Shame they opted for the crappy Marvell chipset then.
For what it's worth, the built-in GigE ports on the 590 Southbridge (the 680i chipset uses an older southbridge) are actually pretty good. I've seen some reports that one port is better than the other though (lower CPU load during transfers), but I've never tested it myself.
It's easy to take tough positions when you have no support to lose. It takes real guts to take an unpopular position (like raising taxes AND cutting spending--which everybody is in favor of until it's their service cut and their tax bill on the doorstep) when you have something to lose. It's something almost no politician has anymore, probably because all of the ones who did were voted out of office by the people who didn't like their positions and replaced with the spineless yes-men we have today.
It's not like the people in this thread were jamming PB&J sandwiches in there or dropping the thing. Normal insert and ejects eventually kill those old NES boxes. If you liked to leave on game in there and play just that, then you would get more life. If you were like me and were always switching out games (I had a brother and a sister with different tastes, one of their games was always in there), or you were the kind of person who pulled the game out when you were done with it and put it back in the sleeve, then your NES probably requires repair if you want to use it today.
To be fair though, this can be repaired relatively easily (although each time you repair it the system will wear out a bit faster next time) and if it comes down to it, you can buy replacement connectors online (but you have to soldier it on yourself).
Oh, I always heard that if you rented games that it would foul up the connectors on your NES. I never really understood why (the implication is that everybody else's NES was filthy, but from what I saw most of them were in about the same shape as mine--although some kids pulled the doors off of theirs, which always bugged me because it was so ugly with the door off).
They'll still be slow though. Transmeta had an interesting idea with the dynamic recompilation stuff, but it never really panned out. Their chips were light on power consumption, but they were dog slow the first couple of times you ran a program, and then they only crawled up to barely acceptable. Also, Intel did a decent enough job bringing the power consumption down low enough on their Mobile chips that people were in the end willing to accept the shorter battery life for performance.
Also, it was difficult to even buy a Transmeta equipped laptop because many manufacturers have exclusive licenses with Intel or AMD that prevented them from ever seriously considering Transmeta chips in their laptops. Worse, there is really no practical way for a person to home-build a laptop, and people who build desktops generally want performance over power consumption. The processor market is a tough game to get into. They should feel pretty good for surviving this long.
I'm surprised your NES still works. The cartridge slot on those big brick models was notorious for wearing out after a few thousand cycles (repeated inserts and ejects eventually bent the contacts enough to where they would no longer make a solid connection). Do you have one of those late model top loading NES boxes? The SNES corrected this problem and as you mentioned a great many of them still work today.
Optical drives are defiantly a weak point. Fans are another weakness. Moving parts are always the first things to wear out. That's why those old consoles are so reliable, they don't have moving parts (except for the aforementioned NES cartridge slot).
I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much data you could fit on an economically priced ROM Cart these days? I mean flash memory (which is admittedly a different technology altogether) is in the 2GB range for $10 these days. While that's a lot more than you pay for 2GB on a DVD (where each unit literally costs you a couple of cents to manufacture), it is getting big enough for a lot of current games. The big catch will always be the crazy RPG market that wants to swap disks with DVDs already. Nobody wants to make another N64.
Of course the "slimline" PS2s you can buy now are known for their shoddy construction. Admittedly there isn't a lot of data on the last 4 or 5 revisions (they've been revising the design a lot), but the first 4 or so seem to fail fairly often based on online reports (which aren't the best measure, but they are the best measure available to the general public).
No, even then Security through Obscurity is harmful. The problem is that it is not easy to tell if your foundation is secure without considerable peer review. By adding the obscurity element you lose your peer review. Even though you may think your foundation is secure, you may have holes that you don't know about. Sure it will be difficult for outside people to find them too, but if they do you're in a lot of trouble.
Worse, the more obscurity you have, the harder it is to get the good stuff configured properly in the first place. Most security breaches come not from fundamental weaknesses in any of the algorithms, but operator errors and surrounding design flaws (like how you handle your keys). The best crypto sytems are the ones that are as simple to operate as possible, well documented, and provide lots of feedback and debugging information to the operator to make sure they are using it correctly.
If they hadn't put that bit at the end the first comment would have been something like: "Would it KILL you to tell me who you're talking about? I actually had to use Google! Slashdot sucks!"
I really respect all of the work Woz did on the Apple, but ever since that plane crash he hasn't been all right in the head. Sometimes I worry about him.
Huh? Net Neutrality is all about not prioritizing certain kinds of data over other kinds in a network traffic sense. It has almost nothing to do with this case other than maybe the idea that the drug companies could buy faster net access for their information (propaganda). What are you talking about?
While it's not hard to think that sea creatures might develop communities (like Dolphins), it is difficult for them to become tool users. Fire is right out of the question for obvious reasons and raw materials can be difficult to come by for open ocean dwellers and of poor quality (waterlogged, rotten, and buried in mud) for coastal dwellers. You really need to get out of the ocean to become a tool user unless you have oceans that are drastically different than ours.
My wife has Cingular (now AT&T) and she really can't complain about the coverage. In fact compared to my T-Mobile coverage she seems to do quite well. Only Verizon has more local coverage, and that's only because they have a contract with the subway system for exclusive access to cellphone repeaters, and the Verizon coverage isn't as good as Cingular once you go out in the country. I don't know about Sprint, I've never had a Sprint phone.
With my experience with phone companies (T-Mobile, Cingular (now AT&T), and Verizon), the SIM card tends to die after 2 or 3 years anyway, and none of them will sell you just a new SIM card, you have to get a whole new 2 year contract, in which case you might as well get a new phone while you're at it. I have several phones in great shape with lots of battery life that I can't use because the SIM card in them died. It's really annoying that the card that you put in once and never touch again is so fragile, but I guess it's a good way to keep you under contract. The plan backfired a bit though because I've switched carriers each time they pull this bullcrap on me.
I have a third generation iPod and the battery is most certainly not soldered to anything in it. In fact it has a connector that you can pull right out when replacing the battery. By far the hardest part of replacing it is getting the case off (which is no mean feat if you've never done it before and don't want to scratch anything). Once the case is off it is trivial to replace the battery and put the case back on. There are tons of places online that sell replacement batteries for the 3G iPods too.
Sounds to me like Nintendo might be a bit overvalued. The Wii is great, but the games have just been trickling out for it and people are going to lose some of their enthusiasm for the system before too long. I'm not an investor, but I can't see how they can maintain that sort of overinflated valuation for too long.
Polygraph Examiners spend the great majority of their time giving polygraphs to people applying for security clearances. Since 9/11 the backlog on security clearances has skyrocketed as people got paranoid and started slapping "SECRET" and "TOP SECRET" labels on previously unclass projects. Also, many contractors saw the writing on the wall and pushed harder for all of their employees to get cleared so they wouldn't be out of the loop on new project opportunities.
The security guards should have been obvious since all federal buildings stepped up their security after 9/11. There were tons of entrances that suddenly got a real live guard 24/7 where they used to have just a apeaker you would buzz in with after hours. There were also lots of parking lot entrances that got new guard shacks. The "cleaning house" theory doesn't seem the most likely explanation to me.
Then maybe you should get on to building one of those air diesel hybrids then. I'm sure you'll find that they have to be manufactured with toxic chemicals and materials that have to be shipped around through.
Um, all of the current Hybrids already use NiMH batteries. I don't know why you think they use Lead-Acid. Recycling the batteries would be a problem, but they're designed not to wear out--and empirical evidence suggests that they do a pretty good job of not wearing out, the only people that I've found who replace Prius batteries are the guys who are converting them into plug-in Hybrids and want to get more miles out of them.
I played the heck out of the Empire Strikes Back. It was one of those games where your loss was inevitable (just like in the movie!), but you could hold them off for awhile. The game did have some interesting quirks. Because it took about a thousand shots from your speeder to take out a single walker (and they were all lined up slowly marching towards your base), you really had no hope of stopping them, however occasionally one of the pixels on the walker (in one of four hard to shoot spots) would flash for a second and if you got your shot in you would one-shot the walker. The thing is, if that spot flashed on one walker, it flashed on all of them (thank you 2600 hardware), and if it was one of the ones in the front, and you were lined up perfectly, you could finish off several walkers in a row for big points.
Like most 2600 games there wasn't really an ending to the game, but the manual claimed that if you shot down 255 AT-ATs the game would crash and you would have to reset it, which is about as much as you can ask for an ending to a 2600 game. I never got anywhere close to that personally.
I hate Verizon too, but it's really hard to argue with a 30/5 line that costs half as much as the old 5/2 line I was getting from Speakeasy, especially since I actually get most of the 30/5 out of the line. I hate how only Verizon can offer it though, since they still use PPPoE for no good reason and block incoming port 80 and have no option for static or even multiple IP addresses. All of that stuff is really a minor annoyance compared to the $50 a month I'm saving and the ability to FTP a multi hundred megabyte file from home in a handful of minutes.
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Shame they opted for the crappy Marvell chipset then.
For what it's worth, the built-in GigE ports on the 590 Southbridge (the 680i chipset uses an older southbridge) are actually pretty good. I've seen some reports that one port is better than the other though (lower CPU load during transfers), but I've never tested it myself.
It's easy to take tough positions when you have no support to lose. It takes real guts to take an unpopular position (like raising taxes AND cutting spending--which everybody is in favor of until it's their service cut and their tax bill on the doorstep) when you have something to lose. It's something almost no politician has anymore, probably because all of the ones who did were voted out of office by the people who didn't like their positions and replaced with the spineless yes-men we have today.
It's not like the people in this thread were jamming PB&J sandwiches in there or dropping the thing. Normal insert and ejects eventually kill those old NES boxes. If you liked to leave on game in there and play just that, then you would get more life. If you were like me and were always switching out games (I had a brother and a sister with different tastes, one of their games was always in there), or you were the kind of person who pulled the game out when you were done with it and put it back in the sleeve, then your NES probably requires repair if you want to use it today.
To be fair though, this can be repaired relatively easily (although each time you repair it the system will wear out a bit faster next time) and if it comes down to it, you can buy replacement connectors online (but you have to soldier it on yourself).
Oh, I always heard that if you rented games that it would foul up the connectors on your NES. I never really understood why (the implication is that everybody else's NES was filthy, but from what I saw most of them were in about the same shape as mine--although some kids pulled the doors off of theirs, which always bugged me because it was so ugly with the door off).
They'll still be slow though. Transmeta had an interesting idea with the dynamic recompilation stuff, but it never really panned out. Their chips were light on power consumption, but they were dog slow the first couple of times you ran a program, and then they only crawled up to barely acceptable. Also, Intel did a decent enough job bringing the power consumption down low enough on their Mobile chips that people were in the end willing to accept the shorter battery life for performance.
Also, it was difficult to even buy a Transmeta equipped laptop because many manufacturers have exclusive licenses with Intel or AMD that prevented them from ever seriously considering Transmeta chips in their laptops. Worse, there is really no practical way for a person to home-build a laptop, and people who build desktops generally want performance over power consumption. The processor market is a tough game to get into. They should feel pretty good for surviving this long.
I'm surprised your NES still works. The cartridge slot on those big brick models was notorious for wearing out after a few thousand cycles (repeated inserts and ejects eventually bent the contacts enough to where they would no longer make a solid connection). Do you have one of those late model top loading NES boxes? The SNES corrected this problem and as you mentioned a great many of them still work today.
Optical drives are defiantly a weak point. Fans are another weakness. Moving parts are always the first things to wear out. That's why those old consoles are so reliable, they don't have moving parts (except for the aforementioned NES cartridge slot).
I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much data you could fit on an economically priced ROM Cart these days? I mean flash memory (which is admittedly a different technology altogether) is in the 2GB range for $10 these days. While that's a lot more than you pay for 2GB on a DVD (where each unit literally costs you a couple of cents to manufacture), it is getting big enough for a lot of current games. The big catch will always be the crazy RPG market that wants to swap disks with DVDs already. Nobody wants to make another N64.
Of course the "slimline" PS2s you can buy now are known for their shoddy construction. Admittedly there isn't a lot of data on the last 4 or 5 revisions (they've been revising the design a lot), but the first 4 or so seem to fail fairly often based on online reports (which aren't the best measure, but they are the best measure available to the general public).
No, even then Security through Obscurity is harmful. The problem is that it is not easy to tell if your foundation is secure without considerable peer review. By adding the obscurity element you lose your peer review. Even though you may think your foundation is secure, you may have holes that you don't know about. Sure it will be difficult for outside people to find them too, but if they do you're in a lot of trouble.
Worse, the more obscurity you have, the harder it is to get the good stuff configured properly in the first place. Most security breaches come not from fundamental weaknesses in any of the algorithms, but operator errors and surrounding design flaws (like how you handle your keys). The best crypto sytems are the ones that are as simple to operate as possible, well documented, and provide lots of feedback and debugging information to the operator to make sure they are using it correctly.
If they hadn't put that bit at the end the first comment would have been something like: "Would it KILL you to tell me who you're talking about? I actually had to use Google! Slashdot sucks!"
I really respect all of the work Woz did on the Apple, but ever since that plane crash he hasn't been all right in the head. Sometimes I worry about him.
Huh? Net Neutrality is all about not prioritizing certain kinds of data over other kinds in a network traffic sense. It has almost nothing to do with this case other than maybe the idea that the drug companies could buy faster net access for their information (propaganda). What are you talking about?
Obviously not, lead is toxic to the environment.
Work use being the ones they hinted at in the article. Letting molecular biologists touch and manipulate molecules that they're visualizing, etc...
Additionally, the cheap home model will probably not be as good as an expensive commercial models.
I think porn manufacturers just popped a woody. Making it feel "real" is probably a long way off though, especially for home use.
While it's not hard to think that sea creatures might develop communities (like Dolphins), it is difficult for them to become tool users. Fire is right out of the question for obvious reasons and raw materials can be difficult to come by for open ocean dwellers and of poor quality (waterlogged, rotten, and buried in mud) for coastal dwellers. You really need to get out of the ocean to become a tool user unless you have oceans that are drastically different than ours.
My wife has Cingular (now AT&T) and she really can't complain about the coverage. In fact compared to my T-Mobile coverage she seems to do quite well. Only Verizon has more local coverage, and that's only because they have a contract with the subway system for exclusive access to cellphone repeaters, and the Verizon coverage isn't as good as Cingular once you go out in the country. I don't know about Sprint, I've never had a Sprint phone.
With my experience with phone companies (T-Mobile, Cingular (now AT&T), and Verizon), the SIM card tends to die after 2 or 3 years anyway, and none of them will sell you just a new SIM card, you have to get a whole new 2 year contract, in which case you might as well get a new phone while you're at it. I have several phones in great shape with lots of battery life that I can't use because the SIM card in them died. It's really annoying that the card that you put in once and never touch again is so fragile, but I guess it's a good way to keep you under contract. The plan backfired a bit though because I've switched carriers each time they pull this bullcrap on me.
I have a third generation iPod and the battery is most certainly not soldered to anything in it. In fact it has a connector that you can pull right out when replacing the battery. By far the hardest part of replacing it is getting the case off (which is no mean feat if you've never done it before and don't want to scratch anything). Once the case is off it is trivial to replace the battery and put the case back on. There are tons of places online that sell replacement batteries for the 3G iPods too.
Sounds to me like Nintendo might be a bit overvalued. The Wii is great, but the games have just been trickling out for it and people are going to lose some of their enthusiasm for the system before too long. I'm not an investor, but I can't see how they can maintain that sort of overinflated valuation for too long.
I'm thinking she has spent so much time reading Myspace that it damaged her mind.
Polygraph Examiners spend the great majority of their time giving polygraphs to people applying for security clearances. Since 9/11 the backlog on security clearances has skyrocketed as people got paranoid and started slapping "SECRET" and "TOP SECRET" labels on previously unclass projects. Also, many contractors saw the writing on the wall and pushed harder for all of their employees to get cleared so they wouldn't be out of the loop on new project opportunities.
The security guards should have been obvious since all federal buildings stepped up their security after 9/11. There were tons of entrances that suddenly got a real live guard 24/7 where they used to have just a apeaker you would buzz in with after hours. There were also lots of parking lot entrances that got new guard shacks. The "cleaning house" theory doesn't seem the most likely explanation to me.
Then maybe you should get on to building one of those air diesel hybrids then. I'm sure you'll find that they have to be manufactured with toxic chemicals and materials that have to be shipped around through.
Um, all of the current Hybrids already use NiMH batteries. I don't know why you think they use Lead-Acid. Recycling the batteries would be a problem, but they're designed not to wear out--and empirical evidence suggests that they do a pretty good job of not wearing out, the only people that I've found who replace Prius batteries are the guys who are converting them into plug-in Hybrids and want to get more miles out of them.
I played the heck out of the Empire Strikes Back. It was one of those games where your loss was inevitable (just like in the movie!), but you could hold them off for awhile. The game did have some interesting quirks. Because it took about a thousand shots from your speeder to take out a single walker (and they were all lined up slowly marching towards your base), you really had no hope of stopping them, however occasionally one of the pixels on the walker (in one of four hard to shoot spots) would flash for a second and if you got your shot in you would one-shot the walker. The thing is, if that spot flashed on one walker, it flashed on all of them (thank you 2600 hardware), and if it was one of the ones in the front, and you were lined up perfectly, you could finish off several walkers in a row for big points.
Like most 2600 games there wasn't really an ending to the game, but the manual claimed that if you shot down 255 AT-ATs the game would crash and you would have to reset it, which is about as much as you can ask for an ending to a 2600 game. I never got anywhere close to that personally.
What do mathematicians have to do with this? It's an engineering problem.
I hate Verizon too, but it's really hard to argue with a 30/5 line that costs half as much as the old 5/2 line I was getting from Speakeasy, especially since I actually get most of the 30/5 out of the line. I hate how only Verizon can offer it though, since they still use PPPoE for no good reason and block incoming port 80 and have no option for static or even multiple IP addresses. All of that stuff is really a minor annoyance compared to the $50 a month I'm saving and the ability to FTP a multi hundred megabyte file from home in a handful of minutes.