Yep, definitely remember WinPlay. It was the only choice for a while. Did you ever find a site called TEK (was tek.dorms.tamu.edu)? It was based in Les Appelt Hall a dorm I was lucky enough to be staying in at Texas A&M University. It lasted a little while until the guys at Geffen and Ascap (I think) found out about it. Then they took it down, but they had streaming back in '95 with personal playlists. That rocked! I had my own playlist on the server which had like 3GB+ of music. At the time that was huge because 6.4GB drives weren't out yet...
Jesus H.... well, I royally screwed up that paragraph. I read through my post like 8 times and edited the hell out of it and got tired of proofreading it and thought all was good. Thanks for pointing that out. It was in my post at one time, but got edited out by my dumb ass! *blush*
I'll make it easy on ya and answer your questions. What you really need to do is rewatch M1 and M2 before you see M3. If you had you would have realized that M3 did a great job of weaving things together.
How does Neo really stop the Sentinels? How did Smith enter Bane? How did he get so powerful? It's all explained away with one or two sentences. We're just supposed to accept it because it's "symbolic" of something. Reloaded seemed to treat itself like a bridge to some sort of great explanation for everything in the third movie. Guess what? It never comes! What the fuck?
Don't smoke weed before you go see this movie. He stopped the sentinels by crossing his powers over from one dimension (The Matrix) to the "Real World". He can feel the machines in the real world and can see them without eyes, but he can't see flesh. Of course, he wasn't ready for this so he passed out and ended up in a train station between Real and Matrix Land. Neo figures out he can cross over without plugging in so why is it such a jump to figure Smith can do the same? In fact, when the phone call happens it basically takes the conciousness of someone from The Matrix and uploads that into the brain of the person tapped in. So Smith gets the call and loads himself into the brain of Bayne. Not a stretch at all. Especially if you look at it from a programming poing of view. If you have an open input like say a get(char *) and you load up whatever comes your way of course you could load up something unexpected. They load up crap all the time into peoples minds such as Kung Fu, Piloting a chopper, Ju Jitsu, etc...
Obviously, Smith gets so powerful by replication because he learns that Neo can break the rules so he does too. Others have broken the rules. The Twins did, all of Merovingians henchmen did... Smith learned something when Neo went inside of him and destroyed him from the inside out on M1. He learned he could break the rules, and that makes him the self-replicating monster. The Matrix itself cannot stop him since it does not know how to bend and break its own rules with its own Agents. So The Matrix must rely on Neo to save it. Notice that when Smith touches people a silver mercury like material envelops its subjects. The mercury like material is always symbolic of a program taking over another program in the matrix. This happens when Neo takes the red pill in M1, when Morpheus is injected with the syringe when being held prisoner in M1 before Neo rescues him, when Smith touches people in M1 and M2, etc... Matrix Reloaded was a great bridge between M1 and M3. I can't stress how much you need to look at details to see this.
* The focus is Zion. Instead of freeing the people of the Matrix, as the first one suggested, the sequels have been all about saving this dirty underground city we don't care about. What the hell happened to the people of the Matrix? It's like the movies don't even care.
OK, so Zion isn't Las Vegas. They had to be more utilitarian. Zion is only the focus because they are the resistance against the machines. Their purpose is to free all of humanity. Also, as far as the rest of the people. At the end of the movie the Architect said they would be freed because of the agreement between the machine and Neo. The Architect blatantly said he would free when he talked to the Oracle at the end of the movie. I have no idea how you missed this. Again. Set down the bong.
* No humanity in the characters and dialogue. The movies just don't enjoy themselves. The first one had a mixture of humor and joy and was just having fun with what it could do. That's why things like the lobby scene kicked so much ass. It was like, "We've smashed the barriers of physics, now lets see what we can do with it!" And you had the fun human moments like the discussion during breakfast, the Cipher character, and so on. Neo was just a normal computer programmer who discovered the world around him wasn't real. More importantly, the movie was FUN.
Well, the thing is damn near every chip manufacturer releases datasheets on their chips. That includes the obvious ones like Intel, Motorola, IBM, Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor, Microchip, Samsung, Micron, etc... and those are just off the top of my head. I used to have several 3" binders full of datasheeets printed 8 pages per sheet (4 pages front, 4 pages back) per project from other companies whose products we used in our designs. These datasheets were our bibles for the design. For VIA not to release datasheets keeps them from being put in embedded designs, new designs of motherboards, etc. Below is a copy of their policy on datasheets... quite crappy I might add.
"Datasheets are typically only supplied to development partners and large customers under a non disclosure agreement. If you are an end user, please be advised that datasheets will not be supplied. Requests from Open Source Developers and individuals creating system management tools and other utilities for public use are considered on a case by case basis. Driver developers can also find links to information from Microsoft and assistance for Linux developers here. Please complete the request form below and clearly explain what information you need and why.
Now, you might be saying big deal. All you have to do is fill out a form. Now, notice they will only pay attention to you if you are a big company. Well, in my previous life I used to be an embedded hardware developer. I helped design new circuit boards for a variety of companies. Some big some small. I guarantee you that if I saw a statement like this I would not even contact VIA. We have deadlines to meet and we don't need any of this red tape crap. Its hard enough to get a design out on an impossible deadline without resorting to begging a company to give us info for their stupid products. Most other companies are very forthright with their info and will even make sure a Field Applications Engineer is there to answer your questions. I know alot of other designers will back me up and agree that we don't need one more roadblock. Then again, I guess VIA's focus is just on the few manufacturers that use their products. In addition, I think its pretty sad that they only release their datasheets on a "case by case basis" to OSS developers. Whatever. This makes me wanna hurl my Asus Terminator (with VIA chipset) out the damn window. Now, I know why the Linux kernels are so damn finicky on this system. I was seriously considering buying a little mini-ITX board and case before I saw this, but not anymore. I can use someone else, and I will buy from someone else for personal use as well.
I agree, expecially on the embedded side. Also, a USB to RS232 adapter would not work because 90% of the time you need more than just transmit and receive. The control lines for serial are just as important if not more so. Perhaps just a header (just nine pins) not the full blown connector would work. Oh well, on the PC side RS232 has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaurs. I suspect in another decade the embedded world will have done so as well.
Yeah, I agree with you. I haven't heard of Phantom either. I think "infamous" would be better hyphenated as "in-famous" (as in not famous).
In all fairness though it looks as if all of their games will be downloaded on demand. Not a bad idea considering they won't have any retail support. Guess we'll let the games do the talking because thats what makes a difference on consoles of any type.
They spelled [url="http://www.nvidia.com"]nVidia[/url] wrong in their video. Verified this in their windows 250k and 500k streams... haha... look for NVIDEA... its about 2:40 into the video... made by gamers? Not the video becasue a true gamer would know how to spell nVidia...
I'm running WinXP and using IE to browse the site. So I want to download the video and I get prompted to install an ActiveX object... umm... NO! Its just downloading a video and we have HREF tags for that. There is no way in hell I am trusting some company I have never even heard of to install an ActiveX object. So blow me Phantom!
Sorry to hear about that man, but not all PDAs have such abysmal battery life. I can use my Handspring Visor Edge with Magellan GPS for the same purposes and there is still plenty of battery life for on and off duties. I can go camping and Geocaching for the weekend and not even think about batteries. I was in Ecuador and didn't charge up my Visor for a week.
On a similar note, I had an iPAQ 3700 series and its battery life was equally lacking. I hear the HP 1910s and above are better though. I dunno about other PPC devices, but the Palms seem to have much better battery lives.
What Damage Studios is doing makes sense in a way. Any developers that have worked for SCO will have an NDA which prevents them from working for any competitors. Its hard to say what their client and server ends of their games will run on. However, I bet their server runs on a Linux or BSD box, and they probably don't want any trouble from any SCO lawyers...
Yeah, I really sent this *blush*. Looks like I was fooled by the article and the post. In my defense I did search the USB forums site for their point of view, but didn't find anything at the time. Then I was reading a Maximum PC article on this and realized my error. I was mis-informed, and could not find any contradictory evidence. My apologies to the USB Forum.
"Just wanted to mention you guys are a bunch of jerks for renaming USB 1.1 to USB 2.0. I hope you guys get sued by the European Union and many others for your flagrant violation of computer buyers trust. Computing standards are hard enough to keep track of without you guys renaming things. How very dishonest of your organization and your constituents.
The above steps were very helpful. I switched the background color to black in my IDE and there was an instant relief in eye strain. Also, once the above steps are followed head on over to Maximum PC and check out their article on tuning up your monitor. They also have a Windows util called DisplayMate that will help, but is not required for the advise in the article.
Hell yes! And the crappy runner up was probably WinPlay. That thing was far less stable and took up far more resources. Not to mention WinAMP kept improving its CPU utilization. With each release you would use less and less of your processor. WinAMP and Nullsoft earned my respect and they blew *everyone* else out of the water hands down. Shit, we still use the same basic product almost 8 years later and its better than its predecessor WinAMP 3.x
From what we learned in the drug war, anything you throw out is fair game...
"The Supreme Court concluded that anyone who puts trash on a public curb forfeits a privacy claim to it, and that police seizure of it from a trash collector does not constitute an unreasonable search." - Hemp Products
I thought our rights stopped at the curb?!... I guess we better invoke the DMCA on the cops, people trying to steal our identities, and any poor bastard that touches our trash...
OK, so now people are getting pissed if we slashdot their servers. Since when on the Internet do you have to "ask" to see a webpage. Well, if you don't like it then don't post your servers on the *public* Internet. DUUUUUUH! I have an idea, don't want us coming in? Make things password protected for your precious little community. Don't be a bitch because someone is interested in your site. Next thing you know people will be bitching because a search engine found their site. [SARCASM]Thanks for asking Google![/SARCASM]
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, definitely remember WinPlay. It was the only choice for a while. Did you ever find a site called TEK (was tek.dorms.tamu.edu)? It was based in Les Appelt Hall a dorm I was lucky enough to be staying in at Texas A&M University. It lasted a little while until the guys at Geffen and Ascap (I think) found out about it. Then they took it down, but they had streaming back in '95 with personal playlists. That rocked! I had my own playlist on the server which had like 3GB+ of music. At the time that was huge because 6.4GB drives weren't out yet...
JOhn
So I guess we cannot make artwork with American Currency anymore? What a crock. Guilty until proven innocent I guess. The new American way.
JOhn
OK, so I know about Yahoo, but is there another site that has info (with date perhaps) on percent of stock held by insiders?
JOhn
Jesus H.... well, I royally screwed up that paragraph. I read through my post like 8 times and edited the hell out of it and got tired of proofreading it and thought all was good. Thanks for pointing that out. It was in my post at one time, but got edited out by my dumb ass! *blush*
JOhn
I'll make it easy on ya and answer your questions. What you really need to do is rewatch M1 and M2 before you see M3. If you had you would have realized that M3 did a great job of weaving things together.
How does Neo really stop the Sentinels? How did Smith enter Bane? How did he get so powerful? It's all explained away with one or two sentences. We're just supposed to accept it because it's "symbolic" of something. Reloaded seemed to treat itself like a bridge to some sort of great explanation for everything in the third movie. Guess what? It never comes! What the fuck?
Don't smoke weed before you go see this movie. He stopped the sentinels by crossing his powers over from one dimension (The Matrix) to the "Real World". He can feel the machines in the real world and can see them without eyes, but he can't see flesh. Of course, he wasn't ready for this so he passed out and ended up in a train station between Real and Matrix Land. Neo figures out he can cross over without plugging in so why is it such a jump to figure Smith can do the same? In fact, when the phone call happens it basically takes the conciousness of someone from The Matrix and uploads that into the brain of the person tapped in. So Smith gets the call and loads himself into the brain of Bayne. Not a stretch at all. Especially if you look at it from a programming poing of view. If you have an open input like say a get(char *) and you load up whatever comes your way of course you could load up something unexpected. They load up crap all the time into peoples minds such as Kung Fu, Piloting a chopper, Ju Jitsu, etc...
Obviously, Smith gets so powerful by replication because he learns that Neo can break the rules so he does too. Others have broken the rules. The Twins did, all of Merovingians henchmen did... Smith learned something when Neo went inside of him and destroyed him from the inside out on M1. He learned he could break the rules, and that makes him the self-replicating monster. The Matrix itself cannot stop him since it does not know how to bend and break its own rules with its own Agents. So The Matrix must rely on Neo to save it. Notice that when Smith touches people a silver mercury like material envelops its subjects. The mercury like material is always symbolic of a program taking over another program in the matrix. This happens when Neo takes the red pill in M1, when Morpheus is injected with the syringe when being held prisoner in M1 before Neo rescues him, when Smith touches people in M1 and M2, etc... Matrix Reloaded was a great bridge between M1 and M3. I can't stress how much you need to look at details to see this.
* The focus is Zion. Instead of freeing the people of the Matrix, as the first one suggested, the sequels have been all about saving this dirty underground city we don't care about. What the hell happened to the people of the Matrix? It's like the movies don't even care.
OK, so Zion isn't Las Vegas. They had to be more utilitarian. Zion is only the focus because they are the resistance against the machines. Their purpose is to free all of humanity. Also, as far as the rest of the people. At the end of the movie the Architect said they would be freed because of the agreement between the machine and Neo. The Architect blatantly said he would free when he talked to the Oracle at the end of the movie. I have no idea how you missed this. Again. Set down the bong.
* No humanity in the characters and dialogue. The movies just don't enjoy themselves. The first one had a mixture of humor and joy and was just having fun with what it could do. That's why things like the lobby scene kicked so much ass. It was like, "We've smashed the barriers of physics, now lets see what we can do with it!" And you had the fun human moments like the discussion during breakfast, the Cipher character, and so on. Neo was just a normal computer programmer who discovered the world around him wasn't real. More importantly, the movie was FUN.
Wi
Well, the thing is damn near every chip manufacturer releases datasheets on their chips. That includes the obvious ones like Intel, Motorola, IBM, Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor, Microchip, Samsung, Micron, etc... and those are just off the top of my head. I used to have several 3" binders full of datasheeets printed 8 pages per sheet (4 pages front, 4 pages back) per project from other companies whose products we used in our designs. These datasheets were our bibles for the design. For VIA not to release datasheets keeps them from being put in embedded designs, new designs of motherboards, etc. Below is a copy of their policy on datasheets... quite crappy I might add.
"Datasheets are typically only supplied to development partners and large customers under a non disclosure agreement. If you are an end user, please be advised that datasheets will not be supplied. Requests from Open Source Developers and individuals creating system management tools and other utilities for public use are considered on a case by case basis. Driver developers can also find links to information from Microsoft and assistance for Linux developers here. Please complete the request form below and clearly explain what information you need and why.
Thank you for your cooperation." - VIA Datasheets Request Form
Now, you might be saying big deal. All you have to do is fill out a form. Now, notice they will only pay attention to you if you are a big company. Well, in my previous life I used to be an embedded hardware developer. I helped design new circuit boards for a variety of companies. Some big some small. I guarantee you that if I saw a statement like this I would not even contact VIA. We have deadlines to meet and we don't need any of this red tape crap. Its hard enough to get a design out on an impossible deadline without resorting to begging a company to give us info for their stupid products. Most other companies are very forthright with their info and will even make sure a Field Applications Engineer is there to answer your questions. I know alot of other designers will back me up and agree that we don't need one more roadblock. Then again, I guess VIA's focus is just on the few manufacturers that use their products. In addition, I think its pretty sad that they only release their datasheets on a "case by case basis" to OSS developers. Whatever. This makes me wanna hurl my Asus Terminator (with VIA chipset) out the damn window. Now, I know why the Linux kernels are so damn finicky on this system. I was seriously considering buying a little mini-ITX board and case before I saw this, but not anymore. I can use someone else, and I will buy from someone else for personal use as well.
JOhn
Great info with the numbers. However, I'm wondering if anyone has graphs out there for these or similar benchmarks...
JOhn
oops... typo... shoulda used preview mode :(
JOhn
I agree, expecially on the embedded side. Also, a USB to RS232 adapter would not work because 90% of the time you need more than just transmit and receive. The control lines for serial are just as important if not more so. Perhaps just a header (just nine pins) not the full blown connector would work. Oh well, on the PC side RS232 has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaurs. I suspect in another decade the embedded world will have done so as well.
JOhn
Yeah, I agree with you. I haven't heard of Phantom either. I think "infamous" would be better hyphenated as "in-famous" (as in not famous).
In all fairness though it looks as if all of their games will be downloaded on demand. Not a bad idea considering they won't have any retail support. Guess we'll let the games do the talking because thats what makes a difference on consoles of any type.
JOhn
They spelled [url="http://www.nvidia.com"]nVidia[/url] wrong in their video. Verified this in their windows 250k and 500k streams... haha... look for NVIDEA... its about 2:40 into the video... made by gamers? Not the video becasue a true gamer would know how to spell nVidia...
JOhn
I'm running WinXP and using IE to browse the site. So I want to download the video and I get prompted to install an ActiveX object... umm... NO! Its just downloading a video and we have HREF tags for that. There is no way in hell I am trusting some company I have never even heard of to install an ActiveX object. So blow me Phantom!
JOhn
Sorry to hear about that man, but not all PDAs have such abysmal battery life. I can use my Handspring Visor Edge with Magellan GPS for the same purposes and there is still plenty of battery life for on and off duties. I can go camping and Geocaching for the weekend and not even think about batteries. I was in Ecuador and didn't charge up my Visor for a week.
On a similar note, I had an iPAQ 3700 series and its battery life was equally lacking. I hear the HP 1910s and above are better though. I dunno about other PPC devices, but the Palms seem to have much better battery lives.
JOhn
haha... yeah, I guess you're the original. I've only been doing that since 1995... hehe...
JOhn
HOLY SHIT!
;)
You sign your name like me?! Did you copy me?
JOhn
Yeah, no kidding.. and the sad thing is there are job requirements like that. Duh.. its impossible!
JOhn
What Damage Studios is doing makes sense in a way. Any developers that have worked for SCO will have an NDA which prevents them from working for any competitors. Its hard to say what their client and server ends of their games will run on. However, I bet their server runs on a Linux or BSD box, and they probably don't want any trouble from any SCO lawyers...
JOhn
Yeah, I really sent this *blush*. Looks like I was fooled by the article and the post. In my defense I did search the USB forums site for their point of view, but didn't find anything at the time. Then I was reading a Maximum PC article on this and realized my error. I was mis-informed, and could not find any contradictory evidence. My apologies to the USB Forum.
JOhn
Then there will be a new version of Macrovision for our monitors... haha.. just kidding.
JOhn
This is not anti-static...
JOhn
Here is the text...
5 21 0&mode=thread&tid=137/ Database/18Jun2003_data col61.html
"Just wanted to mention you guys are a bunch of jerks for renaming USB 1.1 to USB 2.0. I hope you guys get sued by the European Union and many others for your flagrant violation of computer buyers trust. Computing standards are hard enough to keep track of without you guys renaming things. How very dishonest of your organization and your constituents.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/18/202
http://www.bangkokpost.com
- John Peterson"
I encourage you guys to do the same.
JOhn
The above steps were very helpful. I switched the background color to black in my IDE and there was an instant relief in eye strain. Also, once the above steps are followed head on over to Maximum PC and check out their article on tuning up your monitor. They also have a Windows util called DisplayMate that will help, but is not required for the advise in the article.
Anyway, thanks bjb!
JOhn
Hell yes! And the crappy runner up was probably WinPlay. That thing was far less stable and took up far more resources. Not to mention WinAMP kept improving its CPU utilization. With each release you would use less and less of your processor. WinAMP and Nullsoft earned my respect and they blew *everyone* else out of the water hands down. Shit, we still use the same basic product almost 8 years later and its better than its predecessor WinAMP 3.x
JOhn
From what we learned in the drug war, anything you throw out is fair game...
"The Supreme Court concluded that anyone who puts trash on a public curb forfeits a privacy claim to it, and that police seizure of it from a trash collector does not constitute an unreasonable search." - Hemp Products
I thought our rights stopped at the curb?!... I guess we better invoke the DMCA on the cops, people trying to steal our identities, and any poor bastard that touches our trash...
JOhn
So here is a blurb from suprnova.org
Thanks for asking slashdot...
users, we will be back
OK, so now people are getting pissed if we slashdot their servers. Since when on the Internet do you have to "ask" to see a webpage. Well, if you don't like it then don't post your servers on the *public* Internet. DUUUUUUH! I have an idea, don't want us coming in? Make things password protected for your precious little community. Don't be a bitch because someone is interested in your site. Next thing you know people will be bitching because a search engine found their site. [SARCASM]Thanks for asking Google![/SARCASM]
Thats the end of my rant.
JOhn