So, in other words, it's Mario with HD graphics and a map editor.
Remember Abuse? It was a sidescroller with a map editor and, even better, a LISP environment that allowed custom objects to be created. Eventually it was even released under the GPL2. It's currently in the Debian repository.
Really, nothing amazing got done with it. LittleBigPlanet is almost certainly going to be even more limited than Abuse, and I highly doubt it'll be any better. (Although to be fair, I never did use Abuse's network multilpayer mode, so who knows, maybe the multiplayer thing will work.) But Abuse was a PC game and had the entire power of mouse and keyboard to drive the map editor. Somehow I can't imagine trying to do anything similar on the PS3 without making it so limited as to be worthless.
As for PlayStation Home, I watched the entire little Sony infomercial on it, so if it's anything more than Second Life without the ability to create custom items and with a crappy matchmaking service poorly slapped on top, Sony sure didn't show it. Somehow I just can't see it being anything but annoying.
Forgive me for pointing out the blindingly obvious, but I'm going to go with the fact that people are calling it a blatant rip-off of Second Life with Live functionality poorly tacked on is because it is, in fact, a blatant rip-off of Second Life with Live functionality poorly tacked on. There's a great bit in the Sony Home PR fluff-video where they explain in great detail how their IRC-with-HD-graphics also allows you to play find people to play with in multiplayer games, which to me, sounds like an absolutely horrendous way to do matchmaking. (Ever tried to find groups in an MMORPG using nothing by chat? There's a reason most MMORPGs have group-finding tools.)
So, from the video, it looks like a crappy Second Life knock-off with Live functionality tacked on. (I don't know enough about the Mii system to be comfortable to say it's a Mii knock-off, because creating customizable avatars isn't exactly a new concept. In fact, I'd say the innovative thing with Miis was the art style and the ability to import them into other games, which the Sony feature lacks.)
As for LittleBigPlanet, it looks like a fairly nice side-scroller, but nothing really ground-breaking. Similar concepts have existed for years in Super Mario. Maybe not with HD graphics, but the same concepts. Nothing really ground-breaking. I'd like to see more side-scrollers created, I miss them, but it's nothing that would make me buy a PS3.
In fact, nothing shown in this article makes me want a PS3. It's all about the games, not the crappy Second Life + Live thing they demoed.
If I'm not mistaken, the new Battlestar Galactica series is fairly accurate with sound in space.
The new Battlestar Galactica is explicitly inaccurate about sound in space. If you listen to the commentary tracks on the miniseries, they talk about sound in space and how they came to the conclusion that BSG is really a drama, and that sound in space caused a more dramatic experience than realistic sound in space.
Ultimately BSG is about the characters. They're attempting to create a realistic-seeming world, but in places where depicting reality would distract from the story, the story comes first. There are plenty of examples of things that, strictly, are less than realistic, but are done because it makes the story progress better.
I can't really come up with a good example, but if you listen to the commentary tracks or to the commentary podcast they'll frequently talk about things that had to be changed to be slightly less realistic to make the story flow better.
Possibly because some people like buying things at a physical store, and, let's be honest: all the competition with Best Buy is about as bad.
I already refuse to shop at Circuit City. That leaves Best Buy and CompUSA, at least until CompUSA starts closing stores, at which point the closest CompUSA to me will be in another state. So you might argue that people should buy online or buy from other stores.
But, really, when it comes to the things that Best Buy sells, if you're set on getting them at a physical store, none of the competition is really any better.
I seem to recall Sony saying achievements were stupid and that they wouldn't bother implementing them because no one wanted them, or something to that effect.
Apparently this is more Sony innovation in the "SIXAXIS" sense: bad mouth the innovator when people praise the idea, and then come back and "invent" it themselves and pretend it's some huge new feature, that they'd been planning for years!
I can understand why the may not want "innovation" of that kind leaked, instead preferring to very carefully "manage" the PR to try and pretend this is some great new idea and not just a crappy knock-off of both X-Box Live and the Wii's online services.
I think it's more along the lines of "yes, we know it exists - please don't ask us about it, we want to talk about our product and not compare it to WoW."
Otherwise they're basically guaranteed to be asked how they plan to "beat WoW" which ultimately becomes an effort in comparing the new game to WoW and, in a way, yet another ad for WoW.
<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE p [<!ELEMENT p (PCDATA)><!ENTITY b "b"><!ENTITY e "e"><!ENTITY q " "><!ENTITY r "t"><!ENTITY t "?">]><p xmlns="http://example.com/sure/it/is" >Wanna&q;&b;&e;&r;&t;</p>
Sorry, I had to.
(And, yes, that's both well-formed and valid XML! Well-formed means it can be parsed as XML, and the valid part means it validates against its embedded DTD.)
Ironically, though, if you "post anonymously" on the Wikipedia, your IP address becomes public, so you're easier to track down.
It's much better to post using a user account, because while then your edits are tracked across IPs, the only people who can track you down are admins with what I think's called the "checkuser" privilege. Whatever it's called, it's the privilege to check a user's IP.
So remember, when trolling people on the Wikipedia, don't do it AC-style. Create a sockpuppet instead.
But on the other hand, the fact that I can't get one means that I've essentially given up trying. I actually gave up early January and figured that I'd check again in February, but they still aren't available, so now I've basically completely given up until the summer at the earliest.
So not being able to meet demand might, ultimately, hurt them - I just don't care about the Wii anymore. I don't really want it anymore. I did at one point, but after being unable to get it, I've basically given up - I've stopped actively trying to get one, and am no longer looking.
If the hype dies between now and when they become accessible enough that I can actually find one, I might simply wind up not buying one.
Is the hype starting to diminish? I'd say "yes" - I'm not as interested in getting one as I once was. Part of it is definitely that I simply can't, because there are none around. But another part is that the hype is starting to wear off - the Wii isn't as exciting as it once was.
(That, and FFVI Advance was released, so the only console I currently have time for is my DS...)
I can't remember the exact details, but I remember at one point having a scenario that worked out to a dependency of a dependency conflicting with the dependency of another dependency, making it essentially impossible to install the original RPM.
I think I switched to Gentoo over that, until I got sick and tired of compiling, after which I moved to Debian and finally Ubuntu.
But not the MSI format specification. That would allow me to cross-compiler into an installable package. As it stands, my users who run Windows have to deal with no installer.
WiX is fully open source, so if you wanted, you should be able to figure out how to create MSIs from that. In any case, you could try running it under Mono, maybe it'll work under Linux...
MSIs are one of the best ideas for Windows in a while... No more dealing with poorly-written homebrew installers or 10-year old, 16-bit InstallShield programs.
You're wrong, and you want proof? Look how many programs- nay, look how many programs come from Microsoft that are still distributed as exe files. That shiny new Zune's software comes in exe-form.
Most of those EXEs are actually MSIs wrapped with a stub installer that can install the Windows Installer if it's missing.
No of course not, but that's why you used a straw man. MSI is an executable, and just made Microsoft's security problem worse: it introduced yet another executable file format.
Well..... yes. It is. Sort of. It allows arbitrary binary code to be run - but then again, it's an installer. It could run arbitrary code anyway. Complaining that MSI is "another executable format" would be like complaining that RPM is "another executable format" - it's equally true. (Although I think RPM generally runs shell scripts, not direct binary code. Although I could be wrong.)
Nobody downloads "gzipped file of source or a deb that complains about dependencies" ever. They say "apt-get install xyz" and it goes and figures out the dependancies itself.
Right, nobody does that because it's practically impossible to get it working. Instead they discover that it's not in the apt repository and give up. That's the problem with the Linux packaging system - if it's not there already, it's basically impossible to install unless you're a Linux expert. Now you might say that "any software you'd ever need" is going to be available, but you're guaranteed to be wrong at some point. Some new game, some new app, something will become available that someone will want to install - and won't be able to, because it's not in the distribution repository.
Worse, from the developer point of view, they might create some great new software that they want to release in an easy to install form - and, really, can't. Maybe they'll generate an RPM or a DEB for their own installed Linux distro, but beyond that, it's just too much effort to try and make an installer for everyone.
Oh, and MSI is horrendously overcomplicated compared to RPM and DEB, in case you wanted to know. Nothing like having to generate a GUID for every single file you might want to install. (Although to be fair, that's likely because most Windows programs don't contain all too many files.)
How can it? What do you want it to send, the command line?:) It doesn't know where the URL came from, there's no way it can generate a referrer without being told what it is.
You can tell it to send a referrer (via "--referer" - the misspelling comes from the HTTP spec) on the command line. You can set any number of headers, actually, using the "--header" argument. All around it's a very powerful utility.
Yep - I've had an overzealous config of Norton delete every NSIS installer I had created. (Which was a number, used for installing various components of an in-house software system.) Specifically Norton had decided that every installer created by NSIS 2.17 was a virus, and someone had configured the file server where I had the installers to delete infected files (instead of just quarantining them).
1) LoZ: WindWaker - Sailing around to pick up all those triforce pieces, it all just slowed down there and I never beat the game.
You didn't miss much - as I recall, all the major dungeons were already complete by that point and completing the Triforce essentially sent you straight to Gannon. The thing that annoyed me the most about that part was discovering that you had to have the Ghost Ship map to get on the Ghost Ship. They dropped clues left and right about where the Ghost Ship would be, so I was following the damned thing around for an hour before looking it up online and discovering that you had to go to an island and loot the Ghost Ship map, which provided a nice bright red circle indicating exactly where it was. Then simply being near the ship would pop you onto it.
6) Final Fantasy X - I got stuck at the first, whatever that sport thigy was, match. Or shortly thereafter.
You didn't have to actually win the first game. Just play it. And if you hadn't gotten the secret Jecht Shot move, it was essentially impossible to win.
On the other hand, if you had gotten the Jecht Shot, it was incredibly easy to win, and you got some fairly useless trinket for winning.
I never found FFX to be that challenging - possibly because I found out about Clear Spheres and the Monster Arena before attempting the final boss, and went after Sin with everyone except Wakka having their unlocked ultimate weapon. (Wakka's required playing Blitzball, which I despised.) Break Damage Limit and Break HP Limit were nasty - Yuna had around 20,000 HP when I stopped playing, and Tidus and Auron both did 99,999 on a normal attack.
My (possibly completely incorrect) impression of the problem ISPs have with BitTorrent is that it uses a lot of upload bandwidth at the last mile. Caching the data won't really help with that.
As I understand it, most ISPs have tons of bandwidth within their own network, but have much less bandwidth on the last mile. Essentially the last mile might be a 50Mbsp down/10Mbps up link shared among 20 customers. (Like 57% of all statistics, those numbers were made up.) So they might sell the connection as a 6Mbps/1Mbsp asynchronous connection to all those customers based on the typical web surfing usage pattern, where it's unlikely that any given customer will be using all of the bandwidth they're allocated.
If, instead, all of those 20 customers are participating in a BitTorrent swarm, they're completely saturating that last mile, and none of them can get the bandwidth they were sold. Worse still, if a mere 10 customers are able to flood the line, then the remaining 10 might actually get no access at all.
In this case, caching the data won't help - the ISP can't send and receive the data from their hub down to the customer line in the first place. Caching it might reduce the load on their backbone, but, as I understand it, that's not where BitTorrent overloads the network in the first place.
I know I have to keep my BitTorrent upload throttled to something like 50% of my max upload speed, or I can't do anything else, as BitTorrent overwhelms my available upload. Caching on the other end wouldn't help with that - I'd still be uploading enough to the local cache to overwhelm my own connection.
Why is this offtopic? It's correct. The ShackNews article has been updated to include:
Update: Since posting our original news item on the matter, Shacknews has been contacted by Electronic Arts, which is co-publishing the game along with Namco Bandai. EA noted that there has not in fact been any final decision made as to Hellgate: London's online pricing model, be it subscription-based or otherwise. We respect this situation, while maintaining that have reported fairly on statements we received. A full interview is forthcoming.
The pricing model for online play isn't final yet. The details on online play are fuzzy as well.
If you look closely at the photos on the linked article, you'll notice that next to the signal strength indicator in the upper-left hand corner appears "Cingular." The keynote wrap-up says that this phone will only be available to Cingular customers (at least in the US):
10:54am - "iPhone owners will be Cingular and AT&T customers -- they'll get the best network and service in the business. Apple... Cingular... and AT&T have come a long ways."
So, I guess I won't be able to get one. I suppose I could go into a rant about how stupid it is that, in the US at least, cellphones are so strongly tied to individual providers. The cellphone I currently own is also tied to my provider. As in, the physical hardware can't be modified to work with any other provider. It uses some proprietary protocol, and can only have the number changed by the provider directly.
In any case, it looks like if you're not a Cingular customer, you won't be able to get an iPhone.
I may as well clarify my original "almost" because I did find one store that had a Wii. They were only selling it as a bundle with an extra controller and two games.
They were out of extra controllers.
While it'd be funny to say that they had a Wii they couldn't sell, I think the reality is that they'd have given me a rain check, but since they had no good games either (basically only movie/TV tie-in games), I didn't bother. I'd rather not spend an extra $100 on games I'd never play.
As a fairly useless anecdote, in almost every store I've been to, they were completely sold out of Wiis, had several PS3s on hand, and had plenty of XBox360s on display.
And I've been to a lot of stores looking for my Wii - I've had to resign myself that about the earliest the stores expect to receive more is late January to early February.
But in several cases, I've had a hopeful sales person mention after I asked them about the Wii that they have the PS3 available for sale. Too bad I don't have, A) a HDTV or B) $600 to spare. (And, yes, I mean $600 - I never did see anyone selling the $500 model, so even though it exists, no one had it.)
But essentially no one has a Wii and won't for a while. Seems that, short term at least, the Wii is the clear winner.
I'd assume, without knowing, that that's a Firefox thing. Presumably you're referring to using the little Google search box in the upper right hand corner of the browser, and presumably you've already gone to the Google preferences page (actually, for the Japanese Google, I suppose that'd be the preferences on google.co.jp), and changed your language preferences there after making sure you accept cookies from google.co.jp (or google.com, depending).
Firefox appends a locale string to every Google search they create, it flags the search as coming from a specific version of Firefox. Specifically, on my searches, it'll add "&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official" to the search URL. Now, I haven't bothered checking if Google actually pays attention to this part of the URL for locale (I'd really hope it doesn't), but if it does, you can remove that part of the query string from the Google search plugin.
Simply (sarcasm, natch) find your Firefox install, and open searchplugins\google.xml, and remove or comment out the <Param name="rls"> element.
Alternatively, if you mean the Google Toolbar, try... um...
Actually, I'm not sure how to contact Google. I suppose I should try a web search for that.
Hope this helps, although somehow, after previewing it, I doubt it will.
No, it's real. He's parroting Microsoft's selling of the feature. It's called Windows ReadyBoost (they helpfully don't offer an anchor to link directly to it, it's there, scroll down). Another poster offered a FAQ about ReadyBoost on an MSDN blog, where the blogger assures his readers that Microsoft has worked out the issues involved with limited writes and removing the drive.
To quote the linked Microsoft advertising page:
Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. Windows ReadyBoost lets users use a removable flash memory device, such as a USB thumb drive, to improve system performance without opening the box.
They really are selling it as "add a USB drive to improve your system's memory."
Fortunately there's a Windows registry key that can fix that. Ironically I found it on the Apple support forums, because dual-booting Mac OS X with Windows runs into the exact same problem dual-booting with Linux does.
You're thinking of Denis Leary's Merry F#$%n' Christmas Special. I think it was on last year. They have some clips from the show on the Comedy Central site, but not the segment you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
So, in other words, it's Mario with HD graphics and a map editor.
Remember Abuse? It was a sidescroller with a map editor and, even better, a LISP environment that allowed custom objects to be created. Eventually it was even released under the GPL2. It's currently in the Debian repository.
Really, nothing amazing got done with it. LittleBigPlanet is almost certainly going to be even more limited than Abuse, and I highly doubt it'll be any better. (Although to be fair, I never did use Abuse's network multilpayer mode, so who knows, maybe the multiplayer thing will work.) But Abuse was a PC game and had the entire power of mouse and keyboard to drive the map editor. Somehow I can't imagine trying to do anything similar on the PS3 without making it so limited as to be worthless.
As for PlayStation Home, I watched the entire little Sony infomercial on it, so if it's anything more than Second Life without the ability to create custom items and with a crappy matchmaking service poorly slapped on top, Sony sure didn't show it. Somehow I just can't see it being anything but annoying.
Forgive me for pointing out the blindingly obvious, but I'm going to go with the fact that people are calling it a blatant rip-off of Second Life with Live functionality poorly tacked on is because it is, in fact, a blatant rip-off of Second Life with Live functionality poorly tacked on. There's a great bit in the Sony Home PR fluff-video where they explain in great detail how their IRC-with-HD-graphics also allows you to play find people to play with in multiplayer games, which to me, sounds like an absolutely horrendous way to do matchmaking. (Ever tried to find groups in an MMORPG using nothing by chat? There's a reason most MMORPGs have group-finding tools.)
So, from the video, it looks like a crappy Second Life knock-off with Live functionality tacked on. (I don't know enough about the Mii system to be comfortable to say it's a Mii knock-off, because creating customizable avatars isn't exactly a new concept. In fact, I'd say the innovative thing with Miis was the art style and the ability to import them into other games, which the Sony feature lacks.)
As for LittleBigPlanet, it looks like a fairly nice side-scroller, but nothing really ground-breaking. Similar concepts have existed for years in Super Mario. Maybe not with HD graphics, but the same concepts. Nothing really ground-breaking. I'd like to see more side-scrollers created, I miss them, but it's nothing that would make me buy a PS3.
In fact, nothing shown in this article makes me want a PS3. It's all about the games, not the crappy Second Life + Live thing they demoed.
The new Battlestar Galactica is explicitly inaccurate about sound in space. If you listen to the commentary tracks on the miniseries, they talk about sound in space and how they came to the conclusion that BSG is really a drama, and that sound in space caused a more dramatic experience than realistic sound in space.
Ultimately BSG is about the characters. They're attempting to create a realistic-seeming world, but in places where depicting reality would distract from the story, the story comes first. There are plenty of examples of things that, strictly, are less than realistic, but are done because it makes the story progress better.
I can't really come up with a good example, but if you listen to the commentary tracks or to the commentary podcast they'll frequently talk about things that had to be changed to be slightly less realistic to make the story flow better.
Possibly because some people like buying things at a physical store, and, let's be honest: all the competition with Best Buy is about as bad.
I already refuse to shop at Circuit City. That leaves Best Buy and CompUSA, at least until CompUSA starts closing stores, at which point the closest CompUSA to me will be in another state. So you might argue that people should buy online or buy from other stores.
But, really, when it comes to the things that Best Buy sells, if you're set on getting them at a physical store, none of the competition is really any better.
I seem to recall Sony saying achievements were stupid and that they wouldn't bother implementing them because no one wanted them, or something to that effect.
Apparently this is more Sony innovation in the "SIXAXIS" sense: bad mouth the innovator when people praise the idea, and then come back and "invent" it themselves and pretend it's some huge new feature, that they'd been planning for years!
I can understand why the may not want "innovation" of that kind leaked, instead preferring to very carefully "manage" the PR to try and pretend this is some great new idea and not just a crappy knock-off of both X-Box Live and the Wii's online services.
I think it's more along the lines of "yes, we know it exists - please don't ask us about it, we want to talk about our product and not compare it to WoW."
Otherwise they're basically guaranteed to be asked how they plan to "beat WoW" which ultimately becomes an effort in comparing the new game to WoW and, in a way, yet another ad for WoW.
<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE p [<!ELEMENT p (PCDATA)><!ENTITY b "b"><!ENTITY e "e"><!ENTITY q " "><!ENTITY r "t"><!ENTITY t "?">]><p xmlns="http://example.com/sure/it/is" >Wanna&q;&b;&e;&r;&t;</p>
Sorry, I had to.
(And, yes, that's both well-formed and valid XML! Well-formed means it can be parsed as XML, and the valid part means it validates against its embedded DTD.)
Ironically, though, if you "post anonymously" on the Wikipedia, your IP address becomes public, so you're easier to track down.
It's much better to post using a user account, because while then your edits are tracked across IPs, the only people who can track you down are admins with what I think's called the "checkuser" privilege. Whatever it's called, it's the privilege to check a user's IP.
So remember, when trolling people on the Wikipedia, don't do it AC-style. Create a sockpuppet instead.
But on the other hand, the fact that I can't get one means that I've essentially given up trying. I actually gave up early January and figured that I'd check again in February, but they still aren't available, so now I've basically completely given up until the summer at the earliest.
So not being able to meet demand might, ultimately, hurt them - I just don't care about the Wii anymore. I don't really want it anymore. I did at one point, but after being unable to get it, I've basically given up - I've stopped actively trying to get one, and am no longer looking.
If the hype dies between now and when they become accessible enough that I can actually find one, I might simply wind up not buying one.
Is the hype starting to diminish? I'd say "yes" - I'm not as interested in getting one as I once was. Part of it is definitely that I simply can't, because there are none around. But another part is that the hype is starting to wear off - the Wii isn't as exciting as it once was.
(That, and FFVI Advance was released, so the only console I currently have time for is my DS...)
I can't remember the exact details, but I remember at one point having a scenario that worked out to a dependency of a dependency conflicting with the dependency of another dependency, making it essentially impossible to install the original RPM.
I think I switched to Gentoo over that, until I got sick and tired of compiling, after which I moved to Debian and finally Ubuntu.
WiX is fully open source, so if you wanted, you should be able to figure out how to create MSIs from that. In any case, you could try running it under Mono, maybe it'll work under Linux...
Most of those EXEs are actually MSIs wrapped with a stub installer that can install the Windows Installer if it's missing.
Well..... yes. It is. Sort of. It allows arbitrary binary code to be run - but then again, it's an installer. It could run arbitrary code anyway. Complaining that MSI is "another executable format" would be like complaining that RPM is "another executable format" - it's equally true. (Although I think RPM generally runs shell scripts, not direct binary code. Although I could be wrong.)
Right, nobody does that because it's practically impossible to get it working. Instead they discover that it's not in the apt repository and give up. That's the problem with the Linux packaging system - if it's not there already, it's basically impossible to install unless you're a Linux expert. Now you might say that "any software you'd ever need" is going to be available, but you're guaranteed to be wrong at some point. Some new game, some new app, something will become available that someone will want to install - and won't be able to, because it's not in the distribution repository.
Worse, from the developer point of view, they might create some great new software that they want to release in an easy to install form - and, really, can't. Maybe they'll generate an RPM or a DEB for their own installed Linux distro, but beyond that, it's just too much effort to try and make an installer for everyone.
Oh, and MSI is horrendously overcomplicated compared to RPM and DEB, in case you wanted to know. Nothing like having to generate a GUID for every single file you might want to install. (Although to be fair, that's likely because most Windows programs don't contain all too many files.)
How can it? What do you want it to send, the command line? :) It doesn't know where the URL came from, there's no way it can generate a referrer without being told what it is.
You can tell it to send a referrer (via "--referer" - the misspelling comes from the HTTP spec) on the command line. You can set any number of headers, actually, using the "--header" argument. All around it's a very powerful utility.
Yep - I've had an overzealous config of Norton delete every NSIS installer I had created. (Which was a number, used for installing various components of an in-house software system.) Specifically Norton had decided that every installer created by NSIS 2.17 was a virus, and someone had configured the file server where I had the installers to delete infected files (instead of just quarantining them).
You didn't miss much - as I recall, all the major dungeons were already complete by that point and completing the Triforce essentially sent you straight to Gannon. The thing that annoyed me the most about that part was discovering that you had to have the Ghost Ship map to get on the Ghost Ship. They dropped clues left and right about where the Ghost Ship would be, so I was following the damned thing around for an hour before looking it up online and discovering that you had to go to an island and loot the Ghost Ship map, which provided a nice bright red circle indicating exactly where it was. Then simply being near the ship would pop you onto it.
You didn't have to actually win the first game. Just play it. And if you hadn't gotten the secret Jecht Shot move, it was essentially impossible to win.
On the other hand, if you had gotten the Jecht Shot, it was incredibly easy to win, and you got some fairly useless trinket for winning.
I never found FFX to be that challenging - possibly because I found out about Clear Spheres and the Monster Arena before attempting the final boss, and went after Sin with everyone except Wakka having their unlocked ultimate weapon. (Wakka's required playing Blitzball, which I despised.) Break Damage Limit and Break HP Limit were nasty - Yuna had around 20,000 HP when I stopped playing, and Tidus and Auron both did 99,999 on a normal attack.
You have to love easily abusable systems.
It's probably worth posting the Daily Show interview with Bill Gates:
My (possibly completely incorrect) impression of the problem ISPs have with BitTorrent is that it uses a lot of upload bandwidth at the last mile. Caching the data won't really help with that.
As I understand it, most ISPs have tons of bandwidth within their own network, but have much less bandwidth on the last mile. Essentially the last mile might be a 50Mbsp down/10Mbps up link shared among 20 customers. (Like 57% of all statistics, those numbers were made up.) So they might sell the connection as a 6Mbps/1Mbsp asynchronous connection to all those customers based on the typical web surfing usage pattern, where it's unlikely that any given customer will be using all of the bandwidth they're allocated.
If, instead, all of those 20 customers are participating in a BitTorrent swarm, they're completely saturating that last mile, and none of them can get the bandwidth they were sold. Worse still, if a mere 10 customers are able to flood the line, then the remaining 10 might actually get no access at all.
In this case, caching the data won't help - the ISP can't send and receive the data from their hub down to the customer line in the first place. Caching it might reduce the load on their backbone, but, as I understand it, that's not where BitTorrent overloads the network in the first place.
I know I have to keep my BitTorrent upload throttled to something like 50% of my max upload speed, or I can't do anything else, as BitTorrent overwhelms my available upload. Caching on the other end wouldn't help with that - I'd still be uploading enough to the local cache to overwhelm my own connection.
You're right. My 5G iPod is actually a 27.82GB model according to the Capacity field in iTunes.
Why is this offtopic? It's correct. The ShackNews article has been updated to include:
The pricing model for online play isn't final yet. The details on online play are fuzzy as well.
If you look closely at the photos on the linked article, you'll notice that next to the signal strength indicator in the upper-left hand corner appears "Cingular." The keynote wrap-up says that this phone will only be available to Cingular customers (at least in the US):
So, I guess I won't be able to get one. I suppose I could go into a rant about how stupid it is that, in the US at least, cellphones are so strongly tied to individual providers. The cellphone I currently own is also tied to my provider. As in, the physical hardware can't be modified to work with any other provider. It uses some proprietary protocol, and can only have the number changed by the provider directly.
In any case, it looks like if you're not a Cingular customer, you won't be able to get an iPhone.
I may as well clarify my original "almost" because I did find one store that had a Wii. They were only selling it as a bundle with an extra controller and two games.
They were out of extra controllers.
While it'd be funny to say that they had a Wii they couldn't sell, I think the reality is that they'd have given me a rain check, but since they had no good games either (basically only movie/TV tie-in games), I didn't bother. I'd rather not spend an extra $100 on games I'd never play.
As a fairly useless anecdote, in almost every store I've been to, they were completely sold out of Wiis, had several PS3s on hand, and had plenty of XBox360s on display.
And I've been to a lot of stores looking for my Wii - I've had to resign myself that about the earliest the stores expect to receive more is late January to early February.
But in several cases, I've had a hopeful sales person mention after I asked them about the Wii that they have the PS3 available for sale. Too bad I don't have, A) a HDTV or B) $600 to spare. (And, yes, I mean $600 - I never did see anyone selling the $500 model, so even though it exists, no one had it.)
But essentially no one has a Wii and won't for a while. Seems that, short term at least, the Wii is the clear winner.
I'd assume, without knowing, that that's a Firefox thing. Presumably you're referring to using the little Google search box in the upper right hand corner of the browser, and presumably you've already gone to the Google preferences page (actually, for the Japanese Google, I suppose that'd be the preferences on google.co.jp), and changed your language preferences there after making sure you accept cookies from google.co.jp (or google.com, depending).
Firefox appends a locale string to every Google search they create, it flags the search as coming from a specific version of Firefox. Specifically, on my searches, it'll add "&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official" to the search URL. Now, I haven't bothered checking if Google actually pays attention to this part of the URL for locale (I'd really hope it doesn't), but if it does, you can remove that part of the query string from the Google search plugin.
Simply (sarcasm, natch) find your Firefox install, and open searchplugins\google.xml, and remove or comment out the <Param name="rls"> element.
Alternatively, if you mean the Google Toolbar, try... um...
Actually, I'm not sure how to contact Google. I suppose I should try a web search for that.
Hope this helps, although somehow, after previewing it, I doubt it will.
No, it's real. He's parroting Microsoft's selling of the feature. It's called Windows ReadyBoost (they helpfully don't offer an anchor to link directly to it, it's there, scroll down). Another poster offered a FAQ about ReadyBoost on an MSDN blog, where the blogger assures his readers that Microsoft has worked out the issues involved with limited writes and removing the drive.
To quote the linked Microsoft advertising page:
They really are selling it as "add a USB drive to improve your system's memory."
Fortunately there's a Windows registry key that can fix that. Ironically I found it on the Apple support forums, because dual-booting Mac OS X with Windows runs into the exact same problem dual-booting with Linux does.
You're thinking of Denis Leary's Merry F#$%n' Christmas Special. I think it was on last year. They have some clips from the show on the Comedy Central site, but not the segment you're talking about.