The dreamcast lacks the competitive features in this arena. Sure, it's got an artificially-low price of $99, which is like the iOpener- sold at a loss with the goal of making money off licensing fees (subscription fees in the case of iOpener). But it doesn't have the hardware, support for hardware, or features that products like Tivo have. Tivo is poised to really dominate the set-top box arena. It should be trivial for the company to add a web browsing interface, keyboard, mouse, etc. Just like the iOpener, if Sega found that a substantial number of people were buying the dreamcast to convert it to some use that doesn't net them licensing fees from game makers, then they'll quickly squelch that little party.
The other compelling aspect of the tivo is that it's running on x86 linux. Porting games and apps should be a breeze once tivo offers an api for the interface. This is an advantage tivo has over web tv. In order to get games and other apps on webTV, microsoft is going to have to start from a standstill in convincing developers to work on the platform. "But Bill, we've already got our coders working on the WinCE, PocketPC, X-box, Win2k versions of SuperBlammo Invaders. Now we've got to also get this thing to deploy on webTV? Ok, if you promise this is the next big thing..."
I agree, for infantry, it is unlikely that a railgun will replace gunpowder-propelled weapons any time soon. But if we continue to support world leaders who emphasize the need to keep the military strong rather than working towards peace and world harmony, then perhaps things like an 'infantry' will persist long enough for technology to support handheld railguns.
The main challenge with them is having a portable power source strong enough to run them. I predict that by the time we would have achieved this technological feat, the concept of aiming handheld weapons would be obsolete. Instead, your gun would likely be mounted on a robotic arm and would be syncronized with a head-mounted sighting / display system. Your hands would be free for scrambling across the terrain while your robot arm would heft the weapon above you. You could lay flat on the ground behind rocks while the arm extends up and shows you the view ahead and even locks in on moving objects or heat signatures. Death by friendly fire might be minimized by troops wearing a reflector that tells the gun "don't kill".
There are certain scenarios where a non-chemical propellent weapon (i.e. railgun) would have an advantage. I have never been near a railgun, but I'd imagine that they could be made perfectly quiet. I can imagine that one future battle tactic might be to fill a battlefield with combustible gas. An invading army with machine guns would have to either 'hold their fire' or suffer the consequences. Meanwhile a defending force could pick off the invaders with crossbows.
The sim-x series is a good example of the non-zero-sum genre. I would also say that some resource management games like Railroad Tycoon fit this definition. RT can be played competitively, but you can also meet the objective by simply running your railroads really well. There's also a limited amount of cooperation available as you can use the other player's tracks, factories, etc. You can even buy stock in the other player's company.
There are fewer games like this in console systems, but one extremely popular game comes to mind: Parrapa the Rapper. Parrapa was a game that appealed to both sexes, so it might be said that males are inclined to enjoy zero-sum games more than females, but there's really not enough evidence here to draw that conclusion.
The presentation of these numbers is vague, but not misleading if read carefully. This chart details software sales. Nintendo is at the top because it is having to write its own titles. Of that billion dollars they made, I don't know how many millions Nintendo had to swallow on development, advertising, and marketing of the software titles. I'd say a lot, though.
The magic formula in the console market is to build the killer platform and get all the software foundries like EA and the rest on the list to write the games and pay to advertise them while the platform owner rakes in licensing fees. If you look at all the publishers on that list, I'd say the lion's share of profits for each member (Except Nintendo and Sega) was gai ned from PlayStation title sales:
Sure, there were a few ports of the great PlayStation games to Nintendo and Sega, but by and large, those console s haven't raked in the exponential profits via licensing fees that Sony has enjoyed.
Don't get me wrong here. I am happy to see Nintendo on the right side of a profit margin and sad to see Sega cast its dream into the ocean. The more competition in the marketplace, the more pressure these console manufacturers have to pack features in at a lower price. Had the dreamcast not existed, there's no way in heck Sony would have put a DVD player in the PS2.
One last note. The DreamCast was the resul t of a partnership between Microsoft and Sega. It sported WinCE as the OS. Part of the angle there was to leverage exisiting Microsoft development tools so porting from the PC platform would be more appealing to developers. I think I've seen some copy-and-pasting of this strategy going into the Xbox press releases lately....
I had no idea that those things cost $9k!! A friend of mine gave me one for free before the company went out of business. Bought a 21" monitor off him for a couple hundred as well.
I am glad you brought this topic up. It fully agrees with the fellow who mentioned price and form factor.
Ross Technologies, an Austin-based hardware manu who went belly-up a couple years ago, found out the hard way that there just wasn't a compelling reason to have a computer-in-a-computer. They're more expensive, less expandable, less powerful, and add to workplace noise. Since you're already limited to connecting to it via ethernet from the host computer, why not get a cheaper rackmounted solution like that sub $1k Sun box mentioned last week? If Ross technologies couldn't get this product to fly with SunOS, there's no way this thing will sell. LinuxPPC has a fraction of the apps supported that SunOS does.And don't get confused by the word 'linux' prepended to the name. Just because it's linux doesn't mean everything works. Try running icecast and watch your CPU utilization hit 95% after a couple hours...
If it weren't for junk mail, the USPS would not be in business. Think about it. If you didn't get streams of junk mail delivered to your door, it wouldn't be cost-feasible for them to come by everyday to occaisionally drop a letter off from your grandma (who doesn't have the wherewithall to send e-mail) and check to see if you have an envelope to be picked up with a 34-cent stamp attached? You get rid of junk snailmail and we're going to have to pay much higher fees for stamps.
One area where this protest is valid, however, are those annoying subscription cards in magazines. I swear, for the number of those that fall out of Wired each issue, you could probably bind and print your own zine on them. These business-reply cards ne ed to all be mailed back to the magazine. Not sure if attaching bricks to the cards will be valid, though.
One thing that is interesting, however, is that you can attach these cards to entire boxes of stuff, change the address, and mail it to you r friend for free. I knew a girl in Springfield, Mo. who I didn't particularly respect. I glued one of these cards to a big box that I filled with sandwich crusts, a rock, dried chunks of iguana poop, etc. and taped a piece of paper with her address on th e front. A week or so later, she got a note in her apartment mailbox saying she had a package to get at the post office. So, she went over there all excited, got the box out to her car, opened it up, and boom! It was a present of trash!
What 'normal linux' are you talking about? I've run MKLinux on my PowerComputing 120 for a few years now because it's the only linux distro that supports nubus powermacs. MKLinux will not run on PCI powermacs. So how can I compare the speed of 'normal linux' on
the same hardware?
As a general proposition, we do not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about
you to any third party.
This is like Wallmart saying they stock American-made products "whenever they can".
This is another strong example of how ludicrous TRUSTE is. For EBAY to be TRUSTE certified and for that certification to carry any weight, this phrase should be "We do not sell or rent any personally identifiable information about you to any third party without your approval. As it stands now, who knows what they're doing? Just e-bay and 'the highest bidder'.
That's a great rule of thumb. It's just not so relevant in the tech field. If this person is qualified enough that the small company is willing to have her be the IT manager (which probably isn't that big of a deal since the company is only 8 people), then she could probably get a job pretty quickly.
While I've got my cursor in this big text box, I'll also say that I think this is a silly ask slashdot topic. I mean, how frequently does this really happen where someone doesn't want to get promoted and make more money but is forced to anyway? Am this tech worker from Bizarro World?
Apparently CT believes the proper use of apostrophies ranks right up there with DVD zoning. For those interested in leet skills like correct grammar, the word "it's" is a contraction of "it" and "is". On the other hand, "its" is a possesive pronount. You can check by breaking it out as in "It is just such a pain."
"Applications for this system are potentially frightening,"
said an intelligence source. "One expert I spoke with
estimated that an integrated bundle of 12-15 PlayStations
could provide enough computer power to control an Iraqi
unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV -- a pilotless aircraft."
BEOWULF?
Actually, one of the more hysterical parts of the article occurs just below...
Iraq has been working on development of UAVs for
several years as a possible platform for delivering
chemical weapons, say intelligence experts.
Ok. So why in the hell would Iraq be wasting research on developing unmanned aircraft when its most expendable resource is human beings?
I think we have witnessed an urban legend being born.
Are you kidding? The field is no place to be doing ANYTHING that requires a mouse.
The reason they probably designed this mouse is for misuse / abuse. They probably have a lot of situations where people improperly packed a laptop / mouse for transport, then got to the other end and something rolled against the computer and smashed the mouse. If you think the mouse is expensive, I bet the computer is exponentially more expensive. On top of that, I bet these things get distributed to a bunch of self-important dorks who work in the pentagon. The type of computer you get in the pentagon is a huge status thing that people waste all kinds of taxpayer money just trying to one-up the other guy.
You just watch. If G. W. Shrub gets elected, as soon as he starts pitching the ABM pork project the lobbiests are telling him to promote, he'll cite this iridium threat as a reason why we need an anti ballistic missle program.
If it were up to me, and clearly it's not, I'd leverage this threat to fund a hunter-killer satellite system. Not that I'm really a proponent of interrupting other people's communications, I just would like to see some of that battle-bots tv stuff taken to the next level. Obviously if we had hunter-killer satellites, they could fly around flinging these iridium satellites out into space.
I recommend that you survey the various employees of the agency to find out what questions people call in and ask the most often. Make links available at the top level of the site's heirarchy to this info. Maps, addresses, and phone numbers will usually fall into this category. If you've got a huge repository of official documents, do some analysis of which documents are most frequently viewed. You can use a simple web log analyzer to figure it out and then perhaps have a gutter on the right side of the document search page that includes links to these frequently requested documents.
I do see your point about the single point of failure. In this scenario, I still think it's a blessing and agree with mr. rat bastard. Especially in the case of a natural disaster. Let's imagine an avalance comes along and totally crushes the hosting facility. If these guys are smart, and all indications sugggest they are, they've got the whole file system frequently backed up off-site. The surviving employees of telia can simply call IBM and have them put another one of these beasts online at some temporary hosting facility (oh, maybe exodus or some place). Then they can restore the file system from backup and have all 30,000 'imaged' machines running in probably a few hours. If you had 30,000 physical boxes, this process would take considerably longer. Not only would it require you to get your hands on 30,000 computers right away, but they would need approximately the same specs as the ones that got smashed in the avalanche.
This architecture really abstracts the whole thing such that you're not having to deal with 800,000 accounts in a restoration emergency.
I guess I misunderstood your agenda. You weren't saying the earth is changing and we'll be able to roll with the punches. You were saying the earth is changing and we'll be gone along with all those other lifeforms that fail to adapt.
In order to mitigate this slide into oblivion, we can act more environmentally responsibly. By setting the example, we can ask others to act in the same way. You say cutting our emissions by 50% doesn't mean jack squat when China and India will increase theirs by 200%; well, that's akin to two US soldiers justifying the rape of a 13 year old villager because when the Vietcong invade, they'll not only rape her, but kill her as well. Sure, the western industrial revolution was rough on the environment. We're at a more enlightened point in our civilization now. We can assist others so they won't make the same mistakes we did. If you're going to justify the behaviour of foreign powers based on American history, then we shouldn't pipe up when they start up their slave trade, either. I guess China's already got it going on with its forced labor prison camps making Nike shoes... so you're probably right in your prediction of history predicting the future.
If there's no ozone, then you just become nocturnal or you don't go outside during the day. You adapt to your changing
environment (or you die).
This isn't very well thought-out. It also demonstrates the shallow insight provided on those other issues mentioned.
Trying to shoehorn the continued existence of humans via technology isn't going to be a feasible plan. In the long run, there'll be some environmental challenge that the boys in the lab won't be able to conquer. And with each successive environmental challenge, the required technical resources will become increasingly taxed due to the increased complexity of the problems. When you build evironmental patches on top of workarounds on top of patches, it gets really damn tricky to figure out what gets knocked out of whack when you jigger xyz around. Do you REALLY want to put your life in the hands of a group of humans playing the role of mother nature?
In case you need it spoonfed: Your suggestion that humans can survive no ozone by becoming nocturnal is ignorant of our position in the food chain / ecosystem. Will the rest of the animals we eat become nocturnal? Hmm.. No vegetation. It'd be nice not to have some oxygen once in a while.
Keep in mind that we might be running on Earth 3.0, but by definition of the product cycle, we don't get to see the release of Earth 4.0.
You've made some very well conceived posts on this topic. And like you, I'm a strong proponent of Nintendo.
I recommend, however, that you rethink a few of your comments..
That is why Nintendo 64 software can hit the top of Sales
and Rental charts - because a greater percentage of a smaller user base buying software in [sic] better then [sic] a small percentage of a huge user base.
The thing you need to consider is friction. When a console manufacturer has to develop and market a large percentage of the titles available for the platform, it has to absorb software development and marketing costs that prohibit it from really making the HUGE bucks. The gold for a console manufacturer is in the licensing to third-party developers. If a console manufacturer can simply create a platform and then sit back and let everyone else develop the content, even if the licensing nets a small percentage of each game sold, it's a higher profit-to-cost ratio than when they've got to prime the pump with their own titles.
Piracy is every bit as bad for the PSX as it is for the PC.
This is simply not true. As you point out, a PSX title can be duplicated via readily available, consumer-level CDR equipment, but to play duped PSX games requires mildly-radical hardware modifications to the console. The latter is not as common as the former. I've seen very few mainstream news articles covering the impact piracy has had on the PSX platform. Of the computer users I know, a high percentage have at least one pirated piece of software on their computers. Of the PSX owners I know, only a small percentage have modified playstations that can play pirated or imported discs.
The gameboy is a juggernaut. To have lasted this long as a platform is simply astonishing. I hope Nintendo continues to help keep competition present by bringing innovations to the market. With the X-Box, Microsoft intends to leverage its monopoly in the PC arena to aggressively invade the console arena. The biggest assett they have (forget all that hardware business, any company these days can cram a bunch of chips in a box) in coming to consoles is the cross-platform argument for developers.. ease of porting PC titles to the console. As a fan of console gaming, I don't see how I should be so excited about this. That's sort of like telling someone they should buy XYZ car because it'll enable the construction companies to convert train tracks to roads for you more easily.
On that site about making your own controls, there's a whole collection of links to sites people have put up to document their own cabinet construction projects... there's a hell of a lot of successful efforts
out there!
I followed it and it contained another link to this site for a company that's selling fully-configured arcade cabinets for installing computers in and running MAME. Check it
out. Looks identical to an asteroids stand-up cabinet.
You have effectively made that challenging metamorphisis from an aquatic lifeform to a terrestial being stumbling around on nubs. Climb atop the tallest moss-covered rock and grunt your dominance in the toungue only known to you- "I am king of the retards!"
Good troll, KTB. I especially like the sig. Covers any inefficiencies in your actual posts.
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Its just such a pain.
Apparently CT believes the proper use of apostrophies ranks right up there with DVD zoning. For those interested in leet skills like correct grammar, the word "it's" is a contraction of "it" and "is". On the other hand, "its" is a possesive pronount. You can check by breaking it out as in "It is just such a pain."
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