The title is f'ing retarded. It has nothing to do with how many Chinese like censorship, but rather of the people that do, how many prefer that the government does it versus someone else doing it.
It has been spun to mislead the reader into thinking that 85% of Chinese approve of the act of censoring by itself, which is not the case. That number is not given because we are meant to assume it is 85% (or 100%).
- Buttons and d-pad use rubber pads with carbon contacts. The rubber is prone to tearing from normal wear, and the carbon contacts are susceptible to dirt buildup. I ordered aftermarket replacement pads when mine wore out.
- The LCD screen would often develop vertical lines of non-working pixels. Not sure what causes this - probably connector related.
- Dust can get in between the screen and cover plate. At least it can be opened and cleaned, unlike my GBA SP (although my SP seems to be better sealed against dust infiltration, making it a non-issue).
- Crude cartridge lock on the power switch is prone to breakage caused by rough handling. Nintendo used to be paranoid (in the original NES/GB eras) about people removing cartridges during save operations I think.
Other design issues:
- Speaker had a powerful magnetic driver. You could stick paper clips to the back of the GB or mess up CRT displays with it!
- Nonstandard AC adapter connector was a pain, but foreshadowed an era of proprietary connectors in handheld devices.
- Power LED was always on, and dimmed as battery died. This drained a bit of extra power. I guess modern systems are at least as bad, but at least they have rechargeable batteries built in now.
- Screen cover plate got scratched up, but then I couldn't seem to polish the scratches out.
The things I really liked about it:
- Even though it used 4 AA batteries, it squeezed every last drop of charge from them before they died.
From the discussion at Ars Technica:
Originally posted by aix: WTF!!!:mad:
We already paid 200 billion for fiber optic to the home, but never received it. Just search for "200 billion dollar broadband scandal". But here's a clip:
Starting in the early 1990's, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the "National Infrastructure Initiative" to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies - SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.
Kushnick's "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal" says the government was promised 86 million households with fiber wiring delivering bi-directional 45 Mbps speeds, capable of handling 500 channels by 2006. He calls it a fraud case, with deft omission in the annals of the FCC, that cost households at least $2000 a piece but got nothing in return.
I think there were subsidies to the telcos as well as tax breaks and incentives.... and what do have to show for it ??
And yes I'm going to point out it was the dems who were in the seat when this happened. Only to show that both parties are really different sides of the same coin.
Originally posted by : I'll ignore the billions spent, and the billions we still have to spend in Iraq...
I'll ignore the other major issues that maybe this country needs to spend 100 Billion on first...
In short, Verizon, ATT, SBC and the other big TeleComs were supposed to do this, FOR US, in the last 10-15 years.
They got major tax breaks and government handouts to do this. So where is it?
16th in the World in Broadband
This is one of the largest scandals in American history.
* By 2006, 86 million households should have been rewired with a fiber optic wire, capable of 45 Mbps, in both directions. -- read the promises.
* The public subsidies for infrastructure were pocketed. The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household..... and more from --> http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htmhttp://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
Reports like this piss me off, cause the first thing I think of, knowing the history of How we're already supposed to have fiber to the home, is who paid for the report? and what is it really asking for? Hear hear! I can't believe noone brought this up sooner, or even in the article. There's pretty much no hope at this point for the US to have a globally competitive broadband Internet infrastructure.
What about focus? If you're looking at something far away, how will the display be sharp? In fact, how can it ever be sharp enough to read that close up?
My eyes also go crazy if they perceive something moving around in my field of vision closer to me than where I'm focusing; sometimes I have to close one eye in a car when looking at the road when windshield wipers are moving across the front window. I think it's a brain thing though, because sometimes I do the same when watching the speeder bike sequences in SW:RotJ for example:p
- If you have an opportunity to get a decent internship, do it. If nothing else it'll look good on a resume. - Learn C/C++. - Get comfortable using Linux/Unix, at least to the point of being able to write some simple utility/test programs/scripts. - Take a software engineering class if your college has one available. - Expose yourself to some SQL and writing web-based frontends in one or more server-side scripting languages (PHP or whatever). - Get a good grounding in general programming concepts (how computers actually work under the hood, algorithms, data structures, object oriented design, etc.). - Look at job listings for stuff that looks interesting and see what qualifications they're looking for; explore the related technologies and concepts.
Fortunately I was able to do all of those in college except for the internship.
Also, it's true that college only prepares you so much; you'll have to spend a lot of time getting up to speed.
WoW is so old that it doesn't take advantage of most new gaming PC technologies. Dual-core "support" was just added in the last patch, allowing about 10% of the second core to be used. SLI gives no tangible benefit in WoW at all, and actually degrades performance for some people.
Also, many people with decent PC's are reporting abysmal framerates in newer WoW content, while people with mediocre Macs have no performance problems at all. I'm forced to conclude that if you want a really good laptop for WoW, you should buy a Mac.
First, I thought it was funny that you seemed to insinuate that Angband is new. I played both ancestors (most notably Moria, my first and favorite roguelike) and derivatives of it 15-20 years ago.
Second, levels aren't annoying - loading screens are. I haven't seen a lot of newer games that have "levels" for their own sake; much more common are loading screens resulting from map-based design. Most 3D games, following the legacy of Wolfenstein3D/Doom/Quake/Half-Life, sew together a collection of finite-sized maps to make the game, and transitioning from one map to the other usually requires a significant loading time.
I think many more immersive games, especially RPGs, have moved past this concept where possible. Good examples include WoW (where the only level loading happens when you transition to an instanced map where only people in your group can join you) and Morrowind/Oblivion (which dynamically loads in chunks of map data in the background to simulate a seamless game world). Even old RPGs like the last Wizardry trilogy (6, 7, 8) were not bound by levels or loading screens.
As others have mentioned, the level concept itself has also separated from the loading screen necessity in newer action games, instead taking on a character of progression checkpointing.
I think it's a gray area when the content is actually there but locked. Sure, adding content (a la Oblivion mods) shouldn't change the rating, but if there's a cutscene included with the game that's "disabled" then it's still technically part of the content included in the purchase of the game.
Honestly, game companies (especially Rockstar!) ought to know better by now. It shouldn't be that hard to replace a video or audio file with a stub, or null out some game-rendered cutscene script, even at the last minute if it comes to that.
One of the apartments I lived in in the last 5 years had an exclusive contract with a no-name cable company. Our complex was one to which they did not provide Internet access, and despite being in an urban area we had no affordable alternatives such as DSL. As a result, I had to wait nearly a year for Comcast to buy out the smaller company and offer Internet access. While the exclusive contract propped up a small company, it also locked me out of Internet access at home for a year, so I'm all for the change. It's encouraging to see that the FCC is finally realizing just how delusional they were being in thinking that there was real competition among service providers. Cable vs. DSL doesn't cut it in areas where one, the other, or both is not available.
I haven't started using OpenOffice yet myself (no need for an office suite at home), but I installed it on my mom's laptop a year ago when she asked if I could put Microsoft Office on it >.> She didn't like it because it was too different, but then she got a job at a small private school that uses OpenOffice. I seem to recall that they emailed her some.ODF documents and I pointed out how cool it was that she already had the software to open them:p
The original Populous actually predates the Warcraft series by a number of years. Also, the Starflight series is right up there with Fallout and Deus Ex as some of my favorite games ever.
Sony's pushing the PSP as a UMD player turned me off to it; pushing the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player is destroying what little interest I may have had left in the system. Then again, I don't own any current-generation consoles at all, so I'm probably outside of the target demographic.
Before he speaks have a lawyer type give a 5 minute discussion on how the preceding speech is CopyRight (R) $date by $school and reproduction by any means will result in prosecution. Then Lock the doors (make loud slamming noises) and have him give his talk. Preceding speech? I'm resisting the urge to be pedantic and failing, sorry >.>
Personally I don't think it's a problem of vigilance versus apathy. I think it's a fundamental flaw in the representative democracy system. There's just too many people, and they're too easily manipulated by the mass media. Unless you make it a major hobby to keep up with politics and do lots of independent research, you're going to have your opinions handed to you by *someone*.
It's just like religious control in the Dark Ages, except swap out the Bible with the truth, and the church with a combination of government, media and corporations working in concert to stay in power and increase that power. They've learned how to do a pretty damn good job of it now too.
I seriously doubt that voting is going to make anything better (hell, there's serious doubt as to whether people's votes will even truly be counted any more). There just isn't a system of government that works well enough for a country the size of the U.S. It was a great experiment, but the founders could never have imagined the power of corporations and mass media, nor how big and powerful we'd get.
I'm too depressed to vote because of all this. Even if I wasn't I'd be torn between voting for the lesser of two evils, or voting for whatever will suck us down the drain the fastest. Face it, your votes don't count any more - lobbyist money does. To fix things, we'd need to eliminate not just the completely retarded two-party system (seriously, wtf?), but parties altogether so that politicians are forced to run on their own merit alone. We'd have to eliminate lobbying and force corporations to go through the people (which still wouldn't solve everything since people are easily manipulated, especially by corporate mass-media).
The U.S. is fucked. Enjoy the ride into hell ladies and gentlemen. Great time to be alive.
The only flaw found so far is that it can't identify Steve Ballmer because voice recognition software isn't able to make sense of the sound of chairs smashing into things.
I still have my original Game Boy, purchased in 1990. Then again, I still have my original Atari 2600 too. >.>
The article made me start thinking again about buying a Sega Nomad, and I'm surprised at how cheap and available they are on eBay. I should probably just get a laptop and load it with emulators instead though:p
Slashdot Mirror
The title is f'ing retarded. It has nothing to do with how many Chinese like censorship, but rather of the people that do, how many prefer that the government does it versus someone else doing it.
It has been spun to mislead the reader into thinking that 85% of Chinese approve of the act of censoring by itself, which is not the case. That number is not given because we are meant to assume it is 85% (or 100%).
The original Gameboy has some weak points:
- Buttons and d-pad use rubber pads with carbon contacts. The rubber is prone to tearing from normal wear, and the carbon contacts are susceptible to dirt buildup. I ordered aftermarket replacement pads when mine wore out.
- The LCD screen would often develop vertical lines of non-working pixels. Not sure what causes this - probably connector related.
- Dust can get in between the screen and cover plate. At least it can be opened and cleaned, unlike my GBA SP (although my SP seems to be better sealed against dust infiltration, making it a non-issue).
- Crude cartridge lock on the power switch is prone to breakage caused by rough handling. Nintendo used to be paranoid (in the original NES/GB eras) about people removing cartridges during save operations I think.
Other design issues:
- Speaker had a powerful magnetic driver. You could stick paper clips to the back of the GB or mess up CRT displays with it!
- Nonstandard AC adapter connector was a pain, but foreshadowed an era of proprietary connectors in handheld devices.
- Power LED was always on, and dimmed as battery died. This drained a bit of extra power. I guess modern systems are at least as bad, but at least they have rechargeable batteries built in now.
- Screen cover plate got scratched up, but then I couldn't seem to polish the scratches out.
The things I really liked about it:
- Even though it used 4 AA batteries, it squeezed every last drop of charge from them before they died.
- Stereo sound when headphones are used.
- Adjustable contrast.
- Standard headphone connector.
- Mine still works after almost 20 years.
WTF!!!
We already paid 200 billion for fiber optic to the home, but never received it. Just search for "200 billion dollar broadband scandal". But here's a clip:
Starting in the early 1990's, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the "National Infrastructure Initiative" to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies - SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.
Kushnick's "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal" says the government was promised 86 million households with fiber wiring delivering bi-directional 45 Mbps speeds, capable of handling 500 channels by 2006. He calls it a fraud case, with deft omission in the annals of the FCC, that cost households at least $2000 a piece but got nothing in return.
I think there were subsidies to the telcos as well as tax breaks and incentives
BUPKISS! Freaking nothing, zilch, nada, zip, zero, goose egg, F%&KING damn 20th place
And yes I'm going to point out it was the dems who were in the seat when this happened. Only to show that both parties are really different sides of the same coin. Originally posted by :
I'll ignore the billions spent, and the billions we still have to spend in Iraq...
I'll ignore the other major issues that maybe this country needs to spend 100 Billion on first...
And now, baring all of that...
*WHAT THE FUCK*
Any of you know this story?
http://www.teletruth.org/http://www.teletruth.org
http://www.teletruth.org/PennBroadbandfraud.htmlhttp://www.teletruth.org/PennBroadbandfraud.html
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htmhttp://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
In short, Verizon, ATT, SBC and the other big TeleComs were supposed to do this, FOR US, in the last 10-15 years.
They got major tax breaks and government handouts to do this.
So where is it?
16th in the World in Broadband
This is one of the largest scandals in American history.
* By 2006, 86 million households should have been rewired with a fiber optic wire, capable of 45 Mbps, in both directions. -- read the promises.
* The public subsidies for infrastructure were pocketed. The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household.
Reports like this piss me off, cause the first thing I think of, knowing the history of How we're already supposed to have fiber to the home, is who paid for the report? and what is it really asking for? Hear hear! I can't believe noone brought this up sooner, or even in the article. There's pretty much no hope at this point for the US to have a globally competitive broadband Internet infrastructure.
What about focus? If you're looking at something far away, how will the display be sharp? In fact, how can it ever be sharp enough to read that close up?
:p
My eyes also go crazy if they perceive something moving around in my field of vision closer to me than where I'm focusing; sometimes I have to close one eye in a car when looking at the road when windshield wipers are moving across the front window. I think it's a brain thing though, because sometimes I do the same when watching the speeder bike sequences in SW:RotJ for example
I wonder what the performance and graphical quality losses will be, as well as what kinds of quirks may result.
Works out good for Sony, whose batteries were the ones exploding in their competitors' laptops.
- If you have an opportunity to get a decent internship, do it. If nothing else it'll look good on a resume.
- Learn C/C++.
- Get comfortable using Linux/Unix, at least to the point of being able to write some simple utility/test programs/scripts.
- Take a software engineering class if your college has one available.
- Expose yourself to some SQL and writing web-based frontends in one or more server-side scripting languages (PHP or whatever).
- Get a good grounding in general programming concepts (how computers actually work under the hood, algorithms, data structures, object oriented design, etc.).
- Look at job listings for stuff that looks interesting and see what qualifications they're looking for; explore the related technologies and concepts.
Fortunately I was able to do all of those in college except for the internship.
Also, it's true that college only prepares you so much; you'll have to spend a lot of time getting up to speed.
WoW is so old that it doesn't take advantage of most new gaming PC technologies. Dual-core "support" was just added in the last patch, allowing about 10% of the second core to be used. SLI gives no tangible benefit in WoW at all, and actually degrades performance for some people.
Also, many people with decent PC's are reporting abysmal framerates in newer WoW content, while people with mediocre Macs have no performance problems at all. I'm forced to conclude that if you want a really good laptop for WoW, you should buy a Mac.
Heh, Congress 404'd the Internet.
First, I thought it was funny that you seemed to insinuate that Angband is new. I played both ancestors (most notably Moria, my first and favorite roguelike) and derivatives of it 15-20 years ago.
Second, levels aren't annoying - loading screens are. I haven't seen a lot of newer games that have "levels" for their own sake; much more common are loading screens resulting from map-based design. Most 3D games, following the legacy of Wolfenstein3D/Doom/Quake/Half-Life, sew together a collection of finite-sized maps to make the game, and transitioning from one map to the other usually requires a significant loading time.
I think many more immersive games, especially RPGs, have moved past this concept where possible. Good examples include WoW (where the only level loading happens when you transition to an instanced map where only people in your group can join you) and Morrowind/Oblivion (which dynamically loads in chunks of map data in the background to simulate a seamless game world). Even old RPGs like the last Wizardry trilogy (6, 7, 8) were not bound by levels or loading screens.
As others have mentioned, the level concept itself has also separated from the loading screen necessity in newer action games, instead taking on a character of progression checkpointing.
I think it's a gray area when the content is actually there but locked. Sure, adding content (a la Oblivion mods) shouldn't change the rating, but if there's a cutscene included with the game that's "disabled" then it's still technically part of the content included in the purchase of the game.
Honestly, game companies (especially Rockstar!) ought to know better by now. It shouldn't be that hard to replace a video or audio file with a stub, or null out some game-rendered cutscene script, even at the last minute if it comes to that.
You can set XP to show a bluescreen instead of just rebooting. I'm guessing you had it set to just reboot instead.
One of the apartments I lived in in the last 5 years had an exclusive contract with a no-name cable company. Our complex was one to which they did not provide Internet access, and despite being in an urban area we had no affordable alternatives such as DSL. As a result, I had to wait nearly a year for Comcast to buy out the smaller company and offer Internet access. While the exclusive contract propped up a small company, it also locked me out of Internet access at home for a year, so I'm all for the change. It's encouraging to see that the FCC is finally realizing just how delusional they were being in thinking that there was real competition among service providers. Cable vs. DSL doesn't cut it in areas where one, the other, or both is not available.
I haven't started using OpenOffice yet myself (no need for an office suite at home), but I installed it on my mom's laptop a year ago when she asked if I could put Microsoft Office on it >.> She didn't like it because it was too different, but then she got a job at a small private school that uses OpenOffice. I seem to recall that they emailed her some .ODF documents and I pointed out how cool it was that she already had the software to open them :p
Maybe we can build a campfire, sing some songs. Why don't we try that?
The original Populous actually predates the Warcraft series by a number of years. Also, the Starflight series is right up there with Fallout and Deus Ex as some of my favorite games ever.
Sony's pushing the PSP as a UMD player turned me off to it; pushing the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player is destroying what little interest I may have had left in the system. Then again, I don't own any current-generation consoles at all, so I'm probably outside of the target demographic.
Someone argued the exact opposite in an earlier post: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=283809&cid =20410121
Who is right?
Someone argued the exact opposite in an earlier post: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=283809&cid =20410121
Who is right?
will result in prosecution. Then Lock the doors (make loud slamming noises) and have him give his talk. Preceding speech? I'm resisting the urge to be pedantic and failing, sorry >.>
Personally I don't think it's a problem of vigilance versus apathy. I think it's a fundamental flaw in the representative democracy system. There's just too many people, and they're too easily manipulated by the mass media. Unless you make it a major hobby to keep up with politics and do lots of independent research, you're going to have your opinions handed to you by *someone*.
It's just like religious control in the Dark Ages, except swap out the Bible with the truth, and the church with a combination of government, media and corporations working in concert to stay in power and increase that power. They've learned how to do a pretty damn good job of it now too.
I seriously doubt that voting is going to make anything better (hell, there's serious doubt as to whether people's votes will even truly be counted any more). There just isn't a system of government that works well enough for a country the size of the U.S. It was a great experiment, but the founders could never have imagined the power of corporations and mass media, nor how big and powerful we'd get.
I'm too depressed to vote because of all this. Even if I wasn't I'd be torn between voting for the lesser of two evils, or voting for whatever will suck us down the drain the fastest. Face it, your votes don't count any more - lobbyist money does. To fix things, we'd need to eliminate not just the completely retarded two-party system (seriously, wtf?), but parties altogether so that politicians are forced to run on their own merit alone. We'd have to eliminate lobbying and force corporations to go through the people (which still wouldn't solve everything since people are easily manipulated, especially by corporate mass-media).
The U.S. is fucked. Enjoy the ride into hell ladies and gentlemen. Great time to be alive.
I watched Dark City once and seem to remember disliking it for being annoyingly surreal and unbelievable.
The only flaw found so far is that it can't identify Steve Ballmer because voice recognition software isn't able to make sense of the sound of chairs smashing into things.
I still have my original Game Boy, purchased in 1990. Then again, I still have my original Atari 2600 too. >.>
:p
The article made me start thinking again about buying a Sega Nomad, and I'm surprised at how cheap and available they are on eBay. I should probably just get a laptop and load it with emulators instead though