I think I actually have two lazy eyes, probably brought on at an early age by nearsightedness and / or astigmatism. I believe the explanation I recieved was that the muscles on one side of the eye are stronger then the other side, and the eye gets pulled out of alignment in certain situations. I had surgury on one eye to mitigate the effects, but I still have the symptoms which cause all kinds of wierd effects for me, as I will try to explain.
I can, at will, cause either one of my eyes to break convergence and look somewhere else and then alternate which eye is lazy by "looking" out the other eye. That "lazy" eye will then start looking outward and I'll get double vision, but how noticable it is depends on how out-of-whack my eye convergence is (I can also control how much convergence I loose, so I can go from slight, almost overlapping double vision, to nearly completely different viewpoints). If I'm looking at something to the extreme right or left I usually end up looking with just one eye, but I don't notice the double-vision for some reason. I've since learned to physically turn my head / body towards what I'm looking at since that makes it physically possible for me to look at something with both eyes. Another trick I use is to look at something with my "outside eye" (i.e. if I'm looking at something to my right, I will look at it with my left eye, visa-versa if looking left). I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone, but AFAIK, most people should be able to "look" through either of their eyes at will. Over time, I've managed to adapt my behaviour so that most of the time these symptoms don't occur.
The most dangerous downsides to all this is that when I get extremely tired, or very drunk, I can no longer keep my eyes converged and normal vision becomes impossible. Nothing short of intensely focusing on a high-contrast area (say, the sharp edge of a table) will bring convergence back. However, I'm not sure if this happens because of my lazy eyes, or if it happens to other people. Driving while tired is extremely dangerous for me, especially at night, since I loose all sense of depth perception when I get double-vision and I suddenly have no idea which lane I'm in or where I'm headed.
One interesting aspect about all this is that if I cover one eye then I can no longer get this behaviour to happen, which has saved me a few times during extremely boring lectures! Something about looking with both eyes causes the trouble.
Back when I worked as a computer tech at my High School I was usually the one called on to fix the printers when they (inevitably) broke. These printers were rugged, and received repeated bashings (see below) while continuing to function.
The labs in question were fairly ugly even for that time, being a swath of 486/33 computers on a 10-base-2 (can't remember) network; kick-ass at one point, but slim-pickings when entry level machines were P166s. The printers were hefty old (Okijet?) dot-matrix printers used for printing out assignments and such. They were connected to the PCs via a 4-port LPT switch box, so one printer per 4 computers.
The typical printer complaint was "I can't print", this could usually be fixed by jiggling the switch on the switch-box, or sometimes by turning the printer on and off (sometimes in rapid succession). The majority of the printer problems were of this type, and relatively easy to fix. Sometimes, however, a printer would get in its head the idea that it wasn't going to print and throw all manner of tantrums instead of working properly. This was a Troublesome Printer, prone to all kinds of ill-mannered behavior and outbursts.
A Troublesome Printer was usually treated with Boot Therapy, outlined below, but other methods included:
-Picking it up, then dropping it -Taking it out back and working it over with the Reset Stick (a baseball bat) -Screaming and cursing at it with the most foul obscenities imaginable, sometimes including a dash of voodoo magic -Showing the printer the Reclamation Pile, an assortment of leftover parts from other failed printers (like taking a delinquent child to prison to show them where they might end up one day) -Boot Therapy, elaborated below
Boot Therapy was the most successful treatment for delinquent printers. It was a robust yet simple method which could be quickly executed, not unlike a sudden backhand-slap across the face. Completing a Boot Therapy session required very little time, only a few seconds, and I'm proud to say it had a 100% success rate.
The actual method of Boot Therapy is very simple, simply put: kick the printer. The sudden Percussive Therapy* shocks the Troublesome Printer back into a state of readiness, allowing ink and paper to merge within its confines once more. The subtleties of Boot Therapy, which make or break it as a successful form of treatment, are contained entirely in *how* you kick it.
Boot Therapy is much too complicated to describe herein, more like PHD dissertation material, but I shall endeavor to list the kind of factors that need be considered when employing this kind of treatment:
-Force of the kick -Approach angle -Footwear (soft-soled runners work better then steel-toed boots, they don't leave a brui--er.. mark) -Crash impulse duration -Where the kick is directed -Does the printer know you're going to kick it? (this is very important, as most will attempt to block you) -Is the printer on? -By far the most important: ** Are there any faculty members present in the immediate area? ** (they tend to frown on such progressive treatments as Boot Therapy using such harsh invective and "Criminal" and "Insane", if only they knew what they were up against) -And a plethora of other second- and third-order effects.
So there you have it, a brief description of the cutting edge world of Boot Therapy. The printers in question continued to work well, despite being kicked repeatedly, except one, which needed Therapy several times a week. They always seemed to keep working well, especially on my watch, but I think they were replaced a few years later with cheap Mexican Printers:-P
Disclaimer: -Yes, I actually did do this for real. -No, I never got caught. -Yes, it does (or did, rather) actually work (though maybe not 100% of the time). -No printer damage was ever attributed to a faulty application of Boot Therapy -Don't do this for real, especially on those new-fangled $50 Inkjet printers, all plastic and such. The printers I treated had steel in them.
*-I'm aware of the Babylon5 reference to Percussive Therapy or some such; Boot Therapy was pioneered slightly before that, I think.
No, but being nearly tied with Nintendo, the oldest console player, for second place is. They basically came out of nowhere.
If you haven't already realized, the Xbox is a *good* console. If Sony just sits on their haunches with the PS3, Microsoft could very well take the lead from them in the next generation, especially now that the new Xbox and Playstation seem likely to launch very close together.
The Xbox brought lots of innovative new features to the table, if Microsoft can continue to come up with interesting stuff they will likely have the most compelling system.
Word of mouth may have kept many away from the Dreamcast, but I doubt it'll stop Xbox Next (or whatever they are calling it)
It's time to make a real stinker. One for the record books.
While only a TV movie, 10.5, the show about a large earthquake hitting the US, was reportedly made because it was so bad that people would *want* to watch more reality TV after seeing it.
I was at Universal Studios Hollywood on Tuesday. During the studio tour (where you drive around on the busses) we went through a "quiet zone" where they were filming several movies. Right beside the Jurassic Park ride was the set of Serenity, and who was right outside the set? None other then Nathan Fillion, the Captain himself.
Although I don't subscribe to the obsessive-fan mantra, being a huge fan of Firefly and seeing him, dressed in his usual captain garb, was the highlight of the day for me.
I really hope the new movie does well, but either way, we've kept flying.
I fully agree with the parent. Assembly coding is critical in embedded and DSP development.
It's nice to have a compliant C/C++ compiler for your target device, some even have language extensions allowing you to take advantage of more specific features on the chip. However, when it comes down to speed and critical timing issues assembly can't (yet) be beat.
On some recent DSP projects we used the supplied C compiler to do simple things like control logic and other tasks, and it works wonderfully for that type of task, but the critical algorithms were all hand-tuned assembly. Often we would use the compiler output as a start and work from there, but we would invariably blow the doors off it performance-wise, but the compiler did surprise us a few times.
The biggest impact comes with tight timing restrictions. If you've only got 500 microseconds to get a sample done, or process a set of data, *and* you've got to do it a very tight memory space with minimal power consumption, you've got to rely on your assembly language skills to work it out. It's gruelling work, but we can't all just buy faster chips or more memory and use the compiler.
I don't think Video Toaster was used on Jurassic Park, at least, not for rendering; SoftImage was used for the majority of the work. VideoToaster could have been used for compositing or other image effects, but I'm almost certain they never rendered any models with it. I pretty certain because I attented a presentation given by one of the guys who worked on JP, and it was all about SoftImage, but that was a long time ago.
It doesn't have to be annoying, but it will continue to do so. Ads will increasingly become more in-your-face, until such time as we have a massive consumer backlack (and I mean *massive*, but I think we're starting to see the grassroots movment now), or, in the more ideal situation, spammers and other such low-lifes are catapulted into the sun without any sunblock.
In "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, adverstising is ubiquitous. Ads are absolutely everywhere, even on chopsticks! One person in the book has her whole body and the strands of her hair tattooed so that she is a walking advertisement. Other people would just sit in their homes mesmerized by the ads everywhere, never really carrying on a conversation or anything else.
Basically, in that advanced age with nano technology and all, advertisers had basically settled on three things to get people to notice their ads amongst the clutter: tits, cars and explosions. The more in-your-face, gratuituous, outragous, or just plain wierd, the better. They even had ads that played with your peripheral vision, making it look like you were about to be hit by a car, or they'd have to 3d-esque phantom bull-rush you, attempting to get you to flinch.
Also, some people had special optical implants in their eyes, giving them overlays of various screens of data or something. One person in the book had one of those, and some people in India (I think) hacked into his vision system and ran an ad for a roach motel or something in the bottom right corner of his vision 24 hours a day. He couldn't get rid of it, even when he closed his eyes. He killed himself.
Why the hell would they? Does suing over domain naming somehow give Microsoft an edge over its competition? It's seems pretty rediculous to assume that Microsoft is somehow abusing its monopoly by creating a new company to sue other companies based on a ludicrous patent. What the hell happens if they win? Do we browse to 207.46.245.214 instead of microsoft.com? I mean, come on.
That might work, but I bet he'll just reform again once the shards melt again. The only way to dispose of the Tom-1000 is to drop him into molten lava, preferably at a steel plant in California.
I believe the whole point of the Black Gate battle is to "give Frodo a chance". They knew they could not defeat Sauron one-on-one, especially after losing so much at Minas Tirth. All they could do is try and distract him and hope Frodo can complete his quest. There is a chapter in the book, "The Last Debate" or something, I can't remember, which deals with this. Also, there is like 3-4 days difference between the Siege of Gondor and the Pellenor Fields, and the battle at the Black Gate, to account for the travel delay.
And the soundtrack has a song called "The Black Gate", so it's a safe bet it's in. I was worried for a while that this scene would be axed and / or rolled up into the Siege of Gondor, but it looks like it made it. They will probably breeze through it though, just to keep the flow gowing.
Now my only concern is that they didn't bastardize Eowyn at the Pellenor Fields. I don't want to see a Rhohanian Warrior Princess fighting the King of the Nazgul for 5 minutes, I want to see someone whos willing to die defending her king (the face of one who goes seeking death?) trying to defend her king.
including Torn, which looked to be a sweet 3d CRPG with all the reactivity and depth of Torment but with a snazzy 3d engine and the Fallout SPECIAL system
Read this Gamespot Article for the full skinny on why Torn was cancelled. Maybe cancelling it wasn't so bad after all.
I fully agree with you on Planescape: Torment being the greatest RPG of all time. There was a reason why Torment's storyline was so good though; the three primary writers had degrees in Philosophy, Psychology, and English respectively. You don't see that kind of talent together very often. In fact, almost every other RPG feels just like a fancy hack-and-slash game compared to Torment. The sheer depth of detail and imagination prevalent in Torment is simply staggering.
However, there is a catch. In order to play Torment properly you have to read a lot, be very thorough, and try to do it in one short go. There isn't a whole lot of combat in Torment, mostly lots of dialog and description. It's fantastically written, and can easily stand up against most fantasy novels. Getting past the initial shock of reading pages of text is difficult.
Also, in order to keep all the events fresh in your mind, it's good to play it as quickly as possible. I recently played through it again and I finished it in less then a week, which was pretty impressive considering I had midterms at the time. If you take to long, however, you can loose the focus of the story and that's an absolute killer for Torment.
Careful with those "cheap" Canadian drugs, the side effects can be... umm... disfiguring? You'll start to say "eh?" and "aboot" all the time, you'll constantly be wondering if you should quit your job and go be a lumberjack in British Columbia. You'll start to listen to Celine Dion, and, *shudder*, Anne Murray.
It's just best to stay away from Canadian Products. Anything that comes close to Celine Dion is just not safe. Globalization includes all countries except Canada.
That depends on the implementation. Windows drivers, AFAIK, run in kernel mode; so if the driver frags the memory it can cause a crash, or even a BSOD. In linux / *nix I believe the drivers run (mostly) in user mode. So there is a layer of abstraction and protection there to try and prevent the whole system from going down in case of a driver crash.
I'm unsure how this "DriverLoader" works, but I suspect that the designers took similar precautions and have the drivers running in a wrapper in user mode. However, I'm far from a linux kernel expert, so I'm really just guessing.
... don't have a cellphone? Or more correctly, turn my cellphone off? What about different providers? Different networks? Someone would need access to the whole shebang in order to reliably track a phone.
Tracking speeders I could see happening, but not people walking down the street. A few terrorists have already been nabbed by cellphone calls IIRC. Maybe you could track lost cellphones though, that would be kinda cool
I'm just waiting for these guys to shoot to the top of the Seti@Home rankings. Or maybe Folding@Home.
Who would want to do some boring chemical simulations when they can be cock-of-the-walk amongst geeks. Topping @Home would be like having a 12" wang in the locker room, but I guess you'd still have trouble picking up women, as it requires speaking and all.
I was reading about this before seeing this article. One of the points brought up is that it's not really a useful hack because it's quite tricky to utilize.
It looks like you need a memory card reader ($$), and then have to edit a file and add the Title ID for each game you want to play. This requires a bit of work to figure out, and a *nix system to run his software, I think.
It doesn't work with all games all the time, only the ones you specify. Also, there may be a limit to how many table entries you can have, which would limit the number of games you can run.
If someone is tech savvy enough to figure this out, they just might have what it takes to install some of the existing modchips out there. Mine only has one wire, and coupled with a GameShark, will run almost anything out there, but it's a bit of a pain.
Perhaps the bright side is that this will allow users of Linux on the PS2 to run code outside the restrictions of the OS that Sony added.
... settle and release all claims, demands, actions, suits, and causes of action against Microsoft [that they] ever had, could have had, now has or hereafter can, shall or may have.
So everyone who's involved can *never* sue Microsoft again for anything related to Anti-Trust? They take their slap on the wrist, and go laughing all the way to the bank? I guess double jeopardy could be a factor, as subsequent lawsuits would be mostly the same, but this seems to go a tad too far.
Correct application is critical to the effectiveness of thermal goop. The idea is to get a very thin, uncontaminated layer of the stuff between the chip and the heatsink. Any kind of oil, scratches, dust, etc. can cause efficiency to drop.
Have a look at the instructions for Arctic Silver 3 to see what kind of steps are needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I actually have two lazy eyes, probably brought on at an early age by nearsightedness and / or astigmatism. I believe the explanation I recieved was that the muscles on one side of the eye are stronger then the other side, and the eye gets pulled out of alignment in certain situations. I had surgury on one eye to mitigate the effects, but I still have the symptoms which cause all kinds of wierd effects for me, as I will try to explain.
I can, at will, cause either one of my eyes to break convergence and look somewhere else and then alternate which eye is lazy by "looking" out the other eye. That "lazy" eye will then start looking outward and I'll get double vision, but how noticable it is depends on how out-of-whack my eye convergence is (I can also control how much convergence I loose, so I can go from slight, almost overlapping double vision, to nearly completely different viewpoints). If I'm looking at something to the extreme right or left I usually end up looking with just one eye, but I don't notice the double-vision for some reason. I've since learned to physically turn my head / body towards what I'm looking at since that makes it physically possible for me to look at something with both eyes. Another trick I use is to look at something with my "outside eye" (i.e. if I'm looking at something to my right, I will look at it with my left eye, visa-versa if looking left). I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone, but AFAIK, most people should be able to "look" through either of their eyes at will. Over time, I've managed to adapt my behaviour so that most of the time these symptoms don't occur.
The most dangerous downsides to all this is that when I get extremely tired, or very drunk, I can no longer keep my eyes converged and normal vision becomes impossible. Nothing short of intensely focusing on a high-contrast area (say, the sharp edge of a table) will bring convergence back. However, I'm not sure if this happens because of my lazy eyes, or if it happens to other people. Driving while tired is extremely dangerous for me, especially at night, since I loose all sense of depth perception when I get double-vision and I suddenly have no idea which lane I'm in or where I'm headed.
One interesting aspect about all this is that if I cover one eye then I can no longer get this behaviour to happen, which has saved me a few times during extremely boring lectures! Something about looking with both eyes causes the trouble.
Back when I worked as a computer tech at my High School I was usually the one called on to fix the printers when they (inevitably) broke. These printers were rugged, and received repeated bashings (see below) while continuing to function.
:-P
The labs in question were fairly ugly even for that time, being a swath of 486/33 computers on a 10-base-2 (can't remember) network; kick-ass at one point, but slim-pickings when entry level machines were P166s. The printers were hefty old (Okijet?) dot-matrix printers used for printing out assignments and such. They were connected to the PCs via a 4-port LPT switch box, so one printer per 4 computers.
The typical printer complaint was "I can't print", this could usually be fixed by jiggling the switch on the switch-box, or sometimes by turning the printer on and off (sometimes in rapid succession). The majority of the printer problems were of this type, and relatively easy to fix.
Sometimes, however, a printer would get in its head the idea that it wasn't going to print and throw all manner of tantrums instead of working properly. This was a Troublesome Printer, prone to all kinds of ill-mannered behavior and outbursts.
A Troublesome Printer was usually treated with Boot Therapy, outlined below, but other methods included:
-Picking it up, then dropping it
-Taking it out back and working it over with the Reset Stick (a baseball bat)
-Screaming and cursing at it with the most foul obscenities imaginable, sometimes including a dash of voodoo magic
-Showing the printer the Reclamation Pile, an assortment of leftover parts from other failed printers (like taking a delinquent child to prison to show them where they might end up one day)
-Boot Therapy, elaborated below
Boot Therapy was the most successful treatment for delinquent printers. It was a robust yet simple method which could be quickly executed, not unlike a sudden backhand-slap across the face. Completing a Boot Therapy session required very little time, only a few seconds, and I'm proud to say it had a 100% success rate.
The actual method of Boot Therapy is very simple, simply put: kick the printer. The sudden Percussive Therapy* shocks the Troublesome Printer back into a state of readiness, allowing ink and paper to merge within its confines once more. The subtleties of Boot Therapy, which make or break it as a successful form of treatment, are contained entirely in *how* you kick it.
Boot Therapy is much too complicated to describe herein, more like PHD dissertation material, but I shall endeavor to list the kind of factors that need be considered when employing this kind of treatment:
-Force of the kick
-Approach angle
-Footwear (soft-soled runners work better then steel-toed boots, they don't leave a brui--er.. mark)
-Crash impulse duration
-Where the kick is directed
-Does the printer know you're going to kick it? (this is very important, as most will attempt to block you)
-Is the printer on?
-By far the most important: ** Are there any faculty members present in the immediate area? ** (they tend to frown on such progressive treatments as Boot Therapy using such harsh invective and "Criminal" and "Insane", if only they knew what they were up against)
-And a plethora of other second- and third-order effects.
So there you have it, a brief description of the cutting edge world of Boot Therapy. The printers in question continued to work well, despite being kicked repeatedly, except one, which needed Therapy several times a week. They always seemed to keep working well, especially on my watch, but I think they were replaced a few years later with cheap Mexican Printers
Disclaimer:
-Yes, I actually did do this for real.
-No, I never got caught.
-Yes, it does (or did, rather) actually work (though maybe not 100% of the time).
-No printer damage was ever attributed to a faulty application of Boot Therapy
-Don't do this for real, especially on those new-fangled $50 Inkjet printers, all plastic and such. The printers I treated had steel in them.
*-I'm aware of the Babylon5 reference to Percussive Therapy or some such; Boot Therapy was pioneered slightly before that, I think.
No, but being nearly tied with Nintendo, the oldest console player, for second place is. They basically came out of nowhere.
If you haven't already realized, the Xbox is a *good* console. If Sony just sits on their haunches with the PS3, Microsoft could very well take the lead from them in the next generation, especially now that the new Xbox and Playstation seem likely to launch very close together.
The Xbox brought lots of innovative new features to the table, if Microsoft can continue to come up with interesting stuff they will likely have the most compelling system.
Word of mouth may have kept many away from the Dreamcast, but I doubt it'll stop Xbox Next (or whatever they are calling it)
They are non-critical fixes for problems, or sometimes just addition programs / functionality.
It's time to make a real stinker. One for the record books.
While only a TV movie, 10.5, the show about a large earthquake hitting the US, was reportedly made because it was so bad that people would *want* to watch more reality TV after seeing it.
I was at Universal Studios Hollywood on Tuesday. During the studio tour (where you drive around on the busses) we went through a "quiet zone" where they were filming several movies. Right beside the Jurassic Park ride was the set of Serenity, and who was right outside the set? None other then Nathan Fillion, the Captain himself.
Although I don't subscribe to the obsessive-fan mantra, being a huge fan of Firefly and seeing him, dressed in his usual captain garb, was the highlight of the day for me.
I really hope the new movie does well, but either way, we've kept flying.
I fully agree with the parent. Assembly coding is critical in embedded and DSP development.
It's nice to have a compliant C/C++ compiler for your target device, some even have language extensions allowing you to take advantage of more specific features on the chip. However, when it comes down to speed and critical timing issues assembly can't (yet) be beat.
On some recent DSP projects we used the supplied C compiler to do simple things like control logic and other tasks, and it works wonderfully for that type of task, but the critical algorithms were all hand-tuned assembly. Often we would use the compiler output as a start and work from there, but we would invariably blow the doors off it performance-wise, but the compiler did surprise us a few times.
The biggest impact comes with tight timing restrictions. If you've only got 500 microseconds to get a sample done, or process a set of data, *and* you've got to do it a very tight memory space with minimal power consumption, you've got to rely on your assembly language skills to work it out. It's gruelling work, but we can't all just buy faster chips or more memory and use the compiler.
I saw them in one category that they didn't win in...I'm sure of it.
Yeah, Andy Serkis for Best Supporting Actor.
I don't think Video Toaster was used on Jurassic Park, at least, not for rendering; SoftImage was used for the majority of the work. VideoToaster could have been used for compositing or other image effects, but I'm almost certain they never rendered any models with it. I pretty certain because I attented a presentation given by one of the guys who worked on JP, and it was all about SoftImage, but that was a long time ago.
It doesn't have to be annoying, but it will continue to do so. Ads will increasingly become more in-your-face, until such time as we have a massive consumer backlack (and I mean *massive*, but I think we're starting to see the grassroots movment now), or, in the more ideal situation, spammers and other such low-lifes are catapulted into the sun without any sunblock.
In "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson, adverstising is ubiquitous. Ads are absolutely everywhere, even on chopsticks! One person in the book has her whole body and the strands of her hair tattooed so that she is a walking advertisement. Other people would just sit in their homes mesmerized by the ads everywhere, never really carrying on a conversation or anything else.
Basically, in that advanced age with nano technology and all, advertisers had basically settled on three things to get people to notice their ads amongst the clutter: tits, cars and explosions. The more in-your-face, gratuituous, outragous, or just plain wierd, the better. They even had ads that played with your peripheral vision, making it look like you were about to be hit by a car, or they'd have to 3d-esque phantom bull-rush you, attempting to get you to flinch.
Also, some people had special optical implants in their eyes, giving them overlays of various screens of data or something. One person in the book had one of those, and some people in India (I think) hacked into his vision system and ran an ad for a roach motel or something in the bottom right corner of his vision 24 hours a day. He couldn't get rid of it, even when he closed his eyes. He killed himself.
Why the hell would they? Does suing over domain naming somehow give Microsoft an edge over its competition? It's seems pretty rediculous to assume that Microsoft is somehow abusing its monopoly by creating a new company to sue other companies based on a ludicrous patent. What the hell happens if they win? Do we browse to 207.46.245.214 instead of microsoft.com? I mean, come on.
That might work, but I bet he'll just reform again once the shards melt again. The only way to dispose of the Tom-1000 is to drop him into molten lava, preferably at a steel plant in California.
I believe the whole point of the Black Gate battle is to "give Frodo a chance". They knew they could not defeat Sauron one-on-one, especially after losing so much at Minas Tirth. All they could do is try and distract him and hope Frodo can complete his quest. There is a chapter in the book, "The Last Debate" or something, I can't remember, which deals with this. Also, there is like 3-4 days difference between the Siege of Gondor and the Pellenor Fields, and the battle at the Black Gate, to account for the travel delay.
And the soundtrack has a song called "The Black Gate", so it's a safe bet it's in. I was worried for a while that this scene would be axed and / or rolled up into the Siege of Gondor, but it looks like it made it. They will probably breeze through it though, just to keep the flow gowing.
Now my only concern is that they didn't bastardize Eowyn at the Pellenor Fields. I don't want to see a Rhohanian Warrior Princess fighting the King of the Nazgul for 5 minutes, I want to see someone whos willing to die defending her king (the face of one who goes seeking death?) trying to defend her king.
Homer: Oooh, that's bad.
Shopkeeper: But it comes with a free Frogurt!
Homer: That's good!
Shopkeeper: The Frogurt is also cursed.
Homer: That's bad.
Shopkeeper: But you get your choice of toppings!
Homer: That's good!
Shopkeeper: The toppings contain sodium benzoate. [Homer looks puzzled.] That's bad.!?
Homer: Can I go now?
from here
Read this Gamespot Article for the full skinny on why Torn was cancelled. Maybe cancelling it wasn't so bad after all.
Regret can change the nature of a man.
I fully agree with you on Planescape: Torment being the greatest RPG of all time. There was a reason why Torment's storyline was so good though; the three primary writers had degrees in Philosophy, Psychology, and English respectively. You don't see that kind of talent together very often. In fact, almost every other RPG feels just like a fancy hack-and-slash game compared to Torment. The sheer depth of detail and imagination prevalent in Torment is simply staggering.
However, there is a catch. In order to play Torment properly you have to read a lot, be very thorough, and try to do it in one short go. There isn't a whole lot of combat in Torment, mostly lots of dialog and description. It's fantastically written, and can easily stand up against most fantasy novels. Getting past the initial shock of reading pages of text is difficult.
Also, in order to keep all the events fresh in your mind, it's good to play it as quickly as possible. I recently played through it again and I finished it in less then a week, which was pretty impressive considering I had midterms at the time. If you take to long, however, you can loose the focus of the story and that's an absolute killer for Torment.
There was a slashdot article on this a few months back. Try googling for it
Careful with those "cheap" Canadian drugs, the side effects can be... umm... disfiguring? You'll start to say "eh?" and "aboot" all the time, you'll constantly be wondering if you should quit your job and go be a lumberjack in British Columbia. You'll start to listen to Celine Dion, and, *shudder*, Anne Murray.
It's just best to stay away from Canadian Products. Anything that comes close to Celine Dion is just not safe. Globalization includes all countries except Canada.
That depends on the implementation. Windows drivers, AFAIK, run in kernel mode; so if the driver frags the memory it can cause a crash, or even a BSOD. In linux / *nix I believe the drivers run (mostly) in user mode. So there is a layer of abstraction and protection there to try and prevent the whole system from going down in case of a driver crash.
I'm unsure how this "DriverLoader" works, but I suspect that the designers took similar precautions and have the drivers running in a wrapper in user mode. However, I'm far from a linux kernel expert, so I'm really just guessing.
... don't have a cellphone? Or more correctly, turn my cellphone off? What about different providers? Different networks? Someone would need access to the whole shebang in order to reliably track a phone.
Tracking speeders I could see happening, but not people walking down the street. A few terrorists have already been nabbed by cellphone calls IIRC. Maybe you could track lost cellphones though, that would be kinda cool
I'm just waiting for these guys to shoot to the top of the Seti@Home rankings. Or maybe Folding@Home.
Who would want to do some boring chemical simulations when they can be cock-of-the-walk amongst geeks. Topping @Home would be like having a 12" wang in the locker room, but I guess you'd still have trouble picking up women, as it requires speaking and all.
I was reading about this before seeing this article. One of the points brought up is that it's not really a useful hack because it's quite tricky to utilize.
It looks like you need a memory card reader ($$), and then have to edit a file and add the Title ID for each game you want to play. This requires a bit of work to figure out, and a *nix system to run his software, I think.
It doesn't work with all games all the time, only the ones you specify. Also, there may be a limit to how many table entries you can have, which would limit the number of games you can run.
If someone is tech savvy enough to figure this out, they just might have what it takes to install some of the existing modchips out there. Mine only has one wire, and coupled with a GameShark, will run almost anything out there, but it's a bit of a pain.
Perhaps the bright side is that this will allow users of Linux on the PS2 to run code outside the restrictions of the OS that Sony added.
I hope this guy's web server has a mirror or two
... settle and release all claims, demands, actions, suits, and causes of action against Microsoft [that they] ever had, could have had, now has or hereafter can, shall or may have.
So everyone who's involved can *never* sue Microsoft again for anything related to Anti-Trust? They take their slap on the wrist, and go laughing all the way to the bank? I guess double jeopardy could be a factor, as subsequent lawsuits would be mostly the same, but this seems to go a tad too far.
Have a look at the instructions for Arctic Silver 3 to see what kind of steps are needed.