Win32 has a system call to determine whether you're running on WinDOS or on NT. It also has a system call to determine the version (perhaps even down to the build ID) of the running OS. What happens when IsNT() (I made up the name) returns TRUE and WinVer() returns 5.0? Sure it says "Windows 2000 Professional" on the box, but it is the 5.0 release of NT.
I was under the impression that government work could never be patented at all since it is funded by tax payers.
Prior art does not have to refer to a prior patent. It can refer to any prior application of a process. Application of a new and useful process by the government before anybody applies for a patent on the process places the process in the public domain.
Government-funded research often produces patents that are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Sad but true.
Morpheus sucks for ROMs
on
SNES Portable
·
· Score: 1
VisualBoy Advance or Boycott Advance
I recommend VisualBoy Advance, as it focuses on compatibility über alles.
a PSX to USB controller adapter (or any USB gamepad)
The official GBA development system uses a Super NES controller. Play the exact game the developers made with an easily-soldered parallel port adapter. Read More in this journal entry.
Morpheus to download ROMS
Why? With Morpheus or WinMX, 1. it's illegal, and 2. you can never be sure you have a good dump. Better to buy the cartridge and use a Flash Advance linker to dump it. Follow the links at gbadev.org (I don't work for gbadev.org) to see where to buy a linker. Plus, with a linker and a flash cartridge, you too can make GBA games.
XBox has parental locking features built in. All a parent has to do is turn it on, and hey presto - no kid can play that game.
Then what's the point of the Xbox if parents are going to lock their kids away from the only game worth playing? Then it becomes an expensive ($330) DVD player. To succeed, a game console needs to penetrate households, and this means it needs launch titles. Currently, GameCube has a better set of launch or near-launch titles (Monkey Ball, Smash Bros 2, etc).
GBA is not binary compatible with Super NES
on
SNES Portable
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
um...didn't Nintendo already do this? I think it's called Gameboy Advance
GBA isn't binary compatible with Super NES. Thus, even though you have ports of many Super NES games, you don't have ports of anything by Square (FF, Mana, Chrono) because Square and nintendo no longer talk to each other after SMRPG and FF7.
However, this curse becomes a blessing once you get GCC for ARM and a $50 "MBV2" PC link cable: you can easily write your own code for GBA.
Re:Yay! Secret of Mana in the Car!
on
SNES Portable
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The GBA is actually more powerful than a SNES
Twice the CPU, twice the RAM, twice the graphics, and no more sound I/O lag.
it has pretty much the same gfx capability
Exactly twice as powerful. On Super NES, you could get three layers of 16 colors per tile or one Mode 7 layer of 256 colors per tile, and each line could hold only 256 pixels of sprites. On GBA, you can get four layers of tiles, two layers of tiles + one layer of Mode 7, or two layers of Mode 7. Each GBA scanline can hold more sprite pixels, allowing developers to fake more background layers. GBA sprites can also be 256-color and/or scaled.
worse sound
True, in a way. Super NES sound was 16-bit, with instruments compressed 4 to 1. GBA sound is 8-bit with uncompressed instruments. However, how many times will you be connecting the GBA to a rack system as opposed to a pair of simple headphones? Also, the GBA's ARM7TDMI CPU can see all the sound registers; the "loading" you saw on most Super NES games wasn't a problem with cartridge media but rather with the brain-damaged bus between the main CPU and the sound CPU. This was especially evident on Lord of the Rings, where turning off background music made map changes twice as fast.
it's not just a SNES in a tiny form factor, one has to recode
The Super NES was an enhanced NES, which used a single memory-mapped port for data writes to video RAM. The GBA is a new architecture based on memory-mapped everything, somewhat similar to the old Game Boy.
Recoding shouldn't be a problem; the GBA's ARM7TDMI processor has a decent GCC build available, and this makes coding much easier than it was for the 65c816 and SPC700 processors inside the Super NES, which could only use assembly language because they each had only three semi-general-purpose registers.
However, you'll never see Square games on GBA. Nintendo hates Square and Square hates Nintendo after how each treated the other in the Super Mario RPG project and the early days of the Final Fantasy VII project. On the other hand, what I've played of Golden Sun doesn't suck at all, and you already have the old Dragon Warrior games on GBC.
I would pay big bucks for a port of Zero Wing to GBA.
and until fractal compression makes its way into media file formats, all this jazz is just that... empty words.
Fractal compression as we know it is also just empty words. Michael Barnsley's patented fractal transform is an implicit vector quantization approach that scales each 4x4 pixel block from an 8x8 pixel block elsewhere in the picture and adds a constant RGB offset (Read More from the comp.compression FAQ). It has been shown not to be that much stronger than JPEG, especially the new JPEG 2000 that supports wavelet decomposition (no more blocking artifacts).
Lets assume you can fit 7GB (as opposed to 700MB) on a DVD.
No, lets assume you can fit 8 GB (8.4 billion bytes) on a dual-layer DVD. This is 8 * 1048576 kilobytes. Divide that by 32,400 seconds (9 hours) for the Godfather trilogy, and you get about 256 kilobytes or 2 megabits per second. (For comparison, the binary code for the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 fits into 3 megabits.)
So now instead of 23kb/s you can get 230kb/s. Holy fucking shit, that's barely enough for a stereo mp3 stream!
You confuse kilobits with kilobytes. An average MP3 data rate of 24 kilobytes (192 kilobits) per second is enough for transparent reproduction of stereo audio according to r3mix.net, and even 5.1 channel Dolby Digital uses only 48 kilobytes per second. This leaves 212 kilobytes per second average for video, and MPEG-4 DivX video can easily do DVD quality at this data rate.
And with Nintendo's gay ass games (pikmin? wtf? and have you seen how fucking gay they made Link
"Gay" means happy. Yes, Link is smiling for the camera. Let me guess, are you a Tori Amos fan?
"Gay" also means homosexual. How does Link look any more homosexual than some of the little hero characters in any anime? And there certainly isn't any "f___ing" or "gay ass" (don't click it) in Zelda 9.
Gamecube looks like it's aimed at the 5-10 year old market
How again is it impossible for 18+ gamers to have fun playing Rogue Leader, Dave Mirra BMX, or Waverace Blue Storm? Just because it isn't as full of gore as Mortal Kombat or Quake III: Arena doesn't mean adults hate it. Heck, the next five years' worth of Capcom Resident Evil games will be GameCube exclusives.
whereas Xbox, despite its flaws, at least looks like something that someone over 12 years old might be able to enjoy.
Not if the right-wingers behind this list of politically incorrect toys get their way: it'll become illegal for retailers to sell M-rated games to children or to adults who don't sign a contract "I will not expose my children to this game." Most reviewers consider the M-rated game "Halo" the only outstanding game for Xbox. Without Halo, Xbox is nothing more than a GameCube with a hard drive and a DVD player.
I am completely unimpressed by nintendo's games
True, Super Smash Bros. Melee isn't a clone of Street Fighter II or Tekken like most of the other fighting games on the market: it introduces battlefield tactics that a flat plane just can't provide.
They didn't leverage their monopoly status, just their very large sums of cash on hand.
That would be money laundering. It's illegal in the United States to finance a venture with money gained unlawfully. Buying all your competitors (especially in hostile takeovers) may also be illegal under some circumstances. Even without considering government-imposed penalties, acting anticompetitively may bring short-term rewards, but it eventually hurts the bottom line by degrading the value of the company's largest asset: its name.
Correct; the existence of the popular games "Monopoly" by Hasbro and "Basketball" by Naismith demonstrates this. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in video games either; the continued profitability of Sony and Nintendo demonstrate this. However, Microsoft does have a monopoly in the following area: operating systems for machines that can run commercial sim games (i.e. not freeciv). The average sim game (such as simcity, civ, or any RTS) requires a keyboard and a mouse for best efficiency (no, the joypad interface to super nes simcity and the like is not all that efficient), and the machines that come packaged with those input devices as of December 2001 tend to be PCs. A U.S. federal court has decided that Microsoft has a monopoly on PC operating systems.
It is illegal (and termed "money laundering") to finance a new venture (such as Xbox) with funds gained from illegal activity (such as predatory monopolistic behavior).
You know, the funny thing about/usr/share is it is supposed to be where you put "data" which can be shared by users, right?
No./usr/share and/usr/local/share are for files installed by an application and shared between the different binary architectures the application can be compiled for (such as map files for a game). To share data among users, use/home/johndoe/pub, or use groups.
"Movie" does not always mean feature film. I'm pretty sure that by "movie", geekoid meant a more general class of files, that is, any file containing moving images synchronized to audio, such as a feature film's trailer, a Flash movie (YATTA!), a music video, etc.
Besides, a feature film may not be available in a given jurisdiction (think region lockout or shipping restrictions). In the United States, copying of such movies may be protected by "no harm, no foul" (17 USC 107) or the "no suitor, no judge" principle of common law.
You haven't explained why the Berne Convention isn't considered constitutional in the US though
Clicked submit too soon. U.S. Constitution 1.8.1 requires copyprivilege terms to have limits (but not necessarily reasonable limits). The Berne Convention requires members to recognize each other's copyprivilege laws. If they include statutory perpetual copyright, that part of the treaty is unconstitutional. (A 1,000 year term would in theory be OK.)
where do you *hope* the level of online freedom is in about 2101
Probably not very high, especially now that a war was beginning. The CEO of UniViaDisFox, Richard Cats, has declared that "All your I.P. are belong to us."
House directory and Senate directory: whom to fax if you want this law repealed. Yes, fax. E-mail is assumed to be spam, while paper mail is assumed to carry anthrax.
I think the system we have, with copyright expiring after a while, is the correct system: that way the artist knows his immediate family profit from his work and not faceless corporations.
Immediate family, immediate profit. Copyright should last life plus TEN years (long enough for the family members to learn to produce more works), not life plus 70. However, Constitution 1.8.8 as interpreted by the Eldred v. Ashcroft court recognizes the lifetime of the Universe less a day as an adequate "limited time."
Americans: please write your representative and senators, asking them to repeal the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Is the US Constitution strictly relevant to a book by a British author?
Yes. The Berne Convention establishes international copyright law, but United States Constitution 6.2 (This constutition, and statutes and treaties thereunder, "shall be the supreme law of the land") requires that all treaties be constitutional, and US Constitution 1.8.8. This is why the United States does not recognize the statutory perpetual copyright that the UK has passed on some of JM Barrie's work.
I think what might happen is if the trilogy is a success is they might go back and do a hobbit movie.
But after they finish the LotR series (it's really NOT a trilogy), what two stories will JRRT's descendants write to fill in the gap between The Hobbit (i.e. episode 1) and LotR (i.e. episodes 4 through 6)? And what changes will be made in LotR: Special Edition?
In a Communist model, copyright would be used to prevent branching and ensure the development stays with the main project. The copyright owners ultimately being the government.
In a capitalist Proprietary Corporate Oligopoly model, on the other hand, copyright would be used to prevent branching and ensure the development stays with the main project. The copyright owners ultimately effectively becoming the government. See also the Bono Act and the DMCA.
The number of people competent to hand-roll a procmailrc, let alone install all the other needed anti-spam tools, is a tiny fraction of the total number of email users. And maintaining all of that anti-spam infrastructure to keep up with the latest spammer tricks.
Then why not throw up a web site containing filter scripts for the popular mail servers (to route received mail to an IMAP folder "junkmail") and MUAs (to label received mail as possibly spam, with a new sort option "order by spam probability") and putting checks for new filter scripts in the weekly software update regimen (server) or downloading them automatically (client)? In fact, I bet several people have already started such projects.
I checked the Coleman site for pricing on real generators, and (as consistent with my experience elsewhere) the pricing was "call us".
"Call us" generally means "If you have to ask, you can't afford it; it's not priced for residential use." It lets sellers put people on the line who are experienced in dealing with the effects of sticker shock. Once, I was looking into a library to develop installable filesystems for Windows NT/2K/XP to see if I could port ext2fs, but Microsoft's poorly documented headers cost $1,000, and the only other available package cost $100,000. Ouch.
Does anyone know if you can run this at 640x480 as is?
No. Unlike CRT technology, LCD technology has discrete pixels, one to each set of three transistors. Rescaling an input produces ugly blockiness or blurriness instead of the exact aliasing that hinted fonts rely on.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. Windows NT 5.0 will never be released.
Win32 has a system call to determine whether you're running on WinDOS or on NT. It also has a system call to determine the version (perhaps even down to the build ID) of the running OS. What happens when IsNT() (I made up the name) returns TRUE and WinVer() returns 5.0? Sure it says "Windows 2000 Professional" on the box, but it is the 5.0 release of NT.
Only that wouldn't work because as long as you can read a file, you can duplicate it.
Then turn off 'read', and make the playing of media files dependent on the 'execute' bit, as it is in UNIX systems with Perl scripts, etc.
What does a secure version of Linux have to do with DRM? Totally different things as far as I can tell.
s/copyrighted/classified/ in Microsoft's DRM proposal and you have a DRM system more along the lines of what the NSA would create.
I was under the impression that government work could never be patented at all since it is funded by tax payers.
Prior art does not have to refer to a prior patent. It can refer to any prior application of a process. Application of a new and useful process by the government before anybody applies for a patent on the process places the process in the public domain.
Government-funded research often produces patents that are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Sad but true.
VisualBoy Advance or Boycott Advance
I recommend VisualBoy Advance, as it focuses on compatibility über alles.
a PSX to USB controller adapter (or any USB gamepad)
The official GBA development system uses a Super NES controller. Play the exact game the developers made with an easily-soldered parallel port adapter. Read More in this journal entry.
Morpheus to download ROMS
Why? With Morpheus or WinMX, 1. it's illegal, and 2. you can never be sure you have a good dump. Better to buy the cartridge and use a Flash Advance linker to dump it. Follow the links at gbadev.org (I don't work for gbadev.org) to see where to buy a linker. Plus, with a linker and a flash cartridge, you too can make GBA games.
XBox has parental locking features built in. All a parent has to do is turn it on, and hey presto - no kid can play that game.
Then what's the point of the Xbox if parents are going to lock their kids away from the only game worth playing? Then it becomes an expensive ($330) DVD player. To succeed, a game console needs to penetrate households, and this means it needs launch titles. Currently, GameCube has a better set of launch or near-launch titles (Monkey Ball, Smash Bros 2, etc).
um...didn't Nintendo already do this? I think it's called Gameboy Advance
GBA isn't binary compatible with Super NES. Thus, even though you have ports of many Super NES games, you don't have ports of anything by Square (FF, Mana, Chrono) because Square and nintendo no longer talk to each other after SMRPG and FF7.
However, this curse becomes a blessing once you get GCC for ARM and a $50 "MBV2" PC link cable: you can easily write your own code for GBA.
The GBA is actually more powerful than a SNES
Twice the CPU, twice the RAM, twice the graphics, and no more sound I/O lag.
it has pretty much the same gfx capability
Exactly twice as powerful. On Super NES, you could get three layers of 16 colors per tile or one Mode 7 layer of 256 colors per tile, and each line could hold only 256 pixels of sprites. On GBA, you can get four layers of tiles, two layers of tiles + one layer of Mode 7, or two layers of Mode 7. Each GBA scanline can hold more sprite pixels, allowing developers to fake more background layers. GBA sprites can also be 256-color and/or scaled.
worse sound
True, in a way. Super NES sound was 16-bit, with instruments compressed 4 to 1. GBA sound is 8-bit with uncompressed instruments. However, how many times will you be connecting the GBA to a rack system as opposed to a pair of simple headphones? Also, the GBA's ARM7TDMI CPU can see all the sound registers; the "loading" you saw on most Super NES games wasn't a problem with cartridge media but rather with the brain-damaged bus between the main CPU and the sound CPU. This was especially evident on Lord of the Rings, where turning off background music made map changes twice as fast.
it's not just a SNES in a tiny form factor, one has to recode
The Super NES was an enhanced NES, which used a single memory-mapped port for data writes to video RAM. The GBA is a new architecture based on memory-mapped everything, somewhat similar to the old Game Boy.
Recoding shouldn't be a problem; the GBA's ARM7TDMI processor has a decent GCC build available, and this makes coding much easier than it was for the 65c816 and SPC700 processors inside the Super NES, which could only use assembly language because they each had only three semi-general-purpose registers.
However, you'll never see Square games on GBA. Nintendo hates Square and Square hates Nintendo after how each treated the other in the Super Mario RPG project and the early days of the Final Fantasy VII project. On the other hand, what I've played of Golden Sun doesn't suck at all, and you already have the old Dragon Warrior games on GBC.
I would pay big bucks for a port of Zero Wing to GBA.
and until fractal compression makes its way into media file formats, all this jazz is just that... empty words.
Fractal compression as we know it is also just empty words. Michael Barnsley's patented fractal transform is an implicit vector quantization approach that scales each 4x4 pixel block from an 8x8 pixel block elsewhere in the picture and adds a constant RGB offset (Read More from the comp.compression FAQ). It has been shown not to be that much stronger than JPEG, especially the new JPEG 2000 that supports wavelet decomposition (no more blocking artifacts).
Lets assume you can fit 7GB (as opposed to 700MB) on a DVD.
No, lets assume you can fit 8 GB (8.4 billion bytes) on a dual-layer DVD. This is 8 * 1048576 kilobytes. Divide that by 32,400 seconds (9 hours) for the Godfather trilogy, and you get about 256 kilobytes or 2 megabits per second. (For comparison, the binary code for the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3 fits into 3 megabits.)
So now instead of 23kb/s you can get 230kb/s. Holy fucking shit, that's barely enough for a stereo mp3 stream!
You confuse kilobits with kilobytes. An average MP3 data rate of 24 kilobytes (192 kilobits) per second is enough for transparent reproduction of stereo audio according to r3mix.net, and even 5.1 channel Dolby Digital uses only 48 kilobytes per second. This leaves 212 kilobytes per second average for video, and MPEG-4 DivX video can easily do DVD quality at this data rate.
And with Nintendo's gay ass games (pikmin? wtf? and have you seen how fucking gay they made Link
"Gay" means happy. Yes, Link is smiling for the camera. Let me guess, are you a Tori Amos fan?
"Gay" also means homosexual. How does Link look any more homosexual than some of the little hero characters in any anime? And there certainly isn't any "f___ing" or "gay ass" (don't click it) in Zelda 9.
Gamecube looks like it's aimed at the 5-10 year old market
How again is it impossible for 18+ gamers to have fun playing Rogue Leader, Dave Mirra BMX, or Waverace Blue Storm? Just because it isn't as full of gore as Mortal Kombat or Quake III: Arena doesn't mean adults hate it. Heck, the next five years' worth of Capcom Resident Evil games will be GameCube exclusives.
whereas Xbox, despite its flaws, at least looks like something that someone over 12 years old might be able to enjoy.
Not if the right-wingers behind this list of politically incorrect toys get their way: it'll become illegal for retailers to sell M-rated games to children or to adults who don't sign a contract "I will not expose my children to this game." Most reviewers consider the M-rated game "Halo" the only outstanding game for Xbox. Without Halo, Xbox is nothing more than a GameCube with a hard drive and a DVD player.
I am completely unimpressed by nintendo's games
True, Super Smash Bros. Melee isn't a clone of Street Fighter II or Tekken like most of the other fighting games on the market: it introduces battlefield tactics that a flat plane just can't provide.
They didn't leverage their monopoly status, just their very large sums of cash on hand.
That would be money laundering. It's illegal in the United States to finance a venture with money gained unlawfully. Buying all your competitors (especially in hostile takeovers) may also be illegal under some circumstances. Even without considering government-imposed penalties, acting anticompetitively may bring short-term rewards, but it eventually hurts the bottom line by degrading the value of the company's largest asset: its name.
But Microsoft isn't a monopoly in games.
Correct; the existence of the popular games "Monopoly" by Hasbro and "Basketball" by Naismith demonstrates this. Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in video games either; the continued profitability of Sony and Nintendo demonstrate this. However, Microsoft does have a monopoly in the following area: operating systems for machines that can run commercial sim games (i.e. not freeciv). The average sim game (such as simcity, civ, or any RTS) requires a keyboard and a mouse for best efficiency (no, the joypad interface to super nes simcity and the like is not all that efficient), and the machines that come packaged with those input devices as of December 2001 tend to be PCs. A U.S. federal court has decided that Microsoft has a monopoly on PC operating systems.
It is illegal (and termed "money laundering") to finance a new venture (such as Xbox) with funds gained from illegal activity (such as predatory monopolistic behavior).
You know, the funny thing about /usr/share is it is supposed to be where you put "data" which can be shared by users, right?
No. /usr/share and /usr/local/share are for files installed by an application and shared between the different binary architectures the application can be compiled for (such as map files for a game). To share data among users, use /home/johndoe/pub, or use groups.
There is always the option of paying for them.
"Movie" does not always mean feature film. I'm pretty sure that by "movie", geekoid meant a more general class of files, that is, any file containing moving images synchronized to audio, such as a feature film's trailer, a Flash movie (YATTA!), a music video, etc.
Besides, a feature film may not be available in a given jurisdiction (think region lockout or shipping restrictions). In the United States, copying of such movies may be protected by "no harm, no foul" (17 USC 107) or the "no suitor, no judge" principle of common law.
You haven't explained why the Berne Convention isn't considered constitutional in the US though
Clicked submit too soon. U.S. Constitution 1.8.1 requires copyprivilege terms to have limits (but not necessarily reasonable limits). The Berne Convention requires members to recognize each other's copyprivilege laws. If they include statutory perpetual copyright, that part of the treaty is unconstitutional. (A 1,000 year term would in theory be OK.)
where do you *hope* the level of online freedom is in about 2101
Probably not very high, especially now that a war was beginning. The CEO of UniViaDisFox, Richard Cats, has declared that "All your I.P. are belong to us."
I think the system we have, with copyright expiring after a while, is the correct system: that way the artist knows his immediate family profit from his work and not faceless corporations.
Immediate family, immediate profit. Copyright should last life plus TEN years (long enough for the family members to learn to produce more works), not life plus 70. However, Constitution 1.8.8 as interpreted by the Eldred v. Ashcroft court recognizes the lifetime of the Universe less a day as an adequate "limited time."
Americans: please write your representative and senators, asking them to repeal the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Is the US Constitution strictly relevant to a book by a British author?
Yes. The Berne Convention establishes international copyright law, but United States Constitution 6.2 (This constutition, and statutes and treaties thereunder, "shall be the supreme law of the land") requires that all treaties be constitutional, and US Constitution 1.8.8. This is why the United States does not recognize the statutory perpetual copyright that the UK has passed on some of JM Barrie's work.
I think what might happen is if the trilogy is a success is they might go back and do a hobbit movie.
But after they finish the LotR series (it's really NOT a trilogy), what two stories will JRRT's descendants write to fill in the gap between The Hobbit (i.e. episode 1) and LotR (i.e. episodes 4 through 6)? And what changes will be made in LotR: Special Edition?
In a Communist model, copyright would be used to prevent branching and ensure the development stays with the main project. The copyright owners ultimately being the government.
In a capitalist Proprietary Corporate Oligopoly model, on the other hand, copyright would be used to prevent branching and ensure the development stays with the main project. The copyright owners ultimately effectively becoming the government. See also the Bono Act and the DMCA.
The number of people competent to hand-roll a procmailrc, let alone install all the other needed anti-spam tools, is a tiny fraction of the total number of email users. And maintaining all of that anti-spam infrastructure to keep up with the latest spammer tricks.
Then why not throw up a web site containing filter scripts for the popular mail servers (to route received mail to an IMAP folder "junkmail") and MUAs (to label received mail as possibly spam, with a new sort option "order by spam probability") and putting checks for new filter scripts in the weekly software update regimen (server) or downloading them automatically (client)? In fact, I bet several people have already started such projects.
I checked the Coleman site for pricing on real generators, and (as consistent with my experience elsewhere) the pricing was "call us".
"Call us" generally means "If you have to ask, you can't afford it; it's not priced for residential use." It lets sellers put people on the line who are experienced in dealing with the effects of sticker shock. Once, I was looking into a library to develop installable filesystems for Windows NT/2K/XP to see if I could port ext2fs, but Microsoft's poorly documented headers cost $1,000, and the only other available package cost $100,000. Ouch.
Does anyone know if you can run this at 640x480 as is?
No. Unlike CRT technology, LCD technology has discrete pixels, one to each set of three transistors. Rescaling an input produces ugly blockiness or blurriness instead of the exact aliasing that hinted fonts rely on.