Pacman is excellent, a total clone of the arcade game, even down to the sounds and graphics. It runs pretty fast too, and is doesn't lock the CPU like flash tends to. The odd thing is that Excel VB macros can draw pixels with Cell.FillColor on my old laptop easily as fast as the optimised assembler routines could draw them on arcade machine.
I've coralized the links because geocities can't handle a slashdotting.
If you compile stuff, shouldn't you get something faster than a P3-733?
You could get a cheap dual core system, and build with -jN on Gnu make to build several things in parallel for example. If all you do is compile and do GUI stuff, on board graphics are probably ok. And pretty much any modern hard disk is ok, since it's CPU bound with a high optimisation level. But a fast CPU and a decent amount of Ram to cache in should speed up compiles enormously.
Yo' comment about Ebonics struck uh nerve wiff me. Ebonics be havin' rigid syntactic rules followed by all speakers, just as American English do. It iz uh misconception dat Ebonics iz "bad English". This be racist yo, a linguistic lynching.
<snip incoherent rant about Katrina, George Bush, Enron, The war on terror, etc>
200 years ago de white man pwned us, but thanks to Dr Farrakhan and Malcolm X we be free, but de white man pwnz our language to dis' day. White devils be dissin' Ebonics EVERYDAY, but if you be in the kno', yo kno' Ebonics be the language great black men like Tupac, Shakespeare and Beethoven rapped in. Your comment illustrates uh playa' hatah' attitude towards segregated societies, an' I'm gonna put a cap in yo pasty ass. Melanin deficient bitch.
And then there's the fatal Pons & Fleischman / scientific research in $HOT_TOPIC mistake of talking to the regular press before you get peer reviewed. Either because you're afraid of getting scooped, or because you're too involved emotionally in your work to realise that it might be, to be blunt, bollocks.
I'm in Sweden at the moment in a group of two houses. When I moved in, Telia had managed to fuck up my DSL move completely so I used my neighbour's DSL connection - I basically lent her my WiFi router. One of her friends mentioned that open wifi is a security risk, so we'll probably move to WEP soon (I've got an old laptop which doesn't do WPA).
I got my DSL connected, and the interesting thing is that you can have WEP with authentication set to both Open and Shared. That way, everyone can connect using the Open method, but you can secure known machines with the Shared key.
WEP sucks of course, the idea that you need to email way too small 128 bit keys around is absurd, but it gives you some kind of security. But I do all the online banking stuff over https (and banks have a clever hard key scheme where you have a gadget which signs two 4 digit hex numbers to produce a 6 digit one to prove you are who you say you are), and email is over SSL and it's all via the wired connection from a desktop machine, so I never rely on it. In terms of cost, DSL is unmetered here, and I've never seen a guest on my network use insane amounts of bandwidth - even people torrenting tend to set the max speeds to ~50kbytes/sec, low enough for it not to overload a 2Mbit down/ 1Mbit up DSL connection. In any case, you can always kick them off the router if they hog.
But with the right technology, and more importantly the right people, open WiFi isn't a problem.
Well, I can tell you an interesting story about Japan. My Dad worked got invited to do some research there a few years back. One of his colleagues brought a expensive looking laptop to work each day, in a battered satchel. Once someone asked him a question that needed internet access to answer, and he looked around for the laptop and realised he'd left it somewhere. He didn't seem to panic at all, and went asked at the railway station when he got out of work at the usual time. The laptop was there. No one seemed at all suprised that neither the guy that found it, nor the railway workers had been tempted to steal it.
So Japan is, or maybe was different. But I'd think that the bike thing would work there still. Hell lots of European cities manage it, and I'd guess small towns could manage it as well. But in a big US/UK city, this sort of scheme is doomed.
And surf porn too, admittedly. Bin Laden's new #2 has issued a fatwa allowing us to look at fleshbot in our spare time. We recruited many cyber-jihaadis from the Egyptian Islamic Resistance after that, I can tell you. The other day, I invented a new cyber weapon, the hidden goatse link. The eyes of the Zionist Crusader Apes were seared by that, thanks to Allah.
And I've noticed that the Hellfire missiles fired by the bestial demonic Zionist dogs come ever closer to #2. If merciful Allah should choose to take him to paradise, I'm sure to be the new #2. I will issue a fatwa merging al-Qaeda with the GNAA, and moving our office to Pittsburgh where the Zionist swine will be unable to harm us. And that the infidel technology known as 'phat pipes' is halal, and a duty to all good Muslims.
I think both sides are talking about aspects of the same thing.
I'm a firm believer in evolution, as a way to go from the total simplicity of a sterile abiotic planet to the complexity we know see. Evolution is an essentially blind, unconcious process. But it's amazing how perfect the organisms it creates are. When you read about moths living in cold climates with heat exchangers to transfer heat from their warm exhaled air to their cold inhaled air, or HIV which actually seems to benefit from having a really error prone system to copy it's RNA, you realise that evolution does a perfect job at engineering. Much better than human engineers could do, despite the fact that we're conscious and it's not.
Compare this to God. God, at least the Christian one is omnipotent and omniscient. I reckon that combination precludes consciousness, and it sounds to me like a kind of intelligence that is much more like evolution than a single human engineer.
Actually, once you have a company full of human engineers, much of the changes they make are not that much better than random mutations. They tend to join a project late, way after the people that understood the whole thing have left, and make changes without really understanding why they worked. That's the smart ones, the dumb ones keep insisting their changes work long after the customer has threatened to sue.
The problem with the Christian version of God is that people see it as a conscious entity. If they could live with God being the unconcious intelligence that builds perfect organisms, or the elegance of the underlying physics once we have a GUT, then they wouldn't spend time arguing about it.
Actually, physics itself, if you view the whole process rather than individual scientists seems to be more of an evolutionary process than the result of anyone seeing the big picture. So once again you have a group of conscious people working, but the process will outlive any of them, and so can't have any goals that exceed an individual physicist's lifetime. So physics itself is not conscious, but it will certainly produce a GUT given time.
But the people that believe in evolution insist that it's not intelligent, and the people that believe in God insist on a version of God that predates science. And if either side talked about calmly, they'd realise that the other side's ideas are not as unacceptable as they think.
In Sony's Stumble, the Ghost of Betamax By KEN BELSON
AT first glance, Amir Majidimehr does not look like a game-changer in the battle to develop the next generation of DVD players and discs. As the vice president for Windows digital media at Microsoft, he neither steers a Hollywood studio nor controls one of the many consumer electronics giants that are betting billions of dollars on one of the two new formats that promise to play high-definition movies and television shows.
Yet when he and his team in Redmond, Wash., decided last September to abandon their neutral stance and to support Toshiba and its HD-DVD standard over the Blu-ray format led by Sony, the unexpected change of heart reverberated through the technology industry.
Suddenly, Toshiba's seemingly quixotic defense of its format had new life. Intel joined Microsoft in backing HD-DVD. Hewlett-Packard withdrew its exclusive support of Blu-ray. This month, another member of the Blu-ray camp, LG Electronics, hedged its bets, too, signing a deal to license Toshiba's technology.
And earlier this month, one of the main reasons underpinning Microsoft's move to shuck its neutrality the complexity of producing Blu-ray technology led to Sony's acknowledgment that it might delay this spring's scheduled release of its PlayStation 3 game console partly because the needed technology was still being worked out.
The possible delay and the Blu-ray group's loss of its once-commanding lead are not encouraging developments for Sony in its attempt to revive its electronics group after a series of bungles. PlayStation 3 is crucial to Sony's future, and not only because the latest version of its gaming consoles could generate billions in revenue; the new machines will include disc drives that will turn them into Blu-ray DVD players as well.
"The PlayStation is more than a game system to them; it's one of their attempts to own the digital living room," said Robert Heiblim, a consultant to electronics companies. "Blu-ray is also critically important to get right. They don't want to be weak in an area they feel they can dominate."
A DECADE ago, a prospective death match between competing first-generation DVD players was averted when Sony and Philips agreed to back down and join the Toshiba/Warner Brothers side, in exchange for a share of royalties that all DVD player producers pay to the format's creator. Now, no truce seems near, as neither side wants to settle for a small piece of what could be a big electronics success.
So consumers and retailers may be in for a reprise of the confusing VHS-Betamax showdown of the early 1980's, with Toshiba replacing Matsushita as Sony's adversary. But Sony hopes to have a happier resolution this time. Sony lost the battle two decades ago when its highly regarded Betamax technology was defeated by VHS, a more widely accepted alternative.
Once again, the differences between the two technologies are not huge. And a growing chorus of critics, including some studio chiefs eager to sell new products as quickly as possible, call the Blu-ray format unnecessarily elaborate and expensive.
The first HD-DVD machines from Toshiba and the competing Blu-ray players from Sony, Samsung and the other Blu-ray companies will all play movies with crisper pictures, enhanced sound and a bevy of interactive features like pictures within pictures and links to the Internet. The machines will also play older DVD's.
Technophiles got a preview of the HD-DVD technology on Wednesday at an electronics store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As Jessica Simpson and Johnny Knoxville cavorted in the movie "The Dukes of Hazzard," prospective buyers were able to see the difference between a plain old DVD and the high-definition kind. But the main feature was the price. Toshiba will sell two players starting in March; one will cost just $499, half the price of the cheapest Blu-ray machines, the first of which will hit the stores this spring. Samsung's f
Because they know that PVR owners will skip the ad otherwise. If they do this, they'll slow motion through it to get their free burger.
And all the cheats are just gravy too. They've got people who normally go to great trouble to ignore them instead going to a bit of trouble to pay attention.
If I were them, I'd make the PVR dudes bark for a dollar into an automated bark recognition phone number hidden in the freeze frame
Automated Bark Recognition system: Welcome to KFC's secret bark for a dollar system. Will you bark for a dollar. C'mon, all you gotta do is bark for a dollar. Caller. Arf ABRS: I can't hear you. C'mon bark for a dollar. BARK FOR A DOLLAR! Caller. ARF! WOOF! ARF! WOOF! ABRS: Good dog! Please speak you name and address now.
The original Dark Crystal was excellent but it was a kid's movie. We liked because we were kids when we saw it. When we look at the original through adult's eyes, it won't be anywhere near as impressive, because the new Dark Crystal will also be a kids movie.
Studios know where the best target market for these sorts of films is, and it isn't us.
E.g. compare the box office of Harry Potter movies with Serenity. First one was unashamedly aimed at kids, second one aimed at 30 something sci fi geeks. Harry Potter makes hundreds of millions of dollars, Serenity just about broke even. If you look at the whole HP franchise - all the HP films, it will make literally billions of dollars, hundreds or thousands of times more than the Serenity franchise, because Serenity was only one film, and it's much harder to make the first film of a series than the subsequent ones. Just imagine trying to raise money for Serenity vs the next HP movie. The people that lend you money for HPn+1 know that it will make x% of the last movie - the numbers are big enough that you can probably plot a graph of profit vs series member and know best and worst case estimates. Since the worst case is still a sh*tload of money, it's an easy case to make.
The people that lend you money for Serenity will moan about how it is based on a 'failed' series and have no idea if the rabid fans will get enough of their friends into a cinema to make the whole thing work.
Simple economics predicts that this movie will disappoint fans of the original. It's a sad fact, but it's the truth.
And before all the browncoats start pointing out that I'm ignoring DVD and foreign sales, you have to remember that it applies to HP too. If you add up all the possible sources of money, Serenity probably did ok. HP on the other hand did far better than ok. I'd like it not to be true, since I'd much rather watch Firefly than HP, but wanting something to be true doesn't automatically make it true.
HL2 had some innovative elements though, like characters that had been turned into zombies by an alien parasite. Never heard that before
Still HL2 was fun. And I shoot people on my computer because it's cheaper than doing it in the real world, not because it's intellectually stimulating.
What's so hard about x86 assembler? Serious question.
Once you get into protected mode, the instruction set is orthogonal. It's a bit register starved, but I've never done anything where that's an issue.Admittedly I spend a lot more time reading assembler than writing it, debugging closed source stuff mostly.
And in anycase, the future is x86-64 and SSE, and neither of those have any serious flaws.
It's like the loveable but rather slow guy with the inane grin who keeps getting "Employee of the Month" at Burger King even though he gets every order wrong and never manages to collect the right amount of money. And you just take one look at him, and decide not to complain about your Donut Double Whopper with ketchup, because just isn't the done thing. You say thanks and eat that nasty ass burger, and walk to your car strong feeling of enlightenment. On the way out, all the other staff smile at you, like your the fucking Dalai Lama.
It's proof that despite our reputation as mean spirited Type A geeks, we have a heart, damnit.
Why do you need to dump the Bios? EFI was designed for a non x86 chip where the Bios was unusable. x86-64 starts up in 16 bit mode, so it can still boot via INT 13, which currently supports 64 bit LBAs (sector numbers). That's enough to support harddrives for the next twenty years or so. ACPI can pass information about any hardware to the OS. It has support for 64 bit addresses, too. In fact, it's what EFI uses for plug'n'play information. Modern OSs don't use the Bios post boot anyway. Even the switch from MBR to GPT partitioning to get partitions bigger than 2^32 sectors can be done without changing the Bios. A well written OS loader can probably minimise the switches from 16 to 32/64 bit mode to the point where it's faster than calling more bloated 32/64 bit code directly, given that an INT 13 handler is tiny compared to the EFI equivalent.
There isn't any technical reason to boot an x86 board in any other way. Of course, if you want a closed platform it may be desirable, but that's another story.
Slashdot Mirror
You can download Space Invaders & Pacman in Visual Basic for Excel.
c /
/ pac/pacelle.zip
/ cellvader/cellvader_e.zip
The site
http://www.geocities.jp.nyud.net:8090/nchikada/pa
Pacman download
http://www1.plala.or.jp.nyud.net:8090/chikada/vba
Space Invaders
http://www1.plala.or.jp.nyud.net:8090/chikada/vba
Pacman is excellent, a total clone of the arcade game, even down to the sounds and graphics. It runs pretty fast too, and is doesn't lock the CPU like flash tends to. The odd thing is that Excel VB macros can draw pixels with Cell.FillColor on my old laptop easily as fast as the optimised assembler routines could draw them on arcade machine.
I've coralized the links because geocities can't handle a slashdotting.
I'm not a consumer, but the phrase "It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue" sprung to mind when I read it.
If you compile stuff, shouldn't you get something faster than a P3-733?
You could get a cheap dual core system, and build with -jN on Gnu make to build several things in parallel for example. If all you do is compile and do GUI stuff, on board graphics are probably ok. And pretty much any modern hard disk is ok, since it's CPU bound with a high optimisation level. But a fast CPU and a decent amount of Ram to cache in should speed up compiles enormously.
Don't you mean
Yo' comment about Ebonics struck uh nerve wiff me. Ebonics be havin' rigid syntactic rules followed by all speakers, just as American English do. It iz uh misconception dat Ebonics iz "bad English". This be racist yo, a linguistic lynching.
<snip incoherent rant about Katrina, George Bush, Enron, The war on terror, etc>
200 years ago de white man pwned us, but thanks to Dr Farrakhan and Malcolm X we be free, but de white man pwnz our language to dis' day. White devils be dissin' Ebonics EVERYDAY, but if you be in the kno', yo kno' Ebonics be the language great black men like Tupac, Shakespeare and Beethoven rapped in. Your comment illustrates uh playa' hatah' attitude towards segregated societies, an' I'm gonna put a cap in yo pasty ass. Melanin deficient bitch.
And then there's the fatal Pons & Fleischman / scientific research in $HOT_TOPIC mistake of talking to the regular press before you get peer reviewed. Either because you're afraid of getting scooped, or because you're too involved emotionally in your work to realise that it might be, to be blunt, bollocks.
Hmm, you don't like your spiritual leaders to display uncertainty and you don't like hip hop culture.
;-)
Would you like to come in for a Free Personality Test
I think you were very, very lucky
http://www.stauffercom.com/chupacabra.html
Time to teach those phonies a lesson I think.
A US cup is 236 ml
Or it's 48 US teaspoons
or half a US pint, or 41.6% of a uk pint
If the cup were full of tea made out of antimatter and it combined with a cup of normal matter it would produce a blast of about
10.6 megatons
So 22g of antimatter+22g of normal matter=1 megaton. This is a very useful thing to know
I'm in Sweden at the moment in a group of two houses. When I moved in, Telia had managed to fuck up my DSL move completely so I used my neighbour's DSL connection - I basically lent her my WiFi router. One of her friends mentioned that open wifi is a security risk, so we'll probably move to WEP soon (I've got an old laptop which doesn't do WPA).
I got my DSL connected, and the interesting thing is that you can have WEP with authentication set to both Open and Shared. That way, everyone can connect using the Open method, but you can secure known machines with the Shared key.
WEP sucks of course, the idea that you need to email way too small 128 bit keys around is absurd, but it gives you some kind of security. But I do all the online banking stuff over https (and banks have a clever hard key scheme where you have a gadget which signs two 4 digit hex numbers to produce a 6 digit one to prove you are who you say you are), and email is over SSL and it's all via the wired connection from a desktop machine, so I never rely on it. In terms of cost, DSL is unmetered here, and I've never seen a guest on my network use insane amounts of bandwidth - even people torrenting tend to set the max speeds to ~50kbytes/sec, low enough for it not to overload a 2Mbit down/ 1Mbit up DSL connection. In any case, you can always kick them off the router if they hog.
But with the right technology, and more importantly the right people, open WiFi isn't a problem.
Well, I can tell you an interesting story about Japan. My Dad worked got invited to do some research there a few years back. One of his colleagues brought a expensive looking laptop to work each day, in a battered satchel. Once someone asked him a question that needed internet access to answer, and he looked around for the laptop and realised he'd left it somewhere. He didn't seem to panic at all, and went asked at the railway station when he got out of work at the usual time. The laptop was there. No one seemed at all suprised that neither the guy that found it, nor the railway workers had been tempted to steal it.
So Japan is, or maybe was different. But I'd think that the bike thing would work there still. Hell lots of European cities manage it, and I'd guess small towns could manage it as well. But in a big US/UK city, this sort of scheme is doomed.
Yes, we fight the infidel pigs on the Internet.
And surf porn too, admittedly. Bin Laden's new #2 has issued a fatwa allowing us to look at fleshbot in our spare time. We recruited many cyber-jihaadis from the Egyptian Islamic Resistance after that, I can tell you. The other day, I invented a new cyber weapon, the hidden goatse link. The eyes of the Zionist Crusader Apes were seared by that, thanks to Allah.
And I've noticed that the Hellfire missiles fired by the bestial demonic Zionist dogs come ever closer to #2. If merciful Allah should choose to take him to paradise, I'm sure to be the new #2. I will issue a fatwa merging al-Qaeda with the GNAA, and moving our office to Pittsburgh where the Zionist swine will be unable to harm us. And that the infidel technology known as 'phat pipes' is halal, and a duty to all good Muslims.
If you're serious about gaming, groin burns are a small price to pay for 20% more FPS.
they could even encourage people to take "polls" about what products they prefer, allowing for even more targeted ads
Like ads for hair products, emo music and razor blades perhaps.
Mind you if there's money in Emo, that would explain the style choices in digg's flickr photos.
You mean 'trademark that'.
I think both sides are talking about aspects of the same thing.
I'm a firm believer in evolution, as a way to go from the total simplicity of a sterile abiotic planet to the complexity we know see. Evolution is an essentially blind, unconcious process. But it's amazing how perfect the organisms it creates are. When you read about moths living in cold climates with heat exchangers to transfer heat from their warm exhaled air to their cold inhaled air, or HIV which actually seems to benefit from having a really error prone system to copy it's RNA, you realise that evolution does a perfect job at engineering. Much better than human engineers could do, despite the fact that we're conscious and it's not.
Compare this to God. God, at least the Christian one is omnipotent and omniscient. I reckon that combination precludes consciousness, and it sounds to me like a kind of intelligence that is much more like evolution than a single human engineer.
Actually, once you have a company full of human engineers, much of the changes they make are not that much better than random mutations. They tend to join a project late, way after the people that understood the whole thing have left, and make changes without really understanding why they worked. That's the smart ones, the dumb ones keep insisting their changes work long after the customer has threatened to sue.
The problem with the Christian version of God is that people see it as a conscious entity. If they could live with God being the unconcious intelligence that builds perfect organisms, or the elegance of the underlying physics once we have a GUT, then they wouldn't spend time arguing about it.
Actually, physics itself, if you view the whole process rather than individual scientists seems to be more of an evolutionary process than the result of anyone seeing the big picture. So once again you have a group of conscious people working, but the process will outlive any of them, and so can't have any goals that exceed an individual physicist's lifetime. So physics itself is not conscious, but it will certainly produce a GUT given time.
But the people that believe in evolution insist that it's not intelligent, and the people that believe in God insist on a version of God that predates science. And if either side talked about calmly, they'd realise that the other side's ideas are not as unacceptable as they think.
"Super Mega Bass Boost" yeah right.
Even cheap hifi these days has "Ultra Mega Bass Boost" and my hifi at home has at least "Hyper Mega Bass Boost".
At least if someone gives you an open source poo, you can demand a copy of the food they ate to produce it.
BTW user:bugmenot, pass:bugmenot works fine
In Sony's Stumble, the Ghost of Betamax
By KEN BELSON
AT first glance, Amir Majidimehr does not look like a game-changer in the battle to develop the next generation of DVD players and discs. As the vice president for Windows digital media at Microsoft, he neither steers a Hollywood studio nor controls one of the many consumer electronics giants that are betting billions of dollars on one of the two new formats that promise to play high-definition movies and television shows.
Yet when he and his team in Redmond, Wash., decided last September to abandon their neutral stance and to support Toshiba and its HD-DVD standard over the Blu-ray format led by Sony, the unexpected change of heart reverberated through the technology industry.
Suddenly, Toshiba's seemingly quixotic defense of its format had new life. Intel joined Microsoft in backing HD-DVD. Hewlett-Packard withdrew its exclusive support of Blu-ray. This month, another member of the Blu-ray camp, LG Electronics, hedged its bets, too, signing a deal to license Toshiba's technology.
And earlier this month, one of the main reasons underpinning Microsoft's move to shuck its neutrality the complexity of producing Blu-ray technology led to Sony's acknowledgment that it might delay this spring's scheduled release of its PlayStation 3 game console partly because the needed technology was still being worked out.
The possible delay and the Blu-ray group's loss of its once-commanding lead are not encouraging developments for Sony in its attempt to revive its electronics group after a series of bungles. PlayStation 3 is crucial to Sony's future, and not only because the latest version of its gaming consoles could generate billions in revenue; the new machines will include disc drives that will turn them into Blu-ray DVD players as well.
"The PlayStation is more than a game system to them; it's one of their attempts to own the digital living room," said Robert Heiblim, a consultant to electronics companies. "Blu-ray is also critically important to get right. They don't want to be weak in an area they feel they can dominate."
A DECADE ago, a prospective death match between competing first-generation DVD players was averted when Sony and Philips agreed to back down and join the Toshiba/Warner Brothers side, in exchange for a share of royalties that all DVD player producers pay to the format's creator. Now, no truce seems near, as neither side wants to settle for a small piece of what could be a big electronics success.
So consumers and retailers may be in for a reprise of the confusing VHS-Betamax showdown of the early 1980's, with Toshiba replacing Matsushita as Sony's adversary. But Sony hopes to have a happier resolution this time. Sony lost the battle two decades ago when its highly regarded Betamax technology was defeated by VHS, a more widely accepted alternative.
Once again, the differences between the two technologies are not huge. And a growing chorus of critics, including some studio chiefs eager to sell new products as quickly as possible, call the Blu-ray format unnecessarily elaborate and expensive.
The first HD-DVD machines from Toshiba and the competing Blu-ray players from Sony, Samsung and the other Blu-ray companies will all play movies with crisper pictures, enhanced sound and a bevy of interactive features like pictures within pictures and links to the Internet. The machines will also play older DVD's.
Technophiles got a preview of the HD-DVD technology on Wednesday at an electronics store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. As Jessica Simpson and Johnny Knoxville cavorted in the movie "The Dukes of Hazzard," prospective buyers were able to see the difference between a plain old DVD and the high-definition kind. But the main feature was the price. Toshiba will sell two players starting in March; one will cost just $499, half the price of the cheapest Blu-ray machines, the first of which will hit the stores this spring. Samsung's f
Because they know that PVR owners will skip the ad otherwise. If they do this, they'll slow motion through it to get their free burger.
And all the cheats are just gravy too. They've got people who normally go to great trouble to ignore them instead going to a bit of trouble to pay attention.
If I were them, I'd make the PVR dudes bark for a dollar into an automated bark recognition phone number hidden in the freeze frame
Automated Bark Recognition system: Welcome to KFC's secret bark for a dollar system. Will you bark for a dollar. C'mon, all you gotta do is bark for a dollar.
Caller. Arf
ABRS: I can't hear you. C'mon bark for a dollar. BARK FOR A DOLLAR!
Caller. ARF! WOOF! ARF! WOOF!
ABRS: Good dog! Please speak you name and address now.
but then I had a shitty childhood.
This movie isn't aimed at you and me.
t er.php
The original Dark Crystal was excellent but it was a kid's movie. We liked because we were kids when we saw it. When we look at the original through adult's eyes, it won't be anywhere near as impressive, because the new Dark Crystal will also be a kids movie.
Studios know where the best target market for these sorts of films is, and it isn't us.
E.g. compare the box office of Harry Potter movies with Serenity. First one was unashamedly aimed at kids, second one aimed at 30 something sci fi geeks. Harry Potter makes hundreds of millions of dollars, Serenity just about broke even. If you look at the whole HP franchise - all the HP films, it will make literally billions of dollars, hundreds or thousands of times more than the Serenity franchise, because Serenity was only one film, and it's much harder to make the first film of a series than the subsequent ones. Just imagine trying to raise money for Serenity vs the next HP movie. The people that lend you money for HPn+1 know that it will make x% of the last movie - the numbers are big enough that you can probably plot a graph of profit vs series member and know best and worst case estimates. Since the worst case is still a sh*tload of money, it's an easy case to make.
The people that lend you money for Serenity will moan about how it is based on a 'failed' series and have no idea if the rabid fans will get enough of their friends into a cinema to make the whole thing work.
Simple economics predicts that this movie will disappoint fans of the original. It's a sad fact, but it's the truth.
And before all the browncoats start pointing out that I'm ignoring DVD and foreign sales, you have to remember that it applies to HP too. If you add up all the possible sources of money, Serenity probably did ok. HP on the other hand did far better than ok. I'd like it not to be true, since I'd much rather watch Firefly than HP, but wanting something to be true doesn't automatically make it true.
Here are the numbers for Serenity
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2005/FRFLY.php
And here are the numbers for the HP franchise
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/series/HarryPot
You could reasonably predict that you can spend $150,000,000 on "HP: Order of the Phoenix" and get back between $800-$900M.
For a movie aimed at the same demographic as Serenity, i.e. us, you're unlikely to make any real profit.
So which demographic will the Dark Crystal target?
HL2 had some innovative elements though, like characters that had been turned into zombies by an alien parasite. Never heard that before
Still HL2 was fun. And I shoot people on my computer because it's cheaper than doing it in the real world, not because it's intellectually stimulating.
What's so hard about x86 assembler? Serious question.
Once you get into protected mode, the instruction set is orthogonal. It's a bit register starved, but I've never done anything where that's an issue.Admittedly I spend a lot more time reading assembler than writing it, debugging closed source stuff mostly.
And in anycase, the future is x86-64 and SSE, and neither of those have any serious flaws.
It's like the loveable but rather slow guy with the inane grin who keeps getting "Employee of the Month" at Burger King even though he gets every order wrong and never manages to collect the right amount of money. And you just take one look at him, and decide not to complain about your Donut Double Whopper with ketchup, because just isn't the done thing. You say thanks and eat that nasty ass burger, and walk to your car strong feeling of enlightenment. On the way out, all the other staff smile at you, like your the fucking Dalai Lama.
It's proof that despite our reputation as mean spirited Type A geeks, we have a heart, damnit.
Why do you need to dump the Bios? EFI was designed for a non x86 chip where the Bios was unusable. x86-64 starts up in 16 bit mode, so it can still boot via INT 13, which currently supports 64 bit LBAs (sector numbers). That's enough to support harddrives for the next twenty years or so. ACPI can pass information about any hardware to the OS. It has support for 64 bit addresses, too. In fact, it's what EFI uses for plug'n'play information. Modern OSs don't use the Bios post boot anyway. Even the switch from MBR to GPT partitioning to get partitions bigger than 2^32 sectors can be done without changing the Bios. A well written OS loader can probably minimise the switches from 16 to 32/64 bit mode to the point where it's faster than calling more bloated 32/64 bit code directly, given that an INT 13 handler is tiny compared to the EFI equivalent.
There isn't any technical reason to boot an x86 board in any other way. Of course, if you want a closed platform it may be desirable, but that's another story.