The quickest way to determine if the old new.net was the culprit is to ping the loopback. Since it screws with the winsock, a loopback ping will error out on a system that's been damaged by new.net, where it won't if there's a hardware issue with the computer. We always just used a simple freeware winsock repair tool. When I left the repair place I worked at, our operative strategy was still (as of last December) to simply do a manual remove on new.net before running any other spyware removal utitlities.
It's nice that your company has encoruaged a corporate culture that allows you to fix problems, but I'm sure we both know that something like that won't translate well into Dell or HP's support system.
This has nothing to do with warranty. Your hard drive diagnostic utility, while fallible, is probably 99% likely to be correct. His fried modem could indeed be a bad modem, or it could be that he erased the dial-in number, changed ISPs, or knocked the cord out of the back. If forcibly removed by older versions of ad-aware, new.net would totally screw up Windows' TCP stack. At first glance, a person could easily assume that their NIC had failed, but a few simple troubleshooting steps could tell you that it was a software issue, not a hardware one.
I've been doing computer repair for years, and I still remember the time I called roadrunner to complain that their service was down, only to find out that my cat had managed to unscrew the coax two rooms over (I still don't know how). In today's economic climate, tech support simply can't assume that you know what you're doing; they will run tests and scripts until they're satisfied that the problem is hardware-related. It's irritating when there is a genuine problem, but it also helps keep the overall cost down on your shiny new notebook.
Believe me, Dell will jump through just as many hoops when it comes to something that can't immediately be diagnosed through their packed-in diagnostic tools.
Now that you mention it, I think you're correct. It's been a while, and I only remember seeing my brother holding it up to the screen. I suppose the line method would probably be easier to implement, as well.
About ten years back, my brother had a very simple watch/PIM (Personal info manager, for those of you unfamiliar with term) made by Casio, IIRC. The unique feature was that you installed a driver which allowed the data input program to mess with your refresh rate (I'm guessing) and transmit the information to the watch. It usually took four or five tries to get it right, but I remember being pretty impressed with the unique method that helped avoid keeping track of a dongle/connector.
What digital signal? All of the info I've seen on the next-gen devices indicates that they'll be using component video for HD feeds in addition to optional HDMI/DVI. None of them will be converting to a DTV signal (which would involve pointlessly compressing video generated on the fly into an MPEG-2 transport stream). Assuming there's a normal analog TV involved, you'll hook it up the same way you always did: just use the best analog connection your TV supports. Assuming it's an HD-compatible TV or HDTV, you'll hook it up via component video or HDMI/DVI if those connections are present.
HD-compatible refers to television that are capable of displaying HD content but not tuning into Over-the-air digital feeds. Essentially, they're like monitors without a computer - all the resolution capability is there.
If you have an HD compatible TV and hook up an XBox 360 or PS3 to it, you'll get HD resolution without the need for a converter box. Additionally, if you have HD content being distributed via digital cable or satellite and you hook those devices up (using a component or DVI or Firewire connection, of course), you'll get HD content.
A converter allows an HD-compabitle TV to tune into telelvision shows being broadcast over the airwaves and being picked up with rabbit ears (or some similar antenna). This is one of the reasons (besides) confusion that consumers have been willing to purchase HD-compatible TVs; most of them already use digital cable or satellite and thus already have a converter box of sorts.
Read my responses to the same two posts above. Manufacturers aren't including ATSC tuners because they don't have to, and their price will be incidental once they're required and the economy of scale kicks in. OTA tuners are expensive because very few people buy them, and they are targetted at videophiles who have money to burn. Technologically, an ATSC tuner is nothing more than an RF tuner and an MPEG-2 decoder that is clocked slightly faster than the ones you might find in a DVD player. They'd probably cost $60 if they were selling like DVD players do, and they'll probably cost less than $10 to manufacturers once they're being built into every TV larger than 25 inches. In short, the ATSC tuner will be an incidental part of the TV's cost, and the actual cost centers in that TV are already low enough to be well within the requested price range.
Grandparent Post:
In a few months, a TV like that will be required to receive free over-the-air transmissions, so I'm sure you'll see a model sometime closer to the end of this year with those features.
The word "like" implies similarity, so a TV like that would be one similar, but not identical. Such as, for example, "a model sometime closer to the end of this year" that "will be required to receive free over-the-air transmission." Genius. If I wanted to talk about this TV in particular, I would have used the phrase "such as" and wouldn't have qualified it with waiting for a model nearer to the end of the year.
As for the warranty issue, no television manufacturer I know provides a warranty greater than 1 year in either parts or labor, with the exception of a few RPTV's which come with a two-year warranty on the CRT guns. That's the way it rolls. It doesn't necessarily mean that the units will fail any faster, just that the manufacturer has chosen to sacrifice that portion of the profit in order to lower the price. It's a crapshoot. I'd probably lay down money that it wouldn't last eleven years, but my brother has an eight year-old Sharp that came with a one-year warranty and hasn't seen a single problem during those eight years. Realistically, a manufacturer would provide a twelve-year warranty if they knew nothing would break, but we don't live in a perfect world. My complaint was with the fact that you demanded someone show you a TV that would last that long. No one can know if one will or not, and neither a one nor a three year warranty will guarantee a longer-lasting product. Older Sony TVs had three year warranties not because they were more reliable, but simply because market research at the time showed that people placed a value on a warranty, and Sony raised the price so that they could offer that feature.
Who is Advent? Just one of the many companies who source their CRTs from the same Korean and Chinese manufacturers that crank out a lot of the Samsung/Hyundai/etc. and even some Japanese CRT units. Yeah, they're probably not as good a quality as a Toshiba or Hitachi, but my point was to illustrate that what you were asking for wasn't unattainable, or at least it won't be in a few months.
Read my answer to the similar response above. ATSC tuners are actually pretty trivial tech, they're just not operating in an economy of scale. I would lay money down that once it becomes a requirement, a nearly identical model with an ATSC tuner would be available at the same price by the end of the year.
Oh, no, that TV can't pick up OTA DTV sources. Very few can, because until next month, it's not required. At the end of July, the FCC requirement kicks in, and any HDTV over 25", IIRC, will be required to sport an ATSC tuner. Hence my clarification in point 2 that a TV similar to this would probably be out by the end of the year.
Picking up and displaying a 480p DTV source requires no fancier hardware than what a generic-brand $30 DVD player sports. Higher-end HD-capable OTA ATSC boxes cost a lot more, but that's because the market they're primarily selling to owns expensive TVs and doesn't balk at spending a bit more for a better quality picture.
Buying this TV right now wouldn't meet his qualifications, but my point was to illustrate that something very, very close to what he wanted already exists, and that it WILL exist in a few months.
That took me about 30 seconds to find. Best Buy happened to be the first retailer I hit, but I'm sure you'd have similar results elsewhere.
1) Granted, it's $329 instead of $250, but it's also 27" instead of 21". Don't forget to factor inflation.
2) In a few months, a TV like that will be required to receive free over-the-air transmissions, so I'm sure you'll see a model sometime closer to the end of this year with those features.
3) I don't know what sort of Home Theater equipment you have, but this thing has plenty of inputs and a line-level audio out, so I don't see how it couldn't.
4) Done plus 6"
5) There's a 26" Widescreen Samsung CRT on that same site for $450, so it's $120 more.
6) Wouldn't we all like that. Hell, you can't say that about anything, and it's not a by-product of DTV or not. My folks have a cheap Magnavox from the mid 80's that still works, and I've seen quality, name-brand TVs from many different time periods crap out. This one will be a crapshoot. Also, how exactly will you judge that something will last 11 years without a single problem?
Remember: $8,000 65" HDMI-equipped LCoS TVs with 1080p display capability are NOT the only DTVs out there.
GTA3 didn't suceed purely because it was 3D, it succeeded because despite some flaws it was fun, immersive and gave the player free rein within a detailed world.
Re-read my original post. It's entirely because of the quality 3D that GTA 3 was able to give the player full rein within a detailed world. I can jump off of buildings in a car, climb up onto flowerboxes, hide behind crates. These characteristics were not present in the previous games because it wasn't possible in their graphical world.
Sure, there are the missions, but I didn't even finish the game until more than a year after its release. The entire appeal of the game is the fact that it's almost a world simulator. The only way it's able to achieve that status is precisely because the developers did have good quality graphics to work with. I'm not saying that the graphics make up for a lack of gameplay (they don't, and never will). What I am saying is that people should stop trotting out the "Old Man" rhetoric that puts the two concepts at polar opposites of the gaming spectrum. Face it: Almost every quality game of the last four or five years has relied on big jumps in graphical capabilities to provide a meaninful improvement to the gameplay experience.
I'm going to pick on AC here for a minute, because every time any article such as this is posted, people trot out the ol' "Gameplay rules over graphics argument."
You're correct. Gameplay does trump graphics. In a purely theoretical world, if given choice A or B, almost everyone would choose gameplay over graphics. Fortunately, we don't live in that world.
Further, when people create this dichotomy, they ignore the fact that graphics have an enormous amount of power in enabling good gameplay. Without the simple hardware power increases of the last five years, many of the great games from that same timeframe wouldn't have happened.
Take Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City/SA, for example. People love the storylines, and the satirical look at the world, but both of those chracteristics were present in GTA 1 and 2. Neither of those games was particularly succesful at all compared to the last three. The sense of immersion was provided by a major jump in graphical capability that afforded the developers the ability to create an extremely immersive environment. In GTA 2, you could still choose to abide by the laws or mow down pedestrians, take alternate missions as you desired, and run amok with a gun or just listen to humorous radio DJs. The only difference was that the whole game took place from a top-down perspective. Arguably, every gameplay aspect of Grand Theft Auto would be do-able on a Sega CD, but I guarantee you it simply wouldn't be as much fun. I enjoy GTA 2, but it can't come close to holding my interest like GTA 3.
Or we'll take Katamari Damacy, a game that will entertain almost anyone. The gameplay and quirky charm is what draws everyone in, but I'll lay straight out that said gameplay simply wouldn't have been possible with the graphical power of the PS1. Seeing individual objects rolled up in the katamri wouldn't be possible. Without the smooth zooming transitions of the camera, the gameplay and control would suffer significantly. Critics would refer to it as a solid idea that was poorly executed, and they'd be absolutely correct. Again, gameplay here is great, but it relies on the graphical capability of good hardware to make it work.
There are still plenty of simple gameplay improvements left to tweak that will rely on quality graphical capability. I want to see truly, totally deformable environments in an RTS. I want to be able to blast through a building to create an alternate path for my units, or fell that building to block the advance of enemy troops. I want randomized chunks of metal flying off of an exploding tank that can wound surrounding personnel. Realistically, both of those ideas could be implemented in a simple top-down strategy game, but they won't have that truly realistic feel until I can see the size of the building in relation to the troops, or until I can shoot out the corner to drop a chunk on te enemy. Just like GTA would be do-able on a SegaCD, those ideas would be do-able in the original Command and Conquer, but they're not going to have that same truly satisfying feel until they're implemented in full 3D with the proper accompanying physics.
FPSes would benefit from those same characteristics, so it's not as though they're immune from this issue, either. Yes, gameplay is king, but please don't create an argument that forces graphics to the other side. Many gameplay ideas simply need good quality graphics behind them before they can be properly implemented.
The Japanese version of the Toyota Prius has an option for a one-button parallel park. Of course, said feature will never be seen in the US because of liability issues.
There have been several vertical keyboard/mouse designs oon the market, all of them built for ergonomic purposes. Wresting your wrist on it's side tends to be a much more natural position than the vertical "hunch."
Of course, all that it moot if this requires you to grip the gun higher up, thus placing undue stress on your upper arm.
Since (situational) irony is the opposite of what's expected, I would say that the submitter was probably correct in his or her use of "ironic." If I were to encounter something like this, I would immediately assume that it was a lame gimmick built to cheesily cash in on the novelty market, which would probably make me doubt the mouse's ergonomics.
I met The Fat Man once. He came and spoke at the University of Texas game developers organization. I was an officer in the organization, so I went and met the guy at the parking garage, then walked with him over to the lecture hall where he would be speaking. The guy was absolutely over-the-top larger than life.
He pulled up in a 1950's Rolls-Royce (right hand drive model), license plate GUD BAD and shouted at me to get in. The front grill had a set of longhorns mounted on it. He was wearing a replica F-16 flight suit with the name "Fat Man" on the breast.
The man is a composing genius, but not for reasons we might ordinarily cite. Sure, his creepy soundtracks on the 7th Guest were awesome, but he takes a totally different approach to a lot of compositions. He demoed an intro song (and accompanying video) for a PC game whose name I foget. Rather than the typical orchestral "sweeping emotions" or "going to war" compositions, he had a pseudo-Bluegrass song about how the title character was kind of a religious zealot, but he felt he was doing the right thing. It's the difference between a composer who's told "Give me something sort of like the imperial march, but with more energy" and a composer who's told, "Make something that fits with this scene."
Incidentally, the lecture he gave was actually an amazing insight into the minor role given to music in gaming, and his ideas to fix it. He was actively trying to market a system to some of the major players that worked like this:
Quake 2 has, say, 20 levels. Id hires a composer, and said composer writes the music for each of those levels. The music is tagged with various characteristics (scary, ominous, fast, slow, lyics, etc.) and is allowed to play for about 10 hours of gameplay. After that, the game would download music from a catalog of other games or private musical productions that fit the same characteristics. It was a cool idea, and it fit with his attitude that pretty much boiled down to "I want everyone to be able to hear someone's music."
Totally OT, I know, but I just wanted a little chance to reminisce about a breif encounter with a truly impressive individual in the gaming world.
You're absolutely correct. One of the major trends right now in urban housing is for a developer to buy up a small section of older 1-story homes in a decent part of a downtown area, then knock those homes down and replace them with 4-story townhomes. Most of these townhomes are ~2,500 sq. ft. affairs, but the number of stairs has got to affect their ability to sell.
During my time working for astructured wiring subcontractor, I saw several of these places setup with small elevators, but the numbers I usually heard tossed about were in the $80,000 to $100,000 range. A $20,000 elevator would definitely have a market not just at a personal level, but with many of those developers willing to make it a standard feature in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
I'm sorry, but I have difficulty comprehending complex issues about what it is to be human unless they're presented to me in anime form.
So we're going to need an anime on this issue, preferably with intensely slow pacing and occasionally boring monologues in between brief, action-filled flashes of the crack commando team "Sheep Force 2014."
Sheep Force 2014: They've been engineered to be the perfect killing machines, but they're also still in high school!
They tried that; it was called Esperanto. By "that," of course, I mean a reasonably logical language designed entirely for international communication. It was a flop. The only people who speak Esperanto do so out of a peculiar desire to embrace the marginal and obscure. They're the linguistic equivalent of the local Apple LISA user's club.
In Japanese (or Mandarin, I can't remember), the symbolic character for "noise" is three women. Language is intrinsically tied to culture. Hell, the names of the days in English still pay homage to Norse gods that haven't been widely worshipped in almost 1300 years. There are countless cases in history where one people ruled another, and they still weren't able to entirely force their language upon the subservient. You simply can't foist any artificial language on people.
English spelling can't be cleaned up. You know how everyone complains about backwards compatibility kludging up the computer world? Language relies infinitely more on that idea.
I'll put it to you this way: let's say we decide to rid English of the French endings. We'll redo words such as "repetition" and "concession" with an 'sh.' Fine, now they make more sense phonetically, except the millions of people who speak English are now confused by the spelling. In other words, there have to be such enormous gains put forth by changing a spelling that they can overcome the time needed to adapt to that spelling. It'd be like trying to bring the metric system to America, only much worse; there are definite tangible benefits to metric, but there are none that I can see to replacing those letters with 'sh.'
Spelling and grammar rules in every language are totally arbitrary when you get down to it. Some languages are better at following their established rules than others (and English is about as bad as it gets), but at the end of the day, the only reason we agree to follow them is to make communication easier. I could read English written using Cyrillic characters if I needed to, but I can read English faster using the existing Roman/Arabic character set because of experience. When it comes down to it, you're not going to convince nearly a billion native speakers to change so that the future set has a more "logical" spelling system, because there's no major tangible benefit and the systems all lack logic when you get down to it.
See my post above; I've seen Shuttle-type machines in both CompUSA and Best Buy. They're nowhere near as small as Mini-ITX computers, though, and they tend to be aimed at a very different market.
Integrated CastleRock Graphics Adapter with MPEG2 Decoding
And from the dual processor article post:
The CN400 features an integrated UniChrome Pro graphics processor with 2D/3D graphics engine, hardware digital video acceleration, and Chromotion CE video display engine, including hardware MPEG-2/-4 acceleration and advanced video rendering and display technologies
So, yeah, a single processor system with embedded video does have a dedicated processor (technically the GPU) for DVD playing. MPEG-2 hardware decoders are pretty trivial to construct, and I can remember videocards as far back as the Voodoo3 building it in as part of the chipset. My guess is that a lot of the calculations for decoding MPEG video are quite similar to certain 3D calculations, as nearly every GPU seems to support this feature.
I'm sure the responsiveness is fine. I've used SMP systems, and they generally do have a good ability to resist getting bogged down. My point here was two-fold, though.
1) While acceptable for some use, it is not a reasonably powered mid-range desktop; Even Joe User demands more than email and surfing nowadays.
2) I wouldn't abandon a 2x500mhz system, but I also wouldn't go out and pay ~$250 for one right now.
It handles video playback because it has a dedicated processor that heavily assists MPEG-2/4 decoding. What about simple image or video editing (yes, Joe User is actually interested in preserving his memories). What about heavy multitasking? Hell, what about the occasional 2 year-old game? Remember, we're talking here about non-video performance approximately equal to dual 500Mhz PIIIs. Yes, it's probably useable, but you can buy a lot more powerful kit for what this will probably sell for.
Yeah, it'd probably work fine as a mediaPC (provided you weren't trying for HD), but the average home user does sometimes demand more than that, and this thing doesn't look like it would deliver.
Slashdot Mirror
The quickest way to determine if the old new.net was the culprit is to ping the loopback. Since it screws with the winsock, a loopback ping will error out on a system that's been damaged by new.net, where it won't if there's a hardware issue with the computer. We always just used a simple freeware winsock repair tool. When I left the repair place I worked at, our operative strategy was still (as of last December) to simply do a manual remove on new.net before running any other spyware removal utitlities.
It's nice that your company has encoruaged a corporate culture that allows you to fix problems, but I'm sure we both know that something like that won't translate well into Dell or HP's support system.
This has nothing to do with warranty. Your hard drive diagnostic utility, while fallible, is probably 99% likely to be correct. His fried modem could indeed be a bad modem, or it could be that he erased the dial-in number, changed ISPs, or knocked the cord out of the back. If forcibly removed by older versions of ad-aware, new.net would totally screw up Windows' TCP stack. At first glance, a person could easily assume that their NIC had failed, but a few simple troubleshooting steps could tell you that it was a software issue, not a hardware one.
I've been doing computer repair for years, and I still remember the time I called roadrunner to complain that their service was down, only to find out that my cat had managed to unscrew the coax two rooms over (I still don't know how). In today's economic climate, tech support simply can't assume that you know what you're doing; they will run tests and scripts until they're satisfied that the problem is hardware-related. It's irritating when there is a genuine problem, but it also helps keep the overall cost down on your shiny new notebook.
Believe me, Dell will jump through just as many hoops when it comes to something that can't immediately be diagnosed through their packed-in diagnostic tools.
Now that you mention it, I think you're correct. It's been a while, and I only remember seeing my brother holding it up to the screen. I suppose the line method would probably be easier to implement, as well.
About ten years back, my brother had a very simple watch/PIM (Personal info manager, for those of you unfamiliar with term) made by Casio, IIRC. The unique feature was that you installed a driver which allowed the data input program to mess with your refresh rate (I'm guessing) and transmit the information to the watch. It usually took four or five tries to get it right, but I remember being pretty impressed with the unique method that helped avoid keeping track of a dongle/connector.
What digital signal? All of the info I've seen on the next-gen devices indicates that they'll be using component video for HD feeds in addition to optional HDMI/DVI. None of them will be converting to a DTV signal (which would involve pointlessly compressing video generated on the fly into an MPEG-2 transport stream). Assuming there's a normal analog TV involved, you'll hook it up the same way you always did: just use the best analog connection your TV supports. Assuming it's an HD-compatible TV or HDTV, you'll hook it up via component video or HDMI/DVI if those connections are present.
HD-compatible refers to television that are capable of displaying HD content but not tuning into Over-the-air digital feeds. Essentially, they're like monitors without a computer - all the resolution capability is there.
If you have an HD compatible TV and hook up an XBox 360 or PS3 to it, you'll get HD resolution without the need for a converter box. Additionally, if you have HD content being distributed via digital cable or satellite and you hook those devices up (using a component or DVI or Firewire connection, of course), you'll get HD content.
A converter allows an HD-compabitle TV to tune into telelvision shows being broadcast over the airwaves and being picked up with rabbit ears (or some similar antenna). This is one of the reasons (besides) confusion that consumers have been willing to purchase HD-compatible TVs; most of them already use digital cable or satellite and thus already have a converter box of sorts.
Read my responses to the same two posts above. Manufacturers aren't including ATSC tuners because they don't have to, and their price will be incidental once they're required and the economy of scale kicks in. OTA tuners are expensive because very few people buy them, and they are targetted at videophiles who have money to burn. Technologically, an ATSC tuner is nothing more than an RF tuner and an MPEG-2 decoder that is clocked slightly faster than the ones you might find in a DVD player. They'd probably cost $60 if they were selling like DVD players do, and they'll probably cost less than $10 to manufacturers once they're being built into every TV larger than 25 inches. In short, the ATSC tuner will be an incidental part of the TV's cost, and the actual cost centers in that TV are already low enough to be well within the requested price range.
Grandparent Post: In a few months, a TV like that will be required to receive free over-the-air transmissions, so I'm sure you'll see a model sometime closer to the end of this year with those features.
The word "like" implies similarity, so a TV like that would be one similar, but not identical. Such as, for example, "a model sometime closer to the end of this year" that "will be required to receive free over-the-air transmission." Genius. If I wanted to talk about this TV in particular, I would have used the phrase "such as" and wouldn't have qualified it with waiting for a model nearer to the end of the year.
As for the warranty issue, no television manufacturer I know provides a warranty greater than 1 year in either parts or labor, with the exception of a few RPTV's which come with a two-year warranty on the CRT guns. That's the way it rolls. It doesn't necessarily mean that the units will fail any faster, just that the manufacturer has chosen to sacrifice that portion of the profit in order to lower the price. It's a crapshoot. I'd probably lay down money that it wouldn't last eleven years, but my brother has an eight year-old Sharp that came with a one-year warranty and hasn't seen a single problem during those eight years. Realistically, a manufacturer would provide a twelve-year warranty if they knew nothing would break, but we don't live in a perfect world. My complaint was with the fact that you demanded someone show you a TV that would last that long. No one can know if one will or not, and neither a one nor a three year warranty will guarantee a longer-lasting product. Older Sony TVs had three year warranties not because they were more reliable, but simply because market research at the time showed that people placed a value on a warranty, and Sony raised the price so that they could offer that feature.
Who is Advent? Just one of the many companies who source their CRTs from the same Korean and Chinese manufacturers that crank out a lot of the Samsung/Hyundai/etc. and even some Japanese CRT units. Yeah, they're probably not as good a quality as a Toshiba or Hitachi, but my point was to illustrate that what you were asking for wasn't unattainable, or at least it won't be in a few months.
Read my answer to the similar response above. ATSC tuners are actually pretty trivial tech, they're just not operating in an economy of scale. I would lay money down that once it becomes a requirement, a nearly identical model with an ATSC tuner would be available at the same price by the end of the year.
Oh, no, that TV can't pick up OTA DTV sources. Very few can, because until next month, it's not required. At the end of July, the FCC requirement kicks in, and any HDTV over 25", IIRC, will be required to sport an ATSC tuner. Hence my clarification in point 2 that a TV similar to this would probably be out by the end of the year.
Picking up and displaying a 480p DTV source requires no fancier hardware than what a generic-brand $30 DVD player sports. Higher-end HD-capable OTA ATSC boxes cost a lot more, but that's because the market they're primarily selling to owns expensive TVs and doesn't balk at spending a bit more for a better quality picture.
Buying this TV right now wouldn't meet his qualifications, but my point was to illustrate that something very, very close to what he wanted already exists, and that it WILL exist in a few months.
Okay
That took me about 30 seconds to find. Best Buy happened to be the first retailer I hit, but I'm sure you'd have similar results elsewhere.
1) Granted, it's $329 instead of $250, but it's also 27" instead of 21". Don't forget to factor inflation.
2) In a few months, a TV like that will be required to receive free over-the-air transmissions, so I'm sure you'll see a model sometime closer to the end of this year with those features.
3) I don't know what sort of Home Theater equipment you have, but this thing has plenty of inputs and a line-level audio out, so I don't see how it couldn't.
4) Done plus 6"
5) There's a 26" Widescreen Samsung CRT on that same site for $450, so it's $120 more.
6) Wouldn't we all like that. Hell, you can't say that about anything, and it's not a by-product of DTV or not. My folks have a cheap Magnavox from the mid 80's that still works, and I've seen quality, name-brand TVs from many different time periods crap out. This one will be a crapshoot. Also, how exactly will you judge that something will last 11 years without a single problem?
Remember: $8,000 65" HDMI-equipped LCoS TVs with 1080p display capability are NOT the only DTVs out there.
GTA3 didn't suceed purely because it was 3D, it succeeded because despite some flaws it was fun, immersive and gave the player free rein within a detailed world.
Re-read my original post. It's entirely because of the quality 3D that GTA 3 was able to give the player full rein within a detailed world. I can jump off of buildings in a car, climb up onto flowerboxes, hide behind crates. These characteristics were not present in the previous games because it wasn't possible in their graphical world.
Sure, there are the missions, but I didn't even finish the game until more than a year after its release. The entire appeal of the game is the fact that it's almost a world simulator. The only way it's able to achieve that status is precisely because the developers did have good quality graphics to work with. I'm not saying that the graphics make up for a lack of gameplay (they don't, and never will). What I am saying is that people should stop trotting out the "Old Man" rhetoric that puts the two concepts at polar opposites of the gaming spectrum. Face it: Almost every quality game of the last four or five years has relied on big jumps in graphical capabilities to provide a meaninful improvement to the gameplay experience.
I'm going to pick on AC here for a minute, because every time any article such as this is posted, people trot out the ol' "Gameplay rules over graphics argument."
You're correct. Gameplay does trump graphics. In a purely theoretical world, if given choice A or B, almost everyone would choose gameplay over graphics. Fortunately, we don't live in that world.
Further, when people create this dichotomy, they ignore the fact that graphics have an enormous amount of power in enabling good gameplay. Without the simple hardware power increases of the last five years, many of the great games from that same timeframe wouldn't have happened.
Take Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City/SA, for example. People love the storylines, and the satirical look at the world, but both of those chracteristics were present in GTA 1 and 2. Neither of those games was particularly succesful at all compared to the last three. The sense of immersion was provided by a major jump in graphical capability that afforded the developers the ability to create an extremely immersive environment. In GTA 2, you could still choose to abide by the laws or mow down pedestrians, take alternate missions as you desired, and run amok with a gun or just listen to humorous radio DJs. The only difference was that the whole game took place from a top-down perspective. Arguably, every gameplay aspect of Grand Theft Auto would be do-able on a Sega CD, but I guarantee you it simply wouldn't be as much fun. I enjoy GTA 2, but it can't come close to holding my interest like GTA 3.
Or we'll take Katamari Damacy, a game that will entertain almost anyone. The gameplay and quirky charm is what draws everyone in, but I'll lay straight out that said gameplay simply wouldn't have been possible with the graphical power of the PS1. Seeing individual objects rolled up in the katamri wouldn't be possible. Without the smooth zooming transitions of the camera, the gameplay and control would suffer significantly. Critics would refer to it as a solid idea that was poorly executed, and they'd be absolutely correct. Again, gameplay here is great, but it relies on the graphical capability of good hardware to make it work.
There are still plenty of simple gameplay improvements left to tweak that will rely on quality graphical capability. I want to see truly, totally deformable environments in an RTS. I want to be able to blast through a building to create an alternate path for my units, or fell that building to block the advance of enemy troops. I want randomized chunks of metal flying off of an exploding tank that can wound surrounding personnel. Realistically, both of those ideas could be implemented in a simple top-down strategy game, but they won't have that truly realistic feel until I can see the size of the building in relation to the troops, or until I can shoot out the corner to drop a chunk on te enemy. Just like GTA would be do-able on a SegaCD, those ideas would be do-able in the original Command and Conquer, but they're not going to have that same truly satisfying feel until they're implemented in full 3D with the proper accompanying physics.
FPSes would benefit from those same characteristics, so it's not as though they're immune from this issue, either. Yes, gameplay is king, but please don't create an argument that forces graphics to the other side. Many gameplay ideas simply need good quality graphics behind them before they can be properly implemented.
The Japanese version of the Toyota Prius has an option for a one-button parallel park. Of course, said feature will never be seen in the US because of liability issues.
There have been several vertical keyboard/mouse designs oon the market, all of them built for ergonomic purposes. Wresting your wrist on it's side tends to be a much more natural position than the vertical "hunch."
Of course, all that it moot if this requires you to grip the gun higher up, thus placing undue stress on your upper arm.
Since (situational) irony is the opposite of what's expected, I would say that the submitter was probably correct in his or her use of "ironic." If I were to encounter something like this, I would immediately assume that it was a lame gimmick built to cheesily cash in on the novelty market, which would probably make me doubt the mouse's ergonomics.
I met The Fat Man once. He came and spoke at the University of Texas game developers organization. I was an officer in the organization, so I went and met the guy at the parking garage, then walked with him over to the lecture hall where he would be speaking. The guy was absolutely over-the-top larger than life.
He pulled up in a 1950's Rolls-Royce (right hand drive model), license plate GUD BAD and shouted at me to get in. The front grill had a set of longhorns mounted on it. He was wearing a replica F-16 flight suit with the name "Fat Man" on the breast.
The man is a composing genius, but not for reasons we might ordinarily cite. Sure, his creepy soundtracks on the 7th Guest were awesome, but he takes a totally different approach to a lot of compositions. He demoed an intro song (and accompanying video) for a PC game whose name I foget. Rather than the typical orchestral "sweeping emotions" or "going to war" compositions, he had a pseudo-Bluegrass song about how the title character was kind of a religious zealot, but he felt he was doing the right thing. It's the difference between a composer who's told "Give me something sort of like the imperial march, but with more energy" and a composer who's told, "Make something that fits with this scene."
Incidentally, the lecture he gave was actually an amazing insight into the minor role given to music in gaming, and his ideas to fix it. He was actively trying to market a system to some of the major players that worked like this:
Quake 2 has, say, 20 levels. Id hires a composer, and said composer writes the music for each of those levels. The music is tagged with various characteristics (scary, ominous, fast, slow, lyics, etc.) and is allowed to play for about 10 hours of gameplay. After that, the game would download music from a catalog of other games or private musical productions that fit the same characteristics. It was a cool idea, and it fit with his attitude that pretty much boiled down to "I want everyone to be able to hear someone's music."
Totally OT, I know, but I just wanted a little chance to reminisce about a breif encounter with a truly impressive individual in the gaming world.
You're absolutely correct. One of the major trends right now in urban housing is for a developer to buy up a small section of older 1-story homes in a decent part of a downtown area, then knock those homes down and replace them with 4-story townhomes. Most of these townhomes are ~2,500 sq. ft. affairs, but the number of stairs has got to affect their ability to sell.
During my time working for astructured wiring subcontractor, I saw several of these places setup with small elevators, but the numbers I usually heard tossed about were in the $80,000 to $100,000 range. A $20,000 elevator would definitely have a market not just at a personal level, but with many of those developers willing to make it a standard feature in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
I'm sorry, but I have difficulty comprehending complex issues about what it is to be human unless they're presented to me in anime form.
So we're going to need an anime on this issue, preferably with intensely slow pacing and occasionally boring monologues in between brief, action-filled flashes of the crack commando team "Sheep Force 2014."
Sheep Force 2014: They've been engineered to be the perfect killing machines, but they're also still in high school!
The first upgrade in Rouge agent would be Covergirl or possibly Lancome.
The first upgrade in Rouge Agent would be Covergirl or Lancome.
They tried that; it was called Esperanto. By "that," of course, I mean a reasonably logical language designed entirely for international communication. It was a flop. The only people who speak Esperanto do so out of a peculiar desire to embrace the marginal and obscure. They're the linguistic equivalent of the local Apple LISA user's club.
In Japanese (or Mandarin, I can't remember), the symbolic character for "noise" is three women. Language is intrinsically tied to culture. Hell, the names of the days in English still pay homage to Norse gods that haven't been widely worshipped in almost 1300 years. There are countless cases in history where one people ruled another, and they still weren't able to entirely force their language upon the subservient. You simply can't foist any artificial language on people.
English spelling can't be cleaned up. You know how everyone complains about backwards compatibility kludging up the computer world? Language relies infinitely more on that idea.
I'll put it to you this way: let's say we decide to rid English of the French endings. We'll redo words such as "repetition" and "concession" with an 'sh.' Fine, now they make more sense phonetically, except the millions of people who speak English are now confused by the spelling. In other words, there have to be such enormous gains put forth by changing a spelling that they can overcome the time needed to adapt to that spelling. It'd be like trying to bring the metric system to America, only much worse; there are definite tangible benefits to metric, but there are none that I can see to replacing those letters with 'sh.'
Spelling and grammar rules in every language are totally arbitrary when you get down to it. Some languages are better at following their established rules than others (and English is about as bad as it gets), but at the end of the day, the only reason we agree to follow them is to make communication easier. I could read English written using Cyrillic characters if I needed to, but I can read English faster using the existing Roman/Arabic character set because of experience. When it comes down to it, you're not going to convince nearly a billion native speakers to change so that the future set has a more "logical" spelling system, because there's no major tangible benefit and the systems all lack logic when you get down to it.
Does it boost my cell phone's reception?
See my post above; I've seen Shuttle-type machines in both CompUSA and Best Buy. They're nowhere near as small as Mini-ITX computers, though, and they tend to be aimed at a very different market.
From the benchmark article I posted:
Integrated CastleRock Graphics Adapter with MPEG2 Decoding
And from the dual processor article post:
The CN400 features an integrated UniChrome Pro graphics processor with 2D/3D graphics engine, hardware digital video acceleration, and Chromotion CE video display engine, including hardware MPEG-2/-4 acceleration and advanced video rendering and display technologies
So, yeah, a single processor system with embedded video does have a dedicated processor (technically the GPU) for DVD playing. MPEG-2 hardware decoders are pretty trivial to construct, and I can remember videocards as far back as the Voodoo3 building it in as part of the chipset. My guess is that a lot of the calculations for decoding MPEG video are quite similar to certain 3D calculations, as nearly every GPU seems to support this feature.
I'm sure the responsiveness is fine. I've used SMP systems, and they generally do have a good ability to resist getting bogged down. My point here was two-fold, though.
1) While acceptable for some use, it is not a reasonably powered mid-range desktop; Even Joe User demands more than email and surfing nowadays.
2) I wouldn't abandon a 2x500mhz system, but I also wouldn't go out and pay ~$250 for one right now.
It handles video playback because it has a dedicated processor that heavily assists MPEG-2/4 decoding. What about simple image or video editing (yes, Joe User is actually interested in preserving his memories). What about heavy multitasking? Hell, what about the occasional 2 year-old game? Remember, we're talking here about non-video performance approximately equal to dual 500Mhz PIIIs. Yes, it's probably useable, but you can buy a lot more powerful kit for what this will probably sell for.
Yeah, it'd probably work fine as a mediaPC (provided you weren't trying for HD), but the average home user does sometimes demand more than that, and this thing doesn't look like it would deliver.