Are the six axes not orthogonal or has Sony come up with some practical use for string theory? (If the latter, I can see why it's on the expensive side...)
The PS3 will now support the Time Cube. Your PS3 will be able to play four, er, six simultaneous games in one revolution of the BluRay disc.
In the old days, disk drive motors and fans. But many of these now run on 5V, hence the cheap USB-powered drive cases out there. Chips at CMOS power levels run at 3.3v, TTL is 5v,but hardly anything runs at 12v anymore.
Fans still do. Have you actually tried finding a 5 volt fan in a computer?
Question: With all of the exploding batteries lately (Apple, Dell, Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo (possibly), etc. Have you seen any reports of Sony laptops exploding?
Yes. Back in August, a 5+ year old Sony Vaio caught fire at this year's US Go Congress, it was in the strong player (dan-level) room, and disrupted play for some time due to the need for evacuation from the fumes. Fortunately, at the time nobody was playing at that particular table when it went off.
Joke well taken, but in all honesty the bigger joke is that we technically could have had flying cars already. You know what the problem is? the general public couldn't be trusted not to crash the things left and right. In no time there would be more flying lawsuits than cars.
Not only is there the trouble of random idiots crashing the things (how would you like it if a flying car crashed into your roof?), but he wants to use liquid hydrogen for superconductivity. If you don't keep the valves and such of cryo-liquids in tip-top shape, sooner or later you will find out what a BLEVE is all about. Oh yeah, I want something like that being flown around by teenagers, uh huh. Even non-flammable cryo-liquids like LN2 can be dangerous just from the powerful expansion as it boils, never mind frostbite or flames.
The blurb (RTFA? What's that mean?) suggests that the actual design of the gameplay depends on handed-ness, which is why to make Link right-handed they had to flip everything else as well. That doesn't make much sense to me.
I think they simply made the decision late enough in the schedule that they didn't have the time to run it back through playtesting.
Since some people really will want to play left-handed (I'm a lefty only when writing and eating, so not me), why not just make it a configurable option?
But mirroring the whole freaking game? Someone couldn't have thought of just flipping the character model a year or two ago when they still had time to do it? Then people could even play the game a second time with their off hand.
For those who were "too lazy; didn't read" the comments on the badastronomy page, the transit only lasted one second. So not only was it great camera work, it was great timing, too.
You do know that a good deal of that 85 watts is for charging the batteries, right? You don't need that big of a power supply if you aren't charging batteries.
The US announcement is supposed to be today. Apparently they are going to release it in the US first, which is unusual for Nintendo. The Japanese game companies usually release in Japan first, people go nuts importing systems that won't work with games from their own country (when released), then there is a US release. The PS3 and Wii being released first in the US is definitely a change from the past.
Sorry about invoking Admiral Ackbar here, but I heard about this recently, I think it was on digg. The trick is that by participating in a survey, you suddenly have a "business relationship" with them, which means they can hit you with a regular telemarketing call.
I personally prefer to use the magic words "Please put me on your do not call list", especially when I hear that telltale lag between picking up the phone and the outbound dialer connecting me with a sub-human.
It also doesn't hurt that I have one of those Telezapper thingies (only set to "stun", meaning just the first of the three tones), which works against anybody with older dialer equipment who can't be bothered to buy new equipment.
What about Texas, in the area south of San Antonio? It's mostly water to the east (except for Florida, of course) and you can get closer to the equator. The area has problems with tornadoes, but unless I'm mistaken, that can be mitigated by building a reinforced structure along the lines of the current structures in Florida. (We certainly get tornadoes here as well.)
I don't recall hearing much about tornadoes along the gulf coast. Certainly Texas would be a good location, but I guess that back in the day Florida had better pork-barrel politicians than Texas did. There is, of course, some NASA presence in Houston (in fact, that's where shuttle conrtol is after launch), especially after LBJ became president, but Houston is too far north because it's north of the gulf and doesn't have the needed splashdown area. Also, Florida has a lot better permanent civilization along its eastern coast, whereas Texas mostly has drive-by tourism. In Texas, that part of the gulf coast is somewhere you go for the weekend or spring break, not somewhere you live.
My trick is to download stuff via a Windows 2000 install. I've only done it once just the other day, but it was from a W2K installed from one of those install CDs that had a setup file changed to bypass the CD key. (for which everybody knows the "default" key anyhow, so this was really just to save me time when installing)
Since I know that someday Microsoft will probably decide to take all the W2K patches offline, my plan is to download a copy of the installers for every patch that was auto-installed.
Except that an actual Commodore computer setup isn't the only (or even the best) way to read the floppy disks. The two other options are: 1) a Commodore floppy drive hooked up to a PC with the appropriate cable and software, or 2) a special disk controller card such as a Catweasel which reads the raw flux transition timing rather than trying to read actual data.
I tinkered around with writing code for a Catweasel to read Commodore floppy disks, and while the GCR format was a bit easier than Apple's (which was designed by Woz to be very efficient, by using a very tricky bit scrambling), if I had wanted to read file data (I was just trying to create D64 images) it would have been trickier than the Apple II because most files on the C64 use next-sector links in the last two bytes of the previous sector.
Tell me, have you actually WATCHED a football game in HD? Your post seems to say no (or that you have some offbrand cable company as your provider).
That's actually an important point. Cable companies are very likely to re-compress the network HD signal to a lower bit rate than you would get with from the over-the-air signal with an antenna on the roof. And even then, there are some over-the-air stations that want to broadcast secondary channels, but it's usually only a single weather/radar channel, so it doesn't take all that much from the main channel.
I liken these two formats to LaserDiscs. They were out there, they were superior to tapes, but they were large, clunky, and no one really adopted them except those that were techno-freaks.
I don't think this is entirely true. I got in to laserdisc in its last couple of years (getting a lot of clearance LDs from Bjorns store), and the problem was more one of price. When you got right down to it, it cost $8 to make a laserdisc. That's manufacturing and distribution cost. This was when there were bins of VHS sell-through tapes for $5 or less. (whereas we now have Wal-Mart's $5.50 Dump Bin) Even with very high economies of scale if LD had become mainstream, the damn things would still be expensive to manufacture. One of the big problems with LD at the start was that the companies behind it hadn't factored in the cost of needing a clean room, which turned out to be essential to get acceptable quality.
But Laserdisc actually started dying as an inverse of the same effect that has left SACD/DVD-A as niche formats, and seems to be on the way to leaving Blu-Ray/HD-DVD as niche formats as well. Just from pre-announcements of DVD, people were selling off laserdisc two years before DVD came out, which was a bit later than it was supposed to because of the extra time to compromise the two competing formats into one. (This is something that was NOT done with HD; thanks Sony for being such an ass.)
Presumably the thought of having a high quality picture that could easily exceed LD was a part of it, but for people to ditch LD in advance, the one absolutely 100% known fact of the CD-size disc must have played a big role. People knew that they could be manufactured at cheaply as VHS, meaning that they had the possibility of going mainstream. There wasn't quite as much of a quality or reliability improvement as from LP to CD, but the convienence factor of LD vs DVD size was even higher, as LDs were twice as thick and maybe three times as heavy as LPs (they were made of acrylic), and longer movies needed two of those discs, which meant you had to get up to change discs in the middle of a movie. Part of the reason for the extra thickness was to get them sturdy enough to remain flat at 12 inches. There were a very few single-sided 8" LDs made using CD-thickness polycarbonate, but the lack of run time made them nothing more than curiousities.
Now I have to wonder if what drove early adopters most was the smaller form factor, the promise of cheaper movies (LD movies sold at about $40, when DVDs were $20 out of the gate AND sold at the same time as VHS movies were rental-only), or the ability to fit 99% of all movies on a single disc so you didn't need a disc swap. Or maybe it was all three. In any case it was a "perfect storm" that was only rivaled by the adoption of CD, and hasn't been seen since.
I don't know about Vista, but XP stays muted after you reboot.
Until they decide that the branding is so important that they have to override the volume setting to play the sound. I can hear the meeting somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft... "Since we don't know what volume level it should be if the user mutes the sound, we'll just play at at maximum volume, no matter what the volume setting is." (I can't wait for the first hearing impairment lawsuit for someone getting blasted with that sound while wearing headphones)
that rom based and is like the bios beep on a pc. If there is a error you hear a different sound.
The best of those was the "auto accident" sound. Anyhow, I so rarely start up or reboot a Mac (I usually get 2-12 weeks uptime) that I hardly ever hear it.
What is annoying, however, is that the Mac mini (at least the original PPC version) will play the startup sound through the built-in speaker, even if you have headphones plugged in.
It was only last week, but I'm surprised that I hadn't heard in the "usual places" (slashdot, digg) that Dice-K (check out that picture!) got grounded. Damn, now we don't get to make jokes about Otakus! In! Space! Rumor had it he was planning to wear some sort of costume while up there.
Trivia: it was only revealed a few months ago (because that's now long it took Neil to realize it) that translator Neil Nadelman came up with that nickname.
Slashdot Mirror
Are the six axes not orthogonal or has Sony come up with some practical use for string theory? (If the latter, I can see why it's on the expensive side...)
The PS3 will now support the Time Cube. Your PS3 will be able to play four, er, six simultaneous games in one revolution of the BluRay disc.
The wireless feature was a great idea, they just screwed it up. Maybe they can fix it before Apple steps in with an iPod Shareable(TM)
This is Microsoft. Just like Windows and the Xbox, they'll get it right on the third try.
In the old days, disk drive motors and fans. But many of these now run on 5V, hence the cheap USB-powered drive cases out there. Chips at CMOS power levels run at 3.3v, TTL is 5v,but hardly anything runs at 12v anymore.
Fans still do. Have you actually tried finding a 5 volt fan in a computer?
Question: With all of the exploding batteries lately (Apple, Dell, Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo (possibly), etc. Have you seen any reports of Sony laptops exploding?
Yes. Back in August, a 5+ year old Sony Vaio caught fire at this year's US Go Congress, it was in the strong player (dan-level) room, and disrupted play for some time due to the need for evacuation from the fumes. Fortunately, at the time nobody was playing at that particular table when it went off.
Joke well taken, but in all honesty the bigger joke is that we technically could have had flying cars already. You know what the problem is? the general public couldn't be trusted not to crash the things left and right. In no time there would be more flying lawsuits than cars.
Not only is there the trouble of random idiots crashing the things (how would you like it if a flying car crashed into your roof?), but he wants to use liquid hydrogen for superconductivity. If you don't keep the valves and such of cryo-liquids in tip-top shape, sooner or later you will find out what a BLEVE is all about. Oh yeah, I want something like that being flown around by teenagers, uh huh. Even non-flammable cryo-liquids like LN2 can be dangerous just from the powerful expansion as it boils, never mind frostbite or flames.
The blurb (RTFA? What's that mean?) suggests that the actual design of the gameplay depends on handed-ness, which is why to make Link right-handed they had to flip everything else as well. That doesn't make much sense to me.
I think they simply made the decision late enough in the schedule that they didn't have the time to run it back through playtesting.
Since some people really will want to play left-handed (I'm a lefty only when writing and eating, so not me), why not just make it a configurable option?
But mirroring the whole freaking game? Someone couldn't have thought of just flipping the character model a year or two ago when they still had time to do it? Then people could even play the game a second time with their off hand.
It's also today's APOD picture:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060921.html
For those who were "too lazy; didn't read" the comments on the badastronomy page, the transit only lasted one second. So not only was it great camera work, it was great timing, too.
Maybe they can get something into orbit for the 50th anniversary of Sputnik? They still have a bit more than a year to make it happen.
It was a hit-and-run, you insensitive clod.
That's right. Texas state law. If you're involved in an auto accident, you stay to render aid, etc.
You do know that a good deal of that 85 watts is for charging the batteries, right? You don't need that big of a power supply if you aren't charging batteries.
Apple fanatics don't firebomb Anglican churches just because a Roman Catholic suggested they refrain from violence.
That's right. It's the Linux fanatics that firebomb Anglican churches just because a Roman Catholic suggested they use Windows.
I'm sure there's less pathetic ways to get your point across.
Fixed.
(ahem) --> IN JAPAN <--
The US announcement is supposed to be today. Apparently they are going to release it in the US first, which is unusual for Nintendo. The Japanese game companies usually release in Japan first, people go nuts importing systems that won't work with games from their own country (when released), then there is a US release. The PS3 and Wii being released first in the US is definitely a change from the past.
Sorry about invoking Admiral Ackbar here, but I heard about this recently, I think it was on digg. The trick is that by participating in a survey, you suddenly have a "business relationship" with them, which means they can hit you with a regular telemarketing call.
I personally prefer to use the magic words "Please put me on your do not call list", especially when I hear that telltale lag between picking up the phone and the outbound dialer connecting me with a sub-human.
It also doesn't hurt that I have one of those Telezapper thingies (only set to "stun", meaning just the first of the three tones), which works against anybody with older dialer equipment who can't be bothered to buy new equipment.
What about Texas, in the area south of San Antonio? It's mostly water to the east (except for Florida, of course) and you can get closer to the equator. The area has problems with tornadoes, but unless I'm mistaken, that can be mitigated by building a reinforced structure along the lines of the current structures in Florida. (We certainly get tornadoes here as well.)
I don't recall hearing much about tornadoes along the gulf coast. Certainly Texas would be a good location, but I guess that back in the day Florida had better pork-barrel politicians than Texas did. There is, of course, some NASA presence in Houston (in fact, that's where shuttle conrtol is after launch), especially after LBJ became president, but Houston is too far north because it's north of the gulf and doesn't have the needed splashdown area. Also, Florida has a lot better permanent civilization along its eastern coast, whereas Texas mostly has drive-by tourism. In Texas, that part of the gulf coast is somewhere you go for the weekend or spring break, not somewhere you live.
My trick is to download stuff via a Windows 2000 install. I've only done it once just the other day, but it was from a W2K installed from one of those install CDs that had a setup file changed to bypass the CD key. (for which everybody knows the "default" key anyhow, so this was really just to save me time when installing)
Since I know that someday Microsoft will probably decide to take all the W2K patches offline, my plan is to download a copy of the installers for every patch that was auto-installed.
Except that an actual Commodore computer setup isn't the only (or even the best) way to read the floppy disks. The two other options are: 1) a Commodore floppy drive hooked up to a PC with the appropriate cable and software, or 2) a special disk controller card such as a Catweasel which reads the raw flux transition timing rather than trying to read actual data.
I tinkered around with writing code for a Catweasel to read Commodore floppy disks, and while the GCR format was a bit easier than Apple's (which was designed by Woz to be very efficient, by using a very tricky bit scrambling), if I had wanted to read file data (I was just trying to create D64 images) it would have been trickier than the Apple II because most files on the C64 use next-sector links in the last two bytes of the previous sector.
Tell me, have you actually WATCHED a football game in HD? Your post seems to say no (or that you have some offbrand cable company as your provider).
That's actually an important point. Cable companies are very likely to re-compress the network HD signal to a lower bit rate than you would get with from the over-the-air signal with an antenna on the roof. And even then, there are some over-the-air stations that want to broadcast secondary channels, but it's usually only a single weather/radar channel, so it doesn't take all that much from the main channel.
I liken these two formats to LaserDiscs. They were out there, they were superior to tapes, but they were large, clunky, and no one really adopted them except those that were techno-freaks.
I don't think this is entirely true. I got in to laserdisc in its last couple of years (getting a lot of clearance LDs from Bjorns store), and the problem was more one of price. When you got right down to it, it cost $8 to make a laserdisc. That's manufacturing and distribution cost. This was when there were bins of VHS sell-through tapes for $5 or less. (whereas we now have Wal-Mart's $5.50 Dump Bin) Even with very high economies of scale if LD had become mainstream, the damn things would still be expensive to manufacture. One of the big problems with LD at the start was that the companies behind it hadn't factored in the cost of needing a clean room, which turned out to be essential to get acceptable quality.
But Laserdisc actually started dying as an inverse of the same effect that has left SACD/DVD-A as niche formats, and seems to be on the way to leaving Blu-Ray/HD-DVD as niche formats as well. Just from pre-announcements of DVD, people were selling off laserdisc two years before DVD came out, which was a bit later than it was supposed to because of the extra time to compromise the two competing formats into one. (This is something that was NOT done with HD; thanks Sony for being such an ass.)
Presumably the thought of having a high quality picture that could easily exceed LD was a part of it, but for people to ditch LD in advance, the one absolutely 100% known fact of the CD-size disc must have played a big role. People knew that they could be manufactured at cheaply as VHS, meaning that they had the possibility of going mainstream. There wasn't quite as much of a quality or reliability improvement as from LP to CD, but the convienence factor of LD vs DVD size was even higher, as LDs were twice as thick and maybe three times as heavy as LPs (they were made of acrylic), and longer movies needed two of those discs, which meant you had to get up to change discs in the middle of a movie. Part of the reason for the extra thickness was to get them sturdy enough to remain flat at 12 inches. There were a very few single-sided 8" LDs made using CD-thickness polycarbonate, but the lack of run time made them nothing more than curiousities.
Now I have to wonder if what drove early adopters most was the smaller form factor, the promise of cheaper movies (LD movies sold at about $40, when DVDs were $20 out of the gate AND sold at the same time as VHS movies were rental-only), or the ability to fit 99% of all movies on a single disc so you didn't need a disc swap. Or maybe it was all three. In any case it was a "perfect storm" that was only rivaled by the adoption of CD, and hasn't been seen since.
I don't know about Vista, but XP stays muted after you reboot.
Until they decide that the branding is so important that they have to override the volume setting to play the sound. I can hear the meeting somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft... "Since we don't know what volume level it should be if the user mutes the sound, we'll just play at at maximum volume, no matter what the volume setting is." (I can't wait for the first hearing impairment lawsuit for someone getting blasted with that sound while wearing headphones)
All it sounds like to me is a great way to get kicked out of a class.
You regularly reboot OS X or Linux in class? Maybe you should listen to the teacher/professor instead of upgrading your OS?
that rom based and is like the bios beep on a pc. If there is a error you hear a different sound.
The best of those was the "auto accident" sound. Anyhow, I so rarely start up or reboot a Mac (I usually get 2-12 weeks uptime) that I hardly ever hear it.
What is annoying, however, is that the Mac mini (at least the original PPC version) will play the startup sound through the built-in speaker, even if you have headphones plugged in.
It was only last week, but I'm surprised that I hadn't heard in the "usual places" (slashdot, digg) that Dice-K (check out that picture!) got grounded. Damn, now we don't get to make jokes about Otakus! In! Space! Rumor had it he was planning to wear some sort of costume while up there.
Trivia: it was only revealed a few months ago (because that's now long it took Neil to realize it) that translator Neil Nadelman came up with that nickname.
What's Lorne Greene doing in that picture? :-)