This movie has a small but vocal fanbase. Of course, it's not one of those movies you can actually dress up and go to conventions and stuff, but nevertheless, I think it is one of the top 10 animated films ever.
The story is simple and sweet, and although it uses cliches a bit, it has a good sense of history and how absurd (or maybe not that paranoid) back in the 60's.
If you're bored one night, try to pick it up. I think you'll know what I mean after you see it.
The battery is surprisingly cheap. It's for sale at Lik Sang for $13US. The operational lifetime is about 500 charges (says the manual). That's probably good for at least 2 years worth of play time for the average user. Plus, it only take 3 hours to charge it, and it lasts 10 hours w/ backlight, and up to 18 w/o backlight.
And a headphone jack is available, only you have to pay extra (about $8, or $5 for an integrated headphone... go figure).
There are a lot of nifty accessories available now, like a pager-style holster.
I just picked one up today, and here's my mini-review. The screen is great, pretty much agree with all the previous comments. I'll talk about stuff that hasn't (that I've seen) been covered here.
The buttons are recessed slightly, so it takes a bit of time to get used to. Also, they're slightly smaller than the original GBA, so larger hands might find it awkward, especially with the new configuration. It's also harder to do a soft-reset (which may or may not be a bad thing).
The sound is significantly better (IMO), probably due to the placement of the speaker. It's smack in the middle of the device, so your palms won't muffle the sound (a la GBA). Still, no headset jack.
The shoulder buttons are smaller (L & R), but after a couple of games, it's not noticeable.
The cartridge slot is at the bottom, so certain peripherals like the Kirby tilt module won't work, and the digital camera attachments might be weird to work with.
The AC adapter is really well made, with the prongs folding inside so it's easy to transport. It's also small (about 3/4" x 1.5" x 2") and light. Too bad it's still a wall-wart design.
The screen is now protected due to the design, but the plastic doesn't feel that robust. I'm thinking that it can get easily scratched (though I'm not going to try to find out).
Other than that, I'm *highly* impressed with the GBA SP. If you have a GBA without the Afterburner kit, try to sell it to kid next door or give it to some young relatives. It's just that good. For only $100US, you get an amazing piece of hardware that can entertain you longer than a $2k laptop can on a flight overseas. 9.5/10
I wouldn't call 55% a minority. Yet that's the percent that supports Bush on this issue. (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/11/politics/11POLL.html, registration needed).
As for the last war that you guys started, I believe it was the war of 1812, when you guys invaded Canada.
Genes are only part of the whole picture when it comes to muscle-mass. Genetically identical twins can have totally different physiques due to lifestyle, including diet and exercise (which, including genes, make the largest difference in physique).
Muscle mass automagically atrophies when not in use, so I don't see how someone can "grow" muscle like they would grow hair.
Obviously, there are serious moral and biological questions that have yet to be answered about all this. And unfortunately, these types of people usually have too optimistic view of the near-future. I mean, where are the flying-cars and annual visits to the moon?
I would like to throw the idea around that Atari was just a "one hit wonder" and really had no idea WTF it was doing and paid the consequence for its actions (and inactions). It was up to Nintendo to show everybody how it could and should be done.
Sure, Atari had its accomplices (Intellivision, Colleco) but Atari was the "big boy" but didn't have the maturity for a good business model or proper "hot or not" entertainment senses. By flooding the market with crap ass games (and letting companies they've licensed do that... ET anyone?) they spread such ill-will among the public that it took literally years before all the stars aligned and Nintendo showed the path.
So for them to last as long as they have, I don't think we should really mourn them, as they've been dead for the longest time. (though admittedly Stun Running did suck up a lot of my money). They've just been a souless zombie for the last 20 years.
Just like a criminal record check, these credit checks are quite useful in ID'ing potential problems. The government does this to military/CIA personnel to ensure that people holding vital information would be less likely to take bribes for information.
Of course, there's no solid way to prevent bribes from happening, but if you've had credit problems, you know how "under the gun" you feel when the agencies heckle you for money. Sometimes you would almost do anything to get rid of them... Hmm.. sounds like SPAM!
Of course, you have all the rights to refuse to a credit search. Unfortunately, the company has all the right to refuse to hire you on those grounds alone.
and this poll proved it. Only 1 of the top 25 listed has come out within the last 5 years. All the rest were in the "golden years" (basically everything BEFORE 1998). Like a sun setting, The Simpsons is really past it's prime.
What irks me is that The Family Guy had some real spunk and great writing, until it was cancelled (along with Futurama, which had a longer run). But I don't think it's reasonable to cancel those shows when King of the Hill and The Simpsons are still on. Is there no justice in the world?!
We don't need more HD storage, realistically speaking. Unless you're doing some serious video editing/archiving the internet/archiving pr0n, the 180 gig HD's will do you just fine.
What we do need is faster access/read times, and an easy way to get that is a solidstate HD. Not a huge amount of storage, maybe about 5-10 gigs worth. Enough to hold the OS and commonly used apps. With RAM prices as low as they are now, where are these things?! I want nano-second access times, not miliseconds! Imagine booting your computer in 3 seconds. Now that would be progress.
I can't see how this article could be remotely relevant when we all know that people that read/. are buff patent lawyers who do quantum physics and code elegant encryption hacks in their spare time.
I mean, the three-some sex alone with our model girlfriends is a workout in itself, but I guess lesser people wouldn't be able to keep up.
is never the printing, S&H, recording or any of that. It's *always* the marketing (I'm including music videos). Companies spend millions pushing their music onto MTV, MuchMusic (Canadian variant) and radio stations.
A music video, a self-contained commercial for the album costs a LOT of money ($100k up to $500k), without actually bringing any money in by itself (except for the growing trend of musicvid DVD's).
Everytime you watch a music video or listen to the radio, that's marketing money spent just to get you to buy the album. For people that want to go big-time, you gotta shell out the big-bucks. That $20 you pay for the CD pays for pretty much every method that got you aware of the CD in the first place. Except for word-of-mouth, which to marketers, is priceless (which it is, since it's free).
By my count, MAME 0.63b has about 3700 ROM's (give or take a couple, some are just varients of each other), 32k is almost 10x more games than that.
Seeing how it took about 25 years alone to make those ROM's, I can't see how it is humanly possible to create 32k games. Even a rehash of games of yore (PC, NES, SNES, SEGA, etc) would hardly break the 25k mark. That's a LOT of games.
First, you can't get a decent Geforce4 Ti for ~$100. Maybe a Geforce4MX, but that is a severly crippled GF4, so much so that even John Carmack said not to get one. A Geforce4 4200 (which is the lowest Geforce 4 is about $150.
So you don't "need" a 9700 that costs $300. How about the ATI 9500, which is the slow brother of the 9700? Much cheaper, a bit crippled, but performs on par or even better than the GF 4600, let alone the 4200. And only about $180. WITH DirectX 9 support, anti-alias glory with anisotropic filtering, all at a playable rate.
This isn't just how that the 9700 is faster (duh!) than the 4x00 series from Nvidia, but also how the whole 9x00 family is faster than Nvidia, budget and highend (I don't count the bastardized 9000). This family is all derived from the tech of the 9700.
but don't take my opinion for it, check it out for yourself.
So, I don't think this is a big revelation to anyone here. Computers are just tools, MS is dumbing everybody down, blah blah blah.
What this does revel is that human teaching methods are peaking. Gone is the dreams that you can teach calculus to grade 5's (a la STTNG) or having all the students be med-skool bound.
There's always going to be the geniuses, the idiots, and the "everbody in between" crowd. Learning is wildly varied from one person to the next, as is teaching method. I think there's a snide arrogance that we supposedly know "better" because we have these fancy tools and such instead of the blackboard used 50 years ago.
As Calvin (of C&H fame) said, "you can present the material, but you can't make me care". You'll always have that, unless you can find someway of legally spiking the water fountains.
I work at a nuclear power plant, and anyone that has radiation therapy can't go into the actual plant (they just stay in the admin building). Elsewise, they would set off a lot of detectors that we have around the building.
My manager's wife once had radio-iodine treatment for her overactive thyroid, and he was curious on how much radiation she was actually getting. So he borrow a gamma meter from work (good old FAG gamma meter F4) and surveyed her neck.
He found a MASSIVE amount of radiation comming off her thyroid/neck area (this was right after treatment). At contact, it was like 4 rem/h (about 4 mSv) and working distance (30 cm) it was 100 mrem/h (0.1 mSv). A highly localized dose, but still giving off considerable amounts of radiation constantly. I get about 2-3 mrem of radiation for every 12 hour shift I work, and I'm allowed 5rem total dose per year.
The health physic guy told my manager that she probably got a lifedose of 10 rem, which is almost as much as my managers lifedose at the nuclear plant. Pretty heavy stuff.
Gamma is hard to shield (goes through everything), so a briefcase with a decent amount of radioactive stuff would be really hard to shield without the case being stupid heavy. So, you would only need to set the threshold around 10 mrem to catch anybody with anything sizable.
I did (read "did") a lot of DV video editing, so I needed the speed of RAID 0, of both read and write.
Not being that rich, I couldn't afford a SCSI RAID system, so I tried to see if IDE RAID could fit the bill.
I guess I really shouldn't blame it all on the RAID 0, because it was the HD that died due to unknown circumstances (RAID controller is among the possibilities).
But what the RAID 0 did was pretty much make any data I had on there unretrievable by any conventional (and cheap) means.
And I guess an underlying fact is that my hubris of geek-tech lordship just screamed that I needed a phat RAID 0 system to impress the chicks.
RAID, for me, sucked big donkey balls. Used an MSI KT3 Ultra ARU which has RAID built in.
The jist of the story is that I lost almost 240 gigs worth of files. Yeah yeah, I did RAID 0, when one day one of my HD's decides to click incessantly. There was nothing I could do. I sat there tearing up as the drive was clicking because I knew I wasn't going to be able to save the drive.
I habitually backup files, but mostly the dynamic stuff like email, documents and ICQ databases. Most people don't backup 240 gigs worth of data, let alone a gig. I tried to restore what I could, but some stuff was lost forever. It was like a fire going through all my files.
I guess that's a painful lesson learned.
RAID system bootup times are also longer, by a factor of 2x. But that's another story.
A PDA that you don't normally carry along with your wallet and watch is pretty much usless, just like a cellphone that gets left at home.
It's only good if you have it on you, where you can whip it out at a moment's notice. I carry mine all the time, so I would have 3 bulges in my pocket... Wallet/cell phone, PocketPC, and.. umm...
The PocketPC has soo much going for it, from maps (PocketMap), AvantGo (the killer app IMO of PDA's), games, MP3 player (just don't forget the headphones), and all the usually PDA stuff.
Waiting in line? Whip it out and play a quick game of Bejeweled (another killer app!). Lost? Load up PocketMap.
But I couldn't do any of that if I didn't carry it with me, at all times. Sure, there's the chance it could break/get stolen, but that's with all tools. If you don't use it, no matter how useful it *could* be, it's just a waste of money.
My blog isn't for you. It's password protected (not 128-bit) to keep out the riffraff that don't know who I am. Not a strong system, but it's meant more to be a fence than a massive firewall.
I don't post for the masses or rant about world issues. Everybody knows that opinions on the internet are like assholes. Everybody's got them, and most of them stink.
Who I do post for are my friends and relatives, who, if they wanted to, could check up on my life, see my work sched (I work shift), read a bit of my relational life and all the little stuff you don't want to repeat to every single friend, again and again. It's my bulletin board, and it's all mine. If you know me, check it out. If you don't, I don't have anything interesting to say to you, except for some pictures of my hot friends.
Slashdot Mirror
That being said, still good to see it out, although it's a bit late (Quake sourcecode was released a few years back).
The story is simple and sweet, and although it uses cliches a bit, it has a good sense of history and how absurd (or maybe not that paranoid) back in the 60's.
If you're bored one night, try to pick it up. I think you'll know what I mean after you see it.
And a headphone jack is available, only you have to pay extra (about $8, or $5 for an integrated headphone... go figure).
There are a lot of nifty accessories available now, like a pager-style holster.
The buttons are recessed slightly, so it takes a bit of time to get used to. Also, they're slightly smaller than the original GBA, so larger hands might find it awkward, especially with the new configuration. It's also harder to do a soft-reset (which may or may not be a bad thing).
The sound is significantly better (IMO), probably due to the placement of the speaker. It's smack in the middle of the device, so your palms won't muffle the sound (a la GBA). Still, no headset jack.
The shoulder buttons are smaller (L & R), but after a couple of games, it's not noticeable.
The cartridge slot is at the bottom, so certain peripherals like the Kirby tilt module won't work, and the digital camera attachments might be weird to work with.
The AC adapter is really well made, with the prongs folding inside so it's easy to transport. It's also small (about 3/4" x 1.5" x 2") and light. Too bad it's still a wall-wart design.
The screen is now protected due to the design, but the plastic doesn't feel that robust. I'm thinking that it can get easily scratched (though I'm not going to try to find out).
Other than that, I'm *highly* impressed with the GBA SP. If you have a GBA without the Afterburner kit, try to sell it to kid next door or give it to some young relatives. It's just that good. For only $100US, you get an amazing piece of hardware that can entertain you longer than a $2k laptop can on a flight overseas. 9.5/10
As for the last war that you guys started, I believe it was the war of 1812, when you guys invaded Canada.
Muscle mass automagically atrophies when not in use, so I don't see how someone can "grow" muscle like they would grow hair.
Obviously, there are serious moral and biological questions that have yet to be answered about all this. And unfortunately, these types of people usually have too optimistic view of the near-future. I mean, where are the flying-cars and annual visits to the moon?
Sure, Atari had its accomplices (Intellivision, Colleco) but Atari was the "big boy" but didn't have the maturity for a good business model or proper "hot or not" entertainment senses. By flooding the market with crap ass games (and letting companies they've licensed do that... ET anyone?) they spread such ill-will among the public that it took literally years before all the stars aligned and Nintendo showed the path.
So for them to last as long as they have, I don't think we should really mourn them, as they've been dead for the longest time. (though admittedly Stun Running did suck up a lot of my money). They've just been a souless zombie for the last 20 years.
Of course, there's no solid way to prevent bribes from happening, but if you've had credit problems, you know how "under the gun" you feel when the agencies heckle you for money. Sometimes you would almost do anything to get rid of them... Hmm.. sounds like SPAM!
Of course, you have all the rights to refuse to a credit search. Unfortunately, the company has all the right to refuse to hire you on those grounds alone.
What irks me is that The Family Guy had some real spunk and great writing, until it was cancelled (along with Futurama, which had a longer run). But I don't think it's reasonable to cancel those shows when King of the Hill and The Simpsons are still on. Is there no justice in the world?!
That, and the movie before that, Star Trek - Insurrection wasn't good at all. Remember: Once fooled, shame on you. Twice fooled, shame on me.
The public might be stupid, but not THAT stupid
What we do need is faster access/read times, and an easy way to get that is a solidstate HD. Not a huge amount of storage, maybe about 5-10 gigs worth. Enough to hold the OS and commonly used apps. With RAM prices as low as they are now, where are these things?! I want nano-second access times, not miliseconds! Imagine booting your computer in 3 seconds. Now that would be progress.
I mean, the three-some sex alone with our model girlfriends is a workout in itself, but I guess lesser people wouldn't be able to keep up.
It's not libel if it's true =)
A music video, a self-contained commercial for the album costs a LOT of money ($100k up to $500k), without actually bringing any money in by itself (except for the growing trend of musicvid DVD's).
Everytime you watch a music video or listen to the radio, that's marketing money spent just to get you to buy the album. For people that want to go big-time, you gotta shell out the big-bucks. That $20 you pay for the CD pays for pretty much every method that got you aware of the CD in the first place. Except for word-of-mouth, which to marketers, is priceless (which it is, since it's free).
By my count, MAME 0.63b has about 3700 ROM's (give or take a couple, some are just varients of each other), 32k is almost 10x more games than that. Seeing how it took about 25 years alone to make those ROM's, I can't see how it is humanly possible to create 32k games. Even a rehash of games of yore (PC, NES, SNES, SEGA, etc) would hardly break the 25k mark. That's a LOT of games.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
WTF? This guy is just copying and reposting his old stuff over again (look at his Russia/India posts) and changing names.
First, you can't get a decent Geforce4 Ti for ~$100. Maybe a Geforce4MX, but that is a severly crippled GF4, so much so that even John Carmack said not to get one. A Geforce4 4200 (which is the lowest Geforce 4 is about $150.
So you don't "need" a 9700 that costs $300. How about the ATI 9500, which is the slow brother of the 9700? Much cheaper, a bit crippled, but performs on par or even better than the GF 4600, let alone the 4200. And only about $180. WITH DirectX 9 support, anti-alias glory with anisotropic filtering, all at a playable rate.
This isn't just how that the 9700 is faster (duh!) than the 4x00 series from Nvidia, but also how the whole 9x00 family is faster than Nvidia, budget and highend (I don't count the bastardized 9000). This family is all derived from the tech of the 9700.
but don't take my opinion for it, check it out for yourself.
Tech Report on 9500
Anandtech on 9500
Tom's Hardware on 9500
What this does revel is that human teaching methods are peaking. Gone is the dreams that you can teach calculus to grade 5's (a la STTNG) or having all the students be med-skool bound.
There's always going to be the geniuses, the idiots, and the "everbody in between" crowd. Learning is wildly varied from one person to the next, as is teaching method. I think there's a snide arrogance that we supposedly know "better" because we have these fancy tools and such instead of the blackboard used 50 years ago.
As Calvin (of C&H fame) said, "you can present the material, but you can't make me care". You'll always have that, unless you can find someway of legally spiking the water fountains.
BLOG! .plan it's good
What's full of posts
and lying boasts?
it's BLOG, it's BLOG
It's better than
it's BLOG BLOG
It's not a question of 'should'
What's boring and lame
and always the same?
it's BLOG, it's BLOG
It's a diary on the 'net
it's BLOG, it's BLOG
it's stories about your pet
Everyone loves the BLOG
Everyone needs a BLOG
BLOG from Whammo!
or if you like the logs...
LOG!
What rolls down stairs
Alone or in pairs
Rolls over your neighbor's dog.
What's great for a snack
And fits on your back
It's log, log, log!
It's lo-og, lo-og,
It's big, it's heavy, it's wood.
It's lo-og, lo-og,
It's better than bad, it's good.
Everyone wants a log,
You're gonna love it, log
Come on and get your log,
Everyone needs a log...
BY BLAMMO!
My manager's wife once had radio-iodine treatment for her overactive thyroid, and he was curious on how much radiation she was actually getting. So he borrow a gamma meter from work (good old FAG gamma meter F4) and surveyed her neck.
He found a MASSIVE amount of radiation comming off her thyroid/neck area (this was right after treatment). At contact, it was like 4 rem/h (about 4 mSv) and working distance (30 cm) it was 100 mrem/h (0.1 mSv). A highly localized dose, but still giving off considerable amounts of radiation constantly. I get about 2-3 mrem of radiation for every 12 hour shift I work, and I'm allowed 5rem total dose per year.
The health physic guy told my manager that she probably got a lifedose of 10 rem, which is almost as much as my managers lifedose at the nuclear plant. Pretty heavy stuff.
Gamma is hard to shield (goes through everything), so a briefcase with a decent amount of radioactive stuff would be really hard to shield without the case being stupid heavy. So, you would only need to set the threshold around 10 mrem to catch anybody with anything sizable.
Not being that rich, I couldn't afford a SCSI RAID system, so I tried to see if IDE RAID could fit the bill.
I guess I really shouldn't blame it all on the RAID 0, because it was the HD that died due to unknown circumstances (RAID controller is among the possibilities).
But what the RAID 0 did was pretty much make any data I had on there unretrievable by any conventional (and cheap) means.
And I guess an underlying fact is that my hubris of geek-tech lordship just screamed that I needed a phat RAID 0 system to impress the chicks.
The jist of the story is that I lost almost 240 gigs worth of files. Yeah yeah, I did RAID 0, when one day one of my HD's decides to click incessantly. There was nothing I could do. I sat there tearing up as the drive was clicking because I knew I wasn't going to be able to save the drive.
I habitually backup files, but mostly the dynamic stuff like email, documents and ICQ databases. Most people don't backup 240 gigs worth of data, let alone a gig. I tried to restore what I could, but some stuff was lost forever. It was like a fire going through all my files. I guess that's a painful lesson learned.
RAID system bootup times are also longer, by a factor of 2x. But that's another story.
It's only good if you have it on you, where you can whip it out at a moment's notice. I carry mine all the time, so I would have 3 bulges in my pocket... Wallet/cell phone, PocketPC, and.. umm...
The PocketPC has soo much going for it, from maps (PocketMap), AvantGo (the killer app IMO of PDA's), games, MP3 player (just don't forget the headphones), and all the usually PDA stuff.
Waiting in line? Whip it out and play a quick game of Bejeweled (another killer app!). Lost? Load up PocketMap.
But I couldn't do any of that if I didn't carry it with me, at all times. Sure, there's the chance it could break/get stolen, but that's with all tools. If you don't use it, no matter how useful it *could* be, it's just a waste of money.
I don't post for the masses or rant about world issues. Everybody knows that opinions on the internet are like assholes. Everybody's got them, and most of them stink.
Who I do post for are my friends and relatives, who, if they wanted to, could check up on my life, see my work sched (I work shift), read a bit of my relational life and all the little stuff you don't want to repeat to every single friend, again and again. It's my bulletin board, and it's all mine. If you know me, check it out. If you don't, I don't have anything interesting to say to you, except for some pictures of my hot friends.