That description is really messed up. Ocarina of Time is the first Zelda game to feature horseback riding. Twilight Princess is the first game to feature horseback combat.
Unless I'm misremembering things badly, OoT allows you to use the bow and arrow while riding Epona. Doesn't that count as "horseback combat"?
Its funny to see you categorize the nexus 7 as low end, since every performance related spec exceeds that of the ipad.
Not the one that really counts: the iPad 3 has a 9.7-inch screen with a 2048x1536 resolution (264 ppi), while the Nexus 7 has a 7-inch screen with a 1280x800 resolution (216 ppi). Since a tablet is pretty much all screen from a UI perspective, this difference is far more important than having a slightly faster CPU. (Not to mention that iOS is often considered a more polished user interface experience than Android.) Quad-core is overkill for tablets anyway; what, are you planning to run x264 on it or something? It's a web surfing / ebook / media consumption device.
That's a project I've been investigating the feasibility of recently, using a microcontroller or FPGA to emulate cartridges for use with real console hardware.
For the NES, this has already been done. You're correct that for the SNES, coprocessors would make it a more difficult proposition.
Why would they post the PCB? Well do you have a spare Zelda test cart to compare against? Even among those who have one; would they open it up? This isn't exactly an easy verification.
Opening NES cartridges is not at all difficult, and there is essentially no risk of damage if you use the correct tool and work with reasonable care. (Japanese Famicom games are actually more of a challenge, because they snap together rather than using screws, and it's easy to break the plastic trying to get them apart.)
I saw the questions section, but I found very little in the way of proof. There is no picture of a test cart's PCB to verify against, and the in article they refer to verify this claim has nothing more than front facing picture and a passing mention of the cart. Do you have a verifiable Zelda test cart PCB picture to compare against?
Someone on the NintendoAge forum who owns a yellow Zelda test cart said that it has the same PCB as the production cart.
You can see a photo of the production Zelda PCB here.
I wonder what the "SRP" stands for. Summer Retail Promotion, perhaps? Does anyone know if Zelda was demoed in toy stores during the summer of 1987? Just speculation on my part. I can't say for sure if it is authentic.
I am sure I'm overlooking something, but to me, it seems that all you need to do to "create" this prototype, is burn the ROM file (available around the web) onto the EPROMs, place them into a garden variety copy of Legend of Zelda, and that's it. One could even easily make a funky-colored case for the cart, with a 3D printer. A $50-100 expense for a 3 orders of magnitude higher profit.
Anyone planning to do this would need to design and fabricate a fake PCB as well, since the PCB for prototypes is considerably different for those on production NES games. On most NES boards, you can't even swap in an EPROM without doing some hacking to the traces, since the mask ROM pinouts are not standard.
If someone were both knowledgeable and dishonest enough to try something like this, they'd probably be better off counterfeiting a rare production NES game, like Stadium Events (which routinely goes for thousands of dollars). For that, they could get the PCB and cart casing from a common game, remove the old label, and forge a new one. The hardest part would be getting new mask ROMs with silkscreening matching the originals. My prediction is that if high-end NES collecting proves to be more than a passing fad, we'll see some very convincing counterfeits being manufactured in China before too much longer...
Several posters pointed out that the description seems to be for a newer Zelda game, not the original Legend of Zelda. This isn't because the seller put in incorrect info, but because there's a problem with the stock eBay description. Whenever you sell a video game on eBay, the selling tool will beg you to select the game from eBay's internal database and hassle you if you don't. This database information contains stuff like name, release date, and a short description (the part which was botched here). It also sometimes contains stock photos, which can be (and usually are) deleted and overridden by whoever is posting the listing.
eBay does the same thing with books and other media as well. You can see this by going to "Sell an item" and entering the media name in the box labeled "Enter a UPC, ISBN, VIN VIN help or keywords that describe your item." There are about 500 entries containing the phrase "Legend of Zelda", so it's not surprising that there might be some corrupted entries and/or duplicates in there.
Someone could of easily just taken a old cartridge rom from a released cart. and put it in its own case.
The circuit board is definitely not the same as the released version. The production version of Legend of Zelda has a standard NES-SNROM PCB. The prototype in this auction uses a custom board labeled "NES-SRP-TEST-02" which appears to have four EPROMs installed, probably 256Kbit each. (The production version has the game code on a single 1Mbit mask ROM.)
But that raises the obvious question: why would home/casual users want to choose the Surface over the iPad? It won't be much cheaper (if any), it won't have nearly as many apps available, and it won't be considered as cool or stylish. The iPad is already the de facto standard tablet, and Microsoft faces a steep uphill climb if they want to dislodge it. Between the iPad on the high end and the various cheap Android tablets (Kindle Fire, Nexus 7) on the low end, where is there room for Surface in the consumer market?
.. it is trying to create a new niche. One that has more in common with the ultra book market than iPads. Something that plays nice with business / enterprise setup.
The problem with that argument is that the Surface tablet runs WinRT, which can't join Windows domains. (The more expensive Surface Pro is an x86 tablet that can, but if they're aiming for business use, why even bother with the cheaper offering that doesn't do what is needed?)
From a mathematics perspective, algebra is everywhere.
From the perspective of middle school / high school education, "algebra" means an abstract field of study that involves equations with letter variables, usually disconnected from any real-world context.
Yes, you can write I=prt as an algebraic equation. But understanding how this works is not as difficult as what is usually called "algebra" because it does not involve abstract thinking and because its real-world application is clear and unambiguous. Many people, perhaps a majority, simply do not and cannot understand abstraction.
A lot of the things taught in high school algebra are completely disconnected from the real world. As a programmer, I probably use algebra-derived concepts more than the average person, but I can't remember the last time I ever had to factor a polynomial. Why do we think everyone needs to learn trivia like that?
Any tradesman who needs to find out whether a square is really square will generally use the Pythagorean theorem. Google "3-4-5 method" for details (though you can probably already guess from the title).
Really now. This presupposes that the point of education is to provide students with things they will "use." If this were the case, why not just send students to trade school?
Maybe we should be sending more students to trade school. It's not as if our current system of education is such a shining success, or that there are good jobs for all college graduates right now.
Specialization is what makes modern civilization possible. Without division of labor, we'd all be subsistence farmers. Either Heinlein didn't know what he was talking about, or (more likely) the words he put in the mouth of Lazarus Long weren't meant to be taken as gospel truth.
Screw that, it doesn't matter what algebra is good for.
My 5th grade math teacher said this, math helps change the way you think. It doesn't seem like much, but you'll need that way of thinking in the future. And she was right.
They used to make this same argument about Greek and Latin: sure, you may not actually use these skills, but they teach critical thinking and build character. It was nonsense then and it's nonsense now.
Most people are going to have credit cards, 401ks, mortgages, car loans, etc.
And understanding how these things work should definitely be a part of the basic high school curriculum. But figuring out interest rates doesn't require a full-fledged understanding of algebra.
substitute in his thesis,
Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white.
and substitute to:
History is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white.
"I am not good at", or "I don't want to" are not good arguments for not requiring learnin'.
The problem is that you didn't actually address the arguments he raises in the original article. His primary argument (as I read it) is twofold:
Algebra causes more trouble for more students than any other required subject
Algebra is not inherently necessary to good citizenship or educated adulthood
This second part of the argument is where your "gotcha!" formulation falls apart. Some very basic knowledge of US history may be required for good citizenship. But the equivalent in mathematics would not be algebra (a specialized skill which, as Dr. Hacker notes in the article, few adults actually use) but rather a basic understanding of fractions and decimals, knowing how to balance a bank account and calculate interest, and so forth.
But the whole point in outsourcing is that you pay a fixed amount to third parties to complete a specific job, and they take over the responsibility for making a profit (or, at worst, breaking even).
That's true if the job remains the same. But it seldom does. A tried-and-true method is to give a lowball amount for the basic contract, but charge out the ass for change requests. (And there will always be change requests.) This is true whether the contractee is a private company or the federal government.
Call me a cynic, but I think everyone wised up to the fact that they weren't really buying solid gold toilet seats, so they had to find something else in the budget to fund all that black ops stuff...
The toilet seat thing was blown way out of proportion. It was a custom-molded plastic assembly for military aircraft use, and as most people here know, when you do injection molding, the initial tooling costs are very high. High setup costs + low volume = seemingly outrageous per-unit price. It's not as if they were paying $700 for the same type of toilet seat you can buy at the local Home Depot.
It's the Department of "Defense". I would be surprised if it wasn't over budget. (I'd also be surprised if there wasn't some pork being doled out to contractors in key congressional districts from these programs.)
From the perspective of Microsoft's core markets, last decade wasn't really "lost". You could more accurately say there was a lost half-decade from 2004 to 2009. But Microsoft's bread and butter is the business/power-user desktop, and Windows 7 is the best desktop OS ever produced. As for Office, I know this will be controversial to say, but the Ribbon actually was a welcome change – once you get used to it (which doesn't really take that long), it's a lot more user-friendly than the old nested menus.
Microsoft is losing its way now, chasing the chimera of Apple-sized smartphone and tablet profits, while forgetting the core customers who count on them to provide the tools to do serious work (or, in some cases, serious gaming). Windows 8 is shaping up to be another Vista-sized flop, and we can only hope it will end with Ballmer out on the street and Microsoft returning to its senses.
The Forbes bankster types are just sore because they got played. Worse, they got played by a geek – someone they underestimated because he wasn't wearing a $5,000 business suit, but who proved by his handling of the IPO that he was smarter than all of them put together.
Zuckerberg already cashed out to the tune of a billion dollars. Why should he care that a bunch of arrogant bankers lost money on the stock? Not his problem. He still has a controlling interest in the company thanks to the Class B shares he retained, so the other shareholders can't even force him out.
Zuckerberg beat Wall Street at their own game, and they can't stand it.
Slashdot Mirror
That description is really messed up. Ocarina of Time is the first Zelda game to feature horseback riding. Twilight Princess is the first game to feature horseback combat.
Unless I'm misremembering things badly, OoT allows you to use the bow and arrow while riding Epona. Doesn't that count as "horseback combat"?
Its funny to see you categorize the nexus 7 as low end, since every performance related spec exceeds that of the ipad.
Not the one that really counts: the iPad 3 has a 9.7-inch screen with a 2048x1536 resolution (264 ppi), while the Nexus 7 has a 7-inch screen with a 1280x800 resolution (216 ppi). Since a tablet is pretty much all screen from a UI perspective, this difference is far more important than having a slightly faster CPU. (Not to mention that iOS is often considered a more polished user interface experience than Android.) Quad-core is overkill for tablets anyway; what, are you planning to run x264 on it or something? It's a web surfing / ebook / media consumption device.
That's a project I've been investigating the feasibility of recently, using a microcontroller or FPGA to emulate cartridges for use with real console hardware.
For the NES, this has already been done. You're correct that for the SNES, coprocessors would make it a more difficult proposition.
Why would they post the PCB? Well do you have a spare Zelda test cart to compare against? Even among those who have one; would they open it up? This isn't exactly an easy verification.
Opening NES cartridges is not at all difficult, and there is essentially no risk of damage if you use the correct tool and work with reasonable care. (Japanese Famicom games are actually more of a challenge, because they snap together rather than using screws, and it's easy to break the plastic trying to get them apart.)
I saw the questions section, but I found very little in the way of proof. There is no picture of a test cart's PCB to verify against, and the in article they refer to verify this claim has nothing more than front facing picture and a passing mention of the cart. Do you have a verifiable Zelda test cart PCB picture to compare against?
Someone on the NintendoAge forum who owns a yellow Zelda test cart said that it has the same PCB as the production cart.
You can see a photo of the production Zelda PCB here.
I wonder what the "SRP" stands for. Summer Retail Promotion, perhaps? Does anyone know if Zelda was demoed in toy stores during the summer of 1987? Just speculation on my part. I can't say for sure if it is authentic.
I am sure I'm overlooking something, but to me, it seems that all you need to do to "create" this prototype, is burn the ROM file (available around the web) onto the EPROMs, place them into a garden variety copy of Legend of Zelda, and that's it. One could even easily make a funky-colored case for the cart, with a 3D printer. A $50-100 expense for a 3 orders of magnitude higher profit.
Anyone planning to do this would need to design and fabricate a fake PCB as well, since the PCB for prototypes is considerably different for those on production NES games. On most NES boards, you can't even swap in an EPROM without doing some hacking to the traces, since the mask ROM pinouts are not standard.
If someone were both knowledgeable and dishonest enough to try something like this, they'd probably be better off counterfeiting a rare production NES game, like Stadium Events (which routinely goes for thousands of dollars). For that, they could get the PCB and cart casing from a common game, remove the old label, and forge a new one. The hardest part would be getting new mask ROMs with silkscreening matching the originals. My prediction is that if high-end NES collecting proves to be more than a passing fad, we'll see some very convincing counterfeits being manufactured in China before too much longer...
Several posters pointed out that the description seems to be for a newer Zelda game, not the original Legend of Zelda. This isn't because the seller put in incorrect info, but because there's a problem with the stock eBay description. Whenever you sell a video game on eBay, the selling tool will beg you to select the game from eBay's internal database and hassle you if you don't. This database information contains stuff like name, release date, and a short description (the part which was botched here). It also sometimes contains stock photos, which can be (and usually are) deleted and overridden by whoever is posting the listing.
eBay does the same thing with books and other media as well. You can see this by going to "Sell an item" and entering the media name in the box labeled "Enter a UPC, ISBN, VIN VIN help or keywords that describe your item." There are about 500 entries containing the phrase "Legend of Zelda", so it's not surprising that there might be some corrupted entries and/or duplicates in there.
Someone could of easily just taken a old cartridge rom from a released cart. and put it in its own case.
The circuit board is definitely not the same as the released version. The production version of Legend of Zelda has a standard NES-SNROM PCB. The prototype in this auction uses a custom board labeled "NES-SRP-TEST-02" which appears to have four EPROMs installed, probably 256Kbit each. (The production version has the game code on a single 1Mbit mask ROM.)
Simple - home/casual users. Like the Ipad.
But that raises the obvious question: why would home/casual users want to choose the Surface over the iPad? It won't be much cheaper (if any), it won't have nearly as many apps available, and it won't be considered as cool or stylish. The iPad is already the de facto standard tablet, and Microsoft faces a steep uphill climb if they want to dislodge it. Between the iPad on the high end and the various cheap Android tablets (Kindle Fire, Nexus 7) on the low end, where is there room for Surface in the consumer market?
The problem with that argument is that the Surface tablet runs WinRT, which can't join Windows domains. (The more expensive Surface Pro is an x86 tablet that can, but if they're aiming for business use, why even bother with the cheaper offering that doesn't do what is needed?)
From a mathematics perspective, algebra is everywhere.
From the perspective of middle school / high school education, "algebra" means an abstract field of study that involves equations with letter variables, usually disconnected from any real-world context.
Yes, you can write I=prt as an algebraic equation. But understanding how this works is not as difficult as what is usually called "algebra" because it does not involve abstract thinking and because its real-world application is clear and unambiguous. Many people, perhaps a majority, simply do not and cannot understand abstraction.
A lot of the things taught in high school algebra are completely disconnected from the real world. As a programmer, I probably use algebra-derived concepts more than the average person, but I can't remember the last time I ever had to factor a polynomial. Why do we think everyone needs to learn trivia like that?
Just tip 20% and don't be a cheap bastard.
Any tradesman who needs to find out whether a square is really square will generally use the Pythagorean theorem. Google "3-4-5 method" for details (though you can probably already guess from the title).
Really now. This presupposes that the point of education is to provide students with things they will "use." If this were the case, why not just send students to trade school?
Maybe we should be sending more students to trade school. It's not as if our current system of education is such a shining success, or that there are good jobs for all college graduates right now.
Specialization is for insects
Specialization is what makes modern civilization possible. Without division of labor, we'd all be subsistence farmers. Either Heinlein didn't know what he was talking about, or (more likely) the words he put in the mouth of Lazarus Long weren't meant to be taken as gospel truth.
Screw that, it doesn't matter what algebra is good for. My 5th grade math teacher said this, math helps change the way you think. It doesn't seem like much, but you'll need that way of thinking in the future. And she was right.
They used to make this same argument about Greek and Latin: sure, you may not actually use these skills, but they teach critical thinking and build character. It was nonsense then and it's nonsense now.
Most people are going to have credit cards, 401ks, mortgages, car loans, etc.
And understanding how these things work should definitely be a part of the basic high school curriculum. But figuring out interest rates doesn't require a full-fledged understanding of algebra.
substitute in his thesis, Algebra is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white. and substitute to: History is an onerous stumbling block for all kinds of students: disadvantaged and affluent, black and white.
"I am not good at", or "I don't want to" are not good arguments for not requiring learnin'.
The problem is that you didn't actually address the arguments he raises in the original article. His primary argument (as I read it) is twofold:
This second part of the argument is where your "gotcha!" formulation falls apart. Some very basic knowledge of US history may be required for good citizenship. But the equivalent in mathematics would not be algebra (a specialized skill which, as Dr. Hacker notes in the article, few adults actually use) but rather a basic understanding of fractions and decimals, knowing how to balance a bank account and calculate interest, and so forth.
But the whole point in outsourcing is that you pay a fixed amount to third parties to complete a specific job, and they take over the responsibility for making a profit (or, at worst, breaking even).
That's true if the job remains the same. But it seldom does. A tried-and-true method is to give a lowball amount for the basic contract, but charge out the ass for change requests. (And there will always be change requests.) This is true whether the contractee is a private company or the federal government.
Call me a cynic, but I think everyone wised up to the fact that they weren't really buying solid gold toilet seats, so they had to find something else in the budget to fund all that black ops stuff...
The toilet seat thing was blown way out of proportion. It was a custom-molded plastic assembly for military aircraft use, and as most people here know, when you do injection molding, the initial tooling costs are very high. High setup costs + low volume = seemingly outrageous per-unit price. It's not as if they were paying $700 for the same type of toilet seat you can buy at the local Home Depot.
It's the Department of "Defense". I would be surprised if it wasn't over budget. (I'd also be surprised if there wasn't some pork being doled out to contractors in key congressional districts from these programs.)
From the perspective of Microsoft's core markets, last decade wasn't really "lost". You could more accurately say there was a lost half-decade from 2004 to 2009. But Microsoft's bread and butter is the business/power-user desktop, and Windows 7 is the best desktop OS ever produced. As for Office, I know this will be controversial to say, but the Ribbon actually was a welcome change – once you get used to it (which doesn't really take that long), it's a lot more user-friendly than the old nested menus.
Microsoft is losing its way now, chasing the chimera of Apple-sized smartphone and tablet profits, while forgetting the core customers who count on them to provide the tools to do serious work (or, in some cases, serious gaming). Windows 8 is shaping up to be another Vista-sized flop, and we can only hope it will end with Ballmer out on the street and Microsoft returning to its senses.
The Forbes bankster types are just sore because they got played. Worse, they got played by a geek – someone they underestimated because he wasn't wearing a $5,000 business suit, but who proved by his handling of the IPO that he was smarter than all of them put together.
Zuckerberg already cashed out to the tune of a billion dollars. Why should he care that a bunch of arrogant bankers lost money on the stock? Not his problem. He still has a controlling interest in the company thanks to the Class B shares he retained, so the other shareholders can't even force him out.
Zuckerberg beat Wall Street at their own game, and they can't stand it.
He sold a billion dollars worth of stock at the IPO. Something tells me he'll be just fine.