What the heck. I'm an ignorant layman who'd probably look in the wrong end of the telescope, so of course I'll weigh in with an opinion. It's the Slashdot Way.
My goal: to be conservative and preserve the status quo. Nine planets was good enough for me, dammit, and it should be good enough for all of humanity until the end of time.
After five entire minutes of thought (and man do I need a nap now), I came up with this:
1. Orbits the sun. 2. Is not a star. Planets are fusion-free zones. 3. Gas giants count, as long as there's none of that nasty fusion stuff going on. 4. Has enough size/gravity to hold an atmosphere of X% of the pressure of Earth's, if it were in the same orbit Earth is. Initial value of X is 10, subject to change. Actual PRESENCE of atmosphere is irrelevant. It's the mass that matters. This means that small, very dense objects could be planets, and things made of duffuse materials would have to be exceedingly large. 5. Tweak the number in 4 (10%) up or down to the minimum required to let the existing 9 planets remain as planets. Ideally, tweak it high enough to shut out all these silly pretend planets people keep coming up with.
Everyone knows there are nine planets, so by golly, we rejigger the rules until we have nine planets.:-)
Well, I don't have any good way to do one. I CAN say that wben I was using the Audigy 2 NX on my HTPC to drive my good stereo, I was very unhappy with the sound. The treble was awful. For a long time, I thought it was the speakers. DVDs sounded great, but CDs always sucked.
I had picked up the Sonica Theater when I was experimenting with the Mac Mini as an HTPC (no damn good, as it turns out), and hooked it up to the HTPC just to see what it sounded like. I was immediately floored by the difference. It was night and day... the treble finally sounded right, and I finally could really enjoy my front system for music. All those months I thought it was the speakers, and it was actually the sound card at fault.
To give you a data point, I can sometimes hear a difference between a CD and a LAME encoding with --preset-standard. With --preset-extreme, I've never been able to hear any difference, at least on Sennheiser HD600s on an amplifier, driven by an an iPod. (I've never done that test through the speaker system, though.) I have reasonably good ears, but I'm no audiophile. And the difference between the 2NX and the Sonica Theater was very, very pronounced on solid midrange audio gear.
You'll see many people say that the M-Audio cards or the Audiotrak Prodigy "sound better for music", but they're almost never clear about why. Well, I believe this is why... that horrible 48khz resample.
All of the SBLive and Audigy cards do an internal resample from 44.1Khz to 48khz. If you're listening on good gear, this really screws the sound up. Unless you can stay at 48khz from source to delivery, you DO NOT want to route sound through an Audigy if you really care about the quality.
The Audiotrak Prodigy and M-Audio Revolution 7.1 are both solid cards, with better DACs than the Audigy has, and they don't do the 48khz butchering. If you drive them with ASIO or kernel streaming, you can get true lossless output.
For whatever weird reason, the M-Audio Sonica Theater, if you configure it for 44.1Khz out, will do perfect lossless output even on normal programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Somehow, it avoid Windows' kmixer and sends an undamaged bitstream. Using that card, you can play a DTS-encoded.WAV file over fiber or coax to your stereo, even with iTunes or WMP, and have it sound perfect.
It's very hard to get really good sound out of Windows... if your sound education has been on a computer, chances are extremely high that you don't yet know very much. It was certainly a learning curve for me.... at this point, at least I know I'm ignorant.
You know, that thought occurred to me. I should have dug a little deeper before asking. Thanks for the reply. I wonder why they don't use the headphone cord as an antenna? The headset market is pretty lucrative. They'd have to make players compatible with regular headphones, so customers wouldn't get mad that they couldn't use their own. But they could probably sell a $10 headphone with an extra antenna wire for like $40. Maybe the AM radio market just isn't big enough, or maybe moving antennas aren't good for AM. If I, in my vast ignorance, can think of this, surely the engineers must have.
As far as the HTML goes, I'm not qualified to judge. I haven't seen the dread Firefox text-flow bug in the last few days, though, so that seems fixed. Wasn't the whole point of the redo to switch over to CSS? And isn't that largely to make skinning easier?
If you can do a better CSS, I'm sure any number of us would be happy to use it.:)
Maybe someone with more understanding of electronics can answer this one for me. Howcome all the portable devices with radios always have FM only? Why do they never have AM? It can't be circuit complexity... I built crystal radios with those silly 100-in-1 project kits from all those years ago. I could wire up a working crystal radio (admittedly, with zero understanding of how it WORKED) in about 15 minutes. And that didn't even use a bloomin' battery!
Ico was wonderful, It had a.... wistful poignancy to it, and telling a story with so few words was a feat in and of itself. With so little dialog, the story was very open to interpretation, and I think everyone that played it experienced it a litte differently. A brilliant game, no doubt. One of the ways I measure games is by how clear my memory is of them, and I remember a great deal about Ico. It's certainly in my top-10 games list.
If you haven't played it, also look up The Longest Journey. It's a huge, involved adventure with intricate, fun characters, and lots and lots of great dialog. You really do get the feeling that the protagonist is an art student, struggling to get by. Her world is diverse and interesting. And THEN things start officially Getting Weird.
It was obvious that an enormous amount of time and effort went into crafting it just so. I have rarely been so hooked into a story; 'mesmerised' wouldn't be too far off. And the ending was very powerful, very possibly the strongest single gaming memory I have. Of all the story-based games I've played, that one is the best. (Grim Fandango got pretty darn close, though.)
If you don't like adventure games, pick it up anyway, and use a walkthrough... it's an absolutely fascinating game just to WATCH, even without the puzzle-solving. Think of it as a very long, interactive movie.
I wish it had gotten more press and acclaim. It's really quite remarkable.
Surprisingly enough, nothing is stopping you from using DOS, which STILL works fine on pretty much any PC you'd buy. Find a copy, install, and off you go.
Now, you're not going to be able to use very much memory, and the size of the hard drives you can format will be sharply limited, but it should still work fine. As should WP 5.0... although getting a printer driver for a current printer might take some work.
If you truly don't need all those extra features, there's NOTHING keeping you from doing things the old way.... at blinding speed, to boot. DOS programs mostly work great on 25Mhz 386s. With a 2.6Ghz Opteron, I don't think you'll be waiting long on WP's Print Preview function.:)
But that's a weakness of the encryption, not the broadcast. Are you comfortable sending SSL transactions to Amazon? An awful lot of people can see that traffic, you know.
But with very small charges.... like, say, 10 cents, or 25 cents -- how many people would actually bother to file a fraud report? You might be able to get away with it even in your first month, and keep it up for a long period of time, as long as you didn't get too greedy. You could probably siphon off a few thousand a month, 25 cents at a time, almost forever, particularly if you wrote in duplicate-checking, so that you didn't charge the same person more than once a month or so.
Namecheap seems quite good. I like their site layout a lot. Everything makes sense and is easy to do... and if for some reason you're confused, they even have tutorials available. They also offer WhoisGuard, which anonymizes your contact information through a remailer. This means people can still contact you if there's a problem with a domain, but they don't automatically get your real name, address, and email.
They're also, as their name implies, quite cheap. $8.88/yr for domains, and another $5/year or so for WhoisGuard, if you want that. They offer many free services as well, like domain website redirection and good DNS management.
I haven't seen them do anything even REMOTELY duplicitous or sneaky.
Joker.com was my prior registrar. They are also good, completely non-sneaky, and inexpensive. They probably cost a little more than Namecheap does now, because of the decline in the U.S. dollar. I switched because Joker had nothing like WhoisGuard at the time. (I don't know if they do now or not.) I'm happy with Namecheap, but I'd use Joker again anytime.
I believe Namecheap is an eNom reseller, so they are a relatively small outfit, without the infrastructure of 'real' domain registrars, like Joker. The Namecheap site is better-designed and much easier to navigate, and they have a few features Joker doesn't. Joker can be downright cryptic at times. Everything works and does what it should, but the interface is 'early Linux desktop'... clunky and strangely laid out. Namecheap is extremely polished in comparison. That said, I've seen Namecheap's web redirects get squirrely a couple of times.
I used Network Solutions for many years, as well. They have a good interface and extremely robust infrastructure, but they're expensive. They're also complete bastards, and try to upsell you in unscrupulous ways. I suggest avoiding them. GoDaddy is another very bad outfit. And their CEO advocates torture. (he thinks we're not hard enough in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib). I suggest never, never using them.
On the whole, if you're running a small to medium site, Namecheap may be one of your best choices. If you're running a big setup, particularly if the registrar is redirecting your website or hosting your DNS, you'd probably be better off with Joker's superior infrastructure.
From what I can see, these don't appear to be RFID cards. They seem to be using an encrypted signal with a handshake. An simple eavesdropper shouldn't be able to do anything with the data he snoops, because all he's going to be able to see is the key exchange and then the encrypted bitstream.
It's just using the air to transmit encrypted information instead of a wire. As long as the encryption is good, the simple fact that it's broadcast instead of being on a wire shouldn't matter.
Ok, that said, I could see one potential attack vector, in that a bad guy could theoretically initiate a key exchange and swipe some cash from you. If all it takes is being nearby with an inductive field to power the card, then a fraudulent charge would be pretty easy to make. The virtual equivalent of pickpocketing. If you did it in small amounts per card, you could walk through a crowd with your portable gear and make hundreds of dollars an hour.
One idea to work around that would be requiring the user to hold the card in two specific places, on opposite sides. Thumb on one side, finger on the other, touching big gold contact points. If the card can detect the proper grip (very trivial technology), then it is active; otherwise, it refuses transactions. That should prevent 'pickpocketing'.
Basically, there needs to be a way for the user to announce 'yes, this is an authorized charge' other than simple proximity. The Kung-Fu Grip is one possibility... there must be others. Heck, the cards may already DO this. The actual technical data seems exceedingly scarce.
Snooping, at least, doesn't appear to be a potential problem.
First, considering that IGN actually saw the hardware and had more detail in their article than anyone else, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't know where you learned to separate truth from fiction, but citing IRC comments as an authoritative source doesn't give you a whole lot of credibility.
Second, in ALL of your examples of gripped objects, the thumb is curled into a ball. If the object is small enough, the thumb ends up between the first and second fingers. The Revolution is quite different. It appears to extend the thumb in a strange direction, a bit like the "hitchhiking" gesture, though not as extreme. Extending it at that angle and wiggling it under pressure for prolonged periods of time looks painful to me. I can't think of any 'natural' tools/devices that are intended to be held that way.
Asserting that the Revolution controller is the same as a hammer means that either you saw a different controller than I did, or you use hammers in a very strange way.
As far as your last comment goes... I'm sure you're very knowledgeable about pornography, but I don't really see how it's relevant.
But they don't really have any power over me. The fact that this gizmo has extra functions I can't use is pretty much irrelevant to me. I don't care about those functions. And they're not going to be turned on against my will. They don't have a magic wand that will suddenly lock me out of my own data.
I just don't see what the issue is here. This isn't Bitkeeper, where I'm using the product at the sufferance of an asshole. They can't take my cards away or make them stop working... so what's the problem? What potential drawback am I facing by using this format?
See my other post, a little further down in this thread. IGN claims that the Revolution will require sensors deployed on either side of the TV. I don't know whether or not they're right... but they had more info than anyone else, so I'm inclined to believe them until contradicted.
What concerns me about the controller is the constant thumb pressure. That's not at all a 'normal' grip position. Maintaining it for long periods, particularly when wiggling the thumb like mad, doesn't intuitively seem like a very good idea. I've always been prone to DeQuervain's (sort of like carpal tunnel that affects the thumb tendons rather than the fingers), and that controller looks very painful to me.
My main "television" is a projector, and I throw a 100" (diagonal) screen. It's actually too big for the room I have it in. I really should size it down a little, but I bought the screen in my prior home, and replacing it would be expensive. And yes, it is bloody enormous. Projector people are known to snicker, "You still measure your screen size in inches? How quaint.":)
And it's not even THAT expensive... you can easily get a very nice projector that will handle a screen that large for under $2k. The big downside is that the room needs to be totally dark for a projector to look good. (just like real theaters, in fact.) If you have a room with good light control, projectors will let you throw an enormous, movielike image for a very reasonable price, relatively speaking.
As far as mouselike sensitivity.... it's something I want, and I'm concerned this won't have it. I can live without, I certainly have before, but I still want it.
So all SD cards must support MMC mode. MMC mode works. Therefore....(left as an exercise for the reader).
I did say, if you notice, that nothing uses the encryption capability of the card anyway. It doesn't *matter* what the internal protocol is, as long as it works to do what we want, which is store and retrieve data. I can take an SD card, plug it into an SD slot, and it just works. That's all I really need. You can think of SD as MMC in a better package, with a write-protect tab.
If they change the rules at some future time, and start shipping SD cards that don't support MMC mode, we can switch formats to something else. All our existing cards will keep working. It's not like they're going to wave a magic wand and remotely disable the ones we already have.
And:
A) It's exceedingly unlikely that they would be able to force all the manufacturers to stop supporting MMC mode; B) Even if they COULD, the screaming would be so loud that SD would be destroyed as a standard. They're not likely to do that. D) Linux users, relatively speaking, buy lots of hardware. SD's manufacturer may not want us to have access to the encryption stuff, but we have better software to do that anyway. Why would they blow off a big chunk of the market by changing the rules when they didn't have to? They've got it nailed now... the cards work in vanilla mode for everyone, and encrypted mode for people who have paid for a license. That's a great setup. Why on earth would they change? C) Real MMC works in SD slots anyway, so if they DO pull a boneheaded move and try to shut us out, we can just buy native MMC.
It JUST WORKS. Plug it in and you're good. You don't have to think about SD or MMC, you just get a universal reader, plug it in, and off you go. The SD encryption features aren't used by any device I know of. You can argue semantics about it "being used as an MMC card", but no normal human cares about that. They want to plug it into the computer and have it work. If you buy an SD card, that will happen. That's all that matters.
SD is better than MMC anyway... the MMC cards are so thin they're pretty fragile. SD is quite robust. I have been carrying a card in my wallet for the last two years, and it's none the worse for wear. And you get a nifty write-protect tab, which I like very much.
If I understand your anti-SD objection correctly, you're upset about something that's totally irrelevant.
I use a 4-in-1 reader and it just works. With everything. I don't have it handy right now to look at, but it was a $25 or $30 job at Best Buy. (I *think* the brand name was ImageMate, but that could easily be wrong.)
Support's built right into the kernel. Plug it in, wham, it works. No hassle. Each slot looks like a different SCSI device. I've used it for both CF and SD and it works fine.
Via VMWare, the built-in card-reader on my monitor also works perfectly with OpenBSD and with Linux, both for CF and SD. I presume it would work if I plugged it straight in, as well, but I don't run Linux directly on this machine.
I've had NO problem using multiple SD cards with Linux for years. I don't know where you guys are getting your info (and/or your readers), but there's no reason whatsoever for it to be difficult. It's such a no-brainer that I am completely confused why we're even having the conversation.
What crack are you smoking? I've been using SD cards with Linux for years. If you don't have a device that uses the security features (nearly all of them), then it just works like any other flash device would.
It might be possible to lock content on an SD card so that it wasn't accessible from Linux, but one you purchased blank and formatted yourself isn't going to give you any problems.
You can get 2 gig cards for around $140 now, and they're dropping fast. SD is a really good format... still thick enough to be tough, but easily tucked into a wallet or other small carrier. CF can store a lot more, but the cards are much less convenient.
Realistically, SD sizes aren't likely to be a drawback. As an example, my entire Thief2 installation, including the unofficial T2X mod (which is a bit uneven, but really amazing for a fan remake), weighs in at about 1.8 gigs. That's voice, movies, and everything. The T2X directory itself is about a gig, and that's about the best fan-made product I know. I doubt you'll see anything homebrew that's *better* anytime soon.
Remember, the Gamecube's disks only hold 1.8 gigs, and they've done some seriously amazing stuff with that machine.
Many other possible issues with the GP2X, but the size of SD cards isn't one of them.:)
That's very unlikely. Your viewing space is pretty much irrelevant. They're not going to be deploying two (expensive) hardware sensors to measure the width of your TV. If for some bizarre reason they really did need to know that, they'd have you measure it and enter it into a setup screen.
Those sensors will determine the controller's physical location, and the onboard sensors will determine tilt and acceleration. Getting an absolute location using only accelerometers would be quite difficult, and very prone to drift. Having two fixed sensors makes that problem go away.
I do wonder how they'll handle height if they're only using two external sensors.
The unit is held in one hand. It interacts with included motion sensors (which are placed on the left and right sides of televisions) to become a virtual conductor, of sorts.
Dawn of War is a VERY good game. I'm not heavily into RTSes as a general rule, but I played that one a lot. Great units, very atmospheric, lots of strategic depth. Designing an RTS from battle-tested(heh) pen and paper rules was a fantastic idea. It's been tried before, but this one really got it right.
Major downside is that the single player game is exceedingly short. They're just about to ship an expansion, Winter Assault, on the 20th. It'll add a bunch of single-player content, as well as another playable race, making five total. (not many RTSes out with five distinct sides... possibly no others?)
It got a little lost, last year, because the Total War:Rome game shipped right at the same time. Damn shame, really... people were more excited about Rome, and it didn't get the press or sales it really deserved. A year later, I'm still playing Warhammer on occasion, but Rome sits on the shelf.
If you're gaming on the PC, like RTSes at all, and missed this title, I strongly suggest checking it out.
One is that the main controller looks like carpal tunnel city. Admittedly, I haven't used it yet, but it looks awkward. The wrist will be under exactly opposing strains, from the thumb pushing down and the other fingers pushing up. My knowledge about wrists is mostly limited to just HAVING two of them, but when I'm holding a standard two-handed controller, it doesn't feel like the support strain is hitting my wrists too badly. It feels like it's radiated down my arm to my elbows. And the load is shared between both hands. With the new Revolution controller, the pressure is all on one hand and comes at the top of the controller. I can't help but think that the wrist will take the entire load... possibly like a lever using the wrist as a fulcrum... against itself.
It may be perfectly fine -- remember, I'm no expert here -- but I still wonder.
My other concern is how precise and repeatable the hand-gesture controls will be. It's a really superb idea, but it's going to require deployment of sensors on either side of the TV. I wonder how well Nintendo is going to handle the gamut of televisions, from 13" B&W up to 100" projection models. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, but doing it right, and giving it the kind of sensitivity you have with mice and analog thumbsticks, will be very hard.
If they can get it working reliably, but it's a bit sloppy (which is my expectation), they'll need to adjust game designs quite a bit to accommodate it. But it'll give a degree of immersiveness that we will love. Practically everyone instinctively moves the controller around, trying to give their character or car an extra 'push' when they're in a tight spot... making that into an actual control mechanic is brilliant.
Upshot: I'm so there. I'll buy one when it ships. Even if it fails, at least they're really doing something NEW.
The rings aren't very solid; most of the material is believed to be ice crystals that are, at most, a few meters in diameter. And despite their apparent solidity from here, they're an awful lot of empty space.
Chances are pretty good that an asteroid would just sail right through the rings unimpeded. If it did hit something, it wouldn't be stopped. The inertia of the (small) body it hit would almost certainly be completely overcome by the incoming inertia of the asteroid. If it hit hard enough to break the asteroid apart, the result might look something like a shotgun blast, with a spray of asteroid chunks and a tiny bit of ring material continuing roughly along the same path the asteroid had been following. The 'hole' in the rings would almost certainly be filled within hours or days.
If the asteroid happened to be slow enough to be captured into orbit, and happened to be on the same plane as the rings, it could potentially join the ring system. Over time, it might be torn apart by tidal forces into small chunks and blend in with the rest of the material.
No matter what, it wouldn't just hit them and explode in place. The rings aren't nearly solid enough for that. It'd be like trying to stop a bullet with a sheet of Saran Wrap, perhaps with rice stuck to it.
Slashdot Mirror
What the heck. I'm an ignorant layman who'd probably look in the wrong end of the telescope, so of course I'll weigh in with an opinion. It's the Slashdot Way.
:-)
My goal: to be conservative and preserve the status quo. Nine planets was good enough for me, dammit, and it should be good enough for all of humanity until the end of time.
After five entire minutes of thought (and man do I need a nap now), I came up with this:
1. Orbits the sun.
2. Is not a star. Planets are fusion-free zones.
3. Gas giants count, as long as there's none of that nasty fusion stuff going on.
4. Has enough size/gravity to hold an atmosphere of X% of the pressure of Earth's, if it were in the same orbit Earth is. Initial value of X is 10, subject to change. Actual PRESENCE of atmosphere is irrelevant. It's the mass that matters. This means that small, very dense objects could be planets, and things made of duffuse materials would have to be exceedingly large.
5. Tweak the number in 4 (10%) up or down to the minimum required to let the existing 9 planets remain as planets. Ideally, tweak it high enough to shut out all these silly pretend planets people keep coming up with.
Everyone knows there are nine planets, so by golly, we rejigger the rules until we have nine planets.
Well, I don't have any good way to do one. I CAN say that wben I was using the Audigy 2 NX on my HTPC to drive my good stereo, I was very unhappy with the sound. The treble was awful. For a long time, I thought it was the speakers. DVDs sounded great, but CDs always sucked.
I had picked up the Sonica Theater when I was experimenting with the Mac Mini as an HTPC (no damn good, as it turns out), and hooked it up to the HTPC just to see what it sounded like. I was immediately floored by the difference. It was night and day... the treble finally sounded right, and I finally could really enjoy my front system for music. All those months I thought it was the speakers, and it was actually the sound card at fault.
To give you a data point, I can sometimes hear a difference between a CD and a LAME encoding with --preset-standard. With --preset-extreme, I've never been able to hear any difference, at least on Sennheiser HD600s on an amplifier, driven by an an iPod. (I've never done that test through the speaker system, though.) I have reasonably good ears, but I'm no audiophile. And the difference between the 2NX and the Sonica Theater was very, very pronounced on solid midrange audio gear.
You'll see many people say that the M-Audio cards or the Audiotrak Prodigy "sound better for music", but they're almost never clear about why. Well, I believe this is why... that horrible 48khz resample.
All of the SBLive and Audigy cards do an internal resample from 44.1Khz to 48khz. If you're listening on good gear, this really screws the sound up. Unless you can stay at 48khz from source to delivery, you DO NOT want to route sound through an Audigy if you really care about the quality.
.WAV file over fiber or coax to your stereo, even with iTunes or WMP, and have it sound perfect.
The Audiotrak Prodigy and M-Audio Revolution 7.1 are both solid cards, with better DACs than the Audigy has, and they don't do the 48khz butchering. If you drive them with ASIO or kernel streaming, you can get true lossless output.
For whatever weird reason, the M-Audio Sonica Theater, if you configure it for 44.1Khz out, will do perfect lossless output even on normal programs like iTunes or Windows Media Player. Somehow, it avoid Windows' kmixer and sends an undamaged bitstream. Using that card, you can play a DTS-encoded
It's very hard to get really good sound out of Windows... if your sound education has been on a computer, chances are extremely high that you don't yet know very much. It was certainly a learning curve for me.... at this point, at least I know I'm ignorant.
You know, that thought occurred to me. I should have dug a little deeper before asking. Thanks for the reply. I wonder why they don't use the headphone cord as an antenna? The headset market is pretty lucrative. They'd have to make players compatible with regular headphones, so customers wouldn't get mad that they couldn't use their own. But they could probably sell a $10 headphone with an extra antenna wire for like $40. Maybe the AM radio market just isn't big enough, or maybe moving antennas aren't good for AM. If I, in my vast ignorance, can think of this, surely the engineers must have.
:)
As far as the HTML goes, I'm not qualified to judge. I haven't seen the dread Firefox text-flow bug in the last few days, though, so that seems fixed. Wasn't the whole point of the redo to switch over to CSS? And isn't that largely to make skinning easier?
If you can do a better CSS, I'm sure any number of us would be happy to use it.
Maybe someone with more understanding of electronics can answer this one for me. Howcome all the portable devices with radios always have FM only? Why do they never have AM? It can't be circuit complexity... I built crystal radios with those silly 100-in-1 project kits from all those years ago. I could wire up a working crystal radio (admittedly, with zero understanding of how it WORKED) in about 15 minutes. And that didn't even use a bloomin' battery!
So why on earth don't they include AM too?
Ico was wonderful, It had a.... wistful poignancy to it, and telling a story with so few words was a feat in and of itself. With so little dialog, the story was very open to interpretation, and I think everyone that played it experienced it a litte differently. A brilliant game, no doubt. One of the ways I measure games is by how clear my memory is of them, and I remember a great deal about Ico. It's certainly in my top-10 games list.
If you haven't played it, also look up The Longest Journey. It's a huge, involved adventure with intricate, fun characters, and lots and lots of great dialog. You really do get the feeling that the protagonist is an art student, struggling to get by. Her world is diverse and interesting. And THEN things start officially Getting Weird.
It was obvious that an enormous amount of time and effort went into crafting it just so. I have rarely been so hooked into a story; 'mesmerised' wouldn't be too far off. And the ending was very powerful, very possibly the strongest single gaming memory I have. Of all the story-based games I've played, that one is the best. (Grim Fandango got pretty darn close, though.)
If you don't like adventure games, pick it up anyway, and use a walkthrough... it's an absolutely fascinating game just to WATCH, even without the puzzle-solving. Think of it as a very long, interactive movie.
I wish it had gotten more press and acclaim. It's really quite remarkable.
Surprisingly enough, nothing is stopping you from using DOS, which STILL works fine on pretty much any PC you'd buy. Find a copy, install, and off you go.
:)
Now, you're not going to be able to use very much memory, and the size of the hard drives you can format will be sharply limited, but it should still work fine. As should WP 5.0... although getting a printer driver for a current printer might take some work.
If you truly don't need all those extra features, there's NOTHING keeping you from doing things the old way.... at blinding speed, to boot. DOS programs mostly work great on 25Mhz 386s. With a 2.6Ghz Opteron, I don't think you'll be waiting long on WP's Print Preview function.
But that's a weakness of the encryption, not the broadcast. Are you comfortable sending SSL transactions to Amazon? An awful lot of people can see that traffic, you know.
But with very small charges.... like, say, 10 cents, or 25 cents -- how many people would actually bother to file a fraud report? You might be able to get away with it even in your first month, and keep it up for a long period of time, as long as you didn't get too greedy. You could probably siphon off a few thousand a month, 25 cents at a time, almost forever, particularly if you wrote in duplicate-checking, so that you didn't charge the same person more than once a month or so.
Namecheap seems quite good. I like their site layout a lot. Everything makes sense and is easy to do... and if for some reason you're confused, they even have tutorials available. They also offer WhoisGuard, which anonymizes your contact information through a remailer. This means people can still contact you if there's a problem with a domain, but they don't automatically get your real name, address, and email.
They're also, as their name implies, quite cheap. $8.88/yr for domains, and another $5/year or so for WhoisGuard, if you want that. They offer many free services as well, like domain website redirection and good DNS management.
I haven't seen them do anything even REMOTELY duplicitous or sneaky.
Joker.com was my prior registrar. They are also good, completely non-sneaky, and inexpensive. They probably cost a little more than Namecheap does now, because of the decline in the U.S. dollar. I switched because Joker had nothing like WhoisGuard at the time. (I don't know if they do now or not.) I'm happy with Namecheap, but I'd use Joker again anytime.
I believe Namecheap is an eNom reseller, so they are a relatively small outfit, without the infrastructure of 'real' domain registrars, like Joker. The Namecheap site is better-designed and much easier to navigate, and they have a few features Joker doesn't. Joker can be downright cryptic at times. Everything works and does what it should, but the interface is 'early Linux desktop'... clunky and strangely laid out. Namecheap is extremely polished in comparison. That said, I've seen Namecheap's web redirects get squirrely a couple of times.
I used Network Solutions for many years, as well. They have a good interface and extremely robust infrastructure, but they're expensive. They're also complete bastards, and try to upsell you in unscrupulous ways. I suggest avoiding them. GoDaddy is another very bad outfit. And their CEO advocates torture. (he thinks we're not hard enough in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib). I suggest never, never using them.
On the whole, if you're running a small to medium site, Namecheap may be one of your best choices. If you're running a big setup, particularly if the registrar is redirecting your website or hosting your DNS, you'd probably be better off with Joker's superior infrastructure.
That will happen shortly after they crack public-key encryption, I imagine.
Despite the misleading post title, these things aren't RFID. They're smartcards. Very, VERY difficult to copy.
From what I can see, these don't appear to be RFID cards. They seem to be using an encrypted signal with a handshake. An simple eavesdropper shouldn't be able to do anything with the data he snoops, because all he's going to be able to see is the key exchange and then the encrypted bitstream.
It's just using the air to transmit encrypted information instead of a wire. As long as the encryption is good, the simple fact that it's broadcast instead of being on a wire shouldn't matter.
Ok, that said, I could see one potential attack vector, in that a bad guy could theoretically initiate a key exchange and swipe some cash from you. If all it takes is being nearby with an inductive field to power the card, then a fraudulent charge would be pretty easy to make. The virtual equivalent of pickpocketing. If you did it in small amounts per card, you could walk through a crowd with your portable gear and make hundreds of dollars an hour.
One idea to work around that would be requiring the user to hold the card in two specific places, on opposite sides. Thumb on one side, finger on the other, touching big gold contact points. If the card can detect the proper grip (very trivial technology), then it is active; otherwise, it refuses transactions. That should prevent 'pickpocketing'.
Basically, there needs to be a way for the user to announce 'yes, this is an authorized charge' other than simple proximity. The Kung-Fu Grip is one possibility... there must be others. Heck, the cards may already DO this. The actual technical data seems exceedingly scarce.
Snooping, at least, doesn't appear to be a potential problem.
First, considering that IGN actually saw the hardware and had more detail in their article than anyone else, I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't know where you learned to separate truth from fiction, but citing IRC comments as an authoritative source doesn't give you a whole lot of credibility.
Second, in ALL of your examples of gripped objects, the thumb is curled into a ball. If the object is small enough, the thumb ends up between the first and second fingers. The Revolution is quite different. It appears to extend the thumb in a strange direction, a bit like the "hitchhiking" gesture, though not as extreme. Extending it at that angle and wiggling it under pressure for prolonged periods of time looks painful to me. I can't think of any 'natural' tools/devices that are intended to be held that way.
Asserting that the Revolution controller is the same as a hammer means that either you saw a different controller than I did, or you use hammers in a very strange way.
As far as your last comment goes... I'm sure you're very knowledgeable about pornography, but I don't really see how it's relevant.
But they don't really have any power over me. The fact that this gizmo has extra functions I can't use is pretty much irrelevant to me. I don't care about those functions. And they're not going to be turned on against my will. They don't have a magic wand that will suddenly lock me out of my own data.
I just don't see what the issue is here. This isn't Bitkeeper, where I'm using the product at the sufferance of an asshole. They can't take my cards away or make them stop working... so what's the problem? What potential drawback am I facing by using this format?
See my other post, a little further down in this thread. IGN claims that the Revolution will require sensors deployed on either side of the TV. I don't know whether or not they're right... but they had more info than anyone else, so I'm inclined to believe them until contradicted.
:)
What concerns me about the controller is the constant thumb pressure. That's not at all a 'normal' grip position. Maintaining it for long periods, particularly when wiggling the thumb like mad, doesn't intuitively seem like a very good idea. I've always been prone to DeQuervain's (sort of like carpal tunnel that affects the thumb tendons rather than the fingers), and that controller looks very painful to me.
My main "television" is a projector, and I throw a 100" (diagonal) screen. It's actually too big for the room I have it in. I really should size it down a little, but I bought the screen in my prior home, and replacing it would be expensive. And yes, it is bloody enormous. Projector people are known to snicker, "You still measure your screen size in inches? How quaint."
And it's not even THAT expensive... you can easily get a very nice projector that will handle a screen that large for under $2k. The big downside is that the room needs to be totally dark for a projector to look good. (just like real theaters, in fact.) If you have a room with good light control, projectors will let you throw an enormous, movielike image for a very reasonable price, relatively speaking.
As far as mouselike sensitivity.... it's something I want, and I'm concerned this won't have it. I can live without, I certainly have before, but I still want it.
So all SD cards must support MMC mode. MMC mode works. Therefore....(left as an exercise for the reader).
I did say, if you notice, that nothing uses the encryption capability of the card anyway. It doesn't *matter* what the internal protocol is, as long as it works to do what we want, which is store and retrieve data. I can take an SD card, plug it into an SD slot, and it just works. That's all I really need. You can think of SD as MMC in a better package, with a write-protect tab.
If they change the rules at some future time, and start shipping SD cards that don't support MMC mode, we can switch formats to something else. All our existing cards will keep working. It's not like they're going to wave a magic wand and remotely disable the ones we already have.
And:
A) It's exceedingly unlikely that they would be able to force all the manufacturers to stop supporting MMC mode;
B) Even if they COULD, the screaming would be so loud that SD would be destroyed as a standard. They're not likely to do that.
D) Linux users, relatively speaking, buy lots of hardware. SD's manufacturer may not want us to have access to the encryption stuff, but we have better software to do that anyway. Why would they blow off a big chunk of the market by changing the rules when they didn't have to? They've got it nailed now... the cards work in vanilla mode for everyone, and encrypted mode for people who have paid for a license. That's a great setup. Why on earth would they change?
C) Real MMC works in SD slots anyway, so if they DO pull a boneheaded move and try to shut us out, we can just buy native MMC.
I don't see any possible downside here. Do you?
It JUST WORKS. Plug it in and you're good. You don't have to think about SD or MMC, you just get a universal reader, plug it in, and off you go. The SD encryption features aren't used by any device I know of. You can argue semantics about it "being used as an MMC card", but no normal human cares about that. They want to plug it into the computer and have it work. If you buy an SD card, that will happen. That's all that matters.
SD is better than MMC anyway... the MMC cards are so thin they're pretty fragile. SD is quite robust. I have been carrying a card in my wallet for the last two years, and it's none the worse for wear. And you get a nifty write-protect tab, which I like very much.
If I understand your anti-SD objection correctly, you're upset about something that's totally irrelevant.
I use a 4-in-1 reader and it just works. With everything. I don't have it handy right now to look at, but it was a $25 or $30 job at Best Buy. (I *think* the brand name was ImageMate, but that could easily be wrong.)
Support's built right into the kernel. Plug it in, wham, it works. No hassle. Each slot looks like a different SCSI device. I've used it for both CF and SD and it works fine.
Via VMWare, the built-in card-reader on my monitor also works perfectly with OpenBSD and with Linux, both for CF and SD. I presume it would work if I plugged it straight in, as well, but I don't run Linux directly on this machine.
I've had NO problem using multiple SD cards with Linux for years. I don't know where you guys are getting your info (and/or your readers), but there's no reason whatsoever for it to be difficult. It's such a no-brainer that I am completely confused why we're even having the conversation.
What crack are you smoking? I've been using SD cards with Linux for years. If you don't have a device that uses the security features (nearly all of them), then it just works like any other flash device would.
It might be possible to lock content on an SD card so that it wasn't accessible from Linux, but one you purchased blank and formatted yourself isn't going to give you any problems.
You can get 2 gig cards for around $140 now, and they're dropping fast. SD is a really good format... still thick enough to be tough, but easily tucked into a wallet or other small carrier. CF can store a lot more, but the cards are much less convenient.
:)
Realistically, SD sizes aren't likely to be a drawback. As an example, my entire Thief2 installation, including the unofficial T2X mod (which is a bit uneven, but really amazing for a fan remake), weighs in at about 1.8 gigs. That's voice, movies, and everything. The T2X directory itself is about a gig, and that's about the best fan-made product I know. I doubt you'll see anything homebrew that's *better* anytime soon.
Remember, the Gamecube's disks only hold 1.8 gigs, and they've done some seriously amazing stuff with that machine.
Many other possible issues with the GP2X, but the size of SD cards isn't one of them.
That's very unlikely. Your viewing space is pretty much irrelevant. They're not going to be deploying two (expensive) hardware sensors to measure the width of your TV. If for some bizarre reason they really did need to know that, they'd have you measure it and enter it into a setup screen.
Those sensors will determine the controller's physical location, and the onboard sensors will determine tilt and acceleration. Getting an absolute location using only accelerometers would be quite difficult, and very prone to drift. Having two fixed sensors makes that problem go away.
I do wonder how they'll handle height if they're only using two external sensors.
Dawn of War is a VERY good game. I'm not heavily into RTSes as a general rule, but I played that one a lot. Great units, very atmospheric, lots of strategic depth. Designing an RTS from battle-tested(heh) pen and paper rules was a fantastic idea. It's been tried before, but this one really got it right.
Major downside is that the single player game is exceedingly short. They're just about to ship an expansion, Winter Assault, on the 20th. It'll add a bunch of single-player content, as well as another playable race, making five total. (not many RTSes out with five distinct sides... possibly no others?)
It got a little lost, last year, because the Total War:Rome game shipped right at the same time. Damn shame, really... people were more excited about Rome, and it didn't get the press or sales it really deserved. A year later, I'm still playing Warhammer on occasion, but Rome sits on the shelf.
If you're gaming on the PC, like RTSes at all, and missed this title, I strongly suggest checking it out.
This is a GREAT idea, but I have two worries.
One is that the main controller looks like carpal tunnel city. Admittedly, I haven't used it yet, but it looks awkward. The wrist will be under exactly opposing strains, from the thumb pushing down and the other fingers pushing up. My knowledge about wrists is mostly limited to just HAVING two of them, but when I'm holding a standard two-handed controller, it doesn't feel like the support strain is hitting my wrists too badly. It feels like it's radiated down my arm to my elbows. And the load is shared between both hands. With the new Revolution controller, the pressure is all on one hand and comes at the top of the controller. I can't help but think that the wrist will take the entire load... possibly like a lever using the wrist as a fulcrum... against itself.
It may be perfectly fine -- remember, I'm no expert here -- but I still wonder.
My other concern is how precise and repeatable the hand-gesture controls will be. It's a really superb idea, but it's going to require deployment of sensors on either side of the TV. I wonder how well Nintendo is going to handle the gamut of televisions, from 13" B&W up to 100" projection models. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, but doing it right, and giving it the kind of sensitivity you have with mice and analog thumbsticks, will be very hard.
If they can get it working reliably, but it's a bit sloppy (which is my expectation), they'll need to adjust game designs quite a bit to accommodate it. But it'll give a degree of immersiveness that we will love. Practically everyone instinctively moves the controller around, trying to give their character or car an extra 'push' when they're in a tight spot... making that into an actual control mechanic is brilliant.
Upshot: I'm so there. I'll buy one when it ships. Even if it fails, at least they're really doing something NEW.
The rings aren't very solid; most of the material is believed to be ice crystals that are, at most, a few meters in diameter. And despite their apparent solidity from here, they're an awful lot of empty space.
Chances are pretty good that an asteroid would just sail right through the rings unimpeded. If it did hit something, it wouldn't be stopped. The inertia of the (small) body it hit would almost certainly be completely overcome by the incoming inertia of the asteroid. If it hit hard enough to break the asteroid apart, the result might look something like a shotgun blast, with a spray of asteroid chunks and a tiny bit of ring material continuing roughly along the same path the asteroid had been following. The 'hole' in the rings would almost certainly be filled within hours or days.
If the asteroid happened to be slow enough to be captured into orbit, and happened to be on the same plane as the rings, it could potentially join the ring system. Over time, it might be torn apart by tidal forces into small chunks and blend in with the rest of the material.
No matter what, it wouldn't just hit them and explode in place. The rings aren't nearly solid enough for that. It'd be like trying to stop a bullet with a sheet of Saran Wrap, perhaps with rice stuck to it.