I've got an 80 gig iPod that sounds just fine in my cars plugged into the line in (or through the tape deck) with 256kbit or FLAC encodes. 128kbit isn't horrible, but satellite wasn't honestly much better. I recall hearing that XM actually was using AAC for the streams, with bitrate decided on a per-channel basis.
Initially, yes, the radios were huge. My Delphi SkyFi was giant, as is the SkyFi 2 (Complete with FCC violating FM transmitter, woo!) I replaced it with.
Indoor reception is spotty, yeah. It's a satellite. Stick it in a southern window and it'll usually work unless you have obstructions.
Contracts? I never encountered a contract in relation to XM, so I don't know what you're on about here. You buy a radio, you subscribe, cancel whenever. Sirius might have been different, but I didn't think so.
Paying for each radio wasn't a big deal before, since the rates were lower than today.
The biggest problem with satellite now, is that so many of the complaints you have about regular radio finally got pulled in.
The advertising sucks and feels designed for morons, and there -are- only about a dozen different ads you'll hear in the space of a day's listening on some channels. The sound quality, in my opinion anyhow, did drop with the Sirius merger. The Sirius DJ's are serious "weak sauce" with few exceptions (Nina Blackwood's good on the 80's, and Cain(?) on Octane isn't bad) though the XM DJ's always seemed to be a lot better quality. (I wouldn't have even accepted three free months if they weren't keeping Grant Random and Bodhi around)
But what annoys the hell out of me, is that they talk over the songs now. Yesterday, I was listening to Alice Cooper's "Hey, Stupid" and the last moment of the song got cut off mid-phrase. When I'm trying to listen to a song and get into the groove, that pisses me -right- off. So it goes right up there with your "Idiotic DJ's" complaint.
Even in most cities, 3G coverage is spotty as hell. I can't drive from one end of Carson City to the other using Pandora on my iPhone, without the phone dropping into EDGE during the drive and blasting high-volume GSM noise through my speakers.
Sirius XM is formed from two companies that both had massive overhead (literally) and poor plans to get out of it. I always felt that XM had a better chance to survive, and that Stern just cost Sirius way too much. (Besides, Opie & Anthony are actually funnier.)
This is one of the primary reasons I got XM when I did, back in 2002. I was doing a lot of long distance driving, and it was great not to have to mess with trying to find a new station every hour or so. It didn't hurt that the DJ's were talented, the playlists were deep and the quality was stellar compared to anything short of a CD at the time.
Back then, XM really felt like an amazing thing. They were playing music, didn't have many ads, didn't really stray from the "We're here to play your music" ideals that they based the business plan around. Unfortunately, things just went (slowly) downhill from there.
Right now, I'm on the last free month of three that they gave me when I called to cancel after the Sirius channel merge took away some of my favorite stations. I've got a Slacker G1 shipping on Wednesday, an 80 gig iPod and an iPhone now, so I have options galore that I didn't seven years ago. Three months ago, I had five XM Radio accounts for myself and family. Next week, I'm only going to have one.
Sirius XM did exactly what people were afraid they would if they merged. Jacked prices, destroyed choice in the marketplace, and in general screwed the customer. The FCC made a huge mistake allowing this merger, and now people who used to enjoy satellite radio are paying for it.
But I'm not nearly as bitter as I could be. Slacker and Pandora are great, the spread of DRM-free MP3's from Amazon and iTunes mean I don't have as many qualms about 'buying' music online as I once did, and one of my XM radios will easily move between my two cars with only a power brick. Sirius and XM may have been afraid that the Internet was going to pose a challenge, but by raising multi-radio rates $2 mo/radio, only three months after killing/merging a lot of people's favorite stations they're only making it worse for themselves.
So why do you need to do your high-end Photoshop work on the same machine you use for programming? Sure, it might be a -little- quicker, but networking makes a whole world of difference.
A Mac mini could be just fine for XCode work for most people, and what exactly is your definition of high-end Photoshop work? And a learning curve coming from XP to OSX? That's like a couple hours.
Sure, there's a learning curve to XCode, but it's not as steep as people who have never touched it think. Join the ADC for free, download the free tutorial videos, etcetera, and look into it.
Bottom line, if you're that easily dissuaded from getting into development, you're not that excited after all.
I have to say that this book, which I picked up last week, has really given me a kick in the pants as far as getting back into programming. I haven't hardly done a damn thing since college in '02, and since I went to a pretty craptastic school that doesn't mean much.
MS Visual C++ really made programming a slog, compared to the IDE that Apple came up with for XCode. I'm just a couple chapters into the book now, but all in all I'm really enjoying the process of programming again for the first time since GW-BASIC. I can understand why a lot of people here (especially here) complain about having to buy a Mac, having to use XCode, having to do things Apple's way but for something like the iPhone and iPod Touch development I can't imagine a better route.
This is for the most part a very good book, at least for my rusty brain, but it definitely needs some kind of Objective-C accompaniment if you're not familiar with the language and want to do more than just follow instructions. Well worth the money.
And again, to those people complaining about XCode and doing things Apple's way, dig around the ADC site and you'll see that Apple's learned a hell of a lot since the days when CodeWarrior was the only hope for a Mac developer's sanity.
The problem with reverse osmosis, is that the membranes for RO systems are very, very difficult to maintain and store in the kind of conditions you'll find in third-world nations without a supply chain following along. Membranes need to be kept refrigerated, properly sealed, and replaced on a fairly regular basis. Something that pulls off the same task with a lower level of support requirement would be a big hit in many markets, I'm sure.
Thinking like that is exactly _why_ the world needs people like Dean Kamen.
Irrational engineering has led either directly or indirectly to many, many of the world's great advances. Guys like Kamen are out there on the "crazy edge" of bleeding edge, for a good reason.
What I'd love to see Kamen work on would be some kind of mass-market home water purification system for use here in the US, simply because that way he'd be able to make a profitable killing. There are so few companies that manufacture equipment out there now, that they would not be difficult at all to supplant with a better product.
US Filter, Culligan, etc, are all designed to support an infrastructure of independent distributors and not really intended for personal maintenance. The technology in these things is seriously old-school in most cases, while the science behind them is fairly simple.
Radon removal - simple as hell. Just push air in and out of water to clear it. I've seen it lowered just by putting a valve on the water lines for low levels. Or by using carbon filters. Water softening - simple as hell, but requires filtering media cleaning which goes through bag after bag of salt, which then goes into groundwater or sewage systems. Iron removal - again, simple but requires filter media. pH balancing - simple, but requires chemicals.
If Dean can come up with ways to do those items without the grossly excessive media requirements they have these days, he'll really be on to something to revolutionize an industry.
I lived in Manchester working for my brother's water company for a few years, I may not know all the details, but I know that it's an industry based on some really simple principles that could benefit from some serious technological leaps beyond "Hey, the timer that says to use 10 pounds of salt to clean a water softener is now digital instead of an analog timer!"
If you design your system with a web-based system, you can even go ahead and add other types of device into the mix while still properly supporting a phone. Something that works with the aging Nokia 770's web interface, or even the newer 810 would work just fine with an iPhone, or any flavor of Windows Mobile.
In my personal experience, the iPhone would be a great platform for something like this - though the cost of entry isn't so great. However, the iPod Touch would do just as well unless you really need to have cellular access to things from long distances. The Mobile Safari interface is nice and clean, and the "Sliding" paradigm used in a lot of interfaces for it seems to be quite user-friendly and not too tough to work with.
Windows Mobile might be good for development of a standard application, and Windows Mobile devices are a dime a dozen these days if you don't mind going back a few versions. Unfortunately, the underlying OS is.. Windows Mobile.
So with this NDA issue, I can't buy a book, read a forum, get any assistance at all with writing my iPhone application... So what the hell good is an SDK you can't talk about? Is this cellular fight club or something?
Apple, fix this shit. Really. Fix it now. There's no excuse for not letting the NDA go, no way that it protects you. The phone's been jailbroken, it _will_ be unlocked, so why stifle development?
I've been a Dreamhost customer for a couple years, since seeing someone here mention them a while back. And I used to be really happy with them. Unfortunately, right at the same time as they're making this push to suggest people use Google Apps for email serving - which may be a good idea - they're also having some really disastrous support issues for some customers.
I suggested a client of mine, who has a small business that needs a steady uptime but doesn't generate enough money yet to pay for a dedicated host, switch to Dreamhost so I could design him a new web presence on Wordpress. We got him all set up there, his new site went live, he loved everything about it... but then the cluster it was on turned out to be a three month lemon. So bad, Dreamhost is actually killing brand-new hardware and putting people on other systems. This is good... except that it's taken them months to do it, and many websites like my client's were just plain -down- for days at a time.
They even at one point sent me an email saying "We've moving you to another server as you requested, it started an hour ago." which came two hours after the client said to go with another host.
I got him calmed down thanks to Dreamhost's email - mainly because I haven't been paid for the -first- 60 hours of work on this site - and avoided the move, but the next week the server in question crapped out again and his site was still on it. The email felt like a lie. For $10 a month, you can't expect five nines, but you should be able to expect something better than a week to two of downtime a year which is what people on the blingy cluster were getting. Also of note, Dreamhost has no phone support.
I stuck with Dreamhost for quite some time, but I really just can't suggest them until they get things straightened out. All this coming on the heels of February's "Bill all customers for a year or two instead of a month." mistake, and I'm hoping they have a bit of a shakeup.
My personal sites are staying there, because I'm not anal about uptimes and they're fairly inexpensive, but I get a bad feeling from how they handled this cluster issue and how they're pushing people off to different mail servers. It makes me worried.
I loved that game, but what always struck me as mildly depressing was playing the classic "Jetfighter II" which had the YF-23 "Black Widow" in it, the plane that eventually lost out to the F-22 in that round of fighting proposals. The YF-23 was such a gorgeous concept.
Of course, the best thing about Jetfighter II was mid 90's game physics. I fondly recall the time I landed a YF-23 on a carrier with a three-point landing due to intentional stalling at 10 feet off the deck. Low and slow, vector thrust upward, kill the throttle entirely and glide over the deck until you pop flaps and yank the nose up until you nail a stall then level off with gear down and just drop.
Knock your SR-71 design estimate back about a decade. The OXCART contract that created the SR-71 (evolving it from the A-12) was awarded in 1959, so all the real design work was done before 1960, it was just the construction that took a couple years. And the SR-71 served damn well until we put enough satellites in the sky to cover things almost as well with closer to realtime monitoring.
Sometimes it makes you wonder just how many eyes the military really has up there now, if they were willing to mothball the SR-71 with no (public) clear successor.
In a day and age where aircraft from the 1950's are still flying and in active service, to see something like the F-117 come and go so quickly has to be a sign of major design limitations from the first day of use.
Two bombs, no Air-to-Air capability other than playing "How not to be seen." really well, and subsonic speeds just seemed to make the F-117 come across as oddball in my eyes. Either the F-22 has better stealth than we realize, or there's something newer, more stealthier and more secretive coming around.
I haven't seen an honest-to-god serial port in ages on anything new. What I've done for that is just get an old Panasonic Toughbook CF-71 and use that for things that require me to plug into a console.
The biggest problem in portable systems that aren't designed to replace a desktop is that they couldn't replace one if they -had- to. And honestly, when I've carried a laptop around with me for any length of time and serious usage, it's gone and replaced my primary desktop for everything except gaming. For people like your typical Slashdot reader, unless we get something that's at least on par with a low-end but functional desktop, we're probably going to be too frustrated by a limited budget laptop.
I have a Macbook, and I love it. But if I wanted something on a budget that was going to be my utility system for lugging around and doing office-type tasks, the last thing I'd want to use is a full-blown desktop OS. There really needs to be a new kind of system designed for portable machines that's designed for ease of use, low power consumption, and high grades of flexibility without needing to wade through a typical desktop interface.
If I were designing a new OS for one of these systems, I'd want something that handled software installation and deletion similarly to OS X. You drag a file into Applications or wherever, and it runs when you click it. I would want accessory and connectivity options designed along the lines of a PDA - illustrative graphical things you toggle on and off with virtual switches. I'd want a heavily customized and graphically streamlined version of Open Office to handle documents. A modified version of Firefox made to work within the context of a special application control bar similar to a combination of the OS X task bar and the Windows tray.
Linux is just not a good platform for something like this as it currently stands. I for one never want to worry about whether or not my glibc is the right fucking version before I install software. (It's been a while since I used a mainstream distro for longer than a few days) And I know that if I don't want to know it, my mom sure the hell wouldn't when she saw a neat new gadget to install on her email device.
Insofar as hardware goes, I think Intel has the right processor coming out with Atom. If a system like I just described was written from the ground up, a gigabyte of RAM should be plenty - but go for two so you can use one as a disk cache for even more speed improvement. Again, a custom OS and streamlined applications could be easily done within a few gigabytes of hard drive. And there's no reason an 8G internal flash source wouldn't work with an option to slot in another 8 or so with the latest flash technologies for media storage and application space.
Dual-core CPU's wouldn't necessarily be needed if you're not loading up a monster desktop OS. Just take a look at what Nokia has managed with the N8XX line, which for all its faults is still a damn nice little piece of hardware. It runs Linux, so packaging is a clusterfuck, and at least the N770 takes a while to boot - then runs slowly - but those can be overcome with RAM upgrades.
I was recently on the market for a budget laptop, and was surprised by what was out there. I wasn't looking at subnotes, or super-cheap, or anything of the sort. But what amazed me was how I was able to find so many laptops with 802.11n, gigabit wired networking, ExpressCard, DVD burners, 2-3 gigabytes of RAM and sizeable SATA hard drives for under $800. But!
Almost NONE of these had Bluetooth.
What the hell?
I wound up with a Toshiba U305 which wasn't bad, 250 gigs of HD, 2G RAM, 1.67Ghz dual-core CPU, about 3-4 hours of battery life - but I was stuck with Vista, no bluetooth, and 100Mbit wired networking.
13 days later I soaked the 15% return charge at Best Buy and got... yeah, a Macbook.
Aside from tepid video performance and a small hard drive, and lacking the still-mostly-useless to me ExpressCard slot, it's been great.
I've been trying to think of a good response to your post, Stephen. I'm even going so far as to assume this is really you, which is a first for me. What's been hanging me up though, is that I'm really torn on what the idea of good game material for television could be.
Should it be something that offers the industry a little cachet of trendiness? Perhaps something a little more sophisticated? Maybe a good sense of humor, with an undercurrent of sincerity? I think there's room for all of these - but that the example we were given of The Metagame didn't seem to know what it wanted to be. From all appearances, it looked like a game of Win, Lose or Draw from the 1980's if you just glanced at the layout for a minute. I've worked in public access television, and I know how much of a pain in the ass it is to get a good set so I feel your pain on that point, but at the same time the actual game itself could have felt a lot more polished.
The topics I watched (the first two) were fairly good ones, with a nice sense of fit to what it felt like you were shooting for until you all started to speak up and then... the answers just came off as though nobody had ever thought of them before. The woman who said Half-Life was more realistic because Gordon Freeman wore glasses? I wanted someone to throw her a laptop and make her play the game because it sure didn't look like she ever had. This may work okay for the MTV crowd, but when it comes to the geeks that actually like the kind of depth these questions offer as a possibility... it's just going to make us wonder what the hell we're wasting time on.
My work in public access was technical - not creative - so I'm sure I'm not the best judge of what I saw, even for a public access loser. However, I was approached to do a show a few months before I left the program I was with, and I wouldn't have let something like this off my scratch drive before dropping it online. It sounds like a different experience in person, but this... just didn't work. The GDC crowd is a much better fit for this kind of material. However.
My completely unsolicited 0.02 would start by suggesting a better host configuration. You don't need two people to corral a debate show. You need one person, like perhaps CleverNickName (Wil Wheaton, if you're new here to Slashdot) who really, truly gets the gaming medium and can get into it in a way that few others will ever manage. I'm sure you've heard his PAX07 keynote. Give the teams at least a visible soft time limit. Maybe 30 seconds twice each for back and forth on a topic before audience judging. And - count some hands! A debate show where the answers are obviously being screwed with (people clapping for -both- options) turns into nothing but your typical forum-based wankery - but it takes up more time to watch on camera than it does to read and/or skip by a few pages of forum posters doing the same kind of non-numerically judged dick waving. Also, why bother having the giant chart of videogames on one monitor? Unless I missed something, that was only relevant when the titles were picked in the beginning. Just use a flash applet and a randomizer instead of sticking another LCD in the shot.
Add a little bit of showmanship to it, and I sure don't mean that challenge logo or whatever it was, that looks like it was slapped together in Windows Movie Maker. Hell, man. Check out www.newtek.com and pick up one of those badboys for your editing work.
Now, before I take off (insomnia, yay!) and maybe try and sleep, let me offer up one thing that I have yet to see presented properly on TV. Counter-Strike. I would love to see a Counter-Strike ladder treated in a way that didn't come off as a cheesy attention whorejob. Real commentary, tactical observations by professional operators, critique and observation of player control habits. These are things I'd love to see.
"Look at the way the Counter-Terrorist team is stacking up on the doorway. That's a fine example of SWAT tactics and..." "... And unfortunately for CT
Y'know, I was really disappointed by the quality of the arguments put forth. Seriously, the game idea is fairly weak on its own, but mix that in with people that don't really have any idea how to debate and discuss trivial crap in anything other than a way that sounds like a cancelled Comedy Central gameshow? No.
I would have utterly obliterated the arguments against Half-Life versus Halo, which is as far as I watched - the first segment anyhow. And honestly could have made a good case in the other direction. Anyone that spent far too many hours reading the old WWWF Grudge Match website of a bygone era because they had no life could do that. I mean, arguing that Half-Life was more realistic because Gordon Freeman had glasses and a face? What? There isn't even a Gordon Freeman -model- in the original Half-Life.
These are arguments only one level above "Hal0 sux!" due to enforced cordiality.
No.
Half-Life was more realistic than Halo in that it was based on a twisted form of actual reality, rather than a genericized future world that allowed writers to make everything up as they went along. Halo was never designed to be realistic, it was designed to be an extraordinarly well presented example of the FPS genre in order to showcase the power of the platform (later console) it was designed for. Halo's innovation was not in the reality and depth of story - even its predecessor Marathon series more than one-upped it in that regard.
What made Half-Life more realistic and worthy of a movie treatment (the two arguments I bothered to watch) were the fact it was written in order to allow the player to really experience what it was like to -be- Gordon Freeman, not just controlling some character whose life was scripted out for him. It employed realistic weapons against terrifyingly poor odds and overpowering opponents, and managed to tell more of a story in 1998 than Halo managed years later. How many people who played both games look back at Halo maps and go "Ah, those were the good old days." With the exception of Silent Cartographer, I suspect very few in comparison to the people who recall the pure dread of crowbar-smashing a path through the tunnels leading to the Lambda complex only to wind up in a collapsing sewer pipe.
Yes, the above argument is created by a tired (and slightly pathetic) mind. But it's 5:30AM and I'm going to bed.
And yes, I'd whore myself out to be on that show and really put on a -show- of pointless, completely retarded argument skills.
Maybe if they patched a locked camera mouse activated control scheme into HG:L it might actually be fun to play. Naw, those things aren't difficult if you know how to play any FPS since the dawn of time. And if you don't - stick to Diablo II. What would really make Hellgate: London a fun game to play would be a client that wasn't a complete piece of ass and a backend server architecture that didn't collapse in on itself like a black hole while trying to do something simple like keep three party members in the same instances. Or eating stats. Or crashing with anything that isn't x86 DX9.
They're getting better, and I'm enjoying it more, but... Man, this first week or so has not made me want to subscribe.
(merged posts)
Let me get this straight. You're complaining about nVidia releasing a new, cheaper, cooler, faster card not because ATI is about to cut its throat but simply because it wants to serve its customers better and push the envelope further???
I'm sorry, but open specs and decent drivers do not great hardware engineering make. I'm as eager as anyone to see game development shift to Linux, but given that it was nVidia that steamrolled ATI for the past three product generations with increasing effect, what makes you think the next one will be different? I'm not really complaining, but I am finding it a bit puzzling as to the precise method and timing considering the current market conditions already vastly favor nVidia's options over ATI's. If they'd released it as a cheaper-than-8800GTS model under a different model denomination, then there'd be nothing new. Everyone expects newer, faster, better and eventually cheaper - but not in a product in the same line.
As it currently stands, every generation of nVidia cards has seemed to have the performance curve going from GT->GTS->GTX and then to a version either xx50 or x100 higher or lower than the baseline, which for this generation is 8800. Also, when you introduce new features, typically version numbers increase - thus, an 8850 seeming more realistic a release model for this card from an outsider's perspective on the history of the industry. Basic math:
New Features + Performance Increase = New Version
Instead, they're offering new features, a performance increase, and a substantial price cut in a model that exceeds the previous standard bearer without having faced external forces that made it particularly compelling. They'd lose no face in introducing an 8850 series even in the face of a dramatically improved ATI product. They could even have priced this card at a low enough level as an 8850 product without making too much of a mess of the current expectations of the product line. Now, it looks like GTS->GT->GTX which simply gets confusing when you look at the last two generations of nVidia products.
Now as far as development goes, I'm a strong believer that ATI/AMD have the potential to combine to make the next true generation of video products a real revolution over what ATI could have done alone. There may be a large focus right now on what ATI/AMD does for the low, onboard end of video chips, and how this might bring in huge profits considering the size of the install base for that level of equipment - but the real kicker is going to be the high end. If ATI and nVidia both could hold an entire market segment together, it's viable. Especially considering that when ATI first entered the game with a serious chip several years ago, it came off almost as a joke - and AMD wasn't doing much better by many accounts.
So yes, it seemed like I wasn't taking actual hardware development into account I suppose, but I'll admit I'm taking it for granted instead. The open specifications and driver support are signs that they're really working on making the right steps to enable them to take strides toward a performance lead. And in all honesty? I don't give that much of a damn about Linux game development. I'm further in line with the people who think Linux needs to finish what's been started already on the core platform (complete drivers, solidify the user experience) before trying to harass game companies into supporting a platform that competes endlessly with itself. But that's a rant for a whole other thread.
SLI can and does provide some serious performance increases in today's cards, at least on the nVidia side. ATI has yet to really prove themselves capable. Now, SLI on the same card has also been done - the 7950GX2 from nVidia a generation ago being the best example. It's going to be really, really tough to pull off something like multi-core in the GPU realm with the transistor counts being as high as they are, and the heat issue being as prominent as it is. My dual-core CPU doesn't need the cooling power my single-core NV90 GPU does, because the transistor count needed by NV90 is (I believe) higher.
Games won't require SLI by default, simply because most games are designed to run on average-level hardware. And for a good example of what this might be among gamers in general, take a look at the Valve hardware survey which offers some real insight as to what your typical gamer has in his or her machine. The percentage of computers equipped on par with mine, for example, with a single 8800GTS running in DX10 mode is miniscule, and hardware far, far lower is more the norm. But then, you have to look at games like Crysis that just turn my machine into a whining bitch trying to get above 20fps in high detail modes on 1680x1050.
Some people just don't like detail settings less than "Maximum".
Personally, this is the first time I've ever owned a rig this high end. I'm happy to have it, and can deal with not being able to run Crysis at maximum detail - but I'll also try and move up when the boost in performance is worth paying for.
Slashdot Mirror
So don't compress to 128k?
I've got an 80 gig iPod that sounds just fine in my cars plugged into the line in (or through the tape deck) with 256kbit or FLAC encodes. 128kbit isn't horrible, but satellite wasn't honestly much better. I recall hearing that XM actually was using AAC for the streams, with bitrate decided on a per-channel basis.
Initially, yes, the radios were huge. My Delphi SkyFi was giant, as is the SkyFi 2 (Complete with FCC violating FM transmitter, woo!) I replaced it with.
Indoor reception is spotty, yeah. It's a satellite. Stick it in a southern window and it'll usually work unless you have obstructions.
Contracts? I never encountered a contract in relation to XM, so I don't know what you're on about here. You buy a radio, you subscribe, cancel whenever. Sirius might have been different, but I didn't think so.
Paying for each radio wasn't a big deal before, since the rates were lower than today.
The biggest problem with satellite now, is that so many of the complaints you have about regular radio finally got pulled in.
The advertising sucks and feels designed for morons, and there -are- only about a dozen different ads you'll hear in the space of a day's listening on some channels. The sound quality, in my opinion anyhow, did drop with the Sirius merger. The Sirius DJ's are serious "weak sauce" with few exceptions (Nina Blackwood's good on the 80's, and Cain(?) on Octane isn't bad) though the XM DJ's always seemed to be a lot better quality. (I wouldn't have even accepted three free months if they weren't keeping Grant Random and Bodhi around)
But what annoys the hell out of me, is that they talk over the songs now. Yesterday, I was listening to Alice Cooper's "Hey, Stupid" and the last moment of the song got cut off mid-phrase. When I'm trying to listen to a song and get into the groove, that pisses me -right- off. So it goes right up there with your "Idiotic DJ's" complaint.
Even in most cities, 3G coverage is spotty as hell. I can't drive from one end of Carson City to the other using Pandora on my iPhone, without the phone dropping into EDGE during the drive and blasting high-volume GSM noise through my speakers.
Sirius XM is formed from two companies that both had massive overhead (literally) and poor plans to get out of it. I always felt that XM had a better chance to survive, and that Stern just cost Sirius way too much. (Besides, Opie & Anthony are actually funnier.)
This is one of the primary reasons I got XM when I did, back in 2002. I was doing a lot of long distance driving, and it was great not to have to mess with trying to find a new station every hour or so. It didn't hurt that the DJ's were talented, the playlists were deep and the quality was stellar compared to anything short of a CD at the time.
Back then, XM really felt like an amazing thing. They were playing music, didn't have many ads, didn't really stray from the "We're here to play your music" ideals that they based the business plan around. Unfortunately, things just went (slowly) downhill from there.
Right now, I'm on the last free month of three that they gave me when I called to cancel after the Sirius channel merge took away some of my favorite stations. I've got a Slacker G1 shipping on Wednesday, an 80 gig iPod and an iPhone now, so I have options galore that I didn't seven years ago. Three months ago, I had five XM Radio accounts for myself and family. Next week, I'm only going to have one.
Sirius XM did exactly what people were afraid they would if they merged. Jacked prices, destroyed choice in the marketplace, and in general screwed the customer. The FCC made a huge mistake allowing this merger, and now people who used to enjoy satellite radio are paying for it.
But I'm not nearly as bitter as I could be. Slacker and Pandora are great, the spread of DRM-free MP3's from Amazon and iTunes mean I don't have as many qualms about 'buying' music online as I once did, and one of my XM radios will easily move between my two cars with only a power brick. Sirius and XM may have been afraid that the Internet was going to pose a challenge, but by raising multi-radio rates $2 mo/radio, only three months after killing/merging a lot of people's favorite stations they're only making it worse for themselves.
So why do you need to do your high-end Photoshop work on the same machine you use for programming? Sure, it might be a -little- quicker, but networking makes a whole world of difference.
A Mac mini could be just fine for XCode work for most people, and what exactly is your definition of high-end Photoshop work? And a learning curve coming from XP to OSX? That's like a couple hours.
Sure, there's a learning curve to XCode, but it's not as steep as people who have never touched it think. Join the ADC for free, download the free tutorial videos, etcetera, and look into it.
Bottom line, if you're that easily dissuaded from getting into development, you're not that excited after all.
I have to say that this book, which I picked up last week, has really given me a kick in the pants as far as getting back into programming. I haven't hardly done a damn thing since college in '02, and since I went to a pretty craptastic school that doesn't mean much.
MS Visual C++ really made programming a slog, compared to the IDE that Apple came up with for XCode. I'm just a couple chapters into the book now, but all in all I'm really enjoying the process of programming again for the first time since GW-BASIC. I can understand why a lot of people here (especially here) complain about having to buy a Mac, having to use XCode, having to do things Apple's way but for something like the iPhone and iPod Touch development I can't imagine a better route.
This is for the most part a very good book, at least for my rusty brain, but it definitely needs some kind of Objective-C accompaniment if you're not familiar with the language and want to do more than just follow instructions. Well worth the money.
And again, to those people complaining about XCode and doing things Apple's way, dig around the ADC site and you'll see that Apple's learned a hell of a lot since the days when CodeWarrior was the only hope for a Mac developer's sanity.
The problem with reverse osmosis, is that the membranes for RO systems are very, very difficult to maintain and store in the kind of conditions you'll find in third-world nations without a supply chain following along. Membranes need to be kept refrigerated, properly sealed, and replaced on a fairly regular basis. Something that pulls off the same task with a lower level of support requirement would be a big hit in many markets, I'm sure.
I just have zero idea how to do it.
Thinking like that is exactly _why_ the world needs people like Dean Kamen.
Irrational engineering has led either directly or indirectly to many, many of the world's great advances. Guys like Kamen are out there on the "crazy edge" of bleeding edge, for a good reason.
What I'd love to see Kamen work on would be some kind of mass-market home water purification system for use here in the US, simply because that way he'd be able to make a profitable killing. There are so few companies that manufacture equipment out there now, that they would not be difficult at all to supplant with a better product.
US Filter, Culligan, etc, are all designed to support an infrastructure of independent distributors and not really intended for personal maintenance. The technology in these things is seriously old-school in most cases, while the science behind them is fairly simple.
Radon removal - simple as hell. Just push air in and out of water to clear it. I've seen it lowered just by putting a valve on the water lines for low levels. Or by using carbon filters. Water softening - simple as hell, but requires filtering media cleaning which goes through bag after bag of salt, which then goes into groundwater or sewage systems. Iron removal - again, simple but requires filter media. pH balancing - simple, but requires chemicals.
If Dean can come up with ways to do those items without the grossly excessive media requirements they have these days, he'll really be on to something to revolutionize an industry.
I lived in Manchester working for my brother's water company for a few years, I may not know all the details, but I know that it's an industry based on some really simple principles that could benefit from some serious technological leaps beyond "Hey, the timer that says to use 10 pounds of salt to clean a water softener is now digital instead of an analog timer!"
If you design your system with a web-based system, you can even go ahead and add other types of device into the mix while still properly supporting a phone. Something that works with the aging Nokia 770's web interface, or even the newer 810 would work just fine with an iPhone, or any flavor of Windows Mobile.
In my personal experience, the iPhone would be a great platform for something like this - though the cost of entry isn't so great. However, the iPod Touch would do just as well unless you really need to have cellular access to things from long distances. The Mobile Safari interface is nice and clean, and the "Sliding" paradigm used in a lot of interfaces for it seems to be quite user-friendly and not too tough to work with.
Windows Mobile might be good for development of a standard application, and Windows Mobile devices are a dime a dozen these days if you don't mind going back a few versions. Unfortunately, the underlying OS is.. Windows Mobile.
Try again... again. How about $29.88 for a standalone player, that you can pick up at your local Wal-Mart?
So with this NDA issue, I can't buy a book, read a forum, get any assistance at all with writing my iPhone application... So what the hell good is an SDK you can't talk about? Is this cellular fight club or something?
Apple, fix this shit. Really. Fix it now. There's no excuse for not letting the NDA go, no way that it protects you. The phone's been jailbroken, it _will_ be unlocked, so why stifle development?
I've been a Dreamhost customer for a couple years, since seeing someone here mention them a while back. And I used to be really happy with them. Unfortunately, right at the same time as they're making this push to suggest people use Google Apps for email serving - which may be a good idea - they're also having some really disastrous support issues for some customers.
I suggested a client of mine, who has a small business that needs a steady uptime but doesn't generate enough money yet to pay for a dedicated host, switch to Dreamhost so I could design him a new web presence on Wordpress. We got him all set up there, his new site went live, he loved everything about it... but then the cluster it was on turned out to be a three month lemon. So bad, Dreamhost is actually killing brand-new hardware and putting people on other systems. This is good... except that it's taken them months to do it, and many websites like my client's were just plain -down- for days at a time.
They even at one point sent me an email saying "We've moving you to another server as you requested, it started an hour ago." which came two hours after the client said to go with another host.
I got him calmed down thanks to Dreamhost's email - mainly because I haven't been paid for the -first- 60 hours of work on this site - and avoided the move, but the next week the server in question crapped out again and his site was still on it. The email felt like a lie. For $10 a month, you can't expect five nines, but you should be able to expect something better than a week to two of downtime a year which is what people on the blingy cluster were getting. Also of note, Dreamhost has no phone support.
I stuck with Dreamhost for quite some time, but I really just can't suggest them until they get things straightened out. All this coming on the heels of February's "Bill all customers for a year or two instead of a month." mistake, and I'm hoping they have a bit of a shakeup.
My personal sites are staying there, because I'm not anal about uptimes and they're fairly inexpensive, but I get a bad feeling from how they handled this cluster issue and how they're pushing people off to different mail servers. It makes me worried.
I loved that game, but what always struck me as mildly depressing was playing the classic "Jetfighter II" which had the YF-23 "Black Widow" in it, the plane that eventually lost out to the F-22 in that round of fighting proposals. The YF-23 was such a gorgeous concept.
Of course, the best thing about Jetfighter II was mid 90's game physics. I fondly recall the time I landed a YF-23 on a carrier with a three-point landing due to intentional stalling at 10 feet off the deck. Low and slow, vector thrust upward, kill the throttle entirely and glide over the deck until you pop flaps and yank the nose up until you nail a stall then level off with gear down and just drop.
Knock your SR-71 design estimate back about a decade. The OXCART contract that created the SR-71 (evolving it from the A-12) was awarded in 1959, so all the real design work was done before 1960, it was just the construction that took a couple years. And the SR-71 served damn well until we put enough satellites in the sky to cover things almost as well with closer to realtime monitoring.
Sometimes it makes you wonder just how many eyes the military really has up there now, if they were willing to mothball the SR-71 with no (public) clear successor.
In a day and age where aircraft from the 1950's are still flying and in active service, to see something like the F-117 come and go so quickly has to be a sign of major design limitations from the first day of use.
Two bombs, no Air-to-Air capability other than playing "How not to be seen." really well, and subsonic speeds just seemed to make the F-117 come across as oddball in my eyes. Either the F-22 has better stealth than we realize, or there's something newer, more stealthier and more secretive coming around.
I haven't seen an honest-to-god serial port in ages on anything new. What I've done for that is just get an old Panasonic Toughbook CF-71 and use that for things that require me to plug into a console.
The biggest problem in portable systems that aren't designed to replace a desktop is that they couldn't replace one if they -had- to. And honestly, when I've carried a laptop around with me for any length of time and serious usage, it's gone and replaced my primary desktop for everything except gaming. For people like your typical Slashdot reader, unless we get something that's at least on par with a low-end but functional desktop, we're probably going to be too frustrated by a limited budget laptop.
I have a Macbook, and I love it. But if I wanted something on a budget that was going to be my utility system for lugging around and doing office-type tasks, the last thing I'd want to use is a full-blown desktop OS. There really needs to be a new kind of system designed for portable machines that's designed for ease of use, low power consumption, and high grades of flexibility without needing to wade through a typical desktop interface.
If I were designing a new OS for one of these systems, I'd want something that handled software installation and deletion similarly to OS X. You drag a file into Applications or wherever, and it runs when you click it. I would want accessory and connectivity options designed along the lines of a
PDA - illustrative graphical things you toggle on and off with virtual switches. I'd want a heavily customized and graphically streamlined version of Open Office to handle documents. A modified version of Firefox made to work within the context of a special application control bar similar to a combination of the OS X task bar and the Windows tray.
Linux is just not a good platform for something like this as it currently stands. I for one never want to worry about whether or not my glibc is the right fucking version before I install software. (It's been a while since I used a mainstream distro for longer than a few days) And I know that if I don't want to know it, my mom sure the hell wouldn't when she saw a neat new gadget to install on her email device.
Insofar as hardware goes, I think Intel has the right processor coming out with Atom. If a system like I just described was written from the ground up, a gigabyte of RAM should be plenty - but go for two so you can use one as a disk cache for even more speed improvement. Again, a custom OS and streamlined applications could be easily done within a few gigabytes of hard drive. And there's no reason an 8G internal flash source wouldn't work with an option to slot in another 8 or so with the latest flash technologies for media storage and application space.
Dual-core CPU's wouldn't necessarily be needed if you're not loading up a monster desktop OS. Just take a look at what Nokia has managed with the N8XX line, which for all its faults is still a damn nice little piece of hardware. It runs Linux, so packaging is a clusterfuck, and at least the N770 takes a while to boot - then runs slowly - but those can be overcome with RAM upgrades.
I rant too much.
I was recently on the market for a budget laptop, and was surprised by what was out there. I wasn't looking at subnotes, or super-cheap, or anything of the sort. But what amazed me was how I was able to find so many laptops with 802.11n, gigabit wired networking, ExpressCard, DVD burners, 2-3 gigabytes of RAM and sizeable SATA hard drives for under $800. But!
Almost NONE of these had Bluetooth.
What the hell?
I wound up with a Toshiba U305 which wasn't bad, 250 gigs of HD, 2G RAM, 1.67Ghz dual-core CPU, about 3-4 hours of battery life - but I was stuck with Vista, no bluetooth, and 100Mbit wired networking.
13 days later I soaked the 15% return charge at Best Buy and got... yeah, a Macbook.
Aside from tepid video performance and a small hard drive, and lacking the still-mostly-useless to me ExpressCard slot, it's been great.
I've been trying to think of a good response to your post, Stephen. I'm even going so far as to assume this is really you, which is a first for me. What's been hanging me up though, is that I'm really torn on what the idea of good game material for television could be.
Should it be something that offers the industry a little cachet of trendiness? Perhaps something a little more sophisticated? Maybe a good sense of humor, with an undercurrent of sincerity? I think there's room for all of these - but that the example we were given of The Metagame didn't seem to know what it wanted to be. From all appearances, it looked like a game of Win, Lose or Draw from the 1980's if you just glanced at the layout for a minute. I've worked in public access television, and I know how much of a pain in the ass it is to get a good set so I feel your pain on that point, but at the same time the actual game itself could have felt a lot more polished.
The topics I watched (the first two) were fairly good ones, with a nice sense of fit to what it felt like you were shooting for until you all started to speak up and then... the answers just came off as though nobody had ever thought of them before. The woman who said Half-Life was more realistic because Gordon Freeman wore glasses? I wanted someone to throw her a laptop and make her play the game because it sure didn't look like she ever had. This may work okay for the MTV crowd, but when it comes to the geeks that actually like the kind of depth these questions offer as a possibility... it's just going to make us wonder what the hell we're wasting time on.
My work in public access was technical - not creative - so I'm sure I'm not the best judge of what I saw, even for a public access loser. However, I was approached to do a show a few months before I left the program I was with, and I wouldn't have let something like this off my scratch drive before dropping it online. It sounds like a different experience in person, but this... just didn't work. The GDC crowd is a much better fit for this kind of material. However.
My completely unsolicited 0.02 would start by suggesting a better host configuration. You don't need two people to corral a debate show. You need one person, like perhaps CleverNickName (Wil Wheaton, if you're new here to Slashdot) who really, truly gets the gaming medium and can get into it in a way that few others will ever manage. I'm sure you've heard his PAX07 keynote. Give the teams at least a visible soft time limit. Maybe 30 seconds twice each for back and forth on a topic before audience judging. And - count some hands! A debate show where the answers are obviously being screwed with (people clapping for -both- options) turns into nothing but your typical forum-based wankery - but it takes up more time to watch on camera than it does to read and/or skip by a few pages of forum posters doing the same kind of non-numerically judged dick waving. Also, why bother having the giant chart of videogames on one monitor? Unless I missed something, that was only relevant when the titles were picked in the beginning. Just use a flash applet and a randomizer instead of sticking another LCD in the shot.
Add a little bit of showmanship to it, and I sure don't mean that challenge logo or whatever it was, that looks like it was slapped together in Windows Movie Maker. Hell, man. Check out www.newtek.com and pick up one of those badboys for your editing work.
Now, before I take off (insomnia, yay!) and maybe try and sleep, let me offer up one thing that I have yet to see presented properly on TV. Counter-Strike. I would love to see a Counter-Strike ladder treated in a way that didn't come off as a cheesy attention whorejob. Real commentary, tactical observations by professional operators, critique and observation of player control habits. These are things I'd love to see.
"Look at the way the Counter-Terrorist team is stacking up on the doorway. That's a fine example of SWAT tactics and..."
"... And unfortunately for CT
Y'know, I was really disappointed by the quality of the arguments put forth. Seriously, the game idea is fairly weak on its own, but mix that in with people that don't really have any idea how to debate and discuss trivial crap in anything other than a way that sounds like a cancelled Comedy Central gameshow? No.
I would have utterly obliterated the arguments against Half-Life versus Halo, which is as far as I watched - the first segment anyhow. And honestly could have made a good case in the other direction. Anyone that spent far too many hours reading the old WWWF Grudge Match website of a bygone era because they had no life could do that. I mean, arguing that Half-Life was more realistic because Gordon Freeman had glasses and a face? What? There isn't even a Gordon Freeman -model- in the original Half-Life.
These are arguments only one level above "Hal0 sux!" due to enforced cordiality.
No.
Half-Life was more realistic than Halo in that it was based on a twisted form of actual reality, rather than a genericized future world that allowed writers to make everything up as they went along. Halo was never designed to be realistic, it was designed to be an extraordinarly well presented example of the FPS genre in order to showcase the power of the platform (later console) it was designed for. Halo's innovation was not in the reality and depth of story - even its predecessor Marathon series more than one-upped it in that regard.
What made Half-Life more realistic and worthy of a movie treatment (the two arguments I bothered to watch) were the fact it was written in order to allow the player to really experience what it was like to -be- Gordon Freeman, not just controlling some character whose life was scripted out for him. It employed realistic weapons against terrifyingly poor odds and overpowering opponents, and managed to tell more of a story in 1998 than Halo managed years later. How many people who played both games look back at Halo maps and go "Ah, those were the good old days." With the exception of Silent Cartographer, I suspect very few in comparison to the people who recall the pure dread of crowbar-smashing a path through the tunnels leading to the Lambda complex only to wind up in a collapsing sewer pipe.
Yes, the above argument is created by a tired (and slightly pathetic) mind. But it's 5:30AM and I'm going to bed.
And yes, I'd whore myself out to be on that show and really put on a -show- of pointless, completely retarded argument skills.
They're getting better, and I'm enjoying it more, but... Man, this first week or so has not made me want to subscribe.
Wouldn't that be 'science-to-be-done'? (Remember that time I pretended I was going to nitpick at you? Wasn't that great?) No. No it wouldn't be.Now this is great. Nice one.
I'm sorry, but open specs and decent drivers do not great hardware engineering make. I'm as eager as anyone to see game development shift to Linux, but given that it was nVidia that steamrolled ATI for the past three product generations with increasing effect, what makes you think the next one will be different? I'm not really complaining, but I am finding it a bit puzzling as to the precise method and timing considering the current market conditions already vastly favor nVidia's options over ATI's. If they'd released it as a cheaper-than-8800GTS model under a different model denomination, then there'd be nothing new. Everyone expects newer, faster, better and eventually cheaper - but not in a product in the same line.
As it currently stands, every generation of nVidia cards has seemed to have the performance curve going from GT->GTS->GTX and then to a version either xx50 or x100 higher or lower than the baseline, which for this generation is 8800. Also, when you introduce new features, typically version numbers increase - thus, an 8850 seeming more realistic a release model for this card from an outsider's perspective on the history of the industry. Basic math:
New Features + Performance Increase = New Version
Instead, they're offering new features, a performance increase, and a substantial price cut in a model that exceeds the previous standard bearer without having faced external forces that made it particularly compelling. They'd lose no face in introducing an 8850 series even in the face of a dramatically improved ATI product. They could even have priced this card at a low enough level as an 8850 product without making too much of a mess of the current expectations of the product line. Now, it looks like GTS->GT->GTX which simply gets confusing when you look at the last two generations of nVidia products.
Now as far as development goes, I'm a strong believer that ATI/AMD have the potential to combine to make the next true generation of video products a real revolution over what ATI could have done alone. There may be a large focus right now on what ATI/AMD does for the low, onboard end of video chips, and how this might bring in huge profits considering the size of the install base for that level of equipment - but the real kicker is going to be the high end. If ATI and nVidia both could hold an entire market segment together, it's viable. Especially considering that when ATI first entered the game with a serious chip several years ago, it came off almost as a joke - and AMD wasn't doing much better by many accounts.
So yes, it seemed like I wasn't taking actual hardware development into account I suppose, but I'll admit I'm taking it for granted instead. The open specifications and driver support are signs that they're really working on making the right steps to enable them to take strides toward a performance lead. And in all honesty? I don't give that much of a damn about Linux game development. I'm further in line with the people who think Linux needs to finish what's been started already on the core platform (complete drivers, solidify the user experience) before trying to harass game companies into supporting a platform that competes endlessly with itself. But that's a rant for a whole other thread.
SLI can and does provide some serious performance increases in today's cards, at least on the nVidia side. ATI has yet to really prove themselves capable. Now, SLI on the same card has also been done - the 7950GX2 from nVidia a generation ago being the best example. It's going to be really, really tough to pull off something like multi-core in the GPU realm with the transistor counts being as high as they are, and the heat issue being as prominent as it is. My dual-core CPU doesn't need the cooling power my single-core NV90 GPU does, because the transistor count needed by NV90 is (I believe) higher. Games won't require SLI by default, simply because most games are designed to run on average-level hardware. And for a good example of what this might be among gamers in general, take a look at the Valve hardware survey which offers some real insight as to what your typical gamer has in his or her machine. The percentage of computers equipped on par with mine, for example, with a single 8800GTS running in DX10 mode is miniscule, and hardware far, far lower is more the norm. But then, you have to look at games like Crysis that just turn my machine into a whining bitch trying to get above 20fps in high detail modes on 1680x1050. Some people just don't like detail settings less than "Maximum". Personally, this is the first time I've ever owned a rig this high end. I'm happy to have it, and can deal with not being able to run Crysis at maximum detail - but I'll also try and move up when the boost in performance is worth paying for.