It started with a problem: I bought a new computer, what do I do with my old one? So I bought a cheapy Radeon LE card with TV out, and plugged it in to my TV.
Then I put a DVD ROM in it. Then I put an 80-gig drive in it. Then I put a Hauppage WinTV card in it. What did it turn into? A Media Machine. I use SnapStream to capture TV shows... lots and lots of TV shows. For example, I'd like to watch Farscape from beginning to end. Now I can realistically do that, since Sci-Fi channel is airing it.
I can watch DVDs, and when I get a better sound system for it, I'll even play MP3's on it.
Now there are sites popping up with Video on Demand streamed through the internet. Check out http://www.intertainer.tv/. I got a subscription to this service, and it isn't half bad! Now I can watch movies for roughly the price to rent them at the store, the diffrence is I don't have to drive to the store twice to view one movie. Now I can just say "I want to watch this movie now" *click*.
I went to Siggraph this year, spent 4 days in L.A.. The hotel I went to didn't have anything interesting on TV. Fortunately I had a bunch of shows I wanted to watch ready to go on my laptop.
It's nice to be able to enjoy the $35 I spend a month on Cable TV, without having to schedule my life around it.
I honestly don't understand why it's such a bad thing that a FEATURE is being ADDED to DVD Players.
Yeah yeah, it's cool to hate Microsoft, blah blah blah. "I don't want to support MS, therefore I won't buy this product", -- ok, fine. Go have fun.
Let me tell you why this technology is interesting to me.
- You can get the WMP encoder for FREE. The MPEG group wants you to pay for software to encode MPEG2 stuff. At least that used to be the case, I haven't looked into MPEG in over a year now so my info may be old. To the best of my understanding, in order to burn a DVD that can play in a DVD player, you need special software to do this. With WMP support, I can just make the WMP file, burn it to a DVD, and watch it on my DVD player. This is *COOL*.
- I use WMP at the moment for a home-brew PVR. (Go to http://www.snapstream.com if this is interesting to you) Eventually I might switch to DivX, but at the moment I'm using WMP because it's easy to use, and it isn't half bad.
Eventually I want a portable solution. When PocketPC's get a little faster, I'll be able to play the files I capture from SnapStream on them. This will make airplane travel much eaiser to bear. Unfortunately, even if these machines do get faster, there's RAM limitations. I've been hoping to find a way to encode my TV shows so I can watch them on a portable DVD player.
And now, this might happen!! I might be able to take my output straight from snapstream, burn it to a CD/DVD, and play it on a portable DVD Player! Now THAT is totally cool.
I wanted to answer one other thing. A couple of people asked why this was/.'d in the first place. Initially, I think it was just because the violence in video games issue might be resurrected ad nauseum again. However I would like to bring up another reason why this is an important story.
This looks like the beginnings of using the web to improve morality in the world. If there are sites like this that will allow parents to be notified of potentially offensive toys/content, then maybe they will look to this to improve their parenting skills instead of trying to put a stop to the company producing them.
I see this as a potentially good thing, provided they don't break out of simply informing to attempting to rally people against things like this.
My advice to this site is: "Inform the people, but don't speculate about the reasons behind certain things. Don't draw silly conlclusions like DOOM promotes Satan worshipping, etc. The last thing we need is a bunch of ill-informed idiots trying to tell me that I'm going to hell over a game.
This particular site doesn't offend me a whole lot. It looks like it's just an information site, as opposed to a site intended to remove these items from the market.
However, this did bring back a few memories of some parents' group attempting to block the sale of the Harry Potter novels. Their reasoning was along the lines that children would become desensitized to the coming of the anti-christ.
Now personally, I've been reading the first book, and I'm nearly halfway through it now. So far I have YET to see anything I'd prevent my child (if I had one, I'm not claiming to be a parent yet) from being exposed to. The movie had some scenes that were scary, but I never had any religious concerns over it.
Yet, if these people had their way, I would never have seen the movie! Now what right does anybody have to prevent me or my future children from seeing a movie? I wish I could remember who said it... something along the lines of "You are free to say whatever you want in this country, but you are not free from being offended by somebody."
Fortunately, they weren't successful in banning the books. However, I think that there are groups out there who can manipulate the media to prevent our basic freedoms. I'll give you an example: A child burns down his house. The mother blames Beavis and Butthead because the show had one of the characters set fire to something. Because of this, Beavis and Butthead is moved to 10 o'clock.
My freedom to watch Beavis and Butthead at 6pm was taken away by an overreactive parent who couldn't teach her kids not to play with matches. Let me ask you something lady, if Beavis and Butthead were such bad influences, how come we didn't have a rash of house burnings all over the country?
Anyway, back to the topic here. I'm ok with somebody setting up a site with reviews of toys, alerting me to the idea that they may rub against my parenting morals. I am a BIG FAN of parents getting to know what it is their kids are getting into. That is really important! The best thing to do, as a parent, is to teach your kids good common sense. If you don't want your kids to burn down the house, tell them that! My parents did. They still live in the house I grew up in! Don't turn off Beavis and Butthead. If a poorly animated cartoon like B&B can cause your kid to burn down the house, you have seriously failed as a parent.
One final note. As a parent's group, you have the right IMHO to NOTIFY parents of a potentially offensive piece of media or toy. But don't you EVER try to take my freedoms away with it. Just because it doesn't settle with your tastes, doesn't mean you should act like Kile's mom and try to stop its' release. It's none of your business if I play Doom or not, but I do appreciate you letting me know that it might not be good for my child.
Interesting. Thank you for giving me a thoughtful answer. I have to admit, my assumption about what I was going to hear back was ill concieved. I was expecting to hear something along the lines of "because so and so is gay", with really nothing more insightful than that.
Heh. With witty comebacks like that, I can imagine Oscar Wilde will soon be forgotten. That poor AC will never know that you burned him so bad behind his back.
Seriously, though. Why do some of you troll? I'm asking you for a serious thought out answer. Can you give me one? Is there some story in the backgruond about why you do it?
Actually, Arnie's arm is stick in the gear in the metal shop plant. The processor may or not be gone, but they only destroyed the hard drives etc, they didn't kill the people who actually worked on it.
At worst, they delayed the apolocolyptic future. Which would make sense since 1997 was the year all hell was supposed to break loose.
First off, I agree with you wholly that you should be able to without having to worry about the RIAA.
However, I feel I should play Devil's Advocate here. The RIAA sees every MP3 created as a CD not purchased. If you went to MP3.Com, for example, and downloaded all of the 2000 (200 CD's x 10 songs per CD avg?) songs so that you don't have to swap CD's all the time, then they'd say 2000 more pirated songs were downloaded.
Is their logic correct? Heck no! But they use this flimsy logic to get the courts to pass silly laws like the DMCA. They don't see it them as backup copies, but rather copies intended to distribute to other people so people don't buy the CD's.
In a sense, I can see the RIAA being worried about this. The thing is, though, I think more and more people want to listen to individual songs and not CD's full of filler. This is scary for the RIAA because if people get their way, then they would only buy a song for $2 a pop instead of buying the album for $20. On top of that, they'd need media for each individual song. At that point, the individual artists don't even need the record industry anymore, they could sell that service by themselves! That business model suddenly doesn't sound so interesting, does it?
Getting back to your question, personally I'd recommend using Morpheus or whatever Napster clone is available to just build up your collection of songs, then only rip the ones you can't find. That way, instead of ripping 2000 or so songs, you may only end up ripping like 50.
Be careful, though. If the RIAA comes knocking at your door because of this article, be sure to have each and every one of your CD's ready to present to them.
I want to start by saying I totally agree with you about the games measuring the system, but I have a couple of points to make.
The reason why the hardware is being analyzed is that people want to see room for growth. You mentioned Star Fox using the SuperFX chip. The SNES was designed to run this kind of DSP, whereas the Genesis couldn't do this very well. (remember virtua racing for it? HUUUUGE cartridge)
The people who plunk down change for the machine would like to know that it does have a few surprises waiting for it. Remember Virtua Fighter 2 for the Saturn? Remember how much better it looked than ANYTHING on the Playstation? I think there are people out there betting that whatever system they own will pull a rabbit like that one out of their hats.
The other point I'd like to make is that it's comforting to know that the hardware is simplified. One thing that really stinks is when a game slows down in the heat of the action. By having a system configuration that is predictable, they can greatly reduce problems like these. If the XBOX, for example, had a bottleneck where drawing a huge polygon on the screen drastically slowed it down, then that'd be bad for most games. But if the XBOX can handle games in just about any situation reliably, then it's good to know that ur gaming experience isn't going to be distrupted by a bottleneck in the system.
I, personally, chose the GameCube because I believe it has the best potential. Not because of it's power, but because of the work artists have been able to put into it. I really believe that the battle between the consoles out today will be decided by the artists, not the programmers this time. Look at Donkey Kong Country and you'll see what I mean....
People equate cartoony with kiddie. If it has bright colors, it's for kids. No sexual content, its for kids. Use of any type of imagination at all, its for kids.
What bothers me most is that the 'more adult' games have little depth in comparison with it's animated counterparts. There are, of course, exceptions to this comment. But for the most part, well they don't! Twisted metal comes to mind. It's post-apocolyptic, it's destructive, and it's fun for about 2 weekends. After that.. well there isn't a whole much to it.
Which was better? Mortal Kombat (more adult) or Street Figher II (more cartoony)? MK was more appealing because of the splashes of blood, etc. But, arguably, SFII (and it's many many children) had deeper, more interesting game play. That's why SFII derivitives are STILL popular in arcades, but MK has just kind of... well.. gone away.
Final Fantasy 7 vs. Zelda OoT? That's likely to spark a never ending debate. FF7 did have a really cool story line, but in many ways Zelda had better game value. A good deal of FF was "move a few spaces, turn based attack, move a few spaces, turn based attack, bored bored bord." Zelda, on the other hand, you WERE Link. You controlled him, and you saw the world through his eyes.
FF7, to me, had a a more attracative story line, but Zelda was a deeper game.
What I'm trying to say is that just because a game is 'kiddie', doens't mean it isn't fun.
I don't understand why you think IE is the cause of it slowing down. That's kind of silly to imagine because IE is not a running process on the machine.
There probably are some things that run slower on Win2k, wouldn't surprise me a whole lot. However, Win2k is a far superior OS to Win95 by any stretch of the imagination. I wonder how many people had to reboot because Netscape crashed on Win95. I know that was a daily occurance with me when I first started cruising the web. I never have that problem on Win2k today.
I'll happily trade a small percentage of speed for a great improvement in stability any day.
As a sysadmin, it's a pain in the butt to keep everybody's computers running normally. Frankly, not only am I a big fan of everybody in the office having the SAME OS, also I am a fan of everybody having the MOST SUPPORTED OS.
Today, that is Windows 2000. Nearly everybody here is running 2000, and it's great. It's easy to maintain. I will give you an example: the network shared laser printer. It's really easy to set up in Win2K. Go to the computer controlling the printer, add the printer, and then hit 'OK'.
Then we've got a Win95 box that also needed to share the printer.... oh dear. I won't bore you with specifics, but I had to go download stuff from HP and reboot once. All this so somebody could print on an ancient machine.
With 95 being blown away, it makes it easier for me to tell the higher-ups that we need to put some $$ into the latest OS. "I could have had this employee up and running in under a minute, instead of 20" sometimes works, but this works even better "Well, I can't get Windows 95 anymore so I'll have to get their new OS." They won't know the difference, but I will since I'm supporting it.
This is the type of appliance that really needs a CE like OS running it. I have computers in my apartment acting as appliances right now. For example, I have a PVR I built up just so I can keep up on my favorite TV shows, then archive them to CD so I can drag them out next year and watch them again.
I *could* have bought a Tivo to do this, but my needs were that I could archive them and come back to them later, something a Tivo doesn't let me do.
The main drawback is that it is still... a PC. If something goes wrong, it takes roughly 30 seconds for it to come back up. Is this a bad thing? Well I'm not really complaining, particularly because the OS I'm running is rock solid.
If I could do the same thing with CE, then a power cycle would be 5 seconds. Now *that* would be really cool. I still have the ability to upgrade it to new technologies, but the OS itself is more suited to appliance technology.
Like or hate CE, it is cool to have a PC that comes on within moments.
As much as I liked the idea of the Indrema, I never read ANYTHING that suggested there was any business potential. Just sounded like two garage guys with an enthusiastic idea that they thought would magically take off.
I seriously doubt Indrema was ever on Microsoft's radar. As a gamer *I* wasn't even interested in the thing. I just thought it'd be cool to poke around it.
I highly doubt Microsoft had anything to do with it's failure. Indrema basically self destructed.
Sorry bud, but once ppl start using that, it'll quickly get modded down. Then nobody will see it.
What amuses me is that I think the same people who spend too much time 'trolling' here are the same ppl that complain they can't get laid.
I really like this idea. I want to be able to watch my SnapStream (www.snapstream.com) captured TV shows on the go. Right now I lug a laptop around, but with the new airline security restrictions lately I'm worried one day I won't be able to do that anymore. If this little device can play back my shows, then I would be ecstatic!
In second place, I'd take a product that's a laptop hard-drive connected via Compact Flash card to my PocketPC. It's two components to carry instead of one, but man it'd be cool to catch up on Farscape since I'm never home to watch it.
Hmm.. I had an idea I wanted to share. One thing I have always wanted is the ability to watch TV while laying down. I've actually thought about building some kind of contraption that'd allow me to hang a TV, screen down, so I could lay under it and watch TV more comfortably.
I'm afraid to tackle something like this because of how heavy TV's are... I wonder, since this device is LCD, and I imagine it's pretty lightweight, I wonder if I could run an A/V cable to it and maybe hook up my DVD player to it?
It'd be more comfortable playing games, too. It'd be so wonderful to be able to sit down and play a game without being distracted by a sore back. Anybody else feel my pain?
I think luggable would be a more suitable word than portable in this case. You wouldn't walk around carrying the GameCube AND the controller to play it. I really do like the idea of having a display like this so I can pick up the machine and use it in a more comfortable area of my apartment.
I don't know about everybody else, but my apartment has it's fair share of hot and cool spots...
Re:Hmm... You can see where this is going, right?
on
Portable GameCube
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree with you. I have a feeling Nintendo designed not just a powerful home system, but their next portable system in the next 5 years.
Think about that... by the time it launches you have a library of 500 or so games. Heck, by then they might even have an 802.11 adapter for it. Imagine the LAN Party you could have then? Everybody brings their GBA sized GCN and their Network cards, somebody sets up a cheap $100 wireless hub, and everybody sits around an apartment playing a cool game.
Heck.. have the party at StarBuck's or something. Heh.
Re:Hmmm, game appliance for $350
on
Portable GameCube
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well... u might want to play WaveRace, or Luigi's Mansion, or MonkeyBall, or [insert game that you can play on the GameCube but not on the PC here]...
This is the TRUE reason to own a game system. Not hard drives, processors, RAM, Nintendo, MS, whatever.. its because there are GAMES you want to play on it.
I'm willing to accept the cap, at least temporarily. What's really helping my relations with AT&T right now is that my ping times are significantly better. I can always wait a little longer to get a file, but ping times are rather time critical.
I do wish, though, that if I'm going to get 1/4th the speed I had before that AT&T would at least up my upstream cap to 384k. At least then I'll be able to update my website faster.
Slashdot Mirror
How are you enjoying playing Star Fox on it?
Oh wait, you can't play Star Fox on the Game Boy Advance. I guess it's not the same machine.
It started with a problem: I bought a new computer, what do I do with my old one? So I bought a cheapy Radeon LE card with TV out, and plugged it in to my TV.
Then I put a DVD ROM in it. Then I put an 80-gig drive in it. Then I put a Hauppage WinTV card in it. What did it turn into? A Media Machine. I use SnapStream to capture TV shows... lots and lots of TV shows. For example, I'd like to watch Farscape from beginning to end. Now I can realistically do that, since Sci-Fi channel is airing it.
I can watch DVDs, and when I get a better sound system for it, I'll even play MP3's on it.
Now there are sites popping up with Video on Demand streamed through the internet. Check out http://www.intertainer.tv/. I got a subscription to this service, and it isn't half bad! Now I can watch movies for roughly the price to rent them at the store, the diffrence is I don't have to drive to the store twice to view one movie. Now I can just say "I want to watch this movie now" *click*.
I went to Siggraph this year, spent 4 days in L.A.. The hotel I went to didn't have anything interesting on TV. Fortunately I had a bunch of shows I wanted to watch ready to go on my laptop.
It's nice to be able to enjoy the $35 I spend a month on Cable TV, without having to schedule my life around it.
I honestly don't understand why it's such a bad thing that a FEATURE is being ADDED to DVD Players.
Yeah yeah, it's cool to hate Microsoft, blah blah blah. "I don't want to support MS, therefore I won't buy this product", -- ok, fine. Go have fun.
Let me tell you why this technology is interesting to me.
- You can get the WMP encoder for FREE. The MPEG group wants you to pay for software to encode MPEG2 stuff. At least that used to be the case, I haven't looked into MPEG in over a year now so my info may be old. To the best of my understanding, in order to burn a DVD that can play in a DVD player, you need special software to do this. With WMP support, I can just make the WMP file, burn it to a DVD, and watch it on my DVD player. This is *COOL*.
- I use WMP at the moment for a home-brew PVR. (Go to http://www.snapstream.com if this is interesting to you) Eventually I might switch to DivX, but at the moment I'm using WMP because it's easy to use, and it isn't half bad.
Eventually I want a portable solution. When PocketPC's get a little faster, I'll be able to play the files I capture from SnapStream on them. This will make airplane travel much eaiser to bear. Unfortunately, even if these machines do get faster, there's RAM limitations. I've been hoping to find a way to encode my TV shows so I can watch them on a portable DVD player.
And now, this might happen!! I might be able to take my output straight from snapstream, burn it to a CD/DVD, and play it on a portable DVD Player! Now THAT is totally cool.
I wanted to answer one other thing. A couple of people asked why this was /.'d in the first place. Initially, I think it was just because the violence in video games issue might be resurrected ad nauseum again. However I would like to bring up another reason why this is an important story.
This looks like the beginnings of using the web to improve morality in the world. If there are sites like this that will allow parents to be notified of potentially offensive toys/content, then maybe they will look to this to improve their parenting skills instead of trying to put a stop to the company producing them.
I see this as a potentially good thing, provided they don't break out of simply informing to attempting to rally people against things like this.
My advice to this site is: "Inform the people, but don't speculate about the reasons behind certain things. Don't draw silly conlclusions like DOOM promotes Satan worshipping, etc. The last thing we need is a bunch of ill-informed idiots trying to tell me that I'm going to hell over a game.
This particular site doesn't offend me a whole lot. It looks like it's just an information site, as opposed to a site intended to remove these items from the market.
However, this did bring back a few memories of some parents' group attempting to block the sale of the Harry Potter novels. Their reasoning was along the lines that children would become desensitized to the coming of the anti-christ.
Now personally, I've been reading the first book, and I'm nearly halfway through it now. So far I have YET to see anything I'd prevent my child (if I had one, I'm not claiming to be a parent yet) from being exposed to. The movie had some scenes that were scary, but I never had any religious concerns over it.
Yet, if these people had their way, I would never have seen the movie! Now what right does anybody have to prevent me or my future children from seeing a movie? I wish I could remember who said it... something along the lines of "You are free to say whatever you want in this country, but you are not free from being offended by somebody."
Fortunately, they weren't successful in banning the books. However, I think that there are groups out there who can manipulate the media to prevent our basic freedoms. I'll give you an example: A child burns down his house. The mother blames Beavis and Butthead because the show had one of the characters set fire to something. Because of this, Beavis and Butthead is moved to 10 o'clock.
My freedom to watch Beavis and Butthead at 6pm was taken away by an overreactive parent who couldn't teach her kids not to play with matches. Let me ask you something lady, if Beavis and Butthead were such bad influences, how come we didn't have a rash of house burnings all over the country?
Anyway, back to the topic here. I'm ok with somebody setting up a site with reviews of toys, alerting me to the idea that they may rub against my parenting morals. I am a BIG FAN of parents getting to know what it is their kids are getting into. That is really important! The best thing to do, as a parent, is to teach your kids good common sense. If you don't want your kids to burn down the house, tell them that! My parents did. They still live in the house I grew up in! Don't turn off Beavis and Butthead. If a poorly animated cartoon like B&B can cause your kid to burn down the house, you have seriously failed as a parent.
One final note. As a parent's group, you have the right IMHO to NOTIFY parents of a potentially offensive piece of media or toy. But don't you EVER try to take my freedoms away with it. Just because it doesn't settle with your tastes, doesn't mean you should act like Kile's mom and try to stop its' release. It's none of your business if I play Doom or not, but I do appreciate you letting me know that it might not be good for my child.
Interesting. Thank you for giving me a thoughtful answer. I have to admit, my assumption about what I was going to hear back was ill concieved. I was expecting to hear something along the lines of "because so and so is gay", with really nothing more insightful than that.
:)
Bad of me to make assumptions. Good luck.
Thank you.
Heh. With witty comebacks like that, I can imagine Oscar Wilde will soon be forgotten. That poor AC will never know that you burned him so bad behind his back.
Seriously, though. Why do some of you troll? I'm asking you for a serious thought out answer. Can you give me one? Is there some story in the backgruond about why you do it?
Actually, Arnie's arm is stick in the gear in the metal shop plant. The processor may or not be gone, but they only destroyed the hard drives etc, they didn't kill the people who actually worked on it.
At worst, they delayed the apolocolyptic future. Which would make sense since 1997 was the year all hell was supposed to break loose.
First off, I agree with you wholly that you should be able to without having to worry about the RIAA.
However, I feel I should play Devil's Advocate here. The RIAA sees every MP3 created as a CD not purchased. If you went to MP3.Com, for example, and downloaded all of the 2000 (200 CD's x 10 songs per CD avg?) songs so that you don't have to swap CD's all the time, then they'd say 2000 more pirated songs were downloaded.
Is their logic correct? Heck no! But they use this flimsy logic to get the courts to pass silly laws like the DMCA. They don't see it them as backup copies, but rather copies intended to distribute to other people so people don't buy the CD's.
In a sense, I can see the RIAA being worried about this. The thing is, though, I think more and more people want to listen to individual songs and not CD's full of filler. This is scary for the RIAA because if people get their way, then they would only buy a song for $2 a pop instead of buying the album for $20. On top of that, they'd need media for each individual song. At that point, the individual artists don't even need the record industry anymore, they could sell that service by themselves! That business model suddenly doesn't sound so interesting, does it?
Getting back to your question, personally I'd recommend using Morpheus or whatever Napster clone is available to just build up your collection of songs, then only rip the ones you can't find. That way, instead of ripping 2000 or so songs, you may only end up ripping like 50.
Be careful, though. If the RIAA comes knocking at your door because of this article, be sure to have each and every one of your CD's ready to present to them.
it looks kind of like a face... doesn't it.
Sorry, I don't recognize your 'greatness' because I don't know who you are.
I want to start by saying I totally agree with you about the games measuring the system, but I have a couple of points to make.
The reason why the hardware is being analyzed is that people want to see room for growth. You mentioned Star Fox using the SuperFX chip. The SNES was designed to run this kind of DSP, whereas the Genesis couldn't do this very well. (remember virtua racing for it? HUUUUGE cartridge)
The people who plunk down change for the machine would like to know that it does have a few surprises waiting for it. Remember Virtua Fighter 2 for the Saturn? Remember how much better it looked than ANYTHING on the Playstation? I think there are people out there betting that whatever system they own will pull a rabbit like that one out of their hats.
The other point I'd like to make is that it's comforting to know that the hardware is simplified. One thing that really stinks is when a game slows down in the heat of the action. By having a system configuration that is predictable, they can greatly reduce problems like these. If the XBOX, for example, had a bottleneck where drawing a huge polygon on the screen drastically slowed it down, then that'd be bad for most games. But if the XBOX can handle games in just about any situation reliably, then it's good to know that ur gaming experience isn't going to be distrupted by a bottleneck in the system.
I, personally, chose the GameCube because I believe it has the best potential. Not because of it's power, but because of the work artists have been able to put into it. I really believe that the battle between the consoles out today will be decided by the artists, not the programmers this time. Look at Donkey Kong Country and you'll see what I mean....
People equate cartoony with kiddie. If it has bright colors, it's for kids. No sexual content, its for kids. Use of any type of imagination at all, its for kids.
What bothers me most is that the 'more adult' games have little depth in comparison with it's animated counterparts. There are, of course, exceptions to this comment. But for the most part, well they don't! Twisted metal comes to mind. It's post-apocolyptic, it's destructive, and it's fun for about 2 weekends. After that.. well there isn't a whole much to it.
Which was better? Mortal Kombat (more adult) or Street Figher II (more cartoony)? MK was more appealing because of the splashes of blood, etc. But, arguably, SFII (and it's many many children) had deeper, more interesting game play. That's why SFII derivitives are STILL popular in arcades, but MK has just kind of... well.. gone away.
Final Fantasy 7 vs. Zelda OoT? That's likely to spark a never ending debate. FF7 did have a really cool story line, but in many ways Zelda had better game value. A good deal of FF was "move a few spaces, turn based attack, move a few spaces, turn based attack, bored bored bord." Zelda, on the other hand, you WERE Link. You controlled him, and you saw the world through his eyes.
FF7, to me, had a a more attracative story line, but Zelda was a deeper game.
What I'm trying to say is that just because a game is 'kiddie', doens't mean it isn't fun.
I don't understand why you think IE is the cause of it slowing down. That's kind of silly to imagine because IE is not a running process on the machine.
There probably are some things that run slower on Win2k, wouldn't surprise me a whole lot. However, Win2k is a far superior OS to Win95 by any stretch of the imagination. I wonder how many people had to reboot because Netscape crashed on Win95. I know that was a daily occurance with me when I first started cruising the web. I never have that problem on Win2k today.
I'll happily trade a small percentage of speed for a great improvement in stability any day.
As a sysadmin, it's a pain in the butt to keep everybody's computers running normally. Frankly, not only am I a big fan of everybody in the office having the SAME OS, also I am a fan of everybody having the MOST SUPPORTED OS.
Today, that is Windows 2000. Nearly everybody here is running 2000, and it's great. It's easy to maintain. I will give you an example: the network shared laser printer. It's really easy to set up in Win2K. Go to the computer controlling the printer, add the printer, and then hit 'OK'.
Then we've got a Win95 box that also needed to share the printer.... oh dear. I won't bore you with specifics, but I had to go download stuff from HP and reboot once. All this so somebody could print on an ancient machine.
With 95 being blown away, it makes it easier for me to tell the higher-ups that we need to put some $$ into the latest OS. "I could have had this employee up and running in under a minute, instead of 20" sometimes works, but this works even better "Well, I can't get Windows 95 anymore so I'll have to get their new OS." They won't know the difference, but I will since I'm supporting it.
This is the type of appliance that really needs a CE like OS running it. I have computers in my apartment acting as appliances right now. For example, I have a PVR I built up just so I can keep up on my favorite TV shows, then archive them to CD so I can drag them out next year and watch them again.
I *could* have bought a Tivo to do this, but my needs were that I could archive them and come back to them later, something a Tivo doesn't let me do.
The main drawback is that it is still... a PC. If something goes wrong, it takes roughly 30 seconds for it to come back up. Is this a bad thing? Well I'm not really complaining, particularly because the OS I'm running is rock solid.
If I could do the same thing with CE, then a power cycle would be 5 seconds. Now *that* would be really cool. I still have the ability to upgrade it to new technologies, but the OS itself is more suited to appliance technology.
Like or hate CE, it is cool to have a PC that comes on within moments.
As much as I liked the idea of the Indrema, I never read ANYTHING that suggested there was any business potential. Just sounded like two garage guys with an enthusiastic idea that they thought would magically take off.
I seriously doubt Indrema was ever on Microsoft's radar. As a gamer *I* wasn't even interested in the thing. I just thought it'd be cool to poke around it.
I highly doubt Microsoft had anything to do with it's failure. Indrema basically self destructed.
Sorry bud, but once ppl start using that, it'll quickly get modded down. Then nobody will see it. What amuses me is that I think the same people who spend too much time 'trolling' here are the same ppl that complain they can't get laid.
I really like this idea. I want to be able to watch my SnapStream (www.snapstream.com) captured TV shows on the go. Right now I lug a laptop around, but with the new airline security restrictions lately I'm worried one day I won't be able to do that anymore. If this little device can play back my shows, then I would be ecstatic!
In second place, I'd take a product that's a laptop hard-drive connected via Compact Flash card to my PocketPC. It's two components to carry instead of one, but man it'd be cool to catch up on Farscape since I'm never home to watch it.
Hmm.. I had an idea I wanted to share. One thing I have always wanted is the ability to watch TV while laying down. I've actually thought about building some kind of contraption that'd allow me to hang a TV, screen down, so I could lay under it and watch TV more comfortably.
I'm afraid to tackle something like this because of how heavy TV's are... I wonder, since this device is LCD, and I imagine it's pretty lightweight, I wonder if I could run an A/V cable to it and maybe hook up my DVD player to it?
It'd be more comfortable playing games, too. It'd be so wonderful to be able to sit down and play a game without being distracted by a sore back. Anybody else feel my pain?
I think luggable would be a more suitable word than portable in this case. You wouldn't walk around carrying the GameCube AND the controller to play it. I really do like the idea of having a display like this so I can pick up the machine and use it in a more comfortable area of my apartment.
I don't know about everybody else, but my apartment has it's fair share of hot and cool spots...
I agree with you. I have a feeling Nintendo designed not just a powerful home system, but their next portable system in the next 5 years.
Think about that... by the time it launches you have a library of 500 or so games. Heck, by then they might even have an 802.11 adapter for it. Imagine the LAN Party you could have then? Everybody brings their GBA sized GCN and their Network cards, somebody sets up a cheap $100 wireless hub, and everybody sits around an apartment playing a cool game.
Heck.. have the party at StarBuck's or something. Heh.
Well... u might want to play WaveRace, or Luigi's Mansion, or MonkeyBall, or [insert game that you can play on the GameCube but not on the PC here]... This is the TRUE reason to own a game system. Not hard drives, processors, RAM, Nintendo, MS, whatever.. its because there are GAMES you want to play on it.
I'm willing to accept the cap, at least temporarily. What's really helping my relations with AT&T right now is that my ping times are significantly better. I can always wait a little longer to get a file, but ping times are rather time critical.
I do wish, though, that if I'm going to get 1/4th the speed I had before that AT&T would at least up my upstream cap to 384k. At least then I'll be able to update my website faster.