Doesn't always work. Case in point: Sid Meier's SimGolf.
After buying this game I have vowed to never EVER buy another Sid Meier game. It was that bad.
It started off with me bored one day. I wasn't planning on looking at the game. I don't like golf. But I found a demo online and the fact that it was published by Maxis (a EA division, I think they suck too, and I blame them for much of this). I played the demo and had a great time, so I went out and bought the game.
I own the game, now the fun begins, right? The game was full of bugs. Lots of them. Golfers complain if they have to walk a lot. So you would create a golf cart rental place, then they wouldn't complain, right? That's the way it SHOULD work, and that's how it worked after a patch, but before that golfers riding in carts up hills would have little speach bubbles COMPLAINING ABOUT WALKING UP HILLS. The game was FULL of things like this. Not only these little annoyance bugs, but things that could prevent you from EVERY playing your course, which you had to do to further yourself in the game (and test your course). Bugs bugs bugs. Many MANY people complaining on the forums didn't get us anywhere. Bugs were documented, complained about, well known, NOTHING. When we FINALLY got a patch (the one mentioned above) there were still bugs, it didn't fix many of them. I would have returned the game but by the time all of this transpired, it was too late (and the store probably wouldn't have taken it back since it was opened).
The demo got me to buy a game that I would have never bought otherwise. I "enjoyed" the game. Result? I now refuse to buy from Sid Meier, hate EA, lost all faith in Maxis, don't like Firaxis (the developer?), and no longer buy games when they come out because of crap like this.
Demos are great things, and I think they should be released. I bought Castle Wolfenstein because of it's demo (I was tired of FPSes, but the demo was so great I had to buy it). There are many times demos have gotten me to look at games, buy games, or avoid games because I didn't like them. My only warning is this: if you're going to make a demo, the game better be as good. About all the bugs were out of the SimGolf demo, they weren't noticeable (I spent tons of time on it). But everything that would happen after the demo expired (you could only make 3 holes or something like that, play for X ammount of time IIRC too) went to hell.
Don't screw with me, I'm nearly impossible to win back as a customer.
Now THERE is an interesting idea. What if you could make a wireless keyboard/mouse that doesn't need power? It should be possible. Or at least one that would last MUCH longer than a standard one.
For the mouse, you could use a standard mechanical mechanism for the movement (as opposed to optical) and connect the movement to little tiny generators that would make a tiny amount of electricity. I bet this could gain a decent amount of energy. This could also be done with magnetic induction if you made a little mat that would be powered and the mouse would get it's power that way. Really this has already been done (not with induction, but radio IIRC) in Wacom tablets. They work fantastically.
For the keyboard, I think you'd be in an even better situation. First you could put simple solar cells at the top of they keyboard. That would provide you most of the power under most circumstances anyways. But if you rigged up little things that give you a tiny amount of power with each keypress, you could generate a good amount of electricity there too.
For a decent sized business that uses lots of computers and wan't to be wireless for some reason, I be this could save them some real money, even if it's more expensive up front. Just an idea.
I agree. I don't like the amount of CPU that USB can eat up. I prefer PS/2 over USB. I hope they fix this in WUSB. CPUs may be getting faster, but that's no excuse to stick us all with cruddy WinModems, WinPrinters, WinSoundcards, etc. I'll pay the extra $5 for something that works well, thank you.
They plan to get it certified, they are just forming their own group and bypassing them for now because they say that it takes way to long to get it certified. This way they can start making things and we'll all see it soon. If they didn't, they could end up not getting aproval untill it would be time to update it anyway because of bandwidth needs (or something else). Just an example, I don't know how long it would take.
This is what I'm worried about. Let's take the home theater example. While it would be nice to have my DVD player talk to my reciever, they are both powered independantly. But what about connecting to my speakers using WUSB? Do I have to keep batteries in my speakers now? Will each speaker have a seperate power cord? Wouldn't EITHER of those be a large pain?
To go back to computing space, there are lots of little USB devices that get power from the bus, and I wouldn't want to have to add batteries to everything. My GBA Flash Cart programmer get's its power from USB. What about USB->serial/parallel converters for when I want to use some of my older stuff? While this would be handy for hard drives and other things that often need seperate power anyways, this could be a pain in other circumstances.
If you read the posted article, it will allow limited host capability which would allow you to do things like print pictures straight from your cellphone to your printer without having to have a computer involved. This is a good thing too, because bluetooth allows the same thing, so to not include it would be quite stupid.
Also, this is designed to compete in a different space. While it can do the things that Bluetooth does, it's also designed to be used by hard drives and other devices that require MUCH more bandwidth than is available with Bluetooth. Maybe when it's updated, but right now you just couldn't use it for a hard drive or to connect your 5MP digital camera.
That's the way it is at the university near me. There is one station that plays NPR content in the mornings, evenings and weekeds; and they play classical music the rest of the time (which is nice because they are the only FM station to do so). The other station is weaker, but it's the "true" college station. It's the one that's run by students with popular music (I believe it plays indie/local/unknown mostly) and such. Personally I kind of like having the two. There are many who like the second station (not my cup of tea, but it's cool that it's there), but I really like the first. If there weren't two, someone would be unhappy.
Still, this is a good decision. I would be cool to get some new stations. I would be so cool to be able to tune in Folk, a local/indie station, a station that plays stuff from the 40s or 50s, etc. Right now it's Country, Oldies, Rock, Pop, Rap, etc. All ClearChannel type stuff. I would be nice to hear something new.
I can understand that, but just how much did the developer get paid? If they've already made the game and ported it to the other systems (which must be true if it was released in the US on all systems) then the simple act of now pressing and selling new disks (yeah, translation, sure, but not much work) wouldn't cost much and you'd get all those sales. Sony would either have to pay a TON of money, or the games weren't worth that much in the first place so they probably aren't that great.
That's what I meant by "translation." It intercepts the system calls (library calls, etc) and makes the equivelent Linux call instead. Sounds like translation to me. I also said SPECIFICALLY that is was NOT AN EMULATOR. Your post seems to be identicle to mine, so my guess is that you just missunderstood my point.
WineX is based on Wine, which is actually an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator". It's not a full emulator (like running a gameboy emulator would be), it simply intercepts system calls and translates them into the Linux equivelents, the actuall program code doesn't need to be translated. So programs that make very few syscalls (things like, just to take the far end Super Pi, which simply calculates Pi to various accuracies) would run almost identically. On the other hand a program that uses tons of Windows calls (like something that uses Direct3D) would be very slow. Games that don't make tons of those kind of calls (like simple card games, 2D games, etc) should run fine (close to "Windows" speed) as should OpenGL programs (because OpenGL can be passed to the OpenGL subsystem and doesn't need to be translated into OpenGL (or something else) like must happen with D3D).
So it really depends on the program. I assume you could find out for a specific game by searching google or the WineX forums or support pages (they have pages that list supported games and their status, right? Been a while since I've been to their site).
Second half of 2004. Oops, I read that as 2005. That's not as good for AMD in the server area, but the still have some time for the desktop and both them and Transmetta still have time for mobile. As for chipset, usually Intel does a good job, but the fact that the Athlon64 has the nForce3 could be a major boon for AMD, not to mention all the other chipsets out there. I hadn't even thought of the chipset issue.
Yep. I would expect the difference to be just like what we see now. Intel will have one version of the instruction set (x86-64 + SSE4 or whatever) and AMD will have another (x86-64 + 3DNow!, for example). They will work, but there will be specializations for some things. Basically they are as compatable with one another as the P4 and Athlon are.
As for this whole thing, I'm not suprised and this is a MAJOR boon for AMD, because now people have no reason not to port their software to x86-64. The companies get customers now (Athlon64 and Opteron) and more later when Intel releases their chip. The other big win for AMD is that their chips is out NOW. So when the software starts to come, people who want/need that 64bits will get Opterons and they can gain some real market share before Intel's processor comes out (especially the desktop one since Intel is releasing the server chip first). As long as AMD is willing to cut back on their prices a little now to trade for future gains, this could be a MAJOR opportunity for them.
As for us consumers, this is a win. Intel trying to push Itanic (or even worse a THIRD arch) down our throats would be terrible. Now we have one clear "winner" in the 64 bit wars (don't reply with stuff like the G5, I'm talking the Intel/AMD/Transmetta/etc. side).
And where is Transmetta's announcment? They should make one two! I bet they could get a good chip out the door before Chipzilla gets a good mobile x86-64 chip out there. This would be a great chance for them too, they could grab a good chunk of the laptop market becuase it would only be them and AMD, and AMD isn't marketing towards low power ultra-lite laptops.
Did you even read the SUMMARY? On the system they showed, 2.6 performed dramatically better in EVERY AREA. Now if you are running a 128k processor megacomputer with 12 terabytes of RAM and ueberbit ethernet connection, maybe you don't need the performance increase because your computer could serve pages to every other computer ever built without breaking a sweat, but for people with NORMAL comptuers, that isn't the case. Upgrading to 2.6 is basically getting a free performance boost.
You were having problems with your current webservers? They can't serve pages fast enough? You'll have to spend $50,000 to upgrade so you can handle it? Put 2.6 on! You might be able to hold off that upgrade for 6-12 months, by which time that $50,000 will buy you much more computer than it will today (not to mention you could invest that money and have more by then).
What do you call a FREE PERFORMANCE UPGRADE? You call it good!
Besides, it doesn't matter if it needs a "little while to iron out." If you just blindly deploy new kernels on production servers with no testing, you deserve the flack that will come you way if you get bit by a bug.
When I was in middle school (or maybe it was freshman year of HS) Tamagotchis just game to the states. Everyone in school had one that they played with between classes. I remember one kid (can't remember his name though, Nevin?) who had like 12 of them because the previous Tamagotchis died. He kept them all on one keychain, even the dead ones. You should have seen his face and how mad he got when someone told him all you had to do was stick a paperclip in the back to reset one and you could play again. He didn't know this so every time one died he would just buy another.
Why would they? That would allow people to get VoIP. They would be killing their own business. I realize most people wouldn't do that (they'd probably go cell) but still. This will NEVER change unless regulation says that they must seperate the two. It makes no sense (from the phone company's point of view).
I would suggest the GBA. Now I know that you said you didn't want to because they were locked down, but the fact is that isn't true.
First of all, it's really not that hard to program for and most languages are available (with free compilers no less). You don't need a library, although there are ones out there that might have a license that would suit you. All you need is a flash cart and a flash cart programmer and those aren't too hard to get and don't cost that much. You'll have to look around for one but you could build your own or buy one off e-bay. You don't need a $5000 dev kit to program the GBA. And there are emulators that you can use to test your program and such. A single person can easily make a game.
The main site I'd like to point you to (although there are many) is GBAdev.org. You can find tools, tutorials, demos (with source) and more. There was going to be a book published about programing for the GBA but lawyers basically nixed it. The good news though is that the guy who wrote it put it online for free! You can find that book here (it's a bunch of PDF files).
Once you make your game, all you'd have to do is take it to a publisher (or get the big,a href="http://www.nintendo.com">N's help) and you could sell it to the largest audience in the world. The GBA has more units sold than the PS2 or any other current console (IIRC).
I'd be worried about the bandwidth. For a VGA sized screen (640x480) at 60hz with 8bit color you're looking at about 18 megabytes per second. If you want 24 bit color, it's about 55 megabytes per second. 1024x768x24x60 is about 1135 megabytes. Remember that 10baseT is 1.25 megabytes per second, 100baseT is 12.5, and 1000baseT is 125, so even 8 bit VGA needs gigabit ethernet.
So really you MUST have compression unless you want to kill the network (and that's assuming you have gigabit) so a simple dongle is out of the question. You are left with KVMs that do this for you (mentioned in another post) and running video over cat5e (not ethernet, it uses the cable) which is also in another post. A simple dongle isn't feasable to run VGA over an Ethernet network.
"In addition, Itanium lacked WMP, DirectX, and many other features that customers will NOT do without on Athlon64 systems, meaning even more development time."
That's true, but MS isn't that dumb. There were good reasons for not including those features on the Itanium. As a VERY expensive workstation processor, no end users have them. They are used on expensive computers where rendering is OpenGL and there are no games (so no DirectX) and if I owned Itanium workstations and found my employees usething them to watch videos with WMP I'd fire 'em, so I doubt there was much call for WMP on it.
I agree with you that if MS just put the Itanium version on the Opteron, they'd be in trouble, but I think this is the full x86-32 version (feature wise) only for the Opteron.
Uh, no. I read the article. That's why I put "If you have an AMD Opteron or Athlon64..." in the submission. Your point makes no sense becasue there is a full version of Windows XP for the Itanium, so WHY WOULD YOU NEED THIS CUSTOMER PREVIEW (read: "Windows Beta")? That's what makes this interesting. It's a version for the Opteron, for x86-64, so it wouldn't run on the Itanium since that's IA64. Nice try.
Yeah, the load times at the start of Halo levels were long, but it took quite a long time to go through a level in Halo, and during that whole time there was no loading (a TINY studder whe loading a new area of th level, but nothing compared to what it would be otherwise). This allowed them to have big, complex levels without needing frequent pauses during the gameplay to load stuff. I think they used it to fantastic effect.
I hope a large number of those details are wrong. First of all, I know it will be 18-24 months later, but 3 "high end" G5s (2.0 ghz maybe) still won't be very cheep by then, and will put out a significant ammount of heat. Are they planning on selling at a loss again to cover the CPUs? And what's with the HD? I think that was one of the best things about the xbox! No little memory cards to fill up, you have a FULL HARD DRIVE. The reason why most developers don't use it is because most games are just ports from other platforms (or designed for all three at once) so they were never designed for the hard drive. Halo made great use of it (remembering where you killed every enemy in a level) and the downloadable content in some games has been great too (Mech Assault and Crimson Skies for one), and that's not possible without a hard drive.
Lastly, BACKWARDS COMPATABILITY. That one feature made a HUGE difference in the PS2, and Sony is expected to do it again, aren't they? I think not having this feature would be like Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot. Three fast G5s should be enough to fully emulate a 733 mhz Pentium 3, right? They bought Virtual PC, so they have the technology.
I can't say I get this article. I know it's based on rumors from across the web, but when you put the picture together it makes NO SENSE unless MS is trying to fail or something.
I USE Outlook 2k3 and have used it's spam filtering. It does work, cutting my spam down to 1/3 to 1/4 of it's volume, and it's simple to use.
That said, I didn't want that last 1/3 to 1/4 of spam, we all know that it can be a LOT better than that. I used Cloudmark's SpamNet, which was great untill they charged for it and turned their back on their community. So from there I went to SpamAssassian which was nice but still not perfect or right. Next I went to Popfile which I have fell in love with. Great UI, fantastic (98-99% correct) accuracy, and it's free (and always will be, stupid Cloundmark).
As for micropayments in the way Gate suggests, I don't like that. What is to keep someone from deciding they don't like me and charging me money? I DO like the idea of requiring a second or two of processing time per e-mail sent (especially if you could choose what it does, say Seti@Home or folding), but as soon as spammers found a way around it it becomes useless, and what would happen to mailing lists?
At the rate things have been going, it won't be too long before these kind of things (such as the Diabold example) will start happening to the media themselves. Even if they wanted to ignore all this for some reason (here's your chance conspiracy nuts), after a while the problems would hit home and then it would be very hard to ignore.
Even if they are doing this for self serving reasons (which I doubt, I think these problems are really starting to be more than "flukes" so they are worth reporting on in their eyes now) this is good for us, as I think many citizens don't understand how bad these things can get. Techies are quite informed on this issue (due in large part to thing like Diabold and the DMCA), but many "normal" people don't see all the abuses that are going on, and so they will be shocked when it becomes common enough to effect them. Things like this article (although I don't like the NYT, but that's OT) can raise awareness and help stem/reverse the tide before we all start to drown.
That's true. Like most things there are a few scumbags who make everything look bad. The problem is that often these aren't little people (like the newbie interns that they send out to report live in hurricanes), these are BIG people. These are Tom Brocaw, Howard Reigns (the head of the NYT), Connie Chung, etc. (examples, not neccisarily bad). And when it's these people, they can (and often do) use their power to controll those below them to report things "their way" too. I have no problem with reporters editorializing on issues, I think that could improve viewiership and differentiate the networks from eachother; but it's important that the reporters make it known when they are editorializing and when they are reporting.
Of my examples above, I'll pull out Howard Reigns (not sure if that's the correct spelling). After he took over the NYT in about mid 2000, he went straight to the business of shaping the news to his views. There is a whole chapter in "Why The Left Hates American" (I think that's the one) that talks all about this and gives examples and documentation.
Now I should note that in a way this is the way it used to be. It used to be (WAY back) that there were many papers in each town, and you would read the paper of the editor you liked. Each editor would choose stories that were to his likeing and advanced his viewpoint, and this was know. This still happens today, but the problem is that all too often the people do this while still claiming to be independant.
Sorry for the mini-rant, this is one of the issues that really bugs me.
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After buying this game I have vowed to never EVER buy another Sid Meier game. It was that bad.
It started off with me bored one day. I wasn't planning on looking at the game. I don't like golf. But I found a demo online and the fact that it was published by Maxis (a EA division, I think they suck too, and I blame them for much of this). I played the demo and had a great time, so I went out and bought the game.
I own the game, now the fun begins, right? The game was full of bugs. Lots of them. Golfers complain if they have to walk a lot. So you would create a golf cart rental place, then they wouldn't complain, right? That's the way it SHOULD work, and that's how it worked after a patch, but before that golfers riding in carts up hills would have little speach bubbles COMPLAINING ABOUT WALKING UP HILLS. The game was FULL of things like this. Not only these little annoyance bugs, but things that could prevent you from EVERY playing your course, which you had to do to further yourself in the game (and test your course). Bugs bugs bugs. Many MANY people complaining on the forums didn't get us anywhere. Bugs were documented, complained about, well known, NOTHING. When we FINALLY got a patch (the one mentioned above) there were still bugs, it didn't fix many of them. I would have returned the game but by the time all of this transpired, it was too late (and the store probably wouldn't have taken it back since it was opened).
The demo got me to buy a game that I would have never bought otherwise. I "enjoyed" the game. Result? I now refuse to buy from Sid Meier, hate EA, lost all faith in Maxis, don't like Firaxis (the developer?), and no longer buy games when they come out because of crap like this.
Demos are great things, and I think they should be released. I bought Castle Wolfenstein because of it's demo (I was tired of FPSes, but the demo was so great I had to buy it). There are many times demos have gotten me to look at games, buy games, or avoid games because I didn't like them. My only warning is this: if you're going to make a demo, the game better be as good. About all the bugs were out of the SimGolf demo, they weren't noticeable (I spent tons of time on it). But everything that would happen after the demo expired (you could only make 3 holes or something like that, play for X ammount of time IIRC too) went to hell.
Don't screw with me, I'm nearly impossible to win back as a customer.
For the mouse, you could use a standard mechanical mechanism for the movement (as opposed to optical) and connect the movement to little tiny generators that would make a tiny amount of electricity. I bet this could gain a decent amount of energy. This could also be done with magnetic induction if you made a little mat that would be powered and the mouse would get it's power that way. Really this has already been done (not with induction, but radio IIRC) in Wacom tablets. They work fantastically.
For the keyboard, I think you'd be in an even better situation. First you could put simple solar cells at the top of they keyboard. That would provide you most of the power under most circumstances anyways. But if you rigged up little things that give you a tiny amount of power with each keypress, you could generate a good amount of electricity there too.
For a decent sized business that uses lots of computers and wan't to be wireless for some reason, I be this could save them some real money, even if it's more expensive up front. Just an idea.
I agree. I don't like the amount of CPU that USB can eat up. I prefer PS/2 over USB. I hope they fix this in WUSB. CPUs may be getting faster, but that's no excuse to stick us all with cruddy WinModems, WinPrinters, WinSoundcards, etc. I'll pay the extra $5 for something that works well, thank you.
They plan to get it certified, they are just forming their own group and bypassing them for now because they say that it takes way to long to get it certified. This way they can start making things and we'll all see it soon. If they didn't, they could end up not getting aproval untill it would be time to update it anyway because of bandwidth needs (or something else). Just an example, I don't know how long it would take.
To go back to computing space, there are lots of little USB devices that get power from the bus, and I wouldn't want to have to add batteries to everything. My GBA Flash Cart programmer get's its power from USB. What about USB->serial/parallel converters for when I want to use some of my older stuff? While this would be handy for hard drives and other things that often need seperate power anyways, this could be a pain in other circumstances.
Also, this is designed to compete in a different space. While it can do the things that Bluetooth does, it's also designed to be used by hard drives and other devices that require MUCH more bandwidth than is available with Bluetooth. Maybe when it's updated, but right now you just couldn't use it for a hard drive or to connect your 5MP digital camera.
Still, this is a good decision. I would be cool to get some new stations. I would be so cool to be able to tune in Folk, a local/indie station, a station that plays stuff from the 40s or 50s, etc. Right now it's Country, Oldies, Rock, Pop, Rap, etc. All ClearChannel type stuff. I would be nice to hear something new.
I can understand that, but just how much did the developer get paid? If they've already made the game and ported it to the other systems (which must be true if it was released in the US on all systems) then the simple act of now pressing and selling new disks (yeah, translation, sure, but not much work) wouldn't cost much and you'd get all those sales. Sony would either have to pay a TON of money, or the games weren't worth that much in the first place so they probably aren't that great.
That's what I meant by "translation." It intercepts the system calls (library calls, etc) and makes the equivelent Linux call instead. Sounds like translation to me. I also said SPECIFICALLY that is was NOT AN EMULATOR. Your post seems to be identicle to mine, so my guess is that you just missunderstood my point.
So it really depends on the program. I assume you could find out for a specific game by searching google or the WineX forums or support pages (they have pages that list supported games and their status, right? Been a while since I've been to their site).
Second half of 2004. Oops, I read that as 2005. That's not as good for AMD in the server area, but the still have some time for the desktop and both them and Transmetta still have time for mobile. As for chipset, usually Intel does a good job, but the fact that the Athlon64 has the nForce3 could be a major boon for AMD, not to mention all the other chipsets out there. I hadn't even thought of the chipset issue.
As for this whole thing, I'm not suprised and this is a MAJOR boon for AMD, because now people have no reason not to port their software to x86-64. The companies get customers now (Athlon64 and Opteron) and more later when Intel releases their chip. The other big win for AMD is that their chips is out NOW. So when the software starts to come, people who want/need that 64bits will get Opterons and they can gain some real market share before Intel's processor comes out (especially the desktop one since Intel is releasing the server chip first). As long as AMD is willing to cut back on their prices a little now to trade for future gains, this could be a MAJOR opportunity for them.
As for us consumers, this is a win. Intel trying to push Itanic (or even worse a THIRD arch) down our throats would be terrible. Now we have one clear "winner" in the 64 bit wars (don't reply with stuff like the G5, I'm talking the Intel/AMD/Transmetta/etc. side).
And where is Transmetta's announcment? They should make one two! I bet they could get a good chip out the door before Chipzilla gets a good mobile x86-64 chip out there. This would be a great chance for them too, they could grab a good chunk of the laptop market becuase it would only be them and AMD, and AMD isn't marketing towards low power ultra-lite laptops.
You were having problems with your current webservers? They can't serve pages fast enough? You'll have to spend $50,000 to upgrade so you can handle it? Put 2.6 on! You might be able to hold off that upgrade for 6-12 months, by which time that $50,000 will buy you much more computer than it will today (not to mention you could invest that money and have more by then).
What do you call a FREE PERFORMANCE UPGRADE? You call it good!
Besides, it doesn't matter if it needs a "little while to iron out." If you just blindly deploy new kernels on production servers with no testing, you deserve the flack that will come you way if you get bit by a bug.
When I was in middle school (or maybe it was freshman year of HS) Tamagotchis just game to the states. Everyone in school had one that they played with between classes. I remember one kid (can't remember his name though, Nevin?) who had like 12 of them because the previous Tamagotchis died. He kept them all on one keychain, even the dead ones. You should have seen his face and how mad he got when someone told him all you had to do was stick a paperclip in the back to reset one and you could play again. He didn't know this so every time one died he would just buy another.
Why would they? That would allow people to get VoIP. They would be killing their own business. I realize most people wouldn't do that (they'd probably go cell) but still. This will NEVER change unless regulation says that they must seperate the two. It makes no sense (from the phone company's point of view).
First of all, it's really not that hard to program for and most languages are available (with free compilers no less). You don't need a library, although there are ones out there that might have a license that would suit you. All you need is a flash cart and a flash cart programmer and those aren't too hard to get and don't cost that much. You'll have to look around for one but you could build your own or buy one off e-bay. You don't need a $5000 dev kit to program the GBA. And there are emulators that you can use to test your program and such. A single person can easily make a game.
The main site I'd like to point you to (although there are many) is GBAdev.org. You can find tools, tutorials, demos (with source) and more. There was going to be a book published about programing for the GBA but lawyers basically nixed it. The good news though is that the guy who wrote it put it online for free! You can find that book here (it's a bunch of PDF files).
Once you make your game, all you'd have to do is take it to a publisher (or get the big ,a href="http://www.nintendo.com">N's help) and you could sell it to the largest audience in the world. The GBA has more units sold than the PS2 or any other current console (IIRC).
So really you MUST have compression unless you want to kill the network (and that's assuming you have gigabit) so a simple dongle is out of the question. You are left with KVMs that do this for you (mentioned in another post) and running video over cat5e (not ethernet, it uses the cable) which is also in another post. A simple dongle isn't feasable to run VGA over an Ethernet network.
That's true, but MS isn't that dumb. There were good reasons for not including those features on the Itanium. As a VERY expensive workstation processor, no end users have them. They are used on expensive computers where rendering is OpenGL and there are no games (so no DirectX) and if I owned Itanium workstations and found my employees usething them to watch videos with WMP I'd fire 'em, so I doubt there was much call for WMP on it.
I agree with you that if MS just put the Itanium version on the Opteron, they'd be in trouble, but I think this is the full x86-32 version (feature wise) only for the Opteron.
Uh, no. I read the article. That's why I put "If you have an AMD Opteron or Athlon64..." in the submission. Your point makes no sense becasue there is a full version of Windows XP for the Itanium, so WHY WOULD YOU NEED THIS CUSTOMER PREVIEW (read: "Windows Beta")? That's what makes this interesting. It's a version for the Opteron, for x86-64, so it wouldn't run on the Itanium since that's IA64. Nice try.
Yeah, the load times at the start of Halo levels were long, but it took quite a long time to go through a level in Halo, and during that whole time there was no loading (a TINY studder whe loading a new area of th level, but nothing compared to what it would be otherwise). This allowed them to have big, complex levels without needing frequent pauses during the gameplay to load stuff. I think they used it to fantastic effect.
Lastly, BACKWARDS COMPATABILITY. That one feature made a HUGE difference in the PS2, and Sony is expected to do it again, aren't they? I think not having this feature would be like Microsoft shooting themselves in the foot. Three fast G5s should be enough to fully emulate a 733 mhz Pentium 3, right? They bought Virtual PC, so they have the technology.
I can't say I get this article. I know it's based on rumors from across the web, but when you put the picture together it makes NO SENSE unless MS is trying to fail or something.
Shut yo' mouth!
They just don't want the shaft.
Then we can dig it.
With appologies to everyone. Bye bye Karma.
That said, I didn't want that last 1/3 to 1/4 of spam, we all know that it can be a LOT better than that. I used Cloudmark's SpamNet, which was great untill they charged for it and turned their back on their community. So from there I went to SpamAssassian which was nice but still not perfect or right. Next I went to Popfile which I have fell in love with. Great UI, fantastic (98-99% correct) accuracy, and it's free (and always will be, stupid Cloundmark).
As for micropayments in the way Gate suggests, I don't like that. What is to keep someone from deciding they don't like me and charging me money? I DO like the idea of requiring a second or two of processing time per e-mail sent (especially if you could choose what it does, say Seti@Home or folding), but as soon as spammers found a way around it it becomes useless, and what would happen to mailing lists?
Even if they are doing this for self serving reasons (which I doubt, I think these problems are really starting to be more than "flukes" so they are worth reporting on in their eyes now) this is good for us, as I think many citizens don't understand how bad these things can get. Techies are quite informed on this issue (due in large part to thing like Diabold and the DMCA), but many "normal" people don't see all the abuses that are going on, and so they will be shocked when it becomes common enough to effect them. Things like this article (although I don't like the NYT, but that's OT) can raise awareness and help stem/reverse the tide before we all start to drown.
Of my examples above, I'll pull out Howard Reigns (not sure if that's the correct spelling). After he took over the NYT in about mid 2000, he went straight to the business of shaping the news to his views. There is a whole chapter in "Why The Left Hates American" (I think that's the one) that talks all about this and gives examples and documentation.
Now I should note that in a way this is the way it used to be. It used to be (WAY back) that there were many papers in each town, and you would read the paper of the editor you liked. Each editor would choose stories that were to his likeing and advanced his viewpoint, and this was know. This still happens today, but the problem is that all too often the people do this while still claiming to be independant.
Sorry for the mini-rant, this is one of the issues that really bugs me.