Sony is NOT deliberately manipulating their games or online worlds to make people play longer
Are you sure? When I worked for a game company we deliberately did things to make people play them longer. We made the graphics look nicer, we tinkered with rules to make it challenging without being too hard, we hired people to do a nicer sound track. In short we attempted to make it more fun. Our only incentive was "if they love this one maybe they will notice the next one is by the same people and buy it!"
I'm sure the designers of this game did as well since they have even more incentive, the more months people enjoy the game the longer they will pay $10/month.
(I don't think there is anything wrong with that, just that yes, I'm pretty sure there was manipulation done to make the game more fun, for longer periods of time...I'm sure the people that design board games, card games, and dice games do the same thing, or theme parks)
Also note that "Powerbook G3" technically refers to the Kanga G3
Hmmm, I would have thought "PowerBook G3" would refer to anything that says "PoweBook G3" on the case, especally things that say "PowerBook G3" with nothing in front of or after it, which is exactly what my (er, my wife's) "FireWire" PowerBook G3 says right on the front between the LCD and keyboard where my PowerBook G4 says "PowerBook G4"...
Wish I had thought of this before, but there is another common iBook/TiBook mod other then color/light changing. The old iBook ("toilet seat" iBooks) had a built in handle. Very useful. The new iBook doesn't, no PowerBook ever did. some places sell handle kits fot the TiBook and new iBook. I have one on my TiBook, slightly unwealdy, but way better for carrying then no handle (not cross town carry, for that a backpack is better, but to go from your office to someone else's to show something, or moving from room to room in your house). However if Apple had done it they could have made it from Al and put the TiBook antenna in it. I think a lot of people would pay a modest extra ammount for the handle and better 802.11 reception...even if that made it a BTO option.
because so little Ti is used? Check again my ignorant friend, the casing is a sheet of pure titanium, just like on the wings of aircraft and sattellites.
Yes? And? It is pure Ti, and it is pretty much the only exterior case material, but very little is used. How could that be? Well it is thin! That's right the iBook has maybe a 1/4inch of plastic, and the TiBook has maybe 1/16th of an inch of Ti.
The TiBook while it is very nice does have a few drawbacks. It is physically wider. As a more costly item it may be more of a theft target. Worst of all (to me) it has a whole lot less 802.11 range (the iBook and PowerBook G3 tends to have much better range then most PCMCIA 802.11 cards, the TiBook has somewhat worse range then 802.11 cards). There are a lot of good things about the TiBook though.
I thought the Harley custom program was largely a response to a thriving modification aftermarket. They essentially saw that the demand was there and moved in to take a piece of it.
According to the history channel at least a Harley VP was at a show and saw a bunch of people selling bike mod kits and a light bulb went off. The guy that did the "tron book" bought his kit at a show, so maybe all we need is the right VP going to the show:-)
There aren't very many mod shops for Powerbooks yet. If it becomes a viable business, it would make sense for Apple to try to grab a piece of that pie.
I have no idea how many or few mod shops there are for Apple's (or Wintel hardware). However there was an existing similar business (body shops) for bikes, but computer repair shops pretty much do wholesale part replacements, not repair. So I don't think there is a close enough shop to mutate. Also motorcycles had more interchangeable parts, so you could take some other companies chopper parts and put 'em on a Harley to get a low rider Harley. It would be hard to take a Viao shell and put it on an iBook... (or an iBook shell on a JetBook).
You are right though, if Apple waits for mod shops to become common then they know they have a sure thing. If they decide the demand is there before something proves that it is, well they could be wrong (they could also find out they are right years or decades before it is a "sure thing").
P.S. I think the 2 line laser etching on the iPods does sort of count as factory custom, but it is only on one (er, two) product(s), and only one option. Still it is a start. Or if it sells poorly, an end.
If they had more choices, they'd be ordering parts in even smaller numbers and the prices would be even higher. They need to walk a fine line between having too many choices and being boring
Harley has a "factory custom" program. The dealers don't stock these bikes (or at least they don't expect to sell the ones they stock). They are not cheap (you pay for having custom body work). They are not common (many people may buy them, but very very few will buy their "custom" bike with the exact same set of options). The changes are all cosmetic. A factory custom bike isn't really cheaper then buying stock, and having a local shop do the mods (even though Harley saves by not putting on the original parts that they will just take off and replace).
So why do people buy them? Well it is simpler the finding a reputable skilled local body shop to do it, and you keep the warranty. There are some mods I would do to my TiBook (external antenna port, different color logo, maybe some other things) except I want to keep the warranty. I'm sure a lot of people would pay extra (and since they are already buying Apple, pay a lot extra for a custom, maybe not one of a kind, but could be the only one in the state set of mods).
Yes, I know I pushed an old lady down the steps, but if you send me to jail I won't be able to drink beer, hang at the local bar, and work on my hot rod!
A device that's meant to be portable should be durable, and I'm afraid that while plastics have made great strides in impact resistance, for sheer maleability (sp?) of impact and ability to stay in one piece, alloys in use today still win hands down.
Metal is durable, I'll give you that. However the metal used in laptops tends to be chosen to be light so you get very little of it. I doubt the Ti book is more durable then the iBook for example because so little Ti is used. More importantly high impact plastics tend too dissipate more of the force then metal. I don't have lots of impact experience with laptops, but with metal cameras you can get some dings and keep going, but you can also get some that transmit enough force to the camera innards that even though the body has not shattered the camera is dead. With plastic camera you tend to not manage to break the innards without breaking the body. The (better) plastics can take a whole lot of impact. I would rather use the plastic EOS-3 to hammer nails then the metal EOS-1v...
Then I picked one up and played with it.
Well the metals frequently feel better then plastics. Of corse rubber is frequently even more tactile. None of that speaks to how durable the thing is though.
ReplayTV has wireless distribution via 802.11b? Moxi demoed that at CES. ReplayTV already has the ability to view still images and play MP3s and DVDs? Moxi demoed those features at CES.
Well it uses IP and ethernet, so if you blow $100~$200 on another 802.11 access point, yeah, sure. Er, to the extent it has an distribution at all (as I understand it you have to "send" the show from one unit, and accept it on the other, there isn't an ability to "pretend all the stuff on that Replay over there is all yours" -- which I think the MOXI does have). Of corse the MOXI still doesn't have what I want. You should be able to combine multiple units to transparently get multiple tuners (otherwise if you own say two TiVos you have the schedule things on them yourself TiVo#2 doesn't know that it found a show TiVo#1 recorded two days ago so it should record this less important show that neither TiVo got yet...which is all stuff a single TiVo would do already).
The other thing that is a shame is MOXI isn't really talking about the core PVR features. How good is it at tracking shows? How good is it at resolving conflicts the way you want? How good is it at letting you know what it will do over the next few days, or why it won't get a show you want? Those are all things TiVo does stunningly well, which is why I prefer it to the Reply 4000 even though the 4000 can do way cooler things with the shows if it manages to record them. Likewise, I don't care that the MOXI can wirelessly send shows to my upstairs TV (even if I had one) if it can't actually record what I want! I'm not saying the MOXI will be bad at it, just that them not talking about that kind of feature makes me a little hesitant about the thing.
I'm surprised that given all the interest from the Open Source community that a OSS based PVR isn't being worked on?
Getting a lot of guide data in machine readable form is kind of hinkey (you can get it from web sites, probably violating their TOS, and more over if a whole bunch of people start doing it they will just start making the HTML really hard to parse)...plus there is a ton of polish on things like the TiVo...plus the existing PVRs are pretty cheap, cheaper then an MPEG encoder on a PCI card plus a hard drive...plus all the smart folks are out hacking ethernet cards into the TiVo already so they can suck all the data they want off it, and schedule programming form the web already:-)
Oh yeah, plus I saw about 3 such projects a year or so ago. Don't know where they are now though.
Re:Doesn't it say something about society?
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AdCritic To Return
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· Score: 2
Yes, I think its absolutely ridiculous that advertisements have become a form of entertainment. Of course,/. appeals to the yuppie generation, where materialism means a lot, and hence, advertisment becomes an inherent part of their life.
What does materialism have to do with it? Most of the ads I like are for products I neither own, nor intend to -- for example Mitsu cars, I like the "mini music video" feel they have, but I don't like the cars. I like the VW bug comercials too, but I'm not in the market for that car, and my wife happens to hate the bug. I like the smartbeep comercial, but I'm not about to buy a pager, and they don't sell in my area either.
People here at/. complain about web banners, popups, popunders, etc. but they go giddy when they get to watch TV commericials. Some are willing to pay money to watch advertisements. How does that make any sense? Of course that's not that surprising when you can see t-shirts everywhere advertising nike, armani, ck, etc, for 20-30 bucks a pop. Simply calling a form of advertisement by a different name - fashion - and people are willing to pay.
Well when you are forced to watch them they are intrrupting whatever it is you were looking for. When you go look for them they are what you wanted. If you are forced to watch them you see the ones you hate (Oxy Clean anyone?) along with the ones that are cool. If you seek them out you only watch the ones you like (or have some chance of liking).
Check out adbusters [adbusters.org] for some good critical views on advertisments and over-commercialization.
Been there. My life is slightly better since killing most junk mail, and using a TiVo to skip most TV ads, but there are still a few I do like to see.
Ok, I'm just rather amazed at the concept that you can't give American youngsters any responsibility at all until they move away from their parents' house and have to take the enormous burden of responsibility in a very short time. I believe it's not as prevalent here in Finland where I live, though it can be seen.
Most parents give their kids more responsibility and independence as they get closer to collage age (a rather large chunk of it comes when you get to driving age, and another chunk when you take a job for "real" pay, and another chunk if you manage to earn enough for your own car...or are gifted one). Still there is a rather huge step from "living at home going to high school, mostly trusted" to "living at collage and totally trusted". It's not surprising lots of people who never skipped a class in high school skip a ton of classes in collage. Or do drugs for the first time there. Or all manner of less then ideal things. Not because collage students are inherently irresponsible, but because they have gone from "a little" responsible to totally responsible in a single day. If the change were more gradual the screw ups would be smaller (I think).
Though I must say it seems to a foreigner like me to fit well in the mentality of taking some values like nationalism as granted (well, here in Finland we don't for example pledge allegiance to the flag in school; You still do it over there, don't you? In fact I have yet to see a Finnish school with a flag inside, except on Finnish independence day celebrations and such).
At least where I grew up we had to stop because "One nation under God" was promoting religion which the US government is not allowed to do.
I think my parents had a rather balanced approach regarding my privacy - sometimes I felt they were too intrusive, and in retrospect I'm *really* happy I sometimes rebelled.
I got most of my privacy after I learned how to drive. Somewhat more after I managed to buy my own car (they were fairly permissive on what I could borrow theirs for, so it wasn't a huge leap), and then the rest of it when I moved out. As far as I know my parents never searched my room...or at least they never commented on my porno collection, and I don't think I had anything else they would have objected too.
People are always worried about region codes, but I've yet to run into a movie I want that is for another reigon. Quit your complaining and go buy a DVD player.
Maybe other people have different taste from you? Lots of Anime is not in R1. Buffy wasn't available in R1 until about two years after it was available in the UK.
The message sent was clear: Software developers today are more interested in making a game look pretty then givig it guts.
As a former CoinOp game developer I have to say the game developers do still care strongly about game play (er, they use to when I did it), but management didn't. More over the users frequently didn't, and since they pay the bills, well, frequently you follow their wishes.
Or you quit and program something else for a living.
While nostalgia for old classic computer games might be cool in sort of a "I remember when..." way, PLAY THEM. Go to the Underdogs site and download them and play them. You will soon see that despite rosy-colored memories of how much fun you had playing Empire or Sword of Aragon, suddenly it's apparent that, while great games for their time, our expectations are tremendously higher
Well there is some of that. Rogue's ASCII graphics just don't stand up. I don't get the same fear in the pit of my stomach when the "K" comes into the room where I was hoping to recover. On the other hand CivI can still cause a "lost weekend"...
I think there are two things going on. One is nostalgia (esp for lost forms like the text adventure), and playing those might not make the grade anymore. The other is you are looking at 20+ years of computer games and picking a handful of the best ones, then you compare them with whatever has been around for in the last few months...well of corse master peaces of the past can trump a few randomly chosen games. They might not beat the best game of the year though. Even a Civ lover has to admit that the new Civ might be better then the original! Then again they might beat the best game of the year, as a Civ lover I think Civ won out for about a decade.
Ack, I just want a nice PERMANENT (and cheap!) email address
I always thought pobox.com was a good service for that. Never used 'em though, never quite needed what they offered.
However one service I do use for very not-permanent addresses is Spam Gourmet which lets you make as many limited life addresses as you like (you can extend their life if you want). The only forward to something else though. I use them for pretty much all web forms and Usenet posts.
It is interesting that Apple offers Bluetooth as a USB dongle rather than have it built-in so at least there is some seperation between the Airport (802.11b) antenna which is built into the computer/laptop and the Bluetooth unit.
Or maybe it is just that they figure people won't buy a whole new computer just to get it? I expect future Apple products will build the BT module in (unless there is basically zero demand).
Well that and if you put a Blue Tooth antenna inside a TiBook I bet it has a range of about 3 inches:-)
Re:Performance - doesn't anyone care?
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Serial ATA Coming
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SCSI devices cant talk to eachother without utilizing CPU power either, one of the differences is indeed that data has to go through memory
SCSI devices can talk to each other, not just to a "SCSI CPU Device". The very very seldom do. When someone added the experimental splice system call to Ultrix (or was it DIGITAL Unix at the time? or maybe NetBSD/Alpha) they did support SCSI disk to tape and disk to disk copies. As far as I know that was the first and last time it was done in any "common" OS.
Both SCSI and ATA have to be interrupted when the drives have to be told which blocks of data have to go where, the SCSI drive has no concept of a filesystem after all
That is true, what the splice code did was on the read side look at the block numbers in the inode, and the first and second (and third if that FFS used it) level indirect block tables. On the write side to a tape device it was trivial, for another disk device it had to use the normal FFS code to find space for new blocks, which caused a normal read of the free block map, and normal writes to the block map and the block (indirect) tables for the inode (and the cache for the block to be written had to be invalidated). However in both cases the data writes went from device to device without going through main memory.
The speed up from skipping the CPU/memory step was modest. The speed up from being able to do the reads and writes somewhat out of order was less modest. The speed up or slowdown from not getting the recently written blocks in the block cache was frequently larger then the other effects.
As it turned out the larger win for splice was in dealing with network I/O and skipping the user-to-user context switches, which may be why neither Linux nor the BSD's implement their splice-like calls (sendfile I think) in a way that skips the CPU, they just avoid user-to-user context switches.
If the experiment was re-done it might be different, the memory wall keeps getting larger, and modern CPUs throw away a lot more pending work then the old Alpha did.
All this stuff was written up in one of the mid-90's Usenix reports if you want to read it in more detail then I remember.
The people running the FW working group seem to disagree, at the very least they are intent on not tracking all of the future SCSI logical changes, nor are the logical changes for FireWire being funneled back into "non serial" SCSI.
Other then that I agree, FireWire does seem really a whole like like SCSI with a different transport, hot plug, and support for bandwidth and timeslice reservation...
Re:Serial ATA could REALLY cut into SCSI sales
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Serial ATA Coming
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there is a single SCSI driver, based on the identity of your SCSI controller. All other SCSI devices attached to the bus are accessed using this driver. this has never really been true under Windows or MacOS
Er, that is exactly how MacOS X does it, and I think how Mac OS prior to OSX also did it.
Re:SerialATA doesn't seem very advanced
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Serial ATA Coming
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· Score: 2
Also for the number of devices, since it's now PTP connections, it's relatively agnostic as to the number of devices since it no longer fits into the old model of channels. I still haven't found specific references for the number of devices, but the Maxtor presentation has a picture of a SATA drop-in PCI card with 6 SATA connectors.
But...how is a 6 drive SATA controller 100% software compatible with a older ATA spec that supported exactly two drives? Does the one SATA controller show up as 3 (or six) "normal" ATA controllers? Or is 100% really 100% except when you have more then two devices, send more then X bps, it is a day ending in Y, or the pope is waring a funny hat?
And isn't it sad that "requires no changes to Windows" has started being a major hardware feature?
Still, I would rather have a standard for a fast way to connect any device to my computer rather than USB2/firewire + SATA. Why not just work on cranking up the speed on existing standards instead of reinventing the wheel (with a kludge based on ATA)?
I share the desire for fewer interface types, but there are different tradeoffs to make with low speed (and frequently low cost required) devices like keyboards, mice and joysticks then with high speed devices (many network connections, hard drives, DVD players, displays)...and yet another set of isosocrnous devices (or whatever the term for latency intolerant is...like sound devices).
Making one standard that does it all will make it really complex (hi USB2!) and can make it costly to implement. I don't think USB2 will suffer in small devices because of how hubs have to work you can make the cheap devices cheap and the ones that have to be expensive can be expensive...except the hubs will be more costly because they are less like the simple bus USB1.x hubs could be and more like little rate converting ethernet switches.
Making two standards (say USB1.x and FireWire) have lots of political problems, but I think would have been simpler to deal with...unfortunetly that doesn't look like it will happen. Ah well, at least I can hope that USB2 and SATA don't suck more then FireWire (and I can wonder if USB2 will cut the legs out from under SATA since it might be "enough" to take the low end of the market leaving SATA in the same place ATA left SCSI...)
have you seen the controllers? some are single chip solutions (literally, just a single small chip).
even though the spec may be verbose, the silicon needed to support it isn't any bigger than a regular ide controller (roughly).
That is in part because a very large part of what the spec covers is stuff the hardware doesn't care about (contents of the "packets" vs. how to move them around). The FW chip on a PowerBook doesn't know how to send a "I'm not on the bus" packet out, or what to do with one when it comes in (other then what it does with all incoming packets - DMA it into memory and pull the interrupt line high so the OS can come by later and sniff at it).
The other reason it is huge is specs tend to be written huge, Internet RFCs are a marvel of brevity if you compare them to what most standards bodies produce (except the IPsec ones which are a lot closer to normal standards documents...).
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure? When I worked for a game company we deliberately did things to make people play them longer. We made the graphics look nicer, we tinkered with rules to make it challenging without being too hard, we hired people to do a nicer sound track. In short we attempted to make it more fun. Our only incentive was "if they love this one maybe they will notice the next one is by the same people and buy it!"
I'm sure the designers of this game did as well since they have even more incentive, the more months people enjoy the game the longer they will pay $10/month.
(I don't think there is anything wrong with that, just that yes, I'm pretty sure there was manipulation done to make the game more fun, for longer periods of time...I'm sure the people that design board games, card games, and dice games do the same thing, or theme parks)
Hmmm, I would have thought "PowerBook G3" would refer to anything that says "PoweBook G3" on the case, especally things that say "PowerBook G3" with nothing in front of or after it, which is exactly what my (er, my wife's) "FireWire" PowerBook G3 says right on the front between the LCD and keyboard where my PowerBook G4 says "PowerBook G4"...
Bull, at the very least the FireWire G3 had built in airport (or at least an internal slot for it, and an internal antenna).
I'll bet you $100 I can produce one. Or $3000. Whatever.
Wish I had thought of this before, but there is another common iBook/TiBook mod other then color/light changing. The old iBook ("toilet seat" iBooks) had a built in handle. Very useful. The new iBook doesn't, no PowerBook ever did. some places sell handle kits fot the TiBook and new iBook. I have one on my TiBook, slightly unwealdy, but way better for carrying then no handle (not cross town carry, for that a backpack is better, but to go from your office to someone else's to show something, or moving from room to room in your house). However if Apple had done it they could have made it from Al and put the TiBook antenna in it. I think a lot of people would pay a modest extra ammount for the handle and better 802.11 reception...even if that made it a BTO option.
Yes? And? It is pure Ti, and it is pretty much the only exterior case material, but very little is used. How could that be? Well it is thin ! That's right the iBook has maybe a 1/4inch of plastic, and the TiBook has maybe 1/16th of an inch of Ti.
The TiBook while it is very nice does have a few drawbacks. It is physically wider. As a more costly item it may be more of a theft target. Worst of all (to me) it has a whole lot less 802.11 range (the iBook and PowerBook G3 tends to have much better range then most PCMCIA 802.11 cards, the TiBook has somewhat worse range then 802.11 cards). There are a lot of good things about the TiBook though.
According to the history channel at least a Harley VP was at a show and saw a bunch of people selling bike mod kits and a light bulb went off. The guy that did the "tron book" bought his kit at a show, so maybe all we need is the right VP going to the show :-)
I have no idea how many or few mod shops there are for Apple's (or Wintel hardware). However there was an existing similar business (body shops) for bikes, but computer repair shops pretty much do wholesale part replacements, not repair. So I don't think there is a close enough shop to mutate. Also motorcycles had more interchangeable parts, so you could take some other companies chopper parts and put 'em on a Harley to get a low rider Harley. It would be hard to take a Viao shell and put it on an iBook... (or an iBook shell on a JetBook).
You are right though, if Apple waits for mod shops to become common then they know they have a sure thing. If they decide the demand is there before something proves that it is, well they could be wrong (they could also find out they are right years or decades before it is a "sure thing").
P.S. I think the 2 line laser etching on the iPods does sort of count as factory custom, but it is only on one (er, two) product(s), and only one option. Still it is a start. Or if it sells poorly, an end.
Harley has a "factory custom" program. The dealers don't stock these bikes (or at least they don't expect to sell the ones they stock). They are not cheap (you pay for having custom body work). They are not common (many people may buy them, but very very few will buy their "custom" bike with the exact same set of options). The changes are all cosmetic. A factory custom bike isn't really cheaper then buying stock, and having a local shop do the mods (even though Harley saves by not putting on the original parts that they will just take off and replace).
So why do people buy them? Well it is simpler the finding a reputable skilled local body shop to do it, and you keep the warranty. There are some mods I would do to my TiBook (external antenna port, different color logo, maybe some other things) except I want to keep the warranty. I'm sure a lot of people would pay extra (and since they are already buying Apple, pay a lot extra for a custom, maybe not one of a kind, but could be the only one in the state set of mods).
Yes, I know I pushed an old lady down the steps, but if you send me to jail I won't be able to drink beer, hang at the local bar, and work on my hot rod!
What kind of defense is that?
Metal is durable, I'll give you that. However the metal used in laptops tends to be chosen to be light so you get very little of it. I doubt the Ti book is more durable then the iBook for example because so little Ti is used. More importantly high impact plastics tend too dissipate more of the force then metal. I don't have lots of impact experience with laptops, but with metal cameras you can get some dings and keep going, but you can also get some that transmit enough force to the camera innards that even though the body has not shattered the camera is dead. With plastic camera you tend to not manage to break the innards without breaking the body. The (better) plastics can take a whole lot of impact. I would rather use the plastic EOS-3 to hammer nails then the metal EOS-1v...
Well the metals frequently feel better then plastics. Of corse rubber is frequently even more tactile. None of that speaks to how durable the thing is though.
Well it uses IP and ethernet, so if you blow $100~$200 on another 802.11 access point, yeah, sure. Er, to the extent it has an distribution at all (as I understand it you have to "send" the show from one unit, and accept it on the other, there isn't an ability to "pretend all the stuff on that Replay over there is all yours" -- which I think the MOXI does have). Of corse the MOXI still doesn't have what I want. You should be able to combine multiple units to transparently get multiple tuners (otherwise if you own say two TiVos you have the schedule things on them yourself TiVo#2 doesn't know that it found a show TiVo#1 recorded two days ago so it should record this less important show that neither TiVo got yet...which is all stuff a single TiVo would do already).
The other thing that is a shame is MOXI isn't really talking about the core PVR features. How good is it at tracking shows? How good is it at resolving conflicts the way you want? How good is it at letting you know what it will do over the next few days, or why it won't get a show you want? Those are all things TiVo does stunningly well, which is why I prefer it to the Reply 4000 even though the 4000 can do way cooler things with the shows if it manages to record them. Likewise, I don't care that the MOXI can wirelessly send shows to my upstairs TV (even if I had one) if it can't actually record what I want! I'm not saying the MOXI will be bad at it, just that them not talking about that kind of feature makes me a little hesitant about the thing.
Getting a lot of guide data in machine readable form is kind of hinkey (you can get it from web sites, probably violating their TOS, and more over if a whole bunch of people start doing it they will just start making the HTML really hard to parse)...plus there is a ton of polish on things like the TiVo...plus the existing PVRs are pretty cheap, cheaper then an MPEG encoder on a PCI card plus a hard drive...plus all the smart folks are out hacking ethernet cards into the TiVo already so they can suck all the data they want off it, and schedule programming form the web already :-)
Oh yeah, plus I saw about 3 such projects a year or so ago. Don't know where they are now though.
What does materialism have to do with it? Most of the ads I like are for products I neither own, nor intend to -- for example Mitsu cars, I like the "mini music video" feel they have, but I don't like the cars. I like the VW bug comercials too, but I'm not in the market for that car, and my wife happens to hate the bug. I like the smartbeep comercial, but I'm not about to buy a pager, and they don't sell in my area either.
Well when you are forced to watch them they are intrrupting whatever it is you were looking for. When you go look for them they are what you wanted. If you are forced to watch them you see the ones you hate (Oxy Clean anyone?) along with the ones that are cool. If you seek them out you only watch the ones you like (or have some chance of liking).
Been there. My life is slightly better since killing most junk mail, and using a TiVo to skip most TV ads, but there are still a few I do like to see.
Most parents give their kids more responsibility and independence as they get closer to collage age (a rather large chunk of it comes when you get to driving age, and another chunk when you take a job for "real" pay, and another chunk if you manage to earn enough for your own car...or are gifted one). Still there is a rather huge step from "living at home going to high school, mostly trusted" to "living at collage and totally trusted". It's not surprising lots of people who never skipped a class in high school skip a ton of classes in collage. Or do drugs for the first time there. Or all manner of less then ideal things. Not because collage students are inherently irresponsible, but because they have gone from "a little" responsible to totally responsible in a single day. If the change were more gradual the screw ups would be smaller (I think).
At least where I grew up we had to stop because "One nation under God" was promoting religion which the US government is not allowed to do.
I got most of my privacy after I learned how to drive. Somewhat more after I managed to buy my own car (they were fairly permissive on what I could borrow theirs for, so it wasn't a huge leap), and then the rest of it when I moved out. As far as I know my parents never searched my room...or at least they never commented on my porno collection, and I don't think I had anything else they would have objected too.
Maybe other people have different taste from you? Lots of Anime is not in R1. Buffy wasn't available in R1 until about two years after it was available in the UK.
As a former CoinOp game developer I have to say the game developers do still care strongly about game play (er, they use to when I did it), but management didn't. More over the users frequently didn't, and since they pay the bills, well, frequently you follow their wishes.
Or you quit and program something else for a living.
Well there is some of that. Rogue's ASCII graphics just don't stand up. I don't get the same fear in the pit of my stomach when the "K" comes into the room where I was hoping to recover. On the other hand CivI can still cause a "lost weekend"...
I think there are two things going on. One is nostalgia (esp for lost forms like the text adventure), and playing those might not make the grade anymore. The other is you are looking at 20+ years of computer games and picking a handful of the best ones, then you compare them with whatever has been around for in the last few months...well of corse master peaces of the past can trump a few randomly chosen games. They might not beat the best game of the year though. Even a Civ lover has to admit that the new Civ might be better then the original! Then again they might beat the best game of the year, as a Civ lover I think Civ won out for about a decade.
I always thought pobox.com was a good service for that. Never used 'em though, never quite needed what they offered.
However one service I do use for very not-permanent addresses is Spam Gourmet which lets you make as many limited life addresses as you like (you can extend their life if you want). The only forward to something else though. I use them for pretty much all web forms and Usenet posts.
Or maybe it is just that they figure people won't buy a whole new computer just to get it? I expect future Apple products will build the BT module in (unless there is basically zero demand).
Well that and if you put a Blue Tooth antenna inside a TiBook I bet it has a range of about 3 inches :-)
SCSI devices can talk to each other, not just to a "SCSI CPU Device". The very very seldom do. When someone added the experimental splice system call to Ultrix (or was it DIGITAL Unix at the time? or maybe NetBSD/Alpha) they did support SCSI disk to tape and disk to disk copies. As far as I know that was the first and last time it was done in any "common" OS.
That is true, what the splice code did was on the read side look at the block numbers in the inode, and the first and second (and third if that FFS used it) level indirect block tables. On the write side to a tape device it was trivial, for another disk device it had to use the normal FFS code to find space for new blocks, which caused a normal read of the free block map, and normal writes to the block map and the block (indirect) tables for the inode (and the cache for the block to be written had to be invalidated). However in both cases the data writes went from device to device without going through main memory.
The speed up from skipping the CPU/memory step was modest. The speed up from being able to do the reads and writes somewhat out of order was less modest. The speed up or slowdown from not getting the recently written blocks in the block cache was frequently larger then the other effects.
As it turned out the larger win for splice was in dealing with network I/O and skipping the user-to-user context switches, which may be why neither Linux nor the BSD's implement their splice-like calls (sendfile I think) in a way that skips the CPU, they just avoid user-to-user context switches.
If the experiment was re-done it might be different, the memory wall keeps getting larger, and modern CPUs throw away a lot more pending work then the old Alpha did.
All this stuff was written up in one of the mid-90's Usenix reports if you want to read it in more detail then I remember.
The people running the FW working group seem to disagree, at the very least they are intent on not tracking all of the future SCSI logical changes, nor are the logical changes for FireWire being funneled back into "non serial" SCSI.
Other then that I agree, FireWire does seem really a whole like like SCSI with a different transport, hot plug, and support for bandwidth and timeslice reservation...
Er, that is exactly how MacOS X does it, and I think how Mac OS prior to OSX also did it.
But...how is a 6 drive SATA controller 100% software compatible with a older ATA spec that supported exactly two drives? Does the one SATA controller show up as 3 (or six) "normal" ATA controllers? Or is 100% really 100% except when you have more then two devices, send more then X bps, it is a day ending in Y, or the pope is waring a funny hat?
And isn't it sad that "requires no changes to Windows" has started being a major hardware feature?
I share the desire for fewer interface types, but there are different tradeoffs to make with low speed (and frequently low cost required) devices like keyboards, mice and joysticks then with high speed devices (many network connections, hard drives, DVD players, displays)...and yet another set of isosocrnous devices (or whatever the term for latency intolerant is...like sound devices).
Making one standard that does it all will make it really complex (hi USB2!) and can make it costly to implement. I don't think USB2 will suffer in small devices because of how hubs have to work you can make the cheap devices cheap and the ones that have to be expensive can be expensive...except the hubs will be more costly because they are less like the simple bus USB1.x hubs could be and more like little rate converting ethernet switches.
Making two standards (say USB1.x and FireWire) have lots of political problems, but I think would have been simpler to deal with...unfortunetly that doesn't look like it will happen. Ah well, at least I can hope that USB2 and SATA don't suck more then FireWire (and I can wonder if USB2 will cut the legs out from under SATA since it might be "enough" to take the low end of the market leaving SATA in the same place ATA left SCSI...)
That is in part because a very large part of what the spec covers is stuff the hardware doesn't care about (contents of the "packets" vs. how to move them around). The FW chip on a PowerBook doesn't know how to send a "I'm not on the bus" packet out, or what to do with one when it comes in (other then what it does with all incoming packets - DMA it into memory and pull the interrupt line high so the OS can come by later and sniff at it).
The other reason it is huge is specs tend to be written huge, Internet RFCs are a marvel of brevity if you compare them to what most standards bodies produce (except the IPsec ones which are a lot closer to normal standards documents...).