ROM chips just made the most sense because the removable media of the era was so terrible. Consider that a lot of NES games came on 2 Megabit cartridges, that's 256kB. A contemporary disk drive might be something like the Commodore 1541, where each disk held 164kB of data. Worse, it took on the order of minutes to read that much data off of one of those disks, even before you account for the braindead bus the C64 was saddled with. Later on, there were 8mb carts (1mB!). High density floppies didn't start to arrive until halfway through the NES's life cycle.
Add in the fact that you can put memory in each cart if you're blowing out the base system's RAM space, or even other processors, and the carts are really a no-brainer. It's not even hard to see why Nintendo held on to Carts after everybody else moved to optical disks, especially since those early optical disks were still quite slow, even though the total capacity completely blew away anything you could get with a cart. It's a fine tradeoff for anybody who is willing to lovingly craft the world to look good with mostly flat or gouraud shaded polys. It just sucked for all of the third party developers who were making a lot of use of textures to hide the low poly counts of those systems, and who didn't want a cartoony aesthetic to their game.
Yeah, I have a tough time crying over the lost profits of the middlemen. Especially the likes of Gamestop, which have been fairly customer hostile for as long as I can remember. "Oh, you only order enough copies of a game to cover exactly what was preordered and no more? You do realize I could have just ordered it from Amazon instead and saved myself a trip out here and $10 right?"
The tug of war between the developers and the consumers is a constant struggle. Theoretically with no possibility of Gamefly or used sales eating into your profits and with online stores needing much lower profit margins (what they ask for may be different though) to stay afloat, new game prices for the next generation consoles could be considerably cheaper. If Microsoft or Sony were really bold, they would lower the cost of entry on their consoles and attract a large number of independent developers well beyond what services like the XBLA currently do, and allow them to grow and build AAA (or maybe just AA) sized games. Remove as many unnecessary expenses and restrictions as possible and you could have a major win.
It's a risky move however. Major publishers (EA) don't like lowering the barriers to entry, and they have major leverage with console manufacturers. "Oh, you want to let indie studios make full size games? Hmm, how much do you like having Madden on your console?" Basically, you would have to convince Sony and Microsoft to both do it at the same time so the big name studios don't have any leverage over them with this issue, and good luck convincing Sony to open up even a little bit. They've shown themselves to be willing to choke themselves to death for years now as long as it allows them to maintain an iron grip on all parts of their console.
Why shouldn't it be a surprise? The graphics hardware in a 360 or a PS3 is positively low end by today's standards. While I know that Nintendo doesn't bother to compete on megapixels, it's really trivial to build even a cheap PC these days that will completely spank the last generation consoles performance wise. It doesn't seem to make sense to bring a new console to market that is even more limited than that. Basically, the per-console savings of just a few dollars each to go from low end to ultra low end graphics wouldn't seem to justify hamstringing your developers so much.
The downside is that Fox News gets to run 2 months of stories about how the socialist government is even trying to get between you and your movie popcorn and you had better not even think about voting for them again; fair and balanced.
It is depressing how much stuff is not being done in Washington because of how it would play out on the nation's most watched news channel. I firmly believe that the hyper scrutiny of the 24 hour news cycle is the primary cause behind the total partisan gridlock in Congress today. If you can't make a basic compromise without being called a traitor for weeks in the "news" then you can't expect to get anything done. Worse, the people who did buck the trend and try to get stuff done? They're out and replaced by wackos from the extreme fringe of the party.
There's nothing stopping case manufacturers from doing this now except the relentless drive to produce the cheapest case possible. Heck, most cases use drive rails for the 5 1/4 bays already. I've seen plenty of OEMs that go finger friendly for things like PCI slots as well. They're not too far away from having finger friendly clips for the motherboard and 3 1/2 drive bay mounts.
That was more or less my experience with it. I went to college in 1995 and the recommended machine was an IBM P75 with 16MB of RAM. Plenty for DOS and Win3.1, but it also came preloaded with OS/2 3.0 Warp. That was pretty cool I thought, so I booted up OS/2 to check it out. It took forever to boot, and once booted the UI was just dog slow. Clicking on a menu required a full second or more for it to draw on the screen. It was just unusable. It also didn't have a good web browser, which even in 1995, was a death knell for any OS (my friends BeBox had the same problem).
Looking back now, I might have been able to tweak it and get it usable if I had been willing to invest the time in it, but I instead focused my energy on FreeBSD (2.1!) and that turned out to be the better choice anyway.
The one thing I did like about that machine: PC-DOS was better than MS-DOS. Not a lot better, but its memory management was just slightly superior so that the constant headaches my friends had with trying to get stuff to run on their MS-DOS machines (damn, 1MB short of base memory!) was not a problem on mine. I never had to make boot floppies to get Doom to run because PC-DOS was slightly better about getting stuff up into High Memory).
How much did the near lack of winter weather for the end of 2011 across much of the US affect those on-time statistics? It's hard to praise someone for adequate performance when they did not suffer many challenges.
Ironic that just this morning I was hearing of yet another Mass Transit project (Arlington-Alexandria streetcar project) being canned because it was "too expensive". Mass transit is great when you have it, useless when you don't.
A screenplay and a novel are not all that similar, and that's the closest thing to the book that the movie will get. It takes a real talent to make a screenplay out of a novel, and that is where it becomes a derivative work. Converting to PDF is not the same thing.
Best Buy doesn't need to install a router in a power strip to stick a $75 price tag on it. Just a little extra bullshit on the package is all they need.
Oh no, I've lost the last place around here that sells HDMI cables for $30/foot! However am I going to find someone with outrageous markup to rip me off? And where am I going to go to get constantly upsold on every damn thing?
To be fair though, I have not actually bought anything at a Bestbuy in years now, so this doesn't really affect me very much. Their business practices already killed me off as a customer as sure as closing my local store will.
Why should I as the author expect anything from that? I didn't make the movie, why should I expect to get a piece of it just because they used my book as source material? Copyright should protect me from having Random House take my book, slap a different cover on it, and resell it as their own work. It shouldn't prevent people from making derivative works.
It's pretty much impossible to write a completely original novel or movie. Something somewhere in your work is going to be construed as a reference to something before. That's a good thing, it lets people leverage the combined knowledge of society in order to advance the state of the art. The current copyright (and patent) system is undermining this, by letting artists block off their work for effectively indefinite periods and add the specter of lawsuit to any successful work. The copyright realm is not as bad as the patent realm on the lawsuit front (because as I mentioned before, even those people copied existing ideas), but I fully expect the situation to get worse over time unless something is done to nip it in the bud.
Yeah, I personally group those companies down with the "freeze your body and in 100 years they'll have the cures for old age and for freezing and you'll be revived in the future!" places. The advantage is that since you're paying them year after year they will have the operating budget to actually keep running long enough to be useful, unlike those body places that typically run out of money and then just dump the bodies out back. You have to be outrageously optimistic to think that it will pan out though.
Basically, if some stem cell research pans out then you might need some of your own stem cells later in life to actually use it. While there is currently no use for cord blood, the thinking is that in 60 years it might be really useful, and that's when your kid may need it. It's impossible to say what new medical procedures will be available in 60 years, so the whole thing is a gamble. Heck, even if the medical procedures pan out, they may not have a good way of reversing the freezing damage on the cells.
It's something for optimists with some extra disposable income. There are some pretty sketchy looking cord blood companies out there however, so do your research. Since nobody is making withdrawals from these banks yet, it's hard to tell which ones are real and which ones are scams/incompetent.
So long as people insist on being paid for the care they administer (including building expensive prosthetic), there will be no such thing as "the end of disabilities". Especially mental disabilities. There is already a treatment available for a great many conditions today: A full time aide, it's just that few people can afford such an extravagance.
Sadly, nVidia doesn't seem all that interested in the 3D-Vision project anymore. I don't think the sales numbers were what they had hoped for and the whole project is just on life support at this point. I don't think they're going to drop driver support anytime soon, but I don't think they're going to push game devs to go "3D Vision Certified" either anymore.
Even though in theory it should work perfectly since your 3D card knows all of the information it needs to send proper 3D to the glasses, game developers tend to do little tricks that break it. Fog and Shadow effects are a big problem, often appearing out of plane or causing massive slowdowns for instance. UI elements tend to be problematic as well, since they are frequently just 2D objects basically painted on top of the screen. Game developers aren't interested in working around those problems either for the small number of customers (a small subset of the already small PC gaming subset) that are effected.
A good modern example is Mass Effect 3. Most of the game was alright with 3D glasses, except you have to turn off shadows and some smoke effects were messed up, but there were a few places were it totally collapsed. The Galaxy map where you navigate around to your missions was totally broken in 3D mode for instance.
Having a small child myself, I freaking hate most of the DVDs targeted to them. Especially Disney DVDs, with their either 10 or 25 minutes (your choice, you have to hit the button shortly after inserting the disc) of unskippable ads before it starts the movie. Fastplay my ass. It's infuriating to me when he gets a Handy Manny DVD for Christmas and I have to go back and rip it and re-encode the disc so he doesn't have to sit through an outrageously long stretch of ads just to play the movie. Every time I go through the process I think to myself: I should have just pirated this, I'm being punished for trying to do the right thing.
From what I remember of Laserdiscs, they were pretty much exclusively marketed towards cinephiles who wanted something better than VHS. The high price point insured that they never broke out of their relatively small niche though, and the number of titles available on Laserdisc was never all that large. They were also unwieldy and could suffer from oxidation of the metal layer due to manufacturing defects caused by the unwieldy form factor. Early players were only single sided too, so for many movies you had to get up and flip the disc halfway through.
Basically, it was a technology with a lot of drawbacks but a large enough profit margin to keep the format alive for a couple of decades until DVD came along and utterly outclassed it in pretty much every way.
The fact that your set doesn't do HDMI isn't in spite of being over 1080p, it is because of it. HDMI only goes up to 1080p, so it doesn't make sense for higher resolution displays. That's why monitors have plateaued at 1080p even though much greater pixel densities are possible and PC hardware is more than powerful enough to drive it these days. I think it's embarrassing that the 9.7" screen on an iPad has more pixels than the vast majority of full on 23"+ computer monitors.
Carriers already disable their phones so you can only use that particular Carrier's SIM card in the phone. I don't see how the software one would be any different.
Amiga was also hobbled by the brain dead management at the time. Even if you have the best product in the world it is an uphill battle if your management is insane.
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ROM chips just made the most sense because the removable media of the era was so terrible. Consider that a lot of NES games came on 2 Megabit cartridges, that's 256kB. A contemporary disk drive might be something like the Commodore 1541, where each disk held 164kB of data. Worse, it took on the order of minutes to read that much data off of one of those disks, even before you account for the braindead bus the C64 was saddled with. Later on, there were 8mb carts (1mB!). High density floppies didn't start to arrive until halfway through the NES's life cycle.
Add in the fact that you can put memory in each cart if you're blowing out the base system's RAM space, or even other processors, and the carts are really a no-brainer. It's not even hard to see why Nintendo held on to Carts after everybody else moved to optical disks, especially since those early optical disks were still quite slow, even though the total capacity completely blew away anything you could get with a cart. It's a fine tradeoff for anybody who is willing to lovingly craft the world to look good with mostly flat or gouraud shaded polys. It just sucked for all of the third party developers who were making a lot of use of textures to hide the low poly counts of those systems, and who didn't want a cartoony aesthetic to their game.
Yeah, I have a tough time crying over the lost profits of the middlemen. Especially the likes of Gamestop, which have been fairly customer hostile for as long as I can remember. "Oh, you only order enough copies of a game to cover exactly what was preordered and no more? You do realize I could have just ordered it from Amazon instead and saved myself a trip out here and $10 right?"
The tug of war between the developers and the consumers is a constant struggle. Theoretically with no possibility of Gamefly or used sales eating into your profits and with online stores needing much lower profit margins (what they ask for may be different though) to stay afloat, new game prices for the next generation consoles could be considerably cheaper. If Microsoft or Sony were really bold, they would lower the cost of entry on their consoles and attract a large number of independent developers well beyond what services like the XBLA currently do, and allow them to grow and build AAA (or maybe just AA) sized games. Remove as many unnecessary expenses and restrictions as possible and you could have a major win.
It's a risky move however. Major publishers (EA) don't like lowering the barriers to entry, and they have major leverage with console manufacturers. "Oh, you want to let indie studios make full size games? Hmm, how much do you like having Madden on your console?" Basically, you would have to convince Sony and Microsoft to both do it at the same time so the big name studios don't have any leverage over them with this issue, and good luck convincing Sony to open up even a little bit. They've shown themselves to be willing to choke themselves to death for years now as long as it allows them to maintain an iron grip on all parts of their console.
Why shouldn't it be a surprise? The graphics hardware in a 360 or a PS3 is positively low end by today's standards. While I know that Nintendo doesn't bother to compete on megapixels, it's really trivial to build even a cheap PC these days that will completely spank the last generation consoles performance wise. It doesn't seem to make sense to bring a new console to market that is even more limited than that. Basically, the per-console savings of just a few dollars each to go from low end to ultra low end graphics wouldn't seem to justify hamstringing your developers so much.
The downside is that Fox News gets to run 2 months of stories about how the socialist government is even trying to get between you and your movie popcorn and you had better not even think about voting for them again; fair and balanced.
It is depressing how much stuff is not being done in Washington because of how it would play out on the nation's most watched news channel. I firmly believe that the hyper scrutiny of the 24 hour news cycle is the primary cause behind the total partisan gridlock in Congress today. If you can't make a basic compromise without being called a traitor for weeks in the "news" then you can't expect to get anything done. Worse, the people who did buck the trend and try to get stuff done? They're out and replaced by wackos from the extreme fringe of the party.
There's nothing stopping case manufacturers from doing this now except the relentless drive to produce the cheapest case possible. Heck, most cases use drive rails for the 5 1/4 bays already. I've seen plenty of OEMs that go finger friendly for things like PCI slots as well. They're not too far away from having finger friendly clips for the motherboard and 3 1/2 drive bay mounts.
That was more or less my experience with it. I went to college in 1995 and the recommended machine was an IBM P75 with 16MB of RAM. Plenty for DOS and Win3.1, but it also came preloaded with OS/2 3.0 Warp. That was pretty cool I thought, so I booted up OS/2 to check it out. It took forever to boot, and once booted the UI was just dog slow. Clicking on a menu required a full second or more for it to draw on the screen. It was just unusable. It also didn't have a good web browser, which even in 1995, was a death knell for any OS (my friends BeBox had the same problem).
Looking back now, I might have been able to tweak it and get it usable if I had been willing to invest the time in it, but I instead focused my energy on FreeBSD (2.1!) and that turned out to be the better choice anyway.
The one thing I did like about that machine: PC-DOS was better than MS-DOS. Not a lot better, but its memory management was just slightly superior so that the constant headaches my friends had with trying to get stuff to run on their MS-DOS machines (damn, 1MB short of base memory!) was not a problem on mine. I never had to make boot floppies to get Doom to run because PC-DOS was slightly better about getting stuff up into High Memory).
How much did the near lack of winter weather for the end of 2011 across much of the US affect those on-time statistics? It's hard to praise someone for adequate performance when they did not suffer many challenges.
Ironic that just this morning I was hearing of yet another Mass Transit project (Arlington-Alexandria streetcar project) being canned because it was "too expensive". Mass transit is great when you have it, useless when you don't.
A screenplay and a novel are not all that similar, and that's the closest thing to the book that the movie will get. It takes a real talent to make a screenplay out of a novel, and that is where it becomes a derivative work. Converting to PDF is not the same thing.
Best Buy doesn't need to install a router in a power strip to stick a $75 price tag on it. Just a little extra bullshit on the package is all they need.
The "Lifetime" warranty was only good for 6 months too, that's the lifetime of one of those screen protectors.
Oh no, I've lost the last place around here that sells HDMI cables for $30/foot! However am I going to find someone with outrageous markup to rip me off? And where am I going to go to get constantly upsold on every damn thing?
To be fair though, I have not actually bought anything at a Bestbuy in years now, so this doesn't really affect me very much. Their business practices already killed me off as a customer as sure as closing my local store will.
Why should I as the author expect anything from that? I didn't make the movie, why should I expect to get a piece of it just because they used my book as source material? Copyright should protect me from having Random House take my book, slap a different cover on it, and resell it as their own work. It shouldn't prevent people from making derivative works.
It's pretty much impossible to write a completely original novel or movie. Something somewhere in your work is going to be construed as a reference to something before. That's a good thing, it lets people leverage the combined knowledge of society in order to advance the state of the art. The current copyright (and patent) system is undermining this, by letting artists block off their work for effectively indefinite periods and add the specter of lawsuit to any successful work. The copyright realm is not as bad as the patent realm on the lawsuit front (because as I mentioned before, even those people copied existing ideas), but I fully expect the situation to get worse over time unless something is done to nip it in the bud.
Yeah, I personally group those companies down with the "freeze your body and in 100 years they'll have the cures for old age and for freezing and you'll be revived in the future!" places. The advantage is that since you're paying them year after year they will have the operating budget to actually keep running long enough to be useful, unlike those body places that typically run out of money and then just dump the bodies out back. You have to be outrageously optimistic to think that it will pan out though.
Basically, if some stem cell research pans out then you might need some of your own stem cells later in life to actually use it. While there is currently no use for cord blood, the thinking is that in 60 years it might be really useful, and that's when your kid may need it. It's impossible to say what new medical procedures will be available in 60 years, so the whole thing is a gamble. Heck, even if the medical procedures pan out, they may not have a good way of reversing the freezing damage on the cells.
It's something for optimists with some extra disposable income. There are some pretty sketchy looking cord blood companies out there however, so do your research. Since nobody is making withdrawals from these banks yet, it's hard to tell which ones are real and which ones are scams/incompetent.
I guess this is a lesson for any prospective parents out there: Don't name your child Pedophil or Murdebby.
So long as people insist on being paid for the care they administer (including building expensive prosthetic), there will be no such thing as "the end of disabilities". Especially mental disabilities. There is already a treatment available for a great many conditions today: A full time aide, it's just that few people can afford such an extravagance.
Sadly, nVidia doesn't seem all that interested in the 3D-Vision project anymore. I don't think the sales numbers were what they had hoped for and the whole project is just on life support at this point. I don't think they're going to drop driver support anytime soon, but I don't think they're going to push game devs to go "3D Vision Certified" either anymore.
Even though in theory it should work perfectly since your 3D card knows all of the information it needs to send proper 3D to the glasses, game developers tend to do little tricks that break it. Fog and Shadow effects are a big problem, often appearing out of plane or causing massive slowdowns for instance. UI elements tend to be problematic as well, since they are frequently just 2D objects basically painted on top of the screen. Game developers aren't interested in working around those problems either for the small number of customers (a small subset of the already small PC gaming subset) that are effected.
A good modern example is Mass Effect 3. Most of the game was alright with 3D glasses, except you have to turn off shadows and some smoke effects were messed up, but there were a few places were it totally collapsed. The Galaxy map where you navigate around to your missions was totally broken in 3D mode for instance.
Having a small child myself, I freaking hate most of the DVDs targeted to them. Especially Disney DVDs, with their either 10 or 25 minutes (your choice, you have to hit the button shortly after inserting the disc) of unskippable ads before it starts the movie. Fastplay my ass. It's infuriating to me when he gets a Handy Manny DVD for Christmas and I have to go back and rip it and re-encode the disc so he doesn't have to sit through an outrageously long stretch of ads just to play the movie. Every time I go through the process I think to myself: I should have just pirated this, I'm being punished for trying to do the right thing.
It is amazing how much money you can make as an artist when you cut out the middlemen isn't it?
From what I remember of Laserdiscs, they were pretty much exclusively marketed towards cinephiles who wanted something better than VHS. The high price point insured that they never broke out of their relatively small niche though, and the number of titles available on Laserdisc was never all that large. They were also unwieldy and could suffer from oxidation of the metal layer due to manufacturing defects caused by the unwieldy form factor. Early players were only single sided too, so for many movies you had to get up and flip the disc halfway through.
Basically, it was a technology with a lot of drawbacks but a large enough profit margin to keep the format alive for a couple of decades until DVD came along and utterly outclassed it in pretty much every way.
The fact that your set doesn't do HDMI isn't in spite of being over 1080p, it is because of it. HDMI only goes up to 1080p, so it doesn't make sense for higher resolution displays. That's why monitors have plateaued at 1080p even though much greater pixel densities are possible and PC hardware is more than powerful enough to drive it these days. I think it's embarrassing that the 9.7" screen on an iPad has more pixels than the vast majority of full on 23"+ computer monitors.
Yeah, I note for instance that my (CDMA) Verizon iPhone 4S has a SIM slot on the side that actually came with a Verizon SIM card.
Carriers already disable their phones so you can only use that particular Carrier's SIM card in the phone. I don't see how the software one would be any different.
Amiga was also hobbled by the brain dead management at the time. Even if you have the best product in the world it is an uphill battle if your management is insane.