Just curious, How much of a latency difference does it make? I'm concerned with my voip account and some online gaming.
Also, I was glad to see them offer dry dsl (does anyone else offer that in Canada?). But what is bandrates? This is only listed for dry loop dsl. What's the difference from band a to g?
* Band Rates Band A $7.25/mo. Band B $9.10/mo. Band C $10.22/mo. Band D $10.98/mo. Band E $15.91/mo. Band F $16.20/mo. Band G $25.10/mo.
just to add, some company now owns virtuality and still sells their equipment (for a pretty penny). They have some videos showcasing the games. Certainly we can do better than this?
I remember when I first heard of VR around 1989-90. I'm talking about the big headset with two screens one for each eye drawing a slightly different angle, with it also having head tracking and then draw the screens appropriately.
I thought, what an amazing idea! This seemed like the closest thing you could have to a holodeck (kind of like a holodeck in reverse). Anyway, some games came out in the arcades. One company in particular was virtuality. They had this game called Dactyl Nightmare that I tried a couple of times. It was like a fps where you and a friend were pitted in an arena against each other with a gun. There was also this pterodactyl flying around that would randomly try and grab one of you. Anyway, neat simple idea to showcase VR. Problem was, it was certainly not ready for prime time.
The screens were extremely low res. I mean it seemed lower than 320x240 per screen. But what really ruined the immersion factor was the frame rate. It felt like it was in the teens at best. Most of the time it felt like a slideshow. Anyway, they had a couple other games at the time, and they were pretty much the same experience.
I still think it's a great idea, just way ahead of it's time. The problem was they were trying to do 3d (on two screens no less) in a 2d world. At that time, I think virtua racing/fighter just hit the scene. Almost all games were 2d still, and most certainly with the consoles/home computers.
I checked their wiki entry just now and there was a sequel to dactyl nightmare which came out about 3 years later that ran on a 486, so I could just imagine what the first ran on.
Anyway, the idea seemed to flop, but I always thought it was an idea ahead of it's time. Certainly we could do two screens at say 640 480 at 60 fps. It's been 16-17 years since I tried this and thought by now the idea would resurface.
Opera now has this (i forget the specifics, it's part of html5 i think). I read an article last year saying it'll be in opera and ff. It's in opera's latest, but afaik, it's not in ff3. Is this on the horizon for ff4?
"Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3 can be played with mouse and keyboard just fine."
This is true, but also kind of useless. I want to have competitive gameplay when I play online without fighting the interface.
Adding a mouse/keyboard to a ps3 solves only one of the above. The problem then arises that you'll be kicking everyone else's ass as the majority of your 'competition' will be using a gamepad. You might revel in your kicking butt at first, but I'd imagine it would get boring in short order.
Just let you know, ffdshow is pretty handy for decoding mpeg4 variants (xvid,divx etc) without having to install a full encoder and decoder, as ffdshow is just for playback. It's great for people who just view and will never be encoding files. Also even if you are encoding, it's nice to use for decoding as you have the same interface/options for setting brightness, filters etc.
I read totem in the next gnome has the ability to act as a mythtv frontend. It mentioned watching recordings and even live tv. I'm wondering how it works exactly. Does one see the full gui?
Compaq and the rest of the big boys do not provide original install cds anymore. They are just cds of images of their custom installs with all the crap they provide. Actually, most of them do not provide any cd anymore. The image is on another partition and well anyway... what I'm asking is obivously is there any hope for these users?
Aww, I can't help myself. I keep posting this story whenever chess comes up. It's a short story he did once for putting an extremely shot story on a post card. Being slashdot, the majority have probably read it, but for the few it's a good quick read:
Sorry I have no points. Great post. I'm really surprised at giving so many shots to an infant. What was the logic in speeding up the timetable of when a child vs an infant gets their shots?
Isn't there a big stink with geeksquad about the employees going through customers harddrives for music, videos whatever and they all share them. Haven't they said that they were isolated incidents and it's not normal procedure, well it's sounds like it's normal procedure at circuit city.
Damn it bugs me that this (and the other article about not having to give up his encryption keys) centers around child porn for issues such as this, but I'd like to think that if I brought a computer in for repair I should damn well be assured of some privacy and not have some tech geek rifling through my contents.
They say it was to find something to burn, wtf is that?! They should have some standard usb thumbdrive with various sized files to make sure the burner is stressed properly.
The only time they should be going through a customer's harddrive is when they are installing a new one and formatting it.
I don't think the customer should have the onus on them to back up all their bookmarks, personal files, history, cookies passwords etc, and then delete all that stuff, and then restore it back when they get the computer back from the shop just to ensure their privacy is not violated.
I'd love this guy to get pinched based on the content he had, but this should not be allowed. Those employees should be fired for doing that, and if it's standard policy of the store, well they should be sued.
People always joke about this, and I see that it doesn't. The c# gave me a little hope thinking maybe it could run with mono but it uses direct x. I'm wondering if there are any wii mote hacks for linux.
I dislike microsoft for a lot of things, but coupling IE isn't one of them. I don't think it's bs that it is well integrated into the OS. Just stick to standards. And I don't see what would really motivate OEMs to bundle a different browser.
And on the other side of the fence, try and remove konqueror from kde.
Yes, George pissed me off that he finally 'gave in' and gave us the originals but it's a poor transfer.
What I want to know is what treatment did the original theatrical version get? A plain jane transfer or nice anamorphic digital restoration cleaning up where needed. Ya I know, most of you hate the voices. Well, I grew up with the voices there damnit. To aptly quote the movie, "You're talking about memories..."
It gave me great pleasure when I discovered emulators back around 96-97 and relived some of my favourite c64 games. Since switching to linux a few years ago, I haven't been able to do so. Linux is pretty good for the most part with emulation (mame, various psx, snes, genesis, gameboy emus), but is sorely lacking regarding the c64.
There is basically vice and frodo. Vice isn't bad on the windows side, but they are fairly awful on the linux side. This is mainly due to neither of them using something like sdl to do fullscreen emulation. They both use weird vesa modes or something and it's a nightmare to try and get a good screen mode for anything usable. Supposedly the last version of vice does have an sdl mode, and I was eager to try this and compiled the latest without much success. Frodo planned an sdl version as well but that doesn't seem to be in much active development anymore.
It's 2007 and there still isn't a good c64 emu for linux. That is just sad.
I used to hope for more ogg support, but I don't think mp3 is going away anytime soon. I guess we should count our blessings that a format exploded with no drm. Anyway, mp3's patent is going to expire in 2010 (some sources say 2011, one of the two anyway). Which isn't really far off. And yes you are right on #1, in that ogg is best technically, but there are literally thousands of mp3 products, and once the patent has expired, more companies will add it with no longer being a licensing fee. Btw, does anyone have a ballpark figure of what franhaufer (sp) has made off this one patent? I'm assuming it's a ridiculous figure.
I don't have a wii, but my brother does and have had lots of fun playing wii sports. Well just golf and bowling, the rest are actually pretty bad. The boxing is so out of sync with what you actually do it's not funny, and tennis is just dumb when you make a swing gesture and the little racket swings with it's canned animation.
From what I've read the wii is capable of true 1:1 movement but has any game shown that yet? Like even golf in wii sports, when it's in putting mode it feels a little off sometimes and you get these mis-swings. I wish they'd make it a true 1:1 movement so even if I want to wallop the ball with the putter, when then just let the user do that.
But about other games, ignoring mario, from some of the other games I've tried, I wasn't impressed. And again there doesn't seem to be a killer game besides mario galaxy.
I know nintendo goes for the the kid/family market but why not have the other deeper games as well? I remember when nintendo got an 'exclusive' for the resident evil series. I was shocked at that deal that sony would let that franchise slip away, and was curious what nintendo was up to in the sense that were they going to make a push and show it can be a more mature gaming box as well? But they didn't really.
Anyway, I think it's a great little system, that's cheap, well built and it's cool with the browser capabilites and all, I'm just not sold on the titles yet.
Not that gamespot is the greatest review site, but just look at the scores for the latest wii games:
Well, one thing to mention of defender. It had two firsts. It's brag board kept the list even with the power off. And it was the first game to have a 'map' if you will seeing information of the action going outside what was on the current play area.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok cool, I never knew bell offers dry dsl with no additional charges.
I guess someone paying rate g is far away from the dsl main line? 25 extra a month is pretty damn pricey.
Just curious, How much of a latency difference does it make? I'm concerned with my voip account and some online gaming.
Also, I was glad to see them offer dry dsl (does anyone else offer that in Canada?). But what is bandrates? This is only listed for dry loop dsl. What's the difference from band a to g?
* Band Rates
Band A $7.25/mo.
Band B $9.10/mo.
Band C $10.22/mo.
Band D $10.98/mo.
Band E $15.91/mo.
Band F $16.20/mo.
Band G $25.10/mo.
just to add, some company now owns virtuality and still sells their equipment (for a pretty penny). They have some videos showcasing the games. Certainly we can do better than this?
http://www.arcadianvr.com/images/Video/Video_Page.htm
I remember when I first heard of VR around 1989-90. I'm talking about the big headset with two screens one for each eye drawing a slightly different angle, with it also having head tracking and then draw the screens appropriately.
I thought, what an amazing idea! This seemed like the closest thing you could have to a holodeck (kind of like a holodeck in reverse). Anyway, some games came out in the arcades. One company in particular was virtuality. They had this game called Dactyl Nightmare that I tried a couple of times. It was like a fps where you and a friend were pitted in an arena against each other with a gun. There was also this pterodactyl flying around that would randomly try and grab one of you. Anyway, neat simple idea to showcase VR. Problem was, it was certainly not ready for prime time.
The screens were extremely low res. I mean it seemed lower than 320x240 per screen. But what really ruined the immersion factor was the frame rate. It felt like it was in the teens at best. Most of the time it felt like a slideshow.
Anyway, they had a couple other games at the time, and they were pretty much the same experience.
I still think it's a great idea, just way ahead of it's time. The problem was they were trying to do 3d (on two screens no less) in a 2d world. At that time, I think virtua racing/fighter just hit the scene. Almost all games were 2d still, and most certainly with the consoles/home computers.
I checked their wiki entry just now and there was a sequel to dactyl nightmare which came out about 3 years later that ran on a 486, so I could just imagine what the first ran on.
Anyway, the idea seemed to flop, but I always thought it was an idea ahead of it's time. Certainly we could do two screens at say 640 480 at 60 fps. It's been 16-17 years since I tried this and thought by now the idea would resurface.
I wish you were right, but it's not the case. Right now my provider (small dsl provider) is not throttling but I expect that to change very soon:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-canadian-isps-furious-about-bell-canadas-traffic-throttling.html
Opera now has this (i forget the specifics, it's part of html5 i think). I read an article last year saying it'll be in opera and ff. It's in opera's latest, but afaik, it's not in ff3. Is this on the horizon for ff4?
Didn't know that, that's a step in the right direction. I wonder though how few fellow mouse/keyboard jockeys are.
"Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3 can be played with mouse and keyboard just fine."
This is true, but also kind of useless. I want to have competitive gameplay when I play online without fighting the interface.
Adding a mouse/keyboard to a ps3 solves only one of the above. The problem then arises that you'll be kicking everyone else's ass as the majority of your 'competition' will be using a gamepad. You might revel in your kicking butt at first, but I'd imagine it would get boring in short order.
Just let you know, ffdshow is pretty handy for decoding mpeg4 variants (xvid,divx etc) without having to install a full encoder and decoder, as ffdshow is just for playback. It's great for people who just view and will never be encoding files. Also even if you are encoding, it's nice to use for decoding as you have the same interface/options for setting brightness, filters etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoD6zzd35mc
I read totem in the next gnome has the ability to act as a mythtv frontend. It mentioned watching recordings and even live tv. I'm wondering how it works exactly. Does one see the full gui?
Compaq and the rest of the big boys do not provide original install cds anymore. They are just cds of images of their custom installs with all the crap they provide. Actually, most of them do not provide any cd anymore. The image is on another partition and well anyway... what I'm asking is obivously is there any hope for these users?
Aww, I can't help myself. I keep posting this story whenever chess comes up. It's a short story he did once for putting an extremely shot story on a post card. Being slashdot, the majority have probably read it, but for the few it's a good quick read:
http://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/learn/html/e.8.2.shtml
This story deals with there being more unique chess games than atoms in the universe.
And, funny, I just watched searching for bobby fischer last week. It's one of those kinds of movies I watch every couple of years. Just a classic.
Sorry I have no points. Great post. I'm really surprised at giving so many shots to an infant. What was the logic in speeding up the timetable of when a child vs an infant gets their shots?
Isn't there a big stink with geeksquad about the employees going through customers harddrives for music, videos whatever and they all share them. Haven't they said that they were isolated incidents and it's not normal procedure, well it's sounds like it's normal procedure at circuit city.
Damn it bugs me that this (and the other article about not having to give up his encryption keys) centers around child porn for issues such as this, but I'd like to think that if I brought a computer in for repair I should damn well be assured of some privacy and not have some tech geek rifling through my contents.
They say it was to find something to burn, wtf is that?! They should have some standard usb thumbdrive with various sized files to make sure the burner is stressed properly.
The only time they should be going through a customer's harddrive is when they are installing a new one and formatting it.
I don't think the customer should have the onus on them to back up all their bookmarks, personal files, history, cookies passwords etc, and then delete all that stuff, and then restore it back when they get the computer back from the shop just to ensure their privacy is not violated.
I'd love this guy to get pinched based on the content he had, but this should not be allowed. Those employees should be fired for doing that, and if it's standard policy of the store, well they should be sued.
"Is it getting cold in here?" - Satan
People always joke about this, and I see that it doesn't. The c# gave me a little hope thinking maybe it could run with mono but it uses direct x. I'm wondering if there are any wii mote hacks for linux.
I never had a vectrex as a kid but my friend had one and got to play it a few times. What I've always wondered was how were those 3d glasses? I mean just look at those suckers
http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/feature/3117/image011.jpg
As a kid i was dying to try it.
I dislike microsoft for a lot of things, but coupling IE isn't one of them. I don't think it's bs that it is well integrated into the OS. Just stick to standards. And I don't see what would really motivate OEMs to bundle a different browser.
And on the other side of the fence, try and remove konqueror from kde.
Yes, George pissed me off that he finally 'gave in' and gave us the originals but it's a poor transfer.
What I want to know is what treatment did the original theatrical version get? A plain jane transfer or nice anamorphic digital restoration cleaning up where needed. Ya I know, most of you hate the voices. Well, I grew up with the voices there damnit. To aptly quote the movie, "You're talking about memories..."
It gave me great pleasure when I discovered emulators back around 96-97 and relived some of my favourite c64 games. Since switching to linux a few years ago, I haven't been able to do so. Linux is pretty good for the most part with emulation (mame, various psx, snes, genesis, gameboy emus), but is sorely lacking regarding the c64.
There is basically vice and frodo. Vice isn't bad on the windows side, but they are fairly awful on the linux side. This is mainly due to neither of them using something like sdl to do fullscreen emulation. They both use weird vesa modes or something and it's a nightmare to try and get a good screen mode for anything usable. Supposedly the last version of vice does have an sdl mode, and I was eager to try this and compiled the latest without much success. Frodo planned an sdl version as well but that doesn't seem to be in much active development anymore.
It's 2007 and there still isn't a good c64 emu for linux. That is just sad.
I used to hope for more ogg support, but I don't think mp3 is going away anytime soon. I guess we should count our blessings that a format exploded with no drm. Anyway, mp3's patent is going to expire in 2010 (some sources say 2011, one of the two anyway). Which isn't really far off. And yes you are right on #1, in that ogg is best technically, but there are literally thousands of mp3 products, and once the patent has expired, more companies will add it with no longer being a licensing fee. Btw, does anyone have a ballpark figure of what franhaufer (sp) has made off this one patent? I'm assuming it's a ridiculous figure.
I don't have a wii, but my brother does and have had lots of fun playing wii sports. Well just golf and bowling, the rest are actually pretty bad. The boxing is so out of sync with what you actually do it's not funny, and tennis is just dumb when you make a swing gesture and the little racket swings with it's canned animation.
From what I've read the wii is capable of true 1:1 movement but has any game shown that yet? Like even golf in wii sports, when it's in putting mode it feels a little off sometimes and you get these mis-swings. I wish they'd make it a true 1:1 movement so even if I want to wallop the ball with the putter, when then just let the user do that.
But about other games, ignoring mario, from some of the other games I've tried, I wasn't impressed. And again there doesn't seem to be a killer game besides mario galaxy.
I know nintendo goes for the the kid/family market but why not have the other deeper games as well? I remember when nintendo got an 'exclusive' for the resident evil series. I was shocked at that deal that sony would let that franchise slip away, and was curious what nintendo was up to in the sense that were they going to make a push and show it can be a more mature gaming box as well? But they didn't really.
Anyway, I think it's a great little system, that's cheap, well built and it's cool with the browser capabilites and all, I'm just not sold on the titles yet.
Not that gamespot is the greatest review site, but just look at the scores for the latest wii games:
http://www.gamespot.com/reviews.html?type=reviews&platform=1031&tag=subnav;reviews
I get excited about the hardware but when I see the titles out there I think, meh not yet.
"BTW, I'm an avid gamer with a couple decades experience."
Well.... usually I really like to know a little more before making these decisions but what the heck. You're Hired!!
Well, one thing to mention of defender. It had two firsts. It's brag board kept the list even with the power off. And it was the first game to have a 'map' if you will seeing information of the action going outside what was on the current play area.