What about the Linux client they promised at start? If it's good enough to run their servers, it's good enough to have a client. Specially as they use OpenGL for graphics and already have a MacOSX client.
Just go to a currency converter and enter $99. You'll see that it is about 80. But the PS2 Linux Kit will cost 149, which is around $183. All of this before taxes, of course, so it's not because of that.
So why does the Linux kit cost double in Europe? According to the latest charts, there are more PS2s in Europe than in the USA (remember that, for Sony, Europe includes non-Japan Asia and Africa), yet games are always released later here. Sometimes they are released six months later, and sometimes they are not released at all.
Piracy, they'll tell you. But maybe we resort to piracy because we don't have other options. I would have never thought of modding my PS2 until I saw that I'd never be able to play some games unless I did so. So I modded it, and now I can play Disgaea. I would have bought it, certainly, but it wasn't released here so I had to download it and patch it to PAL. It was worth it.
I'd just like an explanation for all these discrimination that made sense, even if it was from a strictly business point of view.
Airplanes don't wait for passenger 42 to come on board, even when passenger 42 is a politician or powerful businessman.
Well, my father was once stranded in a plane for 45 minutes and then the queen of Spain went on board. So maybe they don't wait for politicians, but they do wait for royalty.
I once had an interview were they demanded 5 years of experience in PHP... this was back when PHP had just got to version 3, and I tried to explain to them that no one had so much experience, much less in real-world use.
They didn't hire me. I'm better off now, by the way, as they dot-bombed.
Here in Barcelona, not long ago, a pacifist organization proposed adding a box in the tax forms that would disallow the government from spending your taxes on defense research or contracts.
A lot of people signed in the campaign, but the government, of course, did not change anything.
Now imagine if something like this could be done in the USofA, which spends on weapons as much as the 10 next most-spending countries put together!
(All this data is taken out of UN reports, which I'm now too lazy to find...)
With just one year of the DoD budget, famine could be erradicated forever in this planet, and you'd have enough spare change to build another shuttle and send a mission to Mars!
Of course now the important thing is bombing Iraq because the stupid dictator there tried to kill someone's daddy *and* has huge amounts if oil...
Let's put an example (completely imaginary, as I don't recall the x86 ISA exactly):
There is an instruction for adding two general purpose registers, and for adding two MMX registers, but not for adding a general to a MMX.
So to be able to use all existing registers as if they were GP you would need to include instructions for every possible combination. That would make all registers GP, wouldnt' that? And it would be very difficult to implement in silicon.
When I voted, I was telling both Bush AND Gore to go fuck themselves. What were YOU telling them?
I couldn't tell them anything! That's the point of the article. More and more people in the world are put under the USA jurisdiction without the benefit of vote. It's like "taxation witout representation", only in this case is more like "legislation without representation" because the rest of the world have to comply with USA's laws but have no say in them.
Of course I'm just bitching a little, because if I was an Iraqui I would be more worried about the "destruction without representation" that seems to be coming ahead.
IWALS (I was a Law student), but don't take this as professional advice.
It certainly is that way here in Europe: the side that loses the case usually has to pay both sides' legal fees (at the judge discretion).
But not in the USA. Well, maybe it is in some states, but generally every side has to pay its own legal fees.
Maybe that's the reason we have so few of those plainly stupid suits here, as if you sue someone you have to be really sure of it or face paying up your lawyer and theirs.
Some statistics I read a while ago (might have changed): While in the USA 80% of the suits are between private parties, in Europe only 20% are. The rest are between the State and the defendant, that is, criminal suits.
Until I got to this fundamental difference, I didn't understand why lawyers were so important in the USA.
I used to do videogames programming, and I used not two, but THREE different displays.
When debugging, I had the code on the main screen, the game on another one, where I could see if the drawing routines were behaving correctly and finally I had another (smaller) screen with the documentation. When you program something on MS Windows, you really need to have the docs handy. Yes, their APIs are awful and they usually change things around.
OFFTOPIC: I once was assigned a digital video related project, and during the six months the project lasted, MS changed the name of the APIs we were using three times: ActiveMovie -> DirectMovie -> SomethingMovie, I can't remember. It drove me nuts!
This shows your strategy wasn't as good as you think it was.
Your strategy was good for the real Senate, but you were playing a mock-up.
When you play any strategy game, you don't concentrate on the real world, but instead you try to win using the rules of the game.
If you wanted to win, you should have played Democrat, increased the education budget 10x and give shelter to the poor decreasing the military expenses.
I recently had a browser related problem with my registrar, eNom.
They have a web based DNS manager, which is one of the main reasons I chose them. But when I tried to use it for the first time, it wouldn't work. Tech support said it was because they website has been designed for "IE 5 or Netscape 4.7 and above", although the part where you give them your credit card number works perfectly with any browser.
Now I'll have to wait one year before switching to another registrar! If only they had stated that I wouldn't be able to use their services, now I wouldn't have the problem.
The funny thing is that I use Mozilla 1.0, which is clearly "above" both IE 5 and Netscape 4.7.
I am a foreigner (what you sometimes call an "alien") and, like the rest of the world, I'm getting a little concerned on the way you behave lately.
I live in one of the countries your government calls "allies", so for now I'm not worried that you'll bomb or invade us, but the downside is that governments here tend to go around copying any stupid idea you decide to turn into law (except the real good ones, like paying for the development of the Internet).
So I'm asking this seriously: Is there anything we can do to help? I certainly can't write, fax or call my representatives (I've never heard of any D/R-Rest of the World).
And let me tell you, I never had any assigment that was remotely similar to this one. There wasn't a single comic-book in the library, even!
Of course, I never got into the reserved-for-teachers part of the library. But I always assumed they just kept there all the copies of "The Art Of Programming" marked as "Unavailable to students", not comic books.
If I have posted far, it is because I replied to the messages of giants.
When they changed James Bond from Sean Connery to George Lazenby, people screamed in horror and most believed the series would just disappear.
If they throw sufficient imagination / money / whatever into it, we could end up having an eternal Indiana Jones, forever fighting the Nazis at the outstart of WWII.
Think of it, that's how most "infinite" comic-book series work.
---
If I have posted further, it is because I reply to giants.
Re:One simple reason why it won't work:
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
I am sure that some Europeans don't like the inroads American culture has made into their society. However I am sort of puzzled by the apparent feeling of European governments that they must legislate to insure local content in their media. What sort of freedom is this? Shouldn't Europeans be free to listen or watch whatever they please?
That's why we regulate it! I want to see movies in my own language, and movies about local things. If it was just let to "market forces" or any other mythical entity that's just an excuse for multinational corporations, all movie theaters here would just show "Britney Spears Strikes Back Again III".
Those names were adopted under the last Spanish presidency of the EU, which, if you don't know, rotates between member countries.
The name of the coin was selected for being easy to pronounce in almost all European languages, but because of the Spanish presidency it's a little easier in latin-derived languages than in German, for example.
As a kind of compensation, the fractionary name (cents, abbreviated ct or just c) is a little difficult to pronounce for Spaniards, who are not used to so many consonants with just one vowel. So they are not using it. Going against EU practices, the Spanish government (and everybody else in Spain) calls the fractionary coins "céntimos", which is what they called a % of spanish pesetas.
As an off-side, we catalans are having a little problem with cents, too. "Cents" in catalan means "hundred", so when you try to say "2 cents", you sound exactly like saying "200". And as most mass media here are Spanish, people are also picking the "céntimos" approach.
Re:Issues with the euro in day-to-day life
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
* The devil is in the details, as they say, and in this case the devil is in the rounding. As I said, 6 euros are roughly 1000 pesetas. But that's not exact: 6.01 is more precise. This doesn't mean anything in "cheap" things, but if you're going to buy a car... There's a lot of concern about the way that commerces are going to apply rounding, as many think that they're going to raise prices to make them more "euro-compliant".
I think the rounding will be more important in small prices, not in big ones. When you're buying a car, one € more or less it's not big deal.
But small prices have gone up a lot in just one day. Let's take coffe for example. Two days ago a coffe here in Barcelona was 150 spanish pesetas, which is officially 0.90 €. But most coffe shops (and bars) will round it up to 1€, so you are paying 16 pesetas more.
Well, 16 pesetas are not a lot, but think on all coffes sold yesterday:) That's going to generate a lot more inflation that all cars toghether, I think.
It's a really good idea, at least if the phone has a dictionary for your language. If not, it's just a big pain in the ass, as the dictionary constantly tries to write something, and it gets a lot more frustating than Clippy. I always end up turning it off (I speak Catalan, no luck!).
I wish Nokia and the other phone makers could agree on a dictionary format that you could download to the phone. With Nokia's 3330, you can download logotypes, welcome screens, screensavers and music tones. Why not dictionaries? Or better yet, translations for the phone messages, I'm tired of my phone speaking to me in Spanish or Portuguese.
Slashdot Mirror
What about the Linux client they promised at start? If it's good enough to run their servers, it's good enough to have a client. Specially as they use OpenGL for graphics and already have a MacOSX client.
Original discussion here.
There is a cache here:m l
http://www.angelfire.com/tx4/cus/lambda.ht
Truly one of the best blogs out there.
Just go to a currency converter and enter $99. You'll see that it is about 80. But the PS2 Linux Kit will cost 149, which is around $183. All of this before taxes, of course, so it's not because of that.
So why does the Linux kit cost double in Europe? According to the latest charts, there are more PS2s in Europe than in the USA (remember that, for Sony, Europe includes non-Japan Asia and Africa), yet games are always released later here. Sometimes they are released six months later, and sometimes they are not released at all.
Piracy, they'll tell you. But maybe we resort to piracy because we don't have other options. I would have never thought of modding my PS2 until I saw that I'd never be able to play some games unless I did so. So I modded it, and now I can play Disgaea. I would have bought it, certainly, but it wasn't released here so I had to download it and patch it to PAL. It was worth it.
I'd just like an explanation for all these discrimination that made sense, even if it was from a strictly business point of view.
Airplanes don't wait for passenger 42 to come on board, even when passenger 42 is a politician or powerful businessman.
Well, my father was once stranded in a plane for 45 minutes and then the queen of Spain went on board. So maybe they don't wait for politicians, but they do wait for royalty.
I once had an interview were they demanded 5 years of experience in PHP... this was back when PHP had just got to version 3, and I tried to explain to them that no one had so much experience, much less in real-world use.
They didn't hire me. I'm better off now, by the way, as they dot-bombed.
Here in Barcelona, not long ago, a pacifist organization proposed adding a box in the tax forms that would disallow the government from spending your taxes on defense research or contracts.
A lot of people signed in the campaign, but the government, of course, did not change anything.
Now imagine if something like this could be done in the USofA, which spends on weapons as much as the 10 next most-spending countries put together!
(All this data is taken out of UN reports, which I'm now too lazy to find...)
With just one year of the DoD budget, famine could be erradicated forever in this planet, and you'd have enough spare change to build another shuttle and send a mission to Mars!
Of course now the important thing is bombing Iraq because the stupid dictator there tried to kill someone's daddy *and* has huge amounts if oil...
Because there aren't instructions for it.
Let's put an example (completely imaginary, as I don't recall the x86 ISA exactly):
There is an instruction for adding two general purpose registers, and for adding two MMX registers, but not for adding a general to a MMX.
So to be able to use all existing registers as if they were GP you would need to include instructions for every possible combination. That would make all registers GP, wouldnt' that? And it would be very difficult to implement in silicon.
When I voted, I was telling both Bush AND Gore to go fuck themselves. What were YOU telling them?
I couldn't tell them anything! That's the point of the article. More and more people in the world are put under the USA jurisdiction without the benefit of vote. It's like "taxation witout representation", only in this case is more like "legislation without representation" because the rest of the world have to comply with USA's laws but have no say in them.
Of course I'm just bitching a little, because if I was an Iraqui I would be more worried about the "destruction without representation" that seems to be coming ahead.
IWALS (I was a Law student), but don't take this as professional advice.
It certainly is that way here in Europe: the side that loses the case usually has to pay both sides' legal fees (at the judge discretion).
But not in the USA. Well, maybe it is in some states, but generally every side has to pay its own legal fees.
Maybe that's the reason we have so few of those plainly stupid suits here, as if you sue someone you have to be really sure of it or face paying up your lawyer and theirs.
Some statistics I read a while ago (might have changed): While in the USA 80% of the suits are between private parties, in Europe only 20% are. The rest are between the State and the defendant, that is, criminal suits.
Until I got to this fundamental difference, I didn't understand why lawyers were so important in the USA.
I used to do videogames programming, and I used not two, but THREE different displays.
When debugging, I had the code on the main screen, the game on another one, where I could see if the drawing routines were behaving correctly and finally I had another (smaller) screen with the documentation. When you program something on MS Windows, you really need to have the docs handy. Yes, their APIs are awful and they usually change things around.
OFFTOPIC: I once was assigned a digital video related project, and during the six months the project lasted, MS changed the name of the APIs we were using three times: ActiveMovie -> DirectMovie -> SomethingMovie, I can't remember. It drove me nuts!
This shows your strategy wasn't as good as you think it was.
Your strategy was good for the real Senate, but you were playing a mock-up.
When you play any strategy game, you don't concentrate on the real world, but instead you try to win using the rules of the game.
If you wanted to win, you should have played Democrat, increased the education budget 10x and give shelter to the poor decreasing the military expenses.
That should've given you A+.
I recently had a browser related problem with my registrar, eNom.
They have a web based DNS manager, which is one of the main reasons I chose them. But when I tried to use it for the first time, it wouldn't work. Tech support said it was because they website has been designed for "IE 5 or Netscape 4.7 and above", although the part where you give them your credit card number works perfectly with any browser.
Now I'll have to wait one year before switching to another registrar! If only they had stated that I wouldn't be able to use their services, now I wouldn't have the problem.
The funny thing is that I use Mozilla 1.0, which is clearly "above" both IE 5 and Netscape 4.7.
Hello U.S. Americans,
I am a foreigner (what you sometimes call an "alien") and, like the rest of the world, I'm getting a little concerned on the way you behave lately.
I live in one of the countries your government calls "allies", so for now I'm not worried that you'll bomb or invade us, but the downside is that governments here tend to go around copying any stupid idea you decide to turn into law (except the real good ones, like paying for the development of the Internet).
So I'm asking this seriously: Is there anything we can do to help? I certainly can't write, fax or call my representatives (I've never heard of any D/R-Rest of the World).
And let me tell you, I never had any assigment that was remotely similar to this one. There wasn't a single comic-book in the library, even!
Of course, I never got into the reserved-for-teachers part of the library. But I always assumed they just kept there all the copies of "The Art Of Programming" marked as "Unavailable to students", not comic books.
If I have posted far, it is because I replied to the messages of giants.
When they changed James Bond from Sean Connery to George Lazenby, people screamed in horror and most believed the series would just disappear.
If they throw sufficient imagination / money / whatever into it, we could end up having an eternal Indiana Jones, forever fighting the Nazis at the outstart of WWII.
Think of it, that's how most "infinite" comic-book series work.
---
If I have posted further, it is because I reply to giants.
I am sure that some Europeans don't like the inroads American culture has made into their society. However I am sort of puzzled by the apparent feeling of European governments that they must legislate to insure local content in their media. What sort of freedom is this? Shouldn't Europeans be free to listen or watch whatever they please?
That's why we regulate it! I want to see movies in my own language, and movies about local things. If it was just let to "market forces" or any other mythical entity that's just an excuse for multinational corporations, all movie theaters here would just show "Britney Spears Strikes Back Again III".
Those names were adopted under the last Spanish presidency of the EU, which, if you don't know, rotates between member countries.
The name of the coin was selected for being easy to pronounce in almost all European languages, but because of the Spanish presidency it's a little easier in latin-derived languages than in German, for example.
As a kind of compensation, the fractionary name (cents, abbreviated ct or just c) is a little difficult to pronounce for Spaniards, who are not used to so many consonants with just one vowel. So they are not using it. Going against EU practices, the Spanish government (and everybody else in Spain) calls the fractionary coins "céntimos", which is what they called a % of spanish pesetas.
As an off-side, we catalans are having a little problem with cents, too. "Cents" in catalan means "hundred", so when you try to say "2 cents", you sound exactly like saying "200". And as most mass media here are Spanish, people are also picking the "céntimos" approach.
* The devil is in the details, as they say, and in this case the devil is in the rounding. As I said, 6 euros are roughly 1000 pesetas. But that's not exact: 6.01 is more precise. This doesn't mean anything in "cheap" things, but if you're going to buy a car ... There's a lot of concern about the way that commerces are going to apply rounding, as many think that they're going to raise prices to make them more "euro-compliant".
I think the rounding will be more important in small prices, not in big ones. When you're buying a car, one € more or less it's not big deal. :) That's going to generate a lot more inflation that all cars toghether, I think.
But small prices have gone up a lot in just one day. Let's take coffe for example. Two days ago a coffe here in Barcelona was 150 spanish pesetas, which is officially 0.90 €. But most coffe shops (and bars) will round it up to 1€, so you are paying 16 pesetas more.
Well, 16 pesetas are not a lot, but think on all coffes sold yesterday
It's a really good idea, at least if the phone has a dictionary for your language. If not, it's just a big pain in the ass, as the dictionary constantly tries to write something, and it gets a lot more frustating than Clippy. I always end up turning it off (I speak Catalan, no luck!).
I wish Nokia and the other phone makers could agree on a dictionary format that you could download to the phone. With Nokia's 3330, you can download logotypes, welcome screens, screensavers and music tones. Why not dictionaries? Or better yet, translations for the phone messages, I'm tired of my phone speaking to me in Spanish or Portuguese.