You can still get the original Wii for $129 from Walmart US. At only $30 more, I don't see much of a use for this new Wii Mini, especially because it doesn't have internet. Which means it can't play Netflix. You might as just buy the old Wii, which was pretty much already mini, and use that . Plus the old Wii comes with Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort. It looks as though the Wii Mini doesn't come with any games at all.
That's not Microsoft's fault. It's the fault of HP, Acer, Lenovo and others who install all the crapware before selling you a machine. If you buy the parts from a place like Tigerdirect/ NewEgg, and install a fresh copy of Windows 7/8 on it, then there is no crapware. What I actually did with my last Windows 7 laptop was format the hard drive as soon as I got it and reinstalled from a disk I had got from a buddy of mine. With Windows 7, there was no special OEM only keys that didn't work with regular install disks. Although I was at BestBuy a few weeks ago and the sales person offered a $100 service that would do exactly that. Wipe the hard drive clean, and install just windows, along with the drivers, but without all the bloatware. So, I agree this is a real problem, but the blame shouldn't be put on Microsoft. If MS tried to put pressure on them to stop doing that, they would probably have another antitrust suit on their hands.
This is my point of view as well. People say the RIAA and MPAA prices are outrageous, so they just pirate. I say instead of you don't like the price they are asking for their product, you just shouldn't use their product at all. If you pirate it, they have more ammunition to convince the governments to pass draconian laws which monitor online usage and bring heavy fines against people pirating their copyrighted material. If instead you just completely ignore content that you don't agree with the pricing model on, and find artists and publishers that you do agree with the pricing model on, or go for public domain stuff, you are sending a clear message that you aren't going to pay the prices they are asking. I used to pirate stuff, but I gave that up a while ago. There's no movie/book/album out there that I absolutely have to watch/read/listen to.
Actually, that doesn't make it the true default in Firefox. If you type stuff into the address bar in FireFox (not the search box) it will still search using google (or your actual default search engine). Since Chrome uses the address bar as the search bar, you have to change the default. From a quick clicking around, I couldn't actually figure out how to change the default search engine used when typing in the address bar in FireFox. Went to "Manage Search engines" and I didn't see anyway to set a default. Also tried moving DDG all the way to the top. That didn't fix it either. Seems like FireFox makes some things more difficult than chrome.
I think Google is being pretty nice here. If they really wanted to be anti-competitive they would try to stop sites from displaying Google search results within their own site and trying to pass themselves off as some kind of alternative to Google. Really Google could be doing a lot worse based on how entrenched they are in internet culture. Although, maybe they are so entrenched because they make it so easy for other site developers to use the data and tools that they've put so much hard work into.
Actually, just tested with Chrome. It's trivally easy. Once you've done a single search with DDG, it shows up in a list of "Alternative Search Engines" Try it right now. Do a search on DDG. Then go to settings. Under the search section, Click on Manage Search Engines, Look for DDG in the "Other Search Engines" section, and click on "Make Default". That's pretty simple. I mean, they could include DDG in their default list, but then WebCrawler, or AltaVista, or a multitude of other search engines would probably complain as well. If you've already done a search on DDG, it's the exact same number of clicks. "Wrench", Options, Manage Search Engines, Make Default. VS. Wrench", Options, Drop Down Box, Bing/Yahoo/Chrome.
Meh, You can just buy a whole BluRay player for about the same price as the drive. The cheap Dell computer might not even have enough horsepower to play a BluRay disc. Also, the cheap Dell computer probably won't be able to play Wii/Gamecube games with Dolphin either. And then there's the advantage of having a real remote for your BluRay player.
Yeah, but even a cheap Dell computer will cost more than $120 that the Wii is going for. Not to mention that with a modded Wii, you can hook up a hard drive to the USB port and play your emulated/Wii games off that. Even with the cost of the hard disk you still come out way under the price of the "cheap" Dell computer. Plus, you'd have to get gamepads anyway for the computer, and the Wii comes with 1 to start with.
That's kind of what I was thinking. Why would a frozen turkey contain any more water than a thawed turkey. I had no idea that they put extra water in the frozen ones to jack up the price. Of course, we only buy fresh, (never frozen) turkeys for thanksgiving, and for almost all our meat.
I was going to say something along these lines. Get a Wii, mod it, and through a bunch of emulators on there. For the Wii, you don't even need to hardware mod it. Just get a copy of Super Smash Brothers, or Indiana Jones and you're set. You can even rent the game, which is what I did back when the twilight princess game still worked. Use a free month subscription to GameFly if you don't have a physical game rental store. You can also pick up games for pretty cheap now since it's been superseded by the WiiU.
So true here. Sports is the one reason I know that most people haven't turned off the cable. And it's not just houses with nerds, it's everyone. This is especially true up here in Canada where you get very little sports coverage unless you have cable. Not like down in the states where you can get a lot of the games over the air.
I was thinking that if you had 100,000 nodes, that a certain percentage of them could be dedicated for fail over when one of the nodes goes down. The data, would exist in at least 2 nodes, kid of like RAID but for entire computers. If one node goes down, another node can take it's place. The cluster would only have to pause a short time while the new node got the proper contents into memory along with the instructions it needed to run. You'd need to do some kind of coding so a server could pick up as close as possible to where the other one died, but at least it wouldn't require an actual human to walk in and replace a part for the whole cluster to continue.
I'm not so sure about that. A song is maybe 4 MB. According to this article with proper storage mechanisms, you can store about 500,000 bytes on a single sheet of paper using a 600 dpi printer. And that's just using black and white. Add in support for multiple colors and you could probably easily encode most MP3 files on a page or two. Even without color, you could fit a 4 MB song on 8 pages. Not a single page, but hardly a box.
This is just like the situation in Canada and the US. Prices in the US were always less, and we always attributed it to the exchange rate, but now the US $ is pretty much on par with the Canadian $, and there's still a lot of cases where products are much cheaper in the US than in Canada. I know a few people who are planning trips to the US this weekend for their big "black friday" sales.
I'm a human and I can't tell whether a swatch of color is burgundy or maroon. There's no way a robot could do better at such a subjective, human specialized task.
Ok, sure the computer couldn't get it right all the time, but it could probably do an OK job, and not get bored with it's menial life and just start writing down answers instead of giving it a best guess.
A few months ago I really really tried switching to Linux, and in the end I went back to Windows 7 (now at Windows 8). Tried about 10 different distros, and none of them really provided what I needed. I did learn some fun stuff along the way though. Getting WiFi working in Slackware 14 was quite an adventure. Most distros did a really terrible job at making it easy to configure WiFi. There were other issues such as I was never able to get my video card drivers working properly. half the games I bought from Humble Bundle didn't work, possibly due to video card drivers, but others failed with seg faults. Compared to Windows, Linux was completely terrible. Perhaps if you have just the right hardware configuration it will work for you. It works great for me under VMWare, which is why I decided to try and switch in the first place.
You're right on that. I think it was more of a developer thing than anything else. Most of the games I bought for my GC were Nintendo titles, and they all had almost no load time. Need For Speed on the other hand had terrible load times on the GameCube. The game was fun, but I never spent that much time playing it because it took so long between races. I think this is one of the reasons why Mario Kart is so fun when you have people over. No waiting around for minutes as tracks load like with other racing games.
Actually, I was quite happy that Nintendo held on to cartridges one extra generation. The PlayStation used CDs and had atrocious load times. The GameCube also used proprietary CDs (not sure if it was due to the discs or some other reason) and had vastly superior load times compared to the PS2. That's one thing I've always liked about Nintendo is that they focused on getting load times to be short. Metroid Prime was beautiful in this respect. A vast landscape, and only briefly did it go into loading (when on the elevator) and then it almost wasn't even noticeable as it was almost part of the game. It was easily possibly to play Metroid for more than half an hour without running into an elevator. It only happened when they switch to a completely different landscape.
Yeah, like that's worked out so well for us in the past. Publishers create the worst kinds of DRM. At least when I get and Xbox/Wii/PS game I know it isn't going to install some boot loader or root kit or rogue driver on my system and screw it up. If the security is baked into the console, at least I don't have publishers coming up with their own messed up schemes that end up messing with my system. I know that I can buy a game, take it home, and play it.
I want it to do more, but I don't want it to be running Linux, or Android, or any other mainstream OS. Sure it means that I may get more apps, as developers are more familiar with it, but these general purpose operating systems just seem to slow things down in the end. My console just needs to play games, allow me to watch videos, and surge the web. That's it. It doesn't need multitasking. Whatever program is running should have full reign over the console so that it can take full advantage of the hardware. My Android phone is good, but it does these annoying things. If a text message comes in while playing a game, the game will come to a screeching halt for 10 seconds just so my phone can make a ding sound. Sometimes games will play slow, for no apparent reason whatsoever, even if I've recently restarted the phone. Sometimes it will just fail to connect to the network. It will say it's connected, but no data will get through. I want my console to just work, and to be able to do exactly one thing at a time, and do that one thing well.
This is one thing that Apple is good at. Letting you know their product exists. They have TV ads, magazine ads, retail stores, good placement in retail stores they don't own (Apple pays for that placement). They make a huge media event every time they want to release a product. If I wasn't a tech geek, I probably wouldn't know that the Microsoft Surface exists. Unless I'm actually buying a new computer, I probably wouldn't even know Windows 8 exists. Nobody outside of tech circles know that the Google Nexus 4/7/10 exists. These products are selling quite well none the less, but they really should try to do a better job at marketing.
I think that eventually all this will disappear. It's just a temporary problem while the music owners get their act together. There's already a couple services out there that let you listen to unlimited music. With some you can even save the music to your phone so you don't have to be connected to the internet to listen. With RDIO, for $10 a month I can get access a very large selection of music. Add in Netflix and Hulu Plus, and for $30 a month you have access to all the movies, TV, and music you want. All we need is for these services to increase the size of their selection and most people probably won't bother with pirating. I know I don't pirate that much since I actually have valid ways of getting stuff without spending obscene amounts of money like $20 for a CD with 8 songs on it.
The arena where we used to go public skating had a door marked OFFICE but because of bad kerning (perhaps intentionally??) it read as OFF ICE. Quite funny to me as a kid.
Yeah, but Walmart had a net income last year of 15.7 billion. While Apple had a net income of 41 billion. Even though Walmart has almost 3 times the revenue (447 billion vs 156) I know which company I'd rather be working for, or in charge of, or have stock in. Sure Walmart makes a large sum of money, and they're profitable, but they expend an awful lot of energy to get that done. Walmart has 2.2 million employees, Apple, only 72 thousand. All my numbers are from Wikipedia (WalmartApple).
Actually, Apple only started to do well once they started to cater to the top 5-10%. They spent a lot of years trying to chase after MS and the PC vendors and only later realized that there's no money to be made there. They are a very profitable company for the markets they serve. They only want to make good, high quality products. Is there something wrong with that?
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You can still get the original Wii for $129 from Walmart US. At only $30 more, I don't see much of a use for this new Wii Mini, especially because it doesn't have internet. Which means it can't play Netflix. You might as just buy the old Wii, which was pretty much already mini, and use that . Plus the old Wii comes with Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort. It looks as though the Wii Mini doesn't come with any games at all.
That's not Microsoft's fault. It's the fault of HP, Acer, Lenovo and others who install all the crapware before selling you a machine. If you buy the parts from a place like Tigerdirect/ NewEgg, and install a fresh copy of Windows 7/8 on it, then there is no crapware. What I actually did with my last Windows 7 laptop was format the hard drive as soon as I got it and reinstalled from a disk I had got from a buddy of mine. With Windows 7, there was no special OEM only keys that didn't work with regular install disks. Although I was at BestBuy a few weeks ago and the sales person offered a $100 service that would do exactly that. Wipe the hard drive clean, and install just windows, along with the drivers, but without all the bloatware. So, I agree this is a real problem, but the blame shouldn't be put on Microsoft. If MS tried to put pressure on them to stop doing that, they would probably have another antitrust suit on their hands.
This is my point of view as well. People say the RIAA and MPAA prices are outrageous, so they just pirate. I say instead of you don't like the price they are asking for their product, you just shouldn't use their product at all. If you pirate it, they have more ammunition to convince the governments to pass draconian laws which monitor online usage and bring heavy fines against people pirating their copyrighted material. If instead you just completely ignore content that you don't agree with the pricing model on, and find artists and publishers that you do agree with the pricing model on, or go for public domain stuff, you are sending a clear message that you aren't going to pay the prices they are asking. I used to pirate stuff, but I gave that up a while ago. There's no movie/book/album out there that I absolutely have to watch/read/listen to.
Actually, that doesn't make it the true default in Firefox. If you type stuff into the address bar in FireFox (not the search box) it will still search using google (or your actual default search engine). Since Chrome uses the address bar as the search bar, you have to change the default. From a quick clicking around, I couldn't actually figure out how to change the default search engine used when typing in the address bar in FireFox. Went to "Manage Search engines" and I didn't see anyway to set a default. Also tried moving DDG all the way to the top. That didn't fix it either. Seems like FireFox makes some things more difficult than chrome.
I think Google is being pretty nice here. If they really wanted to be anti-competitive they would try to stop sites from displaying Google search results within their own site and trying to pass themselves off as some kind of alternative to Google. Really Google could be doing a lot worse based on how entrenched they are in internet culture. Although, maybe they are so entrenched because they make it so easy for other site developers to use the data and tools that they've put so much hard work into.
Actually, just tested with Chrome. It's trivally easy. Once you've done a single search with DDG, it shows up in a list of "Alternative Search Engines" Try it right now. Do a search on DDG. Then go to settings. Under the search section, Click on Manage Search Engines, Look for DDG in the "Other Search Engines" section, and click on "Make Default". That's pretty simple. I mean, they could include DDG in their default list, but then WebCrawler, or AltaVista, or a multitude of other search engines would probably complain as well. If you've already done a search on DDG, it's the exact same number of clicks. "Wrench", Options, Manage Search Engines, Make Default. VS. Wrench", Options, Drop Down Box, Bing/Yahoo/Chrome.
Meh, You can just buy a whole BluRay player for about the same price as the drive. The cheap Dell computer might not even have enough horsepower to play a BluRay disc. Also, the cheap Dell computer probably won't be able to play Wii/Gamecube games with Dolphin either. And then there's the advantage of having a real remote for your BluRay player.
Yeah, but even a cheap Dell computer will cost more than $120 that the Wii is going for. Not to mention that with a modded Wii, you can hook up a hard drive to the USB port and play your emulated/Wii games off that. Even with the cost of the hard disk you still come out way under the price of the "cheap" Dell computer. Plus, you'd have to get gamepads anyway for the computer, and the Wii comes with 1 to start with.
That's kind of what I was thinking. Why would a frozen turkey contain any more water than a thawed turkey. I had no idea that they put extra water in the frozen ones to jack up the price. Of course, we only buy fresh, (never frozen) turkeys for thanksgiving, and for almost all our meat.
I was going to say something along these lines. Get a Wii, mod it, and through a bunch of emulators on there. For the Wii, you don't even need to hardware mod it. Just get a copy of Super Smash Brothers, or Indiana Jones and you're set. You can even rent the game, which is what I did back when the twilight princess game still worked. Use a free month subscription to GameFly if you don't have a physical game rental store. You can also pick up games for pretty cheap now since it's been superseded by the WiiU.
So true here. Sports is the one reason I know that most people haven't turned off the cable. And it's not just houses with nerds, it's everyone. This is especially true up here in Canada where you get very little sports coverage unless you have cable. Not like down in the states where you can get a lot of the games over the air.
I was thinking that if you had 100,000 nodes, that a certain percentage of them could be dedicated for fail over when one of the nodes goes down. The data, would exist in at least 2 nodes, kid of like RAID but for entire computers. If one node goes down, another node can take it's place. The cluster would only have to pause a short time while the new node got the proper contents into memory along with the instructions it needed to run. You'd need to do some kind of coding so a server could pick up as close as possible to where the other one died, but at least it wouldn't require an actual human to walk in and replace a part for the whole cluster to continue.
I'm not so sure about that. A song is maybe 4 MB. According to this article with proper storage mechanisms, you can store about 500,000 bytes on a single sheet of paper using a 600 dpi printer. And that's just using black and white. Add in support for multiple colors and you could probably easily encode most MP3 files on a page or two. Even without color, you could fit a 4 MB song on 8 pages. Not a single page, but hardly a box.
This is just like the situation in Canada and the US. Prices in the US were always less, and we always attributed it to the exchange rate, but now the US $ is pretty much on par with the Canadian $, and there's still a lot of cases where products are much cheaper in the US than in Canada. I know a few people who are planning trips to the US this weekend for their big "black friday" sales.
I'm a human and I can't tell whether a swatch of color is burgundy or maroon. There's no way a robot could do better at such a subjective, human specialized task.
Ok, sure the computer couldn't get it right all the time, but it could probably do an OK job, and not get bored with it's menial life and just start writing down answers instead of giving it a best guess.
A few months ago I really really tried switching to Linux, and in the end I went back to Windows 7 (now at Windows 8). Tried about 10 different distros, and none of them really provided what I needed. I did learn some fun stuff along the way though. Getting WiFi working in Slackware 14 was quite an adventure. Most distros did a really terrible job at making it easy to configure WiFi. There were other issues such as I was never able to get my video card drivers working properly. half the games I bought from Humble Bundle didn't work, possibly due to video card drivers, but others failed with seg faults. Compared to Windows, Linux was completely terrible. Perhaps if you have just the right hardware configuration it will work for you. It works great for me under VMWare, which is why I decided to try and switch in the first place.
You're right on that. I think it was more of a developer thing than anything else. Most of the games I bought for my GC were Nintendo titles, and they all had almost no load time. Need For Speed on the other hand had terrible load times on the GameCube. The game was fun, but I never spent that much time playing it because it took so long between races. I think this is one of the reasons why Mario Kart is so fun when you have people over. No waiting around for minutes as tracks load like with other racing games.
Actually, I was quite happy that Nintendo held on to cartridges one extra generation. The PlayStation used CDs and had atrocious load times. The GameCube also used proprietary CDs (not sure if it was due to the discs or some other reason) and had vastly superior load times compared to the PS2. That's one thing I've always liked about Nintendo is that they focused on getting load times to be short. Metroid Prime was beautiful in this respect. A vast landscape, and only briefly did it go into loading (when on the elevator) and then it almost wasn't even noticeable as it was almost part of the game. It was easily possibly to play Metroid for more than half an hour without running into an elevator. It only happened when they switch to a completely different landscape.
Yeah, like that's worked out so well for us in the past. Publishers create the worst kinds of DRM. At least when I get and Xbox/Wii/PS game I know it isn't going to install some boot loader or root kit or rogue driver on my system and screw it up. If the security is baked into the console, at least I don't have publishers coming up with their own messed up schemes that end up messing with my system. I know that I can buy a game, take it home, and play it.
I want it to do more, but I don't want it to be running Linux, or Android, or any other mainstream OS. Sure it means that I may get more apps, as developers are more familiar with it, but these general purpose operating systems just seem to slow things down in the end. My console just needs to play games, allow me to watch videos, and surge the web. That's it. It doesn't need multitasking. Whatever program is running should have full reign over the console so that it can take full advantage of the hardware. My Android phone is good, but it does these annoying things. If a text message comes in while playing a game, the game will come to a screeching halt for 10 seconds just so my phone can make a ding sound. Sometimes games will play slow, for no apparent reason whatsoever, even if I've recently restarted the phone. Sometimes it will just fail to connect to the network. It will say it's connected, but no data will get through. I want my console to just work, and to be able to do exactly one thing at a time, and do that one thing well.
This is one thing that Apple is good at. Letting you know their product exists. They have TV ads, magazine ads, retail stores, good placement in retail stores they don't own (Apple pays for that placement). They make a huge media event every time they want to release a product. If I wasn't a tech geek, I probably wouldn't know that the Microsoft Surface exists. Unless I'm actually buying a new computer, I probably wouldn't even know Windows 8 exists. Nobody outside of tech circles know that the Google Nexus 4/7/10 exists. These products are selling quite well none the less, but they really should try to do a better job at marketing.
I think that eventually all this will disappear. It's just a temporary problem while the music owners get their act together. There's already a couple services out there that let you listen to unlimited music. With some you can even save the music to your phone so you don't have to be connected to the internet to listen. With RDIO, for $10 a month I can get access a very large selection of music. Add in Netflix and Hulu Plus, and for $30 a month you have access to all the movies, TV, and music you want. All we need is for these services to increase the size of their selection and most people probably won't bother with pirating. I know I don't pirate that much since I actually have valid ways of getting stuff without spending obscene amounts of money like $20 for a CD with 8 songs on it.
The arena where we used to go public skating had a door marked OFFICE but because of bad kerning (perhaps intentionally??) it read as OFF ICE. Quite funny to me as a kid.
Yeah, but Walmart had a net income last year of 15.7 billion. While Apple had a net income of 41 billion. Even though Walmart has almost 3 times the revenue (447 billion vs 156) I know which company I'd rather be working for, or in charge of, or have stock in. Sure Walmart makes a large sum of money, and they're profitable, but they expend an awful lot of energy to get that done. Walmart has 2.2 million employees, Apple, only 72 thousand. All my numbers are from Wikipedia (Walmart Apple).
Actually, Apple only started to do well once they started to cater to the top 5-10%. They spent a lot of years trying to chase after MS and the PC vendors and only later realized that there's no money to be made there. They are a very profitable company for the markets they serve. They only want to make good, high quality products. Is there something wrong with that?