Best thing they can do is make the thing act like a usb-disk to get maximum portability.
Or have it use some kind of removable media. I want Sony to make a good phone / PDA / camera / Mp3 player that uses memory sticks. The latest in that product is a 1GB "high speed" mem stick. Surely that's enough to handle those three tasks.
One of the biggest problems of camera phones is poor flash (if the phone has one AT ALL). Until phone manufacturers make phones with a good quality Xenon strobe flash, 5 MP still doesn't mean anything if the lighting conditions stink. (See this month's issue of PC World for a little blurb on possible developments of Xenon strobe flashes in camera phones.)
I understand the general populous plays by different rules, but photographers avoid using a flash whenever possible. Natural light is more... well natural actually. And besides, you're talking about a PHONE. If you put a high intensity flash on it you're going to increase bulk and weight significantly - it's not like a standard phone battery can support that kind of output.
Instead of mac apple and beatles apple fighting.. why don't they team up and sell a version of the white ipod with an apple graphic on the wheel thats pre-loaded with the beatles' white album.. the marketing writes itself.
Because if the marketing is writing itself Apple Computer can't sell more PowerMacs to their ad agency (:
Just another example of someone who knows what's good for me better than I do and feels the need to impose his beliefs on me.
But isn't that just what the guy is trying to avoid by turning off televisions? He wants to sit in a public place and not have the TV blairing at him the whole time.
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 1
I have to put in my 2 cents at this point to mention how playing multiplayer games in a 4-player split-screen sucks ass. Gee, let's all look at each other's view, that'll make it easier to snipe!
Well of course there's always that, and I agree when you're playing with opponents on your shared screen. In addition to have 1/4 of a presumably already small screen, your opponent is watching you run out in the open. Sucksabunch.
However! There is a good side to this coin!
Halo being our example of choice, playing either 4 v 4 or 8 v 8 sharing a common screen can make team play amazingly more entertaining. Assuming capture the flag on Blood Gulch, being able to coordinate where your team mates are for a better organized capture and return is seriously aided by being able to see exactly where your team mate is.
Re:Why I dislike Halo (and all modern console game
on
Halo 2 Goes Gold
·
· Score: 1
From the first day, I've been given a horrible impression by all modern consoles. PS2, GC, and XBox. My issues is with their controller setups. I absolutely despise the concept of dual joystick and I think the XBox controllers are the worst yet. Many people would surely agree with me that they're oversized and poorly laid out. There are of course third party replacements.
Are you off your rocker? Dual joysticks are great. You have 360 degrees of analog input without rasing your thumb. The modern game pad is so diverse that it works well with a plethora of games. FPS, RTS, racing, side scroll, puzzle, flight sim...
This leads me to a conclusion that PC gaming is just "better" from a usability standpoint. In a PC FPS I get freelook with the mouse, and 5 individual buttons to map (at least on my mouse). On the left, I get movement and strafe as well as any other function I want to bind near those keys. The classic "Quake" layout. And I can change this layout at will. It is far more powerful and far more natural.
For first person shooters, and nearly no other game type, the mouse is superior. With variable-speed twitch-reaction control you can turn your character in any direction nearly instantaneously. However, you can do almost the same thing with a right-side joystick. But you can't input variable speed walking / straifing with a keyboard - it's pretty much on | off.
Beyond that, PC games have readily available multiplayer over the internet; the apex of multiplayer gaming. Console games are only just now getting this, and some of them are even subscription only.
And this is a reason to not play them at all? How spoiled are you?
In short, if I were to purchase Halo, I wouldn't touch the console. I'd get it for the PC. It's just a superior gaming experience. I don't see how the negligible (to me) convenience of plugging in a console and playing the game could at all be anywhere near the gaming experience you get on a PC with its infinitely customizable interface.
In short, if Halo 2 is available for PC (and Linux in my case), I would consider it. But as long as any game remains locked into a console with what is IMHO an inferior interface it won't be worth my time and money.
Are you insane? Surely you are. The over 4 million people who purchased Halo aren't stupid. Console FPS games can be quite excellent. That's not to say that they all are, or that they're as good as the "PC" FPS selections, but you said yourself that it's still fairly early on in the market.
Tell me, anyone, what is the lure of console games? Is it merely the plug it in and go aspect? Why settle for an inferior user interface? Or am I missing something important here regarding the design of modern contollers? I did like the N64 controller as well as controllers like the Gravis Gamepad Pro. But dual-joystick just isn't a substitute for a mouse and keyboard for me./endrant
The N64 controller was pure shat.
The lure to console gaming is that FOUR people can play Halo at (what was an initial cost of...) roughly $755. Lets see you get four people playing Halo on PC for that kind of money. How about sixteen? Toss in about $100 in network equipment and multiply initial cost by four and you're going strong with sixteen people.
If you don't understand why people play FPS games on console, you've never taken the time to experience it for yourself. Halo is undeniably amazing. One of the best games of all time. And I don't even like the XBox!
Now, for your style of console gaming you should pick up a PS2 and Red Faction 2, along with various other games that support a keyboard and mouse. The PS2's USB ports are limited in their developer use, but the occational game to take advantage of the extra hardware are big winners in my mind.
Console vs Computer is a cost battle more than anything.
I've got to admit - I thought this was going to be a story about hitmen wacking small business owners in some new untraceable way that made it look like natural causes.
Format? Reinstall? Be very careful how you use your computer and who you let use it?
Works for me.
I'm not going to offer any anti-Windows babble, because that's not a true solution. But if you are going to use Windows, you have to know what it is you're dealing with. "Trust No One" (:
I'd say that the fastest computers will always be fucking huge. If engineers could somehow magically fit the total power of the Earth Simulator into a single 1u chassis, people would still cluster a few hundred of them together. There's no such thing as enough processing power, as people always find a way to utilize it.
Hmmm... good point. Sometimes I slip into "Apple Mind" and forget that technology has progressed and think that my workstation is a super computer (referance to the G4 'your own personal supercomputer' ad campaign). No matter how much processing power we can cram into a small space, someone will still stick a bunch of them together and run dnetc on it (:
Let's see what happens come Supercomputing '04... good things can come in small sizes.;)
From the linked site...
with a sustained speed of 11.68 teraflops and a peak speed of 16 teraflops, uses more than 8,000 PowerPC processors packed into just four refrigerator-sized racks.
So lets say their "refridgerator sized racks" are about the size of 1.5 standard racks, and you'd need about 3x the amount of flops they're getting currently, so that's 36 racks? Not too shabby. Almost half the space of the Cray AMD setup. I guess I didn't realize it was so nicely packaged (:
It would take sixty racks of these to best the Earth Simulator's theoretical peak; more than 60% more processors.
Still, if they need someone to, uh, test one...
Interesting numbers. Also to note, NEC's Earth Simulator is now nearly three years old - the Cray XD1 is made with modern AMDs.
I guess there's no getting around it. For the time being our really fast computers will just be fucking huge. Oh, and call NEC if you want a big computer. (:
Rule #31 of posting on Slashdot: Using inverted smileys will cause people to think your post was sarcastic and therefore mod you as a troll. In order to avoid this please use the standardised form of having the bracket last (e.g.:)).
Commenting on this rule will have your post marked down as -1 Offtopic.
My 3-year-old son has recently decided that instead of a book at bedtime, I ( or my wife ) will tell him a story. Then he tells us what the story will be about. If the story we tell him at some point doesn't include the things he thinks it should include, he tells us about it.
Sounds like interactive story-telling to me...
That is soooooo cool. Still doesn't make me want to have kids, but it is very cool indeed. Congratulations on an apparently successful family (:
One of my favorite games is (was) Ico. It told a great story and was tons of fun to play. Getting an entire movie audience interacting with the movie in a sort of story video game would be impressive. That's what I want to see.
And... how did this article get posted without a single link in the preview for us to slashdot?
Actually my friend is currently in the process of starting up this type of business. Right now he's tied up in finding a place to put the center, but he mentioned to me some of the costs with liscencing the games. This is off the top of my head, so I can't vouche for it's accuracy. Blizzard games go for 1000 a series a year. I assume that's per pc, but I don't know for sure. Valve is 10 per month per pc per game. MS games he gets free through his trade guild. Those are just what I remember off the top of my head.
Yeah, I think I've heard my friend say similar things. He didn't want to do StarCraft for that reason. Too much money for too old of a game.
Space / Location: He actually hunted for a while. Basically, with a specialized business as this is, you can put it just about anywhere. It's not like there's a conveinience factor to it. People that want to play games are going to go where the games are. Much like movie theators. They're usually on the edge of town where real estate is cheap. I would suggest your friend do the same thing. About the only thing I see making a big difference is jr high and high school kids. During school season he has between 20 and 30 kids show up after school (3:35 when they get out at 3:30, they b-line it for the games). He's in a fairly good location for our jr high, about a mile away, and the highschool is only another half mile further than that. Unfortunately he doesn't have much parking, but again, it's mostly kids who either walk-in, get dropped off, or show up in large packs sharing rides (:
I'm not a big game-player. What do the game developers think of that? Video/DVDs have specific EULA's - something like $20 for a DVD, or $80 for a rental DVD (you'll be making money by renting it). Does the gaming industry have similar practices, or does your friend just buy the games on the high street, install them, and charge Joe Public to play them (with all his infrastructure, etc)? I'm not wanting to question his legal status at all - I'm merely asking a question to which I'd be interested to hear the answer.
He does own a copy for each machine of each game he has installed. I was shocked, frankly. I expected him to take a... cheaper route. But I've seen the boxes with my own eyes. Twenty-something copies of twenty-something different games will fill a storage room, even if they're the new smaller boxes (:
He says he's gone over all the legality stuff. There was something to do with Blizzard, which I can't recall. The other stuff he has some loop hole or something. I think it has to do with selling time to be in his place, but using the computers is free... so on paper he's not charging to play the games. Standard statement, I am not a lawyer.
Another interesting thing he's done is setup four moded XBoxen with big hard drives (and great big 40" televisions... !) and a bunch of games. Again, he owns four copies of all the games that are on the moded XBoxes. I guess he's still in violation, but I think we all agree that what he's violating is a load of BS anyway.
There are a few other replies to this comment that I will retort against here, as to avoid making more comments.
$4 an hour is CHEAP. Arcade games, take DDR for example, cost $1 for one game which seldom lasts longer than 15 minutes. Tada! Back to $4. Next we take 20 to 25 top-of-the-line Windows gaming computers and put them on a lag-free network with all the games you could want, fully patched and moded for every current popular game. Unlimited options, maximum quality. $4 is cheap. There is another game center about half an hour away in another town that charges nearly double that AFTER a large membership fee, which isn't required at my friend's business. And he offers memberships as well which give you unlimited play for one flat rate.
Me on the other hand, I play for free (: A little technical support and physical labor goes a long way. It also helps that I save his ass in 16 player Halo from time to time (:
Slashdot Mirror
Best thing they can do is make the thing act like a usb-disk to get maximum portability.
Or have it use some kind of removable media. I want Sony to make a good phone / PDA / camera / Mp3 player that uses memory sticks. The latest in that product is a 1GB "high speed" mem stick. Surely that's enough to handle those three tasks.
But I agree, it also needs to be a USB reader.
One of the biggest problems of camera phones is poor flash (if the phone has one AT ALL).
... well natural actually. And besides, you're talking about a PHONE. If you put a high intensity flash on it you're going to increase bulk and weight significantly - it's not like a standard phone battery can support that kind of output.
Until phone manufacturers make phones with a good quality Xenon strobe flash, 5 MP still doesn't mean anything if the lighting conditions stink. (See this month's issue of PC World for a little blurb on possible developments of Xenon strobe flashes in camera phones.)
I understand the general populous plays by different rules, but photographers avoid using a flash whenever possible. Natural light is more
Instead of mac apple and beatles apple fighting.. why don't they team up and sell a version of the white ipod with an apple graphic on the wheel thats pre-loaded with the beatles' white album.. the marketing writes itself.
Because if the marketing is writing itself Apple Computer can't sell more PowerMacs to their ad agency (:
Just another example of someone who knows what's good for me better than I do and feels the need to impose his beliefs on me.
But isn't that just what the guy is trying to avoid by turning off televisions? He wants to sit in a public place and not have the TV blairing at him the whole time.
There really isn't much to say in the "comment" field as I've said all I need to say in the "subject" field.
vino's included in gnome 2.6 and uses the new xorg extensions making it very very fast
And it makes beer too!
I have to put in my 2 cents at this point to mention how playing multiplayer games in a 4-player split-screen sucks ass. Gee, let's all look at each other's view, that'll make it easier to snipe!
Well of course there's always that, and I agree when you're playing with opponents on your shared screen. In addition to have 1/4 of a presumably already small screen, your opponent is watching you run out in the open. Sucksabunch.
However! There is a good side to this coin!
Halo being our example of choice, playing either 4 v 4 or 8 v 8 sharing a common screen can make team play amazingly more entertaining. Assuming capture the flag on Blood Gulch, being able to coordinate where your team mates are for a better organized capture and return is seriously aided by being able to see exactly where your team mate is.
From the first day, I've been given a horrible impression by all modern consoles. PS2, GC, and XBox. My issues is with their controller setups. I absolutely despise the concept of dual joystick and I think the XBox controllers are the worst yet. Many people would surely agree with me that they're oversized and poorly laid out. There are of course third party replacements.
...
/endrant
...) roughly $755. Lets see you get four people playing Halo on PC for that kind of money. How about sixteen? Toss in about $100 in network equipment and multiply initial cost by four and you're going strong with sixteen people.
Are you off your rocker? Dual joysticks are great. You have 360 degrees of analog input without rasing your thumb. The modern game pad is so diverse that it works well with a plethora of games. FPS, RTS, racing, side scroll, puzzle, flight sim
This leads me to a conclusion that PC gaming is just "better" from a usability standpoint. In a PC FPS I get freelook with the mouse, and 5 individual buttons to map (at least on my mouse). On the left, I get movement and strafe as well as any other function I want to bind near those keys. The classic "Quake" layout. And I can change this layout at will. It is far more powerful and far more natural.
For first person shooters, and nearly no other game type, the mouse is superior. With variable-speed twitch-reaction control you can turn your character in any direction nearly instantaneously. However, you can do almost the same thing with a right-side joystick. But you can't input variable speed walking / straifing with a keyboard - it's pretty much on | off.
Beyond that, PC games have readily available multiplayer over the internet; the apex of multiplayer gaming. Console games are only just now getting this, and some of them are even subscription only.
And this is a reason to not play them at all? How spoiled are you?
In short, if I were to purchase Halo, I wouldn't touch the console. I'd get it for the PC. It's just a superior gaming experience. I don't see how the negligible (to me) convenience of plugging in a console and playing the game could at all be anywhere near the gaming experience you get on a PC with its infinitely customizable interface.
In short, if Halo 2 is available for PC (and Linux in my case), I would consider it. But as long as any game remains locked into a console with what is IMHO an inferior interface it won't be worth my time and money.
Are you insane? Surely you are. The over 4 million people who purchased Halo aren't stupid. Console FPS games can be quite excellent. That's not to say that they all are, or that they're as good as the "PC" FPS selections, but you said yourself that it's still fairly early on in the market.
Tell me, anyone, what is the lure of console games? Is it merely the plug it in and go aspect? Why settle for an inferior user interface? Or am I missing something important here regarding the design of modern contollers? I did like the N64 controller as well as controllers like the Gravis Gamepad Pro. But dual-joystick just isn't a substitute for a mouse and keyboard for me.
The N64 controller was pure shat.
The lure to console gaming is that FOUR people can play Halo at (what was an initial cost of
TV: $300
XBox: $300
Halo: $50
3x controllers: $105
If you don't understand why people play FPS games on console, you've never taken the time to experience it for yourself. Halo is undeniably amazing. One of the best games of all time. And I don't even like the XBox!
Now, for your style of console gaming you should pick up a PS2 and Red Faction 2, along with various other games that support a keyboard and mouse. The PS2's USB ports are limited in their developer use, but the occational game to take advantage of the extra hardware are big winners in my mind.
Console vs Computer is a cost battle more than anything.
South Korean Music Retailers Dying
I've got to admit - I thought this was going to be a story about hitmen wacking small business owners in some new untraceable way that made it look like natural causes.
whats so hard about loading a transparent PNG anyway?
Holy shit! I forgot I had that function now. Firefox r0x0rs my b0x0rs! I'm off to redesign my website (:
Is there a good HOWTO on cleaning up a Windoze box from spyware and keeping it clean? I use the following method:
Install Ad-aware, update, clean, reboot, clean
Install Spybot S&D, update, clean, reboot, clean
Install Spywareblaster, update, enable protection
Format? Reinstall? Be very careful how you use your computer and who you let use it?
Works for me.
I'm not going to offer any anti-Windows babble, because that's not a true solution. But if you are going to use Windows, you have to know what it is you're dealing with. "Trust No One" (:
And I like it. Video games are not detrimental to my health, and me playing the games is not detrimental to anyone else's health.
... should I try and cut back? Don't answer that.
Addictions are bad!
I'm also addicted to breathing
An electronics device that is also part of the video game industry ... DELAYED!?! How can this be!
Seriously.
I'd say that the fastest computers will always be fucking huge. If engineers could somehow magically fit the total power of the Earth Simulator into a single 1u chassis, people would still cluster a few hundred of them together. There's no such thing as enough processing power, as people always find a way to utilize it.
... good point. Sometimes I slip into "Apple Mind" and forget that technology has progressed and think that my workstation is a super computer (referance to the G4 'your own personal supercomputer' ad campaign). No matter how much processing power we can cram into a small space, someone will still stick a bunch of them together and run dnetc on it (:
Hmmm
Actually:
;)
...
Blue Gene
Let's see what happens come Supercomputing '04... good things can come in small sizes.
From the linked site
with a sustained speed of 11.68 teraflops and a peak speed of 16 teraflops, uses more than 8,000 PowerPC processors packed into just four refrigerator-sized racks.
So lets say their "refridgerator sized racks" are about the size of 1.5 standard racks, and you'd need about 3x the amount of flops they're getting currently, so that's 36 racks? Not too shabby. Almost half the space of the Cray AMD setup. I guess I didn't realize it was so nicely packaged (:
It would take sixty racks of these to best the Earth Simulator's theoretical peak; more than 60% more processors.
Still, if they need someone to, uh, test one...
Interesting numbers. Also to note, NEC's Earth Simulator is now nearly three years old - the Cray XD1 is made with modern AMDs.
I guess there's no getting around it. For the time being our really fast computers will just be fucking huge. Oh, and call NEC if you want a big computer. (:
"So."
Incase you scientists haven't noticed, anything that tastes good, or makes a person feel good, is addictive.
Thanks for spending all the research money.
Rule #31 of posting on Slashdot: Using inverted smileys will cause people to think your post was sarcastic and therefore mod you as a troll. In order to avoid this please use the standardised form of having the bracket last (e.g. :)).
Commenting on this rule will have your post marked down as -1 Offtopic.
That's stupid.
My 3-year-old son has recently decided that instead of a book at bedtime, I ( or my wife ) will tell him a story. Then he tells us what the story will be about. If the story we tell him at some point doesn't include the things he thinks it should include, he tells us about it.
Sounds like interactive story-telling to me...
That is soooooo cool. Still doesn't make me want to have kids, but it is very cool indeed. Congratulations on an apparently successful family (:
One of my favorite games is (was) Ico. It told a great story and was tons of fun to play. Getting an entire movie audience interacting with the movie in a sort of story video game would be impressive. That's what I want to see.
... how did this article get posted without a single link in the preview for us to slashdot?
And
If there is one marketing term I despise more than any other, it's "cyber". Well that and putting the letter "e" or "i" in front of terms.
Drop it already! It's sooo 90s, dude.
And while you're trying to scan all your bills, why don't you enter them at Where's George? It's an interesting project.
Actually my friend is currently in the process of starting up this type of business. Right now he's tied up in finding a place to put the center, but he mentioned to me some of the costs with liscencing the games. This is off the top of my head, so I can't vouche for it's accuracy. Blizzard games go for 1000 a series a year. I assume that's per pc, but I don't know for sure. Valve is 10 per month per pc per game. MS games he gets free through his trade guild. Those are just what I remember off the top of my head.
Yeah, I think I've heard my friend say similar things. He didn't want to do StarCraft for that reason. Too much money for too old of a game.
Space / Location: He actually hunted for a while. Basically, with a specialized business as this is, you can put it just about anywhere. It's not like there's a conveinience factor to it. People that want to play games are going to go where the games are. Much like movie theators. They're usually on the edge of town where real estate is cheap. I would suggest your friend do the same thing. About the only thing I see making a big difference is jr high and high school kids. During school season he has between 20 and 30 kids show up after school (3:35 when they get out at 3:30, they b-line it for the games). He's in a fairly good location for our jr high, about a mile away, and the highschool is only another half mile further than that. Unfortunately he doesn't have much parking, but again, it's mostly kids who either walk-in, get dropped off, or show up in large packs sharing rides (:
I'm not a big game-player. What do the game developers think of that? Video/DVDs have specific EULA's - something like $20 for a DVD, or $80 for a rental DVD (you'll be making money by renting it). Does the gaming industry have similar practices, or does your friend just buy the games on the high street, install them, and charge Joe Public to play them (with all his infrastructure, etc)? I'm not wanting to question his legal status at all - I'm merely asking a question to which I'd be interested to hear the answer.
... cheaper route. But I've seen the boxes with my own eyes. Twenty-something copies of twenty-something different games will fill a storage room, even if they're the new smaller boxes (:
... so on paper he's not charging to play the games. Standard statement, I am not a lawyer.
... !) and a bunch of games. Again, he owns four copies of all the games that are on the moded XBoxes. I guess he's still in violation, but I think we all agree that what he's violating is a load of BS anyway.
He does own a copy for each machine of each game he has installed. I was shocked, frankly. I expected him to take a
He says he's gone over all the legality stuff. There was something to do with Blizzard, which I can't recall. The other stuff he has some loop hole or something. I think it has to do with selling time to be in his place, but using the computers is free
Another interesting thing he's done is setup four moded XBoxen with big hard drives (and great big 40" televisions
There are a few other replies to this comment that I will retort against here, as to avoid making more comments.
$4 an hour is CHEAP. Arcade games, take DDR for example, cost $1 for one game which seldom lasts longer than 15 minutes. Tada! Back to $4. Next we take 20 to 25 top-of-the-line Windows gaming computers and put them on a lag-free network with all the games you could want, fully patched and moded for every current popular game. Unlimited options, maximum quality. $4 is cheap. There is another game center about half an hour away in another town that charges nearly double that AFTER a large membership fee, which isn't required at my friend's business. And he offers memberships as well which give you unlimited play for one flat rate.
Me on the other hand, I play for free (: A little technical support and physical labor goes a long way. It also helps that I save his ass in 16 player Halo from time to time (: