No, because Chelloveck doesn't own the rights to make the update, even if they still had the tools to do so.
That's true, I have neither the rights nor the tools. I tried to finagle a copy of the source code when I got laid off, but they wouldn't let me take it.
However, Pfutz did make an update after I left, and got permission to distribute ROM images of all the Capcom pinball machines. You can find them linked off his home page, at http://home.comcast.net/~pfutz/Capcom/index.htm.
But I find it interesting that two of the three games in the final round are from a company no longer making pinball games. Truly the era of pinball is coming to a close.
Well, considering that there's exactly one company currently making pinball machines...
Dude, the era of pinball ended more than a decade ago. I was there, working at Capcom Coin-Op programming pinball machines when the bottom fell out. All the manufacturers shut down within just a few years, between 1995 and 1999. Stern had shut down their line years ago, but they re-opened after everyone else quit. As I understand it, Gary Stern himself decided that someone had to keep making machines. I don't know if it's even profitable; it's a labor of love.
/me is the proud owner (and programmer of!) Big Bang Bar, due to be the next on the manufacturing line when Capcom got out of the biz.
That's my take on this, too. The '=' key on a calculator is more of a "print" operator than an equality symbol. Think of it as the "show me the accumulated value" operator. The other half of this is that kids at that level are used to seeing problems expressed as "1 + 2". No '=' symbol. It's assumed, and the kid is supposed to write '3' as the answer.
Now, combine those two notions. If you see "4 + 3 + 2 = __ + 2" it's natural to evaluate 4+3+2 as 9 and put it in the blank, then add 2 and give the answer as 11. Key it into a basic 4-function calculator and that's exactly what you get.
So the problem isn't that kids don't know what the '=' sign means, the problem is that the '=' sign has been overloaded to have multiple meanings. Us old farts who "know" that the '=' sign means equality are appalled, but that's the way it is. We've trained the kids to think of it as an evaluation operator.
It's because electrons act as waves rather than particles in graphene sheets. Old news. Dr. Sheldon Cooper proved this months ago. Keep up with the literature, people!
It's not that pink is an "undesirable" color, it's just that it's pink. Even car thieves know better than to piss off a Mary Kay rep. Mary Kay is one mean bitch!
I wiggle the mouse and randomly highlight text while I'm reading -- it used to confuse and baffle co-workers. Mostly it's just keeping my hand busy.
I do the same thing, too. And it pisses me off when I find sites which "helpfully" pop up something when you click on a non-link. Like certain newspaper sites which will pop up a definition when you click on any random word in the text. Yes, your web monkey is very clever, but I already know what "the" means. Go away.
Weren't Joust and Gyruss purely digital inputs? I'm trying to think of any non-trackball / non-wheel / non-paddle stick-based arcade games that used analog controls from a retro time-period, and the only one I'm coming up with is Afterburner.
Yes, they were digital. I have an original Gyruss cabinet; it uses a bog-standard 8-way digital stick. Joust is a 2-way digital stick. I think Tailgunner (an ancient vector game) used an analog stick, but that's the only one that comes to mind. Sinistar and a few others mimicked a low-resolution analog stick by using a funky 49-way digital stick.
"Sir, one of the employees is making noises about computer viruses in our kiosks. And get this, he's a member of the internet hacker site known as "slashdot". He goes by the name 'Fluffeh'. We need to get rid of him immediately!"
That may be part of it, but it seems that the magnetic nature of the connector is the key component. All the abstract mentions is the magnetic attraction between the plug and the receptacle, not the layout of the pins. I haven't tried plowing through the legalese of all 57 claims to see if the layout is considered.
Apple's patent cites a fair number of other patents, many of which also cover magnetic connectors in different applications. So yeah, it's been done before, but there's something (rather, 57 somethings) which are considered to be significant deviations from earlier designs.
My stereo receiver came with a USB dongle that lets it act as a sound card. Runs at 2.4GHz. Completely screws with wi-fi.
Many wireless "listen to your audio in another room" transmitters run at 2.4GHz. Completely screws with wi-fi.
Baby monitors, phones, home security systems... 2.4GHz is a ghetto. The first thing to do is to try other wi-fi channels and see if you can find a clear one. If that doesn't work, check the surrounding area for interfering devices. Start with your own home; if you have any wireless devices in your house, turn them off and see if the problem goes away. Next, knock on the neighbors' doors and ask them to do the same. With luck you'll find the culprit.
Basically, I'm finding it hard to see the difference between the emulation/preservation/source port culture we have now and what these guys are doing, with the exception that they are somehow more "credible" or "legitimate" because they're a university project. Their methodologies might be more formalized, and they're receiving government funding, but their goals are identical to those of the thousands of people already involved in emulation and archiving of obsolete hardware and software.
The difference is, these kids have actually convinced their advisers that this is something worth college credit, or at least a couple of thesis papers. Come on, who wouldn't want a Masters degree in playing MAME? Um, excuse me, in "Preservation of Virtual Worlds". Brilliant! Wish I'd thought of it! Oh, that's right, I couldn't have; most of these games came out after I graduated... Besides, I was already majoring in pinball.
Of course the new music sucks. New music has sucked ever since Oog's children figured out you could bang sticks together, not just rocks. And it sucked even more when Oog's children's children figured out you could bang the sticks on the rocks. It's just been all downhill ever since then.
Excuse me, I'll leave and let you get back to the maintenance of your lawn.
And MS Word or Office isn't the task, word processing, presentations, spread sheets, and databases are the requirements.
I agree with you in theory. It's much better to teach the underlying principles than the specific tools. But.
The task at hand isn't "use a word processor" or "use a spreadsheet". It's "describe the Magna Carta's significance" or "analyze findings from this lab procedure." It's a bit much to ask of the history teacher, for example, to be conversant in MS Word and WordPerfect and OpenOffice and Pages and AbiWord and whatever other programs a student might have trouble with. Limiting the scope to one official platform helps to keep focus on the subject, not on the tool.
Of course, it can be argued that the focus is even better maintained if a lowest-common-denominator plain-ASCII editor is used. Or maybe even a pencil and paper...
My son just graduated high school. He was having trouble with some of his math homework, in which he was supposed to calculate a power regression for a given data set. He is the type who mindlessly presses buttons on his calculator and never thinks about whether the answers make sense, so I told him to do it without. He didn't know how. Look in the book, I told him. It's a problem from the book, the book must explain how to do it. He couldn't find it. So I looked through the book and found it. The procedure? "Enter the points into your graphing calculator and hit the 'find regression' button."
I never needed a computer, or anything besides a calculator, for high school or any of the basic college classes
A calculator? You spoiled wuss. I did long division with a pencil and paper. And my dad called me a wuss because he did it with chalk and slate.
The frivolous luxuries of one generation are the essential tools of the next. I don't know if a laptop falls into that category yet, but you certainly can't dismiss it out of hand just because your generation didn't have it.
Amen. The principal should have no more control over what a student says or does outside of school hours and off school property than he does over any non-student. By all means he should complain to the student and the student's parents. Hell, sue 'em if he wants to. But I think it's an abuse of his authority to punish the student academically, any more than it's his job to suspend the kid for shoplifting from the local Kwik-E-Mart. It's outside of school, so it's outside his jurisdiction.
If the student posted the same fake MySpace page about some third-party unknown to the principal, would the principal be justified in suspending the student? If a non-student posted the fake MySpace page about the principal, would the principal be justified in taking some sort of personal revenge?
FWIW, I say this as a parent. My own son graduates high school next week and I'd be pissed if his principal meted out punishment for something like this. Of course, I'd also be pissed at my kid and would take appropriate action. If the principal came to me first I might even agree that suspension was an appropriate part of the punishment, depending on the exact circumstances. (Though frankly, I think kids see suspension more as a reward than a punishment.) But I don't think it's appropriate for the principal to punish the kid for something done outside of school. That's my job as the parent, or the court's job if the offense is serious enough.
Politicians have always lied...the difference is that the common person can now find proof about it in a matter of seconds with a single Google search.
Which is part of the problem. You can now find "proof" of anything, along with the "damn lies" perpetrated by the opposition. Whatever position you want to believe in, you can find some talk show or blog to follow and reinforce your prejudices.
Seriously. It was an innocent question but from the moderator's reaction you'd think I'd insulted Ron Paul or something.
I don't know why you got a flamebait mod; it seems to me you had a perfectly valid question asked in a perfectly non-trollish manner. Bad moderator! Shame! For pennance
As for your question... I don't know why anyone else likes Zappa, but I generally like his music for the depth, richness, and variety of it all. He has some really intricate work, and fascinating combinations of instruments. It's different. It's unique. It's weird. It's not all to my taste; I'd say I actively dislike about 10% of his stuff. But even in that 10% I can recognize and appreciate his sheer craftsmanship. I really wish that I'd managed to see Frank perform live.
If you want a good, approachable introduction to Zappa, I recommend finding Weird Al's "Genius in France" (on the Poodle Hat album). It's not a parody of any one song, but an homage to Zappa's style. And it's a pretty funny song in its own right.
Beginning to wake up to the idea? I got out of the cellular biz back in '95, and "location based service" was being talked about then. It's hardly a new idea, and it's one the telcos have been drooling over for more than a decade. Maybe they're finally figuring out ways to make it pay off.
If they can fix the stuck pixels, it would be a sweet screen!
Fix them? They're a feature! They give you a visual reference so you don't lose track of where you are in the picture. Sheesh, you're probably the same guy who wants to get rid of artificial lens flare in CGI, when everyone knows that pictures only look real when they're covered with fake image artifacts.
Better than what's happening now: professor churns out a low-grade course book, then gets it added as a mandatory book. One of my calculus profs did that, and it was the worst piece of crap book I'd ever bought.
Yeah, any half-assed hack professor can write his own book. I ran into the same thing several times. I was really pleased when I got a class where the professor didn't actually write the textbook, but his research formed the basis for a chapter in someone else's book. He knew his stuff!
Slashdot Mirror
That's true, I have neither the rights nor the tools. I tried to finagle a copy of the source code when I got laid off, but they wouldn't let me take it.
However, Pfutz did make an update after I left, and got permission to distribute ROM images of all the Capcom pinball machines. You can find them linked off his home page, at http://home.comcast.net/~pfutz/Capcom/index.htm.
Well, considering that there's exactly one company currently making pinball machines...
Dude, the era of pinball ended more than a decade ago. I was there, working at Capcom Coin-Op programming pinball machines when the bottom fell out. All the manufacturers shut down within just a few years, between 1995 and 1999. Stern had shut down their line years ago, but they re-opened after everyone else quit. As I understand it, Gary Stern himself decided that someone had to keep making machines. I don't know if it's even profitable; it's a labor of love.
/me is the proud owner (and programmer of!) Big Bang Bar, due to be the next on the manufacturing line when Capcom got out of the biz.
That's my take on this, too. The '=' key on a calculator is more of a "print" operator than an equality symbol. Think of it as the "show me the accumulated value" operator. The other half of this is that kids at that level are used to seeing problems expressed as "1 + 2". No '=' symbol. It's assumed, and the kid is supposed to write '3' as the answer.
Now, combine those two notions. If you see "4 + 3 + 2 = __ + 2" it's natural to evaluate 4+3+2 as 9 and put it in the blank, then add 2 and give the answer as 11. Key it into a basic 4-function calculator and that's exactly what you get.
So the problem isn't that kids don't know what the '=' sign means, the problem is that the '=' sign has been overloaded to have multiple meanings. Us old farts who "know" that the '=' sign means equality are appalled, but that's the way it is. We've trained the kids to think of it as an evaluation operator.
It's because electrons act as waves rather than particles in graphene sheets. Old news. Dr. Sheldon Cooper proved this months ago. Keep up with the literature, people!
It's not that pink is an "undesirable" color, it's just that it's pink. Even car thieves know better than to piss off a Mary Kay rep. Mary Kay is one mean bitch!
I do the same thing, too. And it pisses me off when I find sites which "helpfully" pop up something when you click on a non-link. Like certain newspaper sites which will pop up a definition when you click on any random word in the text. Yes, your web monkey is very clever, but I already know what "the" means. Go away.
Yes, they were digital. I have an original Gyruss cabinet; it uses a bog-standard 8-way digital stick. Joust is a 2-way digital stick. I think Tailgunner (an ancient vector game) used an analog stick, but that's the only one that comes to mind. Sinistar and a few others mimicked a low-resolution analog stick by using a funky 49-way digital stick.
"Sir, one of the employees is making noises about computer viruses in our kiosks. And get this, he's a member of the internet hacker site known as "slashdot". He goes by the name 'Fluffeh'. We need to get rid of him immediately!"
That may be part of it, but it seems that the magnetic nature of the connector is the key component. All the abstract mentions is the magnetic attraction between the plug and the receptacle, not the layout of the pins. I haven't tried plowing through the legalese of all 57 claims to see if the layout is considered.
Apple's patent cites a fair number of other patents, many of which also cover magnetic connectors in different applications. So yeah, it's been done before, but there's something (rather, 57 somethings) which are considered to be significant deviations from earlier designs.
U.S. patent number 7,311,526 for those of you playing at home.
Mmmm.... iCakes, with maple iSyrup... A part of this complete breakfast!
My stereo receiver came with a USB dongle that lets it act as a sound card. Runs at 2.4GHz. Completely screws with wi-fi.
Many wireless "listen to your audio in another room" transmitters run at 2.4GHz. Completely screws with wi-fi.
Baby monitors, phones, home security systems... 2.4GHz is a ghetto. The first thing to do is to try other wi-fi channels and see if you can find a clear one. If that doesn't work, check the surrounding area for interfering devices. Start with your own home; if you have any wireless devices in your house, turn them off and see if the problem goes away. Next, knock on the neighbors' doors and ask them to do the same. With luck you'll find the culprit.
The difference is, these kids have actually convinced their advisers that this is something worth college credit, or at least a couple of thesis papers. Come on, who wouldn't want a Masters degree in playing MAME? Um, excuse me, in "Preservation of Virtual Worlds". Brilliant! Wish I'd thought of it! Oh, that's right, I couldn't have; most of these games came out after I graduated... Besides, I was already majoring in pinball.
I just want to know what "Catholic Technology" is. Are they working on a RoboPope?
Significant privacy concerns? You mean like, "Don't talk about private shit in public?"
Of course the new music sucks. New music has sucked ever since Oog's children figured out you could bang sticks together, not just rocks. And it sucked even more when Oog's children's children figured out you could bang the sticks on the rocks. It's just been all downhill ever since then.
Excuse me, I'll leave and let you get back to the maintenance of your lawn.
I agree with you in theory. It's much better to teach the underlying principles than the specific tools. But.
The task at hand isn't "use a word processor" or "use a spreadsheet". It's "describe the Magna Carta's significance" or "analyze findings from this lab procedure." It's a bit much to ask of the history teacher, for example, to be conversant in MS Word and WordPerfect and OpenOffice and Pages and AbiWord and whatever other programs a student might have trouble with. Limiting the scope to one official platform helps to keep focus on the subject, not on the tool.
Of course, it can be argued that the focus is even better maintained if a lowest-common-denominator plain-ASCII editor is used. Or maybe even a pencil and paper...
My son just graduated high school. He was having trouble with some of his math homework, in which he was supposed to calculate a power regression for a given data set. He is the type who mindlessly presses buttons on his calculator and never thinks about whether the answers make sense, so I told him to do it without. He didn't know how. Look in the book, I told him. It's a problem from the book, the book must explain how to do it. He couldn't find it. So I looked through the book and found it. The procedure? "Enter the points into your graphing calculator and hit the 'find regression' button."
Oy.
A calculator? You spoiled wuss. I did long division with a pencil and paper. And my dad called me a wuss because he did it with chalk and slate.
The frivolous luxuries of one generation are the essential tools of the next. I don't know if a laptop falls into that category yet, but you certainly can't dismiss it out of hand just because your generation didn't have it.
Amen. The principal should have no more control over what a student says or does outside of school hours and off school property than he does over any non-student. By all means he should complain to the student and the student's parents. Hell, sue 'em if he wants to. But I think it's an abuse of his authority to punish the student academically, any more than it's his job to suspend the kid for shoplifting from the local Kwik-E-Mart. It's outside of school, so it's outside his jurisdiction.
If the student posted the same fake MySpace page about some third-party unknown to the principal, would the principal be justified in suspending the student? If a non-student posted the fake MySpace page about the principal, would the principal be justified in taking some sort of personal revenge?
FWIW, I say this as a parent. My own son graduates high school next week and I'd be pissed if his principal meted out punishment for something like this. Of course, I'd also be pissed at my kid and would take appropriate action. If the principal came to me first I might even agree that suspension was an appropriate part of the punishment, depending on the exact circumstances. (Though frankly, I think kids see suspension more as a reward than a punishment.) But I don't think it's appropriate for the principal to punish the kid for something done outside of school. That's my job as the parent, or the court's job if the offense is serious enough.
Gee, it's almost as if the judge had experience with smug armchair lawyers who think they can off on a technicality. Go figure.
Which is part of the problem. You can now find "proof" of anything, along with the "damn lies" perpetrated by the opposition. Whatever position you want to believe in, you can find some talk show or blog to follow and reinforce your prejudices.
I don't know why you got a flamebait mod; it seems to me you had a perfectly valid question asked in a perfectly non-trollish manner. Bad moderator! Shame! For pennance
As for your question... I don't know why anyone else likes Zappa, but I generally like his music for the depth, richness, and variety of it all. He has some really intricate work, and fascinating combinations of instruments. It's different. It's unique. It's weird. It's not all to my taste; I'd say I actively dislike about 10% of his stuff. But even in that 10% I can recognize and appreciate his sheer craftsmanship. I really wish that I'd managed to see Frank perform live.
If you want a good, approachable introduction to Zappa, I recommend finding Weird Al's "Genius in France" (on the Poodle Hat album). It's not a parody of any one song, but an homage to Zappa's style. And it's a pretty funny song in its own right.
Beginning to wake up to the idea? I got out of the cellular biz back in '95, and "location based service" was being talked about then. It's hardly a new idea, and it's one the telcos have been drooling over for more than a decade. Maybe they're finally figuring out ways to make it pay off.
Fix them? They're a feature! They give you a visual reference so you don't lose track of where you are in the picture. Sheesh, you're probably the same guy who wants to get rid of artificial lens flare in CGI, when everyone knows that pictures only look real when they're covered with fake image artifacts.
Yeah, any half-assed hack professor can write his own book. I ran into the same thing several times. I was really pleased when I got a class where the professor didn't actually write the textbook, but his research formed the basis for a chapter in someone else's book. He knew his stuff!