the best part about the PSP's homebrew scene is that the only hardware you need to purchase is the large-capacity memory stick. 20 months ago, when I got my memory stick, a 512MB one was 100$. now, you can get a 2GB one for that price. Where with the DS, you need to buy the pass/wifime device + a flashcart, and you can't, necessarily, use standard hardware to read the flashcart (I've got a 8-in-one memorycard reader... and I'm aware that some flashcarts are available with direct USB connections, but I don't have any windows machines, so my choices are limited for that).
I'm intrested, how did you bricked your PSP?
basically, I was an idiot. I downloaded Tokabot for the PSP and when I tried to launch it, it said it needed to update the firmware. I was tired and I had a couple drinks, so without thinking, I had the loaded iso try to update the firmware. when it restarted the PSP, the iso unloaded and it never finished updating, so my PSP's firmware update was incomplete, hence, it won't boot anymore and is bricked.
What are your favorite games for the DS? What was the better ones for the PSP?
for DS, I've loved nearly every game I've had for it. Wario, new Super Mario Brothers, Castlevania... all GREAT games. the kirby game, pacpix, trauma center; spectacular.
For the PSP, RidgeRacers was a lot of fun, but after I beat it, I got kinda tired of it. Lumines and Minna No Golf (Hot shots Golf, I think it's called in the US?) were the best games I got for it. Loco Roco is also quite awesome.
Tony Hawk, Collon, Armoured Core, Bleach, metal gear, wipe-out, and GTA were all medocre at best. most were terrible (namely tony hawk, bleach, and armoured core).
this is blown out of proportion, but I think he's inflating it so for advertising revenue. did you see all the adverts on that page?
I've had similar things happen to electrical equipment in the past. I had a Pentium3's fan die in a server at work. we came in in the morning and smelled burnt plastic, and when we discovered that the server wasn't on, we opened it up only to find a 3" crater in the motherboard.
I also had something similar happen with my G4 upgrade in my old desktop machine. the fan died, but the machine kept running. I woke up and smelled hot plastic, but didn't know what it was... I took a shower and when I got out, I sat at my machine (still wet) and every application had unexpectedly quit. That's when I noticed a strange sound and I opened the side of the machine to see the processor fan vibrating and turning slowly. I touched the heatsink to feel how hot it was and the dampness on my hands actually caused a sizzle sound and I burned my fingertip.
I could imagine that if I had left for work before inspecting that, I could have started a fire.
in my life, I've also had an 8-port switch blow (with smoke and a flash), several powerstrips pop and melt, a powerbrick for my powerbook turn to putty, and a floppy drive spray fire.
I've got both systems, and I'd have to say that although the DS has much better games, until the DS lite came out, I was a much bigger fan of the PSP's size/feel.
also, the PSP's got such a nice homebrew scene and you can watch video on it. Before I got my new ipod, with video capabilities, the PSP was really my only option for watching video on the go... and I had an NES emulator on it with over 100 ROMs. Plus I could download PSP games and play them off the memory stick.
Since I bricked my PSP (because I'm an idiot), and got a DS Lite, I've completely fallen in love with the DS and have been blowing too much $ on games. they're way more fun. but I do miss Lumines. I can't wait til that comes out for the 360 so I can get my fix, again....spike
I keep wondering who these silly people are who piss on the parade, every time.
like with every gadget, it's great for some people and just not enough for other people. Like when the 40GB iPods came out, people were bitching that it wasn't 100GB and half the size.
now, I think the best use for this device for be for the handheld console hacker community. It'd be pretty sweet to access this via your PSP or DS and get access to some serious content (movies, games, ROMs, etc). 16GB in such a small space (especially compared to carrying a plethora of UMDs, and it's TINY compared to a PSP) in a single device is a great thing for PSP owners.
could also be a nice compliment for other handheld devices.
speaking of which, when are devices (namely PDAs and cell phones) going to have a USB port for supplemental storage?! I mean, to be able to add 16GB of music to your cell phone or your Palm by snapping something in like that would be great. Sure, they've got memory stick ports, but those aren't quite as universal as USB drives. you could even attach a 500GB USB harddrive to it.
and for those of you who'd complain about a 8cm bar poking out at a 90 degree angle from yer cell, I'm sure someone could make an adapter to make the USB device go parallel to the cell/pda/etc.
Swap completely depends on the computer's real RAM available and the purpose of the computer and the OS on said computer.
To adequately answer the question, "How much Virtual Memory is Enough?" The correct answer is "It depends".
exactly... and some OSs (read: OSX) caches less-frequently used data (cached window contents, and other images, etc) to the drive to free up real RAM; it doesn't matter how much RAM is installed on the machine, it'll still use the swap. Even my machine at work with 8GB of RAM frequently uses the swap even before 1/4 of the RAM has been touched.
well, machines of mine that have a 300GB drive don't have the smaller drives (10GB) in them. my point was really that when you've got 300GB of storage, does the difference between 500MB and 5GB of swap really matter? why not just go with the latter?
however, in response to your mention of the fact that older drives will be slower... you're right. I just use those drives in machines because I really dont' know what else to do with them. I threw out all of my 1GB drives a couple years ago and now I've got piles of 4-8GB high performance (as of like 1999) scsi harddrives kicking around that I don't know what else to do with.
not creating a swap partition at all is a bad idea, imo...
you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got.
I typically just make a 1 or 2 GB swap partition since I've got more than enough space to spare. I mean, back in the days when 128MB of RAM was considered a lot, and a 5GB drive was considered huge, no one would consider using 20% of their storage space for swap. Now, it's not unusual to have 300GB of storage, so what's 1% of that being used for swap?
I've also got a serious collection of 2-6GB harddrives kicking around, now, so I've been using them for swap. It's really pointless to have a 4GB partition for data, so I just use the entire 6GB drive for swap on some machines.
my primary server right now has a 4GB swap partition and 1.25GB of RAM... a piece of bad AJAX code that ran overnight wound up using all the RAM and had some seriously detrimental effects on the performance of the server. it took 25 minutes to ssh in in the morning and when I finally got in, I found that the load averages were at over 100 (I've NEVER see that before).
my point is that even if you have a LOT of RAM, it's still handy to have some spillover available.
I only played the demo for a few hours before my roommate bought the game and I felt that it was rather fun to just go around killing zombies.
but I've watched him play about 2/3 of the game and that phone is annoying. I think it's more annoying when you're not the one playing, because you're sitting at your computer reading slashdot or looking at pr0n and all you can hear is the faint sound of a bowling ball crushing a skull with an overpowering, extra loud phone ringing on top of it.
I think the game would be an order of magnitude better if it had GTA1 style multiplayer (multi console? online?) gameplay. run around, kill zombies all you want, but then try to find your opponent...
or like... minigames! the game needs minigames. drug the zombies, line them up and knock them over like dominoes or a bad Rube Goldberg machine. Or something of a where's waldo type game... The game had so much potential to be something truly great, but it fell short in nearly every aspect.
Perhaps they could release some supplemental or episodic content on Xbox Live?
The problem with that is that there's really no way of proving that the contents of the CD weren't changed.
We have a similar situation at my job. We get files from clients on CD and DVD (although a LOT less often in the last year or two due to high-speed internet connectivity and me setting up an FTP server) and we need to keep the CDs on hand for extended periods of time. We do keep a backup of the original files on the server for quick access.
At least if you keep the original media, and someone says that you did something wrong, you can show what the client sent and prove whether or not the mistake was theirs.
At my place, here, our solution is to use those 100-disk spindles. we've got 4 of them, and when the 4th fills up, we dump the first and start to populate that. It's completely un-organized and the one or two times we needed to locate a disk, we just figured out about where it would be located based on the date of the job and the dates of the jobs the other CDs were from.
Also, it doesn't help that 9/10 of the disks we get aren't labeled and are on very generic media.
I'd think that the best bet would be to add the disk and its contents to a database (like DiskTracker) and label the CD with the number so you can find it easily. we do that with our job data backups.
The requirement isn't really silly so much as it is simply lame.
Re:Current computer
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'm not sure I'm reading your post right (no pun intended), but...
some BIOS require certain devices to be present to pass the POST. I discovered this the hard way when setting up a headless server. I spent 20 hours installing gentoo, got the services all nicely configured and put the machine in the corner, and it never went online... so I pulled it out and brought it back to my desk and it booted fine.
I didn't find out that it was keyboard/monitor missing errors that was preventing the system from booting until I carried the monitor to the other side of the room and plugged it in and saw the keyboard error... then I poked around in the bios and saw the options for requiring keyboard and monitor.
Face it, the abbreviation "M$" is immediatly readable and identifiable.
while you've got a point, so does the GP poster... I'm pretty childish when it comes to Microsoft due to the fact that they kill just about everything that's great in the computing world. Their worst targets, in my eyes, have been Be (an OS that I loved enough to ditch apple for) and Bungie (my favourite gaming company of my youth).
Also, everyone seems to think that my hatred of M$ is related to the old Apple vs. M$ flamewar, where it isn't. I've always had very specific reasons why I didn't like M$, many of which are related to the fact that they rarely support anything outside of their own technology, or they "extend" existing tech to a point where their implementation becomes incompatible with everything else. this leads to people who learn the M$ version and when they try to use an OSS version or even just a plain standard version (J++ and Java, for instance), they blame the non-M$ branded one for not working the way they expect.
All of this frustration that I feel is compounded by the fact that most people don't seem to care at all about this and assume that the reason that M$ is the goliath that they are is because they ship a superior product; which isn't true. A perfect example is how several people I know (and I can only assume that there are LOTS more out there) see no reason to dump IE in favour of Firefox or other alternative browser. Their reasoning is that since IE has such high marketshare, there really must not be any real good reason to use anything else. And if pages don't render right (because of mis-implemented support for CSSx or other technologies), it's the fault of the website creators for not taking IE into account.
I mean, I'm not saying that VBA is a great thing or anything, but it was the only thing that was letting me do any kind of cross-platform programming of documents between OSX and the windows machines.
You could tell me to just not upgrade, but I was really hoping for more support for it in OSX, rather than less. it's bad enough that a lot of features that are available in the windows version aren't in Office for OSX, and that OSX's performance of VBA code is HORRID.
During the whole antitrust thing, Be had gone to the DoJ and presented their case to them stating that, basically, with all the evidence they had, it was an open and shut case against M$. the DoJ, for whatever reasons, decided to instead focus on the fact that IE was bundled and embedded inside windows.
Be's case was that M$ was using unfair business practices to force them out of the industry. the M$ contract, to bundle and pre-install windows with your computers was that you were not allowed to sell any other operating system software, even if you bundle windows in addition to Windows, whether it's installed or not, or sold separately.
I believe it was Toshiba that was in talks with Be to bundle their OS as a dual-boot option, but M$ started throwing their lawyers at them.
The reason this didn't hit mainstream was that this contractual agreement between vendors and M$ was protected as a trade secret.
I never really read up on garbage collection, but from the way it was originally explained to me, when I learned ObjC after learning Java, I kinda grouped the autorelease pool in my mind with Java's garbage collection.
I guess ObjC's is just a kind of slapped together GC-like implementation?
for me, it started with collecting icons in System 7 on my mac... then I moved on to collecting sounds/sound effects, then when I got my 56K modem, I started downloading more and more games and other warez.
now, I'm happy just collecting ROMs and music... I've completely lost interest in collecting software I'll never use.
however, I do miss Magic. too bad the game isn't what it used to be. and too bad I didn't spend the 35$ on the black lotus when I first started. damned thing sells for 1000$+ now.
Where do you live? perhaps I'd like to move there.
When I used to buy cigarettes in NJ, they'd card me and jot down my license. When I purchase alcohol, some stores jot down my license number on paper or punch it into their cashier devices. I bought a set of markers a couple weeks back and they did the same thing to me. They asked for ID and wrote it down.
Shit's going down, but I think it's regional. It's stupid.
FontAgent Pro is the best font application out there for OSX. It performs reasonably well up to about 10000 fonts. after that, it starts to choke, when loading (primarily because it has an option to compare font metrics to determine exact duplicates).
as for merging, that's possible using a great commandline utility called rsync that comes with OSX, albeit, I think you need to install the developer tools to get access to that. Apple's rsync is broken for some things, since it doesn't preserve dates, but there's a fix called rsyncx that works great.
I don't see why someone couldn't make a contextual menu module (CMM) front-end for rsync integration in the Finder. that'd be badass.
Slashdot Mirror
the best part about the PSP's homebrew scene is that the only hardware you need to purchase is the large-capacity memory stick. 20 months ago, when I got my memory stick, a 512MB one was 100$. now, you can get a 2GB one for that price. Where with the DS, you need to buy the pass/wifime device + a flashcart, and you can't, necessarily, use standard hardware to read the flashcart (I've got a 8-in-one memorycard reader... and I'm aware that some flashcarts are available with direct USB connections, but I don't have any windows machines, so my choices are limited for that).
I'm intrested, how did you bricked your PSP?
basically, I was an idiot. I downloaded Tokabot for the PSP and when I tried to launch it, it said it needed to update the firmware. I was tired and I had a couple drinks, so without thinking, I had the loaded iso try to update the firmware. when it restarted the PSP, the iso unloaded and it never finished updating, so my PSP's firmware update was incomplete, hence, it won't boot anymore and is bricked.
What are your favorite games for the DS? What was the better ones for the PSP?
for DS, I've loved nearly every game I've had for it. Wario, new Super Mario Brothers, Castlevania... all GREAT games. the kirby game, pacpix, trauma center; spectacular.
For the PSP, RidgeRacers was a lot of fun, but after I beat it, I got kinda tired of it. Lumines and Minna No Golf (Hot shots Golf, I think it's called in the US?) were the best games I got for it. Loco Roco is also quite awesome.
Tony Hawk, Collon, Armoured Core, Bleach, metal gear, wipe-out, and GTA were all medocre at best. most were terrible (namely tony hawk, bleach, and armoured core).
I wasn't dripping!!!
just a little damp.
the machine was upright and it's not like I was handling components or anything. so yeah.
this is blown out of proportion, but I think he's inflating it so for advertising revenue. did you see all the adverts on that page?
I've had similar things happen to electrical equipment in the past. I had a Pentium3's fan die in a server at work. we came in in the morning and smelled burnt plastic, and when we discovered that the server wasn't on, we opened it up only to find a 3" crater in the motherboard.
I also had something similar happen with my G4 upgrade in my old desktop machine. the fan died, but the machine kept running. I woke up and smelled hot plastic, but didn't know what it was... I took a shower and when I got out, I sat at my machine (still wet) and every application had unexpectedly quit. That's when I noticed a strange sound and I opened the side of the machine to see the processor fan vibrating and turning slowly. I touched the heatsink to feel how hot it was and the dampness on my hands actually caused a sizzle sound and I burned my fingertip.
I could imagine that if I had left for work before inspecting that, I could have started a fire.
in my life, I've also had an 8-port switch blow (with smoke and a flash), several powerstrips pop and melt, a powerbrick for my powerbook turn to putty, and a floppy drive spray fire.
I've got both systems, and I'd have to say that although the DS has much better games, until the DS lite came out, I was a much bigger fan of the PSP's size/feel.
...spike
also, the PSP's got such a nice homebrew scene and you can watch video on it. Before I got my new ipod, with video capabilities, the PSP was really my only option for watching video on the go... and I had an NES emulator on it with over 100 ROMs. Plus I could download PSP games and play them off the memory stick.
Since I bricked my PSP (because I'm an idiot), and got a DS Lite, I've completely fallen in love with the DS and have been blowing too much $ on games. they're way more fun. but I do miss Lumines. I can't wait til that comes out for the 360 so I can get my fix, again.
I keep wondering who these silly people are who piss on the parade, every time.
like with every gadget, it's great for some people and just not enough for other people. Like when the 40GB iPods came out, people were bitching that it wasn't 100GB and half the size.
now, I think the best use for this device for be for the handheld console hacker community. It'd be pretty sweet to access this via your PSP or DS and get access to some serious content (movies, games, ROMs, etc). 16GB in such a small space (especially compared to carrying a plethora of UMDs, and it's TINY compared to a PSP) in a single device is a great thing for PSP owners.
could also be a nice compliment for other handheld devices.
speaking of which, when are devices (namely PDAs and cell phones) going to have a USB port for supplemental storage?! I mean, to be able to add 16GB of music to your cell phone or your Palm by snapping something in like that would be great. Sure, they've got memory stick ports, but those aren't quite as universal as USB drives. you could even attach a 500GB USB harddrive to it.
and for those of you who'd complain about a 8cm bar poking out at a 90 degree angle from yer cell, I'm sure someone could make an adapter to make the USB device go parallel to the cell/pda/etc.
Budgetary constraints, eh? Since when is this administration concerned about budgetary constraints?!
One way to slow the spending would have been to not have a war (or at least not THIS war), eh?
Swap completely depends on the computer's real RAM available and the purpose of the computer and the OS on said computer.
To adequately answer the question, "How much Virtual Memory is Enough?" The correct answer is "It depends".
exactly... and some OSs (read: OSX) caches less-frequently used data (cached window contents, and other images, etc) to the drive to free up real RAM; it doesn't matter how much RAM is installed on the machine, it'll still use the swap. Even my machine at work with 8GB of RAM frequently uses the swap even before 1/4 of the RAM has been touched.
well, machines of mine that have a 300GB drive don't have the smaller drives (10GB) in them. my point was really that when you've got 300GB of storage, does the difference between 500MB and 5GB of swap really matter? why not just go with the latter?
however, in response to your mention of the fact that older drives will be slower... you're right. I just use those drives in machines because I really dont' know what else to do with them. I threw out all of my 1GB drives a couple years ago and now I've got piles of 4-8GB high performance (as of like 1999) scsi harddrives kicking around that I don't know what else to do with.
not creating a swap partition at all is a bad idea, imo...
you never know when some runaway process is going to eat all yer RAM and need to use swap... no matter how much RAM you've got.
I typically just make a 1 or 2 GB swap partition since I've got more than enough space to spare. I mean, back in the days when 128MB of RAM was considered a lot, and a 5GB drive was considered huge, no one would consider using 20% of their storage space for swap. Now, it's not unusual to have 300GB of storage, so what's 1% of that being used for swap?
I've also got a serious collection of 2-6GB harddrives kicking around, now, so I've been using them for swap. It's really pointless to have a 4GB partition for data, so I just use the entire 6GB drive for swap on some machines.
my primary server right now has a 4GB swap partition and 1.25GB of RAM... a piece of bad AJAX code that ran overnight wound up using all the RAM and had some seriously detrimental effects on the performance of the server. it took 25 minutes to ssh in in the morning and when I finally got in, I found that the load averages were at over 100 (I've NEVER see that before).
my point is that even if you have a LOT of RAM, it's still handy to have some spillover available.
I only played the demo for a few hours before my roommate bought the game and I felt that it was rather fun to just go around killing zombies.
but I've watched him play about 2/3 of the game and that phone is annoying. I think it's more annoying when you're not the one playing, because you're sitting at your computer reading slashdot or looking at pr0n and all you can hear is the faint sound of a bowling ball crushing a skull with an overpowering, extra loud phone ringing on top of it.
I think the game would be an order of magnitude better if it had GTA1 style multiplayer (multi console? online?) gameplay. run around, kill zombies all you want, but then try to find your opponent...
or like... minigames! the game needs minigames. drug the zombies, line them up and knock them over like dominoes or a bad Rube Goldberg machine. Or something of a where's waldo type game... The game had so much potential to be something truly great, but it fell short in nearly every aspect.
Perhaps they could release some supplemental or episodic content on Xbox Live?
http://www.polksheriff.org/cgi-bin/i080914?book=20 01020912
that appears to be him... complete with mugshot and everything.
The problem with that is that there's really no way of proving that the contents of the CD weren't changed.
We have a similar situation at my job. We get files from clients on CD and DVD (although a LOT less often in the last year or two due to high-speed internet connectivity and me setting up an FTP server) and we need to keep the CDs on hand for extended periods of time. We do keep a backup of the original files on the server for quick access.
At least if you keep the original media, and someone says that you did something wrong, you can show what the client sent and prove whether or not the mistake was theirs.
At my place, here, our solution is to use those 100-disk spindles. we've got 4 of them, and when the 4th fills up, we dump the first and start to populate that. It's completely un-organized and the one or two times we needed to locate a disk, we just figured out about where it would be located based on the date of the job and the dates of the jobs the other CDs were from.
Also, it doesn't help that 9/10 of the disks we get aren't labeled and are on very generic media.
I'd think that the best bet would be to add the disk and its contents to a database (like DiskTracker) and label the CD with the number so you can find it easily. we do that with our job data backups.
The requirement isn't really silly so much as it is simply lame.
I'm not sure I'm reading your post right (no pun intended), but...
some BIOS require certain devices to be present to pass the POST. I discovered this the hard way when setting up a headless server. I spent 20 hours installing gentoo, got the services all nicely configured and put the machine in the corner, and it never went online... so I pulled it out and brought it back to my desk and it booted fine.
I didn't find out that it was keyboard/monitor missing errors that was preventing the system from booting until I carried the monitor to the other side of the room and plugged it in and saw the keyboard error... then I poked around in the bios and saw the options for requiring keyboard and monitor.
Face it, the abbreviation "M$" is immediatly readable and identifiable.
while you've got a point, so does the GP poster... I'm pretty childish when it comes to Microsoft due to the fact that they kill just about everything that's great in the computing world. Their worst targets, in my eyes, have been Be (an OS that I loved enough to ditch apple for) and Bungie (my favourite gaming company of my youth).
Also, everyone seems to think that my hatred of M$ is related to the old Apple vs. M$ flamewar, where it isn't. I've always had very specific reasons why I didn't like M$, many of which are related to the fact that they rarely support anything outside of their own technology, or they "extend" existing tech to a point where their implementation becomes incompatible with everything else. this leads to people who learn the M$ version and when they try to use an OSS version or even just a plain standard version (J++ and Java, for instance), they blame the non-M$ branded one for not working the way they expect.
All of this frustration that I feel is compounded by the fact that most people don't seem to care at all about this and assume that the reason that M$ is the goliath that they are is because they ship a superior product; which isn't true. A perfect example is how several people I know (and I can only assume that there are LOTS more out there) see no reason to dump IE in favour of Firefox or other alternative browser. Their reasoning is that since IE has such high marketshare, there really must not be any real good reason to use anything else. And if pages don't render right (because of mis-implemented support for CSSx or other technologies), it's the fault of the website creators for not taking IE into account.
Thanks for posting the details. =)
ok, THAT royally sucks.
I mean, I'm not saying that VBA is a great thing or anything, but it was the only thing that was letting me do any kind of cross-platform programming of documents between OSX and the windows machines.
You could tell me to just not upgrade, but I was really hoping for more support for it in OSX, rather than less. it's bad enough that a lot of features that are available in the windows version aren't in Office for OSX, and that OSX's performance of VBA code is HORRID.
I think "slapped together" is a bit of an emotional-loaded term for how it works...
that's not how I meant it.
BeOS died because of Microsoft.
During the whole antitrust thing, Be had gone to the DoJ and presented their case to them stating that, basically, with all the evidence they had, it was an open and shut case against M$. the DoJ, for whatever reasons, decided to instead focus on the fact that IE was bundled and embedded inside windows.
Be's case was that M$ was using unfair business practices to force them out of the industry. the M$ contract, to bundle and pre-install windows with your computers was that you were not allowed to sell any other operating system software, even if you bundle windows in addition to Windows, whether it's installed or not, or sold separately.
I believe it was Toshiba that was in talks with Be to bundle their OS as a dual-boot option, but M$ started throwing their lawyers at them.
The reason this didn't hit mainstream was that this contractual agreement between vendors and M$ was protected as a trade secret.
not joking. just asking for clarification.
I never really read up on garbage collection, but from the way it was originally explained to me, when I learned ObjC after learning Java, I kinda grouped the autorelease pool in my mind with Java's garbage collection.
I guess ObjC's is just a kind of slapped together GC-like implementation?
I'm confused... I thought that ObjC did have garbage collection...
isn't that what the Autorelease pool is for? or is this more automatic?
I mean, is it possible for m$ to not think with their wallet? wasn't tech ever just plain fun to them?
for me, it started with collecting icons in System 7 on my mac... then I moved on to collecting sounds/sound effects, then when I got my 56K modem, I started downloading more and more games and other warez.
now, I'm happy just collecting ROMs and music... I've completely lost interest in collecting software I'll never use.
however, I do miss Magic. too bad the game isn't what it used to be. and too bad I didn't spend the 35$ on the black lotus when I first started. damned thing sells for 1000$+ now.
I smell BS. An ID for a lighter? Bah.
Where do you live? perhaps I'd like to move there.
When I used to buy cigarettes in NJ, they'd card me and jot down my license. When I purchase alcohol, some stores jot down my license number on paper or punch it into their cashier devices. I bought a set of markers a couple weeks back and they did the same thing to me. They asked for ID and wrote it down.
Shit's going down, but I think it's regional. It's stupid.
FontAgent Pro is the best font application out there for OSX. It performs reasonably well up to about 10000 fonts. after that, it starts to choke, when loading (primarily because it has an option to compare font metrics to determine exact duplicates).
as for merging, that's possible using a great commandline utility called rsync that comes with OSX, albeit, I think you need to install the developer tools to get access to that. Apple's rsync is broken for some things, since it doesn't preserve dates, but there's a fix called rsyncx that works great.
I don't see why someone couldn't make a contextual menu module (CMM) front-end for rsync integration in the Finder. that'd be badass.
actually, it's 100% Red and 100% Green (which makes yellow). He's output to an RGB device, generally.
now, pacman printed on paper... that's 100% yellow. but who plays pacman on paper?
wasn't there some crazy bastard who wrote a pacman implementation in postscript once, though? or was that tetris?