I've had a certain soft spot for LZX for some time. Came out on the Amiga quite a while back, when LHA was pretty much it. It was fast, it compressed well. Better than PKZIP, even, as it apparently used a rather large search window.
But that seemed to be the end of it. I remember hearing that it was rather difficult to code for a DOS PC - why I don't think was explained - and Aminet was never happy to move over as they couldn't get a UNIX decompresser for it.
It strikes me as hugely unlikely that it's simply impossible to get it running under anything other than AmigaOS, but does anyone know what came of it? Seemed like a real breakthrough at the time.
Handwriting recognition: I _hate_ Graffiti. Produces too many errors and it's not flexible enough. By all accounts, Jot and Calligraphy are better.
Resolution: I wouldn't object to haveing a bigger screen, and CE boxes have screens three times the resolution. Plus, the writing area isn't fixed like the Palm, it's just another part of the screen. So, if you're not writing you can reclaim the space, and the virtual keyboard takes up the same amount of space as the handwriting pad.
Voic recording: it's designed for quick notes and it compresses. You can get quite a bit into that much memory and I'd like that featuer on my Palm. Except I can't without effectively strapping a separate machine on.
Play MP3s: Perhaps I don't want to carry _another_ little box around. I'd love one of those Symbian Quartz prototypes, simply as I don't much like carrying round a Palm and a phone when there's clear overlap.
I don't dispute that Palms are nice, or that WinCE as was has problems. But there's an awful lot that's very nice about those machines and if they'd only get a sane person to redo that UI, I'd want one.
I agree that peretual motion and the like isn't likely to be something I'll ever see, but last time I heard conservation of ebergy was a theory, nothing more.
It seems to fit, but has it actually been shwon to be true? If it hasn't, all power to anyone trying to disprove it with perpetual motion machines. If they've got that much free time, why not?
3rd January 2042 works nicely enough by the system they're suggesting here but I'd have to be picky and prefer the same day in 416 or 4159. Neither of which will, I suspect, have been or be seen by anyone in this forum.
Orbital engines may be a bad idea, but this was being promtoed a few months ago. It was an unconventional two-stroke where everything 'orbitted', hence my assumption it was an orbital.
This system could have combustion chambers of any type acheivable with conventional engines. With that few moving parts. Looks a VERY nice idea.
The poiont is that fuel cell cars aren't BATTERY electric cars, which is what most people think of when I refer to electric cars. Hence the distinction.
Oops, forgotten about that - though, given how many people go to NY City on shooping trips from the UK it's either bendable, badly enforced or lightly punished.
Nice to know I'm not the only person who'd like to get one to the UK to have a play with;)
I suspect a more enterprising slashdotter could buy up a bundle, make the necessary adaptions and stick them on eBay. Anyone feeling tempted, or do I have to fly across the Atlantic to get a £60 computer?;) OK, _several_ £60 computers...
Electric motors aren't that fantastic in cars, actually. Sure, they've got high torque at low revs: too much, actually. Most larger electric testbeds have to be managed VERY carefully to minimise this, or you spin your wheels rather embarrassingly every time you pull away, damaging your tyres in the process.
Battery energy density's pretty poor, too, while the energy tends to come from coal fuelled power stations which actually increases pollution. So your nice clean electric car's only serving to move the pollution away from the cities - NIMBY all over again.
Electric motors have a lot less moving parts than a conventional petrol engine, I'll agree, but have you come across orbital engines? Six or seven parts, only a couple of which move. Still more than an electric motor, I'll agree, but a more realistic proposition for cars, too.
If you want a practical alternative to petrol powered cars, it's likely to be either hydrogen fuelled combustion engines or fuel cells. Both are substantially better than electric cars for the environment and are relatively easy to slot into the existing infrastructure. Wait 10-15 years and they'll probably cost little more than current petrol vehicles of similar ability.
I accept I'm not even remotely a geologist, but I understand Venus is slowly losing its atmosphere due to a lack of a magnetic field. And that Venus is a pretty similar size to Earth.
Go into PC World and you'll find row after row after row of comptuers lined up in demo mode. The Windows boxes tend to be running adverts, screensavers or just showing the desktop.
The iMacs are all playing A Bug's Life.
Now, look at the volume of games available for each platform and think whether Apple UK might possibly have had a word with PC World on this one...
Speaking as someone who does moderate periodically, I'd disagree. That _was_ flamebait.
One sentence in particular:
"95% of Microsoft's OS releases are bug fixes, and the other 5% are featrues they stole from other people, but you have to pay for it!"
This implies that only 1 OS release in 20 adds functionality and that NONE of the functions they're adding are there own idea. Not just the good ideas they're adding, the bad ones too.
Both of those statements are demostrably false, the comment's flamebait.
Mounting as a process may well make sense, but I don't think you can really say that the UNIX way of still mounting disks manually is particularly clever.
OK, I'm a throwback who still likes Amigas, but they've got stuff they can teach you. In this case, floppy disks that don't have weird, multi-fork formats like the Mac but have a proper icon and launching system (well, pretty good - not ideal though) and where the system notices when they go in and out of the drive.
The Windows approach is pretty silly - it REALLY should be able to notice a disk change by now - but the UNIX approach could do with some automation for user-friendliness.
I did work experience 3-4 years ago with AS/400s and RPG. Weird until you get used to it, but great fun!
Anyway, my technical knowledge of OS/400 is decidedly limited but the lovely guy who explained it all to me definitely said it didn't care about WHAT storage is used, it just used storage. The boundary between memory and disc wasn't visible.
Hopefully someone who has worked with them for more than a week and a little more recently can help out here, but that's what I recall.
Greg
Re: stuffed full of all the features anyone could
on
Multics Scheduler
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· Score: 1
I'd have to agree that Linux isn't clearly superior, or even smaller. Code size figures for Windows include all sorts of things which aren't in the Linux kernel.
But I have to take issue with your comment about the Windows 2000 GUI. I agree it's still not brilliant, but it's noticeably nicer to use than 98. There's still a few silly little things I'm not quite comfortable with, but it's not all that bad a GUI. Really.
Greg, posting under IE5 as Netscape's playing up. Oh, it's nice to be reminded of just why I hate IE...
I don't think that's even the dominant form of humour here, TBH - though it does come up relatively frequently.
Work with MS products for any length of time, though, and you'll discover fairly rapidly that the system crashes - or degrades performance far enough to force a reboot - fairly frequently. They can blame the third parties or the device drivers all they like, but neither should be capable of doing that much damage and the main reason they play up is the daft DLL problems.
Yes, some of it's exaggerated but you realise how bad it can be when you have to live with it. It's not that far from the truth IME.
Average possible or acheived, I wonder? Not that many people bother trying to run a 9x box 24/7, IME.
I did last year, though. As we all know, it can aoccasionally get in a strop and crash repeatedly, they taking down the mean. But when it was running, it'd usually run for a day or so before it (or an unprotected application) did something silly and forced me to reboot due to substantially degraded performance.
I'd love to know how to get 9x stable enough to produce an average possible uptime of 2.1 days.
I agree, and said so when the previous bill came up for discussion here.
The problem, though, as another poster pointed out, is that that takes a VERY long time and isn't automatic. In the mean time, we have some extremely illiberal legislation on the books, granting the government powers that most of us seem to find repugnant.
"I would agree that is is just an only extention to an already dificult problem. I would also agree that users have the ability to "live off the grid" if they truley value their privacy. What I would take exception with is the degree graularity offered by triagulating your traveling habits with a hard ID on who you are."
This isn't anything new, though - they can do this anyway. Whether they do or not isn't relevant.
"Is it wrong for my store, on it's own, to know what I buy and when? No, as long as they seek my informed consent and compensate me for the release of this valuable information."
Informed consent is the key phrase here. I'm not sure it's present much of the time, which is why I refuse to have a supermarket loyalty card. They can offer this due to the value of the data, but the implications of this simply aren't understood by most people.
"Is it wrong for my cell phone company to triagulate my position as I use my phone? No, as long as they ask my informed consent, and compensate me for this valuable information."
Again I'd agree, but do we know what they do with these records? We know they can get them and it appears they can store them for a while as they've been used in legal cases. But d they do so automatically and, if so, what do they do with the data?
"It *is* wrong (as doubleclick is finding out) to passivly log byte crossing a network and selll this valuable information to anyone willing to pay."
Why?
I had NO problem whatsoever with DoubleClick until they started tying data to people. As long as it was simply an anonymous userID, I don't see that is was any different to plenty of other things.
For example, I mentioned earlier supermarket till rolls. They get sold without any linking to customers, as the raw information on sales volumes and patterns is still useful. Being able to identify categories of users is just as valuable as being able to identify individual users. Now, at first, that's all DoubleClick were doing. And if you regard that as fundamentally wrong then there's plenty of other issues you have to think about.
"The problem in this great nation at the moment is that there are no laws on the books from preventing this kind of profiling. It's wrong, and the laws of this great land need to be adjusted to give the user to "live on the grid" and have control over his own profile."
I have to admit, it mildly amuses me to see so much bitching about the American legal system or modern culture but still see references to this great land...
Anyway.
While I understand the potential dangers of profiling, I'm inclined to say you're overreacting a little. The American legal system DOES need updating here, but not by banning profiling. IT's just not that big a problem.
What you DO need is prpoer data protection legislation. Might I suggest the UK Data Protection Act 1998 (http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/courses/foundation/module s/bis0015/links/dpact98/index.html) as a good model?
Basically, all data has to be relevant, up to date and accurate. And as soon as the purpose for which it was compiled passes, you have to get rid of it.
Seems to be pretty good legislation which works well.
If you're so worried about this then you shouldn't have a mobile, plain and simple.
1) Is fairly obvious. Of course they know who you are.
2) They can get from other means - if you have a supermarket loyalty card, they can get it from that. If not, they can have a stab at it by combining credit card details with the unidentified till records that get sold. Note that the second option isn't necessarily legal in the EU as they can't guarantee the accuracy.
3) They can do already. There have been cases where mobile phone signals have been tracked and admitted as evidence of movements in court.
4) They can infer from 3)
5) They can already get if they really want and you discuss this sort of thing on your phone.
Sorry if this bursts a few bubbles, but they don't need this sort of tech to totally invade your privacy. They can do it anyway and if you're that worried, you should turn off your mobile phone now.
Human nature means you have to be very careful about bleeping. We tend to guess what would have been bleeped out, so they may not consider that helpful.
There's then the problem that they (Trey & Matt) could bleep the song themselves, but bleeping entirely broadcastable terms. Human nature then thinks that something bad must've been in there to get it bleeped out, works out a possibility and the song is perceived as rather worse, despite not actually SAYING anything you wouldn't repeat to your grandmother.
I can see why they might not want to use the bleeper.
You talk about bloatware and the 1 GB hadrd drive mark. Well, I'm not sure we haven't already hit the point where HDD space is irrelevant to most people.
Taking myself as a fairly standard example, I've got a 7.85GB (formatted) drive in my system. Loads of games - more than I have time to play - and all bar two on a full install. One wouldn't work on a full install (Colin McRae Rally - BIG minus to Codemasters) and I resented 1515 MB for Bladerunner. But everything else is fully installed.
Then there's my personal data. Tons of it, including almost the entire contents of my old Amiga A1200. Way more than I ever use.
Then there's the apps. Loads of programs that look cool on coverdiscs but have been used twice, installed. Three clever screensavers, installed. SmartSuite, installed. Delphis 1 and 4 plus C++ Builder 3. CorelDRAW! Suite 4. Several reference works, massaged to run from HDD rather than CD in a few cases.
Anyway, you get the idea. It's one heavily overloaded machine which I could trim down to 1/4 the used disc space without any significant loss of functionality. So, given that this HDD drive would be regarded as a little small by most magazine reviewers, I must be bursting at the seams, right?
No, just under 5 GB used.
Processors and GFX cards seem to be heading that way fairly fast, too. Doesn't mean I'm not enjoying the games they make to try and use up the extra cycles, but my 18 month-old machine (P-II 400 and TNT1) still performs fine on new demos whenever I try out the latest releases. Not 'runs acceptably on minimal settings' but 'doesn't seem to drop frames on high settings'. Q3 had some GFX corruption, but that's it.
Accelerating the numbers this fast is shooting themselves in the foot. There just isn't the incentive to upgrade there once was, and by forcing the speeds up this fast, they're accelerating the progress towards our not having to upgrade.
Is there anything I want to upgrade in the near future? Yes, memory. 128KB fely huge on my Spectrum, but 128MB feels inadequate under W2K.
I can't see that as a good enough reason for Sony.
There's a good sized market for import consoles before their launch over here. Bumps up Sony's sales figures very nicely. But they don't always play the UK spec games so they get replaced when the proper ones come out.
But, this way, they only get the one sale...
I'm wondering whether this might actually be an unintended side-effect.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a certain soft spot for LZX for some time. Came out on the Amiga quite a while back, when LHA was pretty much it. It was fast, it compressed well. Better than PKZIP, even, as it apparently used a rather large search window.
But that seemed to be the end of it. I remember hearing that it was rather difficult to code for a DOS PC - why I don't think was explained - and Aminet was never happy to move over as they couldn't get a UNIX decompresser for it.
It strikes me as hugely unlikely that it's simply impossible to get it running under anything other than AmigaOS, but does anyone know what came of it? Seemed like a real breakthrough at the time.
Handwriting recognition: I _hate_ Graffiti. Produces too many errors and it's not flexible enough. By all accounts, Jot and Calligraphy are better.
Resolution: I wouldn't object to haveing a bigger screen, and CE boxes have screens three times the resolution. Plus, the writing area isn't fixed like the Palm, it's just another part of the screen. So, if you're not writing you can reclaim the space, and the virtual keyboard takes up the same amount of space as the handwriting pad.
Voic recording: it's designed for quick notes and it compresses. You can get quite a bit into that much memory and I'd like that featuer on my Palm. Except I can't without effectively strapping a separate machine on.
Play MP3s: Perhaps I don't want to carry _another_ little box around. I'd love one of those Symbian Quartz prototypes, simply as I don't much like carrying round a Palm and a phone when there's clear overlap.
I don't dispute that Palms are nice, or that WinCE as was has problems. But there's an awful lot that's very nice about those machines and if they'd only get a sane person to redo that UI, I'd want one.
Erm...
I agree that peretual motion and the like isn't likely to be something I'll ever see, but last time I heard conservation of ebergy was a theory, nothing more.
It seems to fit, but has it actually been shwon to be true? If it hasn't, all power to anyone trying to disprove it with perpetual motion machines. If they've got that much free time, why not?
Greg
What makes you think you need 14 months?
3rd January 2042 works nicely enough by the system they're suggesting here but I'd have to be picky and prefer the same day in 416 or 4159. Neither of which will, I suspect, have been or be seen by anyone in this forum.
Not even Methuselah was _that_ old...
Greg
My apologies, I must've got the names wrong.
Orbital engines may be a bad idea, but this was being promtoed a few months ago. It was an unconventional two-stroke where everything 'orbitted', hence my assumption it was an orbital.
This system could have combustion chambers of any type acheivable with conventional engines. With that few moving parts. Looks a VERY nice idea.
Greg
The poiont is that fuel cell cars aren't BATTERY electric cars, which is what most people think of when I refer to electric cars. Hence the distinction.
Greg
Oops, forgotten about that - though, given how many people go to NY City on shooping trips from the UK it's either bendable, badly enforced or lightly punished.
Anyone know which?
Greg
Nice to know I'm not the only person who'd like to get one to the UK to have a play with ;)
;) OK, _several_ £60 computers...
I suspect a more enterprising slashdotter could buy up a bundle, make the necessary adaptions and stick them on eBay. Anyone feeling tempted, or do I have to fly across the Atlantic to get a £60 computer?
Greg
Electric motors aren't that fantastic in cars, actually. Sure, they've got high torque at low revs: too much, actually. Most larger electric testbeds have to be managed VERY carefully to minimise this, or you spin your wheels rather embarrassingly every time you pull away, damaging your tyres in the process.
Battery energy density's pretty poor, too, while the energy tends to come from coal fuelled power stations which actually increases pollution. So your nice clean electric car's only serving to move the pollution away from the cities - NIMBY all over again.
Electric motors have a lot less moving parts than a conventional petrol engine, I'll agree, but have you come across orbital engines? Six or seven parts, only a couple of which move. Still more than an electric motor, I'll agree, but a more realistic proposition for cars, too.
If you want a practical alternative to petrol powered cars, it's likely to be either hydrogen fuelled combustion engines or fuel cells. Both are substantially better than electric cars for the environment and are relatively easy to slot into the existing infrastructure. Wait 10-15 years and they'll probably cost little more than current petrol vehicles of similar ability.
Greg
I accept I'm not even remotely a geologist, but I understand Venus is slowly losing its atmosphere due to a lack of a magnetic field. And that Venus is a pretty similar size to Earth.
Anyone else?
Greg
Over here, they seem cool enough with it.
Go into PC World and you'll find row after row after row of comptuers lined up in demo mode. The Windows boxes tend to be running adverts, screensavers or just showing the desktop.
The iMacs are all playing A Bug's Life.
Now, look at the volume of games available for each platform and think whether Apple UK might possibly have had a word with PC World on this one...
Greg
Speaking as someone who does moderate periodically, I'd disagree. That _was_ flamebait.
One sentence in particular:
"95% of Microsoft's OS releases are bug fixes, and the other 5% are featrues they stole from other people, but you have to pay for it!"
This implies that only 1 OS release in 20 adds functionality and that NONE of the functions they're adding are there own idea. Not just the good ideas they're adding, the bad ones too.
Both of those statements are demostrably false, the comment's flamebait.
Greg
That last paragraph is the thing to remember, certainly.
But you got moderated down to Flamebait for saying THAT?
Wow, I hope this one comes up in my M2.
Greg
Mounting as a process may well make sense, but I don't think you can really say that the UNIX way of still mounting disks manually is particularly clever.
OK, I'm a throwback who still likes Amigas, but they've got stuff they can teach you. In this case, floppy disks that don't have weird, multi-fork formats like the Mac but have a proper icon and launching system (well, pretty good - not ideal though) and where the system notices when they go in and out of the drive.
The Windows approach is pretty silly - it REALLY should be able to notice a disk change by now - but the UNIX approach could do with some automation for user-friendliness.
Greg
I did work experience 3-4 years ago with AS/400s and RPG. Weird until you get used to it, but great fun!
Anyway, my technical knowledge of OS/400 is decidedly limited but the lovely guy who explained it all to me definitely said it didn't care about WHAT storage is used, it just used storage. The boundary between memory and disc wasn't visible.
Hopefully someone who has worked with them for more than a week and a little more recently can help out here, but that's what I recall.
Greg
I'd have to agree that Linux isn't clearly superior, or even smaller. Code size figures for Windows include all sorts of things which aren't in the Linux kernel.
But I have to take issue with your comment about the Windows 2000 GUI. I agree it's still not brilliant, but it's noticeably nicer to use than 98. There's still a few silly little things I'm not quite comfortable with, but it's not all that bad a GUI. Really.
Greg, posting under IE5 as Netscape's playing up. Oh, it's nice to be reminded of just why I hate IE...
Juts a thought: time isn't free.
I wonder how much it cost Boeing to look for the tanks?
Greg
I don't think that's even the dominant form of humour here, TBH - though it does come up relatively frequently.
Work with MS products for any length of time, though, and you'll discover fairly rapidly that the system crashes - or degrades performance far enough to force a reboot - fairly frequently. They can blame the third parties or the device drivers all they like, but neither should be capable of doing that much damage and the main reason they play up is the daft DLL problems.
Yes, some of it's exaggerated but you realise how bad it can be when you have to live with it. It's not that far from the truth IME.
Greg
Average possible or acheived, I wonder? Not that many people bother trying to run a 9x box 24/7, IME.
I did last year, though. As we all know, it can aoccasionally get in a strop and crash repeatedly, they taking down the mean. But when it was running, it'd usually run for a day or so before it (or an unprotected application) did something silly and forced me to reboot due to substantially degraded performance.
I'd love to know how to get 9x stable enough to produce an average possible uptime of 2.1 days.
Greg
I agree, and said so when the previous bill came up for discussion here.
The problem, though, as another poster pointed out, is that that takes a VERY long time and isn't automatic. In the mean time, we have some extremely illiberal legislation on the books, granting the government powers that most of us seem to find repugnant.
Greg
"I would agree that is is just an only extention to an already dificult problem. I would also agree that users have the ability to "live off the grid" if they truley value their privacy. What I would take exception with is the degree graularity offered by triagulating your traveling habits with a hard ID on who you are."
e s/bis0015/links/dpact98/index.html) as a good model?
This isn't anything new, though - they can do this anyway. Whether they do or not isn't relevant.
"Is it wrong for my store, on it's own, to know what I buy and when? No, as long as they seek my informed consent and compensate me for the release of this valuable information."
Informed consent is the key phrase here. I'm not sure it's present much of the time, which is why I refuse to have a supermarket loyalty card. They can offer this due to the value of the data, but the implications of this simply aren't understood by most people.
"Is it wrong for my cell phone company to triagulate my position as I use my phone? No, as long as they ask my informed consent, and compensate me for this valuable information."
Again I'd agree, but do we know what they do with these records? We know they can get them and it appears they can store them for a while as they've been used in legal cases. But d they do so automatically and, if so, what do they do with the data?
"It *is* wrong (as doubleclick is finding out) to passivly log byte crossing a network and selll this valuable information to anyone willing to pay."
Why?
I had NO problem whatsoever with DoubleClick until they started tying data to people. As long as it was simply an anonymous userID, I don't see that is was any different to plenty of other things.
For example, I mentioned earlier supermarket till rolls. They get sold without any linking to customers, as the raw information on sales volumes and patterns is still useful. Being able to identify categories of users is just as valuable as being able to identify individual users. Now, at first, that's all DoubleClick were doing. And if you regard that as fundamentally wrong then there's plenty of other issues you have to think about.
"The problem in this great nation at the moment is that there are no laws on the books from preventing this kind of profiling. It's wrong, and the laws of this great land need to be adjusted to give the user to "live on the grid" and have control over his own profile."
I have to admit, it mildly amuses me to see so much bitching about the American legal system or modern culture but still see references to this great land...
Anyway.
While I understand the potential dangers of profiling, I'm inclined to say you're overreacting a little. The American legal system DOES need updating here, but not by banning profiling. IT's just not that big a problem.
What you DO need is prpoer data protection legislation. Might I suggest the UK Data Protection Act 1998 (http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/courses/foundation/modul
Basically, all data has to be relevant, up to date and accurate. And as soon as the purpose for which it was compiled passes, you have to get rid of it.
Seems to be pretty good legislation which works well.
Greg
If you're so worried about this then you shouldn't have a mobile, plain and simple.
1) Is fairly obvious. Of course they know who you are.
2) They can get from other means - if you have a supermarket loyalty card, they can get it from that. If not, they can have a stab at it by combining credit card details with the unidentified till records that get sold. Note that the second option isn't necessarily legal in the EU as they can't guarantee the accuracy.
3) They can do already. There have been cases where mobile phone signals have been tracked and admitted as evidence of movements in court.
4) They can infer from 3)
5) They can already get if they really want and you discuss this sort of thing on your phone.
Sorry if this bursts a few bubbles, but they don't need this sort of tech to totally invade your privacy. They can do it anyway and if you're that worried, you should turn off your mobile phone now.
Greg
Human nature means you have to be very careful about bleeping. We tend to guess what would have been bleeped out, so they may not consider that helpful.
There's then the problem that they (Trey & Matt) could bleep the song themselves, but bleeping entirely broadcastable terms. Human nature then thinks that something bad must've been in there to get it bleeped out, works out a possibility and the song is perceived as rather worse, despite not actually SAYING anything you wouldn't repeat to your grandmother.
I can see why they might not want to use the bleeper.
Greg
You talk about bloatware and the 1 GB hadrd drive mark. Well, I'm not sure we haven't already hit the point where HDD space is irrelevant to most people.
Taking myself as a fairly standard example, I've got a 7.85GB (formatted) drive in my system. Loads of games - more than I have time to play - and all bar two on a full install. One wouldn't work on a full install (Colin McRae Rally - BIG minus to Codemasters) and I resented 1515 MB for Bladerunner. But everything else is fully installed.
Then there's my personal data. Tons of it, including almost the entire contents of my old Amiga A1200. Way more than I ever use.
Then there's the apps. Loads of programs that look cool on coverdiscs but have been used twice, installed. Three clever screensavers, installed. SmartSuite, installed. Delphis 1 and 4 plus C++ Builder 3. CorelDRAW! Suite 4. Several reference works, massaged to run from HDD rather than CD in a few cases.
Anyway, you get the idea. It's one heavily overloaded machine which I could trim down to 1/4 the used disc space without any significant loss of functionality. So, given that this HDD drive would be regarded as a little small by most magazine reviewers, I must be bursting at the seams, right?
No, just under 5 GB used.
Processors and GFX cards seem to be heading that way fairly fast, too. Doesn't mean I'm not enjoying the games they make to try and use up the extra cycles, but my 18 month-old machine (P-II 400 and TNT1) still performs fine on new demos whenever I try out the latest releases. Not 'runs acceptably on minimal settings' but 'doesn't seem to drop frames on high settings'. Q3 had some GFX corruption, but that's it.
Accelerating the numbers this fast is shooting themselves in the foot. There just isn't the incentive to upgrade there once was, and by forcing the speeds up this fast, they're accelerating the progress towards our not having to upgrade.
Is there anything I want to upgrade in the near future? Yes, memory. 128KB fely huge on my Spectrum, but 128MB feels inadequate under W2K.
Greg
I can't see that as a good enough reason for Sony.
There's a good sized market for import consoles before their launch over here. Bumps up Sony's sales figures very nicely. But they don't always play the UK spec games so they get replaced when the proper ones come out.
But, this way, they only get the one sale...
I'm wondering whether this might actually be an unintended side-effect.
Greg