I once met a fellow at a party who told me that when he was a small child his mother was single and they had to bounce around from cheap motel to cheaper motels. For him, the Atari 2600 game, Breakout, was pure escapism. He had read every bit of text on the box about how the paddle you control is really a space ship and it is trying to destroy a cosmic cloud barrier that has trapped the ship with all its passengers. This fellow even had constructed a space helmet out of cardboard which he would wear while playing the game. He would often stay up late at night playing and so his mother could sleep in their small hotel room, he would drape a blanket over the television and himself to block the glow.
The story he told me climaxes when he said one night the fire department came banging on their motel room door. The whole building was being evacuated. The boy, his mother, and the other residents were instructed to stand on the other side of the street opposite the motel. A landslide had weakened the foundation of the building. As they stood out there in the night, they watched as the motel slid down a cliff into the ocean. The boy cried as he watched, in his words, "his whole life being destroyed in that landslide." He meant that his Atari 2600 with Breakout had been lost.
I know you're probably aware of this solution, but I'll throw it out there anyway. Several vendors are selling low-power set-top boxes that support torrent downloads to attached or internal media. These run linux and can also deliver 1080p media to your TV from a wide array of file formats.
I recently purchased the Patriot Box Office for $65 (with rebate) off NewEgg's site. It's not without it's problems, but it performs most of its responsibilities reliably. It also works as a NAS, though without many permissions options.
I'd get three more of these before I'd waste any money on a walwart linux box. These settop boxes are just as hackable, plus they have hardware video chipsets.
You're right about the production expenses, etc. It's kind of ugly, though, the way things have turned out. It's as if the developers (publishers) said, "We want to give you consumers less so we can make more money. Here's a dumbed-down controller, lower-horsepower, and closed platform for you to enjoy." And consumers said, "Ok."
The result is that innovation has been squelched. Hobbyists & garage studios can't knock out mods on their own. The number of developers who are financed to develop for a console is much smaller than those who used to code PC titles.
So, 3D is kind of a big deal right now. It's the feature on a lot of the new HDTV's. nVidia already has a card that supports hardware 3D rendering. None of the big 3 consoles have it, though. Consumers will have to wait until the console vendors have scheduled the lifecycle of the current consoles to expire and then they will be allowed to upgrade to the next generation console platform for 3D gaming. Hopefully that next generation of console will maintain legacy support (ahem, PS3 & PS2). It's possible they might retrofit the current consoles via firmware updates, but that's going to mean software-rendered 3D. Good luck with that.
As somebody who was a PC-only gamer for most of the 90s, I always used to enjoy the point, 3 years or so into the console cycle, where my PC was putting out the kind of graphics that my console-owning friends could only dream of. It's been a long time since we were in that kind of territory, though.
You do realize that your observation proves my point completely, don't you? It's because of the console platform dominance that developers are no longer pushing the envelope with their PC releases. As with the Crysis example you gave, it is economically unattractive for publishers to back a dev studio who is working on a PC-only title. If John Carmack walked into Activision's offices and said, "Guys, I just came up with this new rendering engine that's incredible. Ambient lighting, reflective shadows, the whole shebang! Only drawback is that it requires a video chipset released within the current generation of video cards." Those executives would punt his ass right out the door if titles using the engine can't easily port to consoles.
Did you notice that this year's QuakeCon tournaments were entirely limited to QuakeLive? iD has given up on horsepower-hungry development and has redirected its pc-gaming business towards comodity hardware.
Sadly, I don't much care about those consumers affected by denied RMA requests. The larger picture here is that this is another example of how console gaming has brought stagnation to the gaming industry. Companies who profitted from deploying bleeding edge hardware that was demanded by a constant churn of increasing software demands are no longer able to stay afloat. Consoles lock graphics to a much longer generation than does pc gaming. It's hard for companies like BFG to stay afloat when stuff stays the same for five or more years.
I know many will say the same thing. But perhaps I'll be first.
First: A sign on front door that says, "Rattlesnakes for sale: $25.00"
Second: Pistol. Taurus makes a gun called the Judge that fires 45 cal bullets and 410 shotgun shells in the same chambers. Not my favorite gun, but it does lend itself to someone who wants a varied approach.
Great information in your post. I suspect the reason Microsoft doesn't go with an ODM is because it might be significantly more expensive, which would result in a more expensive phone that won't compete as well in the marketplace (see: Dell Streak @ $299).
Also, it seems to be their dream that a horde of OEM's will license Win 7 phone OS and save Microsoft the hardware R & D, and exposure to flop risk. It's a false hope considering OEM's have Android available for free, but I'm pretty sure that's what Steve B. is thinking.
Wow. That is an astonishingly-bad piece of messaging. Their corporate perspective truly is warped by their decades-long desktop monopoly. This is where the monopoly actually hinders their ability to develop realistic marketing strategies.
Everything I'm hearing from MS these days assumes defacto widespread consumer adoption of their forthcoming products. In this case, Kostas Mallios, Microsoft's general manager for Strategy and Business Development, was allowed to put the cart before the horse and give a presentation at an advertising convention about Windows 7 Phone subjecting their captive audience to push advertising. I suppose they were desperate to woo these ad execs away from iAd & Google's Admob, but they're really forgetting the priority interest in this equation: please the consumer. Like so many other of their blunders, Microsoft is reducing the end-user experience to benefit their business interests. They just assume they can get away with it because they assume a monopoly position in the category. Whoops!
And this is a single data point, but the US governments own inaction in prosecuting Plame's divulger demonstrates that "sensitive" info and names can be released without damaging "national security." It does add another data point to the theory that "national security" is whatever benefits those in power.
I don't agree that the Plame case proves "National Security" is preserved in spite of secrecy breaches. Because of the very nature of the secrecy, we have no way of knowing what her exact role was and what potential her work might have had if it weren't interrupted by the executive branch. Maybe the contacts she had recruited in the field were somewhere close to locating Osama Bin Laden.
It is true that we haven't seen another 9/11-scale attack, but few in America would say the coast is clear. We've still got two wars raging endlessly and more islamic militants turning violent every day. If the work that Valerie Plame was conducting as a covert agent was unimportant to the cause of National Security, then why should the government have been wasting millions of dollars on supporting her role? What would it take to affirm that National Security had been compromised by divulging Valerie Plame's identity? If terrorists crashed a blimp into the Superbowl, would you blame Cheney, Scooter, and Rove for having identified Plame as a CIA agent?
The drawback to wholesale leaks like this is that sometimes innocent people can be harmed. As an example, when Valerie Plame's identity was divulged, the CIA downplayed her official capacity as being that of a desk jockey. That's what they'll say whether she really is a desk jockey, or an elite 007 killing machine. Anyway, the problem with exposing Valerie Plame is that she had contacts in the field who were then exposed to have been meeting with a CIA agent. Kinda puts those people at risk within their own organizations.
Same with these documents. Even a casual remark in a report about a helpful shop owner can put that person on a Taliban hit list.
The perspective espoused by WikiLeaks is irresponsible and naive.
Sure, but that only entails one person looking at a disgusting image once. Right now, they're subjecting many people to the same disgusting image every time someone posts it.
More than 80% of this work can be knocked out with a digital fingerprinting tool like tineye.com uses. Spiders can check every image referenced from any myspace.com html against a fingerprint match with a blacklist of images.
TFA mentions google doing something like this with YouTube videos, but it sounds like the majority of sites are crowdsourcing their visitors to flag content that gets reviewed by these folks. A digital fingerprinting tool can eliminate tedious review by both visitors and the moderators.
When you purchase Starcraft II, you're not buying the bits on the disk. You're paying for the registered account to play through their network. If you try to sell the disk to Gamespot, it's useless. The purchaser will still need to shell out for an account to play on the network. Blizzard wants to ensure that anyone who plays Starcraft II pays Blizzard. Not a third-party retailer.
There is a very large market between hardcore PC people and Solitaire playing casual gamers, namely all the people that own a gaming console.
You're right. And those people are well-served by consoles and the massive content library available for those consoles. Compared to oNLive, there's not much incentive for console players to put down their controllers and subscribe to onLive.
Best of luck to them, but they seem to hold a solution looking for a problem.
Your website isn't specific about why you've dismissed shipping containers. Let me explain why they're your best bet compared to the other modular materials you're considering.
Shipping containers are cheap and easy to transport and arrange. They can easily be modified with standard cutting and welding tools. No pre-existing windows or other openings than the doors on the end, so it's a sturdy, stackable modular material.
Airplanes are made of high-grade aluminum and are not cheap, easy to obtain, or convenient to transport if the plane is of any size worth using. The shape doesn't lend itself to stacking, so you don't have many options for architecture. Aluminum is also not very easy to weld, so good luck with that. Because aluminum is a valuable metal, airplanes are more prone to recycling than re-use.
Train cars- same thing as airplanes except that they're also rife with windows that will need to be covered and they are extremely hard to move to a location away from train tracks. There is a lot of high-grade aluminum and steel in their construction, so if they're transportable, they're also likely to be recycled rather than re-used.
Shipping containers really are the way to go. Don't sweat that they're too short or narrow. Simple cutting and welding can fix that. Different locales frequently collect a surplus because shippers don't want to spend the diesel to return an empty one. So you're helping to reduce the carbon footprint of the container if you can re-use it at its one-way destination.
In both app stores, the vendors apparently need to really improve the presentation of apps. Sorting by rating would be a VERY nice feature in the Apple App Store, for instance.
But in both cases, if they are going to provide a proper infrastructure for selling mobile phone software, the consumers and developers would both benefit hugely by better categorization, sorting, and filtering of search results.
It does deserve to be noted as a colossal mistake to have allowed reviews by people who hadn't even downloaded a given app.
When SuperMonkeyBall was released, there were over 3,000 reviews. The average star rating was a high 4. I paid $9 for it and found out it was a horrible port with horrible controls and actually sucked. Then I read the reviews and they were mostly from iTunes users who were fans of the console version of the game and wanted to mouth off about how great it is. Few of them had actually played it on the iPhone.
Set the WIFI broadcast name of the router to something like, "George Hamilton cheated on his SATs!" where "George Hamilton" = your boss's name. Take it to work, plug it in, and hide it under your desk or someone else's. Can be used for all kinds of passive-aggressive complaining at work.
I remember quite the opposite. In fact, in the early 2000's, I remember a situation where some kids in Canada ran a scanner on the band specific to analog cellphones. They had the scanner connected to a shoutcast streaming server and ran it for weeks. The Canadian law allowed this because the intent of the eavesdropping was not malicious or for criminal purposes. In fact, scanners built for sale in Canada don't block the 800mhz frequencies because the law doesn't prohibit listening to those broadcasts as it does in the US.
Those temperature fluctuations are likely to increase over time as people's patience for retaining the data wanes. Engineering is rarely the culprit for something to be destroyed or torn down. The Astrodome in Houston was designed to last 200 years, but people got bored with it and the city built a new stadium. Now they just have sporadic rodeos there and people are always talking about tearing it down.
Over time, it's likely people will eventually stop caring about the data archived on these memory cards and throw them out of the temperature-controlled storage facility.
I'm not saying the hardware is a loss-leader. I am saying that a certain amount of their expected profit on the device comes from media sales, otherwise they would charge more than $499 for the iPad.
Note that no similarly-sized and equipped Android tablets are showing up on shelves with price tags lower than $499.
Don't think the business model will work. Let's use the iPad as an example. The OS isn't the expensive part of that product. Apple sells the iPad for $499 with the understanding that the purchaser will likely buy several apps and many movies through iTunes. You put Ubuntu on there, and the user can apt-get to bypass the App store. Same with movies.
The other problem is that tablets are media consumption devices, and Netflix doesn't work on Ubuntu.
Using Linux isn't going to save any hardware manufacturer a significant component cost. And since Android is there for free, there's not a good business argument for bundling Ubuntu.
Should have sold it way sooner. With that many miles, it's going to be hard to sell on Craigslist. Best might be to sell it to an unwary eBayer sight-unseen. "broken odometer"
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an anecdote to support your assertion:
I once met a fellow at a party who told me that when he was a small child his mother was single and they had to bounce around from cheap motel to cheaper motels. For him, the Atari 2600 game, Breakout, was pure escapism. He had read every bit of text on the box about how the paddle you control is really a space ship and it is trying to destroy a cosmic cloud barrier that has trapped the ship with all its passengers. This fellow even had constructed a space helmet out of cardboard which he would wear while playing the game. He would often stay up late at night playing and so his mother could sleep in their small hotel room, he would drape a blanket over the television and himself to block the glow.
The story he told me climaxes when he said one night the fire department came banging on their motel room door. The whole building was being evacuated. The boy, his mother, and the other residents were instructed to stand on the other side of the street opposite the motel. A landslide had weakened the foundation of the building. As they stood out there in the night, they watched as the motel slid down a cliff into the ocean. The boy cried as he watched, in his words, "his whole life being destroyed in that landslide." He meant that his Atari 2600 with Breakout had been lost.
I know you're probably aware of this solution, but I'll throw it out there anyway. Several vendors are selling low-power set-top boxes that support torrent downloads to attached or internal media. These run linux and can also deliver 1080p media to your TV from a wide array of file formats.
I recently purchased the Patriot Box Office for $65 (with rebate) off NewEgg's site. It's not without it's problems, but it performs most of its responsibilities reliably. It also works as a NAS, though without many permissions options.
I'd get three more of these before I'd waste any money on a walwart linux box. These settop boxes are just as hackable, plus they have hardware video chipsets.
You're right about the production expenses, etc. It's kind of ugly, though, the way things have turned out. It's as if the developers (publishers) said, "We want to give you consumers less so we can make more money. Here's a dumbed-down controller, lower-horsepower, and closed platform for you to enjoy." And consumers said, "Ok."
The result is that innovation has been squelched. Hobbyists & garage studios can't knock out mods on their own. The number of developers who are financed to develop for a console is much smaller than those who used to code PC titles.
So, 3D is kind of a big deal right now. It's the feature on a lot of the new HDTV's. nVidia already has a card that supports hardware 3D rendering. None of the big 3 consoles have it, though. Consumers will have to wait until the console vendors have scheduled the lifecycle of the current consoles to expire and then they will be allowed to upgrade to the next generation console platform for 3D gaming. Hopefully that next generation of console will maintain legacy support (ahem, PS3 & PS2). It's possible they might retrofit the current consoles via firmware updates, but that's going to mean software-rendered 3D. Good luck with that.
You do realize that your observation proves my point completely, don't you? It's because of the console platform dominance that developers are no longer pushing the envelope with their PC releases. As with the Crysis example you gave, it is economically unattractive for publishers to back a dev studio who is working on a PC-only title. If John Carmack walked into Activision's offices and said, "Guys, I just came up with this new rendering engine that's incredible. Ambient lighting, reflective shadows, the whole shebang! Only drawback is that it requires a video chipset released within the current generation of video cards." Those executives would punt his ass right out the door if titles using the engine can't easily port to consoles.
Did you notice that this year's QuakeCon tournaments were entirely limited to QuakeLive? iD has given up on horsepower-hungry development and has redirected its pc-gaming business towards comodity hardware.
Goodbye innovation. Hello stagnation.
Sadly, I don't much care about those consumers affected by denied RMA requests. The larger picture here is that this is another example of how console gaming has brought stagnation to the gaming industry. Companies who profitted from deploying bleeding edge hardware that was demanded by a constant churn of increasing software demands are no longer able to stay afloat. Consoles lock graphics to a much longer generation than does pc gaming. It's hard for companies like BFG to stay afloat when stuff stays the same for five or more years.
Reverse--
Put the RFID on the car, and the reader in the track. Minimize baggage on the car. Great idea for a lot of game-like options.
Great information in your post. I suspect the reason Microsoft doesn't go with an ODM is because it might be significantly more expensive, which would result in a more expensive phone that won't compete as well in the marketplace (see: Dell Streak @ $299).
Also, it seems to be their dream that a horde of OEM's will license Win 7 phone OS and save Microsoft the hardware R & D, and exposure to flop risk. It's a false hope considering OEM's have Android available for free, but I'm pretty sure that's what Steve B. is thinking.
Wow. That is an astonishingly-bad piece of messaging. Their corporate perspective truly is warped by their decades-long desktop monopoly. This is where the monopoly actually hinders their ability to develop realistic marketing strategies.
Everything I'm hearing from MS these days assumes defacto widespread consumer adoption of their forthcoming products. In this case, Kostas Mallios, Microsoft's general manager for Strategy and Business Development, was allowed to put the cart before the horse and give a presentation at an advertising convention about Windows 7 Phone subjecting their captive audience to push advertising. I suppose they were desperate to woo these ad execs away from iAd & Google's Admob, but they're really forgetting the priority interest in this equation: please the consumer. Like so many other of their blunders, Microsoft is reducing the end-user experience to benefit their business interests. They just assume they can get away with it because they assume a monopoly position in the category. Whoops!
I don't agree that the Plame case proves "National Security" is preserved in spite of secrecy breaches. Because of the very nature of the secrecy, we have no way of knowing what her exact role was and what potential her work might have had if it weren't interrupted by the executive branch. Maybe the contacts she had recruited in the field were somewhere close to locating Osama Bin Laden.
It is true that we haven't seen another 9/11-scale attack, but few in America would say the coast is clear. We've still got two wars raging endlessly and more islamic militants turning violent every day. If the work that Valerie Plame was conducting as a covert agent was unimportant to the cause of National Security, then why should the government have been wasting millions of dollars on supporting her role? What would it take to affirm that National Security had been compromised by divulging Valerie Plame's identity? If terrorists crashed a blimp into the Superbowl, would you blame Cheney, Scooter, and Rove for having identified Plame as a CIA agent?
The drawback to wholesale leaks like this is that sometimes innocent people can be harmed. As an example, when Valerie Plame's identity was divulged, the CIA downplayed her official capacity as being that of a desk jockey. That's what they'll say whether she really is a desk jockey, or an elite 007 killing machine. Anyway, the problem with exposing Valerie Plame is that she had contacts in the field who were then exposed to have been meeting with a CIA agent. Kinda puts those people at risk within their own organizations.
Same with these documents. Even a casual remark in a report about a helpful shop owner can put that person on a Taliban hit list.
The perspective espoused by WikiLeaks is irresponsible and naive.
Seth
Sure, but that only entails one person looking at a disgusting image once. Right now, they're subjecting many people to the same disgusting image every time someone posts it.
More than 80% of this work can be knocked out with a digital fingerprinting tool like tineye.com uses. Spiders can check every image referenced from any myspace.com html against a fingerprint match with a blacklist of images.
TFA mentions google doing something like this with YouTube videos, but it sounds like the majority of sites are crowdsourcing their visitors to flag content that gets reviewed by these folks. A digital fingerprinting tool can eliminate tedious review by both visitors and the moderators.
Seth
Piracy isn't the concern. It's the resellers.
When you purchase Starcraft II, you're not buying the bits on the disk. You're paying for the registered account to play through their network. If you try to sell the disk to Gamespot, it's useless. The purchaser will still need to shell out for an account to play on the network. Blizzard wants to ensure that anyone who plays Starcraft II pays Blizzard. Not a third-party retailer.
Seth
You're right. And those people are well-served by consoles and the massive content library available for those consoles. Compared to oNLive, there's not much incentive for console players to put down their controllers and subscribe to onLive.
Best of luck to them, but they seem to hold a solution looking for a problem.
Seth
Your website isn't specific about why you've dismissed shipping containers. Let me explain why they're your best bet compared to the other modular materials you're considering.
Shipping containers are cheap and easy to transport and arrange. They can easily be modified with standard cutting and welding tools. No pre-existing windows or other openings than the doors on the end, so it's a sturdy, stackable modular material.
Airplanes are made of high-grade aluminum and are not cheap, easy to obtain, or convenient to transport if the plane is of any size worth using. The shape doesn't lend itself to stacking, so you don't have many options for architecture. Aluminum is also not very easy to weld, so good luck with that. Because aluminum is a valuable metal, airplanes are more prone to recycling than re-use.
Train cars- same thing as airplanes except that they're also rife with windows that will need to be covered and they are extremely hard to move to a location away from train tracks. There is a lot of high-grade aluminum and steel in their construction, so if they're transportable, they're also likely to be recycled rather than re-used.
Shipping containers really are the way to go. Don't sweat that they're too short or narrow. Simple cutting and welding can fix that. Different locales frequently collect a surplus because shippers don't want to spend the diesel to return an empty one. So you're helping to reduce the carbon footprint of the container if you can re-use it at its one-way destination.
Seth
In both app stores, the vendors apparently need to really improve the presentation of apps. Sorting by rating would be a VERY nice feature in the Apple App Store, for instance.
But in both cases, if they are going to provide a proper infrastructure for selling mobile phone software, the consumers and developers would both benefit hugely by better categorization, sorting, and filtering of search results.
Seth
It does deserve to be noted as a colossal mistake to have allowed reviews by people who hadn't even downloaded a given app.
When SuperMonkeyBall was released, there were over 3,000 reviews. The average star rating was a high 4. I paid $9 for it and found out it was a horrible port with horrible controls and actually sucked. Then I read the reviews and they were mostly from iTunes users who were fans of the console version of the game and wanted to mouth off about how great it is. Few of them had actually played it on the iPhone.
Set the WIFI broadcast name of the router to something like, "George Hamilton cheated on his SATs!" where "George Hamilton" = your boss's name. Take it to work, plug it in, and hide it under your desk or someone else's. Can be used for all kinds of passive-aggressive complaining at work.
I remember quite the opposite. In fact, in the early 2000's, I remember a situation where some kids in Canada ran a scanner on the band specific to analog cellphones. They had the scanner connected to a shoutcast streaming server and ran it for weeks. The Canadian law allowed this because the intent of the eavesdropping was not malicious or for criminal purposes. In fact, scanners built for sale in Canada don't block the 800mhz frequencies because the law doesn't prohibit listening to those broadcasts as it does in the US.
Seth
Those temperature fluctuations are likely to increase over time as people's patience for retaining the data wanes. Engineering is rarely the culprit for something to be destroyed or torn down. The Astrodome in Houston was designed to last 200 years, but people got bored with it and the city built a new stadium. Now they just have sporadic rodeos there and people are always talking about tearing it down.
Over time, it's likely people will eventually stop caring about the data archived on these memory cards and throw them out of the temperature-controlled storage facility.
I love Google Voice. I use it for my company.
Two tips:
I'm not saying the hardware is a loss-leader. I am saying that a certain amount of their expected profit on the device comes from media sales, otherwise they would charge more than $499 for the iPad.
Note that no similarly-sized and equipped Android tablets are showing up on shelves with price tags lower than $499.
Seth
Don't think the business model will work. Let's use the iPad as an example. The OS isn't the expensive part of that product. Apple sells the iPad for $499 with the understanding that the purchaser will likely buy several apps and many movies through iTunes. You put Ubuntu on there, and the user can apt-get to bypass the App store. Same with movies.
The other problem is that tablets are media consumption devices, and Netflix doesn't work on Ubuntu.
Using Linux isn't going to save any hardware manufacturer a significant component cost. And since Android is there for free, there's not a good business argument for bundling Ubuntu.
Seth
Should have sold it way sooner. With that many miles, it's going to be hard to sell on Craigslist. Best might be to sell it to an unwary eBayer sight-unseen. "broken odometer"
Seth