I struggled for hours trying to figure out why only 23 of the 100 songs I'd selected were being loaded on the phone, despite it having space for at least 90 of them. Then I realized that all of the ones it was silently rejecting were the ones encoded at a higher bitrate. After enabling the downconvert (disabled by default) in the options, it worked great.
I think the target market will be office PCs and servers and the like where the graphics card is more of a necessary evil than a competitive feature. Gamers will of course buy a graphics card too, but regular folks will get their computer a bit cheaper.
I bought the ROKR for my Wife because she needed a new phone (Cingular was telling her that her old one was being obsoleted and would be shut off eventually) and because I wanted her to stop stealing my iPod all of the time.
Overall, I think people have been too harsh on this little phone. It does have some flaws, but overall it's pretty nice. It even has some surprises, like the phone speaker good enough to use the little guy like a tiny boombox. Also, people are focusing on the wrong things when they complain about the phone, the 100 song limit isn't the real issue (think of it like the Shuffle, not a regular iPod), it's the USB1 interface that makes loading songs an almost overnight affair. Also, the battery life seems a bit short to me, although I suspect there will be a firmware upgrade for it at some point to keep it from draining the battery after only 1 day of sitting idle. The lights on the side are kinda cool, but really touchy and better left disabled. The camera is surprisingly good for a phone though. The 100 song limit is not a huge deal because the phone only comes with 512MB of memory anyway and 100 average length songs does a pretty good job of filling that up. It's only a big issue if you don't believe in listening to any song longer than 30 seconds or something.
Despite the drawbacks, the phone does a pretty good job of what it's supposed to do, and the interface on the phone is quite nice.
Quick tip for anybody with the ROKR: Enable the option in iTunes that downcoverts all songs to 128kbps. If you don't do that, it will just silently refuse to load any song encoded higher and make you pull your hair out in frustration while you try to figure out why half of your playlist is being silently ignored.
I have a feeling the integrated graphics will be, well, integrated graphics. IE, a very very low end graphics card that works just fine as long as you don't care about 3D performance.
It seems to me that console chip development must draw budget away from getting the absolute fastest card out in the shortest time, because once a company starts working with consoles, the other guy gets that 1% faster card out a month before you.
It happened to nVidia and it's happening again to ATI. It probably would have happened to Voodoo too if they hadn't self destructed before console companies realized that they couldn't develop everything in-house anymore.
True, the one area where SGIs really excelled was when they were hooked up to the massive tape robot cabinets that required a constant dataflow in the order of gigabytes per second to keep them running. The SGI boxes were the only thing around that could keep that up.
Actually, I had an O2 and played around with O200s and O2000s at work. MIPS processers were just slower. The architecture of the chips was very nice, and with a budget they probably could have kept ahead of the IA32 architecture for longer, but they just didn't have the volume to keep it up. Sure they sold a lot of chips to Sony for the Playstations, but those were fairly low margin compared to the PC market.
I even played around with one of the first PCs they made. It was a very nice machine, but it cost (IIRC) $5000 and offered only marginally better performance than its $2000 competitor.
The problem is that the company stagnated. They found a niche that kept them going for years, but the niche closed up and they were never very successful moving beyond it. The stagnation also caused most of their best minds to flee for other companies and founding, among other things, nVidia.
I still have an old Indigo under my desk (with Elan graphics and everything), and it's a fun toy to pull out every now and again, but it's down to toy status. A niche company just can't compete directly with the massive R&D budget of someone like ATI or nVidia, and there is little you can do with an SGI big iron box these days that you can't do with one of the professional cards from ATI or nVidia for a whole lot less money.
The same thing happened to the processers SGI uses. MIPS processers were designed to be blazing fast and for awhile they were, but then Intel and AMD caught up and MIPS's relatively miniscule product development budget couldn't compete. SGI's desktop machines ended up being slower than contemporary PCs from about 1999 on.
Have you watched the NASA ballerina video yet? It's hot.
Re:Trip down memory lane
on
20 Years of NES
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Uh, the "Seal of Quality" was just a measure to stop pirates, it was by no means an actual indication of a game's quality. There was plenty of crap out there with the Nintendo Seal of Quality on it.
Eh, that's somewhat more honest than when happens at most companies. Normally you call up and the rep tells you that his name is Steve (hint: it's not). At least you can be relatively sure that the rep's real name isn't CoolElf, assuming Blizzard's HR department isn't run by crackheads.
Reading through the Ars article, I see that the shell is extremely powerful, but most of the functionality is wrapped up as methods for objects. This allows for a lot of flexibility, but it will be difficult to program in unless the documentation is well laid out and easily accessable.
If you're cracking a 500 page book every time you want to split lines or run a regular expression, this will never take off. If there is a good fast (Ars had something that looked fast, but if there is no expanded help on a command beyond "returns int32", it's somewhat useless) documentation system it could be the wave of the future. Here's to hoping.
Even if nobody uses it, it's still better than command.com.
It doesn't help that in a lot of the games you're given a bug report window with a 200 character limit to describe the bug. Many times that is just not enough room to adequeately describe what the bug is.
I know long reports are hard on the QA folks, but for a real issue it can be necessary.
A lot of players submit bug reports on stuff they just don't understand too. It's part of the game, but they havn't realized it yet (my fireballs don't work on this door!).
If it's anything like the latest Asus motherboards, the whole media player thing is handled in the BIOS. All it does is turn on the sound card, set the mixer settings to something reasonable, and send a "play start" command to the CD-ROM. It doesn't need an OS because it's not doing anything sophisticated. The whole thing is probably 200 bytes or so, and most of that is the interface.
The "Good Guys" are the ones that follow the chain of command (unless their commander is some government figure) though. Good soldiers are the bulk of the good guys in the series. While this isn't a surprise in a military novel, one thing you almost never see is one of the good guys (except the main character) questioning the chain of command at all.
Enders game is the only book of his I read, but if you asked me his political position after that I would have come up with rightwing authoritarian. There is a definate subtext of "the authorities are of course right, what are you thinking even considering otherwise?" in that work.
In fact lots of military Sci-Fi falls in that category. Check out David Weber's works for instance. Democracy is just something that gets in the way of chain of command in those books, and it usually does whatever the worst thing possible would be. He primarily uses it as a way to inject "bad" characters into the chain of command so his darling heros can show them up and look better in the eyes of the higher-ups.
Also, IRC isn't really the same as IM. With IRC you are in a chat channel and while you can whisper to people it's cumbersome to do so. Also, the clients tend to take up a lot of screen real estate and aren't so good at telling you when something relevant to you has come up.
While there is no technical reason you couldn't use the IRC protocol with an IM-like front end, that's not really what it was designed for.
It's intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that the reason behind this EU and UN grab for internet power is in order to suppress speech they disagree with. If not that, then why bother?
You don't think it's possible that these guys are just jealous that they don't control it and want it just because they don't have it?
Besides, most people are reasonably happy with ICANN. I wish they were going after Verisign and the root certs instead, those are the real bastards.
On the other hand, a high limit is actually helpful with your credit report. One of the factors in the number is your debt load, which is basically a measure of how close to the limit you are with your various revolving credit options (credit cards). With large limits on your cards, this number stays low and you get a slightly better score. With a small limit on a card you use frequently (for expenses) can hurt your score, since credit scores are one-time snapshots when they are taken and do not take into account that you pay off the card at the end of each month.
Seriously folks, a Credit Card is not a mind control device. It is not a license to spend money you can't pay back either. Exercise a little restraint and you can have a near perfect credit rating later in life, which will make things like buying a home a lot less complicated.
Heh, I have an SB Live Value I bought ages ago when I was a poor college student and built-in sound cost extra and was even crappier on motherboards. Thus far I have felt no need to upgrade. My motherboard now has 6.2 sound and optical out and all sorts of stuff that my (equally old) speakers can't handle. But the SB Live supports 8 channels in hardware compared to the 1 my regular card supports. It's no secret why I still use it.
Admittedly, some of the Chinese technology might seem backward. In the 1980's, they lauched a probe that had to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and needed a heat shield. They researched a bunch of different high tech materials, testing ablating rates, weight, cost, heat transfer, etc., and finally settled on Oak. Yes, a wooden heat shield. It apparently ablated at a known and reliable rate, was a good heat insulator, and had many other benefits, the very least of which was cost. I recognize engineering genius in this decision, but the reporting on it laughed and laughed about the low-tech, backwards-assed Chinese program. I disrespect reporting that presumes that high tech requires high cost; I also disrespect reporting that pretends that basic designs originating in the 1960's but refined constantly since then are somehow less than state of the art.
All of those properties are fine, but the downside of Oak is that it is heavy, really heavy for spacecraft use. It works, but it is inefficent, which is why everybody else passed it up. Still, not a horrible choice for a small satellite.
Plus, 95% of what Congress does is mind numbingly dull and uninteresting for normal folk. I mean how are the "masses" supposed to vote on the regulation of the prices of Lettuce?
This isn't the first time someone has said that on Slashdot. Rep Boucher is one of the few guys in Congress who really gets technology. He's a real class act.
Slashdot Mirror
I struggled for hours trying to figure out why only 23 of the 100 songs I'd selected were being loaded on the phone, despite it having space for at least 90 of them. Then I realized that all of the ones it was silently rejecting were the ones encoded at a higher bitrate. After enabling the downconvert (disabled by default) in the options, it worked great.
I think the target market will be office PCs and servers and the like where the graphics card is more of a necessary evil than a competitive feature. Gamers will of course buy a graphics card too, but regular folks will get their computer a bit cheaper.
I bought the ROKR for my Wife because she needed a new phone (Cingular was telling her that her old one was being obsoleted and would be shut off eventually) and because I wanted her to stop stealing my iPod all of the time.
Overall, I think people have been too harsh on this little phone. It does have some flaws, but overall it's pretty nice. It even has some surprises, like the phone speaker good enough to use the little guy like a tiny boombox. Also, people are focusing on the wrong things when they complain about the phone, the 100 song limit isn't the real issue (think of it like the Shuffle, not a regular iPod), it's the USB1 interface that makes loading songs an almost overnight affair. Also, the battery life seems a bit short to me, although I suspect there will be a firmware upgrade for it at some point to keep it from draining the battery after only 1 day of sitting idle. The lights on the side are kinda cool, but really touchy and better left disabled. The camera is surprisingly good for a phone though. The 100 song limit is not a huge deal because the phone only comes with 512MB of memory anyway and 100 average length songs does a pretty good job of filling that up. It's only a big issue if you don't believe in listening to any song longer than 30 seconds or something.
Despite the drawbacks, the phone does a pretty good job of what it's supposed to do, and the interface on the phone is quite nice.
Quick tip for anybody with the ROKR: Enable the option in iTunes that downcoverts all songs to 128kbps. If you don't do that, it will just silently refuse to load any song encoded higher and make you pull your hair out in frustration while you try to figure out why half of your playlist is being silently ignored.
I have a feeling the integrated graphics will be, well, integrated graphics. IE, a very very low end graphics card that works just fine as long as you don't care about 3D performance.
It seems to me that console chip development must draw budget away from getting the absolute fastest card out in the shortest time, because once a company starts working with consoles, the other guy gets that 1% faster card out a month before you.
It happened to nVidia and it's happening again to ATI. It probably would have happened to Voodoo too if they hadn't self destructed before console companies realized that they couldn't develop everything in-house anymore.
True, the one area where SGIs really excelled was when they were hooked up to the massive tape robot cabinets that required a constant dataflow in the order of gigabytes per second to keep them running. The SGI boxes were the only thing around that could keep that up.
Actually, I had an O2 and played around with O200s and O2000s at work. MIPS processers were just slower. The architecture of the chips was very nice, and with a budget they probably could have kept ahead of the IA32 architecture for longer, but they just didn't have the volume to keep it up. Sure they sold a lot of chips to Sony for the Playstations, but those were fairly low margin compared to the PC market.
I even played around with one of the first PCs they made. It was a very nice machine, but it cost (IIRC) $5000 and offered only marginally better performance than its $2000 competitor.
The problem is that the company stagnated. They found a niche that kept them going for years, but the niche closed up and they were never very successful moving beyond it. The stagnation also caused most of their best minds to flee for other companies and founding, among other things, nVidia.
I still have an old Indigo under my desk (with Elan graphics and everything), and it's a fun toy to pull out every now and again, but it's down to toy status. A niche company just can't compete directly with the massive R&D budget of someone like ATI or nVidia, and there is little you can do with an SGI big iron box these days that you can't do with one of the professional cards from ATI or nVidia for a whole lot less money.
The same thing happened to the processers SGI uses. MIPS processers were designed to be blazing fast and for awhile they were, but then Intel and AMD caught up and MIPS's relatively miniscule product development budget couldn't compete. SGI's desktop machines ended up being slower than contemporary PCs from about 1999 on.
Have you watched the NASA ballerina video yet? It's hot.
Uh, the "Seal of Quality" was just a measure to stop pirates, it was by no means an actual indication of a game's quality. There was plenty of crap out there with the Nintendo Seal of Quality on it.
It also apparently crashed a lot. This is kind of like saying "I got a Volkswagon Beetle up to 200kph[1]!!!" with a whole lot of modifications.
[1] Going downhill
Eh, that's somewhat more honest than when happens at most companies. Normally you call up and the rep tells you that his name is Steve (hint: it's not). At least you can be relatively sure that the rep's real name isn't CoolElf, assuming Blizzard's HR department isn't run by crackheads.
Reading through the Ars article, I see that the shell is extremely powerful, but most of the functionality is wrapped up as methods for objects. This allows for a lot of flexibility, but it will be difficult to program in unless the documentation is well laid out and easily accessable.
If you're cracking a 500 page book every time you want to split lines or run a regular expression, this will never take off. If there is a good fast (Ars had something that looked fast, but if there is no expanded help on a command beyond "returns int32", it's somewhat useless) documentation system it could be the wave of the future. Here's to hoping.
Even if nobody uses it, it's still better than command.com.
It doesn't help that in a lot of the games you're given a bug report window with a 200 character limit to describe the bug. Many times that is just not enough room to adequeately describe what the bug is.
I know long reports are hard on the QA folks, but for a real issue it can be necessary.
A lot of players submit bug reports on stuff they just don't understand too. It's part of the game, but they havn't realized it yet (my fireballs don't work on this door!).
If it's anything like the latest Asus motherboards, the whole media player thing is handled in the BIOS. All it does is turn on the sound card, set the mixer settings to something reasonable, and send a "play start" command to the CD-ROM. It doesn't need an OS because it's not doing anything sophisticated. The whole thing is probably 200 bytes or so, and most of that is the interface.
The "Good Guys" are the ones that follow the chain of command (unless their commander is some government figure) though. Good soldiers are the bulk of the good guys in the series. While this isn't a surprise in a military novel, one thing you almost never see is one of the good guys (except the main character) questioning the chain of command at all.
Enders game is the only book of his I read, but if you asked me his political position after that I would have come up with rightwing authoritarian. There is a definate subtext of "the authorities are of course right, what are you thinking even considering otherwise?" in that work.
In fact lots of military Sci-Fi falls in that category. Check out David Weber's works for instance. Democracy is just something that gets in the way of chain of command in those books, and it usually does whatever the worst thing possible would be. He primarily uses it as a way to inject "bad" characters into the chain of command so his darling heros can show them up and look better in the eyes of the higher-ups.
Also, IRC isn't really the same as IM. With IRC you are in a chat channel and while you can whisper to people it's cumbersome to do so. Also, the clients tend to take up a lot of screen real estate and aren't so good at telling you when something relevant to you has come up.
While there is no technical reason you couldn't use the IRC protocol with an IM-like front end, that's not really what it was designed for.
Besides, most people are reasonably happy with ICANN. I wish they were going after Verisign and the root certs instead, those are the real bastards.
On the other hand, a high limit is actually helpful with your credit report. One of the factors in the number is your debt load, which is basically a measure of how close to the limit you are with your various revolving credit options (credit cards). With large limits on your cards, this number stays low and you get a slightly better score. With a small limit on a card you use frequently (for expenses) can hurt your score, since credit scores are one-time snapshots when they are taken and do not take into account that you pay off the card at the end of each month.
Seriously folks, a Credit Card is not a mind control device. It is not a license to spend money you can't pay back either. Exercise a little restraint and you can have a near perfect credit rating later in life, which will make things like buying a home a lot less complicated.
Heh, I have an SB Live Value I bought ages ago when I was a poor college student and built-in sound cost extra and was even crappier on motherboards. Thus far I have felt no need to upgrade. My motherboard now has 6.2 sound and optical out and all sorts of stuff that my (equally old) speakers can't handle. But the SB Live supports 8 channels in hardware compared to the 1 my regular card supports. It's no secret why I still use it.
Plus, 95% of what Congress does is mind numbingly dull and uninteresting for normal folk. I mean how are the "masses" supposed to vote on the regulation of the prices of Lettuce?
This isn't the first time someone has said that on Slashdot. Rep Boucher is one of the few guys in Congress who really gets technology. He's a real class act.
Actually, yes. Have you seen the per performance per user rates on music streamed over the internet? It's highway robbery.