Seriously though, what a cool way to learn some piano that would be. You could start off with falling blobs but progress to actually reading sheet music scroll past. I would happily pay a couple hundred for that game including a simple unweighted keyboard. Then you could sell a nice weighted keyboard as an upgrade.
Oh lordy but that was funny! Took me a minute to work out what was going on, then pffft! Coke on the keyboard and people sticking their head in my door to see what the laughing was about....
Predictability. I've built about 10 custom PCs per year for the last 9 years (averaged out a bit, obviously, and not including production runs of one particular machine) and over that period I've consistently had an order of magnitude more trouble with non-Intel chipsets.
This isn't anything to do with processor architecture, it's everything to do with predictable, reliable, consistent and supported chipsets. I'm quite sure there are absolute gems in the VIA/SIS/nVidia/etc lineups but honestly, I can't be bothered trying to ferret them out anymore. It's much more reliable to buy an Intel board (or a board with an Intel chipset at least) and bung an Intel processor on it and ship it out. (So, yes, I don't bother to keep up much with the choices, though I do watch events with interest. I just doesn't seem a good use of my time.)
The people who pay me to build systems for them (and it's neither a service I advertise, nor is it cheap) do so because I build fast, quiet, robust and predictable (though not price conscious) PCs. Unfortunately, I usually can't do that without using Intel gear. Which is a pity, I hate Chipzilla's business practices about as much as anyone else out there. If I saw a viable alternative in AMD based systems that would allow me to assemble a faster, more capable machine for less money and without sacrificing the attributes of robust and predictable, I'd be all over it.
All that said, if Intel don't sort out the heat problems with the latest P4s, I may have no good options. As ever, life is a series of compromises...
Wellll.... In an acronym, FPGAs. Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Cost bucks. Dev kits cost a couple hundred. Build your own CPU, or just download an old one. Build your own IO. Build your own audio hardware.
Short of draconian legislation, it is impossible to render these things impracticle
If your xbox has a big hard disk and MPEG hardware, then it is just a tivo (presumably without the linux, of course, but in this instance, this doesn't make much difference) that can play games.
Frankly (and I know this is a subjective opinion,/me dons flame retardant longjohns) the Xbox is a dramatically more entertaining gaming device. So, already we have a device that does two things at least as well as the seperate devices. Now, I don't want to use something plugged into my telly as my primary email device. However, since it is already plugged into my network, I wouldn't mind being able view my inbox from it, maybe get notification of incoming mail when I'm watching Farscape, that sort of thing. Same way as I'd like the ID of the person calling me to flash onto the screen, and I'd like to be able to schedule a programme to record on my tive when I'm watching seeing it's ad during a break.
Integration isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Only in terms of device reliability and it's potential for market cornering.
Gracious, you are right, I did just think it was an ugly game console. Well, not really.
You paint an interesting timeline of the future, one that I buy right up to the point where they invade corporate America with the Xbox(n). I rather suspect that M$ fears the content owners/creators ($ony, AOL/TW etc) as they are the companies rising like rancid cream to the top of the profit margin glass.
Software is becomming a commodity, not Office and Windows, not yet, but they will. There are only so many bells and whistles one can add to the OS and office suite to persuade people to buy it, and only so much money that the M$ tax will bring in on new machines. Sure, corporate america will eventually lease it's software, keeping the revenue flowing on that end, but corporate america is canny with its money and will only part with sufficient to get the job done.
Joe Q Public on the other hand is still a ripe and untapped market. He has lots of money (gaw bless America) and when he wants to be entertained, He Wants To Be Entertained!.
As it currently stands, he has paid his one-off M$ tax on his Dell, pirated his copy of office (and if he has to pay for it due to WPA or whatever, he'll use something else, he doesn't write that many essays and office software isn't fun) and now he isn't really paying MS for anything. The people still getting his dollar are $ony, AOL et al because they are providing him with his ongoing entertainment. Why do you think $ony decided to get into music and movies? Because there is a vast pool of money to be slurped from, and M$ wishes, I'm guessing, to insert it's proboscis by hook or by crook into this pool. The Xbox is just the start of this attack, and more power to them I say.
Don't get me wrong, M$ is somewhat evil, and a very evident evil in my life as a programmer who spends 8 hours a day in front of a Win2K box. They have a monopoly on desktop software and office software. However, the software I write never runs on MS operating systems, never hits MS databases and is interpreted by a non-MS runtime environment. I just use windows as my dev system because that is what my editor runs on, and for that purpose it does it's job.
However, when I go home and turn on the stereo or the TV, I'm giving vast amounts of money to a multopoly of the most appaling sort.
I regard $ony in much the same way I regard Exxon and DeBeers, truly evil multinationals who will do anything and everything they can to get to and stay on the top. MS bashing is very valid in the context of IT professionals, however, in the great big scheme of things, their evil mostly pales into insignificance when compared to what goes on elsewhere in the corporate world.
In that context, if MS want to go out and build the best gaming system they possibly can, from the console to the network, to eventual PVR and other functionality, then go right ahead I say. They have plenty of competition, and frankly I like the competition a lot less. (It is worth noting that when MS actually has some competition, they can produce very good products, subjectively at least. You can have my iPaq when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, ditto my Xbox and my licence for Win2K)
With that in mind, when they dropped the price on the Xbox, Beloved (who does indeed love me) went straight out and bought me one. It is my considered opinion that I have never had a more pleasurable extended gaming experience than I have over the last couple of days with RalliSport Challenge and Halo. (This is coming from someone who has the stereotypical fire breathing thunderbird/GF3/1GB-RAM box at home (It's like a tiny god) plugged into a cable modem just waiting to play what have you, if you can get the damn thing to run stably and free up enough drive space and sort out that weird conflict with the latest detonator driver and work out why the hell the latest 4in1 doesn't work as well as the last three etc etc ad nauseum). No muss, no fuss, no setup, no wondering how it will play on your machine. No hunting for memory cards. Listen to your own music. Nice big adult controller. Fantabulous graphics and sound (I'd rather TV resolution and predicatbly adequate frame rate, though I suppose I'm in the minority there, and all from a device whose total cost is significantly under half of what I paid for my last god damned video card. Shit, where is that receipt?)
When the $50 online kit comes out, I'll be happily queueing with the spotty teenagers and early adopters. Frankly, I'm going to enjoy being able to let my 10 year old play online in a 'safe' sandbox appropriate to his age, and I'm going to get a hell of a kick out of UT against matched opponents (so I don't continuously get the crap kicked out of me by people who still have reflexes like I used to) and I'm going to enjoy the heck out of the headset too. I think it is a fabulous idea and I truly hope it all comes together, despite the fact that it will continue to line Bill's pockets. I don't mind lining them when he provides me with what I want. In terms of the future, if and when the product offends my ethics or morals, I'll stop giving him my money, as is my right.
Damn it all, that was a long rant. I like my xbox a great deal. I dislike MS monopolistic practices. The latter only impacts the former for me in as much as I'm going to encourage MS to engage in business practices that are not monopolistic by supporting those products that are competing. Sony has done little to deserve my money with their current console on a technical level, and frankly I dislike the company enough to boycott it on a moral level.
Slashdot Mirror
...I wanted Piano Hero.
Seriously though, what a cool way to learn some piano that would be. You could start off with falling blobs but progress to actually reading sheet music scroll past. I would happily pay a couple hundred for that game including a simple unweighted keyboard. Then you could sell a nice weighted keyboard as an upgrade.
Oh lordy but that was funny! Took me a minute to work out what was going on, then pffft! Coke on the keyboard and people sticking their head in my door to see what the laughing was about....
Well done!
What do I perceive the problem to be with?
Predictability. I've built about 10 custom PCs per year for the last 9 years (averaged out a bit, obviously, and not including production runs of one particular machine) and over that period I've consistently had an order of magnitude more trouble with non-Intel chipsets.
This isn't anything to do with processor architecture, it's everything to do with predictable, reliable, consistent and supported chipsets. I'm quite sure there are absolute gems in the VIA/SIS/nVidia/etc lineups but honestly, I can't be bothered trying to ferret them out anymore. It's much more reliable to buy an Intel board (or a board with an Intel chipset at least) and bung an Intel processor on it and ship it out. (So, yes, I don't bother to keep up much with the choices, though I do watch events with interest. I just doesn't seem a good use of my time.)
The people who pay me to build systems for them (and it's neither a service I advertise, nor is it cheap) do so because I build fast, quiet, robust and predictable (though not price conscious) PCs. Unfortunately, I usually can't do that without using Intel gear. Which is a pity, I hate Chipzilla's business practices about as much as anyone else out there. If I saw a viable alternative in AMD based systems that would allow me to assemble a faster, more capable machine for less money and without sacrificing the attributes of robust and predictable, I'd be all over it.
All that said, if Intel don't sort out the heat problems with the latest P4s, I may have no good options. As ever, life is a series of compromises...
Wellll.... In an acronym, FPGAs. Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Cost bucks. Dev kits cost a couple hundred. Build your own CPU, or just download an old one. Build your own IO. Build your own audio hardware.
Short of draconian legislation, it is impossible to render these things impracticle
Wellll,
/me dons flame retardant longjohns) the Xbox is a dramatically more entertaining gaming device. So, already we have a device that does two things at least as well as the seperate devices.
If your xbox has a big hard disk and MPEG hardware, then it is just a tivo (presumably without the linux, of course, but in this instance, this doesn't make much difference) that can play games.
Frankly (and I know this is a subjective opinion,
Now, I don't want to use something plugged into my telly as my primary email device. However, since it is already plugged into my network, I wouldn't mind being able view my inbox from it, maybe get notification of incoming mail when I'm watching Farscape, that sort of thing. Same way as I'd like the ID of the person calling me to flash onto the screen, and I'd like to be able to schedule a programme to record on my tive when I'm watching seeing it's ad during a break.
Integration isn't a bad thing in and of itself. Only in terms of device reliability and it's potential for market cornering.
Gracious, you are right, I did just think it was an ugly game console. Well, not really.
You paint an interesting timeline of the future, one that I buy right up to the point where they invade corporate America with the Xbox(n). I rather suspect that M$ fears the content owners/creators ($ony, AOL/TW etc) as they are the companies rising like rancid cream to the top of the profit margin glass.
Software is becomming a commodity, not Office and Windows, not yet, but they will. There are only so many bells and whistles one can add to the OS and office suite to persuade people to buy it, and only so much money that the M$ tax will bring in on new machines. Sure, corporate america will eventually lease it's software, keeping the revenue flowing on that end, but corporate america is canny with its money and will only part with sufficient to get the job done.
Joe Q Public on the other hand is still a ripe and untapped market. He has lots of money (gaw bless America) and when he wants to be entertained, He Wants To Be Entertained!.
As it currently stands, he has paid his one-off M$ tax on his Dell, pirated his copy of office (and if he has to pay for it due to WPA or whatever, he'll use something else, he doesn't write that many essays and office software isn't fun) and now he isn't really paying MS for anything. The people still getting his dollar are $ony, AOL et al because they are providing him with his ongoing entertainment. Why do you think $ony decided to get into music and movies? Because there is a vast pool of money to be slurped from, and M$ wishes, I'm guessing, to insert it's proboscis by hook or by crook into this pool. The Xbox is just the start of this attack, and more power to them I say.
Don't get me wrong, M$ is somewhat evil, and a very evident evil in my life as a programmer who spends 8 hours a day in front of a Win2K box. They have a monopoly on desktop software and office software. However, the software I write never runs on MS operating systems, never hits MS databases and is interpreted by a non-MS runtime environment. I just use windows as my dev system because that is what my editor runs on, and for that purpose it does it's job.
However, when I go home and turn on the stereo or the TV, I'm giving vast amounts of money to a multopoly of the most appaling sort.
I regard $ony in much the same way I regard Exxon and DeBeers, truly evil multinationals who will do anything and everything they can to get to and stay on the top. MS bashing is very valid in the context of IT professionals, however, in the great big scheme of things, their evil mostly pales into insignificance when compared to what goes on elsewhere in the corporate world.
In that context, if MS want to go out and build the best gaming system they possibly can, from the console to the network, to eventual PVR and other functionality, then go right ahead I say. They have plenty of competition, and frankly I like the competition a lot less. (It is worth noting that when MS actually has some competition, they can produce very good products, subjectively at least. You can have my iPaq when you pry it from my cold dead fingers, ditto my Xbox and my licence for Win2K)
With that in mind, when they dropped the price on the Xbox, Beloved (who does indeed love me) went straight out and bought me one. It is my considered opinion that I have never had a more pleasurable extended gaming experience than I have over the last couple of days with RalliSport Challenge and Halo. (This is coming from someone who has the stereotypical fire breathing thunderbird/GF3/1GB-RAM box at home (It's like a tiny god) plugged into a cable modem just waiting to play what have you, if you can get the damn thing to run stably and free up enough drive space and sort out that weird conflict with the latest detonator driver and work out why the hell the latest 4in1 doesn't work as well as the last three etc etc ad nauseum). No muss, no fuss, no setup, no wondering how it will play on your machine. No hunting for memory cards. Listen to your own music. Nice big adult controller. Fantabulous graphics and sound (I'd rather TV resolution and predicatbly adequate frame rate, though I suppose I'm in the minority there, and all from a device whose total cost is significantly under half of what I paid for my last god damned video card. Shit, where is that receipt?)
When the $50 online kit comes out, I'll be happily queueing with the spotty teenagers and early adopters. Frankly, I'm going to enjoy being able to let my 10 year old play online in a 'safe' sandbox appropriate to his age, and I'm going to get a hell of a kick out of UT against matched opponents (so I don't continuously get the crap kicked out of me by people who still have reflexes like I used to) and I'm going to enjoy the heck out of the headset too. I think it is a fabulous idea and I truly hope it all comes together, despite the fact that it will continue to line Bill's pockets. I don't mind lining them when he provides me with what I want. In terms of the future, if and when the product offends my ethics or morals, I'll stop giving him my money, as is my right.
Damn it all, that was a long rant. I like my xbox a great deal. I dislike MS monopolistic practices. The latter only impacts the former for me in as much as I'm going to encourage MS to engage in business practices that are not monopolistic by supporting those products that are competing. Sony has done little to deserve my money with their current console on a technical level, and frankly I dislike the company enough to boycott it on a moral level.