How does Adobe Reader qualify as a client program of any sort? That would require a server component and some sort of protocol between the two, wouldn't it?
In Switzerland, the association SWICO is charged by the state to deal with electronics recycling of all kinds. When you buy an electronic device (even chainsaws count), a recycling fee is added to the price. Then, when the thing dies, you can take it back to any store in the country that carries similar stock. In reality though, even stores that don't sell any computers or monitors will take them back -- the company that picks up and recycles the stuff is the same anyway. The stores are required by law to cooperate and can't weasel out if you bring them a 15 year old 20" monitor and they only sell LED flashflight keyrings.
The fees are very moderate, I never paid more than 7 francs (5 EUR) for a computer, perhaps 15 francs for a rather big dishwasher. With computing equipment, the fee is calculated by the price of the item. Household machinery goes by weight.
Many companies, especially IT, still try to make a very small amount of money by selling off their inventory once it gets replaced, so it's not like we all just dump trucks full of laptops at Mom & Dad's Electric Toothbrush Wonderland. But once the thing refuses to boot, it's good to know I can take it back to any store.
This even covers items sold before 1994 (when recycling became The Law). We've had a few years of experience with this system, and I don't know of anyone who's unhappy with it so far. So: yay for mandatory electronics recycling.
Ah, yes, strong loss of sensation in the glans, sometimes very painful erections and inability to have sex, as well as the often found damaging of the frenulum during circumcision leading to men with circumcisions only feeling "half of" what an uncircumcised man would feel. Routine infant circumcision just to keep the dollars flowing into the doctors' wallets, that's indeed "Score: 4, Funny".
Routine infant circumcision gets American docs a few million US Dollars every year, and it doesn't serve any medical purpose at all. It's cleaner? Yes, if you're one of those men who only shower once a month that's true.
At least those docs who can't make the incision properly are slowly retiring and the younger ones use some sort of funky device to damage the frenulum less, but you still lose the ridged band and a lot of sensation in the glans. Enough of it that many older American men become "physically" impotent or unable to have orgasms years before that would have happened had they been uncircumcised.
If Americans would cut off half of a girl's clitoris at birth (some African tribes do this), there would be an outrcy. Yet cutting off half of the same structure with men is okay. And doing it without the consent of the child and most often even without informing the parents about the consequences isn't very nice either.
Check out NOCIRC for some links to more medical information. There are also some links there for getting a fake foreskin back non-surgically with basic household items. It doesn't bring back your frenulum, but at least you'll have the same amount of sensitivity in the glans as an uncircumcised man.
Sorry for being so off-topic!
Disclaimer: I'm not even circumcised or American, just trying to get rid of the myth that this procedure is harmless or even useful when it's clearly not.
I do the same thing, whenever I buy a CD it first gets copied to CD-R and the original stored in a more or less safe location.
My problem isn't that I wouldn't be ready to re-buy the same album 5 years later. That I still like the album after five years would only serve as proof of how much I like the music. The problem is that you more often than not can't buy the same album after five years. I've even tried contacting the labels or publishers or new owners of the company, no go.
Unless you buy stuff from major labels, who don't release very much quality music anyway, you run the risk of the publisher going bankrupt or its new owner not being interested in keeping up duplication of their old titles. Annoyingly, even small publishers have now started using "copy protection" on their CDs.
Nothing that cdparanoia doesn't crack right out of the box, and because Switzerland isn't in the EU this is all still perfectly legal here, but it's only a matter of time before this changes and I get turned into a criminal for trying to protect the investment (several thousand EUR) I made in my music collection.
Thanks, record industry, for abusing the legal system to protect your aging distribution methods.
In Switzerland all your tech support calls to Dell get rerouted depending on the language you speak/choose. French goes to France, Italian to Italy, German to Germany. So far, so good.
Now I don't doubt that the Germans have quite a high level of quality when it comes to manufacturing machines, optical components, AMD processors and the like, but their customer service is definitely one of the worst I've ever had to experience.
We had a Dell laptop with what we supposed was a damaged wireless LAN card. It would report "Network cable unplugged" even when the card's MAC was clearly allowed to get on the wireless LAN and had the correct SSID set. I'm a UNIX tech and don't know much about Windows, so I felt it might be nice to call Dell to find out what's wrong and get someone to send a replacement card if it really is the card's fault.
After waiting patiently through 10 minutes of pop music three times (their system kicks you off after 10 minutes) I finally managed to get a real, flesh-coloured human on the other end of the line.
Them: "Hello, Dell Inspiron support, how can I help you?" Me: "Ah, well, we have a Dell Truemobile blah blah card here that is acting odd. How can I verify that it really is defective?"
He asks for the service tag, the usual details and I tell him the precise nature of the problem.
Them: "Oh. Well, I see that you have Windows XP Home Edition preinstalled there. Home Edition does not support networks. I'm sorry, we can't take that card back, you need to upgrade to Pro and try again."
I really hope he was fired afterwards, since as they say, "your call may be recorded for quality control". Swapping in the same model Dell TrueMobile card from a different shipment of notebooks worked just fine, by the way.
How much of that money goes towards antivirus companies' corporate (or otherwise big) virus killer licenses? How many companies will decide to buy additional services or software from the antivirus maker, like personal firewalls or spam filters?
Sure, IT companies in general might complain about huge losses, but for antivirus software makers the same losses might mean profits. Not 1:1 of course. If viruses wouldn't exist, those companies would be out of business (duh). And every virus that gets out in the wild serves as a nice reminder that "We fixed this one, but XYZ AntiVirus also offers you SPAM protection! Upgrade now! Exciting deals! LALA!"
Something similar was done by Alexei Shulgin in 1998, on a 386. Sure, he did it by writing the phonetic instructions for the speech synthesis engine by hand, but Yamaha's solution is just a much more sophisticated (and better funded) version of that.
Check out 386DX, his band project. Which includes the 386. That only has 4 MB of RAM and also has to do visualizations and MIDI sound at the same time.
I've had the fortune of seeing him perform live in Linz as well as chatting with him a little, and he came to our school for a lecture. He has a few brilliant projects, maybe you might like WIMP which he developed with a friend.
Swisscom, Switzerland's former telco monopolist, had a service like this several years ago. The idea was for companies to track employees, cars and whatnot while private people would be able to simply find their friends. It all worked via a website, there was no standalone software.
The technology was quite accurate enough at the time, but the service was never successful due to privacy concerns and was removed.
Since the technology already worked, Swisscom has instead been offering Swisscom friendZone since 2001. With friendZone, you can see who else is near you (in the same cell? I have no idea how it works). I believe it's anonymized at first, so you can talk to people as if on IRC or in some other reasonably anonymous meeting place. Once you add people to your friends list, you can also use the service to locate them geographically. The idea is to generate a lot of revenue for the telco through SMS chatting. Yes, some people here are actually happy to pay EUR 0.10 for every "ok" and "lol" they send.
So the technology, at least in this implementation, is old. As so often in the mobile market, Europe lags behind Japan and the USA lag behind Europe.
Over there in Germany, the state of Berlin and Brandenburg is shutting down analog broadcasting also. People on welfare without enough money to buy a digital receiver will get one nearly for free from the state. Nice, huh?
I think Germany's goals are somewhat close to Japan's in terms of "digital only" TV.
Ummm.. Because it allows Mac OS users to run Windows applications? What other application does that (reliably)? SoftWindows has died, SoftPC had the same fate and RealPC is completely destroyed. Did you even consider that before posting?
The only hope now lies in Bochs, an open source PC emulator/virtual machine thingy. Currently it's quite hard to configure and has very low compatibility with existing x86 OS's, but at least it somewhat works and the source is out there.
The only comment about AO is that it "boasted a futuristic environment". How shallow. It's sad, though, because AO fixes a lot of things that Nick thinks are flaws in current MMOPRGs. It eases you into the game, illustrating what the differences between classes and sides are. Then there is the Shadowlands expansion, which gives you purpose through a linear route to take. You always know where to go next, know where the stronger beasts lurk and it truly feels rewarding to take your party to the next area.
There is always something to do. Whether it's autogenerated dungeons or missions-on-demand, with Shadowlands things got a lot better in that area. So what if you're the only one in the playfield at 4 in the morning? Just go solo for half an hour until you meet people to group with. The missions may be repetitive, but they mostly offer a fair reward for the risk invested.
Also, newbies can do a few mission runs that will get them obscure items that high levels pay a lot of credits for. They aren't even hard to find, there's a thread on the official Anarchy Online forum about them, complete with a handy list and a third-party tool to use so you can find them more easily. That way, newbies aren't pest control. They are assassins, brutes, spies or whatever fits the class/profession. Starting at level one. AND they can get a very nice amount of money that will push them all the way into the mid-levels.
AO with Shadowlands is not perfect, none of the MMORPGs can ever be, but it might be exactly what this author is looking for. And buying Shadowlands gets you the previous booster pack and the full version of the game for free. The game only costs EUR 30 in stores, too.
Maybe he should take a look before he damns all MMORPGs to hell.
Battle Isle, the first game to make console-style hex-based strategy games popular on the Amiga and PC already had options for color blind people. The default colors for the units were red and green, I believe. You could switch them to yellow and blue in the options menu, and it was even explained as a feature specifically for color blind people in the manual.
Makes you wonder why a very small and at the time not very well known company could afford to spend some resources on this while today's million-dollar game developers can't.
OpenGroupware live CD with German Linux Mag
on
Opengroupware
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you buy the current issue of Linux Magazin (Germany), you'll get a bootable Knoppix CD where OpenGroupware with all its components (PostgreSQL, Cyrus-IMAP etc.) is already set up and ready to use. You can try almost all the features, so you see what you'd be getting without having to spend the hour or so required to set things up on a fresh server.
Looks like this is exactly what we've been looking for all this time, and Skyrix will offer commercial support for the package as well as nifty add-ons (that cost some money).
NetHack for example is perfectly playable by blind people through a Braille interface. I've seen blind people who play far better than me, and I can see.
I do agree that this "let's help the handicapped" thing was a little weird to say the least, but don't you ever underestimate the gaming prowess of blind people:)
Hope I'm not posting something redundant, way too early in the morning to read posts that are below 3.
Does nobody think an Internet link is too slow for a fighting game? You have latencies of at least 60 ms. Counting protocol overhead, it's probably not as easy as just sending "player 1 has pressed left right now", so it takes quite a lot of data before the character actually moves. Then the same thing back to synchronize both consoles, and it's probably all encrypted to stop cheating (yet more overhead).
Most serious fighting games today need you to really pay attention and sometimes use a split-second time window to break that combo or do this or do that. Okay, DoA is not a serious fighting game, but still -- won't they have to slow down gameplay a lot to make this feasible, and won't that be boring for fighter fans?
I'd rather have just one really really good title every 6 months, one that can last all those 6 months. The gaming market is filled to the brim with mediocre-to-good titles that you play and forget. I'd rather have all that creativity poured into a really good game that you won't forget that easily than another Mark of Kri or Primal that you forget two weeks after finishing it.
And it takes time to make games. Even with dozens of game developers all working on titles in parallel, it still takes each of them a long while until something playable emerges, and some steps of the way simply can't be sped up. Artwork takes time, proper beta testing takes time, getting someone to do new music tracks in the last minute because the legal department forgot to secure the rights to the last ones you had takes time... Making a game has turned into a mammoth of a project. With the sheer numbers it takes these days, I'm surprised that any developers can release more than one game a year. I hear development usually takes between 2 and 5 years nowadays, and that's work for dozens of people.
In Germany and other non-American countries, DoA Xtreme Volleyball is rated what the US authorities would call "teen". Seen anything between 13+ and 16+ as a rating for it depending on the country.
Not every country is as afraid of sex as the USA, and not every region is as afraid of violence as Europe:)
(I don't think anything can shock the Japanese anymore, by the way.)
Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but who gets the money? And that's only if you assume this idea would actually work.
I wouldn't want Britney's or N'Sync's bosses making money off my CPU cycles while all I listen to comes from extremely small labels that aren't part of the RIAA or other such organizations. I'm pretty sure that if this works, whoever runs it won't want to spend time figuring out which labels and bands the stuff that gets downloaded is from. They'll just dump a monthly fee at the RIAA's door and have them figure out the details. So if you're not part of the RIAA collective, no money for j00.
I don't want to be paying for music I don't like, from "artists" that aren't.
On weekends, I live in the mountains. Mountain villages with their 80, 100, sometimes 200 inhabitants aren't interesting for telcos, so the only possible Net connection around here is 56k (at 35 kbps because of bad line quality). Additionally, this costs about EUR 2/hour during the day and EUR 0.5/hour at night because local calls are still pretty expensive around here.
Even if these blimps can only give each subscriber 64k (at a flat rate), that'd already be unbeatable in this area.
Didn't you see all the reports about how a glass of wine a day helps prevent cardiac arrest and generally improves blood flow? Maybe you should say "Don't drink excessively".
Is the performance still acceptable and can compatibility be guaranteed? Chillisoft ASP is great if you're a commercial ISP or otherwise make money from hosting ASP stuff, and therefore can afford the price. But for the little educational student webserver, it's out of the question.
Can this compete? Or do the users have to learn a whole new brand of ".NET ASP" to do anything useful with it? I never knew anyone who uses ASP, so I never looked -- are there other free ASP-on-Linux solutions out there?
Excellent service? I don't think so, and let me tell you why:
- Ordered 3 notebooks from Dell Switzerland's online store - Received two, got confirmation for third but PC never arrives - Called my "customer representative" after two weeks, got a "I'm sick, please call XYZ at extension N" - Called XYZ, she tells me (in not-really-German) that she doesn't know, and Mr. Representative is out of office for the week. Okay. - Called the next week, no one picks up the phone. Getting rerouted to the main number after a couple dozen rings. Giving up for now.
Then the third notebook suddenly arrived! Well, great, so I get to configure it for its future owner. Part of that is setting up wireless networking (we ordered a Dell card with the notebook).
- Win XP finds wireless network card, initializes, finds valid access point -- but doesn't get an IP address? - Linux does the same, but gets an IP address? - Calling Dell tech support after updating the network card's Win XP drivers, checking the DHCP server for DHCPDISCOVERs from the card's MAC and the other obvious stuff. - Get put on hold for 15 minutes after explaining problem. - Guy comes back, asks whether I have Win XP Home Edition or Pro. I say Home. He says "Well, networking is not included with Win XP Home Edition, you need Pro for that". I tell him that's not true. - Guy asks what access points we use. I say Cisco Aironet 1200. He says "Oooh, in that case I can't help you, we only support our own access points, you need to call Cisco". I say "but it works on Linux". He says "I'm sorry to tell you that if you install Linux on a Dell notebook, you void your warranty."
So he flat out lied at least twice? Yeah, great support, that. And we're not just a mom & dad store, we're registered as 1500 - 3000 employee shop with Dell so I guess this is "premium" support.
The next batch of notebooks we'll get will be from Toshiba:)
At my company, we're running a server were workers can upload their MP3s so all the other (1200+) workers can listen to them as streams via their standard MP3 player.
We asked our local version of the RIAA whether this is legal, and after some debate with our legal department, they concluded that yes, it is. Even though you might argue that those streams could be saved to hard drive and taken home, it still is perfectly fine.
I hope the US also has this much freedom, so you could just stream your MP3s or Oggs instead of putting them on a fileserver somewhere.
I've been using an acoustically sealed case from Noise Control. I really can't hear my PC anymore.
I also use one of Noise Control's modified Enermax PSUs and a Silverado CPU cooler. That's all I did to my PC to make it quiet, everything else is stock. A quiet case seems to be the most logical (and least expensive) first step if you ask me. If you can still hear any of your components after you've put them behind 2 cm of noise blocking fluffy stuff, you can start replacing noisy those one by one until the noise stops.
Noise Control now has their own fan control circuitry and new modified PSUs come with it built-in. Also, they have hard drive cages that catch vibrations before they reach your case. With all of that equipment it should be easy to quiet any PC.
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How does Adobe Reader qualify as a client program of any sort? That would require a server component and some sort of protocol between the two, wouldn't it?
In Switzerland, the association SWICO is charged by the state to deal with electronics recycling of all kinds. When you buy an electronic device (even chainsaws count), a recycling fee is added to the price. Then, when the thing dies, you can take it back to any store in the country that carries similar stock. In reality though, even stores that don't sell any computers or monitors will take them back -- the company that picks up and recycles the stuff is the same anyway. The stores are required by law to cooperate and can't weasel out if you bring them a 15 year old 20" monitor and they only sell LED flashflight keyrings.
The fees are very moderate, I never paid more than 7 francs (5 EUR) for a computer, perhaps 15 francs for a rather big dishwasher. With computing equipment, the fee is calculated by the price of the item. Household machinery goes by weight.
Many companies, especially IT, still try to make a very small amount of money by selling off their inventory once it gets replaced, so it's not like we all just dump trucks full of laptops at Mom & Dad's Electric Toothbrush Wonderland. But once the thing refuses to boot, it's good to know I can take it back to any store.
This even covers items sold before 1994 (when recycling became The Law). We've had a few years of experience with this system, and I don't know of anyone who's unhappy with it so far. So: yay for mandatory electronics recycling.
Forgive me for putting you in the "unwashed masses" drawer in that case ;)
Ah, yes, strong loss of sensation in the glans, sometimes very painful erections and inability to have sex, as well as the often found damaging of the frenulum during circumcision leading to men with circumcisions only feeling "half of" what an uncircumcised man would feel. Routine infant circumcision just to keep the dollars flowing into the doctors' wallets, that's indeed "Score: 4, Funny".
Routine infant circumcision gets American docs a few million US Dollars every year, and it doesn't serve any medical purpose at all. It's cleaner? Yes, if you're one of those men who only shower once a month that's true.
At least those docs who can't make the incision properly are slowly retiring and the younger ones use some sort of funky device to damage the frenulum less, but you still lose the ridged band and a lot of sensation in the glans. Enough of it that many older American men become "physically" impotent or unable to have orgasms years before that would have happened had they been uncircumcised.
If Americans would cut off half of a girl's clitoris at birth (some African tribes do this), there would be an outrcy. Yet cutting off half of the same structure with men is okay. And doing it without the consent of the child and most often even without informing the parents about the consequences isn't very nice either.
Check out NOCIRC for some links to more medical information. There are also some links there for getting a fake foreskin back non-surgically with basic household items. It doesn't bring back your frenulum, but at least you'll have the same amount of sensitivity in the glans as an uncircumcised man.
Sorry for being so off-topic!
Disclaimer: I'm not even circumcised or American, just trying to get rid of the myth that this procedure is harmless or even useful when it's clearly not.
I do the same thing, whenever I buy a CD it first gets copied to CD-R and the original stored in a more or less safe location.
My problem isn't that I wouldn't be ready to re-buy the same album 5 years later. That I still like the album after five years would only serve as proof of how much I like the music. The problem is that you more often than not can't buy the same album after five years. I've even tried contacting the labels or publishers or new owners of the company, no go.
Unless you buy stuff from major labels, who don't release very much quality music anyway, you run the risk of the publisher going bankrupt or its new owner not being interested in keeping up duplication of their old titles. Annoyingly, even small publishers have now started using "copy protection" on their CDs.
Nothing that cdparanoia doesn't crack right out of the box, and because Switzerland isn't in the EU this is all still perfectly legal here, but it's only a matter of time before this changes and I get turned into a criminal for trying to protect the investment (several thousand EUR) I made in my music collection.
Thanks, record industry, for abusing the legal system to protect your aging distribution methods.
In Switzerland all your tech support calls to Dell get rerouted depending on the language you speak/choose. French goes to France, Italian to Italy, German to Germany. So far, so good.
Now I don't doubt that the Germans have quite a high level of quality when it comes to manufacturing machines, optical components, AMD processors and the like, but their customer service is definitely one of the worst I've ever had to experience.
We had a Dell laptop with what we supposed was a damaged wireless LAN card. It would report "Network cable unplugged" even when the card's MAC was clearly allowed to get on the wireless LAN and had the correct SSID set. I'm a UNIX tech and don't know much about Windows, so I felt it might be nice to call Dell to find out what's wrong and get someone to send a replacement card if it really is the card's fault.
After waiting patiently through 10 minutes of pop music three times (their system kicks you off after 10 minutes) I finally managed to get a real, flesh-coloured human on the other end of the line.
Them: "Hello, Dell Inspiron support, how can I help you?"
Me: "Ah, well, we have a Dell Truemobile blah blah card here that is acting odd. How can I verify that it really is defective?"
He asks for the service tag, the usual details and I tell him the precise nature of the problem.
Them: "Oh. Well, I see that you have Windows XP Home Edition preinstalled there. Home Edition does not support networks. I'm sorry, we can't take that card back, you need to upgrade to Pro and try again."
I really hope he was fired afterwards, since as they say, "your call may be recorded for quality control". Swapping in the same model Dell TrueMobile card from a different shipment of notebooks worked just fine, by the way.
How much of that money goes towards antivirus companies' corporate (or otherwise big) virus killer licenses? How many companies will decide to buy additional services or software from the antivirus maker, like personal firewalls or spam filters?
Sure, IT companies in general might complain about huge losses, but for antivirus software makers the same losses might mean profits. Not 1:1 of course. If viruses wouldn't exist, those companies would be out of business (duh). And every virus that gets out in the wild serves as a nice reminder that "We fixed this one, but XYZ AntiVirus also offers you SPAM protection! Upgrade now! Exciting deals! LALA!"
Something similar was done by Alexei Shulgin in 1998, on a 386. Sure, he did it by writing the phonetic instructions for the speech synthesis engine by hand, but Yamaha's solution is just a much more sophisticated (and better funded) version of that.
Check out 386DX, his band project. Which includes the 386. That only has 4 MB of RAM and also has to do visualizations and MIDI sound at the same time.
I've had the fortune of seeing him perform live in Linz as well as chatting with him a little, and he came to our school for a lecture. He has a few brilliant projects, maybe you might like WIMP which he developed with a friend.
Swisscom, Switzerland's former telco monopolist, had a service like this several years ago. The idea was for companies to track employees, cars and whatnot while private people would be able to simply find their friends. It all worked via a website, there was no standalone software.
The technology was quite accurate enough at the time, but the service was never successful due to privacy concerns and was removed.
Since the technology already worked, Swisscom has instead been offering Swisscom friendZone since 2001. With friendZone, you can see who else is near you (in the same cell? I have no idea how it works). I believe it's anonymized at first, so you can talk to people as if on IRC or in some other reasonably anonymous meeting place. Once you add people to your friends list, you can also use the service to locate them geographically. The idea is to generate a lot of revenue for the telco through SMS chatting. Yes, some people here are actually happy to pay EUR 0.10 for every "ok" and "lol" they send.
So the technology, at least in this implementation, is old. As so often in the mobile market, Europe lags behind Japan and the USA lag behind Europe.
Over there in Germany, the state of Berlin and Brandenburg is shutting down analog broadcasting also. People on welfare without enough money to buy a digital receiver will get one nearly for free from the state. Nice, huh?
I think Germany's goals are somewhat close to Japan's in terms of "digital only" TV.
Ummm.. Because it allows Mac OS users to run Windows applications? What other application does that (reliably)? SoftWindows has died, SoftPC had the same fate and RealPC is completely destroyed. Did you even consider that before posting?
The only hope now lies in Bochs, an open source PC emulator/virtual machine thingy. Currently it's quite hard to configure and has very low compatibility with existing x86 OS's, but at least it somewhat works and the source is out there.
The only comment about AO is that it "boasted a futuristic environment". How shallow. It's sad, though, because AO fixes a lot of things that Nick thinks are flaws in current MMOPRGs. It eases you into the game, illustrating what the differences between classes and sides are. Then there is the Shadowlands expansion, which gives you purpose through a linear route to take. You always know where to go next, know where the stronger beasts lurk and it truly feels rewarding to take your party to the next area.
There is always something to do. Whether it's autogenerated dungeons or missions-on-demand, with Shadowlands things got a lot better in that area. So what if you're the only one in the playfield at 4 in the morning? Just go solo for half an hour until you meet people to group with. The missions may be repetitive, but they mostly offer a fair reward for the risk invested.
Also, newbies can do a few mission runs that will get them obscure items that high levels pay a lot of credits for. They aren't even hard to find, there's a thread on the official Anarchy Online forum about them, complete with a handy list and a third-party tool to use so you can find them more easily. That way, newbies aren't pest control. They are assassins, brutes, spies or whatever fits the class/profession. Starting at level one. AND they can get a very nice amount of money that will push them all the way into the mid-levels.
AO with Shadowlands is not perfect, none of the MMORPGs can ever be, but it might be exactly what this author is looking for. And buying Shadowlands gets you the previous booster pack and the full version of the game for free. The game only costs EUR 30 in stores, too.
Maybe he should take a look before he damns all MMORPGs to hell.
Battle Isle, the first game to make console-style hex-based strategy games popular on the Amiga and PC already had options for color blind people. The default colors for the units were red and green, I believe. You could switch them to yellow and blue in the options menu, and it was even explained as a feature specifically for color blind people in the manual.
Makes you wonder why a very small and at the time not very well known company could afford to spend some resources on this while today's million-dollar game developers can't.
If you buy the current issue of Linux Magazin (Germany), you'll get a bootable Knoppix CD where OpenGroupware with all its components (PostgreSQL, Cyrus-IMAP etc.) is already set up and ready to use. You can try almost all the features, so you see what you'd be getting without having to spend the hour or so required to set things up on a fresh server.
Looks like this is exactly what we've been looking for all this time, and Skyrix will offer commercial support for the package as well as nifty add-ons (that cost some money).
NetHack for example is perfectly playable by blind people through a Braille interface. I've seen blind people who play far better than me, and I can see.
:)
I do agree that this "let's help the handicapped" thing was a little weird to say the least, but don't you ever underestimate the gaming prowess of blind people
Hope I'm not posting something redundant, way too early in the morning to read posts that are below 3.
Does nobody think an Internet link is too slow for a fighting game? You have latencies of at least 60 ms. Counting protocol overhead, it's probably not as easy as just sending "player 1 has pressed left right now", so it takes quite a lot of data before the character actually moves. Then the same thing back to synchronize both consoles, and it's probably all encrypted to stop cheating (yet more overhead).
Most serious fighting games today need you to really pay attention and sometimes use a split-second time window to break that combo or do this or do that. Okay, DoA is not a serious fighting game, but still -- won't they have to slow down gameplay a lot to make this feasible, and won't that be boring for fighter fans?
I'd rather have just one really really good title every 6 months, one that can last all those 6 months. The gaming market is filled to the brim with mediocre-to-good titles that you play and forget. I'd rather have all that creativity poured into a really good game that you won't forget that easily than another Mark of Kri or Primal that you forget two weeks after finishing it.
And it takes time to make games. Even with dozens of game developers all working on titles in parallel, it still takes each of them a long while until something playable emerges, and some steps of the way simply can't be sped up. Artwork takes time, proper beta testing takes time, getting someone to do new music tracks in the last minute because the legal department forgot to secure the rights to the last ones you had takes time... Making a game has turned into a mammoth of a project. With the sheer numbers it takes these days, I'm surprised that any developers can release more than one game a year. I hear development usually takes between 2 and 5 years nowadays, and that's work for dozens of people.
In Germany and other non-American countries, DoA Xtreme Volleyball is rated what the US authorities would call "teen". Seen anything between 13+ and 16+ as a rating for it depending on the country.
:)
Not every country is as afraid of sex as the USA, and not every region is as afraid of violence as Europe
(I don't think anything can shock the Japanese anymore, by the way.)
Apologies if this has been mentioned already, but who gets the money? And that's only if you assume this idea would actually work.
I wouldn't want Britney's or N'Sync's bosses making money off my CPU cycles while all I listen to comes from extremely small labels that aren't part of the RIAA or other such organizations. I'm pretty sure that if this works, whoever runs it won't want to spend time figuring out which labels and bands the stuff that gets downloaded is from. They'll just dump a monthly fee at the RIAA's door and have them figure out the details. So if you're not part of the RIAA collective, no money for j00.
I don't want to be paying for music I don't like, from "artists" that aren't.
On weekends, I live in the mountains. Mountain villages with their 80, 100, sometimes 200 inhabitants aren't interesting for telcos, so the only possible Net connection around here is 56k (at 35 kbps because of bad line quality). Additionally, this costs about EUR 2/hour during the day and EUR 0.5/hour at night because local calls are still pretty expensive around here.
Even if these blimps can only give each subscriber 64k (at a flat rate), that'd already be unbeatable in this area.
- Don't drink
Didn't you see all the reports about how a glass of wine a day helps prevent cardiac arrest and generally improves blood flow? Maybe you should say "Don't drink excessively".
Is the performance still acceptable and can compatibility be guaranteed? Chillisoft ASP is great if you're a commercial ISP or otherwise make money from hosting ASP stuff, and therefore can afford the price. But for the little educational student webserver, it's out of the question.
Can this compete? Or do the users have to learn a whole new brand of ".NET ASP" to do anything useful with it? I never knew anyone who uses ASP, so I never looked -- are there other free ASP-on-Linux solutions out there?
Excellent service? I don't think so, and let me tell you why:
:)
- Ordered 3 notebooks from Dell Switzerland's online store
- Received two, got confirmation for third but PC never arrives
- Called my "customer representative" after two weeks, got a "I'm sick, please call XYZ at extension N"
- Called XYZ, she tells me (in not-really-German) that she doesn't know, and Mr. Representative is out of office for the week. Okay.
- Called the next week, no one picks up the phone. Getting rerouted to the main number after a couple dozen rings. Giving up for now.
Then the third notebook suddenly arrived! Well, great, so I get to configure it for its future owner. Part of that is setting up wireless networking (we ordered a Dell card with the notebook).
- Win XP finds wireless network card, initializes, finds valid access point -- but doesn't get an IP address?
- Linux does the same, but gets an IP address?
- Calling Dell tech support after updating the network card's Win XP drivers, checking the DHCP server for DHCPDISCOVERs from the card's MAC and the other obvious stuff.
- Get put on hold for 15 minutes after explaining problem.
- Guy comes back, asks whether I have Win XP Home Edition or Pro. I say Home. He says "Well, networking is not included with Win XP Home Edition, you need Pro for that". I tell him that's not true.
- Guy asks what access points we use. I say Cisco Aironet 1200. He says "Oooh, in that case I can't help you, we only support our own access points, you need to call Cisco". I say "but it works on Linux". He says "I'm sorry to tell you that if you install Linux on a Dell notebook, you void your warranty."
So he flat out lied at least twice? Yeah, great support, that. And we're not just a mom & dad store, we're registered as 1500 - 3000 employee shop with Dell so I guess this is "premium" support.
The next batch of notebooks we'll get will be from Toshiba
At my company, we're running a server were workers can upload their MP3s so all the other (1200+) workers can listen to them as streams via their standard MP3 player.
We asked our local version of the RIAA whether this is legal, and after some debate with our legal department, they concluded that yes, it is. Even though you might argue that those streams could be saved to hard drive and taken home, it still is perfectly fine.
I hope the US also has this much freedom, so you could just stream your MP3s or Oggs instead of putting them on a fileserver somewhere.
I've been using an acoustically sealed case from Noise Control. I really can't hear my PC anymore.
I also use one of Noise Control's modified Enermax PSUs and a Silverado CPU cooler. That's all I did to my PC to make it quiet, everything else is stock. A quiet case seems to be the most logical (and least expensive) first step if you ask me. If you can still hear any of your components after you've put them behind 2 cm of noise blocking fluffy stuff, you can start replacing noisy those one by one until the noise stops.
Noise Control now has their own fan control circuitry and new modified PSUs come with it built-in. Also, they have hard drive cages that catch vibrations before they reach your case. With all of that equipment it should be easy to quiet any PC.