Is your computer in front of a couch? Is there a TV signal feed? Can more than one person even sit in front of your computer at the same time?
Computers make great multimedia devices, but it takes extra effort to make those multimedia services available from the comfort of the living room. I have spent some time and effort on this, and it is expensive and time consuming. It is about time for a device like this.
I don't think image has anything to do with it. Sony predicted that people would still buy the system even if it cost $300, and they were right. They will only drop the price when they feel it is necessary to compete. Either the GC or the Xbox will need to start flying off the shelves first.
Why would anyone want to hack your toy program? And for that matter the difficulty of unmaking a black hole is probably linked to the fact that a black hole would be extremely difficult to control even by the maker.
There is a direct relationship between the hackability and the usefulness of a program. Take tar for example. I suspect that very few people use it for creating tape archives. But it is still useful because it is flexible enough to suit other purposes. And what is a hack but using stuff for "other" purposes?
OT: jingoism and the Starship Troopers movie
on
The Forever War
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· Score: 1
Paul Verhoeven (the director of Starship Troopers) is really an expert in poking fun at the action genre while creating classic action flicks at the same time. Robocop and Total Recall were similar in that they had many elements that told you the director was having a good laugh. At the same time the action and violence are so over the top that they practically define the action film.
You could replace a chip on a Playstation to allow it to play burned (therefore pirated) games. I go the impression that this chip mod was quite popular. Does anyone know exactly how popular it was? This level of modification sounds roughly equivalent to booting a Linux disk on the Xbox.
Don't forget that the target audience for the Xbox in particular is males between the ages of 20 and 35, and a lot of these guys know something about computers, or at least know someone else who does.
Our local arcade eventually got several high stools, like what you would use for a breakfast counter in your kitchen. These made extended gaming sessions more comfortable. Standing up all day is for teenagers with crummy jobs:)
It sounds like every member of the "Blue Box" team had the ability and the resources to create a network router company. How come so few of them did?
Most university IT staff and faculty have the skills to work elsewhere, and in many cases they could make more money doing research for a private firm. But they don't. Why not?
Universities are an excellent source of research because there are lots of smart people with free time, resources and interesting problems to solve. I doubt that most of these people are interested in founding startups because that involves a lot of hard, boring work. If these folks really wanted to make a ton of dough all they needed to do was move to the private sector.
While I do think that the original Blue Box team should get credit for the invention there is nothing wrong with taking a university research project and making a product out of it. This is how useful technology moves from the exclusive confines of the school system into the world.
They are now, but what about in the future? The political landscape of Europe has changed a lot in the last 15 years, and will continue to change. A more powerful European Union may eventually threaten the interests of the US, which could cool off our relations.
I doubt that the US and the EU will have serious problems in the near future, but the military has a different way of looking at things. They deal with "threats" and "risks", and they generally see the glass as half-empty (especially when looking at their budget). A separate satellite navigation system could resolve a risk and a budget problem at the same time.
If this microturbine can be mass produced for pennies, like many other semiconductors, and eventually we can make a cheap aluminum tubule sandwich sheet that is thin enough to make cans...
We could make disposable self-cooled cans of Budweiser! Who wouldn't marvel at the combination of technology and wastefulness!
Re:Prettier outside, same junk inside
on
Concept PC 2001
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· Score: 2
I wondered about this myself. Wouldn't a company like Dell turn a modular system into a profitable endeavor by also selling upgrade modules?
The problem is that the desktop system market has razor-thin margins, and the extra materials necessary to make good modular interfaces would cost enough to raise the price significantly. Right now it looks like the market is moving in the opposite direction, towards more integrated systems with non-upgradable parts. Otherwise there would be no way to make $600 computers.
I guess most people are cheap bastards, and the industry has to cater to their desires.
3GIO is still vaporware to discourage the uptake of HyperTransport. AMD claims that HT doesn't compete with 3GIO and Intel ignores HT completely. AMD is correct in that a working design doesn't compete with vaporware and I guess it wouldn't make sense for Intel to point customers to a design with a 2 year head start.
It sounds like C# has some nice features that Java doesn't, but I have my doubts that Microsoft will make it multiplatform. And that is becoming more important as the range of computing devices widens.
Servers tend to run Unix or legacy OSes. Embedded devices run Palm OS or a free Unix like Linux or BSD. Phones run all kinds of custom software. The only platform that Windows rules is the desktop, and that market segment just shrunk for the first time in history. How can C# dominate if it only runs on one type of device?
It seems like most serious crackers are in it for the notoriety. If the entire internet was brought down, how would anyone know who pulled off the ultimate crack?
Who is going to pay a couple hundred extra dollars for a faster IDE hard drive? It looks like 5400RPM 40GB drives can be had for $10 less than 7200RPM units, yet people are still buying them. The only reason IDE is so much cheaper is that the drives are made in larger quantities. A 15K RPM IDE hard drive would be nearly as expensive as the SCSI alternative, and slower since it seems that IDE has a higher latency than SCSI.
And in my personal experience the thermal pad works fine. The reason many HSFs come with a thermal pad is because thermal compounds can dry up or liquify. The important thing is to make sure the HSF is flush with the CPU.
I think you are pointing out that CPUs are producing more and more heat per square inch these days. However I have also noticed that CPU coolers are becoming more and more sophisticated as well.
I bought a HSF (heatsink/fan, a GlobalWin FOP32-1) for my 1Ghz Tbird a year ago that worked well but was very noisy. I recently replaced this with a new cooler (an Antec JetCool) which is equally efficient and much quieter. I have seen a new emphasis on quieter cooling with a number of other products too.
With a dialup modem I used to get a lot more done around the house. I could go get coffee while waiting for pages to load, or do some cleaning. And I got a real sense of well-being when I left my machine on all night to download a 100MB game demo and it actually worked!
Nvidia and ATI have already come out with programmable subunits (vertex and pixel shaders). The developer can write small programs that are applied to each vertex/pixel that comes through the pipe. This is not quite as flexible as a full-blown FPGA, but is a more likely direction for future consoles because it is an easier platform to learn. The XBox already has the Nvidia part with these features.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an excellent point. What needs to happen to get people to create instead of consume?
Is your computer in front of a couch? Is there a TV signal feed? Can more than one person even sit in front of your computer at the same time?
Computers make great multimedia devices, but it takes extra effort to make those multimedia services available from the comfort of the living room. I have spent some time and effort on this, and it is expensive and time consuming. It is about time for a device like this.
I don't think image has anything to do with it. Sony predicted that people would still buy the system even if it cost $300, and they were right. They will only drop the price when they feel it is necessary to compete. Either the GC or the Xbox will need to start flying off the shelves first.
Your formula (H=kU/T) seems good, and also shows that hackability is directly proportional to usability, which was my point if not my semantics.
I agree that "Everything is hackable" is not true, but the spirit of this statement is important and valid. How about "Everything useful is hackable"?
Why would anyone want to hack your toy program? And for that matter the difficulty of unmaking a black hole is probably linked to the fact that a black hole would be extremely difficult to control even by the maker.
There is a direct relationship between the hackability and the usefulness of a program. Take tar for example. I suspect that very few people use it for creating tape archives. But it is still useful because it is flexible enough to suit other purposes. And what is a hack but using stuff for "other" purposes?
Paul Verhoeven (the director of Starship Troopers) is really an expert in poking fun at the action genre while creating classic action flicks at the same time. Robocop and Total Recall were similar in that they had many elements that told you the director was having a good laugh. At the same time the action and violence are so over the top that they practically define the action film.
A cynic could point out that DVR doesn't really better the human race as a whole :)
You could replace a chip on a Playstation to allow it to play burned (therefore pirated) games. I go the impression that this chip mod was quite popular. Does anyone know exactly how popular it was? This level of modification sounds roughly equivalent to booting a Linux disk on the Xbox.
Don't forget that the target audience for the Xbox in particular is males between the ages of 20 and 35, and a lot of these guys know something about computers, or at least know someone else who does.
Our local arcade eventually got several high stools, like what you would use for a breakfast counter in your kitchen. These made extended gaming sessions more comfortable. Standing up all day is for teenagers with crummy jobs :)
It sounds like every member of the "Blue Box" team had the ability and the resources to create a network router company. How come so few of them did?
Most university IT staff and faculty have the skills to work elsewhere, and in many cases they could make more money doing research for a private firm. But they don't. Why not?
Universities are an excellent source of research because there are lots of smart people with free time, resources and interesting problems to solve. I doubt that most of these people are interested in founding startups because that involves a lot of hard, boring work. If these folks really wanted to make a ton of dough all they needed to do was move to the private sector.
While I do think that the original Blue Box team should get credit for the invention there is nothing wrong with taking a university research project and making a product out of it. This is how useful technology moves from the exclusive confines of the school system into the world.
They are now, but what about in the future? The political landscape of Europe has changed a lot in the last 15 years, and will continue to change. A more powerful European Union may eventually threaten the interests of the US, which could cool off our relations.
I doubt that the US and the EU will have serious problems in the near future, but the military has a different way of looking at things. They deal with "threats" and "risks", and they generally see the glass as half-empty (especially when looking at their budget). A separate satellite navigation system could resolve a risk and a budget problem at the same time.
Better yet, and more American...
If this microturbine can be mass produced for pennies, like many other semiconductors, and eventually we can make a cheap aluminum tubule sandwich sheet that is thin enough to make cans...
We could make disposable self-cooled cans of Budweiser! Who wouldn't marvel at the combination of technology and wastefulness!
I wondered about this myself. Wouldn't a company like Dell turn a modular system into a profitable endeavor by also selling upgrade modules?
The problem is that the desktop system market has razor-thin margins, and the extra materials necessary to make good modular interfaces would cost enough to raise the price significantly. Right now it looks like the market is moving in the opposite direction, towards more integrated systems with non-upgradable parts. Otherwise there would be no way to make $600 computers.
I guess most people are cheap bastards, and the industry has to cater to their desires.
3GIO is still vaporware to discourage the uptake of HyperTransport. AMD claims that HT doesn't compete with 3GIO and Intel ignores HT completely. AMD is correct in that a working design doesn't compete with vaporware and I guess it wouldn't make sense for Intel to point customers to a design with a 2 year head start.
It sounds like C# has some nice features that Java doesn't, but I have my doubts that Microsoft will make it multiplatform. And that is becoming more important as the range of computing devices widens.
Servers tend to run Unix or legacy OSes. Embedded devices run Palm OS or a free Unix like Linux or BSD. Phones run all kinds of custom software. The only platform that Windows rules is the desktop, and that market segment just shrunk for the first time in history. How can C# dominate if it only runs on one type of device?
It seems like most serious crackers are in it for the notoriety. If the entire internet was brought down, how would anyone know who pulled off the ultimate crack?
Thats right! In fact Real Men write all of their network packets manually using pico! Client software is for wusses!
There's no way I'm going to fit >4000 MP3s onto a 600MB hard drive. Or one modern game.
Who is going to pay a couple hundred extra dollars for a faster IDE hard drive? It looks like 5400RPM 40GB drives can be had for $10 less than 7200RPM units, yet people are still buying them. The only reason IDE is so much cheaper is that the drives are made in larger quantities. A 15K RPM IDE hard drive would be nearly as expensive as the SCSI alternative, and slower since it seems that IDE has a higher latency than SCSI.
The best computer games use the mouse and keyboard for input. If you want to play games with a gamepad or joystick get a console.
And in my personal experience the thermal pad works fine. The reason many HSFs come with a thermal pad is because thermal compounds can dry up or liquify. The important thing is to make sure the HSF is flush with the CPU.
I think you are pointing out that CPUs are producing more and more heat per square inch these days. However I have also noticed that CPU coolers are becoming more and more sophisticated as well.
I bought a HSF (heatsink/fan, a GlobalWin FOP32-1) for my 1Ghz Tbird a year ago that worked well but was very noisy. I recently replaced this with a new cooler (an Antec JetCool) which is equally efficient and much quieter. I have seen a new emphasis on quieter cooling with a number of other products too.
With a dialup modem I used to get a lot more done around the house. I could go get coffee while waiting for pages to load, or do some cleaning. And I got a real sense of well-being when I left my machine on all night to download a 100MB game demo and it actually worked!
Nvidia and ATI have already come out with programmable subunits (vertex and pixel shaders). The developer can write small programs that are applied to each vertex/pixel that comes through the pipe. This is not quite as flexible as a full-blown FPGA, but is a more likely direction for future consoles because it is an easier platform to learn. The XBox already has the Nvidia part with these features.
Never attribute to malice what could be explained by ignorance or stupidity. And Microsoft and the government have plenty of that to go around.