I have never seen HD-TV's, player/recorders or amplifiers that have HDMI come with a HDMI cable so why blame Sony for not shipping a cable with the PS3. As the the man said "Move along, nothing to see here".
Strange because when I was doing my Electrical Engineering degree in 1981 one of our projects was to write an OS and mini file-system for an embedded device and this was not out of the ordinary since people were doing this prior to the 1980's. You would think that File Allocation Table (FAT) file system is NOT in fact, "novel and non-obvious" at least to a trainee engineer.
Unfortunately for the Patent System it appears that what is obvious to a skilled person in that field is not obvious to people outside that field such as Law makers. Basically it appears that if you have money (and Microsoft does) then you can patent anything by bringing in their so called "Expert Witnesses".
What happened to not being able to patent a process of which software really is a mathematical process.
Actually that is a very bad thing to admit to stealing. It is best to be made redundant (firing is a different matter) since you normally get a package or a "copper" hand-shake, even then I would check the content of the "copper".
You honestly don't think a "golden" handshake applies to anyone but a CEO do you?
I think the best way to define failure is when you actually make an overall loss on a product. Some people think the Nintendo N64 was a failure and granted it did not sell as well as Nintendo liked but it still made a profit. Now the Xbox sold more consoles than the Nintendo Game Cube but Nintendo still made quite healthy profit while the Xbox lost over US$1300M (see Google).
All Sony has to do is make a profit and recoup their R&D (remember this was a cooperative effort with IBM and Toshiba). IBM also has plans for the Cell chip so there is profit to be made here.
Even the so called low yields of the Cell Chip (approx 20% and for a first time run on a chip that size this is quite good) and Blue-Ray lasers (30%) are not really loss producing and what many people continually fail to realise is the fact that Sony completely controls the manufacturing process unlike Microsoft.
Yes you are right but when people talk about 1080p/1080i HDTV's they mean TV's that are normally between 24" to 60" or more in size. I have yet to see a high res PC monitor over 24". in addition quite a few computer monitors actually can be used with some consoles, the PS2, Game Cube, Xbox and the next gen consoles will work on them. In-fact the line between what is called a computer monitor and a HDTV is becoming quite blurred.
I don't really want to get into the console vs PC debate (been going on for years) but I think people have to ask themselves if they would rather sit back on a comfortable chair/sofa or hunch up over a small screen. Surprisingly this can equally apply to both types of gaming.
I think the majority of gamers would like the comfort although for an intense game (ie. FPS) most people end up sitting in a manner that is not conducive to overall comfort. For people who like games that aren't so intense then sitting back is the way to go especially if your screen is large since you should (depends on your eyesight) sit back at least 1.5 to 3 times the diagonal width of you screen. For me that is about 2.5 to 3 meters (8 ft to 10 ft) but now you come to the problem of cables and the only solution IMHO is to go wireless (not infra red) and again this equally applies to consoles and PC's.
There is nothing worse then sitting back playing a game and your kids of wife walk in front of you. What is even worse is when they trip over the cable and your expensive PC/Console gets trashed. That was how I lost my original PS2.
This does get around the issue, however all you are doing is create a different problem.
Picture this. All FireFox/Mozilla users use the agent switcher and one day the IT manager of the particular firm goes before his boss and states that 99% of all users trying to access their web page are using IE5 and IE6 since that is what their logs report (Note: He's not lying). Now put yourself in the bosses shoes since he has to make recommendations on what web browsers that the site will support and what does he say and what actually gets supported.
Great incentive to get a web designer not to support FireFox.
My attitude when FireFox cannot display a web page is to say "stuff it" and go elsewhere. This does get logged and if enough FireFox/Mozilla users did this more web sites would support their browser.
Looked up this "bike" (3 wheels). Nice! but many bikes can beat most cars from a standing start, however some diesel cars (keeping on-topic) can actually go much faster than 140mph but there are very few places in the world that you can do this legally much less safely. I had a Subaru WRX (there are many cars that can beat this) that could easily reach this speed but you needed to go to a track to do it. Get caught by the cops and its by-by license and "watch your fingers" as the cell door closes.
Anyway back on topic.
A jet or rocket engine could easily beat any road vehicle in a straight line but what we are looking at here is a diesel powered car with mechanical linkage from engine to road wheels. I tried a Google search and this is definitely a first although they say they are going to try for 400mph. Should be interesting since to win as the fastest internal combustion engine car they have to beat the following.
For petrol internal combustion engine so far (note the date): When: November 13, 1965 Where: Bonneville Salt Flats, USA Who: Bob Summers USA Car Name: Goldenrod Speed: 409.277mph, 658.526kph (over 1 mile)
All other cars after this have been jet(turbo fan) or rocket. Then again none of them are street legal.
Surprisingly people do base their car purchase on how fast a car can go and the brand that can do this.
I just recently brought a VW Passat 2.0 TDi with Direct shift gearbox and there are a few words that describe it. Excellent performance, economical (approx 5.5l/100km (approx 42 US mpg) to 7.0l/100km), comfortable seating (5), large boot, luxury mod cons and cheaper then its petrol equivalent. Granted there are some petrol cars that can beat it off the lights (if you are into this) but it seems strange that in normal Drive (there is sports and tiptronic as well) I still leave most cars behind and I am not even trying. On the open road I can easily keep up with the traffic and the engine is very quiet although there is a little bit of diesel rattle at idle. That's not bad for a engine that is rated at 103kW (138hp) with 320NM torque and there are better engines coming (with about the same fuel economy) within a few months.
Modern diesel cars are very competitive in price between their petrol equivalent. It must also be noted that 50% of cars sold in Europe are diesel although in the US and in Australia it is nowhere near that but it is increasing.
Before anyone buys a diesel car please do some homework taking into account the price difference between the diesel and its equivalent petrol engine (the VW Passat was cheaper but some other diesel cars are not) also work out how far you are going to travel in a year and the cost in fuel to to this. In addition work out the difference in servicing costs (diesel should be cheaper but be careful). Just about all other things such as tyres, registration and insurance should be the same.
Use Google to search on diesel, bio-diesel, comparison between petrol as well as other fuels such as hydrogen, alcohol... etc and it gets very interesting.
I am over 50 and normally won't play games that insist on scores or first person shooters because I like to enjoy the game not rush through it so I do like RPG's. I also like action-adventure (Diablo falls into this category) as well and can finish them so my reactions are quite good. I find that if a game has a story I tend to enjoy it much more than a "if it moves you kill it and if it don't then kill it anyway" (ie. FPS). Don't get me wrong I don't mind First Person perspective adventure games but shooters are to me an adrenaline rush for about 30 minutes and then pointless (at least to me) after that. Even on-line games don't hold any interest for me and I am a professional engineer working in IT.
I don't think this attitude applies to people over 50 since my overall taste in games has not changed over 25 years, but people who do play games for relaxation and enjoyment. Why do people like one type of game over another? Well we are all different and hopefully the world is better for it.
I think the simple answer would be to do the same as every other company, make money. Don't think Sony is the ogre here, many other companies would do the same given the chance. Hopefully this may be a warning to other companies not to patent mathematical constructs or processes (ie. Software), although I would not hold my breath on this.
To bring this into context look at the PlayStation 1 (CD) and 2 (CD or DVD). When the PS2 came out the DVD was fairly new, in-fact a DVD player was quite expensive and a PC DVD recorder was over US$1000.
Sony did not force games manufacturers to actually use DVD's for their games since you could still play original PS1 games and some PS2 games did come out in CD format. Of course later on most manufactures produced their games on DVD, not that they actually needed the capacity of DVD but it was not really worth while pirating a game to a DVD when that DVD was quite expensive to begin with.
Now with Blueray a similar thing applies, Manufactures are free to used CD or DVD for PS3 games if they wish, but who in their right mind is going to pirate a game to a Blueray disk when that disk is going to cost a significant price of the game. That is not to say that piracy won't happen but it would be significantly reduced.
Over time Blueray disks will come down in price just like DVD did and even today is it worth your while coping a PS2 game when many second-hand PS2 games and even some brand new games are reasonably cheap. Now the Xbox is a different matter since it is possible to mod it, add a larger disk and put plenty of games on it very cheaply and easily.
Creating an add-on HD-DVD to the Xbox is going to just create a cheaper HD-DVD player which will need to be controlled via the Xbox 360 and this is not going to be something that the average consumer wants. I won't deny that they won't sell but I cannot see them selling that many to Xbox 360 buyers since the PS3 starts to look attractive then. I also cannot see the HD-DVD player being used for games since that will really piss off all original Xbox 360 buyers, however it is early days yet and Microsoft may actually pull this off, since they do have deep pockets. They would still have to sell the HD-DVD add-on at a reasonable price (US$100 ???) otherwise they would be sued for unfair advantage and this is something Microsoft cannot afford.
In the mid 1980's I used a Unix product called "Wingz" on an SGI workstation that was a very good GUI spreadsheet. It is still around today, in fact it was very similar to Excel and that was well before MS Windows and MS Office came out. The problem for "Wingz" may have been its cost (about US$1000) and the fact that it ran on Graphical Unix workstations.
What was even stranger was the fact that we could get Unix (well Apollo, SGI, SUN) workstations cheaper than DOS PC's, yet still people wanted DOS machines. Oh the fun we had with DOS viruses.
That happened to me at approx 60ft down when I went to pull my reserve and guess what my reserve was already active (so much for my pre-checks). All I did was rise while exhaling and not going up faster than my bubbles, I surfaced and quickly transferred to my snorkel. The bottom line is I did not panic.
For a jet pack I guess it does not matter if you panic or not, you are going to die if you run out of fuel at any altitude grater than a few feet. Although if you run out at a few feet you may survive with a broken leg. Remember that pack is fairly heavy.
Evidently you never faced the Real Omega (FFX) in the Omega Dungeon. In addition there are some encounters towards the end of the game were you can get killed in one round without getting a turn.
Seriously a person plays a game for many reasons and there are many types of games out there from First Person Shooters (FPS), Sports (huge selection) , Action/Adventure (first or third person), Fighting (or beat em ups), Strategy, Role Playing and many other types. Personally I find most FPS games an adrenalin rush for about 30 minutes and boring after that, while Action/Adventure games and some RPG's I can play for hours at a time, although I will admit that for these types of games a story enhances the game-play.
To me the game-play is more important than the storyline however a good or unusual storyline sometimes makes what would be an ok game an excellent game.
I have to admit the story in FFV111 was interesting and the graphics for the PS1 were excellent but after awhile I just got bored and lost interest at the end of the third disk mainly because I did not like the main character. Now the other FF games (6 (US3), 7 and 10) were more interesting as far as I was concerned because I could really get to like the characters.
I got this and said yes to the upgrade. Basically it shutdown FireFox and did the upgrade. Overall outage less then 2 minutes and back to reading Slashdot.
Won't make much of a comment on Hydrogen powered cars except to say how are you going to store the hydrogen? I know about hydrides but this is not cheap. Actually producing Hydrogen from water sounds great until you start to add up the energy costs. It requires a lot more energy (where is this comming from and please don't say solar power) to produce Hydrogen than you are going to get back from using it.
With regard to diesel cars running on normal veggie oil (ie. from fish and chip shops, McDonald's.. etc). they can - sort off. The people who do this, pre-filter the oil to an extra tank were you start with normal diesel and switch over to the veggie oil (some people even use lard), then 5 minutes before switching the engine off reconnect to the normal diesel. The alternative is to mix with 50% (safer to start with 5% veggie oil first) normal diesel which appears to work quite well. Of course you will void any warranty on your car and you may have the government on you back for not paying the fuel excise.
Some farmers and even those in the know, are actually making their own bio-diesel and although the government requires them to pay an excise there is a black market of bio-diesel, since it is so easy to make. Even paying the excise, bio-diesel can be cheaper than fossil diesel, so some big oil companies are looking to add bio-diesel to their own products (B2 and B5 to start off with) with the added benefit of reducing emissions (now required) and saving them money. Necessity makes strange bed-fellows!
Bio-diesel IMHO is really the way to go, however that has pro's and con's as well (lots of good web sites have info on this). Also many diesel manufacturers are fence sitting until the government (eg. France, with the UK and Australia making some noises) mandates for 5% bio-diesel (B5) in fossil diesel, then their later model diesel cars will all of a sudden run without mods. Conspiracy theory anyone?
For people with earlier model diesels (pre 2000), do some homework before you use bio-diesel since you may have to change your fuel filter and possibly your fuel lines after 2 tank-fulls.
I live in Australia and I fully agree with you, however the people in the UK and Europe are paying much more. That is why diesel and bio-diesel are becoming popular (approx 50% of new cars sold in Europe are diesel).
In Australia diesel cars are just starting to take off since they are becoming trendy and the same is happening in the US although the uptake is slower. I have just got a VW 2.0 diesel (TDI) Passat (the Direct Sift Gearbox is impressive) which was actually AU$2000 cheaper than the petrol version (FSI) so I start saving on fuel immediately. This however may not be true if you decide to buy a smaller car (ie. Golf TDI, Peugeot 307 TD and quite a few others) where the diesel model is normally AU@2k to AU$6k more. You may have to do alot of km's to make up the difference.
With regard to performance don't expect to beat a car like a Subaru WRX (my last car) at the lights but start from zero to the top of a steep hill and you will wonder what most people are doing because one thing a diesel has is torque and accelerating up a hill at low revs (think 1700 rpm) is no problem.
If you are thinking of buying a diesel vehicle it is best to do your homework prior to making a decision. It is no good getting a diesel car, truck or SUV if the overall costs are greater than the equivalent petrol engine for the amount of km (or miles) you do.
At the moment in Australia VW and other diesel makers are "fence sitting" with regard to bio-diesel, so I have to be careful since I could void my warranty. Bio-diesel is approx 5c to 10c cheaper than fossil diesel, although that depends on the percentage, with B100 being the cheapest. There actually is an Australian standard although car makers can't seem to find or acknowledge it (see link below) even though it's ok in Europe where some countries are mandating a minimum of 5% (B5). This may soon change in Australia when Shell and BP start putting bio-diesel (B2 or B5) in their diesel. Conspiracy theory anyone?
With regard to bio-diesel, like every technology there are advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are, virtually zero sulfur, lower CO2 , greater lubricity, less toxic than common salt and is a renewable resource (there are others but most web sites cover this). The major downside of bio-diesel is there is a requirement for growing vast amounts of oil producing plants (eg. canola, sunflower, coconut, kelp?... etc) or even animal products (ie. fat) and in many countries this is a real dilemma because you have to balance land that is normally used to grow food and land that will be used to grow bio-diesel. The same applies to sugar for alcohol as well although IMHO bio-diesel is more environmentally friendly (plenty of web sites cover the pro's and con's on this and even the differences as well).
A few years ago my eldest son was curious on how Computer viruses worked so he asked me. I though about it for a few minutes and remembering the pathetic script-kiddy viruses I had seen, I demoed a virus concept (about 5 minutes) using a simple Korn script. What surprised me was how easy it was to write and just for fun I thought "how do I make my script morph". The answer was so simple and obvious (maybe I should patent it since any stupid or obvious patent appears to be getting through).
What I was able to do (within 15 minutes) was write a simple script that would change it's signature identification every-time it was was run making identification almost impossible. The same concept I used in a simple Korn script could easily be be applied to a binary application, granted this is more complex in the writing but not difficult and I am amazed that we don't see more morphing virus.
People need to realise that a computer is fairly sophisticated and to use it properly you have to have some knowledge of computing, especially basic security. They should not just blindly rely on the so-called latest virus protection software, which always seems to "close the gate after the horse has bolted". I won't hold my breath on this since the main PC operating system is in itself inherently insecure.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this comment.
I think the best way to describe many languages today is "Bloatware" a term I heard coined back in the early 1980's. Once you get into serious maths then you really get to see how inappropriate many languages are. While I am no fan of FORTRAN it is possible to write controlling code in C or C++ and link to the appropriate FORTRAN library. Of course I normally code in a Unix environment so I mainly use scripts, Perl and C.
That is the concept that made the Unix OS and from what I can gather it still holds true today.
IMHO The power of the C language is it's simplicity and it's massive suite of libraries. In fact you can normally link object code from other languages (examples: Assembler, C++ and FORTRAN) as well as being able to call scripts and programs. So C can become the "glue" that can integrate many compilable languages and that leads to portability as well as efficiency.
It is very common in Unix to run a program which normally is a script (Bourne, Korn or Bash... ) that in-turn will actually call the appropriate binary code which could have originally been written in a language other than C. As far as the user is concerned they don't care as long as the program works.
In my experience the customer always knows what he/she wants, the problem is that what they want is normally not what really is required. Lots of coffee and talking are needed in the initial stages and it is always a good idea to find out what the people who are going to use the program think. Unfortunately once a manager steamrolls the project you normally end up with something the workers hate but the managers love since "it's shiny and has all these pop-up menus".
A few years ago I was involved with setting up SAP at a customer site. The IT manager was quite annoyed when he was told that the database must now be modified to conform to the customer's business practices this resulted in a consulting/programming cost that was about 7 times the initial cost of the software. It would have been far cheaper, easier and more efficient (not to mention quicker) to change the business practices to conform to what SAP uses.
Every time I have looked at a patent my eyes glaze over since it is written in legalese which IMHO is nearly incomprehensible or just plain stupid to the professional engineer. Of course the reverse applies as well.
So here we have patent lawyers writing an application for a patent that they most likely don't have a clue about and on other the other side we have people who have the scientific knowledge that cannot understand the legalese. Now waiting in the wings are the patent trolls who don't care so long as the patent has some vague scientific facts that they can use to make a quick dollar because the people they sue cannot afford to fight the patent.
I hope Oracle forces a revamp of the patent system but I won't hold my breath.
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Good post.
I saw this article about 2 days ago.
I have never seen HD-TV's, player/recorders or amplifiers that have HDMI come with a HDMI cable so why blame Sony for not shipping a cable with the PS3. As the the man said "Move along, nothing to see here".
It appears Microsoft won.
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http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651
Strange because when I was doing my Electrical Engineering degree in 1981 one of our projects was to write an OS and mini file-system for an embedded device and this was not out of the ordinary since people were doing this prior to the 1980's. You would think that File Allocation Table (FAT) file system is NOT in fact, "novel and non-obvious" at least to a trainee engineer.
Unfortunately for the Patent System it appears that what is obvious to a skilled person in that field is not obvious to people outside that field such as Law makers. Basically it appears that if you have money (and Microsoft does) then you can patent anything by bringing in their so called "Expert Witnesses".
What happened to not being able to patent a process of which software really is a mathematical process.
Actually that is a very bad thing to admit to stealing. It is best to be made redundant (firing is a different matter) since you normally get a package or a "copper" hand-shake, even then I would check the content of the "copper".
You honestly don't think a "golden" handshake applies to anyone but a CEO do you?
I think the best way to define failure is when you actually make an overall loss on a product. Some people think the Nintendo N64 was a failure and granted it did not sell as well as Nintendo liked but it still made a profit. Now the Xbox sold more consoles than the Nintendo Game Cube but Nintendo still made quite healthy profit while the Xbox lost over US$1300M (see Google).
All Sony has to do is make a profit and recoup their R&D (remember this was a cooperative effort with IBM and Toshiba). IBM also has plans for the Cell chip so there is profit to be made here.
Even the so called low yields of the Cell Chip (approx 20% and for a first time run on a chip that size this is quite good) and Blue-Ray lasers (30%) are not really loss producing and what many people continually fail to realise is the fact that Sony completely controls the manufacturing process unlike Microsoft.
Yes you are right but when people talk about 1080p/1080i HDTV's they mean TV's that are normally between 24" to 60" or more in size. I have yet to see a high res PC monitor over 24". in addition quite a few computer monitors actually can be used with some consoles, the PS2, Game Cube, Xbox and the next gen consoles will work on them. In-fact the line between what is called a computer monitor and a HDTV is becoming quite blurred.
Good post.
I don't really want to get into the console vs PC debate (been going on for years) but I think people have to ask themselves if they would rather sit back on a comfortable chair/sofa or hunch up over a small screen. Surprisingly this can equally apply to both types of gaming.
I think the majority of gamers would like the comfort although for an intense game (ie. FPS) most people end up sitting in a manner that is not conducive to overall comfort. For people who like games that aren't so intense then sitting back is the way to go especially if your screen is large since you should (depends on your eyesight) sit back at least 1.5 to 3 times the diagonal width of you screen. For me that is about 2.5 to 3 meters (8 ft to 10 ft) but now you come to the problem of cables and the only solution IMHO is to go wireless (not infra red) and again this equally applies to consoles and PC's.
There is nothing worse then sitting back playing a game and your kids of wife walk in front of you. What is even worse is when they trip over the cable and your expensive PC/Console gets trashed. That was how I lost my original PS2.
This does get around the issue, however all you are doing is create a different problem.
Picture this. All FireFox/Mozilla users use the agent switcher and one day the IT manager of the particular firm goes before his boss and states that 99% of all users trying to access their web page are using IE5 and IE6 since that is what their logs report (Note: He's not lying). Now put yourself in the bosses shoes since he has to make recommendations on what web browsers that the site will support and what does he say and what actually gets supported.
Great incentive to get a web designer not to support FireFox.
My attitude when FireFox cannot display a web page is to say "stuff it" and go elsewhere. This does get logged and if enough FireFox/Mozilla users did this more web sites would support their browser.
Looked up this "bike" (3 wheels). Nice! but many bikes can beat most cars from a standing start, however some diesel cars (keeping on-topic) can actually go much faster than 140mph but there are very few places in the world that you can do this legally much less safely. I had a Subaru WRX (there are many cars that can beat this) that could easily reach this speed but you needed to go to a track to do it. Get caught by the cops and its by-by license and "watch your fingers" as the cell door closes.
Anyway back on topic.
A jet or rocket engine could easily beat any road vehicle in a straight line but what we are looking at here is a diesel powered car with mechanical linkage from engine to road wheels. I tried a Google search and this is definitely a first although they say they are going to try for 400mph. Should be interesting since to win as the fastest internal combustion engine car they have to beat the following.
For petrol internal combustion engine so far (note the date):
When: November 13, 1965
Where: Bonneville Salt Flats, USA
Who: Bob Summers USA
Car Name: Goldenrod
Speed: 409.277mph, 658.526kph (over 1 mile)
All other cars after this have been jet(turbo fan) or rocket. Then again none of them are street legal.
Surprisingly people do base their car purchase on how fast a car can go and the brand that can do this.
... etc and it gets very interesting.
I just recently brought a VW Passat 2.0 TDi with Direct shift gearbox and there are a few words that describe it. Excellent performance, economical (approx 5.5l/100km (approx 42 US mpg) to 7.0l/100km), comfortable seating (5), large boot, luxury mod cons and cheaper then its petrol equivalent. Granted there are some petrol cars that can beat it off the lights (if you are into this) but it seems strange that in normal Drive (there is sports and tiptronic as well) I still leave most cars behind and I am not even trying. On the open road I can easily keep up with the traffic and the engine is very quiet although there is a little bit of diesel rattle at idle. That's not bad for a engine that is rated at 103kW (138hp) with 320NM torque and there are better engines coming (with about the same fuel economy) within a few months.
Modern diesel cars are very competitive in price between their petrol equivalent. It must also be noted that 50% of cars sold in Europe are diesel although in the US and in Australia it is nowhere near that but it is increasing.
Before anyone buys a diesel car please do some homework taking into account the price difference between the diesel and its equivalent petrol engine (the VW Passat was cheaper but some other diesel cars are not) also work out how far you are going to travel in a year and the cost in fuel to to this. In addition work out the difference in servicing costs (diesel should be cheaper but be careful). Just about all other things such as tyres, registration and insurance should be the same.
Use Google to search on diesel, bio-diesel, comparison between petrol as well as other fuels such as hydrogen, alcohol
I am over 50 and normally won't play games that insist on scores or first person shooters because I like to enjoy the game not rush through it so I do like RPG's. I also like action-adventure (Diablo falls into this category) as well and can finish them so my reactions are quite good. I find that if a game has a story I tend to enjoy it much more than a "if it moves you kill it and if it don't then kill it anyway" (ie. FPS). Don't get me wrong I don't mind First Person perspective adventure games but shooters are to me an adrenaline rush for about 30 minutes and then pointless (at least to me) after that. Even on-line games don't hold any interest for me and I am a professional engineer working in IT.
I don't think this attitude applies to people over 50 since my overall taste in games has not changed over 25 years, but people who do play games for relaxation and enjoyment. Why do people like one type of game over another? Well we are all different and hopefully the world is better for it.
I think the simple answer would be to do the same as every other company, make money. Don't think Sony is the ogre here, many other companies would do the same given the chance. Hopefully this may be a warning to other companies not to patent mathematical constructs or processes (ie. Software), although I would not hold my breath on this.
To bring this into context look at the PlayStation 1 (CD) and 2 (CD or DVD). When the PS2 came out the DVD was fairly new, in-fact a DVD player was quite expensive and a PC DVD recorder was over US$1000.
Sony did not force games manufacturers to actually use DVD's for their games since you could still play original PS1 games and some PS2 games did come out in CD format. Of course later on most manufactures produced their games on DVD, not that they actually needed the capacity of DVD but it was not really worth while pirating a game to a DVD when that DVD was quite expensive to begin with.
Now with Blueray a similar thing applies, Manufactures are free to used CD or DVD for PS3 games if they wish, but who in their right mind is going to pirate a game to a Blueray disk when that disk is going to cost a significant price of the game. That is not to say that piracy won't happen but it would be significantly reduced.
Over time Blueray disks will come down in price just like DVD did and even today is it worth your while coping a PS2 game when many second-hand PS2 games and even some brand new games are reasonably cheap. Now the Xbox is a different matter since it is possible to mod it, add a larger disk and put plenty of games on it very cheaply and easily.
Creating an add-on HD-DVD to the Xbox is going to just create a cheaper HD-DVD player which will need to be controlled via the Xbox 360 and this is not going to be something that the average consumer wants. I won't deny that they won't sell but I cannot see them selling that many to Xbox 360 buyers since the PS3 starts to look attractive then. I also cannot see the HD-DVD player being used for games since that will really piss off all original Xbox 360 buyers, however it is early days yet and Microsoft may actually pull this off, since they do have deep pockets. They would still have to sell the HD-DVD add-on at a reasonable price (US$100 ???) otherwise they would be sued for unfair advantage and this is something Microsoft cannot afford.
In the mid 1980's I used a Unix product called "Wingz" on an SGI workstation that was a very good GUI spreadsheet. It is still around today, in fact it was very similar to Excel and that was well before MS Windows and MS Office came out. The problem for "Wingz" may have been its cost (about US$1000) and the fact that it ran on Graphical Unix workstations.
What was even stranger was the fact that we could get Unix (well Apollo, SGI, SUN) workstations cheaper than DOS PC's, yet still people wanted DOS machines. Oh the fun we had with DOS viruses.
That happened to me at approx 60ft down when I went to pull my reserve and guess what my reserve was already active (so much for my pre-checks). All I did was rise while exhaling and not going up faster than my bubbles, I surfaced and quickly transferred to my snorkel. The bottom line is I did not panic.
For a jet pack I guess it does not matter if you panic or not, you are going to die if you run out of fuel at any altitude grater than a few feet. Although if you run out at a few feet you may survive with a broken leg. Remember that pack is fairly heavy.
Evidently you never faced the Real Omega (FFX) in the Omega Dungeon. In addition there are some encounters towards the end of the game were you can get killed in one round without getting a turn.
Seriously a person plays a game for many reasons and there are many types of games out there from First Person Shooters (FPS), Sports (huge selection) , Action/Adventure (first or third person), Fighting (or beat em ups), Strategy, Role Playing and many other types. Personally I find most FPS games an adrenalin rush for about 30 minutes and boring after that, while Action/Adventure games and some RPG's I can play for hours at a time, although I will admit that for these types of games a story enhances the game-play.
To me the game-play is more important than the storyline however a good or unusual storyline sometimes makes what would be an ok game an excellent game.
I have to admit the story in FFV111 was interesting and the graphics for the PS1 were excellent but after awhile I just got bored and lost interest at the end of the third disk mainly because I did not like the main character. Now the other FF games (6 (US3), 7 and 10) were more interesting as far as I was concerned because I could really get to like the characters.
I got this and said yes to the upgrade.
Basically it shutdown FireFox and did the upgrade.
Overall outage less then 2 minutes and back to reading Slashdot.
Won't make much of a comment on Hydrogen powered cars except to say how are you going to store the hydrogen? I know about hydrides but this is not cheap. Actually producing Hydrogen from water sounds great until you start to add up the energy costs. It requires a lot more energy (where is this comming from and please don't say solar power) to produce Hydrogen than you are going to get back from using it.
.. etc). they can - sort off. The people who do this, pre-filter the oil to an extra tank were you start with normal diesel and switch over to the veggie oil (some people even use lard), then 5 minutes before switching the engine off reconnect to the normal diesel. The alternative is to mix with 50% (safer to start with 5% veggie oil first) normal diesel which appears to work quite well. Of course you will void any warranty on your car and you may have the government on you back for not paying the fuel excise.
With regard to diesel cars running on normal veggie oil (ie. from fish and chip shops, McDonald's
Some farmers and even those in the know, are actually making their own bio-diesel and although the government requires them to pay an excise there is a black market of bio-diesel, since it is so easy to make. Even paying the excise, bio-diesel can be cheaper than fossil diesel, so some big oil companies are looking to add bio-diesel to their own products (B2 and B5 to start off with) with the added benefit of reducing emissions (now required) and saving them money. Necessity makes strange bed-fellows!
Bio-diesel IMHO is really the way to go, however that has pro's and con's as well (lots of good web sites have info on this). Also many diesel manufacturers are fence sitting until the government (eg. France, with the UK and Australia making some noises) mandates for 5% bio-diesel (B5) in fossil diesel, then their later model diesel cars will all of a sudden run without mods. Conspiracy theory anyone?
For people with earlier model diesels (pre 2000), do some homework before you use bio-diesel since you may have to change your fuel filter and possibly your fuel lines after 2 tank-fulls.
I live in Australia and I fully agree with you, however the people in the UK and Europe are paying much more. That is why diesel and bio-diesel are becoming popular (approx 50% of new cars sold in Europe are diesel).
d ards/biodiesel/index.html
... etc) or even animal products (ie. fat) and in many countries this is a real dilemma because you have to balance land that is normally used to grow food and land that will be used to grow bio-diesel. The same applies to sugar for alcohol as well although IMHO bio-diesel is more environmentally friendly (plenty of web sites cover the pro's and con's on this and even the differences as well).
In Australia diesel cars are just starting to take off since they are becoming trendy and the same is happening in the US although the uptake is slower. I have just got a VW 2.0 diesel (TDI) Passat (the Direct Sift Gearbox is impressive) which was actually AU$2000 cheaper than the petrol version (FSI) so I start saving on fuel immediately. This however may not be true if you decide to buy a smaller car (ie. Golf TDI, Peugeot 307 TD and quite a few others) where the diesel model is normally AU@2k to AU$6k more. You may have to do alot of km's to make up the difference.
With regard to performance don't expect to beat a car like a Subaru WRX (my last car) at the lights but start from zero to the top of a steep hill and you will wonder what most people are doing because one thing a diesel has is torque and accelerating up a hill at low revs (think 1700 rpm) is no problem.
If you are thinking of buying a diesel vehicle it is best to do your homework prior to making a decision. It is no good getting a diesel car, truck or SUV if the overall costs are greater than the equivalent petrol engine for the amount of km (or miles) you do.
At the moment in Australia VW and other diesel makers are "fence sitting" with regard to bio-diesel, so I have to be careful since I could void my warranty. Bio-diesel is approx 5c to 10c cheaper than fossil diesel, although that depends on the percentage, with B100 being the cheapest. There actually is an Australian standard although car makers can't seem to find or acknowledge it (see link below) even though it's ok in Europe where some countries are mandating a minimum of 5% (B5). This may soon change in Australia when Shell and BP start putting bio-diesel (B2 or B5) in their diesel. Conspiracy theory anyone?
http://www.deh.gov.au/atmosphere/fuelquality/stan
With regard to bio-diesel, like every technology there are advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are, virtually zero sulfur, lower CO2 , greater lubricity, less toxic than common salt and is a renewable resource (there are others but most web sites cover this). The major downside of bio-diesel is there is a requirement for growing vast amounts of oil producing plants (eg. canola, sunflower, coconut, kelp?
When you do this you can safely install Windows 2000/XP without any service packs.
A few years ago my eldest son was curious on how Computer viruses worked so he asked me. I though about it for a few minutes and remembering the pathetic script-kiddy viruses I had seen, I demoed a virus concept (about 5 minutes) using a simple Korn script. What surprised me was how easy it was to write and just for fun I thought "how do I make my script morph". The answer was so simple and obvious (maybe I should patent it since any stupid or obvious patent appears to be getting through).
What I was able to do (within 15 minutes) was write a simple script that would change it's signature identification every-time it was was run making identification almost impossible. The same concept I used in a simple Korn script could easily be be applied to a binary application, granted this is more complex in the writing but not difficult and I am amazed that we don't see more morphing virus.
People need to realise that a computer is fairly sophisticated and to use it properly you have to have some knowledge of computing, especially basic security. They should not just blindly rely on the so-called latest virus protection software, which always seems to "close the gate after the horse has bolted". I won't hold my breath on this since the main PC operating system is in itself inherently insecure.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this comment.
I think the best way to describe many languages today is "Bloatware" a term I heard coined back in the early 1980's. Once you get into serious maths then you really get to see how inappropriate many languages are. While I am no fan of FORTRAN it is possible to write controlling code in C or C++ and link to the appropriate FORTRAN library. Of course I normally code in a Unix environment so I mainly use scripts, Perl and C.
That is the concept that made the Unix OS and from what I can gather it still holds true today.
... ) that in-turn will actually call the appropriate binary code which could have originally been written in a language other than C. As far as the user is concerned they don't care as long as the program works.
IMHO The power of the C language is it's simplicity and it's massive suite of libraries. In fact you can normally link object code from other languages (examples: Assembler, C++ and FORTRAN) as well as being able to call scripts and programs. So C can become the "glue" that can integrate many compilable languages and that leads to portability as well as efficiency.
It is very common in Unix to run a program which normally is a script (Bourne, Korn or Bash
In my experience the customer always knows what he/she wants, the problem is that what they want is normally not what really is required. Lots of coffee and talking are needed in the initial stages and it is always a good idea to find out what the people who are going to use the program think. Unfortunately once a manager steamrolls the project you normally end up with something the workers hate but the managers love since "it's shiny and has all these pop-up menus".
A few years ago I was involved with setting up SAP at a customer site. The IT manager was quite annoyed when he was told that the database must now be modified to conform to the customer's business practices this resulted in a consulting/programming cost that was about 7 times the initial cost of the software. It would have been far cheaper, easier and more efficient (not to mention quicker) to change the business practices to conform to what SAP uses.
Every time I have looked at a patent my eyes glaze over since it is written in legalese which IMHO is nearly incomprehensible or just plain stupid to the professional engineer. Of course the reverse applies as well.
So here we have patent lawyers writing an application for a patent that they most likely don't have a clue about and on other the other side we have people who have the scientific knowledge that cannot understand the legalese. Now waiting in the wings are the patent trolls who don't care so long as the patent has some vague scientific facts that they can use to make a quick dollar because the people they sue cannot afford to fight the patent.
I hope Oracle forces a revamp of the patent system but I won't hold my breath.