But seriously, some of the old file transfer protocols had some pretty nifty abilities, like restarting downloads.
Indeed.
I used ZModem not long ago on a project transferring data over a dodgy link. ZModem implementations are very small, quite fast, and they handle data integrity well. Also handy is the vast number of ready made tools which you can make use of. In my case, I could use ZModem through Minicom, or straight on the command line via sz/rz.
Finally, ZModem (and its predecessors X and YModem) are not that large or complex. A little bit of study and you'll have a good handle on how it works. When working with dodgy hardware or a flaky link (by which I mean home built, prototype boards, etc.), being able to follow along with your transfer protocol can help you isolate problems.
Also, backward compatibility. There is a whole heap of filesystems in Linux that exist only to fetch data from old media and old systems. For example, nobody in their right mind would actually *use* the Amiga filesystem for/home.
These filesystems all increase the count, but they are rarely used and don't see any development other than to make sure they still function with the latest kernel.
Well the idea that NTFS got it right is funny to start with. Defrag??? I still have to freaking Defrag?
No. Not unless you've got some sort of pathological disk access pattern that is also going to require a "defrag" on _any_ filesystem.
Yes, you still need to defragment your NTFS partitions occasionally. NTFS still frequently creates files with hundreds of fragments depending on how they are created.
For example, copying a large file off a CD will result in just a handful of fragments (it really *ought* to be one, but rarely is). Compare this to some update auto-downloader app that reads a stream of bytes over the Net and writes them to disk in many small increments. You might end up with a few thousand fragments for a file of 20-30 MB. Once, I even saw an under-1KB text file have 124 fragments. Wow.
Now, Vista does go out of its way to make this less noticeable as it will automatically start defragging the drive in the background when your computer has been idle for a short time. Oddly, though, while you might expect it to continue to defrag as long as you leave the machine idle, it doesn't. After it has "finished", run a defrag program that gives you more information than Vista's included "Disk Defragmenter" (which isn't hard as Defragmenter tells you *nothing* whatsoever). You will find that there are still many files with varying degrees of fragmentation.
Still, this auto-defrag in Vista is good enough that most users will almost never need to manually defrag their drives since it seems to activate often enough to keep the level of fragmentation under control. That said, after you install a very large program (say, an 8GB game), the level of fragmentation might increase significantly (only on the new files, obviously). Since the idle-time defragmenter never completely "finishes" during a single run, it might take a bit of time before all those new files have actually been defragmented.
Personally, I only use Windows (Vista in this case) for gaming and generally leave the defragmenting alone. After I install a new game, and sometimes after uninstalling one, I will manually run the defragmenter. I use AusLogics Disk Defrag to do the job since it's free and it gives some basic information about what it's actually doing, a visual approximation of how far along it is, and a report of the files it touched. I think it can also move more files than the Vista defragmenter, but I'm not positive about that.
Would it really be that hard to have ONE good fs that you could tune to different use cases? Probably not. But the average Linux coder sees that something isn't fast in case X and goes ahead redoing the entire wheel. And why? Because the thing he just looked at wasn't designed very well either and can't be adapted easily to different use scenarios. And why? Because it was done by a half-assed coder like himself. And so the circle closes.
Actually, yes, it is that hard. There's a good reason why so much research goes into filesystem development. A desktop use-case is very different from a database use-case which is again different from a web server use-case. Sure, you could find a middle ground, but it would result it mediocre performance (even after tuning) for all concerned.
Also, haven't you noticed that there is, essentially, "ONE good fs" that the vast majority of Linux systems use? It's called ext3 and it's the default for pretty much every major Linux distribution for the very reason that it does offer good performance in most cases. Desktop PC, laptop, small web server, DVR, development machine... ext3 is a perfectly fine choice for all of these uses.
Contrast this with Windows where you basically have a choice between FAT32/VFAT for memcards and NTFS for hard drives. It tries to be everything to everybody, but in the end it is merely adequate for everybody. That, and it still requires periodic defragmentation. Really now... this is a problem that the rest of the filesystem/OS development world solved a long long time ago. Microsoft is constantly adding/tweaking/reworking NTFS... isn't it about time they fixed that?
First, the poster is an obvious AC troll so that pretty much automatically makes the discussion moot. But, supposing that wasn't the case...
The poster gave absolutely no information as to what sort of problem he was having. All we know is that it involves USB wireless. This is more or less the equivalent of "Our ship is broken. Will you make it go?"
And if the completely vague and generic complaint wasn't enough, the poster made generous use of colorful metaphors. This, more than anything else, is probably why he got the sarcastic response.
If you're going to complain about the user--developer communication challenge, next time please pick a better example than an AC troll.
Yeah... but it's all about money, and Microsoft and Sony want a piece of that pie.
There's no doubt that the "hardcore crowd" can make a company money. When Blizzard releases something, it's practically guaranteed to generate vast quantities of cash. But there are a lot more gamers out there than just the hardcore crowd.
I'm fairly confident that games for... let's call them "seasoned gamers"... won't be going away. Making these games makes people money, presumably enough of it otherwise they would have stopped long ago. But the focus on these gamers is gone and it's not coming back. The wider focus on more casual gamers is here to stay. They're not going away and neither are games for them.
What does this mean for seasoned gamers? There will be a lot more chaff to sort through to find the good games. The Wii is all the proof you need of this. It also means that there will probably be fewer games targeted at the seasoned crowd simply because there are more areas to cover. No longer is the workload focused entirely on the hardcore.
So, it's not the end times, not at all. There will be a lot more lousy games, to be sure, some so bad you can't help but think they give a particular platform a bad name. But, if all the consoles have this, the shame will be spread around generously. And there will still be games that us veteran gamers will want to play. Good games, though they'll be harder to find.
The reason PulseAudio is important is that it is a user space solution and this is important because audio choices have expanded considerably in the past ten years. There needs to be a simple(ish) GUI method of handling this nest of connections.
For example, on my PC I've simple on-board audio (intel-hda, I think) with four speakers and a pair of headphones. That's not hard to manage and I can actually do well with just ALSA (though ALSA isn't smart enough to handle speaker muting when I plug in the headphones).
Now, however, I have bought a nice pair of stereo Bluetooth headphones. How do I manage this additional piece of the puzzle? I can get sound through ALSA. It's a bit messy, requiring some changes in my.asoundrc file to redirect sound from on-board audio to Bluetooth, and running a script to make the BT connection. But, it's just a single channel and only one program can use it at a time.
An all ALSA solution is not possible because mixing is not possible. dmix only functions with actual "hardware" devices and BT audio is implemented as an ALSA plug-in and therefore not compatible. The real solution is to have a layer much higher than ALSA handling the routing and mixing. Preferably something easier to use, too.
PulseAudio *mostly* fits the bill... but its BT audio support is very immature and, as others have pointed out, it can be more than a little buggy. On my system it seems to start up it seemingly random configurations of volume. Often it starts muted. I unmute, but I must also open the volume controller, find the output device slider and then mute and unmute it specifically. Then I get sound. On other occasions when it happens to remember its old settings and starts unmuted, it usually works fine without any further meddling.
So, I think that given some time, PulseAudio will mature into a good and proper solution for a number of audio issues on Linux. Things will probably speed up significantly if other distros decide to use it and throw their weight behind it since I think the dev team is really tiny.
DOS had QBasic and debug.exe to do some assembly stuff (which was even more hard core).
Ah, I remember using "debug" to actually debug some old DOS programs of mine. Specifically, I was debugging a simple TSR (terminate and stay resident, essentially a daemon in DOS). It had a very unfriendly interface, but once you learned to use it, it was quite helpful.
The best part about debug was that it ran in DOS 16bit real mode. That meant that you had access to anything on the machine you wanted. You could give debug any address you wanted. Addresses in segment:offset format, of course, since you can't access it all with a single 16bit pointer. This let you look at DOS code in memory, BIOS data, other TSRs, or anything else lurking in memory.
Palm OS pre-version 5.x also had a free 3rd party debug program you could download. Since the m68k chips were also 16bit, you could use it to poke around anywhere in memory. It also has a decent interface that would let you jump right to offsets in memory where programs were stored. And, since Palm's used RAM for everything on the m68k devices, there was usually always more interesting stuff in RAM than on a machine with DOS.:)
Yes! Somebody else appears to get it! Trek, to me and many others I'm sure, is about exploring the unknown and how that relates to the human condition. But since Rick Berman took over, Trek has devolved into just-another-action-movie, and it's sad.
I did not enjoy much about the new Trek movie. The cast, I though, was well picked and did their roles well. Someday, perhaps, they will be given a decent Trek movie in which to act, but this was not it. It ended up being a long series of explosions, coincidences through which the characters meet one another, and a couple of scenes with a generic villain. This was all strung together by horrible (though common these days) cinematography and excellent special effects.
The Trek I loved is gone... and I don't think it will be coming back. Fortunately, I've go the TOS and TNG episodes as well as (most of) the movies made by the TOS cast.
Everything after that began to change and oftentimes become very un-Trek. Not that I didn't find enjoyment in watching DS9 and even (most of) Voyager, but they both strayed further and further from the core ideals of what Trek should be.
I guess the only saving grace here is that I worked very hard to not get my expectations up because I knew the movie would be a let down. I didn't know how it would, but I knew it would find a way.
Since we know there will be many sequels coming forth, here's hoping that they can take this admittedly good cast and put them in something worthy of being called Star Trek.
After the whole Gmail problem, it seems like Google would have been a little more on the ball with regards to the naming of future products. The article says that the trademark hasn't been used in years and that the company in question has even been dissolved.
Still, the trademark was granted and Google's strategy seems to have been to think happy thoughts while the USPTO decided the case. Couldn't they have just dealt with Specht before this turned towards lawsuit territory?
It sure would have cost less to deal with it early on...
Does anybody who dual-boots have a solution for the shared Bluetooth adapter MAC address pairing problem?
That is, currently I have a nice set of BT stereo headphones and soon (hopefully) a BT mouse. When I pair in Linux, it generates a key which is unique to the MACs of the adapter and the device and stores the key on both PC and BT device.
Now, what happens when I reboot into Vista? It doesn't know it has been paired, but the BT headphones *do* think they are still paired to the BT adapter that is present. These particular headphones are capable of remembering five hosts, but in this case the adapter (host) hasn't changed, only the OS.
I guess the solution is to manually force Vista/Linux to use a previously known key file. In this case, I know where Linux stores its BT pairing keys, but try as I might I cannot find where Vista stores this information. Google hasn't been able to help me here, either. I assume it's buried somewhere deep within the darkness of the registry, but where?
Without this fix, I have to re-pair my BT headphones every time I want to use them in a different OS on the same machine, and then re-pair yet again when I boot back into Linux. I'll probably have to do the same dance for a BT mouse, which will dramatically reduce its usefulness...:(
So... surely I'm not the only one to run into this. Anybody else with ideas/solutions?
This was a rather interesting post, but... punctuation please! You are missing so many commas that it's almost a crime. Several periods, too. It probably took me twice as long to read your text as it should have.
So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game and had its reputation tarnished by the freeloaders because of the server load issue.
No... it's still quite a bit more complex than that because you've included one of the other big piracy fallacies. These points are important to remember. Not all pirates are "trying" games before buying. Not all pirates are *ever* planning on buying the game they have copied.
So, no, Stardock has absolutely not lost 80% of possible revenue on Demigod. Some revenue, yes. But figuring out what that real value is is probably close to impossible. Even if you could poll pirates, would they answer truthfully? There are any number of reasons why they wouldn't: just because, deliberately being dishonest, some semblance of conscious tells them they really are stealing but they'd rather not admit it, etc.
In fact, Stardock's CEO recognizes this. Most DRM schemes operate on the premise that if pirates absolutely cannot copy your game, they'll come rushing back with cash thus making up for the cost in time and money for the DRM you used. But this doesn't hold up in real life.
When I was younger, I copied many games. I was in junior high and high school in the days just before the Net became widespread (graduated HS in 97). My friends and I routinely shared games. Why did I do it? Because I had no money. What little I did have was usually spent on video games (almost all PC). So when I pirated a game, what was really lost? Absolutely nothing. If I hadn't pirated the alternative was that I would not have played the game at all because purchasing it was not an option. Sure, that was the "right" and legal thing, but, hey, I was young.
If anything, the copying I did in my youth actually helped out the industry as a whole because I was exposed to a much wider variety of games, finding what I did and didn't like. Later, when I started to have more money, those genres/companies I liked got more money. I even bought some games that I had only copied in the past, including my all time favorite game, Star Control 2, when I finally found a re-release in stores.
Anyway, the point is that this is a very complex subject and the economics of it are equally complex. Who copies what and how often all depends on age, income, and personal temperament. Same thing with how much money is lost. It's not zero, it's not equal to the number of pirated copies floating around, and it's definitely not 2000xCost using RIAA math.
Hmmm... I think it's a little more than that. At least, they're specifically picking on Google in the summary's synopsis of the article. And why?
When I look at Google News, I see a page of links, the titles of which are almost entirely just headlines. The few that aren't just headlines include only a sentence or two from the article. How is this not fair use? And how is the AP entitled to any compensation for this? If you truly want to know more, you'll click on a link and, if it's an AP story, be sent to an AP website where you will get both the full article and the AP's ads.
For site's which don't play nice, ripping whole articles or outright plagiarism, then go ahead, bring down the hammer. But that's not a new problem. This, on the other hand, sounds an awful lot like the AP going for a money grab while waving a big lawyer stick. And what's worse is that they might succeed because the courts have time and again shown questionable judgment when it comes to cases involving linking and fair use.
In the places I've worked it's either been a) me who was responsible for buying/configuring my own machine or b) given a PC purchased by IT/management, but users given very wide latitude on how to configure/use it.
As annoying as all these useless background and systray apps are, isn't this as much the fault of lazy IT departments as it is the companies which produce these programs? And from all these comments, it would seem this is a problem with *many* IT departments.
Why do the IT people leave all of this stuff on? I have to assume if people complain about it so much that they can't take it off themselves otherwise they would have long ago. So why can't IT be bothered to properly configure the machines they maintain?
Surely most IT depts. configure one machine and ghost/clone it to others for backup and replication purposes and to prevent duplication of work. It's even less forgivable to not get rid of these apps if you only have to do it once.
Yikes... so I guess the issue here is an IT department gone crazy? Or, at the very least, a system implemented by IT staff who are either completely lacking the proper knowledge or lacking an idea of what it is like to use this system in the "real world". Either way, it doesn't sound like much fun to use...
And LDAP: it's a light directory system, useful for storing information about users. Passwords, names, contact info... stuff like that. Can't say what in particular your system is using it for, but it's clear that your IT people haven't set it up for single sign-on since you have to log into several different programs.
Starting up is another story. It takes me about 15-20 minutes before I am completely started. First it takes ten to just start up my PC including the autostart of some programs including Citrix. Citrix itself takes at least another 10 minutes and there I have to manually start the programs I need for the day, as I am unable to launch the automagically.
I'm constantly surprised by these frequent accounts of computers which take forever and a day to start up. It's not that I disbelieve them, but what exactly are these programs doing which takes such an incredible amount of time before they become useful?
I haven't personally experienced this since the early-ish Pentium days when OEM PCs came loaded with huge amounts of junk. Just unbearable. They still have all that junk, but PCs have become so much faster it's less of a problem and more of an annoyance now. At least, it is until you wipe the thing and set it up properly.
And these machines are almost invariably Windows PCs. I've got non-bleeding edge Linux PCs acting as servers running all manner of daemons doing all manner of tasks and they all go from cold to useful in less than two minutes. My Linux desktop machine boots even faster, but the time to usability (TTU?) is slightly longer as I open/reposition various user apps, open documents, etc. But it's still just a few minutes before I can doing something useful.
Yes, I do understand that this is a technical issue and it could easily be solved. I am not the person to do that.
Indeed. One day sleep/hibernate will work on enough machines to be the solution that most people are looking for. It already works just fine on my Laptop running Ubuntu. And my desktop can suspend fine in Vista, but has problems with the annoying ATI fglrx driver in Debian. Someday, though... someday...
I'm sorry, does everyone forget the date around this time of year?
Unfortunate timing, yes, but I think this is legitimate. If you're going to fool people, you normally don't announce and execute your prank before April 1st actually arrives.
I'm not sure what you mean by Facebook and Twitter as "dead man walking." Aren't these two of the fastest growing websites (in terms of members) on the internet? (And if you mean "they'll die eventually" then you too are a dead man walking...)
Wild inaccuracies aside, I think the GP meant that, so far, Facebook has yet to turn a profit. It's getting bigger and bigger and becoming ever more full of features, but there business plan seems to be "if we get big enough, we'll eventually make money through scaling".
I don't know, though... given their vast userbase and the site's general usefulness (*so* much better than Myspace ever was), it really seems like they should be making a good deal of money. But they're not. Even venture capitalists will only throw money at something for so long.:)
Slashdot Mirror
But seriously, some of the old file transfer protocols had some pretty nifty abilities, like restarting downloads.
Indeed.
I used ZModem not long ago on a project transferring data over a dodgy link. ZModem implementations are very small, quite fast, and they handle data integrity well. Also handy is the vast number of ready made tools which you can make use of. In my case, I could use ZModem through Minicom, or straight on the command line via sz/rz.
Finally, ZModem (and its predecessors X and YModem) are not that large or complex. A little bit of study and you'll have a good handle on how it works. When working with dodgy hardware or a flaky link (by which I mean home built, prototype boards, etc.), being able to follow along with your transfer protocol can help you isolate problems.
All right, Carousel!
Woo!
Those of us living in the desert, perhaps?
:)
I've never owned a raincoat. On the very infrequent days when it rains, an umbrella is generally sufficient to get the job done.
Also, backward compatibility. There is a whole heap of filesystems in Linux that exist only to fetch data from old media and old systems. For example, nobody in their right mind would actually *use* the Amiga filesystem for /home.
These filesystems all increase the count, but they are rarely used and don't see any development other than to make sure they still function with the latest kernel.
Well the idea that NTFS got it right is funny to start with. Defrag??? I still have to freaking Defrag?
No. Not unless you've got some sort of pathological disk access pattern that is also going to require a "defrag" on _any_ filesystem.
Yes, you still need to defragment your NTFS partitions occasionally. NTFS still frequently creates files with hundreds of fragments depending on how they are created.
For example, copying a large file off a CD will result in just a handful of fragments (it really *ought* to be one, but rarely is). Compare this to some update auto-downloader app that reads a stream of bytes over the Net and writes them to disk in many small increments. You might end up with a few thousand fragments for a file of 20-30 MB. Once, I even saw an under-1KB text file have 124 fragments. Wow.
Now, Vista does go out of its way to make this less noticeable as it will automatically start defragging the drive in the background when your computer has been idle for a short time. Oddly, though, while you might expect it to continue to defrag as long as you leave the machine idle, it doesn't. After it has "finished", run a defrag program that gives you more information than Vista's included "Disk Defragmenter" (which isn't hard as Defragmenter tells you *nothing* whatsoever). You will find that there are still many files with varying degrees of fragmentation.
Still, this auto-defrag in Vista is good enough that most users will almost never need to manually defrag their drives since it seems to activate often enough to keep the level of fragmentation under control. That said, after you install a very large program (say, an 8GB game), the level of fragmentation might increase significantly (only on the new files, obviously). Since the idle-time defragmenter never completely "finishes" during a single run, it might take a bit of time before all those new files have actually been defragmented.
Personally, I only use Windows (Vista in this case) for gaming and generally leave the defragmenting alone. After I install a new game, and sometimes after uninstalling one, I will manually run the defragmenter. I use AusLogics Disk Defrag to do the job since it's free and it gives some basic information about what it's actually doing, a visual approximation of how far along it is, and a report of the files it touched. I think it can also move more files than the Vista defragmenter, but I'm not positive about that.
Would it really be that hard to have ONE good fs that you could tune to different use cases? Probably not. But the average Linux coder sees that something isn't fast in case X and goes ahead redoing the entire wheel. And why? Because the thing he just looked at wasn't designed very well either and can't be adapted easily to different use scenarios. And why? Because it was done by a half-assed coder like himself. And so the circle closes.
Actually, yes, it is that hard. There's a good reason why so much research goes into filesystem development. A desktop use-case is very different from a database use-case which is again different from a web server use-case. Sure, you could find a middle ground, but it would result it mediocre performance (even after tuning) for all concerned.
Also, haven't you noticed that there is, essentially, "ONE good fs" that the vast majority of Linux systems use? It's called ext3 and it's the default for pretty much every major Linux distribution for the very reason that it does offer good performance in most cases. Desktop PC, laptop, small web server, DVR, development machine... ext3 is a perfectly fine choice for all of these uses.
Contrast this with Windows where you basically have a choice between FAT32/VFAT for memcards and NTFS for hard drives. It tries to be everything to everybody, but in the end it is merely adequate for everybody. That, and it still requires periodic defragmentation. Really now... this is a problem that the rest of the filesystem/OS development world solved a long long time ago. Microsoft is constantly adding/tweaking/reworking NTFS... isn't it about time they fixed that?
Seriously?
First, the poster is an obvious AC troll so that pretty much automatically makes the discussion moot. But, supposing that wasn't the case...
The poster gave absolutely no information as to what sort of problem he was having. All we know is that it involves USB wireless. This is more or less the equivalent of "Our ship is broken. Will you make it go?"
And if the completely vague and generic complaint wasn't enough, the poster made generous use of colorful metaphors. This, more than anything else, is probably why he got the sarcastic response.
If you're going to complain about the user--developer communication challenge, next time please pick a better example than an AC troll.
Yeah... but it's all about money, and Microsoft and Sony want a piece of that pie.
There's no doubt that the "hardcore crowd" can make a company money. When Blizzard releases something, it's practically guaranteed to generate vast quantities of cash. But there are a lot more gamers out there than just the hardcore crowd.
I'm fairly confident that games for... let's call them "seasoned gamers"... won't be going away. Making these games makes people money, presumably enough of it otherwise they would have stopped long ago. But the focus on these gamers is gone and it's not coming back. The wider focus on more casual gamers is here to stay. They're not going away and neither are games for them.
What does this mean for seasoned gamers? There will be a lot more chaff to sort through to find the good games. The Wii is all the proof you need of this. It also means that there will probably be fewer games targeted at the seasoned crowd simply because there are more areas to cover. No longer is the workload focused entirely on the hardcore.
So, it's not the end times, not at all. There will be a lot more lousy games, to be sure, some so bad you can't help but think they give a particular platform a bad name. But, if all the consoles have this, the shame will be spread around generously. And there will still be games that us veteran gamers will want to play. Good games, though they'll be harder to find.
The reason PulseAudio is important is that it is a user space solution and this is important because audio choices have expanded considerably in the past ten years. There needs to be a simple(ish) GUI method of handling this nest of connections.
For example, on my PC I've simple on-board audio (intel-hda, I think) with four speakers and a pair of headphones. That's not hard to manage and I can actually do well with just ALSA (though ALSA isn't smart enough to handle speaker muting when I plug in the headphones).
Now, however, I have bought a nice pair of stereo Bluetooth headphones. How do I manage this additional piece of the puzzle? I can get sound through ALSA. It's a bit messy, requiring some changes in my .asoundrc file to redirect sound from on-board audio to Bluetooth, and running a script to make the BT connection. But, it's just a single channel and only one program can use it at a time.
An all ALSA solution is not possible because mixing is not possible. dmix only functions with actual "hardware" devices and BT audio is implemented as an ALSA plug-in and therefore not compatible. The real solution is to have a layer much higher than ALSA handling the routing and mixing. Preferably something easier to use, too.
PulseAudio *mostly* fits the bill... but its BT audio support is very immature and, as others have pointed out, it can be more than a little buggy. On my system it seems to start up it seemingly random configurations of volume. Often it starts muted. I unmute, but I must also open the volume controller, find the output device slider and then mute and unmute it specifically. Then I get sound. On other occasions when it happens to remember its old settings and starts unmuted, it usually works fine without any further meddling.
So, I think that given some time, PulseAudio will mature into a good and proper solution for a number of audio issues on Linux. Things will probably speed up significantly if other distros decide to use it and throw their weight behind it since I think the dev team is really tiny.
$ make it STOP=true
DOS had QBasic and debug.exe to do some assembly stuff (which was even more hard core).
Ah, I remember using "debug" to actually debug some old DOS programs of mine. Specifically, I was debugging a simple TSR (terminate and stay resident, essentially a daemon in DOS). It had a very unfriendly interface, but once you learned to use it, it was quite helpful.
The best part about debug was that it ran in DOS 16bit real mode. That meant that you had access to anything on the machine you wanted. You could give debug any address you wanted. Addresses in segment:offset format, of course, since you can't access it all with a single 16bit pointer. This let you look at DOS code in memory, BIOS data, other TSRs, or anything else lurking in memory.
Palm OS pre-version 5.x also had a free 3rd party debug program you could download. Since the m68k chips were also 16bit, you could use it to poke around anywhere in memory. It also has a decent interface that would let you jump right to offsets in memory where programs were stored. And, since Palm's used RAM for everything on the m68k devices, there was usually always more interesting stuff in RAM than on a machine with DOS. :)
Yes! Somebody else appears to get it! Trek, to me and many others I'm sure, is about exploring the unknown and how that relates to the human condition. But since Rick Berman took over, Trek has devolved into just-another-action-movie, and it's sad.
I did not enjoy much about the new Trek movie. The cast, I though, was well picked and did their roles well. Someday, perhaps, they will be given a decent Trek movie in which to act, but this was not it. It ended up being a long series of explosions, coincidences through which the characters meet one another, and a couple of scenes with a generic villain. This was all strung together by horrible (though common these days) cinematography and excellent special effects.
The Trek I loved is gone... and I don't think it will be coming back. Fortunately, I've go the TOS and TNG episodes as well as (most of) the movies made by the TOS cast.
Everything after that began to change and oftentimes become very un-Trek. Not that I didn't find enjoyment in watching DS9 and even (most of) Voyager, but they both strayed further and further from the core ideals of what Trek should be.
I guess the only saving grace here is that I worked very hard to not get my expectations up because I knew the movie would be a let down. I didn't know how it would, but I knew it would find a way.
Since we know there will be many sequels coming forth, here's hoping that they can take this admittedly good cast and put them in something worthy of being called Star Trek.
After the whole Gmail problem, it seems like Google would have been a little more on the ball with regards to the naming of future products. The article says that the trademark hasn't been used in years and that the company in question has even been dissolved.
Still, the trademark was granted and Google's strategy seems to have been to think happy thoughts while the USPTO decided the case. Couldn't they have just dealt with Specht before this turned towards lawsuit territory?
It sure would have cost less to deal with it early on...
Does anybody who dual-boots have a solution for the shared Bluetooth adapter MAC address pairing problem?
That is, currently I have a nice set of BT stereo headphones and soon (hopefully) a BT mouse. When I pair in Linux, it generates a key which is unique to the MACs of the adapter and the device and stores the key on both PC and BT device.
Now, what happens when I reboot into Vista? It doesn't know it has been paired, but the BT headphones *do* think they are still paired to the BT adapter that is present. These particular headphones are capable of remembering five hosts, but in this case the adapter (host) hasn't changed, only the OS.
I guess the solution is to manually force Vista/Linux to use a previously known key file. In this case, I know where Linux stores its BT pairing keys, but try as I might I cannot find where Vista stores this information. Google hasn't been able to help me here, either. I assume it's buried somewhere deep within the darkness of the registry, but where?
Without this fix, I have to re-pair my BT headphones every time I want to use them in a different OS on the same machine, and then re-pair yet again when I boot back into Linux. I'll probably have to do the same dance for a BT mouse, which will dramatically reduce its usefulness... :(
So... surely I'm not the only one to run into this. Anybody else with ideas/solutions?
Oh god, my eyes!
This was a rather interesting post, but... punctuation please! You are missing so many commas that it's almost a crime. Several periods, too. It probably took me twice as long to read your text as it should have.
So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game and had its reputation tarnished by the freeloaders because of the server load issue.
No... it's still quite a bit more complex than that because you've included one of the other big piracy fallacies. These points are important to remember. Not all pirates are "trying" games before buying. Not all pirates are *ever* planning on buying the game they have copied.
So, no, Stardock has absolutely not lost 80% of possible revenue on Demigod. Some revenue, yes. But figuring out what that real value is is probably close to impossible. Even if you could poll pirates, would they answer truthfully? There are any number of reasons why they wouldn't: just because, deliberately being dishonest, some semblance of conscious tells them they really are stealing but they'd rather not admit it, etc.
In fact, Stardock's CEO recognizes this. Most DRM schemes operate on the premise that if pirates absolutely cannot copy your game, they'll come rushing back with cash thus making up for the cost in time and money for the DRM you used. But this doesn't hold up in real life.
When I was younger, I copied many games. I was in junior high and high school in the days just before the Net became widespread (graduated HS in 97). My friends and I routinely shared games. Why did I do it? Because I had no money. What little I did have was usually spent on video games (almost all PC). So when I pirated a game, what was really lost? Absolutely nothing. If I hadn't pirated the alternative was that I would not have played the game at all because purchasing it was not an option. Sure, that was the "right" and legal thing, but, hey, I was young.
If anything, the copying I did in my youth actually helped out the industry as a whole because I was exposed to a much wider variety of games, finding what I did and didn't like. Later, when I started to have more money, those genres/companies I liked got more money. I even bought some games that I had only copied in the past, including my all time favorite game, Star Control 2, when I finally found a re-release in stores.
Anyway, the point is that this is a very complex subject and the economics of it are equally complex. Who copies what and how often all depends on age, income, and personal temperament. Same thing with how much money is lost. It's not zero, it's not equal to the number of pirated copies floating around, and it's definitely not 2000xCost using RIAA math.
Hmmm... I think it's a little more than that. At least, they're specifically picking on Google in the summary's synopsis of the article. And why?
When I look at Google News, I see a page of links, the titles of which are almost entirely just headlines. The few that aren't just headlines include only a sentence or two from the article. How is this not fair use? And how is the AP entitled to any compensation for this? If you truly want to know more, you'll click on a link and, if it's an AP story, be sent to an AP website where you will get both the full article and the AP's ads.
For site's which don't play nice, ripping whole articles or outright plagiarism, then go ahead, bring down the hammer. But that's not a new problem. This, on the other hand, sounds an awful lot like the AP going for a money grab while waving a big lawyer stick. And what's worse is that they might succeed because the courts have time and again shown questionable judgment when it comes to cases involving linking and fair use.
Chalk it up to lack of experience.
In the places I've worked it's either been a) me who was responsible for buying/configuring my own machine or b) given a PC purchased by IT/management, but users given very wide latitude on how to configure/use it.
As annoying as all these useless background and systray apps are, isn't this as much the fault of lazy IT departments as it is the companies which produce these programs? And from all these comments, it would seem this is a problem with *many* IT departments.
Why do the IT people leave all of this stuff on? I have to assume if people complain about it so much that they can't take it off themselves otherwise they would have long ago. So why can't IT be bothered to properly configure the machines they maintain?
Surely most IT depts. configure one machine and ghost/clone it to others for backup and replication purposes and to prevent duplication of work. It's even less forgivable to not get rid of these apps if you only have to do it once.
Yikes... so I guess the issue here is an IT department gone crazy? Or, at the very least, a system implemented by IT staff who are either completely lacking the proper knowledge or lacking an idea of what it is like to use this system in the "real world". Either way, it doesn't sound like much fun to use...
And LDAP: it's a light directory system, useful for storing information about users. Passwords, names, contact info... stuff like that. Can't say what in particular your system is using it for, but it's clear that your IT people haven't set it up for single sign-on since you have to log into several different programs.
Reticulating splines?
:)
Starting up is another story. It takes me about 15-20 minutes before I am completely started. First it takes ten to just start up my PC including the autostart of some programs including Citrix. Citrix itself takes at least another 10 minutes and there I have to manually start the programs I need for the day, as I am unable to launch the automagically.
I'm constantly surprised by these frequent accounts of computers which take forever and a day to start up. It's not that I disbelieve them, but what exactly are these programs doing which takes such an incredible amount of time before they become useful?
I haven't personally experienced this since the early-ish Pentium days when OEM PCs came loaded with huge amounts of junk. Just unbearable. They still have all that junk, but PCs have become so much faster it's less of a problem and more of an annoyance now. At least, it is until you wipe the thing and set it up properly.
And these machines are almost invariably Windows PCs. I've got non-bleeding edge Linux PCs acting as servers running all manner of daemons doing all manner of tasks and they all go from cold to useful in less than two minutes. My Linux desktop machine boots even faster, but the time to usability (TTU?) is slightly longer as I open/reposition various user apps, open documents, etc. But it's still just a few minutes before I can doing something useful.
Yes, I do understand that this is a technical issue and it could easily be solved. I am not the person to do that.
Indeed. One day sleep/hibernate will work on enough machines to be the solution that most people are looking for. It already works just fine on my Laptop running Ubuntu. And my desktop can suspend fine in Vista, but has problems with the annoying ATI fglrx driver in Debian. Someday, though... someday...
I'm sorry, does everyone forget the date around this time of year?
Unfortunate timing, yes, but I think this is legitimate. If you're going to fool people, you normally don't announce and execute your prank before April 1st actually arrives.
I'm not sure what you mean by Facebook and Twitter as "dead man walking." Aren't these two of the fastest growing websites (in terms of members) on the internet? (And if you mean "they'll die eventually" then you too are a dead man walking...)
Wild inaccuracies aside, I think the GP meant that, so far, Facebook has yet to turn a profit. It's getting bigger and bigger and becoming ever more full of features, but there business plan seems to be "if we get big enough, we'll eventually make money through scaling".
I don't know, though... given their vast userbase and the site's general usefulness (*so* much better than Myspace ever was), it really seems like they should be making a good deal of money. But they're not. Even venture capitalists will only throw money at something for so long. :)
A: Nebraska.
Q: Where is the United States Strategic Corn Reserve?