I looked through that article and couldn't find anything that said the barrier was already too low just concerns that it might become inadequate sooner than initially expected.
The thing I don't (note: i've experianced wthis with both gaming and DVD playback, I haven't tried bluray playback yet) like about the PS3 is the fan noise. It's fine when you first turn it on but after running for a while the fans spool up and then it becomes loud enough to be annoying especially annoying when you are trying to use it late at night and therefore want to keep the volume down.
Have they fixed the fan noise in later iterations of the PS3 (mine is a 40GB pal model so fairly early)?
There were some differences, a high speed option was added (aka run everything at twice the clock), the die was shrunk the color features were added and the die was of course shrunk.
IMO we are talking about a difference comparable to that between a DS and a DSi, some incremental improvements and new features but not massively different.
What's more important is variety. Are you really going to get both Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2? I haven't played that particular series but if I like a game and find it completable then i'll amost certainly buy the sequal (sometimes if I like it enough i'll buy the sequal even if I can't complete the first one), heck the last two consoles I bought (PS3 and XBOX 360) were bought primerally because I wanted to continue following a series (R&C for the PS3, GTA for the 360)
The original gameboy and the color are pretty damn close architecturally though and many games were released that took advantage of the GBCs color support while still supporting the original gameboy (though there were also some color specific titles).
The GBA was a totally different device though with far more processing power.
Oh, sorry, my bad for not looking that up. But at least it's digital right The wii has no digital outputs. Afaict your choices are officially* composite, RGB scart or component and of those component is the only one that allows 480p.
Component or RGB scart is definately a big improvement over composite and a huge improvement over VHS but IMO the difference between 480i and 480p over the same interface is pretty marginal.
*There are also unofficial VGA cables though they have the issue of being a little annoying to set up (and for us europeans the further annoyance that european virtual console titles and gamecube titles generally don't support 480p) since there is no way for them to tell the console that they don't support the interlaced stuff.
t's the Wii's other display options... of which there is just one; 480i. depends where you bought your wii, if you bought it on this side of the pond you get the choice between 576i 50Hz, 480i 60Hz and 480p 60Hz.
XP-64 doesn't count, it wasn't really XP Assuming you mean XP proffessional x64 edition (and not XP 64-bit edition which was for the itanic) it is really 2003, not that I consider that a bad thing, using the same core components as a server release means more chance of drivers getting written.
and nobody wrote drivers for it While i'm sure there are some shitty vendors who support x64 vista/2K8/7 but not 64-bit 2K3 i was actually surprised to find that all the hardware worked fine when I set it up on my office desktop. This includes all the perhipherals I was using!
You don't need to compromise the original cert, you just need to get one of the many certification authorities that are trusted by the major browsers to create you one with the right name on it.
Afaict some of the certification authorities are very lax about checking that the person applying for the certificate is the legitimate owner of the domain and I have no doubt that if the Chinese government wanted they would have no trouble procuring such a certificate.
Still afaict much the same principle applies, if a blind student needs access to a book the university will convert it into a form they can use, the equipment to scan and OCR (particulally the high end OCR software) is likely to cost more than a simple photocopier but once you have it the process should be pretty simple.
A trend towards DRM protected ebooks should worry everyone but it should particularlly worry the blind.
Maybe it's reckless endangerment of children. Maybe it's just a plain old dick move. But I think it'd work. I think the most likely outcome would be a lot of lost customers and quite possiblly lawsuits or even criminal charges depending on the laws in your jurisdiction.
The general point: if you make someone else's behaviour cost them something (financially or emotionally) in order to discourage that behaviour, make sure it costs enough (i.e. too much). I'd say just make sure it costs enough that you benifit from it rather than being hurt by it. If your customers consider that price acceptable then you both win.
In the daycare case I'd figure out
1: how many staff do I need to keep back if a child isn't picked up on time (say 2) 2: how much will I be paying those staff to stay back (say make it time and a half) 3: what are the utility etc costs of keeping the building open longer. once you have those figures you know how much a late pickup costs you. Make the price double the cost and your golden.
Ultimately since afaict we don't know what the contract between google and tmobile says we don't know which of them is causing the problem.
If google gets paid the subsidy by tmobile regardless of whether the customer cancels then they are the ones double dipping. If tmobile are charging an early termination fee but not paying the subsidy to google then they are the ones double dipping.
Most toys designed for younger kids are designed to make it hard to get the batteries out. Many of them even have screw-shut battery compartments.
Also batteries with cadmium in seem to have pretty much gone the way of the dodo at least here in the UK. Non-rechargable batteries were advertising the fact they were cadmium free years ago and most rechargables are now nimh.
There are no clients or servers with duke3D multiplayer it's a peer to peer synchronised system.
You need to copy the map to all the machines and start all the machines with EXACTLY the same settings (including specifying the same user map), then it should work.
Remember the old 75ohm antenna connections. They looked like a horse shoe, and to attach it to your TV, you needed either a flathead screwdriver or a knife? Um i'm pretty sure that style of connector was for 300 ohm balanced feeder, 75 ohm is the coax stuff.
Great, another place where my phone can be stolen. I don't see how putting it on a charge mat on your desk is any worse from a theft point of view than putting it on your desk and plugging in a charge cable.
Afaict in most MMOs you get ahead by spending more time "grinding" at the game than other people. Skill helps too at least to some extent.
The thing is some people want to get ahead without the effort and/or get further than they reasonablly could on thier merits alone so they bend or break the rules. This phenomenon isn't unique to computer games, look at how many sportsmen over the years have used drugs to get ahead.
Now in MMOs one of the common ways of breaking the rules is to trade real-world money for ingame money. Of course this ingame money has to come from somewhere. That means either
1: paying people to "farm" for it 2: writing bots to "farm" for it 3: stealing it
Afaict all these techniques have been used by WOW gold-sellers.
Other than completely getting rid of the in-game economy or restricting it so much that everything feels horribly forced or selling in-game currency for real money at knock-down prices (a cure that I think would be worse than the disease) I don't see any real way to stop real money trading.
Personally if I needed a lot of license dongles on a server and wanted to keep them secure and protected what I'd do is try to mount a USB hub inside the case somewhere (maybe cable tie it to something like http://www.startech.com/item/SATA35252X-35-Bay-to-Dual-25-SATA-HDD-Adapter.aspx and mount it in a drive bay). Then just make an adaptor cable to go from the USB hub to one of the motherboards USB headers.
It's not very difficult for corporate and hosting firms to make their public web sites IPv6 reachable That reminds me of another issue, some operating systems and software will try v6 first and apply very long timeouts before falling back to v4. This means that if a user has broken or terriblly performing v6 connectivity then sites that advertise v6 IPs will be horriblly slow for them.
Such a situation is hardly going to encourage server operators to offer v6 ips for thier services.
It will be interesting to see how everything pans out but I get the distinct impression that it is going to be pretty messy:(.
Afaict build was actually pretty good for it's day (it had slopes, the ability to look up and down albiet in a slightly broken way, sectors were allowed to overlap in certain situations, and the ability for sectors to move easilly in real time allowing swinging doors, moving lights and varous other affect) and afaict duke was the first widely known game on the build engine. The trouble is quake (with it's true 3D world) came out not long after.
Did other engines have these features before build and if so were there any well known games based on them?
Slashdot Mirror
I looked through that article and couldn't find anything that said the barrier was already too low just concerns that it might become inadequate sooner than initially expected.
The thing I don't (note: i've experianced wthis with both gaming and DVD playback, I haven't tried bluray playback yet) like about the PS3 is the fan noise. It's fine when you first turn it on but after running for a while the fans spool up and then it becomes loud enough to be annoying especially annoying when you are trying to use it late at night and therefore want to keep the volume down.
Have they fixed the fan noise in later iterations of the PS3 (mine is a 40GB pal model so fairly early)?
There were some differences, a high speed option was added (aka run everything at twice the clock), the die was shrunk the color features were added and the die was of course shrunk.
IMO we are talking about a difference comparable to that between a DS and a DSi, some incremental improvements and new features but not massively different.
What's more important is variety. Are you really going to get both Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2?
I haven't played that particular series but if I like a game and find it completable then i'll amost certainly buy the sequal (sometimes if I like it enough i'll buy the sequal even if I can't complete the first one), heck the last two consoles I bought (PS3 and XBOX 360) were bought primerally because I wanted to continue following a series (R&C for the PS3, GTA for the 360)
The original gameboy and the color are pretty damn close architecturally though and many games were released that took advantage of the GBCs color support while still supporting the original gameboy (though there were also some color specific titles).
The GBA was a totally different device though with far more processing power.
Oh, sorry, my bad for not looking that up. But at least it's digital right
The wii has no digital outputs. Afaict your choices are officially* composite, RGB scart or component and of those component is the only one that allows 480p.
Component or RGB scart is definately a big improvement over composite and a huge improvement over VHS but IMO the difference between 480i and 480p over the same interface is pretty marginal.
*There are also unofficial VGA cables though they have the issue of being a little annoying to set up (and for us europeans the further annoyance that european virtual console titles and gamecube titles generally don't support 480p) since there is no way for them to tell the console that they don't support the interlaced stuff.
t's the Wii's other display options... of which there is just one; 480i.
depends where you bought your wii, if you bought it on this side of the pond you get the choice between 576i 50Hz, 480i 60Hz and 480p 60Hz.
XP-64 doesn't count, it wasn't really XP
Assuming you mean XP proffessional x64 edition (and not XP 64-bit edition which was for the itanic) it is really 2003, not that I consider that a bad thing, using the same core components as a server release means more chance of drivers getting written.
and nobody wrote drivers for it
While i'm sure there are some shitty vendors who support x64 vista/2K8/7 but not 64-bit 2K3 i was actually surprised to find that all the hardware worked fine when I set it up on my office desktop. This includes all the perhipherals I was using!
The lack of a netware client is annoying though :(
You might also want to consider some form of encrypted VPN back to a trusted network.
You don't need to compromise the original cert, you just need to get one of the many certification authorities that are trusted by the major browsers to create you one with the right name on it.
Afaict some of the certification authorities are very lax about checking that the person applying for the certificate is the legitimate owner of the domain and I have no doubt that if the Chinese government wanted they would have no trouble procuring such a certificate.
Still afaict much the same principle applies, if a blind student needs access to a book the university will convert it into a form they can use, the equipment to scan and OCR (particulally the high end OCR software) is likely to cost more than a simple photocopier but once you have it the process should be pretty simple.
A trend towards DRM protected ebooks should worry everyone but it should particularlly worry the blind.
Maybe it's reckless endangerment of children. Maybe it's just a plain old dick move. But I think it'd work.
I think the most likely outcome would be a lot of lost customers and quite possiblly lawsuits or even criminal charges depending on the laws in your jurisdiction.
The general point: if you make someone else's behaviour cost them something (financially or emotionally) in order to discourage that behaviour, make sure it costs enough (i.e. too much).
I'd say just make sure it costs enough that you benifit from it rather than being hurt by it. If your customers consider that price acceptable then you both win.
In the daycare case I'd figure out
1: how many staff do I need to keep back if a child isn't picked up on time (say 2)
2: how much will I be paying those staff to stay back (say make it time and a half)
3: what are the utility etc costs of keeping the building open longer.
once you have those figures you know how much a late pickup costs you. Make the price double the cost and your golden.
Ultimately since afaict we don't know what the contract between google and tmobile says we don't know which of them is causing the problem.
If google gets paid the subsidy by tmobile regardless of whether the customer cancels then they are the ones double dipping. If tmobile are charging an early termination fee but not paying the subsidy to google then they are the ones double dipping.
Most toys designed for younger kids are designed to make it hard to get the batteries out. Many of them even have screw-shut battery compartments.
Also batteries with cadmium in seem to have pretty much gone the way of the dodo at least here in the UK. Non-rechargable batteries were advertising the fact they were cadmium free years ago and most rechargables are now nimh.
mmm, a quick look at thier site though doesn't seem to show any pages with server versions.
Too bad for the phone maker it was a simple act of smacking the thing like a child would or an angry person.
Spot on
This demonstrator didn't just say it was practically unbreakable he then went on to offer the reporter a free phone if he could break the demo model!
The phone was broken by hitting it three times on the corner of the demonstrators fish tank.
BULLSHIT
There are no clients or servers with duke3D multiplayer it's a peer to peer synchronised system.
You need to copy the map to all the machines and start all the machines with EXACTLY the same settings (including specifying the same user map), then it should work.
Remember the old 75ohm antenna connections. They looked like a horse shoe, and to attach it to your TV, you needed either a flathead screwdriver or a knife?
Um i'm pretty sure that style of connector was for 300 ohm balanced feeder, 75 ohm is the coax stuff.
Great, another place where my phone can be stolen.
I don't see how putting it on a charge mat on your desk is any worse from a theft point of view than putting it on your desk and plugging in a charge cable.
Afaict in most MMOs you get ahead by spending more time "grinding" at the game than other people. Skill helps too at least to some extent.
The thing is some people want to get ahead without the effort and/or get further than they reasonablly could on thier merits alone so they bend or break the rules. This phenomenon isn't unique to computer games, look at how many sportsmen over the years have used drugs to get ahead.
Now in MMOs one of the common ways of breaking the rules is to trade real-world money for ingame money. Of course this ingame money has to come from somewhere. That means either
1: paying people to "farm" for it
2: writing bots to "farm" for it
3: stealing it
Afaict all these techniques have been used by WOW gold-sellers.
Other than completely getting rid of the in-game economy or restricting it so much that everything feels horribly forced or selling in-game currency for real money at knock-down prices (a cure that I think would be worse than the disease) I don't see any real way to stop real money trading.
Personally if I needed a lot of license dongles on a server and wanted to keep them secure and protected what I'd do is try to mount a USB hub inside the case somewhere (maybe cable tie it to something like http://www.startech.com/item/SATA35252X-35-Bay-to-Dual-25-SATA-HDD-Adapter.aspx and mount it in a drive bay). Then just make an adaptor cable to go from the USB hub to one of the motherboards USB headers.
It's not very difficult for corporate and hosting firms to make their public web sites IPv6 reachable
That reminds me of another issue, some operating systems and software will try v6 first and apply very long timeouts before falling back to v4. This means that if a user has broken or terriblly performing v6 connectivity then sites that advertise v6 IPs will be horriblly slow for them.
Such a situation is hardly going to encourage server operators to offer v6 ips for thier services.
It will be interesting to see how everything pans out but I get the distinct impression that it is going to be pretty messy :(.
Afaict build was actually pretty good for it's day (it had slopes, the ability to look up and down albiet in a slightly broken way, sectors were allowed to overlap in certain situations, and the ability for sectors to move easilly in real time allowing swinging doors, moving lights and varous other affect) and afaict duke was the first widely known game on the build engine. The trouble is quake (with it's true 3D world) came out not long after.
Did other engines have these features before build and if so were there any well known games based on them?