/* Welcome to Sun Microsystems, can I take your order please? */ if (!hp->happy_flags & HFLAG_FENABLE) return happy_meal_bb_write(hp, tregs, reg, value);
/* Would you like fries with that? */ hme_write32(hp, tregs + TCVR_FRAME, (FRAME_WRITE | (hp->paddr...
While I do think it would be a good idea if there were some easy way to tell the reprint version from the original release, this is a good thing, because these games that are more popular than what was printed can now be enjoyed by more people. If a game is popular enough that someone can front $100K to make a press run AND make money off it, then more power to them.
FYI, I have what was apparently a NOS copy of Disgaea that I got last year for $20, and I'm pretty sure it's not a reprint because it still had the "dogbone" sticker. Now I'm really glad that I'm anal about keeping the dogbone and other stickers inside the case under the booklet, since apparently these reprints don't have the dogbone sticker.
The most obvious example is that there was no good way for Mac users to watch Windows Media 9 Standard videos (WMV3) before the Flip4Mac components came out.
The latest WiMP for Mac would play WMV3 video just fine... as long as they were in a supported container type like a.wmv file. What it couldn't do was play WMV3 video in a.AVI wrapper, because.AVI was "too old" according to the error message. If you've had problems playing WMV3 it's because you've been downloading videos off the internet, where people these days have an fondness for encoding to WMV3 in.AVI files. (Don't worry, they'll be moving up to H264 inside.MKV files soon enough to screw you again.)
As you should know uran is limited too - give it 70 years to last.
That's why we shouldn't be building old-style slow reactors that do only a single reaction on the fuel. The US government has been against breeder reactors because they can be used to generate munitions-grade plutonium, but there are newer types of breeder reactors which generate contaminated plutonium, perfectly useful for continuing the reaction, but not for building bombs. And re-reacting the fission products will get rid of long-lived nuclear waste, which means less uranium is needed to begin with, and there is no need for 10,000-year waste dumps when you have waste half-lives measured in decades.
People keep bringing up the "point" that hydrogen takes too much energy to generate.
No, they keep bringing up the "fact" that hydrogen takes more energy to generate than you get back from it.
Hydrogen will never be an energy source. It will be used for energy transfer, from renewal sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and yes, that eeeevil nuclear plant.
Three years ago, you probably could have said, "I can't imagine the VHS section at Best Buy going away within the next three years."
Three years ago, you probably could have said, "I can't imagine the CD section at Best Buy going away within the next three years." And you'd be right. SACD and DVD-A (and yes, even DTS CD) are still niche formats, even if they do get a few feet of shelf space. VHS was almost 20 years old, had noticably bad picture quality (especially in 6-hour mode which got used way too much), and you had to rewind. DVD didn't kill VHS, it just gave it the opportunity to die.
There is a point where "good enough" is good enough. Even if they started today selling only DVD players with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray mechanisms, that still wouldn't excite most consumers into re-purchasing all their movies. And draconian misfeatures, like, say, not allowing HD analog component output, will just hurt the HD disc formats more. And then there will always be the Joe Six-Packs in the crowd who buy the HD disk "because it's better", then watch it through an S-video connection. These are the same folks who think that just because they see that "ABC HD" logo, they've got to be watching it in HD.
Ignoring for a moment that I don't plan to ever run Vista, I don't normally use computers to play DVDs anyhow. I get an out-of-region disc every now and then, and it's easier for me to just rip it on an RPC-1 drive (the ripper I use strips region coding and Macrovision flags as it rips), re-burn it to a DVD-R, and stick it back in the snap case, than it is for me to remember what magic buttons I need to press on my remote to set my DVL-909 to another region, and then set it back again, every time I want to play the original disc.
All RPC-2 does is prevent the drive from passing through the decryption information from out-of-region discs. So having an RPC-1 drive means 1) faster ripping of out-of-region discs, and 2) the ability to easily play out-of-region discs. I was wondering what the hell Microsoft might be thiking, so I RTFA'd and found out that there were apparently just too many technical problems for them. Hey, they can't even keep their OS secure, so I'm not too surprised. Awwwwww, poor Microsoft.
I suspect all this will do is cause the firmware hackers to start making region-free firmware that speaks RPC-2. I mean, after all, they're already patching RPC-2 firmware.
Hell, I had a Tristar once, which did everything this thing does (played both NES and Famicom carts) while pretending to be an add-on to my SNES. That saved even more shelf space than having one of these would. What advantage does this have over a Tristar?
You had a Tristar once... and you got rid of it? You fool!
Mine works great, though I did have to solder a jumper wire to make SNES FX games work. It's one of the best things you can get... if you can find one. The main negatives are 1) no S-video, and 2) no Arkanoid controller support.
The NES is one of the hardest consoles to program for EVER. It is a major pain in the ass, I've worked on two NES titles and they are not fun.
What, were you trying to do bitmap-style graphics on it or something?
You should try your hand at the Atari 7800 sometime. If the NES is a pain in the ass, the 7800 is a pain in the whole body. The difference between the 7800 and the Colecovision is like night and day. The NES shouldn't be too much different from the Colecovision (other than being 6502 code instead of Z-80 code). But the NES has much better color support than Colecovision. It's a major pain trying to make artwork within the limitations of the Colecovision... 15 fixed colors, not very good ones at that, and no more than two colors per 8 consecutive pixels.
I've heard that when a TV series or movie is being filmed that includes "alternate races", particularly ones which require prosthetic makeup (orcs, klingons, whatever), the various ethnicities of extras will tend to congregate with others of the same ethnicity in the studio cafeteria. But of course this is nowhere near the scale of MMOGs.
Heck, I had a problem with the later version of Aeon Flux where she (and everyone else) talked. The original Liquid Television episodes were a sort of Groundhog Day of her trying to accomplish some mission, failing in various squicky ways, then starting over again.
Notice how the only thing bad he can say about it is a bad attempt at humor in the instructions. Who reads the freaking instructions? It's actually a pretty good game, sort of like Robotron on downers.
I agree with the people who think he should have tried to write something interesting instead of a bunch of tired heckling one-liners. The suck of 1984 is a topic that actually has enough substance to write a good article. So what does he do? He writes a sucky article full of lame pseudo-jokes instead of a good article about suckage.
How many of you have keyboards with E-mail buttons and LEDs? How many of you actually have the driver installed that makes them work? How many of you aren't even using Windows and couldn't install the driver if you wanted to? The only special button on the keyboard I have hooked up to a Windows box that works is the stupid suspend button, which I would never use, but it does get hit by accident sometimes.
Yeah, the extra buttons on those common-as-dirt Compaq USB keyboards sure are useful when plugged into an OS X box. And now your hand will be between you and the lights most of the time. Oh yeah, and this will be real useful for left-handed mouse users.
Hard crashes that affect a single digit percentage of users all running identical hardware and software, especially when some of those crashes are during boot are a tell-tale sign of hardware problems.
Given that apparently it's a small number of customers having this problem, I would have to suspect bad hardware is at fault. In particular, bad RAM. It happens. I got an HDTV tuner that out of the box had a bunch of shimmering vertical stripes in the video, and I rightly guessed that it was a RAM problem. I took it back and exchanged for the only one left in the store, which was the display model on the shelf, and I had no more problems with it. (Except I do have to reboot it every couple of weeks when something goes wonky like decoding the audio...)
Also, where I work has used a 3rd-party embedded network processor card which has had problems with both the DRAM timing, and incompatibities with specific types of SRAM chips that were ordinarily within spec. We found this out pretty quickly because I wrote a better memory test than anyone else was using with this board. And we have other PC-based equipment that has had a couple of incidents with bad motherboard DIMMs.
Hard crashes that affect a single digit percentage of users all running identical hardware and software, especially when some of those crashes are during boot.
[tinfoilHat]Now we know why Microsoft wanted to limit quantities on the launch day![/tinfoilHat] Ha, ha, it's not cool that the customers with these problems probably had to buy a couple hundred bucks of accessories and games just to move to the front of the line. This is not where you want to find out that your brand new expensive game system suffers from dodgy RAM chips.
This better not be happening in Japan, or they'll be stuck as the "DOABox" like the original XBox was. (Ha ha, that's funny, DOA, ha ha.) And if it is, they're probably going to have to send field service guys to people's houses to bow and gomennasai profusely as they swap out equipment to satisfy pissed off Japanese customers.
...Lego shift the current block format a millimeter or so. That way it can cripple interoperability with mega blocks' products and further lock in customers. They can sell it as an innovation, saving money to their costumers with all the plastic being cut out. But that's just how we do it where I work...:)
What do you think Technic and Bionicle were for? So they could create new pieces and new types of connections which were patented in their own right. That they could do new cool stuff with Technic was nice, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it works great... if you've got at least a 2GHz processor!
If you don't, you're SOL. My poor 1.3GHz Duron can't handle H264 video without pausing.
FYI, I have what was apparently a NOS copy of Disgaea that I got last year for $20, and I'm pretty sure it's not a reprint because it still had the "dogbone" sticker. Now I'm really glad that I'm anal about keeping the dogbone and other stickers inside the case under the booklet, since apparently these reprints don't have the dogbone sticker.
I think you need to read this Penny Arcade strip to get the full idea of what a gold farmer is:
(http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/02/16)
(click on the "news" button at the bottom for the commentary on that strip)
.FLV plays just fine in VLC.
And as for Indeo, wasn't there an Indeo plug-in for the OS9 quicktime? That ought to be enough to transcode to something more open.
The latest WiMP for Mac would play WMV3 video just fine... as long as they were in a supported container type like a .wmv file. What it couldn't do was play WMV3 video in a .AVI wrapper, because .AVI was "too old" according to the error message. If you've had problems playing WMV3 it's because you've been downloading videos off the internet, where people these days have an fondness for encoding to WMV3 in .AVI files. (Don't worry, they'll be moving up to H264 inside .MKV files soon enough to screw you again.)
And how about "Grand Theft Auto: Mullah City", where you get to jack a Humvee?
That's why we shouldn't be building old-style slow reactors that do only a single reaction on the fuel. The US government has been against breeder reactors because they can be used to generate munitions-grade plutonium, but there are newer types of breeder reactors which generate contaminated plutonium, perfectly useful for continuing the reaction, but not for building bombs. And re-reacting the fission products will get rid of long-lived nuclear waste, which means less uranium is needed to begin with, and there is no need for 10,000-year waste dumps when you have waste half-lives measured in decades.
No, they keep bringing up the "fact" that hydrogen takes more energy to generate than you get back from it.
Hydrogen will never be an energy source. It will be used for energy transfer, from renewal sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and yes, that eeeevil nuclear plant.
Swing your arms from side to side.
Come on, it's time to go.
Do the Mario!
Take one step, and then again.
Let's do the Mario, all together now!
You got it! It's the Mario! Do the Mario!
Swing your arms from side to side.
Come on, it's time to go.
Do the Mario!
Take one step, and then again.
Let's do the Mario, all together now!
Come on now. Just like that!
I was in college at the time, and I still thought Captain Lou Albano was great as Mario.
Three years ago, you probably could have said, "I can't imagine the CD section at Best Buy going away within the next three years." And you'd be right. SACD and DVD-A (and yes, even DTS CD) are still niche formats, even if they do get a few feet of shelf space. VHS was almost 20 years old, had noticably bad picture quality (especially in 6-hour mode which got used way too much), and you had to rewind. DVD didn't kill VHS, it just gave it the opportunity to die.
There is a point where "good enough" is good enough. Even if they started today selling only DVD players with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray mechanisms, that still wouldn't excite most consumers into re-purchasing all their movies. And draconian misfeatures, like, say, not allowing HD analog component output, will just hurt the HD disc formats more. And then there will always be the Joe Six-Packs in the crowd who buy the HD disk "because it's better", then watch it through an S-video connection. These are the same folks who think that just because they see that "ABC HD" logo, they've got to be watching it in HD.
All RPC-2 does is prevent the drive from passing through the decryption information from out-of-region discs. So having an RPC-1 drive means 1) faster ripping of out-of-region discs, and 2) the ability to easily play out-of-region discs. I was wondering what the hell Microsoft might be thiking, so I RTFA'd and found out that there were apparently just too many technical problems for them. Hey, they can't even keep their OS secure, so I'm not too surprised. Awwwwww, poor Microsoft.
I suspect all this will do is cause the firmware hackers to start making region-free firmware that speaks RPC-2. I mean, after all, they're already patching RPC-2 firmware.
...but what will I put on my wastebaskets now that there won't be any more "Intel Inside" stickers?
Any good digital signature or hash is always going to come up with a different result after changing exactly one byte of the hashed file.
You had a Tristar once... and you got rid of it? You fool!
Mine works great, though I did have to solder a jumper wire to make SNES FX games work. It's one of the best things you can get... if you can find one. The main negatives are 1) no S-video, and 2) no Arkanoid controller support.
What, were you trying to do bitmap-style graphics on it or something?
You should try your hand at the Atari 7800 sometime. If the NES is a pain in the ass, the 7800 is a pain in the whole body. The difference between the 7800 and the Colecovision is like night and day. The NES shouldn't be too much different from the Colecovision (other than being 6502 code instead of Z-80 code). But the NES has much better color support than Colecovision. It's a major pain trying to make artwork within the limitations of the Colecovision... 15 fixed colors, not very good ones at that, and no more than two colors per 8 consecutive pixels.
I've heard that when a TV series or movie is being filmed that includes "alternate races", particularly ones which require prosthetic makeup (orcs, klingons, whatever), the various ethnicities of extras will tend to congregate with others of the same ethnicity in the studio cafeteria. But of course this is nowhere near the scale of MMOGs.
Heck, I had a problem with the later version of Aeon Flux where she (and everyone else) talked. The original Liquid Television episodes were a sort of Groundhog Day of her trying to accomplish some mission, failing in various squicky ways, then starting over again.
I agree with the people who think he should have tried to write something interesting instead of a bunch of tired heckling one-liners. The suck of 1984 is a topic that actually has enough substance to write a good article. So what does he do? He writes a sucky article full of lame pseudo-jokes instead of a good article about suckage.
What about Nethack, you insensitive clod! With your "@" fully anti-aliased at 1080i HDTV resolution!
Why does anyone bother to climb a mountain? Because it's there.
Anyhow, Microsoft definitely tightened up its security in the 360. It's entirely possible that the PS3 will be broken long before the 360.
Yeah, the extra buttons on those common-as-dirt Compaq USB keyboards sure are useful when plugged into an OS X box. And now your hand will be between you and the lights most of the time. Oh yeah, and this will be real useful for left-handed mouse users.
Hard crashes that affect a single digit percentage of users all running identical hardware and software, especially when some of those crashes are during boot are a tell-tale sign of hardware problems.
Also, where I work has used a 3rd-party embedded network processor card which has had problems with both the DRAM timing, and incompatibities with specific types of SRAM chips that were ordinarily within spec. We found this out pretty quickly because I wrote a better memory test than anyone else was using with this board. And we have other PC-based equipment that has had a couple of incidents with bad motherboard DIMMs.
Hard crashes that affect a single digit percentage of users all running identical hardware and software, especially when some of those crashes are during boot.
[tinfoilHat]Now we know why Microsoft wanted to limit quantities on the launch day![/tinfoilHat] Ha, ha, it's not cool that the customers with these problems probably had to buy a couple hundred bucks of accessories and games just to move to the front of the line. This is not where you want to find out that your brand new expensive game system suffers from dodgy RAM chips.
This better not be happening in Japan, or they'll be stuck as the "DOABox" like the original XBox was. (Ha ha, that's funny, DOA, ha ha.) And if it is, they're probably going to have to send field service guys to people's houses to bow and gomennasai profusely as they swap out equipment to satisfy pissed off Japanese customers.
What do you think Technic and Bionicle were for? So they could create new pieces and new types of connections which were patented in their own right. That they could do new cool stuff with Technic was nice, too.