I have 72 blue LEDs on my watch...
on
The Blues for LEDs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the best waste of money I have found in a long time. Its even a feature of the watch that blue LEDs are the second most expensive LEDs you can get.
A note that came with the watch said the battery only lasts 6-9 months if I need to know the time 15 times a day but who cares when you have such a rockin wrist peice.
Its even worse if you are paying in Euro's rather than GBP.
I could grab a plane ticket to NY, stay in a nice hotel for a couple of days, watch a show on broadway, buy a powerbook and still pay less than I would from Apple UK.
I really want to switch but not at these prices...
This is just an Epia Mini-ITX motherboard in a bog standard Morex Cubid Mini-ITX case. I have both sat here on my desk and its a great little silent linux server.
They cost a lot less to buy what this company wants to charge you. Sure they added wireless card/hard drive/memory but $500 still seems a bit expensive.
Check out http://www.mini-itx.com for details of the motherboard / case. They also have an online store for Europeans...
BTW, you can easily get 2 hard drives in that case if you take out the included hd enclosure so you could make one with a lot more space than 120gb...
Bitstream do something similar for PDA's with a product called ThunderHawk. Instead of reformating the page as such what they do is use a custom font that is much more readable on a pda sized device and resize the images on the fly.
Most PDA's at the moment use a 320x240 screen resolution, using ThunderHawk gives you a 640x480 view of a webpage but still using the 320x240 pda screen. Works really well.
Ahh but you have to remember that without strong software sales MS is going to take a serious hit on the hardware. Let them claim that they have sold 2 million, MS shareholders can jump for joy but without big 3rd party support the box aint going anywhere.
Another thing you have to remember is that if you buy an xbox and now and shove it in the drawer until you can hack it you are stopping someone buying one and purchasing games for it (and MS making any money);)
Weavus
Re:The other way round
on
MAME On Xbox
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· Score: 4, Informative
There seems to be a common misconception that the Xbox is just a pc console. Every slashdot story about the Xbox has numerous posts abotu this. The Xbox may have some standard pc components inside it (x86 cpu, hard disk, geforce etc) but there is a lot that is different.
The biggest difference between the two is that the Xbox uses unified memory. This means the cpu/graphics/sound all use the same memory and dont have to contend with the pc memory bottleneck of getting stuff to the graphics card. Emulating that is going to take a lot of time/effort and cpu power.
Apart from that, i'm sure Microsoft have put in plenty of other measures to stop people emulating the Xbox on a PC. BIOS checks, DirectX differences, Stripped OS etc...
Dont expect a game playing xbox emulator for a long time.
Weavus
Re:X-Box is evil
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This isnt helping Microsoft at all. By buying the Xbox but not getting any games for it and just using it to play old arcade games you are hurting them on a number of levels.
1) Microsoft lose money on the hardware and make it back on the software. Just buying the machine to play old arcade games makes MS loose money.
2) If lots of people buy Xbox's and dont buy any games it looks real bad to publishers who look at stats like games sold/machines sold. If this figure is real bad publishers wont want to release games on this system and will just produce games for other systems.
The trouble with Xbox homebrew is that the DVD's the Xbox use arnt completly standard and cant be burnt at home at the moment. I have not seen any reports of the machine being able to boot off anything but these disks so getting this type of software on the machine if you dont have a development station is going to be hard.
Weavus
Boycott Advance runs most commercial games
on
BoyCott Advance
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· Score: 4
Did you guys even read the website before saying that it only runs a few "homebrew demos"? Ok the screenshot page only has pictures of these demos but the actual emulator runs most current games.
There are still a few graphical errors in some games and sound is not emulated properly yet but this IS a full blown emulator and the GBA has been emulated. Mario Advance and Mr Driller 2 seem to play pefectly on it.
At the moment you need at least a 700mhz to get decent speed out of it and the whole point of the GBA is lost as you cant take your computer on the train but this emulator is fantastic for the development scene as it allows you to test your own created roms without needing to either buy a Nintendo Dev Kit (circa $8000) or a pirate flash backup rom (which arnt even out yet).
I really dont think an emulator such as this is as damaging as say UltraHLE was to Nintendo. As I said before the whole point of the GBA is lost and apart from the development benefits the only real reason for using it is to check out games before you actually buy them.
Weavus
The story isnt that the XBox is going to emulate the Dreamcast but that Microsoft will include the $30 Dreamcast-all-in-one chip that Sega have created for use in set-top boxes and that 'Dreamcast on a PCI card' we have heard about.
Think about how the PS2 plays PS1 games, they have a PS1 chip in the PS2. The PS2 does not emulate the PS1. The same _could_ be done for the DC and XBox combo...
While it seems a little far fetched at the moment its certanly not impossible.
Another thing...Did anyone remember the first XBox footage we saw that had that few seconds of a game that looked remarkably like Sonic Adventure? Perhaps they were trying to tell us something?
I think the headline of the story is complete rubbish. Altavista never launched any service to withdraw. The whole thing was a marketing ploy to increase their allready overvalued stock.
For the last two weeks the UK arm of the company has been trying to avoid the simple question of show a single user who is using the service. They lied and twisted anything they could and only today they have held their hands up and said 'ok, so we dont actually have a service' and then what do they do? Blame British Telecom of course!
The simple fact that they never asked BT for any resources before they 'launched' the service tells me they knew they were never going to be able to deliver what they promised.
A story a while back on TheRegister already covers this exact problem.
Check it out, its kind of sad, but she actually beat the credit card company and was allowed to dodge the $70k bill she ran up. Her excuse was that she should not have been allowed to run up the bill because gambling is not allowed in her home state.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the best waste of money I have found in a long time. Its even a feature of the watch that blue LEDs are the second most expensive LEDs you can get.
Pimpin aint easy watch by PIMP
A note that came with the watch said the battery only lasts 6-9 months if I need to know the time 15 times a day but who cares when you have such a rockin wrist peice.
Check out these prices:
Its even worse if you are paying in Euro's rather than GBP.
I could grab a plane ticket to NY, stay in a nice hotel for a couple of days, watch a show on broadway, buy a powerbook and still pay less than I would from Apple UK.
I really want to switch but not at these prices...
This is just an Epia Mini-ITX motherboard in a bog standard Morex Cubid Mini-ITX case. I have both sat here on my desk and its a great little silent linux server.
They cost a lot less to buy what this company wants to charge you. Sure they added wireless card/hard drive/memory but $500 still seems a bit expensive.
Check out http://www.mini-itx.com for details of the motherboard / case. They also have an online store for Europeans...
BTW, you can easily get 2 hard drives in that case if you take out the included hd enclosure so you could make one with a lot more space than 120gb...
Bitstream do something similar for PDA's with a product called ThunderHawk. Instead of reformating the page as such what they do is use a custom font that is much more readable on a pda sized device and resize the images on the fly.
Most PDA's at the moment use a 320x240 screen resolution, using ThunderHawk gives you a 640x480 view of a webpage but still using the 320x240 pda screen. Works really well.
Ahh but you have to remember that without strong software sales MS is going to take a serious hit on the hardware. Let them claim that they have sold 2 million, MS shareholders can jump for joy but without big 3rd party support the box aint going anywhere.
;)
Another thing you have to remember is that if you buy an xbox and now and shove it in the drawer until you can hack it you are stopping someone buying one and purchasing games for it (and MS making any money)
Weavus
There seems to be a common misconception that the Xbox is just a pc console. Every slashdot story about the Xbox has numerous posts abotu this. The Xbox may have some standard pc components inside it (x86 cpu, hard disk, geforce etc) but there is a lot that is different.
The biggest difference between the two is that the Xbox uses unified memory. This means the cpu/graphics/sound all use the same memory and dont have to contend with the pc memory bottleneck of getting stuff to the graphics card. Emulating that is going to take a lot of time/effort and cpu power.
Apart from that, i'm sure Microsoft have put in plenty of other measures to stop people emulating the Xbox on a PC. BIOS checks, DirectX differences, Stripped OS etc...
Dont expect a game playing xbox emulator for a long time.
Weavus
This isnt helping Microsoft at all. By buying the Xbox but not getting any games for it and just using it to play old arcade games you are hurting them on a number of levels.
1) Microsoft lose money on the hardware and make it back on the software. Just buying the machine to play old arcade games makes MS loose money.
2) If lots of people buy Xbox's and dont buy any games it looks real bad to publishers who look at stats like games sold/machines sold. If this figure is real bad publishers wont want to release games on this system and will just produce games for other systems.
The trouble with Xbox homebrew is that the DVD's the Xbox use arnt completly standard and cant be burnt at home at the moment. I have not seen any reports of the machine being able to boot off anything but these disks so getting this type of software on the machine if you dont have a development station is going to be hard.
Weavus
Did you guys even read the website before saying that it only runs a few "homebrew demos"? Ok the screenshot page only has pictures of these demos but the actual emulator runs most current games. There are still a few graphical errors in some games and sound is not emulated properly yet but this IS a full blown emulator and the GBA has been emulated. Mario Advance and Mr Driller 2 seem to play pefectly on it. At the moment you need at least a 700mhz to get decent speed out of it and the whole point of the GBA is lost as you cant take your computer on the train but this emulator is fantastic for the development scene as it allows you to test your own created roms without needing to either buy a Nintendo Dev Kit (circa $8000) or a pirate flash backup rom (which arnt even out yet). I really dont think an emulator such as this is as damaging as say UltraHLE was to Nintendo. As I said before the whole point of the GBA is lost and apart from the development benefits the only real reason for using it is to check out games before you actually buy them. Weavus
The story isnt that the XBox is going to emulate the Dreamcast but that Microsoft will include the $30 Dreamcast-all-in-one chip that Sega have created for use in set-top boxes and that 'Dreamcast on a PCI card' we have heard about.
Think about how the PS2 plays PS1 games, they have a PS1 chip in the PS2. The PS2 does not emulate the PS1. The same _could_ be done for the DC and XBox combo...
While it seems a little far fetched at the moment its certanly not impossible.
Another thing...Did anyone remember the first XBox footage we saw that had that few seconds of a game that looked remarkably like Sonic Adventure? Perhaps they were trying to tell us something?
I think the headline of the story is complete rubbish. Altavista never launched any service to withdraw. The whole thing was a marketing ploy to increase their allready overvalued stock.
For the last two weeks the UK arm of the company has been trying to avoid the simple question of show a single user who is using the service. They lied and twisted anything they could and only today they have held their hands up and said 'ok, so we dont actually have a service' and then what do they do? Blame British Telecom of course!
The simple fact that they never asked BT for any resources before they 'launched' the service tells me they knew they were never going to be able to deliver what they promised.
A story a while back on TheRegister already covers this exact problem.
Check it out, its kind of sad, but she actually beat the credit card company and was allowed to dodge the $70k bill she ran up. Her excuse was that she should not have been allowed to run up the bill because gambling is not allowed in her home state.
Weavus