What are you trying to do here? Get spam kings shipped to Quantanamo Camp? Combining two evils (erosion of human rights and spam) does not yield goodness.
I must be a really, really bad person, because I immediately thought, "yes!".
That was my immediate thought. But then the money paid to the new employees gets spent on all kinds of goods and services - houses, cars, food, whatever. The money paid to the people selling that stuff gets spent on other stuff, offered by other people who go on to do the same. And so on. And everyone pays taxes, so that money eventually comes back to the goverment, who pay and employ more people. It's a loop. It only fails when people stop spending the money and hang on to it. So how "good" the economy is must be a measurement of how quickly the money is flowing through the system, not just the amount of money in the system?
Of course, what I know of economics could be written on the back of a postage stamp...
I can't say for current day laptops, but early ARM based Acorn computers had shared video and system memory. It did indeed suck bandwidth, which seems was a problem when it came to IO. If you set the resolution high enough, the screen would turn black while loading from disk, presumably so any incoming data from the drive doesn't get lost while the bus is in use by the video output. Fortunately, at the time, the OS and software in general didn't constantly suck at the disk, as is common today.
I presume today's bus speeds, processor caches and other buffers are sufficiently fast and large enough to share the memory without too much of a noticable effect...
You've just reminded me of a book I read recently.. The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
Set in the near future, part of the scene-setting describes a speck streaking across the sky as remains of the ISS, a project abandoned some time after a catastrophic space shuttle accident hindered progress. A little spooky, for a book published in January 2001.
The book goes on to describe how the UK was forced to withdraw from the EU due to the economic constraints imposed preventing the government from doing anything to help a severe recession. Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland go their separate ways, the royal family head off to Australia and England becomes the newest state in the USA. Curiously, none of this seems too far-fetched, either!
The story follows the development - and the people behind the development - of cameras that use wormhole technology ("WormCams") to allow people to see anywhere and eventually at any time. It's quite a good book, although it gets a bit weird towards the end!
I only found out yesterday that Paris Hilton is a person. For weeks I've been deleting all these junk mails appearing to offer me security tapes from some French hotel. Suddenly, the world made a little more sense. Or less. I'm not sure.
But I was wondering... buffer overflows are a problem because we have a descending stack - ie. as you add stuff, the stack pointer moves backwards through memory - so the return address and other data is always located just in front of any local data.
What is the reasoning behind the use of a descending stack? Is this a legacy from a hardware or software decision? Is there anything we would lose by having an ascending stack, which would make overflow exploits a lot more difficult? Anyone know?
Bah, mod me -1, cynic, but I think this is the last thing games need at the moment.
We all know a major problem with the games industry at the moment is the lack of innovation - the reluctance of publishers to fund the long term development of a game that doesn't fit the tried and tested mold of a dozen other games. They can't afford to spend money on games that they can't guarantee will sell.
Tell these same publishers they need to divert many $$$ from the budget to secure an actor or actress for essentially a couple of hours in a sound studio and a signature allowing the use of their likeness, and I guarantee you they'll plump for a basic clone of whatever's in the top 10 that particular day. You could argue that the use of a popular celebrity would help any game sell, but I can't see that washing with those in control of the purse strings.
The following quote jumped to mind: "Opinions are like arseholes - everyone's got one". Either it applies quite well to this story, or just generally sums up Slashdot. One or the other.
Games get diluted enough trying to keep management, marketing, brand, licence holders and gawd-only-knows-who happy. Trying to cater to hundreds or thousands of requests from gamers is just not possible. Mind you, it doesn't hurt to listen. Someone may have a gem of an idea, or if a significant group are asking for a particular feature, it may be worth investigating. At least, that's my wishy-washy opinion.
You just wait until the Inland Revenue folks realise that plenty of things are being bought and sold right under their noses, tax free!
My tax return form is complex enough without having to remember how many rat skins I sold between April 2002 and April 2003. Or can I argue it's all off-shore, and hence tax-exempt?
This is standard practice in the console world, not a Microsoft conspiracy. Sony et al have similar soak test requirements that must be passed before release.
I'm still using the P200 I bought in '97, too. Although I have fitted a cd-writer, oh, and the original cd-rom gave way to a dvd-rom drive. I've had to replace the graphics card a couple of times, too. I upped the memory, added a couple of larger hard drives and put in a slightly faster processor to help windows cope a bit more. Ah yeah, but then I needed a new mobo to fit the new processor, and the mobo wouldn't fit the old case.
Oh ok, it's a different pc, but the floppy drive, keyboard and AWE 64 sound card are original!
Aerobraking, similar to that imagined in Arthur C Clarke's 2010: Odyssey 2. I gather the physics is fairly sound, as NASA used it for precisely this purpose a couple of years ago.
My best attempt at 56k is actually around 45k. I don't think I'll be able to claim a 20% refund from the modem manufacturer for lost bandwidth, though. Or will I..?;)
Maybe you folks blessed with ADSL are freeing up resources for us dial-up users. I've noticed no dips in my - admittedly feeble - connection speed, and the last routing problem I encountered about six months ago was quickly solved when I phoned what I thought to be a reasonably clueful tech support line.
Hmm... I think we're talking about the same Demon!
I've been with Demon for about eight years. They've had their ups and downs over that time - just like every other ISP - but lately service has been fine.
I tried Plus.net for a while when they were offering free weekend calls before surftime became available. They messed up badly with charging my credit card, racking up about UKP600 in repeated charges, them made me jump through hoops to show that they'd screwed up. I personally wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole.
I'm also in the UK, and our flexi-time scheme allows +/-30 minutes on either side of the 9:00-5:30 working day. I can come in at 8:30 and leave at 5:00, or if I don't come in until 9:30, I have to stay till 6:00. And no, no rollover of extra hours worked.
Typically, I'm unaffected by this, as I start at 8am and leave at 9pm to stand any chance of hitting the current deadlines. Pah.. looks like my rebuild's nearly done...
Sadly, I missed all the fun the first time around, as manufacturers came around to the idea that kits weren't necessarily the best way forward. I'm reminded of the Acorn story, where a "malfunctioning" kit was returned, only to find it had been glued together, not soldered.
Anyway, I was inspired during a university course where we wired together (networked and singing!) Z80 based computers, and one of these days I'll get around to making my own at home just for the heck of it. I've been saying that many, many years now, but hey - one of these days...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm.. I guess that means I'm not going to make my fortune by melting down boxes of Golden Grahams.
...it could turn all four wheels 90 degrees.
What are you trying to do here? Get spam kings shipped to Quantanamo Camp? Combining two evils (erosion of human rights and spam) does not yield goodness.
I must be a really, really bad person, because I immediately thought, "yes!".
That was my immediate thought. But then the money paid to the new employees gets spent on all kinds of goods and services - houses, cars, food, whatever. The money paid to the people selling that stuff gets spent on other stuff, offered by other people who go on to do the same. And so on. And everyone pays taxes, so that money eventually comes back to the goverment, who pay and employ more people. It's a loop. It only fails when people stop spending the money and hang on to it. So how "good" the economy is must be a measurement of how quickly the money is flowing through the system, not just the amount of money in the system?
Of course, what I know of economics could be written on the back of a postage stamp...
I can't say for current day laptops, but early ARM based Acorn computers had shared video and system memory. It did indeed suck bandwidth, which seems was a problem when it came to IO. If you set the resolution high enough, the screen would turn black while loading from disk, presumably so any incoming data from the drive doesn't get lost while the bus is in use by the video output. Fortunately, at the time, the OS and software in general didn't constantly suck at the disk, as is common today.
I presume today's bus speeds, processor caches and other buffers are sufficiently fast and large enough to share the memory without too much of a noticable effect...
You've just reminded me of a book I read recently.. The Light of Other Days by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
Set in the near future, part of the scene-setting describes a speck streaking across the sky as remains of the ISS, a project abandoned some time after a catastrophic space shuttle accident hindered progress. A little spooky, for a book published in January 2001.
The book goes on to describe how the UK was forced to withdraw from the EU due to the economic constraints imposed preventing the government from doing anything to help a severe recession. Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland go their separate ways, the royal family head off to Australia and England becomes the newest state in the USA. Curiously, none of this seems too far-fetched, either!
The story follows the development - and the people behind the development - of cameras that use wormhole technology ("WormCams") to allow people to see anywhere and eventually at any time. It's quite a good book, although it gets a bit weird towards the end!
I only found out yesterday that Paris Hilton is a person. For weeks I've been deleting all these junk mails appearing to offer me security tapes from some French hotel. Suddenly, the world made a little more sense. Or less. I'm not sure.
Yep, better string handling. Always good.
But I was wondering... buffer overflows are a problem because we have a descending stack - ie. as you add stuff, the stack pointer moves backwards through memory - so the return address and other data is always located just in front of any local data.
What is the reasoning behind the use of a descending stack? Is this a legacy from a hardware or software decision? Is there anything we would lose by having an ascending stack, which would make overflow exploits a lot more difficult? Anyone know?
Bah, mod me -1, cynic, but I think this is the last thing games need at the moment.
We all know a major problem with the games industry at the moment is the lack of innovation - the reluctance of publishers to fund the long term development of a game that doesn't fit the tried and tested mold of a dozen other games. They can't afford to spend money on games that they can't guarantee will sell.
Tell these same publishers they need to divert many $$$ from the budget to secure an actor or actress for essentially a couple of hours in a sound studio and a signature allowing the use of their likeness, and I guarantee you they'll plump for a basic clone of whatever's in the top 10 that particular day. You could argue that the use of a popular celebrity would help any game sell, but I can't see that washing with those in control of the purse strings.
The following quote jumped to mind: "Opinions are like arseholes - everyone's got one". Either it applies quite well to this story, or just generally sums up Slashdot. One or the other.
Games get diluted enough trying to keep management, marketing, brand, licence holders and gawd-only-knows-who happy. Trying to cater to hundreds or thousands of requests from gamers is just not possible. Mind you, it doesn't hurt to listen. Someone may have a gem of an idea, or if a significant group are asking for a particular feature, it may be worth investigating. At least, that's my wishy-washy opinion.
Folklore says that to truly kill an XBox, you need to use a silver bullet.
There. Will that do?
You just wait until the Inland Revenue folks realise that plenty of things are being bought and sold right under their noses, tax free!
My tax return form is complex enough without having to remember how many rat skins I sold between April 2002 and April 2003. Or can I argue it's all off-shore, and hence tax-exempt?
...and lots of it.
This is standard practice in the console world, not a Microsoft conspiracy. Sony et al have similar soak test requirements that must be passed before release.
I'm still using the P200 I bought in '97, too. Although I have fitted a cd-writer, oh, and the original cd-rom gave way to a dvd-rom drive. I've had to replace the graphics card a couple of times, too. I upped the memory, added a couple of larger hard drives and put in a slightly faster processor to help windows cope a bit more. Ah yeah, but then I needed a new mobo to fit the new processor, and the mobo wouldn't fit the old case.
Oh ok, it's a different pc, but the floppy drive, keyboard and AWE 64 sound card are original!
Really? Wanna buy this other 3D laptop? Don't let the crayon logo fool you, it's genuinely 3D - honest - and a bargain at only $2999.
Aerobraking, similar to that imagined in Arthur C Clarke's 2010: Odyssey 2. I gather the physics is fairly sound, as NASA used it for precisely this purpose a couple of years ago.
My best attempt at 56k is actually around 45k. I don't think I'll be able to claim a 20% refund from the modem manufacturer for lost bandwidth, though. Or will I..? ;)
Maybe you folks blessed with ADSL are freeing up resources for us dial-up users. I've noticed no dips in my - admittedly feeble - connection speed, and the last routing problem I encountered about six months ago was quickly solved when I phoned what I thought to be a reasonably clueful tech support line.
Hmm... I think we're talking about the same Demon!
I've been with Demon for about eight years. They've had their ups and downs over that time - just like every other ISP - but lately service has been fine.
I tried Plus.net for a while when they were offering free weekend calls before surftime became available. They messed up badly with charging my credit card, racking up about UKP600 in repeated charges, them made me jump through hoops to show that they'd screwed up. I personally wouldn't touch them with a ten foot pole.
But yes, static IP address, no problem...
I'm also in the UK, and our flexi-time scheme allows +/-30 minutes on either side of the 9:00-5:30 working day. I can come in at 8:30 and leave at 5:00, or if I don't come in until 9:30, I have to stay till 6:00. And no, no rollover of extra hours worked.
Typically, I'm unaffected by this, as I start at 8am and leave at 9pm to stand any chance of hitting the current deadlines. Pah.. looks like my rebuild's nearly done...
But they're trying to find something that will crash faster...
I feel your pain, brother!
I've had at least four people email it to me over the last day or so, and it's already grating more than the "all your base.." fluff.
Sadly, I missed all the fun the first time around, as manufacturers came around to the idea that kits weren't necessarily the best way forward. I'm reminded of the Acorn story, where a "malfunctioning" kit was returned, only to find it had been glued together, not soldered.
Anyway, I was inspired during a university course where we wired together (networked and singing!) Z80 based computers, and one of these days I'll get around to making my own at home just for the heck of it. I've been saying that many, many years now, but hey - one of these days...
I'm glad to see the machine is being supplied in kit form as well as pre-assembled, for that true 70's home computing experience :)