write an emulator which will run on the GBA while resident in one of these flash cartridges that will allow you to play NES or SNES roms on the GBA. I can't see why it couldn't be done. The processing power exceeds either of these systems, and the cartidges more than exceed the required space for any PC emulator and a handful of SNES ROMs.
of course, if anyone is successful, the GBA's fun potential will increase exponentially(GBAFUN2 = [GBAFUN1^#ofEMULATEDSYSTEMS] * #ofEMULATEDGAMES), so you'd better buy these cartridges up now because Nintendo of America REALLY won't be happy about that.
you can be the first to find out that they explode after 100 km.
honestly, i can't wait for these things to go public, just so that i can laugh at commercials of people traversing the Great Wall and exploring the Himalayas on them.
If these discs end up being cheaper than dvd rentals i suppose you could always intercept the video out and then re-encode it on your hard-drive.
Also, i sometimes wonder if these people have any kind of soul. I mean, don't they feel even a little bit bad about producing all this excess waste intentionally? Isn't our society wasteful enough as it is?
The real issue here is Peer 2 Peer file-sharing. Whether the specific software is openNap, Morpheus or what have you, makes no difference.
As bandwith steadily grows and more people have the ability to connect their cable/sattelite service through their computers or through some set-top CD-R gadget, TV programs will begin to appear more and more frequently on file-sharing lists.
The real interesting event will be when the TV corporations start to get scared that they are losing their audience for their commercials and step into the whole IP fray against peer 2 peer with the RIAA.
Modern Peer 2 Peer file-sharing will be VERY hard to shut down(no centralized servers), but if the court cases go the wrong way, it is entirely possible that we could find ourselves in a position where strongarm tactics are being used to prevent file-sharing whenever possible: port blocking, criminal charges for distributing or using file-sharing programs, etc.
these fears become much more real the more heavyweights we have batting against file-sharing.
I have to admit, seeing X run on a screen like that warms my heart in a certain way on a cold canadian morning such as this. This is an interesting counterpoint to the previous headline re: PS2-Linux.
BAD: big guy making linux run on his own hardware
GOOD: little guy making linux run on the big guy's hardware.
Disclaimer: I'm not really being cynical here, i understand the concerns of limiting hardware access and draconian copy-protection, it's just interesting.
this is a pretty silly gimmick.
Unless of course you are a 31337 h4x0r and you need to make sure that your leetness is evident by displaying a graffito-style image during your notebooks boot cycle while you have it illegally patched into the pay phone from which you are hacking the defence servers.
Or of course, i suppose you could use it to display some sort of reminder to take this opportunity to grab yourself a bite to eat in the middle of your 20 hour coding sessions.
You're right when you say that what makes Apple Apple is that they sell the "whole widget" in one shiny box. As a matter of fact, you're right in pretty much everything you say.
I understand that this new motherboard does not hail the immediate arrival of a Mac hardware open market, but I think that it may be a sign of things to come. If there is a sudden push towards Apple clones, I don't know if all the litigation in the world can stop the market from opening up. Remember IBM(i understand that the case presents significant differences, but the analogy holds some water).
What I'm getting at is that Apple may have to face an open market not too far in the future. And you bring up another interesting point: Can the computer market really bear two competing open market standards?
Competition is a good and healthy thing, but part of me is a little worried by this.
I mean, if apple hardware becomes the open market that PC hardware is now, Apple will have to quickly adapt.
Microsoft understood from the beginning that the real profit is to be made in software, but Apple is still a proprietary hardware company that happens to also sell the software which their machines require.
If the market truly opens up, Apple may face the really tough choice of dumping their hardware line entirely. When the time comes, will they make the right choice and make the shift to software-only gracefully?
If they don't then I fear that one of the last strongholds against Microsoft market share may wither and die.
On the other hand, it will be in the best interest of the companies which produce third party hardware to keep Apple in business(after all, if Apple goes under, who will buy hardware for Mac OS?), so maybe some sort of truce will be drawn. I guess as always, it's wait and see.
Really though, despite the foreshadowing, this is good news for the market.
Re:Action, Adventure, a Licences, Umm.. Fun anyone
on
Farscape Video Game
·
· Score: 2
i have a game boy advance.
i got tony hawk 2 for christmas and was disappointed. i traded it in last week for chu-chu rocket. i don't think i've made a better trade in my life. Including the time i traded my soul for a case of Jolt cola and tickets to the Slayer concert.
Re:Action, Adventure, a Licences, Umm.. Fun anyone
on
Farscape Video Game
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>Am I remebering things wrong, or is is not
>possible to make a simple but fun game anymore?
CHU CHU ROCKET!
there is still some room in the simple but fun category. Tetris swept the world in the days of Super Mario 3. And let's not forget bust-a-move. These games are among the real gems. There is a lot to be said for pushing graphical limitations as far as they can go, but it will always be the simple, yet enthralling games that make the biggest impact. No commitment, lot's of challenge.
If the way that this works is that a "web page" is being created on HP(or whoever) servers for each spot the first time someone posts there. This "new" web is basically just an extension of the old web. Will we end up with a new.GPS top level domain? Will all of the these locational web sites be browsable through the web as we know it?
Basically, if i want to know what people are saying about my favorite restaurant/movie theatre/porno shop/whatever, do i have to actually go there or can i just plug the latitude and longitude into my web browser while sitting at home?
This is true. The most travelled parts of the new web would be the most travelled parts of the world. I can think of a million and one random fun uses for this. For example, going and sitting under my favorite tree in the City Park and composing poetry, then just leaving it there. Or imagine someone comes up with something really interesting, one of those catch everyone's attention for a few seconds things(like All-Your-Base). Then they post it somewhere, like on the sidewalk of the main street in their city. Within half an hour, there are dozens of people trying to cram within a few meters of this spot to check it out. Then some clever person reposts it a few blocks over, and so on...
very interesting. You could just use your GPS phone while sitting at your computer in order to store data. Sure, anyone else who was in the same room with a GPS could access it, but it would be perfect for stuff like MP3s. Of course, there are lots of "storage for ads" style sites already on the net, but i wonder if the people behind this have already considered whether or not this is the kind of service they want to offer.
In todays world, any technological service provider must consider not only how they want it to be used, but the myriad other ways that people might think of to use it.
That would be really cool, if the technology worked that way. Unfortunately, that would suggest that some way to actually turn empty space into a computer storage mechanism had been discovered(aside from placing a hard drive in the previously empty space). What's actually going to happen is that any "spacial data" which you store will be uploaded to a GPS-Server. Then, anyone accessing the server with the same position codes would access the same information. The information on that server however, would be readable from anywhere by anyone with a powerful enough legal document.
This could theoretically serve huge practical purposes but, like every other new media, it will quickly be co-opted for advertising nd porn. Like the internet, there will still be valuable stuff there, but you'll have to learn to ignore whatever new equivalent of banner ads and pop-ups.
freedom is not a magic word. Should murderers be free to kill? Almost everyone agrees that murder cannot be tolerated. The debates arise when the issue is in how to deal with murderers. The United States has far from absolute freedom. Uncountable things which fall well under the blanket of personal liberties are disallowed(recreational drug use for example), yet corporations, which aren't even human entities, are allowed to cross all of the lines of reasonable behaviour which we tend to expect from other people. If everyone behaved in a reasonable manner at all times, there would be no reason to ever need to restrict the freedoms of any person or any corporation. I believe in absolute maximum freedom. This means that you limit only as much freedom as you have to to make sure that other people's freedoms aren't trampled. The murderer is not allowed to murder because that tramples the freedom of the person who wants to continue to live. Somehow, this fails to have been applied to corporations because the pursuit of the buck has been labelled a noble goal.
The Anti-Trust suit against Microsoft is an attempt to limit it's freedoms as a corporation. Is this a bad thing?
i have to admit that i myself have large reservations about capitalism as it is applied in North America, particularly in the freedoms whihc it allows to Corporations. But still, Open Source is about Information, not about little guys VS. corporations. It justhappens that the single largest opponent of Open Source and the GPL is also the single largest corporation(I don't have to say the name of the Beast, do I?).
As a community, we have to be careful about who we decide our enemies are. Linux has benefitted in the past from corporate involvement: Corel for Example. Red Hat(also Mandrake) has been held up as the flagship product of the Linux Community many times in terms of winning over the Windows/Apple user who doesn't want to take the time to understand all of the 'computer tech complexities' that they believe Linux involves. But we have to ask ourselves: If a large number of ex-Windows users get won over by AOL/RedHat Linux, have we really lost? It seems to me that a Linux user is a Linux user and that one more Linux user is one less customer for Bill and one less pocketbook supporting closed source.
Perhaps many of us would personally like to see AOL fall on it's face for unrelated reasons, but if they want to swing some of their weight around to back the Red Hat project, I don't think that we should necessarily get up in arms over it.
being involved with a startup, particularily as an employee not a partner, does not mean that the company going under has to take you with it. You lose your job yes. You lose as much of your savings as are in the form of stocks, yes. But if you're smart, you have at least enough money to tide you over for a month or two and if you have skills then that is more than enough time to find a new job.
I spent 3 weeks this summer eating rice and beans and living on a friend's couch while working forty-five hour weeks at my new tech-job and saving up to get myself a new place. It was far from being hellish, it was kinda fun. If i had kids it would be a different matter entirely. In the meantime, given the choice between fun and stable in a job, i'll take fun.
I know what i'd want in order to accept a government contract techie job:
1. a gun
2. cool black suit with black sunglasses
3. a really intimidating badge which says United States Network Administration Special Forces Covert Operative.
seriously, if nothing else these jobs offer stability... but there's no feeling of the gamble, no thoughts of going 1.0, no watching stock rise and fall... i dunno, maybe it'll appeal to me in twenty years or something. i hope not though.
I'm not entirely sure what driver's liscences look like in the states right now, but here in Ontario we already have Driver's Licenses with magnetic strips on them.
that link that unfortunately takes over the rest of the post is a link to a site with a picture of the Ontario Driver's License.
That's what i get for not previewing before i post. forgot an angle bracket.
All cops have a little computer in their cars where they can swipe your lisence and bring up your criminal and civil record. It's gotten to the point now where some dance clubs swipe licenses in order to check ID for age. There is already significant talk of uniting both of these card into a one piece that also contains the Social Insurance Number(Social Security for you americans).
Anyways my point is that this all managed to slip under the radar in Ontario about five years back and there was almost no public resistance to it(probably because the old two-piece driver's lisence was so damn ugly and inconvenient), and there is almost no public knowledge as to what kind of information is actually stored on that magnetic strip.
Slashdot Mirror
I issue a formal challenge to all slashdotters:
write an emulator which will run on the GBA while resident in one of these flash cartridges that will allow you to play NES or SNES roms on the GBA. I can't see why it couldn't be done. The processing power exceeds either of these systems, and the cartidges more than exceed the required space for any PC emulator and a handful of SNES ROMs.
of course, if anyone is successful, the GBA's fun potential will increase exponentially(GBAFUN2 = [GBAFUN1^#ofEMULATEDSYSTEMS] * #ofEMULATEDGAMES), so you'd better buy these cartridges up now because Nintendo of America REALLY won't be happy about that.
just a thought
you can be the first to find out that they explode after 100 km.
honestly, i can't wait for these things to go public, just so that i can laugh at commercials of people traversing the Great Wall and exploring the Himalayas on them.
hmmm. does this thing have a stereo.
i need more sleep.
If these discs end up being cheaper than dvd rentals i suppose you could always intercept the video out and then re-encode it on your hard-drive.
Also, i sometimes wonder if these people have any kind of soul. I mean, don't they feel even a little bit bad about producing all this excess waste intentionally? Isn't our society wasteful enough as it is?
> Another analyst said, "Jesus, that's big."
I love the reporting style, this is GREAT!
This line also appeared in the article about my [censored].
i wonder if the oversized chip will lead to particular cooling difficulties(i.e. standard fans and heatsinks can't cool the entire surface area)...
Napster is a buzzword.
The real issue here is Peer 2 Peer file-sharing. Whether the specific software is openNap, Morpheus or what have you, makes no difference.
As bandwith steadily grows and more people have the ability to connect their cable/sattelite service through their computers or through some set-top CD-R gadget, TV programs will begin to appear more and more frequently on file-sharing lists.
The real interesting event will be when the TV corporations start to get scared that they are losing their audience for their commercials and step into the whole IP fray against peer 2 peer with the RIAA.
Modern Peer 2 Peer file-sharing will be VERY hard to shut down(no centralized servers), but if the court cases go the wrong way, it is entirely possible that we could find ourselves in a position where strongarm tactics are being used to prevent file-sharing whenever possible: port blocking, criminal charges for distributing or using file-sharing programs, etc.
these fears become much more real the more heavyweights we have batting against file-sharing.
I have to admit, seeing X run on a screen like that warms my heart in a certain way on a cold canadian morning such as this. This is an interesting counterpoint to the previous headline re: PS2-Linux.
BAD: big guy making linux run on his own hardware
GOOD: little guy making linux run on the big guy's hardware.
Disclaimer: I'm not really being cynical here, i understand the concerns of limiting hardware access and draconian copy-protection, it's just interesting.
the 'attractive aqua theme' looks pretty grey to me...
this is a pretty silly gimmick.
Unless of course you are a 31337 h4x0r and you need to make sure that your leetness is evident by displaying a graffito-style image during your notebooks boot cycle while you have it illegally patched into the pay phone from which you are hacking the defence servers.
Or of course, i suppose you could use it to display some sort of reminder to take this opportunity to grab yourself a bite to eat in the middle of your 20 hour coding sessions.
You're right when you say that what makes Apple Apple is that they sell the "whole widget" in one shiny box. As a matter of fact, you're right in pretty much everything you say.
I understand that this new motherboard does not hail the immediate arrival of a Mac hardware open market, but I think that it may be a sign of things to come. If there is a sudden push towards Apple clones, I don't know if all the litigation in the world can stop the market from opening up. Remember IBM(i understand that the case presents significant differences, but the analogy holds some water).
What I'm getting at is that Apple may have to face an open market not too far in the future. And you bring up another interesting point: Can the computer market really bear two competing open market standards?
Competition is a good and healthy thing, but part of me is a little worried by this.
I mean, if apple hardware becomes the open market that PC hardware is now, Apple will have to quickly adapt.
Microsoft understood from the beginning that the real profit is to be made in software, but Apple is still a proprietary hardware company that happens to also sell the software which their machines require.
If the market truly opens up, Apple may face the really tough choice of dumping their hardware line entirely. When the time comes, will they make the right choice and make the shift to software-only gracefully?
If they don't then I fear that one of the last strongholds against Microsoft market share may wither and die.
On the other hand, it will be in the best interest of the companies which produce third party hardware to keep Apple in business(after all, if Apple goes under, who will buy hardware for Mac OS?), so maybe some sort of truce will be drawn. I guess as always, it's wait and see.
Really though, despite the foreshadowing, this is good news for the market.
i have a game boy advance.
i got tony hawk 2 for christmas and was disappointed. i traded it in last week for chu-chu rocket. i don't think i've made a better trade in my life. Including the time i traded my soul for a case of Jolt cola and tickets to the Slayer concert.
>Am I remebering things wrong, or is is not
>possible to make a simple but fun game anymore?
CHU CHU ROCKET!
there is still some room in the simple but fun category. Tetris swept the world in the days of Super Mario 3. And let's not forget bust-a-move. These games are among the real gems. There is a lot to be said for pushing graphical limitations as far as they can go, but it will always be the simple, yet enthralling games that make the biggest impact. No commitment, lot's of challenge.
Here's another thought:
.GPS top level domain? Will all of the these locational web sites be browsable through the web as we know it?
If the way that this works is that a "web page" is being created on HP(or whoever) servers for each spot the first time someone posts there. This "new" web is basically just an extension of the old web. Will we end up with a new
Basically, if i want to know what people are saying about my favorite restaurant/movie theatre/porno shop/whatever, do i have to actually go there or can i just plug the latitude and longitude into my web browser while sitting at home?
This is true. The most travelled parts of the new web would be the most travelled parts of the world. I can think of a million and one random fun uses for this. For example, going and sitting under my favorite tree in the City Park and composing poetry, then just leaving it there. Or imagine someone comes up with something really interesting, one of those catch everyone's attention for a few seconds things(like All-Your-Base). Then they post it somewhere, like on the sidewalk of the main street in their city. Within half an hour, there are dozens of people trying to cram within a few meters of this spot to check it out. Then some clever person reposts it a few blocks over, and so on...
very interesting. You could just use your GPS phone while sitting at your computer in order to store data. Sure, anyone else who was in the same room with a GPS could access it, but it would be perfect for stuff like MP3s. Of course, there are lots of "storage for ads" style sites already on the net, but i wonder if the people behind this have already considered whether or not this is the kind of service they want to offer.
In todays world, any technological service provider must consider not only how they want it to be used, but the myriad other ways that people might think of to use it.
That would be really cool, if the technology worked that way. Unfortunately, that would suggest that some way to actually turn empty space into a computer storage mechanism had been discovered(aside from placing a hard drive in the previously empty space). What's actually going to happen is that any "spacial data" which you store will be uploaded to a GPS-Server. Then, anyone accessing the server with the same position codes would access the same information. The information on that server however, would be readable from anywhere by anyone with a powerful enough legal document.
This could theoretically serve huge practical purposes but, like every other new media, it will quickly be co-opted for advertising nd porn. Like the internet, there will still be valuable stuff there, but you'll have to learn to ignore whatever new equivalent of banner ads and pop-ups.
the list of extras is impressive, but it would have been really nice to see:
1. text of the original novels.
2. audio if the original radio show.
The mini-series was alright, entertaining at least. The radio show on the other hand was brilliant.
freedom is not a magic word. Should murderers be free to kill? Almost everyone agrees that murder cannot be tolerated. The debates arise when the issue is in how to deal with murderers. The United States has far from absolute freedom. Uncountable things which fall well under the blanket of personal liberties are disallowed(recreational drug use for example), yet corporations, which aren't even human entities, are allowed to cross all of the lines of reasonable behaviour which we tend to expect from other people. If everyone behaved in a reasonable manner at all times, there would be no reason to ever need to restrict the freedoms of any person or any corporation. I believe in absolute maximum freedom. This means that you limit only as much freedom as you have to to make sure that other people's freedoms aren't trampled. The murderer is not allowed to murder because that tramples the freedom of the person who wants to continue to live. Somehow, this fails to have been applied to corporations because the pursuit of the buck has been labelled a noble goal.
The Anti-Trust suit against Microsoft is an attempt to limit it's freedoms as a corporation. Is this a bad thing?
i don't live in the richest country in the world. pretty arrogant assumption.
i have to admit that i myself have large reservations about capitalism as it is applied in North America, particularly in the freedoms whihc it allows to Corporations. But still, Open Source is about Information, not about little guys VS. corporations. It justhappens that the single largest opponent of Open Source and the GPL is also the single largest corporation(I don't have to say the name of the Beast, do I?).
As a community, we have to be careful about who we decide our enemies are. Linux has benefitted in the past from corporate involvement: Corel for Example. Red Hat(also Mandrake) has been held up as the flagship product of the Linux Community many times in terms of winning over the Windows/Apple user who doesn't want to take the time to understand all of the 'computer tech complexities' that they believe Linux involves. But we have to ask ourselves: If a large number of ex-Windows users get won over by AOL/RedHat Linux, have we really lost? It seems to me that a Linux user is a Linux user and that one more Linux user is one less customer for Bill and one less pocketbook supporting closed source.
Perhaps many of us would personally like to see AOL fall on it's face for unrelated reasons, but if they want to swing some of their weight around to back the Red Hat project, I don't think that we should necessarily get up in arms over it.
being involved with a startup, particularily as an employee not a partner, does not mean that the company going under has to take you with it. You lose your job yes. You lose as much of your savings as are in the form of stocks, yes. But if you're smart, you have at least enough money to tide you over for a month or two and if you have skills then that is more than enough time to find a new job.
I spent 3 weeks this summer eating rice and beans and living on a friend's couch while working forty-five hour weeks at my new tech-job and saving up to get myself a new place. It was far from being hellish, it was kinda fun. If i had kids it would be a different matter entirely. In the meantime, given the choice between fun and stable in a job, i'll take fun.
I know what i'd want in order to accept a government contract techie job:
1. a gun
2. cool black suit with black sunglasses
3. a really intimidating badge which says United States Network Administration Special Forces Covert Operative.
seriously, if nothing else these jobs offer stability... but there's no feeling of the gamble, no thoughts of going 1.0, no watching stock rise and fall... i dunno, maybe it'll appeal to me in twenty years or something. i hope not though.
sorry, correction.
that first line reads:
I'm not entirely sure what driver's liscences look like in the states right now, but here in Ontario we already have Driver's Licenses with magnetic strips on them.
that link that unfortunately takes over the rest of the post is a link to a site with a picture of the Ontario Driver's License.
That's what i get for not previewing before i post. forgot an angle bracket.
I'm not entirely sure what driver's liscences look like in the states right now, but here in Ontario we already have . We also have health cards(for the national health care system that us socialists have) that look identical to the drivers licenses, only they're green.
All cops have a little computer in their cars where they can swipe your lisence and bring up your criminal and civil record. It's gotten to the point now where some dance clubs swipe licenses in order to check ID for age. There is already significant talk of uniting both of these card into a one piece that also contains the Social Insurance Number(Social Security for you americans).
Anyways my point is that this all managed to slip under the radar in Ontario about five years back and there was almost no public resistance to it(probably because the old two-piece driver's lisence was so damn ugly and inconvenient), and there is almost no public knowledge as to what kind of information is actually stored on that magnetic strip.
Don't let it happen if you can avoid it.