Digital TV is here, now, in Europe. No built in copy control. Satellite, cable and broadcast digital television.
All of the above employ Macrovision selectively -- specifically on the Pay Per View movie channels. They don't use Macrovision on other channels because they know time-shifting using a VCR is such a basic consumer expectation. By contrast, taping a PPV movie is not necessary (in the broadcaster's eyes) since you have 4 opportunities every hour to watch the film from the beginning.
Of course, Macrovision is fairly trivial to defeat -- there are off the shelf devices to do so.
At least some digital broadcasters are perfectly happy with the concept of timeshifting: Sky Digital (Rupert Murdoch's digital satellite network) is working in partnership with TiVo -- there'll be a TiVo unit released in Europe this year containing two Sky Digital decoders.
To an extent I can sympathise with content owners' desire to prevent or dissuade home recording for posterity. My wall full of Simpsons VHS home recordings probably explain why I haven't bought any of their prerecorded tapes... Mind you -- they're getting a big chunk of my money the moment they put an entire series, in order, on a DVD box set. --
OK, I was being somewhat glib. The fact is, it's different strokes for different folks.
Personally, I don't create network diagrams or flowcharts, it just doesn't come up. I have no need for a database beyond what can be done with
flat files and grep (although if I did I'd probably be looking at postgres). I use the Gimp, but really that's only playing around -- image manipulation is not part of my job. Word processing, spreadsheets, etc are not something I need to use, so MS Office is not something I require.
Dreamweaver is something I've never tried. I prefer to write my own HTML, and if that becomes a chore, then I take that as on obvious cue to knock up some simple Perl or shell scripting to write it for me. So far I haven't needed to create any web material so complex that Dreamweaver is required. You'll note if you visit my web site that most of my HTML is very basic -- I like it that way.
My job is to write network server and security applications, and for doing that a UNIX/X desktop is the ideal place to be from where I'm sitting.
I do occasionally use Windows, for example when I get a laptop from work which I'm not going to have for long enough to warrant installing Linux -- but I swear I'm like a fish out of water. I'm lost with Windows and I don't actually know how to get things done. Putting cygwin on helps;)
So, for me, in a very real sense, Linux (or any other UNIX) is for work, Windows is purely for play. I appreciate your needs may be different from mine. --
I once read a review of Linux by a non-technical writer. Believe it or not, the boot messages scrolling past were irksome to this reviewer, and she asked someone why they were necessary. The reply was "Oh, engineers like that sort of thing". This answer, apparently, summed up everything that was wrong with Linux for this particular reviewer.
Well, of course, if her computer went wrong, I'm sure she'd be glad if the support personell she called had something to go on -- but this does raise a point. Part of making Linux appeal to the masses (if that's your bag -- by no means does everyone even care if the masses use Linux) is to make every stage pretty: prettify X (with Gnome, E etc), prettify logons (gdm vs xdm), prettify the boot process. Many people *are* that shallow.
So: this is a good thing. I'd advocate putting it in the sock kernel; as long as there's a way to switch to the proper boot messages when you need to see them. --
In particular, I'm bitching about the fact that
Everybuddy and Gaim fail to build on Solaris systems simply because the code is written without regard to other systems.
You can say "Well, it says its for Linux" or "GNU isn't UNIX" or some other cop-out, but in reality with these types of programs it doesn't take a lot of effort at the design phase to make it cross (UNIX) platform and still perform just as well.
The "cop out" is "you've got the source, fix it yourself". Maybe these guys don't have Solaris boxes to try things out on. I'm sure if you give them some diffs, they'll gladly accept your fixes (put them in #IFDEF solaris). Fix it for AIX too while you're at it, since you think it's so easy. --
Several people have posted explaining that you want an SVGA monitor because an arcade monitor has such poor resolution.
The fact is, if you want authenticity, an SVGA monitor is never going to look like an original late 1980s coin-op.
Get Snes9x, and run a game fullscreen on an SVGA monitor. Turn off all the posh graphics modes (most emulators now allow you to interpolate, blur etc.). Boggle at the pixelation. This pixellation was less noticable on a TV. A coin-op monitor is the same as a TV in terms of scan frequency, dotpitch etc.
MAME provides scanline and TV emulation modes, where it attempts to simlate the appearance of a lower resolution monitor, but it can only do the best it can with what's avaiable.
So, for the most authentic looking emulation of JAMMA era games, it's gotta be an original JAMMA arcade monitor. I would suggest ditching X for this purpose, and using MAME for DOS (FreeDOS if you like), and ArcadeOS for menuing (see www.mameworld.net) both of these have NTSC resolution modes wherein they underclock certain VGA cards.
Yes, you'll lose the ability to play vector games like Asteroids at 1280x1024; and that's a shame. Some of the newer non-JAMMA games supported by MAME used medium-resolution monitors, and again you'll lose out on those. But I think it's probably worth it if your passion is for all those classic JAMMA games of the late 80s and early 90s. --
OK, Midi Maze was on the Atari ST, but we're talking about the 15 most influential games, not most influential DOS/Windows games.
In fact the article states "15 most influential PC games". If this weren't the case, I'd be jumping in with dozens of more important 8 and 16 bit games, as well as many console games.
I think this may explain the absence of Lemmings, since it was ported from the Amiga (?). The same may go for Monkey Island.
I think nowadays 'PC' is taken to mean x86 IBM PC descendants, and not the more general "personal computer" which could include everything from the Spectrum, through Atari ST, to a modern PowerPC Macintosh... --
It seems very odd to me that there isn't a *single* point & click adventure in there -- no Maniac Mansion, no Monkey Island, no Sam'n'Max, no Day of the Tentacle.
These games are influential both in the sense that they were hugely popular, and in the sense that they influenced the games of today -- Monkey Island 4 is just out and selling well. --
It's not for us to declare the sega console as dead- a bit of smart advertising and promotion could make it come alive in a big way.
Well, if you've misunderstood the story, others may have too -- so I'll correct you... Sega's current machine is the Dreamcast. It's doing OK: Playstation 2 will eventually dominate IMHO because of the vast marketing you refer to (although the media seems to be falling over itself to provide Sony with free publicity. Positive feedback, perhaps). However, the story refers to new games released for the SegaCD -- the CD drive addon to the Megadrive / Genesis (the machine had a different name in Japan/Europe and the States) -- a 16 bit machine which truly is a dead platform.
New Dreamcast games come out pretty much every week; that wouldn't be a new story, even on Slashdot! (although, it seems if Sony so much as sneeze, Rob's on the story...) --
Since this scheme is so keen on changing things, why keep the entirely arbitary 7 day week? 5 goes into 365 rather neatly for example; why not do that? Sure, working patterns would change, but it's no more of a wrench that anything else proposed. --
I generally don't blame the publisher if the game sucks. Late arriving, yes.
You might consider blaming the publisher if the game is delivered on time, but sucks -- often the developers want extra time to make the game "just right", but the publishers insist on taking an inferior product in order to meet seasonal deadlines. A nice example is Metropolis Street Racer: it was over a year later than promised, but ask any journalist who saw the game around the time of its original deadline, and they'll say Sega did the right thing to give Bizarre Creations extra time. The result is a masterpiece (so people who like driving games tell me). --
No version of Quake is available for PS2 as yet. The only FPS for PS2 on general release is TimeSplitters. Unreal Tournament comes out soon, Quake 3 is further off in the future.
Maybe you're thinking of Quake 2 on PS1, or Quake 3 on Dreamcast. On DC Quake 3 you can split the screen horizontally or vertically AFAIK, as well as play online fullscreen. --
"ever played duck hunt? i dunno about anyone else but that seems like the optimal way to play a game such as this on a console system. i've seen a game for psx called time trial (it was something like that) where it showed your crosshairs on the screen and you shot at people. combine this with some type of 1 handed movement controller and shoot-em-up games would be alot cooler "
I have not played it, but I gather Resident Evil Gun Survivor combines character movement using a D-pad with lightgun-based shooting.
That said, "shooting people" and "cool"? First Person shooters are not my favourite genre, so I've not spent very much time with them, but with the PS2 coming out recently I've watched a couple of movies of Unreal Tournament and Time Splitters, and I have to say the constant barrage of gunfire and OTT howls of agony actually made me feel a little ill. Maybe I'm getting old:) --
Sure, mouse+keyboard are better for First Person Shooters, but NEWSFLASH FPS is not the only kind of game. Great games like Virtua Tennis, Sonic Adventure, Bomberman, etc. control better with a console control pad.
The review mentions that the ED game is a little like Resident Evil. In the recent Resident Evil Code: Veronica game (PS2 and Dreamcast) Claire auto-aims at whatever enemies are closest to where you point her. No, this isn't cheating, because the game isn't a glorified duck-shoot -- but it does mean you don't need the twitch-to-an-absolute-position interface a mouse provides.
Some sort of UI standard might be very useful. I have an LG 3350e DVD player which professes to double as an MP3 player. It's lucky MP3 wasn't a major factor when I decided to buy it...
What I'd expect a CD MP3 player to do when you put in a disk and press play is something along the lines of:
Read the entire directory structure -- this takes several minutes for a CD at full capacity
Display the directory in an MS Explorer style GUI (thereby requiring the TV to be switched on, bah!)
Select each track you want played individually (there will be several hundred on a CD)
then press play
This is hopeless.
Of course, it's not really a standard that's required, it's someone working on the product who's actually prepared to think about what a consumer might want from an MP3 player, rather than just wanting to be able to put a tick on the spec sheet. --
Since neither SSH or SSL use signed certificates on both ends they are potentially open to attack.
I'll put my hand up in the air and admit I don't know much about SSH -- but SSL most certainly supports signed certificates on both ends: it's up to the server whether it requires a valid client certificate, up to the client whether it requires a valid server certificate. Try adding 'SSLVerifyClient require' to your Apache/Mod_SSL directory stanzas sometime.
Just because many deployed SSL applications choose not to use client certification (presumably because of the hassle for users of obtaining a client certificate) does not mean the protocol doesn't support it.
Actually I'll wager OpenSSH is able to require client certificates, since it is built on OpenSSL. --
I don't see the point in that. The games you list were designed with a PC in mind: keyboard, mouse and all. Why take those games away from their natural home?
OTOH, putting MAME in a cabinet is a great idea: taking the games in question *Back* home (and it's been done many a time). Putting a Sega Saturn, a Playstation or a Dreamcast in a cabinet is also a great idea, because of all those arcade-prefect conversions. PSX Tekken 2 in a cabinet is virtually identical to playing the game in the arcade. Ditto Dreamcast Virtua Tennis... etc.
When I read the/. post, I assumed this would be more exciting than it actually turned out to be.
The guy starts off with a monitor and a Ms Pacman boardset. All he does is make a cabinet, and wire it up. This is basically nothing but a carpentry project with a little electrical wiring (no electronics as such). Now, building a replica cabinet is a cool thing in itself; I just don't think of it as "News for Nerds" -- it's news for woodworkers.
I encourage people to look in an arcade cabinet: you'd be surprised at just how little there is in there: speakers, monitor, controls, all wired up to a single interface connector.
What I thought I was going to see, and something that would have been incredibly cool, was instructions on building a Ms Pacman board from scratch: using off the shelf chips and home-burnt PROMs (naughty!). Wake me up when we see that.
It *is* a cool project though. Well done to the guy and everything. --
Say IBM get's a new CEO that wants to start selling the e-mail addresses of their web-store customers to other companies. Would the Privacy Officer have the power to stop this?
If the privacy policy given to said customers forbade selling on their email addresses, then that couldn't happen (unless IBM broke the law) - and that's partly what a privacy officer's job is: ensure that any services which hold data on people have a well-defined privacy policy. It's up to the customer whether or not an individual privacy policy is to their satisfaction; but anything done with the data within those boundaries is fair game.
In the UK, by the way, we have the Data Protection Act, which defines strict laws about what information you are allowed to store on individuals under what circumstances. --
I dunno why I'm posting on a two-day-old thread nobody's reading any more, but I don't see this mentioned so I thought I should record it for posterity:)
It appears that the current batch of European PAL PS2s have a problem with DVD playback over RGB.
The SCART standard used for European video applications carries both composite video (acceptable quality/one signal for whole picture/ universally accepted) and RGB video (very high quality / one signal for each of red, green, blue, sync / not all TVs accept it) [as well as S-video, but that's niche stuff in Europe].
PS2 owners appear to have discovered that although they can play games using RGB SCART fine, DVD playback is green-tinged and odd-looking. DVD playback over composite SCART is OK.
Some Sony sources are claiming this is to prevent DVD pirates from copying the nice, clean, RGB signal; that argument doesn't wash since there are plenty of cheaper DVD decks with RGB output a pirate could use instead, and anyway, DVD can be pirated much more easily in the digital domain now we have DeCSS. It seems more likely that something was overlooked in the move from US model to European model and that one of the AV pins meant for RGB is putting out US-style Component Video signals.
It's good that MS adapt Linux code
... Because that is what the OSS spirit of sharing is all about.
If this were BSD code we were talking about, you'd be right, but since it's GPL'd Linux code we're (hypothetically) talking about, MS would be obliged to publish the entire source to whatever component of Windows this (hypothetically) is under the GPL too.
The Linux community copies MS ideas at every opportunity it gets - WINE, Samba, even the look & feel of the desktops.
That's a trifle unfair. SAMBA is merely a protocol implementation. The "idea" in SAMBA is filesharing: hadly a Microsoft innovation; and Jeremy Allison is on record as saying that SMB sucks as a protocol: nobody actually *wants* to use SAMBA: it's only there as a compromise. Windows won't do it our way (NFS), so we'll be nice about it and talk to Windows the way it wants. Mohammed going to the mountain.And, just so we can brag about it, we'll make SAMBA better than native Windows SMB....
WINE is similar: nobody *wants* to use WINE. Every WINE user would prefer Linux native versions of the applications they're running in WINE.
As for the desktops, I'll regretfully half-agree with you on that one. Whoever decided to make FVWM95 a default window manager wants shooting - it's terrible PR. Personally I use WindowMaker, which is sufficently dissimilar to any iteration of Windows as to totally confuse most people who try to use my desktop (and I get confused using Windows -- damn click-to-focus --shudder--).
Anyhoo: this is all moot. MS are not daft enough to be putting GPL code in Windows. I don't work for MS, but where I do work we have lawyers jumping through hoops to make sure freeware licenses are adhered to. If we do it, I'm certain MS will do it. If they're replicating Linux functionality, I'm sure they'll be doing it in a clean-room manner.
Health risks aren't the only percieved risk with GM crops. I'm not even sure they're the main objection. There's also the possibility they may cause harm to ecosystems around where the crop is grown. Of course, farming (esp. large scale industrial farming) has always disrupted ecosystems, and there's a great deal of ill-considered basic fear of the new going on, but nonetheless these things are worth thinking hard about before going into large-scale production. --
Slashdot Mirror
Digital TV is here, now, in Europe. No built in copy control. Satellite, cable and broadcast digital television.
All of the above employ Macrovision selectively -- specifically on the Pay Per View movie channels. They don't use Macrovision on other channels because they know time-shifting using a VCR is such a basic consumer expectation. By contrast, taping a PPV movie is not necessary (in the broadcaster's eyes) since you have 4 opportunities every hour to watch the film from the beginning.
Of course, Macrovision is fairly trivial to defeat -- there are off the shelf devices to do so.
At least some digital broadcasters are perfectly happy with the concept of timeshifting: Sky Digital (Rupert Murdoch's digital satellite network) is working in partnership with TiVo -- there'll be a TiVo unit released in Europe this year containing two Sky Digital decoders.
To an extent I can sympathise with content owners' desire to prevent or dissuade home recording for posterity. My wall full of Simpsons VHS home recordings probably explain why I haven't bought any of their prerecorded tapes... Mind you -- they're getting a big chunk of my money the moment they put an entire series, in order, on a DVD box set.
--
OK, I was being somewhat glib. The fact is, it's different strokes for different folks.
;)
Personally, I don't create network diagrams or flowcharts, it just doesn't come up. I have no need for a database beyond what can be done with
flat files and grep (although if I did I'd probably be looking at postgres). I use the Gimp, but really that's only playing around -- image manipulation is not part of my job. Word processing, spreadsheets, etc are not something I need to use, so MS Office is not something I require.
Dreamweaver is something I've never tried. I prefer to write my own HTML, and if that becomes a chore, then I take that as on obvious cue to knock up some simple Perl or shell scripting to write it for me. So far I haven't needed to create any web material so complex that Dreamweaver is required. You'll note if you visit my web site that most of my HTML is very basic -- I like it that way.
My job is to write network server and security applications, and for doing that a UNIX/X desktop is the ideal place to be from where I'm sitting.
I do occasionally use Windows, for example when I get a laptop from work which I'm not going to have for long enough to warrant installing Linux -- but I swear I'm like a fish out of water. I'm lost with Windows and I don't actually know how to get things done. Putting cygwin on helps
So, for me, in a very real sense, Linux (or any other UNIX) is for work, Windows is purely for play. I appreciate your needs may be different from mine.
--
I once read a review of Linux by a non-technical writer. Believe it or not, the boot messages scrolling past were irksome to this reviewer, and she asked someone why they were necessary. The reply was "Oh, engineers like that sort of thing". This answer, apparently, summed up everything that was wrong with Linux for this particular reviewer.
Well, of course, if her computer went wrong, I'm sure she'd be glad if the support personell she called had something to go on -- but this does raise a point. Part of making Linux appeal to the masses (if that's your bag -- by no means does everyone even care if the masses use Linux) is to make every stage pretty: prettify X (with Gnome, E etc), prettify logons (gdm vs xdm), prettify the boot process. Many people *are* that shallow.
So: this is a good thing. I'd advocate putting it in the sock kernel; as long as there's a way to switch to the proper boot messages when you need to see them.
--
In particular, I'm bitching about the fact that
Everybuddy and Gaim fail to build on Solaris systems simply because the code is written without regard to other systems.
You can say "Well, it says its for Linux" or "GNU isn't UNIX" or some other cop-out, but in reality with these types of programs it doesn't take a lot of effort at the design phase to make it cross (UNIX) platform and still perform just as well.
The "cop out" is "you've got the source, fix it yourself". Maybe these guys don't have Solaris boxes to try things out on. I'm sure if you give them some diffs, they'll gladly accept your fixes (put them in #IFDEF solaris). Fix it for AIX too while you're at it, since you think it's so easy.
--
Several people have posted explaining that you want an SVGA monitor because an arcade monitor has such poor resolution.
The fact is, if you want authenticity, an SVGA monitor is never going to look like an original late 1980s coin-op.
Get Snes9x, and run a game fullscreen on an SVGA monitor. Turn off all the posh graphics modes (most emulators now allow you to interpolate, blur etc.). Boggle at the pixelation. This pixellation was less noticable on a TV. A coin-op monitor is the same as a TV in terms of scan frequency, dotpitch etc.
MAME provides scanline and TV emulation modes, where it attempts to simlate the appearance of a lower resolution monitor, but it can only do the best it can with what's avaiable.
So, for the most authentic looking emulation of JAMMA era games, it's gotta be an original JAMMA arcade monitor. I would suggest ditching X for this purpose, and using MAME for DOS (FreeDOS if you like), and ArcadeOS for menuing (see www.mameworld.net) both of these have NTSC resolution modes wherein they underclock certain VGA cards.
Yes, you'll lose the ability to play vector games like Asteroids at 1280x1024; and that's a shame. Some of the newer non-JAMMA games supported by MAME used medium-resolution monitors, and again you'll lose out on those. But I think it's probably worth it if your passion is for all those classic JAMMA games of the late 80s and early 90s.
--
OK, Midi Maze was on the Atari ST, but we're talking about the 15 most influential games, not most influential DOS/Windows games.
In fact the article states "15 most influential PC games". If this weren't the case, I'd be jumping in with dozens of more important 8 and 16 bit games, as well as many console games.
I think this may explain the absence of Lemmings, since it was ported from the Amiga (?). The same may go for Monkey Island.
I think nowadays 'PC' is taken to mean x86 IBM PC descendants, and not the more general "personal computer" which could include everything from the Spectrum, through Atari ST, to a modern PowerPC Macintosh...
--
It seems very odd to me that there isn't a *single* point & click adventure in there -- no Maniac Mansion, no Monkey Island, no Sam'n'Max, no Day of the Tentacle.
These games are influential both in the sense that they were hugely popular, and in the sense that they influenced the games of today -- Monkey Island 4 is just out and selling well.
--
"Extreme Death Metal" *is* pop -- at least, it seems to be mass-produced for an eager and huge American audience. IMHO...
--
It's not for us to declare the sega console as dead- a bit of smart advertising and promotion could make it come alive in a big way.
Well, if you've misunderstood the story, others may have too -- so I'll correct you... Sega's current machine is the Dreamcast. It's doing OK: Playstation 2 will eventually dominate IMHO because of the vast marketing you refer to (although the media seems to be falling over itself to provide Sony with free publicity. Positive feedback, perhaps). However, the story refers to new games released for the SegaCD -- the CD drive addon to the Megadrive / Genesis (the machine had a different name in Japan/Europe and the States) -- a 16 bit machine which truly is a dead platform.
New Dreamcast games come out pretty much every week; that wouldn't be a new story, even on Slashdot! (although, it seems if Sony so much as sneeze, Rob's on the story...)
--
Since this scheme is so keen on changing things, why keep the entirely arbitary 7 day week? 5 goes into 365 rather neatly for example; why not do that? Sure, working patterns would change, but it's no more of a wrench that anything else proposed.
--
I'm in the UK; you can't *move* for PS Ones -- old style Playstations, New-style PSOnes, new, second hand, shops, car boot sales; they're everywhere.
A recent trip to France saw them stacked high in supermarkets.
Where were you looking?
--
I generally don't blame the publisher if the game sucks. Late arriving, yes.
You might consider blaming the publisher if the game is delivered on time, but sucks -- often the developers want extra time to make the game "just right", but the publishers insist on taking an inferior product in order to meet seasonal deadlines. A nice example is Metropolis Street Racer: it was over a year later than promised, but ask any journalist who saw the game around the time of its original deadline, and they'll say Sega did the right thing to give Bizarre Creations extra time. The result is a masterpiece (so people who like driving games tell me).
--
A friend of mine got a PS2 and rented quake II
No version of Quake is available for PS2 as yet. The only FPS for PS2 on general release is TimeSplitters. Unreal Tournament comes out soon, Quake 3 is further off in the future.
Maybe you're thinking of Quake 2 on PS1, or Quake 3 on Dreamcast. On DC Quake 3 you can split the screen horizontally or vertically AFAIK, as well as play online fullscreen.
--
"ever played duck hunt? i dunno about anyone else but that seems like the optimal way to play a game such as this on a console system. i've seen a game for psx called time trial (it was something like that) where it showed your crosshairs on the screen and you shot at people. combine this with some type of 1 handed movement controller and shoot-em-up games would be alot cooler "
:)
I have not played it, but I gather Resident Evil Gun Survivor combines character movement using a D-pad with lightgun-based shooting.
That said, "shooting people" and "cool"? First Person shooters are not my favourite genre, so I've not spent very much time with them, but with the PS2 coming out recently I've watched a couple of movies of Unreal Tournament and Time Splitters, and I have to say the constant barrage of gunfire and OTT howls of agony actually made me feel a little ill. Maybe I'm getting old
--
You cannot control the damn aiming easily.
Sure, mouse+keyboard are better for First Person Shooters, but NEWSFLASH FPS is not the only kind of game. Great games like Virtua Tennis, Sonic Adventure, Bomberman, etc. control better with a console control pad.
The review mentions that the ED game is a little like Resident Evil. In the recent Resident Evil Code: Veronica game (PS2 and Dreamcast) Claire auto-aims at whatever enemies are closest to where you point her. No, this isn't cheating, because the game isn't a glorified duck-shoot -- but it does mean you don't need the twitch-to-an-absolute-position interface a mouse provides.
--
What I'd expect a CD MP3 player to do when you put in a disk and press play is something along the lines of:
find $CDMOUNTPOINT/ -name '*.mp3' -exec mpg123 {} \;
i.e. play each file in the order you find them.
What the LG does is:
This is hopeless.
Of course, it's not really a standard that's required, it's someone working on the product who's actually prepared to think about what a consumer might want from an MP3 player, rather than just wanting to be able to put a tick on the spec sheet.
--
Since neither SSH or SSL use signed certificates on both ends they are potentially open to attack.
I'll put my hand up in the air and admit I don't know much about SSH -- but SSL most certainly supports signed certificates on both ends: it's up to the server whether it requires a valid client certificate, up to the client whether it requires a valid server certificate. Try adding 'SSLVerifyClient require' to your Apache/Mod_SSL directory stanzas sometime.
Just because many deployed SSL applications choose not to use client certification (presumably because of the hassle for users of obtaining a client certificate) does not mean the protocol doesn't support it.
Actually I'll wager OpenSSH is able to require client certificates, since it is built on OpenSSL.
--
I don't see the point in that. The games you list were designed with a PC in mind: keyboard, mouse and all. Why take those games away from their natural home?
OTOH, putting MAME in a cabinet is a great idea: taking the games in question *Back* home (and it's been done many a time). Putting a Sega Saturn, a Playstation or a Dreamcast in a cabinet is also a great idea, because of all those arcade-prefect conversions. PSX Tekken 2 in a cabinet is virtually identical to playing the game in the arcade. Ditto Dreamcast Virtua Tennis... etc.
--
When I read the /. post, I assumed this would be more exciting than it actually turned out to be.
The guy starts off with a monitor and a Ms Pacman boardset. All he does is make a cabinet, and wire it up. This is basically nothing but a carpentry project with a little electrical wiring (no electronics as such). Now, building a replica cabinet is a cool thing in itself; I just don't think of it as "News for Nerds" -- it's news for woodworkers.
I encourage people to look in an arcade cabinet: you'd be surprised at just how little there is in there: speakers, monitor, controls, all wired up to a single interface connector.
What I thought I was going to see, and something that would have been incredibly cool, was instructions on building a Ms Pacman board from scratch: using off the shelf chips and home-burnt PROMs (naughty!). Wake me up when we see that.
It *is* a cool project though. Well done to the guy and everything.
--
Say IBM get's a new CEO that wants to start selling the e-mail addresses of their web-store customers to other companies. Would the Privacy Officer have the power to stop this?
If the privacy policy given to said customers forbade selling on their email addresses, then that couldn't happen (unless IBM broke the law) - and that's partly what a privacy officer's job is: ensure that any services which hold data on people have a well-defined privacy policy. It's up to the customer whether or not an individual privacy policy is to their satisfaction; but anything done with the data within those boundaries is fair game.
In the UK, by the way, we have the Data Protection Act, which defines strict laws about what information you are allowed to store on individuals under what circumstances.
--
I've been led to believe this is far from unusual with US employers. IBM UK Ltd do nothing of the sort.
--
I dunno why I'm posting on a two-day-old thread nobody's reading any more, but I don't see this mentioned so I thought I should record it for posterity :)
/one signal for whole picture/ universally accepted) and RGB video (very high quality / one signal for each of red, green, blue, sync / not all TVs accept it) [as well as S-video, but that's niche stuff in Europe].
It appears that the current batch of European PAL PS2s have a problem with DVD playback over RGB.
The SCART standard used for European video applications carries both composite video (acceptable quality
PS2 owners appear to have discovered that although they can play games using RGB SCART fine, DVD playback is green-tinged and odd-looking. DVD playback over composite SCART is OK.
Some Sony sources are claiming this is to prevent DVD pirates from copying the nice, clean, RGB signal; that argument doesn't wash since there are plenty of cheaper DVD decks with RGB output a pirate could use instead, and anyway, DVD can be pirated much more easily in the digital domain now we have DeCSS. It seems more likely that something was overlooked in the move from US model to European model and that one of the AV pins meant for RGB is putting out US-style Component Video signals.
We'll see what happens.
--
It's good that MS adapt Linux code
... Because that is what the OSS spirit of sharing is all about.
If this were BSD code we were talking about, you'd be right, but since it's GPL'd Linux code we're (hypothetically) talking about, MS would be obliged to publish the entire source to whatever component of Windows this (hypothetically) is under the GPL too.
The Linux community copies MS ideas at every opportunity it gets - WINE, Samba, even the look & feel of the desktops.
That's a trifle unfair. SAMBA is merely a protocol implementation. The "idea" in SAMBA is filesharing: hadly a Microsoft innovation; and Jeremy Allison is on record as saying that SMB sucks as a protocol: nobody actually *wants* to use SAMBA: it's only there as a compromise. Windows won't do it our way (NFS), so we'll be nice about it and talk to Windows the way it wants. Mohammed going to the mountain.And, just so we can brag about it, we'll make SAMBA better than native Windows SMB....
WINE is similar: nobody *wants* to use WINE. Every WINE user would prefer Linux native versions of the applications they're running in WINE.
As for the desktops, I'll regretfully half-agree with you on that one. Whoever decided to make FVWM95 a default window manager wants shooting - it's terrible PR. Personally I use WindowMaker, which is sufficently dissimilar to any iteration of Windows as to totally confuse most people who try to use my desktop (and I get confused using Windows -- damn click-to-focus --shudder--).
Anyhoo: this is all moot. MS are not daft enough to be putting GPL code in Windows. I don't work for MS, but where I do work we have lawyers jumping through hoops to make sure freeware licenses are adhered to. If we do it, I'm certain MS will do it. If they're replicating Linux functionality, I'm sure they'll be doing it in a clean-room manner.
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Medicaly I mean?
Health risks aren't the only percieved risk with GM crops. I'm not even sure they're the main objection. There's also the possibility they may cause harm to ecosystems around where the crop is grown. Of course, farming (esp. large scale industrial farming) has always disrupted ecosystems, and there's a great deal of ill-considered basic fear of the new going on, but nonetheless these things are worth thinking hard about before going into large-scale production.
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I agree, but try selling that concept to parents and governors who don't really understand (yet think they do).
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