Given that patents do exist, and likely will continue, maybe there should be very different price scales for patents depending on whether it is a corporation, or an individual getting the patent. If the price were very high for buisnesses, we wouldn't see so much patent squating by businesses, and if it were cheaper, maybe we would see more by individuals....
Re:I always thought a 2 CD system would be perfect
on
Games Knoppix
·
· Score: 1
The only problem with that is that to maintain the 'Console' image, users can't be expected to swap disks just to get the game to load. You need to have a system that keeps the drivers in the system. Putting in the 'System' disk once and leaving it there would be acceptable, but having to put it in every time, then take it out and put in the game disk would be unacceptable to most.
That being said, the 'System' disk could be a USB key, or a SD card. If you like, that could invisibly copy the OS to ram, but the Idea is that a user could just put the game in the drive and go, completely ignoring the fact that this was a "PC".
I always thought a 2 CD system would be perfect...
on
Games Knoppix
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I always thought that a 2 CD system would be perfect to 'Consolize' the PC and specifically linux. At the prices of CD drives today, it would be pretty inexpensive to have two CD\DVD drives in a system. You could then make the hard drive optional. The first drive would be the OS/Driver drive. The second drive would be the game drive. You would have something like Knoppix to initialize all of your hardware in drive 1, and if there is a disk in drive 2 it would automatically load like a console.
This would give all the benefits of the console. Specifically, put the disk in and it runs. No seeing the OS at all. It would also allow for simple upgrade when new hardware came out. Just replace the Disk 1, and all of the Disk 2's still work.
Heck, the Disk one could even be a USB/SD/Compact Flash drive. Then people would freak out about the second CD. They would just see the system as "upgradeable".
With this system, geeks could 'roll there own' game system. And, white box dealers could very easily put the effort in once to make their first "console", and just make copies for the hundred other systems they sell.
"That is, the rights of an enslaved individual to liberty vs. the rights for you to pirate someone's copyrighted work?"
No, he is comparing the rights of an enslaved part of the population to the rights of an a wholly enslaved population.
The fact is that once common thoughts are "patented" or "copyrighten" we all end up as the very worst examples of share croppers. We can very quickly end up in a situation were functioning just enough to feed our families costs us more in licenses than we can earn. We have already seen cases where individuals have lost the rights to their own thoughts. http://www.unixguru.com/
But every doctor I have ever seen will only deal with cheap and easy ailments. I had chronic problems for years that several doctors insisted were "low grade allergies" dispite clear evidence to the contrary. I could get no relief until I started reasearching the symptoms myself. I have found doctors only to be useful after you have already diagnosed yourself.
Have any of you been suprised by what a doctor has diagnosed you with???
Every major OS for the last decade has been a p2p client. If you share a drive/directory/folder, and another user shares a drive/directory/folder, you have a peer to peer network.
Unless "the powers that be" are willing to ban every OS that has file sharing, any ban on p2p will be nothing but a shame.
The only real features that the software being refered to as 'p2p' provide beyond what is provided by standard OSs are multi-source downloads, and improved searching.
I want an MP3 player that has a small compartment like a battery compartment where I can plug in a standard USB memory stick. Then, I can have gigs of music in a very small amount of space. It will also mean that as memory sizes grow and prices drop, the player is cheaply and easily upgraded with widely availible memory. Today 1 or 2 gigs...Next year it could have 8 or 16 gig. Plus any amount you have in your pocket.
Since the whiny jerks who think that everyone should modify their behavior to please their over sensiteve personalities are going to cry and whine that "The guy next to me is talking in a public place!!!"
The airlines should just hand out free earplugs. Then the people who are so overly sensitve that human speech irritates them, but are too stupid to bring their own ear plugs, can stop their complaining.
Just because that is HOW they make money, doesn't mean that it is the NECESSARY for profitablility. It's a poor argument with video games, it's a poor argument with cable, and and it's a poor argument with movies.
Earplugs...If you couldn't hear it...EARPLUGS!!!! Complaining because you can hear someone talking in while riding on public transportation is incredibly rude. Instead of trying force everyone around you to conform to what you want, for less than a dollar you can buy a set of earplugs, and cut out not only the people talking on cell phones, but people talking in person, radios, and engine noise.
Should companies choose the product that makes software executives a few billions bucks more, or should they choose the software the was the best that could be made?
I have an 80 hour, and a 120 hour ReplayTV, as well as a 250 hour drive in a PC for the server (http://www.dvarchive.organdistilloccasionallyruno utofspace./
How do I do this? I often set up channels for things that I MIGHT watch. For example WAM has been showing the TV show 'Weird Science'. Now, when I set up the channel, I didn't KNOW I was going to watch it, but thought that I MIGHT want to watch it. So, I set up a 10 hour channel, and let it run. A month later, I noticed that I had 10 hours of this show, so I had a 'Weird Science' Marathon. It was entertaining, and didn't require constant attention.
My wife has programs that she recorded over a year ago, and still hasn't seen. I have no doubt she will eventually watch them, as I periodically see her watch old shows.
'Good Eats' alone has 120 episodes, and at a medium quality takes up ~120 gigs. (2gb/hour * 60 hrs = 120 gig)br
The real benefit of DVRs is not that they make better VCRs. The real benefit is in allowing you to watch WHAT you want WHEN you want it. That requires a lot of disk space.
When I bought my Amiga for $300, an equivilent PC...Oh wait, PCs only had Adlib sound, 4 color CGA graphics, and no multi-tasking...
Ok, when I bought my Amiga for $300, the average PC, which was no where near as fast simple or functional, was $1400. I can definitly say that cheap and easy was NOT why people bought computers.
The reason that the x86 architecture became popular was because IBM put their stamp of approval on it and MS-DOS, and at that time, "no one got fired for buying IBM". So, no matter how much cheaper, reliable, or functional the competitors were, businesses were going to buy Blue.
Compaq started the trend away from IBM brand machines by cloning the IBM PC BIOS, so you could slip in a slightly cheaper hardware system without drawing too much attention. Of course, given the current patent and copyright situation, they would have been sued out of existance if they tried that now.
So, if you want to thank someone for the cheap PCs we run today, you can thank Compaq, but don't think that ease of use, or price is what brought Windows and x86 into dominance.
Microsoft did not popularize the internet. In fact they tried to kill it with 'blackbird'. Microsoft jumped on the HTML bandwagon AFTER Netscape/Mozilla created the 'market'. Computers were not popularized by Microsoft. They were quite popular before before windows, and DRDOS was just as good (or better) right up until Windows 95. There were plenty of good choices prior to MS's dominance. While the x86 platform (debatably) is the best desktop solution today, up until the win95/Voodoo time period, it was one of the worst. The MS/x86 computer system set computers back 5 to 10 years.
Just get a wired IR repeater (for the ultimate in reliability), and run the video out to the TV. This way you have far less clutter in the living room, and since you have to run coax in to your entertainment center for cable or satallite anyway, the IR repeater and audio/video line should not be a big deal.
As for the CD/DVD in the other room issue...It's a media PC! When you get the disc the first time, you drop it in the media PC once, rip it to the hard drive, and then put it away for safe keeping until some time when you have a hard drive failure. DVDs and CDs are no longer a medium that you use to watch/listen to media. They are now a long term storage solution to be used for loading on the hard drive. If your not going to store your media on a hard drive, you might as well just use regular components.
I decided not to use a keyboard, or keyboard equivilent in my current cabinet because after building my first cabinet, I found that "I, Robot", one of the greatest arcade games of all time has a control bug that makes it impossible to play with a keyboard. It seems to be something to do with keyboard polling because when you press a button, it holds longer than the button is pushed.
Anyway, all games I have tried worked great with the gravis game pads I have rewired to the controls. The key with the Gravis pads is that they have software (unfortuanly only for windows) that will map any button push to a keyboard key, or macro on a program by program basis. This allows me to still use the front ends that only support keyboard presses, while using the native joystick support within Mame.
If the hackers want to get homebrew going on gamecube, the guys building mod-chips should be working out a way to wire a standard dvd drive to the GC. Something along the lines of flip a switch, and it uses the DVD drive instead of the built in mini drive.
P.A.C.E. http://www.pacepros.com/ will give you a W-2 so things like buying a house, and doing your taxes becomes much easier. Their fee is EXTREAMLY reasonable considering the services offere to contractors. They give you all the benefits of being a contractor, and an employee at the same time.
Tell them Scott Skaife referred you....
More power plants are harder to regulate...
on
230mph Electric Car
·
· Score: 1
While in theory you might be producing just as much pollution by having one big power plant than by using a gas car, but each car is a power plant, and it would definitly be easier to make sure that one plant is as clean as possible than it is to make sure that the 100,000+ power plants in all the cars are running as clean as possible.
Maybe someone with more engineering knowledge than me can answer this, but what is the drawback of having an "all electric" vehicle that has a generator sitting in the trunk. This would dramatically simplify the engineering of the vehicle, while giving you the range of a gas vehicle. If and when fuel cells become viable, simply pull out the gas generator, and drop in the fuel cell. In the mean time, if you have a ethonol station in your town, you could run much cleaner by just swapping your gas generator with your ethonol generator. If designed properly, swapping power sources could be a 15 minute job.
The questions that come to mind are, can a gas generator, produce enough electricity to power the vehicle?
Would this use dramatically more fuel than running directly off of gas?
On the plus side, the 10 hours you have it plugged into your home (That has solor panels right?), you get to refuel for free.
Cool, then you won't mind the local quicky stop owner doing a full body cavity search on you when you try to exit the store. After all, he is just trying to protect his product. You MIGHT be a shoplifter, and its obiously ok to mistreat legitimate customers if it (questionably) stops a small amount of loss to (questionably) theft.
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Don't forget the MS BOB market?
My wife responded to my description of the SX, DX situation with "So, you want the 486DX, not the 486 Sucks, right?"
Given that patents do exist, and likely will continue, maybe there should be very different price scales for patents depending on whether it is a corporation, or an individual getting the patent. If the price were very high for buisnesses, we wouldn't see so much patent squating by businesses, and if it were cheaper, maybe we would see more by individuals....
The only problem with that is that to maintain the 'Console' image, users can't be expected to swap disks just to get the game to load. You need to have a system that keeps the drivers in the system. Putting in the 'System' disk once and leaving it there would be acceptable, but having to put it in every time, then take it out and put in the game disk would be unacceptable to most.
That being said, the 'System' disk could be a USB key, or a SD card. If you like, that could invisibly copy the OS to ram, but the Idea is that a user could just put the game in the drive and go, completely ignoring the fact that this was a "PC".
I always thought that a 2 CD system would be perfect to 'Consolize' the PC and specifically linux. At the prices of CD drives today, it would be pretty inexpensive to have two CD\DVD drives in a system. You could then make the hard drive optional. The first drive would be the OS/Driver drive. The second drive would be the game drive. You would have something like Knoppix to initialize all of your hardware in drive 1, and if there is a disk in drive 2 it would automatically load like a console.
This would give all the benefits of the console. Specifically, put the disk in and it runs. No seeing the OS at all. It would also allow for simple upgrade when new hardware came out. Just replace the Disk 1, and all of the Disk 2's still work.
Heck, the Disk one could even be a USB/SD/Compact Flash drive. Then people would freak out about the second CD. They would just see the system as "upgradeable".
With this system, geeks could 'roll there own' game system. And, white box dealers could very easily put the effort in once to make their first "console", and just make copies for the hundred other systems they sell.
"That is, the rights of an enslaved individual to liberty vs. the rights for you to pirate someone's copyrighted work?"
No, he is comparing the rights of an enslaved part of the population to the rights of an a wholly enslaved population.
The fact is that once common thoughts are "patented" or "copyrighten" we all end up as the very worst examples of share croppers. We can very quickly end up in a situation were functioning just enough to feed our families costs us more in licenses than we can earn. We have already seen cases where individuals have lost the rights to their own thoughts. http://www.unixguru.com/
But every doctor I have ever seen will only deal with cheap and easy ailments. I had chronic problems for years that several doctors insisted were "low grade allergies" dispite clear evidence to the contrary. I could get no relief until I started reasearching the symptoms myself. I have found doctors only to be useful after you have already diagnosed yourself.
Have any of you been suprised by what a doctor has diagnosed you with???
Every major OS for the last decade has been a p2p client. If you share a drive/directory/folder, and another user shares a drive/directory/folder, you have a peer to peer network.
Unless "the powers that be" are willing to ban every OS that has file sharing, any ban on p2p will be nothing but a shame.
The only real features that the software being refered to as 'p2p' provide beyond what is provided by standard OSs are multi-source downloads, and improved searching.
I want an MP3 player that has a small compartment like a battery compartment where I can plug in a standard USB memory stick. Then, I can have gigs of music in a very small amount of space. It will also mean that as memory sizes grow and prices drop, the player is cheaply and easily upgraded with widely availible memory. Today 1 or 2 gigs...Next year it could have 8 or 16 gig. Plus any amount you have in your pocket.
Since the whiny jerks who think that everyone should modify their behavior to please their over sensiteve personalities are going to cry and whine that "The guy next to me is talking in a public place!!!"
The airlines should just hand out free earplugs. Then the people who are so overly sensitve that human speech irritates them, but are too stupid to bring their own ear plugs, can stop their complaining.
Just because that is HOW they make money, doesn't mean that it is the NECESSARY for profitablility. It's a poor argument with video games, it's a poor argument with cable, and and it's a poor argument with movies.
Earplugs...If you couldn't hear it...EARPLUGS!!!! Complaining because you can hear someone talking in while riding on public transportation is incredibly rude. Instead of trying force everyone around you to conform to what you want, for less than a dollar you can buy a set of earplugs, and cut out not only the people talking on cell phones, but people talking in person, radios, and engine noise.
No, they don't. All one needs to do to 'Jump the Shark.' is to use the term "Jump the Shark."
Should companies choose the product that makes software executives a few billions bucks more, or should they choose the software the was the best that could be made?
Just the people who paid for their music.
http://www.dvarchive.org/ and I still occasionally run out of space.
I have an 80 hour, and a 120 hour ReplayTV, as well as a 250 hour drive in a PC for the server (http://www.dvarchive.organdistilloccasionallyruno utofspace./
How do I do this? I often set up channels for things that I MIGHT watch. For example WAM has been showing the TV show 'Weird Science'. Now, when I set up the channel, I didn't KNOW I was going to watch it, but thought that I MIGHT want to watch it. So, I set up a 10 hour channel, and let it run. A month later, I noticed that I had 10 hours of this show, so I had a 'Weird Science' Marathon. It was entertaining, and didn't require constant attention.
My wife has programs that she recorded over a year ago, and still hasn't seen. I have no doubt she will eventually watch them, as I periodically see her watch old shows.
'Good Eats' alone has 120 episodes, and at a medium quality takes up ~120 gigs. (2gb/hour * 60 hrs = 120 gig)br
The real benefit of DVRs is not that they make better VCRs. The real benefit is in allowing you to watch WHAT you want WHEN you want it. That requires a lot of disk space.
When I bought my Amiga for $300, an equivilent PC...Oh wait, PCs only had Adlib sound, 4 color CGA graphics, and no multi-tasking...
Ok, when I bought my Amiga for $300, the average PC, which was no where near as fast simple or functional, was $1400. I can definitly say that cheap and easy was NOT why people bought computers.
The reason that the x86 architecture became popular was because IBM put their stamp of approval on it and MS-DOS, and at that time, "no one got fired for buying IBM". So, no matter how much cheaper, reliable, or functional the competitors were, businesses were going to buy Blue.
Compaq started the trend away from IBM brand machines by cloning the IBM PC BIOS, so you could slip in a slightly cheaper hardware system without drawing too much attention. Of course, given the current patent and copyright situation, they would have been sued out of existance if they tried that now.
So, if you want to thank someone for the cheap PCs we run today, you can thank Compaq, but don't think that ease of use, or price is what brought Windows and x86 into dominance.
Microsoft did not popularize the internet. In fact they tried to kill it with 'blackbird'. Microsoft jumped on the HTML bandwagon AFTER Netscape/Mozilla created the 'market'. Computers were not popularized by Microsoft. They were quite popular before before windows, and DRDOS was just as good (or better) right up until Windows 95. There were plenty of good choices prior to MS's dominance. While the x86 platform (debatably) is the best desktop solution today, up until the win95/Voodoo time period, it was one of the worst. The MS/x86 computer system set computers back 5 to 10 years.
Just get a wired IR repeater (for the ultimate in reliability), and run the video out to the TV. This way you have far less clutter in the living room, and since you have to run coax in to your entertainment center for cable or satallite anyway, the IR repeater and audio/video line should not be a big deal.
As for the CD/DVD in the other room issue...It's a media PC! When you get the disc the first time, you drop it in the media PC once, rip it to the hard drive, and then put it away for safe keeping until some time when you have a hard drive failure. DVDs and CDs are no longer a medium that you use to watch/listen to media. They are now a long term storage solution to be used for loading on the hard drive. If your not going to store your media on a hard drive, you might as well just use regular components.
I decided not to use a keyboard, or keyboard equivilent in my current cabinet because after building my first cabinet, I found that "I, Robot", one of the greatest arcade games of all time has a control bug that makes it impossible to play with a keyboard. It seems to be something to do with keyboard polling because when you press a button, it holds longer than the button is pushed.
Anyway, all games I have tried worked great with the gravis game pads I have rewired to the controls. The key with the Gravis pads is that they have software (unfortuanly only for windows) that will map any button push to a keyboard key, or macro on a program by program basis. This allows me to still use the front ends that only support keyboard presses, while using the native joystick support within Mame.
If the hackers want to get homebrew going on gamecube, the guys building mod-chips should be working out a way to wire a standard dvd drive to the GC. Something along the lines of flip a switch, and it uses the DVD drive instead of the built in mini drive.
P.A.C.E. http://www.pacepros.com/ will give you a W-2 so things like buying a house, and doing your taxes becomes much easier. Their fee is EXTREAMLY reasonable considering the services offere to contractors. They give you all the benefits of being a contractor, and an employee at the same time. Tell them Scott Skaife referred you....
While in theory you might be producing just as much pollution by having one big power plant than by using a gas car, but each car is a power plant, and it would definitly be easier to make sure that one plant is as clean as possible than it is to make sure that the 100,000+ power plants in all the cars are running as clean as possible.
Maybe someone with more engineering knowledge than me can answer this, but what is the drawback of having an "all electric" vehicle that has a generator sitting in the trunk. This would dramatically simplify the engineering of the vehicle, while giving you the range of a gas vehicle. If and when fuel cells become viable, simply pull out the gas generator, and drop in the fuel cell. In the mean time, if you have a ethonol station in your town, you could run much cleaner by just swapping your gas generator with your ethonol generator. If designed properly, swapping power sources could be a 15 minute job.
The questions that come to mind are, can a gas generator, produce enough electricity to power the vehicle?
Would this use dramatically more fuel than running directly off of gas?
On the plus side, the 10 hours you have it plugged into your home (That has solor panels right?), you get to refuel for free.
Cool, then you won't mind the local quicky stop owner doing a full body cavity search on you when you try to exit the store. After all, he is just trying to protect his product. You MIGHT be a shoplifter, and its obiously ok to mistreat legitimate customers if it (questionably) stops a small amount of loss to (questionably) theft.