Supposedly there was a hack to allow 1ghz computers to run 10.5, but I wouldn't have much space left over on the 20GB hard drive after 10.5 would be installed. Sadly like most TiBooks of that era, one of my hinges broke and it's now collecting dust somewhere. Sadly a hinge repair costs almost as much as the entire laptop is worth these days.
Maybe he's a mac user. 10.1-> 10.2 -> 10.3 all sped up my 550 mhz powerbook back in the day. 10.4 was the first OS update to slow down my computer (10.3.9 was screaming fast on my laptop). 10.4.1 fixed some speed issues, and by the time 10.4.5 came out it was nearly as fast as 10.3.5 or so. So it's possible to upgrade your OS and end up with a faster feeling system. There used to be a mac benchmarking site, mac feats that documented that each release was in fact marginally faster in most every aspect.
Lenovo sells what's essentially an Eee Box (atom processor+motherboard) in a midtower case for $200 shipped if you shop around on their website. I've seen it for less. It includes a DVD+/-R optical drive and 1 spare SATA port, for a total of three drives. It also includes a PCI slot where you could add a 4 SATA port expansion card. Hard drives only eat about 5w a piece, so the meager power supply shouldn't have trouble with the "extra load" at all. My buddy just put together something similar from newegg, but he went with the Atom 320 processor (64 bit, dual core atom) for a few bucks more. It's his primary file server now.
All this competition between phones, with a wide variety of them available, means Android OS 3.0 should kick some ass. Android is set to explode here come December/January, and the next (3rd?) generation of phones should be pretty rocking, with less slowdowns. I don't see this as a bad thing at all, and may force Apple to finally include some sort of real multitasking that doesn't hamper performance.
$100 to the first person to post the fully draft here or on wikileaks. Seriously we can leak SpiderMan movies, crack supposedly uncrackable digital encryption schemes and share giant files, but nobody is willing to post perhaps 60kb of text? IANAL but, Considering the type of legislation, leaking this sort of thing isn't likely to follow with litigation against the mole.
I was thinking something along the same sort of lines; there's no force feedback (tactile feeback/negative feedback) for when he runs into stuff. I would like to see how the neuro-map for a mouse just being placed into the simulator looks compared to a mouse who spent his whole life "on the ball". I bet my brain's neuro-map looks a lot different when I'm playing TF2 compared to when I'm mountain biking or paintballing.
I think $100,000 is roughly how much, in electricity costs, it costs to run the many, many computers for 5-10 years needed to grind out this particular number. Plus maintenance and taxes. You could pretty much say this research was done "at cost".
Most modern "smartphones" have a facebook app, and a lot of people these days have unlimited SMS that they can use with twitter. Between those two (facebook and twitter) popping up in my blackberry inbox alongside regular email, I'm pretty much "always on". I don't always respond the same day though. That's one reason why I couldn't get rid of my Blackberry for an iPhone - because it consolidates 100% of my messaging (including voice) into a single device. Now that I have google voice, my email is once again a contender, but cell phones these days actually outperform desktop computers as communication devices these days.
Err, you're aware that Bethesda == iD now, right? And most (all?) of Bethesda's titles are on Steam... I only buy about 3 games a year myself. I have yet to spend > $35 on any one game. TF2 was $20, L4D in a 4 pack is only $33 and change and then most of my other games were gifted for some reason or another.
Basically, Blizzard is creating their own Steam-like competitor. You need a AAAAA level game that people are willing to register a new account for (like Valve did with Half-Life 2). Some people might bitch about it, but if you drink the Steam-Kool-Aid (like I do) it creates a better community atmosphere for those who play particular video games 10, 20 or even 80 hours a week. But enough about the community aspect, this is really a push to create Blizzard's own digital distribution network, similar to Valve's Steam. Valve pioneered the idea of building a D.Distribution network on a AAAAA title, and Blizzard is following their buisness plan step for step, by requiring people to register a battle.net account for Starcraft 2 (and WoW). Between the two, they'll have how many tens of millions of registered customers ready and waiting to buy games through their digital distribution channel? On day 1 no less. Pretty cool, and damn smart. Whoever the executive was that pioneered this (at the cost of delaying SC2) is getting a phat performance bonus next year
One can only hope (dream?) that battle.net and steam will have some sort of interoperability down the road. Fenced gardens are great, but people aren't going to want to juggle Battle.Net, Steam and Games for Windows Live buddy lists.
Reportedly sidekicks are thin clients, other than making phone calls, everything on the phone is saved on the server side. Which is a special kind of retarded, in today's world where a blackberry performs all the same functions, and provides a local backup feature. But yeah as for the backups, all your backups are worthless if your data backup code is flawed, and nobody ever checks the backup tapes. When MS bought the service, they probably changed the location the servers were in, plugged everything back in, and kept going. I imagine a project like that would be on a short timetable, and "checking to see that the backup tapes are really being backed up to" is low on the priority list when the service is already live.
Ooops, I have a second, better pic of said undulatus asperatus. This one was taken at Skillman and Mockingbird, Dallas, TX - about 3 miles north of downtown:
This occured on May 25th 2009 in Dallas, just north of downtown. I'm sure if you search flickr for that geotag/timestamp, other pictures of it will show up in outdoor pics in the background of the images. Here's my 2megapixel cell phone camera picture of it:
I'll admit my picture isn't as good as the one posted in Wired (it hasn't been photoshopped to hell with image contrast and color saturation), but I was on my lunch break trying to meet up with a friend for lunch at the mall that day.
Yeah, but Street Fighter 4, bought and run through Steam, which boasts online play "with friends", requires Windows Live (and an MS passport account, ugh) to play with your "friends", who must also have Windows Live accounts. Ugh. It's really sloppily implemented, and I wish all of the 100 or so reviews I'd read about the game simply said "this is a poor PC port of a console game" so I could have just bought the console version. There's no steam integration at all, which means you can't challenge people to games through the steam chat (as you can with TF2, DODS, L4D etc)
No, I think ad revenue is down across the board and all the journalists went to a "making sensationalist headlines work for YOU" seminar, and some of the slashdot editors went along to it. Even the relatively even-keeled slashdot has become rather fox-news-like in terms of sensationalist stories about nothing. It's one thing to break news about the Patriot act, NSA monitoring US citizens without warrants, etc but putting sensationalist bullshit about a very well liked company and their digital distribution service is a new low (actually I think this is the second or third time I've seen an anti-valve article in the last couple of months here on/.). I've noticed a few other sites like Boing Boing have become exceptionally sensationalist and using 2nd and 3rd tier (and lower) tactics to get pageviews, rather than building a solid base of regular viewers. It's really sad, and I hope the marketing company that they both hired gets cut soon, it's really hurting independent media quality by following these tactics. I don't mind the occasional story poking fun at SCO, but dammit, not every story needs to be sensationalized!
That's a pretty weak argument for someone with a modern connection. It took me about 30 min to install the orange box (about 4.8gb) on my home connection. If you account for time spent looking for the original disk, it's about neck and neck for the physical install vs. the online download these days. If you're buying a new game (if you're me, that's about 90% of all games played) then it's usually preloaded onto your computer until release date. That means it's faster, in that you don't have to drive to gamestop, or swing by there on your way home from work, and run through a messy installer. You just click on it, and it runs, first time and ready to go.
Steam is the best way to buy/play games, bar none. Until something better comes along, I'll continue buying my games exclusively through Steam. That may be several years; the only other option for PCs right now is "Windows Live", or whatever the bullshit was that I had to download to get SF4 to install.
Seconding this. The second analog stick should have been added when the PSP3000 was released... 3 years ago? Has it been that long already? Maybe more. I hate to say it, but fuck the early adopters, you buy first generation hardware, you're going to get stuck with crappy controls. Dual Analog took three(?) years to come to fruition on the old PSX. Didn't seem to hurt their sales any. The idea that it only has one analog stick is just mind boggling. The DS will probably have dual analog sticks before Sony does at this rate.
One other thing I would have changed: make the controls slide out from the side, instead of from the bottom. Allows you to create full height shoulder buttons, and spaces your hands apart enough that you can actually play the damn thing. The PSP's controls were way too small to begin with; I'm an adult male and there's no way in hell I would downsize the control surface any more. The DS Lite's controls are about as small as I would ever go. I'll probably skip this portable console, just like I did with the original PSP.
Another response to the proprietary cable. I'm quoting right from the article. It speaks for itself:
It gets even sillier, however. You can use the Bluetooth capabilities of the system to link a Dual Shock 3 to the system, in order to play with an actual controller. That's a pretty cool feature, right? The only problem is, without USB you need to connect the controller, and the PSP Go, to a PS3. So to sync the controller to the system you need another system, a USB cable, the proprietary PSP Go cable, and the controller. It's not exactly the most elegant solution, and in this situation the PS3 works as a $300 adapter.
Proprietary cable for on iPod? It's Apple, stupid!
This is the only one I have issue with. The ipod connector is probably the most successful connector designed since the USB connector. My friend plugged her iPhone right into my 2004 vintage iPod FM transmitter* and we listened to her tunes on the way to the Cowboys game the whole way. Yeah, it's a proprietary connector, and apple charges people to use it in their products, but it hasn't changed in close to 10 years and most everyone has a cable for it now. Most power connector multi-pack kits include an adapter these days for the iPod. Pretty much everyone I know has an iPod connector wired into the aux/line level input for their stereo for parties and whatnot. You can't really say that about the PSP cables (especially if they change them). I guess you could use the headphone jack, but then you have to futz about with the PSP headphone volume and the stereo volume before hand so you don't blow out your speakers or wake your upstairs neighbors.
*DLO Transpod, btw, they release a new model every year and the old version, same hardware, different case is available CHEAP on amazon usually - most powerful signal out of an FM transmitter I've seen so far and I've tried them all. Signal strength is important in my area (Dallas) since Dallas has the most crowded radio market in the nation (yes, even more so than NYC). All the stations are taken, so you need something with a STRONG signal to overpower one of the lesser stations. Highly reccomended. No, I don't work for DLO.
IANAD (i'm not a doctor) but if you're under 20 (when most bone breaks occur, until you turn about 45-60), most breaks are "green tree" fractures requiring about 2-4 weeks in a cast or splint. If you break it again to a full break (which I did) you're still only looking at 4-6 weeks, tops before the cast comes off. Casts are super cheap, require zero surgery (other than the doctor "setting" the bone - done externally, no knives needed) and are generally completely non-invasive. IMO this is vastly preferable to surgically inserting what is essentially a hardened chemical into the body, which is going to require at minimum a cast anyways.
Agreed on the picture quality. Some marketer somewhere decided that digital signal was better, but unless you have a late 90's emachines CRT or noname brand CRT, the picture has always been razor sharp. I've always had NEC or Sony Trinitrons, so YMMV, but my 1996 vintage sony Trinitron 17" CRT is just as sharp as my 2009 vintage Samsung LCD (with better refresh and blacks to boot). The only thing LCDs have going for them is size/price. 24" LCDs are in the $180 range for basic consumer needs. Hard to beat that; a 19" 4:3 CRT will cost easily that much new.
Slashdot Mirror
Supposedly there was a hack to allow 1ghz computers to run 10.5, but I wouldn't have much space left over on the 20GB hard drive after 10.5 would be installed. Sadly like most TiBooks of that era, one of my hinges broke and it's now collecting dust somewhere. Sadly a hinge repair costs almost as much as the entire laptop is worth these days.
Maybe he's a mac user. 10.1-> 10.2 -> 10.3 all sped up my 550 mhz powerbook back in the day. 10.4 was the first OS update to slow down my computer (10.3.9 was screaming fast on my laptop). 10.4.1 fixed some speed issues, and by the time 10.4.5 came out it was nearly as fast as 10.3.5 or so. So it's possible to upgrade your OS and end up with a faster feeling system. There used to be a mac benchmarking site, mac feats that documented that each release was in fact marginally faster in most every aspect.
I think $1500 is the base price. $379 gets you a box with a motherboard and 1gb of ram plugged into it, no hard drives or anything
Lenovo sells what's essentially an Eee Box (atom processor+motherboard) in a midtower case for $200 shipped if you shop around on their website. I've seen it for less. It includes a DVD+/-R optical drive and 1 spare SATA port, for a total of three drives. It also includes a PCI slot where you could add a 4 SATA port expansion card. Hard drives only eat about 5w a piece, so the meager power supply shouldn't have trouble with the "extra load" at all. My buddy just put together something similar from newegg, but he went with the Atom 320 processor (64 bit, dual core atom) for a few bucks more. It's his primary file server now.
All this competition between phones, with a wide variety of them available, means Android OS 3.0 should kick some ass. Android is set to explode here come December/January, and the next (3rd?) generation of phones should be pretty rocking, with less slowdowns. I don't see this as a bad thing at all, and may force Apple to finally include some sort of real multitasking that doesn't hamper performance.
Today's XKCD is extremely topical:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/bag_check.png
$100 to the first person to post the fully draft here or on wikileaks. Seriously we can leak SpiderMan movies, crack supposedly uncrackable digital encryption schemes and share giant files, but nobody is willing to post perhaps 60kb of text? IANAL but, Considering the type of legislation, leaking this sort of thing isn't likely to follow with litigation against the mole.
I was thinking something along the same sort of lines; there's no force feedback (tactile feeback/negative feedback) for when he runs into stuff. I would like to see how the neuro-map for a mouse just being placed into the simulator looks compared to a mouse who spent his whole life "on the ball". I bet my brain's neuro-map looks a lot different when I'm playing TF2 compared to when I'm mountain biking or paintballing.
I think $100,000 is roughly how much, in electricity costs, it costs to run the many, many computers for 5-10 years needed to grind out this particular number. Plus maintenance and taxes. You could pretty much say this research was done "at cost".
Most modern "smartphones" have a facebook app, and a lot of people these days have unlimited SMS that they can use with twitter. Between those two (facebook and twitter) popping up in my blackberry inbox alongside regular email, I'm pretty much "always on". I don't always respond the same day though. That's one reason why I couldn't get rid of my Blackberry for an iPhone - because it consolidates 100% of my messaging (including voice) into a single device. Now that I have google voice, my email is once again a contender, but cell phones these days actually outperform desktop computers as communication devices these days.
Err, you're aware that Bethesda == iD now, right? And most (all?) of Bethesda's titles are on Steam... I only buy about 3 games a year myself. I have yet to spend > $35 on any one game. TF2 was $20, L4D in a 4 pack is only $33 and change and then most of my other games were gifted for some reason or another.
Basically, Blizzard is creating their own Steam-like competitor. You need a AAAAA level game that people are willing to register a new account for (like Valve did with Half-Life 2). Some people might bitch about it, but if you drink the Steam-Kool-Aid (like I do) it creates a better community atmosphere for those who play particular video games 10, 20 or even 80 hours a week. But enough about the community aspect, this is really a push to create Blizzard's own digital distribution network, similar to Valve's Steam. Valve pioneered the idea of building a D.Distribution network on a AAAAA title, and Blizzard is following their buisness plan step for step, by requiring people to register a battle.net account for Starcraft 2 (and WoW). Between the two, they'll have how many tens of millions of registered customers ready and waiting to buy games through their digital distribution channel? On day 1 no less. Pretty cool, and damn smart. Whoever the executive was that pioneered this (at the cost of delaying SC2) is getting a phat performance bonus next year
One can only hope (dream?) that battle.net and steam will have some sort of interoperability down the road. Fenced gardens are great, but people aren't going to want to juggle Battle.Net, Steam and Games for Windows Live buddy lists.
The Sidekick saves everything server side. Other than making phonecalls, it's a thinclient.
Reportedly sidekicks are thin clients, other than making phone calls, everything on the phone is saved on the server side. Which is a special kind of retarded, in today's world where a blackberry performs all the same functions, and provides a local backup feature. But yeah as for the backups, all your backups are worthless if your data backup code is flawed, and nobody ever checks the backup tapes. When MS bought the service, they probably changed the location the servers were in, plugged everything back in, and kept going. I imagine a project like that would be on a short timetable, and "checking to see that the backup tapes are really being backed up to" is low on the priority list when the service is already live.
Ooops, I have a second, better pic of said undulatus asperatus. This one was taken at Skillman and Mockingbird, Dallas, TX - about 3 miles north of downtown:
http://nearlydeaf.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG00396.jpg
This occured on May 25th 2009 in Dallas, just north of downtown. I'm sure if you search flickr for that geotag/timestamp, other pictures of it will show up in outdoor pics in the background of the images. Here's my 2megapixel cell phone camera picture of it:
http://nearlydeaf.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG00395.jpg
And here's my shameless personal blog plug about my entry about it just now:
http://nearlydeaf.com/?p=377
I'll admit my picture isn't as good as the one posted in Wired (it hasn't been photoshopped to hell with image contrast and color saturation), but I was on my lunch break trying to meet up with a friend for lunch at the mall that day.
Yeah, but Street Fighter 4, bought and run through Steam, which boasts online play "with friends", requires Windows Live (and an MS passport account, ugh) to play with your "friends", who must also have Windows Live accounts. Ugh. It's really sloppily implemented, and I wish all of the 100 or so reviews I'd read about the game simply said "this is a poor PC port of a console game" so I could have just bought the console version. There's no steam integration at all, which means you can't challenge people to games through the steam chat (as you can with TF2, DODS, L4D etc)
No, I think ad revenue is down across the board and all the journalists went to a "making sensationalist headlines work for YOU" seminar, and some of the slashdot editors went along to it. Even the relatively even-keeled slashdot has become rather fox-news-like in terms of sensationalist stories about nothing. It's one thing to break news about the Patriot act, NSA monitoring US citizens without warrants, etc but putting sensationalist bullshit about a very well liked company and their digital distribution service is a new low (actually I think this is the second or third time I've seen an anti-valve article in the last couple of months here on /.). I've noticed a few other sites like Boing Boing have become exceptionally sensationalist and using 2nd and 3rd tier (and lower) tactics to get pageviews, rather than building a solid base of regular viewers. It's really sad, and I hope the marketing company that they both hired gets cut soon, it's really hurting independent media quality by following these tactics. I don't mind the occasional story poking fun at SCO, but dammit, not every story needs to be sensationalized!
That's a pretty weak argument for someone with a modern connection. It took me about 30 min to install the orange box (about 4.8gb) on my home connection. If you account for time spent looking for the original disk, it's about neck and neck for the physical install vs. the online download these days. If you're buying a new game (if you're me, that's about 90% of all games played) then it's usually preloaded onto your computer until release date. That means it's faster, in that you don't have to drive to gamestop, or swing by there on your way home from work, and run through a messy installer. You just click on it, and it runs, first time and ready to go.
Steam is the best way to buy/play games, bar none. Until something better comes along, I'll continue buying my games exclusively through Steam. That may be several years; the only other option for PCs right now is "Windows Live", or whatever the bullshit was that I had to download to get SF4 to install.
Seconding this. The second analog stick should have been added when the PSP3000 was released... 3 years ago? Has it been that long already? Maybe more. I hate to say it, but fuck the early adopters, you buy first generation hardware, you're going to get stuck with crappy controls. Dual Analog took three(?) years to come to fruition on the old PSX. Didn't seem to hurt their sales any. The idea that it only has one analog stick is just mind boggling. The DS will probably have dual analog sticks before Sony does at this rate.
One other thing I would have changed: make the controls slide out from the side, instead of from the bottom. Allows you to create full height shoulder buttons, and spaces your hands apart enough that you can actually play the damn thing. The PSP's controls were way too small to begin with; I'm an adult male and there's no way in hell I would downsize the control surface any more. The DS Lite's controls are about as small as I would ever go. I'll probably skip this portable console, just like I did with the original PSP.
Another response to the proprietary cable. I'm quoting right from the article. It speaks for itself:
This is the only one I have issue with. The ipod connector is probably the most successful connector designed since the USB connector. My friend plugged her iPhone right into my 2004 vintage iPod FM transmitter* and we listened to her tunes on the way to the Cowboys game the whole way. Yeah, it's a proprietary connector, and apple charges people to use it in their products, but it hasn't changed in close to 10 years and most everyone has a cable for it now. Most power connector multi-pack kits include an adapter these days for the iPod. Pretty much everyone I know has an iPod connector wired into the aux/line level input for their stereo for parties and whatnot. You can't really say that about the PSP cables (especially if they change them). I guess you could use the headphone jack, but then you have to futz about with the PSP headphone volume and the stereo volume before hand so you don't blow out your speakers or wake your upstairs neighbors.
*DLO Transpod, btw, they release a new model every year and the old version, same hardware, different case is available CHEAP on amazon usually - most powerful signal out of an FM transmitter I've seen so far and I've tried them all. Signal strength is important in my area (Dallas) since Dallas has the most crowded radio market in the nation (yes, even more so than NYC). All the stations are taken, so you need something with a STRONG signal to overpower one of the lesser stations. Highly reccomended. No, I don't work for DLO.
IANAD (i'm not a doctor) but if you're under 20 (when most bone breaks occur, until you turn about 45-60), most breaks are "green tree" fractures requiring about 2-4 weeks in a cast or splint. If you break it again to a full break (which I did) you're still only looking at 4-6 weeks, tops before the cast comes off. Casts are super cheap, require zero surgery (other than the doctor "setting" the bone - done externally, no knives needed) and are generally completely non-invasive. IMO this is vastly preferable to surgically inserting what is essentially a hardened chemical into the body, which is going to require at minimum a cast anyways.
Agreed on the picture quality. Some marketer somewhere decided that digital signal was better, but unless you have a late 90's emachines CRT or noname brand CRT, the picture has always been razor sharp. I've always had NEC or Sony Trinitrons, so YMMV, but my 1996 vintage sony Trinitron 17" CRT is just as sharp as my 2009 vintage Samsung LCD (with better refresh and blacks to boot). The only thing LCDs have going for them is size/price. 24" LCDs are in the $180 range for basic consumer needs. Hard to beat that; a 19" 4:3 CRT will cost easily that much new.