Until the Playstation, almost every Japense console had a distinctly different shape and design. The Famicom (Japan's NES) looked more like a playschool toy than a console, the Super Famicom (Jap. SNES) had a far cooler design than the blocky American version, and the Japanese Saturn was silver and had different controllers than ours.
As for the games? Well I can't be specific, since I never actually bought any imports, but I'd include at least a few of the all-time greats that were originally Japanese hits before they decided to bring them over here. The Street Fighter series, Mario games, Final Fantasy series, Dragon Warrior series, etc. In fact, before the SNES, American-devleoped games (besides sports) were quite rare.
Because you missed the keywords, "a console game library that goes back to about 1986."
IIRC, the NES was released in 1985 and 1986 thru 1989 were the NES's prime years. In that time, the Atari (et al) were pretty much forgotten while everyone was busy hailing the Almighty Nintendo and Sega. It is indeed an impressive collection nontheless.
Ideal systems would include: Atari 2600, NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, Sega, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, DreamCast, and Playstation.
IMHO, I would probably modify that list to include the TG16 and remove the Dreamcast. It simply hasn't been around long enough to prove itself to be worth anything. For all we know, it could be the next Jaguar. The Saturn can stay, because it's a great example of that one system that almost everyone wanted at one point but is glad they didn't actually buy.
Also, I am of the adamant opinion that no video game collection is complete without at least a representative collection of Japanese consoles and games.
Aw cripe. This above comment is supposed to be by me, Eil. Not AC. I must've truly done something weird to netscape between posting the original comment and this reply.
The case sets the stage for other European countries to possibly adopt similar rules to stem an epidemic that cost the music industry an estimated $5 billion last year."
Get real. When have you ever known a company to not pass expenses like this on to the consumer rather than take the bill themselves? If someone tries to retaliate or say something about it, all the companies have to do is turn to their shareholders and say, "But we're just protecting our profit margin!" And then everything in businessland is dandy again while the Germans shell out extra bucks for their hardware. And no, it won't always just be the Germans.
True, yes, but I'm morally against overclocking.:P One of the reasons I bought the Athlon was for it's exceptional floating point performance, however.
The whole 15 IRQ thing is annoying! Yes, yes, I know that a lot of you will flame me and say "get a SCSI system," but some people can't always afford that kind of system (but I would love one!)
So then it seems your whole basis for complaint is that you don't make enough money to buy the things you want. Am I missing something here?
Maybe the downfall of the P4 will convince Intel to rethink their plans, maybe not... either way both Intel and AMD are still rehashing the x86.
Mostly because x86 is still very popular and no one wants to toss away their software. I'm not an expert on microprocessor architecture, but I'm happy with x86 itself as long as the prices are low, and the performance is good. (Note: I'm an Athlon user, so a bit of subjectiveness is ahead.)
I agree with you in that I'm somewhat surprised that Intel is still following their old, pathetic, marketing-driven roadmap. You'd think in the year that the Athlon has been out and cutting into Intel's profit margin, that they would have at least been preparing themselves in some way to top AMD technologically.
One thing I like about AMD is that they went ahead and developed a whole new processor core and dubbed it the Athlon. Intel, OTOH, has been using their old 686 core since the days of the first PentiumPro, and it shows. I don't *know* whether or not the Pentium4 still uses the PPro core, but I suspect it does based on the sheer lunatic cooling and power requirements.
I didn't expect AMD would keep their title of Most Powerful x86 Chip on the Planet(tm) for this long.
Remember the Law of Software Envelopment: Every program expands until it can read mail. The programs which cannot are replaced by ones that can.
That's a jwz ideal. Back when the Mozilla project had just started (like, a few weeks after it was announced) I was on some sort of general Mozilla mailing list where people could toss around ideas on how the project should go. I suggested immediately that the email client, the newsreader, and that godawful HTML composer should be completely separate from the browser. Well, I should have worn my asbestos underwear 'cause jwz flamed me into ashes with the above italicized Law of Software Envelopment.
I still believe that the ideal program should do one thing and do it well while maintaining harmonious interoperability with other, even dependent, programs. (A separate browser and email client could do this effortlessly and many already do.) Have we forgotten the principles of the Unix philosophy so quickly?
There are a few exceptions where integration is desired... For example, with Napster, the application does the searching, the chatting, and the downloading. However, I still believe that the world wide web and email are completely different entities with literally no relation to each other than the odd anchor tag. Hotmail, el al, are completely different, since your web browser isn't technically the client, the web *server* is.
So the solution is: Get yourself a valid email address with "nospam" or the like in it - The spammers will do the work for you and exclude you from their lists.
That's something like reverse psychology for the spambots, isn't it?:)
Of course, if I were a spambot author, I'd include all sorts of regex's to de-mangle the most common forms of address mangling. With that in mind, I reason that the best course of action is to just mangle your address to the point that it doesn't look like one.
As an example, you may note that *my* slashdot email address has the @ and . enclosed in both braces and spaces. Any human would be able to demangle it to a vaild address, but spambots don't even see it. As an added bonus, the humans who email me don't have to decide which words of the address to delete, lessening the margin of error.
A short demonstrative snippet:
Below are the answers to many Frequenly Asked Fucking Stupid Questions about isfuckingbrilliant services. If you've got any fucking stupid questions that are unanswered, you can mail them to support@isfuckingbrilliant.com
How do I get rid of that fucking stupid banner? Don't be fucking stupid, we offer you a free service, all we ask is for that ONE banner to be displayed when someone enters your site, it's not awhole lot to ask for is it? In the near future we plan to have several banner options, such as delay and frames, this will give you more options if you do not like popup banners.
And there is the very clean port tree. About 4500 programs in/usr/ports,
My reason for installing, trying, and then erasing FreeBSD (with a Mandrake 7.2 distro) is that the ports seem highly overrated in my opinion. Yes, it is an absolutely wonderful idea, but I had problems with almost every program I downloaded, compiled, and ran under FreeBSD. The build process itself went well, but it's almost as if the people who did the ports went, "well, it compiles correctly, everything must be fine, let's update ports."
For example, I downloaded Gnome and Sawfish (absolute requirements for any production system that I intend to use), and all went well except when it came time to actually run the apps. Sawfish never would work correctly, and Gnome would do various things like freeze occasionally upon startup, crash apps randomly, and be very buggy in general. Whether it's the fault of the Gnome developers or the FBSD porters, something wasn't right because I'm now using that same version on my Linux system without any problems.
As for my own personal opinion, I'd gladly use FreeBSD for something non-complicated but requiring stability and power. As for my workstation, I do believe I'll stick with Linux.
Well, whoever saves their credit card number on their machine deserves to be billed for this new 47" television that's making its way up to my doorstep...
From what I would assume, flat-ribbon cables are flat for a reason... it helps keep the signals isolated from one another. If you start cramming all those wires together, you wind up changing the impedance and capacitive characteristics of the cable.
However, I've noticed that the wires on my 86-pin UltraWide cable (came with my Tekram SCSI card) are... well.. interlaced. I originally assumed that it was merely to make the cable more flexible (which it does, nicely), but now that I think about it, might there be another more scientific reason for doing this?
Of course the MPAA should be getting frightened about DIVX and the new DVD to CD-R Video devices being launched.
They're not. Of course they're going to try and stop it, but the whole RIAA vs. MP3 debacle has already proven that Joe Sixpack cares more about having a store-bought perfect copy than wasting his time pirating discs just to see a stinking movie.
Don't forget that most people bought DVD players for the higher quality in the first place and aren't going to give that up for a couple of free flicks. As far as I can tell, the quality of that DIVX is worse than VHS.
Surely, preventing all DVD-R from reading on a stand alone DVD player would kill a lot of the legit market for DVD-R.
No offense, but you haven't been watching much news in the last year, have you? Those that have would note that the whole DVD industry is far from legit, even from the very beginning. They don't consumers making DVD-R's at all, let alone for a low price.
I surely do hope all of your predictions are correct. I'd much like to see DVD eventually become more of a recognized standard than the vast market strongarm tactic it currently is.
The registry is not meant to be edited directly. Also, many programs (the open-source ones, at least) don't usually use the registry at all and have regular fun little text config files that we're all used to.
Unix isn't in itself any less proprietary or commercial than Windows.
'Scuse me? Care to lay off the bong for a little while?:P
Well what you say is *partially* correct. UNIX (the commercial product, of which very little remains) itself is pretty much closed, but when the man above said "Unix," he was referring to the Unix philosophy, ideals, and practice. When I speak of Unix in this manner, I am not just talking about the commericial product (which, btw, isn't actually called UNIX anymore), but rather the range of OSes that follow the UNIX philosophy such as Linux, FreeBSD, even QNX, BeOS, or MacOS X in a loose sort of way.
I only remember actually seeing it once in an ad, but I know there was a 3D0 PCI card waaay back in the day. No word on how it worked, but it must have. AFAIK, the package consisted of one (rather large) PCI card, a gamepad, and some DOS drivers.
ROFL! I can only *wish* to meet interesting people like your coach / babysitter. There are too many in this world who lack imagination like that, and try as I might, I still have a difficult time finding them.
The closest I ever came was this guy I met in basic training who had a slight stutter and insisted that he had devised a way to make *anything* travel at an infinite velocity. (It sounded to me like the inverse of a perpetual motion machine, but needless to say, I couldn't quite comprehend his theory...) I only knew him for a few weeks before we lost touch. But, he was an aquaintence I don't think I'll ever forget.
Err... EH? Such a place does exist? I remember chatting with a friend of my mother's while doing homework one day... she was trying to explain to me that a well-rounded individual was the best one and I maintained that everyone should have the choice to just do one thing very well rather than simply be adequate at everything.
After that debate, I tried to imagine myself as the well-rounded individual and I decided right there that I couldn't imagine myself not wanting to truly master at least one thing, even if it meant sacrificing other less important things.
Just a thought for all of the college/university (where I'm from, there is a difference) -bound/.ers.
Finally, I have to ask... where are you from? I'd like to go.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Until the Playstation, almost every Japense console had a distinctly different shape and design. The Famicom (Japan's NES) looked more like a playschool toy than a console, the Super Famicom (Jap. SNES) had a far cooler design than the blocky American version, and the Japanese Saturn was silver and had different controllers than ours.
As for the games? Well I can't be specific, since I never actually bought any imports, but I'd include at least a few of the all-time greats that were originally Japanese hits before they decided to bring them over here. The Street Fighter series, Mario games, Final Fantasy series, Dragon Warrior series, etc. In fact, before the SNES, American-devleoped games (besides sports) were quite rare.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, was NEVER released! Project was announced but cancelled
That's funny, wonder how it got up there on my shelf between WipeOutXL and Xenogears... pretty neat trick for a game that was never released.
but none of the more famous and "better" ones, like street fighter
You are relying on that crack pipe a bit too much these days if you believe there was ever a Street Fighter for the Neo*Geo.
Because you missed the keywords, "a console game library that goes back to about 1986."
IIRC, the NES was released in 1985 and 1986 thru 1989 were the NES's prime years. In that time, the Atari (et al) were pretty much forgotten while everyone was busy hailing the Almighty Nintendo and Sega. It is indeed an impressive collection nontheless.
Ideal systems would include: Atari 2600, NES, Super NES, Nintendo 64, Sega, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, DreamCast, and Playstation.
IMHO, I would probably modify that list to include the TG16 and remove the Dreamcast. It simply hasn't been around long enough to prove itself to be worth anything. For all we know, it could be the next Jaguar. The Saturn can stay, because it's a great example of that one system that almost everyone wanted at one point but is glad they didn't actually buy.
Also, I am of the adamant opinion that no video game collection is complete without at least a representative collection of Japanese consoles and games.
Aw cripe. This above comment is supposed to be by me, Eil. Not AC. I must've truly done something weird to netscape between posting the original comment and this reply.
The case sets the stage for other European countries to possibly adopt similar rules to stem an epidemic that cost the music industry an estimated $5 billion last year."
Get real. When have you ever known a company to not pass expenses like this on to the consumer rather than take the bill themselves? If someone tries to retaliate or say something about it, all the companies have to do is turn to their shareholders and say, "But we're just protecting our profit margin!" And then everything in businessland is dandy again while the Germans shell out extra bucks for their hardware. And no, it won't always just be the Germans.
True, yes, but I'm morally against overclocking.
Lucky for your commie ass that I won't be using that email address much longer.
The whole 15 IRQ thing is annoying! Yes, yes, I know that a lot of you will flame me and say "get a SCSI system," but some people can't always afford that kind of system (but I would love one!)
So then it seems your whole basis for complaint is that you don't make enough money to buy the things you want. Am I missing something here?
Maybe the downfall of the P4 will convince Intel to rethink their plans, maybe not... either way both Intel and AMD are still rehashing the x86.
Mostly because x86 is still very popular and no one wants to toss away their software. I'm not an expert on microprocessor architecture, but I'm happy with x86 itself as long as the prices are low, and the performance is good. (Note: I'm an Athlon user, so a bit of subjectiveness is ahead.)
I agree with you in that I'm somewhat surprised that Intel is still following their old, pathetic, marketing-driven roadmap. You'd think in the year that the Athlon has been out and cutting into Intel's profit margin, that they would have at least been preparing themselves in some way to top AMD technologically.
One thing I like about AMD is that they went ahead and developed a whole new processor core and dubbed it the Athlon. Intel, OTOH, has been using their old 686 core since the days of the first PentiumPro, and it shows. I don't *know* whether or not the Pentium4 still uses the PPro core, but I suspect it does based on the sheer lunatic cooling and power requirements.
I didn't expect AMD would keep their title of Most Powerful x86 Chip on the Planet(tm) for this long.
That's what I did, except I used the extra dough to buy nice SCSI card and two 10krpm drives. I haven't looked back since.
Remember the Law of Software Envelopment: Every program expands until it can read mail. The programs which cannot are replaced by ones that can.
That's a jwz ideal. Back when the Mozilla project had just started (like, a few weeks after it was announced) I was on some sort of general Mozilla mailing list where people could toss around ideas on how the project should go. I suggested immediately that the email client, the newsreader, and that godawful HTML composer should be completely separate from the browser. Well, I should have worn my asbestos underwear 'cause jwz flamed me into ashes with the above italicized Law of Software Envelopment.
I still believe that the ideal program should do one thing and do it well while maintaining harmonious interoperability with other, even dependent, programs. (A separate browser and email client could do this effortlessly and many already do.) Have we forgotten the principles of the Unix philosophy so quickly?
There are a few exceptions where integration is desired... For example, with Napster, the application does the searching, the chatting, and the downloading. However, I still believe that the world wide web and email are completely different entities with literally no relation to each other than the odd anchor tag. Hotmail, el al, are completely different, since your web browser isn't technically the client, the web *server* is.
So the solution is: Get yourself a valid email address with "nospam" or the like in it - The spammers will do the work for you and exclude you from their lists.
That's something like reverse psychology for the spambots, isn't it?
Of course, if I were a spambot author, I'd include all sorts of regex's to de-mangle the most common forms of address mangling. With that in mind, I reason that the best course of action is to just mangle your address to the point that it doesn't look like one.
As an example, you may note that *my* slashdot email address has the @ and . enclosed in both braces and spaces. Any human would be able to demangle it to a vaild address, but spambots don't even see it. As an added bonus, the humans who email me don't have to decide which words of the address to delete, lessening the margin of error.
A short demonstrative snippet:
Below are the answers to many Frequenly Asked Fucking Stupid Questions about isfuckingbrilliant services. If you've got any fucking stupid questions that are unanswered, you can mail them to support@isfuckingbrilliant.com
How do I get rid of that fucking stupid banner?
Don't be fucking stupid, we offer you a free service, all we ask is for that ONE banner to be displayed when someone enters your site, it's not awhole lot to ask for is it? In the near future we plan to have several banner options, such as delay and frames, this will give you more options if you do not like popup banners.
And there is the very clean port tree. About 4500 programs in
My reason for installing, trying, and then erasing FreeBSD (with a Mandrake 7.2 distro) is that the ports seem highly overrated in my opinion. Yes, it is an absolutely wonderful idea, but I had problems with almost every program I downloaded, compiled, and ran under FreeBSD. The build process itself went well, but it's almost as if the people who did the ports went, "well, it compiles correctly, everything must be fine, let's update ports."
For example, I downloaded Gnome and Sawfish (absolute requirements for any production system that I intend to use), and all went well except when it came time to actually run the apps. Sawfish never would work correctly, and Gnome would do various things like freeze occasionally upon startup, crash apps randomly, and be very buggy in general. Whether it's the fault of the Gnome developers or the FBSD porters, something wasn't right because I'm now using that same version on my Linux system without any problems.
As for my own personal opinion, I'd gladly use FreeBSD for something non-complicated but requiring stability and power. As for my workstation, I do believe I'll stick with Linux.
What you say is perfectly true, but I was referring more to VHS vs. the reduced resolution combined with compression artifacts produced by a DivX rip.
Well, whoever saves their credit card number on their machine deserves to be billed for this new 47" television that's making its way up to my doorstep...
From what I would assume, flat-ribbon cables are flat for a reason... it helps keep the signals isolated from one another. If you start cramming all those wires together, you wind up changing the impedance and capacitive characteristics of the cable.
However, I've noticed that the wires on my 86-pin UltraWide cable (came with my Tekram SCSI card) are... well.. interlaced. I originally assumed that it was merely to make the cable more flexible (which it does, nicely), but now that I think about it, might there be another more scientific reason for doing this?
Of course the MPAA should be getting frightened about DIVX and the new DVD to CD-R Video devices being launched.
They're not. Of course they're going to try and stop it, but the whole RIAA vs. MP3 debacle has already proven that Joe Sixpack cares more about having a store-bought perfect copy than wasting his time pirating discs just to see a stinking movie.
Don't forget that most people bought DVD players for the higher quality in the first place and aren't going to give that up for a couple of free flicks. As far as I can tell, the quality of that DIVX is worse than VHS.
Surely, preventing all DVD-R from reading on a stand alone DVD player would kill a lot of the legit market for DVD-R.
No offense, but you haven't been watching much news in the last year, have you? Those that have would note that the whole DVD industry is far from legit, even from the very beginning. They don't consumers making DVD-R's at all, let alone for a low price.
I surely do hope all of your predictions are correct. I'd much like to see DVD eventually become more of a recognized standard than the vast market strongarm tactic it currently is.
C:\Windows\regedit.exe
The registry is not meant to be edited directly. Also, many programs (the open-source ones, at least) don't usually use the registry at all and have regular fun little text config files that we're all used to.
Unix isn't in itself any less proprietary or commercial than Windows.
'Scuse me? Care to lay off the bong for a little while?
Well what you say is *partially* correct. UNIX (the commercial product, of which very little remains) itself is pretty much closed, but when the man above said "Unix," he was referring to the Unix philosophy, ideals, and practice. When I speak of Unix in this manner, I am not just talking about the commericial product (which, btw, isn't actually called UNIX anymore), but rather the range of OSes that follow the UNIX philosophy such as Linux, FreeBSD, even QNX, BeOS, or MacOS X in a loose sort of way.
Mustn't take everything so literal, lad.
This comment I just posted isn't *particularly* true, and is better explained by a few posts below. sorry.
I only remember actually seeing it once in an ad, but I know there was a 3D0 PCI card waaay back in the day. No word on how it worked, but it must have. AFAIK, the package consisted of one (rather large) PCI card, a gamepad, and some DOS drivers.
ROFL! I can only *wish* to meet interesting people like your coach / babysitter. There are too many in this world who lack imagination like that, and try as I might, I still have a difficult time finding them.
The closest I ever came was this guy I met in basic training who had a slight stutter and insisted that he had devised a way to make *anything* travel at an infinite velocity. (It sounded to me like the inverse of a perpetual motion machine, but needless to say, I couldn't quite comprehend his theory...) I only knew him for a few weeks before we lost touch. But, he was an aquaintence I don't think I'll ever forget.
Err... EH? Such a place does exist? I remember chatting with a friend of my mother's while doing homework one day... she was trying to explain to me that a well-rounded individual was the best one and I maintained that everyone should have the choice to just do one thing very well rather than simply be adequate at everything.
After that debate, I tried to imagine myself as the well-rounded individual and I decided right there that I couldn't imagine myself not wanting to truly master at least one thing, even if it meant sacrificing other less important things.
Just a thought for all of the college/university (where I'm from, there is a difference) -bound
Finally, I have to ask... where are you from? I'd like to go.