Your analogy is flawed. MP3 is superior to WMA in every way and it's used by more people. Whereas Windows is not superior to Linux in any way despite being used by more people.
People who don't feel like dicking around with software installation and buying uber graphics cards would buy the console. Plug it in and it runs. There's nothing wrong with consoles in general, I just like everything being on the PC because I'm like that. Many people are not. Choice is good.
Less support for WMA the better
on
No WMA for HP iPod
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm so tired of the WMA format. It's like a god damned virus. Just the other day I was explaining the concept of a CD MP3 player to someone I know and when he showed me his digital music collection, it was all in WMA. Now of course it's easily converted, but that's one extra thing I'll have to show him how to do. MP3 is the standard, nothing else should be supported, if only for clarity and simplicity reasons! If anything else is ever supported, it should be OGG because OGG is essentially open source MP3.
Notice that this has been released for the PS2, XBox, AND PC? Not that this game particularly interests me in the slightest, but I wish game companies would do this more often. I have the PC computing power to handle games like Smash Brothers Melee or Metroid Prime but due the lack of a PC port, I have to either buy a GC, which IMO is a waste of money seeing as how I already have a good enough computer, or wait for GC emulation to get mature enough to be useful. If Nintendo ported their games to the PC or even other consoles like this game company has done, there'd be a much wider fanbase!
Indeed. There are plenty of ways to solve this problem without using monthly throughput limits. Throughput limits in this fashion should be made illegal. It is not the responsibility of the customer to manager their throughput in such a way that it remains profitable for the ISP. The ISP can restructure their service to continue to allow 100% saturation without losing profit.
I understand your concerns as an ISP, but hear my argument as a customer. As a customer, I don't want to cause you to go out of business but I also want to be able to use a fair share of bandwidth. You're right that most customers want fast speed and low usage. But as a "high bandwidth user" myself, I find throughput capping and extra charges for overuse offensive.
However, I think a compromise is in order. I think that 10gb per month is WAY too low. That averages out to about 3 or 4 kilobytes per second at 100% connection saturation, which, by the way, I almost always have 100% saturation on my connection.
50gb per month is a more acceptable throughput limit. But even still, at maximum speeds on a cable connection I can transfer hundreds of gigs a month at 100% saturation.
The compromise I speak of is an opt-in speed capping for users who think they're going to use 50gb per month. At 50gb per month, your connection could be capped at 20kps and you will exactly reach 50gb per month at 100% saturation, give or take a gig.
Granted this system will not solve all problems, but I could easily live with 20kps cap if I was allowed to use it at 100% saturation with no questions asked. If it were applied to an adaptave bandwidth allocating program, perhaps my connection could start out at 20kps but as time goes on, if I do not use the bandwidth, my speed is gradually increased so that can always match 50gb per month each month. (Or perhaps never match it if the connection goes majorly unused.)
Under this compromise, power users get their bandwidth at acceptable levels without nazi-like fines for exceeding limits, and ISP still profits due to the fact that most users will never approach this limit.
No, they can't. If Slashdot starts deleting troll posts and crapfloods they're participating in active censorship which is one thing they're committed to avoid. Slashdot is a social experiment in total freedom of speech with zero "true" moderation. Meaning you take the good with the bad. The intelligent discussion with the GNAA. The interesting comments with the crapfloods.
Someone probably has amassed several accounts and/or several ips and has executed shitstorm.pl.
Crapflooding on Slashdot is not difficult, it's just a bit complicated. Nothing is un-crapfloodable. And since Slashdot doesn't delete posts, it's a much more tempting target than other sites.
I've got to start doing that. Am I the only one who's ever edited a friend's homepage with a little bit of perl, php, asp, or javascript (depending on their server type) that randomly redirects you to goatse in one of every 100 page views?;)
Thing I like about that little practical joke is that it takes them a week or so to notice which makes them wonder which, if any, of their visitors got hit by it yet.
Wow. That reminds me of something similar which also happened to me during high school. I took a "computer science" class which was actually nothing but a word processing class. Since I typed so much faster than everyone else, I would finish my assignments much earlier, then spend the remainder of my time in class working on various PHP projects.
One day the teacher demanded to know what I was doing when she saw me using my syntax highlighted code editor along with windows explorer for ftp. Not understanding what any of what I was doing actually was, much like in your story, I was blindly accused of "hacking" and asked to stop. Though my story has a happy ending, because I explained to the counselor what I was doing who in turn explained it to the teacher. God forbid the teacher should listen to the students directly.
It's been said before and I'll say it again. Win2k/XP and even Linux does not absolutely mean manual logins. If you need your computers to just turn on, boot, and have a pretty desktop, you can do that in any (major) OS. For Win2k or XP, they got this great program called TweakUI that you can use to auto-fill in the username/password every time so the kids don't have to type or click a thing during the boot sequence.
In my case, both my father and my grandparents are still in the Win98 world. (A close friend of my father's still runs Win95!) I'm going to use all of this as an excuse to give them a much needed upgrade when I visit them this summer.
Actually I've just recently looked into PS2 emulation, which is finally starting to mature. I'll need to rent a copy of FFX or something to see if it's any good though.
I suppose I'll always hold my ground that the PC is the universal gaming platform, no matter how much in the minority it may seem at times.
Piracy is a valid concern, but arguing that developing on their own hardware is the only defense against mass piracy is flawed. In either situation, people are still going to pirate their games. It's just a question of whether it's sooner or later and to what extent. I'd wager there's just as much Playstation piracy as there is native computer game piracy, all things considered.
And that still doesn't change the fact that I do have a sufficiently powerful PC and I refuse to invest in other platforms. Therefore because console gamers refuse to port their games to other platforms or support emulation, they have lost my business until an emulator is developed and I have a reason to buy their games.
That ipod battery faq is most informative. Has instructions on how to replace the battery yourself, or use an external battery pack. Under no circumstance is an ipod ever considered disposable or useless.
It's a chicken and the egg problem. If Sony sponsored the development of a more perfect emulator, you wouldn't need as beefy a system to accurately emulate the console. The power in the hardware is there, the software simply needs refinement.
Your point about console makers wanting to control their hardware (much like Apple wants to control their's) is valid. I disagree with the entire philosophy personally. We should have the freedom to choose our own platform whether it's console gaming or OSX. There are advantages to limiting your product to specific hardware, yes, but I see platform unity with a little extra work as more desirable than 4 different platforms that all work reasonably well out of the box. A niche, no doubt, but the demand is there and isn't going away.
However, your technical point is not valid. The hardware in the PS2 and the GC is no better than most people's PC hardware. Any realtively modern computer could handle a well written GC or PS2 emulator. See specs below. (A dual opteron could run them both at the same time and laugh;)
Official PS2 Specs: CPU: 128 Bit "Emotion Engine" System Clock: 300 MHz System Memory: 32 MB Direct Rambus Memory Bus Bandwidth: 3.2 GB per second Co-Processor: FPU (Floating Point Multiply Accumulator x 1, Floating Point Divider x 1) Vector Units: VU0 and VU1 (Floating Point Multiply Accumulator x 9, Floating Point Divider x 1) Floating Point Performance: 6.2 GFLOPS 3D CG Geometric Transformation: 66 million Polygons Per Second Compressed Image Decoder: MPEG2 Graphics: "Graphics Synthesizer" Clock Frequency: 150MHz DRAM Bus bandwidth: 48 GB Per Second DRAM Bus width: 2560 bits Pixel Configuration: RGB:Alpha:Z Buffer (24:8:32) Maximum Polygon Rate: 75 Million Polygons Per Second Sound: "SPU2+CPU" Number of voices: ADPCM: 48 channel on SPU2 plus definable by software Sampling Frequency: 44.1 KHz or 48 KHz (selectable) I/O Processor CPU Core: Current PlayStation CPU Clock Frequency: 33.8 MHz or 37.5 MHz (selectable) Sub Bus: 32 Bit Interface Types: IEEE1394, Universal Serial Bus (USB) Communication via PC-Card PCMCIA Disc Media: DVD-ROM (CD-ROM compatible)
Official name: Nintendo GameCube MPU (microprocessor unit): IBM Power PC "Gekko" (The Gekko MPU integrates the power PC CPU into a custom, game-centric chip.) Manufacturing process:.18-micron copper-wire technology Clock frequency: 485 MHz CPU capacity: 1125 Dmips (Dhrystone 2.1) Internal data precision: 32-bit integer and 64-bit floating-point External bus bandwidth: 1.3GB/second peak bandwidth (32-bit address space, 64-bit data bus 162 MHz clock) Internal cache:
* L1: Instruction 32KB, Data 32KB (8 way) L2: 256KB (2 way) System LSI: "Flipper" Manufacturing process:.18-micron NEC-embedded DRAM process Clock frequency: 162 MHz Embedded frame buffer: Approx. 2MB Sustainable Latency : 6.2ns (1T-SRAM) Sustainable latency: 5 ns (1T-SRAM) Embedded texture cache: Approximately 1MB Texture read bandwidth: 10.4GB/second (peak) Main memory bandwidth: 2.6GB/second (peak) Color, Z buffer: Each is 24 bits Image processing function: 2.6GB/second (Peak) Other: Real-time decompression of display list, HW motion compensation capability The following sound-related functions are all incorporated into the System LSI: Sound processor: custom Macronix 16-bit DSP Instruction memory: 8KB RAM + 8KB ROM Data memory: 8KB RAM + 4KB ROM Clock frequency: 81 MHz Maximum number of simultaneously produced sounds: ADPCM: 64CH Sampling Frequency: 48 KHz System floating-point arithmetic capability: 10.5 GFlops (peak) MPU, geometry engine, HW lighting total Actual display capability: 6 million to 12 million polygons/second (display capability assuming actual game with complexity model, texture, etc.) System main memory: 24MB sustainable latency 10 ns or lower (1T-SRAM) A-Memory: 16MB (100 MHz DRAM) Disc Drive: CAV (constant angular velocity) s
True, but nevertheless the argument stands. The more people who become emu enthusiasts (like me) the more rapidly the concept will develop and become widely accepted.
I'll see your hypocrite accusation and raise you a false assumption.
The statement I'm making is not that everyone should spend their personal hard-earned money for the promotion of (medical) science, which you both seem to be assuming I meant. The statement I'm making is that we don't need to be spending money on weapons. I couldn't care less what you spend your money on. What I do care about is what our country is spending money researching. Missile propellent is not exactly something we need.
Slashdot Mirror
Your analogy is flawed. MP3 is superior to WMA in every way and it's used by more people. Whereas Windows is not superior to Linux in any way despite being used by more people.
People who don't feel like dicking around with software installation and buying uber graphics cards would buy the console. Plug it in and it runs. There's nothing wrong with consoles in general, I just like everything being on the PC because I'm like that. Many people are not. Choice is good.
I'm so tired of the WMA format. It's like a god damned virus. Just the other day I was explaining the concept of a CD MP3 player to someone I know and when he showed me his digital music collection, it was all in WMA. Now of course it's easily converted, but that's one extra thing I'll have to show him how to do. MP3 is the standard, nothing else should be supported, if only for clarity and simplicity reasons! If anything else is ever supported, it should be OGG because OGG is essentially open source MP3.
Notice that this has been released for the PS2, XBox, AND PC? Not that this game particularly interests me in the slightest, but I wish game companies would do this more often. I have the PC computing power to handle games like Smash Brothers Melee or Metroid Prime but due the lack of a PC port, I have to either buy a GC, which IMO is a waste of money seeing as how I already have a good enough computer, or wait for GC emulation to get mature enough to be useful. If Nintendo ported their games to the PC or even other consoles like this game company has done, there'd be a much wider fanbase!
Let's not forget i.am/bald for those of us who like fantastic artsy websites without the use of Flash (though there is some Java toward the end.)
No. "GNU/Asianux" would be the proper formatting for the politically correct inclusion of "GNU" in the name.
Indeed. There are plenty of ways to solve this problem without using monthly throughput limits. Throughput limits in this fashion should be made illegal. It is not the responsibility of the customer to manager their throughput in such a way that it remains profitable for the ISP. The ISP can restructure their service to continue to allow 100% saturation without losing profit.
I understand your concerns as an ISP, but hear my argument as a customer. As a customer, I don't want to cause you to go out of business but I also want to be able to use a fair share of bandwidth. You're right that most customers want fast speed and low usage. But as a "high bandwidth user" myself, I find throughput capping and extra charges for overuse offensive.
However, I think a compromise is in order. I think that 10gb per month is WAY too low. That averages out to about 3 or 4 kilobytes per second at 100% connection saturation, which, by the way, I almost always have 100% saturation on my connection.
50gb per month is a more acceptable throughput limit. But even still, at maximum speeds on a cable connection I can transfer hundreds of gigs a month at 100% saturation.
The compromise I speak of is an opt-in speed capping for users who think they're going to use 50gb per month. At 50gb per month, your connection could be capped at 20kps and you will exactly reach 50gb per month at 100% saturation, give or take a gig.
Granted this system will not solve all problems, but I could easily live with 20kps cap if I was allowed to use it at 100% saturation with no questions asked. If it were applied to an adaptave bandwidth allocating program, perhaps my connection could start out at 20kps but as time goes on, if I do not use the bandwidth, my speed is gradually increased so that can always match 50gb per month each month. (Or perhaps never match it if the connection goes majorly unused.)
Under this compromise, power users get their bandwidth at acceptable levels without nazi-like fines for exceeding limits, and ISP still profits due to the fact that most users will never approach this limit.
Disappearing? Slashdot doesn't delete posts. Modding down isn't causing them to disappear, especially seeing as how I read at -1 ;)
No, they can't. If Slashdot starts deleting troll posts and crapfloods they're participating in active censorship which is one thing they're committed to avoid. Slashdot is a social experiment in total freedom of speech with zero "true" moderation. Meaning you take the good with the bad. The intelligent discussion with the GNAA. The interesting comments with the crapfloods.
Indeed. One of the most impressive crapfloods I've ever seen.
Once, however, there are a far more insideous crapflood on alt.games.final-fantasy-rpg back in the good ol' dialup days.
Someone probably has amassed several accounts and/or several ips and has executed shitstorm.pl.
Crapflooding on Slashdot is not difficult, it's just a bit complicated. Nothing is un-crapfloodable. And since Slashdot doesn't delete posts, it's a much more tempting target than other sites.
LOL
;)
I've got to start doing that.
Am I the only one who's ever edited a friend's homepage with a little bit of perl, php, asp, or javascript (depending on their server type) that randomly redirects you to goatse in one of every 100 page views?
Thing I like about that little practical joke is that it takes them a week or so to notice which makes them wonder which, if any, of their visitors got hit by it yet.
Wow.
That reminds me of something similar which also happened to me during high school. I took a "computer science" class which was actually nothing but a word processing class. Since I typed so much faster than everyone else, I would finish my assignments much earlier, then spend the remainder of my time in class working on various PHP projects.
One day the teacher demanded to know what I was doing when she saw me using my syntax highlighted code editor along with windows explorer for ftp. Not understanding what any of what I was doing actually was, much like in your story, I was blindly accused of "hacking" and asked to stop. Though my story has a happy ending, because I explained to the counselor what I was doing who in turn explained it to the teacher. God forbid the teacher should listen to the students directly.
It's been said before and I'll say it again. Win2k/XP and even Linux does not absolutely mean manual logins. If you need your computers to just turn on, boot, and have a pretty desktop, you can do that in any (major) OS. For Win2k or XP, they got this great program called TweakUI that you can use to auto-fill in the username/password every time so the kids don't have to type or click a thing during the boot sequence.
In my case, both my father and my grandparents are still in the Win98 world. (A close friend of my father's still runs Win95!) I'm going to use all of this as an excuse to give them a much needed upgrade when I visit them this summer.
Isn't this what Redhat's Bluecurve does?
Actually I've just recently looked into PS2 emulation, which is finally starting to mature. I'll need to rent a copy of FFX or something to see if it's any good though.
I suppose I'll always hold my ground that the PC is the universal gaming platform, no matter how much in the minority it may seem at times.
Piracy is a valid concern, but arguing that developing on their own hardware is the only defense against mass piracy is flawed. In either situation, people are still going to pirate their games. It's just a question of whether it's sooner or later and to what extent. I'd wager there's just as much Playstation piracy as there is native computer game piracy, all things considered.
And that still doesn't change the fact that I do have a sufficiently powerful PC and I refuse to invest in other platforms. Therefore because console gamers refuse to port their games to other platforms or support emulation, they have lost my business until an emulator is developed and I have a reason to buy their games.
That ipod battery faq is most informative. Has instructions on how to replace the battery yourself, or use an external battery pack. Under no circumstance is an ipod ever considered disposable or useless.
It's a chicken and the egg problem. If Sony sponsored the development of a more perfect emulator, you wouldn't need as beefy a system to accurately emulate the console. The power in the hardware is there, the software simply needs refinement.
However, your technical point is not valid. The hardware in the PS2 and the GC is no better than most people's PC hardware. Any realtively modern computer could handle a well written GC or PS2 emulator. See specs below. (A dual opteron could run them both at the same time and laugh
Unless of course the big companies (namely Sony and Nintendo) recognize the demand and start offering public support for emulators.
True, but nevertheless the argument stands. The more people who become emu enthusiasts (like me) the more rapidly the concept will develop and become widely accepted.
I'll see your hypocrite accusation and raise you a false assumption.
The statement I'm making is not that everyone should spend their personal hard-earned money for the promotion of (medical) science, which you both seem to be assuming I meant. The statement I'm making is that we don't need to be spending money on weapons. I couldn't care less what you spend your money on. What I do care about is what our country is spending money researching. Missile propellent is not exactly something we need.