There is no doubt there was a great deal of good engineering going on here.. but in the end, it's just taking a bunch of off the shelf components and putting it into a box.
This would be much, much cooler if the guy had figured out how to use the onboard computer to A: do the video switching, and B: taking one controller, and re-directing the wires to the proper consol unit from one single controller. Then we'd have something to write home about.
I wish PC designers (as well as all consumer electronics designers) would experiment a little more with their designs.
It used to be all large TVs were in a wood cabinet. They were generally beautiful. Then sometime in the late 80s there were all sort of experiments in design, and it took several years for the winner to emerge; today's black molded plastic standard that pretty much all of our TVs are.
Around that same time, component stereo equipment switched from silver with the occasional wooden accents to the now standard black.
And that seems to be the lifespan of consumer electronics design. Functional-experiment-functional-stylish-functual black. Every so often somebody will break from the heard, but will eventually come back to the standards.
Yes, there are many who enter garbage in all the fields. And yes, there are those who use the obvious throw-away email addresses. But we assume them to be not very serious prospective customers.
I can personally attest to over a dozen peices of software I've purchased after entering a bogus e-mail address.
I don't know what software you sell, but if I was shopping for an application you sell, and your marketing people wanted to know this 'golden' information why I went with a competitor, it's because you wanted to make me jump through hoops I did'nt want to jump through just to see if your stuff was any good.
Number 1: It's been said time and again, but registration. There are a million reasons why a company wants to have this, and I see these posts from people saying that I have no position to compain. I have EVERY reason to compain. I am a potential customer. And I don't want you to know anything about me until I buy your software. That's what I would prefer.
If I'm made to type in an e-mail address to download, I type in a bogus address. If I need to get a key or anything else from my e-mail, I've just been sent the message that the software company does'nt want my business. This has happened more then once, and I've gone somewhere else. If I like your software, and I give you my or my companies credit card number, you get to know who I am. Not before.
2. Full featured software. If I bother to download your evaulation, I expect to be able to use it. When I can't save my work, or find that an important feature is turned off, or I have some stupid 10 minut time limit, the software gets deleted.
3. Installation. I can tell right away how much I'd like or not like a peice of software by installation. Paste icons all over my desktop without asking? You've annoyed me. Put yourself in my startup, even though it's not needed? You're gone. Bundle yourself with spyware? You're gone.
4. Remind me, clearly, when the evaulation period is getting to the end. 'You have 5 days left in your evaulation period' when I start the program up. I can think of many times when I've found a peice of software I like, forget to purchase it, forget to get approval for the purchase. I find another way to get something done, and I'll just forget about it. If I were a more orginized person, I'd keep tabs of those things, but I'm not.
Re:Already approaching from the wrong direction
on
64kbps @ 40,000 ft.
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I can see (and expect) power to your wi-fi WAP to be shutoff during takeoff-landing.
But, from what I understand, the frequencies used by the aircraft would not experience interfearence from the wi-fi network.
But this just made me think: I keep my 802.11b card in my laptop all the time, and when I fly, I usually pull my laptop out (typically out of bordom). I never really thought about it before, but I wonder if I'm breaking any laws/regulations by having that little thing on while in flight... and if so, are we going to start seing flight attendents asking people to pull their PC cards out?
Already approaching from the wrong direction
on
64kbps @ 40,000 ft.
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Communications experts say they could charge by the minute or the bit.
Why not the flight? Or the day. I'd pay $15 to have a solid net connection on a 5 hour flight.
I'm looking at this from a passenger point of view, but I think we're eventually going to see (and need) net connectivity in the air.
And it should be cheaper then they think. Why go for a wired network in the plane at all? Pulling cables through a pre-existing airplane has to be expensive. A decent WAP which can handle 64 users at the same time and cover the entire cabin gives you a lan at ~$5-700 installed. Couple that with pre-existing antenneas, get a decent switch, and violla, you have internect connectivity in an average craft for a few thousand bucks.
Wi-fi is already becomming the standard at airports (even though current coverage stinks). Why not partner with one of the many wi-fi providers popping up? I don't subscribe to any of them, but if I found out that my subscription to boingo would keep me connected at the airport, in the plane, and the hotel when I landed, I'd sign up in a second.
I think the hope is access to information (and improvements in teaching) will give the country the intellectual capital needed to raise out of that.
The real ethical issue, as I see is, is the introduction of an appealing forigen culture into the native population. I don't know how that will turn out in the end.
15 years ago, I was speaking with a freind of my fathers about these new exotic 'hard drives' you could get. He was a big time computer guru, and I was a little kid.
I said to him that I thought a 10 megabyte hdd would be perfect, and that someday we would be able to buy one for less then $1,000. He scoffed.
I still remember this very clearly. "Why in heavens name would you ever need that much space in a hard drive"
I worked it out, and every concievable program I'd use, including saved files, all told would only need 2 megs. It was just impossible to think up enough applications at the time that a home PC really needed.
I'd love to run into him again and ask him if he remembers that conversation. In 10 years, 100 Terrabyte drives will seem 'quaint'.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought the little wire that ran from the CD-Rom drive to the sound card shot out the raw audio to the sound card, which in turn, if instructed spits it out to your audio out.
This should compleatly bypass any system/disk I/O, should'nt it? The requests the game is making on the hardware is just a start, stop, or change track instruction.
I could see it being a problem if all of the audio was stored on the hard drive in wav (or simular format), but if your just looking at music, it just seems a good deal simpler to have that run off the CD.
Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?
These sort of games seem to work by pushing computers to their limits, so it just seems odd that they would include something that takes power away from graphics/engine, espically when it's really not needed. (standard CD audio can be read off a disk with next to no CPU usage)
Trying to draw parallels between free music and text publishing in relationship to weather they help or hurt sales is an apples to oranges situation.
On the surface, distributing pirated books should be a heck of a lot easier then music. The file size is small (espically in unformated plain text). There is a slightly more difficult situation of getting the printed page to electronic format, but a bored pirate with some OCR software and several hours to kill should be able to do it with little problem.
So, why is'nt anyone trading pirated books? Part of this has to do with a declining love of the medium found in the Internet generation. But I suspect more is found in the computers inability to translate media into an enjoyable format.
When I download a song I like, it's very easy to take the music, pump it to my stereo or burn it onto a CD, making the recording indistingusable from a purchased copy. A text file enjoys no such luxery. Lying on my couch reading off the screen of a laptop is just not as good as holding a book in my hand.
So, when somebody goes online and sees a free book they enjoy, the next logical step is to purchase the thing, because having an actual book format copy is better. There is little value added, other then album art/liner notes, and the knowledge you've done the right thing, by going out and purchasing music.
That having been said, I still think unrestricted free trade of music is a good thing, and helps the artists in the long run. I just don't see this article as being a credible argument for that.
So if you don't like it, you can try to go into business yourself to make a better product or provide a better service? I don't think companies should be penalized because the public is too lazy to switch to something new, I think I'd be rather $#%@'ed off if I had a business and the government started sticking their noses in where they don't belong.
1. There are better products.
2. I can't switch because software that I need to use for work is only developed for windows, because...
3. MS uses it's monopoly bully tactics to make sure it stays that way.
The BSD machine sitting on my desk, with an AMD processesor, is some sort of freak?
Talk about being kicked in the nuts over breakfast. I've had AMD machines for over 10 years, ever since my first 486DX 40. I buy and build AMD machines exclusivly for work. I'd guess I've spent (personally and through work purchases) $15k on AMD products. I have fervent brand loyalty to AMD because A: when alls said and done, they have a better price/performance ratio, and B: I like underdogs.
If AMD decides it wants to be microsofts little bitch poodle, B is gone. If somebody else gives comparable price/performance, then I am gone as their customer.
So to show my support, I'm supposed to pay money to join a website to download mp3s of the same crappy bullshit artists the big record companies are in love with?
Um, no thanks.
I'll stick with the latest file sharing program, find music I like and that's actually good, then go down to the local record store and buy or order the CD.
Guess that means don't shop at Best Buy. Which won't be too hard. Good hardware can be found cheaper, and I'd much rather go to a local record store then some big corporate chain.
Big chain stores love to make arangements with record companies. Remember a few years back when they would cut out the dirty words on CDs sent to some big chains and not tell anyone about it?
Music is art. Big business has no place in that world. (P.S., your local record store has a better chance of having that obscure but good CD then Best Buy... they just might be a little short on the latest J-Lo release)
1. Windows and MS's major OSs are pretty unique, but at the same time are'nt nearly as advanced at the core as other major OSs, meaning a) nobody would want to steal it, and b) if somebody did, it would probably be easy to catch anyone if they did.
2. All the software outside of the base OS really does'nt provide MS with income. Media player, IE, directx, et. al. are ad-ons MS uses to get market share in those realms. If open, the worst that could happen is somebody makes it better and MS steals the ideas.
3. With thousands of programmers pouring over source code, security issues could be identified much quicker, allowing MS to (eventually) shed one of it's major banes
4. Somebody might actually figure out a way to make windows stable. MS buys the rights to include this in their Windows.. wow, they have improvements at a very marginal cost.
5. MS actually does something that makes geeks happy.
But with current spotty status of DSL, I wonder sometimes if the FCC is really doing a good job here.
Yeah, CA screwed up on electricity, but my best guess is there is so much egg on their faces that the UC is going to go all out to make sure something like this worse.
Either that or it will fail miserably. If I were in CA, I'd have a dialup account for a backup...just in case.
I'm responsible for buying all the hardware for my company, and I won't pick up anything smaller then 17"
At one point, my boss asked me why I was always going for the larger monitors. My response: "Because 15" (or 14", which we had at the time) was just too small. In a few years people with bad eyesite are going to blame it on their monitors if they are too small"
This will happen. The question is'nt if somebody will sue because their company gave them a small CRT (or LCD), but when. I sure as heck don't want to be there.
I keep my WAP open and very public. Number one because it's cool, and number two because it keeps me on my toes security wise.
At best I get 2-3 people connecting in a given day. Even if the location was heavily advertised, I doubt I'd see more then 10.
The money I'd make through this would'nt be worth the time and energy to collect income, the system resources on my machine to keep proper accounting, or the loss of helping to build free wireless networks.
I keep my WAP open so folks at the the bar down the street can get online. I wish everyone had that attidude.
don't know about anyone else here, but I don't think Microsoft is exactly a flash-in-the-pan, flavor-of-the-day, fad kind of beast. Judging by their actions and perseverance over the past decades
A college or university is not, nor should be a place where flavor of the day propritary platform should be taught. The focus of a college should be to give the student a broad enough understanding of the basic workings of programming and computers that the graduate can have enough background to quickly adapt to any platform.
If you want to focus on something like.net (or something else popular), they have trade schools.
Even then, I'm not so sure there is much nostalgia involved.
It's not that I dislike fancy graphics and sound, it's just that I've not seen much time and energy devoted to it recently.
Another person posting in this thread touched on it: Software developers care about making a great all around game. Managers care about selling a product. Because computers keep changing and new software keeps comming out, a new game can only really expect to have 18-24 month shelf time before it's pushed out of the way.
That just does'nt seem to be enough time for word of mouth to spread. So, it's probably not that there are'nt good games being made, it's probably just that I never hear about them throught he noise.
The gaming press has a lot of fault here. When I read their articles, they seem more focused on the fps and rts games. I mean, that's fine, it's just not my cup of tea.
I really wonder if there is a source of news I can turn to for game reviews that cater more towards people like me, who think graphics and sound are neat, but don't belive they should be the primary focus of the games.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no doubt there was a great deal of good engineering going on here.. but in the end, it's just taking a bunch of off the shelf components and putting it into a box.
This would be much, much cooler if the guy had figured out how to use the onboard computer to A: do the video switching, and B: taking one controller, and re-directing the wires to the proper consol unit from one single controller. Then we'd have something to write home about.
I wish PC designers (as well as all consumer electronics designers) would experiment a little more with their designs.
It used to be all large TVs were in a wood cabinet. They were generally beautiful. Then sometime in the late 80s there were all sort of experiments in design, and it took several years for the winner to emerge; today's black molded plastic standard that pretty much all of our TVs are.
Around that same time, component stereo equipment switched from silver with the occasional wooden accents to the now standard black.
And that seems to be the lifespan of consumer electronics design. Functional-experiment-functional-stylish-functual black. Every so often somebody will break from the heard, but will eventually come back to the standards.
Yes, there are many who enter garbage in all the fields. And yes, there are those who use the obvious throw-away email addresses. But we assume them to be not very serious prospective customers.
I can personally attest to over a dozen peices of software I've purchased after entering a bogus e-mail address.
I don't know what software you sell, but if I was shopping for an application you sell, and your marketing people wanted to know this 'golden' information why I went with a competitor, it's because you wanted to make me jump through hoops I did'nt want to jump through just to see if your stuff was any good.
Number 1: It's been said time and again, but registration. There are a million reasons why a company wants to have this, and I see these posts from people saying that I have no position to compain. I have EVERY reason to compain. I am a potential customer. And I don't want you to know anything about me until I buy your software. That's what I would prefer.
If I'm made to type in an e-mail address to download, I type in a bogus address. If I need to get a key or anything else from my e-mail, I've just been sent the message that the software company does'nt want my business. This has happened more then once, and I've gone somewhere else. If I like your software, and I give you my or my companies credit card number, you get to know who I am. Not before.
2. Full featured software. If I bother to download your evaulation, I expect to be able to use it. When I can't save my work, or find that an important feature is turned off, or I have some stupid 10 minut time limit, the software gets deleted.
3. Installation. I can tell right away how much I'd like or not like a peice of software by installation. Paste icons all over my desktop without asking? You've annoyed me. Put yourself in my startup, even though it's not needed? You're gone. Bundle yourself with spyware? You're gone.
4. Remind me, clearly, when the evaulation period is getting to the end. 'You have 5 days left in your evaulation period' when I start the program up. I can think of many times when I've found a peice of software I like, forget to purchase it, forget to get approval for the purchase. I find another way to get something done, and I'll just forget about it. If I were a more orginized person, I'd keep tabs of those things, but I'm not.
I can see (and expect) power to your wi-fi WAP to be shutoff during takeoff-landing.
But, from what I understand, the frequencies used by the aircraft would not experience interfearence from the wi-fi network.
But this just made me think: I keep my 802.11b card in my laptop all the time, and when I fly, I usually pull my laptop out (typically out of bordom). I never really thought about it before, but I wonder if I'm breaking any laws/regulations by having that little thing on while in flight... and if so, are we going to start seing flight attendents asking people to pull their PC cards out?
Communications experts say they could charge by the minute or the bit.
Why not the flight? Or the day. I'd pay $15 to have a solid net connection on a 5 hour flight.
I'm looking at this from a passenger point of view, but I think we're eventually going to see (and need) net connectivity in the air.
And it should be cheaper then they think. Why go for a wired network in the plane at all? Pulling cables through a pre-existing airplane has to be expensive. A decent WAP which can handle 64 users at the same time and cover the entire cabin gives you a lan at ~$5-700 installed. Couple that with pre-existing antenneas, get a decent switch, and violla, you have internect connectivity in an average craft for a few thousand bucks.
Wi-fi is already becomming the standard at airports (even though current coverage stinks). Why not partner with one of the many wi-fi providers popping up? I don't subscribe to any of them, but if I found out that my subscription to boingo would keep me connected at the airport, in the plane, and the hotel when I landed, I'd sign up in a second.
I think the hope is access to information (and improvements in teaching) will give the country the intellectual capital needed to raise out of that.
The real ethical issue, as I see is, is the introduction of an appealing forigen culture into the native population. I don't know how that will turn out in the end.
15 years ago, I was speaking with a freind of my fathers about these new exotic 'hard drives' you could get. He was a big time computer guru, and I was a little kid.
I said to him that I thought a 10 megabyte hdd would be perfect, and that someday we would be able to buy one for less then $1,000. He scoffed.
I still remember this very clearly. "Why in heavens name would you ever need that much space in a hard drive"
I worked it out, and every concievable program I'd use, including saved files, all told would only need 2 megs. It was just impossible to think up enough applications at the time that a home PC really needed.
I'd love to run into him again and ask him if he remembers that conversation. In 10 years, 100 Terrabyte drives will seem 'quaint'.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought the little wire that ran from the CD-Rom drive to the sound card shot out the raw audio to the sound card, which in turn, if instructed spits it out to your audio out.
This should compleatly bypass any system/disk I/O, should'nt it? The requests the game is making on the hardware is just a start, stop, or change track instruction.
I could see it being a problem if all of the audio was stored on the hard drive in wav (or simular format), but if your just looking at music, it just seems a good deal simpler to have that run off the CD.
Why would you want to have any sort of audio compression taking up CPU cycles in a game that is so processesor depedent?
These sort of games seem to work by pushing computers to their limits, so it just seems odd that they would include something that takes power away from graphics/engine, espically when it's really not needed. (standard CD audio can be read off a disk with next to no CPU usage)
Am I way off base here? If so, let me know why.
Trying to draw parallels between free music and text publishing in relationship to weather they help or hurt sales is an apples to oranges situation.
On the surface, distributing pirated books should be a heck of a lot easier then music. The file size is small (espically in unformated plain text). There is a slightly more difficult situation of getting the printed page to electronic format, but a bored pirate with some OCR software and several hours to kill should be able to do it with little problem.
So, why is'nt anyone trading pirated books? Part of this has to do with a declining love of the medium found in the Internet generation. But I suspect more is found in the computers inability to translate media into an enjoyable format.
When I download a song I like, it's very easy to take the music, pump it to my stereo or burn it onto a CD, making the recording indistingusable from a purchased copy. A text file enjoys no such luxery. Lying on my couch reading off the screen of a laptop is just not as good as holding a book in my hand.
So, when somebody goes online and sees a free book they enjoy, the next logical step is to purchase the thing, because having an actual book format copy is better. There is little value added, other then album art/liner notes, and the knowledge you've done the right thing, by going out and purchasing music.
That having been said, I still think unrestricted free trade of music is a good thing, and helps the artists in the long run. I just don't see this article as being a credible argument for that.
pathighgate: Are you a learning computer? ;-)
SmarterChild: Yes indeed.
pathighgate: like skynet?
SmarterChild: C'mon, you know.
=====
So if you don't like it, you can try to go into business yourself to make a better product or provide a better service? I don't think companies should be penalized because the public is too lazy to switch to something new, I think I'd be rather $#%@'ed off if I had a business and the government started sticking their noses in where they don't belong.
1. There are better products.
2. I can't switch because software that I need to use for work is only developed for windows, because...
3. MS uses it's monopoly bully tactics to make sure it stays that way.
The BSD machine sitting on my desk, with an AMD processesor, is some sort of freak?
Talk about being kicked in the nuts over breakfast. I've had AMD machines for over 10 years, ever since my first 486DX 40. I buy and build AMD machines exclusivly for work. I'd guess I've spent (personally and through work purchases) $15k on AMD products. I have fervent brand loyalty to AMD because A: when alls said and done, they have a better price/performance ratio, and B: I like underdogs.
If AMD decides it wants to be microsofts little bitch poodle, B is gone. If somebody else gives comparable price/performance, then I am gone as their customer.
Gee. Great.
So to show my support, I'm supposed to pay money to join a website to download mp3s of the same crappy bullshit artists the big record companies are in love with?
Um, no thanks.
I'll stick with the latest file sharing program, find music I like and that's actually good, then go down to the local record store and buy or order the CD.
So when they can't hack it at 'Teen Beat' anymore, really awful interviewers work for German game websites?
Guess that means don't shop at Best Buy. Which won't be too hard. Good hardware can be found cheaper, and I'd much rather go to a local record store then some big corporate chain.
Big chain stores love to make arangements with record companies. Remember a few years back when they would cut out the dirty words on CDs sent to some big chains and not tell anyone about it?
Music is art. Big business has no place in that world. (P.S., your local record store has a better chance of having that obscure but good CD then Best Buy... they just might be a little short on the latest J-Lo release)
Consider the following things:
1. Windows and MS's major OSs are pretty unique, but at the same time are'nt nearly as advanced at the core as other major OSs, meaning a) nobody would want to steal it, and b) if somebody did, it would probably be easy to catch anyone if they did.
2. All the software outside of the base OS really does'nt provide MS with income. Media player, IE, directx, et. al. are ad-ons MS uses to get market share in those realms. If open, the worst that could happen is somebody makes it better and MS steals the ideas.
3. With thousands of programmers pouring over source code, security issues could be identified much quicker, allowing MS to (eventually) shed one of it's major banes
4. Somebody might actually figure out a way to make windows stable. MS buys the rights to include this in their Windows.. wow, they have improvements at a very marginal cost.
5. MS actually does something that makes geeks happy.
Normally I'm not a fan of government regulation.
But with current spotty status of DSL, I wonder sometimes if the FCC is really doing a good job here.
Yeah, CA screwed up on electricity, but my best guess is there is so much egg on their faces that the UC is going to go all out to make sure something like this worse.
Either that or it will fail miserably. If I were in CA, I'd have a dialup account for a backup...just in case.
I'm responsible for buying all the hardware for my company, and I won't pick up anything smaller then 17"
At one point, my boss asked me why I was always going for the larger monitors. My response: "Because 15" (or 14", which we had at the time) was just too small. In a few years people with bad eyesite are going to blame it on their monitors if they are too small"
This will happen. The question is'nt if somebody will sue because their company gave them a small CRT (or LCD), but when. I sure as heck don't want to be there.
I keep my WAP open and very public. Number one because it's cool, and number two because it keeps me on my toes security wise.
At best I get 2-3 people connecting in a given day. Even if the location was heavily advertised, I doubt I'd see more then 10.
The money I'd make through this would'nt be worth the time and energy to collect income, the system resources on my machine to keep proper accounting, or the loss of helping to build free wireless networks.
I keep my WAP open so folks at the the bar down the street can get online. I wish everyone had that attidude.
I've never worked on the Quality assurance side of an ISP, but I'd like this answered.
When I pick up my phone, theres a dialtone, and other then some rare occasions, I place a call, I get through.
I turn on a light switch, there is always power. I turn on the stove and the gas is flowing. I turn on the tap, and water comes out.
So why can't my ISP have this quality? My guess is they just hav'nt had the same amount of time other utilities have had to work out all the bugs.
This may be a simple question with a difficult answer, but I'd like to know why.
don't know about anyone else here, but I don't think Microsoft is exactly a flash-in-the-pan, flavor-of-the-day, fad kind of beast. Judging by their actions and perseverance over the past decades
You mean like Blackbird?
This is a bit unsettling.
.net (or something else popular), they have trade schools.
A college or university is not, nor should be a place where flavor of the day propritary platform should be taught. The focus of a college should be to give the student a broad enough understanding of the basic workings of programming and computers that the graduate can have enough background to quickly adapt to any platform.
If you want to focus on something like
===
Even then, I'm not so sure there is much nostalgia involved.
It's not that I dislike fancy graphics and sound, it's just that I've not seen much time and energy devoted to it recently.
Another person posting in this thread touched on it: Software developers care about making a great all around game. Managers care about selling a product. Because computers keep changing and new software keeps comming out, a new game can only really expect to have 18-24 month shelf time before it's pushed out of the way.
That just does'nt seem to be enough time for word of mouth to spread. So, it's probably not that there are'nt good games being made, it's probably just that I never hear about them throught he noise.
The gaming press has a lot of fault here. When I read their articles, they seem more focused on the fps and rts games. I mean, that's fine, it's just not my cup of tea.
I really wonder if there is a source of news I can turn to for game reviews that cater more towards people like me, who think graphics and sound are neat, but don't belive they should be the primary focus of the games.