* Richly designed universe, tons of ships, with tons of configurations * Excellent space engine with beautiful art, incorporating pixel shaders for real-time lighting. * Innovative flight model, making for very fast-paced battles. * Contrived, but well-executed storyline. The depth of characters made up for the redundant plot. * Excellent online play on persistent servers.
While it only took me a week to beat the single player game, I was caught up for months in the multiplayer. The game was certainly worth the purchase price.
Yes, the multiplayer game had no content, but then again it was also absolutely free, with the community maintaining servers. Basically, they gave us a clean slate to start from, and the community responded with the content. Just have a look at Lancers Reactor to get a tast of what you missed out on.
So what, exactly, makes it qualify for this list, in your opinion?
Office '98 was released for Macintosh. Office is not limited to the Windows world.
As for backward compatibility, I actually found that Office 97 could open up documents from Word 2000 pretty reliably.
Microsoft got a really bad rep for "incompatible formats" because you couldn't open Office 97 documents in Office 95. You had to explicitly save your Office 97 document as "Office 95 compatible", which was far from "incompatible".
But you can imagine, after people carted their disk across the office, or down to the computer lab, only to find it wouldn't open, that many people were not happy.
Microsoft also got a really bad rep with Office 97 because of troubles importing Office 95 documents. I can remember many times where importted documents had messed-up footnotes and page layouts, it was really inexcusable considering that they advertised backward compatibility.
AFAIK, this should no longer be a problem, as MS has been selling one standard file format since then.
Running away would be a sign you are unable to defend yourself.
In most boxing matches, if you do not defend yourself, the rules state the referee must stop the fight.
This rule is really intended to save boxers who are too tired / beat up to keep their arms up, but are too thickheaded and determined to fall to the mat. But it also can apply to fighters making a mockery of the match, so no boxing stance, no win.
Two years ago I sunk 20 bucks into a very small ( about 1/5 the size of this hulk mentioned in the article ) powered USB hub, and 4 cheapo USB gamepads.
I've been enjoying 4-player MAME for years now, where has the author of this "story" been? The whole point of USB was to do away with complicated, proprietary gadgets like this one that nobody will buy.
Er, by your logic you should get terrible headaches watching TV.
No. Televisions have less reactive phosphors, which makes it harder to see the path of the electron gun. Motion blur from the video feed also helps to hide the "flicker" effect.
If you're getting headaches on a 60hz monitor (standard in the 90s and perfectly useable)
Not quite. Console VGA text modes, and low-resolution VGA both run at 70Hz, a significant improvement over 60Hz for those with sensitive eyes.
Multisync SVGA monitors have been available since the early 90s, and have been quite affordable since the mid 90s. 60Hz was hardly a "standard" for the 90s.
Remember, the human eye cannot tell the difference between 30fps and 32fps, continuity is the same.
Of course not, you're beating a dead horse. Nobody can tell the difference between framerates that close together. But the human eye CAN tell the difference between 30 and 60fps in a rendered scene, especially on a monitor. The extra fps make up for the lack of motion blur.
The only reason a higher fps in a game means anything is because of how it reflects the speed at which your network card is receiving information
Now you just sound like an idiot.
The reason you can tell any difference between 30 and 60 or 100 isn't because your eyes are special and you can tell the difference between the framerates, it's because either your network (or nic) isn't up to the task or your graphics card is being bogged down by slow drivers or some combination.
Network lag and dropped packets produce an effect that is different from a slow framerate. Your local screen update rate is independernt of network updates, but a good video card cannot make up for a poor network connection.
* A video card that can produce 30fps under optimal conditions cannot cope under a heavily loaded game with lots of effects and overdraw. People cannot tell the difference between 60 and 120fps, but when action gets heavy, and your framerate drops by more than half, you're going to be glad you can do 120fps in the best case, because it still gives you 50-60fps in the worst case.
* A non-optimal network connection produces a different effect, where moving objects in the game skip around or "teleport".
Allow me to make an analogy that even you can understand.
Let's say you have a machine capable of software decoding a DVD at full speed. To simulate a real game environment with tons of overdraw and effects, let's say you run TWO instances of the DVD decoder, which cuts your framerate in half ( minus overhead ). For an NTSC encoded DVD, this gives you a consistent 15fps, but it will actually look WORSE than a movie originally recorded at 15fps, because part of the motion blur is lost. If you had purchased a machine twice as powerful, you would have been able to handle this worst-case with ease, hence the reason for having a system that is overkill in the "best case".
Now, let's say you have a machine capable of software decoding a DVD at full speed, but you're burning a CD at the same time, with the burner on the same IDE channel as the DVD-ROM. The CD burner keeps grabbing the IDE bus, causing you to drop 5-6 frames every few seconds. This is an analogy for dropped packets, and if your network settings are incorrect or your connection has problems, it can happen constantly. This is independent of how fast your processor can process DVD video, but if the processor cannot keep up with the video stream, it makes the dropped frames from bus interference even worse.
A few years back I was shooting shows for a friend ( the director at the time ), and he rented an XL-1 for me to use.
I did a few practice runs during the dress rehersals, and I had to admit the AF was dodgy, probably due to the high contrasts on-stage.
Anyway, I ended up filming the whole thing in manual; the focus on the XL-1 is wonderfully smooth to operate, and the video came out great. Of course, I wouldn't suggest MF video for situations where you cannot anticipate where your subject will move, that's why we still need AF.
Right, the idea is that there are several things in the basic design that you can probably reuse between different services without compromising usability.
You've mentioned all the changes each service is going to get in their version of the plane, but how about all the things that aren't gonna change?
I just happen to work for the company building the Radar and EW system for JSF. When we design something new, we always derrive the product from previous designs, but because our previous design is usually outdated (compared to customer requirements), we often end up building something new at great expense.
Building one system for 3 lines of service at the same time just makes sense, instead of building something completely new for every customer who gets a case of feature envy. Sure, it's not the answer to everything, but it's cheaper than designing 3 different planes from the ground up, and it was key to convincing Congress to replace some of our aging fighter fleet.
Over the years I've played a ton of RPGs, and although I have no problem with random encounters, I can understand why some people would so readily hate them.
One game series that stood out in terms of handling random encounters was the Fallout series created by Black Isle. Your player had a skill called "Outdoorsman" which determined your traveling and scouting capabilities. A higher outdoorsman rating would help you avoid random encounters, but you had to be willing to commit skill points toward it (at the cost of other skills). Further, items like the car (which you acquired later in the game) made random encounters less likely.
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum, we had the Shining Force series created by Sonic Team. All "encounters" were scripted, significant battles that pitted the player in strategic combat with enemy forces (basically, the battle layout was Final Fantasy Tactics without 3D terrain, 10 years earlier). The complete lack of random encounters was refreshing, and the impressive storylines mananaged to keep you involved and interested from beginning to end.
Basically, the point is that games do not have to have "dumb" random encounter engines, nor do they have to have random encounters at all. What I am trying to say is this: if you have a modern RPG, and the random encounters are handled poorly, then this suggests that the rest of the game is also designed poorly. There are too many good examples out there for RPG makers to have any excuses anymore.
Let's see, they need an x86 processor because Sun is losing out in the non-x86 world. Fujitsu already can make a better UltraSparc, and IBM is constantly hounding on Sun with their Power4, just to name a couple.
Why AMD? Two easy reasons:
1. Intel is single-handedly responsible for the rise of inexpensive x-86 based servers. Lots of bad blood there. As for IA-64, Sun would probably give in and buy Fujitsu-made UltraSparcs before they ported to anything Intel.
2. The AMD Opteron has flat 64-bit addressing over the Xeon, but here is the key point: AMD's on-processor memory controller, plus dual Hypertransport busses for inter-processor communication mean that Opteron sees MUCH HIGHER efficiency in multi-processor configurations versus the Xeon.
The Verite could do edge anti-aliasing with little hit to performance in games written for the RRedline API. I know Tomb Raider was ported to RRedline, and possibly TR2.
I do remember VQuake, turning on edge antialiasing for world, models and particles, and it looked sweet. FSAA has got NOTHING on edge antialiasing, there's no blurred textures, just edges without jaggies.
For those who do not remember, VQuake was THE FIRST 3D-accelerated version of Quake, specifically made for the v1000 series. Carmack chose to work with Rendition porting Quake to the v1000 because, at the time of release, the Voodoo Graphics was superior, but twice the price.
You forget that the Gamecube disc is continuously spinning, as is the case for most consoles.
I wonder how Sony is going to deal with this concept: continuous motion would make their game loads more responsive, but would also drain the battery faster. Even with a smaller diameter, the spin-up for an optical drive is measured in seconds.
Another problem everyone else overlooks concerning spin and power usage: isn't this thing going to waste a significant amount of power counter-acting rotation of the spinning axis?
I always recall that old demonstration in my physics class, consisting of a bike wheel mounted on an axle with handles. You spin up the wheel, then try to turn it, and you HAVE TO DO SIGNIFICANT WORK to change the axis of rotation.
Now, imagine a gamer with his hands changing angle pretty often, probably jittery hands plugging away at the buttons, and I can imagine even more power lost if the disc keeps spinning constantly. Every movement of the player's hands will cost the disc momentum.
I am really curious how Sony is going to aproach this problem, because I am certain that a disc that spins down will be a blow to usability ( think slower than PS1 load times ), while a disc that spins constantly will suck battery life like nothing before.
Actually, the earliest instance of easy backward-compatibility I can recall was the Atari 7800. It could read 2600 and 7800 carts, all from the same cartridge slot. Of course, the 7800 was so heavily delayed that Nintendo stole their market...
Even though the z80 hardware was built in to the Megadrive / Genesis, you had to shell out for the Master System Converter.
This, plus the fact that the Master System didn't sell too well, made it a losing feature.
When you sell millions of PS1s, and you can get an optical drive cheap that reads your old CD media, and your new DVD media, then you've got backward-compatibility that's a selling point.
ATARI and Sega did it first. Nintendo and Sony were the first companies to do it right.
I need not search for precious gold; Of wealth, I have my share. For with my eyes, I scan the skies And find my fortune there. A host of priceless dreams unfold In songs that bluebirds sing. The earth, the sea belong to me - I'm richer than a king. To add to things that money cannot buy, An echo brings this very soft reply:
Yes! We have no bananas! We have no bananas today! We've string beans and onions, papayas and scallions, And all kinds of fruit and say! We have an old-fashioned tomato, Long Island potato, But, yes! We have no bananas! We have no bananas today!
Yes, we no-nje gotta de bananos. We no-nje gotta-da banano today, but one-a menoots! We gotta new kinda garlic - When-a use-a dees garlic, It-a meka you stand apart-a from-a you friends. We gotta 64,000 watermelone! We don't-a sell any, but the guy we buy'em from... Mama mia! Does he sell a watermelone! But-a yes! We no-nje gotta the bananas. Hey, why you-on? We no-nje gotta de bananos today!
Yes! Ah, we have no bananas! What's that? An half a banana? Now what good is a banana split? Uh-huh-huh-huh! We have a muttons, and buttons, And kippers with zippers, And pounds of devaluated pounds... "Banana": S T I N K ! They ain't no stinkin' bananas! Precisely! They ain't no stinking bananas! Yes! Ah, we have no bananas! Pip pip, cheerio, and *******! Uh-huh-huh-huh!
Yes, we ain't got bananas. We ain't got bananas today. We got pickles and crocks; We got bagels and locks; A bagel that's a donut dipped in cement. We got delicious knishes and kosher champagne - The kosher champagne - there's two cents plain; Pastrami, salami, matzos, and jam. You should pardon the expression: We even got ham!
But yes, we ain't got bananas. We ain't got bananas today.
Or, just go to Blockbuster with your own 4.2 gig thumb drives, plug into the USB 3 (this is the future ya know) port, download right there.
....
.... ( 30 minutes later ) still waiting....
I hope you can grasp the fact that the fastest flash on earth can only write at a few megs a second ( this is regardless of bus technology ). Until there comes a fundamental change in how flash memory is designed ( MRAM, perhaps? ), you're going to be stuck with slow writes.
Yeah, I think I came up with this brilliant idea in 6th grade, something to do with an electric car that used a generator to continuously regenerate power. After we started discusing physics in Junior High, I felt really stupid having ever conceived of the above, because once it was mentioned to me, conservation of energy made perfect sense.
Now I don't feel so stupid, because I have living proof that people can graduate high school and STILL not understand the simple concept of conservation of energy.
The point is, this blog posted information about a company, and readily identified that company and the location of said photograph.
If I publically posted where I work, and possibly provided pertinent information on the various facilities within my workplace, including location and what they do, THAT WOULD BE IRRESPONSIBLE OF ME. I could easily be fired for that, and possibly prosecuted.
Employees need to understand that their workplace is not their property, and they need to respect the fact that being on that property is a privelege. Most companies have written policies against disseminating ANY information about facilities without proper authorization, and they usually have to sign such a clause at hire time.
This isn't whistle-blowing, MS isn't breaking any laws, so there's no exception. If you are stupid enough to take photos and identify the location, AND slap your name on it, then you deserve to be fired.
This depends on the level of security of the area.
I work in classification level Secret areas daily, and I am allowed tom take my cellphone inside, but it has to be turned off.
But there are areas I have been inside in this same company that require you to leave your phone at the door.
Regardless, cameras of any type are not allowed to be carried inside company grounds by employees. This includes camera phones, and covers both secured and open work areas.
Many companies have rules against cameras to protect their proprietary and government data. I would not be surprised at all if Microsoft has a policy against cameras, and if they consider the information provided proprietary, that's grounds for dismissal.
All those 128k AAC tracks from the Apple Store are VBR ENCODED with a target average bitrate of 128k.
VBR is part of the original mp3 spec. The only reason CBR became popular was because back in 1997/98, the processing power required for VBR wasn't there, and good free VBR encoders didn't exist.
If you encode an mp3 in VBR with a target bitrate of 128k, it will sound MUCH BETTER than a 128k CBR mp3 ( quality somewhere between 160k and 192k CBR ) because the encoder will use 160k and 192k frames for many of the more complicated portions of the song.
On top of this, I don't understand why Apple cannot relese tracks that have been optimally encoded, rather then average bitrate encoded. The 128k AAC is not nearly enough to reproduce accurately every song on the planet, and it may actually be a waste for some music. When you consider that a lame --alt-preset only uses as much storage space as required to meet a TARGET QUALITY LEVEL, not a target file size, then you wonder why Apple doesn't offer such an elegant optimization with their AACs. Is the encoder just not capable of this?
Finally, yes AAC uses less space than a comparable-quality CBR mp3, but when you compare to a VBR mp3, the gap closes significantly. I wish people would educate themselves before so readily bashing mp3, just because they downloaded some crappy 128k CBR rips off of Kazaa, or they stupidly ripped all their albums in 192k CBR. I personally find it impressive that mp3 is still capable of competing despite being a decade or so old, but it cannot supplement ignorance.
IBM has decided that a slot-based hardware adaptation is best, whereas Intel is angling for wireless connectivity. Both are basically computers and storage with battery in a tiny box.
Slashdot Mirror
Link to Laancer's Reactor
Damn plain text stripped out my link.
Freelancer, are you nuts?
Let's see:
* Richly designed universe, tons of ships, with tons of configurations
* Excellent space engine with beautiful art, incorporating pixel shaders for real-time lighting.
* Innovative flight model, making for very fast-paced battles.
* Contrived, but well-executed storyline. The depth of characters made up for the redundant plot.
* Excellent online play on persistent servers.
While it only took me a week to beat the single player game, I was caught up for months in the multiplayer. The game was certainly worth the purchase price.
Yes, the multiplayer game had no content, but then again it was also absolutely free, with the community maintaining servers. Basically, they gave us a clean slate to start from, and the community responded with the content. Just have a look at Lancers Reactor to get a tast of what you missed out on.
So what, exactly, makes it qualify for this list, in your opinion?
Office '98 was released for Macintosh. Office is not limited to the Windows world.
As for backward compatibility, I actually found that Office 97 could open up documents from Word 2000 pretty reliably.
Microsoft got a really bad rep for "incompatible formats" because you couldn't open Office 97 documents in Office 95. You had to explicitly save your Office 97 document as "Office 95 compatible", which was far from "incompatible".
But you can imagine, after people carted their disk across the office, or down to the computer lab, only to find it wouldn't open, that many people were not happy.
Microsoft also got a really bad rep with Office 97 because of troubles importing Office 95 documents. I can remember many times where importted documents had messed-up footnotes and page layouts, it was really inexcusable considering that they advertised backward compatibility.
AFAIK, this should no longer be a problem, as MS has been selling one standard file format since then.
Running away would be a sign you are unable to defend yourself.
In most boxing matches, if you do not defend yourself, the rules state the referee must stop the fight.
This rule is really intended to save boxers who are too tired / beat up to keep their arms up, but are too thickheaded and determined to fall to the mat. But it also can apply to fighters making a mockery of the match, so no boxing stance, no win.
Well, IANALBMSIATALS
I am not a lawyer, but my sister is about to attend law school.
HAH, BEAT THAT ACRONYM SPOUTERS!
Two years ago I sunk 20 bucks into a very small ( about 1/5 the size of this hulk mentioned in the article ) powered USB hub, and 4 cheapo USB gamepads.
I've been enjoying 4-player MAME for years now, where has the author of this "story" been? The whole point of USB was to do away with complicated, proprietary gadgets like this one that nobody will buy.
Er, by your logic you should get terrible headaches watching TV.
No. Televisions have less reactive phosphors, which makes it harder to see the path of the electron gun. Motion blur from the video feed also helps to hide the "flicker" effect.
If you're getting headaches on a 60hz monitor (standard in the 90s and perfectly useable)
Not quite. Console VGA text modes, and low-resolution VGA both run at 70Hz, a significant improvement over 60Hz for those with sensitive eyes.
Multisync SVGA monitors have been available since the early 90s, and have been quite affordable since the mid 90s. 60Hz was hardly a "standard" for the 90s.
Remember, the human eye cannot tell the difference between 30fps and 32fps, continuity is the same.
Of course not, you're beating a dead horse. Nobody can tell the difference between framerates that close together. But the human eye CAN tell the difference between 30 and 60fps in a rendered scene, especially on a monitor. The extra fps make up for the lack of motion blur.
The only reason a higher fps in a game means anything is because of how it reflects the speed at which your network card is receiving information
Now you just sound like an idiot.
The reason you can tell any difference between 30 and 60 or 100 isn't because your eyes are special and you can tell the difference between the framerates, it's because either your network (or nic) isn't up to the task or your graphics card is being bogged down by slow drivers or some combination.
Network lag and dropped packets produce an effect that is different from a slow framerate. Your local screen update rate is independernt of network updates, but a good video card cannot make up for a poor network connection.
* A video card that can produce 30fps under optimal conditions cannot cope under a heavily loaded game with lots of effects and overdraw. People cannot tell the difference between 60 and 120fps, but when action gets heavy, and your framerate drops by more than half, you're going to be glad you can do 120fps in the best case, because it still gives you 50-60fps in the worst case.
* A non-optimal network connection produces a different effect, where moving objects in the game skip around or "teleport".
Allow me to make an analogy that even you can understand.
Let's say you have a machine capable of software decoding a DVD at full speed. To simulate a real game environment with tons of overdraw and effects, let's say you run TWO instances of the DVD decoder, which cuts your framerate in half ( minus overhead ). For an NTSC encoded DVD, this gives you a consistent 15fps, but it will actually look WORSE than a movie originally recorded at 15fps, because part of the motion blur is lost. If you had purchased a machine twice as powerful, you would have been able to handle this worst-case with ease, hence the reason for having a system that is overkill in the "best case".
Now, let's say you have a machine capable of software decoding a DVD at full speed, but you're burning a CD at the same time, with the burner on the same IDE channel as the DVD-ROM. The CD burner keeps grabbing the IDE bus, causing you to drop 5-6 frames every few seconds. This is an analogy for dropped packets, and if your network settings are incorrect or your connection has problems, it can happen constantly. This is independent of how fast your processor can process DVD video, but if the processor cannot keep up with the video stream, it makes the dropped frames from bus interference even worse.
So, you're saying that this whole effort is just a fancy attempt at a Fibonacci sequence?
First real-world application I've ever seen...
I have to agree with this,
A few years back I was shooting shows for a friend ( the director at the time ), and he rented an XL-1 for me to use.
I did a few practice runs during the dress rehersals, and I had to admit the AF was dodgy, probably due to the high contrasts on-stage.
Anyway, I ended up filming the whole thing in manual; the focus on the XL-1 is wonderfully smooth to operate, and the video came out great. Of course, I wouldn't suggest MF video for situations where you cannot anticipate where your subject will move, that's why we still need AF.
Right, the idea is that there are several things in the basic design that you can probably reuse between different services without compromising usability.
You've mentioned all the changes each service is going to get in their version of the plane, but how about all the things that aren't gonna change?
I just happen to work for the company building the Radar and EW system for JSF. When we design something new, we always derrive the product from previous designs, but because our previous design is usually outdated (compared to customer requirements), we often end up building something new at great expense.
Building one system for 3 lines of service at the same time just makes sense, instead of building something completely new for every customer who gets a case of feature envy. Sure, it's not the answer to everything, but it's cheaper than designing 3 different planes from the ground up, and it was key to convincing Congress to replace some of our aging fighter fleet.
Over the years I've played a ton of RPGs, and although I have no problem with random encounters, I can understand why some people would so readily hate them.
One game series that stood out in terms of handling random encounters was the Fallout series created by Black Isle. Your player had a skill called "Outdoorsman" which determined your traveling and scouting capabilities. A higher outdoorsman rating would help you avoid random encounters, but you had to be willing to commit skill points toward it (at the cost of other skills). Further, items like the car (which you acquired later in the game) made random encounters less likely.
On the completely opposite end of the spectrum, we had the Shining Force series created by Sonic Team. All "encounters" were scripted, significant battles that pitted the player in strategic combat with enemy forces (basically, the battle layout was Final Fantasy Tactics without 3D terrain, 10 years earlier). The complete lack of random encounters was refreshing, and the impressive storylines mananaged to keep you involved and interested from beginning to end.
Basically, the point is that games do not have to have "dumb" random encounter engines, nor do they have to have random encounters at all. What I am trying to say is this: if you have a modern RPG, and the random encounters are handled poorly, then this suggests that the rest of the game is also designed poorly. There are too many good examples out there for RPG makers to have any excuses anymore.
You could always call it:
"Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper Babysitting Service" Linux.
To appeal to the Simpsons demographic, of course!
Let's see, they need an x86 processor because Sun is losing out in the non-x86 world. Fujitsu already can make a better UltraSparc, and IBM is constantly hounding on Sun with their Power4, just to name a couple.
Why AMD? Two easy reasons:
1. Intel is single-handedly responsible for the rise of inexpensive x-86 based servers. Lots of bad blood there. As for IA-64, Sun would probably give in and buy Fujitsu-made UltraSparcs before they ported to anything Intel.
2. The AMD Opteron has flat 64-bit addressing over the Xeon, but here is the key point: AMD's on-processor memory controller, plus dual Hypertransport busses for inter-processor communication mean that Opteron sees MUCH HIGHER efficiency in multi-processor configurations versus the Xeon.
I must agree, I wouldn't do this with piss like Bud, let alone a real beer.
:)
Of course, an ice-cold chilled mug is a diffeent story, but you can chill the mug without water
The Verite could do edge anti-aliasing with little hit to performance in games written for the RRedline API. I know Tomb Raider was ported to RRedline, and possibly TR2.
I do remember VQuake, turning on edge antialiasing for world, models and particles, and it looked sweet. FSAA has got NOTHING on edge antialiasing, there's no blurred textures, just edges without jaggies.
For those who do not remember, VQuake was THE FIRST 3D-accelerated version of Quake, specifically made for the v1000 series. Carmack chose to work with Rendition porting Quake to the v1000 because, at the time of release, the Voodoo Graphics was superior, but twice the price.
You forget that the Gamecube disc is continuously spinning, as is the case for most consoles.
I wonder how Sony is going to deal with this concept: continuous motion would make their game loads more responsive, but would also drain the battery faster. Even with a smaller diameter, the spin-up for an optical drive is measured in seconds.
Another problem everyone else overlooks concerning spin and power usage: isn't this thing going to waste a significant amount of power counter-acting rotation of the spinning axis?
I always recall that old demonstration in my physics class, consisting of a bike wheel mounted on an axle with handles. You spin up the wheel, then try to turn it, and you HAVE TO DO SIGNIFICANT WORK to change the axis of rotation.
Now, imagine a gamer with his hands changing angle pretty often, probably jittery hands plugging away at the buttons, and I can imagine even more power lost if the disc keeps spinning constantly. Every movement of the player's hands will cost the disc momentum.
I am really curious how Sony is going to aproach this problem, because I am certain that a disc that spins down will be a blow to usability ( think slower than PS1 load times ), while a disc that spins constantly will suck battery life like nothing before.
Actually, the earliest instance of easy backward-compatibility I can recall was the Atari 7800. It could read 2600 and 7800 carts, all from the same cartridge slot. Of course, the 7800 was so heavily delayed that Nintendo stole their market...
Even though the z80 hardware was built in to the Megadrive / Genesis, you had to shell out for the Master System Converter.
This, plus the fact that the Master System didn't sell too well, made it a losing feature.
When you sell millions of PS1s, and you can get an optical drive cheap that reads your old CD media, and your new DVD media, then you've got backward-compatibility that's a selling point.
ATARI and Sega did it first. Nintendo and Sony were the first companies to do it right.
Speaking of songs that get stuck in your head...
yes, we have no bananas
I need not search for precious gold;
Of wealth, I have my share.
For with my eyes, I scan the skies
And find my fortune there.
A host of priceless dreams unfold
In songs that bluebirds sing.
The earth, the sea belong to me -
I'm richer than a king.
To add to things that money cannot buy,
An echo brings this very soft reply:
Yes! We have no bananas!
We have no bananas today!
We've string beans and onions,
papayas and scallions,
And all kinds of fruit and say!
We have an old-fashioned tomato,
Long Island potato,
But, yes! We have no bananas!
We have no bananas today!
Yes, we no-nje gotta de bananos.
We no-nje gotta-da banano today, but one-a menoots!
We gotta new kinda garlic -
When-a use-a dees garlic,
It-a meka you stand apart-a from-a you friends.
We gotta 64,000 watermelone!
We don't-a sell any, but the guy we buy'em from...
Mama mia! Does he sell a watermelone!
But-a yes! We no-nje gotta the bananas. Hey, why you-on?
We no-nje gotta de bananos today!
Yes! Ah, we have no bananas!
What's that? An half a banana?
Now what good is a banana split? Uh-huh-huh-huh!
We have a muttons, and buttons,
And kippers with zippers,
And pounds of devaluated pounds...
"Banana": S T I N K !
They ain't no stinkin' bananas!
Precisely! They ain't no stinking bananas!
Yes! Ah, we have no bananas!
Pip pip, cheerio, and *******! Uh-huh-huh-huh!
Yes, we ain't got bananas.
We ain't got bananas today.
We got pickles and crocks;
We got bagels and locks;
A bagel that's a donut dipped in cement.
We got delicious knishes and kosher champagne -
The kosher champagne - there's two cents plain;
Pastrami, salami, matzos, and jam.
You should pardon the expression: We even got ham!
But yes, we ain't got bananas.
We ain't got bananas today.
Or, just go to Blockbuster with your own 4.2 gig thumb drives, plug into the USB 3 (this is the future ya know) port, download right there.
....
.... ( 30 minutes later ) still waiting....
I hope you can grasp the fact that the fastest flash on earth can only write at a few megs a second ( this is regardless of bus technology ). Until there comes a fundamental change in how flash memory is designed ( MRAM, perhaps? ), you're going to be stuck with slow writes.
Yeah, I think I came up with this brilliant idea in 6th grade, something to do with an electric car that used a generator to continuously regenerate power. After we started discusing physics in Junior High, I felt really stupid having ever conceived of the above, because once it was mentioned to me, conservation of energy made perfect sense.
Now I don't feel so stupid, because I have living proof that people can graduate high school and STILL not understand the simple concept of conservation of energy.
Somehow I missed making a point.
The point is, this blog posted information about a company, and readily identified that company and the location of said photograph.
If I publically posted where I work, and possibly provided pertinent information on the various facilities within my workplace, including location and what they do, THAT WOULD BE IRRESPONSIBLE OF ME. I could easily be fired for that, and possibly prosecuted.
Employees need to understand that their workplace is not their property, and they need to respect the fact that being on that property is a privelege. Most companies have written policies against disseminating ANY information about facilities without proper authorization, and they usually have to sign such a clause at hire time.
This isn't whistle-blowing, MS isn't breaking any laws, so there's no exception. If you are stupid enough to take photos and identify the location, AND slap your name on it, then you deserve to be fired.
This depends on the level of security of the area.
I work in classification level Secret areas daily, and I am allowed tom take my cellphone inside, but it has to be turned off.
But there are areas I have been inside in this same company that require you to leave your phone at the door.
Regardless, cameras of any type are not allowed to be carried inside company grounds by employees. This includes camera phones, and covers both secured and open work areas.
Many companies have rules against cameras to protect their proprietary and government data. I would not be surprised at all if Microsoft has a policy against cameras, and if they consider the information provided proprietary, that's grounds for dismissal.
All those 128k AAC tracks from the Apple Store are VBR ENCODED with a target average bitrate of 128k.
VBR is part of the original mp3 spec. The only reason CBR became popular was because back in 1997/98, the processing power required for VBR wasn't there, and good free VBR encoders didn't exist.
If you encode an mp3 in VBR with a target bitrate of 128k, it will sound MUCH BETTER than a 128k CBR mp3 ( quality somewhere between 160k and 192k CBR ) because the encoder will use 160k and 192k frames for many of the more complicated portions of the song.
On top of this, I don't understand why Apple cannot relese tracks that have been optimally encoded, rather then average bitrate encoded. The 128k AAC is not nearly enough to reproduce accurately every song on the planet, and it may actually be a waste for some music. When you consider that a lame --alt-preset only uses as much storage space as required to meet a TARGET QUALITY LEVEL, not a target file size, then you wonder why Apple doesn't offer such an elegant optimization with their AACs. Is the encoder just not capable of this?
Finally, yes AAC uses less space than a comparable-quality CBR mp3, but when you compare to a VBR mp3, the gap closes significantly. I wish people would educate themselves before so readily bashing mp3, just because they downloaded some crappy 128k CBR rips off of Kazaa, or they stupidly ripped all their albums in 192k CBR. I personally find it impressive that mp3 is still capable of competing despite being a decade or so old, but it cannot supplement ignorance.
And that's "General Protection Fault" to you mister.
I outrank you!
Oh yeah, it's exactly the same concept as an Intel Personal Server.
IBM has decided that a slot-based hardware adaptation is best, whereas Intel is angling for wireless connectivity. Both are basically computers and storage with battery in a tiny box.