The nail in the coffin was one of Mehdi's final decisions:
AGA GFX chips were made under contract by HP (the Commodore ex-Mostek fab couldn't handle better than 2 micron). This required forecasting so they'd reserve fab time for us.
Some of us pushed hard for dropping all the non-AGA models and selling the A1200, A2400 (aka A4000), and A3000+ for Christmas.
In summer of '93, when told that (because he'd been unwilling to commit to production of enough AGA chipsets earlier) that Commodore could only make something like ~50K A1200's for Christmas, he basically said "well, we're going to sell our normal 300K units for Christmas, so make as many A1200's as we have chips for, and make the rest A600's". (Seriously paraphrased, with 13 years of mental bitrot, and I'm sure the numbers are off.)
Needless to say, 90% (or whatever) of the now-obsolete A600's didn't sell... And that ate up the rest of Commodore's capital in unsold inventory. The rest was a foregone conclusion.
That was Irving Gould's routine (he was chairman). There were lots of "issues" at stockholder meetings around the C= jet, which tended to get sold and leased-back regularly.
A few original Amiga Los Gatos people continued to work for us as consultants or employees until close to the end, on and off. One was lead on The Sims later. A bunch ended up at/founded 3DO (for a while).
Retargetable GFX was planned and underway in the last three years or so; it wasn't ready yet for the AA/AGA machines (A1200/A4000), but would have come soon after. The lead graphics programmer is now a major developer at Valve.
Keep Tripos? Oh, boy, you REALLY don't want to say that.;-) And you obviously never saw the internals.... I consider it a badge of honor that I never once ran the Tripos compiler, and I was the person who adopted it and moved it entirely to C and assembler (most of the ASM was for Tripos compatibility interfaces, plus the loader/relocator I think, which was a cpu hotspot).
Exec was very nice; an oversight here or there, and it was designed very much around a shared-memory, no-protection architecture, which was not a negative, just a fact. A similar OS kernel designed from the start for a CPU with an MMU would be QNX.
Something people may not realize is that the Apple Mac engineering team (for example) probably outnumbered the Amiga team by 20-30:1 (perhaps 100:1 or more in software). When I started in 1988, the entire software team was around 8-10. I think the low point in 1987 was around 4. High point was perhaps 25ish for software around '92. Total engineering was no more than 150 at peak, generally 100 or less - and those include chip-design & layout people, which most companies didn't have; they just bought existing chips.
We used to joke about how much more efficient we were. Even so, it's hard when outnumbered to those levels.
George had an entire drawer of uncashed checks before the accounting people forced him to set up direct deposit.
At a recent get-together of a half-dozen or so ex-Commodore/Amiga engineers, we were discussing this book. The overall opinion, including of the one person who was interviewed for it, was that it was pretty good at covering the early Commodore days, the C64 and Tramiel issues, but the coverage of the post-Tramiel Amiga days (especially the later parts) was a bit spottier and had some factual problems. The author's main contacts are with the C64 and Atari ST/Tramiel crowd, so this isn't surprising.
I personally don't remember any large number of Amigas scrapped for the "they f***ed it up" message; in fact I'd seriously doubt that. And there were easter eggs in every version of the OS, usually far more extensive than that one.
Also, there were no "mainframes" at Commodore; the biggest iron was a Vax 11/780(if I remember right). And none of the software builds were done on that; all the Amiga SW was built on Sun-2's (early on) or on Amigas directly. By 1989ish, only a few libraries were still built on Suns - I think Workbench.lib was the last holdout, or close to. For AmigaOS 2.0, I ported AmigaDOS and all the remaining BCPL filesystems and commands to C and assembler built on Amigas. The "darkest before the dawn" story is likewise close, but not quite correct. (It is legendary, though.) However, while we weren't waiting for compiles, there were interludes in the 2.0-2.04 days when we did sleep in some offices and storage rooms on cots, and had a freezer full of frozen meals, plus lots of delivered pizza, italian, etc.
Admittedly, the employees were upset enough about the (mis)management by Mehdi Ali (much more so than Irving Gould) that at the "Deathbed Vigil" party when bankruptcy was declared, we burnt Mehdi Ali in effigy in my backyard.
The old offices are now QVC Studio Park; you can tour them. A few people at QVC know about this; when selling the C64-in-a-joystik a year or two ago, the host mentioned that the building used to house Commodore. It is truely absolutely huge....
Note: I haven't read the book yet, though others in the group discussing it had, and one was a major interviewee.
I know people in the military. I know many of them WOULD refuse to fight if Bush tried to use them to put himself in charge as a military dictator. The same thing would happen if a US general tried to do the same thing. Yes, there would always be those who are loyal to the military and not their country. However they are in the minority.
It's rarely put in those terms to the grunts. There are many ways to keep the majority of the military behind a coup (or at least abstaining): see movies like The Enemy Within (1994). For a president, all it requires is enough people (in the military) believing that there's a threat from a terrorist or home-grown insurgent group.
I'm not saying that the following is why Bush pushed for things like the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, FCC expansion of CALEA to all internet access (virtually), etc, but those powers are exactly the sorts of things that enable a government to apply the sort of domestic controls of a totalitarian or fascist state. And such things don't happen overnight; it happens one step at a time, each one a "reasonable expansion" to deal with some perceived or hyped threat.
Lots of conservatives are upset about some of these because they don't trust a politician (of any stripe) with access to such powers.
Back in roughly 1991 or 1992, I was working at Commodore/Amiga with AT&T DSP3210's (we were considering adding them to Amiga 3000's/4000's). They supported speech recognition, and due to that (somehow) I was asked to participate in a NIST program to collect speech samples over telephone. You made calls where you were randomly connected to another participant, and talked about a given topic. I imagine they were later transcribed; the purpose of this was to create a natural (connected) speech database for speech recognition researchers and vendors.
Since it was done by NIST, I imagine the database is available. Note that it will be limited by the telephone call quality (4KHz).
Nethack is, of course, the ultimate comfort game. Just don't hit your dog! I still play it, and there's an 'online' tournament every fall starting on Halloween (hosted by/dev/null). (And of course, extra nasties on Halloween (and full moons, and Friday the 13th, etc).
2. Snood. Mindless and as slow as you want (except the ridiculous armageddon level where time's an issue)
3. Civ X (any Civ - 1, 2, 3, 4). Need I say more.
4. Jewels95 (I kept the install; you can find it here though).
5. Mahjong. Ok, so 95% of "Mahjong" titles have nothing to do with real Mahjong other than using the tiles, and are really just "matching" games. It's been a comfort game for me since it first came out for the Amiga in 1986-1987ish.
We were on automatic billpay with our mortgage company. Takes some of the stress out, right?
So, the annual adjustment happened for taxes/ins (escrow), and there was a small increase. And the automatic bill didn't get adjusted, so they debited the old (smaller) amount. $50ish difference. Fine, we called them to fix it, and gave them a payment over the phone. Apparently this happened to a few thousand people who's accounts were charged the day they updated the escrow, or some such. That solved it, right? Wrong.
The $50ish was credited to the escrow account directly, not to the currently due payment. Next billing cycle comes, and we see that it's wrong, and call them again. They correct it again, and it's credited wrong again (this time to principal). A third billing cycle, and we see it's wrong (and now the payment amount on the account is wrong), and we also get a you're overdue letter. Finally, after a LONG time with an agent, and having to give them another over-the-phone small payment (it was valid, to correct for other mistakes and so that everything would get properly set so the payment would go back to the correct amount), they FINALLY got it right. We tried to get them to send a letter saying "they made no late payments", etc, and couldn't, but they did finally send us an accounting of payments showing those months as paid in full on-time. Though we waited a few months before celebrating.
For years, I'd get a $0.04 tax bill for a little sliver of land behind my house (long story short, there was a mis-surveying when my house was built, and to "fix" it while allowing enough space for a flag lot next to mine I was deeded a sliver about 2000 sq ft (my lot was 1 acre, ~40,000 sq ft). Every year, the county would send the 4 cent tax bill, and I'd pay $0.3x cents to mail in my 4 cent check. (School taxes actually were noticable, all of $4/year.)
In Pennsylvania (PECO/Exelon territory, outside Philly), you can sign up for wind power for 2.5 cents/KWHr additional. They're trying to get people to sign up for 2 units of 100KWHrs, but you can choose any amount or 100% of your usage, which my wife and I do. (And we use a LOT more electric than most people do - we use modern, high-efficiency, 2 stage heat pumps (15ish SEER, 7-8 HSPF) to heat and cool our house, which is a 1930 hunting lodge expanded into a large contemporary around 1970 - lots and lots of windows, lots and lots of leaks, not a huge amount of insulation. We also supplement with modern woodstove in the winter, and the house has some level of natural passive solar.) PECO has fairly high rates to start with; circa 14ish cents/KWHr (generation plus transmission plus limited-time cost-recovery granted them when they allowed competition several years back).
The main wind generation in PA is in the appalachians; you can see them from the PA turnpike not a huge distance from Pittsburgh.
As for the Adirondacks - That's a tougher question, because of the issue of siting in the park (NY state constitution declares it should be kept "forever wild", and towers in particular have an effect on the landscape and "wildness" for a long distance around. Hydro dams built long ago in the park are now considered to have been a big mistake environmentally and in terms of protecting the wild nature of the park. However, in this one particular case, it's a harder call because that site is already severely degraded (a mine), and it's zoned industrial (rare inside the park), and major power lines already exist there.
The Adirondack Council is recommending biomass instead of wind for green power within the park.
Tricks like that only work if you can predict the external port number to tell the other person to use. A third-party site can do this (though you should use STUN instead of Skype) - but only if your NAT isn't a fully-symmetric NAT. (There are 4 main types of NAT, one of which is symmetric, where the port number to communicate to host A is different than the port number when communicating to host B, and there's no way to know.)
The alternative when behind such a nat is to use a relay (such as RTP-Relay, a TURN server, or what Skype does), or to tell the NAT to open a port for you (such as via UPnP), or statically configure a port-forward in the NAT.
Chris Crawford tried for a "highbrow" commercial game with "Balance of Power" in 1984-1986, an "Un-war" game about thermonuclear cold (and hot) war. He wrote a book about it later, and this experience lead to the founding of the first (that I know of) newsletter for computer game designers, and then to the founding of the Computer Game Developer's Conference, still running today.
But was partisanship the important point of the article or what caused it? No. In fact, the article doesn't mention democrats anywhere, nor does it appear to be a partisan issue from the reporting. It does appear there is a difference between the Governor and some of the other people involved in handling voting, but the reporter apparently didn't see enough of a party issue to even make it worth mentioning someone as "State Rep FooBar (a Democrat)".
You seem to be the one who pushed the partisan aspect. Now, perhaps there is a partisan aspect (on either side - the Governor could just be using this to grandstand and embarrass the people of the other party by tying them to a bunch of fuckups). But if so, you should have given a source for that.
[ARGH. Lost my typing (emacs bindings don't *always* work in browser text boxes. Shortened version follows]
This was why the OLD Computer Gaming World avoided giving numeric/star ratings for so long.
Some people consider different things when buying. Some look at a tie-in/license (parents, younger kids, non-"gamers"). Some look at genre/subject: WWII, evil-alien-shooter, cute ponies, horror. Some look at whether text of reviews (is it monotonous, etc). Some look for eye-candy or cool tech; game is secondary (anyone remember "Trespasser"?). And some look at the numeric rating closely - but not many, I'll bet.
My guess is that of those who even look at reviews at all, most use the numeric rating just to group it into 3 bins: Run like the plague, it's ok to look at other factors, and (occasionally) look at it even if you normally wouldn't. And for those who find a game first then check reviews, the 3rd case is out, so it's basically only a "look for warning flag before pulling trigger" check.
Who buys "Barbies playhouse" because it got a 8.8 instead of "Kill nasty aliens with cool guns" which got a 7.8? No one. Some may buy Barbies playhouse because that the sort of game they like. And others might NOT buy KNAWCG when they normally would because it got a 4.8, or because if KNAWCG got a 7.8 and "Kill nasty Nazis with cool guns" got a 9.5. But the point is that subtleties of score have almost no impact, and even gross differences of score have only moderate impact except at the very extremes.
You're right about the audiophile airheads - they also believe things like painting the edges of CDs "colors" the sound, and putting cast stone with inductors under a component "solidifies" the sound (magically, I guess). (No, I'm not joking - look up "Shakti stones", reviewed favorably by Audiophile in circa 1995/6, at which point I decided Audiophile (and the people who believe what they say) are idiots.)
As for subsonics on headphones - headphones generally don't do much with subsonics; not to mention that LP hardware has limitations down there too. What you hear on Dark Side of the Moon LP (when compared to CD) could be all sorts of things, starting with motor/etc rumble, totally different mastering, a high-pass before digital mastering to get rid of rumble artifacts in the original or to avoid making amps waste power trying to reproduce a 10hz rumble, etc, etc.
Overall, though, I agree with you. And I used to be a radio DJ at a tech university.
In 1993 I interviewed with 3DO (several of my former coworkers and friends were working there). They offered me a serious raise to move out there; the work was cool; the coworkers were great; the environment and perks rocked. Trip Hawkins himself interviewed me and gave me the hard sell. Later I described Trip Hawkins as having a "reality-distortion field" surrounding him. I left there convinced, but I'd told myself I wouldn't say yes or no until I had a chance to think.
After getting home, I realized that I didn't buy Trip Hawkins explanation why they could sell a videogame system (in 1993) for $700, and he didn't seem to be that interested in driving the price down quickly. I should have been one of the target early-adopters (enough money, lifelong gamer, single, male, 31) - and I wouldn't pay that. I turned them down.
A few days later, on a Saturday, I got a call from Trip himself, asking why I'd turned them down, and trying to convince me a) that it could sell, and b) to change my mind. Obviously, he wasn't successful.
So, while $600 (after inflation) is considerably lower than $700 in 1993, it's still high. The big catch is that it's also a blue-ray player which (to those with HD displays) adds some definite value, and may help persuade the non-game-players in the household.
The sketchy details that have been leaked (and the fact that the government seems determined to avoid the normal FISA court, which will give them a warrant for a tomato if it looks aggressive) implies that they're not targeting individuals. There would be no need for a "secret, warrantless" program in that case, so they'd just have gotten warrants.
The very strong implication of what's known of AT&T's involvement implies they're "trolling" for data by monitoring large numbers of people, or a portion of all traffic at random (perhaps through speech recognition to flag for further review). Perhaps they're tapping anyone who ever called someone who called a suspect (which, I'm sure, would be thousands). Or anyone who called *them*.
And like I said semi-sarcastically, if it wasn't secret perhaps I could answer your question about who's rights have been violated. Catch-22.
This is why FISA is there - to block "fishing expeditions" and provide some at least cursory review to avoid blatent abuses of power. (Minor abuses likely would get by FISA, given that the court almost never denies a request.)
Designing a videophone/video-chat application isn't hard. Doing it well is HARD. I know.;-)
It's quite possible that typical PC-based "video chat" solutions don't do well near the upload speed limit. There are lots of issues (loss) if you get near the congestion point - usually on the upstream, but it can happen elsewhere. The simple solution is to simply never go near it, but that really hurts video quality. Also, frame rate is important, as is delay. And lots of cheapo USB 1.1 webcams can't do 30FPS at the resolutions people are using. And video codec is important - H.264 is much better than the typical H.263, but has a LOT higher processing power requirement.
Standalone videophones (hint: Ojo) can do much better at using all available bandwidth (though not all do, of course). We usually run smoothly at 80-95% of the available upstream rate.
Umm... That clause doesn't fly legally. IANAL, but the GPL is a restriction on distribution, not on use. As such, adding a clause restricting use probably has no real effect. The GPL is not a EULA, and so it's hard/impossible to turn it into one. You could add a separate EULA, but that would probably require a different framework, etc.
Re:The writing was on the wall when ...
on
RIP CGW
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· Score: 4, Informative
Giving in to the "ratings" pressure was the first big step down the slippery slope, and the other was selling to ZD. I've subscribed (and/or bought off the newstand) since the mid-1980's; I stuck with it as it slowly declined over the last decade especially.
I remember when it was fat, covered DOS, (680x0) Mac, Amiga, and ST games, and there was NO console coverage. That was a LONG time ago. I miss it. I also miss the old "Hall of Fame".
I don't plan to renew my subscription to whatever this new magazine is (even if almost all the games I play nowadays are Windows (plus Nethack, Angband and a few others on Linux).
Slashdot Mirror
The nail in the coffin was one of Mehdi's final decisions:
AGA GFX chips were made under contract by HP (the Commodore ex-Mostek fab couldn't handle better than 2 micron). This required forecasting so they'd reserve fab time for us.
Some of us pushed hard for dropping all the non-AGA models and selling the A1200, A2400 (aka A4000), and A3000+ for Christmas.
In summer of '93, when told that (because he'd been unwilling to commit to production of enough AGA chipsets earlier) that Commodore could only make something like ~50K A1200's for Christmas, he basically said "well, we're going to sell our normal 300K units for Christmas, so make as many A1200's as we have chips for, and make the rest A600's". (Seriously paraphrased, with 13 years of mental bitrot, and I'm sure the numbers are off.)
Needless to say, 90% (or whatever) of the now-obsolete A600's didn't sell... And that ate up the rest of Commodore's capital in unsold inventory. The rest was a foregone conclusion.
That was Irving Gould's routine (he was chairman). There were lots of "issues" at stockholder meetings around the C= jet, which tended to get sold and leased-back regularly.
A few original Amiga Los Gatos people continued to work for us as consultants or employees until close to the end, on and off. One was lead on The Sims later. A bunch ended up at/founded 3DO (for a while).
;-) And you obviously never saw the internals.... I consider it a badge of honor that I never once ran the Tripos compiler, and I was the person who adopted it and moved it entirely to C and assembler (most of the ASM was for Tripos compatibility interfaces, plus the loader/relocator I think, which was a cpu hotspot).
Retargetable GFX was planned and underway in the last three years or so; it wasn't ready yet for the AA/AGA machines (A1200/A4000), but would have come soon after. The lead graphics programmer is now a major developer at Valve.
Keep Tripos? Oh, boy, you REALLY don't want to say that.
Exec was very nice; an oversight here or there, and it was designed very much around a shared-memory, no-protection architecture, which was not a negative, just a fact. A similar OS kernel designed from the start for a CPU with an MMU would be QNX.
Hi, anonymous coward - I'm sure I know you. :-)
Something people may not realize is that the Apple Mac engineering team (for example) probably outnumbered the Amiga team by 20-30:1 (perhaps 100:1 or more in software). When I started in 1988, the entire software team was around 8-10. I think the low point in 1987 was around 4. High point was perhaps 25ish for software around '92. Total engineering was no more than 150 at peak, generally 100 or less - and those include chip-design & layout people, which most companies didn't have; they just bought existing chips.
We used to joke about how much more efficient we were. Even so, it's hard when outnumbered to those levels.
George had an entire drawer of uncashed checks before the accounting people forced him to set up direct deposit.
At a recent get-together of a half-dozen or so ex-Commodore/Amiga engineers, we were discussing this book. The overall opinion, including of the one person who was interviewed for it, was that it was pretty good at covering the early Commodore days, the C64 and Tramiel issues, but the coverage of the post-Tramiel Amiga days (especially the later parts) was a bit spottier and had some factual problems. The author's main contacts are with the C64 and Atari ST/Tramiel crowd, so this isn't surprising.
I personally don't remember any large number of Amigas scrapped for the "they f***ed it up" message; in fact I'd seriously doubt that. And there were easter eggs in every version of the OS, usually far more extensive than that one.
Also, there were no "mainframes" at Commodore; the biggest iron was a Vax 11/780(if I remember right). And none of the software builds were done on that; all the Amiga SW was built on Sun-2's (early on) or on Amigas directly. By 1989ish, only a few libraries were still built on Suns - I think Workbench.lib was the last holdout, or close to. For AmigaOS 2.0, I ported AmigaDOS and all the remaining BCPL filesystems and commands to C and assembler built on Amigas. The "darkest before the dawn" story is likewise close, but not quite correct. (It is legendary, though.) However, while we weren't waiting for compiles, there were interludes in the 2.0-2.04 days when we did sleep in some offices and storage rooms on cots, and had a freezer full of frozen meals, plus lots of delivered pizza, italian, etc.
Admittedly, the employees were upset enough about the (mis)management by Mehdi Ali (much more so than Irving Gould) that at the "Deathbed Vigil" party when bankruptcy was declared, we burnt Mehdi Ali in effigy in my backyard.
The old offices are now QVC Studio Park; you can tour them. A few people at QVC know about this; when selling the C64-in-a-joystik a year or two ago, the host mentioned that the building used to house Commodore. It is truely absolutely huge....
Note: I haven't read the book yet, though others in the group discussing it had, and one was a major interviewee.
I'm not saying that the following is why Bush pushed for things like the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, FCC expansion of CALEA to all internet access (virtually), etc, but those powers are exactly the sorts of things that enable a government to apply the sort of domestic controls of a totalitarian or fascist state. And such things don't happen overnight; it happens one step at a time, each one a "reasonable expansion" to deal with some perceived or hyped threat.
Lots of conservatives are upset about some of these because they don't trust a politician (of any stripe) with access to such powers.
Yes, that's got to be it. Good find - and not free it appears.
Back in roughly 1991 or 1992, I was working at Commodore/Amiga with AT&T DSP3210's (we were considering adding them to Amiga 3000's/4000's). They supported speech recognition, and due to that (somehow) I was asked to participate in a NIST program to collect speech samples over telephone. You made calls where you were randomly connected to another participant, and talked about a given topic. I imagine they were later transcribed; the purpose of this was to create a natural (connected) speech database for speech recognition researchers and vendors.
Since it was done by NIST, I imagine the database is available. Note that it will be limited by the telephone call quality (4KHz).
2. Snood. Mindless and as slow as you want (except the ridiculous armageddon level where time's an issue)
3. Civ X (any Civ - 1, 2, 3, 4). Need I say more.
4. Jewels95 (I kept the install; you can find it here though).
5. Mahjong. Ok, so 95% of "Mahjong" titles have nothing to do with real Mahjong other than using the tiles, and are really just "matching" games. It's been a comfort game for me since it first came out for the Amiga in 1986-1987ish.
We were on automatic billpay with our mortgage company. Takes some of the stress out, right?
So, the annual adjustment happened for taxes/ins (escrow), and there was a small increase. And the automatic bill didn't get adjusted, so they debited the old (smaller) amount. $50ish difference. Fine, we called them to fix it, and gave them a payment over the phone. Apparently this happened to a few thousand people who's accounts were charged the day they updated the escrow, or some such. That solved it, right? Wrong.
The $50ish was credited to the escrow account directly, not to the currently due payment. Next billing cycle comes, and we see that it's wrong, and call them again. They correct it again, and it's credited wrong again (this time to principal). A third billing cycle, and we see it's wrong (and now the payment amount on the account is wrong), and we also get a you're overdue letter. Finally, after a LONG time with an agent, and having to give them another over-the-phone small payment (it was valid, to correct for other mistakes and so that everything would get properly set so the payment would go back to the correct amount), they FINALLY got it right. We tried to get them to send a letter saying "they made no late payments", etc, and couldn't, but they did finally send us an accounting of payments showing those months as paid in full on-time. Though we waited a few months before celebrating.
For years, I'd get a $0.04 tax bill for a little sliver of land behind my house (long story short, there was a mis-surveying when my house was built, and to "fix" it while allowing enough space for a flag lot next to mine I was deeded a sliver about 2000 sq ft (my lot was 1 acre, ~40,000 sq ft). Every year, the county would send the 4 cent tax bill, and I'd pay $0.3x cents to mail in my 4 cent check. (School taxes actually were noticable, all of $4/year.)
In Pennsylvania (PECO/Exelon territory, outside Philly), you can sign up for wind power for 2.5 cents/KWHr additional. They're trying to get people to sign up for 2 units of 100KWHrs, but you can choose any amount or 100% of your usage, which my wife and I do. (And we use a LOT more electric than most people do - we use modern, high-efficiency, 2 stage heat pumps (15ish SEER, 7-8 HSPF) to heat and cool our house, which is a 1930 hunting lodge expanded into a large contemporary around 1970 - lots and lots of windows, lots and lots of leaks, not a huge amount of insulation. We also supplement with modern woodstove in the winter, and the house has some level of natural passive solar.) PECO has fairly high rates to start with; circa 14ish cents/KWHr (generation plus transmission plus limited-time cost-recovery granted them when they allowed competition several years back).
The main wind generation in PA is in the appalachians; you can see them from the PA turnpike not a huge distance from Pittsburgh.
As for the Adirondacks - That's a tougher question, because of the issue of siting in the park (NY state constitution declares it should be kept "forever wild", and towers in particular have an effect on the landscape and "wildness" for a long distance around. Hydro dams built long ago in the park are now considered to have been a big mistake environmentally and in terms of protecting the wild nature of the park. However, in this one particular case, it's a harder call because that site is already severely degraded (a mine), and it's zoned industrial (rare inside the park), and major power lines already exist there.
The Adirondack Council is recommending biomass instead of wind for green power within the park.
Tricks like that only work if you can predict the external port number to tell the other person to use. A third-party site can do this (though you should use STUN instead of Skype) - but only if your NAT isn't a fully-symmetric NAT. (There are 4 main types of NAT, one of which is symmetric, where the port number to communicate to host A is different than the port number when communicating to host B, and there's no way to know.)
The alternative when behind such a nat is to use a relay (such as RTP-Relay, a TURN server, or what Skype does), or to tell the NAT to open a port for you (such as via UPnP), or statically configure a port-forward in the NAT.
Chris Crawford tried for a "highbrow" commercial game with "Balance of Power" in 1984-1986, an "Un-war" game about thermonuclear cold (and hot) war. He wrote a book about it later, and this experience lead to the founding of the first (that I know of) newsletter for computer game designers, and then to the founding of the Computer Game Developer's Conference, still running today.
But was partisanship the important point of the article or what caused it? No. In fact, the article doesn't mention democrats anywhere, nor does it appear to be a partisan issue from the reporting. It does appear there is a difference between the Governor and some of the other people involved in handling voting, but the reporter apparently didn't see enough of a party issue to even make it worth mentioning someone as "State Rep FooBar (a Democrat)".
You seem to be the one who pushed the partisan aspect. Now, perhaps there is a partisan aspect (on either side - the Governor could just be using this to grandstand and embarrass the people of the other party by tying them to a bunch of fuckups). But if so, you should have given a source for that.
[ARGH. Lost my typing (emacs bindings don't *always* work in browser text boxes. Shortened version follows]
This was why the OLD Computer Gaming World avoided giving numeric/star ratings for so long.
Some people consider different things when buying. Some look at a tie-in/license (parents, younger kids, non-"gamers"). Some look at genre/subject: WWII, evil-alien-shooter, cute ponies, horror. Some look at whether text of reviews (is it monotonous, etc). Some look for eye-candy or cool tech; game is secondary (anyone remember "Trespasser"?). And some look at the numeric rating closely - but not many, I'll bet.
My guess is that of those who even look at reviews at all, most use the numeric rating just to group it into 3 bins: Run like the plague, it's ok to look at other factors, and (occasionally) look at it even if you normally wouldn't. And for those who find a game first then check reviews, the 3rd case is out, so it's basically only a "look for warning flag before pulling trigger" check.
Who buys "Barbies playhouse" because it got a 8.8 instead of "Kill nasty aliens with cool guns" which got a 7.8? No one. Some may buy Barbies playhouse because that the sort of game they like. And others might NOT buy KNAWCG when they normally would because it got a 4.8, or because if KNAWCG got a 7.8 and "Kill nasty Nazis with cool guns" got a 9.5. But the point is that subtleties of score have almost no impact, and even gross differences of score have only moderate impact except at the very extremes.
You're right about the audiophile airheads - they also believe things like painting the edges of CDs "colors" the sound, and putting cast stone with inductors under a component "solidifies" the sound (magically, I guess). (No, I'm not joking - look up "Shakti stones", reviewed favorably by Audiophile in circa 1995/6, at which point I decided Audiophile (and the people who believe what they say) are idiots.)
As for subsonics on headphones - headphones generally don't do much with subsonics; not to mention that LP hardware has limitations down there too. What you hear on Dark Side of the Moon LP (when compared to CD) could be all sorts of things, starting with motor/etc rumble, totally different mastering, a high-pass before digital mastering to get rid of rumble artifacts in the original or to avoid making amps waste power trying to reproduce a 10hz rumble, etc, etc.
Overall, though, I agree with you. And I used to be a radio DJ at a tech university.
In 1993 I interviewed with 3DO (several of my former coworkers and friends were working there). They offered me a serious raise to move out there; the work was cool; the coworkers were great; the environment and perks rocked. Trip Hawkins himself interviewed me and gave me the hard sell. Later I described Trip Hawkins as having a "reality-distortion field" surrounding him. I left there convinced, but I'd told myself I wouldn't say yes or no until I had a chance to think.
After getting home, I realized that I didn't buy Trip Hawkins explanation why they could sell a videogame system (in 1993) for $700, and he didn't seem to be that interested in driving the price down quickly. I should have been one of the target early-adopters (enough money, lifelong gamer, single, male, 31) - and I wouldn't pay that. I turned them down.
A few days later, on a Saturday, I got a call from Trip himself, asking why I'd turned them down, and trying to convince me a) that it could sell, and b) to change my mind. Obviously, he wasn't successful.
So, while $600 (after inflation) is considerably lower than $700 in 1993, it's still high. The big catch is that it's also a blue-ray player which (to those with HD displays) adds some definite value, and may help persuade the non-game-players in the household.
No effect (directly) on UDP (no ACKs); UDP could be hit by congestion caused by lots of TCP traffic (of course).
The sketchy details that have been leaked (and the fact that the government seems determined to avoid the normal FISA court, which will give them a warrant for a tomato if it looks aggressive) implies that they're not targeting individuals. There would be no need for a "secret, warrantless" program in that case, so they'd just have gotten warrants.
The very strong implication of what's known of AT&T's involvement implies they're "trolling" for data by monitoring large numbers of people, or a portion of all traffic at random (perhaps through speech recognition to flag for further review). Perhaps they're tapping anyone who ever called someone who called a suspect (which, I'm sure, would be thousands). Or anyone who called *them*.
And like I said semi-sarcastically, if it wasn't secret perhaps I could answer your question about who's rights have been violated. Catch-22.
This is why FISA is there - to block "fishing expeditions" and provide some at least cursory review to avoid blatent abuses of power. (Minor abuses likely would get by FISA, given that the court almost never denies a request.)
Designing a videophone/video-chat application isn't hard. Doing it well is HARD. I know. ;-)
It's quite possible that typical PC-based "video chat" solutions don't do well near the upload speed limit. There are lots of issues (loss) if you get near the congestion point - usually on the upstream, but it can happen elsewhere. The simple solution is to simply never go near it, but that really hurts video quality. Also, frame rate is important, as is delay. And lots of cheapo USB 1.1 webcams can't do 30FPS at the resolutions people are using. And video codec is important - H.264 is much better than the typical H.263, but has a LOT higher processing power requirement.
Standalone videophones (hint: Ojo) can do much better at using all available bandwidth (though not all do, of course). We usually run smoothly at 80-95% of the available upstream rate.
Umm... That clause doesn't fly legally. IANAL, but the GPL is a restriction on distribution, not on use. As such, adding a clause restricting use probably has no real effect. The GPL is not a EULA, and so it's hard/impossible to turn it into one. You could add a separate EULA, but that would probably require a different framework, etc.
Giving in to the "ratings" pressure was the first big step down the slippery slope, and the other was selling to ZD. I've subscribed (and/or bought off the newstand) since the mid-1980's; I stuck with it as it slowly declined over the last decade especially.
I remember when it was fat, covered DOS, (680x0) Mac, Amiga, and ST games, and there was NO console coverage. That was a LONG time ago. I miss it. I also miss the old "Hall of Fame".
I don't plan to renew my subscription to whatever this new magazine is (even if almost all the games I play nowadays are Windows (plus Nethack, Angband and a few others on Linux).