1) Moving to a PPC... I guess it's worth a LOT to IBM to have a dominant position in the console processor market, which will mean a lot of real-time programmers switching from x86 to the PowerPC instruction set, and will put a big nail in x86's coffin. I'm guessing they simpy made Micrsoft an offer they couldn't refuse.
2) How many consoles have ever been backwards compatible... of the dozen I own, exactly ONE is backward compatible (the PS2), and I've only bothered using it in that mode for around 2 hours. No compatibility certainly didn't hurt the first playstation, the gamecube, the first xbox, the supernintendo, the atari 2600 etc. If you own any Xbox games, then you ALREADY OWN AN XBOX! Why would you need another machine capable of playing the games?
3) "HDDs are cheap and spacious compared to the alternatives." Given that the alternative of not having HDD is free and takes no room at all, I can't agree with you!
You can't get it in the states, but you can get one elsewhere and import it, as I know a few Smart fans have done, so I'm technically still correct:-)
I have a nasty feeling the 2006 car that goes to America will be the rumoured 4x4 off-roader, which has none of the virtues of the original smart apart from swappable body panels, and is effectively going to be an M-class Mercedes with a new body.
That's quite close to the explanation we were given by Smart to the British owner's club, but there is definitely no 'loose crash requirents' category here. Other parts of Europe do have a category for 'microcars' not capable of over 30mph (which are classed as motorbikes with 4 wheels) but the Smart will happily cruise all day at it's speed limiter of 84mph, so it doesn't qualify!
The Smart is actually very highly rated in high speed crash tests, thanks to the way the engine gets forced underneath the car in a rear-ender, the way it's so short you can't broadside the car without hitting a nice bouncy wheel or two, the seat backs being big thick slabs of metal, and so on.
The *only* crash test it fails on is a US-specific one that requires the vehicle to suffer no damage *at all* in very very low speed front end crashes, something that's practically impossible in a bumperless car with overhangs of about 1 inch. The (very cheap to replace) plastic front panels will scratch and/or crack in this test, while the impact is safely absorbed by the tyres just behind them. This approach of having a sacrificial panel works very well practically, but doesn't pass the 'no damage at all' rule.
BMW sold Rover to a consortuim of investors for a sum in the very near vicinity of $0. The investors renamed it 'the MG group' and are making a 900 horsepower supercar badged MG, and are importing a tiny Indian thing for less than 5k UKP which they are badging the 'City Rover'
Actually the Polski Fiats were just old Fiat models rebadged. The Poles bought the old production lines from Fiat when Fiat brought out a new model.
Most of the Indian car industry used to work like this, using old British production lines. They even ended up importing the 'Hindustan Ambassador' back to us as a sort of modern classic!
Recently Daewoo did the same, bringing back to life previous generation of the Vauxhall/Opel Astra with a drastcally reduced price tag.
JD Power also do their survey here in Britain, with pretty much the opposite results.
While we hardly have any cars on sale here that are overtly American (pretty much just the Plymouth PT Cruiser, now that they gave up trying to sell us Chrylser Neons recently), we tended to rank far eastern cars the highest and SUVs/Fords really badly. I don't remember the exact details but there was a Toyota in 1st place and the Smart Coupe that I drive came 3rd - a car that you can't get in the States at all, despite being one of DailmleyChrysler's top selling products in Europe.
BBC Radio 4 has a regular programme for the visually impaired, which I happened to catch while driving home from the office the other day, and a prototype device was being reviewed that matches your description very well.
The programme's home page is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/intouch.shtml the show is archived there for 1 week, in realplayer format, so you have until next Tuesday if you want to hear it too.
From the show's factsheet:
Geoff Adams-Spink reviewed Pico, one of the new generation of lightweight portable video magnifiers. It's manufactured by Telesensory, which has a UK office that can advise on ordering the product, which will be priced at around 500.
PICO's main features: pocket-sized video magnifier integrated rechargeable battery full colour and negative modes magnification at 5X
CONTACTS
TELESENSORY UK Operations 2 Millfield House Woodshots Meadow Croxley Business Park Watford Hertfordshire WD18 8YX Tel: 0808 0908090 (Freephone number) Tel: 01923 231313 Fax: 01923 231385 E-mail: uk@telesensory.com Taking orders for Pico now and the product will be available from the middle of February.
If calling from outside the UK, you'll need to drop the leading 0 from those numbers and add the international code to the UK, and the Freephone call won't be free ionternationally.
if this device doesn't do the trick (it might end up a little pricey since the usual technology exchage rate of $1=1 that Americans hit us colonials with might only work one way), how about a thin plastic fresenel lens? Portable, cheap and effective.
If the physical article is more desirable than the download, then people will buy the article after getting the download. This applies just as well to music as to games.
This fetish for the physical article is exactly what the RIAA should be trying to encourage with CDs if they want a business model that will actually work in the 21st century.
I've never heard of Cornice before (am I woefully uninformed? maybe!)
I suspect one of the bigger names will turn out to be Apple's supplier. Apple have been at the cutting edge ofindustrial design for years now, so I would also expect the drive for a mini ipod would not be a off-the-shelf product at all, instead it would be very tightly integrated into the mini ipod.
As for $70 per 100,000, I think that's a sign this isn't the drive too. Apple would be putting in an order for a few million a year. If Cornice was the supplier for a product as hot as mini ipod, would they really have 100,000 spare to offer to anyone else, and would Apple let them pitch it so boldly at other mp3 player builders the day before (supposed) launch?
Either this system penalises old hardware, or it's vulnerable to emulation.
I suspect that a microsoft already sells the software you need to break this, since 20 virtual PCs running on a fast box act a lot like 20 slow PCS.
If not, how long will it take spammers to write a multiple instance mail client that runs slowly? Will fooling this system take much then setting a flag that says 'sender_processor=i386-25'?
That's where you are wrong. There are LOADS of really amazing hobby musicians out there who would really like the opportunity to get their music into a game for no fee at all.
The problem is that none of the have a high enough profile for you to hear about them, so you need to go and look for them - which is the point I was trying to make in my original post. Raising their profile to ther point where they get noticed is the hardest part for a musician who wants to give away their music, so being associated witha good game would be a wonderful opportunity for them.
BTW, algoryhtmic composition is not a new concept, you can trace the idea right back to Mozart's musical dice game from 1787, this is just the first one that I have heard about that has been marketed to the games industry. I guess the fact that so many people are assuming this is a new thing reinforces my point that there is not enough crossover between the two fields?
This is exacly why you should be talking to a real musician! Creating variations on a theme to induce emotions, keeping a long piece of music sounding fresh with different arrangments, and so on are all things that musicians already know how to do.
If your spec if for a 72 hour responsive soundtrack that doesn't take up a lot of space, working with a musician and a tracker style sample/note playback system with some mildly clever arpeggiators is going to be a very good way to do it.
No, it's not a troll, follow your own link and see.
Mac-OS support was dropped at around version 1.2.1, I would be more precise but http://www.mozilla.org/releases/ is one of the pages that I can't render properly in the version of Mozilla for Mac OS that I have here, everything between version 1.0.2 and 1.4 seems to be missing.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, why not just get a an actual musician to create real music for your game?
Contrary to popular/. opion, there are plenty of RIAA-hating open-source-friendly musicans out there who would love to create soundtracks and/or sound effects for games.
Try signing up for a mailing list where musicians hang out online (such as the music-bar list at ampfea.org) and ask around.
I think I'd rather fire up mame and play the original arcade game to get my star wars fix.
Half the fun of the orignal film was the idea of flying around in cool spaceships, having battles, but that seems to be totally missing from this game. So they finally put in the vehicles that should have been there on day 1? All you get is a beaten up hovercar and two motorbikes that the wheels have fallen off.
Get back to me when I can win a souped-up smuggling ship in a game of cards and use it to run empire blockades.
If this system of bounty-posting works, I'd like to invest in getting a recent version of Mozilla ported to Mac-OS. The final build we got for Mac-OS doesn't have spam-filtering, fails to render slashdot some of the time, and has a debilitating bug where the focus is lost if you change to another app with mozilla mimimised, stopping you using the keyboard.
Mac-OS has a massive userbase of low coputer-literacy 'creative' people who bought a mac for usability and are highly resistant to retraining to OSX, but since OSX is a much nicer development environment, all the programmers were very quick to jump ship. It would certainly make my life easier if I could migrate all the designers I look after to Mozilla.
So, is there a bounty for a Mac-OS port out there, or how do I start one and get it noticed by potention developers/contributors?
The UK position on this is that you do NOT need a passport to enter the UK if you are a citizen of the European Union, HOWEVER, you must be able to prove that you are an EU citizen.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Moving to a PPC... I guess it's worth a LOT to IBM to have a dominant position in the console processor market, which will mean a lot of real-time programmers switching from x86 to the PowerPC instruction set, and will put a big nail in x86's coffin. I'm guessing they simpy made Micrsoft an offer they couldn't refuse.
2) How many consoles have ever been backwards compatible... of the dozen I own, exactly ONE is backward compatible (the PS2), and I've only bothered using it in that mode for around 2 hours. No compatibility certainly didn't hurt the first playstation, the gamecube, the first xbox, the supernintendo, the atari 2600 etc. If you own any Xbox games, then you ALREADY OWN AN XBOX! Why would you need another machine capable of playing the games?
3) "HDDs are cheap and spacious compared to the alternatives." Given that the alternative of not having HDD is free and takes no room at all, I can't agree with you!
You can't get it in the states, but you can get one elsewhere and import it, as I know a few Smart fans have done, so I'm technically still correct :-)
I have a nasty feeling the 2006 car that goes to America will be the rumoured 4x4 off-roader, which has none of the virtues of the original smart apart from swappable body panels, and is effectively going to be an M-class Mercedes with a new body.
That's quite close to the explanation we were given by Smart to the British owner's club, but there is definitely no 'loose crash requirents' category here. Other parts of Europe do have a category for 'microcars' not capable of over 30mph (which are classed as motorbikes with 4 wheels) but the Smart will happily cruise all day at it's speed limiter of 84mph, so it doesn't qualify!
The Smart is actually very highly rated in high speed crash tests, thanks to the way the engine gets forced underneath the car in a rear-ender, the way it's so short you can't broadside the car without hitting a nice bouncy wheel or two, the seat backs being big thick slabs of metal, and so on.
The *only* crash test it fails on is a US-specific one that requires the vehicle to suffer no damage *at all* in very very low speed front end crashes, something that's practically impossible in a bumperless car with overhangs of about 1 inch. The (very cheap to replace) plastic front panels will scratch and/or crack in this test, while the impact is safely absorbed by the tyres just behind them. This approach of having a sacrificial panel works very well practically, but doesn't pass the 'no damage at all' rule.
BMW sold Rover to a consortuim of investors for a sum in the very near vicinity of $0. The investors renamed it 'the MG group' and are making a 900 horsepower supercar badged MG, and are importing a tiny Indian thing for less than 5k UKP which they are badging the 'City Rover'
Which cars do you think are British? We hardly have any British manufacturers left apart from MG/Rover (great if you are a pensioner!).
Take a look at TVRs and tell me honestly you think they are ugly!
Actually the Polski Fiats were just old Fiat models rebadged. The Poles bought the old production lines from Fiat when Fiat brought out a new model.
Most of the Indian car industry used to work like this, using old British production lines. They even ended up importing the 'Hindustan Ambassador' back to us as a sort of modern classic!
Recently Daewoo did the same, bringing back to life previous generation of the Vauxhall/Opel Astra with a drastcally reduced price tag.
JD Power also do their survey here in Britain, with pretty much the opposite results.
While we hardly have any cars on sale here that are overtly American (pretty much just the Plymouth PT Cruiser, now that they gave up trying to sell us Chrylser Neons recently), we tended to rank far eastern cars the highest and SUVs/Fords really badly. I don't remember the exact details but there was a Toyota in 1st place and the Smart Coupe that I drive came 3rd - a car that you can't get in the States at all, despite being one of DailmleyChrysler's top selling products in Europe.
BBC Radio 4 has a regular programme for the visually impaired, which I happened to catch while driving home from the office the other day, and a prototype device was being reviewed that matches your description very well.
The programme's home page is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/intouch.shtml
the show is archived there for 1 week, in realplayer format, so you have until next Tuesday if you want to hear it too.
From the show's factsheet:
Geoff Adams-Spink reviewed Pico, one of the new generation of lightweight portable video magnifiers. It's manufactured by Telesensory, which has a UK office that can advise on ordering the product, which will be priced at around 500.
PICO's main features:
pocket-sized video magnifier
integrated rechargeable battery
full colour and negative modes
magnification at 5X
CONTACTS
TELESENSORY UK
Operations
2 Millfield House
Woodshots Meadow
Croxley Business Park
Watford
Hertfordshire WD18 8YX
Tel: 0808 0908090 (Freephone number)
Tel: 01923 231313
Fax: 01923 231385
E-mail: uk@telesensory.com
Taking orders for Pico now and the product will be available from the middle of February.
If calling from outside the UK, you'll need to drop the leading 0 from those numbers and add the international code to the UK, and the Freephone call won't be free ionternationally.
if this device doesn't do the trick (it might end up a little pricey since the usual technology exchage rate of $1=1 that Americans hit us colonials with might only work one way), how about a thin plastic fresenel lens? Portable, cheap and effective.
Their contact details are:
BPI
Riverside Building
County Hall
Westminster Bridge Road
London SE1 7JA
Tel: 020 7803 1300 (+44 instead of the leading 0 if you are outside the UK)
Fax: 020 7803 1310 (+44 instead of the leading 0 if you are outside the UK)
Email: general@bpi.co.uk
If the physical article is more desirable than the download, then people will buy the article after getting the download. This applies just as well to music as to games.
This fetish for the physical article is exactly what the RIAA should be trying to encourage with CDs if they want a business model that will actually work in the 21st century.
I've never heard of Cornice before (am I woefully uninformed? maybe!)
I suspect one of the bigger names will turn out to be Apple's supplier. Apple have been at the cutting edge ofindustrial design for years now, so I would also expect the drive for a mini ipod would not be a off-the-shelf product at all, instead it would be very tightly integrated into the mini ipod.
As for $70 per 100,000, I think that's a sign this isn't the drive too. Apple would be putting in an order for a few million a year. If Cornice was the supplier for a product as hot as mini ipod, would they really have 100,000 spare to offer to anyone else, and would Apple let them pitch it so boldly at other mp3 player builders the day before (supposed) launch?
You did steal it from us British people though, and didn't even have the decency to let us build deregulated casinos in the bits you didn't want!
Snub the mac??!?!? Office for OSX has a better feature list than the PC version.
yep, that's boo.com, a fashion store on the net, the advantage of the net over traditional bricks and mortar clothes shops is clear:
Customers cannot
see,
feel,
or try on the products
they need to pay postage
they have to wait for the clothers to arrive
couple that with a multi-million dollar marketing campaign that was so good that you can't even find out about them with google.
pure genius!
You get news that isn't just a bunch of paraphrased press releases?
Man, I gotta find the preferences checkbox for that stuff!
Either this system penalises old hardware, or it's vulnerable to emulation.
I suspect that a microsoft already sells the software you need to break this, since 20 virtual PCs running on a fast box act a lot like 20 slow PCS.
If not, how long will it take spammers to write a multiple instance mail client that runs slowly? Will fooling this system take much then setting a flag that says 'sender_processor=i386-25'?
That's where you are wrong. There are LOADS of really amazing hobby musicians out there who would really like the opportunity to get their music into a game for no fee at all.
The problem is that none of the have a high enough profile for you to hear about them, so you need to go and look for them - which is the point I was trying to make in my original post. Raising their profile to ther point where they get noticed is the hardest part for a musician who wants to give away their music, so being associated witha good game would be a wonderful opportunity for them.
BTW, algoryhtmic composition is not a new concept, you can trace the idea right back to Mozart's musical dice game from 1787, this is just the first one that I have heard about that has been marketed to the games industry. I guess the fact that so many people are assuming this is a new thing reinforces my point that there is not enough crossover between the two fields?
MacOS != OSX
This is exacly why you should be talking to a real musician! Creating variations on a theme to induce emotions, keeping a long piece of music sounding fresh with different arrangments, and so on are all things that musicians already know how to do.
If your spec if for a 72 hour responsive soundtrack that doesn't take up a lot of space, working with a musician and a tracker style sample/note playback system with some mildly clever arpeggiators is going to be a very good way to do it.
No, it's not a troll, follow your own link and see.
Mac-OS support was dropped at around version 1.2.1, I would be more precise but http://www.mozilla.org/releases/ is one of the pages that I can't render properly in the version of Mozilla for Mac OS that I have here, everything between version 1.0.2 and 1.4 seems to be missing.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, why not just get a an actual musician to create real music for your game?
/. opion, there are plenty of RIAA-hating open-source-friendly musicans out there who would love to create soundtracks and/or sound effects for games.
Contrary to popular
Try signing up for a mailing list where musicians hang out online (such as the music-bar list at ampfea.org) and ask around.
I think I'd rather fire up mame and play the original arcade game to get my star wars fix.
Half the fun of the orignal film was the idea of flying around in cool spaceships, having battles, but that seems to be totally missing from this game. So they finally put in the vehicles that should have been there on day 1? All you get is a beaten up hovercar and two motorbikes that the wheels have fallen off.
Get back to me when I can win a souped-up smuggling ship in a game of cards and use it to run empire blockades.
If this system of bounty-posting works, I'd like to invest in getting a recent version of Mozilla ported to Mac-OS. The final build we got for Mac-OS doesn't have spam-filtering, fails to render slashdot some of the time, and has a debilitating bug where the focus is lost if you change to another app with mozilla mimimised, stopping you using the keyboard.
Mac-OS has a massive userbase of low coputer-literacy 'creative' people who bought a mac for usability and are highly resistant to retraining to OSX, but since OSX is a much nicer development environment, all the programmers were very quick to jump ship. It would certainly make my life easier if I could migrate all the designers I look after to Mozilla.
So, is there a bounty for a Mac-OS port out there, or how do I start one and get it noticed by potention developers/contributors?
The UK position on this is that you do NOT need a passport to enter the UK if you are a citizen of the European Union, HOWEVER, you must be able to prove that you are an EU citizen.
Guess what you need to show to prove that?
I know I couldn't show an image with the terrible banding in the 'after' image to a customer without getting laughed out of the building.
How about they get back to us when it's ACTUALLY usable?