"is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?"
No.
The actual problem is in how the hardware today works. Video boards are REALLY, REALLY GOOD at getting an image moving in one direction - from computer, to vid board, to monitor.
They are quite LOUSY, however, in sending that video information back to the computer or the hard drive.
This is why even the gameplay movies you see today have been created with a simple workaround: hook up the board to a capture card of some sort (sometimes as simple as a vga->TV external converter) and capture away.
I'm guessing the big proprietary change in NVidia's model is an allocation of bandwidth back for sending the data the other direction - the rest of the stuff (raytracing etc) is just fluff. And of course it doesn't hurt in the slightest that it doesn't have to run at 60+ FPS all the time, so it can take the extra time to make frame, send frame back other way, make frame...
The owner of the building is obliged to warn the patrons who have paid admission if something is going on. If I don't want to be scanned with night vision goggles, I have the right to know they're doing it so I can take my business elsewhere. Just like, if they have a security camera pointed down into the bathroom stalls, I have the right to know about it and be warned before some gay-ass security guard gets to jerk off watching me unzip on candid camera.
And as far as your "oh they'll never actually get jail time" - BULLSHIT. The maximum penalty under law should never be excessive, otherwise you're gonna get some poor slob railroaded because the MPAA paid off the DA with a nice shiny new convertible to get them sent to prison.
Wherever the law allows for abuses of the legal system, we can rest assured those abuses WILL occur. Just look at forum shopping over domain name lawsuits these days, something that in 1995 we were assured was "technically possible" but that would "never occur because there wouldn't be enough chance of it changing the outcome."
The point is not that catching these people is bad - they broke the law, they got caught. That's all fine and good.
The problem is:
#1 - the use of night vision goggles, WITHOUT THE POSTING OF A WARNING TO THE EFFECT THAT THEY MIGHT BE USED, is likely an illegal search, bringing some form of liability on the theater for doing so. (IANAL)
#2 - the punishment greatly exceeds the crime. We're talking about throwing someone into jail. Granted they were copying movies, but even so, some form of monetary fine ought to be the end of it.
Let's face it folks, when the penalty for copying one singular MP3 is more jail time than you'd get for burning a dog or cat alive, the law is seriously fucked up. And we have Motion Picture Ass Head Jack Valenti to thank for it.
Just remember, your VCR is the equivalent of the Boston Strangler, too.
WhenU's obviously lying out their asses in this lawsuit.
They claim - and I quote: WhenU's software, one of the apparent targets of the act, is installed only with user consent, and does not invade the privacy of computer users.
Well for starters, at the University where I work, I run one of the computer labs for the particular college I work under (we have several). Despite our best efforts, we invariably have to clean a machine out from a bunch of spyware that has infested it - Deep Freeze seems to have culled that from the main lab, but as the rest of campus isn't subnetted yet (stupid central IT budget) we can't roll it out on the rest.
What do I find when I go through the machines with Spybot to figure out what's going on with them? Invariably, it's the same fucking story.
eZula, Gator (YES YOU ARE SPYWARE YOU FUCKING LYING BASTARDS), WhenU.SaveNow, Lycos Sidebar, Apropos, and whatever else their current tricklers are dumping in.
Twice we've caught them actually installing. In the background, no user clicks required, no EULA agreed to. Just the installers dropping in from some webpage and then silently running the trickler (and downloading OTHER tricklers) till the machine's spyware-ed half to death.
Fuck you, WhenU. We all hope you go away. The POINT of this legislation is to drive you out of business and I hope the court throws your lying ass right out on the street to suffer.
Most of my PC games are backed up. And then I have another 5-6 CDs of the No-CD cracks. Why?
Because things happen to CDs. Pets knock boxes off of shelves. People drop things. Sit on them without noticing they're there (my original Win98 CD went this way, lucky I'd copied it beforehand).
I'd love to do the same with my games too. Nothing wrong there.
And then there's the foreign games market. Playstations, un-modded, won't play import games, which renders a decently large portion of the population who want certain games unable to get them.
Me? I have been tempted over and over to mod my PS2. Why? DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION. Plainly put, the American versions SUCK.
The Japanese versions have all the cool music. The Americanized versions' music have all sucked by comparison. Haven't tried Ultramix, rather scared of it to be honest.
The article's blatant partisan writing better suited to the editorial page than to being presented as a "factual" article.
I work at a public university. One of the problems a public university has to deal with is the phenomenon of clueless users in dorms/offices/wireless connections, who may or may not become spam zombies.
In addition, there's all the wonderful viruses that exist, and the fact that spammers regularly spoof their emails to appear to have come from us in hopes of getting through.
We've tried contacting AOL to get through, no luck. We've begged their "Spam Czar" to whitelist just the university's email server - they can go ahead and block email from the rest of the IP range, we really don't care, but we want our email server whitelisted for obvious reasons - nothing.
Every day by about 10 AM, if we're lucky, we've been blacklisted.
We're a public university. We don't send "opt-in" marketing or, for that matter, any marketing. AOL just doesn't care to deal with it, they seem willing to accept a 25% or higher false-positive rate and claim that it's helping people.
Because Apple decided to completely undercut them with its own version of editing software.
The moment Apple starts producing something similar to Photoshop, goodbye photoshop.
Remember the mid-'90s when Apple was producing tons of things on its own, and everyone quit writing for the Mac? Remember how Apple touted "look, we have everything you might want" and everyone shouted back "variety please"?
Apple's re-creating the same road they went down before. It's only a matter of time. Watch their product base continue to dwindle.
Gator claim #1: "Oh, they downloaded something we're partnered with (Divx even) so they implicitly agreed to the installation." And Gator pays EVERYONE to include their spyware with the install and bury the agreement somewhere in a click-through box.
Gator claim #2: "The trickler is only there to update and fix the software if problems happen." - but in reality, it's ALSO there to reinstall itself if you use Ad-Aware, Spybot, or any of the other programs designed to get RID of Gator. And of course Gator's "uninstall" doesn't exist, you have to uninstall whatever it came in with (assuming you can figure out what it was), and then it leaves the trickler in place...
The worst of it is that Gator's trickler then drops in a ton MORE components that Gator is partnered with, like that browser hijacker New.Net.
See, the problem is, Spyware jerks (like Gator) always CLAIM that what they are delivering is (a) with permission, (b) wanted, and (c) delivering some sort of benefit to the consumer.
And it takes a hell of a lot to debunk that.
The BIG one is to get shitholes like Gator to stop using "trickler" apps that reinstall the program if the user tries to remove it.
If you have GameA which many gamers get frustrated because they can never finish, how well will GameA2:EvenHarder sell?
You're missing the point. The size of the levels won't be to make them harder, it'll be to make them MORE FUN and to ELIMINATE LOAD POINTS. Where you can go from one point in the world to any other, without hitting a load screen.
And again, on AI: "Killer" AI is NOT BETTER. "BETTER" AI is an AI that MORE CLOSELY CONFORMS TO HOW THE SUBJECT WOULD ACTUALLY REACT. And that takes a ton of compute cycles.
Nothing pisses me off more then a point in a game where I have 10 options, none of which I like.
Nothing pisses me off than being at work and having 10 or more options on what to do, none of which I'd like to be doing. WHAT'S YOUR POINT? If the gameplay and story you're currently on are COMPELLING, one or two points where you're making a hard choice - the "I don't like any of these options but I have to pick one" choice - can lead down a really cool story arc for all you know.
I will pay $20.00 to go to a crappy movie with my wife and we will have a good time, even if all we do is poke fun of the movie. I won't pay $35-$55 for a crappy game that will frustrate me for a long time.
Dunno what to tell you there. Personally, if I go to a movie that's really that bad, I want my money back. At least with the game, you have the chance to take it back to a resale store and recoup your losses. You OWN a copy. After that movie, you're out your $20 whether the movie rocked or sucked, after the game you can get some of it back.
Would you pay a few bucks a month to RENT games, and be able to return ones you don't like? Try Gamefly, my friend. You might start finding games you like again with a lot less exposure. Or read some damned game reviews, we reviewers work our butts off to steer you clear of the bad games.
We may have a graphical-niceties plateau, at some point. We're not there quite yet.
But, what can be done with improved processing power from now on?
1. BETTER AI. We can improve AI at range. Instead of monsters staying in one place in a game till they hear the player, they can ALL be moving around in the level, ALL the time. If you never know exactly where they are, the game gets more exciting. One time you go through, sure, they might be right around the corner - the next, they're NOT right there, and instead they're sitting back waiting to ambush you somewhere else.
This is not to say that better AI is killer AI, by the way. Better AI is the AI that CLOSEST APPROXIMATES WHAT THE CREATURE SHOULD DO. If I'm in a D&D adventure and killing Orcs, I expect them to ACT like Orcs. If they're some devious wizard, I expect run-and-snipe tactics. If they're a brawny brawler, I expect to be charged. The better processing power you have, the less you have to cut corners, and the deeper you can make the AI such that a creature not only looks and sounds as expected, but ACTS like one might expect it to.
2. EXPANDED LEVEL SIZE. This is one of those biggies. Doom, for all its technological prowess of the time, relied on sending players back and forth through levels a lot. Hexen, with its "hub" setup, even more so - reusing content to make things SEEM much bigger than they were.
The PS2 can't handle the size of areas we want these days. Best example is the PS2 port of Deus Ex, where every level got chopped up into 5-10 areas with load zones in order to fit them together, as compared to the original PC version (which still rocks, BTW).
3. Multilinear gameplay. THIS is where the "in the movies" feel comes from - where YOU, the GAMER, are picking what the story is. Choosing your side and defining what your character thinks/feels is a level of immersion that makes pencil-and-paper gaming still survive and even thrive today, and video games are finally going expand out from the "reading a book" format of the Final Fantasy 'roleplaying' idea, into the TRUE Roleplaying idea where you have a control over your character's destiny and placement.
4. Finally, he misses out on where video games are going. Look at Hollywood: how many pathetic, bad, annoying sequel movies or just bad premises with bad actors are put into theaters or straight to video each year? TONS. The Video Game industry is the same way, and the reviewers are important in both industry in getting people to buy in - but the number of games is a sign of long-term health, not a signal of impending doom.
#1 - Emulation of chips has been around for a heck of a hard time. Emulation itself shouldn't be a patentable concept anymore.
#2 - Emulation of a system on a less-powerful system has been around since people were programming Commodore 64 emulators that would run on a 286 or an Amiga.
#3 - They claim that frameskipping is something they invented. BULLSHIT. See the C64/Amiga emulators above, or any other emulator ever written.
#4 - The moving of an emulator from desktop to handheld system isn't anything new. Even if they somehow claim that prior art doesn't exist, handheld systems have forever had games and applications programmed for them, the porting of emulator applications is merely "logical next step" and CANNOT be patentable under patent regulations.
For example, a Nigerian email sent from a hotmail/yahoo account (they almost all are) would seemingly, by this standard, come from the US.
And then there's the thing they themselves point out; their methods of determining origin only go so far, hijacked machines / email routers configured to "wash" the headers of relayed stuff also go a long way to making the numbers invalid.
I still say the ultimate revenge is to paper-spam the big spammers. Sign them up for hundreds of thousands of magazines and all the rest.
The coup de grace would be then to package and mail a spammer the contents of my cats' litterbox the day after feeding them beef 'n' bean leftovers.
Let's see; in the Bible, horrific things are done to the main character, who endures them and tells people to forgive those who did and treat them kindly.
Yeah. Real violent.
In the OT, it's historical accounts of wars. Ok, check. For that matter, Homer's tales, and most other historical accounts are pretty bloodthirsty. So?
The Koran/Hadith/Shari'a, on the other hand, prescribe brutal punishments and the horrific treatment of women. They include direct calls to convert "infidels" by the sword, to wage war till all are converted.
They call for the enslavement of the "peoples of the book" and the destruction -- wholesale -- of any others.
Compared to the Koran/Hadith/Shari'a, the OT and Bible are childrens' novels about a Turle named Yertle.
Planetary governors would have just absorbed Stormtroopers into their defense forces.
Still-Imperial sectors, no way in hell they would have been celebrating.
Only a few planets, if that, would have had any reason to have a party the day after Palpatine died. The Special Edition bullshit makes it look like the entire universe is throwing some gigantic party.
Biggs went off to the Academy. He didn't join the Rebels till later, and Luke never knew Biggs had till he met him on-base. Luke wanted to go to the Imperial Academy, like Biggs had.
Or are you not paying attention when Aunt Beru talks to Uncle Owen about how he "promised" Luke could go off to the Academy?
Face it; at the end of RoTJ, NOBODY IN THE GALAXY was supposed to know what was going on.
The Second Death Star had been destroyed. Whee. The Imperial Fleet was defeated. Whee.
The Rebels were victorious. Oh joy.
We forget two very important things: #1 - People fear change almost as much as they hate oppression (look at Iraq / Islam in general; a bunch of seventh-century savages they remain, even while claiming to overthrow governments in the name of their "freedom").
#2 - The Rebels were a minority in the galaxy, whose population mostly just wanted to be left alone.
It's been explored in the novels and elsewhere; during the time of the Empire, there were a few planets in rebellion, but mostly it was just business as usual. Unless you got the attention of the Imperial government, you did business the same way you'd done it under the Republic.
If you joined the Imperial Forces, chances are you did it because of a slick recruiting plan and promises of good wages / adventure -- hey, Luke was about to join up before Obi-Wan came along, wasn't he? For that matter, the officers of the Imperial Navy might have feared Vader, but the grunts were happy enough as they were, obviously.
Therefore, having a LOCALIZED celebration on Endor made sense. There were a bunch of Rebels present, because they'd won the battle, and there were a bunch of Ewoks around because they were indigenous.
Showing celebrations elsewhere? Yeesh, people. THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO CELEBRATIONS ELSEWHERE.
You think the entire galaxy would have just cheered and shouted and gone "Whee, the Emperor's gone! Yay!"???
Fuck that. They'd have been hand-wringing, worried about who was restoring/keeping order with the StormTroopers now out of a job. Planetary governors would alternately have been quelling civil distress and working on plans either to take over territory or work their way into positions of power in the new government. Smugglers wouldn't have given a flying fuck, except that the unrest made it easier for them to slip stuff into ports undetected.
That's the reality. On Endor, and maybe a few other Rebel bases, there might have been a party. Mon Calamari perhaps, given what the Emperor did to them.
Coruscant? The seat of the Emperor's power? FUCK NO. Coruscant wouldn't have been cheering. The other planets shown? Likewise.
"Yub Yub" and the original party scene make sense. The Special Edition bullshit is just that, BULLSHIT, and completely ignores the realities of the universe Lucas constructed in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
"is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?"
No.
The actual problem is in how the hardware today works. Video boards are REALLY, REALLY GOOD at getting an image moving in one direction - from computer, to vid board, to monitor.
They are quite LOUSY, however, in sending that video information back to the computer or the hard drive.
This is why even the gameplay movies you see today have been created with a simple workaround: hook up the board to a capture card of some sort (sometimes as simple as a vga->TV external converter) and capture away.
I'm guessing the big proprietary change in NVidia's model is an allocation of bandwidth back for sending the data the other direction - the rest of the stuff (raytracing etc) is just fluff. And of course it doesn't hurt in the slightest that it doesn't have to run at 60+ FPS all the time, so it can take the extra time to make frame, send frame back other way, make frame...
It's liability towards the patrons.
The owner of the building is obliged to warn the patrons who have paid admission if something is going on. If I don't want to be scanned with night vision goggles, I have the right to know they're doing it so I can take my business elsewhere. Just like, if they have a security camera pointed down into the bathroom stalls, I have the right to know about it and be warned before some gay-ass security guard gets to jerk off watching me unzip on candid camera.
And as far as your "oh they'll never actually get jail time" - BULLSHIT. The maximum penalty under law should never be excessive, otherwise you're gonna get some poor slob railroaded because the MPAA paid off the DA with a nice shiny new convertible to get them sent to prison.
Wherever the law allows for abuses of the legal system, we can rest assured those abuses WILL occur. Just look at forum shopping over domain name lawsuits these days, something that in 1995 we were assured was "technically possible" but that would "never occur because there wouldn't be enough chance of it changing the outcome."
The point is not that catching these people is bad - they broke the law, they got caught. That's all fine and good.
The problem is:
#1 - the use of night vision goggles, WITHOUT THE POSTING OF A WARNING TO THE EFFECT THAT THEY MIGHT BE USED, is likely an illegal search, bringing some form of liability on the theater for doing so. (IANAL)
#2 - the punishment greatly exceeds the crime. We're talking about throwing someone into jail. Granted they were copying movies, but even so, some form of monetary fine ought to be the end of it.
Let's face it folks, when the penalty for copying one singular MP3 is more jail time than you'd get for burning a dog or cat alive, the law is seriously fucked up. And we have Motion Picture Ass Head Jack Valenti to thank for it.
Just remember, your VCR is the equivalent of the Boston Strangler, too.
Life is so complicated when you let Academics who haven't been outside the Ivory Tower in ten-plus years fuck it up.
They claim - and I quote:
WhenU's software, one of the apparent targets of the act, is installed only with user consent, and does not invade the privacy of computer users.
Well for starters, at the University where I work, I run one of the computer labs for the particular college I work under (we have several). Despite our best efforts, we invariably have to clean a machine out from a bunch of spyware that has infested it - Deep Freeze seems to have culled that from the main lab, but as the rest of campus isn't subnetted yet (stupid central IT budget) we can't roll it out on the rest.
What do I find when I go through the machines with Spybot to figure out what's going on with them? Invariably, it's the same fucking story.
eZula, Gator (YES YOU ARE SPYWARE YOU FUCKING LYING BASTARDS), WhenU.SaveNow, Lycos Sidebar, Apropos, and whatever else their current tricklers are dumping in.
Twice we've caught them actually installing. In the background, no user clicks required, no EULA agreed to. Just the installers dropping in from some webpage and then silently running the trickler (and downloading OTHER tricklers) till the machine's spyware-ed half to death.
Fuck you, WhenU. We all hope you go away. The POINT of this legislation is to drive you out of business and I hope the court throws your lying ass right out on the street to suffer.
Most of my PC games are backed up. And then I have another 5-6 CDs of the No-CD cracks. Why?
Because things happen to CDs. Pets knock boxes off of shelves. People drop things. Sit on them without noticing they're there (my original Win98 CD went this way, lucky I'd copied it beforehand).
I'd love to do the same with my games too. Nothing wrong there.
And then there's the foreign games market. Playstations, un-modded, won't play import games, which renders a decently large portion of the population who want certain games unable to get them.
Me? I have been tempted over and over to mod my PS2. Why? DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION. Plainly put, the American versions SUCK.
The Japanese versions have all the cool music. The Americanized versions' music have all sucked by comparison. Haven't tried Ultramix, rather scared of it to be honest.
The article's blatant partisan writing better suited to the editorial page than to being presented as a "factual" article.
I work at a public university. One of the problems a public university has to deal with is the phenomenon of clueless users in dorms/offices/wireless connections, who may or may not become spam zombies.
In addition, there's all the wonderful viruses that exist, and the fact that spammers regularly spoof their emails to appear to have come from us in hopes of getting through.
We've tried contacting AOL to get through, no luck. We've begged their "Spam Czar" to whitelist just the university's email server - they can go ahead and block email from the rest of the IP range, we really don't care, but we want our email server whitelisted for obvious reasons - nothing.
Every day by about 10 AM, if we're lucky, we've been blacklisted.
We're a public university. We don't send "opt-in" marketing or, for that matter, any marketing. AOL just doesn't care to deal with it, they seem willing to accept a 25% or higher false-positive rate and claim that it's helping people.
Just another reason AOL sucks.
Because Apple decided to completely undercut them with its own version of editing software.
The moment Apple starts producing something similar to Photoshop, goodbye photoshop.
Remember the mid-'90s when Apple was producing tons of things on its own, and everyone quit writing for the Mac? Remember how Apple touted "look, we have everything you might want" and everyone shouted back "variety please"?
Apple's re-creating the same road they went down before. It's only a matter of time. Watch their product base continue to dwindle.
It'll be about two more days now till someone alters the code and delivers a REAL malicious payload through the damn program.
Uhm, no.
Gator claim #1: "Oh, they downloaded something we're partnered with (Divx even) so they implicitly agreed to the installation." And Gator pays EVERYONE to include their spyware with the install and bury the agreement somewhere in a click-through box.
Gator claim #2: "The trickler is only there to update and fix the software if problems happen." - but in reality, it's ALSO there to reinstall itself if you use Ad-Aware, Spybot, or any of the other programs designed to get RID of Gator. And of course Gator's "uninstall" doesn't exist, you have to uninstall whatever it came in with (assuming you can figure out what it was), and then it leaves the trickler in place...
The worst of it is that Gator's trickler then drops in a ton MORE components that Gator is partnered with, like that browser hijacker New.Net.
See, the problem is, Spyware jerks (like Gator) always CLAIM that what they are delivering is (a) with permission, (b) wanted, and (c) delivering some sort of benefit to the consumer.
And it takes a hell of a lot to debunk that.
The BIG one is to get shitholes like Gator to stop using "trickler" apps that reinstall the program if the user tries to remove it.
You're missing the point. The size of the levels won't be to make them harder, it'll be to make them MORE FUN and to ELIMINATE LOAD POINTS. Where you can go from one point in the world to any other, without hitting a load screen.
And again, on AI: "Killer" AI is NOT BETTER. "BETTER" AI is an AI that MORE CLOSELY CONFORMS TO HOW THE SUBJECT WOULD ACTUALLY REACT. And that takes a ton of compute cycles.
Nothing pisses me off more then a point in a game where I have 10 options, none of which I like.
Nothing pisses me off than being at work and having 10 or more options on what to do, none of which I'd like to be doing. WHAT'S YOUR POINT? If the gameplay and story you're currently on are COMPELLING, one or two points where you're making a hard choice - the "I don't like any of these options but I have to pick one" choice - can lead down a really cool story arc for all you know.
I will pay $20.00 to go to a crappy movie with my wife and we will have a good time, even if all we do is poke fun of the movie. I won't pay $35-$55 for a crappy game that will frustrate me for a long time.
Dunno what to tell you there. Personally, if I go to a movie that's really that bad, I want my money back. At least with the game, you have the chance to take it back to a resale store and recoup your losses. You OWN a copy. After that movie, you're out your $20 whether the movie rocked or sucked, after the game you can get some of it back.
Would you pay a few bucks a month to RENT games, and be able to return ones you don't like? Try Gamefly, my friend. You might start finding games you like again with a lot less exposure. Or read some damned game reviews, we reviewers work our butts off to steer you clear of the bad games.
We may have a graphical-niceties plateau, at some point. We're not there quite yet.
But, what can be done with improved processing power from now on?
1. BETTER AI. We can improve AI at range. Instead of monsters staying in one place in a game till they hear the player, they can ALL be moving around in the level, ALL the time. If you never know exactly where they are, the game gets more exciting. One time you go through, sure, they might be right around the corner - the next, they're NOT right there, and instead they're sitting back waiting to ambush you somewhere else.
This is not to say that better AI is killer AI, by the way. Better AI is the AI that CLOSEST APPROXIMATES WHAT THE CREATURE SHOULD DO. If I'm in a D&D adventure and killing Orcs, I expect them to ACT like Orcs. If they're some devious wizard, I expect run-and-snipe tactics. If they're a brawny brawler, I expect to be charged. The better processing power you have, the less you have to cut corners, and the deeper you can make the AI such that a creature not only looks and sounds as expected, but ACTS like one might expect it to.
2. EXPANDED LEVEL SIZE. This is one of those biggies. Doom, for all its technological prowess of the time, relied on sending players back and forth through levels a lot. Hexen, with its "hub" setup, even more so - reusing content to make things SEEM much bigger than they were.
The PS2 can't handle the size of areas we want these days. Best example is the PS2 port of Deus Ex, where every level got chopped up into 5-10 areas with load zones in order to fit them together, as compared to the original PC version (which still rocks, BTW).
3. Multilinear gameplay. THIS is where the "in the movies" feel comes from - where YOU, the GAMER, are picking what the story is. Choosing your side and defining what your character thinks/feels is a level of immersion that makes pencil-and-paper gaming still survive and even thrive today, and video games are finally going expand out from the "reading a book" format of the Final Fantasy 'roleplaying' idea, into the TRUE Roleplaying idea where you have a control over your character's destiny and placement.
4. Finally, he misses out on where video games are going. Look at Hollywood: how many pathetic, bad, annoying sequel movies or just bad premises with bad actors are put into theaters or straight to video each year? TONS. The Video Game industry is the same way, and the reviewers are important in both industry in getting people to buy in - but the number of games is a sign of long-term health, not a signal of impending doom.
Both Gambit and Liberty, Gameboy emulators for Palm OS, precede this by at least a few months.
= 67
Nintendo CAN'T claim to have invented this stuff.
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_Story.asp?ID
#1 - Emulation of chips has been around for a heck of a hard time. Emulation itself shouldn't be a patentable concept anymore.
#2 - Emulation of a system on a less-powerful system has been around since people were programming Commodore 64 emulators that would run on a 286 or an Amiga.
#3 - They claim that frameskipping is something they invented. BULLSHIT. See the C64/Amiga emulators above, or any other emulator ever written.
#4 - The moving of an emulator from desktop to handheld system isn't anything new. Even if they somehow claim that prior art doesn't exist, handheld systems have forever had games and applications programmed for them, the porting of emulator applications is merely "logical next step" and CANNOT be patentable under patent regulations.
Fuck you, Nintendo.
Step two... add giant robot.
Step three... BATTLEMECH.
For example, a Nigerian email sent from a hotmail/yahoo account (they almost all are) would seemingly, by this standard, come from the US.
And then there's the thing they themselves point out; their methods of determining origin only go so far, hijacked machines / email routers configured to "wash" the headers of relayed stuff also go a long way to making the numbers invalid.
I still say the ultimate revenge is to paper-spam the big spammers. Sign them up for hundreds of thousands of magazines and all the rest.
The coup de grace would be then to package and mail a spammer the contents of my cats' litterbox the day after feeding them beef 'n' bean leftovers.
I can keep it up all day long. You know you're abusing the system when you mod down a reply but not the post that caused the reply.
You reply to someone's comment, they mod you troll.
They never moderate the islamofascist terror-appeaser troll, however. Nosiree.
Let's see; in the Bible, horrific things are done to the main character, who endures them and tells people to forgive those who did and treat them kindly.
Yeah. Real violent.
In the OT, it's historical accounts of wars. Ok, check. For that matter, Homer's tales, and most other historical accounts are pretty bloodthirsty. So?
The Koran/Hadith/Shari'a, on the other hand, prescribe brutal punishments and the horrific treatment of women. They include direct calls to convert "infidels" by the sword, to wage war till all are converted.
They call for the enslavement of the "peoples of the book" and the destruction -- wholesale -- of any others.
Compared to the Koran/Hadith/Shari'a, the OT and Bible are childrens' novels about a Turle named Yertle.
Accurate, yes. Read the Koran, the Hadith, and Shari'a, then tell me it's not a bloodthirsty, barbaric, genocidal bargain-bin religion.
If you can do that honestly, you're the moral equivalent of Hannibal Lecter.
Planetary governors would have just absorbed Stormtroopers into their defense forces.
Still-Imperial sectors, no way in hell they would have been celebrating.
Only a few planets, if that, would have had any reason to have a party the day after Palpatine died. The Special Edition bullshit makes it look like the entire universe is throwing some gigantic party.
Biggs went off to the Academy. He didn't join the Rebels till later, and Luke never knew Biggs had till he met him on-base. Luke wanted to go to the Imperial Academy, like Biggs had.
Or are you not paying attention when Aunt Beru talks to Uncle Owen about how he "promised" Luke could go off to the Academy?
Yeesh. Idiots abound.
Face it; at the end of RoTJ, NOBODY IN THE GALAXY was supposed to know what was going on.
The Second Death Star had been destroyed. Whee. The Imperial Fleet was defeated. Whee.
The Rebels were victorious. Oh joy.
We forget two very important things:
#1 - People fear change almost as much as they hate oppression (look at Iraq / Islam in general; a bunch of seventh-century savages they remain, even while claiming to overthrow governments in the name of their "freedom").
#2 - The Rebels were a minority in the galaxy, whose population mostly just wanted to be left alone.
It's been explored in the novels and elsewhere; during the time of the Empire, there were a few planets in rebellion, but mostly it was just business as usual. Unless you got the attention of the Imperial government, you did business the same way you'd done it under the Republic.
If you joined the Imperial Forces, chances are you did it because of a slick recruiting plan and promises of good wages / adventure -- hey, Luke was about to join up before Obi-Wan came along, wasn't he? For that matter, the officers of the Imperial Navy might have feared Vader, but the grunts were happy enough as they were, obviously.
Therefore, having a LOCALIZED celebration on Endor made sense. There were a bunch of Rebels present, because they'd won the battle, and there were a bunch of Ewoks around because they were indigenous.
Showing celebrations elsewhere? Yeesh, people. THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO CELEBRATIONS ELSEWHERE.
You think the entire galaxy would have just cheered and shouted and gone "Whee, the Emperor's gone! Yay!"???
Fuck that. They'd have been hand-wringing, worried about who was restoring/keeping order with the StormTroopers now out of a job. Planetary governors would alternately have been quelling civil distress and working on plans either to take over territory or work their way into positions of power in the new government. Smugglers wouldn't have given a flying fuck, except that the unrest made it easier for them to slip stuff into ports undetected.
That's the reality. On Endor, and maybe a few other Rebel bases, there might have been a party. Mon Calamari perhaps, given what the Emperor did to them.
Coruscant? The seat of the Emperor's power? FUCK NO. Coruscant wouldn't have been cheering. The other planets shown? Likewise.
"Yub Yub" and the original party scene make sense. The Special Edition bullshit is just that, BULLSHIT, and completely ignores the realities of the universe Lucas constructed in the first place.
UGO took them over. Realmedia file is gone.