degree before he was "saved" and while he was a wiccan, a mormon, a mason, a gnostic, a catholic, and a UFO watcher simultaneously.
~Will
You mean you do not consider this standard Highschool material?
Exactly.
For everyone looking at the latin virus explanation post and going "HOLY CRAP!!!1!", it's really not that bad. This is honestly 2nd year high school latin at best, and probably stuff that you'd hit in 1st semester latin at a university. I know when I took greek, first semester was all about declining nouns - the prof. wanted to get that down before we went to tenses, which are harder.
I hope this helps, if not to explain it, to at least show that what he's doing is not that bad.
In English, we conjugate verbs all the time - it's second nature. It allows us to understand that "are our children learning?" is correct, when "is our children learning?" is not, because in this case, "children" is plural, and "children" is also the subject (remember, to find the subject of a question, you have to turn it into a statement, i.e. "are our children learning? -> "our children are learning").
Well, in Latin and Greek, the same thing is done with nouns. You conjugate nouns. Except that it's called declining nouns. Verbs conjugate, nouns decline, and difficult students decline to conjugate.
So, in Latin, when you say,
"The boy built the tower" and
"The boy gave the tower a roof" and
"The tower fell down",
the word for tower is spelled differently, because of where it's used in the sentence.
In the first case, it's the direct object, receiving the action of the verb. In the second case, it's the indirect object, describing something about the direct object (which is roof). In both of these cases, you could say that the tower is in the objective case. Latin and Greek just call that accusative. In the third example, the tower is the subject of the sentence, which is just called the nominative case.
And there are other cases, which do get a little more in depth, like the genitive case. But, if you think about it, genitive is from the greek genesis, meaning a begining, and the genitive case is used with nouns "comming from" somewhere, whether it's actual travel, or an abstract idea like love comming from god (there's a lot of genitive in the greek new testament).
Keep in mind that this isn't as foreign as it sounds to English speakers. We do it on a limited basis with pronouns: He gave me the ball, vs. I gave the ball to him.
So that's really all there is to it. When the virus guy is posting about declinations, all he means is ways to decline nouns. We group them into first, second, thrid, etc, based on how they decline, much the way people group verbs when they study a foreign language. And the concept of gendered nouns is very much still in use - spanish and french still have masculine and feminine nouns, as do a host of other languages, and german has neuter nouns as well.
It's not that bad. Give those dead languages a fair chance.
~Will
That's akin to one of the questions that I can never get answered. If god loves us and wants us to be happy, why did he give us the choice to sin in the garden of eden. If he is all-knowing, he would have known that adam/eve would eat the apple. If the consequences of this action offend god, why did he give us the choice.
If god wants us all in heaven to celebrate with him, why does he give us the choice.
Seems sadistic to me.
~Wx
Out of curiousity, were you here then? I mean, your user ID is 600,000+. I was just wondering if it's a new account, and you used to post as someone else.
I remember the whole 9 yards, where they took it down, and a bunch of folks were clammering that they shouldn't take it down, and it would be the a triumph of free speech. And then it was like, who are we kidding? We've all read op clambake, and we know what they do to people who screw with them.
~Will
To this point in Microsoft's history, they have done NOTHING that I can think of out of the kindness of their hearts. Everything can be written up as enough to get by with as much money as they can take from customers and carry to the bank.
I can think of two things:
1.) Supporting a $100 O.S. for 6 years with official updates and patches. Quite a deal, one that you certainly won't see from redhat.
2.) Allowing pirated copies of windows XP to install service pack 2. A clip from the article: "Microsoft group product manager Barry Goffe told ComputerTimes that [...] it was more important to keep user safe than to be 'concerned about the revenue issue.'"
~Will
But, for further reference (for anyone who's reading this thread), UT2004 does NOT run fine on my backup card, a GeForce 2 MX200/32MB. With all the textures turned down fairly low, it works ... ok. But, even at that, it's not too good.
So, if you expect to play doom3 with a geforce2, expect to be looking at 640x480.
Maximum PC this month had a feature on the new GeForce FX 6800, and then had a blurb on the new year's games, and the hardware they expected to be needed.
For Doom3, they recomended a GeForce FX 5800 + or an ATI 9800+, w/ 2.8 or 3Ghz proc (quoting from memory).
But for reference, they also said that you'd need a GeForce FX 5700 to play UT2004, and it works fine on the geforce4 ti4200 I used to have before it went titsup. So, YMMV. You'll probably want a 9800 ATI to take full advantage, but if you've got something 9200 or 9600 level, you're going to be able to play it, just don't expect full detail.
~Will
One thing's for certain: The guy does an excellent job of keeping up Google's mysterious aura. When asked if the number of servers was 10k or more like 100k, he said "over 10k". When asked about future technologies and directions for the company, he always answered vaguely ("I can't comment on specifics").
This is pretty cool. The aura that google has that no one knows how it works, and no one knows where it is, and no one knows what it's doing... That's a pretty cool public image to have for something used as much as google is. I just wonder if investors are going to want to know more about what's going on.
~Will
Knew I forgot something:
SATA Hard Drive 200GB Maxtor 8MB cache
I was looking on monarch computer just this weekend, and here's what I came up with:
Antec "Piano Quiet" case
2 x Enermax 120mm adjustable speed fans
MSI Motherboard NForce2 Audio/Lan/SATA/Dual Chan DDR400
AMD XP 3200+ Barton 640K 400Mhz FSB
ThermalTake Heatsink/fan
2 x 512MB Corsair Mid-grade DDR400 RAM (1GB Total)
ATI (ati brand) Radeon 9800 XT 256MB 8xAGP
SoundBlaster Audigy OEM
w/ 3 year warranty parts/labor
w/ assembly cost included
Comes to about $1500. Less than their machine, I'm sure, and probably able to spank it.
~Will