The PS2 was the first console to have major backwards-compatibility (ie you could chuck in a PS game and it would play - there were even optimisation options). No other console does it, and it was a big deal when it happened. The PS lives on a single chip, and Sony have demonstrated a similar single-chip emulation of the PS2.
Why would Xbox2 be backwards compatible? The whole thread seems to expect this should happen, and numerous people are happily quoting "they can't do this because they'd break compatibility". Wake up! Backwards compatibility in the game industry (other than PS and GC) is a luxury, not a right.
For example the BBC has not embraced Open Source, even for their own in house products, even under a non-commercial-use-only license. They are an organisation that could do such things free from commercial considerations, yet refuse to. It's infuriating.
There used to be a unit at Kingswood Warren that worked extensively using OSS. They even had a webcam here [No longer working] with a great big inflatable Tux in the background. Then the unit got sucked into the Beeb's commercial arm, moved elesewhere and were forced at gunpiont to use IIS. I cried for them, having had the same thing happen to me.
2) How the hell is the quality of someone else's marriage going to affect your own?
That's what I couldn't understand. The fact that Shrub et al are talking about "danger" and "threat" without ever qualifying exactly how the damage is done is a dead giveaway - they cannot defend their position as their position is indefensible. "You're all equal, just some of you are less equal than others".
4) I'm [afraid?] these arguments against gay marriage are the exact same ones used against inter-racial marriages 50 years ago.
I didn't think of it that way, but you're spot on. Scary how short people's memories are, and scary also how this dovetails with other warnings from recent history people seem to be repeating these days.
Here in the USA, we have a big fuss over seeing one female breast exposed on national TV. Meanwhile, in London there's a newspaper that makes a point of publishing a photo of a topless model on one of the first few pages.
The very same paper that GWB gave one of his rare interviews to, strangely.
In parts of Europe, pro-Nazi material that we're willing to tolerate in the USA is absolutely forbiden, particularly in the places that were invaded during World War II. We can write off Nazis as political loonies, but those places feel terror when the topic is brought up since they saw it first hand.
In Germany it's a (frequently prosecuted) criminal act to deny the holocaust took place. Regional considerations play a huge part in our lives, and the net is challenging this. Can a German deny the holocaust on a Brazilian website on a Australian server?
On an entirely unrelated note, why is a union of 2 commited lovers, whatever their sex, a threat to "the oldest and most sacred institution in America", whereas a 2 minute drive-thru ceremony in Las Vegas isn't?
I know Israel was enemy number 1. I was making the point that he wouldn't lift a finger to help UBL, either. As in "I'd chew my own leg off before I did x".
As with all things, it's a scale. I'd argue that it's fairly hard to attack China with an Aegis system though, unless you want to fry them a dozen at a time. Ditto Patriot and other systems bought.
Don't be so pessimistic about the Middle East situation:) There are other more probable vaporize-everything scenarios:( I don't really think the Isreali/Palestinian conflict will lead to a nuclear war. Even if there are nuclear bombs being unleashed, they will be isolated and won't really do much damage (I'm talking about dirty bombs.)
'Suitcase nuke' in Jerusalem [where better to hit at the 'Zionist crusaders'?] Tel Aviv hits Mecca + Medina [This one's a bit of a stretch, but I'd imagine the plans exist] Islamabad hits Tel Aviv It all goes downhill from here...
I agree that Stumpy McNutjob (AKA Kim Jong Il) is probably more of a worry though, depending on how far he thinks he can push - unless the Northern Resource Area concept takes off... I think Moscow should fill out those NATO forms now and keep them in a drawer, just in case...
I'm not exactly saying Taiwan is Chinese. But it isn't independent in any sense either. The UN does not recognize it. Most countries don't. It doesn't really have an independent foreign policy of any sort.
As I understand the situation, Taiwan is being excruciatingly polite about the whole affair. They acknowledge their limited independence, and would probably consider being ruled under a similar "one nation, two systems" regime as Hong Kong.
They realise that as soon as they make overtures to the UN, or overtly declare independence, it will poison relations with Beijing irreperably. All they want *is* a limited independence, and note that almost entirely the hardware sold to Taiwan by the US is defensive.
Palestine is probably a good example, in effect but not cause; the cause is almost diametrically oppposed - Israel forces the status on them, whereas Taiwan assumes it itself. But that's a whole other can of worms (albeit also one in my personal top-three-reasons-we'll-all-vaporise-one-day list)
For satellite TV it is even believed that the chips were scanned with an electronic microscope to find the underlying algorithms.
This is a fascinating story, involving DirecTV, Murdoch and some shady Israeli labs feeding corporate-grade secrets to card hackers. Much more info via here.
I was amused to discover that 747s [and 757s?] contain a large DU counterweight in the tail and more in the wings. Density, see.
So, if you ever see a 747 burning, cover your mouth and get the hell away from it. Uranium Oxide (formed at temperatures as low as 450degC) is a nasty bugger..
The only example of a burning 747 causing problems I've ever found was the 1992 El AL cargo crash in Amsterdam, but that flight had perfume and flowers[1] on board as well so the results are a little messed up.
[1] 29Kg of fissile plutonium and enough raw ingredients to make 1500 litres of a lethal nerve agent, as it later turned out. Government lies disgust me.
hope it gets a lot of publicity in the Middle East. I like the thought of the Mohammedan fiends choking on their hookahs when they learn they got their asses shot to rags by a girl. Heh heh!
Iraq was governed by a socialist secular state system, which portrayed itself as Islamic only when it suited them. This is why an Al Queda-Iraq link is going to be impossible to prove (despite what 70% of Americans think none has yet been demonstrated); UBL wanted to overthrow Saddam almost as much as the Bush junta, and Saddam would have given Israel military assistance before UBL.
These are the facts - the media portrayal is different, obviously. *sigh*.
-- NOT FLAMEBAIT. NOT TROLLING. FACTS, IN A PLEASANT LEMON SAUCE, SINCE 1999
Shocker! Big business spends money to try and make more money! And some of the spending is a little grey, ethically and morally speaking!
Isn't this supposed to be a news site?
-- This is not flamebait or trolling (and these are not the droids you seek). This is commentary, done in a sarcastic tone. Posting tiny examples of the prevalence of corporate influence in our world is a waste of time.
Of course, after writing this, I remembered the Soviet RORSAT series of satellites, that are powered by reactors. I think there's US hardware up there with similar setups, also for surveillance.
So launching a reactor not a first, but using it for propulsion would be. I'd bet it takes a much bigger hunk of U238 to get to Mars than to take pictures of navy bases from space though.
It could also be argued that the embargos were effectively an act of war just as OPEC cutting off US oil supply would be today
Why would OPEC cutting off the US oil supply be an act of war?
If OPEC picketed your ports, attacked your supply convoys and blockaded your allies, that would be an act of war. A trade group deciding not to sell their product to a certain country, whatever the political reasons, is not an act of war, no matter how much a lot of people in the US might like it to be.
Then again, if Bush has managed to declare The War Against Terror to be a legitimate war, despite there being no enemy and not even any substantiated proof of who attacked the US in 2001, then maybe he can declare war against a group of men in suits too?
As long as you don't actually activate your reactor until you reach a safe orbit, the amount of radioactivity is small
The only worrying part is that you have to choose a launch area where you are on the right latitude for the orbit you're after and where an exploding nuclear reactor at 60,000 feet won't scatter dirt all over everywhere. AFAIK, it's not technology holding back nuclear space flight, it's the fact no-one's brave enough to loft several kilos of fissible material upwards attached to several dozen tons of rocket fuel.
What do you think of the BT200? I'm in the market for a bluetooth headset. Does it work with both the phone and the Powerbook?
The powerbooks just got a bluetooth update to improve connectivity to a wider range of BT headsets, so more than likely, yes. However, I'd go for the Plantronics M3000 as it's essentially the Nokia headset with a bigger battery. Personally, I have the SE HBH200 because it does caller ID on the headset and looks less like some sort of camp Star Trek jewelry.
Now if only someone will make a Bluetooth CDMA phone so I can switch to Sprint because my overpriced cell provider was just bought by the evil Cingular overlords.
IBM and NEC both just dropped support for Bluetooth in their ASIC core selection (which is key to cellphone, other cheap device, and mobo mfg'ers), LSI and Mitsubishi stopped development altogether after wasting some cash trying to figure out what the spec actually was and how to plug the holes in it safely
IBM, NEC, LSI and Mitsi together make up what, about 10% of the global cellphone market? Nokia have got on board and SE damn near 0wn bluetooth anyway. Bluetooth in phones isn't going anywhere.
And, if you don't think Intel can affect such a thing, try standing on the back of InfiniBand and trying to see through the dust to catch a glimpse of PCI-express as it buzzes by when Intel switched from the former to the latter.
Intel is combining BT and WiFI for centrino 2. Intel make a number of these every year, or so I'm told, so a standard dying shortly after Intel embrace it would seem to be a fairly spurious claim.
Bluetooth has taken years to get momentum, it's far from perfect and I've no doubt wireless USB is cool. However, it's here to stay. I hope, anyway, or my Bluetooth car kit, my Powerbook and my P800 are all going to have to revert to cables.
Stephenson provides a clean, narratative [?] tale with very little room for personal interpretation, IMO. The beauty of Gibson's work is that every year more of it comes true, and the very fact that it is written without the benefit of understanding nmap or assembly registers gives it a realism a strained Stephenson book will never have.
I read Cryptonomicon once, and won't read it again (unless I decide that maybe it can't be as bad as I remember). The ending was abrupt and comical, the story disjointed and the characters far too one-dimensional.
I have never found anywhere offering a more realistic could-be vision of the future than a Gibson book. He even has SUVs and mouldy space stations, and current buzz-terms like SARS and nanobots could have fallen ready-built from his pages.
This could lead to a similar situation to that seen within the Xbox developers scene - there's software developed to run on a modded xbox without using Microsoft's copyrighted XDK, which is semi-not-quite-yet-illegal and therefore can be considered "virgin" or "white", and software developed very much with the XDK which is illegal and which you have to look slightly harder for.
Could we see Virgin, White, Corporate Linux and alongside it dark Linux products, built to no legal compliance and used by the quite large group of people who don't care about copyright issues? As the flourishing 'piracy' culture [I'd guestimate 70-80% of any sample population will have borrowed/copied/cracked/shared/downloaded/shoplift ed software or content in their possession] demonstrates, there's a hella lot of them...
Will keeping the 2 seperate be one of the main challenges to Linux growth, development and ultimately commercial success?
Slashdot Mirror
The PS2 was the first console to have major backwards-compatibility (ie you could chuck in a PS game and it would play - there were even optimisation options). No other console does it, and it was a big deal when it happened. The PS lives on a single chip, and Sony have demonstrated a similar single-chip emulation of the PS2.
Why would Xbox2 be backwards compatible? The whole thread seems to expect this should happen, and numerous people are happily quoting "they can't do this because they'd break compatibility". Wake up! Backwards compatibility in the game industry (other than PS and GC) is a luxury, not a right.
2) How the hell is the quality of someone else's marriage going to affect your own?
That's what I couldn't understand. The fact that Shrub et al are talking about "danger" and "threat" without ever qualifying exactly how the damage is done is a dead giveaway - they cannot defend their position as their position is indefensible. "You're all equal, just some of you are less equal than others".
4) I'm [afraid?] these arguments against gay marriage are the exact same ones used against inter-racial marriages 50 years ago.
I didn't think of it that way, but you're spot on. Scary how short people's memories are, and scary also how this dovetails with other warnings from recent history people seem to be repeating these days.
On an entirely unrelated note, why is a union of 2 commited lovers, whatever their sex, a threat to "the oldest and most sacred institution in America", whereas a 2 minute drive-thru ceremony in Las Vegas isn't?
Poetic hyperbole.
I know Israel was enemy number 1. I was making the point that he wouldn't lift a finger to help UBL, either. As in "I'd chew my own leg off before I did x".
Tel Aviv hits Mecca + Medina [This one's a bit of a stretch, but I'd imagine the plans exist]
Islamabad hits Tel Aviv
It all goes downhill from here...
I agree that Stumpy McNutjob (AKA Kim Jong Il) is probably more of a worry though, depending on how far he thinks he can push - unless the Northern Resource Area concept takes off... I think Moscow should fill out those NATO forms now and keep them in a drawer, just in case...
Not only is Michael's CAPS key b0rked, he's stuck a day in the past.
iAMD64 has a nice ring to it, no?
I hope they bring back the blue man group to promote 64 bit desktop computing. They'd need another 4 limbs each or something though.
They realise that as soon as they make overtures to the UN, or overtly declare independence, it will poison relations with Beijing irreperably. All they want *is* a limited independence, and note that almost entirely the hardware sold to Taiwan by the US is defensive.
Palestine is probably a good example, in effect but not cause; the cause is almost diametrically oppposed - Israel forces the status on them, whereas Taiwan assumes it itself. But that's a whole other can of worms (albeit also one in my personal top-three-reasons-we'll-all-vaporise-one-day list)
I was amused to discover that 747s [and 757s?] contain a large DU counterweight in the tail and more in the wings. Density, see.
So, if you ever see a 747 burning, cover your mouth and get the hell away from it. Uranium Oxide (formed at temperatures as low as 450degC) is a nasty bugger..
The only example of a burning 747 causing problems I've ever found was the 1992 El AL cargo crash in Amsterdam, but that flight had perfume and flowers[1] on board as well so the results are a little messed up.
[1] 29Kg of fissile plutonium and enough raw ingredients to make 1500 litres of a lethal nerve agent, as it later turned out. Government lies disgust me.
These are the facts - the media portrayal is different, obviously. *sigh*.
--
NOT FLAMEBAIT. NOT TROLLING. FACTS, IN A PLEASANT LEMON SAUCE, SINCE 1999
Apple Version
Microsoft Version
Eric S Raymond Version
Shocker! Big business spends money to try and make more money! And some of the spending is a little grey, ethically and morally speaking!
Isn't this supposed to be a news site?
--
This is not flamebait or trolling (and these are not the droids you seek). This is commentary, done in a sarcastic tone. Posting tiny examples of the prevalence of corporate influence in our world is a waste of time.
Of course, after writing this, I remembered the Soviet RORSAT series of satellites, that are powered by reactors. I think there's US hardware up there with similar setups, also for surveillance.
So launching a reactor not a first, but using it for propulsion would be. I'd bet it takes a much bigger hunk of U238 to get to Mars than to take pictures of navy bases from space though.
It doesn't make much sense to say that, today, Taiwan is Chinese.
Why would OPEC cutting off the US oil supply be an act of war?
If OPEC picketed your ports, attacked your supply convoys and blockaded your allies, that would be an act of war. A trade group deciding not to sell their product to a certain country, whatever the political reasons, is not an act of war, no matter how much a lot of people in the US might like it to be.
Then again, if Bush has managed to declare The War Against Terror to be a legitimate war, despite there being no enemy and not even any substantiated proof of who attacked the US in 2001, then maybe he can declare war against a group of men in suits too?
Bluetooth has taken years to get momentum, it's far from perfect and I've no doubt wireless USB is cool. However, it's here to stay. I hope, anyway, or my Bluetooth car kit, my Powerbook and my P800 are all going to have to revert to cables.
Stephenson provides a clean, narratative [?] tale with very little room for personal interpretation, IMO. The beauty of Gibson's work is that every year more of it comes true, and the very fact that it is written without the benefit of understanding nmap or assembly registers gives it a realism a strained Stephenson book will never have.
I read Cryptonomicon once, and won't read it again (unless I decide that maybe it can't be as bad as I remember). The ending was abrupt and comical, the story disjointed and the characters far too one-dimensional.
I have never found anywhere offering a more realistic could-be vision of the future than a Gibson book. He even has SUVs and mouldy space stations, and current buzz-terms like SARS and nanobots could have fallen ready-built from his pages.
I stuck my ICQ number (low 1xxxxx) on Ebay a while back, and they pulled it under their Verified Rights Owner program when AOL contacted them.
Apparently AOL were the verified owner of the six digit number.
How can a username be owned? If it is owned by anyone, should it not be me?
This could lead to a similar situation to that seen within the Xbox developers scene - there's software developed to run on a modded xbox without using Microsoft's copyrighted XDK, which is semi-not-quite-yet-illegal and therefore can be considered "virgin" or "white", and software developed very much with the XDK which is illegal and which you have to look slightly harder for.
t ed software or content in their possession] demonstrates, there's a hella lot of them...
Could we see Virgin, White, Corporate Linux and alongside it dark Linux products, built to no legal compliance and used by the quite large group of people who don't care about copyright issues? As the flourishing 'piracy' culture [I'd guestimate 70-80% of any sample population will have borrowed/copied/cracked/shared/downloaded/shoplif
Will keeping the 2 seperate be one of the main challenges to Linux growth, development and ultimately commercial success?
Just my 1/50th of a theory.