Always kind of wondered where wasd came from, and how they strafe left and run at the same time.
In exactly the same way as you do with ESDF I'd guess. With my central three fingers on WAD, my pinkie falls on shift and my thumb on space, which feels perfectly natural and maps to the major controls in every FPS. I just don't see the big difference, it's exactly the same layout just one key over. You may have more spare keys to map on the left, but as it's only your little finger which can hit them, having the nice big shift, caps-lock etc. is more useful than the normal-sized keys which would fall naturally with ESDF.
That may be true, but it's not like your copy of Windows 98 (or ME, if you're perverse) will have evaporated into the ether, so you could still play the game if you kept the old hardware and OS. With continual online checks you don't even get that choice, you can change nothing and the game will just stop working when the publisher gets bored of providing the authorisation servers.
DRM like this results in de-facto perpetual copyright - if the keys never get released the copyright materials never get released to the public, so the public interest side of the copyright bargain never materialises. I think we need laws to enforce key escrow, patches to disable online activation when the authorisation servers are taken off-line and the like. They're just running rings around the intentions of copyright law otherwise.
I don't recall progressive scan ones over here, but I'm no enthusiast. It's plain old interlaced PAL, just wider. Initially it was only any use for watching widescreen DVDs, but gradually satellite, cable and terrestrial digital provided widescreen content. Reading up, DVDs can be encoded either way and output either, with some loss of resolution if the encoding and your set didn't match. Thinking back I do recall DVDs here several years ago being released in both 4:3 and 16:9 formats. I think pretty much all DVDs here are encoded 16:9 now, with 4:3 viewers picking between letterbox and pan&scan and the player converting as required.
I should add that I went digital before I went widescreen, so perhaps analogue transmissions aren't widescreen. All I know is when I plugged it in and picked 16:9 in the menu on my digital box the screen was usually full and I didn't lose anything from the top and bottom of the screen, so it isn't just zooming. Judging by the position of on-screen logos 4:3 viewers don't see the edges 16:9 viewers do. DVDs have been widescreen since day 1, 4:3 just throws some information away (either vertical resolution in letterbox or horizontal in pan&scan). My TV is an 8 year old CRT, given to me by my brother who upgraded to a widescreen SDTV plasma a few years ago. It didn't cost $2000 new.
Perhaps it's just a PAL thing, but widescreen (16:9) SDTVs are pretty common over here (UK) and have been for a good few years - since before HDTV was anything but a toy for real AV enthusiasts. I don't have an HDTV receiver, but all new broadcast content I see is widescreen. Legacy 4:3 contents gets black bars at the edges. Do you people in NTSC land not get widescreen without an HDTV?
That wasn't the greatest deal ever. Alan Sugar[1] sold Sinclair's existing stock of Spectrums for more than he paid for the company. Clive Sinclair hasn't made billions since then, I'm not sure if he even made millions, but Alan Sugar has made billions[3] - though not all of the back of that purchase.
[1] Who happens to be the boss in the UK version of The Apprentice - the UK's Donald Trump[2], in that sense. [2] When initially writing this post I couldn't remember his name, so it originally read "that guy with the tall buildings and bad hair". [3] In US dollars at least. His net worth was a bit shy of a billion quid last time I looked.
It's not free, but it is cheap. Smaller screen = less money. Small case means no need for a metal frame = less money. No optical drive = less money. Assuming these things are similar to my Eee they are incredibly basic inside - silver paint serves as a shield, one sheet of metal under the keyboard is the heatsink, even the trackpad buttons are on the motherboard itself instead of on a daughterboard. There is only one type of screw holding my Eee together. Compared to the other laptops I've been inside with multiple pieces of shielding with a thousand tiny screws, heatpipe coolers for the CPU, daughterboards for power input or case buttons or indicator lights, hard drive, optical drive, all screwed to a metal frame, blah blah blah... they're incredibly simple in terms of construction. There's no expensive engineering there, that's all been done by Intel making a low-power reference design that fits on a motherboard small enough. I guess the closest you'd get to fancy electronics would be fitting the power supplies in there (no room for cheap electrolytic caps) - but they don't use much power, so you don't need many of yer fancy big low-ESR ceramic or tantalum caps anyway.
The price is what it is because that's what they think the market will bear, not because it's representative of the manufacturing cost. One there are more on the market and the early adopters have has their fill someone will cut the price by 20% or more and the rest will follow suit.
Why not a 2W x86-64 processor like the Atom? ARM may be an inherently more efficient architecture, but Intel have an awesome 45nm process and are getting pretty good at dealing with those clunky old x86 instructions efficiently.
Why would this worry Intel? Not very many comparative benchmarks, but the IPC of the Nano and a Celeron-M appear to be similar (extrapolating from the bottom graph in TFA). That means a 1GHz Nano (TDP: 5W) would have similar performance to a 1.8GHz Silverthorne Atom (TDP: 2.5W). The 1.8GHz Nano has a TDP of a whopping 25W - that's Core 2 territory. Intel won't be very worried, especially since their parts are built on 45nm, so they get far more chips per wafer.
OS/2 didn't die on Windows 95's release date, Netscape didn't die the day they bundled IE. The investigations into Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly started with the FTC in 1991. The DoJ later had a case and reached a settlement with Microsoft in 1994, where they agreed not to leverage their monopoly by bundling additional software with Windows. Not only were they in a position to dominate before Windows 95, they were already dominating. They expanded their dominance from the desktop operating system market to squash Lotus, Borland, Netscape et. al using Windows 95 as a club.
Perhaps you missed all the anti-trust trials. Microsoft won in large part because they illegally manipulated the market. You couldn't buy a machine with OS/2 because anyone who tried to sell one would have their OEM price for Windows go through the roof.
As much as the bank looks oddly at a sudden amount of large withdrawls, they'd certainly take the time to wonder why someone is getting three cents continuously deposited into their account.
It doesn't strike me as at all inevitable that his bank would notice. Alarms on the automated systems which trigger human intervention would I expect be primarily based on large transactions, not small ones. I suppose there must be a specific trigger for an unusually large number of transactions, or a trigger for a review for accounts operating on the edge of the distribution curve for a variety of parameters. With no trigger no human ever looks - it's all automated. I doubt any human other than me has looked at my bank account in years.
Are you saying the FreeBSD drivers work with the specific Atheros card in the Eee? There is a proper open-source driver for some Atheros cards in Linux too - ath5k, which I believe is a port of the *BSD one. But it doesn't work with the one in the Eee.
I wouldn't go for a server distribution for a multimedia GUI project without checking that it doesn't have a kernel tuned for throughput rather than latency (eg. 100Hz ticks, no preemption). Just use any old desktop distribution and turn off what's not required. It's not like a couple of gigs of disk space matters much on a box that will be storing digital video.
I don't see much difference between win32 app running on 'alternative' win32 API implementation (wine) and.NET app running on 'alternative'.NET implementation (mono).
Here's one enormous difference: Wine only works on x86, mono works on many architectures.
Far from all of what makes up an application (on any platform) is executable code, which is the only thing which is duplicated in a Universal Binary. There's a lot of resources - GUI layouts, help files, localisations etc. which are not duplicated, so the overall size change depends very much on the nature of the app. As a couple of random examples, the Chess app is 4.1MB, of which about 800k is executable code. Cadintosh is 20MB, of which 2.3MB is executable code (lots of illustrated multi-language help). OK, they're both going to have lots of resources by their nature. DivX Converter is at the other end of the spectrum with a lightweight GUI and minimal help, 9.2MB with 7MB of code.
Wikipedia is exactly the wrong place to look for information on this. Just read the edit histories and talk pages. Any competing theory, or any evidence which standard cosmology finds difficult, just gets shouted down by what I can only call consensus fanboys. It's a shocking abuse of Wikipedia, but as it's not the most popular opinion that's being abused nobody seems to mind. No weasel words? Yeah, right, that gets enforced on the Plasma Cosmology page - "the cosmic triple jump"? WTF? That sounds like the title of a slide from a Fox shockumentary, not the title of a diagram in an encyclopedia entry.
The difference is that the government spent thousands of dollars on something that you or I could build for less than 1.......
Either you shit kevlar and can propose, justify, design, refine, build and test a device in five minutes (I'm assuming McDonalds wages for you, but the real engineers and scientists get paid a lot more), or it's not kevlar that comes out of your ass, but your Slashdot posts.
Slashdot Mirror
In exactly the same way as you do with ESDF I'd guess. With my central three fingers on WAD, my pinkie falls on shift and my thumb on space, which feels perfectly natural and maps to the major controls in every FPS. I just don't see the big difference, it's exactly the same layout just one key over. You may have more spare keys to map on the left, but as it's only your little finger which can hit them, having the nice big shift, caps-lock etc. is more useful than the normal-sized keys which would fall naturally with ESDF.
That may be true, but it's not like your copy of Windows 98 (or ME, if you're perverse) will have evaporated into the ether, so you could still play the game if you kept the old hardware and OS. With continual online checks you don't even get that choice, you can change nothing and the game will just stop working when the publisher gets bored of providing the authorisation servers.
DRM like this results in de-facto perpetual copyright - if the keys never get released the copyright materials never get released to the public, so the public interest side of the copyright bargain never materialises. I think we need laws to enforce key escrow, patches to disable online activation when the authorisation servers are taken off-line and the like. They're just running rings around the intentions of copyright law otherwise.
I don't recall progressive scan ones over here, but I'm no enthusiast. It's plain old interlaced PAL, just wider. Initially it was only any use for watching widescreen DVDs, but gradually satellite, cable and terrestrial digital provided widescreen content. Reading up, DVDs can be encoded either way and output either, with some loss of resolution if the encoding and your set didn't match. Thinking back I do recall DVDs here several years ago being released in both 4:3 and 16:9 formats. I think pretty much all DVDs here are encoded 16:9 now, with 4:3 viewers picking between letterbox and pan&scan and the player converting as required.
I should add that I went digital before I went widescreen, so perhaps analogue transmissions aren't widescreen. All I know is when I plugged it in and picked 16:9 in the menu on my digital box the screen was usually full and I didn't lose anything from the top and bottom of the screen, so it isn't just zooming. Judging by the position of on-screen logos 4:3 viewers don't see the edges 16:9 viewers do. DVDs have been widescreen since day 1, 4:3 just throws some information away (either vertical resolution in letterbox or horizontal in pan&scan). My TV is an 8 year old CRT, given to me by my brother who upgraded to a widescreen SDTV plasma a few years ago. It didn't cost $2000 new.
Perhaps it's just a PAL thing, but widescreen (16:9) SDTVs are pretty common over here (UK) and have been for a good few years - since before HDTV was anything but a toy for real AV enthusiasts. I don't have an HDTV receiver, but all new broadcast content I see is widescreen. Legacy 4:3 contents gets black bars at the edges. Do you people in NTSC land not get widescreen without an HDTV?
That wasn't the greatest deal ever. Alan Sugar[1] sold Sinclair's existing stock of Spectrums for more than he paid for the company. Clive Sinclair hasn't made billions since then, I'm not sure if he even made millions, but Alan Sugar has made billions[3] - though not all of the back of that purchase.
[1] Who happens to be the boss in the UK version of The Apprentice - the UK's Donald Trump[2], in that sense.
[2] When initially writing this post I couldn't remember his name, so it originally read "that guy with the tall buildings and bad hair".
[3] In US dollars at least. His net worth was a bit shy of a billion quid last time I looked.
The Silverthorne Atom was single core, the Diamondville comes in single or dual core.
It's not free, but it is cheap. Smaller screen = less money. Small case means no need for a metal frame = less money. No optical drive = less money. Assuming these things are similar to my Eee they are incredibly basic inside - silver paint serves as a shield, one sheet of metal under the keyboard is the heatsink, even the trackpad buttons are on the motherboard itself instead of on a daughterboard. There is only one type of screw holding my Eee together. Compared to the other laptops I've been inside with multiple pieces of shielding with a thousand tiny screws, heatpipe coolers for the CPU, daughterboards for power input or case buttons or indicator lights, hard drive, optical drive, all screwed to a metal frame, blah blah blah... they're incredibly simple in terms of construction. There's no expensive engineering there, that's all been done by Intel making a low-power reference design that fits on a motherboard small enough. I guess the closest you'd get to fancy electronics would be fitting the power supplies in there (no room for cheap electrolytic caps) - but they don't use much power, so you don't need many of yer fancy big low-ESR ceramic or tantalum caps anyway.
The price is what it is because that's what they think the market will bear, not because it's representative of the manufacturing cost. One there are more on the market and the early adopters have has their fill someone will cut the price by 20% or more and the rest will follow suit.
Why not a 2W x86-64 processor like the Atom? ARM may be an inherently more efficient architecture, but Intel have an awesome 45nm process and are getting pretty good at dealing with those clunky old x86 instructions efficiently.
Why would this worry Intel? Not very many comparative benchmarks, but the IPC of the Nano and a Celeron-M appear to be similar (extrapolating from the bottom graph in TFA). That means a 1GHz Nano (TDP: 5W) would have similar performance to a 1.8GHz Silverthorne Atom (TDP: 2.5W). The 1.8GHz Nano has a TDP of a whopping 25W - that's Core 2 territory. Intel won't be very worried, especially since their parts are built on 45nm, so they get far more chips per wafer.
Yeah, it's amazing how Mark Shuttleworth made billions in IT and started the most popular Linux distribution without even having a computer.
OS/2 didn't die on Windows 95's release date, Netscape didn't die the day they bundled IE. The investigations into Microsoft's desktop OS monopoly started with the FTC in 1991. The DoJ later had a case and reached a settlement with Microsoft in 1994, where they agreed not to leverage their monopoly by bundling additional software with Windows. Not only were they in a position to dominate before Windows 95, they were already dominating. They expanded their dominance from the desktop operating system market to squash Lotus, Borland, Netscape et. al using Windows 95 as a club.
Why is it not available on the two currently fastest selling games consoles - the Wii and PS3?
Hot having an HDTV doesn't mean you don't have widescreen.
Perhaps you missed all the anti-trust trials. Microsoft won in large part because they illegally manipulated the market. You couldn't buy a machine with OS/2 because anyone who tried to sell one would have their OEM price for Windows go through the roof.
Nice theory. In practice it seems that what happens is that if 2% of law-abiding citizens carry guns then 80% of criminals carry guns.
As a guess, flare gun(s).
How do you know it wasn't a shot pistol? Single shot, cartridge big enough for a couple of comically small morsels. Smartass.
It doesn't strike me as at all inevitable that his bank would notice. Alarms on the automated systems which trigger human intervention would I expect be primarily based on large transactions, not small ones. I suppose there must be a specific trigger for an unusually large number of transactions, or a trigger for a review for accounts operating on the edge of the distribution curve for a variety of parameters. With no trigger no human ever looks - it's all automated. I doubt any human other than me has looked at my bank account in years.
Are you saying the FreeBSD drivers work with the specific Atheros card in the Eee? There is a proper open-source driver for some Atheros cards in Linux too - ath5k, which I believe is a port of the *BSD one. But it doesn't work with the one in the Eee.
I wouldn't go for a server distribution for a multimedia GUI project without checking that it doesn't have a kernel tuned for throughput rather than latency (eg. 100Hz ticks, no preemption). Just use any old desktop distribution and turn off what's not required. It's not like a couple of gigs of disk space matters much on a box that will be storing digital video.
Here's one enormous difference: Wine only works on x86, mono works on many architectures.
Far from all of what makes up an application (on any platform) is executable code, which is the only thing which is duplicated in a Universal Binary. There's a lot of resources - GUI layouts, help files, localisations etc. which are not duplicated, so the overall size change depends very much on the nature of the app. As a couple of random examples, the Chess app is 4.1MB, of which about 800k is executable code. Cadintosh is 20MB, of which 2.3MB is executable code (lots of illustrated multi-language help). OK, they're both going to have lots of resources by their nature. DivX Converter is at the other end of the spectrum with a lightweight GUI and minimal help, 9.2MB with 7MB of code.
Wikipedia is exactly the wrong place to look for information on this. Just read the edit histories and talk pages. Any competing theory, or any evidence which standard cosmology finds difficult, just gets shouted down by what I can only call consensus fanboys. It's a shocking abuse of Wikipedia, but as it's not the most popular opinion that's being abused nobody seems to mind. No weasel words? Yeah, right, that gets enforced on the Plasma Cosmology page - "the cosmic triple jump"? WTF? That sounds like the title of a slide from a Fox shockumentary, not the title of a diagram in an encyclopedia entry.
Either you shit kevlar and can propose, justify, design, refine, build and test a device in five minutes (I'm assuming McDonalds wages for you, but the real engineers and scientists get paid a lot more), or it's not kevlar that comes out of your ass, but your Slashdot posts.