To get HDTV running well right now, you are looking at 3000-5000 dollars, and unless you get broadcast HDTV, AND have a compliant aerial, you will get one channel of HBO, and HD theater channel in HD. So until you get a good variety of programming over the way you get your TV, dont bother. It will be quite a while before enough programming is HD to make it worth your while.
This is just blatant FUD. You can buy a HD set for $700 , and a bigscreen HD set for less than $2000. If your cable co supports HD, that only costs as much as a digital cable box, and getting HD OTA is ~$300 for a tuner and $20 for some rabbit ears.
And in many areas of the country that'll get you ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB, HBO-HD, Showtime-HD, Discovery-HD. Most of the networks are broadcasting most of their primetime lineups in HD.
That's not necessarily true for everyone, so check out your local situation, but odds are you're going to have plenty of HD available without too much trouble.
'll just gloss over the fact that I can't afford to drop $6k on a TV...A quick look at Sony's site shows that a 32" HDTV is going to set me back $5000.
I'm worried that the FTC is going to change standards soon, and then I'll have to buy a $300 converter box to use my "new" TV.
Networks and affiliates have spent millions of dollars to broadcast the current standard. Even ignoring the consumer backlash, there's no way they're going to allow it to be changed.
...the hassles of there not being a clear-cut HDTV standard make this close to a waste of money 5 years down the road.
You're kidding, right? The HD standard is well established, both over the air and via cable. Furthermore, all analog broadcasts are in 1080i or 720p. That's not going to change.
So long as you get a HD set capable of handling 1080i and 720p (that is, basially all of them), you're good to go.
the set is one of the smallest costs of an HD setup
On the contrary, the cost of the set can be the only substantial cost you incur -- and they can be had for as little as $800 for 27" HD set.
In Austin, you can get a number of HD channels (HBO-HD, Showtime-HD, ABC-HD, CBS-HD) simply by swapping out your digital cable box for a HD model at no cost. Hook up the component outputs, and boom, you're watching HD. No more difficult or expensive than hooking up a non-HDTV.
$125/m cables? Please -- head down to Radio Shack and pick up some cables for $10, they'll do just as well.
hd over cable would be a lot better. but hd over airwaves? it doesent even get the range that normal uhf gets
I know you're trolling, but I can't resist...
I'm getting HD (CBS and ABC) over Time Warner cable. I can also get CBS, NBC, and WB digitally over-the-air. All of the digital signals are crystal-clear, even when broadcasting in SD, and I can receive CBS OTA even though it's low-power and low-antenna (for now), which would have resulted in a grainy, fuzzy picture were it analog.
Games cost $50. Think about it. I think the main reason games aren't so popular there is that game demos are widely available and are free to download.
Or maybe that they're an order of magnitude larger to download and bandwidth isn't infinite.
Or maybe that they take much longer to use than music, so the demand for a game "collection" is much less. I buy more games than I have time to play. Same is true for almost all my peers (mid-twenties).
I'm coming to the discussion kind of late, but while reading through the comments it struck me that there's an important point that seems to be getting overlooked: If it becomes a crime to sell M-rated games to those under 17, we're entrusting a non-governmental organization (the ESRB) to decide what is and is not a federal crime.
There are all sorts of checks and balances in government precisely because they have that power. What if this becomes law, and we're unhappy about the job the ESRB is doing? Do we get to know who's on the rating panel? Do we get to elect them? Are they subject to recall? Can they be bought or influenced? What recourse is there if they damage a business by unfairly rating a game because of baises? Etc etc.
There are reasons we entrust the government, and the govenment only, to decide what should and should not be legal. This is an abdication of that responsibility, and one that I'm certainly not comfortable with.
When is the last time you saw the police show up at a movie theater and arrest the 16 year old ticket seller for selling tickets to the latest R-rated action flick to his under-18 friends?
Never, because it's not illegal. There's no law on the books that makes it illegal for those under 17 to go to an R rated movie. It's typically disallowed by the theater, yes, but that's far different than being illegal.
If in twenty years, they extend copyrights again, then it should be abundently clear to the courts that this is going on, then they might overturn both.
IIRC, copyrights have been extended 11 times in the last 40 years. One of the judges basically asked "Why wasn't this brought up during all those other extensions?", and the case still lost.
I think it's pretty clear what's going to happen when copyrights are extended again twenty years from now.
Remember that there's almost no chance that DirecTV or Dish are going to be providing locals (that is NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, WB, UPN) in HD because of the enormous bandwidth required to beam those HD streams into each local market. They're having a hard enough time finding bandwidth for the heavily compressed SD locals.
You'll still be able to TiVo things like Showtime-HD, HBO-HD, HDNet and Discovery-HD. But personally I use my PVR to time-shift my locals far more than anything else.
Presumably both the standalone HD TiVo will handle OTA reception of HD locals, but lots of folks don't look at "old fashoned" antennas too kindly. Not to mention all the markets that don't have OTA HD yet.
Out of curiousity, have you played Thief 1 or 2, System Shock 2, or Deus Ex?
Much of your rant lines up pretty well with the design philosophies we had at Looking Glass (and I know Irrational shared), and that we have currently at Ion Storm. So I'm curious as to your take on how well we've accomplished our goals.
An RPG is just like a movie, only there is player interaction.
Wow, maybe I'm just biased because I'm a developer working on a CRPG (Deus Ex 2), but I'll respectfully disagree.
RPGs (and games in general) are the interaction. I know I don't speak for everyone in the industry, but all this striving to be like films strikes me as missing the point. We're one of the very few media at the moment that can have meaninful interaction with the player -- allow the player to develop plans, to analyse the situation and come with solutions the problem at hand, to give the player a sense of intentionality. RPGs are probably the most literate and intelligent area of gaming, and are the best suited to really delve into the power of interaction.
If I want to be told a good plot, I'll rent a DVD or go to the theater -- they can do that better than we can. Games should be striving to challenge and involve. No sense playing to another media's strength when you've got your own.
some voice stuff is in the center, that's why it sounds muffled
That's pure speculation on your part -- I've never noticed it sounding muffled.
but when the Xbox is supposed to create 5.1 from discrete channels produced by the game, it fails
This is a known limitation of the HRTF algorithm they're using. I'm pretty sure devs can change so that it'll mix the L/R channels into the front speaker too, but you have to be careful with volume balance issues.
Wouldn't it be much better to mandate that all vehicles must be electrical or hybrid by 2007? As much as I like my car, I can see the advantage of such law. but TV phase out? for what?
Well, the conversion to digital is there for efficiency (a HD signal requires about the same bandwidth of an analog SD signal). Basically, the transition to digital was going to happen at some point anyway, and now that it's been started and stations are using BOTH their analog and digital frequencies, we'd like to get everyone out of the analog frequences so we can start auctioning them off or using them for other purposes.
There is really no reason TO buy a DTV right now, as VERY few stations and cable systems even broadcast in it.
Most of the top-30 markets have ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox broadcasting digitially. All but Fox have a substantial amount of HD programming available -- most filmed primetime series, Leno, Conan this December, SEC college football, NCAA basketball, even Young and the Restless! Add to that what the satellite services provide (DiscoveryHD, HDNet, Sho-HD, HBO-HD). The vast majority of Americans do have at least some true HDTV available to them using nothing more than a STB and a standard UHF antenna. You're simply misinformed.
This means that a TV station has the option of broadcasting in anything from HDTV quality, down to MULTIPLE heavily digitally compressed SDTV signals!
True, though ignoring Fox and their 480p stance, the Big Three are all primarily airing their digitally-produced events and filmed shows, and movies in true HDTV (1080i or 720p). I haven't heard anyone make any mention that they were going to start doing otherwise.
There is no assurance that EVERY or even MOST programs or stations you receive will be any better in quality than what we get today on NTSC analog!
If you'd take a look at HiDefGuide you'd see that there's a pretty good assurance that if you bought a HD STD (or the appropriate DirectTV/Dish receivers) you'd get a dramaticallybetter quality picture than what analog NTSC can provide.
So, in a fair world, Nakamura would have been compensated much better than he has been.
As far as I can see, this was pretty fair. If Nakamura was really at the top of his field, blowing everyone else out of the water, he should have been able to demand any reasonable salary he wanted, and probably had the clout to renegotiate his contract to make sure he got a share of patent royalties, right?
And if Nichia didn't find his terms reasonable, he could have gone elsewhere, since he's so clearly an enormously valuable asset, right?
At my current job I stand to make pretty substantial bonuses if the product I'm working on does well -- but I know exactly what the terms of that agreement are, and know there's a chance that I'm not going to get anything out of it. It's the empolyee's responsibility to know the terms of their compensation, and if there are any fuzzy bits they're unhappy with, try to clear them up.
"Hoping" for a company to give a big bonus sounds like a recipe for disappointment to me.
So, with that same argument, were you ticked when didn't came on the scene as a shorter way of saying did not?
The difference is that that contraction began in speech and was eventually itegrated into the accepted written language. Saying "didn't" is far more fluid than saying "did not".
Given that the you->u abbreviation happended entirely within the typing domain, commenting that it isn't a relevant timesaver (to those that actually bother to learn to type) seems perfectly valid to me.
The combination of pixel and vertex shaders allows stunning effects like flag that flaps in the wind and still casts the right shadows, and it's all done on the card (an example I stole from an NVidia presentation).
Of course, since it's done on-card, in means you can't have physics interact with it in any meaningful way, or do any real collision detection/raycasting, or generate sounds in sync with flaps, etc etc.
Shaders are nice for doing cosmetic effects, but as they become more general-purpose, the fact that they involve moving code to a (largely) unqueryable place beomes a larger and larger downside.
Particularly for those game developers (like me) who are interested in doing lots of world sim that the player can interact with in natural ways.
Actually, The Mole has some pretty darn good game design. Of course, it was the one sporting the worst ratings and got canned (or at least not renewed).
No one person could really use all this storage in a home/personal computing needs (THAT ARE LEGITMATE).
I legitimately archive (for personal use only) and timeshift OTA High-Definition TV -- at 8.64GB/hr, a 320GB drive is 37 hours, which is far more comfortable than the 18 that more typical 160GB drives would supply.
Being pragmatically moral is not the issue. The issue is how God who is pure can possibly interract with someone who is not pure. When you mix pure water with pure water, the result is still pure water. But when you mix contaminated water, no matter how small, with pure water, the result is contaminated water
Okay, this has officially gone from amusing to sad and scary.
That you can perceive someone as being "unpure" based not on their thoughts or deeds but based whether they happen to believe in a particular deity, is simply absurd. So raping, murdering, downright evil folk can get to eternal salvation, but helpful, polite me is damned to eternal suffering. Gotcha. And this is the religion you've chosen to believe? Blows my mind.
So...what about all those folks before Christianity existed...what about them? They in hell too? Or did they get grandfathered in?
Slashdot Mirror
Why exactly does watching TV equate to being "drones"? Or mean that we're somehow unaware of or complicit to the evils of DMCA?
Or does that just make for easier trolling?
And in many areas of the country that'll get you ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB, HBO-HD, Showtime-HD, Discovery-HD. Most of the networks are broadcasting most of their primetime lineups in HD.
That's not necessarily true for everyone, so check out your local situation, but odds are you're going to have plenty of HD available without too much trouble.
Networks and affiliates have spent millions of dollars to broadcast the current standard. Even ignoring the consumer backlash, there's no way they're going to allow it to be changed.
So long as you get a HD set capable of handling 1080i and 720p (that is, basially all of them), you're good to go.
In Austin, you can get a number of HD channels (HBO-HD, Showtime-HD, ABC-HD, CBS-HD) simply by swapping out your digital cable box for a HD model at no cost. Hook up the component outputs, and boom, you're watching HD. No more difficult or expensive than hooking up a non-HDTV.
$125/m cables? Please -- head down to Radio Shack and pick up some cables for $10, they'll do just as well.
I'm getting HD (CBS and ABC) over Time Warner cable. I can also get CBS, NBC, and WB digitally over-the-air. All of the digital signals are crystal-clear, even when broadcasting in SD, and I can receive CBS OTA even though it's low-power and low-antenna (for now), which would have resulted in a grainy, fuzzy picture were it analog.
I will enjoy my $6000 TV, thankyouverylittle.
Or maybe that they take much longer to use than music, so the demand for a game "collection" is much less. I buy more games than I have time to play. Same is true for almost all my peers (mid-twenties).
I'm coming to the discussion kind of late, but while reading through the comments it struck me that there's an important point that seems to be getting overlooked: If it becomes a crime to sell M-rated games to those under 17, we're entrusting a non-governmental organization (the ESRB) to decide what is and is not a federal crime.
There are all sorts of checks and balances in government precisely because they have that power. What if this becomes law, and we're unhappy about the job the ESRB is doing? Do we get to know who's on the rating panel? Do we get to elect them? Are they subject to recall? Can they be bought or influenced? What recourse is there if they damage a business by unfairly rating a game because of baises? Etc etc.
There are reasons we entrust the government, and the govenment only, to decide what should and should not be legal. This is an abdication of that responsibility, and one that I'm certainly not comfortable with.
If in twenty years, they extend copyrights again, then it should be abundently clear to the courts that this is going on, then they might overturn both.
IIRC, copyrights have been extended 11 times in the last 40 years. One of the judges basically asked "Why wasn't this brought up during all those other extensions?", and the case still lost.
I think it's pretty clear what's going to happen when copyrights are extended again twenty years from now.
Remember that there's almost no chance that DirecTV or Dish are going to be providing locals (that is NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, WB, UPN) in HD because of the enormous bandwidth required to beam those HD streams into each local market. They're having a hard enough time finding bandwidth for the heavily compressed SD locals.
You'll still be able to TiVo things like Showtime-HD, HBO-HD, HDNet and Discovery-HD. But personally I use my PVR to time-shift my locals far more than anything else.
Presumably both the standalone HD TiVo will handle OTA reception of HD locals, but lots of folks don't look at "old fashoned" antennas too kindly. Not to mention all the markets that don't have OTA HD yet.
Out of curiousity, have you played Thief 1 or 2, System Shock 2, or Deus Ex?
Much of your rant lines up pretty well with the design philosophies we had at Looking Glass (and I know Irrational shared), and that we have currently at Ion Storm. So I'm curious as to your take on how well we've accomplished our goals.
Chris Carollo
Deus Ex 2 Lead Programmer
An RPG is just like a movie, only there is player interaction.
Wow, maybe I'm just biased because I'm a developer working on a CRPG (Deus Ex 2), but I'll respectfully disagree.
RPGs (and games in general) are the interaction. I know I don't speak for everyone in the industry, but all this striving to be like films strikes me as missing the point. We're one of the very few media at the moment that can have meaninful interaction with the player -- allow the player to develop plans, to analyse the situation and come with solutions the problem at hand, to give the player a sense of intentionality. RPGs are probably the most literate and intelligent area of gaming, and are the best suited to really delve into the power of interaction.
If I want to be told a good plot, I'll rent a DVD or go to the theater -- they can do that better than we can. Games should be striving to challenge and involve. No sense playing to another media's strength when you've got your own.
some voice stuff is in the center, that's why it sounds muffled
That's pure speculation on your part -- I've never noticed it sounding muffled.
but when the Xbox is supposed to create 5.1 from discrete channels produced by the game, it fails
This is a known limitation of the HRTF algorithm they're using. I'm pretty sure devs can change so that it'll mix the L/R channels into the front speaker too, but you have to be careful with volume balance issues.
Wouldn't it be much better to mandate that all vehicles must be electrical or hybrid by 2007? As much as I like my car, I can see the advantage of such law. but TV phase out? for what?
:-)
Well, the conversion to digital is there for efficiency (a HD signal requires about the same bandwidth of an analog SD signal). Basically, the transition to digital was going to happen at some point anyway, and now that it's been started and stations are using BOTH their analog and digital frequencies, we'd like to get everyone out of the analog frequences so we can start auctioning them off or using them for other purposes.
But I'd support the hybrid mandate as well.
There is really no reason TO buy a DTV right now, as VERY few stations and cable systems even broadcast in it.
Most of the top-30 markets have ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox broadcasting digitially. All but Fox have a substantial amount of HD programming available -- most filmed primetime series, Leno, Conan this December, SEC college football, NCAA basketball, even Young and the Restless! Add to that what the satellite services provide (DiscoveryHD, HDNet, Sho-HD, HBO-HD). The vast majority of Americans do have at least some true HDTV available to them using nothing more than a STB and a standard UHF antenna. You're simply misinformed.
This means that a TV station has the option of broadcasting in anything from HDTV quality, down to MULTIPLE heavily digitally compressed SDTV signals!
True, though ignoring Fox and their 480p stance, the Big Three are all primarily airing their digitally-produced events and filmed shows, and movies in true HDTV (1080i or 720p). I haven't heard anyone make any mention that they were going to start doing otherwise.
There is no assurance that EVERY or even MOST programs or stations you receive will be any better in quality than what we get today on NTSC analog!
If you'd take a look at HiDefGuide you'd see that there's a pretty good assurance that if you bought a HD STD (or the appropriate DirectTV/Dish receivers) you'd get a dramatically better quality picture than what analog NTSC can provide.
Which is kinda nice for those of us who don't have $600+ to blow on visual studio.
I believe you can get Visual C++ Standard Edition for $90, which while lacking the optimizing portion of the compiler, should do the job.
So, in a fair world, Nakamura would have been compensated much better than he has been.
As far as I can see, this was pretty fair. If Nakamura was really at the top of his field, blowing everyone else out of the water, he should have been able to demand any reasonable salary he wanted, and probably had the clout to renegotiate his contract to make sure he got a share of patent royalties, right?
And if Nichia didn't find his terms reasonable, he could have gone elsewhere, since he's so clearly an enormously valuable asset, right?
At my current job I stand to make pretty substantial bonuses if the product I'm working on does well -- but I know exactly what the terms of that agreement are, and know there's a chance that I'm not going to get anything out of it. It's the empolyee's responsibility to know the terms of their compensation, and if there are any fuzzy bits they're unhappy with, try to clear them up.
"Hoping" for a company to give a big bonus sounds like a recipe for disappointment to me.
So, with that same argument, were you ticked when didn't came on the scene as a shorter way of saying did not?
The difference is that that contraction began in speech and was eventually itegrated into the accepted written language. Saying "didn't" is far more fluid than saying "did not".
Given that the you->u abbreviation happended entirely within the typing domain, commenting that it isn't a relevant timesaver (to those that actually bother to learn to type) seems perfectly valid to me.
The combination of pixel and vertex shaders allows stunning effects like flag that flaps in the wind and still casts the right shadows, and it's all done on the card (an example I stole from an NVidia presentation).
Of course, since it's done on-card, in means you can't have physics interact with it in any meaningful way, or do any real collision detection/raycasting, or generate sounds in sync with flaps, etc etc.
Shaders are nice for doing cosmetic effects, but as they become more general-purpose, the fact that they involve moving code to a (largely) unqueryable place beomes a larger and larger downside.
Particularly for those game developers (like me) who are interested in doing lots of world sim that the player can interact with in natural ways.
Actually, The Mole has some pretty darn good game design. Of course, it was the one sporting the worst ratings and got canned (or at least not renewed).
There's no accounting for taste....
All I want is a decent 19" 1600x1200 LCD. Why I can get a 1600x1200 screen on my 15" laptop but not in a 17" or 19" desktop model is beyond me.
:-)
If anyone's got any links to 16x12 LCD desktop monitors, I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong.
No one person could really use all this storage in a home/personal computing needs (THAT ARE LEGITMATE).
I legitimately archive (for personal use only) and timeshift OTA High-Definition TV -- at 8.64GB/hr, a 320GB drive is 37 hours, which is far more comfortable than the 18 that more typical 160GB drives would supply.
Being pragmatically moral is not the issue. The issue is how God who is pure can possibly interract with someone who is not pure. When you mix pure water with pure water, the result is still pure water. But when you mix contaminated water, no matter how small, with pure water, the result is contaminated water
Okay, this has officially gone from amusing to sad and scary.
That you can perceive someone as being "unpure" based not on their thoughts or deeds but based whether they happen to believe in a particular deity, is simply absurd. So raping, murdering, downright evil folk can get to eternal salvation, but helpful, polite me is damned to eternal suffering. Gotcha. And this is the religion you've chosen to believe? Blows my mind.
So...what about all those folks before Christianity existed...what about them? They in hell too? Or did they get grandfathered in?