In my state, they DO need two pictures to prove that you ran the light. All of the red light cameras around here overtly take two pictures (with flash, even during daylight hours!) and you're "supposed" to receive the pictures along with your ticket in the mail. And, yes, nearly all of the camera equipped traffic lights here have noticeably and demonstrably short yellow lights, where the state mandate (and possibly federal DOT, 'do it this way if you want your highway grants') is three seconds, some of the camera-lights in town are as short as one second!
The process is highly automated and it's fairly obvious that there is no human oversight. The enticement not to contest the ticket or call the state out on anything is the (frankly, highly illegal) practice of my state demanding court costs up front if you take the ticket to court, to be refunded if you win. I'm fairly sure that violates the innocent-before-proven-guilty clause in both state and federal constitutions.
Story #1: I stood behind a gentleman in line at the DOT one day who was (this is important for the story) a fairly dapper black man who owned a very nice Harley, which I admired out in the parking lot. I saw him ride it up. He brought with him his mailed-in ticket, showing both pictures of someone on a bike running a red light. A skinny white man, with no helmet, wearing a wife beater. On a street bike (think crotch rocket, not a Harley). After pointing out his bike and skin color to the clerk (and I vouched for him; I saw him ride the bike up) the ticket was quietly erased. Obviously, no one had looked at the photos and even the computer system had gotten the license plate number wrong.
Story #2: I got "nailed" by a traffic light camera that I KNEW had a short yellow light, from watching other people get caught by it. Instead of going through the yellow, I stopped at the line and let the light turn red. A full three seconds or so after the light went red, the camera flashed me twice. I anticipated the stupidity well in advance, and was not surprised when a ticket turned up in the mail nearly a month later. It contained ONE photo. I contested and took it to court, to discover the "court costs up-front" policy mentioned above... I demanded to see the second photo, as the camera clearly and obviously took two. The state clerks were very cagey about this, first claiming it was "not necessary" and then claiming it "didn't exist," there was only one photo. To his credit, the judge pointed out that it was the law to present both photos, and he would decide what was bloody well "necessary" for the proceedings. The second photo was produced... Showing my car in exactly the same position, stopped well behind the white line, as it was in the first photo. Oops! In this case, clearly there was some human oversight which decided to lie about the evidence.
No one from the state was punished. I got out of the ticket (obviously) but it took them nearly four months to return my court costs.
Story #3: A friend of mine, who is somewhat cheeky, reported getting out of his automated camera-ticket by demanding to confront his accuser. As there was no paper trail as to who (if anyone) reviewed the ticket or entered the complaint to the court, the case was dropped. (This is why when a cop writes you a ticket it has a lot of flowey language to the effect of "I, [name of officer] do duly swear under oath of perjury that I observed, etc., etc." The cop is acting as your accuser, and entering the charge as TESTIMONY to the court, which is important. A camera can not testify, only a person can testify about what the camera captured.) I imagine this loophole will be legislated around as soon as someone tries it in every state.
This just goes to show that the world is finally listening to what I've been saying for YEARS, namely we need to ditch all this tied-to-a-carrier smartphone BS and bring back the PDA. Small device, pile of processing power, able to run general purpose software, buttload of storage, touch screen, go.
Screw netbooks. When can I buy a proper PDA again? Something about the size of a stack of 3x5 cards with nice, high-res touchscreen, maybe one of those trendy slideout keyboards, Wifi, Bluetooth, decent amount of storage, and a memory card slot? That can run an actual web browser and other arbitrary apps? And with battery life that doesn't totally suck, and that's not a freaking phone tied to a contract and service agreement and which will refuse to work without a valid SIM card?
Maybe something that can run SSH and remote desktop, run a REAL web browser (not Pocket Internet Explorer, like current WinMo handhelds/phones), play a couple of games, play back video, network tasks, etc.? My old Axim does all of the above except the web browser part; Apparently nobody is interesting in making a mobile web browser that doesn't run on a damn phone. I don't need a damn phone-tied-to-PDA. I already have a phone.
How about turning out some new models that are a bleeding 4:3 aspect ratio, instead of 16:9? Nowadays it seems every LCD panel in the world is a repurposed HDTV unit. Those of us who lots of coding and document work tend to prefer monitors without a squished vertical aspect and a bunch of wasted horizontal space (especially considering 100% of the universe uses 8.5x11 or A4 paper that's taller than it is wide, and document design reflects this format).
There's always going to be gaming hardware to buy. Not just consoles, but controllers, cables, adapters, cases, accessories, and repair parts.
Also, download distribution faces the Christmas Conundrum. It's a lot more impactful for a parent to give their kid a boxed copy of Game X instead of a point card they can use to download Game X from Download Service Y.
Plus, there are diehard collector dorks like me who like to have a shelf full of our games rather than a hard drive, memory card, or flash disk that doesn't look nearly as nice. (I guess it's the same reason people fill bookshelves with back issues of National Geographic that they'll never read again.)
I think there will always be a place for physical game media even if the only purpose of that media is to install on your device the same way a download would. Piracy will be a non-issue, really... Just look at how much piracy Steam is stamping out for Valve's games. (Hint: None. There are cracked installs, cracked updates, and hacked servers to play them on, all available for free at a Bittorrent hub near you.)
I would question your notion of "skipped it." There was, of course, the network adapter and hard drive combo for the PS2 as well as the Eye Toy. The Gamecube had its broadband adapter... thingy, as well as the Gameboy player and the phenominally useless GBA linkup (except for Crystal Chronicles). And no console escaped the ubiquitous presence of the DDR dance mat.
And who can forget the E-Reader and the wireless link dongle for the Gameboy Advance? Oh, that's right. A lot of people can, and did. Both were supposed to revolutionize portable gaming, and both... didn't.
Remember that after the '84 video game crash, Nintendo came along and pretty much defined modern video gaming as we know it with the NES. Controllers with D-pads, managed third party licensing, holiday timed releases, literature, and mascots: Nintendo pretty much just made it all up and the rest of the fledgling industry followed suit.
Here's some food for thought: It's becoming pretty clear that gaming as a whole is moving towards a bit of a different demographic. This is partly because those of us who were the kids buying the first Nintendos and Segas have grown up into (presumably) responsible adultlike beings who are now buying Wiis and Xboxes. Coupled with this is the move to 'casual gaming' led mostly by the Wii (and also the DS) which is bringing in people from older generations who up until now have been unfamiliar with video gaming entirely.
One caveat about this: The "bug your parents" business model doesn't apply as well anymore. Older and wiser people who are making frankly massive investments into consoles and games for them are expecting to get a decent run time out of their investments. The huge new market of first-time gamers, grandmothers, and all the other people we like to pick on (who are all buying the Wii) are a tenuous market at best, and it's likely that the console makers are concluding that forcing everyone to jump ship and move to a new platform will probably alienate this whole market. Lots of grandmothers will say, "screw you, I'm not buying a new games machine" and suddenly not only are they not making money on new console sales but they're not making money on their legacy machine anymore, either.
The cash cow then becomes not selling new machines, but selling new upgrades for the existing machines. Grandma (or whoever) will swallow "buy this thing that plugs into your Wii (or Xbox, or PS3)" easier than she'll swallow "spend $500 on this new console that's different from your old one."
The Wii already has this curious casual gamer market. Sony and Microsoft sure want to capitalize on that success, and it's clear that the best (read: cheapest) way to do this is by upgrading rather than replacing. And while all the rest of us are cracking wise about people ripping off Nintendo, at least this method of Nintendo-rippage will be cheaper (and hopefully better) than replacing existing consoles outright. Which will piss off a lot fewer people.
Eff that. I'll be much happier just making sure Flash content works at all on any of my mobile devices. Windows Mobile support for Flash has been on the "yes, please" list for about a decade now... The last version of Flash for Windows Mobile/PocketPC was, I think, a crippled, broken version of 6 (possibly 7) that doesn't work with Youtube or any other streaming video site, doesn't handle user input properly, doesn't work in anything except Pocket IE, and frequently just doesn't work at all (or crashes out the browser without warning).
This is how having Youtube support was a killer app for the iPhone and iTouch. None of its competitors had a working version of Flash, and therefore they couldn't use Youtube (or any other video site, for that matter).
Uh-huh. And a burgeoning community of console hackers, software mods, firmware hacks, millions of modchips sold, Nintendo DS flashcarts selling faster than actual Nintendo DS consoles, and a modchip installation store in just about every organized flea market and farmers market in the country proves that this is a problem endemic only to PC gaming.
I don't know about you, but I think the "shot in the arm" PC gaming needs is a serious divergence from console gaming in terms of titles, but it needs to take a big cue from console games in terms of fitting game design to the platform at hand.
Here's a useless antecdote: Need for Speed Shift just came out. Yay me, I love Need for Speed. So I bought it for my PC, which has an SLI pair of not-to-terribly-old nVidia graphics cards and should be pefectly capable of playing Shift. Surprise! It doesn't work. Presents me with a cute little "shift.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close" dialog every time I try to run it. Tried reinstalling video drivers, changing driver versions, updating Windows, reinstalling the game, reinstalling Windows entirely. No go.
Meanwhile, the kids with their Xboxes (those that aren't red-ringing) and their PS3's (that may have cost a zillion dollars) can just stick the disk in the drive, press power, and play the damn game.
Why can't we do this with PC games? Every major PC title I can think of in recent years has suffered from a pile porting, control, stability, and feature issues from launch, some of them continuing to this day. (GTA4 on the PC, anyone?) PC gaming needs to diverge from the "blockbuster title" mentality of current console games, and more importantly break away from just being a pile of (usually lousy) ports of games that are already available on consoles. I should not have to hack around, troll forums, download patches, and sacrifice a chicken to my video card drivers just to be able to play a recently released game. And when I get it working, I should not wind up with a lousy watered-down console port that isn't optimized in any way for my hardware, limits my control schemes, handles mouse and joystick input all weird (if it supports mouse or joystick input at all!), yet is still somehow incapable of playing online against the version of the same title running on everyone else's console.
Games need to be tailored to the hardware. And not just the video hardware or operating system or what have you for speed and stability, but to the control hardware (mouse and keyboard), display hardware (high resolution monitor relatively close to the user), and operating environment (running along with other applications, probably competing with torrent, IM, browser, and other software).
Pretty much the only outfit doing this properly is Valve, with the Steam platform. Steam is (relatively) stable, the Source engine runs on all kinds of hardware, all of the Valve designed games on it are designed foremost for the PC taking advantage of mouse-and-keyboard, it plays nice with other applications running alongside it, and it provides a community, downloadable content, free games, updates, and other shit people actually want via its network connection and not just more DRM (though it has that, too).
As much as it pains me to admit it and as much as I liked Bioshock, Fallout 3, Grid, NFS: Carbon, etc., the last game I really had a good PC gaming experience with was Half Life 2. Well, that and Plants Vs. Zombies. But you get the idea.
Forget the hardware. Let's get the software right.
Strike "flash," replace with "ROM." You really think any game company is going to release anything in a format that's easily readable or worse, easily writable by consumer technology?
I predict any future solid-state game media will be ROM, and it will be encrypted out the wazoo.
I'll also add that game companies may yet attempt to stick with optical, spinning-disk based media for systems that don't go compltely download-only in the future. Two simple reasons. First, optical disks are a buttload cheaper to manufacture, unit per unit, and require no additional assembly. Press it, label it, ship it. ROM cartridges have to be burned, then assembled, then cased, etc. Second, optical disk media has a finite lifetime that manufacturers are very keen to take advantage of to sell you new copies of games, or just new games (or systems!) altogether. Take, for instance, Sony. They spoiled us with the PS2's quite good backwards compatability with PS1 games and used it as a big marketing point when the PS2 was just released. They tried the same trick with the PS3, but note how quickly they dropped the backwards compatability feature when they found how much PS2 games were biting into PS3 game sales. Now Sony is happy to sell you two consoles: A PS3 that will no longer play PS2 games, and a separate PS2 for full retail cost.
The fix to this is as simple as the fix preventing original NES power supplies from cooking themselves: Shut off your power strip when you're done with the console for the day.
I still have my original Gameboy, which my father bought for me when the machine launched in the US. (Incidentally, I got a Gameboy FIRST. I got an NES later.) It still works, but like many original Gameboys it eventually suffered from the Screen Rot of Doom problem, and it's lost probably 25% of its vertical columns of pixels on the left and right edges of the screen. So it works for only suitably small values of "works." Despite a couple of decades of being abused, getting dropped, smashed, sat on, having batteries left in it for years on end, being locked in closed cars, etc., etc. It's surprising that the screen rot problem (which seems to be a function of oxidation and not mechanical failure) is the only thing that's wrong with it.
I also have a Gameboy Pocket which is not quite as old, but if it were alive it'd be easily old enough to get a driver's license... They corrected the screen rot problem from the Gameboy Pocket on up and mine works flawlessly. Despite the same abuse.
Come to think of it, even my original front-loading NES still works. It developed the same fatigue problems with the cartridge connector as every other front-loader in the universe, but all I had to do was bend all the pins back and smear a little dielectric grease on them and it works better than new... I don't even have to push the cartridge down anymore.
My SNES, Genesis, N64, and oodles of Gameboys... All still working great. Even both of my Atari 2600's are still trucking.
Meanwhile... One of my Playstations: Broken. One of my PS2's has a dead laser, and the other one is in the process of dying. Original Xbox: Dead. One of my Dreamcasts: Dead. Etc., etc. The pattern? Things with moving parts have finite lifetimes. The sad fact is, it seems that optical disk based consoles are just predestined to fail because their piddly little lasers, spindle motors, and tracking assemblies wear out. ROM/cartridge based machines can be made to last forever, partly because the older ones are bog simple machines that barely generate any heat, but also because you can ALWAYS find a way to bodge electrical contact between the cartridge pins and the CPU.
For this reason I predict that the DS will be the last classic console. Your 30+ year old Atari will probably game on forever, but your 2 year old Xbox, PS3, or Wii can never be expected to.
Not for an original NES you don't. Grab a #1 Philips head and hack away. People can, and do. Ripping out the lockout chip leaps to mind as a good first improvement, followed by cleaning and re-bending all the pins on the cartridge connector. As a sidenote, disabling the lockout chip would theoretically enable you to run arbitrary, unlicensed games on the system. (How we go full circle!) That'd be more useful if there were any unlicensed software other than Bible Adventures.
This is precisely the reason I still have my Canon A70 even though I have newer, shinier, and swanker cameras around the place. The A70 may be old and chunky and have most of its silvery finish flaked off, but it still takes fantastic photos and runs off of four bog standard, regular old, available anywhere at any hour AA cells. A set of high capacity NiMh rechargeables, by preference, but it can run for a while on alkalines in a pinch.
When civilization falls and the roaches take over, my stupid old-fashioned camera will still work, because I guarantee you the roaches will still use AA's in their TV remotes or something. Cameras powered by little proprietary lithium ion packs may be slimmer or sleeker or whatever, but I'll take the capacity to use standard cells any day.
I notice printer manufacturers are doing this nowadays as well, including the very same Canon. Guess who is going to have his Pixma iP5000 (with non-chipped ink cartridges) pried from his cold, dead fingers?
Point taken. But the outside-the-box uses of DVD media are part of what spurred its adoption. Stuff like camcorders that write to burnable DVD's, DVD-ROM/R/RW drives getting built into laptops, etc. And a large factor of all that is cost - both of the hardware, and of the media.
(Yes, I remember when blank DVD's were hilariously expensive, too. But they came down in price a lot faster than BD-R disks seem to be.)
Well, I don't have a Blu-Ray drive so I sure as hell can't transcode it, DRM or not. And I don't feel like paying for one at the moment, either.
I also left out an important detail. Cost of a quality blank DVD+/R disk: ~43 cents. Cost of a quality blank Blu-Ray disk: ~6 dollars. (Verbatim media for both, from the same store.)
You know, on the back of my social security card it says in big bold letters that my card and number are not to be used for identification purposes. I wonder if they've changed that bit in recent years? On a form 4473 (that is Application to Purchase a freaking firearm) I am allowed to skip the portion about the social security number and the federal background check will still go through and I am still allowed to walk home with my new shooting iron.
So I guess that ties it.
Forget the Palm Pre, take that money you would have given to Sprint and buy a gun instead.
I think what is more telling is the fact that so many people are still buying standard def., original flavor DVD's over Blu-Ray. In some ways, I really think this should come as no surprise.
DVD player in the minivan/SUV: Standard def. Portable DVD player: Standard def. The majority of televisions still in the USA: Standard def (digital or otherwise). Cost of a perfectly capable, plays-all, region free DVD player in the supermarket: $20.
Whichever big-business sector you hate this week (the hardware makers, the movie studios, the publishers, the MPAA, whatever) are pretty much trying to cram a high cost technology down the thoats of people who by majority don't want it, can't use it, or can't afford it.
Push for (potentially) standardized low-power/decent-performance mobile platform that might actually result in a handheld general purpose computer that isn't an iPhone? Yes, please.
(Yes, I know all about the Palm Pre, Blackberries, and others. Quiet, you in the peanut gallery.)
If it doesn't work, a competitive push for other makers (ARM, etc.) to do better? Yes please to that, as well.
If this thing is supposed to be based on x86-ish architecture, though, I wonder how (or if) they've licked the bus and chipset power consumption problems still plaguing Atom based machines. The Atom is nifty and all and can run on 2 watts or whatever, but unless I've missed some big news somewhere you still need a 15-20 watt chipset/bus/BIOS/etc. hooked up to make it work.
That said, if this comes to fruition I'd very much like to see it used not only in phones, but in standalone PDA style devices as well. I know I'm in the vast minority these days but I like having the flexibility of a powerful PDA that's not tied to a service provider.
Point taken. But ten billion could be funneled into something like, oh I don't know... health care. Or if you can't find anything better to do with it they could just give it to me.
I don't have any problem with the sale of the spectrum or even the switch itself. I'm just sick of hearing "Oh noes, grandma won't be able to watch her stories!" for the 1,436,030,823,584th time.
I "get" the background and the technological reasons to switch to digital TV and all that. But honestly, how many millions of our tax dollars are being wasted on this "dear god we need to drop everything and help everyone switch because lord knows we can't trust them to handle their own affairs!" game? Seriously. Why should we care? It's only television.
Having to hear every four seconds about how it's going to be some kind of goddamned tragedy because some portion of lazy motherfuckers sitting on a couch somewhere can't be arsed to replace or upgrade their own equipment (or get someone to do it for them!) when we've been listening to the same goddamned twitter about this switch for three fucking years is really wearing thin. Now we're going to have to hear three more years of whining about how the new digital TV is no good, so-and-so can't get such-and-such channel anymore, and woe is me, my reception sucks now. I have a better idea: Why don't we just turn the whole thing the fuck off? I quit watching TV when I was a teenager and honestly, my life hasn't been any less enriched because of it. I have a TV, but it's an old analog one that I use as a monitor for my game consoles. I don't have cable, I don't have a converter box, and I don't even have a damn antenna for the thing. I don't care, and I don't see why anyone else should care enough to be treating this like some kind of disaster.
Way back when this digital switchover was announced in the first place I held the vain hope that some portion of people might wake up and decide to do something else with themselves instead of park in front of their (soon to be useless) TV. Like, I dunno. Read a book. Learn some stuff on the Internet. Go the fuck outside for some reason other than to go to work or to the liquor store. Interact with real people. Learn something about the world.
I don't characterize myself as a very smart person compared to most, and I'm fairly young and therefore am automatically assumed to lack experience. Yet somehow I am continually amazed at the sheer ignorance that many people I meet display about absolutely everything. Science, literature, fiction, history, geography, mechanics, anything. Yet they can recite to me chapter and verse what happened on Survivor or American Idol. The one that gets me is how they can complain to me about the war in Iraq, yet they don't actually know where Iraq is. These are people who are older than me -- people who should be "old enough to know better." Yet the only thing they know about the world is what they see through the damned box at the other end of the living room.
And it pisses me off. These people don't need pampering. Let them flounder. Maybe it'll force them to learn something about the world, even if it's just some tiny inconsequential thing that they need to hook up to get their fucking idiot box working again.
Does anyone else remember the "Activator" controller for the Genesis/SNES? This sounds like an echo of that concept, but with updated technology that might actualy, you know... work.
Everything old is new again. Around and around we go...
Technically, most engines "can" be converted to E85. However, not all engines "may" be converted. Does that make sense?
Look at it this way: the parts required to do so are simply not available for all (or even most) older engines. No parts, no conversion. You have to find someone to make the parts if you aren't going to make them yourself, and in the case of carbs, injectors, reprogrammed PCM's, and all things beyond simple fuel lines and filters there's a lot of startup and tooling cost involved in manufacturing parts for a seemingly endless array of older engines.
Some of the hot rod and petrolhead guys have found a niche for E85 and have made it work well. That's great, but they're a minority, they're working with a comparatively small set of performance engines, they have the time and knowhow to do these conversions, tinker with them, and potentially wind up with vehicles that are not practical for the road or are laid up on jack stands for weeks on end while parts are found or made. And they're collectively spending a buttload of money on it (as petrolheads are wont to do, as their hobby), which is something the unwashed masses will be very reluctant to do.
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In my state, they DO need two pictures to prove that you ran the light. All of the red light cameras around here overtly take two pictures (with flash, even during daylight hours!) and you're "supposed" to receive the pictures along with your ticket in the mail. And, yes, nearly all of the camera equipped traffic lights here have noticeably and demonstrably short yellow lights, where the state mandate (and possibly federal DOT, 'do it this way if you want your highway grants') is three seconds, some of the camera-lights in town are as short as one second!
The process is highly automated and it's fairly obvious that there is no human oversight. The enticement not to contest the ticket or call the state out on anything is the (frankly, highly illegal) practice of my state demanding court costs up front if you take the ticket to court, to be refunded if you win. I'm fairly sure that violates the innocent-before-proven-guilty clause in both state and federal constitutions.
Story #1: I stood behind a gentleman in line at the DOT one day who was (this is important for the story) a fairly dapper black man who owned a very nice Harley, which I admired out in the parking lot. I saw him ride it up. He brought with him his mailed-in ticket, showing both pictures of someone on a bike running a red light. A skinny white man, with no helmet, wearing a wife beater. On a street bike (think crotch rocket, not a Harley). After pointing out his bike and skin color to the clerk (and I vouched for him; I saw him ride the bike up) the ticket was quietly erased. Obviously, no one had looked at the photos and even the computer system had gotten the license plate number wrong.
Story #2: I got "nailed" by a traffic light camera that I KNEW had a short yellow light, from watching other people get caught by it. Instead of going through the yellow, I stopped at the line and let the light turn red. A full three seconds or so after the light went red, the camera flashed me twice. I anticipated the stupidity well in advance, and was not surprised when a ticket turned up in the mail nearly a month later. It contained ONE photo. I contested and took it to court, to discover the "court costs up-front" policy mentioned above... I demanded to see the second photo, as the camera clearly and obviously took two. The state clerks were very cagey about this, first claiming it was "not necessary" and then claiming it "didn't exist," there was only one photo. To his credit, the judge pointed out that it was the law to present both photos, and he would decide what was bloody well "necessary" for the proceedings. The second photo was produced... Showing my car in exactly the same position, stopped well behind the white line, as it was in the first photo. Oops! In this case, clearly there was some human oversight which decided to lie about the evidence.
No one from the state was punished. I got out of the ticket (obviously) but it took them nearly four months to return my court costs.
Story #3: A friend of mine, who is somewhat cheeky, reported getting out of his automated camera-ticket by demanding to confront his accuser. As there was no paper trail as to who (if anyone) reviewed the ticket or entered the complaint to the court, the case was dropped. (This is why when a cop writes you a ticket it has a lot of flowey language to the effect of "I, [name of officer] do duly swear under oath of perjury that I observed, etc., etc." The cop is acting as your accuser, and entering the charge as TESTIMONY to the court, which is important. A camera can not testify, only a person can testify about what the camera captured.) I imagine this loophole will be legislated around as soon as someone tries it in every state.
This just goes to show that the world is finally listening to what I've been saying for YEARS, namely we need to ditch all this tied-to-a-carrier smartphone BS and bring back the PDA. Small device, pile of processing power, able to run general purpose software, buttload of storage, touch screen, go.
Screw netbooks. When can I buy a proper PDA again? Something about the size of a stack of 3x5 cards with nice, high-res touchscreen, maybe one of those trendy slideout keyboards, Wifi, Bluetooth, decent amount of storage, and a memory card slot? That can run an actual web browser and other arbitrary apps? And with battery life that doesn't totally suck, and that's not a freaking phone tied to a contract and service agreement and which will refuse to work without a valid SIM card?
Maybe something that can run SSH and remote desktop, run a REAL web browser (not Pocket Internet Explorer, like current WinMo handhelds/phones), play a couple of games, play back video, network tasks, etc.? My old Axim does all of the above except the web browser part; Apparently nobody is interesting in making a mobile web browser that doesn't run on a damn phone. I don't need a damn phone-tied-to-PDA. I already have a phone.
How about turning out some new models that are a bleeding 4:3 aspect ratio, instead of 16:9? Nowadays it seems every LCD panel in the world is a repurposed HDTV unit. Those of us who lots of coding and document work tend to prefer monitors without a squished vertical aspect and a bunch of wasted horizontal space (especially considering 100% of the universe uses 8.5x11 or A4 paper that's taller than it is wide, and document design reflects this format).
Nail, hammer, head.
There's always going to be gaming hardware to buy. Not just consoles, but controllers, cables, adapters, cases, accessories, and repair parts.
Also, download distribution faces the Christmas Conundrum. It's a lot more impactful for a parent to give their kid a boxed copy of Game X instead of a point card they can use to download Game X from Download Service Y.
Plus, there are diehard collector dorks like me who like to have a shelf full of our games rather than a hard drive, memory card, or flash disk that doesn't look nearly as nice. (I guess it's the same reason people fill bookshelves with back issues of National Geographic that they'll never read again.)
I think there will always be a place for physical game media even if the only purpose of that media is to install on your device the same way a download would. Piracy will be a non-issue, really... Just look at how much piracy Steam is stamping out for Valve's games. (Hint: None. There are cracked installs, cracked updates, and hacked servers to play them on, all available for free at a Bittorrent hub near you.)
I would question your notion of "skipped it." There was, of course, the network adapter and hard drive combo for the PS2 as well as the Eye Toy. The Gamecube had its broadband adapter... thingy, as well as the Gameboy player and the phenominally useless GBA linkup (except for Crystal Chronicles). And no console escaped the ubiquitous presence of the DDR dance mat.
And who can forget the E-Reader and the wireless link dongle for the Gameboy Advance? Oh, that's right. A lot of people can, and did. Both were supposed to revolutionize portable gaming, and both... didn't.
It's certainly been done before.
Remember that after the '84 video game crash, Nintendo came along and pretty much defined modern video gaming as we know it with the NES. Controllers with D-pads, managed third party licensing, holiday timed releases, literature, and mascots: Nintendo pretty much just made it all up and the rest of the fledgling industry followed suit.
Here's some food for thought: It's becoming pretty clear that gaming as a whole is moving towards a bit of a different demographic. This is partly because those of us who were the kids buying the first Nintendos and Segas have grown up into (presumably) responsible adultlike beings who are now buying Wiis and Xboxes. Coupled with this is the move to 'casual gaming' led mostly by the Wii (and also the DS) which is bringing in people from older generations who up until now have been unfamiliar with video gaming entirely.
One caveat about this: The "bug your parents" business model doesn't apply as well anymore. Older and wiser people who are making frankly massive investments into consoles and games for them are expecting to get a decent run time out of their investments. The huge new market of first-time gamers, grandmothers, and all the other people we like to pick on (who are all buying the Wii) are a tenuous market at best, and it's likely that the console makers are concluding that forcing everyone to jump ship and move to a new platform will probably alienate this whole market. Lots of grandmothers will say, "screw you, I'm not buying a new games machine" and suddenly not only are they not making money on new console sales but they're not making money on their legacy machine anymore, either.
The cash cow then becomes not selling new machines, but selling new upgrades for the existing machines. Grandma (or whoever) will swallow "buy this thing that plugs into your Wii (or Xbox, or PS3)" easier than she'll swallow "spend $500 on this new console that's different from your old one."
The Wii already has this curious casual gamer market. Sony and Microsoft sure want to capitalize on that success, and it's clear that the best (read: cheapest) way to do this is by upgrading rather than replacing. And while all the rest of us are cracking wise about people ripping off Nintendo, at least this method of Nintendo-rippage will be cheaper (and hopefully better) than replacing existing consoles outright. Which will piss off a lot fewer people.
Eff that. I'll be much happier just making sure Flash content works at all on any of my mobile devices. Windows Mobile support for Flash has been on the "yes, please" list for about a decade now... The last version of Flash for Windows Mobile/PocketPC was, I think, a crippled, broken version of 6 (possibly 7) that doesn't work with Youtube or any other streaming video site, doesn't handle user input properly, doesn't work in anything except Pocket IE, and frequently just doesn't work at all (or crashes out the browser without warning).
This is how having Youtube support was a killer app for the iPhone and iTouch. None of its competitors had a working version of Flash, and therefore they couldn't use Youtube (or any other video site, for that matter).
Uh-huh. And a burgeoning community of console hackers, software mods, firmware hacks, millions of modchips sold, Nintendo DS flashcarts selling faster than actual Nintendo DS consoles, and a modchip installation store in just about every organized flea market and farmers market in the country proves that this is a problem endemic only to PC gaming.
Sure.
Pull the other one, it plays Metallica.
I don't know about you, but I think the "shot in the arm" PC gaming needs is a serious divergence from console gaming in terms of titles, but it needs to take a big cue from console games in terms of fitting game design to the platform at hand.
Here's a useless antecdote: Need for Speed Shift just came out. Yay me, I love Need for Speed. So I bought it for my PC, which has an SLI pair of not-to-terribly-old nVidia graphics cards and should be pefectly capable of playing Shift. Surprise! It doesn't work. Presents me with a cute little "shift.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close" dialog every time I try to run it. Tried reinstalling video drivers, changing driver versions, updating Windows, reinstalling the game, reinstalling Windows entirely. No go.
Meanwhile, the kids with their Xboxes (those that aren't red-ringing) and their PS3's (that may have cost a zillion dollars) can just stick the disk in the drive, press power, and play the damn game.
Why can't we do this with PC games? Every major PC title I can think of in recent years has suffered from a pile porting, control, stability, and feature issues from launch, some of them continuing to this day. (GTA4 on the PC, anyone?) PC gaming needs to diverge from the "blockbuster title" mentality of current console games, and more importantly break away from just being a pile of (usually lousy) ports of games that are already available on consoles. I should not have to hack around, troll forums, download patches, and sacrifice a chicken to my video card drivers just to be able to play a recently released game. And when I get it working, I should not wind up with a lousy watered-down console port that isn't optimized in any way for my hardware, limits my control schemes, handles mouse and joystick input all weird (if it supports mouse or joystick input at all!), yet is still somehow incapable of playing online against the version of the same title running on everyone else's console.
Games need to be tailored to the hardware. And not just the video hardware or operating system or what have you for speed and stability, but to the control hardware (mouse and keyboard), display hardware (high resolution monitor relatively close to the user), and operating environment (running along with other applications, probably competing with torrent, IM, browser, and other software).
Pretty much the only outfit doing this properly is Valve, with the Steam platform. Steam is (relatively) stable, the Source engine runs on all kinds of hardware, all of the Valve designed games on it are designed foremost for the PC taking advantage of mouse-and-keyboard, it plays nice with other applications running alongside it, and it provides a community, downloadable content, free games, updates, and other shit people actually want via its network connection and not just more DRM (though it has that, too).
As much as it pains me to admit it and as much as I liked Bioshock, Fallout 3, Grid, NFS: Carbon, etc., the last game I really had a good PC gaming experience with was Half Life 2. Well, that and Plants Vs. Zombies. But you get the idea.
Forget the hardware. Let's get the software right.
Strike "flash," replace with "ROM." You really think any game company is going to release anything in a format that's easily readable or worse, easily writable by consumer technology?
I predict any future solid-state game media will be ROM, and it will be encrypted out the wazoo.
I'll also add that game companies may yet attempt to stick with optical, spinning-disk based media for systems that don't go compltely download-only in the future. Two simple reasons. First, optical disks are a buttload cheaper to manufacture, unit per unit, and require no additional assembly. Press it, label it, ship it. ROM cartridges have to be burned, then assembled, then cased, etc. Second, optical disk media has a finite lifetime that manufacturers are very keen to take advantage of to sell you new copies of games, or just new games (or systems!) altogether. Take, for instance, Sony. They spoiled us with the PS2's quite good backwards compatability with PS1 games and used it as a big marketing point when the PS2 was just released. They tried the same trick with the PS3, but note how quickly they dropped the backwards compatability feature when they found how much PS2 games were biting into PS3 game sales. Now Sony is happy to sell you two consoles: A PS3 that will no longer play PS2 games, and a separate PS2 for full retail cost.
And since when are Ataris not?
The fix to this is as simple as the fix preventing original NES power supplies from cooking themselves: Shut off your power strip when you're done with the console for the day.
I still have my original Gameboy, which my father bought for me when the machine launched in the US. (Incidentally, I got a Gameboy FIRST. I got an NES later.) It still works, but like many original Gameboys it eventually suffered from the Screen Rot of Doom problem, and it's lost probably 25% of its vertical columns of pixels on the left and right edges of the screen. So it works for only suitably small values of "works." Despite a couple of decades of being abused, getting dropped, smashed, sat on, having batteries left in it for years on end, being locked in closed cars, etc., etc. It's surprising that the screen rot problem (which seems to be a function of oxidation and not mechanical failure) is the only thing that's wrong with it.
I also have a Gameboy Pocket which is not quite as old, but if it were alive it'd be easily old enough to get a driver's license... They corrected the screen rot problem from the Gameboy Pocket on up and mine works flawlessly. Despite the same abuse.
Come to think of it, even my original front-loading NES still works. It developed the same fatigue problems with the cartridge connector as every other front-loader in the universe, but all I had to do was bend all the pins back and smear a little dielectric grease on them and it works better than new... I don't even have to push the cartridge down anymore.
My SNES, Genesis, N64, and oodles of Gameboys... All still working great. Even both of my Atari 2600's are still trucking.
Meanwhile... One of my Playstations: Broken. One of my PS2's has a dead laser, and the other one is in the process of dying. Original Xbox: Dead. One of my Dreamcasts: Dead. Etc., etc. The pattern? Things with moving parts have finite lifetimes. The sad fact is, it seems that optical disk based consoles are just predestined to fail because their piddly little lasers, spindle motors, and tracking assemblies wear out. ROM/cartridge based machines can be made to last forever, partly because the older ones are bog simple machines that barely generate any heat, but also because you can ALWAYS find a way to bodge electrical contact between the cartridge pins and the CPU.
For this reason I predict that the DS will be the last classic console. Your 30+ year old Atari will probably game on forever, but your 2 year old Xbox, PS3, or Wii can never be expected to.
Enjoy it while it lasts, kiddos.
Not for an original NES you don't. Grab a #1 Philips head and hack away. People can, and do. Ripping out the lockout chip leaps to mind as a good first improvement, followed by cleaning and re-bending all the pins on the cartridge connector. As a sidenote, disabling the lockout chip would theoretically enable you to run arbitrary, unlicensed games on the system. (How we go full circle!) That'd be more useful if there were any unlicensed software other than Bible Adventures.
Got an PROM burner?
This is precisely the reason I still have my Canon A70 even though I have newer, shinier, and swanker cameras around the place. The A70 may be old and chunky and have most of its silvery finish flaked off, but it still takes fantastic photos and runs off of four bog standard, regular old, available anywhere at any hour AA cells. A set of high capacity NiMh rechargeables, by preference, but it can run for a while on alkalines in a pinch.
When civilization falls and the roaches take over, my stupid old-fashioned camera will still work, because I guarantee you the roaches will still use AA's in their TV remotes or something. Cameras powered by little proprietary lithium ion packs may be slimmer or sleeker or whatever, but I'll take the capacity to use standard cells any day.
I notice printer manufacturers are doing this nowadays as well, including the very same Canon. Guess who is going to have his Pixma iP5000 (with non-chipped ink cartridges) pried from his cold, dead fingers?
Point taken. But the outside-the-box uses of DVD media are part of what spurred its adoption. Stuff like camcorders that write to burnable DVD's, DVD-ROM/R/RW drives getting built into laptops, etc. And a large factor of all that is cost - both of the hardware, and of the media.
(Yes, I remember when blank DVD's were hilariously expensive, too. But they came down in price a lot faster than BD-R disks seem to be.)
Well, I don't have a Blu-Ray drive so I sure as hell can't transcode it, DRM or not. And I don't feel like paying for one at the moment, either.
I also left out an important detail. Cost of a quality blank DVD+/R disk: ~43 cents. Cost of a quality blank Blu-Ray disk: ~6 dollars. (Verbatim media for both, from the same store.)
You know, on the back of my social security card it says in big bold letters that my card and number are not to be used for identification purposes. I wonder if they've changed that bit in recent years? On a form 4473 (that is Application to Purchase a freaking firearm) I am allowed to skip the portion about the social security number and the federal background check will still go through and I am still allowed to walk home with my new shooting iron.
So I guess that ties it.
Forget the Palm Pre, take that money you would have given to Sprint and buy a gun instead.
I think what is more telling is the fact that so many people are still buying standard def., original flavor DVD's over Blu-Ray. In some ways, I really think this should come as no surprise.
DVD player in the minivan/SUV: Standard def.
Portable DVD player: Standard def.
The majority of televisions still in the USA: Standard def (digital or otherwise).
Cost of a perfectly capable, plays-all, region free DVD player in the supermarket: $20.
Whichever big-business sector you hate this week (the hardware makers, the movie studios, the publishers, the MPAA, whatever) are pretty much trying to cram a high cost technology down the thoats of people who by majority don't want it, can't use it, or can't afford it.
Push for (potentially) standardized low-power/decent-performance mobile platform that might actually result in a handheld general purpose computer that isn't an iPhone? Yes, please.
(Yes, I know all about the Palm Pre, Blackberries, and others. Quiet, you in the peanut gallery.)
If it doesn't work, a competitive push for other makers (ARM, etc.) to do better? Yes please to that, as well.
If this thing is supposed to be based on x86-ish architecture, though, I wonder how (or if) they've licked the bus and chipset power consumption problems still plaguing Atom based machines. The Atom is nifty and all and can run on 2 watts or whatever, but unless I've missed some big news somewhere you still need a 15-20 watt chipset/bus/BIOS/etc. hooked up to make it work.
That said, if this comes to fruition I'd very much like to see it used not only in phones, but in standalone PDA style devices as well. I know I'm in the vast minority these days but I like having the flexibility of a powerful PDA that's not tied to a service provider.
Point taken. But ten billion could be funneled into something like, oh I don't know... health care. Or if you can't find anything better to do with it they could just give it to me.
I don't have any problem with the sale of the spectrum or even the switch itself. I'm just sick of hearing "Oh noes, grandma won't be able to watch her stories!" for the 1,436,030,823,584th time.
I "get" the background and the technological reasons to switch to digital TV and all that. But honestly, how many millions of our tax dollars are being wasted on this "dear god we need to drop everything and help everyone switch because lord knows we can't trust them to handle their own affairs!" game? Seriously. Why should we care? It's only television.
Having to hear every four seconds about how it's going to be some kind of goddamned tragedy because some portion of lazy motherfuckers sitting on a couch somewhere can't be arsed to replace or upgrade their own equipment (or get someone to do it for them!) when we've been listening to the same goddamned twitter about this switch for three fucking years is really wearing thin. Now we're going to have to hear three more years of whining about how the new digital TV is no good, so-and-so can't get such-and-such channel anymore, and woe is me, my reception sucks now. I have a better idea: Why don't we just turn the whole thing the fuck off? I quit watching TV when I was a teenager and honestly, my life hasn't been any less enriched because of it. I have a TV, but it's an old analog one that I use as a monitor for my game consoles. I don't have cable, I don't have a converter box, and I don't even have a damn antenna for the thing. I don't care, and I don't see why anyone else should care enough to be treating this like some kind of disaster.
Way back when this digital switchover was announced in the first place I held the vain hope that some portion of people might wake up and decide to do something else with themselves instead of park in front of their (soon to be useless) TV. Like, I dunno. Read a book. Learn some stuff on the Internet. Go the fuck outside for some reason other than to go to work or to the liquor store. Interact with real people. Learn something about the world.
I don't characterize myself as a very smart person compared to most, and I'm fairly young and therefore am automatically assumed to lack experience. Yet somehow I am continually amazed at the sheer ignorance that many people I meet display about absolutely everything. Science, literature, fiction, history, geography, mechanics, anything. Yet they can recite to me chapter and verse what happened on Survivor or American Idol. The one that gets me is how they can complain to me about the war in Iraq, yet they don't actually know where Iraq is. These are people who are older than me -- people who should be "old enough to know better." Yet the only thing they know about the world is what they see through the damned box at the other end of the living room.
And it pisses me off. These people don't need pampering. Let them flounder. Maybe it'll force them to learn something about the world, even if it's just some tiny inconsequential thing that they need to hook up to get their fucking idiot box working again.
Does anyone else remember the "Activator" controller for the Genesis/SNES? This sounds like an echo of that concept, but with updated technology that might actualy, you know... work.
Everything old is new again. Around and around we go...
Technically, most engines "can" be converted to E85. However, not all engines "may" be converted. Does that make sense?
Look at it this way: the parts required to do so are simply not available for all (or even most) older engines. No parts, no conversion. You have to find someone to make the parts if you aren't going to make them yourself, and in the case of carbs, injectors, reprogrammed PCM's, and all things beyond simple fuel lines and filters there's a lot of startup and tooling cost involved in manufacturing parts for a seemingly endless array of older engines.
Some of the hot rod and petrolhead guys have found a niche for E85 and have made it work well. That's great, but they're a minority, they're working with a comparatively small set of performance engines, they have the time and knowhow to do these conversions, tinker with them, and potentially wind up with vehicles that are not practical for the road or are laid up on jack stands for weeks on end while parts are found or made. And they're collectively spending a buttload of money on it (as petrolheads are wont to do, as their hobby), which is something the unwashed masses will be very reluctant to do.