The one thing I've never been able to adjust to on US keyboards is the Enter key. I don't know if it's a common thing, but they always seem to be 3 keys wide and only 1 key tall on US keyboards, whereas the UK enter key is about 1.5 keys wide and 2 keys tall.
My inaccurate fingers seem to find the UK key more easily. It's not a massive thing but worth remembering.
I wonder if it's possible to a spare buy UK Dell laptop keyboard and fit it to a US model? I've dismantled a couple of laptops and the keyboard is pretty modular, you'd just need the one for the UK model. Assuming you can get Dell to sell one...:)
It does look a bit bulky, then again I still wear my "bulky" Casio Databank watch, I'd be lost without it. Although in comparison it's a tiny watch. If everyone is wearing something that big I might be persuaded but it looks delicate too, one clumsy swing of the arm could result in a broken screen...
I've looked for possible replacesments to my Casio Databank lots of times, but things like the (now cancelled) Fossil PDA watch and this can't seem to match the battery life of my trusty Casio (currently 5 years compared to the Fossil's 4 days).
It's true these newer "watches" have CPU's and screens that provide flexibility for other applications, but I can't see them being that much better at reminding me when Eastenders is on, what time it is in France or even retrieving a phone number. Which is all I really want from a watch to be honest. And the Casio is decidedly smaller and more resistent to the odd bang too.
That said this old watch isn't going to last forever, and I don't like the current Databank watches- it seems the new ones only allow a stingy 8 characters to be entered per reminder or contact; compared to the "huge" 16 of my current watch. You'd think they'd add more space not less!:)
To paraphrase the immortal Douglas Adams, I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
I didn't want to give many details since it might give scammers hints (not that I did anything really clever here), but since I've given the impression I spend my days snooping people's emails, I'll try to go into some detail. The first thing to tip me off was just the large number of signups from the same address. At first I thought it was another 419er.
Next I checked his sign up details, he'd created 50 accounts all with the same details (e.g. firstname, lastname, address were all identical). Finally, earlier that week I had noticed a large amount of traffic from eBay's mail system, delivering lots of emails to these accounts.
With a give away like that I did one final check by looking up some of his addresses on eBay. He was selling satellite nav, plasma TVs etc, and all of it was way too cheap for what it was worth. At this point I thought that if he wasn't scamming, why set up 50 separate accounts? The whole point of the eBay feedback system is that lots of good feedback shows you are a trustworthy seller. So by then I was certain he was up to no good and checked one of his mailboxes, which revealed the last of his tricks:
The guy would open an auction, and invite potential buyers to email him any questions about the product. When he'd got enough "fish on the hook" he would close the auction and email the "fish" telling them he was having problems with eBay but he was still willing to sell if they were interested. He then asked if they would mind paying him directly.... Since he only had 1 of each product to sell on eBay it was clear he was trying to sell the same thing multiple times and by being paid directly he was skipping the relative safety of PayPal et al. At which point I slapped the auto-responders on and locked his accounts.
It is a condition in our T&Cs that we reserve the right to inspect an account if we suspect illegal activity, but I only exercise that right if I am absolutely sure there is something going on. Usually this means an email sent to the abuse address with headers that prove the email came from our system.
Now, if you think eBay scammers are bad, try keeping 419ers of your system. Luckily the rise of broadband means they usually have the same IP address for extended periods of time. So when we are informed of a scamming account we can find all of their other accounts at the same time.
I run a webmail system and I caught someone signing up multiple accounts and creating fake auctions on eBay. He had about 50 accounts when I caught him. I tried reporting the accounts he'd created to eBay but they didn't reply.
So instead I locked all his accounts and put an auto-responder message on them. This auto-responder would explain to the sender that the guy was a con-artist and that they should not under any circumstances send him money.
I wish I could have seen his face when he realised he'd lost all his correspondance with people he was planning to con.
Isn't this totally pointless for finding "real" pirates anyway? For starters what people downloaded wasn't even illegal. I mean if I write a "Hello World" program and call it UT2004.exe does that mean everyone who downloads it is likely to be an evil pirate?
Unless these guys have created fake files that match the size of the real thing (UT2004 is ~4Gb) and present it in the form of a CD image, surely the only people who would be fooled by this would be people who think a little 100k program could be a full game.
This is hardly going to get very far with the BitTorrent or EMule scene is it? A pointless exercise that does nothing but put a back door into people's computers.
This seems to bear out the rumours that "the next big thing" from Intel on the desktop will be based on the Pentium M which is a chip which ably demonstrates that more Megahurtz isn't necessarily better.
I guess Intel is starting this change in numbering early so it doesn't debut a new chip and a new way of labelling the speed of the chip at the same time. Launching both at the same time might look suspicious to less informed buyers, especially if Intel goes from selling 4Ghz chips to 2.4Ghz chips with a PR of 4500+. By starting early hopefully people will be more accustomed to the new numbering scheme and less likely to think they are being conned. A friend recently told me he had bought a new 3Ghz Athlon XP, he was ready to take it back to the shop after I explained what the 3000 meant!
I wonder how compatible this will be with AMD's PR ratings? What would the equivalent to an Athlon 64 with a PR of 3400 be? I hope Intel doesn't invent a PR system that deliberately uses bigger PR numbers than AMDs. I can see confusion amongst consumers who will think an Athlon 64 4000+ is not a match for a "Pentium 5 6000" even if they are equivalent performers.
While Megahurtz has long been a poor way of determining the speed of a chip, I think having two different PR systems that aren't compatible could be worse.
You're partially right, US SNES consoles were never prevented from playing Japanese games, however I think most cartridges did have region chips in them.
I live in the UK and owned a Japanese Super Famicom and I was unable to play UK or US games without an adaptor. Naturally the US games wouldn't fit without a bridge adaptor (or hacking lumps out of the cartidge port) but Nintendo eventually got wise to this and prevented US games playing on Jap/UK machines. To get around this importers had to buy new adaptors which allowed two cartridges to be plugged onto them, one cartridge was the game you wanted to play, and the other supplied the region checking to fool the console into thinking it was playing a game from its region.
The absolute best reason buying adaptors was for PAL Mario Kart, because of the extra lines of the PAL TV system the PAL version would have run slower or had big borders. Happily it was full screen and optimised to try and make it as fast as the Jap/US version, so when playing on a US/Jap machine in NTSC mode it was the fastest of all the versions.:)
The NES was actually region locked internally for Europe which was easily remedied by cutting a couple of wires!
Most cartridges since the Famicom/NES have had country lock-out chips (kind of like DVD regions) but aside from a few notable examples there wasn't any kind of copy protection- there wasn't much need as cartridge counterfeiting is pretty difficult when there are custom chips like the SuperFX in them.
IIRC Street Fighter Alpha and Star Ocean both did employ encryption but I those were the only ones.
With the widespread availability of flash cartridges for the GBA I'm surprised Nintendo hasn't started throwing its weight around sooner. It's a shame for emulation fans like myself though,
I can understand why they'd go after the Tapwave Zodiac too, it can currently emulate NES games perfectly and SNES emulation is starting to make good progress, who wants to pay $30 for a GBA port of a SNES game when you can download the original for free and play it on the Zodiac?
I'm sure the fact that Nintendo is now selling expensive collector editions of its old NES games for the GBA in Japan has nothing to do with this.... It's been huge a success so I suspect they are now looking at re-releasing other classics and are making sure emulation isn't going to spoil business.
This is interesting and surprising, I expected older games to be less likely to rely on Vblanks for timing, but in fact it seems those old games were very well written.
Conversely I recently read a review of an Xbox which had been "upgraded" with a 1400Mhz CPU which showed that lots of games stopped working properly because they relied on the exact timing of the CPU! The review is here if anyone's interested.
Predictions like this are pretty pointless, if Microsoft manage to get GTA4 as an exclusive and have Halo 3, Ninja Gaiden 2, Knights of the Old Republic 3, etc ready for launch I could see the next console war happening differently.
I believe that the Xbox2 and PS3 are going to launch at roughly the same time so it will be the exclusives to each platform announced between now and launch time that will probably decide who wins the opening salvos.
Of course if one machine is much more powerful than another that could also skew the sales regardless of the quality of launch titles.
According to the article we need to upgrade less often, it says buying a new PC every 2-3 years is too much strain on the environment.
Uh-oh. Aside from the case I usually change everything in my computer every 6 months! If I'd followed this advice and still had my PC from 4 years ago I'd be trying to play Half Life 2 and Doom 3 on a P2 266 and Riva TNT this summer. Scary.
I can't see many people following this advice unfortunately.
Is it just me, or isn't it a bit unfair to expect potential employees to reveal their online names? I mean I wouldn't want my boss seeing what I post on the animalsex.com boards...
Seriously though, I don't think it's fair to poke into people's personal lives just to see if they have ever said anything negative about Open Source.
Hmmm, I have an interview next week, better make myself look good... Open Source is great!
I've heard these touch screen rumours too, it makes me wonder if the DS will even have the conventional D-pad and buttons or if every game might have its own "virtual" joypad on the lower screen.
Given how Nintendo loves to design controllers around games this could be the ultimate way of creating controls unique to each game.
Using Nintendo's example of a football game, the top screen could focus on a single player and the bottom screen could allow the player to touch the player they want to select, or to even "draw" a path with their finger to tell the player to pass the ball in a particular direction. This could even work better than a mouse for some games.
That said, having tried to play emulators on my iPaq with a virtual joypad it's very difficult because you have no tactile feedback of when your fingers are over the buttons. E3 is going to be interesting...
From this article it looks like the HDTV All-In-Wonder card won't have any useful video input sockets on the card and there's no mention of any external connector box.
I really want a decent means for connecting things like games consoles to my PC monitor. All the VGA boxes out there just give horrid blurry pictures because they double the scanlines of the picture. I wish someone would do a card with component or SCART inputs.:(
I find the Dreamcast controller to be sadly underrated by many people, I hated it to start with but after Crazy Taxi I grew to really love the pad, particularly the analogue stick which I think is probably my favourite ever because it had a very smooth action.
I thought the "fat" X-Box controller would be the spiritual successor to the DC's pad, but sadly it was some weird mutant thing that tried to copy the DC, Dual Shock and N64 pad all at once.:) The S controller is a lovely pad though.
I am concerned about the decision to drop 2 buttons from the X-Box 2 pad, the GameCube often gets critised for having one less button than the X-Box/PS2 and it could slightly hamper PS3 ports that need more buttons than are on the pad. The Dreamcast was criticised for having two buttons less than the Saturn/PS1.
Not that fewer buttons is a bad thing but I think these days there's a "mine's got more buttons than yours" competition going on. So I think it's my duty to remind people of this lest history repeat itself. *shudder*
This is a bloody pain in the neck. SPF was just starting to look like it might be adopted on a large scale basis an MS have to stick their proprietary oar in.
I don't want to have to make my mail servers compliant with this AND SPF, I also do not like the idea of sending XML packets to/from Hotmail (and other MS mail system) for every email allegedly from them.
Also I'd rather not use an MS solution since there are always security holes. How long till the spammers find a way around this and start sending out spam via a flaw in Hotmail?
I'm hoping the X-Box 2 will have a USB2 or Fire Wire port, then it could be possible to create some sort of boot CD that uses the external hard drive to boot Linux.
I quite like the idea of using an iPod to store Linux for the X-Box 2!:)
Hooray, after all these years of being told that chips are fattening someone has finally managed to make chips with light in!
Now if someone could just replace the sugar in Coke with light and I could eat my standard programmer's diet without getting fat enough to break my chair.
No, but he will be filming a documentary of the production of the wine. He will re-release this documentary in 20 years time, and digitally alter the film to show the evil grapes shooting first thus justifying them being crushed.
Jabba the Hutt will be digitally added to the label of the bottles too.
I agree, I'm pretty certain that the reason for IBM ditching their hard drive division was because 3 generations of their GXP drives had been failures. The last generation of GXP even came with a warning to only use the drive for 8 hours or less at a time(!).
I've been through 4 IBM "DeathStar" drives and all of them broke down. In the end I just asked the nice people at OcUK to swap it for a Western Digital which has so far lasted longer than all 4 IBM drives put together.
So in true Comic Book Guy style: Worst. Hard-drive. Ever.
Slashdot Mirror
But I thought all those online petitions *did* make a difference!
Like that petition to stop the evil "Lord of the Rings" franchise from cashing in on 9/11 by calling one of the films "The Two Towers".
The one thing I've never been able to adjust to on US keyboards is the Enter key. I don't know if it's a common thing, but they always seem to be 3 keys wide and only 1 key tall on US keyboards, whereas the UK enter key is about 1.5 keys wide and 2 keys tall.
:)
My inaccurate fingers seem to find the UK key more easily. It's not a massive thing but worth remembering.
I wonder if it's possible to a spare buy UK Dell laptop keyboard and fit it to a US model? I've dismantled a couple of laptops and the keyboard is pretty modular, you'd just need the one for the UK model. Assuming you can get Dell to sell one...
It does look a bit bulky, then again I still wear my "bulky" Casio Databank watch, I'd be lost without it. Although in comparison it's a tiny watch. If everyone is wearing something that big I might be persuaded but it looks delicate too, one clumsy swing of the arm could result in a broken screen...
:)
I've looked for possible replacesments to my Casio Databank lots of times, but things like the (now cancelled) Fossil PDA watch and this can't seem to match the battery life of my trusty Casio (currently 5 years compared to the Fossil's 4 days).
It's true these newer "watches" have CPU's and screens that provide flexibility for other applications, but I can't see them being that much better at reminding me when Eastenders is on, what time it is in France or even retrieving a phone number. Which is all I really want from a watch to be honest. And the Casio is decidedly smaller and more resistent to the odd bang too.
That said this old watch isn't going to last forever, and I don't like the current Databank watches- it seems the new ones only allow a stingy 8 characters to be entered per reminder or contact; compared to the "huge" 16 of my current watch. You'd think they'd add more space not less!
To paraphrase the immortal Douglas Adams, I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
I didn't want to give many details since it might give scammers hints (not that I did anything really clever here), but since I've given the impression I spend my days snooping people's emails, I'll try to go into some detail. The first thing to tip me off was just the large number of signups from the same address. At first I thought it was another 419er.
Next I checked his sign up details, he'd created 50 accounts all with the same details (e.g. firstname, lastname, address were all identical). Finally, earlier that week I had noticed a large amount of traffic from eBay's mail system, delivering lots of emails to these accounts.
With a give away like that I did one final check by looking up some of his addresses on eBay. He was selling satellite nav, plasma TVs etc, and all of it was way too cheap for what it was worth. At this point I thought that if he wasn't scamming, why set up 50 separate accounts? The whole point of the eBay feedback system is that lots of good feedback shows you are a trustworthy seller. So by then I was certain he was up to no good and checked one of his mailboxes, which revealed the last of his tricks:
The guy would open an auction, and invite potential buyers to email him any questions about the product. When he'd got enough "fish on the hook" he would close the auction and email the "fish" telling them he was having problems with eBay but he was still willing to sell if they were interested. He then asked if they would mind paying him directly.... Since he only had 1 of each product to sell on eBay it was clear he was trying to sell the same thing multiple times and by being paid directly he was skipping the relative safety of PayPal et al. At which point I slapped the auto-responders on and locked his accounts.
It is a condition in our T&Cs that we reserve the right to inspect an account if we suspect illegal activity, but I only exercise that right if I am absolutely sure there is something going on. Usually this means an email sent to the abuse address with headers that prove the email came from our system.
Now, if you think eBay scammers are bad, try keeping 419ers of your system. Luckily the rise of broadband means they usually have the same IP address for extended periods of time. So when we are informed of a scamming account we can find all of their other accounts at the same time.
I run a webmail system and I caught someone signing up multiple accounts and creating fake auctions on eBay. He had about 50 accounts when I caught him. I tried reporting the accounts he'd created to eBay but they didn't reply.
So instead I locked all his accounts and put an auto-responder message on them. This auto-responder would explain to the sender that the guy was a con-artist and that they should not under any circumstances send him money.
I wish I could have seen his face when he realised he'd lost all his correspondance with people he was planning to con.
Isn't this totally pointless for finding "real" pirates anyway? For starters what people downloaded wasn't even illegal. I mean if I write a "Hello World" program and call it UT2004.exe does that mean everyone who downloads it is likely to be an evil pirate?
Unless these guys have created fake files that match the size of the real thing (UT2004 is ~4Gb) and present it in the form of a CD image, surely the only people who would be fooled by this would be people who think a little 100k program could be a full game.
This is hardly going to get very far with the BitTorrent or EMule scene is it? A pointless exercise that does nothing but put a back door into people's computers.
Oh yeah, he's perfectly happy with his AMD system now. In fact he's looking to "retire" his current Athlon XP for an Athlon 64.
This seems to bear out the rumours that "the next big thing" from Intel on the desktop will be based on the Pentium M which is a chip which ably demonstrates that more Megahurtz isn't necessarily better.
I guess Intel is starting this change in numbering early so it doesn't debut a new chip and a new way of labelling the speed of the chip at the same time. Launching both at the same time might look suspicious to less informed buyers, especially if Intel goes from selling 4Ghz chips to 2.4Ghz chips with a PR of 4500+. By starting early hopefully people will be more accustomed to the new numbering scheme and less likely to think they are being conned. A friend recently told me he had bought a new 3Ghz Athlon XP, he was ready to take it back to the shop after I explained what the 3000 meant!
I wonder how compatible this will be with AMD's PR ratings? What would the equivalent to an Athlon 64 with a PR of 3400 be? I hope Intel doesn't invent a PR system that deliberately uses bigger PR numbers than AMDs. I can see confusion amongst consumers who will think an Athlon 64 4000+ is not a match for a "Pentium 5 6000" even if they are equivalent performers.
While Megahurtz has long been a poor way of determining the speed of a chip, I think having two different PR systems that aren't compatible could be worse.
You're partially right, US SNES consoles were never prevented from playing Japanese games, however I think most cartridges did have region chips in them.
:)
I live in the UK and owned a Japanese Super Famicom and I was unable to play UK or US games without an adaptor. Naturally the US games wouldn't fit without a bridge adaptor (or hacking lumps out of the cartidge port) but Nintendo eventually got wise to this and prevented US games playing on Jap/UK machines. To get around this importers had to buy new adaptors which allowed two cartridges to be plugged onto them, one cartridge was the game you wanted to play, and the other supplied the region checking to fool the console into thinking it was playing a game from its region.
The absolute best reason buying adaptors was for PAL Mario Kart, because of the extra lines of the PAL TV system the PAL version would have run slower or had big borders. Happily it was full screen and optimised to try and make it as fast as the Jap/US version, so when playing on a US/Jap machine in NTSC mode it was the fastest of all the versions.
The NES was actually region locked internally for Europe which was easily remedied by cutting a couple of wires!
Most cartridges since the Famicom/NES have had country lock-out chips (kind of like DVD regions) but aside from a few notable examples there wasn't any kind of copy protection- there wasn't much need as cartridge counterfeiting is pretty difficult when there are custom chips like the SuperFX in them.
IIRC Street Fighter Alpha and Star Ocean both did employ encryption but I those were the only ones.
With the widespread availability of flash cartridges for the GBA I'm surprised Nintendo hasn't started throwing its weight around sooner. It's a shame for emulation fans like myself though,
I can understand why they'd go after the Tapwave Zodiac too, it can currently emulate NES games perfectly and SNES emulation is starting to make good progress, who wants to pay $30 for a GBA port of a SNES game when you can download the original for free and play it on the Zodiac?
I'm sure the fact that Nintendo is now selling expensive collector editions of its old NES games for the GBA in Japan has nothing to do with this.... It's been huge a success so I suspect they are now looking at re-releasing other classics and are making sure emulation isn't going to spoil business.
DIRECTIVE 1 Serve the public trust
DIRECTIVE 2 Protect the innocent
DIRECTIVE 3 Uphold the law
DIRECTIVE 4 Never oppose an OCP officer
DIRECTIVE 5 Change name slighly to prevent copyright lawsuit
This is interesting and surprising, I expected older games to be less likely to rely on Vblanks for timing, but in fact it seems those old games were very well written.
Conversely I recently read a review of an Xbox which had been "upgraded" with a 1400Mhz CPU which showed that lots of games stopped working properly because they relied on the exact timing of the CPU! The review is here if anyone's interested.
Predictions like this are pretty pointless, if Microsoft manage to get GTA4 as an exclusive and have Halo 3, Ninja Gaiden 2, Knights of the Old Republic 3, etc ready for launch I could see the next console war happening differently.
I believe that the Xbox2 and PS3 are going to launch at roughly the same time so it will be the exclusives to each platform announced between now and launch time that will probably decide who wins the opening salvos.
Of course if one machine is much more powerful than another that could also skew the sales regardless of the quality of launch titles.
According to the article we need to upgrade less often, it says buying a new PC every 2-3 years is too much strain on the environment.
Uh-oh. Aside from the case I usually change everything in my computer every 6 months! If I'd followed this advice and still had my PC from 4 years ago I'd be trying to play Half Life 2 and Doom 3 on a P2 266 and Riva TNT this summer. Scary.
I can't see many people following this advice unfortunately.
So this means Java will be broken but .Net won't be? I guess in about 5 years time we'll be seeing another anti-trust case again MS get to court.
What happens if my life gets infected with a worm and starts blue screening or sending rude emails to everyone I know?
Is it just me, or isn't it a bit unfair to expect potential employees to reveal their online names? I mean I wouldn't want my boss seeing what I post on the animalsex.com boards...
Seriously though, I don't think it's fair to poke into people's personal lives just to see if they have ever said anything negative about Open Source.
Hmmm, I have an interview next week, better make myself look good... Open Source is great!
I've heard these touch screen rumours too, it makes me wonder if the DS will even have the conventional D-pad and buttons or if every game might have its own "virtual" joypad on the lower screen.
Given how Nintendo loves to design controllers around games this could be the ultimate way of creating controls unique to each game.
Using Nintendo's example of a football game, the top screen could focus on a single player and the bottom screen could allow the player to touch the player they want to select, or to even "draw" a path with their finger to tell the player to pass the ball in a particular direction. This could even work better than a mouse for some games.
That said, having tried to play emulators on my iPaq with a virtual joypad it's very difficult because you have no tactile feedback of when your fingers are over the buttons. E3 is going to be interesting...
From this article it looks like the HDTV All-In-Wonder card won't have any useful video input sockets on the card and there's no mention of any external connector box.
:(
I really want a decent means for connecting things like games consoles to my PC monitor. All the VGA boxes out there just give horrid blurry pictures because they double the scanlines of the picture. I wish someone would do a card with component or SCART inputs.
I thought the "fat" X-Box controller would be the spiritual successor to the DC's pad, but sadly it was some weird mutant thing that tried to copy the DC, Dual Shock and N64 pad all at once. :) The S controller is a lovely pad though.
I am concerned about the decision to drop 2 buttons from the X-Box 2 pad, the GameCube often gets critised for having one less button than the X-Box/PS2 and it could slightly hamper PS3 ports that need more buttons than are on the pad. The Dreamcast was criticised for having two buttons less than the Saturn/PS1.
Not that fewer buttons is a bad thing but I think these days there's a "mine's got more buttons than yours" competition going on. So I think it's my duty to remind people of this lest history repeat itself. *shudder*
This is a bloody pain in the neck. SPF was just starting to look like it might be adopted on a large scale basis an MS have to stick their proprietary oar in.
I don't want to have to make my mail servers compliant with this AND SPF, I also do not like the idea of sending XML packets to/from Hotmail (and other MS mail system) for every email allegedly from them.
Also I'd rather not use an MS solution since there are always security holes. How long till the spammers find a way around this and start sending out spam via a flaw in Hotmail?
I'm hoping the X-Box 2 will have a USB2 or Fire Wire port, then it could be possible to create some sort of boot CD that uses the external hard drive to boot Linux.
:)
I quite like the idea of using an iPod to store Linux for the X-Box 2!
Hooray, after all these years of being told that chips are fattening someone has finally managed to make chips with light in!
Now if someone could just replace the sugar in Coke with light and I could eat my standard programmer's diet without getting fat enough to break my chair.
No, but he will be filming a documentary of the production of the wine. He will re-release this documentary in 20 years time, and digitally alter the film to show the evil grapes shooting first thus justifying them being crushed.
Jabba the Hutt will be digitally added to the label of the bottles too.
I agree, I'm pretty certain that the reason for IBM ditching their hard drive division was because 3 generations of their GXP drives had been failures. The last generation of GXP even came with a warning to only use the drive for 8 hours or less at a time(!).
I've been through 4 IBM "DeathStar" drives and all of them broke down. In the end I just asked the nice people at OcUK to swap it for a Western Digital which has so far lasted longer than all 4 IBM drives put together.
So in true Comic Book Guy style: Worst. Hard-drive. Ever.