Yeah, since you put it that way, all any addiction is the lack of the will and sheer determination. Even alcohol, drugs, etc.
From personal experience (not as an addict to anything, but just using games as an escape) is that for some people the game becomes a proxy for life. This actually makes it worse in some ways than a drug addiction which 'merely' alters your brain chemistry. The game not only alters your brain chemistry via the reward mechanism, it creates a feedback loop because the more you play, the better you get at triggering the reward mechanism. IE, you get better at the game in question.
It's easy for you to say it, but can you do something similar? It's not such an extreme analogy for me to propose that the 'Game of Life' in the US is hollow and empty with a materialistic reward and positive feedback system analagous to a game. In such a situation could you just throw it all away and throw yourself into a monastary with little positive feedback, little material gain, and very little encouragement?
It's easy for me to see how someone stuck in a game might see the real world as emptier and less satisfying because there is less order, less feedback, less reward, less gain than the online world where they have already mastered or can imagine mastering the rules and becoming proficient. You are asking them to become happy; can you be happy if I asked you to throw away your life and live as a monk or hermit?
Are you smoking crack?
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
Sorry, but I saw the patents in referral to IT and Ginger; the concept of a autobalancing wheelchair and a fuel efficient drive system almost immediately sounded like a scooter, or something similar, to me.
Another point. Is no one thinking: Segway, segueway? As in, this is going to introduce something new and different? This is a short term (though short may mean 20 years to Kamen) until whatever he's introducing because of Segway hits the market.
Right; but there is leeway as to sharing, as I live in a three income household with two phone lines, one DSL account, five IPs, 6 computers, and two LANs, not to mention friends who come over for gaming purposes and all.
Sharing of bandwidth inside an apartment complex via one massive DSL pipe vs 20 different smaller lines is another example. I've seen it done, but I can't say what the contract was.
I 'share' my connection with my parents and my brother at home. It's listed under one name, but all 'share' the cost of the connection.
Now, we *do* buy 5 IPs, but we also use one of those IPs to NAT for 4 PCs, as well.
The point being that what's wrong with *splitting* a net connection? Where's the distinction between letting the neighbor come over to browse on your PC, NAT a LAN to the single IP, letting him come over to hook up his PC once in a while for games, running a cable to his apartment for 'convenience', running a wireless net for even more convenience, or sharing the costs of the connection?
I do all of those with my service, except it's all in the family; me, my brother, and my parents, where my brother ostensibly 'pays' for the service.
Install a bastard Pentium Overdrive, and you have a 100 to 120MHz machine, *maybe*, possibly.
Bump up the ram to 32mb... and you can install Windows95. You can trivially install Linux.
You can play mp3s, if barely, on a 486. You can play mpeg1 movies on a Pentium, but it would drop frames and take a bit of space. On the other hand, if they have low res low quality version, maybe it's not a big deal anyway.
If you look at IBM's PCM site, they list 2 Commodore 286s and 4 Commodore 486s, and it's perfectly possible to upgrade a Commodore to some bastard Pentium chips. Of course he'd be limited to VESA video cards, probably, but it's completely possible to get Windows 95 running on one of those... or at least Linux.
It seems that the only consumers willing to pay for design considerations are Apple customers.
Fanless design, low power design, ease of accessability, ease of maintainance, CPUs on daughtercards, Firewire and USB, easy to access ram, easy to open cases, are all part of the G4 Tower and the G4 laptop.
The majority of PC buyers would rather put up with more noise pollution, cramped and difficult to maintain cases, spaghetti cables, and heat than pay for the design and manufacture of concept PCs.
Buy a G4 tower then :P
on
Concept PC 2001
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Seriously, if you're advocating simple to upgrade PCs.
Pull a latch and the side of the G4 pops open. Drives sit on the bottom and are connected to a ribbon cable. CPU sits on an easily upgradable daughtercard (or maybe it's in a ZIF socket by now, I own a Titanium Laptop), ram is easily accessable, and all the PCI slots are trivially available because the motherboard lies on the hinged door.
The problem? Most PC buyers don't want to *pay* for the ability to easily tinker with their PC, instead placing higher value on performance and price, leaving design innovation, power consumption, and noise pollution as casualties of their budgets.
Amazon here lists the Linksys router/access point for $180, the Netgear variant for $225, and a SMC variation for $190. There's also D-Link's, for $195.
They offer more ports (3-4), a print server, some have modems, but unles I'm much mistaken, none support more than 10 wireless users. Apple's does:)
Oh, and Apple's was first, even if it is higher priced, by now. What Apple needs to add to it's lineup is an Apple print server... then when you hook it up to the Airport, you get a wireless print server, for 'free':)
It's because Motorola has traditionally included a lot of onboard support 'for free' in their embedded chips, such as memory controllers, interrupt handlers, SRAM, EEPROM, etc.
It doesn't mean we won't see HT used on the motherboards, or that HT and RapidIO won't both be on the motherboard.
It could be that RapidIO is used between CPUs and memory, with HT linking the video, sound, PCI-X(ugh, I think I like 3GIO better) together with the CPU-Memory systems.
It certainly *looked* like taichi to me, but I can't be authoritative on that. I just kept thinking "Hmmm, I've seen this in his 'Tai Chi Master' movie."
Except the SFX was much, much, better, and the bad guy much, much, cooler.
Rip!Go looks like an excellent mp3 player device, maybe even better than the RioVolt.
It isn't an iPod. Sure you can store 185mb of data on a mCDR, but it's not like this thing can actually *burn* on the fly with it's USB port or something.
The whole hype about the iPod is that it's a portable stylish Firewire hard drive with an mp3 player integrated into it.
The Rip!Go is a CD player with an integrated mp3 player. The iAudio is an mp3 player, only.
Well, it looks nice and it seems to have the capacity to be an excellent mp3 player, but it has no other storage capabilities; which is what the iPod offers. iPod *matches* all those features, plus offers 4.9gb more storage, 30x faster transfer speed, recharging through the Firewire port, the ability to boot off the device, as well as use it as a firewire disk.
Otherwise, the iAudio is much better as a small portable mp3 player; 10 hours of playback with 2 hours of music? Just a little unbalanced.
Ah, quite right, quite right. I'm paying for form and style, right?;)
Still, then, it's a question of economies of scale, isn't it? Cases are slightly more expensive, CPUs are slightly more expensive, mobos are slightly more expensive, engineers to write drivers, etc, because there's no volume involved...
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it.
on
The Guts Of An iPod
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· Score: 2
You're right, it's bad form to misquote if I'm going to quote...
8 hours is indeed not half the battery time, not even close.
It's not the closed shop mentality, so much as using retailers I'm familiar and comfortable with. In this case, the manufacturer of said device, or Amazon, or Buy. Amazon lists the 6gb Archos jukebox at $239, which isn't much cheaper than Archos's list price.
So the question is, why is an entry level 600MHz iMac *so* expensive if the screen, hard drive, memory, video, etc, are all commodity parts?
If the CPU is cheaper than AMD's, why is an entry level Mac 50% more expensive than an entry AMD or Intel?
Okay, so maybe I don't know enough to judge, but somewhere some component is raising the cost... and if the hard drive, memory, video, and CPU aren't it... maybe it's the chipset and drivers, in which case using the NForce and NVIDIA drivers may drive the cost down of the system by $100? Who knows except Apple?
Re:Mac-only ..... nobody seems to get it.
on
The Guts Of An iPod
·
· Score: 2
The 'costs half as much' versions are also twice as heavy and half as much battery time for the same size drive, isn't it?
The website says it's $249, hardly half the price:)
The Archos was nice until the iPod came out; now here's something faster by 30x and lighter by half and smaller by half and more batter life to boot.
So the big event is how smaller, lighter, faster, and longer the iPod is than, say, the Archos. You just have to pay for that luxury.
Evidently you don't value those strengths, so the iPod doesn't mean anything to you.
If you read http://www.macobserver.com/article/2001/10/29.4.sh tml you will see that the music folder is just a hidden folder. To write a PC tool to use the iPod means:
Firewire hard disk ability
HFS+ (I think) capability
I suspect Linux people may get this first, if only because Darwin and Linux have HFS+ support and Windows doesn't (yet).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, since you put it that way, all any addiction is the lack of the will and sheer determination. Even alcohol, drugs, etc.
From personal experience (not as an addict to anything, but just using games as an escape) is that for some people the game becomes a proxy for life. This actually makes it worse in some ways than a drug addiction which 'merely' alters your brain chemistry. The game not only alters your brain chemistry via the reward mechanism, it creates a feedback loop because the more you play, the better you get at triggering the reward mechanism. IE, you get better at the game in question.
It's easy for you to say it, but can you do something similar? It's not such an extreme analogy for me to propose that the 'Game of Life' in the US is hollow and empty with a materialistic reward and positive feedback system analagous to a game. In such a situation could you just throw it all away and throw yourself into a monastary with little positive feedback, little material gain, and very little encouragement?
It's easy for me to see how someone stuck in a game might see the real world as emptier and less satisfying because there is less order, less feedback, less reward, less gain than the online world where they have already mastered or can imagine mastering the rules and becoming proficient. You are asking them to become happy; can you be happy if I asked you to throw away your life and live as a monk or hermit?
Sorry, but I saw the patents in referral to IT and Ginger; the concept of a autobalancing wheelchair and a fuel efficient drive system almost immediately sounded like a scooter, or something similar, to me.
Another point. Is no one thinking: Segway, segueway? As in, this is going to introduce something new and different? This is a short term (though short may mean 20 years to Kamen) until whatever he's introducing because of Segway hits the market.
Right; but there is leeway as to sharing, as I live in a three income household with two phone lines, one DSL account, five IPs, 6 computers, and two LANs, not to mention friends who come over for gaming purposes and all.
Sharing of bandwidth inside an apartment complex via one massive DSL pipe vs 20 different smaller lines is another example. I've seen it done, but I can't say what the contract was.
Reselling? What about splitting a net connection?
I 'share' my connection with my parents and my brother at home. It's listed under one name, but all 'share' the cost of the connection.
Now, we *do* buy 5 IPs, but we also use one of those IPs to NAT for 4 PCs, as well.
The point being that what's wrong with *splitting* a net connection? Where's the distinction between letting the neighbor come over to browse on your PC, NAT a LAN to the single IP, letting him come over to hook up his PC once in a while for games, running a cable to his apartment for 'convenience', running a wireless net for even more convenience, or sharing the costs of the connection?
I do all of those with my service, except it's all in the family; me, my brother, and my parents, where my brother ostensibly 'pays' for the service.
What about if I ask the neighbor to give me $20 a month to share the bandwidth. Is that wrong?
The Japanese borrowed arbeit to form their word arubaito, for part time work or labor.
Commodore PCs ran as high as 486-66s.
Install a bastard Pentium Overdrive, and you have a 100 to 120MHz machine, *maybe*, possibly.
Bump up the ram to 32mb... and you can install Windows95. You can trivially install Linux.
You can play mp3s, if barely, on a 486. You can play mpeg1 movies on a Pentium, but it would drop frames and take a bit of space. On the other hand, if they have low res low quality version, maybe it's not a big deal anyway.
If you look at IBM's PCM site, they list 2 Commodore 286s and 4 Commodore 486s, and it's perfectly possible to upgrade a Commodore to some bastard Pentium chips. Of course he'd be limited to VESA video cards, probably, but it's completely possible to get Windows 95 running on one of those... or at least Linux.
It seems that the only consumers willing to pay for design considerations are Apple customers.
Fanless design, low power design, ease of accessability, ease of maintainance, CPUs on daughtercards, Firewire and USB, easy to access ram, easy to open cases, are all part of the G4 Tower and the G4 laptop.
The majority of PC buyers would rather put up with more noise pollution, cramped and difficult to maintain cases, spaghetti cables, and heat than pay for the design and manufacture of concept PCs.
Seriously, if you're advocating simple to upgrade PCs.
Pull a latch and the side of the G4 pops open. Drives sit on the bottom and are connected to a ribbon cable. CPU sits on an easily upgradable daughtercard (or maybe it's in a ZIF socket by now, I own a Titanium Laptop), ram is easily accessable, and all the PCI slots are trivially available because the motherboard lies on the hinged door.
The problem? Most PC buyers don't want to *pay* for the ability to easily tinker with their PC, instead placing higher value on performance and price, leaving design innovation, power consumption, and noise pollution as casualties of their budgets.
Uh, really? It can support 254 wireless users? I thought most wireless points had hard constraints due to bandwidth limitations?
Amazon here lists the Linksys router/access point for $180, the Netgear variant for $225, and a SMC variation for $190. There's also D-Link's, for $195. They offer more ports (3-4), a print server, some have modems, but unles I'm much mistaken, none support more than 10 wireless users. Apple's does :)
Oh, and Apple's was first, even if it is higher priced, by now. What Apple needs to add to it's lineup is an Apple print server... then when you hook it up to the Airport, you get a wireless print server, for 'free' :)
It's because Motorola has traditionally included a lot of onboard support 'for free' in their embedded chips, such as memory controllers, interrupt handlers, SRAM, EEPROM, etc.
It doesn't mean we won't see HT used on the motherboards, or that HT and RapidIO won't both be on the motherboard.
It could be that RapidIO is used between CPUs and memory, with HT linking the video, sound, PCI-X(ugh, I think I like 3GIO better) together with the CPU-Memory systems.
As an example.
Your babe tolerates certain levels and sleeps through others.
For her (him?) it's Counterstrike. For others it's the fan on the CPU. For other's it's the whirring of the CDRW drive.
Me, I use a PowerBook because I *love* silence. I listen to my music *quiet*, so when the CPU or PS fan is louder than my music, I have issues.
My *new* PC is an 800MHz Celeron with a low speed fan and a 140W PS in order to supress noise. Tradeoffs of power and heat for noise and performance.
It certainly *looked* like taichi to me, but I can't be authoritative on that. I just kept thinking "Hmmm, I've seen this in his 'Tai Chi Master' movie."
Except the SFX was much, much, better, and the bad guy much, much, cooler.
Had a lot of fun. I do wushu, though, so I liked seeing Jet Li doing Bagua and some other form I totally did not recognize.
:) might have made things confusing.
I dunno what you expected out of the movie, but I wasn't expecting anything better than Highlander, which seemed suspiciously similar.
The fact that the two Jets were only distinguished because of their fighting styles (how very martial arts
I thought it was trippy that Jet Li in at least two, if not three, universes always fell for the same woman.
You *can* burn on the fly with this thing!
:)
However,at USB speeds, it's pretty slow. If it were Firewire, was cdrw, and less than $300, I'd be *all* over it.
As it is, I'm gonna have to look into it now
Rip!Go looks like an excellent mp3 player device, maybe even better than the RioVolt.
It isn't an iPod. Sure you can store 185mb of data on a mCDR, but it's not like this thing can actually *burn* on the fly with it's USB port or something.
The whole hype about the iPod is that it's a portable stylish Firewire hard drive with an mp3 player integrated into it.
The Rip!Go is a CD player with an integrated mp3 player. The iAudio is an mp3 player, only.
Well, it looks nice and it seems to have the capacity to be an excellent mp3 player, but it has no other storage capabilities; which is what the iPod offers. iPod *matches* all those features, plus offers 4.9gb more storage, 30x faster transfer speed, recharging through the Firewire port, the ability to boot off the device, as well as use it as a firewire disk.
Otherwise, the iAudio is much better as a small portable mp3 player; 10 hours of playback with 2 hours of music? Just a little unbalanced.
Ah, quite right, quite right. I'm paying for form and style, right? ;)
Still, then, it's a question of economies of scale, isn't it? Cases are slightly more expensive, CPUs are slightly more expensive, mobos are slightly more expensive, engineers to write drivers, etc, because there's no volume involved...
You're right, it's bad form to misquote if I'm going to quote...
8 hours is indeed not half the battery time, not even close.
It's not the closed shop mentality, so much as using retailers I'm familiar and comfortable with. In this case, the manufacturer of said device, or Amazon, or Buy. Amazon lists the 6gb Archos jukebox at $239, which isn't much cheaper than Archos's list price.
So the question is, why is an entry level 600MHz iMac *so* expensive if the screen, hard drive, memory, video, etc, are all commodity parts?
If the CPU is cheaper than AMD's, why is an entry level Mac 50% more expensive than an entry AMD or Intel?
Okay, so maybe I don't know enough to judge, but somewhere some component is raising the cost... and if the hard drive, memory, video, and CPU aren't it... maybe it's the chipset and drivers, in which case using the NForce and NVIDIA drivers may drive the cost down of the system by $100? Who knows except Apple?
The 'costs half as much' versions are also twice as heavy and half as much battery time for the same size drive, isn't it?
:)
The website says it's $249, hardly half the price
The Archos was nice until the iPod came out; now here's something faster by 30x and lighter by half and smaller by half and more batter life to boot.
So the big event is how smaller, lighter, faster, and longer the iPod is than, say, the Archos. You just have to pay for that luxury.
Evidently you don't value those strengths, so the iPod doesn't mean anything to you.
If you read http://www.macobserver.com/article/2001/10/29.4.sh tml you will see that the music folder is just a hidden folder. To write a PC tool to use the iPod means:
Firewire hard disk ability
HFS+ (I think) capability
I suspect Linux people may get this first, if only because Darwin and Linux have HFS+ support and Windows doesn't (yet).
Hardware agnostic means the device holds the view that the ultimate hardware platform is unknown and probably unknowable.
If the design is good, then the OS and drivers and everything above the OS does not know and does not have the means to know what the hardware is.
That seems to be a good enough description for agnostic, doesn't it? It's an analogy, and not a 100% fit.