I love monowall, but the interface for doing traffic shaping/QoS is, well, non existent. Their GUI (at least for this function) is less than intuitive.
Anyone know of any docs? Or perhaps might post a mini-how-to here?
Win2k is my favorite Windows. It runs everything that XP does (don't know where the OP got 95% from), doesn't have the activation bullshit, and is just more stable and less resource hungry than XP.
That being said, I've come across multiple new or newer hardwares that don't support Win2k properly.
Examples:
I bought a Dell 4550 years ago, perhaps circa 2002 or 2003. It would not run Win2k out of the box - audio hardware was unsupported, and drives only ran in DMA mode under XP. Same with Linux. Much complaining to Dell, and a three month wait resulted in replacement audio hardware and a new BIOS that did the trick.
No Nvidia based motherboards allow all features to run with Win2k. I've tried two, and neither allows bootable RAID or any other RAID functionality - the drivers are there, but they just don't work.
MS has tentacles into everything, and you WILL upgrade eventually. I guess I'll move on to XP once Longhorn is truly threatening:)
I just picked up a Zodiac 2 off ebay for about $200 - they got a bit cheap after Tapwave announced that the line is discontinued.
It has a nice ATI graphic chip in it, which has been put to good use in:
* A version of MAME,
* A combo SNES/Gensis/Turbo Graphix/Gameboy emulator. The SNES emu is flawless, and I'm enjoying playing a lot of games that I'd half forgotten about.
* An accelerated version of the TCPMP player
* A mess of Zodiac enabled games. I'd say that the 3D quality is somewhere between a PS1 and a PS2.
* Hexen, Doom and Quake ports by the same developer that did Little John Z.
Plus, the Zodiac 2 has Bluetooth, two SD slots (one SDIO), great widescreen display, aluminum case, and it is small. It ships with a decent mail client and a so-so web browser. It gets pretty nice battery life, too. It supports most SD wifi cards, another plus.
It has turned out to be the best entertainment and "road warrior" PDA that I've ever owned, bar none.
I thought that hybrids were only efficient for highway driving, but not so great for stop-and-start traffic - and that "leadfoot" drivers also further reduce the efficiency (since the internal combustion engine is never shut down that way).
Am I missing something? Or is NYC seeing hybrids as a panancea that won't work? Perhaps just having smaller cars is the answer. And perhaps pouring the money into further improvements for public transport make even more sense. How about tax breaks for folks _without_ cars?
I'm largely ignorant about hybrids, so I'm not trolling, I'm asking. I did lookup up "Prius FAQ" on Google, and found this:
"Short trips KILL gas mileage." Isn't that what taxis do all day? Make lots of short trips?
jh
Remember bnetd... case still ongoing.
on
BlizzCon Cometh
·
· Score: 2, Informative
A couple of stories that may add a historical perspective:
Plastic Army Men ----------------
Remember the great deals on plastic Army men that you could get on the back covers of comic books? This was back in the early '70's. My friend and his brother weren't satisified with their "one per customer" offer, so they made up a bunch of fake siblings with silly names and sent orders it their name.
About 10 years later, the brothers were getting a ton of military recruiting junk mail. As were their fake siblings...
Riflery Team ------------
I was a member of the Riflery team in high school, circa 1981. I lived in a pretty liberal place at the time.
At on practice, I looked down at the bucket of spent.22 casings, and wondered: who was paying for the bullets? I couldn't imagine that the left-wing PTA would ever budget for them.
I asked the teacher-coach. He looked at me funny, and said: "The Army pays for the bullets".
It took me a second to absorb this, and I asked what the Army was getting back in return. The teacher-coach said: "Your target scores".
Now, my parents hadn't agreed to that, and neither did I. I quit that day, not wanting to be "special need" drafted as a sniper.
I'm using a DVD drive, and the CD is one of the Dual Disk thingies. All of my computers have DVD drives, except for one really old one.
I'm thinking that these disks confuse computer (and maybe all) DVD drives because they're seeing a second, wrong layer.
At any rate, to answer your question, an old Clash CD worked, this Shakira disc did not. I would have posted the console output, but I got stopped by the lameness filter.
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,2,0 -toc Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a37 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling cdrecord: Warning: Running on Linux-2.6.7-gentoo-r11 cdrecord: There are unsettled issues with Linux-2.5 and newer. cdrecord: If you have unexpected problems, please try Linux-2.4 or Solaris. scsidev: 'ATAPI:0,2,0' devname: 'ATAPI' scsibus: 0 target: 2 lun: 0 Warning: Using ATA Packet interface. Warning: The related Linux kernel interface code seems to be unmaintained. Warning: There is absolutely NO DMA, operations thus are slow. Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'. cdrecord: Cannot do inquiry for CD/DVD-Recorder. cdrecord: Input/output error. test unit ready: scsi sendcmd: fatal error CDB: 00 00 00 00 00 00 cmd finished after 0.000s timeout 40s
cdparanoia:
cdparanoia -vsQ cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001) (C) 2001 Monty and Xiphophorus
My girlfriend bought the new Shakira album. No comments on that, please:)
The back of the disc says, translated from Spanish: "...this disc does not conform to CD specifications".
So far, I've noted the following aspects:
* It rips with my friend's old CD-R deck (the one that takes the special discs).
* It does not play with iTunes.
* It does not play with Windows Media 9.
* It does not rip with cdrdao on a modern drive.
* It apparently _does_ rip with cdrdao on an ancient CD-ROM drive - well, can't say for sure, since it was proceeding so slowly that the process would take days.
* It does not work with dd with any drive (but I didn't give a blocksize arg, so that could be part of it).
If anyone has something that they'd like me to try, answer this post with a command line and I'll report back.
If you throw out your conceptions of what a processor is, and what a personal computer is, this kind of makes sense.
The old balance used to be: Intel made the processors, Microsoft made the OS, and neither the twain shall meet.
Microsoft blurred the lines with Xbox. Xbox did or will do a lot of what people bought PCs for - games, media playback, etc. And this was fine when it contained Intel CPUs, but now it doesn't. Every Xbox 360 sold will mean that an HTPC or gaming PC may not be, and Intel is not amused.
Microsoft is now promising backwards compatibility, too, with the new Xbox. So, in other words... they're shipping a processor. A software-based emulation type processor, but it is clear that they've developed x86 emulation as a part of their technology portfolio, and like most things MS, it'll get better with time.
Intel also remembers the great ARC/ACE debacle, when Microsoft attempted to loosen Intel's vise on the industry by promoting a multi architecture vision. MS did this again with Windows CE - but Intel again prevailed (and their StrongArm has, well, strongarmed itself to dominance in the small device space).
So: why can't MS push another multi-architecture vision? Why not non-x86 Windows boxes? Why not break the x86 oligarchy? Don't they want the hardware to be close to free of cost, with the user only paying for the software? Kind of like the Xbox? This is clearly only possible with freeing Windows from x86. And like the Xbox 360, they probably have a vision of new classes of devices that would greatly benefit from other architectures.
So: would it be so unthinkable that Intel pushes back? After all, under the traditional Intel/MS detente, they could simply say: we're not making PCs, we didn't buy a PC company - these are Macs. Moreover, Intel has been trying like crazy to get into the consumer electronics space for many years. What better way than with the Apple brand? Where all the PCs use x86 (or even Itanium), and all the iPod/Consumer electronic stuff has Intel ARM cpus. Hmm.
My guess is that they'll have this ported in relatively little time, or that Apple will sic the lawyers in relatively little time;) Or that the OS will be very tightly bound to the CPU.
If Apple doesn't squash it, their OS sales will far exceed their hardware sales.
XM will get as many as 1 million subcribers every year from their deal with Hyundai - which didn't cost half a billion dollars.
XM currently has 2 million more subs than Sirius. There is simply no way that Sirius is going to catch up, Stern or not.
Sirius paid a lot of money for potential Stern subcribers - at least a couple of hundred bucks each. It is extremely unlikely that Sirius will actually make money on this deal any time soon.
Sirius is betting the farm on some risky deals, while XM has had strong and steady growth - and will absolutely turn a profit years before Sirius does.
And while they have all of this content, they only got it by dramatically overpaying for it. XM has, to their credit, refused to play that game. Meanwhile, Sirius has been ignoring certain less sexy aspects that drives growth in this medium.
Sirius is losing the car partnership race. Folks that buy new cars have something like a 30-50% conversion rate for whatever ships in the cars. That is becoming, increasingly, XM. Their new deal with Hyundai is going to probably bring in more subscribers than Stern ever would, but it didn't cost half a billion.
Sirius is also seen as losing the hardware race. They don't have the resources to make desirable hardware. XM isn't doing the best here, either, but they're doing better than Sirius.
Lastly, Sirius cannot afford to launch another sat, and they need to. They're going to burn a lot of money keeping a repeater network going. XM has the resources to continue lofting birds, and saving money from having less of a ground presence - and eventually, having the sat bandwidth to offer new services.
The fact is that Sirius is acting a lot like a dot.com company. They're betting that they get a lot more subscribers before they burn through the cash - and I think that's a bet that they're going to lose.
Sirius will be calling for a secondary stock offering soon. I'm sure that Stern is going to be just thrilled when his huge deal suddenly is worth a whole lot less. That will be the beginning-of-the-end event for Sirius.
jh
Anything reliant on multiplayer doomed
on
The Path to AAA Games
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The sad truth is that any game that relies on multiplayer is going to have a limited audience.
Take you average RTS game. Don't even try to find a game with strangers - you'll end up dealing with rude, cheating juveniles that think it's fun to join your team to make you lose to their friends.
FPS games are worse. Near the top of some ranking? Expect kiddies on your team to frag you or throw flash grenades in your face... simply so that you'll lose your ranking.
The truth is that multiplayer games depend upon some semblance of good sportsmanship, but are typically diminished by mean-spirited assholes. There's a reason why Spore won't have actual multiplayer functionality - too much concern that someone would just come along and snuff you.
Evolution has stopped, and we may actually see some "regression", due to the fact that natural selection is over in most human populations.
Think about it. Women used to mate with the strongest/smartest/most capable that emerged from a pretty level playing field; men used to mate with whoever showed the greatest fertility signs.
Now, you have things like women marrying rich asthmatic heirs; men being attracted to anti-fertility symbols (being super thin is not good for fertility) or being attracted to totally false things like breast implants. You have folks that should be genetically successful falling on the wrong side of socio-economic divides. In other words, people are breeding based on criteria that isn't so good for the genetic health of the species. This is a by-product of civilization.
So what happens when the species becomes populated by offspring based on "social selection", not natural selection? Genetic diseases become multi-generational issues, for one, and that's the most obvious. Not sure what the other ramifications will be, but probably not so good.
I have one, won it in a contest, an Orange SPV-C500.
They're going to have to make a whole lot of changes to make this dog hunt. Problems with the current SmartPhone:
* Sync: you can sync with (just) one device. Don't ever try to unsync with that device, tho - in my case, you just can't. My notebook and phone are bonded forever.
* Interface: One more time: the Windows Start button metaphor doesn't work on small devices. Other issues include that it can take several steps to get to common programs.
* Non-intuitive/inconsistent UI: Sometimes, you can cancel out of something with the "red phone" button like on other phones. Sometimes you have to back out of things with the cursor button. Users of pretty much any other phone UI will go crazy.
* Not invented here syndrome: MMS uses AMR encoding for audio. Smartphone (at least my version) just doesn't support it, period.
* Crashes: It crashes a lot more than other phone OSes I've tried. Sometimes the crashes are partial - like losing networking ability.
* LONG boot time: takes over a minute for my phone to come up.
* Difficult to configure: the interface for configuring email and other internet apps is horrid and slow. Can't do it from a desktop app.
* Web browser is just totally wonky: some things load. Some things don't. What loaded yesterday doesn't work today.
* Slow: I believe that my device as a 200mhz processor in it, but screen updates and nav is really, really slow.
* You get charged for everything: there is seemingly no community, but just software vendors. Folks that are spoiled by all the nice gadgety apps available on Palm and Symbian are going to be disappointed.
Give me a Treo or Symbian device any day. I only use the thing because it was free, and I'm thinking seriously about ebaying it anyway.
Microsoft has a lot of work here before they kill anything. I'm hating this thing so much that I'm about ready to go back to my "dumb" phone and PDA combo that I used before.
It would be one thing if HP called the site a Postive Comments Only Blog, or something like that. But they call it a blog, a term that means one thing - a site for public news and discourse. Then they try to make it something else that suits their PR.
Either have a blog, or don't. That's their right, as it is their servers. But if you ask for feedback from the community, and you give the appearance of being impartial - deal with the consquences.
* They're as owned by special interests as the Republicans. The bankruptacy bill? Everyone voted for it, even very liberal, Hero Of The People Democrats. I mean, SCHUMER voted for that turd, and dude really wants to be a liberal working-class savior. That's insane behavior.
* They are becoming Republican Lite. Look at Hillary. She's starting to get awful cozy with the right-to-lifers. The goal of the Dems is to actually become ok with the Fundies. And that is totally insane, because it can never happen.
They need to grow a spine, start leading, and actually stand up for something. Sure, they may take some hits for a while, but the tide will turn. Kerry lost because he was a flip-flopper, much as I hated the Republicans using the stupid term.
I mean, isn't a defintion of insanity to perform the same acts and behavior over and over again, and believe that there will be a new outcome?
AMD is using Socket 754 for notebook chips (which use this core). You might get luck and either have a motherboard that will support a notebook chip (either through BIOS update or current support - more of a voltage thing), or find a notebook chip that can tolerate a bit of extra voltage.
I think that this product strategy could be work, but only if it was turned inside-out, essentially, and stripped to the basics. In other words, ONE form factor, but widely figurable - even in ways that may not be initially predicted.
How about this:
Start with a form factor that will hit a sweet spot. Perhaps a clamshell? The digitizer that would make it a tablet is probably not all that valuable to most folks - witness the poor sales of Tablet PCs.
Pretty much include only the very basics in the package - processor (how about ARM? - cheap and fast, good power consumption), keyboard, battery, display stuff, perhaps a pointing thingy. No memory. No storage. Battery optional - and use an existing battery form factor, if possible. Oh, and some kind of firmware that can boot anything. Maybe Mini-PCI and Ethernet, if it doesn't add too much to the bottom line.
Build in STANDARD interfaces. USB. PCMCIA. SO-DIMM memory expansion. CF slot.
Let people pick and choose what they want next. Notebook replacement? OK, put in a CF microdrive, lots of RAM, Linux OS, done. Pocket PC on steroids? OK, CompactFlash memory, Windows CE, less memory, wireless card. You get the idea - make it so that there are many, many permutations possible.
Lastly: Support one or two STANDARD configs. Let the community support the rest. Give a few away - what would the OpenZaurus folks do with this beasty? The NetBSD folks? Perhaps someone wants to hack around with WinCE... give a few away and let them.
And then - price the basic box at under $500. Make it the Soekris of portable and desktop computing.
"The game is being done by the in-house Warner Bros. developers."
Time Warner has a near perfect track record of failing with any content that uses any kind of technology. This game should carry on the same sad tradition.
They need to stick to distribution, ink and paper, and celluloid.
There are two op-eds in the NY Times that really speak to this, one directly, one not so much. Friedman and Krugman each talk about some disturbing trends, with facts and figures to go along. Yes, fascist registration or bugmenot is required - deal, but read these columns.
In a nutshell, we have Friedman essentially saying that among other things, having inexpensive and widespread broadband is essential to remain competitive. Countries like Japan and South Korea have encouraged this, since it is in the best interest of their economies. Us? We encourage the profits of the entrenched monopolistic telecoms.
Krugman talks about our health system, and has one astonishing statistic - that we not only pay twice what other countries with "socialized" medicine pay out per capita, with worse results, but almost half of our per capita is Medicare expenditures by the government. In other words, the US government already pays pretty same the much amount per citizen of what the French, Canadian or UK governments do - but we still have 40 million uninsured, and private insurance doubles our per capita. With worse results. This defies any kind of logic.
Why would a government promote policies that give worse results, while enriching private companies and special interests? Simple: our government serves those entities, but not the citizenry. I don't care about your party affiliation or ideology; spending more money with poorer results to benefit the few at the cost of the many is NOT something that represents American ideals. Anyone that says otherwise is simply ignorant or likewise beholden to special interests.
I'd blame the government, but the citizenry is who elected them. We get the government that we deserve.
I've got a few beefs with Nvidia chipsets for AMD, too, mostly on the RAID side. This is from my testing with a tier 1 motherboard, an MSI K8N.
Problems that I've had with the Nforce3 chipset:
* Their storage enhancements just don't work with Win2000 at all, practically speaking. Had to go with XP, not something I was thrilled about.
* Their RAID thingy drops disks at random, for no reason. This has happened with both PATA and SATA, and with different brands of drives.
* Their management utilities are really, really bad.
* Ethernet eats up too much CPU, period.
This is with latest drivers, latest BIOS. The earlier BIOS and drivers were just horrid.
I expected more from Nvidia. It also serves me right for cheaping out and going with onboard RAID, although configuring bootable RAID with Windows is a non-starter AFAIK.
On the other hand, my VIA A64 chipset board, under Linux, has been a dream in all respects. So has an AMD chipset board. Won't be going with Nvidia pretty much ever again.
Slashdot Mirror
I love monowall, but the interface for doing traffic shaping/QoS is, well, non existent. Their GUI (at least for this function) is less than intuitive.
Anyone know of any docs? Or perhaps might post a mini-how-to here?
jh
Win2k is my favorite Windows. It runs everything that XP does (don't know where the OP got 95% from), doesn't have the activation bullshit, and is just more stable and less resource hungry than XP.
:)
That being said, I've come across multiple new or newer hardwares that don't support Win2k properly.
Examples:
I bought a Dell 4550 years ago, perhaps circa 2002 or 2003. It would not run Win2k out of the box - audio hardware was unsupported, and drives only ran in DMA mode under XP. Same with Linux. Much complaining to Dell, and a three month wait resulted in replacement audio hardware and a new BIOS that did the trick.
No Nvidia based motherboards allow all features to run with Win2k. I've tried two, and neither allows bootable RAID or any other RAID functionality - the drivers are there, but they just don't work.
MS has tentacles into everything, and you WILL upgrade eventually. I guess I'll move on to XP once Longhorn is truly threatening
jh
It has a nice ATI graphic chip in it, which has been put to good use in:
* A version of MAME,
* A combo SNES/Gensis/Turbo Graphix/Gameboy emulator. The SNES emu is flawless, and I'm enjoying playing a lot of games that I'd half forgotten about.
* An accelerated version of the TCPMP player
* A mess of Zodiac enabled games. I'd say that the 3D quality is somewhere between a PS1 and a PS2.
* Hexen, Doom and Quake ports by the same developer that did Little John Z.
Plus, the Zodiac 2 has Bluetooth, two SD slots (one SDIO), great widescreen display, aluminum case, and it is small. It ships with a decent mail client and a so-so web browser. It gets pretty nice battery life, too. It supports most SD wifi cards, another plus.
It has turned out to be the best entertainment and "road warrior" PDA that I've ever owned, bar none.
jh
I thought that hybrids were only efficient for highway driving, but not so great for stop-and-start traffic - and that "leadfoot" drivers also further reduce the efficiency (since the internal combustion engine is never shut down that way).
Am I missing something? Or is NYC seeing hybrids as a panancea that won't work? Perhaps just having smaller cars is the answer. And perhaps pouring the money into further improvements for public transport make even more sense. How about tax breaks for folks _without_ cars?
I'm largely ignorant about hybrids, so I'm not trolling, I'm asking. I did lookup up "Prius FAQ" on Google, and found this:
"Short trips KILL gas mileage." Isn't that what taxis do all day? Make lots of short trips?
jh
I didn't buy Warcraft III, or anything else by Blizzard, as a result of Blizzard's stupid actions.
jh
A couple of stories that may add a historical perspective:
.22 casings, and wondered: who was paying for the bullets? I couldn't imagine that the left-wing PTA would ever budget for them.
Plastic Army Men
----------------
Remember the great deals on plastic Army men that you could get on the back covers of comic books? This was back in the early '70's. My friend and his brother weren't satisified with their "one per customer" offer, so they made up a bunch of fake siblings with silly names and sent orders it their name.
About 10 years later, the brothers were getting a ton of military recruiting junk mail. As were their fake siblings...
Riflery Team
------------
I was a member of the Riflery team in high school, circa 1981. I lived in a pretty liberal place at the time.
At on practice, I looked down at the bucket of spent
I asked the teacher-coach. He looked at me funny, and said: "The Army pays for the bullets".
It took me a second to absorb this, and I asked what the Army was getting back in return. The teacher-coach said: "Your target scores".
Now, my parents hadn't agreed to that, and neither did I. I quit that day, not wanting to be "special need" drafted as a sniper.
jh
I think I know what's going on here.
I'm using a DVD drive, and the CD is one of the Dual Disk thingies. All of my computers have DVD drives, except for one really old one.
I'm thinking that these disks confuse computer (and maybe all) DVD drives because they're seeing a second, wrong layer.
At any rate, to answer your question, an old Clash CD worked, this Shakira disc did not. I would have posted the console output, but I got stopped by the lameness filter.
jh
cdrecord:
/dev/cdrom for cdrom... /dev/cdrom for cooked ioctl() interface
cdrecord dev=ATAPI:0,2,0 -toc
Cdrecord-Clone 2.01a37 (i686-pc-linux-gnu) Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jörg Schilling
cdrecord: Warning: Running on Linux-2.6.7-gentoo-r11
cdrecord: There are unsettled issues with Linux-2.5 and newer.
cdrecord: If you have unexpected problems, please try Linux-2.4 or Solaris.
scsidev: 'ATAPI:0,2,0'
devname: 'ATAPI'
scsibus: 0 target: 2 lun: 0
Warning: Using ATA Packet interface.
Warning: The related Linux kernel interface code seems to be unmaintained.
Warning: There is absolutely NO DMA, operations thus are slow.
Using libscg version 'schily-0.8'.
cdrecord: Cannot do inquiry for CD/DVD-Recorder.
cdrecord: Input/output error. test unit ready: scsi sendcmd: fatal error
CDB: 00 00 00 00 00 00
cmd finished after 0.000s timeout 40s
cdparanoia:
cdparanoia -vsQ
cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty and Xiphophorus
Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
Checking
Testing
CDROM sensed: ATAPI compatible JLMS XJ-HD166S
004: Unable to read table of contents header
Unable to open disc. Is there an audio CD in the drive?
cdparanoia III release 9.8 (March 23, 2001)
(C) 2001 Monty and Xiphophorus
Report bugs to paranoia@xiph.org
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
004: Unable to read table of contents header
Unable to open disc. Is there an audio CD in the drive?
My girlfriend bought the new Shakira album. No comments on that, please :)
The back of the disc says, translated from Spanish: "...this disc does not conform to CD specifications".
So far, I've noted the following aspects:
* It rips with my friend's old CD-R deck (the one that takes the special discs).
* It does not play with iTunes.
* It does not play with Windows Media 9.
* It does not rip with cdrdao on a modern drive.
* It apparently _does_ rip with cdrdao on an ancient CD-ROM drive - well, can't say for sure, since it was proceeding so slowly that the process would take days.
* It does not work with dd with any drive (but I didn't give a blocksize arg, so that could be part of it).
If anyone has something that they'd like me to try, answer this post with a command line and I'll report back.
jh
If you throw out your conceptions of what a processor is, and what a personal computer is, this kind of makes sense.
The old balance used to be: Intel made the processors, Microsoft made the OS, and neither the twain shall meet.
Microsoft blurred the lines with Xbox. Xbox did or will do a lot of what people bought PCs for - games, media playback, etc. And this was fine when it contained Intel CPUs, but now it doesn't. Every Xbox 360 sold will mean that an HTPC or gaming PC may not be, and Intel is not amused.
Microsoft is now promising backwards compatibility, too, with the new Xbox. So, in other words... they're shipping a processor. A software-based emulation type processor, but it is clear that they've developed x86 emulation as a part of their technology portfolio, and like most things MS, it'll get better with time.
Intel also remembers the great ARC/ACE debacle, when Microsoft attempted to loosen Intel's vise on the industry by promoting a multi architecture vision. MS did this again with Windows CE - but Intel again prevailed (and their StrongArm has, well, strongarmed itself to dominance in the small device space).
So: why can't MS push another multi-architecture vision? Why not non-x86 Windows boxes? Why not break the x86 oligarchy? Don't they want the hardware to be close to free of cost, with the user only paying for the software? Kind of like the Xbox? This is clearly only possible with freeing Windows from x86. And like the Xbox 360, they probably have a vision of new classes of devices that would greatly benefit from other architectures.
So: would it be so unthinkable that Intel pushes back? After all, under the traditional Intel/MS detente, they could simply say: we're not making PCs, we didn't buy a PC company - these are Macs. Moreover, Intel has been trying like crazy to get into the consumer electronics space for many years. What better way than with the Apple brand? Where all the PCs use x86 (or even Itanium), and all the iPod/Consumer electronic stuff has Intel ARM cpus. Hmm.
This could make a lot of sense.
jh
http://www.maconlinux.org/
;) Or that the OS will be very tightly bound to the CPU.
My guess is that they'll have this ported in relatively little time, or that Apple will sic the lawyers in relatively little time
If Apple doesn't squash it, their OS sales will far exceed their hardware sales.
jh
Nope, but I do get paid to know which service will win :)
XM will get as many as 1 million subcribers every year from their deal with Hyundai - which didn't cost half a billion dollars.
XM currently has 2 million more subs than Sirius. There is simply no way that Sirius is going to catch up, Stern or not.
Sirius paid a lot of money for potential Stern subcribers - at least a couple of hundred bucks each. It is extremely unlikely that Sirius will actually make money on this deal any time soon.
Sirius is betting the farm on some risky deals, while XM has had strong and steady growth - and will absolutely turn a profit years before Sirius does.
And while they have all of this content, they only got it by dramatically overpaying for it. XM has, to their credit, refused to play that game. Meanwhile, Sirius has been ignoring certain less sexy aspects that drives growth in this medium.
Sirius is losing the car partnership race. Folks that buy new cars have something like a 30-50% conversion rate for whatever ships in the cars. That is becoming, increasingly, XM. Their new deal with Hyundai is going to probably bring in more subscribers than Stern ever would, but it didn't cost half a billion.
Sirius is also seen as losing the hardware race. They don't have the resources to make desirable hardware. XM isn't doing the best here, either, but they're doing better than Sirius.
Lastly, Sirius cannot afford to launch another sat, and they need to. They're going to burn a lot of money keeping a repeater network going. XM has the resources to continue lofting birds, and saving money from having less of a ground presence - and eventually, having the sat bandwidth to offer new services.
The fact is that Sirius is acting a lot like a dot.com company. They're betting that they get a lot more subscribers before they burn through the cash - and I think that's a bet that they're going to lose.
Sirius will be calling for a secondary stock offering soon. I'm sure that Stern is going to be just thrilled when his huge deal suddenly is worth a whole lot less. That will be the beginning-of-the-end event for Sirius.
jh
The sad truth is that any game that relies on multiplayer is going to have a limited audience.
Take you average RTS game. Don't even try to find a game with strangers - you'll end up dealing with rude, cheating juveniles that think it's fun to join your team to make you lose to their friends.
FPS games are worse. Near the top of some ranking? Expect kiddies on your team to frag you or throw flash grenades in your face... simply so that you'll lose your ranking.
The truth is that multiplayer games depend upon some semblance of good sportsmanship, but are typically diminished by mean-spirited assholes. There's a reason why Spore won't have actual multiplayer functionality - too much concern that someone would just come along and snuff you.
jh
Evolution has stopped, and we may actually see some "regression", due to the fact that natural selection is over in most human populations.
Think about it. Women used to mate with the strongest/smartest/most capable that emerged from a pretty level playing field; men used to mate with whoever showed the greatest fertility signs.
Now, you have things like women marrying rich asthmatic heirs; men being attracted to anti-fertility symbols (being super thin is not good for fertility) or being attracted to totally false things like breast implants. You have folks that should be genetically successful falling on the wrong side of socio-economic divides. In other words, people are breeding based on criteria that isn't so good for the genetic health of the species. This is a by-product of civilization.
So what happens when the species becomes populated by offspring based on "social selection", not natural selection? Genetic diseases become multi-generational issues, for one, and that's the most obvious. Not sure what the other ramifications will be, but probably not so good.
jh
I have one, won it in a contest, an Orange SPV-C500.
They're going to have to make a whole lot of changes to make this dog hunt. Problems with the current SmartPhone:
* Sync: you can sync with (just) one device. Don't ever try to unsync with that device, tho - in my case, you just can't. My notebook and phone are bonded forever.
* Interface: One more time: the Windows Start button metaphor doesn't work on small devices. Other issues include that it can take several steps to get to common programs.
* Non-intuitive/inconsistent UI: Sometimes, you can cancel out of something with the "red phone" button like on other phones. Sometimes you have to back out of things with the cursor button. Users of pretty much any other phone UI will go crazy.
* Not invented here syndrome: MMS uses AMR encoding for audio. Smartphone (at least my version) just doesn't support it, period.
* Crashes: It crashes a lot more than other phone OSes I've tried. Sometimes the crashes are partial - like losing networking ability.
* LONG boot time: takes over a minute for my phone to come up.
* Difficult to configure: the interface for configuring email and other internet apps is horrid and slow. Can't do it from a desktop app.
* Web browser is just totally wonky: some things load. Some things don't. What loaded yesterday doesn't work today.
* Slow: I believe that my device as a 200mhz processor in it, but screen updates and nav is really, really slow.
* You get charged for everything: there is seemingly no community, but just software vendors. Folks that are spoiled by all the nice gadgety apps available on Palm and Symbian are going to be disappointed.
Give me a Treo or Symbian device any day. I only use the thing because it was free, and I'm thinking seriously about ebaying it anyway.
Microsoft has a lot of work here before they kill anything. I'm hating this thing so much that I'm about ready to go back to my "dumb" phone and PDA combo that I used before.
jh
It would be one thing if HP called the site a Postive Comments Only Blog, or something like that. But they call it a blog, a term that means one thing - a site for public news and discourse. Then they try to make it something else that suits their PR.
Either have a blog, or don't. That's their right, as it is their servers. But if you ask for feedback from the community, and you give the appearance of being impartial - deal with the consquences.
jh
Why?
* They're as owned by special interests as the Republicans. The bankruptacy bill? Everyone voted for it, even very liberal, Hero Of The People Democrats. I mean, SCHUMER voted for that turd, and dude really wants to be a liberal working-class savior. That's insane behavior.
* They are becoming Republican Lite. Look at Hillary. She's starting to get awful cozy with the right-to-lifers. The goal of the Dems is to actually become ok with the Fundies. And that is totally insane, because it can never happen.
They need to grow a spine, start leading, and actually stand up for something. Sure, they may take some hits for a while, but the tide will turn. Kerry lost because he was a flip-flopper, much as I hated the Republicans using the stupid term.
I mean, isn't a defintion of insanity to perform the same acts and behavior over and over again, and believe that there will be a new outcome?
jh
Since the entire American government is owned by corporate interests, it'll take about 5 minutes for this to get passed by Congress.
I'd hope that the consumer electronics lobby is stronger than the MPAA, but I fear it isn't so.
jh
AMD is using Socket 754 for notebook chips (which use this core). You might get luck and either have a motherboard that will support a notebook chip (either through BIOS update or current support - more of a voltage thing), or find a notebook chip that can tolerate a bit of extra voltage.
How about this:
And then - price the basic box at under $500. Make it the Soekris of portable and desktop computing.
"The game is being done by the in-house Warner Bros. developers."
Time Warner has a near perfect track record of failing with any content that uses any kind of technology. This game should carry on the same sad tradition.
They need to stick to distribution, ink and paper, and celluloid.
In a nutshell, we have Friedman essentially saying that among other things, having inexpensive and widespread broadband is essential to remain competitive. Countries like Japan and South Korea have encouraged this, since it is in the best interest of their economies. Us? We encourage the profits of the entrenched monopolistic telecoms.
Krugman talks about our health system, and has one astonishing statistic - that we not only pay twice what other countries with "socialized" medicine pay out per capita, with worse results, but almost half of our per capita is Medicare expenditures by the government. In other words, the US government already pays pretty same the much amount per citizen of what the French, Canadian or UK governments do - but we still have 40 million uninsured, and private insurance doubles our per capita. With worse results. This defies any kind of logic.
Why would a government promote policies that give worse results, while enriching private companies and special interests? Simple: our government serves those entities, but not the citizenry. I don't care about your party affiliation or ideology; spending more money with poorer results to benefit the few at the cost of the many is NOT something that represents American ideals. Anyone that says otherwise is simply ignorant or likewise beholden to special interests.
I'd blame the government, but the citizenry is who elected them. We get the government that we deserve.
jh
I've got a few beefs with Nvidia chipsets for AMD, too, mostly on the RAID side. This is from my testing with a tier 1 motherboard, an MSI K8N.
Problems that I've had with the Nforce3 chipset:
* Their storage enhancements just don't work with Win2000 at all, practically speaking. Had to go with XP, not something I was thrilled about.
* Their RAID thingy drops disks at random, for no reason. This has happened with both PATA and SATA, and with different brands of drives.
* Their management utilities are really, really bad.
* Ethernet eats up too much CPU, period.
This is with latest drivers, latest BIOS. The earlier BIOS and drivers were just horrid.
I expected more from Nvidia. It also serves me right for cheaping out and going with onboard RAID, although configuring bootable RAID with Windows is a non-starter AFAIK.
On the other hand, my VIA A64 chipset board, under Linux, has been a dream in all respects. So has an AMD chipset board. Won't be going with Nvidia pretty much ever again.
jh