Editors got it wrong AGAIN
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VoIP at $15 a Pop
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· Score: 5, Informative
Creative has some closed source software with it that they manage to sneak per call charges in with,
Only for VoIP-to-PSTN calls, that require servers to handle the switching.
but ignoring that one can install the open source fobbit software and do point-to-point unmetered VoIP calls to anyone else with a G.723.1 codec VoIP phone.
Which are free with the Creative software. This software won't save anyone a dime in call charges.
What it adds is support for firewalls, and allows you to use the device without registering with a credit card. It loses the ability to do PSTN calls.
Re:Looks like it takes a normal handset phone.
on
VoIP at $15 a Pop
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· Score: 2
So that would take care of the usual audio quality problem of "sounds like you're talking from the bottom of a garbage can."
Why? Does using a handset instead of a microphone for audio input guarantee a certain level of quality in the audio compression? More likely it would be worse, as a handset pickup is designed only for the demands of POTS service, which has lousy audio. A dedicated mic through a sound card would capture better audio (and can support stereo).
...most people interested in ci-Fi are waiting for the second Lord of The Rings movie.... I think more people are waiting for the next X-Men movie than a SW movie in which we know that Anakin gets involved with Queen whats-her-name and starts becoming Darth Vader.... Right now, he has no room to move.
Um, he has a hell of a lot more "room" than Peter Jackson does with Two Towers. I mean, I could probably guess how that ENTIRE MOVIE will unfold! And the next one as well!
The idea behind the Phantom Edit is really cool, but downloading an entire movie is both redundant (if I own the DVD already) and has obvious sticky legal issues.
It'd be nice to define a way to re-edit a film from DVD footage, such that you can redistribute the edit as simple "score" information. You just list the edit segments as references to timed slices of the original data. The resulting file would be tiny, and you're not sharing any copyrighted information. When you "play" the edit, the DVD player just skips around the source movie playing the edits in order.
More complicated editing techniques like the separation of audio and video tracks (to maintain music continuity for instance) could be implemented by having separate edit information for each. The player software must become a little smarter at this point though.
This mechanism could also be used to implement the "amateur commentaries" that Ebert talked about a little while back. You just include the commentary information in a separate file, which would be much smaller as you would have to provide only the actual commentary, not all the "dead air" between comments. The edit score would play the appropriate comment at the right time, with nice crossfading if you prefer.
As long as you're throwing latency considerations to the wind, why not just build a plain old CD-ROM drive that reads the entire disc on load into an onboard 700M memory buffer, and subsequently serves data just as fast as you can transfer it?
Heh, I still have my $400+ USR HST (not DS!) 14.4kb modem lurking in my storage room. It's the size of a notebook computer.
I don't consider it the "bad old days" at all. I was running 14.4 amongst all the 2400 bps modems a good year or two before v32/v32bis modems were generally available.
I donate the PC to a school. The Windows license must accompany it.
They can't possibly enforce that. You are free to do whatever you like to that copy of Windows, including destroy it. What the license implies is that you can't dissociate the license from the machine such that you can use the license on another machine. That is entirely different.
You're not compelled to include the OS, you're simply prohibited from using it on another machine.
Do you really think you are not being taped when you enter an adult shop?
It's probably more likely, as adult shops have far more trouble with shoplifting than average. It seems that even people with plenty of money have trouble walking up to the counter and ringing up that Anal Intruder Deluxe.
because the day they turn 18, something magical happens
Hahaha, yes, that's ridiculous!
The magical date is of course 17. Or was it 6? I'm pretty sure that 12 year old girl over there knows what she's doing... I mean the age is irrelevant really, it's all about how mature that 8 year old is.
There are 30 year old mentally challenged people less capable, and mature 11 year olds better capable, of making responsible decisions than an "average 18 year old". What do you propose be written in the law books if not the arbitrary 18 that's there now?
"Build a computer yourself" in this context does _not_ mean buying a motherboard, cpu, and peripherals and slapping them together.
Homebuilding a PC today would cost far more in parts alone than buying a cheap clone at Walmart. Add to that the massive task of custom-designing hardware to run a modern CPU, memory, and IO, and you're talking _loads_ of work.
Is it even possible? One could always recreate an old Altair project, but could a talented engineer homebuild a Pentium-based machine? Or is the support logic implicitly so complex that it must be implemented with custom chipsets?
Empathy would require the animal to have emotions, I did not know that cats and dogs were capable of such things, please point out some specific studies.
I have no "specific studies" for you. Having spent many years with dogs, however, there is simply no question whatsoever in my mind that animals have emotions. Dogs in particular seem more emotional than humans. At least, they're more expressive. Happiness, sadness, anger, guilt, irritability, they've got it all.
Instead of "data", try Occam's razor on this. Is it more ridiculous to believe that animals have emotions and thought, or to believe that humans alone of all animals have them? I think there are no fundamental differences between animal and human minds. We're just farther up the grade on the intelligence meter.
Oh, I know that *I* would learn something, and I didn't mean to imply that he would necessarily consider it a waste of time. It's just that when I consider how productive someone like him or his peers can be while simply thinking, I have less desire to occupy his time with my chitchat.:)
Stephen's great politeness paradoxically made me ill at ease; I was acutely aware of the many demands on his time, and, after all, I had just stopped by to talk shop.
I've often wondered what I would do if I were given the opportunity to spend some time with a person like Hawking. I suspect that I would feel the same, and would end up just slinking quietly out of his office, embarrassed that I had wasted a moment of the time he might have spent moving human knowledge a bit further ahead.
'More expensive' is not really that debatable! Its either more expensive, or its not. In the UK, the X-Box is more expensive
Since when is the UK the whole world? Sorry, that hasn't been the case for over 200 years. You're just another random euro province now. In every important country, the prices are the same.
Repeat after me - it doesnt matter about the tech - nobody buys consoles for the tech!
Can you read?
I just said that Xbox 2 isn't going to be the way that MS attacks their problems, the way people here are suggesting.
The real reason? X-Box is more expensive and has less good games!
Yep. Though "more expensive" is debatable, it's equivalently priced in most places.
The PS2 is right in the sweet spot right now, for game volume and quality. The "2nd generation" PS2 games are arriving, and they're good. While the quality of Xbox games is generally high, there are simply not enough available.
That's really the only reason. No one's complaining about the hardware, apart from the "giant controller" gripes. Even PS2 fanboy reviews will grudgingly admit that the Xbox has better tech under the hood. So I don't expect that MS's answer to the sales problems will be Xbox 2.0. It's going to be even more partnering with or purchasing of game developers.
MS will never abandon the unit, they know how important it is. They're gonna go terminator, here: It absolutely will not stop, ever. They want to relive the Netscape/IE story in the worst way.
You clearly [think] games on the PS2 don't make the kind of resource demands that their PC counterparts do.
They absolutely do not. No PS2 game has or ever will keep hundreds of megs of game data in memory. Everquest on a PC does exactly that.
The PS2 is great at what it does. What it does not do is manage very large amounts of data at one time. Console games are carefully designed never to do that.
It can't be that hard to demonstrate that it has the capabilities of both, but who knows.
However, I suspect that the unit is closer to my description than I thought. The spec sheet lists "Applications: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, Jeode Java Virtual Machine, Microsoft Instant Messenger, Citrix® ICA® Client 6.0, Microsoft RDP 5.1, Multimedia Microsoft Media Player 7.0". So apparently you can run a browser, etc. locally instead of doing everything through RPD.
In fact, the term "wireless monitor" describes exactly how little functionality this device offers. For some amazingly stupid reason, they've castrated WinCE to the point that all it can do is terminal services.
Why not just call it a "large format PDA", and fix it up with all the little native apps that small PDAs have, including it's own web browser (that can connect through your desktop or router), as well as an RDP client. Then you can get some additional use from it on the road without having an arbitrary "wireless tether" to your desktop pc.
Total BS. While you save the upfront cost of loading the OS, the choice of OS does not affect the amount of memory required to store texture, model, and world data, which is the bottleneck for EQ.
I'm hoping this version takes advantage of the Ps2's graphic capabilites, rather then what I've seen on EQ before.
Very doubtful. While the PS2 chipset can drive a good framerate, the minimal memory and total absence of a hard drive would require stripping loads of detail from what you see on a PC. This engine is about a real *bulk* of data, not the small set of detailed models and textures in a typical console game.
Getting that sort of game, designed and optimized just for PCs, to run at all on the PS2 is going to be a real feat.
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Only for VoIP-to-PSTN calls, that require servers to handle the switching.
but ignoring that one can install the open source fobbit software and do point-to-point unmetered VoIP calls to anyone else with a G.723.1 codec VoIP phone.
Which are free with the Creative software. This software won't save anyone a dime in call charges.
What it adds is support for firewalls, and allows you to use the device without registering with a credit card. It loses the ability to do PSTN calls.
Why? Does using a handset instead of a microphone for audio input guarantee a certain level of quality in the audio compression? More likely it would be worse, as a handset pickup is designed only for the demands of POTS service, which has lousy audio. A dedicated mic through a sound card would capture better audio (and can support stereo).
Um, he has a hell of a lot more "room" than Peter Jackson does with Two Towers. I mean, I could probably guess how that ENTIRE MOVIE will unfold! And the next one as well!
It'd be nice to define a way to re-edit a film from DVD footage, such that you can redistribute the edit as simple "score" information. You just list the edit segments as references to timed slices of the original data. The resulting file would be tiny, and you're not sharing any copyrighted information. When you "play" the edit, the DVD player just skips around the source movie playing the edits in order.
More complicated editing techniques like the separation of audio and video tracks (to maintain music continuity for instance) could be implemented by having separate edit information for each. The player software must become a little smarter at this point though.
This mechanism could also be used to implement the "amateur commentaries" that Ebert talked about a little while back. You just include the commentary information in a separate file, which would be much smaller as you would have to provide only the actual commentary, not all the "dead air" between comments. The edit score would play the appropriate comment at the right time, with nice crossfading if you prefer.
Pardon me, I seem to have accidentally stepped into a conversation from 10 YEARS AGO.
As long as you're throwing latency considerations to the wind, why not just build a plain old CD-ROM drive that reads the entire disc on load into an onboard 700M memory buffer, and subsequently serves data just as fast as you can transfer it?
I don't consider it the "bad old days" at all. I was running 14.4 amongst all the 2400 bps modems a good year or two before v32/v32bis modems were generally available.
They can't possibly enforce that. You are free to do whatever you like to that copy of Windows, including destroy it. What the license implies is that you can't dissociate the license from the machine such that you can use the license on another machine. That is entirely different.
You're not compelled to include the OS, you're simply prohibited from using it on another machine.
Not to mention .ac (Ascension Island), .ad (Andorra), .ae (United Arab Emirates), ...
It's probably more likely, as adult shops have far more trouble with shoplifting than average. It seems that even people with plenty of money have trouble walking up to the counter and ringing up that Anal Intruder Deluxe.
Hahaha, yes, that's ridiculous!
The magical date is of course 17. Or was it 6? I'm pretty sure that 12 year old girl over there knows what she's doing... I mean the age is irrelevant really, it's all about how mature that 8 year old is.
There are 30 year old mentally challenged people less capable, and mature 11 year olds better capable, of making responsible decisions than an "average 18 year old". What do you propose be written in the law books if not the arbitrary 18 that's there now?
Homebuilding a PC today would cost far more in parts alone than buying a cheap clone at Walmart. Add to that the massive task of custom-designing hardware to run a modern CPU, memory, and IO, and you're talking _loads_ of work.
Is it even possible? One could always recreate an old Altair project, but could a talented engineer homebuild a Pentium-based machine? Or is the support logic implicitly so complex that it must be implemented with custom chipsets?
More complex event handling in general, yeah. It'd be nice to have a generalized, maybe scripted, event handlers.
"When (user in group "family") (logs in) (after 5:00 pm), (play ring.wav)".
"When (Joe) (changes status to (idle) (between 9am and 5pm)) send msg to joe: 'Get to work!!'".
I have no "specific studies" for you. Having spent many years with dogs, however, there is simply no question whatsoever in my mind that animals have emotions. Dogs in particular seem more emotional than humans. At least, they're more expressive. Happiness, sadness, anger, guilt, irritability, they've got it all.
Instead of "data", try Occam's razor on this. Is it more ridiculous to believe that animals have emotions and thought, or to believe that humans alone of all animals have them? I think there are no fundamental differences between animal and human minds. We're just farther up the grade on the intelligence meter.
That was a set-up, right?
Oh, I know that *I* would learn something, and I didn't mean to imply that he would necessarily consider it a waste of time. It's just that when I consider how productive someone like him or his peers can be while simply thinking, I have less desire to occupy his time with my chitchat. :)
I've often wondered what I would do if I were given the opportunity to spend some time with a person like Hawking. I suspect that I would feel the same, and would end up just slinking quietly out of his office, embarrassed that I had wasted a moment of the time he might have spent moving human knowledge a bit further ahead.
Don't know. You'll have to ask an American. :)
Since when is the UK the whole world? Sorry, that hasn't been the case for over 200 years. You're just another random euro province now. In every important country, the prices are the same.
Repeat after me - it doesnt matter about the tech - nobody buys consoles for the tech!
Can you read?
I just said that Xbox 2 isn't going to be the way that MS attacks their problems, the way people here are suggesting.
Yep. Though "more expensive" is debatable, it's equivalently priced in most places.
The PS2 is right in the sweet spot right now, for game volume and quality. The "2nd generation" PS2 games are arriving, and they're good. While the quality of Xbox games is generally high, there are simply not enough available.
That's really the only reason. No one's complaining about the hardware, apart from the "giant controller" gripes. Even PS2 fanboy reviews will grudgingly admit that the Xbox has better tech under the hood. So I don't expect that MS's answer to the sales problems will be Xbox 2.0. It's going to be even more partnering with or purchasing of game developers.
MS will never abandon the unit, they know how important it is. They're gonna go terminator, here: It absolutely will not stop, ever. They want to relive the Netscape/IE story in the worst way.
They absolutely do not. No PS2 game has or ever will keep hundreds of megs of game data in memory. Everquest on a PC does exactly that.
The PS2 is great at what it does. What it does not do is manage very large amounts of data at one time. Console games are carefully designed never to do that.
However, I suspect that the unit is closer to my description than I thought. The spec sheet lists "Applications: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5, Jeode Java Virtual Machine, Microsoft Instant Messenger, Citrix® ICA® Client 6.0, Microsoft RDP 5.1, Multimedia Microsoft Media Player 7.0". So apparently you can run a browser, etc. locally instead of doing everything through RPD.
Why not just call it a "large format PDA", and fix it up with all the little native apps that small PDAs have, including it's own web browser (that can connect through your desktop or router), as well as an RDP client. Then you can get some additional use from it on the road without having an arbitrary "wireless tether" to your desktop pc.
Total BS. While you save the upfront cost of loading the OS, the choice of OS does not affect the amount of memory required to store texture, model, and world data, which is the bottleneck for EQ.
Very doubtful. While the PS2 chipset can drive a good framerate, the minimal memory and total absence of a hard drive would require stripping loads of detail from what you see on a PC. This engine is about a real *bulk* of data, not the small set of detailed models and textures in a typical console game.
Getting that sort of game, designed and optimized just for PCs, to run at all on the PS2 is going to be a real feat.