To what extent would you need Atari's permission to build and sell something like this? The problems would be putting the Logo on it (so don't do that) and including ROMs. Could you sell it with an emulator and no ROMs?
I would think that any patents involved would be long expired, so copyright would be the only issue. The big problem there is any built-in operating system. You couldn't include that without the licensing. That's probably the showstopper.
Well, if it plays off of ROMs on SD cards, then that would kill any pirate cartridge market. I think people who still have cartridges would enjoy using them, and it would mean people could use the games they already own instead of downloading them from questionable sources.
Of course, what the consumers want isn't the only factor that drives product design. The company will probably see the ability to play cartridges or downloaded ROMs as lost sales from their app store, so I expect it will only play ROMs downloaded from Atari for between one and five dollars apiece.
I know that it can be done because I've done it. I in no way was asserting that it can be done with the device they're proposing to sell.
Learn to read before you flame. And learn some better vocabulary. If you're going to swear at people, be creative about it. Don't limit yourself to a single word.
You can use old controllers through USB with the Stelladaptor. I would hope that whatever controllers they offer will work through USB in a way that is compatible, but they may be going entirely Bluetooth for controllers. There was nothing in the article to say what their controller plan is. I'm hoping whatever they do, the new controllers will work well with other emulators and such.
What would be truly awesome is if this would work with any old Atari cartridge you might have sitting around. They could do this with an optional USB cartridge reader.
Since obviously they're using an emulator internally, they would have to have a really good one for this to work, but it would be incredibly awesome.
Yup. This has been the case for over a decade now. Even in the corporate market where there are policies letting you get a new PC with no questions asked if you current one is more than four years old (for example), most employees don't ask because getting the settings just the way they want them on the new system will take forever--they probably don't remember half the things they've changed. The typical upgrade cycle is more like eight years. Laptops are upgraded more frequently, as the mobile systems really have been seeing more improvement, but still there's not a lot of incentive if the old system is working well.
And that's for situations where to the user the replacement is free.
For home users, most people who aren't pushing the limits with gaming won't even start thinking about replacing the system until it's ten years old or something breaks.
Now imagine if, say, Dell and Microsoft partnered to run ads showing how you can hook up your new Dell PC to your old system, and it will magically transfer every application and setting over so that you start with the same desktop you've known for years, only everything runs much faster. (And imagine they developed the software so that was true.) That would do something to push the upgrade cycle, and would sell a lot more units. (This would also apply to the small business market, but not the enterprise market where they have standard images from the IT department.) [By the way, the last time I upgraded a Mac, this is exactly how it worked. It was perfect. Apple should advertise how easy it is to upgrade to a new Macintosh.]
You should consider that the font and images (though I don't load them by default) are part of the sender's expression. Email is about communication, and that is not just ASCII anymore. When the sender does it right, the fonts add to the communication.
Apart from this one font, it works fairly well. It's important to specify a fixed-width font for code samples and such, but otherwise a variable-width font is good. If I had a plug-in to convert this one font to Ariel in Thunderbird, I would be quite happy.
I despise Calibri. About half the emails I receive at work use it, and it's absolutely horrible for reading. Even comic sans would be better.
Maybe it looks alright when printed out, but who prints anymore? On my screen it's painful. Microsoft is trying to gouge my eyes out. All they care is that people use a font that is only available with their products.
If the car is playing the MP3s (or other formats), then the car needs a player that is convenient. It's easy to fail in this. The engineers who design it often don't expect a 1TB drive with 200,000 songs on it. And tomorrow the numbers may be larger. Maybe for large drives, the car may need to create a subdirectory with index file--that's fine; just don't reject the media or crash if there are too many songs.
The interface needs to handle playing by directory, artist, album, playlist, etc.
Good USB media support is a vital feature of a modern car entertainment system. (And one Tesla has pretty much failed at--most owners who use it aren't happy.)
What you're not going to get is intelligent random music. The car's entertainment system won't analyze all the tracks, so that it can randomly pick tracks that are like the track you last listened to, giving you a Pandora-like effect with your own music. (I would love that.) Until that changes, even if you have a complete library of everything you like, there are still advantages to the streaming services.
Tesla is paying fees to Slacker (in the US) and other services (elsewhere) for streaming. They've been growing so quickly that the fees for the cars already on the road have been irrelevant, but they're reaching a point where it's going to be an issue, especially if the margin on the Model 3 is lower.
One option is to just require owners to pay for a subscription to Slacker (or whatever service they support) after a few years if they want to continue to use it. That's simple, but they think they can do better. By creating their own tiered service, they can offer a base level for free, while getting many of the owners to pay a subscription fee for more features. Instead of simply handing off the business to someone else, they can capture that revenue for themselves. Also, by creating their own service, they can make it work exactly the way they want it to, without having to rejigger it when the contracted vendor makes changes or goes out of business.
Now the problem is that the streaming services are generally struggling financially. This suggests that it's not easy to get deals with the record labels that let you break even. Perhaps Tesla is in a different situation where they'll get a much higher subscription rate, but I expect they'll find that even their customers avoid monthly subscription fees.
The Tesla software is mostly fine except for USB media. That, most definitely, deserves whatever derision you can throw at it. It's still better than some cars, though. (256 song limit, Nissan? Really?)
Streaming through bluetooth is fine, though I wish you could select a different streaming media connection from the phone connection. Then I could receive phone calls while my son is watching a movie on the iPad. I'm sure others have similar issues where separating the two features would be really nice.
The streaming service is fine. Slacker wouldn't have been my choice, but the selection of music if good. Slacker may be in some trouble--perhaps if they go bankrupt, Tesla could buy them and rebrand it as Tesla music, adding features as they see fit.
My wife doesn't have a smart phone, so that's not an option for her. Streaming music directly through the entertainment system is a big plus. I'll agree that having the option to stream it from a phone is absolutely critical. You should even be able to use a separate bluetooth connection for streaming media from your phone for voice calls, so the driver can receive calls while a passenger is streaming music.
As to navigation, you can't beat the map on the car's 17" display. Yes, Waze works better, but it doesn't integrate with the car's battery status and the need to route through Supercharging stations. Tesla has pretty much nailed it on navigation apart from the Waze alerts. Having a navigation system that includes automatic over-the-air updates is critical (not like, say, the Nissan Leaf where you have to pay over $100 to update the maps on a yearly basis).
I expect the first thing Amazon will change is the back-end distribution system. This is something Amazon knows better than pretty much anyone else, especially for non-perishables, which is probably more than half the store.
Hopefully by pre-announcing the selection of a LTS kernel, distributions will make a point of selecting it to minimize their work in maintaining a stable and secure kernel. It was harder for them to do that when the LTS decision wasn't made until after the kernel was out.
I used to always run the latest Linux kernel, but since I run VMWare, I ran into too many problems with broken modules doing that. While I would love to see them get all of their modules into the mainline kernel (I fail to see why they really need something that couldn't be a generic service), that's really not relevant to this discussion. I've also had some problems with Nvidia modules, though to a much lesser extent.
So now my strategy it to always go with the latest LTS kernel. This has proven to be a successful strategy that keeps me with a relatively recent and stable kernel while also having one that will work consistently with outside modules.
Perhaps they're just looking at the retro market, but my idea would be to create a real console, or even partner with one of the existing companies, and create an add-on or special Atari edition of their console.
For classic games, create a USB cartridge reader (with the various game select toggle switches). The whole thing could be shipped with a built-in flash programmed with a selection of classic games and the emulator. Just plug in to the partner console, and it's a 2600 (or 5200, or 7800).
Extra bonus if the system is compatible with the USB Stelladaptor so that you could play with the real joysticks (which hopefully they would re-release for this system).
For example, if Microsoft bought Atari or partnered with them, they could put out the Atari edition X-Box, or offer it as an add-on for the X-Box.
I'm wondering if the leaks will hurt or help the ratings. Some people will watch the downloads instead of the broadcasts, but those people may generate buzz for the shows (if they're any good) and increase the excitement and eventual ratings.
If the shows are lousy, the leaks will probably hurt, but otherwise they should help.
Systems in a data center should have two different power systems. The contractor shut one of them down to do some work. That should have been fine. I would guess that the work was to replace or repair some of the power infrastructure. The most likely situation here is that the contractor switched off the wrong one, and the correct one was already off (possibly due to the failure for which the contractor was called in the first place, or else someone had already shut it off for him).
Process errors like this are, unfortunately, all too common. I've heard stories of service people replacing redundant parts pulling out the good one by mistake and crashing entire systems, so it's not surprising that this could happen on a larger scale. I know my employer has worked very hard to adjust processes to minimize this type of mistake.
When they banned bringing water through security, the sales of water bottles inside the security area. This will create a huge demand for rental businesses. You can already rent portable DVD players that you return at your destination airport. This could be expanded easily to laptops and iPads.
Reading between the lines, I infer that you're buying a laptop and then returning it. Besides the ethical issues, I've heard that some stores catch on to this and refuse to sell you stuff after a few times.
What you seem to have mastered that others could learn from is working from a generic system, keeping all your data separate (flash sticks and such).
I read it as Amazon because so many of the devices are FireTV Sticks. It's so brain-dead easy to install apps on them that I wonder why people pay someone else to do it.
One thing that would really help cut down on piracy is better licensing for streaming. What if we had mandatory licensing for streaming just like we do for music for radio stations? Then suddenly instead of having to subscribe to half a dozen services and then still not having access to everything, you could subscribe to one and really have everything.
There are a number of ways this could work.
One model that I have in mind is to go back to the original NetFlix model where they buy physical media. Let them stream to one customer per disc that they own per day. Or even every three days (to simulate mailing the disc back and forth). Of course, instead of physically buying the discs, they would buy a license (same as buying a digital copy today), but the end result is the same--anything released for purchase would be available through streaming service subscriptions. Perhaps for new releases, you would have to reserve a stream ahead of time, but you would never have to worry about which service has what older movie or TV series.
You still might subscribe separately for sports. This wouldn't stop companies from creating their own content and only providing it on their own network--for as long as they don't sell it outside their network.
All that said, I'm still a cable subscriber, and I use MythTV to record everything using HDHomerun Prime with a cable card. (Apart from HBO, FiOS is nice about copy restrictions.)
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To what extent would you need Atari's permission to build and sell something like this? The problems would be putting the Logo on it (so don't do that) and including ROMs. Could you sell it with an emulator and no ROMs?
I would think that any patents involved would be long expired, so copyright would be the only issue. The big problem there is any built-in operating system. You couldn't include that without the licensing. That's probably the showstopper.
Well, if it plays off of ROMs on SD cards, then that would kill any pirate cartridge market. I think people who still have cartridges would enjoy using them, and it would mean people could use the games they already own instead of downloading them from questionable sources.
Of course, what the consumers want isn't the only factor that drives product design. The company will probably see the ability to play cartridges or downloaded ROMs as lost sales from their app store, so I expect it will only play ROMs downloaded from Atari for between one and five dollars apiece.
I know that it can be done because I've done it. I in no way was asserting that it can be done with the device they're proposing to sell.
Learn to read before you flame. And learn some better vocabulary. If you're going to swear at people, be creative about it. Don't limit yourself to a single word.
You can use old controllers through USB with the Stelladaptor. I would hope that whatever controllers they offer will work through USB in a way that is compatible, but they may be going entirely Bluetooth for controllers. There was nothing in the article to say what their controller plan is. I'm hoping whatever they do, the new controllers will work well with other emulators and such.
Time will tell.
What would be truly awesome is if this would work with any old Atari cartridge you might have sitting around. They could do this with an optional USB cartridge reader.
Since obviously they're using an emulator internally, they would have to have a really good one for this to work, but it would be incredibly awesome.
Yup. This has been the case for over a decade now. Even in the corporate market where there are policies letting you get a new PC with no questions asked if you current one is more than four years old (for example), most employees don't ask because getting the settings just the way they want them on the new system will take forever--they probably don't remember half the things they've changed. The typical upgrade cycle is more like eight years. Laptops are upgraded more frequently, as the mobile systems really have been seeing more improvement, but still there's not a lot of incentive if the old system is working well.
And that's for situations where to the user the replacement is free.
For home users, most people who aren't pushing the limits with gaming won't even start thinking about replacing the system until it's ten years old or something breaks.
Now imagine if, say, Dell and Microsoft partnered to run ads showing how you can hook up your new Dell PC to your old system, and it will magically transfer every application and setting over so that you start with the same desktop you've known for years, only everything runs much faster. (And imagine they developed the software so that was true.) That would do something to push the upgrade cycle, and would sell a lot more units. (This would also apply to the small business market, but not the enterprise market where they have standard images from the IT department.) [By the way, the last time I upgraded a Mac, this is exactly how it worked. It was perfect. Apple should advertise how easy it is to upgrade to a new Macintosh.]
You should consider that the font and images (though I don't load them by default) are part of the sender's expression. Email is about communication, and that is not just ASCII anymore. When the sender does it right, the fonts add to the communication.
Apart from this one font, it works fairly well. It's important to specify a fixed-width font for code samples and such, but otherwise a variable-width font is good. If I had a plug-in to convert this one font to Ariel in Thunderbird, I would be quite happy.
I despise Calibri. About half the emails I receive at work use it, and it's absolutely horrible for reading. Even comic sans would be better.
Maybe it looks alright when printed out, but who prints anymore? On my screen it's painful. Microsoft is trying to gouge my eyes out. All they care is that people use a font that is only available with their products.
What about "whatever my company gives me?"
Yes and no.
If the car is playing the MP3s (or other formats), then the car needs a player that is convenient. It's easy to fail in this. The engineers who design it often don't expect a 1TB drive with 200,000 songs on it. And tomorrow the numbers may be larger. Maybe for large drives, the car may need to create a subdirectory with index file--that's fine; just don't reject the media or crash if there are too many songs.
The interface needs to handle playing by directory, artist, album, playlist, etc.
Good USB media support is a vital feature of a modern car entertainment system. (And one Tesla has pretty much failed at--most owners who use it aren't happy.)
What you're not going to get is intelligent random music. The car's entertainment system won't analyze all the tracks, so that it can randomly pick tracks that are like the track you last listened to, giving you a Pandora-like effect with your own music. (I would love that.) Until that changes, even if you have a complete library of everything you like, there are still advantages to the streaming services.
I think I can see the reasoning here.
Tesla is paying fees to Slacker (in the US) and other services (elsewhere) for streaming. They've been growing so quickly that the fees for the cars already on the road have been irrelevant, but they're reaching a point where it's going to be an issue, especially if the margin on the Model 3 is lower.
One option is to just require owners to pay for a subscription to Slacker (or whatever service they support) after a few years if they want to continue to use it. That's simple, but they think they can do better. By creating their own tiered service, they can offer a base level for free, while getting many of the owners to pay a subscription fee for more features. Instead of simply handing off the business to someone else, they can capture that revenue for themselves. Also, by creating their own service, they can make it work exactly the way they want it to, without having to rejigger it when the contracted vendor makes changes or goes out of business.
Now the problem is that the streaming services are generally struggling financially. This suggests that it's not easy to get deals with the record labels that let you break even. Perhaps Tesla is in a different situation where they'll get a much higher subscription rate, but I expect they'll find that even their customers avoid monthly subscription fees.
The Tesla software is mostly fine except for USB media. That, most definitely, deserves whatever derision you can throw at it. It's still better than some cars, though. (256 song limit, Nissan? Really?)
Streaming through bluetooth is fine, though I wish you could select a different streaming media connection from the phone connection. Then I could receive phone calls while my son is watching a movie on the iPad. I'm sure others have similar issues where separating the two features would be really nice.
The streaming service is fine. Slacker wouldn't have been my choice, but the selection of music if good. Slacker may be in some trouble--perhaps if they go bankrupt, Tesla could buy them and rebrand it as Tesla music, adding features as they see fit.
Disagree!
My wife doesn't have a smart phone, so that's not an option for her. Streaming music directly through the entertainment system is a big plus. I'll agree that having the option to stream it from a phone is absolutely critical. You should even be able to use a separate bluetooth connection for streaming media from your phone for voice calls, so the driver can receive calls while a passenger is streaming music.
As to navigation, you can't beat the map on the car's 17" display. Yes, Waze works better, but it doesn't integrate with the car's battery status and the need to route through Supercharging stations. Tesla has pretty much nailed it on navigation apart from the Waze alerts. Having a navigation system that includes automatic over-the-air updates is critical (not like, say, the Nissan Leaf where you have to pay over $100 to update the maps on a yearly basis).
I expect the first thing Amazon will change is the back-end distribution system. This is something Amazon knows better than pretty much anyone else, especially for non-perishables, which is probably more than half the store.
Hopefully by pre-announcing the selection of a LTS kernel, distributions will make a point of selecting it to minimize their work in maintaining a stable and secure kernel. It was harder for them to do that when the LTS decision wasn't made until after the kernel was out.
I used to always run the latest Linux kernel, but since I run VMWare, I ran into too many problems with broken modules doing that. While I would love to see them get all of their modules into the mainline kernel (I fail to see why they really need something that couldn't be a generic service), that's really not relevant to this discussion. I've also had some problems with Nvidia modules, though to a much lesser extent.
So now my strategy it to always go with the latest LTS kernel. This has proven to be a successful strategy that keeps me with a relatively recent and stable kernel while also having one that will work consistently with outside modules.
Perhaps they're just looking at the retro market, but my idea would be to create a real console, or even partner with one of the existing companies, and create an add-on or special Atari edition of their console.
For classic games, create a USB cartridge reader (with the various game select toggle switches). The whole thing could be shipped with a built-in flash programmed with a selection of classic games and the emulator. Just plug in to the partner console, and it's a 2600 (or 5200, or 7800).
Extra bonus if the system is compatible with the USB Stelladaptor so that you could play with the real joysticks (which hopefully they would re-release for this system).
For example, if Microsoft bought Atari or partnered with them, they could put out the Atari edition X-Box, or offer it as an add-on for the X-Box.
I'm wondering if the leaks will hurt or help the ratings. Some people will watch the downloads instead of the broadcasts, but those people may generate buzz for the shows (if they're any good) and increase the excitement and eventual ratings.
If the shows are lousy, the leaks will probably hurt, but otherwise they should help.
Systems in a data center should have two different power systems. The contractor shut one of them down to do some work. That should have been fine. I would guess that the work was to replace or repair some of the power infrastructure. The most likely situation here is that the contractor switched off the wrong one, and the correct one was already off (possibly due to the failure for which the contractor was called in the first place, or else someone had already shut it off for him).
Process errors like this are, unfortunately, all too common. I've heard stories of service people replacing redundant parts pulling out the good one by mistake and crashing entire systems, so it's not surprising that this could happen on a larger scale. I know my employer has worked very hard to adjust processes to minimize this type of mistake.
When they banned bringing water through security, the sales of water bottles inside the security area. This will create a huge demand for rental businesses. You can already rent portable DVD players that you return at your destination airport. This could be expanded easily to laptops and iPads.
Reading between the lines, I infer that you're buying a laptop and then returning it. Besides the ethical issues, I've heard that some stores catch on to this and refuse to sell you stuff after a few times.
What you seem to have mastered that others could learn from is working from a generic system, keeping all your data separate (flash sticks and such).
Yup, that same FCC. I filed a complaint once and it got my problem resolved.
I read it as Amazon because so many of the devices are FireTV Sticks. It's so brain-dead easy to install apps on them that I wonder why people pay someone else to do it.
One thing that would really help cut down on piracy is better licensing for streaming. What if we had mandatory licensing for streaming just like we do for music for radio stations? Then suddenly instead of having to subscribe to half a dozen services and then still not having access to everything, you could subscribe to one and really have everything.
There are a number of ways this could work.
One model that I have in mind is to go back to the original NetFlix model where they buy physical media. Let them stream to one customer per disc that they own per day. Or even every three days (to simulate mailing the disc back and forth). Of course, instead of physically buying the discs, they would buy a license (same as buying a digital copy today), but the end result is the same--anything released for purchase would be available through streaming service subscriptions. Perhaps for new releases, you would have to reserve a stream ahead of time, but you would never have to worry about which service has what older movie or TV series.
You still might subscribe separately for sports. This wouldn't stop companies from creating their own content and only providing it on their own network--for as long as they don't sell it outside their network.
All that said, I'm still a cable subscriber, and I use MythTV to record everything using HDHomerun Prime with a cable card. (Apart from HBO, FiOS is nice about copy restrictions.)