I sometimes wear headphones at work (just a temp, though) but I think some people will consider that to be rude. It's just that headphones have this fuck-off attitude associated with them, like an in your face version of a DND label. I mean, that's not what I feel like when wearing them, I don't mind people interrupting me at all, but I know it's what it looks like. I often wear only one side of the headphones so that I at least notice people "sneaking" up to me and start the conversation myself if necessary...
I'm not saying that imposing your music on others is a good alternative, of course, but maybe they've told him they don't mind as long as the volume is low enough.
They work just fine because they both sacrifice quality (as evidences in low res textures, for instance) and have greater loading times, in various variations. Based on (1) more data means more beautiful (as someone else above put it) and (2) optical drives transmit less data in the same time there obviously is a trade-off and no way around it. Of course, console developers are quite good at making do with less data (1) and smartly streaming data off the CD when it's needed (2).
Yes, well, the problem is you don't have a speedy drive, because there is no such thing. All optical drives are horribly slow, the fastest deliver maybe 10 MB/s when they're in a good mood and 5 MB/s on average. Considering how data transfer from memory to graphics memory to GPU is measured in gigabytes per second (>1 and >10, respectively) and all that data has to come from somewhere, I'd rather it be my hard drive than my optical drive, because the former is 10 times as fast.
The first CD games, as I recall, often streamed low-res video from the CD, and some of todays games to that, too, because you can stream it. But most other data you can't stream, or only when you decrease it in quality, which I'd rather not.
Me neither, I thought it was a typo for Try and Play, a MS term for either the agony of gamers who can't get a game to work, or consumers in general for whom Plug and Play fails horribly.
Love it or hate it, Steam prevents piracy, but it works.
Sorry for disagreeing with you twice in one thread, but Steam didn't exactly prevent piracy. It was cracked, and as far as I am aware, cracked versions that actually enable you to play online are maintained as Steam or HL2 is updated. If that's true (I never tried, I bought the game), HL1 had a better copy-protection. You might be right about it being one of the few games that was available in retail first, though.
As far as patches in this system are concerned, I don't think that will be a huge problem. Just recreate the file system structure of the CD/DVD on the hard drive and have any files that are on the HD override the CD data. That would mean querying the HD at least every time the game is started (at worst: every time a file is accessed, but that's probably not necessary), but that's not that much work, especially if MS delivers a framework that does this automatically. In fact, I think there are games that already work like this even though they don't run off CD/DVD - data in a file-system folder overrides the data contained in the game data packages.
What kind of copy protection will be used? Is this really just a scheme to prevent people from playing with duped cds, or installing a game and passing the cd on to a friend?
SATA goes now at a speed of 150, IDE HDDs go at 133, slower ones go at 100. Corect me if I am wrong, but CD/DVD ROM drives go at a speed of 66.
The numbers you are citing are in MB/s, and are the theoretical bus speed of SATA and various PATA UDMA modes. There is currently no single consumer hard drive able to sustain even the slowest mode you refer to (UDMA4), although modern HDs are pretty close. SATA was introduced because it's conceivable that UDMA6 won't be fast enough in the not-too-distant future, but mostly because it has other features that are, as one might put it, kewl. Obviously, CD (1x = 150 KB/s) and DVD (1x = 1.32 MB/s) drives are far from that, HDs are about 10 times as fast as CDs in terms of throughput and I assume they difference is even larger in terms of latency.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you - while you can do great stuff by smartly streaming data from the CD, you could also try smartly streaming data from the HD and get 10 times the data to display. So obviously, there is a tradeoff involved, either accept loading times or compromise the quality of the presentation.
Ah, thanks. Sounds a bit like companies advertising with their trade register ID instead of a name to me.;) We don't have anything like that here in Germany, at least not as far as I am aware. Radio stations call themselves whatever they want to, although acronyms are popular and the letter R is frequent for obvious reasons.
Ant is integrated into IntelliJ IDEA, and IIRC there are JUnit plugins. Let me just state here that IntelliJ IDEA is by far the best IDE I have ever seen. Their motto is "develop with pleasure", and as cheesy as it may sound, some of the convenience the IDE brings really is quite pleasing. I'm using Eclipse now because the J2ME integration is way better, and so far Eclipse could do everything IDEA could, but it's just all much more streamlined in IDEA. At least that's my experience - I don't want to start a religious war here. I really hope JetBrains continues working on IDEA; their latest tool was a C# development tool, I hope they're not jumping ship.
My faith in the public moderation system just dropped a notch./i
Look at it this way: The moderation system is in place to promote nearly all good posts to +3 and above. Cases like this could be considered false positives, but the real filth rarely gets moderated up high, and conversely the really good stuff rarely, if ever, gets moderated far down. It tends to err on the side of the comment author, which isn't a bad thing.
I really think the moderation system works surprisingly well, I often read at +5 and there's always a lot of genuinely interesting posts.
Sorry for being off-topic, I just had to break a bone for the mod system here, seeing how rarely it gets appreciated.
I also use BitTornado, but simply because Azureus was too much client for me. I never have more than one or maybe two simultaneous torrents running anyway, and the Azureus interface was just unneccesarily complex for that task. It's got some neat little features, though, e.g. the ability to delete the torrent file after the download is complete. The BitTornado GUI isn't exactly beautiful, in fact it looks like ass, but it's simple and does the job. That said, I'm always looking for alternatives, but all that I have seen were horrendously overengineered. As for the underlying programming language, I don't really care - apart from the hashing, BT doesn't seem to be that much of a resource hog.
Exactly. I got back the results for an exam in stochastics about a week ago. When they weren't viewable at 4 PM or so, I tried various URLs on the server that were likely to link to the PDF containing the results - based on other documents on the exam and on last years results, etc. I failed, I didn't get the URL right (it was totally different than last years) and the document wasn't even online at that point, it was uploaded at around 6 PM.
But the point is, I was doing much the same thing (on far lower scale wrt to impact on my life), and I certainly wouldn't call it hacking. I also had no moral problems doing it - why would I? I doubt anyone would have cared.
70 hours? Odd. The Register reports 50 hours, with a catch: "Sony claims the devices will operate for a staggering 50 hours on a single charge, but that's when playing back 105Kbps ATRAC 3 files in "power saving mode". It's not clear what this mode is - presumably it's with no EQ and the display turned off. Still, it's a big leap over the Shuffle's 18-hour play time."
Apart from the Win ports already mentioned by myself and other, you can play Escape Velocity on an emulated Mac in x86. I did that before they got around to porting it. You need Basilisk II (680x0 emu), a copy of a Mac ROM and a copy of Mac OS 7/8 - the latter is freely available on the Apple website, IIRC. Anyway, guides to the whole emulating thing are available. But then again these days it's probably much easier to run the whole thing in Wine.
I'm also a student, and I'm also stuck with a 17" CRT (stuck as in waiting for the damned thing to finally die). Despite the tight budget, I managed to push the monitor back a few cm/inches. It involved moving the desk away from the wall the same length, an extremely complex procedure which should earn me my engineering degree once I publish a paper documenting the process.;)
As for me, well, my keyboards so close to the edge of my desk I have no space for one.
Ew, sounds like you don't have enough room to rest your wrist on the desk in front of the keyboard - how on Earth can you stand that! We have some desktops at work set up that way, I hate it. (Of course, worse are those folks who insist on putting their displays on top of their desktop cases, raising it by ~20 cm - ergonomics be damned.)
You're welcome. On a sidenote: the official BT homepage has a new look! When did that happen. I figured the site with Bram Cohen's photo prominently placed (upper left edge, was it?) would last forever...
On a more serious note, the actual torrents are linked to elsewhere in this story's comments. There are also downloads on SF.net which might be faster.
Note that Escape Velocity was released for Windows last year. I loved it on the Mac, and on Windows I even paid for it... Although IMO the final scenario (Nova) isn't anywhere near as good as the second (Override) or some of the total conversion add-ons available - probably because Nova is fairly linear. Fortunately, Override was ported to Windows, as well, and is available as a free add-on.
the amount of freight we move around on rail per ton/mile
That does not seem to parse with me. Maybe I'm just stupid. Did you mean amount of freight measured in ton/mile? That still doesn't make sense, though, does it? Ton * mile seems like a more reasonable way to measure the amount of freight transported. But it's not like there was any merit to transporting a lot of stuff over large distances - actually, the less you transport and the shorter the distance, the better. Obviously, a large, sparsely populated country will tend to transport goods over large distances. The measurement that's most relevant is probably the ratio of goods transported via road vs goods transported via rail.
Finally, the site you link to doesn't exactly strike me as a good source, and the numbers are 10 years old. But I'm not really in a position to debunk it.
Slashdot Mirror
I sometimes wear headphones at work (just a temp, though) but I think some people will consider that to be rude. It's just that headphones have this fuck-off attitude associated with them, like an in your face version of a DND label. I mean, that's not what I feel like when wearing them, I don't mind people interrupting me at all, but I know it's what it looks like. I often wear only one side of the headphones so that I at least notice people "sneaking" up to me and start the conversation myself if necessary...
I'm not saying that imposing your music on others is a good alternative, of course, but maybe they've told him they don't mind as long as the volume is low enough.
They work just fine because they both sacrifice quality (as evidences in low res textures, for instance) and have greater loading times, in various variations. Based on (1) more data means more beautiful (as someone else above put it) and (2) optical drives transmit less data in the same time there obviously is a trade-off and no way around it. Of course, console developers are quite good at making do with less data (1) and smartly streaming data off the CD when it's needed (2).
Yes, well, the problem is you don't have a speedy drive, because there is no such thing. All optical drives are horribly slow, the fastest deliver maybe 10 MB/s when they're in a good mood and 5 MB/s on average. Considering how data transfer from memory to graphics memory to GPU is measured in gigabytes per second (>1 and >10, respectively) and all that data has to come from somewhere, I'd rather it be my hard drive than my optical drive, because the former is 10 times as fast.
The first CD games, as I recall, often streamed low-res video from the CD, and some of todays games to that, too, because you can stream it. But most other data you can't stream, or only when you decrease it in quality, which I'd rather not.
Me neither, I thought it was a typo for Try and Play, a MS term for either the agony of gamers who can't get a game to work, or consumers in general for whom Plug and Play fails horribly.
Love it or hate it, Steam prevents piracy, but it works.
Sorry for disagreeing with you twice in one thread, but Steam didn't exactly prevent piracy. It was cracked, and as far as I am aware, cracked versions that actually enable you to play online are maintained as Steam or HL2 is updated. If that's true (I never tried, I bought the game), HL1 had a better copy-protection. You might be right about it being one of the few games that was available in retail first, though.
As far as patches in this system are concerned, I don't think that will be a huge problem. Just recreate the file system structure of the CD/DVD on the hard drive and have any files that are on the HD override the CD data. That would mean querying the HD at least every time the game is started (at worst: every time a file is accessed, but that's probably not necessary), but that's not that much work, especially if MS delivers a framework that does this automatically. In fact, I think there are games that already work like this even though they don't run off CD/DVD - data in a file-system folder overrides the data contained in the game data packages.
What kind of copy protection will be used? Is this really just a scheme to prevent people from playing with duped cds, or installing a game and passing the cd on to a friend?
No! Hahahah, we'd never do anything like that.
SATA goes now at a speed of 150, IDE HDDs go at 133, slower ones go at 100. Corect me if I am wrong, but CD/DVD ROM drives go at a speed of 66.
The numbers you are citing are in MB/s, and are the theoretical bus speed of SATA and various PATA UDMA modes. There is currently no single consumer hard drive able to sustain even the slowest mode you refer to (UDMA4), although modern HDs are pretty close. SATA was introduced because it's conceivable that UDMA6 won't be fast enough in the not-too-distant future, but mostly because it has other features that are, as one might put it, kewl. Obviously, CD (1x = 150 KB/s) and DVD (1x = 1.32 MB/s) drives are far from that, HDs are about 10 times as fast as CDs in terms of throughput and I assume they difference is even larger in terms of latency.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you - while you can do great stuff by smartly streaming data from the CD, you could also try smartly streaming data from the HD and get 10 times the data to display. So obviously, there is a tradeoff involved, either accept loading times or compromise the quality of the presentation.
References: c't 6/2005, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDMA, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD-ROM
Ah, thanks. Sounds a bit like companies advertising with their trade register ID instead of a name to me. ;) We don't have anything like that here in Germany, at least not as far as I am aware. Radio stations call themselves whatever they want to, although acronyms are popular and the letter R is frequent for obvious reasons.
Ant is integrated into IntelliJ IDEA, and IIRC there are JUnit plugins. Let me just state here that IntelliJ IDEA is by far the best IDE I have ever seen. Their motto is "develop with pleasure", and as cheesy as it may sound, some of the convenience the IDE brings really is quite pleasing. I'm using Eclipse now because the J2ME integration is way better, and so far Eclipse could do everything IDEA could, but it's just all much more streamlined in IDEA. At least that's my experience - I don't want to start a religious war here. I really hope JetBrains continues working on IDEA; their latest tool was a C# development tool, I hope they're not jumping ship.
Is there some kind of law saying that all US radio stations have got all-capital names starting with a W? Seriously.
My faith in the public moderation system just dropped a notch./i
Look at it this way: The moderation system is in place to promote nearly all good posts to +3 and above. Cases like this could be considered false positives, but the real filth rarely gets moderated up high, and conversely the really good stuff rarely, if ever, gets moderated far down. It tends to err on the side of the comment author, which isn't a bad thing.
I really think the moderation system works surprisingly well, I often read at +5 and there's always a lot of genuinely interesting posts.
Sorry for being off-topic, I just had to break a bone for the mod system here, seeing how rarely it gets appreciated.
I also use BitTornado, but simply because Azureus was too much client for me. I never have more than one or maybe two simultaneous torrents running anyway, and the Azureus interface was just unneccesarily complex for that task. It's got some neat little features, though, e.g. the ability to delete the torrent file after the download is complete. The BitTornado GUI isn't exactly beautiful, in fact it looks like ass, but it's simple and does the job.
That said, I'm always looking for alternatives, but all that I have seen were horrendously overengineered. As for the underlying programming language, I don't really care - apart from the hashing, BT doesn't seem to be that much of a resource hog.
Yup. At least, that's the idea.
Actually, I'm a bit worried. How did the passed-out woman end up with her face on the dog's butt?! Hmm.
Exactly. I got back the results for an exam in stochastics about a week ago. When they weren't viewable at 4 PM or so, I tried various URLs on the server that were likely to link to the PDF containing the results - based on other documents on the exam and on last years results, etc. I failed, I didn't get the URL right (it was totally different than last years) and the document wasn't even online at that point, it was uploaded at around 6 PM.
;)
But the point is, I was doing much the same thing (on far lower scale wrt to impact on my life), and I certainly wouldn't call it hacking. I also had no moral problems doing it - why would I? I doubt anyone would have cared.
BTW, I passed! Yay me!
70 hours? Odd. The Register reports 50 hours, with a catch: "Sony claims the devices will operate for a staggering 50 hours on a single charge, but that's when playing back 105Kbps ATRAC 3 files in "power saving mode". It's not clear what this mode is - presumably it's with no EQ and the display turned off. Still, it's a big leap over the Shuffle's 18-hour play time."
Apart from the Win ports already mentioned by myself and other, you can play Escape Velocity on an emulated Mac in x86. I did that before they got around to porting it. You need Basilisk II (680x0 emu), a copy of a Mac ROM and a copy of Mac OS 7/8 - the latter is freely available on the Apple website, IIRC. Anyway, guides to the whole emulating thing are available. But then again these days it's probably much easier to run the whole thing in Wine.
I'm also a student, and I'm also stuck with a 17" CRT (stuck as in waiting for the damned thing to finally die). Despite the tight budget, I managed to push the monitor back a few cm/inches. It involved moving the desk away from the wall the same length, an extremely complex procedure which should earn me my engineering degree once I publish a paper documenting the process. ;)
Wow, that's almost as much as a HD floppy disk! I wish I had a MW reader for my C-64.
As for me, well, my keyboards so close to the edge of my desk I have no space for one.
Ew, sounds like you don't have enough room to rest your wrist on the desk in front of the keyboard - how on Earth can you stand that! We have some desktops at work set up that way, I hate it. (Of course, worse are those folks who insist on putting their displays on top of their desktop cases, raising it by ~20 cm - ergonomics be damned.)
http://www.bittorrent.com/
You're welcome. On a sidenote: the official BT homepage has a new look! When did that happen. I figured the site with Bram Cohen's photo prominently placed (upper left edge, was it?) would last forever...
On a more serious note, the actual torrents are linked to elsewhere in this story's comments. There are also downloads on SF.net which might be faster.
You must be new around here. ;) (Slashdot puts a space in long "words" to prevent them from messing with the layout.) Linkfied.
180MB. I think that must be the biggest thing I ever downloaded from SF.
Note that Escape Velocity was released for Windows last year. I loved it on the Mac, and on Windows I even paid for it... Although IMO the final scenario (Nova) isn't anywhere near as good as the second (Override) or some of the total conversion add-ons available - probably because Nova is fairly linear. Fortunately, Override was ported to Windows, as well, and is available as a free add-on.
the amount of freight we move around on rail per ton/mile
That does not seem to parse with me. Maybe I'm just stupid. Did you mean amount of freight measured in ton/mile? That still doesn't make sense, though, does it? Ton * mile seems like a more reasonable way to measure the amount of freight transported. But it's not like there was any merit to transporting a lot of stuff over large distances - actually, the less you transport and the shorter the distance, the better. Obviously, a large, sparsely populated country will tend to transport goods over large distances. The measurement that's most relevant is probably the ratio of goods transported via road vs goods transported via rail.
Finally, the site you link to doesn't exactly strike me as a good source, and the numbers are 10 years old. But I'm not really in a position to debunk it.