2. The price is WAY WAY higher! Than what?? If you're comparing with a few years ago, see point #1.
It's more expensive for two tickets to see a movie then it is to buy a new release DVD at the Suncoast that is 100ft from the door of the theater.
It's $8.50 per ticket to see the movie in the theater, and all DVDs are 25% off duing the week after release at Suncoast. The decision becomes pay $17 for two tickets to see some commercials followed by a movie where I my or may not have the experience ruined by some obnoxious audience members, and the sticky floor will need to be washed off my shoes later, or I can spend $16 and watch the movie at home with no obnoxious people, and I can keem the movie to watch again whenever I'd like. Screw the theater.
Gun laws like requiring fingerprinting don't work. The reason is simple. People who are planning on committing a crime with their gun are going to obtain their gun illegally to avoid the fingerprinting law.
You cant make laws that require criminals to identify themselves and expect them to work. Criminals don't obey the laws. That's why they are criminals.
If you're planning on running custom code that needs insanely fast FP performance and isn't easily distributable, or you absolutely need 64-bit hardware, then you should go for it. Otherwise, they're overpriced and you should get something else.
Itanium will likely end up filling the markes previously occupied by Alpha, PA-RISC, and some MIPS-64 platforms. They seem to be using the same design and marketing paradigm. (Proprietary platform. High performace. High price.) The types of people that you are probably thinking of when you say "enthusiast" aren't going to be able to afford one of these.
The failing modem is an extremely common problem with the units (just read any TiVo board)
This is one of my biggest stupid internet user pet peeves. (You are the stupid internet user, by the way). Complaints in a forum are *NOT* evidence that a problem is extremely common. Practically everybody who has the modem problem posts it to the forums, and you see only a few hundred people complainging there. There are hundreds of thousands of TiVos out there. The people bitching about the broken modems are less then 1/100 of a percent of TiVo owners. That's not a very common problem.
PC games have the same stupid issue. Some company puts out a game and puts a forum on their web site. They sell a million copies of the game. 500-1000 people who did a shitty job building their own PC have trouble with the game and the forum becomes useless because a few people post tens of times a day about how bad the problem is and how they should sue the publisher. Morrowind's forums are my favorite example of this.
A few hundred unfortunate people whining in a forum doesn't make their problem widespread.
That was my point. the original story was trying to imply that gentoo was for everybody. It's not for people who want t a binary distro.
You need 4000 available packages and instantaneous perfect security? And don't find that contradictory?
I don't need 4000 packages, I need to know that when I want one package that it'll be available. The more packages there are, the better the chance of that.
If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?
I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available. I'm waiting for it to have widely available high performace mirrors that serve binaries, so I only have to compile when I want to, and I can be using that new piece of software in seconds. I'm waiting for it to have a proven track record for strict filesystem hirearchy standard compliance (the same standard each release, please). I'm waiting for it to run on all the platforms I currently use (still missing arm). I'm waiting for it to have a dedicated team of hundreds of developers that release security updates in hours (In binary form so that I don't have to wait for compilation for security). I'm waiting for transparent integration of non-"free" software into the standard package installation system. And most importantly, I'm waiting to find any reason why my current system may be insufficient, or even sub-optimal, because I don't feel the need to fix what isn't broken.
I'd still like to see ANY evidence. All you've posted is analyst speculation and rumour. The second article says "it will continue to lose money even three, four years out into the future", which is clearly not true, because sony claims to make a profit on each unit even after the recent price drop.
You can't post actual evidence because there is none. If sony lost money per unit on the original machines, they didn't tell anybody about it.
Is this a reproducable fact, or the numbers Sprint gave you?
It varies. It is much faster late at night. In the middle of the day I only get ~30-50kB/sec (that's BYTES, not bits) if the on screen speed readout is to be believed. At night, it is much faster. It's not like I'm downloading large files, though. It brings up my (ical2html generated) calendar practically instantaniously. My main complaint about it is that all the software is java, and it's slow ass to load up programs. Also, at $0.02/kB, I try and avoid using it if I'm near a teathered connection. It's great for checking e-mail or looking up directions on the web if you absolutely have to, but I don't like to do that. It's a phone, and I'd rather talk to people considering long distance is included. e-mail is inferior to a telephone conversation if the cost is the same.
So, essentially you're complaing about the HD being to large?
That's rediculous. I'm complainging about the transfer being too slow. It's only a 5GB disk. It shouldn't take more than half a day to read all of it. Bluetooth should be 10x faster.
BTW... How do you synchronise your E-Mail with your PDA? Or your Address-book? And with your mobile? How do you access the Internet with your mobile? And with other people's?
It's very simple. I have a server in my house, and all the data is there. Wherever I am, I can access the data, either using somebody else's internet connection (or my work connection), or through the browser on my cell phone which connects to the internet directly via my carrier. What do I need a PDA for? My phone has a browser, and my server does that.
The best part is that after all that effort, I only use all that stuff as a last resort, because when I'm away from my desk I don't want to be bothered with work.
Other then my CDMA2000 enabled cell phone (Sprint PCS Vision, faster then bluetooth BTW, so If I did have a PDA and it was bluetooth enabled, I wouldn't be able to get my phone's full bandwidth to my PDA), why do I need slow wireless?
Anyway, back on topic: Hardly. It was never intended for that kind of thing, still you can do it.
We're talking about a bluetooth hard drive here. At the optimal transfer speed, you'll need three sets of batteries to read all the data off of this thing. I understand that this is not what bluetooth was designed for, but it's the kind of thing that people want it for, and it should have been taken into account. Hence it was obsolete before it arrived.
I'd love to walk in with a player in my pocket and have it automatically sync with my desktop's current media collection.
At just under 1 Mbit, you'd better be staying in the room a long time if you want to sync up more than a single MP3. Bluetooth was obsolete before it hit the shelves.
To my knowledge, there exists no software that can copy a protected disc. And there might never be.
Who says you need to copy the disc, or even a crack the executeable? Having the data from the disk and a program that emulates the physical features of the copy protection works just fine. I use such a program all the time because I find that my CD-ROM drive is unacceptably slow. The CD comes out of the game box and is copied to the hard drive, and then it goes safely back in the box where it won't be damaged. The games run faster, and I don't have to buy a new CD-ROM drive every two years like I used to.
There isn't a copy protection product on the shelves in your software retailer right now that isn't already defeated, no hacking required.
Copy protection is a waste of money.
Even if they do find a way to encrypt the software on the disc in such a way that it can't be decrypted without the original, people will just start copying the unencrypted data out of system memory and distributing that. It may not be impossible to stop software piracy, but it certainly won't be worth the cost it will involve. People who can afford the software already pay for it.
Oh, BTW, that regulation you cited only applies if you are claiming that you have a U.S. patent pending. If you don't specify that it's a U.S. patent it doesn't apply to you.
You have included a key phrase. If you can claim that you intend to file a patent, or that you have "patent pending" on your product because you put it there before you were denied a patent and it would require extra effort to remove it, you can reasonably claim that you are not intending to decieive the public, and are allowed to have "patent pending" on your product.
Deception of consumers is a crime regardless.
Even so, it is difficult to prove motivation, and you will be hard pressed to find people who were forced to pay said fine, even though there are products that you use every day that say "patent pending" when there isn't one.
Let the moderators make their own decisions. You clearly can't even comprehend your own post well enough, so I don't know why you consider yourself a worthy judge of mine.
At least in the U.S., you can't say "Patent Pending" until you (or, much more likely, your Patent Agent or Patent Attorney) have filed a Patent Application with the PTO.
Not true. You can put "Patent pending" on anything for any reason. You can even put it on products that have been denied a patent. There is no law or regulation that disallows it.
I'm in the same situation. 36" sony on a sony stand, and an upgraded TiVo. Turns out I like the stand better with the door off anyway. The glass can't get dirty if there's no glass.
Whether it is the memory process or another process that causes the degradation, the cure is the same. I doubt that the person who wrote the question cares about the exact process.
The cure is NOT to switch battery types, it's to charge your batteries correctly.
Instead of looking for a phone with a "high tech" battery, he should be looking for a phone with a high quality charger.
Regardless of the level of chip you put into an integrated motherboard no serious gamer will buy this...
Yeah, but lots of casual gamers will. There's WAY more casual gamers out there than hardcore gamers. YOu just don't hear about them because they don't live and breathe games, and don't spend hours posting in forums. IN fact, the only reason that hardcore gamers are relavent in the market at all is because they are willing to pay MASSIVE amounts of money for video hardware. If the weren't, there'd be too few of them for the hardware companies to even bother with.
Like it or not most games are played on integrated video hardware.
I'm not going to sling insults any longer, but I am going to try to state my opinion perhaps more clearly than before. If you don't mind people looking up your clothing, that's fine. Some do, some don't. But, in all cases the person choosing to look up someone's clothes should get permission before doing so. I do realize that different people will have different opinions about what is acceptible. That's a very good use for language: I can ask you if my desired action would offend you.
Do you ask permission before you have any contact with anybody. I didn't think so. There are some things that are acceptable by default. Looking at people, taking pictures in public, etc. There are lots of things where permission is implied. The line between where you have to ask permission and where you don't is subjective. People have different opinions. You would be painfully aware of this if you ever traveled to a place where the local culture had a different line than you do. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you're from the US, and you've never been to europe, or you would already know what I mean. Until you start asking permission to look in somebody's general direction, and getting everybody in the frame;s permission before taking vacation pictures, I will continue to disagree with you.
Nothing is a clear cut as you believe. If it were, the world would be a much more peaceful place.
In many states it's only illegal to pass a modified odometer reading off as the actual value. That's fraud. It's not illegal to change the readout, or to replace the odometer. If you look on the bill of sale from for cars in most states, you'll see a check box and a blank where you can disclose that the odometer was modified and what the actual mileage is.
The devaluation is at the software and game level. Is Developer X going to spend 5 million making a game that can be pirated with ease because someone can goto lik-sang.com and get a modchip? NOooooooooooooooooooooooooo
That sounds good in theory, but my experience with people who mod their current generation consoles is that they want to do things not normally allowed, such as play import games/DVDs, and run custom software that was written by random people on the internet. People just aren't pirating games for these new DVD based consoles like they used to for PSX, because it's just not practical, mod chip or no.
If you think that the availability of mod chips is what is causing Xbox development to stagnate, you're seriously misguided. There are mod chips out there for the PS2 also, and the titles keep pouring out for the PS2. I think that the only reason somebody hasn't come out with a mod for the Gamecube yet is because Nintendo made it trivial to make the gamecube play import titles, so there's no incentive to make a mod chip.
Slashdot Mirror
2. The price is WAY WAY higher!
Than what?? If you're comparing with a few years ago, see point #1.
It's more expensive for two tickets to see a movie then it is to buy a new release DVD at the Suncoast that is 100ft from the door of the theater.
It's $8.50 per ticket to see the movie in the theater, and all DVDs are 25% off duing the week after release at Suncoast. The decision becomes pay $17 for two tickets to see some commercials followed by a movie where I my or may not have the experience ruined by some obnoxious audience members, and the sticky floor will need to be washed off my shoes later, or I can spend $16 and watch the movie at home with no obnoxious people, and I can keem the movie to watch again whenever I'd like. Screw the theater.
Gun laws like requiring fingerprinting don't work. The reason is simple. People who are planning on committing a crime with their gun are going to obtain their gun illegally to avoid the fingerprinting law.
You cant make laws that require criminals to identify themselves and expect them to work. Criminals don't obey the laws. That's why they are criminals.
If you're planning on running custom code that needs insanely fast FP performance and isn't easily distributable, or you absolutely need 64-bit hardware, then you should go for it. Otherwise, they're overpriced and you should get something else.
Itanium will likely end up filling the markes previously occupied by Alpha, PA-RISC, and some MIPS-64 platforms. They seem to be using the same design and marketing paradigm. (Proprietary platform. High performace. High price.) The types of people that you are probably thinking of when you say "enthusiast" aren't going to be able to afford one of these.
The failing modem is an extremely common problem with the units (just read any TiVo board)
This is one of my biggest stupid internet user pet peeves. (You are the stupid internet user, by the way). Complaints in a forum are *NOT* evidence that a problem is extremely common. Practically everybody who has the modem problem posts it to the forums, and you see only a few hundred people complainging there. There are hundreds of thousands of TiVos out there. The people bitching about the broken modems are less then 1/100 of a percent of TiVo owners. That's not a very common problem.
PC games have the same stupid issue. Some company puts out a game and puts a forum on their web site. They sell a million copies of the game. 500-1000 people who did a shitty job building their own PC have trouble with the game and the forum becomes useless because a few people post tens of times a day about how bad the problem is and how they should sue the publisher. Morrowind's forums are my favorite example of this.
A few hundred unfortunate people whining in a forum doesn't make their problem widespread.
If you don't mind tarballs, it looks like that 4000 number has been surpased.
I was going by their website which says that there are 2800 tested packages.
If you want a binary distro, use a binary distro.
That was my point. the original story was trying to imply that gentoo was for everybody. It's not for people who want t a binary distro.
You need 4000 available packages and instantaneous perfect security? And don't find that contradictory?
I don't need 4000 packages, I need to know that when I want one package that it'll be available. The more packages there are, the better the chance of that.
If you haven't tried Gentoo yet, what are you waiting for?
I'm waiting for it to have over 4000 packages tested and available. I'm waiting for it to have widely available high performace mirrors that serve binaries, so I only have to compile when I want to, and I can be using that new piece of software in seconds. I'm waiting for it to have a proven track record for strict filesystem hirearchy standard compliance (the same standard each release, please). I'm waiting for it to run on all the platforms I currently use (still missing arm). I'm waiting for it to have a dedicated team of hundreds of developers that release security updates in hours (In binary form so that I don't have to wait for compilation for security). I'm waiting for transparent integration of non-"free" software into the standard package installation system. And most importantly, I'm waiting to find any reason why my current system may be insufficient, or even sub-optimal, because I don't feel the need to fix what isn't broken.
Glad you asked?
Need more evidence? Then find it yourself.
I'd still like to see ANY evidence. All you've posted is analyst speculation and rumour. The second article says "it will continue to lose money even three, four years out into the future", which is clearly not true, because sony claims to make a profit on each unit even after the recent price drop.
You can't post actual evidence because there is none. If sony lost money per unit on the original machines, they didn't tell anybody about it.
Is this a reproducable fact, or the numbers Sprint gave you?
It varies. It is much faster late at night. In the middle of the day I only get ~30-50kB/sec (that's BYTES, not bits) if the on screen speed readout is to be believed. At night, it is much faster. It's not like I'm downloading large files, though. It brings up my (ical2html generated) calendar practically instantaniously. My main complaint about it is that all the software is java, and it's slow ass to load up programs. Also, at $0.02/kB, I try and avoid using it if I'm near a teathered connection. It's great for checking e-mail or looking up directions on the web if you absolutely have to, but I don't like to do that. It's a phone, and I'd rather talk to people considering long distance is included. e-mail is inferior to a telephone conversation if the cost is the same.
So, essentially you're complaing about the HD being to large?
That's rediculous. I'm complainging about the transfer being too slow. It's only a 5GB disk. It shouldn't take more than half a day to read all of it. Bluetooth should be 10x faster.
BTW... How do you synchronise your E-Mail with your PDA?
Or your Address-book? And with your mobile?
How do you access the Internet with your mobile?
And with other people's?
It's very simple. I have a server in my house, and all the data is there. Wherever I am, I can access the data, either using somebody else's internet connection (or my work connection), or through the browser on my cell phone which connects to the internet directly via my carrier. What do I need a PDA for? My phone has a browser, and my server does that.
The best part is that after all that effort, I only use all that stuff as a last resort, because when I'm away from my desk I don't want to be bothered with work.
Other then my CDMA2000 enabled cell phone (Sprint PCS Vision, faster then bluetooth BTW, so If I did have a PDA and it was bluetooth enabled, I wouldn't be able to get my phone's full bandwidth to my PDA), why do I need slow wireless?
Anyway, back on topic: Hardly. It was never intended for that kind of thing, still you can do it.
We're talking about a bluetooth hard drive here. At the optimal transfer speed, you'll need three sets of batteries to read all the data off of this thing. I understand that this is not what bluetooth was designed for, but it's the kind of thing that people want it for, and it should have been taken into account. Hence it was obsolete before it arrived.
I'd love to walk in with a player in my pocket and have it automatically sync with my desktop's current media collection.
At just under 1 Mbit, you'd better be staying in the room a long time if you want to sync up more than a single MP3. Bluetooth was obsolete before it hit the shelves.
To my knowledge, there exists no software that can copy a protected disc. And there might never be.
Who says you need to copy the disc, or even a crack the executeable? Having the data from the disk and a program that emulates the physical features of the copy protection works just fine. I use such a program all the time because I find that my CD-ROM drive is unacceptably slow. The CD comes out of the game box and is copied to the hard drive, and then it goes safely back in the box where it won't be damaged. The games run faster, and I don't have to buy a new CD-ROM drive every two years like I used to.
There isn't a copy protection product on the shelves in your software retailer right now that isn't already defeated, no hacking required.
Copy protection is a waste of money.
Even if they do find a way to encrypt the software on the disc in such a way that it can't be decrypted without the original, people will just start copying the unencrypted data out of system memory and distributing that. It may not be impossible to stop software piracy, but it certainly won't be worth the cost it will involve. People who can afford the software already pay for it.
Please post evidence. Why do you think this is true?
Oh, BTW, that regulation you cited only applies if you are claiming that you have a U.S. patent pending. If you don't specify that it's a U.S. patent it doesn't apply to you.
for the purpose of deceiving the public
You have included a key phrase. If you can claim that you intend to file a patent, or that you have "patent pending" on your product because you put it there before you were denied a patent and it would require extra effort to remove it, you can reasonably claim that you are not intending to decieive the public, and are allowed to have "patent pending" on your product.
Deception of consumers is a crime regardless.
Even so, it is difficult to prove motivation, and you will be hard pressed to find people who were forced to pay said fine, even though there are products that you use every day that say "patent pending" when there isn't one.
Let the moderators make their own decisions. You clearly can't even comprehend your own post well enough, so I don't know why you consider yourself a worthy judge of mine.
At least in the U.S., you can't say "Patent Pending" until you (or, much more likely, your Patent Agent or Patent Attorney) have filed a Patent Application with the PTO.
Not true. You can put "Patent pending" on anything for any reason. You can even put it on products that have been denied a patent. There is no law or regulation that disallows it.
(admittedly, if the first one is destroyed very quickly, there will be a huge political barrier to overcome before a second cable could be deployed)
There's an easy solution to this problem that can be summed up with a quote: "Why build one when you can buld two for twice the price" - S.R.Hadden
I'm in the same situation. 36" sony on a sony stand, and an upgraded TiVo. Turns out I like the stand better with the door off anyway. The glass can't get dirty if there's no glass.
Remove that door!
Typically, the sign design stations are dedicated boxes as when they're not in use designing, or driving the plotter, they're not making money.
Looks like you've identified your unseen dependency problem.
Whether it is the memory process or another process that causes the degradation, the cure is the same. I doubt that the person who wrote the question cares about the exact process.
The cure is NOT to switch battery types, it's to charge your batteries correctly.
Instead of looking for a phone with a "high tech" battery, he should be looking for a phone with a high quality charger.
Let's put this falsehood to rest already:
NiCd Batteries do NOT have "memory"
Regardless of the level of chip you put into an integrated motherboard no serious gamer will buy this...
Yeah, but lots of casual gamers will. There's WAY more casual gamers out there than hardcore gamers. YOu just don't hear about them because they don't live and breathe games, and don't spend hours posting in forums. IN fact, the only reason that hardcore gamers are relavent in the market at all is because they are willing to pay MASSIVE amounts of money for video hardware. If the weren't, there'd be too few of them for the hardware companies to even bother with.
Like it or not most games are played on integrated video hardware.
I'm not going to sling insults any longer, but I am going to try to state my opinion perhaps more clearly than before. If you don't mind people looking up your clothing, that's fine. Some do, some don't. But, in all cases the person choosing to look up someone's clothes should get permission before doing so. I do realize that different people will have different opinions about what is acceptible. That's a very good use for language: I can ask you if my desired action would offend you.
Do you ask permission before you have any contact with anybody. I didn't think so. There are some things that are acceptable by default. Looking at people, taking pictures in public, etc. There are lots of things where permission is implied. The line between where you have to ask permission and where you don't is subjective. People have different opinions. You would be painfully aware of this if you ever traveled to a place where the local culture had a different line than you do. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you're from the US, and you've never been to europe, or you would already know what I mean. Until you start asking permission to look in somebody's general direction, and getting everybody in the frame;s permission before taking vacation pictures, I will continue to disagree with you.
Nothing is a clear cut as you believe. If it were, the world would be a much more peaceful place.
In many states it's only illegal to pass a modified odometer reading off as the actual value. That's fraud. It's not illegal to change the readout, or to replace the odometer. If you look on the bill of sale from for cars in most states, you'll see a check box and a blank where you can disclose that the odometer was modified and what the actual mileage is.
The devaluation is at the software and game level. Is Developer X going to spend 5 million making a game that can be pirated with ease because someone can goto lik-sang.com and get a modchip? NOooooooooooooooooooooooooo
That sounds good in theory, but my experience with people who mod their current generation consoles is that they want to do things not normally allowed, such as play import games/DVDs, and run custom software that was written by random people on the internet. People just aren't pirating games for these new DVD based consoles like they used to for PSX, because it's just not practical, mod chip or no.
If you think that the availability of mod chips is what is causing Xbox development to stagnate, you're seriously misguided. There are mod chips out there for the PS2 also, and the titles keep pouring out for the PS2. I think that the only reason somebody hasn't come out with a mod for the Gamecube yet is because Nintendo made it trivial to make the gamecube play import titles, so there's no incentive to make a mod chip.