Almost (but not quite) every console generation has been dominated by the first to market system. Doesn't guarantee anything, but historically the trend has always been that way, until Sega fumbled the ball.
Re:DS not meant as competition to the PSP?
on
Sony Delays PSP To 2005
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The thing a lot of people here seem to be forgetting about how Nintendo became so domainant to begin with in handhelds is that the Gameboy has backward compatibility.
Nintendo had cemented their ownership of the handheld market many, many years before "backwards compatibility" was even thought up. By the time the Gameboy Color came out (let alone the GBA), Nintendo had been the only serious player for... well, forever in the gaming industry. 9 years spans 2 or 3 generations of consoles.
Backwards compatibility may have helped GBA sales somewhat, but don't kid yourself. Nintendo would still own the handheld market even if you couldn't play your 15 year old games on it.
AFAIK the SVCD standard is the exact same video (mpeg 2) as DVD. So I don't see how it could be worse, let alone *much* worse. And worse than DivX/Xvid? Heh. That's funny. You do realize that those are basically compressed mpeg 2, right?
AMDs are not so bad now, older versions would for example melt if you removed the cooling
I've always been of the opinion that if you're in the habit of removing your heatsink from a running processor, you have deeper problems than worrying about whether or not it will melt. Tom's sure managed to keep a lot of people I know from buying AMD, which is pretty funny considering how much cooler AMD chips run these days compared to Intel.
And you wonder why music and software intustries are lobbying to get P2P networks... shut down?
I don't wonder why at all. I know damn well why. If I was in their shoes, I'd do the very same thing. Just as if I was a dictator who ran my country through force and intimidation, I'd try to shut down anything that allowed my subjects to communicate openly.
So you're saying that Freenet's primary use is to circumvent copyright laws in countries that DO have them.
No, Freenet's primary purpose is to prevent the above from happening. To allow people to communicate when the powers that be would otherwise prevent it.
Free Software != Free Speech
Leaked Windows source code != Free Software. If I wanted free software, I'd download an ISO. If I wanted a better understanding of how Windows works, I'd download the source code. You don't really think people are posting the source on Freenet to make themselves a warezed copy, do you?
You're thinking trademarks. Copyright is an automatic right granted upon creation of a qualifying work, and doesn't "lapse" if you don't defend it. If that was the case, I could start distributing a whole ton of things that no one's defended in years. Think old video game roms, for one. They can be traded for years illicitly, but once the copyright owner decides to, they can still sue you whenever they like.
If this was not the case, there would be a metric assload of roms legally available for MAME and most other emulators, because other than Nintendo, very few companies have ever gone after rom traders.
Slashdotters STILL don't understand why so many people and companies perceive that most traffic on P2P networks involves either porn, infringed music/movies/software.
I understand perfectly well why that pereception exists. It's because is true. Not all, but most traffic on P2P networks does involve what you listed. Most money in the US has traces of cocaine in it. The implication being that most money has been used in the (highly illegal) drug trade. Does that do any favours for the legitimacy of money? Personally, I didn't realize we were trying to make KaZaa OK with Grandma and Grandpa. In 1995, I couldn't care less if people wanted to think the "interweb" was filled with nothing but kiddie porn (which was a popular perception at the time). I feel the same for P2P today. Let people demonize it all they want, it's still not going away.
When people advocate something like Freenet, and you shoot it down because it "illegitimizes P2P", you're missing the point. What's illegal in one country (criticizing the government) isn't necessarily illegal in another. Or hell, even wrong. Maybe someone out there thinks source code shouldn't be protected by law. Maybe in some countries it ISN'T. The point of Freenet is to allow that someone to post it, free of persecution. You can't advocate free speech based on "well, this part of speech is wrong".
You're right. Everyone should be exactly equal, regardless of effort put into life. Regardless of who does the work, we should divvy out the spoils equally.
If I choose to never do anything productive, I should still be entitled to the exact same standard of living as you. You should give me your new car every second day of the week. Your house? You should allow me to live there. Your computer? Sorry, I can't afford one, so neither should you be able to. We should both get a cheaper model so that I don't feel inferior to you. Me me me.
See, going to ridiculous extremes works both ways, and is.. well, ridiculous. Any have/have-not disparity always comes down to ME. The haves want what they have, and the have-nots want it also.
With the exception of small rural communitites, and some cities in Quebec, religion isn't a very big part of anyone's public life up here. Canada was founded mostly by Christians, like the US, but over time (in part due to our immigration system) we have a lot more diversity on that front. And we actively encourage and promote it. We also don't have a "bible belt", nor a Utah.
It's not that people in Canada don't go to church. I believe our attendance rates may be even higher than the US. But we don't allow one dominating religion to rule the lives of others. We go by our traditions, which are in many ways Christian (for example, statutory holidays), but that's about it. The "religious right" that so dominates your politics these days is but a small minority here.
And no, for all you Ontario folk: Alberta does not count as a bible belt. People there struck me as less religious than the rest of the praries, if not the country. And wow, off-topic as a post can get:)
in many places, it's legal for two 16-year-olds to have sex
I always shock my American friends when I tell them how it works up in the Great White North (tm).
Once a person hits 14, they can have sex with anyone (not in a position of authority), legally. This means a 60 year old man can have sex with a 14 year old girl.
In between 12 and 13, a person can have sex with someone assuming they're no more than 2 years older than themselves. So, a 12 and 13 year old can legally have sex, no rape/kiddy porn/whatever charges.
But of course, taking nude photos of someone under age 18 is still illegal. All I can say is, I'm happy digital cameras didn't exist when I was a teen.
Think about it, you can do/view and say what you want on their(sic) but in return your(sic) hosting material you do not have a choice about what its(sic) hosting and dont(sic) have a choice not to host?
But you do have a choice. Don't run it.
Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I want, but no way can others do things I disagree with". Freedom of speech for example, is best summed up by (paraphrased) "I may disagree with you, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".
I'm pretty much the most stubborn, opinionated person I know. I hate it when people disagree with me. And I'd still sacrifice everything to let them do it.
"Liberal" doesn't have a negative connotation in Canada. It is simply the name of a political party. (And its connotation depends on the current public opinion of that party.)
Judging from recent polls, I'd say it currently does have a negative connotation in Canada:)
Although it is amusing that most, if not all of this, has come from our current leader, who as I'm told time and again, we do not actually elect in our system. We elect parties, and they choose the leader. Too bad when the leader screws up, the party loses:/
Maybe they could call it GNU/Xfree86 and keep everyone happy?:)
(There's something sickly ironic about a vanity clause being an issue towards any license dreamed up by Stallman).
On the practical side, however, you're entirely correct of course. Again with the irony, this being the reason I refuse to start calling the OS I run GNU/Xfree/KDE/Linux.
If you don't want to "get screwed", as you call it, never, ever, EVER pay "top dollar" for a video card. Ever. You will ALWAYS watch as your precious $500 card depreciates to $100 in a month or two.
Yeah, it's almost as if Slashdot is composed of individuals, who have differing opinions on things.
Funny, eh?
Re:"Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex"
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Niven's essay has always reminded me of a joke:
Superman is flying around one night, and spies Wonder Woman sleeping through her open window. Well, Superman has Super-speed, so he figures he can be "in and out" before anyone's the wiser. So, he zips in, does his business really fast, and takes off.
Shortly after, Wonder Woman sits up and asks "what the hell was that?"
The Invisible Man, lying next to her, sits up and says "I don't know, but damn, does my ass ever hurt."
Part of the problem with these electronics stores is uninformed staff, and part of the problem is, quite frankly, stupid customers.
I bought a wireless router and card from A&B sound (canuck retailer) last year, and the clerk insisted I give my name and address. I had a couple of hours to kill, so instead of the usual fake info, I decided to really press it with him. I think we argued for about 5 minutes steady about it (along the lines you were saying), when he finally told me "without your name and address, your warranty isn't valid".
Well! This really, really pissed me off, mostly because I know damn well what a manufacturer's warranty requires. I'm not 100% sure if it's law in Canada, but I'm pretty sure with proof of sale and the product, they're required to adhere to their warranties, regardless of "who" bought it. I think they guy finally gave up and entered some bullshit information (many stores actually can't process sales without a name and address now), but told me he'd put the sale though. As he bagged my gear and made change for me, he warned me again that I had no warranty on these items. I next asked if a manager was around, and if he'd ever heard of something called the Better Business Bureau. I guess this spooked him, we talked some more, and he finally let on what the problem was.
You need to have your name and address on file with them, OR a valid sales receipt. With the receipt, they don't care if you're Saddam Hussein returning the item. Without it, they just look at your driver's license as ID and process the return as normal. Apparently, a good chunk of their returns are from customers too stupid to keep receipts, and hence store policy is to get the info to avoid confrontations with the next stupid customer.
After this incident, I actually talked to a few store managers with brains at some other places, and it turns out this is almost universally true with electronics. Enough people don't have receipts (and stores hate dealing with hassle), so they've given up and just use name and address to track this stuff now.
A lot of times, we bring crap like this down on ourselves.
Yes, but I don't feel like going to the library every month to see if there's a recall on my car(ie read the magazine for free).
Then by all means, it's within your rights to give your car dealer your name and address. What the grand(*)parent was trying to say was, it shouldn't be REQUIRED. If I don't give my address, and miss a recall, that's my own damn fault. The dealer doesn't have to handhold me through life, thanks.
Note: I tried making a cable to run off my PC's parallel port a couple of years ago, and it never worked. It's not as simple as it looks.
For those too lazy to read, it boils down to this: You cannot read or write a disk formatted for a Commodore drive on a PC, and the same is true for a PC-formatted disk in a Commodore drive. They use entirely different formats to write to the disk, it's not just a matter of a different filesystem. The above link allows one (in theory) to build a parallel1541 (one of the most common Commodore disk drives) interface, and some PC software to handle the data transfer.
Either way, this is still pretty neat if just for (legit) emulator use. I remember GEOS when it first came out, and as annoying as it was, I saw pretty quick that this was the future for all home computing. It took me until the early 90s before I saw anything like this on the PC (Macs have always been too pricey for my tastes).
suppose that someone started a "Rate-A-Student" web site, where professors could post messages anonymously
When you (a professor) start paying me (a student) to attend your lectures, by all means.
Rememeber who's paying your salary. I have a right to publicly complain about services rendered in exchange for money. Feel free to open a retail outlet where you publish details about annoying customers, and see how long you stay in business.
How a 4.0 MB program takes up 8 times as much RAM I will never know.
That's because you don't understand how computer programs work. You don't just load them into memory, and boom! Everything works.
Programs dynamically allocate memory to be used for their internal workings. This is what is commonly referred to as a "heap". It's basically a big "heap" of memory that a program can, at its whim (and within boundaries set by the OS:), use.
Think about what your average complex program does. It's not just math. It needs to store a LOT of data. Things the user enters, and things that result from calculations from that data. Different representations of that data, you name it. The worst part is when you're pulling data from another computer. You suddenly need to store all of THAT data within your own RAM. Kinda like webpages. Opera caches everything insanely well (I can go back in my browser through dozens of links, and the pages will render almost instantaneously). All of this is stored within RAM. The longer you use Opera, the more RAM it will use, and this is a big reason why.
Anyway, if you're writing "hello world", you're correct. Your program will pretty much use only the memory needed to load the executable (and a bit for stack space, plus OS-related information). But anything reasonably complex, with complicated data structuring, and pulling data from other sources... THAT will use a LOT of memory. That's just how computers work.
Slashdot Mirror
I have four words for you: almost any other console.
Atari's 2600, Nintendo's NES, Nintendo's Gameboy, Sega's Genesis, Sony's Playstation, the PS2...
Almost (but not quite) every console generation has been dominated by the first to market system. Doesn't guarantee anything, but historically the trend has always been that way, until Sega fumbled the ball.
The thing a lot of people here seem to be forgetting about how Nintendo became so domainant to begin with in handhelds is that the Gameboy has backward compatibility.
... well, forever in the gaming industry. 9 years spans 2 or 3 generations of consoles.
Nintendo had cemented their ownership of the handheld market many, many years before "backwards compatibility" was even thought up. By the time the Gameboy Color came out (let alone the GBA), Nintendo had been the only serious player for
Backwards compatibility may have helped GBA sales somewhat, but don't kid yourself. Nintendo would still own the handheld market even if you couldn't play your 15 year old games on it.
SVCD's image quality is much worse than DVD
AFAIK the SVCD standard is the exact same video (mpeg 2) as DVD. So I don't see how it could be worse, let alone *much* worse. And worse than DivX/Xvid? Heh. That's funny. You do realize that those are basically compressed mpeg 2, right?
AMDs are not so bad now, older versions would for example melt if you removed the cooling
I've always been of the opinion that if you're in the habit of removing your heatsink from a running processor, you have deeper problems than worrying about whether or not it will melt. Tom's sure managed to keep a lot of people I know from buying AMD, which is pretty funny considering how much cooler AMD chips run these days compared to Intel.
it's getting increasingly difficult for people who want to avoid antiperspirant
:)
You know, it's funny. In my 30-odd years of life I've only ever seen people talk about actively AVOIDING antiperspirants twice:
Once was in an undergrad comp sci lounge. The second was on Slashdot.
Now where do these stereotypes come from?
And you wonder why music and software intustries are lobbying to get P2P networks ... shut down?
I don't wonder why at all. I know damn well why. If I was in their shoes, I'd do the very same thing. Just as if I was a dictator who ran my country through force and intimidation, I'd try to shut down anything that allowed my subjects to communicate openly.
So you're saying that Freenet's primary use is to circumvent copyright laws in countries that DO have them.
No, Freenet's primary purpose is to prevent the above from happening. To allow people to communicate when the powers that be would otherwise prevent it.
Free Software != Free Speech
Leaked Windows source code != Free Software. If I wanted free software, I'd download an ISO. If I wanted a better understanding of how Windows works, I'd download the source code. You don't really think people are posting the source on Freenet to make themselves a warezed copy, do you?
You're thinking trademarks. Copyright is an automatic right granted upon creation of a qualifying work, and doesn't "lapse" if you don't defend it. If that was the case, I could start distributing a whole ton of things that no one's defended in years. Think old video game roms, for one. They can be traded for years illicitly, but once the copyright owner decides to, they can still sue you whenever they like.
If this was not the case, there would be a metric assload of roms legally available for MAME and most other emulators, because other than Nintendo, very few companies have ever gone after rom traders.
Slashdotters STILL don't understand why so many people and companies perceive that most traffic on P2P networks involves either porn, infringed music/movies/software.
I understand perfectly well why that pereception exists. It's because is true. Not all, but most traffic on P2P networks does involve what you listed. Most money in the US has traces of cocaine in it. The implication being that most money has been used in the (highly illegal) drug trade. Does that do any favours for the legitimacy of money? Personally, I didn't realize we were trying to make KaZaa OK with Grandma and Grandpa. In 1995, I couldn't care less if people wanted to think the "interweb" was filled with nothing but kiddie porn (which was a popular perception at the time). I feel the same for P2P today. Let people demonize it all they want, it's still not going away.
When people advocate something like Freenet, and you shoot it down because it "illegitimizes P2P", you're missing the point. What's illegal in one country (criticizing the government) isn't necessarily illegal in another. Or hell, even wrong. Maybe someone out there thinks source code shouldn't be protected by law. Maybe in some countries it ISN'T. The point of Freenet is to allow that someone to post it, free of persecution. You can't advocate free speech based on "well, this part of speech is wrong".
You're right. Everyone should be exactly equal, regardless of effort put into life. Regardless of who does the work, we should divvy out the spoils equally.
If I choose to never do anything productive, I should still be entitled to the exact same standard of living as you. You should give me your new car every second day of the week. Your house? You should allow me to live there. Your computer? Sorry, I can't afford one, so neither should you be able to. We should both get a cheaper model so that I don't feel inferior to you. Me me me.
See, going to ridiculous extremes works both ways, and is.. well, ridiculous. Any have/have-not disparity always comes down to ME. The haves want what they have, and the have-nots want it also.
With the exception of small rural communitites, and some cities in Quebec, religion isn't a very big part of anyone's public life up here. Canada was founded mostly by Christians, like the US, but over time (in part due to our immigration system) we have a lot more diversity on that front. And we actively encourage and promote it. We also don't have a "bible belt", nor a Utah.
:)
It's not that people in Canada don't go to church. I believe our attendance rates may be even higher than the US. But we don't allow one dominating religion to rule the lives of others. We go by our traditions, which are in many ways Christian (for example, statutory holidays), but that's about it. The "religious right" that so dominates your politics these days is but a small minority here.
And no, for all you Ontario folk: Alberta does not count as a bible belt. People there struck me as less religious than the rest of the praries, if not the country. And wow, off-topic as a post can get
in many places, it's legal for two 16-year-olds to have sex
I always shock my American friends when I tell them how it works up in the Great White North (tm).
Once a person hits 14, they can have sex with anyone (not in a position of authority), legally. This means a 60 year old man can have sex with a 14 year old girl.
In between 12 and 13, a person can have sex with someone assuming they're no more than 2 years older than themselves. So, a 12 and 13 year old can legally have sex, no rape/kiddy porn/whatever charges.
But of course, taking nude photos of someone under age 18 is still illegal. All I can say is, I'm happy digital cameras didn't exist when I was a teen.
Think about it, you can do/view and say what you want on their(sic) but in return your(sic) hosting material you do not have a choice about what its(sic) hosting and dont(sic) have a choice not to host?
But you do have a choice. Don't run it.
Freedom doesn't mean "I can do whatever I want, but no way can others do things I disagree with". Freedom of speech for example, is best summed up by (paraphrased) "I may disagree with you, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it".
I'm pretty much the most stubborn, opinionated person I know. I hate it when people disagree with me. And I'd still sacrifice everything to let them do it.
That, my friend, is freedom.
"Liberal" doesn't have a negative connotation in Canada. It is simply the name of a political party. (And its connotation depends on the current public opinion of that party.)
:)
:/
Judging from recent polls, I'd say it currently does have a negative connotation in Canada
Although it is amusing that most, if not all of this, has come from our current leader, who as I'm told time and again, we do not actually elect in our system. We elect parties, and they choose the leader. Too bad when the leader screws up, the party loses
Maybe they could call it GNU/Xfree86 and keep everyone happy? :)
(There's something sickly ironic about a vanity clause being an issue towards any license dreamed up by Stallman).
On the practical side, however, you're entirely correct of course. Again with the irony, this being the reason I refuse to start calling the OS I run GNU/Xfree/KDE/Linux.
First time graphics card buyer?
If you don't want to "get screwed", as you call it, never, ever, EVER pay "top dollar" for a video card. Ever. You will ALWAYS watch as your precious $500 card depreciates to $100 in a month or two.
Is there going to be a PCI+X as well? :)
Yeah, it's almost as if Slashdot is composed of individuals, who have differing opinions on things.
Funny, eh?
Niven's essay has always reminded me of a joke:
Superman is flying around one night, and spies Wonder Woman sleeping through her open window. Well, Superman has Super-speed, so he figures he can be "in and out" before anyone's the wiser. So, he zips in, does his business really fast, and takes off.
Shortly after, Wonder Woman sits up and asks "what the hell was that?"
The Invisible Man, lying next to her, sits up and says "I don't know, but damn, does my ass ever hurt."
King Kong? What's the relevance?
Sci-Fi. Fantasy. The geek genres.
70 foot tall monkey rampaging around New York.
You're right, I can't see anything relevant.
Part of the problem with these electronics stores is uninformed staff, and part of the problem is, quite frankly, stupid customers.
I bought a wireless router and card from A&B sound (canuck retailer) last year, and the clerk insisted I give my name and address. I had a couple of hours to kill, so instead of the usual fake info, I decided to really press it with him. I think we argued for about 5 minutes steady about it (along the lines you were saying), when he finally told me "without your name and address, your warranty isn't valid".
Well! This really, really pissed me off, mostly because I know damn well what a manufacturer's warranty requires. I'm not 100% sure if it's law in Canada, but I'm pretty sure with proof of sale and the product, they're required to adhere to their warranties, regardless of "who" bought it. I think they guy finally gave up and entered some bullshit information (many stores actually can't process sales without a name and address now), but told me he'd put the sale though. As he bagged my gear and made change for me, he warned me again that I had no warranty on these items. I next asked if a manager was around, and if he'd ever heard of something called the Better Business Bureau. I guess this spooked him, we talked some more, and he finally let on what the problem was.
You need to have your name and address on file with them, OR a valid sales receipt. With the receipt, they don't care if you're Saddam Hussein returning the item. Without it, they just look at your driver's license as ID and process the return as normal. Apparently, a good chunk of their returns are from customers too stupid to keep receipts, and hence store policy is to get the info to avoid confrontations with the next stupid customer.
After this incident, I actually talked to a few store managers with brains at some other places, and it turns out this is almost universally true with electronics. Enough people don't have receipts (and stores hate dealing with hassle), so they've given up and just use name and address to track this stuff now.
A lot of times, we bring crap like this down on ourselves.
Yes, but I don't feel like going to the library every month to see if there's a recall on my car(ie read the magazine for free).
Then by all means, it's within your rights to give your car dealer your name and address. What the grand(*)parent was trying to say was, it shouldn't be REQUIRED. If I don't give my address, and miss a recall, that's my own damn fault. The dealer doesn't have to handhold me through life, thanks.
Here's a start:
http://sta.c64.org/xcables.html.
Note: I tried making a cable to run off my PC's parallel port a couple of years ago, and it never worked. It's not as simple as it looks.
For those too lazy to read, it boils down to this: You cannot read or write a disk formatted for a Commodore drive on a PC, and the same is true for a PC-formatted disk in a Commodore drive. They use entirely different formats to write to the disk, it's not just a matter of a different filesystem. The above link allows one (in theory) to build a parallel1541 (one of the most common Commodore disk drives) interface, and some PC software to handle the data transfer.
Either way, this is still pretty neat if just for (legit) emulator use. I remember GEOS when it first came out, and as annoying as it was, I saw pretty quick that this was the future for all home computing. It took me until the early 90s before I saw anything like this on the PC (Macs have always been too pricey for my tastes).
Now?
suppose that someone started a "Rate-A-Student" web site, where professors could post messages anonymously
When you (a professor) start paying me (a student) to attend your lectures, by all means.
Rememeber who's paying your salary. I have a right to publicly complain about services rendered in exchange for money. Feel free to open a retail outlet where you publish details about annoying customers, and see how long you stay in business.
How a 4.0 MB program takes up 8 times as much RAM I will never know.
:), use.
That's because you don't understand how computer programs work. You don't just load them into memory, and boom! Everything works.
Programs dynamically allocate memory to be used for their internal workings. This is what is commonly referred to as a "heap". It's basically a big "heap" of memory that a program can, at its whim (and within boundaries set by the OS
Think about what your average complex program does. It's not just math. It needs to store a LOT of data. Things the user enters, and things that result from calculations from that data. Different representations of that data, you name it. The worst part is when you're pulling data from another computer. You suddenly need to store all of THAT data within your own RAM. Kinda like webpages. Opera caches everything insanely well (I can go back in my browser through dozens of links, and the pages will render almost instantaneously). All of this is stored within RAM. The longer you use Opera, the more RAM it will use, and this is a big reason why.
Anyway, if you're writing "hello world", you're correct. Your program will pretty much use only the memory needed to load the executable (and a bit for stack space, plus OS-related information). But anything reasonably complex, with complicated data structuring, and pulling data from other sources... THAT will use a LOT of memory. That's just how computers work.