Try to find a copy of Einhander (playstation1) for example. Go ahead. You'll have a hell of a time. Well I see a couple of american and japanese copies on ebay buy it now which I could purchase right now should I so desire (though I would have to get a chipped playstation to play them). It seems it was never release in europe.
It is expensive though, £25 for a japaneese copy or £40 for a european copy.
Space stations are a good idea IMO, far better to leave your LAB and living facilities up there all the time then to cart them up and down all the time.
The crazy thing was building and servicing the space station using the space shuttle and hence carting a shitload of unessacery shuttle orbiter mass in and out of space continuously. Unfortunately NASA had scrapped everything else that was man rated.
I'm not sure there was much else they could do, if the things wouldn't start then getting a firmware upgrade in would be tricky to say the least. Replacing the zunes would have been pointless since they woul be back to life long before any replacements could be shipped out.
I went to dabs.com (a major computer parts supplier here in the UK) selected hard drives, filtered to desktop SATA drives and got the following choice of manufacturers
* Western Digital (23),
* Seagate (20),
* HP (17),
* Samsung (8),
* Hitachi (6),
* Maxtor (6),
* IBM (5),
* Fujitsu Siemens (2),
* ExcelStor Technology (2),
* Buffalo (1)
The HP,IBM and buffalo ones seem to just be rebranded drives sold as spares for thier other product lines.
The couple of fujitsu models seem to have a very poor cost per gigabyte and poor total capacity.
Excelstore drives seem to be very low capacity (though at more reasonable prices than fujitsu).
segate and maxtor are the same company now.
So that leaves us with a list of four choices for decent sized desktop drives: segate, WD, hitachi and samsung. Not quite as dire as only two but not exactly a huge range either.
and who wants a 5 yr warranty now when you're going to get four or more opportunities to use it? and worse it seems the new segate/maxtor don't do advance rmas like maxtor used to. Advance rmas were good for two reasons,
1: they meant you could copy the data across without having to find/buy another drive. 2: when you got the new drive it came in manufacturer approved pacaging that you could then use to return the old drive (rather than having to buy manufacturer approved packaging which afaict is what you have to do now)
When income is no longer quite so disposable, will people be willing to pay more for quality with the understanding that it costs less in the long-term? But how will they know which products will last?
Will companies and thier shareholders be prepared to take the years of losses or mediocre profits needed to build up a reputation for solid quality when everyone else is selling cheap junk? and when they have built that reputation will they be able to resist the urge to trash it in the name or short term profits (sony have done this in certain product areas afaict)
because arena games are (relatively) easy to make with a distributed uncooperative team. Once you have the basics in place people can work on improving the interface, improving the weaponset, improving the character art/models and making new levels pretty much independently.
For a story game you need someone to sketch out the story, then all the mappers need to cooperate to make maps that fit with that story (and feed back to the story guy when they can't so the story can be adjusted) and to use a consistent set of art. Then the programmers need to get involved with the mappers to make the NPCs that will tell the story and so on.
Though IIRC when they finally got stig to drive it round thier own test track and put it on the leaderboard they were surprised how poorly it performed.
I presume he means PCI bus clock cycles not CPU clock cycles.
Normal PCI slots are and always have been 32 bit 33mhz, there are faster variants of PCI but they have remained niche interfaces (mostly used in servers).
but with GUI unlikely. Anyone remember the archimedies machines with riscos 2.x. The screen flashed up
risc os 2048K acorn ADFS
and then almost immediately the desktop popped up.
Of course having the OS in rom, the configuration in some kind of solid state storage (not sure if it was EEProm or battery backed ram) and a relatively known hardware setup helped a lot.
Re:Vala makes the creating widgets argument moot
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 1
Disclaimer i've only used the gtk/gnome very briefly
Fact is most OOP languages are specific to one object system. GTK already has it's own custom object system and the system will be pretty bewildering to anyone without a low level knowlage of structure layouts.
If people want to work with it without doing the OOP stuff by hand they need a language designed for that object system. Indeed vala is fairly unusual among native code languages in being designed arround an existing object system rather than introducing a new one.
To me vala looks a lot easier to understand than manual OOP with gobject. Especially for people who have some familiarity with languages that use similar syntax (C++, java, C#).
Sorry that should have been APC not UPS, i'm getting my TLAs mixed up.
Re:It's good news, but is it too late?
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 1
Java is portable If you define portable as wintel, lintel and solaris then definately othewise not so much.
Mac is somewhat supported but it's at apples whim and typically they delay for ages then force you to upgrade your OS to get an up to date version of java.
Other linux plaforms are supported but only barely. The openjdk version of hotspot can currently only do JIT on i386, amd64 and possiblly sparc (someone is working on this but how long it will take is anyones guess). I belive there is an attempt to use the openjdk libs with the cacao VM but I dunno how well they work.
The other problem with java is it doesn't play well with other languages. Calling other languages from java is pretty annoying (though made better by the third party JNA). Calling java from other languages is even worse.
You also have to release enough that the user can use your app with a new version of the library. If you are dynamic linking to Qt this is easy but if you are static linking for some reason (say to make an installer or a utility app that does not require installation) it adds complexity to your distribution process.
I always wondered about this assertion (not saying it is inherently wrong, but it does get me thinking). If a game is "only secure against cheating through obscurity" wouldn't that imply that it's committing a cardinal sin of online game design: "Never trust the client" Unfortunately following "NEVER trust the client" is impractical for FPS games with our current technology if you want acceptable performance.
and the more trust you put in the client the better you can make the game perform. For example most games handle movement and sometimes even hitscan on the client side to make the gameplay appear smoother. This obviously requires the client to have a lot of information.
There are some cheats (using your FPS example) that you would not be able to stop even with closed clients. For example, there is a tool commonly used by Guild Wars players called "TexMod" which sits in DirectX and replaces textures. Pretty useless for the most part, allowing for local-only custom skins (leading, of course, to the inevitable nude mods). But for a game like COD4 (assuming that's even on PC), you could replace the skin for the terrorists/SAS uniforms to a bright orange with full reflection to make it easier to see them, or replace the wall with a similar texture at 80% transparency. A closed client doesn't stop that. A possible way arround that would be to subtuly alter the textures and change thier IDs each time the game was loaded to make it much harder for the software to spot which textures to replace.
Also many games are now starting to include scanners for cheat programs. They aren't perfect but combined with permanently banning players by their CD key or eqivilent they can be pretty effective against all but the richest cheaters.
Well the first result was http://kezfun.net/search?s=pokemon+sex&s_what=onlinegames , which looks decidedly unsuitable for minors, at the top of the page I see a button titles titled "bustnow porntube" and "f**k a local girl" (bowdlerisation mine) and an "ads by blacklabelads" section that looks similar to the "ads by google" sections you see on many sites.
The second result is a youtube video with pokemon being played with the text replaced by sexual references.
That concluded that using the european system of 230/400 3 phase AC for distribution splitting out to 230V single phase AC near the point of use was almost as efficiant as a 400V DC system and far cheaper and easier to deploy. Your servers existing power supplies can almost certinaly handle 230V without any problems (changing a switch may be required on crappier models)
BTW in many cases there are often huge savings to be made without changing your infrastructure just by using better PSUs, cheapasss PSUs are both inefficiant and unreliable.
When you typed "*BASIC" to get into the BASIC interpreter, this was actually no different than using "*PASCAL" to get into our environment or any other ROM software. Minor nitpick. Unlike the * commands for entering other languages which were intepreted by the language roms which then called the OS to switch the current language to themselves the *BASIC command was actually intepreted by the "OS" itself.
Unfortunately not all advertising providers are that good at targeting and malware once it gets in is likely to affect all users.
Also words can have different meanings in different contexts and search engines can pick up the wrong one. For example most pokemon (in the more recent games) have a gender. Another simpler to type word for gender is sex. Guess what you get when you do a google search for pokemon sex?
note: this article seems to be about the middle east and the indian subcontinent. Traffic from europe to eastasia seems to go via the USA in my experiance.
acquire non-sea europe to asia internet backbone And what route would you propose to take to get from india to europe over land?
india->pakistan->iran->turkey->greece or bulgaria? india->china->possibly kazakhstan->russia->ukraine or belarus?
going via the med to egypt and then through saudi-arabia and the UAE seems far more attractive to me. Afaict all those countries have pretty western friendly governments.
There is also the fuel issue, we are probablly heading towards peak oil and may even be there already. Light aircraft already use more fuel than road travel and any kind of VTOL craft will likely use way more.
So in addition to everything you have mentioned we need a new source of cheap portable power before the flying car can become a reality for ordinary people.
Minor nitpick, the rolls royce pegasus engine that powers the harrier is actually a turbofan. Bypass air comes out the front ports engine exhaust out the back.
Still given the fact it's a low bypass engine even if a mixing system was added (which would probablly significantly increase the weight and bulk) tempreature of the exhaust would probablly still be a problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Try to find a copy of Einhander (playstation1) for example. Go ahead. You'll have a hell of a time.
Well I see a couple of american and japanese copies on ebay buy it now which I could purchase right now should I so desire (though I would have to get a chipped playstation to play them). It seems it was never release in europe.
It is expensive though, £25 for a japaneese copy or £40 for a european copy.
Space stations are a good idea IMO, far better to leave your LAB and living facilities up there all the time then to cart them up and down all the time.
The crazy thing was building and servicing the space station using the space shuttle and hence carting a shitload of unessacery shuttle orbiter mass in and out of space continuously. Unfortunately NASA had scrapped everything else that was man rated.
I'm not sure there was much else they could do, if the things wouldn't start then getting a firmware upgrade in would be tricky to say the least. Replacing the zunes would have been pointless since they woul be back to life long before any replacements could be shipped out.
Are there only two brands left?
Lets take a look
I went to dabs.com (a major computer parts supplier here in the UK) selected hard drives, filtered to desktop SATA drives and got the following choice of manufacturers
* Western Digital (23),
* Seagate (20),
* HP (17),
* Samsung (8),
* Hitachi (6),
* Maxtor (6),
* IBM (5),
* Fujitsu Siemens (2),
* ExcelStor Technology (2),
* Buffalo (1)
The HP,IBM and buffalo ones seem to just be rebranded drives sold as spares for thier other product lines.
The couple of fujitsu models seem to have a very poor cost per gigabyte and poor total capacity.
Excelstore drives seem to be very low capacity (though at more reasonable prices than fujitsu).
segate and maxtor are the same company now.
So that leaves us with a list of four choices for decent sized desktop drives: segate, WD, hitachi and samsung. Not quite as dire as only two but not exactly a huge range either.
and who wants a 5 yr warranty now when you're going to get four or more opportunities to use it?
and worse it seems the new segate/maxtor don't do advance rmas like maxtor used to. Advance rmas were good for two reasons,
1: they meant you could copy the data across without having to find/buy another drive.
2: when you got the new drive it came in manufacturer approved pacaging that you could then use to return the old drive (rather than having to buy manufacturer approved packaging which afaict is what you have to do now)
When income is no longer quite so disposable, will people be willing to pay more for quality with the understanding that it costs less in the long-term?
But how will they know which products will last?
Will companies and thier shareholders be prepared to take the years of losses or mediocre profits needed to build up a reputation for solid quality when everyone else is selling cheap junk? and when they have built that reputation will they be able to resist the urge to trash it in the name or short term profits (sony have done this in certain product areas afaict)
because arena games are (relatively) easy to make with a distributed uncooperative team. Once you have the basics in place people can work on improving the interface, improving the weaponset, improving the character art/models and making new levels pretty much independently.
For a story game you need someone to sketch out the story, then all the mappers need to cooperate to make maps that fit with that story (and feed back to the story guy when they can't so the story can be adjusted) and to use a consistent set of art. Then the programmers need to get involved with the mappers to make the NPCs that will tell the story and so on.
Ever notice that your video card works before you install drivers for it?
For sufficiantly small values of works.
Though IIRC when they finally got stig to drive it round thier own test track and put it on the leaderboard they were surprised how poorly it performed.
I presume he means PCI bus clock cycles not CPU clock cycles.
Normal PCI slots are and always have been 32 bit 33mhz, there are faster variants of PCI but they have remained niche interfaces (mostly used in servers).
Afaict every PC has either an ISA bus or something that looks like one to software (e.g. the intel LPC bus).
but with GUI unlikely.
Anyone remember the archimedies machines with riscos 2.x. The screen flashed up
risc os 2048K
acorn ADFS
and then almost immediately the desktop popped up.
Of course having the OS in rom, the configuration in some kind of solid state storage (not sure if it was EEProm or battery backed ram) and a relatively known hardware setup helped a lot.
Disclaimer i've only used the gtk/gnome very briefly
Fact is most OOP languages are specific to one object system. GTK already has it's own custom object system and the system will be pretty bewildering to anyone without a low level knowlage of structure layouts.
If people want to work with it without doing the OOP stuff by hand they need a language designed for that object system. Indeed vala is fairly unusual among native code languages in being designed arround an existing object system rather than introducing a new one.
To me vala looks a lot easier to understand than manual OOP with gobject. Especially for people who have some familiarity with languages that use similar syntax (C++, java, C#).
Sorry that should have been APC not UPS, i'm getting my TLAs mixed up.
Java is portable
If you define portable as wintel, lintel and solaris then definately othewise not so much.
Mac is somewhat supported but it's at apples whim and typically they delay for ages then force you to upgrade your OS to get an up to date version of java.
Other linux plaforms are supported but only barely. The openjdk version of hotspot can currently only do JIT on i386, amd64 and possiblly sparc (someone is working on this but how long it will take is anyones guess). I belive there is an attempt to use the openjdk libs with the cacao VM but I dunno how well they work.
The other problem with java is it doesn't play well with other languages. Calling other languages from java is pretty annoying (though made better by the third party JNA). Calling java from other languages is even worse.
You also have to release enough that the user can use your app with a new version of the library. If you are dynamic linking to Qt this is easy but if you are static linking for some reason (say to make an installer or a utility app that does not require installation) it adds complexity to your distribution process.
I always wondered about this assertion (not saying it is inherently wrong, but it does get me thinking). If a game is "only secure against cheating through obscurity" wouldn't that imply that it's committing a cardinal sin of online game design: "Never trust the client"
Unfortunately following "NEVER trust the client" is impractical for FPS games with our current technology if you want acceptable performance.
and the more trust you put in the client the better you can make the game perform. For example most games handle movement and sometimes even hitscan on the client side to make the gameplay appear smoother. This obviously requires the client to have a lot of information.
There are some cheats (using your FPS example) that you would not be able to stop even with closed clients. For example, there is a tool commonly used by Guild Wars players called "TexMod" which sits in DirectX and replaces textures. Pretty useless for the most part, allowing for local-only custom skins (leading, of course, to the inevitable nude mods). But for a game like COD4 (assuming that's even on PC), you could replace the skin for the terrorists/SAS uniforms to a bright orange with full reflection to make it easier to see them, or replace the wall with a similar texture at 80% transparency. A closed client doesn't stop that.
A possible way arround that would be to subtuly alter the textures and change thier IDs each time the game was loaded to make it much harder for the software to spot which textures to replace.
Also many games are now starting to include scanners for cheat programs. They aren't perfect but combined with permanently banning players by their CD key or eqivilent they can be pretty effective against all but the richest cheaters.
Well the first result was http://kezfun.net/search?s=pokemon+sex&s_what=onlinegames , which looks decidedly unsuitable for minors, at the top of the page I see a button titles titled "bustnow porntube" and "f**k a local girl" (bowdlerisation mine) and an "ads by blacklabelads" section that looks similar to the "ads by google" sections you see on many sites.
The second result is a youtube video with pokemon being played with the text replaced by sexual references.
That concluded that using the european system of 230/400 3 phase AC for distribution splitting out to 230V single phase AC near the point of use was almost as efficiant as a 400V DC system and far cheaper and easier to deploy. Your servers existing power supplies can almost certinaly handle 230V without any problems (changing a switch may be required on crappier models)
BTW in many cases there are often huge savings to be made without changing your infrastructure just by using better PSUs, cheapasss PSUs are both inefficiant and unreliable.
I would guess a transformer based SMPSU (since you would probablly want isolation between input and output)
When you typed "*BASIC" to get into the BASIC interpreter, this was actually no different than using "*PASCAL" to get into our environment or any other ROM software.
Minor nitpick. Unlike the * commands for entering other languages which were intepreted by the language roms which then called the OS to switch the current language to themselves the *BASIC command was actually intepreted by the "OS" itself.
Unfortunately not all advertising providers are that good at targeting and malware once it gets in is likely to affect all users.
Also words can have different meanings in different contexts and search engines can pick up the wrong one. For example most pokemon (in the more recent games) have a gender. Another simpler to type word for gender is sex. Guess what you get when you do a google search for pokemon sex?
note: this article seems to be about the middle east and the indian subcontinent. Traffic from europe to eastasia seems to go via the USA in my experiance.
acquire non-sea europe to asia internet backbone
And what route would you propose to take to get from india to europe over land?
looking at a map of the world ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_TLD_Map.jpg ) the routes I can come up with don't look very promising.
india->pakistan->iran->turkey->greece or bulgaria?
india->china->possibly kazakhstan->russia->ukraine or belarus?
going via the med to egypt and then through saudi-arabia and the UAE seems far more attractive to me. Afaict all those countries have pretty western friendly governments.
There is also the fuel issue, we are probablly heading towards peak oil and may even be there already. Light aircraft already use more fuel than road travel and any kind of VTOL craft will likely use way more.
So in addition to everything you have mentioned we need a new source of cheap portable power before the flying car can become a reality for ordinary people.
Minor nitpick, the rolls royce pegasus engine that powers the harrier is actually a turbofan. Bypass air comes out the front ports engine exhaust out the back.
Still given the fact it's a low bypass engine even if a mixing system was added (which would probablly significantly increase the weight and bulk) tempreature of the exhaust would probablly still be a problem.