No it's not. The DRM does not work (i.e. it is possible to pirate the games), yet you can lose all your games if you ever get banned from Steam for whatever reason.
Anyway, it seems to still be OK provided I play at 1600x1200 resolution and without AA, but I don't really see much of a difference between 1600x1200 and 1920x1440 and the jagged lines do not annoy me, or rather with AA the image becomes blurry, which is more annoying.
It has so little memory because it was released, what, 3 years ago? My N93 is not much better, having ~20MB of free RAM after boot, but they probably could not fit more memory to it without making it too expensive. Still, I can use Google Maps, Garmin Mobile XT (with external bluetooth GPS receiver) and Opera Mobile 10.00 though not at the same time and Opera sometimes runs out of memory, especially on large sites.
But the phone is easy to use, has a large keypad and no touch screen (I read somewhere that most of the touch screen cell phones do not work with a stylus, only with a finger, and I do not want the screen to get dirty I also do not want to wash my hands every time I want to use the phone).
The phone is enough for me. If I needed to use other apps on a small device, I would probably get an Atom based netbook, like the Fujitsu U810 or U820. Much bigger (and higher resolution) screen, keyboard and x86.
With my my current (Nokia N93) and previous (Nokia 6310i) phones I did not even have to get permission from the carrier (I bought the phones separately, whithout contract). I just connect the phone to my laptop using Bluetooth and set up the dial-up connection (some bluetooth software manages that as well, but with standard Windows BT stack I needed to set it up manually).
If I can connect to the internet from my phone, then I can also do it from my laptop using the phone as a modem. If the connection is intended for web surfing on the phone then it may have a lot of ports blocked but otherwise the connection can be usable, since port 80 is still open.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that nobody has invaded the USA recently enough for currently alive people to remember it.
Maybe if more people knew what it's like to lie down in some ditch and hear bullets flying over it, be forced out of home because it currently is too near the front line or even worse, having your house (and everything you own) destroyed by a bomb (or the retreating army lighting it on fire so it could not be used by the enemy) with or without your loved ones in it, they would not talk about war as if it was a good thing.
The composer expects to be paid forever if somebody makes money using his work. On one hand I agree with it, but the level of it should be limited. Also the composer said that he also transcribes music for hire and would also expect to be paid again if the person who hired him (and paid for the transcription) sold the transcription and made money.
So, how many times he gets paid for his work:
Some singer likes his work and wants to learn and perform it - he needs to buy the sheet music, so the composer gets paid for his work. Said singer goes on to record a CD and sell it. Now he must pay the composer a percentage of the profits in addition to the initial price of the sheet music. Let's say a radio station wants to broadcast the song. It has to buy the CD (paying the singer and in turn the composer), but it also has to buy a license to broadcast the music (part of the money goes to the singer and composer again). At this point, the singer has been paid twice and the composer three times for their work. A restaurant wants to play the radio station to it's customers. It too has to buy a license to do it (even though the radio station already paid for the right to broadcast) paying the singer and composer yet again.
On the other hand, non-art people usually only get paid once for their work. I don't continue to pay HP for the 11 year old printer that I have (I buy ink refills) and I wouldn't have to even if I made money using the printer. I don't continue to pay the builder who built my house. A company pays once for the computers that it uses to make money, even Microsoft does not ask a percentage of the profits in order to use Windows (well, you do not have to upgrade to each new version). If I fix a PC I get paid once and not a percentage of the profits that were made using that PC.
How being hired to transcribe music and being hired to fix a PC differ so that one of them entitles the worker to get paid again for the work, while the other does not?
That's why if I ever need or want to do video editing, I'm buying another VCR, edit controller and all other hardware stuff. If I'm paying my 5 years salary for it, I want to at least have a tangible item not encumbered by licenses (if I buy a VCR I can do whatever I want with it - use it to record/play tapes, modify it to store data, take it apart if I need to fix it etc).
However, the game could have consistent rules. For example, raising-from-the-dead magic can fail to work if the dead guy was blown up (you could revive him, but not put him back together) or killed with a magic spell that prevents revival and then have the plot important death happen this way.
The nuke level magic spell could, for example, be limited to living things and/or just your enemies. But if you say that the spell works just like a nuke, then I expect to be able to level a city with it.
But if I have a rocket louncher using which I can destroy various wooden barriers then I should also be able to destroy the locket rotting wooden door or at least be offered a reason why I must find the key (there is no way to launch the rocket safely because earlier I found out that launching a rocket from a closed space can be bad for your health; the sound will alert someone or whatever) and not just "yea, you could blow a hole in that wall, but here your 10 rockets won't work against this door, save them for when you need to blow up a battleship"
Sticker on the drive says Seagate ST41200N, the drive identifies itself as IMPRIMIS 94601-15, so it probably was manufactured around the time when Seagate bought Imprimis (they changed the sticker but did not bother to change the ROM or wherever the ID is stored).
...but MBR is the only format a BIOS can recognize and work with
But all the BIOS does is read LBA #0 of a drive looking for the 55AA signature, if found, load the sector to memory and jump to it. From then the program that actually is in the MBR can do whatever it wants.
Drive makers used to provide various drive overlays that enabled various drives to work in systems that did not support the capacity (at least one such overlay was used in >137GB drives on systems that did not support LBA48). Can't they make such an overlay now?
Of course, with my current hard drive I can only watch something like 40 movies at once. There are some times that I wish I could watch at least 100 movies at once. OTOH, I have 10 hard drives, so I would be able to watch more movies at once, but my file server only has a 1gbps ethernet connection and only PCI 32bit/33MHz slots, so a 10gbps network card would be useless. Also, for external drives, USB2.0 limits the transfer speed to ~40MB/s which a hard drive can do.
Oh and my internet connection will be upgraded to FTTH, but that will only be 200mbps, at least for now, so a hard drive will be enough for seeding.
I use LTO2 tapes for archiving, but my tape drive can read or write at only 30MB/s so a hard drive is enough there too.
I have seen NTFS corruption in Windows, but it was due to a bad cable (1m IDE cables do not always work as intended, I lowered the transfer rate from 100MB/s to 66MB/s and have no more problems with that drive, once I had a bad USB cable that made a few sectors on my external drive unreadable - that was fun to figure out) or when my friend turned his computer off by unplugging it every day. NTFS is pretty good at keeping the file system structure intact, even when the PC crashes (especially if that happens due to a bad connection to the system drive, I probably have a few corrupt files on that one, but the file system is OK)
However, as someone who has 10 hard drives (total capacity is about 3TB) I can tell you that having a lot of drive letters is inconvenient (was that movie in J:, M:, N:, R:, S: or some other drive). I looked for some software that could combine them to one drive letter (without destroying the data), something like if I have two files M:\movies\movie1.avi and n;\movies\movie2.avi, I could just open, say, Z:\movies and see both files even though they are on separate drives, this could be read only as I could just write a file straight to a drive that has enough space, but for reading it would be much better. Didn't find anything, so I tried to make my own program, but could not understand how to create a shell namespace extension or a SMB server (assuming I could run it on Windows).
At home though, the investment in tape drives and and media is simply cost prohibitive.
I bought a used LTO2 tape drive for ~$180, but I use it primarily for archiving. I back up really important data, but backing up 3TB would be difficult and expensive. However, most of the data is replaceable and split to 10 hard drives (no RAID or anything, just 10 drives, though I would like a way to make them appear as a single drive letter at least for reading the files), so, even a complete failure of one drive would not take out all of the data.
And probably a good deal more people that I am leaving out.
Everyone who live in countries that do not have software patents.
But to even state that just being free is good enough goes 100% counter to history.
Because while the "free" format may be chosen if it was available at the time that the "non-free" one was, just being "free" is not enough for people to change their devices etc. My cell phone supports divx and h264, so these are already "free" to me, if I wanted a phone that supports VP8 or Theora, I would have to buy one, so the format is not exactly "free" to me.
I will take "free as in $0" over "free as in open source" any time. I am not a programmer and I don't care if I have the right to modify the code or not. Do you only buy older hardware only because it is easier to mod? I'm sure a CGA video card is easier to mod than any of the new ones.
I also live in a country that does not have software patents, so h264 is as free to me as VP8.
I never said that electric cars will always suck. I'm sure first gasoline cars sucked compared to horses, but the cars were improved faster than horses were. Same can be said about electric cars.
As for having multiple cars (one for short range driving and another one for long range), it increases the upfront costs (you buy two cars instead of one) and may make the short range car uneconomical. Example: I can buy a used gas car in good condition let's say for $5k, the car consumes 10L/100km or I could buy a new car that consumes 6L/100km, but costs $30k. For the $25k difference I could buy a lot of gas for $1.47/L, 17'000L, which I could use to drive 170'000km with the older car and that would just cover the initial cost of the newer car with no fuel. Yes, if I drive a lot then the new car will pay for itself eventually (after ~420'000km the costs would even out), but it may be too late (my 28 year old car only has ~420'000km on the odometer). This of course takes only the fuel consumption into account and not, say maintenance costs (which may be higher for the older car) and so on.
Range and refill time. My car gets about 350km on LPG (I can switch to gasoline then), but refilling it takes only a few minutes. If my car got 160km on LPG (it had a smaller tank) I could still drive 300km but would need to stop a few minutes for a refill. How long would it take to recharge the Leaf? Does the station need to have a nuclear reactor nearby or is the electricity from a 330kV line enough?
So, oil is only used as car fuel and not for manufacturing plastics (which I'm sure even the electric cars use), or, say, as fuel in power plants? Great then, if we all start using electric cars there would be no more need for oil...
AFAIK, the USA gets half of its electricity from coal, so enjoy the dead coal miners. If I had to choose, I'd rather have fish and squids etc dead an a single human, but that's just me.
My car has two fuel tanks - gasoline and LPG. The LPG tank does not have a gauge on the dashboard - the gauge is only on the tank itself which is in the trunk. I know that I can drive ~350km with full tank, but if it runs out, I can just switch to gasoline and stop at the nearest fuel station that has LPG.
While the frequency or amplitude will not be reproduced perfectly, you can assume that it won't change by much, for example if you sent 1kHz it probably won't arrive as 2kHz and 2kHz won't become 1kHz. Also, if you send it vs sending nothing it probably won't change that much either, so it's just a matter of figuring out how fast can you go until the signal becomes too distorted to use. Analog modems seem to be pretty capable of determining the speed at which a reliable connection can be made (and the line has noise, attenuation, distortion, echo etc which all depend on the actual line - a long line with loading coils will behave one way, while a direct connection to a ISDN PBX will behave differently, same about audio compression - landlines also use some compression - a-law or mu-law).
Cell phones that have a modem are compatible with analog PSTN modems.
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No it's not. The DRM does not work (i.e. it is possible to pirate the games), yet you can lose all your games if you ever get banned from Steam for whatever reason.
old, tragically outdated, Radeon 4700
I have a Radeon HD2900XT you insensitive clod!
Anyway, it seems to still be OK provided I play at 1600x1200 resolution and without AA, but I don't really see much of a difference between 1600x1200 and 1920x1440 and the jagged lines do not annoy me, or rather with AA the image becomes blurry, which is more annoying.
It has so little memory because it was released, what, 3 years ago? My N93 is not much better, having ~20MB of free RAM after boot, but they probably could not fit more memory to it without making it too expensive. Still, I can use Google Maps, Garmin Mobile XT (with external bluetooth GPS receiver) and Opera Mobile 10.00 though not at the same time and Opera sometimes runs out of memory, especially on large sites.
But the phone is easy to use, has a large keypad and no touch screen (I read somewhere that most of the touch screen cell phones do not work with a stylus, only with a finger, and I do not want the screen to get dirty I also do not want to wash my hands every time I want to use the phone).
The phone is enough for me. If I needed to use other apps on a small device, I would probably get an Atom based netbook, like the Fujitsu U810 or U820. Much bigger (and higher resolution) screen, keyboard and x86.
Sorry, my previous phone was 6230i, not 6310i.
With my my current (Nokia N93) and previous (Nokia 6310i) phones I did not even have to get permission from the carrier (I bought the phones separately, whithout contract). I just connect the phone to my laptop using Bluetooth and set up the dial-up connection (some bluetooth software manages that as well, but with standard Windows BT stack I needed to set it up manually).
If I can connect to the internet from my phone, then I can also do it from my laptop using the phone as a modem. If the connection is intended for web surfing on the phone then it may have a lot of ports blocked but otherwise the connection can be usable, since port 80 is still open.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that nobody has invaded the USA recently enough for currently alive people to remember it.
Maybe if more people knew what it's like to lie down in some ditch and hear bullets flying over it, be forced out of home because it currently is too near the front line or even worse, having your house (and everything you own) destroyed by a bomb (or the retreating army lighting it on fire so it could not be used by the enemy) with or without your loved ones in it, they would not talk about war as if it was a good thing.
The composer expects to be paid forever if somebody makes money using his work. On one hand I agree with it, but the level of it should be limited. Also the composer said that he also transcribes music for hire and would also expect to be paid again if the person who hired him (and paid for the transcription) sold the transcription and made money.
So, how many times he gets paid for his work:
Some singer likes his work and wants to learn and perform it - he needs to buy the sheet music, so the composer gets paid for his work.
Said singer goes on to record a CD and sell it. Now he must pay the composer a percentage of the profits in addition to the initial price of the sheet music.
Let's say a radio station wants to broadcast the song. It has to buy the CD (paying the singer and in turn the composer), but it also has to buy a license to broadcast the music (part of the money goes to the singer and composer again). At this point, the singer has been paid twice and the composer three times for their work.
A restaurant wants to play the radio station to it's customers. It too has to buy a license to do it (even though the radio station already paid for the right to broadcast) paying the singer and composer yet again.
On the other hand, non-art people usually only get paid once for their work. I don't continue to pay HP for the 11 year old printer that I have (I buy ink refills) and I wouldn't have to even if I made money using the printer. I don't continue to pay the builder who built my house. A company pays once for the computers that it uses to make money, even Microsoft does not ask a percentage of the profits in order to use Windows (well, you do not have to upgrade to each new version). If I fix a PC I get paid once and not a percentage of the profits that were made using that PC.
How being hired to transcribe music and being hired to fix a PC differ so that one of them entitles the worker to get paid again for the work, while the other does not?
That's why if I ever need or want to do video editing, I'm buying another VCR, edit controller and all other hardware stuff. If I'm paying my 5 years salary for it, I want to at least have a tangible item not encumbered by licenses (if I buy a VCR I can do whatever I want with it - use it to record/play tapes, modify it to store data, take it apart if I need to fix it etc).
There is no difference between "Price: $0" and "Price: $0 and you get the source code" for the end user who is not a programmer.
However, the game could have consistent rules. For example, raising-from-the-dead magic can fail to work if the dead guy was blown up (you could revive him, but not put him back together) or killed with a magic spell that prevents revival and then have the plot important death happen this way.
The nuke level magic spell could, for example, be limited to living things and/or just your enemies. But if you say that the spell works just like a nuke, then I expect to be able to level a city with it.
But if I have a rocket louncher using which I can destroy various wooden barriers then I should also be able to destroy the locket rotting wooden door or at least be offered a reason why I must find the key (there is no way to launch the rocket safely because earlier I found out that launching a rocket from a closed space can be bad for your health; the sound will alert someone or whatever) and not just "yea, you could blow a hole in that wall, but here your 10 rockets won't work against this door, save them for when you need to blow up a battleship"
Sticker on the drive says Seagate ST41200N, the drive identifies itself as IMPRIMIS 94601-15, so it probably was manufactured around the time when Seagate bought Imprimis (they changed the sticker but did not bother to change the ROM or wherever the ID is stored).
Thanks, I'll try it.
Or you can use Truecrypt or similar and the rest of us can pay less for the drives.
...but MBR is the only format a BIOS can recognize and work with
But all the BIOS does is read LBA #0 of a drive looking for the 55AA signature, if found, load the sector to memory and jump to it. From then the program that actually is in the MBR can do whatever it wants.
Drive makers used to provide various drive overlays that enabled various drives to work in systems that did not support the capacity (at least one such overlay was used in >137GB drives on systems that did not support LBA48). Can't they make such an overlay now?
I have an 8 platter/15 head 5.25" drive that still works...
Of course, with my current hard drive I can only watch something like 40 movies at once. There are some times that I wish I could watch at least 100 movies at once. OTOH, I have 10 hard drives, so I would be able to watch more movies at once, but my file server only has a 1gbps ethernet connection and only PCI 32bit/33MHz slots, so a 10gbps network card would be useless. Also, for external drives, USB2.0 limits the transfer speed to ~40MB/s which a hard drive can do.
Oh and my internet connection will be upgraded to FTTH, but that will only be 200mbps, at least for now, so a hard drive will be enough for seeding.
I use LTO2 tapes for archiving, but my tape drive can read or write at only 30MB/s so a hard drive is enough there too.
I have seen NTFS corruption in Windows, but it was due to a bad cable (1m IDE cables do not always work as intended, I lowered the transfer rate from 100MB/s to 66MB/s and have no more problems with that drive, once I had a bad USB cable that made a few sectors on my external drive unreadable - that was fun to figure out) or when my friend turned his computer off by unplugging it every day. NTFS is pretty good at keeping the file system structure intact, even when the PC crashes (especially if that happens due to a bad connection to the system drive, I probably have a few corrupt files on that one, but the file system is OK)
However, as someone who has 10 hard drives (total capacity is about 3TB) I can tell you that having a lot of drive letters is inconvenient (was that movie in J:, M:, N:, R:, S: or some other drive). I looked for some software that could combine them to one drive letter (without destroying the data), something like if I have two files M:\movies\movie1.avi and n;\movies\movie2.avi, I could just open, say, Z:\movies and see both files even though they are on separate drives, this could be read only as I could just write a file straight to a drive that has enough space, but for reading it would be much better. Didn't find anything, so I tried to make my own program, but could not understand how to create a shell namespace extension or a SMB server (assuming I could run it on Windows).
At home though, the investment in tape drives and and media is simply cost prohibitive.
I bought a used LTO2 tape drive for ~$180, but I use it primarily for archiving. I back up really important data, but backing up 3TB would be difficult and expensive. However, most of the data is replaceable and split to 10 hard drives (no RAID or anything, just 10 drives, though I would like a way to make them appear as a single drive letter at least for reading the files), so, even a complete failure of one drive would not take out all of the data.
And probably a good deal more people that I am leaving out.
Everyone who live in countries that do not have software patents.
But to even state that just being free is good enough goes 100% counter to history.
Because while the "free" format may be chosen if it was available at the time that the "non-free" one was, just being "free" is not enough for people to change their devices etc. My cell phone supports divx and h264, so these are already "free" to me, if I wanted a phone that supports VP8 or Theora, I would have to buy one, so the format is not exactly "free" to me.
I will take "free as in $0" over "free as in open source" any time. I am not a programmer and I don't care if I have the right to modify the code or not. Do you only buy older hardware only because it is easier to mod? I'm sure a CGA video card is easier to mod than any of the new ones.
I also live in a country that does not have software patents, so h264 is as free to me as VP8.
I never said that electric cars will always suck. I'm sure first gasoline cars sucked compared to horses, but the cars were improved faster than horses were. Same can be said about electric cars.
As for having multiple cars (one for short range driving and another one for long range), it increases the upfront costs (you buy two cars instead of one) and may make the short range car uneconomical. Example: I can buy a used gas car in good condition let's say for $5k, the car consumes 10L/100km or I could buy a new car that consumes 6L/100km, but costs $30k. For the $25k difference I could buy a lot of gas for $1.47/L, 17'000L, which I could use to drive 170'000km with the older car and that would just cover the initial cost of the newer car with no fuel. Yes, if I drive a lot then the new car will pay for itself eventually (after ~420'000km the costs would even out), but it may be too late (my 28 year old car only has ~420'000km on the odometer). This of course takes only the fuel consumption into account and not, say maintenance costs (which may be higher for the older car) and so on.
All that matters is range.
Range and refill time. My car gets about 350km on LPG (I can switch to gasoline then), but refilling it takes only a few minutes. If my car got 160km on LPG (it had a smaller tank) I could still drive 300km but would need to stop a few minutes for a refill. How long would it take to recharge the Leaf? Does the station need to have a nuclear reactor nearby or is the electricity from a 330kV line enough?
So, oil is only used as car fuel and not for manufacturing plastics (which I'm sure even the electric cars use), or, say, as fuel in power plants? Great then, if we all start using electric cars there would be no more need for oil...
AFAIK, the USA gets half of its electricity from coal, so enjoy the dead coal miners. If I had to choose, I'd rather have fish and squids etc dead an a single human, but that's just me.
My car has two fuel tanks - gasoline and LPG. The LPG tank does not have a gauge on the dashboard - the gauge is only on the tank itself which is in the trunk. I know that I can drive ~350km with full tank, but if it runs out, I can just switch to gasoline and stop at the nearest fuel station that has LPG.
While the frequency or amplitude will not be reproduced perfectly, you can assume that it won't change by much, for example if you sent 1kHz it probably won't arrive as 2kHz and 2kHz won't become 1kHz. Also, if you send it vs sending nothing it probably won't change that much either, so it's just a matter of figuring out how fast can you go until the signal becomes too distorted to use. Analog modems seem to be pretty capable of determining the speed at which a reliable connection can be made (and the line has noise, attenuation, distortion, echo etc which all depend on the actual line - a long line with loading coils will behave one way, while a direct connection to a ISDN PBX will behave differently, same about audio compression - landlines also use some compression - a-law or mu-law).
Cell phones that have a modem are compatible with analog PSTN modems.