Having developed under windows a bunch, the worst part is: There's no one Windows - All the different windowses have various subsets of the Windows API that they support. Win95 was always the least featured of this set. Under Win95 you can't assume that there even IS a web browser or directx (though NT4 has the latter problem too, but it did have OpenGL). Despite their claims of non-OS integration, MS used IE as an excuse to add a bunch of functionality in kind of surprising places, so a Win95 out of the box install (not OSR1 or 2) is missing some really handy stuff. For instance, what standard folders (eg, Desktop, Program Files, Documents & Settings, etc) you can query the location of depend on whether you've got IE installed or not. Anyways, developing with Win95 in mind has been a big pain in the ass for a while. I, as a developer, encourage MS to 'force' people to upgrade.
It's like trying to develop for 5 different unixes, but you can't use the preprocessor since it has to all be the same binary.
You got those lives through the Konami code (up up down down left right left right a b start), a clear sign that this game was not made by SNK but by Konami.
The Neogeo wasn't intended to be owned by consumers. Originally it was only a coin-op platform. When demand.. demanded it, they released hte home version, but even that was intended to be rented out to consumers rather than sold to them. $600 is not so much for a rental place. Unfortunately who the hell wants to do that, so they would up just selling them.
It amazes me that as of 2000 people were still making new games (KOF2000, for instance) for this 10 year old hardware. And that they didn't look all that dated!
Though I have to say my favorite game for the neogeo (and really any platform) is Money Puzzle Exchanger. Such bliss!
is aimed primarily at small children but with inappropriately fragile media
That might be an issue if there were another console offering an alternative. As far as I know, the N64 is the last platform to ship that didn't use data discs. (well, or the GBA)
So you say: The average uptime of 1500 win2k boxes is 200 hours. Your 1 linux box has an uptime of 480 days.
I'm no statistician, but.. well, neither are you! This is not a meaningful comparison.
My experience with computers in general is that the uptime in no way matches a normal distribution. You get a solid install, and it stays up forever without serious problems. You get some flakey driver, system dll, or kernel module and it crashes all the time.
This analogy you propose is really off the mark. Adobe is king of the commercial digital graphics world, I agree, but the most significant reasons to hate Microsoft don't apply to Adobe at all.
They create standards, document them well, and encourage other people to use them. They do not change the standards to encourage migration to their products. For instance: PostScript, PDF. PhotoShop plugins are supported by third party apps as well.
They release new versions of their products (not counting free patches (eg, ps 6.0 -> 6.01)) when they have significantly and notably improved them. I never used photoshop before 3, but each and every version since (4,5,5.5,6) have been much improved.
They dominate the market through producing what is widely regarded by those in the industry as a superior product. As far as I know they don't have to resort to anti-competitive exclusivity contracts with anyone in particular, for instance.
The thermoelectric device won't help with this issue. It is just this little disk that gets colder on one side and hotter on the other as you put electricity into it.
So put the cold side on the processor and the hot side on the heatsink & fan. The efficiency of the heatsink is now much greater, since its rate of heat exchange with the air depends on how much colder the air is. The only problem is how efficient is the thermoelectric component - does it move more heat than it makes? I seem to recall that earlier peltier coolers tended to also have power supply problems (as they took a lot of current (though at relatively low voltages)).
In terms of bandwidth, 3 * 96 * 2 (if it IS stereo?) * 16 = 9 MB/s. However, presumably all 16 of those streams are going to different files, so I guess latency could become a bit of an issue, especially if you want to play back other stuff from the same RAM or disk array or whatever at the same time. Though I would expect this to be the sort of application where you could minimize seeks by just making your buffers a meg or two each (so you only need to seek once per channel per bufferlength (a 16 second buffer, and that's one seek per second)). But I'll accept that there are nuances this that I am overlooking.
This goes for a couple of people, who are all "what's the point?"
Computers are noisy. There are all kinds of situations where you don't want to listen to the fan while you listen to the music. I guess you could use a laptop or G4 cube, but then you're well over $300.
This may come as a shock, but many people don't have their computer in the SAME ROOM as their primary stereo system. Or, even if they do, they have an auxilliary stereo elsewhere too (say, the bedroom). Get a P90 instead of this? I don't want to put a computer in my bedroom and one in my living room, that's what my office and server closets are for.
Like many products this is clearly not worth its expense for many people. But it sounds like this is something which could be quite useful to some.
know this is a little offtopic, but it's an important fact that most people don't realize, and the brainwashing of those damned milk commercials doesn't help. I would also like to state that I agree with the poster's main point. The commercials for milk even prove it: TV sells you what you want to hear and not necessarily what is the truth.
I think that Milk Is Good For You has been Conventional European Wisdom for longer than we've had television.
Also, Coke's pretty bad for you. So for someone as lucky to have a bunch of lactase as I am, I think that milk may be less bad for me than coke.
PCI is still a bottleneck. At any rate, your RAM can pump out a lot more throughput than the PCI bus can. On the other hand, where is this bandwidth going? The processor? System RAM? hmm.
Or, for 1/4 the price you can pack together 2x75GB drives in a raid 0 array, get 30x as much space AND get the same bandwidth.
That may be better for some applications. No amount of RAID magic though can reduce the latency though (seek time). So this might be good for some database apps, but a RAID would be better for streaming the data. Though, I can't think of very many apps that require a single 80MB/s stream.
The RAM already has a lot more bandwidth than your PCI bus. I'm not sure how you would talk to this RAID array, but that would almost certainly be your bandwidth bottleneck.
Even neverminding monopoly issues here, I don't believe you. In a situation where there are only 4 or 5 choices (MacOSes, *nix + X, Windowses, BeOS - what else?) each of which has thousands upon thousands of features and thousands upon thousands of flaws, most of those individual features and flaws will be effectively ignored by the market.
The OTHER issue here is that the only people who are evaluating this feature are the ones who realize it's an issue, and already know how to change associations as is. Meaning that their opinion is "sure, it could be a little friendlier, but no big deal". It's not them that this is about.
Hotmail can be used anonymously, so long as you don't establish a link between an IP and your name. Just go to an internet cafe, pay the $5 and there you go.
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biznazzlifrizatch is clearly correct. Don't accept any imitations.
Having developed under windows a bunch, the worst part is: There's no one Windows - All the different windowses have various subsets of the Windows API that they support. Win95 was always the least featured of this set. Under Win95 you can't assume that there even IS a web browser or directx (though NT4 has the latter problem too, but it did have OpenGL). Despite their claims of non-OS integration, MS used IE as an excuse to add a bunch of functionality in kind of surprising places, so a Win95 out of the box install (not OSR1 or 2) is missing some really handy stuff. For instance, what standard folders (eg, Desktop, Program Files, Documents & Settings, etc) you can query the location of depend on whether you've got IE installed or not. Anyways, developing with Win95 in mind has been a big pain in the ass for a while. I, as a developer, encourage MS to 'force' people to upgrade.
It's like trying to develop for 5 different unixes, but you can't use the preprocessor since it has to all be the same binary.
It's all about compromise.
I still have more fun with a neogeo than I have with any other console.
You got those lives through the Konami code (up up down down left right left right a b start), a clear sign that this game was not made by SNK but by Konami.
The Neogeo wasn't intended to be owned by consumers. Originally it was only a coin-op platform. When demand.. demanded it, they released hte home version, but even that was intended to be rented out to consumers rather than sold to them. $600 is not so much for a rental place. Unfortunately who the hell wants to do that, so they would up just selling them.
It amazes me that as of 2000 people were still making new games (KOF2000, for instance) for this 10 year old hardware. And that they didn't look all that dated!
Though I have to say my favorite game for the neogeo (and really any platform) is Money Puzzle Exchanger. Such bliss!
As someone who once had the misfortune of using Microsoft Works, I agree with you 100%.
is aimed primarily at small children but with inappropriately fragile media
That might be an issue if there were another console offering an alternative. As far as I know, the N64 is the last platform to ship that didn't use data discs. (well, or the GBA)
Um. Obsolete means "No longer in use".
So you say: The average uptime of 1500 win2k boxes is 200 hours. Your 1 linux box has an uptime of 480 days.
.. well, neither are you! This is not a meaningful comparison.
I'm no statistician, but
My experience with computers in general is that the uptime in no way matches a normal distribution. You get a solid install, and it stays up forever without serious problems. You get some flakey driver, system dll, or kernel module and it crashes all the time.
Meanwhile, I stopped buying CDs, since the last 5 CDs that I bought only contained a single song that was worth listening to
Surely you knew that before you bought it (#3). Perhaps you were buying the wrong music.
Okay. But it made me laugh.
They create standards, document them well, and encourage other people to use them. They do not change the standards to encourage migration to their products. For instance: PostScript, PDF. PhotoShop plugins are supported by third party apps as well.
They release new versions of their products (not counting free patches (eg, ps 6.0 -> 6.01)) when they have significantly and notably improved them. I never used photoshop before 3, but each and every version since (4,5,5.5,6) have been much improved.
They dominate the market through producing what is widely regarded by those in the industry as a superior product. As far as I know they don't have to resort to anti-competitive exclusivity contracts with anyone in particular, for instance.
The thermoelectric device won't help with this issue. It is just this little disk that gets colder on one side and hotter on the other as you put electricity into it.
So put the cold side on the processor and the hot side on the heatsink & fan. The efficiency of the heatsink is now much greater, since its rate of heat exchange with the air depends on how much colder the air is. The only problem is how efficient is the thermoelectric component - does it move more heat than it makes? I seem to recall that earlier peltier coolers tended to also have power supply problems (as they took a lot of current (though at relatively low voltages)).
But then they won't make a 58 kelvin temperature difference, and you won't get all 700 watts.
In terms of bandwidth, 3 * 96 * 2 (if it IS stereo?) * 16 = 9 MB/s. However, presumably all 16 of those streams are going to different files, so I guess latency could become a bit of an issue, especially if you want to play back other stuff from the same RAM or disk array or whatever at the same time. Though I would expect this to be the sort of application where you could minimize seeks by just making your buffers a meg or two each (so you only need to seek once per channel per bufferlength (a 16 second buffer, and that's one seek per second)). But I'll accept that there are nuances this that I am overlooking.
Computers are noisy. There are all kinds of situations where you don't want to listen to the fan while you listen to the music. I guess you could use a laptop or G4 cube, but then you're well over $300.
This may come as a shock, but many people don't have their computer in the SAME ROOM as their primary stereo system. Or, even if they do, they have an auxilliary stereo elsewhere too (say, the bedroom). Get a P90 instead of this? I don't want to put a computer in my bedroom and one in my living room, that's what my office and server closets are for.
Like many products this is clearly not worth its expense for many people. But it sounds like this is something which could be quite useful to some.
There are plenty of musics which are legally distributed via MP3. http://www.mp3.com contains several examples.
know this is a little offtopic, but it's an important fact that most people don't realize, and the brainwashing of those damned milk commercials doesn't help. I would also like to state that I agree with the poster's main point. The commercials for milk even prove it: TV sells you what you want to hear and not necessarily what is the truth.
I think that Milk Is Good For You has been Conventional European Wisdom for longer than we've had television.
Also, Coke's pretty bad for you. So for someone as lucky to have a bunch of lactase as I am, I think that milk may be less bad for me than coke.
PCI is still a bottleneck. At any rate, your RAM can pump out a lot more throughput than the PCI bus can. On the other hand, where is this bandwidth going? The processor? System RAM? hmm.
Or, for 1/4 the price you can pack together 2x75GB drives in a raid 0 array, get 30x as much space AND get the same bandwidth.
That may be better for some applications. No amount of RAID magic though can reduce the latency though (seek time). So this might be good for some database apps, but a RAID would be better for streaming the data. Though, I can't think of very many apps that require a single 80MB/s stream.
The RAM already has a lot more bandwidth than your PCI bus. I'm not sure how you would talk to this RAID array, but that would almost certainly be your bandwidth bottleneck.
Even neverminding monopoly issues here, I don't believe you. In a situation where there are only 4 or 5 choices (MacOSes, *nix + X, Windowses, BeOS - what else?) each of which has thousands upon thousands of features and thousands upon thousands of flaws, most of those individual features and flaws will be effectively ignored by the market.
The OTHER issue here is that the only people who are evaluating this feature are the ones who realize it's an issue, and already know how to change associations as is. Meaning that their opinion is "sure, it could be a little friendlier, but no big deal". It's not them that this is about.
Even in the limited scope of the gaming world, you're still wrong. Sacrifice used gestures before Black And White did.
Hotmail can be used anonymously, so long as you don't establish a link between an IP and your name. Just go to an internet cafe, pay the $5 and there you go.