I go to a small tech school where the Physics department is using the engineering students (of which I am a part of) as the guinea pigs on testing a system that could work similarly. Instead of providing a physical clicker to everyone, the department chose to use the student laptops, which everyone has to buy when they begin school, and a piece of software called TurningPoint vPad (2006 version).
The idea of the program is a good one: you can take graded or ungraded quizzes, and if you'd like you can even ask anonymous questions of the professor (yes, this gets abused quite a bit, so maybe it shouldn't be anonymous to the professor). Additionally, rather than using a wired connection the school takes advantage of an existing 802.11g network to connect.
Although it sounds like a great idea, the actual execution is very poor. The software sends the question data with a user ID attatched, so anyone with a packet sniffer can see who sends what to the professor, and sends the user ID in cleartext. Also, the software is very poor at keeping it's connection, with a timeout of about 1 second, which isn't very well suited for a wireless network. Finally, the infrastructure of the building and its wireless networks makes connecting to servers harder than it needs to. So far this program is only used in one lecture hall, and depending on where you're sitting in that lecture hall you can receive anywhere from 1 to 3 wireless networks.
Maybe a new or open-source program would help alleviate some of these issues (particularly the timeout issue). However, try to get some of the professors involved in the program, maybe even suggest it to a professor (in writing, with a date on it, so no greedy professors can take the credit for your idea) who works in your school's Computer Science department (if it has one).
The problem is that, for most of the population, gaming is something to be done in the living room. As a PC gamer, I like games I can play with a pad and sitting in my favorite chair with a fancy sound system turned up more than I like some games that force me to sit at my computer.
Also, over time PCs tend to be more expensive. The cost of a gaming PC never went down from the time the PS2 and Xbox came out until now, and probably went up a little, as the hardware kept improving. However, on a console you have a locked-down hardware base to work off of. Because the system is locked for that console generation, there is a reduction in the cost of the hardware. Where Sony may be losing in excess of $150 for every PS3 sold now, by the end of the console's lifetime the manufacturing costs will almost certainly have fallen, and the hardware cost as well. Consequently, there is usually a price reduction, and everyone benefits. In fact, depending on the degree of the price drop, the console manufacturers may be able to turn a profit and make back what they lost on initial sales.
As an example, look at the cost of a DVD player when the PS2 was released versus the cost now. If my memory serves me correctly, the average cost of a DVD player in 2001 was approximately $200, only $100 less than a PS2. By now, you can buy a cheapo DVD player from Best Buy for $40, and cheaper in certain drugstores. This drop in price for a specific component factors in to the cost of the whole item, and when you compound that all the components are cheaper because of more readily available stock and improvements in manufacturing methods, the entire thing comes out much cheaper. In fact, the best time you can buy a console for the manufacturer, in terms of manufcaturing costs, is at the end of its lifestyle, when it is the cheapest to produce.
*sigh* Spoken like a true engineer with design classes shoved down my throat (damn you, Stevens!)
That scene contained *gasp* consensual sexual intercourse. That's right, good old regular sex.
Personally, I haven't played the game with the modification installed (I find that having sex in games is pretty much useless to any type of story), but I have seen pictures and a video floating around if you google them.
Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo make their profits on consoles from game sales, and as such charge 3rd party developers a fee should they wish to run software on the console. It is one of several reasons why the current-generation consoles contain copyright/DRM chips.
Liberated Games has a mix of both open-source games (for those, usually only the engine and a shareware version are available) and "free as in beer" abandonware/marketware (stuff that is released for free in order to promote the release of a sequel, such as "Hidden and Dangerous").
So, both cases are correct.
I agree with this point, although you could have said it a little more carefully.
Cringley wrote the entire piece out of a conjecture. Murdoch may be very well considering other types of revenue that such a large user-base could provide, especially one so diverse as Skype's.
Unless I'm much mistaken, Skype only recently got out of beta for the premium services, so there are still a few bugs to be found in the system, assuredly.
It's not so much that they're intending on breaking homebrew applications, so that you can't play emulators or home games, as they are concerned about piracy.
Any time you can run an unliscneced homebrew app/emulator on a PSP means you can also download a disc image of a commercial game and run that as well.
Personally, I'm split on this one, until they come up with a legitimate way for homebrew apps to run.
Unfortunately, "newer" is not always "better," even if they are different generations.
For example:
- SimCity 2000 is deeper and more involved than 3000
- Tomb Radier continually gets worse with each iteration
- SWAT4 is much more simplified than SWAT3
- The original UT is still the msot fun
- Half-Life 2 wasn't that much better than the first game, except for the driving sequences
Personally, the game I'd love to play is a serious infantry simulation, with an accurate aiming model (no reticule, only blind shooting or irons ights), damage model, and people who play. Unfortunately, the closest thing is Infiltration for UT, and not too many people play that anymore.
There have been some major improvements since the final public beta (the stress test), namely that the levelling process is now much easier (in 3 days I went from lvl 1 to lvl 7, and I'm almost at lvl 8), the missions are for the most part not broken (if you have a team it helps to alleviate it a lot more), but there are still a few interface bugs (namely that every time you die it changes resolution, brings you to a "loading area", and then switches the resolution again and needs to reload all the textures).
Other than the third one, there's nothing too bad about the game now.
Most desktop searches can look inside of Word documents and read metadata from images.
This means that they can find images from a date (for example) even though the file names don't always make sense (i.e.: DSC00082.jpg) or can find all documents on your hard drive having to do with a general topic, no matter where they're stored (for example, I sort in folders by year, but if I have stuff from two different years pertaining to the same thing, a search program can find it).
This is a double-eged sword, however. With Windows' known vulnerabilities, plus the recent ones announced with the Windows Media DRM and Google Desktop Search, it's only a matter of time til more serious hacks are created.
I believe a few years ago, during the.com "boom," PeoplePC tried to woo customers without computers by providing a free computer when they signed up for a 12-month subscription to their service.
If they had tried that previously, before most people got comptuers, they probably would've done great. However, they waited til the end of the boom, when everyone had already bought systems, to start that campaign.
They tried, but it was "too little, too late."
Slashdot Mirror
What about Bling-It-On?
I go to a small tech school where the Physics department is using the engineering students (of which I am a part of) as the guinea pigs on testing a system that could work similarly. Instead of providing a physical clicker to everyone, the department chose to use the student laptops, which everyone has to buy when they begin school, and a piece of software called TurningPoint vPad (2006 version). The idea of the program is a good one: you can take graded or ungraded quizzes, and if you'd like you can even ask anonymous questions of the professor (yes, this gets abused quite a bit, so maybe it shouldn't be anonymous to the professor). Additionally, rather than using a wired connection the school takes advantage of an existing 802.11g network to connect. Although it sounds like a great idea, the actual execution is very poor. The software sends the question data with a user ID attatched, so anyone with a packet sniffer can see who sends what to the professor, and sends the user ID in cleartext. Also, the software is very poor at keeping it's connection, with a timeout of about 1 second, which isn't very well suited for a wireless network. Finally, the infrastructure of the building and its wireless networks makes connecting to servers harder than it needs to. So far this program is only used in one lecture hall, and depending on where you're sitting in that lecture hall you can receive anywhere from 1 to 3 wireless networks. Maybe a new or open-source program would help alleviate some of these issues (particularly the timeout issue). However, try to get some of the professors involved in the program, maybe even suggest it to a professor (in writing, with a date on it, so no greedy professors can take the credit for your idea) who works in your school's Computer Science department (if it has one).
The problem is that, for most of the population, gaming is something to be done in the living room. As a PC gamer, I like games I can play with a pad and sitting in my favorite chair with a fancy sound system turned up more than I like some games that force me to sit at my computer.
Also, over time PCs tend to be more expensive. The cost of a gaming PC never went down from the time the PS2 and Xbox came out until now, and probably went up a little, as the hardware kept improving. However, on a console you have a locked-down hardware base to work off of. Because the system is locked for that console generation, there is a reduction in the cost of the hardware. Where Sony may be losing in excess of $150 for every PS3 sold now, by the end of the console's lifetime the manufacturing costs will almost certainly have fallen, and the hardware cost as well. Consequently, there is usually a price reduction, and everyone benefits. In fact, depending on the degree of the price drop, the console manufacturers may be able to turn a profit and make back what they lost on initial sales.
As an example, look at the cost of a DVD player when the PS2 was released versus the cost now. If my memory serves me correctly, the average cost of a DVD player in 2001 was approximately $200, only $100 less than a PS2. By now, you can buy a cheapo DVD player from Best Buy for $40, and cheaper in certain drugstores. This drop in price for a specific component factors in to the cost of the whole item, and when you compound that all the components are cheaper because of more readily available stock and improvements in manufacturing methods, the entire thing comes out much cheaper. In fact, the best time you can buy a console for the manufacturer, in terms of manufcaturing costs, is at the end of its lifestyle, when it is the cheapest to produce.
*sigh* Spoken like a true engineer with design classes shoved down my throat (damn you, Stevens!)
~lilblackdemon
That scene contained *gasp* consensual sexual intercourse. That's right, good old regular sex. Personally, I haven't played the game with the modification installed (I find that having sex in games is pretty much useless to any type of story), but I have seen pictures and a video floating around if you google them.
Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo make their profits on consoles from game sales, and as such charge 3rd party developers a fee should they wish to run software on the console. It is one of several reasons why the current-generation consoles contain copyright/DRM chips.
Liberated Games has a mix of both open-source games (for those, usually only the engine and a shareware version are available) and "free as in beer" abandonware/marketware (stuff that is released for free in order to promote the release of a sequel, such as "Hidden and Dangerous"). So, both cases are correct.
I agree with this point, although you could have said it a little more carefully. Cringley wrote the entire piece out of a conjecture. Murdoch may be very well considering other types of revenue that such a large user-base could provide, especially one so diverse as Skype's.
Unless I'm much mistaken, Skype only recently got out of beta for the premium services, so there are still a few bugs to be found in the system, assuredly.
It's not so much that they're intending on breaking homebrew applications, so that you can't play emulators or home games, as they are concerned about piracy.
Any time you can run an unliscneced homebrew app/emulator on a PSP means you can also download a disc image of a commercial game and run that as well.
Personally, I'm split on this one, until they come up with a legitimate way for homebrew apps to run.
Unfortunately, "newer" is not always "better," even if they are different generations. For example: - SimCity 2000 is deeper and more involved than 3000 - Tomb Radier continually gets worse with each iteration - SWAT4 is much more simplified than SWAT3 - The original UT is still the msot fun - Half-Life 2 wasn't that much better than the first game, except for the driving sequences Personally, the game I'd love to play is a serious infantry simulation, with an accurate aiming model (no reticule, only blind shooting or irons ights), damage model, and people who play. Unfortunately, the closest thing is Infiltration for UT, and not too many people play that anymore.
I believe the site CoreCodec (http://www.corecodec.org/) specializes as an A/V-specific SourceForge.
NOTE: SourceForge is owned by the same parent company as Slashdot, OSDN.
There have been some major improvements since the final public beta (the stress test), namely that the levelling process is now much easier (in 3 days I went from lvl 1 to lvl 7, and I'm almost at lvl 8), the missions are for the most part not broken (if you have a team it helps to alleviate it a lot more), but there are still a few interface bugs (namely that every time you die it changes resolution, brings you to a "loading area", and then switches the resolution again and needs to reload all the textures). Other than the third one, there's nothing too bad about the game now.
Most desktop searches can look inside of Word documents and read metadata from images. This means that they can find images from a date (for example) even though the file names don't always make sense (i.e.: DSC00082.jpg) or can find all documents on your hard drive having to do with a general topic, no matter where they're stored (for example, I sort in folders by year, but if I have stuff from two different years pertaining to the same thing, a search program can find it). This is a double-eged sword, however. With Windows' known vulnerabilities, plus the recent ones announced with the Windows Media DRM and Google Desktop Search, it's only a matter of time til more serious hacks are created.
I believe a few years ago, during the .com "boom," PeoplePC tried to woo customers without computers by providing a free computer when they signed up for a 12-month subscription to their service.
If they had tried that previously, before most people got comptuers, they probably would've done great. However, they waited til the end of the boom, when everyone had already bought systems, to start that campaign.
They tried, but it was "too little, too late."
^- Flamebait -^