I'm not sure that's a great example though; that's the style of the comic, the image quality is actually very high (the comics are shown in PNG format ie. lossless compress; they are pixel perfect!) If the quality was poor imagine the same style but with excessive jpeg compression artifacts.
Seriously how hard was it to hook up the $2 three color coded RCA jacks?
Depends; to a color blind person, very difficult. Some types aren't so bad and have labels also on the wire which is fine, but without that a friend of mine is completely unable to differentiate the green and red wires. Would be convenient if it was standard practice to label those things in addition to using color!
Emulating the clear plastic templates should be relatively easy; could look something like this.
What I find tough (nearly impossible currently?) is emulating the look of the vector display itself. Up until recently I had a crt, and despite its high resolution the scan lines still gave it away. I have a nice lcd display now, but the pixel grid can still be noticeable a bit. As displays increase in resolution and quality it will probably become possible to get pretty convincing emulation, but for now it seems vector displays have a look that's downright difficult to emulate.
It's also useful for cataloging software; I own an insane amount of dvds and blu-rays and keep a list on my computer. When I get a new disc, I enter the upc code (it's also compatible with barcode scanners though I don't own one) and it automatically checks numerous sites including Amazon to grab things like the title, msrp, director, actors, publisher, number of discs, cover art, and other stuff.
It was on the Red Line, between Farragut North and Metro Center (were going into DC when we saw it)
I don't think that's correct, there's one between Metro Center and Gallery Place, and then between Gallery Place and Judiciary Square. This is only on the Glenmont side of the tracks (you won't see anything heading towards Shady Grove). Between Gallery Place and Judiciary Square has been turned off recently though, not sure why.
That's not a bad feature actually. It makes it easy to quickly see the search bar where you can type in your search. That's what the page is for after all.
Perhaps true, but if they can't design the page to make that clear and obvious without a fade in then that's pretty bad.
The idea of digitized sound through the PC Speaker was around long before Star Control 2 (1992); the earliest game I know of to do this is Czorian Siege in 1983. Of course, it was just a few short clips and was far more limited than what SC2 accomplished but it's an impressive trick and would have been surprising to hear at the time! Access Software used the trick extensively in the late 80's; I think most if not all of their later games supported this. What was interesting about SC2 though was that it took the idea a little further; instead of just playing back a sound clip it actually mixed samples together on the fly to create the music/sounds much like on the GUS version or an Amiga.
Your mileage may vary somewhat depending on what you did, when you worked there, and your personality; I also have a friend who worked at EA who said he would go back. Apparently the short time (year or two?) he was there was extremely busy with long hours, but enjoyed the challenge and got a lot out of it. Of course, he also says if he did go back it would probably be a short time thing again and not long term; so I guess even if you like the place it can (will?) burn you out.
And let's not even get started on the whole liemax thing where we're told it's an imax theater but it's really just a barely adapted standard theater charging imax prices.
That, in my opinion, is by far the bigger scam! Really I'd be ok with those Imax lite theaters if they were branded differently; could still even contain Imax in the name somehow. But that Imax is trying to get away with not making a distinction between the full blown and lite versions is aggravating. As for the fake 3D? I don't find that much of a scam more than bad special effects; many movies just don't look very good, and 3D hasn't changed that!
Here's another recent error message I encountered. Is this helpful? You have either entered an invalid Member ID, an invalid PIN, or your User Account is locked. Please validate that you are entering the correct member ID and PIN and try to log in again. "
Translation: when you did the mandatory password change (required every 90 days), you entered a password that contained the } character. Although the rules say you must include symbol characters, we didn't mean that symbol character.
Problem is if the password doesn't fit the required format this should have been caught when the password was changed. When you are logging in and something goes wrong it's generally considered less than ideal for security reasons to provide too much information. For example, if the wrong password is entered and you specifically state that a would be hacker now knows they have found a valid user id. So we will continue to be stuck with potentially vague, only slightly helpful errors when logging in to many sites...
Active glasses are typically better at reducing "ghosting" which occurs when each eye receives some information from the other eyes frame that should really be blocked. The glasses themselves are cheaper in a polarized system for sure, but I wonder how would the overall cost of everything would compare; is creating a tv capable of polarizing the image appropriately vs. just a regular screen with fast enough refresh rate and active glasses similar in cost?
They have a responsibility, as all companies do, to be sure that their company and product names are unique enough in whatever markets they choose to do business that they will not cause confusion.
That may be the problem though, wouldn't Bing the search engine be a different market than Bing the design company? Seems possible Microsoft saw no competing sites with a similar name, and if they did know of Bing Design they didn't care as there isn't much chance of confusion as the markets are different enough.
I don't think that a snafu like this will do anything to open the eyes of the public to DRM; it's a technical snafu some theaters had running the movie, something which most patrons know nothing about, will never see how it works, and don't care how it works. This isn't equipment anyone is looking to buy or use, and the software (in this form) will never be available for purchase! From a patrons point of view something went wrong behind the scenes and they got a refund, something that happens all the time at theaters for various reasons (could be data corruption loading the movie, digital key problem, or with film a defective or missing reel, shipping problem, and so on).
The store I bought it from looked at the open shrink wrap and said "Sorry". They wouldn't even let me exchange it because, according to the manager, they'd have to eat the cost of it.
Where the heck was this? I've never seen that happen before. I have had retailers refuse an exchange if I didn't have the receipt or it had been a long time since purchase date (greater than 60 days or something). But my understanding is stores can return defective product to the distributor for a refund, so it only costs them some time and effort (though having worked retail I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there was so much disorganization that they essentially never/rarely returned defective product even though they could...)
Higher resolution doesn't necessarily more graphics power. The original NES and the Playstation 2 had the same resolution....
Actually, they didn't. The NES had a resolution of 256x240 and output at 240p. PS2 was variable; apparently it's internal resolution was 256 x 224 up to 1280 x 1024(I doubt much used the highest available; most games would have been around 640x480 I believe) and it could output in 240p/480i/480p NTSC or 576i/50Hz and 480i/60Hz PAL.
Re:Extra! Extra! Read here for the scoop!
on
Why Games Cost $60
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Why do games cost $60? Because that is what the market will pay.
Does this even need to be discussed?
I would think yes; yeah, we all know basic economics, but from someone not working in the industry how much do we know about how this price point was reached? Was this found by trial and error? Market research? Both/other? To what extent have there been deviations and what were the results? To what extent do Nintendo/Sony/MS play a role with "suggestions" about pricing? How does price set expectations about quality? What about the impact of historical prices on the perception of current prices? And whatever else I forgot...There's probably a lot of detail that can be explored about the topic that goes beyond just saying "that's what the market will pay". The article isn't great though it mentions a few points but could have been more detailed and researched.
The original PC used an 8088, not the 8086 (which first appeared in the XT I believe). Remember, this is 1981! What processor would you have preferred? The 4.77 Mhz 8088 was faster than the 1-2Mhz processors found in most (all?) other desktop computers at the time and could address up to 640K memory, also far more than most other desktops then. If I recall there were some better choices available but at a much higher cost. I always thought the 8088 to be a lower cost option that was still reasonably competitive with what was out there.
And how do you know we'd be so much farther ahead with another cpu? You don't think there'd be plenty of opportunity to slow down progress while trying to maintain bizarre backwards compatibility with the other cpu's available in 1981?
It is true that many at IBM didn't think desktop PC's would take off. But I think the PC was an overall solid machine, I'd say those early versions of DOS were a bigger problem than anything hardware wise.
I think there were many more reasons for the Atari 7800's failure; difficulty programming may have contributed, but I think it was low on the list of problems. The big one was the games; initially most games were yet another version of classics. While Nintendo had new, exciting games like Super Mario Bros, etc., Atari had marginally improved versions of Joust, Asteroids, and so on - all previously available on other systems. These were all nice titles to have available and round out the catalog (and indeed many also saw Nintendo ports), but they weren't really competitive, system selling titles, something Atari 7800 very much lacked. Plus the 7800 was really meant to have additional chips added to the cartridges to improved it's capabilities (sound most notably, it had very weak sound - same as Atari 2600 really). As a cost cutting measure Atari at first wouldn't allow programmers to utilize extra memory or sound chips and were rushed to market - as a result many 7800 games weren't nearly as good as they should have been. Nintendo's controversial policy of keeping games on the NES and no competing systems for two years also did not help Atari at all! Atari's marketing wasn't great either, I'm sure that didn't help.
Even before that: Pitfall II on the Atari 2600 (1984) included an extra chip to help provide multi channel music in addition to sound effects and graphical enhancements. Even before then Atari 2600 Asteroids in 1981 was the first game on the system to utilize bank switching.
And if they ask for more money, the developers of these games will (hopefully anyway, because they *should*) tell them "sorry, we don't need your songs", and then proceed to use excellent music from dozens of indie bands no one has ever heard of before,...
From TFA:
In response, Rock Band publisher MTV Games is now boycotting Warner artists, according to a source close to the negotiations.
Looks like things might begin to head that way...there are of course still other major labels, but one major not being considered is now a great sales opportunity for other labels both major and indie. Won't Warner be pissed when they lose all of the license revenue not to mention the promotion their competitors will be receiving from the games...
Lastly, quit referencing Eternal Sunshine. Yeah, it was okay. The original PKD story, We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, was pretty good too. Of course, they never gave credit,...
Eternal Sunshine had nothing to do with We Can Remember it For You Wholesale; yeah, both stories involved memory but were completely different. Total Recall was loosely based on the PKD story, and did credit it.
Other way around I think; if free costs $0.00 and cheap is say $1.00, is cheap not greater than free? If cheap is less than free, then they are paying you...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that's a great example though; that's the style of the comic, the image quality is actually very high (the comics are shown in PNG format ie. lossless compress; they are pixel perfect!) If the quality was poor imagine the same style but with excessive jpeg compression artifacts.
Seriously how hard was it to hook up the $2 three color coded RCA jacks?
Depends; to a color blind person, very difficult. Some types aren't so bad and have labels also on the wire which is fine, but without that a friend of mine is completely unable to differentiate the green and red wires. Would be convenient if it was standard practice to label those things in addition to using color!
Emulating the clear plastic templates should be relatively easy; could look something like this. What I find tough (nearly impossible currently?) is emulating the look of the vector display itself. Up until recently I had a crt, and despite its high resolution the scan lines still gave it away. I have a nice lcd display now, but the pixel grid can still be noticeable a bit. As displays increase in resolution and quality it will probably become possible to get pretty convincing emulation, but for now it seems vector displays have a look that's downright difficult to emulate.
Microchannel was used by the IBM PS/2 series with the exception of the model 25 and model 30 which were 8-bit ISA.
It's also useful for cataloging software; I own an insane amount of dvds and blu-rays and keep a list on my computer. When I get a new disc, I enter the upc code (it's also compatible with barcode scanners though I don't own one) and it automatically checks numerous sites including Amazon to grab things like the title, msrp, director, actors, publisher, number of discs, cover art, and other stuff.
It was on the Red Line, between Farragut North and Metro Center (were going into DC when we saw it)
I don't think that's correct, there's one between Metro Center and Gallery Place, and then between Gallery Place and Judiciary Square. This is only on the Glenmont side of the tracks (you won't see anything heading towards Shady Grove). Between Gallery Place and Judiciary Square has been turned off recently though, not sure why.
That's not a bad feature actually. It makes it easy to quickly see the search bar where you can type in your search. That's what the page is for after all.
Perhaps true, but if they can't design the page to make that clear and obvious without a fade in then that's pretty bad.
The idea of digitized sound through the PC Speaker was around long before Star Control 2 (1992); the earliest game I know of to do this is Czorian Siege in 1983. Of course, it was just a few short clips and was far more limited than what SC2 accomplished but it's an impressive trick and would have been surprising to hear at the time! Access Software used the trick extensively in the late 80's; I think most if not all of their later games supported this. What was interesting about SC2 though was that it took the idea a little further; instead of just playing back a sound clip it actually mixed samples together on the fly to create the music/sounds much like on the GUS version or an Amiga.
Which is odd, as the EGA adapter was released a year prior to the first Amiga!
Your mileage may vary somewhat depending on what you did, when you worked there, and your personality; I also have a friend who worked at EA who said he would go back. Apparently the short time (year or two?) he was there was extremely busy with long hours, but enjoyed the challenge and got a lot out of it. Of course, he also says if he did go back it would probably be a short time thing again and not long term; so I guess even if you like the place it can (will?) burn you out.
And let's not even get started on the whole liemax thing where we're told it's an imax theater but it's really just a barely adapted standard theater charging imax prices.
That, in my opinion, is by far the bigger scam! Really I'd be ok with those Imax lite theaters if they were branded differently; could still even contain Imax in the name somehow. But that Imax is trying to get away with not making a distinction between the full blown and lite versions is aggravating. As for the fake 3D? I don't find that much of a scam more than bad special effects; many movies just don't look very good, and 3D hasn't changed that!
Here's another recent error message I encountered. Is this helpful? You have either entered an invalid Member ID, an invalid PIN, or your User Account is locked. Please validate that you are entering the correct member ID and PIN and try to log in again. " Translation: when you did the mandatory password change (required every 90 days), you entered a password that contained the } character. Although the rules say you must include symbol characters, we didn't mean that symbol character.
Problem is if the password doesn't fit the required format this should have been caught when the password was changed. When you are logging in and something goes wrong it's generally considered less than ideal for security reasons to provide too much information. For example, if the wrong password is entered and you specifically state that a would be hacker now knows they have found a valid user id. So we will continue to be stuck with potentially vague, only slightly helpful errors when logging in to many sites...
Active glasses are typically better at reducing "ghosting" which occurs when each eye receives some information from the other eyes frame that should really be blocked. The glasses themselves are cheaper in a polarized system for sure, but I wonder how would the overall cost of everything would compare; is creating a tv capable of polarizing the image appropriately vs. just a regular screen with fast enough refresh rate and active glasses similar in cost?
They have a responsibility, as all companies do, to be sure that their company and product names are unique enough in whatever markets they choose to do business that they will not cause confusion.
That may be the problem though, wouldn't Bing the search engine be a different market than Bing the design company? Seems possible Microsoft saw no competing sites with a similar name, and if they did know of Bing Design they didn't care as there isn't much chance of confusion as the markets are different enough.
I don't think that a snafu like this will do anything to open the eyes of the public to DRM; it's a technical snafu some theaters had running the movie, something which most patrons know nothing about, will never see how it works, and don't care how it works. This isn't equipment anyone is looking to buy or use, and the software (in this form) will never be available for purchase! From a patrons point of view something went wrong behind the scenes and they got a refund, something that happens all the time at theaters for various reasons (could be data corruption loading the movie, digital key problem, or with film a defective or missing reel, shipping problem, and so on).
The store I bought it from looked at the open shrink wrap and said "Sorry". They wouldn't even let me exchange it because, according to the manager, they'd have to eat the cost of it.
Where the heck was this? I've never seen that happen before. I have had retailers refuse an exchange if I didn't have the receipt or it had been a long time since purchase date (greater than 60 days or something). But my understanding is stores can return defective product to the distributor for a refund, so it only costs them some time and effort (though having worked retail I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there was so much disorganization that they essentially never/rarely returned defective product even though they could...)
Higher resolution doesn't necessarily more graphics power. The original NES and the Playstation 2 had the same resolution....
Actually, they didn't. The NES had a resolution of 256x240 and output at 240p. PS2 was variable; apparently it's internal resolution was 256 x 224 up to 1280 x 1024(I doubt much used the highest available; most games would have been around 640x480 I believe) and it could output in 240p/480i/480p NTSC or 576i/50Hz and 480i/60Hz PAL.
Why do games cost $60? Because that is what the market will pay. Does this even need to be discussed?
I would think yes; yeah, we all know basic economics, but from someone not working in the industry how much do we know about how this price point was reached? Was this found by trial and error? Market research? Both/other? To what extent have there been deviations and what were the results? To what extent do Nintendo/Sony/MS play a role with "suggestions" about pricing? How does price set expectations about quality? What about the impact of historical prices on the perception of current prices? And whatever else I forgot...There's probably a lot of detail that can be explored about the topic that goes beyond just saying "that's what the market will pay". The article isn't great though it mentions a few points but could have been more detailed and researched.
We could easily feed the world if the industrial nations wouldn't insist on their daily hamburgers and steaks.
I think our inability to easily feed the world has a lot more to do with political and money issues rather than how many hamburgers are being eaten.
The original PC used an 8088, not the 8086 (which first appeared in the XT I believe). Remember, this is 1981! What processor would you have preferred? The 4.77 Mhz 8088 was faster than the 1-2Mhz processors found in most (all?) other desktop computers at the time and could address up to 640K memory, also far more than most other desktops then. If I recall there were some better choices available but at a much higher cost. I always thought the 8088 to be a lower cost option that was still reasonably competitive with what was out there.
And how do you know we'd be so much farther ahead with another cpu? You don't think there'd be plenty of opportunity to slow down progress while trying to maintain bizarre backwards compatibility with the other cpu's available in 1981?
It is true that many at IBM didn't think desktop PC's would take off. But I think the PC was an overall solid machine, I'd say those early versions of DOS were a bigger problem than anything hardware wise.
I think there were many more reasons for the Atari 7800's failure; difficulty programming may have contributed, but I think it was low on the list of problems. The big one was the games; initially most games were yet another version of classics. While Nintendo had new, exciting games like Super Mario Bros, etc., Atari had marginally improved versions of Joust, Asteroids, and so on - all previously available on other systems. These were all nice titles to have available and round out the catalog (and indeed many also saw Nintendo ports), but they weren't really competitive, system selling titles, something Atari 7800 very much lacked. Plus the 7800 was really meant to have additional chips added to the cartridges to improved it's capabilities (sound most notably, it had very weak sound - same as Atari 2600 really). As a cost cutting measure Atari at first wouldn't allow programmers to utilize extra memory or sound chips and were rushed to market - as a result many 7800 games weren't nearly as good as they should have been. Nintendo's controversial policy of keeping games on the NES and no competing systems for two years also did not help Atari at all! Atari's marketing wasn't great either, I'm sure that didn't help.
Even before that: Pitfall II on the Atari 2600 (1984) included an extra chip to help provide multi channel music in addition to sound effects and graphical enhancements. Even before then Atari 2600 Asteroids in 1981 was the first game on the system to utilize bank switching.
And if they ask for more money, the developers of these games will (hopefully anyway, because they *should*) tell them "sorry, we don't need your songs", and then proceed to use excellent music from dozens of indie bands no one has ever heard of before, ...
From TFA:
In response, Rock Band publisher MTV Games is now boycotting Warner artists, according to a source close to the negotiations.
Looks like things might begin to head that way...there are of course still other major labels, but one major not being considered is now a great sales opportunity for other labels both major and indie. Won't Warner be pissed when they lose all of the license revenue not to mention the promotion their competitors will be receiving from the games...
Lastly, quit referencing Eternal Sunshine. Yeah, it was okay. The original PKD story, We Can Remember it For You Wholesale, was pretty good too. Of course, they never gave credit,...
Eternal Sunshine had nothing to do with We Can Remember it For You Wholesale; yeah, both stories involved memory but were completely different. Total Recall was loosely based on the PKD story, and did credit it.
Other way around I think; if free costs $0.00 and cheap is say $1.00, is cheap not greater than free? If cheap is less than free, then they are paying you...