Your claim about 45mpg in "realistic usage" for the Prius depends largely on a significant question. What year Prius are you talking about? I have a 2002 Prius, and yes, it gets mid 40's mpg, but my father-in-law has a 2004 Prius, after they did a large redesign with a lot of improvements. His gets mid 50's mpg in real usage. On the highway, it's actually a little better. He picked it up in Billings, Montana(the high demand was causing 1 year waiting lists at dealerships around the country) and filled up the tank before leaving there. He filled up once on the way home to Monroe Michigan. That's a 12 gallon tank, so he made that 1500 mile trip in less than 24 gallons of fuel = 60+ mpg. Sure, a diesel could probably get about 50mpg, but the pollution is still pretty bad from diesels here in the US.
So what you do is use the SP2 firewall's ability to control the access of individual programs. It's a much nicer firewall than XP's default one.
Sure, it's better than what they had before, but Zone Alarm and probably several others are better yet. Have you seen the (lack of) configuration it gives you for controlling program access? I checked the program control options and it's just LIST OF EXCEPTIONS. You have to enter each program that you want to have a blanket exemption from the firewall. Also, that is control for inbound connections only. It doesn't seem to give you any options for controlling which programs get outbound access. It just assumes that outbound connections are not harmful to your computer, so they should all be allowed. I don't really like that, and I would prefer that some programs be allowed on a per-instance basis, such as IE. I never use IE, except when I need to go to windowsupdate, and then I will grant it temporary access to get what it needs.
So deploy SP2 and turn off the firewall. It's on by default, but it's not mandatory, and it's GPO-manageable so you can control the deployment of the firewall through the whole network.
So here was my experience with SP2 and my discovery of some behind the scenes architecture changes they made to WinXP. I had been using Zone Alarm before. When I installed SP2, no more internet connection. Wha? I had made sure to turn off the Windows firewall because I prefer the individual program permissions ability in Zone Alarm and thought two firewalls might conflict a bit. But since I had the Windows firewall off, I couldn't figure out why it was still a problem. What I eventually figured out is that they changed the way programs seek internet access to get their firewall to work.
There used to be this thing called something like sysproc32 or something like that, which asked for permission for the internet at random times. I wasn't doing anything internet related when it would ask, so I thought, "WinXP trying to phone home--no thanks." and set permanent deny in Zone Alarm, and everything still worked fine. Apparently with the move to SP2, all programs get their internet access requests routed through that sysproc32 thing so that Windows has a single gate with which to control access with a firewall. When I enabled that process in Zone Alarm, everything worked again. The downside of all this is that Zone Alarm becomes basically useless as you cannot control individual program access any more.
Yep, the NES was the bread and butter of my game-playing youth. I developed a blister and then a callous on the end of my left thumb that persisted for several years because of that. I still think it is the best movement control for scrollers or platformers. The only design problem I saw with that first NES design was how hard it was on your thumb because of the rough edges/corners and those arrow symbols engraved into the plastic on each direction. I remember playing Tecmo Super Bowl often at a friend's house (he and his brother and I would each pick a team and play through whole seasons) and if you broke loose for a long touchdown run, while trying to dodge tacklers, you were saying, "Ow ow ow." by the time you were getting close to the endzone.:) With the SNES they did round off those edges so it didn't hurt quite so much.
I read some comments on here about the NES Max and NES Advantage. I liked the Max because turbo buttons are invaluable on some games(Gunsmoke), but so much of my play was trained to a pad of some sort instead of joystick, that I couldn't get used to the Advantage. Also, I prefer to hold the controller, rather than having the base of the controller slide around as I move a joystick. That pad thing on the Max(I think they called it a "cyloid" control) was a little harder than the regular pad for most games, but I did find it useful in only about one situation--Track and Field II. There was a hammer throw event, where you had to go round and round on the pad to build up your speed before releasing that ball and chain, and you just couldn't beat the Max for doing that. Actually the Max was great for about every event in that game because most of the others involved pounding the buttons to go faster, vs. just holding down a turbo button.
Not really a sequel--it would probably be better called a spin-off, like The Jeffersons was a spin-off TV show from All in the Family(Archie Bunker). The main character of Commando was called Super-Joe. Bionic Commando was a different guy going through a different type of game, but Nintendo linked in the plot so that the goal was to rescue Super-Joe, who had been kidnapped.
I think of it in the same was as how Mario stuck his big mustached nose into just about every game Nintendo ever made(rather than licensed) for the NES, just to show that, "Hey! Look at us! We're made by Nintendo(TM)!" He was the ref in Mike Tyson's^H^H^H^H^H Punch Out and the guy throwing the pills in Dr. Mario. A friend of mine has a book about Nintendo with an article listing all the places he showed up that I can't remember.
Thank you. I've used the tohd and fromhd options, but I don't understand from the brief descriptions what the bootfrom commands are doing or why they are needed. Any explanation of that?
Where can I find a list of these bootcodes? When I boot Knoppix, and go through the F2, F3, F4 menus, it doesn't list them all, and I have looked around knopper.net/knoppix and www.knoppix.net and haven't found a list of them. Can you reply with a URL for me?
Oh, I guess I should mention, I mean a link that works. I found this list, but the link is dead.
Where can I find a list of these bootcodes? When I boot Knoppix, and go through the F2, F3, F4 menus, it doesn't list them all, and I have looked around knopper.net/knoppix and www.knoppix.net and haven't found a list of them. Can you reply with a URL for me?
Might be worth having in the car for emergencies, but it wouldn't replace anyone's daily coffee if they have any taste buds.
This reminded me of the commentary of Tycho from Penny Arcade when he first got his "pod" type coffee maker. He was so fascinated by the gadgetiness of it, that he never really checked into how good is the coffee that they make. Here were his comments on it:
I am not a coffee snob, I don't think. And my personal theological coordinate argues against the existence of sin. But this machine, or at any rate the coffee cartridge you lock the chamber on, it sins against coffee. It sins against tongues, it verifies the existence of evil. Robert Folger himself could not have devised a taste more foul, even with the use of a laboratory and an electronic supertongue which could taste in the ultraviolet spectrum. It came with a "mild" roast and a "medium" roast, which present a wild inversion of expectations. Imagine that mild and medium are points in a continuum of hideous mouth crimes. The Mild is actually the only potable version,
precisely because it tastes less like their product's theoretical maximum! Medium tastes like the mud in which dead men lie. I haven't even bothered with the Dark roast, whose flavor I imagine is somewhere between devil piss and liquid gonorrhea.
Don't dis Timmy's. For the value, it's the best brewed coffee I've ever had. We used to live in Toledo Ohio, and they had a Tim Horton's there. In 2000, we moved out to Idaho, and we miss Tim's coffee. Fortunately, there is a place that we order Tim Horton's coffee from. We also order the Pickles and Peppers relish from Tony Packo's Cafe in Toledo. Put a lot of it in when you made tuna salad, and it's amazing.
Anyway, if they're putting calcium oxide in the coffee, it'll probably taste about like Starbucks too.:)
The other possibility is that they're going to claim that IBM needed explicit permission to access a resource that was publically posted and anonymously available, which doesn't seem supported by current case law.
I hope you do not get modded up for this mis-information. This is exactly what Jon Stanley's article on Groklaw is about. The current case law is (unfortunately) in support of the concept that a flimsy usage policy is enough to establish something as being "unauthorised", and therefore subject to the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). Here is how disturbing this could be: If instead of being on an ftp site, it was plain text, linked to from their main website, but they had a notice that "The following link contains information whose access is restricted to our customers." That would be enough to make the viewing subject to the CFAA. Technical protection measures are not necessary. I encourage everyone to read Jon's article on Groklaw. It is very informative (in a disturbing, "How can they get away with this &%*$#@?" kind of way.) about the current legal precedents with respect to this act.
You might check into the system rescue CD. It is more common for CD drives to be able to boot than USB devices, anyway, but if you want to use your USB key, you may be able to use the same booting method they use to load the images of the different utilities you want.
Is there any way to get PointBlank any more? I used to play that a lot but haven't played BZFlag yet. Was PointBlank ever ported to any other type of system?
We had an SGI lab at my university ('97-98 timeframe). They had this game called PointBlank in their section of demos that was apparently also an early form of this. It featured a plane in addition to the small, medium, and large tanks. I have looked all over for this game, and it seems to have disappeared.
I really could not stand the mouse controls for Red Alert. And they were non-customizeable. You select your units with a left click and then have to also left click on the unit you want them to attack. Oops, a little bit off with that left click and missed the guy? You just deselected your units. Now you have to go back and find the ones you want, select them again, and then go back to try left clicking that enemy unit again. And don't forget that there's no attack-move(TM) command, so you either have to click directly on the enemy, or wait until your guys get close enough and then tell them to stop and hope they figure out to start shooting at stuff.
How can that kind of UI mistake be allowed to continue in a fairly popular game?
I really got going on my parents' 486, and then got my own computer in 1995 when I was starting college. It was a Pentium 100 that cost almost $3,000. I ended up skipping the Pentium II generation completely because I kept that computer (overclocked to 133) going for the next 5 years until I graduated and got a full time job and was able to buy a P-III 600. That was still our fastest computer until just a few months ago, when I put together a computer from an Athlon 1GHz someone gave me. I do derive a sense of accomplishment from building decent computers with hardly any money into it.
No kidding. Actually, this is one of the few that is actually a technical question instead of a legal one. The "Ask the Slashdot Bar Association" questions were getting old.
Not money itself. Here's the actual reference: 1 Timothy 6:10 "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs."
And for God sakes, people, you can turn the windows auto update manager off. If that's your biggest bitch, go whore yourself somewhere else.
You missed the point of most of the complaints about it. They were trying to find a way to turn it ON, as in, actually working. Most of the comments I read were from people who were trying to use this thing that supposedly works, and it's just not doing anything.
OTOH Gnumeric and / or OOo would be a good place to start. OOo xls compatibility is very good in my experience. Havent used Gnumeric for a while last time (several yrs ago) its xls compatibility was a tad ropey - Im sure its improved by now though!
That all depends on your definition(and the original poster's) of "compatibility". To open and view spreadsheets that were saved in Excel, yes, it is generally "compatible". If you are used to using Excel though, with formulas and calculations, they are all different in OOo, and it is not "compatible" in that way. You have to learn a new system of how to enter the formulas you want, and it would be quite difficult to switch back and forth if you had to use Excel at the office and OOo at home. For someone who is new to a spreadsheet and has not learned the Excel formatting for formulas, it would probably be just as easy to learn the OOo format from the beginning; they are just different.
Crap. I just re-read that and realized I used the phrase "software authentication scheme". That was a bad turn of phrase. I mean a software-implemented user authentication scheme. Please don't go off on some "I hate registering software" thing.
When I was in college, a guy I knew was working on a software authentication scheme for this senior project. Here is how it works. As a new account, you select your user name. You go through a login trainer session, where you have to type that login name about 10 times, while it reads and stores the time intervals between the characters you enter. If you haven't established a certain degree of consistency, it will ask you to enter it a few more times. So that parameter of the natural rhythm with which you type your login name is stored in the system as your "password".
So that sounds like it wouldn't work, right? People know your username so they can duplicate your login, right? Actually, it was really tight. He already had a working version that we all(in the senior design project class) got to try. We never could fool the thing. You could tell someone what your login name was and they would try and try and never could successfully login as you. The main reason this works is that you are typing your own name. If it were a generic word that most people don't have to type very often, there would probably be a lot more similarity in the way different people type it and the system wouldn't work well, but being your own name that you are used to typing, there is some muscle-memory developed that makes it flow out effortlessly and consistently, which no one else can match.
It looks like they left a couple of words out of this quote in the article:
"They're very careful and concerned about not [getting caught] doing anything that's violating their DOJ agreements," Sontag said. While not commenting specifically, Microsoft didn't deny Sontag's account.
Slashdot Mirror
Your claim about 45mpg in "realistic usage" for the Prius depends largely on a significant question. What year Prius are you talking about? I have a 2002 Prius, and yes, it gets mid 40's mpg, but my father-in-law has a 2004 Prius, after they did a large redesign with a lot of improvements. His gets mid 50's mpg in real usage. On the highway, it's actually a little better. He picked it up in Billings, Montana(the high demand was causing 1 year waiting lists at dealerships around the country) and filled up the tank before leaving there. He filled up once on the way home to Monroe Michigan. That's a 12 gallon tank, so he made that 1500 mile trip in less than 24 gallons of fuel = 60+ mpg. Sure, a diesel could probably get about 50mpg, but the pollution is still pretty bad from diesels here in the US.
There used to be this thing called something like sysproc32 or something like that, which asked for permission for the internet at random times. I wasn't doing anything internet related when it would ask, so I thought, "WinXP trying to phone home--no thanks." and set permanent deny in Zone Alarm, and everything still worked fine. Apparently with the move to SP2, all programs get their internet access requests routed through that sysproc32 thing so that Windows has a single gate with which to control access with a firewall. When I enabled that process in Zone Alarm, everything worked again. The downside of all this is that Zone Alarm becomes basically useless as you cannot control individual program access any more.
Yep, the NES was the bread and butter of my game-playing youth. I developed a blister and then a callous on the end of my left thumb that persisted for several years because of that. I still think it is the best movement control for scrollers or platformers. The only design problem I saw with that first NES design was how hard it was on your thumb because of the rough edges/corners and those arrow symbols engraved into the plastic on each direction. I remember playing Tecmo Super Bowl often at a friend's house (he and his brother and I would each pick a team and play through whole seasons) and if you broke loose for a long touchdown run, while trying to dodge tacklers, you were saying, "Ow ow ow." by the time you were getting close to the endzone. :) With the SNES they did round off those edges so it didn't hurt quite so much.
I read some comments on here about the NES Max and NES Advantage. I liked the Max because turbo buttons are invaluable on some games(Gunsmoke), but so much of my play was trained to a pad of some sort instead of joystick, that I couldn't get used to the Advantage. Also, I prefer to hold the controller, rather than having the base of the controller slide around as I move a joystick. That pad thing on the Max(I think they called it a "cyloid" control) was a little harder than the regular pad for most games, but I did find it useful in only about one situation--Track and Field II. There was a hammer throw event, where you had to go round and round on the pad to build up your speed before releasing that ball and chain, and you just couldn't beat the Max for doing that. Actually the Max was great for about every event in that game because most of the others involved pounding the buttons to go faster, vs. just holding down a turbo button.
> Bionic Commando was a sequel wasn't it?
Not really a sequel--it would probably be better called a spin-off, like The Jeffersons was a spin-off TV show from All in the Family(Archie Bunker). The main character of Commando was called Super-Joe. Bionic Commando was a different guy going through a different type of game, but Nintendo linked in the plot so that the goal was to rescue Super-Joe, who had been kidnapped.
I think of it in the same was as how Mario stuck his big mustached nose into just about every game Nintendo ever made(rather than licensed) for the NES, just to show that, "Hey! Look at us! We're made by Nintendo(TM)!" He was the ref in Mike Tyson's^H^H^H^H^H Punch Out and the guy throwing the pills in Dr. Mario. A friend of mine has a book about Nintendo with an article listing all the places he showed up that I can't remember.
Thank you. I've used the tohd and fromhd options, but I don't understand from the brief descriptions what the bootfrom commands are doing or why they are needed. Any explanation of that?
Where can I find a list of these bootcodes? When I boot Knoppix, and go through the F2, F3, F4 menus, it doesn't list them all, and I have looked around knopper.net/knoppix and www.knoppix.net and haven't found a list of them. Can you reply with a URL for me?
Don't dis Timmy's. For the value, it's the best brewed coffee I've ever had. We used to live in Toledo Ohio, and they had a Tim Horton's there. In 2000, we moved out to Idaho, and we miss Tim's coffee. Fortunately, there is a place that we order Tim Horton's coffee from. We also order the Pickles and Peppers relish from Tony Packo's Cafe in Toledo. Put a lot of it in when you made tuna salad, and it's amazing.
:)
Anyway, if they're putting calcium oxide in the coffee, it'll probably taste about like Starbucks too.
You might check into the system rescue CD. It is more common for CD drives to be able to boot than USB devices, anyway, but if you want to use your USB key, you may be able to use the same booting method they use to load the images of the different utilities you want.
Is there any way to get PointBlank any more? I used to play that a lot but haven't played BZFlag yet. Was PointBlank ever ported to any other type of system?
We had an SGI lab at my university ('97-98 timeframe). They had this game called PointBlank in their section of demos that was apparently also an early form of this. It featured a plane in addition to the small, medium, and large tanks. I have looked all over for this game, and it seems to have disappeared.
I really could not stand the mouse controls for Red Alert. And they were non-customizeable. You select your units with a left click and then have to also left click on the unit you want them to attack. Oops, a little bit off with that left click and missed the guy? You just deselected your units. Now you have to go back and find the ones you want, select them again, and then go back to try left clicking that enemy unit again. And don't forget that there's no attack-move(TM) command, so you either have to click directly on the enemy, or wait until your guys get close enough and then tell them to stop and hope they figure out to start shooting at stuff.
How can that kind of UI mistake be allowed to continue in a fairly popular game?
I really got going on my parents' 486, and then got my own computer in 1995 when I was starting college. It was a Pentium 100 that cost almost $3,000. I ended up skipping the Pentium II generation completely because I kept that computer (overclocked to 133) going for the next 5 years until I graduated and got a full time job and was able to buy a P-III 600. That was still our fastest computer until just a few months ago, when I put together a computer from an Athlon 1GHz someone gave me. I do derive a sense of accomplishment from building decent computers with hardly any money into it.
No kidding. Actually, this is one of the few that is actually a technical question instead of a legal one. The "Ask the Slashdot Bar Association" questions were getting old.
Not money itself. Here's the actual reference:
1 Timothy 6:10 "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs."
w00t!
Crap. I just re-read that and realized I used the phrase "software authentication scheme". That was a bad turn of phrase. I mean a software-implemented user authentication scheme. Please don't go off on some "I hate registering software" thing.
When I was in college, a guy I knew was working on a software authentication scheme for this senior project. Here is how it works. As a new account, you select your user name. You go through a login trainer session, where you have to type that login name about 10 times, while it reads and stores the time intervals between the characters you enter. If you haven't established a certain degree of consistency, it will ask you to enter it a few more times. So that parameter of the natural rhythm with which you type your login name is stored in the system as your "password".
So that sounds like it wouldn't work, right? People know your username so they can duplicate your login, right? Actually, it was really tight. He already had a working version that we all(in the senior design project class) got to try. We never could fool the thing. You could tell someone what your login name was and they would try and try and never could successfully login as you. The main reason this works is that you are typing your own name. If it were a generic word that most people don't have to type very often, there would probably be a lot more similarity in the way different people type it and the system wouldn't work well, but being your own name that you are used to typing, there is some muscle-memory developed that makes it flow out effortlessly and consistently, which no one else can match.
It looks like they left a couple of words out of this quote in the article:
"They're very careful and concerned about not [getting caught] doing anything that's violating their DOJ agreements," Sontag said. While not commenting specifically, Microsoft didn't deny Sontag's account.