so throughput for netMD is 495KB / min (9000KB uncompressed/18.18)
which gives 742.5KB / mAh (495KB * 1.5 min/mAh)
on the equivalent of 2AA batteries that's ~ 4000mAh = 2.83 GB transferred on one charge.
Not shabby. Certainly enough to play games without the drive being the battery killer. Yeah, it's probably a best-case scenario, but at least it's a baseline grounded in something we know as fact. Anyway, we'll know the truth soon, so this is sorta irrelevant.
*Mild spoiler warning!*... Which you had to use to clear the minefield in front of the Vulture's hideout. Cute, yellow, mechanical bunnies handled by a grizzly biker. LucasArts was ahead of its time on that one!
I bought my projector screen on ebay from a place called Inventory Solutions Inc. I got a 60"x60" piece of DaLite material on a broken tripod for $35, although they often sell bigger ones. My friend has bought from them too, and they were very good with his slightly problematic order. They also have a good reputation on a few DIY projection forums.
I think DVD media is sort of hard-coded with a maximum burn speed. It will usually say the maximum supported speed on the media packaging, or Nero Bruning Rom can tell you what that speed is if you click on "medium info." After doing some online research it seems like Ritek/Ridata makes good 4x media at a reasonable price. I bought myself a spindle of 25 and have had zero problems burning at 4x so far.
I really liked the old SEGA commercials. They seemed to be pretty popular with the target age group. Gotta love it when that guy would scream "SEGA!" at the end =) some old sega aommercials
Here's at least one correction. The zero-checksum thing isn't really where the copy protection happens, although this is widely believed. There's a 28-page forum thread at
that talks all about it. A shorter summary is on this page, around the middle:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/archive/topic/73691.htm l
Quoted from that summary (excuse the grammar...):
"The track(s) of a pressed CD consist of an as good as straigth spiral, beginning in the inner circle and continuing 'til the outside edge. The factor "almost straight" is very important. Because the laser-unit has some tracking coils, which purpose is to keep the laser-beam, or better reflection of the beam!, as good as centered even if the CD spins at a very high speed, so the beam doesnt loose the trail while reading the track.
The PSXs tracking coils took some advantage of this tecnic, and they have a special output for "tracking errors". Because at the pressing state of the PSX CDs, the Lead-In gets a very little, but still recognisable modulation (near as it was in earlier time on vinyl records). That modulation constists of long or shorter tracks of 22khz wobble pulses, the shortes distance we found out is ca. the lengt of: 1/3 to 1/4 CD sector. The signals consist of the SCEE, SCEA, or SCEI characters in old RS232 transmission code, which is already completly decoded and no big secret.
The modchip simply injects that SCEx characters into the needed wire at the needed time and so the PSX BIOS and CPU 'thinks', the CD-controller sends over the correct signal and starts the boot code sequence. "
Sony was actually pretty crafty with this system. Not that it's not easily defeated, but it had a lot of people (myself included) fooled for a long time!
This post got me thinking that PCs ten years from today might have enough memory to do all 3d rendering with voxels.
The first games were vector based (tempest, vectrex), then came 2d raster graphics (NES, SNES). We are currently in the vector era of 3d graphics, and 10 years from now we might have insanely detailed voxel grahpics. A 1024^3 scene is doable in a few GB of grahpics memory.
2d raster grahpics are such a quantum leap over 2d vector grahpics, I can imagine photorealism being achievable with voxel-based technology provided enough memory.
I've recently switched to Opera for it's smooth handling of keyboard-based web page navigation. I like Mozilla and its ilk a lot, but lately my mouse hand has been aching from overuse, and I just can't tolerate using it as often as the web usually requires.
I highly recommend you give Opera a try if you also have mouse related discomfort. It basically involves holding shift and pressing the arrow keys to navigate links. It's smart enough that if you pagedown and press shift+arrows, it will only highlight links in the viewable portion of the page. It's been a great help, I surf mostly mouse-free, and my right hand feels a lot better.
If anybody knows of a similar way to do this with Mozilla (without pressing tab 500 times), I'm all ears. The Opera controls are also configurable, for those that want to have an ideal personal setup.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out Switcher for Vista, freeware similar to Expose: http://insentient.net/
Very back of the envelope, based on what we know about MiniDisc players. Everything very approximate.
Assuming UMD is no more efficient than MD, here goes:
MD is a mature technology ~ 150MB
For a modern netMD:
66kbps gives 50 hours on one AA battery ~ 2000 mAh
so
1.5 min / mAh
1 min = 9000KB uncompressed = 150KBps = 1200kbps
1200/66 = 18.18:1 compression
so throughput for netMD is 495KB / min (9000KB uncompressed/18.18)
which gives
742.5KB / mAh (495KB * 1.5 min/mAh)
on the equivalent of 2AA batteries that's ~ 4000mAh = 2.83 GB transferred on one charge.
Not shabby. Certainly enough to play games without the drive being the battery killer. Yeah, it's probably a best-case scenario, but at least it's a baseline grounded in something we know as fact. Anyway, we'll know the truth soon, so this is sorta irrelevant.
*Mild spoiler warning!* ... Which you had to use to clear the minefield in front of the Vulture's hideout. Cute, yellow, mechanical bunnies handled by a grizzly biker. LucasArts was ahead of its time on that one!
I bought my projector screen on ebay from a place called Inventory Solutions Inc. I got a 60"x60" piece of DaLite material on a broken tripod for $35, although they often sell bigger ones. My friend has bought from them too, and they were very good with his slightly problematic order. They also have a good reputation on a few DIY projection forums.
Their website is http://www.avforsale.com/
I think DVD media is sort of hard-coded with a maximum burn speed. It will usually say the maximum supported speed on the media packaging, or Nero Bruning Rom can tell you what that speed is if you click on "medium info." After doing some online research it seems like Ritek/Ridata makes good 4x media at a reasonable price. I bought myself a spindle of 25 and have had zero problems burning at 4x so far.
I really liked the old SEGA commercials. They seemed to be pretty popular with the target age group. Gotta love it when that guy would scream "SEGA!" at the end =)
some old sega aommercials
Here's at least one correction. The zero-checksum thing isn't really where the copy protection happens, although this is widely believed. There's a 28-page forum thread at
i d= 48477
m l
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?&thread
that talks all about it. A shorter summary is on this page, around the middle:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/archive/topic/73691.ht
Quoted from that summary (excuse the grammar...):
"The track(s) of a pressed CD consist of an as good as
straigth spiral, beginning in the inner circle and
continuing 'til the outside edge.
The factor "almost straight" is very important.
Because the laser-unit has some tracking coils, which
purpose is to keep the laser-beam, or better reflection
of the beam!, as good as centered even if the CD
spins at a very high speed, so the beam doesnt loose
the trail while reading the track.
The PSXs tracking coils took some advantage of this
tecnic, and they have a special output for
"tracking errors". Because at the pressing state of the
PSX CDs, the Lead-In gets a very little, but still
recognisable modulation (near as it was in earlier time
on vinyl records). That modulation constists of long
or shorter tracks of 22khz wobble pulses, the
shortes distance we found out is ca. the lengt of:
1/3 to 1/4 CD sector. The signals consist of the SCEE,
SCEA, or SCEI characters in old RS232 transmission code,
which is already completly decoded and no big secret.
The modchip simply injects that SCEx characters into
the needed wire at the needed time and so the PSX
BIOS and CPU 'thinks', the CD-controller sends over the
correct signal and starts the boot code sequence. "
Sony was actually pretty crafty with this system. Not that it's not easily defeated, but it had a lot of people (myself included) fooled for a long time!
This post got me thinking that PCs ten years from today might have enough memory to do all 3d rendering with voxels.
The first games were vector based (tempest, vectrex), then came 2d raster graphics (NES, SNES). We are currently in the vector era of 3d graphics, and 10 years from now we might have insanely detailed voxel grahpics. A 1024^3 scene is doable in a few GB of grahpics memory.
2d raster grahpics are such a quantum leap over 2d vector grahpics, I can imagine photorealism being achievable with voxel-based technology provided enough memory.
I've recently switched to Opera for it's smooth handling of keyboard-based web page navigation. I like Mozilla and its ilk a lot, but lately my mouse hand has been aching from overuse, and I just can't tolerate using it as often as the web usually requires.
I highly recommend you give Opera a try if you also have mouse related discomfort. It basically involves holding shift and pressing the arrow keys to navigate links. It's smart enough that if you pagedown and press shift+arrows, it will only highlight links in the viewable portion of the page. It's been a great help, I surf mostly mouse-free, and my right hand feels a lot better.
Check out the controls here:
http://stefan.huberdoc.at/opera/keyboardhelp.html
If anybody knows of a similar way to do this with Mozilla (without pressing tab 500 times), I'm all ears. The Opera controls are also configurable, for those that want to have an ideal personal setup.