The whole Brontitall / 15-mile high marble statue of Arthur Dent, built as a reminder of the moment when Arthur appeared in the sky over the city arguing with a Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser / Lintilla / Allitnil episode only appears at the end of the second season of the original Radio 4 series and was not mentioned in either the TV series or any of the books.
The idea for the "Shoe Event Horizon" however was transplanted onto Frogstar World B - "the most totally evil place in the galaxy".
Very true; I'd also like to know if the 54% failure rate applies to the newer revisions of the 360 motherboard - I was under the impression that the failure rate was considerably lower for newer units
Bollocks; I have an ASUS Striker II Formula motherboard that I've updated the BIOS on several times - every single time with a USB flash drive; it's called 'EZ-Flash 2' and can be accessed from the BIOS setup menu or by hitting Alt-F2 at boot.
why should you have to run as admin? and should you really be running an app as admin which accesses the network?
Agreed, but that's a question you should be levelling at the developers of Soldat themselves - why are they developing an application which requires Administrator access?
Use EasyBCD; my home system currently triple-boots using the Vista bootloader into Vista, XP and Ubuntu. Frankly, it was a piece of piss to set up (just remember not to install GRUB on your MBR).
I don't know if it's the accent that's annoying - I personally find the style of narration from across the pond to be irritating as hell; especially on the piss cheap imports that some of the lower quality satellite/cable channels insist on showing. You know the sort of stuff - [America's / The World's(*)] [Best/Worst/Dullest] [Car Chases/Pets/Celebrity Enemas] - delete as appropriate. In particular I have to single out the terminally annoying Sheriff John Bunnell.
The style over is much more laconic and less, well, hysterical.
(*) The World's prefix still means that 99.99% of the content of the show will be US based
I was reminiscing with some of the younger developers at my workplace about the systems that they grew up with, and rather predictably it seems that most of them have grown up knowing nothing else but x86 architecture (with possibly the odd Amiga or Atari ST thrown in for good measure).
All this got me thinking about the 8-bit machines I cut my teeth on, and started to make me feel really old in the process!
ZX80
This is the first computer I ever laid my hands on while I was at The Pilgrims School in Winchester. I must have been about 10 when our Maths teacher (a certain Captain Roberts if I remember correctly) showed us this wondrous machine at the end of the summer term in 1981. I remember blagging a couple of hours on the unit and working through some of the BASIC examples in the manual.
ZX81
But when we came back for the winter term 1981, miracle of miracles, instead of the one lonely ZX80 the maths lab was now equipped with an entire room of ZX81s!
As the intention was to use these machines for educational purposes, there was the issue of loading the maths quiz du jour (written by Captain Roberts) on each machine. The solution that the school came up with was to have one cassette player by the teachers' desk with the output signal split to all ten ZX81s via cables trunked around the room. All the machines would therefore load from the same tape at exactly the same time. Ingenious!
ZX Spectrum
My initial Speccy was a 16k unit (I'd gone halves with my Dad to buy the machine, and I couldn't afford the far superior 48k machine). However, after enduring the chronic wait for the machine to arrive it eventually turned out to be faulty - part of the onboard RAM wasn't functioning and I was only left with approximately 13k usable.
This machine was sent back to Sinclair Research, and arrived back about three months later with a full complement of 48k. After quickly getting bored with "Hungry Horace" and "Penetrator" what else was left to do with rubber keyed wonder? Well, learn BASIC of course.
BBC Micro Model B
A new school brought new computers; the Beeb was the ultimate educational machine - just about anything that you could imagine at the time could be attached and controlled. But the coup de grace with the machine was the quality of the onboard BASIC interpreter. Not only was the dialect ahead of its' time (DEFPROC and DEFFN anyone?), but it also included a full 6502 assembler.
BBC Micro Model B+ 128
This is probably my favourite 8 bit system of all; the B+ 128 had Sideways RAM (ROM images could be loaded into memory and behave as though they were physically installed in the machine), the more advanced 1770 DFS (which caused no end of problems with some of the more 'interesting' disc copy protection systems). This was coupled with my very first personal non-tape based storage medium; a Pace Electronics 5.25" 40/80 track switchable unit. The luxury!
I kept my beloved Beeb until about 1994 by which time I'd collected the Z80 Second Processor (which allowed you to run CP/M) and the Teletext Adapter. Of course, by this stage I'd already been firmly entrenched in x86 development.
The nice thing about AJAX is that it works in all modern browsers. (And it makes for dynamic pages too.) So a framework that requires.NET is a step backwards.
Way to miss the point dude!
Why is a server side implementation written in.NET that produces client side code a step backwards? Next you'll be telling us that DWR is a step backwards 'cos it's implemented in Java.
This development itself proves the big advantage Java has over C#/.Net in the enterprise arena: a far wider array of supporting libraries and frameworks, not to mention a selection of mature application servers.
This is bound to be the case, considering how much longer Java has been around compared to C# - however, bear in mind that a large number of popular frameworks have already been ported to C#/.Net including NHibernate, Spring.NET and Maverick.NET.
If you actually looked at the list you'd see that Photoshop CS is affected only on Windows XP 64bit Edition. And quite frankly, it's Adobe's fault - not Microsoft's - that they've not pulled their finger out and fixed the issue. As I've said before on this very topic, it's not like they haven't had time to do something about it.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, Photoshop CS works without issue on Windows XP SP2 - I use it regularly on my box.
As for Virtual PC, there's a Service Pack that fixes the slowdown issue - again I'm using it on a day to day basis, hosting a Windows XP Service Pack 2 image running Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 - I therefore know what I'm talking about.
... unstable, not so much, although it does eat memory (unless you periodically call the GC which most apps don't do).
Whoa there cowboy - if you're manually calling the Garbage Collector in any context other than handling IDisposable, then I'd suggest you're doing something seriously wrong.
From the MSDN documentation:
The garbage collection GC class provides the GC.Collect method, which you can use to give your application some direct control over the garbage collector. In general, you should avoid calling any of the collect methods and allow the garbage collector to run independently. In most cases, the garbage collector is better at determining the best time to perform a collection. In certain rare situations, however, forcing a collection might improve your application's performance. It might be appropriate to use the GC.Collect method in a situation where there is a significant reduction in the amount of memory being used at a defined point in your application's code. For example, an application might use a document that references a significant number of unmanaged resources. When your application closes the document, you know definitively that the resources the document has been using are no longer needed. For performance reasons, it makes sense to release them all at once. For more information, see the GC.Collect Method.
Before the garbage collector performs a collection, it suspends all currently executing threads. This can become a performance issue if you call GC.Collect more often than is necessary. You should also be careful not to place code that calls GC.Collect at a point in your program where users could call it frequently. This would defeat the optimizing engine in the garbage collector, which determines the best time to run a garbage collection.
I'm intrigued by your assertion that.NET is 'extremely buggy'. Can you cite some examples? I've been coding in C# for the company I work for almost constantly since the Beta 2 release of.NET 1.0, and cannot for the life of me back up your comment. You might get some mileage if that comment was directed at Visual Studio (which definately has some bugs), but the framework itself is very stable indeed.
Adobe Photoshop CS is still a brand spanking new version of Photoshop...
How about complaining to Adobe if Photoshop CS still doesn't work correctly with SP2? It's not as if there hasn't been any time to correct any issues...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for posting that link dude - I never knew anything like this existed; now I know it does, I'm ordering one!
Hello neighbour! I'm a fellow Yeovillian.... And just to reinforce your point, neither have I ever heard NICE referred to as 'nasty'.
The whole Brontitall / 15-mile high marble statue of Arthur Dent, built as a reminder of the moment when Arthur appeared in the sky over the city arguing with a Nutrimatic Drink Dispenser / Lintilla / Allitnil episode only appears at the end of the second season of the original Radio 4 series and was not mentioned in either the TV series or any of the books. The idea for the "Shoe Event Horizon" however was transplanted onto Frogstar World B - "the most totally evil place in the galaxy".
Very true; I'd also like to know if the 54% failure rate applies to the newer revisions of the 360 motherboard - I was under the impression that the failure rate was considerably lower for newer units
The original comment didn't mention Laptops once - it clearly states that this was a new machine built around an ASUS motherboard.
Bollocks; I have an ASUS Striker II Formula motherboard that I've updated the BIOS on several times - every single time with a USB flash drive; it's called 'EZ-Flash 2' and can be accessed from the BIOS setup menu or by hitting Alt-F2 at boot.
How about the ECMA-334 C# Language Specification for starters...
The BBC Micro version was the original - it was ported to virtually every other platform under the sun afterwards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%29
The best game of all on the BBC Micro was Repton - a great Boulderdash clone that was a damn sight harder to play. Mind you, I'm biased
Use EasyBCD; my home system currently triple-boots using the Vista bootloader into Vista, XP and Ubuntu. Frankly, it was a piece of piss to set up (just remember not to install GRUB on your MBR).
Yeah, there are loads of 'em
I used to use a Glide Wrapper so I could play The Sentinel Returns properly on my system.
I don't know if it's the accent that's annoying - I personally find the style of narration from across the pond to be irritating as hell; especially on the piss cheap imports that some of the lower quality satellite/cable channels insist on showing. You know the sort of stuff - [America's / The World's(*)] [Best/Worst/Dullest] [Car Chases/Pets/Celebrity Enemas] - delete as appropriate. In particular I have to single out the terminally annoying Sheriff John Bunnell.
The style over is much more laconic and less, well, hysterical.
(*) The World's prefix still means that 99.99% of the content of the show will be US based
Meh. A top 100 beers list that manages to ignore the mighty Newcastle Brown Ale? Pants....
I posted this on my blog a while ago:
I was reminiscing with some of the younger developers at my workplace about the systems that they grew up with, and rather predictably it seems that most of them have grown up knowing nothing else but x86 architecture (with possibly the odd Amiga or Atari ST thrown in for good measure).
All this got me thinking about the 8-bit machines I cut my teeth on, and started to make me feel really old in the process!
ZX80
This is the first computer I ever laid my hands on while I was at The Pilgrims School in Winchester. I must have been about 10 when our Maths teacher (a certain Captain Roberts if I remember correctly) showed us this wondrous machine at the end of the summer term in 1981. I remember blagging a couple of hours on the unit and working through some of the BASIC examples in the manual.
ZX81
But when we came back for the winter term 1981, miracle of miracles, instead of the one lonely ZX80 the maths lab was now equipped with an entire room of ZX81s!
As the intention was to use these machines for educational purposes, there was the issue of loading the maths quiz du jour (written by Captain Roberts) on each machine. The solution that the school came up with was to have one cassette player by the teachers' desk with the output signal split to all ten ZX81s via cables trunked around the room. All the machines would therefore load from the same tape at exactly the same time. Ingenious!
ZX Spectrum
My initial Speccy was a 16k unit (I'd gone halves with my Dad to buy the machine, and I couldn't afford the far superior 48k machine). However, after enduring the chronic wait for the machine to arrive it eventually turned out to be faulty - part of the onboard RAM wasn't functioning and I was only left with approximately 13k usable.
This machine was sent back to Sinclair Research, and arrived back about three months later with a full complement of 48k. After quickly getting bored with "Hungry Horace" and "Penetrator" what else was left to do with rubber keyed wonder? Well, learn BASIC of course.
BBC Micro Model B
A new school brought new computers; the Beeb was the ultimate educational machine - just about anything that you could imagine at the time could be attached and controlled. But the coup de grace with the machine was the quality of the onboard BASIC interpreter. Not only was the dialect ahead of its' time (DEFPROC and DEFFN anyone?), but it also included a full 6502 assembler.
BBC Micro Model B+ 128
This is probably my favourite 8 bit system of all; the B+ 128 had Sideways RAM (ROM images could be loaded into memory and behave as though they were physically installed in the machine), the more advanced 1770 DFS (which caused no end of problems with some of the more 'interesting' disc copy protection systems). This was coupled with my very first personal non-tape based storage medium; a Pace Electronics 5.25" 40/80 track switchable unit. The luxury!
I kept my beloved Beeb until about 1994 by which time I'd collected the Z80 Second Processor (which allowed you to run CP/M) and the Teletext Adapter. Of course, by this stage I'd already been firmly entrenched in x86 development.
Ahh, memories...
Or even this link
"You can't show you're resolute without showing you are strong. And you can't show you're strong without blowing people up."
Way to miss the point dude!
Why is a server side implementation written in .NET that produces client side code a step backwards? Next you'll be telling us that DWR is a step backwards 'cos it's implemented in Java.
You got problems with his speech? How about his singing for chrissakes? ;)
This is bound to be the case, considering how much longer Java has been around compared to C# - however, bear in mind that a large number of popular frameworks have already been ported to C#/.Net including NHibernate, Spring.NET and Maverick.NET.
There's a Service Pack for Virtual PC that fixes the issue.
If you actually looked at the list you'd see that Photoshop CS is affected only on Windows XP 64bit Edition. And quite frankly, it's Adobe's fault - not Microsoft's - that they've not pulled their finger out and fixed the issue. As I've said before on this very topic, it's not like they haven't had time to do something about it.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, Photoshop CS works without issue on Windows XP SP2 - I use it regularly on my box.
As for Virtual PC, there's a Service Pack that fixes the slowdown issue - again I'm using it on a day to day basis, hosting a Windows XP Service Pack 2 image running Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 - I therefore know what I'm talking about.
You're thinking of Spitting Image. The famous "I'm an actor" sketch can be found here: http://www.80snostalgia.com/classictv/spittingimag e/movies.html
Damn right, you cannot beat a bottle (or twenty) of dog... ;)
Whoa there cowboy - if you're manually calling the Garbage Collector in any context other than handling IDisposable, then I'd suggest you're doing something seriously wrong.
From the MSDN documentation:
I'm intrigued by your assertion that .NET is 'extremely buggy'. Can you cite some examples? I've been coding in C# for the company I work for almost constantly since the Beta 2 release of .NET 1.0, and cannot for the life of me back up your comment. You might get some mileage if that comment was directed at Visual Studio (which definately has some bugs), but the framework itself is very stable indeed.
How about complaining to Adobe if Photoshop CS still doesn't work correctly with SP2? It's not as if there hasn't been any time to correct any issues...