Good call. A lot of people jump on these extremely-low-power hobby boards, and forget they're also extremely-low-performance. DMA helps a lot, but you really need a strong processor to move data at 1 Gbps. Several steps of sending ethernet data are handled by the processor, especially with typical low-end GbE chipsets.
The Atom dual-core will make you much happier than an anemic Via C7.
Two instructions per cycle if the planets are aligned. The core has the same limitations the Pentium core had with pairing, notably:
* Only a subset of instructions can be executed simultaneously.
* If there is any dependency between the two instructions, they cannot be executed simultaneously.
Yes, the hardware has two integer pipelines, but the benchmarks are somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 instructions per clock with unoptimized code. That number can get larger, but requires an optimized compiler. In the Windows world, that means years. In the Linux world, that means waiting on gcc.
But you just can't do that anymore, and still expect developers to hang-on tight. Let's look at the progression.
PlayStation: one of the easiest consoles to develop for at the time of release. Featured a single beefy processor, and a simple ploygon-based 3D rendering pipeline (minus a few features). Long-term improvement: people decried the CD media for it's slow load times, but then developers learned to stream data off the CD, making later games more fluid and much more immense.
PlayStation 2: more difficult to develop for because the dual vector units VU0 and VU1 were the source of most of the system's computational power. Developers, however, could start-out just using the main CPU for game engine, and the vector units for serial graphics processing only, and still unlock about %60-70 of the system's potential power. Stepping-up to use of the dual vector units provided a decent late-game improvement.
PlayStation 3: much more difficult to program for than any previous console. Just for reference, if you took a program parallized to work well on the PS2, and just ported it wholesale to the PS3, you would only unlock about %20 of the performance potential of the PS3. Pathetic. The difficulty of fully-harnessing the PS3 is already made clear in the article above, and some developers may never be able to, as you may not be able to split your game's threadas eight-ways.
There's "building potential" into the system, and then there's the PS3. The costs of unlocking the PS3's potential are too high for most developers, especially if they're making a multi-platform release (where you can't re-use most of the optimizations made for the PS3). You can only charge so much on a game before customers won't pay the toll.
Absolutely likely. I've worked for small "beltway bandit" companies, and their security is always lax.
Today, I work for a Fortune 100 defense contractor, and we couldn't do this if we tried.
1. The classified networks are completely disconnected from the internet. If you need to bridge a network between multiple locations (what one of the other posters was talking about), you encrypt the traffic using an NES and send it over an unclassified link. The source and destination of that encrypted data path is a closed network.
2. Yes, you can copy data from the classified network to the unclssified network, but it requires a long procedure with tons of paperwork. Basically, if you can do this without raising any red flags, the data is probably clean.
3. Even if your stupid-ass manages to copy classified data to the unclassified network, users don't have admin rights, and can't install anything not on the approved software list.
THIS is why Windows can be on a classified network. Properly-configured and managed, it is as-secure as Linux.
Besides, most of the "bad" CDs I've READ* about have been due to manufacturer error. This fancy mastering process would nto prevent manufacturing defects, it would just prevent errors in the master.
This is just another worthless gimmick.
* Note: "READ" about, because I've bought hundreds, and never encountered a bad one.
Yes, but Microsoft's business plan depends on NEW sales of operating systems. Replacement sales (XP) are a non-growth option, because the market is saturated, and some people may re-use their existing license when upgrading their hardware. Further, staying with XP as your flagship means users looking for new features will jump-ship. So, XP's best-case performance is a slow bleed of marketshare.
If you can get users interested in a new OS, you get real increases in marketshare. You get a lot of people who buy the new OS, and people who were putting-off an upgrade also jump on the wagon. By breaking the cycle of saturated upgrades, you create money they your company wouldn't otherwise have seen, and you fuel hype that keeps your markeshare strong for years (just look at XP).
The reality is, Microsoft is disappointed in Vista marketshare, because XP is bound to bleed away, and isn't making them as much moeny as new sales of Vista would. That is why they are rushing Windows 7 to market, and hyping it every step of the way.
I also remember seeing a History Channel thingy about how the English got Prussian cannon technology from a turncoat engineer. I don't remeber if it was around the time of the Spanish Armada or later in the time of Nelson, but it did happen, and did strengthen British cannon power significantly.
I can't seem to find any mention of it on the web though.
Re: Ah, the era of homepages
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 1
Hell, back in 1996, we didn't have that problem: many business computers didn't have soundcards!
Back in my brave and daring days I was crazy and decided that reinstalls were for wimps.
I started out with a Windows 95 OSR2 machine, then upgraded everything except the hard drive (processor, motherboard, memory, etc). After installing new drivers, the same OS image worked fine. Later, I used a Windows 98 upgrade CD on that same iamge, only because I wanted full-duplex sound support. That upgrade went off without a hitch.
Sure, the system eventualy became unstable, and after enough updates, DirectX didn't work anymore - but the image was functional under Windows 98 for over a year before this happened.
Today, installations are so easy that I just reinstall when I get new internal hardware.
Hey, Intel does the same thing with their latest Atom chipset, Poulsbo. It artificially limits maximum memory to 1GB, even though other chipsets like the G945 Mobile can do more.
Welcome to the world of computers, where you artificially limit what your customers can do so you can maintain market segmentation.
and naval reactors are, like, the size of a dustbin.
Did you even READ the link I posted? The smallest reactor core on that page has a volume over 32,000 cubic feet, and weighs 1130 tons. 1130 TONS. That's one gigantic dustbin.
And keep in mind, these are some of the world's most advanced reactor designs. While the civilian nuclear power industry has largely langushed in the last 30 years, the military has been running a tight ship. You really can't make them any smaller without sacrificing power output, and believe me, a space elevator is going to require as much power as a submarine to move it's mass.
Even shielding isn't that big. Besides, you'll need it anyway, you're in space, remember?
Tell that to the countless NIMBY whiners. You don't think they'll come calling when you put a giant fission reactor above every home on the continent? You don't think they'll bitch until the whole thing is wrapped in radiation and heat shielding, just like RTGs?
And HELL NO, that shielding isn't tiny - it's the reason those naval reactor compartments on the linked page were so large.
You need the shielding no matter what you do: if you plan on lifting people into space using these things, you need shielding. But let's say you're not lifting people into space, just bulk: you STILL need shielding because of the detrimental effects of Radiation Damage. You can harden electronics to a degree, but it's no replacement for radiation shielding. In addition, you can cause premature fatigue failure in matrials by exposing them to high levels of radiation - NOT something I'd want to expose the cable to.
Travel insurance is popular today because the airlines are run by retards: with the practice of flight overbooking, plus issues with fleet maintenence, the chances of your trip being interrupted are significant. Sure, it might only be an hour, but if you're unucky it could turn into a multi-day event. Travel insurance also offers health coverage for people traveing internationally, something attractive to people who have free national heath care that doesn't travel with them.
I was lucky enough to have travel insurance when this happened (delayed my flight back to the US), and it took British Airways a week to sort their schedules out (this was Thursday, and I was quoted "Tuesday" as the earliest departute date back to the US). Because the insurance agency was out hundreds of dollars a day, they were obliged to find me a flight as quickly as possible. They managed to get me out of there in only two days, and I didn't have to sit on the phone with BA for hours to make it happen.
Exactly folks. This is just Quake 3 with a matchup system. The "browser-based" aspect of it is really a gimmick, because you can currently only play it on Windows. Really, they could have just re-released Quake 3 and a community site, and not tied the game to a browser.
I played the closed beta for a week, and then I remembered why I stopped playing Quake 3: I'm just not that fast anymore, and I don't have that kind of energy to waste on a twitch shooter. I used to be good, but not anymore. The younger kids who never bought Quake 3 will probably like it, but I wonder: can a game with no eyecandy whatsoever can hold their attention longer than five minutes?
No, he's not, he's bringing-up both types in the same reply.
He casts-off RTGs immediately because their power output sucks, and then he dismisses naval fission reactors because (1) they're huge and (2) you need a way to remove the waste heat.
Unfortunately, efficiently creating mechanical/electrical energy from heat requires a large temperature differential. Once you've used-up all the energy you can and the temperature drops, the remaining energy is waste heat, and must be removed from the system. Naval reactors work well in this situation: they have an unlimited supply of cool water to remove waste heat. But on a cable in space, the heat has nowhere to go, except perhaps along the cable (who knows if cable material would make a good heatsink).
These were bottom-rung machines bought by people who didn't give a shit. All they wanted was a computar thingy to access thar intarwebs.
When people like this walk into these stores to buy the cheapest computer they can, nothing can move that mountain. You can tell them time and time again that the performance will suck, that it won't work with newer operating systems, and they still won't pony up another dollar.
Face it, Vista got a bad name for three reasons:
1. The lowest-end computers certified to run it were not really capable (since fixed).
2. Nvidia's drivers sucked for the first 6 months.
3. The I/O subsystem was poorly designed (fixed in SP1), and the virtualization of video memory was a poor idea for Vista-32 that makes game memory usage balloon (hence the higher memory requirements for games under Vista, and problems running out of memory that players don't see on XP). REALITY: Vista should have pushed 64-bit as the primary OS.
Only one of the above was really under Microsoft's control.
So it's not standards-compliant. Neither was Netscape. The only difference was: Netscape failed so badly that they never had to clean-up their standards-compliance. They just faded-away, and fueled the fire for the total restart with Mozilla (it took the Mozilla team YEARS to fix that code too).
The problem Microsoft had was they were too successful. Now that the web has matured, they find they have to clean-up and come into compliance, or risk losing more marketshare. I think their methods for this transistion are very thorough:
1. default standards-compliant browsing. 2. has a list of popular non-compliant sites, updated regularly. 3. sites can control IE8 rendering engine through META tags or HTML headers. 4. if the site you visit still doesn't work, the user can switch to "compatibility mode" with the touch of a button.
No, it's not perfect, and it won't happen overnight, but it's the last necessary painful step to complete web standardization.
L4D sales were slow at the start because the reviews were mixed. Most reviewers loved the gameplay, but hated the fact that the content was lacking for $50 (very short game). Most gamers recommended I wait to spend money on the game until either Valve dropped the price, or released a content update.
No really, this reminds me of when I was a kid: all the cheap battery-powered cars had wired remotes. Since I grew-up poor, wired-remote cars were all I got, and I hated them immensely. I had a burning desire to get a wireless RC car, but I had to save my own money to buy one.
And then I found out that most RC car batteries died after 20 minutes. What a dissappointment!
The fact is, the jetpack suffers from the same problems: you can get it wired and cheap, or wireless but useless.
You know, there's a point at which developers stive too far - the complexity gets so high that not enough people are willing to do the work. What you end up with is something unusable after years of effort, and no end in sight.
I recently witnessed this when I decided to try-out ReactOS. I was thinking about developing for it, depending on the state of the project. I loaded up their pre-configured Qemu image, and gave it a look; despite years of development, the OS felt clunky. In Explorer, the display refreshed every time a folder was scanned, which made it very slow. In an application as simple as Wordpad, the cursor disappeared, and the application would revert to the default 6-point font size every time I pressed Enter!
As I looked deeper into the project, I was up fro more disappointment. First, I tried the Live CD just to see how fast it was on real hardware, and didn't get very far - the OS crashed while loading. Second, after reading their FAQ carefully, I noticed that they were never planning to support NTFS. I can understand them saying this five years ago, when read-only NTFS was still touchy, but TODAY? Not a good sign.
It's sad to say, but doing entire system emulation is going to become this complex, so I think you're right to say that the emulation scene is going to die-off. That said, there's simultaneously a limit to how complex the console makers can design a system while still making it affordable for users (and an inexpensive platform to develop for). I think the Wii is an indicator of this, and I expect we'll see less great leaps in hardware complexity/horsepower in the future.
If you can get the cable provider's PVR box, then go for it.
I recently moved from a Series 2 Tivo to Comcast's PVR (Motorola), and I am very satisfied. Hell, it's even easy to turn-on 30-second commercial skip (BONUS: you don't have to re-enable it every time the DVR loses power), so I'm very satisfied using it.
What you lose:
Tivo Suggestions. A loss, certainly, but one I can live with. Recordings are not grouped into a category tree. It means more scrolling to reach items not recorded recently. You cannot skip by 15-minute increments using the skip buttons while FF/RW.
What you gain:
Dual tuners, and no conversion loss. I know you can get this with Series 3, but Series 3 is also much more expensive than Series 2 ever was.
And we found it so offensive that we did what it took to basically eliminate malaria from our society.
We tried mosquito control for years in this country, but didn't have the amazing success we did until we started using DDT.
Why don't other societies do that, too? Why is it our job to do it for them?
Because we were the first to give it a go, we got to use DDT to clear our mosquito problem out when there was zero resistance, and zero public backlash.
Later on, it got harder to get the same results, as the campaigns were mis-managed - just look at the entry on Wikipedia concerning Sri Lanka. They almost eradicated Malaria, and then stopped (for cost reasons) and the remaining mosquitos had time to gain resistance. It's the same thing we see in eradicating bacteriological bugs: if you're going to use antibiotics, you MUST use the full treatment, or you'll leave the resistant strains alive.
So, today DDT isn't as effective as it once was, becasue it wasn't used properly when it was new. And on-top of the reduced effect, countries are being preached to by the international community to stop using DDT. And we pay for that luxury: the mosquito control budgets of just two counties in New York State top four million dollars! If you extrapolate that for the entire east coast, the US spends billions of dollars just keeping the mosquitos at-bay!
So, how exactly is a 3rd-world country supposed to do what we did, when the costs (both political and monetary) of doing what we did have gone up so much? All our meddleing and mis-management is partially responsible for the mess they're in, so we certainly should pay some of the costs or eradication.
Slashdot Mirror
All we need to do is hire Malcom McDowell to destroy the Sun! Just tell him that it will get him into the Nexus, he'll do it for free!
Good call. A lot of people jump on these extremely-low-power hobby boards, and forget they're also extremely-low-performance. DMA helps a lot, but you really need a strong processor to move data at 1 Gbps. Several steps of sending ethernet data are handled by the processor, especially with typical low-end GbE chipsets.
The Atom dual-core will make you much happier than an anemic Via C7.
Two instructions per cycle if the planets are aligned. The core has the same limitations the Pentium core had with pairing, notably:
* Only a subset of instructions can be executed simultaneously.
* If there is any dependency between the two instructions, they cannot be executed simultaneously.
Yes, the hardware has two integer pipelines, but the benchmarks are somewhere in the range of 1-1.5 instructions per clock with unoptimized code. That number can get larger, but requires an optimized compiler. In the Windows world, that means years. In the Linux world, that means waiting on gcc.
But you just can't do that anymore, and still expect developers to hang-on tight. Let's look at the progression.
PlayStation: one of the easiest consoles to develop for at the time of release. Featured a single beefy processor, and a simple ploygon-based 3D rendering pipeline (minus a few features). Long-term improvement: people decried the CD media for it's slow load times, but then developers learned to stream data off the CD, making later games more fluid and much more immense.
PlayStation 2: more difficult to develop for because the dual vector units VU0 and VU1 were the source of most of the system's computational power. Developers, however, could start-out just using the main CPU for game engine, and the vector units for serial graphics processing only, and still unlock about %60-70 of the system's potential power. Stepping-up to use of the dual vector units provided a decent late-game improvement.
PlayStation 3: much more difficult to program for than any previous console. Just for reference, if you took a program parallized to work well on the PS2, and just ported it wholesale to the PS3, you would only unlock about %20 of the performance potential of the PS3. Pathetic. The difficulty of fully-harnessing the PS3 is already made clear in the article above, and some developers may never be able to, as you may not be able to split your game's threadas eight-ways.
There's "building potential" into the system, and then there's the PS3. The costs of unlocking the PS3's potential are too high for most developers, especially if they're making a multi-platform release (where you can't re-use most of the optimizations made for the PS3). You can only charge so much on a game before customers won't pay the toll.
Absolutely likely. I've worked for small "beltway bandit" companies, and their security is always lax.
Today, I work for a Fortune 100 defense contractor, and we couldn't do this if we tried.
1. The classified networks are completely disconnected from the internet. If you need to bridge a network between multiple locations (what one of the other posters was talking about), you encrypt the traffic using an NES and send it over an unclassified link. The source and destination of that encrypted data path is a closed network.
2. Yes, you can copy data from the classified network to the unclssified network, but it requires a long procedure with tons of paperwork. Basically, if you can do this without raising any red flags, the data is probably clean.
3. Even if your stupid-ass manages to copy classified data to the unclassified network, users don't have admin rights, and can't install anything not on the approved software list.
THIS is why Windows can be on a classified network. Properly-configured and managed, it is as-secure as Linux.
Besides, most of the "bad" CDs I've READ* about have been due to manufacturer error. This fancy mastering process would nto prevent manufacturing defects, it would just prevent errors in the master.
This is just another worthless gimmick.
* Note: "READ" about, because I've bought hundreds, and never encountered a bad one.
Yes, but Microsoft's business plan depends on NEW sales of operating systems. Replacement sales (XP) are a non-growth option, because the market is saturated, and some people may re-use their existing license when upgrading their hardware. Further, staying with XP as your flagship means users looking for new features will jump-ship. So, XP's best-case performance is a slow bleed of marketshare.
If you can get users interested in a new OS, you get real increases in marketshare. You get a lot of people who buy the new OS, and people who were putting-off an upgrade also jump on the wagon. By breaking the cycle of saturated upgrades, you create money they your company wouldn't otherwise have seen, and you fuel hype that keeps your markeshare strong for years (just look at XP).
The reality is, Microsoft is disappointed in Vista marketshare, because XP is bound to bleed away, and isn't making them as much moeny as new sales of Vista would. That is why they are rushing Windows 7 to market, and hyping it every step of the way.
I also remember seeing a History Channel thingy about how the English got Prussian cannon technology from a turncoat engineer. I don't remeber if it was around the time of the Spanish Armada or later in the time of Nelson, but it did happen, and did strengthen British cannon power significantly.
I can't seem to find any mention of it on the web though.
Hell, back in 1996, we didn't have that problem: many business computers didn't have soundcards!
Back in my brave and daring days I was crazy and decided that reinstalls were for wimps.
I started out with a Windows 95 OSR2 machine, then upgraded everything except the hard drive (processor, motherboard, memory, etc). After installing new drivers, the same OS image worked fine. Later, I used a Windows 98 upgrade CD on that same iamge, only because I wanted full-duplex sound support. That upgrade went off without a hitch.
Sure, the system eventualy became unstable, and after enough updates, DirectX didn't work anymore - but the image was functional under Windows 98 for over a year before this happened.
Today, installations are so easy that I just reinstall when I get new internal hardware.
Hey, Intel does the same thing with their latest Atom chipset, Poulsbo. It artificially limits maximum memory to 1GB, even though other chipsets like the G945 Mobile can do more.
Welcome to the world of computers, where you artificially limit what your customers can do so you can maintain market segmentation.
Carbon nanotubes are,
Granted.
and naval reactors are, like, the size of a dustbin.
Did you even READ the link I posted? The smallest reactor core on that page has a volume over 32,000 cubic feet, and weighs 1130 tons. 1130 TONS. That's one gigantic dustbin.
And keep in mind, these are some of the world's most advanced reactor designs. While the civilian nuclear power industry has largely langushed in the last 30 years, the military has been running a tight ship. You really can't make them any smaller without sacrificing power output, and believe me, a space elevator is going to require as much power as a submarine to move it's mass.
Even shielding isn't that big. Besides, you'll need it anyway, you're in space, remember?
Tell that to the countless NIMBY whiners. You don't think they'll come calling when you put a giant fission reactor above every home on the continent? You don't think they'll bitch until the whole thing is wrapped in radiation and heat shielding, just like RTGs?
And HELL NO, that shielding isn't tiny - it's the reason those naval reactor compartments on the linked page were so large.
You need the shielding no matter what you do: if you plan on lifting people into space using these things, you need shielding. But let's say you're not lifting people into space, just bulk: you STILL need shielding because of the detrimental effects of Radiation Damage. You can harden electronics to a degree, but it's no replacement for radiation shielding. In addition, you can cause premature fatigue failure in matrials by exposing them to high levels of radiation - NOT something I'd want to expose the cable to.
You must not get out much.
Travel insurance is popular today because the airlines are run by retards: with the practice of flight overbooking, plus issues with fleet maintenence, the chances of your trip being interrupted are significant. Sure, it might only be an hour, but if you're unucky it could turn into a multi-day event. Travel insurance also offers health coverage for people traveing internationally, something attractive to people who have free national heath care that doesn't travel with them.
I was lucky enough to have travel insurance when this happened (delayed my flight back to the US), and it took British Airways a week to sort their schedules out (this was Thursday, and I was quoted "Tuesday" as the earliest departute date back to the US). Because the insurance agency was out hundreds of dollars a day, they were obliged to find me a flight as quickly as possible. They managed to get me out of there in only two days, and I didn't have to sit on the phone with BA for hours to make it happen.
Exactly folks. This is just Quake 3 with a matchup system. The "browser-based" aspect of it is really a gimmick, because you can currently only play it on Windows. Really, they could have just re-released Quake 3 and a community site, and not tied the game to a browser.
I played the closed beta for a week, and then I remembered why I stopped playing Quake 3: I'm just not that fast anymore, and I don't have that kind of energy to waste on a twitch shooter. I used to be good, but not anymore. The younger kids who never bought Quake 3 will probably like it, but I wonder: can a game with no eyecandy whatsoever can hold their attention longer than five minutes?
No, he's not, he's bringing-up both types in the same reply.
He casts-off RTGs immediately because their power output sucks, and then he dismisses naval fission reactors because (1) they're huge and (2) you need a way to remove the waste heat.
Unfortunately, efficiently creating mechanical/electrical energy from heat requires a large temperature differential. Once you've used-up all the energy you can and the temperature drops, the remaining energy is waste heat, and must be removed from the system. Naval reactors work well in this situation: they have an unlimited supply of cool water to remove waste heat. But on a cable in space, the heat has nowhere to go, except perhaps along the cable (who knows if cable material would make a good heatsink).
These were bottom-rung machines bought by people who didn't give a shit. All they wanted was a computar thingy to access thar intarwebs.
When people like this walk into these stores to buy the cheapest computer they can, nothing can move that mountain. You can tell them time and time again that the performance will suck, that it won't work with newer operating systems, and they still won't pony up another dollar.
Face it, Vista got a bad name for three reasons:
1. The lowest-end computers certified to run it were not really capable (since fixed).
2. Nvidia's drivers sucked for the first 6 months.
3. The I/O subsystem was poorly designed (fixed in SP1), and the virtualization of video memory was a poor idea for Vista-32 that makes game memory usage balloon (hence the higher memory requirements for games under Vista, and problems running out of memory that players don't see on XP). REALITY: Vista should have pushed 64-bit as the primary OS.
Only one of the above was really under Microsoft's control.
So it's not standards-compliant. Neither was Netscape. The only difference was: Netscape failed so badly that they never had to clean-up their standards-compliance. They just faded-away, and fueled the fire for the total restart with Mozilla (it took the Mozilla team YEARS to fix that code too).
The problem Microsoft had was they were too successful. Now that the web has matured, they find they have to clean-up and come into compliance, or risk losing more marketshare. I think their methods for this transistion are very thorough:
1. default standards-compliant browsing.
2. has a list of popular non-compliant sites, updated regularly.
3. sites can control IE8 rendering engine through META tags or HTML headers.
4. if the site you visit still doesn't work, the user can switch to "compatibility mode" with the touch of a button.
No, it's not perfect, and it won't happen overnight, but it's the last necessary painful step to complete web standardization.
L4D sales were slow at the start because the reviews were mixed. Most reviewers loved the gameplay, but hated the fact that the content was lacking for $50 (very short game). Most gamers recommended I wait to spend money on the game until either Valve dropped the price, or released a content update.
No really, this reminds me of when I was a kid: all the cheap battery-powered cars had wired remotes. Since I grew-up poor, wired-remote cars were all I got, and I hated them immensely. I had a burning desire to get a wireless RC car, but I had to save my own money to buy one.
And then I found out that most RC car batteries died after 20 minutes. What a dissappointment!
The fact is, the jetpack suffers from the same problems: you can get it wired and cheap, or wireless but useless.
That's great, until you need 4GB+ of RAM. Yeah, there's XP x64, but the support isn't as good as it is for newer x64 Windows versions.
Palm was once *the* one
Virtual monopoly
Not they're barely known
You know, there's a point at which developers stive too far - the complexity gets so high that not enough people are willing to do the work. What you end up with is something unusable after years of effort, and no end in sight.
I recently witnessed this when I decided to try-out ReactOS. I was thinking about developing for it, depending on the state of the project. I loaded up their pre-configured Qemu image, and gave it a look; despite years of development, the OS felt clunky. In Explorer, the display refreshed every time a folder was scanned, which made it very slow. In an application as simple as Wordpad, the cursor disappeared, and the application would revert to the default 6-point font size every time I pressed Enter!
As I looked deeper into the project, I was up fro more disappointment. First, I tried the Live CD just to see how fast it was on real hardware, and didn't get very far - the OS crashed while loading. Second, after reading their FAQ carefully, I noticed that they were never planning to support NTFS. I can understand them saying this five years ago, when read-only NTFS was still touchy, but TODAY? Not a good sign.
It's sad to say, but doing entire system emulation is going to become this complex, so I think you're right to say that the emulation scene is going to die-off. That said, there's simultaneously a limit to how complex the console makers can design a system while still making it affordable for users (and an inexpensive platform to develop for). I think the Wii is an indicator of this, and I expect we'll see less great leaps in hardware complexity/horsepower in the future.
If you can get the cable provider's PVR box, then go for it.
I recently moved from a Series 2 Tivo to Comcast's PVR (Motorola), and I am very satisfied. Hell, it's even easy to turn-on 30-second commercial skip (BONUS: you don't have to re-enable it every time the DVR loses power), so I'm very satisfied using it.
What you lose:
Tivo Suggestions. A loss, certainly, but one I can live with.
Recordings are not grouped into a category tree. It means more scrolling to reach items not recorded recently.
You cannot skip by 15-minute increments using the skip buttons while FF/RW.
What you gain:
Dual tuners, and no conversion loss. I know you can get this with Series 3, but Series 3 is also much more expensive than Series 2 ever was.
Server 2008 (AKA: Vista) runs on IA64. Yeah, same company, but definitely a different architecture.
And we found it so offensive that we did what it took to basically eliminate malaria from our society.
We tried mosquito control for years in this country, but didn't have the amazing success we did until we started using DDT.
Why don't other societies do that, too? Why is it our job to do it for them?
Because we were the first to give it a go, we got to use DDT to clear our mosquito problem out when there was zero resistance, and zero public backlash.
Later on, it got harder to get the same results, as the campaigns were mis-managed - just look at the entry on Wikipedia concerning Sri Lanka. They almost eradicated Malaria, and then stopped (for cost reasons) and the remaining mosquitos had time to gain resistance. It's the same thing we see in eradicating bacteriological bugs: if you're going to use antibiotics, you MUST use the full treatment, or you'll leave the resistant strains alive.
So, today DDT isn't as effective as it once was, becasue it wasn't used properly when it was new. And on-top of the reduced effect, countries are being preached to by the international community to stop using DDT. And we pay for that luxury: the mosquito control budgets of just two counties in New York State top four million dollars! If you extrapolate that for the entire east coast, the US spends billions of dollars just keeping the mosquitos at-bay!
So, how exactly is a 3rd-world country supposed to do what we did, when the costs (both political and monetary) of doing what we did have gone up so much? All our meddleing and mis-management is partially responsible for the mess they're in, so we certainly should pay some of the costs or eradication.