I've had one for almost a year. I got it before Dothan shipped so it's a 1.7ghz Banias. I put in 2GB of Kingmax PC2700, a 60GB Hitachi 7200rpm, and bought a Lacie 4x DVD+/-RW.
I use it for lots of things. I decided to go to South Africa to find a mate and didn't bring my desktop, so it's been my primary computer for awhile now. I tried drawing with it but I'm still not very good. However my mate is quite good and he likes to draw in sketchbook all the time. Sometimes I don't see the laptop all night. You can see some of it here: http://furaffinity.net/user.php?name=miktar
I agree on the screen being hard to see in daylight, but there's ways to improve that. Have a look at http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ ID=18021&SearchTerms=M200,MMI,screen It's not cheap, but I'm told it does make a good difference and they're a Toshiba authorized servicer so it won't void your warranty having the LCD modified by them. Also they can get rid of that dust that gets inside the screen via the badly sealed microphone ports.
In hindsight the Lacie drive is crap. It was cheaper than Toshiba's CDRW but it can't run on the USB power, it needs to be plugged in. I've seen other laptops like Thinkpads that can power it fine, but Toshiba won't talk to me about any kind of BIOS update or something to increase the USB power. If I was buying one now I'd just get an external 5.25" bay and put an NEC 3520A in it since it needs to be plugged in anyway.
However, putting the stock HD into a 2.5" USB case was one of the best things I ever did. I can't count the number of times I've used it to exchange files with people. It works fine on one USB's power.
The bluetooth is nice, I use it to send things to cellphones and PDAs alot. The Intel 802.11b/g wireless also has excellent range I found. The built in SD reader is also convenient though I wish it wasn't such a hassle to boot off it.
I do play some games on it and the FX 5200 is just barely enough to run things decently. You can go to a lanparty and play Quake 3 or UT 2004 without crying.
Overall it's a nice machine, it's like buying a small Wacom Cintiq and getting a free laptop out of the deal.
I agree much of the user produced stuff is going to be total crap. It always is with ANY game, massively multiplayer or no.
But the real staying power of the few outstanding games in other genres has been the ability of users to add their own content.
Consider what map making did for doom, quake, and the like. Or strategy games like Command & Conquer.
Or how about what Counterstrike did for Halflife? I'd argue that even given the original game's wonderful singleplayer story, there's no way interest would have been kept alive and generated at the level halflife2 is seeing without seeing popular mods like CS.
Yes much user content is crap, but these games weed it out through a self-maintaining process. Maps that suck just aren't played. Mods with imbalances are fixed or not played. If you let the users both create/modify the environment and control it by popular vote, the best content will usually come into the spotlight.
The first masively multiplayer game that gets this right, and lets you make zones like you would for an RTS game, and mods like you would for an FPS game, and vehicles like you would for a sim game, all to complement the RPG's traditional strongpoint of character creation, will be the one that lasts.
From what I've seen second life is a good step towards this, but it really needs a modern high speed engine. It absolutely chugs even on state of the art systems. Not exactly great for action gaming.
I really felt bad for the guy, it sucks that he has all these problems
But then I read he's got a 4 month stable contract at $30/hour and pays $320/month on a 2 year old car.
Well boo hoo. I work in the NY area. I'm lucky if I can get a contract to go 4 WEEKS at $100/day cash (works out to 12.50/hr assuming 8 hrs) from a boss I loathe who only calls me when he's desperate and tries to make me work as much unpaid overtime as possible doing things like loading and driving a truck so he can milk what he's paying me as much as possible. I know he's raking it in because these are state agency contracts, various state departments doing rollouts and migrations. I've overheard phonecalls that make me pretty sure he's billing out a ton of us at more than double what he pays us, plus he gets paid more than us from the employer for himself anyway.
Sometimes I can find other work on the side. I might have 20 hours or so coming up at $12/hour doing random IT stuff. Last time I worked with these guys I moved their servers to their new data center, which wasn't bad. Before that it was making ethernet cables by hand for the same. The work's not bad but it's once in a few weeks at low pay.
Yeah this guy has a family and rent and I don't, but he could ditch the leased car and drive a 10 year old junker like I do.
He doesn't wanna put his family with friends/relatives but in that situation it'd probably be better to do so and see them on the weekends than watch them starve to death.
I just love how articles are like "New York is the #1 spot for IT jobs!" Do they ever actually check places like craigslist? Yeah it's the #1 spot for jobs if you're a database developer that knows HTML, Javascript, ASP.NET, PHP, Java, flash, and can admin exchange, oracle, and notes in your spare time for $30k/year. Make sure you have a BS or MS in comp sci and 5 years experience with.NET before you consider applying.
Except for a bad 128MB DIMM I had in 1998 from Micron/Crucial, that they refused to honor the lifetime warranty on because they said "Oh we don't support end users, you have to be an OEM." even though it came back bad on every ram test when I first got it and I still had the recipt and the reseller said "It's a manufacturer lifetime warranty, it has to go through them." I haven't had a problem either.
Of course since then, I haven't bought any of their RAM, and the 2GB of Kingmax SODIMMs in my Toshiba M200 is just fine so far.
The problem with MMORPgs and "poor feature creep" and "newbie dominance" is that most companies that are putting MMORPGs on the market want to invest in the engine, and then have the game sit in maintenance mode for 5 years while people pay a monthly fee.
OF COURSE this is going to lose to newbies as the people in it the longest get bored and technology marches on making the engine seem dated. The traditional response to this is "expansions" to try and milk the existing infrastructure for more than it's worth by providing something for people who have already done everything they care to do in the original game.
If MMOs had a 1-2 year lifecycle target (about the development time for a major game these days) instead of these 5 year business plans, you wouldn't need to worry about getting newbies in while retaining the veterans and constant grief/nerf patches and confusing expansions. You would just say "Look, here's the game. It has a scripted timetable and is designed to play through month X of year Y, after which we will phase out support for a new game." Now this will obviously draw heat from "Well what if I didn't get on when the game started and now it's half over it's not fair!" Well there's lots of competition in the market now. Some people want to jump onboard early to become major powers. Others don't care as much and just want a game that they know is stable and has good content, so they'll wait a bit. I'm sure there'd be enough to go around for everyone as this would create more games in the market at once.
People will go buy your new game if your old game was good. This is proven over and over. Gaming is becoming more like hollywood in that gamers are becoming sensitive to the names behind the product and following the ones they like. You don't need to design a game to last forever hoping to keep people, what you need to do is design another better game with the things people like and improve upon it. Then people will buy the new game.
Also, it's about time we need to see MMO games adopt more flexible pricing structures. If you're an addict with no job, school, or life, then $14.95/month is a pretty good deal for 1000 hours of play per month. If you're a "normal" person who can only play an hour a day and maybe 5 on the weekends, then it's not such a great deal. If you're someone who's gotten talked into trying it out by your friends and only want to log on for an hour on saturday to see what everyone's up to, then it sucks. We need to see things like price per game hour plans, or limited time per month plans. Things like $3.99/month for 3 hours/day max, or $4.95 for 50 hours of gameplay whenever you get around to it. Yes the unlimited pricing is good, but you'll attract a whole new class of people if you make the pricing more attractive for the casual gamers, AKA newbies. Also, trying to do this per game is taxing on people playing multiple games from the same studio. If I want to play everquest and starwars galaxies, I should only need to pay one monthly fee. It's pretty obvious I'm not going to be playing both at once, I'll haeve to split my time between them. MMO monthly fees should be company-wide. The price per game hour plans would negate this issue and make pricing fair for players of multiple MMOs.
Also, seeing MMOs take advantage of the tendancy of people to sell off their stuff would be interesting. Instead of banning ebay in the license agreement, why not embrace it and have your own in-game market where you take a percentage? Alot of people have money but not time. Right now they're at a huge disadvantage to those with time but not money. If I work full time and my friend doesn't, I can't keep up with him in game. If I could buy my way up then it wouldn't be as much of an issue. If people could sell their high powered characters and equipment then they could probably fund their entire experience with some effort and not have to pay monthly fees they might not be able to afford. Second Life does something like this now, and it seems to work.
Yes enough storage. Large organizations aren't utilizing their storage very efficiently. I see tons of places get even lowend machines with 40GB HDs that never even use 1/4 of the capacity. Someone needs to start writing apps that can use that as a distributed virtual NAS with variable redundancy to prevent any single point of failure from losing data. The average office user doesn't need a 40 or 80 or 160GB disk, but the price difference is trivial. There's money to be made in finding ways to put that unused space to use through software.
The places I'm thinking of in this example involve about half a dozen state agencies I've done work for in the last year. 400 new machines * 30GB of unused space per machine = 12TB of unused storage. Oh but it's "enterprise class" stuff you need so obviously off the shelf ATA HDs won't cut it right? How much reliability do you need? You could implement a distributed mirroring system (think distributed hotspare) that has far less impact than a parity system like RAID5 and could have the redundancy level adjusted to any failure tolerance you're comfortable with. 20% failure tolerance would get you 10TB, doubling their online storage. And that's with small HDs. Imagine if you've got a couple thousand 160s in the building.
At home I have a 360GB RAID that I've had for about 2 years now, it replaced my 180GB RAID from about 2 years before that. I'm considering a larger array with 1-2TB of capacity sometime in the next year, though I've found getting a DVD writer has relieved alot of the upgrade pressure, or I'd probably have upgraded already.
Being able to store all the media you want in online storage isn't what I mean by enough storage. Being able to store all the data you use on a regular basis without having to hunt through a stack of disks is enough storage. The rest can be kept offline on burned discs these days. Compare that to having to hunt for the 5.25" floppy with the program you wanted on it back in the day. There was a time when software designers couldn't assume you'd be running from a hard disk with all the files readily available and would have to accomodate swapping floppies.
Having every song, movie, and photo you own at your fingertips is a luxury, not a necessity. It's sure nice though.
First of all, Moore said nothing about storage, only transistors in semiconductors.
If we assume there is a similar correlation with density on magnetic media, it still doesn't necessarily mean it's slowing down now.
AFAIK, drives had a major slowdown in the past around the 8GB mark and then suddenly 20GB->120GB appeared very rapidly, and then slowed down a bit then. I'd need to do alot of research and get some actual data before making a statement about exponential growth of magnetic storage density and whether or not it is feasible to continue or at what rate in the future.
Also, narrowing the comparison to just SCSI devices is foolish, as they are rapidly being supplanted by cheaper ATA based devices. Yes SCSI is superior, it always has been. Except in one place, cost per unit storage. And as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.
Also, lower costs disks such as SATA enable alternate means of increasing capacity and performance such as low cost RAID. SCSI used the RAID argument over mainframe SLED solutions to win in the market. Now mainstream SATA drives are using the exact same argument vs SCSI. The same principles that were true in the 80s and 90s are true now: more disks have inherant advantages, and can be flexibly arranged to provide whichever one you want whether it's performance, capacity, or reliability, in varying degrees. All for lower cost even with the added hardware overhead of the controller.
Finally, there's one more factor that can be causing the slowdown in disk expansion. The fact that file sizes do not expand at the same rate, so demand for larger storage is being outpaced by the increase in density. I'd be interested in seeing what the average webpage size is from 1994-2004. I'm sure it goes up really quick as features like image support and frames first come in, but then mostly levels off. Word processor documents, even bloated by modern office suites, are still not more than an order of magnitude larger than they were 20 years ago. People still put their school papers and resumes on (GASP!) floppy disks. And their rate of density increase has been zero for quite some time, discounting alternate formats such as zip and usb flash.
As storage continues to increase, we're seeing people actually have enough storage. I remember having to pick which games I could install on my 286 and 486. Now I just throw them on and by the time my disk fills in a year I just buy more disk as it's that cheap. My 105MB hardcard for my 286 cost ~$700 in 1989 or so. The 1.7GB fast SCSI-2 Micropolis HD I upgraded my 486 with the 525MB SCSI-2 Conner cost $900 in 1994. These days I could go grab a 200GB disk for $99 on sale. But the point isn't that the technology is better. In 1994 the biggest disk I could get was about 9GB and cost thousands. These days if I want the bigest thing on the block it's 400GB and costs under $400. What the average user gets in a new machine is much closer to the most advanced part in the market than it was 15 years ago when we had 340GB HDs in home machines and 4GB HDs in highend servers. Where did the highend disks go? RAID replaced them. These days if you want an order of magnitude more than what a major OEM ships as standard (Say, 160GB*10) you go for a RAID, either SCSI or ATA.
Once you're paying for RAID hardware you're getting performance levels in the enabling hardware that make SCSI irrelevant. SCSI has a 320MB/sec bus, command queueing on drives, and a dedicated CPU and cache on the host controller. A highend SATA RAID like 3Ware has 150MB/sec per drive non-shared switched bandwidth, command queuing on drives, and a dedicated CPU and cache on the host controller. Only the 3Ware setup will give you VASTLY more bang for the buck because you can buy more and larger disks to give whatever performance/capacity/reliability you want. A 12 drive SATA RAID10 is going to utterly destroy a 5 drive SCSI RAID5 in every possible way except for thermal output and physical space, which can be
Yes, it would be great to add cache to SATA drives. Or wait, how about an onboard CPU to offload the processor? Oh and wait, let's add RAID5 xoring too! Oh and command queuing, elevator sort seek optimizations, and all the other nice SCSI stuff.
Recently I started a thread on the COH suggestion forums that got a high rating about wanting a new ski area zone after having seen how ice worked in one of the missions I played. I also mentioned in a later post if there was a map editing tool I'd probably make it myself.
Do you think most future MMORPGs are going to stay with the developer-based content model like COH and Everquest, or do you think we'll begin seeing more user-based content such as in Second Life?
Do you think Cryptic will ever release some kind of content editor (aside from the already incredible character creator) to the users?
The real reason Kerry will win is because the polls are very wrong. Just as generals always "plan to win the last war" the polls are showing methods designed to win the last election.
When they poll "likely voters" they ignore, among other considerations, people who have cellphones. AFAIK, they only poll over land lines.
Also, there's huge assumptions in the statistical breakdown of voting age. Young voters often don't care about the election and have the lowest turnout. However, many people are so worked up over this election and the results of the last one that I believe we'll see the highest percentage of young voters in a long time. Most younger voters lean more towards the left.
Thus the polls are skewed because their assumptions are totally wrong. Given that it's a dead heat in most polls right now, Kerry should come out ahead.
Unless there's some kind of cheating/manipulation of the election, but what are the odds of that?
This is why I quit trying to sell computers. I had a DBA from 97 to about 2000 or so by the name of Kick@ss Computers (everyone at PC Expo loved it). I sold maybe 2 machines to friends and made less than the late fees I got from my quarterly tax fillings being lost in the mail.
People, even good friends or family, would come to me and ask me what to buy. Then they'd go by some piece of crap from gateway, or worse some whitebox from a place that doesn't have a single employee that speaks non-broken english.
All because they wanted to save $150 on a $2000 system.
BTW, my computers including my laptop were all SCSI from 1992-2001, at which time I replaced the drives with IDE RAIDs on hardware controllers. And I have my really critical stuff mirrored to multiple machines. And backed up on a cd/dvd at least monthly, if not more often when I make a major update like a new program. And I keep multiple copies with friends in case the house burns down. I'm probably going to buy a 1GB flash card (I have about 550MB in source, documents, and old pictures) to keep in my wallet as a master copy for syncing and because flash is extremely durable (even if nailed to a tree).
Can you make a reliable PC? One of the few I built is still running. I built it in early summer 1998. Yes it was a SCSI machine, it had a lowend but extremely well supported tekram controller, a 7200rpm ultrastar, and an ultraplex. The first part to fail on it was the power supply in 2002, due to the house having bad power. I tried getting them on a UPS, but it didn't work. APC says the voltage must be dipping below 90 or over 130 for that to happen, which explains why the PS died. The rest of the machine works fine. It's a win98 machine that's had a broadband connection for 4 years. I suspect it's about due for a cleanout or replacement soon. I'll check it when I'm visiting this thanksgiving.
If you really want a reliable game console, buy 2 and save one in a closet or pick one up on ebay after yours dies. The old ones weren't necessarily more reliable. I went through 3 NES, 2 colecovisions, and 2 playstation 1s, but I'm still on my first xbox. And my first vectrex. =)
More confusion = more google searching to find what the hell you're looking for.
Though I'm getting really sick of searching for something and then finding a scam searchengine page that justs list thousands of random combinations of words as links.
A clip on battery. Just like the first addon for the Advance was a clip on light so you could see the awful screen. And the first one for the SP was a headphone jack to replace the one nintendo took out.
Game systems often have their weak points adressed by other companies. Except Microsoft, who decided just outright buying Bungie was better than waiting for someone to fix their no games anyone gives a damn about problem.
Or do they do what Optimum Online does? Anytime you're using more than a trickle of upstream for more than a few hours, they permanently lock your upstream down to 15% of what you're supposed to get. It's like whee yay fast upload! Oh sorry you can't do anything with it or we take it away.
Nintendo Gameboys and DVD players and TIVOs.
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How Cheap Can A PC Be?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Seriously. Have you seen the specs on the Advance series? They sell for what, $80? With a screen?
Dump the LCD, it's too small for reasonable work. Replace it with TV out. Yes TV is sucky but most can (barely) manage readable text in 640x480 for simple wordprocessing and browsing. I'm betting someone in the next 10 years *cough*china*cough* will develop a digital TV cheap enough to penetrate the 3rd world markets, which should improve things dramaticly. But for now, TV out would suffice, and removing the LCD would probably save at least 20% on the price per unit.
Add a USB port. Just has to be at least one. You can always daisy chain a keyboard and mouse like apple was often fond of. GBA's already have a link system, and wasn't firewire co-developed by apple and nintendo?
Add ethernet. I doubt you could do wireless in the price range, but eventually it'll happen. Generic 100M cards go in 99 cent bins these days. You can even find gigabit cards on sale for under $20. 802.11 cards will follow, though it's not necessary either way, just convenient.
Now someone out there is saying "Wait, what about the disk?" Ok now, repeat after me "There is no disk." Wait, what? You heard me, no disk. How? We centralize the disk on a NAS, and use a bootstrap flash rom similar to a GBA cartridge. This way, you can distribute disk cost among many clients, which is FAR more efficient per GB. Consider a 160GB disk costs barely more than a 20GB disk these days. It's not even twice as much! (seriously, pricewatch has cheapest 20GB @ $33, 160GB 7200rpm @ $66!) By using ROMs with individual user keys, they boot up and request a specific user directory on the NAS, so data can be private, even encrypted. Also, assuming 802.16 really delivers on its promise, consider how many clients even a modest disk and router could serve in the 3rd world. Assuming we use a very light distro (possibly fitting everything but the apps on the boot flash!), what's the average user disk use in the real world? Exclude multimedia files. Hmm gee, those business documents and emails aren't all that big are they? A 160GB disk could probably serve at least 100 users if you restrict the kind of content they can store (just restrict the apps they can use), and that's being pessimistic. Plus disks will continue to grow, so adding more capacity is easy. Ok fine, you don't want to be draconian about file storage. So give each user a reasonable space, say 16GB. Figure it formats down to about 13GB. That's still enough for 3GB of apps and 10GB of files. Say that again, 10GB of files. Can you imagine telling someone from 1994 "You can only store 10GB of files"? Because that's the kind of data storage we're looking at here.
Don't like gameboys? Too much modding work? How bout a DVD player? Ever seen one of those under $100? Umm yeah. Does it have TV out? Yeah. Could it have USB? I don't see why not. Networking? Oh come on, ethernet cards are almost literally a dime a dozen. Processing power? It can decode mpeg2. My pentium 2 300 could barely manage that. And that's minimum spec. I'm betting modern DVD players have all sorts of fancy stuff that takes more CPU anyway.
Yeah I bet you don't like my distributed disk idea either huh? Ok then, how's this work for ya: My old DSS reciever died last week. I went around pricing a new one. Turns out Circuit City is having a sale. They've got an RCA DSS reciever WITH AN 80GB TIVO BUILT IN for $99.95! What ISN'T this machine? Does it have display? Yes, to TV, often to multiple formats. Does it have storage? Hello! 80GB! Does it take media? Hooking a DVD reader to it would probably be trivial, considering it has an IDE disk inside. Networking? It already recieves digital video over a coax cable! It's a cablemodem for all effective purposes! Keyboard/mouse etc? Most of them already have USB or firewire anyway, again trivial.
The HUGE advantage linux has over windows in the 3rd world is PORTABILITY. When you can run the OS on virtually ANY hardware with a recompile, it means you're not constrained to an expensive platform designed for high performance. The only way MS will threaten this is with ports of the CLR virtual machine that.NET runs on, and I'm betting it'll be a while before appliances are running that.
I remember being 11 and since I was in the "advanced" math group, we were being taught the beginnings of algebra. Basic stuff like exponents and solving x + 7 = 5 solve for x, etc. I noticed an interesting shortcut for figuring out the square of a number. I could always just get the square of the previous number and add two, and it was always an odd number. So, not knowing all the symbols and stuff I wrote down an explanation of this somewhat like "If you have x^2, then all you have to do is start with 1, and for every square bigger the difference is you add two." A little while after this I was graphing Y=X and noticed that the row and columns that intersected it were always one larger each time Y=X grew by one. I knew the area of the square covered by it was related, and when I worked out the numbers I figured out how it related to what I was talking about earlier, and then wrote that down too.
My teacher, when I showed this too her just went "that's nice, but you shouldn't use shortcuts for things like squaring numbers because shortcuts don't always work and you might get it wrong and then if you can't show your work you get no credit." My parents did something similar. Even when I used the same things for a "math project" we were made to do in 9th grade or so a few years later, I got alot of "Well it's interesting but so what?" even though by then I'd found a way to expand it to more than squares. The way I did was after alot of agonizing time with a calculator trying to figure out the shortcut for cubes, I figured out that all you have to do to make a bigger cube is take the existing cube, throw a square of depth 1 on each side, throw 3 lines of length one an depth 1 inbetween those squares, and then throw an extra 1x1x1 in the corner. Doing it with a 4D version (which I didn't know the name for at the time but I'd assume it's a tesseract) I guessed would involve adding some cubes, some squares, some lines, and the 1 block again. After a bunch of work with a pocket calculator doing trial and error I figured out it was 4 cubes, 6 squares, and 4 lines. And from there I figured out a way to get the answers for higher numbers in the X^N series.
But nobody ever really cared when I showed it to them.
10 years later, I was forced to retake calculus 2 in college after my school decided my AP credit now only counted for calc 1 instead of 1 and 2 because they'd switched from 3 credit to 4 credit classes. Since I barely remembered my precalc stuff I had my mother ship out all my math notebooks (which is easy when you've been colorcoding your notes by subject all through HS) so I'd at least have all my old cheatsheets.
When I got the oldest yellow book in the stack, I flipped through it and found the pages where I'd first written this stuff. I reread it and then it suddenly made alot more sense when I knew what symbols you'd really use to express that idea. They were:
X^2 dy/dx = 2x+1 and (integral)2x = X^2
and the expanded form from later? x^3 = 3x^2 + 3x + 1 x^4 = 4x^3 + 6x^2 + 4x + 1
and from there figuring out if you lined them up in a row and added the two numbers on either side from the row above you go the next row, like this:
These days of course, nobody ever believes me when I tell them I figured all this stuff out between the ages of 11 and 14.
To this day I still hate math, and can't do algebraic long division because I use my own shortcuts for doing it with actual numbers, much to the dismay of my statistics professor who was amazed I could divide 5 numbers into 9 in my head in less than 10 minutes but not simplest algebraic equations into another even with writing it out and all the time in the world.
Try the first rule of showbusiness: Give the people what they WANT.
People don't really want a messenger service bugging them to setup a.net passport that people can exploit to spam them. They want some specific things in roughly this priority for most people:
1. Enough of an office suite to get their basic work done. 2. Games that actually work without having to do 40 driver updates and config tweaking. 3. Integrated messaging for the services they use already. 4. Integrated antivirus. 5. Integrated utilities such as compression, disk maintenance, and settings migration/sync to portables and other machines. 6. Integrated antispyware. 7. An automaticly upgraded popup/ad/spam/antiworm system like a dynamicly maintained.hosts file. 8. Integrated multimedia apps like photo/video/audio editing.
As for MS, Office is so often bundled they're basicly getting the #1 priority all of the time, and trying really hard to keep people locked into their solution. As long as they can maintain that, they'll likely stay on top becuase people just can't rationalize giving up their primary work app when all their files since the beginning of time are slaved to it.
MS is doing pretty good on #2 as well, games mostly work these days and work well and fast. It's nothing at all like the days of making a custom config.sys and autoexec.bat to get enough memory and the right drivers for each game.
#3 has enough free options that it's usually not an issue, but IMs are so common now they should just be in the OS so people don't have to go download them. EVERYONE uses it.
#4 is an industry unto itself now but people seem to be getting pretty miffed at having to spend $50-100 for software that then wants you to pay $20/month after awhile to keep it from falling apart. Especially something that's become essential due mostly to software engineers not doing their jobs right.
#5 is something that was done halfassed. Yes XP can now read zip files (yay!) but really this needs to be fleshed out to cover all kinds of file and compression formats and add alot better maintenance than "Desktop cleanup wizard". MS automaticly updates things like THEIR codecs in media player, but if you want divx, xvid, real, etc, you're going to spend alot of time downloading things and praying you don't get spyware.
#6 Is a no brainer. Why the antivirus companies are not catering to this market is beyond me. Most people see spyware as a more immediate threat and annoyance due to the constant popups and browser hijacks, so they're willing to spend more on it than antivirus. But there's very little out there on the market. Yes adaware is great but how often do you see it on the shelves at CompUSA? Again this is something that should be fixed in the OS and probably legislated against so that the number of people trying to exploit the system for it goes down.
7. Again a no-brainer. Firefox does a decent job of this, but doesn't get rid of it completely. MS is starting to catch on, hence the popup blocker in SP2, but it still needs to be done a bit more agressively. I'd pay a decent amount per months for a system that would dynamicly log where all the ads come from and then just add the IPs of their servers to my firewall list.
8. Apple is winning tons of people here, and MS is ignoring it. So many people do photo work with digital cameras these days, this should be an obvious integration point. People will start demanding video and audio soon too. Yet the only decent solutions are $300+ apps like photoshop and premiere that you have to buy seperate. Most causual users aren't gonna spend that to remove the redeye from junior's 2nd birthday party. Granted most digital cameras come with some laughable halfassed attempt at photoediting software but the proprietary interfaces on them are HORRIBLE.
Now, the various other OS options out there do better and worse on various points. MS doesn't seem to want to integrate anything useful anymore. App
Advertising makes me want to NOT buy the product of whoever's annoying me the most. Example: I was fairly impressed by Capital One's ads for "no hassle" credit cards. Since I despise being hassled, I considered applying for one. But then I started getting tons of popups for them when I used my web based email, so I decided they were too annoying and hipocritical, so I didn't get one.
Few things piss me off as much as "The Twenty" in movie theaters. It's downright insulting. The ads are all short attention span even though you're basicly a captive audience. And then they have the balls to REVIEW THE CRAP YOU JUST SAW at the end of it, in case you forgot something that made you want to claw your eyes out. This is before the 15 mins of trailers and after the half hour of advertising slides you're subjected to when you try to get to a movie early enough to get a decent seat.
Whatever happened to it being free services (like broadcast TV) had advertising, and pay services (like movies and cable) were ad free? That was THE ENTIRE POINT OF PAYING FOR THEM!
I'd gladly pay someone to reduce the amount of advertising bullshit in my life, in fact I've considered starting a business that does just that, if I could find the capital.
P.S. Firefox doesn't block everything, unless you want to spend eternity editing adblock filters. It's also been the #1 most crash-prone app on my system in the last year.
The coders of this program were quite retarded. On install it immediately tries to install to a preset path on C: with no option to change it. For me, this means it immediately bitches about less than 1GB free on C: and dies. I emailed google's support telling them that it's unlikely a small partition designed just to fit my OS will ever have 1GB or more free though it's welcome to use the hundreds of GB on the other partition in my system. They said they might allow you to specify where it installs to someday, maybe, possibly, if they feel like it.
Why not just boot of a flash drive or an array of flash drives then? The seek time would be about 2 orders of magnitude better. They make IDE to compact flash adapters, go get one.
More drives equals more performance. A six drive RAID-5 will outperform a three drive RAID-5. With smaller drives you can fit more of them in a 1U system.
Only if your traffic is primarily reads. If your server is doing heavy writes, the more drives in a RAID5 the slower your writes will be. This is because RAID5 writes require dependant reads to generate the parity data. To write to 1 drive, you need to perform n-1 reads an XOR and two writes.
However, if you can fit many drives and aren't pressed for capacity, a RAID10 would be vastly superior in all ways except capacity/price.
Yes indeed. 486 SX, 25mhz, 4MB RAM, 127MB HD, SVGA up to 1024x768x256 (external monitor only, LCD max 640x480x256), 16bit sound, optional 2x CD-ROM on the docking station (which takes the weight from 6lbs to 10), and onboard SCSI. Is the internal HD SCSI? I'm not entirely sure, I haven't opened it up. But it certainly hooks up to external SCSI devices just fine.
Why don't I have linux on it? Because I can't seem to find a distro that does anything useful in 4MB RAM and this thing is so old no chance of finding memory for it anymore.
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I've had one for almost a year. I got it before Dothan shipped so it's a 1.7ghz Banias. I put in 2GB of Kingmax PC2700, a 60GB Hitachi 7200rpm, and bought a Lacie 4x DVD+/-RW.
_ ID=18021&SearchTerms=M200,MMI,screen
I use it for lots of things. I decided to go to South Africa to find a mate and didn't bring my desktop, so it's been my primary computer for awhile now. I tried drawing with it but I'm still not very good. However my mate is quite good and he likes to draw in sketchbook all the time. Sometimes I don't see the laptop all night. You can see some of it here: http://furaffinity.net/user.php?name=miktar
I agree on the screen being hard to see in daylight, but there's ways to improve that. Have a look at http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC
It's not cheap, but I'm told it does make a good difference and they're a Toshiba authorized servicer so it won't void your warranty having the LCD modified by them. Also they can get rid of that dust that gets inside the screen via the badly sealed microphone ports.
In hindsight the Lacie drive is crap. It was cheaper than Toshiba's CDRW but it can't run on the USB power, it needs to be plugged in. I've seen other laptops like Thinkpads that can power it fine, but Toshiba won't talk to me about any kind of BIOS update or something to increase the USB power. If I was buying one now I'd just get an external 5.25" bay and put an NEC 3520A in it since it needs to be plugged in anyway.
However, putting the stock HD into a 2.5" USB case was one of the best things I ever did. I can't count the number of times I've used it to exchange files with people. It works fine on one USB's power.
The bluetooth is nice, I use it to send things to cellphones and PDAs alot. The Intel 802.11b/g wireless also has excellent range I found. The built in SD reader is also convenient though I wish it wasn't such a hassle to boot off it.
I do play some games on it and the FX 5200 is just barely enough to run things decently. You can go to a lanparty and play Quake 3 or UT 2004 without crying.
Overall it's a nice machine, it's like buying a small Wacom Cintiq and getting a free laptop out of the deal.
This was my question and I'm glad it got asked.
I agree much of the user produced stuff is going to be total crap. It always is with ANY game, massively multiplayer or no.
But the real staying power of the few outstanding games in other genres has been the ability of users to add their own content.
Consider what map making did for doom, quake, and the like. Or strategy games like Command & Conquer.
Or how about what Counterstrike did for Halflife? I'd argue that even given the original game's wonderful singleplayer story, there's no way interest would have been kept alive and generated at the level halflife2 is seeing without seeing popular mods like CS.
Yes much user content is crap, but these games weed it out through a self-maintaining process. Maps that suck just aren't played. Mods with imbalances are fixed or not played. If you let the users both create/modify the environment and control it by popular vote, the best content will usually come into the spotlight.
The first masively multiplayer game that gets this right, and lets you make zones like you would for an RTS game, and mods like you would for an FPS game, and vehicles like you would for a sim game, all to complement the RPG's traditional strongpoint of character creation, will be the one that lasts.
From what I've seen second life is a good step towards this, but it really needs a modern high speed engine. It absolutely chugs even on state of the art systems. Not exactly great for action gaming.
I really felt bad for the guy, it sucks that he has all these problems
.NET before you consider applying.
But then I read he's got a 4 month stable contract at $30/hour and pays $320/month on a 2 year old car.
Well boo hoo. I work in the NY area. I'm lucky if I can get a contract to go 4 WEEKS at $100/day cash (works out to 12.50/hr assuming 8 hrs) from a boss I loathe who only calls me when he's desperate and tries to make me work as much unpaid overtime as possible doing things like loading and driving a truck so he can milk what he's paying me as much as possible. I know he's raking it in because these are state agency contracts, various state departments doing rollouts and migrations. I've overheard phonecalls that make me pretty sure he's billing out a ton of us at more than double what he pays us, plus he gets paid more than us from the employer for himself anyway.
Sometimes I can find other work on the side. I might have 20 hours or so coming up at $12/hour doing random IT stuff. Last time I worked with these guys I moved their servers to their new data center, which wasn't bad. Before that it was making ethernet cables by hand for the same. The work's not bad but it's once in a few weeks at low pay.
Yeah this guy has a family and rent and I don't, but he could ditch the leased car and drive a 10 year old junker like I do.
He doesn't wanna put his family with friends/relatives but in that situation it'd probably be better to do so and see them on the weekends than watch them starve to death.
I just love how articles are like "New York is the #1 spot for IT jobs!" Do they ever actually check places like craigslist? Yeah it's the #1 spot for jobs if you're a database developer that knows HTML, Javascript, ASP.NET, PHP, Java, flash, and can admin exchange, oracle, and notes in your spare time for $30k/year. Make sure you have a BS or MS in comp sci and 5 years experience with
Except for a bad 128MB DIMM I had in 1998 from Micron/Crucial, that they refused to honor the lifetime warranty on because they said "Oh we don't support end users, you have to be an OEM." even though it came back bad on every ram test when I first got it and I still had the recipt and the reseller said "It's a manufacturer lifetime warranty, it has to go through them." I haven't had a problem either.
Of course since then, I haven't bought any of their RAM, and the 2GB of Kingmax SODIMMs in my Toshiba M200 is just fine so far.
The problem with MMORPgs and "poor feature creep" and "newbie dominance" is that most companies that are putting MMORPGs on the market want to invest in the engine, and then have the game sit in maintenance mode for 5 years while people pay a monthly fee.
OF COURSE this is going to lose to newbies as the people in it the longest get bored and technology marches on making the engine seem dated. The traditional response to this is "expansions" to try and milk the existing infrastructure for more than it's worth by providing something for people who have already done everything they care to do in the original game.
If MMOs had a 1-2 year lifecycle target (about the development time for a major game these days) instead of these 5 year business plans, you wouldn't need to worry about getting newbies in while retaining the veterans and constant grief/nerf patches and confusing expansions. You would just say "Look, here's the game. It has a scripted timetable and is designed to play through month X of year Y, after which we will phase out support for a new game." Now this will obviously draw heat from "Well what if I didn't get on when the game started and now it's half over it's not fair!" Well there's lots of competition in the market now. Some people want to jump onboard early to become major powers. Others don't care as much and just want a game that they know is stable and has good content, so they'll wait a bit. I'm sure there'd be enough to go around for everyone as this would create more games in the market at once.
People will go buy your new game if your old game was good. This is proven over and over. Gaming is becoming more like hollywood in that gamers are becoming sensitive to the names behind the product and following the ones they like. You don't need to design a game to last forever hoping to keep people, what you need to do is design another better game with the things people like and improve upon it. Then people will buy the new game.
Also, it's about time we need to see MMO games adopt more flexible pricing structures. If you're an addict with no job, school, or life, then $14.95/month is a pretty good deal for 1000 hours of play per month. If you're a "normal" person who can only play an hour a day and maybe 5 on the weekends, then it's not such a great deal. If you're someone who's gotten talked into trying it out by your friends and only want to log on for an hour on saturday to see what everyone's up to, then it sucks. We need to see things like price per game hour plans, or limited time per month plans. Things like $3.99/month for 3 hours/day max, or $4.95 for 50 hours of gameplay whenever you get around to it. Yes the unlimited pricing is good, but you'll attract a whole new class of people if you make the pricing more attractive for the casual gamers, AKA newbies. Also, trying to do this per game is taxing on people playing multiple games from the same studio. If I want to play everquest and starwars galaxies, I should only need to pay one monthly fee. It's pretty obvious I'm not going to be playing both at once, I'll haeve to split my time between them. MMO monthly fees should be company-wide. The price per game hour plans would negate this issue and make pricing fair for players of multiple MMOs.
Also, seeing MMOs take advantage of the tendancy of people to sell off their stuff would be interesting. Instead of banning ebay in the license agreement, why not embrace it and have your own in-game market where you take a percentage? Alot of people have money but not time. Right now they're at a huge disadvantage to those with time but not money. If I work full time and my friend doesn't, I can't keep up with him in game. If I could buy my way up then it wouldn't be as much of an issue. If people could sell their high powered characters and equipment then they could probably fund their entire experience with some effort and not have to pay monthly fees they might not be able to afford. Second Life does something like this now, and it seems to work.
Yes enough storage. Large organizations aren't utilizing their storage very efficiently. I see tons of places get even lowend machines with 40GB HDs that never even use 1/4 of the capacity. Someone needs to start writing apps that can use that as a distributed virtual NAS with variable redundancy to prevent any single point of failure from losing data. The average office user doesn't need a 40 or 80 or 160GB disk, but the price difference is trivial. There's money to be made in finding ways to put that unused space to use through software.
The places I'm thinking of in this example involve about half a dozen state agencies I've done work for in the last year. 400 new machines * 30GB of unused space per machine = 12TB of unused storage. Oh but it's "enterprise class" stuff you need so obviously off the shelf ATA HDs won't cut it right? How much reliability do you need? You could implement a distributed mirroring system (think distributed hotspare) that has far less impact than a parity system like RAID5 and could have the redundancy level adjusted to any failure tolerance you're comfortable with. 20% failure tolerance would get you 10TB, doubling their online storage. And that's with small HDs. Imagine if you've got a couple thousand 160s in the building.
At home I have a 360GB RAID that I've had for about 2 years now, it replaced my 180GB RAID from about 2 years before that. I'm considering a larger array with 1-2TB of capacity sometime in the next year, though I've found getting a DVD writer has relieved alot of the upgrade pressure, or I'd probably have upgraded already.
Being able to store all the media you want in online storage isn't what I mean by enough storage. Being able to store all the data you use on a regular basis without having to hunt through a stack of disks is enough storage. The rest can be kept offline on burned discs these days. Compare that to having to hunt for the 5.25" floppy with the program you wanted on it back in the day. There was a time when software designers couldn't assume you'd be running from a hard disk with all the files readily available and would have to accomodate swapping floppies.
Having every song, movie, and photo you own at your fingertips is a luxury, not a necessity. It's sure nice though.
First of all, Moore said nothing about storage, only transistors in semiconductors.
If we assume there is a similar correlation with density on magnetic media, it still doesn't necessarily mean it's slowing down now.
AFAIK, drives had a major slowdown in the past around the 8GB mark and then suddenly 20GB->120GB appeared very rapidly, and then slowed down a bit then. I'd need to do alot of research and get some actual data before making a statement about exponential growth of magnetic storage density and whether or not it is feasible to continue or at what rate in the future.
Also, narrowing the comparison to just SCSI devices is foolish, as they are rapidly being supplanted by cheaper ATA based devices. Yes SCSI is superior, it always has been. Except in one place, cost per unit storage. And as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.
Also, lower costs disks such as SATA enable alternate means of increasing capacity and performance such as low cost RAID. SCSI used the RAID argument over mainframe SLED solutions to win in the market. Now mainstream SATA drives are using the exact same argument vs SCSI. The same principles that were true in the 80s and 90s are true now: more disks have inherant advantages, and can be flexibly arranged to provide whichever one you want whether it's performance, capacity, or reliability, in varying degrees. All for lower cost even with the added hardware overhead of the controller.
Finally, there's one more factor that can be causing the slowdown in disk expansion. The fact that file sizes do not expand at the same rate, so demand for larger storage is being outpaced by the increase in density. I'd be interested in seeing what the average webpage size is from 1994-2004. I'm sure it goes up really quick as features like image support and frames first come in, but then mostly levels off. Word processor documents, even bloated by modern office suites, are still not more than an order of magnitude larger than they were 20 years ago. People still put their school papers and resumes on (GASP!) floppy disks. And their rate of density increase has been zero for quite some time, discounting alternate formats such as zip and usb flash.
As storage continues to increase, we're seeing people actually have enough storage. I remember having to pick which games I could install on my 286 and 486. Now I just throw them on and by the time my disk fills in a year I just buy more disk as it's that cheap. My 105MB hardcard for my 286 cost ~$700 in 1989 or so. The 1.7GB fast SCSI-2 Micropolis HD I upgraded my 486 with the 525MB SCSI-2 Conner cost $900 in 1994. These days I could go grab a 200GB disk for $99 on sale. But the point isn't that the technology is better. In 1994 the biggest disk I could get was about 9GB and cost thousands. These days if I want the bigest thing on the block it's 400GB and costs under $400. What the average user gets in a new machine is much closer to the most advanced part in the market than it was 15 years ago when we had 340GB HDs in home machines and 4GB HDs in highend servers. Where did the highend disks go? RAID replaced them. These days if you want an order of magnitude more than what a major OEM ships as standard (Say, 160GB*10) you go for a RAID, either SCSI or ATA.
Once you're paying for RAID hardware you're getting performance levels in the enabling hardware that make SCSI irrelevant. SCSI has a 320MB/sec bus, command queueing on drives, and a dedicated CPU and cache on the host controller. A highend SATA RAID like 3Ware has 150MB/sec per drive non-shared switched bandwidth, command queuing on drives, and a dedicated CPU and cache on the host controller. Only the 3Ware setup will give you VASTLY more bang for the buck because you can buy more and larger disks to give whatever performance/capacity/reliability you want. A 12 drive SATA RAID10 is going to utterly destroy a 5 drive SCSI RAID5 in every possible way except for thermal output and physical space, which can be
Yes, it would be great to add cache to SATA drives. Or wait, how about an onboard CPU to offload the processor? Oh and wait, let's add RAID5 xoring too! Oh and command queuing, elevator sort seek optimizations, and all the other nice SCSI stuff.
If only someone made a product like that which supported many drives and most major OSes including linux...
If only I could find such a thing under this rock where I've been living the last few years!
Recently I started a thread on the COH suggestion forums that got a high rating about wanting a new ski area zone after having seen how ice worked in one of the missions I played. I also mentioned in a later post if there was a map editing tool I'd probably make it myself.
Do you think most future MMORPGs are going to stay with the developer-based content model like COH and Everquest, or do you think we'll begin seeing more user-based content such as in Second Life?
Do you think Cryptic will ever release some kind of content editor (aside from the already incredible character creator) to the users?
Bush is not another Hitler!
...Hitler had charisma.
/so going to hell but I don't care.
Actually electoral-vote.com now has Kerry ahead 283 to 246 as of 10/31.
The real reason Kerry will win is because the polls are very wrong. Just as generals always "plan to win the last war" the polls are showing methods designed to win the last election.
When they poll "likely voters" they ignore, among other considerations, people who have cellphones. AFAIK, they only poll over land lines.
Also, there's huge assumptions in the statistical breakdown of voting age. Young voters often don't care about the election and have the lowest turnout. However, many people are so worked up over this election and the results of the last one that I believe we'll see the highest percentage of young voters in a long time. Most younger voters lean more towards the left.
Thus the polls are skewed because their assumptions are totally wrong. Given that it's a dead heat in most polls right now, Kerry should come out ahead.
Unless there's some kind of cheating/manipulation of the election, but what are the odds of that?
This is why I quit trying to sell computers. I had a DBA from 97 to about 2000 or so by the name of Kick@ss Computers (everyone at PC Expo loved it). I sold maybe 2 machines to friends and made less than the late fees I got from my quarterly tax fillings being lost in the mail.
People, even good friends or family, would come to me and ask me what to buy. Then they'd go by some piece of crap from gateway, or worse some whitebox from a place that doesn't have a single employee that speaks non-broken english.
All because they wanted to save $150 on a $2000 system.
BTW, my computers including my laptop were all SCSI from 1992-2001, at which time I replaced the drives with IDE RAIDs on hardware controllers. And I have my really critical stuff mirrored to multiple machines. And backed up on a cd/dvd at least monthly, if not more often when I make a major update like a new program. And I keep multiple copies with friends in case the house burns down. I'm probably going to buy a 1GB flash card (I have about 550MB in source, documents, and old pictures) to keep in my wallet as a master copy for syncing and because flash is extremely durable (even if nailed to a tree).
Can you make a reliable PC? One of the few I built is still running. I built it in early summer 1998. Yes it was a SCSI machine, it had a lowend but extremely well supported tekram controller, a 7200rpm ultrastar, and an ultraplex. The first part to fail on it was the power supply in 2002, due to the house having bad power. I tried getting them on a UPS, but it didn't work. APC says the voltage must be dipping below 90 or over 130 for that to happen, which explains why the PS died. The rest of the machine works fine. It's a win98 machine that's had a broadband connection for 4 years. I suspect it's about due for a cleanout or replacement soon. I'll check it when I'm visiting this thanksgiving.
If you really want a reliable game console, buy 2 and save one in a closet or pick one up on ebay after yours dies. The old ones weren't necessarily more reliable. I went through 3 NES, 2 colecovisions, and 2 playstation 1s, but I'm still on my first xbox. And my first vectrex. =)
More confusion = more google searching to find what the hell you're looking for.
Though I'm getting really sick of searching for something and then finding a scam searchengine page that justs list thousands of random combinations of words as links.
A clip on battery. Just like the first addon for the Advance was a clip on light so you could see the awful screen. And the first one for the SP was a headphone jack to replace the one nintendo took out.
Game systems often have their weak points adressed by other companies. Except Microsoft, who decided just outright buying Bungie was better than waiting for someone to fix their no games anyone gives a damn about problem.
Or do they do what Optimum Online does? Anytime you're using more than a trickle of upstream for more than a few hours, they permanently lock your upstream down to 15% of what you're supposed to get. It's like whee yay fast upload! Oh sorry you can't do anything with it or we take it away.
Seriously. Have you seen the specs on the Advance series? They sell for what, $80? With a screen?
.NET runs on, and I'm betting it'll be a while before appliances are running that.
Dump the LCD, it's too small for reasonable work. Replace it with TV out. Yes TV is sucky but most can (barely) manage readable text in 640x480 for simple wordprocessing and browsing. I'm betting someone in the next 10 years *cough*china*cough* will develop a digital TV cheap enough to penetrate the 3rd world markets, which should improve things dramaticly. But for now, TV out would suffice, and removing the LCD would probably save at least 20% on the price per unit.
Add a USB port. Just has to be at least one. You can always daisy chain a keyboard and mouse like apple was often fond of. GBA's already have a link system, and wasn't firewire co-developed by apple and nintendo?
Add ethernet. I doubt you could do wireless in the price range, but eventually it'll happen. Generic 100M cards go in 99 cent bins these days. You can even find gigabit cards on sale for under $20. 802.11 cards will follow, though it's not necessary either way, just convenient.
Now someone out there is saying "Wait, what about the disk?" Ok now, repeat after me "There is no disk." Wait, what? You heard me, no disk. How? We centralize the disk on a NAS, and use a bootstrap flash rom similar to a GBA cartridge. This way, you can distribute disk cost among many clients, which is FAR more efficient per GB. Consider a 160GB disk costs barely more than a 20GB disk these days. It's not even twice as much! (seriously, pricewatch has cheapest 20GB @ $33, 160GB 7200rpm @ $66!) By using ROMs with individual user keys, they boot up and request a specific user directory on the NAS, so data can be private, even encrypted. Also, assuming 802.16 really delivers on its promise, consider how many clients even a modest disk and router could serve in the 3rd world. Assuming we use a very light distro (possibly fitting everything but the apps on the boot flash!), what's the average user disk use in the real world? Exclude multimedia files. Hmm gee, those business documents and emails aren't all that big are they? A 160GB disk could probably serve at least 100 users if you restrict the kind of content they can store (just restrict the apps they can use), and that's being pessimistic. Plus disks will continue to grow, so adding more capacity is easy. Ok fine, you don't want to be draconian about file storage. So give each user a reasonable space, say 16GB. Figure it formats down to about 13GB. That's still enough for 3GB of apps and 10GB of files. Say that again, 10GB of files. Can you imagine telling someone from 1994 "You can only store 10GB of files"? Because that's the kind of data storage we're looking at here.
Don't like gameboys? Too much modding work? How bout a DVD player? Ever seen one of those under $100? Umm yeah. Does it have TV out? Yeah. Could it have USB? I don't see why not. Networking? Oh come on, ethernet cards are almost literally a dime a dozen. Processing power? It can decode mpeg2. My pentium 2 300 could barely manage that. And that's minimum spec. I'm betting modern DVD players have all sorts of fancy stuff that takes more CPU anyway.
Yeah I bet you don't like my distributed disk idea either huh? Ok then, how's this work for ya: My old DSS reciever died last week. I went around pricing a new one. Turns out Circuit City is having a sale. They've got an RCA DSS reciever WITH AN 80GB TIVO BUILT IN for $99.95! What ISN'T this machine? Does it have display? Yes, to TV, often to multiple formats. Does it have storage? Hello! 80GB! Does it take media? Hooking a DVD reader to it would probably be trivial, considering it has an IDE disk inside. Networking? It already recieves digital video over a coax cable! It's a cablemodem for all effective purposes! Keyboard/mouse etc? Most of them already have USB or firewire anyway, again trivial.
The HUGE advantage linux has over windows in the 3rd world is PORTABILITY. When you can run the OS on virtually ANY hardware with a recompile, it means you're not constrained to an expensive platform designed for high performance. The only way MS will threaten this is with ports of the CLR virtual machine that
I remember being 11 and since I was in the "advanced" math group, we were being taught the beginnings of algebra. Basic stuff like exponents and solving x + 7 = 5 solve for x, etc. I noticed an interesting shortcut for figuring out the square of a number. I could always just get the square of the previous number and add two, and it was always an odd number. So, not knowing all the symbols and stuff I wrote down an explanation of this somewhat like "If you have x^2, then all you have to do is start with 1, and for every square bigger the difference is you add two." A little while after this I was graphing Y=X and noticed that the row and columns that intersected it were always one larger each time Y=X grew by one. I knew the area of the square covered by it was related, and when I worked out the numbers I figured out how it related to what I was talking about earlier, and then wrote that down too.
My teacher, when I showed this too her just went "that's nice, but you shouldn't use shortcuts for things like squaring numbers because shortcuts don't always work and you might get it wrong and then if you can't show your work you get no credit." My parents did something similar. Even when I used the same things for a "math project" we were made to do in 9th grade or so a few years later, I got alot of "Well it's interesting but so what?" even though by then I'd found a way to expand it to more than squares. The way I did was after alot of agonizing time with a calculator trying to figure out the shortcut for cubes, I figured out that all you have to do to make a bigger cube is take the existing cube, throw a square of depth 1 on each side, throw 3 lines of length one an depth 1 inbetween those squares, and then throw an extra 1x1x1 in the corner. Doing it with a 4D version (which I didn't know the name for at the time but I'd assume it's a tesseract) I guessed would involve adding some cubes, some squares, some lines, and the 1 block again. After a bunch of work with a pocket calculator doing trial and error I figured out it was 4 cubes, 6 squares, and 4 lines. And from there I figured out a way to get the answers for higher numbers in the X^N series.
But nobody ever really cared when I showed it to them.
10 years later, I was forced to retake calculus 2 in college after my school decided my AP credit now only counted for calc 1 instead of 1 and 2 because they'd switched from 3 credit to 4 credit classes. Since I barely remembered my precalc stuff I had my mother ship out all my math notebooks (which is easy when you've been colorcoding your notes by subject all through HS) so I'd at least have all my old cheatsheets.
When I got the oldest yellow book in the stack, I flipped through it and found the pages where I'd first written this stuff. I reread it and then it suddenly made alot more sense when I knew what symbols you'd really use to express that idea. They were:
X^2 dy/dx = 2x+1
and
(integral)2x = X^2
and the expanded form from later?
x^3 = 3x^2 + 3x + 1
x^4 = 4x^3 + 6x^2 + 4x + 1
and from there figuring out if you lined them up in a row and added the two numbers on either side from the row above you go the next row, like this:
1
1 2 1
1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1
1 5 10 10 5 1
1 6 15 20 15 6 1
etc.
These days of course, nobody ever believes me when I tell them I figured all this stuff out between the ages of 11 and 14.
To this day I still hate math, and can't do algebraic long division because I use my own shortcuts for doing it with actual numbers, much to the dismay of my statistics professor who was amazed I could divide 5 numbers into 9 in my head in less than 10 minutes but not simplest algebraic equations into another even with writing it out and all the time in the world.
Well it's not like there's a shortage of lemmings.
Try the first rule of showbusiness: Give the people what they WANT.
.net passport that people can exploit to spam them. They want some specific things in roughly this priority for most people:
.hosts file.
People don't really want a messenger service bugging them to setup a
1. Enough of an office suite to get their basic work done.
2. Games that actually work without having to do 40 driver updates and config tweaking.
3. Integrated messaging for the services they use already.
4. Integrated antivirus.
5. Integrated utilities such as compression, disk maintenance, and settings migration/sync to portables and other machines.
6. Integrated antispyware.
7. An automaticly upgraded popup/ad/spam/antiworm system like a dynamicly maintained
8. Integrated multimedia apps like photo/video/audio editing.
As for MS, Office is so often bundled they're basicly getting the #1 priority all of the time, and trying really hard to keep people locked into their solution. As long as they can maintain that, they'll likely stay on top becuase people just can't rationalize giving up their primary work app when all their files since the beginning of time are slaved to it.
MS is doing pretty good on #2 as well, games mostly work these days and work well and fast. It's nothing at all like the days of making a custom config.sys and autoexec.bat to get enough memory and the right drivers for each game.
#3 has enough free options that it's usually not an issue, but IMs are so common now they should just be in the OS so people don't have to go download them. EVERYONE uses it.
#4 is an industry unto itself now but people seem to be getting pretty miffed at having to spend $50-100 for software that then wants you to pay $20/month after awhile to keep it from falling apart. Especially something that's become essential due mostly to software engineers not doing their jobs right.
#5 is something that was done halfassed. Yes XP can now read zip files (yay!) but really this needs to be fleshed out to cover all kinds of file and compression formats and add alot better maintenance than "Desktop cleanup wizard". MS automaticly updates things like THEIR codecs in media player, but if you want divx, xvid, real, etc, you're going to spend alot of time downloading things and praying you don't get spyware.
#6 Is a no brainer. Why the antivirus companies are not catering to this market is beyond me. Most people see spyware as a more immediate threat and annoyance due to the constant popups and browser hijacks, so they're willing to spend more on it than antivirus. But there's very little out there on the market. Yes adaware is great but how often do you see it on the shelves at CompUSA? Again this is something that should be fixed in the OS and probably legislated against so that the number of people trying to exploit the system for it goes down.
7. Again a no-brainer. Firefox does a decent job of this, but doesn't get rid of it completely. MS is starting to catch on, hence the popup blocker in SP2, but it still needs to be done a bit more agressively. I'd pay a decent amount per months for a system that would dynamicly log where all the ads come from and then just add the IPs of their servers to my firewall list.
8. Apple is winning tons of people here, and MS is ignoring it. So many people do photo work with digital cameras these days, this should be an obvious integration point. People will start demanding video and audio soon too. Yet the only decent solutions are $300+ apps like photoshop and premiere that you have to buy seperate. Most causual users aren't gonna spend that to remove the redeye from junior's 2nd birthday party. Granted most digital cameras come with some laughable halfassed attempt at photoediting software but the proprietary interfaces on them are HORRIBLE.
Now, the various other OS options out there do better and worse on various points. MS doesn't seem to want to integrate anything useful anymore. App
Advertising makes me want to NOT buy the product of whoever's annoying me the most. Example: I was fairly impressed by Capital One's ads for "no hassle" credit cards. Since I despise being hassled, I considered applying for one. But then I started getting tons of popups for them when I used my web based email, so I decided they were too annoying and hipocritical, so I didn't get one.
Few things piss me off as much as "The Twenty" in movie theaters. It's downright insulting. The ads are all short attention span even though you're basicly a captive audience. And then they have the balls to REVIEW THE CRAP YOU JUST SAW at the end of it, in case you forgot something that made you want to claw your eyes out. This is before the 15 mins of trailers and after the half hour of advertising slides you're subjected to when you try to get to a movie early enough to get a decent seat.
Whatever happened to it being free services (like broadcast TV) had advertising, and pay services (like movies and cable) were ad free? That was THE ENTIRE POINT OF PAYING FOR THEM!
I'd gladly pay someone to reduce the amount of advertising bullshit in my life, in fact I've considered starting a business that does just that, if I could find the capital.
P.S. Firefox doesn't block everything, unless you want to spend eternity editing adblock filters. It's also been the #1 most crash-prone app on my system in the last year.
The coders of this program were quite retarded. On install it immediately tries to install to a preset path on C: with no option to change it. For me, this means it immediately bitches about less than 1GB free on C: and dies. I emailed google's support telling them that it's unlikely a small partition designed just to fit my OS will ever have 1GB or more free though it's welcome to use the hundreds of GB on the other partition in my system. They said they might allow you to specify where it installs to someday, maybe, possibly, if they feel like it.
Why not just boot of a flash drive or an array of flash drives then? The seek time would be about 2 orders of magnitude better. They make IDE to compact flash adapters, go get one.
More drives equals more performance. A six drive RAID-5 will outperform a three drive RAID-5. With smaller drives you can fit more of them in a 1U system.
Only if your traffic is primarily reads. If your server is doing heavy writes, the more drives in a RAID5 the slower your writes will be. This is because RAID5 writes require dependant reads to generate the parity data. To write to 1 drive, you need to perform n-1 reads an XOR and two writes.
However, if you can fit many drives and aren't pressed for capacity, a RAID10 would be vastly superior in all ways except capacity/price.
SCSI in laptops? Keep dreaming.
Funny you should say that...
Behold! The Texas Instruments 4000M, produced circa 1994.
Marvel at its amazing 7" dual scan VGA screen!
Let's look at the back ports.
Let's see, what's this port here? 50 pin scsi port?
Yes indeed. 486 SX, 25mhz, 4MB RAM, 127MB HD, SVGA up to 1024x768x256 (external monitor only, LCD max 640x480x256), 16bit sound, optional 2x CD-ROM on the docking station (which takes the weight from 6lbs to 10), and onboard SCSI. Is the internal HD SCSI? I'm not entirely sure, I haven't opened it up. But it certainly hooks up to external SCSI devices just fine.
Why don't I have linux on it? Because I can't seem to find a distro that does anything useful in 4MB RAM and this thing is so old no chance of finding memory for it anymore.