This thing cannot, repeat CANNOT emulate the GBA. Check the site, there's no mention of this. Even trying it would be stupid - go ahead, run a working GBA emulator on this sort of hardware. Have fun with your 2 frames per second.
This isn't hurting Nintendo's current revenue stream at all, save for the fraction of a percent of original GameBoy games still being sold.
Yikes, several dozen other posts have already pointed this out, yet it gets both posted and modded up.
Oh, and for the record, Playstation emulators were popular years ago (everyone had Connetix's for a while), back when Sony WAS making hordes of money off the platform. And because the emulator didn't care what media you put in it, everyone used pirated copies of the games. So don't give me this horseshit that somehow PSX emulators are 'ok', when a system that doesn't emulate any currently sold system isn't.
Interesting idea as a hack, but not really much of a point. The OS you mention is designed to run on 8-bit machines, most of which had less than 100K of ram in them.
This thing on the other hand, is a 32-bit risc processor with 8mb or ram.
Slight difference:)
Note the talk about linux being ported to it. There's no need for a tiny OS like there is on a Commodore 64.
100,000 monkeys on 100,000 typewriters may not come up with Shakespeare, but odds are you'll be sick of their Television programs soon enough.
(The tens of thousands of unpatched IIS servers out there are like the monkeys, and Code Red is... bah, if I'm explaining this far, then even *I* didn't get the joke)
MSN.com (their search engine) has been the default home page of every Internet Explorer install since 1996. Also, try typing anything into IE that doesn't nicely resolve. Once again, msn.com (can't remember exactly how many years this behaviour has been in place). 7 years with 90% of the computing world pointed straight at your search engine, and Google is #1 by leaps and bounds.
For legacy maintenance purposes I recently had a chance to play once again with Windows 95, and NT 4. Both (OSR2 for 95) come with Internet Explorer 2. That's right, *2*. For those of you that never had the pleasure, let's just say it's like using a word processor from the Windows 3.1 days, with less graphics support.
So anyway, I needed to poke around a bit online, and for fun, decided to check out some sites with good old IE 2. Google: perfect. Slashdot: perfect. Hmm, let's try microsoft.com.
I only have one word to describe it: OUCH.
The number of Javascript errors I got JUST FROM GOING TO THE INDEX PAGE made me want to stop. Of course, you have to click on each and every one. After a time I got so fed up, I thought, hell with this, I'm upgrading IE. You don't want to know how much fun it is. Most of the navigation doesn't work properly, and the pages scroll like mad horizontally at 640x480 for some reason. Anyway, I managed to get IE 5 installed on the 95 box eventually, so I thought, what the hell, let's put IE 4 on the NT box - I had the service pack 3 option pack cd handy, figure I'll save some headache.
Ok, so we're running IE 4. Let's browse to microsoft.com again. Lo and behold, there really isn't any improvement (although at least you can set it to avoid Javascript errors on a page - but click on a link, and up comes the error again).
I know Microsoft has basically abandoned their old platforms, but come on - there's no need to have such complex crap on an index page, for god's sake. At least check my user agent header and feed me something a little simpler. Most of the other websites I frequent didn't give me 1/10th the problems.
Long time Windows/DOS user, and I really do like Windows 2000, but I gotta tell you: if Microsoft thinks they can even come close to what Google does, well, I want some of what they're smoking.
Your analogy is kind of bizarre. It's almost like saying 'we noticed this plant killed people when ingested, and it only took 10 years to develop a concentrated poison from it, so why is it taking so long to build a computer out of this element silicon they discovered 50 years ago?'
Noticing something kills bacteria and then feeding that to people, while being something of an intellectual leap, wasn't exactly a great effort in terms of making mass quantities of it. Using DNA research to actually do something useful is a lot trickier, but the rewards will be that much greater. If it'd keep you happy, we can start feeding people bowls of pure DNA in the hopes something will happen:).
I've been working on building one of these for years, but noone ever seems to have any infinitely long reels of tape in stock (let alone two of them):(
But virii *do* use DNA for code storage, and the article had absolutely nothing to contradict that.
You're correct, and the summary had absolutely nothing to contradict that also. *most* viruses use DNA for their genetic code. *some* use RNA. (hence the comment 'except for a few viruses').
Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine
I beg to differ. On my other system, a 433 with 256MB of RAM, Mozilla is a pig. Pure and simple. It takes close to 30 seconds to load sometimes, and page rendering makes me feel like I'm back on 14.4 dialup. Contrast this with Opera, which loads in a second or 2, and renders pages as soon as they're downloaded (in fairness, I won't mention how fast IE is, because they cheat and preload most of the browser when the system boots:).
Now that I have an 1800XP, you're right, Moz is pretty zippy. But it's pretty sad that I'd need almost 2ghz of effective performance just to render some html.
I won't even talk about how long Moz takes to load on the Redhat box (p2-266, 256 RAM). Let's just say Galeon beats it by an order of Magnitude. Same renderer too, so just what's causing the delay? Oh yeah. Bloat.
Nope. At least, certainly not for the mainstream consoles.
The NES, SNES, etc used battery-backed RAM to save your game with. Things like flash memory were just too expensive (or didn't exist) back then. This is why a well-used Zelda cartridge doesn't save games very well after a few years, yet some of them still do even today - almost 20 years later. The secret? A simple CR2032 battery, at least in the NES carts. Yup, the same battery that most motherboards now use (do any still use those old battery boxes you hooked on with jumper pins?). Whenever I need to repair an NES cart, I'm sure to have a dead motherboard or 2 to scavenge from.
I can't speak for GameGear, if it WAS batter backed it'd be a much smaller form-factor battery, I'd imagine. Any Slashdotters know?
Yes, because we know every single thing ever designed by engineers *never* has failure that doesn't make the 6 O'clock news.
Wait, don't various engineers end up designing almost all consumer products at one stage or another? Remind me to call CNN next time my toaster burns some toast due to a faulty circuit.
Back when I was in grade school, one thing that always puzzled me is that the teachers would tell us "April Fool's Day ends at noon, so no more pranks after that". Of course, unlike the rest of the herd, I was actually able to compute 'Day' to mean 24 hours, so this one flummoxed me for a while, until I realized that it just saves a half day of tomfoolery from happening.
Nowadays, for almost a month leading up to April 1 (and sometimes a week or 2 after), seemingly EVERYTHING is 'close enough to April Fool's Day' to be a joke. At least in the geek world. Know what? Let's pass a new law: play a joke online that doesn't fall precisely on April 1 (any time zone, this should give the idiots 48 hours to stretch it out), and we install Windows 3.11 on your new P4 3.06ghz baby.
It's really, really annoying that every other news story in March and part of April is inevitably followed up by questions of its authenticity, simply because April 1 is less than 30 days away.
You're sort of mixing up what you're talking about, but mostly, you're on track. It's trivially easy to cause something to obtain perpetual motion - as many other posts have pointed out, just toss something into space. Odds are it'll keep going forever. Perpetual motion isn't hard at all (after all, Newton's laws effectively demand that it be possible). A perpetual motion MACHINE, on the other hand...
As for weather, the problem is you're relying on an external power source - the sun. Turn that off, and boom, no weather (well, eventually anyway). You are correct though, we can use this energy that's just sitting around and gain more than we put into something. In fact, this is how our entire planet survives - both its organisms and our modern society. Think hydroelectric damns and wind turbines - they're just using something that's there anyway. And plants take advantage of the ever-present sun to store chemical energy within themselves, which other organisms then use when they eat said plants, etc.
The problem still lies in self-contained systems. A friend of mine took years to believe me that you couldn't run a ship (assuming no wind outside) with windmills powering a motor that actually powers the ship. Friction is a bitch:)
Recent DivX versions are getting closer to SVCD quality. Sadly, not quite there yet. As for why?
Hmm.. 1 cd for almost any decent DivX rip. 2, 3, and even 4 cds for even the shortest movie encoded using SVCD. Not only do you save on cds (and the associated storage space), but you don't have to change discs midway into a movie (several times in some cases). Sucks if you don't have a changer, I'd imagine.
Oh, and as for every DVD player playing VCD/SVCD.. those claims are way overstated. AFAIK no Toshiba player handles SVCD. Many Panasonic models can't handle it either. I won't even go into the low end stuff like Samsung...
My Apex AD-5131 also has a standard IDE DVD-ROM drive, and a rather plastic feel to it. Yet, it plays damn near everything I throw at it (save DivX, natch:) flawlessly. Can't always judge a book by its cover.
Every time someone talks about mini-ITX lately, there's always the inevitable comment "don't plan on running Quake 3 on it" or some such nonsense.
If I had the cash, I'd say one of these would make the *perfect* emulation console. You can get cases about the same size as the board, maybe 4-5 inches high (ie: smaller than an Xbox:). Toss in even a 10gb hard drive and you can have thousands upon thousands of games available. Coupla USB controllers, built in TV-out.. *drool* Hell, add on the always mentioned mp3 player, and it's multifunctional.
Slashdot Mirror
Moderators, pass the crack pipe.
This thing cannot, repeat CANNOT emulate the GBA. Check the site, there's no mention of this. Even trying it would be stupid - go ahead, run a working GBA emulator on this sort of hardware. Have fun with your 2 frames per second.
This isn't hurting Nintendo's current revenue stream at all, save for the fraction of a percent of original GameBoy games still being sold.
Yikes, several dozen other posts have already pointed this out, yet it gets both posted and modded up.
Oh, and for the record, Playstation emulators were popular years ago (everyone had Connetix's for a while), back when Sony WAS making hordes of money off the platform. And because the emulator didn't care what media you put in it, everyone used pirated copies of the games. So don't give me this horseshit that somehow PSX emulators are 'ok', when a system that doesn't emulate any currently sold system isn't.
Interesting idea as a hack, but not really much of a point. The OS you mention is designed to run on 8-bit machines, most of which had less than 100K of ram in them.
:)
This thing on the other hand, is a 32-bit risc processor with 8mb or ram.
Slight difference
Note the talk about linux being ported to it. There's no need for a tiny OS like there is on a Commodore 64.
100,000 monkeys on 100,000 typewriters may not come up with Shakespeare, but odds are you'll be sick of their Television programs soon enough.
... bah, if I'm explaining this far, then even *I* didn't get the joke)
(The tens of thousands of unpatched IIS servers out there are like the monkeys, and Code Red is
MSN.com (their search engine) has been the default home page of every Internet Explorer install since 1996. Also, try typing anything into IE that doesn't nicely resolve. Once again, msn.com (can't remember exactly how many years this behaviour has been in place). 7 years with 90% of the computing world pointed straight at your search engine, and Google is #1 by leaps and bounds.
Next!
For legacy maintenance purposes I recently had a chance to play once again with Windows 95, and NT 4. Both (OSR2 for 95) come with Internet Explorer 2. That's right, *2*. For those of you that never had the pleasure, let's just say it's like using a word processor from the Windows 3.1 days, with less graphics support.
So anyway, I needed to poke around a bit online, and for fun, decided to check out some sites with good old IE 2. Google: perfect. Slashdot: perfect. Hmm, let's try microsoft.com.
I only have one word to describe it: OUCH.
The number of Javascript errors I got JUST FROM GOING TO THE INDEX PAGE made me want to stop. Of course, you have to click on each and every one. After a time I got so fed up, I thought, hell with this, I'm upgrading IE. You don't want to know how much fun it is. Most of the navigation doesn't work properly, and the pages scroll like mad horizontally at 640x480 for some reason. Anyway, I managed to get IE 5 installed on the 95 box eventually, so I thought, what the hell, let's put IE 4 on the NT box - I had the service pack 3 option pack cd handy, figure I'll save some headache.
Ok, so we're running IE 4. Let's browse to microsoft.com again. Lo and behold, there really isn't any improvement (although at least you can set it to avoid Javascript errors on a page - but click on a link, and up comes the error again).
I know Microsoft has basically abandoned their old platforms, but come on - there's no need to have such complex crap on an index page, for god's sake. At least check my user agent header and feed me something a little simpler. Most of the other websites I frequent didn't give me 1/10th the problems.
Long time Windows/DOS user, and I really do like Windows 2000, but I gotta tell you: if Microsoft thinks they can even come close to what Google does, well, I want some of what they're smoking.
All I need is a hill (check) and the patience and understanding of my wife (stand by for news on that...)
:)
I know, it takes us years (if not decades) longer than average folk, but someday every geek meets his one and only
Your analogy is kind of bizarre. It's almost like saying 'we noticed this plant killed people when ingested, and it only took 10 years to develop a concentrated poison from it, so why is it taking so long to build a computer out of this element silicon they discovered 50 years ago?'
:).
Noticing something kills bacteria and then feeding that to people, while being something of an intellectual leap, wasn't exactly a great effort in terms of making mass quantities of it. Using DNA research to actually do something useful is a lot trickier, but the rewards will be that much greater. If it'd keep you happy, we can start feeding people bowls of pure DNA in the hopes something will happen
I've been working on building one of these for years, but noone ever seems to have any infinitely long reels of tape in stock (let alone two of them) :(
Interestingly enough, 50 years ago was 1953 :)
But virii *do* use DNA for code storage, and the article had absolutely nothing to contradict that.
You're correct, and the summary had absolutely nothing to contradict that also. *most* viruses use DNA for their genetic code. *some* use RNA. (hence the comment 'except for a few viruses').
Unless you're trying to run Mozilla on a freaking Pentium 100 with 64 megs of RAM or something else antiquated like that, performance is fine
:).
I beg to differ. On my other system, a 433 with 256MB of RAM, Mozilla is a pig. Pure and simple. It takes close to 30 seconds to load sometimes, and page rendering makes me feel like I'm back on 14.4 dialup. Contrast this with Opera, which loads in a second or 2, and renders pages as soon as they're downloaded (in fairness, I won't mention how fast IE is, because they cheat and preload most of the browser when the system boots
Now that I have an 1800XP, you're right, Moz is pretty zippy. But it's pretty sad that I'd need almost 2ghz of effective performance just to render some html.
I won't even talk about how long Moz takes to load on the Redhat box (p2-266, 256 RAM). Let's just say Galeon beats it by an order of Magnitude. Same renderer too, so just what's causing the delay? Oh yeah. Bloat.
Basically, If my body didn't make it, I don't want it.
So how do you eat food then, exactly?
Nope. At least, certainly not for the mainstream consoles.
The NES, SNES, etc used battery-backed RAM to save your game with. Things like flash memory were just too expensive (or didn't exist) back then. This is why a well-used Zelda cartridge doesn't save games very well after a few years, yet some of them still do even today - almost 20 years later. The secret? A simple CR2032 battery, at least in the NES carts. Yup, the same battery that most motherboards now use (do any still use those old battery boxes you hooked on with jumper pins?). Whenever I need to repair an NES cart, I'm sure to have a dead motherboard or 2 to scavenge from.
I can't speak for GameGear, if it WAS batter backed it'd be a much smaller form-factor battery, I'd imagine. Any Slashdotters know?
And this is why the whole 'who can call themselves an Engineer' is a pretty stupid debate.
Know what most of the public think an Engineer is?
The guy who drives the train.
Yes, because we know every single thing ever designed by engineers *never* has failure that doesn't make the 6 O'clock news.
Wait, don't various engineers end up designing almost all consumer products at one stage or another? Remind me to call CNN next time my toaster burns some toast due to a faulty circuit.
We jail a higher percentage of our population than any other country. Including China, Iraq, Iran, or North Korea.
That's because, in these countries, most 'law-breakers' don't survive long enough to make it to prison.
Any need to read further than the subject line, and I wonder just what you're doing here in the first place.
Back when I was in grade school, one thing that always puzzled me is that the teachers would tell us "April Fool's Day ends at noon, so no more pranks after that". Of course, unlike the rest of the herd, I was actually able to compute 'Day' to mean 24 hours, so this one flummoxed me for a while, until I realized that it just saves a half day of tomfoolery from happening.
Nowadays, for almost a month leading up to April 1 (and sometimes a week or 2 after), seemingly EVERYTHING is 'close enough to April Fool's Day' to be a joke. At least in the geek world. Know what? Let's pass a new law: play a joke online that doesn't fall precisely on April 1 (any time zone, this should give the idiots 48 hours to stretch it out), and we install Windows 3.11 on your new P4 3.06ghz baby.
It's really, really annoying that every other news story in March and part of April is inevitably followed up by questions of its authenticity, simply because April 1 is less than 30 days away.
You must be drunk if you think it takes a master's degree in chemistry to know the formula for ethanol :)
You're sort of mixing up what you're talking about, but mostly, you're on track. It's trivially easy to cause something to obtain perpetual motion - as many other posts have pointed out, just toss something into space. Odds are it'll keep going forever. Perpetual motion isn't hard at all (after all, Newton's laws effectively demand that it be possible). A perpetual motion MACHINE, on the other hand...
:)
As for weather, the problem is you're relying on an external power source - the sun. Turn that off, and boom, no weather (well, eventually anyway). You are correct though, we can use this energy that's just sitting around and gain more than we put into something. In fact, this is how our entire planet survives - both its organisms and our modern society. Think hydroelectric damns and wind turbines - they're just using something that's there anyway. And plants take advantage of the ever-present sun to store chemical energy within themselves, which other organisms then use when they eat said plants, etc.
The problem still lies in self-contained systems. A friend of mine took years to believe me that you couldn't run a ship (assuming no wind outside) with windmills powering a motor that actually powers the ship. Friction is a bitch
Recent DivX versions are getting closer to SVCD quality. Sadly, not quite there yet. As for why?
Hmm.. 1 cd for almost any decent DivX rip. 2, 3, and even 4 cds for even the shortest movie encoded using SVCD. Not only do you save on cds (and the associated storage space), but you don't have to change discs midway into a movie (several times in some cases). Sucks if you don't have a changer, I'd imagine.
Oh, and as for every DVD player playing VCD/SVCD.. those claims are way overstated. AFAIK no Toshiba player handles SVCD. Many Panasonic models can't handle it either. I won't even go into the low end stuff like Samsung...
My Apex AD-5131 also has a standard IDE DVD-ROM drive, and a rather plastic feel to it. Yet, it plays damn near everything I throw at it (save DivX, natch :) flawlessly. Can't always judge a book by its cover.
Every time someone talks about mini-ITX lately, there's always the inevitable comment "don't plan on running Quake 3 on it" or some such nonsense.
:). Toss in even a 10gb hard drive and you can have thousands upon thousands of games available. Coupla USB controllers, built in TV-out.. *drool* Hell, add on the always mentioned mp3 player, and it's multifunctional.
:(
If I had the cash, I'd say one of these would make the *perfect* emulation console. You can get cases about the same size as the board, maybe 4-5 inches high (ie: smaller than an Xbox
Oh yeah, there's always that legality issue
run Linux and be able to play Ogg, DivX, Quake, Freecell and Minesweeper.
:)
Isn't Minesweeper trademarked by Microsoft?
No offense, but if your biggest concern while playing a video game is
"hmm, how much can I sell this item for on Ebay... WHAT??? some asshole cheated and sold his for more??"
I really thing it's time to step back from the computer for a while.