Sounds like even someplace closer like Mars is going to take an impractically large receiver.
The Sun is roughly the same distance from Earth all the time, because we have a roughly circular orbit around it.
Mars is sometimes closer to us when our orbital position around the Sun is on the same side as Mars, however due to the different year lengths on Mars and Earth, sometimes it's much further away on the far side of the Sun to us.
I'm trying to think of any non-trackball / non-wheel / non-paddle stick-based arcade games that used analog controls from a retro time-period, and the only one I'm coming up with is Afterburner.
MAME can answer that question, more or less.
Under the MAWS deluxe search, change 'controls' to 'stick' which is MAME-ese for analogue joystick/yoke. You get this list including things like 720, Enduro Racer, Paperboy, SW/TESB/ROTJ, Space Harrier and Thunder Blade to pick a few classics.
To respond to the original question about joysticks, a lot of people build their own arcade sticks. The parts are readily available and the build doesn't need to be hard.arcadecontrols.com is a great resource and community for scratching that itch.
The truth is though that every type of home system is/was different, and the controls that suit a Commodore 64 and nothing like what suits a SNES, or an N64. If you're trying to recreate original-feel controllers for even a handful of emulated systems, it's going to be a lot of hassle obtaining them all, let alone getting them to work. A decently-made fighter stick plus an X360 controller should be enough to cover most bases most of the time.
As such, Opera can't do uneven-width 'sliding doors' tabs that extend to fill a container, which is what we needed recently. Some might call that an isolated bug, but honestly - a CSS1 rendering bug should not survive this long, while they're implementing more advanced and newer features.
My regret is that (both the) Opera users who visit our site think we've failed to use web standards when really it's -- gasp! -- Opera's fault.
If I believe that Social Security is going to collapse before I can benefit... why the hell would I want pay into such a thing?
That's just it. Seeing welfare as a purely financial thing misses the entire point.
Where I live, we have nowhere near the ratio of people in deep poverty that some other countries do. Having fewer really poor and desperate people in my society makes my society safer, cleaner and generally a bunch happier. In my society, I'm not waiting for the end of my career to experience the benefits of a functional welfare system, paid back as a pension; rather, I live today without so much fear that I need to go armed in public like people do overseas.
Bwahahahaha!!! I very nearly spent a "funny" mod point on your post for that sentence alone:) Instead you win this week's award for "Most Strained Metaphor Used in Anger During a Tedious and Recurring Flamewar".
Congratulations, it'll look great stuck to your fridge! Keep smiling.
I wouldn't be surprised if every user whose "validation" fails tries at least a couple more times after that, inflating the failure rate.
I wouldn't be surprised if such a telling and useful metric wasn't normalised for such a predictable behaviour, perhaps by linking multiple attempts to the one machine ID. Keep in mind that WGA is designed to re-check machines periodically anyway.
How can I tell them that the images would be really good if they were somewhere else on the screen?
It's very likely that, in addition to a public beta, Google is doing some live user testing on the interface, where stuff like that would be picked up. It's pretty easy to tell if your screen layout is wrong when you watch a few people try to accomplish tasks with it. Learning whether or not people's actual search problems are solved, however, requires huge numbers of test subjects in real world situations like this!
Which is precisely what Freenet doesn't do - provide a secure distribution channel. There is something you haven't considered - a distribution channel is a two way pipe. Not only must data flow to the consumer, but payments must flow to the producer.
I don't know very much about Freenet, but from what I gather, an invitation-only implementation that 0.7 sounds like provides a deniable distribution channel. To illustrate: Alice creates the content, then sells Bob a membership to her node via any arbitrary contact channel (e.g. existing IRC paedophile network, IRL, etc), then disseminates the content via her darknet.
Carol over in law enforcement might arrest Alice if the initial content creation is detected (or if she catches her getting it from some other dude), but can't prove that Bob ever actually received that content too, because Carol isn't privy to the darknet. That feature of the protocol could be worth a lot of money to Bob.
Of course, there's nothing to stop Carol watching over Bob's shoulder, so to speak, and busting him that way - trojans, van eck phreaking, hidden cameras, undercover humans, whatever. It's just that the traditional 'data slurp--log-analysis--arrest warrant' thing is effectively nullified as a evidence gathering tactic.
I hate people who say "mod parent up" but this really is important. I found Accoona via Spybot today while disinfecting a relative's machine. Oh, and yes... the search engine itself is rubbish.
Like many people here, I maintain a fleet of boxes owned by my family and friends... keeping things patched, virus definitions up to date, logs checked and spyware purged. I do this voluntarily because these are people I care about. If I could fix cars, I'd be changing oil for people too (luckily I have a brother in law who can manage that).
When it comes to DRM / copy protection circumvention, I see my role as unpaid geek in just the same way. It's my job to make sure that proper the DRM-defeating disc ripping tools are available and easy to use, no-CD game cracks are swapped in, and I tell people about the little disclaimers to watch out for when buying CDs.
I see the concept of 'plugging the analog hole' as nothing more than exploitation of non-technical consumers. A year ago, timeshifting on VHS was a non-issue. If the cartels choose to make it one, I'll damned well react by spreading my techspertise across the widest possible consumer base I can. The more people who fall outside the 'casual copier discouraged by simple protection' category, the weaker their case for persisting with this rubbish.
I was always taught that the music industry needed airplay (spaceplay?) as a primary marketing activity. If they make it uneconomical for radio to exist, what position does that leave them in to attract new listeners?
I guess they'd be the only ones that could afford their own fees so they'd have to set up their own radio replacement facility to communicate with the public. Then they don't even need payola, it's one big commercial for themselves.
...You get the money, and you LOSE the control. Simple as that.
(bold emphasis mine) Except we all know that's not actually the truth. Sony still gets the money, and the copyright. Cue the href to the now-five-years-old Courtney Love article for more information.
Sadly, unless you're Fugazi, you're not likely to be heard by many people unless you sell out. Something about the world just not being a fair place or some such...
Ah, I see. What you're saying is that English majors should be ignorant of Math and Science, they don't have to bother with such things.
No, that's not what was said. How much English did you take during your time studying? You don't have to be such a troll -- but it is harder to use your head. Try it sometime.
basically helpful tooltips should appear as you are typing, warning you if your input doesn't makes sense or is out of bounds or whatever
Good usability tries to take this further. When designing, one anticipates errors the users might make, and removes the possibility for them happening at all (see Jakob's fifth heuristic). Simple example: instead of using a simple text box for date entry in the format dd/mm/yyyy and hoping the user reads the explanatory note next to the field, one might use three dropdowns.
Careful design helps, but for complex systems not even a guru can predictively design the perfect interface. That's where usability testing makes such a difference. That involves getting real people to use successive iterations of a design until it's really great.
Facilitating and interpreting this testing is a different skill to designing in the first place. Involving test users outside the development team is something that takes preparation, and often money. Is it any wonder that interface design is the weakest link in FOSS?
They don't explain what Firefox is, they don't talk about it's advantages, and are therefore completely irrelevant.
"+5, Insightful" ?
"Coca-Cola is a refreshing carbonated beverage containing the stimulating and addictive effects of sugar and caffeine. You should buy some because it outperforms competing drink brands."
Honestly - have you not noticed that advertising has moved on in the past fifty years? If spelling things out literally was the best way to make people buy something, it would still be the dominant advertising paradigm. In our culture, in this place and time, that simply doesn't work as well as creative use of metonymy, association and suggestion.
Eliciting an emotional response - be it humour, surprise, comfort or whatever - and then shoving a carefully managed brand in front of people DOES work. This is a brand awareness campaign - not a direct call to action, despite what it looks like.
Think about your regular grocery shopping. Of all the things that you re-buy every week, how many brands can you honestly say you chose off the shelf at random the first time, without ever hearing about them somewhere first? Of course there'll be a brand of deodorant here and a packet of corn chips there that you just thought you'd try out and then you liked it, but everybody, sometime, chooses a product because it just looks more credible than the generic box next to it. You sound pretty savvy, so you, like me I hope, aren't as motivated by recognition and trust as most people are. For many people, that's almost the only reason they choose one brand over another.
IANA Marketer, but I did it at uni, and work with some.
Re:You want me because of my .. referral?
on
Mac mini to PC Hack
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
...don't be a smarmy pissant and use the popularity of his work to increase your chances at winning a Mac mini
Although I agree with you, this Kevin Rose chap seems to be actively encouraging exactly those comments.
Pyramid schemes provide benefits to
<acronym title="suckers">participants</acronym>
in inverse proportion to the expontentially growing userbase. There's a finite number of people who will follow you into these things, and only those who get in very early stand a chance of attracting the requisite numbers to receive the pay-off. Plus they've sold their privacy (and their time, when it comes to dealing with the deluge of spam).
For these $FREEITEM offers, there are two groups who stand to lose (and therefore underpin the entire scheme):
latecomers who sell their privacy and time for no eventual $FREEITEM (since they can't attract a further ~10 suckers); and
the advertisers themselves who spend more on the
<acronym title="people who just demonstrated they are too cheap to pay for things anyway">qualified sales leads</acronym>
than they will ever make up in sales conversions.
For those who are interested, and ESPECIALLY those who are considering "buying in" - (the Coral Cache of) Rob Cockerham's entertaining masterpiece on the Herbalife system should give anyone with half a brain enough warning to walk quickly on by with their hands in their pockets and eyes pointed straight ahead.
On Intel filing obscure trademarks: "what does VIIV mean? Could this be the Roman numerals for 6-4 indicating a 64-bit chip, or could this be the Roman numeral five twice, separated by two lines, indicating the dual cores of the Pentium 5 chip?"
This very article, where CBN even comes out and admits it: "there's little to corroborate this"
I know, I know, there's usually someone who pipes up at times like this and throws karma to the open seas - but this is a news aggregation site. This place exists because of eyeballs, and eyeballs are attracted to gossip - but is it so hard to filter the noise? Can we PLEASE have a topic for "mere speculation", so we can filter it, Caldera/SCOstyle? Alternatively - someone point me at a site with Truth for nerds, stuff that happened.
...IE lets me use blend transitions (Firefox doesn't, at least that I can find)
You mean, like this blend effect? See the images of Brisbane box in the bottom-left column. Sorry, I don't have the source at hand, but it does work perfectly in Firefox.
Slashdot Mirror
The Sun is roughly the same distance from Earth all the time, because we have a roughly circular orbit around it.
Mars is sometimes closer to us when our orbital position around the Sun is on the same side as Mars, however due to the different year lengths on Mars and Earth, sometimes it's much further away on the far side of the Sun to us.
MAME can answer that question, more or less.
Under the MAWS deluxe search, change 'controls' to 'stick' which is MAME-ese for analogue joystick/yoke. You get this list including things like 720, Enduro Racer, Paperboy, SW/TESB/ROTJ, Space Harrier and Thunder Blade to pick a few classics.
To respond to the original question about joysticks, a lot of people build their own arcade sticks. The parts are readily available and the build doesn't need to be hard.arcadecontrols.com is a great resource and community for scratching that itch.
The truth is though that every type of home system is/was different, and the controls that suit a Commodore 64 and nothing like what suits a SNES, or an N64. If you're trying to recreate original-feel controllers for even a handful of emulated systems, it's going to be a lot of hassle obtaining them all, let alone getting them to work. A decently-made fighter stick plus an X360 controller should be enough to cover most bases most of the time.
Wheeeee-Oshhhhhhhhh!
Who made you such an "expert" then?
Lifehacker has a well laid-out and illustrated introduction avec screenshots.
Yeah, get back to me when Opera fixes this CSS bug that is over five years old.
As such, Opera can't do uneven-width 'sliding doors' tabs that extend to fill a container, which is what we needed recently. Some might call that an isolated bug, but honestly - a CSS1 rendering bug should not survive this long, while they're implementing more advanced and newer features.
My regret is that (both the) Opera users who visit our site think we've failed to use web standards when really it's -- gasp! -- Opera's fault.
That's just it. Seeing welfare as a purely financial thing misses the entire point.
Where I live, we have nowhere near the ratio of people in deep poverty that some other countries do. Having fewer really poor and desperate people in my society makes my society safer, cleaner and generally a bunch happier. In my society, I'm not waiting for the end of my career to experience the benefits of a functional welfare system, paid back as a pension; rather, I live today without so much fear that I need to go armed in public like people do overseas.
I'm not trolling, I'm just Australian.
Bwahahahaha!!! I very nearly spent a "funny" mod point on your post for that sentence alone :) Instead you win this week's award for "Most Strained Metaphor Used in Anger During a Tedious and Recurring Flamewar".
Congratulations, it'll look great stuck to your fridge! Keep smiling.
I don't know very much about Freenet, but from what I gather, an invitation-only implementation that 0.7 sounds like provides a deniable distribution channel. To illustrate: Alice creates the content, then sells Bob a membership to her node via any arbitrary contact channel (e.g. existing IRC paedophile network, IRL, etc), then disseminates the content via her darknet.
Carol over in law enforcement might arrest Alice if the initial content creation is detected (or if she catches her getting it from some other dude), but can't prove that Bob ever actually received that content too, because Carol isn't privy to the darknet. That feature of the protocol could be worth a lot of money to Bob.
Of course, there's nothing to stop Carol watching over Bob's shoulder, so to speak, and busting him that way - trojans, van eck phreaking, hidden cameras, undercover humans, whatever. It's just that the traditional 'data slurp--log-analysis--arrest warrant' thing is effectively nullified as a evidence gathering tactic.
I hate people who say "mod parent up" but this really is important. I found Accoona via Spybot today while disinfecting a relative's machine. Oh, and yes... the search engine itself is rubbish.
Mike Davidson figured it out.
In a nutshell: accessible, degradable rich fonts for headlines/callouts. Check out the example and the discussion.
Like many people here, I maintain a fleet of boxes owned by my family and friends... keeping things patched, virus definitions up to date, logs checked and spyware purged. I do this voluntarily because these are people I care about. If I could fix cars, I'd be changing oil for people too (luckily I have a brother in law who can manage that).
When it comes to DRM / copy protection circumvention, I see my role as unpaid geek in just the same way. It's my job to make sure that proper the DRM-defeating disc ripping tools are available and easy to use, no-CD game cracks are swapped in, and I tell people about the little disclaimers to watch out for when buying CDs.
I see the concept of 'plugging the analog hole' as nothing more than exploitation of non-technical consumers. A year ago, timeshifting on VHS was a non-issue. If the cartels choose to make it one, I'll damned well react by spreading my techspertise across the widest possible consumer base I can. The more people who fall outside the 'casual copier discouraged by simple protection' category, the weaker their case for persisting with this rubbish.
I was always taught that the music industry needed airplay (spaceplay?) as a primary marketing activity. If they make it uneconomical for radio to exist, what position does that leave them in to attract new listeners?
I guess they'd be the only ones that could afford their own fees so they'd have to set up their own radio replacement facility to communicate with the public. Then they don't even need payola, it's one big commercial for themselves.
Odd thought.
And there's a mirror here as well.
(bold emphasis mine) Except we all know that's not actually the truth. Sony still gets the money, and the copyright. Cue the href to the now-five-years-old Courtney Love article for more information.
Sadly, unless you're Fugazi, you're not likely to be heard by many people unless you sell out. Something about the world just not being a fair place or some such...
No, that's not what was said. How much English did you take during your time studying? You don't have to be such a troll -- but it is harder to use your head. Try it sometime.
Good usability tries to take this further. When designing, one anticipates errors the users might make, and removes the possibility for them happening at all (see Jakob's fifth heuristic). Simple example: instead of using a simple text box for date entry in the format dd/mm/yyyy and hoping the user reads the explanatory note next to the field, one might use three dropdowns.
Careful design helps, but for complex systems not even a guru can predictively design the perfect interface. That's where usability testing makes such a difference. That involves getting real people to use successive iterations of a design until it's really great.
Facilitating and interpreting this testing is a different skill to designing in the first place. Involving test users outside the development team is something that takes preparation, and often money. Is it any wonder that interface design is the weakest link in FOSS?
"+5, Insightful" ?
"Coca-Cola is a refreshing carbonated beverage containing the stimulating and addictive effects of sugar and caffeine. You should buy some because it outperforms competing drink brands."
Honestly - have you not noticed that advertising has moved on in the past fifty years? If spelling things out literally was the best way to make people buy something, it would still be the dominant advertising paradigm. In our culture, in this place and time, that simply doesn't work as well as creative use of metonymy, association and suggestion.
Eliciting an emotional response - be it humour, surprise, comfort or whatever - and then shoving a carefully managed brand in front of people DOES work. This is a brand awareness campaign - not a direct call to action, despite what it looks like.
Think about your regular grocery shopping. Of all the things that you re-buy every week, how many brands can you honestly say you chose off the shelf at random the first time, without ever hearing about them somewhere first? Of course there'll be a brand of deodorant here and a packet of corn chips there that you just thought you'd try out and then you liked it, but everybody, sometime, chooses a product because it just looks more credible than the generic box next to it. You sound pretty savvy, so you, like me I hope, aren't as motivated by recognition and trust as most people are. For many people, that's almost the only reason they choose one brand over another.
IANA Marketer, but I did it at uni, and work with some.
StationRipper to the rescue again!
Although I agree with you, this Kevin Rose chap seems to be actively encouraging exactly those comments.
Pyramid schemes provide benefits to
in inverse proportion to the expontentially growing userbase. There's a finite number of people who will follow you into these things, and only those who get in very early stand a chance of attracting the requisite numbers to receive the pay-off. Plus they've sold their privacy (and their time, when it comes to dealing with the deluge of spam).For these $FREEITEM offers, there are two groups who stand to lose (and therefore underpin the entire scheme):
- latecomers who sell their privacy and time for no eventual $FREEITEM (since they can't attract a further ~10 suckers); and
- the advertisers themselves who spend more on the than they will ever make up in sales conversions.
For those who are interested, and ESPECIALLY those who are considering "buying in" - (the Coral Cache of) Rob Cockerham's entertaining masterpiece on the Herbalife system should give anyone with half a brain enough warning to walk quickly on by with their hands in their pockets and eyes pointed straight ahead.- Firefox books planned: "Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?"
- Speculation on the success of a newly released product: "...the Mac mini may shift consumers away from the larger tower style desktops to smaller ones"
- Factless 'clue sniffing' from HTML source viewing: "the Apple website has hidden clues that suggest the coming of the PB G5 very soon"
- On Intel filing obscure trademarks: "what does VIIV mean? Could this be the Roman numerals for 6-4 indicating a 64-bit chip, or could this be the Roman numeral five twice, separated by two lines, indicating the dual cores of the Pentium 5 chip?"
- A flaky pundit guesses at a business plan based on a few observed facts: "Dvorak speculates that a Firefox based Google browser and Google-OS may soon be coming to a cluster near you"
- This very article, where CBN even comes out and admits it: "there's little to corroborate this"
I know, I know, there's usually someone who pipes up at times like this and throws karma to the open seas - but this is a news aggregation site. This place exists because of eyeballs, and eyeballs are attracted to gossip - but is it so hard to filter the noise? Can we PLEASE have a topic for "mere speculation", so we can filter it, Caldera/SCOstyle? Alternatively - someone point me at a site with Truth for nerds, stuff that happened.You mean, like this blend effect? See the images of Brisbane box in the bottom-left column. Sorry, I don't have the source at hand, but it does work perfectly in Firefox.
I know how to fix that! Go to Tools, Internet Options, Security tab, then click the "Custom level..." button.
:)
Scroll down until you see a heading "ActiveX controls and plugins", and then select "enable" for every option in that section.
Voila - problem solved! I hope this helps.