Perhaps I'm just not thinking this through properly for a Wednesday, but "What the hell is this crap?".
Comparing a videogame system to a digital camera?
Editors - Why are you wasting my time? What's next, comparing a toaster oven to a graphics card?
This review is great. Not only is it funny... both because of the ridiculous premise and the fact it's pulled off well... but it's quite useful and informative.
The cool thing is that this review gets in the reviews for two products, and sums it up with an "if you only can afford one, get this one" opinion. If you're looking for "which digital camera or game system is the best", go elsewhere... everyone else has that already. This is a wonderful opinion piece.
Besides, you don't have much choice anyway. The G3 is basically the best consumer-level digital camera, and the GBA SP is the only real portable game system. We already knew that. Maybe you have a bit of extra cash and can't decide which to get, though. Or maybe you just want a good laugh. Why does everything have to be formal, boring, and scientific?
I for one would love to see more good reader articles like (but not exactly like) this one.
Thanks for the hint.:-) I was trying to find one today when I heard they were out "early" (like Nintendo didn't probably tell them to go ahead, hah), but all the game shops had them "reservation only". Suckage. When I saw your comment, I immediately went to Best Buy and found a nice platinum one.
The Space War anlaogy for a curved universe doesn't really fit. The behavior in Spae War is discontinuous. You start out on one edge of the screen and after going past the edge of the screen, you are magically transported to the other side.
Actually it's a fine analogy. The problem is the display screen, not the Space War universe. If you were to map a torus onto a flat display, it would seem that you're magically transported. In reality, the discontinuity is the display, not the universe. (In similar games, I'm not sure about this one in particular, you can be "right on the border" and see your ship halfway on either edge. Perhaps Space War lacks this "sophistication".)
Anyway, this is like saying "that is not a picture of something 3D, because the picture is 2D". Just because it's 2D doesn't mean it can't represent something 3D.
Besides, if you want to be really pedantic, the real problem would be the dimensions of the toroid universe in question... it wouldn't really map exactly to a rectangular screen unless you changed a few "universal constants".;-) (Not that I have a problem with this.;-))
Nice ripoff there. Next time try not claiming you wrote something many people here have read, and give proper credit where it's due.
The full content of the article, however, is right on track, and coming from a much more authoritative source. I encourage everyone to click and read the real article; you may want to read the rest of the site when you're done, too, if you haven't. Quite funny.
On the other hand if you were to take out a couple power stations you could disrupt the flow of information, as well as disrupt the lives of people for a considerable amount of time. It would be much harder to replace a power plant than wires and transformers.
It's good you considered this, but given this is being used for last-mile internet (as opposed to actual infrastructure, such as backbones), this isn't really an issue. Besides, if you disrupt power, you're going to take out most people's ability to access the network anyway.
Those who have backup power (and need it) ought to have concern for this, of course. They will probably not be using this as a solution anyway. (Probably should not.)
So really... what is the real arguement against hydrogen?
I believe it also has the lowest potential energy of any substance, so compared to having something else in the same volume, you get less energy out. And it's not particularly easy to work with compared to anything else, either.
I think the main advantage is that it is (as someone else said) abundant, but it's still not easy to process and prepare for use. You won't be dumping liquid hydrogen into a battery.
For refilling it, the tank idea is actually pretty good, although hydrogen is still fairly dangerous. Too bad helium doesn't work for this.
I just want to be able to fill up a battery from the water faucet and run my laptop for a week. Call me back when they get that.;-)
A battery the size of a cigarette lighter that lasts for 10 hours? I've got those. They're these little sticks with two "A"'s marked on them and they run my GBA for a good 15 hours
Miniature batteries for my mobile phone? Gee I think I've got that too. It lasts about 10 hours. And I can replentish it by using this other magical device on my wall called a socket.
Seriously... fuel cells will need to run a phone for a month at least to be worth it. A laptop better run for a couple weeks. Recharging them isn't a simple matter of plugging them in the wall as it is now... you've got to replace the hydrogen (or other fuel, most people seem focused on hydrogen for some inane reason, even though it's hard to make and doesn't have much energy content).
This article, like many other nanotech articles, is mostly hype and handwaving (and most of these things aren't even what you typically consider nanotech). So who won buzzword bingo?;-)
Perhaps you intended it as such, but far too many people think this way, unfortunately. They will see this comment and think "yeah, that makes sense!" as opposed to actually getting the contradiction. I'm glad you see it as such, however.
They all look like Puzzle Bobble to me, and that was for the SNES, which is even older than the platforms listed for Bust a Move. I can't find any source for a NES version having existed, though the arcade and GameGear versions listed on that page may have been of that era.
It would be easy to display your browsing history as a hierarchy or as a link web, but it would probably take up more space on your screen. Display space is at a premium.
Yeah, this is why i see having a "full screen" (or however big your window is) graph view, and when you click on a node, the node replaces it. If you click on a link, it would "iconify" the content back to its node on the graph view, add it to the graph, load the new content, and then show it to you.
It's interesting about the interactivity bit. I've seen various projects that do similar things, but most are toys/proofs-of-concept or not very developed (like the wiki stuff, although I haven't looked at that much so maybe it's more advanced than I realize).
Thanks for the book reference, I'll check it out sometime.
Bah, I thought of this years ago. Back buttons suck. So does the whole linear web browser model. I mean, it's the web, right? Why is it always back and forward? Why don't we see a web (graph) view?
I always wanted a web browser called "Sting" that displayed stuff like this and let you "cut through" the web.;-)
Why is any game rare? If it is rare, it must mean few people are copying it. If few people are copying it, it must mean it's not popular. If it's not popular, chances are better than fair that it sucks.
This isn't necessarily the case. While (as your next statement attests to) you may not care about original packaging, some do.
There are games that are quite good that are quite difficult to find even copies of. Some of these are due to the fact there is a small release, and a great game goes unnoticed, whether it's from a small no-name publisher and it's not hyped by the media, or what. It happens.
Also, there is bit decay. The attitude that digital media and information does not die is a wrong one. The copy on that floppy disk you made 5 years ago you just haven't played in awhile may now be corrupt. That dye on that CDR you burned may have faded. You might have forgotten about when your hard disk crashed. (And worse, you might have lost access keys or the original hardware to play it.)
All in all, this makes actually collecting games pretty fun. It's mostly affordable (their top game listed is $6500, which compared to collecting antiques or something is nothing), and finding an original copy of a game, with manuals and packaging, can provide quite a challenge.
Heck, there are games I have a hard time finding that are only a few years old: Dragon Warrior VII (PSX) and Suikoden 2 (PSX) you have to hunt for. Stores don't have them new or used.
Which brings us to the third possibility: games made in limited run that people like and aren't willing to get rid of.
You might be able to find copies of these someplace, but that's not exactly legal nor is it as much fun. Although, at some point it becomes more important to preserve the game than worrying about legality or packaging.
That article is 2 years old. MySQL has advanced greatly since.
No, it hasn't. A summary of the list of missing features:
No subselects
No SELECT INTO TABLE
No stored procedures and triggers
No Foreign Keys (!!)
No views
No -- as a comment parameter
Of course, they give crap rationalizations for each, and/or that "it's planned for [distant version of MySQL]". Of these features, only the last might be considered trivial, and even that is quite a pain if you're trying to write some portable SQL.
The others, particularly the lack of triggers and foreign keys, make this a data integrity nightmare for anything nontrivial.
Sure, sure, "but you can do it all in code": typical response. You know, that was their response to lack of transactions, too. "Too slow", "you don't need those". Right. You could just write a whole database in your code, too. The point of using a RDBMS (and, lacking relations of any sort, makes MySQL just a DBMS) is reliability so you don't have to constantly worry about these things.
PostgreSQL has all of the above features, and quite a few more. It's an OORDBMS. (Yes, this is very cool, and lets you do some very nifty things.) It's got better-than-row-level-locking (MVCC; MySQL does table locking only.) And all the other things people have mentioned here.
MySQL is a toy database, and should be treated as such. Not just for transactions: for all the things that make a robust RDBMS.
So the billboard picks up the frequency you're mixing the incoming signal with (because you need a frequency generator to create that frequency, and they will emit it -- there's not much you can do to stop it short of burying it in a completely metal box -- which kind of stops the incoming radio signal).
OK, I know very little on the subject, so I want to know if it would work to shield the radio, but not the antenna. Would the internal frequency it still leak "back up" the antenna? Could you extend this in some way so that it wouldn't? (Second, unshielded receiver box, sending a "shielded" signal to the receiver/decoder/whatever.) I mean (given you're paranoid enough) you could probably make a box to encode the whole signal digitally and send it encrypted to a shielded box for digital processing. If you were desperate.
(And for those who say "who cares, why be so silly over such a small thing"... well, it might not matter now, when your radio station of preference is being monitored, but at some point, it will. That's when this knowledge becomes useful.)
Ok, first off I'm no fan of XML, to put it lightly. Actually I hate it for the ridiculous misconception that it is. However, this OASIS thing isn't a bad idea, especially if it help move away from closed formats.
Also, as much as I dislike XML, your statements are ridiculous:
[...] in reality it is simply a higher-level encoding that may or may not be easier to understand but is guaranteed to both take longer to parse and take up more space than the conventional.doc format because of the size of the tags, making this a downgrade 'optimization' of both speed and size [...]
Everyone should just stop reading your post here and dismiss it for tripe. Either you're just trolling, or you have never even used something similar. As another poster has noted, even the simplest MS Word document is of ridiculous size. Try making a multi-hundred-page document and see how many megs this takes up (if MS Word will even handle it; it chokes quite quickly as your pagecount rises).
Markup is basically no more than the raw data, with negligible constant overhead and fractional size complexity based on total document length. This is going from a typical LaTeX document. HTML can be a lot of markup, depending on your content-to-formatting ratio; and "common" for HTML these days is not mostly content-oriented, as word processed documents are. This article is discussing the former, not the latter.
Microsoft owns.doc, however XML is still a wildcard; are there submarine patents on the technology running silent and deep waiting for just the right moment to blow a hole in Microsoft's pocketbook? We've talked about this sort of thing on./ before.
This might be a valid concern. Or it might be if Microsoft didn't have a huge defense patent portfolio.
[...] Anything tougher than bold, italics, and tables has been proven to be an O(n^2) representation in HTML and has been neglected because nobody wants to download a meg of webpage. [...]
What? Doing things like tables takes an exponential time complexity resulting in higher document mass? Please point us to this wonderful "proof", as it seems to have found some interesting bends in... reality.
However, let's assume for a moment you knew what you were talking about, and that there's an exponential size complexity, and that by HTML you mean XML, since HTML is not a relevant part of this discussion in the first place. (Or was this just a straw man to begin with? I thought so.)
Increasing size by a factor of n^2 based on complexity of formatting does not make much sense; for one it assumes certain types of formatting have a well-defined complexity (they don't), and it also assumes the writers of the DTD don't know what they're doing (they do).
For instance, you can define setting the font to have constant overhead when applying it to any given length of text. (LaTeX, or even HTML, both do this.) Similarly, you can define setting the position and size of a block of text to have a constant overhead for a piece of text. The ability to set the font and place blocks of text on a page lets you do just about anything (tables, frames, columns, paragraphs, etc.). Given that there is a constant size complexity for each piece of text, there is therefore, worst case, a linear size complexity for formatting your whole document (some multiplier times n where n is the number of "pieces" of text).
Even in cases like HTML, where you can have a lot of markup if you do tons of formatting, the cost in terms of size of formatting does not increase based on the size of the content. That is, "set the font to XYZ" does not change in size if your content is one character, or ten characters, or a million.
So please, understand that while it would be cool for Microsoft to adopt these new standards, economically speaking they're doing the right thing.
Oh, sure, it's economical for them. Just not for the reasons you gave above.
This is so non-sequitur, I'm gonna burn a little karma and have a little fun, OK?;-)
The key is that this isn't just any company. Sure, a normal company might choose to try their hand at a new market, supporting it with profits from another. But this is a monopoly, and they're using their monopoly to gain marketshare in other markets. All the other markets! This is the definition of such abuse.
Horseshit. Using your logic, every company in the world should only have one department: Sales.
I see you referring to the color "blue". You correlate this closely with stocks in Japan performing ballet, but I don't think that is quite the conditional you wish to imply.
No other department brings more money into the company than it consumes during its operation. Okay, okay, some could argue that profitable support departments may exist in some companies but this is rare.
You are correct in referring to departments, and money, and how this has an impact on the environment. Why, just last week, someone I know took a fishing trip.
Next you are going to tell me that Microsoft should get rid of all of their marketing staff, developers, support staff, admin staff, etc. because they are a cost centre being supported by the sales team.
Is it because microsoft should get rid of all of their marketing staff
developers support staff admin staff etc because they are a cost
centre being supported by the sales team that you came to me?
When we're dealing with a monopoly, the rules are different.
Did you ever stop to think about that statement. Really think about it? Ever wonder how fscked the world would be if that attitude were applied universally?
What? What would the world be like if there were nested "if" statements? Wait. The world is like that. You just forgot.
There are qualifiers, checks, and balances for a reason. Otherwise there would be unchecked chaos.
Just because it is the law doesn't make it a good law. Removing the blindfold from Lady Justice is far too grave a matter to justify a separate standard for monopolies.
This is tripe. "Lady Justice" is hardly blind to begin with. If you kill someone in self defense, is that the same as cold-blooded premeditated murder? The system sees circumstance as important. Being a monopoly is one of these circumstances.
Monopolies are an imbalance in the system. The system cannot be perfect, so it tries to correct for its imperfections. In a perfect system, there would never be a monopoly. However, an imperfect system with corrections is better than a blind system which refuses to acknowledge a problem.
That one division carries a company is NOT an abuse of their monopoly position.
When you're a monopoly, yes it is.
Just because a company makes a profit in 1 area and loses in another doesn't make it abusive.
Again, when your entire multi-billion-dollar monopoly which has widespread penetration in many markets is being supported by two out of thousands of products... that's abuse.
The key is that this isn't just any company. Sure, a normal company might choose to try their hand at a new market, supporting it with profits from another. But this is a monopoly, and they're using their monopoly to gain marketshare in other markets. All the other markets! This is the definition of such abuse.
Summary: do not compare this to "any other company". Whey we're dealing with a monopoly, the rules are different.
The obvious solution is going to be a transmission tax on VoIP calls.
This is about the dumbest thing I've heard in a few days. No. The solution is for POTS to die. Telcos can switch their services over to simply providing everyone with highspeed wired internet.
They need to get paid.
They can get paid for doing something worthwhile. Not charging for bits to a particular port because their old business model won't support them. Who comes up with this crap? There's no "right to profit" in the Constitution or any other law. Why do you think the dot-com bust happened? If one business model becomes unsustainable, you move or get trampled.
No. MSFT isn't a monopoly. If MSFT was a monopoly, then Linux isn't an operating system and a Macintosh isn't a Personal Computer.
Bzzt. You lose. Microsoft is a legal monopoly. Acquiring this status does not require you hold 100% of the market; rather only something like 85%. Even this is probably a little lenient. Being a monopoly is also not illegal, as long as you don't abuse it.
We don't need to get more aggressive with anti-trust. Coke and Pepsi do the same crap that MSFT does, and they are not monopolies. Car companies--same thing.
Nice logic. Coke and Pepsi do bad things and aren't monopolies. Microsoft does bad things. Therefore, MS isn't a monopoly.
Humans eat food and water, and aren't cows. Cows eat food and water. Therefore, cows aren't cows.
(business reform stuff snipped)
Yeah. This should happen. You don't go quite far enough, but we're at least on the same page here.
Unfortunately, you're rather naive if you think monopolies should be left to run unchecked. In a perfect system, either monopolies couldn't happen, or they would run their natural course and die.
The problem is, this isn't a perfect system. Look at the RIAA, MPAA, even Microsoft lobbies; when corporations can fund lawmaking, legislate their business model, and outlaw their competition, the system doesn't work.
The checks and balances are there for a reason. You take those away, and everything topples. Right now, it's leaning precariously.
Funny, I've always been the exact opposite. Although Quake (particularly 1) had potential, it was always "gee, another level, it's kinda weird, but what's the point? Why am I playing this?" Although Q1 felt something like Doom, which was nice to start out with, it wasn't carried through.
Quake 2 was infinitely worse in my book. "Another factory on another alien planet with... aliens to kill. *yawn*" It was all the same, all the way.
We won't discuss the lacking of Quake 3.
Oddly enough, I've been playing Doom 1 again lately, and it's been great. I really, really miss Doom's automap in new games (like everything after Doom), and even the quick story they have, coupled with the wonderful level design, makes it a much more interesting game in my book.
(I picked up Doom 2 recently too, and unfortunately it seems to suffer from some of the same problems as Quake did; nicer technology, less reason for me to play the game. And no, just shooting demons/aliens/whatever is not enough motivation for me to play something, particularly in things like Halflife where even if you turn things up to the hardest mode there are very few things to shoot. Red Faction was kinda fun though, decent if slightly bland story, but good level variety and lots to shoot at.)
Descent 3 also had a story coupled with gameplay that let you actually feel like you were part of the mission, at least for me. (Plus, it had lots to shoot at, and even an automap, woo hoo. Although I liked Descent 1's map better.)
Anyway, hopefully Doom 3 will bring back the old days of Doom 1, and it sounds like they're trying to flesh out the story, which will be cool. "Ultimate single-player FPS experience" someone said, and that'll be a nice break in a long line of bland deathmatch clones.
Because Microsoft owns the computer industry. It sucks. Their software is worthless. What's an admin supposed to do? Go deploying linux boxes at every workstation? Sure, I'd love that. There's a few UNIX geeks in various departments who would love that too. For the people who have no business using a computer, having e-mail, or getting on the internet, it'd take us years to train them in on linux. Then all we'd hear is "why can't I install this dancing puppy thingy that my stupid ass aunt sent me?"
So, let me get this straight, you work for a company where you won't install a secure piece of software because your users, who are unqualified to (in your opinion) even use a computer, are dictating your job to you. Furthermore, one of the motivating factors is installing random software sent via email on an already insecure operating system on your corporate network.
The fact is, to deploy linux and force users into it goes against everything that an IT department stands for. We have to cater to the greater audience. If 90% of our users refuse to use anything other than Windows, we're screwed. Wed can hold daily meetings about what Microsoft has done NOW, why they're eveil, why their software is bad for us, they still won't get it.
So what is it that your "IT department stands for"? Caving in to the whining of ignorant users? It seems you have an issue with priorities here. Maybe a bit of communication with upper management would help. It seems like these people are doing "normal" things like using email and word processing, which you can easily do on Linux. These people are employees here. They were hired to do a job for your company, and if your company says they need to use a secure OS, then they had better buckle under and learn, or find a new job.
So, to sum it up, we know MS sucks. I hate their software with a passion. SOMETIMES YOU JUST DON'T HAVE A CHOICE. I run linux at work and at home. We run linux products at the T1 entry point here at work. We have to run Windows on most desktops because THE PEOPLE WHO USE THEM ARE MORONS AND DON'T CARE ABOUT SECURITY.
Why don't you have a choice? Caring about security is your job and you seem to be the one who doesn't care. If you cared, you'd use something secure.
(Oh, stop your whining about "but that's not how the real world works." Sure it is. You expect to go get a job designing or building an aircraft, and get by with "but all I know how to do is use Legos. Why should I have to use what you want?" Get real. IT departments need to do their bloody job. Think of what would happen to an engineer who used a faulty part, willingly, knowingly, and as an excuse said "oh but that's what my users wanted!")
Imagine two kids of nearly equal weight on a see-saw. One sits on the end, as is normal. Now, in order to achieve balance and "fairness," the other does not sit in the middle, on the fulcrum.
Now imagine an 800lb gorilla and a little kid on a see-saw.
Slashdot Mirror
This review is great. Not only is it funny... both because of the ridiculous premise and the fact it's pulled off well... but it's quite useful and informative.
The cool thing is that this review gets in the reviews for two products, and sums it up with an "if you only can afford one, get this one" opinion. If you're looking for "which digital camera or game system is the best", go elsewhere... everyone else has that already. This is a wonderful opinion piece.
Besides, you don't have much choice anyway. The G3 is basically the best consumer-level digital camera, and the GBA SP is the only real portable game system. We already knew that. Maybe you have a bit of extra cash and can't decide which to get, though. Or maybe you just want a good laugh. Why does everything have to be formal, boring, and scientific?
I for one would love to see more good reader articles like (but not exactly like) this one.
Thanks for the hint. :-) I was trying to find one today when I heard they were out "early" (like Nintendo didn't probably tell them to go ahead, hah), but all the game shops had them "reservation only". Suckage. When I saw your comment, I immediately went to Best Buy and found a nice platinum one.
BestBuy++, nsxdavid++.
Actually it's a fine analogy. The problem is the display screen, not the Space War universe. If you were to map a torus onto a flat display, it would seem that you're magically transported. In reality, the discontinuity is the display, not the universe. (In similar games, I'm not sure about this one in particular, you can be "right on the border" and see your ship halfway on either edge. Perhaps Space War lacks this "sophistication".)
Anyway, this is like saying "that is not a picture of something 3D, because the picture is 2D". Just because it's 2D doesn't mean it can't represent something 3D.
Besides, if you want to be really pedantic, the real problem would be the dimensions of the toroid universe in question... it wouldn't really map exactly to a rectangular screen unless you changed a few "universal constants". ;-) (Not that I have a problem with this. ;-))
Nice ripoff there. Next time try not claiming you wrote something many people here have read, and give proper credit where it's due.
The full content of the article, however, is right on track, and coming from a much more authoritative source. I encourage everyone to click and read the real article; you may want to read the rest of the site when you're done, too, if you haven't. Quite funny.
It's good you considered this, but given this is being used for last-mile internet (as opposed to actual infrastructure, such as backbones), this isn't really an issue. Besides, if you disrupt power, you're going to take out most people's ability to access the network anyway.
Those who have backup power (and need it) ought to have concern for this, of course. They will probably not be using this as a solution anyway. (Probably should not.)
I believe it also has the lowest potential energy of any substance, so compared to having something else in the same volume, you get less energy out. And it's not particularly easy to work with compared to anything else, either.
I think the main advantage is that it is (as someone else said) abundant, but it's still not easy to process and prepare for use. You won't be dumping liquid hydrogen into a battery.
For refilling it, the tank idea is actually pretty good, although hydrogen is still fairly dangerous. Too bad helium doesn't work for this.
I just want to be able to fill up a battery from the water faucet and run my laptop for a week. Call me back when they get that. ;-)
A battery the size of a cigarette lighter that lasts for 10 hours? I've got those. They're these little sticks with two "A"'s marked on them and they run my GBA for a good 15 hours
Miniature batteries for my mobile phone? Gee I think I've got that too. It lasts about 10 hours. And I can replentish it by using this other magical device on my wall called a socket.
Seriously... fuel cells will need to run a phone for a month at least to be worth it. A laptop better run for a couple weeks. Recharging them isn't a simple matter of plugging them in the wall as it is now... you've got to replace the hydrogen (or other fuel, most people seem focused on hydrogen for some inane reason, even though it's hard to make and doesn't have much energy content).
This article, like many other nanotech articles, is mostly hype and handwaving (and most of these things aren't even what you typically consider nanotech). So who won buzzword bingo? ;-)
Perhaps you intended it as such, but far too many people think this way, unfortunately. They will see this comment and think "yeah, that makes sense!" as opposed to actually getting the contradiction. I'm glad you see it as such, however.
Either you're either overlooking reality, or you're asking the impossible:
So in reality, as other posters have said, you need to look at what is being said, not who said it, or you will be looking for a long time.
They all look like Puzzle Bobble to me, and that was for the SNES, which is even older than the platforms listed for Bust a Move. I can't find any source for a NES version having existed, though the arcade and GameGear versions listed on that page may have been of that era.
Yeah, this is why i see having a "full screen" (or however big your window is) graph view, and when you click on a node, the node replaces it. If you click on a link, it would "iconify" the content back to its node on the graph view, add it to the graph, load the new content, and then show it to you.
It's interesting about the interactivity bit. I've seen various projects that do similar things, but most are toys/proofs-of-concept or not very developed (like the wiki stuff, although I haven't looked at that much so maybe it's more advanced than I realize).
Thanks for the book reference, I'll check it out sometime.
Bah, I thought of this years ago. Back buttons suck. So does the whole linear web browser model. I mean, it's the web, right? Why is it always back and forward? Why don't we see a web (graph) view?
I always wanted a web browser called "Sting" that displayed stuff like this and let you "cut through" the web. ;-)
This isn't necessarily the case. While (as your next statement attests to) you may not care about original packaging, some do.
There are games that are quite good that are quite difficult to find even copies of. Some of these are due to the fact there is a small release, and a great game goes unnoticed, whether it's from a small no-name publisher and it's not hyped by the media, or what. It happens.
Also, there is bit decay. The attitude that digital media and information does not die is a wrong one. The copy on that floppy disk you made 5 years ago you just haven't played in awhile may now be corrupt. That dye on that CDR you burned may have faded. You might have forgotten about when your hard disk crashed. (And worse, you might have lost access keys or the original hardware to play it.)
All in all, this makes actually collecting games pretty fun. It's mostly affordable (their top game listed is $6500, which compared to collecting antiques or something is nothing), and finding an original copy of a game, with manuals and packaging, can provide quite a challenge.
Heck, there are games I have a hard time finding that are only a few years old: Dragon Warrior VII (PSX) and Suikoden 2 (PSX) you have to hunt for. Stores don't have them new or used.
Which brings us to the third possibility: games made in limited run that people like and aren't willing to get rid of.
You might be able to find copies of these someplace, but that's not exactly legal nor is it as much fun. Although, at some point it becomes more important to preserve the game than worrying about legality or packaging.
No, it hasn't. A summary of the list of missing features:
Of course, they give crap rationalizations for each, and/or that "it's planned for [distant version of MySQL]". Of these features, only the last might be considered trivial, and even that is quite a pain if you're trying to write some portable SQL.
The others, particularly the lack of triggers and foreign keys, make this a data integrity nightmare for anything nontrivial.
Sure, sure, "but you can do it all in code": typical response. You know, that was their response to lack of transactions, too. "Too slow", "you don't need those". Right. You could just write a whole database in your code, too. The point of using a RDBMS (and, lacking relations of any sort, makes MySQL just a DBMS) is reliability so you don't have to constantly worry about these things.
PostgreSQL has all of the above features, and quite a few more. It's an OORDBMS. (Yes, this is very cool, and lets you do some very nifty things.) It's got better-than-row-level-locking (MVCC; MySQL does table locking only.) And all the other things people have mentioned here.
MySQL is a toy database, and should be treated as such. Not just for transactions: for all the things that make a robust RDBMS.
OK, I know very little on the subject, so I want to know if it would work to shield the radio, but not the antenna. Would the internal frequency it still leak "back up" the antenna? Could you extend this in some way so that it wouldn't? (Second, unshielded receiver box, sending a "shielded" signal to the receiver/decoder/whatever.) I mean (given you're paranoid enough) you could probably make a box to encode the whole signal digitally and send it encrypted to a shielded box for digital processing. If you were desperate.
(And for those who say "who cares, why be so silly over such a small thing"... well, it might not matter now, when your radio station of preference is being monitored, but at some point, it will. That's when this knowledge becomes useful.)
Ok, first off I'm no fan of XML, to put it lightly. Actually I hate it for the ridiculous misconception that it is. However, this OASIS thing isn't a bad idea, especially if it help move away from closed formats.
Also, as much as I dislike XML, your statements are ridiculous:
Everyone should just stop reading your post here and dismiss it for tripe. Either you're just trolling, or you have never even used something similar. As another poster has noted, even the simplest MS Word document is of ridiculous size. Try making a multi-hundred-page document and see how many megs this takes up (if MS Word will even handle it; it chokes quite quickly as your pagecount rises).
Markup is basically no more than the raw data, with negligible constant overhead and fractional size complexity based on total document length. This is going from a typical LaTeX document. HTML can be a lot of markup, depending on your content-to-formatting ratio; and "common" for HTML these days is not mostly content-oriented, as word processed documents are. This article is discussing the former, not the latter.
This might be a valid concern. Or it might be if Microsoft didn't have a huge defense patent portfolio.
What? Doing things like tables takes an exponential time complexity resulting in higher document mass? Please point us to this wonderful "proof", as it seems to have found some interesting bends in... reality.
However, let's assume for a moment you knew what you were talking about, and that there's an exponential size complexity, and that by HTML you mean XML, since HTML is not a relevant part of this discussion in the first place. (Or was this just a straw man to begin with? I thought so.) Increasing size by a factor of n^2 based on complexity of formatting does not make much sense; for one it assumes certain types of formatting have a well-defined complexity (they don't), and it also assumes the writers of the DTD don't know what they're doing (they do).
For instance, you can define setting the font to have constant overhead when applying it to any given length of text. (LaTeX, or even HTML, both do this.) Similarly, you can define setting the position and size of a block of text to have a constant overhead for a piece of text. The ability to set the font and place blocks of text on a page lets you do just about anything (tables, frames, columns, paragraphs, etc.). Given that there is a constant size complexity for each piece of text, there is therefore, worst case, a linear size complexity for formatting your whole document (some multiplier times n where n is the number of "pieces" of text).
Even in cases like HTML, where you can have a lot of markup if you do tons of formatting, the cost in terms of size of formatting does not increase based on the size of the content. That is, "set the font to XYZ" does not change in size if your content is one character, or ten characters, or a million.
Oh, sure, it's economical for them. Just not for the reasons you gave above.
This is so non-sequitur, I'm gonna burn a little karma and have a little fun, OK? ;-)
I see you referring to the color "blue". You correlate this closely with stocks in Japan performing ballet, but I don't think that is quite the conditional you wish to imply.
You are correct in referring to departments, and money, and how this has an impact on the environment. Why, just last week, someone I know took a fishing trip.
Is it because microsoft should get rid of all of their marketing staff developers support staff admin staff etc because they are a cost centre being supported by the sales team that you came to me?
What? What would the world be like if there were nested "if" statements? Wait. The world is like that. You just forgot.
There are qualifiers, checks, and balances for a reason. Otherwise there would be unchecked chaos.
This is tripe. "Lady Justice" is hardly blind to begin with. If you kill someone in self defense, is that the same as cold-blooded premeditated murder? The system sees circumstance as important. Being a monopoly is one of these circumstances.
Monopolies are an imbalance in the system. The system cannot be perfect, so it tries to correct for its imperfections. In a perfect system, there would never be a monopoly. However, an imperfect system with corrections is better than a blind system which refuses to acknowledge a problem.
When you're a monopoly, yes it is.
Again, when your entire multi-billion-dollar monopoly which has widespread penetration in many markets is being supported by two out of thousands of products... that's abuse.
The key is that this isn't just any company. Sure, a normal company might choose to try their hand at a new market, supporting it with profits from another. But this is a monopoly, and they're using their monopoly to gain marketshare in other markets. All the other markets! This is the definition of such abuse.
Summary: do not compare this to "any other company". Whey we're dealing with a monopoly, the rules are different.
This is about the dumbest thing I've heard in a few days. No. The solution is for POTS to die. Telcos can switch their services over to simply providing everyone with highspeed wired internet.
They can get paid for doing something worthwhile. Not charging for bits to a particular port because their old business model won't support them. Who comes up with this crap? There's no "right to profit" in the Constitution or any other law. Why do you think the dot-com bust happened? If one business model becomes unsustainable, you move or get trampled.
Bzzt. You lose. Microsoft is a legal monopoly. Acquiring this status does not require you hold 100% of the market; rather only something like 85%. Even this is probably a little lenient. Being a monopoly is also not illegal, as long as you don't abuse it.
Nice logic. Coke and Pepsi do bad things and aren't monopolies. Microsoft does bad things. Therefore, MS isn't a monopoly.
Humans eat food and water, and aren't cows. Cows eat food and water. Therefore, cows aren't cows.
Yeah. This should happen. You don't go quite far enough, but we're at least on the same page here.
Unfortunately, you're rather naive if you think monopolies should be left to run unchecked. In a perfect system, either monopolies couldn't happen, or they would run their natural course and die.
The problem is, this isn't a perfect system. Look at the RIAA, MPAA, even Microsoft lobbies; when corporations can fund lawmaking, legislate their business model, and outlaw their competition, the system doesn't work.
The checks and balances are there for a reason. You take those away, and everything topples. Right now, it's leaning precariously.
...it only breaks 4096 patents, but with special "patent combinations" it can break up to 58,621.
Funny, I've always been the exact opposite. Although Quake (particularly 1) had potential, it was always "gee, another level, it's kinda weird, but what's the point? Why am I playing this?" Although Q1 felt something like Doom, which was nice to start out with, it wasn't carried through.
Quake 2 was infinitely worse in my book. "Another factory on another alien planet with... aliens to kill. *yawn*" It was all the same, all the way.
We won't discuss the lacking of Quake 3.
Oddly enough, I've been playing Doom 1 again lately, and it's been great. I really, really miss Doom's automap in new games (like everything after Doom), and even the quick story they have, coupled with the wonderful level design, makes it a much more interesting game in my book.
(I picked up Doom 2 recently too, and unfortunately it seems to suffer from some of the same problems as Quake did; nicer technology, less reason for me to play the game. And no, just shooting demons/aliens/whatever is not enough motivation for me to play something, particularly in things like Halflife where even if you turn things up to the hardest mode there are very few things to shoot. Red Faction was kinda fun though, decent if slightly bland story, but good level variety and lots to shoot at.)
Descent 3 also had a story coupled with gameplay that let you actually feel like you were part of the mission, at least for me. (Plus, it had lots to shoot at, and even an automap, woo hoo. Although I liked Descent 1's map better.)
Anyway, hopefully Doom 3 will bring back the old days of Doom 1, and it sounds like they're trying to flesh out the story, which will be cool. "Ultimate single-player FPS experience" someone said, and that'll be a nice break in a long line of bland deathmatch clones.
So, let me get this straight, you work for a company where you won't install a secure piece of software because your users, who are unqualified to (in your opinion) even use a computer, are dictating your job to you. Furthermore, one of the motivating factors is installing random software sent via email on an already insecure operating system on your corporate network.
So what is it that your "IT department stands for"? Caving in to the whining of ignorant users? It seems you have an issue with priorities here. Maybe a bit of communication with upper management would help. It seems like these people are doing "normal" things like using email and word processing, which you can easily do on Linux. These people are employees here. They were hired to do a job for your company, and if your company says they need to use a secure OS, then they had better buckle under and learn, or find a new job.
Why don't you have a choice? Caring about security is your job and you seem to be the one who doesn't care. If you cared, you'd use something secure.
(Oh, stop your whining about "but that's not how the real world works." Sure it is. You expect to go get a job designing or building an aircraft, and get by with "but all I know how to do is use Legos. Why should I have to use what you want?" Get real. IT departments need to do their bloody job. Think of what would happen to an engineer who used a faulty part, willingly, knowingly, and as an excuse said "oh but that's what my users wanted!")
In short, you need to take some responsibility.
Imagine two kids of nearly equal weight on a see-saw. One sits on the end, as is normal. Now, in order to achieve balance and "fairness," the other does not sit in the middle, on the fulcrum.
Now imagine an 800lb gorilla and a little kid on a see-saw.
Thanks.