Yeah, I held off on buying a DS until the Lite came out primarily for the size, initially. The DS Lite is actually small enough to fit entirely in my back pocket. Dimensionally, it's only about an inch longer on one side than the original iPod. The size of the original DS, it was like carrying around a small shoe; it didn't fit anywhere very well, it had that gap where the two screens met, so it would open all the time, and a fucking tiny ass stylus.
The screens though, of course is what sells the system. It was miserable work to squint at those terrible screens on the original DS while playing games; the new system is just infintiely more crisp, higher contrast, and of course, brighter. That I can play it at noon outside in Texas is impressive.
I use a mac, so when I was updating XP for my girlfriend's computer, and noticed the update entitled "Windows Genuine Advantage", I naturally assumed this was a bad program, but didn't know what it was for, exactly. Why? Well, look at other famously bad things with good names... No Child Left Behind Act (16 states sued the federal government over this, because it dropped funding in 99% of cases), or the infamous Patriot Act. I'm just keeping an eye out for the "Windows Lead in to Gold" service patch.
No, I'm being totally serious - this new interface sucks for old time users, and I want the option to browse the same way I have been for the last 9 years. I litterally grew up with the old interface (found/. in 8th grade, graduated university this may) and my brain is well trained to scan through the discussions and mentally highlight discussions of interest inside of an article's main discussion. If I wanted a wonky interface that looks B&W to me and is difficult to read, I'll go to kuro5hin.org - but I come to slashdot because it's a much higher volume site with great discussion (once you filter out the noise, which took me about three years of tweaking in the preferences).
Yeah, I'm bitching because I don't like change, but I'd at least like the hidden option to use the old school interface and allow myself to continue using the brain training from the last near-decade.
how do i fix slashdot so that it doesn't look like i'm surfing slashdot from inside a Matrix movie?
Re:PSP in general was just a huge mistake
on
Everyone Hates UMD
·
· Score: 1
Because everything else in the universe uses SD (Except high end digital SLRs and a few consumer cameras). If your device uses XD or mini SD, there are adapters to use the chips in a regular SD reader. SD is cheap, Memory Sticks are not. Many computers (my girlfriend's laptop, for example) have SD readers built in, which makes them like a super high density floppy disk, and simplifies your life because there's One Standard. Memory sticks make you have to go out, buy a seperate reader, you can't always buy Memory Sticks when you're on vacation and need another one; SD cards are almost as avalible as AA batteries.
Personally I still use CF for the most part (and it's about 50% cheaper), but while I was biased towards only buying CF in the past, I'd seriously consider a device with SD now that the market has matured and is basically the standard in consumer devices.
Printer drivers, etc add 4GB to an OSX installation, I would assume Vista requires double that for an updated set of drivers for an even larger variety of perhirials & junk. Plus various fonts in various languages. Plus windows bloat.
I can see the Wiivolution at $250; $200 is a nice, round number, but $300 is too high to undercut the market. Since the wiivolution is just a gamecube with an upgraded processor and video card, it's easy to see how they can release it for such a low price - significantly smaller R&D costs. Ram is always really low; the PS3 has what, 128mb? The PS2 had 32mb, and does just fine; so long as the design stays the same, developers can wring a lot of performance out of a relatively small amount of ram.
Until the majority of new-console purchasing families own a 42" or larger HDTV, HDTV isn't ever going to catch on. The advantages of HDTV become apparent when blown up to 60" or so, and blocky, aliased PS2 graphics really begin to show their age. DVDs look great on normal TVs, providing they were made in the last 15 years or so. I think microsoft made a huge mistake showing off the king kong video game in HD on a HDTV that was 17" in size... made it look like a fancy Jurrassic Park PS2 game.
So, is the average family going to have a 42" plasma TV in three years? Unless the bottom of the market falls out and the price drops to $400, I'm guessing no. The PS2 and Xbox still have long lives ahead of them... at least two more years. The mass migration of developers from the PS to PS2 simply isn't going to happen as quickly as it did in the past.
Not to be an apologetic, but Trinitron technology is frickin' awesome. Typing this on a 17" sony trinitron monitor purchased along with a sony viao computer in 1996 (the original viao, manufactured by intel in washington state). The viao is still used to boot in to win98 in extreme emergencies (I use a mac), but otherwise is trash. The Trinitron monitor, which is novel, but sturdy and extremely high quality hardware, is my monitor of choice even today. I'm sure if you go and look up what exactly Trinitron technology is, and how it works, and then go examine some 10-15 year old monitors, you'll find that they're still some of the crispest (is that a word) monitors out there.
3000 sq ft is HUGE. I currently live in a 2700 sq ft house, and boy am I spoiled. It's making me realize my real (low, very, very low) economic position when I'm out apartment hunting and looking at these 800 sq ft apartments for two people.
2700 sq feet will buy you 4 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, giant kitchen, seperate (12x15') dining room (could be used as a home office), formal living room, den, mini bar, laundry room, etc etc ad nauseum.
A single family can live comfortably in a 1200-1500 sq foot house. Oh, sure, you only get one living room, the dining room is a little smaller, and 2-3 bedrooms doesn't leave you with your very own home office, but it's still very livable. Of our four bedrooms, I live in one, parents in the other, one is a storage room (with a bunk bed for guests), and the fourth is simply a guest bedroom with a king sized bed, and some nightstands that got relegated to guest bedroom status when they were deemed "too 80's(used perhaps three times a year). Way, WAY overkill for a three person family. Maybe if you were morman with 8 kids...
Point being, most people use 4 rooms on a regular basis, Kitchen, Laundry, Bedroom, Livingroom. Having 8 bedrooms doesn't make you any happier, since those doors are shut 99% of the time, and you have no use for them.
For me, personally, it's that I can run a particular search query, and if I don't get the exact results I'm looking for, I know how to tweak it so that google will give me the results I need. I could spend 15 minutes on yahoo tweaking search strings to get the exact page/nugget of info, but Google and I are old friends, he knows exactly what I want, if not the first time, than the second. Yahoo or MSN is often times like asking the crazy guy on the corner for directions to the super market. You'll get the general idea, but there's so much gibberish/noise that it's not worth the trouble hardly.
Also: I freaking hate getting ads for credit cards every time I search for anything. I have three, thank you, no I don't want/need any more. When I did need another credit card, I went to Google, and searched for lists of the best credit cards, and applied from one of those sites.
I'll go with a mac mini, dick around with that for a year, and pick up a used PS3 for $180, thanks. In the meantime, I'll be plenty busy with the DS lite and the rediculous number of great, reasonably priced games that are slated to be released in the Very Near Future (not to mention Opera DS).
You know? Those dots in convenient, rectangular patterns? I'm sure a braile teacher (with sight) can read what all those men, women bathroom signs say in movie theaters and other random places. Those dots might not be very convenient to draw with a ball point pen, but if you wanted to design a pen for a different style of writing, I'd use a whiteout as a template, filled with magnetic ink.
Probably 100 times more legible once you get used to learning braile, and super machine readable so long as you're "writing" or stippling on 1mm graph paper.
Bingo. Every buisness textbook in college starts out with, or at least contains "it takes 10 times more money to gain a customer than it does to retain them". It's pretty easy to sell the idea of "$4 movie rental - $1.50 packaging - $.32 postage - $.50 handling - 1.00 administrative costs = fantastic profit margin for a new buisness" to a venture capitalist. Most don't expect a profit within the first six months, usually 18 months. Customers first, trim the fat later.
There were over 100,000 users before april of 2000, and nearly a million users by 2005. What's so significant about this? Well for starters, until 2005ish you had to have an invite code, sort of like gmail, except that you only got one invite code to give out - ever. Livejournal sort of started the whole online social networking craze.
Agreed. Pretty much all of my friends (male and female(!)) got signed up with LJ sometime between sophmore and junior year of high school. Most everyone only posts once a month or so, but that's about 100 times more communication that our group still does than most other groups of high school friends. It's good for planning parties, etc too, since everyone knows where to check to see when/where my annual new years party will be at. About thirty of us total use livejournal on s semi regular basis, and of those 10 update at least once every other week... not bad for a group of people who are busy and have either graduated or are about to graduate college.
Granted, many of us are now on facebook and/or myspace, but livejournal is a much more usable interface, and it's hard to get the girls of the group to switch to anything else.
Cell phones and what not are great, but face it, you only have about 10 friends in the city you live in, and another 10 spread across the country that you actually want to keep in touch with on a weekly basis. LJ makes it easy to share and learn about what's going on and keep lines of communication open should you need to contact them about something.
DS games aren't region locked. Since the browser itself isn't going to translate english webpages in to japanese, you shouldn't have any issues displaying english language webpages on the web browser. Even if there is no english localization (ha!), fan made tutorials will pop up explaining the japanese preference screen, etc within two days of it's release.
I'll definately be importing a copy when they release Opera (and picking up a DS lite)... beats the heck out of carrying about an entire laptop to check email or other basic web processes. Retail for Opera DS is supposed to be about $25, add on $10 for import costs... not a bad deal, all things considered.
rule of thumb: never buy rev. A products from apple. with those small exceptions, I enjoy 45+ day uptime on my powerbook, only rebooting for an OS update (although I've skipped the last two since I loathe rebooting)
/disclaimer: i worked as a "red shirt" for compUSA in high school many moons ago, but haven't been inside one or worked for one in ages
compUSA used to (and still did when i inquired about it in 2003) sell TAC or TAP insurance on laptops. Something like $400, but it covered accidental droppage/pwnage, and they would cover a powerbook. An option to consider if you don't like that apple's lack of pwnage coverage.
2 years is considered the usable lifespan of a lithium ion battery. usually one of the 10-20 cells in the battery fails at that point, which puts undue strain on the other 9-19 cells, causing them to fail more quickly. Probably some time in the next 6 months, you'll notice a slow downwards progression where you went from 3-4 hours, to just over 2 hours. I get about 90 minutes on my 2001 era TiBook, even though it says 100 minutes - on the original battery. I'll probably be down to an hour's time come replacement time - 64 bit intel powerbook, baby! (merom = late 2006-early 2007?)
Apple has issued statements staying that they would not try to hinder the installation of XP on their products. They have access to the dual boot sourcecode; I'm sure they wouldn't actively try to shoot themselves in the foot over something like this... talk about bad PR. Windows may release an update breaking the dual boot support, but windows updates are so infrequent that after a day the newest version of dual boot should be "fixed" to support the new update. Not really anything I would worry about.
Makes sense. Anyone who's taken a marketing or buisness class (or hell, just follows technology trends/prices) understands that when you have a hot new technology, you charge serious $$$ for it, trying to recoup your R&D as much as possible, and to bleed the early adopters dry, because, well, you charge what the market will bear. Ultimately, A/V people will buy these. Buisnesses will buy them for their purposes, and you'll start to see them in super high end laptops as the price begins to drop over the next two years. After three to five years, with the initial costs (manufacturing, R&D) paid off, the price will drop so that they can offer their product to a different market, ala the consumer market.
Does this happen often? Heck, I probably could have saved myself some time and just copied and pasted a similar argument from the early-flat panel LCD era on slashdot. Or the 4GB compact flash era. Or...
Flash drives are the Next Big Thing. In three years' time, Western Digital and Seagate will be dropping their prices to stay competitive with Samsung's superior technology. In six years you'll be able to tell middle schoolers "i remember when ALL computers came with hard drives that spun on big (3.5) magnetic discs!". Floppies died two years ago, hard drives will bit it shortly.
I know you're kidding, but I'm excited about keeping my rapidly aging 2001 powerbook on the road by upgrading it's 20gb traditional hard drive with a 32gb flash drive in a year's time. When the battery was new, I could get 5 hours of web surfing time in with the HD spun down. I suspect a flash drive would use even less energy than a hard drive in idle mode.
The other thing people haven't mentioned, is that many laptops use 4200 or 5400rpm drives to conserve power, which often become the limiting factor for speed on the laptop. Currently I use a 7200rpm external drive over firewire, and I picked up about a 15% increase in "percieved speed" according to my Hadlock-meter. A flash drive would give me the same sort of performance on the road, without the need for a bulky external drive + wall wart.
I'll admit I don't have any real experience with it, but as I understand it, iCal supports webDAV servers other than.mac; Perhaps you could "roll your own" webDAV server, which both entorage and ical talk to?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I held off on buying a DS until the Lite came out primarily for the size, initially. The DS Lite is actually small enough to fit entirely in my back pocket. Dimensionally, it's only about an inch longer on one side than the original iPod. The size of the original DS, it was like carrying around a small shoe; it didn't fit anywhere very well, it had that gap where the two screens met, so it would open all the time, and a fucking tiny ass stylus.
The screens though, of course is what sells the system. It was miserable work to squint at those terrible screens on the original DS while playing games; the new system is just infintiely more crisp, higher contrast, and of course, brighter. That I can play it at noon outside in Texas is impressive.
I use a mac, so when I was updating XP for my girlfriend's computer, and noticed the update entitled "Windows Genuine Advantage", I naturally assumed this was a bad program, but didn't know what it was for, exactly. Why? Well, look at other famously bad things with good names... No Child Left Behind Act (16 states sued the federal government over this, because it dropped funding in 99% of cases), or the infamous Patriot Act. I'm just keeping an eye out for the "Windows Lead in to Gold" service patch.
No, I'm being totally serious - this new interface sucks for old time users, and I want the option to browse the same way I have been for the last 9 years. I litterally grew up with the old interface (found /. in 8th grade, graduated university this may) and my brain is well trained to scan through the discussions and mentally highlight discussions of interest inside of an article's main discussion. If I wanted a wonky interface that looks B&W to me and is difficult to read, I'll go to kuro5hin.org - but I come to slashdot because it's a much higher volume site with great discussion (once you filter out the noise, which took me about three years of tweaking in the preferences).
Yeah, I'm bitching because I don't like change, but I'd at least like the hidden option to use the old school interface and allow myself to continue using the brain training from the last near-decade.
how do i fix slashdot so that it doesn't look like i'm surfing slashdot from inside a Matrix movie?
Because everything else in the universe uses SD (Except high end digital SLRs and a few consumer cameras). If your device uses XD or mini SD, there are adapters to use the chips in a regular SD reader. SD is cheap, Memory Sticks are not. Many computers (my girlfriend's laptop, for example) have SD readers built in, which makes them like a super high density floppy disk, and simplifies your life because there's One Standard. Memory sticks make you have to go out, buy a seperate reader, you can't always buy Memory Sticks when you're on vacation and need another one; SD cards are almost as avalible as AA batteries.
Personally I still use CF for the most part (and it's about 50% cheaper), but while I was biased towards only buying CF in the past, I'd seriously consider a device with SD now that the market has matured and is basically the standard in consumer devices.
Printer drivers, etc add 4GB to an OSX installation, I would assume Vista requires double that for an updated set of drivers for an even larger variety of perhirials & junk. Plus various fonts in various languages. Plus windows bloat.
I can see the Wiivolution at $250; $200 is a nice, round number, but $300 is too high to undercut the market. Since the wiivolution is just a gamecube with an upgraded processor and video card, it's easy to see how they can release it for such a low price - significantly smaller R&D costs. Ram is always really low; the PS3 has what, 128mb? The PS2 had 32mb, and does just fine; so long as the design stays the same, developers can wring a lot of performance out of a relatively small amount of ram.
Until the majority of new-console purchasing families own a 42" or larger HDTV, HDTV isn't ever going to catch on. The advantages of HDTV become apparent when blown up to 60" or so, and blocky, aliased PS2 graphics really begin to show their age. DVDs look great on normal TVs, providing they were made in the last 15 years or so. I think microsoft made a huge mistake showing off the king kong video game in HD on a HDTV that was 17" in size... made it look like a fancy Jurrassic Park PS2 game.
So, is the average family going to have a 42" plasma TV in three years? Unless the bottom of the market falls out and the price drops to $400, I'm guessing no. The PS2 and Xbox still have long lives ahead of them... at least two more years. The mass migration of developers from the PS to PS2 simply isn't going to happen as quickly as it did in the past.
Not to be an apologetic, but Trinitron technology is frickin' awesome. Typing this on a 17" sony trinitron monitor purchased along with a sony viao computer in 1996 (the original viao, manufactured by intel in washington state). The viao is still used to boot in to win98 in extreme emergencies (I use a mac), but otherwise is trash. The Trinitron monitor, which is novel, but sturdy and extremely high quality hardware, is my monitor of choice even today. I'm sure if you go and look up what exactly Trinitron technology is, and how it works, and then go examine some 10-15 year old monitors, you'll find that they're still some of the crispest (is that a word) monitors out there.
3000 sq ft is HUGE. I currently live in a 2700 sq ft house, and boy am I spoiled. It's making me realize my real (low, very, very low) economic position when I'm out apartment hunting and looking at these 800 sq ft apartments for two people.
2700 sq feet will buy you 4 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, giant kitchen, seperate (12x15') dining room (could be used as a home office), formal living room, den, mini bar, laundry room, etc etc ad nauseum.
A single family can live comfortably in a 1200-1500 sq foot house. Oh, sure, you only get one living room, the dining room is a little smaller, and 2-3 bedrooms doesn't leave you with your very own home office, but it's still very livable. Of our four bedrooms, I live in one, parents in the other, one is a storage room (with a bunk bed for guests), and the fourth is simply a guest bedroom with a king sized bed, and some nightstands that got relegated to guest bedroom status when they were deemed "too 80's(used perhaps three times a year). Way, WAY overkill for a three person family. Maybe if you were morman with 8 kids...
Point being, most people use 4 rooms on a regular basis, Kitchen, Laundry, Bedroom, Livingroom. Having 8 bedrooms doesn't make you any happier, since those doors are shut 99% of the time, and you have no use for them.
For me, personally, it's that I can run a particular search query, and if I don't get the exact results I'm looking for, I know how to tweak it so that google will give me the results I need. I could spend 15 minutes on yahoo tweaking search strings to get the exact page/nugget of info, but Google and I are old friends, he knows exactly what I want, if not the first time, than the second. Yahoo or MSN is often times like asking the crazy guy on the corner for directions to the super market. You'll get the general idea, but there's so much gibberish/noise that it's not worth the trouble hardly.
Also: I freaking hate getting ads for credit cards every time I search for anything. I have three, thank you, no I don't want/need any more. When I did need another credit card, I went to Google, and searched for lists of the best credit cards, and applied from one of those sites.
I'll go with a mac mini, dick around with that for a year, and pick up a used PS3 for $180, thanks. In the meantime, I'll be plenty busy with the DS lite and the rediculous number of great, reasonably priced games that are slated to be released in the Very Near Future (not to mention Opera DS).
You know? Those dots in convenient, rectangular patterns? I'm sure a braile teacher (with sight) can read what all those men, women bathroom signs say in movie theaters and other random places. Those dots might not be very convenient to draw with a ball point pen, but if you wanted to design a pen for a different style of writing, I'd use a whiteout as a template, filled with magnetic ink.
Probably 100 times more legible once you get used to learning braile, and super machine readable so long as you're "writing" or stippling on 1mm graph paper.
Bingo. Every buisness textbook in college starts out with, or at least contains "it takes 10 times more money to gain a customer than it does to retain them". It's pretty easy to sell the idea of "$4 movie rental - $1.50 packaging - $.32 postage - $.50 handling - 1.00 administrative costs = fantastic profit margin for a new buisness" to a venture capitalist. Most don't expect a profit within the first six months, usually 18 months. Customers first, trim the fat later.
There were over 100,000 users before april of 2000, and nearly a million users by 2005. What's so significant about this? Well for starters, until 2005ish you had to have an invite code, sort of like gmail, except that you only got one invite code to give out - ever. Livejournal sort of started the whole online social networking craze.
Agreed. Pretty much all of my friends (male and female(!)) got signed up with LJ sometime between sophmore and junior year of high school. Most everyone only posts once a month or so, but that's about 100 times more communication that our group still does than most other groups of high school friends. It's good for planning parties, etc too, since everyone knows where to check to see when/where my annual new years party will be at. About thirty of us total use livejournal on s semi regular basis, and of those 10 update at least once every other week... not bad for a group of people who are busy and have either graduated or are about to graduate college.
Granted, many of us are now on facebook and/or myspace, but livejournal is a much more usable interface, and it's hard to get the girls of the group to switch to anything else.
Cell phones and what not are great, but face it, you only have about 10 friends in the city you live in, and another 10 spread across the country that you actually want to keep in touch with on a weekly basis. LJ makes it easy to share and learn about what's going on and keep lines of communication open should you need to contact them about something.
DS games aren't region locked. Since the browser itself isn't going to translate english webpages in to japanese, you shouldn't have any issues displaying english language webpages on the web browser. Even if there is no english localization (ha!), fan made tutorials will pop up explaining the japanese preference screen, etc within two days of it's release.
I'll definately be importing a copy when they release Opera (and picking up a DS lite)... beats the heck out of carrying about an entire laptop to check email or other basic web processes. Retail for Opera DS is supposed to be about $25, add on $10 for import costs... not a bad deal, all things considered.
rule of thumb: never buy rev. A products from apple. with those small exceptions, I enjoy 45+ day uptime on my powerbook, only rebooting for an OS update (although I've skipped the last two since I loathe rebooting)
/disclaimer: i worked as a "red shirt" for compUSA in high school many moons ago, but haven't been inside one or worked for one in ages
compUSA used to (and still did when i inquired about it in 2003) sell TAC or TAP insurance on laptops. Something like $400, but it covered accidental droppage/pwnage, and they would cover a powerbook. An option to consider if you don't like that apple's lack of pwnage coverage.
2 years is considered the usable lifespan of a lithium ion battery. usually one of the 10-20 cells in the battery fails at that point, which puts undue strain on the other 9-19 cells, causing them to fail more quickly. Probably some time in the next 6 months, you'll notice a slow downwards progression where you went from 3-4 hours, to just over 2 hours. I get about 90 minutes on my 2001 era TiBook, even though it says 100 minutes - on the original battery. I'll probably be down to an hour's time come replacement time - 64 bit intel powerbook, baby! (merom = late 2006-early 2007?)
Apple has issued statements staying that they would not try to hinder the installation of XP on their products. They have access to the dual boot sourcecode; I'm sure they wouldn't actively try to shoot themselves in the foot over something like this... talk about bad PR. Windows may release an update breaking the dual boot support, but windows updates are so infrequent that after a day the newest version of dual boot should be "fixed" to support the new update. Not really anything I would worry about.
Makes sense. Anyone who's taken a marketing or buisness class (or hell, just follows technology trends/prices) understands that when you have a hot new technology, you charge serious $$$ for it, trying to recoup your R&D as much as possible, and to bleed the early adopters dry, because, well, you charge what the market will bear. Ultimately, A/V people will buy these. Buisnesses will buy them for their purposes, and you'll start to see them in super high end laptops as the price begins to drop over the next two years. After three to five years, with the initial costs (manufacturing, R&D) paid off, the price will drop so that they can offer their product to a different market, ala the consumer market.
Does this happen often? Heck, I probably could have saved myself some time and just copied and pasted a similar argument from the early-flat panel LCD era on slashdot. Or the 4GB compact flash era. Or...
Flash drives are the Next Big Thing. In three years' time, Western Digital and Seagate will be dropping their prices to stay competitive with Samsung's superior technology. In six years you'll be able to tell middle schoolers "i remember when ALL computers came with hard drives that spun on big (3.5) magnetic discs!". Floppies died two years ago, hard drives will bit it shortly.
I know you're kidding, but I'm excited about keeping my rapidly aging 2001 powerbook on the road by upgrading it's 20gb traditional hard drive with a 32gb flash drive in a year's time. When the battery was new, I could get 5 hours of web surfing time in with the HD spun down. I suspect a flash drive would use even less energy than a hard drive in idle mode.
The other thing people haven't mentioned, is that many laptops use 4200 or 5400rpm drives to conserve power, which often become the limiting factor for speed on the laptop. Currently I use a 7200rpm external drive over firewire, and I picked up about a 15% increase in "percieved speed" according to my Hadlock-meter. A flash drive would give me the same sort of performance on the road, without the need for a bulky external drive + wall wart.
Somebody's been reading a bit too much Neal Stephenson lately.
I'll admit I don't have any real experience with it, but as I understand it, iCal supports webDAV servers other than .mac; Perhaps you could "roll your own" webDAV server, which both entorage and ical talk to?