Who has a hotmail account? Who would create a hotmail account. Older people have them, of course. I would suggest that even older people might have an aol.com account.
I don't think my bank or credit card company needs to know where I eat lunch every day. Sure, I use plastic to avoid dealing with a cashier (gas stations and parking) and of course for online shopping where you can't use cash. I find cash convenient for me and faster than a lot of transactions I see when people have to use a card, wait for it to authorize, some then fire up a printer, then they sign it. Dunno. My bank probably thinks I'm a drug dealer. My cash machine is only a few minutes away from the office, so it's easy to get more. Lots of point-of-sale machines at small shops get malware on them as well. We've had a few instances at work where a lot of people suddenly saw unexpected charges on their cards. In both cases, a nearby lunch place had their point-of-sale system infected and it stole their information. So, it does happen.
Everyone will agree that a vinyl record sounds different than the CD/Blu Ray/SACD. This difference is due to the limitations of vinyl. Everybody is in agreement with this so far. The divergence occurs because some people equate the fact that the mixes are different to meaning that one must be better than the other. It would be very interesting if you could put the vinyl master mix on CD and see what people think. If people think vinyl is better than CD, they will play both sources and proclaim that whatever they hear as different is inherently better. Instrumentation will show that the CD is more accurate, of course, but that doesn't matter.
This is true when shopping for loudspeakers or receivers. If you can hear a difference between two speakers in the store, you will invariably say that the more expensive one (or one with more prestige) must be the correct sound and that the other speaker is cheap. Measurements may indicate that the other speaker is technically producing a better representation of what is on the source, but the ears hear a difference then the eyes go about determining WHY they are different.
This applies to many things: vinyl/cd, speaker a/b, wine a/b, and many other things.
At a whopping 10cm, couldn't one devise a way to send the data over a tesla-coil arc? Tremendous energy available, unclear about bandwidth available in a "controlled" arc of electricity.
Have a Volvo and it has the Sensus 3.0 stuff in it, which includes apps such as Pandora and a few others. The tech package came with a 6 month trial for everything, but that has since expired and I don't drive enough to make it worth it. What's frustrating is that it won't even let you pair it with your hotspot phone to use those apps, so it is just a complete waste of money to have it in the car. The tech is also slow, interface created by committee, and NOT car friendly. Give me Google Maps with a Siri interface and that's it. I should be able to say "find the nearest Arby's restaurant" and that's it. Garmin Nav or any iPhone/Android navigation app is much easier to use.
The main issue is that people see the technology as a way for car makers to extract more money from you AFTER you've already shelled out 20, 30, 40, or 50k for their car. That is just crazy. Car manufacturers need to include these as actual features instead of a way to get money out of your wallet.
This would be akin to giving you free air conditioning for 6 months, but if you want it to work after that then you have to pay a monthly fee. We bought the car, I don't want to keep paying for that. If you can't do that, then take it out of the car, reduce the price of the car, then people will be happier about it.
While man-in-the-middle SSL connections sound like something everyone should be against, those in the corporate environment rely on using an in-line scanner to check for malicious/virus files going in/out the corporate environment. Those entities need to be able to block/report on where those file originated and their final destination. To do that, they rely on the scanning device being the SSL endpoint in order to decrypt and inspect the content. I would hope that this ability will be configurable via AD policy to allow the corporate MitM certificate to be considered trusted; however, there are an increasing number of sites that have javascript which verifies the SSL connection and checks that there is no MitM SSL occuring. While it sounds safe, it actually HELPS virus/malware authors if browsers block MitM connections to ssl sites.
An SSL cert is like $5 from Comodo, so if all browsers checked for MitM connections and prevented access, then corporations can't protect their networks from content on an SSL connection and would have to trust all content from the interwebs.
There are security ramifications to increased security.
As an admin, I'd love to see the actual technical aspects of the breach. How did they get in? How did they compromise your security? How long were they in the system before being detected? How did you detect them? Were you logging information that did catch them, but some oversight caused that data to be missed? How do you KNOW they are out of the system without flattening the entire infrastructure?
Knowing this data can help security professionals add more security layers to keep the evil-doers out of the network.
If ONE person is injured/killed within a 10 mile radius of a theater and the person doing the killing proclaims any notion of it being done because of the release of the movie, the relatives of the one shot will sue Sony for millions of dollars due to the release of the film that Sony KNEW could unleash terrorism. Imagine if it happened at 5 locations? What about one nutjob in one theater ala the Batman movie a few years ago? Sony would be put at fault for blatantly disregarding public safety by knowingly releasing a film. It's the same reason newspapers won't print an image of Mohammed or that South Park had to pull an episode that was going to show Mohammed.
Hyper-sensitivity to everything for fear of litigation.
The NSA likely has keys from all the major SSL cert vendors, rendering this "spamvertisement" moot. HTTPS does not mean that you're secure from everybody. It means you've added a layer of security that will thwart MOST prying eyes, but those that really want to know what you're doing WILL know what you're doing.
Knock knock. Whose there? It's the government. It's the government, who? It's the government and we're here for our GPS units. Hand them over or be labeled a terrorist.
Look, some high up government person is going to read this, realize that some national security breach has potentially occurred, then send in the troops to reclaim those units. This won't take long.
If it is light flashes, what's to prevent someone from snooping it from afar? Convenient technology often means insecure technology. Weird to develop a product just because one of the major phone vendors don't support a protocol. Seems like that vendor should add that feature to their phones, rather than re-invent a new protocol.
Just because some of us are older and don't have time to finish games, what about the kids out there that don't have full-time jobs and families? There are way more gamers under 18 than when I was a kid. The answer isn't simply that we have jobs and families now, the answer is probably that kids today have tons of things that demand their attention and so finishing games is low on the priority list.
Facebook profiles, "farming", city-building, etc. all are time sucks that prevent even the kids from dedicating the necessary time to finish a game.
MailScanner, which ships with Fedora, includes a feature called watermarking. Like those that have already posted, it works by creating a custom header with a secret key that is used to add a quick little seemingly random text and puts it in the header. If mail is coming from a bounceback, MailScanner checks the message for a match on the header. If it doesn't see one, then you can have it act based on that scenario. After turning this on, I get zero bounceback/scatterback emails into my Inbox. A perfectly elegant solution that works well and is easy to implement.
Aero is off and my background is black. Why waste resources with extra stuff that doesn't improve the end-user experience. All that stuff does is show off how much you like to waste time by customizing your desktop. Vista with Aero and all that stuff is like the myspace.com of the desktop: most of it is just useless clutter.
I do have ReadyBoost via a usb drive; however, I can't say I notice any difference.
A car accident? A broken-down car beside the road? Aggressive driving? Drunk driving? Cars with the left blinker on endlessly? Cars with broken head/tail lights? Cars doing 60+ mph on the space-saver spare?
Now, can imagine all this happening even 20 feet in the air? Disaster.
The flying car already exists and it is called a helicopter. If you think you can fly a helicopter without weeks upon weeks of training, then go buy one and start commuting.
1) The best seat in the place is where the HUGE projector is located. No need for something like this in a completely blacked-out room.
2) The spray-foam cave idea looks ok, but how do you keep it clean and dust free? Further, the ambiance is ruined once you put the smooth leather chairs in there. They should be rock-like, imho.
3) Speakers: like any real theater, you shouldn't be able to see them. No real reason that the Triads couldn't have been placed behind foam-esque screen and hide their existence.
4) Pretty large investment and yet you can "only" have 8 people there to watch a movie.
5) Where's the gear? (I hope it is truly hidden)
6) Do you enter via a statue-pull-bookcase-open and a pole?
Ok, here's what broke for me (some are still broken):
1) Logitech Harmony 880 remote. Software would not run or install on Vista. 2) mAudio: Music software would not run or install on Vista. 3) Symantec AV version 9. Needed an upgrade to a special version 10, was not free. 4) ps tools: pslist, pskill, etc. 5) BIOS motherboard applications. Could not monitor fan speed, system health, etc. 6) Cisco VPN client. Needed to run a beta client that does not support Cisco firewall.
I actually had better luck going from Win98 to XP.
26 years ago, I built that Estes X-wing for a 9th grade science class project. (Man, does that make me feel old) It worked much better than this video shows; however, being that it was so much smaller and used smaller rocket motors, it's easy to see why. Even though the Estes X-Wing had two big chutes for recovery, that wasn't enough to keep it from breaking into a few pieces on landing. The people in the class (uhhh, were there girls in my class, I honestly can't remember there being any) were very excited to see it fly. It actually flew quite well.
I'm running Vista at work to test how well it works as well as a copy home.
At home, I have a 3.5 year old machine. It was beefy at the time: 3.2 Gig Pentium, 2 gigs ram, 160 gig hd, etc. I have replaced the video card, since those tend to go out of style from time to time. XP on that machine was fast. As fast as I'd ever need for daily use. I was starting to need to crank down resolution in games to get acceptable framerate, but that's standard fare in the gaming world for computers getting long in the tooth. I installed Vista. Wow, is this machine a pig. It takes LONGER to boot (clean wipe install), takes forever to do file copies/moves, really creeps and crawls with anti-virus enabled, and popups galore with UAC enabled. It looks clunky, it feels clunky, and it runs clunkily. One would think that a 3.5 year installed XP would be slower than a fresh Vista install: not so.
At work, I have a dual core 2.4 ghz with 120 gig hd and two gigs of RAM. Under XP, it booted in like 10 seconds, but using it for work didn't feel much faster than my home machine. It has, of course, a crap-ass graphics card, but I don't play games at work. I install Vista (clean wipe) and have the same issues as above. It takes almost 3x longer to boot, file copies around the network are painful, even moving files around on the local machine takes forever. Symantec does have a version of their corporate av product, but it will spin the cpu at 100% for 24 hours during a simple av update (not Vistas fault, per se). I've had to run un-manged in order for that not to happen. Scheduled scans make the computer unusable where under XP I could hardly notice anything happening.
I recently recieved a questionaire from Microsoft asking when I plan on deploying Vista to the rest of our environment; my response, "I'm not planning on deploying this software this year or next year." This announcement certainly sounds like Microsoft must have gotten a lot more professionals stating the same thing.
We are buying Vista, though. We don't have another option with our computer supplier. Fortunately, we have Software Assurance on our copies of Vista. This allows one to run OLDER versions of software for which you have a license of a newer product. A license on Vista, we're told, allows you to run XP if you choose. So Microsoft thinks we're running 20+ Vista computers, but really we only have one.
The Toshiba HD-DVD player works today at 1/3rd the price of the Samsung unit. Initial picture quality of early releases makes evident the better quality of the BluRay titles. BluRay rushed their product to market in order to cling to market share; in doing so, they used the old MPEG2 codec, which compresses images horribly. The primary reason for this: they did not have dual-layer capability working at time of release, so they needed to compress the image to fit on their single-layer releases. They apparently have dual layer working and have switched to the Microsoft codec. Reviewes of these discs have been far more favorable.
You still have to wonder about the cost. The Samsung player is $1K, you can get the Toshiba unit for $399. Soon, the Xbox 360 drive will be available at $200 for those that have a 360.
The only thing Sony has going for it: PS3 launch and the fact they are a movie distribution company. Sony has been pretty big-headed lately thinking that of course consumers will pay for a mere $600 for a game console, of course they will use our BluRay format, of course we can put a "rootkit" on a PC. We are Sony, why can't we do it?
I was fortunate enough to have enough miles and therefore went with a first class seat. They had cigarette-style power plugs, and I had a car adapter for my laptop. They gave a free 1 hour coupon for Connexion, and I paid the full price for the 5 hour flight. What a godsend having the ability to surf while in the air, it makes the flight go much faster. Without a power plug, as is still standard for coach class, I wouldn't buy the service. That's the gist of the problem.
While I would really like to have the theatrical version, I would LOVE to have an HD-DVD version of all the films. Since he shot in HD with a digital camera, the pictures should be stunning. While some bemoan the acting, there are some fine actors in the first three, so if one has to blame someone for bad acting, you should be leveling your criticism against the director.
Back in the day, our high school allowed us to take home a Apple IIe on weekends. My friend took one home and called me a few hours later saying he couldn't get it to work after a while. We were 17 at the time, by the way. I drove over to have a look since I was the whiz kid and he was the wannabe. I couldn't get it to boot either, they booted off the floppy drive. I put in a custom boot disk I built and tried it, it didn't work. I pulled out my 5.25" disk and looked at it. It was coated with something and looked wet. I asked my buddy why this would be, his answer: "Well, I got it home and was playing Castle Wolfenstien, and the drive was squeaking pretty loudly, so I just opened the drive and shot a blast of WD-40 into it to quiet it down. It stopped the noise, but now it won't boot."
The PC section was relegated to a tiny hallway in the basement. PC gaming, such as it is, will be gone in two years time. Consoles have the power now. PCs no longer to be any faster than a 450Mhz box to surf the net and run mail. It's finished. My two and a half year old P4 3.2 is still considered a high end machine. Back in the day, you could squeeze 2 years out of a box, max. Sure, the ati 9800 pro could use an upgrade, but I can still get almost $120 for it on ebay.
The next gen consoles have just as much power, now the only real difference is the interface. I prefer keyboard/mouse over the controller for first person shooters, but that's about it. If I can have fun with Halo, I can have fun in Half Life 2. It isn't financially feasible to code for so many platforms, one of them has to give. Aloha, pc gaming. It was nice to know you. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
No way will the Xbox 2/Next come out in time for Christmas. Microsoft is trying to force Sony to release their PS3 before it's ready, then release the Xbox 2/Next to one-up them. Microsoft is not a leader in ANYTHING, they follow.
Has anybody seen a SDK for the XBOX 2? Without one, how do you develop software for it? So we're like 10 months away from the purported release date. There was the SDK for the Xbox 12 months before the XBOX 1. Heck, what ARE the titles for XBOX 2? Surely if games are going to be released for it in Novemeber they are already alpha and getting ready to go beta.
No SDK, no titles. No titles, no console. The hype machine at Microsoft is running full tilt to force Sony to release the PS3 ahead of schedule.
Slashdot Mirror
Who has a hotmail account? Who would create a hotmail account. Older people have them, of course. I would suggest that even older people might have an aol.com account.
I don't think my bank or credit card company needs to know where I eat lunch every day. Sure, I use plastic to avoid dealing with a cashier (gas stations and parking) and of course for online shopping where you can't use cash. I find cash convenient for me and faster than a lot of transactions I see when people have to use a card, wait for it to authorize, some then fire up a printer, then they sign it. Dunno. My bank probably thinks I'm a drug dealer. My cash machine is only a few minutes away from the office, so it's easy to get more. Lots of point-of-sale machines at small shops get malware on them as well. We've had a few instances at work where a lot of people suddenly saw unexpected charges on their cards. In both cases, a nearby lunch place had their point-of-sale system infected and it stole their information. So, it does happen.
Get off my lawn...I suppose?
Everyone will agree that a vinyl record sounds different than the CD/Blu Ray/SACD. This difference is due to the limitations of vinyl. Everybody is in agreement with this so far. The divergence occurs because some people equate the fact that the mixes are different to meaning that one must be better than the other. It would be very interesting if you could put the vinyl master mix on CD and see what people think. If people think vinyl is better than CD, they will play both sources and proclaim that whatever they hear as different is inherently better. Instrumentation will show that the CD is more accurate, of course, but that doesn't matter.
This is true when shopping for loudspeakers or receivers. If you can hear a difference between two speakers in the store, you will invariably say that the more expensive one (or one with more prestige) must be the correct sound and that the other speaker is cheap. Measurements may indicate that the other speaker is technically producing a better representation of what is on the source, but the ears hear a difference then the eyes go about determining WHY they are different.
This applies to many things: vinyl/cd, speaker a/b, wine a/b, and many other things.
Buy what you like.
At a whopping 10cm, couldn't one devise a way to send the data over a tesla-coil arc? Tremendous energy available, unclear about bandwidth available in a "controlled" arc of electricity.
Have a Volvo and it has the Sensus 3.0 stuff in it, which includes apps such as Pandora and a few others. The tech package came with a 6 month trial for everything, but that has since expired and I don't drive enough to make it worth it. What's frustrating is that it won't even let you pair it with your hotspot phone to use those apps, so it is just a complete waste of money to have it in the car. The tech is also slow, interface created by committee, and NOT car friendly. Give me Google Maps with a Siri interface and that's it. I should be able to say "find the nearest Arby's restaurant" and that's it. Garmin Nav or any iPhone/Android navigation app is much easier to use.
The main issue is that people see the technology as a way for car makers to extract more money from you AFTER you've already shelled out 20, 30, 40, or 50k for their car. That is just crazy. Car manufacturers need to include these as actual features instead of a way to get money out of your wallet.
This would be akin to giving you free air conditioning for 6 months, but if you want it to work after that then you have to pay a monthly fee. We bought the car, I don't want to keep paying for that. If you can't do that, then take it out of the car, reduce the price of the car, then people will be happier about it.
While man-in-the-middle SSL connections sound like something everyone should be against, those in the corporate environment rely on using an in-line scanner to check for malicious/virus files going in/out the corporate environment. Those entities need to be able to block/report on where those file originated and their final destination. To do that, they rely on the scanning device being the SSL endpoint in order to decrypt and inspect the content. I would hope that this ability will be configurable via AD policy to allow the corporate MitM certificate to be considered trusted; however, there are an increasing number of sites that have javascript which verifies the SSL connection and checks that there is no MitM SSL occuring. While it sounds safe, it actually HELPS virus/malware authors if browsers block MitM connections to ssl sites.
An SSL cert is like $5 from Comodo, so if all browsers checked for MitM connections and prevented access, then corporations can't protect their networks from content on an SSL connection and would have to trust all content from the interwebs.
There are security ramifications to increased security.
As an admin, I'd love to see the actual technical aspects of the breach. How did they get in? How did they compromise your security? How long were they in the system before being detected? How did you detect them? Were you logging information that did catch them, but some oversight caused that data to be missed? How do you KNOW they are out of the system without flattening the entire infrastructure?
Knowing this data can help security professionals add more security layers to keep the evil-doers out of the network.
Here's your main reason:
If ONE person is injured/killed within a 10 mile radius of a theater and the person doing the killing proclaims any notion of it being done because of the release of the movie, the relatives of the one shot will sue Sony for millions of dollars due to the release of the film that Sony KNEW could unleash terrorism. Imagine if it happened at 5 locations? What about one nutjob in one theater ala the Batman movie a few years ago? Sony would be put at fault for blatantly disregarding public safety by knowingly releasing a film. It's the same reason newspapers won't print an image of Mohammed or that South Park had to pull an episode that was going to show Mohammed.
Hyper-sensitivity to everything for fear of litigation.
The NSA likely has keys from all the major SSL cert vendors, rendering this "spamvertisement" moot. HTTPS does not mean that you're secure from everybody. It means you've added a layer of security that will thwart MOST prying eyes, but those that really want to know what you're doing WILL know what you're doing.
What a silly thing to appear on slashdot.
Knock knock.
Whose there?
It's the government.
It's the government, who?
It's the government and we're here for our GPS units. Hand them over or be labeled a terrorist.
Look, some high up government person is going to read this, realize that some national security breach has potentially occurred, then send in the troops to reclaim those units. This won't take long.
Some people need to feel important.
If it is light flashes, what's to prevent someone from snooping it from afar? Convenient technology often means insecure technology. Weird to develop a product just because one of the major phone vendors don't support a protocol. Seems like that vendor should add that feature to their phones, rather than re-invent a new protocol.
Just because some of us are older and don't have time to finish games, what about the kids out there that don't have full-time jobs and families? There are way more gamers under 18 than when I was a kid. The answer isn't simply that we have jobs and families now, the answer is probably that kids today have tons of things that demand their attention and so finishing games is low on the priority list.
Facebook profiles, "farming", city-building, etc. all are time sucks that prevent even the kids from dedicating the necessary time to finish a game.
MailScanner, which ships with Fedora, includes a feature called watermarking. Like those that have already posted, it works by creating a custom header with a secret key that is used to add a quick little seemingly random text and puts it in the header. If mail is coming from a bounceback, MailScanner checks the message for a match on the header. If it doesn't see one, then you can have it act based on that scenario. After turning this on, I get zero bounceback/scatterback emails into my Inbox. A perfectly elegant solution that works well and is easy to implement.
Aero is off and my background is black. Why waste resources with extra stuff that doesn't improve the end-user experience. All that stuff does is show off how much you like to waste time by customizing your desktop. Vista with Aero and all that stuff is like the myspace.com of the desktop: most of it is just useless clutter.
I do have ReadyBoost via a usb drive; however, I can't say I notice any difference.
Have you ever seen:
A car accident?
A broken-down car beside the road?
Aggressive driving?
Drunk driving?
Cars with the left blinker on endlessly?
Cars with broken head/tail lights?
Cars doing 60+ mph on the space-saver spare?
Now, can imagine all this happening even 20 feet in the air? Disaster.
The flying car already exists and it is called a helicopter. If you think you can fly a helicopter without weeks upon weeks of training, then go buy one and start commuting.
1) The best seat in the place is where the HUGE projector is located. No need for something like this in a completely blacked-out room.
2) The spray-foam cave idea looks ok, but how do you keep it clean and dust free? Further, the ambiance is ruined once you put the smooth leather chairs in there. They should be rock-like, imho.
3) Speakers: like any real theater, you shouldn't be able to see them. No real reason that the Triads couldn't have been placed behind foam-esque screen and hide their existence.
4) Pretty large investment and yet you can "only" have 8 people there to watch a movie.
5) Where's the gear? (I hope it is truly hidden)
6) Do you enter via a statue-pull-bookcase-open and a pole?
Ok, here's what broke for me (some are still broken):
1) Logitech Harmony 880 remote. Software would not run or install on Vista.
2) mAudio: Music software would not run or install on Vista.
3) Symantec AV version 9. Needed an upgrade to a special version 10, was not free.
4) ps tools: pslist, pskill, etc.
5) BIOS motherboard applications. Could not monitor fan speed, system health, etc.
6) Cisco VPN client. Needed to run a beta client that does not support Cisco firewall.
I actually had better luck going from Win98 to XP.
26 years ago, I built that Estes X-wing for a 9th grade science class project. (Man, does that make me feel old) It worked much better than this video shows; however, being that it was so much smaller and used smaller rocket motors, it's easy to see why. Even though the Estes X-Wing had two big chutes for recovery, that wasn't enough to keep it from breaking into a few pieces on landing. The people in the class (uhhh, were there girls in my class, I honestly can't remember there being any) were very excited to see it fly. It actually flew quite well.
I'm running Vista at work to test how well it works as well as a copy home.
At home, I have a 3.5 year old machine. It was beefy at the time: 3.2 Gig Pentium, 2 gigs ram, 160 gig hd, etc. I have replaced the video card, since those tend to go out of style from time to time. XP on that machine was fast. As fast as I'd ever need for daily use. I was starting to need to crank down resolution in games to get acceptable framerate, but that's standard fare in the gaming world for computers getting long in the tooth. I installed Vista. Wow, is this machine a pig. It takes LONGER to boot (clean wipe install), takes forever to do file copies/moves, really creeps and crawls with anti-virus enabled, and popups galore with UAC enabled. It looks clunky, it feels clunky, and it runs clunkily. One would think that a 3.5 year installed XP would be slower than a fresh Vista install: not so.
At work, I have a dual core 2.4 ghz with 120 gig hd and two gigs of RAM. Under XP, it booted in like 10 seconds, but using it for work didn't feel much faster than my home machine. It has, of course, a crap-ass graphics card, but I don't play games at work. I install Vista (clean wipe) and have the same issues as above. It takes almost 3x longer to boot, file copies around the network are painful, even moving files around on the local machine takes forever. Symantec does have a version of their corporate av product, but it will spin the cpu at 100% for 24 hours during a simple av update (not Vistas fault, per se). I've had to run un-manged in order for that not to happen. Scheduled scans make the computer unusable where under XP I could hardly notice anything happening.
I recently recieved a questionaire from Microsoft asking when I plan on deploying Vista to the rest of our environment; my response, "I'm not planning on deploying this software this year or next year." This announcement certainly sounds like Microsoft must have gotten a lot more professionals stating the same thing.
We are buying Vista, though. We don't have another option with our computer supplier. Fortunately, we have Software Assurance on our copies of Vista. This allows one to run OLDER versions of software for which you have a license of a newer product. A license on Vista, we're told, allows you to run XP if you choose. So Microsoft thinks we're running 20+ Vista computers, but really we only have one.
The Toshiba HD-DVD player works today at 1/3rd the price of the Samsung unit. Initial picture quality of early releases makes evident the better quality of the BluRay titles. BluRay rushed their product to market in order to cling to market share; in doing so, they used the old MPEG2 codec, which compresses images horribly. The primary reason for this: they did not have dual-layer capability working at time of release, so they needed to compress the image to fit on their single-layer releases. They apparently have dual layer working and have switched to the Microsoft codec. Reviewes of these discs have been far more favorable.
You still have to wonder about the cost. The Samsung player is $1K, you can get the Toshiba unit for $399. Soon, the Xbox 360 drive will be available at $200 for those that have a 360.
The only thing Sony has going for it: PS3 launch and the fact they are a movie distribution company. Sony has been pretty big-headed lately thinking that of course consumers will pay for a mere $600 for a game console, of course they will use our BluRay format, of course we can put a "rootkit" on a PC. We are Sony, why can't we do it?
I was fortunate enough to have enough miles and therefore went with a first class seat. They had cigarette-style power plugs, and I had a car adapter for my laptop. They gave a free 1 hour coupon for Connexion, and I paid the full price for the 5 hour flight. What a godsend having the ability to surf while in the air, it makes the flight go much faster. Without a power plug, as is still standard for coach class, I wouldn't buy the service. That's the gist of the problem.
While I would really like to have the theatrical version, I would LOVE to have an HD-DVD version of all the films. Since he shot in HD with a digital camera, the pictures should be stunning. While some bemoan the acting, there are some fine actors in the first three, so if one has to blame someone for bad acting, you should be leveling your criticism against the director.
Back in the day, our high school allowed us to take home a Apple IIe on weekends. My friend took one home and called me a few hours later saying he couldn't get it to work after a while. We were 17 at the time, by the way. I drove over to have a look since I was the whiz kid and he was the wannabe. I couldn't get it to boot either, they booted off the floppy drive. I put in a custom boot disk I built and tried it, it didn't work. I pulled out my 5.25" disk and looked at it. It was coated with something and looked wet. I asked my buddy why this would be, his answer: "Well, I got it home and was playing Castle Wolfenstien, and the drive was squeaking pretty loudly, so I just opened the drive and shot a blast of WD-40 into it to quiet it down. It stopped the noise, but now it won't boot."
Ahh, the memories.
The PC section was relegated to a tiny hallway in the basement. PC gaming, such as it is, will be gone in two years time. Consoles have the power now. PCs no longer to be any faster than a 450Mhz box to surf the net and run mail. It's finished. My two and a half year old P4 3.2 is still considered a high end machine. Back in the day, you could squeeze 2 years out of a box, max. Sure, the ati 9800 pro could use an upgrade, but I can still get almost $120 for it on ebay.
The next gen consoles have just as much power, now the only real difference is the interface. I prefer keyboard/mouse over the controller for first person shooters, but that's about it. If I can have fun with Halo, I can have fun in Half Life 2. It isn't financially feasible to code for so many platforms, one of them has to give. Aloha, pc gaming. It was nice to know you. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
No way will the Xbox 2/Next come out in time for Christmas. Microsoft is trying to force Sony to release their PS3 before it's ready, then release the Xbox 2/Next to one-up them. Microsoft is not a leader in ANYTHING, they follow.
Has anybody seen a SDK for the XBOX 2? Without one, how do you develop software for it? So we're like 10 months away from the purported release date. There was the SDK for the Xbox 12 months before the XBOX 1. Heck, what ARE the titles for XBOX 2? Surely if games are going to be released for it in Novemeber they are already alpha and getting ready to go beta.
No SDK, no titles. No titles, no console. The hype machine at Microsoft is running full tilt to force Sony to release the PS3 ahead of schedule.