This is entirely offtopic, so I'm going to mod myself down (no karma bonus) so as to not disrupt the article thread, but I agree.
If I'm not sure if a person is trying to troll or not, I check their past posting history and see what they're prone to doing. If they have a stack of -1 moderations in the past X postings, then by all means it's pretty safe to assume they're a serial troll and handle it accordingly.
It's only reasonable to take someone's history in mind when dealing with them.
If you're having trouble with your netword card in Windows XP, you'll find a tool with a lot of useful commandline diagnostics in IPCONFIG (You can flush DNS from there, which has actually been useful on more than one occasion). If you're having trouble with your monitor, Remote Desktop can be used to pull up the full GUI from another machine and work with it.
I'm an oldtimer, myself, and the Linux-style of "editing config files and using the commandline" is fine by me, but it's a bit much for a lot of people.
Funny you put it that way. Most academics I've run into are relatively conservative and would rather rehash the last relatively stable theory than to try to blaze new ground and put their career on the line.
The new system as described is supposed to be a "next generation" type system, meaning a good jump beyond the GBA. At least that's what they were saying only a month ago. Moving in with another high-end system only a year after releasing the DS would be suicidally insane. I think it's probably going to be another year and a half MINIMUM before we see a new GB design so as to not cannibalize the DS sales or injure the still-strong GBA sales.
Well, the 4-8GB mark is accurate if you're working with the compression that DVDs use, MPEG2. I believe you can cut it up to half without any noticible quality loss by using MPEG4 compression, because of improvements in the compression format itself.
That's still a lot of download, but it's an improvement. It also depends highly on how long the episode you're grabbing runs. 200-350MB for a 25 minute episode (30 minus commercials) is pretty good quality (Better than standard TV reception though not HDTV-level) but you're not going to get a two hour movie into 700MB without serious cutting.
It's all very variable based on the footage being compressed, the length of the video, and the quality/resolution aimed for.
Well, this ties back into my old statement, but not everyone needs top line performance.. and when top of the line is running at a minimum of $4k (1992 price for a 486/33 with 8MB RAM-- I remember this specifically as a friend bought a second tier (out of four) computer from ZEOS in 1992) you cut where you can because that's a hell of a lot of money. Most of these people running Lotus 1-2-3 didn't particularly care about the video or disk controller performance because price/performance ratio-wise you saw serious dropoff at the medium-high end of the spectrum that wasn't paying off in productivity.
I won't argue that many clones were pretty shoddily made, though.
I distinctly remember every CARD using MCA being at least $100 more than the non-MCA equivelent at the time. Soundblasters going at $130 were showing at $250 for the MCA version no matter where you looked. It wasn't the $5 for the license on the PC side that killed it, it was the absolutely insane card pricing.
Some of us HAVE had serious problems with applications, on the other hand. There's legitimate concern and complaint out there, and it only takes a quick look over this very same article's comments to find them.
You would be surprised-- if you've spent any time at the MAME forums, you'll see a lot of classic gaming fans who have played just about anything and everything. I'm pretty sure that the game has its share of fans. In fact, looking over the list, it looks like MAME already supports it.
Well, there are multiple ways of getting rights to several of the gamesets-- Capcom has a CD of their classic game romsets up to CPS1 that's being sold by Hanaho Games. Also there's the Atari romsets, currently available for purchase online.
I wouldn't say block the use of MAME for all games unless bought from him, considering he's also selling an arcade machine design with its own emulator. It'd be more likely a move to block and kill MAME entirely...
As far as I understand it, even in a bankruptcy the rights will transfer to someone somewhere out there. Wolfenstein 3D's history, if I recall correctly, was something of the sort-- they tracked down the rights to the original Wolfenstein game and found some grandmother who didn't even know she HAD those rights.
I'm probably wrong as to the game, but I know there was at least one instance of a semi-recent (1990s) sequel to an old Apple/Commodore game like this.
Out of curiousity, which game did you work on (if you can speak freely on the matter)?
That's it entirely. Japan is treated first-class since it comes from there. The US is a large market but not as big as Japan, so it's second-class (doesn't help that the US division of Sony in particular has its head so far up its ass-- 3D gaming only bias, anyone?), however..
Europe not only needs multiple languages in localization but frequently massive cuts need to be made due to anti-violence laws that aren't uniform across Europe as compared to a single set of laws for the US (Contra to Probotector changes, anyone?) and for consoles there's the whole reformatting to PAL issue.. localization for Europe is considerably tougher than for the US. While the PAL thing doesn't count for a handheld, it's the overall "Japan first, US won't take so long, but Europe will be slow going" mindset.
I won't be surprised if the US launch date slips for having difficulty producing enough hardware. Not sure if I'm going to be in line for one or not, but I'll probably wait until the initial warfare dies off and it's easier to get one in the stores if I get one at all-- or possibly even wait for the second revision since I've had *really* bad luck with first rev Sony hardware to date.
Windows doesn't work "out of the box" with semimodern hardware any better than Linux does-- I still have to grab drivers for my soundcard and videocard to make them work with Windows (Radeon 9700 Pro and Audigy). Oh, and my network adaptor as well-- I'm using an NForce2 motherboard and there aren't drivers on the Windows CD itself. I have to install those from an additional CD. Admittedly getting drivers installed is a little easier on Windows, but it's still far beyond what the 'average' user is comfortable with.
This is where Dell makes it easier-- by standardizing on a single configuration on the machine and including the necessary drivers from the start, there's no hassle or headache to getting the hardware working. If Dell were to distribute similarly with a Linux-based config using a standard pre-set hardware config, you'd find it goes pretty much as well.
As for ease of use, I'd put Gentoo at the bottom of the list-- it's definitely a distro for an experienced user, though that's not really a mark against it such that it's designed for people who want additional control and are willing to learn the additional steps to handle it.
This has been going on for 20 years, and in fact was largely ignored by the anime companies until recently because there was an unspoken agreement over stopping subbing when a license was available.
This was fine for those in the US, but led to a lot of disgruntled European fans who were waiting years beyond the extensive wait for a US release for their own. So, the dispute ended up being about subs continuing after domestic (US) release-- companies like ADV argue that sub distribution should stop after a US release, and European sub groups disagree.
Then add in the pirate groups that were doing their own things outright.
It's been a grey-area issue for a very long time, and is hindered additionally by the fact that the anime release companies in the US pay attention to sub groups to find out what people *want*.
My use case isn't the norm, but I need a lot of drive bays. My current machine is designed that I can add a couple of additional 250GB HDs as they're needed, and I know full well that I'll be needing them in the next year or two with the very large files I tend to deal with (raw video and audio, for one thing) so I'm prepared in advance.
That said, I'm still looking at replacing my older 'basic internet functionality' machine with a Mac Mini to see how I like that end of the world. I've got my high end machine for the heavy applications, so if I could replace the mini-tower with a Mac Mini and be happy with the whole arrangement then it's a big win in terms of size and heat generation.
And heat is the LAST thing we need in the CPU right now with this sort of heat issues on the top end. It's getting harder to keep these things stable as it is-- adding another major heat source right in the CPU would assuredly push past the line of what standard cooling can handle.
I use an SSH tunnel to push my RDP connection through my work's firewall so that I can access my work machine from home, and since I have a similar arrangement at home, (Linux-based firewall on a cheap Poweredge 350) I can pretty much do the same the other way as well.
Let me tell you, that's a real life saver on occasion.
Though, I'm curious-- does anyone know if Mac OS X supports RDP? Not as a client, I mean, but is there a RDP server built-in? I've been looking at the Mac Mini, and it'd be really nice to be able to access it just the same as I do my other machines. I know there's always VNC, but RDP just feels a lot more responsive over a medium-bandwidth connection.
Okay, now THAT I'll give you. I've been using a GBA flash cart to satisfy any NES cravings I have-- PocketNES is pretty damn good-- but an actually decent PocketFami would be an interesting change. I'll have to see what the reviews say when it comes in..
The Cube IS somewhat lacking in the 3rd party stuff, but I can't argue the party gaming aspect. F-Zero GX and Smash Bros get a lot of group play here.
I just wish Nintendo would get off their asses and figure out how to make online gaming work for them. Hell, I'd just about kill for a Phantasy Star Online version that does local network and online play on the DS, but the DS apparently doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack.
Nintendo could probably even rake in cash off a Pokemon MMORPG if they really tried, but there's nothing even resembling online innovation from them right now.
Not that they're really missing all THAT much with the sheer asshat factor I see on X-Box Live and PS2 gaming. You can't avoid the idiots..
There have been handheld Famicom clones for years. For instance the GameAxe and TopGuy. According to the same source, this system was announced a year ago but only finally made it to the retail shelves. In any case, it's nothing really *new*.
Jabber is still a real mess. The clients are confusing in many cases, the cross-compatibility transports don't work (read: haven't been updated since the betas of Jabber 1 back in 2000) and the old server design is utterly broken in a dozen places. Jabber 2 is supposed to fix this, but there's still no solid server release and no compatible transports.
Jabber is so far behind schedule in usability that it may never become reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Be very very frightened, for it already exists. Well, just minus the jumping around part.
This is entirely offtopic, so I'm going to mod myself down (no karma bonus) so as to not disrupt the article thread, but I agree.
If I'm not sure if a person is trying to troll or not, I check their past posting history and see what they're prone to doing. If they have a stack of -1 moderations in the past X postings, then by all means it's pretty safe to assume they're a serial troll and handle it accordingly.
It's only reasonable to take someone's history in mind when dealing with them.
You'll just be seeing the install time moved to level loading times.
If you're having trouble with your netword card in Windows XP, you'll find a tool with a lot of useful commandline diagnostics in IPCONFIG (You can flush DNS from there, which has actually been useful on more than one occasion). If you're having trouble with your monitor, Remote Desktop can be used to pull up the full GUI from another machine and work with it.
I'm an oldtimer, myself, and the Linux-style of "editing config files and using the commandline" is fine by me, but it's a bit much for a lot of people.
Funny you put it that way. Most academics I've run into are relatively conservative and would rather rehash the last relatively stable theory than to try to blaze new ground and put their career on the line.
Yeah, it's me, the oldschool #ranma! member (1993-1998 or so). I saw your name and knew it was you. Your blog style is exactly how I remember you.
Uh.. you probably oughta check the Shoryuken ladders. Alpha 3 isn't even on the list. Seems like CVS2, MVC2, and SF3:TS are the big ones these days.
Though I still agree that Alpha 3 was the high point for the series if you can get past the occasional infinite combo and other weird issue.
The new system as described is supposed to be a "next generation" type system, meaning a good jump beyond the GBA. At least that's what they were saying only a month ago. Moving in with another high-end system only a year after releasing the DS would be suicidally insane. I think it's probably going to be another year and a half MINIMUM before we see a new GB design so as to not cannibalize the DS sales or injure the still-strong GBA sales.
Well, the 4-8GB mark is accurate if you're working with the compression that DVDs use, MPEG2. I believe you can cut it up to half without any noticible quality loss by using MPEG4 compression, because of improvements in the compression format itself.
That's still a lot of download, but it's an improvement. It also depends highly on how long the episode you're grabbing runs. 200-350MB for a 25 minute episode (30 minus commercials) is pretty good quality (Better than standard TV reception though not HDTV-level) but you're not going to get a two hour movie into 700MB without serious cutting.
It's all very variable based on the footage being compressed, the length of the video, and the quality/resolution aimed for.
Well, this ties back into my old statement, but not everyone needs top line performance.. and when top of the line is running at a minimum of $4k (1992 price for a 486/33 with 8MB RAM-- I remember this specifically as a friend bought a second tier (out of four) computer from ZEOS in 1992) you cut where you can because that's a hell of a lot of money. Most of these people running Lotus 1-2-3 didn't particularly care about the video or disk controller performance because price/performance ratio-wise you saw serious dropoff at the medium-high end of the spectrum that wasn't paying off in productivity.
I won't argue that many clones were pretty shoddily made, though.
Er...
I distinctly remember every CARD using MCA being at least $100 more than the non-MCA equivelent at the time. Soundblasters going at $130 were showing at $250 for the MCA version no matter where you looked. It wasn't the $5 for the license on the PC side that killed it, it was the absolutely insane card pricing.
Some of us HAVE had serious problems with applications, on the other hand. There's legitimate concern and complaint out there, and it only takes a quick look over this very same article's comments to find them.
You would be surprised-- if you've spent any time at the MAME forums, you'll see a lot of classic gaming fans who have played just about anything and everything. I'm pretty sure that the game has its share of fans. In fact, looking over the list, it looks like MAME already supports it.
Well, there are multiple ways of getting rights to several of the gamesets-- Capcom has a CD of their classic game romsets up to CPS1 that's being sold by Hanaho Games. Also there's the Atari romsets, currently available for purchase online.
I wouldn't say block the use of MAME for all games unless bought from him, considering he's also selling an arcade machine design with its own emulator. It'd be more likely a move to block and kill MAME entirely...
As far as I understand it, even in a bankruptcy the rights will transfer to someone somewhere out there. Wolfenstein 3D's history, if I recall correctly, was something of the sort-- they tracked down the rights to the original Wolfenstein game and found some grandmother who didn't even know she HAD those rights.
I'm probably wrong as to the game, but I know there was at least one instance of a semi-recent (1990s) sequel to an old Apple/Commodore game like this.
Out of curiousity, which game did you work on (if you can speak freely on the matter)?
That's it entirely. Japan is treated first-class since it comes from there. The US is a large market but not as big as Japan, so it's second-class (doesn't help that the US division of Sony in particular has its head so far up its ass-- 3D gaming only bias, anyone?), however..
Europe not only needs multiple languages in localization but frequently massive cuts need to be made due to anti-violence laws that aren't uniform across Europe as compared to a single set of laws for the US (Contra to Probotector changes, anyone?) and for consoles there's the whole reformatting to PAL issue.. localization for Europe is considerably tougher than for the US. While the PAL thing doesn't count for a handheld, it's the overall "Japan first, US won't take so long, but Europe will be slow going" mindset.
I won't be surprised if the US launch date slips for having difficulty producing enough hardware. Not sure if I'm going to be in line for one or not, but I'll probably wait until the initial warfare dies off and it's easier to get one in the stores if I get one at all-- or possibly even wait for the second revision since I've had *really* bad luck with first rev Sony hardware to date.
Windows doesn't work "out of the box" with semimodern hardware any better than Linux does-- I still have to grab drivers for my soundcard and videocard to make them work with Windows (Radeon 9700 Pro and Audigy). Oh, and my network adaptor as well-- I'm using an NForce2 motherboard and there aren't drivers on the Windows CD itself. I have to install those from an additional CD. Admittedly getting drivers installed is a little easier on Windows, but it's still far beyond what the 'average' user is comfortable with.
This is where Dell makes it easier-- by standardizing on a single configuration on the machine and including the necessary drivers from the start, there's no hassle or headache to getting the hardware working. If Dell were to distribute similarly with a Linux-based config using a standard pre-set hardware config, you'd find it goes pretty much as well.
As for ease of use, I'd put Gentoo at the bottom of the list-- it's definitely a distro for an experienced user, though that's not really a mark against it such that it's designed for people who want additional control and are willing to learn the additional steps to handle it.
This has been going on for 20 years, and in fact was largely ignored by the anime companies until recently because there was an unspoken agreement over stopping subbing when a license was available.
This was fine for those in the US, but led to a lot of disgruntled European fans who were waiting years beyond the extensive wait for a US release for their own. So, the dispute ended up being about subs continuing after domestic (US) release-- companies like ADV argue that sub distribution should stop after a US release, and European sub groups disagree.
Then add in the pirate groups that were doing their own things outright.
It's been a grey-area issue for a very long time, and is hindered additionally by the fact that the anime release companies in the US pay attention to sub groups to find out what people *want*.
My use case isn't the norm, but I need a lot of drive bays. My current machine is designed that I can add a couple of additional 250GB HDs as they're needed, and I know full well that I'll be needing them in the next year or two with the very large files I tend to deal with (raw video and audio, for one thing) so I'm prepared in advance.
That said, I'm still looking at replacing my older 'basic internet functionality' machine with a Mac Mini to see how I like that end of the world. I've got my high end machine for the heavy applications, so if I could replace the mini-tower with a Mac Mini and be happy with the whole arrangement then it's a big win in terms of size and heat generation.
And heat is the LAST thing we need in the CPU right now with this sort of heat issues on the top end. It's getting harder to keep these things stable as it is-- adding another major heat source right in the CPU would assuredly push past the line of what standard cooling can handle.
I use an SSH tunnel to push my RDP connection through my work's firewall so that I can access my work machine from home, and since I have a similar arrangement at home, (Linux-based firewall on a cheap Poweredge 350) I can pretty much do the same the other way as well.
Let me tell you, that's a real life saver on occasion.
Though, I'm curious-- does anyone know if Mac OS X supports RDP? Not as a client, I mean, but is there a RDP server built-in? I've been looking at the Mac Mini, and it'd be really nice to be able to access it just the same as I do my other machines. I know there's always VNC, but RDP just feels a lot more responsive over a medium-bandwidth connection.
Okay, now THAT I'll give you. I've been using a GBA flash cart to satisfy any NES cravings I have-- PocketNES is pretty damn good-- but an actually decent PocketFami would be an interesting change. I'll have to see what the reviews say when it comes in..
The Cube IS somewhat lacking in the 3rd party stuff, but I can't argue the party gaming aspect. F-Zero GX and Smash Bros get a lot of group play here.
I just wish Nintendo would get off their asses and figure out how to make online gaming work for them. Hell, I'd just about kill for a Phantasy Star Online version that does local network and online play on the DS, but the DS apparently doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack.
Nintendo could probably even rake in cash off a Pokemon MMORPG if they really tried, but there's nothing even resembling online innovation from them right now.
Not that they're really missing all THAT much with the sheer asshat factor I see on X-Box Live and PS2 gaming. You can't avoid the idiots..
There have been handheld Famicom clones for years. For instance the GameAxe and TopGuy. According to the same source, this system was announced a year ago but only finally made it to the retail shelves. In any case, it's nothing really *new*.
Jabber is still a real mess. The clients are confusing in many cases, the cross-compatibility transports don't work (read: haven't been updated since the betas of Jabber 1 back in 2000) and the old server design is utterly broken in a dozen places. Jabber 2 is supposed to fix this, but there's still no solid server release and no compatible transports.
Jabber is so far behind schedule in usability that it may never become reality.
They say as much in the FAQs. It's also stated that if you don't want it linked to your account, log out first.