There's a bit of a cultural divide here. I understand SMS never really took off in the US the way it has in the UK & Europe where many people send dozens a day. I know teens who send hundreds a day. For lots of people that's the only thing they use their phones for. I certainly have an SMS to 'voice call' ratio of about 10:1.
>And why do we care about some e-penis benchmark?
Agreed. Back in the day when overclocking or m/board chipsets made a tangible difference in a world where PC power trailed software requirements, benchmarks were a useful way of ensuring you were wringing the max out of your hardware. These days, almost everything is fast enough and unless you're playing frame rate willy waving on Crysis or whatever, it's really of no real interest. The broad brush approaches of CPU speed and/or number of CPUs are all you need to worry about e.g. Word processing/Internet stuff? Anything will do. Video work? fast CPU/twin/quad CPU. Games? Max it all out. worrying about if an AMD X2 6000 beats an Intel Core Duo2 whatever is really no longer of any real value.
It's a 3+ year old benchmark being let loose on 2008 vintage CPU's and making mistakes on it's optimisations. I wouldn't expect anything else. It's going to have a 3 year old view on the kind of things these CPUs can do and will act accordingly.
These days, I rarely download music BUT I'd sign up for a service that provided copies of older/rarer stuff. Having been a serious buyer of vinyl back in the day with all the coloured vinyl, remixes, 12inch singles, gatefold double packs etc., I love collecting, especially unusual stuff.
Most of the downloading I've done has been things ripped from vinyl by others or simply unavailable elsewhere (got a few albums of 'premixes' i.e. albums before the final version, work in progress cuts etc). I can't imagine many artists happy with officially making those available but if any would, I'd pay. Equally, it's frustrating, especially to fans of particular artists when a rare mix or limited edition can't be tracked down at any price - it's things like that that I start looking for although since the demise of Napster and the increase in torrents, I find it much harder finding anything of interest outside the usual well known artists and mixes, all the really interesting stuff has just dropped of the radar, unless I'm looking in the wrong places or using the wrong P2P networks/clients.
On the downside, it would kill the used record market somewhat if it was easy to get hold of rarer stuff in digital form but then many collectors will still pay $200 or whatever for a real copy of album x even when MP3s are available and collecting has always been up and down anyway. I've got 12inch singles that used to exchange hands for £500+ but now are worth maybe £50-60 assuming you could find a buyer at all.
Bottom line is, if a service started tomorrow that had *everything* by *everyone* available (fantasy mode here), I'd happily pay $1 a track/$40 a month to have access to that.
>I have no problem with the US extraditing criminals back the the UK
Which is lovely of you but it's your government who are being difficult in this, not you.
>Please tell me how this treaty is one sided
Because the UK adheres to it yet the US has yet to send a single citizen to the UK despite many, many attempts?
>He should have been prosecuted in the UK.
Except what he did wasn't illegal in the UK at the time. He was also leant on very heavily by the US authorities who said he'd get taken to the cleaners as a terrorist unless he complied and went to them voluntarily for trial. Not a nice way to do business when you're not used to plea bargaining like we are in the UK.
And it gets worse, it goes on to a second article about a UFO sighting in 'England' then go on to say it was seen in Wales. That's two different countries you dumb f*cks.
>still nominally under the rule of the Queen of england right?
Well, apart from there being no such person as the 'Queen of England' and her role being purely symbolic with day to day 'ruling' done by the government, you're spot on.
>The British Empire is...
Rather smaller than it was as part of the deal America made with us post WW2 to avoind bankruptcy was to break up the Empire.
I'm in London I can't find anyone who supports it! I'm sure they're out there somewherebut not in my circle of aquaintences - probably the Daily Mail readers who are easily whipped up into a frenzy of knee-jerking.
We keep being told there is overwhelming public support for this but I'm yet to meet anyone who thinks it's a good idea. I'd like to know *exactly* wat the question was the government asked that go such a high support rate. I'm guessing based on previous ones they'e weasled their way with it was "Would you support 42 days if we could guarantee your safety from all future attacks and promise only to detain proper terrorists not innocent people?'
The question that showed people apparantly supporting the ID card was along the same lines.
Ah, good old Rob Northern - I remember checking the boot sectors for their various little tricks and messages. Wonder what he does now - more of the same?
Another horrible one was Lotus 123 for DOS, mainly earlier versions. That used to write to the master floppy when it installed to track where it had been installed. When you wanted to put it on another PC you had to uninstall it first and that would restore the master floppy ready for reinstalling elsewhere. It also wrote something nasty to the HD - an unmoveable file of some sort ISTR which probably made life interesting for defraggers.
Yeah, I remember all that, especially tugging the floppy during the bad sector write. Of course, stuff like the Happy board, 1050 Duplicator etc made it a lot easier copying 8bit Atari games.
Back then it was more about collecting titles than anything and people would try and out do each other on numbs 'hey, I've got 400 floppies full of games!' etc. The few games I actually played were the ones I bought, partly out of bloody mindedness i.e. having payed GBP35 for a game I was damn well going to get 35 worth of game no matter how bad it was, especially when it took 20 mins to load off a tape. The other thing was I always felt guilty enough to cough up for a game I really got some use of - Infocoms, Defender, Dig Dug, Archon etc.
Oh I remember those two. Nasty. Another one was the donglefor leaderboard golf. On the Atari 800 you had to put it in the second joystick port to play. It was a sealed epoxy resined thing so no way to get in without destroying it's secrets.
Anyhow, I wrote the worlds shorted Atari Basic program i.e. print stick(1) which displayed what the joystick port was seeing and all it was was up and down simultanously so I bought a joysick connector shell, wired the two lines up and voila - it worked just fine:-)
World's lamest copy protection, basically.
Badly researched, inaccurate...
It misses out on huge chunks of anti-piracy techniques, introduces stuff like it was new ten years after it was first used and asfor 'typing programs into DOS' - WTF?
This has to be one of the worst articles a slashdot story has linked to for some time.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a bit of a cultural divide here. I understand SMS never really took off in the US the way it has in the UK & Europe where many people send dozens a day. I know teens who send hundreds a day. For lots of people that's the only thing they use their phones for. I certainly have an SMS to 'voice call' ratio of about 10:1.
>I would assume their ads are text these days...
Why on earth is this marked flamebait?
Writes an (anonymous) Intel representative.
>And why do we care about some e-penis benchmark?
Agreed. Back in the day when overclocking or m/board chipsets made a tangible difference in a world where PC power trailed software requirements, benchmarks were a useful way of ensuring you were wringing the max out of your hardware. These days, almost everything is fast enough and unless you're playing frame rate willy waving on Crysis or whatever, it's really of no real interest. The broad brush approaches of CPU speed and/or number of CPUs are all you need to worry about e.g. Word processing/Internet stuff? Anything will do. Video work? fast CPU/twin/quad CPU. Games? Max it all out. worrying about if an AMD X2 6000 beats an Intel Core Duo2 whatever is really no longer of any real value.
It's a 3+ year old benchmark being let loose on 2008 vintage CPU's and making mistakes on it's optimisations. I wouldn't expect anything else. It's going to have a 3 year old view on the kind of things these CPUs can do and will act accordingly.
These days, I rarely download music BUT I'd sign up for a service that provided copies of older/rarer stuff. Having been a serious buyer of vinyl back in the day with all the coloured vinyl, remixes, 12inch singles, gatefold double packs etc., I love collecting, especially unusual stuff.
Most of the downloading I've done has been things ripped from vinyl by others or simply unavailable elsewhere (got a few albums of 'premixes' i.e. albums before the final version, work in progress cuts etc). I can't imagine many artists happy with officially making those available but if any would, I'd pay. Equally, it's frustrating, especially to fans of particular artists when a rare mix or limited edition can't be tracked down at any price - it's things like that that I start looking for although since the demise of Napster and the increase in torrents, I find it much harder finding anything of interest outside the usual well known artists and mixes, all the really interesting stuff has just dropped of the radar, unless I'm looking in the wrong places or using the wrong P2P networks/clients.
On the downside, it would kill the used record market somewhat if it was easy to get hold of rarer stuff in digital form but then many collectors will still pay $200 or whatever for a real copy of album x even when MP3s are available and collecting has always been up and down anyway. I've got 12inch singles that used to exchange hands for £500+ but now are worth maybe £50-60 assuming you could find a buyer at all.
Bottom line is, if a service started tomorrow that had *everything* by *everyone* available (fantasy mode here), I'd happily pay $1 a track/$40 a month to have access to that.
>It's clearly X-Com
Nah, Gerry Anderson's UFO - Skydiver and the Interceptors looked way cooler than this odd looking ship.
There was a film back during the 'the commies are under the bed!' phase about communist aliens from Mars that might have inspired this?
>I have no problem with the US extraditing criminals back the the UK
Which is lovely of you but it's your government who are being difficult in this, not you.
>Please tell me how this treaty is one sided
Because the UK adheres to it yet the US has yet to send a single citizen to the UK despite many, many attempts?
>He should have been prosecuted in the UK.
Except what he did wasn't illegal in the UK at the time. He was also leant on very heavily by the US authorities who said he'd get taken to the cleaners as a terrorist unless he complied and went to them voluntarily for trial. Not a nice way to do business when you're not used to plea bargaining like we are in the UK.
>Ferris core? Is the memory arranged in a big wheel
No, it's named after Ferris Bueller - inventor, teen-hero and all round great guy.
And it gets worse, it goes on to a second article about a UFO sighting in 'England' then go on to say it was seen in Wales. That's two different countries you dumb f*cks.
(FX: Check notes)
You can take off, fly at 6 times the speed of sound *and* come back again?
Fantastic, it come back?
>still nominally under the rule of the Queen of england right?
Well, apart from there being no such person as the 'Queen of England' and her role being purely symbolic with day to day 'ruling' done by the government, you're spot on.
>The British Empire is...
Rather smaller than it was as part of the deal America made with us post WW2 to avoind bankruptcy was to break up the Empire.
I'm in London I can't find anyone who supports it! I'm sure they're out there somewherebut not in my circle of aquaintences - probably the Daily Mail readers who are easily whipped up into a frenzy of knee-jerking.
We keep being told there is overwhelming public support for this but I'm yet to meet anyone who thinks it's a good idea. I'd like to know *exactly* wat the question was the government asked that go such a high support rate. I'm guessing based on previous ones they'e weasled their way with it was "Would you support 42 days if we could guarantee your safety from all future attacks and promise only to detain proper terrorists not innocent people?'
The question that showed people apparantly supporting the ID card was along the same lines.
Ah, good old Rob Northern - I remember checking the boot sectors for their various little tricks and messages. Wonder what he does now - more of the same?
>I did that, only it was for the ST
Now you mention it, it was Leaderboard on the ST, I just used the 800 to read the dongle as it was easier.
Another horrible one was Lotus 123 for DOS, mainly earlier versions. That used to write to the master floppy when it installed to track where it had been installed. When you wanted to put it on another PC you had to uninstall it first and that would restore the master floppy ready for reinstalling elsewhere. It also wrote something nasty to the HD - an unmoveable file of some sort ISTR which probably made life interesting for defraggers.
Yeah, I remember all that, especially tugging the floppy during the bad sector write. Of course, stuff like the Happy board, 1050 Duplicator etc made it a lot easier copying 8bit Atari games.
Back then it was more about collecting titles than anything and people would try and out do each other on numbs 'hey, I've got 400 floppies full of games!' etc. The few games I actually played were the ones I bought, partly out of bloody mindedness i.e. having payed GBP35 for a game I was damn well going to get 35 worth of game no matter how bad it was, especially when it took 20 mins to load off a tape. The other thing was I always felt guilty enough to cough up for a game I really got some use of - Infocoms, Defender, Dig Dug, Archon etc.
Oh I remember those two. Nasty. Another one was the donglefor leaderboard golf. On the Atari 800 you had to put it in the second joystick port to play. It was a sealed epoxy resined thing so no way to get in without destroying it's secrets. :-)
Anyhow, I wrote the worlds shorted Atari Basic program i.e. print stick(1) which displayed what the joystick port was seeing and all it was was up and down simultanously so I bought a joysick connector shell, wired the two lines up and voila - it worked just fine
World's lamest copy protection, basically.
Badly researched, inaccurate...
It misses out on huge chunks of anti-piracy techniques, introduces stuff like it was new ten years after it was first used and asfor 'typing programs into DOS' - WTF?
This has to be one of the worst articles a slashdot story has linked to for some time.
Macs have no bugs, everyone knows that. This is just scaremongering by the Windows crowd. Yep, that'll be it.