I'll grant you that that certainly isn't verbose, but there's no way in hell you can say that isn't hard to read. Even the average Perl script is easier to read than that. What does #' mean?
I'm assuming the C++ code is overloading the less than operator. The ugliness of that C++ code isn't from the language, it's from the odd naming scheme used. About the only thing not completely self explanatory in the example is the return value of compareString, but that return value convention is a pretty standard thing.
This you can at least figure out what it's doing fairly easily. It takes a bit of thinking about it to parse though as the syntax isn't at all natural. Without knowing Lisp, it's not at all obvious why things are grouped the way they are. The order of things is a little weird too. "s1 string s2" and "s1 s2 string" both seem more logical a syntax than "string s1 s2".
The verbosity of C++ code is nice because you can read it out loud and understand what it's doing. Lambda expressions might be easy to read if your idea of a good time is solving graph theory problems, but otherwise they really aren't clear.
Just a few thoughts in response to your questions.
The GBA got 20 hours out of 2 AA's, I'll believe 10 hours for this system. It's got a lot better hardware than the GBA, but it's got several years of technology evolution to help reduce the power usage.
To give you an idea of resolutions, the GBA is 240x160. I think the DS is 256x192 for each screen. Most N64 games ran at 320x240, with a few at 640x480 (and usually only with the RAM upgrade). I think most PS1 games were 320x240 as well.
BTW, most game manufacturers do profit from the hardware. It's only those that are desperate for marketshare that don't (Microsoft and Sega with the Saturn). But in the end there's much more money to be made from games.
Maybe the patient should decide what treatments they want to pursue (experimental or otherwise), rather than the government.
That already happens now to an extent. If you go to an oncologist, depending on your cancer, you'll be offered an assortment of treatments to choose from. Some will already be approved, others will be in experimental stages. You won't be offered it though unless it has gone through some early testing. The first stage of testing is to figure out two things: First, if there are any show stopper side effects, and second, if there is any indication that the treatment actually does anything. Before that level of testing is done, you have no basis at all to make any claims about the risks or possible benefits of a treatment. Once it gets passed the early testing, it will go into clinical trials. You will be offered the chance to take part in them. There is another phase of testing after that, which you again will have the option of taking part in. I don't know all the details on that phase, but you are definitely given the treatment as opposed to the chance of being in a control group.
Really, the government is doing two things in the process. One is not letting drugs be tested on people until you have demonstrated a reason to believe the treatment won't cause problems worse than those it is trying to fix. The other is forcing the proper scientific method to be done for the testing process.
You're totally not understanding where the bottleneck is. The issue isn't if it's possible to push 480Mb/s out of one machine, or if it's possible to push it over a link rated at 480Mb/s. The issue is if it's possible to do it *using the original TCP standard*.
Each end of a TCP connection allocates a receive buffer. The available empty space in this buffer is mentioned as part of the header on every packet. A TCP implementation allowed to continue sending packets to the other machine as long as there is space in the buffer. If machine A says it has an 8 KB buffer, then machine B can send 8 KB without worrying. If machine B receives an ACK packet saying that there is free buffer space from machine A before it sends 8 KB, then it can keep on sending data. However, if 8 KB is sent before machine B hears anything from machine A, machine B is required to completely stop sending data until it receives an ACK indicating free buffer space.
The buffer size specified in the TCP header is a 16 byte number. This worked fine on slower networks, but according to the article it peaks around 10Mb/s. It becomes an issue of latency. Once you receive a packet, you need to be able to get an acknowledgement packet to the other machine before it can send out 64KB of data (counting the packet you just received). If you can't, the other machine stops sending data until it hears from you.
Sometime in the 90's when the problem first became an issue, a solution was developed. A new TCP option was created that indicated the buffer size in the TCP header was to be multiplied by a number specified during the initialization of the connection to get the true buffer size. Apparently MS only implemented this recently.
You obviously dont know what you're talking about. When a program under Unix is loaded and requires a library, that library is loaded in memory until the program no longer uses it. So if you do update a library on disk, as long your program is on memory it will use the library loaded on memory (the previous one) and won't use the newly installed once until it is restarted. New programs launched will use the new library.
You obviously didn't pay attention to anything I said. I specifically said that's what Unix does, and that it has the potential for problems.
The problem comes down to shared resources. The issue occurs when an API stays the same but the implementation changes. Here's an example. You have two programs that communicate with each other through the use of an API in a shared library. The communication can be via a file on disk, shared memory, or whatever else you choose. The API is fine, but the implementation turns out to have a flaw. A new version of the shared library fixes the bug in the implementation. This fix maintains perfect binary compatibility, however, it means that the corrected library cannot safely communicate with the flawed library. This is a complete non-issue if you only replace libraries on disk if they are not in use. If you overwrite the library on disk while it's in use, you will get conflicts between the already running applications and the newly launched applications.
Unix systems gladly replace system libraries that are in use, and just hope that not problems happen because two different versions of the same library are in use simultaneously. The further away from the core libraries you get, the lower the odds of a problem, but it's still a risk. The Unix approach is basically "Let's just go ahead and do it, it'll probably be ok."
Windows takes the safe approach of only updating libraries that are not in use. I'm sure you'd wind up with weird glitches if your apps were using multiple versions of GDI simultaneously. The Windows approach is "It may be ok to update this now, or it may not. Just to be safe, let's not update it until we can guarentee it's safe."
The Vista implementation is going to try to free up libraries, and if it can, will then update them in place. If not, you'll still have to reboot.
Google haven't figured out how to make a bunch of money on things like Gmail yet, so, because they ALSO don't want the support hassles if something goes wrong, they mark their product as "beta".
Gmail has been making money from the beginning. Ever notice those ads on the side of your email?
Google News is the hard one. The actual content is provided by other companies who are also trying to make money off of it. If Google pushes too hard to get their ads in, the companies providing the content will cut them off.
With the Revolution being estimated at 1/4th the price of both the systems, it doesnt look like Nintendo will be in trouble anytime soon even IF the controller idea doesnt work out.
That's just people dreaming. Think about it a little. The GameCube is currently $100. Although Nintendo isn't going to support HD resolutions, they have said the Revolution will have comparable graphics to the other next gen systems at non-HD resolutions. That's still significantly more powerful than the GameCube. The system is also going to have 512 MB of flash memory built in, which will add a bit to the cost. Realisticlly, you'll talking about launching at Nintendo's traditional $200 point.
Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, which even Shigeru Miyamoto now calls "boring" and basically unfinished. But it has a score of 94.9% on GameRankings, because the press bought the hype that they themselves helped create.
Miyamoto did not say Wind Waker is boring. He said the triforce hunt section of the game was boring. He did have a list of things he would do differently if he had more time to work on the game, but every game designer has a list like that for every game they have ever worked on.
The triforce hunt does get boring, but it's not that big a section of the game. The only other significant flaw in the game is that you have to get pretty far into the game before the enemies do a significant amount of damage to you, which means that once you get a couple hearts you pretty much can't die unless you're trying to. Despite the claims of the people who only played Ocarina of Time, the graphics fit in with the style of the rest of the series perfectly and are very well done. Quite honestly, if the development team had another 3 months or so to work on the game, it probably would have easily topped Ocarina of Time. In the end, it definitely is one of the better games in the series.
Typical distros that support pervasive no-reboot updating (like Debian) don't exactly replace a "running" libc (or any other library), they simply update the on-disk copy. So any programs run after that will get the new libc, but any programs that were started before the update will of course be using the old libc.
I remember upgrading from the last libc5 Debian to the first libc6 one. The output of "who" and related commands was messed up until I rebooted because the file that contains that info had a different format between libc5 and libc6. It got messed up a bit from having both running. In this particular case it wasn't something that really mattered, but it certainly shows the potential for problems.
Don't blame the union for the NHL lockout/strike. That labor dispute can be summed up as the owners one day woke up and realized "Wait... hockey isn't as popular as other sports. We can't have money vaults like Scrooge McDuck if we pay the players what we agreed to pay them. We need to find a way out of these contracts."
Don't offer someone a contract for more than you feel comfortable paying them. Don't blame the players for accepting an overvalued offer.
not having benchmarked them, i would guess that sql server would be faster on the same hardware.
From my testing, SQL Server would do simple queries like "select distinct a from b" far faster than Postgres would. If you don't use things like distinct or aggregate functions, Postgres will usually perform at worst a factor of 2 slower. When you got to complicated queries (around the point where you start considering using views to simplify things, or if you perform heavy calculations in the WHERE clause), Postgres would become much faster than SQL Server. I've seen queries that take hours in SQL Server take under a minute in Postgres. The only difference in the boxes being the SQL Server box having 1GB RAM vs 512 MB for Postgres.
Also, generally speaking, if you include the same table in your FROM clause multiple times, or both in your main query and in a subquery, SQL Server will usually crawl through your query. Postgres doesn't seem to care if you use the sample table multiple times in a query.
Before the really recent update, Slashdot's HTML was a horrible mess. I don't think you could've grafted AJAX onto that if you wanted to. So give them time before expecting anything majorly new.
Besides, you're not likely to see anything to results in less page loads. That would reduce advertising impressions.
Good gameplay is essential, but why should I care how well the character controls if I don't care about what he's doing?
Would a complex relationship between Mario and the Princess make the game any better?
Does anyone play Street Fighter for the endings?
Would Contra be any better if the aliens went on rants about why they were trying to take over the world?
Would giving Little Mac a backstory make you more likely to want to beat Mike Tyson?
More often than not, complex stories just drag a game down. They force a game into a linear progression and usually just result in a lot of gameplay sacrifices to meet the demands of the story.
At least with Open Source you have potentially thousands of programmers looking for security holes and reporting those security problems.
Open Source potentially has thousands of programmers working on the code, but also potentially as few as just the original author, or even zero if the author abandons it. Microsoft has thousands of programmers on their payroll working full time on their products.
Microsoft's problems come down to two things. One is the upper management insisting on integrating everything, hoping that once customers use one of their products they will use more of them. The other is Win32, which is horribly designed, but yet is the reason for their monopoly. The first problem won't change until you replace the executives with people content with coexisting with other companies, and the second will never change unless Windows at some point in time becomes irrelevant.
Clearly Windows needs to be completely re thought with NO concern for legacy apps. See also OS X.
But if they did that, why would you use Windows?
If you had to choose between Windows Rewrite, which isn't backwards compatible, Linux, and MacOS X, the appeal of the non Windows solutions is a lot higher than it is now.
My Oracle of Ages cartridge was sitting right in front of me, so I just checked that. Link always swings the sword left handed, regardless of whether it's on A or B. Well, if you face left or right, the animation is the same, just flipped, so one of them is left handed and one is right.
I can tell you flat out that Win98 Second Edition could not do it on my Compaq Armada 7400 laptop with it's ESS sound card. That computer could do it when I installed Win2000, but Win98 simply would not play multiple sounds at once.
For years, I had that computer and a desktop that had a SoundBlaster Live, both running Win98 Second Edition. The desktop could multiplex audio streams, but the laptop absolutely would not do it.
Well, given that Mozilla never achieved any significant market share, and Firefox took off because Moz moved away from monolithic preference-hell, the evidence seems to suggest you are wrong.
That's not why Firefox took off. Firefox took off because it was actually advertised. Mozilla.org supported projects such as SpreadFirefox and an ad in the New York Times.
The Suite, on the other hand, they went to every effort to make sure people didn't use it. There was never any push to make people use it. The official stance of Mozilla.org was "The suite is a reference implementation for developers only. Only use it if you know what you're doing. Otherwise, use something based off it such as Netscape." The Mozilla.org site stressed that message heavily. Also, the download page for the suite was loaded with warnings "This may be extremely buggy and may do bad things to your computer. Use at your own risk." Let's not forget it was only a year or two ago at most that they took down the big warning about possible Y2K bugs on the download page. About the only thing more they could've done to scare people away from the Suite was to make you click on a picture from goatse.cx to download the installer.
There might be a nice market amongst luddites and regressives, and those who think they are sticking it "to the man" by using something with such an aging and nasty interface.
How about people who think it's just plain stupid that you have to install a bunch of extensions and go making lots of changes in about:config just to get FireFox usable?
The only way that Mac and Windows and Linux are now able to do what BeOS was doing is that we now have 3GHZ processors in our computers, while BeOS was providing the same speed and responsiveness on much slower machines. The threading of BeOS is one of it major strengths, and windows is JUST NOW (with vista) starting to implement the idea in full.
You sound like the typical GEOS user did years ago. As they learned back then, it doesn't matter what you did before Windows or better than it. The only thing that matters is "Is the current version of Windows good enough?" It doesn't matter if it takes a multi-gigahertz computer to make Windows as fast as other OS's because a 2.5ghz machine is considered slow nowadays. You have to be leaps and bounds better than Windows to stand a chance against it.
It is like when Windows98 allowed multiple audio streams to be processed and play simultaneously. Not a single review even noticed this, but yet it was a big step ahead in consumer OSes. LDDM is basically doing this with GPUs and video - and on a much grander scale.
Win98 didn't support multiple sound streams simultaneously. If you had that functionality, it's because you had a sound card such as the SoundBlaster Live that had hardware support for it.
As a NJ resident, I gotta agree. Considering you can't really dig in the soil or swim in a river without getting sick here, what's a few mice with the plague gonna do?
Besides, you can't go very far in Jersey without running into a Superfund site, so the mice probably already have cancer.
The N64 launched in Japan with the analog stick, at which point Sega copied it and actually managed to release it in the US before the N64 launched there.
That's why Nintendo didn't want to reveal their hand too early with the controller.
* drive no faster than 55, try to use the brakes as little as possible by keeping an above-average distance from the vehicle in front and driving smoothly. * don't use cruise control if you can help it (it keeps constant speed not constant throttle and can't account for, say, wanting to keep excess momentum right before going up a hill).
At least from my experiences with my '04 Sentra, I've got to disagree with that. If I go on a long highway trip at 70-75mph with the cruise control on most of the time, I'll get close to 40mpg. If I go about 60-65 without the cruise control, I'll get about 30 mpg, or with the cruise control 31-32.
Cruise control does have the problem you speak of, but it's generally more than made up fo by regulating your speed. You're not going to be able to maintain the speed of your car nearly as well on your own as the cruise control can, so you'll constantly be alternating between lightening up on the gas and hitting it harder, which is worse on your fuel efficiency.
Slashdot Mirror
#'string<
I'll grant you that that certainly isn't verbose, but there's no way in hell you can say that isn't hard to read. Even the average Perl script is easier to read than that. What does #' mean?
I'm assuming the C++ code is overloading the less than operator. The ugliness of that C++ code isn't from the language, it's from the odd naming scheme used. About the only thing not completely self explanatory in the example is the return value of compareString, but that return value convention is a pretty standard thing.
(lambda (s1 s2) (declare (string s1 s2)) (string< s1 s2))
This you can at least figure out what it's doing fairly easily. It takes a bit of thinking about it to parse though as the syntax isn't at all natural. Without knowing Lisp, it's not at all obvious why things are grouped the way they are. The order of things is a little weird too. "s1 string s2" and "s1 s2 string" both seem more logical a syntax than "string s1 s2".
The verbosity of C++ code is nice because you can read it out loud and understand what it's doing. Lambda expressions might be easy to read if your idea of a good time is solving graph theory problems, but otherwise they really aren't clear.
Just a few thoughts in response to your questions.
- 18-05,%20Gp2x%20Review
The GBA got 20 hours out of 2 AA's, I'll believe 10 hours for this system. It's got a lot better hardware than the GBA, but it's got several years of technology evolution to help reduce the power usage.
Google searching found these specs as one of the first hits: http://www.killerredcar.com/?p=news/2005-12-28-22
To give you an idea of resolutions, the GBA is 240x160. I think the DS is 256x192 for each screen. Most N64 games ran at 320x240, with a few at 640x480 (and usually only with the RAM upgrade). I think most PS1 games were 320x240 as well.
BTW, most game manufacturers do profit from the hardware. It's only those that are desperate for marketshare that don't (Microsoft and Sega with the Saturn). But in the end there's much more money to be made from games.
Maybe the patient should decide what treatments they want to pursue (experimental or otherwise), rather than the government.
That already happens now to an extent. If you go to an oncologist, depending on your cancer, you'll be offered an assortment of treatments to choose from. Some will already be approved, others will be in experimental stages. You won't be offered it though unless it has gone through some early testing. The first stage of testing is to figure out two things: First, if there are any show stopper side effects, and second, if there is any indication that the treatment actually does anything. Before that level of testing is done, you have no basis at all to make any claims about the risks or possible benefits of a treatment. Once it gets passed the early testing, it will go into clinical trials. You will be offered the chance to take part in them. There is another phase of testing after that, which you again will have the option of taking part in. I don't know all the details on that phase, but you are definitely given the treatment as opposed to the chance of being in a control group.
Really, the government is doing two things in the process. One is not letting drugs be tested on people until you have demonstrated a reason to believe the treatment won't cause problems worse than those it is trying to fix. The other is forcing the proper scientific method to be done for the testing process.
That's probably why there's a power button for the system on the controller.
You're totally not understanding where the bottleneck is. The issue isn't if it's possible to push 480Mb/s out of one machine, or if it's possible to push it over a link rated at 480Mb/s. The issue is if it's possible to do it *using the original TCP standard*.
Each end of a TCP connection allocates a receive buffer. The available empty space in this buffer is mentioned as part of the header on every packet. A TCP implementation allowed to continue sending packets to the other machine as long as there is space in the buffer. If machine A says it has an 8 KB buffer, then machine B can send 8 KB without worrying. If machine B receives an ACK packet saying that there is free buffer space from machine A before it sends 8 KB, then it can keep on sending data. However, if 8 KB is sent before machine B hears anything from machine A, machine B is required to completely stop sending data until it receives an ACK indicating free buffer space.
The buffer size specified in the TCP header is a 16 byte number. This worked fine on slower networks, but according to the article it peaks around 10Mb/s. It becomes an issue of latency. Once you receive a packet, you need to be able to get an acknowledgement packet to the other machine before it can send out 64KB of data (counting the packet you just received). If you can't, the other machine stops sending data until it hears from you.
Sometime in the 90's when the problem first became an issue, a solution was developed. A new TCP option was created that indicated the buffer size in the TCP header was to be multiplied by a number specified during the initialization of the connection to get the true buffer size. Apparently MS only implemented this recently.
You obviously dont know what you're talking about.
When a program under Unix is loaded and requires a library, that library is loaded in memory until the program no longer uses it. So if you do update a library on disk, as long your program is on memory it will use the library loaded on memory (the previous one) and won't use the newly installed once until it is restarted. New programs launched will use the new library.
You obviously didn't pay attention to anything I said. I specifically said that's what Unix does, and that it has the potential for problems.
The problem comes down to shared resources. The issue occurs when an API stays the same but the implementation changes. Here's an example. You have two programs that communicate with each other through the use of an API in a shared library. The communication can be via a file on disk, shared memory, or whatever else you choose. The API is fine, but the implementation turns out to have a flaw. A new version of the shared library fixes the bug in the implementation. This fix maintains perfect binary compatibility, however, it means that the corrected library cannot safely communicate with the flawed library. This is a complete non-issue if you only replace libraries on disk if they are not in use. If you overwrite the library on disk while it's in use, you will get conflicts between the already running applications and the newly launched applications.
Except the Vista implementation is better.
Unix systems gladly replace system libraries that are in use, and just hope that not problems happen because two different versions of the same library are in use simultaneously. The further away from the core libraries you get, the lower the odds of a problem, but it's still a risk. The Unix approach is basically "Let's just go ahead and do it, it'll probably be ok."
Windows takes the safe approach of only updating libraries that are not in use. I'm sure you'd wind up with weird glitches if your apps were using multiple versions of GDI simultaneously. The Windows approach is "It may be ok to update this now, or it may not. Just to be safe, let's not update it until we can guarentee it's safe."
The Vista implementation is going to try to free up libraries, and if it can, will then update them in place. If not, you'll still have to reboot.
Google haven't figured out how to make a bunch of money on things like Gmail yet, so, because they ALSO don't want the support hassles if something goes wrong, they mark their product as "beta".
Gmail has been making money from the beginning. Ever notice those ads on the side of your email?
Google News is the hard one. The actual content is provided by other companies who are also trying to make money off of it. If Google pushes too hard to get their ads in, the companies providing the content will cut them off.
With the Revolution being estimated at 1/4th the price of both the systems, it doesnt look like Nintendo will be in trouble anytime soon even IF the controller idea doesnt work out.
That's just people dreaming. Think about it a little. The GameCube is currently $100. Although Nintendo isn't going to support HD resolutions, they have said the Revolution will have comparable graphics to the other next gen systems at non-HD resolutions. That's still significantly more powerful than the GameCube. The system is also going to have 512 MB of flash memory built in, which will add a bit to the cost. Realisticlly, you'll talking about launching at Nintendo's traditional $200 point.
Look at a game like The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker, which even Shigeru Miyamoto now calls "boring" and basically unfinished. But it has a score of 94.9% on GameRankings, because the press bought the hype that they themselves helped create.
Miyamoto did not say Wind Waker is boring. He said the triforce hunt section of the game was boring. He did have a list of things he would do differently if he had more time to work on the game, but every game designer has a list like that for every game they have ever worked on.
The triforce hunt does get boring, but it's not that big a section of the game. The only other significant flaw in the game is that you have to get pretty far into the game before the enemies do a significant amount of damage to you, which means that once you get a couple hearts you pretty much can't die unless you're trying to. Despite the claims of the people who only played Ocarina of Time, the graphics fit in with the style of the rest of the series perfectly and are very well done. Quite honestly, if the development team had another 3 months or so to work on the game, it probably would have easily topped Ocarina of Time. In the end, it definitely is one of the better games in the series.
Typical distros that support pervasive no-reboot updating (like Debian) don't exactly replace a "running" libc (or any other library), they simply update the on-disk copy. So any programs run after that will get the new libc, but any programs that were started before the update will of course be using the old libc.
I remember upgrading from the last libc5 Debian to the first libc6 one. The output of "who" and related commands was messed up until I rebooted because the file that contains that info had a different format between libc5 and libc6. It got messed up a bit from having both running. In this particular case it wasn't something that really mattered, but it certainly shows the potential for problems.
Don't blame the union for the NHL lockout/strike. That labor dispute can be summed up as the owners one day woke up and realized "Wait... hockey isn't as popular as other sports. We can't have money vaults like Scrooge McDuck if we pay the players what we agreed to pay them. We need to find a way out of these contracts."
Don't offer someone a contract for more than you feel comfortable paying them. Don't blame the players for accepting an overvalued offer.
not having benchmarked them, i would guess that sql server would be faster on the same hardware.
From my testing, SQL Server would do simple queries like "select distinct a from b" far faster than Postgres would. If you don't use things like distinct or aggregate functions, Postgres will usually perform at worst a factor of 2 slower. When you got to complicated queries (around the point where you start considering using views to simplify things, or if you perform heavy calculations in the WHERE clause), Postgres would become much faster than SQL Server. I've seen queries that take hours in SQL Server take under a minute in Postgres. The only difference in the boxes being the SQL Server box having 1GB RAM vs 512 MB for Postgres.
Also, generally speaking, if you include the same table in your FROM clause multiple times, or both in your main query and in a subquery, SQL Server will usually crawl through your query. Postgres doesn't seem to care if you use the sample table multiple times in a query.
Before the really recent update, Slashdot's HTML was a horrible mess. I don't think you could've grafted AJAX onto that if you wanted to. So give them time before expecting anything majorly new.
Besides, you're not likely to see anything to results in less page loads. That would reduce advertising impressions.
Good gameplay is essential, but why should I care how well the character controls if I don't care about what he's doing?
Would a complex relationship between Mario and the Princess make the game any better?
Does anyone play Street Fighter for the endings?
Would Contra be any better if the aliens went on rants about why they were trying to take over the world?
Would giving Little Mac a backstory make you more likely to want to beat Mike Tyson?
More often than not, complex stories just drag a game down. They force a game into a linear progression and usually just result in a lot of gameplay sacrifices to meet the demands of the story.
At least with Open Source you have potentially thousands of programmers looking for security holes and reporting those security problems.
Open Source potentially has thousands of programmers working on the code, but also potentially as few as just the original author, or even zero if the author abandons it. Microsoft has thousands of programmers on their payroll working full time on their products.
Microsoft's problems come down to two things. One is the upper management insisting on integrating everything, hoping that once customers use one of their products they will use more of them. The other is Win32, which is horribly designed, but yet is the reason for their monopoly. The first problem won't change until you replace the executives with people content with coexisting with other companies, and the second will never change unless Windows at some point in time becomes irrelevant.
Clearly Windows needs to be completely re thought with NO concern for legacy apps. See also OS X.
But if they did that, why would you use Windows?
If you had to choose between Windows Rewrite, which isn't backwards compatible, Linux, and MacOS X, the appeal of the non Windows solutions is a lot higher than it is now.
My Oracle of Ages cartridge was sitting right in front of me, so I just checked that. Link always swings the sword left handed, regardless of whether it's on A or B. Well, if you face left or right, the animation is the same, just flipped, so one of them is left handed and one is right.
I can tell you flat out that Win98 Second Edition could not do it on my Compaq Armada 7400 laptop with it's ESS sound card. That computer could do it when I installed Win2000, but Win98 simply would not play multiple sounds at once.
For years, I had that computer and a desktop that had a SoundBlaster Live, both running Win98 Second Edition. The desktop could multiplex audio streams, but the laptop absolutely would not do it.
Well, given that Mozilla never achieved any significant market share, and Firefox took off because Moz moved away from monolithic preference-hell, the evidence seems to suggest you are wrong.
That's not why Firefox took off. Firefox took off because it was actually advertised. Mozilla.org supported projects such as SpreadFirefox and an ad in the New York Times.
The Suite, on the other hand, they went to every effort to make sure people didn't use it. There was never any push to make people use it. The official stance of Mozilla.org was "The suite is a reference implementation for developers only. Only use it if you know what you're doing. Otherwise, use something based off it such as Netscape." The Mozilla.org site stressed that message heavily. Also, the download page for the suite was loaded with warnings "This may be extremely buggy and may do bad things to your computer. Use at your own risk." Let's not forget it was only a year or two ago at most that they took down the big warning about possible Y2K bugs on the download page. About the only thing more they could've done to scare people away from the Suite was to make you click on a picture from goatse.cx to download the installer.
There might be a nice market amongst luddites and regressives, and those who think they are sticking it "to the man" by using something with such an aging and nasty interface.
How about people who think it's just plain stupid that you have to install a bunch of extensions and go making lots of changes in about:config just to get FireFox usable?
The only way that Mac and Windows and Linux are now able to do what BeOS was doing is that we now have 3GHZ processors in our computers, while BeOS was providing the same speed and responsiveness on much slower machines. The threading of BeOS is one of it major strengths, and windows is JUST NOW (with vista) starting to implement the idea in full.
You sound like the typical GEOS user did years ago. As they learned back then, it doesn't matter what you did before Windows or better than it. The only thing that matters is "Is the current version of Windows good enough?" It doesn't matter if it takes a multi-gigahertz computer to make Windows as fast as other OS's because a 2.5ghz machine is considered slow nowadays. You have to be leaps and bounds better than Windows to stand a chance against it.
It is like when Windows98 allowed multiple audio streams to be processed and play simultaneously. Not a single review even noticed this, but yet it was a big step ahead in consumer OSes. LDDM is basically doing this with GPUs and video - and on a much grander scale.
Win98 didn't support multiple sound streams simultaneously. If you had that functionality, it's because you had a sound card such as the SoundBlaster Live that had hardware support for it.
Win2k, otoh, could do it in software.
As a NJ resident, I gotta agree. Considering you can't really dig in the soil or swim in a river without getting sick here, what's a few mice with the plague gonna do?
Besides, you can't go very far in Jersey without running into a Superfund site, so the mice probably already have cancer.
The N64 launched in Japan with the analog stick, at which point Sega copied it and actually managed to release it in the US before the N64 launched there.
That's why Nintendo didn't want to reveal their hand too early with the controller.
* drive no faster than 55, try to use the brakes as little as possible by keeping an above-average distance from the vehicle in front and driving smoothly.
* don't use cruise control if you can help it (it keeps constant speed not constant throttle and can't account for, say, wanting to keep excess momentum right before going up a hill).
At least from my experiences with my '04 Sentra, I've got to disagree with that. If I go on a long highway trip at 70-75mph with the cruise control on most of the time, I'll get close to 40mpg. If I go about 60-65 without the cruise control, I'll get about 30 mpg, or with the cruise control 31-32.
Cruise control does have the problem you speak of, but it's generally more than made up fo by regulating your speed. You're not going to be able to maintain the speed of your car nearly as well on your own as the cruise control can, so you'll constantly be alternating between lightening up on the gas and hitting it harder, which is worse on your fuel efficiency.