"Well, that's just the sort of blinkered, phillistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behind, squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for a struggling artist, you EXCREMENT! You whining, hypocritical toady with your colour TV set and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes. You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing BASTARD! Well I wouldn't become a Freemason now if you got down on your lousy stinking knees and begged me!"
"It seems that we shall have to agree to disagree on most of this..."
Agreed.
"...since you have a pessimistic view of how Halo would have been received had Bungie not been bought by Microsoft. "
I'm not sure pessimism is the term I'd use. Bear in mind that I've been monitoring the game industry for a long time now. Though I haven't played Halo (which you may fault me for if you like) I have heard a great deal of comments about it. It seems as though the interesting part of the game is its graphics. That's as deep as I personally have seen it. It's not particularly innovative otherwise. Worse, it's a genre that has been done to death on PC. On the PS2, it would be graphically inferior (significantly) than on the PC or the XBOX, so a lot of that appeal disappears. If you can give me a strong reason why Halo would have been popular otherwise, I woulud be all ears.
"You are entitled to your own opinion of them; however, I would encourage you to consider boycotting, too, since they have engaged in many activities that would be considered anticompetitive even after being found to be an illegal monopoly."
I have my own dealings with Microsoft. They have products I will not buy. However, I'm not going to boycot every single product that Microsoft makes. That's just stupid. I won't buy Office because it calls home to unlock itself, but I'm happy to buy a Microsoft Optical mouse. Why? Because I want to reward Microsoft for bringing a great product into the market, and punish them for doing something stupid like the locking mechanism with Office.
Would I boycot Microsoft by not buying an XBOX? Again, no, it's stupid. MS's game division is not only a barely connected arm of Microsoft, but it's laughable to think they're trying anything anti-competitive here. All they've done so far is make a game machine here. They're not locking you into buying. They're not trying to make it do more than just play games. They've made a game system and they hope to profit from it in the same way Sony did with the PS1.
I'm not saying boycotting Microsoft is stupid, but I do feel very strongly that if you're going to take action, be effective. If Microsoft's not doing any wrong with the XBOX, then why boycot it? You hurt the developers trying to get started in this industry, but Microsoft barely feels it.
Trust me when I say, you're better off doing what you can to encourage Microsoft to do the right thing. They're not going to notice you boycotting them, but they will notice when you do things like buy optical mice.
Your call. I'm not going to pretend I'm more enlightened than you. All I ask is an ear, not obedience.
"But, as I said, it appears that we have differing premises on this argument, so further debate is likely fruitless."
It'd be far less fruitless if your reasoning was less tainted by "MS is evil" and better structured around "here's a strong reason why I think Halo would have done well."
Funny thing is, we'd be in total agreement if we were talking about Final Fantasy 7 instead of Halo. That was an interesting game that would have been successful on any platform except PC.
"I'd totally be on board with these people except that instead of 1000Mb == 1 Gb, 1024Mb == 1Gb. They are getting MORE than they think!"
RTFA: The problem is that people are buying what they are told is 20 gigs of storage, but really they can only use 18.4 or so. However it's being misinterpreted, the customers are getting it in the shorts.
I dun really care, though. I've grown up under the idea that disks are always smaller than advertised. Remember 2.0 meg unformatted floppies that magically shrank to 1.4 megs in the wash?
"Ah. So not only is the PS2 somehow significantly inferior to the XBox (I don't know the relative specs, but I'm quite sure it wouldn't make that big a difference), but for some reason, less people would have bought it if they didn't have to buy a new console to play it...yeah. I'm sure that's what would have happened."
Actually, the PS2 does have a nasty bottleneck. It has something like 4 megs of video RAM. This RAM not only has to store the frame buffer (something like 1.2 megs for that alone) and it has to store the textures for that frame. Ever noticed that games on the PS2 look fuzzy, like low res? That's because they halve the vertical resolution so they can put that memory towards textures. This causes softness in the image. The Dreamcast was an inferior machine to the PS2 (it came out a year or two earlier), but side by side its graphics were clearer than the PS2's.
Halo is very texture heavy. Worse yet, it uses a lot of the graphics features that the XBOX has built into the hardware, the PS2's 'emotion processor' would have to do all that. Some shortcuts would most assuredly have to be taken to get a decent of Halo ported over.
"Huh?? Last I checked, Sony didn't own Square; as a matter of fact, they just merged with Enix, another very successful RPG-maker, to form Square-Enix. This way, Square doesn't even need Sony to publish their titles in North America the way they used to. And it was Microsoft, not Sony, that bought Rare."
Never said that Sony owned Square, though I guess I can see how you read that from my Rare comment. They did have exclusive access to Square in the PS1 days. Wanna play Final Fantasy 7 or 8? Sure, if you own a PS1. (Note: these were later ported to PC.)
"So who has Sony bought lately? I haven't been paying much attention, but I think I would have noticed if they'd bought anyone big."
I was talking about title exclusivity, and Sony's done a lot of that. Crash Bandicoot comes to mind. Go have a peek at Google. Sony's done it a lot. Nintendo's done it a lot. Sega's done it a lot. Etc. Microsoft's not done anything new here.
" do you think that Halo would have sold fewer titles than on the XBox, "
There's reason to believe either way. On one hand, PS2 has a lot more customers than the XBOX. On the other hand, the PS2 has a much much larger library than the XBOX. Halo would have fallen into a crack.
" And there's also the fact that various people, including me, wouldn't buy the XBox because we're boycotting M$"
I got news for ya, there ain't enough of you to even show up on Microsoft's radar. Frankly, if you're going to boycott Microsoft over Halo, then you need to boycott Sony over Final Fantasy, Sega over Jet Grind Radio, and Nintendo over Rogue Squadron.
"Halo is only the "must-have" title for XBox because the XBox really didn't do well, and has very few games of its caliber."
Agreed.
"And, once again, you are discounting the PS2 sales entirely."
I'm not discounting them, I just don't think Halo would have done all that well on the PS2. There's a very simple reason why: PS2 doesn't come with an ethernet port. What good is that game without on-line play? Also, don't forget that Sony's got far too many good games under its belt for Halo to be considered anything but mediochre.
"It seems to me that you somehow need to justify Halo's XBox exclusivity. "
For the record, I don't own an XBOX. I don't want one. Even if I had one, Halo wouldn't get a second look from me. I have no motivation to justify Halo's exclusivity other than I think Bungie would have tanked otherwise. So many game companies produce a game and then fall under because they weren't successful enough. Frankly, as my next job could very well come from the game industry, I want game companies to be successful. Halo would not have done very well on the PC. It might have done okay o
"And don't try to tell me you think that people wouldn't have bought it for PS2. I would have; it was one of the reasons I bought one."
I find that questionable. The PS2 has limitations that would have watered down that game significantly. But, if they were to do a decent job, I could see you being quite happy with it.
"So it would have had the consistency of consoles, the flexibility of PCs (both Wintel and Mac), and the early, unencumbered release it deserved. Until M$ bought Bungie and decided that they wanted to push the XBox."
I hope you realize that Sony is guilty of this stuff, a lot more so than Microsoft. Square? Rare? Etc.
Encumbered? Give me a break! That game would not have sold well on the PC. Even if by some miracle it did, there's still the matter that it would have done several times better on the XBOX. It's not encumbered by Microsoft, they got themselves a golden opportunity. Halo is the must have game for XBOX. It would have been another ho-hum-did-it-before title on the PC that would have been lucky to sell half a million units.
Exclusivity is a fact of life in game consoles. It is not something Microsoft invented. Nor were they being particularly evil in doing so. Bungie's doing quite well and they have a new game in the works.
You can only buy games if the companies who make them are successful.
"What gets me is that people actually panic even when they put the statistics right there in the page, 1 in a million chance. There is greater chance that we would nuke ourselves out of existance. Or yet maybe I could win the lottery, think ill go buy a ticket."
Nuclear war is not a flip of the coin. It's a fate we control on our own. An asteroidal impact is something you can't get away from simply by moving out of the country.
I'm not the least bit surprised that asteroidal impact is scarier than nuclear war. The moment we find out one's going to hit, chaos ensues. It could take 10 years for the asteroid to reach here, but people will panic anyway because they'll know that they have n years to live. In many ways, that would be far worse than a nuclear war. At least when the bombs are dropped, you can feel relieved that it's over instead of imminent.
" the media should focus on the more interesting statistics of astronomy.. like.. uh.. "
Kobe Bryant? The California recall? Criticism of the President for not finding the weapons that the bad guys really really really really doesn't want us to find?
"Everyone who complained that Microsoft is so evil for the lack in quality of code they put out, raise your hand so we can heckle you. "
I wonder if the average MS heckler imagines the software development wing of MS looks like Gringott's Bank. I don't think it occurs to them that the programmers there are human.
"I remember that. Wasn't the version for the SNES made so that there was no "blood?""
Yes, that's true, though it does show an interesting decision made by Nintendo.
The original Mortal Kombat for SNES had sweat flying off the opponent instead of blood. Nintendo was very hard nosed about this. Their reasoning was that they wanted to make sure that parents were comfortable in buying games for their kids without having to be overly involved in what's in these games. (Interestingly enough, that view might have been more supported today...)
However, people complained. A lot of people complained. Nintendo listened. The lightened up on the no-blood rule and when Mortal Kombat 2 came out, it whooped the tar out of the inferior Genesis version. Not only did the SNES version support a much broader color pallete, but also one of the reviewers described the audio of the Genesis version as having laryngitis. (sp?)
Nintendo deserves a little credit for what happened there. They took a stand that they thought would be appreciated, and when the customers said they were wrong, they listened and changed their policy. If only the RIAA'd do that...
"Considering I haven't read anywhere that the Xbox adapter will be incompatible wtih other things, I think you might be jumping the gun assuming that it's not."
I never meant to imply that the X-BOX adapter was like that. I just meant in general. I don't own an X-BOX, I have a GameCube. The reason I brought this up is because today I was thinking of getting a network adapter for it, but it's $40 and it only works on the GC, unlikely to work on the next console. Maybe if they included it in game?
Okay, I'm rambling. The point is I didn't mean to imply that the XBOX adapter was proprietary. Hopefully not many people interpreted it that way.
... but I have difficulty seeing how any of this could work without a standardized system. Maybe, just maybe if everybody ran the same version of [$IdealOS], this would be possible. But it just doesn't work that way. Even if you just isolate the Windows users out there, everybody has different tasks for their computers. Somebody who sets up a PC as a VCR, for example, is going to treat it like an appliance, not like a car that has to be maintained. (Sorry for the weak example, I'm sleep deprived.)
No, this idea may have the right intentions, but it's not a well executed one.
I was a HAM radio operator a few years ago. Though my license has long expired, my information is still there. Does that scare me? Nope. Even if the info was up to date, it still wouldn't bother me. Why? The main reason is that they'd have to know my callsign to find it. If they find that, then yeah they'd have that info.
The problem is that my info isn't all that hard to find. I can either live in fear that somebody will *gasp* find my address and... uh.. do something that I can imagine, or I can just accept that my info's out there. Am I being ignorant? Maybe. However, if somebody wants to find me, they WILL. Frankly, I'm more interested in my friends and family finding that info then in preventing invisible enemies from acquiring it.
" At Outpost, for example, the Linksys g-compatible model is selling for $159.99."
I'd pay that for a generic one that will work with future consoles, like a USB wireless adapter for example. $160 for a wireless adapter for a single console is ridiculous. I guess if consumer demand is high enough... afterall, cat5 is not able to get everywhere, such as neighboring apartments.
Funny that this topic came up, the company I work for has a spherical video camera that'd be of interest to helicopter pilots who want to see what's underneath the ship, i.e. power lines nad antennae.
... it could be uploading photos the moment a radio signal is established, as opposed to waiting for a grunt to hook up a cable.
Pretty slick!
Kinda curious if you've considered using a PocketPC for that. Just plug the CF card into the PocketPc that already has 802.11 going, then write a simple little app that handles the transfer bit. That'll get you into the 5lb mark, and there's no moving parts to break. The downside is that may be a little pricier than you have in mind. The plus side is that it turns on instantly and has its own display etc.
Slashdot Mirror
"Taken from this site, it will randomly create a registration login for you. No personal data filled out. Amazing."
At some point, people just have to stop and say "is registration really all that unresonable?"
...how succint the article was.
"In Soviet Russia... ...video card benchmarks you!"
In Soviet Russia, jokes don't laugh at you!
Yeah, they'd be so happy that their games no longer work.
"identicle: adj. The similarity of two testicles"
Man, I don't know what's funnier: The joke or the mod who thought it was 'Informative'.
"Well, that's just the sort of blinkered, phillistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behind, squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for a struggling artist, you EXCREMENT! You whining, hypocritical toady with your colour TV set and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic secret handshakes. You wouldn't let me join, would you, you blackballing BASTARD! Well I wouldn't become a Freemason now if you got down on your lousy stinking knees and begged me!"
OMG! Mr Fraiser Crane! Can I have your autograph?
... who are about to be exposed to endless repetitive Monty Python quotes. My gf was so relieved that I'm a Spaceballs fan.
"It seems that we shall have to agree to disagree on most of this..."
Agreed.
"...since you have a pessimistic view of how Halo would have been received had Bungie not been bought by Microsoft. "
I'm not sure pessimism is the term I'd use. Bear in mind that I've been monitoring the game industry for a long time now. Though I haven't played Halo (which you may fault me for if you like) I have heard a great deal of comments about it. It seems as though the interesting part of the game is its graphics. That's as deep as I personally have seen it. It's not particularly innovative otherwise. Worse, it's a genre that has been done to death on PC. On the PS2, it would be graphically inferior (significantly) than on the PC or the XBOX, so a lot of that appeal disappears. If you can give me a strong reason why Halo would have been popular otherwise, I woulud be all ears.
"You are entitled to your own opinion of them; however, I would encourage you to consider boycotting, too, since they have engaged in many activities that would be considered anticompetitive even after being found to be an illegal monopoly."
I have my own dealings with Microsoft. They have products I will not buy. However, I'm not going to boycot every single product that Microsoft makes. That's just stupid. I won't buy Office because it calls home to unlock itself, but I'm happy to buy a Microsoft Optical mouse. Why? Because I want to reward Microsoft for bringing a great product into the market, and punish them for doing something stupid like the locking mechanism with Office.
Would I boycot Microsoft by not buying an XBOX? Again, no, it's stupid. MS's game division is not only a barely connected arm of Microsoft, but it's laughable to think they're trying anything anti-competitive here. All they've done so far is make a game machine here. They're not locking you into buying. They're not trying to make it do more than just play games. They've made a game system and they hope to profit from it in the same way Sony did with the PS1.
I'm not saying boycotting Microsoft is stupid, but I do feel very strongly that if you're going to take action, be effective. If Microsoft's not doing any wrong with the XBOX, then why boycot it? You hurt the developers trying to get started in this industry, but Microsoft barely feels it.
Trust me when I say, you're better off doing what you can to encourage Microsoft to do the right thing. They're not going to notice you boycotting them, but they will notice when you do things like buy optical mice.
Your call. I'm not going to pretend I'm more enlightened than you. All I ask is an ear, not obedience.
"But, as I said, it appears that we have differing premises on this argument, so further debate is likely fruitless."
It'd be far less fruitless if your reasoning was less tainted by "MS is evil" and better structured around "here's a strong reason why I think Halo would have done well."
Funny thing is, we'd be in total agreement if we were talking about Final Fantasy 7 instead of Halo. That was an interesting game that would have been successful on any platform except PC.
"I'd totally be on board with these people except that instead of 1000Mb == 1 Gb, 1024Mb == 1Gb.
They are getting MORE than they think!"
RTFA: The problem is that people are buying what they are told is 20 gigs of storage, but really they can only use 18.4 or so. However it's being misinterpreted, the customers are getting it in the shorts.
I dun really care, though. I've grown up under the idea that disks are always smaller than advertised. Remember 2.0 meg unformatted floppies that magically shrank to 1.4 megs in the wash?
"Ah. So not only is the PS2 somehow significantly inferior to the XBox (I don't know the relative specs, but I'm quite sure it wouldn't make that big a difference), but for some reason, less people would have bought it if they didn't have to buy a new console to play it...yeah. I'm sure that's what would have happened."
Actually, the PS2 does have a nasty bottleneck. It has something like 4 megs of video RAM. This RAM not only has to store the frame buffer (something like 1.2 megs for that alone) and it has to store the textures for that frame. Ever noticed that games on the PS2 look fuzzy, like low res? That's because they halve the vertical resolution so they can put that memory towards textures. This causes softness in the image. The Dreamcast was an inferior machine to the PS2 (it came out a year or two earlier), but side by side its graphics were clearer than the PS2's.
Halo is very texture heavy. Worse yet, it uses a lot of the graphics features that the XBOX has built into the hardware, the PS2's 'emotion processor' would have to do all that. Some shortcuts would most assuredly have to be taken to get a decent of Halo ported over.
"Huh?? Last I checked, Sony didn't own Square; as a matter of fact, they just merged with Enix, another very successful RPG-maker, to form Square-Enix. This way, Square doesn't even need Sony to publish their titles in North America the way they used to. And it was Microsoft, not Sony, that bought Rare."
Never said that Sony owned Square, though I guess I can see how you read that from my Rare comment. They did have exclusive access to Square in the PS1 days. Wanna play Final Fantasy 7 or 8? Sure, if you own a PS1. (Note: these were later ported to PC.)
"So who has Sony bought lately? I haven't been paying much attention, but I think I would have noticed if they'd bought anyone big."
I was talking about title exclusivity, and Sony's done a lot of that. Crash Bandicoot comes to mind. Go have a peek at Google. Sony's done it a lot. Nintendo's done it a lot. Sega's done it a lot. Etc. Microsoft's not done anything new here.
" do you think that Halo would have sold fewer titles than on the XBox, "
There's reason to believe either way. On one hand, PS2 has a lot more customers than the XBOX. On the other hand, the PS2 has a much much larger library than the XBOX. Halo would have fallen into a crack.
" And there's also the fact that various people, including me, wouldn't buy the XBox because we're boycotting M$"
I got news for ya, there ain't enough of you to even show up on Microsoft's radar. Frankly, if you're going to boycott Microsoft over Halo, then you need to boycott Sony over Final Fantasy, Sega over Jet Grind Radio, and Nintendo over Rogue Squadron.
"Halo is only the "must-have" title for XBox because the XBox really didn't do well, and has very few games of its caliber."
Agreed.
"And, once again, you are discounting the PS2 sales entirely."
I'm not discounting them, I just don't think Halo would have done all that well on the PS2. There's a very simple reason why: PS2 doesn't come with an ethernet port. What good is that game without on-line play? Also, don't forget that Sony's got far too many good games under its belt for Halo to be considered anything but mediochre.
"It seems to me that you somehow need to justify Halo's XBox exclusivity. "
For the record, I don't own an XBOX. I don't want one. Even if I had one, Halo wouldn't get a second look from me. I have no motivation to justify Halo's exclusivity other than I think Bungie would have tanked otherwise. So many game companies produce a game and then fall under because they weren't successful enough. Frankly, as my next job could very well come from the game industry, I want game companies to be successful. Halo would not have done very well on the PC. It might have done okay o
"And don't try to tell me you think that people wouldn't have bought it for PS2. I would have; it was one of the reasons I bought one."
I find that questionable. The PS2 has limitations that would have watered down that game significantly. But, if they were to do a decent job, I could see you being quite happy with it.
"So it would have had the consistency of consoles, the flexibility of PCs (both Wintel and Mac), and the early, unencumbered release it deserved. Until M$ bought Bungie and decided that they wanted to push the XBox."
I hope you realize that Sony is guilty of this stuff, a lot more so than Microsoft. Square? Rare? Etc.
Encumbered? Give me a break! That game would not have sold well on the PC. Even if by some miracle it did, there's still the matter that it would have done several times better on the XBOX. It's not encumbered by Microsoft, they got themselves a golden opportunity. Halo is the must have game for XBOX. It would have been another ho-hum-did-it-before title on the PC that would have been lucky to sell half a million units.
Exclusivity is a fact of life in game consoles. It is not something Microsoft invented. Nor were they being particularly evil in doing so. Bungie's doing quite well and they have a new game in the works.
You can only buy games if the companies who make them are successful.
Go to IMDB.com, find the transformers movie, then look at the address. I'm not aware of how to avoid that.
:P
Sorry.
"What gets me is that people actually panic even when they put the statistics right there in the page, 1 in a million chance. There is greater chance that we would nuke ourselves out of existance. Or yet maybe I could win the lottery, think ill go buy a ticket."
Nuclear war is not a flip of the coin. It's a fate we control on our own. An asteroidal impact is something you can't get away from simply by moving out of the country.
I'm not the least bit surprised that asteroidal impact is scarier than nuclear war. The moment we find out one's going to hit, chaos ensues. It could take 10 years for the asteroid to reach here, but people will panic anyway because they'll know that they have n years to live. In many ways, that would be far worse than a nuclear war. At least when the bombs are dropped, you can feel relieved that it's over instead of imminent.
" the media should focus on the more interesting statistics of astronomy.. like.. uh.. "
Kobe Bryant? The California recall? Criticism of the President for not finding the weapons that the bad guys really really really really doesn't want us to find?
"The difference is that Microsofts patches take forever to come out and introduce more holes than anything else."
Wanna cracker, Polly?
"Everyone who complained that Microsoft is so evil for the lack in quality of code they put out, raise your hand so we can heckle you. "
I wonder if the average MS heckler imagines the software development wing of MS looks like Gringott's Bank. I don't think it occurs to them that the programmers there are human.
Orson Wells?
"I remember that. Wasn't the version for the SNES made so that there was no "blood?""
Yes, that's true, though it does show an interesting decision made by Nintendo.
The original Mortal Kombat for SNES had sweat flying off the opponent instead of blood. Nintendo was very hard nosed about this. Their reasoning was that they wanted to make sure that parents were comfortable in buying games for their kids without having to be overly involved in what's in these games. (Interestingly enough, that view might have been more supported today...)
However, people complained. A lot of people complained. Nintendo listened. The lightened up on the no-blood rule and when Mortal Kombat 2 came out, it whooped the tar out of the inferior Genesis version. Not only did the SNES version support a much broader color pallete, but also one of the reviewers described the audio of the Genesis version as having laryngitis. (sp?)
Nintendo deserves a little credit for what happened there. They took a stand that they thought would be appreciated, and when the customers said they were wrong, they listened and changed their policy. If only the RIAA'd do that...
I'd like to know who the moderators were that modded this as flamebait and troll. That was classic!
"Considering I haven't read anywhere that the Xbox adapter will be incompatible wtih other things, I think you might be jumping the gun assuming that it's not."
I never meant to imply that the X-BOX adapter was like that. I just meant in general. I don't own an X-BOX, I have a GameCube. The reason I brought this up is because today I was thinking of getting a network adapter for it, but it's $40 and it only works on the GC, unlikely to work on the next console. Maybe if they included it in game?
Okay, I'm rambling. The point is I didn't mean to imply that the XBOX adapter was proprietary. Hopefully not many people interpreted it that way.
... but I have difficulty seeing how any of this could work without a standardized system. Maybe, just maybe if everybody ran the same version of [$IdealOS], this would be possible. But it just doesn't work that way. Even if you just isolate the Windows users out there, everybody has different tasks for their computers. Somebody who sets up a PC as a VCR, for example, is going to treat it like an appliance, not like a car that has to be maintained. (Sorry for the weak example, I'm sleep deprived.)
No, this idea may have the right intentions, but it's not a well executed one.
I was a HAM radio operator a few years ago. Though my license has long expired, my information is still there. Does that scare me? Nope. Even if the info was up to date, it still wouldn't bother me. Why? The main reason is that they'd have to know my callsign to find it. If they find that, then yeah they'd have that info.
... uh.. do something that I can imagine, or I can just accept that my info's out there. Am I being ignorant? Maybe. However, if somebody wants to find me, they WILL. Frankly, I'm more interested in my friends and family finding that info then in preventing invisible enemies from acquiring it.
The problem is that my info isn't all that hard to find. I can either live in fear that somebody will *gasp* find my address and
" At Outpost, for example, the Linksys g-compatible model is selling for $159.99."
I'd pay that for a generic one that will work with future consoles, like a USB wireless adapter for example. $160 for a wireless adapter for a single console is ridiculous. I guess if consumer demand is high enough... afterall, cat5 is not able to get everywhere, such as neighboring apartments.
May I ask what the USB master is for?
*curious*
Funny that this topic came up, the company I work for has a spherical video camera that'd be of interest to helicopter pilots who want to see what's underneath the ship, i.e. power lines nad antennae.
... it could be uploading photos the moment a radio signal is established, as opposed to waiting for a grunt to hook up a cable.
Pretty slick!
Kinda curious if you've considered using a PocketPC for that. Just plug the CF card into the PocketPc that already has 802.11 going, then write a simple little app that handles the transfer bit. That'll get you into the 5lb mark, and there's no moving parts to break. The downside is that may be a little pricier than you have in mind. The plus side is that it turns on instantly and has its own display etc.