The DVD player in the PS2 is really, really cheap and it does not take much to damage a PS2 DVD to the point where it does not play.
I have several such disks that I can only play because I have a MOD chip and I have copied the scratched DVD's to new disks that the PS2 can read.
Plus there are some neat free utilities for working with save games on the memory card, multimedia players and othersoftware that is difficult to run on an un-modded PS2.
I think the issue is it was made into several episodes, and so they spend the first half hour going over things you learned in the previous episode, which made for a lot of repeating and telling things over, because they had to make sure you could start watching in the middle, which is where telling things repeatidly came in handy, so you don't get lost if you start in the middle, or a week passes between viewings, which is good to catch up, but makes for lots of stuff getting repeated, which I didn't like, but liked the rest, even though it was repeating over and over and over and over until I wanted to grab the guy and say just get ON with it! because you know, the repeating was getting annoying...
I hate to tell it to everyone getting ready to outsource their programmers, but they are not the big reason why games cost money.
In the field of console games, paying $10 per game to Microsoft or Sony is part of it.
But most of the cost is in marketing. More money is often spent on advertising than on the game itself, and in most cases you have to spend it to get enough people aware of your game to make a profit.
Then lets look at companies that spend $15 million on a mis-managed game that gets canceled half way through.
The game industry is immensely difficult. You have to mesh designers, programmers and artists.. ALL which are creative talents. It's not like running a construction project or assembly line.
Oh, did I also mention one of the best things you can do to totally ruin team productivity is split them up into diffrent locations? There is a HUGE diffrence between having everyone in an office and having one or more groups a state or world away.
I wouldn't worry... anyone who outsources programmers for game development is doomed.
I'm not so much agast at the lack of unique movies like Memento, but at the lack of movies that don't rely on previous movies to get people to see it.
Take a random title "Gilligans Island" throw in a few big stars, spend $100 million on special effects.. and maybe 10 minutes on a crappy script and you get instant blockbuster. And a horrible movie.
Then make second one, and repeat until people stop going. Then find a new title...
Why is is that almost every remake of a movie has the producers and directors trying to convince people that one, they are not COPYING, they are doing a remake.. it's an honor! Then they end up going on about how they are re-inventing the movie.
Umm... isn't anyone capable of re-inventing these days without the re?
I hope this one turns out good, instead of yet another huge box office smash due to the name, and not the empty content.
This works for almost all cats, but not one of mine.
My cat loves tape. He eats it. Licks envelopes. Chews packing tape off packages I get. I can't leave tape of any kind out. he chews on the rolls.
As for the cable chewing, I'll repeat what others said. That is not normal. Your cat needs attention. Anotehr cat, more toys or just more play time with you should fix it.
If this guy didn't have permission to take the reader, he is pretty lucky.
Imagine trying to explain to an undercover stakeout police crew why you were retrieving an illegal device off an ATM. "Just wanted to look inside it, officers... honest!"
I much prefer the Phillips remote. I like the large buttons for pause, fast forward and reverse that fit nicely under the thumb.
I have to agree though that it's one flaw is if you pick it up without looking at it, it is NOT easy to tell which end you are holding it by. It's pretty annoying to pick it up in the dark and go to fast-forward and end up rewinding instead. Although after a few years of using it I can tell by weight now and flip it around automaticly.
The top of the peanut should have had some extra texture or angles that make it uncomftrable to hold backwards, so when you grab it you know you have the wrong end. Makybe some sort of electroshock...
The reason we have spam is because it is pretty much free to send.
We have lots of real junk mail, but imagine if every mom and pop store, kid and porn site could anonymously send a letter to everyone for FREE? You would be burried in letters.
The ONLY way to stop Spam is to make it too expensive for spammers to dend it. There are many ways to do this, some good, some bad, some work with others.
1. Charge.
Mail can be sent with a one-time key that allows the reciever to charge for the email.
Email boxes can be configured to allow whitlisted people in for free, allow anyone to send, or only allow paid mail.
Mailing lists and other bulk emailing needs can send all their mail out as no-charge. Nobody can force you to pay them.. but they don't have to read your email either.
This of course will only work with...
2. Authenticated mail servers. If we make it too time consuming for spammers to spam, we will stop the majority of it. Make them have to hack into an authenticated server before they can send. Still will not stop it, but will cut the flood way down.
3. Authenticated users. Even better. Now I know that when it says From: Friend@aol.com it really is them.
4. Expensive CPU computation. Make sending servers answer hard math questions. Downsides are people with Pentium 90's who run mailing lists get hit. But is it always a bad thing to make people with high usage pay for what they consume?
5. Let Microsoft or AOL set up a secret, closed source mailing system incompatable with the current SMTP methods and trust them to handle the spam and not destroy our privacy. No thanks.
6. Let the government handle all the email, making you use your SSN or some other unique identifier as an address. Not going to even touch this one.
There are plenty of other ways. Spam is now such a problem we need to impliment one or more of them. We have to make sure spammers PAY for every message somehow. Make it expensive in money, time or time served.
Between dealing with the horribly overcomplicated tax code, legal issues, bills, dealing with publishers or self publishing and dealing with distributers or on-line sales systems, advertising, marketing research and everything else that goes into running a busines, you can forget about doing any programming.
You need a lawyer, accountant and a CEO to manage the whole mess and THEN you can hire programmers (or yourself) to actually start writing.
Running around collecting free or cheap items and hording them to ransom off is simple greed. Remember the company that bought up all those vaccenes a while ago so they could crank up the price and most small hospitals couldn't afford them?
Calling it a valid comercial enterprise and "just the way the free market works to maximize the value of a product" does not make it morally right. Just because something you are doing involved money does NOT mean you can throw morality out the window.
I strongly dislike cybersquatters and anyone else who makes money purely off being a greedy bastard. Lots may do it, it may be legal, but they are stikk jerks.
At an ISP I worked for in '95 or so, we made sure we used the word unmetered instead of unlimited when advertising, talking to customers and on the web pages.
That way we could cancel accounts and warn people if they abused the service.
Our policy was you could dial up for as long as you wanted, provided you were USING the service. If you wanted to play a game for 36 hours straight, we had no issues. But if you wanted to leave a server running while you went to work, that was met with warnings and terminations.
Out of maybe a few thousand people, we only had to warn a dozen a year and cancel a handfull of accounts.
That was before the days of widespread PTP filesharing though...
For starters you need a $15,000 development station.
Then you need to licence the SDK for an amount Sony will decide.
Then for each game you need to spend about half a million dollars to get it approved and tested by Sony. They can reject you for any reason and make you pay to have it tested until they are happy.
Then you pay Sony $8 for each game you sell, plus the costs to produce the special CD's the PS2 needs.
Then do the same with Microsoft and Nintendo.
Don't forget several programmers, artists and people to figure out the maze of licencing procedures for each console.
Making console games is in no way something a single person can do, sadly. The consoles are VERY tightly controlled.
You are assuming tha the whole 90 mb/s stream is going to one site.
More likely you will have a hundred processes each sending to a diffrent endpoint on the internet. The routers in between are just that, routers and designed from the ground up to handle fast packet switching. I'd say this will be very useable in the real world to increase performance.
As for games, I have not yet seen a LAN game that can't be run on a 10 Mbps ethernet network. 100 is better, but you need a massive (64 players?) game to even be able to notice the improvement.
I had one of those! It was my favorite watch. Until you switched it into calculator mode, there was no way to tell (other than tiny + - / x labels) that it was a calculator.
It had two LCD displays stacked, one normal watch with big numbers and lots of info, and the other with calculator digits at the top and the rest of the screen with the numeric keypad.
I think the dual LCD aspect make it coller than the $600 thing pictured.
I wish I could get a hold of one of the old Casis, mine broke years ago or I'd still be using it.
The whole reason TiVo is so good at what it does is that you have people taking chanel data and hand-editing the goofs and problems, as well as using an expensive feed that is very accurate.
There simply is no source of guide data available for free that gives data weeks in advance and also keeps track of changes like sudden presidental speeches and lineup and program switches.
For freeing me of the "of my god it's 7:53 and I need to go home NOW or miss my show" crap, I have no problem with $10 a month.
TiVo doesn't simply chainge your viewing habits, it changes your life.:-)
I have been a subsriber at Baen for almost two years now. It's great to get books before they are published, cheaper than for paper, and I always have something to read (with my PDA).
They need more press, I can't think of any other publisher that has done as much to promote unencrypted and even free ebooks.
Slashdot Mirror
The DVD player in the PS2 is really, really cheap and it does not take much to damage a PS2 DVD to the point where it does not play.
I have several such disks that I can only play because I have a MOD chip and I have copied the scratched DVD's to new disks that the PS2 can read.
Plus there are some neat free utilities for working with save games on the memory card, multimedia players and othersoftware that is difficult to run on an un-modded PS2.
My friends and I had the same problems.
I think the issue is it was made into several episodes, and so they spend the first half hour going over things you learned in the previous episode, which made for a lot of repeating and telling things over, because they had to make sure you could start watching in the middle, which is where telling things repeatidly came in handy, so you don't get lost if you start in the middle, or a week passes between viewings, which is good to catch up, but makes for lots of stuff getting repeated, which I didn't like, but liked the rest, even though it was repeating over and over and over and over until I wanted to grab the guy and say just get ON with it! because you know, the repeating was getting annoying...
I hate to tell it to everyone getting ready to outsource their programmers, but they are not the big reason why games cost money.
In the field of console games, paying $10 per game
to Microsoft or Sony is part of it.
But most of the cost is in marketing. More money is often spent on advertising than on the game itself, and in most cases you have to spend it to get enough people aware of your game to make a profit.
Then lets look at companies that spend $15 million on a mis-managed game that gets canceled half way through.
The game industry is immensely difficult. You have to mesh designers, programmers and artists.. ALL which are creative talents. It's not like running a construction project or assembly line.
Oh, did I also mention one of the best things you can do to totally ruin team productivity is split them up into diffrent locations? There is a HUGE diffrence between having everyone in an office and having one or more groups a state or world away.
I wouldn't worry... anyone who outsources programmers for game development is doomed.
Everyone tells me it can be done, but show me where on 2000 you can turn off...
445/tcp open microsoft-ds
That gets bound to every interface. With multiple network adapters, you can not tell it to stop binding to one.
Read my earlier post on the subject.
Actually, pretty easy.
:-)
If you could actually turn off unwanted and insecure services you wouldn't NEED a firewall.
My FreeBSD/Linux based routers serve as firewalls for my Windows boxes. Very easy to turn off everything but ssh.
In Windows you can't even tell whats running let alone shut it off. There are many ports that get attached to every interface and no way to fix it.
The first and only firewall most people need is an OS that doesn't open itself up to the world like a cheap two-bit, umm, door. Or something.
I'm not so much agast at the lack of unique movies like Memento, but at the lack of movies that don't rely on previous movies to get people to see it.
Take a random title "Gilligans Island" throw in a few big stars, spend $100 million on special effects.. and maybe 10 minutes on a crappy script and you get instant blockbuster. And a horrible movie.
Then make second one, and repeat until people stop going. Then find a new title...
Why is is that almost every remake of a movie has the producers and directors trying to convince people that one, they are not COPYING, they are doing a remake.. it's an honor! Then they end up going on about how they are re-inventing the movie.
Umm... isn't anyone capable of re-inventing these days without the re?
I hope this one turns out good, instead of yet another huge box office smash due to the name, and not the empty content.
This works for almost all cats, but not one of mine.
My cat loves tape. He eats it. Licks envelopes. Chews packing tape off packages I get. I can't leave tape of any kind out. he chews on the rolls.
As for the cable chewing, I'll repeat what others said. That is not normal. Your cat needs attention. Anotehr cat, more toys or just more play time with you should fix it.
If this guy didn't have permission to take the reader, he is pretty lucky.
Imagine trying to explain to an undercover stakeout police crew why you were retrieving an illegal device off an ATM. "Just wanted to look inside it, officers... honest!"
Read the press release. Much of the action will take place in a "far away galaxy" with a new threat, so expect lots of new sets.
I much prefer the Phillips remote. I like the large buttons for pause, fast forward and reverse that fit nicely under the thumb.
:-)
I have to agree though that it's one flaw is if you pick it up without looking at it, it is NOT easy to tell which end you are holding it by. It's pretty annoying to pick it up in the dark and go to fast-forward and end up rewinding instead. Although after a few years of using it I can tell by weight now and flip it around automaticly.
The top of the peanut should have had some extra texture or angles that make it uncomftrable to hold backwards, so when you grab it you know you have the wrong end. Makybe some sort of electroshock...
Go TiVo.
The reason we have spam is because it is pretty much free to send.
We have lots of real junk mail, but imagine if every mom and pop store, kid and porn site could anonymously send a letter to everyone for FREE? You would be burried in letters.
The ONLY way to stop Spam is to make it too expensive for spammers to dend it. There are many ways to do this, some good, some bad, some work with others.
1. Charge.
Mail can be sent with a one-time key that allows the reciever to charge for the email.
Email boxes can be configured to allow whitlisted people in for free, allow anyone to send, or only allow paid mail.
Mailing lists and other bulk emailing needs can send all their mail out as no-charge. Nobody can force you to pay them.. but they don't have to read your email either.
This of course will only work with...
2. Authenticated mail servers. If we make it too time consuming for spammers to spam, we will stop the majority of it. Make them have to hack into an authenticated server before they can send. Still will not stop it, but will cut the flood way down.
3. Authenticated users. Even better. Now I know that when it says From: Friend@aol.com it really is them.
4. Expensive CPU computation. Make sending servers answer hard math questions. Downsides are people with Pentium 90's who run mailing lists get hit. But is it always a bad thing to make people with high usage pay for what they consume?
5. Let Microsoft or AOL set up a secret, closed source mailing system incompatable with the current SMTP methods and trust them to handle the spam and not destroy our privacy. No thanks.
6. Let the government handle all the email, making you use your SSN or some other unique identifier as an address. Not going to even touch this one.
There are plenty of other ways. Spam is now such a problem we need to impliment one or more of them. We have to make sure spammers PAY for every message somehow. Make it expensive in money, time or time served.
Between dealing with the horribly overcomplicated tax code, legal issues, bills, dealing with publishers or self publishing and dealing with distributers or on-line sales systems, advertising, marketing research and everything else that goes into running a busines, you can forget about doing any programming.
You need a lawyer, accountant and a CEO to manage the whole mess and THEN you can hire programmers (or yourself) to actually start writing.
Code or Manage. Pick ONE.
I entirely disagree.
Running around collecting free or cheap items and hording them to ransom off is simple greed. Remember the company that bought up all those vaccenes a while ago so they could crank up the price and most small hospitals couldn't afford them?
Calling it a valid comercial enterprise and "just the way the free market works to maximize the value of a product" does not make it morally right. Just because something you are doing involved money does NOT mean you can throw morality out the window.
I strongly dislike cybersquatters and anyone else who makes money purely off being a greedy bastard. Lots may do it, it may be legal, but they are stikk jerks.
What is wrong with it? There is a line in the graph missing, but he explains that.
"Obviously when hyper-threading was disabled on my P4 test system, I was unable to run the Multiple CPU portion of Cinebench's rendering benchmark."
At an ISP I worked for in '95 or so, we made sure we used the word unmetered instead of unlimited when advertising, talking to customers and on the web pages.
That way we could cancel accounts and warn people if they abused the service.
Our policy was you could dial up for as long as you wanted, provided you were USING the service. If you wanted to play a game for 36 hours straight, we had no issues. But if you wanted to leave a server running while you went to work, that was met with warnings and terminations.
Out of maybe a few thousand people, we only had to warn a dozen a year and cancel a handfull of accounts.
That was before the days of widespread PTP filesharing though...
"The thing that always bugs me about TV is that I can't turn the page when I want to, either forward or backward!"
:-)
Get a TiVo, then you can!
Books have lots of great benifits, but a well done show (Like NOVA usually is) has advantages too.
Use both.
Take the PS2 for example.
For starters you need a $15,000 development station.
Then you need to licence the SDK for an amount Sony will decide.
Then for each game you need to spend about half a million dollars to get it approved and tested by Sony. They can reject you for any reason and make you pay to have it tested until they are happy.
Then you pay Sony $8 for each game you sell, plus the costs to produce the special CD's the PS2 needs.
Then do the same with Microsoft and Nintendo.
Don't forget several programmers, artists and people to figure out the maze of licencing procedures for each console.
Making console games is in no way something a single person can do, sadly. The consoles are VERY tightly controlled.
Looks like there are only two working links in the dangerous projects section. Bummer.
I would love to know the numbers behind this. I hope if this goes anywhere, we can see some real figures.
How much DOES the Government spend on productivity tools like Office and on desktop software like Windows?
Ian
You are assuming tha the whole 90 mb/s stream is going to one site.
More likely you will have a hundred processes each sending to a diffrent endpoint on the internet. The routers in between are just that, routers and designed from the ground up to handle fast packet switching. I'd say this will be very useable in the real world to increase performance.
As for games, I have not yet seen a LAN game that can't be run on a 10 Mbps ethernet network. 100 is better, but you need a massive (64 players?) game to even be able to notice the improvement.
I had one of those! It was my favorite watch. Until you switched it into calculator mode, there was no way to tell (other than tiny + - / x labels) that it was a calculator.
It had two LCD displays stacked, one normal watch with big numbers and lots of info, and the other with calculator digits at the top and the rest of the screen with the numeric keypad.
I think the dual LCD aspect make it coller than the $600 thing pictured.
I wish I could get a hold of one of the old Casis, mine broke years ago or I'd still be using it.
No way this would work.
:-)
The whole reason TiVo is so good at what it does is that you have people taking chanel data and hand-editing the goofs and problems, as well as using an expensive feed that is very accurate.
There simply is no source of guide data available for free that gives data weeks in advance and also keeps track of changes like sudden presidental speeches and lineup and program switches.
For freeing me of the "of my god it's 7:53 and I need to go home NOW or miss my show" crap, I have no problem with $10 a month.
TiVo doesn't simply chainge your viewing habits, it changes your life.
--
Ian
I have been a subsriber at Baen for almost two years now. It's great to get books before they are published, cheaper than for paper, and I always have something to read (with my PDA).
They need more press, I can't think of any other publisher that has done as much to promote unencrypted and even free ebooks.