Yes its visualls are stunning especially if you had a proper PC. It was also EMPTY. If you leave early on new years day and see the entire city before you devoid of live that is what Morrowind was like.
Lots of it came from too ambitious plans and too weak hardware. If you saw concept art of Vivec, you'd understand. It would be a big challenge for nowadays gfx cards to render such thing at more than 10FPS in 800x600. Back then - forget it. They just had to cut down on the number of characters and objects...
If you ever played a more focussed RPG Read: Linear RPG.
you will know that at stages you will encounter shops wich sell you goods that are oddly enough at your current level. Weird eh? Morrowind designers didn't know what shop you were going to encounter when and I ended up stealing the best bow very early on in the game. (Yes I am a thieving basartd) I probably shouldn't have done that but I wandered into the city saw it and stole it. And you missed the great Daedric Longbow which kicks ass of any bow you can find in a town. Usually stealing/getting expensive stuff early on is damn difficult. If you want, go visit nearest daedric ruins, it's near. Win against a daedra, and there you are, a piece of daedric weapon/armor. Cool? No. The daedra will kick your ass. I challenged a Frygian Hag really early on in the game. Lost about 30 health potions I had kept just in case, and quite a few others. Barely survived. Got the cool dagger which I used for next 5-6 levels until I got something stronger and could beat shit off a hag without sweat. But in the meantime the dagger was a well deserved reward for the hard battle. You were a good thief, you got a good bow. Congrats. Stealing the one that comes with the "archery" mod is pretty much impossible without cheating or at least killing the shopkeeper...
generic FAT is a very bad idea for flash media. Every write operation no matter where on the media causes a write operation in one area. Your flash media can survive a million writes so theoretically you can write 100 million files as long as you randomize/distribute their locations evenly over the media. Sorry, with each file write, no matter where, FAT gets updated, a single location gets written. After a million writes it dies. Bummer. Manufacturers overcome it by placing FAT on separate chip of extended lifetime or virtually mapping 'flat diskspace' to physical chip address space and migrating it from time to time, so that FAT "wanders". Won't be quite possible if you format the media at home.
But if its just a fixed price game, why would Pioneer be selling them for 1800 dollars?
Because Pioneer doesn't sell media. They want their investment back and the only way to do so is by selling the players, while others harvest the vast profit from media played on these players.
The 50 bucks was of top of my head, it may be more, I don't know. I doubt it will be anything near 1800, or even 500 though. More likely below 200.
And now the fun part. XB360 uses standard old DVD-ROMs with just some tricks that probably are hackable. The data was read already. Writing it back and producing working copies on DVD with some modchip or the like is just the matter of time. Size of the pirated games market then? I'd say 3/4 of the market total. Major loss. In the meantime Sony will be releasing their games on media that aren't writable by any home technology. So far nobody talks about Blu-Ray writers. The best DRM you can think of - feel free to make a copy of our disk, just buy a $20mln disk-stamping facility to do it, currently any cheaper way is nonexistant. And there's no way to squeeze 25GB on a single DVD so even if you read the content, you won't be able to replay it in PS3. So if you want to play PS3 games, you will have to buy originals. Or at very best and unlikely event, poor rips with lots of content removed to fit on a DVD. Sony may easily expect their Blu-ray media profits won't be dimnished the least bit by piracy. The only risk is "oh, PS3 is unhackable. I'll better get an XBox then, I'll save a lot on games then." - that's profit lost for both of them (or even a small gain for M$: Peripherials, some (way fewer but still) games, maybe some subscription service). So Sony wants to gain biggest market share it can before XBox360 is hacked...
Small loss? Even if it costs them an extremely cheap price of 300 bucks oem to get the blue ray player in there
Or manufacture one for $50 themselves. It's expensive because it's a novelty. The machinery and development costed a fortune. But once the production line is in place (and you disregard the cost of the line itself) a single unit will be just slightly more expensive than a CD drive. The blue laser isn't -that- expensive and all the rest is just improved precision of the old technology, so unit cost doesn't increase all that much. Of course if you produce OEM blu-ray, you want to get the production line investment back as fast as possible, so add $250 "development and machines" cost to each $50/unit real cost. But a giant like Sony can afford distributing the "return of investment" over a way longer period, and instead of charging us $1000 now and $80 in 3 years for the same device, they are quite ready to charge us a flat $80 all the time, nuking the competition into oblivion and gaining a healthy margin of profit from market share they gain and media sales. The "loss per unit" is a pretty imaginary value, because a single unit is REALLY cheap. It's just that the price includes a part of "loss" that has already happened, their investment in production. They -already- lost what they had to lose, now they will just try to get that back, faster (but less) or slower (but more).
Quoting the FAQ: A single-layer disc can fit 23.3GB, 25GB or 27GB. A dual-layer disc can fit 46.6GB, 50GB or 54GB.
Some other source: The bulk wholesale price for 2GB flash memory (...) dropped to US$12 (1,300 yen) in June this [2005] year.
Would you be ready to pay $150 extra for media the game/movie is written to? We still need to wait for flash prices to go through the bottom, and it won't be soon.
Or they will do the same as they did with PS2 and DVD: Release it at a small loss for people to kill to get one. Get huge market penetration because you get a Blu-Ray player and a top-notch console at a fraction of price of a generic blu-ray player from competition. Then earn lots and lots on games, as people try to "discover what their player can do, besides playing movies".
Well, I wrote a complaint about excessively long queues to the student's affairs office (or whatever it's called in English). The waiting time was like 3h, and it was open only 4h/day 4days/week, and the performance was embarassingly weak. I gathered about 400 signatures of students. Answer? "We can speed our work up. It takes us half a hour to positively resolve your cases, but only 5 minutes to resolve them negatively. We will be denying all the requests we are allowed to deny and then the queue will be moving much faster. Cancel your complaint or we will do so."
If he can't be trusted to keep comments about an academic superior and his fellow peers professional, how can he be trusted to keep comments about future patients confidential and professional as well?
Translation: malpractice, n: Reason why surgeons wear face masks.
If I was in charge, I'd put sockets and transparent light guides to put any kind of LEDs in the drive at strategical point and drive the light to the most interesting spots. And place at least one LED on the head:)
I have a drive that's extremely noisy when horizontally. I turned it vertically (sockets up) and it went very silent (while still working!;), and runs nicely in my home server for some 2 years now.
Seriously, they don't. It's fun when you risk damage. It's no fun if you're sure to damage it. Modders kept putting windows in harddrives for a LONG time, but recently they stopped, because any drive above some 60GB doesn't survive it. Not sure what is the reason - pressure/humidity change, microparticles in atmosphere or whatever, but the drives invariably die. If you want a windowed drive, play with an old-fashioned 20G ATA66 drive, forget anything SATA....
Good idea. Actually, I wouldn't like to see into their minds really. Just the idea of them having a hole in their head covered with a lens appeals to me... Actually, screw the lens, I just want them with holes in their heads...
It creates a copy. Blame Microsoft that it doesn't import Firefox bookmarks. BTW, seems "customizable Google home page" may be what you want. Other nice alternative - RSS-based web storage for your bookmarks.
and if incidence of homophobia decreases over the next 50 years, as it may well do due to social acceptance...
As I mentioned, it's irrational. Increase of social acceptance will result just in this, increase of social acceptance. People will suppress their homophobia using rationality, but that won't remove repulsion with the idea of -them- having sex with a member of the same sex. It will reduce number of people hostile towards homosexuals and as result move the self-denying and hiding homosexuals in the open, but won't increase the "natural" percentages of homo/bisexuals.
I don't know for sure, but have a gut feeling that a lot of homophobic reaction is due to social taboos programmed from a _very_ early age
Yes, like the stone age or something like that. The -phobias have the same origins as -philias, very likely genetic.
Black, multimedia keys, excessively cheap (below $10). Still pretty comfortable and cool-looking. It fell off the desk. The corner broke off. The keyboard still worked, but the sharp edge of broken plastic was exactly where I'm resting my hand. So I decided to 'soften' it by melting with a lighter. Damn cheap black plastic.
This guy just asked how to speed up sorting rows of a HTML table in Javascript. Of course no matter what algorithm you pick, rewriting DOM is going to be slow.
IANAPhysicist, but IIRC (sorry for the abuse) if light hits objects comparable/smaller than its wavelength it gets diffracted but still the "middle dot" remains the strongest. You lose focus and contrast but if you get to filter out the non-diffracted component, you're home. Of course squeezing toothpaste back into the tube is way easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes its visualls are stunning especially if you had a proper PC. It was also EMPTY. If you leave early on new years day and see the entire city before you devoid of live that is what Morrowind was like.
Lots of it came from too ambitious plans and too weak hardware. If you saw concept art of Vivec, you'd understand. It would be a big challenge for nowadays gfx cards to render such thing at more than 10FPS in 800x600. Back then - forget it. They just had to cut down on the number of characters and objects...
If you ever played a more focussed RPG
Read: Linear RPG.
you will know that at stages you will encounter shops wich sell you goods that are oddly enough at your current level. Weird eh? Morrowind designers didn't know what shop you were going to encounter when and I ended up stealing the best bow very early on in the game. (Yes I am a thieving basartd) I probably shouldn't have done that but I wandered into the city saw it and stole it.
And you missed the great Daedric Longbow which kicks ass of any bow you can find in a town. Usually stealing/getting expensive stuff early on is damn difficult. If you want, go visit nearest daedric ruins, it's near. Win against a daedra, and there you are, a piece of daedric weapon/armor. Cool? No. The daedra will kick your ass.
I challenged a Frygian Hag really early on in the game. Lost about 30 health potions I had kept just in case, and quite a few others. Barely survived. Got the cool dagger which I used for next 5-6 levels until I got something stronger and could beat shit off a hag without sweat. But in the meantime the dagger was a well deserved reward for the hard battle. You were a good thief, you got a good bow. Congrats. Stealing the one that comes with the "archery" mod is pretty much impossible without cheating or at least killing the shopkeeper...
-o noadate
generic FAT is a very bad idea for flash media. Every write operation no matter where on the media causes a write operation in one area. Your flash media can survive a million writes so theoretically you can write 100 million files as long as you randomize/distribute their locations evenly over the media. Sorry, with each file write, no matter where, FAT gets updated, a single location gets written. After a million writes it dies. Bummer.
Manufacturers overcome it by placing FAT on separate chip of extended lifetime or virtually mapping 'flat diskspace' to physical chip address space and migrating it from time to time, so that FAT "wanders". Won't be quite possible if you format the media at home.
But if its just a fixed price game, why would Pioneer be selling them for 1800 dollars?
Because Pioneer doesn't sell media. They want their investment back and the only way to do so is by selling the players, while others harvest the vast profit from media played on these players.
The 50 bucks was of top of my head, it may be more, I don't know. I doubt it will be anything near 1800, or even 500 though. More likely below 200.
And now the fun part. XB360 uses standard old DVD-ROMs with just some tricks that probably are hackable. The data was read already. Writing it back and producing working copies on DVD with some modchip or the like is just the matter of time. Size of the pirated games market then? I'd say 3/4 of the market total. Major loss.
In the meantime Sony will be releasing their games on media that aren't writable by any home technology. So far nobody talks about Blu-Ray writers. The best DRM you can think of - feel free to make a copy of our disk, just buy a $20mln disk-stamping facility to do it, currently any cheaper way is nonexistant. And there's no way to squeeze 25GB on a single DVD so even if you read the content, you won't be able to replay it in PS3. So if you want to play PS3 games, you will have to buy originals. Or at very best and unlikely event, poor rips with lots of content removed to fit on a DVD. Sony may easily expect their Blu-ray media profits won't be dimnished the least bit by piracy.
The only risk is "oh, PS3 is unhackable. I'll better get an XBox then, I'll save a lot on games then." - that's profit lost for both of them (or even a small gain for M$: Peripherials, some (way fewer but still) games, maybe some subscription service). So Sony wants to gain biggest market share it can before XBox360 is hacked...
Small loss? Even if it costs them an extremely cheap price of 300 bucks oem to get the blue ray player in there
Or manufacture one for $50 themselves.
It's expensive because it's a novelty. The machinery and development costed a fortune. But once the production line is in place (and you disregard the cost of the line itself) a single unit will be just slightly more expensive than a CD drive. The blue laser isn't -that- expensive and all the rest is just improved precision of the old technology, so unit cost doesn't increase all that much.
Of course if you produce OEM blu-ray, you want to get the production line investment back as fast as possible, so add $250 "development and machines" cost to each $50/unit real cost. But a giant like Sony can afford distributing the "return of investment" over a way longer period, and instead of charging us $1000 now and $80 in 3 years for the same device, they are quite ready to charge us a flat $80 all the time, nuking the competition into oblivion and gaining a healthy margin of profit from market share they gain and media sales. The "loss per unit" is a pretty imaginary value, because a single unit is REALLY cheap. It's just that the price includes a part of "loss" that has already happened, their investment in production. They -already- lost what they had to lose, now they will just try to get that back, faster (but less) or slower (but more).
Quoting the FAQ:
A single-layer disc can fit 23.3GB, 25GB or 27GB.
A dual-layer disc can fit 46.6GB, 50GB or 54GB.
Some other source:
The bulk wholesale price for 2GB flash memory (...) dropped to US$12 (1,300 yen) in June this [2005] year.
Would you be ready to pay $150 extra for media the game/movie is written to?
We still need to wait for flash prices to go through the bottom, and it won't be soon.
Or they will do the same as they did with PS2 and DVD: Release it at a small loss for people to kill to get one. Get huge market penetration because you get a Blu-Ray player and a top-notch console at a fraction of price of a generic blu-ray player from competition. Then earn lots and lots on games, as people try to "discover what their player can do, besides playing movies".
Well, I wrote a complaint about excessively long queues to the student's affairs office (or whatever it's called in English). The waiting time was like 3h, and it was open only 4h/day 4days/week, and the performance was embarassingly weak. I gathered about 400 signatures of students.
Answer? "We can speed our work up. It takes us half a hour to positively resolve your cases, but only 5 minutes to resolve them negatively. We will be denying all the requests we are allowed to deny and then the queue will be moving much faster. Cancel your complaint or we will do so."
If he can't be trusted to keep comments about an academic superior and his fellow peers professional, how can he be trusted to keep comments about future patients confidential and professional as well?
Translation:
malpractice, n: Reason why surgeons wear face masks.
If I was in charge, I'd put sockets and transparent light guides to put any kind of LEDs in the drive at strategical point and drive the light to the most interesting spots. And place at least one LED on the head :)
I have a drive that's extremely noisy when horizontally. I turned it vertically (sockets up) and it went very silent (while still working! ;), and runs nicely in my home server for some 2 years now.
Seriously, they don't. It's fun when you risk damage. It's no fun if you're sure to damage it.
Modders kept putting windows in harddrives for a LONG time, but recently they stopped, because any drive above some 60GB doesn't survive it. Not sure what is the reason - pressure/humidity change, microparticles in atmosphere or whatever, but the drives invariably die. If you want a windowed drive, play with an old-fashioned 20G ATA66 drive, forget anything SATA....
Actually I've seen quite a few institutions with a policy against getting magnets anywhere near CD disks.
Good idea.
Actually, I wouldn't like to see into their minds really. Just the idea of them having a hole in their head covered with a lens appeals to me... Actually, screw the lens, I just want them with holes in their heads...
You can hang it by your door so the ladies can check their hair and makeup reflected in the shiny platters.
Wishful thinking, slashdotter.
"Whoa, neat! We have the site lit up, we can start construction now. Where are the tools?"
"Right behind the courtain!"
It creates a copy. Blame Microsoft that it doesn't import Firefox bookmarks.
BTW, seems "customizable Google home page" may be what you want. Other nice alternative - RSS-based web storage for your bookmarks.
whoops. wrong story.
and if incidence of homophobia decreases over the next 50 years, as it may well do due to social acceptance...
As I mentioned, it's irrational. Increase of social acceptance will result just in this, increase of social acceptance. People will suppress their homophobia using rationality, but that won't remove repulsion with the idea of -them- having sex with a member of the same sex. It will reduce number of people hostile towards homosexuals and as result move the self-denying and hiding homosexuals in the open, but won't increase the "natural" percentages of homo/bisexuals.
I don't know for sure, but have a gut feeling that a lot of homophobic reaction is due to social taboos programmed from a _very_ early age
Yes, like the stone age or something like that. The -phobias have the same origins as -philias, very likely genetic.
Moon? Why not go further? It IS a pretty dangerous idea if the original designers call it MAD...
Did you ever have to extinguish your keyboard?
Well, I did.
Black, multimedia keys, excessively cheap (below $10). Still pretty comfortable and cool-looking. It fell off the desk. The corner broke off. The keyboard still worked, but the sharp edge of broken plastic was exactly where I'm resting my hand. So I decided to 'soften' it by melting with a lighter.
Damn cheap black plastic.
PS I do not own a TV!
In this context it's obligatory.
In Soviet Russia...
You may die happy that you succeeded and they do if they backstab you.
And what if the teleporter doesn't decompose you, just scans you? An exact copy gets created at the remote location but the old one isn't destroyed?
This guy just asked how to speed up sorting rows of a HTML table in Javascript. Of course no matter what algorithm you pick, rewriting DOM is going to be slow.
...
So I suggested.
TD { position: relative }
row[i].style.top=(height*(newpos-i)) + "px";
Damn, I'm scared of myself.
IANAPhysicist, but IIRC (sorry for the abuse) if light hits objects comparable/smaller than its wavelength it gets diffracted but still the "middle dot" remains the strongest. You lose focus and contrast but if you get to filter out the non-diffracted component, you're home. Of course squeezing toothpaste back into the tube is way easier.