Thinking about it, I see the possibility for black market for pre-hacked Xbox DVD drives (send in your old one and get it back hacked etc.) that have been pre-moded with a firmware "bank" selector switch, to enable the user to select for original code (for games that check for it) and the hacked code.
In fact the switch could act as a safety device that also cuts out the network port link when in the "hacked bank" mode (just add more pole/throws to the switch and route one of the Ethernet Tx or Rx wires through it) so you don't accidentally get banned.
In addition these enterprising companies could also offer an "ultra" version that has programmer and interface built into / hanging off the DVD drive which comes out to an external connector port so you can easily link to your Xbox DVD drive to a PC for future DVD firmware updates without opening the case again.
Of course this would all be for "fair use" of something (?).... !
I play this with my wife and we both enjoy it. In 2 player mode the better player wins the first few matches, but every time you win you go up a skill level (speed increases) until your reach a point where you are both winning levels by equal shares, it is an automatic handicapping system.
In addition Tetris is one of those games that is just fun to play even if you don't ultimately win that round.
Kid's building any car is great and I am not decrying their achievement, it is remarkable for their age and academic history. If they had put together a regular gasoline car from scratch I think they should get university scholarships.
The point I was trying to make however, is that it appears to me that the media goes crazy ("highlight of the show") whenever a "fuel efficient" car is announced in the USA.
I wish they (the media) would realise that cars with higher fuel efficiency than anything sold in the USA exist and for sale in most other countries by the same manufacturers, using regular engine technology, and have just as high or higher fuel efficiency than all the prototypes they are rolling out (hybrid, soy oil, ethanol) using regular gasoline or diesel.
Soy bean oil, ethanol, DESIL. Engines can be designed and tune to adapt to any one of these combustible products.
As for the fuel efficiency - this is not news.
VW have a prototype a 3 cylinder diesel car (note NO battery packs or hybrid drive) that can do 100+ mpg.
Modern *European* cars with common rail injection turbo diesel engines have enough torque for sub 7 second 0-60mph times and can cruise at 70mph doing over 60mpg. YOU CAN BUY THESE CARS FROM THE SHOW ROOM NOW ! (IN EUROPE!)
Why the big deal in the USA when someone makes a car prototype that can do more than 40 mpg ?
The (unofficial) member of team, that I remember most fondly at a young impressionable age, was Carol Cleveland. I hope we see plenty of her appearances!
I have been using a barton cope Athlon XP-M on a Via KT266A motherboard for over a year. My motherboard had no bios update to support greater than 13x multiplier.
So Instead I wire wrapped a few pins on the CPU to force a 16x multiplier. Overclock is very stable and as the previous poster said, runs very power frugal (low voltage, low heat).
Whether to buy this upgrade, from a point of view of performance per $, Will have to wait for a few factors to become apparent:
1) What overclocks will people get (can most people reliably get up to or past 7800GT PCI core/memory speeds).
2) Are there extra pipes/shaders units that can be unlocked?
3) What does the price settle to after the initial supply/demand fluctuation of early adopters (first few weeks).
After that I will make my decision to get one or migrate my 939 cpu and ram from my Nforce3 MB to a $70 Motherboard with PCIe and buy a 7800GT PCIe instead.
BestBuy and CompUSa have them for ~$350.
Mail order places have them for ~$290.
Considering that the PCIe is ~$290 and faster Iwoudl hope the prices for the AGP part come down to ~$250 or lower in the coming weeks or else as many people have poitned out it is better value to go with a PCIe part and a new MB if you can take your CPU and RAM with you.
...would make this uneconomic.
Sure it adds power, but power to weight is the most important for cars that are used to MOVE people. You not only need the steam engine but also a supply of water to convert to steam. Water is not light.
Also you would probably need a pure / filtered form of water or have to decalcify your engine every 3K miles. Has anyone stopped and compared the cost of bottled water (per gallon) at a gas stations compared to the cost of gas/petrol/desil (per gallon)
My cable company charges an installation fee for a HDTV box. Whether I am technical savvy or not they insist on coming to my home and hooking it up with me. They confirm that a high def signal is getting to my TV, They show me the HD channel numbers.
Now then, for the forgetful or stupid people why not get the installer to ask them if they would like to "force" HD programming where-ever possible? All it takes is the set-top-box makers to add a software set-up feature that can be enabled so that whenever someone selects e.g. Fox SD (e.g. channel 6 analogue) they actually get shown fox HD channel (e.g. channel 881)? For the really stupid people it could even pretend to be the analogue channel number i.e. a duplicate.
I have a PSOne LCD screen and as far as I amaware it does not have any touch screen functioanlity, only display and sound.
I have hacked mine up already and since many Nvidia cards do not have the right type of VGA sync signal I use the S-VIDEO TV out of my Nvidia card instead. If you run with TV out then select the native resolution of the pannel (320x240) as your TV res mode it is pixel perfect.
Please could someone correct me if I am wrong about the touch screen functionailty of the Psone LCD screen?
...As I soon realized on 9/11.
At the time I was a PhD student in a London University. The short hop to the London Internet exchange and bandwidth afforded to my office and Lab meant I had given up on analogue radio and TV and was using news web sites, real player news clips and streaming internet radio of major radio stations.
When the disaster unfolded ALL of these technologies failed on me (news sites no longer loaded, streaming radio would not buffer) and I had to dust off the old radio discarded at the back of the lab to get any information as to what was happening.
Do not underestimate the usefulness of the old radios.
Slashdot Mirror
you are correct. DVI-HDMi and HDMi-HDMI cables are under $10 if you mail-order.
The price in the big chain stores? - now that is a different 3 figure story.
Thinking about it, I see the possibility for black market for pre-hacked Xbox DVD drives (send in your old one and get it back hacked etc.) that have been pre-moded with a firmware "bank" selector switch, to enable the user to select for original code (for games that check for it) and the hacked code.
.... !
In fact the switch could act as a safety device that also cuts out the network port link when in the "hacked bank" mode (just add more pole/throws to the switch and route one of the Ethernet Tx or Rx wires through it) so you don't accidentally get banned.
In addition these enterprising companies could also offer an "ultra" version that has programmer and interface built into / hanging off the DVD drive which comes out to an external connector port so you can easily link to your Xbox DVD drive to a PC for future DVD firmware updates without opening the case again.
Of course this would all be for "fair use" of something (?)
how long until a game is released that checksums the DVD firmware and "updates it" to soemthing more secure?
( + reporting to MS Live if you have a hacked verison and cancelling your account? ala Blizzard?)
"Tetris Worlds" (Ps2)
Is exactly the type of game you are requesting.
I play this with my wife and we both enjoy it. In 2 player mode the better player wins the first few matches, but every time you win you go up a skill level (speed increases) until your reach a point where you are both winning levels by equal shares, it is an automatic handicapping system.
In addition Tetris is one of those games that is just fun to play even if you don't ultimately win that round.
... CTRL+ALT+DEL ?
My back hurts having to bend over to press the third key with my hand...
Kid's building any car is great and I am not decrying their achievement, it is remarkable for their age and academic history. If they had put together a regular gasoline car from scratch I think they should get university scholarships.
The point I was trying to make however, is that it appears to me that the media goes crazy ("highlight of the show") whenever a "fuel efficient" car is announced in the USA.
I wish they (the media) would realise that cars with higher fuel efficiency than anything sold in the USA exist and for sale in most other countries by the same manufacturers, using regular engine technology, and have just as high or higher fuel efficiency than all the prototypes they are rolling out (hybrid, soy oil, ethanol) using regular gasoline or diesel.
Soy bean oil, ethanol, DESIL. Engines can be designed and tune to adapt to any one of these combustible products.
As for the fuel efficiency - this is not news.
VW have a prototype a 3 cylinder diesel car (note NO battery packs or hybrid drive) that can do 100+ mpg.
Modern *European* cars with common rail injection turbo diesel engines have enough torque for sub 7 second 0-60mph times and can cruise at 70mph doing over 60mpg. YOU CAN BUY THESE CARS FROM THE SHOW ROOM NOW ! (IN EUROPE!)
Why the big deal in the USA when someone makes a car prototype that can do more than 40 mpg ?
No, these HDMI switchboxes mearly store the display device ID, they do not decrypt the digital stream.
if I have only one digital port, it's going to the Direct-TV HD box. and all the rest of these guys can just go whistle.
If you only have one digital port, then it is about time you invested in a HDMI switch box. 1x4 versions are down to the $100 mark....
The (unofficial) member of team, that I remember most fondly at a young impressionable age, was Carol Cleveland. I hope we see plenty of her appearances!
Carol Cleveland [Wiki]
Me too!
I have been using a barton cope Athlon XP-M on a Via KT266A motherboard for over a year. My motherboard had no bios update to support greater than 13x multiplier.
So Instead I wire wrapped a few pins on the CPU to force a 16x multiplier. Overclock is very stable and as the previous poster said, runs very power frugal (low voltage, low heat).
Whether to buy this upgrade, from a point of view of performance per $, Will have to wait for a few factors to become apparent:
1) What overclocks will people get (can most people reliably get up to or past 7800GT PCI core/memory speeds).
2) Are there extra pipes/shaders units that can be unlocked?
3) What does the price settle to after the initial supply/demand fluctuation of early adopters (first few weeks).
After that I will make my decision to get one or migrate my 939 cpu and ram from my Nforce3 MB to a $70 Motherboard with PCIe and buy a 7800GT PCIe instead.
BestBuy and CompUSa have them for ~$350.
Mail order places have them for ~$290.
Considering that the PCIe is ~$290 and faster Iwoudl hope the prices for the AGP part come down to ~$250 or lower in the coming weeks or else as many people have poitned out it is better value to go with a PCIe part and a new MB if you can take your CPU and RAM with you.
Channel 4 ? - Check !
Broadcast after 9pm ? - Check !
Full Frontal Nudidy probability = 97.34132%
...would make this uneconomic. Sure it adds power, but power to weight is the most important for cars that are used to MOVE people. You not only need the steam engine but also a supply of water to convert to steam. Water is not light. Also you would probably need a pure / filtered form of water or have to decalcify your engine every 3K miles. Has anyone stopped and compared the cost of bottled water (per gallon) at a gas stations compared to the cost of gas/petrol/desil (per gallon)
My cable company charges an installation fee for a HDTV box. Whether I am technical savvy or not they insist on coming to my home and hooking it up with me. They confirm that a high def signal is getting to my TV, They show me the HD channel numbers. Now then, for the forgetful or stupid people why not get the installer to ask them if they would like to "force" HD programming where-ever possible? All it takes is the set-top-box makers to add a software set-up feature that can be enabled so that whenever someone selects e.g. Fox SD (e.g. channel 6 analogue) they actually get shown fox HD channel (e.g. channel 881)? For the really stupid people it could even pretend to be the analogue channel number i.e. a duplicate.
I have a PSOne LCD screen and as far as I amaware it does not have any touch screen functioanlity, only display and sound. I have hacked mine up already and since many Nvidia cards do not have the right type of VGA sync signal I use the S-VIDEO TV out of my Nvidia card instead. If you run with TV out then select the native resolution of the pannel (320x240) as your TV res mode it is pixel perfect. Please could someone correct me if I am wrong about the touch screen functionailty of the Psone LCD screen?
...As I soon realized on 9/11. At the time I was a PhD student in a London University. The short hop to the London Internet exchange and bandwidth afforded to my office and Lab meant I had given up on analogue radio and TV and was using news web sites, real player news clips and streaming internet radio of major radio stations. When the disaster unfolded ALL of these technologies failed on me (news sites no longer loaded, streaming radio would not buffer) and I had to dust off the old radio discarded at the back of the lab to get any information as to what was happening. Do not underestimate the usefulness of the old radios.