You can make money off your music without selling out to the "man". Selling records is a way to get your music to people who aren't at the same place you are when you're playing your music. A single CD can end up in the hands of dozens of people exposing your music to all of them and potentially winning some fans.
No. Cerritos is a pretty urban town in the middle of other urban towns. It'd cost a bundle to tear up sidewalks and streets to add enough fiber to connect every house in the city.
Yeah man I totally agree. Apple should tell the RIAA and their 400,000 song contribution to the iTunes catalog to shove off. That would be so revolutionary.
Weird, another craptastic "review" from Eugenia. A quick look around the intarweb and she would have found this little gem. It answers several of her gripes, including the Flash and Rhythmbox problems she ran into. She's also using apt when yum is set up out of the box and works pretty well. If she had stuck to yum there would have been far fewer problems with her install.
It is classic Eugenia fare. I really wish the slashdot editors would stop posting her damnable reviews whenever they're submitted. Her reviews consist equally of false information and cheerleading for her geek underdog of the hour. Some weeks it is Windows, others it is some unknown and unused Linux distro, and most of the time there's a quip added about Be.
Please post informed reviews rather than overhyped trolling.
Thank you Mr.Ifailedcriticalthinking for your insight. Try this brain buster on for size. Company A develops a new battery with five times the capacity of competing Li-ion batteries. It is small and light weight to boot. Trying to hock this battery to dumbards who can barely cope with the letter abbriviated battery sizes would not make a lot of money.
Selling the batteries to cell phone, PDA, video game, and camera manufacturers however would make them a fair chunk of change. Such devices don't always have user servicable batteries. If Samsung puts this new battery in one of their MP3 players they can trump all of their competition stuck in the days of Li-ion batteries. Such an advantage would be worth Samsung signing a long term exclusivity contract with Company A.
Even if Company A were shrewd and sold their batteries directly they could charge a mint for them. The best part of that deal is people would buy them. If they sold batteries than could power modern Palms as long as the IIIx used to go on its AAAs Palm owners would buy them in droves. The AA batteries you see at the super market are not the end all be all of the battery industry. YHL.
How is it that "batteries don't last as long as I'd like" turns into "there's no development put into batteries" in some people's minds? There's lots of time and money put into developing better batteries because if someone creates the better battery they will make lots of money.
The lack of headway is the chemistry, not the funding or effort. There's a finite limit on the amount of energy you can safely store and retrieve chemically from a given volume. A lot of development is focused on getting higher energy/volume ratios, lithium polymer and methanol fuel cells are good examples of this branch of development.
Looking for better battery chemistries is much more difficult. Between environmental concerns and ridiculous patents trying to market new chemistries isn't a cake walk for any company. There's a lot of materials that can be used in batteries. Not all of them are things you want ending up in land fills or in the hands of complete and utter morons.
Disney's been heading into the CG arena for quite a few years now. While cels are still hand drawn they all end up scanned into a computer and colored and composited digitally. Drawing directly on the computer instead of scanning cels simply cuts out a rather pricey step in the animation process. They also get to leverage the computer's innate ability to do really tedious jobs quickly.
If they made some software that would take something drawn on a tablet and convert it into NURBS and let the animator define relationships easily they could save a lot of time animating. They could adopt interpolation techniques used in 3D animation to flat 2D animation. It also isn't terribly difficult to adapt 3D animation to look like cel drawings. Disney's been doing that for years, ever since the antilope scene in Kimb^H^H^H^HLion King. The milling crowds in the Hunchback of Notre Dame were animated using a similar technique.
Regardless of how Disney makes their films I just want them to hire some decent writers. Their movies aren't flops because of the animation techniques, they flops because they're crappy movies. I had really high hopes for Atlantis. It looked like it might be an interesting flick from the previews. Titan AE despite its suckiness was a much better animated action flick. Emperor's New Groove however was pretty funny and is one of if not the best animated disney flick made in the past several years. Treasure Planet was as boring and uninspired as Atlantis. Hercules however was pretty funny and kept my interest. Lilo & Stitch so didn't live up to my expectations. It needed way more Stitch hilarity and less whining about being a family.
Most banks offer debit cards with credit backing now. You can use the card as if it were a credit card without any charges. The money comes out of your checking account instead of a credit company's coffers. If you're serious about paying for things online these sorts of debit cards are readily available, even when you're underage.
There's an appriciable number of phones supporting Bluetooth available. Most of the more affordable phones are not available to Nextel customers unfortunately. Ericsson/Sony-Ericsson, Siemens, and Nokia all have several BT equipped phones. I have a R520m I bought on eBay for about $60. It supports more contacts than I have friends, has a calendar that synchs with iCal, both a HSCSD and GPRS modem, and has a pretty nice antenna.
The Nokia 6310i as I understand it is pretty comparable to the R520 and would probably cost you about the same. The T28 and T39 from Ericsson also support Bluetooth, as does the Nokia 3650, 7650 and N-Gage. Sony-Ericsson has quite a few Bluetooth equipped phones now, the T6x0 as well as the P800 and 900. The price ranges for those phones can vary from as much as $400 ro $0 when you sign up with a new carrier.
As for the BT functionality I've already got that. I can open Address Book, click a contact, and my phone will dial the number for me. With a BT headset or a plain old wired headset I don't even need to take my phone out of my pocket (save for bad reception). You can also pair multiple devices at once, say your laptop, PDA, and phone.
When something on television is more entertaining than playing Neverwinter Nights or Metroid Prime I'll watch it. Until then I'll stick to video games. When the choices of shows range from boring sitcoms to unreality TV my interest wanes. I would rate farting on a snare drum as more entertaining than the latest sitcom from ABC. I'm not in any of the demographics prime time television is aiming at and thus prime time television has nothing to offer me.
The shows I have been interested enough in to actually watch have all been taken off the air. Family Guy, Futurama, and God, The Devil, and Bob. Making prime time safe for conservatives and kiddies is not going to get my eyeballs glued to the screen. I suspect the situation is the same for other people more like me than the prime time demographic.
We'll watch something interesting on cable or flip on a game instead of watch Ten Rules (RIP JR.) or Survivor MLCXXIII Sebastopol. Most of the time though I'll go somewhere with my friends or take a walk. I find night time walks during the new Fall television seasons are to be especially nice. There's few people out and about and the glow of the televisions in livingrooms make up for broken street lamps. Sometime I feel like the Stranger walking down the sidewalk.
Infinium is this year's Indrema. They've got pie in the sky plans and nothing to show for their hype. If you look at all the features Infinium is proposing for the Phantom it starts to look a lot like an updated L600 from Indrema. The hype for the Phantom actually looks like a cross between Lindows.com's and Indream's hype. It's like the marketoids from both companies got together in a conclave of absurdity.
I want to feel bad for anyone who invests in this flop. I find it exceedingly difficult however because they're painfully stupid. Hopefully the people backing Infinium married well so there's a chance their offspring to end up with decent genes.
Server crowding and low framerates are implementation issues. To me as a player they are really beside the point. They're technical hurdles I'm paying them to overcome by buying the game. If I'm shelling out $10 a month on top of the $50 I spent on the game itself I really don't care what they have to do to make it enjoyable. If the game is boring because of technical problems I'll take my cash somewhere else.
Amen to that. From the publisher's stand point I can understand fixed pricing. Anything paid for that goes unused amortizes the cost of someone who uses way more resources than they pay for. From my point of view $10 is a lot of coin to dish out for a game. Server space isn't cheap by any means, neither is a support staff. While I can sympathize, I don't care. I'm a dirty rotten consumer, I want something for nothing. If I can't have that I want something for very little. I already spent my money on a computer capable on running the game, a fast internet connection to enjoy the online experience, and I paid for a copy of the game. I've shelled out beaucoup cash to play their game. I'm not up for spending even more to support it.
If Sony or anyone else wanted to sell me an online game they would need to nix the credit card requirement. I've got enough recurring charges on my card without a video game being tacked on top. Sell me the game with three months of online time attached to it. Give me another three months for every expansion I buy. Three months gives me enough time to play the game enough to decide if I like it or if I wasted my money. Instead of having me sign up with a credit card sell a little calling card like deal with X weeks of server time.
All the content in the world doesn't matter when a game needs a credit card to play. Credit card requirements exclude lots of students both in high school and college as well as people who simply don't want/need more credit card charges. Companies then wouldn't need to worry about content because there would be people online to interact with.
Once I'm playing the game my interest isn't too hard to keep. If you're running a fantasy game give players a couple languages or writing systems to learn. Provide clues to special items or abilities in these languages. It give the hard core players something to do and rewards them for it. Also give the players a highly interactive world. I want to see a game where any NPC I can talk to will give me a unique reaction depending on a number of different factors. Take dialog trees to the next level by adjusting the NPC's actions and demeanor to the results of the dialog. If you insult a member of an NPC clan or guild you should have some consequence any time you meet another of that group's members.
I'd also like to see games learn from the likes of Pokemon and Animal Crossing. Both of those games use real time clocks to change the world according to the time. When it is dark out different things happen than during the day. Events take place only on particular days. Putting this into an online game would be easy. Tie the game's calandar either to the real world one or its own. If its around Halloween give people spooky adventures, if its around Christmas give them philanthropic ones. Give players a reason to have their characters online and in particular areas at certain times. Characters can have different schedules based on any of their personal atributes. Mages might be called to a conclave or mage fair and fighters might be invited to a tournament. No new media needs to be made for these sorts of events, just NPC scripts and players shwoing up to participate.
Inside the game world give players something to do besides blindly adventure or talk to NPCs. Tournaments or contests where players can be rewarded for particular skills would be a pretty good idea. Again no media needs to be produced, only in-game scripting and characters are needed.
If you're chatting all day on MSN over GPRS complaining about a new version is moot. Go to a friend's house and bogart their cable modem for a couple minutes.
I was mad I had to use the non-Office v.X Messenger as well. It looks and acts much nicer than their new version. Regardless with Wi-Fi hotspots, friends with broadband, and connected phone jacks you ought to be able to find some method of downloading Messenger other than via GPRS.
I do not think that word means what he thinks it means. In my eyes Bluetooth is anything but dead. In fact I see it as a booming technology.
Every model of Mac Apple sells save two (iBook and eMac) have Bluetooth as an option, the Powerbooks for example come with it by default. Anyone wanting Bluetooth can invest $30 and add the capability to their computer. Most new PC laptops come with Bluetooth at least as an add-in option. Bluetooth modules for PocketPC and Palm based handhelds aren't horribly expensive and some models even come with Bluetooth as a standard feature. Numerous models of keyboards, mice, printers are on the market and gaining popularity.
Right now BT has a serious advantage in the market because of market demographics. The sort of people Apple markets the Powerbook to are the same people Sony-Ericsson market the T68i and T610 to. They're also very likely to be the people picking up the higher end palms. These people have decent jobs and make enough to have cash on hand to buy cool technical gadgets.
From that perspective I hardly see Bluetooth dying. The market for high end gadgety crap is decently sized and soon enough more manufacturers will be using BT in their products. As more pedestrian products end up BT enabled more periphrial manufacturers will be cranking out BT enabled periphrials. Dead, not hardly.
The "bubble" burst on eBooks. Right. How about we take "What did DRM kill before it got started?" for $500?
The cost of entry for eBooks is simply too high to make even the geekiest of geek want to use them. You cannot simply buy the right eBook reader. Out of a number of available titles you would want to buy at least one will be in a format incompatible with your software or hardware reader. That one book will defy the logic of all your previous purchase decisions.
This is the eBook concept's fatal flaw. From the get go there was no one all emcompassing standard vendors could use to hoc their wares. Besides the format problem there's the DRM problem. A paper book I can loan to my friend without much hassle. Just last week I loaned Candide to my friend. With a DRM book, even if we had the same reader product would I be able to share my copy of the book? Maybe maybe not, depending on the format's DRM scheme.
Having just helped someone put WindowsXP on a laptop last night I easily say the flaw is not on the user end. There's a hojillion security vulnerabilities in WindowsXP. Most people do not have broadband. Lacking broadband makes it really damn difficult to keep up with patches. The fresh WindowsXP install that went on the laptop couldn't even connect to the internet for five minutes without being hit by MSBlaster. Five minutes. That's ridiculous. The user is not at fault in a situation like that, Microsoft is.
Ballmer can blame users all he wants. It comes down to Microsoft having a crappy security model and poor development practices. Having a bunch of temporary employees programming black boxes gets them into a lot of trouble. So does having DCOM services a majority of users will never need or use enabled by default. A WindowsXP Pro system shouldn't be listening to RPCs from the internet.
Ballmer needs to have his developers look more closely at how they are designing their systems. Windows shouldn't have a broadband connection as part of the damn system requirements. Even with an automagic updater people without fast persistant connections will still run around without the proper patches. Maybe Microsoft needs an ounce of prevention to release more secure and robust systems in the future.
A landline would be fine if I could carry it around with me and had a decent long distance plan. MCI's Neighborhood deal costs as much as a good cell plan and isn't mobile. AT&T's Unlimited plan only works if both parties are AT&T customers which sucks. All the resale carriers want to add $30+ to an existing landline bill which after taxes ends up running about $20 itself. For the price of any of those you can have a decent cell phone plan with a subsidized - free or cheap - cell phone.
If you're away from home for more than ten minutes a day and want either to get in touch with people or have them get in touch with you a landline is sitting as home sucking up money. I've got the same number whether I'm in Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Denver, or Dallas. As I'm quite mobile a cell phone makes more sense for me than it does someone who sits at home all the time.
Besides simple connectivity most cells phones offer some useful features. Caller ID is a very nice thing to have because I know who's calling and whether I want to answer. I can turn the audible ringer off so I'm not bugging anyone else when I get a call. Most of the time I just forward all my calls to voicemail and check them at my leisure. I like my phone to be pull media.
I think I need to forward this to AT&T. They seem to be unable to build a tower within range of my house. It'd be really cool to get reception in my neighborhood without building a parabolic antenna to mount on my phone.
Hopefully this means good things for companies that own and operate cell towers in the US. One thing most cities here lack is decent coverage with the services you're paying for. I live in southern California which is pretty densely developed. Coverage in the inland areas can be pretty shoddy depending on what part of town you're kicking around in. San Bernadino and Riverside have decent coverage in the commercial sectors but crappy coverage in the outlying sprawl. I'm finding Orange county has the same problem. Several swaths of PCH have horrible coverage, both for AT&T and Cingular. LA has decent coverage downtown and in Hollywood.
This of course is concerning the networks' "Next Generation" (2.5G) network coverage. What I find really dastardly is no phones are really designed for the US market. Gadgets and whatnot be damned. We've got a much different situation than Europe or Asia. We've got lots of land to cover and lots less money going into tower upgrades. As such large tracts of land are being served by AMPS or PCS towers still. The phones sold anymore have no PCS support to fall back on save for the Siemens S46. I would have thought the major phone manufacturers would have seen fit to provide the bigger GSM providers phones that better fit the network infrastructure.
What a disappointing article. His "speed" tests consisted of the ridiculously unscientific "boot time" test and application launch tests. Lopped on top of that were hand crafted Photoshop and Bryce "tests" which verify that the dual G5 kicks the crap out of the 17" G4 and 1.25GHz PowerMac. My 12" Powerbook is faster than the Lombard I bought in 1999. Yay.
What about running real stuff like FCP's Compressor or Maya's mental ray renderer plug-in? Maybe even a After Effects render speed. Using iMovie to test anything isn't very fair to the people who would buy a G5. They're not using iMovie to work on SD video. Photoshop users aren't using a bunch of filters picked at random.
Re:Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO
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OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1
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· Score: 3, Informative
In Jaguar (10.2) the Print to PDF feature doesn't use any compression. OO's print to PDF feature supports image compression. In Panther (10.3) Apple is finally adding compression support to their Print to PDF feature so the files ought to be a whole lot smaller than the ones produced in jaguar. Granted they might not be as small as a dedicated PDF generation utility might output but they are much better than Jaguar's PDFs.
Regardless, the ability to print anything to a PDF is a very cool feature. Want to send an AppleWorks document to a Windows user? Print to PDF and you're pretty much set.
Charter was nice enough to uncap my cable connection until March 2004. Where I used to have a 256k/128k connection I now have a 2m/150k connection. Apparently Charter is restructuring their pricing and services to offer 384k as their low end service. For me that is plenty.
I'm not the world's biggest bandwidth hog by any means. Only every couple of weeks I run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade all or Software Update. If anything needs to download I leave my Powerbook running over night. I first discovered my megafast connection watching a movie trailer for Kill Bill. It was done so fast I thought my connection got borked and Quicktime was up to no good. Lo and behold I was downloading the Large trailer at 240KB/s.
Since then I really haven't made much use of my super fat connection. Having a 256k link was good enough for me. I could listen to internet radio at 128kbps and stuff browse the web without a problem. Playing WC3 or NWN while another computer was on the web wasn't a problem either.
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You can make money off your music without selling out to the "man". Selling records is a way to get your music to people who aren't at the same place you are when you're playing your music. A single CD can end up in the hands of dozens of people exposing your music to all of them and potentially winning some fans.
No. Cerritos is a pretty urban town in the middle of other urban towns. It'd cost a bundle to tear up sidewalks and streets to add enough fiber to connect every house in the city.
Yeah man I totally agree. Apple should tell the RIAA and their 400,000 song contribution to the iTunes catalog to shove off. That would be so revolutionary.
Weird, another craptastic "review" from Eugenia. A quick look around the intarweb and she would have found this little gem. It answers several of her gripes, including the Flash and Rhythmbox problems she ran into. She's also using apt when yum is set up out of the box and works pretty well. If she had stuck to yum there would have been far fewer problems with her install.
It is classic Eugenia fare. I really wish the slashdot editors would stop posting her damnable reviews whenever they're submitted. Her reviews consist equally of false information and cheerleading for her geek underdog of the hour. Some weeks it is Windows, others it is some unknown and unused Linux distro, and most of the time there's a quip added about Be.
Please post informed reviews rather than overhyped trolling.
tell application "X11" /sw/bin/init.sh && gimp"
activate
end tell
do shell script "export DISPLAY=:0 && source
Save as an Application. You can even add a cool GIMP icon.
Thank you Mr.Ifailedcriticalthinking for your insight. Try this brain buster on for size. Company A develops a new battery with five times the capacity of competing Li-ion batteries. It is small and light weight to boot. Trying to hock this battery to dumbards who can barely cope with the letter abbriviated battery sizes would not make a lot of money.
Selling the batteries to cell phone, PDA, video game, and camera manufacturers however would make them a fair chunk of change. Such devices don't always have user servicable batteries. If Samsung puts this new battery in one of their MP3 players they can trump all of their competition stuck in the days of Li-ion batteries. Such an advantage would be worth Samsung signing a long term exclusivity contract with Company A.
Even if Company A were shrewd and sold their batteries directly they could charge a mint for them. The best part of that deal is people would buy them. If they sold batteries than could power modern Palms as long as the IIIx used to go on its AAAs Palm owners would buy them in droves. The AA batteries you see at the super market are not the end all be all of the battery industry. YHL.
How is it that "batteries don't last as long as I'd like" turns into "there's no development put into batteries" in some people's minds? There's lots of time and money put into developing better batteries because if someone creates the better battery they will make lots of money.
The lack of headway is the chemistry, not the funding or effort. There's a finite limit on the amount of energy you can safely store and retrieve chemically from a given volume. A lot of development is focused on getting higher energy/volume ratios, lithium polymer and methanol fuel cells are good examples of this branch of development.
Looking for better battery chemistries is much more difficult. Between environmental concerns and ridiculous patents trying to market new chemistries isn't a cake walk for any company. There's a lot of materials that can be used in batteries. Not all of them are things you want ending up in land fills or in the hands of complete and utter morons.
Disney's been heading into the CG arena for quite a few years now. While cels are still hand drawn they all end up scanned into a computer and colored and composited digitally. Drawing directly on the computer instead of scanning cels simply cuts out a rather pricey step in the animation process. They also get to leverage the computer's innate ability to do really tedious jobs quickly.
If they made some software that would take something drawn on a tablet and convert it into NURBS and let the animator define relationships easily they could save a lot of time animating. They could adopt interpolation techniques used in 3D animation to flat 2D animation. It also isn't terribly difficult to adapt 3D animation to look like cel drawings. Disney's been doing that for years, ever since the antilope scene in Kimb^H^H^H^HLion King. The milling crowds in the Hunchback of Notre Dame were animated using a similar technique.
Regardless of how Disney makes their films I just want them to hire some decent writers. Their movies aren't flops because of the animation techniques, they flops because they're crappy movies. I had really high hopes for Atlantis. It looked like it might be an interesting flick from the previews. Titan AE despite its suckiness was a much better animated action flick. Emperor's New Groove however was pretty funny and is one of if not the best animated disney flick made in the past several years. Treasure Planet was as boring and uninspired as Atlantis. Hercules however was pretty funny and kept my interest. Lilo & Stitch so didn't live up to my expectations. It needed way more Stitch hilarity and less whining about being a family.
Most banks offer debit cards with credit backing now. You can use the card as if it were a credit card without any charges. The money comes out of your checking account instead of a credit company's coffers. If you're serious about paying for things online these sorts of debit cards are readily available, even when you're underage.
There's an appriciable number of phones supporting Bluetooth available. Most of the more affordable phones are not available to Nextel customers unfortunately. Ericsson/Sony-Ericsson, Siemens, and Nokia all have several BT equipped phones. I have a R520m I bought on eBay for about $60. It supports more contacts than I have friends, has a calendar that synchs with iCal, both a HSCSD and GPRS modem, and has a pretty nice antenna.
The Nokia 6310i as I understand it is pretty comparable to the R520 and would probably cost you about the same. The T28 and T39 from Ericsson also support Bluetooth, as does the Nokia 3650, 7650 and N-Gage. Sony-Ericsson has quite a few Bluetooth equipped phones now, the T6x0 as well as the P800 and 900. The price ranges for those phones can vary from as much as $400 ro $0 when you sign up with a new carrier.
As for the BT functionality I've already got that. I can open Address Book, click a contact, and my phone will dial the number for me. With a BT headset or a plain old wired headset I don't even need to take my phone out of my pocket (save for bad reception). You can also pair multiple devices at once, say your laptop, PDA, and phone.
When something on television is more entertaining than playing Neverwinter Nights or Metroid Prime I'll watch it. Until then I'll stick to video games. When the choices of shows range from boring sitcoms to unreality TV my interest wanes. I would rate farting on a snare drum as more entertaining than the latest sitcom from ABC. I'm not in any of the demographics prime time television is aiming at and thus prime time television has nothing to offer me.
The shows I have been interested enough in to actually watch have all been taken off the air. Family Guy, Futurama, and God, The Devil, and Bob. Making prime time safe for conservatives and kiddies is not going to get my eyeballs glued to the screen. I suspect the situation is the same for other people more like me than the prime time demographic.
We'll watch something interesting on cable or flip on a game instead of watch Ten Rules (RIP JR.) or Survivor MLCXXIII Sebastopol. Most of the time though I'll go somewhere with my friends or take a walk. I find night time walks during the new Fall television seasons are to be especially nice. There's few people out and about and the glow of the televisions in livingrooms make up for broken street lamps. Sometime I feel like the Stranger walking down the sidewalk.
Infinium is this year's Indrema. They've got pie in the sky plans and nothing to show for their hype. If you look at all the features Infinium is proposing for the Phantom it starts to look a lot like an updated L600 from Indrema. The hype for the Phantom actually looks like a cross between Lindows.com's and Indream's hype. It's like the marketoids from both companies got together in a conclave of absurdity.
I want to feel bad for anyone who invests in this flop. I find it exceedingly difficult however because they're painfully stupid. Hopefully the people backing Infinium married well so there's a chance their offspring to end up with decent genes.
Server crowding and low framerates are implementation issues. To me as a player they are really beside the point. They're technical hurdles I'm paying them to overcome by buying the game. If I'm shelling out $10 a month on top of the $50 I spent on the game itself I really don't care what they have to do to make it enjoyable. If the game is boring because of technical problems I'll take my cash somewhere else.
Amen to that. From the publisher's stand point I can understand fixed pricing. Anything paid for that goes unused amortizes the cost of someone who uses way more resources than they pay for. From my point of view $10 is a lot of coin to dish out for a game. Server space isn't cheap by any means, neither is a support staff. While I can sympathize, I don't care. I'm a dirty rotten consumer, I want something for nothing. If I can't have that I want something for very little. I already spent my money on a computer capable on running the game, a fast internet connection to enjoy the online experience, and I paid for a copy of the game. I've shelled out beaucoup cash to play their game. I'm not up for spending even more to support it.
If Sony or anyone else wanted to sell me an online game they would need to nix the credit card requirement. I've got enough recurring charges on my card without a video game being tacked on top. Sell me the game with three months of online time attached to it. Give me another three months for every expansion I buy. Three months gives me enough time to play the game enough to decide if I like it or if I wasted my money. Instead of having me sign up with a credit card sell a little calling card like deal with X weeks of server time.
All the content in the world doesn't matter when a game needs a credit card to play. Credit card requirements exclude lots of students both in high school and college as well as people who simply don't want/need more credit card charges. Companies then wouldn't need to worry about content because there would be people online to interact with.
Once I'm playing the game my interest isn't too hard to keep. If you're running a fantasy game give players a couple languages or writing systems to learn. Provide clues to special items or abilities in these languages. It give the hard core players something to do and rewards them for it. Also give the players a highly interactive world. I want to see a game where any NPC I can talk to will give me a unique reaction depending on a number of different factors. Take dialog trees to the next level by adjusting the NPC's actions and demeanor to the results of the dialog. If you insult a member of an NPC clan or guild you should have some consequence any time you meet another of that group's members.
I'd also like to see games learn from the likes of Pokemon and Animal Crossing. Both of those games use real time clocks to change the world according to the time. When it is dark out different things happen than during the day. Events take place only on particular days. Putting this into an online game would be easy. Tie the game's calandar either to the real world one or its own. If its around Halloween give people spooky adventures, if its around Christmas give them philanthropic ones. Give players a reason to have their characters online and in particular areas at certain times. Characters can have different schedules based on any of their personal atributes. Mages might be called to a conclave or mage fair and fighters might be invited to a tournament. No new media needs to be made for these sorts of events, just NPC scripts and players shwoing up to participate.
Inside the game world give players something to do besides blindly adventure or talk to NPCs. Tournaments or contests where players can be rewarded for particular skills would be a pretty good idea. Again no media needs to be produced, only in-game scripting and characters are needed.
If you're chatting all day on MSN over GPRS complaining about a new version is moot. Go to a friend's house and bogart their cable modem for a couple minutes.
I was mad I had to use the non-Office v.X Messenger as well. It looks and acts much nicer than their new version. Regardless with Wi-Fi hotspots, friends with broadband, and connected phone jacks you ought to be able to find some method of downloading Messenger other than via GPRS.
I do not think that word means what he thinks it means. In my eyes Bluetooth is anything but dead. In fact I see it as a booming technology.
Every model of Mac Apple sells save two (iBook and eMac) have Bluetooth as an option, the Powerbooks for example come with it by default. Anyone wanting Bluetooth can invest $30 and add the capability to their computer. Most new PC laptops come with Bluetooth at least as an add-in option. Bluetooth modules for PocketPC and Palm based handhelds aren't horribly expensive and some models even come with Bluetooth as a standard feature. Numerous models of keyboards, mice, printers are on the market and gaining popularity.
Right now BT has a serious advantage in the market because of market demographics. The sort of people Apple markets the Powerbook to are the same people Sony-Ericsson market the T68i and T610 to. They're also very likely to be the people picking up the higher end palms. These people have decent jobs and make enough to have cash on hand to buy cool technical gadgets.
From that perspective I hardly see Bluetooth dying. The market for high end gadgety crap is decently sized and soon enough more manufacturers will be using BT in their products. As more pedestrian products end up BT enabled more periphrial manufacturers will be cranking out BT enabled periphrials. Dead, not hardly.
The "bubble" burst on eBooks. Right. How about we take "What did DRM kill before it got started?" for $500?
The cost of entry for eBooks is simply too high to make even the geekiest of geek want to use them. You cannot simply buy the right eBook reader. Out of a number of available titles you would want to buy at least one will be in a format incompatible with your software or hardware reader. That one book will defy the logic of all your previous purchase decisions.
This is the eBook concept's fatal flaw. From the get go there was no one all emcompassing standard vendors could use to hoc their wares. Besides the format problem there's the DRM problem. A paper book I can loan to my friend without much hassle. Just last week I loaned Candide to my friend. With a DRM book, even if we had the same reader product would I be able to share my copy of the book? Maybe maybe not, depending on the format's DRM scheme.
Bzzt. The ICF was enabled. It did nothing to stop the Blaster infection.
"My eyes! The goggles do nutheeng!"
Having just helped someone put WindowsXP on a laptop last night I easily say the flaw is not on the user end. There's a hojillion security vulnerabilities in WindowsXP. Most people do not have broadband. Lacking broadband makes it really damn difficult to keep up with patches. The fresh WindowsXP install that went on the laptop couldn't even connect to the internet for five minutes without being hit by MSBlaster. Five minutes. That's ridiculous. The user is not at fault in a situation like that, Microsoft is.
Ballmer can blame users all he wants. It comes down to Microsoft having a crappy security model and poor development practices. Having a bunch of temporary employees programming black boxes gets them into a lot of trouble. So does having DCOM services a majority of users will never need or use enabled by default. A WindowsXP Pro system shouldn't be listening to RPCs from the internet.
Ballmer needs to have his developers look more closely at how they are designing their systems. Windows shouldn't have a broadband connection as part of the damn system requirements. Even with an automagic updater people without fast persistant connections will still run around without the proper patches. Maybe Microsoft needs an ounce of prevention to release more secure and robust systems in the future.
A landline would be fine if I could carry it around with me and had a decent long distance plan. MCI's Neighborhood deal costs as much as a good cell plan and isn't mobile. AT&T's Unlimited plan only works if both parties are AT&T customers which sucks. All the resale carriers want to add $30+ to an existing landline bill which after taxes ends up running about $20 itself. For the price of any of those you can have a decent cell phone plan with a subsidized - free or cheap - cell phone.
If you're away from home for more than ten minutes a day and want either to get in touch with people or have them get in touch with you a landline is sitting as home sucking up money. I've got the same number whether I'm in Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Denver, or Dallas. As I'm quite mobile a cell phone makes more sense for me than it does someone who sits at home all the time.
Besides simple connectivity most cells phones offer some useful features. Caller ID is a very nice thing to have because I know who's calling and whether I want to answer. I can turn the audible ringer off so I'm not bugging anyone else when I get a call. Most of the time I just forward all my calls to voicemail and check them at my leisure. I like my phone to be pull media.
I think I need to forward this to AT&T. They seem to be unable to build a tower within range of my house. It'd be really cool to get reception in my neighborhood without building a parabolic antenna to mount on my phone.
Hopefully this means good things for companies that own and operate cell towers in the US. One thing most cities here lack is decent coverage with the services you're paying for. I live in southern California which is pretty densely developed. Coverage in the inland areas can be pretty shoddy depending on what part of town you're kicking around in. San Bernadino and Riverside have decent coverage in the commercial sectors but crappy coverage in the outlying sprawl. I'm finding Orange county has the same problem. Several swaths of PCH have horrible coverage, both for AT&T and Cingular. LA has decent coverage downtown and in Hollywood.
This of course is concerning the networks' "Next Generation" (2.5G) network coverage. What I find really dastardly is no phones are really designed for the US market. Gadgets and whatnot be damned. We've got a much different situation than Europe or Asia. We've got lots of land to cover and lots less money going into tower upgrades. As such large tracts of land are being served by AMPS or PCS towers still. The phones sold anymore have no PCS support to fall back on save for the Siemens S46. I would have thought the major phone manufacturers would have seen fit to provide the bigger GSM providers phones that better fit the network infrastructure.
What a disappointing article. His "speed" tests consisted of the ridiculously unscientific "boot time" test and application launch tests. Lopped on top of that were hand crafted Photoshop and Bryce "tests" which verify that the dual G5 kicks the crap out of the 17" G4 and 1.25GHz PowerMac. My 12" Powerbook is faster than the Lombard I bought in 1999. Yay.
What about running real stuff like FCP's Compressor or Maya's mental ray renderer plug-in? Maybe even a After Effects render speed. Using iMovie to test anything isn't very fair to the people who would buy a G5. They're not using iMovie to work on SD video. Photoshop users aren't using a bunch of filters picked at random.
In Jaguar (10.2) the Print to PDF feature doesn't use any compression. OO's print to PDF feature supports image compression. In Panther (10.3) Apple is finally adding compression support to their Print to PDF feature so the files ought to be a whole lot smaller than the ones produced in jaguar. Granted they might not be as small as a dedicated PDF generation utility might output but they are much better than Jaguar's PDFs.
Regardless, the ability to print anything to a PDF is a very cool feature. Want to send an AppleWorks document to a Windows user? Print to PDF and you're pretty much set.
Charter was nice enough to uncap my cable connection until March 2004. Where I used to have a 256k/128k connection I now have a 2m/150k connection. Apparently Charter is restructuring their pricing and services to offer 384k as their low end service. For me that is plenty.
I'm not the world's biggest bandwidth hog by any means. Only every couple of weeks I run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade all or Software Update. If anything needs to download I leave my Powerbook running over night. I first discovered my megafast connection watching a movie trailer for Kill Bill. It was done so fast I thought my connection got borked and Quicktime was up to no good. Lo and behold I was downloading the Large trailer at 240KB/s.
Since then I really haven't made much use of my super fat connection. Having a 256k link was good enough for me. I could listen to internet radio at 128kbps and stuff browse the web without a problem. Playing WC3 or NWN while another computer was on the web wasn't a problem either.