Further to this, they also refuse to unlock the bootloader if the phone was originally carrier-locked, even if the phone is out of warranty. My Xperia Z2 is now a boat-anchor because of (1) a badly bloated stock O/S and (2) locked bootloader which cannot be unlocked other than by paying an exorbitant fee to the original carrier, with whom I don't even do business.
I would have gladly kept using the phone were I able to run custom firmware on it. The camera was really good, as was the microphone - I could record clips at live shows and concerts and get *really* decent audio from this phone. My current G5 makes recordings which sound like messed-up McDonalds' drive-through-speakers.
The title is a bit misleading - it *should* read "(At Least In Québec)".
This case was a civil matter heard in the Québec Superior Court, and some of the statues cited were from the Québec Code of Civil Procedure. The legislative framework of Québec is derived from French civil law, whereas the English-speaking provinces derive from English common law. A Québec precedent on a civil matter won't have weight in other provinces, so extrapolating a Québec decision to the whole of Canada isn't correct. A similar decision would need to be reacehd in, say, the Ontario or B.C. superior court, as there's much more commonality between the common-law derived jurisdictions (no pun intended).
a globular cluster of several thousand stars (compressed into a space just a few dozen light-years apart) is being thrown out of galaxy M87.
I always have issues with astronomical articles that say something *is* happening, especially when the observation is of a structure 53.4 million light years away. *Was* happening, sure. *Is* happening? Don't think so...
This article seems to be talking about newer hardware and the NVIDIA binary blob driver. If you're stuck with Nouveau and an older NVIDIA card, your performance is going to be much worse than Windoze. I recently de-Windozed a P4 box running a GeForce440MX. Perfectly acceptable performance under XP became molasses-slow under Xubuntu 13 - we're talking seconds per screen refresh, and lots of visual artifacting. Newer distys and the legacy binary blob drivers that support GeForce 4 don't play nice with each other either. I ended up yanking the card and putting in a Radeon 9800SE (with 1/4 the video RAM) and even with the open-source radeon driver, performance was astronomically better - the machine was actually *useable*.
This game has brought back everything that I used to enjoy about video games back in the 90's console era (NES/Genesis/SNES/TG16) - joy, frustration, a sense of wonder, and an as-of-yet unresolved addiction. (10 more stars to go!) The control scheme took all of 30 seconds to master. The graphics, while not super-detailed, are incredibly smooth (with the exception of some underwater bits). The score is spectacular - haunting, epic, whimsical, and nostalgic as the need arises.
I bought the game on release day (while on vacation), somewhat on a whim - thinking "It can't live up to the hype", "Hopefully it will have good trade value" and "At least it will give me something to do after I finish Guitar Hero III". So far, I've probably put 60 hours into SMG, and perhaps six hours into GH3.
Having played all of the other Mario games to some degree (I never owned an SNES, but played a fair bit of SMW) only SM64 has been as much of an addiction as SMG. (My virtual console copy of SM64 hasn't been played in almost a month.)
I also recently got a used copy of Rayman Raving Rabbids. It has been an enjoyable game thus far, although the control is sometimes lacking (the 'slam the outhouse door' minigame is very inconsistent).
Considering the fact that I already own three games in the Unreal Tournament franchise, how the fourth game in the Tournament series can be called '3' is beyond me...
1. Unreal Tournament
2. Unreal Tournament 2003
3. Unreal Tournament 2004
4. Unreal Tournament 3 (?)
Such pedantics will not affect my purchase of said game, however, provided my rig has enough balls to render the game at a reasonable frame rate.
In all likelihood, the chip is being fabricated at IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York, and is only being packaged at their Bromont, Quebec packaging facility.
Google is your friend - I was able to find a copy in less than 10 seconds of searching. Whether or not it will work under XP is another question altogether...
Re:Anyone Remember...
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Indeed I do. Doom I and II, Final Doom, Quake, Heretic, Hexen and Wolf3d... and the miracle of qcrack.exe...
I agree. I started out with a Timex/Sinclaiar 1000, which was the North American equivalent of the ZX81. It was monochrome, with 2k of memory. The 16k expansion would have cost an extra $80 at the time:)
Upgrading to a TRS-80 MC-10 was a huge step forward... of course, the curve continues to rise somewhat exponentially:
T/S 1000
TRS-80 MC-10
C-64
Amiga 500 (modded with a 1 MB Fat Agnus chip by me)
P-200 PC
P-233 w/MMX
K6-2 300
Athlon 1000
Athlon XP 2500+
Re:But how much power does your machine use?
on
A Kilowatt of Power
·
· Score: 1
Looks like a useful gadget.
You cannot use it to determine how much power the computer itself needs, because the device will show the total power drawn from the mains:
- the amount of power drawn from the PSU to power the computer, and
- the total losses of the power supply.
Unless you know how efficient the PSU is at a given load, you cannot accurately gauge how much power is being used by the computer itself and how much is being converted into heat and electrical noise by the PSU itself.
And, since IAAPSD (I am a power supply designer), the same observations are applicable:
- a 1 kW PSU and a 400W PSU will deliver equal amounts of power into a conventional system that only needs 250W - specifically, 250W
- most commercial-grade PSUs are unlikely to survive long-term at their maximum rated power - that is to say, that 300W power supply that you bought for $10 from your local PC junk discount store is not the best thing to power your dual-core uber-gaming rig
- most commercial-grade PSUs do have an efficiency sweet-spot because they do not use things like input power factor correction and are not engineered to exceed their requirements (i.e. ATX specifications) by even a fraction (to keep costs to a minimum)
- a high-power PSU running at light load can be expected to last much longer than a lower-rated PSU at the same load as the component stress levels are lower - that is to say, the components in the 1 kW PSU are stronger than those in a 400W PSU, and industry standards dictate compoment stress levels to not exceed 50-70% of maximum (depending on the type of part) to ensure long MTBF (mean time between failures)
- all power supplies fail eventually - if well-designed, the only things that will wear out are the electrolytic capacitors, which will eventually dry out (over a period of years) and cause the PSU to degrade and eventually quit
Once you answer the 'challenging' questions you are asked to fill out a form for a chance to win - unless you're an EU citizen, don't bother. Not open to North American residents.
Provided that this isn't merely pre-IPO hype, and that the technology is actually feasible, one can only hope that the automotive industry is taking keen notice of this.
There are arguements that the energy density of fossil fuel cannot ever be supplanted by hydrogen, and that replacing gasoline will be a long, challenging problem to solve. This is still an exciting idea, though.
This *is* how they work, of course. If your system needs 200W, the power supply will provide 200W. Doesn't matter if the PSU is rated for 350W, 500W, or 1kW. Less output power means less input power - less amps into the power supply. If you're drawing 200W from a 650W power supply, it does not mean that ~450W is being wasted - it simply means that less power is being drawn from the mains.
The rating that appears on the unit is considered to be it's maximum output power, and is the power level at which the various regulatory and safety agencies will test the supply at (UL, CSA, TUV, etc.)
Being employed by a company that manufactures power supplies, here is my $0.02...
1.) The PSU will only deliver as much current as commanded by the computer. If you have 300W of loading, 300W will be drawn from it. With most PC PSUs operating in the area of 70-75% efficiency (which is awful) you'd expect to be pulling 400W from the mains.
2.) The key advantage to using a 1kW PSW in a system that only draws 300W is component stress. It is a known fact that the life of an electronic component in use is inversely proportional to the amount of stress it sees. Using a switching MOSFET at 100% of its rating will drastically shorten its useful life compared with using the same component at 50% of its rating. This is especially critical for electrolytic capacitors. Unless the design is buggered (i.e. crap efficiency unless operated at >50% maximum load) it would certainly last longer and be more reliable than a lower-capability supply delivering the same amount of power.
NAVMAT guidelines (US Navy power supply reliablilty guidelines) dictate compoment deratings anywhere from 70-50% of maximum. You can bet that cheap, generic supplies do NOT meet any derating guidelines - this is why they tend to blow up often. By using the PSU at less than its rated power, you are essentially creating some margin as far as component derating goes.
3.) The primary of a high-power supply will be tougher (as it has to deliver more power) and therefore will be more easily able to deal with line conditions (brown-outs, drop-outs, surges, etc.)
I'd have no issues using this 1kW supply in a conventional, single-CPU system knowing that I'm likely only using the PSU to 40-50% of its capacity.
The game was originally released for DOS, Atari ST, Amiga, Genesis, SNES and Sega Master System. There's also Populous II (less SMS).
A 'modern' PC version called Populous: The Beginning was also released a few years back.
Your best bet is googling or by searching the plethora of abandonware sites that are out there.
My personal vote goes to the Amiga version.
I also started out with a T-S 1000 as a 'first' computer.
I used it for at least two years before the keyboard gave out. I remember lusting over the 16k RAM expansion package, never having the coin as a pre-preteen to afford the $80 sticker price.
From there, the curve was somewhat exponential in terms of processing power (and price):
TRS-80 MC-10 (4k of memory, and sound! and color!) - had no way to save programs
C-64 (with a 1541 and a 9-pin dot matrix printer) - 7eet hAx0r dAzE
Amiga 500 (upgraded to a 1MB Fat Agnes chip, and a 40 MB SCSI HD via a GVC interface)
Pentium 100 w/Trident 1MB card
Pentium 200-MMX w/Matrox Mistake (uh, Mystique)
AMD K6-2 300 w/Matrox Millenium and 3Dfx Voodoo 1
AMD K6-2 450 w/Riva TNT2
AMD Athlon 700 (cartridge) w/GF2 MX
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ w/ATI Radeon 8500
For those of you who wish to reminisce, here's a T-S 1000 emulator Java applet! Blister keyboard sold separately.
advertainment
on
Advergames
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Look at companies like NStorm, who offer freely downloadable Macromedia games that are 100% advertainment (i.e. Elf Bowling 2 for CDNOW, Elf Bowling 3 for TechTV).
Instead of having the end user pay for the game, the advertiser ponies up and their name is attached to what can be a fiendishly addictive little pastime. The end user gets something for essentially nothing, and may or may not notice the corporate name attached to the game.
I would expect that the population will have to be slowly weaned into seeing advertising in 'commercial' games, much like how TV producers and filmmakers have been slowly weaning product placements into their products. Too much at once would promote a backlash.
Striking a balance between the advertising content and the 'game' content will prove tricky as well. It seems to me that video games that have been 100% advertiser-based have been niche titles at best, and certainly not at the top of anyone's best game list. Games like 7UP Cool Spot, the old Chuck Wagon game for the 2600 VCS, McKids... all forgettable titles that were relatively uninspiring and far from groundbreaking.
Slashdot Mirror
Further to this, they also refuse to unlock the bootloader if the phone was originally carrier-locked, even if the phone is out of warranty. My Xperia Z2 is now a boat-anchor because of (1) a badly bloated stock O/S and (2) locked bootloader which cannot be unlocked other than by paying an exorbitant fee to the original carrier, with whom I don't even do business. I would have gladly kept using the phone were I able to run custom firmware on it. The camera was really good, as was the microphone - I could record clips at live shows and concerts and get *really* decent audio from this phone. My current G5 makes recordings which sound like messed-up McDonalds' drive-through-speakers.
The title is a bit misleading - it *should* read "(At Least In Québec)".
This case was a civil matter heard in the Québec Superior Court, and some of the statues cited were from the Québec Code of Civil Procedure. The legislative framework of Québec is derived from French civil law, whereas the English-speaking provinces derive from English common law. A Québec precedent on a civil matter won't have weight in other provinces, so extrapolating a Québec decision to the whole of Canada isn't correct. A similar decision would need to be reacehd in, say, the Ontario or B.C. superior court, as there's much more commonality between the common-law derived jurisdictions (no pun intended).
a globular cluster of several thousand stars (compressed into a space just a few dozen light-years apart) is being thrown out of galaxy M87.
I always have issues with astronomical articles that say something *is* happening, especially when the observation is of a structure 53.4 million light years away. *Was* happening, sure. *Is* happening? Don't think so...
Those 96-series drivers don't work with the latest Ubuntu disty, which is where I was having my issues.
This article seems to be talking about newer hardware and the NVIDIA binary blob driver. If you're stuck with Nouveau and an older NVIDIA card, your performance is going to be much worse than Windoze. I recently de-Windozed a P4 box running a GeForce440MX. Perfectly acceptable performance under XP became molasses-slow under Xubuntu 13 - we're talking seconds per screen refresh, and lots of visual artifacting. Newer distys and the legacy binary blob drivers that support GeForce 4 don't play nice with each other either. I ended up yanking the card and putting in a Radeon 9800SE (with 1/4 the video RAM) and even with the open-source radeon driver, performance was astronomically better - the machine was actually *useable*.
This game has brought back everything that I used to enjoy about video games back in the 90's console era (NES/Genesis/SNES/TG16) - joy, frustration, a sense of wonder, and an as-of-yet unresolved addiction. (10 more stars to go!) The control scheme took all of 30 seconds to master. The graphics, while not super-detailed, are incredibly smooth (with the exception of some underwater bits). The score is spectacular - haunting, epic, whimsical, and nostalgic as the need arises.
I bought the game on release day (while on vacation), somewhat on a whim - thinking "It can't live up to the hype", "Hopefully it will have good trade value" and "At least it will give me something to do after I finish Guitar Hero III". So far, I've probably put 60 hours into SMG, and perhaps six hours into GH3.
Having played all of the other Mario games to some degree (I never owned an SNES, but played a fair bit of SMW) only SM64 has been as much of an addiction as SMG. (My virtual console copy of SM64 hasn't been played in almost a month.)
I also recently got a used copy of Rayman Raving Rabbids. It has been an enjoyable game thus far, although the control is sometimes lacking (the 'slam the outhouse door' minigame is very inconsistent).
Considering the fact that I already own three games in the Unreal Tournament franchise, how the fourth game in the Tournament series can be called '3' is beyond me...
1. Unreal Tournament
2. Unreal Tournament 2003
3. Unreal Tournament 2004
4. Unreal Tournament 3 (?)
Such pedantics will not affect my purchase of said game, however, provided my rig has enough balls to render the game at a reasonable frame rate.
IKEA stores in Canada have drop-off bins for old bulbs as well as spent batteries.
I doubt it. IBM doesn't operate a fab in Canada.
In all likelihood, the chip is being fabricated at IBM's facility in East Fishkill, New York, and is only being packaged at their Bromont, Quebec packaging facility.
Disclaimer: IAAC (I am a Canadian)
Load "star" comma eight comma one.
Time to beat Impossible Mission again.
Run, run, flip, die, flip, run.
[fast forward to one hour later]
"No ... no ... NO! Mission accomplished. Congratulations!"
I beat the game. I rule.
Google is your friend - I was able to find a copy in less than 10 seconds of searching. Whether or not it will work under XP is another question altogether...
Indeed I do. Doom I and II, Final Doom, Quake, Heretic, Hexen and Wolf3d ... and the miracle of qcrack.exe...
I agree. I started out with a Timex/Sinclaiar 1000, which was the North American equivalent of the ZX81. It was monochrome, with 2k of memory. The 16k expansion would have cost an extra $80 at the time :)
Upgrading to a TRS-80 MC-10 was a huge step forward ... of course, the curve continues to rise somewhat exponentially:
Looks like a useful gadget.
You cannot use it to determine how much power the computer itself needs, because the device will show the total power drawn from the mains:
Unless you know how efficient the PSU is at a given load, you cannot accurately gauge how much power is being used by the computer itself and how much is being converted into heat and electrical noise by the PSU itself.
I seem to remember the same arguments from a few months back:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/ 22/2157244&tid=232&tid=126
And, since IAAPSD (I am a power supply designer), the same observations are applicable:
Once you answer the 'challenging' questions you are asked to fill out a form for a chance to win - unless you're an EU citizen, don't bother. Not open to North American residents.
Provided that this isn't merely pre-IPO hype, and that the technology is actually feasible, one can only hope that the automotive industry is taking keen notice of this.
There are arguements that the energy density of fossil fuel cannot ever be supplanted by hydrogen, and that replacing gasoline will be a long, challenging problem to solve. This is still an exciting idea, though.
The rating that appears on the unit is considered to be it's maximum output power, and is the power level at which the various regulatory and safety agencies will test the supply at (UL, CSA, TUV, etc.)
Being employed by a company that manufactures power supplies, here is my $0.02... 1.) The PSU will only deliver as much current as commanded by the computer. If you have 300W of loading, 300W will be drawn from it. With most PC PSUs operating in the area of 70-75% efficiency (which is awful) you'd expect to be pulling 400W from the mains. 2.) The key advantage to using a 1kW PSW in a system that only draws 300W is component stress. It is a known fact that the life of an electronic component in use is inversely proportional to the amount of stress it sees. Using a switching MOSFET at 100% of its rating will drastically shorten its useful life compared with using the same component at 50% of its rating. This is especially critical for electrolytic capacitors. Unless the design is buggered (i.e. crap efficiency unless operated at >50% maximum load) it would certainly last longer and be more reliable than a lower-capability supply delivering the same amount of power. NAVMAT guidelines (US Navy power supply reliablilty guidelines) dictate compoment deratings anywhere from 70-50% of maximum. You can bet that cheap, generic supplies do NOT meet any derating guidelines - this is why they tend to blow up often. By using the PSU at less than its rated power, you are essentially creating some margin as far as component derating goes. 3.) The primary of a high-power supply will be tougher (as it has to deliver more power) and therefore will be more easily able to deal with line conditions (brown-outs, drop-outs, surges, etc.) I'd have no issues using this 1kW supply in a conventional, single-CPU system knowing that I'm likely only using the PSU to 40-50% of its capacity.
The game was originally released for DOS, Atari ST, Amiga, Genesis, SNES and Sega Master System. There's also Populous II (less SMS). A 'modern' PC version called Populous: The Beginning was also released a few years back. Your best bet is googling or by searching the plethora of abandonware sites that are out there. My personal vote goes to the Amiga version.
I also started out with a T-S 1000 as a 'first' computer.
I used it for at least two years before the keyboard gave out. I remember lusting over the 16k RAM expansion package, never having the coin as a pre-preteen to afford the $80 sticker price.
From there, the curve was somewhat exponential in terms of processing power (and price):
- TRS-80 MC-10 (4k of memory, and sound! and color!) - had no way to save programs
- C-64 (with a 1541 and a 9-pin dot matrix printer) - 7eet hAx0r dAzE
- Amiga 500 (upgraded to a 1MB Fat Agnes chip, and a 40 MB SCSI HD via a GVC interface)
- Pentium 100 w/Trident 1MB card
- Pentium 200-MMX w/Matrox Mistake (uh, Mystique)
- AMD K6-2 300 w/Matrox Millenium and 3Dfx Voodoo 1
- AMD K6-2 450 w/Riva TNT2
- AMD Athlon 700 (cartridge) w/GF2 MX
- AMD Athlon XP 2000+ w/ATI Radeon 8500
For those of you who wish to reminisce, here's a T-S 1000 emulator Java applet! Blister keyboard sold separately.Look at companies like NStorm, who offer freely downloadable Macromedia games that are 100% advertainment (i.e. Elf Bowling 2 for CDNOW, Elf Bowling 3 for TechTV).
... all forgettable titles that were relatively uninspiring and far from groundbreaking.
Instead of having the end user pay for the game, the advertiser ponies up and their name is attached to what can be a fiendishly addictive little pastime. The end user gets something for essentially nothing, and may or may not notice the corporate name attached to the game.
I would expect that the population will have to be slowly weaned into seeing advertising in 'commercial' games, much like how TV producers and filmmakers have been slowly weaning product placements into their products. Too much at once would promote a backlash.
Striking a balance between the advertising content and the 'game' content will prove tricky as well. It seems to me that video games that have been 100% advertiser-based have been niche titles at best, and certainly not at the top of anyone's best game list. Games like 7UP Cool Spot, the old Chuck Wagon game for the 2600 VCS, McKids