Maybe this is the kind of thing we need to turn public sentiment away from the greenies and get some more nuclear power plants built.
I have no idea what the figures are, but nuclear has to be infinitely better for the environement than natuarl gas and coal. Tidal, sun ray, and wind turbines are doing what they can, but it just isn't much.
Have we gotten to the point of a high effeciency house being economical? Private solar pannels on the home, with low wattage bulbs and such? This past weekend I was washing my dogs and discovered that the water left in the hose all afternoon was actually hotter than what comes out of my hot water heater. I need to build a solar pre-heater contraption for my gas water heater.
Eight or nine years ago having several hundred Mp3s made a guy the cool kid in town. Now not having several thousand Mp3s makes a guy obsolete.
I got my name, LoudMusic, those eight or nine years ago by having A) A cable modem, and B) 12GB of Mp3s. I guess about three years ago the mission to fill with Mp3s every last byte of disk space I could purchase just became profound insanity. I had plans to build multi-terabyte disk arrays and gather all my friends collections together. Then I realized that 99% of what I already possessed I'd never listened to.
Gluttony.
So now I litterally have no music on my computer. Any of my computers. I use iTunes at work and listen to my coworkers shared libraries. At home I just play video games (old ones at that...)
The extreme abundance of content is simply overwhelming. Furthermore it's mostly crap and almost impossible to sort through it to find a gem.
I know a lot of manufacturers have started including iPod connections in the glovebox with stereo's equipped with direct control of the gadget, but has anyone made a headunit with a cassette-like bay for the iPod? It would be like, retro cool. I guess the problem comes with the different form factors of all the different iPods, but I suppose they could include various shims.
For $4 more, you get a faster processor, 4 times the memory, more harddrive space, dual optical drives, SLI, and a 20" LCD. Apple has done a good job of making sure that they add a lot of mac only accessories (or gimmicks depending on your point of view) that make direct comparisons to a PC harder. Stuff like backlit keyboards with light sensors, integrated webcam, frontrow, firewire, small formfactor, etc.
...it could be highly useful for example in the corporate setting...
Oh, for fuck's sake! Don't give them any more ideas.
The extra cost of technology staff and the risk of a shittastrophe are nothing compared to abysmal employee morale. If you don't let 'em stroke off for a few minutes a couple of times an hour by going to ebay or playing snood you're going to end up with a resentful staff. And they'll produce awful, crappy work for you.
*** INSANELY OFF-TOPIC REPLY ***
Where I completely agree with your sentiment, I have to question when it became OK for professional employees to generally goof off and dick around for HOURS every day. We are some lazy sons-a-bitches.
Office Space (1999)
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
I'm not that bad, but I'm definitely not putting in 40 hours of work in a week. What has caused this? Is it purely computer / internet related, or have employees been wasting absurd amounts of company time for several decades?
I remember way back when, thinking that when the technology arrived to make games look "real" it would be pretty cool. WRONG. When games look "real" and are modeling real physics, they are limited in what they can do. All we get in the way of innovation is new environments for running around shooting stuff.
Sprite based 2D games could violate physical laws and we didn't care. Better yet, games didn't have to exist in an analog of the known universe at all.
We got what we asked for, and damn it, it's boring.
So what you're saying is the real world is boring and thats why we made video games in the first place - replicating the real world in a video game will just be a boring video game?;)
Sounds pretty good to me, except that we can replicate real world events that we're not allowed to do or are physically or financially unable to do in a video game environment. Like racing Formula 1 cars around Nurburgring, building insane rollercoasters, or shooting cops in the face with a bazooka. That shit never gets old!
I think the problem for the GTA style games is that when GTA:3 hit massive sales there were a slew of copycat games that sucked. Then all the legal battles drained everyone of what little interest remained.
Am I caught in a time warp? I could SWEAR I've played Madden on PS2 with more than two players. After double checking the website it supports four with multi-tap. XBox and 360 do as well. PS2 even has online play which I believe would allow four players per console, total of eight. I could be wrong.
Furthermore, there are games like Fifa World Cup that support up to EIGHT players on a single console using two multi-tap units. Additionally I've seen more than one video hockey series that supported more than two players per console. Hell, even Virtua Tennis on Dreamcast supported four players.
I agree with you on all aspects except the spaces, though 'no spaces' is of course the most robust. HFS+ / OS X don't care about spaces or their placement but NTFS / Windows do not like having a space at the begining or double spaces (I think...). And the multiple periods has never been an issue for me.
I guess now is as good a time as any, Mr / Mrs Anonymous Coward.
I see you are pretty on-the-mark when it comes to Apple's target market. Here's your 10/23/2001 comment on the iPod release.
"Raise your hand if you have iTunes... Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port... Raise your hand if you have both... Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device... There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod."
You're a regular Apple Nostradamus.
Months after that post Apple released iTunes for Windows. Later they produced a USB iPod. And the price has come down to as low as $99. Infact you can't even spend $400 on an iPod if you tried!
Wow! They fixed what was wrong with the product and now it's selling millions of units. Imagine that.
It's also noteworthy that Vista requires OEMs to have some kind of networking ability. While this is a given by today's standards, I find it very curious that an operating system REQUIRES me to have it.
Just because it requires you to have the hardware doesn't inclusively mean you can't firewall connections to *.microsoft.com:*;)
Who is Apple's target market? I think the only reason they even try to appeal to geeks is because they can use the word "UNIX" like some kind of geek mating call. Aside from that they've really got nothing geeky in their linup. It's all posh bling. Look at the PC vs Mac adverts - it's all about easy to use and does the things a basic user wants to do.
Apple and Jobs don't care that they're losing touch with 'the OS community'. I doubt they ever cared much in the first place. Just enough to get Slashdot to make an Apple section.
Pssst, I heard that the Star Control sequel will feature Duke Nukem caught in a world of Orcs, blasting his way out in a massive Counterstrike against the enemy. Better still, it will run on Windows Vista when it's released too.
It doesn't seem like it would be too terribly difficult to circumvent the block.
However, Ito's images do show up in the Flickr group pools for his guild, We Know, and for World of Warcraft, because more than half of the images in his account are traditional photographs. In Ito's Flickr account, images he has taken of Helsinki, Finland, and Vancouver, British Columbia, show up beside an image of guild members setting out for a hike in World of Warcraft.
Just upload a crap load of pictures, yours or ones you find randomly on the `net, and then add all the screenshots you wish.
They're pissing off members and potentially generating monumental amounts of useless data on their servers.
Instead of an "on | off" switch for the entire account they need to have it be selective per image. But good luck writing effective code for that.
Parent post is spot on. I hear my corporate friends saying the same thing all the time. This isn't to say that American workers are garounteed to be better, but I think that as the majority goes we are in the industry because we like computers and making them work and the majority of Indian workers are in it because "Oh, big America pay much dollars for computer job". Or maybe that's the group we have access to here. I have plenty of American friends that are the same way, they earned a bachelor's degree in comp-sci so they could get paid 'big bucks'. Only to find out that the degree didn't teach them how to do their job. But it seems the ratio is just smaller for us than it appears to be for them.
Has anyone else noticed that 2006 isn't over yet? This list is worthless. In a month there will be new technology out that could be on the list changing all the numbers.
Even the reviewers are getting ahead of themselves. Is there just nothing going on worth talking about?
I think I like the mentality of "We're not going to tell you what we're working on until it's done". Compare that to something like Duke Nukem Forever, or damn near any Microsoft product. Hype kills technology for me. I'd much rather just have products appear in a usable state than listen to people talk about something that doesn't exist for two years only to find out the producer is killing the project.
SPARE ME.
Oh, looks like Google is trying to. Good for them.
I can't imagine anyone attempting such a license. No wait, Microsoft did it. Well no one else anyway.
And besides, in my circle of friends we just pass games around anyway. If everyone buys 10 to 15 games and you have ten friends, that's well over 100 games.
Buying or selling used games never really made sense to me anyway. The money you get from a retail shop for a used game is a joke. And the price break buying them used isn't worth the hastle of replacing the book with a disk full of scratches.
I'm sure there are better ones on the `Net, but this one seemed 'good enough'. Gives an idea of the time frame these scientists work with. 5.4 to 6.3 million years ago was... a long fucking time ago. But in the grand view, not really that big of a deal.
I don't think you can pull it off. $500-$600 is too much to pay for a video game console that, as far as I can tell, isn't doing that much of consequence to distinguish itself from the XBox 360 in the eyes of your average consumer.
I think that is the single largest issue for the PS3. Even if it does do everything Sony say it can do, the average consumer won't even know it. And even the ones who do are going to see the price tag and quickly slide over to the Microsoft product section of the store.
Personally I have no problem paying $600 for a game console. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than a gaming computer, and a hell of a lot more fun. "How is a console more fun?" you ask? I don't have to worry about upgrades every six months to play the latest fun games, and I don't have to worry about supporting an operating system the whole time. It Just Works. And it's designed to sit near my 42" TV, where as computers are not (that's the best wording I could come up with to avoid the argument that it is possible to play HL2 on a 42" TV).
Apple's web site indicates this new model has a stunning glossy screen. Am I the only one that hates these new glossy screens. They reflect glare and just look bad. The screen on the MacBook Pro isn't glossy. Why does the MacBook need a glossy screen?
I'll second this.
We recently bought a Dell with the gossy finish. When it arrived we decided it was a $34 we should have spent on a useless floppy drive instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe this is the kind of thing we need to turn public sentiment away from the greenies and get some more nuclear power plants built.
I have no idea what the figures are, but nuclear has to be infinitely better for the environement than natuarl gas and coal. Tidal, sun ray, and wind turbines are doing what they can, but it just isn't much.
Have we gotten to the point of a high effeciency house being economical? Private solar pannels on the home, with low wattage bulbs and such? This past weekend I was washing my dogs and discovered that the water left in the hose all afternoon was actually hotter than what comes out of my hot water heater. I need to build a solar pre-heater contraption for my gas water heater.
It is odd that the big car companies aren't more on this track!
Just like Dell is in bed with Microsoft, the auto manufacturers are in bed with the oil companies. No surprises.
Eight or nine years ago having several hundred Mp3s made a guy the cool kid in town. Now not having several thousand Mp3s makes a guy obsolete.
...)
I got my name, LoudMusic, those eight or nine years ago by having A) A cable modem, and B) 12GB of Mp3s. I guess about three years ago the mission to fill with Mp3s every last byte of disk space I could purchase just became profound insanity. I had plans to build multi-terabyte disk arrays and gather all my friends collections together. Then I realized that 99% of what I already possessed I'd never listened to.
Gluttony.
So now I litterally have no music on my computer. Any of my computers. I use iTunes at work and listen to my coworkers shared libraries. At home I just play video games (old ones at that
The extreme abundance of content is simply overwhelming. Furthermore it's mostly crap and almost impossible to sort through it to find a gem.
I could have sworn it was already there ... ?
I know a lot of manufacturers have started including iPod connections in the glovebox with stereo's equipped with direct control of the gadget, but has anyone made a headunit with a cassette-like bay for the iPod? It would be like, retro cool. I guess the problem comes with the different form factors of all the different iPods, but I suppose they could include various shims.
For $4 more, you get a faster processor, 4 times the memory, more harddrive space, dual optical drives, SLI, and a 20" LCD. Apple has done a good job of making sure that they add a lot of mac only accessories (or gimmicks depending on your point of view) that make direct comparisons to a PC harder. Stuff like backlit keyboards with light sensors, integrated webcam, frontrow, firewire, small formfactor, etc.
For $4 more you don't get a Mac.
...it could be highly useful for example in the corporate setting...
Oh, for fuck's sake! Don't give them any more ideas.
The extra cost of technology staff and the risk of a shittastrophe are nothing compared to abysmal employee morale. If you don't let 'em stroke off for a few minutes a couple of times an hour by going to ebay or playing snood you're going to end up with a resentful staff. And they'll produce awful, crappy work for you.
*** INSANELY OFF-TOPIC REPLY ***
Where I completely agree with your sentiment, I have to question when it became OK for professional employees to generally goof off and dick around for HOURS every day. We are some lazy sons-a-bitches.
Office Space (1999)
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
I'm not that bad, but I'm definitely not putting in 40 hours of work in a week. What has caused this? Is it purely computer / internet related, or have employees been wasting absurd amounts of company time for several decades?
I remember way back when, thinking that when the technology arrived to make games look "real" it would be pretty cool. WRONG. When games look "real" and are modeling real physics, they are limited in what they can do. All we get in the way of innovation is new environments for running around shooting stuff.
;)
Sprite based 2D games could violate physical laws and we didn't care. Better yet, games didn't have to exist in an analog of the known universe at all.
We got what we asked for, and damn it, it's boring.
So what you're saying is the real world is boring and thats why we made video games in the first place - replicating the real world in a video game will just be a boring video game?
Sounds pretty good to me, except that we can replicate real world events that we're not allowed to do or are physically or financially unable to do in a video game environment. Like racing Formula 1 cars around Nurburgring, building insane rollercoasters, or shooting cops in the face with a bazooka. That shit never gets old!
I think the problem for the GTA style games is that when GTA:3 hit massive sales there were a slew of copycat games that sucked. Then all the legal battles drained everyone of what little interest remained.
Am I caught in a time warp? I could SWEAR I've played Madden on PS2 with more than two players. After double checking the website it supports four with multi-tap. XBox and 360 do as well. PS2 even has online play which I believe would allow four players per console, total of eight. I could be wrong.
Furthermore, there are games like Fifa World Cup that support up to EIGHT players on a single console using two multi-tap units. Additionally I've seen more than one video hockey series that supported more than two players per console. Hell, even Virtua Tennis on Dreamcast supported four players.
Am I missing something?
I agree with you on all aspects except the spaces, though 'no spaces' is of course the most robust. HFS+ / OS X don't care about spaces or their placement but NTFS / Windows do not like having a space at the begining or double spaces (I think ...). And the multiple periods has never been an issue for me.
A perfectly good reason to not put your weed in there.
I guess now is as good a time as any, Mr / Mrs Anonymous Coward.
... ... ... ...
I see you are pretty on-the-mark when it comes to Apple's target market. Here's your 10/23/2001 comment on the iPod release.
"Raise your hand if you have iTunes
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port
Raise your hand if you have both
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod."
You're a regular Apple Nostradamus.
Months after that post Apple released iTunes for Windows.
Later they produced a USB iPod.
And the price has come down to as low as $99. Infact you can't even spend $400 on an iPod if you tried!
Wow! They fixed what was wrong with the product and now it's selling millions of units. Imagine that.
You're a regular ass hat.
It's also noteworthy that Vista requires OEMs to have some kind of networking ability. While this is a given by today's standards, I find it very curious that an operating system REQUIRES me to have it.
;)
Just because it requires you to have the hardware doesn't inclusively mean you can't firewall connections to *.microsoft.com:*
Who is Apple's target market? I think the only reason they even try to appeal to geeks is because they can use the word "UNIX" like some kind of geek mating call. Aside from that they've really got nothing geeky in their linup. It's all posh bling. Look at the PC vs Mac adverts - it's all about easy to use and does the things a basic user wants to do.
Apple and Jobs don't care that they're losing touch with 'the OS community'. I doubt they ever cared much in the first place. Just enough to get Slashdot to make an Apple section.
Pssst, I heard that the Star Control sequel will feature Duke Nukem caught in a world of Orcs, blasting his way out in a massive Counterstrike against the enemy. Better still, it will run on Windows Vista when it's released too.
R UNONXBOX360ORPLAYSTATION3WHATABOUTMYINTELMACAWESOM EXORZ!!!!
OMFG!!!!!1!ONE!!1!!!11!!!!ELEVEN!!!!!!1!! IWANTITNOWTHATISGOINGTOBETHECOOLESTGAMEEVERWILLIT
How about they rush Duke Nukem Foruntil-it's-done. Which hopefully would be sooner rather than later.
It doesn't seem like it would be too terribly difficult to circumvent the block.
However, Ito's images do show up in the Flickr group pools for his guild, We Know, and for World of Warcraft, because more than half of the images in his account are traditional photographs. In Ito's Flickr account, images he has taken of Helsinki, Finland, and Vancouver, British Columbia, show up beside an image of guild members setting out for a hike in World of Warcraft.
Just upload a crap load of pictures, yours or ones you find randomly on the `net, and then add all the screenshots you wish.
They're pissing off members and potentially generating monumental amounts of useless data on their servers.
Instead of an "on | off" switch for the entire account they need to have it be selective per image. But good luck writing effective code for that.
Parent post is spot on. I hear my corporate friends saying the same thing all the time. This isn't to say that American workers are garounteed to be better, but I think that as the majority goes we are in the industry because we like computers and making them work and the majority of Indian workers are in it because "Oh, big America pay much dollars for computer job". Or maybe that's the group we have access to here. I have plenty of American friends that are the same way, they earned a bachelor's degree in comp-sci so they could get paid 'big bucks'. Only to find out that the degree didn't teach them how to do their job. But it seems the ratio is just smaller for us than it appears to be for them.
It's not that they have propretary formats. It's just that they cling to them too tightly.
;)
Is that not the definition of proprietary? I do believe IT IS!
I'm not saying I disagree with your mentality, just the terminology
Has anyone else noticed that 2006 isn't over yet? This list is worthless. In a month there will be new technology out that could be on the list changing all the numbers.
Even the reviewers are getting ahead of themselves. Is there just nothing going on worth talking about?
I think I like the mentality of "We're not going to tell you what we're working on until it's done". Compare that to something like Duke Nukem Forever, or damn near any Microsoft product. Hype kills technology for me. I'd much rather just have products appear in a usable state than listen to people talk about something that doesn't exist for two years only to find out the producer is killing the project.
SPARE ME.
Oh, looks like Google is trying to. Good for them.
I can't imagine anyone attempting such a license. No wait, Microsoft did it. Well no one else anyway.
And besides, in my circle of friends we just pass games around anyway. If everyone buys 10 to 15 games and you have ten friends, that's well over 100 games.
Buying or selling used games never really made sense to me anyway. The money you get from a retail shop for a used game is a joke. And the price break buying them used isn't worth the hastle of replacing the book with a disk full of scratches.
I'm sure there are better ones on the `Net, but this one seemed 'good enough'. Gives an idea of the time frame these scientists work with. 5.4 to 6.3 million years ago was ... a long fucking time ago. But in the grand view, not really that big of a deal.
I don't think you can pull it off. $500-$600 is too much to pay for a video game console that, as far as I can tell, isn't doing that much of consequence to distinguish itself from the XBox 360 in the eyes of your average consumer.
I think that is the single largest issue for the PS3. Even if it does do everything Sony say it can do, the average consumer won't even know it. And even the ones who do are going to see the price tag and quickly slide over to the Microsoft product section of the store.
Personally I have no problem paying $600 for a game console. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than a gaming computer, and a hell of a lot more fun. "How is a console more fun?" you ask? I don't have to worry about upgrades every six months to play the latest fun games, and I don't have to worry about supporting an operating system the whole time. It Just Works. And it's designed to sit near my 42" TV, where as computers are not (that's the best wording I could come up with to avoid the argument that it is possible to play HL2 on a 42" TV).
Apple's web site indicates this new model has a stunning glossy screen. Am I the only one that hates these new glossy screens. They reflect glare and just look bad. The screen on the MacBook Pro isn't glossy. Why does the MacBook need a glossy screen?
I'll second this.
We recently bought a Dell with the gossy finish. When it arrived we decided it was a $34 we should have spent on a useless floppy drive instead.