it was more than that. There was a thick black line between each entry. The line was very similar to the arrow line except that it didn't have the small arrowhead and it was much longer. I tried squinting to see how an old person would see the ballat (I could read the names, but that big line sure looked more tempting than the little short line).
Depends how much protection you're willing to buy. You could make hourly tape backups and have a brinks truck come by and drop them in a giant inpenetrable vault somewhere, this would keep you from ever loosing more than an hours worth of data, even if you were at ground zero in a nuclear explosion. On the other hand, some home users might balk at the cost of such a solution.
If you're primarily interested in preventing data loss from disc failure, then the RAID option is great. It's easy to set up, reasonably inexpensive, fast, and hassle free. It won't save you against the accidental rm -rf / unfortunatly. In that case, you might want to keep your discs seperate and just use the second one as an oversized inexpensive tape device that you automatically backup your entire system on every night. How many of us live in houses where giant rocks fall out of the ceiling regularly anyway?
I've actually done something similar to this. I put a few big disks in a RAID5 setup in a PC case. Every night I do backups to this machine (with full backups weekly and incremental backups nightly). The whole thing was cheap, and it's fully automated so I don't have to swap tapes in and out constantly. Since I really don't care about the write performance of the backup system (it's fast enough), I used software RAID and a few off the shelf ATA cards. As it turns out, the PCI bus is my bottleneck, but 66/64 PCI is still rather pricy and not widely available yet.
When did this happen? I never had to have any of my friends do that to get the $5. I still like my PayPal account, but maybe that's because I understand what it is. I never keep any money in it and I use it to give tips to websites, to buy the occasional cheap item off ebay, to pay my Slashdot bill, and the like. I've had people pay me with ebay before and I always move the money off to my real account once I get it. It's really a convienent system, and I hate to see it get shut down and replaced with a ton of incompatable rivals no better than the original.
If they were large pseudo-photographic GIFs that might have been the way to go. The files would be Smaller (although you've already lost most of your colorspace), and it's not like GIF is a lossy compression format (unless you had to drop an original 24 bit image to 8 bits). Plus there were patent issues...
A better idea would have been to convert your gifs to PNGs, although it won't save you as much space as the JPEGs will, you will retain the perfect copy of the original image.
I don't know about you, but my version of XFree seems to chug right along just about as fast in X as it does in Windows (unless the traffic is actually going over the network). Granted, applications that dont' make use of the Xv extension, and have lots and lots of screen updates are slightly slower, but you can program apps to perform badly in windows too. Even the 3D acceleration is only a few FPS (2-3) slower in X than it is in Windows.
Even though the Palm can only display 4096 colors without resorting to ugly hacks (like pixel flickering), I don't see what the big deal is.
Ok, they lied in their marketing, that's bad. But they seem to be trying to do the honorable thing here. If the color depth is that important do you just get the refund and buy yourself a Handspring.
But lets work the numbers here: A 160x160 pixel screen has 25600 pixels total. The 12 bits per pixel can only display 4096 unique colors. This means that in the worst case scenario, every color will have to be spread across 6.25 pixels. This doesn't seem all that bad to me. In fact it sounds like just the sort of design tradeoff I might have made. Going all the way up to 65536 unique colors is kind of a waste since you'll never be able to get all of those on the screen at once.
Of course Palm should have advertised it as a 12bit screen right from the start, but I'm not ready to hang them out to dry for this. On the contrary, offering Sim City (which is still a fine game, despite what the vitriol filled posts on here might say) seems like a nice gesture to me. Palm certainly could have done worse.
Does anybody remember IOmega and the Click of Death? Years in lawsuits that just make the scum sucking lawyers richer and richer and what do we get? A coupon from IOmega for some paltry sum off of our next purchase of an IOmega product, long after most of us had swarn off IOmega forever. Would you guys have preferred that?
That's because the manufacturer here left reality when they thought that people wouldn't mind being teathered to their laptop by their camera. I actually had a vision of a guy walking around with a laptop strapped to his back and his Bluetooth camera furiously trying to squeeze bits through a coffee-stirrer.
In my experiance with this cheap easily assembled furnature, the biggest problem is the instruction manual. Usually it's some horrible job done at the last minute, then translated into English by somebody's kid who's just finished English 101. Often times the instructions are just plain wrong (presumably due to design changes made to the piece after the manual was written). Fortunatly, almost all of this furnature has the same basic instructions:
1. put all of the little lockbolt things in the little holes.
2. Put all of the big cam things into the big holes
3. Stick all of the parts together and twist the cams until they stop.
It's not rocket science, but I'd still like a manual that was at least partially understandable.
In reality, Bluetooth is not designed for large data transfers like this. 1Mbps is the marketing speed. In reality, Bluetooth devices have a fairly hefty overhead that cuts into their transmit rate significantly.
Bluetooth was designed around supporting low bandwidth cellular links between your phone and whatever device you have, trading business cards, doing voice (the protocol stack actually has a "bypass" for voice data built right into the spec), and synchronization type tasks. In reality, this camera should be using something like 802.11 if it wants to make that data link useful. (shoot 20 pictures and you're waiting more than 15 minutes for the pictures to transfer. For that kind of speed you could just hook up the USB link cable and have it done in a fraction of the time).
Opinon on this is going to vary wildly, but I've seen two major schools of thought on this topic:
Computer Scientist standpoint: This says that you should never need to know about the hardware. You should be programming in sufficently high level languages like Lisp that keep you from knowing anything about the underlying architecture. Knowing about the architecture leads you to programming FOR that architecture, which is the first step towards unportable code. Also, most pure computer scientists are more interested in proving that their solution is correct that actaully solving the problem. These people often give lip service to the importance of knowing the architecture while simultaniously designing languages that no computer will ever be able to run and that nobody would ever ever want to program in (anybody have a spare Turing machine handy? Mine ran out of infinate paper tape.)
C Programmers point of view: This places the high level language as more of a glue between the programmer and the machine. You try to do things in ways that are optimal for the machine so your programs run fast, while still trying to be at least somewhat portable. (and hey, if you get it wrong, there's always #IFDEF right?). Most professional programmers seem to fall in this category, as it involves getting much more work done with fewer inductive proofs.
I know I'm going to be flamed about the Lisp crack, but you have to admit, Lisp programs are portable.
Actually, you might be surprised just how much government code makes it out to the world. In general the source that doesn't make it out is the stuff that is either classified (which wouldn't be useful to most open source programmers anyway, since they don't need better missile guidance), or incorperates other copywritten code. For instance, my company often uses the Open Channel Foundation to publish code. Most of the stuff in here isn't really that useful for your average Linux geek, but there is plenty of material nonetheless.
One of the problems is that the government doesn't bother to build a better web browser, they're building interface kits to expensive milspec satellite systems.
Color me dubious. The primary power drain is the _antenna_, at least on modern 802.11 cards. If you start cutting power to the antenna, you will start losing range. A better antenna design can offest this loss to a degree, but it is very expensive to manufacture extremely high quality antennas.
What I can see is an adaption of the 802.11 that steps back your transmit power when you aren't using it to its fullest extent. There's no reason really to transmit at the full 11mbit when you're just sending HTTP Get requests and you're 5 feet from the basestation.
If this is the case with the TI chip, then additional miniturization will not help your power consumption much. In fact the current jump would matter much less than the new sophisticated power control circutry added to the design.
The semicolon isn't bad. The only think I dislike about semicolon based languages is that they keep me on the Qwerty keyboard. I've tried learning the dvorak keyboard a few times over the years, and it always comes down to programming in C, Perl, Java, etc... and finding that semicolon inconvienently placed.
May I suggest just blocking popups. Saves a lot of potental embarassment. It's easy to do, just pull down Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Scripts & Plugins in Mozilla and disable unrequested windows.
Interesting then that many (admittedly old) games no longer run under Win2k/xp. In fact if you're hankering for a fix of Commander Keen, Scorched Earth, or any of the other old DOS classics you're prtty much SOL unless you still have an old Win9x or earlier parition hanging around and you don't have any important unsupported hardware (sound cards!) in your system. I've known people who keep old DOS boxes around (486s or early Pentiums) just to play old games.
Local Blockbusters charge about $3-$5US for a 3-5 day rental. (Ironicaly, the $3 rentals usually last for 5 days while the $5 rentals last 3 days). Mom & Pop places often only let you keep the video overnight, but usually only charge $2-$3 per rental. It used to be a really good deal to get DSS and use their PPV system ($2.50/each), but they raised their prices awhile back--which was a shame, because my parents used to rent stuff from there all the time, but now they don't anymore because it's too expensive.
I've always suspected that reguar high speed internet connections (T1, OC3, etc...) are horribly overpriced. The broadband connections are probably closer to what it actually costs per byte to offer that kind of service. The problem with the traditional high speed solutions is that they are priced for businesses, which don't mind paying $1500/month for a 1.5Mb connection. There wasn't enough competition to lower the price, and the businesses weren't balking at the prices like a home user would.
I know the Joke thing would get me. There's no way I'd tell my best jokes to my employer (they just aren't workplace safe), much less my interviewer. Besides, you probably don't want to hear some of the jokes I make to myself when I go out to interview, they aren't very flattering to the employer or interviewer.
Or maybe it's the people who have actually tried to get defective media replaced after a couple of years (around the time when floppies start to decay). Several times companies are unresponsive citing that they don't support that piece of software anymore, or worse, that they're out of business.
Also, like most previous copy protection systems, I suspect this won't work on a subset of the hardware for some reason. I know it irritates me to no end to get a new game and discover that it doesn't work in my CD-ROM drive because the publisher used Safedisc.
Has that ever stopped the RIAA, the MPAA, or even the BSA from making up whatever number they feel like?
I'm pretty sure they'll multiply the cost of the CD ($30) with the number of users who downloaded the client for whatever service you are using (easily > 100,000,000). Isn't that how the BSA used to calculate the "revenue lost" that it always reported to the media?
Think of it this way. There is a temporal cold war going on. There is quite a bit of subterfuge on both sides and no doubt plenty of assassination attempts on key figures thoughout history. Minor timeline inconsistancies are merely the work of time terrorists.
Plus, there is a good chance that the Computer on the Enterprise will be damaged in a future episode before they get a chance to get back to Earth. Star Fleet computers seem to be very susceptable to this sort of tampering, as every third alien speices they encounter seems to be able to figure out the root password (which is apparently "password"). If the records were lost then it would account for the scarce anecdotal evidence the NCC-1701D crew had on the Ferengi when they first met them. Lord knows that nobody in Star Fleet has ever kept a backup.
Kohan isn't a processer intensive game though. My old PII-400 didn't even break a sweat with the old Loki port. It looks like there's a bit of overhead for the WineX libraries.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to counter the zombie rush though. I honestly don't see very much rushing in Kohan. Your early militas are strong enough to beat down a zombie company and a half, and the upkeep on any other units prevents them from being used. Additionally, there is a restrictive company limit in the game (that slowly increases as your empire expands), that prevent you from massing a huge army at the very start of the game. Even if you have a ceyah player with 5 zombie companies (starting village upgraded to town and one expansion), by the time those zombies get to you (they have to find you first) 10 minutes or more have passed in the game and you probably have a strong enough army to counter them.
Like all things this isn't absolute, but rushes are very difficult to pull off in Kohan so not many people seem to employ them.
Now if you don'd build up your econ and turtle then you will be defeated. If you are annoyed that you get defeated with this strategy (which works against the computer), then don't come complaining to Slashdot.
Part of the RTS genre is learning good tactics and good strategy.
Slashdot Mirror
it was more than that. There was a thick black line between each entry. The line was very similar to the arrow line except that it didn't have the small arrowhead and it was much longer. I tried squinting to see how an old person would see the ballat (I could read the names, but that big line sure looked more tempting than the little short line).
Depends how much protection you're willing to buy. You could make hourly tape backups and have a brinks truck come by and drop them in a giant inpenetrable vault somewhere, this would keep you from ever loosing more than an hours worth of data, even if you were at ground zero in a nuclear explosion. On the other hand, some home users might balk at the cost of such a solution.
If you're primarily interested in preventing data loss from disc failure, then the RAID option is great. It's easy to set up, reasonably inexpensive, fast, and hassle free. It won't save you against the accidental rm -rf / unfortunatly. In that case, you might want to keep your discs seperate and just use the second one as an oversized inexpensive tape device that you automatically backup your entire system on every night. How many of us live in houses where giant rocks fall out of the ceiling regularly anyway?
I've actually done something similar to this. I put a few big disks in a RAID5 setup in a PC case. Every night I do backups to this machine (with full backups weekly and incremental backups nightly). The whole thing was cheap, and it's fully automated so I don't have to swap tapes in and out constantly. Since I really don't care about the write performance of the backup system (it's fast enough), I used software RAID and a few off the shelf ATA cards. As it turns out, the PCI bus is my bottleneck, but 66/64 PCI is still rather pricy and not widely available yet.
When did this happen? I never had to have any of my friends do that to get the $5. I still like my PayPal account, but maybe that's because I understand what it is. I never keep any money in it and I use it to give tips to websites, to buy the occasional cheap item off ebay, to pay my Slashdot bill, and the like. I've had people pay me with ebay before and I always move the money off to my real account once I get it. It's really a convienent system, and I hate to see it get shut down and replaced with a ton of incompatable rivals no better than the original.
If they were large pseudo-photographic GIFs that might have been the way to go. The files would be Smaller (although you've already lost most of your colorspace), and it's not like GIF is a lossy compression format (unless you had to drop an original 24 bit image to 8 bits). Plus there were patent issues...
A better idea would have been to convert your gifs to PNGs, although it won't save you as much space as the JPEGs will, you will retain the perfect copy of the original image.
I don't know about you, but my version of XFree seems to chug right along just about as fast in X as it does in Windows (unless the traffic is actually going over the network). Granted, applications that dont' make use of the Xv extension, and have lots and lots of screen updates are slightly slower, but you can program apps to perform badly in windows too. Even the 3D acceleration is only a few FPS (2-3) slower in X than it is in Windows.
Even though the Palm can only display 4096 colors without resorting to ugly hacks (like pixel flickering), I don't see what the big deal is.
Ok, they lied in their marketing, that's bad. But they seem to be trying to do the honorable thing here. If the color depth is that important do you just get the refund and buy yourself a Handspring.
But lets work the numbers here: A 160x160 pixel screen has 25600 pixels total. The 12 bits per pixel can only display 4096 unique colors. This means that in the worst case scenario, every color will have to be spread across 6.25 pixels. This doesn't seem all that bad to me. In fact it sounds like just the sort of design tradeoff I might have made. Going all the way up to 65536 unique colors is kind of a waste since you'll never be able to get all of those on the screen at once.
Of course Palm should have advertised it as a 12bit screen right from the start, but I'm not ready to hang them out to dry for this. On the contrary, offering Sim City (which is still a fine game, despite what the vitriol filled posts on here might say) seems like a nice gesture to me. Palm certainly could have done worse.
Does anybody remember IOmega and the Click of Death? Years in lawsuits that just make the scum sucking lawyers richer and richer and what do we get? A coupon from IOmega for some paltry sum off of our next purchase of an IOmega product, long after most of us had swarn off IOmega forever. Would you guys have preferred that?
That's because the manufacturer here left reality when they thought that people wouldn't mind being teathered to their laptop by their camera. I actually had a vision of a guy walking around with a laptop strapped to his back and his Bluetooth camera furiously trying to squeeze bits through a coffee-stirrer.
In my experiance with this cheap easily assembled furnature, the biggest problem is the instruction manual. Usually it's some horrible job done at the last minute, then translated into English by somebody's kid who's just finished English 101. Often times the instructions are just plain wrong (presumably due to design changes made to the piece after the manual was written). Fortunatly, almost all of this furnature has the same basic instructions:
1. put all of the little lockbolt things in the little holes.
2. Put all of the big cam things into the big holes
3. Stick all of the parts together and twist the cams until they stop.
It's not rocket science, but I'd still like a manual that was at least partially understandable.
In reality, Bluetooth is not designed for large data transfers like this. 1Mbps is the marketing speed. In reality, Bluetooth devices have a fairly hefty overhead that cuts into their transmit rate significantly.
Bluetooth was designed around supporting low bandwidth cellular links between your phone and whatever device you have, trading business cards, doing voice (the protocol stack actually has a "bypass" for voice data built right into the spec), and synchronization type tasks. In reality, this camera should be using something like 802.11 if it wants to make that data link useful. (shoot 20 pictures and you're waiting more than 15 minutes for the pictures to transfer. For that kind of speed you could just hook up the USB link cable and have it done in a fraction of the time).
- Computer Scientist standpoint: This says that you should never need to know about the hardware. You should be programming in sufficently high level languages like Lisp that keep you from knowing anything about the underlying architecture. Knowing about the architecture leads you to programming FOR that architecture, which is the first step towards unportable code. Also, most pure computer scientists are more interested in proving that their solution is correct that actaully solving the problem. These people often give lip service to the importance of knowing the architecture while simultaniously designing languages that no computer will ever be able to run and that nobody would ever ever want to program in (anybody have a spare Turing machine handy? Mine ran out of infinate paper tape.)
- C Programmers point of view: This places the high level language as more of a glue between the programmer and the machine. You try to do things in ways that are optimal for the machine so your programs run fast, while still trying to be at least somewhat portable. (and hey, if you get it wrong, there's always #IFDEF right?). Most professional programmers seem to fall in this category, as it involves getting much more work done with fewer inductive proofs.
I know I'm going to be flamed about the Lisp crack, but you have to admit, Lisp programs are portable.Actually, you might be surprised just how much government code makes it out to the world. In general the source that doesn't make it out is the stuff that is either classified (which wouldn't be useful to most open source programmers anyway, since they don't need better missile guidance), or incorperates other copywritten code. For instance, my company often uses the Open Channel Foundation to publish code. Most of the stuff in here isn't really that useful for your average Linux geek, but there is plenty of material nonetheless.
One of the problems is that the government doesn't bother to build a better web browser, they're building interface kits to expensive milspec satellite systems.
Color me dubious. The primary power drain is the _antenna_, at least on modern 802.11 cards. If you start cutting power to the antenna, you will start losing range. A better antenna design can offest this loss to a degree, but it is very expensive to manufacture extremely high quality antennas. What I can see is an adaption of the 802.11 that steps back your transmit power when you aren't using it to its fullest extent. There's no reason really to transmit at the full 11mbit when you're just sending HTTP Get requests and you're 5 feet from the basestation. If this is the case with the TI chip, then additional miniturization will not help your power consumption much. In fact the current jump would matter much less than the new sophisticated power control circutry added to the design.
The semicolon isn't bad. The only think I dislike about semicolon based languages is that they keep me on the Qwerty keyboard. I've tried learning the dvorak keyboard a few times over the years, and it always comes down to programming in C, Perl, Java, etc... and finding that semicolon inconvienently placed.
May I suggest just blocking popups. Saves a lot of potental embarassment. It's easy to do, just pull down Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Scripts & Plugins in Mozilla and disable unrequested windows.
Interesting then that many (admittedly old) games no longer run under Win2k/xp. In fact if you're hankering for a fix of Commander Keen, Scorched Earth, or any of the other old DOS classics you're prtty much SOL unless you still have an old Win9x or earlier parition hanging around and you don't have any important unsupported hardware (sound cards!) in your system. I've known people who keep old DOS boxes around (486s or early Pentiums) just to play old games.
Wow, a lot of people were taken by this troll. I applaud you.
...on how long it will take for this to be cracked?
Local Blockbusters charge about $3-$5US for a 3-5 day rental. (Ironicaly, the $3 rentals usually last for 5 days while the $5 rentals last 3 days). Mom & Pop places often only let you keep the video overnight, but usually only charge $2-$3 per rental. It used to be a really good deal to get DSS and use their PPV system ($2.50/each), but they raised their prices awhile back--which was a shame, because my parents used to rent stuff from there all the time, but now they don't anymore because it's too expensive.
I've always suspected that reguar high speed internet connections (T1, OC3, etc...) are horribly overpriced. The broadband connections are probably closer to what it actually costs per byte to offer that kind of service. The problem with the traditional high speed solutions is that they are priced for businesses, which don't mind paying $1500/month for a 1.5Mb connection. There wasn't enough competition to lower the price, and the businesses weren't balking at the prices like a home user would.
I know the Joke thing would get me. There's no way I'd tell my best jokes to my employer (they just aren't workplace safe), much less my interviewer. Besides, you probably don't want to hear some of the jokes I make to myself when I go out to interview, they aren't very flattering to the employer or interviewer.
Or maybe it's the people who have actually tried to get defective media replaced after a couple of years (around the time when floppies start to decay). Several times companies are unresponsive citing that they don't support that piece of software anymore, or worse, that they're out of business.
Also, like most previous copy protection systems, I suspect this won't work on a subset of the hardware for some reason. I know it irritates me to no end to get a new game and discover that it doesn't work in my CD-ROM drive because the publisher used Safedisc.
Has that ever stopped the RIAA, the MPAA, or even the BSA from making up whatever number they feel like?
I'm pretty sure they'll multiply the cost of the CD ($30) with the number of users who downloaded the client for whatever service you are using (easily > 100,000,000). Isn't that how the BSA used to calculate the "revenue lost" that it always reported to the media?
Think of it this way. There is a temporal cold war going on. There is quite a bit of subterfuge on both sides and no doubt plenty of assassination attempts on key figures thoughout history. Minor timeline inconsistancies are merely the work of time terrorists.
Plus, there is a good chance that the Computer on the Enterprise will be damaged in a future episode before they get a chance to get back to Earth. Star Fleet computers seem to be very susceptable to this sort of tampering, as every third alien speices they encounter seems to be able to figure out the root password (which is apparently "password"). If the records were lost then it would account for the scarce anecdotal evidence the NCC-1701D crew had on the Ferengi when they first met them. Lord knows that nobody in Star Fleet has ever kept a backup.
Kohan isn't a processer intensive game though. My old PII-400 didn't even break a sweat with the old Loki port. It looks like there's a bit of overhead for the WineX libraries.
You'd be surprised how easy it is to counter the zombie rush though. I honestly don't see very much rushing in Kohan. Your early militas are strong enough to beat down a zombie company and a half, and the upkeep on any other units prevents them from being used. Additionally, there is a restrictive company limit in the game (that slowly increases as your empire expands), that prevent you from massing a huge army at the very start of the game. Even if you have a ceyah player with 5 zombie companies (starting village upgraded to town and one expansion), by the time those zombies get to you (they have to find you first) 10 minutes or more have passed in the game and you probably have a strong enough army to counter them.
Like all things this isn't absolute, but rushes are very difficult to pull off in Kohan so not many people seem to employ them.
Now if you don'd build up your econ and turtle then you will be defeated. If you are annoyed that you get defeated with this strategy (which works against the computer), then don't come complaining to Slashdot.
Part of the RTS genre is learning good tactics and good strategy.