While flashy, a lot of the OSX interface helps productivity in subtle ways. For example, because of icon scaling on the dock you can set your dock to be really, really small and still have it usable. Because windows "genie" themselves back into a specific spot on the dock, there is never a question of where to go to find the window. Because interface elements are always subtly textured, you quickly learn to ignore those portions of the screen when looking for content. The bubbliest thing you can do when using OSX is press the F10 key, but that pulls back all of the windows so you can select the one you want by what it looks like. (F9 does that in the current application, and F11 reveals the desktop)
I used to run WindowMaker (NeXT) on Linux as well. The minimalist aesthetic appealed to me, even though it seemed like just a flashy way to open a lot of XTerms. And while NeXT was all about usability, it was also created under the eye of Steve Jobs. People forget that Apple's designs are created to be usable first and sexy second. The touch sensitive scroll wheel on the iPod may be luscious and indulgent, but I'll be damned if I can find a better way to scroll through a long list of songs (maybe Sony's click wheel, but that's patented).
Creating a unified look and feel for graphical Linux apps has been long overdue. Say what you will about their own hideous violations of their own style guidelines, but Apple's style guidelines and freely available icons has helped ensure a consistent user experience across most applications for almost two decades. Such a thing would be great for Linux.
Why is this desirable? Quite simply, having a unified look and feel makes switching between applications faster and easier. There is no need to figure out where quit is hiding when quit is always the last option under the file menu. There is no need to search for the folder button when the folder button looks the same in your applications as it does in your shell as it does in your browser.
Of course, I would like to see this go farther, and define voluntary standards for hotkeys, splash screens, etc. But an icon base is a step in the right direction.
To be fair, all of game development involves firing buckshot in hopes that something will stick. You whip up 50 ideas, and throw them at publishers. Publishers twitch a finger when you describe 10 of them, so you go off and develop those ideas. You come back, and they're interested in 3. You make 3 full fledged demos, and 1 gets picked up for a full build. They shotgun blast you with features they're thinking about, and you pick the dozen that sound the least painful. You run off to make your E3 Demo. Your E3 Demo is proof that your minimum gameplay is all you need, but while you're out there your publisher promises the press that your game will have every feature imaginable and some that aren't. Any features that seem to stick get begrudgingly implemented amongst much cursing. You polish up whatever hydra you've created, and you put it in a box. The publisher's marketing people then forget about it and bury it in a list somewhere, or maybe it sticks to them and they advertise it in everything from Home and Garden to Time Magazine... maybe the game magazines if you're really lucky. And after all that, the gamer will look at the cover of your box in a store and go "eh."
I agree, though, that if they want to attract female gamers they need to drop the girls jumping on trampolines and deliver more quality content that isn't about having the most blood or the biggest linebackers. The Xbox isn't even particularly bad in this department, but you would never know it by their marketing.
I don't know if it is still there, but I've heard that Microsoft's head game development studio has a grand staircase leading up to a giant topless female bust. Getting rid of THAT, and making a major concerted effort to hire female developers would help. That's not to say that women necessarily make games better suited for women, but three or four woman on a development team is usually enough to end a lot of the unprofessional stupidly masculine stuff that happens on all-male teams and pushes women out of gaming. Could you imagine a woman sitting in on the decision to have a BloodRayne "extra bouncy juggies" cheat? If you can't say it to a fellow female developer with a straight face, you shouldn't put it in the game.
When I first met her my girlfriend would never touch gaming. She thought it was entirely degrading to women. That's all that had ever been shown to her through advertising and media... Sex object girls jumping up and down while fast cars drive by (I'm looking at YOU, Namco). Or huge sweaty linebackers smashing into eachother. Or even Mario rescuing the princess. That's all she knew, because that's how the industry on average chooses to portray itself. That's not, thankfully, all the industry provides. We have games like Nintendogs, Virtua Tennis, Hot Shots Golf, The Sims, and tons of others. Heck, Quake 3 managed to be an action dream without being demeaning to women. Eventually I got my girlfriend hooked on DDR, Katamari, and Karaoke Revolution, but it was quite the uphill battle to change her perceptions. And whenever I see the doom trailer, I can feel things slipping back down.
It's not that we have to start attracting women to gaming. We just need to stop repelling them.
If you don't mind modding your enclosure, the wire running into your drive should be serving up 12v of power on a standard molex connector... Just cut a hole in your casing and add a 12v fan to the side. Or really, add a 24 volt fan to the side, as that will run fast enough yet still be quiet.
Other options include as was mentioned above getting an enclosure that will fit a 5.25" drive, but adding one of the aftermarket drive bay coolers to the deal. Again, try to get one whose fan speed you can turn down.
Or buy an external drive bay, strip off the outer shell, and put it in a big box with a lot of air.
You really do need a fan for external hard drives... Be careful though, the smaller the fan, and the more porous the enclosure, the more noise it makes. So if you want to enjoy your Mini, make sure to get a slower spinning, Fluid-dynamic-bearing drive, and an enclosure with a really big, slow spinning fan. Both Maxtor and Seagate have good FDB drives. Western Digital, on the other hand, is to be avoided like the plague.
A: Where is everyone getting $250? The article says the small pad will cost 30-40.
B: My last trip I took
An MP3 player A Cell Phone A Phone A handheld MIDI sequencer A Nintendo DS A Digital Camera
I would gladly pay 40 dollars to have something that charges EVERYTHING I have and will have. This is especially true if it is one solid piece rather than dozens of little connectors to get lost and confused. As it stood I remembered the charger to half of my electronics, but still found my cell phone turned off most of the trip to conserve the prescious charge.
The more wired homes get, the more wire management becomes a big issue. Being able to simplify down from 10 incompatible, random voltage wall-warts to 1 charging pad is a big help in that battle. 40 for that sounds totally reasonable.
A: When Sony released the Memory Stick, MMC cards were widely available (SD cards, basically, without the copyprotection).
B: Try going 100% Compact Flash sometime. Not only can you use devices from multiple manufacturers, but you have no upper limit on size. We have an old digital camera here that came out when 16MB CF cards were considered large. Now we have a 1GB card in it, and it chugs along happily. If I need a little extra space, I can jam one of the many old cards into my PDA. Up or down, you have complete compatibility.
I can't say the same for my Sony devices, where some take the original Memory Stick, some take Memory Stick Pro, some only take Memory Stick Duo... and none of which get large enough for serious use. I'm still shocked that a lot of Memory Stick devices can only take 128, 256, or 512BM MAXIMUM card sizes. The old devices are now far less useful, as data expands... a CF-based MP3 player from 1998 is as useful today as when it was bought, as the capacity can expand up to the size of an iPod Nano, but a Memory Stick based MP3 player would be stuck at 128 MB. Why create a standard that is incompatible with future upgrades?
C: SD cards are still smaller than Memory Stick Duo cards, have more capacity, are cheaper... Oh, and are a standard that multiple manufacturers support, not just one. You can buy a Palm Pilot, or a Kodak Camera, or an HP Pocket PC device that all support the same Memory Card. Want to buy a PDA that's compatible with your memory sticks? Sorry, Sony got out of that market.
And while SD cards aren't as upwardly compatible as CF cards (there is a maximum size each generation supports), they're a heck of a lot smaller than both CF or Memory Sticks.
D: Did I mention that even amongst Sony's line there are incompatibilities? It was nice of them to ship "adaptor sticks" with their new cameras, but I've never needed an adaptor for CF. If they keep changing it, it's not a "standard."
There is a reason why professional photographers will only shoot on CF. If you want high capacity and flexibility, you need CF. If you want small space and low power consumption, you want SD. There is really no reason for memory sticks to exist at all, as they don't do anything better than either of the two dominant standards.
And the record companies surely are giving that additional profits from sales and ad revenue generated by the videos back to the artists who pay for their production from their cut of album sales... right? Otherwise such a thing would be horribly immoral, the equivalent of selling something you don't own... right?
This will go great with all of the checks the RIAA must be sending to artists from the illegal download lawsuit revenues.
I've already seen some comments with respect to how this could be a great leap forward in getting arbitrary code to run on the xbox. However, what you have to realize is that the Development Kits don't sign code, Microsoft signs code. All the development kits allow you to do is create code that will run on a special Xbox-like development platform. It's possible that the dev platform would help in figuring out the architecture of the system, but some kid from MIT would likely have that figured out two weeks after launch anyway. It also might also simplify the process of creating code for hacked Xboxes. But ultimately, the limitation isn't writing code on chipped consoles, the limitation has always been getting code to run on non-modified consoles. Having Xbox 360 development stations won't help that.
There are tens of thousands of Xbox development kits floating throughout the world, many in the hands of people who would love to see Linux on Xbox. But it didn't help with that effort. And likely having a few loose cannon Xbox 360 development kits won't make a difference in getting arbitrary code on that system either.
Microsoft signs the code. Unsigned code won't run. Either snag a code signing station (good luck!) or break the cryptography. Nothing less will suffice for a pure software solution.
I've always found it odd that in e=mc^2 the c^2 is (probably) a constant, and can be simplified to something else: e=mC. Now, anyone looking at that equation will see that what you are doing is simply converting between units. And units are not part of the physical world, but merely an arbitrary standard we pick to facilitate calculations. So the equation is really just E = M.
Why have the c^2 part at all? Is the energy contained in an object really variable based upon the speed of light in a particular material? Or is it just there to show school children that the energy contained is really, really big? Is there something that I'm missing?
I've tried to wire up a house to have multiple rooms served by a single audio source. It is really a pain. Basically all high-end amps assume that you have some variant on a 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, etc setup. None of them expect that you want a 4:1 for the dining room + a mono for your bedroom and a Stereo for your kitchen. Split the wires? Introduces audible distortion. Multiple Amps? Again, distortion.
The wires also went literally everywhere, and were snaking around the apartment like an overgrown fern monster. And this was only 2 additional rooms... My original plan was to try 3 rooms, and build up to all 6 areas (with two sources!). None of that would be practical with current tech.
For a single room, you are completely correct that the traditional analog setup is best for the forseeable future. But people don't live in a single room.
While audiophiles may sit down on the couch and listen to their music, the average person likes to listen to their music while going around the house doing what they need to do... be that cleaning, laundry, making breakfast, or anything else. Personally, I'd much rather have a constant, pervasive mono audio stream than a great high-fi setup that I get 20 second snippets of as I run around. All of the timing and positioning cues become a garbled mess when you're listening from one room over anyway.
California Adventure (the LA-based Disneyland-next-to-Disneyland) also streams their entire park's audio over gigabit ethernet.
And if you go there the audio sounds terrible. Everything sounds like it is being played through a sheet of plywood. It sounds a lot like, well, most amusement park audio systems. All-weather outdoor speakers are not notoriously clean. Some of the indoor stuff isn't bad, though it isn't great... For some reason everything sounds a bit downsampled. I wonder if they're using digital source, converting to analog for processing, then converting back to digital for transmission.
Either way I hope this tech takes off, and music that starts digital stays digital right up to the speakers. But I'm not rushing out to buy a pair just yet.
While capitalism is predisposed to breaking down into monopoly states, sometimes it works. If Google works to break Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop, lobbies for fair use rights to index and playback arbitrary content, fights the kinds of software patents that have been weilded against it, Google could both do a lot of good while looking out for its own self-interest.
One of the nice things about the 'net is that nobody has figured out a way to get a solid monopoly lock. People aren't tied to your hardware, or software, or anything. The only thing Google could hold over you to stay would be Gmail and other data that you submit to them, but that wouldn't preclude you from shopping at Amazon.com. The fact that Google is doing so well despite the default search engine on all windows installs being MSN should show you how much power the consumer has in this area.
I'm willing to risk it. Google has shown remarkable desire to do no evil, and is one of the only major forces in tech, or for that matter corporate America, who believes that. We need the help.
I have the sneaking suspicion that HD-DVD is going to eventually come out the winner in this next round of format wars. While BluRay is technically superior, they're close enough that it may just come down to HD-DVD's being slightly cheaper. Being non region-encoded will help a lot. It's like they're appologizing for slapping us in the face last time, and promising they'll never do it again. Not that I believe it, but it's nice to hear.
Of course, they could both fall flat on their faces. While DVD's provided a huge image jump, a lot of convienience, and extra shelf space over VHS, HD-DVD's and BluRay disks really only have an advantage for upgraded TV sets. Even then the average consumer probably won't notice the difference.
BTW, while the HD-DVD standard requires a rip-to-PC capability, they're allowed to charge you extra for that.
Re:Is the Video iPod worth the wait?
on
No Video iPod Coming?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Remember, this is Apple. They're not going to release something that's just "better than nothing." If they're going to release a video iPod, they're going to solve the distribution problems, make encoding trivial, give it an easy interface, and mark it way up. It will be usable by one hand, you will be able to watch and do the dishes at the same time, and it will be revolutionary in other ways that we can't even think of right now. It will also be very, very thin and utterly sexy. Did I mention it would be really expensive?
Unlike MP3's, video files come as Divx, WMV, Real, MPEG2, MPEG4, and a host of others. Even the audio encoding varies pretty widely. That means a strong general purpose chip, which drives prices much higher and battery life down. And, let's not forget, while Apple's stuff is amazingly well designed from an aesthetic standpoint, they always have first-gen problems. I wouldn't be surprised if an undertaking like this was suffering from those behind-the-scenes.
But an iPhone would be exactly the sort of killer that we all need. Imagine being able to sync your phone to your desktop as easily as getting music onto your iPod. Or e-mailing a photograph in two clicks instead of twenty. Or being able to talk on the phone while still looking up a number. Or any one of a host of other major problems with phones these days. A grid computing friend of mine just bought a phone the other day, and it took the two of us about 15 minutes to figure out how to take a picture.
Motorola and Nokia's phone interfaces could use a LOT of help. I'm guessing that's why the itunes phone isn't taking off: It really lacks what apple is selling. It isn't the ability to play MP3's, it's the clarity and simplicity of the interface. Why would anyone want a phone that plays MP3's if it takes 10 minutes of frustration to play anything?
You make console homebrew in your spare time. You ported Lumines to the GBA. You've written up 400 things at everything.com. People glow about you on wikipedia. You've contributed to open source projects.
Send your portfolio to one of the dozens of companies that do Game Boy development. Most companies don't publicise their openings, so send it anyway. http://thq.kenexa.com/thq/cc/Home.ss http://corporate.infogrames.com/hr.html?action=job s_all Nintendo Activision EA etc... While you're at it, try Red Hat. They like to hire people who have contributed to open source projects, and have cool / geeky hobbies.
While you're doing that, learn to drive a car. After years of playing arcade racers, you should feel right at home. Then get your ass out to California, New York, Boston, or possibly Austin, where actual software development takes place. My girlfriend's recruiter keeps calling and calling... It's really quite different than the way things were 3 years ago. Hell, I'm turning down work, and I haven't looked for a job in two years.
If you distill everything you've done down, your resume must look impressive. Just get out to where jobs actually are and get your life going... Though definitely apply everywhere you might want to live, whether or not you are currently there. Lots of places do some degree of covering moving costs or offering signing bonuses. And scraping together enough money for a plane ticked from friends is a lot easier when you have a good-paying job waiting on the other end.
BTW, when applying for minimum-wage jobs, lie about your education. Always pretend to have the appropriate education for the job you're targeting. Usually that means "some college," or even "College degree," but never "BS in computer science from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology." People don't like to hire people for minimum wage jobs who aren't going to be trapped there. Be slightly more impressive than the average min wage worker, but not much beyond that.
Generally speaking, towards the end of each console's lifecycle you will see a decline in interest. That's why it is the end of the lifecycle. You saw that between the 2600 and the NES, the NES and the Genesis / SNES, the Genesis and the Playstation, and the Playstation and the PS2. If popularity of a console wasn't declining, they likely wouldn't replace it.
Likewise, it is well known that consoles and gaming in general do better during economic downturns. As we seem to be coming out of a deep recession into a reasonably good economy, it's not surprising that highly escapist forms of entertainment are less attractive, compared to traveling or spending time in the real world.
Third, an annoying thing that tends to speed up the decline of consoles at the end is that the publishers are all refocusing their attention and development resources on the upcoming platforms. There just isn't much to buy. What is Microsoft releasing for the Xbox this year? Has anyone managed to squeeze real development dollars out of SONY for the PS2 in the past year?
This is the normal cycle of the gaming industry. I'm not surprised. Things will pick up again in two to three years once the next console wars has really kicked off.
Actually, no, you can't precache from a memory card. Nor can you do a true "state snapshot" save anywhere system with a standard size memory card. You can't save a 100MB level file to a memory card. Players probably won't rip their CD collection to MP3 files on a memory card. Guild Wars could never have been done without a Hard Drive. You can't have the player create a counterstrike level without a Hard Drive.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to make a great game without a HDD. It's just a nice tool to have, and the tool that differentiated the Xbox from the PS2.
Faced with the suggestion that Microsoft might have let down developers by removing the guarantee of a hard drive in every box, Allard said: I dont know who weve let down. There isnt a game on 360 that you cant play without a hard drive, so I think thats a good thing for consumers.
Umm... Developers. That's the one you've let down. There are a LOT of games on the Xbox that you can't play without the hard drive. Any sort of disk precaching or large format storage is lost. Any guarantee of an easy save flow is lost. Any illusion of easy compatibility with PC's is lost. Custom soundtracks? Lost. Arbitrary save file size? Lost. Save anywhere? Lost. Guarantee of space for downloadable content? Lost. Player generation of content? Lost.
I'm not saying that the financial tradeoffs weren't worth axing the HDD for. But I am saying that the HDD was one of the two major things the Xbox had going for it.
Well, your business model could be to put bottles of water out on a table with a collection plate and the words "Water - One Dollar" scrawled on a cardboard sign. From a practical standpoint, it's safe to say that you have the wrong business model.
I should point out that there are many legal ways to get the RIAA's music without them getting a dime. You can buy a second-hand CD. You can time-shift from the radio. A friend can give you a CD. You can play it on a piano yourself. You can listen outside a concert hall without going in. Heck, you can pay the artists and see their concert... the recording companies don't get money from that.
As for moral... I have a deep unnerving dissatisfaction with the idea that fundamental parts of the American and world cultures are permanently owned and restricted ad infinitum. That songs, images, ideas embedded in our heads are not our own, and cannot be freely played with. You can't, for example, create an image of Mickey being shipped off to Iraq without Disney suing you out of existence (whether or not they would win the case is irrelevant). The compromise is that this term is limited, originally to 20 years. Content gets created, and after a certain point we get our freedom to shape our culture back.
Just look at the vibrancy of the underground music culture, where music is mixed and remixed without a thought to the original copyright holders. They can shape, twist, and reimagine our culture, shining lights on what it means. But they can't do it legally, and unlike other underground-to-popular music forms they never will be able to. They're Musical Outlaws, and just the concept of that is greatly distasteful.
Copyright limits freedom. Period. This compromise was made to encourage the creation of the useful arts. But copyright laws have grown significantly more restrictive than that over the years, and has turned from a compromise on freedoms for the public good, to parts of the culture that companies "own." It's that last part that I can't abide by.
It's not their music. It's music. The law is very explicit on this point.
Slashdot Mirror
While flashy, a lot of the OSX interface helps productivity in subtle ways. For example, because of icon scaling on the dock you can set your dock to be really, really small and still have it usable. Because windows "genie" themselves back into a specific spot on the dock, there is never a question of where to go to find the window. Because interface elements are always subtly textured, you quickly learn to ignore those portions of the screen when looking for content. The bubbliest thing you can do when using OSX is press the F10 key, but that pulls back all of the windows so you can select the one you want by what it looks like. (F9 does that in the current application, and F11 reveals the desktop)
I used to run WindowMaker (NeXT) on Linux as well. The minimalist aesthetic appealed to me, even though it seemed like just a flashy way to open a lot of XTerms. And while NeXT was all about usability, it was also created under the eye of Steve Jobs. People forget that Apple's designs are created to be usable first and sexy second. The touch sensitive scroll wheel on the iPod may be luscious and indulgent, but I'll be damned if I can find a better way to scroll through a long list of songs (maybe Sony's click wheel, but that's patented).
Creating a unified look and feel for graphical Linux apps has been long overdue. Say what you will about their own hideous violations of their own style guidelines, but Apple's style guidelines and freely available icons has helped ensure a consistent user experience across most applications for almost two decades. Such a thing would be great for Linux.
Why is this desirable? Quite simply, having a unified look and feel makes switching between applications faster and easier. There is no need to figure out where quit is hiding when quit is always the last option under the file menu. There is no need to search for the folder button when the folder button looks the same in your applications as it does in your shell as it does in your browser.
Of course, I would like to see this go farther, and define voluntary standards for hotkeys, splash screens, etc. But an icon base is a step in the right direction.
To be fair, all of game development involves firing buckshot in hopes that something will stick. You whip up 50 ideas, and throw them at publishers. Publishers twitch a finger when you describe 10 of them, so you go off and develop those ideas. You come back, and they're interested in 3. You make 3 full fledged demos, and 1 gets picked up for a full build. They shotgun blast you with features they're thinking about, and you pick the dozen that sound the least painful. You run off to make your E3 Demo. Your E3 Demo is proof that your minimum gameplay is all you need, but while you're out there your publisher promises the press that your game will have every feature imaginable and some that aren't. Any features that seem to stick get begrudgingly implemented amongst much cursing. You polish up whatever hydra you've created, and you put it in a box. The publisher's marketing people then forget about it and bury it in a list somewhere, or maybe it sticks to them and they advertise it in everything from Home and Garden to Time Magazine... maybe the game magazines if you're really lucky. And after all that, the gamer will look at the cover of your box in a store and go "eh."
I agree, though, that if they want to attract female gamers they need to drop the girls jumping on trampolines and deliver more quality content that isn't about having the most blood or the biggest linebackers. The Xbox isn't even particularly bad in this department, but you would never know it by their marketing.
I don't know if it is still there, but I've heard that Microsoft's head game development studio has a grand staircase leading up to a giant topless female bust. Getting rid of THAT, and making a major concerted effort to hire female developers would help. That's not to say that women necessarily make games better suited for women, but three or four woman on a development team is usually enough to end a lot of the unprofessional stupidly masculine stuff that happens on all-male teams and pushes women out of gaming. Could you imagine a woman sitting in on the decision to have a BloodRayne "extra bouncy juggies" cheat? If you can't say it to a fellow female developer with a straight face, you shouldn't put it in the game.
When I first met her my girlfriend would never touch gaming. She thought it was entirely degrading to women. That's all that had ever been shown to her through advertising and media... Sex object girls jumping up and down while fast cars drive by (I'm looking at YOU, Namco). Or huge sweaty linebackers smashing into eachother. Or even Mario rescuing the princess. That's all she knew, because that's how the industry on average chooses to portray itself. That's not, thankfully, all the industry provides. We have games like Nintendogs, Virtua Tennis, Hot Shots Golf, The Sims, and tons of others. Heck, Quake 3 managed to be an action dream without being demeaning to women. Eventually I got my girlfriend hooked on DDR, Katamari, and Karaoke Revolution, but it was quite the uphill battle to change her perceptions. And whenever I see the doom trailer, I can feel things slipping back down.
It's not that we have to start attracting women to gaming. We just need to stop repelling them.
We should all feel comfortable entering our credit card information at Activision. In fact, I'm going to do it right now on their super secure server.
I suggest you all follow me and just do it.
If you don't mind modding your enclosure, the wire running into your drive should be serving up 12v of power on a standard molex connector... Just cut a hole in your casing and add a 12v fan to the side. Or really, add a 24 volt fan to the side, as that will run fast enough yet still be quiet.
Other options include as was mentioned above getting an enclosure that will fit a 5.25" drive, but adding one of the aftermarket drive bay coolers to the deal. Again, try to get one whose fan speed you can turn down.
Or buy an external drive bay, strip off the outer shell, and put it in a big box with a lot of air.
You really do need a fan for external hard drives... Be careful though, the smaller the fan, and the more porous the enclosure, the more noise it makes. So if you want to enjoy your Mini, make sure to get a slower spinning, Fluid-dynamic-bearing drive, and an enclosure with a really big, slow spinning fan. Both Maxtor and Seagate have good FDB drives. Western Digital, on the other hand, is to be avoided like the plague.
And yes, get your drive and enclosure separately.
A: Where is everyone getting $250? The article says the small pad will cost 30-40.
B: My last trip I took
An MP3 player
A Cell Phone
A Phone
A handheld MIDI sequencer
A Nintendo DS
A Digital Camera
I would gladly pay 40 dollars to have something that charges EVERYTHING I have and will have. This is especially true if it is one solid piece rather than dozens of little connectors to get lost and confused. As it stood I remembered the charger to half of my electronics, but still found my cell phone turned off most of the trip to conserve the prescious charge.
The more wired homes get, the more wire management becomes a big issue. Being able to simplify down from 10 incompatible, random voltage wall-warts to 1 charging pad is a big help in that battle. 40 for that sounds totally reasonable.
A: When Sony released the Memory Stick, MMC cards were widely available (SD cards, basically, without the copyprotection).
B: Try going 100% Compact Flash sometime. Not only can you use devices from multiple manufacturers, but you have no upper limit on size. We have an old digital camera here that came out when 16MB CF cards were considered large. Now we have a 1GB card in it, and it chugs along happily. If I need a little extra space, I can jam one of the many old cards into my PDA. Up or down, you have complete compatibility.
I can't say the same for my Sony devices, where some take the original Memory Stick, some take Memory Stick Pro, some only take Memory Stick Duo... and none of which get large enough for serious use. I'm still shocked that a lot of Memory Stick devices can only take 128, 256, or 512BM MAXIMUM card sizes. The old devices are now far less useful, as data expands... a CF-based MP3 player from 1998 is as useful today as when it was bought, as the capacity can expand up to the size of an iPod Nano, but a Memory Stick based MP3 player would be stuck at 128 MB. Why create a standard that is incompatible with future upgrades?
C: SD cards are still smaller than Memory Stick Duo cards, have more capacity, are cheaper... Oh, and are a standard that multiple manufacturers support, not just one. You can buy a Palm Pilot, or a Kodak Camera, or an HP Pocket PC device that all support the same Memory Card. Want to buy a PDA that's compatible with your memory sticks? Sorry, Sony got out of that market.
And while SD cards aren't as upwardly compatible as CF cards (there is a maximum size each generation supports), they're a heck of a lot smaller than both CF or Memory Sticks.
D: Did I mention that even amongst Sony's line there are incompatibilities? It was nice of them to ship "adaptor sticks" with their new cameras, but I've never needed an adaptor for CF. If they keep changing it, it's not a "standard."
There is a reason why professional photographers will only shoot on CF. If you want high capacity and flexibility, you need CF. If you want small space and low power consumption, you want SD. There is really no reason for memory sticks to exist at all, as they don't do anything better than either of the two dominant standards.
Power PC chips? In short supply?
I'm glad to see Microsoft continues to follow in Apple's footsteps.
And the record companies surely are giving that additional profits from sales and ad revenue generated by the videos back to the artists who pay for their production from their cut of album sales... right? Otherwise such a thing would be horribly immoral, the equivalent of selling something you don't own... right?
This will go great with all of the checks the RIAA must be sending to artists from the illegal download lawsuit revenues.
Truly, this is a wonderful time to be a musician.
I've already seen some comments with respect to how this could be a great leap forward in getting arbitrary code to run on the xbox. However, what you have to realize is that the Development Kits don't sign code, Microsoft signs code. All the development kits allow you to do is create code that will run on a special Xbox-like development platform. It's possible that the dev platform would help in figuring out the architecture of the system, but some kid from MIT would likely have that figured out two weeks after launch anyway. It also might also simplify the process of creating code for hacked Xboxes. But ultimately, the limitation isn't writing code on chipped consoles, the limitation has always been getting code to run on non-modified consoles. Having Xbox 360 development stations won't help that.
There are tens of thousands of Xbox development kits floating throughout the world, many in the hands of people who would love to see Linux on Xbox. But it didn't help with that effort. And likely having a few loose cannon Xbox 360 development kits won't make a difference in getting arbitrary code on that system either.
Microsoft signs the code. Unsigned code won't run. Either snag a code signing station (good luck!) or break the cryptography. Nothing less will suffice for a pure software solution.
I've always found it odd that in e=mc^2 the c^2 is (probably) a constant, and can be simplified to something else: e=mC. Now, anyone looking at that equation will see that what you are doing is simply converting between units. And units are not part of the physical world, but merely an arbitrary standard we pick to facilitate calculations. So the equation is really just E = M.
Why have the c^2 part at all? Is the energy contained in an object really variable based upon the speed of light in a particular material? Or is it just there to show school children that the energy contained is really, really big? Is there something that I'm missing?
I've tried to wire up a house to have multiple rooms served by a single audio source. It is really a pain. Basically all high-end amps assume that you have some variant on a 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, etc setup. None of them expect that you want a 4:1 for the dining room + a mono for your bedroom and a Stereo for your kitchen. Split the wires? Introduces audible distortion. Multiple Amps? Again, distortion.
The wires also went literally everywhere, and were snaking around the apartment like an overgrown fern monster. And this was only 2 additional rooms... My original plan was to try 3 rooms, and build up to all 6 areas (with two sources!). None of that would be practical with current tech.
For a single room, you are completely correct that the traditional analog setup is best for the forseeable future. But people don't live in a single room.
While audiophiles may sit down on the couch and listen to their music, the average person likes to listen to their music while going around the house doing what they need to do... be that cleaning, laundry, making breakfast, or anything else. Personally, I'd much rather have a constant, pervasive mono audio stream than a great high-fi setup that I get 20 second snippets of as I run around. All of the timing and positioning cues become a garbled mess when you're listening from one room over anyway.
California Adventure (the LA-based Disneyland-next-to-Disneyland) also streams their entire park's audio over gigabit ethernet.
And if you go there the audio sounds terrible. Everything sounds like it is being played through a sheet of plywood. It sounds a lot like, well, most amusement park audio systems. All-weather outdoor speakers are not notoriously clean. Some of the indoor stuff isn't bad, though it isn't great... For some reason everything sounds a bit downsampled. I wonder if they're using digital source, converting to analog for processing, then converting back to digital for transmission.
Either way I hope this tech takes off, and music that starts digital stays digital right up to the speakers. But I'm not rushing out to buy a pair just yet.
While capitalism is predisposed to breaking down into monopoly states, sometimes it works. If Google works to break Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop, lobbies for fair use rights to index and playback arbitrary content, fights the kinds of software patents that have been weilded against it, Google could both do a lot of good while looking out for its own self-interest.
One of the nice things about the 'net is that nobody has figured out a way to get a solid monopoly lock. People aren't tied to your hardware, or software, or anything. The only thing Google could hold over you to stay would be Gmail and other data that you submit to them, but that wouldn't preclude you from shopping at Amazon.com. The fact that Google is doing so well despite the default search engine on all windows installs being MSN should show you how much power the consumer has in this area.
I'm willing to risk it. Google has shown remarkable desire to do no evil, and is one of the only major forces in tech, or for that matter corporate America, who believes that. We need the help.
I have the sneaking suspicion that HD-DVD is going to eventually come out the winner in this next round of format wars. While BluRay is technically superior, they're close enough that it may just come down to HD-DVD's being slightly cheaper. Being non region-encoded will help a lot. It's like they're appologizing for slapping us in the face last time, and promising they'll never do it again. Not that I believe it, but it's nice to hear.
Of course, they could both fall flat on their faces. While DVD's provided a huge image jump, a lot of convienience, and extra shelf space over VHS, HD-DVD's and BluRay disks really only have an advantage for upgraded TV sets. Even then the average consumer probably won't notice the difference.
BTW, while the HD-DVD standard requires a rip-to-PC capability, they're allowed to charge you extra for that.
Remember, this is Apple. They're not going to release something that's just "better than nothing." If they're going to release a video iPod, they're going to solve the distribution problems, make encoding trivial, give it an easy interface, and mark it way up. It will be usable by one hand, you will be able to watch and do the dishes at the same time, and it will be revolutionary in other ways that we can't even think of right now. It will also be very, very thin and utterly sexy. Did I mention it would be really expensive?
Unlike MP3's, video files come as Divx, WMV, Real, MPEG2, MPEG4, and a host of others. Even the audio encoding varies pretty widely. That means a strong general purpose chip, which drives prices much higher and battery life down. And, let's not forget, while Apple's stuff is amazingly well designed from an aesthetic standpoint, they always have first-gen problems. I wouldn't be surprised if an undertaking like this was suffering from those behind-the-scenes.
But an iPhone would be exactly the sort of killer that we all need. Imagine being able to sync your phone to your desktop as easily as getting music onto your iPod. Or e-mailing a photograph in two clicks instead of twenty. Or being able to talk on the phone while still looking up a number. Or any one of a host of other major problems with phones these days. A grid computing friend of mine just bought a phone the other day, and it took the two of us about 15 minutes to figure out how to take a picture.
Motorola and Nokia's phone interfaces could use a LOT of help. I'm guessing that's why the itunes phone isn't taking off: It really lacks what apple is selling. It isn't the ability to play MP3's, it's the clarity and simplicity of the interface. Why would anyone want a phone that plays MP3's if it takes 10 minutes of frustration to play anything?
I heard they're even coming out with BrainSearch so you can remember who that was you slept with last night.
dev/null?
Does he get to lobby for whatever he wants one day a week?
But you don't get as hungry...
You make console homebrew in your spare time. You ported Lumines to the GBA. You've written up 400 things at everything.com. People glow about you on wikipedia. You've contributed to open source projects.
b s_all
Send your portfolio to one of the dozens of companies that do Game Boy development. Most companies don't publicise their openings, so send it anyway.
http://thq.kenexa.com/thq/cc/Home.ss
http://corporate.infogrames.com/hr.html?action=jo
Nintendo
Activision
EA
etc...
While you're at it, try Red Hat. They like to hire people who have contributed to open source projects, and have cool / geeky hobbies.
While you're doing that, learn to drive a car. After years of playing arcade racers, you should feel right at home. Then get your ass out to California, New York, Boston, or possibly Austin, where actual software development takes place. My girlfriend's recruiter keeps calling and calling... It's really quite different than the way things were 3 years ago. Hell, I'm turning down work, and I haven't looked for a job in two years.
If you distill everything you've done down, your resume must look impressive. Just get out to where jobs actually are and get your life going... Though definitely apply everywhere you might want to live, whether or not you are currently there. Lots of places do some degree of covering moving costs or offering signing bonuses. And scraping together enough money for a plane ticked from friends is a lot easier when you have a good-paying job waiting on the other end.
BTW, when applying for minimum-wage jobs, lie about your education. Always pretend to have the appropriate education for the job you're targeting. Usually that means "some college," or even "College degree," but never "BS in computer science from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology." People don't like to hire people for minimum wage jobs who aren't going to be trapped there. Be slightly more impressive than the average min wage worker, but not much beyond that.
Generally speaking, towards the end of each console's lifecycle you will see a decline in interest. That's why it is the end of the lifecycle. You saw that between the 2600 and the NES, the NES and the Genesis / SNES, the Genesis and the Playstation, and the Playstation and the PS2. If popularity of a console wasn't declining, they likely wouldn't replace it.
Likewise, it is well known that consoles and gaming in general do better during economic downturns. As we seem to be coming out of a deep recession into a reasonably good economy, it's not surprising that highly escapist forms of entertainment are less attractive, compared to traveling or spending time in the real world.
Third, an annoying thing that tends to speed up the decline of consoles at the end is that the publishers are all refocusing their attention and development resources on the upcoming platforms. There just isn't much to buy. What is Microsoft releasing for the Xbox this year? Has anyone managed to squeeze real development dollars out of SONY for the PS2 in the past year?
This is the normal cycle of the gaming industry. I'm not surprised. Things will pick up again in two to three years once the next console wars has really kicked off.
They balance out. You swim at the same speed... at least according to the winner.
Actually, no, you can't precache from a memory card. Nor can you do a true "state snapshot" save anywhere system with a standard size memory card. You can't save a 100MB level file to a memory card. Players probably won't rip their CD collection to MP3 files on a memory card. Guild Wars could never have been done without a Hard Drive. You can't have the player create a counterstrike level without a Hard Drive.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to make a great game without a HDD. It's just a nice tool to have, and the tool that differentiated the Xbox from the PS2.
Notice how he evades the question.
Faced with the suggestion that Microsoft might have let down developers by removing the guarantee of a hard drive in every box, Allard said: I dont know who weve let down. There isnt a game on 360 that you cant play without a hard drive, so I think thats a good thing for consumers.
Umm... Developers. That's the one you've let down. There are a LOT of games on the Xbox that you can't play without the hard drive. Any sort of disk precaching or large format storage is lost. Any guarantee of an easy save flow is lost. Any illusion of easy compatibility with PC's is lost. Custom soundtracks? Lost. Arbitrary save file size? Lost. Save anywhere? Lost. Guarantee of space for downloadable content? Lost. Player generation of content? Lost.
I'm not saying that the financial tradeoffs weren't worth axing the HDD for. But I am saying that the HDD was one of the two major things the Xbox had going for it.
Well, your business model could be to put bottles of water out on a table with a collection plate and the words "Water - One Dollar" scrawled on a cardboard sign. From a practical standpoint, it's safe to say that you have the wrong business model.
I should point out that there are many legal ways to get the RIAA's music without them getting a dime. You can buy a second-hand CD. You can time-shift from the radio. A friend can give you a CD. You can play it on a piano yourself. You can listen outside a concert hall without going in. Heck, you can pay the artists and see their concert... the recording companies don't get money from that.
As for moral... I have a deep unnerving dissatisfaction with the idea that fundamental parts of the American and world cultures are permanently owned and restricted ad infinitum. That songs, images, ideas embedded in our heads are not our own, and cannot be freely played with. You can't, for example, create an image of Mickey being shipped off to Iraq without Disney suing you out of existence (whether or not they would win the case is irrelevant). The compromise is that this term is limited, originally to 20 years. Content gets created, and after a certain point we get our freedom to shape our culture back.
Just look at the vibrancy of the underground music culture, where music is mixed and remixed without a thought to the original copyright holders. They can shape, twist, and reimagine our culture, shining lights on what it means. But they can't do it legally, and unlike other underground-to-popular music forms they never will be able to. They're Musical Outlaws, and just the concept of that is greatly distasteful.
Copyright limits freedom. Period. This compromise was made to encourage the creation of the useful arts. But copyright laws have grown significantly more restrictive than that over the years, and has turned from a compromise on freedoms for the public good, to parts of the culture that companies "own." It's that last part that I can't abide by.
It's not their music. It's music. The law is very explicit on this point.