A few years ago while I was still in college, I wrote a paper for my computer ethics class on the subject of abandonware. In the course of my research I stumbled across some old games that I'd never played as a kid; the first game in the Monkey Island series, and the first three Quest for Glory titles. Those games were positively *ancient*. Someone already mentioned in the comments that these games are considered classics (bringing back memories and whatnot), but I thought the games were compelling, even without having played them as a kid. I remember taking a three week break from Unreal Tournament to play through QFGII for the first time. I thought it was great, despite the EGA graphics and text parser. That is evidence enough for me that vintage games can have more than just nostalgia value.
Actually part of the problem with this device is that it *can't* play just any h.264. The resolution has to postage-stamp sized for it to work. 320x240 is the max supported for h264, or 480x480 for more basic MPEG4. That's absurd...it's even smaller than an OS X icon!
Microsoft's OGL wrapper for DirectX does add a lot of overhead, but it doesn't matter - hardly anyone uses that. Normally under Windows you use the OpenGL implementation that comes from the graphics chipset manufacturer. NVIDIA, ATI, 3DLabs, etc. all have their own, which can be very fast without any sort of DirectX involvement. These are generally much more up to data than MS OGL anyway.
So the headline reads that this is the worlds smallest mp3 player... yet if I take the usb cap off my ipod shuffle, it's volume is measurably less than that of the DAH-1500. Does that mean I've had the world's smallest mp3 player since february, and nobody's come out with anything smaller?
This thing is almost exactly the same volume as the ipod shuffle (though a cube is arguably an inferior form factor), and requires a cable to connect it to a computer instead of having a built-in USB plug.
That means it's not as useful as a self-contained portable storage device.
The music sounds great for me. Probably because I'm using a $3000 Monster cat5 cable to connect to the internet, through a JPS Labs broadband router, drawing power from an Audio Magic Clairvoyant AC Adapter.
Will this new architecture be extensible enough that the primitive drawing routines can be implemented as fragment programs (like Quartz 2D Extreme)? There was a huge speedup for those that enabled it on OS X and I'm sure X11 could reap the same benefits. It makes a lot of sense to offload drawing and compositing to the GPU, but I couldn't find any reference to it in the article.
Re:Speed up the interface a bit!
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Just a Phone?
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So if I want to save the hearing in my left ear by opening up the passenger side window instead...I'm supposed to reach over there and turn a crank while I'm driving? It's a lot safer to just hit a switch and let the window roll down on it's own. And a manual transmission? Taking my hand off the wheel to change gears, and then screwing with the clutch...it's just another distraction I don't need when I should be concentrating on not being a road hazard. If really need to downshift going downhill or something, my Passat's automatic transmission still lets me do that anyway.
The "bland" rounded shape you were taking about also cuts down on noise and wind resistance, which saves on gas.
It sounds like you'd rather be driving around in some 1970's beatermobile. Big, obnoxious, no power steering, abs or airbags... just the sort of thing that'll take your genes out of the pool.
I'd sure like to see you put DRMd WMA music on your player if you aren't running Windows. Where are you going to get the decryption key?
At least with iTunes, you have more control over the music than you'd have just dumping the files there manually. The iPod preserves your desired volume and equalizer settings for each song, along with some other nifty tweaks like custom time in/out points.
So, what about music that can't be performed live? Techno isn't generally, or any other sort of music where a single person plays more than one instrument track. Don't forget that a lot of music that is still being sold has even outlived it's performers.
If the cashier had been correct and there never existed a legal 2 dollar bill, then the man with fake $2 bills would not be committing a crime by using them. You can't counterfeit a bill that doesn't exist. That's how people can pass a 3 dollar "bill" without breaking the law; the cashier would just unknowingly make a barter trade for the purchase.
As a game developer you should know that CPU development has jack to do with modern games.
Why is it then, in a modern game like half-life 2, my frame rate is silky-smooth until an explosion sets a lot of objects in motion? The same models are still being drawn on screen only they're now part of a real-time kinematics simulation. That stuff is very computationally and memory intensive. Pretty soon you'll start seeing simulated sound effects (that's right, sound with no prerecorded samples), and NN controlled behavior. GPU-bound games are so 1990s.
Actually the lack of Firewire 800 is a deal-breaker for me. Without it, there is no way to get any kind of high-speed mass storage connected to the thing. It uses a laptop-grade (ie; slow) HD and has no gigabit for connecting to a shared RAID.
This happened to me once, except the janitor didn't have to unplug anything. What he did was plug the floor waxer into an open socket on the UPS that fed our editorial system. The waxer overloaded the power supply and it shut down. It took us a while to determine exactly why the UPS failed since the diagnostics said everything was ok. Then we noticed how clean the floor was...
I have a lot of respect for what they are trying to do with Mindawn, but what advantage do they have over other non-drm download services? For example, Magnatune has a larger selection, about a dozen different formats and bit rates available, and you can volunteer to pay more or less for an album based on how much you think it's worth. I can't even buy a track off Mindawn and put it on my MP3 player without reencoding it. What's the point of non-DRMed music if you can't get it in a popular format?
Office 2004 for OS X already does something similiar with pallets. Instead of blurring (thus making the windows unreadable), it makes the pallets increasingly transparent after several seconds to a few minutes of disuse. They only become about 25% opaque, so the pallets are still faintly readable but they don't obscure the document as you're working. Moving the mouse cursor over a pallette instantly brings it back to full opacity and resets the fade timer.
I'd really like something such as this as an OS-wide service so Adobe apps could use it. When laying out a page in InDesign, for example, it's a huge problem having a million pallets scattered around that prevent you from reading parts of the layout you're working on.
"It took him a while to die," Dr. Klamut said. "She must have stabbed him 40 to 80 times with that iPod. His death was not instantaneous, that's for sure"
We have some proprietary hardware on the PCs at work that require certain clock speeds. So we have a practical need for underclocking a CPU. In the past we've purchased high end desktops only to underclock them to like 533MHz in order to make them work.
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A few years ago while I was still in college, I wrote a paper for my computer ethics class on the subject of abandonware. In the course of my research I stumbled across some old games that I'd never played as a kid; the first game in the Monkey Island series, and the first three Quest for Glory titles. Those games were positively *ancient*. Someone already mentioned in the comments that these games are considered classics (bringing back memories and whatnot), but I thought the games were compelling, even without having played them as a kid. I remember taking a three week break from Unreal Tournament to play through QFGII for the first time. I thought it was great, despite the EGA graphics and text parser. That is evidence enough for me that vintage games can have more than just nostalgia value.
Actually part of the problem with this device is that it *can't* play just any h.264. The resolution has to postage-stamp sized for it to work. 320x240 is the max supported for h264, or 480x480 for more basic MPEG4. That's absurd...it's even smaller than an OS X icon!
I don't think that $100 million is quite enough to advertise a product that has almost no new features...
Microsoft's OGL wrapper for DirectX does add a lot of overhead, but it doesn't matter - hardly anyone uses that. Normally under Windows you use the OpenGL implementation that comes from the graphics chipset manufacturer. NVIDIA, ATI, 3DLabs, etc. all have their own, which can be very fast without any sort of DirectX involvement. These are generally much more up to data than MS OGL anyway.
...everything hasn't gone to eDonkey yet!
So the headline reads that this is the worlds smallest mp3 player... yet if I take the usb cap off my ipod shuffle, it's volume is measurably less than that of the DAH-1500. Does that mean I've had the world's smallest mp3 player since february, and nobody's come out with anything smaller?
This thing is almost exactly the same volume as the ipod shuffle (though a cube is arguably an inferior form factor), and requires a cable to connect it to a computer instead of having a built-in USB plug.
That means it's not as useful as a self-contained portable storage device.
The music sounds great for me. Probably because I'm using a $3000 Monster cat5 cable to connect to the internet, through a JPS Labs broadband router, drawing power from an Audio Magic Clairvoyant AC Adapter.
Will this new architecture be extensible enough that the primitive drawing routines can be implemented as fragment programs (like Quartz 2D Extreme)? There was a huge speedup for those that enabled it on OS X and I'm sure X11 could reap the same benefits. It makes a lot of sense to offload drawing and compositing to the GPU, but I couldn't find any reference to it in the article.
So if I want to save the hearing in my left ear by opening up the passenger side window instead...I'm supposed to reach over there and turn a crank while I'm driving? It's a lot safer to just hit a switch and let the window roll down on it's own. And a manual transmission? Taking my hand off the wheel to change gears, and then screwing with the clutch...it's just another distraction I don't need when I should be concentrating on not being a road hazard. If really need to downshift going downhill or something, my Passat's automatic transmission still lets me do that anyway.
The "bland" rounded shape you were taking about also cuts down on noise and wind resistance, which saves on gas.
It sounds like you'd rather be driving around in some 1970's beatermobile. Big, obnoxious, no power steering, abs or airbags... just the sort of thing that'll take your genes out of the pool.
Does the Mac mini have an inertial sensor like the PowerBooks?
If so, is it accurate enough that I use one of these modded Mac minis as a guidance system for an intercontinental ballistic missile?
I'd sure like to see you put DRMd WMA music on your player if you aren't running Windows. Where are you going to get the decryption key?
At least with iTunes, you have more control over the music than you'd have just dumping the files there manually. The iPod preserves your desired volume and equalizer settings for each song, along with some other nifty tweaks like custom time in/out points.
So, what about music that can't be performed live? Techno isn't generally, or any other sort of music where a single person plays more than one instrument track. Don't forget that a lot of music that is still being sold has even outlived it's performers.
"theft by deception"?
You mean I can have used car dealers arrested too?
No, I think it was meant to be a radio drama originally. The books were adaptations that came later.
Now you'd think that adapting a radio program to a movie would be cake...just add visuals. Apparently that is not the case.
If the cashier had been correct and there never existed a legal 2 dollar bill, then the man with fake $2 bills would not be committing a crime by using them. You can't counterfeit a bill that doesn't exist. That's how people can pass a 3 dollar "bill" without breaking the law; the cashier would just unknowingly make a barter trade for the purchase.
As a game developer you should know that CPU development has jack to do with modern games.
Why is it then, in a modern game like half-life 2, my frame rate is silky-smooth until an explosion sets a lot of objects in motion? The same models are still being drawn on screen only they're now part of a real-time kinematics simulation. That stuff is very computationally and memory intensive. Pretty soon you'll start seeing simulated sound effects (that's right, sound with no prerecorded samples), and NN controlled behavior. GPU-bound games are so 1990s.
Don't you mean buzznumber?
Actually the lack of Firewire 800 is a deal-breaker for me. Without it, there is no way to get any kind of high-speed mass storage connected to the thing. It uses a laptop-grade (ie; slow) HD and has no gigabit for connecting to a shared RAID.
This happened to me once, except the janitor didn't have to unplug anything. What he did was plug the floor waxer into an open socket on the UPS that fed our editorial system. The waxer overloaded the power supply and it shut down. It took us a while to determine exactly why the UPS failed since the diagnostics said everything was ok. Then we noticed how clean the floor was...
Yeah; there are a lot of geeks in our engineering lab that look and dress exactly like that.
I have a lot of respect for what they are trying to do with Mindawn, but what advantage do they have over other non-drm download services? For example, Magnatune has a larger selection, about a dozen different formats and bit rates available, and you can volunteer to pay more or less for an album based on how much you think it's worth. I can't even buy a track off Mindawn and put it on my MP3 player without reencoding it. What's the point of non-DRMed music if you can't get it in a popular format?
Office 2004 for OS X already does something similiar with pallets. Instead of blurring (thus making the windows unreadable), it makes the pallets increasingly transparent after several seconds to a few minutes of disuse. They only become about 25% opaque, so the pallets are still faintly readable but they don't obscure the document as you're working. Moving the mouse cursor over a pallette instantly brings it back to full opacity and resets the fade timer.
I'd really like something such as this as an OS-wide service so Adobe apps could use it. When laying out a page in InDesign, for example, it's a huge problem having a million pallets scattered around that prevent you from reading parts of the layout you're working on.
This has to be the best line from that report:
"It took him a while to die," Dr. Klamut said. "She must have stabbed him 40 to 80 times with that iPod. His death was not instantaneous, that's for sure"
We have some proprietary hardware on the PCs at work that require certain clock speeds. So we have a practical need for underclocking a CPU. In the past we've purchased high end desktops only to underclock them to like 533MHz in order to make them work.