Re:Flash-only unfortunate?
on
Fahrenheit
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· Score: 1
> Its unfortunate because html would be viewable to > 100% of people. Did I need to explain that?
Well, yes. Do you mean by using HTML's <video> tag? Or, perhaps, through the... oh, god, this is so stupid I can't even make fun of it anymore.
Television is pretty hard to render in HTML, you'll find.
Re:When will society and government learn
on
Spy Fly
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· Score: 1
> Please tell me what would happen, if I gave some > monkeys, a button, and told the monkey not to > push the little red button which ends the world, > wait lets take it a step further, lets say I give > this power to thousands, millions of monkeys.
Probably not a whole lot, considering the relatively low likelihood of the monkeys speaking any language you do. (reads the rest of the post) On second thought...
Honestly, the simple answer is to observe that the fault here is not that of the monkeys, but the person giving them a button. Before you think that that plays right into your hands, let me ask you a question: when's the last time you were given a nuclear bomb to watch overnight? Me, it's been a couple'a months.
> How long until one of the monkeys pushes the > button?
If only the "submit [post]" button were red, I could make a funny joke here. Taco? Favor?
> For scientific minds reading this, the second law > of thermodynamics clearly explains in a very > logical way, that unless humans are educated and > evolve mentally as a whole, expect things to > collapse, with technologies like this here, the > atomic bomb, soon nano technology, just wait > until it gets in the hands of bin laden, the > next hitler, hell i wouldnt even trust these > technologies in the hands of george bush or the > average american.
Yeah. The law that says chaos will increase clearly says a lot about what's gonna happen if humans don't evolve. (cough) And besides, since when is George Bush not an average American?
Here's a hint, by the way:
> So why are we busy creating technology after > technology without educating people in how to > responsibly use these technologies we create?
Oh, because the typical american doesn't have time for the ~10 years it takes to learn nuclear physics, #insert remarks about lasers, ballistics, chemistry, viral gene therapy, etc.
> Are we supposed to be proud of our technology > which will be used to spy on millions of people, > ruin millions of lives, get people killed etc?
Generally, yes, as it's not the technologies but the ways in which they are used that are reprehensible. Hate guns? Hope you enjoyed your 4th of july fireworks. Not a fan of nuclear bombs? Well, hope you don't live on the midwest power grid. Dislike chemical weapons? Guess you don't like plastics, which save more lives than you realize, or cleansers, of which can be said the same. Not a fan of biological weapons? Try not to get cancer.
How come nobody bitches about knives anymore? More people die to metal blade wounds than gun wounds in the US every day. Or don't you care, because you want to cut your steak and open your boxes?
Quit blaming technology for mankind's ills, you fucking feeb.
----
A side note:
> Why do we need a 350-400 billion military budget > yet only a 20 billion dollar school budget?
Whereas I'm all for greater spending in schools, I think that the painfully obvious answer here is that textbooks aren't quite as expensive as armored tanks.
Software development is difficult to parallelize. Eight-ten years is a good bet given an optimum use of programmer time. See: The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with TMM, as well as TPOP and Code Complete. It's not software, but modules which are difficult to parallelize. This is one of the extreme advantages of OO design (which Windows relies heavily upon) in large projects: once the interface is guaranteed, you don't have to wait for your coworker to get done.
I doubt China gives a damn about violating Microsoft's copyright.
As do I. If you had bothered to take the time to read what I wrote, you'll notice that I was not the one talking about copyrights. Then again, if you had bothered to think before you'd posted, you'd realize that writing your own software doesn't violate any copyrights ever, so I guess it's a matter of what to make fun of first.
Windows 2000 is a better future base to develop on than Windows 98. Microsoft has been trying to replace Windows 9x with the NT line for the last 8 years now.
Except that they're not developing on Win98. They're just allowing the interfaces to be supported. The reason M$ wants away from 98 is because it's built on the DOs core, which in inherently difficult for multiuser memory protection models, and nearly always results in flawed hacked implementations. Nothing says that China's replacement would carry DOS' flaws simply because it can respond to the requests Windows applications make. See WINE, Lindows.
Group X cannot complete copying Product 2, Revision 4. Besides, it's foolish for them not to try to mimic Product 3, Edition 4. (sighs). Think about it, dumbass. It suggests that they just got their hands on Windows 98 source code and went with it.
The funniest part about this is that the article which you seem to have failed to read explicitly states that it is being built on Linux. Not only are you calling me a dumbass for not assuming your conspiracy theory, but you've failed to do the basic requisite reading to have half a clue what you're talking about. Would you like fries with that?
You smell like poo.
Most people cannot smell through a modem. Perhaps you should check your upper lip.
> You'd be surprised how far a low-ping quality > IDSL can go for as many people as are on it. > Its definitely far and away better than ISDN or > dial-up
No, it isn't. IDSL is ISDN. The only difference is that it's routed through the DSLAM cap router, which typically has you in a locked position on your ATM cloud, so you don't have to wait for a handshake. Oh, and because it's got a different name, they can charge you double.
It's an extraordinarily expensive and time consuming undertaking. We're talking about 10 years of development for talented, well organized groups, with constant feedback, review, testing, and some degree of industry support.
See, it would have been much funnier if you'd said "oh yeah, you and what army?", because then the answer would have been far more obvious. So, let's go into the obvious. Which of the following do you expect is the most "extraordinarily" (*) time consuming and expensive task? Which is the least? (Hint: not #5)
1) Immunizing a populace of over one billion people, many rural in a sense that Americans do not understand, against the largest changing body of cross-species novel viruses on the globe 2) Building a road infrastructure to the geographically largest country on earth, over 50% of which is essentially in the city infrastructure dark ages 3) Building and testing an operating system whose APIs are well known and have been documented for over 5 years, which has a number of open- and closed-source emulation packages already running for examples, and adding really large font support 4) Managing the world's largest military 5)Dealing with hosers like you
Other simple, mildly funny, painfully obvious examples exist by the metric assload. I feel I should point out that if both a company (Lindows) and the Open Source community (WINE) can do it, certainly, so can a government with a huge vested interest and pockets deeper than even the original creators could dream of.
There's no way China developed this from scratch, this fast,
Oh, yeah, because if Microsoft can make it from 95 to 98 in three years when it's cutting edge, still in development, and unknown, then years later, when it's well documented, something with at least twenty times the programmers, five years' worth of compiler development, five years' worth of compilation time increase and god knows how much deeper pockets couldn't possibly do it from scratch.
with their resources,
Do you believe that Microsoft has greater resources than the People's Republic of China?
A hint: nearly 10% of Chinese work for their government. Nearly 0.5% of those are programmers, resulting in 0.05% of the population being chinese government programmers.
Microsoft's Windows team is the largest commercial programming group in existance at ~1,400 programmers, IIRC.
Which means that, let's see, 0.5% of let's be generous and say a flat billion, which is way low, is a measely two hundred thousand. So, China must dedicate equal money (not a problem) and 0.007% of their programmers to match resources.
Gasp. Choke, even.
Cloning Windows 98 of all things doesn't make sense either. Windows 2000 is more stable, extensible, powerful.
Group X cannot complete copying Product 2, Revision 4. Besides, it's foolish for them not to try to mimic Product 3, Edition 4. (sighs)
If they can't do 98, they certainly can't do 2000. I think they could actually do either, and just don't want to waste time on 2000, which provides no significant value.
Oh, and here's yet another hint: if they're starting from scratch, IT DOESN'T MATTER IF WIN98 IS STABLE. They'll have all new code, remember? Or do you think that because they look and feel the same, one will nessecarily have the flaws of the other?
Besides, if they need something more than the original provided, they can add it. Remember, since they're writing it, they have both the source code and the engineers.
Do you think when you post, or just try to find things to argue with?
It's either Linux + WINE + custom hacks, or they probably got their hands on Windows 98 source code and did some global search and replaces.
Oh, yeah, because nobody would notice the extreme similarity in the binaries. Microsoft would *never* think to check for something which could net them tens of billions of dollars. Microsoft hasn't ever litigated anything, ever.
exclaim($jesus . $mary . $joseph); die();
(On a seperate note, I'm not refuting
We're talking about 10 years of development for talented, well organized groups
because there are so many funny jokes you can make with the observation that Microsoft did it in three years.)
(*) Extraordinary: outside of the ordinary. You cannot use "extraordinary" to describe the typical cost of building something, doltish. Turn the histrionicator off and try to use words you understand, please.
Now though with the cheap USB storage devices hitting the market the concept of dongles might come back. Although the only way to truely secure it would be with a strong cryptographic code to secure both the device itself and the traffic between the device and the software. Althogh you still come down to the fundemental problem that the information is still passing through the users computer and is open to sniffing and cracking.
Steps to crack:
Find function which checks for dongle
Find successful response datagram
Alter binary to change dongle-check function's caller pointer to that of new function
Cause new function to always return success datagram
Include 3l33t installer, text ph1lz, and greetz to various 14-year-olds
...we all unite and call ourselves europeans and make fun of the americans (not including canadians).
(blinks) Isn't that sort of like "The Germans, not including The French" ?
I love it when a European tells me that an average American is so badly schooled that the average European better knows their American history. After asking them who Malcolm Little is, which they never know, and after patiently listening to how some hollywood movie has history all wrong (what a shocker, that), I usually give them an example of classy European geography like this, and send them on their way.
Another thing - you mistakenly state that the GBA has a Z-buffer. WTF? As someone who claims to be developing a 3D engine for the GBA, you must be aware that the GBA most certainly doesn't have a Z buffer. It doesn't even have any polygon rendering hardware.
(grins) Yet another reason not to post stoned.:) Same reason I didn't really grammar or html check; it's a minor miracle i didn't screw any of those links up.
Development of the SGADE has changed hands (to me), and is now continuing full force.
Congratulations! Jaap's code was instrumental in helping me grok the hardware; I'm happy to hear that his work is being maintained and extended. The best of luck to you; SGADE is (imho) a critical thing: an amateur environment which could be made legitimate by being sued by a commercial product. This is (again imho) HAM's critical fault, and besides, I like your name better.:)
Okay. Some stuff I missed, after reading through the questions.
The hardware supports carts up to 256 megabit (32mb) in size. There are flash carts which have more space, however, through software bank switching. No commercial ROM currently even hits the hardware size limit (manufactureing costs, it is widely believed, are to blame; it may be the case that Big N limits the available size of carts to both themselves and third parties)
Yes, a linux distro would fit. No, it wouldn't be any fun without a keyboard. Yes, TCP/IP has already been done (a working webserver, which IIRC was even on SlashDot already. That's what caused me to try to post the homebrew dev scene the first time.)
Emulators: there are about a dozen good ones around; many stick to VisualBoy Advance and Mappy Virtual Machine for development. VBA is often regarded as the best and fastest emulation, and Mappy is usually seen as having the best debugging tools (source-level breakpoints, register viewing, disassembly, viewers for most of the important chunks of RAM, etc). VBA interfaces with GNU debuggers, but I'm lazy, and haven't tried it.
How good is the processor? Good enough to emulate an NES? Yes. In fact, there's a port of an emulator which runs NES binaries which were stapled onto the end of the emu binary out there already (it uses scaling and rotation to fit the otherwise too-large pictures; some detail is lost, so text often looks funny, etc). I have no linkage; sorry.
To be specific, the processor is an ARM7 TDMI running at approx 16 mhz. Also, the screen does 60hz refreshes, is 240x160, and has a bitmapped 15bpp color mode (among other modes, including z-buffered modes). The programmer is afforded extreme memory mapping flexability by the hardware; it's more fun than a Rubix' Cube.
Sorry - should have clarified - the ones I listed are all emulators for the GBA. Sorry, but not even remotely close. You didn't even get the popular ones. There's a pretty decent list here, at Zophar's Domain (a pretty good dev site)
Descent is probably beyond the GBA's capabilities, since it uses arbitrarily-angled perspective-correct textured polygons, which are a fair bit harder to render on a low-end CPU (the GBA has a 16MHz ARM7 CPU).You should see some of the stuff that's going on. There are a number of fully textured 3D engines out there, one of which actually uses Descent levels as its examples! (I linked to another in my previous post which uses the quake level 1) A good example is the Raylight engine, though there are probably a dozen that I've seen (and a few proprietary, one of which I'm about halfway done writing:) )
Hey, maybe we'll see Tux Racer for the GBA? That'd be tight. Quite possible. A racer wouldn't be difficult - the floor is a mode 7 S/R background, the sprites are prerendered, and there's enough VRAM that they don't need to be DMAed into place or anything (though people do that anyway, often enough [grins])
Actually, how low-level is the API? Any chance someone could get Linux running on one of these babies?"The API" isn't. HAM has an engine, SGADE has an engine, there are others (I don't use them), and there are some commercial ones. But, here's the thing: the hardware does a lot of stuff. Sprites and backgrounds are supported in hardware, and do scaling and blending stuff, etc. It's just register tweakage. You don't really need an API.
Big N does send an API of some sort, but I'm not a licensed developer, so I know dick about it. I'm told it's not that much of a difference - mostly just wrapper functions.
well if you realyl want to consider assembler an API, that is your answer. ARM flavored assmebler. We're not stuck to Assembly. Though there are about six assemblers in common use (the one that gets most use as not just part of a toolchain seems to be GoldRoad, but because I don't use assembly except in-line, I have a biased perspective), there are also a buttload of C and C++ and so forth compilers. Because Gnu's Compiler Collection (GCC does not mean gnu's c compiler) works and is the common compiler for the homebrew platform, you also have access to *compiled* java, pascal, and I think Objective C and Forth, or Fortran, or something that starts with an F. Too lazy to go check.:)
There are other compilers which can target the platform. Commercial people often use the ARMADS or SDT. Other tools, like the Metaware toolchain and the Green Hills Optimizing Compiler (it's part of the name, not a parroted description, settle down) are commonly used because of their purported performance. Far from being an expert myself, I'll just point you at the Dhrystone that David Welch graciously presented to the community.
I was planning on trying to develop something on my friends PS2 when he got the Linux kit. But since I actually own a GBA, this is a much more worthy project. More worthy, but more difficult. You'll want a flash cart and linker - the hardware is still the only perfect binary executor, though VBA is pretty impressive. All told, the PS2 Linux kit isn't more expensive, and it's hella more fun in the long run (Tux Racer on a console anyway, doncha know!)
At about $70 (Game Boy Advanced, Amazon price [amazon.com]), you can create custom games, ports of other things, etc. This sounds to me like a much more practical thing to purchase to play around with the the PS2, which is in at least the $500 range to start hacking your own stuff for. You're counting just the hardware in one, but the hardware and the mod stuff in the other. $200 (ps2) + $200 (Linux kit) is $400. There was a recent price drop. $70 (AGB) + $40 (USB Flasher) + $15 (Power cable for flasher) + $10 (Parallel cord) + ~$100 (Average flash cart - price varies by size) = $235. Granted, a $175 price difference, but not what you implied. Also, a lot of us already have both. Then, the price of a homebrew kit actually weighs in the other direction, and the AGB is small and limiting enough that unless you really want to, it's a pain of a challenge.
It would be interesting to know how many people will create practical, non-game applications. I know there are many non-game attachments, like a TV tuner and digital camera available for the unit. There are already music sequencers, methods of connecting it (realtime!) to a PC for chatter, MIDI sequencers, connections to serve as visualizers for various kinds of data collectors (think forest service), and a host of weird homebrew things that aren't exactly games. I expect quite a few more over time; I'm working on one in a half-assed way right now. Moreover, over time I expect level editors for at least homebrew games, and possibly for commercial games; would you call those applications?
This would totally rule.. I'd love to see Nethack for the GB. I'm currently working on a Palm version, and of course, it'll work on Windows CE, but honestly, wouldn't Nethack be an awesome alternative to bejeweled on the bus?Shhh... Shen Mansell already has Moshpit put together, and there are three or four people already rumbling about alternatives on the list. Also, note that I'm on alt.games.roguelike.development making an ass of myself all the time... (For those who may be Ccurious, a BooFly is a creature which looks like Will Riker and which doesn't meet me for coffee at E3. Thpppbbt.)
I think that companies like Nintendo and Sony and such should sell stipped down dev kits for like, say $50... including software you'd need and maybe a transfer cable. This gets kicked around a lot in the chatrooms and on the dev lists. The consensus seems to be that yeah, it'd be nice, but though a lot of people would really use it for what it was for, a whole lot of people would use it to pirate games, and besides, Big N's licensing fees per cart and hegemony on software support their business model, so they'd be hurting themselves anyway. In conclusion: not bloody likely.
No disrespect to the great underground game hackers out there, but I don't think there is much of a risk of an uber fantastic game like Gran Tourismo 3 getting put out. Whereas art and sound resources usually make this true, with time, they actually often do. Take a look into the very mature NES or 2600 development scenes; you'll see things you'd never imagine possible (for instance, someone ported the Z-Machine interpreter Frotz to the GameBoy Advance as GBA Frotz, which seems impressive until you realize that the no$gmb guy, who I think is Martin Korth or something, and who really needs to put his damn name in his bio page, did it for the gameboy(!) in *8* *K* of RAM (far smaller than the real Z-Machine was supposed to be), and it works fine! Linkage
Homebrew developers thrive on being told it can't be done. The more you tell them they can't do commercial stuff, the more you're going to see commercial stuff done. That's what got me started.:)
Yes, Craig Rothwell is reliable (someone else's post). Also, though Lik-Sang is reliable (that's where I got mine), right now cyustoms is banning the import of these, and so you won't get one even if lik-sang mails it to you. Craig Rothwell currently goes under their radar, but don't try him if you're seeing this post a month or so old - things may have changed (they often do, unfortunately). The best thing to do is to go to the Yahoo! Group and ask; you'll get a lot of replies in 48 hours.
I know that the Game Cube can use GBA as controllers. I am not sure what the interface protocol is like, though. Do you think that it might be possible to make custom GBA carts for Cube games, that provide enhancements (cheats, etc) to a game playing on the Cube? No. The GC uses half-size DVD discs which are difficult to burn and which have not yet had their protections cracked or circumvented. Things may change later.
So does this mean that with the ROMS that are for the SNES, we could somehow make our own port of say "Secret of Mana" (or some other SNES title) for the GBA? That would be awesome! Though probably not awesome enough for me to spare time to learn this. If you're dedicated. you need to scale a lot of graphics down; the sound hardware is completely different, so the audio stuff will need to be wholly rewritten. There are odd considerations due to the different CPUs. But, yeah, many people have been porting SNES and Genesis games commercially; I don't see why a team of amateurs with lots of time and skill couldn't do the same. It's not easy, though, mind you.
This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. Pre-chewed pieces of pap! And shouldn't be teaching anyway!!@!3T1!! r00l!
I've submitted this maybe a half dozen times with more linkage. Oh, well.:)
The ability to program for the GameBoy Advance is *not* Linx or Mac only. The biggest group of developers centers around a partial build of GCC called "DevKit Advance", which has pre-made setups for Win32 and Linux. There are smaller communities each around "HAM", "SGADE", and "GCCGBA" - all Win32 prebuilt only. If you've ever built your own GCC, however, you can build to GBA, and that means you can build from damn near *anywhere*.
Good places to go to learn:
IRC: #gbadev on EfNet - fairly active channel full of developers, mostly amateur but a few commercial. DO NOT ASK FOR ROMS OR COMPILER DOCS HERE! You would be summarily banned. This is a legit ONLY channel.
Yahoo! Groups "GbaDev". Many of the same crowd as above, but a larger populace, and by email, not realtime chat. Also, there are archives.:) Many of your problems - even surprisingly difficult ones - can be answered just by digging through the archives. Moderated.
There are more tutorials than just The Pern Project, but I can only ever remember that one.:) I got started before that tutorial, so I have no idea of its quality (many people seem to have started with it)
Compilers:
SGADE - The Socrates GameBoy Advance Development Environment - Good, complete, fairly easy to install, completely unrestricted open source. Developer is tireds and overbusy, and wants someone to take over the development. (Yahoo group also available
HAMFree for non-commercial development. Has an installer; fairly painless for Win32 people. There are requirements about using is commercially which I personally do not dig.
DevKitAdvance - The modified distro of GCC that the bulk of us use. You'll see Jason's name on GCC mailing lists from time to time. Thanks, Fenix. (This is the kit I use, though rather heavily modified)
Someone whined and GCCGBA was taken away from us, because it wasn't a whole GCC distro or something (the discussion was never made public, and I'm going by rumor); the remaining packages don't seem to have trouble, but I'm a little will happen to other compilers over time.
Quake Level 1 displayed realtime on gameboy: Article and Video
Miscellaneous news sites with links to code and tools:
GbaDev.org - The canonical news source, especially since AGBDEV.NET died. Most things are covered here. Those that aren't can be found at
Jeff Froweihn's Devrs.Com. Jeff Froweihn wrote the lnkscript and various other stuff that you're likely using if use use the homebrew community's stuff. Thank him. Also, he maintains an aswesome, if difficult to take in at once, news site.
Anyway, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it's a start, and you can get to most of the good ones from there by linkage. If anyone needs a hand, my email address at slash should work.
StoneCyph on EfNet, johnisaheadcase / Fatty diZilla on mailing list
For all of the ranting I see about how on this coast you have to deal with this problem, and yadda yadda yadda, I feel that I should mention that in Pittsburgh - a beautiful city with a wonderful, kind, and funny speaking people - the worst we have to deal with are icy steps.
The first tornado of the century happened on Mount Wa(r)shington, and scattered a bunch of roof tiles. Our last earthquake was in 1983, and nobody noticed - it was a 0.7, the biggest we've had since the Richter scale was invented. The rivers flood, but we're a very hilly city, so that means we lose about 20 feet of docks every 10 years or so. Our idea of a hurricane is a big fat drunk Yinzer (if you've been here, you know what a Yinzer is.)
There's no truth the the idea that everywhere has weather problems of serious magnitude. Stop living on coasts, on plains, on fault lines, and near volcanoes, and you're free. Hilly inland cities in stable mountains are pretty sweet. And if it isn't in the mountain tops (*cough* Colorado *cough*) or in Albany somewhere, you don't have to deal with ridiculous snow, either.
Hell, if it weren't for all the people from Ohio that live there, Cleveland would be pretty swag, too.
Yeah, see, here's the thing. If my keyboard is coated in scum, bacteria and filth, it's still *my* scum, bacteria, and filth. I can't give myself something I don't already have.
Whereas that public toilet... Herpes can be transmitted that way. ('course, I still use public toilets, because I don't fear the invisible killer and wash my hands nine times after they touch the atmosphere...)
> I wonder what it is that makes us so skeptical > of the perceptions of others when it comes to > books, but so eager to hear the opinions of > others when we're talking about movies.
Oh, because Slashdot reviews highly technical books, where details matter greatly, and looks at highly stupid movies, where if the average Joe had fun, you probably will, too.
> So, I'm not sure what you are referring to that > makes this a "remake". Sounds to me like the > same game.
Space HoRSE is neither a remake nor a port. It is a ripoff. Think of Rise of the Triad, compared to Wolfenstein. It's got no apparent new stuff (maybe a few more races and events), the market model looks virtually identical (they're even using the players' pictures' positions on parallel lines as indicators in the market scene! good thing they changed from horizontal to vertical... ), et cetera.
God, it's depressing when you can't even make words up for a foreign language that sound half as funny as the real ones.
Even being Norweigan (by descent, not nationality) I have a hard time imagining the population of Iceland not laughing themselves silly looking through a phone book.
Or Croatia, for that matter. If you have parents from Iceland and Croatia, and live in Hollywood, does that mean your last name is Hillary Czrzstk-Sjollboortsson?
> Maybe you intended that to be a joke, but it's > not quite that simple. The hydrogen would have > to be highly compressed to make transport > economical.
You mean compressed by the blimp walls, right?
(sighs) Strap a fan on its ass and it flies. How much more economical do you need to be? A car battery and a $5.99 house fan from Office Depot should get you there faster than Amtrak, anyway.
> I also look forward to the day when SVG is a > widely available and widely supported browser > option. We can all benefit when complex layouts > can be described in terms of vectors and colour > fills rather than overlarge and complex bitmaps > for the classic web page touches like 3D colour > balls and arrows.
(cough)
It's called Flash, and it's been common since before *NG (the graphics that are cool because "network" is in the name.)
PHP has been able to make Flash on the fly for a few years, IIRC.
God forbid you report on an issue which has anything other than completely unresolvable content, such as the current debacle wherein Yahoo! has flown against the explicit directions of *all* of its customers, changed their marketing preferences to "yes", and sold their personal data against their will.
Or that the BBB won't touch the issue, that the FCC won't reply to the issue, that TrustE's submission form doesn't work, and that they won't respond to *any* email.
No, no: another 9/11 sensationalism. Jon, please, listen to the people when they tell you that they don't want to think about that for a while. Stop picking at the scabs.
> They assert that competing systems usually only > provide 128-bit security, but theirs provides > 5000-10000-bit security, because that's roughly > the sizes of encryption programs they pass > between client and server. Yes, that's an upper > bound on the possible complexity, but most of > those bits are the expression of the program, > not the key itself.
You know, you're right in the tone of your article. I want to point out a missed detail which makes it even funnier, though: they don't claim to have 5,000-10,000 bit security. They claim to have 5000-(2^10,000) bit security.
That's 1.995something x10^3010. Yes, there are more than three thousand digits in that number, decimal.
And all you need to do is use this little algo (which they say isn't an algo) to generate the one-time pad (which is generated, so it's regeneratable) and it's uncrackable!
> I have a 200MHz StrongARM in my Gameboy > Advance. The SNES had a 3MHz processor. The GBA > is a bit more powerful than the SNES, but not > by the same delta as a 4MHz 8086 and a 200MHz > Pentium!
Whereas the sentiment of the note is correct, I suggest you follow through with some fact checking. The processor in the GameBoy Advance is an ARM7 TDMI, running at 16.78 mHz.
Even so, it should be noted that the Emotion Engine's IPC and so forth (as IPC and mHz aren't everything either, no matter what AMD's webpage told you) aren't as impressive as everyone here seems to think they are.
What's important about the PS2 with regards to speed are a few things: bandwidth (it's just sickening), two reconfigurable vector computation engines (VU0 and VU1 - seems like they might be great for a lot of beowulfish stuff, but then, I have no idea how those clusters really run, so take that with a grain of salt), and the following slap in the face: because all of the comparsions you read were using the DreamCast as the watermark at the time.
The machine, if used aggressively, can still tangle with the GameCube. How it fares against the XBox is the subject of debate; my personal belief is that with careful use it could surpass the XBox, but many people disagree (some feel the higher instruction processing rate is the deciding factor, which would give the issue to the XBox; others feel that the cache problems of an instruction-oriented architecture outweigh the benefits when considered against the bandwidth oriented architecture, which would give it to the PS2, at the cost of being very difficult to write to.)
Moreover, there are facets of the XBox like realtime Dolby 5.1 compression of generated audio which the PS2 has to dedicate a VU to hope to match (this is a significant chunk of the PS2's processing power, making this a Bad Thing).
> [The GameCube ] is otherwise architecturally > quite remote from a PC.
Not really. Certainly not as far as the PS2, and arguably not even as far as a PS1. Whereas the bus layout and memory maps are completely different, you'll find that things like a normal opcode list make a bigger difference in the long run anyway - I mean, really, nobody in the industry uses magic numbers; it's all a macro called VRAM anyway. On the other hand, you really do use assembly, and quite often.
> Again, "very fast" is completely relative.
Not really. The SNES was "really fast" when it came out, and now it's dog slow. It's relative to what the consumer expects. The judgement made solely on experience, while not being hindered by expectations regarding numbers, operating system concerns, et cetera, is a better measure (in my mind) of "really fast" than anything else.
I mean, we've had Crays which pound your box (whatever it is) into the ground for probably 20 years. Is your box still really fast? Yes: Quake gets three digit frame rates, and even IE doesn't lag.
Now quit doting so much on numbers for subjective judgements. "Fast" doesn't have a number attatched to it in the dictionary, does it?
> The XBOX may have a 700MHz Celery (which is > kinda slow anyway, but an OK general-purpose > CPU),
For someone talking about the relativity of speed, you're certainly not thinking about it much. Consider the previous generations of chip, and the current. A celery 700 is more than plenty fast.
> but take away its graphics accelerator and > you'll be lucky to rival a SNES or PSX.
I don't honestly believe you have any idea what you're talking about, no offense. My 486/33 was able to emulate the SNES in DOS mode, which means it was eating the CPU, graphics cards, sound cards, and so forth all on its lonesome.
If you can't tell the difference between a 486/33 and a Celery 700, you're not qualified to be talking about relative machine speeds. No offense. And, hey: go have alook at Bleem!'s requirements.
> The PS2's core is rather tied together, but > even though it's 300MHz, it can push a decent > amount of polys.
The Emotion Engine doesn't push any polys at all, ever. Did you do any research before claiming to know what was going on under the hood? Vertex pushing is almost always solely the province of the Graphics Synthesizer, and sometimes the VU units.
> Oh, and to be somewhat on topic, anything Sony > says about the PS3 is likely complete hype at > this point.
It's been in development for almost two years. I bet they have a general idea of how it's going to work.
> I know just as well as the next guy how the > market[t]ing deal works.
Slashdot Mirror
> Its unfortunate because html would be viewable to
... oh, god, this is so stupid I can't even make fun of it anymore.
> 100% of people. Did I need to explain that?
Well, yes. Do you mean by using HTML's <video> tag? Or, perhaps, through the
Television is pretty hard to render in HTML, you'll find.
> Please tell me what would happen, if I gave some
> monkeys, a button, and told the monkey not to
> push the little red button which ends the world,
> wait lets take it a step further, lets say I give
> this power to thousands, millions of monkeys.
Probably not a whole lot, considering the relatively low likelihood of the monkeys speaking any language you do. (reads the rest of the post) On second thought...
Honestly, the simple answer is to observe that the fault here is not that of the monkeys, but the person giving them a button. Before you think that that plays right into your hands, let me ask you a question: when's the last time you were given a nuclear bomb to watch overnight? Me, it's been a couple'a months.
> How long until one of the monkeys pushes the
> button?
If only the "submit [post]" button were red, I could make a funny joke here. Taco? Favor?
> For scientific minds reading this, the second law
> of thermodynamics clearly explains in a very
> logical way, that unless humans are educated and
> evolve mentally as a whole, expect things to
> collapse, with technologies like this here, the
> atomic bomb, soon nano technology, just wait
> until it gets in the hands of bin laden, the
> next hitler, hell i wouldnt even trust these
> technologies in the hands of george bush or the
> average american.
Yeah. The law that says chaos will increase clearly says a lot about what's gonna happen if humans don't evolve. (cough) And besides, since when is George Bush not an average American?
Here's a hint, by the way:
> So why are we busy creating technology after
> technology without educating people in how to
> responsibly use these technologies we create?
Oh, because the typical american doesn't have time for the ~10 years it takes to learn nuclear physics, #insert remarks about lasers, ballistics, chemistry, viral gene therapy, etc.
> Are we supposed to be proud of our technology
> which will be used to spy on millions of people,
> ruin millions of lives, get people killed etc?
Generally, yes, as it's not the technologies but the ways in which they are used that are reprehensible. Hate guns? Hope you enjoyed your 4th of july fireworks. Not a fan of nuclear bombs? Well, hope you don't live on the midwest power grid. Dislike chemical weapons? Guess you don't like plastics, which save more lives than you realize, or cleansers, of which can be said the same. Not a fan of biological weapons? Try not to get cancer.
How come nobody bitches about knives anymore? More people die to metal blade wounds than gun wounds in the US every day. Or don't you care, because you want to cut your steak and open your boxes?
Quit blaming technology for mankind's ills, you fucking feeb.
----
A side note:
> Why do we need a 350-400 billion military budget
> yet only a 20 billion dollar school budget?
Whereas I'm all for greater spending in schools, I think that the painfully obvious answer here is that textbooks aren't quite as expensive as armored tanks.
Software development is difficult to parallelize. Eight-ten years is a good bet given an optimum use of programmer time. See: The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with TMM, as well as TPOP and Code Complete. It's not software, but modules which are difficult to parallelize. This is one of the extreme advantages of OO design (which Windows relies heavily upon) in large projects: once the interface is guaranteed, you don't have to wait for your coworker to get done.
I doubt China gives a damn about violating Microsoft's copyright.
As do I. If you had bothered to take the time to read what I wrote, you'll notice that I was not the one talking about copyrights. Then again, if you had bothered to think before you'd posted, you'd realize that writing your own software doesn't violate any copyrights ever, so I guess it's a matter of what to make fun of first.
Windows 2000 is a better future base to develop on than Windows 98. Microsoft has been trying to replace Windows 9x with the NT line for the last 8 years now.
Except that they're not developing on Win98. They're just allowing the interfaces to be supported. The reason M$ wants away from 98 is because it's built on the DOs core, which in inherently difficult for multiuser memory protection models, and nearly always results in flawed hacked implementations. Nothing says that China's replacement would carry DOS' flaws simply because it can respond to the requests Windows applications make. See WINE, Lindows.
Group X cannot complete copying Product 2, Revision 4. Besides, it's foolish for them not to try to mimic Product 3, Edition 4. (sighs). Think about it, dumbass. It suggests that they just got their hands on Windows 98 source code and went with it.
The funniest part about this is that the article which you seem to have failed to read explicitly states that it is being built on Linux. Not only are you calling me a dumbass for not assuming your conspiracy theory, but you've failed to do the basic requisite reading to have half a clue what you're talking about. Would you like fries with that?
You smell like poo.
Most people cannot smell through a modem. Perhaps you should check your upper lip.
Parent is modded insightful? Compare quotes, please.
> > and tried to sell, online, the 5 oz. of moon
> > rocks
>
> But a few hundred pounds of moonrock are sure
> to be noticed
Apparently, a few hundred pounds are noticed even when they're not in the article. (sigh)
> You'd be surprised how far a low-ping quality
> IDSL can go for as many people as are on it.
> Its definitely far and away better than ISDN or
> dial-up
No, it isn't. IDSL is ISDN. The only difference is that it's routed through the DSLAM cap router, which typically has you in a locked position on your ATM cloud, so you don't have to wait for a handshake. Oh, and because it's got a different name, they can charge you double.
See WhatIs.
It's an extraordinarily expensive and time consuming undertaking. We're talking about 10 years of development for talented, well organized groups, with constant feedback, review, testing, and some degree of industry support.
See, it would have been much funnier if you'd said "oh yeah, you and what army?", because then the answer would have been far more obvious. So, let's go into the obvious. Which of the following do you expect is the most "extraordinarily" (*) time consuming and expensive task? Which is the least? (Hint: not #5)
1) Immunizing a populace of over one billion people, many rural in a sense that Americans do not understand, against the largest changing body of cross-species novel viruses on the globe
2) Building a road infrastructure to the geographically largest country on earth, over 50% of which is essentially in the city infrastructure dark ages
3) Building and testing an operating system whose APIs are well known and have been documented for over 5 years, which has a number of open- and closed-source emulation packages already running for examples, and adding really large font support
4) Managing the world's largest military
5) Dealing with hosers like you
Other simple, mildly funny, painfully obvious examples exist by the metric assload. I feel I should point out that if both a company (Lindows) and the Open Source community (WINE) can do it, certainly, so can a government with a huge vested interest and pockets deeper than even the original creators could dream of.
There's no way China developed this from scratch, this fast,
Oh, yeah, because if Microsoft can make it from 95 to 98 in three years when it's cutting edge, still in development, and unknown, then years later, when it's well documented, something with at least twenty times the programmers, five years' worth of compiler development, five years' worth of compilation time increase and god knows how much deeper pockets couldn't possibly do it from scratch.
with their resources,
Do you believe that Microsoft has greater resources than the People's Republic of China?
A hint: nearly 10% of Chinese work for their government. Nearly 0.5% of those are programmers, resulting in 0.05% of the population being chinese government programmers.
Microsoft's Windows team is the largest commercial programming group in existance at ~1,400 programmers, IIRC.
Which means that, let's see, 0.5% of let's be generous and say a flat billion, which is way low, is a measely two hundred thousand. So, China must dedicate equal money (not a problem) and 0.007% of their programmers to match resources.
Gasp. Choke, even.
Cloning Windows 98 of all things doesn't make sense either. Windows 2000 is more stable, extensible, powerful.
Group X cannot complete copying Product 2, Revision 4. Besides, it's foolish for them not to try to mimic Product 3, Edition 4. (sighs)
If they can't do 98, they certainly can't do 2000. I think they could actually do either, and just don't want to waste time on 2000, which provides no significant value.
Oh, and here's yet another hint: if they're starting from scratch, IT DOESN'T MATTER IF WIN98 IS STABLE. They'll have all new code, remember? Or do you think that because they look and feel the same, one will nessecarily have the flaws of the other?
Besides, if they need something more than the original provided, they can add it. Remember, since they're writing it, they have both the source code and the engineers.
Do you think when you post, or just try to find things to argue with?
It's either Linux + WINE + custom hacks, or they probably got their hands on Windows 98 source code and did some global search and replaces.
Oh, yeah, because nobody would notice the extreme similarity in the binaries. Microsoft would *never* think to check for something which could net them tens of billions of dollars. Microsoft hasn't ever litigated anything, ever.
exclaim($jesus . $mary . $joseph); die();
(On a seperate note, I'm not refuting
We're talking about 10 years of development for talented, well organized groups
because there are so many funny jokes you can make with the observation that Microsoft did it in three years.)
(*) Extraordinary: outside of the ordinary. You cannot use "extraordinary" to describe the typical cost of building something, doltish. Turn the histrionicator off and try to use words you understand, please.
Steps to crack:
Find function which checks for dongle
Find successful response datagram
Alter binary to change dongle-check function's caller pointer to that of new function
Cause new function to always return success datagram
Include 3l33t installer, text ph1lz, and greetz to various 14-year-olds
...we all unite and call ourselves europeans and make fun of the americans (not including canadians).
(blinks) Isn't that sort of like "The Germans, not including The French" ?
I love it when a European tells me that an average American is so badly schooled that the average European better knows their American history. After asking them who Malcolm Little is, which they never know, and after patiently listening to how some hollywood movie has history all wrong (what a shocker, that), I usually give them an example of classy European geography like this, and send them on their way.
Thanks for the ammo.
Another thing - you mistakenly state that the GBA has a Z-buffer. WTF? As someone who claims to be developing a 3D engine for the GBA, you must be aware that the GBA most certainly doesn't have a Z buffer. It doesn't even have any polygon rendering hardware.
:) Same reason I didn't really grammar or html check; it's a minor miracle i didn't screw any of those links up.
(grins) Yet another reason not to post stoned.
made legitimate by being sued
(Sighs) The thing I hate most about spell checkers is that they miss mistakes if the mistakes also spell valid words.
Used. . Obvious joke trolls, begone.
Stupid 2 minute filter made me rewrite this. Bleargh.
Development of the SGADE has changed hands (to me), and is now continuing full force.
:)
Congratulations! Jaap's code was instrumental in helping me grok the hardware; I'm happy to hear that his work is being maintained and extended. The best of luck to you; SGADE is (imho) a critical thing: an amateur environment which could be made legitimate by being sued by a commercial product. This is (again imho) HAM's critical fault, and besides, I like your name better.
Actually, how low-level is the API? Any chance someone could get Linux running on one of these babies?"The API" isn't. HAM has an engine, SGADE has an engine, there are others (I don't use them), and there are some commercial ones. But, here's the thing: the hardware does a lot of stuff. Sprites and backgrounds are supported in hardware, and do scaling and blending stuff, etc. It's just register tweakage. You don't really need an API.
Big N does send an API of some sort, but I'm not a licensed developer, so I know dick about it. I'm told it's not that much of a difference - mostly just wrapper functions.
There are other compilers which can target the platform. Commercial people often use the ARM ADS or SDT. Other tools, like the Metaware toolchain and the Green Hills Optimizing Compiler (it's part of the name, not a parroted description, settle down) are commonly used because of their purported performance. Far from being an expert myself, I'll just point you at the Dhrystone that David Welch graciously presented to the community.
Homebrew developers thrive on being told it can't be done. The more you tell them they can't do commercial stuff, the more you're going to see commercial stuff done. That's what got me started.
This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. Pre-chewed pieces of pap! And shouldn't be teaching anyway!!@!3T1!! r00l!
cough Sorry. Old habits die hard.
The ability to program for the GameBoy Advance is *not* Linx or Mac only. The biggest group of developers centers around a partial build of GCC called "DevKit Advance", which has pre-made setups for Win32 and Linux. There are smaller communities each around "HAM", "SGADE", and "GCCGBA" - all Win32 prebuilt only. If you've ever built your own GCC, however, you can build to GBA, and that means you can build from damn near *anywhere*.
Good places to go to learn:
Compilers:
Some interesting stuff that's been done:
Miscellaneous news sites with links to code and tools:
Anyway, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but it's a start, and you can get to most of the good ones from there by linkage. If anyone needs a hand, my email address at slash should work.
StoneCyph on EfNet, johnisaheadcase / Fatty diZilla on mailing list
For all of the ranting I see about how on this coast you have to deal with this problem, and yadda yadda yadda, I feel that I should mention that in Pittsburgh - a beautiful city with a wonderful, kind, and funny speaking people - the worst we have to deal with are icy steps.
The first tornado of the century happened on Mount Wa(r)shington, and scattered a bunch of roof tiles. Our last earthquake was in 1983, and nobody noticed - it was a 0.7, the biggest we've had since the Richter scale was invented. The rivers flood, but we're a very hilly city, so that means we lose about 20 feet of docks every 10 years or so. Our idea of a hurricane is a big fat drunk Yinzer (if you've been here, you know what a Yinzer is.)
There's no truth the the idea that everywhere has weather problems of serious magnitude. Stop living on coasts, on plains, on fault lines, and near volcanoes, and you're free. Hilly inland cities in stable mountains are pretty sweet. And if it isn't in the mountain tops (*cough* Colorado *cough*) or in Albany somewhere, you don't have to deal with ridiculous snow, either.
Hell, if it weren't for all the people from Ohio that live there, Cleveland would be pretty swag, too.
Yeah, see, here's the thing. If my keyboard is coated in scum, bacteria and filth, it's still *my* scum, bacteria, and filth. I can't give myself something I don't already have.
Whereas that public toilet... Herpes can be transmitted that way. ('course, I still use public toilets, because I don't fear the invisible killer and wash my hands nine times after they touch the atmosphere...)
If so, where can I go to find out what GCC is missing?
(I had to write this three times because of that damn 20 second after reply widget. Thanks, trolls.)
> I wonder what it is that makes us so skeptical
> of the perceptions of others when it comes to
> books, but so eager to hear the opinions of
> others when we're talking about movies.
Oh, because Slashdot reviews highly technical books, where details matter greatly, and looks at highly stupid movies, where if the average Joe had fun, you probably will, too.
> So, I'm not sure what you are referring to that
> makes this a "remake". Sounds to me like the
> same game.
Space HoRSE is neither a remake nor a port. It is a ripoff. Think of Rise of the Triad, compared to Wolfenstein. It's got no apparent new stuff (maybe a few more races and events), the market model looks virtually identical (they're even using the players' pictures' positions on parallel lines as indicators in the market scene! good thing they changed from horizontal to vertical... ), et cetera.
> Hitaveita Reykjavikur
> Nesjavellir
> Bjamarflag
> Námafjall
> Krafla
God, it's depressing when you can't even make words up for a foreign language that sound half as funny as the real ones.
Even being Norweigan (by descent, not nationality) I have a hard time imagining the population of Iceland not laughing themselves silly looking through a phone book.
Or Croatia, for that matter. If you have parents from Iceland and Croatia, and live in Hollywood, does that mean your last name is Hillary Czrzstk-Sjollboortsson?
Sorry. Back to the cage for me.
> Maybe you intended that to be a joke, but it's
> not quite that simple. The hydrogen would have
> to be highly compressed to make transport
> economical.
You mean compressed by the blimp walls, right?
(sighs) Strap a fan on its ass and it flies. How much more economical do you need to be? A car battery and a $5.99 house fan from Office Depot should get you there faster than Amtrak, anyway.
> I also look forward to the day when SVG is a
> widely available and widely supported browser
> option. We can all benefit when complex layouts
> can be described in terms of vectors and colour
> fills rather than overlarge and complex bitmaps
> for the classic web page touches like 3D colour
> balls and arrows.
(cough)
It's called Flash, and it's been common since before *NG (the graphics that are cool because "network" is in the name.)
PHP has been able to make Flash on the fly for a few years, IIRC.
For example, OmniHTTPd has been doing it for over half a decade.
> Thanks to our myopic and narcissistic media
God forbid you report on an issue which has anything other than completely unresolvable content, such as the current debacle wherein Yahoo! has flown against the explicit directions of *all* of its customers, changed their marketing preferences to "yes", and sold their personal data against their will.
Or that the BBB won't touch the issue, that the FCC won't reply to the issue, that TrustE's submission form doesn't work, and that they won't respond to *any* email.
No, no: another 9/11 sensationalism. Jon, please, listen to the people when they tell you that they don't want to think about that for a while. Stop picking at the scabs.
> They assert that competing systems usually only
> provide 128-bit security, but theirs provides
> 5000-10000-bit security, because that's roughly
> the sizes of encryption programs they pass
> between client and server. Yes, that's an upper
> bound on the possible complexity, but most of
> those bits are the expression of the program,
> not the key itself.
You know, you're right in the tone of your article. I want to point out a missed detail which makes it even funnier, though: they don't claim to have 5,000-10,000 bit security. They claim to have 5000-(2^10,000) bit security.
That's 1.995something x10^3010. Yes, there are more than three thousand digits in that number, decimal.
And all you need to do is use this little algo (which they say isn't an algo) to generate the one-time pad (which is generated, so it's regeneratable) and it's uncrackable!
(cough)
> I have a 200MHz StrongARM in my Gameboy
> Advance. The SNES had a 3MHz processor. The GBA
> is a bit more powerful than the SNES, but not
> by the same delta as a 4MHz 8086 and a 200MHz
> Pentium!
Whereas the sentiment of the note is correct, I suggest you follow through with some fact checking. The processor in the GameBoy Advance is an ARM7 TDMI, running at 16.78 mHz.
Even so, it should be noted that the Emotion Engine's IPC and so forth (as IPC and mHz aren't everything either, no matter what AMD's webpage told you) aren't as impressive as everyone here seems to think they are.
What's important about the PS2 with regards to speed are a few things: bandwidth (it's just sickening), two reconfigurable vector computation engines (VU0 and VU1 - seems like they might be great for a lot of beowulfish stuff, but then, I have no idea how those clusters really run, so take that with a grain of salt), and the following slap in the face: because all of the comparsions you read were using the DreamCast as the watermark at the time.
The machine, if used aggressively, can still tangle with the GameCube. How it fares against the XBox is the subject of debate; my personal belief is that with careful use it could surpass the XBox, but many people disagree (some feel the higher instruction processing rate is the deciding factor, which would give the issue to the XBox; others feel that the cache problems of an instruction-oriented architecture outweigh the benefits when considered against the bandwidth oriented architecture, which would give it to the PS2, at the cost of being very difficult to write to.)
Moreover, there are facets of the XBox like realtime Dolby 5.1 compression of generated audio which the PS2 has to dedicate a VU to hope to match (this is a significant chunk of the PS2's processing power, making this a Bad Thing).
> [The GameCube ] is otherwise architecturally
> quite remote from a PC.
Not really. Certainly not as far as the PS2, and arguably not even as far as a PS1. Whereas the bus layout and memory maps are completely different, you'll find that things like a normal opcode list make a bigger difference in the long run anyway - I mean, really, nobody in the industry uses magic numbers; it's all a macro called VRAM anyway. On the other hand, you really do use assembly, and quite often.
> Again, "very fast" is completely relative.
Not really. The SNES was "really fast" when it came out, and now it's dog slow. It's relative to what the consumer expects. The judgement made solely on experience, while not being hindered by expectations regarding numbers, operating system concerns, et cetera, is a better measure (in my mind) of "really fast" than anything else.
I mean, we've had Crays which pound your box (whatever it is) into the ground for probably 20 years. Is your box still really fast? Yes: Quake gets three digit frame rates, and even IE doesn't lag.
Now quit doting so much on numbers for subjective judgements. "Fast" doesn't have a number attatched to it in the dictionary, does it?
> The XBOX may have a 700MHz Celery (which is
> kinda slow anyway, but an OK general-purpose
> CPU),
For someone talking about the relativity of speed, you're certainly not thinking about it much. Consider the previous generations of chip, and the current. A celery 700 is more than plenty fast.
> but take away its graphics accelerator and
> you'll be lucky to rival a SNES or PSX.
I don't honestly believe you have any idea what you're talking about, no offense. My 486/33 was able to emulate the SNES in DOS mode, which means it was eating the CPU, graphics cards, sound cards, and so forth all on its lonesome.
If you can't tell the difference between a 486/33 and a Celery 700, you're not qualified to be talking about relative machine speeds. No offense. And, hey: go have alook at Bleem!'s requirements.
> The PS2's core is rather tied together, but
> even though it's 300MHz, it can push a decent
> amount of polys.
The Emotion Engine doesn't push any polys at all, ever. Did you do any research before claiming to know what was going on under the hood? Vertex pushing is almost always solely the province of the Graphics Synthesizer, and sometimes the VU units.
> Oh, and to be somewhat on topic, anything Sony
> says about the PS3 is likely complete hype at
> this point.
It's been in development for almost two years. I bet they have a general idea of how it's going to work.
> I know just as well as the next guy how the
> market[t]ing deal works.
You sure?
(sighs)