I picked up a cheapie refurb Netgear 'print server' for about $50 on ebay - one thing to fiddle with and gives me four physical network sockets.
I'd kill for a quieter drive - OR better still, caching to the 360 HD. I don't mind buying a bigger HD, leaving the disk in the drive, whatever it takes - but I'm damned if I'll sit looking at loading screens as my room vibrates when I bought the damn thing with an HD. PS3 can do it, it's only a firmware update, c'mon MS...
Seem to be two systems idea here. One is that you can download and burn a DVD as you currently do with iTunes (with a limit on the number of burns), the other using a booth to allow you to burn your own DVD.
Now I've no problem with the limited burns, as once you've burnt it once, you can copy/rip the DVD using the existing de-CSS stuff.
What IS interesting is the involvement of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray people. Retailers aren't too keen on HD stuff yet and REALLY don't want to stock identical content on two different and confusing formats. If the booth system is used for the HD formats, then I can see this being a massive gain. If, for example, my local shop stocks the top 50 titles on BlueRay, but has a booth allowing me to get a copy of all HD-DVDs available from the magical booth - then I know which format player I'm more likely to invest in.
Cheaper retailing costs, complete availability, never running out etc - FFS there's no reason the system couldn't be expanded to shove TV onto the disks if that's what you fancy.
As an ex-Aibo owner, I can speak with authority and state the most fun I ever had with it, was knocking it over just to watch it get back up again.
Everytime somebody came across "You've got to see this!" *KICK*
In addition I'd like to add that everybody that came over also liked kicking robotic dogs.
the closest comparison I can think of is somebody looks at your car, builds one for themselves and Ford is pissed off as it looks like the one they designed.
we have CCTV in public places - this is based upon the obviously warped logic, that if you do something in a public place, then you shouldn't expect it to be private.
In some places CCTV is going a bit far, but there are numerous occasions where it is a definite benefit. If you're wating for a taxi, withdrawing money from an ATM or merely just walking home alone late at night - then you're safer if there's a CCTV camera covering you and the possibility somebody's watching. In fact the more I think about this, the more ridiculous your point sounds - do you object to the police patrolling in public places?
That page gzips down to 12k - so ~2 seconds download speed.
The larger problem would probably be load on the server - possibly you could get around this by pre-compressing and then randomly serving. I don't think this was supposed to be a perfect solution, it's just a nice little demo showing how something common can be done in a new way.
I don't mean 'specific' hardware - in the way Apple do. I mean specific in a 'If you want Aero, then you need to buy a card that supports these features - and let graphics card makers put a 'supports Aero' logo on their cards with those features'.
Current situation where I can double my memory, spend £500 on a graphics card and windows still looks and behaves exactly the same just seems a bit well..'wasteful'
I have an old Xbox with Xbox Media Centre - and I can play all the YouTube stuff I want on my TV.
As a person able to do this I can tell you:
a) You don't want to sit on your couch f'in about with millions of crappy little clips.
b) The crappy little clips look REALLY crappy on a big TV.
Proper IPTV is here and will only grow. Multicast handles all the broadcast stuff, what we need is a P2P addon that'll handle the OnDemand stuff (I don't just mean conventional PayPerView, I mean providerless YouTube style stuff) and I want a nice Open front end that'll let me view all this on anything (and if MS will support it in MCE2, then I'll buy MCE2)
That would certainly influence my decision to buy (positively)
What I would DEARLY love is for the automotive makers to produce some new standards of their own.
I do NOT appreciate having bulky great cigarette lighter adapters hanging out all over the place (nice little variable voltage adapters would be a lot simpler).
Bluetooth is great for making stuff talk to each other, but farting around getting Bluetooth to connect to my GPS, my PDA and my phone is a fiddle (and the radio is still playing away when the phone rings).
Right - the more I think about it I think I just want mini-USB sockets on every single surface allowing me to charge everything and provide (data) connections between all my stuff - $50 flash based linux system could do this, but if MS want to beat them to it, then fine my me.
Oh - and one final thing. WTF do I have to have vent/sucker mounts for all my GPS and phone stuff? Could Ford please develop some little sockets that I can just click stuff to?
Speech recognition is 'nice' - but that's it. I cannot imagine an office full of people all gabbling at their PCs without going nuts.
Few things I'd like to see are:
1) Tight integration to client devices. I stuck MCE onto my PC and it really was a pleasure to see my TV stuff picked up by their lovely BDA drivers and all that Tivo stuff appear. Whilst that was nice, it was nowhere near the f'in quantum leap when I pointed my 360 at my big PC over the wifi and got all those features suddenly appearing on my 40" screen.
Wifi implementation is very cheap and MS are normally good at allowing 3rd parties to access their tech (unlike Apple), yet have not quite managed to sell it very well. I'd like a clock radio that played my podcasts etc - I think I just like the idea of having a big central PC that can do all the heavy lifting and a number of thin clients that can all access it (and not all have to have their own bespoke software running on the back end).
2) Haptic stuff. Look at the Wii. Could be basic stuff like a laptop just turning off the screen if there's nobody sitting infront of it or mouse gestures like strokeit integrated into the GUI.
3) Telephony. I've no idea why I have an IP deskphone and laptop sitting on my desk. They have messenger which provides perfectly good person to person calls, they have outlook that provides a centralized mail and calendar resource - can't they just bolt on telephony? Point my deskphone number to my laptop wherever it is, divert to mobile if my PC is off, hold calls if I'm in a meeting etc?
4) Have some balls when it comes to hardware manufacturers. Apple is able to say 'right, we're using the new bios thingie' and make the hardware. MS tentatively seems to make steps towards it, but continuously supports old stuff. Now I know they have to support the old stuff and I know many people appreciate it - but they need to clearly define what hardware they want people to use to optimize 'the experience' and tell Dell. They have started to do this with the Vista certification - I've no idea why people bitch abotu this, but if you want flashy graphics, you need a decent PC and you need people to be able to buy that decent PC with confidence. The quasi-flash drives supported under Vista are a good thing - but I WANT MORE.
5) Better implementation of Bluetooth (and whatever comes along next). I'd love to be able to have my PC boot up (maybe into hibernation) when my phone walks in through the door. Popup on my phone screen with a summary (at least) when I get an email.
Just reading through my points, it seems I want integration. I may be in a minority as most people here seem to get their knickers in a twist when MS bundle a browser with XP - but I want all my stuff to just work together nicely and out of the box. I can't expect MS to support every device, but maybe if they just published some open standards (or formally adopted the perfectly good open ones we already have) hardware manufacturers WOULD comply (as I would buy).
after reading Wikipedia (I was interested in the precise meaning) nobody seems to have an f'in clue precisely what fascism is - just that it's a name that's been applied to loads of groups, by other people and never in a nice way.
You're not physically sending anything. You're connecting to an smtp server and asking them to pass the message along for you.
Think of it like you sending a letter to a friend, asking them to transcribe it for you and then pass it onto another person - and then suing your friend for reading the message as they transcribed it.
When an email leaves your own network, you're relying on civic minded people to pass it along for you. Back to the snail mail analogy, if your package is lost in the post you can claim your money back as they courier had a duty of care, if your email goes missing 'tough'. It's up to each hop to determine whether or not they want to pass it on and they can do with your email as they wish.
and have no problem paying my license fee, purely on the basis of what it costs me and what I get.(although I dislike the fact I'm compelled to pay it merely for owning equipment capable of receiving the signal)
Maybe partnering with Zudeo (or whoever) the BBC should roll the license fee out worldwide - $10 a month and you get access to their entire live and archived output. For a start it would reduce my license fee.
taking out your backups, exactly why can't you download the same thing again merely incurring Apple's bandwidth fees?
Possibly your bored of the documentary, why shouldn't you be allowed to sell it, as you would a DVD?
You decide iTunes and your ipod are rubbish and you want to change to another platform - why do you have to rebuy it all again (likewise VHS->DVD)?
as not enough people use them, for anybody to even offer the makers a token ammount of money for commercializing them.
So I suspect none of them will ever go 'to the dark side'
imho the nicest browser on my PC is always the latest version of Opera - and the stuff they've done on mobiles is stunning (both java and symbian). This is helped in no small part by using their servers to cache and scale to fit - making the whole experience very snappy on a small screened device.
Not just PCs and phones, but there's also the Wii and DS versions of Opera.
Even if we leave out the fine work above, opera have innovated in all manner of ways. Tabbed browsing way before Firefox and stuff like mouse gestures which I can no longer live without (although i've switched to the wonderous free StrokeIt which allows gestures on all apps).
IE7 works well, but it's well... IE and Firefox seems to be heading the way of Mozilla and getting quite bloaty. I suspect the problem with OSS is that everybody loves to add new shiney bells and whistles and nobody says 'enough, just leave it and make it stable' (Not really a judgement, as I know I much prefer to create than fix myself).
There are already utilities like Xfire that can unify the online experience for games - I can see who is online, playing what and join them in whatever game with a click of my mouse.
XFire also does other handy things, like automatically downloading patches for any games I have installed.
XFire is already doing pretty much what Live does on my 360, but it does no more. What I'd really like is a tool that went further and logs the hardware I have installed and brings drivers into the mix. Another useful thing would be auto-setup, if I've got a decent graphics card and like inverted mouse, then why should I have to stick the res up from 800x600 and invert the mouse on every game I play? I know it's only a small thing, but it would be nice.
I started using Blacklists, but always ended up in a mess. Stuff still got through, so you'd add another blacklist and then one would randomly start blocking gmails 'to teach google a lesson' etc.
ASSP installs nicely (I'm actually running it on MS Server with hmailserver) and does what it says on the tin. Takes a week or so to train it up, but once it's up it easily gets 99% of all spam, tags it and then my mail server shoves it into my users junk folders.
To keep this thing ticking over you need full time sys-admins, support teams, server farms, bandwidth and various other reasonably expensive things.
Open Sourcing it would seem to alleviate the expense of the actual game developers, but not much more.
Now the game has already been written, so I'd have thought dev expenses would currently be minimal - so not too much saving moving it to OSS.
The first load of expenses are fixed(ish) and have to be covered, so either OSS as a whole is going to have to pay for other people to play - or people themselves will have to pay to play - and we can't let everybody run about compiling in their own stuff...and the more people come in, the more it's going to cost to run..
And it's not even as if the damn thing is covering it's costs at the moment - hence the sale...
The whole concept seems bizarre.
Seemingly there is something that is losing money, so OSS thinks it's a good idea to buy it?
Imagine this were some failed Microsoft product - would the OSS community all start bouncing on their chairs clammering to take it over and give up on this 'Linux thing'?
lets me do all of the above (and doesn't crash my RAID). I can think of lots of things that'll stop working when I install Linux, what I'm really looking for is a pretty damn fine list of improvements that're unavailable using XP.
What a great idea. Give your parents a CD to shove in their working computer.
I can feel the love already coming from my Mum:
Why does it take an age to start?
Why does it say it can't install my wifi driver?
Now I've managed to install a Linux Wifi driver, what's my Hex key?
Where's IE?
Where've all my bookmarks gone?
What exactly have I gained by this gift?
Slashdot Mirror
but some 'unfunny' people are going to give more cash to charity and spoil the gag for the rest of us :(
I picked up a cheapie refurb Netgear 'print server' for about $50 on ebay - one thing to fiddle with and gives me four physical network sockets.
I'd kill for a quieter drive - OR better still, caching to the 360 HD. I don't mind buying a bigger HD, leaving the disk in the drive, whatever it takes - but I'm damned if I'll sit looking at loading screens as my room vibrates when I bought the damn thing with an HD. PS3 can do it, it's only a firmware update, c'mon MS...
Seem to be two systems idea here. One is that you can download and burn a DVD as you currently do with iTunes (with a limit on the number of burns), the other using a booth to allow you to burn your own DVD.
Now I've no problem with the limited burns, as once you've burnt it once, you can copy/rip the DVD using the existing de-CSS stuff.
What IS interesting is the involvement of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray people. Retailers aren't too keen on HD stuff yet and REALLY don't want to stock identical content on two different and confusing formats. If the booth system is used for the HD formats, then I can see this being a massive gain. If, for example, my local shop stocks the top 50 titles on BlueRay, but has a booth allowing me to get a copy of all HD-DVDs available from the magical booth - then I know which format player I'm more likely to invest in.
Cheaper retailing costs, complete availability, never running out etc - FFS there's no reason the system couldn't be expanded to shove TV onto the disks if that's what you fancy.
As an ex-Aibo owner, I can speak with authority and state the most fun I ever had with it, was knocking it over just to watch it get back up again.
Everytime somebody came across "You've got to see this!" *KICK*
In addition I'd like to add that everybody that came over also liked kicking robotic dogs.
the closest comparison I can think of is somebody looks at your car, builds one for themselves and Ford is pissed off as it looks like the one they designed.
we have CCTV in public places - this is based upon the obviously warped logic, that if you do something in a public place, then you shouldn't expect it to be private.
In some places CCTV is going a bit far, but there are numerous occasions where it is a definite benefit. If you're wating for a taxi, withdrawing money from an ATM or merely just walking home alone late at night - then you're safer if there's a CCTV camera covering you and the possibility somebody's watching.
In fact the more I think about this, the more ridiculous your point sounds - do you object to the police patrolling in public places?
That page gzips down to 12k - so ~2 seconds download speed.
The larger problem would probably be load on the server - possibly you could get around this by pre-compressing and then randomly serving. I don't think this was supposed to be a perfect solution, it's just a nice little demo showing how something common can be done in a new way.
That's not the most promising of starts..
I don't mean 'specific' hardware - in the way Apple do. I mean specific in a 'If you want Aero, then you need to buy a card that supports these features - and let graphics card makers put a 'supports Aero' logo on their cards with those features'.
Current situation where I can double my memory, spend £500 on a graphics card and windows still looks and behaves exactly the same just seems a bit well..'wasteful'
I have an old Xbox with Xbox Media Centre - and I can play all the YouTube stuff I want on my TV.
As a person able to do this I can tell you:
a) You don't want to sit on your couch f'in about with millions of crappy little clips.
b) The crappy little clips look REALLY crappy on a big TV.
Proper IPTV is here and will only grow. Multicast handles all the broadcast stuff, what we need is a P2P addon that'll handle the OnDemand stuff (I don't just mean conventional PayPerView, I mean providerless YouTube style stuff) and I want a nice Open front end that'll let me view all this on anything (and if MS will support it in MCE2, then I'll buy MCE2)
That would certainly influence my decision to buy (positively)
What I would DEARLY love is for the automotive makers to produce some new standards of their own.
I do NOT appreciate having bulky great cigarette lighter adapters hanging out all over the place (nice little variable voltage adapters would be a lot simpler).
Bluetooth is great for making stuff talk to each other, but farting around getting Bluetooth to connect to my GPS, my PDA and my phone is a fiddle (and the radio is still playing away when the phone rings).
Right - the more I think about it I think I just want mini-USB sockets on every single surface allowing me to charge everything and provide (data) connections between all my stuff - $50 flash based linux system could do this, but if MS want to beat them to it, then fine my me.
Oh - and one final thing. WTF do I have to have vent/sucker mounts for all my GPS and phone stuff? Could Ford please develop some little sockets that I can just click stuff to?
Speech recognition is 'nice' - but that's it. I cannot imagine an office full of people all gabbling at their PCs without going nuts.
Few things I'd like to see are:
1) Tight integration to client devices. I stuck MCE onto my PC and it really was a pleasure to see my TV stuff picked up by their lovely BDA drivers and all that Tivo stuff appear. Whilst that was nice, it was nowhere near the f'in quantum leap when I pointed my 360 at my big PC over the wifi and got all those features suddenly appearing on my 40" screen.
Wifi implementation is very cheap and MS are normally good at allowing 3rd parties to access their tech (unlike Apple), yet have not quite managed to sell it very well. I'd like a clock radio that played my podcasts etc - I think I just like the idea of having a big central PC that can do all the heavy lifting and a number of thin clients that can all access it (and not all have to have their own bespoke software running on the back end).
2) Haptic stuff. Look at the Wii. Could be basic stuff like a laptop just turning off the screen if there's nobody sitting infront of it or mouse gestures like strokeit integrated into the GUI.
3) Telephony. I've no idea why I have an IP deskphone and laptop sitting on my desk. They have messenger which provides perfectly good person to person calls, they have outlook that provides a centralized mail and calendar resource - can't they just bolt on telephony? Point my deskphone number to my laptop wherever it is, divert to mobile if my PC is off, hold calls if I'm in a meeting etc?
4) Have some balls when it comes to hardware manufacturers. Apple is able to say 'right, we're using the new bios thingie' and make the hardware. MS tentatively seems to make steps towards it, but continuously supports old stuff. Now I know they have to support the old stuff and I know many people appreciate it - but they need to clearly define what hardware they want people to use to optimize 'the experience' and tell Dell. They have started to do this with the Vista certification - I've no idea why people bitch abotu this, but if you want flashy graphics, you need a decent PC and you need people to be able to buy that decent PC with confidence. The quasi-flash drives supported under Vista are a good thing - but I WANT MORE.
5) Better implementation of Bluetooth (and whatever comes along next). I'd love to be able to have my PC boot up (maybe into hibernation) when my phone walks in through the door. Popup on my phone screen with a summary (at least) when I get an email.
Just reading through my points, it seems I want integration. I may be in a minority as most people here seem to get their knickers in a twist when MS bundle a browser with XP - but I want all my stuff to just work together nicely and out of the box. I can't expect MS to support every device, but maybe if they just published some open standards (or formally adopted the perfectly good open ones we already have) hardware manufacturers WOULD comply (as I would buy).
after reading Wikipedia (I was interested in the precise meaning) nobody seems to have an f'in clue precisely what fascism is - just that it's a name that's been applied to loads of groups, by other people and never in a nice way.
You're not physically sending anything. You're connecting to an smtp server and asking them to pass the message along for you.
Think of it like you sending a letter to a friend, asking them to transcribe it for you and then pass it onto another person - and then suing your friend for reading the message as they transcribed it.
When an email leaves your own network, you're relying on civic minded people to pass it along for you. Back to the snail mail analogy, if your package is lost in the post you can claim your money back as they courier had a duty of care, if your email goes missing 'tough'. It's up to each hop to determine whether or not they want to pass it on and they can do with your email as they wish.
and have no problem paying my license fee, purely on the basis of what it costs me and what I get.(although I dislike the fact I'm compelled to pay it merely for owning equipment capable of receiving the signal)
Maybe partnering with Zudeo (or whoever) the BBC should roll the license fee out worldwide - $10 a month and you get access to their entire live and archived output. For a start it would reduce my license fee.
taking out your backups, exactly why can't you download the same thing again merely incurring Apple's bandwidth fees?
Possibly your bored of the documentary, why shouldn't you be allowed to sell it, as you would a DVD?
You decide iTunes and your ipod are rubbish and you want to change to another platform - why do you have to rebuy it all again (likewise VHS->DVD)?
as not enough people use them, for anybody to even offer the makers a token ammount of money for commercializing them.
So I suspect none of them will ever go 'to the dark side'
imho the nicest browser on my PC is always the latest version of Opera - and the stuff they've done on mobiles is stunning (both java and symbian). This is helped in no small part by using their servers to cache and scale to fit - making the whole experience very snappy on a small screened device.
Not just PCs and phones, but there's also the Wii and DS versions of Opera.
Even if we leave out the fine work above, opera have innovated in all manner of ways. Tabbed browsing way before Firefox and stuff like mouse gestures which I can no longer live without (although i've switched to the wonderous free StrokeIt which allows gestures on all apps).
IE7 works well, but it's well... IE and Firefox seems to be heading the way of Mozilla and getting quite bloaty. I suspect the problem with OSS is that everybody loves to add new shiney bells and whistles and nobody says 'enough, just leave it and make it stable' (Not really a judgement, as I know I much prefer to create than fix myself).
So now not only are you forced to pay for a BR drive you may not even want - you're paying for performance that's never going to be required.
There are already utilities like Xfire that can unify the online experience for games - I can see who is online, playing what and join them in whatever game with a click of my mouse.
XFire also does other handy things, like automatically downloading patches for any games I have installed.
XFire is already doing pretty much what Live does on my 360, but it does no more. What I'd really like is a tool that went further and logs the hardware I have installed and brings drivers into the mix. Another useful thing would be auto-setup, if I've got a decent graphics card and like inverted mouse, then why should I have to stick the res up from 800x600 and invert the mouse on every game I play? I know it's only a small thing, but it would be nice.
I started using Blacklists, but always ended up in a mess. Stuff still got through, so you'd add another blacklist and then one would randomly start blocking gmails 'to teach google a lesson' etc.
ASSP installs nicely (I'm actually running it on MS Server with hmailserver) and does what it says on the tin. Takes a week or so to train it up, but once it's up it easily gets 99% of all spam, tags it and then my mail server shoves it into my users junk folders.
To keep this thing ticking over you need full time sys-admins, support teams, server farms, bandwidth and various other reasonably expensive things.
Open Sourcing it would seem to alleviate the expense of the actual game developers, but not much more.
Now the game has already been written, so I'd have thought dev expenses would currently be minimal - so not too much saving moving it to OSS.
The first load of expenses are fixed(ish) and have to be covered, so either OSS as a whole is going to have to pay for other people to play - or people themselves will have to pay to play - and we can't let everybody run about compiling in their own stuff...and the more people come in, the more it's going to cost to run..
And it's not even as if the damn thing is covering it's costs at the moment - hence the sale...
The whole concept seems bizarre.
Seemingly there is something that is losing money, so OSS thinks it's a good idea to buy it?
Imagine this were some failed Microsoft product - would the OSS community all start bouncing on their chairs clammering to take it over and give up on this 'Linux thing'?
lets me do all of the above (and doesn't crash my RAID). I can think of lots of things that'll stop working when I install Linux, what I'm really looking for is a pretty damn fine list of improvements that're unavailable using XP.
What a great idea. Give your parents a CD to shove in their working computer.
I can feel the love already coming from my Mum: Why does it take an age to start? Why does it say it can't install my wifi driver? Now I've managed to install a Linux Wifi driver, what's my Hex key? Where's IE? Where've all my bookmarks gone? What exactly have I gained by this gift?
of copies of the id pages of passports - much the same as you'd have if you'd taken a summer job working for Hertz.