From what I recall, the PS2 being backwards-compatible was a nifty bit of sound engineering thinking. For the cost of a couple of extra pennies per unit, they used the CPU of the PSX as the graphics chip on the PS2. Not only did they already have the manufacturing capability set up (no small feat), but games were instantly backwards compatible, because the GPU would simply revert to being the main CPU when a PSX disc was inserted. No emulation!
Seriously--if artists owned any share of the copyright after their CD hit the market, do you think we'd see the flood of remade songs that are on the airwaves today?
I'm not sure what you mean by this. The copyright holder can't prohibit anyone from covering their song (though the person doing the cover does have to pay royalties) once they allow anyone to record it once. The copyright holder only has the right to prohibit someone from recording it for the first time.
The process is called a "mechanical license" -- it has to be granted by the author (or to whomever he assigns the copyright) for the first publication, but after that the granting of the license is automatic as long as the royalties are paid.
The funny thing is that this is one of the few tools an artist can use against his own record company -- if the company is trying to push to get an abulm out, but the artist isn't satisfied with the way track #X came out, he can deny his own company the mechanical license they would need to be able to release the song. Of course, that does wonders for artist/record company relationship...:)
We use a debit cards attached to an account different from our main account - to protect against on-line fraud.
Which means you could still lose the entire amount in that account to fraud -- a regular credit card will limit your liability to $50 (or less).
Use cash. That will keep the lines moving!
I agree with the idea of using cash, but it will certainly not "keep the lines moving" since so many cashiers appear to not be able to count properly (or in some cases, at all).
The real question is, can you get "eaten" by a dead dragon like in the original. It was always a little annoying, but still prtty funny...
I seem to recall that basically if you killed a dragon, but the dragon's head blocked your path (especially in one of the mazes), then you could still get swallowed by the dead dragon -- but the game would still continue on, because it didn't consider you "eaten". Nevertheless, you were still stuck.
It got even more bizarre when the bat picked up the dead dragon (including you) and started flying around with it...
Where do you get a 50-pack of quality CD-R's for $5.00?
Who said anything about quality?:)
For one-off uses like this, generic CD-Rs should be sufficient. I can usually get a 50-pack for $5 or a 100-pack for $8-$10 -- after rebates -- once or twice a month from CompUSA or Circuit City -- the CC 100 packs are frequently even non-generic, such as Fuji.
As far as generics go, I've only had one disk ever fail on me, and that was during the write process.
Figure $5 for a pack of 50, so $0.10 each -- you can't re-record on them, but it shouldn't cost you more than CD-RWs that start failig at 15 uses or so. Plus, this way you have the ability to create instant archives of your favorite shows, or just discard the used disks.
Sounds just fine to me -- the guy who owns the papers gets to print whatever he wants. On the other hand, it does sound like a serious problem of a monopoly dominating the forum of ideas...
"Free" is an overloaded term. In the typical context it can either refer to cost ("free" = "no cost") or to rights ("free" = "no legal restrictions").
To differentiate, many postings here at./ and elsewhere use "free speech" vs. "free beer" as examples of whether something is free from restriction or doesn't cost anything, respectively. So "free-as-in-beer" refers specifically to cost.
The newsworthy part of the story is that a market leader apparently thinks it has to produce an ill-disguised clone of a market follower's ad.
You're right in that Microsoft had the choice of doing nothing or doing something. But doing something this stupid is to lend credence to your competition rather than building interest or confidence in your own product.
The Ford/Chevy analogy does not work because they have reasonably equivalent market share. The better anaolgy would be if there were ads for a Yugo featuring former Ford owners, which Ford countered with an ad featuring former Yugo owners. That would have been a massively stupid move for Ford, because all they are doing is equating the two makes in peoples' minds.
(The Yugo/Ford analogy is not intended to imply any correlation between quality of produts, just strength of market share...)
Skip cable, get a satellite dish -- new subscribers usually get free or heavily discounted equipment and installation. You also only pay $30-$40 a month for the non-premium channels (eveything but the sports packages, HBO, Showtime, etc.). It saves a lot of money over cable in the long run, and the picture quality is much better.
TiVO subscription service for DirecTV customers (using the TiVO units with a built-in DirecTV tuner) was recently dropped to $5/month.
The key to function points -- or any other -- estimation techniques is relying on historical data to predict future results. This means that they are fairly accurate as long as you collect metrics and stay within the same general project domain and relative project size. The more radical the departure from historical size or domain the new project is, the less accurate an estimate will be.
However, the biggest thing to remember is that no matter what estimation method is used, the simple fact that a methodical approach to analyzing the problem will almost always yield a reasonable estimate.
The main reasons projects go over schedule and budget are:
"Feature creep" -- having the requirements change significantly over the course of the project without adding the impact of changes into the schedule.
Rampant optimism -- many engineers (and managers) will typically estimate how long they think it should take to do a specific task but will not add in a buffer in case somthing goes wrong. And something always goes wrong.
Artificial deadlines -- project schedules where the budget (time and money) was set by customer/marketing committments, and not by the technical requirements at all.
Calendar/personnel issues -- people take vacations, there are holidays, and people occasionally fall ill. Plan for it. Also, don't forget any company/department meetings, training, seminars, etc.
Dependencies -- if a required piece of hardware or software won't be available (or is late), it can impact the overall schedule, espeecially if critical path tasks depnd on those materials.
Risk management is indeed the key. As the project manager or lead engineer, it is your job to predict what potential risks might be and attempt to mitigate them on a cost-effectiveness basis. You can still be bit by bad luck, but you can minize the chances it will strike.
Possibly, but those bashing MS in that case would be wrong. In the end, the browser is the one responsible for rendering the content, and providing an option to limit the extent of the display is not ignoring or dictating standards in any way.
The referenced bug site says that the work-around is to disable active scripting. I've tested this, and it works -- MSIE now asks my whether or not I want to execute the program instead of running it automatically.
Re:nice, but welcome back to the real world
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2
But aestetics has its place, too. One of my personal guidelines when evaluating a software design is to ensure that any "ugliness" that appears in the design has a damn good reason for being "ugly". More often than not, a design "ugliness" is the result of a poor design, and not caused by the requirments. On the other hand, sometimes the "ugliness" is imposed by the requirements, and in that case, naturally the requirements take precedence over "elegant" design.
You think that's bad, try Final Fantasy Tactics -- a good strategy is to leave one opponent alive (preferably immobile), and use skills to reduce everyone's attack power so they can bang away on each other practically ad infinitum, untill you've gained all the XP and skill points you possibly can...
Both, to some degree. Most of the time, it's pretty transparent, and doesn't affect me much. On the other hand, when I want to get to a little-used function, it's a royal pain in the ass.
One other problem I can see with these is that someone who basically has the layout memorized may get crossed up by a menu item moving or disappearing as different features are used more or less.
Try Chrono Cross on the PlayStation -- instead of experience levels, you gain a new "level" after beating each boss rather than gaining levels through random encounters. (Random encounters and side quests do let the characters grow a little, but only to a maximum set by the current boss level...)
In the U.S., a TV season is one year, or about 20-24 new episodes for a prime-time drama or comedy. Shows that run on a daily basis, of course, will have many more episodes per season.
The biggest advantage is that all of the processing takes place in the database, so you don't have the performance hit of reading records out of the DB, doing the processing, and then sending back the results.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I recall, the PS2 being backwards-compatible was a nifty bit of sound engineering thinking. For the cost of a couple of extra pennies per unit, they used the CPU of the PSX as the graphics chip on the PS2. Not only did they already have the manufacturing capability set up (no small feat), but games were instantly backwards compatible, because the GPU would simply revert to being the main CPU when a PSX disc was inserted. No emulation!
I'm not sure what you mean by this. The copyright holder can't prohibit anyone from covering their song (though the person doing the cover does have to pay royalties) once they allow anyone to record it once. The copyright holder only has the right to prohibit someone from recording it for the first time.
The process is called a "mechanical license" -- it has to be granted by the author (or to whomever he assigns the copyright) for the first publication, but after that the granting of the license is automatic as long as the royalties are paid.
The funny thing is that this is one of the few tools an artist can use against his own record company -- if the company is trying to push to get an abulm out, but the artist isn't satisfied with the way track #X came out, he can deny his own company the mechanical license they would need to be able to release the song. Of course, that does wonders for artist/record company relationship... :)
Actually, no. I think it's spelled "Aeyrn".
Which means you could still lose the entire amount in that account to fraud -- a regular credit card will limit your liability to $50 (or less).
Use cash. That will keep the lines moving!
I agree with the idea of using cash, but it will certainly not "keep the lines moving" since so many cashiers appear to not be able to count properly (or in some cases, at all).
And you're saying that like this is a bad thing?
Since they do run ads now, what's their excuse for not producing quality programming currently?
Not that I think the application likely, but they could feed on the energy of the "host" that they are destroying...
The real question is, can you get "eaten" by a dead dragon like in the original. It was always a little annoying, but still prtty funny...
I seem to recall that basically if you killed a dragon, but the dragon's head blocked your path (especially in one of the mazes), then you could still get swallowed by the dead dragon -- but the game would still continue on, because it didn't consider you "eaten". Nevertheless, you were still stuck.
It got even more bizarre when the bat picked up the dead dragon (including you) and started flying around with it...
Who said anything about quality? :)
For one-off uses like this, generic CD-Rs should be sufficient. I can usually get a 50-pack for $5 or a 100-pack for $8-$10 -- after rebates -- once or twice a month from CompUSA or Circuit City -- the CC 100 packs are frequently even non-generic, such as Fuji.
As far as generics go, I've only had one disk ever fail on me, and that was during the write process.
Figure $5 for a pack of 50, so $0.10 each -- you can't re-record on them, but it shouldn't cost you more than CD-RWs that start failig at 15 uses or so. Plus, this way you have the ability to create instant archives of your favorite shows, or just discard the used disks.
Sounds just fine to me -- the guy who owns the papers gets to print whatever he wants. On the other hand, it does sound like a serious problem of a monopoly dominating the forum of ideas...
"Free" is an overloaded term. In the typical context it can either refer to cost ("free" = "no cost") or to rights ("free" = "no legal restrictions").
./ and elsewhere use "free speech" vs. "free beer" as examples of whether something is free from restriction or doesn't cost anything, respectively. So "free-as-in-beer" refers specifically to cost.
To differentiate, many postings here at
And, apparently, from the too-lazy-to-spell department, too...
The newsworthy part of the story is that a market leader apparently thinks it has to produce an ill-disguised clone of a market follower's ad.
You're right in that Microsoft had the choice of doing nothing or doing something. But doing something this stupid is to lend credence to your competition rather than building interest or confidence in your own product.
The Ford/Chevy analogy does not work because they have reasonably equivalent market share. The better anaolgy would be if there were ads for a Yugo featuring former Ford owners, which Ford countered with an ad featuring former Yugo owners. That would have been a massively stupid move for Ford, because all they are doing is equating the two makes in peoples' minds.
(The Yugo/Ford analogy is not intended to imply any correlation between quality of produts, just strength of market share...)
TiVO subscription service for DirecTV customers (using the TiVO units with a built-in DirecTV tuner) was recently dropped to $5/month.
However, the biggest thing to remember is that no matter what estimation method is used, the simple fact that a methodical approach to analyzing the problem will almost always yield a reasonable estimate.
The main reasons projects go over schedule and budget are:
Risk management is indeed the key. As the project manager or lead engineer, it is your job to predict what potential risks might be and attempt to mitigate them on a cost-effectiveness basis. You can still be bit by bad luck, but you can minize the chances it will strike.
Possibly, but those bashing MS in that case would be wrong. In the end, the browser is the one responsible for rendering the content, and providing an option to limit the extent of the display is not ignoring or dictating standards in any way.
Ok, so basically, it looks like a no-frills TiVO with an additional DVD-RAM drive for archival. Am I reading that pretty much correctly?
The referenced bug site says that the work-around is to disable active scripting. I've tested this, and it works -- MSIE now asks my whether or not I want to execute the program instead of running it automatically.
But aestetics has its place, too. One of my personal guidelines when evaluating a software design is to ensure that any "ugliness" that appears in the design has a damn good reason for being "ugly". More often than not, a design "ugliness" is the result of a poor design, and not caused by the requirments. On the other hand, sometimes the "ugliness" is imposed by the requirements, and in that case, naturally the requirements take precedence over "elegant" design.
You think that's bad, try Final Fantasy Tactics -- a good strategy is to leave one opponent alive (preferably immobile), and use skills to reduce everyone's attack power so they can bang away on each other practically ad infinitum, untill you've gained all the XP and skill points you possibly can...
Both, to some degree. Most of the time, it's pretty transparent, and doesn't affect me much. On the other hand, when I want to get to a little-used function, it's a royal pain in the ass.
One other problem I can see with these is that someone who basically has the layout memorized may get crossed up by a menu item moving or disappearing as different features are used more or less.
Try Chrono Cross on the PlayStation -- instead of experience levels, you gain a new "level" after beating each boss rather than gaining levels through random encounters. (Random encounters and side quests do let the characters grow a little, but only to a maximum set by the current boss level...)
In the U.S., a TV season is one year, or about 20-24 new episodes for a prime-time drama or comedy. Shows that run on a daily basis, of course, will have many more episodes per season.
The biggest advantage is that all of the processing takes place in the database, so you don't have the performance hit of reading records out of the DB, doing the processing, and then sending back the results.