My phone has a neat feature called "airplane mode" which basically turns off the radio. It lets you keep the phone on even if the flight says cellphones must be off (as it's basically just a PDA at that point)...so I can use the phone to play games, compose txt messages for later sending, edit/rearrange the address book, play music/videos, etc. A cellphone at 30000 ft in a plane would likely not be able to get any kind of signal, thus it'd go into "searching for network" mode, which generates a much stronger signal than the phone normally transmits while in operation, would possibly generate a lot more interference, and also drain the batteries a lot faster. A lot of modern phones have a lot of non-phone features, and airplane mode lets those be used even in situations where the phone portion has to be deactivated.
10000 ft is kind of low, unless you're talking about a relatively short fight. The flights I've taken (OH to WA and OH to AZ) generally cruise at 30000 ft.
Scary...I remember that game, pretty fondly actually. I had it for my Atari 400 as a kid. I remember putting quite a lot of time into it, though I don't think you could ever "win". It just kept getting harder.
There's not just one secret spaceship! There are 3 now...Daedalus, Odyssey, and Apollo. Prometheus was blown up. Don't forget, they *did* mention fleet.;)
It's not a complete waste of time. It gives me something to do while I'm stuck at work today. It's fun speculating the night before what kinds of jokes will be posted on April Fools. I was mainly curious about what Blizzard would put up...except theirs were kind of lame this year. Tinfoil hat that makes you immune to mind control, an announcement for a "new" game called WHOA that shows doctored Warcraft 3 boxes, unedited Warcraft 3 screenshots, and a description that is Warcraft 3 exactly...they could've been more creative than that. I personally would rather see them implement a "world event" in-game (like with Midsummer Fire Festival), complete with NPC's that play jokes on you and send you on wild goose chases. It'd take more effort than putting up jokes on their website, but it'd be appreciated more I think. Also, amusingly enough, today wowwiki.com is meowwiki.
See, the internet really *is* a series of tubes, after all! I know this is an April Fools joke, but that just had to be said. Coincidentally enough, the word I have to type to log in to reply to this message was "blockage".
Yeah, my PS2 is the last full-size model they made (when they first introduced progressive scan DVD playback). It has a quieter fan and built-in IR receiver also. It's possible they may have improved the DVD playback in newer versions, but it can't hold a candle to the progressive scan DVD player I got at Wal-mart. Here it is:
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_ id=4810681
Supports progressive scan, great picture/quality even in progressive on my Samsung 20" widescreen LCD HDTV (using component), and also plays Divx files burned to DVD+/-R. I'm very happy with it.
Except...DVD makes a lot more sense than VHS when it comes to prerecorded movies, *especially* for rental places. DVD vs. VHS is apples and oranges compared to Blu-ray/HD-DVD vs. DVD. VHS tapes are clunky, have to be rewound, wear out with use, etc. DVD's will work indefinitely unless they're scratched or damaged. DVD offered a *significant* picture quality increase over VHS, eliminated the need to rewind, eliminated the wear-out-with-use problem, and they're far cheaper to manufacture. All of these qualities benefit places like Blockbuster tremendously, as well as make it a lot easier for people to buy and watch movies. It makes sense that DVD's completely displaced VHS in such a short amount of time (same with CD's vs. vinyl and audio tapes). Blu-ray is not going to displace DVD in this fashion...there's no advantage to it. A little bit better picture if you have a $3000 TV and really expensive cables? Copy protection that fails often, requiring the TV and player to be power cycled repeatedly? Once the newness wears off, and the "gotta have every new thing that comes out" people get what they want, Blu-ray and HD-DVD are going to be in the same state as SACD and DVD-audio. It doesn't have any advantages over the existing format (DVD) except resolution, and you can only get that by getting a really expensive TV, expensive cables, and dealing with cumbersome copy protection that fails a lot. No thanks! Plus, keep in mind that Sony is talking about units *shipped*, not sold. They can play with numbers by shipping (or claming to ship) whatever they like.
Try using the PS2 DVD player on a progressive scan TV. The quality is abysmal, deinterlacing artifacts everywhere. Every software player I've used on my computer has done a far better job. The PS2 DVD player is alright if all you've got is a cheap TV without component/progressive scan, but stick it on a good TV and it looks awful. I got a progressive scan Divx-enabled DVD player at Wal-mart for $37, and it beats the PS2 by leaps and bounds.
The producers of Stargate specifically stated that Infinity is not canon...none of the people involved with Stargate had anything to do with it, and it doesn't follow most of the rules for stargate travel that were laid down. It should basically be considered a Stargate-"themed" series that has nothing whatsoever to do with Stargate itself. It was something that was basically done to be a fun kid's show...it may not be all bad, but it doesn't happen in the Stargate universe.
Not just that...but the aforementioned Blizzard games *do* support OpenGL. On Windows they use Direct3D by default, but you can change that behavior with the -opengl command line switch when starting the game. This is why they were so easily portable to MacOSX and why they run so well on Wine.
No kidding. I already have a "home server", and it cost a couple hundred less than the PS3. It's a custom Gentoo box built using a VIA mini-ITX motherboard. It's got a 160GB hard drive, two onboard NIC's, 1GB of RAM, and all of the services I could ever want or need (Apache, Samba, NFS, telnet, FTP, SSH, NTP, rsync, etc). Trying to use a PS3 for this would be ridiculous.
Alternatively, he could've gotten to his corpse pretty fast and just not res'd for 3 days. He couldn't have not released, because you auto-release after 6 minutes. But you can stand by your corpse indefinitely without res'ing.;)
I haven't had a chance to read a complete list of RHEL packages...however they did have some sort of notice that Oracle was included. So I believe that's one of them. I haven't used Redhat since version 6 or so (it's been awhile)...but they've always had some proprietary software. Netscape, OSS (the "commercial" version), etc. Proprietary software is a very small percentage of the overall package but there are pieces of it here and there, at least in Redhat.
There really isn't any comparison between WOW and single player "offline" games that "require" an internet connection to play. Something like Half-Life 2 having to "authenticate" to play is ridiculous...whereas for WOW there would be no way NOT to do it. WOW is a lot more than just a game, it's a persistant online world...there would be no way to implement that type of game without a network connection. WOW doesn't sell like hotcakes because you have to buy it...it sells like hotcakes because it's a really well done game. The price is reasonable ($19 for the game w/first month free, $15/month) for an online game you can play with your friends with millions of players. $15 for a month of WOW is very cheap, entertainment/$ wise. Sure, Burning Crusade costs $40, but it's not required, and if you think of it as a one-time fee to add additional content without any increase in the monthly fee, it's not really that bad. A company that makes bad games trying to reduce "piracy" by adding authentication to single player games is just signing their death warrant.
RHEL is not free, for a couple reasons. Sure the OS itself is all based on free software, and you can download the SRPM's for it from Redhat's site. In fact, the actual OS is pretty much indistinguishable from Fedora. However, RHEL also includes some proprietary software (there is proprietary software for free OS's too, look at stuff like Oracle), plus you're also paying for a support contract. This is not targeted at home users, it's targeted at businesses that want the "peace of mind" support contract and also want the proprietary software that's included with it. All of the free software that RHEL uses is available for download on their site if you want to build it yourself.
I had a 4mb 72-pin parity SIMM go bad one time...this was about 12 years ago in a 486 I used to have. It just didn't work one day (it worked for the first two months). Turn the computer on, get past BIOS start, bam...parity error before bootloader could even start. Reboot, try again, parity error. Turn off parity checking, it actually started to boot and then crashed. The RAM was obviously very defective...when I took that 1 stick out the computer booted normally even with parity on, if I tried to boot with just that stick it would never even POST. That's the only time I have ever seen memory fail...but then it came from a really shady local dealer who regularly scammed people...this same guy had a rack of "shareware" DOS games with neatly printed labels (all labels he printed) for like $5/disk, all of the disks completely blank (not even formatted). I had happened to get one of those when I got the RAM, and my friend did too (from another part of the rack, we didn't give much thought to that at the time, was just an "oh, this looks like it might be neat" thing). Neither disk was even formatted. The CDROM drives he sold me and my friend died within a month also (about a month after the RAM). Amazingly the store was still in business when I went back with the stick of RAM...he looked at it with a magnifying glass, claimed it was "scratched" and therefore abused. I burned rubber out of his parking lot, tossing a lot of gravel against the windows, then I found a reputable place to get RAM (though this was back in the days when 4MB cost $200). 2 days later I drove by, the place was boarded up and closed. Both CDROM drives died within 2 days of each other a month later. Nothing that came out of that place worked.
Technically, there was only one. The two shows we know as "Voltron" in the US were actually two completely unrelated Japanese shows. "Lion Voltron" was Hyakujuu-ou Golion, while the "Vehicle Voltron" was Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. The two shows had absolutely nothing to do with each other. It was the translators that decided to make changes to try to tie them together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltron
WOW acutally has several types of "instances", distinguished by portal color. First, the two main continents (Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms) actually are instances that are separate from each other (the ships and zeppelins are the "portals"). These work the same way "travel" instances do (white portals)...programming-wise they are still instances, but there is no limit to the number of players in it, and all players are placed in the same instance. Outland is the same way, and the Blood Elf/Draenei starting areas also are (to get to the blood elf area you walk through a white portal or teleport). This means that the Blood Elf/Draenei starting areas, while they are shown on the main world map, are not technically part of the geography of EK or Kalimdor...if you were to find a way to exploit the terrain to get around the portal to the blood elf area you'd probably just end up at a beach with nothing there (and possibly terrain glitches since that area hasn't been finished since you're not supposed to go there). Blue instance portals are normal 5-man instances (some of these have a limit of 10 players so you can technically enter with a raid but you're not really supposed to). In these, a separate instance is created for every party that enters. Raid portals are green and are either 10, 20, 25, or 40-man, separate instance is created for each party...only difference with these is that they reset on a regular weekly schedule rather than when you clear it or reset it manually, you can't reset these manually. This is because these are long and hard and take a lot of work to find a group for...so you don't necessarily have to complete it all at once. Finally there are purple portals (only in Outland so far)...these are the same as regular (blue), only difference is it indicates that a heroic mode exists for that instance.
Columbus, OH here...there are PS3's *everywhere*. Every store I've been has at least 3-4 sitting on the shelf. Best Buy and Wal-mart have 5, and they're mostly 60GB models. Noone is buying them, there have been an excess of PS3's here since mid December. Ask about a Wii though, noone has any, Wii's sell out within 15 minutes of getting them in stock, regardless of how many they get.
Can't speak for any recent American cars, but I have a 2004 Prius, and with a simple press of a button on the dash, I can switch between miles and km on the speedometer and odometer (everything on the dash is digital). Every car I've ever driven with an analog speedometer has had mph on the outside of the track and kph on the inside.
Slashdot Mirror
My phone has a neat feature called "airplane mode" which basically turns off the radio. It lets you keep the phone on even if the flight says cellphones must be off (as it's basically just a PDA at that point)...so I can use the phone to play games, compose txt messages for later sending, edit/rearrange the address book, play music/videos, etc. A cellphone at 30000 ft in a plane would likely not be able to get any kind of signal, thus it'd go into "searching for network" mode, which generates a much stronger signal than the phone normally transmits while in operation, would possibly generate a lot more interference, and also drain the batteries a lot faster. A lot of modern phones have a lot of non-phone features, and airplane mode lets those be used even in situations where the phone portion has to be deactivated.
"Do something!" (Col. Sanders on the intercom)
10000 ft is kind of low, unless you're talking about a relatively short fight. The flights I've taken (OH to WA and OH to AZ) generally cruise at 30000 ft.
Scary...I remember that game, pretty fondly actually. I had it for my Atari 400 as a kid. I remember putting quite a lot of time into it, though I don't think you could ever "win". It just kept getting harder.
There's not just one secret spaceship! There are 3 now...Daedalus, Odyssey, and Apollo. Prometheus was blown up. Don't forget, they *did* mention fleet. ;)
It's not a complete waste of time. It gives me something to do while I'm stuck at work today. It's fun speculating the night before what kinds of jokes will be posted on April Fools. I was mainly curious about what Blizzard would put up...except theirs were kind of lame this year. Tinfoil hat that makes you immune to mind control, an announcement for a "new" game called WHOA that shows doctored Warcraft 3 boxes, unedited Warcraft 3 screenshots, and a description that is Warcraft 3 exactly...they could've been more creative than that. I personally would rather see them implement a "world event" in-game (like with Midsummer Fire Festival), complete with NPC's that play jokes on you and send you on wild goose chases. It'd take more effort than putting up jokes on their website, but it'd be appreciated more I think. Also, amusingly enough, today wowwiki.com is meowwiki.
See, the internet really *is* a series of tubes, after all! I know this is an April Fools joke, but that just had to be said. Coincidentally enough, the word I have to type to log in to reply to this message was "blockage".
Yeah, my PS2 is the last full-size model they made (when they first introduced progressive scan DVD playback). It has a quieter fan and built-in IR receiver also. It's possible they may have improved the DVD playback in newer versions, but it can't hold a candle to the progressive scan DVD player I got at Wal-mart. Here it is: http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_ id=4810681
Supports progressive scan, great picture/quality even in progressive on my Samsung 20" widescreen LCD HDTV (using component), and also plays Divx files burned to DVD+/-R. I'm very happy with it.
Except...DVD makes a lot more sense than VHS when it comes to prerecorded movies, *especially* for rental places. DVD vs. VHS is apples and oranges compared to Blu-ray/HD-DVD vs. DVD. VHS tapes are clunky, have to be rewound, wear out with use, etc. DVD's will work indefinitely unless they're scratched or damaged. DVD offered a *significant* picture quality increase over VHS, eliminated the need to rewind, eliminated the wear-out-with-use problem, and they're far cheaper to manufacture. All of these qualities benefit places like Blockbuster tremendously, as well as make it a lot easier for people to buy and watch movies. It makes sense that DVD's completely displaced VHS in such a short amount of time (same with CD's vs. vinyl and audio tapes). Blu-ray is not going to displace DVD in this fashion...there's no advantage to it. A little bit better picture if you have a $3000 TV and really expensive cables? Copy protection that fails often, requiring the TV and player to be power cycled repeatedly? Once the newness wears off, and the "gotta have every new thing that comes out" people get what they want, Blu-ray and HD-DVD are going to be in the same state as SACD and DVD-audio. It doesn't have any advantages over the existing format (DVD) except resolution, and you can only get that by getting a really expensive TV, expensive cables, and dealing with cumbersome copy protection that fails a lot. No thanks! Plus, keep in mind that Sony is talking about units *shipped*, not sold. They can play with numbers by shipping (or claming to ship) whatever they like.
Try using the PS2 DVD player on a progressive scan TV. The quality is abysmal, deinterlacing artifacts everywhere. Every software player I've used on my computer has done a far better job. The PS2 DVD player is alright if all you've got is a cheap TV without component/progressive scan, but stick it on a good TV and it looks awful. I got a progressive scan Divx-enabled DVD player at Wal-mart for $37, and it beats the PS2 by leaps and bounds.
The producers of Stargate specifically stated that Infinity is not canon...none of the people involved with Stargate had anything to do with it, and it doesn't follow most of the rules for stargate travel that were laid down. It should basically be considered a Stargate-"themed" series that has nothing whatsoever to do with Stargate itself. It was something that was basically done to be a fun kid's show...it may not be all bad, but it doesn't happen in the Stargate universe.
Not just that...but the aforementioned Blizzard games *do* support OpenGL. On Windows they use Direct3D by default, but you can change that behavior with the -opengl command line switch when starting the game. This is why they were so easily portable to MacOSX and why they run so well on Wine.
No kidding. I already have a "home server", and it cost a couple hundred less than the PS3. It's a custom Gentoo box built using a VIA mini-ITX motherboard. It's got a 160GB hard drive, two onboard NIC's, 1GB of RAM, and all of the services I could ever want or need (Apache, Samba, NFS, telnet, FTP, SSH, NTP, rsync, etc). Trying to use a PS3 for this would be ridiculous.
Alternatively, he could've gotten to his corpse pretty fast and just not res'd for 3 days. He couldn't have not released, because you auto-release after 6 minutes. But you can stand by your corpse indefinitely without res'ing. ;)
I haven't had a chance to read a complete list of RHEL packages...however they did have some sort of notice that Oracle was included. So I believe that's one of them. I haven't used Redhat since version 6 or so (it's been awhile)...but they've always had some proprietary software. Netscape, OSS (the "commercial" version), etc. Proprietary software is a very small percentage of the overall package but there are pieces of it here and there, at least in Redhat.
There really isn't any comparison between WOW and single player "offline" games that "require" an internet connection to play. Something like Half-Life 2 having to "authenticate" to play is ridiculous...whereas for WOW there would be no way NOT to do it. WOW is a lot more than just a game, it's a persistant online world...there would be no way to implement that type of game without a network connection. WOW doesn't sell like hotcakes because you have to buy it...it sells like hotcakes because it's a really well done game. The price is reasonable ($19 for the game w/first month free, $15/month) for an online game you can play with your friends with millions of players. $15 for a month of WOW is very cheap, entertainment/$ wise. Sure, Burning Crusade costs $40, but it's not required, and if you think of it as a one-time fee to add additional content without any increase in the monthly fee, it's not really that bad. A company that makes bad games trying to reduce "piracy" by adding authentication to single player games is just signing their death warrant.
RHEL is not free, for a couple reasons. Sure the OS itself is all based on free software, and you can download the SRPM's for it from Redhat's site. In fact, the actual OS is pretty much indistinguishable from Fedora. However, RHEL also includes some proprietary software (there is proprietary software for free OS's too, look at stuff like Oracle), plus you're also paying for a support contract. This is not targeted at home users, it's targeted at businesses that want the "peace of mind" support contract and also want the proprietary software that's included with it. All of the free software that RHEL uses is available for download on their site if you want to build it yourself.
I had a 4mb 72-pin parity SIMM go bad one time...this was about 12 years ago in a 486 I used to have. It just didn't work one day (it worked for the first two months). Turn the computer on, get past BIOS start, bam...parity error before bootloader could even start. Reboot, try again, parity error. Turn off parity checking, it actually started to boot and then crashed. The RAM was obviously very defective...when I took that 1 stick out the computer booted normally even with parity on, if I tried to boot with just that stick it would never even POST. That's the only time I have ever seen memory fail...but then it came from a really shady local dealer who regularly scammed people...this same guy had a rack of "shareware" DOS games with neatly printed labels (all labels he printed) for like $5/disk, all of the disks completely blank (not even formatted). I had happened to get one of those when I got the RAM, and my friend did too (from another part of the rack, we didn't give much thought to that at the time, was just an "oh, this looks like it might be neat" thing). Neither disk was even formatted. The CDROM drives he sold me and my friend died within a month also (about a month after the RAM). Amazingly the store was still in business when I went back with the stick of RAM...he looked at it with a magnifying glass, claimed it was "scratched" and therefore abused. I burned rubber out of his parking lot, tossing a lot of gravel against the windows, then I found a reputable place to get RAM (though this was back in the days when 4MB cost $200). 2 days later I drove by, the place was boarded up and closed. Both CDROM drives died within 2 days of each other a month later. Nothing that came out of that place worked.
I think Sony hired the Iraqi Information Minister to head their PR department.
Technically, there was only one. The two shows we know as "Voltron" in the US were actually two completely unrelated Japanese shows. "Lion Voltron" was Hyakujuu-ou Golion, while the "Vehicle Voltron" was Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. The two shows had absolutely nothing to do with each other. It was the translators that decided to make changes to try to tie them together. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltron
WOW acutally has several types of "instances", distinguished by portal color. First, the two main continents (Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms) actually are instances that are separate from each other (the ships and zeppelins are the "portals"). These work the same way "travel" instances do (white portals)...programming-wise they are still instances, but there is no limit to the number of players in it, and all players are placed in the same instance. Outland is the same way, and the Blood Elf/Draenei starting areas also are (to get to the blood elf area you walk through a white portal or teleport). This means that the Blood Elf/Draenei starting areas, while they are shown on the main world map, are not technically part of the geography of EK or Kalimdor...if you were to find a way to exploit the terrain to get around the portal to the blood elf area you'd probably just end up at a beach with nothing there (and possibly terrain glitches since that area hasn't been finished since you're not supposed to go there). Blue instance portals are normal 5-man instances (some of these have a limit of 10 players so you can technically enter with a raid but you're not really supposed to). In these, a separate instance is created for every party that enters. Raid portals are green and are either 10, 20, 25, or 40-man, separate instance is created for each party...only difference with these is that they reset on a regular weekly schedule rather than when you clear it or reset it manually, you can't reset these manually. This is because these are long and hard and take a lot of work to find a group for...so you don't necessarily have to complete it all at once. Finally there are purple portals (only in Outland so far)...these are the same as regular (blue), only difference is it indicates that a heroic mode exists for that instance.
Well...it could be worse. At least the Jobs Reality Distortion Field is now being used for a good cause.
Columbus, OH here...there are PS3's *everywhere*. Every store I've been has at least 3-4 sitting on the shelf. Best Buy and Wal-mart have 5, and they're mostly 60GB models. Noone is buying them, there have been an excess of PS3's here since mid December. Ask about a Wii though, noone has any, Wii's sell out within 15 minutes of getting them in stock, regardless of how many they get.
Hey...maybe that's it exactly. People said the same thing about SCO, comparing them to the chicken ahem..."lover" from South Park.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickenlover
Can't speak for any recent American cars, but I have a 2004 Prius, and with a simple press of a button on the dash, I can switch between miles and km on the speedometer and odometer (everything on the dash is digital). Every car I've ever driven with an analog speedometer has had mph on the outside of the track and kph on the inside.