But back then, weren't "Unix workstations" mostly "Unix dumb terminals"? Even a 386 is fine for a remote X display, as long as you are running the programs on another computer. The Palm, on the other hand, has to be entirely self-contained.
I do agree with you that it should be faster, though. I have a Palm 3X, which I believe has a 16Mhz processor. An 8Mhz 68000 Mac, running a much larger screen, was more responsive than this little guy is. I like it anyway, but your comments re:efficiency are probably accurate.
Remember, too -- software always lags behind hardware. The hardware dev cycle on PDAs has been a *lot* faster than on desktops, but they've still covered much of the same ground.... from 16mhz up to whatever they're running now. (did you say 175 already? wow.) DOS didn't move real fast for a long time either, as I recall.
And Linux was ported to the Palm in the early years -- but it never went anywhere, presumably because it simply wasn't CPU/memory efficient enough to DO anything. Linux on a PDA might make sense *now*, but it really didn't back then. If it had, it would have made more of an impact.
I apologize... I got my version numbers wrong. It was the original Wing Commander I'm thinking of. I played it on a 286 and it "forced" me to upgrade.:-)
3 had all that FMV -- definitely not 386 stuff. Duh.:-)
If the game is good enough, it will create a market for hardware to run it.
Wing Commander 3 sold a LOT of 386s. Doom sold a lot of 486s. And I, at least, bought a couple of video cards just for Counterstrike. At one time, everyone was on the upgrade mill, feverishly trying to keep up with the games. The pace of innovation has slowed a great deal, but I suspect a really major step forward could reignite upgrade frenzy, at least for a year or so.
Don't underestimate the power of a great game to sell hardware.
Actually, from what I can see, the TCPA part of things might be really useful. Wouldn't it be nice to be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that your signed kernel loaded, and that trojans haven't been implanted into your system? It would be a *lot* harder to hack this kind of system.
TCPA is just a tool, and an optional one. Palladium, Microsoft's DRM system, is quite different, and obviously not to be trusted. (well, at least not by YOU. Microsoft trusts it.:-) ) They use TCPA in an abusive way, making sure you can't run code they don't want you to run. But you can also use it for yourself, making sure that only code YOU authorize will run. (this is, of course, presuming that free software tools to support the TCPA architecture will be written.)
And it's completely optional. You may be required to use TCPA in future releases of Microsoft products, but you can always avoid Windows.
If you're running TCPA-enabled free software on a system with that hardware support, you could potentially gain more control over your system than you have now.
I bought an import on EBay several weeks ago. I'm quite pleased with the system. I had previously bought Golden Sun and a GBA based on some strong reviews of it. I found the original GBA to be essentially unplayable. The small, dark screen was just too unpleasant for my adult (age 35) eyes to handle. I gave up on Golden Sun after a few hours.
The SP model is an amazing difference. I'd have preferred a true backlight, but what they provided is *almost* as good. It's a clever frontlighting system that puts some sort of glowing stripe on all four sides of the screen, hidden from view by the case.
The big problem with all the regular GBA lighting systems was that there were direct reflections and glare. (the Afterburner system is apparently better, but I haven't seen it.) This indirect front-lighting system is nearly perfect. You can see a sort of shimmering 'fringe' effect of widely-spaced squares (which I think are third-order reflections) if you are using it in a very dark room, but it's honestly barely noticeable, and about 20 seconds into the game you'll forget about it.
It seems pretty hard to use, though, in very bright light. This is a little ironic, because the original GBA required extremely bright light to be playable. This one is best in a slightly darkened room. The recessed screen doesn't pick up outside light sources well, and its frontlight is easily drowned out by more than normal room brightness. For outdoor use, you may actually prefer the original GBA.
Complaints: I wish the screen were just a *little* bigger, but it's usable. The lack of a headphone jack is also quite annoying. And I wish they'd stayed with regular AA batteries. I have the NiMH rechargeables, which pack an amazing amount of power in a small space. I'd have preferred to be able to charge up 2 or 3 pairs for an extended roadtrip. 10 hours isn't bad, but with regular AAs you have essentially unlimited battery life.
Nitpicks notwithstanding, this is the system Nintendo should have shipped originally. I'm quite happy with mine.
I've found the site www.r3mix.net to be incredibly useful. If you use their preset standards in LAME (the --r3mix argument), it's nearly impossible to tell an MP3 apart from the real thing. I can sometimes tell on good headphones, if I'm extremely familiar with the music and know EXACTLY what to look for (mostly slight weirdnesses in stereo imaging), but I have to be concentrating intensely to hear any difference.
It's a good site if you're into MP3. It's out of date now, as the author stopped updating last year sometime, but it's still a valuable resource and a great start on learning how to encode superior-quality MP3s.
"It's a no-brainer. Anything which lets people enjoy music too much is bad for the industry. If they can just move their songs around anywhere they want, how are we supposed to make money selling multiple CDs? If music is too convenient to transport, we can't sell people whole stacks of different CDs at different locations. They'll be able to listen to all of their music anywhere they are. Can you imagine?
"Further, we believe that people that listen to their music too much are also depriving the artists of revenue. If you listen to an album more than 10 or 12 times, you're morally obligated to go buy another copy. Anything else is stealing food from the mouths of starving artists."
When asked whether artists were deliberately kept starving, the spokesman refused comment.
I Was An Atomic Mutant is getting raves over at GoneGold; they really love this one. It's got a lot of buzz over there, and it's a cheap game. I haven't played it myself, but I plan to pick it up soon.
Just a heads-up for casual passers-by... I Was An Atomic Mutant has a very good rep, if you're looking for something new and interesting.
Boy, I wish you'd put your name on this one, I'd have put you on my friends list. It IS creepy hearing you type -- you could be me!
I have been saying that over and over... it's not Bush's fault. I don't like him, but blaming the economy on him just isn't accurate. It's Clinton and Greenspan that oughta be taken out back and shot.
I almost missed this post because it's at 0 -- would some kind moderator please bump it to 1 so more people see it? Thanks.
Well, it worries me a little. What I'm more worried about is the implosion of the US itself. The 30s were a time of great social unrest, and with the groundwork that's been laid with the Patriot Act, our newly-minted police state may start really showing its fangs if the unrest gets bad.
It's been said that "when goods don't cross borders, soldiers do". If the Europeans try to shut down the free trade stuff (entirely possible because they are pissed at us for a number of reasons), I think that's going to increase world tensions substantially. Another poster here was saying that the socialist states there have no money to spend on defense and will get eaten by someone who is hungry and nasty. Dunno whether or not he's right, but it's interesting to think about.
I don't see any clear path from here to WW3. I suppose it could happen, but it looks like it would take a whole series of things to happen first. The police-state thing worries me a lot more.
But we've been having terrible, terrible inflation for the last 15 years. It's just not in the CPI (which is cooked to the point of uselessness anyway).
If you didn't notice, the stock market went to the MOON... with no fundamentals behind it. This is a form of inflation. And it's a seductive and terrible one, because people LOVE IT and WANT MORE. They KNIGHTED Greenspan for setting off an asset-inflation bubble.
It's doing the same thing with housing now. Liquidity seeks inflation. Once the stock-market bubbles started to pop and the Fed started really SERIOUSLY loading cash into the markets, it didn't go back into the bubble like they wanted, it went into a DIFFERENT one, mortgage finance. That whole structure is riddled with problems, top to bottom, and a lot of people are going to lose everything in that mess.
We also have a huge debt bubble... when cash is easy to get, banks are willing to lend more and people are willing to spend more. The result has been an vast buildup of consumption debt (which is different from productive debt, as another poster in this thread points out.)
The falling dollar is a ticking timebomb. To finance our present standard of living, we are running a 500 billion dollar trade deficit. This means we have to attract about 1.5 billion dollars PER DAY of other people's wealth into this country. If the dollar starts seriously dropping, people aren't going to be willing to finance our consumption binge anymore, and we're going to be in a world of hurt. The imports we're so dependent on will become a LOT more expensive. At the same time, our markets will drop substantially because foreigners own a lot of our stock.
And the thing about making our exports more competitive is very true. Unfortunately, we don't HAVE many of those anymore, we've outsourced everything because of the expensive dollar. The dollar was so strong for so long that it essentially eviscerated our manufacturing base. All the jobs have gone overseas! So the falling dollar will make things more expensive, but we won't get many exports to compensate.
Over the longer-term, a cheaper dollar is absolutely essential, because the strong dollar is killing us. But we have a LOT of work to do in rebuilding our manufacturing base, and we're NOT going to enjoy doing it.
This is a common analysis, but it's probably wrong.
During the 1940s and 1950s, economists were worried about the money supply, which had grown only 18% for the entire two decades, while GNP (it's GDP now, but it was GNP then) had grown something like 65% over the same period. They were worried that there 'wasn't enough money', but the economy seemed to be doing just fine anyway.
In 2001, the Fed grew the money aggregates by about 18%. (Which by any historical standard is INSANE -- this is crazy! they did in ONE YEAR what it took TWO DECADES to do back in the first half of the 20th century.) They grew money supply by, um, 8 or 10% last year (I forget right now, I'd have to look it up to be sure), and this year they're running at about a 12% rate.
But things are still going down, and in fact they've really set off the mortgage finance bubble by doing this. It's obvious that they learned the particular lessons that you describe, but it also appears very likely that these lessons are wrong.
If just printing money led to prosperity, the banana republics would own the world. Money and wealth are different. Money is a scorekeeper used to track real wealth. If the money supply contracts somewhat, that won't cause severe problems in a healthy economy; there are ways of adjusting. It might cause a little pain short-term, but long-term it's no big deal.
And the biggest reason the money supply shrank so much in the 1930s was because of debt defaults, not the Fed. If I owe you $50, and I have your $50, then we BOTH think we have the same $50, and we both carry it on our books. If I then default on my loan to you, $50 is destroyed. A small deflation can trigger a series of debt defaults, which makes the deflation worse (destroys more money), which triggers more defaults, and so on.
The Fed at the time was TRYING to grow the money supply but couldn't... because the Fed lends money into the market, it is dependent on finding a willing borrower to take it. In the absence of willing borrowers, the Fed can't do much. This is where the 'pushing on a string' observation from the 1930s came from.
Since 1880, stocks have beaten every other form of investment. However, when you go back and actually run the numbers, *most of that return was from reinvested dividends*.
From 1880 onwards, stocks paid an average dividend of about 4%. If you reinvested your dividend, you beat all other asset classes. But note that these numbers are computed in aggregate on market indices. This has a strong 'survivorship bias', because companies that die get dropped out of the index. People who invested in those companies lost money, but the index kept going up.
At present, stocks hardly pay dividends at all. The average is somewhere around 1%, I think a little bit under. That means that, going forward, stocks are likely to substantially UNDERperform most other investments, at least until their prices drop back to something approaching reasonable again.
If you buy stocks now for $100, and sell them in 20 years for $110, you haven't "lost money", but you have lost a HUGE amount of money, compared to what you could have had. Warren Buffett has devoted his life to showing just how much difference a few percentage points make. He's one of the wealthiest men on the planet because he consistently made just a few points more than everyone else did.
Wall Street likes to tell you "you can't lose money over that 20 year period!" -- but between inflation and lost opportunity costs, you most certainly can. And, going forward, stocks in the aggregate are one of the worst places to put your money. There will be individual winners, but you'll have to do serious research on companies instead of just being able to throw darts at the dartboard.
The fundamental game of investing has changed again. In the 1970s, everyone was into 'market timing' because the market had gone pretty much nowhere for 10-15 years. Then the mantra gradually changed to 'boy and hold'. Well, buy and hold is all used up now, and you'll need new strategies to do well, at least for the next 10-15 years.
I have no doubt that the US will eventually recover, but we will go through a very painful process of readjustment to get there. The next 10 or 20 years are going to be very, very un-fun. I can't tell you exactly what will happen, but pretty much every possible outcome is bad.
You say that not all debt is bad, but then you admit that America is in debt up to its frigging eyebrows in unproductive debt. You personally believe you're in productive debt, but your ability to service your debt is dependent on your ability to charge rent, which is likely to drop substantially in really bad times. You may have bought cheap enough that you'll make it through okay... but most places, even "cheap" real estate is terribly overpriced. We are in three major bubbles; the overarching credit bubble, which has spawned everything else, and the secondary asset-market and the real-estate bubbles. It is NOT NORMAL for real estate to go up 20% a year, year after year, all across the country.
Personally, I'm trying to keep my powder dry; ther's going to come a time when real estate and stock are very, very cheap. When pretty much everyone is convinced that real estate and stocks are the absolute worst things you could possibly buy, that'll be the time to start loading up.
Japan is a great example. I don't know if they're actually at their bottom yet, but the psychology over there is the sort you see at big bottoms.... everyone is doom-and-gloom and convinced that Japan is dead in the water. I'm not convinced it's quite time yet to buy Japan, but I figure sometime in the next 2-3 years I may end up investing heavily over there. They're the best manufacturers on the planet; they can do things that nobody else can do. And they're worried they're about to disintegrate.
THAT is what a bottom looks like. Not this mindless 'bottom-callng' you get every day on TV.
War worked because the economy was strong and we didn't know it.
Huh? Let me explain: economies gain strength in recessions and in depressions, though a deep enough depression can do true and long-lasting damage. The reason they gain strength is because waste is eliminated. As companies struggle to survive, they become very efficient.
The big problem is that it's hard to convince people to start spending money again after they've been saving so hard for so long. Our economy was extremely efficient by 1939, but we weren't spending money yet, so we didn't really realize it. Along came the war, and afterward, boom.... things took off like a rocket.
But note that the value of the dollar dropped by about half during the war, and that about 40% of the total economic output of the WHOLE COUNTRY was devoted to war production. People who had saved a lot of dollars prior to 1939 probably weren't too happy about their savings, after.
Right now the economy is terribly sick, from unrelenting dollar injection from Sir Prints-A-Lot (Greenspan), the bubble, and then desperate attempts by the Fed to prop up the bubble. This has caused huge distortions in the economy, moving wealth into 'sexy' projects like telecoms and dotcoms (where it was wasted and destroyed), and pulling it away from places where it was actually needed (like powerplants and oil exploration), to use two simple and obvious examples.
If we get into a war now, it might have some temporary effect, but it would be more propping-up. It will just make the problem WORSE, not better. We might feel better for a year or two, but ultimately the liquidity injections caused by the borrowing for a war are just another form of the liquidity injections by Greenspan at every crisis point over the last 12-13 years. It would be more of the same stuff that's making us sick -- prescribing more booze for the alchoholic. The alchoholic may feel great for awhile, but he/she will be sicker than ever shortly.
In any case, the effects of the Iraq war aren't likely to be profound, positive OR negative. Keep in mind that current expense projections are at about 0.1% of the GDP.... ie, pretty much a non-event. We might get a sense of euphoria if we beat them easily, and if we see ensuing cheap oil that WOULD be good for the economy -- but things are so badly damaged that cheap oil alone won't make that much of a difference, and euphoria can only last so long.
And the economic results of a bubble are devastation -- at least, they always have been. Japan went through a bubble in the late 80s. It started to pop in around 1990. 13 years later, they are still suffering; in fact, their stock market, the Nikkei, just hit a TWENTY-YEAR LOW and it's STILL going down. Bubbles create hangovers that are far worse than their preceding highs, and EVERYONE suffers from them, not just the people who benefited from the bubble. The last bubble we had was in the late 1920s, and its bursting resulted in the Great Depression.
Folks, Silicon Valley will not return to what it was. In terms of real purchasing power, salaries will not return to what they were in your working lifetimes, and maybe never. Tech is already suffering from a true Depression, and the rest of the economy is most likely headed there too. We had the biggest bubble in the history of mankind, and if past experience is a guide, we will go through the biggest bust in history as well.
The Fed has cut rates faster and farther than they ever have in their 90-year history. Money is flooding the system via easy credit and a bubble in mortgage finance. We are at 40-year lows in interest rates..... and STILL the economy is failing. States are in the worst fiscal crisis "since the Great Depression" (their words, not mine.) Layoffs are rampant, stores are closing, bankruptcies are steadily rising -- and that's BEFORE the spigot of much-too-easy credit is closed.
The Great Depression left deep scars in this country, and a profound fear of credit and debt. Unemployment rates were around 30%. Healthy, strong men were living in cardboard shacks in great numbers. (which were called Hoovervilles, as people blamed Hoover for the Depression. This wasn't even remotely the case; the Depression was caused by the vast excess and waste of the 20s, not the little bit of nothing that Hoover did.)
The bubble we had this time was far larger, and encompassed much more of the economy... in fact, it sucked the whole world in. Likely results of the ensuing bust left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: it's not going to be fun.
A final suggestion: "buy and hold" is a good recipe for going broke in this environment. Wall Street has indocrinated everyone about 'buy and hold', but remember that they are trying to sell you something. These were the clowns giving you $500 price targets on Amazon. Do you REALLY trust them to manage your retirement savings?
From 1930-1932, the Dow lost over 90% of its value. The Nikkei, from 1990 until now, has lost about 70%. This is not a good way to save for retirement.
The site www.sco.com is running Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1 on Linux.
Looks like they started to switch in August of 2002, had some problems and switched back to SCO for a few days, and then completed their switch on August 14, 2002.
You KNOW a company is dying when they don't eat their own dog food.
This game was revolutionary; it was a little like Wizardry, but went far, far beyond that. It was in real-time, meaning that your life or death depended at least in part on your reflexes. It was brilliant at teaching you how things worked by leaving hints and requiring you to use skills you'd just gained. Dungeon Master was among the first, if not THE first, to offer the interface rule of 'pick up an item directly out of the world and place it or use it on something'. Example: pick up an apple off the floor in front of you. Drop it in your backpack to store it, on your face to eat it, on the floor to set it down, or in midair to throw it. It had a unique, syllable-based magic system. It let you make potions. It had hidden switches on the walls and hotspots where dropping particular items caused specific effects.
All these things are pretty passe nowadays, because EVERYONE does them. ALL of the FPS-type dungeon games are still doing what Dungeon Master did, with prettier graphics. Wizardry 8 (a great recent game) would be instantly recognizable to anyone who had played Dungeon Master.
For me at least, this was the first truly, viscerally immersive computer game. I wasn't sitting at a computer, I was fighting for my life in a very hostile environment.
After all these years, I clearly remember creeping around in that dungeon, one or two characters dead and the others badly hurt, trying to find a resurrection altar. I heard one of the nasty scorpion things scuttling closer. I was looking in all directions, trying to spot it so that I could flee in the opposite direction. I looked the wrong way just a little too long, turned around, and *exactly* as I realized it was there, it struck. I shrieked like a girl and ran like hell. (I think I escaped with one living character, and eventually did get everyone resurrected.).
This game was 1985's equivalent to Evercrack. It wasn't just a game, it was a way of life. Instant conversation-starter at the user group meetings.
After all, think about it. It's been FIFTEEN YEARS and the release of the source code for this game made Slashdot. That alone ought to tell you there's something special here.
A couple jobs ago, we moved from Gateway laptops (which were probably the least-reliable pieces of shit I've ever seen) to the Thinkpad 600s. That line of laptops was quite tough. We did lose a few over the years. One screen broke when the laptop was knocked out of an overhead bin by a careless passenger (at least that's the story we were given; the screen was indeed cracked.) On the whole we were very happy with them. We just bought lots of little eraser tips for the trackpoint.
For myself, I'm now using a Thinkpad T20. It is designed very much like the 600 was. It may even be the same case. I have not been terribly gentle to it, and overall it's in excellent physical shape. Everything works exactly as it did when I bought it new.
Sadly, it took some electronic damage when I was connected to a phone line that was struck by lightning. The modem no longer works, and the machine will now instantly power off if it's dropped on its right side from more than about a half-inch. But I don't really blame the Thinkpad for this. As long as I don't drop the right side, all is well. ("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Then don't do that!")
I also made the mistake of knocking it off a shelf at about four feet while it was on. Twice. *blush* The hard drive in it did not take well to that treatment and developed many bad sectors. I got the critical data off and replaced the drive. Fortunately, 30gb 5400 RPM laptop hard drives are only about $120 with shipping, so it was a fairly cheap mistake.
I've had it about two years, and I believe it should last another couple, at least if I stop knocking it off shelves.:-)
ISPs have tried to rely on 'common carrier' defenses in the past. However, if they start blocking SOME email, can they be held liable for mail that they DON'T block?
And can you selectively give up common carrier status? If you block some email but host anyone's web page, for instance, can you be sued successfully for objectionable content on those web pages?
While no comet with such a small nucleus has ever survived that kind of close solar approach (one-fourth of Mercury's orbit) without fragmenting, this one did[....]
Wow. You mean we got lucky enough to see something that hasn't happened even once in the several billion years the Solar System has been around?
I suppose he could have said "we haven't seen anything like this happen before", but that would be so boring in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
But back then, weren't "Unix workstations" mostly "Unix dumb terminals"? Even a 386 is fine for a remote X display, as long as you are running the programs on another computer. The Palm, on the other hand, has to be entirely self-contained.
I do agree with you that it should be faster, though. I have a Palm 3X, which I believe has a 16Mhz processor. An 8Mhz 68000 Mac, running a much larger screen, was more responsive than this little guy is. I like it anyway, but your comments re:efficiency are probably accurate.
Remember, too -- software always lags behind hardware. The hardware dev cycle on PDAs has been a *lot* faster than on desktops, but they've still covered much of the same ground.... from 16mhz up to whatever they're running now. (did you say 175 already? wow.) DOS didn't move real fast for a long time either, as I recall.
And Linux was ported to the Palm in the early years -- but it never went anywhere, presumably because it simply wasn't CPU/memory efficient enough to DO anything. Linux on a PDA might make sense *now*, but it really didn't back then. If it had, it would have made more of an impact.
I apologize... I got my version numbers wrong. It was the original Wing Commander I'm thinking of. I played it on a 286 and it "forced" me to upgrade. :-)
:-)
3 had all that FMV -- definitely not 386 stuff. Duh.
They even mention MS trying to get him to delay the PC version *in the article*.
Didn't read it?
Figures.
If the game is good enough, it will create a market for hardware to run it.
Wing Commander 3 sold a LOT of 386s. Doom sold a lot of 486s. And I, at least, bought a couple of video cards just for Counterstrike. At one time, everyone was on the upgrade mill, feverishly trying to keep up with the games. The pace of innovation has slowed a great deal, but I suspect a really major step forward could reignite upgrade frenzy, at least for a year or so.
Don't underestimate the power of a great game to sell hardware.
How accurate and informing of you to carefully avoid mentioning that this was due to a slip and fall, not diet.
I'm going to leave aside the argument about whether or not privacy is a right (there are good arguments both pro- and con-).
I do want to point out something a bit more fundamental, though. Rights aren't any good if they can be casually taken away.
When everyone in the world despises you, when the government *hates* you and wants you *dead*.... that's when you need rights.
If you only have them when you are popular, you don't have them.
Actually, from what I can see, the TCPA part of things might be really useful. Wouldn't it be nice to be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that your signed kernel loaded, and that trojans haven't been implanted into your system? It would be a *lot* harder to hack this kind of system.
:-) ) They use TCPA in an abusive way, making sure you can't run code they don't want you to run. But you can also use it for yourself, making sure that only code YOU authorize will run. (this is, of course, presuming that free software tools to support the TCPA architecture will be written.)
TCPA is just a tool, and an optional one. Palladium, Microsoft's DRM system, is quite different, and obviously not to be trusted. (well, at least not by YOU. Microsoft trusts it.
And it's completely optional. You may be required to use TCPA in future releases of Microsoft products, but you can always avoid Windows.
If you're running TCPA-enabled free software on a system with that hardware support, you could potentially gain more control over your system than you have now.
I bought an import on EBay several weeks ago. I'm quite pleased with the system. I had previously bought Golden Sun and a GBA based on some strong reviews of it. I found the original GBA to be essentially unplayable. The small, dark screen was just too unpleasant for my adult (age 35) eyes to handle. I gave up on Golden Sun after a few hours.
The SP model is an amazing difference. I'd have preferred a true backlight, but what they provided is *almost* as good. It's a clever frontlighting system that puts some sort of glowing stripe on all four sides of the screen, hidden from view by the case.
The big problem with all the regular GBA lighting systems was that there were direct reflections and glare. (the Afterburner system is apparently better, but I haven't seen it.) This indirect front-lighting system is nearly perfect. You can see a sort of shimmering 'fringe' effect of widely-spaced squares (which I think are third-order reflections) if you are using it in a very dark room, but it's honestly barely noticeable, and about 20 seconds into the game you'll forget about it.
It seems pretty hard to use, though, in very bright light. This is a little ironic, because the original GBA required extremely bright light to be playable. This one is best in a slightly darkened room. The recessed screen doesn't pick up outside light sources well, and its frontlight is easily drowned out by more than normal room brightness. For outdoor use, you may actually prefer the original GBA.
Complaints: I wish the screen were just a *little* bigger, but it's usable. The lack of a headphone jack is also quite annoying. And I wish they'd stayed with regular AA batteries. I have the NiMH rechargeables, which pack an amazing amount of power in a small space. I'd have preferred to be able to charge up 2 or 3 pairs for an extended roadtrip. 10 hours isn't bad, but with regular AAs you have essentially unlimited battery life.
Nitpicks notwithstanding, this is the system Nintendo should have shipped originally. I'm quite happy with mine.
It's a good site if you're into MP3. It's out of date now, as the author stopped updating last year sometime, but it's still a valuable resource and a great start on learning how to encode superior-quality MP3s.
"It's a no-brainer. Anything which lets people enjoy music too much is bad for the industry. If they can just move their songs around anywhere they want, how are we supposed to make money selling multiple CDs? If music is too convenient to transport, we can't sell people whole stacks of different CDs at different locations. They'll be able to listen to all of their music anywhere they are. Can you imagine?
"Further, we believe that people that listen to their music too much are also depriving the artists of revenue. If you listen to an album more than 10 or 12 times, you're morally obligated to go buy another copy. Anything else is stealing food from the mouths of starving artists."
When asked whether artists were deliberately kept starving, the spokesman refused comment.
Uplink is a great game that's wildly innovative, and it even runs under Linux. www.introversion.co.uk -- there's a free demo.
I Was An Atomic Mutant is getting raves over at GoneGold; they really love this one. It's got a lot of buzz over there, and it's a cheap game. I haven't played it myself, but I plan to pick it up soon.
Just a heads-up for casual passers-by... I Was An Atomic Mutant has a very good rep, if you're looking for something new and interesting.
Boy, I wish you'd put your name on this one, I'd have put you on my friends list. It IS creepy hearing you type -- you could be me!
I have been saying that over and over... it's not Bush's fault. I don't like him, but blaming the economy on him just isn't accurate. It's Clinton and Greenspan that oughta be taken out back and shot.
I almost missed this post because it's at 0 -- would some kind moderator please bump it to 1 so more people see it? Thanks.
Well, it worries me a little. What I'm more worried about is the implosion of the US itself. The 30s were a time of great social unrest, and with the groundwork that's been laid with the Patriot Act, our newly-minted police state may start really showing its fangs if the unrest gets bad.
It's been said that "when goods don't cross borders, soldiers do". If the Europeans try to shut down the free trade stuff (entirely possible because they are pissed at us for a number of reasons), I think that's going to increase world tensions substantially. Another poster here was saying that the socialist states there have no money to spend on defense and will get eaten by someone who is hungry and nasty. Dunno whether or not he's right, but it's interesting to think about.
I don't see any clear path from here to WW3. I suppose it could happen, but it looks like it would take a whole series of things to happen first. The police-state thing worries me a lot more.
But we've been having terrible, terrible inflation for the last 15 years. It's just not in the CPI (which is cooked to the point of uselessness anyway).
If you didn't notice, the stock market went to the MOON... with no fundamentals behind it. This is a form of inflation. And it's a seductive and terrible one, because people LOVE IT and WANT MORE. They KNIGHTED Greenspan for setting off an asset-inflation bubble.
It's doing the same thing with housing now. Liquidity seeks inflation. Once the stock-market bubbles started to pop and the Fed started really SERIOUSLY loading cash into the markets, it didn't go back into the bubble like they wanted, it went into a DIFFERENT one, mortgage finance. That whole structure is riddled with problems, top to bottom, and a lot of people are going to lose everything in that mess.
We also have a huge debt bubble... when cash is easy to get, banks are willing to lend more and people are willing to spend more. The result has been an vast buildup of consumption debt (which is different from productive debt, as another poster in this thread points out.)
The falling dollar is a ticking timebomb. To finance our present standard of living, we are running a 500 billion dollar trade deficit. This means we have to attract about 1.5 billion dollars PER DAY of other people's wealth into this country. If the dollar starts seriously dropping, people aren't going to be willing to finance our consumption binge anymore, and we're going to be in a world of hurt. The imports we're so dependent on will become a LOT more expensive. At the same time, our markets will drop substantially because foreigners own a lot of our stock.
And the thing about making our exports more competitive is very true. Unfortunately, we don't HAVE many of those anymore, we've outsourced everything because of the expensive dollar. The dollar was so strong for so long that it essentially eviscerated our manufacturing base. All the jobs have gone overseas! So the falling dollar will make things more expensive, but we won't get many exports to compensate.
Over the longer-term, a cheaper dollar is absolutely essential, because the strong dollar is killing us. But we have a LOT of work to do in rebuilding our manufacturing base, and we're NOT going to enjoy doing it.
This is a common analysis, but it's probably wrong.
During the 1940s and 1950s, economists were worried about the money supply, which had grown only 18% for the entire two decades, while GNP (it's GDP now, but it was GNP then) had grown something like 65% over the same period. They were worried that there 'wasn't enough money', but the economy seemed to be doing just fine anyway.
In 2001, the Fed grew the money aggregates by about 18%. (Which by any historical standard is INSANE -- this is crazy! they did in ONE YEAR what it took TWO DECADES to do back in the first half of the 20th century.) They grew money supply by, um, 8 or 10% last year (I forget right now, I'd have to look it up to be sure), and this year they're running at about a 12% rate.
But things are still going down, and in fact they've really set off the mortgage finance bubble by doing this. It's obvious that they learned the particular lessons that you describe, but it also appears very likely that these lessons are wrong.
If just printing money led to prosperity, the banana republics would own the world. Money and wealth are different. Money is a scorekeeper used to track real wealth. If the money supply contracts somewhat, that won't cause severe problems in a healthy economy; there are ways of adjusting. It might cause a little pain short-term, but long-term it's no big deal.
And the biggest reason the money supply shrank so much in the 1930s was because of debt defaults, not the Fed. If I owe you $50, and I have your $50, then we BOTH think we have the same $50, and we both carry it on our books. If I then default on my loan to you, $50 is destroyed. A small deflation can trigger a series of debt defaults, which makes the deflation worse (destroys more money), which triggers more defaults, and so on.
The Fed at the time was TRYING to grow the money supply but couldn't... because the Fed lends money into the market, it is dependent on finding a willing borrower to take it. In the absence of willing borrowers, the Fed can't do much. This is where the 'pushing on a string' observation from the 1930s came from.
Since 1880, stocks have beaten every other form of investment. However, when you go back and actually run the numbers, *most of that return was from reinvested dividends*.
From 1880 onwards, stocks paid an average dividend of about 4%. If you reinvested your dividend, you beat all other asset classes. But note that these numbers are computed in aggregate on market indices. This has a strong 'survivorship bias', because companies that die get dropped out of the index. People who invested in those companies lost money, but the index kept going up.
At present, stocks hardly pay dividends at all. The average is somewhere around 1%, I think a little bit under. That means that, going forward, stocks are likely to substantially UNDERperform most other investments, at least until their prices drop back to something approaching reasonable again.
If you buy stocks now for $100, and sell them in 20 years for $110, you haven't "lost money", but you have lost a HUGE amount of money, compared to what you could have had. Warren Buffett has devoted his life to showing just how much difference a few percentage points make. He's one of the wealthiest men on the planet because he consistently made just a few points more than everyone else did.
Wall Street likes to tell you "you can't lose money over that 20 year period!" -- but between inflation and lost opportunity costs, you most certainly can. And, going forward, stocks in the aggregate are one of the worst places to put your money. There will be individual winners, but you'll have to do serious research on companies instead of just being able to throw darts at the dartboard.
The fundamental game of investing has changed again. In the 1970s, everyone was into 'market timing' because the market had gone pretty much nowhere for 10-15 years. Then the mantra gradually changed to 'boy and hold'. Well, buy and hold is all used up now, and you'll need new strategies to do well, at least for the next 10-15 years.
I have no doubt that the US will eventually recover, but we will go through a very painful process of readjustment to get there. The next 10 or 20 years are going to be very, very un-fun. I can't tell you exactly what will happen, but pretty much every possible outcome is bad.
You say that not all debt is bad, but then you admit that America is in debt up to its frigging eyebrows in unproductive debt. You personally believe you're in productive debt, but your ability to service your debt is dependent on your ability to charge rent, which is likely to drop substantially in really bad times. You may have bought cheap enough that you'll make it through okay... but most places, even "cheap" real estate is terribly overpriced. We are in three major bubbles; the overarching credit bubble, which has spawned everything else, and the secondary asset-market and the real-estate bubbles. It is NOT NORMAL for real estate to go up 20% a year, year after year, all across the country.
Personally, I'm trying to keep my powder dry; ther's going to come a time when real estate and stock are very, very cheap. When pretty much everyone is convinced that real estate and stocks are the absolute worst things you could possibly buy, that'll be the time to start loading up.
Japan is a great example. I don't know if they're actually at their bottom yet, but the psychology over there is the sort you see at big bottoms.... everyone is doom-and-gloom and convinced that Japan is dead in the water. I'm not convinced it's quite time yet to buy Japan, but I figure sometime in the next 2-3 years I may end up investing heavily over there. They're the best manufacturers on the planet; they can do things that nobody else can do. And they're worried they're about to disintegrate.
THAT is what a bottom looks like. Not this mindless 'bottom-callng' you get every day on TV.
War worked because the economy was strong and we didn't know it.
Huh? Let me explain: economies gain strength in recessions and in depressions, though a deep enough depression can do true and long-lasting damage. The reason they gain strength is because waste is eliminated. As companies struggle to survive, they become very efficient.
The big problem is that it's hard to convince people to start spending money again after they've been saving so hard for so long. Our economy was extremely efficient by 1939, but we weren't spending money yet, so we didn't really realize it. Along came the war, and afterward, boom.... things took off like a rocket.
But note that the value of the dollar dropped by about half during the war, and that about 40% of the total economic output of the WHOLE COUNTRY was devoted to war production. People who had saved a lot of dollars prior to 1939 probably weren't too happy about their savings, after.
Right now the economy is terribly sick, from unrelenting dollar injection from Sir Prints-A-Lot (Greenspan), the bubble, and then desperate attempts by the Fed to prop up the bubble. This has caused huge distortions in the economy, moving wealth into 'sexy' projects like telecoms and dotcoms (where it was wasted and destroyed), and pulling it away from places where it was actually needed (like powerplants and oil exploration), to use two simple and obvious examples.
If we get into a war now, it might have some temporary effect, but it would be more propping-up. It will just make the problem WORSE, not better. We might feel better for a year or two, but ultimately the liquidity injections caused by the borrowing for a war are just another form of the liquidity injections by Greenspan at every crisis point over the last 12-13 years. It would be more of the same stuff that's making us sick -- prescribing more booze for the alchoholic. The alchoholic may feel great for awhile, but he/she will be sicker than ever shortly.
In any case, the effects of the Iraq war aren't likely to be profound, positive OR negative. Keep in mind that current expense projections are at about 0.1% of the GDP.... ie, pretty much a non-event. We might get a sense of euphoria if we beat them easily, and if we see ensuing cheap oil that WOULD be good for the economy -- but things are so badly damaged that cheap oil alone won't make that much of a difference, and euphoria can only last so long.
And the economic results of a bubble are devastation -- at least, they always have been. Japan went through a bubble in the late 80s. It started to pop in around 1990. 13 years later, they are still suffering; in fact, their stock market, the Nikkei, just hit a TWENTY-YEAR LOW and it's STILL going down. Bubbles create hangovers that are far worse than their preceding highs, and EVERYONE suffers from them, not just the people who benefited from the bubble. The last bubble we had was in the late 1920s, and its bursting resulted in the Great Depression.
Folks, Silicon Valley will not return to what it was. In terms of real purchasing power, salaries will not return to what they were in your working lifetimes, and maybe never. Tech is already suffering from a true Depression, and the rest of the economy is most likely headed there too. We had the biggest bubble in the history of mankind, and if past experience is a guide, we will go through the biggest bust in history as well.
The Fed has cut rates faster and farther than they ever have in their 90-year history. Money is flooding the system via easy credit and a bubble in mortgage finance. We are at 40-year lows in interest rates..... and STILL the economy is failing. States are in the worst fiscal crisis "since the Great Depression" (their words, not mine.) Layoffs are rampant, stores are closing, bankruptcies are steadily rising -- and that's BEFORE the spigot of much-too-easy credit is closed.
The Great Depression left deep scars in this country, and a profound fear of credit and debt. Unemployment rates were around 30%. Healthy, strong men were living in cardboard shacks in great numbers. (which were called Hoovervilles, as people blamed Hoover for the Depression. This wasn't even remotely the case; the Depression was caused by the vast excess and waste of the 20s, not the little bit of nothing that Hoover did.)
The bubble we had this time was far larger, and encompassed much more of the economy... in fact, it sucked the whole world in. Likely results of the ensuing bust left as an exercise for the reader. Hint: it's not going to be fun.
A final suggestion: "buy and hold" is a good recipe for going broke in this environment. Wall Street has indocrinated everyone about 'buy and hold', but remember that they are trying to sell you something. These were the clowns giving you $500 price targets on Amazon. Do you REALLY trust them to manage your retirement savings?
From 1930-1932, the Dow lost over 90% of its value. The Nikkei, from 1990 until now, has lost about 70%. This is not a good way to save for retirement.
The site www.sco.com is running Apache/1.3.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.7.1 OpenSSL/0.9.6 PHP/4.0.3pl1 on Linux.
Looks like they started to switch in August of 2002, had some problems and switched back to SCO for a few days, and then completed their switch on August 14, 2002.
You KNOW a company is dying when they don't eat their own dog food.
I guess you had to be there. :-)
This game was revolutionary; it was a little like Wizardry, but went far, far beyond that. It was in real-time, meaning that your life or death depended at least in part on your reflexes. It was brilliant at teaching you how things worked by leaving hints and requiring you to use skills you'd just gained. Dungeon Master was among the first, if not THE first, to offer the interface rule of 'pick up an item directly out of the world and place it or use it on something'. Example: pick up an apple off the floor in front of you. Drop it in your backpack to store it, on your face to eat it, on the floor to set it down, or in midair to throw it. It had a unique, syllable-based magic system. It let you make potions. It had hidden switches on the walls and hotspots where dropping particular items caused specific effects.
All these things are pretty passe nowadays, because EVERYONE does them. ALL of the FPS-type dungeon games are still doing what Dungeon Master did, with prettier graphics. Wizardry 8 (a great recent game) would be instantly recognizable to anyone who had played Dungeon Master.
For me at least, this was the first truly, viscerally immersive computer game. I wasn't sitting at a computer, I was fighting for my life in a very hostile environment.
After all these years, I clearly remember creeping around in that dungeon, one or two characters dead and the others badly hurt, trying to find a resurrection altar. I heard one of the nasty scorpion things scuttling closer. I was looking in all directions, trying to spot it so that I could flee in the opposite direction. I looked the wrong way just a little too long, turned around, and *exactly* as I realized it was there, it struck. I shrieked like a girl and ran like hell. (I think I escaped with one living character, and eventually did get everyone resurrected.).
This game was 1985's equivalent to Evercrack. It wasn't just a game, it was a way of life. Instant conversation-starter at the user group meetings.
After all, think about it. It's been FIFTEEN YEARS and the release of the source code for this game made Slashdot. That alone ought to tell you there's something special here.
A couple jobs ago, we moved from Gateway laptops (which were probably the least-reliable pieces of shit I've ever seen) to the Thinkpad 600s. That line of laptops was quite tough. We did lose a few over the years. One screen broke when the laptop was knocked out of an overhead bin by a careless passenger (at least that's the story we were given; the screen was indeed cracked.) On the whole we were very happy with them. We just bought lots of little eraser tips for the trackpoint.
:-)
For myself, I'm now using a Thinkpad T20. It is designed very much like the 600 was. It may even be the same case. I have not been terribly gentle to it, and overall it's in excellent physical shape. Everything works exactly as it did when I bought it new.
Sadly, it took some electronic damage when I was connected to a phone line that was struck by lightning. The modem no longer works, and the machine will now instantly power off if it's dropped on its right side from more than about a half-inch. But I don't really blame the Thinkpad for this. As long as I don't drop the right side, all is well. ("Doc, it hurts when I do this." "Then don't do that!")
I also made the mistake of knocking it off a shelf at about four feet while it was on. Twice. *blush* The hard drive in it did not take well to that treatment and developed many bad sectors. I got the critical data off and replaced the drive. Fortunately, 30gb 5400 RPM laptop hard drives are only about $120 with shipping, so it was a fairly cheap mistake.
I've had it about two years, and I believe it should last another couple, at least if I stop knocking it off shelves.
ISPs have tried to rely on 'common carrier' defenses in the past. However, if they start blocking SOME email, can they be held liable for mail that they DON'T block?
And can you selectively give up common carrier status? If you block some email but host anyone's web page, for instance, can you be sued successfully for objectionable content on those web pages?
Wow. You mean we got lucky enough to see something that hasn't happened even once in the several billion years the Solar System has been around?
I suppose he could have said "we haven't seen anything like this happen before", but that would be so boring in comparison.