My father came to the UK some years ago (15 maybe) and they still used that strange system where 12 shillings was a quarter and 8 quarters was a pound (I am just babbling what I remember... those are not accurate numbers)...
We switched to the Pound and Penny in 1971. That was 35 years ago. I think you would remember the difference between 15 and 35!
At the time, it was the same old OLD MISERABLE people that complained, because they didn't like change, even if it was for the better. We had a fucking 3p coin before that! And a 1/4 of a pence coin. And the coins were the size of dinner plates.
As for pre-decimalisation monetary denominations:
Originally the pound consisted of 20 shillings each of 12 pence, the abbreviation for which, d, came from the denier of Charlemagne, which in turn came from the Roman denarius.
Apple made it available a few months after that storm in a teacup.
They were probably tidying up the code, and people thought that it was Apple not releasing the kernel source code anymore.
What's worse is that you replied with this to a post that gave you an explicit link to the page you could get all the sources from. One click on "Darwin" and what do I see?
Mac OS X 10.4.8 Darwin 8.8
Source (PPC)
Source (x86)
It depends on your definition of 'embedded'. Quite often embedded means both integrated, low-power and rather weak actually.
However take the iTV device. Most likely this runs on cheaper hardware than x86. It could very well be an iPod on steroids. It could be a >500MHz ARM based device with dedicated video hardware. Now 500MHz isn't a lot by today's standards, but Mac OS X will run on ~300MHz Macs. Yes, ARM isn't PowerPC either, but I guess that a high-end mobile graphics core these days beats an 8MB Rage128.
Hell, it could run on a PowerPC chip like the Wii uses (750CL)- that was estimated to cost around $13. Vastly cheaper than even the cheapest x86. Failing that, a MPC5200,...
All the effort should be spent on advocating your advantages in a positive manner - and then you can compare yourself to the competition, you have a solution to the problem, you're not merely pointing out the bad stuff.
Negative marketing has been shown time and time again to annoy the people that catch the brunt of it - political campaigns through to Apple adverts. Maybe it will stop a few people upgrading, but it won't make them think of switching another solution unless you present that alternative solution in a wondrous halo of wonder fixing all of their issues.
How about a GoodLinux or something campaign as well?
In Britain, by the way, the waste plumbing is always on the outsideof the house.
That's for older houses up to the sixties - either they were so old they used to have external toilets, and the process of converting a room into an inside toilet is made easier by running the waste pipe externally, or they didn't think better of it.
Most (all?) modern houses have the waste pipe inside, in a corner of the house, although the vent still goes up through the roof.
I'm sure the bath/shower and toilets use the same waste pipe however.
Future houses may have to incorporate a grey-water storage tank underneath, which will use sink and bath outflows to reuse for toilet flushing and garden watering. Dunno how they'll deal with the soap issue for the latter...
God, why did I spend a few minutes writing a post about British waste pipe engineering?!
This book is pretty good, and has proved useful in several situations in the past. Of course I found out afterwards they weren't zombies, but hey, my intake of LSD in the 70s surely didn't contribute!
i.e., yeah, it's a good fun read, get someone to get it for you as an extra Christmas or Birthday present.
The CD32 was ahead of its time, built by a company that couldn't sell beer to alcoholics, and it looked cheap and tacky. One of its odd add-ons was the MPEG acceleration unit for VCDs.
Despite this it did have some good games and the hardware was pretty good - although not ideal for a games console. It was certainly more powerful than the Megadrive or SNES though - 14MHz 68020, 2MB RAM, etc. Graphics-wise it was powerful, but not totally game oriented (for mid-90s style games).
This wouldn't be a problem in the UK, and probably Europe, as no-one uses things like 1-800-COMCAST over here for telephone numbers in adverts. If it is the same in asia, then the two major mobile phone markets would not be affected by using this new keyboard.
According to comments on other sites, you can view any media that's attached via the memory card readers or USB - including MPEG4 videos on a USB attached hard drive.
Considering that in addition you can directly swap the hard drive yourself and the manual tells you how, Sony really appear to be very open with the PS3. Install a new OS? Yes, the option is there in the firmware. This is most unlike Sony! i guess that time restraints meant they couldn't implement all the feature limitations that they actually wanted to do:p
Compared to the very very closed nature of the XBox360 this could turn out to be very interesting. Also how long is it before someone works out a way of playing copied PS2 games from a hard drive/DVDR on the incorporated PS2 hardware?
Dude you have problems. One of them is growing older later than the bands you listen to.
Black Album is good, but it isn't the same as their previous albums. It certainly isn't cut for radio, unless your local radio stations like 6 minute songs. That's a pretty retarded statement. Unless the US got a speshual edition Black Album that no-one else did. Each of the songs on the Black Album is good in its own right, even if it isn't what you expected. Fuck, at least its a billion times better than Linkin Fucking Park. Thank your lucky stars.
What you are exhibiting is a case of 'fucking never grew up and never learnt to appreciate other music'. You're no better than a chav, except your music of choice is metal instead of D'n'B. Grow a cock.
However if you applied all your arguments to Load then I would agree wholeheartedly. That's when they sold out, that was an abomination of an album.
What use is a fancy Ajax web interface when it is so slow?
It's slow on a dual-2.3GHz G5 machine, and it's positively sloth-like on a 1.33GHz G4 (Firefox). It's slow on Windows too (2GHz Athlon).
It has lots of nice features, and it looks like a stand-alone mail client with added tabs, so it is innovative too. But it is sooooo sllloooowwwww. I can't bear to use it to be honest, I switched back to classic view. There's no excuse for the multiple second delayed reactions when clicking on things in the interface.
GMail is nippy and featureful, and the labelling function does away with that pesky management of email folders issue.
My Wii money has just been spent on a new Power Shower after my current one blew up. Add on top both the plumber and electrician fees (plus the likelihood that the latter will require that I install an up-to-date fuse box) and the cost is quite significant. A Wii + some games is what I'd rather have spent the money on.
Quite honestly I don't see Nintendo not selling their consoles now. The issue is Nintendo's long-term strategy - will they continue to drive the Wii in the marketplace, unlike what they did with the Gamecube? It's all very well selling some 10m consoles by the end of 2007, but that's no use in 2010 if you only shifted another 5 million because you neglected to keep the console price competitive and publicised, and all the third party publishers dropped away and the Premium PS3 costs $299.
They're a nice size, the cases aren't over the top, they have decent liner notes, the quality is good enough (although we'd all like 192kHz 32-bit audio these days heh) and they're DRM free. Quite often you can get them very cheaply as well, even for 6 month old albums.
Online music store music (iTunes in particular) has no physical presence, no liner notes, the quality is lower than I'd be happy with, they have DRM, and the pricing is fixed forever, there's no sales, or reasonable price drops for less popular music (although the music companies would rather have price rises for popular music).
Since I've bought an iPod, my music purchasing has doubled, and it has all been CDs (apart from some free tracks from iTunes I got with Coke, which I used for pop songs that I'd never buy the album for, but I liked that particular song). Oh, I lie, I bought 3 albums from Magnatune, but that's because I could get them at high bitrates without DRM, and pay what I thought it was worth and know that the artist still got a reasonable cut.
Why has it increased? Simply because I consume more music because I have a portable player that I listen to quite regularly. Also iTunes makes it very simple to import music (although I'd like it to have a function to rip music in two ways at the same time - one for the iPod (default 128kbps VBR), and one for the home (default AAC lossless). The songs would show up as a single entity in iTunes, but when you synced an iPod it would put the iPod rips on instead of the high quality rips (which you could use with the forthcoming iTV, or with your home stereo system, etc).
It's still more expensive even taking VAT into account. By around £20 over the US, and £10 over the EU.
Hell, some countries in Europe have >20% tax, yet their Wiis are going to cost less than in the UK, a country that doesn't even need a translation done for it. And PAL is used by more people than NTSC worldwide, and any modern graphics chip will be able to output PAL or NTSC anyway, without extra hardware.
The law can explain the higher cost than the US - more consumer rights suggests higher costs, because you can't shovel near-crap on people and then say 'sowwee, too late, you suck' to them. But the laws will generally be EU-wide.
However I'm sick and tired of the UK being more expensive than the EU. Tell me once again why we haven't adopted the Euro - it really seems to be costing us dearly.
I expect that video will be 5 bytes per pixel by the time this comes out - already the latest version of the HDMI specification allows for 36-bits per pixel, which would require 5 bytes.
So 7680 x 4320 x 5 at 60fps = 9.3GB/s.
Another comment said that this was 25 years away, although I wouldn't be surprised if it was only 15 years away the way things are progressing. 9.3GB/s is offered on even low-end graphics cards these days, but the bandwidth problem is between the player and the display, i.e., the HDMI equivalent specification of the time will have to carry that much bandwidth.
HDMI 1.3 currently carries over 1GB/s on its interlink, so that's probably not a worry ether.
And the console is sold at a $200 loss, that means each game has to make up $20 just for the console manufacturer to break even. Hence why this generation's games are yet another $10 more expensive than the previous generations.
Online services do add another revenue source however, which can help.
So the Wii will make a small profit for Nintendo, every game will make them a profit, online services may make them a profit. The games can be sold with far less licensing fees as well, hence why Wii games are cheaper. Also because the games are cheaper to make (not HD, etc) they'll be cheaper some more.
Nintendo will make billions in profit. Let's see Microsoft and Sony make billions in profit from their home console business...
Pretty much immediately as long as the DSL or Cable connection is over 1.5mbps down in real world usage, as that's the bitrate of the movies that Apple is providing.
It looks like Apple is limiting the maximum download rate to 10mbits per download / client. Otherwise it would have taken the original poster 2 minutes to download the 1.2GB file.
~~~
Argh, iTunes 7 still doesn't have an option to 'group compilations in library', arse. I was hoping that the 'album' view would do that.
1) Narrow the selection users have 2) Can herald new virtual console games every week
The first one means that users don't have too much to choose from, which means they'll come to a decision sooner, and they're more likely to come to a decision. Also the limitation will encourage players to buy new games as well as virtual console games.
The latter keeps interest in the virtual console high over the many years the Wii will be around. It also means that new games can be sold at higher prices. It's also nice for users, they can get a detailed lowdown on a few games every month, rather than a list of 1000+ games that they would never look at the detail for.
Doom III ran reasonably at 640x480 on a 9500, and jerked like an electrocuted eel at 800x600. The 9500 was exactly half of a 9700 Pro when suitably overclocked. As it ran other games perfectly I can only assume that Doom III really suffered under a certain minimum of capability which was between the 9500 and the 9700 Pro.
Slashdot Mirror
My father came to the UK some years ago (15 maybe) and they still used that strange system where 12 shillings was a quarter and 8 quarters was a pound (I am just babbling what I remember... those are not accurate numbers)...
We switched to the Pound and Penny in 1971. That was 35 years ago. I think you would remember the difference between 15 and 35!
At the time, it was the same old OLD MISERABLE people that complained, because they didn't like change, even if it was for the better. We had a fucking 3p coin before that! And a 1/4 of a pence coin. And the coins were the size of dinner plates.
As for pre-decimalisation monetary denominations:
Originally the pound consisted of 20 shillings each of 12 pence, the abbreviation for which, d, came from the denier of Charlemagne, which in turn came from the Roman denarius.
http://www.tclayton.demon.co.uk/coins.html#index
Apple made it available a few months after that storm in a teacup.
They were probably tidying up the code, and people thought that it was Apple not releasing the kernel source code anymore.
What's worse is that you replied with this to a post that gave you an explicit link to the page you could get all the sources from. One click on "Darwin" and what do I see?
Mac OS X 10.4.8
Darwin 8.8
Source (PPC)
Source (x86)
So, yeah, 100% completely wrong.
It depends on your definition of 'embedded'. Quite often embedded means both integrated, low-power and rather weak actually.
...
However take the iTV device. Most likely this runs on cheaper hardware than x86. It could very well be an iPod on steroids. It could be a >500MHz ARM based device with dedicated video hardware. Now 500MHz isn't a lot by today's standards, but Mac OS X will run on ~300MHz Macs. Yes, ARM isn't PowerPC either, but I guess that a high-end mobile graphics core these days beats an 8MB Rage128.
Hell, it could run on a PowerPC chip like the Wii uses (750CL)- that was estimated to cost around $13. Vastly cheaper than even the cheapest x86. Failing that, a MPC5200,
I hate negative marketing.
All the effort should be spent on advocating your advantages in a positive manner - and then you can compare yourself to the competition, you have a solution to the problem, you're not merely pointing out the bad stuff.
Negative marketing has been shown time and time again to annoy the people that catch the brunt of it - political campaigns through to Apple adverts. Maybe it will stop a few people upgrading, but it won't make them think of switching another solution unless you present that alternative solution in a wondrous halo of wonder fixing all of their issues.
How about a GoodLinux or something campaign as well?
(I didn't read the article)
And it's awesome. I want one. It's got the worst keyboard known to mankind though. But the formfactor is excellent.
The plastic is not cigarette resistant though, that was one of our tests earlier in the pub.
Heh, I guess it isn't Slashdot, News For Plumbers for a reason...
I had actually wondered why the waste pipe was inside in more modern houses because of the maintainance issue. Silly me.
In Britain, by the way, the waste plumbing is always on the outsideof the house.
That's for older houses up to the sixties - either they were so old they used to have external toilets, and the process of converting a room into an inside toilet is made easier by running the waste pipe externally, or they didn't think better of it.
Most (all?) modern houses have the waste pipe inside, in a corner of the house, although the vent still goes up through the roof.
I'm sure the bath/shower and toilets use the same waste pipe however.
Future houses may have to incorporate a grey-water storage tank underneath, which will use sink and bath outflows to reuse for toilet flushing and garden watering. Dunno how they'll deal with the soap issue for the latter...
God, why did I spend a few minutes writing a post about British waste pipe engineering?!
This book is pretty good, and has proved useful in several situations in the past. Of course I found out afterwards they weren't zombies, but hey, my intake of LSD in the 70s surely didn't contribute!
i.e., yeah, it's a good fun read, get someone to get it for you as an extra Christmas or Birthday present.
The CD32 was ahead of its time, built by a company that couldn't sell beer to alcoholics, and it looked cheap and tacky. One of its odd add-ons was the MPEG acceleration unit for VCDs.
Despite this it did have some good games and the hardware was pretty good - although not ideal for a games console. It was certainly more powerful than the Megadrive or SNES though - 14MHz 68020, 2MB RAM, etc. Graphics-wise it was powerful, but not totally game oriented (for mid-90s style games).
I'd nominate the Amstrad GX4000 before the CD32.
This wouldn't be a problem in the UK, and probably Europe, as no-one uses things like 1-800-COMCAST over here for telephone numbers in adverts. If it is the same in asia, then the two major mobile phone markets would not be affected by using this new keyboard.
Personally I find that T9 works well enough.
According to comments on other sites, you can view any media that's attached via the memory card readers or USB - including MPEG4 videos on a USB attached hard drive.
:p
Considering that in addition you can directly swap the hard drive yourself and the manual tells you how, Sony really appear to be very open with the PS3. Install a new OS? Yes, the option is there in the firmware. This is most unlike Sony! i guess that time restraints meant they couldn't implement all the feature limitations that they actually wanted to do
Compared to the very very closed nature of the XBox360 this could turn out to be very interesting. Also how long is it before someone works out a way of playing copied PS2 games from a hard drive/DVDR on the incorporated PS2 hardware?
Fridge game: words made; sadness avoided.
This is utterly pointless, worthless drivel.
GNAA troll posts; moderated down; victory!
make && make install; make clean
why am i still up; insomnia?
Someone point Terry Goodkind at this.
Christnuggets on a stick, that man!
He doesn't know when to stop.
Until the readers care no more.
I think you can all think of TMI situations where my story beats all others.
Meh, who am I kidding?
Dude you have problems. One of them is growing older later than the bands you listen to.
Black Album is good, but it isn't the same as their previous albums. It certainly isn't cut for radio, unless your local radio stations like 6 minute songs. That's a pretty retarded statement. Unless the US got a speshual edition Black Album that no-one else did. Each of the songs on the Black Album is good in its own right, even if it isn't what you expected. Fuck, at least its a billion times better than Linkin Fucking Park. Thank your lucky stars.
What you are exhibiting is a case of 'fucking never grew up and never learnt to appreciate other music'. You're no better than a chav, except your music of choice is metal instead of D'n'B. Grow a cock.
However if you applied all your arguments to Load then I would agree wholeheartedly. That's when they sold out, that was an abomination of an album.
What use is a fancy Ajax web interface when it is so slow?
It's slow on a dual-2.3GHz G5 machine, and it's positively sloth-like on a 1.33GHz G4 (Firefox). It's slow on Windows too (2GHz Athlon).
It has lots of nice features, and it looks like a stand-alone mail client with added tabs, so it is innovative too. But it is sooooo sllloooowwwww. I can't bear to use it to be honest, I switched back to classic view. There's no excuse for the multiple second delayed reactions when clicking on things in the interface.
GMail is nippy and featureful, and the labelling function does away with that pesky management of email folders issue.
My Wii money has just been spent on a new Power Shower after my current one blew up. Add on top both the plumber and electrician fees (plus the likelihood that the latter will require that I install an up-to-date fuse box) and the cost is quite significant. A Wii + some games is what I'd rather have spent the money on.
Quite honestly I don't see Nintendo not selling their consoles now. The issue is Nintendo's long-term strategy - will they continue to drive the Wii in the marketplace, unlike what they did with the Gamecube? It's all very well selling some 10m consoles by the end of 2007, but that's no use in 2010 if you only shifted another 5 million because you neglected to keep the console price competitive and publicised, and all the third party publishers dropped away and the Premium PS3 costs $299.
They're a nice size, the cases aren't over the top, they have decent liner notes, the quality is good enough (although we'd all like 192kHz 32-bit audio these days heh) and they're DRM free. Quite often you can get them very cheaply as well, even for 6 month old albums.
Online music store music (iTunes in particular) has no physical presence, no liner notes, the quality is lower than I'd be happy with, they have DRM, and the pricing is fixed forever, there's no sales, or reasonable price drops for less popular music (although the music companies would rather have price rises for popular music).
Since I've bought an iPod, my music purchasing has doubled, and it has all been CDs (apart from some free tracks from iTunes I got with Coke, which I used for pop songs that I'd never buy the album for, but I liked that particular song). Oh, I lie, I bought 3 albums from Magnatune, but that's because I could get them at high bitrates without DRM, and pay what I thought it was worth and know that the artist still got a reasonable cut.
Why has it increased? Simply because I consume more music because I have a portable player that I listen to quite regularly. Also iTunes makes it very simple to import music (although I'd like it to have a function to rip music in two ways at the same time - one for the iPod (default 128kbps VBR), and one for the home (default AAC lossless). The songs would show up as a single entity in iTunes, but when you synced an iPod it would put the iPod rips on instead of the high quality rips (which you could use with the forthcoming iTV, or with your home stereo system, etc).
You can click on the 'style' button to get a wireframe mesh rather than the rather abysmal 'sketch' front end.
Then again it is only a prototype, hopefully the in-application rendering will improve vastly because it isn't helping the application do its thing.
I expect that in-game potatoes, gourds, melons, coconuts and snowmen will look great in the future.
It's still more expensive even taking VAT into account. By around £20 over the US, and £10 over the EU.
Hell, some countries in Europe have >20% tax, yet their Wiis are going to cost less than in the UK, a country that doesn't even need a translation done for it. And PAL is used by more people than NTSC worldwide, and any modern graphics chip will be able to output PAL or NTSC anyway, without extra hardware.
The law can explain the higher cost than the US - more consumer rights suggests higher costs, because you can't shovel near-crap on people and then say 'sowwee, too late, you suck' to them. But the laws will generally be EU-wide.
However I'm sick and tired of the UK being more expensive than the EU. Tell me once again why we haven't adopted the Euro - it really seems to be costing us dearly.
I expect that video will be 5 bytes per pixel by the time this comes out - already the latest version of the HDMI specification allows for 36-bits per pixel, which would require 5 bytes.
So 7680 x 4320 x 5 at 60fps = 9.3GB/s.
Another comment said that this was 25 years away, although I wouldn't be surprised if it was only 15 years away the way things are progressing. 9.3GB/s is offered on even low-end graphics cards these days, but the bandwidth problem is between the player and the display, i.e., the HDMI equivalent specification of the time will have to carry that much bandwidth.
HDMI 1.3 currently carries over 1GB/s on its interlink, so that's probably not a worry ether.
And the console is sold at a $200 loss, that means each game has to make up $20 just for the console manufacturer to break even. Hence why this generation's games are yet another $10 more expensive than the previous generations.
Online services do add another revenue source however, which can help.
So the Wii will make a small profit for Nintendo, every game will make them a profit, online services may make them a profit. The games can be sold with far less licensing fees as well, hence why Wii games are cheaper. Also because the games are cheaper to make (not HD, etc) they'll be cheaper some more.
Nintendo will make billions in profit. Let's see Microsoft and Sony make billions in profit from their home console business...
Pretty much immediately as long as the DSL or Cable connection is over 1.5mbps down in real world usage, as that's the bitrate of the movies that Apple is providing.
It looks like Apple is limiting the maximum download rate to 10mbits per download / client. Otherwise it would have taken the original poster 2 minutes to download the 1.2GB file.
~~~
Argh, iTunes 7 still doesn't have an option to 'group compilations in library', arse. I was hoping that the 'album' view would do that.
Trivial - if there's a limited selection you:
1) Narrow the selection users have
2) Can herald new virtual console games every week
The first one means that users don't have too much to choose from, which means they'll come to a decision sooner, and they're more likely to come to a decision. Also the limitation will encourage players to buy new games as well as virtual console games.
The latter keeps interest in the virtual console high over the many years the Wii will be around. It also means that new games can be sold at higher prices. It's also nice for users, they can get a detailed lowdown on a few games every month, rather than a list of 1000+ games that they would never look at the detail for.
Doom III ran reasonably at 640x480 on a 9500, and jerked like an electrocuted eel at 800x600. The 9500 was exactly half of a 9700 Pro when suitably overclocked. As it ran other games perfectly I can only assume that Doom III really suffered under a certain minimum of capability which was between the 9500 and the 9700 Pro.