You know what, I will make it even easier for you. Install Dreamweaver CS3. Use default templates. Replace default graphics with some pics you take with a digital camera and edit using Gimp or Photoshop. Don't have the budget for CS3? No problem, there is a 30 day free trial from Adobe's website - certainly long enough to spice up the webpage.
Here is another example - Use something like Microsoft Project to setup a flow chart. Know what you are going to have on your front page, knwo what menus you are going to have, and submenus. Have this designed before you start coding. Check your flowchart - there should be no broken links, pages you cannot get to because you forgot to provide a link, etc.
It may not come out as the best website ever, but you will have something that is functional, and will look halfway decent.
However, I still agree with the parent - hire someone. When we had our church website redesigned, I tried for the longest to try to come up with something. In the end, we hired someone. I handed them my flowchart, and for $300 they came up with a site design. We could update the site using Contribute, which was nice, it ment that the pastor or any of the staff could update it without knowing a thing about HTML. I went into the XML code after it was written and tweaked it a bit, to replace a graphic here, lock in a font there (before hands, the page looked great in windows running Firefox, but looked like crap in IE, and was barely legeable on Linux and Mac). So yeah, they did not do the entire site for us, that was not in teh contract. They provided us with a framework to work with, with some demo pages, and I did the tweaking I needed to make it work for us. Saved me a buttload of time, we had a really nice website, that was easy to update, everyone was happy.
I so totally agree. I have not been to an arcade in roughly 10 years (okay, I have not spent money in an arcade in roughly 10 years), and I and one or two of my friends seemed to be the only ones there. I wondered into one at the mall the other day, and was shocked to find that Cruisin' World was the newest game there. Places like Dave and Busters still have a mildly successful arcade, but you pay an arm and a leg to play the games. It seems most modern games cost at least $1.50 to play, and that for 2-3 minutes of fun? I can go down to Blockbusters and rent a game for $4 and keep it a couple of days. It has been a long time since $20 worth of quarters could entertain you for a day.
I do get tickled by the stuff I see in arcades sometimes when I wonder through. On my last trip to Vegas, I saw TuxRacer
Truthfully, even if the arcade is still popular in Japan, if arcade machines are your primary source of income, you may want to start thinking of branching out a bit.
Why is everyone talking about jerk sellers? I thought the article was about buyers. You know, I actually had one negative feedback from being a buyer, and it was because I bailed on an auction. However, I was able to respond to that feedback saying that the seller significantly raised the shipping cost after the end of auction. Point is, i had another, what, 99 positive feedbacks where people were praising how fast of a buyer i was, how I usually sent payment before they even checked to see who won, etc.
No, removing the negative feedback is a BAD thing. I always check feedback of a seller before I bid, and I know many who sell on e-bay high dollar stuff, talking about stuff in the thousands of dollars, and they check buyer feedback. I agree with this thread, though, when you leave feedback, don't let the other person see it until they have left feedback as well, that way there is no retaliation.
I have seen the retaliation as well. My mom is feeling it badly. She just discovered e-bay before christmas, and saw stuff like "All six seasons of Gilmour Girls, $99". At that time, my mom did not understand Chinese bootlegs. It came in, she filed a complaint with e-bay and paypal, seller responded with leaving negative feedback. Of course my mom sent that to e-bay, e-bay removed it as they were conducting an investigation. Point is, negative feedback only hurts you if you really deserved it, there is ways to get it removed or to respond to it when someone leaves it.
The TG16 had very good CD based offerings while predating all of these (sega/cd-i/psx). The Saturn also predates the PSX and had amazing 2D titles, including both original titles and near-perfect ports from the neo-geo. I did not mention the TurboGrafx16 because I thought I was the only one who would remember it. The TurboGrafx16 was not distributed in Europe, and the CD-Rom was an add-on accessory, although most remember it as being the first CD-Rom System. (source)As I said, the PSX was not the first, they are what made it successful.
The Saturn was released on November 22nd, 1994 in Japan, and the Playstation was released on December 3rd in Japan. I fail to see how you can say that 2 weeks justifies sayign that it Predated the Playstation. While the Saturn may have been successful in Japan, it was a misrable failure in the US, to my dismay, as I actually bought one (I LOVED the thing). As such, I stand by when I say that the Playstation was the first SUCCESSFUL cd-based console.
Celeb-ration! We've got reasons to celebrate. Millions of them!
This week we've hit some magic numbers. We're tracking over 1 million torrents. We have had over 10 million simultaneous peers on the trackers. We're at 2.5 million registered users (and they are active as well). And this is blog post 100!
Tomorrow we will (hopefully) finish the long story about the site until now, as a celebration. If you can find the URL for it, go ahead and read it, but please don't tell anyone the URL in the comments if you do find it. The text is not ready yet, we're missing some entries and the pictures are not always at the correct place. But it would be cool if you wrote a comment that you _did_ find the page;)
In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We've been here for years and we will be here many more.
It also came to our attention that it's now possible to buy the documents, from the police!, in the current investigation about The Pirate Bay. But only on paper. And it's not 4000 pages, it 4620 pages. And they cost 6050 SEK for all of them (about 1000 USD). Our view of it? Why not just make a PDF, make a torrent of the PDF and seed it. We know a perfect place you can do that for free, and nobody would have to pay for all those pages of investigation. And a hell of a lot of trees would be saved... And even though the information in the investigation might be a bit personal at times (alcohol intake, sex addictions) we're not suing the police for commercially exploiting the material they took from us without permission.
Sharing is caring - to care for us please share even more then before! (and btw - Thanks to Pepsi for the AMAZING logo on the frontpage!
Eh, I upgraded the wireless card in my work laptop from an 802.11g Intel Proset Wireless to a Dell Wireless 802.11n card. I noticed no difference on battery life, no matter if I am connected to a B, G or N network. I notice no difference in speed between running on Battery and DC - I average 130 Mbps connection on my home N network (I thought it was supposed to do 300, but not really complaining, its much faster than what I had before, and I only have 100Mbps on the ethernet anyways. So at least on the adaptor end, I do not see any difference in power consumption, and if there is one, it is marginal. Either that, or Vista is doing some wierd tricks (have not really tested it with XP, while I am dual booting on the machine, I like the new features in Vista so much that I cringe every time I have to boot back into XP for the one rarely used program that does not work in Vista).
That's a tough call. Each system really introduced new ideas, and new ways of gameplays. I am sure that many people are actually going to say that their first game system was their favorite, or their newest one. So for me, the first would be the C64, and the latest would be the PS3 or the Wii, but I think I am going to have to go with the greatest gamesystem ever as the Playstation.
The Playstation actually did not introduce the CD-Rom based format - they made it work. If you want to look at previous CD based systems, the SegaCd, the Phillips CD-I (an amazing game system, but overpriced), and others really all failed. And when the Playstation first came out, it seemed like it was slow to be adopted as well. Now, while Sony had developed outstanding Hardware, it would be nothing without the games, and IMHO the defining games were Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 9. I know this sounds biased, but these games really did push the envelope of what the system could do. Final Fantasy 7 was a HUGE breakthrough in video games with its graphics and sound. Final Fantasy 8 took it a step futher with more human-like characters.
There are two other consoles that deserve credit as well, because they changed gaming forever in the way you interact. Those are the Gameboy and the Wii. The Gameboy first came out, what, some 20 years ago, and its still holding strong. Other developers, such as Sega's Game Gear (which, in all honesty, really was way superior to the Gameboy), failed misrably. And you did have hand-held video games before then, but the Gameboy was really the first one that was successful.
And of course, the Wii. Do I even need to talk about it?
And I guess the Atari 2600 deserves some credit. It was really the first home console that was widely successful, and pretty much brought video games into the home in the first place (there may have been previous consoles, but they were not anywhere near as successful).
Darn it! Well then I guess my pics are in there. I guess that is what I get for getting a Myspace to talk to all my friends who are too lazy to do any type of e-mail outside of myspace, and actually putting my pics up there instead of on my own webserver usign password authentication.
So I wonder if there are pics of like celebs or models or stuff like that who have private profiles. Oh, wait.
Player sales - not media sales. Remember the point of this format war is not to sell players below cost, but to sell media. What were the numbers for the previous weeks sales? 83:17, for Blu-Ray. The week before that? 85:15, Blu-Ray (NPD figures). The last weeks figures include the time period of Toshiba's "massive" player sales.
Toshiba just started the sale several days ago, first through Amazon and it just started trickling to the major electronics sales. Your figures don't account for the sale at all. I think the point that he was trying to make was for Movie sales. If you are giving away 7 movies with your player, it may push the player some, but you are still GIVING away the movies, not saling them. The HD-DVD group is hemoraging money right now - they are saling the players below cost (granted Sony and Samsung probably are as well), then GIVE the movies away. Shoot, at that deal, why would I ever BUY HD-DVD discs? With the discs running about $30 a piece, just go out and buy another player and get another 7 free movies. You are moving merchandise, but making zero profit - in fact, you are loosing it.
Now, granted, with the number of actual sales of media compared to DVD sales, are movie studios really making a profit in either format?
But seriously, even if you are dumping merchandise on the market, how long can you continue to do it and justify the losses? Truthfully, I think all Toshiba at the moment is trying to do is just dump stock and try to recover a little of their losses before announcing that they are pulling out.
It truthfully sounds like your IT department is seriously understaffed.
In any, and every, IT job I have worked in, the workload varies from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. Sometimes I am so busy, that I work long hours into the night. I have had the occasional night when I do not get home until 10 or 11. I have luckely not been at this job long enough that I have had to work overnight.
However, this does not mean that it is always like this. And what I do is dependant as to what this "down time" is.
I am a PC Desktop tech. My company does not believe in SMS. This means I have to manually go down to install programs on users computers. An install such as Adobe CS3 Design Suite, or Microsoft Office, and installing updates, can easily take an hour. And guess what, I have to babysit the darn thing. The install files set on a server share that can only be accessed by domain administrators and IT personel, so its not like I can walk off. If I lock the comptuer, than the user will come back, and either reboot the computer in the middle of an install or try to unlock the computer, failing to see that its not them thats logged in, and lock the account out. So I am left to babysit these installs. What is common for me during these times is to log into the Outlook Web Portal and get caught up on e-mails. To my surprise, the RSS feeds I have setup in my Outlook also appear in the Web Portal, so its a great time to get caught up reading Slashdot and sorting through the mass other newsstroies in the newsfeeds I subscribe to, so that I can read them later. If someone comes by, it looks like I am working.
But there are also the "True" downtimes. No trouble tickets. No computer role outs. No projects. At this time, first thing I do is check with my fellow PC techs, and see if they need help. After that, I check with the Mac techs, and see if there is anything I can help with (even though we are about 50 / 50 split between the Macs and PCs, we tend to have WAY more Mac tickets than PC tickets). I then check and see if I need to do any documentation (I usually do this as I am doing my project, so I am usually not behind on documentation). If everything is good, then I start doing training. Lynda.com is a great site. If I am good there, or do not feel like training that day, then I may start reading news articles. Sometimes the occasional game of football may break out - usually on Fridays about 3:30ish when most people have left for the weekend. Finding stuff on YouTube has happened from time to time. The helpdesk guys get superboard and they usually are really good at finding webgames. Sometimes I will actually go for a walk and leave the building for a few minutes (there are times you just have to force yourself to get away sometimes). Every now and then, I will start taking a tour of the floors, and just see if anyone has those "little" problems that they are too embarresed to contact the helpdesk about or just do not want to spend the time waiting on hold about.
So why do i know so well about downtime? That is Desktop Support. You can have a day when Microsoft pushes out some update that breaks half the computers in your corporation and you have to run around fixing it (for the type of enviornment we are in, and the type of industry, our users MUST have local admin rights), followed by a day when you suddenly have 12 new users showing up that day and no one bothered to put in a request to IT for computers, all the time trying to get a project done, followed by a day or two of absolutely nothing other than to deliver a power cord to someone. That is how an IT department SHOULD be - you are not there to always be busy, you are there to be a rapid response team. I.T. should be like a fire department - its not how many fires you can put out, its how fast you can respond and how well you put it out. If you are constantly putting out fires, then you do not have enough fire fighters.
I was about 3 when my dad bought our first Commodore 64, and amazingly I do not remember life before then. I ceartenly never remember sitting in a high chair.;-)
And Python uses a form of precompilation. The first time a Python module is loaded, it's compiled into Python bytecode, and stored in a.pyc file alongside the source code. Further invocations use the bytecode. Python's bytecode compiler is blazingly fast, and that's why it's suitable for the modern 3D games listed above. You make a statement about bytecode, then claim its blazingly fast? Granted, it is faster than an interpereted language, but its nowhere near the speed of compiled language.
While your 2 GHz processor may be more than fast enough to run Python code, it will NEVER be as fast as a compiled binary. So while your quad core processor running at 3.2GHz will run these products just fine, you will probably find that it chokes on a 133 MHz Pentium machine in Python when the original sorce, written in C, ran just fine on your old 33 MHz 386.
Please refrain from making such blatantly incorrect and, well, just plain stupid comments in the future. Thanks for proving that as long as something is open source, people will defend it even if its not the best option.
Yes. Go buy yourself a harddrive enclosure that has a USB interface. I was thinking the same thing, but I see a bit of a problem with this. My experience has been that USB enclosers tend to run about $40 a piece. Some harddrives seem to be flaky with them, with the effect that I actually had a 200gig harddrive that was perfectly fine in my system actually fail right after I put it into the usb harddrive encloser (seemed that the drive, as it was one of the EARLY 200 gig drives, had to have a special driver installed for windows to use it properly, and when I plugged it in and it registered as a usb removable device.... Nasty). Even over USB2, the transfer rates of these USB harddrives seem WAY slower than an internal drive or a regular usb external HD (not sure why on that one), and seem to bluescreen windows if you try to access the drive while its copying or moving data. Oh, and make sure that your jumper settings are right on the drive depending on which brand and model of hd encloser you get, and make sure you do not have the usb drive plugged in if you have "Boot From USB" enabled in your BIOS, or you are likely to find that you cannot even boot your computer (same if you leave your iPod plugged in). Oh, and then there is the whole issue of having to mount the drive in the encloser, because the enclosers I got have the wires attached to the encloser itself, and the wires are not long enough to hook the drive up and just see what is on the drive before you decide if you want to mount it. Annoying. In fact, you are lucky if you can manage to hook the cables up once the drive is mounted, you have a really confined space to work in.
Truthfully, if I just want to slap in an HD and see what is on it, I find it much easier to open up my case, get a long IDE cable and power cable at CompUSA or Fry's, plug it into the secondary IDE slot, and do it that way. Yeah, so I have to turn off my computer between checking out drives, but it is WAY faster and less tedious than having to mess with the external HD encloser.
And what's a pretty good way to ensure that someone else won't pull them out later on and find usable data? Easiest way, other than completely physically destroying the platters, is to zero out the drive. The idea is to take the drive as a whole, and just write zeros over the entire drive. The DoD uses either a 3 pass wipe or a 7 pass wipe. We used a 3 pass wipe when I worked at a government contractor. However, you are probably fine with a single pass wipe. Killdisk is a program I use that is free for the single pass wipe, and it seems to take about 17 minutes a drive (your time will vary depending on size and speed of drive).
It wasn't just ported to C++, it was ported to a combination of C++ and Python. Great, so now instead of just someone putting together a binary and distributing it, I now have to install Python, and watch the thing try to compile the source code on the fly. I guess the speed of the game will now be permanately stuck on turtle, because if you speed it up, the event will be over with before Python can compile it. Hey, while we are at it, maybe we can take some old assembly code and convert it to Java!
Windows will warn you if you yank the drive without telling it to disconnect the drive precisely for this reason. You have not messed with Windows in about 7 years, have you? Windows 2000 did indeed warn you if you yanked a USB drive without unmounting it first, XP and Vista do not.
On a side note, in a parent thread, someone stated that the slow read / write speeds were caused by Vista. It should be noted that Microsoft's technet states that the slow copy / move issue with tons of files in a folder is something that is fixed in SP1.
I have noticed something over the past couple of months, that I am having more and more trouble with torrents that are hosted on ThePirateBay's trackers. After doing a tracert, I noticed that AT&T is blocking all traffic out of the AT&T network directed to tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org and vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org I got around it by using Tor. Interestingly, they do not block the actual port or P2P traffic, just connections to thepiratebay trackers. Now while I know that most of the torrents on ThePirateBay are not legal in the US, their trackers are public, making it easy to setup a torrent, and they do have quite a few legal torrents. Even more interestingly, AT&T does not seem to block any other trackers that I know of. Hmmm
After reading the article, the content of the article pretty much backs what I was thinking - that while Comcast may be using some of the bandwidth for internet, most of this looks as if it will be employed for High-Def content on demand. This is 160 meg a second on their network, not on the internet. At least, that is what I am making out of the story.
I totally agree. I use my PS3 primaraly as a BluRay player, and I ocassionally load up a PS3 or old PS2 or PS1 game on it, and I do love it as a media player, but it is a BluRay player for me first and foremost.
The parent thread talking about how Paramount is exclusively HD-DVD is kinda moot. Microsoft paid Paramount $150 million to do HD-DVD exclusively for 18 months after which time, they can choose to do whatever format they choose. This was thought to be a good move for Paramount, as BluRay and HD-DVD sales were not excpected to reach $150 million in that 18 month period. However, with WB, probably the biggest company that HD-DVD had, choosing to go BluRay exclusively, with most of the major studios backing BluRay, with the majority of consumers I have talked to supporting BluRay (the only people I know who have an HD-DVD player also have BluRay players, but I know MANY people who have PS3s and buy BluRay movies for them), with Blockbuster dropping support of HD-DVD, with Apple backing BluRay, seriously, how long can HD-DVD expect to keep fighting? Consumers have spoken. Producers have spoken. HD-DVD is a dead format. I expect them to make a last stand, and they may still sale some players, but I really do feel that this WB move has put the nail in the coffin for HD-DVD.
While I have not tried Ubox, I am familer with the Netflix program. I have never had any issues viewing the files. On my laptop, I usually export it to my secondary display, which is a widescreen 19 inch dell lcd with no issues. At home, I have an NVidia 8600 with a component breakout box that goes to my 30 inch 1080i CRT HDTV (No DVI, no HDMI). On this, I have also never had an issue with watching Netflix movies. It seems the issue here is unique to his setup - possibly using HDMI. If you continue having problems, unhook the HDMI and switch to component or the VGA adaptor and see if the problem goes away (I am not sure what kind of tv or video card you have, I saw nothing in the article addressing that). I just find it highly amusing that I have no issues exporting the 480 stream video to my HDTV which is running at 1920x1080 over analog component with no protection, but you have issues doing it over HDMI, which is how Hollywood wants you to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what, I will make it even easier for you. Install Dreamweaver CS3. Use default templates. Replace default graphics with some pics you take with a digital camera and edit using Gimp or Photoshop. Don't have the budget for CS3? No problem, there is a 30 day free trial from Adobe's website - certainly long enough to spice up the webpage.
Here is another example - Use something like Microsoft Project to setup a flow chart. Know what you are going to have on your front page, knwo what menus you are going to have, and submenus. Have this designed before you start coding. Check your flowchart - there should be no broken links, pages you cannot get to because you forgot to provide a link, etc.
It may not come out as the best website ever, but you will have something that is functional, and will look halfway decent.
However, I still agree with the parent - hire someone. When we had our church website redesigned, I tried for the longest to try to come up with something. In the end, we hired someone. I handed them my flowchart, and for $300 they came up with a site design. We could update the site using Contribute, which was nice, it ment that the pastor or any of the staff could update it without knowing a thing about HTML. I went into the XML code after it was written and tweaked it a bit, to replace a graphic here, lock in a font there (before hands, the page looked great in windows running Firefox, but looked like crap in IE, and was barely legeable on Linux and Mac). So yeah, they did not do the entire site for us, that was not in teh contract. They provided us with a framework to work with, with some demo pages, and I did the tweaking I needed to make it work for us. Saved me a buttload of time, we had a really nice website, that was easy to update, everyone was happy.
I so totally agree. I have not been to an arcade in roughly 10 years (okay, I have not spent money in an arcade in roughly 10 years), and I and one or two of my friends seemed to be the only ones there. I wondered into one at the mall the other day, and was shocked to find that Cruisin' World was the newest game there. Places like Dave and Busters still have a mildly successful arcade, but you pay an arm and a leg to play the games. It seems most modern games cost at least $1.50 to play, and that for 2-3 minutes of fun? I can go down to Blockbusters and rent a game for $4 and keep it a couple of days. It has been a long time since $20 worth of quarters could entertain you for a day.
I do get tickled by the stuff I see in arcades sometimes when I wonder through. On my last trip to Vegas, I saw TuxRacer
Truthfully, even if the arcade is still popular in Japan, if arcade machines are your primary source of income, you may want to start thinking of branching out a bit.
Our apple rep told our company to expect this in June. I assumed Apple knew what Apple was doing.
Why is everyone talking about jerk sellers? I thought the article was about buyers. You know, I actually had one negative feedback from being a buyer, and it was because I bailed on an auction. However, I was able to respond to that feedback saying that the seller significantly raised the shipping cost after the end of auction. Point is, i had another, what, 99 positive feedbacks where people were praising how fast of a buyer i was, how I usually sent payment before they even checked to see who won, etc.
No, removing the negative feedback is a BAD thing. I always check feedback of a seller before I bid, and I know many who sell on e-bay high dollar stuff, talking about stuff in the thousands of dollars, and they check buyer feedback. I agree with this thread, though, when you leave feedback, don't let the other person see it until they have left feedback as well, that way there is no retaliation.
I have seen the retaliation as well. My mom is feeling it badly. She just discovered e-bay before christmas, and saw stuff like "All six seasons of Gilmour Girls, $99". At that time, my mom did not understand Chinese bootlegs. It came in, she filed a complaint with e-bay and paypal, seller responded with leaving negative feedback. Of course my mom sent that to e-bay, e-bay removed it as they were conducting an investigation. Point is, negative feedback only hurts you if you really deserved it, there is ways to get it removed or to respond to it when someone leaves it.
The Saturn was released on November 22nd, 1994 in Japan, and the Playstation was released on December 3rd in Japan. I fail to see how you can say that 2 weeks justifies sayign that it Predated the Playstation. While the Saturn may have been successful in Japan, it was a misrable failure in the US, to my dismay, as I actually bought one (I LOVED the thing). As such, I stand by when I say that the Playstation was the first SUCCESSFUL cd-based console.
Celeb-ration!
;)
We've got reasons to celebrate. Millions of them!
This week we've hit some magic numbers. We're tracking over 1 million torrents. We have had over 10 million simultaneous peers on the trackers. We're at 2.5 million registered users (and they are active as well). And this is blog post 100!
Tomorrow we will (hopefully) finish the long story about the site until now, as a celebration. If you can find the URL for it, go ahead and read it, but please don't tell anyone the URL in the comments if you do find it. The text is not ready yet, we're missing some entries and the pictures are not always at the correct place. But it would be cool if you wrote a comment that you _did_ find the page
In case we lose the pending trial (yeah right) there will still not be any changes to the site. The Pirate Bay will keep operating just as always. We've been here for years and we will be here many more.
It also came to our attention that it's now possible to buy the documents, from the police!, in the current investigation about The Pirate Bay. But only on paper. And it's not 4000 pages, it 4620 pages. And they cost 6050 SEK for all of them (about 1000 USD). Our view of it? Why not just make a PDF, make a torrent of the PDF and seed it. We know a perfect place you can do that for free, and nobody would have to pay for all those pages of investigation. And a hell of a lot of trees would be saved... And even though the information in the investigation might be a bit personal at times (alcohol intake, sex addictions) we're not suing the police for commercially exploiting the material they took from us without permission.
Sharing is caring - to care for us please share even more then before! (and btw - Thanks to Pepsi for the AMAZING logo on the frontpage!
Eh, I upgraded the wireless card in my work laptop from an 802.11g Intel Proset Wireless to a Dell Wireless 802.11n card. I noticed no difference on battery life, no matter if I am connected to a B, G or N network. I notice no difference in speed between running on Battery and DC - I average 130 Mbps connection on my home N network (I thought it was supposed to do 300, but not really complaining, its much faster than what I had before, and I only have 100Mbps on the ethernet anyways. So at least on the adaptor end, I do not see any difference in power consumption, and if there is one, it is marginal. Either that, or Vista is doing some wierd tricks (have not really tested it with XP, while I am dual booting on the machine, I like the new features in Vista so much that I cringe every time I have to boot back into XP for the one rarely used program that does not work in Vista).
That's a tough call. Each system really introduced new ideas, and new ways of gameplays. I am sure that many people are actually going to say that their first game system was their favorite, or their newest one. So for me, the first would be the C64, and the latest would be the PS3 or the Wii, but I think I am going to have to go with the greatest gamesystem ever as the Playstation.
The Playstation actually did not introduce the CD-Rom based format - they made it work. If you want to look at previous CD based systems, the SegaCd, the Phillips CD-I (an amazing game system, but overpriced), and others really all failed. And when the Playstation first came out, it seemed like it was slow to be adopted as well. Now, while Sony had developed outstanding Hardware, it would be nothing without the games, and IMHO the defining games were Final Fantasy 7, 8 and 9. I know this sounds biased, but these games really did push the envelope of what the system could do. Final Fantasy 7 was a HUGE breakthrough in video games with its graphics and sound. Final Fantasy 8 took it a step futher with more human-like characters.
There are two other consoles that deserve credit as well, because they changed gaming forever in the way you interact. Those are the Gameboy and the Wii. The Gameboy first came out, what, some 20 years ago, and its still holding strong. Other developers, such as Sega's Game Gear (which, in all honesty, really was way superior to the Gameboy), failed misrably. And you did have hand-held video games before then, but the Gameboy was really the first one that was successful.
And of course, the Wii. Do I even need to talk about it?
And I guess the Atari 2600 deserves some credit. It was really the first home console that was widely successful, and pretty much brought video games into the home in the first place (there may have been previous consoles, but they were not anywhere near as successful).
Darn it! Well then I guess my pics are in there. I guess that is what I get for getting a Myspace to talk to all my friends who are too lazy to do any type of e-mail outside of myspace, and actually putting my pics up there instead of on my own webserver usign password authentication.
So I wonder if there are pics of like celebs or models or stuff like that who have private profiles. Oh, wait.
I guess this means they are not Sarbanes Oxley compliant. I see lawsuits here
Toshiba just started the sale several days ago, first through Amazon and it just started trickling to the major electronics sales. Your figures don't account for the sale at all. I think the point that he was trying to make was for Movie sales. If you are giving away 7 movies with your player, it may push the player some, but you are still GIVING away the movies, not saling them. The HD-DVD group is hemoraging money right now - they are saling the players below cost (granted Sony and Samsung probably are as well), then GIVE the movies away. Shoot, at that deal, why would I ever BUY HD-DVD discs? With the discs running about $30 a piece, just go out and buy another player and get another 7 free movies. You are moving merchandise, but making zero profit - in fact, you are loosing it.
Now, granted, with the number of actual sales of media compared to DVD sales, are movie studios really making a profit in either format?
But seriously, even if you are dumping merchandise on the market, how long can you continue to do it and justify the losses? Truthfully, I think all Toshiba at the moment is trying to do is just dump stock and try to recover a little of their losses before announcing that they are pulling out.
In a different article it states that sales figures do not include PS3s or the XBox 360 addon drives
It truthfully sounds like your IT department is seriously understaffed.
In any, and every, IT job I have worked in, the workload varies from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. Sometimes I am so busy, that I work long hours into the night. I have had the occasional night when I do not get home until 10 or 11. I have luckely not been at this job long enough that I have had to work overnight.
However, this does not mean that it is always like this. And what I do is dependant as to what this "down time" is.
I am a PC Desktop tech. My company does not believe in SMS. This means I have to manually go down to install programs on users computers. An install such as Adobe CS3 Design Suite, or Microsoft Office, and installing updates, can easily take an hour. And guess what, I have to babysit the darn thing. The install files set on a server share that can only be accessed by domain administrators and IT personel, so its not like I can walk off. If I lock the comptuer, than the user will come back, and either reboot the computer in the middle of an install or try to unlock the computer, failing to see that its not them thats logged in, and lock the account out. So I am left to babysit these installs. What is common for me during these times is to log into the Outlook Web Portal and get caught up on e-mails. To my surprise, the RSS feeds I have setup in my Outlook also appear in the Web Portal, so its a great time to get caught up reading Slashdot and sorting through the mass other newsstroies in the newsfeeds I subscribe to, so that I can read them later. If someone comes by, it looks like I am working.
But there are also the "True" downtimes. No trouble tickets. No computer role outs. No projects. At this time, first thing I do is check with my fellow PC techs, and see if they need help. After that, I check with the Mac techs, and see if there is anything I can help with (even though we are about 50 / 50 split between the Macs and PCs, we tend to have WAY more Mac tickets than PC tickets). I then check and see if I need to do any documentation (I usually do this as I am doing my project, so I am usually not behind on documentation). If everything is good, then I start doing training. Lynda.com is a great site. If I am good there, or do not feel like training that day, then I may start reading news articles. Sometimes the occasional game of football may break out - usually on Fridays about 3:30ish when most people have left for the weekend. Finding stuff on YouTube has happened from time to time. The helpdesk guys get superboard and they usually are really good at finding webgames. Sometimes I will actually go for a walk and leave the building for a few minutes (there are times you just have to force yourself to get away sometimes). Every now and then, I will start taking a tour of the floors, and just see if anyone has those "little" problems that they are too embarresed to contact the helpdesk about or just do not want to spend the time waiting on hold about.
So why do i know so well about downtime? That is Desktop Support. You can have a day when Microsoft pushes out some update that breaks half the computers in your corporation and you have to run around fixing it (for the type of enviornment we are in, and the type of industry, our users MUST have local admin rights), followed by a day when you suddenly have 12 new users showing up that day and no one bothered to put in a request to IT for computers, all the time trying to get a project done, followed by a day or two of absolutely nothing other than to deliver a power cord to someone. That is how an IT department SHOULD be - you are not there to always be busy, you are there to be a rapid response team. I.T. should be like a fire department - its not how many fires you can put out, its how fast you can respond and how well you put it out. If you are constantly putting out fires, then you do not have enough fire fighters.
Let's do it. Someone start this petition, and lets get the word out.
I was about 3 when my dad bought our first Commodore 64, and amazingly I do not remember life before then. I ceartenly never remember sitting in a high chair. ;-)
Pitty you got marked as flamebait. You should have said "It will take a Beowulf cluster to watch Beowulf".
While your 2 GHz processor may be more than fast enough to run Python code, it will NEVER be as fast as a compiled binary. So while your quad core processor running at 3.2GHz will run these products just fine, you will probably find that it chokes on a 133 MHz Pentium machine in Python when the original sorce, written in C, ran just fine on your old 33 MHz 386. Please refrain from making such blatantly incorrect and, well, just plain stupid comments in the future. Thanks for proving that as long as something is open source, people will defend it even if its not the best option.
Truthfully, if I just want to slap in an HD and see what is on it, I find it much easier to open up my case, get a long IDE cable and power cable at CompUSA or Fry's, plug it into the secondary IDE slot, and do it that way. Yeah, so I have to turn off my computer between checking out drives, but it is WAY faster and less tedious than having to mess with the external HD encloser. And what's a pretty good way to ensure that someone else won't pull them out later on and find usable data? Easiest way, other than completely physically destroying the platters, is to zero out the drive. The idea is to take the drive as a whole, and just write zeros over the entire drive. The DoD uses either a 3 pass wipe or a 7 pass wipe. We used a 3 pass wipe when I worked at a government contractor. However, you are probably fine with a single pass wipe. Killdisk is a program I use that is free for the single pass wipe, and it seems to take about 17 minutes a drive (your time will vary depending on size and speed of drive).
It wasn't just ported to C++, it was ported to a combination of C++ and Python. Great, so now instead of just someone putting together a binary and distributing it, I now have to install Python, and watch the thing try to compile the source code on the fly. I guess the speed of the game will now be permanately stuck on turtle, because if you speed it up, the event will be over with before Python can compile it. Hey, while we are at it, maybe we can take some old assembly code and convert it to Java!
On a side note, in a parent thread, someone stated that the slow read / write speeds were caused by Vista. It should be noted that Microsoft's technet states that the slow copy / move issue with tons of files in a folder is something that is fixed in SP1.
I have noticed something over the past couple of months, that I am having more and more trouble with torrents that are hosted on ThePirateBay's trackers. After doing a tracert, I noticed that AT&T is blocking all traffic out of the AT&T network directed to tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org and vip.tracker.thepiratebay.org I got around it by using Tor. Interestingly, they do not block the actual port or P2P traffic, just connections to thepiratebay trackers. Now while I know that most of the torrents on ThePirateBay are not legal in the US, their trackers are public, making it easy to setup a torrent, and they do have quite a few legal torrents. Even more interestingly, AT&T does not seem to block any other trackers that I know of. Hmmm
After reading the article, the content of the article pretty much backs what I was thinking - that while Comcast may be using some of the bandwidth for internet, most of this looks as if it will be employed for High-Def content on demand. This is 160 meg a second on their network, not on the internet. At least, that is what I am making out of the story.
I totally agree. I use my PS3 primaraly as a BluRay player, and I ocassionally load up a PS3 or old PS2 or PS1 game on it, and I do love it as a media player, but it is a BluRay player for me first and foremost.
The parent thread talking about how Paramount is exclusively HD-DVD is kinda moot. Microsoft paid Paramount $150 million to do HD-DVD exclusively for 18 months after which time, they can choose to do whatever format they choose. This was thought to be a good move for Paramount, as BluRay and HD-DVD sales were not excpected to reach $150 million in that 18 month period. However, with WB, probably the biggest company that HD-DVD had, choosing to go BluRay exclusively, with most of the major studios backing BluRay, with the majority of consumers I have talked to supporting BluRay (the only people I know who have an HD-DVD player also have BluRay players, but I know MANY people who have PS3s and buy BluRay movies for them), with Blockbuster dropping support of HD-DVD, with Apple backing BluRay, seriously, how long can HD-DVD expect to keep fighting? Consumers have spoken. Producers have spoken. HD-DVD is a dead format. I expect them to make a last stand, and they may still sale some players, but I really do feel that this WB move has put the nail in the coffin for HD-DVD.
While I have not tried Ubox, I am familer with the Netflix program. I have never had any issues viewing the files. On my laptop, I usually export it to my secondary display, which is a widescreen 19 inch dell lcd with no issues. At home, I have an NVidia 8600 with a component breakout box that goes to my 30 inch 1080i CRT HDTV (No DVI, no HDMI). On this, I have also never had an issue with watching Netflix movies. It seems the issue here is unique to his setup - possibly using HDMI. If you continue having problems, unhook the HDMI and switch to component or the VGA adaptor and see if the problem goes away (I am not sure what kind of tv or video card you have, I saw nothing in the article addressing that). I just find it highly amusing that I have no issues exporting the 480 stream video to my HDTV which is running at 1920x1080 over analog component with no protection, but you have issues doing it over HDMI, which is how Hollywood wants you to do it.