A fancy new Microsoft Natural keyboard I tried at work came with such an adapter. All of these adapters, serial --> ps/2, ps/2 --> AT, ps/2 --> USB, seem to be simply two connectors with wires joining the appropriate pins.
Just to point it out, I think there may be more to the PS/2 USB adapter than let on here. In the manual for the Microsoft Natural keyboard, it mentions that the USB adapter will only work for the Microsoft keyboard. I'd love to hear otherwise, but I am led to believe that there is some circuitry in the keyboard that detects if the adapter is being used, and then sends different signals down the wire to work with USB. I haven't tried any of this yet (since my PC at work where I have this keyboard doesn't do USB [NT4]), but I still have the adapter otherwise.
Just for the sake of people who haven't seen it, the MS keyboard basically has a standard PS/2 cable, but they included a 10" wire that has a female PS/2 adapter on one end and a USB connector on the other. Really looks like nothing special, so I'm suspicious if the keyboard does something, or if it really is that simple to go PS/2 to USB.
Actually, I've had this idea for years, but never did anything about it. But here are two things I can say about filtering issue.
First, I believe that PC cases should be built like some airconditioners are - I mean that by the fact that some ACs have filters that are easially removed and cleaned. More specifically, filters that are part of a plastic slip of some sort, rather than the "bungie this foam piece over the condensator". Failing that, maybe a tactfully wrapped panty hose over the air in-flowing ducts.
Second, I was at Javitts center for a PC Expo (or something like that) in NYC a few years ago, and in the basement (where most of the cheaper booths are), some person was trying to sell fan filters that clipped on to the fan port (on back of PC). However, at that time I had never seen a PC case that was doing anything other than blowing air OUT of these ports, so effectively, this filter was only catching the dust AFTER it had blown through the computer. I looked at it for a moment hoping that this was the solution to my quest, but instead realizing the fault of design, commented to the person, "so wait.. you've made your computer a $2000 air filter for under your desk?"
While it was a little un-called-for to say that, maybe it was with some hopes that they'd redesign and come out with something practical? Who knows..
While I'm sure many people would hope that history would repeat itself here, it is a different story now.
Back when IBM was the "Lord of x86", there were clones available. The clones offered basically the same thing as the true blue IBM product. The only reason why people would really buy IBM was for the name (and secondly because their hardware was quality).
Now, if you consider Microsoft the "Lord of x86", then consider what can you get that is the same thing as Windows? Don't tell me Linux/BeOS/BSD/etc, because they're not exactly the same thing. Can someone who has never touched an alternative OS work it as easially as Windows? This is debatable, but the popular vote is no. Can they run the cool programs their friends send them in email without hassle? For the most part, no. Can they run their AOL? For 14 million (?) subscribers, "not really". Can they buy a cheap system from Dell without Windows? No.
I don't like it any more than the rest of you, but this isn't the same playing ground as the IBM/MCA issue. Macintosh is the alternative (though they probably need a friend or two to convince them that the Mac is just as easy (or easier) than the Windows box), but Apple needs to reduce the price of entry to their world to appeal to people used to seeing Dell's great deals.
Re:6502 microcode bugs...
on
Pet Bugs?
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· Score: 1
Ah. good old cisc. IIRC, the 6502 was still pretty snappy, getting most ops done in one or two cycles.
Well, a few of the load/save operations took 4-7 cycles, but they shaved a few off when the 65C02 came out.
Funny that you mention "good ol' CISC", because whenever I try to explain CISC VS RISC to people, I use the analogy that the old 8-bit 6502 is almost RISC in that is has much fewer instructions to contend with. Yes, this isn't quite accurate, but in the argument that I build up, it helps drive a point home.
It probably would take quite a while, actually.. Cray machines' strength lies in vector processing. In other words, your BASH shell will run at Pentium 166 speeds while your eigen matrix computation will fly through at 100x the speed.
I guess you could say its almost like using your nVidia GPU to do your regular computational tasks; it can do it, but it really shines when doing 3D graphics.
It is even better when you're strolling through the data center of a fortune 500 company's headquarters, come across two different Cray machines, and go "WOAH! This is the coolest thing I've ever seen!".. I forget the models of the ones I saw, but no custom x86 rig drops my jaw nearly as much.
Reading about this makes me think of the Kids in the Hall movie, "Brain Candy". Specifically, in the movie at the Roritor Pharmacutical company, they are sitting at a big table discussing that they need a new drug to sell to the people. The discussion of a Father's Day drug, a Christmas drug, a Boxing day drug (etc.. you get the idea).. I almost hear the McAfee and Symantec people talking about how they need a 4th of July virus...
I have a Logitech ClickSmart 510 ($140) that is basically the same idea here; a webcam on steroids.
It has this "size-enlarging" feature, as it takes small (320x200), medium (640x480) and large (1280x1024 or something like that). The large takes the same amount of memory as the medium shots, so I was suspicious immediately. The picture quality isn't terrible when it comes out at that size, but I certainly don't use it anymore because I can get same-to-better results enlgarging it myself, if I really want to.
Didn't know that about the airport. My observation was from my several trips to Cleveland. Maybe I didn't see all there was to see about mass transit there.
To make it known, La Guardia has nothing except maybe a connecting bus. I don't like that silly little airport anyway. JFK has the A subway running to it. And as for my airport of preference, Newark, a NJ Transit train that runs into Penn Station will bring you to a monorail stop. Granted, that might not be as good as a subway stop downstairs of the checkin, but it isn't half bad.
You obviously don't know (at least) New York City. Yes, there are thousands of cars on the streets, but we have a very good mass transit system in the tri-state area (NY, NJ and CT) that carries hundreds of thousands of commuters into the city every day. The NYC mass transit system alone registers nearly 2.3 billion riders a year (about 6.3 million a day).
I will agree with your argument in other areas, however. I think that in many places in the country, they have nowhere near the mass transit system of other countries. Never really noticed much in Denver or Cleveland. Granted, things are little more spread out there.
In regards to NS4.7 being a little faster even with the NFS drive, it might be due to the MEMORY part of the cache; NS and MOZ are different in how they handle cache, and possibly your NS memory cache is larger? Speculation...
As far as RC2 not having the option, the way that I always handle these things is to hack it to use the local drive as the cache. In Netscape, you could have edited the preferences.js file and found where the cache is defined. Otherwise, for any other program that has a cache directory (i.e. The GIMP's temporary directory in ${HOME}/.gimp), I usually remove the temp directory they have and replace it with a symbolic link to something in/var/tmp. If you use GIMP, you should try this.. you'll notice enormous speedup on some operations.
The/var/tmp is a great thing if you're NFS mounted. I don't think many administrators would appreciate you using it if you're not careful, because as I said above, it is not automatically cleaned by the OS. On my Ultra 10 from my old job, I had about 1.5GB available on/var/tmp, so I'd pretty much do ALL my throwaway work on that drive (stuff that didn't have to be RAID protected). Remember, this is local disk, so it isn't going over your 10/100MBit network.. a C++ library (approx 250k lines of code) which would take about 20 minutes to compile on this machine over NFS would be about 3-5 minutes faster using/var/tmp.
Again, this is a wonderful tip as long as you're responsible with it. Remember that if the system reboots, you're not guaranteed that/var/tmp contents will be there. If your machine is blasted, you certainly won't have/var/tmp. If you fill your/var/tmp, you might cause the OS to CRASH. Just be sure to leave at least 100MB available and you shouldn't have any problems.
I ran Mozilla regularly on a Ultra 10 (333MHz/256MB) and didn't think it was that bad.
My guess is that you're using this at work, correct? If you're at work, and your system is set up like most Sun boxen in a work environment, your home page is probably on an NFS drive. If this is correct so far, then I bet what is really killing your performance is that your cache directory is on the NFS drive.
I could be completely wrong on your situation, but if that is the case, you can fix this by putting your cache on your machine's local disk. You just have to find some space, so do this:
Open a shell and type "df -k/var/tmp". This will report to you how much space is available on your local disk (/var/tmp is typically located on your local disk; filesystem should be something like/dev/ctd0s0.. or/dev/vx/..).
Look at the "Available" column. This is being reported in kilobytes (-k), so dividing that by 1024 is roughly the number of MB free. If this is under 100MB or the "percentage used" is over 60%, then you might not want to proceed (if you use up ALL this space, you'll prevent other applications from running).
Create a subdirectory in/var/tmp called "mozcache".
Open Mozilla, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Cache->Di sk Cache Folder and set it to/var/tmp/mozcache. You might want to reduce your disk cache setting to something around 8192-16384 if you're worried about space.
Close mozilla, restart. Hit a web page and verify that it is using the new cache by doing a directory listing of/var/tmp/mozcache.
Two words of warning:
/var/tmp is NOT automatically cleaned by Solaris. Any files you create there will most likely stay there. Of course, Mozilla cleans up its own cache directory, but just keep this in mind.
If you go to another machine, it might not create the/var/tmp/mozcache.
Apologies if this is stuff you already know.. I just figured that if you didn't know this, it'd be useful.
Suddenly every geek in the world seeks out a Gopher site. All the protocol analyzers out there register a huge spike in a dormant protocol. Most think it is a bug.
Some "artsy" or "retro" computer person decides to create a series of Gopher sites simply because it is "creative" to do so. I guess this is kind of like people who release software for obsolete computers or people who play vinyl records just to impress people with how cool they are.
Note: Just to avoid any flames, I am NOT bashing vinyl; I happen to be an avid vinyl collector for personal reasons (cover art, sound, etc)..
Re:NJ: Attic Static DDIAL? 2AM BBS? Drew Undergrou
on
Remembering the BBS
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· Score: 1
Ok, the day I browse at 0 and do a search for my old handle.. sounds like R.B. to me.. I wrote a few (>cough
Of course, huge apologies if I got this one wrong, there are only two other possibilities for QBasic, but I think I got this one right in the voice coder.
Well, I haven't really seen much that brings you so close to first-person that does much other.
My case-in-point is that I recently shelled out some money for Microsoft Train Simulator. It uses the DirectX technologies to give you a first-person perspective experience of driving several different types of trains on different routes. For someone who would love to quit his day job and become a train engineer, this is fantastic. However, even on a P4-1800 with gobs of memory and a 64MB GF2MX video card, this thing is dog slow and has "passing grade" graphics. While it is fun to play, it doesn't satisfy my real first-person experience.
What I mean by "real" experience is the feeling I got when I first played Descent on a Pentium 60 in a dark room with stereo speakers. Turn the music down, sound FX way up, and don't come back to the real world for hours. I had the same experience with Quake II. It seems that only a handful of games seem to get this experience right, and the engines that drive these games typically come from companies who make these blood-lust games.
These games are an escape. Yes, I wish they could have the same rendering engine in Train Simulator as they do in Quake III, but that probably won't happen. So until then, I'll get my kicks from fragging aliens.
my two cents..
I have had teams that preferred the char* format before, and personally I like it myself since the type of variable you're describing is a char*, and you're calling it foo. Now what I don't like is the idea of putting more than one variable on the same line. That is where my specs (and personal style) resolves your issue. I define ONLY ONE variable per line. Heck, source code space can be verbose; I believe that if someone writes really small code in source, then they're usually just trying to show off.
My belief is that compilers are pretty good, and the optimizers are always improving. Write the code legible and clear, and let the compiler/optimizer make it small and tight for you. Besides, when you only define one variable per line, you've got the rest of the line for a comment on what that variable's use is!
So is this why making a phone call in Las Vegas costs an arm and a leg? Even at the cheapest hotels, calling something across the street will cost you at least $2 for the connection.
Yes, I know that any casino area (read: Atlantic City, Vegas, reservations) nickle-and-dime you every chance they get, but sometimes it is a bit ridiculous.
I wish I remembered where I read this, but it was a few years ago. What I had read was that the 80286 was officially approved by NASA for use in outer space applications. Most likely, this meant that it was approved for use in sattelites, but I would imagine that a shuttle has better radiation shielding than a satellite (the real issue here).
Of course, it would be a useless statement if the current shuttles still are based on 8086 (read: 8086 and 80286 are no where near pin compatible, so it isn't a drop-in solution). Nonetheless, if they were really having troubles, they could upgrade their boards to 80286 in a semi-reasonable amount of time, no?
C'mon, you must remember something. Most of the people who read this site can be labeled as "above average computer users". With this, I would say that many of these people are educated (or simply devoted to learning computers) well, enough to understand the intricacies of computers.
Now let's look at kids in special education courses. My girlfriend is a teacher in the Bronx (NY) and some of these kids can't even alphabetize at the age of 10! Do you expect them to use BASH?
I agree with you that using CLIs force you to have a greater understanding of computers. I appreciate that. I also believe that programmers who are just starting out should fire up an Apple II emulator and learn 6502 assembly language so that they can have a greater understanding of how computers (and compilers) really work. But to think that EVERYONE should do this is simply too much. Heck, some people can't stop their VCRs from flashing 12:00, but they should know that 'cat' isn't just the name of a furry animal?
Sorry if this comes out as a bit of a rant, but I just think that reality should be recognized sometimes.
it's a recession. Guess what kind of stuff is the first to get cut from people's budget? Yep, overpriced crappy music.
Ahh yes, I'd agree with you in the "adult" demographic, but what about in the teenage demographic? Those kids will buy anything that appears cool, and the record companies know that and they ALSO know that the kids have no regard for this re-session thing.
Frank Zappa discussed this idea quite well in his autobiography ("The Real Frank Zappa Book") by describing a 13 year old girl that hears a song on the radio, talks with her friends about it, goes out to the store and buys the album for that one song so that she can play it over and over again and talk on the phone with her friends about it some more before the next song comes out. It even helps if the musicians are boy-ish cute, because then they can buy posters and talk to their friends how dreamy so-and-so is.
Something like that....
Hmm, wonder if the new line of HP calculators would be in the form of an iPaq..
Actually, I'm miffed by the idea that HP (cough.. carly) dropped the calculator line. Go around Wall Street trading desks and EVERYONE has a 12C/17Bii/19Bii on their desk. Go to any business school and you'll find the same situation. The TI calculators are fine, but HP is (soon to be 'was' I guess) the standard.
Well, I guess if Oracle had plans to construct the "Big Brother" database for the USA, then this'll certainly hurt. Hmm.. wonder what would happen if the database was open source? Running the nation's biggest information repository on MySQL.. would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
At least I think that we do.. At one intersection in particular (Houston and Bowery) I've noticed numerous times a flash when someone does an illegal move in this intersection. On nearby poles, you can see a camera and flash bulb.
I don't know what kind of results this thing produces, but I'd be certain that it does automatic tickets.
Ahh yes, RealPlayer. However, you may recall that RealPlayer didn't do all this "All Your Associations Belong To Us" move until Microsoft started elbowing in on their business. Let's turn the wayback machine to around 1997, shall we?
Back then RealPlayer was a neat and promising product. Microsoft didn't like that (of course), so they made the streaming Windows Media capabilities. Microsoft did their typical hard-hand tactic and broke RealPlayer on Windows. RealPlayer, in an effort to stay in business has to adopt a new method of living on the Windows desktop, and as a result all these new "features" end up in RealPlayer and slowly evolves into the piece of garbage (unfortunately) that it is today.
Quite honestly, I don't blame Real for doing all that they've done to RealPlayer. It may not be the best way, but it is certainly one of the few (only?) ways to survive. I have my own problems with RealPlayer; specifically that I've told it a thousand times to NOT launch the taskbar icon upon startup, yet it still does to this day. The amount of "spam space" on the RealPlayer window is horrendous. You have to disable 6 different "views" to get down to a minimalistic display. This is almost unacceptable, but I do appreciate one thing about Real: They support other operating systems. Yes, Microsoft has released Windows Media Player for Solaris and Macintosh, but no Linux or other systems. Real can claim that they're available for several flavors of UNIX in addition to Mac and Windows.
Actually, this is quite better I think. MTV, when it started, jumped right in to playing videos. Although I had cable at the time and started watching it a few days afterwards, if it had been something like this (read: constant broadcasting before the fact), then I would have been able to catch that ever-so-nostalgic "first broadcast".
I guess some people would rather see it from the beginning, and this method allows that.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to point it out, I think there may be more to the PS/2 USB adapter than let on here. In the manual for the Microsoft Natural keyboard, it mentions that the USB adapter will only work for the Microsoft keyboard. I'd love to hear otherwise, but I am led to believe that there is some circuitry in the keyboard that detects if the adapter is being used, and then sends different signals down the wire to work with USB. I haven't tried any of this yet (since my PC at work where I have this keyboard doesn't do USB [NT4]), but I still have the adapter otherwise.
Just for the sake of people who haven't seen it, the MS keyboard basically has a standard PS/2 cable, but they included a 10" wire that has a female PS/2 adapter on one end and a USB connector on the other. Really looks like nothing special, so I'm suspicious if the keyboard does something, or if it really is that simple to go PS/2 to USB.
First, I believe that PC cases should be built like some airconditioners are - I mean that by the fact that some ACs have filters that are easially removed and cleaned. More specifically, filters that are part of a plastic slip of some sort, rather than the "bungie this foam piece over the condensator". Failing that, maybe a tactfully wrapped panty hose over the air in-flowing ducts.
Second, I was at Javitts center for a PC Expo (or something like that) in NYC a few years ago, and in the basement (where most of the cheaper booths are), some person was trying to sell fan filters that clipped on to the fan port (on back of PC). However, at that time I had never seen a PC case that was doing anything other than blowing air OUT of these ports, so effectively, this filter was only catching the dust AFTER it had blown through the computer. I looked at it for a moment hoping that this was the solution to my quest, but instead realizing the fault of design, commented to the person, "so wait.. you've made your computer a $2000 air filter for under your desk?"
While it was a little un-called-for to say that, maybe it was with some hopes that they'd redesign and come out with something practical? Who knows..
Back when IBM was the "Lord of x86", there were clones available. The clones offered basically the same thing as the true blue IBM product. The only reason why people would really buy IBM was for the name (and secondly because their hardware was quality).
Now, if you consider Microsoft the "Lord of x86", then consider what can you get that is the same thing as Windows? Don't tell me Linux/BeOS/BSD/etc, because they're not exactly the same thing. Can someone who has never touched an alternative OS work it as easially as Windows? This is debatable, but the popular vote is no. Can they run the cool programs their friends send them in email without hassle? For the most part, no. Can they run their AOL? For 14 million (?) subscribers, "not really". Can they buy a cheap system from Dell without Windows? No.
I don't like it any more than the rest of you, but this isn't the same playing ground as the IBM/MCA issue. Macintosh is the alternative (though they probably need a friend or two to convince them that the Mac is just as easy (or easier) than the Windows box), but Apple needs to reduce the price of entry to their world to appeal to people used to seeing Dell's great deals.
Well, a few of the load/save operations took 4-7 cycles, but they shaved a few off when the 65C02 came out.
Funny that you mention "good ol' CISC", because whenever I try to explain CISC VS RISC to people, I use the analogy that the old 8-bit 6502 is almost RISC in that is has much fewer instructions to contend with. Yes, this isn't quite accurate, but in the argument that I build up, it helps drive a point home.
I guess you could say its almost like using your nVidia GPU to do your regular computational tasks; it can do it, but it really shines when doing 3D graphics.
It is even better when you're strolling through the data center of a fortune 500 company's headquarters, come across two different Cray machines, and go "WOAH! This is the coolest thing I've ever seen!".. I forget the models of the ones I saw, but no custom x86 rig drops my jaw nearly as much.
Reading about this makes me think of the Kids in the Hall movie, "Brain Candy". Specifically, in the movie at the Roritor Pharmacutical company, they are sitting at a big table discussing that they need a new drug to sell to the people. The discussion of a Father's Day drug, a Christmas drug, a Boxing day drug (etc.. you get the idea).. I almost hear the McAfee and Symantec people talking about how they need a 4th of July virus...
It has this "size-enlarging" feature, as it takes small (320x200), medium (640x480) and large (1280x1024 or something like that). The large takes the same amount of memory as the medium shots, so I was suspicious immediately. The picture quality isn't terrible when it comes out at that size, but I certainly don't use it anymore because I can get same-to-better results enlgarging it myself, if I really want to.
To make it known, La Guardia has nothing except maybe a connecting bus. I don't like that silly little airport anyway. JFK has the A subway running to it. And as for my airport of preference, Newark, a NJ Transit train that runs into Penn Station will bring you to a monorail stop. Granted, that might not be as good as a subway stop downstairs of the checkin, but it isn't half bad.
You obviously don't know (at least) New York City. Yes, there are thousands of cars on the streets, but we have a very good mass transit system in the tri-state area (NY, NJ and CT) that carries hundreds of thousands of commuters into the city every day. The NYC mass transit system alone registers nearly 2.3 billion riders a year (about 6.3 million a day).
I will agree with your argument in other areas, however. I think that in many places in the country, they have nowhere near the mass transit system of other countries. Never really noticed much in Denver or Cleveland. Granted, things are little more spread out there.
In regards to NS4.7 being a little faster even with the NFS drive, it might be due to the MEMORY part of the cache; NS and MOZ are different in how they handle cache, and possibly your NS memory cache is larger? Speculation...
As far as RC2 not having the option, the way that I always handle these things is to hack it to use the local drive as the cache. In Netscape, you could have edited the preferences.js file and found where the cache is defined. Otherwise, for any other program that has a cache directory (i.e. The GIMP's temporary directory in ${HOME}/.gimp), I usually remove the temp directory they have and replace it with a symbolic link to something in /var/tmp. If you use GIMP, you should try this.. you'll notice enormous speedup on some operations.
The /var/tmp is a great thing if you're NFS mounted. I don't think many administrators would appreciate you using it if you're not careful, because as I said above, it is not automatically cleaned by the OS. On my Ultra 10 from my old job, I had about 1.5GB available on /var/tmp, so I'd pretty much do ALL my throwaway work on that drive (stuff that didn't have to be RAID protected). Remember, this is local disk, so it isn't going over your 10/100MBit network.. a C++ library (approx 250k lines of code) which would take about 20 minutes to compile on this machine over NFS would be about 3-5 minutes faster using /var/tmp.
Again, this is a wonderful tip as long as you're responsible with it. Remember that if the system reboots, you're not guaranteed that /var/tmp contents will be there. If your machine is blasted, you certainly won't have /var/tmp. If you fill your /var/tmp, you might cause the OS to CRASH. Just be sure to leave at least 100MB available and you shouldn't have any problems.
Enjoy your new-found speed...
My guess is that you're using this at work, correct? If you're at work, and your system is set up like most Sun boxen in a work environment, your home page is probably on an NFS drive. If this is correct so far, then I bet what is really killing your performance is that your cache directory is on the NFS drive.
I could be completely wrong on your situation, but if that is the case, you can fix this by putting your cache on your machine's local disk. You just have to find some space, so do this:
- Open a shell and type "df -k
/var/tmp". This will report to you how much space is available on your local disk (/var/tmp is typically located on your local disk; filesystem should be something like /dev/ctd0s0.. or /dev/vx/..).
- Look at the "Available" column. This is being reported in kilobytes (-k), so dividing that by 1024 is roughly the number of MB free. If this is under 100MB or the "percentage used" is over 60%, then you might not want to proceed (if you use up ALL this space, you'll prevent other applications from running).
- Create a subdirectory in
/var/tmp called "mozcache".
- Open Mozilla, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Cache->Di sk Cache Folder and set it to
/var/tmp/mozcache. You might want to reduce your disk cache setting to something around 8192-16384 if you're worried about space.
- Close mozilla, restart. Hit a web page and verify that it is using the new cache by doing a directory listing of
/var/tmp/mozcache.
Two words of warning:Apologies if this is stuff you already know.. I just figured that if you didn't know this, it'd be useful.
- Suddenly every geek in the world seeks out a Gopher site. All the protocol analyzers out there register a huge spike in a dormant protocol. Most think it is a bug.
- Some "artsy" or "retro" computer person decides to create a series of Gopher sites simply because it is "creative" to do so. I guess this is kind of like people who release software for obsolete computers or people who play vinyl records just to impress people with how cool they are.
Note: Just to avoid any flames, I am NOT bashing vinyl; I happen to be an avid vinyl collector for personal reasons (cover art, sound, etc)..Ok, the day I browse at 0 and do a search for my old handle.. sounds like R.B. to me.. I wrote a few (>cough Of course, huge apologies if I got this one wrong, there are only two other possibilities for QBasic, but I think I got this one right in the voice coder.
My case-in-point is that I recently shelled out some money for Microsoft Train Simulator. It uses the DirectX technologies to give you a first-person perspective experience of driving several different types of trains on different routes. For someone who would love to quit his day job and become a train engineer, this is fantastic. However, even on a P4-1800 with gobs of memory and a 64MB GF2MX video card, this thing is dog slow and has "passing grade" graphics. While it is fun to play, it doesn't satisfy my real first-person experience.
What I mean by "real" experience is the feeling I got when I first played Descent on a Pentium 60 in a dark room with stereo speakers. Turn the music down, sound FX way up, and don't come back to the real world for hours. I had the same experience with Quake II. It seems that only a handful of games seem to get this experience right, and the engines that drive these games typically come from companies who make these blood-lust games.
These games are an escape. Yes, I wish they could have the same rendering engine in Train Simulator as they do in Quake III, but that probably won't happen. So until then, I'll get my kicks from fragging aliens.
my two cents..
was good coding practice, while
char *foo, bar;
wasn't
I have had teams that preferred the char* format before, and personally I like it myself since the type of variable you're describing is a char*, and you're calling it foo. Now what I don't like is the idea of putting more than one variable on the same line. That is where my specs (and personal style) resolves your issue. I define ONLY ONE variable per line. Heck, source code space can be verbose; I believe that if someone writes really small code in source, then they're usually just trying to show off.
My belief is that compilers are pretty good, and the optimizers are always improving. Write the code legible and clear, and let the compiler/optimizer make it small and tight for you. Besides, when you only define one variable per line, you've got the rest of the line for a comment on what that variable's use is!
Yes, I know that any casino area (read: Atlantic City, Vegas, reservations) nickle-and-dime you every chance they get, but sometimes it is a bit ridiculous.
Even calling an 800 number costs money!
Of course, it would be a useless statement if the current shuttles still are based on 8086 (read: 8086 and 80286 are no where near pin compatible, so it isn't a drop-in solution). Nonetheless, if they were really having troubles, they could upgrade their boards to 80286 in a semi-reasonable amount of time, no?
Now let's look at kids in special education courses. My girlfriend is a teacher in the Bronx (NY) and some of these kids can't even alphabetize at the age of 10! Do you expect them to use BASH?
I agree with you that using CLIs force you to have a greater understanding of computers. I appreciate that. I also believe that programmers who are just starting out should fire up an Apple II emulator and learn 6502 assembly language so that they can have a greater understanding of how computers (and compilers) really work. But to think that EVERYONE should do this is simply too much. Heck, some people can't stop their VCRs from flashing 12:00, but they should know that 'cat' isn't just the name of a furry animal?
Sorry if this comes out as a bit of a rant, but I just think that reality should be recognized sometimes.
Ahh yes, I'd agree with you in the "adult" demographic, but what about in the teenage demographic? Those kids will buy anything that appears cool, and the record companies know that and they ALSO know that the kids have no regard for this re-session thing.
Frank Zappa discussed this idea quite well in his autobiography ("The Real Frank Zappa Book") by describing a 13 year old girl that hears a song on the radio, talks with her friends about it, goes out to the store and buys the album for that one song so that she can play it over and over again and talk on the phone with her friends about it some more before the next song comes out. It even helps if the musicians are boy-ish cute, because then they can buy posters and talk to their friends how dreamy so-and-so is.
Something like that....
Actually, I'm miffed by the idea that HP (cough.. carly) dropped the calculator line. Go around Wall Street trading desks and EVERYONE has a 12C/17Bii/19Bii on their desk. Go to any business school and you'll find the same situation. The TI calculators are fine, but HP is (soon to be 'was' I guess) the standard.
ok, ok.. offtopic
I don't know what kind of results this thing produces, but I'd be certain that it does automatic tickets.
Back then RealPlayer was a neat and promising product. Microsoft didn't like that (of course), so they made the streaming Windows Media capabilities. Microsoft did their typical hard-hand tactic and broke RealPlayer on Windows. RealPlayer, in an effort to stay in business has to adopt a new method of living on the Windows desktop, and as a result all these new "features" end up in RealPlayer and slowly evolves into the piece of garbage (unfortunately) that it is today.
Quite honestly, I don't blame Real for doing all that they've done to RealPlayer. It may not be the best way, but it is certainly one of the few (only?) ways to survive. I have my own problems with RealPlayer; specifically that I've told it a thousand times to NOT launch the taskbar icon upon startup, yet it still does to this day. The amount of "spam space" on the RealPlayer window is horrendous. You have to disable 6 different "views" to get down to a minimalistic display. This is almost unacceptable, but I do appreciate one thing about Real: They support other operating systems. Yes, Microsoft has released Windows Media Player for Solaris and Macintosh, but no Linux or other systems. Real can claim that they're available for several flavors of UNIX in addition to Mac and Windows.
Ok, I'm done.. thanks for listening ;-)
I guess some people would rather see it from the beginning, and this method allows that.