Find out in advance if the power socket on the power suppy is detachable. If it is, buy a UK lead for it before you go out. If it isn't buy a UK power supply for it before you go out. Also bring a US->UK plug converter. Make a CD of any of the kind of software you'd normally have installed, plus a selection of your normal documents/family photos etc that you'd have on your computer.
After you've bought your laptop, install the software and copy over some of your documents. If possible swap the backdrop to a picture of your kids or Mum or something like that. Change the regional settings to match the UK.
Then throw away all the packaging, CDs US power lead etc before you leave the hotel. Just keep the kind of things you'd normally take with you on a trip.
When you go through UK customs, it's not that likely you'll be stopped. If you do get stopped, the UK power supply and the fact that you've got lots of crap installed already will make it look like you just took your laptop with you anyway.
The big difference is that you can already buy music online in Europe from Microsoft, whereas you can't from Apple. Unless this changes later this year, Microsoft will have an advantage.
You could always try a SonyEricsson T68i - for a mobile phone it's pretty old now, but:
a) It's fairly small b) It's got a good battery life c) It's got bluetooth and GPRS d) Okay, it's got a colour screen, but it's small and doesn't have a camera or anything e) They're really cheap and easy to get hold of nowadays
I have heard of people having reliability and speed problems with them, but mine's always been fast and rock solid, so I'm guessing it's something to do with the older firmware revisions or something.
As for bluetooth - it's true that you have to specially turn it on to being discoverable (which on the T68i only lasts for 3 minutes), however this doesn't matter once you've paired your BT headset with it.
Once the devices are paired, they should just work. I've had no problems with my T68i and a BT headset, and my Palmpilot connects to it fine as well.
What!? Console systems from the NES forwards have always had mediocre CPUs with graphics coprocessors to handle the majority of graphical work. It's really only been comparitively recently that PCs have started doing the same thing.
The PS2 isn't that much more coprocessor heavy than a current PC - although it does have two extra vector units, it lacks the GPU T&L 'coprocessor' of modern PCs.
The Sega Saturn was a dual processor machine, the PS2 was hardly unprecedented in the console world in having more than just a standard CPU and GPU.
That article has to go down in the hall of fame of utterly crap EDGE articles. (Hey - it's a *big* hall...)
The author demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about consoles, and many of the techniques he talks about are possible and in use on current-generation consoles.
The concept that until the PS2, consoles had merely been a subset of the wider PC industry is laughable.
No, it seems to me that basically after the recent editorial walkout at EDGE they had a guy with practically no technical knowledge about consoles who happened to know a guy who worked at Climax, and they were desperate for content, so he wrote this bullshit article.
Of course, as with all EDGE articles, they never identify the authour, which in his case, is probably good for him.
I think if Darpa didn't want people to equip their vehicles with maps they would have explicitly banned them. I'd be surprised if anybody is doing completely without maps. Sure, the CMU guys may have *better* maps than anyone else, but without a map how will you plan the route? (Consider here that the corridoor for the route may be several miles wide in some places - the corridoor could well have an impassible ravine or something similar in part of it - you'd need a little foreknowledge to know to avoid it - or risk wasting loads of time driving along the side looking for somewhere to cross)
The advantage of a GUI over a command-line tool is that once you've got used to the GUI system you can reuse that knowlegde when using other GUI software that you may not have seen before.
There is seldom much information I can reuse when moving from one CLI tool to another.
I think actually this is a reaction that shows Microsoft's disappointment that the games developers did not innovate more with microsoft's innovation (putting a hard drive in a console). Hardy any games used it, and I don't of any that used it in a particularly interesting way.
Considering the expense of including a hard drive, I'm not surprised that they are trying to see if they can leave it out next time, as nobody did much with it this time.
Well, my argument would fall apart if Microsoft were going to put 8GB memory cards into Xbox 2, but I don't think that's likely to happen. If they're looking at taking the hard drive out of the Xbox, they'll be much more likely to put either a small internal flash card (32Mb?) and have the option to buy larger external memory cards that slot in , or perhaps even not have an internal card at all.
Microsoft doesn't care about people putting other operating systems onto Xbox. It's not a big enough chunk of people to make any difference to them.
The main thing that will concern them is cost. Hard drives are big and expensive - the hard drive is probably the most expensive component in the Xbox. If they can get rid of it, it makes a lot more financial sense to them.
There is also the fact that the hard drive makes it easier to pirate games, but to be honest I don't think that's as big a problem as the sheer expense of it.
They've already got boxes playing tetris, solitaire and the like. I don't see why they shouldn't try and do something to compete with the other big players, after all they may be able to make a more expensive box and get the money back with the cable subscription fees, in much the same way that mobile phone handset manufacturers do at the moment.
Current console manufacturers do a similar thing, but have to make money off software licensing, which is a much less reliable source of income.
I'm sure it wouldn't be too tricky to put physical or electrical limits on the exoskeleton to prevent it from moving into a position that the human body can't. I seriously doubt it'd be a big problem.
I like the ponytail gaps in the headrests idea - very useful. However, I'd have thought the door folding upwards and outwards would be a right pain when you're parking in a car park and the bay isn't very wide - they'll be a lot harder to squeeze out of.
I don't think the amount of time I spend on a particular game has chaged a huge amount, actualy - modern games are much better at keeping me interested - the endless repetition of the older games tended to put me off after a while, and to be honest I finished very few of them.
Those older games were hard so that you couldn't complete them in half an hour. As result you had to continually play parts of it over and over again until you could complete them. Nowadays as games have much more content they can allow the player to progress faster as there is more game to get through.
In my opinion this is a Good Thing, I certainly don't believe that Harder == More Fun. This is why I like different difficulty levels - you can tailor the game to the way you like to play. Those with lots of time and few responsibilities are welcome to spend five hours every night on 'Bastard Hard' - however, with a wife and three kids I just don't have that kind of time to play levels over and over again until I can do them. If I play at 'Normal' or 'Easy' I can still progress in the game with only a few hours per week.
I wrote a program for my palmpilot that queried my mobile (a T68i) for it's current cell. I was going to make this into a program that would give me reminders based on my location, but I never got around to finishing it...
The big problem is finding a record of all the cell values and their locations - I never found one for my service (O2), although I was able to get a list of all the cells on the way to work, just by running the program.
The accuracy isn't great, although it gets better in central London. Near Oxford Street I was getting a new cell every 100 yards or so...
Th reality of extremist animal rights activism in the UK at the moment is that medical research using animals is under a serious threat due to the violent actions of the activists. A top UK university recently had to curtail its animal research due to the sheer cost of security that would be required to ensure the safety of its researchers.
There is currently a battle for the hearts and minds of the British public over animal testing. Unfortunately the non-animal-testing bunch are louder and have a ready stock of pictures of fluffy kittens with wires coming out of their heads. All those whose lives or reatives lives have been saved due to treatments that are the result of animal testing do not have the same kind of arresting image to get behind, and most do probably not even know that they would likely not be alive if not for animal testing.
Yes, the realits of animal testing is not always pleasant, but neither is a world in which your loved ones die of ailments that should be curable.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I suppose that's always an option.
Find out in advance if the power socket on the power suppy is detachable. If it is, buy a UK lead for it before you go out. If it isn't buy a UK power supply for it before you go out. Also bring a US->UK plug converter. Make a CD of any of the kind of software you'd normally have installed, plus a selection of your normal documents/family photos etc that you'd have on your computer.
After you've bought your laptop, install the software and copy over some of your documents. If possible swap the backdrop to a picture of your kids or Mum or something like that. Change the regional settings to match the UK.
Then throw away all the packaging, CDs US power lead etc before you leave the hotel. Just keep the kind of things you'd normally take with you on a trip.
When you go through UK customs, it's not that likely you'll be stopped. If you do get stopped, the UK power supply and the fact that you've got lots of crap installed already will make it look like you just took your laptop with you anyway.
Lovely.
Er. I didn't say that.
The big difference is that you can already buy music online in Europe from Microsoft, whereas you can't from Apple. Unless this changes later this year, Microsoft will have an advantage.
You could always try a SonyEricsson T68i - for a mobile phone it's pretty old now, but:
a) It's fairly small
b) It's got a good battery life
c) It's got bluetooth and GPRS
d) Okay, it's got a colour screen, but it's small and doesn't have a camera or anything
e) They're really cheap and easy to get hold of nowadays
I have heard of people having reliability and speed problems with them, but mine's always been fast and rock solid, so I'm guessing it's something to do with the older firmware revisions or something.
As for bluetooth - it's true that you have to specially turn it on to being discoverable (which on the T68i only lasts for 3 minutes), however this doesn't matter once you've paired your BT headset with it.
Once the devices are paired, they should just work. I've had no problems with my T68i and a BT headset, and my Palmpilot connects to it fine as well.
....his experiences are common to *most* products sold, regardless of underlying OS
I'd say that much of the time installing software for Linux is about an order of magnitude harder than it is on Windows...
> > this is likely to be a moot issue.
> I think you mean "mute". Moot isn't a word
Oh, perfect!
What!?
Console systems from the NES forwards have always had mediocre CPUs with graphics coprocessors to handle the majority of graphical work. It's really only been comparitively recently that PCs have started doing the same thing.
The PS2 isn't that much more coprocessor heavy than a current PC - although it does have two extra vector units, it lacks the GPU T&L 'coprocessor' of modern PCs.
The Sega Saturn was a dual processor machine, the PS2 was hardly unprecedented in the console world in having more than just a standard CPU and GPU.
That article has to go down in the hall of fame of utterly crap EDGE articles. (Hey - it's a *big* hall...)
The author demonstrates a complete lack of understanding about consoles, and many of the techniques he talks about are possible and in use on current-generation consoles.
The concept that until the PS2, consoles had merely been a subset of the wider PC industry is laughable.
No, it seems to me that basically after the recent editorial walkout at EDGE they had a guy with practically no technical knowledge about consoles who happened to know a guy who worked at Climax, and they were desperate for content, so he wrote this bullshit article.
Of course, as with all EDGE articles, they never identify the authour, which in his case, is probably good for him.
It's 256bytes!,
I think if Darpa didn't want people to equip their vehicles with maps they would have explicitly banned them. I'd be surprised if anybody is doing completely without maps. Sure, the CMU guys may have *better* maps than anyone else, but without a map how will you plan the route? (Consider here that the corridoor for the route may be several miles wide in some places - the corridoor could well have an impassible ravine or something similar in part of it - you'd need a little foreknowledge to know to avoid it - or risk wasting loads of time driving along the side looking for somewhere to cross)
The advantage of a GUI over a command-line tool is that once you've got used to the GUI system you can reuse that knowlegde when using other GUI software that you may not have seen before.
There is seldom much information I can reuse when moving from one CLI tool to another.
I think actually this is a reaction that shows Microsoft's disappointment that the games developers did not innovate more with microsoft's innovation (putting a hard drive in a console). Hardy any games used it, and I don't of any that used it in a particularly interesting way.
Considering the expense of including a hard drive, I'm not surprised that they are trying to see if they can leave it out next time, as nobody did much with it this time.
Someone needs to give the Viacom/MTV management a slap.
GROW THE FUCK UP!
Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if maybe they're going for some form of encrypted storage or something like that.
Well, my argument would fall apart if Microsoft were going to put 8GB memory cards into Xbox 2, but I don't think that's likely to happen. If they're looking at taking the hard drive out of the Xbox, they'll be much more likely to put either a small internal flash card (32Mb?) and have the option to buy larger external memory cards that slot in , or perhaps even not have an internal card at all.
Microsoft doesn't care about people putting other operating systems onto Xbox. It's not a big enough chunk of people to make any difference to them.
The main thing that will concern them is cost. Hard drives are big and expensive - the hard drive is probably the most expensive component in the Xbox. If they can get rid of it, it makes a lot more financial sense to them.
There is also the fact that the hard drive makes it easier to pirate games, but to be honest I don't think that's as big a problem as the sheer expense of it.
They've already got boxes playing tetris, solitaire and the like. I don't see why they shouldn't try and do something to compete with the other big players, after all they may be able to make a more expensive box and get the money back with the cable subscription fees, in much the same way that mobile phone handset manufacturers do at the moment.
Current console manufacturers do a similar thing, but have to make money off software licensing, which is a much less reliable source of income.
I'm sure it wouldn't be too tricky to put physical or electrical limits on the exoskeleton to prevent it from moving into a position that the human body can't. I seriously doubt it'd be a big problem.
I like the ponytail gaps in the headrests idea - very useful. However, I'd have thought the door folding upwards and outwards would be a right pain when you're parking in a car park and the bay isn't very wide - they'll be a lot harder to squeeze out of.
That's 7.3Kg, for those of us metrically inclined.
I don't think the amount of time I spend on a particular game has chaged a huge amount, actualy - modern games are much better at keeping me interested - the endless repetition of the older games tended to put me off after a while, and to be honest I finished very few of them.
Those older games were hard so that you couldn't complete them in half an hour. As result you had to continually play parts of it over and over again until you could complete them. Nowadays as games have much more content they can allow the player to progress faster as there is more game to get through.
In my opinion this is a Good Thing, I certainly don't believe that Harder == More Fun. This is why I like different difficulty levels - you can tailor the game to the way you like to play. Those with lots of time and few responsibilities are welcome to spend five hours every night on 'Bastard Hard' - however, with a wife and three kids I just don't have that kind of time to play levels over and over again until I can do them. If I play at 'Normal' or 'Easy' I can still progress in the game with only a few hours per week.
Out of interest, how much of Eric Raymond make out of OS/Free software?
I mean, if he's having to supplement his income with speaking engagements and book sales, what chance has someone rather less well known have?
I wrote a program for my palmpilot that queried my mobile (a T68i) for it's current cell. I was going to make this into a program that would give me reminders based on my location, but I never got around to finishing it...
The big problem is finding a record of all the cell values and their locations - I never found one for my service (O2), although I was able to get a list of all the cells on the way to work, just by running the program.
The accuracy isn't great, although it gets better in central London. Near Oxford Street I was getting a new cell every 100 yards or so...
Th reality of extremist animal rights activism in the UK at the moment is that medical research using animals is under a serious threat due to the violent actions of the activists. A top UK university recently had to curtail its animal research due to the sheer cost of security that would be required to ensure the safety of its researchers.
There is currently a battle for the hearts and minds of the British public over animal testing. Unfortunately the non-animal-testing bunch are louder and have a ready stock of pictures of fluffy kittens with wires coming out of their heads. All those whose lives or reatives lives have been saved due to treatments that are the result of animal testing do not have the same kind of arresting image to get behind, and most do probably not even know that they would likely not be alive if not for animal testing.
Yes, the realits of animal testing is not always pleasant, but neither is a world in which your loved ones die of ailments that should be curable.