Somehow, I doubt that OSX will be available on ordinary PCs. Ther is SUCH a variety of PC hardware, this would be unlikely.
Gee, you have a nVidia card? OSX only supports ATI.
Whoops. nForce chipset. Sorry.
Looks like your Athlon 64 does not support SSE3. Now, you software will crash for your amusement. Enjoy!
It is not that Apple could NOT support all of those devices. It is just that Apple is not likely to put the work into it, because they want people to buy THEIR hardware. I suppose that you MIGHT be able to build a PC made just to run OSX (using the components that have drivers), but that would have to be deliberate. Or, you could get lucky and have just the right hardware, but that would be unlikely.
Oh, one more thing. Don't expect 3rd party drivers for mobos. If it is impossible to buy OSX by itself, no mobo manufacturer will support it. Video cards MIGHT be another story. I can imagine nVidia and ATI writing their own Mac drivers if this x86 thing takes off.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be VERY wrong about this whole thing.
This is about my only complaint with Epson drivers. I have an R200. With my old HP 720, the draft mode still looked good while using less ink. With my newer Epson, the "draft" mode uses soooooo much less ink, the paper is quite hard to read, as the text is more of a light gray. They really need to add something between the two current settings.
Possibly true. But on my cheap inkjet printer ($100 retail), I have already saved enough money using cheap ink to pay for the printer if I have to replace it. When a printer is $100, and a complete ink replacement is $70, you do NOT have much to loose.
A coler laser is a different story, though, as hardware tends to start at $400.
Another option is to have two printers. In an office environment with a couple of users or more, space is probably not a huge concern. Thow in an inkjet with cheap refill ink for draft and general office use. Who cares if there is a small streak in a draft or an internal memo. This will get most of the use.
Then, you have a separate printer stocked with only factory-new ink carts. Use this for the work that matters (likely to be about 10% of your total printing). The best of both worlds.
But there is also the question of why you aren't using laser...
----- One argument against generic ink is that it can clog the heads and voids the warranty. I have saved enough money buying generic ink to completely replace my $100 Epson if it dies. And after putting three sets of refills in it, it still works great!
The funny thing is that I saw the edges of that picture on the original web page. That looks just like the "lena" picture that I used to use at a target back when I took my image processing class. That "lena" was a picture of a girl's face wearing a fancy hat.
Take GT4. Reduce the polygon count by 1/2. Reduce the resolution of the textures by 1/2. Does it harm the game in any way? Perhaps, but not by much. It would still have the same game play. If you crash into a tree, it can have "blob" for the foliage on top, instead of rendering each individual leaf. But it is still a tree, and you still go boom.
Let me put it another way. Would you like to play a beautiful ultra-high-eye-candy version of Daikatana? Me neither.
You need a certain amount of graphics for game play. Anything above that is icing on the cake. But there has to be cake (game play). All icing and no cake is yucky (boring). Solid cake with even a little icing is still good.
Nintendo is in trouble. Their longtime cash cow, the venerable Game Boy, is going to lose market share to the PSP.
Nope. Not in the least. One of the primarly targets for the GB line is teen and pre-teens. If daddy swings a hammer for a living, come Christmas, Daddy is going to see a $150 DS and a $300 PSP kit. Guess who wins this war?
The PSP is likely to win some new fans of gaming (think twenty-something professionals) who would not be tempted to buy a DS. Sure, the PSP will steal SOME DS customers, but I think that there are enough out there who can afford a DS who can't afford a PSP that Nintendo will be OK.
What the parent said is correct. No gain from zipping an.ISO...
Look at it this way. The idea is to get as much movie on a DVD as possible. The people who invented MPEG2 went through a LOT of trouble to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the format. If it were possible to zip an MPEG2 stream to get better compression, that leads to the conslusion: the MPEG2 format was not very good to begin with.
Of course, it IS possible to get better compression using MPEG4, but that is a special-purpose and more advanced compression algorithm for video.
MPEG is for video, Zip is for general data. Zip is a jack of all trades, but obviously a master of none.
OK. Even/. has its share of idiots, but the original poster is right. This is the type of thing that a lot of geeks (myself included) wish that we had the insanity and time to do. This is cool stuff. Too bad I have a life. I would not even have the time to attempt this even using VHDL and an FPGA or two...
And yet... This is definately a cool feature that might drive geeks (like me) to buy one. And more console sales = larger target audience.
The assumption being that "hobby" games won't eat into commercial sales. I believe that to be a likely proposition. A hobby game will likely not have a budget of a million or two to blow. Hobby games might be good for an hour or two. But what do you do after that? Grand Theft Auto XXVI!
Being robust is also and advantage -- but NOBODY talks about it. I find that DVDs are quite prone to having problems if you get them scratched. With the density increasing, this problem is likely to get worse. A larger DVD - ho hum. An indestructible DVD - that excites me!
This *IS* wrong. What has happened is that long-term thinking has gone away. We live in the world of the disposable CEO who has a lot of stock options. A CEO is much better off to think five quarters ahead rather than 10 years. "R&D? Naaaaaa. That won't pay off for another ten years. I will only be here for another five." HP is the perfect example.
The internet has also allowed stockholders to be the same way. 20 years ago, it was almost impossible to be a "day trader" and check on your stocks all of the time (unless you were doing it for a living). You had the newspaper with its once-a-day prices, and that's it. People also tended to hang on to stocks for a long time.
But you are right about not being able to do anything about it, short of a re-education program for investors.
Sure. It sounds like a good idea -- until these boxes hit some warez and mp3 sites. Next thing you know, the BSA and MPAA are knocking on Microsoft's door. I wonder how many licenses for Windows and Office the BSA will force Microsoft to buy...
If you're not willing to pay extra just for looks, why did you buy a Mac to begin with?
OK. I am NOT willing to pay extra for looks. Please let me know which Mac I can buy that is cheaper, but uglier. New products only, please. I like having a warranty.
<crickets chirping>
What? Is that silence that I hear?
Ohhhh. That's right. There IS NO CHEAPER MACINTOSH!
Enter miniMate: a FireWire 400/USB 2.0 hub with integrated Ultra ATA 3.5" disk bay with up to a 400GB 7200RPM disk, all in an enclosure aesthetically designed exactly like the form factor of the Mac mini (except a bit shorter):
Sound interesting. But why not ask the obvious question...
That device is somewhat expensive. Why doesn't somebody come up with a new case for the Mini? If some enterprising company good with plastic could just make a new case which looks just like the Mini case, except is a couple of inches taller in order to hold a standard 3-1/2 IDE drive, that would sell like hotcakes. Being just plastic, it could likely be sold for $50 or less. Pop out the old board and install it in the new case with a spiffy 200GB hard drive, and you are set! You could even upgrade RAM since you have the case open.
Does anybody want to step up to the plate? I would do it myself, but I am an electrical engineer, not a mechanical;)
What you say is indeed true. But look at the intended usage. Those devices are intended to be carried, so the hard drive HAS to be small.
Face it: tiny hard drives are a lot more expensive than even a standard laptop hard drive. So, you use them when you have to. A portable music player is a "have to" application. Nobody would buy a huge MP3 box.
A game console that connects to a television, on the other hand, is not intended to be portable. Let's assume that they intend to use a hard drive. The price goes up due to the hard drive, and then they are at a definite price disadvantage compared to Sony or Microsoft (all other things being equal, which they never are).
If they were going to go for a hard drive, then going for the cheapest is the best bet, so it would likely have a 3-1/2" model. So it is likely that no HD is present.
On the other hand, I could be full of hot air. Maybe they decided that the "cool factor" was worth the extra expense. Not likely, but possible.
Well, this doesn't look much like a market for Microsoft to play in. I wonder how long it will be before the intended users want to play games, or run Excel? Something tells me that it will be day zero.
OpenOffice should be able to fit on a 256MB storage device. It would be some work to re-compile it for whatever processor is running this thing, but there is no reason that it can't be done. Not Exel, but good enough for almost everybody.
For people who are not used to having a computer, they will probably not care too much about HL2 or Doom2. They will likely be hapy with Tetris, Solitaire, and a good breakout clone. I remember pouring hours into: Odyssey-2, NEC TurboGrafx, NES, SuperNES. I bet that this machine is at least as powerful as all of those put together. So it DOES have the horsepower for games, maybe just 3D ones. I bet that Doom and Hexen will be able to run after a quick re-compile.
Back in my day, I remember having 640x480 and being grateful for such high-resolution graphics.
You are spoiled by today's systems. So am I. I run 1600x1200 every day. But if you run 0x0 every day because you don't have a computer, 640x480 seems beautiful.
Don't forget that people used to do useful work on a 80x25 mono screen without graphics. No photoshop, but good enough to word processing to drive a daisy-wheel printer. This thing is bound to be at least as powerful as a Pentium-120. And a Pentium 120 (with 24MB and a 1.2Gb HD) got me my Master's degree by running Matlab and Protel.
If history is any indicator, this will bomb. I have seen more than a few "sub-(one/two/three)-hundred-dollar" systems. They are eventually built, greeted with millions of yawns, and soon disappear. What makes this one any different?
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow, I doubt that OSX will be available on ordinary PCs. Ther is SUCH a variety of PC hardware, this would be unlikely.
Gee, you have a nVidia card? OSX only supports ATI.
Whoops. nForce chipset. Sorry.
Looks like your Athlon 64 does not support SSE3. Now, you software will crash for your amusement. Enjoy!
It is not that Apple could NOT support all of those devices. It is just that Apple is not likely to put the work into it, because they want people to buy THEIR hardware. I suppose that you MIGHT be able to build a PC made just to run OSX (using the components that have drivers), but that would have to be deliberate. Or, you could get lucky and have just the right hardware, but that would be unlikely.
Oh, one more thing. Don't expect 3rd party drivers for mobos. If it is impossible to buy OSX by itself, no mobo manufacturer will support it. Video cards MIGHT be another story. I can imagine nVidia and ATI writing their own Mac drivers if this x86 thing takes off.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be VERY wrong about this whole thing.
This is about my only complaint with Epson drivers. I have an R200. With my old HP 720, the draft mode still looked good while using less ink. With my newer Epson, the "draft" mode uses soooooo much less ink, the paper is quite hard to read, as the text is more of a light gray. They really need to add something between the two current settings.
Possibly true. But on my cheap inkjet printer ($100 retail), I have already saved enough money using cheap ink to pay for the printer if I have to replace it. When a printer is $100, and a complete ink replacement is $70, you do NOT have much to loose.
A coler laser is a different story, though, as hardware tends to start at $400.
Another option is to have two printers. In an office environment with a couple of users or more, space is probably not a huge concern. Thow in an inkjet with cheap refill ink for draft and general office use. Who cares if there is a small streak in a draft or an internal memo. This will get most of the use.
Then, you have a separate printer stocked with only factory-new ink carts. Use this for the work that matters (likely to be about 10% of your total printing). The best of both worlds.
But there is also the question of why you aren't using laser...
-----
One argument against generic ink is that it can clog the heads and voids the warranty. I have saved enough money buying generic ink to completely replace my $100 Epson if it dies. And after putting three sets of refills in it, it still works great!
You've got quesions. They've got answers.
What was the subject again?
The funny thing is that I saw the edges of that picture on the original web page. That looks just like the "lena" picture that I used to use at a target back when I took my image processing class. That "lena" was a picture of a girl's face wearing a fancy hat.
Is this new picture different?
Perhaps, but look at it this way...
Take GT4. Reduce the polygon count by 1/2. Reduce the resolution of the textures by 1/2. Does it harm the game in any way? Perhaps, but not by much. It would still have the same game play. If you crash into a tree, it can have "blob" for the foliage on top, instead of rendering each individual leaf. But it is still a tree, and you still go boom.
Let me put it another way. Would you like to play a beautiful ultra-high-eye-candy version of Daikatana? Me neither.
You need a certain amount of graphics for game play. Anything above that is icing on the cake. But there has to be cake (game play). All icing and no cake is yucky (boring). Solid cake with even a little icing is still good.
One of the primarly targets for the GB line is teen and pre-teens. If daddy swings a hammer for a living, come Christmas, Daddy is going to see a $150 DS and a $300 PSP kit. Guess who wins this war?
The PSP is likely to win some new fans of gaming (think twenty-something professionals) who would not be tempted to buy a DS. Sure, the PSP will steal SOME DS customers, but I think that there are enough out there who can afford a DS who can't afford a PSP that Nintendo will be OK.
What the parent said is correct. No gain from zipping an .ISO...
Look at it this way. The idea is to get as much movie on a DVD as possible. The people who invented MPEG2 went through a LOT of trouble to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the format. If it were possible to zip an MPEG2 stream to get better compression, that leads to the conslusion: the MPEG2 format was not very good to begin with.
Of course, it IS possible to get better compression using MPEG4, but that is a special-purpose and more advanced compression algorithm for video.
MPEG is for video, Zip is for general data. Zip is a jack of all trades, but obviously a master of none.
OK. Even /. has its share of idiots, but the original poster is right. This is the type of thing that a lot of geeks (myself included) wish that we had the insanity and time to do. This is cool stuff. Too bad I have a life. I would not even have the time to attempt this even using VHDL and an FPGA or two...
Bravo for the guy who built this!
And yet...
This is definately a cool feature that might drive geeks (like me) to buy one. And more console sales = larger target audience.
The assumption being that "hobby" games won't eat into commercial sales. I believe that to be a likely proposition. A hobby game will likely not have a budget of a million or two to blow. Hobby games might be good for an hour or two. But what do you do after that? Grand Theft Auto XXVI!
Being robust is also and advantage -- but NOBODY talks about it. I find that DVDs are quite prone to having problems if you get them scratched. With the density increasing, this problem is likely to get worse. A larger DVD - ho hum. An indestructible DVD - that excites me!
This *IS* wrong. What has happened is that long-term thinking has gone away. We live in the world of the disposable CEO who has a lot of stock options. A CEO is much better off to think five quarters ahead rather than 10 years. "R&D? Naaaaaa. That won't pay off for another ten years. I will only be here for another five." HP is the perfect example.
The internet has also allowed stockholders to be the same way. 20 years ago, it was almost impossible to be a "day trader" and check on your stocks all of the time (unless you were doing it for a living). You had the newspaper with its once-a-day prices, and that's it. People also tended to hang on to stocks for a long time.
But you are right about not being able to do anything about it, short of a re-education program for investors.
Sure. It sounds like a good idea -- until these boxes hit some warez and mp3 sites. Next thing you know, the BSA and MPAA are knocking on Microsoft's door. I wonder how many licenses for Windows and Office the BSA will force Microsoft to buy...
That type if mistake is called a "typo" or "clumsy fingers."
Mistaking "they're," "there," and "their" is ignorance.
Well, I for one, welcome any company with the work "Beer" in the name.
<crickets chirping>
What? Is that silence that I hear?
Ohhhh. That's right. There IS NO CHEAPER MACINTOSH!
That device is somewhat expensive. Why doesn't somebody come up with a new case for the Mini? If some enterprising company good with plastic could just make a new case which looks just like the Mini case, except is a couple of inches taller in order to hold a standard 3-1/2 IDE drive, that would sell like hotcakes. Being just plastic, it could likely be sold for $50 or less. Pop out the old board and install it in the new case with a spiffy 200GB hard drive, and you are set! You could even upgrade RAM since you have the case open.
Does anybody want to step up to the plate? I would do it myself, but I am an electrical engineer, not a mechanical
What you say is indeed true. But look at the intended usage. Those devices are intended to be carried, so the hard drive HAS to be small.
Face it: tiny hard drives are a lot more expensive than even a standard laptop hard drive. So, you use them when you have to. A portable music player is a "have to" application. Nobody would buy a huge MP3 box.
A game console that connects to a television, on the other hand, is not intended to be portable. Let's assume that they intend to use a hard drive. The price goes up due to the hard drive, and then they are at a definite price disadvantage compared to Sony or Microsoft (all other things being equal, which they never are).
If they were going to go for a hard drive, then going for the cheapest is the best bet, so it would likely have a 3-1/2" model. So it is likely that no HD is present.
On the other hand, I could be full of hot air. Maybe they decided that the "cool factor" was worth the extra expense. Not likely, but possible.
For people who are not used to having a computer, they will probably not care too much about HL2 or Doom2. They will likely be hapy with Tetris, Solitaire, and a good breakout clone. I remember pouring hours into: Odyssey-2, NEC TurboGrafx, NES, SuperNES. I bet that this machine is at least as powerful as all of those put together. So it DOES have the horsepower for games, maybe just 3D ones. I bet that Doom and Hexen will be able to run after a quick re-compile.
Back in my day, I remember having 640x480 and being grateful for such high-resolution graphics.
You are spoiled by today's systems. So am I. I run 1600x1200 every day. But if you run 0x0 every day because you don't have a computer, 640x480 seems beautiful.
Don't forget that people used to do useful work on a 80x25 mono screen without graphics. No photoshop, but good enough to word processing to drive a daisy-wheel printer. This thing is bound to be at least as powerful as a Pentium-120. And a Pentium 120 (with 24MB and a 1.2Gb HD) got me my Master's degree by running Matlab and Protel.
If history is any indicator, this will bomb. I have seen more than a few "sub-(one/two/three)-hundred-dollar" systems. They are eventually built, greeted with millions of yawns, and soon disappear. What makes this one any different?
That is what the Copyright Commandos are for. They are a special branch of the military.