It's been about a month, so they're probably all gone, but you may want to check your local Target, if you have one. Target was clearing out the 64mb/1.3 megapixel still camera for $25, I picked one up for myself at the time since I needed a USB keychain anyway, and the camera was a nice addition since it was on clearance anyway.
The pictures it takes look decent - as long as you're in plain daylight. It doesn't have a flash, so if it's darker, you can expect to delete the picture as soon as you hook it up to your computer. I wouldn't use it as a primary camera, but I do tend to carry it around to take snapshots when I'm out with friends, and it serves that role rather well.
Have you ever actually used the XP firewall? I'm starting the think that you haven't. I've run into problems on more than one occassion where the vanilla/SP1 firewall rendered a connection unusable for something a user wanted to do. There's a reason why so many tech support knowledge bases include "Try disabling the Windows XP Firewall" as one of the first trouble shooting steps for a non-working internet app.
So, in this case, 'better than nothing' is really dubious, if the user wants to actually do anything with their connection other than use port 80. A consumer router firewall is better than nothing - in some ways the XP firewall is just as bad, if not worse.
You're kidding about the XP firewall, right? In the version that ships with vanilla XP and SP1, calling it worthless would probably be an understatement. You're the first person I've heard that takes it anywhere near seriously.
That said, SP2 will ship with a much improved firewall that could be called a Zone Alarm lite, but honestly, my preference is still for a hardware level firewall. The reason for this is you're stopping the traffic before it ever touches the system, helping to stop a vulnerability in software from turning into a break-in of the actual system.
The difference is these huge Japanese megacorporations are horizontal in nature - they have their hand in the pie everywhere, but they aren't a single, vertical monopoly like Microsoft is.
Intel isn't a monopoly in the strictest sense, but they've been known to exhibit the same type of behaviour as a dominant player that garnered Microsoft its monopoly in the first palce - which is why nationalism may be *A* factor in this, but is far from the only one.
I have a feeling you're thinking of the South Korean government who was backing Hynix with multi-billion dollar subsidies. Both the US and EU hit Hynix cheaps with a substantial tariff last summer, which drove up the price of DDR to a point which it's only just now starting to recover from.
The entire problem with the CD model of business was they kept raising prices beyond the point where there would have been peak demand. They just happened to have to easy scapegoat of online piracy to blame at the time.
I'm not saying piracy isn't hurting at all, but the slumping CD sales are likely far more related to the fact the CDs just plain cost too much. This is just the record companies trying to show that they still haven't learned their lesson and attempting to ruin legal online downloads in the same way.
Absolutely - and this will likely follow the same path that DeCSS did. Sourceforge has actually already pulled it, but's out, and it will be mirrored in places outside of the US' jurisdiction where such software is legal.
It's a shame that as a country that prides itself in its freedom, when it comes to information, we're rapidly becoming one of the least free nations on earth, thanks to the media lobbies. With any luck, the US will come up with a DVD Jon of our own in the near future - someone willing to fight it out and get the DMCA at least partially struck down.
Honestly, this is borderline, but I can understand the logic behind it. What happens if it turns out the trolls are right, Apple does die, and you need new hardware? Or play your AACs under Linux? Or any number of other scenarios that could call for legitimate fair use?
Here's the thing you and many others are missing - PlayFair only strips the DRM if you already own a legal copy. If you read so much as the single paragraph summary on their site, you'd see that in order crack the DRM, PlayFair extracts your key from either your iPod or your iTunes software. So if you don't already have legal access to the music, you're not going to be able to strip the DRM.
Yes, it can be used as a piracy tool, but really the argument for this isn't really any different than the one for DeCSS. This can be, and very much is, a tool for fair use.
Except Microsoft didn't start Hotmail - it was bought by them later on. That's where all the jokes about "even Microsoft runs FreeBSD" come from - the Hotmail servers ran FreeBSD before and for a good while after Microsoft bought them.
You know, I'm going to have to counter this. I don't personally own a Mac (though I am considering a PowerBook once they become available with G5s), but I have several friends who do. The OS X interface is absolutely top-notch in both regards - it's easy to use and there are shortcuts all over the place that make it useful.
Honestly, it's just a Unix with a solid UI sitting on top of it - which is exactly why so many geeks like myself drool over it. There's not really anything that I do on any of my Linux boxes that I couldn't get done with Mac, quite possibly easier.
People focus on the eye candy in OS X, but there's really a lot more to it. The default UI is great out of the box, but when you throw in the fact that there are tons of excellent 3rd party add-ons that make an already efficient interface that much easier to use, I can't really find much to complain about myself.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: GameBoy* is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered GameBoy* community when IDC confirmed that GameBoy* market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that GameBoy* has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. GameBoy* is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict GameBoy*'s future. The hand writing is on the wall: GameBoy* faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for GameBoy* because GameBoy* is dying. Things are looking very bad for GameBoy*. As many of us are already aware, GameBoy* continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
GameBoy Advanced is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time GameBoy Advanced developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: GameBoy Advanced is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
GameBoy Color leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of GameBoy Color. How many users of GameBoy Classic are there? Let's see. The number of GameBoy Color versus GameBoy Classic posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 GameBoy Classic users. VirtualBoy posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of GameBoy Classic posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of VirtualBoy. A recent article put GameBoy Advanced at about 80 percent of the GameBoy* market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 GameBoy Advanced users. This is consistent with the number of GameBoy Advanced Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, GameBoy Advanced went out of business and was taken over by Sega who sell another troubled OS. Now Sega is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that GameBoy* has steadily declined in market share. GameBoy* is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If GameBoy* is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. GameBoy* continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, GameBoy* is dead.
Fact: GameBoy* is dying
Anyone with an interest in the barebones levels of film-making will probably find Doug Liman and Steve Mirrione's commentaries on both Go and Swingers interesting. Apparently Liman chronically runs out of money during filming and really gives some great insight on how to pull things off on a tight budget.
It's probably worth noting that IE will do popup blocking itself beginning with SP2. Microsoft has already released SP2 RC1 for public download, for those of you that like to live on the edge. In addition, it upgrades the Windows Firewall to what I think of as a ZoneAlarm lite, which isn't half bad considering it's a freebie for windows users.
I'll personally stick to Firefox, but in the few days I've been running the SP2 RC1 on my windows box, I have to say I'm impressed, and it's a step in the right direction.
When everyone has XP and DRM and ABC and DEF and CIA, then braodband to boot, no amount of tinfoil on earth will cloak your activities from BB...
Wow, I always thought Best Buy was a type of evil corporation, but I had no clue they took things this far! Thanks for the warning, Brother, see you on the front lines!!
Absolutely, my wording was poor, but there's a reason I included the second sentence that you quoted, so I'll restate - if your code specifically benefits from 64 bit addressability, then it will run faster as a 64 bit binary. However, most code doesn't, and therefore will run slightly slower as a 64 bit binary than it would be as a 32 bit binary.
There are certainly applications where being able to perform 64 bit math is extremely valuable, but I was just trying to point out that extending a CPU to 64 bit is not the magic bullet speed increase that some Slashdot readers seem to think it is.
You do realize that moving software to 64 bit just for the sake of 64 bitness is NOT a way to improve speed. In fact, on RISC architechture such as the PPC, a 64 bit binary will generally be slower than a 32 bit binary running identical code.
The reason for this is the PPC architechture doesn't get any of the boosts such as increased register availablity that x86 does with x86-64 by going 64 bit. The only difference is it can address a larger data set. Unless you're doing something which directly benefits from 64 bitness on a PPC CPU, you'll be better off with a 32 bit binary.
Except that myself and many other PC-oriented gamers found Halo to be vastly overrated. Granted, it's one of the best console FPS games out there, but coming from a background where there are a huge number of polished, solid FPS games, Halo really isn't all that special. In fact, I'd personally rate it second-tier at best.
It should already fit on a single DVD. The DVD version of Unreal Tournament 2004, for example, is a single disc, while the CD version is 6 seperate CD-ROMs.
How in the world would that be the case? All BTX is is a new motherboard standard which rearranges the position of the components on the board to improve airflow and cooling. The CPU socket has been moved to the lower left corner of the board, with expansion cards in the top right, for example.
As far as CPUs are concerned, this is no different than having a Socket 370 board in ATX, mATX, and mini-ITX form factor. Could somebody mod the troll back down, please?
I didn't either until a few weeks ago, though they've apparently been floating around for several months now. Almost wish I hadn't heard, that's $40 I wouldn't have spent otherwise;)
Heck you can get sufficient power for home comptuters (including developers) from a 40$ Duron Morgan core.
Better still is $40 for the new Duron Applebred core. $43 got me a 1.8GHz Applebred chip, which is essentially an Athlon Thoroughbred-B with partial cache.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been about a month, so they're probably all gone, but you may want to check your local Target, if you have one. Target was clearing out the 64mb/1.3 megapixel still camera for $25, I picked one up for myself at the time since I needed a USB keychain anyway, and the camera was a nice addition since it was on clearance anyway.
The pictures it takes look decent - as long as you're in plain daylight. It doesn't have a flash, so if it's darker, you can expect to delete the picture as soon as you hook it up to your computer. I wouldn't use it as a primary camera, but I do tend to carry it around to take snapshots when I'm out with friends, and it serves that role rather well.
Have you ever actually used the XP firewall? I'm starting the think that you haven't. I've run into problems on more than one occassion where the vanilla/SP1 firewall rendered a connection unusable for something a user wanted to do. There's a reason why so many tech support knowledge bases include "Try disabling the Windows XP Firewall" as one of the first trouble shooting steps for a non-working internet app.
So, in this case, 'better than nothing' is really dubious, if the user wants to actually do anything with their connection other than use port 80. A consumer router firewall is better than nothing - in some ways the XP firewall is just as bad, if not worse.
You're kidding about the XP firewall, right? In the version that ships with vanilla XP and SP1, calling it worthless would probably be an understatement. You're the first person I've heard that takes it anywhere near seriously.
That said, SP2 will ship with a much improved firewall that could be called a Zone Alarm lite, but honestly, my preference is still for a hardware level firewall. The reason for this is you're stopping the traffic before it ever touches the system, helping to stop a vulnerability in software from turning into a break-in of the actual system.
The difference is these huge Japanese megacorporations are horizontal in nature - they have their hand in the pie everywhere, but they aren't a single, vertical monopoly like Microsoft is.
Intel isn't a monopoly in the strictest sense, but they've been known to exhibit the same type of behaviour as a dominant player that garnered Microsoft its monopoly in the first palce - which is why nationalism may be *A* factor in this, but is far from the only one.
I have a feeling you're thinking of the South Korean government who was backing Hynix with multi-billion dollar subsidies. Both the US and EU hit Hynix cheaps with a substantial tariff last summer, which drove up the price of DDR to a point which it's only just now starting to recover from.
The entire problem with the CD model of business was they kept raising prices beyond the point where there would have been peak demand. They just happened to have to easy scapegoat of online piracy to blame at the time.
I'm not saying piracy isn't hurting at all, but the slumping CD sales are likely far more related to the fact the CDs just plain cost too much. This is just the record companies trying to show that they still haven't learned their lesson and attempting to ruin legal online downloads in the same way.
Did you try to actually download it? The links are there but it 404's.
Absolutely - and this will likely follow the same path that DeCSS did. Sourceforge has actually already pulled it, but's out, and it will be mirrored in places outside of the US' jurisdiction where such software is legal.
It's a shame that as a country that prides itself in its freedom, when it comes to information, we're rapidly becoming one of the least free nations on earth, thanks to the media lobbies. With any luck, the US will come up with a DVD Jon of our own in the near future - someone willing to fight it out and get the DMCA at least partially struck down.
Honestly, this is borderline, but I can understand the logic behind it. What happens if it turns out the trolls are right, Apple does die, and you need new hardware? Or play your AACs under Linux? Or any number of other scenarios that could call for legitimate fair use?
Here's the thing you and many others are missing - PlayFair only strips the DRM if you already own a legal copy. If you read so much as the single paragraph summary on their site, you'd see that in order crack the DRM, PlayFair extracts your key from either your iPod or your iTunes software. So if you don't already have legal access to the music, you're not going to be able to strip the DRM.
Yes, it can be used as a piracy tool, but really the argument for this isn't really any different than the one for DeCSS. This can be, and very much is, a tool for fair use.
Except Microsoft didn't start Hotmail - it was bought by them later on. That's where all the jokes about "even Microsoft runs FreeBSD" come from - the Hotmail servers ran FreeBSD before and for a good while after Microsoft bought them.
The fact that Google started as a research project at Stanford probably didn't hurt.
You know, I'm going to have to counter this. I don't personally own a Mac (though I am considering a PowerBook once they become available with G5s), but I have several friends who do. The OS X interface is absolutely top-notch in both regards - it's easy to use and there are shortcuts all over the place that make it useful.
Honestly, it's just a Unix with a solid UI sitting on top of it - which is exactly why so many geeks like myself drool over it. There's not really anything that I do on any of my Linux boxes that I couldn't get done with Mac, quite possibly easier.
People focus on the eye candy in OS X, but there's really a lot more to it. The default UI is great out of the box, but when you throw in the fact that there are tons of excellent 3rd party add-ons that make an already efficient interface that much easier to use, I can't really find much to complain about myself.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: GameBoy* is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered GameBoy* community when IDC confirmed that GameBoy* market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that GameBoy* has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. GameBoy* is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict GameBoy*'s future. The hand writing is on the wall: GameBoy* faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for GameBoy* because GameBoy* is dying. Things are looking very bad for GameBoy*. As many of us are already aware, GameBoy* continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. GameBoy Advanced is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time GameBoy Advanced developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: GameBoy Advanced is dying. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. GameBoy Color leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of GameBoy Color. How many users of GameBoy Classic are there? Let's see. The number of GameBoy Color versus GameBoy Classic posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 GameBoy Classic users. VirtualBoy posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of GameBoy Classic posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of VirtualBoy. A recent article put GameBoy Advanced at about 80 percent of the GameBoy* market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 GameBoy Advanced users. This is consistent with the number of GameBoy Advanced Usenet posts. Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, GameBoy Advanced went out of business and was taken over by Sega who sell another troubled OS. Now Sega is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that GameBoy* has steadily declined in market share. GameBoy* is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If GameBoy* is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. GameBoy* continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, GameBoy* is dead. Fact: GameBoy* is dying
Anyone with an interest in the barebones levels of film-making will probably find Doug Liman and Steve Mirrione's commentaries on both Go and Swingers interesting. Apparently Liman chronically runs out of money during filming and really gives some great insight on how to pull things off on a tight budget.
It's probably worth noting that IE will do popup blocking itself beginning with SP2. Microsoft has already released SP2 RC1 for public download, for those of you that like to live on the edge. In addition, it upgrades the Windows Firewall to what I think of as a ZoneAlarm lite, which isn't half bad considering it's a freebie for windows users.
I'll personally stick to Firefox, but in the few days I've been running the SP2 RC1 on my windows box, I have to say I'm impressed, and it's a step in the right direction.
Wow, I always thought Best Buy was a type of evil corporation, but I had no clue they took things this far! Thanks for the warning, Brother, see you on the front lines!!
You're confusing patent and trademark. Trademark has to be vigorously defended to remain valid, patent doesn't necessarilly.
Absolutely, my wording was poor, but there's a reason I included the second sentence that you quoted, so I'll restate - if your code specifically benefits from 64 bit addressability, then it will run faster as a 64 bit binary. However, most code doesn't, and therefore will run slightly slower as a 64 bit binary than it would be as a 32 bit binary. There are certainly applications where being able to perform 64 bit math is extremely valuable, but I was just trying to point out that extending a CPU to 64 bit is not the magic bullet speed increase that some Slashdot readers seem to think it is.
You do realize that moving software to 64 bit just for the sake of 64 bitness is NOT a way to improve speed. In fact, on RISC architechture such as the PPC, a 64 bit binary will generally be slower than a 32 bit binary running identical code.
The reason for this is the PPC architechture doesn't get any of the boosts such as increased register availablity that x86 does with x86-64 by going 64 bit. The only difference is it can address a larger data set. Unless you're doing something which directly benefits from 64 bitness on a PPC CPU, you'll be better off with a 32 bit binary.
Except that myself and many other PC-oriented gamers found Halo to be vastly overrated. Granted, it's one of the best console FPS games out there, but coming from a background where there are a huge number of polished, solid FPS games, Halo really isn't all that special. In fact, I'd personally rate it second-tier at best.
It should already fit on a single DVD. The DVD version of Unreal Tournament 2004, for example, is a single disc, while the CD version is 6 seperate CD-ROMs.
How in the world would that be the case? All BTX is is a new motherboard standard which rearranges the position of the components on the board to improve airflow and cooling. The CPU socket has been moved to the lower left corner of the board, with expansion cards in the top right, for example.
As far as CPUs are concerned, this is no different than having a Socket 370 board in ATX, mATX, and mini-ITX form factor. Could somebody mod the troll back down, please?
I didn't either until a few weeks ago, though they've apparently been floating around for several months now. Almost wish I hadn't heard, that's $40 I wouldn't have spent otherwise ;)
Because AltiVec is just an Apple brand name for a vector processing unit? What do you think MMX, SSE, and 3D Now! are?
Better still is $40 for the new Duron Applebred core. $43 got me a 1.8GHz Applebred chip, which is essentially an Athlon Thoroughbred-B with partial cache.