I was under the impression that Battletech as a concept was a direct descendant of the Robotech series.
What made Battletech unique was the universe and gameplay, not the 'Mech concept.
Anyone who thinks you have to be FASA to make a 'Mech game need only look as far as Earthseige. So long as you don't use the term "'Mech", and juggle the weapons and designs a bit, you should be fine on the copyright thing.
You get a much higher resolution and color fidelity than anyone would ever be willing to pipe over an analog broadcast channel.
Even lower-resolution analog broadcasts are not without their gotchas. Your quality NTSC broadcast doesn't even use the same amount of color information for each quadrant of the screen, they concentrate the color bandwidth for the center. This is only one of the many tricks used to pack the thing into 6 MHz.
As for the compression artifacts, when did you ever get a perfect NTSC analog broadcast? There's always some form of image corruption, either due to reflections and environment ( broadcast ), or amplification and interference ( cable ). One thing digital brodcasts give us is error correction, meaning that there's a high probability that you're receiving a near-perfect picture, or no picture at all.
Why do users need incredibly strong passwords, unless the people designing the authentication system and maintaining the databases aren't doing their job?
If the password is difficult enough to survive a few hundred dictionary hack authentication attempts without breaking, it's good enough. By then you should invalidate the password and send off a new one to the user.
I make sure my important stuff has good passwords: my baking, paypal, billpay, email, and web store accounts, that's all personal. But if I say, sign up for a gaming site, or a forum like slashdot, I use a disposable password. I don't care if somebody hacks it, it's just an account, it's replaceable. Even so, I'm fairly certain you could not guess it within 1000 attempts, which makes it secure enough for me.
It's funny because it pokes fun at the human mentality: we are masters of this planet.
Funny thing is, we are not even masters of our own domain. We introduce species into an environment as pest control, and they become new, toughter pests. We pop pills with the latest and greatest chemicals only to discover they cause deaths in people with a previously unknown genetic trait. We split the atom, and proceed to use it to threaten our own existence. We eradicate diseases ( Smallpox, the most virulent strains of Influenza, etc ), but this simply means that is any one of them were ro resurge, it would have the same deadly effect as the Black Plague due to no resistance in the population.
We liken ourselves to supermen every day by pushing the boundaries without knowing or thoroughly considering all the consequences. The fact that "Superman" is in a wheelchair only serves to remind us how foolish we are as a race.
No matter how advanced we become, we are only human. Mortal. Fallible.
I seem to recall my freshman year of college, those with faster Pentium-based computers played Quake with cracked copies.
Those with slower machines opted for multiplayer GTA, which was also not paid for. Unlike Quake, I was led to believe that this was the norm for GTA, and that compared to the sales, the number of GTA "users" was staggering. But this might have something to do with the fact that stores refused to carry the product.
Anyway, this is hardly amazing news, as there were already patches for GTA back in the day that allowed for Glide accelerated graphics ( for all that fixed overhead angle texture-scaling ). Moving it to Direct3D is simply a small step in the same direction.
But, then again, there are dozens of classic software titles that could receive a similar treatment. But the companies don't want to let go of anything remotely valuable, and even make up excuses about having to support a free product. I would not be surprised if the GTA community takes up most of the support slack on this one, so maybe that will blow one of the most common developer's excuses right out of the water.
On the contrary, the jump from 5400 to 7200 RPM was incredible.
You are clouding your own judgement by comparing today's 7200 RPM drives to the 5400 RPM drives. The 5400 RPM drives have good transfer rates due to to their typically higher density, but in terms of random access, 7200 RPM takes the cake.
You CANNOT do fast random access without a fast spindle speed.
Here's a review of the first 7200 RPM IDE drive, introduced by Seagate in 1998. I actually have the 6.4GB version of this drive still running in my server...runs hot, and it's pretty crappy by today's standards, but BOY was it fast in '98.
"Patents may help in other markets (cars for example) but as far as software is concerned they can only produce monopolies faster than rabbits produce rabbits."
On the contrary, Henry Ford would have a different opinion.
William Selden, an experienced patent lawyer and part-time tinkerer, "patented" the automobile in 1879. He used his experience to keep the patent pending for 15 years, until pioneers were finally able to sell the auto in volume. Then he sold the licensing rights to a firm, intending on enforcing them.
Forget the fact that Selden was only building on prior art ( steam engines powering boats, wagons and omnibusses ), and simply adapted an existing engine design. The patent office approved it anyway, in 1894.
His patent gave birth to the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, a group that used the power of the license to build an oligopy. Once the group gained critical mass, it refused to license new players ( like Henry Ford, for instance ).
But modern automobiles had little in common with Selden's concept, from the engine and transmission to the ignition and braking systems. Henry Ford fought the ALAM through years of suits, and finally overturned the patent in 1911. But the damage to the industry was done, innovation and expansion had been held back for nearly 15 years.
So much for patents fostering advances in automobiles. You can misuse a patent for anything.
PCI spec is 133MB/s, which is hardly a marked improvement. 16-bit ISA, by contrast, was barely 16MB/s.
If I am to believe the theoretical numbers for AGP, then PCI Express as a graphics bus makes even less sense:
AGP 1x = 264MB/s ( 66.6 mHz, 64-bit ) AGP 2x = 528MB/s ( 66.6 mHz rise and fall, 64-bit ) AGP 4x ~ 1GB/s ( 66.6 mHz - 4 strobe, 64-bit ) AGP 8x... you get the picture.
What in the hell do we need a PCI replacement for that has zero potential for handling enormous video bandwidth as well as or better than AGP?
What in hell do we need a PCI replacement for that doesn't even utilize the PCI-X or 64-bit, 66MHz PCI already being pushed for servers? Not to mention that fact that any device that can push the bandwidth of PCI is already available in one of the above formats, who wants to build yet another model for PCI Express?
Honestly, if you need to find emerging technologies, just look to the server path. Intel has always been about trickle-down, this move doesn't make any sense.
It took most desktop users a decade and the 486 to practically push this barrier. By that time, two generations of 32-bit capable chips had been introduced to the marketplace.
If one takes this into perspective, then Intel may be quite correct that 64-bit will not make an impression on the desktop until nearly 2010, and that even waiting a few years to introduce 64-bit desktop solutions will not be too late. It may not be IA-64 that ends up on the desktop, but that doesn't change the timeline.
Your average 286 buyer in the mid-80s had 1MB of ram, or 1/16 the maximum. Even though desktop 32-bit chips weren't available ( 386 was server -targeted at the time ) when it was purchased, it was probably replaced with a 386 or 486 machine well before upgrading the ram to the maximum.
Your average user now has around 256MB of ram, or 1/16 the maximum. Most likely, even with 64-bit desktop chips not released for a few more years, we will still have a couple of product generations before everyone needs 64-bit capability.
This would be like Nintendo deciding to put a 4KB limit on cart size with the NES because it's all Atari ever needed.
As it was, the NES was released years after the Atari, so smartly it was much less limited. Most early games used an 8 x 16Kb format, and later roms approached 1Mbit.
Come on folks, even CF has no problem incorporating extremely high density chips with no hassle to the user. If this is the best Sony can do years after CF was inroduced, they had best just go jump off a cliff right now.
Yamaha stepped into the market when Plextor was king, promising to lead the unwashed masses to Partial CAV heaven.
But Yamaha never really delivered, from a quality standpoint, and once everyone jumped on the Z-CLV bandwagon there was no chance. Today, Lite-On rules the market with cheap reliable CD burners. Anyone who can't beat them has to either move on the DVD recorders, or get out of the market altogether.
Even Plextor will succumb, soon enough. When you can buy reliable 48x CD writers for $50, even Plextor's cherished name cannot sell their overpriced burners.
Good riddance. I don't care who makes my floppy drive, I have a feeling in a few years I won't be caring who makes my CD-RW either.
Thanks to a good cleaning. The edge connector on the motherboard is mostly to blame, it gets corroded over time. The actual pin connector that makes contact with the cart is actually very durable, none of my pins have bent to the point of no connection despite this unit being 15 years old.
Some suggestions to get your unit working:
1. USE AN ERASER. YOU MUST, -MUST- DO THIS. Smirk if you will, but erasers have been the #1 most effective way I've found for getting corrosion off conductive surfaces. When you open the NES to clean the edge connector, use these before you use any chemicals.
Even better, you can use erasers to clean up your cart pins just by running the side of a pencil eraser along your cart's pins. You can use the pencil to reach down in there, so you don't even have to remove the plastic case.
2. Still having games with flashing green screens at boot? Use the friction between the pin connector and the cartridge to your advantage. Since this is a metal-on-metal connection, you can use the two connectors to cut through the grime.
Insert the cartridge so that it's not quite seated in the back and push it down so it locks in and the pins bite down on it. Now, if you push hard, you can still move the cartridge forward just a little. Without removing it, carefully push it forward. It should move all of a few millimeters, but that much friction between the two will cut through corrosion on both the cart and the pin connectors.
You should be able to make games work more often on the first try with this trick, although admittedly it may not be good for the long-term life of the connectors.
I have a 2002 SC2 with 18k miles on it, and I drive it constantly over the crappy streets of downtown Baltimore.
The only plastic rattle I've had is from the inside of the driver's door, I have a feeling something is coming a bit loose. I'll probably pop it open and actually take a look when the weather gets warmer.
Saturn S series cars are inherently louder because they have no stabilization bars, and unlike the L series inline 4, the S series uses a timing chain instead of a timing belt. I've noticed that the engine, when cold, has a perceptible high-pitched whine at lower RPMs, I've always assumed it's the metal timing chain.
Anyway, it's a moot concern because all indications point to the Ion using the same 140hp engine as the inline 4 available on the L and the Vue. This engine has stabilization bars and a timing belt.
In all honesty, I did not notice a significant difference in actual running noise between the S series, the Corolla and the Civic EX. Even today, when I punch it up to 85mph on I95, The noise level is perfectly acceptable to me. No noticable wind-induced rattling, just your expected wind noise.
Re:Expect fianl report in 6 months
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This is exactly what I was thinking when they first mentioned the shuttle has no black box. Why they can't have a backup short-term buffer is beyond me. Considering that the shuttle's entire approach is less than half an hour in duration, even a short 30-minute buffer recorder would be capable of providing a complete sequence of data in the case of any tragedy.
How do you get it down? Use all that technology we developed for MIRV nuclear warheads, each individual warhead has a heat shield for re-entry, guidance and payload. We pack dozens of these things on a single ICBM, so you can imagine how little each weighs
Add in an explosive bolt system to launch the black box away from the aircraft in the case of total sensor failure ( read: catastrophic structural or power failure ), and a simple parachute to make the landing survivable.
It makes you wonder how NASA ever survived before the put in the second telemetry tracking satellite in 1988, prior to that the shuttle must have had communication black-outs like capsule re-entry. Ejection seats? Phased out. Additional flight sensors? Phased out. I have a funny feeling the black box got a similar treatment along the way.
"I'm suprised apartment buildings don't pool together and get a T1 into the buildling and provide internet to all apartments."
Perhaps it's because apartment complexes have no business being ISPs. They would need somebody on staff capable of maintaining the system, and that's not cheap. Typically, apartment complexes are run on the cheap, with as few people on staff as possible.
If wired, did you ever think about the cost of running Cat 5 drops all over the place? If wireless, did you consider how many repeaters might be required for a 4 square block complex, or 15 floor building? This is the same reason most apartment complexes refused to wire all their apartments with cable until the mid eighties, when there was an assured demand and full market acceptance.
Now, think about the percentage of apartments that won't even use that infarstructure. You have to lay the connection, because leases change, and the next occupants many want it. Finding a balance that actually makes you money or just break even is tough. You don't want to pay for all that equipment in the first place, but you certainly don't want to pay for it if there's not enough demand.
Don't know about big games that take weeks to finish and give you sore thumbs for a month, but one of the biggest attractions cashing in on braodband are online gaming sites that offer LOTs of simple games that you can download. The killer apps are usually the multiplayer versions.
If these people made some sweeping deals with major online gaming portals to provide service, it's not unbelievable that they could claim thousands of games at launch. They could setup an all-purpose portal specially designed for console owners, so you don't have to go through the pain of registering with all the individual gaming portals.
It already require broadband, so ass a fully-featured web browser with Flash and Java support and you're set. There are literally thousands of online games scattered around hundreds of major gaming portals, many of which are unique games.
Add good 3D graphics and some major titles, and you've got an entertainment center. Sometimes people want complex, sometimes they want it simple, with some good human players. How about both?
Of course, it's probably just a hoax, but who knows these days...
Your rough math is a good attempt, but you've got some errors.
First of all, most production DVDs these days are single-sided, dual-layer, giving you a maximum capacity over 9GB. This is why most DVD-R makers are comfortable that you are not going to pirate movies in their original format, since very few recordable formats support dual-layer or dual-side recording.
Second of all, many movies are encoded at much less than 10Mb data rate. I've rarely seen a DVD that tops 9Mb/s. Most of the industry has no qualms about playing with this data rate to fit their movie on the desired medium, even at the cost of quality.
Case in point: my copy of Barry Lyndon ( part of my Kubrick Collection ) is terrible quality. Obviously, their answer for a 3+ hour movie was to use a crappy bitrate rather than use DVD-18 ( Double-sided, dual-layered ) or two dual-layered discs.
You don't seem to understand anything about designing a video card, although you seem to have memorized your economics textbook.
Your Matinee price example cannot be directly applied to the arguement at hand. Movies are scheduled events, that is to say, they are time-limited, so their value does change with the time of day.
You see, you forget that theaters can still make money on matinees. There are usually less people on staff, and less theaters in use, which reduces the overall running cost.
This is the problem I have with ATI's manufacturing concept. Usually when you implement an expensive feature like a 256-bit bus on a PCB, it is considered a special-purpose PCB. For your produces that make use of 128 or 64-bit busses, you design a stripped-down board that uses less layers, and therefore costs you a lot less to produce.
This is the same concept as a movie matinee - reduce overhead, and you can still make money despite cheaper prices. But ATI is not reducing overhead at all, they're using the same expensive board, and pairing it with slower memory.
If you havn't been stuck in some deep rabbit hole for the last year, you'd know that the memory market has all but collapsed. Overall, this means that the slower ram is not going to cut costs by much, so you're left with an expensive part aimed at a budget market.
How is it economical to speed-bin a chip and connect it to slower ram on an expensive PCB, just to prop-up the prices of the highend part? Are we supposed to sit back and watch as the high-end cards top $500? When does it finally make sense to make a custom mid-range part?
Agreed. We went over this way back in the day with Intel.
Back in the days of the Pentium Classic, Intel chips were obviously being speed-binned to cap the market. Even the lowly P133s were capable of so much more, and the 150 and 166 chips could do 200 with zero tweaks. The hardware was not limited, so this wasn't really stealing.
Intel chips had a handful of lines to determine their operating multiplier, normally determined by jumpers on the board by the user. People were simply changing a switch, not hacking anything.
So, to remove the cheapest set of chips from the mix, Intel cut the higher multiplier leads on their P133 chips so you could only run them at 2x. This limited most folks to 2x75, and stopped the budget overclocking. The hardware was removed, so only a major hack could get around it.
So, what is this?
The Radeon 9500 has ALL THE HARDWARE present. It simply has two switches ( one hardware, one software ) that prevent folks from utilizing the extra hardware. How is this stealing is all the customer has to do is flip a switch? It's speed-binning all over again.
You folkks want to know why the Radeon 9700 is so goddamned expensive? Its because ATI's manufacturing department is being a bunch of asses. HONESTLY, we've heard FOR YEARS that 256-bit memory busses on PCBs were PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE to produce, but what is this BS? EVEN THE 128-bit bus cards are using 256-bit bus PCBs!
They're not even using a less-complicated PCB to stem costs, its the same damn hardware. They just plop in a chip, flip a resistor and burn the EEPROM. No wonder a 9700 Pro costs as much as a Kia...they're probably getting nothing or losing money on the 9500.
Most software houses with more than 2 people end up defining a CMM Level 3 system without even thinking about it, it's the standard respnse to the situation. A defined set of standards to make code easy to manage and maintain.
CMM Level 4 adds code management. Basically this is peer review at all levels of the design, code and implementation. Any decent-sized software group will start to do this on their own anyway, there's far too much at stake to ignore problems that can be caught early.
CMM Level 5 adds metrics to optimize development. I'm personally no big fan of metrics, because they attempt to add bounds to a concept that changes constantly. But the bean counters need something to justify their existence on this planet, so they heavily promote CMM, especially Level 5, and some of the software groups I've worked for were proud to have the stamp of approval. Big deal.
I'd trust a couple of kids in a garage before I'd trust some no-name company with CMM Level 5 cert. A few years of track record is worth a thousand certifications.
SOUNDS like a great idea to have a Flash long-term storage paired with a DRAM Ramdrive. But then, most of you don't know how slowly flash reads and writes compared to standard DRAM, or even a hard disk.
Typical read speeds for Flash top out at 4MB/s Typical write speeds top out at 2.5MB/s
These numbers are about 10x slower than performance drives of today. Sure, you could have a nice 1GB DRAM drive containing your OS, backed up by a Flash bank. But the damn thing would take 4 minutes to boot, copying the image from the Flash to the DRAM. Set-top devices don't have the overhead of having to run programs, the OS and all applicable pieces are tucked away in 16 or 32MB of Flash, and obviously that doesn't translate well when you have something more complex like a full-featured computer.
Speculative saves to the Flash would cut down on the power-down time and reduce the chance of information loss, but writing to the Flash thousands of times a day is not good for it. You'd have to be sure to exclude caches from the speculative saves.
Yes, you could say the number is "for entertainment purposes only", but you see how far that got Miss Cleo? They're STILL suing her despite her ad's subtle disclaimers. If people start to believe your numbers, and they're off JUST ENOUGH to set off the breathalyzer, then you could be sued. If you thought the Irresponsible 90s were bad, just wait until you see what the 00s can dredge up.
The machine should not intervene at all. This is why even automated bars still have bartenders, nothing can replace the human part of bartending. I don't see the 486 quelling discontent and cooling off fighting drunks.
Your tech tree was determined at the start of the game, and was a combination of your race and randomness. You could research multiple techs at once.
They only got rid of the multiple tech research because most experienced MOO players quickly learned that researching one tech at a time could get you key techs sooner, and was the better tactic. The MOO2 programmers simply took out all the repetitive tech concentration movement an experienced player would normally have to do.
Agreed, when I was a kid I hated long car rides, because I was basically stuck with my mind and my walkman. Books could make me sick in 20 minutes, and I'd feel that way the whole day, so I avoided them like the plague.
Even video games would give me motion sickness eventually, although I found I could use them for an our or so. I can only imagine how my stomach would churn at reading Slashdot on the road. This is why I love finally being able to drive on trips, it gives me something to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that Battletech as a concept was a direct descendant of the Robotech series.
What made Battletech unique was the universe and gameplay, not the 'Mech concept.
Anyone who thinks you have to be FASA to make a 'Mech game need only look as far as Earthseige. So long as you don't use the term "'Mech", and juggle the weapons and designs a bit, you should be fine on the copyright thing.
The concept is more for less.
You get a much higher resolution and color fidelity than anyone would ever be willing to pipe over an analog broadcast channel.
Even lower-resolution analog broadcasts are not without their gotchas. Your quality NTSC broadcast doesn't even use the same amount of color information for each quadrant of the screen, they concentrate the color bandwidth for the center. This is only one of the many tricks used to pack the thing into 6 MHz.
As for the compression artifacts, when did you ever get a perfect NTSC analog broadcast? There's always some form of image corruption, either due to reflections and environment ( broadcast ), or amplification and interference ( cable ). One thing digital brodcasts give us is error correction, meaning that there's a high probability that you're receiving a near-perfect picture, or no picture at all.
This is the concept I've been mulling over.
Why do users need incredibly strong passwords, unless the people designing the authentication system and maintaining the databases aren't doing their job?
If the password is difficult enough to survive a few hundred dictionary hack authentication attempts without breaking, it's good enough. By then you should invalidate the password and send off a new one to the user.
I make sure my important stuff has good passwords: my baking, paypal, billpay, email, and web store accounts, that's all personal. But if I say, sign up for a gaming site, or a forum like slashdot, I use a disposable password. I don't care if somebody hacks it, it's just an account, it's replaceable. Even so, I'm fairly certain you could not guess it within 1000 attempts, which makes it secure enough for me.
It's funny because it pokes fun at the human mentality: we are masters of this planet.
Funny thing is, we are not even masters of our own domain. We introduce species into an environment as pest control, and they become new, toughter pests. We pop pills with the latest and greatest chemicals only to discover they cause deaths in people with a previously unknown genetic trait. We split the atom, and proceed to use it to threaten our own existence. We eradicate diseases ( Smallpox, the most virulent strains of Influenza, etc ), but this simply means that is any one of them were ro resurge, it would have the same deadly effect as the Black Plague due to no resistance in the population.
We liken ourselves to supermen every day by pushing the boundaries without knowing or thoroughly considering all the consequences. The fact that "Superman" is in a wheelchair only serves to remind us how foolish we are as a race.
No matter how advanced we become, we are only human. Mortal. Fallible.
I seem to recall my freshman year of college, those with faster Pentium-based computers played Quake with cracked copies.
Those with slower machines opted for multiplayer GTA, which was also not paid for. Unlike Quake, I was led to believe that this was the norm for GTA, and that compared to the sales, the number of GTA "users" was staggering. But this might have something to do with the fact that stores refused to carry the product.
Anyway, this is hardly amazing news, as there were already patches for GTA back in the day that allowed for Glide accelerated graphics ( for all that fixed overhead angle texture-scaling ). Moving it to Direct3D is simply a small step in the same direction.
But, then again, there are dozens of classic software titles that could receive a similar treatment. But the companies don't want to let go of anything remotely valuable, and even make up excuses about having to support a free product. I would not be surprised if the GTA community takes up most of the support slack on this one, so maybe that will blow one of the most common developer's excuses right out of the water.
On the contrary, the jump from 5400 to 7200 RPM was incredible.
You are clouding your own judgement by comparing today's 7200 RPM drives to the 5400 RPM drives. The 5400 RPM drives have good transfer rates due to to their typically higher density, but in terms of random access, 7200 RPM takes the cake.
You CANNOT do fast random access without a fast spindle speed.
Here's a review of the first 7200 RPM IDE drive, introduced by Seagate in 1998. I actually have the 6.4GB version of this drive still running in my server...runs hot, and it's pretty crappy by today's standards, but BOY was it fast in '98.
"Patents may help in other markets (cars for example) but as far as software is concerned they can only produce monopolies faster than rabbits produce rabbits."
On the contrary, Henry Ford would have a different opinion.
William Selden, an experienced patent lawyer and part-time tinkerer, "patented" the automobile in 1879. He used his experience to keep the patent pending for 15 years, until pioneers were finally able to sell the auto in volume. Then he sold the licensing rights to a firm, intending on enforcing them.
Forget the fact that Selden was only building on prior art ( steam engines powering boats, wagons and omnibusses ), and simply adapted an existing engine design. The patent office approved it anyway, in 1894.
His patent gave birth to the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers, a group that used the power of the license to build an oligopy. Once the group gained critical mass, it refused to license new players ( like Henry Ford, for instance ).
But modern automobiles had little in common with Selden's concept, from the engine and transmission to the ignition and braking systems. Henry Ford fought the ALAM through years of suits, and finally overturned the patent in 1911. But the damage to the industry was done, innovation and expansion had been held back for nearly 15 years.
So much for patents fostering advances in automobiles. You can misuse a patent for anything.
More info:
http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html
Did I read that right? 250MB/s?
... you get the picture.
PCI spec is 133MB/s, which is hardly a marked improvement. 16-bit ISA, by contrast, was barely 16MB/s.
If I am to believe the theoretical numbers for AGP, then PCI Express as a graphics bus makes even less sense:
AGP 1x = 264MB/s ( 66.6 mHz, 64-bit )
AGP 2x = 528MB/s ( 66.6 mHz rise and fall, 64-bit )
AGP 4x ~ 1GB/s ( 66.6 mHz - 4 strobe, 64-bit )
AGP 8x
What in the hell do we need a PCI replacement for that has zero potential for handling enormous video bandwidth as well as or better than AGP?
What in hell do we need a PCI replacement for that doesn't even utilize the PCI-X or 64-bit, 66MHz PCI already being pushed for servers? Not to mention that fact that any device that can push the bandwidth of PCI is already available in one of the above formats, who wants to build yet another model for PCI Express?
Honestly, if you need to find emerging technologies, just look to the server path. Intel has always been about trickle-down, this move doesn't make any sense.
The 286 brought us 24-bit addressing ( 16MB ).
It took most desktop users a decade and the 486 to practically push this barrier. By that time, two generations of 32-bit capable chips had been introduced to the marketplace.
If one takes this into perspective, then Intel may be quite correct that 64-bit will not make an impression on the desktop until nearly 2010, and that even waiting a few years to introduce 64-bit desktop solutions will not be too late. It may not be IA-64 that ends up on the desktop, but that doesn't change the timeline.
Your average 286 buyer in the mid-80s had 1MB of ram, or 1/16 the maximum. Even though desktop 32-bit chips weren't available ( 386 was server -targeted at the time ) when it was purchased, it was probably replaced with a 386 or 486 machine well before upgrading the ram to the maximum.
Your average user now has around 256MB of ram, or 1/16 the maximum. Most likely, even with 64-bit desktop chips not released for a few more years, we will still have a couple of product generations before everyone needs 64-bit capability.
You're kidding me? Sony should be ashamed.
This would be like Nintendo deciding to put a 4KB limit on cart size with the NES because it's all Atari ever needed.
As it was, the NES was released years after the Atari, so smartly it was much less limited. Most early games used an 8 x 16Kb format, and later roms approached 1Mbit.
Come on folks, even CF has no problem incorporating extremely high density chips with no hassle to the user. If this is the best Sony can do years after CF was inroduced, they had best just go jump off a cliff right now.
Yamaha stepped into the market when Plextor was king, promising to lead the unwashed masses to Partial CAV heaven.
But Yamaha never really delivered, from a quality standpoint, and once everyone jumped on the Z-CLV bandwagon there was no chance. Today, Lite-On rules the market with cheap reliable CD burners. Anyone who can't beat them has to either move on the DVD recorders, or get out of the market altogether.
Even Plextor will succumb, soon enough. When you can buy reliable 48x CD writers for $50, even Plextor's cherished name cannot sell their overpriced burners.
Good riddance. I don't care who makes my floppy drive, I have a feeling in a few years I won't be caring who makes my CD-RW either.
Thanks to a good cleaning. The edge connector on the motherboard is mostly to blame, it gets corroded over time. The actual pin connector that makes contact with the cart is actually very durable, none of my pins have bent to the point of no connection despite this unit being 15 years old.
Some suggestions to get your unit working:
1. USE AN ERASER. YOU MUST, -MUST- DO THIS.
Smirk if you will, but erasers have been the #1 most effective way I've found for getting corrosion off conductive surfaces. When you open the NES to clean the edge connector, use these before you use any chemicals.
Even better, you can use erasers to clean up your cart pins just by running the side of a pencil eraser along your cart's pins. You can use the pencil to reach down in there, so you don't even have to remove the plastic case.
2. Still having games with flashing green screens at boot? Use the friction between the pin connector and the cartridge to your advantage. Since this is a metal-on-metal connection, you can use the two connectors to cut through the grime.
Insert the cartridge so that it's not quite seated in the back and push it down so it locks in and the pins bite down on it. Now, if you push hard, you can still move the cartridge forward just a little. Without removing it, carefully push it forward. It should move all of a few millimeters, but that much friction between the two will cut through corrosion on both the cart and the pin connectors.
You should be able to make games work more often on the first try with this trick, although admittedly it may not be good for the long-term life of the connectors.
I have a 2002 SC2 with 18k miles on it, and I drive it constantly over the crappy streets of downtown Baltimore.
The only plastic rattle I've had is from the inside of the driver's door, I have a feeling something is coming a bit loose. I'll probably pop it open and actually take a look when the weather gets warmer.
Saturn S series cars are inherently louder because they have no stabilization bars, and unlike the L series inline 4, the S series uses a timing chain instead of a timing belt. I've noticed that the engine, when cold, has a perceptible high-pitched whine at lower RPMs, I've always assumed it's the metal timing chain.
Anyway, it's a moot concern because all indications point to the Ion using the same 140hp engine as the inline 4 available on the L and the Vue. This engine has stabilization bars and a timing belt.
In all honesty, I did not notice a significant difference in actual running noise between the S series, the Corolla and the Civic EX. Even today, when I punch it up to 85mph on I95, The noise level is perfectly acceptable to me. No noticable wind-induced rattling, just your expected wind noise.
This is exactly what I was thinking when they first mentioned the shuttle has no black box. Why they can't have a backup short-term buffer is beyond me. Considering that the shuttle's entire approach is less than half an hour in duration, even a short 30-minute buffer recorder would be capable of providing a complete sequence of data in the case of any tragedy.
How do you get it down? Use all that technology we developed for MIRV nuclear warheads, each individual warhead has a heat shield for re-entry, guidance and payload. We pack dozens of these things on a single ICBM, so you can imagine how little each weighs
Add in an explosive bolt system to launch the black box away from the aircraft in the case of total sensor failure ( read: catastrophic structural or power failure ), and a simple parachute to make the landing survivable.
It makes you wonder how NASA ever survived before the put in the second telemetry tracking satellite in 1988, prior to that the shuttle must have had communication black-outs like capsule re-entry. Ejection seats? Phased out. Additional flight sensors? Phased out. I have a funny feeling the black box got a similar treatment along the way.
"I'm suprised apartment buildings don't pool together and get a T1 into the buildling and provide internet to all apartments."
Perhaps it's because apartment complexes have no business being ISPs. They would need somebody on staff capable of maintaining the system, and that's not cheap. Typically, apartment complexes are run on the cheap, with as few people on staff as possible.
If wired, did you ever think about the cost of running Cat 5 drops all over the place? If wireless, did you consider how many repeaters might be required for a 4 square block complex, or 15 floor building? This is the same reason most apartment complexes refused to wire all their apartments with cable until the mid eighties, when there was an assured demand and full market acceptance.
Now, think about the percentage of apartments that won't even use that infarstructure. You have to lay the connection, because leases change, and the next occupants many want it. Finding a balance that actually makes you money or just break even is tough. You don't want to pay for all that equipment in the first place, but you certainly don't want to pay for it if there's not enough demand.
0x2b or not 0x2b, the answer is -1
Not true. The bitwise OR of a value and it's complement is always true. That is to say, for bit x:
x + !x = 1
And so, assuming 8 significant bits by the two hex digits:
0x2B + !0x2B = 0x2B + 0xD4 = 0xFF
Don't know about big games that take weeks to finish and give you sore thumbs for a month, but one of the biggest attractions cashing in on braodband are online gaming sites that offer LOTs of simple games that you can download. The killer apps are usually the multiplayer versions.
If these people made some sweeping deals with major online gaming portals to provide service, it's not unbelievable that they could claim thousands of games at launch. They could setup an all-purpose portal specially designed for console owners, so you don't have to go through the pain of registering with all the individual gaming portals.
It already require broadband, so ass a fully-featured web browser with Flash and Java support and you're set. There are literally thousands of online games scattered around hundreds of major gaming portals, many of which are unique games.
Add good 3D graphics and some major titles, and you've got an entertainment center. Sometimes people want complex, sometimes they want it simple, with some good human players. How about both?
Of course, it's probably just a hoax, but who knows these days...
Your rough math is a good attempt, but you've got some errors.
First of all, most production DVDs these days are single-sided, dual-layer, giving you a maximum capacity over 9GB. This is why most DVD-R makers are comfortable that you are not going to pirate movies in their original format, since very few recordable formats support dual-layer or dual-side recording.
Second of all, many movies are encoded at much less than 10Mb data rate. I've rarely seen a DVD that tops 9Mb/s. Most of the industry has no qualms about playing with this data rate to fit their movie on the desired medium, even at the cost of quality.
Case in point: my copy of Barry Lyndon ( part of my Kubrick Collection ) is terrible quality. Obviously, their answer for a 3+ hour movie was to use a crappy bitrate rather than use DVD-18 ( Double-sided, dual-layered ) or two dual-layered discs.
You don't seem to understand anything about designing a video card, although you seem to have memorized your economics textbook.
Your Matinee price example cannot be directly applied to the arguement at hand. Movies are scheduled events, that is to say, they are time-limited, so their value does change with the time of day.
You see, you forget that theaters can still make money on matinees. There are usually less people on staff, and less theaters in use, which reduces the overall running cost.
This is the problem I have with ATI's manufacturing concept. Usually when you implement an expensive feature like a 256-bit bus on a PCB, it is considered a special-purpose PCB. For your produces that make use of 128 or 64-bit busses, you design a stripped-down board that uses less layers, and therefore costs you a lot less to produce.
This is the same concept as a movie matinee - reduce overhead, and you can still make money despite cheaper prices. But ATI is not reducing overhead at all, they're using the same expensive board, and pairing it with slower memory.
If you havn't been stuck in some deep rabbit hole for the last year, you'd know that the memory market has all but collapsed. Overall, this means that the slower ram is not going to cut costs by much, so you're left with an expensive part aimed at a budget market.
How is it economical to speed-bin a chip and connect it to slower ram on an expensive PCB, just to prop-up the prices of the highend part? Are we supposed to sit back and watch as the high-end cards top $500? When does it finally make sense to make a custom mid-range part?
Agreed. We went over this way back in the day with Intel.
Back in the days of the Pentium Classic, Intel chips were obviously being speed-binned to cap the market. Even the lowly P133s were capable of so much more, and the 150 and 166 chips could do 200 with zero tweaks. The hardware was not limited, so this wasn't really stealing.
Intel chips had a handful of lines to determine their operating multiplier, normally determined by jumpers on the board by the user. People were simply changing a switch, not hacking anything.
So, to remove the cheapest set of chips from the mix, Intel cut the higher multiplier leads on their P133 chips so you could only run them at 2x. This limited most folks to 2x75, and stopped the budget overclocking. The hardware was removed, so only a major hack could get around it.
So, what is this?
The Radeon 9500 has ALL THE HARDWARE present. It simply has two switches ( one hardware, one software ) that prevent folks from utilizing the extra hardware. How is this stealing is all the customer has to do is flip a switch? It's speed-binning all over again.
You folkks want to know why the Radeon 9700 is so goddamned expensive? Its because ATI's manufacturing department is being a bunch of asses. HONESTLY, we've heard FOR YEARS that 256-bit memory busses on PCBs were PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE to produce, but what is this BS? EVEN THE 128-bit bus cards are using 256-bit bus PCBs!
They're not even using a less-complicated PCB to stem costs, its the same damn hardware. They just plop in a chip, flip a resistor and burn the EEPROM. No wonder a 9700 Pro costs as much as a Kia...they're probably getting nothing or losing money on the 9500.
Just a quickie.
CMM Level 5 is just as much a joke as it sounds.
Most software houses with more than 2 people end up defining a CMM Level 3 system without even thinking about it, it's the standard respnse to the situation. A defined set of standards to make code easy to manage and maintain.
CMM Level 4 adds code management. Basically this is peer review at all levels of the design, code and implementation. Any decent-sized software group will start to do this on their own anyway, there's far too much at stake to ignore problems that can be caught early.
CMM Level 5 adds metrics to optimize development. I'm personally no big fan of metrics, because they attempt to add bounds to a concept that changes constantly. But the bean counters need something to justify their existence on this planet, so they heavily promote CMM, especially Level 5, and some of the software groups I've worked for were proud to have the stamp of approval. Big deal.
I'd trust a couple of kids in a garage before I'd trust some no-name company with CMM Level 5 cert. A few years of track record is worth a thousand certifications.
SOUNDS like a great idea to have a Flash long-term storage paired with a DRAM Ramdrive. But then, most of you don't know how slowly flash reads and writes compared to standard DRAM, or even a hard disk.
Typical read speeds for Flash top out at 4MB/s
Typical write speeds top out at 2.5MB/s
These numbers are about 10x slower than performance drives of today. Sure, you could have a nice 1GB DRAM drive containing your OS, backed up by a Flash bank. But the damn thing would take 4 minutes to boot, copying the image from the Flash to the DRAM. Set-top devices don't have the overhead of having to run programs, the OS and all applicable pieces are tucked away in 16 or 32MB of Flash, and obviously that doesn't translate well when you have something more complex like a full-featured computer.
Speculative saves to the Flash would cut down on the power-down time and reduce the chance of information loss, but writing to the Flash thousands of times a day is not good for it. You'd have to be sure to exclude caches from the speculative saves.
This would be a liability risk.
Yes, you could say the number is "for entertainment purposes only", but you see how far that got Miss Cleo? They're STILL suing her despite her ad's subtle disclaimers. If people start to believe your numbers, and they're off JUST ENOUGH to set off the breathalyzer, then you could be sued. If you thought the Irresponsible 90s were bad, just wait until you see what the 00s can dredge up.
The machine should not intervene at all. This is why even automated bars still have bartenders, nothing can replace the human part of bartending. I don't see the 486 quelling discontent and cooling off fighting drunks.
Wow. Sounds like...
Hmmm....
Let me think...
Oh! Master of Orion.
Your tech tree was determined at the start of the game, and was a combination of your race and randomness. You could research multiple techs at once.
They only got rid of the multiple tech research because most experienced MOO players quickly learned that researching one tech at a time could get you key techs sooner, and was the better tactic. The MOO2 programmers simply took out all the repetitive tech concentration movement an experienced player would normally have to do.
Agreed, when I was a kid I hated long car rides, because I was basically stuck with my mind and my walkman. Books could make me sick in 20 minutes, and I'd feel that way the whole day, so I avoided them like the plague.
Even video games would give me motion sickness eventually, although I found I could use them for an our or so. I can only imagine how my stomach would churn at reading Slashdot on the road. This is why I love finally being able to drive on trips, it gives me something to do.