New Zealand and Australia are like the US Guinea pigs for new technology. Before the US makes use of it themselves, giving it a test-run in a developed, friendly, and reasonably well-off country like Australia and NZ makes for a good test case.
I'm more heartened by motherboard makers' explorations into "instant-on" BIOSes which let you use mail and TV functions of your PC hardware without needed to boot Windows and suffer the onslaught of long boot times, a million virii, bad drivers. Windows XP with DirectX9 on it, has given me the black-screen-of-death lockups on more than one occasion when using the multimedia functions on my graphics card. I liked the blue screen more... at least that way Windows knew it had a problem.
Instant-on technologies seems to be the way to go. With things like bootable USB flash memories, Magnetic RAM, things look more "solid state" and like a console.
Maybe one day my PC will get it's own kernal ROM and boot as fast as my old Commodore 64 did.
I think it's mainly an issue of "content" and "community".
Most game content is unattractive to women, just as barbie dolls are unattractive to 5 year old boys. Robots, guns, lives, and shooting doesn't interest women in the slightest.
Having said that though, women are more inclined to play a game of self-preservation whereby they do this my outsmarting, capturing and enslaving other characters to do things against their will... while making them think it's all their idea! This sort of thing you would see in "The sims" for example. If my personal experiences with women are anything to go by, that's the kind of mind-games they're into!
Then there is the community element.... Women are much more interested in playing games with other people, and hate being alone.
Women love Role Playing Games as well.
I'm inclinded to think that it's women who are the most vocal about games being "anti-social"... at least, that's how it's been in my life.
My girlfriend doesn't like it either... because it takes time away from HER... and she's much happier being passive and watching TV like a mindless sheep, rather than having to use her brain to play a game!
When she wants to though, she can play a mean game of Mario Kart.... but before long it bores her.... so...
A load of junk characters equivalent to the two-byte Japanese kana characters appear on the screen, reducing the display to jibberish. That is, if you are lucky to see anything at all.
Bootable CDs are fun.... but it turns the PC into a game console - plus CDs have nowhere to save data.
Now, this idea of the bootable game CD is very feasible if we are talking about something like MAME. Check out the AdvanceCD project.... it's great.
However, some people like to play games while their computer stays on the net... and others while their PC is crunching away compiling something.
A PC costs a lot of money, it makes no sense to get one if it's just going to be a glorified game console. Consoles cost a lot less and don't require a monitor.
One thing that Linux can do really well is CLUSTER EASILY. Forget the PS3... as long as games are written to make use of Linux's clustering abilities - we can have some MASSIVE gaming servers and game environments.
Now all I want for Christmas is an Open Mosix release for the 2.6 kernel.:)
We'll see wave after wave of trojan programs that require the superuser password in order to work.... and guess how many people are going to do as instructed?
Already there are loads of Linux apps that require Superuser intervention... take CD-Roast for example.
At the moment, Linux is viewed as good enough for the desktop of people who only use their computers as a glorified communications device.
We're talking Internet, Mail, and Office utilities.
These users want to do these three things without viruses, spyware, hardware upgrades, and crufty Operating Systems that crash.
As for users who want to use a PC for gaming, music, and multimedia... Linux is probably not the best choice. However, when it comes to getting work done without all the nonsense, Linux is where it's at.
Australian Shows
on
Retro Vision
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you thought the Dukes of Hazzard and Kight Rider were bad... it's a far cry from "Neighbours" and the Australian "Young Talent Time".
"Full House" is slow torture compared to "Young Talent Time".
There was a time for everything 80s... and that was in the 80s.
Recently in Japan, Nintendo have been re-releasing some of their old 8-bit NES games on the GBA. So you can buy the original Super Mario Bros. on the GBA now, as well as many other old school NES games legally.
This patent no doubt ties in with the fact that Nintendo want to fleece their back-catalogue.
I wonder if they borrowed a certain GBA NES emulator to get the effect though?
What's scary about this is that you have a fake sake being passed off as a real, authentic business.
What's to stop the fake site from selling products On-Line, and harvesting Credit Card numbers?
Heck, they don't even have to change the email addresses on their fake site to that of the original company.... and then the original compnay end up with a lot of very angry "customers"........
This might sound like a strange solution, but there were tonnes of good educational programs on some of those old 8-bit machines... especially the Apple ][ and even for the Commodore 64.
If you can fish some of these old-skool educational programs out and run emulators on your laptops, then you've got something at least. Dunno about the legality of using old software on an emulator... but I doubt anyone will really care.
I remember playing loads of educational games on the Commodore 64 back in the day... "Rocky's Boots" and "Goldfields" were my favourites.
If you do this you can say goodbye to spare blocks that are remapped in case the HD finds a bad block. If you want to risk all your data stored on your huge hard drives... go ahead and do this. Otherwise I think this is generally a bad idea.
It is definitely not a case of Hard Drive makers ripping us off either. Even though you can buy a 250GB hard drive, it will appear on the system as 231GB or something close to that due to the math that GB are calculated at, as well as the file system overhead.
More likely is that they want other people to research how to build a future battledroid to capable of military-level spy/front-line army work... capable of survivng desert conditions for a given number of miles.
Slashdot Mirror
Gnome + KDE = KnoDE
New Zealand and Australia are like the US Guinea pigs for new technology. Before the US makes use of it themselves, giving it a test-run in a developed, friendly, and reasonably well-off country like Australia and NZ makes for a good test case.
I'm more heartened by motherboard makers' explorations into "instant-on" BIOSes which let you use mail and TV functions of your PC hardware without needed to boot Windows and suffer the onslaught of long boot times, a million virii, bad drivers. Windows XP with DirectX9 on it, has given me the black-screen-of-death lockups on more than one occasion when using the multimedia functions on my graphics card.
I liked the blue screen more... at least that way Windows knew it had a problem.
Instant-on technologies seems to be the way to go. With things like bootable USB flash memories, Magnetic RAM, things look more "solid state" and like a console.
Maybe one day my PC will get it's own kernal ROM and boot as fast as my old Commodore 64 did.
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to you!
I think it's mainly an issue of "content" and "community". Most game content is unattractive to women, just as barbie dolls are unattractive to 5 year old boys. Robots, guns, lives, and shooting doesn't interest women in the slightest. Having said that though, women are more inclined to play a game of self-preservation whereby they do this my outsmarting, capturing and enslaving other characters to do things against their will... while making them think it's all their idea! This sort of thing you would see in "The sims" for example. If my personal experiences with women are anything to go by, that's the kind of mind-games they're into! Then there is the community element.... Women are much more interested in playing games with other people, and hate being alone. Women love Role Playing Games as well.
I'm inclinded to think that it's women who are the most vocal about games being "anti-social"... at least, that's how it's been in my life.
My girlfriend doesn't like it either... because it takes time away from HER... and she's much happier being passive and watching TV like a mindless sheep, rather than having to use her brain to play a game!
When she wants to though, she can play a mean game of Mario Kart.... but before long it bores her.... so...
I remember loading games from the Commodore 64 from Datasette. After all was said and done, the thing was a tape driven 300 Baud modem!
A minimum of 3 minute wait time if the tape had a fast loader, and up to half an hour if it was saved by standard loading.
Then the heads would always go askew and the tape would come up with errors....
Man those days suck... thank god they aren't coming back!
A load of junk characters equivalent to the two-byte Japanese kana characters appear on the screen, reducing the display to jibberish. That is, if you are lucky to see anything at all.
Been there and done that.
Bootable CDs are fun.... but it turns the PC into a game console - plus CDs have nowhere to save data. Now, this idea of the bootable game CD is very feasible if we are talking about something like MAME. Check out the AdvanceCD project.... it's great. However, some people like to play games while their computer stays on the net... and others while their PC is crunching away compiling something. A PC costs a lot of money, it makes no sense to get one if it's just going to be a glorified game console. Consoles cost a lot less and don't require a monitor.
One thing that Linux can do really well is CLUSTER EASILY. Forget the PS3... as long as games are written to make use of Linux's clustering abilities - we can have some MASSIVE gaming servers and game environments.
:)
Now all I want for Christmas is an Open Mosix release for the 2.6 kernel.
The real issue here (I think), is that it would hurt Realtek more in the long run when there is no sourced driver available for their own hardware.
Without acceptance into Linux, people are more likely to avoid their hardware when choosing a Linux set-up.
So who's the real loser going to be in this situation?
Answer: Realtek, and their own customers!
Wouldn't Mobilix get sued by Mobil as well?
You're right about one thing.
.... and guess how many people are going to do as instructed?
We'll see wave after wave of trojan programs that require the superuser password in order to work
Already there are loads of Linux apps that require Superuser intervention... take CD-Roast for example.
C?
Yeah, just kill it off already... I wanna go back to using Commodore 64 BASIC.
I'm talking about professional level music creation/editing, and professional multimedia development.
I know some Hollywood studios use clusters of Linux to do CGI rendering, but that's a totally different kettle of fish.
And I bet if SCO told you to jump off a cliff, you'd do that as well.
At the moment, Linux is viewed as good enough for the desktop of people who only use their computers as a glorified communications device. We're talking Internet, Mail, and Office utilities. These users want to do these three things without viruses, spyware, hardware upgrades, and crufty Operating Systems that crash. As for users who want to use a PC for gaming, music, and multimedia... Linux is probably not the best choice. However, when it comes to getting work done without all the nonsense, Linux is where it's at.
If you thought the Dukes of Hazzard and Kight Rider were bad... it's a far cry from "Neighbours" and the Australian "Young Talent Time".
"Full House" is slow torture compared to "Young Talent Time".
There was a time for everything 80s... and that was in the 80s.
Recently in Japan, Nintendo have been re-releasing some of their old 8-bit NES games on the GBA. So you can buy the original Super Mario Bros. on the GBA now, as well as many other old school NES games legally.
This patent no doubt ties in with the fact that Nintendo want to fleece their back-catalogue.
I wonder if they borrowed a certain GBA NES emulator to get the effect though?
Man, Granny's Garden kicked some major arse....
Just about everyone I know who grew up using a C64 at school knows that game.
"Raft Away River", "sheepdog Trails" and all those Jacaranda software titels were damn great as well.
I wish I could find "Dinosaur Discovery" for the Apple II because that was fantastic as well...
What's scary about this is that you have a fake sake being passed off as a real, authentic business.
What's to stop the fake site from selling products On-Line, and harvesting Credit Card numbers?
Heck, they don't even have to change the email addresses on their fake site to that of the original company.... and then the original compnay end up with a lot of very angry "customers"........
This might sound like a strange solution, but there were tonnes of good educational programs on some of those old 8-bit machines... especially the Apple ][ and even for the Commodore 64.
If you can fish some of these old-skool educational programs out and run emulators on your laptops, then you've got something at least.
Dunno about the legality of using old software on an emulator... but I doubt anyone will really care.
I remember playing loads of educational games on the Commodore 64 back in the day... "Rocky's Boots" and "Goldfields" were my favourites.
Here goes nothing....
1...
2...
3...
IMAGINE A BEOWULF CLUSTER OF GENESISES!!!!!
(Is that Genesisesiseis?!)
If you do this you can say goodbye to spare blocks that are remapped in case the HD finds a bad block.
If you want to risk all your data stored on your huge hard drives... go ahead and do this. Otherwise I think this is generally a bad idea.
It is definitely not a case of Hard Drive makers ripping us off either. Even though you can buy a 250GB hard drive, it will appear on the system as 231GB or something close to that due to the math that GB are calculated at, as well as the file system overhead.
So yeah, this idea sucks.
More likely is that they want other people to research how to build a future battledroid to capable of military-level spy/front-line army work... capable of survivng desert conditions for a given number of miles.