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Presumably, most people here have a fair familiarity with the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) phenomenon, but here's a rundown of the major products out there from my bookmarks, for anyone who's interested but not wholly informed. Feel free to correct any of this if my understanding of any of these games is in any way flawed:

Anarchy Online
Asheron's Call
Dark Age of Camelot
Everquest
Shadowbane (just released - very buggy)
A Tale in the Desert
Ultima Online

Horizons
Eve Online (final beta - close to release)
City of Heroes
Dragon Empires (in beta)
Everquest 2 (in development)
Lineage II (in development)
Star Wars Galaxies (closed beta)
Imperator (very early development)
World of Warcraft (very early development)

Most of these games don't release specific subscriber base numbers. However, a series of very good guesses is compiled here.

Presumably, most people here have a fair familiarity with the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) phenomenon, but here's a rundown of the major products out there from my bookmarks, for anyone who's interested but not wholly informed. Feel free to correct any of this if my understanding of any of these games is in any way flawed:

Anarchy Online
Asheron's Call
Dark Age of Camelot
Everquest
Shadowbane (just released - very buggy)
A Tale in the Desert
Ultima Online

Horizons
Eve Online (final beta - close to release)
City of Heroes
Dragon Empires (in beta)
Everquest 2 (in development)
Lineage II (in development)
Star Wars Galaxies (closed beta)
Imperator (very early development)
World of Warcraft (very early development)

Most of these games don't release specific subscriber base numbers. However, a series of very good guesses is compiled here.

Presumably, most people here have a fair familiarity with the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) phenomenon, but here's a rundown of the major products out there from my bookmarks, for anyone who's interested but not wholly informed. Feel free to correct any of this if my understanding of any of these games is in any way flawed:

Anarchy Online
Asheron's Call
Dark Age of Camelot
Everquest
Shadowbane (just released - very buggy)
A Tale in the Desert
Ultima Online

Horizons
Eve Online (final beta - close to release)
City of Heroes
Dragon Empires (in beta)
Everquest 2 (in development)
Lineage II (in development)
Star Wars Galaxies (closed beta)
Imperator (very early development)
World of Warcraft (very early development)

Most of these games don't release specific subscriber base numbers. However, a series of very good guesses is compiled here.

Yes. Honestly, the lines are very small, and the trinitron display is far better than any other crt technology. I usually don't see the lines unless I just happen upon them, or am looking for them. I usually tune them out. Of course now they are obvious to me again because this thread reminded me they are there, but I am sure they will disappear again soon. :)

Essentially your choices if you want a good display are to either take the trinitron and deal with the lines, or take the lcd and deal with the resolution limitations (LCD screens display best at their native resolution, which is directly related to the number of physical pixels in the display) and blurring (as described elsewhere in this article, a function of the refresh rate / memory effects in the pixels). Oh and the LCD is lighter. But this is human technology, it is not meant to be perfect.

I used to own a giant Sony monitor, a GDM-1936. Heavy-as! 32kg according to the manual. Anyway, as it was the only monitor I owned at the time and I wanted to go to a LAN party I was carrying it down two flights of stairs. I got down the first flight ok and the second flight was just 3 little concrete stairs. I lost my balance, droppd the monitor and fell into it with my face. Cut up my mouth really bad, blood everywhere. I still wanted to go to the LAN though, so I got up, kicked the monitor, got in my car (the rest of my gear was already loaded), drove to the closest computer store, tried to explain what I was looking for but the blood was making it difficult to talk, so I pointed to some el-cheapo flat 17" thing (Velta was the brand name, no finer make than Velta!), bought it and carried on to the LAN. Still use that monitor and that was 4 years ago. Research, smeasearch. It turned out to be a pretty good monitor.

sony's site has a number you can call. i would post a link here, but i'm at work and sony's site is blocked, so i wouldnt be able to do anything better than www.sony.com.
my contempt for the internet filters at my place of work are to be saved for a completely different discussion...

Actually this is a great idea. I mean, the VAIO thing seems unlikely. There is also a media center PC with minidisc, but it retails at 2999, so I won't even bother providing a link.

However, I have a friend that just bought a Sony MiniDisc/MP3 player from Best Buy. Incidentally, it was $129, less than half the price listed here. I am not entirely sure it was the same model, but I think it is. I have no reason for the price discrepancy.

In any case, if you were not set on the medium (optical vs. minidisc), this might suit your purposes. You could disassemble this and make it smaller, though it is pretty damn small as it is. You were unclear in your post whether your desire is just to prove that you can hack an MP3 player together, or whether you were trying to save money, but $129 is pretty darn cheap. If it is missing the features you want, you could buy this and hack those in. A bigger LCD would be nice. Also, there is this, a computer MiniDisc drive. It might help you with construction/experimentation, or even using this device in your ultimate invention.

The cons as I see them are that you are tied down to a proprietary, closed-source medium. It is relatively popular, but not ubiquitous (like CDR).

The pros: it's cheap. It's easy. It's small.

Good Luck. -Foster

Normally, if one takes a picture of something, you did the work, you own the copyright. (Simple enough.) However, for some reason, Connecticut has sold the rights to images of everything inside the mansion, and the staff have to waste their time trying to make sure people don't bring cameras in. Ridiculous.

With the increasing ubiquity of digital cameras, cameras in phones, cameras in PDAs, cameras in watches, cameras "in" people... where do you draw the line? Can you even draw a line?

If I remember correctly, Steve Mann was allowd to use his body-mounted computers while taking tests at MIT. The reasoning was -- since he never took the stuff off -- that it was just another part of his body. I wonder what would happen if he tried to enter Gillette Castle...?

(Though I haven't visited, I believe that Biltmore has the same no-camera rule for the same reason...)

It's all about greed... when people realize all this greed is hurting the common good, things will change. Problem is, the greedy ones are busy trying to convince us we're all "better off this way."

Riiight.

The Sony memory sticks are becoming more prolific with Sony products, so just about anything you get nowadays has some form of MS port, even the VEGA tvs.

Also Sony has liscensed out over 100 MFs to create memory stick media, as well as products to support them. HP for example has printers which support MS media, and I expect more soon.

As for more on new MS and size...

http://news.sel.sony.com/pressrelease/3200

http://news.sel.sony.com/digitalimages/album?album _id=139480

I use MS to replace my clunky old Zips and floppies, as well as the usual use of digital media and CLIE backups. They work for damn near anything you need. Was even nice back at an old LUG meeting to see them get the PCMCIA Memory Stick reader working without skipping a beat.

The Sony memory sticks are becoming more prolific with Sony products, so just about anything you get nowadays has some form of MS port, even the VEGA tvs.

Also Sony has liscensed out over 100 MFs to create memory stick media, as well as products to support them. HP for example has printers which support MS media, and I expect more soon.

As for more on new MS and size...

http://news.sel.sony.com/pressrelease/3200

http://news.sel.sony.com/digitalimages/album?album _id=139480

I use MS to replace my clunky old Zips and floppies, as well as the usual use of digital media and CLIE backups. They work for damn near anything you need. Was even nice back at an old LUG meeting to see them get the PCMCIA Memory Stick reader working without skipping a beat.

FW-900

The .vbs viruses... they seem to have come from Columbia. A look at the source of one of them reveals
rem "Plan Colombia" virus v1.0

As a Columbia student, Columbia resident, Columbia wearer, Columbia listener, Columbia purchaser, and Colombia consumer -- and as an American, patriot, and staunch promoter of all that is good and right in this world -- I beg you to kindly note the small, but significant, difference between Columbia and Colombia.

Think of the children! Otherwise, the terrorists have already won.

Thank you.

The .vbs viruses... they seem to have come from Columbia. A look at the source of one of them reveals
rem "Plan Colombia" virus v1.0

As a Columbia student, Columbia resident, Columbia wearer, Columbia listener, Columbia purchaser, and Colombia consumer -- and as an American, patriot, and staunch promoter of all that is good and right in this world -- I beg you to kindly note the small, but significant, difference between Columbia and Colombia.

Think of the children! Otherwise, the terrorists have already won.

Thank you.

Most people I see playing online shoot-em-ups are too busy fragging their opponents to bother taking their hands from the cursor keys (or whatever they use for direction and fire) to use the keyboard; that would reduce their kill rate.

I've noticed that the foul language in online games is directly proportional to the pace of the game. As an example, Sony makes an online tank game called Tanarus that has several variations, some faster than others. In the slower game there's some expletives, but not a lot. In the faster game, the language is unbelieveable, because, while the pace is alot faster, it's still a tank game and therefore allows for typed messages between melees while your tank is cruising away or you're respawning in your base.

The reason we don't see worse language in Q3A, I believe, is that there simply isn't enough time to talk AND play.

Not to start a flame war or anysuch mayhem, but honestly I don't see this game or the always mentioned Star Wars Galaxies game getting too far.
Both these games will get great intial turnout, I would expect, simply due to the already successful marketing of their names. But beyond that they have relatively little to offer.

For my money, a game like ShadowBane (also from UbiSoft) will truly rock the market and gain players that will stick. As will Planetside , the first first-person shooter MMOG, at least that I know of.

At least these companies have their bases covered. When Myst dies a silent death UbiSoft will be sitting pretty atop the cash cow that ShadowBane will become, and Sony will keep things running with Planetside and of course the neverending run of EQ.

and that people really are dumb enough to pay upfront for the device, and pay ongoing amounts for the functionality

You must not have heard of this little game called Everquest.

I've been waiting around for Horizons for quite some time. At least the beta is seeing some light of day recently. But it sure doesn't beat the long awaited Sovereign that I believe was announced sometime after Everquest was launched...Everquest!

Here's why:

I would expect Sony's stock price to have plummeted and investors would be made aware (no evidence on Yahoo Biz).

I would expect that Sony's website would mention this issue (here's the press release site for the Playstation http://us.playstation.com/news/PressReleases/ and Sony's official press release site) Note the lack of this story.

Google turns up no results either.

Don't post stories like this without checking them.

And as a clickable link....

So now my $8k multi-channel wireless microphone system (UHF 66-68) will be shut down by someone setting up the latest-and-greatest 44Mbps wireless access point, and it's only gonna go to their 256k DSL modem anyway.

--

That's odd, considering neitherDell, Sony, Toshiba, nor Fujitsu require you to purchase Office XP. IBM was the only one that I saw from a quick glance.

Sony is more loveable when you consider that it's a multi-headed beast.

• The things we love come from Sony Electronics Inc. and Sony Computers Inc.
• The stuff we hate is happening at Sony Music Enterntainment Inc. and Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.

scare off the technical hackers who are willing to go this far to tear apart their speakers to break DRM.

You only need an E-Z hook to tap the signal from a speaker. (Am I a felon yet?) You don't need an uber hacker. Are they going to build DRM into earbuds?

The morons are using a background containing solid black [lib.oh.us] when essential text on top of it is black.

Looks fine to me, but then I long ago decided that I knew my preferences better than any webmaster and forced my color scheme.

They use a number of different typefaces on pages, creating a non-uniform look, which slows down reading.

Same thing. Looks fine here.

The icons [lib.oh.us] are unintuitive or unclear. What does the icon for local history and genealogy represent? Looks like flying hot dogs to me.

I do agree, but I think that using icons on websites is just annoying anyway. I've never seen an icon at all that I think is a good idea. It's much easier to just have text links (unless you're catering to a non-English audience, perhaps, but this is a local US library). They have the text right next to each icon -- is it *that* hard to tell what's what on that page?

They link to pages that are under construction [lib.oh.us] without indicated that such is the case.

Uh..yeah? So?

From a technical standpoint (unless you have some layer of stuff that preprocesses your static pages), that's a *much* better system. If you update a page, you shouldn't track down every link to said page -- hell, they could be anywhere on the Internet.

I do agree that the fact that they used Tux on an FP site is a bit funny, but what's more likely is that the guy got all of the Tux stuff from a cheapo Web clipart collections (looking for "computer" stuff), and didn't have any idea what it meant. This isn't like the library blew zillions of dollars hiring techies...

They use ALL [lib.oh.us] CAPS [lib.oh.us] for a publication where emphasis can and should be marked in other ways.

The ALL CAPS bit is hardly that egregious. Yes, it's not the ideal mechanism, but the idea is to make a short bit of text clearly stand out and still be readable, which this successfully does. Sure, a professional publisher would get twitchy because it violates some "rules" that are reasonably-well grounded...but big deal. It does the job, which is what matters.

They use single line breaks [lib.oh.us] instead of paragraphs, which makes it very hard to read.

This is true.

It doesn't take Nostradamus to figure out that they will never keep static pages like this [lib.oh.us] updated, which will lead to large portions of the site being useless.

True enough. However, from what I can see, this is a library staff doing the work. This is not a company with a budget to hire a bunch of programmers and whatnot. I doubt anyone there has significant scripting knowledge. For the resources available, this is hardly awful.

I think the reason that I'm reluctant to criticize the site is that many sites that are considered "professional" do a far worse job than this one of holding to the spirit of HTML. They use Javascript for regular linking, they force pixel-level layout, they embed Flash bits all over. Going to this site reminded me of lots of mid-90s websites, when people still gave something of a shit about what HTML looks like. You've done a good job of finding issues with the website, and I suppose I'm a bit biased in favor of it. But even so, I wish more websites would look like this again, instead of some "professional" websites.

There's been some improvement. Designers have finally learned that websites should resize, that people don't all have Javascript/cookies/Flash on (and use fallbacks), that users are *not* going to change their resolution to view a website, that hierarchies are good, that images of text (instead of just text) are bad, that massive amounts of tables with tons of links are bad...when the initial move away from simple, HTML-2.0-ish sites started, I wasn't that thrilled, but it's started to come back around.

Som examples of sites that I really don't like (though they're considered "professional" and major sites):

ICQ. There's a lot of, uh, *stuff* on the main page. This "massive amounts of stuff on the main page" motif has survived multiple redesigns.

HotBot. Lots of stuff, ugly color scheme (which appeared after the Wired purchase of HotBot).

Sony. Nobody likes rollover menus.

RCA. Rollover menus from hell.

Kraft. Nonresizeable (and wide), rather bizarre news format (which also limits them to four news items).

BIC (Yeah, the guys that make pens). All the effort of rendering fonts into an image so that you can make a website look unreadable.

Kleenex. When I go here, I want to find out how much lotion is in a given tissue, not look at a bunch of Flash crap.

So here's why I like their website. It renders cleanly in older and text-based browsers. It's fast and small. No Javascript or pop-up menus are present. It doesn't tell you to change your resolution. It provides actual email links (i.e. you don't have to go through a form). It's fairly easy to find what you want, and the immediately useful information (library hours, telephone numbers) are right on the front page.

There are, as you've found, some issues. But I'd far rather read their website than any of the big, "professional", heavily-funded websites that I listed above.

Frankly, the only popular website that I really think has good design any more is Google, which has a team that's fanatically committed to a spartan, light interface. Everyone I talked to said that it looked out of date or old when everyone else was going bigger, flashier, and more bitmapped...and now, look who's on top. :-) People *like* simple, fast web pages, not big monstrosities.

It's true that the guy didn't say Flash, so I probably misread it. I just see the one website in a long time that gets back to the basics, and I see tons of people slamming it...it comes off wrong.

Lemme check out your own website...I'm guessing that we'd differ on some of the things you did as well.

You use frames -- I firmly feel that frames are a bad idea, and after a four year love-hate relationship (i.e. designers loved frames, viewers hated them), they pretty much went away. As such, you have to slap a "this webpage is better with browsers X, Y, and Z at the bottom of your page.

You complained about hard to read icons, yet your own site has a block of six quite unidentifiable icons. Sure, you can run the mouse over them to get the text, but then they partly cover up neighboring icons. So I pretty much end up moving the mouse over an icon, moving it away, moving it onto another one...repeat six times *just* to find out what the links on your site are.

You apparently did the ford.se site, according to your CV. This is Flash only.

You use Javascript for normal links

Your poetry page has a miniscule frame that makes it extremely difficult to read any text.

On the upsite, your site *is* accessable with older browsers, even if it's a little annoying to click through frame-related links.

Everyone has the elements that they find valuable in a website. I rather like theirs. :-)

You're wrong. Picture this:

1) Sony develops copy protection that largely works (yes, yes, I know.)
2) Sony develop hardware and software (for their other hardware)that supports it.
3) Artists start getting less money because recording labels give them less royalties due to bad sales.
4) ???*
5) Profit. Massively.

Can you guess the blank? Horizontal markets are the way to go. Microsoft supports everything off of Windows sales. Conglomo's time has come. And its name is Sony. or microsoft. or nokia. or maybe samsung at a push.

*A Record label offers them more, because it a) sells more due to hassle factor, and b) can partially support it from hardware revenues.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/

No that's a URL. This is a link.

If there were Diplomats and Mob Bosses in these games I would actually play.

Not sure about diplomats, but you can enter politics. Each town needs a mayor. No mob bosses since the Hutt faction got cut but maybe in an expansion. You can be a smuggler though. Take a look at the professions list. It's quite interesting.

According to the faq you can't.

You're allowed to have one hyphen or apostrophe in your name. Numbers and other punctuation are not allowed, and we will also follow strict capitalization rules.

Don't worry though, if the game takes of, they will probably release another game set after ROTJ.

Um, They are actually developing an Everquest 2 to come out next year. You can read about it at sony's site and watch some videos at IGN

just wait for the space expansion

A nice dream, but according to the FAQ:

3.02 Can I be Luke Skywalker , Han Solo or Princess Leia?

No. To preserve the continuity of the fiction, you will not be able to play the key figures in the Star Wars universe. However, you may cross paths with a few of them...

People have been waiting on this for ages: it will bear a strong resemblance to Everquest thanks to having the same development team from Sony/Verant. Here's the Star Wars Galaxies Official FAQ and, the answer to the all-important question from page three of the FAQ:

3.03 Will I be able to kill Darth Vader?

At this point, you will probably not be able to kill Darth Vader, but some players may have the opportunity to interact with him. We would like to adhere to the continuity as much as possible; Vader is key to the trilogy, so you probably won't be able to kill him (like you would really stand a chance against the Lord of the Sith anyway...)

• Sony Clie
• Asprin
• Carmex
• Cell phone
• Wallet
• Lens cleaning cloth
• Nail clippers
• Comb
• Keys
• spare change

http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/support/news/hdd.html

...you can have paper that has checkmarks that say "fax this" or "email this" and the software knows what to do.

That sounds like a great idea! Handwritten emails ::gasp:: do actually have a use because sometimes you just need to add a complicated diagram of something (a friend wanted me to write a chat program with D&D functions built in, for example) and drawing it on the computer and then attaching it is just too complicated. Same goes for faxing.

Or, you could have a dayrunner know what and where you scheduled something and sync with Outlook. Lotsa possibilities.

It's easier than that!

I mean, I'm not trying to be a troll, but can't Palms sync with Outlook and also sort your address book, sound alarms, bla bla bla? A digital yet physical organizer is sorta missing the point.

But I think that, to best use this functionality, you would need a wireless connection to send/receive things. A phone, for example, that has a pen like this could be great--you could (using Multimedia Messaging System and somewhat bigger screens--maybe e-ink?) seamlessly integrate typed notes (IR "hovering keyboard") and pictures. Imagine being able to sign a text message or note, or add a quick picture--it could be pretty cool!

Battery life: up to 10 hours continuous MP3 CD playback, up to four hours CD-DA playback, up to one-and-a-half hours DVD video playback

So, in other words, the battery's official specs give it enough power to make it through one showing of a 90 minute movie. Factor in the usual reduction in battery life vs. the official claim, and this drive will come in well short of being able to play a standard length film. Want to watch Lord of the Rings? Better have 3 sets of fully charged batteries in addition to your laptop.

Geez, how difficult is it to make links clickable by adding some_text tags to them???

Sony press release

Product page

Link
Link

Link
Link

Uh oh.....

Sony isn'y going to like this!

https://store.station.sony.com

both of which can take the same amount of time, assuming that you want to actually get everything working properly. Take a typical sony vaio update / install procedure for example...

Once you register, you can improve your chess with hundreds of Web-based exercises, specifically designed to complement my book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Chess.

Come join us! Register a name, install our easy-to-use software, and then use that to connect to our playing site. You can try it for free! With over 25,000 paying members from all over the world, Chessclub.com is the longest running and most vibrant chess community on the internet. You can play games and get a rating, watch grandmasters play while discussing the game, take lessons, play in tournaments, play in simultaneous exhibitions, try chess variants like bughouse, crazyhouse and atomic, play chess programs of all levels, and much more.

Apparently, if your link exceeds one line of this tiny edit window, it will punish you by inserting spaces into your URL. The link in the previous post is broken, click here instead.

Everquest, alone, has a fanbase of over 375,000 subscribers who are willing to play a monthly fee to play.

Just because you personally did not like the game doesn't mean that many, many other do and are willing to pay a trivial monthly fee ($13) to play as much as they want.

These are the same problems Sony & Lucasarts are going to have with Star Wars Galaxies. What stops people from ALL becoming Dark Jedi called Darth l33t with double-ended red lightsabers? I'd expect Marvel start players as fairly weak heroes and allow them to improve their powers and run factions (superhero groups) up to the point where the highest level players might be in the realm of the X-Men, Alpha Flight, etc. If they want to be Spider-Man, yay... they'll just suck compared to the real thing. Sony have also indicated in Galaxies that heroes like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo will make the very very rare appearance, but will be impossible to kill, to prevent lame stuff. Of course, that didn't quite happen with Lord British on UO...

So the answer is just simple if you think back a few years.

We have the mid-70's to early-80's rivalry between Sony's Betamax and JVC's VHS formats.

I'll skip the unpleasant details of the war here, but the point you have to remember is that the much more technically appreciated Betamax format lost out.

So the answer to your question is ... the looser will be the most technically appreciated. Bye Bye "+" format ?

I have one of Sony's mp3 walkman, like this one.
The good thing about it is that it is small and works well. I only use it when running and the small size is perfect for that purpose. For my use, I don't care if I can't copy the files to another PC, that it counts the number of times that I have uploaded/downloaded to it(so you can't keep downloading to multiple devices I assume) or that it converts it to another format. So that is not a problem for my use of it.
However, I would kindly ask them to go f... themself if they want to track my usage of it. I have paid for my CD's that I download to it, I have paid for the entire product and I they want to get something from me, like collecting information, I want something back, something that would make it worth it.
Yes, I can enroll to their "community" and sample new music etc but that does not cut it.
The included software(OpenMG) was slow like a dog on my 1Ghz P3, even simple meny navigation sucks. I managed to misplace the program CD(stupid me), I still however have the cover with the serial number. It took an entire evening to find a place where I could find a upgrade that didn't require my version to be installed. I also found a version Real Jukebox that worked with my player but now that Real has gone on a extreme nagging crusade to get me to upgrade to their latest sucky Real player One, that too is getting unbearable.

Ok, so what am I saying? The hardware itself works great for me, it even have been covered in sweat(yuck) several times and still works. The small size and low weight is great when I go for that one hour run. But the software simply sucks to the extend that it is nearly unusable and with their latest great idea here, I am seriously considering to dump the bastard and find another player to use.

As a reliable member of the Slash-Dot community, with my "karma points" well into the "Positive" range, I would like to express my complete satisfaction with my new Sony-Ericsson TI-85 phone.

This baby is "phat." It does voicemail, email, plays online games, and even takes pictures! I have a blast hanging out with my "elite" friends talking about Linux and snapping shots of good times.

I would definitely recommend this product to any of my fellow Slash-Dot enthusiasts. For more information, check out their slick URL at http://www.sony.com. You will be hard pressed to find a better phone for your money. Take it from me, a supporter of Linux and Free Source.