Get a top-loading NES. They were solidly built and basically blinkey-free.
You can also get a new NES out of China, if you can find one of the myriad of clones. They generally have better connecters than the original, and are still being produced new to this day.
The NES is a system that really needs to be played in hardware, not emulated. Ironically, it was it's relative simplicity that made games focus on the physical interaction aspect... something that just doesn't come across as well with the computer's lag.
For your specific problem, if you don't want to buy a new system, just jimmy the new connector until it is sufficiently loose. Go slowly but surely, and it will eventually loosen up. A friend of mine had a tight grip system when he first replaced his connector. While it didn't have the grip of death of yours it was quite tight, but has worn down to being simply sufficient.
Area storage! I would imagine that walking around a physical building and having file sharing available for the location you are at would be kind of neat. The library could serve up interesting articles, while the student center might have PDF files of paperwork. You should still be able to connect remotely, but for simple Samba it would be great.
Well, no slam intended to Clone Wars, it's great stuff, but these episodes are like 3 minutes long apiece and have very little dialogue; some have none whatsoever.
You're right, it's a very unfair comparison. Clone Wars would have been so much better if it was 3 minutes long and had very little dialogue.
Do they feature a horrible actor, awful script, and whiny, annoying characters?
Oh do they. It feels like the writer was constantly going down to Tashi Station to pick up some pooooower conveeeerters.
Darth Vader has to be extra whiny and annoying, because he is only passing half of that on to his offspring. It's called continuity. It's also called writing yourself into a corner.
And it's an intergalactic war with a bunch of Bankers. Bankers. If it isn't clear how a hollywood mogul would feel about Bankers, let's just say Lucas has always pronounced his B's and W's similarly.
The prequals have to be full of annoying, whiny brats doing annoying whiny brat-like things. Otherwise, how would we know it was Star Wars?
There's another guy in the team who gets that collision intuition too. We had a chat about it as they were doing some more of that tedious collision testing. Our conclusion was that it comes from years of playing. You get a subconsious understanding of the conditions of a bug-free region and a bugged region.
Usually twitching is the dead giveaway. Even the slightest bit indicates that physics broke down. One of the favorite tricks in the first game I worked on (a basketball game) was to wedge a player firmly between two other players, causing him to vibrate slightly, then pass the ball. It would cannon up into the sky, and wouldn't come down for a dozen seconds or more. Nothing in a modern, well designed engine will cause twitches except problems or problem areas.
Slight hitches are also a sign of trouble. If you slide along a wall, and there is the slightest pause, that usually indicates that something isn't quite aligned, and there is a space that you could theoretically squeeze yourself into.
Remember Designers: The clip plane is your friend!
There is also the small space effect... Any time a player's space transitions from enough to not enough along a sloped line instead of a sharp point, problems will occur. You may have to try and wedge a shoulder in there, or filp forward and backwards rapidly, but be it a lower-than-90 degree corner or a small pipe that creeps too low lengthwise, it will cause problems to somebody.
Then there is the bowl effect, where you have a condition that the player should slide down but only encounters another place where they should slide down in the opposite direction. No designer worth his salt would do this normally, but on 80 hour weeks where the only thing to break up the death march is beer...
The pothole effect is about the same, where you have a hole near to the width of the character's collision box, that theoretically they should fall into but the engine can't quite make up it's mind.
There's the penetration ploy... Where you find something pokey and sharp, try to overlap that slightly in a way while walking away from the wall. Many engines will push you back through (or into) the wall. This was most famously demonstrated by The Secret of Mana, where you could traverse characters (including one blocking your return to your home village) by walking up to them and flipping back and forth. 3D engine examples exist too, though none come to mind immediately.
There are others, but those are just what come to mind right now.
And the bug wasn't there the day before. They went ahead and added something the day before the deadlines, the fools.
Don't you just love it when the Lead Programmer starts a conversation by saying "This shouldn't break anything, but we..."
Don't forget, she is cleared for nuclear wastelands. Because she didn't post personal information to the site I won't blow her cover, but with a little due dilligence you can find out that she didn't just buy one.
And that probably is enough to keep the average people from doing what she is doing. In fact, the checkpoint is probably there exactly to stop average people from doing what she is doing. I won't want anyone going in there that didn't have a professional appreciation of the idea that where you are may be safe but four feet to your right may be death. Plus that keeps the ghost town a ghost town, and not one of those terrible run-down tourist traps.
Besides, the concept of ecological armageddon tourism is just a little... Creepy.
Creativity. Your best testers are the ones that can still come up with ludicrous, ridiculous things to try after doing ludicrous, ridiculous things to this piece of software for 10 hours a day the past 8 months. You know, the ones that decide to feed the big monster the meat of undying gratitude and attack them with the pokey fork of infuriating blindness while pausing and saving during the same frame, only to load the game and, without unpausing, cast the instaneous spell of random teleportation on the poor beast.
From an engineering standpoint it doesn't require a lot of "special training," but the same thing could be said about the marketing department. You need a very broad experience base touching on 3d drawing, programming, design, and gameplay. You do have to deduce all of the interrelating systems in a game and how they may misinteract with eachother. The programmer probably thought to put in a special case clause for doing direct damage to a unit in the same tick that they transfer ownership to the damaging player, but did they remember about area damage? They must have implemented pathfinding around obstacles, and regions of potential interacction around obstacles, but did they remember to update completely surrounded regions of potential interaction when obstacles are removed? I had to create a demo level for the programmers for that last one, so that they would understand what was going wrong.
Testers should not be disposable (until the end of the project *sigh*), because good testers will save a lot of valuable programmer and artist time. Now, most publisher's testing departments I have worked with (and in) have been disposable, simply because their job was not to create the best game possible, but to put in the number of hours as stipulated in the contract. But the in-house teams I have worked in (and with) have all been excellent, focused, and above all, valuable. A programmer could say he saw something weird at a particular location, and go do something more important. When he came back, there would be a %100 repro and parameterization that gave them insight into the problem. With a good QA team, bugs can take minutes to fix. With a bad QA team, that same fix might take hours to figure out.
To misquote Tom Lehrer, a testing department is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends upon what you put into it. The attitude that a testing department is not a skilled position will be reflected in the kinds of testers that you hire and ultimately, the kind of work that they perform.
In other words, demand better. Game development teams are in a position to select great QA people because there's just so bloody many of us. Take advantage of that. Put out your feelers long before the position becomes necessary, and select the best of the best. Pay a livable wage, integrate QA into the process, give them direct access to your programmers, and you will have a truly valuable asset in development.
The alternative is to have a QA department with a high churn and a low useful output. Prophesies tend to self-fulfill.
Let's not forget, Atari died of its own mismanagement, not because Microsoft quashed it.
Smaller HDDs? Slower CPU's? Because of Cartridges? That doesn't make any sense. If companies are competing as games platforms, don't you think we'd have a dramatic rise in power every few years... like we've been having in the console arena? Games always require faster processors. Furthermore, how would this tap the demand of the PC crowd, instead of drawing from the console group? Wouldn't the people be interested in this kind of networking.
BTW, the cartridges you describe are also known as "disks," like the things that the PC used for memory. Otherwise you're talking real chip-based cartridges, which were too expensive to use compared to other mediums of the time (such as floppys), and had no storage.
If there were no master operating system out there, the computing demands would go up significantly as many more pieces of software would be running in JAVA or envoking other forms of cross-platform compatibility. Once again, I fail to see how software would not be keeping up with hardware.
Have you never used a business Tandy? Saying that companies would have held off moving to computerized systems is forgetting that long before Windows was out many businesses were using computerized systems. You still get people complaining about not being able to upgrade their OS2Warp systems. And as OS2 was an IBM creation, and was adopted by the FBI, it could very easily have "legitimized" the personal computer industry.
I hate posts like this. People attributing to Microsoft what is really the broader fault of technology. Automated systems and informational conduits are sufficient reasons to adopt computing systems, and the armies of salesmen for IBM and SUN are enough to replace those of Microsoft.
Once people had computers, networking became obvious. Once people had networking, communications became obvious. Once people had communications, e-mail became obvious. Once people had e-mail, HTML became obvious. Once people had HTML, the personal computer became inevitable. Right up until that last prerequisite, the network only needed (and was developed on) UNIX based systems. That would still put the personal computer boom in around 97/98.
Can we be so sure that the end here (travel in space, colonization, etc.) justifies the means we as humans may need to take to get there (commercial interests)?
I fail to see how "commercial interests" are the anthesis of space travel and colonization. What is so terrible about making money that it needs to be banned from space? It's not like they're sending the XPlanes up there to block out the sun in an act of cartoonish supervillany.
If someone can make money escaping the atmosphere in an attempt to speed up intercontinental flight, good for them. If someone can make money carrying satellites into space, or running experiments in zero-G, good for them. Profitability equals the survival of a venture... It's why profitable but socially negative corporations are difficult to get rid of. We want that kind of tenacity on our side. The spreading of mankind outside of our little planet is a good thing, and so long as the companies that do it are behaving in an ecologically responsible fashion, more power to them.
Theoretically, the only reason going into space would be profitable is if there was something sufficiently valuable up there that we should go. The more space travel there is, the less expensive it will be. The less expensive space travel is, the more experiments, manufacturing, and living can take place up there. There must be all kinds of ludicrously dangerous Xtreme sports for our grandkids to discover.
And, in case you haven't noticed, there are already commercial space operations out there. Far more often than NASA they're the ones putting up the satellite phone satellites and the flying transponders we rely upon. Except for the problem of junk in orbit, there isn't anything wrong with that.
They'll probably release a MSN toolbar that is a feature-for-feature copy of the Googlebar, and automatically install it on the next Windows Update. Maybe on "accident" is uninstalls the original Google toolbar (Cough*netscape*Cough). Make all URL line searches and mistypes go to MSN, and remove the ability to choose your default search engine.
They don't have to make the "world's greatest," they just have to make something that is competitively passable, and is deeply hooked into their existing product line. The "Internet Search" in the file search bar is already inexorably linked to MSN...
In 1994, MS and the DOJ came to an agreement that stopped per-machine licencing. It was the violation of this agreement (in other ways) that lead to the big anti-trust case in the late 90s. All part of the process.
Yes, the process of Microsoft violations coming so rapidly and repeatedly as to pose too much of a moving target for the DOJ. Forget punishing them for what they used to do, look what they're doing now. Oh, they're not doing that anymore, look now! Oh, now they're doing something else. New case!
It is unfortunate... unfortunate that the DOJ didn't do thier jobs properly the first FOUR times, allowing this company to continue to behave in an anticompetitive and illegal manner with nothing more than a wink and a nudge.
Why can't I get away with abusive and immoral practices for 25 years, leading to nothing but becoming the richest man, and company, in the world? Am I not rich enough? Is my industry not new enough to be beyond the law?
While limited one of many particular aspects of Microsoft's behavior, I applaud the EU's ruling. If anything it was too limited in scope... hopefully other cases will follow. Let's see, there is DrDos, BeOS, Word compatibility, IE, per-cpu licensing, OS only licensing, No naked licensing...
It was actually just a general comment on the confusing naming issues brought up by the mozilla people. People seem to get the assorted thund-fire-foxy-bird stuff confused all of the time, none of which is helped by the total lack of theming with the larger mozilla name. Personally I think they should just break down and call thunderbird "Charazard" and firefox "Flareon."
Ok, first why should I switch from the current BIOS I have to this one, make the case.
You shouldn't. Ok, that's unnecessarily harsh, but as it stands right now LinuxBIOS is primarily for people who are between very and highly technically inclined... Kind of like linux was shortly after it's release. That's why their website "SUCKS," because this isn't yet ready for the KDE crowd. You'd have to be comfortable finding the status of your motherboard, downloading and compiling the appropriate files, reflashing your onboard FlashROM, and other nasty, dirty things. I wouldn't consider myself qualified to get their best documented system up and running unless I was between jobs, and even then I consider it iffy.
Linux BIOS as it stands is useful for a few specific things: Building clusters and building robots. Any embedded system running on linux on a traditional motherboard can be sped up significantly by using Linux BIOS. But it does require quite a bit of work and knowledge to get it running... If you want a computer pre-flashed with LinuxBIOS, you can purchase one off the shelf, but I would be hesitant to try and build one without a lot of time and / or skill.
It isn't that the LinuxBIOS people don't want that kind of end-user friendliness, it's just that the project is still in the mode of getting things working at all, let alone in an easy fashion.
Secondly, as you might have figured out, it is not a drop-in BIOS replacement. Your computer enters the boot phase and exists the other side with Linux running. You'll not get Windows to run directly on that, and I'd be surprised if it ran virtually (as the BIOS windows is expecting doesn't exist). If anyone here has experience running Windows on a LinuxBIOS, please let us know.
None of this is to say that the goals of the project are bad. Imagine being able to boot to command line in 3 seconds! You could start an ssh session before your monitor was done de-gaussing. Attach a 4 line LED display to one of these motherboards, and you would have a great tool for debugging network problems. Or just speed things up significantly, and spend more time doing what you are supposed to be doing, with the added bonus of being able to shut down your computer when you are done (gasp!). It just needs a lot more work, and a lot of developer support. I'm glad to see it posted to Slashdot, as the exposure might net a few more eager helpers.
"firewalls create problems while performing daily business tasks on the server from home"
Not a well-configured software one. It's not as safe as a hardware firewall, but it is a heck of a lot safer than running around with your pants down, not knowing when your machine is connecting and what it is sending. It makes it difficult to connect *to* the machine, but your home winbox shouldn't be a remote server anyway.
Grab ZoneAlarm NOW, and put up with a few extra dialog boxes until it is trained.
Furthermore, good Antivirus software will detect many trojans. Get AVG if you have alredy abandoned your AV of choice.
This must sound like free windows security 101 by now, but get AdAware and / or Spybot, and schedule a regular download / check for once every week.
For encrypting sensitive or old data, you can either use windows built-in encryption (which uses your user password, enable this now if your machine is fast enough) and / or pick up a (non-free) copy of Dekart Private Disk, AKA The Bat! Private Disk, a simple encrypted virtual disk creator. Anything you really don't want people to see should go here... Just remember to shut it down when you're done.
Furthermore, don't use I.E. and don't use Outlook. What many people refer to as "computer" viruses or "windows" exploits are really just I.E. exploits or Outlook viruses. Firebird, I mean, Thun... Firefox is a powerful little internet surfer, which while not as flexible as my beloved Opera (ducks), does render pages faster, is more beginner friendly, and is free. Thunderbird is a good mail replacement, though pegasus mail, Opera's built in e-mail client, and the non-free The Bat! are all good choices. If you want the most security possible, try Secure Bat. At 140 dollars per copy, it isn't cheap, but it does encrypt all of your personal files and utilizes hardware token authentication to ensure that you really are who you say you are.
Finally, don't forget to regularly back up your disks to something not normally connected to the computer. For simplicity's sake, I'd attach an external USB drive and run Polder Backup once a week, removing the drive when done. For a more automated approach, get a PC controllable X10 unit, and have it turn on and off the external USB drive, so that backups can be completely automatic.
You know, books are far easier to burn than the encrypted 512MB flash drive I keep in my pocket. For whitewashing data, monthly publications do keep revising their view of history to an annoying degree. This is true both online and off. But for data stored locally, the truth is archived and protected. It's theoretically possible that Windows XP has hooks that will allow the Secret Service to remove the video of campaign promises Bush made on my drive, but it's not bloody likely to make it through two firewalls and onto the backup drive that is disconnected and sitting in a closet, nor the linux-based offsite backup.
In short, it is good to be paranoid about the lack of care people take with old data and publications, but to say that history can be erased at the push of a button is borderline hysteria. Personally I'd rather have a portable repository of hundreds of books and magazines, randing from War and Peace to the daily news (which I get on my Palm Pilot anyway), than to have a hard copy of all data which I can't take with me anyway.
So long as we demand flexibility (or fragility) in protection schemes and a standardized data format, we should be in a better position to keep data safe.
But even if it were enforceable, it wouldn't help anyhow... clients would still tend to disconnect once they have 100% of the file. That's just unavoidable- the server cannot coerce help from a client which doesn't need anything from it.
The bottleneck comes from that last 1% of the file. The first 99% of the file come down very quickly, but without anyone at all having that last bit, the available bandwidth just dies. If someone disconnects when they have 100% of the file, that's OK because they have served up 75% of the file across any number of chunks. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would distribute the problem and remove the main bottleneck.
"Sales of FrameMaker licenses have been greater on the Windows and Solaris platforms for a number of years." They spelled it out and no tinfoil hat conspiracy.
That's not really fair, now is it? You would have to compare sales of the last Mac version (for OS9) with a version of FrameMaker for windows running under DOS Emulation on XP, and running under an equivalently constrained set of parameters for Solaris. Saying that FrameMaker on the Mac died a natural death is like saying that Lincoln died a natural death: very natural he would die, considering the massive head trauma.
They decided to kill it years ago, when sales weren't underperforming, probably as a way of forcing migration away from a platform where competition to Adobe products is both prevalent and successful.
I've been cutting my barcodes out of the card, and just carrying those around for years, but they have gotten a bit unweildly. Does anyone know of a PDA-based barcode simulator that will allow you to create scanable representations of barcodes? Would a bitwise GIF be sufficient?
I can only imagine what kind of bonuses Rob has on his card.
Along those lines, there was a boxing game in Ape Escape for the original playstation that used both of the dual shock sticks, one for each hand. There was also skiing with one stick for each foot. Many people considered this to be terribly difficult to manipulate. I can only hazard a guess as to how difficult it would be to control both hands and feet independently on a character with 4 joysticks, and that would only be in two dimensions.
Slashdot Mirror
I know few people read the articles, but why don't people read the articles before they complain about the article's percieved lack of information?
Try the buy link. Or just compare models.
And next time, make sure you read the article and not just the Google Cache when somebody says a website was updated.
Get a top-loading NES. They were solidly built and basically blinkey-free.
You can also get a new NES out of China, if you can find one of the myriad of clones. They generally have better connecters than the original, and are still being produced new to this day.
The NES is a system that really needs to be played in hardware, not emulated. Ironically, it was it's relative simplicity that made games focus on the physical interaction aspect... something that just doesn't come across as well with the computer's lag.
For your specific problem, if you don't want to buy a new system, just jimmy the new connector until it is sufficiently loose. Go slowly but surely, and it will eventually loosen up. A friend of mine had a tight grip system when he first replaced his connector. While it didn't have the grip of death of yours it was quite tight, but has worn down to being simply sufficient.
Area storage! I would imagine that walking around a physical building and having file sharing available for the location you are at would be kind of neat. The library could serve up interesting articles, while the student center might have PDF files of paperwork. You should still be able to connect remotely, but for simple Samba it would be great.
Well, no slam intended to Clone Wars, it's great stuff, but these episodes are like 3 minutes long apiece and have very little dialogue; some have none whatsoever.
You're right, it's a very unfair comparison. Clone Wars would have been so much better if it was 3 minutes long and had very little dialogue.
Do they feature a horrible actor, awful script, and whiny, annoying characters?
Oh do they. It feels like the writer was constantly going down to Tashi Station to pick up some pooooower conveeeerters.
Darth Vader has to be extra whiny and annoying, because he is only passing half of that on to his offspring. It's called continuity. It's also called writing yourself into a corner.
And it's an intergalactic war with a bunch of Bankers. Bankers. If it isn't clear how a hollywood mogul would feel about Bankers, let's just say Lucas has always pronounced his B's and W's similarly.
The prequals have to be full of annoying, whiny brats doing annoying whiny brat-like things. Otherwise, how would we know it was Star Wars?
There's another guy in the team who gets that collision intuition too. We had a chat about it as they were doing some more of that tedious collision testing. Our conclusion was that it comes from years of playing. You get a subconsious understanding of the conditions of a bug-free region and a bugged region.
Usually twitching is the dead giveaway. Even the slightest bit indicates that physics broke down. One of the favorite tricks in the first game I worked on (a basketball game) was to wedge a player firmly between two other players, causing him to vibrate slightly, then pass the ball. It would cannon up into the sky, and wouldn't come down for a dozen seconds or more. Nothing in a modern, well designed engine will cause twitches except problems or problem areas.
Slight hitches are also a sign of trouble. If you slide along a wall, and there is the slightest pause, that usually indicates that something isn't quite aligned, and there is a space that you could theoretically squeeze yourself into.
Remember Designers: The clip plane is your friend!
There is also the small space effect... Any time a player's space transitions from enough to not enough along a sloped line instead of a sharp point, problems will occur. You may have to try and wedge a shoulder in there, or filp forward and backwards rapidly, but be it a lower-than-90 degree corner or a small pipe that creeps too low lengthwise, it will cause problems to somebody.
Then there is the bowl effect, where you have a condition that the player should slide down but only encounters another place where they should slide down in the opposite direction. No designer worth his salt would do this normally, but on 80 hour weeks where the only thing to break up the death march is beer...
The pothole effect is about the same, where you have a hole near to the width of the character's collision box, that theoretically they should fall into but the engine can't quite make up it's mind.
There's the penetration ploy... Where you find something pokey and sharp, try to overlap that slightly in a way while walking away from the wall. Many engines will push you back through (or into) the wall. This was most famously demonstrated by The Secret of Mana, where you could traverse characters (including one blocking your return to your home village) by walking up to them and flipping back and forth. 3D engine examples exist too, though none come to mind immediately.
There are others, but those are just what come to mind right now.
And the bug wasn't there the day before. They went ahead and added something the day before the deadlines, the fools.
Don't you just love it when the Lead Programmer starts a conversation by saying "This shouldn't break anything, but we..."
Don't forget, she is cleared for nuclear wastelands. Because she didn't post personal information to the site I won't blow her cover, but with a little due dilligence you can find out that she didn't just buy one.
And that probably is enough to keep the average people from doing what she is doing. In fact, the checkpoint is probably there exactly to stop average people from doing what she is doing. I won't want anyone going in there that didn't have a professional appreciation of the idea that where you are may be safe but four feet to your right may be death. Plus that keeps the ghost town a ghost town, and not one of those terrible run-down tourist traps.
Besides, the concept of ecological armageddon tourism is just a little... Creepy.
"They swept over like Mongol-Tartars."
And so you post her to the front page. Again. That's just spiteful.
You can't buy this kind of publicity, but you are sure going to pay for it. Hopefully the bill falls on anglefire and not our friend on the bike.
Creativity. Your best testers are the ones that can still come up with ludicrous, ridiculous things to try after doing ludicrous, ridiculous things to this piece of software for 10 hours a day the past 8 months. You know, the ones that decide to feed the big monster the meat of undying gratitude and attack them with the pokey fork of infuriating blindness while pausing and saving during the same frame, only to load the game and, without unpausing, cast the instaneous spell of random teleportation on the poor beast.
From an engineering standpoint it doesn't require a lot of "special training," but the same thing could be said about the marketing department. You need a very broad experience base touching on 3d drawing, programming, design, and gameplay. You do have to deduce all of the interrelating systems in a game and how they may misinteract with eachother. The programmer probably thought to put in a special case clause for doing direct damage to a unit in the same tick that they transfer ownership to the damaging player, but did they remember about area damage? They must have implemented pathfinding around obstacles, and regions of potential interacction around obstacles, but did they remember to update completely surrounded regions of potential interaction when obstacles are removed? I had to create a demo level for the programmers for that last one, so that they would understand what was going wrong.
Testers should not be disposable (until the end of the project *sigh*), because good testers will save a lot of valuable programmer and artist time. Now, most publisher's testing departments I have worked with (and in) have been disposable, simply because their job was not to create the best game possible, but to put in the number of hours as stipulated in the contract. But the in-house teams I have worked in (and with) have all been excellent, focused, and above all, valuable. A programmer could say he saw something weird at a particular location, and go do something more important. When he came back, there would be a %100 repro and parameterization that gave them insight into the problem. With a good QA team, bugs can take minutes to fix. With a bad QA team, that same fix might take hours to figure out.
To misquote Tom Lehrer, a testing department is like a sewer: what you get out of it depends upon what you put into it. The attitude that a testing department is not a skilled position will be reflected in the kinds of testers that you hire and ultimately, the kind of work that they perform.
In other words, demand better. Game development teams are in a position to select great QA people because there's just so bloody many of us. Take advantage of that. Put out your feelers long before the position becomes necessary, and select the best of the best. Pay a livable wage, integrate QA into the process, give them direct access to your programmers, and you will have a truly valuable asset in development.
The alternative is to have a QA department with a high churn and a low useful output. Prophesies tend to self-fulfill.
- Chris Canfield
They went from Announcement to Failure to Sequel in just over a year.
It's almost like mid 90's SEGA.
Let's not forget, Atari died of its own mismanagement, not because Microsoft quashed it.
Smaller HDDs? Slower CPU's? Because of Cartridges? That doesn't make any sense. If companies are competing as games platforms, don't you think we'd have a dramatic rise in power every few years... like we've been having in the console arena? Games always require faster processors. Furthermore, how would this tap the demand of the PC crowd, instead of drawing from the console group? Wouldn't the people be interested in this kind of networking.
BTW, the cartridges you describe are also known as "disks," like the things that the PC used for memory. Otherwise you're talking real chip-based cartridges, which were too expensive to use compared to other mediums of the time (such as floppys), and had no storage.
If there were no master operating system out there, the computing demands would go up significantly as many more pieces of software would be running in JAVA or envoking other forms of cross-platform compatibility. Once again, I fail to see how software would not be keeping up with hardware.
Have you never used a business Tandy? Saying that companies would have held off moving to computerized systems is forgetting that long before Windows was out many businesses were using computerized systems. You still get people complaining about not being able to upgrade their OS2Warp systems. And as OS2 was an IBM creation, and was adopted by the FBI, it could very easily have "legitimized" the personal computer industry.
I hate posts like this. People attributing to Microsoft what is really the broader fault of technology. Automated systems and informational conduits are sufficient reasons to adopt computing systems, and the armies of salesmen for IBM and SUN are enough to replace those of Microsoft.
Once people had computers, networking became obvious. Once people had networking, communications became obvious. Once people had communications, e-mail became obvious. Once people had e-mail, HTML became obvious. Once people had HTML, the personal computer became inevitable. Right up until that last prerequisite, the network only needed (and was developed on) UNIX based systems. That would still put the personal computer boom in around 97/98.
Can we be so sure that the end here (travel in space, colonization, etc.) justifies the means we as humans may need to take to get there (commercial interests)?
I fail to see how "commercial interests" are the anthesis of space travel and colonization. What is so terrible about making money that it needs to be banned from space? It's not like they're sending the XPlanes up there to block out the sun in an act of cartoonish supervillany.
If someone can make money escaping the atmosphere in an attempt to speed up intercontinental flight, good for them. If someone can make money carrying satellites into space, or running experiments in zero-G, good for them. Profitability equals the survival of a venture... It's why profitable but socially negative corporations are difficult to get rid of. We want that kind of tenacity on our side. The spreading of mankind outside of our little planet is a good thing, and so long as the companies that do it are behaving in an ecologically responsible fashion, more power to them.
Theoretically, the only reason going into space would be profitable is if there was something sufficiently valuable up there that we should go. The more space travel there is, the less expensive it will be. The less expensive space travel is, the more experiments, manufacturing, and living can take place up there. There must be all kinds of ludicrously dangerous Xtreme sports for our grandkids to discover.
And, in case you haven't noticed, there are already commercial space operations out there. Far more often than NASA they're the ones putting up the satellite phone satellites and the flying transponders we rely upon. Except for the problem of junk in orbit, there isn't anything wrong with that.
I can't tell you how many times I've had users shout at the machines "It's YOUR file! YOU tell me where it is!"
They'll probably release a MSN toolbar that is a feature-for-feature copy of the Googlebar, and automatically install it on the next Windows Update. Maybe on "accident" is uninstalls the original Google toolbar (Cough*netscape*Cough). Make all URL line searches and mistypes go to MSN, and remove the ability to choose your default search engine.
They don't have to make the "world's greatest," they just have to make something that is competitively passable, and is deeply hooked into their existing product line. The "Internet Search" in the file search bar is already inexorably linked to MSN...
In 1994, MS and the DOJ came to an agreement that stopped per-machine licencing. It was the violation of this agreement (in other ways) that lead to the big anti-trust case in the late 90s. All part of the process.
Yes, the process of Microsoft violations coming so rapidly and repeatedly as to pose too much of a moving target for the DOJ. Forget punishing them for what they used to do, look what they're doing now. Oh, they're not doing that anymore, look now! Oh, now they're doing something else. New case!
It is unfortunate... unfortunate that the DOJ didn't do thier jobs properly the first FOUR times, allowing this company to continue to behave in an anticompetitive and illegal manner with nothing more than a wink and a nudge.
Why can't I get away with abusive and immoral practices for 25 years, leading to nothing but becoming the richest man, and company, in the world? Am I not rich enough? Is my industry not new enough to be beyond the law?
While limited one of many particular aspects of Microsoft's behavior, I applaud the EU's ruling. If anything it was too limited in scope... hopefully other cases will follow. Let's see, there is DrDos, BeOS, Word compatibility, IE, per-cpu licensing, OS only licensing, No naked licensing...
It was actually just a general comment on the confusing naming issues brought up by the mozilla people. People seem to get the assorted thund-fire-foxy-bird stuff confused all of the time, none of which is helped by the total lack of theming with the larger mozilla name. Personally I think they should just break down and call thunderbird "Charazard" and firefox "Flareon."
Ok, first why should I switch from the current BIOS I have to this one, make the case.
You shouldn't. Ok, that's unnecessarily harsh, but as it stands right now LinuxBIOS is primarily for people who are between very and highly technically inclined... Kind of like linux was shortly after it's release. That's why their website "SUCKS," because this isn't yet ready for the KDE crowd. You'd have to be comfortable finding the status of your motherboard, downloading and compiling the appropriate files, reflashing your onboard FlashROM, and other nasty, dirty things. I wouldn't consider myself qualified to get their best documented system up and running unless I was between jobs, and even then I consider it iffy.
Linux BIOS as it stands is useful for a few specific things: Building clusters and building robots. Any embedded system running on linux on a traditional motherboard can be sped up significantly by using Linux BIOS. But it does require quite a bit of work and knowledge to get it running... If you want a computer pre-flashed with LinuxBIOS, you can purchase one off the shelf, but I would be hesitant to try and build one without a lot of time and / or skill.
It isn't that the LinuxBIOS people don't want that kind of end-user friendliness, it's just that the project is still in the mode of getting things working at all, let alone in an easy fashion.
Secondly, as you might have figured out, it is not a drop-in BIOS replacement. Your computer enters the boot phase and exists the other side with Linux running. You'll not get Windows to run directly on that, and I'd be surprised if it ran virtually (as the BIOS windows is expecting doesn't exist). If anyone here has experience running Windows on a LinuxBIOS, please let us know.
None of this is to say that the goals of the project are bad. Imagine being able to boot to command line in 3 seconds! You could start an ssh session before your monitor was done de-gaussing. Attach a 4 line LED display to one of these motherboards, and you would have a great tool for debugging network problems. Or just speed things up significantly, and spend more time doing what you are supposed to be doing, with the added bonus of being able to shut down your computer when you are done (gasp!). It just needs a lot more work, and a lot of developer support. I'm glad to see it posted to Slashdot, as the exposure might net a few more eager helpers.
"firewalls create problems while performing daily business tasks on the server from home"
Not a well-configured software one. It's not as safe as a hardware firewall, but it is a heck of a lot safer than running around with your pants down, not knowing when your machine is connecting and what it is sending. It makes it difficult to connect *to* the machine, but your home winbox shouldn't be a remote server anyway.
Grab ZoneAlarm NOW, and put up with a few extra dialog boxes until it is trained.
Furthermore, good Antivirus software will detect many trojans. Get AVG if you have alredy abandoned your AV of choice.
This must sound like free windows security 101 by now, but get AdAware and / or Spybot, and schedule a regular download / check for once every week.
For encrypting sensitive or old data, you can either use windows built-in encryption (which uses your user password, enable this now if your machine is fast enough) and / or pick up a (non-free) copy of Dekart Private Disk, AKA The Bat! Private Disk, a simple encrypted virtual disk creator. Anything you really don't want people to see should go here... Just remember to shut it down when you're done.
Furthermore, don't use I.E. and don't use Outlook. What many people refer to as "computer" viruses or "windows" exploits are really just I.E. exploits or Outlook viruses. Firebird, I mean, Thun... Firefox is a powerful little internet surfer, which while not as flexible as my beloved Opera (ducks), does render pages faster, is more beginner friendly, and is free. Thunderbird is a good mail replacement, though pegasus mail, Opera's built in e-mail client, and the non-free The Bat! are all good choices. If you want the most security possible, try Secure Bat. At 140 dollars per copy, it isn't cheap, but it does encrypt all of your personal files and utilizes hardware token authentication to ensure that you really are who you say you are.
Finally, don't forget to regularly back up your disks to something not normally connected to the computer. For simplicity's sake, I'd attach an external USB drive and run Polder Backup once a week, removing the drive when done. For a more automated approach, get a PC controllable X10 unit, and have it turn on and off the external USB drive, so that backups can be completely automatic.
You know, books are far easier to burn than the encrypted 512MB flash drive I keep in my pocket. For whitewashing data, monthly publications do keep revising their view of history to an annoying degree. This is true both online and off. But for data stored locally, the truth is archived and protected. It's theoretically possible that Windows XP has hooks that will allow the Secret Service to remove the video of campaign promises Bush made on my drive, but it's not bloody likely to make it through two firewalls and onto the backup drive that is disconnected and sitting in a closet, nor the linux-based offsite backup.
In short, it is good to be paranoid about the lack of care people take with old data and publications, but to say that history can be erased at the push of a button is borderline hysteria. Personally I'd rather have a portable repository of hundreds of books and magazines, randing from War and Peace to the daily news (which I get on my Palm Pilot anyway), than to have a hard copy of all data which I can't take with me anyway.
So long as we demand flexibility (or fragility) in protection schemes and a standardized data format, we should be in a better position to keep data safe.
But even if it were enforceable, it wouldn't help anyhow... clients would still tend to disconnect once they have 100% of the file. That's just unavoidable- the server cannot coerce help from a client which doesn't need anything from it.
The bottleneck comes from that last 1% of the file. The first 99% of the file come down very quickly, but without anyone at all having that last bit, the available bandwidth just dies. If someone disconnects when they have 100% of the file, that's OK because they have served up 75% of the file across any number of chunks. It wouldn't be perfect, but it would distribute the problem and remove the main bottleneck.
"Sales of FrameMaker licenses have been greater on the Windows and Solaris platforms for a number of years." They spelled it out and no tinfoil hat conspiracy.
That's not really fair, now is it? You would have to compare sales of the last Mac version (for OS9) with a version of FrameMaker for windows running under DOS Emulation on XP, and running under an equivalently constrained set of parameters for Solaris. Saying that FrameMaker on the Mac died a natural death is like saying that Lincoln died a natural death: very natural he would die, considering the massive head trauma.
They decided to kill it years ago, when sales weren't underperforming, probably as a way of forcing migration away from a platform where competition to Adobe products is both prevalent and successful.
The men that came for me were in a van.
I feel so jipped.
I've been cutting my barcodes out of the card, and just carrying those around for years, but they have gotten a bit unweildly. Does anyone know of a PDA-based barcode simulator that will allow you to create scanable representations of barcodes? Would a bitwise GIF be sufficient?
I can only imagine what kind of bonuses Rob has on his card.
Along those lines, there was a boxing game in Ape Escape for the original playstation that used both of the dual shock sticks, one for each hand. There was also skiing with one stick for each foot. Many people considered this to be terribly difficult to manipulate. I can only hazard a guess as to how difficult it would be to control both hands and feet independently on a character with 4 joysticks, and that would only be in two dimensions.