I hope the combined media/hardware companies see this as clearly as it is.
They created as advanced and locked down set of DRM as they could, and couldn't reconcile a single format for consumers. This was out of greed and in an effort to protect profits, but it may have cost them an entire market to move in to.
While I would'nt say there would be an HD media player in every household by now, but with a single format for HD DVD without any encumbrances I bet that there would have been significantly more sales in this area for media and hardware by now. The difference between projected and actual sales continues to diverge as time goes on. There are many other factors, but I see this as being a substantial part.
I have some questions about this. 100 years ago, how would people with severe clinical depression survive? Would they? How many passed their genes on? What about now, or 100 years from now? Will there be more and more super unhappy people relying on medication to survive? I guess similar things can be said for any illness, but I am just curious.
It seems like there is a huge demand for faster booting systems, but so few people use suspend to disk (hibernate for windows, goes by other names too). Shutting down and booting are faster, and it uses *no* power when off. It seems to me that some people are overly fixated on faster boot times, so long as no interesting software tricks such as suspend are used. Why is that? Many people want a faster booting computer, but refuse to do so with anything other than a traditional boot. I understand the limitations and the need to do a traditional reboot from time to time anyways, but suspending to disk is a great feature that is here now, that doesnt even need ACPI or any sort of power management doo hickery.
Flash is great but even with its random access speeds, the throughput isn't much better than drives, and so I don't see such a huge boost in boot times from flash alone. To have your cpu do all of that work every boot seems a bit rediculous. Reading a 512+ MB file into memory and a few adjustments, you are back to where you were.
(As an aside, can anyone tell me how BeOS was able to boot in only around 7 seconds for me a decade ago, to a fully usable desktop? From fully off to fully usable, that was nuts.... what can modern operating systems do to approach this?)
Are the standard NTFS or Ext3/Reiser/Whatever optimized for use on hard drives? If flash drives start appearing as main system drives, would new or modified versions of file systems help in any way? Or are modern file systems abstract enough to where they dont deal with all the little fiddly-bits? I don't know enough about this area, but it would seem to me that a new hardware device to store files may benefit with a change in the way the OS uses it.
Apparantly, my manual transmission Honda only requires that the clutch be depressed when turning on for the American version. In Japan, there is no sensor requiring you to do so to start the engine. I think the fear was Americans were too stupid to be trusted to not start a car in gear.
With potentially millions of Win98 computers becoming unsupported, there is nothing to suggest they will all or mostly switch to a Linux desktop. But I have every reason to believe that one percent - or even half a percent, or two - would switch over to save costs and improve quality. Grandma wont be the ones to do it on their own, but the people already on the edge, and schools and businesses and the like. We have an older 600MHz P3 / 128MB laptop that Ive put Xubuntu on, and it runs great. My girlfriends old circa '98 laptop that came with Win98, upgraded to XP (deathly slow) is to follow the same path soon. Im sure she isn't the only average computer user who knows a someone who will recommend and help install linux. I'm sure there are actually some grandmas with grandchildren willing to make the switch for them in order to reduce the tech support calls.
There are lots of stories about police abusing their jobs or invading people's civil liberties, but I dont think this is one of them.
One of these things could be used simply to tell if there is an open spot, and a brochure placed in mailboxes nearby. I dont believe that the police will actually be using a laptop to connect to your network and do a test by surfing to google. Again I didnt RTA yet so if that is the case, then I start to be concerned.
This is part of the other half of their jobs. Helping people unlock cars, giving rides to people who are lost, just in general helping the communities they are there to protect.
I have had OO for a while originally some 3Mbps service, its now 10Mbs down, 1 up. This is for $40 a month. Pay a $15 kicker and you get 20down, 2 up. I like the idea of fiber, but not until its in the 100Mbps range.
I do recall the big concern during the N64 days about why Nintendo would choose to stick with cartridges. It could very well be the biggest part of why the market's dominance went from them to Sony, with Squaresoft moving away from the medium.
The reason was primarily due to the high cost of cartridge (which Nintendo used probably for maintaining exclusive control on their own discs for piracy and distribution reasons).
How has this changed now, in 2006? Optical was cool once, but tons and tons of flash is selling, more than ever before. No doubt that optical is cheaper, but with flash manufacturers aiming to sell flash cards for a few bucks in order to get out of the mindset of being reusable and simply being "buy and fill and buy again", will we ever see consoles return to using little memory cards?
I am thinking longer term, 10 years. Wont we have something like 16GB $5 flash cards? I am assuming also that little rom cards could be of equal cost. This may not be quite like 45GB HD/blu discs, but it is well within a similar scope. I would be that at least one engineer on the Wii raised his hand to ask this question when they were considering the media to use -- he may have gotten shot down relatively quickly, but I feel a general distaste brewing nowadays towards optical media. For size and power and cost (for the drive) reasons.
There are a number of sites online with information on this issue. You can take a look at the save the internet coalition at www.savetheinternet.com.
One thing that I strongly suggest people look into is a cooperative effort between moveon.org and of all people, the Christian Coalition. They are teaming up to afford a $70,000 ad in the New York Times. That will really get people talking and see that there couldn't be a more Bipartisan issue out there. 2000 people donating $35 gets the ad. I've already given my money:
https://civic.moveon.org/donatec4/save_the_interne t.html
Wins like this give me hope for the reversal of some rediculous copyright restrictions here in the US.
Has there EVER been a console name that mattered?
on
Both Sides of Wii
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This comes from a history of less-than-stellar names from Nintendo (NES, SNES, N64, Game/Virtual Boy/Cube), but the competition didnt fare much better. Lets take a look.
Atari: A whole bunch of numbers, and a Jaguar. The latter was cool, but that didnt seem to help.
Sega: Master System, CD, 32x - unoriginal and uninteresting. Genesis and Saturn were cool, but they didnt seem to have too great an effect on whether the system failed/succeeded. Dreamcast! Does anyone remember how people felt after hearing this? A gaming console where I can "cast" my "dreams" into? Today, it doesnt even register as odd. If this system had an amazing name, it still would have had the same fate.
Sony: I remember back to the days where this urNOT"e" marketting campaign was trying to sell me some "station" that I could "play" on, right next to the other "multimedia" consoles at the time. Today, a great name, but before it settled on our ears, this name had the same effect as maybe "funbox" or "happytimesmachine"... "playstation".
Microsoft: XBox (360) - boring sequel name (It spun around and came out exactly where it started?), differing opinions on the original name.
The point is that how you percieve a console name at first is completely different to how you percieve it after a few years, or only a few months even. Great consoles have their names reflected back unto them in greatness. I know that without a doubt, a few months after we are all playing with the wii, we will think back to April 2006 and say "Remember how we all thought wii was an odd name?" Marketers want a name that can be remembered and distinguished. Wii won.
Talking about flunking history, there is absolutely *no* record that Gates ever said that, or anything like it.
Also, cars once could only hit 60MPH, and consumers wanted more. Now, your economy minivan breaks 100, and you dont see any automobile under $100K advertise max speed. It is irrelevant, and the consumer (and marketing agencies) realizes this. They are also realizing that perhaps they want a cheaper pc instead of a faster one, easier to use and longer lasting devices instead of feature laden ones, and a smaller and sleeker camera instead of whatever n mexapixels.
This is of course in reference to average consumer, which far outnumbers us slashdotter types. (Even then, we may be the ones enjoy playing with just 640K.)
If we get rid of TLDs,.edu,.gov, and.mil can still stay, although they will be technically what we consider second level domains now, regulated by those specific departments of government instead of any internet agency. Personally, I would love it if the only TLDs were the 2 digit codes, including a.us for us. If the department of education wants to keep.edu, they just make sure they own the regular 3 digit "edu" domain, and they can decide how it is managed.
Slashdot Mirror
I can now become a UNIX-using eunuch from Munich.
The new Sony?
When do they start trying to screw me?
I hope the combined media/hardware companies see this as clearly as it is.
They created as advanced and locked down set of DRM as they could, and couldn't reconcile a single format for consumers. This was out of greed and in an effort to protect profits, but it may have cost them an entire market to move in to.
While I would'nt say there would be an HD media player in every household by now, but with a single format for HD DVD without any encumbrances I bet that there would have been significantly more sales in this area for media and hardware by now. The difference between projected and actual sales continues to diverge as time goes on. There are many other factors, but I see this as being a substantial part.
I have some questions about this. 100 years ago, how would people with severe clinical depression survive? Would they? How many passed their genes on? What about now, or 100 years from now? Will there be more and more super unhappy people relying on medication to survive? I guess similar things can be said for any illness, but I am just curious.
I've had it with these Moth*#@!$! chair jokes, on this Moth##$%!$#@!^ Slashdot!
...Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!"
OK
Decimal is digital too. Not that you don't know this, I just wanted to point it out.
Flash is great but even with its random access speeds, the throughput isn't much better than drives, and so I don't see such a huge boost in boot times from flash alone. To have your cpu do all of that work every boot seems a bit rediculous. Reading a 512+ MB file into memory and a few adjustments, you are back to where you were.
(As an aside, can anyone tell me how BeOS was able to boot in only around 7 seconds for me a decade ago, to a fully usable desktop? From fully off to fully usable, that was nuts.... what can modern operating systems do to approach this?)
Are the standard NTFS or Ext3/Reiser/Whatever optimized for use on hard drives? If flash drives start appearing as main system drives, would new or modified versions of file systems help in any way? Or are modern file systems abstract enough to where they dont deal with all the little fiddly-bits? I don't know enough about this area, but it would seem to me that a new hardware device to store files may benefit with a change in the way the OS uses it.
Apparantly, my manual transmission Honda only requires that the clutch be depressed when turning on for the American version. In Japan, there is no sensor requiring you to do so to start the engine. I think the fear was Americans were too stupid to be trusted to not start a car in gear.
With potentially millions of Win98 computers becoming unsupported, there is nothing to suggest they will all or mostly switch to a Linux desktop. But I have every reason to believe that one percent - or even half a percent, or two - would switch over to save costs and improve quality. Grandma wont be the ones to do it on their own, but the people already on the edge, and schools and businesses and the like. We have an older 600MHz P3 / 128MB laptop that Ive put Xubuntu on, and it runs great. My girlfriends old circa '98 laptop that came with Win98, upgraded to XP (deathly slow) is to follow the same path soon. Im sure she isn't the only average computer user who knows a someone who will recommend and help install linux. I'm sure there are actually some grandmas with grandchildren willing to make the switch for them in order to reduce the tech support calls.
Then, you "get lubricated".
One of these things could be used simply to tell if there is an open spot, and a brochure placed in mailboxes nearby. I dont believe that the police will actually be using a laptop to connect to your network and do a test by surfing to google. Again I didnt RTA yet so if that is the case, then I start to be concerned.
This is part of the other half of their jobs. Helping people unlock cars, giving rides to people who are lost, just in general helping the communities they are there to protect.
I have had OO for a while originally some 3Mbps service, its now 10Mbs down, 1 up. This is for $40 a month. Pay a $15 kicker and you get 20down, 2 up. I like the idea of fiber, but not until its in the 100Mbps range.
...Bullshit Inc.?
I do recall the big concern during the N64 days about why Nintendo would choose to stick with cartridges. It could very well be the biggest part of why the market's dominance went from them to Sony, with Squaresoft moving away from the medium.
The reason was primarily due to the high cost of cartridge (which Nintendo used probably for maintaining exclusive control on their own discs for piracy and distribution reasons).
How has this changed now, in 2006? Optical was cool once, but tons and tons of flash is selling, more than ever before. No doubt that optical is cheaper, but with flash manufacturers aiming to sell flash cards for a few bucks in order to get out of the mindset of being reusable and simply being "buy and fill and buy again", will we ever see consoles return to using little memory cards?
I am thinking longer term, 10 years. Wont we have something like 16GB $5 flash cards? I am assuming also that little rom cards could be of equal cost. This may not be quite like 45GB HD/blu discs, but it is well within a similar scope. I would be that at least one engineer on the Wii raised his hand to ask this question when they were considering the media to use -- he may have gotten shot down relatively quickly, but I feel a general distaste brewing nowadays towards optical media. For size and power and cost (for the drive) reasons.
There are a number of sites online with information on this issue. You can take a look at the save the internet coalition at www.savetheinternet.com. One thing that I strongly suggest people look into is a cooperative effort between moveon.org and of all people, the Christian Coalition. They are teaming up to afford a $70,000 ad in the New York Times. That will really get people talking and see that there couldn't be a more Bipartisan issue out there. 2000 people donating $35 gets the ad. I've already given my money: https://civic.moveon.org/donatec4/save_the_interne t.html
Wins like this give me hope for the reversal of some rediculous copyright restrictions here in the US.
Atari: A whole bunch of numbers, and a Jaguar. The latter was cool, but that didnt seem to help.
Sega: Master System, CD, 32x - unoriginal and uninteresting. Genesis and Saturn were cool, but they didnt seem to have too great an effect on whether the system failed/succeeded. Dreamcast! Does anyone remember how people felt after hearing this? A gaming console where I can "cast" my "dreams" into? Today, it doesnt even register as odd. If this system had an amazing name, it still would have had the same fate.
Sony: I remember back to the days where this urNOT"e" marketting campaign was trying to sell me some "station" that I could "play" on, right next to the other "multimedia" consoles at the time. Today, a great name, but before it settled on our ears, this name had the same effect as maybe "funbox" or "happytimesmachine"... "playstation".
Microsoft: XBox (360) - boring sequel name (It spun around and came out exactly where it started?), differing opinions on the original name.
Colecovision / Intellivision - boo
Odyssey - interesting
The point is that how you percieve a console name at first is completely different to how you percieve it after a few years, or only a few months even. Great consoles have their names reflected back unto them in greatness. I know that without a doubt, a few months after we are all playing with the wii, we will think back to April 2006 and say "Remember how we all thought wii was an odd name?" Marketers want a name that can be remembered and distinguished. Wii won.
With a standard key, I cannot "hear" its configuration from the next room or from down the hall.
Also, cars once could only hit 60MPH, and consumers wanted more. Now, your economy minivan breaks 100, and you dont see any automobile under $100K advertise max speed. It is irrelevant, and the consumer (and marketing agencies) realizes this. They are also realizing that perhaps they want a cheaper pc instead of a faster one, easier to use and longer lasting devices instead of feature laden ones, and a smaller and sleeker camera instead of whatever n mexapixels.
This is of course in reference to average consumer, which far outnumbers us slashdotter types. (Even then, we may be the ones enjoy playing with just 640K.)
Its supposed to be a joke.... The "State" of multimonitor gaming. Damn..
...everything's bigger.
If we get rid of TLDs, .edu, .gov, and .mil can still stay, although they will be technically what we consider second level domains now, regulated by those specific departments of government instead of any internet agency. Personally, I would love it if the only TLDs were the 2 digit codes, including a .us for us. If the department of education wants to keep .edu, they just make sure they own the regular 3 digit "edu" domain, and they can decide how it is managed.