For the same reason that people build cockpits like this for flight simulators -- having a controller where all of the controls actually look and feel like they're part of a control panel for whatever it is that they're supposed to be operating in the simulation. There are companies that sell mockup cockpit shells or cockpit interiors to enhance the feeling of actually flying a plane. The extent to which people will go to replicate genuine controls for their computer can boggle the mind; some people spend literally thousands of dollars buying hardware. And it's not just flight simulations; there are cockpits for racing sims available, too.
No matter how flashy you make the graphics, the person playing the game still has to control their plane, character, car, mech, or whatever in the game. And using a two-button joystick and a keyboard to play the game doesn't help them feel as if they're really there in the game; that's why you see all of the steering-wheel and aircraft joysticks on the market. The controller for Steel Battalions is a special-purpose game controller; it's designed to work well with just that one game. There are other controllers, like the Thrustmaster Cougar, that take a more general approach -- a controller that is fantastically programmable to allow the user to customize their controller to suit whatever game they happen to be playing.
It's important to note that you can't "save" bandwidth for later
Actually, you can. If you don't need it straight away, you should be able to schedule it for later download. I mean, when computing power is scarse (as it does with big iron), you can run batch jobs overnight.
Excuse me? Do you really believe that if you're sucking your data through a (for example) 56kbps pipe, then if you only use 28kbps of it for four hours, you'll be able to, some time later, get four hours of 84kbps throughput? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. If you have a pipe of a given size, that's all the throughput you get, regardless of how you use it. What you describe is saving your bandwidth use for later. But that doesn't save any actual bandwidth; you're going to use up the same bandwidth whether you use it now or at 2300.
It depends on how you look at what constitutes 'shipping costs'. If you have the music in an electronic form, and someone orders it, burning it onto a CD and packaging it is all part of the preparation for shipping it to you, by putting it in a form to ship. Surely you don't think that shipping costs are confined to the actual fee that UPS, FedEx, or the Post Office charges to ship the package, do you? There's package cost and the salary of the person making up the shipment. From what I've seen, there aren't many mail-order houses that charge for shipping that don't make at least a little net profit on their shipping charges.
Consider that people in a crowded restaurant are all talking on basically the same frequencies... the reason you can "listen" to someone is that the brain can do time-delay comparison to lock onto the sender... so, why not have two antennas on devices to enable them to pick signals out of the soup of signals in the air?
To make this work, you have to know where the transmitter is and where you are, so you can calculate what the proper delay between the two antennae should be. This requires even more hardware when you're dealing with something like a car stereo, where the position of the receiver changes. This is one of the things that the military uses GPS for; is GPS going to be a mandatory add-on to cars just to have a functioning car stereo?
While it is true that the signal-processing capability has expanded to the point where it is technically feasible to pack the spectrum more tightly, the premise fails to address either the economic or political feasibility. How many people would be interested in having two hundred more stations in the FM band if it meant that they had to rip out their existing car stereo and replace it with a $500 (low end) software-controlled radio to listen to them, and if they didn't, all they'd get on their stereo was a random hash of noise because their old radio can't separate the stations?
Look at how effectively HDTV has replaced the existing television broadcasts, for example. Unless you can replace all the hardware in use on a spectrum band at the same time, you're faced with the choice of retaining backward compatibility -- which defeats the purpose of the upgrade -- or cutting off the people who don't want or can't upgrade.
For specific and short-range purposes, such as wireless LANs, it may be practical to require a complete end-to-end replacement, but there are large parts of the EM spectrum that are currently in use for which the entrenched interests will lobby strongly against any disruption
On Xbox runs a little amount of big names, but all these Very Imporant Games are basically porting of PC games, and PC games are not nicer when played on a TV with a gamepad.
One game that has recently been announced that will be 'ported' to the Xbox for Xbox Live is Re-Volt, Acclaim's radio-control-car racing game that was released in, IIRC, 1999 or 2000. On the PC, Re-Volt is a wide-open game; Acclaim deliberately left in a crucial set of editing functions that allow users to create their own tracks and cars easily. There is an active user community that have produced additional editing utilities and hundreds of new tracks and cars for the game, with new tracks and cars being released on almost a daily basis. But none of us are expecting that there will be any of this openness in the Xbox version; such an open architecture is foreign to Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Usurp, Control" policy. What enhancements will be available will only come from Microsoft.
have to first select that what you want to adjust and then adjust it: plain idiocy in a car meant to be driven fast.
(From a cartoon published many years ago in Playboy -- a male driving instructor and his woman student in a convertible: "Very good, Miss Wilson -- but that was me you just shifted into third."
I don't know what is done with hardbacks, but there aren't many public libraries that handle paperbacks; they're not sturdy enough to have a useful lifetime given what people do to books. The practice of stripping is the publishing industry's answer to cost-cutting for books with poor sales -- rather than paying to have the unsold books shipped back to them and credit the dealer's account, they just take the covers back as proof that the dealer hasn't sold the book and tried to defraud them by collecting a refund on the book as unsold. As part of the conditions of getting the refund on the book price, the publishers require the dealers to destroy the stripped books.
I figured that the books were ordered by his bookshop, they tried to sell them, then put them in the sale reduced and gave up and returned them to the publisher. Later they recieved the books back...
The person I was replying to was guessing that the reason the books had dealers' stickers on them was that they were being returned to the publisher unsold; I was pointing out that unsold paperbacks aren't returned to the publisher, but are stripped and supposedly destroyed. Nothing about my reply had anything to do with what the Elronners do to pump up the sales of the 'Holy Writ'; I was correcting a misconception about the business practices of the bookstores.
I think that it stems from finding a speed-reading kit (tachitoschope and cards -- basically, a device that flashes a line of text at you for a short period, and you learn to scan the text faster) when I was young, and working my way through the whole program. I finish an average novel in about an hour. There are times when I wish my reading speed were slower, though; carrying enough books to last me through a typical airline flight eats space in my carry-on.
How many of your books are paperbacks, and how many are hardbacks?
The vast majority of my library is paperback, for a basic economic reason -- if I bought hardcover books, I would only be able to read a quarter to a sixth of the new fiction that I read now.
And my reading speed doesn't help; even with paperbacks, if I bought enough books to keep me in new reading material, I'd go broke. The exigencies of work and the Internet have curbed the feeding frenzies, but I can pick up four or five novels on Saturday and have them read by the time I go to work Monday morning. I don't think I'll ever match the 12 novels in 24 hours spasm shortly after I got my card for the main library and found the SF section, though...
I figured that the books were ordered by his bookshop, they tried to sell them, then put them in the sale reduced and gave up and returned them to the publisher.
At least for paperbacks, once a book is shipped to a bookstore, it never returns; it's no longer cost-effective to ship books back. Instead, the book covers are torn off ('stripped') and sent back to the publisher (to show that the book really wasn't sold) and the coverless book destroyed. The publisher credits the bookstore's account for the stripped books, based on the covers they receive.
This is why you periodically see those "If you bought this book without a cover" notices in the front of books; once a book is stripped, the dealer got a refund on it from the publisher, and the book should be destroyed. If the dealer sells the book after that, they're defrauding the publisher.
The only purpose lists like this serve, is inform publishing companies of what types of books/music are selling well, and to make the artists feel good.
It affects the future, too. A publisher will base their decision on how big an advance, how good a contract, and how big a publishing run for an author's next book on the basis of how well that author's books have sold in the past. If they get better numbers, they'll get better offers. There has been an ongoing compression of the midlist (publishing-industry term for authors who sell steadily but not fast), with publishers making lower and lower offers to midlist authors, making smaller print runs, allocating less advertising space, and then (big surprise) the book doesn't do as well because stores and buyers don't know about the book or can't get copies. Meanwhile, they offer huge advances, good contracts, lots of advertising, and large print runs for the latest Tom Clancy (et al.) technothriller. Or the dozen or so hottest romance authors. If this mechanism helps give publishers a more accurate view of the sales of their midlist authors -- especially the ones that shouldn't be stuck down in the midlist -- I'm all for it.
What about the fact that in Terminator 1, only living things could go through, or artificial stuff encased in metal. Yet, we have a completely non- organic critter coming through in the person of the t1000.
If SkyNet is able to produce the living skin for a T-100, then it should be equally able to do something clever like reshape the T-1000 into a sphere, cover it with living skin, and send it, or make a more complex skin covering that gets burned off/shredded during or right after transport.
Also, their ability to "jump" from their ship (which was moments away from reentering) to a supply ship (which was in a stable orbit) simply because they passed close to each other.
Admittedly, I'm operating with more knowledge about the subject than the vast majority of people who see it, but I always cringe when I see movies portraying orbital maneuvers both ass-backwards and flat-out wrong. Ass-backwards because, unlike the way most people's experience would suggest, unless you're really close to an object in the same orbit, you accelerate away from it to get closer to it. Flat-out wrong because the way movement in space seems to be portrayed is that if you want to go from one object in space to another, if your jet pack or reaction pistol runs out of fuel halfway there, you magically stop there in the middle and are stuck, rather than continuing to coast in the direction you were moving.
That was one thing that I never tired of watching in the 'Babylon 5' series -- Earth Alliance Starfuries maneuvering like objects controlled by Newtonian physical laws, rather than swooping around like aircraft in the vacuum of space.
What I found lacking in the article (and all posts so far) is a biggie for me: most printer manufacturers will void your warranty if you use recycled cartridges, and with good reason.
So they say. However, in the US I believe the federal law passed in the 1940's (?) to prevent Henry Ford from pulling the exact same trick would apply, and (if you had the time and $ to pursue the issue in court) this disclaimer would be void.
Under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act and general principles of the Federal Trade Commission Act, a manufacturer may not require the use of any brand of ink (or any other article) unless the manufacturer provides the item free of charge under the terms of the warranty.
[blockquote]"Ink costs half what the printer does"
Guess what folks? So do an awful lot of things you buy. I can go out and pick up a $30 discman, and the CDs are still $15+. The discman (or printer) is just a delivery mechanism, it's what you put in it that actually matters at the end.
So you listen to this $15 CD once and then throw it away, buying the same CD again if you want to listen to it again?
Even with the new 'chipped' cartridges from Epson, you can do much better on prices. With a one-time purchase of a resetter that will clear the memory on the Epson cartridge chips, you can buy filled chipless ink tanks very cheaply. You remove the chip from the empty tank, reset it, and put it in the full tank. For her Epson 777, the replacement black tanks were $6 each, compared to $28 for an OEM tank at Fry's. If she were willing do do her own refills, she could cut her costs down even more.
I have been buying third-party cartridges and refill kits from Alotofthings.com for years -- ever since shortly after I bought an original Epson Stylus Color (no number, no 'Pro', no 'Photo' -- the original). I have never had the ink jam up the printhead, and aside from clumsiness on my part have never had any problems doing refills.
Even if you're not interested in buying third-party ink-jet cartridges or refill kits, I strongly recommend that you visit that site if you are interested in more information behind OEM ink cartridge design and the technology and procedures of refilling cartridges.
Its more than known that refilling those expensive cartdridges are no good for our beloved printers. They are not made on the same materials so they MAY end up damaging the printhead.
Actually, the good companies that sell refill kits for specific printers (as opposed to the 'universal ink-jet refill kit' -- that's about as rational as 'universal oil-change kit') buy their inks from the same companies that manufacture them for the OEMs, so you are buying ink that's 'made on the same materials'. You can tell the good companies, because their refill kits will have guarantees that their inks will print as good as the OEM inks.
'Made on the same materials'? That's a joke. Go look at this page and look at the color variation in Epson OEM cartridges for the same printer; the ink colors, particularly for the yellow ink, are visibly different from OEM cartridge to OEM cartridge.
Actually, they have a significantly longer life than just one tank full of ink; you just have to refill them right. The problem is that the thermal ink jet systems use the ink for cooling the printhead. If you let the ink cartridge run dry, the lack of cooling ink allows elements in the print head to burn out (Information on burning out print heads). If you refill the cartridge before the ink runs out, you can generally get four to six refills before the print head wears out.
Slashdot Mirror
For the same reason that people build cockpits like this for flight simulators -- having a controller where all of the controls actually look and feel like they're part of a control panel for whatever it is that they're supposed to be operating in the simulation. There are companies that sell mockup cockpit shells or cockpit interiors to enhance the feeling of actually flying a plane. The extent to which people will go to replicate genuine controls for their computer can boggle the mind; some people spend literally thousands of dollars buying hardware. And it's not just flight simulations; there are cockpits for racing sims available, too.
No matter how flashy you make the graphics, the person playing the game still has to control their plane, character, car, mech, or whatever in the game. And using a two-button joystick and a keyboard to play the game doesn't help them feel as if they're really there in the game; that's why you see all of the steering-wheel and aircraft joysticks on the market. The controller for Steel Battalions is a special-purpose game controller; it's designed to work well with just that one game. There are other controllers, like the Thrustmaster Cougar, that take a more general approach -- a controller that is fantastically programmable to allow the user to customize their controller to suit whatever game they happen to be playing.
And the fact that Attack of the Clones opened in 1000 fewer theatres than Spider-Man did has nothing to do with its lower box office numbers. Nope.
Tasmanian tiger, not Tasmanian devil. In the future, please pay more attention to the details; they're important.
Actually, you can. If you don't need it straight away, you should be able to schedule it for later download. I mean, when computing power is scarse (as it does with big iron), you can run batch jobs overnight.
Excuse me? Do you really believe that if you're sucking your data through a (for example) 56kbps pipe, then if you only use 28kbps of it for four hours, you'll be able to, some time later, get four hours of 84kbps throughput? Sorry, it doesn't work that way. If you have a pipe of a given size, that's all the throughput you get, regardless of how you use it. What you describe is saving your bandwidth use for later. But that doesn't save any actual bandwidth; you're going to use up the same bandwidth whether you use it now or at 2300.
It depends on how you look at what constitutes 'shipping costs'. If you have the music in an electronic form, and someone orders it, burning it onto a CD and packaging it is all part of the preparation for shipping it to you, by putting it in a form to ship. Surely you don't think that shipping costs are confined to the actual fee that UPS, FedEx, or the Post Office charges to ship the package, do you? There's package cost and the salary of the person making up the shipment. From what I've seen, there aren't many mail-order houses that charge for shipping that don't make at least a little net profit on their shipping charges.
To make this work, you have to know where the transmitter is and where you are, so you can calculate what the proper delay between the two antennae should be. This requires even more hardware when you're dealing with something like a car stereo, where the position of the receiver changes. This is one of the things that the military uses GPS for; is GPS going to be a mandatory add-on to cars just to have a functioning car stereo?
While it is true that the signal-processing capability has expanded to the point where it is technically feasible to pack the spectrum more tightly, the premise fails to address either the economic or political feasibility. How many people would be interested in having two hundred more stations in the FM band if it meant that they had to rip out their existing car stereo and replace it with a $500 (low end) software-controlled radio to listen to them, and if they didn't, all they'd get on their stereo was a random hash of noise because their old radio can't separate the stations?
Look at how effectively HDTV has replaced the existing television broadcasts, for example. Unless you can replace all the hardware in use on a spectrum band at the same time, you're faced with the choice of retaining backward compatibility -- which defeats the purpose of the upgrade -- or cutting off the people who don't want or can't upgrade.
For specific and short-range purposes, such as wireless LANs, it may be practical to require a complete end-to-end replacement, but there are large parts of the EM spectrum that are currently in use for which the entrenched interests will lobby strongly against any disruption
One game that has recently been announced that will be 'ported' to the Xbox for Xbox Live is Re-Volt, Acclaim's radio-control-car racing game that was released in, IIRC, 1999 or 2000. On the PC, Re-Volt is a wide-open game; Acclaim deliberately left in a crucial set of editing functions that allow users to create their own tracks and cars easily. There is an active user community that have produced additional editing utilities and hundreds of new tracks and cars for the game, with new tracks and cars being released on almost a daily basis. But none of us are expecting that there will be any of this openness in the Xbox version; such an open architecture is foreign to Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Usurp, Control" policy. What enhancements will be available will only come from Microsoft.
The concept adds a whole new meaning to BSOD.
Yes, 'BullShit's Our Defense'.
have to first select that what you want to adjust and then adjust it: plain idiocy in a car meant to be driven fast.
(From a cartoon published many years ago in Playboy -- a male driving instructor and his woman student in a convertible: "Very good, Miss Wilson -- but that was me you just shifted into third."
I don't know what is done with hardbacks, but there aren't many public libraries that handle paperbacks; they're not sturdy enough to have a useful lifetime given what people do to books. The practice of stripping is the publishing industry's answer to cost-cutting for books with poor sales -- rather than paying to have the unsold books shipped back to them and credit the dealer's account, they just take the covers back as proof that the dealer hasn't sold the book and tried to defraud them by collecting a refund on the book as unsold. As part of the conditions of getting the refund on the book price, the publishers require the dealers to destroy the stripped books.
You're not reading the post I was replying to:
I figured that the books were ordered by his bookshop, they tried to sell them, then put them in the sale reduced and gave up and returned them to the publisher. Later they recieved the books back...
The person I was replying to was guessing that the reason the books had dealers' stickers on them was that they were being returned to the publisher unsold; I was pointing out that unsold paperbacks aren't returned to the publisher, but are stripped and supposedly destroyed. Nothing about my reply had anything to do with what the Elronners do to pump up the sales of the 'Holy Writ'; I was correcting a misconception about the business practices of the bookstores.
I think that it stems from finding a speed-reading kit (tachitoschope and cards -- basically, a device that flashes a line of text at you for a short period, and you learn to scan the text faster) when I was young, and working my way through the whole program. I finish an average novel in about an hour. There are times when I wish my reading speed were slower, though; carrying enough books to last me through a typical airline flight eats space in my carry-on.
How many of your books are paperbacks, and how many are hardbacks?
The vast majority of my library is paperback, for a basic economic reason -- if I bought hardcover books, I would only be able to read a quarter to a sixth of the new fiction that I read now.
And my reading speed doesn't help; even with paperbacks, if I bought enough books to keep me in new reading material, I'd go broke. The exigencies of work and the Internet have curbed the feeding frenzies, but I can pick up four or five novels on Saturday and have them read by the time I go to work Monday morning. I don't think I'll ever match the 12 novels in 24 hours spasm shortly after I got my card for the main library and found the SF section, though...
I figured that the books were ordered by his bookshop, they tried to sell them, then put them in the sale reduced and gave up and returned them to the publisher.
At least for paperbacks, once a book is shipped to a bookstore, it never returns; it's no longer cost-effective to ship books back. Instead, the book covers are torn off ('stripped') and sent back to the publisher (to show that the book really wasn't sold) and the coverless book destroyed. The publisher credits the bookstore's account for the stripped books, based on the covers they receive.
This is why you periodically see those "If you bought this book without a cover" notices in the front of books; once a book is stripped, the dealer got a refund on it from the publisher, and the book should be destroyed. If the dealer sells the book after that, they're defrauding the publisher.
The only purpose lists like this serve, is inform publishing companies of what types of books/music are selling well, and to make the artists feel good.
It affects the future, too. A publisher will base their decision on how big an advance, how good a contract, and how big a publishing run for an author's next book on the basis of how well that author's books have sold in the past. If they get better numbers, they'll get better offers. There has been an ongoing compression of the midlist (publishing-industry term for authors who sell steadily but not fast), with publishers making lower and lower offers to midlist authors, making smaller print runs, allocating less advertising space, and then (big surprise) the book doesn't do as well because stores and buyers don't know about the book or can't get copies. Meanwhile, they offer huge advances, good contracts, lots of advertising, and large print runs for the latest Tom Clancy (et al.) technothriller. Or the dozen or so hottest romance authors. If this mechanism helps give publishers a more accurate view of the sales of their midlist authors -- especially the ones that shouldn't be stuck down in the midlist -- I'm all for it.
What about the fact that in Terminator 1, only living things could go through, or artificial stuff encased in metal. Yet, we have a completely non- organic critter coming through in the person of the t1000.
If SkyNet is able to produce the living skin for a T-100, then it should be equally able to do something clever like reshape the T-1000 into a sphere, cover it with living skin, and send it, or make a more complex skin covering that gets burned off/shredded during or right after transport.
Also, their ability to "jump" from their ship (which was moments away from reentering) to a supply ship (which was in a stable orbit) simply because they passed close to each other.
Admittedly, I'm operating with more knowledge about the subject than the vast majority of people who see it, but I always cringe when I see movies portraying orbital maneuvers both ass-backwards and flat-out wrong. Ass-backwards because, unlike the way most people's experience would suggest, unless you're really close to an object in the same orbit, you accelerate away from it to get closer to it. Flat-out wrong because the way movement in space seems to be portrayed is that if you want to go from one object in space to another, if your jet pack or reaction pistol runs out of fuel halfway there, you magically stop there in the middle and are stuck, rather than continuing to coast in the direction you were moving.
That was one thing that I never tired of watching in the 'Babylon 5' series -- Earth Alliance Starfuries maneuvering like objects controlled by Newtonian physical laws, rather than swooping around like aircraft in the vacuum of space.
there is a literary technique called Suspension of Disbelief.
I don't mind a movie requiring me to suspend my disbelief; what I object to is a movie that requires me to hang, draw, and quarter it.
Guess what folks? So do an awful lot of things you buy. I can go out and pick up a $30 discman, and the CDs are still $15+. The discman (or printer) is just a delivery mechanism, it's what you put in it that actually matters at the end.
So you listen to this $15 CD once and then throw it away, buying the same CD again if you want to listen to it again?
Even with the new 'chipped' cartridges from Epson, you can do much better on prices. With a one-time purchase of a resetter that will clear the memory on the Epson cartridge chips, you can buy filled chipless ink tanks very cheaply. You remove the chip from the empty tank, reset it, and put it in the full tank. For her Epson 777, the replacement black tanks were $6 each, compared to $28 for an OEM tank at Fry's. If she were willing do do her own refills, she could cut her costs down even more.
I have been buying third-party cartridges and refill kits from Alotofthings.com for years -- ever since shortly after I bought an original Epson Stylus Color (no number, no 'Pro', no 'Photo' -- the original). I have never had the ink jam up the printhead, and aside from clumsiness on my part have never had any problems doing refills.
Even if you're not interested in buying third-party ink-jet cartridges or refill kits, I strongly recommend that you visit that site if you are interested in more information behind OEM ink cartridge design and the technology and procedures of refilling cartridges.
Actually, the good companies that sell refill kits for specific printers (as opposed to the 'universal ink-jet refill kit' -- that's about as rational as 'universal oil-change kit') buy their inks from the same companies that manufacture them for the OEMs, so you are buying ink that's 'made on the same materials'. You can tell the good companies, because their refill kits will have guarantees that their inks will print as good as the OEM inks.
'Made on the same materials'? That's a joke. Go look at this page and look at the color variation in Epson OEM cartridges for the same printer; the ink colors, particularly for the yellow ink, are visibly different from OEM cartridge to OEM cartridge.
Actually, they have a significantly longer life than just one tank full of ink; you just have to refill them right. The problem is that the thermal ink jet systems use the ink for cooling the printhead. If you let the ink cartridge run dry, the lack of cooling ink allows elements in the print head to burn out (Information on burning out print heads). If you refill the cartridge before the ink runs out, you can generally get four to six refills before the print head wears out.