Didn't the 8-bit-nes of the NES limit it to 256 colors, while jumping to 16-bit bumped that limit up to like 65,000? That's a pretty big change.
No. No, no, no. You're talking about the incapability of the graphics unit.
(In NES, AFAIK, the sound unit was physically integrated to the same chip as the CPU, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the CPU's capabilities - it still worked on more or less like any 6502-compatible processor.)
All 6502-workalike-based machines had different graphics and sound units. Their capabilities varied greatly. (NES had 48 colors and 5 grays, Commodore 64 had 16 colors. NES had 64 8x8 hardware sprites, C64 had 8 24x21 hardware sprites. NES had a 5-channel toy bleep-bloop sound unit, C64 had a complex state-of-the-art 3.5-channel semianalog sound synthesizer.)
Also note that I originally said that there was no magical jump in consumer's point of view. There were more than a few things from coder's point of view, of course - M68K processors had cool stuff like ADD.L and even, unbelievably, MUL* and DIV* when 6502 folks had to limp forward with ADC (8-bit addition with carry bit) and no multiplication/division instructions whatsoever.
But my point was that even the coolest processors are nothing if the rest of the hardware still sucks. =)
Getting assignments in specific format, well that's understandable. Grades lowered or not counted - well, that's just plain mean. Would suck to study there. =) If anyone returns them in a format that is absolutely too much of a bother to read (say, OpenOffice.org Writer.sxw file), that's understandable - but what's wrong with plain text, HTML, or even RTF? Last I checked, Word sure opens all of them all right...
You could, of course, use the.doc export function of OpenOffice.org Writer or Abiword or whatever. Formatting would completely suck, but since Word's own default text template sucks anyway, that's hardly a problem =)
Nobody upgrades their processor because it has twice as many bits. Everybody is just looking at the (unscientific, but far more reality-based for comparison) clockspeed rating.
Besides what does it mean that the processor has n bits? That's the word size! (or is it? It's such a bloody useless processor comparison metric that even I am confused.) We're not exactly in the stone age anymore. There's tons of more factors these days that make or break the thing.
This is just marketing rubbish. The "n bits" is so wrong as a marketing gimmick on multiple levels.
Remember when people moved away from 8 bits to 16 bits? Why did people move from C64 to Amiga, or from NES to SNES? Better graphics. Better sound. Faster load times, more storage (=less floppies to switch... well, theoretically). Nobody would admit that the only reason was because there was some magical performance boost due to switching to 16-bit architecture. (This, of course, from the consumer point of view. Coders might find it the only real reason.)
The point is, when the 16-bit systems were introduced, they weren't just introducing 16-bit processors. What was in Amiga that wasn't in Commodore 64? Cool graphics processors, a big honkin' sound unit, a 3.5" floppy drive (going from 332k to 880k without obscure floppy cutting rituals, whee!), more than apparently eight times as much memory... get the picture?
So if you double your bittitude, you have to also double everything else, or otherwise this is a pretty damn pointless thing.
On Mac, it's where the heck church+comma hotkey is at. Firefox app menu - Preferences or something like that. Never used Firefox on OSX, though, only IE ages ago, and Safari recently...
I just wonder why they couldn't put it to Edit - Preferences in Windows too. That's where most of the apps put their preferences anyway. Just because MSIE breaks the rule doesn't mean every other browser should, too. (What the heck "Preferences" does in "Tools" anyway? It has nothing to do with individual "tools", it should cover the whole app... or something.)
Java 5, J2SE 5.0 (improvement of which is what was previously "Java 2")
J2SE Runtime Environment and J2SE SDK version 1.5.0
In other words, the language/platforms uses the minor revision numbers of the SDK.
Though I wonder why the heck it's called "J2SE 5.0". Doesn't J2SE come from "Java 2, Standard Edition"? Wouldn't that now rather be J5SE, or does that look too L33T? Where's J5EE and J5ME? Now my eyes hurt.
..when he contacted SCO and asked them for legal advice.
And he didn't even do what SCO actually recommended - doing a press conference where he'd show a slide with his code (in Greek letters, to carefully protect his precious proprietary trade secrets) on left and OSS Mambo code on right.
Well, GPS-GSM tracking already seems to work pretty well for wolves. Maybe just plain GSM network could be used to track dogs (good coverage in urban areas and has a reasonable accuracy).
The 5 was obviously meant to be the argument, not manual section. In some proprietary C libraries, sleep(n) will sleep for specified number of seconds, sleep(5) call will sleep for 5 seconds and scan for vulnerabilities. Regrettably, GNU libc doesn't implement this, as it has never been correct according to any conceivable standard (it's not in BSD either, it was removed in the ancient times before POSIX and even the BSDI lawsuits and all). Since it's a proprietary extension, it's obvious that the poster was referring to Microsoft C library and not UNIX (MS operating systems don't have manpages, so this notational difference is completely understandable!)...
Nowadays, this exceptional behavior is considered extremely deprecated and it will not necessarily work the way it used to. For example, it does work in win16 but not in any win32 platform, not in any modern release of any proprietary UNIX, and (as mentioned) not in GNU or BSD. Or any POSIX-compliant system anyway.
And the example code was rubbish anyway because it didn't check the return value before printing the message, and effectively printed it in any case, which (I believe) was the point of the whole exercise - a security scanner is no good if it scans for vulnerabilities and then prints the same ambiguous message in any case. In historic UNIXes, sleep(5) returned negative number if vulnerabilities were found (modern C libraries define sleep()'s return value as unsigned int to specifically discourage this weird behavior).
"...Electronic Arts has made the decision to close Earth & Beyond in order to focus resources on future games."
Surely they misspelled "...in order focus resources and talent on Ultima Online, the upcoming expansion, and an unannounced Ultima Online project"? Gee, this sure sounds familiar... not to even mention how sound strategy it sounds like!
EA will never see another penny from me.
Right on! Thanks to the many boneheaded zombieifications of puppet companies, continued brand necrophilia, and the remainder of releases just being mostly crap, it's only fair that they should be boycotted...
(Note: somewhat obscure joke, based on the sequel to the seventh part of one popular western CRPG series...)
Scene: North Corel, eighteen months after the end of FF7...
Barrett: "Yo, homes."
Cloud: "So there are some news about these Cerberus things?"
Tifa: "All I found among Sephiroth's belongings was a map showing the way to a place called the Isle of Cerberus, and this letter."
Barrett: "Okay. Slap it down there!"
As Tifa opens the letter, it magically animates, casting a gigantic holographic projection of Jenova in air...
Barrett: "Jump back!"
Jenova projection: "Sephiroth! Know that my face is most goth-like! While it's unlikely that this ludicruous gang that you spoke of manages to ruin our plans, you must send a clone of you to the Isle of Cerberus, to learn the secret of Acne Medication! Soon I and my horde of puppets will destroy the planet!"
Cloud: "We must send Vincent to the Isle of Cerberus..."
Vincent: "Hm? Why me?"
The rest of the characters unceremoniously tie Vincent to the back of a gold chocobo, which panics and runs off across the ocean. Then, at one point, it disappears mysteriously with a "Zot!" effect.
I don't think it can replace the whole Windows shell (at least without a severe feel of a bubblegum hack). Unless, of course, Cygwin has had some great breakthroughs in terms of X packaging over the last 6 months or something =)
Yet, I think that with proper persuasion and tons of hackery and magic with Cygwin (or even with less of that), it could be possible to run (at least some) GNOME applications in Windows. You still need X though.
It might even be theoretically possible to compile the code as native win32 GUI apps - I know GTK+ 2.x has been ported. I'm not so sure about the GNOME libraries.
A wine glass has three distinguishable stable states (upright, upside down and on its side), and a plate only has two (upright and upside down).
Well, a wine glass has two distinguishable stable states (upright and upside down) and a labile state (on its side) - it can stay stable on its side, but even a small amount of force will make it roll.
Pretty much like the plates, though it's trye that the plates are often pretty damn tricky to make to stand on their edges, much more so than wine glasses...
A really bad one would look for Excel/Word files and modify a couple of data entries in a huge list of numbers.
If I recall correctly, years ago there was an Excel macro virus (or at least a proof-of-concept demo) that did that out there. I saw it in the television back in the day... The Security Expert Guy hit recalc and the bar graph on the screen went crazier each time he did that =)
There was also this urban legend of a CAD program that had an interesting copy protection: If it noted it was cracked, it started quietly messing around with the measurements. They say some construction company used a cracked copy once and the building was more than a bit odd one when it was finished =)
Addendum: Ouch. I started to wonder when I wrote the parent message - why was I recording stuff from DKC when we had a bloody soundtrack CD for the game? The recordings were actually from DKC 2 and 3. I just found the actual files I still somehow had around. File datestamps say 1997-08-08.
But it doesn't matter - the whole series has spectacular music. And all have cheat codes to get to the music test. (DKC2: Start a new game and from the 1p/2p select screen, push down several times. DKC3: highlight an empty save slot, hit LRRLRRLRLR, enter "MUSIC" as code. From the top of my mind, no guarantees...)
My first journey to the cool new-fangled music compression systems was when I tried to record DKC music through the sound card line-in. I compressed the files in Linux using the MPEG reference encoder to Layer II at 64 kbps. The songs fit nicely on floppy =)
Can't remember exactly when this was, but this was back in the Era Before Napster... anyway, it was in the time when the king in the MP3 encoding was l3enc, shareware, the only alternative to use - and I was desperately waiting for a GPL'd MP3 encoder. Back then, no one even made a big deal out of patent issues...
Those were the days.
But I digress. The point was, there is a code in DKC that puts you in the music-test mode - I used this to play the music for purposes of recording stuff. In start-up, move the cursor to Erase Game and hit Down,A,R,B,Y,Down,A,Y (DARBYDAY) and hit Select to change songs. (I even had to cheat and look at the web myself. Was fooled to think the code was DYDDY, but that was the bonus stage trick =)
These days, the best way is, of course, downloading the SPCs.
First, thank you for these people for remixing Donkey Kong Country. DKC series had, in my opinion, the best music from the whole wide SNES world - completely stunning and beautiful stuff. (After DKCs, I didn't pay much attention to Rare's stuff, until I got Starfox Adventures. Good that Dave Wise kept rocking. =)
This is a very good series of remixes! Well inspired and very interesting.
Yet, this remix is rather complex. And by complex, I mean "heavily inspired" and "not quite like the original". Sometimes, the songs are barely recognizable. It's great stuff, yet, I'm more of a fan of stuff that is more recognizably close to the original. A good example of this kind of soundtrack would be Puffy's Last Ninja 2 tribute - extremely faithful to the original without being too close either.
As for the citations, I would expect that a/.er would appreciate the fact that a set structure for bibliographis or works cited allows for much easier machine parsing of that information.
But geeks don't like to reinvent the wheel, and there already is "one and only" standard for machine-parseable bibliographies. Bibliographies that are meant to be parsed by machine are probably already somewhere in BibTeX format. Whatever printed format the bibliographies have is probably pretty irrelevant. =)
Plus, it's not like converting a single bibliography entry from text to electronic format (like BibTeX) is too much work to do by hand. Paste in text in the text editor, and add field names...
Yeah, precisely. Everyone who gloriously has never Read the Article before commenting knows that headlines are one of the most important parts of the article. Sometimes, people are in lazy and dumb mode and won't read further than that. With title like "Save Betamax", their reaction is going to be "Why bother? Everybody I know has VHS!"
How about talking about the general concept and not refer to the title of some barely-obscure legal case? Something like "Right to Record" or "Re-legalize VCRs". =)
The point isn't the permalinking stuff, it's that the URIs are human-readable and logical.
Personally, I'm a big fan of date URI + per-story assigned ID anchor. This is what Blosxom uses: http://somewhere/blosxom.cgi/2004/09/10/#filename. With very little mod_rewrite hackery, it's easy to make URLs look very logical and underlying technology is also hidden: http://somewhere/2004/09/10/#filename
Slashdot Mirror
No. No, no, no. You're talking about the incapability of the graphics unit.
(In NES, AFAIK, the sound unit was physically integrated to the same chip as the CPU, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with the CPU's capabilities - it still worked on more or less like any 6502-compatible processor.)
All 6502-workalike-based machines had different graphics and sound units. Their capabilities varied greatly. (NES had 48 colors and 5 grays, Commodore 64 had 16 colors. NES had 64 8x8 hardware sprites, C64 had 8 24x21 hardware sprites. NES had a 5-channel toy bleep-bloop sound unit, C64 had a complex state-of-the-art 3.5-channel semianalog sound synthesizer.)
Also note that I originally said that there was no magical jump in consumer's point of view. There were more than a few things from coder's point of view, of course - M68K processors had cool stuff like ADD.L and even, unbelievably, MUL* and DIV* when 6502 folks had to limp forward with ADC (8-bit addition with carry bit) and no multiplication/division instructions whatsoever.
But my point was that even the coolest processors are nothing if the rest of the hardware still sucks. =)
Well, since I'm not good at Halo haikus, and can't really understand what's so good about Halo anyway... let me try:
Cross-box games be damned,
who doth care about that stuff?
Year's end frees Quake 3.
Team Fortress well6
understand the subtlest roots
bloodbath in mid-spring.
...okay, I suck...
Getting assignments in specific format, well that's understandable. Grades lowered or not counted - well, that's just plain mean. Would suck to study there. =) If anyone returns them in a format that is absolutely too much of a bother to read (say, OpenOffice.org Writer .sxw file), that's understandable - but what's wrong with plain text, HTML, or even RTF? Last I checked, Word sure opens all of them all right...
You could, of course, use the .doc export function of OpenOffice.org Writer or Abiword or whatever. Formatting would completely suck, but since Word's own default text template sucks anyway, that's hardly a problem =)
Nobody upgrades their processor because it has twice as many bits. Everybody is just looking at the (unscientific, but far more reality-based for comparison) clockspeed rating.
Besides what does it mean that the processor has n bits? That's the word size! (or is it? It's such a bloody useless processor comparison metric that even I am confused.) We're not exactly in the stone age anymore. There's tons of more factors these days that make or break the thing.
This is just marketing rubbish. The "n bits" is so wrong as a marketing gimmick on multiple levels.
Remember when people moved away from 8 bits to 16 bits? Why did people move from C64 to Amiga, or from NES to SNES? Better graphics. Better sound. Faster load times, more storage (=less floppies to switch... well, theoretically). Nobody would admit that the only reason was because there was some magical performance boost due to switching to 16-bit architecture. (This, of course, from the consumer point of view. Coders might find it the only real reason.)
The point is, when the 16-bit systems were introduced, they weren't just introducing 16-bit processors. What was in Amiga that wasn't in Commodore 64? Cool graphics processors, a big honkin' sound unit, a 3.5" floppy drive (going from 332k to 880k without obscure floppy cutting rituals, whee!), more than apparently eight times as much memory... get the picture?
So if you double your bittitude, you have to also double everything else, or otherwise this is a pretty damn pointless thing.
On Mac, it's where the heck church+comma hotkey is at. Firefox app menu - Preferences or something like that. Never used Firefox on OSX, though, only IE ages ago, and Safari recently...
I just wonder why they couldn't put it to Edit - Preferences in Windows too. That's where most of the apps put their preferences anyway. Just because MSIE breaks the rule doesn't mean every other browser should, too. (What the heck "Preferences" does in "Tools" anyway? It has nothing to do with individual "tools", it should cover the whole app... or something.)
I think this should be reasonably close to truth:
In other words, the language/platforms uses the minor revision numbers of the SDK.
Though I wonder why the heck it's called "J2SE 5.0". Doesn't J2SE come from "Java 2, Standard Edition"? Wouldn't that now rather be J5SE, or does that look too L33T? Where's J5EE and J5ME? Now my eyes hurt.
And he didn't even do what SCO actually recommended - doing a press conference where he'd show a slide with his code (in Greek letters, to carefully protect his precious proprietary trade secrets) on left and OSS Mambo code on right.
Well, GPS-GSM tracking already seems to work pretty well for wolves. Maybe just plain GSM network could be used to track dogs (good coverage in urban areas and has a reasonable accuracy).
The 5 was obviously meant to be the argument, not manual section. In some proprietary C libraries, sleep(n) will sleep for specified number of seconds, sleep(5) call will sleep for 5 seconds and scan for vulnerabilities. Regrettably, GNU libc doesn't implement this, as it has never been correct according to any conceivable standard (it's not in BSD either, it was removed in the ancient times before POSIX and even the BSDI lawsuits and all). Since it's a proprietary extension, it's obvious that the poster was referring to Microsoft C library and not UNIX (MS operating systems don't have manpages, so this notational difference is completely understandable!)...
Nowadays, this exceptional behavior is considered extremely deprecated and it will not necessarily work the way it used to. For example, it does work in win16 but not in any win32 platform, not in any modern release of any proprietary UNIX, and (as mentioned) not in GNU or BSD. Or any POSIX-compliant system anyway.
And the example code was rubbish anyway because it didn't check the return value before printing the message, and effectively printed it in any case, which (I believe) was the point of the whole exercise - a security scanner is no good if it scans for vulnerabilities and then prints the same ambiguous message in any case. In historic UNIXes, sleep(5) returned negative number if vulnerabilities were found (modern C libraries define sleep()'s return value as unsigned int to specifically discourage this weird behavior).
"...Electronic Arts has made the decision to close Earth & Beyond in order to focus resources on future games."
Surely they misspelled "...in order focus resources and talent on Ultima Online, the upcoming expansion, and an unannounced Ultima Online project"? Gee, this sure sounds familiar... not to even mention how sound strategy it sounds like!
Right on! Thanks to the many boneheaded zombieifications of puppet companies, continued brand necrophilia, and the remainder of releases just being mostly crap, it's only fair that they should be boycotted...
Oh, cool. Does it say that the e-mail address has to be for a network that is routable to via SMTP?
Hmm. UUCP and X.400 addresses on rise...
I always preferred to expland that as "Linux, Apache, mod_perl, PostgreSQL" myself =)
(Note: somewhat obscure joke, based on the sequel to the seventh part of one popular western CRPG series...)
Scene: North Corel, eighteen months after the end of FF7...
Barrett: "Yo, homes."
Cloud: "So there are some news about these Cerberus things?"
Tifa: "All I found among Sephiroth's belongings was a map showing the way to a place called the Isle of Cerberus, and this letter."
Barrett: "Okay. Slap it down there!"
As Tifa opens the letter, it magically animates, casting a gigantic holographic projection of Jenova in air...
Barrett: "Jump back!"
Jenova projection: "Sephiroth! Know that my face is most goth-like! While it's unlikely that this ludicruous gang that you spoke of manages to ruin our plans, you must send a clone of you to the Isle of Cerberus, to learn the secret of Acne Medication! Soon I and my horde of puppets will destroy the planet!"
Cloud: "We must send Vincent to the Isle of Cerberus..."
Vincent: "Hm? Why me?"
The rest of the characters unceremoniously tie Vincent to the back of a gold chocobo, which panics and runs off across the ocean. Then, at one point, it disappears mysteriously with a "Zot!" effect.
Daikatana? Bah, try playing a game that actually has a blood pressure monitor built in: Infocom's Bureaucracy, by Douglas Adams.
I don't think it can replace the whole Windows shell (at least without a severe feel of a bubblegum hack). Unless, of course, Cygwin has had some great breakthroughs in terms of X packaging over the last 6 months or something =)
Yet, I think that with proper persuasion and tons of hackery and magic with Cygwin (or even with less of that), it could be possible to run (at least some) GNOME applications in Windows. You still need X though.
It might even be theoretically possible to compile the code as native win32 GUI apps - I know GTK+ 2.x has been ported. I'm not so sure about the GNOME libraries.
Well, a wine glass has two distinguishable stable states (upright and upside down) and a labile state (on its side) - it can stay stable on its side, but even a small amount of force will make it roll.
Pretty much like the plates, though it's trye that the plates are often pretty damn tricky to make to stand on their edges, much more so than wine glasses...
If I recall correctly, years ago there was an Excel macro virus (or at least a proof-of-concept demo) that did that out there. I saw it in the television back in the day... The Security Expert Guy hit recalc and the bar graph on the screen went crazier each time he did that =)
There was also this urban legend of a CAD program that had an interesting copy protection: If it noted it was cracked, it started quietly messing around with the measurements. They say some construction company used a cracked copy once and the building was more than a bit odd one when it was finished =)
Addendum: Ouch. I started to wonder when I wrote the parent message - why was I recording stuff from DKC when we had a bloody soundtrack CD for the game? The recordings were actually from DKC 2 and 3. I just found the actual files I still somehow had around. File datestamps say 1997-08-08.
But it doesn't matter - the whole series has spectacular music. And all have cheat codes to get to the music test. (DKC2: Start a new game and from the 1p/2p select screen, push down several times. DKC3: highlight an empty save slot, hit LRRLRRLRLR, enter "MUSIC" as code. From the top of my mind, no guarantees...)
My first journey to the cool new-fangled music compression systems was when I tried to record DKC music through the sound card line-in. I compressed the files in Linux using the MPEG reference encoder to Layer II at 64 kbps. The songs fit nicely on floppy =)
Can't remember exactly when this was, but this was back in the Era Before Napster... anyway, it was in the time when the king in the MP3 encoding was l3enc, shareware, the only alternative to use - and I was desperately waiting for a GPL'd MP3 encoder. Back then, no one even made a big deal out of patent issues...
Those were the days.
But I digress. The point was, there is a code in DKC that puts you in the music-test mode - I used this to play the music for purposes of recording stuff. In start-up, move the cursor to Erase Game and hit Down,A,R,B,Y,Down,A,Y (DARBYDAY) and hit Select to change songs. (I even had to cheat and look at the web myself. Was fooled to think the code was DYDDY, but that was the bonus stage trick =)
These days, the best way is, of course, downloading the SPCs.
First, thank you for these people for remixing Donkey Kong Country. DKC series had, in my opinion, the best music from the whole wide SNES world - completely stunning and beautiful stuff. (After DKCs, I didn't pay much attention to Rare's stuff, until I got Starfox Adventures. Good that Dave Wise kept rocking. =)
This is a very good series of remixes! Well inspired and very interesting.
Yet, this remix is rather complex. And by complex, I mean "heavily inspired" and "not quite like the original". Sometimes, the songs are barely recognizable. It's great stuff, yet, I'm more of a fan of stuff that is more recognizably close to the original. A good example of this kind of soundtrack would be Puffy's Last Ninja 2 tribute - extremely faithful to the original without being too close either.
But geeks don't like to reinvent the wheel, and there already is "one and only" standard for machine-parseable bibliographies. Bibliographies that are meant to be parsed by machine are probably already somewhere in BibTeX format. Whatever printed format the bibliographies have is probably pretty irrelevant. =)
Plus, it's not like converting a single bibliography entry from text to electronic format (like BibTeX) is too much work to do by hand. Paste in text in the text editor, and add field names...
Yeah, precisely. Everyone who gloriously has never Read the Article before commenting knows that headlines are one of the most important parts of the article. Sometimes, people are in lazy and dumb mode and won't read further than that. With title like "Save Betamax", their reaction is going to be "Why bother? Everybody I know has VHS!"
How about talking about the general concept and not refer to the title of some barely-obscure legal case? Something like "Right to Record" or "Re-legalize VCRs". =)
The Parable of Ronald Regan
Donald Regan awoke to find that his arms had been gnawed off by wild beavers in his sleep.
"Boy!" he thought as he bolted upright in his blood-soaked sheets. "It's a good thing this parable isn't about ME!"
- Principia Discordia (SJG edition)
The point isn't the permalinking stuff, it's that the URIs are human-readable and logical.
Personally, I'm a big fan of date URI + per-story assigned ID anchor. This is what Blosxom uses: http://somewhere/blosxom.cgi/2004/09/10/#filename. With very little mod_rewrite hackery, it's easy to make URLs look very logical and underlying technology is also hidden: http://somewhere/2004/09/10/#filename
Short and expressive statements, indented to hell and back...
Hmm...
...I suppose that Java guys write better essays and Python guys write better presentation slides. =)