People have always been stupid and careless. Capacitors (excepting electrolytics) won't be breaking in your lifetime. Even those are fairly durable, provided you aren't using one of these... Feel free to take my comments with a grain of salt, but I'm typing this message on a 22 year old keyboard, while listening a 30 year old stereo with 20 year old speakers. In other news, my sister's 3 year old ipod won't hold a charge anymore.
People are stupid and careless. In addition, capacitors and other parts DO have a limited lifetime.
3rd party launch titles tend to suck, but smart companies have at least one hot title scheduled for release at their hardware launch, that's how they plan to sell the hardware. ex. Virtua Fighter for the Saturn, Soul Caliber for the DC, Super Mario World for the SNES, Super Mario 64 for the N64, Halo for the XBOX.
Of course, there are consoles that fail to do this, and surprisingly enough they ah...fail. ex. Cybermorph for the Jaguar, Sewer Shark for the Sega CD, Doom for the 32X, Coincidence?
I say this a lot. Maybe I should make it my sig. Launch titles suck. Always. It's a fact of life. These games are not representative of the system. Play Kileak for the PS1 and Evergrace for the PS2 and get back to me.
"This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture. The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine."
Let me paint you a picture, you and your wife are having an argument. The neighbor overhears it and calls the police. Even if there is no evidence of abuse on either side, and neither of you nor your wife wants it, one of you is going to jail on felony abuse charges. That's called zero tolerance. It's good for electing politicians, but I wonder if it's good for much else.
Sorry the police are here to serve and protect, their actions are the actions of thugs who enjoy weilding power. So while I might not be deeply sorry for the kid, I am deeply ashamed of the actions of the law enforcement officials.
But Sir! That groinal attachment's supposed to have a lifetime guarantee, you've worn it out in nearly three weeks.
I, for one, welcome our new aerobically-inclined SuperMario overlords. The question is this: is Nintendo too family oriented to move into the obvious niche here -- motion sensing interactive pornography?
Perhaps the real problem is that people that people who are smart enough to become quality engineers are also smart enough to pick a career that isn't easily outsourced or marginalized by H1B's? The government can whine all it wants about math and science, but if careers in those fields aren't reasonably secure or profitable, why should students bust their hump to go there?
I for one welcome our new graduating class of Real Estate Brokers, Cosmetic Surgeons, Politicians and Lawyers specializing in IP law.
I'm all for more H1B workers, but at some point we have to confront the dramatic failings of large sections of the K-12 education system. We need more high quality K-12 schools that the broad population can attend. High stakes testing won't deliver that, and government/teachers union controlled schools haven't and won't deliver that either. (I'm not anti-teacher, but anyone with actual school experience will tell you that the state and national teachers unions are part of the problem, not the solution.)
Does that even matter though? I mean, in order to divert a large mass the farther away you hit it, the less energy you need to use in order to get a miss. Assuming cryogenically frozen Bruce Willis isn't going to jump out of the lander and spike some nukes into the core, you'll get a lot more mileage out of an unmanned mission with additional fuel allowing for far greater impact velocity/range.
On a related note, has there been any progress on the problem of low-G muscle degeneration? This whole Space-1999 moonbase idea isn't likely to get a lot of traction until that's been fixed. That and actually providing some economic benefit, USA/etc. might be willing to throw cash at manned missions for bragging rights, but re-supply of a moon base isn't even in the same ballpark cost wise.
Actually the apollo stack (SM, CM, LM ascent and descent stages) had easily enough velocity budget to fly to and return from some near Earth asteroids. It didn't have the consumables to do it but that could have been launched separately. You get more redundancy that way.
Of course we don't have the apollo CM, which is the only spacecraft in existance which could make a high speed return from an asteroid and reenter the atmosphere, but we will have the CRV which should have similar capabilities. The saturn 5 launch system doesn't exist either and thats the part of this system which is really vapourware.
Anyway good luck to them. Mars has been held off for so long because it is so much more risky and difficult than the moon. Asteroids offer progressively harder challenges, minus the risk of sudden death landing a heavy vehicle on mars.
Um, I didn't say blood was superior to oil as a quench, I said blood is a slower quench than water (being as it has more viscosity (is thicker) than water. Being thicker, heat transfer is slower, therefore cooling is slower.
That's not a myth, but if you'd like to debunk it knock yourself out.
If nobody comes up with some actual proof (a link perhaps?) for the "hardening with blood" thing, I'm calling a big Bullshit on this one. This is a myth which has been debunked many times. Nice karma whoring though.
You can certainly harden with water, all authentic Katanas (for example) are all made via that process. Tempering is what you do after the hardening process to reduce brittleness, ie. sacraficing hardness for toughness.
Tempering is done with oils. Not water. Ever. Steel will either shatter or explode if you attempt to temper with water or with anything water-based. Period.
Um, yeah, about that. When quenching using water cooling is rapid, which generates a high hardness, but also makes the steel exceptionally brittle, and can also cause fractures. Using a slower cooling process (oil, or in a pinch, young male slaves) produces steel that is less hard, but much less brittle. I would imagine people would be much more forgiving of a sword that needs frequent resharpening rather than one that snaps in half at an inconvenient moment.
An ideal sword would be both flexible and sharp, and a number of cultures have achieved this goal via pattern welding (welding alternating thin layers of hard and soft steel), most famously the Japanese katana, but this technology was well known in the ancient world, and is evident in recovered Viking swords, Indonesian kris, and as far back as Roman times (for use in decorative steel artifacts). Its use can also be found in a few modern knives (see Swedish Mora).
This differs from the damascus technique, which was rediscovered in the 1980's by Alfred Pendray and John Verhoeven. They didn't mention nanotubes, just the necessity of small Vanadium impurities in the ore. This explains the 'lost technology' of damascus steel very well, ie. when the original ore deposits containing said impurities were exhausted, the technique simply did not work anymore.
Actually, even this article seems a bit strange to me- I always thought Damascus Steel required the sacrifice of a young male slave with proper supplication to the gods to temper the steel (the blood of the slave provided the carbon for the nano tubes) while this seems to be a different process.
Bog standard Seagate and Fujitsu drives both come with 5 year warranties, and don't cost much more than brands with 1-3 year warranties (Maxtor/Hitachi/WD). On my home rig I use cheap IDE docking racks and re-image my drives every few weeks. This has advantages (with matched drive sets/swappable trays it's trivial to make backups) and disadvantages (drives stuffed in little boxes tend to run hotter, increasing failure rates). Mirroring is another option, but it's riskier in the sense that problems can get mirrored between the drives in your set. You still need to plan for some kind of offline backup.
(Three-year warranty? Yeah, right. Like anyone does buy HDs at that kind of premium. Unless they're Raptors, but then you don't even need a warranty.)
Buy your hard drives OEM from your local beige-box builder instead of from a retailer like Future Shit or Worst Buy, and you get a 3 t 5 year OEM warranty instead of the stupid 1-year warranty, and you pay a bit less.
I believe we've already colonized those, check out our spacious new biodome / gated community, now with a new fitness center and day spa!
There's plenty of pretty hostile environments here we could start to practice on, but I rarely see anything indicating we're doing much beyond putting good air conditioning units in new houses in Lancaster
That's arguably true for Virtua Fighter, since it saw a Japan only release in 94. Those of us in NA and EU markets didn't get it until 95, the same year it was released for the 32X.
The SNES didn't get a port of DOOM until 96, two years after it was released on the 32X. Only the 32X and Jaguar got DOOM in 94, both at approximately the same time.
If I recall correctly, both SNES Doom and Saturn Virtua Fighter came before their 32X counterparts.
An infinite amount of unit testing cannot guarantee an absence of bugs?
But perhaps I am a bit jaded since our company considers one of it's major advantages an all encompasing in-house framework that makes it neigh impossible to unit test most of our modules individually...
On that note I'll make the fairly obvious observation that leaky abstractions (ie. nearly all in-house frameworks) make code both harder to build and harder to maintain, though it's obscure quirks ensure that I'll be able to keep my kid in diapers for the forseeable future.
Much as I'll agree that port was lame, the 32X was the first console to get that game ever. None of the other consoles from that generation had even a half-assed port. It also had the first port of Virtua-Fighter, and um...some other games that largely sucked, though Cosmic Carnage was kind of cool.
Funny that you mention Doom, though. I remember how angry I was when I got the PC version and realized that I was cheated on the 32X version. First of all, the graphics were dumbed down for the 32X version. Second, it didn't have the last level. It just... stopped
I still have mine for the very same reason. Saturn may have crashed and burned outside of Japan, but for 2D gaming it's nearly on par with the Neo-Geo. Personally I'd say the Lynx doesn't deserve to be on this list either. Yes it failed, but when you release products and fail to you know, advertise them, that can happen. In their place I nominate the Sega CD (FMV games at their worst) and the Atari 5200 (for controllers that somehow managed to suck even more than the gold standard, the Intellivision).
I have a friend who still has his Saturn set up purely because of some of the games that have just never been equalled on other consoles. Radiant Silvergun and Street Fighter Zero 3 spring to mind.
Actually, that's not what really happens. Due to the massive trade imbalance, container shipping back to mainland china is practically free, so vast amounts of the stuff get shipped back to China for 'recycling', otherwise known as burning and recycling the copper,gold,steel and nasty airborne pollutants. Since China doesn't have any environmental laws to speak of this is a real money making operation, not only do they get paid to take the cheap crap they originally sold us but recycling it is a profitable operation in of itself.
Still we need a solution to the problem of lead and other toxic chemicals leached into the soil. That makes me wonder...what happened to all the stories of businesses dumping this type of waste in rural China?
I'd think officers planning said brutality would commit it somewhere that wasn't in a line of sight with the cam? I mean, it's a video-cam, this isn't a 360 degree iMax filmography.
--
"Honey, the cast of The Shield is here..."
If anything, I'd think that video in squad cars would reduce the possibility of police brutality, since the cops know that they are being recorded on video, and an allegedly beaten person can get that video.
Freedom is actually the opposite of security. Absolute freedom = anarchy, absolute security = prison. Personally I'd rather be more free than more secure, especially if (as in our current environment) my freedoms are being eroded for a false sense of security.
As an example, I'd point out the UK's capture of 'terrorists' planning to make a liquid bomb and smuggle it onto a plane. These cluefucks didn't have passports, didn't have materials to make said bomb, and said plot is in fact technically implausible
Hold on, but if the government loses this one, what exactley have we won? Getting shot in the street? Poisoned by our next meal? Freedom is nothing without security. And I'm certain they'll have more to go on that just the contents of her computer, the compter contents just coroborates their findings.
Sega didn't have any money for marketing, after their string of failures (32x, Sega CD, Saturn) they barely had enough capital to get the Dreamcast built in the first place.
I'd say the Dreamcast had a lot more in common with the Atari Lynx. Both were innovative platforms made by failing companies that died due to a complete lack of marketing.
and Sega had a failing reputation as well. Combine that with online play not being the key seller that it is not (thanks largely to the XBox), and not particularly good marketing done by Sega, and you might start seeing a few differences.
The first-gen PS2 was notorious for that. IIRC the slim model fixed the problem, though they have issues (overheating/PSU failures) as well.
Given that Sony is putting brand new DVD tech into the PS3, I'm going to laugh my ass off when this happens yet again...
The PS2 lens problems made the 360's failure rate look like a drop in the ocean? Nope, this isn't intended as flamebait - it happened to me, and I was only able to get it working, sort of, by cracking the PS2 open and changing the lens angle.
The good news is that thermonuclear war will cancel out the global warming. Sure it will kill a lot of people, but so will global warming, it's just a question of how directly.
The impact of global warming will most likely affect us within not too many decades if not stopped. That much is a certainty. Thermonuclear war is a remote possibility--there's only two or three countries with enough thermonuclear weapons to have an effect on anything, and none of them are going to launch their entire arsenals.
Slashdot Mirror
.
Of course, there are consoles that fail to do this, and surprisingly enough they ah...fail. ex. Cybermorph for the Jaguar, Sewer Shark for the Sega CD, Doom for the 32X, Coincidence?
Am I the only one hearing a Leonard Nimoy voiceover in my head?
"This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture. The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine."
Let me paint you a picture, you and your wife are having an argument. The neighbor overhears it and calls the police. Even if there is no evidence of abuse on either side, and neither of you nor your wife wants it, one of you is going to jail on felony abuse charges. That's called zero tolerance. It's good for electing politicians, but I wonder if it's good for much else.
I for one welcome our new graduating class of Real Estate Brokers, Cosmetic Surgeons, Politicians and Lawyers specializing in IP law.
On a related note, has there been any progress on the problem of low-G muscle degeneration? This whole Space-1999 moonbase idea isn't likely to get a lot of traction until that's been fixed. That and actually providing some economic benefit, USA/etc. might be willing to throw cash at manned missions for bragging rights, but re-supply of a moon base isn't even in the same ballpark cost wise.
That's not a myth, but if you'd like to debunk it knock yourself out.
An ideal sword would be both flexible and sharp, and a number of cultures have achieved this goal via pattern welding (welding alternating thin layers of hard and soft steel), most famously the Japanese katana, but this technology was well known in the ancient world, and is evident in recovered Viking swords, Indonesian kris, and as far back as Roman times (for use in decorative steel artifacts). Its use can also be found in a few modern knives (see Swedish Mora).
This differs from the damascus technique, which was rediscovered in the 1980's by Alfred Pendray and John Verhoeven. They didn't mention nanotubes, just the necessity of small Vanadium impurities in the ore. This explains the 'lost technology' of damascus steel very well, ie. when the original ore deposits containing said impurities were exhausted, the technique simply did not work anymore.
I believe we've already colonized those, check out our spacious new biodome / gated community, now with a new fitness center and day spa!
The SNES didn't get a port of DOOM until 96, two years after it was released on the 32X. Only the 32X and Jaguar got DOOM in 94, both at approximately the same time.
An infinite amount of unit testing cannot guarantee an absence of bugs?
But perhaps I am a bit jaded since our company considers one of it's major advantages an all encompasing in-house framework that makes it neigh impossible to unit test most of our modules individually...
On that note I'll make the fairly obvious observation that leaky abstractions (ie. nearly all in-house frameworks) make code both harder to build and harder to maintain, though it's obscure quirks ensure that I'll be able to keep my kid in diapers for the forseeable future.
this is absolutely everything we could salvage from the APC wreckage...
--
"Honey, the cast of The Shield is here..."
As an example, I'd point out the UK's capture of 'terrorists' planning to make a liquid bomb and smuggle it onto a plane. These cluefucks didn't have passports, didn't have materials to make said bomb, and said plot is in fact technically implausible
I'd say the Dreamcast had a lot more in common with the Atari Lynx. Both were innovative platforms made by failing companies that died due to a complete lack of marketing.
Given that Sony is putting brand new DVD tech into the PS3, I'm going to laugh my ass off when this happens yet again...
From what I understand the slim version is 'better', instead of DVDs it eats power supplies and overheats.