Comcast is trying like hell to eliminate the analog lineup. They can then force you to pay extra for EVERY TV by forcing a cable box rental.
Based on the number of times I've had to return a set-top box because it Just Stopped Working, and the MSRP prices of the boxes, I have my doubts that Comcast is making much of a profit off that $5/month rental fee. I bet Scientific American are making out like bandits, though.
More likely, Comcast is tired of maintaining redundant analog and digital delivery infrastructures. Continuing to support analog customers is (or soon will be) a money-losing proposition for them, and every dollar they spend on keeping that system up is a dollar they can't spend on upgrading the internet and digital TV systems.
anyone under the age of, say, 40, already gets most of their TV from the internet, where it's on demand and there's far fewer commercials.
You don't actually believe any of what you just wrote, do you?
Geeks like you and me might be comfortable getting our television programming from RSS feeds that monitor BitTorrent index sites for content that was broadcast an hour ago and transcoded on the fly to Xvid by the 21st-century incarnation of what used to be called a "warez courier", then streaming the file from the fileserver in the utility closet to the HTPC in the living room via wireless, but most people aren't.
Most people just want to plug a wire into the back of their TV and have a clicky box to change channels and adjust the volume with.
This is starting to change -- the growth of PVRs over the last decade have made many of us accustomed to expecting content to be available on demand rather than on a schedule, and more and more networks seem to be getting hip to the idea that putting programming on a website is a legitimate delivery channel -- but we're still a long way from the point of "we get most of our TV from the internet".
And if you're willing to expand your definition of "PC" past Lenovo-compatible PCs[1], the PC Engine (called TurboGrafx outside Japan) is in Wii Shop Channel, and some games for the Commodore 64 home computer have shown up in the European Wii Shop Channel.
I'll grant you the C64, and add that Japan's Virtual Console offerings include some titles from the 8-bit MSX computer. But it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that NEC's "PC Engine" had anything in common with a PC other than the two letters in the name. It was out-and-out a game console; no keyboard peripheral was even released for it, not that keyboards were very useful for the shoot-em-ups and soft porn RPGs that the console excelled at.
Considering that it is 10x faster inside than the peak of the SATA interface. It seems to me that there is a lot of potential.
Since the performance bottleneck here seems to be the SATA interface, and not the memory itself, maybe the next evolution of this design could move the RAM directly onto the motherboard, and the CPU could be given rapid access to it through the northbridge?
Imagine what kind of performance that (purely theoretical for now) configuration could accomplish!
I purposely avoided listening to the speeches of Obama, McCain, and the man for whom I ultimately voted, Nader, so I was not swayed by their charisma.
Well then, you intentionally kept yourself ill-informed.
As our head of government, being a persuasive communicator is just about the most important qualification Obama can bring to office; as our head of state, even more so.
If your car has a recall for a safety belt problem, and you don't get it fixed and get into an accident, is it suddenly the car manufacturer's fault? No.
What if my car's safety belt has a design or manufacturing flaw, but the manufacturer has not yet acknowledged it by issuing a recall notice? If I sustain injuries that can be proven to have been caused by the defective belt, can the manufacturer be held liable? Yes! Now can you imagine if a software publisher had to pay restitution to customers every time a bug in their code occurred?
Software is not like a car. For one thing, it doesn't have windshield wipers.
'You draw stuff and your drawings behave physically correctly. As soon as you release the last button, the laws of physics are applied to your drawing.'
MARVEL at the way the virtual crayon material seems to adhere motionlessly to the virtual paper! THRILL as the virtual pigments simulate the refraction of light at different wavelengths!
The company measures my performance by what I get done.
It must be a novel job description you have if your duties do not require interaction with any other people, and therefore does not ever require you to coordinate schedules so you're 'on duty' at specific times.
I've always wondered how even the most pro-piracy people could claim 'slew of inferior games' is a justification to pirate...if it sucks, wouldn't you/not/ want to waste time playing it?
I assume there is a "try before you buy" reasoning here. Nobody wants to drop $35 on a new DS game only to find out it's a piece of crap, and be left with no recourse but to sell it back to GameStop for a quarter of its price as a 'used' game.
If the consumer can instead download a ROM image and spend a few days playing it that way, he can either (a) decide the game is worth $35 after all, and make plans to buy a legit copy that will never be carried out, or (b) decide the game is junk, and delete the game, by which I mean drag the file into the 'archived ROMS' folder but not keep it on the flash card.
I'm not sure if Bush ever had a Blackberry or a PDA, but he used to be a heavy email user. He went cold turkey when he assumed office. According to his "last email" that went out to all his correspondents, it was mainly about the legal exposure.
I think his decision at that moment said a lot about what his priorities would be as President: it was more important for his ass to be completely covered than it was to continue using the tools that would maximize his productivity.
It will be interesting to see, eight years later, with electronic communication methods more pervasive and essential than ever, if President Obama will make the same choice.
The sad truth is, given the choice between a well-written, stable and fast application with a tiny set of features and a giant slow buggy program with every feature under the sun, too many users choose the second.
Do you mind if I rephrase this statement in a way that makes the users' choice somewhat more sympathetic?
"Given the choice between an application which never meets their needs and a program which sometimes meets their needs, users often choose the second."
It's better in the minds of many to have a feature which works right 90% of the time but fails the other 10% than it is for the feature to be entirely absent.
Given that they are talking about 3D gaming on the playstation, surely it's obvious that "any source" refers to games, rather than some DVD movie.
The headline Slashdot gave to this article is "Sony Teases 3D Playstation 3". There's no indication there that the subject refers exclusively to games, as the PS3 is not just a game console but also a Blu-Ray player, DVD player, and networkable media center.
Now THERE is a novel concept - if I have more money, I can use more money to get more things!
Electricity is not a "thing", though; it is a commodity with a (for now) limited supply, and the production of that commodity has impacts (environmental and otherwise) on everyone on the planet, whether they consume that commodity at a normal rate or not.
My point is, there are costs to electricity other than the 'Amount Due' line on your monthly bill.
It could, via HDMI handshaking or impedance measuring or remembering which the last power command the universal remote sent to the TV set was.
How useful is a DVR which doesn't offer rewind, but only records scheduled programs?
Um, about 98% as useful as a DVR which does offer rewind?
I rarely if ever have a need to rewind a live TV signal. Pause, yes, but rewind? Most of the time if something was awesome enough to merit an instant replay, the program's director will replay it for me.
Large predators are pretty rare and those that do skulk around will generally be skeptical at attacking something as large and unfamiliar as a human. They will tend to need to be rather desperate to even try. Paranoid prey animals are probably more dangerous but often occur in herds so are easy to spot and avoid.
Are you describing the jungle, or the "urban jungle"? What you've written is applicable to both.
Manhattan hurt your brain when you were there. It's actually intentional--it's the only way they can keep the theaters on Broadway packed for inane pablum like "Cats".
They must be doing it wrong, then, as the Broadway run of "Cats" ended more than eight years ago, and Broadway in general is really hurting financially right now.
Ask anyone who has lived in New York about pizza, or public transportation, or pretty much anything else for that matter and the conversation will eventually turn to how much better New York is than wherever it is they currently happen to be.
If there's one thing New Yorkers enjoy more than bragging about how great the public transportation system is, it's complaining about how much our transportation system sucks.
All of which leads me to believe that there's something inherently limiting in MIDI - that it is, frankly, an obsolete format - that new digital interface methods better reproduce the mechanics of a performance.
The MIDI specs only support 128 different values for parameters like note velocity and sustain pedal. Like the 640K limit of DOS, it seemed like enough 25 years ago.
I wonder if anyone else has noticed this? Is there a MIDI 2.o in the works to address this?
Some manufacturers have come up with extensions to the MIDI standards to allow parameter depths of 1,024+ to be recorded and reproduced, but new protocols designed to replace MIDI wholesale, such as OSC and mLAN, have seen only limited adoption so far.
Or, the manufacturer of your digital piano may be intentionally crippling the fidelity of your performance when you export to Standard MIDI, as a way of encouraging you to stick with their proprietary format.
Next time someone mentions a technology that is outdated. Like say... floppies.
Ironically (?), the predominant distribution media for digital player pianos is STILL the 3.5" floppy disk.
What was state-of-the-art when the first Disklaviers were released in the late 1980s is now hopelessly anachronistic, but as long as first-generation hardware owners continue to be willing to pay $30 for a handful of MIDI files, concessions to them will continue to be made.
Those games were so popular for a reason. It wasn't for their killer graphics
It's easy to say "it wasn't about the graphics back then," but let's not forget that the NES's graphics were considered "killer" at the time, at least for a $200 home console in 1985. Certainly better in most respects than the graphics on an Atari 2600 or a Commodore 64.
I have reported a dozen requests for useful features over the years that I and my users really need. Only one or so has ever made it to light.
How important are these features to you? Important enough to hire a freelance programmer for a week to prepare and submit a source patch to the project leaders on your behalf? Or not?
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Comcast is trying like hell to eliminate the analog lineup. They can then force you to pay extra for EVERY TV by forcing a cable box rental.
Based on the number of times I've had to return a set-top box because it Just Stopped Working, and the MSRP prices of the boxes, I have my doubts that Comcast is making much of a profit off that $5/month rental fee. I bet Scientific American are making out like bandits, though.
More likely, Comcast is tired of maintaining redundant analog and digital delivery infrastructures. Continuing to support analog customers is (or soon will be) a money-losing proposition for them, and every dollar they spend on keeping that system up is a dollar they can't spend on upgrading the internet and digital TV systems.
anyone under the age of, say, 40, already gets most of their TV from the internet, where it's on demand and there's far fewer commercials.
You don't actually believe any of what you just wrote, do you?
Geeks like you and me might be comfortable getting our television programming from RSS feeds that monitor BitTorrent index sites for content that was broadcast an hour ago and transcoded on the fly to Xvid by the 21st-century incarnation of what used to be called a "warez courier", then streaming the file from the fileserver in the utility closet to the HTPC in the living room via wireless, but most people aren't.
Most people just want to plug a wire into the back of their TV and have a clicky box to change channels and adjust the volume with.
This is starting to change -- the growth of PVRs over the last decade have made many of us accustomed to expecting content to be available on demand rather than on a schedule, and more and more networks seem to be getting hip to the idea that putting programming on a website is a legitimate delivery channel -- but we're still a long way from the point of "we get most of our TV from the internet".
Forget command prompts; to hell with GUIs. This OS is going to have the first Tetris-based user interface.
And if you're willing to expand your definition of "PC" past Lenovo-compatible PCs[1], the PC Engine (called TurboGrafx outside Japan) is in Wii Shop Channel, and some games for the Commodore 64 home computer have shown up in the European Wii Shop Channel.
I'll grant you the C64, and add that Japan's Virtual Console offerings include some titles from the 8-bit MSX computer. But it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that NEC's "PC Engine" had anything in common with a PC other than the two letters in the name. It was out-and-out a game console; no keyboard peripheral was even released for it, not that keyboards were very useful for the shoot-em-ups and soft porn RPGs that the console excelled at.
Considering that it is 10x faster inside than the peak of the SATA interface. It seems to me that there is a lot of potential.
Since the performance bottleneck here seems to be the SATA interface, and not the memory itself, maybe the next evolution of this design could move the RAM directly onto the motherboard, and the CPU could be given rapid access to it through the northbridge?
Imagine what kind of performance that (purely theoretical for now) configuration could accomplish!
I purposely avoided listening to the speeches of Obama, McCain, and the man for whom I ultimately voted, Nader, so I was not swayed by their charisma.
Well then, you intentionally kept yourself ill-informed.
As our head of government, being a persuasive communicator is just about the most important qualification Obama can bring to office; as our head of state, even more so.
If your car has a recall for a safety belt problem, and you don't get it fixed and get into an accident, is it suddenly the car manufacturer's fault? No.
What if my car's safety belt has a design or manufacturing flaw, but the manufacturer has not yet acknowledged it by issuing a recall notice? If I sustain injuries that can be proven to have been caused by the defective belt, can the manufacturer be held liable? Yes! Now can you imagine if a software publisher had to pay restitution to customers every time a bug in their code occurred?
Software is not like a car. For one thing, it doesn't have windshield wipers.
'You draw stuff and your drawings behave physically correctly. As soon as you release the last button, the laws of physics are applied to your drawing.'
MARVEL at the way the virtual crayon material seems to adhere motionlessly to the virtual paper! THRILL as the virtual pigments simulate the refraction of light at different wavelengths!
The company measures my performance by what I get done.
It must be a novel job description you have if your duties do not require interaction with any other people, and therefore does not ever require you to coordinate schedules so you're 'on duty' at specific times.
I've always wondered how even the most pro-piracy people could claim 'slew of inferior games' is a justification to pirate...if it sucks, wouldn't you /not/ want to waste time playing it?
I assume there is a "try before you buy" reasoning here. Nobody wants to drop $35 on a new DS game only to find out it's a piece of crap, and be left with no recourse but to sell it back to GameStop for a quarter of its price as a 'used' game.
If the consumer can instead download a ROM image and spend a few days playing it that way, he can either (a) decide the game is worth $35 after all, and make plans to buy a legit copy that will never be carried out, or (b) decide the game is junk, and delete the game, by which I mean drag the file into the 'archived ROMS' folder but not keep it on the flash card.
I'm not sure if Bush ever had a Blackberry or a PDA, but he used to be a heavy email user. He went cold turkey when he assumed office. According to his "last email" that went out to all his correspondents, it was mainly about the legal exposure.
I think his decision at that moment said a lot about what his priorities would be as President: it was more important for his ass to be completely covered than it was to continue using the tools that would maximize his productivity.
It will be interesting to see, eight years later, with electronic communication methods more pervasive and essential than ever, if President Obama will make the same choice.
The sad truth is, given the choice between a well-written, stable and fast application with a tiny set of features and a giant slow buggy program with every feature under the sun, too many users choose the second.
Do you mind if I rephrase this statement in a way that makes the users' choice somewhat more sympathetic?
"Given the choice between an application which never meets their needs and a program which sometimes meets their needs, users often choose the second."
It's better in the minds of many to have a feature which works right 90% of the time but fails the other 10% than it is for the feature to be entirely absent.
Given that they are talking about 3D gaming on the playstation, surely it's obvious that "any source" refers to games, rather than some DVD movie.
The headline Slashdot gave to this article is "Sony Teases 3D Playstation 3". There's no indication there that the subject refers exclusively to games, as the PS3 is not just a game console but also a Blu-Ray player, DVD player, and networkable media center.
Movie industry is hoping that 3-D will be the "new colour".
So, more and more movies are getting a 3D treatment.
This comment seems to be a repeat from the early 1980s, the early 1950s, the 1910s...
Now THERE is a novel concept - if I have more money, I can use more money to get more things!
Electricity is not a "thing", though; it is a commodity with a (for now) limited supply, and the production of that commodity has impacts (environmental and otherwise) on everyone on the planet, whether they consume that commodity at a normal rate or not.
My point is, there are costs to electricity other than the 'Amount Due' line on your monthly bill.
Your DVR doesn't know if your TV is on.
It could, via HDMI handshaking or impedance measuring or remembering which the last power command the universal remote sent to the TV set was.
How useful is a DVR which doesn't offer rewind, but only records scheduled programs?
Um, about 98% as useful as a DVR which does offer rewind?
I rarely if ever have a need to rewind a live TV signal. Pause, yes, but rewind? Most of the time if something was awesome enough to merit an instant replay, the program's director will replay it for me.
I get the feeling OLPC is a bunch of well-intentioned, high-level talking heads.
Of course it is; Nicholas Negroponte is at the helm. He's a man who has never let concerns of pragmatism color his ideas.
The XO-1 project had some really brilliant people working on it, but by now it seems they've all left or been forced out. A shame.
I watch out for cars, muggers, and mall bargins. My great-great-great grandpa watched for bears, wolves, and nice fresh fruit to eat.
What about a pointed stick?
Large predators are pretty rare and those that do skulk around will generally be skeptical at attacking something as large and unfamiliar as a human. They will tend to need to be rather desperate to even try. Paranoid prey animals are probably more dangerous but often occur in herds so are easy to spot and avoid.
Are you describing the jungle, or the "urban jungle"? What you've written is applicable to both.
Manhattan hurt your brain when you were there. It's actually intentional--it's the only way they can keep the theaters on Broadway packed for inane pablum like "Cats".
They must be doing it wrong, then, as the Broadway run of "Cats" ended more than eight years ago, and Broadway in general is really hurting financially right now.
Ask anyone who has lived in New York about pizza, or public transportation, or pretty much anything else for that matter and the conversation will eventually turn to how much better New York is than wherever it is they currently happen to be.
If there's one thing New Yorkers enjoy more than bragging about how great the public transportation system is, it's complaining about how much our transportation system sucks.
In neither case are we wrong.
All of which leads me to believe that there's something inherently limiting in MIDI - that it is, frankly, an obsolete format - that new digital interface methods better reproduce the mechanics of a performance.
The MIDI specs only support 128 different values for parameters like note velocity and sustain pedal. Like the 640K limit of DOS, it seemed like enough 25 years ago.
I wonder if anyone else has noticed this? Is there a MIDI 2.o in the works to address this?
Some manufacturers have come up with extensions to the MIDI standards to allow parameter depths of 1,024+ to be recorded and reproduced, but new protocols designed to replace MIDI wholesale, such as OSC and mLAN, have seen only limited adoption so far.
Or, the manufacturer of your digital piano may be intentionally crippling the fidelity of your performance when you export to Standard MIDI, as a way of encouraging you to stick with their proprietary format.
Next time someone mentions a technology that is outdated. Like say... floppies.
Ironically (?), the predominant distribution media for digital player pianos is STILL the 3.5" floppy disk.
What was state-of-the-art when the first Disklaviers were released in the late 1980s is now hopelessly anachronistic, but as long as first-generation hardware owners continue to be willing to pay $30 for a handful of MIDI files, concessions to them will continue to be made.
Those games were so popular for a reason. It wasn't for their killer graphics
It's easy to say "it wasn't about the graphics back then," but let's not forget that the NES's graphics were considered "killer" at the time, at least for a $200 home console in 1985. Certainly better in most respects than the graphics on an Atari 2600 or a Commodore 64.
I have reported a dozen requests for useful features over the years that I and my users really need. Only one or so has ever made it to light.
How important are these features to you? Important enough to hire a freelance programmer for a week to prepare and submit a source patch to the project leaders on your behalf? Or not?