When most slashdotter's think of games, they think first person shoot'em up, etc. Those will be a huge utter failure on handheld devices, like cellphones. Remember back when online multi-player games had A) limited bandwidth, and B) limited display (text based)? This is what we have to back to.
Remember the old BBS games? I am sure many people here were addicted to games like L.O.R.D. in the old BBS days. Remember MUDS? That is the niche I see these games flurishing in. People have said there is no community. No community? You just have to think differently about what a community is.
Remember the old card board and plastic pieces type games? Chess, Risk, etc. Someone could play 5 chess games on an ongoing bases with people they know in REAL LIFE! Now that's community! Make your moves back and forth every now and then during the day. People probably won't be playing non-stop for 3 hours, but 5 minutes here, two minutes there. Just have to consider games which work in such a time schedule.
Multi-player games worked well in the BBS days, and in many ways, today's cellphones has better display ability than 80x24 ANSI.
As an interesting sidenote, Covad's stock price is back up to $2.75, from $0.34 earlier this year. They fell off the Nasdaq many months ago, they are on Nasdaq's Bulletin Board exchange. Most nasdaq quote services can still resove them (COVD).
My dell has two, count them, two...fans in the back, both which come on at different heat levels. (Or one is just intermittent and I'm too dumb to realize.)
As someone who sits in front of computers all day who has a preference for ungodly high resolutions, my laptop has really helped my eyes. I recently got a Dell Laptop with a 15" 1600x1200 LCD display. For years my eyes have not been great. Not bad enough to really need glasses, but enough to bug me every now and then. Since I started using the LCD, I have had ever decreasing eye problems.
The screen is so much sharper than any CRT at high resolutions. I am starting to consider replacing my 21" sony trinitron (sp?) on my home desktop machine with an LCD. I want more screen real-estate than these 13" screens, but the prices keep coming down.
If you have eye problems as a result of using a CRT all day long, I highly recomend a high-res LCD.
Image a world where you can channelsurf what your neighbors are watching, live or recorded. Maybe have a "private" setting for what you don't want others to see. That would be a hell of a P2P type network.
I found some 7-8 year old posts I made when I was a teenager. I can't believe how cocky I was, and how poorly I wrote. Very few people ever replied to my posts, and I now understand why. I even found a "me too" (well, almost) post from myself. Wow, that's scary.
I appologize to the whole slashdot community for my teen cockiness in the mid 90's. I didn't mean what I said the way I said it...at least looking back.
One good way to find your old posts is to search for your (old?) email address.
While it may be lower cost (for the gun) and higher quality, I bet the first ones we see will be more expensive. I've got a Sony Trinitron 21" in front of my face right now. I also have a Dell Laptop whos LCD can do 1600x1200. The SOny monitor pales in comparison. The monitor (and the one I previously used at work) have not done great things for my eyes, due to their slight bluring at super high resolutions. My eyesight has improved since I started using primarily my LCD/Laptop. It would be nice to see what kind of quality gain is possible with this. I would be willing to upgrade my hot 21" to a cold 21" if the sharpness is much better.
I saw something similar to this at Syracuse University a few (3-4?) years ago. Students created robots with the ability to find their way through a plywood maze, locate a burning candle, and put out the flame. There were some interesting designs, and the task made each student put a variety of features onto the Robot. Sensors and logic to find their way through the maze without a) bumping into walls, b) going down the same hallway twice. Sensors of various type to locate a candle in each room of the maze, and some type of system to put out a candle (light sensors or heat sensors, attached to a fan, etc.) Most of the login boards were available for about $100, and programmed in C. Cool toy to play with if you have a reason.
I almost wish I had a reason to make something like this myself.
If they build the OS from the ground up, it may take a lot longer to hack the thing then say, a Tivo for instance. While Tivo has been cool about it, I'm sure that Sony doesn't want that to happent to them if they can help it.
While it is easy to hack into a Tivo, one of the reasons is bacause it runs a common user OS. Openness was one of the reason Tivo has had a fairly low cost to get into the market. Sony doesn't care about cost in an instance that this. I bet they were sitting around some conference room talking about how they want PC like features, but not PC like hackability. Some bright guy threw out, "well, we just make our own OS then...the way we want it." Doesn't sound too far fetched to me. Don't have to allow console access from a serial port to configure...make you own serial protocol, command structure, serial cable connections, etc, etc. It is still hackable, but not by the average geek, even with instructions. Even if you do get into to some useful interface...what then?
I used for a few days to see if I liked it. I ran it on Linux. The thing I hate the most was the user interface speed, and look. IBM didn't use standard AWT and Swing to create the user interface, but some IBM propriatary package. Not only does this seem to make it slow, but it is also God aweful on Linux.
Frankly the features may be better than anything else (free) on the market, but they can't make up for the UI. Currently I am using a demo of IDEA, and am quickly falling in love with it. Fastest Java IDE I have used to date, which isn't saying a lot.
IBM has to come up to speed a bit with the UI in order to compete on linux. Until they do, I will be staying well away from it.
While some computers may be cheap, my main workstation is a $2800 dell laptop. While I use VMWare to run the couple windows apps I need (Namely DreamWeaver), I would welcome an app which lets me run windows applications nativly. I'm not going to buy a duplicate of my machine to run windows, becaus e it is certainly not cheap.
Like it or not, if this is real (I have no oppinion on the matter), there is a good sized market for a product like this. If it's a solid product that costs less than VMWare, they will get lots of sales.
Licensing revenues could be huge for this. Other DVD manufactures put in "Sony Guts" (as the SNL saying goes.) Sony at least breaks even on the parts, and then get licensing fees. I bet Sony might not even really provide the guts, they just get big checks in the mail every week. Hell of a business to get into.
Not to mention they get to milk more money out of their old games.
I clicked on the salon link to be greeted by a full page tv commercial style ad. Clicked back, so I don't know what the article says, but I know Cornell just sued HP for a patent they claim HP is using in one of their chips.
Not sure what I think about Universities owning Patents. In general, I don't like the idea, but if it lowers the cost of college it may be a good thing. This may be a good way to lower the costs. College is to expensive, anything that helps is good, I hope the kids who helped invent whatever it is get a piece of the action.
Does this mean there will be less companies which allow our friends, who think we geeks will love these, to send us these annoying stupid e-cards? Do I really need another annoying MIDI soundtrack on top of an animated GIF with message as a "surprise"? I think not. These were cool two years ago when they were still a novelty.
I think the American Airlines (Companies, not company) being onboard says a lot about the current companies. They treat people like cattle unless they pay through the nose. I am lucky enough to be in a city that recently recieved service from JetBlue. I'll be flying them February to FL (havn't flown them yet.) Get this...all seats a leather, with 24(?) channel tv in the seatbacks...no extra cost. Not only that, the tickets are manytimes less than half the cost of their closest competitor out of SYR.
While all the airlines are in the toilet right now, SouthWest and JetBlue are doing the best from what I understand. Isn't that hard to image? The two discount carriers who pride themselves on customer service not being in the shitter when everyone else is!?
Internet (for free) in all the seats would do great things for the US carriers that would install it (highest cost is fuel, not giving customers toys to keep them occupied.) I for one think it may be good for a couple of the major airlines to go belly up.
Sorry this is kind of off topic, but the issue really bugs me.
I have to agree wholeheartedly with that comment. Having worked at a good sized manufacturing opperation (in the IT Group), I know enough to agree, also enough to know such a system is terribly complicated to implement, unless you have a good background in an existing application. We ran our system on an AS/400 using MAPICS. Do you have any idea what companies what pay for this stuff? It is insane! It is easy to get huge amounts of money allocated to an upgrade, because the software RUNS the business.
Seems to me like a webservices core may be able to be developed, which serves extermal user iterface modules. Maybe J2EE core (running in JBOSS), webservices exposed through Apache SOAP. You can then write interfaces in many different languages in different user interface, FAT GUI, thin jsp/php/perl. Ahh, I have real stuff to work on. Don't have time to keep thinking and rambling on about this.
As long as their Digital Wireless network around here still has static for phone calls, I won't be impressed with them. 3G has potential, but I don't think american companies will be able to make much out of it. They don't understand their real market.
Nextel's got a partial clue, but they still have some major lessons to learn.
from their web page:
JBOSS SUCCESS STORY OF THE MONTH! NEW
"Just through you'd like to know that the United States Department of Labor's Office of the Chief Financial Officer uses JBoss to process about $3.0M worth of financial transactions yearly in one application alone. There are several other legacy applications scheduled for migration. By using JBoss, we've saved the taxpayers about $100,000 in BEA Weblogic licensing fee and about $10,000 in annual support fees".
Michael R. Maraya, OCFO/OFD/DFAD
JBoss has a version which include a version of Tomcat, which runs inside the same JVM as the app server, which improves the performance greatly in many cases. That means no network connection, even locally, for RMI calls. Tomcat itself (Jakarta really), Apache's JSP/Servlet container, even as a seperate product integrates very well into Apache since they are made to work together.
A java apllication server is a software package that runs the logic of many high end java applications. An application server is where most of the hard work of an application is done. On top of application servers, you may see things like Java Applets, Java Applications, or JSP/Servet containers (ala Tomcat) which act as the interface between the application and the user.
Usually on a Java Application Server, programs are design as small server side components, which perform independently of each other. By typing the components together, useful applications are born. For instance in e-commerce, a JSP interface may recieve a credit card purchase. It will run your credit card through a credit card component on the JAS, ask a warehouse component to mark the order for picking, notify the shipping component a package will be coming and where to ship the order number to, notify marketing a sale has been made, and tell the purchasing module to order parts which will be needed to replace the unit in inventory.
All of these are seperate components which can be used in many different applications. By creating a system like this, business login never has to exist in more than one place, which reduces programming time, stabibility, and makes the system as a whole more flexible.
Slashdot Mirror
When most slashdotter's think of games, they think first person shoot'em up, etc. Those will be a huge utter failure on handheld devices, like cellphones. Remember back when online multi-player games had A) limited bandwidth, and B) limited display (text based)? This is what we have to back to.
Remember the old BBS games? I am sure many people here were addicted to games like L.O.R.D. in the old BBS days. Remember MUDS? That is the niche I see these games flurishing in. People have said there is no community. No community? You just have to think differently about what a community is.
Remember the old card board and plastic pieces type games? Chess, Risk, etc. Someone could play 5 chess games on an ongoing bases with people they know in REAL LIFE! Now that's community! Make your moves back and forth every now and then during the day. People probably won't be playing non-stop for 3 hours, but 5 minutes here, two minutes there. Just have to consider games which work in such a time schedule.
Multi-player games worked well in the BBS days, and in many ways, today's cellphones has better display ability than 80x24 ANSI.
-Pete
As an interesting sidenote, Covad's stock price is back up to $2.75, from $0.34 earlier this year. They fell off the Nasdaq many months ago, they are on Nasdaq's Bulletin Board exchange. Most nasdaq quote services can still resove them (COVD).
They are not down for the count yet.
-Pete
My dell has two, count them, two...fans in the back, both which come on at different heat levels. (Or one is just intermittent and I'm too dumb to realize.)
As someone who sits in front of computers all day who has a preference for ungodly high resolutions, my laptop has really helped my eyes. I recently got a Dell Laptop with a 15" 1600x1200 LCD display. For years my eyes have not been great. Not bad enough to really need glasses, but enough to bug me every now and then. Since I started using the LCD, I have had ever decreasing eye problems.
The screen is so much sharper than any CRT at high resolutions. I am starting to consider replacing my 21" sony trinitron (sp?) on my home desktop machine with an LCD. I want more screen real-estate than these 13" screens, but the prices keep coming down.
If you have eye problems as a result of using a CRT all day long, I highly recomend a high-res LCD.
-Pete
Image a world where you can channelsurf what your neighbors are watching, live or recorded. Maybe have a "private" setting for what you don't want others to see. That would be a hell of a P2P type network.
Makes one think...
-Pete
Well yes...duh. You don't have to pay per use fees to run coax.
You gotta admit it's getting better...It's getting better all the time!
-Pete
Let's just not replace Rumsfeld with a drone. That guy makes CSPAN the most interesting thing on TV when he's on.
-Pete
I found some 7-8 year old posts I made when I was a teenager. I can't believe how cocky I was, and how poorly I wrote. Very few people ever replied to my posts, and I now understand why. I even found a "me too" (well, almost) post from myself. Wow, that's scary.
I appologize to the whole slashdot community for my teen cockiness in the mid 90's. I didn't mean what I said the way I said it...at least looking back.
One good way to find your old posts is to search for your (old?) email address.
-Pete
While it may be lower cost (for the gun) and higher quality, I bet the first ones we see will be more expensive. I've got a Sony Trinitron 21" in front of my face right now. I also have a Dell Laptop whos LCD can do 1600x1200. The SOny monitor pales in comparison. The monitor (and the one I previously used at work) have not done great things for my eyes, due to their slight bluring at super high resolutions. My eyesight has improved since I started using primarily my LCD/Laptop. It would be nice to see what kind of quality gain is possible with this. I would be willing to upgrade my hot 21" to a cold 21" if the sharpness is much better.
This sounds like a cool technology.
-Pete
I saw something similar to this at Syracuse University a few (3-4?) years ago. Students created robots with the ability to find their way through a plywood maze, locate a burning candle, and put out the flame. There were some interesting designs, and the task made each student put a variety of features onto the Robot. Sensors and logic to find their way through the maze without a) bumping into walls, b) going down the same hallway twice. Sensors of various type to locate a candle in each room of the maze, and some type of system to put out a candle (light sensors or heat sensors, attached to a fan, etc.) Most of the login boards were available for about $100, and programmed in C. Cool toy to play with if you have a reason.
I almost wish I had a reason to make something like this myself.
-Pete
If they build the OS from the ground up, it may take a lot longer to hack the thing then say, a Tivo for instance. While Tivo has been cool about it, I'm sure that Sony doesn't want that to happent to them if they can help it.
While it is easy to hack into a Tivo, one of the reasons is bacause it runs a common user OS. Openness was one of the reason Tivo has had a fairly low cost to get into the market. Sony doesn't care about cost in an instance that this. I bet they were sitting around some conference room talking about how they want PC like features, but not PC like hackability. Some bright guy threw out, "well, we just make our own OS then...the way we want it." Doesn't sound too far fetched to me. Don't have to allow console access from a serial port to configure...make you own serial protocol, command structure, serial cable connections, etc, etc. It is still hackable, but not by the average geek, even with instructions. Even if you do get into to some useful interface...what then?
-Pete
I used for a few days to see if I liked it. I ran it on Linux. The thing I hate the most was the user interface speed, and look. IBM didn't use standard AWT and Swing to create the user interface, but some IBM propriatary package. Not only does this seem to make it slow, but it is also God aweful on Linux.
Frankly the features may be better than anything else (free) on the market, but they can't make up for the UI. Currently I am using a demo of IDEA, and am quickly falling in love with it. Fastest Java IDE I have used to date, which isn't saying a lot.
IBM has to come up to speed a bit with the UI in order to compete on linux. Until they do, I will be staying well away from it.
-Pete
What are you worried about? I doubt they were cluefull enough to make a Linux version of the sniffer. ;-)
-Pete
I should try to trademark my face and demand royalties...
-Pete
While some computers may be cheap, my main workstation is a $2800 dell laptop. While I use VMWare to run the couple windows apps I need (Namely DreamWeaver), I would welcome an app which lets me run windows applications nativly. I'm not going to buy a duplicate of my machine to run windows, becaus e it is certainly not cheap.
Like it or not, if this is real (I have no oppinion on the matter), there is a good sized market for a product like this. If it's a solid product that costs less than VMWare, they will get lots of sales.
-Pete
Licensing revenues could be huge for this. Other DVD manufactures put in "Sony Guts" (as the SNL saying goes.) Sony at least breaks even on the parts, and then get licensing fees. I bet Sony might not even really provide the guts, they just get big checks in the mail every week. Hell of a business to get into.
Not to mention they get to milk more money out of their old games.
-Pete
I clicked on the salon link to be greeted by a full page tv commercial style ad. Clicked back, so I don't know what the article says, but I know Cornell just sued HP for a patent they claim HP is using in one of their chips.
Not sure what I think about Universities owning Patents. In general, I don't like the idea, but if it lowers the cost of college it may be a good thing. This may be a good way to lower the costs. College is to expensive, anything that helps is good, I hope the kids who helped invent whatever it is get a piece of the action.
-Pete
Isn't one stupid patent article enough for one day?
-Pete
Does this mean there will be less companies which allow our friends, who think we geeks will love these, to send us these annoying stupid e-cards? Do I really need another annoying MIDI soundtrack on top of an animated GIF with message as a "surprise"? I think not. These were cool two years ago when they were still a novelty.
God I hope so! This patent may not be all bad!
-Pete
I think the American Airlines (Companies, not company) being onboard says a lot about the current companies. They treat people like cattle unless they pay through the nose. I am lucky enough to be in a city that recently recieved service from JetBlue. I'll be flying them February to FL (havn't flown them yet.) Get this...all seats a leather, with 24(?) channel tv in the seatbacks...no extra cost. Not only that, the tickets are manytimes less than half the cost of their closest competitor out of SYR.
While all the airlines are in the toilet right now, SouthWest and JetBlue are doing the best from what I understand. Isn't that hard to image? The two discount carriers who pride themselves on customer service not being in the shitter when everyone else is!?
Internet (for free) in all the seats would do great things for the US carriers that would install it (highest cost is fuel, not giving customers toys to keep them occupied.) I for one think it may be good for a couple of the major airlines to go belly up.
Sorry this is kind of off topic, but the issue really bugs me.
-Pete
I have to agree wholeheartedly with that comment. Having worked at a good sized manufacturing opperation (in the IT Group), I know enough to agree, also enough to know such a system is terribly complicated to implement, unless you have a good background in an existing application. We ran our system on an AS/400 using MAPICS. Do you have any idea what companies what pay for this stuff? It is insane! It is easy to get huge amounts of money allocated to an upgrade, because the software RUNS the business.
Seems to me like a webservices core may be able to be developed, which serves extermal user iterface modules. Maybe J2EE core (running in JBOSS), webservices exposed through Apache SOAP. You can then write interfaces in many different languages in different user interface, FAT GUI, thin jsp/php/perl. Ahh, I have real stuff to work on. Don't have time to keep thinking and rambling on about this.
-Pete
As long as their Digital Wireless network around here still has static for phone calls, I won't be impressed with them. 3G has potential, but I don't think american companies will be able to make much out of it. They don't understand their real market.
Nextel's got a partial clue, but they still have some major lessons to learn.
-Pete
from their web page:
JBOSS SUCCESS STORY OF THE MONTH! NEW
"Just through you'd like to know that the United States Department of Labor's Office of the Chief Financial Officer uses JBoss to process about $3.0M worth of financial transactions yearly in one application alone. There are several other legacy applications scheduled for migration. By using JBoss, we've saved the taxpayers about $100,000 in BEA Weblogic licensing fee and about $10,000 in annual support fees".
Michael R. Maraya, OCFO/OFD/DFAD
JBoss has a version which include a version of Tomcat, which runs inside the same JVM as the app server, which improves the performance greatly in many cases. That means no network connection, even locally, for RMI calls. Tomcat itself (Jakarta really), Apache's JSP/Servlet container, even as a seperate product integrates very well into Apache since they are made to work together.
Don't know if that answers your question or not.
-Pete
A java apllication server is a software package that runs the logic of many high end java applications. An application server is where most of the hard work of an application is done. On top of application servers, you may see things like Java Applets, Java Applications, or JSP/Servet containers (ala Tomcat) which act as the interface between the application and the user.
Usually on a Java Application Server, programs are design as small server side components, which perform independently of each other. By typing the components together, useful applications are born. For instance in e-commerce, a JSP interface may recieve a credit card purchase. It will run your credit card through a credit card component on the JAS, ask a warehouse component to mark the order for picking, notify the shipping component a package will be coming and where to ship the order number to, notify marketing a sale has been made, and tell the purchasing module to order parts which will be needed to replace the unit in inventory.
All of these are seperate components which can be used in many different applications. By creating a system like this, business login never has to exist in more than one place, which reduces programming time, stabibility, and makes the system as a whole more flexible.
Hope that made sense.
-Pete