I really miss the days that FASA and Activision worked together on MechWarrior 2. The follow ups out of FASA/Microsoft just didn't quite ever live up to those older games, and MechAssault helped drag what used to be a fun mech simulator franchise down into "Halo with Mechs". True, it opened it up to a wider audience, but the fun of the franchise left for many people.
It's been a while since I heard about it at a convention in 98, but by what I remember, the dispute is why Claudia wasn't in the 5th season (except the final episode that was actually shot during the 4th season). She was saying the reason was due to some mis communication and JMS really didn't add much to the conversation. The impression most people got was that she or her agent had said she was busy, so they moved on to find a replacement for her role in the 5th season. She did want to be in it, but by the time she tried to talk to JMS, they had already brought in the new actor. JMS and Claudia were clearly not happy with each other at this convention as they stayed away from each other.
She was involved in some of the TV movies though made after this, and on the commentary tracks of the DVDs, so I doubt that old issue would cause her to be skipped in these direct to DVD shows. The only two characters that I know of that won't be shown are Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs) and G'kar (Andreas Katsulas), as sadly both actors have passed away.
Spaces actually interests me greatly and is likely to be the first time I use a virtual desktop. It finally advances the virtual desktop concept by also wrapping it around expose. Hit a key, and now you see every virtual desktop and can drag windows between them.
I'm aware of how the electoral college works, however, they only decided a winner on the 2000 election after the Supreme Court voted along partisan lines that a proper recount in Florida could not be done. Had a recount of the entire state been allowed, Gore would have likely won.
I'm upset not because "my" candidate lost, I'm upset because the system that we use to elect people into power is so broken, and here 6 years later after a major example, it is possibly worse.
As for voting for change, I did vote yes for the amendment in Colorado to split electoral votes based on the states popular vote percentages. Sadly, it lost since it was introduced to the state by some wealthy Californian that didn't want to have it done in his home state.
Sadly most Americans simply don't care. If we did, we would have been out in the streets like what is going on in Mexico, especially after 2000 when Gore won the popular vote, but lost the presidency because the supreme court said so.
Apparently Bush's administration isn't bad enough to get us off our couches in any significant numbers.
Cingular and T-Mobile are the same way here in the US. A T-Mobile phone is likely to be on 1900mhz, while the Cingular phone is likely to be on 850mhz. My T-Mobile phone had to be sitting on top of speaker wires to do this, but my Cingular phone can do it from a foot away.
Just sold my $2500 PowerBook G4 15 inch 1.25ghz from August 2003 for $1500. The Intel changeover really didn't harm resale value. And in some cases it helped increase it. No idea who bought it, I put it up for consignment at a local reseller.
Yep, comes in handy when the OS can't handle a day or two of uptime. Windows 2000 was so much more stable, and didn't take all that long to boot. Longer then ME, yes, but I bet you wasted more time watching the boot screen then 2000 users did.
"2. disk scan ran inside windows and was a million times faster"
Except that ME wasn't smart enough to multitask when scanning a disk. So that frequent bootup disk scan you saw was always interrupted several times when it tried to start, and if some bootup process accessed the disk say every minute or two, it would never finish. I think the majority of ME users just cancelled that any time it popped up. Of course those of us who skipped ME and went from 98 to 2000 started enjoying journaled filesystems and had no need for the disk scan to run inside windows.
"3. native.zip support"
Zip support that is horribly implemented. Lets walk you through a multipart wizard to extract this file, or present it as an explorer window that lets you run things directly out of, but causes most programs to freak out when you try this. I still don't use the built in Zip support on XP even though it has been slightly improved. Running things inside a Zip directly is as bad as compressing the hard drive for more space.
ME sucked. It was simply a quick release from Microsoft for the consumer market to get something new out, since all the "consumer friendly" features didn't make it into NT 5, err, I mean Windows 2000. For MS to go completly backwards and ship another archaic 16/32 bit mess of DOS based code after Windows 2000 was just silly. I feel pitty on anyone who actually paid for a copy of ME.
Front Row plays anything Quicktime can. And there are codec plugins for Quicktime on the PowerPC side to handle pretty much everything. Below is a list of codecs I used on my PowerPC Mac Mini to play back pretty much everything I had except an occasional Real Media file. Keep in mind these have to be coded specifically for Intel to work on the new Mini properly.
Windows XP 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 64-bit support EFI, but the Intel Core Duo is a 32-bit architecture.
I haven't seen anyone who has tried booting to the XP 64 bit CD yet, thus I am recommending someone try. Sure, the Core Duo is 32 bit, but the 64 bit (at least the X64 versions) will boot on a 32 bit machine and eventually say installation is not supported on the machine. If someone can get these CDs past the "Press any key" prompt on an Intel Mac, it might expose something that can be used elsewhere.
Having a final production OS bootloader to play with might work out better then tinkering with the Vista betas.
It indeed was a great looking game. It was shown off at the B5 convention in southern California around the summer of 98 as well. I remember one of the devs there showing off his skills with one of the fighters, flying really close to the station.
If I remember right, they even had access to the models from the show to work with to keep things looking as close as they could, using 1998 technology of course.
All nVidia videocards, now -- one of which is a Quadro FX 4500 for $1650. Nice knowin' ya, ATI, don't let the door hit you in the rear on the way out.
Woo. NVidia is making all the cards in the PowerMacs. ATI is still making the graphics chip in the iMacs, the Mac Mini, and all the laptops except the 12 inch Powerbook.
Apple has used products from both sides and continues to do so. Nothing changed here. NVidia lost the iMac, and ATI lost the PowerMac.
Mac monitors haven't been 1 printed point = 1 display pixel for a long time. It was a big deal back when the first Mac came out with a 72 dpi screen that you could hold a ruler up to and have it match documents. However, things have greatly changed past 1984,
Recently, most Apple screens hovered around 100 dpi except for the 14 inch iBook. dpi on monitors continues to increase, and operating systems are having a hard time keeping up. Windows XP and OS X Tiger don't scale overly well currently. Both have the underpinnings to do it, and show signs that Vista/Leopard will do a much better job.
Printers are also widly varried, though a direct dpi compairson can't be made since a computer monitor can display many colors with one pixel, where as a printer is limited to usually 4 or so colors per pixel. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dpi
I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package.
Same here. And with the length of time I usually wait between upgrades, I'm also replacing the power supply because of some new power hungry device, a new hard drive since storage always gets cheeper, and a new memory type.
This is why I love the "Macs aren't upgradable" comments. Well, in many ways, PCs aren't either unless you upgrade to that newest CPU every 3 months. So much in the system changes that usually forces people to buy all new things.
So to me, having a motherboard support several different CPU modules doesn't make sense. I upgrade to gain speed every 1.5-2.5 years, and in that time enough has changed that this motherboard will simply hold me back.
Thats no different then going into Diablo 2's online section, and asking for help in the chat room, except that Guild Wars lacks a chat room and instead puts people togther in game instead of in a chat lobby. From the Diablo 2 chat lobby, players can launch into a game togther, and help each other out.
Massive would have been if 2000 people came up to you and went to help you all at once, something the game doesn't support.
Phantasy Star Online also wasn't considered an MMO, and did things just like Guild Wars does. People could assemble in a common area and chat, but going into the mission/fighting part of the game limited you to a small group of people.
As the Guild Wars FAQ even states, it's not an MMORPG, but more of a cooperative RPG. Thus to me, it's sales figures should be compared to other off the shelf games, and not games like WoW.
To me, I think of Guild Wars more as a typical RPG game, with an integrated group finding feature via visiting the towns, instead of the separate chat room/in game aspect of say Diablo II. So to me, this just tells me Guild Wars sold a million copies, and is overall a decent game if that many people are finding it interesting. I am aware of the PVP aspect of it as well, but again thats more of an in game group finder to then go in and have a small deathmatch. Would Half Life 2 be considered an MMO if every time you went into City 17 you saw other players, but once you left the city you were back to playing alone or with a small group? Well, at least then it could justify the mandatory internet connection to play it, but thats another rant for another day.
More and more games are adding online aspects to them. To me, that doesn't automatically make them an MMO in my eyes.
I am also noticing more and more games specifically putting "No monthly fee required" even if it is a single player game with a 16 person deathmatch or something.
It's been reported that this limit only comes up when using iTunes to load music onto the phone. When you use more normal means to move MP3s to it directly and use the built in media player (not the iTunes one), the limitation magically disappears.
Based on the testing people have been doing, it does indeed seem to be DRM.
iTunes 5 keeps track of the number of tracks authorized for playback on the phone so even if your 100 tracks have used only 350MB of the card's capacity, you can't add more. Similarly, although you can swap in a new card that contains new tracks, those tracks won't play until they've been approved for playback by iTunes.
"Approved for playback" seems to point to more a DRM issue then a technical one.
I'm not trying to spread FUD on this. The simple fact is though so many people are overlooking this "limitation". I fear what the next step is beyond this. DRM's main campaign seems to be to ensure people don't know it is there until it is too late. I'll excuse Apple from using DRM on the iTMS, but not in a product like this as a move that seems to be motivated to protect the iPod lineup.
The post by TheRaven64 is wrong. It is indeed limited to 100 songs period. If a theoretical 4gb transflash card was put in the ROKR, it would still limit you to 100 total songs, no matter the length.
See this picture thanks to this post from a person who actually uses the phone, instead of relying on Apple.com information.
Ironic my first "Troll" mod turns out to be due to an uninformed poster. yeah.
I last had empty drive bays on my Pentium III 800 system. I realized back then I didn't have a huge need for massive expansion in my desktop machine.
After that, I went to a Shuttle XPC system. Plenty of internal space for what I need, and no wasted space. If I for some reason need more then 3 hard disks inside my box, it's probably time to add more space to the network server that sits in my basement instead of getting a bigger desktop case.
The article may be right about the 100-song limitation being Apple's fault,
Everyone seems to be saying this, and also that Apple wanted it at 25 initially until Motorola finally got them to bump it up. How is this limit done? Well it seems it is done via DRM in iTunes.
The same DRM that got into iTunes initially because "Apple had no choice if they wanted to open a music store". So, Apple was painted as the good guys initially, because it wasn't their fault they had to use DRM. Now that they are using it in other ways, people are overlooking it. What next?
To any DRM appologists out there, look at what is already starting to happen. 100 songs period on your phone, and you have no control over that even with a bigger memory card.
This Wikipedia entry should get you started. It shows what each cell phone provider around the world uses. Under the technology section, it will have links to each of the protocols.
In general, a phone only supports one major protocol. So a GSM phone can only see GSM signals (and to further confuse things, there are 4 major GSM frequencies that can be used, while most GSM phones only support 2 to 3 of these). A CDMA phone only works on a CDMA network, etc.
Roaming means your phone sees a compatible network to what it supports, but cannot find your exact provider. If Cingular and T-Mobile didn't have a roaming agreement, my T-Mobile phone could still use Cingulars GSM network, but would be "roaming" and I would be charged for it.
Analog roaming is another common term, and some phones contain support for a newer digital standard, and an older analog standard. Whenever it can't find a digital network, it then seeks out an older analog network tower. Remember the suitcase portable phones of the 80's? Those were all analog, and the networks actually still exist. They are however still very expensive, and analog roaming usually hits your wallet hard.
Of course the systems failed because there's no money to be made in building the kind of redundancy into the system that's necessary to keep running.
If a single standard was used though, it would be a whole lot easier. Imagine if every US cell phone provider used only GSM. The companies could still build their own networks if they didn't want to sign agreements. In a time of disaster, just flip the towers from accepting only Company X to a mode that they accept anyone. Sure, damage will occur to the equipment still, but theres a much higher chance of things continuing to work with multiple towers running the same standard.
Right now I'm sure area x has perfect Sprint coverage, while another area still has working Cingular service. But the phones between the two are incompatible.
The other advantage of such a standard would be that providers could pitch in a small bit of money towards a disaster resilant network and everyone would benefit.
THESE ARE DEVELOPER MACHINES AND DO NOT REPRESENT HARDWARE THAT APPLE WILL SHIP.
There. Apple has said many times they don't plan on using a BIOS in the shipping products, and have hinted at EFI. But the first developer machines have a BIOS, so everyone ignores Apple and assumes it will have a BIOS. Apple has a huge investment in driving forward with 64bit with all the marketing they have done, and yet everyone expects PowerMacs with the same Pentium chips in the developer machines that aren't 64 bit.
Nowthis DRM thing comes up. Will Apple do similar in shipping hardware? It's hard to say. But right now, noone here can say yes or no for sure (unless your sitting at Apple's HQ working on the new products right now). I myself wouldn't be suprised if they do indeed put some kind of protection on, as the Mac OS has always had some kind of odd hardware requirement that prevents it from easially just running on a clone PowerPC box.
Just settle down and wait until real products ship. Because if you have OS X 10.4.1 for Intel, you either have the hardware to run it on due to your developer program, or you pirated the ISO image off some torrent site and have it illegially.
Yeah, sure, OS X will probably be runnable on a non Apple box some day. But guess what, it's likely to be a hacked up solution that kinda sorta works, and leaves you wasting time that could have been spent earning money to just buy a $500 Mac Mini. For me, my Apple hardware is a big reason I moved to OS X. Running OS X on my Dell just wouldn't be the same.
You have to remember that a regular DVD will hold 16GB of data in the case of DSDL, and 8GB for DL.
Dual Dided DVDs work OK for movies, but would be horrible for games. Sure, your approaching space beyond a single layer HD-DVD, but the dual sided DVD would need to duplicate content that is shared between "part 1" and "part 2" of the game.
Dual sided disks are also not as durable.
Currently the largest game I've seen is Everquest 2 and it spans about 10 CD, so 7GB at most. It's also an anomoly at the high end, most fit in under 4GB.
My install of Everquest 2 with the optional downloads but not any adventure packs comes in at 4.67 GB of data. I still find it odd their DVD release was on two discs, when it could have all fit on one dual layer disc, including all the extra content they put on.
The biggest game I know of for PC is Myst IV. A full install that no longer requires content off the DVD is a smidge over 8gb. Thats due to the big amount of art assets and movies. Seeing that next gen consoles are pushing HD, a bigger disc format will be necessary to have a game similar to Myst that uses a ton of movies and hi resolution pictures. If they squeeze it down with compression, you either lose processor power to decoding it in game, or suffer quality issues.
Compare games for the Nintendo systems to any other console over the past few years. Media rich games were almost always exclusive to the PS1/2 units, since the PS1 stored a ton more data on a disc then the N64 did, and even now with the GameCube, the PS2 outpaces it by a decent bit. Thankfully a game doesn't need to be media rich to be fun, but I'd like the developers to have the choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I really miss the days that FASA and Activision worked together on MechWarrior 2. The follow ups out of FASA/Microsoft just didn't quite ever live up to those older games, and MechAssault helped drag what used to be a fun mech simulator franchise down into "Halo with Mechs". True, it opened it up to a wider audience, but the fun of the franchise left for many people.
It's been a while since I heard about it at a convention in 98, but by what I remember, the dispute is why Claudia wasn't in the 5th season (except the final episode that was actually shot during the 4th season). She was saying the reason was due to some mis communication and JMS really didn't add much to the conversation. The impression most people got was that she or her agent had said she was busy, so they moved on to find a replacement for her role in the 5th season. She did want to be in it, but by the time she tried to talk to JMS, they had already brought in the new actor. JMS and Claudia were clearly not happy with each other at this convention as they stayed away from each other.
She was involved in some of the TV movies though made after this, and on the commentary tracks of the DVDs, so I doubt that old issue would cause her to be skipped in these direct to DVD shows. The only two characters that I know of that won't be shown are Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs) and G'kar (Andreas Katsulas), as sadly both actors have passed away.
Spaces actually interests me greatly and is likely to be the first time I use a virtual desktop. It finally advances the virtual desktop concept by also wrapping it around expose. Hit a key, and now you see every virtual desktop and can drag windows between them.
0 190215821 is a video of it in action.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=125465655
I'm aware of how the electoral college works, however, they only decided a winner on the 2000 election after the Supreme Court voted along partisan lines that a proper recount in Florida could not be done. Had a recount of the entire state been allowed, Gore would have likely won.
I'm upset not because "my" candidate lost, I'm upset because the system that we use to elect people into power is so broken, and here 6 years later after a major example, it is possibly worse.
As for voting for change, I did vote yes for the amendment in Colorado to split electoral votes based on the states popular vote percentages. Sadly, it lost since it was introduced to the state by some wealthy Californian that didn't want to have it done in his home state.
Sadly most Americans simply don't care. If we did, we would have been out in the streets like what is going on in Mexico, especially after 2000 when Gore won the popular vote, but lost the presidency because the supreme court said so.
Apparently Bush's administration isn't bad enough to get us off our couches in any significant numbers.
What stores in Austin did you check? Only one I visited was the Target on 183, and they had several old DSs, but nothing new.
Cingular and T-Mobile are the same way here in the US. A T-Mobile phone is likely to be on 1900mhz, while the Cingular phone is likely to be on 850mhz. My T-Mobile phone had to be sitting on top of speaker wires to do this, but my Cingular phone can do it from a foot away.
Just sold my $2500 PowerBook G4 15 inch 1.25ghz from August 2003 for $1500. The Intel changeover really didn't harm resale value. And in some cases it helped increase it. No idea who bought it, I put it up for consignment at a local reseller.
"1. faster booting"
.zip support"
Yep, comes in handy when the OS can't handle a day or two of uptime. Windows 2000 was so much more stable, and didn't take all that long to boot. Longer then ME, yes, but I bet you wasted more time watching the boot screen then 2000 users did.
"2. disk scan ran inside windows and was a million times faster"
Except that ME wasn't smart enough to multitask when scanning a disk. So that frequent bootup disk scan you saw was always interrupted several times when it tried to start, and if some bootup process accessed the disk say every minute or two, it would never finish. I think the majority of ME users just cancelled that any time it popped up. Of course those of us who skipped ME and went from 98 to 2000 started enjoying journaled filesystems and had no need for the disk scan to run inside windows.
"3. native
Zip support that is horribly implemented. Lets walk you through a multipart wizard to extract this file, or present it as an explorer window that lets you run things directly out of, but causes most programs to freak out when you try this. I still don't use the built in Zip support on XP even though it has been slightly improved. Running things inside a Zip directly is as bad as compressing the hard drive for more space.
ME sucked. It was simply a quick release from Microsoft for the consumer market to get something new out, since all the "consumer friendly" features didn't make it into NT 5, err, I mean Windows 2000. For MS to go completly backwards and ship another archaic 16/32 bit mess of DOS based code after Windows 2000 was just silly. I feel pitty on anyone who actually paid for a copy of ME.
Front Row plays anything Quicktime can. And there are codec plugins for Quicktime on the PowerPC side to handle pretty much everything. Below is a list of codecs I used on my PowerPC Mac Mini to play back pretty much everything I had except an occasional Real Media file. Keep in mind these have to be coded specifically for Intel to work on the new Mini properly.
p _id=83360
Divx 6: http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/download/
XVid delegate: http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~naegelic/download/
3vix: http://www.3ivx.com/download/macos.html
AC3/A52 decoder: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?grou
WMV Decoder for Quicktime: http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv.htm
Quicktime MPEG2 decoder, $20: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/
Windows XP 64-bit and Windows Server 2003 64-bit support EFI, but the Intel Core Duo is a 32-bit architecture.
I haven't seen anyone who has tried booting to the XP 64 bit CD yet, thus I am recommending someone try. Sure, the Core Duo is 32 bit, but the 64 bit (at least the X64 versions) will boot on a 32 bit machine and eventually say installation is not supported on the machine. If someone can get these CDs past the "Press any key" prompt on an Intel Mac, it might expose something that can be used elsewhere.
Having a final production OS bootloader to play with might work out better then tinkering with the Vista betas.
It indeed was a great looking game. It was shown off at the B5 convention in southern California around the summer of 98 as well. I remember one of the devs there showing off his skills with one of the fighters, flying really close to the station.
If I remember right, they even had access to the models from the show to work with to keep things looking as close as they could, using 1998 technology of course.
All nVidia videocards, now -- one of which is a Quadro FX 4500 for $1650. Nice knowin' ya, ATI, don't let the door hit you in the rear on the way out.
Woo. NVidia is making all the cards in the PowerMacs. ATI is still making the graphics chip in the iMacs, the Mac Mini, and all the laptops except the 12 inch Powerbook.
Apple has used products from both sides and continues to do so. Nothing changed here. NVidia lost the iMac, and ATI lost the PowerMac.
Mac monitors haven't been 1 printed point = 1 display pixel for a long time. It was a big deal back when the first Mac came out with a 72 dpi screen that you could hold a ruler up to and have it match documents. However, things have greatly changed past 1984,
Recently, most Apple screens hovered around 100 dpi except for the 14 inch iBook. dpi on monitors continues to increase, and operating systems are having a hard time keeping up. Windows XP and OS X Tiger don't scale overly well currently. Both have the underpinnings to do it, and show signs that Vista/Leopard will do a much better job.
Printers are also widly varried, though a direct dpi compairson can't be made since a computer monitor can display many colors with one pixel, where as a printer is limited to usually 4 or so colors per pixel. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dpi
I generally find that by the time upgrading the CPU is cost effective, a new motherboard makes sense as part of the package.
Same here. And with the length of time I usually wait between upgrades, I'm also replacing the power supply because of some new power hungry device, a new hard drive since storage always gets cheeper, and a new memory type.
This is why I love the "Macs aren't upgradable" comments. Well, in many ways, PCs aren't either unless you upgrade to that newest CPU every 3 months. So much in the system changes that usually forces people to buy all new things.
So to me, having a motherboard support several different CPU modules doesn't make sense. I upgrade to gain speed every 1.5-2.5 years, and in that time enough has changed that this motherboard will simply hold me back.
Thats no different then going into Diablo 2's online section, and asking for help in the chat room, except that Guild Wars lacks a chat room and instead puts people togther in game instead of in a chat lobby. From the Diablo 2 chat lobby, players can launch into a game togther, and help each other out.
Massive would have been if 2000 people came up to you and went to help you all at once, something the game doesn't support.
Phantasy Star Online also wasn't considered an MMO, and did things just like Guild Wars does. People could assemble in a common area and chat, but going into the mission/fighting part of the game limited you to a small group of people.
As the Guild Wars FAQ even states, it's not an MMORPG, but more of a cooperative RPG. Thus to me, it's sales figures should be compared to other off the shelf games, and not games like WoW.
To me, I think of Guild Wars more as a typical RPG game, with an integrated group finding feature via visiting the towns, instead of the separate chat room/in game aspect of say Diablo II. So to me, this just tells me Guild Wars sold a million copies, and is overall a decent game if that many people are finding it interesting. I am aware of the PVP aspect of it as well, but again thats more of an in game group finder to then go in and have a small deathmatch. Would Half Life 2 be considered an MMO if every time you went into City 17 you saw other players, but once you left the city you were back to playing alone or with a small group? Well, at least then it could justify the mandatory internet connection to play it, but thats another rant for another day.
More and more games are adding online aspects to them. To me, that doesn't automatically make them an MMO in my eyes.
I am also noticing more and more games specifically putting "No monthly fee required" even if it is a single player game with a 16 person deathmatch or something.
It's been reported that this limit only comes up when using iTunes to load music onto the phone. When you use more normal means to move MP3s to it directly and use the built in media player (not the iTunes one), the limitation magically disappears.
Based on the testing people have been doing, it does indeed seem to be DRM.
iTunes 5 keeps track of the number of tracks authorized for playback on the phone so even if your 100 tracks have used only 350MB of the card's capacity, you can't add more. Similarly, although you can swap in a new card that contains new tracks, those tracks won't play until they've been approved for playback by iTunes.
"Approved for playback" seems to point to more a DRM issue then a technical one.
I'm not trying to spread FUD on this. The simple fact is though so many people are overlooking this "limitation". I fear what the next step is beyond this. DRM's main campaign seems to be to ensure people don't know it is there until it is too late. I'll excuse Apple from using DRM on the iTMS, but not in a product like this as a move that seems to be motivated to protect the iPod lineup.
The post by TheRaven64 is wrong. It is indeed limited to 100 songs period. If a theoretical 4gb transflash card was put in the ROKR, it would still limit you to 100 total songs, no matter the length.
See this picture thanks to this post from a person who actually uses the phone, instead of relying on Apple.com information.
Ironic my first "Troll" mod turns out to be due to an uninformed poster. yeah.
I last had empty drive bays on my Pentium III 800 system. I realized back then I didn't have a huge need for massive expansion in my desktop machine.
After that, I went to a Shuttle XPC system. Plenty of internal space for what I need, and no wasted space. If I for some reason need more then 3 hard disks inside my box, it's probably time to add more space to the network server that sits in my basement instead of getting a bigger desktop case.
The article may be right about the 100-song limitation being Apple's fault,
Everyone seems to be saying this, and also that Apple wanted it at 25 initially until Motorola finally got them to bump it up. How is this limit done? Well it seems it is done via DRM in iTunes.
The same DRM that got into iTunes initially because "Apple had no choice if they wanted to open a music store". So, Apple was painted as the good guys initially, because it wasn't their fault they had to use DRM. Now that they are using it in other ways, people are overlooking it. What next?
To any DRM appologists out there, look at what is already starting to happen. 100 songs period on your phone, and you have no control over that even with a bigger memory card.
This Wikipedia entry should get you started. It shows what each cell phone provider around the world uses. Under the technology section, it will have links to each of the protocols.
In general, a phone only supports one major protocol. So a GSM phone can only see GSM signals (and to further confuse things, there are 4 major GSM frequencies that can be used, while most GSM phones only support 2 to 3 of these). A CDMA phone only works on a CDMA network, etc.
Roaming means your phone sees a compatible network to what it supports, but cannot find your exact provider. If Cingular and T-Mobile didn't have a roaming agreement, my T-Mobile phone could still use Cingulars GSM network, but would be "roaming" and I would be charged for it.
Analog roaming is another common term, and some phones contain support for a newer digital standard, and an older analog standard. Whenever it can't find a digital network, it then seeks out an older analog network tower. Remember the suitcase portable phones of the 80's? Those were all analog, and the networks actually still exist. They are however still very expensive, and analog roaming usually hits your wallet hard.
Of course the systems failed because there's no money to be made in building the kind of redundancy into the system that's necessary to keep running.
If a single standard was used though, it would be a whole lot easier. Imagine if every US cell phone provider used only GSM. The companies could still build their own networks if they didn't want to sign agreements. In a time of disaster, just flip the towers from accepting only Company X to a mode that they accept anyone. Sure, damage will occur to the equipment still, but theres a much higher chance of things continuing to work with multiple towers running the same standard.
Right now I'm sure area x has perfect Sprint coverage, while another area still has working Cingular service. But the phones between the two are incompatible.
The other advantage of such a standard would be that providers could pitch in a small bit of money towards a disaster resilant network and everyone would benefit.
Ugg. How many times does it have to be said?
THESE ARE DEVELOPER MACHINES AND DO NOT REPRESENT HARDWARE THAT APPLE WILL SHIP.
There. Apple has said many times they don't plan on using a BIOS in the shipping products, and have hinted at EFI. But the first developer machines have a BIOS, so everyone ignores Apple and assumes it will have a BIOS. Apple has a huge investment in driving forward with 64bit with all the marketing they have done, and yet everyone expects PowerMacs with the same Pentium chips in the developer machines that aren't 64 bit.
Nowthis DRM thing comes up. Will Apple do similar in shipping hardware? It's hard to say. But right now, noone here can say yes or no for sure (unless your sitting at Apple's HQ working on the new products right now). I myself wouldn't be suprised if they do indeed put some kind of protection on, as the Mac OS has always had some kind of odd hardware requirement that prevents it from easially just running on a clone PowerPC box.
Just settle down and wait until real products ship. Because if you have OS X 10.4.1 for Intel, you either have the hardware to run it on due to your developer program, or you pirated the ISO image off some torrent site and have it illegially.
Yeah, sure, OS X will probably be runnable on a non Apple box some day. But guess what, it's likely to be a hacked up solution that kinda sorta works, and leaves you wasting time that could have been spent earning money to just buy a $500 Mac Mini. For me, my Apple hardware is a big reason I moved to OS X. Running OS X on my Dell just wouldn't be the same.
You have to remember that a regular DVD will hold 16GB of data in the case of DSDL, and 8GB for DL.
Dual Dided DVDs work OK for movies, but would be horrible for games. Sure, your approaching space beyond a single layer HD-DVD, but the dual sided DVD would need to duplicate content that is shared between "part 1" and "part 2" of the game.
Dual sided disks are also not as durable.
Currently the largest game I've seen is Everquest 2 and it spans about 10 CD, so 7GB at most. It's also an anomoly at the high end, most fit in under 4GB.
My install of Everquest 2 with the optional downloads but not any adventure packs comes in at 4.67 GB of data. I still find it odd their DVD release was on two discs, when it could have all fit on one dual layer disc, including all the extra content they put on.
The biggest game I know of for PC is Myst IV. A full install that no longer requires content off the DVD is a smidge over 8gb. Thats due to the big amount of art assets and movies. Seeing that next gen consoles are pushing HD, a bigger disc format will be necessary to have a game similar to Myst that uses a ton of movies and hi resolution pictures. If they squeeze it down with compression, you either lose processor power to decoding it in game, or suffer quality issues.
Compare games for the Nintendo systems to any other console over the past few years. Media rich games were almost always exclusive to the PS1/2 units, since the PS1 stored a ton more data on a disc then the N64 did, and even now with the GameCube, the PS2 outpaces it by a decent bit. Thankfully a game doesn't need to be media rich to be fun, but I'd like the developers to have the choice.