I remember back in the early '90s when I still did Fidonet, all echomail messages had a "To:" field (unlike Usenet), you could read replies to you, no matter what group they were in. Messages that weren't replies were by default sent to "All".
So if you created a user named "All", most messages in echomail and most messages in local boards would be flagged as new to you. Once sysops figured that out they usually created the user All and that was the end of it.
To make money, you need to convince the politicians that you need new hardware and that adding a printer to the thing is very difficult...
It would make more sense to me that the voting machine manufacturers should encourage printers being standard equipment, to drive up the price -- and the profits, assuming that the margin over cost-of-goods is kept the same. And the best part is that a printer generally doesn't need software updates. Hardware maintenance and repairs should be more profitable than software updates.
The only way I can think of to avoid the problems of 1) a "receipt" that lets you prove to someone that you voted a certain way, 2) having a possible way for people to snoop on how you voted by correlating the timing of log entries with the sign-in sheets, 3) the "log" roll of paper not necessarily being the same as the receipt (wouldn't old-style lever machines have this problem anyhow?) is to have the voting machine print you a ballot card with your selections when you are finished voting. (hollerith size cards would be great)
It would have a bar code or somesuch for easy automated couting, possibly including some encrypted information (encrypted better than a #defined string as a DES key!) with the machine ID and sequence number (maybe the time and date too), along with a plain text printout of your selections, all digitally signed by the machine's own private key. If you don't like it, go to the poll officers and have them properly destroy it and give you a blank one in return. (not completely blank... they should be pre-printed with the election date and district to avoid people being given pre-voted ballot cards) The initial count would be from the bar codes, and recounts could use the plain text.
That way you would have a system where not only is there a printed record of your vote in the ballot box (and only in the ballot box), but you could verify the human readable side before dropping it into the ballot box. There would be no hanging chad to need a "guess" at what the voter "intended". The encrypted stats could be used when an investigation is needed. Funny business in the sequence numbers should be obvious.
I have an HD ready Sony 4:3 32" CRT that's almost three years old (it had just been discontinued in favor of a re-design at the time, so I got a good deal), and it has a DVI input which I think may even support HDCP, but I really couldn't care less about HD-DVD.
Right now I use that DVI input for a 480p display from a PC running Windows 2000 so that I can watch anime fansubs (the subtitles are much clearer than over S-video), and when I watch HDTV, I usually set the ATSC tuner to downconvert wide-screen HD into a letterboxed 4:3 picture rather than go into squeeze-scan. This means that I'm getting a picture with less resolution than 480p when watching HD, like laserdisc but with the component color of DVD. The extra resolution just isn't that important to me after getting the nice clear picture.
My point is to look at the smashing success of both SACD and DVD-A. I'm sure the RIAA would love for the market to switch to either of those formats. As far as I know, neither format has been cracked, but that may be due to the general lack of interest in either of those formats as much as anything else.
The only thing I want HD-DVD for is as a high-capacity backup medium. And I wouldn't be surprised to hear of people eventually using HD-DVD to make "backups" of 2-5 regular DVDs, along with the appearance of reverse DVD shrink programs to make it easy. Because if you watch it in your living room at a reasonable viewing distance, it's not going to look all that much better to the average person, especially over age 40.
Since the LCD display in most laptops connects directly to the video card using a proprietary interface, there is no chance (practically speaking anyway) that HD video being displayed on the LCD could be intercepted and copied.
You seem to have missed a very important point. Home Theatre types generally won't stand for watching HD-DVD movies on a tiny laptop LCD display. It may be fine for a nerd-boy living in the basement of his parents' house, but that doesn't work for people who have, you know, friends? or maybe family? to watch movies with.
There was also a web site where you could get an NFL jersey with any name you wanted on it. Any name except what was on their filter list, that is.
The problem was, there was (and I guess still is) a player whose last name is "GAY". I'm sure he doesn't get his own jerseys through that web site, but his fans can't either.
And more importantly, it's Yet Another Damn Document Format. I'm annoyed enough that people are making DejaVu documents. (and usually their excuse is that it's 5% smaller than PDF, never mind that Acrobat Pro will let you tune the DPI and compression) When they finally came out with a Mac reader app, I tried printing a DJVU document and found that it printed at a lower resolution than what was displayed on-screen! This was just a scan of some old software documentation (late '80s) so I doubt it was just an optional DRM feature that the document creator turned on. We don't need another YADDF with no Mac reader out there.
I was also annoyed when I found people using a "Comic Book" format (.CBZ/.CBR) for scans of old video game magazines until I found out that it was just a ZIP or RAR full of JPEGs. At that point I was still slightly annoyed at the careless use of the wrong file extension (many reader programs are stupid and only look at the file name instead of the first 4 bytes of the file), but quite relieved that it was such a straightforward format.
but if you want to use any generating PDF or reading PDF programs you need to pay adobe the big money.
The graphics architecture in Mac OS X is built on the PDF spec. Not one penny goes to Adobe when you click on the "Save as PDF" button in the print dialog. Nor does one penny go to Adobe when you use Preview to view a PDF or Postscript file.
And that doesn't count the mentions in other replies of Ghostscript and OpenOffice.
Apple is a big user of ATI chipsets and video cards, has standardized on the DVI video connector, and very probably has an eye on the home theatre market. If ATI has somehow given Apple the idea that their current chipsets support HDCP, they are going to feel the wrath of Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field very soon.
Then disable them from hotlinking via http.conf or.htaccess.
That's way too polite. The BOFH solution is to have off-site references headers redirect to pictures that are "famous" on the internet, such as goatse-man.
ATI has promised a card does something, and then it turns out it never did.
Which is why I don't buy ATI.
free Mac mini [freeminimacs.com] Now thats
Then why are you trying to suck people into a pyramid to get a free Mac mini... which uses an ATI video chipset? I guess you'll take ATI for "free" then?
NES games basically had to do this from the start. It only had 4K of RAM, half being work (CPU) RAM, and half being video RAM. It used a name table/pattern table style graphics chip (a descendant of the TMS-9918, though not based directly upon it like the Sega and MSX video chips), which meant it didn't even have enough RAM for basic graphics! Instead, it relied on the cartridge to put the pattern table into a separate ROM chip, or to have a RAM chip if it just had to have pattern tables in RAM. While NES games didn't go quite as far as having a CPU in the cartridge like SNES FX games did, their mappers got pretty complicated in later games, such as Castlevania 3 as mentioned in TFA.
Atari 2600? Pretty much any game other than Pong and Combat was pushing the system, because of it's 1-D graphics chip that was optimized for those two games. Vertical scrolling was relatively easy, but the limit on what you could put on a scanline made horizontal scrolling hard. The real problem, though, was the 4K cartridge address space. Doing all those tricks took up space, and there aren't a lot of good games that aren't at least 8K bankswitched. (and quite a few bad games that are!) It is still to this day getting pushed to the limit in homebrew games (see atariage.com for examples).
Of the other popular systems of the day, the 5200 definitely didn't get pushed to the limit. Even though it was mostly compatible with the 400/800 line (easy enough to convert if you had source code), the 400/800 line didn't really get pushed until the XE era, after the 5200 died. Intellivision had some nice games in its later days, and I would say that they did in fact push the system. And the Vectrex was too niche and too late to get pushed to the limit.
While the 5200 got only one bankswitched game, the Colecovision died before it could get any. Like the 5200, it had 32K cartridge space. Its 16K VRAM and TMS-9918 graphics were really good for character-cell based games. Its only problems were small work RAM (1K) which could be partially made up for by using extra VRAM as secondary storage, and lack of colors (15 fixed colors, only one or two at a time, and not well-chosen ones like the C64 had). The Sega Master System (an expansion of the Colecovision-like SG-1000) video chip made up for this by doubling the max sprites per line, using 4-bit graphics (16 colors) everywhere, and having 32 palette registers.
Hmm, let's see... here's how much RAM they had, and how much space a game could take before having to use bank switching:
2600 - 128 bytes RAM, 4K cartridge space
INTV - about 1.3K RAM, possibly as much as 48K x 16-bit cartridge space, but with a wonky bus
5200 - 16K RAM, 32K cartridge space
CV - 1K RAM, 16K VRAM, 32K cartridge space
Vec - 1K RAM, at least 40K cartridge space
NES - 2K RAM, 2K VRAM, 40K cartridge space (usually 32K ROM/8K RAM)
"I long for an emulator that plays my old SNES games as it is kind of cumbersome to have many many systems to hook up. A fully functioning Link to the Past on Xbox 360 would make me buy it."
Xbox and Dreamcast have fully ported emulators that run at speed with full sound. What's the problem?
So which emulator would that be for Dreamcast? DreamSNES hasn't been updated for over three years, and it does not run all games at full speed with full sound. Super Famicast is better at some things, but after a bit of googling around, apparently it doesn't hit the all games full speed mark either. It's more like 80-85% with both sound and full graphics emulation turned on. Overclocking the DC can help some, but not enough. Plus, DreamSNES has a problem with the sound that causes the "wind" sound in Chrono Trigger (such as on that bridge to the castle jail) to be played as a buzzing noise.
When I see a Dreamcast SNES emulator that will run Chrono Trigger at 100%, then I'll start believing. Until then, picture the "I WANT TO BELIEVE" poster with a Dreamcast instead of a UFO.
In other news, Sony announced that its new CarStation would not only play the next generation of games, but you can drive it to work (max speed 45MPH, 5 gallon fuel tank, 15MPG), it also has a built in coffeemaker (because people like to enjoy a fresh cup on the way to work), an automatic shaver (for folks with long commutes who don't have the time to shave at home), and will also play BluRay DVDs with 5.1 surround sound.
(Never mind that there wouldn't be enough range for folks with long commutes, or that the thing is too noisy to hear the artefacts in 128K MP3s, etc.)
With the introduction of the 360 and the next generation consoles, online console gaming is primed for takeoff.
This has nothing to do with the 360, the PS3, or the Revolution. This has to do with 1) the increasing uptake of "always-on" broadband, and 2) console game developers finally realizing that console gamers want more online gaming.
All the current generation systems have broadband adapters, though the Dreamcast died before its BBA could become readily available. But three years ago, most console gamers would have had to use dialup, which really is a pain in the butt with a console. While those who were PC gamers were more likely to have had broadband, they weren't likely to care about console gaming.
Really, though, I would like it if LAN gaming were better supported on consoles. About the only console LAN gaming I've seen is with Halo. Broadband and LAN gaming are good for different things, and Xbox Live type gaming is no substitute for LAN gaming. I really hate split-screen gaming. Standard NTSC is low enough resolution without cutting it into four pieces.
The problem with the CV controllers was that 1) the stumpy stick was hard to use and 2) the side fire buttons were just as un-ergonomic as the 5200 side fire buttons. Except instead of having no give whatsoever, they had springs that required too much force to be comfortable. The switches were somewhat unreliable, too, which was impressive considering that they weren't cheap dome or carbon dot switches. But the CV keypads were really quite nice.
I found the face on Mars! Okay, so it's a different face, but you know what I mean. It's in the Eastern kindgom, just south of the big ice area and north of a pentacle island in the middle of some magma. You can see it best at the second or third highest zoom level.
Slashdot Mirror
The same reason for customers to upgrade to either DVD-A or SACD. Because it's shinier!
So if you created a user named "All", most messages in echomail and most messages in local boards would be flagged as new to you. Once sysops figured that out they usually created the user All and that was the end of it.
Okay, fine. You attack the darkness. There's an elf in front of you.
Not to mention that these are only the east coast ports. The communist Chinese already own our west coast ports.
It would make more sense to me that the voting machine manufacturers should encourage printers being standard equipment, to drive up the price -- and the profits, assuming that the margin over cost-of-goods is kept the same. And the best part is that a printer generally doesn't need software updates. Hardware maintenance and repairs should be more profitable than software updates.
It would have a bar code or somesuch for easy automated couting, possibly including some encrypted information (encrypted better than a #defined string as a DES key!) with the machine ID and sequence number (maybe the time and date too), along with a plain text printout of your selections, all digitally signed by the machine's own private key. If you don't like it, go to the poll officers and have them properly destroy it and give you a blank one in return. (not completely blank... they should be pre-printed with the election date and district to avoid people being given pre-voted ballot cards) The initial count would be from the bar codes, and recounts could use the plain text.
That way you would have a system where not only is there a printed record of your vote in the ballot box (and only in the ballot box), but you could verify the human readable side before dropping it into the ballot box. There would be no hanging chad to need a "guess" at what the voter "intended". The encrypted stats could be used when an investigation is needed. Funny business in the sequence numbers should be obvious.
Right now I use that DVI input for a 480p display from a PC running Windows 2000 so that I can watch anime fansubs (the subtitles are much clearer than over S-video), and when I watch HDTV, I usually set the ATSC tuner to downconvert wide-screen HD into a letterboxed 4:3 picture rather than go into squeeze-scan. This means that I'm getting a picture with less resolution than 480p when watching HD, like laserdisc but with the component color of DVD. The extra resolution just isn't that important to me after getting the nice clear picture.
My point is to look at the smashing success of both SACD and DVD-A. I'm sure the RIAA would love for the market to switch to either of those formats. As far as I know, neither format has been cracked, but that may be due to the general lack of interest in either of those formats as much as anything else.
The only thing I want HD-DVD for is as a high-capacity backup medium. And I wouldn't be surprised to hear of people eventually using HD-DVD to make "backups" of 2-5 regular DVDs, along with the appearance of reverse DVD shrink programs to make it easy. Because if you watch it in your living room at a reasonable viewing distance, it's not going to look all that much better to the average person, especially over age 40.
Maybe they plan to be mostly targeting at WA!SP customers?
I'm just waiting for the day when the inevitable immature kiddies on the service get called "WAPS".
You seem to have missed a very important point. Home Theatre types generally won't stand for watching HD-DVD movies on a tiny laptop LCD display. It may be fine for a nerd-boy living in the basement of his parents' house, but that doesn't work for people who have, you know, friends? or maybe family? to watch movies with.
...because most of the people playing them probably aren't getting dates!
The problem was, there was (and I guess still is) a player whose last name is "GAY". I'm sure he doesn't get his own jerseys through that web site, but his fans can't either.
Exactly. All they need now is support for posting new articles from client software.
I was also annoyed when I found people using a "Comic Book" format (.CBZ/.CBR) for scans of old video game magazines until I found out that it was just a ZIP or RAR full of JPEGs. At that point I was still slightly annoyed at the careless use of the wrong file extension (many reader programs are stupid and only look at the file name instead of the first 4 bytes of the file), but quite relieved that it was such a straightforward format.
The graphics architecture in Mac OS X is built on the PDF spec. Not one penny goes to Adobe when you click on the "Save as PDF" button in the print dialog. Nor does one penny go to Adobe when you use Preview to view a PDF or Postscript file.
And that doesn't count the mentions in other replies of Ghostscript and OpenOffice.
Apple is a big user of ATI chipsets and video cards, has standardized on the DVI video connector, and very probably has an eye on the home theatre market. If ATI has somehow given Apple the idea that their current chipsets support HDCP, they are going to feel the wrath of Steve Jobs and his Reality Distortion Field very soon.
That's way too polite. The BOFH solution is to have off-site references headers redirect to pictures that are "famous" on the internet, such as goatse-man.
free Mac mini [freeminimacs.com] Now thats
Then why are you trying to suck people into a pyramid to get a free Mac mini... which uses an ATI video chipset? I guess you'll take ATI for "free" then?
Atari 2600? Pretty much any game other than Pong and Combat was pushing the system, because of it's 1-D graphics chip that was optimized for those two games. Vertical scrolling was relatively easy, but the limit on what you could put on a scanline made horizontal scrolling hard. The real problem, though, was the 4K cartridge address space. Doing all those tricks took up space, and there aren't a lot of good games that aren't at least 8K bankswitched. (and quite a few bad games that are!) It is still to this day getting pushed to the limit in homebrew games (see atariage.com for examples).
Of the other popular systems of the day, the 5200 definitely didn't get pushed to the limit. Even though it was mostly compatible with the 400/800 line (easy enough to convert if you had source code), the 400/800 line didn't really get pushed until the XE era, after the 5200 died. Intellivision had some nice games in its later days, and I would say that they did in fact push the system. And the Vectrex was too niche and too late to get pushed to the limit.
While the 5200 got only one bankswitched game, the Colecovision died before it could get any. Like the 5200, it had 32K cartridge space. Its 16K VRAM and TMS-9918 graphics were really good for character-cell based games. Its only problems were small work RAM (1K) which could be partially made up for by using extra VRAM as secondary storage, and lack of colors (15 fixed colors, only one or two at a time, and not well-chosen ones like the C64 had). The Sega Master System (an expansion of the Colecovision-like SG-1000) video chip made up for this by doubling the max sprites per line, using 4-bit graphics (16 colors) everywhere, and having 32 palette registers.
Hmm, let's see... here's how much RAM they had, and how much space a game could take before having to use bank switching:
2600 - 128 bytes RAM, 4K cartridge space
INTV - about 1.3K RAM, possibly as much as 48K x 16-bit cartridge space, but with a wonky bus
5200 - 16K RAM, 32K cartridge space
CV - 1K RAM, 16K VRAM, 32K cartridge space
Vec - 1K RAM, at least 40K cartridge space
NES - 2K RAM, 2K VRAM, 40K cartridge space (usually 32K ROM/8K RAM)
Xbox and Dreamcast have fully ported emulators that run at speed with full sound. What's the problem?
So which emulator would that be for Dreamcast? DreamSNES hasn't been updated for over three years, and it does not run all games at full speed with full sound. Super Famicast is better at some things, but after a bit of googling around, apparently it doesn't hit the all games full speed mark either. It's more like 80-85% with both sound and full graphics emulation turned on. Overclocking the DC can help some, but not enough. Plus, DreamSNES has a problem with the sound that causes the "wind" sound in Chrono Trigger (such as on that bridge to the castle jail) to be played as a buzzing noise.
When I see a Dreamcast SNES emulator that will run Chrono Trigger at 100%, then I'll start believing. Until then, picture the "I WANT TO BELIEVE" poster with a Dreamcast instead of a UFO.
(Never mind that there wouldn't be enough range for folks with long commutes, or that the thing is too noisy to hear the artefacts in 128K MP3s, etc.)
Oh wait, I don't have any SACD or DVD-A discs. I do have a couple of DTS CDs, but I've had those for six or seven years.
This has nothing to do with the 360, the PS3, or the Revolution. This has to do with 1) the increasing uptake of "always-on" broadband, and 2) console game developers finally realizing that console gamers want more online gaming.
All the current generation systems have broadband adapters, though the Dreamcast died before its BBA could become readily available. But three years ago, most console gamers would have had to use dialup, which really is a pain in the butt with a console. While those who were PC gamers were more likely to have had broadband, they weren't likely to care about console gaming.
Really, though, I would like it if LAN gaming were better supported on consoles. About the only console LAN gaming I've seen is with Halo. Broadband and LAN gaming are good for different things, and Xbox Live type gaming is no substitute for LAN gaming. I really hate split-screen gaming. Standard NTSC is low enough resolution without cutting it into four pieces.
Here's one so far: Magical Tree
The problem with the CV controllers was that 1) the stumpy stick was hard to use and 2) the side fire buttons were just as un-ergonomic as the 5200 side fire buttons. Except instead of having no give whatsoever, they had springs that required too much force to be comfortable. The switches were somewhat unreliable, too, which was impressive considering that they weren't cheap dome or carbon dot switches. But the CV keypads were really quite nice.
If that site had bookmarking, I'd post a link.