In the defense of this process, this is a lot like the bouncer not letting you into the goth club if you're wearing dirty white sneakers and a ripped jean jacket. People go into these fantasy games to be immersed in another would, and seeing names like "FuxinKillBinLaden002" just pulls you out of that fantasy. I'm glad Blizzard took this step, as it seems like an interesting experiement that might turn out to help the experience tremendously, and if it turns out to be a royal mess they can undo it in a single company-wide e-mail.
On the other hand, religious names always seemed inline with the fantasy, and are pretty common normal names anyway. How many Mohammads are there in the Middle East? How many Jesuses in Mejico? I'm good friends with two Shivas, neither of which has threatened to destroy the universe. Hell, my name is Christopher, and it's not like that's short for Count of Monte Cristopher.
And what's with listing pop stars twice? That's just sloppy. What if you are a pop star, and you want to go on as yourself? Is CleverNickname a valid handle?
Not to be a snob, but you need either burned-in lighting on your world, or some form of grime texturing. I'd put that in for your first FX pass, as that will help far more immensely than any dynamic shadowing.
The world is just far too clean and unvaried. Bump up the resolution on the ground texture significantly (You're on a PC, burn that ram!). And get those cars a lot dirtier. If nothing else, at least simulate what you think the final game will be like in static pictures, to get people more excited about the (hopefully realistic) plans you have made.
You seem like you're at the stage where you should be working on level designs. That's good. I'd be sharing those with the community, getting feedback and refinements, as what your wants are in terms of level design will shape what your needs are in terms of engine programming. You aren't just modding an existing game... the code is yours.
You're not just building a final game. You're building enthusiasm for the project as you go, with the in-progress game. Show people a roadmap to the future and they'll respond by helping you get there. Otherwise people get a bit... aimless, and tend not to go anywhere.
Anyway, it looks like you have lots of help already so I'm probably covering old things that you have hashed out with your team members. Either way, Good luck!
We combine stong management ( with our Santa Monica, CA based headquarters ) with superb creative, yet non expensive development teams in Russia. This allows our clients to cut development expenses 3-5 times comparing to cost of local European or US development team or employees. At same time we provide instant feedback to our clients, thanks to our management offices in Los Angeles and London.
And, apparently, their writing is outsourced to Bangladesh. But hey, I'm not going to knock them for striving to provide best of gaming technologies to interactive entertainment industry. I will, however, point out that they don't list any of the games they have done on their "games" page, nor do they reference a single one on their website (they've only done Big Rigs), which BTW is almost straight HTML but doesn't work without I.E. And it is 6 pages long. And two of those pages are blank and one is 404.
At least this proves that my job is secure, for a little while. That is unless someone else can virtually garantee to their customers that they'll won't found term that will be more suitable for them. Or won't garantee. I'm not entirely sure which is bad for me.
I was going to point out another deeply flawed game, Master of Orion 3, as an example of a game which was rightfully panned by critics. Then I realized IGN gave it a 93.
At least it competes for title of Worst 4.99 bargain bin buy ever.
An unsigned 0 minus one should be the largest value a variable can hold, dependent upon the return value the calling function is expecting. If your return value needs to be larger than the max value, you can't possibly return a correct answer no matter how you reach that answer
The point was, that any maximum-sized variable would satisfy the conditions put forth here. The test would be more meaningful if you needed to come within X of the value, or had some other constraint. Why not within 5% of the median? There is never a situation in life where you just need to be larger, and there is no other constraint pulling you back towards rational values.
The Legacy of Kain come courtesy of Crystal Dynamics.
Anachronox and Deus Ex were Ion Storm
Thief was Looking Glass
Tomb Raider came courtesy of Core... But I do have to disagree with you there, they should have made a sequel. I'm still waiting for one. Admittedly, this is a company that thought Chuck Rock, Fighting Force, and ThunderStrike deserved sequels, but they've done enough great things in their heyday that they get a free pass.
This all points to the fact that Eidos is not a developer. They're a publisher. And to say that Eidos didn't push for major changes to Tomb Raider before it was too late because they were getting pinched is ideallic at best... They were raking it in for a while. For a few years Tomb Raider must have been like free money to them. I would be surprised if they felt squeezed in the mid PS1 days.
To be fair to them, Eidos did take some chances on original games. Fear Effect and Mad Maestro come to mind, as does Mr. Mosquito, Pandemonium... And while they do have their share of Backyard Wrestlings and Tron Bonnes, It doesn't seem too out of line with other publishers.
For a year and a half I was traveling back and forth between Boston and Cali to see my long-distance girlfriend. I was "randomly" searched 18 times out of 18 possible. As they were "randomly" searching 1 out of 3 people, this had a probability of 1 out of 2.1 billion.
Yet the government was insisting that no black lists existed. That they weren't keeping track, and that it was totally random.
The only reasons that I can think of offhand to blacklist me is that I joined Calperg and the ACLU, and I saw Nader speak at a local college.
I'm betting the reason that our government lies about what it does is not because there is a vested interest in keeping terrorists from knowing that they may be blacklisted, but rather because how the government chooses who is potentially good and potentially bad is so stereotypical, shallow, and offensive that they would get run out of office if people knew what they were doing.
The court ruled that because the dog only responded to drugs, that the search was perfectly reasonable and upset no privacy concerns. It is assumed that the dog discovers only drugs and that it is infalliable. Because all it does is look for drugs or no drugs, and there is no legitimate privacy concern around having drugs, the search is legit.
This is not applicable in many ways to the internet because the word drugs is not illegal. The words let's bomb the world trade center is not illegal. Nothing you do in your e-mail can be scanned, because nothing you do in your e-mail can be cleanly illegal.
On the other hand, if you're trading files, your MP3's might be checksummed and used against you in a court of law. However, this has already happened anyway, so what's the point in fighting this new justification?
I know this was a joke, but it is overall very true. Separating one's self out because one is "more intelligent" than everyone else just shows how little one really understands everyone else. Many of the things that cause people to consider themselves more intelligent come down to cultural differences and an inability to communicate. Furthermore, while you may be good with abstractions and able to hack some perl into making your school website serve different pages based upon whether a teacher's IP block is looking at it, someone else you know may be able to be plopped down into any city in the world and be able to communicate with the locals to find out the safe neighborhoods, the best resturants, and how to navigate the subway system. Someone has the finger skills and the awareness to play duelin' banjos on a pair of keyboards simultaneously. Someone is holding down two jobs while trying to graduate school and still spend as much time as possible with their kid on a non-existent budget.
It does not help to think of yourself as intelligent. That only separates you from the knowledge you could gain from other people. Instead, think of yourself as you. Judge realistically whether you could meet the challenge of the options presented to you, but don't judge yourself or others outside of the context of challenges.
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. Once you have achieved this connection to mankind, you can learn from mankind. All the other viewpoint does is put up blinders.
"I've called you here today to talk about your thesis. I know your thesis on identity and translocality in European RPG's 1987 - 1997 is almost finished, but it lacks a certain something. How can I say this? We think it will focus better if we sex it up a bit. Don't give me that look. I'm your thesis advisor and I'm advising you to do what I say or we'll boot your ass out. Throw out what you've done and switch to lascivious female vampires in Terminal Reality developed console games, 2000 - 2004. That's right, throw it out. That's right 2000 to 2004. I don't care what year Bloodrayne shipped, just do it.
Don't forget, it needs to be done in three more days to be ready for the holiday season, and you can't afford to fail your first submission.
Stop that. Stop crying. Here, have a tissue. That will be five cents."
I've found that as a broad generalization that HP has had far too many quality control issues to roll that dice again. Since they started farming out manufacturing to the lowest bidder HP's have gone from acceptable to roundly junk. Every now and then you'll come across a HP that works well and reliably for a long time, but for every one of those there are four or five others that shouldn't have made it off of the shipping docks.
In recent years HP has started to farm out the designs to the lowest bidder too. So not only is the manufacturing flawed, what it is that is being made isn't that great either.
I know that people like the name, and that the name invokes familiarity, but avoid HP like the plague. You'll be glad you did.
Interestingly, this has been getting better over the past few years.
And yes, Antec's have been the best pretty consistently. I did have a Verax that I swore by for a long time, until I plugged in a floppy disk drive one pin over to the side. To it's credit, the PSU died quickly and didn't damage any of the other components. I would still probably have a Verax if you could find them anywhere, as they were very low-airflow friendly.
I had a CF to IDE adaptor that was "semi-hot-pluggable." What they meant was it was hot-unpluggable, but if you tried to plug anything into it while hot you were going to crash your system in a mighty hurry.
Ironically, this one was 10 dollars more than the non-hot-pluggable one, but I never found any advantage in it.
360 degrees is not a sphere, but a circle. And if you have a circle and a square, what you have is a column. Or rather, what you have is columns, the half-assed game Sega made to compete with the stroke of genius Tetris. And we all know that Tetris means the third new year (Tris for 3, Tet for Vietnamese new year). Now a GNU year implies that IBM will be doing well, and that the console manufacturer whom they supply will be doing well. But the third? Obviously their third string console manufacturer will do the best. Seeing as how Sony and Microsoft are huge beasts that IBM will be pandering to, obviously Nintendo will be the odd man out. And as such, it is obvious that Microsoft thinks that Nintendo will win the next round.
But of course you are talking about a box, not a rectangle, and a box circle will require a fourth dimension. It has often been suspected that Microsoft's next console would require an additional dimension to fit next to people's TV's, and now we have proof. Additionally, a HyperColumn shape, or in this case a game of HyperColumns, is the perfect way to show off simultaneous transdimentionality and craptacularity along the derivitave axis. And we all know that derivitave axis allow us to see the rate of change over a function. But we all know that the Xbox is only partially derivitave, thus allowing us to approximate the rate of change over a fixed interval distance, in this case the interval of the dimensions next to your television set... height, width, and channel, or HWC for short. Thus the power of the Xbox 2 will be harnessed for two things, playing video games while active, and while idle trying to advance the Harmonized Wage Code movement, thus saving microsoft millions of dollars. In essence, the Xbox 360 is a ruse to get people to pay to run multiprocessors for someone else.
A very clever ruse. And all they had to do was invest billions of dollars and create games about bees.
Cut an 80x80 hole in the top plastic about the middle of the unit, facing upwards. Mount a lo-flow panaflo over the hole, facing up. Wire the panaflo to an external 9v wall wart. Cut the wire to the original fan. For an added bonus, undervolt the panaflo to 6 volts, and add an undervolted rotary fan into the HDD drive bay. This should be silent overall and have a great airflow.
The default internal fan is a 6v 50mm screamer, narrow and loud. Ultimately it moves less air than any undervolted panaflo. Plus it is pretty terribly positioned. A fan on top of your case may prevent you from stacking other equipment on top, but it is perfect for sucking heat off of the gargantuan main heat sink, and gives the fan enough space that the blades don't make that choppy noise. Thanks to a ludicrous heat sink the PS2 doesn't really require that much cooling, though it does require some. It is usually about 20 minutes before a PS2 with no fan will overheat, while a mostly symbolic fan is usually enough.
Of course, the PS2's are engineered to work in hot climates, so if you're near the sahara you may want to run your fan faster. But overall the systems don't need to be noisy.
It's funny they say that "it could provide the processing power for the PlayStation 2 to challenge cheap PCs as the entry-level device of choice for home access to the Web."
Since when is a console a replacement computer? And for that matter, why would you need a hot $hit console to surf the web? The processing power needed to bump off cheap PC's? Get real. You could surf the web on a Saturn. There was probably enough oomph in the Super NES to do it.
Why must journalists always find something for game consoles to do other than play games? Games are a worthy enough pursuit to have their own hardware. You don't see the tech reporters questioning DVD player makers how they plan to engage in more worthy pursuits like spreadsheet operations and surfing whitehouse.org. Why must consoles be more than consoles?
Remember, the apollo missions were taking 10% of GDP for the 10 years or so it was active. I doubt this mission will get that kind of funding.
Plus you're talking about a space agency that goes trolling on eBay for parts to older systems. If they're going to do a moon mission, they're going to have to modernize. Which means re-making a lot of what they had done with a lot of different technology providers.
Well, it is nice that this guy actually bothered to write this up, but he seems to simply be using a lot of common mistakes and guesswork. On top of that, his knoweledge of some basic concepts in hardware administration and business processes is somewhat lacking.
The fact that he's mostly just guessing things, without a lot of technical knowledge or trickery, and that in at least one other case his knowledge is dead and tremendously wrong, just makes the opening in the system that much more glaring. This didn't take a lot of technical knowledge and hacking... this took as much basic knowledge as anyone would gain putting up a home page on geocities.
If I was curious about a WiFi network nearby, and I had a little time to kill before a train, I would have followed the exact same path. Fail the login, directory surf, look at the HTML, find the admin site, try to login with some dirt common logins, get access. At at least three points here, this chain should be broken but it wasn't. That's quite scary.
Management problems are development problems. Just because bad calls are made or ignored from high-up doesn't mean that it isn't part of the development cycle. Even the traditional developers are responsible for having sites listed on sequential numerical basis.
Slashdot Mirror
In the defense of this process, this is a lot like the bouncer not letting you into the goth club if you're wearing dirty white sneakers and a ripped jean jacket. People go into these fantasy games to be immersed in another would, and seeing names like "FuxinKillBinLaden002" just pulls you out of that fantasy. I'm glad Blizzard took this step, as it seems like an interesting experiement that might turn out to help the experience tremendously, and if it turns out to be a royal mess they can undo it in a single company-wide e-mail.
On the other hand, religious names always seemed inline with the fantasy, and are pretty common normal names anyway. How many Mohammads are there in the Middle East? How many Jesuses in Mejico? I'm good friends with two Shivas, neither of which has threatened to destroy the universe. Hell, my name is Christopher, and it's not like that's short for Count of Monte Cristopher.
And what's with listing pop stars twice? That's just sloppy. What if you are a pop star, and you want to go on as yourself? Is CleverNickname a valid handle?
Not to be a snob, but you need either burned-in lighting on your world, or some form of grime texturing. I'd put that in for your first FX pass, as that will help far more immensely than any dynamic shadowing.
The world is just far too clean and unvaried. Bump up the resolution on the ground texture significantly (You're on a PC, burn that ram!). And get those cars a lot dirtier. If nothing else, at least simulate what you think the final game will be like in static pictures, to get people more excited about the (hopefully realistic) plans you have made.
You seem like you're at the stage where you should be working on level designs. That's good. I'd be sharing those with the community, getting feedback and refinements, as what your wants are in terms of level design will shape what your needs are in terms of engine programming. You aren't just modding an existing game... the code is yours.
You're not just building a final game. You're building enthusiasm for the project as you go, with the in-progress game. Show people a roadmap to the future and they'll respond by helping you get there. Otherwise people get a bit... aimless, and tend not to go anywhere.
Anyway, it looks like you have lots of help already so I'm probably covering old things that you have hashed out with your team members. Either way, Good luck!
What, with a developer's website this good?
We combine stong management ( with our Santa Monica, CA based headquarters ) with superb creative, yet non expensive development teams in Russia. This allows our clients to cut development expenses 3-5 times comparing to cost of local European or US development team or employees. At same time we provide instant feedback to our clients, thanks to our management offices in Los Angeles and London.
And, apparently, their writing is outsourced to Bangladesh. But hey, I'm not going to knock them for striving to provide best of gaming technologies to interactive entertainment industry. I will, however, point out that they don't list any of the games they have done on their "games" page, nor do they reference a single one on their website (they've only done Big Rigs), which BTW is almost straight HTML but doesn't work without I.E. And it is 6 pages long. And two of those pages are blank and one is 404.
At least this proves that my job is secure, for a little while. That is unless someone else can virtually garantee to their customers that they'll won't found term that will be more suitable for them. Or won't garantee. I'm not entirely sure which is bad for me.
If only the world were simple like tetris, where blocks fall from the sky and no one has a penis.
What do you think that 4-block line is?
I was going to point out another deeply flawed game, Master of Orion 3, as an example of a game which was rightfully panned by critics. Then I realized IGN gave it a 93.
At least it competes for title of Worst 4.99 bargain bin buy ever.
The ad that was served with the article was "That's what I call an everything Bagel" from McDonalds.
McDonalds. Now with 50% more cannibalism.
An unsigned 0 minus one should be the largest value a variable can hold, dependent upon the return value the calling function is expecting. If your return value needs to be larger than the max value, you can't possibly return a correct answer no matter how you reach that answer
The point was, that any maximum-sized variable would satisfy the conditions put forth here. The test would be more meaningful if you needed to come within X of the value, or had some other constraint. Why not within 5% of the median? There is never a situation in life where you just need to be larger, and there is no other constraint pulling you back towards rational values.
Why not just take an unsigned 0, subtract one, and return that?
Will the number of windows errors increase or will they just occur at even more improbable times?
More improbable times? Like when it's off?
Video: (please be kind)
Relying upon the goodwill of Slashdotters to keep your bandwidth bills within reason?
You're a funny guy.
Take them down now.
The Legacy of Kain come courtesy of Crystal Dynamics.
Anachronox and Deus Ex were Ion Storm
Thief was Looking Glass
Tomb Raider came courtesy of Core... But I do have to disagree with you there, they should have made a sequel. I'm still waiting for one. Admittedly, this is a company that thought Chuck Rock, Fighting Force, and ThunderStrike deserved sequels, but they've done enough great things in their heyday that they get a free pass.
This all points to the fact that Eidos is not a developer. They're a publisher. And to say that Eidos didn't push for major changes to Tomb Raider before it was too late because they were getting pinched is ideallic at best... They were raking it in for a while. For a few years Tomb Raider must have been like free money to them. I would be surprised if they felt squeezed in the mid PS1 days.
To be fair to them, Eidos did take some chances on original games. Fear Effect and Mad Maestro come to mind, as does Mr. Mosquito, Pandemonium... And while they do have their share of Backyard Wrestlings and Tron Bonnes, It doesn't seem too out of line with other publishers.
Look at the list yourself and decide.
For a year and a half I was traveling back and forth between Boston and Cali to see my long-distance girlfriend. I was "randomly" searched 18 times out of 18 possible. As they were "randomly" searching 1 out of 3 people, this had a probability of 1 out of 2.1 billion.
Yet the government was insisting that no black lists existed. That they weren't keeping track, and that it was totally random.
The only reasons that I can think of offhand to blacklist me is that I joined Calperg and the ACLU, and I saw Nader speak at a local college.
I'm betting the reason that our government lies about what it does is not because there is a vested interest in keeping terrorists from knowing that they may be blacklisted, but rather because how the government chooses who is potentially good and potentially bad is so stereotypical, shallow, and offensive that they would get run out of office if people knew what they were doing.
The court ruled that because the dog only responded to drugs, that the search was perfectly reasonable and upset no privacy concerns. It is assumed that the dog discovers only drugs and that it is infalliable. Because all it does is look for drugs or no drugs, and there is no legitimate privacy concern around having drugs, the search is legit.
This is not applicable in many ways to the internet because the word drugs is not illegal. The words let's bomb the world trade center is not illegal. Nothing you do in your e-mail can be scanned, because nothing you do in your e-mail can be cleanly illegal.
On the other hand, if you're trading files, your MP3's might be checksummed and used against you in a court of law. However, this has already happened anyway, so what's the point in fighting this new justification?
This is an interesting non-issue, really.
I know this was a joke, but it is overall very true. Separating one's self out because one is "more intelligent" than everyone else just shows how little one really understands everyone else. Many of the things that cause people to consider themselves more intelligent come down to cultural differences and an inability to communicate. Furthermore, while you may be good with abstractions and able to hack some perl into making your school website serve different pages based upon whether a teacher's IP block is looking at it, someone else you know may be able to be plopped down into any city in the world and be able to communicate with the locals to find out the safe neighborhoods, the best resturants, and how to navigate the subway system. Someone has the finger skills and the awareness to play duelin' banjos on a pair of keyboards simultaneously. Someone is holding down two jobs while trying to graduate school and still spend as much time as possible with their kid on a non-existent budget.
It does not help to think of yourself as intelligent. That only separates you from the knowledge you could gain from other people. Instead, think of yourself as you. Judge realistically whether you could meet the challenge of the options presented to you, but don't judge yourself or others outside of the context of challenges.
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. Once you have achieved this connection to mankind, you can learn from mankind. All the other viewpoint does is put up blinders.
"I've called you here today to talk about your thesis. I know your thesis on identity and translocality in European RPG's 1987 - 1997 is almost finished, but it lacks a certain something. How can I say this? We think it will focus better if we sex it up a bit. Don't give me that look. I'm your thesis advisor and I'm advising you to do what I say or we'll boot your ass out. Throw out what you've done and switch to lascivious female vampires in Terminal Reality developed console games, 2000 - 2004. That's right, throw it out. That's right 2000 to 2004. I don't care what year Bloodrayne shipped, just do it.
Don't forget, it needs to be done in three more days to be ready for the holiday season, and you can't afford to fail your first submission.
Stop that. Stop crying. Here, have a tissue. That will be five cents."
I've found that as a broad generalization that HP has had far too many quality control issues to roll that dice again. Since they started farming out manufacturing to the lowest bidder HP's have gone from acceptable to roundly junk. Every now and then you'll come across a HP that works well and reliably for a long time, but for every one of those there are four or five others that shouldn't have made it off of the shipping docks.
In recent years HP has started to farm out the designs to the lowest bidder too. So not only is the manufacturing flawed, what it is that is being made isn't that great either.
I know that people like the name, and that the name invokes familiarity, but avoid HP like the plague. You'll be glad you did.
Actually, most PSU's die before they are out of spec
Interestingly, this has been getting better over the past few years.
And yes, Antec's have been the best pretty consistently. I did have a Verax that I swore by for a long time, until I plugged in a floppy disk drive one pin over to the side. To it's credit, the PSU died quickly and didn't damage any of the other components. I would still probably have a Verax if you could find them anywhere, as they were very low-airflow friendly.
I had a CF to IDE adaptor that was "semi-hot-pluggable." What they meant was it was hot-unpluggable, but if you tried to plug anything into it while hot you were going to crash your system in a mighty hurry.
Ironically, this one was 10 dollars more than the non-hot-pluggable one, but I never found any advantage in it.
360 degrees is not a sphere, but a circle. And if you have a circle and a square, what you have is a column. Or rather, what you have is columns, the half-assed game Sega made to compete with the stroke of genius Tetris. And we all know that Tetris means the third new year (Tris for 3, Tet for Vietnamese new year). Now a GNU year implies that IBM will be doing well, and that the console manufacturer whom they supply will be doing well. But the third? Obviously their third string console manufacturer will do the best. Seeing as how Sony and Microsoft are huge beasts that IBM will be pandering to, obviously Nintendo will be the odd man out. And as such, it is obvious that Microsoft thinks that Nintendo will win the next round.
But of course you are talking about a box, not a rectangle, and a box circle will require a fourth dimension. It has often been suspected that Microsoft's next console would require an additional dimension to fit next to people's TV's, and now we have proof. Additionally, a HyperColumn shape, or in this case a game of HyperColumns, is the perfect way to show off simultaneous transdimentionality and craptacularity along the derivitave axis. And we all know that derivitave axis allow us to see the rate of change over a function. But we all know that the Xbox is only partially derivitave, thus allowing us to approximate the rate of change over a fixed interval distance, in this case the interval of the dimensions next to your television set... height, width, and channel, or HWC for short. Thus the power of the Xbox 2 will be harnessed for two things, playing video games while active, and while idle trying to advance the Harmonized Wage Code movement, thus saving microsoft millions of dollars. In essence, the Xbox 360 is a ruse to get people to pay to run multiprocessors for someone else.
A very clever ruse. And all they had to do was invest billions of dollars and create games about bees.
It's kinda like the Matrix, only less resource-intensive, and without as much "whoa" time.
So that's what my system was doing when I opened Office and it slowed to a crawl. It wasn't a problem: it was a special effect.
Cut an 80x80 hole in the top plastic about the middle of the unit, facing upwards. Mount a lo-flow panaflo over the hole, facing up. Wire the panaflo to an external 9v wall wart. Cut the wire to the original fan. For an added bonus, undervolt the panaflo to 6 volts, and add an undervolted rotary fan into the HDD drive bay. This should be silent overall and have a great airflow.
The default internal fan is a 6v 50mm screamer, narrow and loud. Ultimately it moves less air than any undervolted panaflo. Plus it is pretty terribly positioned. A fan on top of your case may prevent you from stacking other equipment on top, but it is perfect for sucking heat off of the gargantuan main heat sink, and gives the fan enough space that the blades don't make that choppy noise. Thanks to a ludicrous heat sink the PS2 doesn't really require that much cooling, though it does require some. It is usually about 20 minutes before a PS2 with no fan will overheat, while a mostly symbolic fan is usually enough.
Of course, the PS2's are engineered to work in hot climates, so if you're near the sahara you may want to run your fan faster. But overall the systems don't need to be noisy.
It's funny they say that "it could provide the processing power for the PlayStation 2 to challenge cheap PCs as the entry-level device of choice for home access to the Web."
Since when is a console a replacement computer? And for that matter, why would you need a hot $hit console to surf the web? The processing power needed to bump off cheap PC's? Get real. You could surf the web on a Saturn. There was probably enough oomph in the Super NES to do it.
Why must journalists always find something for game consoles to do other than play games? Games are a worthy enough pursuit to have their own hardware. You don't see the tech reporters questioning DVD player makers how they plan to engage in more worthy pursuits like spreadsheet operations and surfing whitehouse.org. Why must consoles be more than consoles?
Remember, the apollo missions were taking 10% of GDP for the 10 years or so it was active. I doubt this mission will get that kind of funding.
Plus you're talking about a space agency that goes trolling on eBay for parts to older systems. If they're going to do a moon mission, they're going to have to modernize. Which means re-making a lot of what they had done with a lot of different technology providers.
I'm sorry, you don't own those electrons. We're just loaning them to you so that you can use them and give them back, about 60 times per second.
Well, it is nice that this guy actually bothered to write this up, but he seems to simply be using a lot of common mistakes and guesswork. On top of that, his knoweledge of some basic concepts in hardware administration and business processes is somewhat lacking.
The fact that he's mostly just guessing things, without a lot of technical knowledge or trickery, and that in at least one other case his knowledge is dead and tremendously wrong, just makes the opening in the system that much more glaring. This didn't take a lot of technical knowledge and hacking... this took as much basic knowledge as anyone would gain putting up a home page on geocities.
If I was curious about a WiFi network nearby, and I had a little time to kill before a train, I would have followed the exact same path. Fail the login, directory surf, look at the HTML, find the admin site, try to login with some dirt common logins, get access. At at least three points here, this chain should be broken but it wasn't. That's quite scary.
Management problems are development problems. Just because bad calls are made or ignored from high-up doesn't mean that it isn't part of the development cycle. Even the traditional developers are responsible for having sites listed on sequential numerical basis.