moonlit

Actually, they're both pretty different, both from a gameplay angle and a storyline angle. See, Sonic's "thing" is that he's fast, Mario definitely isn't, and while Sonic can jump it's definitely not his forté, Mario on the other hand is known for pretty much only jumping. Sonic never had weapons either, Mario could fire things at enemies. Storyline-wise, Sonic was a natural creature which hated Robotnik's relentless technical attempts to rule, Mario's storyline has quite the reverse, Mario is the human rather then Bowser, and Mario's motivation is rescuing Peach. Personally I favour Sonic, I was a Sega kid, but Mario has his moments too. The 2D games mostly rule over their 3D offspring, though, on both sides of the console coin. Except maybe Sonic Adventure and Mario 64, those were alright. Edit: As for who copied who, Mario came first (about 10 years previous to Sonic's arrival) and I don't think Sega necessarily copied them, but I do think they realised they needed a mascot to counter Nintendo's Mario. Whether either of them were designed to be mascots I don't know, but clearly they ended up that way, and likely for the better in both cases, both are very well recognised and extremely popular characters/game series.

Most people don't know what a chipset is let alone care which one it has, I don't think it's a particularly big deal. For $99 I'm sure someone could put it to use, it's not entirely pointless, it's enough to play video, listen to music, browse the web, it could also make an overpowered digital photo frame, remote access terminal or, given a touchscreen overlay, a home automation console.

Not so, I'm afraid, the DS doesn't run on an x86 CPU which WINE requires. Throw in a chunk of QEMU or something and you might be in business, but natively? No chance.

Basically, from the week beginning 13th December, all sales of that particular single will result in its place in the charts, I'm guessing that since the physical CD isn't currently being sold it wouldn't count, so download it is. Where exactly counts I don't quite know, but I imagine Amazon and iTunes would be among those which do. Another point though is that it will only count if it's purchased from a UK vendor.

I wouldn't say this is a "raid", people are just getting a bit bored with the same old poppy guaranteed certain number one hit from some guy (or girl) who got there on nothing but a (allegedly rigged) phone vote on some really quite dull TV show. I can understand both sides of the argument, for example it's fairly likely that whichever record you buy Cowell will get a cut somehow, and he might well be right in saying that it does more damage to the "contestants" than him, but on the other hand I can see why people would want to upset that with a track which means a lot to a lot of people, something with feeling and energy, not just another crap cover or weak attempt to make a quick buck on the number one christmas single for yet another year running.

A Facebook group (hear me out) is aiming to keep contestents of the X-Factor "talent" show off the charts in the UK this Christmas by running up the numbers for Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name in the download charts this festive season. Simon Cowell is quoted as saying it's "stupid" and "cynical". I say it's an appropriate cheap, easy, legal way of proving a point. Will anyone listen? That's another matter, but it's hardly worthy of a physical protest. Guardian article. NME article against and NME article in support.

The black and white issue is usually a driver thing, I've had the problem myself in the past, there's settings (for example) in nVidia's control panel to switch between PAL/NTSC and S-Video/Composite output, and tweaking those (basically flipping between each setting in turn) will generally get you what you're looking for: a stable, clear, colour image.

General hackery, some interesting radio stuff, hardware, software, console hacking (not piracy, fiddling with memory addresses and such), a little of everything really. Shame, I never really had anything to submit, though I considered it, a great show though, very informative.

If it has svideo then you can use an svideo to composite adapter cable (couple of bucks, if it doesn't come with the card) and an RCA male to male cable which deals with the yellow socket on the TV. The red and white must come from your sound card, for which you need a 3.5mm stereo to male RCA cable, this is the red and white. No need for any complicated converters this way. Composite, as it happens, is actually svideo crammed into a single pair of wires (signal and ground), which is why it's reasonably easy to convert. If it's DVI, you'll need a scan converter, which is more expensive, will need its own power, and may not be the best quality in the world. I'd recommend getting a card with svideo out, it'll save you a lot of money. Svideo male to composite RCA female: Composite RCA male to RCA male: (Doesn't have to be yellow, as long as the plugs are the same, you can use half a red/white cable to do the same job.) 3.5mm stereo male to RCA male: If you want to connect your sound to PC speakers or a seperate amplifyer as well as the TV, you'll want one of these too, but it's not necessary if you only need sound from the TV: (3.5mm stereo splitter or Y cable, male to dual female.)

http://www.youtube.com/user/LitBGA

While the host's network card is wifi, the guest sees it as a wired ethernet card (as with all virtualisation networking, the virtualised OS doesn't see exactly what's in the outside world most of the time, just that there is some kind of network). The way to do it properly is to hook up a wireless card/stick via USB and attach it to the VM that way, then the guest OS can see the wifi card as what it is, not what it's told it is. YMMV with VirtualBox's USB support though, it's very tricky to make it work properly... while I am very much a VirtualBox fan, VMWare Player has much better USB support, and can now create new VMs, should be the the job.

Ahh, that's good to know, all the other VMWare products, though type 2 virtualisers, can access drives as normal, regardless of FS. I should really look at some of that enterprise stuff at some point.

Wot? No ? Those Scandinavians know how to enjoy life.

Exactly the same as a regular HDD but with a different kind of cable connecting it to the machine. In fact, if you were to take it apart, you'd see a small board plugged into a regular (probably SATA) internal HDD.

Then let the sin begin! ... I feel like there should be a screaming guitar kicking in right about now. Some mental drum intro too. I'm not cut out for all this Christian stuff.

RealAlternative is a compatible codec, anything which uses dshow codecs should be able to use it to transcode.

Nothing wrong with any of those. Typewriters work when the power and net is out, 30 year old laptops have a lot of retro charm (and they're good for building muscle), and Psions were actually good once. Incidentally, I recommend one of these: Amstrad PPC512 / Wiki

I'd say we should sticky one of these "which laptop?" threads, but there's only one thing it'd say: think about your requirements, choose appropriately.

VMWare can use physical drives as virtual ones, so you should be able to map it to a VM and read it as if the VM were native.

Holy crap, it's Cooper! I mean... yeah, personally I wouldn't worry too much about the RAM, but if I did then I'd probably buy performance RAM and underclock and undervolt it. If it's reasonably power efficient running at full tilt then you'd probably expect it to consume even less when it's not being stressed. If my theory is broken, do feel free to correct me, but it seems logical to me.

Why didn't I think of that? Doh. Good idea though.

If you look at a PC fan sideways you'll see that there's a gap between the bit that spins and the frame, you can't really make that waterproof, doing so would stop the fan spinning.

I think you coul probably run those fans underwater without modifying them, but a couple of things to note would be potential rusting and the fact that they're not designed to push water and don't have masses of torque, so they might not perform that well. I wouldn't recommend getting a PC PSU involved, though, there's a lot of juice in one of those, batteries would probably be fine, though.

As rtc443 said, you could replace the 9v battery with a 4 pin molex connector. Red is 5v, Yellow is 12v, black is ground. You could, however, use your design as a fan for yourself in the summer months, I often rig up a couple of case fans on a 12v power brick to prop on my desk and cool me down when it gets a little too warm, real simple, real quick, real useful.

What, like this one?