I have noticed that the folks on/. have been very hostile lately, and not just the "trolls". If you (and many others) insist on being that way, try not to stick your foot in your mouth -- it will sound much better that way.
On the same line, some people seem to be awfully defensive lately. While I certainly agree since nearly every reply I've gotten in the past few weeks has been a rant against my personal character it seems, I think the original poster was attempting to correct you, nothing else. Of course I could be wrong, but that's just the way I read it.
Just a simple validation check at validator.w3.orgshows at least six parsing errors for your original link. Writing invalid HTML and blaming it on Netscape is inexcusable. It takes seconds to run HTML through a parser, and using Netscape as a scapegoat for poor markup shows bad taste.
No offense, but this HTML stinks. You have mixed CSS and HTML style tags, valid under HTML 4 Trans. but not the goal of HTML, and you do not enclose attribute data in quotes. You use tables for formatting, and I don't even see how it's needed!
Saying nothing about your technology, it would look a lot more impressive if you wrote your pages in XHTML Strict and did all formatting through CSS. After all, why should people trust your "advanced" XML when you cannot even master XHTML, the simplest form of XML?
This bothered me when Nintendo released the N64 in 1996. I had the A/V hookups, but I knew a lot of people who didn't. I also know that those things cost about a dollar and Nintendo has some gall to charge $25 for it.
Exactly how "good" of a chipset is this, anyway? I highly doubt Sega is going to ship a $40 3Com when they can use a $2 Realtek and no one will know the difference.
USB Ethernet is far, far overpriced. That's why no one uses it (at least no one I met).
You have a good point about the online stores vs. retail, though. Every manufacturer does this kind of thing. I remember right before I got my ATI Rage 128 for $60, ATI sent me an offer to trade up my existing ATI card and get the ATI Rage 128 for "only" $130 ($150 retail). I figured ATI must have been on crack.
Still, console retail and PC retail seem to be two different beasts. The only time I notice console drops is when the item isn't selling well.
All good points, I dunno. I hear the Dreamcast is exceptionally easy to program for. Maybe that played a role. The Dreamcast was cheaper at release, if I recall correctly. And the Dreamcast kinda had that flag of being the "first" console to be PC-like (first in quotations since that's highly opinionated) in features and processing power.
Finally, there probably are a few hacker projects so far, but they're probably either not complete enough or the news of their existence is killed by all the "PSX2 shortage" articles.
...is how much would it actually cost to put an Ethernet jack into these devices? I mean, if I can buy Ethernet cards for less than five dollars, surely it'll cost the OEMs a fraction of that cost. Throw in some DHCP or something and you got instant Ethernet capability. Maybe only 2% of the population will use it, but what's worse: incurring a $1 (est.) extra cost per unit or the daunting task of trading in all those units when the nation (world) goes Ethernet in a few years?
What do you think that little cover on the bottom was for?
But in actuality, the NES in Japan really was more than just a console. However, half (or more) of what Japan saw the US (or anywhere else for that matter) never did. It's a little better today for other video game companies, but Nintendo still has this "RPGs go against our quality-control" mentality.
Well, think about it for a minute. Everybody and their mother killed each other so little Jimmy could get a PSX2 for Christmas. Couple that with the fact that the US release was barely more than a month ago, and you have your answer.
I'd say: give it a little time. Your question will be much more appropriate if this situation of little/no PSX2 hacks exists six months from now.
That seems awfully steep. Even if it's a proprietary adapter, $60 is more than even the high profile 3Com cards. One of the reasons Nintendo is much more successful with their peripherals than other companies in general is the fact that Nintendo will often include them with a game and either eat the cost or include it in the game's price. If Sega licensed a hot FPS and released their adapter with it (a la Starfox 64, etc.), even at a slightly higher price for the game the adapter would probably become more widespread, benefitting both Sega and third parties in the end. Maybe I'm wrong because this has to do with "Internet", but the highest barrier for most of these peripherals is the initial cost and the fact that they'll have limited use (e.g. 1 out of 5 games will be applicable and the PSX2 will be in the closet in 3 years).
Just a rhetorical question with no stats to back it up, but: if Nintendo were not to include the Rumble Pak with Starfox, how many Paks would they have sold separate as opposed to the extras that were purchased as a result of the existence of Starfox's included one?
Even two months ago I saw generic RAM for $60 - $75, but Comp USA will still charge you $120 or so for a generic PC100 DIMM. It just depends on "how deep" you dig into the RAM market, just like in any market.
Not even $150. I saw some generic 128MB PC133 SDRAM going for $45 the other week. The more name brand stuff like Micron et. al. goes for $60 or so. I even saw some generic PC133 256MB DIMMs going for around $100. No matter how you slice it, NOT filling your PC with RAM is a bad idea.
Whether it was technologically astounding or not, I knew many, many people who owned a 800XL but not a single one who owned a regular 800. Technology isn't everything in this business. I think the original NES proved this with it's rather mediocre offerings but powerful price point and marketing.
The HX is meant to cache 512MB provided there is an 11 bit tag RAM chip installed. However, some board manufacturers sought to cheapen the HX line and only put a stock 8 bit tag RAM chip in, which can only cache 64MB.
The HX is the only Intel Pentium chipset that can cache more than 64MB of RAM. The LX (Mercury), NX (Neptune), FX (Triton I), VX (Triton "III"), and TX (Triton "IV") all have poor buffering and cheap tag RAM, so they cannot cache more than 64MB.
Heh, I almost put in "except in use for a dialup router" but I decided against it. I should have known I'd get bitten. With that said, I implied use and not an automated service. People were using their C64s to make music in the late 80s, for example, a production task. I didn't mean a 386 is *completely* useless today, but unless you have some ten year old software sitting around, it's close to that for normal PC tasks.
I certainly hope you're using the HX chipset (doubtful since it's a dual proc "server" chipset) or a Super 7 chipset to use more than 64MB of RAM. If you're using any of the other Intel [something]X chipsets, you're better off either yanking 192MB of that ram or making it into a huge RAM Disk:)
We go from hating people over the age of 20 (approx.) to anti-MS people to a pro IBM/Intel/MS post to a goatse.cx link to an anti-Linux rant. This is quite an accomplishment, but not a flamebait. Mark it offtopic.
Yes a troll, but many, if not most, of these systems long predate the IBM PC. "Not being able to compete with the (IBM) PC" had nothing to do with it. You really think the $5000 monochrome PCs were selling better than the $500 color Ataris in the consumer market? IBM didn't kill these systems, Tandy did, and the 386 killed the Tandy (or was it the 486?).
Furthermore, the old Ataris and Commodores were used far, far longer than their technological level merited. Some of those 1978 machines were still in wide use in the mid to late 80s! Now you find me anyone who still uses a 10 year old IBM-compatible (which is likely a 286 or maybe a 386 if you're real, real lucky) for anything.
The Atari 800XL was my portal to technology. I owe much of what I am today to that wonderful device. While everybody else was just playing video games with their Atari 2600s, I was learning how to interface with computers and how to program in BASIC.
And the games. I had over 300 games for my 800XL. Sure most of them were crappy as can be, but they were fun.
And the old Ataris even had voice synthesis! Man, how long did it take PCs to get that?
Man, I loved my old Atari. One of the worst days of my life was when my mom threw it away while I was at school. She told me "I didn't use it anymore," when all that happened was the disk drive broke the week before. Oh well.
A few months later I got an 8086 with the "full" 640K of RAM and when I heard how fast and how much RAM it had, I surely thought it would make my puny 64K Atari look like junk. Boy, was I disappointed. It had text only monochrome graphics and WordPerfect 5.1. Yeah, WP beat the pants off of Atari's Word Processor, but the machine was no fun at all.
A few years later I got a 386. Surely a 25 Mhz "monster" with 2MB of RAM and VGA graphics would beat the crap out of the Atari, right? Nope. It wasn't until my Pentium 90 did I enjoy computers as much as I enjoyed the ancient Atari.
You cannot surcharge. I'm not sure if it's "illegal" or not, but it is (usually) against contract. What I believe you CAN do however, is offer a "cash discount" for items. Basically, this means that instead of raising the price for credit charges, you lower the price for cash purchaces. This accomplishes the same thing, but allows you to use a loophole in contracting.
Sorry I can't provide the merchant agreement. I don't feel like looking for it or even know if it's in the house.
There are numerous things that make HTML a poor choice for documentation.
First, there's the aforementioned kluge of the HTML standards, but if one is writing documentation, he should stick to pure structuring (at least at first) anyway. If I write an entire document using <p> and <hX> tags, sure it'll be portable, 100% compatible with the W3C guidelines and so on, but there's more than that.
HTML, unlike many other more complicated mark-up languages, has poor support for "book" features. Headers, footers, generation of table of contents, page numbering, margins, cross-platform printing support. The list goes on and on, but if you're doing anything but looking at it in a browser, HTML is not a good choice for documentation.
So that's why HTML is not the best choice for documentation, not because of any grandiose "stylistic perfection" ideas. Furthermore, HTML is no more or less open than may other mark-up standards (e.g. SGML, XML, TeX), and they're all roughly on the same line in terms of portability (if you get the right tools, that is).
Basically, HTML makes a good "quick and dirty" documentation tool, but if you want your options open (wide open), SGML (or maybe XML in a few months) is the way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
yerricde was attempting to correct Galois, the original poster.
I have noticed that the folks on /. have been very hostile lately, and not just the "trolls". If you (and many others) insist on being that way, try not to stick your foot in your mouth -- it will sound much better that way.
On the same line, some people seem to be awfully defensive lately. While I certainly agree since nearly every reply I've gotten in the past few weeks has been a rant against my personal character it seems, I think the original poster was attempting to correct you, nothing else. Of course I could be wrong, but that's just the way I read it.
the red pen has a point about your HTML.
Just a simple validation check at validator.w3.org shows at least six parsing errors for your original link. Writing invalid HTML and blaming it on Netscape is inexcusable. It takes seconds to run HTML through a parser, and using Netscape as a scapegoat for poor markup shows bad taste.
No offense, but this HTML stinks. You have mixed CSS and HTML style tags, valid under HTML 4 Trans. but not the goal of HTML, and you do not enclose attribute data in quotes. You use tables for formatting, and I don't even see how it's needed!
Saying nothing about your technology, it would look a lot more impressive if you wrote your pages in XHTML Strict and did all formatting through CSS. After all, why should people trust your "advanced" XML when you cannot even master XHTML, the simplest form of XML?
How does one bet an Anonymous Coward?
This bothered me when Nintendo released the N64 in 1996. I had the A/V hookups, but I knew a lot of people who didn't. I also know that those things cost about a dollar and Nintendo has some gall to charge $25 for it.
If I said Quake III, I'd get a bunch of
"Why does everybody love QIII when [insert other FPS here] is soooo much better????"
I wanted to keep the post on topic since I don't really care what FPS Sega would decide to license.
Exactly how "good" of a chipset is this, anyway? I highly doubt Sega is going to ship a $40 3Com when they can use a $2 Realtek and no one will know the difference.
USB Ethernet is far, far overpriced. That's why no one uses it (at least no one I met).
You have a good point about the online stores vs. retail, though. Every manufacturer does this kind of thing. I remember right before I got my ATI Rage 128 for $60, ATI sent me an offer to trade up my existing ATI card and get the ATI Rage 128 for "only" $130 ($150 retail). I figured ATI must have been on crack.
Still, console retail and PC retail seem to be two different beasts. The only time I notice console drops is when the item isn't selling well.
All good points, I dunno. I hear the Dreamcast is exceptionally easy to program for. Maybe that played a role. The Dreamcast was cheaper at release, if I recall correctly. And the Dreamcast kinda had that flag of being the "first" console to be PC-like (first in quotations since that's highly opinionated) in features and processing power.
Finally, there probably are a few hacker projects so far, but they're probably either not complete enough or the news of their existence is killed by all the "PSX2 shortage" articles.
We'll see, I guess.
...is how much would it actually cost to put an Ethernet jack into these devices? I mean, if I can buy Ethernet cards for less than five dollars, surely it'll cost the OEMs a fraction of that cost. Throw in some DHCP or something and you got instant Ethernet capability. Maybe only 2% of the population will use it, but what's worse: incurring a $1 (est.) extra cost per unit or the daunting task of trading in all those units when the nation (world) goes Ethernet in a few years?
What do you think that little cover on the bottom was for?
But in actuality, the NES in Japan really was more than just a console. However, half (or more) of what Japan saw the US (or anywhere else for that matter) never did. It's a little better today for other video game companies, but Nintendo still has this "RPGs go against our quality-control" mentality.
Well, think about it for a minute. Everybody and their mother killed each other so little Jimmy could get a PSX2 for Christmas. Couple that with the fact that the US release was barely more than a month ago, and you have your answer.
I'd say: give it a little time. Your question will be much more appropriate if this situation of little/no PSX2 hacks exists six months from now.
That's Dreamcast, not PSX2.
That seems awfully steep. Even if it's a proprietary adapter, $60 is more than even the high profile 3Com cards. One of the reasons Nintendo is much more successful with their peripherals than other companies in general is the fact that Nintendo will often include them with a game and either eat the cost or include it in the game's price. If Sega licensed a hot FPS and released their adapter with it (a la Starfox 64, etc.), even at a slightly higher price for the game the adapter would probably become more widespread, benefitting both Sega and third parties in the end. Maybe I'm wrong because this has to do with "Internet", but the highest barrier for most of these peripherals is the initial cost and the fact that they'll have limited use (e.g. 1 out of 5 games will be applicable and the PSX2 will be in the closet in 3 years).
Just a rhetorical question with no stats to back it up, but: if Nintendo were not to include the Rumble Pak with Starfox, how many Paks would they have sold separate as opposed to the extras that were purchased as a result of the existence of Starfox's included one?
Even two months ago I saw generic RAM for $60 - $75, but Comp USA will still charge you $120 or so for a generic PC100 DIMM. It just depends on "how deep" you dig into the RAM market, just like in any market.
Not even $150. I saw some generic 128MB PC133 SDRAM going for $45 the other week. The more name brand stuff like Micron et. al. goes for $60 or so. I even saw some generic PC133 256MB DIMMs going for around $100. No matter how you slice it, NOT filling your PC with RAM is a bad idea.
Whether it was technologically astounding or not, I knew many, many people who owned a 800XL but not a single one who owned a regular 800. Technology isn't everything in this business. I think the original NES proved this with it's rather mediocre offerings but powerful price point and marketing.
The HX is meant to cache 512MB provided there is an 11 bit tag RAM chip installed. However, some board manufacturers sought to cheapen the HX line and only put a stock 8 bit tag RAM chip in, which can only cache 64MB.
The HX is the only Intel Pentium chipset that can cache more than 64MB of RAM. The LX (Mercury), NX (Neptune), FX (Triton I), VX (Triton "III"), and TX (Triton "IV") all have poor buffering and cheap tag RAM, so they cannot cache more than 64MB.
I didn't mean one couldn't use 64MB at all. I'm saying that one would be better off by not going over 64MB on such a chipset.
Heh, I almost put in "except in use for a dialup router" but I decided against it. I should have known I'd get bitten. With that said, I implied use and not an automated service. People were using their C64s to make music in the late 80s, for example, a production task. I didn't mean a 386 is *completely* useless today, but unless you have some ten year old software sitting around, it's close to that for normal PC tasks.
I certainly hope you're using the HX chipset (doubtful since it's a dual proc "server" chipset) or a Super 7 chipset to use more than 64MB of RAM. If you're using any of the other Intel [something]X chipsets, you're better off either yanking 192MB of that ram or making it into a huge RAM Disk :)
We go from hating people over the age of 20 (approx.) to anti-MS people to a pro IBM/Intel/MS post to a goatse.cx link to an anti-Linux rant. This is quite an accomplishment, but not a flamebait. Mark it offtopic.
Yes a troll, but many, if not most, of these systems long predate the IBM PC. "Not being able to compete with the (IBM) PC" had nothing to do with it. You really think the $5000 monochrome PCs were selling better than the $500 color Ataris in the consumer market? IBM didn't kill these systems, Tandy did, and the 386 killed the Tandy (or was it the 486?).
Furthermore, the old Ataris and Commodores were used far, far longer than their technological level merited. Some of those 1978 machines were still in wide use in the mid to late 80s! Now you find me anyone who still uses a 10 year old IBM-compatible (which is likely a 286 or maybe a 386 if you're real, real lucky) for anything.
To me, "really old" these days is pre-IBM XT, but that's because I'm only 20 and the XT is 18 (1982).
The Atari 800XL was my portal to technology. I owe much of what I am today to that wonderful device. While everybody else was just playing video games with their Atari 2600s, I was learning how to interface with computers and how to program in BASIC.
And the games. I had over 300 games for my 800XL. Sure most of them were crappy as can be, but they were fun.
And the old Ataris even had voice synthesis! Man, how long did it take PCs to get that?
Man, I loved my old Atari. One of the worst days of my life was when my mom threw it away while I was at school. She told me "I didn't use it anymore," when all that happened was the disk drive broke the week before. Oh well.
A few months later I got an 8086 with the "full" 640K of RAM and when I heard how fast and how much RAM it had, I surely thought it would make my puny 64K Atari look like junk. Boy, was I disappointed. It had text only monochrome graphics and WordPerfect 5.1. Yeah, WP beat the pants off of Atari's Word Processor, but the machine was no fun at all.
A few years later I got a 386. Surely a 25 Mhz "monster" with 2MB of RAM and VGA graphics would beat the crap out of the Atari, right? Nope. It wasn't until my Pentium 90 did I enjoy computers as much as I enjoyed the ancient Atari.
You cannot surcharge. I'm not sure if it's "illegal" or not, but it is (usually) against contract. What I believe you CAN do however, is offer a "cash discount" for items. Basically, this means that instead of raising the price for credit charges, you lower the price for cash purchaces. This accomplishes the same thing, but allows you to use a loophole in contracting.
Sorry I can't provide the merchant agreement. I don't feel like looking for it or even know if it's in the house.
There are numerous things that make HTML a poor choice for documentation.
First, there's the aforementioned kluge of the HTML standards, but if one is writing documentation, he should stick to pure structuring (at least at first) anyway. If I write an entire document using <p> and <hX> tags, sure it'll be portable, 100% compatible with the W3C guidelines and so on, but there's more than that.
HTML, unlike many other more complicated mark-up languages, has poor support for "book" features. Headers, footers, generation of table of contents, page numbering, margins, cross-platform printing support. The list goes on and on, but if you're doing anything but looking at it in a browser, HTML is not a good choice for documentation.
So that's why HTML is not the best choice for documentation, not because of any grandiose "stylistic perfection" ideas. Furthermore, HTML is no more or less open than may other mark-up standards (e.g. SGML, XML, TeX), and they're all roughly on the same line in terms of portability (if you get the right tools, that is).
Basically, HTML makes a good "quick and dirty" documentation tool, but if you want your options open (wide open), SGML (or maybe XML in a few months) is the way to go.