Delpart.exe is unnecessary. FDISK.EXE has a complete host of undocumented command-line arguments which allow you to create/modify/destroy partitions on the command line.
I participated in a retail program giveaway for Windows XP. The copy of WinXP Pro that I received came in a plastic sleeve with a CD-key sticker on the back, but the CD said the same thing: "Use of this disc is illegal without a separate license certificate from Microsoft." And of course, the disc didn't come with a license.
Nowhere in that list does it say "Game Boy Advance" or "GBA". Considering that it lists the Game Boy separately from the Game Boy Color, I think it's a bit presumptuous to say that it supports GBA games just because you see that category there.
So, seeing as how it does not actually support GBA games, I don't find it superior to my GBA, which *does* play GBA games.
Then get Nintendo Puzzle Collection for the GameCube. It's due out sometime later this year, and features Dr. Mario, Yoshi's Cookie, and Panel de Pon. All three games are downloadable to your GBA for play on the go, provided you use Sleep Mode and don't get the urge to save your scores or play any other games.
You could also get the original Dr. Mario, which *was* released for the Game Boy in 1989 (I think). There are at least five copies up on eBay right now.
On a side note, having all these GBA-downloadable games is great, but I wish I could use a ROM cartridge or somesuch to download and *store* the games so that I could switch out titles at will, or (gasp) turn the GBA off.:)
I don't know about Midway or other arcade game manufacturers, but I find one of the major problems with the arcade business to be that nobody wants the arcades around.
There are at least three shopping malls in Jackson, MS, the largest city in the state. Only one of them has an arcade (Owned by Namco), and it's in the process of closing up. Why? Because the mall owners wanted to stiff Namco out of more money for the same location, while simultaneously enacting rules cutting back on the amount of money Namco can make at this location. Metrocenter enacted a new rule which basically forbids anyone under the age of 18 from entering the mall without being accompanied by an adult during the hours of 3-Close on Friday or Saturday...pretty much the only time you could have kids/teens in the arcade without it being a schoolnight.
Furthermore, Northpark Mall shafted the Cyberstation's lease (also owned by Namco), because they just didn't want an arcade. The complaint was that "the arcade went against the family atmosphere" which the mall was trying to obtain. They offered a renewal for an exorbitant amount of extra money, but the manager turned down the extortion rate and went on operating the arcade in Metrocenter (until recently anyway).
I went to all of the Wolfchase malls in St. Louis, and *none* of them had arcades anywhere. I checked later, and it seems that most of the arcades are in smaller complexes and shopping centers that are out of the way. Nobody seems to want them around anymore. Perhaps it's somewhat of a "fashion taste"? Are arcades *so* 90's now?
Games like Dance Dance Revolution and Mo-Cap Boxing are demonstrating quite clearly that the arcade industry has life left in it. I disagree with the assertion that the arcade industry is dying, and say instead that outside influences are killing it purposefully.
"I believe the order we adopted last week achieves a principled, balanced approach," said Mr. Martin, who has close ties to the White House.
And what exactly is *that* supposed to mean? Nobody said anything about the White House.
The critics of the compromise included some congressmen who have been among the most outspoken advocates for the so-called Baby Bells
Sounds like someone doesn't care for "big business".
The five members of the Federal Communications Commission defended their new telephone and broadband policy in front of a Congressional hearing today, but they conceded that their compromise proposal, which requires the regional Bell companies to continue to share their phone lines with competitors, left no one happy and was not certain to pump up the flailing telecommunications sector in the near term.
I'd like to see a direct quote, please. It's not very often that someone in the government admits they fucked up. If they actually *stated* that the compromise didn't really accomplish anything and just made things worse, then why the hell did they push it through?
Sorry...but the needle on my BS-meter is pinned right now. I have no love for the Baby Bells, but this article just reeks of poor journalism. I'd like to know what really happened, other than some moderately-amusing flamebait comment from Michael Powell.
I find it rather surprising that this story didn't get posted on the front page. The corporations here seem to have all acknowledged (in front of the three congressmen in attendance, no less) that they can't fight the DMCA in Washington, so the tactic seems to be that they'll take the fight to the consumers (AKA - The general public).
That's exactly what the DMCA battle needs - If the general public realizes how poor of a law this is, then we can get it struck down.
Of course, it doesn't help that the RIAA/MPAA member companies are suing all the Digital Rights Summit attendees, keeping their money/resources tied up with stupid lawsuits filed under a stupid law...
Of course, One question I had when I heard about the GSP was that the e-reader wouldn't work with it.
This was already answered once, but the e-Reader *does* work with the GBA-SP. The expansion plug on the bottom of the mechanism fits just over the bottom edge of the unit, not really getting in the way (unless you hold your GBA weird). Then again, the e-Reader wasn't designed for long-term ergonomics, so it's doubtful you'd really be playing anything on it for longer than an hour.
I would imagine that with the homebrew/demo scene that the original GBA would be better because one could decode the protocol used on the e-reader, print your own cards, and publish your own game that way.
The dot resolution on the e-Cards is probably a couple of degrees finer than your standard household inkjet printer. Think about it. The strip is about 3/8" wide, and about 3" long (don't have one on me to measure, so these are estimates). That means you have about 1.125 square inches of data to store about 2KB, or 16000 bits. sqrt(1.125) gives an average side length of 1.0606", and sqrt(16000) gives 126.49...so you'd have to have approximately 120 distinct dot positions per inch, assuming that there's no uber-compression scheme going on there.
I don't think your home printer can handle that. Perhaps a laser printer, but who knows. Not me, that's for sure.
That, plus the GSP probably has new "license protection"/DRM/Region Coding/Developer lockout/authentication etc. that the original GBA doesn'have.
As has already been mentioned and modded up, the Game Boy line (including the Virtual Boy) has never had any physical or logical region protection system. The most you could say for "developer lockout" is the pursuit and C&D of resellers of flash-linker kits, which have a secondary (and some would argue "primary") use of being able to load and play GB roms downloaded from the Internet.
I understand the interest in developing for these, as I tinker around with them a bit, but it does say something when I'm playing Oracle of Seasons prior to class yesterday, and a kid three seats down from me doesn't recognize the larger GBC cartridge and thinks I'm using a flash cart. When I tell him it's just an older game, he's like "Wow...did you know you can buy a blank cartridge and download games from the Internet on it?"
So they chose the first. Big deal. Do you really think even a majority of these sysadmins would have firewalled their MS SQL server hours before it would be infected? Doubtful. If they didn't apply the patch from July of '02, then they're not going to immediately respond in a few hours to patch an impending threat.
First off, as has already been stated, installing the patch from July '02 is irrelevant, since MS later released a patch in October which re-opened the hole.
Second off, considering that the companies in the Deep Sight program are paying many thousands of dollars to Symantec for first-watch notice, I think it's reasonable to say that they're *remotely* interested in keeping their systems secure.
Third, this worm affected people that weren't running MSSQL - Thousands of systems got packets hitting on the system query port. If you were a second- or top-tier ISP, don't you think it'd pay for you to know as soon as possible that you might want to consider a temporary blocking on that port on all your routers in specific subnets (like your home customers, for instance)?
Microsoft's own programmers don't follow the schema properly, though. Flight Simulator 2000 won't run properly unless you're using an Administrator-class user. Power Users need not apply. I used to do add-on development for FS2K, so I know this for a fact.
Dune 2000 was simply a graphics redo of Dune II. Otherwise, the game was the same (pretty damn good).
A lot of people panned Emperor: Battle For Dune. Personally, I thought it was excellent. The storylines were well-told (Michael Dorn plays the head of Atreides), and I like the involvement that the lesser houses play both in the story and in the game (Ix, Tlielaxu, Fremen, Sardukar, and the Spacing Guild).
For the record, if Westwood had any involvement in Crescent Hawk's Inception, it was publishing only. That game was developed fully by Infocom, the same company that gave you Zork.
Here's the boxart. Notice it says "Westwood Associates" on it, not "Westwood Studios". They may not have even been the same company.
Re:How about Kirby's Adventure?
on
NES PC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nintendo agreed with you, apparently, since Kirby's Adventure was re-released as "Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland" on the Game Boy Advance. The graphics are pristine now, on par with Kirby's Dream Land 3 for the SNES.
It's just that this one "source" was invalid. Reuters and AP ran wire stories on this last week, before the Purdue student put up the webpage. The first known report from ComputerAndVideoGames.com was posted over two weeks ago.
Given the "publicity" of this hoax, and the widespread rumor-mongering of this deal, I'd say that Microsoft might be using this story as a red herring to make people think that the talks never existed. It's still going on, people, and it's still a very real possibility/threat.
These numbers don't mean what you think they mean. Perf vs. Price is good, when you don't have a video card to begin with. When you already have a video card, you have to figure out what your Improved Perf. vs. Price ratio will be. A GF4Ti4200 has excellent price-to-performance ratio, but if you're coming up from an original GF3, then your 3DMark performance will probably sit somewhere between the GF3's on the chart. In a case like that, the Radeon 9700 Pro would probably be an ideal investment, since (off-the-cuff calculation) it would offer the best added bang to the buck.
You're way off base. Rental videos *still* cost in the area of $150. I know this because my uncle purchased the rental-license copy of the South Park movie since it wasn't hitting stores anytime soon.
The DirecTV ECM signal didn't cost DTV any money (other than the R&D involved in the operation). It didn't kill off any existing, PAYING users, or even "advertise" the fact that pirates were getting cut off. The embedded message was only triggered on hacked cards, and regular users saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. It inconvenienced the pirates in a big way - That was the point, wasn't it? Sure, it may not have been effective long-term, but it certainly put out a lot of moochers, right? And quite a few of those people probably went and screamed at their sources, who had to fork over a good bit of cash for new H-cards (since the old ones were now looped) and figure out work-arounds.
I fail to see where you're going with this. You seem to claim that copy-protection hurts nobody but the regular consumers, which is a claim I'd normally agree with. However, the examples you're citing certainly don't lend much weight to your point.
The PlayStation - It had a Japanese release of Return to Zork, in which, I can most definitely assure you, you can be eaten by a grue.
It's not the only one. Read here for more info.
Supporting Linux would be a key advantage over existing console makers, who go out of their way to prevent customers from running a real OS on their devices.
I wonder if you've ever heard of this little company called Sony...
Anyway, yeah, what-ever. An advantage, yes. A key advantage, no. They might sell more consoles. They wouldn't sell any more games, thus they would get no more money from royalties. That's where the money in the console market is.
Poor choice of title...
on
Kiln People
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· Score: 0
Slashdot Mirror
Delpart.exe is unnecessary. FDISK.EXE has a complete host of undocumented command-line arguments which allow you to create/modify/destroy partitions on the command line.
FDISK Info
I participated in a retail program giveaway for Windows XP. The copy of WinXP Pro that I received came in a plastic sleeve with a CD-key sticker on the back, but the CD said the same thing: "Use of this disc is illegal without a separate license certificate from Microsoft." And of course, the disc didn't come with a license.
Port Slashcode to this, and we'll have FP comments *before* the articles appear!
Nowhere in that list does it say "Game Boy Advance" or "GBA". Considering that it lists the Game Boy separately from the Game Boy Color, I think it's a bit presumptuous to say that it supports GBA games just because you see that category there.
So, seeing as how it does not actually support GBA games, I don't find it superior to my GBA, which *does* play GBA games.
Yes, it is worth noting that the first US universities on the list are two of eight tied at #13 (UC-Berkeley and CalTech).
:P
Of course, our university (MSU) got Honorable Mention, which is to say that they were tied for dead last.
The EU Gets YOU!
Oh god...this could make for some very bad Soviet Russia jokes...
But I still want Dr Mario for my GBA.
:)
Then get Nintendo Puzzle Collection for the GameCube. It's due out sometime later this year, and features Dr. Mario, Yoshi's Cookie, and Panel de Pon. All three games are downloadable to your GBA for play on the go, provided you use Sleep Mode and don't get the urge to save your scores or play any other games.
You could also get the original Dr. Mario, which *was* released for the Game Boy in 1989 (I think). There are at least five copies up on eBay right now.
On a side note, having all these GBA-downloadable games is great, but I wish I could use a ROM cartridge or somesuch to download and *store* the games so that I could switch out titles at will, or (gasp) turn the GBA off.
Ohhh...is THAT why "Spider-Man Has Back Problems"?
I don't know about Midway or other arcade game manufacturers, but I find one of the major problems with the arcade business to be that nobody wants the arcades around.
There are at least three shopping malls in Jackson, MS, the largest city in the state. Only one of them has an arcade (Owned by Namco), and it's in the process of closing up. Why? Because the mall owners wanted to stiff Namco out of more money for the same location, while simultaneously enacting rules cutting back on the amount of money Namco can make at this location. Metrocenter enacted a new rule which basically forbids anyone under the age of 18 from entering the mall without being accompanied by an adult during the hours of 3-Close on Friday or Saturday...pretty much the only time you could have kids/teens in the arcade without it being a schoolnight.
Furthermore, Northpark Mall shafted the Cyberstation's lease (also owned by Namco), because they just didn't want an arcade. The complaint was that "the arcade went against the family atmosphere" which the mall was trying to obtain. They offered a renewal for an exorbitant amount of extra money, but the manager turned down the extortion rate and went on operating the arcade in Metrocenter (until recently anyway).
I went to all of the Wolfchase malls in St. Louis, and *none* of them had arcades anywhere. I checked later, and it seems that most of the arcades are in smaller complexes and shopping centers that are out of the way. Nobody seems to want them around anymore. Perhaps it's somewhat of a "fashion taste"? Are arcades *so* 90's now?
Games like Dance Dance Revolution and Mo-Cap Boxing are demonstrating quite clearly that the arcade industry has life left in it. I disagree with the assertion that the arcade industry is dying, and say instead that outside influences are killing it purposefully.
Who's got the political agendas here?
"I believe the order we adopted last week achieves a principled, balanced approach," said Mr. Martin, who has close ties to the White House.
And what exactly is *that* supposed to mean? Nobody said anything about the White House.
The critics of the compromise included some congressmen who have been among the most outspoken advocates for the so-called Baby Bells
Sounds like someone doesn't care for "big business".
The five members of the Federal Communications Commission defended their new telephone and broadband policy in front of a Congressional hearing today, but they conceded that their compromise proposal, which requires the regional Bell companies to continue to share their phone lines with competitors, left no one happy and was not certain to pump up the flailing telecommunications sector in the near term.
I'd like to see a direct quote, please. It's not very often that someone in the government admits they fucked up. If they actually *stated* that the compromise didn't really accomplish anything and just made things worse, then why the hell did they push it through?
Sorry...but the needle on my BS-meter is pinned right now. I have no love for the Baby Bells, but this article just reeks of poor journalism. I'd like to know what really happened, other than some moderately-amusing flamebait comment from Michael Powell.
I find it rather surprising that this story didn't get posted on the front page. The corporations here seem to have all acknowledged (in front of the three congressmen in attendance, no less) that they can't fight the DMCA in Washington, so the tactic seems to be that they'll take the fight to the consumers (AKA - The general public).
That's exactly what the DMCA battle needs - If the general public realizes how poor of a law this is, then we can get it struck down.
Of course, it doesn't help that the RIAA/MPAA member companies are suing all the Digital Rights Summit attendees, keeping their money/resources tied up with stupid lawsuits filed under a stupid law...
Doesn't that profound sense of logic also apply in the phrase "Kill 'em all - Let God sort 'em out"?
Many ISPs host multiple customers' pages on the same server. Blocking that server would also make life difficult for a lot of other people.
Of course, One question I had when I heard about the GSP was that the e-reader wouldn't work with it.
This was already answered once, but the e-Reader *does* work with the GBA-SP. The expansion plug on the bottom of the mechanism fits just over the bottom edge of the unit, not really getting in the way (unless you hold your GBA weird). Then again, the e-Reader wasn't designed for long-term ergonomics, so it's doubtful you'd really be playing anything on it for longer than an hour.
I would imagine that with the homebrew/demo scene that the original GBA would be better because one could decode the protocol used on the e-reader, print your own cards, and publish your own game that way.
The dot resolution on the e-Cards is probably a couple of degrees finer than your standard household inkjet printer. Think about it. The strip is about 3/8" wide, and about 3" long (don't have one on me to measure, so these are estimates). That means you have about 1.125 square inches of data to store about 2KB, or 16000 bits. sqrt(1.125) gives an average side length of 1.0606", and sqrt(16000) gives 126.49...so you'd have to have approximately 120 distinct dot positions per inch, assuming that there's no uber-compression scheme going on there.
I don't think your home printer can handle that. Perhaps a laser printer, but who knows. Not me, that's for sure.
That, plus the GSP probably has new "license protection"/DRM/Region Coding/Developer lockout/authentication etc. that the original GBA doesn'have.
As has already been mentioned and modded up, the Game Boy line (including the Virtual Boy) has never had any physical or logical region protection system. The most you could say for "developer lockout" is the pursuit and C&D of resellers of flash-linker kits, which have a secondary (and some would argue "primary") use of being able to load and play GB roms downloaded from the Internet.
I understand the interest in developing for these, as I tinker around with them a bit, but it does say something when I'm playing Oracle of Seasons prior to class yesterday, and a kid three seats down from me doesn't recognize the larger GBC cartridge and thinks I'm using a flash cart. When I tell him it's just an older game, he's like "Wow...did you know you can buy a blank cartridge and download games from the Internet on it?"
So they chose the first. Big deal. Do you really think even a majority of these sysadmins would have firewalled their MS SQL server hours before it would be infected? Doubtful. If they didn't apply the patch from July of '02, then they're not going to immediately respond in a few hours to patch an impending threat.
First off, as has already been stated, installing the patch from July '02 is irrelevant, since MS later released a patch in October which re-opened the hole.
Second off, considering that the companies in the Deep Sight program are paying many thousands of dollars to Symantec for first-watch notice, I think it's reasonable to say that they're *remotely* interested in keeping their systems secure.
Third, this worm affected people that weren't running MSSQL - Thousands of systems got packets hitting on the system query port. If you were a second- or top-tier ISP, don't you think it'd pay for you to know as soon as possible that you might want to consider a temporary blocking on that port on all your routers in specific subnets (like your home customers, for instance)?
Microsoft's own programmers don't follow the schema properly, though. Flight Simulator 2000 won't run properly unless you're using an Administrator-class user. Power Users need not apply. I used to do add-on development for FS2K, so I know this for a fact.
Dune 2000 was simply a graphics redo of Dune II. Otherwise, the game was the same (pretty damn good).
A lot of people panned Emperor: Battle For Dune. Personally, I thought it was excellent. The storylines were well-told (Michael Dorn plays the head of Atreides), and I like the involvement that the lesser houses play both in the story and in the game (Ix, Tlielaxu, Fremen, Sardukar, and the Spacing Guild).
For the record, if Westwood had any involvement in Crescent Hawk's Inception, it was publishing only. That game was developed fully by Infocom, the same company that gave you Zork.
Here's the boxart. Notice it says "Westwood Associates" on it, not "Westwood Studios". They may not have even been the same company.
Nintendo agreed with you, apparently, since Kirby's Adventure was re-released as "Kirby: Nightmare in Dreamland" on the Game Boy Advance. The graphics are pristine now, on par with Kirby's Dream Land 3 for the SNES.
I hope he doesn't have class tonight, or else his clock is going to be running a bit slow, thanks to the Slashdotting... :)
It's just that this one "source" was invalid. Reuters and AP ran wire stories on this last week, before the Purdue student put up the webpage. The first known report from ComputerAndVideoGames.com was posted over two weeks ago.
Given the "publicity" of this hoax, and the widespread rumor-mongering of this deal, I'd say that Microsoft might be using this story as a red herring to make people think that the talks never existed. It's still going on, people, and it's still a very real possibility/threat.
These numbers don't mean what you think they mean. Perf vs. Price is good, when you don't have a video card to begin with. When you already have a video card, you have to figure out what your Improved Perf. vs. Price ratio will be. A GF4Ti4200 has excellent price-to-performance ratio, but if you're coming up from an original GF3, then your 3DMark performance will probably sit somewhere between the GF3's on the chart. In a case like that, the Radeon 9700 Pro would probably be an ideal investment, since (off-the-cuff calculation) it would offer the best added bang to the buck.
You're way off base. Rental videos *still* cost in the area of $150. I know this because my uncle purchased the rental-license copy of the South Park movie since it wasn't hitting stores anytime soon.
The DirecTV ECM signal didn't cost DTV any money (other than the R&D involved in the operation). It didn't kill off any existing, PAYING users, or even "advertise" the fact that pirates were getting cut off. The embedded message was only triggered on hacked cards, and regular users saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. It inconvenienced the pirates in a big way - That was the point, wasn't it? Sure, it may not have been effective long-term, but it certainly put out a lot of moochers, right? And quite a few of those people probably went and screamed at their sources, who had to fork over a good bit of cash for new H-cards (since the old ones were now looped) and figure out work-arounds.
I fail to see where you're going with this. You seem to claim that copy-protection hurts nobody but the regular consumers, which is a claim I'd normally agree with. However, the examples you're citing certainly don't lend much weight to your point.
The PlayStation - It had a Japanese release of Return to Zork, in which, I can most definitely assure you, you can be eaten by a grue. It's not the only one. Read here for more info.
Supporting Linux would be a key advantage over existing console makers, who go out of their way to prevent customers from running a real OS on their devices.
I wonder if you've ever heard of this little company called Sony...
Anyway, yeah, what-ever. An advantage, yes. A key advantage, no. They might sell more consoles. They wouldn't sell any more games, thus they would get no more money from royalties. That's where the money in the console market is.
I thought this was a book about rednecks!
:)
Kiln, MS - Hometown of Green Bay QB Brett Favre
This isn't troll/flamebait - I come from the area, so I have the right to say that.