You can if you buy used. I've got a PS2, and the most I've paid for a game for the system was $25. I get almost everything either from the bargain bin, Greatest Hits repricing ($20/game for early titles), or as a previously played game from Blockbuster. If you don't care about playing the latest thing, you can acquire quite a library very reasonably.
Alamo food prices are pretty good. Good burgers and pizza are $6-7, popcorn is $2.50, drinks vary from $2-4, salads are $4. Its comparable to eating at a TGIFridays or Chili's, and the food quality is really good.
The two Alamo Drafthouse locations are strictly for movies. During the daytime, they're also available to rent for meetings and private parties. In that kind of situation, I could see network access be really useful -- consider holding a sales meeting there, and having people collaborate online, using the Alamo's video projectors to put up "the big picture".
Also, at the Alamo, people tend to show up 30 minutes prior to a picture to order food and get good seats. Wireless can be useful during that pre-picture downtime.
Symbian is an OK OS, but have you tried programming for it? Its arcane exception handling infrastructure designed for C, rather than C++, really makes writing good applications difficult. Plus, the "your app could be killed at any time" nature of its memory management and multitasking is far less orderly than Palm OS's "one app at a time" system.
I've heard that a VGA-output memory stick is in development by Margi, the people who did the Presenter-to-Go Springboard module for the Visors and for Compact Flash. This would actually let you do presentations from your CLIE. Cool!
Because the original chip, from the early 90's, was the DragonBall. It was designed for Motorola's paging group and for some equipment manufacturers in Asia. There have been three updates since then: DragonBall EZ, DragonBall VZ, and the new Super VZ (coming out this fall). I don't think the anime played a role in the original naming of the chip.
1. Q: Will the BIG N allow for backwards compatablity, or will you be locked into yet another BIG N system that wont run older ROMs you spent all your money on? (i.e. NES, SNES and N64)
The GameCube doesn't conflict with your existing NES, SNES, and N64. In fact, using patented RunAtSameTime technology, it is possible to run software for all of these systems at the same time, as long as you have separate display monitors. The Game Cube is specially designed to avoid destroying your older Nintendo consoles.
Actually, the Motorola DragonBall ARM doesn't run 68K code, it just has a peripheral set that is register-compatible with the DragonBall Super VZ. You would still need to recompile code, but you wouldn't have to do major rewrites of device drivers.
Palm will have a 68K emulator in their new OS. It will execute system calls in native ARM code, so it should be pretty fast for most programs.
I know its a joke, but actually, Palm will likely use Thumb, which is an extension to ARM's instruction set using 16-bit compressed instructions. You execute more instructions, but you use less memory bandwidth, making it a big win for 16-bit wide memory architectures.
Palm OS now can run on the same chipset used in many cell phones, meaning its easier to make Palm-based smartphones.
There are multiple companies making ARM-core based chips. The 68K is a dead end, while ARM allows a wide range of scalability, from cheap ARM 7 devices that are cheaper than Dragonballs to fast XScale processors that can power information appliances.
I think the problem with the Best Buy display is the metal cage that covered the bottom of the unit -- it prevented natural hand placement, making the controls feel more awkward than they actually are.
If any Linux users here in Austin, TX are looking for the Loki game ports for Linux cheap, I spotted most of their titles, new in box, at the Half Price Books on Guadalupe for $15 each. This included Heavy Gear II and Myth II. They also had the Quake III Arena for Linux tins for $20.
1) They modified the debugging engine to respect the lock settings, so you can't get into debug mode from the password prompt when the device is locked, and debugging by soft resetting while holding down doesn't work in a lock mode either. If your device is locked, the only way to unlock is to enter the password or do a hard reset.
2) You can now enter your password on the screen where you want to see your private data to unlock for that programs duration.
There is no on-device encryption. Privacy is still done using a flag on the record.
I'm pretty sure that was intentional. The 10.x.x.x subnet is reserved for private networks, and I'd assume that they wanted to keep their satellite control inside the corporate network. The only time they were accessed outside the corporate net was probabaly through Milo's custom VPN code he wrote to tunnel back into Nurv.
Effectively that happened -- with 3DFX's merger with Gigapixel earlier this year, they've now got a whole new team designing the cool hardware for next year. The products you're seeing now were mostly designed in 1998/early 1999 -- it takes a while to go from design to fab to board production.
The cool thing about the GSM module is that you can use the Visor/module directly as a cell phone, or you can hook up a headset and just leave the PDA in your pocket. Eventually, you could have a wireless headset that does A2D and talks Bluetooth to your PDA which then talks GSM to the phone network. Very neat.
The academic version of CW is fairly cheap ($129 for the full version that generates code for Java, Win32, and MacOS), and Metrowerks now has a Learning Edition for $49 (it will probably lag one version behind CW Professional in the future).
I was one of the compiler engineers at Metrowerks with direct responsibility over the x86 compiler used in the CW for Windows product. Both the front end engineer and I had compatability with the ISO C and C++ standards as a major goal. In some cases, we'd liberalize the default settings to help people port code from VC++ and the older Macintosh tools, but we avoided making extensions to the language which weren't already pointed to by the standard or implemented in the competition.
Actually, $45 a month gets you unlimited service for the VII and VIIx now. The biggest advantage Omnisky has then is that it can do full TCP/IP, while the VII's are limited to the Palm.Net gateway, although several apps let you tunnel through it to get at any web site.
_Yoda Stories_ was developed based on their previous title, _Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures_, which was inspired by Rogue, Nethack, and other random tile-based exploration games. Unfortunately, they didn't do a great job making the UI interesting or making the games difficult -- each is fun for about a half hour, then very tedious.
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I agree. Most waitresses are girls (or at least women). :)
You can if you buy used. I've got a PS2, and the most I've paid for a game for the system was $25. I get almost everything either from the bargain bin, Greatest Hits repricing ($20/game for early titles), or as a previously played game from Blockbuster. If you don't care about playing the latest thing, you can acquire quite a library very reasonably.
Alamo food prices are pretty good. Good burgers and pizza are $6-7, popcorn is $2.50, drinks vary from $2-4, salads are $4. Its comparable to eating at a TGIFridays or Chili's, and the food quality is really good.
The two Alamo Drafthouse locations are strictly for movies. During the daytime, they're also available to rent for meetings and private parties. In that kind of situation, I could see network access be really useful -- consider holding a sales meeting there, and having people collaborate online, using the Alamo's video projectors to put up "the big picture".
Also, at the Alamo, people tend to show up 30 minutes prior to a picture to order food and get good seats. Wireless can be useful during that pre-picture downtime.
Symbian is an OK OS, but have you tried programming for it? Its arcane exception handling infrastructure designed for C, rather than C++, really makes writing good applications difficult. Plus, the "your app could be killed at any time" nature of its memory management and multitasking is far less orderly than Palm OS's "one app at a time" system.
I've heard that a VGA-output memory stick is in development by Margi, the people who did the Presenter-to-Go Springboard module for the Visors and for Compact Flash. This would actually let you do presentations from your CLIE. Cool!
Because the original chip, from the early 90's, was the DragonBall. It was designed for Motorola's paging group and for some equipment manufacturers in Asia. There have been three updates since then: DragonBall EZ, DragonBall VZ, and the new Super VZ (coming out this fall). I don't think the anime played a role in the original naming of the chip.
It won't happen -- ARM is THE CPU core for cell phone manufacturers, and Palm wants their new OS to work on the next generation cell phone platforms.
Actually, the Motorola DragonBall ARM doesn't run 68K code, it just has a peripheral set that is register-compatible with the DragonBall Super VZ. You would still need to recompile code, but you wouldn't have to do major rewrites of device drivers.
Palm will have a 68K emulator in their new OS. It will execute system calls in native ARM code, so it should be pretty fast for most programs.
I know its a joke, but actually, Palm will likely use Thumb, which is an extension to ARM's instruction set using 16-bit compressed instructions. You execute more instructions, but you use less memory bandwidth, making it a big win for 16-bit wide memory architectures.
I think the problem with the Best Buy display is the metal cage that covered the bottom of the unit -- it prevented natural hand placement, making the controls feel more awkward than they actually are.
While there is no official Mac support, you can sync with a Macintosh using IR, or you can get the Mac connection kit from Mark/Space.
Hey, you can code right now... get a $199 Palm m105, a $100 Palm Portable Keyboard (the one that folds up), then get Quartus Forth or Pocket C.
If any Linux users here in Austin, TX are looking for the Loki game ports for Linux cheap, I spotted most of their titles, new in box, at the Half Price Books on Guadalupe for $15 each. This included Heavy Gear II and Myth II. They also had the Quake III Arena for Linux tins for $20.
The security changes are twofold.
1) They modified the debugging engine to respect the lock settings, so you can't get into debug mode from the password prompt when the device is locked, and debugging by soft resetting while holding down doesn't work in a lock mode either. If your device is locked, the only way to unlock is to enter the password or do a hard reset.
2) You can now enter your password on the screen where you want to see your private data to unlock for that programs duration.
There is no on-device encryption. Privacy is still done using a flag on the record.
I'm pretty sure that was intentional. The 10.x.x.x subnet is reserved for private networks, and I'd assume that they wanted to keep their satellite control inside the corporate network. The only time they were accessed outside the corporate net was probabaly through Milo's custom VPN code he wrote to tunnel back into Nurv.
Effectively that happened -- with 3DFX's merger with Gigapixel earlier this year, they've now got a whole new team designing the cool hardware for next year. The products you're seeing now were mostly designed in 1998/early 1999 -- it takes a while to go from design to fab to board production.
The cool thing about the GSM module is that you can use the Visor/module directly as a cell phone, or you can hook up a headset and just leave the PDA in your pocket. Eventually, you could have a wireless headset that does A2D and talks Bluetooth to your PDA which then talks GSM to the phone network. Very neat.
I heard that Nintendo had planned on pushing the Game Boy Color as a gaming machine -- with a 4MHz processor? Who would want to play anything on that?
The academic version of CW is fairly cheap ($129 for the full version that generates code for Java, Win32, and MacOS), and Metrowerks now has a Learning Edition for $49 (it will probably lag one version behind CW Professional in the future).
I was one of the compiler engineers at Metrowerks with direct responsibility over the x86 compiler used in the CW for Windows product. Both the front end engineer and I had compatability with the ISO C and C++ standards as a major goal. In some cases, we'd liberalize the default settings to help people port code from VC++ and the older Macintosh tools, but we avoided making extensions to the language which weren't already pointed to by the standard or implemented in the competition.
Actually, $45 a month gets you unlimited service for the VII and VIIx now. The biggest advantage Omnisky has then is that it can do full TCP/IP, while the VII's are limited to the Palm.Net gateway, although several apps let you tunnel through it to get at any web site.
_Yoda Stories_ was developed based on their previous title, _Indiana Jones Desktop Adventures_, which was inspired by Rogue, Nethack, and other random tile-based exploration games. Unfortunately, they didn't do a great job making the UI interesting or making the games difficult -- each is fun for about a half hour, then very tedious.