...and a fair price to you means... what? $100? $50? $1?
It's not the price of the software that causes these guys to make illegal
copies. I doubt any of them even run the software they have.
That's true. These guys view pirating as a "sport." Their
goal is to distribute as much "warez" without any consideration of
what it is they are couriering.
To get back to the "fair price" issue. I think you will find
that software prices are a lot like VHS/DVD prices. They are extremely
elastic. If a movie is priced at $10 instead of $20, a hell of a lot more
than 2x the people will buy it. If XP was only $25 instead of $200,
millions more people would not want to bother with the hassle of pirating a copy
and just buy the store bought version with all the manuals and junk that go
along with it. Of course this will never happen. Why should
it? Microsoft is attacking piracy from three fronts: 1) activation codes
like in XP, 2) Pressure on the government to raid pirates, and 3) Adding copy
protection in the hardware and making it the defacto standard (i.e., X-Box).
Aw Christ. Here we go again. Every time one of these devices gets mentioned the whole fucking debate over "running audio cables"
rears it ugly head. For the last time...run a digital coax cable to your amplifier/receiver.
NO LOSS!
I was surprised that the X-Box didn't have PS1 emulation. Then I thought about it more carefully:
Microsoft could have bought out Bleem's technology for a song, improved it, and ported it to the
XBox. Of course Sony would have sued Microsoft. Microsoft would win since there's nothing illegal about emulating the PS1.
Hell, if Bleem could successfully defend their product against a giant like Sony, you know MS sure as heck could.
However, Microsoft would then be setting a legal precedent that would have bitten them in the ass once people started emulating the X-Box titles on their home PCs. Thus, no emulation on the X-Box.
I hate the way hard drive companies are just spoon feeding us incremental advances. Why only an 8 meg cache? Gimme a ram slot and let me pop in some of those "useless" 64 MB PC66 memory chips I've got laying around. Now THAT'S a cache!
Satellite radio opens the possibility of having separate channels like
"death metal", "doom metal", and "speed metal".
This level of granularity beats even the best college radio stations (unless
what you REALLY want is local music, in which case you should just buy the CDs
to support them anyway).
Sounds awesome to me, but I wonder if either service has that level of
granularity for hard rock or are they just running multiple top40s
broadcasts? Is there a channel listing with the artists that are commonly
played? I'd like to know before I buy it and find out their definition of
"death metal" is Jethro
Tull.
Edison was not a "creator". He was an "adaptor". Just about all of his inventions were based on something that had already existed, but not perfected. I believe his contribution to the light bulb was to use tungsten as the filament, not the idea of the bulb itself.
Can you create a harmless example of this and post it on a webserver? I'd be interested in seeing how this works. That is, unless you are just guessing how it works without actually trying it.
Re:I must be missing something
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 1
Don't run audio cable from your computer. Instead, run optical or digital coax to your stereo receiver.
Uhhh, that was the whole point of my post. I agree. The GameCube is just for gaming. That's the problem for Nintendo. Unhackable? I seem to remember a story about it already being cracked in Hong Kong?
...and the ColecoVision, and a ton of classic arcade games use the Z80. Too bad they had to charge so much for their CPU. I wonder how much cooler the Atari, Commodore, and Apple 8-bit home computers would have been with Z80s instead of 6502s?
So what it all comes down to is...(cue monkey boy)
DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!
Seriously, Sony won because it had more games. It got that by having more
developers. What's the current status on the number of PS2/X-Box/GameCube
developers? I hope Nintendo realizes that they can't succeed by their in-house games alone.
Am I missing something? Why would you care which CPU is faster? As long as
the CPU is fast enough to play the game, I don't give a rat's ass if it's a
Cray. It's not like I'm folding@home on my Game Cube.
Two reasons:
1) If there is one thing console makers have learned, it's that game developers
will always find a need for that extra bit of performance. Maybe if the
N64 had a little more power, it wouldn't have had those annoying, albeit
infrequent, slowdowns in Mario64. Maybe they could eliminated that
annoying pop-up effect by not drawing objects in the distance. It really
sucked not being able to see things like coins until you got really close to it,
especially on the conveyor-type scene.
2) Who says it's just a gaming console? I mean, yeah, that's Nintendo's
attitude. However, Microsoft and Sony are looking beyond the gaming
world. The X-Box has everything you'd need to turn it into a Windows
PC. What about the Slashdot article about getting Linux running on a
PS2? Nintendo (and you) are not thinking outside the "box".
I think it would be an absolute coup for Apple to take the (cheap)
graphics chip from the flipper and plop it inside their next-generation iMac.
No way. The Flipper chip was not designed for all-out performance.
The entire design of the Gamecube was to maximize performance out of a little
box. Furthermore, ATI didn't have much input into the design of the
Flipper, even though their logo is stamped on every Gamecube case. Current
ATI graphics cards will provide much better performance using the current DDR
memory designs.
This would have been a great machine to run Linux off of if they would have
provided a better I/O system. Would it have been so hard to throw
in a firewire card? Geez.
When it comes to the Gamecube, its hardware allows great real-life
performance when you consider the theoretical limits, compared to the X-Box. The
X-Box has impressive specs on paper, but in reality, the Gamecube can actually
match this.
It could be that the Gamecube hardware is better "integrated",
allowing better performance with less hardware due to fewer bottlenecks.
I think you ought to read the article before you comment. The Gamecube is
better than the PS/2, but lacks the graphics, sound, interface, and raw CPU
power of the X-Box. I hate to say it, but I got a strong feeling Nintendo
may end up like Sega did with the Dreamcast. Great little system, not
enough power/support.
The original argument was not about accuracy at all. It was about how
easy/difficult it would be to measure the period and frequency of the sine
wave. This has to do with precision not accuracy. When you zoom in,
the viewer gains precision for measuring the period, but looses precision of
measuring the frequency because the sample size is much smaller.
I think the example would have been clearer if he used an oscilloscope rather
than a wave editor since the wave editor can measure the waveform
perfectly. Trying to measure a sine wave by fitting them in those
"little squares" is a better analogy
Re:Thinking outside the fireplace
on
Electronic Paper
·
· Score: 1
>1) How do the news stories get uploaded to the paper?
> Flat bed device, or keep a small stack of them in a feeder bin to something
that looks like a fax machine/printer. When you have something to
"print" it prints it on the epaper.
Who's paying for all this? Now I need a piece of hardware to read the
news? I think I'll stick with pulp or just surf to CNN.
>2) The "e-paper" might be light and thin, but a wireless
networked computer isn't.
> The epaper itself has no electronics, only small pixel balls that get rotated
to make pictures/text. The rotating is done by an external device. The epaper
keeps the balls positioned without requiring electronics.
I thought the advantage of newspapers made with epaper would be they could be
updated hourly with the day's news. I mean, from a marketing standpoint,
you are going to have to include some value-added services other than
"here's the same thing as a regular newspaper...only more
complicated!" I suppose if these external devices were located
throughout the city where people could "dock" their e-paper for an
update, it might work. But that sounds awfully expensive.
>3) What happens when it gets dirty?
> What happens when your laptop screen gets dirty? You wipe it clean.
I don't know how resilient the material they plan on using will be, but if it's
going to be cost-effective (i.e., cheap), I don't think it's going to last very
long based on how people currently treat their newspapers. Besides, who
wants to clean coffee stains and doughnut crumbs out of their newspaper every
day?
>4) Breaks?
> Throw it away and get a new one.
That's an awfully broad statement that could be applied to anything.
"My computer is broken." "Throw it away and get a new
one." The costs, which are not well defined yet, will have a lot to
do with this as an option. Not to mention point #6...
>5) Oh, and what about batteries?
> No batteries or plugs for the paper itself. See #2 above.
Depends on how they implement it. Okay, replace the word
"batteries" with "additional hardware."
>6) They're not exactly environmentally-friendly. >
What do you mean?
This e-paper is most likely going to involve non-biodegradable
materials. Paper is great because it's relatively easy to recycle and
biodegrades quite nicely. The same cannot be said of e-paper.
In New York, the use of credit card sized MetroCards (mag-stripe fare cards)
have grown significantly. People use them instead of a metal tokens to get
on the bus or subway because of the special value-added fare perks (e.g., subway
to bus transfers, 10% bonus on $15+ purchases, etc.). The card is supposed
to be reusable, but since the Transit Authority doesn't charge anything for a
new card, it becomes a disposable commodity. If you walk into the
subways in New York, you will usually see MetroCards littered about the
place. Shame, really.
And perhaps more importantly...who's paying for all this bandwidth? It's already nearly impossible to get free webspace without a draconian bandwidth cap. Are we to assume bandwidth costs under this network are going to be 1000x less?
How do the news stories get uploaded to the paper? The
"e-paper" might be light and thin, but a wireless networked computer
isn't. What happens when it gets dirty? Breaks? Oh, and what
about batteries? They're not exactly environmentally-friendly.
People treat magazines and newspapers as disposable items. It's going to
take a serious cultural change for people to treat their periodicals with love
and tenderness. Quite frankly, why should they? To replace a highly
recyclable product like newspaper?
Do you really think Osama bin Laden gets his explosives from Acme Labs?
We already know Bert
is involved with Osama; maybe WileE.Coyote is in cahoots with him,
too!
I'm shocked nobody has come up with another use for this concept other than as a means to look for bombs in luggage.
It's not like this could have prevented the 9/11 disaster since there were no
bombs brought on board any of the planes.
Come on people! Where are all the tinfoil-helmet-wearing-security-freaks
when you need them? How can the government use this to invade our
privacy? this is Slashdot for cry-not-loud!
You are confusing accuracy with precision. The precision of the
measurements increases/decreases when you zoom in. You have no idea if the
measurements are an accurate representation of the source wave, nor
should you care for the purposes of this example.
From what I understand, we still don't fully understand how flapping wings
fully work. Until recently, calculations on the lift provided by bees wings
showed that they should crash and burn.
I've heard that story many times myself. I believe what wasn't accounted
for is the relative viscosity of the fluid (air) from the perspective of the
tiny bee. To a bee, the moving through the air at its size is like a human
trying to walk while underwater. That's why their wings' angle of attack
is so sharp.
Slashdot Mirror
...and a fair price to you means... what? $100? $50? $1?
It's not the price of the software that causes these guys to make illegal copies. I doubt any of them even run the software they have.
That's true. These guys view pirating as a "sport." Their goal is to distribute as much "warez" without any consideration of what it is they are couriering.
To get back to the "fair price" issue. I think you will find that software prices are a lot like VHS/DVD prices. They are extremely elastic. If a movie is priced at $10 instead of $20, a hell of a lot more than 2x the people will buy it. If XP was only $25 instead of $200, millions more people would not want to bother with the hassle of pirating a copy and just buy the store bought version with all the manuals and junk that go along with it. Of course this will never happen. Why should it? Microsoft is attacking piracy from three fronts: 1) activation codes like in XP, 2) Pressure on the government to raid pirates, and 3) Adding copy protection in the hardware and making it the defacto standard (i.e., X-Box).
Aw Christ. Here we go again. Every time one of these devices gets mentioned the whole fucking debate over "running audio cables" rears it ugly head. For the last time...run a digital coax cable to your amplifier/receiver. NO LOSS!
I was surprised that the X-Box didn't have PS1 emulation. Then I thought about it more carefully:
Microsoft could have bought out Bleem's technology for a song, improved it, and ported it to the XBox. Of course Sony would have sued Microsoft. Microsoft would win since there's nothing illegal about emulating the PS1. Hell, if Bleem could successfully defend their product against a giant like Sony, you know MS sure as heck could. However, Microsoft would then be setting a legal precedent that would have bitten them in the ass once people started emulating the X-Box titles on their home PCs. Thus, no emulation on the X-Box.
I hate the way hard drive companies are just spoon feeding us incremental advances. Why only an 8 meg cache? Gimme a ram slot and let me pop in some of those "useless" 64 MB PC66 memory chips I've got laying around. Now THAT'S a cache!
Satellite radio opens the possibility of having separate channels like "death metal", "doom metal", and "speed metal". This level of granularity beats even the best college radio stations (unless what you REALLY want is local music, in which case you should just buy the CDs to support them anyway).
Sounds awesome to me, but I wonder if either service has that level of granularity for hard rock or are they just running multiple top40s broadcasts? Is there a channel listing with the artists that are commonly played? I'd like to know before I buy it and find out their definition of "death metal" is Jethro Tull.
Edison was not a "creator". He was an "adaptor". Just about all of his inventions were based on something that had already existed, but not perfected. I believe his contribution to the light bulb was to use tungsten as the filament, not the idea of the bulb itself.
Can you create a harmless example of this and post it on a webserver? I'd be interested in seeing how this works. That is, unless you are just guessing how it works without actually trying it.
Don't run audio cable from your computer. Instead, run optical or digital coax to your stereo receiver.
Uhhh, that was the whole point of my post. I agree. The GameCube is just for gaming. That's the problem for Nintendo. Unhackable? I seem to remember a story about it already being cracked in Hong Kong?
...and the ColecoVision, and a ton of classic arcade games use the Z80. Too bad they had to charge so much for their CPU. I wonder how much cooler the Atari, Commodore, and Apple 8-bit home computers would have been with Z80s instead of 6502s?
So what it all comes down to is...(cue monkey boy)
DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!
Seriously, Sony won because it had more games. It got that by having more developers. What's the current status on the number of PS2/X-Box/GameCube developers? I hope Nintendo realizes that they can't succeed by their in-house games alone.
Am I missing something? Why would you care which CPU is faster? As long as the CPU is fast enough to play the game, I don't give a rat's ass if it's a Cray. It's not like I'm folding@home on my Game Cube.
Two reasons:
1) If there is one thing console makers have learned, it's that game developers will always find a need for that extra bit of performance. Maybe if the N64 had a little more power, it wouldn't have had those annoying, albeit infrequent, slowdowns in Mario64. Maybe they could eliminated that annoying pop-up effect by not drawing objects in the distance. It really sucked not being able to see things like coins until you got really close to it, especially on the conveyor-type scene.
2) Who says it's just a gaming console? I mean, yeah, that's Nintendo's attitude. However, Microsoft and Sony are looking beyond the gaming world. The X-Box has everything you'd need to turn it into a Windows PC. What about the Slashdot article about getting Linux running on a PS2? Nintendo (and you) are not thinking outside the "box".
I think it would be an absolute coup for Apple to take the (cheap) graphics chip from the flipper and plop it inside their next-generation iMac.
No way. The Flipper chip was not designed for all-out performance. The entire design of the Gamecube was to maximize performance out of a little box. Furthermore, ATI didn't have much input into the design of the Flipper, even though their logo is stamped on every Gamecube case. Current ATI graphics cards will provide much better performance using the current DDR memory designs.
This would have been a great machine to run Linux off of if they would have provided a better I/O system. Would it have been so hard to throw in a firewire card? Geez.
When it comes to the Gamecube, its hardware allows great real-life performance when you consider the theoretical limits, compared to the X-Box. The X-Box has impressive specs on paper, but in reality, the Gamecube can actually match this.
It could be that the Gamecube hardware is better "integrated", allowing better performance with less hardware due to fewer bottlenecks.
I think you ought to read the article before you comment. The Gamecube is better than the PS/2, but lacks the graphics, sound, interface, and raw CPU power of the X-Box. I hate to say it, but I got a strong feeling Nintendo may end up like Sega did with the Dreamcast. Great little system, not enough power/support.
The original argument was not about accuracy at all. It was about how easy/difficult it would be to measure the period and frequency of the sine wave. This has to do with precision not accuracy. When you zoom in, the viewer gains precision for measuring the period, but looses precision of measuring the frequency because the sample size is much smaller.
I think the example would have been clearer if he used an oscilloscope rather than a wave editor since the wave editor can measure the waveform perfectly. Trying to measure a sine wave by fitting them in those "little squares" is a better analogy
>1) How do the news stories get uploaded to the paper?
>
Flat bed device, or keep a small stack of them in a feeder bin to something that looks like a fax machine/printer. When you have something to "print" it prints it on the epaper.
Who's paying for all this? Now I need a piece of hardware to read the news? I think I'll stick with pulp or just surf to CNN.
>2) The "e-paper" might be light and thin, but a wireless networked computer isn't.
>
The epaper itself has no electronics, only small pixel balls that get rotated to make pictures/text. The rotating is done by an external device. The epaper keeps the balls positioned without requiring electronics.
I thought the advantage of newspapers made with epaper would be they could be updated hourly with the day's news. I mean, from a marketing standpoint, you are going to have to include some value-added services other than "here's the same thing as a regular newspaper...only more complicated!" I suppose if these external devices were located throughout the city where people could "dock" their e-paper for an update, it might work. But that sounds awfully expensive.
>3) What happens when it gets dirty?
>
What happens when your laptop screen gets dirty? You wipe it clean.
I don't know how resilient the material they plan on using will be, but if it's going to be cost-effective (i.e., cheap), I don't think it's going to last very long based on how people currently treat their newspapers. Besides, who wants to clean coffee stains and doughnut crumbs out of their newspaper every day?
>4) Breaks?
>
Throw it away and get a new one.
That's an awfully broad statement that could be applied to anything. "My computer is broken." "Throw it away and get a new one." The costs, which are not well defined yet, will have a lot to do with this as an option. Not to mention point #6...
>5) Oh, and what about batteries?
>
No batteries or plugs for the paper itself. See #2 above.
Depends on how they implement it. Okay, replace the word "batteries" with "additional hardware."
>6) They're not exactly environmentally-friendly.
>
What do you mean?
This e-paper is most likely going to involve non-biodegradable materials. Paper is great because it's relatively easy to recycle and biodegrades quite nicely. The same cannot be said of e-paper.
In New York, the use of credit card sized MetroCards (mag-stripe fare cards) have grown significantly. People use them instead of a metal tokens to get on the bus or subway because of the special value-added fare perks (e.g., subway to bus transfers, 10% bonus on $15+ purchases, etc.). The card is supposed to be reusable, but since the Transit Authority doesn't charge anything for a new card, it becomes a disposable commodity. If you walk into the subways in New York, you will usually see MetroCards littered about the place. Shame, really.
And perhaps more importantly...who's paying for all this bandwidth? It's already nearly impossible to get free webspace without a draconian bandwidth cap. Are we to assume bandwidth costs under this network are going to be 1000x less?
How do the news stories get uploaded to the paper? The "e-paper" might be light and thin, but a wireless networked computer isn't. What happens when it gets dirty? Breaks? Oh, and what about batteries? They're not exactly environmentally-friendly.
People treat magazines and newspapers as disposable items. It's going to take a serious cultural change for people to treat their periodicals with love and tenderness. Quite frankly, why should they? To replace a highly recyclable product like newspaper?
Somehow, I don't think putting a crease in "e-paper" is going to be a good idea.
Instead, the streets will be filled with non-biodegradable silicon "video" sheets. Yeah, much better.
Seriously, though. I do like the whole idea of "holodeck wallpaper", though I would tend to wonder how long it would take to become affordable.
I tried using "holodeck wallpaper" once. Every time I tried to jump on Natalie Portman, I smashed into the wall.
Do you really think Osama bin Laden gets his explosives from Acme Labs? We already know Bert is involved with Osama; maybe WileE.Coyote is in cahoots with him, too!
I'm shocked nobody has come up with another use for this concept other than as a means to look for bombs in luggage. It's not like this could have prevented the 9/11 disaster since there were no bombs brought on board any of the planes.
Come on people! Where are all the tinfoil-helmet-wearing-security-freaks when you need them? How can the government use this to invade our privacy? this is Slashdot for cry-not-loud!
You are confusing accuracy with precision. The precision of the measurements increases/decreases when you zoom in. You have no idea if the measurements are an accurate representation of the source wave, nor should you care for the purposes of this example.
From what I understand, we still don't fully understand how flapping wings fully work. Until recently, calculations on the lift provided by bees wings showed that they should crash and burn.
I've heard that story many times myself. I believe what wasn't accounted for is the relative viscosity of the fluid (air) from the perspective of the tiny bee. To a bee, the moving through the air at its size is like a human trying to walk while underwater. That's why their wings' angle of attack is so sharp.