You don't even need #ifdefs: if(NextLevelDataIsNotPresent) {
MessageBox("Hope you enjoyed the demo. For more levels, buy our game!");
GoBackToDemoMainScreen(); } else {
LoadNextLevelAndContinue(); }
Aside from that, I'm not downloading almost 40 gigs of data for a fricking demo. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
In the case of cable VOIP services, the modem's MAC can be used to somewhat localize the call.
That would help for calls made via a ISP-provided VoIP service (AT&T uVerse, etc.) , but wouldn't do anything for other VoIP providers like Vonage where the packets could be sourced from any network in the world.
True square waves only have odd-order harmonics present. Rectangular waves are missing harmonics related to the duty cycle, which for a square wave with a 50% duty cycle, means all even-order harmonics are missing. A 25% duty cycle wave will have all fourth-order harmonics missing. But they're still noisy.:-)
There really isn't any 68000 tech to be "opened up" per se - other manufacturers made 68000-compatible chips, and they're still being made today. 68000 implementations using FPGA hardware are also quite common, and often available for free. The main problem is that the 68K architecture isn't really comparable in performance to today's general-purpose offerings by Intel and AMD and there's no financial incentive to try to make them so. They're still great for embedded stuff, and as you said, they're really easy to program for.
(masks are expensive at about $100K/each for the older processes)
For sure. It was kind of entertaining when I was onsite at Infineon's fab in Munich many years back with a team installing one of our femtosecond-laser defect repair systems and one of our guys (not me, I swear!) got a little careless and put his thumb through the pellicle on a mask. The customer was not pleased.
I don't understand why monorails are so slow-- that seems to be the attribute that kills them.
Safety issues, mostly, at least for Alweg-style trains like those run by Las Vegas and Disneyland/Disney World. The trains run on rubber tires, and are kept stable on the beam by tires that run along the sides. If you have a tire that's underinflated, or if a bearing on a side tire seizes and the tire starts getting dragged along the concrete, there's a non-trivial danger of fire - Disney suffered a really bad monorail fire in 1985 that was caused by this.
That's an option too. A PC with a number of Xenas might be quite useful, but I just don't see people lining up for a new Amiga, especially at that price.
The Xena chip sounds quite interesting, and I can think of a lot of uses for it, especially with the ability to add more of them. Problem is, I don't think it sounds like $1,800 worth of "interesting". If there were some kind of guarantee that Xena would be well supported and that parts would remain available for a while, it'd make it more appealing. As it is, I don't have a lot of confidence that the company will be around for the long term. Also, it would help if their forum link went to a site with a cert that actually matched the site name.
When Lotus 1-2-3 came along, the need for plotting drove the adoption of a proprietary monochrome graphics technology called "Hercules Graphics Adapter", which was much, much more popular than CGA ever was.
Where I worked, CGA systems outsold MDA systems by at least 5 to 1, and HGA was vanishingly rare. When the AT came out, EGA pretty much took away the need to have anything else until VGA came along. We even sold a few PGA systems to a couple of architectural firms.
I think the biggest thing the Amiga offered was a 14.32 MHz system clock, which was exactly 4x the NTSC color burst frequency, which made it easy and cheap to produce genlock interfaces and otherwise do things with video that previously cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Both the CPU and custom chips were clocked at 7.16 MHz, with the CPU and custom hardware being given alternate clock cycles, so the CPU could usually run at full speed while the custom chips did their thing with very little handholding from the 68000. It was a truly remarkable architecture for its time.
OS/2 was so good that many large enterprises relied on it extensively before the advent of NT and as an alternative to UNIX.
A large part of why OS/2 was adopted by larger companies was Communication Manager/2. If you had IBM mainframes in your data center, OS/2 was your best bet at getting everything to play nice together.
Hell, my 5500 pound, 15-year old extended-cab truck will do it in even less with a 3:73 rear end and still gets about 22 mpg on the highway. 10 seconds is not a very high bar to clear at all. I think the only vehicles I've ever owned that couldn't break 10 seconds were a '79 Chevette and an '07 Elantra. One of the happiest days of my life was a few weeks ago when the tow truck came to take that POS Hyundai away.
They don't even care about the enterprise customers. My employer does about $8 billion in business every year, and we're still on Win7 because of all of the MS shenanigans.
...I wonder how many billions of dollars excessive copyright terms have cost the U.S. citizenry directly. Half the Beatles are dead, for crying out loud, and it's been almost 50 years since their last album was released. There's no way copyright can encourage them to record another album.
It'd take a team, not only of software developers, but also mechanical engineers and others that would represent the target audience. Part of the problem with so much open-source stuff is that it often doesn't address the needs of many of its potential users, in large part because either those users' feedback is not solicited, or is dismissed out of hand. A package you write might scratch your particular itch, but it also has to scratch the itch of a lot of other people if it's to be widely successful. Software devs are often notoriously susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect and unwilling to accept constructive criticism.
Add technical writers to that team too - a professional's time usually has a substantial dollar value attached to it, and a package isn't going to see a lot of use if the lack of documentation ends up costing more time for them than using a well-documented commercial product of at least equal functionality. This also extends to making the package easy to install/remove - it may be trivial for a lot of us, but a lot more of the professional types aren't going to do well with a "configure/make/make install" process.
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You don't even need #ifdefs:
if(NextLevelDataIsNotPresent)
{
MessageBox("Hope you enjoyed the demo. For more levels, buy our game!");
GoBackToDemoMainScreen();
}
else
{
LoadNextLevelAndContinue();
}
Aside from that, I'm not downloading almost 40 gigs of data for a fricking demo. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
In the case of cable VOIP services, the modem's MAC can be used to somewhat localize the call.
That would help for calls made via a ISP-provided VoIP service (AT&T uVerse, etc.) , but wouldn't do anything for other VoIP providers like Vonage where the packets could be sourced from any network in the world.
True square waves only have odd-order harmonics present. Rectangular waves are missing harmonics related to the duty cycle, which for a square wave with a 50% duty cycle, means all even-order harmonics are missing. A 25% duty cycle wave will have all fourth-order harmonics missing. But they're still noisy. :-)
Not a problem as long as you have your three seashells handy.
There really isn't any 68000 tech to be "opened up" per se - other manufacturers made 68000-compatible chips, and they're still being made today. 68000 implementations using FPGA hardware are also quite common, and often available for free. The main problem is that the 68K architecture isn't really comparable in performance to today's general-purpose offerings by Intel and AMD and there's no financial incentive to try to make them so. They're still great for embedded stuff, and as you said, they're really easy to program for.
(masks are expensive at about $100K/each for the older processes)
For sure. It was kind of entertaining when I was onsite at Infineon's fab in Munich many years back with a team installing one of our femtosecond-laser defect repair systems and one of our guys (not me, I swear!) got a little careless and put his thumb through the pellicle on a mask. The customer was not pleased.
Because when he's bought, he stays bought. I guess there's a twisted sort of integrity there, but it's not a good thing.
And whatever the merchant pays for, you pay for via higher prices.
Which in turn means higher transaction fees for the card issuer.
I don't understand why monorails are so slow-- that seems to be the attribute that kills them.
Safety issues, mostly, at least for Alweg-style trains like those run by Las Vegas and Disneyland/Disney World. The trains run on rubber tires, and are kept stable on the beam by tires that run along the sides. If you have a tire that's underinflated, or if a bearing on a side tire seizes and the tire starts getting dragged along the concrete, there's a non-trivial danger of fire - Disney suffered a really bad monorail fire in 1985 that was caused by this.
Saw Star Wars 8 in widescreen 3d opening weekend in a theatre with 20 people. If that can't put butts in the seats...
Hell, I saw it opening *night*, and there were fewer people than that in attendance.
No one wants to pay retail for people!
Of course not. The DIY route is much more fun.
That's an option too. A PC with a number of Xenas might be quite useful, but I just don't see people lining up for a new Amiga, especially at that price.
The Xena chip sounds quite interesting, and I can think of a lot of uses for it, especially with the ability to add more of them. Problem is, I don't think it sounds like $1,800 worth of "interesting". If there were some kind of guarantee that Xena would be well supported and that parts would remain available for a while, it'd make it more appealing. As it is, I don't have a lot of confidence that the company will be around for the long term. Also, it would help if their forum link went to a site with a cert that actually matched the site name.
Because there are some of us that still use those PCI slots and drive bays.
When Lotus 1-2-3 came along, the need for plotting drove the adoption of a proprietary monochrome graphics technology called "Hercules Graphics Adapter", which was much, much more popular than CGA ever was.
Where I worked, CGA systems outsold MDA systems by at least 5 to 1, and HGA was vanishingly rare. When the AT came out, EGA pretty much took away the need to have anything else until VGA came along. We even sold a few PGA systems to a couple of architectural firms.
I think the biggest thing the Amiga offered was a 14.32 MHz system clock, which was exactly 4x the NTSC color burst frequency, which made it easy and cheap to produce genlock interfaces and otherwise do things with video that previously cost thousands and thousands of dollars. Both the CPU and custom chips were clocked at 7.16 MHz, with the CPU and custom hardware being given alternate clock cycles, so the CPU could usually run at full speed while the custom chips did their thing with very little handholding from the 68000. It was a truly remarkable architecture for its time.
Not exactly what you were asking for, but the basic idea was already done 10 years ago.
OS/2 was so good that many large enterprises relied on it extensively before the advent of NT and as an alternative to UNIX.
A large part of why OS/2 was adopted by larger companies was Communication Manager/2. If you had IBM mainframes in your data center, OS/2 was your best bet at getting everything to play nice together.
Except for that guy whose nephew keeps borrowing his Barchetta.
Hell, my 5500 pound, 15-year old extended-cab truck will do it in even less with a 3:73 rear end and still gets about 22 mpg on the highway. 10 seconds is not a very high bar to clear at all. I think the only vehicles I've ever owned that couldn't break 10 seconds were a '79 Chevette and an '07 Elantra. One of the happiest days of my life was a few weeks ago when the tow truck came to take that POS Hyundai away.
They don't even care about the enterprise customers. My employer does about $8 billion in business every year, and we're still on Win7 because of all of the MS shenanigans.
So *you're* the other guy with an SX-64. ;-)
...I wonder how many billions of dollars excessive copyright terms have cost the U.S. citizenry directly. Half the Beatles are dead, for crying out loud, and it's been almost 50 years since their last album was released. There's no way copyright can encourage them to record another album.
It'd take a team, not only of software developers, but also mechanical engineers and others that would represent the target audience. Part of the problem with so much open-source stuff is that it often doesn't address the needs of many of its potential users, in large part because either those users' feedback is not solicited, or is dismissed out of hand. A package you write might scratch your particular itch, but it also has to scratch the itch of a lot of other people if it's to be widely successful. Software devs are often notoriously susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect and unwilling to accept constructive criticism.
Add technical writers to that team too - a professional's time usually has a substantial dollar value attached to it, and a package isn't going to see a lot of use if the lack of documentation ends up costing more time for them than using a well-documented commercial product of at least equal functionality. This also extends to making the package easy to install/remove - it may be trivial for a lot of us, but a lot more of the professional types aren't going to do well with a "configure/make/make install" process.
Hell, I remember when they had tube testers at the local drugstore.