Off Topic question: I was thinking of setting up my own mail server but wasnt sure how to handle situations where I take down the server or connectivity issues, as in an upstream caching provider (cheap/free) or do you simply rely on your senders resending if you have significant uptimes?
They generally will keep trying to send if they're running a real mail server, and not a spam zombie.
If there ever was an endorsement for web-based applications, this is it. When a bug is fixed in Windows or Linux, it stays active in the wild for months or years because many users don't update. With web apps the user basically gets an "update" each time they visit the site.
This is great when there is only one site to update. But when everybody is running their own copy of the web app on their web server, you get problems like the recent epidemic of PHP-based bulletin board exploits.
However, further recent warnings on these Pokemon-related health problems have been tempered by the fact that Southern Medical Journal researchers discovered only a small fraction of the children treated were actually diagnosed with photosensitive epilepsy.
Well, duuuuuuh. In the original case in Japan, after watching the Porygon episode, schoolkids were basically told "if you felt sick after watching that episode last night, you can go home right now." If you were a schoolkid, in Japan or elsewhere, what would you do? It doesn't take a Bart Simpson to jump at the chance to play hooky and get away with it.
I'm a pretty big collector, but I'm mostly a thrift-hunter collector, just getting cool stuff as I run across it by accident. We thrift store type collectors are notoriously cheap, so I really don't have any interest in most of this stuff other than it being cool that people are trying to preserve it somehow. And mostly I'd rather write new stuff for old systems anyhow.
I've got a single one-of-a-kind item, but it's from the 8-bit era. And I'm actually surprised that no others of this thing have been found, since it was a released, though very rare item. Of course the first thing I did was dump the ROMs and share them.
Yeah, I know, it's silly. The first one was supposed to be final, but they kind of screwed that up. It was too successful, it got a sequel, and it kind of went on from there.
Square Co., Ltd. first entered the Japanese video game industry in the mid 1980s, developing a variety of simple RPGs for Nintendo's Famicom Disk System (FDS), a disk-based peripheral for the Family Computer (also known as the "Famicom," and known internationally as the Nintendo Entertainment System). By 1987, declining interest in the FDS had placed Square on the verge of bankruptcy. At approximately the same time, Square designer Hironobu Sakaguchi began work on an ambitious new fantasy role playing game for the cartridge-based Famicom, inspired in part by Enix's popular Dragon Quest (known in the United States as Dragon Warrior). Sakaguchi had plans to retire after the completion of the project so he named it Final Fantasy because it was his final game, although it was also going to be Square's final game. In fact, it's commonly believed that the game was named Final Fantasy because of Square and not Sakaguchi, although Sakaguchi himself has confirmed it was named because of his plans for retirement. Either way, Final Fantasy turned out to be far from being Square's or Sakaguchi's last game. Final Fantasy reversed Square's lagging fortunes, and became their flagship franchise.
The presumed per-unit key is only for accessing the BIOS. This prevents chip mods.
The games are digitally signed, and the console only knows the public key, refusing to run games that were not signed with the private key. Without using "sploits", this is pretty much unbreakable without someone finding the key. The Atari 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar keys were found by dumpster diving around a dying Atari; the 3DO key is still not publically known.
When the 360 gets broken, it will surely be through sploits. And then MS's plan is probably to "upgrade" systems over Live, and maybe even by games offering an upgrade and requiring it to play, like with the PSP. Whether the closing of the holes will work remains to be seen.
Don't jizz all over your monitor man. I actually RyourFL. That price is with an internet subscription, just like years ago when you got $400 off a computer for signing up with MSN for a three year contract. And these offers started on the release day, too.
I rather like how someone translated "xbox" as the kanji (kyou), which is basically an "X" in a box, meaning bad luck, as traditionally used in omikuji (slips of paper for fortune telling), and then "xbox 360" as bad luck coming around again. That was much slicker than the obvious "batsu-bako" (literally "penalty box").
All they need now is to work a triangle in there and they've caught up with the PS2 controller! (and no bonus for the guy who tried to use convoluted numerology with roman numerials to come up with "triple X")
What the Ralph Baer/Magnavox patent covered was a raster-based video game. There were quite a few X/Y oscilloscope video games in the early days (Tennis for Two, Spacewar), but nobody had thought to make one that used a regular TV set until Ralph Baer.
Hah, these whiners should be made to pay what this stuff costs in Japan! Now it's more like 4500 yen (40 bucks or so) for 2-4 episodes, but back in the days of Laserdisc, it was usually 7200 yen (yeah, almost 70 bucks!) for 2-4 episodes...even on VHS! Okay, admittedly these were priced so high for rental shops, but there was never a budget release to follow them up.
Sure, the official dubs usually suck (with the exception of RahXephon) but at least your mind doesnt stop while listening or cringe in shock and horror.
Have you heard the dub to Those Who Hunt Elves? I walked in on the middle of that one, and I was sure it was a fandub until I saw the closing credits, at which point my jaw dropped in horror.
Really good dubs are few and far in between (even if the main characters are good, there'll always be incidental characters with bad voice acting), but I really liked the Dragon Half dub.
Oddly enough, the only really bad offender I can think of is Animeigo, and they bloody well should know better, as Robert Woodhead is a tech geek. The YUA DVDs have half a dozen intro bits which can only be skipped by fast-forwarding, and these are just a bunch of logos, not even ads. And in some of the Urusei Yatsura DVDs, for some mind-baffling reason, the STOP button is disabled in the main menus!
All ADV does is start up with ads, which while annoying (especially the English voiceovers for the ads) are easily skipped with just the MENU or chapter+ button.
Stackable hard drives is a fine idea but I'd like to take one apart to see how ventilation is. I've had a much higher failure rate in external drives than internal drives (almost 3:1) over the past 6 years. I still wonder if it is heat or just bad power supplies in these things.
Sometimes it's the drive itself. Sometimes it's the fan, a friend of mine had two of a specific model where the fan went bad, then I checked one of mine and its fan was dead too. Sometimes it's the power supply; I think that's the real reason they're all using external power bricks these days, more so than the safety issue of having semi-exposed AC wiring with a built-in power supply. And sometimes it could be the controller card; I have one with a dead Firewire port, good thing they come in pairs.
All that being said, I wouldn't want one of these without a Firewire port. It's kind of sad that a long-time seller of external drives for the Macintosh now sells a model of external case with only USB support.
It still bugs me that the HDTV decoders in the US are still so expensive. You can get it on board a video card for $50, but a full box is still around $150 at least. Since the rest of the computer is serving primarily as a power supply, that seems kinda pricey.
There's not only no power supply, but there's also no MPEG decoder (which has licensing fees in addition to silicon consts), no display buffer RAM to decode the MPEG into, no D/A converters or analog outputs to your TV set, probably no Dolby Digital audio output either, no remote control, and no plastic case.
Your TV needs a lot more than what's on that $50 card. Oh, and where exactly are you finding an HDTV tuner card for less than $150?
I'm pretty sure that digital (terrestrial) TV in the UK isn't HDTV. So even after analog is cut off, they STILL won't have HD. They might have widescreen, but it won't be HD.
The requirement to decode signals at the maximum resolution is one of the reasons why tuners still cost so much in the USA. Even if it's being shown on a crappy 3" LCD, the tuner still has to be able to decode full-resolution 720p and 1080i video which can then be downsampled.
One other advantage of digital TV is that it is immune to interference from adjacent channels, especially adjacent analog channels. More than a few DTV transmitters in the USA are on an adjacent channel to their current analog transmitter. This will also help utilize the bandwidth more efficiently for the day when channel 52 and up are auctioned off. Originally channels went as high as 83, but until recently it's been 2-62, except 37 (a radio astronomy frequency), or 60 channels. We will be losing eleven more (52-62), and 2-6 may not be suitable for ATSC transmission, which would leave 44 channels, about 25% less than before.
I'm not too concerned about what happens in Office 12. It's what they do about the next release, Office 13, that I'm interested in. Triskaidecaphobics worldwide will spurn it.
Or maybe people will just start referring to this version and it's hall of UI horrors as Office 13.
There is a program that does this already, it's called virtual PC. It allows you to double click an exe on the desktop and have it open up, etc.
I don't want to emulate a whole PC, with its own display and networking and file systems. I just want to run apps. Wine is an API emulator only, letting Windows apps use real windows, instead of pretend windows inside of a single real window. That's what I want to see, Windows apps running in their own windows over an API emulation layer.
Even better would be if I could double-click on a.EXE file and have it just run a Windows app. In fact, this is how Carbon apps work... they run natively on MacOS 9, and they run natively on OS X. But given the state of Windows software installation where everything needs its own installer that's going to expect everything to be where Windows puts it (meaning that the filesystem layout and registry layout are effectively part of the API that must be emulated), that could be tricky.
Classic almost works this way, but because it was originally a single-tasking OS with lots of shared and fixed resources, especially the system heap, which is shared between apps, it has to start up a system-wide environment. This method would probably work well for Windows apps.
Slashdot Mirror
They generally will keep trying to send if they're running a real mail server, and not a spam zombie.
This is great when there is only one site to update. But when everybody is running their own copy of the web app on their web server, you get problems like the recent epidemic of PHP-based bulletin board exploits.
Well, duuuuuuh. In the original case in Japan, after watching the Porygon episode, schoolkids were basically told "if you felt sick after watching that episode last night, you can go home right now." If you were a schoolkid, in Japan or elsewhere, what would you do? It doesn't take a Bart Simpson to jump at the chance to play hooky and get away with it.
Perhaps someone has reflected Slashdot's RSS feed into CmdrTaco's inbox?
I've got a single one-of-a-kind item, but it's from the 8-bit era. And I'm actually surprised that no others of this thing have been found, since it was a released, though very rare item. Of course the first thing I did was dump the ROMs and share them.
From Wikipedia:
The games are digitally signed, and the console only knows the public key, refusing to run games that were not signed with the private key. Without using "sploits", this is pretty much unbreakable without someone finding the key. The Atari 7800, Lynx, and Jaguar keys were found by dumpster diving around a dying Atari; the 3DO key is still not publically known.
When the 360 gets broken, it will surely be through sploits. And then MS's plan is probably to "upgrade" systems over Live, and maybe even by games offering an upgrade and requiring it to play, like with the PSP. Whether the closing of the holes will work remains to be seen.
Don't jizz all over your monitor man. I actually RyourFL. That price is with an internet subscription, just like years ago when you got $400 off a computer for signing up with MSN for a three year contract. And these offers started on the release day, too.
I rather like how someone translated "xbox" as the kanji (kyou), which is basically an "X" in a box, meaning bad luck, as traditionally used in omikuji (slips of paper for fortune telling), and then "xbox 360" as bad luck coming around again. That was much slicker than the obvious "batsu-bako" (literally "penalty box").
All they need now is to work a triangle in there and they've caught up with the PS2 controller! (and no bonus for the guy who tried to use convoluted numerology with roman numerials to come up with "triple X")
www.onebillionviews.com
I think he could get a good start by hijacking the address of The Drudge Report...
What the Ralph Baer/Magnavox patent covered was a raster-based video game. There were quite a few X/Y oscilloscope video games in the early days (Tennis for Two, Spacewar), but nobody had thought to make one that used a regular TV set until Ralph Baer.
Actually, the PS3 will have nine cores, not eight. One PowerPC and eight Cell.
Hmm, maybe an Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit would help... :-)
I once managed to put an "All Your Base" reference in a series of comments, and have them actually be meaningful to the code.
So kwitcher whinin', fanboys!
Have you heard the dub to Those Who Hunt Elves? I walked in on the middle of that one, and I was sure it was a fandub until I saw the closing credits, at which point my jaw dropped in horror.
Really good dubs are few and far in between (even if the main characters are good, there'll always be incidental characters with bad voice acting), but I really liked the Dragon Half dub.
All ADV does is start up with ads, which while annoying (especially the English voiceovers for the ads) are easily skipped with just the MENU or chapter+ button.
I'm curious how Apple plans to put music on iPods without hard drives. I wonder how they will make it work...
Sometimes it's the drive itself. Sometimes it's the fan, a friend of mine had two of a specific model where the fan went bad, then I checked one of mine and its fan was dead too. Sometimes it's the power supply; I think that's the real reason they're all using external power bricks these days, more so than the safety issue of having semi-exposed AC wiring with a built-in power supply. And sometimes it could be the controller card; I have one with a dead Firewire port, good thing they come in pairs.
All that being said, I wouldn't want one of these without a Firewire port. It's kind of sad that a long-time seller of external drives for the Macintosh now sells a model of external case with only USB support.
There's not only no power supply, but there's also no MPEG decoder (which has licensing fees in addition to silicon consts), no display buffer RAM to decode the MPEG into, no D/A converters or analog outputs to your TV set, probably no Dolby Digital audio output either, no remote control, and no plastic case.
Your TV needs a lot more than what's on that $50 card. Oh, and where exactly are you finding an HDTV tuner card for less than $150?
The requirement to decode signals at the maximum resolution is one of the reasons why tuners still cost so much in the USA. Even if it's being shown on a crappy 3" LCD, the tuner still has to be able to decode full-resolution 720p and 1080i video which can then be downsampled.
One other advantage of digital TV is that it is immune to interference from adjacent channels, especially adjacent analog channels. More than a few DTV transmitters in the USA are on an adjacent channel to their current analog transmitter. This will also help utilize the bandwidth more efficiently for the day when channel 52 and up are auctioned off. Originally channels went as high as 83, but until recently it's been 2-62, except 37 (a radio astronomy frequency), or 60 channels. We will be losing eleven more (52-62), and 2-6 may not be suitable for ATSC transmission, which would leave 44 channels, about 25% less than before.
Work = FD
F = MA
Work = MAD
Work isn't much better:
Work = FA
F = MA
Work = MAD
Or maybe people will just start referring to this version and it's hall of UI horrors as Office 13.
I don't want to emulate a whole PC, with its own display and networking and file systems. I just want to run apps. Wine is an API emulator only, letting Windows apps use real windows, instead of pretend windows inside of a single real window. That's what I want to see, Windows apps running in their own windows over an API emulation layer.
Even better would be if I could double-click on a .EXE file and have it just run a Windows app. In fact, this is how Carbon apps work... they run natively on MacOS 9, and they run natively on OS X. But given the state of Windows software installation where everything needs its own installer that's going to expect everything to be where Windows puts it (meaning that the filesystem layout and registry layout are effectively part of the API that must be emulated), that could be tricky.
Classic almost works this way, but because it was originally a single-tasking OS with lots of shared and fixed resources, especially the system heap, which is shared between apps, it has to start up a system-wide environment. This method would probably work well for Windows apps.