Re:Dreamcast = Jaguar = another ill timed console.
on
Dreamcast Postmortem
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· Score: 2
I'd say half a generation. It's still more horsepower than a 1st-gen iMac, or so I'm told, and those aren't terribly slouchy systems (graphics are a bit weak, but that's another story).
Okay, so I don't have either a PSX or a PS2 (don't plan to buy one soon either). But isn't the PS2 controller basically identical to the second-gen PS1 controller?
(And I actually like the DreamCast controller -- it's a bit large for a child but it has just about the right feel for me. It's a bit ugly, but it works.)
Would you hold Volkswagen responsible for what its executives did in WWII as well? The slave labor and everything? I wouldn't; the current management didn't even know about it until they looked into it and they now have a memorial to their slave workers somewhere on their corporate campus.
I could go on, but I don't wish to get modded down because of a rant./Brian
We have a big green box on a telephone pole too. But you can only have so many big green boxes, and retrofitting an existing neighborhood would be rather difficult. Also, it's a question of how old your neighborhood is -- in a dense area like Boston's inner suburbs it would be a lot harder to find space for something like that than it would in some three-year-old cul-de-sac community outside Phoenix. I stick by my original point: in apartment buildings and *maybe* new subdivisions it's workable but really wouldn't fly in already-developed areas.
It'll be interesting to see how this is pulled off. The big problem with it is that it might be even more limited than DSL unless you're redefining the Ethernet standard.
In 1995 I worked on an early broadband networking project at Boston College as a tester (Continental Cablevision, now AT&T Broadband). The main difference between the BC system as it was when it went online and the usual broadband thing was that there was no cable modem per se; the network/CATV signal came into the dorms over a fiber backbone and was split. The cable signal went to a series of coax taps, while the network signal fed to a large IBM box (essentially the "cable modem" and from there into a series of hubs.
This is a great system for a college or an apartment building; you just steal a closet in a hallway here and there, and then wire up the rooms as the opportunity arises. There are basically two problems once you get out of this setting, though...
The first is that Ethernet, like DSL, has a limited range. As I said, the BC network was (and is, I'm sure) built on a fiber-optic backbone. The Enet only comes into play when you enter a building; that's fine. However, there was an interesting layout problem; anybody here who's been to BC will know exactly where I'm talking about...
The Mods are a large patch of creaky, thirty-some-year-old prefab rowhouses that dominate about a quarter of BC's lower campus. Despite the running joke that "the Mods will be torn down by the time you're a senior", they are the most visible institution of campus life. Wiring them was... interesting. As I understood during my time on the testing crew, the Mods were split into two sections, each with its own feed from the backbone. In order to supply each block (with either two or four units per block), the cheapest way to do it was to steal one closet (referred to by students as "the keg closet"; obviously we're talking Party Zone here) per block as a network closet and lock it permanently.
This becomes a problem like so -- if you go into a residential neighborhood, where are you going to put the central network hub? Obviously you can't just rent out space in someone's basement. Building a "network shed" on each corner or telephone pole isn't especially practical either; for a dense neighborhood, can you imagine the thick bundle of Cat5 cable that you'd have to hang off the telephone poles or bury?
Now one could assume perhaps that these problems have certainly been worked on since 1995. But my thought on Enet@home is that you'd probably still be better off with a fiber or DSL drop coming in the front door and building your own network off of a router. I'm not saying it won't work, but I don't see it as being terribly practical...
Has anyone yet seen the Pikachu special edition N64? A more blatant example of unnecessary corporate whoring I have never seen...
See, the real fun part of all this is that the thing Nintendo could have done from the start is release a CD-player cartridge and crank up the Baby Indy that powers the thing. Of course, that would mean continuing to rely on SGI instead of IBM (the GameCube uses a PowerPC chip), which doesn't strike me as being good business sense...
/Brian
Re:the thing about the console wars...
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 2
There was no reason it should have been. Nintendo made the mistake of sticking with cartridges, which has the theoretical upside (negated by patent issues, I believe) of making it possible to add hardware as well as play games but the downside of being a) proprietary and b) limited holding capacity by reason of semiconductor expense.
The N64's also-ran status to me indicates the best reason possible for CD-based game machines: you can get more, more easily, on a $1 CD than you can on $20 worth of EPROMs.
/Brian
Re:About the Xbox Hardware
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 2
I think that feature was taken out of the P3 right about the time they ditched the Slot 1 packaging for it.
/Brian
Re:Nintendo is obviously worried....
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 2
Thus, Conker's Bad Fur Day.
They own the portable gaming market as far as the eye can see, though -- the Game Boy has never had a really serious competitor in the over ten years it's been on the market. Their fate is in their hands, though it doesn't help that they haven't seen fit to include DVD capability on the Gamecube. IMHO DVD capability on a game console is mostly a waste of effort, but there are places (dorm rooms are the first to come to mind) where it would be very useful indeed.
/Brian
the thing about the console wars...
on
XBox Tidbits
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· Score: 2
Seems Sony hasn't learned its own lesson, from the rumors I've been hearing about developing for the PS2.
That being as it is... I'm still rooting for Nintendo, myself. Sega should have won, but after the Saturn (remember that) I don't think anyone was taking them too seriously. My theory on Dreamcast is that Microsoft probably pulled an OS/2 maneuver on Sega -- floated a WinCE-based system as a trial balloon and then yanked the rug out from under them when the XBox was announced.
The "note from Nintendo", real or not, raises some very valid points. Xbox is getting all this press, and we don't even know how it's going to be recieved by the users. But that's pretty typical marketing, I suppose. The fact is that I suspect Xbox is going to come up a little short -- expect a full Windows implementation on it where none is necessary would be my first bit of warning.../Brian
My town, it'll get you a house and a half.
But here's the thing -- you're talking about a six-figure loss instead of eight. I'm sure depending on your market cap it's small enough to get lost in the noise.
I'm not a big Red Hat fan -- they're too pushy and self-serving to be the Open Source community leaders they claim to be -- but it's good to finally have an OSS company showing a profit. Now if they could just get over their big Microsoftian problem, or VA Linux alternately maybe showing up to provide competition.../Brian
Does it really bother you that much that Buchanan has no chance in hell of ever becoming president?
And, you know, this whole thing is incredibly funny anyway. The media is trumping it up like it's the second-freakin-coming of Mad Cow Disease and it isn't even particularly dangerous to us. It's a royal pain in the ass to farmers, of course, but it's not a problem for people...
(In your case, it would be more appropriate to call it foot-*IN*-mouth disease... damn right wing isolationist pseudopatriotic nutjobs give all us Merkins a bad name...)
Talk to a nutritionist who isn't into food faddism. The human species evolved to be omnivorous; any competent nutritionist will tell you that. Why do you think a balanced vegetarian diet is so tricky?
Hey, Ken Thompson did it with Unix, and Unix was Open Source (mostly) in those days.
(Mind you, the full hack never made it out the door (there was a hacked compiler required to do the job), but parts of it did, and rumor has it that it may actually have been used once or twice...)
It was an interesting idea while it lasted, and a very good one for most governments, even if it was a bit overzealous requiring German-only software.
Open Source in the service of national security... *that's* what should be on the line here. Saves development effort, yet ensures that in time of war or other crisis you don't become dependent on someone in another country. I was hoping they were thinking SuSE Linux myself, but oh well...
Hurd is overkill for most projects, and its long delay in seeing the light of day stands as a monument to cathedral hubris. And it's not developed from scratch anyway -- it shares the Mach kernel with a number of other OSes. The only thing really innovative about it is the multiserver design and the architectural intricacies that follow from it. The Hurd is basically a huge toy for the OS geek, and will not gain the kind of momentum that Linux and BSD have.
And yes, you BSD-is-dead, people, BSD has massive momentum. Just ask Apple, and Compaq, and Yahoo, and...
You may agree, you may disagree. But a community has to have some standards.
I look at it this way: AOL is not Usenet. Fact is, they need to keep paying customers. Censorship (or at least segregation of controversial stuff) is probably all but required for them. Now, see, outside the AOL sandbox we don't need that.
Just remember that whether you agree or not with an idea, there's *usually* a legitimate other side to the story. I happen to be not in favor of censorship myself, but there is a place for it, and if nothing else keeping deliberately inflammatory behavior in line is occasionally (but not universally) useful.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say half a generation. It's still more horsepower than a 1st-gen iMac, or so I'm told, and those aren't terribly slouchy systems (graphics are a bit weak, but that's another story).
/Brian
Okay, so I don't have either a PSX or a PS2 (don't plan to buy one soon either). But isn't the PS2 controller basically identical to the second-gen PS1 controller?
(And I actually like the DreamCast controller -- it's a bit large for a child but it has just about the right feel for me. It's a bit ugly, but it works.)
/Brian
So? It's still 64-bit and therefore relevant. (Actually, UltraSPARC Linux comes to mind as well...)
/Brian
And Trillian?
/Brian
ps For those not paying attention, that's Linux for IA64/Itanium...
Would you hold Volkswagen responsible for what its executives did in WWII as well? The slave labor and everything? I wouldn't; the current management didn't even know about it until they looked into it and they now have a memorial to their slave workers somewhere on their corporate campus. I could go on, but I don't wish to get modded down because of a rant. /Brian
And just barely practical there.
We have a big green box on a telephone pole too. But you can only have so many big green boxes, and retrofitting an existing neighborhood would be rather difficult. Also, it's a question of how old your neighborhood is -- in a dense area like Boston's inner suburbs it would be a lot harder to find space for something like that than it would in some three-year-old cul-de-sac community outside Phoenix. I stick by my original point: in apartment buildings and *maybe* new subdivisions it's workable but really wouldn't fly in already-developed areas.
/Brian
I should disclaim this: this is based on my personal experience; IANANA (...network admin...)
/Brian
It'll be interesting to see how this is pulled off. The big problem with it is that it might be even more limited than DSL unless you're redefining the Ethernet standard.
In 1995 I worked on an early broadband networking project at Boston College as a tester (Continental Cablevision, now AT&T Broadband). The main difference between the BC system as it was when it went online and the usual broadband thing was that there was no cable modem per se; the network/CATV signal came into the dorms over a fiber backbone and was split. The cable signal went to a series of coax taps, while the network signal fed to a large IBM box (essentially the "cable modem" and from there into a series of hubs.
This is a great system for a college or an apartment building; you just steal a closet in a hallway here and there, and then wire up the rooms as the opportunity arises. There are basically two problems once you get out of this setting, though...
The first is that Ethernet, like DSL, has a limited range. As I said, the BC network was (and is, I'm sure) built on a fiber-optic backbone. The Enet only comes into play when you enter a building; that's fine. However, there was an interesting layout problem; anybody here who's been to BC will know exactly where I'm talking about...
The Mods are a large patch of creaky, thirty-some-year-old prefab rowhouses that dominate about a quarter of BC's lower campus. Despite the running joke that "the Mods will be torn down by the time you're a senior", they are the most visible institution of campus life. Wiring them was... interesting. As I understood during my time on the testing crew, the Mods were split into two sections, each with its own feed from the backbone. In order to supply each block (with either two or four units per block), the cheapest way to do it was to steal one closet (referred to by students as "the keg closet"; obviously we're talking Party Zone here) per block as a network closet and lock it permanently.
This becomes a problem like so -- if you go into a residential neighborhood, where are you going to put the central network hub? Obviously you can't just rent out space in someone's basement. Building a "network shed" on each corner or telephone pole isn't especially practical either; for a dense neighborhood, can you imagine the thick bundle of Cat5 cable that you'd have to hang off the telephone poles or bury?
Now one could assume perhaps that these problems have certainly been worked on since 1995. But my thought on Enet@home is that you'd probably still be better off with a fiber or DSL drop coming in the front door and building your own network off of a router. I'm not saying it won't work, but I don't see it as being terribly practical...
/Brian
Slightly ot...
Has anyone yet seen the Pikachu special edition N64? A more blatant example of unnecessary corporate whoring I have never seen...
See, the real fun part of all this is that the thing Nintendo could have done from the start is release a CD-player cartridge and crank up the Baby Indy that powers the thing. Of course, that would mean continuing to rely on SGI instead of IBM (the GameCube uses a PowerPC chip), which doesn't strike me as being good business sense...
/Brian
There was no reason it should have been. Nintendo made the mistake of sticking with cartridges, which has the theoretical upside (negated by patent issues, I believe) of making it possible to add hardware as well as play games but the downside of being a) proprietary and b) limited holding capacity by reason of semiconductor expense.
The N64's also-ran status to me indicates the best reason possible for CD-based game machines: you can get more, more easily, on a $1 CD than you can on $20 worth of EPROMs.
/Brian
I think that feature was taken out of the P3 right about the time they ditched the Slot 1 packaging for it.
/Brian
Thus, Conker's Bad Fur Day.
They own the portable gaming market as far as the eye can see, though -- the Game Boy has never had a really serious competitor in the over ten years it's been on the market. Their fate is in their hands, though it doesn't help that they haven't seen fit to include DVD capability on the Gamecube. IMHO DVD capability on a game console is mostly a waste of effort, but there are places (dorm rooms are the first to come to mind) where it would be very useful indeed.
/Brian
Seems Sony hasn't learned its own lesson, from the rumors I've been hearing about developing for the PS2. That being as it is... I'm still rooting for Nintendo, myself. Sega should have won, but after the Saturn (remember that) I don't think anyone was taking them too seriously. My theory on Dreamcast is that Microsoft probably pulled an OS/2 maneuver on Sega -- floated a WinCE-based system as a trial balloon and then yanked the rug out from under them when the XBox was announced. The "note from Nintendo", real or not, raises some very valid points. Xbox is getting all this press, and we don't even know how it's going to be recieved by the users. But that's pretty typical marketing, I suppose. The fact is that I suspect Xbox is going to come up a little short -- expect a full Windows implementation on it where none is necessary would be my first bit of warning... /Brian
Hmm.. I seem to have managed to misstate a couple of posts yesterday, not just this one. I think I left out the word *other*, sorry...
/Brian
It's not that you would be lacking -- it's just that you have to put a lot more planning into your diet, is my point.
/Brian
My town, it'll get you a house and a half. But here's the thing -- you're talking about a six-figure loss instead of eight. I'm sure depending on your market cap it's small enough to get lost in the noise. I'm not a big Red Hat fan -- they're too pushy and self-serving to be the Open Source community leaders they claim to be -- but it's good to finally have an OSS company showing a profit. Now if they could just get over their big Microsoftian problem, or VA Linux alternately maybe showing up to provide competition... /Brian
Does it really bother you that much that Buchanan has no chance in hell of ever becoming president?
And, you know, this whole thing is incredibly funny anyway. The media is trumping it up like it's the second-freakin-coming of Mad Cow Disease and it isn't even particularly dangerous to us. It's a royal pain in the ass to farmers, of course, but it's not a problem for people...
(In your case, it would be more appropriate to call it foot-*IN*-mouth disease... damn right wing isolationist pseudopatriotic nutjobs give all us Merkins a bad name...)
/Brian
Talk to a nutritionist who isn't into food faddism. The human species evolved to be omnivorous; any competent nutritionist will tell you that. Why do you think a balanced vegetarian diet is so tricky?
/Brian
Nothing overzealous about what you're talking about -- that's precisely what I meant.
/Brian
Hey, Ken Thompson did it with Unix, and Unix was Open Source (mostly) in those days.
(Mind you, the full hack never made it out the door (there was a hacked compiler required to do the job), but parts of it did, and rumor has it that it may actually have been used once or twice...)
/Brian
It was an interesting idea while it lasted, and a very good one for most governments, even if it was a bit overzealous requiring German-only software.
Open Source in the service of national security... *that's* what should be on the line here. Saves development effort, yet ensures that in time of war or other crisis you don't become dependent on someone in another country. I was hoping they were thinking SuSE Linux myself, but oh well...
/Brian
Failure schmailure. BSD has been going for over twenty years now -- that's got to be some kind of Open Source record.
/Brian
Hurd is overkill for most projects, and its long delay in seeing the light of day stands as a monument to cathedral hubris. And it's not developed from scratch anyway -- it shares the Mach kernel with a number of other OSes. The only thing really innovative about it is the multiserver design and the architectural intricacies that follow from it. The Hurd is basically a huge toy for the OS geek, and will not gain the kind of momentum that Linux and BSD have.
And yes, you BSD-is-dead, people, BSD has massive momentum. Just ask Apple, and Compaq, and Yahoo, and...
/Brian
You may agree, you may disagree. But a community has to have some standards.
I look at it this way: AOL is not Usenet. Fact is, they need to keep paying customers. Censorship (or at least segregation of controversial stuff) is probably all but required for them. Now, see, outside the AOL sandbox we don't need that.
Just remember that whether you agree or not with an idea, there's *usually* a legitimate other side to the story. I happen to be not in favor of censorship myself, but there is a place for it, and if nothing else keeping deliberately inflammatory behavior in line is occasionally (but not universally) useful.
/Brian
I've seen this before... does someone have an autopost script that pops this up on every BSD article or something? (And a Linux version now...)
/Brian
(ps To those not really in the know, it's a crock anyway -- I'm not going to get into it, but someone is clearly missing the point...)