At least he has the consolation that he is young enough to start again. Brilliant people are never short of ideas.
It is just gutting when your sole vision in life for 5 years is cruelly crushed by large non-feeling corporate entities. But what do you do? Join them, or go against them?
"His bike costs about 4 cents per mile, but a gas powered bike costs 3 cents"
Well, in the UK a gallon of petrol is about £4.00. That is $6.00. If a bike can do 100mpg (for arguments sake) then it costs 6cents a mile in the UK. A bike will probably do 50mpg, which is 12c per mile.
Yet this soyafuel can do 100mpg for 3 cents a mile. That is half to a quarter of the price of normal petrol in the UK.
Hey, forget fuel guzzling America, bring your technology over here where we need it. Please. Now. Not next month, tomorrow.
Now if a car could be made to do 100mpg from cheap soyaoil, then I will be a very happy man. Damn oil cartels.
- power outage - don't they have a backup generator? Always find out about backup electricity when co-locating.
- $850 for 2 boxes per month co-location with unlimited bandwidth - even in the UK you can pay £3100 per year (under $500 per month) for unlimited bandwidth for a box (4U or under), with a reputable provider (clara.net) who know what they are doing.
Anyway, American in store service may be great, but America doesn't match many other countries for tech support. Anyway, in a few months time when the recession bites home in America, there will be plenty of high quality techs available, and service will improve.:)
Hmmm. I would really like to clone the loss making part of the system (the hardware) and rake 100% of the loss away from those that initially developed it.
Games for Indrema were never going to be open source. Games are where the profit is.
Indrema would have been better off working out how to get Linux working on the XBox as a game host OS, and on the GameCube and PS2.
Get the Indrema hardware specs, and software library and opensource them under an "OpenConsole" moniker.
There would be a minimum required power (e.g., Kyro II with 700MHz Athlon), and all consoles that are "OpenConsole" compliant would have to meet that speed, be it with an 800MHz PIII, or whatever. There would be optional parts to the spec (Firewire and Ethernet spring to mind). OpenConsole would be updated once every two years with a new minimum spec, and a backwards compatibility requirement. You do not get OpenConsole label if your console is over-specced either, as that would split the market and tempt people to write games that require too much spec for a particular OpenConsole specification.
Indrema Corporation are expected to shut their doors within the next couple of months after running out of money and failing to find new backers.
Points: 150
Microsoft shares rose 0.1c upon investors hearing the news.
Honestly, this is a shame, as the device had a lot of potential. However they should have stuck with a spec and released something. I hope they opensource the specification before they lock the door.
I agree with your argument, however, wouldn't you want the patent for cancer cure to be held at Oxford University or the Cancer Research Charity mentioned instead of some faceless pharmaceutical company?
No patent will mean that some other company will get a patent on their work. You know how knackered patent offices are, it will happen.
Also, I very much doubt that this research will be sold onto the biggest players. Most drugs cost a tonne because of two things - research costs to recoup and "we have 17 years to get our money on this one boys, then we have to find a health hazard with the system so that our competitors can't use it afterwards". When a cancer research charity is funding the research, it is highly likely that licenses for the drugs will be given out for a reasonable fee to all reputable drug companies. Market competition will then ensure low prices, unless they fix the price amongst themselves.
Hey, even AMDZone wanted to get in on the act of having a team for Cancer Curing, and I hope that they continue to do so. Despite it being Intel sponsored, and the guys at AMDZone are pretty much the definition of Anti-Intel. I am surprised they don't use Macs!:)
Is all that stuff the same quality components as used by Apple though? Apple make machines to last 5 years, PCs are lucky to last 5 years, especially cheap piece o' crud ones like the one above.
Enjoy cutting your hands to bits on an ugly crap case. That motherboard must be the lowest of the low. The mouse will not compare - be honest. And that will be one hell of a crappy 17" monitor - I would prefer a better quality 15" monitor.
And hey, I don't even care one bit about Macs. Yet I think that you should argue like components for like whenever possible.
Well, they were showing off real hardware at St Louis over the weekend (only Amiga could hold a convention over April Fools). This is going to happen. It might not be CHRP, as that spec is quite old now. It will be better. How better, I don't know.
I imagine that a slot based card is cheaper than that, however it is a slightly move awkward shape for a small case.
The slot might also allow two PPC chips to be mounted onto the card - I don't know for sure though, but the IBM CPC710 PPC northbridge supports two PPC CPUs (and is presumably the chip used in dual processor macs).
Remember folks, the Amiga DE is basically a fast VP and Java core with a lot of supporting applications and software. Amiga is being used as a brand name here. The Amiga DE is not the old Amiga OS or Amiga hardware in any way, form or manner. It could have been called the "Haddock Java and VP engine from the company called Amiga".
However, Amiga Inc are also working on Amiga OS4.0 (PPC native Amiga OS, July 2001), OS4.2 (AmigaDE host, December 2001), OS4.5 (new front-end, etc, July 2002) and OS 5.0 (SMP, December 2002). There is a lot of info in the amigaone group at groups.yahoo.com, also at http://ann.lu/ and http://www.amigart.com/.
New Amiga hardware is almost here as well. PPC motherboards that will also run Linux from bPlan, etc. A lot of people on Slashdot want PPC motherboards - now you will be able to get them. There will be several makes, all conforming to the zico specification from AInc (6 PCI slots, AGP, PC133 memory, CPU slot for PPC ships (PPC processors are CBGA chips, so they need a slot based interface unless you mount them directly to the motherboard - no PGA processors like those from Intel and AMD), Firewire, USB, etc).
Have a laugh at the Amiga Politics. There are 3 Amiga OSs now - AROS (x86 native), MorphOS (PPC native) and now the official AmigaOS4.x from Amiga. The people don't get along with each other in general, although AROS are acting as the "Mozilla" to Amigas "Netscape" and MorphOSs "Netscape". So for a general idea of the next gen Amiga OS, look no further than AROS with bells and whistles attached.:-)
You mean 100,000 hours for red, 30,000 hours for green and 1,000 hours for blue, don't you?
Which means that you could get some wicked yellow/red/green displays that will last over 3 years before the green starts giving out. Great for mobile phones and PDAs in my opinion.
Especially if they are higher res than the current technology. A Palm in yellow-scale will suit me fine, if it is running at 640x640:-) Especially with red and green highlights available.
The most amazing thing about this is the display on the device. At around 800dpi, albeit in monochrome, this just kicks ass.
If this is an indicator of how good OLED devices are going to be in the end, then the display market is going to get a lot more interesting within the next couple of years.
I know that the technology process used to make the watch probably wouldn't scale to screen sizes over an inch square at the moment, but 640x480 at 800dpi - that can create 16-shade "yellow"-scale at 200dpi, and 256-shade "yellow"-scale at 100dpi. I would love to see this screen in a mobile phone as soon as possible. Even a downmarket 400dpi version:-)
That clock program looks great as well. I want a clock on my desk that looks like that (but bigger). With the built-in PIM functions as well - it could talk to the computer via Bluetooth and show me my appointments and do things like alarms as stuff. And glow yellow at night for free.
This can be compared to Football Transfers in Europe (and presumably in the USA). In those cases the player is worth the money, in this case it is the employee.
Rival clubs can purchase the contract for a player from a club, and the player can play for that rival club instanty, even against their former club. There is no 'non-compete' clause, although it is possible for clubs to come to agreement between them during the transfer talks.
This is clearly another step towards corporate ownership of employees, and a step away from employee freedom of choice, in return for increased wages. However, we are in a knowledge based economy now (cf. skill in football), so the value is in the knowledge.
Imagine working for your current company, halfway through a contract, when a rival company approaches your company and offers them $100,000 for you (and your knowledge). If the company accepts, and you accept the wage terms of the new company, then kazow, new job. Former employer has recompense for losing your knowledge, you get the wages you want.
If you are wanted, that is!
In Europe, in football, a footballer, Bosman, left his club in order to join another club midway through his contract. His former club did not give up the contract though, so he could not play for the new club. This is how non-compete agreements were enforced by sly clubs who didn't want to lose their employees. However, the EU ruled eventually that footballers have the right to leave their club whenever they want, etc. Lots of mess, resulting in transfer fees now being "Training Recompense", etc to the new club. I don't know all of the details, I am sure someone else does though.
Nintendo have dropped their stupid "cuddly games only" policy. There will now be some pretty kick ass games on the GameCube, violent, bloodthirsty games at last. Sega write good games, and these will appear on the GameCube.
Doom, yeah. Even Quake II isn't big news these days. Sure, the console could come with a games disk, with custom Quake levels and Doom levels running within Quake and Doom (as the originals are Copyrighted, however there are tonnes of freeware levels available).
Indrema at most will be a niche console. It will be the console that in 2 years time people will show to their friends, and they will think that it is neat, then they will ask if it plays {big hit game}... No.
PC hardware sucks. All force and no thought. Where is the elegance? GeForce 3 is not elegant, just brutish, hot, and nasty (average picture quality, etc). x86 is old, decrepit, hot and inefficient. The 400MHz custom PPC that IBM is developing for Nintendo will probably match the 750MHz x86 that Indrema uses, and the GameCube is going to provide developers with a nice software copying preventer, in a custom disk format (small DVD) - you might get the data off of the original, but where do you write a copy?
I don't want M$ to succeed at all - the XBox is all of those bad things I mentioned above. Indrema is as well, but not proprietary (they think that they will get NVidia to write Linux drivers for the GeForce 3 and open source them? Ho ho ho). I would like to see Indrema do reasonably well though, but they haven't got the clout, marketing nous, or fervent following.
Assume that the device uses a cool version of an Athlon processor - say a mobile Athlon 750MHz. This could cost, ooh, about $40 in quantity in a few months time. Add to this the GeForce3 chip, which in quantity, and in a few months time, etc, could be down to $100. Add decent sound. Add DVD drive $50, and so on.
It all adds up. Even taking the hardware alone, without development costs, etc, you could be looking at $400+. If they were confident of selling 1m Indrema consoles though, then economies of scale kick in and the price goes down to $300 a console. But after 4 months on the market, they have to reduce the consoles price to keep interest high. Selling at $200. Still making a loss.
However, by this time 750MHz mobile Athlons could be even cheaper - maybe even bin parts that couldn't make 900MHz, and would normally be chucked. This could reduce the cost even more.
Well, provide a decent programming language for it then. (decent as in usable by people with ideas, but not necessarily programming skills).
Of course, it could easily come with all of the free software like Gimp, KOffice, etc, that would push this console into the home computer market.
I started programming on the Amstrad CPC, in BASIC, then ASM. However, I feel sorry for the person whose first game programming attempts ever have to be in C. Maybe something like Blitz Basic (old Amiga software being revived for the PC soon) would be a nice thing to have. Even AMOS. Even if it isn't all powerful, and limits people to slow 3D or 2D games.
I agree that they can't market it as "yet another games console with possible internet access and duff DVD support", it does need something extra. Maybe they could team up with Sky TV in the UK to try and get an Indrema embedded in every Sky box - Sky are already offering TiVos for their subscribers.
It would be a shame if Indrema were to fail in their dream of creating a Linux based console, however if it fails it would be nice if both the detailed hardware specifications as well as the code were open sourced. This would leave it open for another well funded company to come in and pick up where they left off.
But most of us here can see that there isn't much chance for Indrema. The OS may be free, but hey, it will be free for the XBox as well as far as Microsoft is concerned (until M$ are finally split up (if ever...) and hardware goes the other way from the software). Games developers are backing the dead certs now:
- XBox (except Japanese market)
- Gamecube
- PS2 (looks like it could come in 3rd at this rate)
There is not a market for more than 2 consoles, never mind 3. Indrema reminds me of the old 3D0 - a good machine in its time (94/95) but a combination of PSX, N64 and Saturn killed it off early.
Also I have doubts about the GeForce being used. What would be good is an updated Kyro II with T&L, and running at 250MHz. It wouldn't cost as much to use, its efficiency is surely something that Linux afficionados would love, and with a few small updates to make it more powerful (shouldn't be too hard to do) it would make a good choice. It might even be easy to get Dreamcast games ported as well, as the graphics chipset has is derived from that used in the Dreamcast. That would give it some real backing.
The Indrema has to launch soon though, in less than 6 months, otherwise it is too late. $300 for Gamecube or Indrema. I know what I would choose.
They cost about 8x the price of a normal lightbulb, use up 1/5 of the energy, and last 5 - 10x longer. What is the problem? Oh, you live in America, there is probably some 1000% (to get a $100 lightbulb) tax on energy efficient devices from lobbying from traditional lightbulb manufacturers. Get real.
Even when they originally came out and cost about 30x the price of a normal lightbulb, they would still save you money over the lifetime of the bulb because of the reduced electricity costs.
However, where I live, there was a normal lightbulb that gave out a few weeks ago. It was bought 70 years ago. Got a good lifespan from that one. I think that new cheap lightbulbs are like new floppy disks - they always give up after about a few months or if you use them.
All the bulbs in my house are energy efficient. From the 7W candle bulbs (replacing 40W bulbs) that you can hold in your hand when on after a few hours, to the 11W (60W) bulbs, to the 20W (100W) main lightbulb. I can have 4 lights on in the lounge using up a total of 53W in total, not 240W.
SCreen is 240x160, which allows 38400 pixels, and the GBA can display all 2^15 = 32768 colours at the same time in one of its bitmap modes, so yes, you can put every colour on screen at once if you wanted.
What this actually shows is how low the prices of reflective colour TFT screens has gone. Even if Nintendo are selling the machine at a loss (possibly), then the screen (which is 50% higher resolution than a Palm m505's) isn't costing much either, say $10 - $40. Anyone know any better the trade prices for small format colour TFT screens?
Makes the Palm m505 look expensive for what it is. But you are paying for the platform there, not the hardware.
Still, if Linux/BSD/AmigaNG/QNX/etc could be ported to the GBA, and someone came up with a thin touch sensitive attachment for the GBA that plugged into the serial port, then maybe some serious PDA development could occur.
Slashdot Mirror
At least he has the consolation that he is young enough to start again. Brilliant people are never short of ideas.
It is just gutting when your sole vision in life for 5 years is cruelly crushed by large non-feeling corporate entities. But what do you do? Join them, or go against them?
Well, in the UK a gallon of petrol is about £4.00. That is $6.00. If a bike can do 100mpg (for arguments sake) then it costs 6cents a mile in the UK. A bike will probably do 50mpg, which is 12c per mile.
Yet this soyafuel can do 100mpg for 3 cents a mile. That is half to a quarter of the price of normal petrol in the UK.
Hey, forget fuel guzzling America, bring your technology over here where we need it. Please. Now. Not next month, tomorrow.
Now if a car could be made to do 100mpg from cheap soyaoil, then I will be a very happy man. Damn oil cartels.
So:
:)
- power outage - don't they have a backup generator? Always find out about backup electricity when co-locating.
- $850 for 2 boxes per month co-location with unlimited bandwidth - even in the UK you can pay £3100 per year (under $500 per month) for unlimited bandwidth for a box (4U or under), with a reputable provider (clara.net) who know what they are doing.
Anyway, American in store service may be great, but America doesn't match many other countries for tech support. Anyway, in a few months time when the recession bites home in America, there will be plenty of high quality techs available, and service will improve.
Managed Service = Looking after the server, including applying security patches.
They purchased a sysadmin package, so that the hosting prover supply sysadmin for the box.
Hmmm. I would really like to clone the loss making part of the system (the hardware) and rake 100% of the loss away from those that initially developed it.
Games for Indrema were never going to be open source. Games are where the profit is.
Indrema would have been better off working out how to get Linux working on the XBox as a game host OS, and on the GameCube and PS2.
I agree.
Get the Indrema hardware specs, and software library and opensource them under an "OpenConsole" moniker.
There would be a minimum required power (e.g., Kyro II with 700MHz Athlon), and all consoles that are "OpenConsole" compliant would have to meet that speed, be it with an 800MHz PIII, or whatever. There would be optional parts to the spec (Firewire and Ethernet spring to mind). OpenConsole would be updated once every two years with a new minimum spec, and a backwards compatibility requirement. You do not get OpenConsole label if your console is over-specced either, as that would split the market and tempt people to write games that require too much spec for a particular OpenConsole specification.
Indrema Corporation are expected to shut their doors within the next couple of months after running out of money and failing to find new backers.
Points: 150
Microsoft shares rose 0.1c upon investors hearing the news.
Honestly, this is a shame, as the device had a lot of potential. However they should have stuck with a spec and released something. I hope they opensource the specification before they lock the door.
I agree with your argument, however, wouldn't you want the patent for cancer cure to be held at Oxford University or the Cancer Research Charity mentioned instead of some faceless pharmaceutical company?
No patent will mean that some other company will get a patent on their work. You know how knackered patent offices are, it will happen.
Also, I very much doubt that this research will be sold onto the biggest players. Most drugs cost a tonne because of two things - research costs to recoup and "we have 17 years to get our money on this one boys, then we have to find a health hazard with the system so that our competitors can't use it afterwards". When a cancer research charity is funding the research, it is highly likely that licenses for the drugs will be given out for a reasonable fee to all reputable drug companies. Market competition will then ensure low prices, unless they fix the price amongst themselves.
Hey, even AMDZone wanted to get in on the act of having a team for Cancer Curing, and I hope that they continue to do so. Despite it being Intel sponsored, and the guys at AMDZone are pretty much the definition of Anti-Intel. I am surprised they don't use Macs!
Is all that stuff the same quality components as used by Apple though? Apple make machines to last 5 years, PCs are lucky to last 5 years, especially cheap piece o' crud ones like the one above.
Enjoy cutting your hands to bits on an ugly crap case. That motherboard must be the lowest of the low. The mouse will not compare - be honest. And that will be one hell of a crappy 17" monitor - I would prefer a better quality 15" monitor.
And hey, I don't even care one bit about Macs. Yet I think that you should argue like components for like whenever possible.
Amstrad in the UK in the 80's went after every company that started with "ams", then even started on "am"!
Don't know how they did though.
Well, they were showing off real hardware at St Louis over the weekend (only Amiga could hold a convention over April Fools). This is going to happen. It might not be CHRP, as that spec is quite old now. It will be better. How better, I don't know.
I imagine that a slot based card is cheaper than that, however it is a slightly move awkward shape for a small case.
The slot might also allow two PPC chips to be mounted onto the card - I don't know for sure though, but the IBM CPC710 PPC northbridge supports two PPC CPUs (and is presumably the chip used in dual processor macs).
Remember folks, the Amiga DE is basically a fast VP and Java core with a lot of supporting applications and software. Amiga is being used as a brand name here. The Amiga DE is not the old Amiga OS or Amiga hardware in any way, form or manner. It could have been called the "Haddock Java and VP engine from the company called Amiga".
However, Amiga Inc are also working on Amiga OS4.0 (PPC native Amiga OS, July 2001), OS4.2 (AmigaDE host, December 2001), OS4.5 (new front-end, etc, July 2002) and OS 5.0 (SMP, December 2002). There is a lot of info in the amigaone group at groups.yahoo.com, also at http://ann.lu/ and http://www.amigart.com/.
New Amiga hardware is almost here as well. PPC motherboards that will also run Linux from bPlan, etc. A lot of people on Slashdot want PPC motherboards - now you will be able to get them. There will be several makes, all conforming to the zico specification from AInc (6 PCI slots, AGP, PC133 memory, CPU slot for PPC ships (PPC processors are CBGA chips, so they need a slot based interface unless you mount them directly to the motherboard - no PGA processors like those from Intel and AMD), Firewire, USB, etc).
Have a laugh at the Amiga Politics. There are 3 Amiga OSs now - AROS (x86 native), MorphOS (PPC native) and now the official AmigaOS4.x from Amiga. The people don't get along with each other in general, although AROS are acting as the "Mozilla" to Amigas "Netscape" and MorphOSs "Netscape". So for a general idea of the next gen Amiga OS, look no further than AROS with bells and whistles attached.
Unlike other notebooks, they have stuck the Insert and Delete keys where the space bar should be, and there is a black grey key there as well.
Naff keyboard layouts irk me. Why don't they stick those silly keys somewhere else out of the way?
Yeah, print it out on a printer, then realise that your oled cartridge has a blocked pin so it doesn't work.
:-)
I can see HPs future range:
Plain Black Cartridge
Color Cartridge
Photo Color Cartridge
Monochrome OLED Cartridge (works on T-Shirts!)
Color OLED Cartridge
One day the OLED Cartridge will cost less than the photo cartidge....
Gah, not enough large cell-phone screenshots available for that Timeport.
ah, here is some more info.
You mean 100,000 hours for red, 30,000 hours for green and 1,000 hours for blue, don't you?
:-) Especially with red and green highlights available.
Which means that you could get some wicked yellow/red/green displays that will last over 3 years before the green starts giving out. Great for mobile phones and PDAs in my opinion.
Especially if they are higher res than the current technology. A Palm in yellow-scale will suit me fine, if it is running at 640x640
If this is an indicator of how good OLED devices are going to be in the end, then the display market is going to get a lot more interesting within the next couple of years.
I know that the technology process used to make the watch probably wouldn't scale to screen sizes over an inch square at the moment, but 640x480 at 800dpi - that can create 16-shade "yellow"-scale at 200dpi, and 256-shade "yellow"-scale at 100dpi. I would love to see this screen in a mobile phone as soon as possible. Even a downmarket 400dpi version :-)
That clock program looks great as well. I want a clock on my desk that looks like that (but bigger). With the built-in PIM functions as well - it could talk to the computer via Bluetooth and show me my appointments and do things like alarms as stuff. And glow yellow at night for free.
This can be compared to Football Transfers in Europe (and presumably in the USA). In those cases the player is worth the money, in this case it is the employee.
Rival clubs can purchase the contract for a player from a club, and the player can play for that rival club instanty, even against their former club. There is no 'non-compete' clause, although it is possible for clubs to come to agreement between them during the transfer talks.
This is clearly another step towards corporate ownership of employees, and a step away from employee freedom of choice, in return for increased wages. However, we are in a knowledge based economy now (cf. skill in football), so the value is in the knowledge.
Imagine working for your current company, halfway through a contract, when a rival company approaches your company and offers them $100,000 for you (and your knowledge). If the company accepts, and you accept the wage terms of the new company, then kazow, new job. Former employer has recompense for losing your knowledge, you get the wages you want.
If you are wanted, that is!
In Europe, in football, a footballer, Bosman, left his club in order to join another club midway through his contract. His former club did not give up the contract though, so he could not play for the new club. This is how non-compete agreements were enforced by sly clubs who didn't want to lose their employees. However, the EU ruled eventually that footballers have the right to leave their club whenever they want, etc. Lots of mess, resulting in transfer fees now being "Training Recompense", etc to the new club. I don't know all of the details, I am sure someone else does though.
Doom, yeah. Even Quake II isn't big news these days. Sure, the console could come with a games disk, with custom Quake levels and Doom levels running within Quake and Doom (as the originals are Copyrighted, however there are tonnes of freeware levels available).
Indrema at most will be a niche console. It will be the console that in 2 years time people will show to their friends, and they will think that it is neat, then they will ask if it plays {big hit game}... No.
PC hardware sucks. All force and no thought. Where is the elegance? GeForce 3 is not elegant, just brutish, hot, and nasty (average picture quality, etc). x86 is old, decrepit, hot and inefficient. The 400MHz custom PPC that IBM is developing for Nintendo will probably match the 750MHz x86 that Indrema uses, and the GameCube is going to provide developers with a nice software copying preventer, in a custom disk format (small DVD) - you might get the data off of the original, but where do you write a copy?
I don't want M$ to succeed at all - the XBox is all of those bad things I mentioned above. Indrema is as well, but not proprietary (they think that they will get NVidia to write Linux drivers for the GeForce 3 and open source them? Ho ho ho). I would like to see Indrema do reasonably well though, but they haven't got the clout, marketing nous, or fervent following.
It all adds up. Even taking the hardware alone, without development costs, etc, you could be looking at $400+. If they were confident of selling 1m Indrema consoles though, then economies of scale kick in and the price goes down to $300 a console. But after 4 months on the market, they have to reduce the consoles price to keep interest high. Selling at $200. Still making a loss.
However, by this time 750MHz mobile Athlons could be even cheaper - maybe even bin parts that couldn't make 900MHz, and would normally be chucked. This could reduce the cost even more.
Yeah. Tux Racer. Smiletris. Kickin', man!
You can make games for it
Well, provide a decent programming language for it then. (decent as in usable by people with ideas, but not necessarily programming skills).
Of course, it could easily come with all of the free software like Gimp, KOffice, etc, that would push this console into the home computer market.
I started programming on the Amstrad CPC, in BASIC, then ASM. However, I feel sorry for the person whose first game programming attempts ever have to be in C. Maybe something like Blitz Basic (old Amiga software being revived for the PC soon) would be a nice thing to have. Even AMOS. Even if it isn't all powerful, and limits people to slow 3D or 2D games.
I agree that they can't market it as "yet another games console with possible internet access and duff DVD support", it does need something extra. Maybe they could team up with Sky TV in the UK to try and get an Indrema embedded in every Sky box - Sky are already offering TiVos for their subscribers.
It would be a shame if Indrema were to fail in their dream of creating a Linux based console, however if it fails it would be nice if both the detailed hardware specifications as well as the code were open sourced. This would leave it open for another well funded company to come in and pick up where they left off.
But most of us here can see that there isn't much chance for Indrema. The OS may be free, but hey, it will be free for the XBox as well as far as Microsoft is concerned (until M$ are finally split up (if ever...) and hardware goes the other way from the software). Games developers are backing the dead certs now:
- XBox (except Japanese market)
- Gamecube
- PS2 (looks like it could come in 3rd at this rate)
There is not a market for more than 2 consoles, never mind 3. Indrema reminds me of the old 3D0 - a good machine in its time (94/95) but a combination of PSX, N64 and Saturn killed it off early.
Also I have doubts about the GeForce being used. What would be good is an updated Kyro II with T&L, and running at 250MHz. It wouldn't cost as much to use, its efficiency is surely something that Linux afficionados would love, and with a few small updates to make it more powerful (shouldn't be too hard to do) it would make a good choice. It might even be easy to get Dreamcast games ported as well, as the graphics chipset has is derived from that used in the Dreamcast. That would give it some real backing.
The Indrema has to launch soon though, in less than 6 months, otherwise it is too late. $300 for Gamecube or Indrema. I know what I would choose.
They cost about 8x the price of a normal lightbulb, use up 1/5 of the energy, and last 5 - 10x longer. What is the problem? Oh, you live in America, there is probably some 1000% (to get a $100 lightbulb) tax on energy efficient devices from lobbying from traditional lightbulb manufacturers. Get real.
Even when they originally came out and cost about 30x the price of a normal lightbulb, they would still save you money over the lifetime of the bulb because of the reduced electricity costs.
However, where I live, there was a normal lightbulb that gave out a few weeks ago. It was bought 70 years ago. Got a good lifespan from that one. I think that new cheap lightbulbs are like new floppy disks - they always give up after about a few months or if you use them.
All the bulbs in my house are energy efficient. From the 7W candle bulbs (replacing 40W bulbs) that you can hold in your hand when on after a few hours, to the 11W (60W) bulbs, to the 20W (100W) main lightbulb. I can have 4 lights on in the lounge using up a total of 53W in total, not 240W.
SCreen is 240x160, which allows 38400 pixels, and the GBA can display all 2^15 = 32768 colours at the same time in one of its bitmap modes, so yes, you can put every colour on screen at once if you wanted.
What this actually shows is how low the prices of reflective colour TFT screens has gone. Even if Nintendo are selling the machine at a loss (possibly), then the screen (which is 50% higher resolution than a Palm m505's) isn't costing much either, say $10 - $40. Anyone know any better the trade prices for small format colour TFT screens?
Makes the Palm m505 look expensive for what it is. But you are paying for the platform there, not the hardware.
Still, if Linux/BSD/AmigaNG/QNX/etc could be ported to the GBA, and someone came up with a thin touch sensitive attachment for the GBA that plugged into the serial port, then maybe some serious PDA development could occur.