Perhaps I'm getting a bit jaded in my old age, but isn't this application just a 3D version of the old 320 X 200 at 10fps teleconferencing?
The really impressive part of the whole setup is in the software itself, or so ran the Headline News story shortly ago. The image is not a video feed but a 3D display (behind a flat screen) showing a 3D model generated by the computer. The box makes this model by interpreting on the fly 5 video feeds into one dynamic file.
With all of that wonderful number crunching, what you wind up with is a realtionship that not wholy unlike meeting up with someone whose mollecules are jittering loose in a maximum-security prison visiter's room (plexiglass and all).
And yet after all of this effort, a crisper 3D image could easily be obtained by just using two video feeds with polarized lenses and glasses.
So what better uses could we have for this technology? Half of the system is a way to create realtime 3D objects using video camreas, the other half a 3D projection system based upon computer modeling. That's got to be good for something.
Obviously we could use the model to control the display, creating the opportunity for some really bad games. What about combining with robotics for more accurate telesurgery? Or home object scanners?
Why should managing multiple disks require a great deal of hardware knowledge?
I remember, back in my younger days, transferring large files between computers by plugging a little scuzzy drive into the back of a friend's Quadra. You plugged it in, and it worked. An intelligent management system for those disks would be a piece of paper listing out what's on the drives, and who should have access. That simple. One more IT person freed to work on something productive more productive, like a tan.
I'm sorry, but shiny happy tools from apple usually work, and produce shiny happy people.
Release OSX on x86? Why would Apple gut their hardware market, where they make money, for their software market, where they are less profitable? Quite frankly, while I would love to see a version of OSX dual-booting with my other gaming system, it would be a horrific business move on Apple's part. What would keep people from switching over to Windows when Warcraft 3 was released? They would go from being the crem-de-la-crem of fufu computing to another mismarketed underutilized OS2.
Plain and simple, Apple is not a software monopoly like Microsoft. Apple is a hardware monopoly, like Nintendo. Apple is not releasing OSX in order to leverage a copyprotection scheme onto unsuspecting Windows Media users, they are releasing it to sell more ergonomic keyboards, optical trackballs, glowing blue moniters, and exquisitely designed but totally non-upgradable electric pink boxes.
Apple is the hardware. "Stomping" gates would be a wonderful philanthropic move, but it would only dilute the value of Apple's only bargaining chip: their elite status system.
Is there anyone willing to find out what number prime number it is? If anything digital (in theory) can be referred to by its index, it might be interesting to find out if the law applies to an index to the natural prime of the code of the file, like a natural hyperlink.
Of course, then we could all memorize one of the factors of the non-prime index, so that one day once the world has been expunged of the evil program we can get together and un-encode it. Of course, we could all just copy it down from the back of our t-shirts...
What is Microsoft selling right now? Screenshots. People must make buying decisions about PS2, Dreamcast, and the New Coming systems based around press - only impressions and screenshots. If microsoft "released some screenshots" and they turned out to be fake, then they were trying to booster future sales based upon flagrangly false information. And we're not talking about adding a lense-flare here - those staged "pictures" look NOTHING like the in-game video.
We're judging the value of the system relative to the others available based upon screenshots like these - if the X-box really could reproduce snow or people as intricate as the original images, it would blow everyone else out of the water. SSX who? I'll wait for amped. Oh wait, Amped looks nothing like that. Those bastards.
I've lost a lot of trust in the X-Box over the weekend. And before you go on a rant about the validity of the concept of "trust," ask yourself the relative value of just one screenshot of Zelda running on the Gamecube. Companies, especially in non-essential industries like gaming, need the trust of their constituents to survive. This may be indicative of a company unable to transistion from a position of dominance and utter monopoly to one where they are as expendable as everyone else.
It's amazing how much the arcade industry brought this upon themselves. If you go into the average arcade during any given day, there are maybe one or two people. More on the weekends, true, but most machines lie dormant for most of the day. There is no additional cost per player (besides maintenence)above and beyond aquiring the unit, so why have a game priced at a dollar (far above what most people are willing to pay) than, say, a busy machine at 25 cents per, along with an arcade *full* of those no-longer priced out people buying pizza and cokes? Maybe I'm missing something here, but the economics seem like they are based around a retail model than a service model.
Furthermore, the economics of redundancy have been too seductive to companies like Capcom. Refining an old game and re-releasing it as new is more profitable than starting over. Of course, this is designed to take money out of the Arcade Operator's pocket, and not the gamer's. Capcom found it alluring to develop games once and put them in both the home and arcade. Of course, this makes the arcade operator redundant and unnecessary. Even if they aren't using the Naomi board, companies make their games "safe" for home conversion, without any fun little interfaces like dials or balls - we'll never see another Marble Madness in this climate. Furthermore, they keep making unoriginal games in an attempt to minimize risk. Of course they, and everyone else in the industry, does this by making their machines the same "style" as everyone else's. I'm starting to see why people are drawn to non-racing sports games - they are the only game in the arcade that doesn't fall into an overexploited genre. When was the last time we had something as original as Bump 'n Jump?
All of these practices cannabalize long-term profitability in exchange for short-term gain. When was the last time you saw an industry respond to lowered demand by raising prices? I'm glad to see that Yamauchi's (gomen ne mr. nintendo if I misspelled your name) long-discussed shakeout is finally happening. Company side, we're going to see companies survive like Konami, and Interactive Light (Kick it pro, Slide it), companies that don't sacrifice design in order to make the home conversion work. Unfortunately, with all of the Capcoms of the world vieing for their meager income, I don't think Arcades have a prayer until they enter into a sort of realistic profit-sharing operation akin to Hollywood Video. Only those companies that realize the player's arcade dollar must be the center of their business model over the long haul will survive.
Certainly Yahoo today is not worth 10 billion dollars, and was never worth 150. Yet when compared to how Amazon and most of the rest of the web industry is doing, isn't Yahoo's profitable status proof enough that people visit portals, and that ad revenue when mixed with online sales can be sufficient to fund a portal? For all the doom and gloom around them the fact that they are breaking even is amazing, and should be applauded.
Besides, no one here was foolish enough to believe a portal could be worth 150 billion dollars, right?
Let's not forget that Playstations have never been the longest-lived pieces of hardware one can purchase. I've personally paid for two replacements and my original. The Playstation 2 looks to be even worse, with shortages forcing an overall drop in manufacturing quality.
If a consumer buys a game and it becomes tied to a specific playstation 2, they will only be able to use that game for three years or so until the hardware needs replacing.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I'm getting a bit jaded in my old age, but isn't this application just a 3D version of the old 320 X 200 at 10fps teleconferencing?
The really impressive part of the whole setup is in the software itself, or so ran the Headline News story shortly ago. The image is not a video feed but a 3D display (behind a flat screen) showing a 3D model generated by the computer. The box makes this model by interpreting on the fly 5 video feeds into one dynamic file.
With all of that wonderful number crunching, what you wind up with is a realtionship that not wholy unlike meeting up with someone whose mollecules are jittering loose in a maximum-security prison visiter's room (plexiglass and all).
And yet after all of this effort, a crisper 3D image could easily be obtained by just using two video feeds with polarized lenses and glasses.
So what better uses could we have for this technology? Half of the system is a way to create realtime 3D objects using video camreas, the other half a 3D projection system based upon computer modeling. That's got to be good for something.
Obviously we could use the model to control the display, creating the opportunity for some really bad games. What about combining with robotics for more accurate telesurgery? Or home object scanners?
What is a live 3D feed good for, anyway?
Why should managing multiple disks require a great deal of hardware knowledge?
I remember, back in my younger days, transferring large files between computers by plugging a little scuzzy drive into the back of a friend's Quadra. You plugged it in, and it worked. An intelligent management system for those disks would be a piece of paper listing out what's on the drives, and who should have access. That simple. One more IT person freed to work on something productive more productive, like a tan.
I'm sorry, but shiny happy tools from apple usually work, and produce shiny happy people.
Release OSX on x86? Why would Apple gut their hardware market, where they make money, for their software market, where they are less profitable? Quite frankly, while I would love to see a version of OSX dual-booting with my other gaming system, it would be a horrific business move on Apple's part. What would keep people from switching over to Windows when Warcraft 3 was released? They would go from being the crem-de-la-crem of fufu computing to another mismarketed underutilized OS2.
Plain and simple, Apple is not a software monopoly like Microsoft. Apple is a hardware monopoly, like Nintendo. Apple is not releasing OSX in order to leverage a copyprotection scheme onto unsuspecting Windows Media users, they are releasing it to sell more ergonomic keyboards, optical trackballs, glowing blue moniters, and exquisitely designed but totally non-upgradable electric pink boxes.
Apple is the hardware. "Stomping" gates would be a wonderful philanthropic move, but it would only dilute the value of Apple's only bargaining chip: their elite status system.
Is there anyone willing to find out what number prime number it is? If anything digital (in theory) can be referred to by its index, it might be interesting to find out if the law applies to an index to the natural prime of the code of the file, like a natural hyperlink. Of course, then we could all memorize one of the factors of the non-prime index, so that one day once the world has been expunged of the evil program we can get together and un-encode it. Of course, we could all just copy it down from the back of our t-shirts...
What is Microsoft selling right now? Screenshots. People must make buying decisions about PS2, Dreamcast, and the New Coming systems based around press - only impressions and screenshots. If microsoft "released some screenshots" and they turned out to be fake, then they were trying to booster future sales based upon flagrangly false information. And we're not talking about adding a lense-flare here - those staged "pictures" look NOTHING like the in-game video.
We're judging the value of the system relative to the others available based upon screenshots like these - if the X-box really could reproduce snow or people as intricate as the original images, it would blow everyone else out of the water. SSX who? I'll wait for amped. Oh wait, Amped looks nothing like that. Those bastards.
I've lost a lot of trust in the X-Box over the weekend. And before you go on a rant about the validity of the concept of "trust," ask yourself the relative value of just one screenshot of Zelda running on the Gamecube. Companies, especially in non-essential industries like gaming, need the trust of their constituents to survive. This may be indicative of a company unable to transistion from a position of dominance and utter monopoly to one where they are as expendable as everyone else.
It's amazing how much the arcade industry brought this upon themselves. If you go into the average arcade during any given day, there are maybe one or two people. More on the weekends, true, but most machines lie dormant for most of the day. There is no additional cost per player (besides maintenence)above and beyond aquiring the unit, so why have a game priced at a dollar (far above what most people are willing to pay) than, say, a busy machine at 25 cents per, along with an arcade *full* of those no-longer priced out people buying pizza and cokes? Maybe I'm missing something here, but the economics seem like they are based around a retail model than a service model. Furthermore, the economics of redundancy have been too seductive to companies like Capcom. Refining an old game and re-releasing it as new is more profitable than starting over. Of course, this is designed to take money out of the Arcade Operator's pocket, and not the gamer's. Capcom found it alluring to develop games once and put them in both the home and arcade. Of course, this makes the arcade operator redundant and unnecessary. Even if they aren't using the Naomi board, companies make their games "safe" for home conversion, without any fun little interfaces like dials or balls - we'll never see another Marble Madness in this climate. Furthermore, they keep making unoriginal games in an attempt to minimize risk. Of course they, and everyone else in the industry, does this by making their machines the same "style" as everyone else's. I'm starting to see why people are drawn to non-racing sports games - they are the only game in the arcade that doesn't fall into an overexploited genre. When was the last time we had something as original as Bump 'n Jump? All of these practices cannabalize long-term profitability in exchange for short-term gain. When was the last time you saw an industry respond to lowered demand by raising prices? I'm glad to see that Yamauchi's (gomen ne mr. nintendo if I misspelled your name) long-discussed shakeout is finally happening. Company side, we're going to see companies survive like Konami, and Interactive Light (Kick it pro, Slide it), companies that don't sacrifice design in order to make the home conversion work. Unfortunately, with all of the Capcoms of the world vieing for their meager income, I don't think Arcades have a prayer until they enter into a sort of realistic profit-sharing operation akin to Hollywood Video. Only those companies that realize the player's arcade dollar must be the center of their business model over the long haul will survive.
Certainly Yahoo today is not worth 10 billion dollars, and was never worth 150. Yet when compared to how Amazon and most of the rest of the web industry is doing, isn't Yahoo's profitable status proof enough that people visit portals, and that ad revenue when mixed with online sales can be sufficient to fund a portal? For all the doom and gloom around them the fact that they are breaking even is amazing, and should be applauded.
Besides, no one here was foolish enough to believe a portal could be worth 150 billion dollars, right?
Let's not forget that Playstations have never been the longest-lived pieces of hardware one can purchase. I've personally paid for two replacements and my original. The Playstation 2 looks to be even worse, with shortages forcing an overall drop in manufacturing quality. If a consumer buys a game and it becomes tied to a specific playstation 2, they will only be able to use that game for three years or so until the hardware needs replacing.