So maybe I'll be able to find a store that actually has Wiis in stock by 2011, since they'll be obsolete by then?
Seriously, of the 3 - Playstation, XBox, Wii - only Nintendo hasn't made any price cuts, and they still can't keep them on the shelves for more than a day or two.
A bet a lot of people might start selling back Wiis to stores eventually. After the great opening games like Metroid and Zelda, there hasn't really been anything worth buying recently for the Wii. Have you seen this selection? http://www.gamestop.com/Browse/Search.aspx?N=138+106 - It's really quite sad. I'm thinking about getting an Xbox 360 as a 2nd system, but I'd probably keep my Wii just in case something comes out later on.
Yeah, where are all the $200 netbooks? I'm waiting for one with a 8.9" screen, 1GB of RAM, and an SSD drive. It'd be nice if it came with XP Home, but that seems to add another $100 to the cost.
It's possible over HDMI at least to have the DVR know if the TV is is on or not. I know some newer TV+Blu-Ray player combinations can even have the Blu-Ray player turn the TV on, and turn the input to the correct one, all automatically when you insert a disc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Consumer_Electronics_Control
Picture the Mushroomy Kingdom level from the new Smash Brothers Brawl as the graphics for the actual game play of the original Super Mario Brothers. Same exact game, still 2D, same controls, but re-done with awesome new graphics. That is the one retro area that I think has been completely unexplored.
No need to make things 3D or mess up the controls, but games like Mega Man 9 could have taken more advantage of newer graphics while still keeping the old-school feel to it.
I forgot that Blu-ray is 25GB/50GB not 4GB/8GB when I saw your 8500 figure, but I'm sure that the cost for the manufacturer is lower than $11 for 8GB of flash space. Factor in that the PS3's Blu-ray player reads at 2x (9MB/s) speeds, you can surely cut loading time to 1/4 of current wait at a minimum with around 33MB/s from flash drives.
I doubt all games really need to use 25GB too with Xbox having an 8GB limit on their discs anyway. Xbox 360's DVD reader is 12x (16.2MB/s), so even here flash should be faster.
I doubt flash will be cheaper than mass-produced read-only optical discs anytime soon, but the benefits of quick load time and a place the system can save patches and save files for the game right with the game itself surely make it worth looking into.
8GB - 10.99 - with speeds at about the same as an 8x Blu-ray reader. I'm not sure what speed the PS3's Blu-ray drive is, but the fastest on newegg for sale right now is a 6x drive. Once you factor in random seek delay, I'm sure PS3 games on thumb-drives would load much faster than Blu-ray, and you can have 4GB/2GB models with even cheaper costs, while still allowing for 16GB thumb drives and larger in the future.
Not sure what "+whatever" means, but if you were "at work" for 8 hours, and they recorded 7.5 because you have to wait and log into a system, and when you leave at the end of the day, you have to first sign out (stopping the time at which you are paid for) then shut down the computer before you can leave, then you only get paid for the 7.5 hours you were logged in for.
This is the type of place that would only hire people for 30 hours a week anyway, to avoid having to pay out any health insurance benefits, etc, so overtime is not an issue.
The problem is that many employers use a time keeping system which pays employees based on when they log into some system. For example, a friend of mine works through manpower as a temp for $10/hour just answering phones all day. When she gets to work, she must turn on the computer, and wait for it to boot, which is not the same as home computer because it boots from a network and has to log into a Citrix server somewhere. That takes a bit longer. Then, once a desktop appears, you have to open the "soft phone" software to control the phone and log into the queue. Only then do you actually start getting paid.
There is no way for the employer to know that an employee is at work and working unless they are logged into the soft phone. This means that if she has to be at work at 8:00, that really means she has to have the computer on and be logged in by 8:00, so in reality, be there by 7:45 and be "at work" but not be paid for that first 15 minutes.
It's not that the problem isn't solvable, even with a different technical solution, it's just that's the way they do things. The employers don't see it as a problem, and if you aren't logged in by the time you are supposed to be working, you are "late". Rack up around 5 "lates" or so, and you are fired automatically. It's all done by computer systems behind the scenes, so if you log into the phone at 8:01, you risk being fired. All the more reason that it is really underhandedly telling employees that they must show up for work 15 or more minutes early, and that time is unpaid.
It's not just about being at work and having to reboot and go unpaid in the middle of your day, it's about the only way your boss knows you are even at work requires the computer to already be on.
Yeah, Abit *was* just as guilty, when the problem was first noticed, but they admitted there was a problem, and took a stance of Japanese-only caps later on. Newer boards from Asus and Epox have STILL had bad caps as recently as a year ago, while Abit boards no longer have any problems. This is from my limited experience with all my relatives and friends that I buy parts for and/or fix computers for.
Abit was the only brand of motherboards I knew of that acknowledged the capacitors problem and claimed to use 100% known-good Japanese caps in their boards. With them gone, does that leave any good companies, or will all motherboards still be doomed to leaky budging and exploding capacitors?
The difference is in random throughput and sequential throughput. For a network connection, the difference is in short term burstable bandwidth vs average sustained bandwidth. In both cases, you are measuring the same thing.
Burtable is of course just relative to some other measurement, but you are still measuring speed regardless. You can say a 500GB/month connection is burstable to 10Mbps or a 1.6Mbps connection is burstable to 10Mbps. Both things mean the exact same thing.
New cable packages from Comcast with that Speedburst thing are actually 2 levels of "burstable". If they have a 10Mbps connection that you can burst to 50Mbps for the first 3 seconds of each download, but it is limited to 500GB/month, then you really have a 1.6Mbps connection that is burstable to 10Mbps for certain time spans, and within that it is burstable to 50Mbps for some given shorter timespan.
As it stands, 1.6Mbps should be the advertised figure for downstream speed, not 10 or 50. Right now they tend to advertise 10Mbps in that kind of situation, but just wait until they start advertising the burstable speed only.
This is so true. What most people don't realize is that bits per second and gigabytes per month are both measuring the same thing, just with different units. Google can do the math for you: http://www.google.com/search?q=5+GB%2Fmonth+in+kbps
The average sustained speed should be what is reported, which would mean factoring the monthly cap to kbps. I don't care if your cable connection is 10mbps and is burtable to 50mbps for 4 seconds if it is limited to even 500 GB/month, because that is just under 1.6mbps average, and my 6.0mbps DSL sustains actual transfer of at least 3 times that speed, even after the DSL overhead.
And yes, up and down should both be reported, or perhaps, the smaller of the two should be what is reported. a 50mbps connection is pretty useless if one direction can only transfer 128kbps.
That is pretty typical. It IS a private road, but thats about all it means - the post office doesn't drive on it, and no tax funding. One lot was split into 8, sold individually, 8 houses were eventually built. The deads to the 8 house's lands probably stipulate some sort of maintenance on the private road. I'm sure the original land owner tried to get the local government to make a public road when he split up the land, but they don't want to spend the tax money on that usually. Private roads are still open for anybody to drive on.
No, it does not. Private road means no mail delivery to your door, and no tax funding. It is still publicly drivable unless you actually say "no trespassing" or put up a gate. In this specific case, like many other private roads I've seen, it is one with several different house's driveways on it. It is the result of a former landowner splitting up a very large lot into smaller lots and selling them individually to have houses built on them. They typically TRY to get the local government to build a road for them, but if that fails, they make a private one that isn't really part of any of the smaller lots they sold off.
Look at the streetview pictures, there are several houses on the road, and you can see the sign is a wooden pole with vertical letters on it, not the typical green sign with white letters you usually see. It does not specifically say private, but it is a private road.
All that means is the post office isn't likely to deliver mail to your door, and tax dollars won't fund fixing it. There are several houses on that private road, and they each have their own driveway. Each homeowner's property dead likely does not include the private road area, since what probably happened was 1 large lot was split up into several smaller lots, sold off individually, and the road built simply for access. For most people who don't work for the government, it is a small side road just like any others, and you are free to drive on it and take pictures from it. No privacy was violated here.
I tried that, must have messed something up. I quickly ran into data corruption when upgrading to a 250GB drive from a 120GB. I had SP4 and the EnableBigLBA set (even if it wasn't needed in SP4 anymore), then I used TrueImage to image over to the 250GB, and at first it seemed to work. Then I realized many files were becoming corrupted and unusable, and the OS crashed. That was when I was first "forced" to buy my first copy of XP Pro OEM from NewEgg. I just didn't want to deal with the potential hassle anymore, and XP just worked with a 250GB and single 250GB partition.
I think from the definition put forward, It may be that everyone is using open source to some extent. Even if you're using Windows, IIRC, there is some BSD code in there. A lot of home routers are based on some open source code. Having an account on a web service using LAMP components might count. I think Nokia is using a Linux-based OS, and Apple relies heavily on open source stuff. I think even my Samsung 46" LCD TV "runs" Linux. I only suspect that from flashing the firmware to enable 1:1 pixel mapping at 1080p through HDMI, but most people with such a TV simply wouldn't know they are "using" open source software to simply watch TV. I'd bet my Dish DVR runs some sort of Linux or BSD OS as well, but I haven't even checked into that.
As long as you don't want to install on a HD bigger than ~120GB, or use a wireless network easily, then yes, windows 2000 is pretty much the same thing, without the fancy graphics.
Have you ever tried comparing RealVNC to Microsoft's RDP over a low-bandwidth connection? RDP blows it away, easily. Not to mention that RDP supports changing resolution on the fly and serial/floppy/printer/sound redirection. TightVNC, at least, supports screen resolution changes, and with the Mirror Driver option, is much faster than regular VNCs. I couldn't really care about serial/floppy/printer/sound at all though.
The big reason to use VNC is it is cross-platform. I have 1 Linux, 1 Vista, 2 OS X, and 3 XP computers in my house, and regularly VNC from one OS to another.
I got a new wii with a new serial number, and they copied the data over. My Wii Shopping account still remembers everything I purchased on the old serial number and lets me redownload it just fine on the new system.
I had my Wii replaced under warranty, and while all of my downloaded virtual console games were gone, when I logged into the Wii Shopping channel, it remembered all of my purchases on my account, and they could all still be downloaded for free. The only downside is all of the Mii's I had stored were transfered over from my old Wii by Nintendo, they could no longer be edited in the Mii Editor because they "were not created on this Wii". That is solvable with the tools that let you edit your Mii's on your computer with a bluetooth dongle, but it has the also unfortunate side-effect of clearing out your Wii Sports records if you do that.
Why are so many databases still tabular today and not hierarchal? I'm thinking of how Cache (or M / Mumps) is a database which basically lets you store associative arrays of data nested at any level, and access them in the normal programmatic way which you would access any other array.
SELECT name FROM table WHERE key='xyz'; seems so archaic and limited compared to something PHP-like such as $table['xyz']['name'] where $table is a disk-based global variable accessible from all scripts and automatically synchronized at all times.
If a program hard-coded "Documents and Settings" instead of using one of many available API calls or even looking at %USERPROFILE% then you deserve the crap you get having to re-write it.
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So maybe I'll be able to find a store that actually has Wiis in stock by 2011, since they'll be obsolete by then?
Seriously, of the 3 - Playstation, XBox, Wii - only Nintendo hasn't made any price cuts, and they still can't keep them on the shelves for more than a day or two.
A bet a lot of people might start selling back Wiis to stores eventually. After the great opening games like Metroid and Zelda, there hasn't really been anything worth buying recently for the Wii. Have you seen this selection? http://www.gamestop.com/Browse/Search.aspx?N=138+106 - It's really quite sad. I'm thinking about getting an Xbox 360 as a 2nd system, but I'd probably keep my Wii just in case something comes out later on.
Yeah, where are all the $200 netbooks?
I'm waiting for one with a 8.9" screen, 1GB of RAM, and an SSD drive.
It'd be nice if it came with XP Home, but that seems to add another $100 to the cost.
It's possible over HDMI at least to have the DVR know if the TV is is on or not. I know some newer TV+Blu-Ray player combinations can even have the Blu-Ray player turn the TV on, and turn the input to the correct one, all automatically when you insert a disc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Consumer_Electronics_Control
Picture the Mushroomy Kingdom level from the new Smash Brothers Brawl as the graphics for the actual game play of the original Super Mario Brothers. Same exact game, still 2D, same controls, but re-done with awesome new graphics. That is the one retro area that I think has been completely unexplored.
No need to make things 3D or mess up the controls, but games like Mega Man 9 could have taken more advantage of newer graphics while still keeping the old-school feel to it.
I forgot that Blu-ray is 25GB/50GB not 4GB/8GB when I saw your 8500 figure, but I'm sure that the cost for the manufacturer is lower than $11 for 8GB of flash space. Factor in that the PS3's Blu-ray player reads at 2x (9MB/s) speeds, you can surely cut loading time to 1/4 of current wait at a minimum with around 33MB/s from flash drives.
I doubt all games really need to use 25GB too with Xbox having an 8GB limit on their discs anyway. Xbox 360's DVD reader is 12x (16.2MB/s), so even here flash should be faster.
I doubt flash will be cheaper than mass-produced read-only optical discs anytime soon, but the benefits of quick load time and a place the system can save patches and save files for the game right with the game itself surely make it worth looking into.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227332
8GB - 10.99 - with speeds at about the same as an 8x Blu-ray reader. I'm not sure what speed the PS3's Blu-ray drive is, but the fastest on newegg for sale right now is a 6x drive.
Once you factor in random seek delay, I'm sure PS3 games on thumb-drives would load much faster than Blu-ray, and you can have 4GB/2GB models with even cheaper costs, while still allowing for 16GB thumb drives and larger in the future.
Not sure what "+whatever" means, but if you were "at work" for 8 hours, and they recorded 7.5 because you have to wait and log into a system, and when you leave at the end of the day, you have to first sign out (stopping the time at which you are paid for) then shut down the computer before you can leave, then you only get paid for the 7.5 hours you were logged in for.
This is the type of place that would only hire people for 30 hours a week anyway, to avoid having to pay out any health insurance benefits, etc, so overtime is not an issue.
The problem is that many employers use a time keeping system which pays employees based on when they log into some system. For example, a friend of mine works through manpower as a temp for $10/hour just answering phones all day. When she gets to work, she must turn on the computer, and wait for it to boot, which is not the same as home computer because it boots from a network and has to log into a Citrix server somewhere. That takes a bit longer. Then, once a desktop appears, you have to open the "soft phone" software to control the phone and log into the queue. Only then do you actually start getting paid.
There is no way for the employer to know that an employee is at work and working unless they are logged into the soft phone. This means that if she has to be at work at 8:00, that really means she has to have the computer on and be logged in by 8:00, so in reality, be there by 7:45 and be "at work" but not be paid for that first 15 minutes.
It's not that the problem isn't solvable, even with a different technical solution, it's just that's the way they do things. The employers don't see it as a problem, and if you aren't logged in by the time you are supposed to be working, you are "late". Rack up around 5 "lates" or so, and you are fired automatically. It's all done by computer systems behind the scenes, so if you log into the phone at 8:01, you risk being fired. All the more reason that it is really underhandedly telling employees that they must show up for work 15 or more minutes early, and that time is unpaid.
It's not just about being at work and having to reboot and go unpaid in the middle of your day, it's about the only way your boss knows you are even at work requires the computer to already be on.
Yeah, Abit *was* just as guilty, when the problem was first noticed, but they admitted there was a problem, and took a stance of Japanese-only caps later on. Newer boards from Asus and Epox have STILL had bad caps as recently as a year ago, while Abit boards no longer have any problems. This is from my limited experience with all my relatives and friends that I buy parts for and/or fix computers for.
Abit was the only brand of motherboards I knew of that acknowledged the capacitors problem and claimed to use 100% known-good Japanese caps in their boards. With them gone, does that leave any good companies, or will all motherboards still be doomed to leaky budging and exploding capacitors?
The difference is in random throughput and sequential throughput. For a network connection, the difference is in short term burstable bandwidth vs average sustained bandwidth. In both cases, you are measuring the same thing.
Burtable is of course just relative to some other measurement, but you are still measuring speed regardless. You can say a 500GB/month connection is burstable to 10Mbps or a 1.6Mbps connection is burstable to 10Mbps. Both things mean the exact same thing.
New cable packages from Comcast with that Speedburst thing are actually 2 levels of "burstable". If they have a 10Mbps connection that you can burst to 50Mbps for the first 3 seconds of each download, but it is limited to 500GB/month, then you really have a 1.6Mbps connection that is burstable to 10Mbps for certain time spans, and within that it is burstable to 50Mbps for some given shorter timespan.
As it stands, 1.6Mbps should be the advertised figure for downstream speed, not 10 or 50. Right now they tend to advertise 10Mbps in that kind of situation, but just wait until they start advertising the burstable speed only.
Um, no, you are completely wrong. The unit for latency is typically milliseconds, and is measured with "ping" usually.
As long as the units are "any size of bits or bytes" over "any unit of time" then you are measuring speed, plain and simple.
This is so true. What most people don't realize is that bits per second and gigabytes per month are both measuring the same thing, just with different units. Google can do the math for you: http://www.google.com/search?q=5+GB%2Fmonth+in+kbps
The average sustained speed should be what is reported, which would mean factoring the monthly cap to kbps. I don't care if your cable connection is 10mbps and is burtable to 50mbps for 4 seconds if it is limited to even 500 GB/month, because that is just under 1.6mbps average, and my 6.0mbps DSL sustains actual transfer of at least 3 times that speed, even after the DSL overhead.
And yes, up and down should both be reported, or perhaps, the smaller of the two should be what is reported. a 50mbps connection is pretty useless if one direction can only transfer 128kbps.
That is pretty typical. It IS a private road, but thats about all it means - the post office doesn't drive on it, and no tax funding. One lot was split into 8, sold individually, 8 houses were eventually built. The deads to the 8 house's lands probably stipulate some sort of maintenance on the private road. I'm sure the original land owner tried to get the local government to make a public road when he split up the land, but they don't want to spend the tax money on that usually. Private roads are still open for anybody to drive on.
Not to mention the multiple OTHER houses on the same private road mean it's pretty obviously not JUST their road.
No, it does not. Private road means no mail delivery to your door, and no tax funding. It is still publicly drivable unless you actually say "no trespassing" or put up a gate.
In this specific case, like many other private roads I've seen, it is one with several different house's driveways on it. It is the result of a former landowner splitting up a very large lot into smaller lots and selling them individually to have houses built on them. They typically TRY to get the local government to build a road for them, but if that fails, they make a private one that isn't really part of any of the smaller lots they sold off.
Look at the streetview pictures, there are several houses on the road, and you can see the sign is a wooden pole with vertical letters on it, not the typical green sign with white letters you usually see. It does not specifically say private, but it is a private road.
All that means is the post office isn't likely to deliver mail to your door, and tax dollars won't fund fixing it. There are several houses on that private road, and they each have their own driveway. Each homeowner's property dead likely does not include the private road area, since what probably happened was 1 large lot was split up into several smaller lots, sold off individually, and the road built simply for access. For most people who don't work for the government, it is a small side road just like any others, and you are free to drive on it and take pictures from it. No privacy was violated here.
I tried that, must have messed something up. I quickly ran into data corruption when upgrading to a 250GB drive from a 120GB. I had SP4 and the EnableBigLBA set (even if it wasn't needed in SP4 anymore), then I used TrueImage to image over to the 250GB, and at first it seemed to work. Then I realized many files were becoming corrupted and unusable, and the OS crashed. That was when I was first "forced" to buy my first copy of XP Pro OEM from NewEgg. I just didn't want to deal with the potential hassle anymore, and XP just worked with a 250GB and single 250GB partition.
As long as you don't want to install on a HD bigger than ~120GB, or use a wireless network easily, then yes, windows 2000 is pretty much the same thing, without the fancy graphics.
The big reason to use VNC is it is cross-platform. I have 1 Linux, 1 Vista, 2 OS X, and 3 XP computers in my house, and regularly VNC from one OS to another.
I got a new wii with a new serial number, and they copied the data over. My Wii Shopping account still remembers everything I purchased on the old serial number and lets me redownload it just fine on the new system.
I had my Wii replaced under warranty, and while all of my downloaded virtual console games were gone, when I logged into the Wii Shopping channel, it remembered all of my purchases on my account, and they could all still be downloaded for free. The only downside is all of the Mii's I had stored were transfered over from my old Wii by Nintendo, they could no longer be edited in the Mii Editor because they "were not created on this Wii". That is solvable with the tools that let you edit your Mii's on your computer with a bluetooth dongle, but it has the also unfortunate side-effect of clearing out your Wii Sports records if you do that.
Why are so many databases still tabular today and not hierarchal? I'm thinking of how Cache (or M / Mumps) is a database which basically lets you store associative arrays of data nested at any level, and access them in the normal programmatic way which you would access any other array.
SELECT name FROM table WHERE key='xyz'; seems so archaic and limited compared to something PHP-like such as $table['xyz']['name'] where $table is a disk-based global variable accessible from all scripts and automatically synchronized at all times.
If a program hard-coded "Documents and Settings" instead of using one of many available API calls or even looking at %USERPROFILE% then you deserve the crap you get having to re-write it.