I second the cable-extender thing... though it's actually cheaper to go with Cat5 for extending most things. You might need shielded cable for VGA/DVI/USB (stuff with a bitrate >100MHz), but PS/2 and audio and IR can definitely go a long long way over the cheaper Cat5.
Slower machines are fine for standard-def, but if you want to decode HD, you absolutely need a processor that's only a year or two old. Most living room HD video equipment runs pretty hot because of the CPU requirements (XBox 360, HD PVRs, etc).
As far as cost goes, you can certainly get a cheaper HD system than the one presented in the article.
You can get an HD DVR for fairly cheap these days (especially if subsidized with a cable / satellite agreement).
There are other uses for a media PC than just DVR capabilities... specifically, it's nice to have flexibility to run any codecs and play video downloaded off the 'net. It's also very nice to be able to run things like iTunes and MAME on a media PC.
Yeah, maybe this is small subset of the HTPC market, but until we get better integration of HTPCs with cable/satellite, having two separate boxes (one that's fairly that's super-stable, and one that's super-flexible) isn't a bad way to go.
And I'm certain there are more examples. Particularly in psychology, if only one guy is saying "I have proof!", and all the other experts are saying "we're not sure if that's real proof or not, but we as a society tend to agree with you, so we're not going to critize your study too much", then it's best to wait for a little bit for the answer to firm up on one side or the other.
Also, children face risks in all sorts of things. Interacting socially can lead to bullying, or otherwise have encounters that encourage a child to be more introverted than they'd otherwise be. So, instead of looking simply at the possible risks, you have to look at the risks vs. the benefits.
The article is actually talking about high-bandwidth services such as streaming media and voice over IP. They don't seem to be talking about simple websites at all...
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. From TFA, which you apparently didn't read:
William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.
If the higher standards really do take extra man hours, is that one of the reasons why PC gaming was somewhat in decline compared to consoles? (eg. 720p at 1280x720 is much more akin to PC resolutions) Or are those comments rubbish?
In the US, all local alcohol retailers are required to get a license from their local jurisdiction before they're allowed to sell alcohol, and the license is based on retailers "parenting" kids!
I'm an adult. I want retailers to sell me games, and I want the political pressure off of games that some might find problematic, but which are certainly not as bad for societ as alcohol is. Hopefully clear/upfront/accurate disclosure of game content, combined with effective carding of kids, will make that happen.
Well, that's the online site, which is possibly different from what's available in local stores. But I guess this blog post clarifies a bit more... specific local stores decide to not carry specific mature-rated games. Which, I believe is also true for beer as well, so perhaps it is more consistent than I thought.
Weird thought: are they any jurisdictions where retailers are required to get the game equivalent of a liquor license from their local jurisdiction before they're allowed to sell Mature games?
Because games are interactive. This allows users to boot up GTA for the first time, find a knife, and spend all of their time slitting prostitute's throats, and not doing anything else. Or shooting cops over and over, or...
Granted, there is an actual plot and achievements to GTA: San Andreas that don't require (and even discourage) the above actions. And doing the above gets boring after a while (much as reading over and over a section of a book detailing a murder would quickly get boring), but the interactivity still makes it a little worse... the fact that the player can have an impulse to do something that's normally bad in society, they get to immediately carry those actions out to some extent, and immediate get pseudo-gratification for those actions.
No, I honestly don't think games are significantly worse than movies, but I think it's understandable that some people might think that way?
The problem for adults, as I see it, is that it's such a stigma for a game or movie to be marked "for 18+ year olds only", and that some stores then refuse to sell it. Walmart sells beer but not violent games. As a result, manufacturers want to fudge the rating systems a little.
I think we should encourage honest disclosure about what's in a game, and have manufacturers pander to the large market out there for mature-only content, have stores sell games to adults only, and leave the kids out of it.
On the other hand, it's so cool that "young whippersnappers" can write a perl one-liner that productively creates a several-megabyte hash table these days, as compared to 10 years ago when in the "640kb should be enough for anybody" days, doing anything that took any memory at all was exceedingly painful.
Microsoft uses their profit for positive benefits to society as well. Also, Microsoft employs more than 12,000 people. These people likely buy products or use services that your employer produces.
Ye olde trickle-down argument. It's exceedingly bunk.
So, if Microsoft was replaced by an two companies, those companies wouldn't employ the same number of people and donate the same amount to charity?
And if the two companies did employ fewer people or donated less, doesn't that mean that Microsoft is economically inefficient? And that a better allocation of resources makes our nation's GDP overall, rather than funnelling inefficient money through a single entity?
I know it's in different markets, but that's not the point.
Um, that is the point actually. Sony has oodles of audio and video they want to protect. Microsoft mainly wants to sell hardware and software.
The point wasn't that Microsoft is remotely perfect. It's just an odd chance on Slashdot that we get to say that someone else is slightly worse than MS. I think it's clearly more of a "lesser of two evils" kind of thing, or "ignore Sony, pay attention to Nintendo" kind of thing.
(yes, the story is still more wrinkled than I've stated it. I'm not going to enumerate every possible caveat. The overall gist of my post is correct)
We can't rely on game technology to push gaming forward anymore. Quake 4 was greeted with a collective ho-hum. Now that everything has 3D and 5.1 sound, now we only care about how good the gameplay is. And that's not any particular console's fault, is it?
Most analysts are calling for demand to be met after Christmas. So far, as best we know, the PS3 will be launched in "spring of 2006". The first XBox's price was cut (from $300 to $200) 5 months after launch. So, I guess it might be reasonable. Though in this case, the 360 is beating PS3, so I bet they have less of an incentive to drop prices early.
How soon will it be until the 360 has a price cut? Seriously, Microsoft may well not catch up with demand (eg. XBoxes won't be available on a walk-in basis) until near the time that Sony releases the PS3. I really don't think price cuts will play a role in 360-vs-PS3 in the short-term.
One thing that struck me was the end of this ArsTechnica article comparing the next-gen consoles. Ars hammers home the point that Sony, being a content-creator, and Microsoft being only a device-maker, means that Sony will always tend to have more DRM on their system than the XBox does. Now, granted, consoles may not necessarily become the final media player in your living room, but if they're the ones that make it, quixotically, it seems like XBox is the most open way towards that for now.
And a way for your EMule servers to differentiate porn from MP3s, and only put porn on the 6999 port, and put MP3's on port 4662, and for clients to figure it all out.
It really is obvious, but one of the reasons this wouldn't work is that it would force all porn transports (HTTP, Usenet, FTP, Bittorrent,...) to listen on the same port number. Yeah, it could probably be done if there's a truly dire need to do so (eg. on corporate firewalls, everything proxies over:80 these days), but it's almost certainly always a bad idea to do.
The benefits of modding (namely, XBMC and the ability to play backups) are just too great to *not* do it.
And the downsides are that you can't play XBox Live games. Which is fine for some, because you may not want to pay to play on servers that may otherwise be free, but on the XBox 360, the central online service plays a much more important role, so it will be a greater disincentive to hack your box.
Slashdot Mirror
I second the cable-extender thing... though it's actually cheaper to go with Cat5 for extending most things. You might need shielded cable for VGA/DVI/USB (stuff with a bitrate >100MHz), but PS/2 and audio and IR can definitely go a long long way over the cheaper Cat5.
As far as cost goes, you can certainly get a cheaper HD system than the one presented in the article.
There are other uses for a media PC than just DVR capabilities... specifically, it's nice to have flexibility to run any codecs and play video downloaded off the 'net. It's also very nice to be able to run things like iTunes and MAME on a media PC.
Yeah, maybe this is small subset of the HTPC market, but until we get better integration of HTPCs with cable/satellite, having two separate boxes (one that's fairly that's super-stable, and one that's super-flexible) isn't a bad way to go.
Is closed-source DRM-defeating software more legal somehow? Why was open source mentioned at all?
Also, children face risks in all sorts of things. Interacting socially can lead to bullying, or otherwise have encounters that encourage a child to be more introverted than they'd otherwise be. So, instead of looking simply at the possible risks, you have to look at the risks vs. the benefits.
If the higher standards really do take extra man hours, is that one of the reasons why PC gaming was somewhat in decline compared to consoles? (eg. 720p at 1280x720 is much more akin to PC resolutions) Or are those comments rubbish?
Yes, but "martian" is a mass intransvestite, so Vast Martian Ice doesn't work so well.
I'm an adult. I want retailers to sell me games, and I want the political pressure off of games that some might find problematic, but which are certainly not as bad for societ as alcohol is. Hopefully clear/upfront/accurate disclosure of game content, combined with effective carding of kids, will make that happen.
Weird thought: are they any jurisdictions where retailers are required to get the game equivalent of a liquor license from their local jurisdiction before they're allowed to sell Mature games?
Granted, there is an actual plot and achievements to GTA: San Andreas that don't require (and even discourage) the above actions. And doing the above gets boring after a while (much as reading over and over a section of a book detailing a murder would quickly get boring), but the interactivity still makes it a little worse... the fact that the player can have an impulse to do something that's normally bad in society, they get to immediately carry those actions out to some extent, and immediate get pseudo-gratification for those actions.
No, I honestly don't think games are significantly worse than movies, but I think it's understandable that some people might think that way?
I think we should encourage honest disclosure about what's in a game, and have manufacturers pander to the large market out there for mature-only content, have stores sell games to adults only, and leave the kids out of it.
Mod up the parent and grandparent!
On the other hand, it's so cool that "young whippersnappers" can write a perl one-liner that productively creates a several-megabyte hash table these days, as compared to 10 years ago when in the "640kb should be enough for anybody" days, doing anything that took any memory at all was exceedingly painful.
A: Come up with a good slogan.
Umm.... perhaps you've stumbled on the wrong site.
So, if Microsoft was replaced by an two companies, those companies wouldn't employ the same number of people and donate the same amount to charity?
And if the two companies did employ fewer people or donated less, doesn't that mean that Microsoft is economically inefficient? And that a better allocation of resources makes our nation's GDP overall, rather than funnelling inefficient money through a single entity?
Um, that is the point actually. Sony has oodles of audio and video they want to protect. Microsoft mainly wants to sell hardware and software.
The point wasn't that Microsoft is remotely perfect. It's just an odd chance on Slashdot that we get to say that someone else is slightly worse than MS. I think it's clearly more of a "lesser of two evils" kind of thing, or "ignore Sony, pay attention to Nintendo" kind of thing.
(yes, the story is still more wrinkled than I've stated it. I'm not going to enumerate every possible caveat. The overall gist of my post is correct)
We can't rely on game technology to push gaming forward anymore. Quake 4 was greeted with a collective ho-hum. Now that everything has 3D and 5.1 sound, now we only care about how good the gameplay is. And that's not any particular console's fault, is it?
Most analysts are calling for demand to be met after Christmas. So far, as best we know, the PS3 will be launched in "spring of 2006". The first XBox's price was cut (from $300 to $200) 5 months after launch. So, I guess it might be reasonable. Though in this case, the 360 is beating PS3, so I bet they have less of an incentive to drop prices early.
How soon will it be until the 360 has a price cut? Seriously, Microsoft may well not catch up with demand (eg. XBoxes won't be available on a walk-in basis) until near the time that Sony releases the PS3. I really don't think price cuts will play a role in 360-vs-PS3 in the short-term.
One thing that struck me was the end of this ArsTechnica article comparing the next-gen consoles. Ars hammers home the point that Sony, being a content-creator, and Microsoft being only a device-maker, means that Sony will always tend to have more DRM on their system than the XBox does. Now, granted, consoles may not necessarily become the final media player in your living room, but if they're the ones that make it, quixotically, it seems like XBox is the most open way towards that for now.
...
It really is obvious, but one of the reasons this wouldn't work is that it would force all porn transports (HTTP, Usenet, FTP, Bittorrent, ...) to listen on the same port number. Yeah, it could probably be done if there's a truly dire need to do so (eg. on corporate firewalls, everything proxies over :80 these days), but it's almost certainly always a bad idea to do.
Yeah, no doubt. Somebody overslept and didn't show up for work.
And the downsides are that you can't play XBox Live games. Which is fine for some, because you may not want to pay to play on servers that may otherwise be free, but on the XBox 360, the central online service plays a much more important role, so it will be a greater disincentive to hack your box.