Have you used VOIP? It seems you may have some of the details out of date.....I have VOIP both at my work and home, and the quality is no different then a regular land line (if anything i might be better)
Wireless does not have the same capabilities as a cell phone
They actually are making or already made 802.11 capable cell phones already...it has all the same capabilities, caller id, etc...
Also, I really worry what will happen if VOIP gets all around and a large segment give up landlines, what hapens when the power goes out?
The wife was worried about this too, until she realized all of our phones were portable phones anyhow which would have been useless when the power was out. I have a cell phone for when the power is out. And if there is some armageddon like event that leaves the power out in a major metropolis like philly for more then 2 or 3 days, then we probably have bigger problems on our hands:).
I don't think people want to call MAC Addresses and there will be a need for the Phone/VOIP transision at some point in the system for out of area calls
VOIP phones still have real phone numbers....you can call my VOIP phones from a regular phone and vice versa.
Maybe not the death of the telcos, but certainly a large loss in profits for them....once a city is blanketed with wifi access, its only a matter of time before VOIP would take over in the city. There is a reason Verizon can offer VOIP but doesn't market it.
Neither of the current search engines are really all that great. Its still extremely hard to find some things because nothing is catagorized or organized, its just the most popularly linked pages that contain the words searched for. Which for alot of things works well...but god forbid you search for anything that could potentially be sold...then your flooded with sales sites. Take for example if you wanted to find out if a 94 honda accord has cup holders...you really have to do some fancy searching to find this....search for 94 "honda accord" "cup holders" and you'll get sites selling cup holders, sites selling accords, that also contain nissans with cup holders etc. But if the data was some how organized via meta tags or whatever, i could at least narrow it down to non-classified sites, non-sales sites, and specificially technincal sites or whatever. Yahoo's old directory did this, I think we could find a way to do it with meta tags now.
I loved all the other gran turismo's but GT3 sucked IMO because suddenly midway through the simulation mode, tire wear came into play...ok that's fair real life car racing needs to take into account tires. But even if you had "medium slick" tires, which were about the bare minimum to simply keep up with cars less powerful then you, they would be glowing red by the 4th lap of a 10 lap race. This means the car is undrivable and you need a pit stop. This is NOT realistic! Gran Touring type races, especially ones with less then 20 laps do not generally require tire changes, and forget even using racing slick tires in the game, one lap and they are red. Anyways, if this is at least an option to turn off the game would have been great, but because they randomly left in this one aspect of realism the end of the game was never seen by me because its just not fun pitstopping every two laps.
Beyond what everyone else is saying about the driving feel of all the cars being similar to their real life counterparts, the thing I like about the GT franchise is the rediculous detail set to tuning cars. As a car junky myself in real life, its amazing to me that I can change a cars gear ratios to a 3rd decimal place with just a couple clicks, see what it does to the car, and then adjust again. Adjusting for aerodynamics and speed isn't just "put this bad ass spoiler on it" or "the magic scoop" like most car games...you really can angle a front spoiler 3 mm and changer the springiness of your suspension 1.45 nm or whatever to acheive a positive or negative. You can be an amateur car engineer with this game, although I don't think most people get into this aspect, thats one of the things I really like about it.
I have a website that used to be on the front page of all the major search engines under the first words you would type and expect to find a site like mine. The hits were 10,000 a day for a while, then just moving to the second page on yahoo or google would make the hits drop down to 3,000 then 1,200 or so. Thats one of my problems with Google working so well, is that its impossible for a small company or person to get their website out there. They should give some high ranking to new sites to help them along.
I've said it before and i'll say it again...if its a feature thats is widely accessable it shouldnt be beta! Don't be such wusses google, just make it freakin' release. If there are still things you want to add, make it version 1.0 or something. Google has more of a fear of commitment then i do.
1. Video Out (how cool would an S-VIDEO port on there be). Hook up an S-VIDEO --> RCA adapter, and hook it into any TV, and play full screen. Oh how life would change.
Then you would see how crappy the graphics are...they "got away" with "PS2-like" graphics by only having to display them on a tiny screen. They would look prehistoric on a TV.
Didn't Microsoft already buy $150 million dollars worth of Apple in the late 90s? (In exchange for Apple using IE) I don't remember if they bought that in stock or what, but if they did it was a pretty good investment.
I was honestly hoping to find better results, because i would like to see more competition for Google, but unfortunately I did not. Try searching for "used cars" and you get lots of generic local used car dealers or link farms, its not until page 2 that you get "famous" sites like Autotrader.com or cars.com
Its way too hard to maintain, as its entirely manual, but search engines were at their best when Yahoo catagorized everything under their directory. It was so easy to find relevant sites, and it was nice when you did a search, if the page it found wasnt relevant, you could always click the directory link and it would bring you to similar sites without you having to guess what the best keywords to use are. I wish someone would come up with some way of automating something like this.
I bought Quicken 2001 in 2000, and to answer alot of the "why does anyone need this?" comments, I use it as alot more then "just paying my bills". Quicken helped me get out of debt by producing nice net worth graphs, showing me my income vs expense for the month etc. I pay my bills online through my banks website, not Quicken. But I do use quicken to update my stock portfolio. This is very difficult to do manually. But this service is being cut off as well. They sent out coupons for people effected by this to get basically 50% off, but there is a reason I havn't upgraded so far, they havn't added any new worthwhile features in YEARS. The interface just looks "slicker" now (I think more confusing). So I may end up upgrading only cuz i have to, but if instead of strongarming people they should just make the reason for upgrading more compelling.
I don't understand why everyone has to treat this as a "Zero sum" game. Both can succeed, because I think they appeal to different groups. As usual the Nintendo appeals more towards kids, and people loyal to the brand, while the PSP is more appealing to adults and techs. Although I still think PSP will have much less sales then the DS because the primary buyers of portables are kids. I personally have no use for either cuz I'm the one who drives, i don't travel often etc...but when I was a kid I used portables all the time in the back of the minivan etc...
MS's new authentication and registration techniques do work on the small scale, your average person who does have the technical know-how to just copy the Win98 cd doesn't usually have the know how to find the crack for systems like WinXP that need to be "activated" i know alot of family/friends who used to just copy software but have bought XP cuz its "pirate proof".
The US is not the shining pinnacle of freedom it once was
When was that? When we had slaves, when we said the Irish need not apply, or when we rounded up japanese and sent them to camps? I think we have more freedoms today then ever, and one of those freedoms is the right for a company to choose who it wants to host and who it doesn't.
Slashdot Mirror
News Update....Halo will only be able to be shown in Movie Theatres that are running Windows Media Player 10
The next standard hasnt came out yet, and your already planning to make it outdated! Bah. I will never buy another movie again.
Or be the BEST GAME EVER, like Bart Simpson Versus the Space Mutants
3) It will produce wave after wave of crappy game, with a few games good enough to make you finally have to buy the system
4) It will be the best selling system on the market
Have you used VOIP? It seems you may have some of the details out of date.....I have VOIP both at my work and home, and the quality is no different then a regular land line (if anything i might be better)
:).
Wireless does not have the same capabilities as a cell phone
They actually are making or already made 802.11 capable cell phones already...it has all the same capabilities, caller id, etc...
Also, I really worry what will happen if VOIP gets all around and a large segment give up landlines, what hapens when the power goes out?
The wife was worried about this too, until she realized all of our phones were portable phones anyhow which would have been useless when the power was out. I have a cell phone for when the power is out. And if there is some armageddon like event that leaves the power out in a major metropolis like philly for more then 2 or 3 days, then we probably have bigger problems on our hands
I don't think people want to call MAC Addresses and there will be a need for the Phone/VOIP transision at some point in the system for out of area calls
VOIP phones still have real phone numbers....you can call my VOIP phones from a regular phone and vice versa.
Maybe not the death of the telcos, but certainly a large loss in profits for them....once a city is blanketed with wifi access, its only a matter of time before VOIP would take over in the city. There is a reason Verizon can offer VOIP but doesn't market it.
Neither of the current search engines are really all that great. Its still extremely hard to find some things because nothing is catagorized or organized, its just the most popularly linked pages that contain the words searched for. Which for alot of things works well...but god forbid you search for anything that could potentially be sold...then your flooded with sales sites. Take for example if you wanted to find out if a 94 honda accord has cup holders...you really have to do some fancy searching to find this....search for 94 "honda accord" "cup holders" and you'll get sites selling cup holders, sites selling accords, that also contain nissans with cup holders etc. But if the data was some how organized via meta tags or whatever, i could at least narrow it down to non-classified sites, non-sales sites, and specificially technincal sites or whatever. Yahoo's old directory did this, I think we could find a way to do it with meta tags now.
I loved all the other gran turismo's but GT3 sucked IMO because suddenly midway through the simulation mode, tire wear came into play...ok that's fair real life car racing needs to take into account tires. But even if you had "medium slick" tires, which were about the bare minimum to simply keep up with cars less powerful then you, they would be glowing red by the 4th lap of a 10 lap race. This means the car is undrivable and you need a pit stop. This is NOT realistic! Gran Touring type races, especially ones with less then 20 laps do not generally require tire changes, and forget even using racing slick tires in the game, one lap and they are red. Anyways, if this is at least an option to turn off the game would have been great, but because they randomly left in this one aspect of realism the end of the game was never seen by me because its just not fun pitstopping every two laps.
Beyond what everyone else is saying about the driving feel of all the cars being similar to their real life counterparts, the thing I like about the GT franchise is the rediculous detail set to tuning cars. As a car junky myself in real life, its amazing to me that I can change a cars gear ratios to a 3rd decimal place with just a couple clicks, see what it does to the car, and then adjust again. Adjusting for aerodynamics and speed isn't just "put this bad ass spoiler on it" or "the magic scoop" like most car games...you really can angle a front spoiler 3 mm and changer the springiness of your suspension 1.45 nm or whatever to acheive a positive or negative. You can be an amateur car engineer with this game, although I don't think most people get into this aspect, thats one of the things I really like about it.
I have a website that used to be on the front page of all the major search engines under the first words you would type and expect to find a site like mine. The hits were 10,000 a day for a while, then just moving to the second page on yahoo or google would make the hits drop down to 3,000 then 1,200 or so. Thats one of my problems with Google working so well, is that its impossible for a small company or person to get their website out there. They should give some high ranking to new sites to help them along.
I've said it before and i'll say it again...if its a feature thats is widely accessable it shouldnt be beta! Don't be such wusses google, just make it freakin' release. If there are still things you want to add, make it version 1.0 or something. Google has more of a fear of commitment then i do.
1. Video Out (how cool would an S-VIDEO port on there be). Hook up an S-VIDEO --> RCA adapter, and hook it into any TV, and play full screen. Oh how life would change.
Then you would see how crappy the graphics are...they "got away" with "PS2-like" graphics by only having to display them on a tiny screen. They would look prehistoric on a TV.
Didn't Microsoft already buy $150 million dollars worth of Apple in the late 90s? (In exchange for Apple using IE) I don't remember if they bought that in stock or what, but if they did it was a pretty good investment.
I was honestly hoping to find better results, because i would like to see more competition for Google, but unfortunately I did not. Try searching for "used cars" and you get lots of generic local used car dealers or link farms, its not until page 2 that you get "famous" sites like Autotrader.com or cars.com
You are personally responsible for me skipping half of my classes in college. Hope you enjoy your stinkin' shareware fees.
Its way too hard to maintain, as its entirely manual, but search engines were at their best when Yahoo catagorized everything under their directory. It was so easy to find relevant sites, and it was nice when you did a search, if the page it found wasnt relevant, you could always click the directory link and it would bring you to similar sites without you having to guess what the best keywords to use are. I wish someone would come up with some way of automating something like this.
I bought Quicken 2001 in 2000, and to answer alot of the "why does anyone need this?" comments, I use it as alot more then "just paying my bills". Quicken helped me get out of debt by producing nice net worth graphs, showing me my income vs expense for the month etc. I pay my bills online through my banks website, not Quicken. But I do use quicken to update my stock portfolio. This is very difficult to do manually. But this service is being cut off as well. They sent out coupons for people effected by this to get basically 50% off, but there is a reason I havn't upgraded so far, they havn't added any new worthwhile features in YEARS. The interface just looks "slicker" now (I think more confusing). So I may end up upgrading only cuz i have to, but if instead of strongarming people they should just make the reason for upgrading more compelling.
Would it be evil if some software company held a patent on this technology and sued them?
Whoa i never saw this coming, a g3, then a g4...i figured the next logical step would be Gtanium or geon. This is some top secret stuff you found.
You worked on Duke Nukem Forever? ;)
I don't understand why everyone has to treat this as a "Zero sum" game. Both can succeed, because I think they appeal to different groups. As usual the Nintendo appeals more towards kids, and people loyal to the brand, while the PSP is more appealing to adults and techs. Although I still think PSP will have much less sales then the DS because the primary buyers of portables are kids. I personally have no use for either cuz I'm the one who drives, i don't travel often etc...but when I was a kid I used portables all the time in the back of the minivan etc...
Did you miss the part where I said your AVERAGE person wouldn't know how to do that? I know how to do that, but Uncle Ted and whoever else doesn't.
MS's new authentication and registration techniques do work on the small scale, your average person who does have the technical know-how to just copy the Win98 cd doesn't usually have the know how to find the crack for systems like WinXP that need to be "activated" i know alot of family/friends who used to just copy software but have bought XP cuz its "pirate proof".
RTFA, security updates can still be downloaded
The US is not the shining pinnacle of freedom it once was
When was that? When we had slaves, when we said the Irish need not apply, or when we rounded up japanese and sent them to camps? I think we have more freedoms today then ever, and one of those freedoms is the right for a company to choose who it wants to host and who it doesn't.