I've no argument for point 1... since that's fairly true. Point 2, though, I've some concerns of.
While it can be said that DRM stuff can be purchased for cheaper than what you get from its physical counterpart, I do find that the amount you paid for in comparison either works out in the end or that the DRM protected content is not worth spending for in the end.
I have long forgotten the last time I have purchased a CD. With my iPod, the most I have been getting from iTMS are weekly freebies that I found to be interesting to listen to. However, when you consider actually purchasing things like songs or albums, would what you paid for really be worth it in the end? Let's assume for the instance that the purchase is for a recent album costing US$13 for the DRM-protected content. We have the music content downloaded and its license properly downloaded from the store. We listen to it and we keep it around for a while. But have we ever thought about the audio quality at all?
Every store that sells downloadable multimedia content like music or videos/movies are using a compression that is less than that of the physical counterpart. This, to me, is unacceptable. Most particular is music, as many audio stores will let you download purchased music at a lossy bitrate such as 128kbit/s or 192kbit/s. Sure, the average Joe isn't going to hear the difference. But the power users, the picky users, and the audiophile users aren't going to stand for it. To this very day, the physical audio CD is still the only source for the highest quality audio possible. There's no built-in DRM. There's no compression inherit with it.
Now let us assume for this instance that the physical counterpart for the same album mentioned earlier is priced the same at the local store. If given the choice, which would you rather choose? I personally think the choice is obvious but I'll leave that up to you...
It's not as simple as that, though. The article details a possible legal loophole problem when it comes to IPTV. Since cable TV uses an actual cable line, then it's easy to enforce the law where necessary. AT&T's U-Verse, using IPTV, works differently in that it's "cable but not cable".
The Ars article has all the details, including the metal giant that they called 52B. It stands around 5ft tall, 4ft deep, and is about 2ft wide. It is big. AT&T wants to build and deploy those boxes wherever they please. Part of the problem is that these so-called tele-comm upgrade is also going to provide video services (like cable). Using IPTV as part of the legal loophole, AT&T wants to put a bunch of these boxes scattered across the towns that they're trying to roll fiber out to. These deployment also affect a section of a town. So unlike a cable TV deployment, service is available to the area where it is immediately available instead to every home in the town.
Both the suburban communities and AT&T are stuck. Yes, competition is good. We all want a choice. But in legal terms, both sides are stuck and AT&T isn't all that lenient when it comes to what they provide as services.
* AT&T claims it is not cable and that it's all telecomms. * If AT&T deploys, the town is likely to be sued by Comcast and the state DA, citing violation of two laws. * If AT&T cannot deploy, the town is sued citing support for monopolies and anti-competitive acts.
AT&T doesn't want a build-out, which would guarantee the service is provided to every house/building in that town within a limited time period. AT&T also refuses to provide a structured layout plan of where they wish to deploy these 52B boxes (for all we know, it might end up in someone's front yard 5ft from the house). The people in some of these towns do not want that. They also do not want a single corporate entity to be the only choice they have for broadband and cable tv services. So the question continues to remain: Where do you stand?
I think there's more to the declining sale than just a release of iTunes 7.0. I'm no expert on how things are going but it seems Apple is expanding a bit too much as to what they offer in the online store. First, we had just plain ol' music. And that's fine given the iPod can only play music. Then it expanded to photos and then videos. Soon the store offered some music videos... then TV episodes... and now movies...
Maybe it's because of other things... but my feeling and opinion is that Apple should have stuck with music overall instead of expanding into selling music videos, TV shows, and movies.
So while combating piracy is a goal for some of these game publishers, what they do not realize is that each game they're releasing is likely giving these people more inconveniences than simplifying the process of loading up a game and go. Instead, we are constantly bugged by the game's insisting request to have the game disc in the drive to properly start up.
When I first got Battlefield 2, I kept the Play disc in the drive. But I often found myself loading up the game frequently. It got to the point where I finally took out the disc, and noticed a bubble spot that wasn't there before. Due to the drive heating up the disc so much, the paint started to come off. Is this something that we really need? This is a danger to the gamer's investment because if the disc is lost, you cannot reinstall it or worst yet, you cannot play or start the game up anymore. Many of these online multi-player games have some form of online authentication system in place. What else do they need? To an extent, that pretty much proves we have proper licenses to the games we purchased at the store. Why bug us more with CD checks and encrypted sectors on disc to prevent us from making a backup to protect the original discs? I simply want to load the game up, log in, and jump into the action.
Tribes: Vengeance could be one....
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 1
Back when people were anxiously waiting for titles like Half-Life 2 and Doom3, Irrational Games developed the next game in the Tribes franchise. When VUG released this game, it had such horrible timing that both HL2 and D3 stole every spotlight there is for a computer game. This resulted in poor sales as a result and even though a patch was released to fix issues with the single player portion, very little to nothing was done to the multiplayer portion. A dedicated server was released but there were so many bugs inherent with the release that bandwidth becomes an issue along with server stability.
For months on end the fans of that title waited for the next big patch that'll hopefully fix everything, including what promised to be PunkBuster support for the title. However, in the painful and patient waiting period, legal issues were problematic that hindered the continuing development of the patch. So many were reassured that there's a patch coming. But the majority of the people have left and moved on, sadly, to other games.
And 6 months into the game's life, VUG has announced that it is ceasing support of the title. Six months was the lifespan of this title before VUG abandoned support for the game. And while many will argue in saying that this was the worst Tribes title of the 3, I say play the game for what it is -- a Tribes game. It may not suit those who are so used to the old days but things change and things evolve.
I can only wish that the game would become either public domain or even open-sourced for people to hack around with. But the sad part of it all is the game's foundation. The game's built upon the Unreal 200x engine. The Havok physics engine was also licensed to be built into that engine. As of now, the engine itself is still in wide use and still a current generation product. The likelihood of the title ever becoming open and released into public domain is so slim and dim that this game will forever be plagued with problems. This title has been abandoned in such a bad way that it makes me despise VUG for what they are.
The line I quoted implied it was mentioned elsewhere so thus I did not check. And nowhere in the paragraph did it say that the videos are also on there. If the blurb was worded differently, then I might have checked the page already.
The artist should have a say as to whether they'd like to opt for a copy protection system that their holders/labels employ. At least this gives the artist the flexibility of being able to let their fans rip the CDs into mp3s for dumping into their portable players. Eventually all the record labels would then be able to gauge as to whether the system is worth the price to pay to "defeat" piracy.
People seem to be looking at this from one side. And that's the Mac side. The first batches of comments seem to stem from folks who are keeping up with the Apple/Mac side of things.
While the acquisition of Konfabulator and its removal of the pricetag is great news for all users of the program, do note that Konfabulator, while originating on the Mac, also has a competitor on the Windows side. That side has been dominated by Stardock's own DesktopX application where it's been around for quite a while now.
The news of Yahoo buying up Konfabulator will benefit both sides of the OS platform. Windows users can soon use Konfabulator for free as an alternative to Stardock's DesktopX which costs about US$15 to register/purchase.
So they plan to kill off rebates... and the catch is to do it within two years. That sounds like a rebate in itself! We'll believe when we see the checks in the mail.:P
If Mozilla 2.0 is to be started, some major changes are needed to how the overall software suite works. The current setup for the Mozilla software suite works just fine and as such, there's little need to fix what isn't broken. However, there's a problem amongst the picky.
We all love Firefox for its speedy startup and simple UI. At the same time, we also love Thunderbird for its speedy startup and simple UI. Well, there's a bit of conflict here. What if we use both? Is it any better than Mozilla? For some, yes. For others, maybe not. So here's the idea.
A Mozilla/Gecko Framework -- what this means is that all the absolute basic and necessity to run a gecko-based application is there and that softwares built upon this library will work as though you have a stand-alone application installed. This is good for a few things. For starters, download time. Firefox and Thunderbird both come with the gecko libraries and anything else that depends on it. It's there to simplify installation and to have everything there without the need of having to install system-specific libraries (in my case, windows\system32). Another good that comes out of this is total modularity. This way, we can truly have a modular system where we have a singular installation of the Gecko engine but can have various softwares based on this to run with it. The possibility of having Mozilla software suite, Thunderbird, and Firefox installed at once without eating up 40-50MB of space is there. Perhaps, in guessing, such concept in realized form would consume at most 20MB for all 3 softwares.
Yeah, I'm sure a handful of you people must be thinking: Isn't this been thought up already with 'such-and-such' feature of Mozilla/Gecko? Yes. It has. But it appears at its current form, it cannot do such things. And I specifically remember a long time ago that one of the goal of Mozilla is to build a software suite that is modular. It's been years since. And I have not seen this realized or come to fruition. If this idea is being delayed to 2.0, so be it. But for 2.0 to be deserving of its number, it ought to at least be capable of being modular.
I'm happy for the Mozilla developers that they are looking forward to a 2.0 codebase. And I wish them luck in persuing that goal of a final code release. This framework idea is my only suggestion, as it is solely needed since we have 3 'ready-for-prime-time' softwares built upon the same Gecko library.
I believe the point in producing this is to show that instead of purchasing expensive high-framerate cameras that has some sky-high pricetag, one can use an alternate and cheaper solution by using CMOS sensors. So let's try placing a couple of things into perspective.
Say you require a camera that can record say 90fps. To a manufacturer of electronic parts, this can be achieved with a little bit of engineering. Basically, take 3 of those 30fps CMOS sensors, pack them together, set a uniform color correction setting, and an interface to send the captured information to. All this would probably costs lots less than a specialized camera that can capture 100fps or so.
If you were to walk around in a computer shop or your local Best Buy, CompUSA, Microcenter, Circuit City, or Fry's, you might have noticed that there are quite a few webcams around, all of which uses the same 30fps CMOS described at the link. The CMOS themselves are likely cheap enough that, in theory, you can assemble a few together and have a 90fps camera. I would assume that the spatial distortion would be next to nil since 3 sensors are closely together.
Please correct me on any points. I believe the concept is interesting and would have some useful uses out there (ie. spectator sports, research, film).
If it said "very large number", it surely is a small percentage of the total overal AIM userbase. I'm still connected. However, seems amusing that AOL did that.
As for it being one of the most widely used, that's probably true. But to all those who think the AIM protocol or whatnot is junk, one could say the same about any other protocols. Instead, one should be asking yourself as to what another person would say had a bunch of friends were on Yahoo! or Messenger? To me, I've a bunch of people on AIM. And sure enough, there are people who has a bunch of people on Yahoo! as well. You use whatever IM protocol your contacts use. And if you need to use multiple protocols because someone is on a different IM network, it's easy to solve that problem as there's gaim, Jabber, Trillian, and IM2 available.
I do not see why people are picking points on this. We just use whatever IM network we end up using. We deal with it and perhaps like it. So everyone, let's all run along now and go about on our usual routines.
How long until we start seeing people plastering "All your base are belong to us!" or variants thereof? Here are a couple of other lines that come to mind...
"Osama Bin-Laden was here" "She bangs! She bangs!"
This can be unrelated but it raises a concern of mine... the prospects of email in the long run or future.
For years email has served us. It has delivered time after time and is a global-wide method of communication. Yet... despite of the wonders of email alone, we are seeing an ever-increasing amount of spam floating around... a bunch of which that creeps in when your filter has been well-trained.
What I'd like to know is... can we reinvent the wheel? Is it possible to reinvent email with the purpose of ending all spam as we know it? Time and time again have I looked through random spam and found that they were delivered even tho it wasn't addressed directly to my email address. And sometimes, I see 'From' fields with my email address on it.
I feel disappointed at how email has turned out given all the methods and tools out there to combat spam... It makes me wonder if we should abandon email altogether and go with something akin to instant messaging.
that picture... it makes me say
on
eyeBlog
·
· Score: 1
What about the coming year of 2005? If I don't see or hear about a big war break out in some mountainous region between many giant robots, then I'm gonna be disappointed.
This does not mathematically make any sense. 2GB or 4GB for 100? Whereas 3 to 5 times the price gets you 10x the space?
If there's one thing that I can't stand is the Apple pricing. It's not a wonder why I've always considered Apple products to be part of a small niche market. I don't care if this is what Apple has decided on for a pricing system. It's not getting them any more customers when a 40GB mp3 player can be had for considerably less than what they're offering.
I complained on how long it took and how much it cost. But I'm not a business major or politician for that matter. I'm just your average joe Boston-region resident. People complained about it countless times. I look at the number and I see problem in financial management. What did the numbers mean to Massachusetts residents? Millions of dollars of their own tax money wasted. Call it whatever you want. If you call it an investment, that investment won't return anything for a very long time and majority of the people who were paying for it will be long gone.
There is a little bit of appreciation going into this. The project started ages ago. And, as I guess this, everyone will stand behind it and let it be finished, despite the inflated cost to build and finish the project. Will the people of Boston and surrounding towns and cities appreciate it? Yes, they have to. They want to. There's only one reason why: ease traffic congestion, no matter how small the improvement may be. If it at least cut their commute time by even a few minutes, it'll make their life all the better.
Why oh why did they chose HD-DVD over Blu-Ray? Cost is one thing. But thinking ahead is another.
The thing I like about Blu-Ray when compared to HD-DVD is that it houses more capable space. It also uses blue-lasers. A writing format is also included so that if you want to archive your p0rn of the 'net you can do that without worrying about multi-archival discs.
Information will continue to expand and grow. This applies to video as well. When DVD first came out, it can house a lot of film content. But then, things start to get tricky. Movie companies are placing an entire movie on one disc and all their extras on a separate discs. Not only does this provide more room for the movie but it also preserves more quality to the film itself. And with the talk of high-definition movies going around, you're going to need much more space than before. What then? That old DVD will not contain your 1080p 2 hour film on a single-side dual-layered DVD, unless you want to compromise video quality which none of us wants.
HD-DVD may remedy this but what then? Blu-Ray can still house more space. That means for the hardcore geeks and nerds, it may be possible to fit all 3 extended version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy into a single disc and have the film in 1080p with no compromise in film quality. And you may also be able to fit all the extras into that same disc. As movies get larger in resolution for distribution, the more space the disc will need to fit with little to no compromise in quality. Blu-Ray would simply benefit in the future run of movies.
While I do not know of the technical limitation of Blu-Ray such as compatibility in playing today's DVDs, are companies that stingy on cost that they do not want to handle Blu-Ray discs? It may be expensive now. But at least one doesn't have to worry about a different format for a long while. HD-DVD, with its smaller capacity, would have a shorter technicalogical lifespan than Blu-Ray would. How much information you can pact into a single disc matters a lot when you consider that digital video is the most consuming piece of information than any other medium. The more space available, the better film studios and viewers will be when they, in some unknown future, view the movie in insane high resolution with hardly any loss in video quality.
HD-DVD may be the next-gen standard now. But I wonder how many would still back Blu-Ray because of the possibilities and the fact that it houses more information than HD-DVD. Cost-effective? Yeah. But you're only delaying the inevitable. Technology moves fast. I doubt it'll slow down for HD-DVD.
One could imagine, for instance, contact lenses with displays and miniature computers on them, so that you can experience a virtual tour of a new city as you walk around.
Okay, can it give me a full red color flood with various data graphs and numbers floating around and a cursor? I want to experience walking around with Terminator eyes for a few days.
Slashdot Mirror
I've no argument for point 1... since that's fairly true. Point 2, though, I've some concerns of.
While it can be said that DRM stuff can be purchased for cheaper than what you get from its physical counterpart, I do find that the amount you paid for in comparison either works out in the end or that the DRM protected content is not worth spending for in the end.
I have long forgotten the last time I have purchased a CD. With my iPod, the most I have been getting from iTMS are weekly freebies that I found to be interesting to listen to. However, when you consider actually purchasing things like songs or albums, would what you paid for really be worth it in the end? Let's assume for the instance that the purchase is for a recent album costing US$13 for the DRM-protected content. We have the music content downloaded and its license properly downloaded from the store. We listen to it and we keep it around for a while. But have we ever thought about the audio quality at all?
Every store that sells downloadable multimedia content like music or videos/movies are using a compression that is less than that of the physical counterpart. This, to me, is unacceptable. Most particular is music, as many audio stores will let you download purchased music at a lossy bitrate such as 128kbit/s or 192kbit/s. Sure, the average Joe isn't going to hear the difference. But the power users, the picky users, and the audiophile users aren't going to stand for it. To this very day, the physical audio CD is still the only source for the highest quality audio possible. There's no built-in DRM. There's no compression inherit with it.
Now let us assume for this instance that the physical counterpart for the same album mentioned earlier is priced the same at the local store. If given the choice, which would you rather choose? I personally think the choice is obvious but I'll leave that up to you...
It's not as simple as that, though. The article details a possible legal loophole problem when it comes to IPTV. Since cable TV uses an actual cable line, then it's easy to enforce the law where necessary. AT&T's U-Verse, using IPTV, works differently in that it's "cable but not cable".
The Ars article has all the details, including the metal giant that they called 52B. It stands around 5ft tall, 4ft deep, and is about 2ft wide. It is big. AT&T wants to build and deploy those boxes wherever they please. Part of the problem is that these so-called tele-comm upgrade is also going to provide video services (like cable). Using IPTV as part of the legal loophole, AT&T wants to put a bunch of these boxes scattered across the towns that they're trying to roll fiber out to. These deployment also affect a section of a town. So unlike a cable TV deployment, service is available to the area where it is immediately available instead to every home in the town.
Both the suburban communities and AT&T are stuck. Yes, competition is good. We all want a choice. But in legal terms, both sides are stuck and AT&T isn't all that lenient when it comes to what they provide as services.
* AT&T claims it is not cable and that it's all telecomms.
* If AT&T deploys, the town is likely to be sued by Comcast and the state DA, citing violation of two laws.
* If AT&T cannot deploy, the town is sued citing support for monopolies and anti-competitive acts.
AT&T doesn't want a build-out, which would guarantee the service is provided to every house/building in that town within a limited time period. AT&T also refuses to provide a structured layout plan of where they wish to deploy these 52B boxes (for all we know, it might end up in someone's front yard 5ft from the house). The people in some of these towns do not want that. They also do not want a single corporate entity to be the only choice they have for broadband and cable tv services. So the question continues to remain: Where do you stand?
I think there's more to the declining sale than just a release of iTunes 7.0. I'm no expert on how things are going but it seems Apple is expanding a bit too much as to what they offer in the online store. First, we had just plain ol' music. And that's fine given the iPod can only play music. Then it expanded to photos and then videos. Soon the store offered some music videos... then TV episodes... and now movies...
Maybe it's because of other things... but my feeling and opinion is that Apple should have stuck with music overall instead of expanding into selling music videos, TV shows, and movies.
So while combating piracy is a goal for some of these game publishers, what they do not realize is that each game they're releasing is likely giving these people more inconveniences than simplifying the process of loading up a game and go. Instead, we are constantly bugged by the game's insisting request to have the game disc in the drive to properly start up.
When I first got Battlefield 2, I kept the Play disc in the drive. But I often found myself loading up the game frequently. It got to the point where I finally took out the disc, and noticed a bubble spot that wasn't there before. Due to the drive heating up the disc so much, the paint started to come off. Is this something that we really need? This is a danger to the gamer's investment because if the disc is lost, you cannot reinstall it or worst yet, you cannot play or start the game up anymore. Many of these online multi-player games have some form of online authentication system in place. What else do they need? To an extent, that pretty much proves we have proper licenses to the games we purchased at the store. Why bug us more with CD checks and encrypted sectors on disc to prevent us from making a backup to protect the original discs? I simply want to load the game up, log in, and jump into the action.
Back when people were anxiously waiting for titles like Half-Life 2 and Doom3, Irrational Games developed the next game in the Tribes franchise. When VUG released this game, it had such horrible timing that both HL2 and D3 stole every spotlight there is for a computer game. This resulted in poor sales as a result and even though a patch was released to fix issues with the single player portion, very little to nothing was done to the multiplayer portion. A dedicated server was released but there were so many bugs inherent with the release that bandwidth becomes an issue along with server stability.
For months on end the fans of that title waited for the next big patch that'll hopefully fix everything, including what promised to be PunkBuster support for the title. However, in the painful and patient waiting period, legal issues were problematic that hindered the continuing development of the patch. So many were reassured that there's a patch coming. But the majority of the people have left and moved on, sadly, to other games.
And 6 months into the game's life, VUG has announced that it is ceasing support of the title. Six months was the lifespan of this title before VUG abandoned support for the game. And while many will argue in saying that this was the worst Tribes title of the 3, I say play the game for what it is -- a Tribes game. It may not suit those who are so used to the old days but things change and things evolve.
I can only wish that the game would become either public domain or even open-sourced for people to hack around with. But the sad part of it all is the game's foundation. The game's built upon the Unreal 200x engine. The Havok physics engine was also licensed to be built into that engine. As of now, the engine itself is still in wide use and still a current generation product. The likelihood of the title ever becoming open and released into public domain is so slim and dim that this game will forever be plagued with problems. This title has been abandoned in such a bad way that it makes me despise VUG for what they are.
The line I quoted implied it was mentioned elsewhere so thus I did not check. And nowhere in the paragraph did it say that the videos are also on there. If the blurb was worded differently, then I might have checked the page already.
This is the same code that was running in the Novell Linux Desktop 10 preview videos as seen earlier
Could someone post the URL where these videos are available?
The artist should have a say as to whether they'd like to opt for a copy protection system that their holders/labels employ. At least this gives the artist the flexibility of being able to let their fans rip the CDs into mp3s for dumping into their portable players. Eventually all the record labels would then be able to gauge as to whether the system is worth the price to pay to "defeat" piracy.
People seem to be looking at this from one side. And that's the Mac side. The first batches of comments seem to stem from folks who are keeping up with the Apple/Mac side of things.
While the acquisition of Konfabulator and its removal of the pricetag is great news for all users of the program, do note that Konfabulator, while originating on the Mac, also has a competitor on the Windows side. That side has been dominated by Stardock's own DesktopX application where it's been around for quite a while now.
The news of Yahoo buying up Konfabulator will benefit both sides of the OS platform. Windows users can soon use Konfabulator for free as an alternative to Stardock's DesktopX which costs about US$15 to register/purchase.
P-p-p-powerbook!!!
I'm still waiting for them to develop human rebooting. Some of us could use a little restart in our lives.
So they plan to kill off rebates... and the catch is to do it within two years. That sounds like a rebate in itself! We'll believe when we see the checks in the mail. :P
If Mozilla 2.0 is to be started, some major changes are needed to how the overall software suite works. The current setup for the Mozilla software suite works just fine and as such, there's little need to fix what isn't broken. However, there's a problem amongst the picky.
We all love Firefox for its speedy startup and simple UI. At the same time, we also love Thunderbird for its speedy startup and simple UI. Well, there's a bit of conflict here. What if we use both? Is it any better than Mozilla? For some, yes. For others, maybe not. So here's the idea.
A Mozilla/Gecko Framework -- what this means is that all the absolute basic and necessity to run a gecko-based application is there and that softwares built upon this library will work as though you have a stand-alone application installed. This is good for a few things. For starters, download time. Firefox and Thunderbird both come with the gecko libraries and anything else that depends on it. It's there to simplify installation and to have everything there without the need of having to install system-specific libraries (in my case, windows\system32). Another good that comes out of this is total modularity. This way, we can truly have a modular system where we have a singular installation of the Gecko engine but can have various softwares based on this to run with it. The possibility of having Mozilla software suite, Thunderbird, and Firefox installed at once without eating up 40-50MB of space is there. Perhaps, in guessing, such concept in realized form would consume at most 20MB for all 3 softwares.
Yeah, I'm sure a handful of you people must be thinking: Isn't this been thought up already with 'such-and-such' feature of Mozilla/Gecko? Yes. It has. But it appears at its current form, it cannot do such things. And I specifically remember a long time ago that one of the goal of Mozilla is to build a software suite that is modular. It's been years since. And I have not seen this realized or come to fruition. If this idea is being delayed to 2.0, so be it. But for 2.0 to be deserving of its number, it ought to at least be capable of being modular.
I'm happy for the Mozilla developers that they are looking forward to a 2.0 codebase. And I wish them luck in persuing that goal of a final code release. This framework idea is my only suggestion, as it is solely needed since we have 3 'ready-for-prime-time' softwares built upon the same Gecko library.
I believe the point in producing this is to show that instead of purchasing expensive high-framerate cameras that has some sky-high pricetag, one can use an alternate and cheaper solution by using CMOS sensors. So let's try placing a couple of things into perspective.
Say you require a camera that can record say 90fps. To a manufacturer of electronic parts, this can be achieved with a little bit of engineering. Basically, take 3 of those 30fps CMOS sensors, pack them together, set a uniform color correction setting, and an interface to send the captured information to. All this would probably costs lots less than a specialized camera that can capture 100fps or so.
If you were to walk around in a computer shop or your local Best Buy, CompUSA, Microcenter, Circuit City, or Fry's, you might have noticed that there are quite a few webcams around, all of which uses the same 30fps CMOS described at the link. The CMOS themselves are likely cheap enough that, in theory, you can assemble a few together and have a 90fps camera. I would assume that the spatial distortion would be next to nil since 3 sensors are closely together.
Please correct me on any points. I believe the concept is interesting and would have some useful uses out there (ie. spectator sports, research, film).
If it said "very large number", it surely is a small percentage of the total overal AIM userbase. I'm still connected. However, seems amusing that AOL did that.
As for it being one of the most widely used, that's probably true. But to all those who think the AIM protocol or whatnot is junk, one could say the same about any other protocols. Instead, one should be asking yourself as to what another person would say had a bunch of friends were on Yahoo! or Messenger? To me, I've a bunch of people on AIM. And sure enough, there are people who has a bunch of people on Yahoo! as well. You use whatever IM protocol your contacts use. And if you need to use multiple protocols because someone is on a different IM network, it's easy to solve that problem as there's gaim, Jabber, Trillian, and IM2 available.
I do not see why people are picking points on this. We just use whatever IM network we end up using. We deal with it and perhaps like it. So everyone, let's all run along now and go about on our usual routines.
How long until we start seeing people plastering "All your base are belong to us!" or variants thereof? Here are a couple of other lines that come to mind...
"Osama Bin-Laden was here"
"She bangs! She bangs!"
This can be unrelated but it raises a concern of mine... the prospects of email in the long run or future.
For years email has served us. It has delivered time after time and is a global-wide method of communication. Yet... despite of the wonders of email alone, we are seeing an ever-increasing amount of spam floating around... a bunch of which that creeps in when your filter has been well-trained.
What I'd like to know is... can we reinvent the wheel? Is it possible to reinvent email with the purpose of ending all spam as we know it? Time and time again have I looked through random spam and found that they were delivered even tho it wasn't addressed directly to my email address. And sometimes, I see 'From' fields with my email address on it.
I feel disappointed at how email has turned out given all the methods and tools out there to combat spam... It makes me wonder if we should abandon email altogether and go with something akin to instant messaging.
The future's so bright... I gotta wear shades
What about the coming year of 2005? If I don't see or hear about a big war break out in some mountainous region between many giant robots, then I'm gonna be disappointed.
This does not mathematically make any sense. 2GB or 4GB for 100? Whereas 3 to 5 times the price gets you 10x the space?
If there's one thing that I can't stand is the Apple pricing. It's not a wonder why I've always considered Apple products to be part of a small niche market. I don't care if this is what Apple has decided on for a pricing system. It's not getting them any more customers when a 40GB mp3 player can be had for considerably less than what they're offering.
I complained on how long it took and how much it cost. But I'm not a business major or politician for that matter. I'm just your average joe Boston-region resident. People complained about it countless times. I look at the number and I see problem in financial management. What did the numbers mean to Massachusetts residents? Millions of dollars of their own tax money wasted. Call it whatever you want. If you call it an investment, that investment won't return anything for a very long time and majority of the people who were paying for it will be long gone.
There is a little bit of appreciation going into this. The project started ages ago. And, as I guess this, everyone will stand behind it and let it be finished, despite the inflated cost to build and finish the project. Will the people of Boston and surrounding towns and cities appreciate it? Yes, they have to. They want to. There's only one reason why: ease traffic congestion, no matter how small the improvement may be. If it at least cut their commute time by even a few minutes, it'll make their life all the better.
Why oh why did they chose HD-DVD over Blu-Ray? Cost is one thing. But thinking ahead is another.
The thing I like about Blu-Ray when compared to HD-DVD is that it houses more capable space. It also uses blue-lasers. A writing format is also included so that if you want to archive your p0rn of the 'net you can do that without worrying about multi-archival discs.
Information will continue to expand and grow. This applies to video as well. When DVD first came out, it can house a lot of film content. But then, things start to get tricky. Movie companies are placing an entire movie on one disc and all their extras on a separate discs. Not only does this provide more room for the movie but it also preserves more quality to the film itself. And with the talk of high-definition movies going around, you're going to need much more space than before. What then? That old DVD will not contain your 1080p 2 hour film on a single-side dual-layered DVD, unless you want to compromise video quality which none of us wants.
HD-DVD may remedy this but what then? Blu-Ray can still house more space. That means for the hardcore geeks and nerds, it may be possible to fit all 3 extended version of the Lord of the Rings trilogy into a single disc and have the film in 1080p with no compromise in film quality. And you may also be able to fit all the extras into that same disc. As movies get larger in resolution for distribution, the more space the disc will need to fit with little to no compromise in quality. Blu-Ray would simply benefit in the future run of movies.
While I do not know of the technical limitation of Blu-Ray such as compatibility in playing today's DVDs, are companies that stingy on cost that they do not want to handle Blu-Ray discs? It may be expensive now. But at least one doesn't have to worry about a different format for a long while. HD-DVD, with its smaller capacity, would have a shorter technicalogical lifespan than Blu-Ray would. How much information you can pact into a single disc matters a lot when you consider that digital video is the most consuming piece of information than any other medium. The more space available, the better film studios and viewers will be when they, in some unknown future, view the movie in insane high resolution with hardly any loss in video quality.
HD-DVD may be the next-gen standard now. But I wonder how many would still back Blu-Ray because of the possibilities and the fact that it houses more information than HD-DVD. Cost-effective? Yeah. But you're only delaying the inevitable. Technology moves fast. I doubt it'll slow down for HD-DVD.
Okay, can it give me a full red color flood with various data graphs and numbers floating around and a cursor? I want to experience walking around with Terminator eyes for a few days.
Great. And at the prom, the DJ shall play "Mr. Roboto" by Styx... but can it dance appropriately with that tune?
"Is it done yet?"
"Is what done? Can you rephrase?"
"I can't... otherwise, you'd charge me for two questions."