Here's the thing. A number of people are saying how wonderful it is that google's using an open protocol like Jabber. This is merely pointing out that it's not as open as you might think.
Personally I'm thrilled with google's opennes even if it isn't the full monty so to speak. I've been using GAIM and/or Trillian for a very long time, and I'm sick of the proprietary reverse engineered protocols occasionally changing and breaking. I've occasionally gone weeks without being able to chat with some friends because of such things. No it's not the end of the world, but it's quite annoying.
So it's not perfect, but it's a lot better. That seems to be google's running theme. Most everything they have is in beta and not quite perfect but it's all much better than the competition.
I had a friend who was a big OS/2 fan, and he tried to convince me that it was good, but I could never get it to work quite right. Of course eventually I became a fan of Linux and that's what I run whenever I can (i.e. everywhere but the computer that runs my video games).
I was in college at the time and Windows 95 had just come out. I was debating between using OS/2 Warp or Windows 95. I tried to go with OS/2 at first but I quickly ran into the realization that most of the apps I wanted to use were Windows apps.
Particularly problematic were Internet applications. OS/2 had some support for Windows binaries, but when it came down to running Navigator, etc, it just wasn't up to the task. So I ended up installing Windows 95. The rest is history.
Incidentally about two years after that, we received like 50 copies of OS/2 warp for free. We tried handing them out to people but nobody wanted it.
But that doesn't really solve the fundamental problem. Sure, the tables could be powered, but that's just more complicated for the coffeshop. Sure it might have neat factor, but it'd be just as easy to just plug into the wall or floor most of the time.
The problem is that the physics for how to increase the number of transistors on a chunk of silicon is very well understood and the physics of how to make better batteries is not.
To double the number of transistors on a processor is primarily a matter of lithography, that is etchich smaller and smaller lines into an existing wafer. Same materials, more or less, and same technique, more or less. With batteries, it's far more hit and miss.
The technology and fabrication process to make a lead-acid battery is vastly different than NiCd. NiMh is somewhat similar to NiCd, but then Lithium Ion is rather different and requires a lot more technology to make it work. Then you've got fuel cells as a possibility, and that's vastly different from anything I just described.
There's a lot of effort being put into battery research because everybody understands what a fundamental limitiation it is to everybody's dreams of pervasive wireless. It's rather ironic to describe these internet coffee shops as having "wireless" when you still have to have A/C power to do anything. The problem is that it does not have the clear and obvious path that CPU's have had.
I expect that fuel cells will eventually be the way to go. Still there's a certain inconvenience in them. If I want to charge my laptop batteries, i just plug in my laptop. If I've got a fuel cell, do I have to buy numerous cells? Do I have to fill them up with methanol, etc? It doesn't seem like there's a panacea for portable power (and other p words) anytime soon.
Or maybe, I'll just watch all the old unprotected content that I have lying around. Heck, maybe I'll just read a book. They still let us do that right?
In the end, most people go shopping based on the sticker price. That's why when you open up a dell it's not nearly as elegant.
I used to sell computers at an OfficeMax. We offered, amongst others, Compaq, and Packard Bell. The compaq system were always more expensive than the Packard Bells. When you opened up a Compaq, it was very cleanly layed out and labeled, and the Packard Bells were just frightening. In general the Packard Bells were the source of endless hardware problems.
But which one do you think we sold more of?
Now granted, Packard Bell was so poorly made that it's not an apples and oranges comparison here. But if Dell's are cheaper can run the same software, it could seriously hurt Apple's bottom line.
The question is this: If you could buy the OSX for X86, would you still buy Apple hardware?
Apple doesn't want to sell you a $100 operating system, they want to sell you a $1000 computer. If you can buy a $400 computer from Dell and load OSX onto it, Apple makes less money.
Where it's gets sticky is this: define a porn site.
I've got a vision of what a porn site is... and it's a really good vision... and...
anyhow, where I was going is that your vision and my vision may be very different from say George Bush's vision or James Dobson's vision. It's too binary.
Do you think your child should be able to see tasteful nudity? What about violence? What about cartoon violence? What about sex? What about abrasive language?
The problem with the concept of.xxx is that it's binary. You are either there or you are not. There's no grey area to distinguish between the extremes.
The V-chip is a good example of a system that ALMOST works. It provides a more fine grained rating system, but I know of parents who still don't get the granularity they want. Some shows that are considered by whatever authority to be okay for kids they don't feel are okay for their kid.
Would information about safe sex belong on the regular internet or the.xxx internet? I'd tend to think it'd be on the regular internet, but I know a lot of people would disagree with me.
Creating a.xxx domain would actually be potentially more risky to free speech than to prevent it. Here's the problem. If you have a.xxx domain, then it's possible to distinguish between the part of the internet that's supposed to have objectionable material and the part that isn't.
So this would open the doorway for regulation to go after merely indecent material on non-xxx domains. They could argue in court briefs that it's not preventing them from existing. This would make it far easier for the merely indecent material to be isolated out of the mainstream Internet. Then the filters get put in place and suddenly people get a controversey free Internet.
So for once I agree with the Bush administration but probably for the exact opposite reason.
I think this is a matter of degree. I don't expect a direct feedback loop between the community and the developers, but it would be good to see the developers setting aside a couple hours every week to play the game, and brain storm with people in the community.
This seems to be a fundamental issue with the MMO games. I've not played a game where I haven't heard of this strong sense of disconnect between developers and the community. People are paying a monthly subscription and, rightfully, expect solid customer service.
What I have yet to figure out is whether the amount of feedback from developers that is being received is too low or if the expectations are too high. For example, I pay something like $80/month for Cable, and like $90/month for DSL service. I don't really ever talk to these people. On the other hand, I pay $13/month for an MMO game and I expect to be interact with these game developers routinely.
I think what it boils down to is that one of the selling points of MMO's has been the dynamic environment. That while you may end up paying more to play over time, you can also expect the game to evolve and improve over time. That evolution is necessarily dependent on pretty heavy interaction between the community and developers. That is, if the developers don't develop the features the customer base want to see developed, then they will take their dollars elsewhere.
The problem is that in order to have sufficient development resources you need to generate enough revenue to afford it. To do this you need a critical mass of players, and almost by definition, having enough players to generate this revenue means you're going to have poor interaction between developers and the community. That is, there are so many people who have so many things they want to see in the game, that you're almost guaranteed to be pissing a lot of people off routinely.
I've been playing PlanetSide for two years now and the community has dwindled somewhat. I think the size of the community has lent itself well to better interaction with the developers of late, but there's only a handful of developers they can afford to have working on it. For example, right now, they have no artist working for the project. So they can implement changes, but if the changes require new models, they can't do it. This has lead to rather limited changes to the game which has generally had a negative affect on the overall community.
Blu-ray appears to have developed its own approach--in some cases, proprietary--to each of these three technologies
Time and time again we've seen these "proprietary" techniques developed, and invariably, propriertary means it has a questionable design, buggy implementation, and inadequate testing. So invariably some clever hacker will figure out how to circumvent it and make it all a moot point.
Aside from that, fine, if they want to rig up my PS3 to blow up when I put in a bad disc, go right ahead. I just won't buy a PS3, or the movies that go with it. Gee, I won't be able to watch movies in high def. Well as it turns out, good movies play just as well on my 27" low def Magnavox without surround sound hooked up as they play on a wall encompassing high def with 7.1 surround.
Eventually these media companies will figure out that we can keep ourselves entertained for free via the Internet. That we don't need them, and if they want to sell us stuff and make it easy for us to watch it, we probably will. But if they try to make it hard, then we'll just ignore them.
There's a very good reason they don't do that. Try getting a bar code off of a car in traffic when it's raining. Right.
Frankly a human reading off a license plate and punching into a computer is far cheaper and more effecitve than laser scanning. Besides, better to get the police into the habbit of quickly reading and remembering license plate numbers because doing so when you're not in a car could be kinda useful.
Yes, I've heard of them and they provide a mere sliver of the energy we use on a daily basis. I think this is a neat gadget, but it drives me nuts when people talk about how environmentally friendly Hydrogen power is. Hydrogen is only as environmentally friendly as the process used to get it in the first place.
In the end, assuming that most of your power is coming from fossil fuels anyhow, you're fireplace would probably be more environmentally friendly if it was burning natural gas. The electrolysis process is terribly inefficient.
Okay, so rather than burning a renewable source of energy like wood in my fireplace, I'm going pay $50K to obtain the ability to burn hydrogen. Hydrogne is good and pure and not oil so that's good right? Oh yeah except for the fact that in order to make my fireplace work I need 220 current which is coming FROM DEAD DINOSAURS.
THe problem that I really have with ITune's international support is that it doesn't allow you to go across borders. I can browse through music from the UK but as a US user I cannot buy any of it. That's kind of dumb consider I could buy the CD that way.
I'm assuming the reason this is the case is a track that costs $1 in the US might be $1.50 in the UK for the same artist.
But you sorta proove my point. The cost for a 2600 at it's time was pretty damn high compared to what we're paying now for rather high end systems that play some pretty amazing games.
Converting that to today's price, it would be about $500. Granted it include nine action packed games with the system, but still, it does give some perspective on the real cost of these things.
Hardly. It'll make a difference sure, but think about what the bulk of space on game discs is. It's sound files and video clips. That's not going to make a huge impact on these games. It's telling that DVD drives have been common on PC's for a while now and there's really not much in games that's taking advatange of it. It's just a nice way to consolidate 3 or 4 cd's.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the thing. A number of people are saying how wonderful it is that google's using an open protocol like Jabber. This is merely pointing out that it's not as open as you might think.
Personally I'm thrilled with google's opennes even if it isn't the full monty so to speak. I've been using GAIM and/or Trillian for a very long time, and I'm sick of the proprietary reverse engineered protocols occasionally changing and breaking. I've occasionally gone weeks without being able to chat with some friends because of such things. No it's not the end of the world, but it's quite annoying.
So it's not perfect, but it's a lot better. That seems to be google's running theme. Most everything they have is in beta and not quite perfect but it's all much better than the competition.
Either that or maybe he just has really excellent babysitters :)
Will these new laser cannons be able to shoot box cutters as well?
I had a friend who was a big OS/2 fan, and he tried to convince me that it was good, but I could never get it to work quite right. Of course eventually I became a fan of Linux and that's what I run whenever I can (i.e. everywhere but the computer that runs my video games).
I was in college at the time and Windows 95 had just come out. I was debating between using OS/2 Warp or Windows 95. I tried to go with OS/2 at first but I quickly ran into the realization that most of the apps I wanted to use were Windows apps.
Particularly problematic were Internet applications. OS/2 had some support for Windows binaries, but when it came down to running Navigator, etc, it just wasn't up to the task. So I ended up installing Windows 95. The rest is history.
Incidentally about two years after that, we received like 50 copies of OS/2 warp for free. We tried handing them out to people but nobody wanted it.
Not to mention the fact that you'd have to have both laptops and tables that were designed to support it.
But that doesn't really solve the fundamental problem. Sure, the tables could be powered, but that's just more complicated for the coffeshop. Sure it might have neat factor, but it'd be just as easy to just plug into the wall or floor most of the time.
The problem is that the physics for how to increase the number of transistors on a chunk of silicon is very well understood and the physics of how to make better batteries is not.
To double the number of transistors on a processor is primarily a matter of lithography, that is etchich smaller and smaller lines into an existing wafer. Same materials, more or less, and same technique, more or less. With batteries, it's far more hit and miss.
The technology and fabrication process to make a lead-acid battery is vastly different than NiCd. NiMh is somewhat similar to NiCd, but then Lithium Ion is rather different and requires a lot more technology to make it work. Then you've got fuel cells as a possibility, and that's vastly different from anything I just described.
There's a lot of effort being put into battery research because everybody understands what a fundamental limitiation it is to everybody's dreams of pervasive wireless. It's rather ironic to describe these internet coffee shops as having "wireless" when you still have to have A/C power to do anything. The problem is that it does not have the clear and obvious path that CPU's have had.
I expect that fuel cells will eventually be the way to go. Still there's a certain inconvenience in them. If I want to charge my laptop batteries, i just plug in my laptop. If I've got a fuel cell, do I have to buy numerous cells? Do I have to fill them up with methanol, etc? It doesn't seem like there's a panacea for portable power (and other p words) anytime soon.
Or maybe, I'll just watch all the old unprotected content that I have lying around. Heck, maybe I'll just read a book. They still let us do that right?
Okay, so are there people who:
1) Can afford a $400 Dell
2) Can't afford Internet access
3) CAN AFFORD TO LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO
Not sure. Which one costs more? :)
In the end, most people go shopping based on the sticker price. That's why when you open up a dell it's not nearly as elegant.
I used to sell computers at an OfficeMax. We offered, amongst others, Compaq, and Packard Bell. The compaq system were always more expensive than the Packard Bells. When you opened up a Compaq, it was very cleanly layed out and labeled, and the Packard Bells were just frightening. In general the Packard Bells were the source of endless hardware problems.
But which one do you think we sold more of?
Now granted, Packard Bell was so poorly made that it's not an apples and oranges comparison here. But if Dell's are cheaper can run the same software, it could seriously hurt Apple's bottom line.
Remember that the clones almost killed Apple.
The question is this: If you could buy the OSX for X86, would you still buy Apple hardware?
Apple doesn't want to sell you a $100 operating system, they want to sell you a $1000 computer. If you can buy a $400 computer from Dell and load OSX onto it, Apple makes less money.
Where it's gets sticky is this: define a porn site.
I've got a vision of what a porn site is... and it's a really good vision... and...
anyhow, where I was going is that your vision and my vision may be very different from say George Bush's vision or James Dobson's vision. It's too binary.
Do you think your child should be able to see tasteful nudity? What about violence? What about cartoon violence? What about sex? What about abrasive language?
.xxx is that it's binary. You are either there or you are not. There's no grey area to distinguish between the extremes.
.xxx internet? I'd tend to think it'd be on the regular internet, but I know a lot of people would disagree with me.
The problem with the concept of
The V-chip is a good example of a system that ALMOST works. It provides a more fine grained rating system, but I know of parents who still don't get the granularity they want. Some shows that are considered by whatever authority to be okay for kids they don't feel are okay for their kid.
Would information about safe sex belong on the regular internet or the
See the problem?
Creating a .xxx domain would actually be potentially more risky to free speech than to prevent it. Here's the problem. If you have a .xxx domain, then it's possible to distinguish between the part of the internet that's supposed to have objectionable material and the part that isn't.
So this would open the doorway for regulation to go after merely indecent material on non-xxx domains. They could argue in court briefs that it's not preventing them from existing. This would make it far easier for the merely indecent material to be isolated out of the mainstream Internet. Then the filters get put in place and suddenly people get a controversey free Internet.
So for once I agree with the Bush administration but probably for the exact opposite reason.
I think this is a matter of degree. I don't expect a direct feedback loop between the community and the developers, but it would be good to see the developers setting aside a couple hours every week to play the game, and brain storm with people in the community.
This seems to be a fundamental issue with the MMO games. I've not played a game where I haven't heard of this strong sense of disconnect between developers and the community. People are paying a monthly subscription and, rightfully, expect solid customer service.
What I have yet to figure out is whether the amount of feedback from developers that is being received is too low or if the expectations are too high. For example, I pay something like $80/month for Cable, and like $90/month for DSL service. I don't really ever talk to these people. On the other hand, I pay $13/month for an MMO game and I expect to be interact with these game developers routinely.
I think what it boils down to is that one of the selling points of MMO's has been the dynamic environment. That while you may end up paying more to play over time, you can also expect the game to evolve and improve over time. That evolution is necessarily dependent on pretty heavy interaction between the community and developers. That is, if the developers don't develop the features the customer base want to see developed, then they will take their dollars elsewhere.
The problem is that in order to have sufficient development resources you need to generate enough revenue to afford it. To do this you need a critical mass of players, and almost by definition, having enough players to generate this revenue means you're going to have poor interaction between developers and the community. That is, there are so many people who have so many things they want to see in the game, that you're almost guaranteed to be pissing a lot of people off routinely.
I've been playing PlanetSide for two years now and the community has dwindled somewhat. I think the size of the community has lent itself well to better interaction with the developers of late, but there's only a handful of developers they can afford to have working on it. For example, right now, they have no artist working for the project. So they can implement changes, but if the changes require new models, they can't do it. This has lead to rather limited changes to the game which has generally had a negative affect on the overall community.
Blu-ray appears to have developed its own approach--in some cases, proprietary--to each of these three technologies
Time and time again we've seen these "proprietary" techniques developed, and invariably, propriertary means it has a questionable design, buggy implementation, and inadequate testing. So invariably some clever hacker will figure out how to circumvent it and make it all a moot point.
Aside from that, fine, if they want to rig up my PS3 to blow up when I put in a bad disc, go right ahead. I just won't buy a PS3, or the movies that go with it. Gee, I won't be able to watch movies in high def. Well as it turns out, good movies play just as well on my 27" low def Magnavox without surround sound hooked up as they play on a wall encompassing high def with 7.1 surround.
Eventually these media companies will figure out that we can keep ourselves entertained for free via the Internet. That we don't need them, and if they want to sell us stuff and make it easy for us to watch it, we probably will. But if they try to make it hard, then we'll just ignore them.
There's a very good reason they don't do that. Try getting a bar code off of a car in traffic when it's raining. Right.
Frankly a human reading off a license plate and punching into a computer is far cheaper and more effecitve than laser scanning. Besides, better to get the police into the habbit of quickly reading and remembering license plate numbers because doing so when you're not in a car could be kinda useful.
Yes, I've heard of them and they provide a mere sliver of the energy we use on a daily basis. I think this is a neat gadget, but it drives me nuts when people talk about how environmentally friendly Hydrogen power is. Hydrogen is only as environmentally friendly as the process used to get it in the first place.
In the end, assuming that most of your power is coming from fossil fuels anyhow, you're fireplace would probably be more environmentally friendly if it was burning natural gas. The electrolysis process is terribly inefficient.
Okay, so rather than burning a renewable source of energy like wood in my fireplace, I'm going pay $50K to obtain the ability to burn hydrogen. Hydrogne is good and pure and not oil so that's good right? Oh yeah except for the fact that in order to make my fireplace work I need 220 current which is coming FROM DEAD DINOSAURS.
*SIGH*
THe problem that I really have with ITune's international support is that it doesn't allow you to go across borders. I can browse through music from the UK but as a US user I cannot buy any of it. That's kind of dumb consider I could buy the CD that way.
I'm assuming the reason this is the case is a track that costs $1 in the US might be $1.50 in the UK for the same artist.
Hey don't knock COMBAT. COMBAT pwnz00rs you :)
But you sorta proove my point. The cost for a 2600 at it's time was pretty damn high compared to what we're paying now for rather high end systems that play some pretty amazing games.
Price of Atari 2600 in 1977: $199
Converting that to today's price, it would be about $500. Granted it include nine action packed games with the system, but still, it does give some perspective on the real cost of these things.
Hardly. It'll make a difference sure, but think about what the bulk of space on game discs is. It's sound files and video clips. That's not going to make a huge impact on these games. It's telling that DVD drives have been common on PC's for a while now and there's really not much in games that's taking advatange of it. It's just a nice way to consolidate 3 or 4 cd's.