Interesting, but is it possible that the younger pups were just playing, while as they got older deeper hunting instincts were kicking in and they used those tactics?
Oh, I've no doubt the behaviour is instinctual - they were definitely honing their skills on me. The thing that makes me wonder is "how did they decide which wolf would have which role" - there has to have been something which made them decide that the male would ensnare me while the females went in for the "kill".
Here's something which I can't explain. Maybe a reader here can shed some light on it?
Back in 2006 we had three wolf pups at the wolf centre (I became a volunteer after adopting Kenai, mentioned above). They were hand-reared, so were used to people right from the start.
I decided to do a fun experiment, knowing it'd be the only chance I'd get. Nobody else was this daft!
* When they were three months of age, I ran away from them in their enclosure. They chased me, but when I zigzagged away from them they gave up. * At four months old, I repeated the experiment. This time they followed me even after I zigzagged, before catching up with me (whereupon they licked me profusely). * At six months old, I did it for the final time. This time the two female wolves ran away from me and vanished behind some trees. The male wolf came straight towards me, staring at me intently. When he reached me, he wrapped himself around my legs, causing me to wobble a bit. As I was working out how to extricate myself, there was an almighty "whomp" from behind as the two females jumped upon me. That knocked me over and I was licked half to death by the happy pups.
To this day, I don't know how they communicated their tactics to one another, although clearly they did somehow. Wild wolves do the same thing, of course, as you'll have seen on those nature programmes where they use the pincer movement to get a bison calf away from the herd. FWIW there was no noise from the wolves beforehand, just the rustling of grass as they executed their manoeuvre.
You won't hear a wolf bark very often (and it tends to be distinct "wuff"s rather than a long, continuous series of barks - Mosi at the UKWCT barks if a particular person comes into the centre) but certainly with howls you can that there are different scenarios. For example, the wolves at the UKWCT will do long chorus howls when the nearby church bells ring, but if you take one particular wolf out she'll howl a few times when she's out of sight of the other wolves - presumably to let them know she's still around. If the wolves are feeling playful, they'll sometimes "rally" (which is a real cacophony, you can hear one of my recordings on the wolf page on Wiki, which someone has labelled "rallying cry"). Before the rally properly starts they'll howl, but the pitch varies rather than being a pure note.
Fun fact: when I played one of the wolf howl recordings I'd made, the oscilloscope on WinAmp showed a perfect sine wave for a few seconds. I was impressed!
FWIW, wolves do emit different types of howl - a given wolf won't produce the same howl each time.
Although nobody can say for sure what the meaning is, wolves will make different types of howl if they're separated from their pack, if they've completed a kill, if they're about to "rally" with the pack and, interestingly, if a wolf dies.
For general howling, then yes, it's been known about for years that you can identify a given wolf by their howl. My old adopted wolf Kenai (who lived at the same wolf centre as the original research author used for their studies) had a very recognizable two-tone howl.
Most MMOs rely on server-side stuff for generating the numbers - meaning the bulk of the work is displaying the results to the user, ie more in the way of GPU rather than CPU usage. WoW, for example, is very light on CPU usage but much heavier on the GPU (to the extent that on a 2600K going from a 460 GTX to a 670 GTX resulted in something like an 80% framerate boost in Pandaria.)
Bear in mind that the pace of performance growth has slowed markedly in the last decade in terms of day-to-day usage, with each new generation of Intel chips, for example, only adding around 10% performance each time. That means a 3-year-old PC's CPU isn't far behind the latest ones and it'll be more than adequate. Compare that to, for example, a P3-500 from early 1999, which was the fastest consumer CPU you could buy. 3 years later you had your choice of a 2533Mhz Pentium 4 (which cost around the same), or, if you jumped ship, a 1733MHz Athlon XP.
Things are advancing way more slowly than they used to, meaning PCs stay current / acceptable for longer and thus need replacing less often. And that, in turn, means less will be sold.
(NB, the one exception to this is high-end gaming - GPUs are still advancing a bit more quickly, but even there a decent 3-year-old GPU is still adequate for most things).
The last vestiges of Psion's flagship OS have now died. It's a real pity that they let their slimline, yet feature-complete EPOC 5 be taken over in effect by Nokia. Nokia inherited an OS with cut-n-paste, OLE-style object embedding, fully-draggable windows long before those things appeared elsewhere - and it could do all that (and surf the Web too) on a 36MHz ARM processor. They proceeded to gut the OS over the course of a decade and then ham-fistedly shovel layer upon layer of bloat onto it, effectively eliminating all the hard work that had been put into it in the first place.
The registry goes back to 95, and was part of an effort to block piracy by making 'installing' software a requirement
No, the registry goes back to 1992 and it was part of Windows 3.1 Windows 3.11, a year later, added a better registry editor by default.
And no, it was nothing to do with piracy. It only contained HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT originally and it was used for storing file association info amongst other things - just as HKCR does in current versions of Windows.
A quick Google search will provide all the info you need to know.
You could get 1600x1200 back in 98, providing you had enough VRAM on your graphics card. I have an old 17" Iiyama monitor from back then and it supported 1600x1200. (Technically due to the dot pitch being 0.25 it couldn't resolve the pixels, so it wasn't a viable resolution to use, more a "wonder if it works" type of thing).
I had an 8MB Matrox Millennium G200 back then and Windows 95 was perfectly capable of running at 1600x1200 with the correct drivers.You only needed two megs of VRAM to do that in 256 colours, or 6 megs to do it in 24-bit colour (32-bit colour wasn't an option at any resolution with the drivers I was using back then, 24-bit or "True" colour was as far as they went.)
The shell is still explorer.exe - it's just that upon first run it loads the Metro start screen (by default - it's turned off in Server 2012, which dumps you on the desktop instead). Explorer.exe has been tied up with twinui.dll, which is responsible for handling the Metro stuff.
Remember that from Windows 95 onwards the Start menu and taskbar have been provided by explorer.exe. Win8 is very much the same, regardless of what the marketing blumf about "not loading the desktop until you click on the tile" says.
...if you delete twinui.dll. That gets you straight into the desktop (and kills off Metro), but it's not terribly useful as you don't get any taskbar buttons!
Concorde, although a very expensive plane to maintain, was a crown jewel as far as British Airways was concerned. The seats were sold as "supersonic class", something above even first class. They've reused the chairs in the rather posh Concorde Room at Heathrow and access to that is generally restricted to those flying in First.
It's generally believed that the main reason the Concorde stopped flying is because Airbus, who provided parts for the planes, decided they weren't going to carry on manufacturing spare parts. Simple as that - nothing to do with costs to the operators, merely the fact that they couldn't keep a supply chain maintained.
Fun fact: BA rather meanly drained the fluids from their Concordes when they retired them, meaning it'd be nigh impossible to get them to fly again now. The sole Concorde left at Heathrow is now used as a magazine storage room!
Aside from the suggestion of packing a cheapo minibook (or netbook, or whatever they're called these days) along with say a USB flash drive, the best way would be to use good-quality media.
25 years isn't much time really. I've a 21-year-old IBM PS/2 which still boots up just fine (into Windows 95) - its Seagate SCSI drive is still going strong. I've a box full of Commodore Plus/4 floppies which still read just fine despite being over 25 years old, as do the old PC Plus coverdisks I kept back from my first PC (although they're only 21 years old).
I have a 5.25" drive hooked up to my (Sandy Bridge) PC and yes, it still works. I've another drive in an old P3 I keep ticking over for DOS games; that one's hooked up to a CatWeasel ISA card and that can read pretty much any format you're likely to come across.
As for optical media, I was too poor to afford a CD writer in the early 90s but by the late 90s I could afford one - I still have a few dozen CD-Rs containing source files from back then. The Kodak Gold Ultima discs read perfectly fine, but they were expensive - over a pound a disc. Some of the cheaper discs haven't made it, as the dye's faded and they're now unreadable using standard equipment.
Looks like they've gone back to 1986 and Windows 2.0 style 2D.
It looks hideous to me, I much prefer the gloss and depth of Aero Glass.
Back in the early 90s there was a little program you could get called All3D. This used a DLL called ctl3d.dll to make all the 2D elements of regular Windows 3.1 (such as checkboxes and radio buttons) become 3D, as was eventually the case with regular Windows 95. I daresay some enterprising person will come up with a similar thing for Windows 8.
How amusing - our dear little con-dem Government reckons Britian will have the best superfast broadband by 2015, do they? Well, they might like to "encourage" BT to pull its finger out and upgrade all the exchanges to ADSL2 for a start. There are thousands of small exchanges stuck about 5 years in the past and no plans whatsoever to upgrade them.
Meanwhile all the effort seems to be going to towns and cities, the places that already have the choice of cable or ADSL2 or fibre to the cabinet. They really ought to splunk that cash on bringing everyone up to speed instead, but no, as it's all about money it's far more efficient for them just to push ahead where there's already fast broadband.
I think there's more chance of the Sun suddenly exploding than there is of the UK having the best superfast broadband by 2015.
NVidia have pulled a past one here, which doesn't seem to have been widely picked up yet. The codename for the 680 is GK104. The 460 and 560 cards were based on the cut-down GF104 and GF114 GPUs respectively and were midrange parts. The 480 and 580 high-end parts were based on the full GF100 and GF110 GPUs respectively and had a 384-bit memory bus (rather than the 256-bit bus used on the GF1x4 parts).
In other words - the 680 is really what would otherwise have been called the 660, it's just that nVidia's worked out they can make some extra cash by marketing it as a high-end part. Don't be at all surprised when in a few months time a 685 or 690 appears, based on the "full" GK100 (with a 384-bit memory bus and a fair bit of extra oomph....
most motherboards are still coming with floppy controllers on them for some reason,
If only... None of the HP machines we've bought at work in the past couple of years have had them and we buy both the slimline desktop variety and mini-tower PCs. The few Dells I've seen likewise don't have any floppy ports on the motherboard.
As for build-your-own PCs, or ones from companies that assemble generic parts into PCs, very few come with floppy ports on the motherboard. Indeed, the only non-industrial Intel motherboards I know of that have a floppy port are the ASRock Extreme boards - and that's powered by a SuperIO chip on the motherboard, as chipset support for floppies was dropped by Intel years ago.
Note: the reason I mention all this is because I'm looking at getting a Z77 motherboard in the next few months with a floppy connector, so that I can hook up a 5.25" floppy drive I've acquired (purely for the heck of it, before anyone asks - I've a big box of old disks from the early 90s that I wouldn't mind rummaging through, the PC I used for those having been chucked out years back). ASRock are pretty much the only option nowadays and I have no doubts that when Haswell comes out next year the old 37-pin floppy connector will be well and truly extinct.
My comment referred to the use of PCs for gaming - which is largely what the MPC standards were about and also what the Experience Index is for (after all, you don't need a 7.9 rating to use Word or knock up some PHP code....)
I don't own a PS3 and nor do I want one - the PC on which I'm writing this is my games machine.
As a PC gamer, anything that brings more people to the platform and which drags graphics up from DX9 gets my vote. (Skyrim, for example, looks nice. But think how much nicer it'd be with a DX11 engine with tesselation, as seen in that Heaven benchmark... mmm!)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I've no doubt the behaviour is instinctual - they were definitely honing their skills on me. The thing that makes me wonder is "how did they decide which wolf would have which role" - there has to have been something which made them decide that the male would ensnare me while the females went in for the "kill".
Here's something which I can't explain. Maybe a reader here can shed some light on it?
Back in 2006 we had three wolf pups at the wolf centre (I became a volunteer after adopting Kenai, mentioned above). They were hand-reared, so were used to people right from the start.
I decided to do a fun experiment, knowing it'd be the only chance I'd get. Nobody else was this daft!
* When they were three months of age, I ran away from them in their enclosure. They chased me, but when I zigzagged away from them they gave up.
* At four months old, I repeated the experiment. This time they followed me even after I zigzagged, before catching up with me (whereupon they licked me profusely).
* At six months old, I did it for the final time. This time the two female wolves ran away from me and vanished behind some trees. The male wolf came straight towards me, staring at me intently. When he reached me, he wrapped himself around my legs, causing me to wobble a bit. As I was working out how to extricate myself, there was an almighty "whomp" from behind as the two females jumped upon me. That knocked me over and I was licked half to death by the happy pups.
To this day, I don't know how they communicated their tactics to one another, although clearly they did somehow. Wild wolves do the same thing, of course, as you'll have seen on those nature programmes where they use the pincer movement to get a bison calf away from the herd. FWIW there was no noise from the wolves beforehand, just the rustling of grass as they executed their manoeuvre.
You won't hear a wolf bark very often (and it tends to be distinct "wuff"s rather than a long, continuous series of barks - Mosi at the UKWCT barks if a particular person comes into the centre) but certainly with howls you can that there are different scenarios. For example, the wolves at the UKWCT will do long chorus howls when the nearby church bells ring, but if you take one particular wolf out she'll howl a few times when she's out of sight of the other wolves - presumably to let them know she's still around. If the wolves are feeling playful, they'll sometimes "rally" (which is a real cacophony, you can hear one of my recordings on the wolf page on Wiki, which someone has labelled "rallying cry"). Before the rally properly starts they'll howl, but the pitch varies rather than being a pure note.
Fun fact: when I played one of the wolf howl recordings I'd made, the oscilloscope on WinAmp showed a perfect sine wave for a few seconds. I was impressed!
FWIW, wolves do emit different types of howl - a given wolf won't produce the same howl each time.
Although nobody can say for sure what the meaning is, wolves will make different types of howl if they're separated from their pack, if they've completed a kill, if they're about to "rally" with the pack and, interestingly, if a wolf dies.
For general howling, then yes, it's been known about for years that you can identify a given wolf by their howl. My old adopted wolf Kenai (who lived at the same wolf centre as the original research author used for their studies) had a very recognizable two-tone howl.
Most MMOs rely on server-side stuff for generating the numbers - meaning the bulk of the work is displaying the results to the user, ie more in the way of GPU rather than CPU usage. WoW, for example, is very light on CPU usage but much heavier on the GPU (to the extent that on a 2600K going from a 460 GTX to a 670 GTX resulted in something like an 80% framerate boost in Pandaria.)
Bear in mind that the pace of performance growth has slowed markedly in the last decade in terms of day-to-day usage, with each new generation of Intel chips, for example, only adding around 10% performance each time. That means a 3-year-old PC's CPU isn't far behind the latest ones and it'll be more than adequate. Compare that to, for example, a P3-500 from early 1999, which was the fastest consumer CPU you could buy. 3 years later you had your choice of a 2533Mhz Pentium 4 (which cost around the same), or, if you jumped ship, a 1733MHz Athlon XP.
Things are advancing way more slowly than they used to, meaning PCs stay current / acceptable for longer and thus need replacing less often. And that, in turn, means less will be sold.
(NB, the one exception to this is high-end gaming - GPUs are still advancing a bit more quickly, but even there a decent 3-year-old GPU is still adequate for most things).
The last vestiges of Psion's flagship OS have now died. It's a real pity that they let their slimline, yet feature-complete EPOC 5 be taken over in effect by Nokia. Nokia inherited an OS with cut-n-paste, OLE-style object embedding, fully-draggable windows long before those things appeared elsewhere - and it could do all that (and surf the Web too) on a 36MHz ARM processor. They proceeded to gut the OS over the course of a decade and then ham-fistedly shovel layer upon layer of bloat onto it, effectively eliminating all the hard work that had been put into it in the first place.
msdos.exe, you mean.
No, the registry goes back to 1992 and it was part of Windows 3.1 Windows 3.11, a year later, added a better registry editor by default.
And no, it was nothing to do with piracy. It only contained HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT originally and it was used for storing file association info amongst other things - just as HKCR does in current versions of Windows.
A quick Google search will provide all the info you need to know.
You could get 1600x1200 back in 98, providing you had enough VRAM on your graphics card. I have an old 17" Iiyama monitor from back then and it supported 1600x1200. (Technically due to the dot pitch being 0.25 it couldn't resolve the pixels, so it wasn't a viable resolution to use, more a "wonder if it works" type of thing).
I had an 8MB Matrox Millennium G200 back then and Windows 95 was perfectly capable of running at 1600x1200 with the correct drivers.You only needed two megs of VRAM to do that in 256 colours, or 6 megs to do it in 24-bit colour (32-bit colour wasn't an option at any resolution with the drivers I was using back then, 24-bit or "True" colour was as far as they went.)
Windows Mail is still around, you just have to install it rather than have it bundled with Windows. Download link is here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/is-IS/windows-live/essentials-install-offline-faq
Free to Play on Steam is no more than a slightly different way of offering a demo of a game. And, of course, not all games have normal demos!
Just sounds like they're making excuses to pull out of the PC market to me. I'm sure the likes of Steam won't shed a tear if they go.
The shell is still explorer.exe - it's just that upon first run it loads the Metro start screen (by default - it's turned off in Server 2012, which dumps you on the desktop instead). Explorer.exe has been tied up with twinui.dll, which is responsible for handling the Metro stuff.
Remember that from Windows 95 onwards the Start menu and taskbar have been provided by explorer.exe. Win8 is very much the same, regardless of what the marketing blumf about "not loading the desktop until you click on the tile" says.
...if you delete twinui.dll. That gets you straight into the desktop (and kills off Metro), but it's not terribly useful as you don't get any taskbar buttons!
Concorde, although a very expensive plane to maintain, was a crown jewel as far as British Airways was concerned. The seats were sold as "supersonic class", something above even first class. They've reused the chairs in the rather posh Concorde Room at Heathrow and access to that is generally restricted to those flying in First.
It's generally believed that the main reason the Concorde stopped flying is because Airbus, who provided parts for the planes, decided they weren't going to carry on manufacturing spare parts. Simple as that - nothing to do with costs to the operators, merely the fact that they couldn't keep a supply chain maintained.
Fun fact: BA rather meanly drained the fluids from their Concordes when they retired them, meaning it'd be nigh impossible to get them to fly again now. The sole Concorde left at Heathrow is now used as a magazine storage room!
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/18842117-post10.html
Aside from the suggestion of packing a cheapo minibook (or netbook, or whatever they're called these days) along with say a USB flash drive, the best way would be to use good-quality media.
25 years isn't much time really. I've a 21-year-old IBM PS/2 which still boots up just fine (into Windows 95) - its Seagate SCSI drive is still going strong. I've a box full of Commodore Plus/4 floppies which still read just fine despite being over 25 years old, as do the old PC Plus coverdisks I kept back from my first PC (although they're only 21 years old).
I have a 5.25" drive hooked up to my (Sandy Bridge) PC and yes, it still works. I've another drive in an old P3 I keep ticking over for DOS games; that one's hooked up to a CatWeasel ISA card and that can read pretty much any format you're likely to come across.
As for optical media, I was too poor to afford a CD writer in the early 90s but by the late 90s I could afford one - I still have a few dozen CD-Rs containing source files from back then. The Kodak Gold Ultima discs read perfectly fine, but they were expensive - over a pound a disc. Some of the cheaper discs haven't made it, as the dye's faded and they're now unreadable using standard equipment.
Doh, make that 2 years - 1991. I was thinking of SIBO introduction with the MC range in 1989.
No touch screen, but the Series 3 predates the MessagePad by 4 years (1989). It had gridded icons and a GUI.
http://museo8bits.com/ficha.php?nombre=psionS3
It's not missing. In fact, the up arrow in the Windows 8 Explorer has been there for several months now.
Looks like they've gone back to 1986 and Windows 2.0 style 2D.
It looks hideous to me, I much prefer the gloss and depth of Aero Glass.
Back in the early 90s there was a little program you could get called All3D. This used a DLL called ctl3d.dll to make all the 2D elements of regular Windows 3.1 (such as checkboxes and radio buttons) become 3D, as was eventually the case with regular Windows 95. I daresay some enterprising person will come up with a similar thing for Windows 8.
How amusing - our dear little con-dem Government reckons Britian will have the best superfast broadband by 2015, do they? Well, they might like to "encourage" BT to pull its finger out and upgrade all the exchanges to ADSL2 for a start. There are thousands of small exchanges stuck about 5 years in the past and no plans whatsoever to upgrade them.
Meanwhile all the effort seems to be going to towns and cities, the places that already have the choice of cable or ADSL2 or fibre to the cabinet. They really ought to splunk that cash on bringing everyone up to speed instead, but no, as it's all about money it's far more efficient for them just to push ahead where there's already fast broadband.
I think there's more chance of the Sun suddenly exploding than there is of the UK having the best superfast broadband by 2015.
NVidia have pulled a past one here, which doesn't seem to have been widely picked up yet.
The codename for the 680 is GK104. The 460 and 560 cards were based on the cut-down GF104 and GF114 GPUs respectively and were midrange parts. The 480 and 580 high-end parts were based on the full GF100 and GF110 GPUs respectively and had a 384-bit memory bus (rather than the 256-bit bus used on the GF1x4 parts).
In other words - the 680 is really what would otherwise have been called the 660, it's just that nVidia's worked out they can make some extra cash by marketing it as a high-end part. Don't be at all surprised when in a few months time a 685 or 690 appears, based on the "full" GK100 (with a 384-bit memory bus and a fair bit of extra oomph....
If only... None of the HP machines we've bought at work in the past couple of years have had them and we buy both the slimline desktop variety and mini-tower PCs. The few Dells I've seen likewise don't have any floppy ports on the motherboard.
As for build-your-own PCs, or ones from companies that assemble generic parts into PCs, very few come with floppy ports on the motherboard. Indeed, the only non-industrial Intel motherboards I know of that have a floppy port are the ASRock Extreme boards - and that's powered by a SuperIO chip on the motherboard, as chipset support for floppies was dropped by Intel years ago.
Note: the reason I mention all this is because I'm looking at getting a Z77 motherboard in the next few months with a floppy connector, so that I can hook up a 5.25" floppy drive I've acquired (purely for the heck of it, before anyone asks - I've a big box of old disks from the early 90s that I wouldn't mind rummaging through, the PC I used for those having been chucked out years back). ASRock are pretty much the only option nowadays and I have no doubts that when Haswell comes out next year the old 37-pin floppy connector will be well and truly extinct.
My comment referred to the use of PCs for gaming - which is largely what the MPC standards were about and also what the Experience Index is for (after all, you don't need a 7.9 rating to use Word or knock up some PHP code....)
I don't own a PS3 and nor do I want one - the PC on which I'm writing this is my games machine.
As a PC gamer, anything that brings more people to the platform and which drags graphics up from DX9 gets my vote. (Skyrim, for example, looks nice. But think how much nicer it'd be with a DX11 engine with tesselation, as seen in that Heaven benchmark... mmm!)