Call me a coward if you like, but I'm not installing it.
SEVERAL OF THE FILE IN THE ARCHIVE ARE PART OF THE TRILLIAN MULTI-INSTANT MESSENGER APPLICATION
Check it out for yourself -- open up the archive, and then the individual files in your favorite hex editor. Scroll to the end and start looking through the strings.
Oh, and it also has Wolfenstein 3D embedded in it as well -- or so it seems.
Actually I believe the issue is the executors that run MSFT (e.g. Bill) have large numbers of shares. Therefore if they start receiving dividends, they would be liable for tax. Presumably they are only liable for tax right now when they sell shares. (Roughly speaking- IANAA); and the money that the company is making gets siphoned off as much as possible to the board; and little of it is 'wasted' ending up as taxes.
Hmmm... sounds odd to me:
1. You get taxed when you sell the shares based on the delta in their price (your profit or loss).
2. You get taxed on the dividends.
These are two mutually exclusive concepts. No dividends doesn't automatically mean that they pay less taxes on their profits -- it means that they get LESS profits, and as a result, pay LESS taxes because they made LESS money.
Also, does anyone know how microsoft does there GUI stuff? Gnome is great and all but it just seems to me that the windoes GUI is much better than gnome/kde. I dont want to start a war so i'll say that I'm a linux user nonetheless, but there must be a better way than X windows.
Well, kind of. The Addison Wesley book on Win32 Programming isn't a bad resource either.
Win32 is a lot like Motif conceptually (or so I'm told; I've never programmed Motif). It's also massively extensible. And, unfortunately, once you get away from the base of the system, full of contradictions and different design philosophies. (eg. commctl32, or the new XP theming support). On the whole though, it's a very good system. The reason?
WndProcs.
Once you make everything a message, you can do amazing things. Asynchronous programming, for example, is much easier if everything's a message. You also don't get vtable bloat the way you would if it was all implemented as a C++ class hierarchy. Write some templated wrappers (or use ATL or WTL), and you're set to go with the best of both worlds.
I also assume that when he says "crashes repeatedly," he's talking about the application itself, and not the OS in general--hence cracked codecs, odd drivers, and the like shouldn't be messing with Word at all. (I realize that I'm speaking from a dream world where all applications have their own, protected memory, but that's not the user's fault).
So you expect an Application to work fine when, say, a specific graphics driver blows its stack when you use a brush created in a certain address-range in memory?
Sure, you can handle errors, but if you can crash the *DRIVER*, and the user-mode portion of *that* is what crashes the app, then what are you going to do?
Ok, is it just me, or does pricing an OS at like two to three hundred dollars not really sound like high volume, low price.
Maybe it's his billions and billions of dollars that makes him think that such an overpriced OS is "high volume, low price."
Depends on what you're comparing it to. Compared to Linux or BSD? Of course it's not cheap. Compared to pretty much any other OS on the market (Apple OSs don't count; they made money on the hardware), and yes, it's cheap.
With Winders you got a little hourglass, or some kind of thingy, depending on what you selected. It showed there was activity. KDE goes one step further and displays the icon of the app itself, so you know what is loading.
Windows XP doesn't show an icon; and the original description indicated that what you have described is not what KDE does; c.f.:
KDE added a small icon to the mouse pointer that animated whenever an app was launching.
It certainly sounds like KDE does what Windows does from that description.
Re:Xenophobia and pig headedness ?
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
The next few years should be great for the UK as we aren't going into recession (touch wood) so we'll hopefully steal a march.
According to every single one of my friends and family members, the UK is already *in* a recession. Which is why I'm trying to find a job in the US instead of just giving up and going home.
A few months (a year?) ago, KDE added a small icon to the mouse pointer that animated whenever an app was launching. I considered that tiny act quite innovative -- it solved a usability problem (re-clicking an icon because you think it hasn't launched) that has existed for decades. Now Windows XP does it.
I think you'll find that Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 all did it too.
No it's not. Do a google search on CLEARTYPE to find pages describing the technique that the Apple ][ was using (Woz == God) and that M$ tried to patent twenty years after.
Do another search, and you'll find the pages where Steve Gibson *retracted* that statement. The Apple II didn't have subpixel rendering. It simply used its pixel generator to create colors on top of a black & white NTSC signal by having a high enough resolution that the bandwidth of the signal crossed over into the area reserved for chroma data.
There's a big difference there.
Try reading the actual ClearType papers too -- there's a LOT of engineering behind ClearType, including the use of conceptual 'perfect' display which is down-transformed to match the actual display, and then reverse-transformed to allow tuning to match the conceptual display as much as possible (ie. with a minimum of signal loss). All heavy signal processing stuff.
Besides the relative few who work at work on their Free software projects, the programmers, project managers, web-site maintainers, documentation jockeys and QA volunteers behind the programs we enjoy every day don't seem to be in it for the money, so much as the thrill of releasing new software, a desire to make their own world a little better, and for plain old fun. The staffers and volunteers who put long hours and dedication into organizations trying to safeguard online freedoms are also obviously interested in rewards that go way beyond salaries. This New Year's, consider giving them a little money anyhow.
As a software engineer who is seeing his available software markets diminished by people who are doing it 'for a laugh' instead of as a career, why the hell should I donate money to them? That way, not only am I getting my markets shrunk by 'free' alternatives, but I'm also giving away what I *can* make to the people who are making my life more difficult.
Thanks, but no thanks. If they want to do it for the good of their health, then let them do it WITHOUT any financial support. After all, if they supposedly don't need to make any money from their work, they surely don't need any money to live on, right?
I can think of several programs that run under Linux/Unix which will play QuickTime.mov files -- xanim and xmms (plus the QuickTime-xmms plugin) will both play non-sorenson QuickTime files. The problem is, almost nothing worth watching (in the world of things QuickTime) is available in anything other than a Sorenson-encoded version.
Sorenson, of course, is owned by Apple, and they are as likely to make it open-source as Microsoft is to release the next Office under the GPL.
Now, mplayer will play.asf,.wmv, and.mpeg files with a variety of options (such as double-size and full-screen), and it will play VideoCDs quite nicely -- I have several movies that were dragged back from China on VCD that look great when run through mplayer. It's a great little video player, but it having the ability to play non-sorenson QuickTime is hardly news.
And the amusing thing is that:
1. A large number of the codec DLLs you need to run MPlayer and play those formats are owned by Microsoft, Intel, On2.com, etc etc etc.
2. MPlayer don't have the rights to distribute these codec DLLs in any form. Yet it's Microsoft code. (Check the win32-codecs file on their download site; look at the version info... it's all in there. They apparently stripped the copyright info from the DLLs, and that's it).
3. They've not paid the royalties on the patents either.
I was looking at the TV license website and they claim they have vans that can pick up the signals of a specific TV component.
Their wording made it seem like they require some sort of locator beacon to be built into every British TV. Is this the case or do their vans just pick up escaped EM radiation from the TV? If there is a beacon, do any of you ever open up your TVs and disable it? Or how about putting your TV inside a Faraday Cage?
Good luck actually getting a picture of anything other than snow if you ever *do* put your TV inside a Faraday cage.
Basically, it works like this:
1. Your television receiver has a superheterodyning circuit in it. It basically generates a specific frequency, mixes this with the input signal, separates out the beats caused by interference, and amplifies them.
2. Your television is a big glass tube wrapped in metal coils. These coils tweak at a rate of 15kHz (horizontal coil) and 50Hz (vertical coil) [note: these figures for PAL only].
3. Both of these (1 and 2) emit electromagnetic radiation with detectable and verifiable signatures. Using (1) you can even determine what station someone is tuned to. Using (2) confirms that the person has a monitor or TV that is operating.
Then what's the point of the Xbox if parents are going to lock their kids away from the only game worth playing? Then it becomes an expensive ($330) DVD player. To succeed, a game console needs to penetrate households, and this means it needs launch titles. Currently, GameCube has a better set of launch or near-launch titles (Monkey Ball, Smash Bros 2 [evilpigeon.net], etc).
I'd disagree... the games worth playing for me do NOT include Halo. My list of games that I enjoy includes Dead or Alive 3, Amped, Arctic Thunder, Project Gotham Racing and Oddworld. All of which I'm thoroughly enjoying (particularly Amped).
I'm also looking forward to the other releases... but you can't buy them for love nor money right now... they're all out of stock.
Not if the right-wingers behind this list of politically incorrect toys [slashdot.org] get their way: it'll become illegal for retailers to sell M-rated games to children or to adults who don't sign a contract "I will not expose my children to this game."
No, it won't.
You know why?
XBox has parental locking features built in. All a parent has to do is turn it on, and hey presto - no kid can play that game.
I'm sorry to be so absolutist here, but anything that is to be called a standard must not cost to use. Not anything. (I suppose that a percentage of the profit would be acceptable. There is an argument for that. But even that is highly dubious.)
I take it that you're including the DVD format and MPEG encoding in this rant? Because both cost to use.
The idea of pausing live TV is obvious.
But the actual method that the TiVo developers used to accomplish this isn't. And that is what they are patenting.
And before anyone says that the method IS obvious, remember, in hindsight, everything's pretty obvious.
Sliding Window algorithms for the storage of streaming data are pretty damn obvious. They're documented everywhere. In Knuth. In the TCP/IP spec.
EVERYWHERE.
The only conceivably 'new' thing about this is that it's being used to store MPEG datastreams. I don't particularly count that as innovative or 'new'. Or patentable.
but, yes, normally you'd use JR in this case, or maybe DJNZ which does the decrement automatically.
Actually, it depends on the actual purpose that code is serving.
JR and DJNZ take a different amount of time to complete depending on which direction they take at the branch. The JP CC, XXXX instructions take a constant amount of time *always*, regardless of the outcome of the conditional test.
Depends on what you need to use it for;-)
Oh, and DJNZ only decrements the B register. But you knew that already;-)
The most popular z80 machine, I'm sure, was the game boy.
Anyway, z-80 isn't going to die, the company is just going for bankruptcy, not dissolving. And if it did dissolve I'm sure that people would continue to make chips.
The Game Boy didn't use a Z80. It was Z80 based, but didn't have the exchange register set, for example, and had a few extra instructions.
I live in Washington state and after my connection being down the weekend things appear to be working again. Of course, the first thing I did was to check download speed. Unfortunately it's about three times slower than before. I was regularly getting nearly 4 megabit download speeds (450kb/second) but now it's limited to 1.5 megabit (177kb). Thanks AT&T! Do I get a 60% refund every month?
Oh you poor thing.
On Cap Hill, you could typically only get 174kb/s, and that was without the cap.
So it sucks that you have to go down to the speed you'd get in a populated area. You poor, poor thing. My heart f*ckin' bleeds.
looks like AT&T ran their contractual negotiations down to the wire and made no preparations for their customers. I'm an AT&T @Home customer and my email account was shut down without warning. When the service comes back up (they will not even give a time estimate) they tell me my old email address will not be valid.
AT&T tech support told me yesterday that my previous email address, that was shut down without warning, will not be reestablished. Everyone will have new addresses.
Oh quit whining.
They sent you an email two weeks ago warning you that something like this could happen.
They sent you a snail-mail letter a week ago.
In it, they explicitly tell you that something like this could happen, and that you should backup your email at least once a day onto your own system to minimize the potential loss of data.
Quit your whining and stop acting like a cry baby.
Oh dear. I've done it now. I insulted you. Now you're going to want to sue me too, you fat wanker.
Wow. What a statement. I can rewrite that for you:
"The law of the land aside..."
Read up on copyright law. Fair Use cannot just be discarded like that, on a whim, just because it doesn't suit your argument.
I'm all for Intellectual Property protection, but removing fair use is the ONE thing that you cannot do without screwing people over. And for me, fair use means being able to get at the raw digital data so that I can store it on my PC, my Nomad Jukebox, or my XBOX.
lots of interesting stuff they had in the x-box breakdown. The 2 blank slots for ram for instance and wondering if u could solder some in, the possibilites for replacin the HDD...it was a pretty neat look at a new type of console game.
Speaking of which... I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned yet that the reason for those extra banks is because that's where the debug RAM sits. If you're developing for any hardware, it's nice to have a chunk of space for your ICE, etc etc, to run in.
Secondly, when I saw Halo for the first time, instead of "wow, cool graphics" I thought "wow, DirectX." Maybe I'm alone on this, but I don't like how directX games look... and yes, you CAN tell a difference. The graphics in say, MGS2, look WAY nicer, smoother, crisper than Halo, at least to me.
I'm not a great Halo fan personally; I much prefer Project Gotham Racing, Arctic Thunder and Dead or Alive 3; I agree with you about Halo -- it does look very DirectX. Very Half Life in fact.
Which is a shame. The other games put it to shame. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to control a 1st person shooter with a joystick was nuts.
Project Gotham takes first prize from what was my fave game -- Vanishing Point for the PS1, with 3rd place going to Gran Turismo A-Spec. (It just didn't satisfy). And DOA3... I've not seen anything that compares with it. Anywhere. Ever. Except maybe in some of the arcade games from the past year or so.
I'm losing sleep on the XBox - which is a good sign. I'm even thinking of selling the PS2 -- which was a mistake in the first place. About the only benefit I've seen from owning it is that I can load my old PS1 games faster.
Slashdot Mirror
THIS APP IS A TROJAN OF SOME KIND
Call me a coward if you like, but I'm not installing it.
SEVERAL OF THE FILE IN THE ARCHIVE ARE PART OF THE TRILLIAN MULTI-INSTANT MESSENGER APPLICATION
Check it out for yourself -- open up the archive, and then the individual files in your favorite hex editor. Scroll to the end and start looking through the strings.
Oh, and it also has Wolfenstein 3D embedded in it as well -- or so it seems.
Actually I believe the issue is the executors that run MSFT (e.g. Bill) have large numbers of shares. Therefore if they start receiving dividends, they would be liable for tax. Presumably they are only liable for tax right now when they sell shares. (Roughly speaking- IANAA); and the money that the company is making gets siphoned off as much as possible to the board; and little of it is 'wasted' ending up as taxes.
Hmmm... sounds odd to me:
1. You get taxed when you sell the shares based on the delta in their price (your profit or loss).
2. You get taxed on the dividends.
These are two mutually exclusive concepts. No dividends doesn't automatically mean that they pay less taxes on their profits -- it means that they get LESS profits, and as a result, pay LESS taxes because they made LESS money.
Si
Also, does anyone know how microsoft does there GUI stuff? Gnome is great and all but it just seems to me that the windoes GUI is much better than gnome/kde. I dont want to start a war so i'll say that I'm a linux user nonetheless, but there must be a better way than X windows.
Here's all the info you'll ever need.
Well, kind of. The Addison Wesley book on Win32 Programming isn't a bad resource either.
Win32 is a lot like Motif conceptually (or so I'm told; I've never programmed Motif). It's also massively extensible. And, unfortunately, once you get away from the base of the system, full of contradictions and different design philosophies. (eg. commctl32, or the new XP theming support). On the whole though, it's a very good system. The reason?
WndProcs.
Once you make everything a message, you can do amazing things. Asynchronous programming, for example, is much easier if everything's a message. You also don't get vtable bloat the way you would if it was all implemented as a C++ class hierarchy. Write some templated wrappers (or use ATL or WTL), and you're set to go with the best of both worlds.
Simon
I also assume that when he says "crashes repeatedly," he's talking about the application itself, and not the OS in general--hence cracked codecs, odd drivers, and the like shouldn't be messing with Word at all. (I realize that I'm speaking from a dream world where all applications have their own, protected memory, but that's not the user's fault).
So you expect an Application to work fine when, say, a specific graphics driver blows its stack when you use a brush created in a certain address-range in memory?
Sure, you can handle errors, but if you can crash the *DRIVER*, and the user-mode portion of *that* is what crashes the app, then what are you going to do?
Ok, is it just me, or does pricing an OS at like two to three hundred dollars not really sound like high volume, low price.
Maybe it's his billions and billions of dollars that makes him think that such an overpriced OS is "high volume, low price."
Depends on what you're comparing it to. Compared to Linux or BSD? Of course it's not cheap. Compared to pretty much any other OS on the market (Apple OSs don't count; they made money on the hardware), and yes, it's cheap.
Simon
With Winders you got a little hourglass, or some kind of thingy, depending on what you selected. It showed there was activity. KDE goes one step further and displays the icon of the app itself, so you know what is loading.
Windows XP doesn't show an icon; and the original description indicated that what you have described is not what KDE does; c.f.:
KDE added a small icon to the mouse pointer that animated whenever an app was launching.
It certainly sounds like KDE does what Windows does from that description.
The next few years should be great for the UK as we aren't going into recession (touch wood) so we'll hopefully steal a march.
According to every single one of my friends and family members, the UK is already *in* a recession. Which is why I'm trying to find a job in the US instead of just giving up and going home.
Simon
A few months (a year?) ago, KDE added a small icon to the mouse pointer that animated whenever an app was launching. I considered that tiny act quite innovative -- it solved a usability problem (re-clicking an icon because you think it hasn't launched) that has existed for decades. Now Windows XP does it.
I think you'll find that Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 all did it too.
Simon
No it's not. Do a google search on CLEARTYPE to find pages describing the technique that the Apple ][ was using (Woz == God) and that M$ tried to patent twenty years after.
Do another search, and you'll find the pages where Steve Gibson *retracted* that statement. The Apple II didn't have subpixel rendering. It simply used its pixel generator to create colors on top of a black & white NTSC signal by having a high enough resolution that the bandwidth of the signal crossed over into the area reserved for chroma data.
There's a big difference there.
Try reading the actual ClearType papers too -- there's a LOT of engineering behind ClearType, including the use of conceptual 'perfect' display which is down-transformed to match the actual display, and then reverse-transformed to allow tuning to match the conceptual display as much as possible (ie. with a minimum of signal loss). All heavy signal processing stuff.
Simon
Besides the relative few who work at work on their Free software projects, the programmers, project managers, web-site maintainers, documentation jockeys and QA volunteers behind the programs we enjoy every day don't seem to be in it for the money, so much as the thrill of releasing new software, a desire to make their own world a little better, and for plain old fun. The staffers and volunteers who put long hours and dedication into organizations trying to safeguard online freedoms are also obviously interested in rewards that go way beyond salaries. This New Year's, consider giving them a little money anyhow.
As a software engineer who is seeing his available software markets diminished by people who are doing it 'for a laugh' instead of as a career, why the hell should I donate money to them? That way, not only am I getting my markets shrunk by 'free' alternatives, but I'm also giving away what I *can* make to the people who are making my life more difficult.
Thanks, but no thanks. If they want to do it for the good of their health, then let them do it WITHOUT any financial support. After all, if they supposedly don't need to make any money from their work, they surely don't need any money to live on, right?
Simon
I can think of several programs that run under Linux/Unix which will play QuickTime .mov files -- xanim and xmms (plus the QuickTime-xmms plugin) will both play non-sorenson QuickTime files. The problem is, almost nothing worth watching (in the world of things QuickTime) is available in anything other than a Sorenson-encoded version.
.asf, .wmv, and .mpeg files with a variety of options (such as double-size and full-screen), and it will play VideoCDs quite nicely -- I have several movies that were dragged back from China on VCD that look great when run through mplayer. It's a great little video player, but it having the ability to play non-sorenson QuickTime is hardly news.
Sorenson, of course, is owned by Apple, and they are as likely to make it open-source as Microsoft is to release the next Office under the GPL.
Now, mplayer will play
And the amusing thing is that:
1. A large number of the codec DLLs you need to run MPlayer and play those formats are owned by Microsoft, Intel, On2.com, etc etc etc.
2. MPlayer don't have the rights to distribute these codec DLLs in any form. Yet it's Microsoft code. (Check the win32-codecs file on their download site; look at the version info... it's all in there. They apparently stripped the copyright info from the DLLs, and that's it).
3. They've not paid the royalties on the patents either.
Isn't this llegal?
Simon
I was looking at the TV license website and they claim they have vans that can pick up the signals of a specific TV component.
Their wording made it seem like they require some sort of locator beacon to be built into every British TV. Is this the case or do their vans just pick up escaped EM radiation from the TV? If there is a beacon, do any of you ever open up your TVs and disable it? Or how about putting your TV inside a Faraday Cage?
Good luck actually getting a picture of anything other than snow if you ever *do* put your TV inside a Faraday cage.
Basically, it works like this:
1. Your television receiver has a superheterodyning circuit in it. It basically generates a specific frequency, mixes this with the input signal, separates out the beats caused by interference, and amplifies them.
2. Your television is a big glass tube wrapped in metal coils. These coils tweak at a rate of 15kHz (horizontal coil) and 50Hz (vertical coil) [note: these figures for PAL only].
3. Both of these (1 and 2) emit electromagnetic radiation with detectable and verifiable signatures. Using (1) you can even determine what station someone is tuned to. Using (2) confirms that the person has a monitor or TV that is operating.
Think of it as something like TEMPEST.
Simon
fav icons...man... i can't wait until we have magical talking paperclips, too!
Funny... I actually find them useful... recognizing an image is much faster than reading text. *shrugs*
Then what's the point of the Xbox if parents are going to lock their kids away from the only game worth playing? Then it becomes an expensive ($330) DVD player. To succeed, a game console needs to penetrate households, and this means it needs launch titles. Currently, GameCube has a better set of launch or near-launch titles (Monkey Ball, Smash Bros 2 [evilpigeon.net], etc).
I'd disagree... the games worth playing for me do NOT include Halo. My list of games that I enjoy includes Dead or Alive 3, Amped, Arctic Thunder, Project Gotham Racing and Oddworld. All of which I'm thoroughly enjoying (particularly Amped).
I'm also looking forward to the other releases... but you can't buy them for love nor money right now... they're all out of stock.
Simon
Not if the right-wingers behind this list of politically incorrect toys [slashdot.org] get their way: it'll become illegal for retailers to sell M-rated games to children or to adults who don't sign a contract "I will not expose my children to this game."
No, it won't.
You know why?
XBox has parental locking features built in. All a parent has to do is turn it on, and hey presto - no kid can play that game.
Simon
If DVD players didn't all use MPEG2, they probably wouldn't bother.
DVD players *and* digital movie cameras.
Simon
I'm sorry to be so absolutist here, but anything that is to be called a standard must not cost to use. Not anything. (I suppose that a percentage of the profit would be acceptable. There is an argument for that. But even that is highly dubious.)
I take it that you're including the DVD format and MPEG encoding in this rant? Because both cost to use.
Simon
The idea of pausing live TV is obvious.
But the actual method that the TiVo developers used to accomplish this isn't. And that is what they are patenting.
And before anyone says that the method IS obvious, remember, in hindsight, everything's pretty obvious.
Sliding Window algorithms for the storage of streaming data are pretty damn obvious. They're documented everywhere. In Knuth. In the TCP/IP spec.
EVERYWHERE.
The only conceivably 'new' thing about this is that it's being used to store MPEG datastreams. I don't particularly count that as innovative or 'new'. Or patentable.
but, yes, normally you'd use JR in this case, or maybe DJNZ which does the decrement automatically.
;-)
;-)
Actually, it depends on the actual purpose that code is serving.
JR and DJNZ take a different amount of time to complete depending on which direction they take at the branch. The JP CC, XXXX instructions take a constant amount of time *always*, regardless of the outcome of the conditional test.
Depends on what you need to use it for
Oh, and DJNZ only decrements the B register. But you knew that already
Simon
The most popular z80 machine, I'm sure, was the game boy.
Anyway, z-80 isn't going to die, the company is just going for bankruptcy, not dissolving. And if it did dissolve I'm sure that people would continue to make chips.
The Game Boy didn't use a Z80. It was Z80 based, but didn't have the exchange register set, for example, and had a few extra instructions.
Similar mnemonics, different chip.
Simon
I live in Washington state and after my connection being down the weekend things appear to be working again. Of course, the first thing I did was to check download speed. Unfortunately it's about three times slower than before. I was regularly getting nearly 4 megabit download speeds (450kb/second) but now it's limited to 1.5 megabit (177kb). Thanks AT&T! Do I get a 60% refund every month?
Oh you poor thing.
On Cap Hill, you could typically only get 174kb/s, and that was without the cap.
So it sucks that you have to go down to the speed you'd get in a populated area. You poor, poor thing. My heart f*ckin' bleeds.
Simon
looks like AT&T ran their contractual negotiations down to the wire and made no preparations for their customers. I'm an AT&T @Home customer and my email account was shut down without warning. When the service comes back up (they will not even give a time estimate) they tell me my old email address will not be valid.
AT&T tech support told me yesterday that my previous email address, that was shut down without warning, will not be reestablished. Everyone will have new addresses.
Oh quit whining.
They sent you an email two weeks ago warning you that something like this could happen.
They sent you a snail-mail letter a week ago.
In it, they explicitly tell you that something like this could happen, and that you should backup your email at least once a day onto your own system to minimize the potential loss of data.
Quit your whining and stop acting like a cry baby.
Oh dear. I've done it now. I insulted you. Now you're going to want to sue me too, you fat wanker.
Simon
Fair use issues aside
Wow. What a statement. I can rewrite that for you:
"The law of the land aside..."
Read up on copyright law. Fair Use cannot just be discarded like that, on a whim, just because it doesn't suit your argument.
I'm all for Intellectual Property protection, but removing fair use is the ONE thing that you cannot do without screwing people over. And for me, fair use means being able to get at the raw digital data so that I can store it on my PC, my Nomad Jukebox, or my XBOX.
Simon
lots of interesting stuff they had in the x-box breakdown. The 2 blank slots for ram for instance and wondering if u could solder some in, the possibilites for replacin the HDD...it was a pretty neat look at a new type of console game.
Speaking of which... I'm surprised that no-one's mentioned yet that the reason for those extra banks is because that's where the debug RAM sits. If you're developing for any hardware, it's nice to have a chunk of space for your ICE, etc etc, to run in.
Simon
Secondly, when I saw Halo for the first time, instead of "wow, cool graphics" I thought "wow, DirectX." Maybe I'm alone on this, but I don't like how directX games look... and yes, you CAN tell a difference. The graphics in say, MGS2, look WAY nicer, smoother, crisper than Halo, at least to me.
;-)
I'm not a great Halo fan personally; I much prefer Project Gotham Racing, Arctic Thunder and Dead or Alive 3; I agree with you about Halo -- it does look very DirectX. Very Half Life in fact.
Which is a shame. The other games put it to shame. Whoever thought that it was a good idea to control a 1st person shooter with a joystick was nuts.
Project Gotham takes first prize from what was my fave game -- Vanishing Point for the PS1, with 3rd place going to Gran Turismo A-Spec. (It just didn't satisfy). And DOA3... I've not seen anything that compares with it. Anywhere. Ever. Except maybe in some of the arcade games from the past year or so.
I'm losing sleep on the XBox - which is a good sign. I'm even thinking of selling the PS2 -- which was a mistake in the first place. About the only benefit I've seen from owning it is that I can load my old PS1 games faster.
But that's life
Si