"You should be happy that they are in the hands of a collector who will preserve them..."
True, but him having them locked-up in his basement does not do the collecting "scene" any good. I see that the guy got most of the paperwork and other goodies from that building. That is the kind of thing that needs to be shared (scanned-in and posted) since we (collectors and arcade-history fanatics) cannot just go buy them (like I did with my machines). The behind-the-scenes workings, design documents, company memos, etc. are all something that people like myself would love to read to get a feeling for what it was like in the golden era of the arcade/Atari. I work at a company that used to build chips for Atari and I was speaking with one of the old-time engineers and asked him to view whatever documentation he still had, and he said he had just thrown it all away a couple months earlier! THAT is why this kind of stuff needs to be shared. Imagine if the guy who took these pictures was in an car accident or something and his family had to sort through his things and determine what was valuable and worth selling. I'd guess that the "secret manuals" in the pictures would just end-up in a landfill, thus destroying yet more of the inner-workings documentation of the classic arcade era.
I buy stuff like this Midway Treasures not for the emulated games (which I could have for free) but because of the extras like interviews with the developers, video footage of the factories, or whatever else they put on there.
The games themselves are in little to no danger of becoming "extinct" but the culture and behind-the-scenes "what was it like to be there" stuff is in dire jeopardy of being lost as people die, documents get thrown-out, buildings get demolished, etc. This is what makes me shell-out cash for these "official" emulator discs - and when I saw that this Midway Treasures disc had DVD content (I'm assuming video footage), I popped it into my shopping cart.
MMO gaming via cell phone would be cool, but IMO, they need to make sure they don't charge per minute/byte to make it attractive. For example, I've gotten hooked on Pokemon Sapphire (for GBA) this week (my first Pokemon experience ever) and it would be really cool to be able to link with people "online" while I'm waiting for various daily tasks. However, if I had to pay per minute, I'd definitely not spend a couple hours per day playing others.
That is indeed cheesy that they went with "demos" instead of a real game. That's one of the reasons I have yet to get the Live service. Just on principle, I avoid it because I feel that including only demos is pretty lame.
I, too, looked forward to ReVolt and would have bought Live just for that game. Now, my Xbox sits unused (except to play DVDs) due to the $50 game prices (the same games are $40 on PC with more features).
I agree. I have an Xbox, but only 4 games for it due to the price. $50 is just past some kind of pschological "line" for me - if the games were $40, I'd probably have many more, but for some reason, $50 just "seems" like too much. This is made worse by the fact that I can often get the PC version of the game (often with more/better features) for $40 by just walking a couple aisles over.
Consoles are fun and appropriate for certain "kick back on the couch" games IMO. However, given the choice between a $40 PC version and a $50 Xbox version of a game, the choice is pretty clear to me.
At least on the Unicast demo, I don't get anything at all thanks to the fine work of the Proxomitron (Windows). I'd highly recommend it for killing almost all of the obnoxious crap you'll find on the internet. www.proxomitron.org
A SMT workstation would be sweet to have, but the $800+ price tag puts it a bit out of the reach of the average hobbiest.
It's been a while since I looked at the prices, but since the stations are sold primarily to businesses with deep pockets, I can't imagine that they are much cheaper today.
I am consistently impressed by the FreeBSD team's ability to document their products. Whenever I need info from RedHat, for example, it ranges from a hassle to a PITA. The FreeBSD team maintains an entire, several hundred page handbook as well as east-to-find release notes, descriptions of their processes, FAQs, and much more.
I realize that many of the "hardcore haxx0rz" don't see the value in this documentation, but the fact that it exists and is maintained shows the professionalism and dedication the FreeBSD team has (which results in a damned fine OS!)
When I leave the Season Pass manager after rearranging a couple things, it can take a couple of minutes for the Please Wait to finally go away. I actually curse when I accidentally leave the Pass Manager before I'm done -- at least it gives me time to go grab a snack from the kitchen.
Just FYI, I only have about 17 Season Passes and I keep my Now Playing list fairly clean.
I've always attributed the sluggish (sometimes sloth-like) performance to the combination of pathetic RAM and also the 50MHz CPU. I really wish I could increase the RAM easily (at my own expense obviously) via a DIMM slot or something similar.
Despite all of this (and maybe this is the reason it never gets better), I love my TiVo and will never go back to normal TV watching. I continue to recommend TiVo to all of my friends, just with a warning about the occasional performance issues.
Is anyone aware of any players that feature this chip (or another) with Xvid/DivX/Mpeg-4 functionality enabled? That would be absolutely killer to be able to watch Xvid files on the TV instead of on my tiny little 21" monitor;^)
Of course it's profitable -- remember The Simpsons where Homer and Bart started the grease recycling business? They eventually got run-out of the biz by a "professional" company IIRC. The Simpsons can teach us much, young grasshoppers!
Re:this reminds me of a trick for telemarketers
on
He Writes Back
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I've had good luck when the marketer is female and I do the following:
TM: "Hi, may I speak with Mr. [mispronounced] about this urgent information?"
ME: [in a breathy voice] "Yes, but only if you tell me what you're wearing..."
After that, they hang-up on me. It might also work for male callers, but I have not gotten the balls to try it yet.
Other people that have TiVo's at work have been seeing the same issues, so I doubt we're all having HD failures simultaneously.
This is on a non-DirecTV TiVo -- just a plain-jane *stock* unit, no dual-tuners, no ultra high bitrate, anything.
Thanks for the suggestions, but I've looked at all of the points you provided and I'm pretty sure it's problems with the software. Friends at work confirm this.
Added to the $5 (10%)increase in cable modem. Added to the $20 (40%) increase in natural gas. Added to the $5 (30%) increase in electricity. Added to the $10 (30%) increase in gasoline. Added to the $5 (6%) increase in water. Added to the $6 (12%) increase in cable TV. Added to the $5 (5%) increase in homeowner's dues.
Added to every other bill I get that's "only adding XX number of small dollars", all this really adds-up!!! (percentages added above to put the increase into perspective since I don't keep my heater turned-up high, etc.)
Now, throw this onto the fire -- I'm in the semiconductor industry that's been hit very hard by layoffs, raise/promotion freezes, etc. So, while I have not had a raise in 2+ years, ALL of my bills have increased significantly PERCENTAGE-wise.
It's not that TiVo wants "only $3" -- it's that everyone and their grandmother has their hand out for "only $3" more.
They have to pay for the new bugs^H^H^H^Hfeatures
on
TiVo Service Cost Rising
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"It's a reflection of the cost to deliver the service on an ongoing basis," a TiVo spokeswoman told Reuters. "We have delivered multiple upgrades and new features, and haven't raised prices."
Recently, I've had my trusty TiVo reboot twice while recording shows, give me VERY noticable compression glitches, and a slew of other lesser bugs. All of these problems seem to have happened after the 2.5.x upgrade.
Hell, yeah, TiVo needs 30% more of my money -- they've given me at least 30% more bugs!!!
Anyway, I've been an avid TiVo fan and I evangelize the service to all of my friends and family, but now, it's getting too expensive for most people to "risk" trying it. That was always the biggest obstacle to getting anyone to try a TiVo: "Well, you mean I have to drop $300 on the machine AND pay $10/month to use it??? No way... the free TV guide in the newspaper and my old VCR work just fine!"
As for myself, I think I'll just look into the RePlay boxes (or whatever they're called) since at least I'll get some updated hardware for the monthly cost...
I'm a big complainer about how fast our CPU's have gotten these days, yet I cannot word process any faster than on my 1MHz Commodore 64 -- there are just a ton of extra features that I never use. Don't forget the benchmark that someone did (Ars Technica IIRC) that showed WinblozeXP/OfficeXP would require 33% more cpu to remain at the same performance level as Win2K/Office2K.
Were you planning on dropping wads of cash on the latest and greatest CPU/system only to see it run only as fast as your old system?
Anyway, imagine if someone would write a full-blown assembly version of the Dnet client for this OS -- I'll bet that keyrates would just be obscene compared to Windows/Linux/etc. Of course, this OS is probably still missing the essential networking code, but it's still fun to imagine...
Yeah, that's the first thing I thought when I just looked at those pics. I was going to post a new topic, but a quick search found that I'm not the only one thinking that!!:^)
It's definitely a Borg-looking device. Imagine how many fans and external heatsinks people are going to bolt onto the thing, and it'll look like a Cube in no time...
Mike
Local Police: Just what the criminals need...
on
EMP Artillery Shells
·
· Score: 1
If the local police start getting devices such as this, I can just imagine how they'd use them to "humanely" take-down criminals while the rest of us honest people get our fairly significant investments in electronic goods fryed in the process. This really bothers me because you know that the cops would simply say, "Oh well, sorry." and your insurace company isn't going to cover something like that. Guess what? You get to go spend $10,000 and up on all new shit for your house!!!!
From another point of view, the criminals (or terrorists, more specifically) could use the local cops to do their work for them. They'd just hole-up somewhere and eventually get the cops to "light" an EMP bomb, and the terrorist will have succeeded at impacting hundreds or thousands of innocents significantly.
What would probably help-out with the battery consumption as well as the cost would be to make the webpad device essentially just a wireless display -- something like an X-station. Maybe it could boot from a small PROM/flash and then hit the wireless LAN to finish booting.
This would allow the manufacturers to keep the flash/non-volatile memory smaller and it would allow you to update the "OS" with a normal CD-ROM on your Linux/BSD/Winbloze machine. Without the large memories, disks, or whatever, the webpad's batteries would last longer and the cost would be less.
Additionally, by making the webpad just a "display," you could run programs on the server, thus saving your batteries, reducing cost (lower powered CPU in the webpad), and you wouldn't have to worry about compatibility with the CPU used in the webpad itself. Just imagine "setenv DISPLAY mywebpad:0" and then run whatever you like...
Granted, you'd have to have the "server" on whenever you wanted to use the webpad, but it's likely that you'll have to do that anyway to have a connection to the internet. Plus, many of us have full-time servers running in our homes anyway, right (especially if you have a cable modem or DSL)?
I just searched both www.kbdi.org (channel 12) and www.krma.org (channel 6), both of which are THE PBS stations for the Denver region, and I can't find the show even listed!!!
Unfortunately, www.tvguide.com verified the bad news...
Anyone know when us "hicks" in Colorado will be able to watch this show?
Like the original poster of this thread, I'm not a Microsoft lover by any means (as evidenced by the 1 windows machine and 4 Linux machines on my home network), but...
Let's get real... Microsoft or not, how realistic is it to release an ENTIRE OS and not have any bugs or security holes? Can anyone honestly say that they have NEVER had a Debian/Redhat/Mandrake/SuSE/Suckware/etc. distribution that DID NOT have any "security updates" or new packages to download to "fix bugs"?
My guess is NO. That's why utilities like autorpm and the Mandrake updater exist. Go to any of the Linux distro's sites, and you'll find Errata, Security Fixes, or something similar. I was just looking at several of them this morning!
Yes, it's fun to bash MS every now and then, and sometimes (more often than not) they deserve it. But give me a break -- 2 security holes? If that's all they've got so far, they're doing better than most of the Linux distros...
Yeah, actually, I work 60+ hours per week on HP-UX and Solaris running CDE and OpenWindows. I also ran OS/2 for about a year, and own a Mac. I've even messed around with QNX...
Anyway, I guess that one of my primary gripes about KDE are the icons. They are very professionally done, but done in the same manner that Windows is "professional."
I was running the KDE off of the RedHat 5.2 disk (whichever KDE version that is) and in the default installation, I felt like I was using Winbloze -- the helper apps (control-panel, etc) were all there, the icons very similar, and the buttons/windows looked very close.
I looked briefly into changing things to be more Next-like, but I eventually came to the conclusion (right or wrong) that the Qt libraries were providing the icons/etc. that were making it Windows like, so it would be unlikely to have a simple theme change the underlying libraries. (I'd like to see more about that Next like Qt library, though...) The few themes I did try-out at the time only changed the backgrounds, colors, and stuff like that. Still the same basic look (like changing the themes in WinXX).
Slashdot Mirror
"You should be happy that they are in the hands of a collector who will preserve them..."
True, but him having them locked-up in his basement does not do the collecting "scene" any good. I see that the guy got most of the paperwork and other goodies from that building. That is the kind of thing that needs to be shared (scanned-in and posted) since we (collectors and arcade-history fanatics) cannot just go buy them (like I did with my machines). The behind-the-scenes workings, design documents, company memos, etc. are all something that people like myself would love to read to get a feeling for what it was like in the golden era of the arcade/Atari. I work at a company that used to build chips for Atari and I was speaking with one of the old-time engineers and asked him to view whatever documentation he still had, and he said he had just thrown it all away a couple months earlier! THAT is why this kind of stuff needs to be shared. Imagine if the guy who took these pictures was in an car accident or something and his family had to sort through his things and determine what was valuable and worth selling. I'd guess that the "secret manuals" in the pictures would just end-up in a landfill, thus destroying yet more of the inner-workings documentation of the classic arcade era.
I buy stuff like this Midway Treasures not for the emulated games (which I could have for free) but because of the extras like interviews with the developers, video footage of the factories, or whatever else they put on there.
The games themselves are in little to no danger of becoming "extinct" but the culture and behind-the-scenes "what was it like to be there" stuff is in dire jeopardy of being lost as people die, documents get thrown-out, buildings get demolished, etc. This is what makes me shell-out cash for these "official" emulator discs - and when I saw that this Midway Treasures disc had DVD content (I'm assuming video footage), I popped it into my shopping cart.
It's called Microsoft Bob. Yeah, MS was really just ahead of their time!
MMO gaming via cell phone would be cool, but IMO, they need to make sure they don't charge per minute/byte to make it attractive. For example, I've gotten hooked on Pokemon Sapphire (for GBA) this week (my first Pokemon experience ever) and it would be really cool to be able to link with people "online" while I'm waiting for various daily tasks. However, if I had to pay per minute, I'd definitely not spend a couple hours per day playing others.
That is indeed cheesy that they went with "demos" instead of a real game. That's one of the reasons I have yet to get the Live service. Just on principle, I avoid it because I feel that including only demos is pretty lame.
I, too, looked forward to ReVolt and would have bought Live just for that game. Now, my Xbox sits unused (except to play DVDs) due to the $50 game prices (the same games are $40 on PC with more features).
I agree. I have an Xbox, but only 4 games for it due to the price. $50 is just past some kind of pschological "line" for me - if the games were $40, I'd probably have many more, but for some reason, $50 just "seems" like too much. This is made worse by the fact that I can often get the PC version of the game (often with more/better features) for $40 by just walking a couple aisles over.
Consoles are fun and appropriate for certain "kick back on the couch" games IMO. However, given the choice between a $40 PC version and a $50 Xbox version of a game, the choice is pretty clear to me.
At least on the Unicast demo, I don't get anything at all thanks to the fine work of the Proxomitron (Windows). I'd highly recommend it for killing almost all of the obnoxious crap you'll find on the internet. www.proxomitron.org
A SMT workstation would be sweet to have, but the $800+ price tag puts it a bit out of the reach of the average hobbiest.
It's been a while since I looked at the prices, but since the stations are sold primarily to businesses with deep pockets, I can't imagine that they are much cheaper today.
I am consistently impressed by the FreeBSD team's ability to document their products. Whenever I need info from RedHat, for example, it ranges from a hassle to a PITA. The FreeBSD team maintains an entire, several hundred page handbook as well as east-to-find release notes, descriptions of their processes, FAQs, and much more.
I realize that many of the "hardcore haxx0rz" don't see the value in this documentation, but the fact that it exists and is maintained shows the professionalism and dedication the FreeBSD team has (which results in a damned fine OS!)
OK, you made me actually calculate it.
$14 * 1.75 =~ $24.
That is a 75% tax. Anything that nearly DOUBLES the cost of the original "item" is well over "50%".
Just the same as your sales tax on your new DVD player at Worst Buy or Fry's is the item amount * a tax value = total value.
Mike
You think that tax rate is bad... check-out my land-line from Qworst.
Total basic service: $14
Total taxes paid (Colorado): $10
Total bill: $24!!!!!!!
That's a monster tax! I'm not using the calculator, but a rough guess is that's about 80% tax! I just can't believe that bullshit every month.
Mike
I have a stock 30 hour TiVo standalone.
When I leave the Season Pass manager after rearranging a couple things, it can take a couple of minutes for the Please Wait to finally go away. I actually curse when I accidentally leave the Pass Manager before I'm done -- at least it gives me time to go grab a snack from the kitchen.
Just FYI, I only have about 17 Season Passes and I keep my Now Playing list fairly clean.
I've always attributed the sluggish (sometimes sloth-like) performance to the combination of pathetic RAM and also the 50MHz CPU. I really wish I could increase the RAM easily (at my own expense obviously) via a DIMM slot or something similar.
Despite all of this (and maybe this is the reason it never gets better), I love my TiVo and will never go back to normal TV watching. I continue to recommend TiVo to all of my friends, just with a warning about the occasional performance issues.
Is anyone aware of any players that feature this chip (or another) with Xvid/DivX/Mpeg-4 functionality enabled? That would be absolutely killer to be able to watch Xvid files on the TV instead of on my tiny little 21" monitor ;^)
Of course it's profitable -- remember The Simpsons where Homer and Bart started the grease recycling business? They eventually got run-out of the biz by a "professional" company IIRC. The Simpsons can teach us much, young grasshoppers!
I've had good luck when the marketer is female and I do the following:
TM: "Hi, may I speak with Mr. [mispronounced] about this urgent information?"
ME: [in a breathy voice] "Yes, but only if you tell me what you're wearing..."
After that, they hang-up on me. It might also work for male callers, but I have not gotten the balls to try it yet.
Mike
Other people that have TiVo's at work have been seeing the same issues, so I doubt we're all having HD failures simultaneously.
This is on a non-DirecTV TiVo -- just a plain-jane *stock* unit, no dual-tuners, no ultra high bitrate, anything.
Thanks for the suggestions, but I've looked at all of the points you provided and I'm pretty sure it's problems with the software. Friends at work confirm this.
Yeah, only $3.
Added to the $5 (10%)increase in cable modem.
Added to the $20 (40%) increase in natural gas.
Added to the $5 (30%) increase in electricity.
Added to the $10 (30%) increase in gasoline.
Added to the $5 (6%) increase in water.
Added to the $6 (12%) increase in cable TV.
Added to the $5 (5%) increase in homeowner's dues.
Added to every other bill I get that's "only adding XX number of small dollars", all this really adds-up!!! (percentages added above to put the increase into perspective since I don't keep my heater turned-up high, etc.)
Now, throw this onto the fire -- I'm in the semiconductor industry that's been hit very hard by layoffs, raise/promotion freezes, etc. So, while I have not had a raise in 2+ years, ALL of my bills have increased significantly PERCENTAGE-wise.
It's not that TiVo wants "only $3" -- it's that everyone and their grandmother has their hand out for "only $3" more.
"It's a reflection of the cost to deliver the service on an ongoing basis," a TiVo spokeswoman told Reuters. "We have delivered multiple upgrades and new features, and haven't raised prices."
Recently, I've had my trusty TiVo reboot twice while recording shows, give me VERY noticable compression glitches, and a slew of other lesser bugs. All of these problems seem to have happened after the 2.5.x upgrade.
Hell, yeah, TiVo needs 30% more of my money -- they've given me at least 30% more bugs!!!
Anyway, I've been an avid TiVo fan and I evangelize the service to all of my friends and family, but now, it's getting too expensive for most people to "risk" trying it. That was always the biggest obstacle to getting anyone to try a TiVo: "Well, you mean I have to drop $300 on the machine AND pay $10/month to use it??? No way... the free TV guide in the newspaper and my old VCR work just fine!"
As for myself, I think I'll just look into the RePlay boxes (or whatever they're called) since at least I'll get some updated hardware for the monthly cost...
I'm a big complainer about how fast our CPU's have gotten these days, yet I cannot word process any faster than on my 1MHz Commodore 64 -- there are just a ton of extra features that I never use. Don't forget the benchmark that someone did (Ars Technica IIRC) that showed WinblozeXP/OfficeXP would require 33% more cpu to remain at the same performance level as Win2K/Office2K.
Were you planning on dropping wads of cash on the latest and greatest CPU/system only to see it run only as fast as your old system?
Anyway, imagine if someone would write a full-blown assembly version of the Dnet client for this OS -- I'll bet that keyrates would just be obscene compared to Windows/Linux/etc. Of course, this OS is probably still missing the essential networking code, but it's still fun to imagine...
Yeah, that's the first thing I thought when I just looked at those pics. I was going to post a new topic, but a quick search found that I'm not the only one thinking that!! :^)
It's definitely a Borg-looking device. Imagine how many fans and external heatsinks people are going to bolt onto the thing, and it'll look like a Cube in no time...
Mike
If the local police start getting devices such as this, I can just imagine how they'd use them to "humanely" take-down criminals while the rest of us honest people get our fairly significant investments in electronic goods fryed in the process. This really bothers me because you know that the cops would simply say, "Oh well, sorry." and your insurace company isn't going to cover something like that. Guess what? You get to go spend $10,000 and up on all new shit for your house!!!!
From another point of view, the criminals (or terrorists, more specifically) could use the local cops to do their work for them. They'd just hole-up somewhere and eventually get the cops to "light" an EMP bomb, and the terrorist will have succeeded at impacting hundreds or thousands of innocents significantly.
Mike
What would probably help-out with the battery consumption as well as the cost would be to make the webpad device essentially just a wireless display -- something like an X-station. Maybe it could boot from a small PROM/flash and then hit the wireless LAN to finish booting.
This would allow the manufacturers to keep the flash/non-volatile memory smaller and it would allow you to update the "OS" with a normal CD-ROM on your Linux/BSD/Winbloze machine. Without the large memories, disks, or whatever, the webpad's batteries would last longer and the cost would be less.
Additionally, by making the webpad just a "display," you could run programs on the server, thus saving your batteries, reducing cost (lower powered CPU in the webpad), and you wouldn't have to worry about compatibility with the CPU used in the webpad itself. Just imagine "setenv DISPLAY mywebpad:0" and then run whatever you like...
Granted, you'd have to have the "server" on whenever you wanted to use the webpad, but it's likely that you'll have to do that anyway to have a connection to the internet. Plus, many of us have full-time servers running in our homes anyway, right (especially if you have a cable modem or DSL)?
Mike
I just searched both www.kbdi.org (channel 12) and www.krma.org (channel 6), both of which are THE PBS stations for the Denver region, and I can't find the show even listed!!!
Unfortunately, www.tvguide.com verified the bad news...
Anyone know when us "hicks" in Colorado will be able to watch this show?
Like the original poster of this thread, I'm not a Microsoft lover by any means (as evidenced by the 1 windows machine and 4 Linux machines on my home network), but...
Let's get real... Microsoft or not, how realistic is it to release an ENTIRE OS and not have any bugs or security holes? Can anyone honestly say that they have NEVER had a Debian/Redhat/Mandrake/SuSE/Suckware/etc. distribution that DID NOT have any "security updates" or new packages to download to "fix bugs"?
My guess is NO. That's why utilities like autorpm and the Mandrake updater exist. Go to any of the Linux distro's sites, and you'll find Errata, Security Fixes, or something similar. I was just looking at several of them this morning!
Yes, it's fun to bash MS every now and then, and sometimes (more often than not) they deserve it. But give me a break -- 2 security holes? If that's all they've got so far, they're doing better than most of the Linux distros...
Yeah, actually, I work 60+ hours per week on HP-UX and Solaris running CDE and OpenWindows. I also ran OS/2 for about a year, and own a Mac. I've even messed around with QNX...
Anyway, I guess that one of my primary gripes about KDE are the icons. They are very professionally done, but done in the same manner that Windows is "professional."
I was running the KDE off of the RedHat 5.2 disk (whichever KDE version that is) and in the default installation, I felt like I was using Winbloze -- the helper apps (control-panel, etc) were all there, the icons very similar, and the buttons/windows looked very close.
I looked briefly into changing things to be more Next-like, but I eventually came to the conclusion (right or wrong) that the Qt libraries were providing the icons/etc. that were making it Windows like, so it would be unlikely to have a simple theme change the underlying libraries. (I'd like to see more about that Next like Qt library, though...) The few themes I did try-out at the time only changed the backgrounds, colors, and stuff like that. Still the same basic look (like changing the themes in WinXX).
Mike