Actually, the people in 28 Days Later were not zombies, they were humans infected with a Virus.
All true zombies are as seen in the "of the Dead" series. Although some current theories show that these zombies are in fact caused by the Solanum virus, conclusive evidence still remains to be seen.
It should be noted that, regardless of your situation, you should not attempt to fight a zombie unless absolutely necessary. Remember, should a zombie outbreak occur near your place of residence you should immediately relocate to a rural area. Avoid common motorways and if possible travel by bicycle or motorcycle.
For more information, see The Zombie Survival Guide or check out The Official Zombie Hunters Website
Remember, preperation is key.
I don't really find it odious that they would choose them over the others, and actually since I realized that with Apache being one of the groups, Jakarta is a perfectly good java group to go into, I have less to complain about.
Still need to think of a good project though:(
This looks like a really interesting project. I've often wanted to get into open source development, but the most I've done is to submit a minor bugfix to a project. What seems nice about this project is that it gives some direction on how to get started. I think the idea of hooking a student up with experienced developers also adds to this direction. The problem I've found when trying to contribute to open source software is that few people seem willing to help you get started.
I'm definitely thinking of applying, but why GNOME and the perl foundry but no KDE or Java Foundry? never been fond of Perl or GTK+ myself, and I don't know anything about Python or.NET so my options are kind of limited:(
I'll mostly agree with the article, and I would like to add some things that I've seen in some games that I wish would become more standard in games.
Don't Arbitrarily Restrict Inventory:
One thing that has always bugged me, especially about RPGs, is how a given character can seem to carry an unlimited number of items, but only say, 99 of a given item. This is particularly bothersom in games such as Final Fantasy, where by the end of the game it may take 30 or 40 hi-potions to fully heal your party.
Provide a Glossary:
This was a feature I saw for the first time in Final Fantasy Tactics, and later in Star Ocean 3 (might have been in Star Ocean 2, but it doesn't stick out in my mind), and I thought it was one of the nicest features I've seen in a game in a long time. RPGs are long, time. Most good RPGs have rather complex stories, and sometimes it might be a week or two between when I get time to sit down and play. A glossary helps me to quickly go through and refresh my memory on key points.
Let me skip long animations:
The article hinted at this, but I think it's a point that is worth repeating. Long animations and cut-scenes are pretty the first time you see them, but quickly get really annoying. The best example that comes to my mind are the summons in the Final Fantasy games. I really liked how Chrono Cross has a fast-forward button you could use in a newgame+
Ah yes, how could I have forgotten "Automagically", it is actually probably the most useful of all the listed words, because you can use it when your talking to someone with little computing experience, and they tend to understand what you are trying to say.
Actually, some friends of mine and I had a very similar idea, the biggest difference being that instead of having ranks and playing rounds, the game would take place on a persistent world, and battles would take places as a natural form of competition for scarce resources. Along with just having people manage groups of troops in battle, there would also need to be players to manage cities, and entire countries.
We've been working on developing the game as a side project, right now it's still in the design phase, but if all goes well we should be ready to start actual work in a few months. We were originally planning on coding the game for Linux and releasing it under the GPL, but now it looks like it's probably going to be a free-as-in-beer game for Windows, because we got a really nice offer from a company that a friend of mine works at, basically saying they want a free-as-in-beer game to demo their new engine.
Because there are certain things that it's not ok to do when you have a monopoly that it would be ok to do if your an underdog?
The thing about it is, Mozilla does not have anywhere near the marketshare of Windows, and people who are going to use and develop for Mozilla have generally heard of IE and other browsers, and know of compatibility issues, etc. I know a lot of Windows/Java developers who might have heard the word "Linux" but don't even know that it's an OS. These same people have never heard the word Kernel outside of discussion of popcorn. This is because of Microsoft's monopoly. Now, if someone has never even heard of an alternative, let alone aware of the limitations of the implementatinon of the language they are using to run cross-platform because of some "additions", then they end up making things by accident that only run under Microsoft's version of Java. This only fruthers Microsoft's monopoly.
I concur with this, I own 2 of the current generation systems, a PS2 and a GameCube (three if you count the Dreamcast as part of this generation), and I think I only have about 15 or 20 games for both systems put together (20 or 25 if you count Dreamcast games).
I don't consider myself a hard-core gamer, but I am probably a bit above average. Most people I know with an XBOX only own 5 or 6 games (halo 1 and 2, fable, and a couple of sports games usually).
It seems to me that the XBOX is the console that appeals least to the hard-core gamers (or at least appeals most to the casual gamers), so I think that 30 games to break even is pretty high, especially if the XBOX 360 is going to have a life-span as short as the XBOX.
As someone who makes a living thanks to Copyright, I'd like to chime in. (not necessarily to argue, but just to sort of give my take on the whole thread)
I am an artist, and I do consider myself "truly creative". Even without copyright, I would still create art.
That said, I make a living three ways, the first is selling prints of my artwork, the second is creating new artwork on comission, and the third is licensing artwork I've created.
Without copyright, I wouldn't be able to be profitiable doing any of these things. Sure I could still sell prints of my artwork, but competition would mean that I would be unable to under-cut a large company. Unlike with a physical product, there would be no quality difference between XYZ Big Companies print of my work, and mine. Granted competition is good, but in this case, XYZ Big Company isn't competing in producing art, they are competing in putting something on paper as cheaply as possible. Even without my art, there would still be that competition, since companies would still compete for my business printing off the art in the first place.
Likewise, without copyright, I couldn't make any money licensing artwork I've made. "Well, " you might say "why should you make more money off of some artwork, after all, it doesn't cost you anything extra if I make a copy of it". The answer is that it takes me time to create that art, and if I cannot make a profit off of it, then my time will instead be spent doing other things so that I can pay rent, afford food and clothing, etc. This means less art for you to enjoy.
I also make money by doing artwork that I've been comissioned to do. To this one might say "Well, even without copyright, there will always be people who want to comission artwork, someone has paid you to create the art, why shouldn't we all be able to enjoy it". The answer is that the reason most people or businesses comission artwork from me is that they want to give some product a unique look. A lot of my comissioned artwork comes from doing art for fantasy roleplaying books and such. Much of the value from these books is the visual appeal. If another company or individual came come along and copy the artwork from the books and produce a similarly themed book with the same art, then there is less incentive for people to pay to comission artwork. After all, it isn't gaurnteed to offer a unique look for long.
All that said, as someone who can make a living creating art because of copyright law, I do think that it's a little out of hand. I would be perfectly happy if all of my artwork were in the public domain after 5 or 10 years. I have also released a lot of my art into the public domain, or under a creative commons license.
well, I'm just going to cling to the delusion that once I get into the "real" world the wheat will quickly be seperated from the chaff and it won't necessarily matter where my degree is from as much as what I can actually do.
What you have to realize is that DeVry does not offer a computer science degree. My major is Computer Information Systems, which is not the same thing as Computer Science.
If I had it to do again, I might go to a proper school and get a proper CS degree, but I admit to being bamboozled by the recruiters. Of course, as I do not have any plans to work in academia, I will probably in the end be well served by the fact that DeVry has a (perhaps undeserved) very good reputation in the business world (or at least that's what they keep telling us). In all honest, I'm just going to school so I can get a degree, I've never let school interfere with my learning, and I've invested a good deal of time teaching myself things more commonly found in pure CS courses.
That said, the courses are not of course called "C++" or "Java", I was merely using those as the names of the languages used in the classes to point out that DeVry does not teach purely Microsoft programming.
I go to DeVry (though I'm certainly not a huge fan of them), and I can confirm that this is about half true. DeVry is certainly in bed with microsoft, but I wouldn't say that they teach only Microsoft-oriented programming. Of the 8 programming courses I've had (C++/C++2, Java/Java2, VB, PHP, COBOL, Assembly), one was completely Microsoft Oriented (VB), and two were semi-microsoft oriented. Our C++2 class featured a brief overview of Windows programming at the end of the class. They did use Visual Studio.NET as the IDE for both courses, but I did just fine writing all my homework assignments in vim, compiling with g++, and running on Linux to generate the sample output. The PHP course also covered a bit of ASP at the beginning of the course.
Java I/II are both based around sun's java as opposed to J# or whatever basterdized version of Java microsoft is peddling now (though they do have a C# class they are offering now).
As for some of the other classes at DeVry. All of the database classes are built around Oracle, though they do go over MySQL a bit. I've recently been showing one of my professors a bit about Postgresql, and she seems interested in show some of the new classes a bit about it as well.
The web design classes are built around Dreamweaver (and yes, they do teach how to hand-code) and the webserver is running apache.
I'm not a networking major, so I've only had a few networking classes, but of the three networking classes I've had, one was purely theory, one was a combination of Windows 2000 server and Redhat, and the other was purely based around RedHat.
I do still have the complaint that DeVry spends too much time teaching specific applicaitons and not enough time teaching theory (although, I do often counter myself that I can learn theory well enough on my own), but DeVry does teach a range of programming and other technologies not entirely Microsoft-Oriented.
I'm really glad to see that it's being considered, though I'm not going to hold my breath. It always stuck me as odd that Family Guy got so much more support than Futurama. While I think familiy guy is a perfectly good show as shows go, I think that Futurama is perhaps the best pure-comedy show I've ever watched.
Looking at the sizes for ROMs, an average NES game seems to be in the area of a few hundered k. I have about 12 nes roms (I only download roms for games I actually own, and still enjoy playing, since I don't have room for a dozen consoles in my entertainment center). The largest NES rom in my collection is Kirby's Adventure (one of the last NES games made IIRC) which sits in at about 775k. The smallest is Dragon Warrior, which is about 87k.
SNES ROMs tend to average a couple of megs. The earlier smaller ones at about 1.5 to 2 megs, and the later and larger games coming in at 5 or 6 megs.
N64 ROMs tend to be between 15 and 60 megs. I only have a few N64 ROMs, and they are on a different machine as this one won't run them at more than a couple of FPS, but IIRC Mario 64 is around 15 megs, and Conqurs Bad Fur Day is about 60 megs.
You would probably be able to easily fit the entire library of NES games on a CD. You could probably fit a large portion of the SNES library on a CD as well if you used some sort of compression.
For that matter, you could probably fit the entire library of decent N64 games on a CD, not because of their size, but because there are so few of them LOL.
That said, although it would be nice to be able to pop in a CD containing all your ROMs, nintendo has said that the games will be available for download, and I imagine that they will charge for the priviledge. I know there are a few games that I'd pay to be able to play on my TV again (Super Metroid comes to mind, love that game). I just wonder how long it will be until someone figgures out a way to convert standard ROMs into whatever format nintendo is using, assuming they use some non-standdard format as a means of antipiracy, and can trick the revolution into downloading games off a home server, sort of like the trick to load pirated games onto the GameCube.
This is a neat idea and all, but I think they really have it backwords. Given the quality of most tv, how 'bout making it so that the TV won't turn off unless you have gotten enough proper excercise? Not only will this motivate people to exercise, but if they forget, then when the TV pops on, it's even more motivation to get some excercise by walking out of the room.
It all comes down to precieved value. Just for one example, let's look at the 24" widescreen monitor.
For someone who spends a great deal of time at the computer, it's certainly important to have a display that is comfortable to look at.
What most people do is look at the cheapest solution that meets the minimum acceptable level for what they need, for example, when I recently was shopping for a new monitor, the minimum standards that I wanted in a monitor were that it had to do at least 1600x1200 in 24 bit color, at at least 75hz.
From that point, I looked for the cheapest monitors I could find at that price. From then, I started looking at other monitors, that offered better features. At some point, the extra cost no longer seemed to be justified by the additional benefits offered by a better monitor.
In my case, I ended up buying a CRT monitor because the benefit of having an LCD monitor with a smaller profile wasn't worth the cost of the LCD compared to a similar sized CRT (Of course, I also still don't think the color accuracy of LCDs is quite up to snuff compared to CRTs in most cases).
it was highschool when I first started getting into computers, having never been at a keyboard before, I took a typing class. I remember that, when I started the class, I was typing about 2wpm. We used some sort of typing software, I can't remember the name of it at the moment. Anyway, at the end of the semester, I could type about 12wpm. Sure it was an improvement, but it was still horribly slow.
The semester after that, I started a programming class, I also got a computer at home. At the time, since we started out writing pretty simple programs (hello world, etc) my coding speed was really limited by my typing speed. I found that when I used my own typing style, I could type about twice as fast as if I typed properly, however, I decided to force myself to type properly anyway. Amazingly, pretty soon, I found that I could actually type around 60wpm.
Now, after a lot of experience coding, using IRC, and playing games online, I find that I can type about 110wpm with almost perfect accuracy. I still type almost properly, the only major thing that I do as opposed to a lot of the typests I've seen is that I have a tendency to move my entire hand instead of simply just moving my fingers.
I see a lot of debate about whether or not it's ok to break into a system to prove a vulnrability, and I think a lot of it comes down to knowing how the people who's system it is will react.
When I was in highschool, we had two sets of systems, one was a district wide computer system that held grades, attendence, things of that nature. A second system was shared among the two highschools in my district for the computer science classes. It served webspace, and held shell accounts for all the CS students.
I found vulnrabilities in both systems. On the local CS server we managed to root the server, a couple of my friends and I did a few practical jokes as a demonstration of the vulnrability (nothing to bad really, though certainly a little annoying, things like switching vim and emacs, or changing peoples login shells from bash to tcs). Our CS teacher found it amusing, and even gave us extra credit once we'd put everything back right and shown him the vulnrability. On the other hand, we found a couple of pretty bad vulnrabilities in the main district network. I pointed out to a friend of mine that it probably was a pooor idea to go about doing something similar to the district servers, but he decided that it would be more fun to make a big demostration. He ended up getting expelled for the remainder of the schoolyear. They also never patched the vulnrability.
Videogames seem to becomming a more and more divergent market. I've noticed it a lot with the current generation of games.
It seems like there have become three sort of general categories for games, and systems. The first is analogous to hard core action movies with essentially no plot. They appeal to the largest number of players, beccause they appeal to people normally not inclined to play games, and also can be a sort of guilty pleasure for more hard-core gamers. The XBOX seems to be mostly this sort of games.
The second group is sort of like the hollywood drama, it appeals to people who like to thing their tastes are high brow, but in general they are cookie cutter, though they can often be good-enough to sustain people with higher brow tases during a drought. Occassionally one will really stand out as an excellent game. This seems to be what a lot of the most notable PS2 games are.
The last sort is the games noir, the less notable types of games who's fans like to be somewhat elitist and like to think of as being high brow. These correspond to independent films and such. They are usually innovative, and sometimes they work out to be something great, in which case they generally are picked up by the mainstream. These tend to be the type of games that the gamecube gets.
I think that what's going to happen is that the costs for the first, and somewhat for the second types of games will rise, and result in fruther hollywoodification of games, but I think it will also breath new life into the struggling third sort of games. The more every other game becomes a cookie cutter overhyped FX render of a giant turd, the sooner people will start to crave something really fun, unique, different.
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that most kids either don't have computers at home, or use the same software at home as at school.
I think it's safe to assume that a large majority of kids have Windows boxes at home, and are probably somewhat familiar with essentials like Word and IE.
In this case, I would argue that showing them a different platform is better, or at least as good, as teaching to MS. Instead of teaching them Word or Excel, teach them the basics of how to properly use word processing and spreadsheets. Teach them the theory, and the theory will probably be better ingrained in them for having seen it's implementation in two different ways.
Of course, this is for the basic computers for business usage classes. CS classes should be using Linux anyway (at my highschool all the programing classes did all their work in Vim (or emacs) via ssh to the Debian box the CS teacher set up in secret, and we liked it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the people in 28 Days Later were not zombies, they were humans infected with a Virus.
All true zombies are as seen in the "of the Dead" series. Although some current theories show that these zombies are in fact caused by the Solanum virus, conclusive evidence still remains to be seen.
It should be noted that, regardless of your situation, you should not attempt to fight a zombie unless absolutely necessary. Remember, should a zombie outbreak occur near your place of residence you should immediately relocate to a rural area. Avoid common motorways and if possible travel by bicycle or motorcycle.
For more information, see The Zombie Survival Guide or check out The Official Zombie Hunters Website
Remember, preperation is key.
I don't really find it odious that they would choose them over the others, and actually since I realized that with Apache being one of the groups, Jakarta is a perfectly good java group to go into, I have less to complain about. :(
Still need to think of a good project though
This looks like a really interesting project. I've often wanted to get into open source development, but the most I've done is to submit a minor bugfix to a project. What seems nice about this project is that it gives some direction on how to get started. I think the idea of hooking a student up with experienced developers also adds to this direction. The problem I've found when trying to contribute to open source software is that few people seem willing to help you get started. .NET so my options are kind of limited :(
I'm definitely thinking of applying, but why GNOME and the perl foundry but no KDE or Java Foundry? never been fond of Perl or GTK+ myself, and I don't know anything about Python or
I'll mostly agree with the article, and I would like to add some things that I've seen in some games that I wish would become more standard in games.
Don't Arbitrarily Restrict Inventory:
One thing that has always bugged me, especially about RPGs, is how a given character can seem to carry an unlimited number of items, but only say, 99 of a given item. This is particularly bothersom in games such as Final Fantasy, where by the end of the game it may take 30 or 40 hi-potions to fully heal your party.
Provide a Glossary:
This was a feature I saw for the first time in Final Fantasy Tactics, and later in Star Ocean 3 (might have been in Star Ocean 2, but it doesn't stick out in my mind), and I thought it was one of the nicest features I've seen in a game in a long time. RPGs are long, time. Most good RPGs have rather complex stories, and sometimes it might be a week or two between when I get time to sit down and play. A glossary helps me to quickly go through and refresh my memory on key points.
Let me skip long animations:
The article hinted at this, but I think it's a point that is worth repeating. Long animations and cut-scenes are pretty the first time you see them, but quickly get really annoying. The best example that comes to my mind are the summons in the Final Fantasy games. I really liked how Chrono Cross has a fast-forward button you could use in a newgame+
Wish I had modpoints... someone mod this up funny, or perhaps insiteful.
congrats, you just made my friends list.
Ah yes, how could I have forgotten "Automagically", it is actually probably the most useful of all the listed words, because you can use it when your talking to someone with little computing experience, and they tend to understand what you are trying to say.
Actually, some friends of mine and I had a very similar idea, the biggest difference being that instead of having ranks and playing rounds, the game would take place on a persistent world, and battles would take places as a natural form of competition for scarce resources. Along with just having people manage groups of troops in battle, there would also need to be players to manage cities, and entire countries.
We've been working on developing the game as a side project, right now it's still in the design phase, but if all goes well we should be ready to start actual work in a few months. We were originally planning on coding the game for Linux and releasing it under the GPL, but now it looks like it's probably going to be a free-as-in-beer game for Windows, because we got a really nice offer from a company that a friend of mine works at, basically saying they want a free-as-in-beer game to demo their new engine.
Because there are certain things that it's not ok to do when you have a monopoly that it would be ok to do if your an underdog?
The thing about it is, Mozilla does not have anywhere near the marketshare of Windows, and people who are going to use and develop for Mozilla have generally heard of IE and other browsers, and know of compatibility issues, etc. I know a lot of Windows/Java developers who might have heard the word "Linux" but don't even know that it's an OS. These same people have never heard the word Kernel outside of discussion of popcorn. This is because of Microsoft's monopoly. Now, if someone has never even heard of an alternative, let alone aware of the limitations of the implementatinon of the language they are using to run cross-platform because of some "additions", then they end up making things by accident that only run under Microsoft's version of Java. This only fruthers Microsoft's monopoly.
I concur with this, I own 2 of the current generation systems, a PS2 and a GameCube (three if you count the Dreamcast as part of this generation), and I think I only have about 15 or 20 games for both systems put together (20 or 25 if you count Dreamcast games).
I don't consider myself a hard-core gamer, but I am probably a bit above average. Most people I know with an XBOX only own 5 or 6 games (halo 1 and 2, fable, and a couple of sports games usually).
It seems to me that the XBOX is the console that appeals least to the hard-core gamers (or at least appeals most to the casual gamers), so I think that 30 games to break even is pretty high, especially if the XBOX 360 is going to have a life-span as short as the XBOX.
As someone who makes a living thanks to Copyright, I'd like to chime in. (not necessarily to argue, but just to sort of give my take on the whole thread)
I am an artist, and I do consider myself "truly creative". Even without copyright, I would still create art.
That said, I make a living three ways, the first is selling prints of my artwork, the second is creating new artwork on comission, and the third is licensing artwork I've created.
Without copyright, I wouldn't be able to be profitiable doing any of these things. Sure I could still sell prints of my artwork, but competition would mean that I would be unable to under-cut a large company. Unlike with a physical product, there would be no quality difference between XYZ Big Companies print of my work, and mine. Granted competition is good, but in this case, XYZ Big Company isn't competing in producing art, they are competing in putting something on paper as cheaply as possible. Even without my art, there would still be that competition, since companies would still compete for my business printing off the art in the first place.
Likewise, without copyright, I couldn't make any money licensing artwork I've made. "Well, " you might say "why should you make more money off of some artwork, after all, it doesn't cost you anything extra if I make a copy of it". The answer is that it takes me time to create that art, and if I cannot make a profit off of it, then my time will instead be spent doing other things so that I can pay rent, afford food and clothing, etc. This means less art for you to enjoy.
I also make money by doing artwork that I've been comissioned to do. To this one might say "Well, even without copyright, there will always be people who want to comission artwork, someone has paid you to create the art, why shouldn't we all be able to enjoy it". The answer is that the reason most people or businesses comission artwork from me is that they want to give some product a unique look. A lot of my comissioned artwork comes from doing art for fantasy roleplaying books and such. Much of the value from these books is the visual appeal. If another company or individual came come along and copy the artwork from the books and produce a similarly themed book with the same art, then there is less incentive for people to pay to comission artwork. After all, it isn't gaurnteed to offer a unique look for long.
All that said, as someone who can make a living creating art because of copyright law, I do think that it's a little out of hand. I would be perfectly happy if all of my artwork were in the public domain after 5 or 10 years. I have also released a lot of my art into the public domain, or under a creative commons license.
well, I'm just going to cling to the delusion that once I get into the "real" world the wheat will quickly be seperated from the chaff and it won't necessarily matter where my degree is from as much as what I can actually do.
What you have to realize is that DeVry does not offer a computer science degree. My major is Computer Information Systems, which is not the same thing as Computer Science.
If I had it to do again, I might go to a proper school and get a proper CS degree, but I admit to being bamboozled by the recruiters. Of course, as I do not have any plans to work in academia, I will probably in the end be well served by the fact that DeVry has a (perhaps undeserved) very good reputation in the business world (or at least that's what they keep telling us). In all honest, I'm just going to school so I can get a degree, I've never let school interfere with my learning, and I've invested a good deal of time teaching myself things more commonly found in pure CS courses.
That said, the courses are not of course called "C++" or "Java", I was merely using those as the names of the languages used in the classes to point out that DeVry does not teach purely Microsoft programming.
I go to DeVry (though I'm certainly not a huge fan of them), and I can confirm that this is about half true. DeVry is certainly in bed with microsoft, but I wouldn't say that they teach only Microsoft-oriented programming. Of the 8 programming courses I've had (C++/C++2, Java/Java2, VB, PHP, COBOL, Assembly), one was completely Microsoft Oriented (VB), and two were semi-microsoft oriented. Our C++2 class featured a brief overview of Windows programming at the end of the class. They did use Visual Studio.NET as the IDE for both courses, but I did just fine writing all my homework assignments in vim, compiling with g++, and running on Linux to generate the sample output. The PHP course also covered a bit of ASP at the beginning of the course.
Java I/II are both based around sun's java as opposed to J# or whatever basterdized version of Java microsoft is peddling now (though they do have a C# class they are offering now).
As for some of the other classes at DeVry. All of the database classes are built around Oracle, though they do go over MySQL a bit. I've recently been showing one of my professors a bit about Postgresql, and she seems interested in show some of the new classes a bit about it as well.
The web design classes are built around Dreamweaver (and yes, they do teach how to hand-code) and the webserver is running apache.
I'm not a networking major, so I've only had a few networking classes, but of the three networking classes I've had, one was purely theory, one was a combination of Windows 2000 server and Redhat, and the other was purely based around RedHat.
I do still have the complaint that DeVry spends too much time teaching specific applicaitons and not enough time teaching theory (although, I do often counter myself that I can learn theory well enough on my own), but DeVry does teach a range of programming and other technologies not entirely Microsoft-Oriented.
I'm really glad to see that it's being considered, though I'm not going to hold my breath. It always stuck me as odd that Family Guy got so much more support than Futurama. While I think familiy guy is a perfectly good show as shows go, I think that Futurama is perhaps the best pure-comedy show I've ever watched.
Looking at the sizes for ROMs, an average NES game seems to be in the area of a few hundered k. I have about 12 nes roms (I only download roms for games I actually own, and still enjoy playing, since I don't have room for a dozen consoles in my entertainment center). The largest NES rom in my collection is Kirby's Adventure (one of the last NES games made IIRC) which sits in at about 775k. The smallest is Dragon Warrior, which is about 87k.
SNES ROMs tend to average a couple of megs. The earlier smaller ones at about 1.5 to 2 megs, and the later and larger games coming in at 5 or 6 megs.
N64 ROMs tend to be between 15 and 60 megs. I only have a few N64 ROMs, and they are on a different machine as this one won't run them at more than a couple of FPS, but IIRC Mario 64 is around 15 megs, and Conqurs Bad Fur Day is about 60 megs.
You would probably be able to easily fit the entire library of NES games on a CD. You could probably fit a large portion of the SNES library on a CD as well if you used some sort of compression.
For that matter, you could probably fit the entire library of decent N64 games on a CD, not because of their size, but because there are so few of them LOL.
That said, although it would be nice to be able to pop in a CD containing all your ROMs, nintendo has said that the games will be available for download, and I imagine that they will charge for the priviledge. I know there are a few games that I'd pay to be able to play on my TV again (Super Metroid comes to mind, love that game). I just wonder how long it will be until someone figgures out a way to convert standard ROMs into whatever format nintendo is using, assuming they use some non-standdard format as a means of antipiracy, and can trick the revolution into downloading games off a home server, sort of like the trick to load pirated games onto the GameCube.
hmm... hasn't this been around for a while aready? [link may be NSFW]
This is a neat idea and all, but I think they really have it backwords. Given the quality of most tv, how 'bout making it so that the TV won't turn off unless you have gotten enough proper excercise? Not only will this motivate people to exercise, but if they forget, then when the TV pops on, it's even more motivation to get some excercise by walking out of the room.
It all comes down to precieved value. Just for one example, let's look at the 24" widescreen monitor.
For someone who spends a great deal of time at the computer, it's certainly important to have a display that is comfortable to look at.
What most people do is look at the cheapest solution that meets the minimum acceptable level for what they need, for example, when I recently was shopping for a new monitor, the minimum standards that I wanted in a monitor were that it had to do at least 1600x1200 in 24 bit color, at at least 75hz.
From that point, I looked for the cheapest monitors I could find at that price. From then, I started looking at other monitors, that offered better features. At some point, the extra cost no longer seemed to be justified by the additional benefits offered by a better monitor.
In my case, I ended up buying a CRT monitor because the benefit of having an LCD monitor with a smaller profile wasn't worth the cost of the LCD compared to a similar sized CRT (Of course, I also still don't think the color accuracy of LCDs is quite up to snuff compared to CRTs in most cases).
it was highschool when I first started getting into computers, having never been at a keyboard before, I took a typing class. I remember that, when I started the class, I was typing about 2wpm. We used some sort of typing software, I can't remember the name of it at the moment. Anyway, at the end of the semester, I could type about 12wpm. Sure it was an improvement, but it was still horribly slow.
The semester after that, I started a programming class, I also got a computer at home. At the time, since we started out writing pretty simple programs (hello world, etc) my coding speed was really limited by my typing speed. I found that when I used my own typing style, I could type about twice as fast as if I typed properly, however, I decided to force myself to type properly anyway. Amazingly, pretty soon, I found that I could actually type around 60wpm.
Now, after a lot of experience coding, using IRC, and playing games online, I find that I can type about 110wpm with almost perfect accuracy. I still type almost properly, the only major thing that I do as opposed to a lot of the typests I've seen is that I have a tendency to move my entire hand instead of simply just moving my fingers.
I see a lot of debate about whether or not it's ok to break into a system to prove a vulnrability, and I think a lot of it comes down to knowing how the people who's system it is will react.
When I was in highschool, we had two sets of systems, one was a district wide computer system that held grades, attendence, things of that nature. A second system was shared among the two highschools in my district for the computer science classes. It served webspace, and held shell accounts for all the CS students.
I found vulnrabilities in both systems. On the local CS server we managed to root the server, a couple of my friends and I did a few practical jokes as a demonstration of the vulnrability (nothing to bad really, though certainly a little annoying, things like switching vim and emacs, or changing peoples login shells from bash to tcs). Our CS teacher found it amusing, and even gave us extra credit once we'd put everything back right and shown him the vulnrability. On the other hand, we found a couple of pretty bad vulnrabilities in the main district network. I pointed out to a friend of mine that it probably was a pooor idea to go about doing something similar to the district servers, but he decided that it would be more fun to make a big demostration. He ended up getting expelled for the remainder of the schoolyear. They also never patched the vulnrability.
If the JVM is licensed under the Apache license, which is incompatible with the GPL, does that mean that you cannot use this with GPLed Java software?
as opposed to in severe pain from the crap comming from the speakers of their portable music players?
Videogames seem to becomming a more and more divergent market. I've noticed it a lot with the current generation of games.
It seems like there have become three sort of general categories for games, and systems. The first is analogous to hard core action movies with essentially no plot. They appeal to the largest number of players, beccause they appeal to people normally not inclined to play games, and also can be a sort of guilty pleasure for more hard-core gamers. The XBOX seems to be mostly this sort of games.
The second group is sort of like the hollywood drama, it appeals to people who like to thing their tastes are high brow, but in general they are cookie cutter, though they can often be good-enough to sustain people with higher brow tases during a drought. Occassionally one will really stand out as an excellent game. This seems to be what a lot of the most notable PS2 games are.
The last sort is the games noir, the less notable types of games who's fans like to be somewhat elitist and like to think of as being high brow. These correspond to independent films and such. They are usually innovative, and sometimes they work out to be something great, in which case they generally are picked up by the mainstream. These tend to be the type of games that the gamecube gets.
I think that what's going to happen is that the costs for the first, and somewhat for the second types of games will rise, and result in fruther hollywoodification of games, but I think it will also breath new life into the struggling third sort of games. The more every other game becomes a cookie cutter overhyped FX render of a giant turd, the sooner people will start to crave something really fun, unique, different.
I think the problem with this line of reasoning is that it assumes that most kids either don't have computers at home, or use the same software at home as at school.
I think it's safe to assume that a large majority of kids have Windows boxes at home, and are probably somewhat familiar with essentials like Word and IE.
In this case, I would argue that showing them a different platform is better, or at least as good, as teaching to MS. Instead of teaching them Word or Excel, teach them the basics of how to properly use word processing and spreadsheets. Teach them the theory, and the theory will probably be better ingrained in them for having seen it's implementation in two different ways.
Of course, this is for the basic computers for business usage classes. CS classes should be using Linux anyway (at my highschool all the programing classes did all their work in Vim (or emacs) via ssh to the Debian box the CS teacher set up in secret, and we liked it.