Well, nerds apparently are the ones finding the Thunderbirds revival interesting, and it seems as though a fair number of Slashdot nerds seem to lean toward the right...
I call it all because of the Puppet Factor(tm). Geeks like Thunderbirds, and Geeks like Bush, so I figure it's all about the puppets.
I know that there're definitely flaws inherent in the Palm OS, and the thought of spending $299-399 to read eBooks "decently" may be a bit overboard, but for anyone that's shopping for a PalmOS device anyhow, and wants to consider eBooks, definitely check out a Zodiac. In addition to being a competent gaming machine (at least in hardware, software is desperately needed) it makes a damn good Palm device. The 8M ATI video chip in it does anti-aliasing quite well and makes text quite readable when you use a reader like the commercial app RepliGo. I've been reading some eBooks I've had kicking around for a while on it, and find that it's not nearly as good as a real book, but the eyestrain factor is pretty much nil with the smallest font and landscape mode. The trigger switches on the top of the unit work great for paging, and the analog stick scrolls quite smoothly.
Last week I picked up a Tapwave Zodiac as a new PDA after having lusted after -some- form of small, useful PDA for years. I have a Newton 2100, but it's simply too large for my usual uses, and I never picked up the memory cards and wifi card to really make it useful around the house. Someday I still intend to do this, however. But what struck me as soon as I got the Zodiac home is how much the basic form factor of it resembled that of the almost ten-year-old Newton design. Two expansion slots at the top, large (comparatively) screen, flipcover for the LCD, and an emphasis on being able to be used in landscape mode.
Aside from a few design flaws the Zodiac has in regards to the stylus location and a flipcover, it feels like a Newton in many respects - other than the OS. PalmOS really feels quite weak compared to what the NewtonOS can do, and I really wish that Palm had learned more from what Apple managed to do so many years ago. Screens now are creeping up on the level of pixel density really required for some good UI design, but the operating systems just aren't keeping up. Now, it's also a shame it's taking Palm six versions to get to multitasking.
I have to say I'm glad to see the Zodiac on that list winning at least the bronze. I got mine last week and have been continually impressed with just how smooth the "fit and finish" have been. Aside from a small problem with a bend in the case near the sync port, the Zodiac is a great piece of electronics. Now, if they can only work out a better solution for the stylus, integrate a latch to the flipcover and make it firm (like the Newton 2x00, perhaps) and see what can be worked out with the somewhat tricky sync port connection, it'd be close to perfect.
I heard about this guy that worked at some place with these other guys that some friends of my second cousin knew, that REALLY wanted a copy of Half-Life. This was back in like '98. See, this guy's wife really, really, really didn't understand what the gane was about, so the guy tried to show her why he wanted it so bad and pulled out a crowbar and started whaling on things all over the house!
Once she got out of the coma, and he got off his 3-4 year sentence, he got their kid's copy of Half-Life with the divorce settlement and he's had all the time he needed to play it ever since!
Look, folks. The real success behind Fallout was the story, the aesthetic, the locations, and the fact they put it together with some pretty good attention to the important things like gameplay. Remember that the original plan for Fallout was simply as a GURPS-based game that got re-worked near the end of development into the SPECIAL system that -did- work very well.
The real problem with this kind of development would be if they went and tried to make it turn-based-MMORPG. Then we'd just have to kill them all.
If they do something similar to a City of Heroes environment, without the mind-numbing quest for items and other crap like you have in more traditional MMORPG places, it'd go over quite well.
Sorry, by Top 500 I'm referring to the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. Apparently the cluster of systems used for SecondLife is actually getting close to cracking into that list and might actually be there when the end of the year comes around and the new rankings come out. Every simulator is yet another computer that could contribute to a higher score for the system as a whole.
I think the only problem with Linux distribution of an SL client is simply lack of resources to fine-tune things at this point. The backend is all on Linux machines, and the frontend is all designed for portability already having already been ported to OSX with the release of 1.3. The company is expanding the available land at a pretty quick rate lately and even hired a few new folks over the past couple months.
Eventually, they -want- to do a Linux client. It'll just take time and resources. Also, a nice amusing note - they're on track to get on Top 500 next year.
Remember, the money only vanishes from the economy when someone buys land at auction from the Lindens when it's new. If I buy land from you for L$50000 (which I don't have, so no, I'm not offering.;) then you suddenly have the money and I don't. There really is no way for Linden Dollars to be eliminated now, except when people use them to replace real money for land rights. And I don't even know the rules around that. Expiring accounts are one way, yeah, but I don't think we're going to see someone like Zeppi Schlegel or the other big barons simply shut down an account.:)
There are actually a ton of different rules and regulations that I recently discovered (not by being employed by Linden Labs, but by reading forums) that "Liasons" need to follow.
They can never give out information on customers.
They can have alternate non-"Linden" characters, but with severe restrictions on participation in groups and other aspects of the game that involve money (they can never accumulate "Dwell" which is the monetary bonus for having people use your land.) or leadership.
As others already mentioned, the addition of land involves adding hardware. They might be able to get a deal on land from someone they're friendly with, but if they did it due to being a "Linden", they'd be in deep shit. Hell, I got a deal on my first land parcel from one of the high-ranking money barons in the world during my first month, and I'm almost a nobody there even now that I manage a "radio station".
Actually, the interesting thing is that Linden Labs doesn't directly profit from the real estate dealing going on with the game, other than in the offical new-simulator land auctions they run every once in a while as they add new machines to the cluster. They auction those off, and this is a very recent occurrence. Once they sell the land one time (for either L$ or real dollars) they only make money when it's rented out on a monthly basis. They'd make more money renting 512 square meter parcels to everyone, than they do renting the equivalent of a dedicated server for $195 a month. When someone in-world sells it, they don't take a percentage, cut, or anything similar. I could (and have) simply walk up to a plot of land offered for sale for L$5000, pay L$5000 and as long as I'm paying enough per-month for my land rights, it's mine. The fluctuation in pricing stops affecting LL directly after first sale.
There was pretty bad. Really bad. But once you see what people can do with SecondLife and the kind of creations it inspires - you'll see why people get into it for a lot less money than the MMORPG of the week. If I didn't want land, I'd never need to pay Linden Labs another dollar.
The article linked to has a few flaws in it, unfortunately. One of which is the claim that there's a $9.95 a month fee to join SecondLife. I'm sure others will have pointed this out long before I did. There are two "tiers" of membership, the one-time lifetime registration fee of $9.95 or a monthly $9.95 price to become a premium member with a few extra services, primary of which is the ability to own up to 512 square meters of land parcel as long as you're a premium member.
There, the recently-abandoned social VR site that I found out about before SecondLife, tended to have a real problem with RL$ and VR$ exchanges. You really did have to shell out RL cash for VR buckage, and on a pretty significant range of expenses. Articles of clothing are insanely pricy "There". In contrast with There, the management at Linden Labs (SecondLife's developers) has provided a great deal of control over the economy. They permit - but don't promote - sites such as the gaming open market, and have very few different reasons to try and get real money from you. Primarily, the income for Linden Labs is created by monthly fees to own land. This makes sense, as each chunk of land is essentially a pretty significant chunk of server load. I own roughly 1/16th of the resources of an entire 2.8Ghz server machine, and pay $25 a month for the priviledge. This allows me over a thousand objects with which I can create my own buildings, art objects, whatever. That's the only money Linden Labs gets from me on an ongoing basis.
For in-world money, Linden Dollars (L$) the exchange rate in real money is completely dwarfed by what you can actually make in world by simply being an amiable individual and putting together a few fun events. I've got around L$7000 in world right now, thanks in part to my managing an in-world streaming radio station called Radio SLive which broadcasts an average of 4-5 nights per week of personalized music and banter using Live365's crummy (but legal) alternatives. Offhand, anyone knowing an alternative to L365 that allows for no-login, no-required-webpage referral licensed music streaming - sorry, no independent-only options, we need the RIAA stuff. It's what people want.) please let me know.
If I were to convert the money I've made into real dollars, I'd probably be able to pull around $30 out of SecondLife. Do I really intend to do that? Not a chance. In-world, that money really has a great amount of value. Simply by earning bonuses based on my social interaction with people (you earn positive and negative ratings based on actions, appearance, and build quality) you I made upwards of L$500 a week - enough to buy some cars with, and half-price for many aircraft, some of the most expensive non-land related expenses in the world. I wheeled, dealed, and pleaded to pay the in-world expense to buy my land from other players, and now only need to spend $25 a month to maintan the server space to hold it. It really isn't so bad - I could have almost as much fun with 512 square meters of land, if I weren't hosting occasional events and presenting an in-world frontage for the radio station. Clothing can be made for free - no fees beyond a L$10 upload fee for graphics and 9 second sound clips - and objects (primitives - prims) can be made in-world for attachment to a person's avatar at no costs. The only cost to create items in world is to do so on private land - there are a number of sandbox regions where people can create larger objects without much restriction. A great place to play with building a home before you get land to put it on. Coding in-world is free, and there are even many scripts written and released with a GPL-style license. Some even with the GPL itself.
The real-world to L$ economy is not nearly as bad as it is in other places, simply due to the fact that a great time can be had for literally peanuts. You don't need to own land to have a good time, though it can help. Land is continually being offered at low, low prices to landless peopl
It's not just texture memory FarCry uses that takes so long - We're talking minute plus load times on some maps for the first time through on some systems that meet spec for the game at all. Yeah, the concept of needing 1G of RAM as a requirement for connecting to the network is damn silly, but I was responding to the "1GB is overkill" portion of the parent post. It's not overkill by any means if you're doing things like gaming, or even 3D design work as part of a college course. Most students won't need that. But then, most students shouldn't need gigabit fiber either.
In my opinion, the specs for college systems intended to be used for actual WORK should be pretty reasonable for all but the students involved in computer science or other disciplines that require number crunching.
A one gigahertz box with 256M of RAM and your pick of Linux distros or Windows 98 with a 100Mbit connection to a shared T3 for the entire campus. It was fine in 1999, it's fine now.
Because wireless is not gigabit.:) Wireless is great, yes. However, in a school environment maybe it would be enough. I know for my LAN at home, streaming video from a server machine and synchronizing iTunes libraries over the network is a bit sluggish on wireless, though most dorm residents won't be running servers - and those that do will be able to slap on switches off a server PC and 10/100/1000 copper.
One gig of RAM isn't necessary? Geez, when's the last time you tried to load a FarCry map on Windows XP Pro with all the service packs and even just the minimal functional tray icon crap?
I upgraded from 512M to 768M recently and the difference was just stunning. Trust me, a gig of RAM is most certainly not pushing the limits of human needs. It's pushing the limits of programmer inefficiency and incompetence, but it's not pushing it for actual users.
I know this would be the first problem that came to mind for me. How will people be forced to deal with the problem that there's probably not a single laptop out there that has fiber gigabit in it? Of course, my Powerbook has gigabit copper on it, as does my recently upgraded motherboard. So there're two gigabit units that wouldn't be able to work here. There's a time and place where backwards compatibility has to be maintained, and most certainly a time to ditch it. It seems to me that we're about a decade away from fiber being the most efficient and effective way to push gigabit to the dorm room.
I have one of these. It's pretty shitty. No support for static IP addresses. Best I've had so far is a Netgear MR314, but I was foolish enough to loan that one to my brother and haven't gotten it back yet. The Netgear was pretty basic, but it at least seemed somewhat stable.
Also, the FMI/CompUSA branded model has shit support. And any change to the firmware settings requires a restart. ANY change.
I have a Newton 2100 and love it. Unfortunately, I don't get to use it as much as I'd like to and the OSX support being put together by some of the Newton supporters still around is pretty good, though not nearly as robust as most people will be looking for. Tends to crash a bit, and I know that development stalled but was definitely not dead. The screen on the Newton is almost perfect for eBooks, I think, and the only real flaw with the Newton as a book reader is that there's no hardware switch that can be used to change pages. Everything involves the stylus or a fingernail if you're careful. I'm yet another of those folks that would sincerely love it if Apple produced another PDA with a large form factor. I don't care if a PDA can fit in my shirt pocket, what I value the most is screen size. It wouldn't be hard at all to make something like a Newton-sized screen in 1/4 the thickness, weight and with modern features that could really become so useful as to be invaluable at that size. Price would be a major factor as it usually is, unfortunately. But if any company has the balls, it could be Apple.
But back to the topic at hand, the Newton has survived surprisingly well, can be upgraded for battery life and backlight age repair and even has some crazy motherfuckers tinkering with the idea of Bluetooth enabling it. Pricing for Newtons on eBay was higher than that for many more "advanced" Palm devices like the IIIc (which I traded for my Newton a couple years ago) If I got into reading eBooks, I'd definitely try and see what I could put together using the Newton.
It shouldn't cost anyplace nearly that much money. For that much, you could probably get the whole place wired. Gaming isn't going to be a good thing for wireless, anyhow. But if you insist on doing something wireless, what I'd suggest would be to look for some powerful 802.11g gear (Just top-of-the-line consumer stuff, nothing pro level) and just put one unit on each floor in as central a location as you can manage. It'll be hard to work out the specifics, but I can't imagine it taking more than one unit per floor unless the rooms with computers are long distances from eachother.
Now what I'd really suggest would be to have it wired. This may be something to discuss with the landlord and it wouldn't even be that tough to do, in some cases. You could possibly even run wired connections through the same lines the cable goes.
But if wireless is truly the only option you want, and you can get access to the elevator shaft my suggestion would be to run a 100Mbit line into the shaft to a switch, then drop a potent WAP at each floor level on seperate channels and names, that way you're not sharing all the bandwidth for all the floors. Linksys WAP11's would be good for this as you can hack them to get a little more power.
Look at ReplayTV as an addon to MythTV.
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Thanks to a great program called DVArchive, you can actually use a PC to 'spoof' as a ReplayTV device, and even use some remote control features right from the PC interface. (DVArchive offers a remote control window that controls the PVR directly) Unfortunately, integration with MythTV may be difficult as the author of DVArchive has not responded to messages about releasing source code or specifications again, even though the project is hosted at SourceForge.
I sent him an email yesterday for just such a purpose as asking about access to either source code or documentation on how to access the ReplayTV system if I were to work on another application, and am still hoping for a reply. I think ReplayTV integration with something like MythTV could be an incredible addition to the MythTV add-in suite.
DVArchive is a great bit of software, and thanks to it being written in Java it serves quite well as a multi-platform tool. But there just don't seem to be a lot of updates to information on it, and I'm starting to worry that it's going to just turn into vanish-ware before the knowledge it holds can be released. There were some source links to it some time back, but I have no idea where they might be now. Gerry said the CVS for the original sourceforge site got corrupted at some point.
There're two basic methods of Innovation at work here, Apple's brand and Microsoft's. Microsoft wants to leverage the choice of software tools made by third-party developers (that they haven't driven under by co-opting technology from) to promote a "choice" among applications on the Windows platform.
Apple wants to provide the "choice" of a Non-Windows platform and non-Microsoft technology. And Apple, for all their ills as far as co-opting technology in ways distressingly similar to Microsoft, has never been known to utterly decimate the competition or actively belittle or disparage them. What Apple does when they add new features to the OS is to simply set the bar higher for 3rd party developers.
Apple bothers me in some things, but when it comes right down to it, I don't see Apple trying dirty tricks in the background to drive anyone away from creating music services for the Mac platform. Microsoft would just -love- to push vendors into a MS Music Store lock in.
This actually doesn't bother me a lot, considering that the people they're going after ARE the criminal ones. What -would- bother me is if they decided to come knocking on my door for my recordings of "24" from my TV.
In that case, I'd take G. Gordon's advice. "Aim for the head." Wanna play cop, RIAA? There's your chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, nerds apparently are the ones finding the Thunderbirds revival interesting, and it seems as though a fair number of Slashdot nerds seem to lean toward the right...
I call it all because of the Puppet Factor(tm). Geeks like Thunderbirds, and Geeks like Bush, so I figure it's all about the puppets.
I know that there're definitely flaws inherent in the Palm OS, and the thought of spending $299-399 to read eBooks "decently" may be a bit overboard, but for anyone that's shopping for a PalmOS device anyhow, and wants to consider eBooks, definitely check out a Zodiac. In addition to being a competent gaming machine (at least in hardware, software is desperately needed) it makes a damn good Palm device. The 8M ATI video chip in it does anti-aliasing quite well and makes text quite readable when you use a reader like the commercial app RepliGo. I've been reading some eBooks I've had kicking around for a while on it, and find that it's not nearly as good as a real book, but the eyestrain factor is pretty much nil with the smallest font and landscape mode. The trigger switches on the top of the unit work great for paging, and the analog stick scrolls quite smoothly.
Last week I picked up a Tapwave Zodiac as a new PDA after having lusted after -some- form of small, useful PDA for years. I have a Newton 2100, but it's simply too large for my usual uses, and I never picked up the memory cards and wifi card to really make it useful around the house. Someday I still intend to do this, however. But what struck me as soon as I got the Zodiac home is how much the basic form factor of it resembled that of the almost ten-year-old Newton design. Two expansion slots at the top, large (comparatively) screen, flipcover for the LCD, and an emphasis on being able to be used in landscape mode.
Aside from a few design flaws the Zodiac has in regards to the stylus location and a flipcover, it feels like a Newton in many respects - other than the OS. PalmOS really feels quite weak compared to what the NewtonOS can do, and I really wish that Palm had learned more from what Apple managed to do so many years ago. Screens now are creeping up on the level of pixel density really required for some good UI design, but the operating systems just aren't keeping up. Now, it's also a shame it's taking Palm six versions to get to multitasking.
I have to say I'm glad to see the Zodiac on that list winning at least the bronze. I got mine last week and have been continually impressed with just how smooth the "fit and finish" have been. Aside from a small problem with a bend in the case near the sync port, the Zodiac is a great piece of electronics. Now, if they can only work out a better solution for the stylus, integrate a latch to the flipcover and make it firm (like the Newton 2x00, perhaps) and see what can be worked out with the somewhat tricky sync port connection, it'd be close to perfect.
I heard about this guy that worked at some place with these other guys that some friends of my second cousin knew, that REALLY wanted a copy of Half-Life. This was back in like '98. See, this guy's wife really, really, really didn't understand what the gane was about, so the guy tried to show her why he wanted it so bad and pulled out a crowbar and started whaling on things all over the house!
Once she got out of the coma, and he got off his 3-4 year sentence, he got their kid's copy of Half-Life with the divorce settlement and he's had all the time he needed to play it ever since!
True story!
Look, folks. The real success behind Fallout was the story, the aesthetic, the locations, and the fact they put it together with some pretty good attention to the important things like gameplay. Remember that the original plan for Fallout was simply as a GURPS-based game that got re-worked near the end of development into the SPECIAL system that -did- work very well.
The real problem with this kind of development would be if they went and tried to make it turn-based-MMORPG. Then we'd just have to kill them all.
If they do something similar to a City of Heroes environment, without the mind-numbing quest for items and other crap like you have in more traditional MMORPG places, it'd go over quite well.
Sorry, by Top 500 I'm referring to the Top 500 supercomputers in the world. Apparently the cluster of systems used for SecondLife is actually getting close to cracking into that list and might actually be there when the end of the year comes around and the new rankings come out. Every simulator is yet another computer that could contribute to a higher score for the system as a whole.
I think the only problem with Linux distribution of an SL client is simply lack of resources to fine-tune things at this point. The backend is all on Linux machines, and the frontend is all designed for portability already having already been ported to OSX with the release of 1.3. The company is expanding the available land at a pretty quick rate lately and even hired a few new folks over the past couple months.
Eventually, they -want- to do a Linux client. It'll just take time and resources. Also, a nice amusing note - they're on track to get on Top 500 next year.
Yeah, they'll be fucking in.. oops, people made those animations during the beta preview phase. They're fuckin' already!
;)
(Alexander Blanc appreciates referral references on SecondLife, by the way.
Remember, the money only vanishes from the economy when someone buys land at auction from the Lindens when it's new. If I buy land from you for L$50000 (which I don't have, so no, I'm not offering. ;) then you suddenly have the money and I don't. There really is no way for Linden Dollars to be eliminated now, except when people use them to replace real money for land rights. And I don't even know the rules around that. Expiring accounts are one way, yeah, but I don't think we're going to see someone like Zeppi Schlegel or the other big barons simply shut down an account. :)
There are actually a ton of different rules and regulations that I recently discovered (not by being employed by Linden Labs, but by reading forums) that "Liasons" need to follow.
They can never give out information on customers.
They can have alternate non-"Linden" characters, but with severe restrictions on participation in groups and other aspects of the game that involve money (they can never accumulate "Dwell" which is the monetary bonus for having people use your land.) or leadership.
As others already mentioned, the addition of land involves adding hardware. They might be able to get a deal on land from someone they're friendly with, but if they did it due to being a "Linden", they'd be in deep shit. Hell, I got a deal on my first land parcel from one of the high-ranking money barons in the world during my first month, and I'm almost a nobody there even now that I manage a "radio station".
Actually, the interesting thing is that Linden Labs doesn't directly profit from the real estate dealing going on with the game, other than in the offical new-simulator land auctions they run every once in a while as they add new machines to the cluster. They auction those off, and this is a very recent occurrence. Once they sell the land one time (for either L$ or real dollars) they only make money when it's rented out on a monthly basis. They'd make more money renting 512 square meter parcels to everyone, than they do renting the equivalent of a dedicated server for $195 a month. When someone in-world sells it, they don't take a percentage, cut, or anything similar. I could (and have) simply walk up to a plot of land offered for sale for L$5000, pay L$5000 and as long as I'm paying enough per-month for my land rights, it's mine. The fluctuation in pricing stops affecting LL directly after first sale.
There was pretty bad. Really bad. But once you see what people can do with SecondLife and the kind of creations it inspires - you'll see why people get into it for a lot less money than the MMORPG of the week. If I didn't want land, I'd never need to pay Linden Labs another dollar.
The article linked to has a few flaws in it, unfortunately. One of which is the claim that there's a $9.95 a month fee to join SecondLife. I'm sure others will have pointed this out long before I did. There are two "tiers" of membership, the one-time lifetime registration fee of $9.95 or a monthly $9.95 price to become a premium member with a few extra services, primary of which is the ability to own up to 512 square meters of land parcel as long as you're a premium member.
There, the recently-abandoned social VR site that I found out about before SecondLife, tended to have a real problem with RL$ and VR$ exchanges. You really did have to shell out RL cash for VR buckage, and on a pretty significant range of expenses. Articles of clothing are insanely pricy "There". In contrast with There, the management at Linden Labs (SecondLife's developers) has provided a great deal of control over the economy. They permit - but don't promote - sites such as the gaming open market, and have very few different reasons to try and get real money from you. Primarily, the income for Linden Labs is created by monthly fees to own land. This makes sense, as each chunk of land is essentially a pretty significant chunk of server load. I own roughly 1/16th of the resources of an entire 2.8Ghz server machine, and pay $25 a month for the priviledge. This allows me over a thousand objects with which I can create my own buildings, art objects, whatever. That's the only money Linden Labs gets from me on an ongoing basis.
For in-world money, Linden Dollars (L$) the exchange rate in real money is completely dwarfed by what you can actually make in world by simply being an amiable individual and putting together a few fun events. I've got around L$7000 in world right now, thanks in part to my managing an in-world streaming radio station called Radio SLive which broadcasts an average of 4-5 nights per week of personalized music and banter using Live365's crummy (but legal) alternatives. Offhand, anyone knowing an alternative to L365 that allows for no-login, no-required-webpage referral licensed music streaming - sorry, no independent-only options, we need the RIAA stuff. It's what people want.) please let me know.
If I were to convert the money I've made into real dollars, I'd probably be able to pull around $30 out of SecondLife. Do I really intend to do that? Not a chance. In-world, that money really has a great amount of value. Simply by earning bonuses based on my social interaction with people (you earn positive and negative ratings based on actions, appearance, and build quality) you I made upwards of L$500 a week - enough to buy some cars with, and half-price for many aircraft, some of the most expensive non-land related expenses in the world. I wheeled, dealed, and pleaded to pay the in-world expense to buy my land from other players, and now only need to spend $25 a month to maintan the server space to hold it. It really isn't so bad - I could have almost as much fun with 512 square meters of land, if I weren't hosting occasional events and presenting an in-world frontage for the radio station. Clothing can be made for free - no fees beyond a L$10 upload fee for graphics and 9 second sound clips - and objects (primitives - prims) can be made in-world for attachment to a person's avatar at no costs. The only cost to create items in world is to do so on private land - there are a number of sandbox regions where people can create larger objects without much restriction. A great place to play with building a home before you get land to put it on. Coding in-world is free, and there are even many scripts written and released with a GPL-style license. Some even with the GPL itself.
The real-world to L$ economy is not nearly as bad as it is in other places, simply due to the fact that a great time can be had for literally peanuts. You don't need to own land to have a good time, though it can help. Land is continually being offered at low, low prices to landless peopl
It's not just texture memory FarCry uses that takes so long - We're talking minute plus load times on some maps for the first time through on some systems that meet spec for the game at all. Yeah, the concept of needing 1G of RAM as a requirement for connecting to the network is damn silly, but I was responding to the "1GB is overkill" portion of the parent post. It's not overkill by any means if you're doing things like gaming, or even 3D design work as part of a college course. Most students won't need that. But then, most students shouldn't need gigabit fiber either.
In my opinion, the specs for college systems intended to be used for actual WORK should be pretty reasonable for all but the students involved in computer science or other disciplines that require number crunching.
A one gigahertz box with 256M of RAM and your pick of Linux distros or Windows 98 with a 100Mbit connection to a shared T3 for the entire campus. It was fine in 1999, it's fine now.
Because wireless is not gigabit. :) Wireless is great, yes. However, in a school environment maybe it would be enough. I know for my LAN at home, streaming video from a server machine and synchronizing iTunes libraries over the network is a bit sluggish on wireless, though most dorm residents won't be running servers - and those that do will be able to slap on switches off a server PC and 10/100/1000 copper.
One gig of RAM isn't necessary? Geez, when's the last time you tried to load a FarCry map on Windows XP Pro with all the service packs and even just the minimal functional tray icon crap?
I upgraded from 512M to 768M recently and the difference was just stunning. Trust me, a gig of RAM is most certainly not pushing the limits of human needs. It's pushing the limits of programmer inefficiency and incompetence, but it's not pushing it for actual users.
I know this would be the first problem that came to mind for me. How will people be forced to deal with the problem that there's probably not a single laptop out there that has fiber gigabit in it? Of course, my Powerbook has gigabit copper on it, as does my recently upgraded motherboard. So there're two gigabit units that wouldn't be able to work here. There's a time and place where backwards compatibility has to be maintained, and most certainly a time to ditch it. It seems to me that we're about a decade away from fiber being the most efficient and effective way to push gigabit to the dorm room.
No, brush that under the carpet and KEEP IT AWAY FROM OUR CHILDREN! Will somebody please think of THE CHILDREN!!
FUCK THE CHILDREN!
I have one of these. It's pretty shitty. No support for static IP addresses. Best I've had so far is a Netgear MR314, but I was foolish enough to loan that one to my brother and haven't gotten it back yet. The Netgear was pretty basic, but it at least seemed somewhat stable.
Also, the FMI/CompUSA branded model has shit support. And any change to the firmware settings requires a restart. ANY change.
I have a Newton 2100 and love it. Unfortunately, I don't get to use it as much as I'd like to and the OSX support being put together by some of the Newton supporters still around is pretty good, though not nearly as robust as most people will be looking for. Tends to crash a bit, and I know that development stalled but was definitely not dead. The screen on the Newton is almost perfect for eBooks, I think, and the only real flaw with the Newton as a book reader is that there's no hardware switch that can be used to change pages. Everything involves the stylus or a fingernail if you're careful. I'm yet another of those folks that would sincerely love it if Apple produced another PDA with a large form factor. I don't care if a PDA can fit in my shirt pocket, what I value the most is screen size. It wouldn't be hard at all to make something like a Newton-sized screen in 1/4 the thickness, weight and with modern features that could really become so useful as to be invaluable at that size. Price would be a major factor as it usually is, unfortunately. But if any company has the balls, it could be Apple.
But back to the topic at hand, the Newton has survived surprisingly well, can be upgraded for battery life and backlight age repair and even has some crazy motherfuckers tinkering with the idea of Bluetooth enabling it. Pricing for Newtons on eBay was higher than that for many more "advanced" Palm devices like the IIIc (which I traded for my Newton a couple years ago) If I got into reading eBooks, I'd definitely try and see what I could put together using the Newton.
It shouldn't cost anyplace nearly that much money. For that much, you could probably get the whole place wired. Gaming isn't going to be a good thing for wireless, anyhow. But if you insist on doing something wireless, what I'd suggest would be to look for some powerful 802.11g gear (Just top-of-the-line consumer stuff, nothing pro level) and just put one unit on each floor in as central a location as you can manage. It'll be hard to work out the specifics, but I can't imagine it taking more than one unit per floor unless the rooms with computers are long distances from eachother.
Now what I'd really suggest would be to have it wired. This may be something to discuss with the landlord and it wouldn't even be that tough to do, in some cases. You could possibly even run wired connections through the same lines the cable goes.
But if wireless is truly the only option you want, and you can get access to the elevator shaft my suggestion would be to run a 100Mbit line into the shaft to a switch, then drop a potent WAP at each floor level on seperate channels and names, that way you're not sharing all the bandwidth for all the floors. Linksys WAP11's would be good for this as you can hack them to get a little more power.
Thanks to a great program called DVArchive, you can actually use a PC to 'spoof' as a ReplayTV device, and even use some remote control features right from the PC interface. (DVArchive offers a remote control window that controls the PVR directly) Unfortunately, integration with MythTV may be difficult as the author of DVArchive has not responded to messages about releasing source code or specifications again, even though the project is hosted at SourceForge.
I sent him an email yesterday for just such a purpose as asking about access to either source code or documentation on how to access the ReplayTV system if I were to work on another application, and am still hoping for a reply. I think ReplayTV integration with something like MythTV could be an incredible addition to the MythTV add-in suite.
DVArchive is a great bit of software, and thanks to it being written in Java it serves quite well as a multi-platform tool. But there just don't seem to be a lot of updates to information on it, and I'm starting to worry that it's going to just turn into vanish-ware before the knowledge it holds can be released. There were some source links to it some time back, but I have no idea where they might be now. Gerry said the CVS for the original sourceforge site got corrupted at some point.
There're two basic methods of Innovation at work here, Apple's brand and Microsoft's. Microsoft wants to leverage the choice of software tools made by third-party developers (that they haven't driven under by co-opting technology from) to promote a "choice" among applications on the Windows platform.
Apple wants to provide the "choice" of a Non-Windows platform and non-Microsoft technology. And Apple, for all their ills as far as co-opting technology in ways distressingly similar to Microsoft, has never been known to utterly decimate the competition or actively belittle or disparage them. What Apple does when they add new features to the OS is to simply set the bar higher for 3rd party developers.
Apple bothers me in some things, but when it comes right down to it, I don't see Apple trying dirty tricks in the background to drive anyone away from creating music services for the Mac platform. Microsoft would just -love- to push vendors into a MS Music Store lock in.
This actually doesn't bother me a lot, considering that the people they're going after ARE the criminal ones. What -would- bother me is if they decided to come knocking on my door for my recordings of "24" from my TV.
In that case, I'd take G. Gordon's advice. "Aim for the head." Wanna play cop, RIAA? There's your chance.