-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it.
Goddamn, but that would be so cool.
I mean, blowing up the universe. The whole friggen cheeselog.
I told my manager in a design meeting that we should do all new development using POOP techniques and POOP tools and POOP constructs. Now I'm unemployed like the rest of you.
These will get cheaper over time too, so it'll probably lead to super-cheap mp3 players/digicams and the like in the future, with an embedded gig or two, and maybe make CF or something an option for expansion.
They have a ton of embedded applications, from rackmounted equipment (0.5u servers?), or even the next Gameboy - or maybe even the current GBA (price comes down and have a 1.5 gig HDD inside a GBA Cart? That'd make for some cool games)
It's just a hardware iteration, there have already been 6 or so of them. Later model PS2s out there already do progressive scan.
The DVD player in PS2 is a piece of junk, and virtually always the point of failure. They simply managed to source better quality units at the same (or lower) price.
upgrade the CPU/graphics as well and as such they give it the ability to play new special games that won't work on the original PS2.
That'll never happen. It would be a nightmare of returns and confusion at the local Best Buy/Blockbuster/whatever as people buy the latest PS2 game then return it because it doesnt work on their "lesser" PS2. It would piss off a lot of customers, including myself, if all of a sudden I have to buy a new PS2 to play PS2 games. If they were going to change it's gaming specs, they'd have to call it the PS3, since it'd be a different machine.
By all accounts, the current DVD player in PS2's is a piece of crap. Seek time in movies is god-awful, my Dragons Lair, which is now touted as playable in PS2/Xbox, is not, as it's a 10 second pause every time you make a 'choice' along the way.
Aside from the DVD, what they need to do is add the hard drive (and cheaply, sell it at a loss for 20 bucks or so so everyone can get one, or bundle it with a game) and actually use it in games. Imagine the next iteration of GTA streaming off of a nice fast HDD and not a DVD (the game goes to hell once you get some fingerprints on the disc). Games that stream from DVD all the time like that just kill the already crappy DVD player that much faster.
This is the one feature xbox has that just crushes the competition - when it's used. The games that cache to the HDD load so fast it's like the best of the cartridge format merged with the size of DVDs.
the LCD display and a few buttons won't ever happen
Really? I've already done it, and so have many many others. Look here.
It's pretty much a no brainer to read keypresses off the serial port.
Likewise with most remote packages. The "devil in the details" is getting everything to work flawlessly together, with an intuitive Tivo-like interface, and all the process control - like making sure that the DVD player stops when you start a DivX and so on.
can do wonders with an extremely old computer with Red Hat. With a midrange PC I could pull of plenty of useful things. It may not fry your eggs but its more than just a midrange PC with Red Hat installed
No, it's still just a midrange PC with Red Hat installed. That's not a bad thing, but it's not a MediaPC (take a look at how Windows XP Media edition, or even the Xbox works and note the differences). Its still a PC, not a piece of AV equipment, until you can sit back on the couch, press the play button, and start a movie. There should be no mouse cursor, no CLI, nothing but a simple menu that you navigate with UP/DOWN/START.
I played with one of the 800mhz boards, wanting small form factor PCs to build for my kids with at least enough juice to play some light games and stream DVDs and DivX off of my network.
DVDs played, but were skippy and annoying. High-quality DivX was even worse.
It has so much trouble playing back these streams, I cant imagine the struggles it would have trying to encode them in real time (with a capture card in its free PCI slot).
All in all, I thought it would be neat for a little kiosk-type workstation or something, but didnt cut it as an entertainment device. So back it went.
There are newer, faster, better models. But, I ended up going for Shuttle's FV25 flex-atx boards with Celeron 1.0a's (tualitin core, 256k cache). It's almost as small, has everything onboard (just add 40$ celery CPU and ram), and was much more powerful.
It has onboard S4 savage video with shared ram (it aint high end by any means, but is more capable than people give it credit for - my kids play Dragons Lair 3D and other recent titles on it all the time). DVD/DivX/MP3/etc playback is A1.
It's not fanless, of course, but the way they mounted in the cases I used (refurbed and repainted "Barbie PC" flex atx cases), air is drawn in the bottom, over a fanless CPU/sink (I had to hunt for a sink that was not too big, the intel stock sink wouldnt fit) and straight out the back, so one 80mm fan pinned down to 7 volts keeps the board nice and cool, and you cant hear it.
Shuttle also has FlexATX boards for P4 and Athlon, if you wanted some real power for gaming. You find 'em primarily in their spacewalker barebones kits, but you can buy them seperately if you look around online.
This is all fine and good. A guy built a PC and put linux on it and hooked it up to his TV. It's no great feat, but it's linux so it's on slashdot.
Anyways, here's what's missing or could have been improved..
TV Tuner Card Hauppauge WinTV PCI $60
Does the Hauppage WinPVR card not work? This costs only a few more beans, but provides vastly superior captures and onboard MPEG2 compression, IIRC.
Keyboard Silitek SK-7551 $20
A keyboard and mouse? This is the main stumbling block. A true MediaPC needs to be controlled through a simple interface with a remote control.
Also, stick an LCD display on the front with a few buttons so it can be used without the remote.
Of course that requires a bunch of coding work to make sure everything fits together seamlessly, and there's no trace of being a "PC" left in there.
The new Radeon AIW Pro cards fit the bill for both video capture, playback, remote capabilities, and firewire transfer. Of course, they cost as much as this whole project.
(In a nutshell I just spelled out the Media PC I'm working on putting together)
In the end, this guy built a PC and installed Red Hat on it. Whoopty do. He can call it a MediaPC, he can call it a Star Trek supercomputer. It's still just a midrange PC with Red Hat installed.
There are people who dont want their warranty voided, people who dont have a clue how to copy an XBOX/PS2 disc or dont have a DVD-R to do so, or people who are just plain honest, and dont pirate just because they know how.
He sells/buys used games, used systems, does repairs, sells hard-to-find accessories (he pretty much orders all of it through lik-sang at a discount, apparently he knows someone there since he's from Hong Kong, so you end up paying the Lik Sang price sans shipping)
He sells a ton of old stuff to people like me (Saturn, Jaguar, 3DO, TG16), and is about the only place to find such things within 1000 miles.
He also sells pokemon cards, Dragonball Z/Anime movies and dolls and crap (about the only imported stuff he actually moves).
For the most part, considering 20 feet down the mall is a Toys R Us, and another 100 feet the other way is a Best Buy, he cant compete just selling games anyways.
IIRC, the eula with every game explicitly prohibits reverse engineering, disassembly, blah blah of anything contained on the game disc or any files it creates on the HDD or memory card.
Yeah, though I thought it was Thin-line Soldered On Package or some such.
The xbox' bios is a TSOP eeprom.
You'll also note they talk about burning an "ISO of Halo", when of course, the filesystem they're burning is anything but ISO 9660 (either UDF or Xboxes native system)
A mobile celeron 733 powerful? A 1 gig tualitin celeron would be 40 bucks, with another 30 or so for a mobo.
enough memory
What's 64 megs of SDRAM worth? 10 bucks? I bet most of us have a DIMM collecting dust we could use. I know I have a dozen of 'em.
dvd drive
A crappy dvd drive, on which recordable media support is somewhere between terrible and none, depending on your luck.
high-end graphics card
To be fair, it's a GeForce 3 with another pixel shader. And with no real driver support past a plain-jane framebuffer. And I sincerly doubt nVidia is going to pony up some drivers for the xGPU any time soon.
and more
Yes, an 8, 10 or maybe 20 gig HDD depending once again on luck. A terrible (from a general use PC standpoint) bus configuration. No way to do key/mouse input without sacrificing a $40 control pad.
Seriously.
Cheap case + PSU = 40 bucks
mobo, 733mhz celeron, ram = 100 bucks
Crappy DVD drive = well, you cant buy one as crippled as the xboxes. But lets say 25 bucks for a used 8x.
Cheapest, smallest HDD you can get = 30 bucks.
Sound card and video = spend as much as you want. You can get xbox-linux functionality on anything with a framebuffer. But hey, spend the 10 bucks on a Riva TNT2 and you're already smoking X-linux. But I'll say 50 bucks for a SB PCI card and a cheapo video card with TV-out.
100+40+30+25+50 = 245 bucks for a similarly configured home-built machine.
Xbox would be the price of the box (200) + a memory card (40) + a copy of 007 (20?).
Linux is just the "front" that lets kids talk about how to flash the BIOS with a hacked version to play warez.
They act as though they have the moral high ground with all the linux jibber jabber, but go peruse the forums in the links and you can see what 99% of the kids are really interested in hacking the xbox for.
It aint linux, it ain't Tux racer, it aint backups or imports. It's just code for "warez" and we all know it.
Eg; a local game shop does mods, and sells imports. I was chatting with the owner one day, and asked him how many mods he does a week. He tells me 50 on a good week. I ask him how many import games he sells. He just kind of laughed and says practically none, they just keep them around to legitimize the whole thing.
Either way, that's what I'd do on a busy day with a 56k dialup (downloading 24 hours straight).
Sounds like a pretty harsh limit, considering over here you could get an unlimited dialup account for about the same cost, and be able to pull off 30*500 = 15,000 MiB a month.
Oh well, I guess those guys are too busy taking over grunt level IP jobs to be leeching anyways.
begin rant
All you slashbots, stop saying MB (megabyte) when you mean MiB (mibibyte). Mega = 10^6 = 1,000,000, MiB = 2^20 = 1048576
It's needlessly confusing to overload an existing term when theres a perfectly good (and standard) term.
Slashdot Mirror
And SI says to use a space, and a "." as the decimal separator. Europe and America are wrong.
It's 5 000 000.00, not 5,000,000.00 or 5.000.000,00
Friggin people and their friggin lack of respect for standards.
And it's gibibit, not gigabit (unless it's actually 1 000 000 000 bits per sec)
Simple, you plug iPronto in next to the TV then buy a remote to control it.
-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it.
Goddamn, but that would be so cool.
I mean, blowing up the universe. The whole friggen cheeselog.
I told my manager in a design meeting that we should do all new development using POOP techniques and POOP tools and POOP constructs. Now I'm unemployed like the rest of you.
Love your bias, keep it up.
"It may not be the first, but it is the most incisive because of the way it disects the many fundamental flaws in Microsoft's latest creation."
Translated, they say microsoft is gay so its an automatic +5 insightful.
Of course, computers running Linux, OSX and FreeBSD have absolutely no fundamental flaws.
anti-whatsperant?
huh?
Help me out here.
I'm a linux user and have absolutely no idea what that is.
These will get cheaper over time too, so it'll probably lead to super-cheap mp3 players/digicams and the like in the future, with an embedded gig or two, and maybe make CF or something an option for expansion.
They have a ton of embedded applications, from rackmounted equipment (0.5u servers?), or even the next Gameboy - or maybe even the current GBA (price comes down and have a 1.5 gig HDD inside a GBA Cart? That'd make for some cool games)
It's just a hardware iteration, there have already been 6 or so of them. Later model PS2s out there already do progressive scan.
The DVD player in PS2 is a piece of junk, and virtually always the point of failure. They simply managed to source better quality units at the same (or lower) price.
upgrade the CPU/graphics as well and as such they give it the ability to play new special games that won't work on the original PS2.
That'll never happen. It would be a nightmare of returns and confusion at the local Best Buy/Blockbuster/whatever as people buy the latest PS2 game then return it because it doesnt work on their "lesser" PS2. It would piss off a lot of customers, including myself, if all of a sudden I have to buy a new PS2 to play PS2 games. If they were going to change it's gaming specs, they'd have to call it the PS3, since it'd be a different machine.
By all accounts, the current DVD player in PS2's is a piece of crap. Seek time in movies is god-awful, my Dragons Lair, which is now touted as playable in PS2/Xbox, is not, as it's a 10 second pause every time you make a 'choice' along the way.
Aside from the DVD, what they need to do is add the hard drive (and cheaply, sell it at a loss for 20 bucks or so so everyone can get one, or bundle it with a game) and actually use it in games. Imagine the next iteration of GTA streaming off of a nice fast HDD and not a DVD (the game goes to hell once you get some fingerprints on the disc). Games that stream from DVD all the time like that just kill the already crappy DVD player that much faster.
This is the one feature xbox has that just crushes the competition - when it's used. The games that cache to the HDD load so fast it's like the best of the cartridge format merged with the size of DVDs.
the LCD display and a few buttons won't ever happen
Really? I've already done it, and so have many many others. Look here.
It's pretty much a no brainer to read keypresses off the serial port.
Likewise with most remote packages. The "devil in the details" is getting everything to work flawlessly together, with an intuitive Tivo-like interface, and all the process control - like making sure that the DVD player stops when you start a DivX and so on.
can do wonders with an extremely old computer with Red Hat. With a midrange PC I could pull of plenty of useful things. It may not fry your eggs but its more than just a midrange PC with Red Hat installed
No, it's still just a midrange PC with Red Hat installed. That's not a bad thing, but it's not a MediaPC (take a look at how Windows XP Media edition, or even the Xbox works and note the differences). Its still a PC, not a piece of AV equipment, until you can sit back on the couch, press the play button, and start a movie. There should be no mouse cursor, no CLI, nothing but a simple menu that you navigate with UP/DOWN/START.
I distinctly remember not understanding what the fuck I was reading about the first time it was posted.
I played with one of the 800mhz boards, wanting small form factor PCs to build for my kids with at least enough juice to play some light games and stream DVDs and DivX off of my network.
DVDs played, but were skippy and annoying. High-quality DivX was even worse.
It has so much trouble playing back these streams, I cant imagine the struggles it would have trying to encode them in real time (with a capture card in its free PCI slot).
All in all, I thought it would be neat for a little kiosk-type workstation or something, but didnt cut it as an entertainment device. So back it went.
There are newer, faster, better models. But, I ended up going for Shuttle's FV25 flex-atx boards with Celeron 1.0a's (tualitin core, 256k cache). It's almost as small, has everything onboard (just add 40$ celery CPU and ram), and was much more powerful.
It has onboard S4 savage video with shared ram (it aint high end by any means, but is more capable than people give it credit for - my kids play Dragons Lair 3D and other recent titles on it all the time). DVD/DivX/MP3/etc playback is A1.
It's not fanless, of course, but the way they mounted in the cases I used (refurbed and repainted "Barbie PC" flex atx cases), air is drawn in the bottom, over a fanless CPU/sink (I had to hunt for a sink that was not too big, the intel stock sink wouldnt fit) and straight out the back, so one 80mm fan pinned down to 7 volts keeps the board nice and cool, and you cant hear it.
Shuttle also has FlexATX boards for P4 and Athlon, if you wanted some real power for gaming. You find 'em primarily in their spacewalker barebones kits, but you can buy them seperately if you look around online.
This is all fine and good. A guy built a PC and put linux on it and hooked it up to his TV. It's no great feat, but it's linux so it's on slashdot.
Anyways, here's what's missing or could have been improved..
TV Tuner Card Hauppauge WinTV PCI $60
Does the Hauppage WinPVR card not work? This costs only a few more beans, but provides vastly superior captures and onboard MPEG2 compression, IIRC.
Keyboard Silitek SK-7551 $20
A keyboard and mouse? This is the main stumbling block. A true MediaPC needs to be controlled through a simple interface with a remote control.
Also, stick an LCD display on the front with a few buttons so it can be used without the remote.
Of course that requires a bunch of coding work to make sure everything fits together seamlessly, and there's no trace of being a "PC" left in there.
The new Radeon AIW Pro cards fit the bill for both video capture, playback, remote capabilities, and firewire transfer. Of course, they cost as much as this whole project.
(In a nutshell I just spelled out the Media PC I'm working on putting together)
In the end, this guy built a PC and installed Red Hat on it. Whoopty do. He can call it a MediaPC, he can call it a Star Trek supercomputer. It's still just a midrange PC with Red Hat installed.
Is this open source design coming full circle, a la:
1) Pick a name for the project
2) Set up a webpage and/or sourceforge project
3) Wait for people to come write and test it for you
4) ?
5) Goto 1
There are people who dont want their warranty voided, people who dont have a clue how to copy an XBOX/PS2 disc or dont have a DVD-R to do so, or people who are just plain honest, and dont pirate just because they know how.
He sells/buys used games, used systems, does repairs, sells hard-to-find accessories (he pretty much orders all of it through lik-sang at a discount, apparently he knows someone there since he's from Hong Kong, so you end up paying the Lik Sang price sans shipping)
He sells a ton of old stuff to people like me (Saturn, Jaguar, 3DO, TG16), and is about the only place to find such things within 1000 miles.
He also sells pokemon cards, Dragonball Z/Anime movies and dolls and crap (about the only imported stuff he actually moves).
For the most part, considering 20 feet down the mall is a Toys R Us, and another 100 feet the other way is a Best Buy, he cant compete just selling games anyways.
IIRC, the eula with every game explicitly prohibits reverse engineering, disassembly, blah blah of anything contained on the game disc or any files it creates on the HDD or memory card.
Yeah, though I thought it was Thin-line Soldered On Package or some such.
The xbox' bios is a TSOP eeprom.
You'll also note they talk about burning an "ISO of Halo", when of course, the filesystem they're burning is anything but ISO 9660 (either UDF or Xboxes native system)
a powerful processor
A mobile celeron 733 powerful? A 1 gig tualitin celeron would be 40 bucks, with another 30 or so for a mobo.
enough memory
What's 64 megs of SDRAM worth? 10 bucks? I bet most of us have a DIMM collecting dust we could use. I know I have a dozen of 'em.
dvd drive
A crappy dvd drive, on which recordable media support is somewhere between terrible and none, depending on your luck.
high-end graphics card
To be fair, it's a GeForce 3 with another pixel shader. And with no real driver support past a plain-jane framebuffer. And I sincerly doubt nVidia is going to pony up some drivers for the xGPU any time soon.
and more
Yes, an 8, 10 or maybe 20 gig HDD depending once again on luck. A terrible (from a general use PC standpoint) bus configuration. No way to do key/mouse input without sacrificing a $40 control pad.
Seriously.
Cheap case + PSU = 40 bucks
mobo, 733mhz celeron, ram = 100 bucks
Crappy DVD drive = well, you cant buy one as crippled as the xboxes. But lets say 25 bucks for a used 8x.
Cheapest, smallest HDD you can get = 30 bucks.
Sound card and video = spend as much as you want. You can get xbox-linux functionality on anything with a framebuffer. But hey, spend the 10 bucks on a Riva TNT2 and you're already smoking X-linux. But I'll say 50 bucks for a SB PCI card and a cheapo video card with TV-out.
100+40+30+25+50 = 245 bucks for a similarly configured home-built machine.
Xbox would be the price of the box (200) + a memory card (40) + a copy of 007 (20?).
Simple.
Linux is just the "front" that lets kids talk about how to flash the BIOS with a hacked version to play warez.
They act as though they have the moral high ground with all the linux jibber jabber, but go peruse the forums in the links and you can see what 99% of the kids are really interested in hacking the xbox for.
It aint linux, it ain't Tux racer, it aint backups or imports. It's just code for "warez" and we all know it.
Eg; a local game shop does mods, and sells imports. I was chatting with the owner one day, and asked him how many mods he does a week. He tells me 50 on a good week. I ask him how many import games he sells. He just kind of laughed and says practically none, they just keep them around to legitimize the whole thing.
Either way, that's what I'd do on a busy day with a 56k dialup (downloading 24 hours straight).
Sounds like a pretty harsh limit, considering over here you could get an unlimited dialup account for about the same cost, and be able to pull off 30*500 = 15,000 MiB a month.
Oh well, I guess those guys are too busy taking over grunt level IP jobs to be leeching anyways.
begin rant
All you slashbots, stop saying MB (megabyte) when you mean MiB (mibibyte). Mega = 10^6 = 1,000,000, MiB = 2^20 = 1048576
It's needlessly confusing to overload an existing term when theres a perfectly good (and standard) term.
end rant
I just wrote it, and you linux geeks will love it.
The app is called "GNU-hippies"
What it does is, you run it, and it spawns children again and again until it eats up almost all of your system resources.
You have just enough cpu and ram left to log in and type "killall GNU-hippies"
It's a howlingly good time.
Yeah whatever, like you have anything better to do on a friday night either.
That movie was a success (as much as it might scare some of us), because for one reason or another lots of people bought tickets
Kids.
You are indeed correct.
Hmm..
Odd thing is, I'd corrected that typo.. I guess slashdot didnt save it.
Oh well, they can just jump up my ass.
How do i buy a monitor?
What mouse do you use?
What keyboard do you like best?
I know the MS Naturals are the best but they are teh momopowy so I wanna open source one.
Bleh. If theres nothing to post, dont post. The world will survive slashdot not updating every 5 minutes.
What exactly are you going to do with it?
You arent going to play games, you arent going to get much by way of networking performance?
You going to put two xeons on a board and then choke them to death with 512 megs of PC 2100, an IDE HDD and a budget video card?
I'm curious.. Are you getting dual processors just to say you have it, or do you actually have a use in mind for this machine?
It sounds like buying a thoroughbred arabian and breaking its legs.