Except for laserdisk games. Some of those monsters would eat an entire week's allowance (in ye olden days, $5 to $10 depending how rich your parents were) within an hour.
he sheer volume of quarters I pumped into Dragon's Lair is about what some would pay to have sex with a real woman, let alone Princess Daphne.
These guys have a constantly moving stock of computer hardware and technology from up to 20 years back. One such piece that they have on display (unknown as to if it's for sale) is an ancient 16" 5MB IBM HD. They also have ancient Sun systems, servers, server racks, and a ton of miscelleneous hardware that one could spend a lifetime decyphering the usage of. It's in Tukwila, on Andover Park West, just a block south of Southcenter Mall.
Odd, since I played with it since it's days on SGI systems, and not once to I remember the 3D engine being used in either audio or video applications. It's a 3D rendering engine, and nothing more, or so I was led to believe (over a 10 year period no less).
If it has, can anyone pass along a link to the site hosting the codec? This could outdo DiVX!
Re:Students think CDs are expensive? No surprise.
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem is, when CDs first came out (1980 for you whippersnappers), the technology to produce them was in its infancy. As a result, the discs produced were absurdly expensive. However, as enough people had been willing to buy them, the music industry decided to continue charging not by what the CD cost to produce, but what they could get away with charging. Back in 1980, CDs cost approximately $30 to produce. In 1985, it cost approximately $20, and by 1990 it cost $5 per CD. Fast forward to modern times, and you can get an idea of what the price per disc should be.
Onto the second point: Besides the above, the secondary reason why most games cost as much as they do, is that unlike a month of bubblegum pop production paid at scale, software companies have up to 100 people or more working on any given title. As anyone with experience in the field can attest, a LOT more talent goes into a good game design than a Backstreet Boys album. In fact, most games out there take upwards of 3 years to produce, while top ten bands churn out music more times in a year than Gene Hackman stars in movies.
Additionally, as games continue their lifespans, their prices drop. As operating systems add new features and make others obsolete, the games are nearly unplayable, and join the "2 for $9.95" bargain bin. CDs on the other hand, are playable indefinately (well, except for that little nasty deal with Palladium), so there's not only a good chance you can find an album released on CD 10 years ago, but you can rest assured that it'll probably still cost $14.95-$19.95.
Now on the other hand, lets look at some numbers, 10 years prior:
Video game prices for CD based games (ROM based cartridges don't quite count, as chip prices contributed the most to the overall retail price) usually ran $59-$79. Production time usually ran 1-2 years for games.
CD prices usually ran $14.95-$19.95. Production time usually ran 1-2 years.
And now:
Video game prices for CD based games usually run $29-$49. Production time runs 2-4 years.
CD prices still run $14.95-$19.95. Production time usually runs 6 months to 1 year.
Note the discrepencies in price cuts VS. production costs, the music industry is ripping us off, while game manufacturers are technically working for sweatshop pay.
Would be to ensure that nobody who either owns part of, or the whole of a company that produces computerized voting machines, can ever run for office.
Such has been the case regarding Chuck Hagel, and the voting debacle in Georgia, Florida, and Nebraska. As long as any political group owns the machines, democracy will be nothing more than a joke.
The 3D in Dragons Lair 3D, is cel shaded polygon renderings. Similar to Jet Grind Radio, or Legend of Zelda for the Gamecube.
Back when it was in development, as far back as 1998, DL3D was ahead of its time, for using cel shading. However, as its release came years after the first cel shaded video games hit the market, the gimmick was fairly dated.
As for the reviewer, he doesn't know squat about gaming. While I played the PC version and had little problems with switching camera angles, he lambasts the XBox version for that issue.
However, the idea for DL3D is much better than he lets on. When you played the original, you were playing canned footage, where the best thing they could do for variety, was flip the animation over. DL3D allows you to explore everywhere and everything, something you couldn't do otherwise in the original.
IMO, the reviewer was probably an old gamer who considers remakes or new versions of old games as sacrilege.
Well, if you consider that Haliburton and Enron, under Cheney, were pushing to remove embargos on Iraqi oil, AND invested heavily in Iraq's oil fields.
Or that during the Clinton administration, that Bush Sr. and Unocal were in negotiations with the Taliban for a gas pipeline, and failing that, after we invaded Afghanistan, the president we put in power there just happened to be (surprise surprise)a former Unocal employee. Add to that, the fact that after we got a "better deal", the plans for the gas pipeline were passed with nary a whimper late last year.
Oh, and lest we forget, the group attempting to take on Cheney for his criminal activities recently gave up, because Cheney has some 1600 pound gorillas in his pockets, and the constant state of stalemate would have bankrupted them.
I mean, okay, to start with, I never HAD credit, let alone good credit, I was never wealthy enough to get money I didn't need (which in essense is what credit cards are about), and had over my youth, several bills go unpaid due to the ups and downs of employment over the last 14 years.
But the credit checks are getting out of hand. For example, in Washington state (not sure if it's the same everywhere else), you cannot get even basic employment with supermarkets, or even tobacco shops (a big industry here), without passing a credit check. These jobs are just one notch above working fast food and 24 hour quickiemarts, which means even those on minimum wage cannot get a job that pays a paltry $2-$3 more per hour, if they had any bills go into collection after a layoff. If they had a check bounce once, and didn't pay it off instantly, that's also a black mark, naturally.
However, if all you had for a 5 year period was minimum wage employment, and were looking for a new job while living off a credit card in that time (if you're really lucky), then you're screwed as well, even by missing one bill.
And of course, if you decided to spend some time self employed, and didn't keep 100% accurate tax records, and do all the paperwork (such as those ITs who worked for food or sold their services under the table), you're also fucked.
Of course, since there's a 7 year amnesty, you have to wait that long for anything to be cleared from your credit record.
In a nutshell, it's pretty stupid all around. Not having a job results in not having money, which results in bad credit when you have to choose between a phone bill and eating for another week, or keeping rent paid, which results in not getting the job you need to make money to pay the bills and the rent combined.
Mod parent down as redundant please, I made the exact same joke 40 minutes before that: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid =52934& threshold=2&commentsort=1&tid=134&tid=126&tid=160& mode=thread&cid=5236326
Though the/. server's been acting buggy today too. Was like watching a time machine operate, first 127 posts, then 7, then 3.
Additionally, humans have one thing robots cannot: Imagination.
They have the ability to, in a pinch, come up with solutions to problems that no machine technically can. When they had to build a CO2 scrubber from spare parts on Apollo 13, do you think a robot with the same computational power available in those days could have done the same? Of course not.
Additionally, humans seeing an anomalous phenomena would be immediately intrigued by it (such as nebulae, et al), and would set to studying it about as quickly, possibly even discovering something otherwise completely unknown. A robot would see known gasses, shrug because it's known, and ignore it, going on its way (forget about human intervention, when you're talking outside the solar system. By the time we find out it found something, it's long flown by).
And one other critical factor: Humans have a survival instinct. Robots do not. Humans, when threatened, can respond almost immediately. Robots cannot.
"I remember years ago a friend traded an obscure VHS tape-based system to me. It used some kind of light gun, (I think) there was a score counter on the console itself. The VHS tape 'game' with it was some kind of jet fighters flying around thing. (kinda Top Gun style stuff)
Might that be the ISIX console you mentioned? I don't have it anymore, and I don't remember much else about it."
Nope, the toy you're thinking of sounds like the old Captain Power line of toys, which involved jet fighters, toys and guns with light sensors built in, set up to respond to flashing spots overlaid on the video footage. It was actually a fairly controversial toy too, because kids either had to have two of them to play against each other, or a VCR so they could interact with the video.
The ISIX used a frame shuffling system to create the FMV, so you had clip a, b, c, and d, with one frame each, which the game would then seperate into a frame buffer, based on what software it read from the audio track and the player input.
CD, DVD, and LD games work differently, playing individual clips, and were limited by the seek time of the drives they were played on. While the VHS format was a good idea, the one drawback of the ISIX was the need to rewind the tape after every game (and you think waiting 30 seconds to load a level in Unreal II is bad).
Ultimately, the ISIX was never released, as Worlds of Wonder and Hasbro dropped the project when they folded. A pity too, since it was in development up til 1989 or so, quite a while before CD-ROM based video game platforms that could do the same were either available, or cheap enough for anyone to own.
One, was the Colecovision ADAM, the only system to commit data suicide every time it was turned on. Great concept, lousy implementation.
Two, the Vectrex game system. Brilliant platform, gave people that true arcade vector graphics feel, decent sound (considering this came out about the same time as the Colecovision), and an all in one package the size of a first gen Macintosh. Killed by low game variety and demand (it was a $150-200 game system, which, despite the fact the whole system came in one package, came in on the coattails of the 1970s recessions, when most parents were able to justify paying $20-$40 for a kids toy, but forget anything more).
Third: ISIX. The videogame platform that never came. This was an incredible console that required nothing more than a common VCR to deliver laserdisk'esque videogaming to the masses, using a frameshuffling method to allow multiple video game footage scenes to be displayed. I tried the system over a decade ago, from the wirewrapped prototypes. If Worlds of Wonder didn't tank, we would have seen this on the market, and it would have blown all other interactive media machines of the late 1980s out of the water.
Most of the games lived on, however, in rereleases such as Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and a few "Do your own music video" games that came later. Detach yourself from what you learned and paid for CD based games, and imagine how it would have been to get a game system that would rival them, just by hooking up the VCR you already had. That was it. Not that the games themselves were spectacular in CD media dependant world, but for the technology involved, it was leaps ahead.
Wasn't the author of "Sapphire" also the guy who took advantage of some holes in Linux, with Lion.worm? At least they aren't taking sides, apparently. Seems like a good excuse to close off all data connections with China at least.
The answer is simple: Don't record MPEG-4 on the fly. Record MPEG-1 if you aren't too worried about quality later, or MPEG-2 on the fly, encode it to MPEG-4 from the raw footage.
I've managed to do some good DIY DiVX encodes from VHS that way, maintaining a decent framerate, on a system only 50% faster than yours (1.5Ghz P4). I do, however, recall hearing some mumblings about the Athlon not being that good at encoding realtime video. Though the "AMD Reality Check" tried to disprove that by encoding about 5 seconds of video on competing platforms, frankly it was not an adequate comparison. Memory leaks, dropped frames, and limitations of storage on both systems will show itself after about 10 minutes of continuous recording. Don't get me wrong, I'm neither pro AMD or Intel, both have their flaws and benefits. My system is a case of "what was cheapest, closest, and within my budget".
I'm not much of a server geek, but don't some rack mount systems allow for a one slot PCI riser? If you go that route (slightly older rackmount systems can be bought for ubercheap), each can hold one tuner (and capturing video should be decent, since other than transferring data to the file server, they won't be doing anything else), then use one desktop system for the heavy stuff (encoding, controlling the individual recorders), and one that can act as a RAID file server for all of the recorders.
As for the rackmounts, IIRC, those have built in VGA outputs. Connect those to a bunch monitor sharing blocks (4 to 2, then the 2 to one monitor, so on and so forth), and you can switch from live to recorded on the fly. This is assuming, however, that you want to watch everything on the monitor, and not the TV.
Of course, with the pricing approaching ludicrous numbers to build such a beast, you'd be better off buying a few Tivos.
Or does the controller configuration look an awful lot like a Dreamcast controller? Maybe, just MAYBE, this is the set top console that was planned about 2 years back, that utilizes the Dreamcast technology?
From what I recall, the planned set top DC was going to be broadband based, downloading games, more or less a supercharged WebTV.
I remember watching as FM radio evolved over the last 25-30 years. When FM started out, nobody used it except for a few odd college stations or classical music stations. Most AM stations were mainstream in those days, and were reluctant to switch over, due to AM's wider broadcast area, and most stations already had the hardware, no need to upgrade in the eyes of the suits.
Also, AM radios were considerably cheaper than an FM stereo Hi-Fi (not to mention there being no portable FM recievers that were truly compact until 1979-1980, when the first walkman came out).
At around the same time, some NYC stations were managing to broadcast in stereo on the AM band, but by then it was too late, FM was starting to infiltrate the market. More stations began buying into FM broadcasting.
The college stations, depending on the city, were often running the most original and unique music out there (such as WLIR in NY, running old school punk, synthesized and otherwise non mainstream music in a Debbie Gibson world- The only local station to play Dead Kennedys' "MTV Get Off The Air!"). In fact, between the times I listened to WLIR as a teenager, and "discovered" file sharing, over 10 years had passed where I had no idea what kind of new music was out there.
The openness of FM radio has become a thing of the past, however, thanks to payola and media corporations. In fact, it's the only reason I hope XM satellite radio catches on, because once they take their focus off of FM, maybe more college/amateur/independant broadcasters will have a chance once again to bring in music that appeals to the rest of us.
On a sidenote, however, another benefit to making music available that isn't on mainstream radio, is that punk and alternative music of the 80s made people THINK. Has anyone noticed that as more FM stations hav gotten to the point they are at today, that the public is more apathetic and uninspired? Look at previous peace rallies, and you'll note that it's been dwindling down considerably, starting 1988 and reaching an all time low of approximately a million total attending today.
Music used to be one of the great motivators of activism, so what happens when the corporations control your motivation?
The difference between Apple and Microsoft, however, is this:
Apple: Proprietary hardware and OS, though with a little effort, other operating systems can be installed.
Microsoft: Proprietary OS, open hardware. Any variety of OS can be installed as an alternative.
The key word here is proprietary. Apple makes whatever business they have from the proprietary hardware, not the OS. Microsoft makes whatever business they have from the proprietary OS, not the hardware.
As Microsoft is primarily a software company, they have everything to lose by using an open source kernel which they will have no control over.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for laserdisk games. Some of those monsters would eat an entire week's allowance (in ye olden days, $5 to $10 depending how rich your parents were) within an hour.
he sheer volume of quarters I pumped into Dragon's Lair is about what some would pay to have sex with a real woman, let alone Princess Daphne.
These guys have a constantly moving stock of computer hardware and technology from up to 20 years back. One such piece that they have on display (unknown as to if it's for sale) is an ancient 16" 5MB IBM HD. They also have ancient Sun systems, servers, server racks, and a ton of miscelleneous hardware that one could spend a lifetime decyphering the usage of. It's in Tukwila, on Andover Park West, just a block south of Southcenter Mall.
Odd, since I played with it since it's days on SGI systems, and not once to I remember the 3D engine being used in either audio or video applications. It's a 3D rendering engine, and nothing more, or so I was led to believe (over a 10 year period no less).
If it has, can anyone pass along a link to the site hosting the codec? This could outdo DiVX!
The problem is, when CDs first came out (1980 for you whippersnappers), the technology to produce them was in its infancy. As a result, the discs produced were absurdly expensive. However, as enough people had been willing to buy them, the music industry decided to continue charging not by what the CD cost to produce, but what they could get away with charging. Back in 1980, CDs cost approximately $30 to produce. In 1985, it cost approximately $20, and by 1990 it cost $5 per CD. Fast forward to modern times, and you can get an idea of what the price per disc should be.
Onto the second point: Besides the above, the secondary reason why most games cost as much as they do, is that unlike a month of bubblegum pop production paid at scale, software companies have up to 100 people or more working on any given title. As anyone with experience in the field can attest, a LOT more talent goes into a good game design than a Backstreet Boys album. In fact, most games out there take upwards of 3 years to produce, while top ten bands churn out music more times in a year than Gene Hackman stars in movies.
Additionally, as games continue their lifespans, their prices drop. As operating systems add new features and make others obsolete, the games are nearly unplayable, and join the "2 for $9.95" bargain bin. CDs on the other hand, are playable indefinately (well, except for that little nasty deal with Palladium), so there's not only a good chance you can find an album released on CD 10 years ago, but you can rest assured that it'll probably still cost $14.95-$19.95.
Now on the other hand, lets look at some numbers, 10 years prior:
Video game prices for CD based games (ROM based cartridges don't quite count, as chip prices contributed the most to the overall retail price) usually ran $59-$79. Production time usually ran 1-2 years for games.
CD prices usually ran $14.95-$19.95. Production time usually ran 1-2 years.
And now:
Video game prices for CD based games usually run $29-$49. Production time runs 2-4 years.
CD prices still run $14.95-$19.95. Production time usually runs 6 months to 1 year.
Note the discrepencies in price cuts VS. production costs, the music industry is ripping us off, while game manufacturers are technically working for sweatshop pay.
The lottery numbers for 10 years in advance, then buy all the stock of Microsoft when I turned 18, then own EVERYTHING! Moohahahhhhh!!!
Such has been the case regarding Chuck Hagel, and the voting debacle in Georgia, Florida, and Nebraska. As long as any political group owns the machines, democracy will be nothing more than a joke.
In fact my hand still involuntarily twitches in the direction of white flashing lights
Probably not a good thing when driving....
But it CAN have advantages while mastur- Ow ow ow! I'll stop, I'll stop!
The 3D in Dragons Lair 3D, is cel shaded polygon renderings. Similar to Jet Grind Radio, or Legend of Zelda for the Gamecube.
Back when it was in development, as far back as 1998, DL3D was ahead of its time, for using cel shading. However, as its release came years after the first cel shaded video games hit the market, the gimmick was fairly dated.
As for the reviewer, he doesn't know squat about gaming. While I played the PC version and had little problems with switching camera angles, he lambasts the XBox version for that issue.
However, the idea for DL3D is much better than he lets on. When you played the original, you were playing canned footage, where the best thing they could do for variety, was flip the animation over. DL3D allows you to explore everywhere and everything, something you couldn't do otherwise in the original.
IMO, the reviewer was probably an old gamer who considers remakes or new versions of old games as sacrilege.
There's also a major hentai cosplay scene out there. Yeah, it's blurred all to hell by Japanese censorship laws, but damn, you CANNOT compare to that.
Well, if you consider that Haliburton and Enron, under Cheney, were pushing to remove embargos on Iraqi oil, AND invested heavily in Iraq's oil fields.
Or that during the Clinton administration, that Bush Sr. and Unocal were in negotiations with the Taliban for a gas pipeline, and failing that, after we invaded Afghanistan, the president we put in power there just happened to be (surprise surprise)a former Unocal employee. Add to that, the fact that after we got a "better deal", the plans for the gas pipeline were passed with nary a whimper late last year.
Oh, and lest we forget, the group attempting to take on Cheney for his criminal activities recently gave up, because Cheney has some 1600 pound gorillas in his pockets, and the constant state of stalemate would have bankrupted them.
I mean, okay, to start with, I never HAD credit, let alone good credit, I was never wealthy enough to get money I didn't need (which in essense is what credit cards are about), and had over my youth, several bills go unpaid due to the ups and downs of employment over the last 14 years.
But the credit checks are getting out of hand. For example, in Washington state (not sure if it's the same everywhere else), you cannot get even basic employment with supermarkets, or even tobacco shops (a big industry here), without passing a credit check. These jobs are just one notch above working fast food and 24 hour quickiemarts, which means even those on minimum wage cannot get a job that pays a paltry $2-$3 more per hour, if they had any bills go into collection after a layoff. If they had a check bounce once, and didn't pay it off instantly, that's also a black mark, naturally.
However, if all you had for a 5 year period was minimum wage employment, and were looking for a new job while living off a credit card in that time (if you're really lucky), then you're screwed as well, even by missing one bill.
And of course, if you decided to spend some time self employed, and didn't keep 100% accurate tax records, and do all the paperwork (such as those ITs who worked for food or sold their services under the table), you're also fucked.
Of course, since there's a 7 year amnesty, you have to wait that long for anything to be cleared from your credit record.
In a nutshell, it's pretty stupid all around. Not having a job results in not having money, which results in bad credit when you have to choose between a phone bill and eating for another week, or keeping rent paid, which results in not getting the job you need to make money to pay the bills and the rent combined.
Mod parent down as redundant please, I made the exact same joke 40 minutes before that:d =52934& threshold=2&commentsort=1&tid=134&tid=126&tid=160& mode=thread&cid=5236326
/. server's been acting buggy today too. Was like watching a time machine operate, first 127 posts, then 7, then 3.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?si
Though the
Gawd knows, there doesn't seem like there's ANYTHING they can't find in Iraq.
Additionally, humans have one thing robots cannot: Imagination.
They have the ability to, in a pinch, come up with solutions to problems that no machine technically can. When they had to build a CO2 scrubber from spare parts on Apollo 13, do you think a robot with the same computational power available in those days could have done the same? Of course not.
Additionally, humans seeing an anomalous phenomena would be immediately intrigued by it (such as nebulae, et al), and would set to studying it about as quickly, possibly even discovering something otherwise completely unknown. A robot would see known gasses, shrug because it's known, and ignore it, going on its way (forget about human intervention, when you're talking outside the solar system. By the time we find out it found something, it's long flown by).
And one other critical factor: Humans have a survival instinct. Robots do not. Humans, when threatened, can respond almost immediately. Robots cannot.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =3205287911&category=13904
Need I say more?
"I remember years ago a friend traded an obscure VHS tape-based system to me. It used some kind of light gun, (I think) there was a score counter on the console itself. The VHS tape 'game' with it was some kind of jet fighters flying around thing. (kinda Top Gun style stuff)
Might that be the ISIX console you mentioned? I don't have it anymore, and I don't remember much else about it."
Nope, the toy you're thinking of sounds like the old Captain Power line of toys, which involved jet fighters, toys and guns with light sensors built in, set up to respond to flashing spots overlaid on the video footage. It was actually a fairly controversial toy too, because kids either had to have two of them to play against each other, or a VCR so they could interact with the video.
The ISIX used a frame shuffling system to create the FMV, so you had clip a, b, c, and d, with one frame each, which the game would then seperate into a frame buffer, based on what software it read from the audio track and the player input.
CD, DVD, and LD games work differently, playing individual clips, and were limited by the seek time of the drives they were played on. While the VHS format was a good idea, the one drawback of the ISIX was the need to rewind the tape after every game (and you think waiting 30 seconds to load a level in Unreal II is bad).
Ultimately, the ISIX was never released, as Worlds of Wonder and Hasbro dropped the project when they folded. A pity too, since it was in development up til 1989 or so, quite a while before CD-ROM based video game platforms that could do the same were either available, or cheap enough for anyone to own.
One, was the Colecovision ADAM, the only system to commit data suicide every time it was turned on. Great concept, lousy implementation.
Two, the Vectrex game system. Brilliant platform, gave people that true arcade vector graphics feel, decent sound (considering this came out about the same time as the Colecovision), and an all in one package the size of a first gen Macintosh. Killed by low game variety and demand (it was a $150-200 game system, which, despite the fact the whole system came in one package, came in on the coattails of the 1970s recessions, when most parents were able to justify paying $20-$40 for a kids toy, but forget anything more).
Third: ISIX. The videogame platform that never came. This was an incredible console that required nothing more than a common VCR to deliver laserdisk'esque videogaming to the masses, using a frameshuffling method to allow multiple video game footage scenes to be displayed. I tried the system over a decade ago, from the wirewrapped prototypes. If Worlds of Wonder didn't tank, we would have seen this on the market, and it would have blown all other interactive media machines of the late 1980s out of the water.
Most of the games lived on, however, in rereleases such as Night Trap, Sewer Shark, and a few "Do your own music video" games that came later. Detach yourself from what you learned and paid for CD based games, and imagine how it would have been to get a game system that would rival them, just by hooking up the VCR you already had. That was it. Not that the games themselves were spectacular in CD media dependant world, but for the technology involved, it was leaps ahead.
Reading the article, I'd say it was a fricking big case of money.
Wasn't the author of "Sapphire" also the guy who took advantage of some holes in Linux, with Lion.worm? At least they aren't taking sides, apparently. Seems like a good excuse to close off all data connections with China at least.
The answer is simple: Don't record MPEG-4 on the fly. Record MPEG-1 if you aren't too worried about quality later, or MPEG-2 on the fly, encode it to MPEG-4 from the raw footage.
I've managed to do some good DIY DiVX encodes from VHS that way, maintaining a decent framerate, on a system only 50% faster than yours (1.5Ghz P4). I do, however, recall hearing some mumblings about the Athlon not being that good at encoding realtime video. Though the "AMD Reality Check" tried to disprove that by encoding about 5 seconds of video on competing platforms, frankly it was not an adequate comparison. Memory leaks, dropped frames, and limitations of storage on both systems will show itself after about 10 minutes of continuous recording. Don't get me wrong, I'm neither pro AMD or Intel, both have their flaws and benefits. My system is a case of "what was cheapest, closest, and within my budget".
I'm not much of a server geek, but don't some rack mount systems allow for a one slot PCI riser? If you go that route (slightly older rackmount systems can be bought for ubercheap), each can hold one tuner (and capturing video should be decent, since other than transferring data to the file server, they won't be doing anything else), then use one desktop system for the heavy stuff (encoding, controlling the individual recorders), and one that can act as a RAID file server for all of the recorders.
As for the rackmounts, IIRC, those have built in VGA outputs. Connect those to a bunch monitor sharing blocks (4 to 2, then the 2 to one monitor, so on and so forth), and you can switch from live to recorded on the fly. This is assuming, however, that you want to watch everything on the monitor, and not the TV.
Of course, with the pricing approaching ludicrous numbers to build such a beast, you'd be better off buying a few Tivos.
Or does the controller configuration look an awful lot like a Dreamcast controller? Maybe, just MAYBE, this is the set top console that was planned about 2 years back, that utilizes the Dreamcast technology?
From what I recall, the planned set top DC was going to be broadband based, downloading games, more or less a supercharged WebTV.
Okay, first one to make a "beowulf cluster" joke gets this upside the head. You have been warned.
I remember watching as FM radio evolved over the last 25-30 years. When FM started out, nobody used it except for a few odd college stations or classical music stations. Most AM stations were mainstream in those days, and were reluctant to switch over, due to AM's wider broadcast area, and most stations already had the hardware, no need to upgrade in the eyes of the suits.
Also, AM radios were considerably cheaper than an FM stereo Hi-Fi (not to mention there being no portable FM recievers that were truly compact until 1979-1980, when the first walkman came out).
At around the same time, some NYC stations were managing to broadcast in stereo on the AM band, but by then it was too late, FM was starting to infiltrate the market. More stations began buying into FM broadcasting.
The college stations, depending on the city, were often running the most original and unique music out there (such as WLIR in NY, running old school punk, synthesized and otherwise non mainstream music in a Debbie Gibson world- The only local station to play Dead Kennedys' "MTV Get Off The Air!"). In fact, between the times I listened to WLIR as a teenager, and "discovered" file sharing, over 10 years had passed where I had no idea what kind of new music was out there.
The openness of FM radio has become a thing of the past, however, thanks to payola and media corporations. In fact, it's the only reason I hope XM satellite radio catches on, because once they take their focus off of FM, maybe more college/amateur/independant broadcasters will have a chance once again to bring in music that appeals to the rest of us.
On a sidenote, however, another benefit to making music available that isn't on mainstream radio, is that punk and alternative music of the 80s made people THINK. Has anyone noticed that as more FM stations hav gotten to the point they are at today, that the public is more apathetic and uninspired? Look at previous peace rallies, and you'll note that it's been dwindling down considerably, starting 1988 and reaching an all time low of approximately a million total attending today.
Music used to be one of the great motivators of activism, so what happens when the corporations control your motivation?
The difference between Apple and Microsoft, however, is this:
Apple: Proprietary hardware and OS, though with a little effort, other operating systems can be installed.
Microsoft: Proprietary OS, open hardware. Any variety of OS can be installed as an alternative.
The key word here is proprietary. Apple makes whatever business they have from the proprietary hardware, not the OS. Microsoft makes whatever business they have from the proprietary OS, not the hardware.
As Microsoft is primarily a software company, they have everything to lose by using an open source kernel which they will have no control over.