Slashdot Mirror

Hmm.. Well if I can get someone to pay me for a service or product that they feel is important in their life, whose fault is that - The customer, the seller, or 'society'..

I dont think there is a direct link from technology to consumption/leased life, other than technology used to drive the consumptive desire that has always been there..

I for one just sold a depeeled banana online (seriously) from my website, so I must say I'm feeling pretty good about capitalism.. For every doubt there is a product -god bless the market economy.
-

My brother is a project manager for a Game Developer- he just had a meeting with the "evil empire" last week to pitch a project for the Xbox- It sounds like they have some definate advantages. Apparently the PS2 is *not nice* to develop for, and they have a ways to go before the games will live up to all the hype- One of the major problems is that (apparently) PS2 has NO antialiasing capability.. I find this hard to believe, but from what he was saying a lot of the PS2 stuff looked "worse" than the dreamcast. If this is the case, the PS2 may not be the console champ it looked like it would be.

Since the Xbox is just a PC box, MS has a lot of muscle to get PC games ported (very simple) to the Xbox as well as creating new games, and Dreamcast now has the Playstation emulator, so there goes the backwards compatibility argument for the PS2. Apparently no console has maintained market lead when jumping to next generation - it'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out.
-

I've filed a defensive patent covering certain methods of 'surfing' information using a 'mouse'- and certain methods of retrieving information from a collection of printed papers arranged in a bundle with easily flippable 'pages'.. You are currently infringing on said patent by 'browsing' information on slashdot. Please adjust your current habits, and send a check post-haste to avoid further legal problems.
-

It's true I saw it online.
-

I've got a proposal to make the net safe.. Although it may run against the current US proposal.. One of the key points is the transfer of responsibility from Janet Reno to an agency with more understanding of net technology, such as the National Dairy Council..
-

It is my understanding that the Dreamcast does not contain a traditional OS in a ROM, but rather, loads the OS and drivers at boot time. you can check it out at this old page I found The point is, any OS can be used for development, a game can ship with the latest drivers, etc.

I just thought I'd clear up some misconceptions about the Dreamcast. First off, there is a website that has technical information on the DC Dreamcast Technical Pages 1) The modem on the Dreamcast is modular. Plans for expansion include a Zip drive and ethernet card(for cable modems). The port itself is rated at 50 MB/s(16-bits x 25 MHz) The serial port on the back is rated at 2 Mbits/s which is the same as the 4 controller ports on the front. Also, the Zip drive has a USB port. 2)OS. Developers for the Dreamcast have 2 choices for OS: the Sega OS and the WinCE Dragon OS. The footprint of the WinCE , with every module(including communiocations) is 1.2MB. The WinCE allows for easy(ier) PC ports. The Sega OS has a smaller footprint and allows for a closer to the metal programming. The company that has developed Sega's Modem and is working with Sega currently in Japan developing the high speed ethernet expansion(10 base T). TriSignal A game called Virtual On 2 is coming out in Japan that is said to take advantage of the mode for online play, direct dial, and lan play. That's all for now, if you have questions, just ask. -Dean

There is a project under way which is porting Openbsd to the hitachi's sh4 processor, which is used by the dreamcast. The Effort is concentrated here and on the mailing list(see above link). There is also a nice technical info page for those interested in Dreamcast Specs here.
--Isaac