Why did it took so long for a modchip on the Gamecube? Is it because the targeted market isn't hacker friendly? Was there a market for the Gamecube at all, facing Xbox and PS2 competition? Not enough incentive (demand) to create / sell a chip, not enough potential 'customers'?
So basically they received 150k to develop a logging bot? Not that it existed for the past 10 years... I sure hope their technology is more sophisticated than that. Even then, I don't think they'll get usefull info monitoring public chat rooms; its not like terrorists go to #terrorism to chat about their next plan.
Dual video cards... soon dual-core CPUs, is it a sign that we're slowly approaching the Moores Law limit? The 'dual' strategy allow for further performance gains.... but I can't see myself using more than 2 video cards (hell, I can't even see myself using more than 1), so that will be a very temporary solution.
And we're not even speaking of how much power (wattage) these 'dual solutions' consume...
Re:I want to, but should I?
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Half-life 1 is included with Half-life 2. They even upgraded it to the Source Engine (which means better graphics, prettier effects). Its a great game, you should play it before the second, just for the experience. The story is kind of confusing anyway, and the link between the two even more so, so I think you`ll be as lost as everyone else:)
EA strategy seem to be : produce lots of expansion packs / sequels / add-ons that require no or little effort to implement, and throw a bunch of willing-to-work-hard newcomers at it, 'fire' them (if they don't go first) so you don't have to pay them more for experience (etc), and repeat.
The Sims 1 and 2, with their gazillion expansion packs. Simcity 4. Sports games (Football, Hockey, Soccer, Basketball edition 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, oh god I must buy the 2005 edition!) Recently, NFSU2, which is (in my opinion) less polished / fun, even if its a sequel. Easy money. These game sells year after year, you only need to add a little content and a 30$ price tag.
It seems that the industry focus is about to change from increasing Mhz (essentially useless for most non-gamers non-content producing desktop users) to decreasing noise / power consumption. I think its a sound strategy, as its the only way I can see my parents upgrading from their (noisy as hell) 1 Ghz AMD Thunderbird.
Anyone got a clue why Pentium M are far more costly than P4s? Something to do with (sold units) volume?
# Search your IM chat history...at work or at home! # Discover when your friends update their blogs # Blog as easily as sending an IM # Remember the laundry you just put in the wash # Recall web sites, phone numbers, and email addresses mentioned on IM
Ok, this is nice. But no software to install... this means that it has to store (or at least transmit) my IM chat history. To boot, it parse phone numbers, web sites and EMAIL ADRESSES. And their privacy policy say:
4.2 Contractors Coceve may hire people or businesses to work with or for us on projects, such as performing security audits or providing customer support, in which they may require access to portions of your personally identifying information to do their job. Before we provide any such information to them, however, they must sign confidentiality agreements promising to protect that information, and if applicable, promise its return or destruction when the work is complete.
Oh... they'll give my personal info to business who PROMISED they won't give it to others... right.
It's good to see success commemorated. These days, when talking about the past NASA Space Program, we only hear about failures (Challenger) or near failures (Apollo 13). Incredible achievements for the time... let's hope Bush's Trip to Mars is a serious endeavor, because I can't wait to see that!
Maybe because the 'hunter' with disabilities will shoot the beast in the leg, then in the stomach (barely) and with a little luck, will kill it within an hour or two of intense shooting (exagerating here, but you get the point).
Hunting is a sport if you go in the wild, hiding for a long time, tracking your prey (and drinking beer, too). If it's just point and click at a screen to kill a REAL animal, it's not a sport, it's cruelty. I hope he burns in Hell. Or better, that a 'customer' shoots him accidentally!
Winamp stopped adding useful features / improvements (for me) after version 3.0... iTunes and WMP10 are much better, with song rating / automatic playlists (song I didn't heard in the past week I like, yes thank you).
Why anyone would pay for Winamp is beyond me. The free version does the job... like a bunch of programs out there. Of course, brand recognition, nostalgy and all...
They invested 20 billions since 1993? I was on a 28.8k at this time (like 95% of internet users I suppose)... how could they think of delivering video feeds? Even with my current cable connection, video need to "buffer" for 20-30 seconds (and we're not even talking of Real(Choppy)Video). And with download quotas most ISP are enforcing, I can't see my net connection replace my TV... the infrastructure just isn't there (yet).
According to the article :
"A major hurdle for SBC, however, is how to increase the speed of its network to deliver the television and Internet services it promises. SBC will have to increase its current connection speeds by seven-fold, which may make the company's goal of providing television programming within a year difficult to achieve.
The projections are going to look completely ridiculous by the time we get to the end of 2005, said Albert Lin, an industry analyst at American Technology Research, an equity investment firm."
I wonder is the projections will look completely ridiculous because they'll reach their goal... or not. With Verizon digging holes everywhere, I can't see this happening this soon:)
National TV sometimes come into our lab to interview researchers about health concerns, etc... Invariably, the cameraman insists to film us doing stupid stuff totally unrelated to actual science, because it looks 'scientific'. Pipetting colored solutions (bonus points if you have a big flame nearby), racking tips, checking plates (with no bacteria on them), etc. It is extremely annoying, but I guess it reflects how the public view science... fancy looking stuff they don't understand. So no, I don't think this kind of TV program is good to increase the public's scientific knowledge. But it's not their goal anyway... it's entertainment. I hope.
"Verizon also is looking at other means, including using ground-penetrating radar and other technology, to locate lines before crews dig."
Don't they have maps to locate lines, sewers and such? Don't tell me they're digging blindly...
"County auditors examine the cause of each break and determine whether Verizon or water department officials are to blame. The responsible party is billed, said Rich Cummings, section manager for line maintenance for the water department."
It seem that Verizon will be paying the bill in the end anyway... of course, you can't pay for all the trouble it cause to citizens... can't they be careful?
BioKnoppix and VLinux are indispensable toolboxes for every bioinformatician out there, especially if you do lots of consulting (or need to travel from lab to lab, without having a laptop). Both distributions contains tools for sequence and protein analysis, 3D structure viewing software... etc. Very handy...
I hope you all at least consider that MSFT paid 16.6 million for the SCO Unix license, just to avoid lawsuits from them, with no "evil plans" againstLinux whatsoever. Of course, when they saw the whole affair unwrap last year, it surely made them smile (for a little while at least). But maybe (MAYBE) it wasn't intentional... SCO did it all by itself (Hey look! Big companies give up big money easily! Lets continue!). Sun gave them 9 millions and nobody is accusing them...
Can someone justify that they compared Intel's 3.8 Ghz to AMD 4000+ (4 Ghz equivalent, theorically)? Maybe they wanted to compare both company highest speed CPU... anyway, the only positive side I see in these high speed CPU is that they'll drive prices of their (somewhat) slower counterpart down... the AMD 3500+ is already at a very interesting price/performance ratio, it can only get better... and HL2 is only days away!
With the economical globalization these days, the trend (strategy?) for some countries seem to overspecialize in one specific area (in this case, IT) to outperform competition on a worldwide scale. Risky for sure, but it seems to work right now (at least for India, who reap the profits of investing massively in IT).
They proved the laser worked for a fraction of second.
Now, they still must:
A- Improve duration & Power
"In coming months, Englade said, engineers hope to boost the duration and power of the laser's beam.
Among other technical challenges, Coyle said, engineers must figure out ways to fire the laser for the longer time needed to zap a missile without damaging the optics through which the beam passes -- a kind of technical Catch-22."
B- Shootdown test... destroy a inflight dummy missile
It will then be installed on a 747-400F aircraft for a test that includes shooting down a dummy ballistic missile over the Pacific. No date has been set for that test.
And i guess C, get nuked by someone with the capability (nukes and missile range)... which is... hmmm... the Soviets? Iran? No... North Korea? No... China maybe? Aliens? Terrorists? Anyone?
I'm sure they'll have trouble proving the demise of WordPerfect was due to lack of integrated web browsing capabilities... WPwindows was BAD... at the time, MSWord was seen like a salvation. My sister forced me to reinstall their latest version (6? 7? can't remember)... I still make nightmares at night.
Jeans are common things, and yet, people still buy Levis.
Brand recognition is key in any market. And dont think that when search engines become "common", they'll be better than Google. Running www.Google.com isnt in the reach of most... hardware costs, knowledge, etc.
Even Microsoft can't seem to catch up with them, and it's been many years Google is #1 in my book.
If it takes two decades to build, will it be relevant/secure/useful when completed? Where were we two decades ago? With the ever-evoluting nature of tech, I sure hope they planned ahead...
In anyway, it'll sure be costly. From the article:
"Providing the connections to run the war net will cost at least $24 billion over the next five years - more than the cost, in today's dollars, of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Beyond that, encrypting data will be a $5 billion project."
That's just the running cost, not the hardware/implementation cost (which may rise up to 200 billions). How many social problems could we cure/relief with that kind of money in the world? I know War = Power, but Kindness = Respect too. Yeah, I live in Canada.
With dirt-cheap-to-make phones taking over the (simple) functions of PDAs, I can't see the market for pure PDAs improving much. Honestly, I always found a 400$ device too costly to replace my paper address/notebook. But its a different thing altogether if they can offer me the functionality on my phone, for just about the same price.
Slashdot Mirror
Why did it took so long for a modchip on the Gamecube? Is it because the targeted market isn't hacker friendly? Was there a market for the Gamecube at all, facing Xbox and PS2 competition? Not enough incentive (demand) to create / sell a chip, not enough potential 'customers'?
It doesn't seem related to poor marketshare, as GameCube seem to hold its fair share of the pie.
So basically they received 150k to develop a logging bot? Not that it existed for the past 10 years... I sure hope their technology is more sophisticated than that. Even then, I don't think they'll get usefull info monitoring public chat rooms; its not like terrorists go to #terrorism to chat about their next plan.
Dual video cards... soon dual-core CPUs, is it a sign that we're slowly approaching the Moores Law limit? The 'dual' strategy allow for further performance gains.... but I can't see myself using more than 2 video cards (hell, I can't even see myself using more than 1), so that will be a very temporary solution.
And we're not even speaking of how much power (wattage) these 'dual solutions' consume...
Half-life 1 is included with Half-life 2. They even upgraded it to the Source Engine (which means better graphics, prettier effects). Its a great game, you should play it before the second, just for the experience. The story is kind of confusing anyway, and the link between the two even more so, so I think you`ll be as lost as everyone else :)
EA strategy seem to be : produce lots of expansion packs / sequels / add-ons that require no or little effort to implement, and throw a bunch of willing-to-work-hard newcomers at it, 'fire' them (if they don't go first) so you don't have to pay them more for experience (etc), and repeat.
The Sims 1 and 2, with their gazillion expansion packs. Simcity 4. Sports games (Football, Hockey, Soccer, Basketball edition 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, oh god I must buy the 2005 edition!) Recently, NFSU2, which is (in my opinion) less polished / fun, even if its a sequel. Easy money. These game sells year after year, you only need to add a little content and a 30$ price tag.
Clever business model I guess.
It seems that the industry focus is about to change from increasing Mhz (essentially useless for most non-gamers non-content producing desktop users) to decreasing noise / power consumption. I think its a sound strategy, as its the only way I can see my parents upgrading from their (noisy as hell) 1 Ghz AMD Thunderbird.
Anyone got a clue why Pentium M are far more costly than P4s? Something to do with (sold units) volume?
# Search your IM chat history...at work or at home!
:
# Discover when your friends update their blogs
# Blog as easily as sending an IM
# Remember the laundry you just put in the wash
# Recall web sites, phone numbers, and email addresses mentioned on IM
Ok, this is nice. But no software to install... this means that it has to store (or at least transmit) my IM chat history. To boot, it parse phone numbers, web sites and EMAIL ADRESSES. And their privacy policy say
4.2 Contractors
Coceve may hire people or businesses to work with or for us on projects, such as performing security audits or providing customer support, in which they may require access to portions of your personally identifying information to do their job. Before we provide any such information to them, however, they must sign confidentiality agreements promising to protect that information, and if applicable, promise its return or destruction when the work is complete.
Oh... they'll give my personal info to business who PROMISED they won't give it to others... right.
It's good to see success commemorated. These days, when talking about the past NASA Space Program, we only hear about failures (Challenger) or near failures (Apollo 13). Incredible achievements for the time... let's hope Bush's Trip to Mars is a serious endeavor, because I can't wait to see that!
Maybe because the 'hunter' with disabilities will shoot the beast in the leg, then in the stomach (barely) and with a little luck, will kill it within an hour or two of intense shooting (exagerating here, but you get the point).
Hunting is a sport if you go in the wild, hiding for a long time, tracking your prey (and drinking beer, too). If it's just point and click at a screen to kill a REAL animal, it's not a sport, it's cruelty. I hope he burns in Hell. Or better, that a 'customer' shoots him accidentally!
Winamp stopped adding useful features / improvements (for me) after version 3.0... iTunes and WMP10 are much better, with song rating / automatic playlists (song I didn't heard in the past week I like, yes thank you).
Why anyone would pay for Winamp is beyond me. The free version does the job... like a bunch of programs out there. Of course, brand recognition, nostalgy and all...
National TV sometimes come into our lab to interview researchers about health concerns, etc... Invariably, the cameraman insists to film us doing stupid stuff totally unrelated to actual science, because it looks 'scientific'. Pipetting colored solutions (bonus points if you have a big flame nearby), racking tips, checking plates (with no bacteria on them), etc. It is extremely annoying, but I guess it reflects how the public view science... fancy looking stuff they don't understand. So no, I don't think this kind of TV program is good to increase the public's scientific knowledge. But it's not their goal anyway... it's entertainment. I hope.
"Verizon also is looking at other means, including using ground-penetrating radar and other technology, to locate lines before crews dig."
Don't they have maps to locate lines, sewers and such? Don't tell me they're digging blindly...
"County auditors examine the cause of each break and determine whether Verizon or water department officials are to blame. The responsible party is billed, said Rich Cummings, section manager for line maintenance for the water department."
It seem that Verizon will be paying the bill in the end anyway... of course, you can't pay for all the trouble it cause to citizens... can't they be careful?
BioKnoppix and VLinux are indispensable toolboxes for every bioinformatician out there, especially if you do lots of consulting (or need to travel from lab to lab, without having a laptop). Both distributions contains tools for sequence and protein analysis, 3D structure viewing software... etc. Very handy...
How long can the scramjet engine sustain such a (ludicrous) speed? An hour? A minute? Few seconds? Curious mind.
I hope you all at least consider that MSFT paid 16.6 million for the SCO Unix license, just to avoid lawsuits from them, with no "evil plans" againstLinux whatsoever. Of course, when they saw the whole affair unwrap last year, it surely made them smile (for a little while at least). But maybe (MAYBE) it wasn't intentional... SCO did it all by itself (Hey look! Big companies give up big money easily! Lets continue!). Sun gave them 9 millions and nobody is accusing them...
Don't worry, you made the right choice.
Its more a marketing plot by Intel... their 2Ghz perform just about the same as AMD 2000+, which run at 1666 Ghz.
Mhz are not good to mesure CPU performance anymore.
Can someone justify that they compared Intel's 3.8 Ghz to AMD 4000+ (4 Ghz equivalent, theorically)? Maybe they wanted to compare both company highest speed CPU... anyway, the only positive side I see in these high speed CPU is that they'll drive prices of their (somewhat) slower counterpart down... the AMD 3500+ is already at a very interesting price/performance ratio, it can only get better... and HL2 is only days away!
With the economical globalization these days, the trend (strategy?) for some countries seem to overspecialize in one specific area (in this case, IT) to outperform competition on a worldwide scale. Risky for sure, but it seems to work right now (at least for India, who reap the profits of investing massively in IT).
Now, they still must
A- Improve duration & Power
B- Shootdown test... destroy a inflight dummy missile
And i guess C, get nuked by someone with the capability (nukes and missile range)... which is... hmmm... the Soviets? Iran? No... North Korea? No... China maybe? Aliens? Terrorists? Anyone?
I'm sure they'll have trouble proving the demise of WordPerfect was due to lack of integrated web browsing capabilities... WPwindows was BAD... at the time, MSWord was seen like a salvation. My sister forced me to reinstall their latest version (6? 7? can't remember)... I still make nightmares at night.
Jeans are common things, and yet, people still buy Levis.
Brand recognition is key in any market. And dont think that when search engines become "common", they'll be better than Google. Running www.Google.com isnt in the reach of most... hardware costs, knowledge, etc.
Even Microsoft can't seem to catch up with them, and it's been many years Google is #1 in my book.
If it takes two decades to build, will it be relevant/secure/useful when completed? Where were we two decades ago? With the ever-evoluting nature of tech, I sure hope they planned ahead...
:
In anyway, it'll sure be costly. From the article
"Providing the connections to run the war net will cost at least $24 billion over the next five years - more than the cost, in today's dollars, of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Beyond that, encrypting data will be a $5 billion project."
That's just the running cost, not the hardware/implementation cost (which may rise up to 200 billions). How many social problems could we cure/relief with that kind of money in the world? I know War = Power, but Kindness = Respect too. Yeah, I live in Canada.
With dirt-cheap-to-make phones taking over the (simple) functions of PDAs, I can't see the market for pure PDAs improving much. Honestly, I always found a 400$ device too costly to replace my paper address/notebook. But its a different thing altogether if they can offer me the functionality on my phone, for just about the same price.