Linux certainly couldn't do it alone. You'd have to have strong support in developing the standard from the entire hardware community. Honestly, it'd be much easier for Microsoft to bring such a standard into existence than anyone else. Maybe with Bill Gates 'hardware will be free' stance and their new deals with Sun they will consider actually pushing for more standards in hardware to software interfacing. When the OS market is no longer profitable I could see them doing that. It'd fit in well with their move to conquering the niche markets such as game/media consoles.
I think they won't try though until someone else, such as the major free OSs get together and start pushing such a standard. Get enough push from Linux, the BSDs, possibly even Apple and some embedded OS vendors and then Microsoft will want to embrace and extend the concept.. which in this case could be beneficial. It might even work in well with their DRM strategy as the abstracted drivers could be digitally signed.. forcing the supporting OS to go along with Microsoft's DRM plans.
Does anyone else find 1GB of mail an extremely limiting amount? Most days I get more mail than that. So where does someone go to get a 1TB of mail space? I'm working on moving most my mail off my current mail host to my own server but I'm running into the problem that it seems my broadband provider blocks the incoming smtp port.
Just remember boys and girls.. joining every mailing list you see is baaaaad. I can grep for solutions to problems with most opensource projects though.. as opposed to Googling for the same solution.;)
Let's see.. a new public API every year for all devices of a given type or a new hidden API for every device released.. which is harder to make compatible.
So you're argument is that because there are something like a dozen variants of AGP that AGP isn't worth supporting and that we should just allow every video card to wire itself to the motherboard in a random way?
When a new device comes out they can go ahead and release a suggested API for the device for which it's abstract driver works. Once the suggested API is certified or denied the device can release an update to it's internal drivers that would allow it to work with the new standard. Obviously they can also release their suggested changes before releasing their device to the public if they want to avoid confussing their customers. The same exact steps that go on many places in working with standards bodies.
The API can change. Surely you're not still using an ISA video card although it was a standard interface. I'd be surprised if you're even still using an AGP 1 video card. All the low-level driver would need to be able to do is indicate the API it was conforming to, alert the API as to what features the hardware could support, and do any translating between what the device did internally and the API. That way hardware companies could still use their own secret recipes for doing certain things (since the abstract driver wouldn't be in source form.. something closer to a parse tree maybe) internally but could still make their devices work with a wide range of platforms.
Hardly a CS god. Just sit down and look at everything the current generation of soundcards does and work out a standard API. Sit down and look at everything the videocards do and work out an API. And so forth. To some degree it's already done as all hardware must be compatible at some level to be useful for anything.. this would just move that compatibility level lower down and provide a method of doing the rest in a way that would be platform independant.
As new generation products came out they could submit suggestions for updating the API. Single devices could even use more than one API if it was appropiate and thus mix and match features.
It's more a business of politics than technology I think. A strong standards body would need to form the APIs in order for them to be accepted.
Exactly. If we could socialize some independant movie people into the opensource way of things.. and provide the needed software, as opensource, to solve their technical problems affordably.. then we could get some interesting things going. Surely some of us must have some crossover of interests? I'd like writing a script and producing a movie. Anyone out there good at working a camera or into actting?
I wouldn't mind at all if movie studios wanted to package and release my opencontent movies.. as long as they followed a GPL-like license. Any changes they made would have to be returned.
IMO all us people whining that we want free music and free movies and so forth SHOULD be producing our own open content. That's the way to handle the problem, not by pirating. (Which I admit to sometimes doing just as everyone else does.)
I'd not try to create the complete driver in this way. I'd have a standard driver for each type of device in the OS and would provide just enough logic in the supplied driver (in the device) to allow those devices to link their internal workings to the standard API for that type of device. Maybe it wouldn't work but I find that hard to believe.. I think there just isn't enough interest and that vendors don't really want a standard API to work with.
I've seen tools used that let you write a driver once and port it between Windows and Linux in an automated way. Why that couldn't be built-in I can't see.
No, you want a language that is easy to compile into C/Asm or machine language. You don't want a low level language with platform abstractions which Java definately is not.
Pick one of the existing languages used for this purpose or have some comittee investigate the best features of those languages and create a new open language.
Of course the idea misses some real concrete details.. Slashdot is hardly the place to post complex technical documents.
In my experience Linux has better legacy hardware support altogether. Many devices that have worked fine with one version of Windows would no longer work with newer versions. Things like printers, scanners, and digital cameras have especially been a problem for me. This isn't so much a Windows problem as a non-opensource problem. The companies have no interest in updating the drivers of old devices or worse they go out of business. If the old driver happens not to work or you lose the driver disk then you're out of luck.
Linux has trouble with bleeding edge stuff and stuff that uses almost, but not quite, compatible hardware. The later seems to be a problem with cheap hardware and is usually fixed as soon as some developer gets a chance to look at it and spend a few minutes adding the needed changes to the normal drivers.
My question is. Why shouldn't devices come with drivers installed on the device themselves in a platform-indepedant language? Let Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, or whatever compile the real driver from that abstract driver when first ran. Instead of updating a driver on the OS you could update it in the flash mem of the device and then let it recompile and run the new driver from the device. Then all OS's would have better driver support - even Windows. This wouldn't be to hard to implement as a standard for new hardware so why isn't it done? Legacy hardware could still have the drivers written in this abstract driver language.. you'd just obviously have to keep a legacy driver cache for your OS to compile when it found those devices. You'd also get the benefit that the drivers could always be compiled to get the best use out of your hardware while being a transparent operation to the user.
Probably not. A good reason to start making opencontent movies now. If we can make an OS why couldn't we make a movie? Probably not cutting edge special effect monster blockbusters (not to begin anyway) but decent movies. We have film and sound editing software and a decent video camera doesn't cost any more than a good computer (~$3500). I'm sure we could come up with a script better than most of the crap Hollywood comes up with. We could do the actting ourselves, talk unemployed new actors into doing it for free, or pay those new actors some small fee for participating.
I fixed the problem by using my fancy new printer to print out each frame of the movie.. then I used my crayons to color everything in.. then I scanned it all back in on my Mac and encoded it back into a DVD.
Hrm.. yknow that actually sounds crazy enough to be fun.
I agree cookies are not spyware - but they can be used by spyware. Also the average Windows user does have at least several spyware programs installed. Sit down at just about any average users computer and take a few minutes to look and it is easy to see. Half the complaints I get about Windows running slow or being unstable are caused by these crap programs. For most users these programs are more of a problem than viruses or security holes.
I use Spybot S&D and highly recommend it for all my clients that use Windows. It's easy to use, very effective, and absolutely free. Just to throw my vote into the pot too.:)
Hey! I worked at both schools in Columbia, MO that were listed. A pretty nice town overall. Stephens College is about 90% female so I suggest all geek boys sign up today.
It might be useful if something like apt-get could be called, by a user with suitable permissions, to install a program the first time that programs icon was selected from the desktop menu. That'd be pretty easy to make happen. It might even be useful to allow users to install those programs within their own home directories if the admin doesn't want them to be available to all users.. as long as the admin can easily remove those installations and install a system-wide copy at will. I think Red Carpet is easy enough that most users could already figure out installing software though. It's very much like apt but with a user-friendly interface on top of it.
I do package software for my systems somewhat similar to what they described. I tend to put the packages under/opt/ with all files related to that release underneath. Typically a make file which can fetch and build the package is in/opt/ and/opt//src holds the source and/opt//bin holds the compiled version. In/opt I keep a make file that checks to make sure I have the newest versions of all the download scripts for each program. I like the Unix-like directory structure though so I create symlinks from the real files under/opt into the proper places in the filesystem.
I can't really see any benefit to caching packages. If you want to cache packages why not just use Squid and set wget to use a proxy? Useful if you're managing a network of machines and want to save bandwidth but useless for a single machine.
I've been toying with making my packages install under users accounts. Mostly because that's the way I like to run things like MySQL and Apache. Really there is nothing that tricky about it. Just configure the packages to run under the users directory and don't create the symlinks. I've been trying to figure out the best way to touch each users files at startup and shutdown so that services can be brought up or down properly without the admin needing to take any special action.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to make software installation so easy that a chimp could do it. Then you're likely to wind up with severely messed up file installation like you get in Windows. If typing apt-get install , rug install , or make is to hard then really that user probably shouldn't be installing software. As long as it's confined to their own home directory though I guess the damage possible is limited so why not allow it? Wouldn't something like apt-get be easier than clicking and dragging, if a non root user running it, the packages were installed to their own home directory.. safe from destroying the system and no password required.
I've been thinking of making a game similar to this for months (and am surprised to see such a game already exists). I like RPG style games but find that the heart of the game, questing, is rather boring because it's repetitious and you don't really do anything. You wander the map to collect stuff.. the map mostly looking the same thru most of the game.. and fight things which are mostly boring (I usually make my first moves and then just hold the button down to keep repeating those moves). I like the outdoors and geocaching.. and have been thinking of merging the geocaching concept with multiplayer online rpg's. A lot like what this appears to be.
I don't think you need to worry about people swerving thru traffic to dodge monsters or collect treasures because most likely all such items would be placed on the map by someone actually going there and either electronicly marking the location or leaving a real key item in a cache. It's unlikely that the game's masters would purposely put objects in places that might cause the player or others harm.
I wanted to make deals with local businesses to put these virtual game objects in their businesses. Maybe even require you to interact with real people at those places. Possibly to get an object you'd have to answer a riddle from the bartender (and buy a drink to get him to ask the riddle). Also I like the idea of putting objects in state parks and places such as that.. to require some physical effort to get certain items. Since wireless might not work in these locations I was thinking of putting real items there, in geocaches, that have a game code on them (as well as the URL of the game.. should a non-player find the object we want to lure them in).. type in the code and you're character receives the item or spell or whatever it was. Some items might even be very difficult (physically) to get to.. requiring rock climbing or diving skills. IMO a dusting of lesser items in easy to get spots and fewer rare hard to get to items would be great. I'd love to see players actually buying and selling game objects with real money. You could actually make a living finding these objects and selling them to other players.
I think this world would be way more interesting than something like Everquest because you'd be required to make quests in the real world. You'd form parties of real people and go real places and buy and sell items with real money. The software would only need to tie these social interactions to a storyline and help connect people, that otherwise might never meet, together. Call it computer argumented reality.
I wouldn't buy two copies of movies. If they are of similar quality I'll buy whichever is easy to rip. Right now that is DVD.
What I would like is a Tivo-like device that allows you to add [removable] storage by plugging it into your network and configuring which NFS servers to use. Also I'd like it to be able to autoscan new servers so that if I had something like those portable network drives we mentioned the other day I could just plug them into my hub and bam every ripped DVD, CD, or Tivo-copied television program on the drive is instantly available on my menu as something I could watch. It'd be damn near perfect if I could drop a DVD into the unit and it'd automaticly rip the movie for me.
I'm thinking of trying to build this lil device. I've built set-top computers before and have written most the software required already. I'm thinking of using one of those nano-itx boards. Since no hard drive is needed inside the unit (if it can access network file servers) I think I could build it extremly small. Not sure if I should build in a slim DVD drive or just plug an external one in when I want to rip a DVD. Probably the later. Just need to design a remote control for the unit and I'm ready to roll. I'm thinking of just using a wireless mouse as the remote since my software is optimized for three button navigation.
My favorite thing to do with my browser history is to search it. I index the pages as they go through my proxy server and then I can search them based on keywords and how recently I looked at those pages. I do something similar with my bookmarks. IMO it's far more useful than trying to visually pick out something I went to and have forgotten because usually I can't remember the name of the site or what it looked like.. just the few keywords I was interested in about the site. It'd be great if our web browsers offered this as a feature.
I mostly was thinking of areas without an existing phone/cable network. I've lived in rural areas and they typically don't have cable at all and the phone networks are so old as to be totally useless to try to upgrade.
I think fiber would have lower costs of maintenence than any copper based network. You have less issues with proper grounding and fewer issues with electrical interference.
I also think that if you were implementing fiber in such masses as to be across an entire sizable city that you could drive the prices of the equipment down a lot. Of course home owners would pay the cost of hooking up from the neighborhood hub to their home. What would be $250 added to the cost of building a home? Even if added as a one time fee to add your existing home to such a broadband network that's not that high an expense.
It'd still cost more, probably, to roll out fiber, but I think it'd be worth it. Also I've lived in big cities and have seen them rolling out fiber already so they might very well be able to connect into existing fiber in those places.
It'd be interesting to start on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. Even just within business districts, richer neighborhoods, and upscale apartment complexes it'd be an interesting project.
We pay around $70/month for a cable modem and it's not even that fast. It wouldn't be long at that cost before I could pay to run fiber from my house to a neighborhood router.
Why do I only get 1.5Mb broadband when I see in Japan they have 45Mb? Why is it that city-wide gigabit fiber couldn't be roled out to every home to form a MAN that delivered REAL broadband to every home? Is there a technical reason this wouldn't work? It'd not just be about conencting to the Internet.. it's about connecting within the city. School to school video conferencing, kick ass multiplayer gaming, file sharing, etc. Maybe with frequent wireless access points connecting throughout the cities business and educational areas.
Of course there are economic reasons it would take time to roll out but would it cost any more to implement than DSL or cable? For new regions without DSL or cable is there any economic reason to implement those slower and more complex technologies instead of going with the gigabit ethernet as might be done on a campus network?
Why do we need new ideas? We like what we're comfortable with. My favorite games are like interactive fiction and thus most of my favorites are by SquareSoft. Final Fantasy and similar games could use some fresh ideas in implementation but I like the concept. The biggest problem with games isn't that the concepts are bad. It's that certain aspects of the concepts were never really worked out and those boring points get more annoying the longer they go on. Work out those points and you don't need any huge shifts. Evolution, not revolution.
The drive also comes with two 10/100 ports. Plenty fast for watching even DVD quality video which in my experience takes between 5Mb and 15Mb of the connection to play smoothly. An app that had a decent sized buffer should be able to play just fine on even a 10Mb connection. I've successfully played it over 802.11b with no problems (although my 802.11b gets up to 22Mb connections).
Of course for this use I'm assuming you'd only watch one movie off the drive at a time if you were going to use WiFi. For more, or for writing the movies to the drive, you'd want to plug it into the wired network.
For just about any application the average user would want to do they won't be needing breakneck speeds so I think this would work fine for them. Other than playing with video I can't think of any reason the average user would need to move large bits of data around the network quickly. Possibly you'd be right if you meant to use this as a backup device but then again if you're taking differential backups why not.
The perfect extra feature for something like this would be to make it so it fits inside a removable harddrive tray so if you had a drawer in your computer you could slide this into that space for a faster connectionn.. then pull it out and take it where needed and let it act as a little fileserver.
But do you want to buy a new laptop and carry it around for each hdd you want to share? These are small enough and cheap enough that you could easily carry several around. I'd like one of these with a 300GB drive. Put around 50 ripped DVDs or maybe 5,000 ripped CDs and plug them into your set top box. Much easier than carrying around the originals.
A battery unit would be a useful add-on but for most uses plugging the unit in would work just fine.
I think using 2.5" disks is a bad design decision (normal drives are cheaper and can hold more) but otherwise these sound like useful devices. Similar to firewire drives but easier to share.
The wireless aspect of something like this would be fantastic for on-the-spot networking such as lan parties or board meetings.
This drive is a fantastic idea. For most users they don't want to open any PC to install a hard drive and something like this has the benefit of allowing large data clusters to be shared very easily.
I'd like to get a couple and slap 300GB drives in them and use them for a replacement for carrying around stacks of DVDs. Rip the DVDs to the drives and port them around in a fraction of the space of the originals.. and a lot more portable than even a small computer (currently I use a tiny mini-itx system for this purpose). I just wonder if they have options as to the methods allowed for sharing the files. For my needs I'd like to use NFS but I doubt that's what these will come with.
Exactly why I like to use Mozilla with plugins, Java, and Javascript all turned off. Overall you miss nothing important and the experience is far less stressful. So very few problems.
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Linux certainly couldn't do it alone. You'd have to have strong support in developing the standard from the entire hardware community. Honestly, it'd be much easier for Microsoft to bring such a standard into existence than anyone else. Maybe with Bill Gates 'hardware will be free' stance and their new deals with Sun they will consider actually pushing for more standards in hardware to software interfacing. When the OS market is no longer profitable I could see them doing that. It'd fit in well with their move to conquering the niche markets such as game/media consoles.
I think they won't try though until someone else, such as the major free OSs get together and start pushing such a standard. Get enough push from Linux, the BSDs, possibly even Apple and some embedded OS vendors and then Microsoft will want to embrace and extend the concept.. which in this case could be beneficial. It might even work in well with their DRM strategy as the abstracted drivers could be digitally signed.. forcing the supporting OS to go along with Microsoft's DRM plans.
Does anyone else find 1GB of mail an extremely limiting amount? Most days I get more mail than that. So where does someone go to get a 1TB of mail space? I'm working on moving most my mail off my current mail host to my own server but I'm running into the problem that it seems my broadband provider blocks the incoming smtp port.
;)
Just remember boys and girls.. joining every mailing list you see is baaaaad. I can grep for solutions to problems with most opensource projects though.. as opposed to Googling for the same solution.
Let's see.. a new public API every year for all devices of a given type or a new hidden API for every device released.. which is harder to make compatible.
So you're argument is that because there are something like a dozen variants of AGP that AGP isn't worth supporting and that we should just allow every video card to wire itself to the motherboard in a random way?
When a new device comes out they can go ahead and release a suggested API for the device for which it's abstract driver works. Once the suggested API is certified or denied the device can release an update to it's internal drivers that would allow it to work with the new standard. Obviously they can also release their suggested changes before releasing their device to the public if they want to avoid confussing their customers. The same exact steps that go on many places in working with standards bodies.
The API can change. Surely you're not still using an ISA video card although it was a standard interface. I'd be surprised if you're even still using an AGP 1 video card. All the low-level driver would need to be able to do is indicate the API it was conforming to, alert the API as to what features the hardware could support, and do any translating between what the device did internally and the API. That way hardware companies could still use their own secret recipes for doing certain things (since the abstract driver wouldn't be in source form.. something closer to a parse tree maybe) internally but could still make their devices work with a wide range of platforms.
Hardly a CS god. Just sit down and look at everything the current generation of soundcards does and work out a standard API. Sit down and look at everything the videocards do and work out an API. And so forth. To some degree it's already done as all hardware must be compatible at some level to be useful for anything.. this would just move that compatibility level lower down and provide a method of doing the rest in a way that would be platform independant.
As new generation products came out they could submit suggestions for updating the API. Single devices could even use more than one API if it was appropiate and thus mix and match features.
It's more a business of politics than technology I think. A strong standards body would need to form the APIs in order for them to be accepted.
Exactly. If we could socialize some independant movie people into the opensource way of things.. and provide the needed software, as opensource, to solve their technical problems affordably.. then we could get some interesting things going. Surely some of us must have some crossover of interests? I'd like writing a script and producing a movie. Anyone out there good at working a camera or into actting?
I wouldn't mind at all if movie studios wanted to package and release my opencontent movies.. as long as they followed a GPL-like license. Any changes they made would have to be returned.
IMO all us people whining that we want free music and free movies and so forth SHOULD be producing our own open content. That's the way to handle the problem, not by pirating. (Which I admit to sometimes doing just as everyone else does.)
I'd not try to create the complete driver in this way. I'd have a standard driver for each type of device in the OS and would provide just enough logic in the supplied driver (in the device) to allow those devices to link their internal workings to the standard API for that type of device. Maybe it wouldn't work but I find that hard to believe.. I think there just isn't enough interest and that vendors don't really want a standard API to work with.
I've seen tools used that let you write a driver once and port it between Windows and Linux in an automated way. Why that couldn't be built-in I can't see.
No, you want a language that is easy to compile into C/Asm or machine language. You don't want a low level language with platform abstractions which Java definately is not.
Pick one of the existing languages used for this purpose or have some comittee investigate the best features of those languages and create a new open language.
Of course the idea misses some real concrete details.. Slashdot is hardly the place to post complex technical documents.
In my experience Linux has better legacy hardware support altogether. Many devices that have worked fine with one version of Windows would no longer work with newer versions. Things like printers, scanners, and digital cameras have especially been a problem for me. This isn't so much a Windows problem as a non-opensource problem. The companies have no interest in updating the drivers of old devices or worse they go out of business. If the old driver happens not to work or you lose the driver disk then you're out of luck.
Linux has trouble with bleeding edge stuff and stuff that uses almost, but not quite, compatible hardware. The later seems to be a problem with cheap hardware and is usually fixed as soon as some developer gets a chance to look at it and spend a few minutes adding the needed changes to the normal drivers.
My question is. Why shouldn't devices come with drivers installed on the device themselves in a platform-indepedant language? Let Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, or whatever compile the real driver from that abstract driver when first ran. Instead of updating a driver on the OS you could update it in the flash mem of the device and then let it recompile and run the new driver from the device. Then all OS's would have better driver support - even Windows. This wouldn't be to hard to implement as a standard for new hardware so why isn't it done? Legacy hardware could still have the drivers written in this abstract driver language.. you'd just obviously have to keep a legacy driver cache for your OS to compile when it found those devices. You'd also get the benefit that the drivers could always be compiled to get the best use out of your hardware while being a transparent operation to the user.
Probably not. A good reason to start making opencontent movies now. If we can make an OS why couldn't we make a movie? Probably not cutting edge special effect monster blockbusters (not to begin anyway) but decent movies. We have film and sound editing software and a decent video camera doesn't cost any more than a good computer (~$3500). I'm sure we could come up with a script better than most of the crap Hollywood comes up with. We could do the actting ourselves, talk unemployed new actors into doing it for free, or pay those new actors some small fee for participating.
I fixed the problem by using my fancy new printer to print out each frame of the movie.. then I used my crayons to color everything in.. then I scanned it all back in on my Mac and encoded it back into a DVD.
Hrm.. yknow that actually sounds crazy enough to be fun.
I agree cookies are not spyware - but they can be used by spyware. Also the average Windows user does have at least several spyware programs installed. Sit down at just about any average users computer and take a few minutes to look and it is easy to see. Half the complaints I get about Windows running slow or being unstable are caused by these crap programs. For most users these programs are more of a problem than viruses or security holes.
I use Spybot S&D and highly recommend it for all my clients that use Windows. It's easy to use, very effective, and absolutely free. Just to throw my vote into the pot too. :)
Hey! I worked at both schools in Columbia, MO that were listed. A pretty nice town overall. Stephens College is about 90% female so I suggest all geek boys sign up today.
It might be useful if something like apt-get could be called, by a user with suitable permissions, to install a program the first time that programs icon was selected from the desktop menu. That'd be pretty easy to make happen. It might even be useful to allow users to install those programs within their own home directories if the admin doesn't want them to be available to all users.. as long as the admin can easily remove those installations and install a system-wide copy at will. I think Red Carpet is easy enough that most users could already figure out installing software though. It's very much like apt but with a user-friendly interface on top of it.
/opt/ with all files related to that release underneath. Typically a make file which can fetch and build the package is in /opt/ and /opt//src holds the source and /opt//bin holds the compiled version. In /opt I keep a make file that checks to make sure I have the newest versions of all the download scripts for each program. I like the Unix-like directory structure though so I create symlinks from the real files under /opt into the proper places in the filesystem.
I do package software for my systems somewhat similar to what they described. I tend to put the packages under
I can't really see any benefit to caching packages. If you want to cache packages why not just use Squid and set wget to use a proxy? Useful if you're managing a network of machines and want to save bandwidth but useless for a single machine.
I've been toying with making my packages install under users accounts. Mostly because that's the way I like to run things like MySQL and Apache. Really there is nothing that tricky about it. Just configure the packages to run under the users directory and don't create the symlinks. I've been trying to figure out the best way to touch each users files at startup and shutdown so that services can be brought up or down properly without the admin needing to take any special action.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to make software installation so easy that a chimp could do it. Then you're likely to wind up with severely messed up file installation like you get in Windows. If typing apt-get install , rug install , or make is to hard then really that user probably shouldn't be installing software. As long as it's confined to their own home directory though I guess the damage possible is limited so why not allow it? Wouldn't something like apt-get be easier than clicking and dragging, if a non root user running it, the packages were installed to their own home directory.. safe from destroying the system and no password required.
I've been thinking of making a game similar to this for months (and am surprised to see such a game already exists). I like RPG style games but find that the heart of the game, questing, is rather boring because it's repetitious and you don't really do anything. You wander the map to collect stuff.. the map mostly looking the same thru most of the game.. and fight things which are mostly boring (I usually make my first moves and then just hold the button down to keep repeating those moves). I like the outdoors and geocaching.. and have been thinking of merging the geocaching concept with multiplayer online rpg's. A lot like what this appears to be.
I don't think you need to worry about people swerving thru traffic to dodge monsters or collect treasures because most likely all such items would be placed on the map by someone actually going there and either electronicly marking the location or leaving a real key item in a cache. It's unlikely that the game's masters would purposely put objects in places that might cause the player or others harm.
I wanted to make deals with local businesses to put these virtual game objects in their businesses. Maybe even require you to interact with real people at those places. Possibly to get an object you'd have to answer a riddle from the bartender (and buy a drink to get him to ask the riddle). Also I like the idea of putting objects in state parks and places such as that.. to require some physical effort to get certain items. Since wireless might not work in these locations I was thinking of putting real items there, in geocaches, that have a game code on them (as well as the URL of the game.. should a non-player find the object we want to lure them in).. type in the code and you're character receives the item or spell or whatever it was. Some items might even be very difficult (physically) to get to.. requiring rock climbing or diving skills. IMO a dusting of lesser items in easy to get spots and fewer rare hard to get to items would be great. I'd love to see players actually buying and selling game objects with real money. You could actually make a living finding these objects and selling them to other players.
I think this world would be way more interesting than something like Everquest because you'd be required to make quests in the real world. You'd form parties of real people and go real places and buy and sell items with real money. The software would only need to tie these social interactions to a storyline and help connect people, that otherwise might never meet, together. Call it computer argumented reality.
I wouldn't buy two copies of movies. If they are of similar quality I'll buy whichever is easy to rip. Right now that is DVD.
What I would like is a Tivo-like device that allows you to add [removable] storage by plugging it into your network and configuring which NFS servers to use. Also I'd like it to be able to autoscan new servers so that if I had something like those portable network drives we mentioned the other day I could just plug them into my hub and bam every ripped DVD, CD, or Tivo-copied television program on the drive is instantly available on my menu as something I could watch. It'd be damn near perfect if I could drop a DVD into the unit and it'd automaticly rip the movie for me.
I'm thinking of trying to build this lil device. I've built set-top computers before and have written most the software required already. I'm thinking of using one of those nano-itx boards. Since no hard drive is needed inside the unit (if it can access network file servers) I think I could build it extremly small. Not sure if I should build in a slim DVD drive or just plug an external one in when I want to rip a DVD. Probably the later. Just need to design a remote control for the unit and I'm ready to roll. I'm thinking of just using a wireless mouse as the remote since my software is optimized for three button navigation.
My favorite thing to do with my browser history is to search it. I index the pages as they go through my proxy server and then I can search them based on keywords and how recently I looked at those pages. I do something similar with my bookmarks. IMO it's far more useful than trying to visually pick out something I went to and have forgotten because usually I can't remember the name of the site or what it looked like.. just the few keywords I was interested in about the site. It'd be great if our web browsers offered this as a feature.
I mostly was thinking of areas without an existing phone/cable network. I've lived in rural areas and they typically don't have cable at all and the phone networks are so old as to be totally useless to try to upgrade.
I think fiber would have lower costs of maintenence than any copper based network. You have less issues with proper grounding and fewer issues with electrical interference.
I also think that if you were implementing fiber in such masses as to be across an entire sizable city that you could drive the prices of the equipment down a lot. Of course home owners would pay the cost of hooking up from the neighborhood hub to their home. What would be $250 added to the cost of building a home? Even if added as a one time fee to add your existing home to such a broadband network that's not that high an expense.
It'd still cost more, probably, to roll out fiber, but I think it'd be worth it. Also I've lived in big cities and have seen them rolling out fiber already so they might very well be able to connect into existing fiber in those places.
It'd be interesting to start on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. Even just within business districts, richer neighborhoods, and upscale apartment complexes it'd be an interesting project.
We pay around $70/month for a cable modem and it's not even that fast. It wouldn't be long at that cost before I could pay to run fiber from my house to a neighborhood router.
Why do I only get 1.5Mb broadband when I see in Japan they have 45Mb? Why is it that city-wide gigabit fiber couldn't be roled out to every home to form a MAN that delivered REAL broadband to every home? Is there a technical reason this wouldn't work? It'd not just be about conencting to the Internet.. it's about connecting within the city. School to school video conferencing, kick ass multiplayer gaming, file sharing, etc. Maybe with frequent wireless access points connecting throughout the cities business and educational areas.
Of course there are economic reasons it would take time to roll out but would it cost any more to implement than DSL or cable? For new regions without DSL or cable is there any economic reason to implement those slower and more complex technologies instead of going with the gigabit ethernet as might be done on a campus network?
Why do we need new ideas? We like what we're comfortable with. My favorite games are like interactive fiction and thus most of my favorites are by SquareSoft. Final Fantasy and similar games could use some fresh ideas in implementation but I like the concept. The biggest problem with games isn't that the concepts are bad. It's that certain aspects of the concepts were never really worked out and those boring points get more annoying the longer they go on. Work out those points and you don't need any huge shifts. Evolution, not revolution.
The drive also comes with two 10/100 ports. Plenty fast for watching even DVD quality video which in my experience takes between 5Mb and 15Mb of the connection to play smoothly. An app that had a decent sized buffer should be able to play just fine on even a 10Mb connection. I've successfully played it over 802.11b with no problems (although my 802.11b gets up to 22Mb connections).
Of course for this use I'm assuming you'd only watch one movie off the drive at a time if you were going to use WiFi. For more, or for writing the movies to the drive, you'd want to plug it into the wired network.
For just about any application the average user would want to do they won't be needing breakneck speeds so I think this would work fine for them. Other than playing with video I can't think of any reason the average user would need to move large bits of data around the network quickly. Possibly you'd be right if you meant to use this as a backup device but then again if you're taking differential backups why not.
The perfect extra feature for something like this would be to make it so it fits inside a removable harddrive tray so if you had a drawer in your computer you could slide this into that space for a faster connectionn.. then pull it out and take it where needed and let it act as a little fileserver.
But do you want to buy a new laptop and carry it around for each hdd you want to share? These are small enough and cheap enough that you could easily carry several around. I'd like one of these with a 300GB drive. Put around 50 ripped DVDs or maybe 5,000 ripped CDs and plug them into your set top box. Much easier than carrying around the originals.
A battery unit would be a useful add-on but for most uses plugging the unit in would work just fine.
I think using 2.5" disks is a bad design decision (normal drives are cheaper and can hold more) but otherwise these sound like useful devices. Similar to firewire drives but easier to share.
The wireless aspect of something like this would be fantastic for on-the-spot networking such as lan parties or board meetings.
This drive is a fantastic idea. For most users they don't want to open any PC to install a hard drive and something like this has the benefit of allowing large data clusters to be shared very easily.
I'd like to get a couple and slap 300GB drives in them and use them for a replacement for carrying around stacks of DVDs. Rip the DVDs to the drives and port them around in a fraction of the space of the originals.. and a lot more portable than even a small computer (currently I use a tiny mini-itx system for this purpose). I just wonder if they have options as to the methods allowed for sharing the files. For my needs I'd like to use NFS but I doubt that's what these will come with.
Exactly why I like to use Mozilla with plugins, Java, and Javascript all turned off. Overall you miss nothing important and the experience is far less stressful. So very few problems.