It's too late now but I do agree with those that say scrapping the Saturn 5 design and tooling was damn near criminal. The Russians have continued to evolve and improve their Energiya and can throw more into orbit cheaper than we can now. Rather than the so-called "Space Truck" which turned out to be anything but we should have been flying a whole series of refined Saturn based designs by now. We certainly wouldn't be wringing our hands over effective rockets to reach the Moon.
Generally true but you can keep your old home directory which will pretty much dictate the look and feel of anything installed thereafter. I've been using the same ones across Debian flavored distros for years. If retaining a home dir, you could even move to an RPM distro and install all the same apps. There would be very little outward change. For that matter, you could even go to a BSD and all the desktop behavior would still get picked up.
As for the major upgrade of an old OS scenario, that can be handled but it isn't completely automagical. What I do is dump a list of all installed packages and tar up the/etc directory. I do a new install of the current distro and import the list of installed packages from the old install and tell it to do a dselect-upgrade. I then selectively include from the tarred up etc any config behavior I want to replicate. It is something of a long way around but I get a clean install of new stuff that acts like the old stuff in important ways.
XP needed me to install audio drivers, graphics drivers, motherboard drivers, fingerprint device drivers,... all told, I had to manually put in at least 20 things in Device Manager before it would be happy. Vista had 2 missing: fingerprint and mouse.
That only happens for a year or so after MS releases a new OS. The amount of driver hunting required for a new machine slowly increases from this point.
The problem with supporting the Pirate Bay is that it still runs counter to the position that you have outlined (and to which I myself subscribe, except for your point #2).
I tend to view that as doing to them what they frequently do to us in legislatures. Draconian over-the-top things are proposed like Orrin Hatch wanting to let copyright holders hack computers with no due process which are then reduced to proposals which are still abominable but seem reasonable compared to the original idea.
The Pirate Bay is trying for a de-facto abolishment of copyright while the Pirate Party seems to be for the same thing but explicitly. This too is over the top and more than people like you and me actually favor. But if the wide swaths of the public continue to use services like the Pirate Bay and react in anger to 17 million dollar judgements for P2P sharing then they may have to "compromise" with the public for once.
I see no problem with that as long as I don't wind up being an inadvertent test subject in an inadvertent study. This thing looks to be slightly more powerful than cell phones which DON'T worry me.
I've tangled with installing XP on sata controllered Toshiba's and I can assure you that it isn't always as easy as "type in a code and all the drivers for neat automagical installation instantly appear". I glad you had such an easy time with your Dell. You err in extrapolating that to all MS OS installs. It especially isn't fun when the Windows installer needs a driver disk to light up the storage controller.
I want him/her to be athletic and have a better than average predisposition towards a high IQ?
A likely result would be to get an autistic child built like a gorilla. One of things that I think may be driving autism rates is that educated professionals tend to marry each other more these days. Bright people seem to have more than their share of these kids. Screwing around with the genes for intelligence could do that particular job too.
When few tech staff are available, having to periodically open the case and spray out the lint is a burden. I HIGHLY appreciate fanless designs because once deployed I often don't need to physically lay hands on them until replaced.
Your car analogy is corked because it is possible to have fanless PCs but not oilless cars. And yes, I'm aware that fans are needed for the highest performing machines. Even there much can be done to ease maintenance. I rather like the idea of using heat pipes to bring the heat to radiators that can be cleaned without taking a screwdriver to the case. Or otherwise designing the thing to make the lint removal easy. Some machines have easily cleanable/replaceable intake filters which is a step forward.
Having to take a tower out of some of the stupid places they have to go in sometimes, unplugging all that crap, opening the case, spraying it out, and putting all that back together is just obnoxious.
And so far, only two nuclear bombs have ever been detonated.
In anger against another nation yes. But they have been tested as weapons of realpolitik many many times. Iran, India, Pakistan, and most recently North Korea have tested them just to make a point. The US and USSR used to test them at each other all the time. Tsar Bomba was a militarily useless weapon whose only point in even being designed was to scare the shit out of the West.
You missed several rather large points. It isn't that I might want ESPN's content and my ISP won't pay. It is that I couldn't give a damn about ESPN but have to pay for it if I want a usable Internet connection. As the poster said, I have only one good choice for broadband (well they do have DSL around here but it costs more for a crappier connection) but I could be made to support ESPN just to get online. And if the DSL provider does it too then I either pay ESPN or don't get online at all.
And yes, I actually don't care about watching sports on TV or the Internet...well except for bull riding and only when these yokels get themselves hurt.
I suppose you can try to obtain a different device's HDCP key(s) and program those in. But once the HDCP authority notices that a different device's device keys have been compromised, it may revoke those keys too.
Of course, say it's one of Sony's HDTV models whose HDCP keys get compromised, and the HDCP key authority revokes those keys. Sony HDTV owners will be furious that new Blu-Ray discs don't work on their TV, and Sony will have to issue a firmware update to get new keys and somehow "protect" them better this time. All in all, a total losing proposition.
If one has obtained the keys for a number of popular devices then you could force the HDCP authority to DDOS itself. Done correctly it would be quite the nice black eye for DRM.
A natural engineer by contrast, is better at diagnosis - figuring out what is wrong and fixing it. But often a good engineer will want to do engineering and not medicine.
A engineer is a better diagnostician but the best diagnosticians aren't necessarily engineers. Look at what demo coders on old 8-bits do. They make them do things that even the people who designed them wouldn't have thought possible. And the skillset of a master mechanic does not perfectly dovetail with that of an automotive engineer. The engineer knows how to design a system say an engine that meets any number of criteria and doubtless understands the correct functioning of that part. The mechanic on the other hand will have a long list of unconscious heuristics for how the system behaves when a part of the engine is degraded or nonfunctional entirely. Troubleshooting is a world all of it's own. And I agree with you that many many doctors don't understand troubleshooting. If they did, I think you'd see much less of the shotgun approach most of them take with tests.
Many of them are there for compatibility reasons. I've rescued Apple and Amiga disks by sticking them in Linux boxes. Others are there for very specific contexts like flash devices. Of the ones that can be used as root filesystems, some are better at certain workloads. In practice there only a handful of that can be used to host the system itself with ext3 soon to be ext4 being the most common for workaday use.
I can't stand Married With Children now but at the time it was a very welcome antidote to The Cosby Show which my parents were gonzo fans of. Antidotes are generally as bad as the poisons they treat.
Of course as you say, the odds of a particular car, house, or what have you getting hit are astronomical but this is like winning the lottery. You aren't likely to hit the jackpot but SOMEBODY is going to.
One can always sniff the wires without getting inside binaries. This is what Samba does. And USB debuggers have existed for years. Crypto on both ends can complicate this so one may have to resort to clean room at least enough to suss out how the crypto works.
I didn't get the Kirby size wrong either. I said MegaBITs not bytes.
My uncompressed Kirby's Adventure rom is 786448 bytes. 786448 bytes times 8 bits is 6291584 bits. Typical 7800 titles only manage to be 1 megabit by comparison or less. Even allowing for padding and inefficiency (NES carts were partitioned into code and graphics segments. doubt there is much inefficiency there) the NES was getting bigger games and more developer and artist attention.
I'll also note that BallBlazer includes a POKEY chip; this chip was the sound/IO chip for the A8 Home Computers and also used in many arcade titles. It is one of only two or three 7800 titles that do. Commando was the only other title to include it then and there are now a few homebrews that employ it. In good hands which LucasFilm Games were, POKEY can generate good results. Furthermore those music routines originate with the A8 version of the game. Be that as it may, POKEY was designed in the seventies to generate sound effects first and foremost and music second and is fairly primitive compared to the device in the NES. The 7800 cart port has an audio in so other chips in practice could be used but so far as I know none were. GCC had an economical yet capable one mostly designed but Tramiel killed it. Nice to see some love for it from a C64 lover though:-).
All other 7800 titles use the 2600 TIA chip for sound. Since the 7800 has a few more cycles to burn driving it; it can sound better than it does in the 2600 but it doesn't even begin to rival the sound device in the NES much less the POKEY which is basically a more capable (more channels, divisors, etc) but similar design.
I do believe that leaves Starfox as the only thing I got well and truly wrong.
So I goofed a bit on the sizes and Starfox, big deal. Nonetheless, going by your figures NES games max out twice as large as the biggest 7800 titles and it turns out the contents of the Kirby's Adventure rom is 768K and I have never heard of a 7800 title that large (and a hexdump of it tells me it isn't mostly padding either). And the 7800 only has Scrapyard Dog in that genre. And it isn't all some sort of inefficiency bloat relative to the 7800. The levels in Kirby are large and there are many of them. I just had a gander at my 7800 roms. Most are 128K and the 7800 couldn't have had more than 1 or two titles larger than that. A further look at my two rom collections show that NES titles were routinely larger than 128K and it's game content. At one time I could beat Midnight Mutants in 15 minutes. Fun game but the game world was pretty tiny compared to the many NES games in that style. It's library was heavy with arcade style games in a world that buying up Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Karnov, and so-forth. The 7800 pretty much missed the 7800 and RPG train.
Incidentally, I have a 7800 and a pretty large library and have put quite few hours in on BallBlazer. So I know and love it well. Yeah, the NES won't do that style of 3D well but with these 8-bits especially it is easy to produce an example game that showcases the platform's strengths and use it as an argument for absolute superiority. Hell I even know where there's an A8 vs. C-64 thread that's been raging since November and it's just one screenshot and YouTube flick after another. None of which changes the fact the Commie led the market over the A8 for a number of good reasons not all of which were purely technical.
Nintendo did a better job of reading the market and creating new markets. They engineered a system that scrolled large tiled worlds around very well then sold the hell out of sprawling adventures. The 7800 wasn't as good at that but the Tramiels weren't going to support it in any case. I didn't get THAT part wrong, and you're getting me wrong. I have a 7800 and an NES and played the 7800 much more. I happen to prefer the style but I understand why it lost. It wasn't technically superior in some areas that were important (sound and tiled graphics) and it wasn't well supported or marketed by Atari. If I liked things like Mike Tyson Punch-Out and Super Mario World then the 7800 just wasn't going to deliver. It matters not whether it could in practice.
The INTY control disc was a digital pad that could register 16 directions vs 8 for most any other d-pad or digital joystick. The only thing that will get anywhere near it for emulation is an analog thumbstick and even then the emulator really has to take care to capture that aspect well.
Not that it mattered much but the NES won't do something like Robotron as well. Moving lots of objects around fast and flicker free isn't a strength but then that isn't the type of game it was engineered for.
I think too that the controller on the Inty often worked against it. It was great for the deeper strategy games and war sims but I hated playing anything twitch with it like AstroSmash (speaking of which the 2600 port doesn't compare badly). Intellivision games were often true to their name in another way. You had to read the manual to play many of them whereas 2600 titles tended much more in the pick up and play direction. I know many of my buddies at the time saw many Intellivision games as "hard". At that time "hard-core" gamers didn't command the influence they do now and Atari seemed to understand this better than Mattel. I had an 800XL and even then preferred computers with keyboards for that sort of gaming.
1977-to-1984 - Atari VCS/2600 - inferior to Intellivision 1985-to-1990 - NES - inferior to Sega Master System and Atari ProSystem/7800
The 7800 deserved to lose to the NES for several reasons and I'm pretty much a hater when it comes to the pastel palleted cutesy flickerfest that was the NES. The main technical strength of the 7800 is that it is good at bashing lots of sprites around. This makes for very solid ports of some classic arcade games. Food Fight and Robotron are excellent on this system. But it's big weaknesses compared to the NES is that it isn't good at scrolling large tiled screens around in different directions and they made the moronic decision to use the 2600's TIA chip for sound.
The 7800 was designed in '83 to out ColecoVision the ColecoVision. The game library is heavy with games like Asteroids, Robotron, Donkey Kong, and Dig Dug as well lots of scrolling shooters. In the post-Crash world of '86 strong arcade ports weren't as big a selling point. Super Mario Bros. was the pack-in for every NES I ever saw and Nintendo created a entirely new market with games like this: large story-driven worlds with lots of tricks, secrets, and wrinkles. And the NES had a decent sound chip to supply the music and sound effects for these games.
The 7800 could do games like that but they were harder to develop and there were factors other than the technical vs. the NES. Atari at this point had alienated their reseller market which made getting 7800 stuff into the stores hard. And then there were the Tramiels. Sam Tramiel didn't want to be in the videogame business at all. To him they were just a source of funding for the computer division. So cheapness dominated every aspect of the 7800. GCC had all but finished a better soundchip that could have either been built into carts or included in the 7800 proper and wasn't terribly expensive but it was axed. Including the POKEY from the A8 computers in the unit itself was likewise axed and it was only used in a handful of carts. Tramiel also refused to authorize enhanced carts with bigger PROMs, more memory, extra processing, and better sound. The NES had many 4 megabit titles and Kirby weighed in at 6 megabits. Titles like StarFox even had hardware to spruce up the graphics. I don't believe any 7800 release was larger than 128K. Tramiel also wasn't willing to spend much on marketing, licensing, or wooing 3rd party development.
On the other hand, the 2600 isn't as wimpy compared to the Intellivision as Plympton made it out to be. Put a little RAM and larger PROMs in the carts and the 2600 can at least rival the Intellivision with games like TunnelRunner, Solaris, and Radar Lock. And the some of the RealSports narrowed or closed the gap as well. To be sure, early Inty titles outshine early 2600 titles.
There was a/. article about it a few years back. It always tries to choose the worst possible block for the next block coming up. Need that long 4 square block? You'll get a evilly oriented z-block....
Theology is not religion and is certainly not about any specific deity like Zombie Jesus(TM) or Allah. . . . By the way all world religions offer answers to these questions, but are by no means the only answers one can give. One could be scientific about it, and try to answer these question from that perspective, but that kind of analysis usually leaves us cold, feeling small, and somewhat unfulfilled.
Yeah. Yeah. Tell me more about this version of Jesus who casts about the landscape on a quest for succulent brains whilst preaching the love of his father.
I don't entirely buy that. Most mainstream religions don't require a person to see themselves as worthy ONLY through the religion and most DON'T require as much offerings or tithing they can pressure you out of. There is a huge difference between the corner Baptist church where they don't get bent out of shape if you go to church with your Methodist friend some Sunday and a group like the Moonies. That Baptist church most likely isn't after you to sign over all your money and capital then sell yourself into virtual slavery to cross the Bridge as Scientology will.
Religions differ in the demands they make on parishioners and in the control exerted on them. Religions that make inordinate demands on your social, psychological, time, credulity, and financial resources deserve a pejorative and "cult" is as good as any.
There is plenty not to like about more mainstream religions like the Baptists and Southern Baptists especially but being a cult isn't one of them.
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It's too late now but I do agree with those that say scrapping the Saturn 5 design and tooling was damn near criminal. The Russians have continued to evolve and improve their Energiya and can throw more into orbit cheaper than we can now. Rather than the so-called "Space Truck" which turned out to be anything but we should have been flying a whole series of refined Saturn based designs by now. We certainly wouldn't be wringing our hands over effective rockets to reach the Moon.
Generally true but you can keep your old home directory which will pretty much dictate the look and feel of anything installed thereafter. I've been using the same ones across Debian flavored distros for years. If retaining a home dir, you could even move to an RPM distro and install all the same apps. There would be very little outward change. For that matter, you could even go to a BSD and all the desktop behavior would still get picked up.
As for the major upgrade of an old OS scenario, that can be handled but it isn't completely automagical. What I do is dump a list of all installed packages and tar up the /etc directory. I do a new install of the current distro and import the list of installed packages from the old install and tell it to do a dselect-upgrade. I then selectively include from the tarred up etc any config behavior I want to replicate. It is something of a long way around but I get a clean install of new stuff that acts like the old stuff in important ways.
XP needed me to install audio drivers, graphics drivers, motherboard drivers, fingerprint device drivers, ... all told, I had to manually put in at least 20 things in Device Manager before it would be happy. Vista had 2 missing: fingerprint and mouse.
That only happens for a year or so after MS releases a new OS. The amount of driver hunting required for a new machine slowly increases from this point.
The problem with supporting the Pirate Bay is that it still runs counter to the position that you have outlined (and to which I myself subscribe, except for your point #2).
I tend to view that as doing to them what they frequently do to us in legislatures. Draconian over-the-top things are proposed like Orrin Hatch wanting to let copyright holders hack computers with no due process which are then reduced to proposals which are still abominable but seem reasonable compared to the original idea.
The Pirate Bay is trying for a de-facto abolishment of copyright while the Pirate Party seems to be for the same thing but explicitly. This too is over the top and more than people like you and me actually favor. But if the wide swaths of the public continue to use services like the Pirate Bay and react in anger to 17 million dollar judgements for P2P sharing then they may have to "compromise" with the public for once.
I see no problem with that as long as I don't wind up being an inadvertent test subject in an inadvertent study. This thing looks to be slightly more powerful than cell phones which DON'T worry me.
I've tangled with installing XP on sata controllered Toshiba's and I can assure you that it isn't always as easy as "type in a code and all the drivers for neat automagical installation instantly appear". I glad you had such an easy time with your Dell. You err in extrapolating that to all MS OS installs. It especially isn't fun when the Windows installer needs a driver disk to light up the storage controller.
I want him/her to be athletic and have a better than average predisposition towards a high IQ?
A likely result would be to get an autistic child built like a gorilla. One of things that I think may be driving autism rates is that educated professionals tend to marry each other more these days. Bright people seem to have more than their share of these kids. Screwing around with the genes for intelligence could do that particular job too.
When few tech staff are available, having to periodically open the case and spray out the lint is a burden. I HIGHLY appreciate fanless designs because once deployed I often don't need to physically lay hands on them until replaced.
Your car analogy is corked because it is possible to have fanless PCs but not oilless cars. And yes, I'm aware that fans are needed for the highest performing machines. Even there much can be done to ease maintenance. I rather like the idea of using heat pipes to bring the heat to radiators that can be cleaned without taking a screwdriver to the case. Or otherwise designing the thing to make the lint removal easy. Some machines have easily cleanable/replaceable intake filters which is a step forward.
Having to take a tower out of some of the stupid places they have to go in sometimes, unplugging all that crap, opening the case, spraying it out, and putting all that back together is just obnoxious.
And so far, only two nuclear bombs have ever been detonated.
In anger against another nation yes. But they have been tested as weapons of realpolitik many many times. Iran, India, Pakistan, and most recently North Korea have tested them just to make a point. The US and USSR used to test them at each other all the time. Tsar Bomba was a militarily useless weapon whose only point in even being designed was to scare the shit out of the West.
You missed several rather large points. It isn't that I might want ESPN's content and my ISP won't pay. It is that I couldn't give a damn about ESPN but have to pay for it if I want a usable Internet connection. As the poster said, I have only one good choice for broadband (well they do have DSL around here but it costs more for a crappier connection) but I could be made to support ESPN just to get online. And if the DSL provider does it too then I either pay ESPN or don't get online at all.
And yes, I actually don't care about watching sports on TV or the Internet...well except for bull riding and only when these yokels get themselves hurt.
I suppose you can try to obtain a different device's HDCP key(s) and program those in. But once the HDCP authority notices that a different device's device keys have been compromised, it may revoke those keys too.
Of course, say it's one of Sony's HDTV models whose HDCP keys get compromised, and the HDCP key authority revokes those keys. Sony HDTV owners will be furious that new Blu-Ray discs don't work on their TV, and Sony will have to issue a firmware update to get new keys and somehow "protect" them better this time. All in all, a total losing proposition.
If one has obtained the keys for a number of popular devices then you could force the HDCP authority to DDOS itself. Done correctly it would be quite the nice black eye for DRM.
A natural engineer by contrast, is better at diagnosis - figuring out what is wrong and fixing it. But often a good engineer will want to do engineering and not medicine.
A engineer is a better diagnostician but the best diagnosticians aren't necessarily engineers. Look at what demo coders on old 8-bits do. They make them do things that even the people who designed them wouldn't have thought possible. And the skillset of a master mechanic does not perfectly dovetail with that of an automotive engineer. The engineer knows how to design a system say an engine that meets any number of criteria and doubtless understands the correct functioning of that part. The mechanic on the other hand will have a long list of unconscious heuristics for how the system behaves when a part of the engine is degraded or nonfunctional entirely. Troubleshooting is a world all of it's own. And I agree with you that many many doctors don't understand troubleshooting. If they did, I think you'd see much less of the shotgun approach most of them take with tests.
Many of them are there for compatibility reasons. I've rescued Apple and Amiga disks by sticking them in Linux boxes. Others are there for very specific contexts like flash devices. Of the ones that can be used as root filesystems, some are better at certain workloads. In practice there only a handful of that can be used to host the system itself with ext3 soon to be ext4 being the most common for workaday use.
I can't stand Married With Children now but at the time it was a very welcome antidote to The Cosby Show which my parents were gonzo fans of. Antidotes are generally as bad as the poisons they treat.
That HAS happened and more than once. Here is one that happened in '92.
http://www.nyrockman.com/pages/peekskill-knapp.htm
Here is a somewhat exhaustive list of meteor impacts into man made objects:
http://imca.repetti.net/metinfo/metstruck.html
Of course as you say, the odds of a particular car, house, or what have you getting hit are astronomical but this is like winning the lottery. You aren't likely to hit the jackpot but SOMEBODY is going to.
One can always sniff the wires without getting inside binaries. This is what Samba does. And USB debuggers have existed for years. Crypto on both ends can complicate this so one may have to resort to clean room at least enough to suss out how the crypto works.
I didn't get the Kirby size wrong either. I said MegaBITs not bytes.
My uncompressed Kirby's Adventure rom is 786448 bytes. 786448 bytes times 8 bits is 6291584 bits. Typical 7800 titles only manage to be 1 megabit by comparison or less. Even allowing for padding and inefficiency (NES carts were partitioned into code and graphics segments. doubt there is much inefficiency there) the NES was getting bigger games and more developer and artist attention.
I'll also note that BallBlazer includes a POKEY chip; this chip was the sound/IO chip for the A8 Home Computers and also used in many arcade titles. It is one of only two or three 7800 titles that do. Commando was the only other title to include it then and there are now a few homebrews that employ it. In good hands which LucasFilm Games were, POKEY can generate good results. Furthermore those music routines originate with the A8 version of the game. Be that as it may, POKEY was designed in the seventies to generate sound effects first and foremost and music second and is fairly primitive compared to the device in the NES. The 7800 cart port has an audio in so other chips in practice could be used but so far as I know none were. GCC had an economical yet capable one mostly designed but Tramiel killed it. Nice to see some love for it from a C64 lover though :-).
All other 7800 titles use the 2600 TIA chip for sound. Since the 7800 has a few more cycles to burn driving it; it can sound better than it does in the 2600 but it doesn't even begin to rival the sound device in the NES much less the POKEY which is basically a more capable (more channels, divisors, etc) but similar design.
I do believe that leaves Starfox as the only thing I got well and truly wrong.
So I goofed a bit on the sizes and Starfox, big deal. Nonetheless, going by your figures NES games max out twice as large as the biggest 7800 titles and it turns out the contents of the Kirby's Adventure rom is 768K and I have never heard of a 7800 title that large (and a hexdump of it tells me it isn't mostly padding either). And the 7800 only has Scrapyard Dog in that genre. And it isn't all some sort of inefficiency bloat relative to the 7800. The levels in Kirby are large and there are many of them. I just had a gander at my 7800 roms. Most are 128K and the 7800 couldn't have had more than 1 or two titles larger than that. A further look at my two rom collections show that NES titles were routinely larger than 128K and it's game content. At one time I could beat Midnight Mutants in 15 minutes. Fun game but the game world was pretty tiny compared to the many NES games in that style. It's library was heavy with arcade style games in a world that buying up Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Karnov, and so-forth. The 7800 pretty much missed the 7800 and RPG train.
Incidentally, I have a 7800 and a pretty large library and have put quite few hours in on BallBlazer. So I know and love it well. Yeah, the NES won't do that style of 3D well but with these 8-bits especially it is easy to produce an example game that showcases the platform's strengths and use it as an argument for absolute superiority. Hell I even know where there's an A8 vs. C-64 thread that's been raging since November and it's just one screenshot and YouTube flick after another. None of which changes the fact the Commie led the market over the A8 for a number of good reasons not all of which were purely technical.
Nintendo did a better job of reading the market and creating new markets. They engineered a system that scrolled large tiled worlds around very well then sold the hell out of sprawling adventures. The 7800 wasn't as good at that but the Tramiels weren't going to support it in any case. I didn't get THAT part wrong, and you're getting me wrong. I have a 7800 and an NES and played the 7800 much more. I happen to prefer the style but I understand why it lost. It wasn't technically superior in some areas that were important (sound and tiled graphics) and it wasn't well supported or marketed by Atari. If I liked things like Mike Tyson Punch-Out and Super Mario World then the 7800 just wasn't going to deliver. It matters not whether it could in practice.
The INTY control disc was a digital pad that could register 16 directions vs 8 for most any other d-pad or digital joystick. The only thing that will get anywhere near it for emulation is an analog thumbstick and even then the emulator really has to take care to capture that aspect well.
Not that it mattered much but the NES won't do something like Robotron as well. Moving lots of objects around fast and flicker free isn't a strength but then that isn't the type of game it was engineered for.
I think too that the controller on the Inty often worked against it. It was great for the deeper strategy games and war sims but I hated playing anything twitch with it like AstroSmash (speaking of which the 2600 port doesn't compare badly). Intellivision games were often true to their name in another way. You had to read the manual to play many of them whereas 2600 titles tended much more in the pick up and play direction. I know many of my buddies at the time saw many Intellivision games as "hard". At that time "hard-core" gamers didn't command the influence they do now and Atari seemed to understand this better than Mattel. I had an 800XL and even then preferred computers with keyboards for that sort of gaming.
The 7800 deserved to lose to the NES for several reasons and I'm pretty much a hater when it comes to the pastel palleted cutesy flickerfest that was the NES. The main technical strength of the 7800 is that it is good at bashing lots of sprites around. This makes for very solid ports of some classic arcade games. Food Fight and Robotron are excellent on this system. But it's big weaknesses compared to the NES is that it isn't good at scrolling large tiled screens around in different directions and they made the moronic decision to use the 2600's TIA chip for sound.
The 7800 was designed in '83 to out ColecoVision the ColecoVision. The game library is heavy with games like Asteroids, Robotron, Donkey Kong, and Dig Dug as well lots of scrolling shooters. In the post-Crash world of '86 strong arcade ports weren't as big a selling point. Super Mario Bros. was the pack-in for every NES I ever saw and Nintendo created a entirely new market with games like this: large story-driven worlds with lots of tricks, secrets, and wrinkles. And the NES had a decent sound chip to supply the music and sound effects for these games.
The 7800 could do games like that but they were harder to develop and there were factors other than the technical vs. the NES. Atari at this point had alienated their reseller market which made getting 7800 stuff into the stores hard. And then there were the Tramiels. Sam Tramiel didn't want to be in the videogame business at all. To him they were just a source of funding for the computer division. So cheapness dominated every aspect of the 7800. GCC had all but finished a better soundchip that could have either been built into carts or included in the 7800 proper and wasn't terribly expensive but it was axed. Including the POKEY from the A8 computers in the unit itself was likewise axed and it was only used in a handful of carts. Tramiel also refused to authorize enhanced carts with bigger PROMs, more memory, extra processing, and better sound. The NES had many 4 megabit titles and Kirby weighed in at 6 megabits. Titles like StarFox even had hardware to spruce up the graphics. I don't believe any 7800 release was larger than 128K. Tramiel also wasn't willing to spend much on marketing, licensing, or wooing 3rd party development.
On the other hand, the 2600 isn't as wimpy compared to the Intellivision as Plympton made it out to be. Put a little RAM and larger PROMs in the carts and the 2600 can at least rival the Intellivision with games like TunnelRunner, Solaris, and Radar Lock. And the some of the RealSports narrowed or closed the gap as well. To be sure, early Inty titles outshine early 2600 titles.
http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html
There was a /. article about it a few years back. It always tries to choose the worst possible block for the next block coming up. Need that long 4 square block? You'll get a evilly oriented z-block....
Yeah. Yeah. Tell me more about this version of Jesus who casts about the landscape on a quest for succulent brains whilst preaching the love of his father.
Did they shout "Hip! Hip! Hooray!" too?
I don't entirely buy that. Most mainstream religions don't require a person to see themselves as worthy ONLY through the religion and most DON'T require as much offerings or tithing they can pressure you out of. There is a huge difference between the corner Baptist church where they don't get bent out of shape if you go to church with your Methodist friend some Sunday and a group like the Moonies. That Baptist church most likely isn't after you to sign over all your money and capital then sell yourself into virtual slavery to cross the Bridge as Scientology will.
Religions differ in the demands they make on parishioners and in the control exerted on them. Religions that make inordinate demands on your social, psychological, time, credulity, and financial resources deserve a pejorative and "cult" is as good as any.
There is plenty not to like about more mainstream religions like the Baptists and Southern Baptists especially but being a cult isn't one of them.