How many visitors on Slashdot per day? I wanna see these statistics. If they only had 8 users, a quarter of them would be insignificant. If they really have millions of hits per day from hundreds of thousands of users, then 25% is enough to start a riot.
However, it's Slashdot, so I guess such a riot would never happen, it's still crazy to say "only a quarter of our users will be broken":)
And free wireless in the other sense too; you need a $100 adapter for the XBox360.
So, cheaper by $150, and $100 again for the wireless, and $50 because you don't need to buy a game just to get started, etc. etc.
Did you see the prices for the controllers? 3800 Yen for the Wiimote, 1800 for the Gamecube-style, the Nunchuck, and the rest of the gamut. That's like super-cheap ($30 and $15 respectively).
One thing I am aching for now, just for my friends (I hate these games) is one of those singalong games, where you could just plug a microphone attachment where the Nunchuck would go, and hold it and wave it around like Whitney or Britney or Christina and have your 3D avatar do the same. They'd go nuts for that while I was drinking all the alcohol:)
Bundling a game by force at least means retailers will have to think twice about "compulsory bundling" like they did with the XBox360. Remember when the Playstation 2 came out? A lot of people bought one in the beginning because they wanted a new console but ALSO because their original Playstation 1 was completely hosed through 6 years of play. They come into the store, with their $500 for the new box, and... oh.. I have to buy one of these "packs" with 2 shitty racing games in it? All I wanted was the PS2, the demo disk, a new Dual Shock ('cos my old one is friiied) and to play all my old games maybe with some texture filtering. Denied. Disappointed. Hand over the $750:(
I love love love the browser, and the weather thing, and virtual console.. just seeing R-Type in Nintendo's Japanese presentation made me wet. I want to play Super Mario World again, and when I get stuck, I want to press the HOME button, fire up Opera, and look for the GameFAQs article. Oh no more running for a magazine or booting the PC just for that!
Playing all those old Gamecube games for $5-$10 in the bargain and second-user bins at Gamestop will keep me happy for SOOOO long.
Yeah we'd all like it to cost $150, but Nintendo are apparently going to sell the Wii at a profit in contrast to the super-expensive loss-making XBox360 and Playstation 3. They have plenty of scope to cost reduce, lower consumer prices in the future, without it being a real financial tussle for them.
HOORAY! I've never been this excited about a games console in my life.
POWER5 would kick an Opteron's ass. However.. it would cost 5 times more if you bought it from IBM. I guess IBM don't even want to pay their own premiums for their own top-class chips:(
Not that the console might have an aftermarket resale value more than 4x over and above it's retail price, but that there are fucking parents out there, who will go to eBay and spend $2000 on a fucking console for their spoilt fucking brat kid.
Fuck you, if you're one of those parents. You are exactly the kind of person that makes this world a horrible place to live in. A little patience wouldn't go amiss, you know. Jimmy will have his PS3 before he goes back to school, you don't need to give it to him on Christmas Day (although I know if I had a kid like yours, who demands that he has a $2000 games console, I would be giving him a kick up the backside for Christmas, and not a PS3)
I seem to recall that Linux swsusp2 uses the swap file as standby/hibernation space; in this case you should have enough swap space to store the compressed memory image (gzip loves to say it can compress to about 1/3 of the filesize, so I guess make it 1/2 your memory even if you have 2GB. You will need it to suspend, if nothing else, and can turn down the swap behaviour using kernel tunables.
By the way when an application loads it probably is pushed in via mmap and therefore isn't much different from loading it from swap anyway.
Most swap access on most systems is pre-emptive, so that the system performance balances out. Stuff that isn't used much goes into swap, and until reallocated stays in physical memory anyway. As soon as you need that memory, it doesn't need to swap out those pages. That's why Windows is always clacking at your disk while idle. Also; Linux allocates the vast majority of truly free physical memory to disk cache anyway (unused memory is wasted memory) so in the process of resizing caches and giving memory back, doing disk writes to flush that disk cache, you also get clacking of your disk for that.
Seriously, you can't think using the disk is a bad thing? Just wait for those new NVRAM drives, swap will have never been faster.
On a lighter note, for 32-bit systems who don't want the overhead of PAE for main processes, there are methods to map the >4GB range and use Northbridge DMA to activate this RAM (maybe up to 60GB if you're insane) as a virtual swap disk. Imagine swap that's just as fast as RAM, with only the overhead of a context switch into the extended page map.. that would be neat. I wonder why nobody every implemented this in Linux for PAE (or PowerPC goddamn it!) systems:(
Unfortunately the Darwinians are SOOOO fucking stupid. You have to micromanage them around every mountain and tree until they get to some unobtainable version number.
It does show you can bring out a lot of gaming in very few real actions though.
Like I said I hope the new controllers f.i on the Wii will encourage designers to think about how you can get things done with one hand, one wavy pointer, and maybe 3 buttons, WHILE reducing the number of actions (it would be too easy to have one of them be a menu button).
I always loved the way Square's "Ring Menu" (see Secret of Mana etc.) worked. Mix that with an iPod ClickWheel thing, that would be awesome for an RTS game with a wavy pointer. You could just hold down a button, wave the wand to rotate the wheel and let it select it by letting go of the button. However I think they patented it, or at least Apple probably have a patent now on the same kind of idea:(
I hope games consoles like the Wii simplify this. Mouse clicks turn to buttons etc. but you can do everything you'd ever want with a mouse. I think waving a pointer or using a stylus just seems easier.. I *LOVE* playing RTS games with my Wacom, it's so much friendlier selecting units that way:)
Young woman agent works for secret agency happens to be involved with aliens, evil megacorporation, go to Area 51. It was SO contrived.
Halo is worse.
And of course both games suffered from having the shittiest control systems on the planet. Why nobody came up with a better controller for FPS on console systems before the Wii, I have no idea. I mean other than a PS/2 keyboard and mouse attached to an adapter on your PS2:)
Of course Microsoft are not a stupid company. They'll produce software where they think they will make money. As Windows gets more and more of a pain in the ass for people (I'm thinking governments etc. proposing and actually doing the dance of moving to a Linux desktop or an Open Document Format) and they move away from those, they still want Office, some Microsoft products, some migration or keepsake Microsoft functionality. They may even begrudge the fact that they have to leave a perfectly good solution behind.
MS will notice (they already have..) and then they will pounce with something like they did with IE for Solaris. Something to keep the MS Office wanters happy. I doubt we will see mass migration of Windows users to Linux just because we will eventually have the "real" MS Office there. But it will make some corporate environments a little less tense when it comes to document swapping time..
If the astronomers who thought of the new classification system really give a shit about reclassifying something that will happen in a FEW BILLION YEARS.
If we are even still on Earth in the year 3,000,000,2006 - that is.
Having moved from the UK (Alt Gr!) to the US (Right-Alt is the fucking same as Left-Alt!?!?!) I heartily agree with this.
Alt Gr should be a standard key everywhere. I just can't type ANY non-ASCII character with a US keymap unless I resort to charmap or the Alt-numpad option. And since I am using a laptop; that doesn't work anyway. Infuriating.
I use the Windows key all the time, it sames me picking up a mouse if I can just go tap-tap-tap on a couple keys in the corner and get a "Run" dialog up (Windows-R), show the desktop (Windows-D) or pick My Computer from the menu using arrows. I guess each to his own. But the menu key, I've never used that, because the Alt key does the same damn thing in every app. If I press it in here Firefox gives me the textbox editing menu but I never use that even with the mouse.
My Mom loves Rainbow Islands, and all those classic arcade games of that ilk.
Of course Taito collection is already on the XBox so it was mom friendly when it came out. Does it still work under the emulation?
I only wish they would have provided a real Bug joystick, and let Bub and Bob jump using pushing up of the joystick, rather than pressing a button. You can't fire rainbows and jump so easily with two buttons on one hand:(
She loves the ORIGINAL Mario (or the Mario Allstars version. As long as it's the Super Mario Bros. or Lost Levels versions, or Mario 3. Anything else she won't play). Once XBox 360 gets those, it'll be on a win. ROTFLMAO. I guess Wii wins there.
Anyone thinking of porting Tapper to a next-gen console?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly: why would you buy an $18,000 server to use gzip? :)
:)
If gzip were at all optimized for Power, it would fly. But nobody buys $18,000 servers to run gzip so nobody does.
Try unfolding proteins or simulating weather patterns or.. god forbid.. determining if the nuclear stockpile is gonna degrade and explode
As user 740018, 25% of users is 185000 people.
:)
How many visitors on Slashdot per day? I wanna see these statistics. If they only had 8 users, a quarter of them would be insignificant. If they really have millions of hits per day from hundreds of thousands of users, then 25% is enough to start a riot.
However, it's Slashdot, so I guess such a riot would never happen, it's still crazy to say "only a quarter of our users will be broken"
And free wireless in the other sense too; you need a $100 adapter for the XBox360.
:)
So, cheaper by $150, and $100 again for the wireless, and $50 because you don't need to buy a game just to get started, etc. etc.
Did you see the prices for the controllers? 3800 Yen for the Wiimote, 1800 for the Gamecube-style, the Nunchuck, and the rest of the gamut. That's like super-cheap ($30 and $15 respectively).
One thing I am aching for now, just for my friends (I hate these games) is one of those singalong games, where you could just plug a microphone attachment where the Nunchuck would go, and hold it and wave it around like Whitney or Britney or Christina and have your 3D avatar do the same. They'd go nuts for that while I was drinking all the alcohol
Well, I was thinking of it in a very Avid Merrion kind of way.
e s/B/bo_selecta/
I want to put my wet on my Wii. AHEM.
http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsit
Bundling a game by force at least means retailers will have to think twice about "compulsory bundling" like they did with the XBox360. Remember when the Playstation 2 came out? A lot of people bought one in the beginning because they wanted a new console but ALSO because their original Playstation 1 was completely hosed through 6 years of play. They come into the store, with their $500 for the new box, and... oh.. I have to buy one of these "packs" with 2 shitty racing games in it? All I wanted was the PS2, the demo disk, a new Dual Shock ('cos my old one is friiied) and to play all my old games maybe with some texture filtering. Denied. Disappointed. Hand over the $750 :(
I love love love the browser, and the weather thing, and virtual console.. just seeing R-Type in Nintendo's Japanese presentation made me wet. I want to play Super Mario World again, and when I get stuck, I want to press the HOME button, fire up Opera, and look for the GameFAQs article. Oh no more running for a magazine or booting the PC just for that!
Playing all those old Gamecube games for $5-$10 in the bargain and second-user bins at Gamestop will keep me happy for SOOOO long.
Yeah we'd all like it to cost $150, but Nintendo are apparently going to sell the Wii at a profit in contrast to the super-expensive loss-making XBox360 and Playstation 3. They have plenty of scope to cost reduce, lower consumer prices in the future, without it being a real financial tussle for them.
HOORAY! I've never been this excited about a games console in my life.
You have to be kidding, right? :P
:(
POWER5 would kick an Opteron's ass. However.. it would cost 5 times more if you bought it from IBM. I guess IBM don't even want to pay their own premiums for their own top-class chips
Not amazing, SCARY.
Not that the console might have an aftermarket resale value more than 4x over and above it's retail price, but that there are fucking parents out there, who will go to eBay and spend $2000 on a fucking console for their spoilt fucking brat kid.
Fuck you, if you're one of those parents. You are exactly the kind of person that makes this world a horrible place to live in. A little patience wouldn't go amiss, you know. Jimmy will have his PS3 before he goes back to school, you don't need to give it to him on Christmas Day (although I know if I had a kid like yours, who demands that he has a $2000 games console, I would be giving him a kick up the backside for Christmas, and not a PS3)
Nah. They were too Powerful.
Looks like it's Opterons.. and they're using that "plug chips into spare AMD sockets" thing to put the Cell processor on the HT bus.
Sounds neat. Shame they didn't use POWER5 or something though..
Because you make more money that way.
PowerPC or x86 or something else?
Well, if you walk in and don't TAKE anything, it's free.
I'm sure it's cheaper at 20 cents per copy than Google's friends are charging..
The library has old newspapers for free.
a ry_of_congress_to_digitize_old_newspapers.php
You can order old newspapers from the Library of Congress FOR FREE.
http://utterlyboring.com/archives/2004/11/23/libr
Although I can't for the life of me work out HOW to get them from the LOC, it's probably hidden deep on their website. If you call 'em up though..
You could ship a 20k script that sets up Firefox or IE (via group policy) to do exactly the same thing.
A whole new browser? Give me a fucking break. I remember how shitty Freeserve was and still is, okay?
I seem to recall that Linux swsusp2 uses the swap file as standby/hibernation space; in this case you should have enough swap space to store the compressed memory image (gzip loves to say it can compress to about 1/3 of the filesize, so I guess make it 1/2 your memory even if you have 2GB. You will need it to suspend, if nothing else, and can turn down the swap behaviour using kernel tunables.
:(
By the way when an application loads it probably is pushed in via mmap and therefore isn't much different from loading it from swap anyway.
Most swap access on most systems is pre-emptive, so that the system performance balances out.
Stuff that isn't used much goes into swap, and until reallocated stays in physical memory anyway. As soon as you need that memory, it doesn't need to swap out those pages. That's why Windows is always clacking at your disk while idle. Also; Linux allocates the vast majority of truly free physical memory to disk cache anyway (unused memory is wasted memory) so in the process of resizing caches and giving memory back, doing disk writes to flush that disk cache, you also get clacking of your disk for that.
Seriously, you can't think using the disk is a bad thing? Just wait for those new NVRAM drives, swap will have never been faster.
On a lighter note, for 32-bit systems who don't want the overhead of PAE for main processes, there are methods to map the >4GB range and use Northbridge DMA to activate this RAM (maybe up to 60GB if you're insane) as a virtual swap disk. Imagine swap that's just as fast as RAM, with only the overhead of a context switch into the extended page map.. that would be neat. I wonder why nobody every implemented this in Linux for PAE (or PowerPC goddamn it!) systems
Unfortunately the Darwinians are SOOOO fucking stupid. You have to micromanage them around every mountain and tree until they get to some unobtainable version number.
:(
It does show you can bring out a lot of gaming in very few real actions though.
Like I said I hope the new controllers f.i on the Wii will encourage designers to think about how you can get things done with one hand, one wavy pointer, and maybe 3 buttons, WHILE reducing the number of actions (it would be too easy to have one of them be a menu button).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiken_Densetsu
I always loved the way Square's "Ring Menu" (see Secret of Mana etc.) worked. Mix that with an iPod ClickWheel thing, that would be awesome for an RTS game with a wavy pointer. You could just hold down a button, wave the wand to rotate the wheel and let it select it by letting go of the button. However I think they patented it, or at least Apple probably have a patent now on the same kind of idea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinia_(computer_ga me)
:)
Simple but still a fucking bore to control.
I hope games consoles like the Wii simplify this. Mouse clicks turn to buttons etc. but you can do everything you'd ever want with a mouse. I think waving a pointer or using a stylus just seems easier.. I *LOVE* playing RTS games with my Wacom, it's so much friendlier selecting units that way
Perfect Dark's plot was stupid.
:)
Young woman agent works for secret agency happens to be involved with aliens, evil megacorporation, go to Area 51. It was SO contrived.
Halo is worse.
And of course both games suffered from having the shittiest control systems on the planet. Why nobody came up with a better controller for FPS on console systems before the Wii, I have no idea. I mean other than a PS/2 keyboard and mouse attached to an adapter on your PS2
Well personally I don't count radio shows that turned TV ;)
:)
Ahhh.. it's nice to know at least we don't have the monopoly on drudging out the same old shit year after year. I mean that's a good thing, right?
Is any US Sci-Fi show (or any show whatsoever) ever going to beat Doctor Who (or Coronation Street)?
Of course Microsoft are not a stupid company. They'll produce software where they think they will make money. As Windows gets more and more of a pain in the ass for people (I'm thinking governments etc. proposing and actually doing the dance of moving to a Linux desktop or an Open Document Format) and they move away from those, they still want Office, some Microsoft products, some migration or keepsake Microsoft functionality. They may even begrudge the fact that they have to leave a perfectly good solution behind.
MS will notice (they already have..) and then they will pounce with something like they did with IE for Solaris. Something to keep the MS Office wanters happy. I doubt we will see mass migration of Windows users to Linux just because we will eventually have the "real" MS Office there. But it will make some corporate environments a little less tense when it comes to document swapping time..
If the astronomers who thought of the new classification system really give a shit about reclassifying something that will happen in a FEW BILLION YEARS.
If we are even still on Earth in the year 3,000,000,2006 - that is.
There are only 500 children in Thailand?
:D
If not "a laptop for every child" is a bit short
Having moved from the UK (Alt Gr!) to the US (Right-Alt is the fucking same as Left-Alt!?!?!) I heartily agree with this.
Alt Gr should be a standard key everywhere. I just can't type ANY non-ASCII character with a US keymap unless I resort to charmap or the Alt-numpad option. And since I am using a laptop; that doesn't work anyway. Infuriating.
I use the Windows key all the time, it sames me picking up a mouse if I can just go tap-tap-tap on a couple keys in the corner and get a "Run" dialog up (Windows-R), show the desktop (Windows-D) or pick My Computer from the menu using arrows. I guess each to his own. But the menu key, I've never used that, because the Alt key does the same damn thing in every app. If I press it in here Firefox gives me the textbox editing menu but I never use that even with the mouse.
My Mom loves Rainbow Islands, and all those classic arcade games of that ilk.
:(
:)
y er.php?game=tapper
Of course Taito collection is already on the XBox so it was mom friendly when it came out. Does it still work under the emulation?
I only wish they would have provided a real Bug joystick, and let Bub and Bob jump using pushing up of the joystick, rather than pressing a button. You can't fire rainbows and jump so easily with two buttons on one hand
She loves the ORIGINAL Mario (or the Mario Allstars version. As long as it's the Super Mario Bros. or Lost Levels versions, or Mario 3. Anything else she won't play). Once XBox 360 gets those, it'll be on a win. ROTFLMAO. I guess Wii wins there.
Anyone thinking of porting Tapper to a next-gen console?
http://www.midway.com/classicGames/classicGamePla