Oh noes! I am deathly afraid of a hidden device driver called "Null" on my machine! I wish I could just do like those Linux guys do and send it to/dev/null!
If it's locked while the plane is on the ground via radio code from ATC and won't open until ATC sends an unlock code, there's no amount of terrorist cajoling that will cause that door to open, nor does the pilot have to be a "heartless bastard". It just won't open while the plane is in flight.
<BChikapa> Holy shit. Calisa, are you watching this thing on Fox <Calisa> no. <BChikapa> This guy was in a boat, and a swordfish JUMPED OUT OF THE WATER AND STABBED HIM IN THE FACE. <Calisa> [SA]HatfulOfHollow finally got them. <BChikapa> I don't know if it's sadder that you made that joke, or that I got it.
And to top it all off, chilling the moisture out of the ground is going to dehydrate that soil, causing things to die. There's a good reason that cooling systems are used for dehumidification.
However, if they're talking drip irrigation from buried pipes, then it's an excellent idea. However, it's nothing new. You can buy the materials to set a system like this up in your garden from the nearest hardware store with a decent lawn and garden department.
And any water exposed to open air is going to have a certain amount of evaporation, so i'm not sure why he's on about that. I'd be willing to bet it's more efficient from an evaporation viewpoint to spray the water from above, since evaporation causes cooling. Cooling causes dehumidification of the surrounding material by condensation. If you evaporatively cool the soil by drip irrigation, the soil cools and releases it's moisture faster. It goes into the water table or an underground aquifer, taking with it unused nutrients, unsettled herbicides, unspent pesticides, and it still doesn't reach the plants for the time needed for them to absorb it. If you instead evap-cool the air above it, the water condenses out of the air and falls onto that soil, hydrating it and leaving nutrients and chemicals undisturbed for a longer time.
Better question... why didn't they keep a local copy of The Doctor before they sent him to the other end of the galaxy? Really, he's just a collection of data, so why not transmit a recon copy? Why bother bringing him back? Just duplicate him and send the clone on its way.
It would've been a much different episode, but still doable. Of course, it also would've required a Star Trek writer to know something about technology instead of just using the usual tried-and-true method of 1) insert thumb, 2) clench and wiggle, 3) remove thumb and sniff it for content.
One thing to remember, if holograms are so "easy" to make into self-aware AI's, then why did Tom & Harry have such trouble making a stable holomatrix while The Doctor (no name, you should note) was away saving the Prometheus with Andy Dick (Holo-doc mark II)?
Not that I care, I just see that episode in reruns a lot for some reason. I'm always disappointed because Voyager was only interesting to me because of the utter sexiness that is Jeri Ryan, and she's not on screen very much in that episode.
Even the POTS is peer-to-peer at a certain level. It'd really fuck everyone in the ass if it was shut down, including the lawmaking bodies of the world as well as the *AA's and their ilk.
I'm just gonna jump in here with an expansion of this idea...
Imagine if Nintendo did Apple's trick... A gaming iPod, an online "hub" with a store, periodic (required) firmware updates to keep systems that connect to it up-to-date, downloadable games for low cost and a vast library of them... The possibilities are damn-near endless.
They could build the emulator into the games themselves as sort of a software "mapper" like the NES had in cart hardware. That would allow them to make a Genesis (or whatever) emulator after the system is out the door, then bundle it with any game you download that requires that particular emulator, allowing for emulated systems to be added a couple years down the road. They could even have every emulator be stubbed for network multiplayer (where a second player on the original system is expected to be on the network in the emulator).
The "gaming iPod" idea would allow for a Gameboy-like device that could store all (or a manageable set) the games that it's capable of emulating for mobile gaming.
Forcing these games (and new games as well) to have stubbed-in netplay would create a need for a game hosting/finding/matching service (I believe this is going to be Gamespy anyway, so that part's actually gonna happen). Add some voice chat, simple file transfer for screenshots and such (but not for those games you bought... they require your activation like iTunes does for protected music), IM/email, etc. (How about IM that just waits for you on a caching server if you're offline, but comes on through instantly if you're online? Best of both worlds...)
They could make a killing doing this. And it would put Xbox Live to shame. And the anti-Nintendo zealots could shut up too.
(In case you couldn't tell, I'm one of those mid-20's NES generation guys and a Nintendo fanboy to a certain degree.)
No, those games were developed by Squaresoft. Nintendo is the publisher on every game bearing the Nintendo "Seal of Approval" thingy. Sometimes Nintendo would have a sub-publisher that would bankroll a production run (Acclaim did this a lot for smaller developers, like "Iguana", who made the NBA Jam and Turok games), but in the end, every game for every Nintendo system has been published by Nintendo itself.
The only exceptions to this are those odd old games for the NES and SNES that looked different. Tengen had the black carts, and most of their games were "approved" by Nintendo (though that practice went away after the NES died). Camerica had the gold cartridges with the extra connector on the back of the cart. Then there were those blue ones (I think Spindizzy was one of these). The SNES had Super Noah's Ark, which required a piggybacked "real" cartridge to get around hardware lockouts. I'm not sure, but I think that it might've even required Wolf3D in order to use the engine.
In any event, If Nintendo chose to do so, they could probably force Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) to allow those games to be sold on a Nintendo-branded service. It's surely a clause in the "Seal of Approval" publishing contract.
There's a term for it, and it's something that sticks in the back of every leader's mind, whether he's in a political, corporate, academic, religious, or any other leading position.
Power base.
A leader silently fears those words, for they represent his nemesis. He can't survive without a power base, yet he is at odds with it. He needs it, yet it struggles to remove him. And it can.
There are many examples throughout history. Not too many of them are recent, however, which means we're probably due for an uprising of one sort or another. Current leaders have much to fear.
This article couldn't have hit/. at a more appropriate time.
I noticed that I didn't have admin access anymore about 3 weeks ago. I started looking for a job. 2 interviews later, and I'm hired. I turned in my 2 weeks today. When I notified my boss, he said that it's a good thing I'm leaving, since he was planning on firing me anyway.
Meanwhile, I still have rainy-day access (backdoors) into the server that I've been using to clean up messes for the last 3 weeks. I'm not an asshole, so I won't be doing anything to these systems once I'm gone, but I guarantee that the admin has exactly NO clue that I could get in as an admin right now.
Just changing a few passwords isn't going to help. You must assume that the box is out of your control when an admin leaves.
Really I have no sympathy for intelligent people who fail to utilize a little bit of judgement.
Amen.
I found vulnerabilities in the school network when I was in high school, too. I found an unprotected (no password!) super user named "Ron". I fiddled with it for a while, then I deleted everyone's user accounts. On a Friday. Monday morning, the accounts were back, "Ron" was replaced by "Rob", and the teachers had dark circles under their eyes.
I repeated it with "Rob", "Roy", "Russ", and several other similar names. Mind you, all other accounts were like "jsmith" or "ajones", all first initial, last name stuff. These super user accounts were NAMED like a sore thumb. They could've named one "MOTHERFUCK" and it wouldn't have been any more obvious that it was a super user.
They finally wised up and just assigned a group of teachers to be admins without the safety net of a backdoor account. They ditched Novell soon after, I hear, but that was after I graduated.
And for those that want to know, I fessed up after I had my grades and transcript in hand. They said something to the effect of "well, at least we know that we can't trust anyone not to find a back door". Therein lies the lesson: don't tell them it's you until they have no means of harming you.
Umm... I'm pretty sure you had to press the buttons on the NES and even earlier systems to make them do anything. I'd count that as "pressure sensitive".
Nintendo has been trying desperately hard to bring back the social aspect to gaming, to bring back the arcades of old. Now with this design, every person just owns a piece of the arcade.
My god... and here we all thought Microsoft was the evil master of Embrace-and-Extend. Microsoft's E&E stuff has always been a small 5-year one-shot deal. Here you're saying that Nintendo has been plotting to take over the arcade scene for 30 years, and did so by killing it with a home replacement, becoming ubiquitous, and pouncing when the tech becomes available to extend it...
It's all so clear now...
I, for one, welcome our new (old?) Nintendo overlords.
The "Cell" is a modified PPC 4xx core with some fancy additions. The Gamecube uses a PPC 4xx right now.
If the Xbox uses a PPC 97x core, it will be in a different league. It'll be able to do something similar to DirectX 9's floating point stuff, and be able to do it well, even from the CPU.
And it's nice that you mention the different API's for each system... I'm betting the Revolution is going to have Ageia's PPU hardware in it. Just a hunch.
That argument will die when it's unquestionably false. In my mind, good games are everywhere for the Gamecube, but likely, you grew up with a Playstation rather than a NES or SNES, and prefer the mindless pap Sony prefers to push on their console.
Playstation games have always had a "dude where's my car" feel to them. It's very similar to Sega 10-13 years ago. For instance, they actually made a Michael Jackson "moonwalking" game. People actually bought it. Sad. There are just so many "B-rated" games. And the ones that aren't "B-rated" are aimed at preteens that wear neon-colored clothes and haven't grown pubes yet.
But finally, people realized that Nintendo was making games that didn't suck. And soon people will rediscover Nintendo and their un-sucky games. Sega's making Nintendo franchises now (F-Zero being particularly well done on the Gamecube, I must say). Sony had some good games on the NES. Maybe they'll be back to doing that in a decade or so.
Until then, we must suffer Acclaim-like feces and a system that allows it to ferment into a potent mixture of stench and pure poison with nothing so much as a proverbial gas mask to protect us. Not only that, but people seem to be sucking this raw sewage down like the bottom-feeding lowlifes they truly are. They'll grow out of it soon, though. Nobody can be 15 forever.
Another poster is describing a UDF disk reader... which is exactly what the Gamecube uses. Universal Disk Format is what DVD's use. A DVD drive that doesn't have DVD(CSS)-decryption hardware in it is a UDF disk reader.
So in a way, Nintendo did use a "DVD drive", just not one that can play DVD's. The laser assembly is identical. The read-from-outside-to-spindle thing is an optional thing in the format spec too. So is the smaller disk size. It's all just standard parts with a smaller plastic plate on top of it and a config ROM set to drive the motor accordingly.
I doubt that costs a whole lot more than building a BIOS that enforces copy protection (which is most likely why Nintendo used that setup). You can't easily burn disks that can be read edge-to-center, but when you can (in 5 to 10 years), I'm guessing that the Gamecube BIOS doesn't have much in the way of copy protection. And that is what reduces cost.
NES CPU was a 65c02, and sound was (AFAIK) straight off a couple of pins of it. Konami games had a tendency to include a Yamaha synth chip in the cart that allowed for deeper bass. Not all games with deep basslines had a secondary synth, though. Most notably, Journey to Silius used the saw channel for drums and worked some sort of voodoo to get "awesome" (for NES anyway...) guitars out of the square and noise channels.
SNES had a 65c816 CPU, but sound was mostly handled by the SPC700. I think sound effects were still out of the CPU.
The Gameboy used a Z80 for its CPU. I don't know how its sound was done. Probably something similar to the NES.
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Unless, of course, they're being paid my Microsoft to carry only Microsoft products.
I've known of a few shops that get a sizable chunk of money for that sort of arrangement.
Just one more:
Stuponfucious.
Yeah, I'm a PA whore.
Oh noes! I am deathly afraid of a hidden device driver called "Null" on my machine! I wish I could just do like those Linux guys do and send it to /dev/null!
:)
Oh, wait...
If it's locked while the plane is on the ground via radio code from ATC and won't open until ATC sends an unlock code, there's no amount of terrorist cajoling that will cause that door to open, nor does the pilot have to be a "heartless bastard". It just won't open while the plane is in flight.
Link.
<BChikapa> Holy shit. Calisa, are you watching this thing on Fox
<Calisa> no.
<BChikapa> This guy was in a boat, and a swordfish JUMPED OUT OF THE WATER AND STABBED HIM IN THE FACE.
<Calisa> [SA]HatfulOfHollow finally got them.
<BChikapa> I don't know if it's sadder that you made that joke, or that I got it.
Bingo.
And to top it all off, chilling the moisture out of the ground is going to dehydrate that soil, causing things to die. There's a good reason that cooling systems are used for dehumidification.
However, if they're talking drip irrigation from buried pipes, then it's an excellent idea. However, it's nothing new. You can buy the materials to set a system like this up in your garden from the nearest hardware store with a decent lawn and garden department.
And any water exposed to open air is going to have a certain amount of evaporation, so i'm not sure why he's on about that. I'd be willing to bet it's more efficient from an evaporation viewpoint to spray the water from above, since evaporation causes cooling. Cooling causes dehumidification of the surrounding material by condensation. If you evaporatively cool the soil by drip irrigation, the soil cools and releases it's moisture faster. It goes into the water table or an underground aquifer, taking with it unused nutrients, unsettled herbicides, unspent pesticides, and it still doesn't reach the plants for the time needed for them to absorb it. If you instead evap-cool the air above it, the water condenses out of the air and falls onto that soil, hydrating it and leaving nutrients and chemicals undisturbed for a longer time.
Better question... why didn't they keep a local copy of The Doctor before they sent him to the other end of the galaxy? Really, he's just a collection of data, so why not transmit a recon copy? Why bother bringing him back? Just duplicate him and send the clone on its way.
It would've been a much different episode, but still doable. Of course, it also would've required a Star Trek writer to know something about technology instead of just using the usual tried-and-true method of 1) insert thumb, 2) clench and wiggle, 3) remove thumb and sniff it for content.
Emerson Electric is headquartered in St. Louis, and IIRC, their products are all made in factories in the US or its territories.
They make TV's and related electronics (VCR's, stereos, DVD players, etc.).
The Nerd is strong with this one...
One thing to remember, if holograms are so "easy" to make into self-aware AI's, then why did Tom & Harry have such trouble making a stable holomatrix while The Doctor (no name, you should note) was away saving the Prometheus with Andy Dick (Holo-doc mark II)?
Not that I care, I just see that episode in reruns a lot for some reason. I'm always disappointed because Voyager was only interesting to me because of the utter sexiness that is Jeri Ryan, and she's not on screen very much in that episode.
He already chants "Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!" when he lists their products. At least, that's the way I always heard it...
Even the POTS is peer-to-peer at a certain level. It'd really fuck everyone in the ass if it was shut down, including the lawmaking bodies of the world as well as the *AA's and their ilk.
Umm... doesn't Magnusson-Moss require a 1-year warranty for any product sold in the U.S.? Or am I dreaming? Or are you outside the U.S.?
I'm just gonna jump in here with an expansion of this idea...
Imagine if Nintendo did Apple's trick... A gaming iPod, an online "hub" with a store, periodic (required) firmware updates to keep systems that connect to it up-to-date, downloadable games for low cost and a vast library of them... The possibilities are damn-near endless.
They could build the emulator into the games themselves as sort of a software "mapper" like the NES had in cart hardware. That would allow them to make a Genesis (or whatever) emulator after the system is out the door, then bundle it with any game you download that requires that particular emulator, allowing for emulated systems to be added a couple years down the road. They could even have every emulator be stubbed for network multiplayer (where a second player on the original system is expected to be on the network in the emulator).
The "gaming iPod" idea would allow for a Gameboy-like device that could store all (or a manageable set) the games that it's capable of emulating for mobile gaming.
Forcing these games (and new games as well) to have stubbed-in netplay would create a need for a game hosting/finding/matching service (I believe this is going to be Gamespy anyway, so that part's actually gonna happen). Add some voice chat, simple file transfer for screenshots and such (but not for those games you bought... they require your activation like iTunes does for protected music), IM/email, etc. (How about IM that just waits for you on a caching server if you're offline, but comes on through instantly if you're online? Best of both worlds...)
They could make a killing doing this. And it would put Xbox Live to shame. And the anti-Nintendo zealots could shut up too.
(In case you couldn't tell, I'm one of those mid-20's NES generation guys and a Nintendo fanboy to a certain degree.)
No, those games were developed by Squaresoft. Nintendo is the publisher on every game bearing the Nintendo "Seal of Approval" thingy. Sometimes Nintendo would have a sub-publisher that would bankroll a production run (Acclaim did this a lot for smaller developers, like "Iguana", who made the NBA Jam and Turok games), but in the end, every game for every Nintendo system has been published by Nintendo itself.
The only exceptions to this are those odd old games for the NES and SNES that looked different. Tengen had the black carts, and most of their games were "approved" by Nintendo (though that practice went away after the NES died). Camerica had the gold cartridges with the extra connector on the back of the cart. Then there were those blue ones (I think Spindizzy was one of these). The SNES had Super Noah's Ark, which required a piggybacked "real" cartridge to get around hardware lockouts. I'm not sure, but I think that it might've even required Wolf3D in order to use the engine.
In any event, If Nintendo chose to do so, they could probably force Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) to allow those games to be sold on a Nintendo-branded service. It's surely a clause in the "Seal of Approval" publishing contract.
Something comes to mind about the 6.019999th floor right about now...
Oh yes! I remember now! Never piss off the BOFH. And buy him curry and lagers.
There's a term for it, and it's something that sticks in the back of every leader's mind, whether he's in a political, corporate, academic, religious, or any other leading position.
Power base.
A leader silently fears those words, for they represent his nemesis. He can't survive without a power base, yet he is at odds with it. He needs it, yet it struggles to remove him. And it can.
There are many examples throughout history. Not too many of them are recent, however, which means we're probably due for an uprising of one sort or another. Current leaders have much to fear.
This article couldn't have hit /. at a more appropriate time.
I noticed that I didn't have admin access anymore about 3 weeks ago. I started looking for a job. 2 interviews later, and I'm hired. I turned in my 2 weeks today. When I notified my boss, he said that it's a good thing I'm leaving, since he was planning on firing me anyway.
Meanwhile, I still have rainy-day access (backdoors) into the server that I've been using to clean up messes for the last 3 weeks. I'm not an asshole, so I won't be doing anything to these systems once I'm gone, but I guarantee that the admin has exactly NO clue that I could get in as an admin right now.
Just changing a few passwords isn't going to help. You must assume that the box is out of your control when an admin leaves.
Really I have no sympathy for intelligent people who fail to utilize a little bit of judgement.
Amen.
I found vulnerabilities in the school network when I was in high school, too. I found an unprotected (no password!) super user named "Ron". I fiddled with it for a while, then I deleted everyone's user accounts. On a Friday. Monday morning, the accounts were back, "Ron" was replaced by "Rob", and the teachers had dark circles under their eyes.
I repeated it with "Rob", "Roy", "Russ", and several other similar names. Mind you, all other accounts were like "jsmith" or "ajones", all first initial, last name stuff. These super user accounts were NAMED like a sore thumb. They could've named one "MOTHERFUCK" and it wouldn't have been any more obvious that it was a super user.
They finally wised up and just assigned a group of teachers to be admins without the safety net of a backdoor account. They ditched Novell soon after, I hear, but that was after I graduated.
And for those that want to know, I fessed up after I had my grades and transcript in hand. They said something to the effect of "well, at least we know that we can't trust anyone not to find a back door". Therein lies the lesson: don't tell them it's you until they have no means of harming you.
None. The inventor would disappear DeBeers-style and the invention would be buried with him.
Umm... I'm pretty sure you had to press the buttons on the NES and even earlier systems to make them do anything. I'd count that as "pressure sensitive".
Nintendo has been trying desperately hard to bring back the social aspect to gaming, to bring back the arcades of old. Now with this design, every person just owns a piece of the arcade.
My god... and here we all thought Microsoft was the evil master of Embrace-and-Extend. Microsoft's E&E stuff has always been a small 5-year one-shot deal. Here you're saying that Nintendo has been plotting to take over the arcade scene for 30 years, and did so by killing it with a home replacement, becoming ubiquitous, and pouncing when the tech becomes available to extend it...
It's all so clear now...
I, for one, welcome our new (old?) Nintendo overlords.
The "Cell" is a modified PPC 4xx core with some fancy additions. The Gamecube uses a PPC 4xx right now.
If the Xbox uses a PPC 97x core, it will be in a different league. It'll be able to do something similar to DirectX 9's floating point stuff, and be able to do it well, even from the CPU.
And it's nice that you mention the different API's for each system... I'm betting the Revolution is going to have Ageia's PPU hardware in it. Just a hunch.
That argument will die when it's unquestionably false. In my mind, good games are everywhere for the Gamecube, but likely, you grew up with a Playstation rather than a NES or SNES, and prefer the mindless pap Sony prefers to push on their console.
Playstation games have always had a "dude where's my car" feel to them. It's very similar to Sega 10-13 years ago. For instance, they actually made a Michael Jackson "moonwalking" game. People actually bought it. Sad. There are just so many "B-rated" games. And the ones that aren't "B-rated" are aimed at preteens that wear neon-colored clothes and haven't grown pubes yet.
But finally, people realized that Nintendo was making games that didn't suck. And soon people will rediscover Nintendo and their un-sucky games. Sega's making Nintendo franchises now (F-Zero being particularly well done on the Gamecube, I must say). Sony had some good games on the NES. Maybe they'll be back to doing that in a decade or so.
Until then, we must suffer Acclaim-like feces and a system that allows it to ferment into a potent mixture of stench and pure poison with nothing so much as a proverbial gas mask to protect us. Not only that, but people seem to be sucking this raw sewage down like the bottom-feeding lowlifes they truly are. They'll grow out of it soon, though. Nobody can be 15 forever.
Another poster is describing a UDF disk reader... which is exactly what the Gamecube uses. Universal Disk Format is what DVD's use. A DVD drive that doesn't have DVD(CSS)-decryption hardware in it is a UDF disk reader.
So in a way, Nintendo did use a "DVD drive", just not one that can play DVD's. The laser assembly is identical. The read-from-outside-to-spindle thing is an optional thing in the format spec too. So is the smaller disk size. It's all just standard parts with a smaller plastic plate on top of it and a config ROM set to drive the motor accordingly.
I doubt that costs a whole lot more than building a BIOS that enforces copy protection (which is most likely why Nintendo used that setup). You can't easily burn disks that can be read edge-to-center, but when you can (in 5 to 10 years), I'm guessing that the Gamecube BIOS doesn't have much in the way of copy protection. And that is what reduces cost.
Mostly correct.
NES CPU was a 65c02, and sound was (AFAIK) straight off a couple of pins of it. Konami games had a tendency to include a Yamaha synth chip in the cart that allowed for deeper bass. Not all games with deep basslines had a secondary synth, though. Most notably, Journey to Silius used the saw channel for drums and worked some sort of voodoo to get "awesome" (for NES anyway...) guitars out of the square and noise channels.
SNES had a 65c816 CPU, but sound was mostly handled by the SPC700. I think sound effects were still out of the CPU.
The Gameboy used a Z80 for its CPU. I don't know how its sound was done. Probably something similar to the NES.