What about the rift this will cause on the business side...for years to come, employees will value their worth to the company by their ability to run Aero Glass on their desktop...
It's really because of size and effort involved in doing a "good" game now...look at the origonal games by these developers...
John Carmack - Wolf3D Will Wright - Sim City
Both "ground breaking" *IDEAS* in their time, and both have what would be considered lack-luster graphics now. The sad fact is that if Sim City or Wolf 3D were released today, they wouldn't be given the time of day. The big companies (Sony, EA, Atari, etc) have pushed us to the point that no one great person could come up with a new breakthough game...
Todays blockbuster games are developed by large teams of programmers, designers, sound artists, voice actors, 3D modelers, etc...
Of course, 2D graphics were much easier to hack together than 3D graphics...2-bit sound was easier to hack together than 16-bit CD quality surround sound...this is just the evolution of the gaming industry. Want to see where it's headed, look at film...we are about where film was back in the 60's...audiences are starting to demand more...story and gameplay have taken a back seat to better graphics and commercial crossovers (RIAA musicians, MPAA voice actors, etc)...
There will occasionaly be a few independent breakthroughs...but in general, these will be a thing of the past.
Where is video gaming's Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino? Open source is a good bet, but everyone knows open source are rarely the result of a single person's effort...Flash games show some promise...but just like independent film, fans are going to seek out these developers until they become a commercial success...
That's why companies like the idea of online games. You are pretty much stuck with the game, since they generally aren't easily transferable...not only that, but quite a few games come with free play time (3 months free, etc)...this makes resale of these games less profitable...
You know what's interesting...most people thought that the iPod would not do well. It didn't even take off very well until about the 3rd generation...so yes, the iPod was never designed to be a "killer" device...it just turned out that way...
Right now, the 60GB 5G iPod can be had for ~$399...it does Video (and fairly decent video at that) and doubles as a digital photo wallet (with a $25 digital camera connector)...not to mention, there's currently a project to port RockBox to the iPod...
There aren't many that even offer a 60GB option...none that are signifigantly lower in price, and have one or more of the following problems...they have poor build quality (I know this is opinion), poor firmware (also opinion), low battery life (compared to the 60GB Video), B&W screen, no video support, or no digital camera connectivity.
Yea, sure...that's what they will tell you when they first do it...and it may be that way for a while...look at banner ads...we were told that "banner ads keep your content free"...and for a while that was true...but now, sites are making less and less money on ads...and what has happened...the ads have become more intrusive...so what are we doing now??? We have now started paying for content (like Slashdot Subscriptions and TotalFark)...
That's interesting, but he is comparing a large format camera (4x5) with a 35mm digital...the age of the camera doesn't really matter as much in film photography as long as it's a decent quality camera. What he should really be comparing this to is one of these(39MP) or one of these(45MP)...as these are medium/large format digital cameras...
I agree with most of what you said here, except for the thing about "ideal conditions"...there is no way to get "ideal conditions" with film...you're always going to have a high amount of grain in the image...and as such, the image quality will always fall below that 24MP mark...
Now, as for the validity of his claims, take a look at some of the links at the bottom of the page...specifically this one which explains that at 16MP, digital cameras actually get into the medium format range...or this one that deosn't try and come up with some arbitrary value for MegaPixels and actually gives a comparison of the different images...or this one which uses a figure closer to your figure (21.4MP) for film that finds the D60 (6MP) is about the same quality as 35MM...there's more, but I'll let you find the rest...
What about just doing what I do and set up one of your Linux boxes to use Samba and tar all of your important files on your Windows boxes to its harddrive and tar all of its important files to one of your Windows boxes. Do the same for all of your other Linux boxes, BSD, etc with NFS/SSH...
Set up a cron job to do everything and set up a rotation scheme in the script. You can probably narrow all of your documents/config files down to ~1GB or less...
Well, first off, you can protest the charges on anything you are charged for...so if you started getting unsolicited text messages, you could call them and complain. They would then most likely give you a credit for the message and potentially block any future advertisements from that company. Most likely the way ads would be done over this is the same way ads are done from the cell company...they don't count...if they did, the company doing the ads would be in for lots of law suits.
As far as the "Do Not Call" list for the cell phones. That's complete B.S. There's still a law on the books that says that if you pay for an incoming call, telemarketers can't call you. The only thing that will be happening is the cell companies have begun to publish cell phone directories between themselves...you still have to dial 411 to get the numbers and they have no intention of making these numbers available in a list. The reason this is being done is because a lot of people (myself included) have dropped their land line and only have a cell phone now...that makes our number essentially unlisted...and not everyone wants their number unlisted. As it stands right now, if you want to list your cell phone number, you can pay to have it added to a phonebook, but it is not automatic.
Actually if Sony was smart, they would spin off the whole music right now...that way they could distance the rest of the company from BMG's actions...
If they were to do this soon, they could claim that the parent company was not responsible.
Now, if only they could integrate this with Wine so that I can use it on my Linux box...I have to use IE to test sites from time to time, but I prefer to just fire up wine instead of rebooting to Windows...this would make it a whole lot easier on me (and a few others I'm sure)...
Actually, Nintendo make awesome games. Unfortunately, hardly anyone else makes games for Nintendo consoles at all.
This is pretty much what caused Sega to get out of the console market. Sega has always made good games (just like Nintendo), but they just couldn't get the number of good developers to release their games on their systems. EA's refusal to develop for the Dreamcast hurt as well...As did the fact that Dreamcast games could be copied and run on unmodded systems...
Maybe Nintendo will do the same thing Sega did and drop their console hardware division at some point...I don't personally think they will, but it might happen. I also don't think they will get rid of their portable division because they are still at the top in that category (PSP is gaining ground, but nowhere near the installed base of Nintendo's portables)...
Maybe the more obvious thing is that while Sony and Microsoft seem to be going in the direction of "more features", maybe Nintendo will simply make their systems smaller...to the point of their consoles being "portable"...this may be the next step for Nintendo...
Yes, but these aren't cheap (~$100 for a cheap one) and they are easily identified by a cursory look at the back of the machine. $100 is a bit much to lose if you are "found out", so these will mostly be installed by machine owners. I know there have been incidents when these were installed, but most of these are put in high traffic, high risk areas. In some way, these are easier to detect than software keyloggers. Not only that, but most of these (all that I know of) use a standard set of "wake" commands and they will then dump their guts...I'm sure there aren't that many commands to try...now if they made a keyboard that had a keylogger built-in that looked normal otherwise, then that would be a problem...
A link? Are you nuts? Not everything is online you know...
Re:FBI? NSA? Homeland Security? BullSh***
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
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· Score: 2, Informative
You know, you're right...I don't know what got into me there...they would never do anything like that...
Always make sure your hardware is within standard civilian specs...wouldn't want to have problems reading that satellite data if you needed to run out to Wal-Mart and replace a drive would you?
How long ago was this? Some branches may be different, but the secure facilities I know of generally consist of Windows PCs locked down in the way that I described. Before CD-RWs were popular, the standards were probably more relaxed, but now that anyone can buy a CD-RW and write any type of software to it...they exercise more caution with CDs/DVDs...
Re:FBI? NSA? Homeland Security?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Someone in a secure/top secret/classified government network has probably stuck one of these CDs into their machine at some point.
No, they probably haven't. The kinds of machines that are in these secure environments are locked down big time...most don't even have a CD-ROM attached to the machine. The networks are closed (no direct internet access) and the machines with CD-ROMs/RWs have their lasers aligned differently so as to not be able to be read on a standard drive...one of the benifits of purposefuly misaligning the laser that writes the disks to be read in these machines is that you can't just insert a standard CD...
Yes, contrary to what the media would have you belive, the folks in secure/top-secret/classified government positions are not stupid...
You know that's true, as a matter of fact, Sun changed their pricing a while back to be more competitive with RedHat...but you notice who is changing their strategy here? Sun...
Yea, Solaris might be cheaper on paper, but there's gonna be more problems running it on just any hardware...not so with RedHat...And you can bet that if you are running Solaris on a competitors machine, the fingers are gonna point to hardware whenever there's a problem...
Besides, Sun support sucks...about half the time when I call for something like a system down problem, I get transfered to some guy in India who is reading from a script and doesn't know what he's talking about...and after like 2 hours of him reading from some script I'm finally transfered to a developer that actually knows what he's talking about and get a comment like "well, I don't know what the problem is"...oh, that's great...waste 3 hours just to tell me that you can't help me...
I'm just guessing here because most of them are extremely hard to understand...and I used to work in a company that had employees mostly from India and Pakistan...now just imagine how someone feels that doesn't have the background that I have...Sun made the mistake of offshoring a sizable portion of their US tech support and most of em suck...as far as I'm concerned, it has ruined their reputation for support...
Lets just wait till there's a major distributor (besides Sun) that offers support for OpenSolaris...
What you say? Sun won't even offer commercial support for OpenSolaris?
So, you can't get support for any OpenSolaris distro from a major vendor...yea, I can see how it may have the upper hand here...
Till I can find at least 2 major distributors that offer commercial support for OpenSolaris, I wouldn't count on it being anymore than an interesting project.
You can bet that Sun is gonna make sure that any commecrial support from other companies comes through Solaris and not OpenSolaris...
When he moved from his position as CEO in 1999 to a member of the board, he had always anticipated this happening...and he has taken a back seat as of late (ever since starting Lulu Tech Circus).
This is the way a good founder/CEO steps down from his company...it's just that lately, we haven't had many good CEOs in the public eye.
This is certainly not bad for Red Hat...and I wonder now who will take his place on the board...
Slashdot Mirror
What about the rift this will cause on the business side...for years to come, employees will value their worth to the company by their ability to run Aero Glass on their desktop...
Then again, if your machine can't run Vista then you obviously arent too interested in gaming...at least the kind that would require a Windows PC...
It's really because of size and effort involved in doing a "good" game now...look at the origonal games by these developers...
John Carmack - Wolf3D
Will Wright - Sim City
Both "ground breaking" *IDEAS* in their time, and both have what would be considered lack-luster graphics now. The sad fact is that if Sim City or Wolf 3D were released today, they wouldn't be given the time of day. The big companies (Sony, EA, Atari, etc) have pushed us to the point that no one great person could come up with a new breakthough game...
Todays blockbuster games are developed by large teams of programmers, designers, sound artists, voice actors, 3D modelers, etc...
Of course, 2D graphics were much easier to hack together than 3D graphics...2-bit sound was easier to hack together than 16-bit CD quality surround sound...this is just the evolution of the gaming industry. Want to see where it's headed, look at film...we are about where film was back in the 60's...audiences are starting to demand more...story and gameplay have taken a back seat to better graphics and commercial crossovers (RIAA musicians, MPAA voice actors, etc)...
There will occasionaly be a few independent breakthroughs...but in general, these will be a thing of the past.
Where is video gaming's Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino? Open source is a good bet, but everyone knows open source are rarely the result of a single person's effort...Flash games show some promise...but just like independent film, fans are going to seek out these developers until they become a commercial success...
That's why companies like the idea of online games. You are pretty much stuck with the game, since they generally aren't easily transferable...not only that, but quite a few games come with free play time (3 months free, etc)...this makes resale of these games less profitable...
I would say according to this comparison, AntiVir is the best...and of course, this is the only comparison that really matters...
Actually, I haven't heard anything about the Apple / Sun merger recently...the origonal deal fell through, but it always comes up from time to time...
You know what's interesting...most people thought that the iPod would not do well. It didn't even take off very well until about the 3rd generation...so yes, the iPod was never designed to be a "killer" device...it just turned out that way...
Right now, the 60GB 5G iPod can be had for ~$399...it does Video (and fairly decent video at that) and doubles as a digital photo wallet (with a $25 digital camera connector)...not to mention, there's currently a project to port RockBox to the iPod...
There aren't many that even offer a 60GB option...none that are signifigantly lower in price, and have one or more of the following problems...they have poor build quality (I know this is opinion), poor firmware (also opinion), low battery life (compared to the 60GB Video), B&W screen, no video support, or no digital camera connectivity.
Yea, sure...that's what they will tell you when they first do it...and it may be that way for a while...look at banner ads...we were told that "banner ads keep your content free"...and for a while that was true...but now, sites are making less and less money on ads...and what has happened...the ads have become more intrusive...so what are we doing now??? We have now started paying for content (like Slashdot Subscriptions and TotalFark)...
My bad, the P45 is 39MP as well, and not 45MP...
That's interesting, but he is comparing a large format camera (4x5) with a 35mm digital...the age of the camera doesn't really matter as much in film photography as long as it's a decent quality camera. What he should really be comparing this to is one of these(39MP) or one of these(45MP)...as these are medium/large format digital cameras...
I agree with most of what you said here, except for the thing about "ideal conditions"...there is no way to get "ideal conditions" with film...you're always going to have a high amount of grain in the image...and as such, the image quality will always fall below that 24MP mark...
Now, as for the validity of his claims, take a look at some of the links at the bottom of the page...specifically this one which explains that at 16MP, digital cameras actually get into the medium format range...or this one that deosn't try and come up with some arbitrary value for MegaPixels and actually gives a comparison of the different images...or this one which uses a figure closer to your figure (21.4MP) for film that finds the D60 (6MP) is about the same quality as 35MM...there's more, but I'll let you find the rest...
What about just doing what I do and set up one of your Linux boxes to use Samba and tar all of your important files on your Windows boxes to its harddrive and tar all of its important files to one of your Windows boxes. Do the same for all of your other Linux boxes, BSD, etc with NFS/SSH...
Set up a cron job to do everything and set up a rotation scheme in the script. You can probably narrow all of your documents/config files down to ~1GB or less...
Well, first off, you can protest the charges on anything you are charged for...so if you started getting unsolicited text messages, you could call them and complain. They would then most likely give you a credit for the message and potentially block any future advertisements from that company. Most likely the way ads would be done over this is the same way ads are done from the cell company...they don't count...if they did, the company doing the ads would be in for lots of law suits.
As far as the "Do Not Call" list for the cell phones. That's complete B.S. There's still a law on the books that says that if you pay for an incoming call, telemarketers can't call you. The only thing that will be happening is the cell companies have begun to publish cell phone directories between themselves...you still have to dial 411 to get the numbers and they have no intention of making these numbers available in a list. The reason this is being done is because a lot of people (myself included) have dropped their land line and only have a cell phone now...that makes our number essentially unlisted...and not everyone wants their number unlisted. As it stands right now, if you want to list your cell phone number, you can pay to have it added to a phonebook, but it is not automatic.
Actually if Sony was smart, they would spin off the whole music right now...that way they could distance the rest of the company from BMG's actions... If they were to do this soon, they could claim that the parent company was not responsible.
Now, if only they could integrate this with Wine so that I can use it on my Linux box...I have to use IE to test sites from time to time, but I prefer to just fire up wine instead of rebooting to Windows...this would make it a whole lot easier on me (and a few others I'm sure)...
Actually, Nintendo make awesome games. Unfortunately, hardly anyone else makes games for Nintendo consoles at all.
This is pretty much what caused Sega to get out of the console market. Sega has always made good games (just like Nintendo), but they just couldn't get the number of good developers to release their games on their systems. EA's refusal to develop for the Dreamcast hurt as well...As did the fact that Dreamcast games could be copied and run on unmodded systems...
Maybe Nintendo will do the same thing Sega did and drop their console hardware division at some point...I don't personally think they will, but it might happen. I also don't think they will get rid of their portable division because they are still at the top in that category (PSP is gaining ground, but nowhere near the installed base of Nintendo's portables)...
Maybe the more obvious thing is that while Sony and Microsoft seem to be going in the direction of "more features", maybe Nintendo will simply make their systems smaller...to the point of their consoles being "portable"...this may be the next step for Nintendo...
Yes, but these aren't cheap (~$100 for a cheap one) and they are easily identified by a cursory look at the back of the machine. $100 is a bit much to lose if you are "found out", so these will mostly be installed by machine owners. I know there have been incidents when these were installed, but most of these are put in high traffic, high risk areas. In some way, these are easier to detect than software keyloggers. Not only that, but most of these (all that I know of) use a standard set of "wake" commands and they will then dump their guts...I'm sure there aren't that many commands to try...now if they made a keyboard that had a keylogger built-in that looked normal otherwise, then that would be a problem...
Can you provide a link to back this up?
A link? Are you nuts? Not everything is online you know...
You know, you're right...I don't know what got into me there...they would never do anything like that...
Always make sure your hardware is within standard civilian specs...wouldn't want to have problems reading that satellite data if you needed to run out to Wal-Mart and replace a drive would you?
How long ago was this? Some branches may be different, but the secure facilities I know of generally consist of Windows PCs locked down in the way that I described. Before CD-RWs were popular, the standards were probably more relaxed, but now that anyone can buy a CD-RW and write any type of software to it...they exercise more caution with CDs/DVDs...
Someone in a secure/top secret/classified government network has probably stuck one of these CDs into their machine at some point.
No, they probably haven't. The kinds of machines that are in these secure environments are locked down big time...most don't even have a CD-ROM attached to the machine. The networks are closed (no direct internet access) and the machines with CD-ROMs/RWs have their lasers aligned differently so as to not be able to be read on a standard drive...one of the benifits of purposefuly misaligning the laser that writes the disks to be read in these machines is that you can't just insert a standard CD...
Yes, contrary to what the media would have you belive, the folks in secure/top-secret/classified government positions are not stupid...
You know that's true, as a matter of fact, Sun changed their pricing a while back to be more competitive with RedHat ...but you notice who is changing their strategy here? Sun...
Yea, Solaris might be cheaper on paper, but there's gonna be more problems running it on just any hardware...not so with RedHat...And you can bet that if you are running Solaris on a competitors machine, the fingers are gonna point to hardware whenever there's a problem...
Besides, Sun support sucks...about half the time when I call for something like a system down problem, I get transfered to some guy in India who is reading from a script and doesn't know what he's talking about...and after like 2 hours of him reading from some script I'm finally transfered to a developer that actually knows what he's talking about and get a comment like "well, I don't know what the problem is"...oh, that's great...waste 3 hours just to tell me that you can't help me...
I'm just guessing here because most of them are extremely hard to understand...and I used to work in a company that had employees mostly from India and Pakistan...now just imagine how someone feels that doesn't have the background that I have...Sun made the mistake of offshoring a sizable portion of their US tech support and most of em suck...as far as I'm concerned, it has ruined their reputation for support...
Lets just wait till there's a major distributor (besides Sun) that offers support for OpenSolaris...
What you say? Sun won't even offer commercial support for OpenSolaris?
So, you can't get support for any OpenSolaris distro from a major vendor...yea, I can see how it may have the upper hand here...
Till I can find at least 2 major distributors that offer commercial support for OpenSolaris, I wouldn't count on it being anymore than an interesting project.
You can bet that Sun is gonna make sure that any commecrial support from other companies comes through Solaris and not OpenSolaris...
When he moved from his position as CEO in 1999 to a member of the board, he had always anticipated this happening...and he has taken a back seat as of late (ever since starting Lulu Tech Circus).
This is the way a good founder/CEO steps down from his company...it's just that lately, we haven't had many good CEOs in the public eye.
This is certainly not bad for Red Hat...and I wonder now who will take his place on the board...