Okay, I know that there are some video games that have originated in other nations that were made partially with government grants. The problem is that I can't find any citations! Anyone remember some of these?
My mind is saying Syberia and The Longest Journey were partially funded by grants from Norway and Canada but I can't find citations. I'm pretty sure that France also has a grant for video game development.
Sounds like a plan! Of course, he also has to disconnect his house from all electricity, remove all batteries from his house, disconnect the telephone, remove refrigeration, heat, water pumps and computers.
I guess the tin-foil might block the cellphone, radio and television radiation, not to mention signals from sattelites!
Then he has to block all light from the sun and somehow figure out how to change basic universal constants so that he's no longer able to be affected by the earths electro-magnetic field.
Wait! I just thought of a billion dollar business plan! Selling pre-made tinfoil clothing to morons! Look for our spring line of swimwear and bikinis!
Maybe I can shed some light on this, having played the original beta and also when it was live on GameTap.
It depends on what you mean by MMO. No, it's not WoW. It's more of a graphical chat-room. All of "Ages beyond Myst" is here. (Ages beyond Myst is the original beta live game, altered for offline play and with a couple of ages that Cyan finished before canceling the beta.) Almost certainly there will be some added content from when the game was available under GameTap. (At least most of the files are included in the download).
When the game was actually live, there were monthly events put on by Cyan staff. These included plot and storyline events, opening of new areas, multi-user puzzles to unlock new content and from time to time, new clothing for avatars. These almost certainly will not happen in the foreseeable future.
The big draw, however, were user created events. There were regular meet-and-greets, poetry nights, dance parties and heek competitions (Similar to rock-paper-scissors but with up to 5 players.) There were D'ni language classes, tours of Bahro glyphs and paintings and discussion groups, especially about in game history and working translations of D'ni scripts and books.
Cyan released several new ages during the course of their run on GameTap. Some of the puzzles were altered to make them only solvable in groups or with at least two people. There were also at least ten other ages in various stages of development as well as quite a few fan created ages that are still being worked on.
So, if you are looking for fighting, leveling, auction houses and monsters, this probably isn't the game for you. If you like adventure games, long discussions, thought puzzles and linguistics, this might be something you would like to try. Don't expect any official updates, new content or bug fixes in the foreseeable future. Supposedly, the source code will be released. There are quite a few very capable coders and programmers in the Uru community so there is the possibility of fan created patches and updates before to long.
It's free. If you don't like it, that's fine. If you do, maybe I'll see you at the next poetry slam or Guild of Archivists meeting. Also, think about dropping a donation on Cyan. The more money and support they get, the more likely we will see real progress.
You know, if thing is already a capacitive screen, you might as well make it an LCD as well. Yes I know he demonstrated that you can't see it without your hands being in the way but I'm imagining a iPod-esque scroll wheel that can be moved around and let you roll through open windows. Or how about audio/video controls of cover art flow.
Heck, for the people concerned about precision, make it a graphics tablet as well so you can use a stylus to draw. With the LCD multi-touch you could drop controls and a color wheel on there. Even setting/controls that change every time you switch to a different application. When you put more than one finger on it, it could revert back to the basic multi-touch pad.
I figure it will be sort of like the netbook war of today. Manufactures will realize that there isn't much of a way to get faster so they will start concentrating on design, reliability and lifespan. It will probably be a golden age in computing.
I'm just waiting for a peta-hertz computer with a 500 exabyte hard-drive able to do universe simulations in real time that will fit in my pocket, go 100 years on a charge and be indestructible.
Depending on how old you are, this might be creepy or not. Keep in mind, the later in the evening the classes are, the older the students.
You know, as a geek, you probably have a degree of some kind. As such, you would probably be more than welcome back at university. Apply for enrollment at your local place of higher learning and pick up some interesting classes. If you spin it right, you might even be able to get your employer to pay for it.
Try languages. French, Spanish and Italian are useful and will get you interacting with people. They also work really well to pad out a resume. You will be AMAZED at how many women you will find in non computer/physics/engineering classes. Another good one is ballroom dancing. Comparative literature classes are mostly big discussion groups with a preset theme that any good geek can research. Try some of the phys-ed classes. Fencing is fun and can add to your geek cred. Some schools offer SCUBA diving courses. Art or painting classes are fun.
Of course, with enrollment you also have a free or cheap gym membership. Gyms are not good places to meet women. It's considered a social faux pas. However, it is a good place to meet people to be friends with. There's also usually a student union building with pool tables, bowling alleys and games.
No, in order to make money, you have to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible. This means insulting as few people as possible, writing so that anyone can understand and making it as familiar as possible to as many people as possible.
You can make a lot of money this way but your writing turns out to be bland, insipid and about as complex as "Run Dog, Run". Take "The Da Vinci Code". As a work of literature, it sucks. It's poorly written, with two-dimensional characters and a plot that has been rehashed many times before. Yet it sold millions because of wide appeal and marketing.
Most well written books appeal to a very small niche market. Yes, once a book becomes a "Classic", everyone reads it. However, most people won't venture outside their comfort zone of their preferred genre unless Oprah recommends it, it sells 15 million copies, gets turned into a movie.... or unless it's free.
That's part of what libraries do and honestly I don't think it's going to hurt sales to give away free e-books. If it's good enough, people will buy a dead-tree version. If it's crap they won't be out any money. I love the Baen Free Books project. They have shown that books sell better if they are given away for free. If I don't like a book, I'm not out anything. However, I'm much more likely to say to a friend "It wasn't for me but you might like it". As a result of Baen, I've discovered several new authors and bought in excess of 100 dead tree books that I wouldn't have otherwise. I figure that's a huge profit for them.
I actually had the same problem. I've got my entire 1,000+ Movie DVD and 400+ Television collection ripped to hard drive for use as streaming media to a media PC. I've been working on it for about 4 years now.
I ended up buying and setting up a bare-bones computers with RAID capabilities. Get a big tower with plenty of cooling. I originally used your same method. I purchased hard drives and external hard drive enclosures. This was cheaper than building pre-made drives. I especially like Vantec enclosures. However, I had a couple of drives go bad over the years. After some experimentation, I found that underpowered drives tend to loose data.
Now, I use the aforementioned RAID 1 solution. Originally I used 400gb drives but now I'm up to purchasing 1-TB drives. I've only had 1 drive go bad in the last 3 years and it was easily replaced with no loss of data. You could probably use Raid 5 just as easily, but my first setup didn't support it so I defaulted to Raid 1. The extra controller cars also used to be cheaper for RAID 1 but the costs have since equalized.
For the moment, I would advise against the 2TB drives. Many have serious slowdown problems and the cost/storage ratio is to high. 1.5tb drives are looking better and better.
Just remember good cooling! This may be the most important factor. Hot hard drives last a MUCH shorter time. I REALLY like Thermatake icage bays. They change 3-5.25" bays into 3-3.5" hard drive bays and have a really nice 120x120 fan on them to keep the drives cool.
If you buy a hard drive a month you can get some enormous storage capacity really quickly without breaking the bank. I'm up to 8TB right now. (16TB of drives).
The wrath was one of the rarest (early) swords in the game. You could enchant them with certain spells to increase strength and damage. However, the enchant spell had a chance of destroying the sword. I believe that a four enchant sword (4-banger) had a 80% chance of destroying the sword. For a time it was possible to get 5 enchants on a sword but the chance of getting 5 enchants was between 2% and 5%.
So, if you played a lot and were high level, you could find 2-3 Wraths a month on average. Then, you could burn through about 20 to 50 of them to get a 5 enchant sword.
Just as a bit of Nostalgia from me, I played the beta of the Realm when it went to 2.0 and again when it went to 3.0.
Since I was one of only about 250 in the initial beta of Realm 3.0, I ran a website with information. (Mystro's Realm for anyone that remembers.) The programmers spent LONG shift for about two weeks with constant updates and fixes. It was one of the only beta tests that I've been involved with that there was almost instant response to fix bugs. We would find things that would crash the client or server and submit them and the programmers would fix them, pushing patches about once an hour from 8:00 a.m. to about 10:00 p.m.
"Positronic" came from Asimov. "Waldo" came from a story by Heinlein where a disabled man uses machines to do his work. "Grok" is Heinlein tool, though not popular vernacular. "Frak and Frell" from Battlestar Galactica "Gorrum" from Firefly. "Shazbot" from Mork and Mindy. Not sure if this counts, but it's about an alien. "Airlock" is from E.E. Smith. "Phaser" is from Gene Roddenberry.
Then there are a lot of compound words that first were combined in Sci-fi. Transhuman, xenobiology, virboknife, visiphone, psychohistory, etc...
I have to agree. I've got a HP Ipaq hx4700. It's got a 4" screen, full color, about 16 hours of battery life while reading books.
I've got a 16gb CF card and keep about 150 books loaded at a time. I also keep several movies, 5 gig of MP3's and several TV shows on it. Screen real estate means I have to press the page turn button quite often but page transitions are almost noticeably fast and I've got a dedicated page down button.
I bought it as a PDA but I now use it almost exclusively for ebook reading.
Gotta love baen.com
They have a free book library and I buy a lot of books from their webservice store as well. I really enjoy mobipocket as a book reader.
And now, HP has the new 210/201's out. Close to the same thing but cheaper, more battery power, brighter screen and not accepts HDSD cards. When and if my current iPaq breaks I will defiantly buy another. (I bought it launch week in late 2004 and it's never died.)
Living in Boise, ID, maybe I can shed some light on this.
MPC has been steadily going downhill for a couple of years. I didn't work for MPC, but I had several customers who did. The gossip from them is a tale of outsourcing gone bad. MPC used to assemble PC's here in Idaho. A couple years ago, they outsourced most of the manufacturing overseas. Instead of building a new factory here, they built in China. All went well for awhile, then the quality started to slip. Companies stopped ordering. There wasn't enough money left to bring the manufacturing back to the states. Finally, the high oil prices of last year destroyed the profit margin they were making by outsourcing the manufacturing.
They have been in a death spiral ever since. They hoped to fix it by declaring Chapter 11 a couple months ago but that obviously didn't work.
*Disclaimer: Please be aware that all my information is third hand and may not reflect other peoples experiences.
"But didn't Apple spend a whole ton of money to write and maintain Mac OS X"
Yes, in EXACTLY the same way Microsoft did with Windows. So why is it that Microsoft can't say "You can only run Windows on Microsoft created computers."? Heck! There's an instant monopoly. Drive HP, Dell, Acer, and Sony right out of business!
I've NEVER understood why Apple thinks that they can dictate this. The Franklin case in '83 shouldn't even apply. (That case was based on modifying apple software and reselling it.) Apple's entire case is based on a shaky interpretation of what an EULA allows and an even shakier and broken US patent office.
Of course, Apple can't afford to NOT challenge Psystar. They have to try and challenge them and try to slap them down hard. There is a fairly good chance that they can even win if they bring enough force to bear and get a sympathetic or under informed judge, allowing them to maintain their monopoly.
Personally, I think Psystar has a stronger case but Apple has more money. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Yah, but what is so sad is that the LDS church has a HUGE online presence, uses the internet on a frequent basis to distribute media and is an early adopter of a lot of technology.
Secondly, these books aren't secret. Any member can walk into any LDS distribution center and pick up a copy. I've got a copy. 95% of the book is on how meetings run, proper activities for youth, how to distribute tithing and how to put in requisition forms for repairs.
However, there are sections on church doctrine and rules. These are more solid rules than what is generally liked in the church. It gives hard and fast examples of improper conduct and what the church response is to them.
The basic idea is that people should govern themselves. If you give them a hard and fast rule, some types of people will see how close they can get to that rule without breaking it. Not a good way to live a christian life.
As a lifelong member of the LDS church, I'm extremely disappointed in how church lawyers and officials are handling this. It's not SECRET. It's PRIVATE. There's a big difference that some church members just don't seem to get.
Sorry. I think I mixed up some words there. Maybe it would help if I described what I'm using.
What I have right now are a couple of low end server machines running Linux Ubuntu, with RAID 1 redundancy. (I'm up to 4+ terabytes.) They each have a gigabit Ethernet card, running through my network router. I've got a wireless router, but it isn't really fast enough for multiple media players, so I have wired connections to three media PC's. The first is a Xbox with XBMC. The second is an XBMC Linux Machine and the third is an older windows media center pc which I'm going to convert to Linux as soon as I get a new motherboard and processor. Currently the only one that can handle high Def video is the Linux box. This works because it's the only one hooked up to a high def TV instead of just S-Video.
I'm planning on adding a dedicated media collecting computer to record TV shows off cable. (Currently, I'm just using my main computer to do video capture.) I'm still in the process of writing some software to automate the process of recording, stripping commercials, labeling and moving the videos to my media servers.
I've got a full collection of almost 1000 DVD's ripped to my servers, almost half of them TV shows. I'm in the process of adding some HD-DVD's to my collection but not in to much of a hurry since only one TV is worth playing them on.
Woops. Sorry... Forgot what I was going to originally post.
The Wii isn't much more powerful than an original Xbox, and in some ways is less powerful. There is no chance that it will be able to play high definition any better than an Apple TV can. (Meaning it CAN, but it's not pretty or fast. Anything with lots of colors or moving objects will bring the system to it's knees.)
Nah, a nice Linux box with good hardware is the wave of the future, as far as high definition personal home media distribution servers are concerned. (Don't get me started on the joke of Windows Vista's media center PC's.)
Which is why the XBMC Team is porting the software to Linux. It's actually quite a good ways along now. It doesn't have a final release scheduled for anytime in the near future, but the beta versions are VERY impressive. I know several people who are using it as a stable home media server and are using 1080p videos (Albeit with multi-core Intel systems with hardcore hardware.)
It's being designed with Ubuntu in mind and already has very good hardware support.
They are working on a direct port right now and as soon as they have that stable, they are going to start adding features like time shifting, video recording, etc...
Heh. So the classic case of the difference between an optimist and an insane person.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". -Benjamin Franklin
Perhaps I'm just an optimist. Or maybe I just don't want to think that buying Microsoft products for the last couple of decades was completely useless when I can get better products open source.
Earlier today I was counting the days until April 24th and the final release of Ubuntu 8.04. Maybe it's finally time to ditch Windows entirely instead of dual booting.
You know, when Windows XP came out, it was fairly slow and bloated. So was Windows 98. It wasn't the software, it was the available hardware. (Not that I'm defending Vista. I can't stand Vista. I've tried it twice now, the first for a month and just last month for two weeks with a new beta SP1. Nasty.)
I don't know if Vista is redeemable. I'm going to have to wait at least until SP2 before I want to try again.
That should be by late 2009. So, imagine double the processor power, with an 8 core processor, a solid state disk and at least 64 gig of RAM. If Microsoft gets their butts in gear and start listening to their customers, SP2 might be something worthwhile. We shall see how it works out.
Yah, but current ARM processors max out at about 700-900 mhz.
If they can really pull off a good, stable, low powered chipset in the 1.5 ghz range.. I would be very interested.
I am still waiting for a revival of the handheld computers. UMPC isn't going anywhere, Palm is getting out of most hardware.
HP is FINALLY getting back into the handheld market, but it's WAY late for it's projections and dosen't seem to be doing any advertising at all for it's new line.
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Okay, I know that there are some video games that have originated in other nations that were made partially with government grants. The problem is that I can't find any citations! Anyone remember some of these?
My mind is saying Syberia and The Longest Journey were partially funded by grants from Norway and Canada but I can't find citations. I'm pretty sure that France also has a grant for video game development.
Sounds like a plan! Of course, he also has to disconnect his house from all electricity, remove all batteries from his house, disconnect the telephone, remove refrigeration, heat, water pumps and computers.
I guess the tin-foil might block the cellphone, radio and television radiation, not to mention signals from sattelites!
Then he has to block all light from the sun and somehow figure out how to change basic universal constants so that he's no longer able to be affected by the earths electro-magnetic field.
Wait! I just thought of a billion dollar business plan! Selling pre-made tinfoil clothing to morons! Look for our spring line of swimwear and bikinis!
The answer to that is yes and no.
Maybe I can shed some light on this, having played the original beta and also when it was live on GameTap.
It depends on what you mean by MMO. No, it's not WoW. It's more of a graphical chat-room. All of "Ages beyond Myst" is here. (Ages beyond Myst is the original beta live game, altered for offline play and with a couple of ages that Cyan finished before canceling the beta.) Almost certainly there will be some added content from when the game was available under GameTap. (At least most of the files are included in the download).
When the game was actually live, there were monthly events put on by Cyan staff. These included plot and storyline events, opening of new areas, multi-user puzzles to unlock new content and from time to time, new clothing for avatars. These almost certainly will not happen in the foreseeable future.
The big draw, however, were user created events. There were regular meet-and-greets, poetry nights, dance parties and heek competitions (Similar to rock-paper-scissors but with up to 5 players.) There were D'ni language classes, tours of Bahro glyphs and paintings and discussion groups, especially about in game history and working translations of D'ni scripts and books.
Cyan released several new ages during the course of their run on GameTap. Some of the puzzles were altered to make them only solvable in groups or with at least two people. There were also at least ten other ages in various stages of development as well as quite a few fan created ages that are still being worked on.
So, if you are looking for fighting, leveling, auction houses and monsters, this probably isn't the game for you. If you like adventure games, long discussions, thought puzzles and linguistics, this might be something you would like to try. Don't expect any official updates, new content or bug fixes in the foreseeable future. Supposedly, the source code will be released. There are quite a few very capable coders and programmers in the Uru community so there is the possibility of fan created patches and updates before to long.
It's free. If you don't like it, that's fine. If you do, maybe I'll see you at the next poetry slam or Guild of Archivists meeting. Also, think about dropping a donation on Cyan. The more money and support they get, the more likely we will see real progress.
You know, if thing is already a capacitive screen, you might as well make it an LCD as well. Yes I know he demonstrated that you can't see it without your hands being in the way but I'm imagining a iPod-esque scroll wheel that can be moved around and let you roll through open windows. Or how about audio/video controls of cover art flow.
Heck, for the people concerned about precision, make it a graphics tablet as well so you can use a stylus to draw. With the LCD multi-touch you could drop controls and a color wheel on there. Even setting/controls that change every time you switch to a different application. When you put more than one finger on it, it could revert back to the basic multi-touch pad.
I figure it will be sort of like the netbook war of today. Manufactures will realize that there isn't much of a way to get faster so they will start concentrating on design, reliability and lifespan. It will probably be a golden age in computing.
I'm just waiting for a peta-hertz computer with a 500 exabyte hard-drive able to do universe simulations in real time that will fit in my pocket, go 100 years on a charge and be indestructible.
Depending on how old you are, this might be creepy or not. Keep in mind, the later in the evening the classes are, the older the students.
You know, as a geek, you probably have a degree of some kind. As such, you would probably be more than welcome back at university. Apply for enrollment at your local place of higher learning and pick up some interesting classes. If you spin it right, you might even be able to get your employer to pay for it.
Try languages. French, Spanish and Italian are useful and will get you interacting with people. They also work really well to pad out a resume. You will be AMAZED at how many women you will find in non computer/physics/engineering classes. Another good one is ballroom dancing. Comparative literature classes are mostly big discussion groups with a preset theme that any good geek can research. Try some of the phys-ed classes. Fencing is fun and can add to your geek cred. Some schools offer SCUBA diving courses. Art or painting classes are fun.
Of course, with enrollment you also have a free or cheap gym membership. Gyms are not good places to meet women. It's considered a social faux pas. However, it is a good place to meet people to be friends with. There's also usually a student union building with pool tables, bowling alleys and games.
No, in order to make money, you have to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible. This means insulting as few people as possible, writing so that anyone can understand and making it as familiar as possible to as many people as possible.
You can make a lot of money this way but your writing turns out to be bland, insipid and about as complex as "Run Dog, Run". Take "The Da Vinci Code". As a work of literature, it sucks. It's poorly written, with two-dimensional characters and a plot that has been rehashed many times before. Yet it sold millions because of wide appeal and marketing.
Most well written books appeal to a very small niche market. Yes, once a book becomes a "Classic", everyone reads it. However, most people won't venture outside their comfort zone of their preferred genre unless Oprah recommends it, it sells 15 million copies, gets turned into a movie.... or unless it's free.
That's part of what libraries do and honestly I don't think it's going to hurt sales to give away free e-books. If it's good enough, people will buy a dead-tree version. If it's crap they won't be out any money. I love the Baen Free Books project. They have shown that books sell better if they are given away for free. If I don't like a book, I'm not out anything. However, I'm much more likely to say to a friend "It wasn't for me but you might like it". As a result of Baen, I've discovered several new authors and bought in excess of 100 dead tree books that I wouldn't have otherwise. I figure that's a huge profit for them.
I actually had the same problem. I've got my entire 1,000+ Movie DVD and 400+ Television collection ripped to hard drive for use as streaming media to a media PC. I've been working on it for about 4 years now.
I ended up buying and setting up a bare-bones computers with RAID capabilities. Get a big tower with plenty of cooling. I originally used your same method. I purchased hard drives and external hard drive enclosures. This was cheaper than building pre-made drives. I especially like Vantec enclosures. However, I had a couple of drives go bad over the years. After some experimentation, I found that underpowered drives tend to loose data.
Now, I use the aforementioned RAID 1 solution. Originally I used 400gb drives but now I'm up to purchasing 1-TB drives. I've only had 1 drive go bad in the last 3 years and it was easily replaced with no loss of data. You could probably use Raid 5 just as easily, but my first setup didn't support it so I defaulted to Raid 1. The extra controller cars also used to be cheaper for RAID 1 but the costs have since equalized.
For the moment, I would advise against the 2TB drives. Many have serious slowdown problems and the cost/storage ratio is to high. 1.5tb drives are looking better and better.
Just remember good cooling! This may be the most important factor. Hot hard drives last a MUCH shorter time. I REALLY like Thermatake icage bays. They change 3-5.25" bays into 3-3.5" hard drive bays and have a really nice 120x120 fan on them to keep the drives cool.
If you buy a hard drive a month you can get some enormous storage capacity really quickly without breaking the bank. I'm up to 8TB right now. (16TB of drives).
You know, I e-mailed the new owners twice about old account reactivation but never got a reply. Not even a "No, that's not possible."
I still feel nostalgic once in awhile and if I had ANY type of encouragement from the current owners, I would probably join up again. Ah well.
Sadly, it's not as dirty as it sounds.
The wrath was one of the rarest (early) swords in the game. You could enchant them with certain spells to increase strength and damage. However, the enchant spell had a chance of destroying the sword. I believe that a four enchant sword (4-banger) had a 80% chance of destroying the sword. For a time it was possible to get 5 enchants on a sword but the chance of getting 5 enchants was between 2% and 5%.
So, if you played a lot and were high level, you could find 2-3 Wraths a month on average. Then, you could burn through about 20 to 50 of them to get a 5 enchant sword.
Just as a bit of Nostalgia from me, I played the beta of the Realm when it went to 2.0 and again when it went to 3.0.
Since I was one of only about 250 in the initial beta of Realm 3.0, I ran a website with information. (Mystro's Realm for anyone that remembers.) The programmers spent LONG shift for about two weeks with constant updates and fixes. It was one of the only beta tests that I've been involved with that there was almost instant response to fix bugs. We would find things that would crash the client or server and submit them and the programmers would fix them, pushing patches about once an hour from 8:00 a.m. to about 10:00 p.m.
It was a fun experience.
Okay, Robotics I knew came from Sci-Fi.
"Positronic" came from Asimov.
"Waldo" came from a story by Heinlein where a disabled man uses machines to do his work.
"Grok" is Heinlein tool, though not popular vernacular.
"Frak and Frell" from Battlestar Galactica
"Gorrum" from Firefly.
"Shazbot" from Mork and Mindy. Not sure if this counts, but it's about an alien.
"Airlock" is from E.E. Smith.
"Phaser" is from Gene Roddenberry.
Then there are a lot of compound words that first were combined in Sci-fi. Transhuman, xenobiology, virboknife, visiphone, psychohistory, etc...
I have to agree. I've got a HP Ipaq hx4700. It's got a 4" screen, full color, about 16 hours of battery life while reading books.
I've got a 16gb CF card and keep about 150 books loaded at a time. I also keep several movies, 5 gig of MP3's and several TV shows on it. Screen real estate means I have to press the page turn button quite often but page transitions are almost noticeably fast and I've got a dedicated page down button.
I bought it as a PDA but I now use it almost exclusively for ebook reading.
Gotta love baen.com
They have a free book library and I buy a lot of books from their webservice store as well. I really enjoy mobipocket as a book reader.
And now, HP has the new 210/201's out. Close to the same thing but cheaper, more battery power, brighter screen and not accepts HDSD cards. When and if my current iPaq breaks I will defiantly buy another. (I bought it launch week in late 2004 and it's never died.)
Living in Boise, ID, maybe I can shed some light on this.
MPC has been steadily going downhill for a couple of years. I didn't work for MPC, but I had several customers who did. The gossip from them is a tale of outsourcing gone bad. MPC used to assemble PC's here in Idaho. A couple years ago, they outsourced most of the manufacturing overseas. Instead of building a new factory here, they built in China. All went well for awhile, then the quality started to slip. Companies stopped ordering. There wasn't enough money left to bring the manufacturing back to the states. Finally, the high oil prices of last year destroyed the profit margin they were making by outsourcing the manufacturing.
They have been in a death spiral ever since. They hoped to fix it by declaring Chapter 11 a couple months ago but that obviously didn't work.
*Disclaimer:
Please be aware that all my information is third hand and may not reflect other peoples experiences.
FreeCiv is a freeware version of Civilization that I still play. They have linux and windows releases.
http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Download#Windows_Packages
"But didn't Apple spend a whole ton of money to write and maintain Mac OS X"
Yes, in EXACTLY the same way Microsoft did with Windows. So why is it that Microsoft can't say "You can only run Windows on Microsoft created computers."? Heck! There's an instant monopoly. Drive HP, Dell, Acer, and Sony right out of business!
I've NEVER understood why Apple thinks that they can dictate this. The Franklin case in '83 shouldn't even apply. (That case was based on modifying apple software and reselling it.) Apple's entire case is based on a shaky interpretation of what an EULA allows and an even shakier and broken US patent office.
Of course, Apple can't afford to NOT challenge Psystar. They have to try and challenge them and try to slap them down hard. There is a fairly good chance that they can even win if they bring enough force to bear and get a sympathetic or under informed judge, allowing them to maintain their monopoly.
Personally, I think Psystar has a stronger case but Apple has more money. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Yah, but what is so sad is that the LDS church has a HUGE online presence, uses the internet on a frequent basis to distribute media and is an early adopter of a lot of technology.
Secondly, these books aren't secret. Any member can walk into any LDS distribution center and pick up a copy. I've got a copy. 95% of the book is on how meetings run, proper activities for youth, how to distribute tithing and how to put in requisition forms for repairs.
However, there are sections on church doctrine and rules. These are more solid rules than what is generally liked in the church. It gives hard and fast examples of improper conduct and what the church response is to them.
The basic idea is that people should govern themselves. If you give them a hard and fast rule, some types of people will see how close they can get to that rule without breaking it. Not a good way to live a christian life.
As a lifelong member of the LDS church, I'm extremely disappointed in how church lawyers and officials are handling this. It's not SECRET. It's PRIVATE. There's a big difference that some church members just don't seem to get.
It's a Heinlein short story. Give me a few minutes and I'll find it.
Oh God.. I was just thinking the same thing.
Sorry. I think I mixed up some words there. Maybe it would help if I described what I'm using.
What I have right now are a couple of low end server machines running Linux Ubuntu, with RAID 1 redundancy. (I'm up to 4+ terabytes.) They each have a gigabit Ethernet card, running through my network router. I've got a wireless router, but it isn't really fast enough for multiple media players, so I have wired connections to three media PC's. The first is a Xbox with XBMC. The second is an XBMC Linux Machine and the third is an older windows media center pc which I'm going to convert to Linux as soon as I get a new motherboard and processor. Currently the only one that can handle high Def video is the Linux box. This works because it's the only one hooked up to a high def TV instead of just S-Video.
I'm planning on adding a dedicated media collecting computer to record TV shows off cable. (Currently, I'm just using my main computer to do video capture.) I'm still in the process of writing some software to automate the process of recording, stripping commercials, labeling and moving the videos to my media servers.
I've got a full collection of almost 1000 DVD's ripped to my servers, almost half of them TV shows. I'm in the process of adding some HD-DVD's to my collection but not in to much of a hurry since only one TV is worth playing them on.
Woops. Sorry... Forgot what I was going to originally post.
The Wii isn't much more powerful than an original Xbox, and in some ways is less powerful. There is no chance that it will be able to play high definition any better than an Apple TV can. (Meaning it CAN, but it's not pretty or fast. Anything with lots of colors or moving objects will bring the system to it's knees.)
Nah, a nice Linux box with good hardware is the wave of the future, as far as high definition personal home media distribution servers are concerned. (Don't get me started on the joke of Windows Vista's media center PC's.)
Which is why the XBMC Team is porting the software to Linux. It's actually quite a good ways along now. It doesn't have a final release scheduled for anytime in the near future, but the beta versions are VERY impressive. I know several people who are using it as a stable home media server and are using 1080p videos (Albeit with multi-core Intel systems with hardcore hardware.)
It's being designed with Ubuntu in mind and already has very good hardware support.
They are working on a direct port right now and as soon as they have that stable, they are going to start adding features like time shifting, video recording, etc...
Heh. So the classic case of the difference between an optimist and an insane person.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results".
-Benjamin Franklin
Perhaps I'm just an optimist. Or maybe I just don't want to think that buying Microsoft products for the last couple of decades was completely useless when I can get better products open source.
Earlier today I was counting the days until April 24th and the final release of Ubuntu 8.04. Maybe it's finally time to ditch Windows entirely instead of dual booting.
You know, when Windows XP came out, it was fairly slow and bloated. So was Windows 98. It wasn't the software, it was the available hardware. (Not that I'm defending Vista. I can't stand Vista. I've tried it twice now, the first for a month and just last month for two weeks with a new beta SP1. Nasty.)
I don't know if Vista is redeemable. I'm going to have to wait at least until SP2 before I want to try again.
That should be by late 2009. So, imagine double the processor power, with an 8 core processor, a solid state disk and at least 64 gig of RAM. If Microsoft gets their butts in gear and start listening to their customers, SP2 might be something worthwhile. We shall see how it works out.
Yah, but current ARM processors max out at about 700-900 mhz.
If they can really pull off a good, stable, low powered chipset in the 1.5 ghz range.. I would be very interested.
I am still waiting for a revival of the handheld computers. UMPC isn't going anywhere, Palm is getting out of most hardware.
HP is FINALLY getting back into the handheld market, but it's WAY late for it's projections and dosen't seem to be doing any advertising at all for it's new line.