Nah, the N64 was launched right around SGI's peak. If it was past their peak, it was soon enough afterwards that people didn't think there was anything wrong. It was probably about 2 years, give or take, after the N64 launch that SGI's troubles became obvious.
in the end Nintendo is usually posting profits for the year (their quarter profits are hit and miss though)
That's putting it a little lightly. Nintendo has only had one unprofitable quarter ever since going public, and has always been profitable for the year. That one quarter Nintendo was unprofitable was due to the US dollar dropping in value substantially compared to the Yen. Nintendo always invests profits in the currency it was earned in, which in the overall scheme limits their risk from currency fluctuations, even if it did hurt them that quarter.
No it wasn't. When they first announced the launch price, they said $249. A few weeks before launch they decided to drop it to $199.
Rumor has it that the price drop was apparently a large part of Nintendo's falling out with SGI, as SGI's cut was a percentage rather than a fixed amount. I have no idea how accurate that claim is though.
Read what you just pasted. It simply says if you're going slower than the normal speed of traffic, keep to the right unless you have have a good reason not to. Good reasons being you have to make a left turn, or you want to pass someone going even slower than you are. As long as you're keeping up with traffic you can stay in the left lane, at least according to your excerpt.
In other words, videogames TRAIN the players to become better and more effective criminals. I don't know about you, but the thought gives me the creeps.
Why don't you start complaining about Law & Order or CSI then? After all, those shows show a crime, then show where the criminal goofed that allowed him to be caught.
Those shows teach far more about being an effective criminal than GTA does. You also have to try pretty hard to avoid being exposed to those shows, as most hours of the day you can find at least one of them showing on TV.
I'm getting a negative aura from this reporting. I don't think a weird controller is going to awe enough people to their platform.
It worked for the DS. And unlike the Xbox 360 and PS3, you don't have to buy an expensive new TV to get a significant difference compared to the old system.
IIRC, the last I heard from the big cheese at Nintendo is that they are working with augmented reality for their next generation of consoles,
Don't know where you heard that. Probably some random rumor site before Nintendo said anything. The rumor sites predicated practically everything but what Nintendo actually ended up doing.
and now we are getting a speed bump and a hard to use, tiny controller?
Nintendo has been saying for the past few years that we don't need more powerful machines. The controller is small because it's one handed. Once you realize that, it seems to fit well in people's hands - at least in the pictures. As to hard to use, everyone who's tried it has said it was great. Do you know something no one else does?
Is Nintendo still doing the whole "this console is for kids" thing?
Still doing? They never did. Bright colors does not mean kids game. Try something like Mario Sunshine sometime. The difficulty level is way to high for most kids. Things like Smash Bros & Mario Kart are big college dorm games. Pokemon, and to a lesser extent Kirby, are the only major things Nintendo really aims at kids.
No they don't. Using the same prefixes to mean the same things for distance, weight, volume, current, power, time, and most other derived units, and using the same one to mean something different for storage, data transmission rates, and binary addressable storage, especially when there's a valid alternative makes no sense at all.
The computer world has used Kilobyte and the like to mean base 2 units from the beginning. Kibibyte and the like is fairly recent. Hard disk makers used base 10 units long before anyone considered creating seperate terms for base 2 units. You can attempt to use that as a justification now, but the original reasoning was very clearly to make the number sound bigger.
Besides, the only people who actually use kibibyte and the like are pedantic Slashdot readers. You're not even going to find those terms used in textbooks.
Here you see what happens when only binary blobs are available. At some stage even your old hardware will stop working because the manufacturer will not provide updated binary blobs drivers.
This is what happens when your kernel developers refuse to provide a stable driver API.
Yes, it would be better if drivers were open, but it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue if Linux provided a stable driver API. It'd make everyone's lives easier if the APIs were more stable. People who won't release an open driver for whatever reason would at least be more likely to develop closed drivers, users already using closed drivers would have less issues going forward, and people writing drivers would no longer have to worry about hitting a constantly moving target.
Yes we do! Sure, drive surface mapping may be done using 512 byte sectors, but the data is USED in 8 bit chunks called bytes. And when you perform reads and writes it is possible to do so with 1 byte at a time, regardless of the sector size of a device this is how the file system is used.
In your application code, yes, you can access one byte at a time. But the OS can't. If you request 1 byte, the OS reads 512 off the disk and gives you the first one. Likewise, if you write 1 byte, the OS has to read 512 off the disk, modify the 1 byte you want to change, then write all 512 back. Accessing 1 byte at a time is completely arbitrary. It's something common to do, but there is no reason inherent to how a disk drive works for it. You could say accessing 32 bits at once is just as natural. It doesn't make a difference to the hard drive, but most CPUs are optimized for accessing data of that size.
Actually, the advertised drive size these days is technicaly smaller than the actual addressable space. For example, take this Western Digital 80GB IDE drive I have here. Advertised as 80GB yet I show a formatted (NTFS) capacity of 80,015,491,072 bytes. This is more than 80,000,000,000 correct? And this is formatted, which means the actual drive space is much larger but some of it has been taken by the NTFS tables. You are correct that there are several ways we can count "bytes" on the drive's surface. But as for the advertising end of things, the published sizes are fair.
You completely missed what I was saying. 80 GB using base 2 units comes out to 85,899,345,920 bytes. Using base 2 units, your 80 GB hard disk is only 74.5 GB. Base 2 units make more sense, as your software and RAM use them for measurements, and the disk size inherently is based on a power of two. 80 GB gets put on the box though because it's a larger number.
Also, the filesystem overhead is not subtracted from the capacity. It's subtracted from the free space. If you format a disk and don't put anything on it, you'll see there is already space used.
Well, this is a good reason, but my stated reasoning about how measurements are taken in the first place is the actual reason behind this. In the end it has nothing to do with accounting for overheard in protocol and every thing to do with how measurements are taken in the first place. If your measuring serial data streams then your unit size is bits, period.
You again missed the point. Your argument doesn't even make sense. If you ignore overhead, using bits versus bytes becomes a completely arbitrary distinction. If you're just going to get bytes by dividing by 8 every time, then it doesn't matter which units you use. There is no difference between 1 byte per second vs 8 bits per second unless you factor in the control bits. Arguing that would be like complaining someone gave a measurement in megabits instead of just bits. After all, you have to measure the bits one at a time. It's not like you know you transferred a megabit unless you're counting the bits along the way.
Ever notice how modems were measured in baud rather than bps? A 2400 baud modem was capable of transmitting about 240 bytes per second. Note that's 1/10th the advertised speed. That would be 8 bits plus 1 start bit and 1 stop bit per byte transferred using the standard 8 bits per byte, no parity, 1 stop bit settings. 7 bits per byte, even parity, 1 stop bit also used to be common in the early text only BBS days. You had plenty of other options to choose from as well, but it was rare they were used.
I stand by what I said. Bits are the unit used because it is a clear, precise measurement. If you used bytes, every measurement would have to have a paragraph qualifying how they were transmitted to be able to compare the numbers.
Storage is measured in full bytes because that is how we use the space, because we read or write in whole 8 bit chunks at a time. Storage is parrellel, networks are (mostly) serial.
No we don't. Disks the smallest addressable unit of a disk is a sector. On most hard disks, a sector is 512 bytes (some are moving to 4096 in the near future). CD sectors are 2352 bytes (before sectors).
If the concept of using bits or bytes for measurement was driven by marketing then don't you think hard drive manufacturers would use bits instead? That would always be a much larger number! But it's not marketing that determines which is used, bytes or bits, it's a matter of speaking in parrellel or serial data streams.
Hard disk size measurement is driven by marketing. That's why the sizes are measured using base 10 units rather than base 2. Considering that the size of a hard disk must be a multiple of 512 bytes, it makes a lot more sense to use base 2 measurements. However, base 10 results in larger numbers, hence it gets used.
The most logical reason to use bits per second for raw bandwidth is because it is an unambiguous measurement. When you actually start to transmit data, you usually add in some combination of start, stop, and parity bits. These settings tend to be customized to suit the needs of the connection, and result in a different number of bits being necessary to transfer one byte. Think back to the old modem days when you'd have to set your modem to things like 8-N-1 or 7-E-1. Those settings change how many bits it takes to transfer one byte.
I don't believe that. I've seen projects that extract the N64 emulator from the Ocarina of Time/Master Quest Bonus Disc, and I've seen ROM dumps of Master Quest that play on N64 emulators.
I haven't seen dumps, but I've heard reports comparing the emulator found on the compilation disc with the emulator on the Ocarina of Time disc. The compilation disc one supposedly gets better framerates than the older one.
As for the compilation disc, why would Nintendo choose to port the games considering it's well established that they created an N64 emulator the the Ocarina of Time disc? The Compilation Disc was just a free giveaway, so they weren't making money off of it. The N64 and GameCube hardware are very different, so it's wouldn't be just a simple port.
The Super GameBoy and GameBoy Player aren't emulators. They are actual GameBoy motherboards in different casing, with the i/o routed through the host console.
All old Zeldas made available for the GameCube are emulated. Metroid 1 in Metroid Prime is emulated as well. All NES games in Animal Crossing are emulated (both when played on the GameCube or loaded onto the GBA). The Classic NES Series of GBA games are emulated as well.
There are actually some homebrew projects out there that will take the NES & N64 emulators off the Zelda Collection discs and allow you to use them with other games.
What's the difference? Link to the Past had a cartoonish graphical style very similar to Wind Waker, and the animations tended to be exaggerated like in cartoons (think Pegasus Boots related stuff in particular).
This guy seems to take the time to thoroughly evaluate each release of each major distro and each major software package he might consider using. He then switches whenever he finds one that's slightly better than what he was using before. How can you possibly do anything significant with your computer if you spend that much changing the software?
There's no concept of 'checking for existing entries on import' - importing the same folder will just give you each track twice...
I've had the opposite problem. If I import a folder again, iTunes will gladly skip over the files already in the library, however, it will leave the files that are no longer there in the library.
If you think PHP is ugly, try looking at ColdFusion. Same basic idea as PHP, but you get to write you code in HTML style syntax. You also get Fortran style operators (gte instead of >=, lt instead of <, etc) Damn near impossible to quickly glance at large block of code and figure out what's going on. The code doesn't stand out from the HTML, and you've got a ton of keywords due to all the information being passed HTML attribute style.
Fun stuff like this...
<cfloop index="i" from="0" to="10" step="1"> <cfif i mod 2 is 1> <cfoutput>#i# is odd</cfoutput> <cfelse> <cfoutput>#i# is even</cfoutput> </cfif> </cfloop>
You also get some really odd language decisions. For example, when they first added support for functions there were no return values. To work around this, you had a special local variable called "caller" which was a structure containing the local variables of the previous scope. They eventually fixed this, but PHP's language problems don't look so bad compared to that.
Windows did its own memory management, but it avoided as much hardware interfacing as possible. You needed to load DOS drivers for any drives other than a floppy or a standard hard disk. Windows didn't do any disk caching on its own and required the DOS cache, Smartdrive, if you wanted any. SCSI and Ethernet cards needed DOS drivers loaded. Windows really only had its own sound and printer drivers, but so did every DOS application. I had very little experience with scanners back then, but I seem to remember the standard procedure was you'd load a DOS driver for your scanner which did the real work, and then install Windows TWAIN drivers which exposed the scanner functionality under a standarized API.
That said, I still consider Windows 3.x an OS. The competitors to Win 3.x did the same thing. Let DOS handle the drivers when there already was a standardized system in place, but do the rest yourself.
The holdup of the AACS stuff for BluRay means that Sony is stockpiling the components for the PS3 and will have millions of units ready to ship by November this year. Sony could have shipped about 500k to Japan in June/July but decided to go with a worldwide release in November. Too bad for Japan, no change for the US, and good news for Europe.
Or it could mean Sony is delaying all manufacturing and taking the time to upgrade the manufacturing plants. It would certainly drop the cost of the PS3 if Sony was able to get in a die shrink before launch.
I was a big fan... until I needed to use PostgreSQL 7 for a real (commercially available) product.
PostgreSQL 7 is ancient. There have already been multiple releases in the 8 series. I never worked significantly with 7, so I can't comment on it much, but with 8.x I haven't had the problems you've talked about.
Nested parentheses in SQL can cause an engine crash. " like... (SELECT A INNER JOIN B) INNER JOIN..." But the crashing is tolerable. Hand-holding the query optimizer is not. Quite often, the optimizer gets the query plan wrong. Sending special commands to disable internal features is often the only resort.
I've never seen 8.x crash, even when I've thrown gigantic, deeply nested queries at it. The optimizer definitely needs to be tweaked though. I've noticed that it tends to favor sequential scans over index scans too often. This is fixable by weighting factors in the config file. I will say that it does take some experimenting to get the configuration tuned properly, which is probably the biggest weakness in the 8.x series.
While it's true that PostgreSQL is more database than most corporate weenies need, it falls down in moderate write environments. It's best used for systems that write data very infrequently, otherwise it fragments quickly. The only solution to table and database fragmentation is dump & reload.
Those are issues you'll only have if you refuse to run vacuum at reasonable intervals. PostgreSQL has some support for clustering tables. It's only a one time thing that doesn't get maintained during writes, but, periodically running it will solve your fragmentation issues (which wouldn't exist if you just ran vacuum).
The 8.x series also includes support for autovacuum, which should eliminate the issue completely.
Ingres was an early database project. IIRC it was designed at Berkeley. Various modern databases, such as Sybase and MS SQL Server, have their roots in Ingres.
Postgres was a fork of Ingres. I'm not sure the history of how it started.
Postgres was renamed/forked (not sure which) to PostgreSQL when it was changed to use SQL as the query language.
In Japan, the original DS sold out nationwide right around Christmas and never had any significant shipments after that. You basically had a 2-3 month span where it was really hard to find a DS. I don't think anyone got cheated there. If you had to have one for Christmas, you got one. If not, you're getting the better one.
When Nintendo announced the Japanese release of the DS Lite about a month ago, they also announced that the US would be getting it in late spring. Even if the DS Lite comes out in early May like rumored, that's still 3 months notice. Considering all games will work on both systems, I think that's pretty reasonable.
The DS Lite selling out twice really isn't that surprising. The DS has been consistantly selling well in Japan. The DS redesign rumors started because the original DS has been completely sold out in Japan for months. People assumed - correctly - that the reason for the shortage was Nintendo revamping the production lines for a new model. Now that the new model is out, Nintendo can't even ship the quantities they were originally intending. If Nintendo announces the date of the next shipment, I wouldn't be surprised to see it sell out quickly as well.
It is time to realize that government is NOT good at regulating business, except from the point of view of the cronies. Bills like this will rarely be used for their original intent, and the un?-intended consequence in the long run is to see criminals made of innocents that had nothing to do with the law's purpose.
Yes, of course, by removing the threat of punishment for screwing over other people, corrupt businessmen everywhere will suddenly see the error in their ways and change. Why didn't anyone think of this before?
The law was initially meant to "fix" problems such as the Enron fiasco, but if you rewind just a few years, you see that most of these fiascos came directly out of trying to take advantage of loopholes in previous laws.
The Enron fiasco was caused by people in power who thought they could get away with stealing. They did for a while, but eventually went too far and everything collapsed.
Society is complex. No matter what legal and economic systems you come up with, there will always be ways for people to take advantage of them.
Your approach is equivalent to Microsoft saying "Well, its impossible to make a modern computer system 100% secure and bug free, therefore, we are going to remove all security features from Windows. Users will be on their own to figure out how to keep their computer running."
That really depends on what station you're listening to. FM has its fair share of inherent quality loss. The quality is also very dependant on what station you're listening to. Some of the New York stations are horrible - Z100 in particular.
In general, I'd put XM's quality either light above or equal to that of FM, with Sirius around the quality of a low end FM station. XM tends to sacrifice the low frequencies in favor of the highs. I guess if you're into bass driven music you might not like it, but for the average rock song you won't notice. As for Sirius, I think they're bandwidth constrained and chose to drop the bitrate a little too much to fit more channels in.
You should try listening to XM before you bash it. The sound quality is definitely noticably better than on Sirius. It's rare that I have any complaints about the sound quality on XM, but Sirius really makes me cringe sometimes. The talk stations aren't great on either, but Sirius's talk stations are especially bad.
XM's web streaming, otoh, ugh, that's barely listenable at best. Haven't heard Sirius's yet so I can't compare that.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah, the N64 was launched right around SGI's peak. If it was past their peak, it was soon enough afterwards that people didn't think there was anything wrong. It was probably about 2 years, give or take, after the N64 launch that SGI's troubles became obvious.
in the end Nintendo is usually posting profits for the year (their quarter profits are hit and miss though)
That's putting it a little lightly. Nintendo has only had one unprofitable quarter ever since going public, and has always been profitable for the year. That one quarter Nintendo was unprofitable was due to the US dollar dropping in value substantially compared to the Yen. Nintendo always invests profits in the currency it was earned in, which in the overall scheme limits their risk from currency fluctuations, even if it did hurt them that quarter.
The Nintendo 64 was $249 sans game. :)
No it wasn't. When they first announced the launch price, they said $249. A few weeks before launch they decided to drop it to $199.
Rumor has it that the price drop was apparently a large part of Nintendo's falling out with SGI, as SGI's cut was a percentage rather than a fixed amount. I have no idea how accurate that claim is though.
Read what you just pasted. It simply says if you're going slower than the normal speed of traffic, keep to the right unless you have have a good reason not to. Good reasons being you have to make a left turn, or you want to pass someone going even slower than you are. As long as you're keeping up with traffic you can stay in the left lane, at least according to your excerpt.
In other words, videogames TRAIN the players to become better and more effective criminals. I don't know about you, but the thought gives me the creeps.
Why don't you start complaining about Law & Order or CSI then? After all, those shows show a crime, then show where the criminal goofed that allowed him to be caught.
Those shows teach far more about being an effective criminal than GTA does. You also have to try pretty hard to avoid being exposed to those shows, as most hours of the day you can find at least one of them showing on TV.
I'm getting a negative aura from this reporting. I don't think a weird controller is going to awe enough people to their platform.
It worked for the DS. And unlike the Xbox 360 and PS3, you don't have to buy an expensive new TV to get a significant difference compared to the old system.
IIRC, the last I heard from the big cheese at Nintendo is that they are working with augmented reality for their next generation of consoles,
Don't know where you heard that. Probably some random rumor site before Nintendo said anything. The rumor sites predicated practically everything but what Nintendo actually ended up doing.
and now we are getting a speed bump and a hard to use, tiny controller?
Nintendo has been saying for the past few years that we don't need more powerful machines. The controller is small because it's one handed. Once you realize that, it seems to fit well in people's hands - at least in the pictures. As to hard to use, everyone who's tried it has said it was great. Do you know something no one else does?
Is Nintendo still doing the whole "this console is for kids" thing?
Still doing? They never did. Bright colors does not mean kids game. Try something like Mario Sunshine sometime. The difficulty level is way to high for most kids. Things like Smash Bros & Mario Kart are big college dorm games. Pokemon, and to a lesser extent Kirby, are the only major things Nintendo really aims at kids.
No they don't. Using the same prefixes to mean the same things for distance, weight, volume, current, power, time, and most other derived units, and using the same one to mean something different for storage, data transmission rates, and binary addressable storage, especially when there's a valid alternative makes no sense at all.
The computer world has used Kilobyte and the like to mean base 2 units from the beginning. Kibibyte and the like is fairly recent. Hard disk makers used base 10 units long before anyone considered creating seperate terms for base 2 units. You can attempt to use that as a justification now, but the original reasoning was very clearly to make the number sound bigger.
Besides, the only people who actually use kibibyte and the like are pedantic Slashdot readers. You're not even going to find those terms used in textbooks.
Here you see what happens when only binary blobs are available. At some stage even your old hardware will stop working because the manufacturer will not provide updated binary blobs drivers.
This is what happens when your kernel developers refuse to provide a stable driver API.
Yes, it would be better if drivers were open, but it wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue if Linux provided a stable driver API. It'd make everyone's lives easier if the APIs were more stable. People who won't release an open driver for whatever reason would at least be more likely to develop closed drivers, users already using closed drivers would have less issues going forward, and people writing drivers would no longer have to worry about hitting a constantly moving target.
Yes we do! Sure, drive surface mapping may be done using 512 byte sectors, but the data is USED in 8 bit chunks called bytes. And when you perform reads and writes it is possible to do so with 1 byte at a time, regardless of the sector size of a device this is how the file system is used.
In your application code, yes, you can access one byte at a time. But the OS can't. If you request 1 byte, the OS reads 512 off the disk and gives you the first one. Likewise, if you write 1 byte, the OS has to read 512 off the disk, modify the 1 byte you want to change, then write all 512 back. Accessing 1 byte at a time is completely arbitrary. It's something common to do, but there is no reason inherent to how a disk drive works for it. You could say accessing 32 bits at once is just as natural. It doesn't make a difference to the hard drive, but most CPUs are optimized for accessing data of that size.
Actually, the advertised drive size these days is technicaly smaller than the actual addressable space. For example, take this Western Digital 80GB IDE drive I have here. Advertised as 80GB yet I show a formatted (NTFS) capacity of 80,015,491,072 bytes. This is more than 80,000,000,000 correct? And this is formatted, which means the actual drive space is much larger but some of it has been taken by the NTFS tables. You are correct that there are several ways we can count "bytes" on the drive's surface. But as for the advertising end of things, the published sizes are fair.
You completely missed what I was saying. 80 GB using base 2 units comes out to 85,899,345,920 bytes. Using base 2 units, your 80 GB hard disk is only 74.5 GB. Base 2 units make more sense, as your software and RAM use them for measurements, and the disk size inherently is based on a power of two. 80 GB gets put on the box though because it's a larger number.
Also, the filesystem overhead is not subtracted from the capacity. It's subtracted from the free space. If you format a disk and don't put anything on it, you'll see there is already space used.
Well, this is a good reason, but my stated reasoning about how measurements are taken in the first place is the actual reason behind this. In the end it has nothing to do with accounting for overheard in protocol and every thing to do with how measurements are taken in the first place. If your measuring serial data streams then your unit size is bits, period.
You again missed the point. Your argument doesn't even make sense. If you ignore overhead, using bits versus bytes becomes a completely arbitrary distinction. If you're just going to get bytes by dividing by 8 every time, then it doesn't matter which units you use. There is no difference between 1 byte per second vs 8 bits per second unless you factor in the control bits. Arguing that would be like complaining someone gave a measurement in megabits instead of just bits. After all, you have to measure the bits one at a time. It's not like you know you transferred a megabit unless you're counting the bits along the way.
Ever notice how modems were measured in baud rather than bps? A 2400 baud modem was capable of transmitting about 240 bytes per second. Note that's 1/10th the advertised speed. That would be 8 bits plus 1 start bit and 1 stop bit per byte transferred using the standard 8 bits per byte, no parity, 1 stop bit settings. 7 bits per byte, even parity, 1 stop bit also used to be common in the early text only BBS days. You had plenty of other options to choose from as well, but it was rare they were used.
I stand by what I said. Bits are the unit used because it is a clear, precise measurement. If you used bytes, every measurement would have to have a paragraph qualifying how they were transmitted to be able to compare the numbers.
Storage is measured in full bytes because that is how we use the space, because we read or write in whole 8 bit chunks at a time. Storage is parrellel, networks are (mostly) serial.
No we don't. Disks the smallest addressable unit of a disk is a sector. On most hard disks, a sector is 512 bytes (some are moving to 4096 in the near future). CD sectors are 2352 bytes (before sectors).
If the concept of using bits or bytes for measurement was driven by marketing then don't you think hard drive manufacturers would use bits instead? That would always be a much larger number! But it's not marketing that determines which is used, bytes or bits, it's a matter of speaking in parrellel or serial data streams.
Hard disk size measurement is driven by marketing. That's why the sizes are measured using base 10 units rather than base 2. Considering that the size of a hard disk must be a multiple of 512 bytes, it makes a lot more sense to use base 2 measurements. However, base 10 results in larger numbers, hence it gets used.
The most logical reason to use bits per second for raw bandwidth is because it is an unambiguous measurement. When you actually start to transmit data, you usually add in some combination of start, stop, and parity bits. These settings tend to be customized to suit the needs of the connection, and result in a different number of bits being necessary to transfer one byte. Think back to the old modem days when you'd have to set your modem to things like 8-N-1 or 7-E-1. Those settings change how many bits it takes to transfer one byte.
I don't believe that. I've seen projects that extract the N64 emulator from the Ocarina of Time/Master Quest Bonus Disc, and I've seen ROM dumps of Master Quest that play on N64 emulators.
I haven't seen dumps, but I've heard reports comparing the emulator found on the compilation disc with the emulator on the Ocarina of Time disc. The compilation disc one supposedly gets better framerates than the older one.
As for the compilation disc, why would Nintendo choose to port the games considering it's well established that they created an N64 emulator the the Ocarina of Time disc? The Compilation Disc was just a free giveaway, so they weren't making money off of it. The N64 and GameCube hardware are very different, so it's wouldn't be just a simple port.
The Super GameBoy and GameBoy Player aren't emulators. They are actual GameBoy motherboards in different casing, with the i/o routed through the host console.
All old Zeldas made available for the GameCube are emulated. Metroid 1 in Metroid Prime is emulated as well. All NES games in Animal Crossing are emulated (both when played on the GameCube or loaded onto the GBA). The Classic NES Series of GBA games are emulated as well.
There are actually some homebrew projects out there that will take the NES & N64 emulators off the Zelda Collection discs and allow you to use them with other games.
What's the difference? Link to the Past had a cartoonish graphical style very similar to Wind Waker, and the animations tended to be exaggerated like in cartoons (think Pegasus Boots related stuff in particular).
This guy seems to take the time to thoroughly evaluate each release of each major distro and each major software package he might consider using. He then switches whenever he finds one that's slightly better than what he was using before. How can you possibly do anything significant with your computer if you spend that much changing the software?
There's no concept of 'checking for existing entries on import' - importing the same folder will just give you each track twice...
I've had the opposite problem. If I import a folder again, iTunes will gladly skip over the files already in the library, however, it will leave the files that are no longer there in the library.
If you think PHP is ugly, try looking at ColdFusion. Same basic idea as PHP, but you get to write you code in HTML style syntax. You also get Fortran style operators (gte instead of >=, lt instead of <, etc) Damn near impossible to quickly glance at large block of code and figure out what's going on. The code doesn't stand out from the HTML, and you've got a ton of keywords due to all the information being passed HTML attribute style.
Fun stuff like this...
<cfloop index="i" from="0" to="10" step="1">
<cfif i mod 2 is 1>
<cfoutput>#i# is odd</cfoutput>
<cfelse>
<cfoutput>#i# is even</cfoutput>
</cfif>
</cfloop>
You also get some really odd language decisions. For example, when they first added support for functions there were no return values. To work around this, you had a special local variable called "caller" which was a structure containing the local variables of the previous scope. They eventually fixed this, but PHP's language problems don't look so bad compared to that.
Windows did its own memory management, but it avoided as much hardware interfacing as possible. You needed to load DOS drivers for any drives other than a floppy or a standard hard disk. Windows didn't do any disk caching on its own and required the DOS cache, Smartdrive, if you wanted any. SCSI and Ethernet cards needed DOS drivers loaded. Windows really only had its own sound and printer drivers, but so did every DOS application. I had very little experience with scanners back then, but I seem to remember the standard procedure was you'd load a DOS driver for your scanner which did the real work, and then install Windows TWAIN drivers which exposed the scanner functionality under a standarized API.
That said, I still consider Windows 3.x an OS. The competitors to Win 3.x did the same thing. Let DOS handle the drivers when there already was a standardized system in place, but do the rest yourself.
The holdup of the AACS stuff for BluRay means that Sony is stockpiling the components for the PS3 and will have millions of units ready to ship by November this year. Sony could have shipped about 500k to Japan in June/July but decided to go with a worldwide release in November. Too bad for Japan, no change for the US, and good news for Europe.
Or it could mean Sony is delaying all manufacturing and taking the time to upgrade the manufacturing plants. It would certainly drop the cost of the PS3 if Sony was able to get in a die shrink before launch.
I was a big fan... until I needed to use PostgreSQL 7 for a real (commercially available) product.
... (SELECT A INNER JOIN B) INNER JOIN ..." But the crashing is tolerable. Hand-holding the query optimizer is not. Quite often, the optimizer gets the query plan wrong. Sending special commands to disable internal features is often the only resort.
PostgreSQL 7 is ancient. There have already been multiple releases in the 8 series. I never worked significantly with 7, so I can't comment on it much, but with 8.x I haven't had the problems you've talked about.
Nested parentheses in SQL can cause an engine crash. " like
I've never seen 8.x crash, even when I've thrown gigantic, deeply nested queries at it. The optimizer definitely needs to be tweaked though. I've noticed that it tends to favor sequential scans over index scans too often. This is fixable by weighting factors in the config file. I will say that it does take some experimenting to get the configuration tuned properly, which is probably the biggest weakness in the 8.x series.
While it's true that PostgreSQL is more database than most corporate weenies need, it falls down in moderate write environments. It's best used for systems that write data very infrequently, otherwise it fragments quickly. The only solution to table and database fragmentation is dump & reload.
Those are issues you'll only have if you refuse to run vacuum at reasonable intervals. PostgreSQL has some support for clustering tables. It's only a one time thing that doesn't get maintained during writes, but, periodically running it will solve your fragmentation issues (which wouldn't exist if you just ran vacuum).
The 8.x series also includes support for autovacuum, which should eliminate the issue completely.
Ingres was an early database project. IIRC it was designed at Berkeley. Various modern databases, such as Sybase and MS SQL Server, have their roots in Ingres.
Postgres was a fork of Ingres. I'm not sure the history of how it started.
Postgres was renamed/forked (not sure which) to PostgreSQL when it was changed to use SQL as the query language.
In Japan, the original DS sold out nationwide right around Christmas and never had any significant shipments after that. You basically had a 2-3 month span where it was really hard to find a DS. I don't think anyone got cheated there. If you had to have one for Christmas, you got one. If not, you're getting the better one.
When Nintendo announced the Japanese release of the DS Lite about a month ago, they also announced that the US would be getting it in late spring. Even if the DS Lite comes out in early May like rumored, that's still 3 months notice. Considering all games will work on both systems, I think that's pretty reasonable.
The DS Lite selling out twice really isn't that surprising. The DS has been consistantly selling well in Japan. The DS redesign rumors started because the original DS has been completely sold out in Japan for months. People assumed - correctly - that the reason for the shortage was Nintendo revamping the production lines for a new model. Now that the new model is out, Nintendo can't even ship the quantities they were originally intending. If Nintendo announces the date of the next shipment, I wouldn't be surprised to see it sell out quickly as well.
It is time to realize that government is NOT good at regulating business, except from the point of view of the cronies. Bills like this will rarely be used for their original intent, and the un?-intended consequence in the long run is to see criminals made of innocents that had nothing to do with the law's purpose.
Yes, of course, by removing the threat of punishment for screwing over other people, corrupt businessmen everywhere will suddenly see the error in their ways and change. Why didn't anyone think of this before?
The law was initially meant to "fix" problems such as the Enron fiasco, but if you rewind just a few years, you see that most of these fiascos came directly out of trying to take advantage of loopholes in previous laws.
The Enron fiasco was caused by people in power who thought they could get away with stealing. They did for a while, but eventually went too far and everything collapsed.
Society is complex. No matter what legal and economic systems you come up with, there will always be ways for people to take advantage of them.
Your approach is equivalent to Microsoft saying "Well, its impossible to make a modern computer system 100% secure and bug free, therefore, we are going to remove all security features from Windows. Users will be on their own to figure out how to keep their computer running."
That really depends on what station you're listening to. FM has its fair share of inherent quality loss. The quality is also very dependant on what station you're listening to. Some of the New York stations are horrible - Z100 in particular.
In general, I'd put XM's quality either light above or equal to that of FM, with Sirius around the quality of a low end FM station. XM tends to sacrifice the low frequencies in favor of the highs. I guess if you're into bass driven music you might not like it, but for the average rock song you won't notice. As for Sirius, I think they're bandwidth constrained and chose to drop the bitrate a little too much to fit more channels in.
You should try listening to XM before you bash it. The sound quality is definitely noticably better than on Sirius. It's rare that I have any complaints about the sound quality on XM, but Sirius really makes me cringe sometimes. The talk stations aren't great on either, but Sirius's talk stations are especially bad.
XM's web streaming, otoh, ugh, that's barely listenable at best. Haven't heard Sirius's yet so I can't compare that.