There's a huge difference between NTSC and a digital signal. NTSC is a kludge, pure and simple. It was never designed to be a color signal, but they graft a separate color signal over the orignal black and white. It's amazing it works at all, but the quality varies wildly. "Never Twice the Same Color."
Expect much better color fidelity out of HDTV, especially coming off of a screen that isn't a picture tube.
I'm hoping this will lead to more diversity in the Palm OS platform. With the exception of the PDQ cellphone and the ruggedized Pilot for inventory, Palm has stuck pretty closely to their original design, making only gradual improvements along the way.
This is smart of them. How many other PDAs have come even close to the Pilot line in sales? Other companies had been trying and trying, and failing and failing. Making radical changes in the PalmPilot would have risked alienating their original user base. What if they had gone over to color screens and noone wanted one with the short battery life color screens entail? They were wise not to risk everything on a roll of the dice, and there's probably a limit to the number of models they can put out themselves.
Now, by licencing out the Pilot for other companies to build, they are FORCING companies to add new features. Forcing, because those other companies MUST differentiate their products from 3Com's in some way, or people will just buy the "real" Pilot. So hopefully you'll see the Pilot with flash memory card slot, the MP3Pilot with the headphone jack, the Color Pilot, the Big Screen Pilot, the cheapass Pilot, the wrought-iron GothPilot, a range of colors, etc.
And if the experiments fail, 3COM will still be selling their original successful model (as well as picking the most successful of the new features, no doubt).
There was an IBM PalmPilot that Palm manufactured for them and silk-screened an IBM logo onto, and supposedly a ruggedized Pilot for inventory that I never actually saw (was it ever released?).
Now they're licensing the Palm OS out to companies who are going to build entirely new devices themselves. It could be a very good move, if it makes the Palm OS the de facto standard, and if it brings about a greater variety of Palm devices.
Leaving the piracy issue aside, why would anyone pay $50 for an emulator, when for about $100 they could have a real Playstation with a PSX controller?
The controller being key, because most PC joysticks and gamepads don't have enough buttons, and those that do have them in the wrong places to be instinctive to use while playing the game. Plus, the basic Sony controller is pretty hard to beat for quality.
Is the picture on the emu better or something?
Lastly, the whole reason I own a PSX is that it's a completely simple source of instant gratification. No patches to install, no drivers to download, just pop the CD in and cycle the power. No emulator is ever ever going to be that simple to use.
People say "that's good" (for Dell, at least) because the iMac sold really really well, despite its shortcomings.
I was personally annoyed by the iMac because having used Mac toasters all through college, I know just how much better a separate monitor you can swivel to a comfortable angle is.
With this technology, couldn't you also use the laser to burn a pattern of "live" and "dead" spaces into the medium, thus getting a read-only medium with even higher density? Or do you only get parallel lines of scoring?
Also, from what you're saying, this is a grid, not a radial pattern like what you'd need for a rotating disk medium. That might actually be better, though: what kinds of bearings could rotate a disk with only nanometers of vibration?
Not too good of an example. In terms of pure text, a book should easily fit on the floppies we have now. Illustrations would bulk it out a lot more, of course.
I agree that the paperback has a long and healthy life ahead of it (you can't beat a book for readibility, tangibility, battery life, or instant gratification), but there are some areas which will be taken over by electronic distribution.
Software manuals have already switched over to electronic distribution as their main medium of publication, for instance. Often the printed manuals only come as PDFs.
Secondly, I foresee a market for electronic publishing of fringe interest items that have gone out of print, especially when the cost of printing is going way up. It's just more economical for people who only want to read the stuff. I read Robert Louis Stevensons's The Silverado Squatters this way on my Pilot. For complete works of authors, the reduced shelf space would be nice, too. "Every surviving work of literature from the dawn of man to 100 A.D., on one CD"
This will all get much nicer when we get better screens, particularly on our handhelds.
The toon-like look of the 3D objects comes from a software plug-in to whichever 3D renderer they used. A lot of programs have them now, they've been around for years.
This isn't the best use I've seen of the technique: the 3D objects didn't seem flat enough, and their signature CGI motion made them stick out too much when they were background details. It was distracting.
If you want a truly magnificent integration of CGI and conventional animation, see "Princess Mononoke" when Disney releases it. Where's the CGI? YOU WON"T BE ABLE TO TELL!
course, most of the music out today is crap anyway - never thought I'd hear myself saying that....
No, it's that the stuff that gets played on the radio is junk. There's still tons of good music coming out, you just can't find it on the radio because the big companies with the big money aren't pushing those artists.
Most of the bands I actually like don't get played on the radio, and most of the new bands I've discovered were from word of mouth or internet newsgroups.
If a band I like actually gets airplay (Sixpence!), it's like a miracle.
Why? Because they haven't lept at every whiz-bang gizmo that comes down the pike?
Look at a Palm V sometime. It's solved almost all of the Pilot's original flaws: better screen, better durability, more memory, backlighting, rechargeable batteries. It looks sharp, too.
Yes, there is no cellphone, voice recording, pcmcia card support, or color screen built in, but those things all either increase the size of the unit outside of the pack-of-cigarettes form factor that's been proven to work, or decrease battery life to unacceptable levels.
Also, simplicity is what sells a Pilot. The last CE POS I looked at had buttons all over it, and I couldn't even figure out how to turn it on. Bleah.
What the Palm people should do (and are now poised to do) is go for the low end of the market with a sub-$100 pilot. The basic Pilot card has GOT to be cheaper than dirt after being mass-manufactured for years. And, it has all that it needs. Just put a graphing calculator on it as standard equipment (and Tetris), and watch the high school kids line up.
The OS/2 users put up a good fight, but in the end lost to the powerful press controlled by Microsoft, and take heed linux users- the same thing can happen to you if you ar enot careful!
Not really. The two situations aren't that similar. OS/2 needed to sell lots of copies of the OS in order to keep going. It needed lots of people buying software to encourage developers to write new software for the platform. The business plan was dependant on getting a chunk of the business world's desktops that never arrived.
Linux, on the other hand, is freeware and does not depend on income or market share to keep going. Those help, to be sure, but aren't part of the base conditions for success.
No, David Brin most likely keeps up with current ideas spun out of NASA and the space industry. The shuttle tank idea has been around for a while in those circles, and many SF writers mine the cutting edge concepts for story ideas.
After all, everyone to the right of President Clinton is a member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." And nobody in the media gave that moniker the belly laugh it deserved.
I saw a Dreamcast a few weeks ago at Katsucon. I saw some fighting game, a Godzilla game, and a demo that had deck guns on a ship firing into the air.
I really wasn't impressed. The graphics were good, but not that much better than Playstation 1 or N64. The Godzilla game, in particular, looked REALLY REALLY polygonal, like the T-Rex in TOMB RAIDER. And, I have yet to see a game for it that I'd actually want to play. I hear that the Sonic game for Dreamcast is good, though.
PSX2 looks like more of a quantum leap forwards, versus a small evolutionary leap for Dreamcast. Though we'll have to see screen shots of actual games to know what it'll really do when it has to work hard.
I just checked sci.space* for references to this thing, and it is being taken seriously. It may not work, or be economical, but it is a valid concept.
Of course, my first reponse was "How Preposterous!", and then I tried to see if I could spot where they photoshopped the image together, but no, it's actually real.
It doesn't have to be perfect to work, just good enough to get the audience to buy into it. Look at Toy Story for an example: nobody would mistake any character in the movie for a real person, but you got involved and the movie worked.
And the graphic I saw looked way better than anything in Toy Story.
Honestly, I do not want to have to download patches and screw around with drivers just to play a stupid video game. The whole point is instant gratification and relief from stress.
So I bought a Playstation. Buy game, put game in Playstation, play game. No muss, no fuss. The games are generally free of serious bugs; in fact, if a game has a bug, it's news. Plus, the cost of the system is so much lower than building and rebuilding an acceptable game system: I bought the whole Playstation for less than some PC joysticks cost!
There are still a few games on the PC that I like (Warcraft II), but by and large, give me a Playstation every time.
I really got ticked off at the "Karl Kling" characterization of OS/2 users as bitter Betamax users, railing away at nobody on a street corner about how they're better than VHS.
OS/2 users have been actively working on the OS they love for a long time. They have made serious progress with Win95 emulation, built new GUIs, ported apps and written apps.
Their main problems are twofold:
1. IBM. "They're not going to support OS/2 anymore." Well, when did they ever? They pretend they're going to make the OS into some new buzzword their marketing droids read about, and hold the OS too closely for anyone else to do anything with it. I wish they'd open source, spin off, or sell, just give the OS to someone who cares. It's the Commodore Amiga story all over again...
2. Traditionally, the OS/2 software development effort has been the traditional Windows payware/shareware model done in miniature, which hasn't been very effective. Apps get written, but they can't get market share, because the OS itself is on the fringes. Open source totally side-steps this issue, because development and deployment aren't tied to market share. This seems to be changing, as people look at Linux and do likewise.
As for problem #1, it's more a case of being held back than being terminal. OS/2 is a full-featured, modern, quality OS with apps and everything. It's already got a lot of the UI pieces that are still coming together for Linux.
Being an OS/2 fan is more like knowing someone who isn't applying themselves than sitting at a deathbed. You hope they'll live up to their potential, but you find it hard to keep caring. And, it's more healthy to be around people who are going somewhere.
The American programmers who leave after 5 years are generally people who have gotten tired of it. A lot of people who get teaching degrees burn out in the same fashion - they find it's not what they want to do with the rest of their lives, or it's not what they expected it would be when they were studying to get there.
Don't confuse this with people who can't get jobs.
Also, when talking about shipping programming jobs overseas, bear in mind the difficulty of coordinating that work with the programmers back home. This is definitely not trivial, when the time zones make it impossible to even teleconference during business hours.
Jon
Uhm, "Normal" Cable TV == Digital TV
on
How is DivX Doing
·
· Score: 1
I hate to tell you, but all of the cable feeds come down off of the satellite in a digital format these days (Digicypher II). So, if you're watching HBO, or whatever, it's from a digital source.
You get artifacting with digital video when people try to cut corners on the bits-per-second in order to cram more onto a single disc. But in a professional environment, it can be done right so that you wouldn't notice it. You crank up the bitrate until the artifacting goes away.
While I respect the effort you put into this article, I can't help but be put off by the way you wrote it. I reads like some kind of lame WIRED magazine cultural-manifesto-wannabe, for crying out loud!
Record Industries: "clueless... fat, greedy... venal.. greedy... mega-corporations... dumb... ignorant..."
You paint your pictures in broad strokes to provoke a reaction in your reader. But in doing so, you're exaggerating the whole thing into ludicrousness:
"The generation of people now rapidly acquiring MP3's will probably never pay for CD's again in their lives."
Why not? Most of them are buying CDs NOW. If you want the music on a CD, buying the CD is a lot cheaper and safer than storing the MP3s on your always-overcrowded hard disk. And everywhere you go, the infrastructure for playing it is widely available and cheap. Plus, you won't lose all of your music when (yes, WHEN) your hard disk crashes.
There was a good point to the article, namely that the companies are behind the times. Not exactly breaking news, but a good point. And bringing Customdisc into the picture as a counter-example was also well done. But you blew the prose all out of proportion.
I don't like screeds, Mr. Katz. I started reading Slashdot because I wanted access to news that was factual, not preprocessed newsy-bits like all the other news outlets provide. Most of the time, modern bad journalism isn't worth the effort to sift the facts from the FUD. I don't want journalism. I want facts.
I hope you will continue to write for Slashdot, but I also hope you can take the high road and stick to the facts a little more closely.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a huge difference between NTSC and a digital signal. NTSC is a kludge, pure and simple. It was never designed to be a color signal, but they graft a separate color signal over the orignal black and white. It's amazing it works at all, but the quality varies wildly. "Never Twice the Same Color."
Expect much better color fidelity out of HDTV, especially coming off of a screen that isn't a picture tube.
Jon
This is smart of them. How many other PDAs have come even close to the Pilot line in sales? Other companies had been trying and trying, and failing and failing. Making radical changes in the PalmPilot would have risked alienating their original user base. What if they had gone over to color screens and noone wanted one with the short battery life color screens entail? They were wise not to risk everything on a roll of the dice, and there's probably a limit to the number of models they can put out themselves.
Now, by licencing out the Pilot for other companies to build, they are FORCING companies to add new features. Forcing, because those other companies MUST differentiate their products from 3Com's in some way, or people will just buy the "real" Pilot. So hopefully you'll see the Pilot with flash memory card slot, the MP3Pilot with the headphone jack, the Color Pilot, the Big Screen Pilot, the cheapass Pilot, the wrought-iron GothPilot, a range of colors, etc.
And if the experiments fail, 3COM will still be selling their original successful model (as well as picking the most successful of the new features, no doubt).
Jon
There was an IBM PalmPilot that Palm manufactured for them and silk-screened an IBM logo onto, and supposedly a ruggedized Pilot for inventory that I never actually saw (was it ever released?).
Now they're licensing the Palm OS out to companies who are going to build entirely new devices themselves. It could be a very good move, if it makes the Palm OS the de facto standard, and if it brings about a greater variety of Palm devices.
Jon
Leaving the piracy issue aside, why would anyone pay $50 for an emulator, when for about $100 they could have a real Playstation with a PSX controller?
The controller being key, because most PC joysticks and gamepads don't have enough buttons, and those that do have them in the wrong places to be instinctive to use while playing the game. Plus, the basic Sony controller is pretty hard to beat for quality.
Is the picture on the emu better or something?
Lastly, the whole reason I own a PSX is that it's a completely simple source of instant gratification. No patches to install, no drivers to download, just pop the CD in and cycle the power. No emulator is ever ever going to be that simple to use.
Jon
People say "that's good" (for Dell, at least) because the iMac sold really really well, despite its shortcomings.
I was personally annoyed by the iMac because having used Mac toasters all through college, I know just how much better a separate monitor you can swivel to a comfortable angle is.
Jon
With this technology, couldn't you also use the laser to burn a pattern of "live" and "dead" spaces into the medium, thus getting a read-only medium with even higher density? Or do you only get parallel lines of scoring?
Also, from what you're saying, this is a grid, not a radial pattern like what you'd need for a rotating disk medium. That might actually be better, though: what kinds of bearings could rotate a disk with only nanometers of vibration?
Jon
You're right, of course. Oops.
Jon
I could see someone building a hard drive for a mouse- or bug-sized 'bot with this tech, but not a viral-sized one!
At one molecule per bit, it's going to take a lot of nano-legs to carry the code around!
It's kewl, though!
Jon
Not too good of an example. In terms of pure text, a book should easily fit on the floppies we have now. Illustrations would bulk it out a lot more, of course.
;)
Oh well, it's only journalism.
Jon
A product with this name actually came out a few years back. No idea (or interest) how good it actually was.
Software manuals have already switched over to electronic distribution as their main medium of publication, for instance. Often the printed manuals only come as PDFs.
Secondly, I foresee a market for electronic publishing of fringe interest items that have gone out of print, especially when the cost of printing is going way up. It's just more economical for people who only want to read the stuff. I read Robert Louis Stevensons's The Silverado Squatters this way on my Pilot. For complete works of authors, the reduced shelf space would be nice, too. "Every surviving work of literature from the dawn of man to 100 A.D., on one CD"
This will all get much nicer when we get better screens, particularly on our handhelds.
The toon-like look of the 3D objects comes from a software plug-in to whichever 3D renderer they used. A lot of programs have them now, they've been around for years.
This isn't the best use I've seen of the technique: the 3D objects didn't seem flat enough, and their signature CGI motion made them stick out too much when they were background details. It was distracting.
If you want a truly magnificent integration of CGI and conventional animation, see "Princess Mononoke" when Disney releases it. Where's the CGI? YOU WON"T BE ABLE TO TELL!
Jon Acheson
Most of the bands I actually like don't get played on the radio, and most of the new bands I've discovered were from word of mouth or internet newsgroups.
If a band I like actually gets airplay (Sixpence!), it's like a miracle.
Jon
Why? Because they haven't lept at every whiz-bang gizmo that comes down the pike?
Look at a Palm V sometime. It's solved almost all of the Pilot's original flaws: better screen, better durability, more memory, backlighting, rechargeable batteries. It looks sharp, too.
Yes, there is no cellphone, voice recording, pcmcia card support, or color screen built in, but those things all either increase the size of the unit outside of the pack-of-cigarettes form factor that's been proven to work, or decrease battery life to unacceptable levels.
Also, simplicity is what sells a Pilot. The last CE POS I looked at had buttons all over it, and I couldn't even figure out how to turn it on. Bleah.
What the Palm people should do (and are now poised to do) is go for the low end of the market with a sub-$100 pilot. The basic Pilot card has GOT to be cheaper than dirt after being mass-manufactured for years. And, it has all that it needs. Just put a graphing calculator on it as standard equipment (and Tetris), and watch the high school kids line up.
Jon Acheson
Linux, on the other hand, is freeware and does not depend on income or market share to keep going. Those help, to be sure, but aren't part of the base conditions for success.
Jon
No, David Brin most likely keeps up with current ideas spun out of NASA and the space industry. The shuttle tank idea has been around for a while in those circles, and many SF writers mine the cutting edge concepts for story ideas.
Jon
After all, everyone to the right of President Clinton is a member of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." And nobody in the media gave that moniker the belly laugh it deserved.
I saw a Dreamcast a few weeks ago at Katsucon. I saw some fighting game, a Godzilla game, and a demo that had deck guns on a ship firing into the air.
I really wasn't impressed. The graphics were good, but not that much better than Playstation 1 or N64. The Godzilla game, in particular, looked REALLY REALLY polygonal, like the T-Rex in TOMB RAIDER. And, I have yet to see a game for it that I'd actually want to play. I hear that the Sonic game for Dreamcast is good, though.
PSX2 looks like more of a quantum leap forwards, versus a small evolutionary leap for Dreamcast. Though we'll have to see screen shots of actual games to know what it'll really do when it has to work hard.
I just checked sci.space* for references to this thing, and it is being taken seriously. It may not work, or be economical, but it is a valid concept.
Of course, my first reponse was "How Preposterous!", and then I tried to see if I could spot where they photoshopped the image together, but no, it's actually real.
And if it works, DAMN cool!
It doesn't have to be perfect to work, just good enough to get the audience to buy into it. Look at Toy Story for an example: nobody would mistake any character in the movie for a real person, but you got involved and the movie worked.
And the graphic I saw looked way better than anything in Toy Story.
Jon
Honestly, I do not want to have to download patches and screw around with drivers just to play a stupid video game. The whole point is instant gratification and relief from stress.
So I bought a Playstation. Buy game, put game in Playstation, play game. No muss, no fuss. The games are generally free of serious bugs; in fact, if a game has a bug, it's news. Plus, the cost of the system is so much lower than building and rebuilding an acceptable game system: I bought the whole Playstation for less than some PC joysticks cost!
There are still a few games on the PC that I like (Warcraft II), but by and large, give me a Playstation every time.
Jon
I really got ticked off at the "Karl Kling" characterization of OS/2 users as bitter Betamax users, railing away at nobody on a street corner about how they're better than VHS.
OS/2 users have been actively working on the OS they love for a long time. They have made serious progress with Win95 emulation, built new GUIs, ported apps and written apps.
Their main problems are twofold:
1. IBM. "They're not going to support OS/2 anymore." Well, when did they ever? They pretend they're going to make the OS into some new buzzword their marketing droids read about, and hold the OS too closely for anyone else to do anything with it. I wish they'd open source, spin off, or sell, just give the OS to someone who cares. It's the Commodore Amiga story all over again...
2. Traditionally, the OS/2 software development effort has been the traditional Windows payware/shareware model done in miniature, which hasn't been very effective. Apps get written, but they can't get market share, because the OS itself is on the fringes. Open source totally side-steps this issue, because development and deployment aren't tied to market share. This seems to be changing, as people look at Linux and do likewise.
As for problem #1, it's more a case of being held back than being terminal. OS/2 is a full-featured, modern, quality OS with apps and everything. It's already got a lot of the UI pieces that are still coming together for Linux.
Being an OS/2 fan is more like knowing someone who isn't applying themselves than sitting at a deathbed. You hope they'll live up to their potential, but you find it hard to keep caring. And, it's more healthy to be around people who are going somewhere.
The American programmers who leave after 5 years are generally people who have gotten tired of it. A lot of people who get teaching degrees burn out in the same fashion - they find it's not what they want to do with the rest of their lives, or it's not what they expected it would be when they were studying to get there.
Don't confuse this with people who can't get jobs.
Also, when talking about shipping programming jobs overseas, bear in mind the difficulty of coordinating that work with the programmers back home. This is definitely not trivial, when the time zones make it impossible to even teleconference during business hours.
Jon
I hate to tell you, but all of the cable feeds come down off of the satellite in a digital format these days (Digicypher II). So, if you're watching HBO, or whatever, it's from a digital source.
You get artifacting with digital video when people try to cut corners on the bits-per-second in order to cram more onto a single disc. But in a professional environment, it can be done right so that you wouldn't notice it. You crank up the bitrate until the artifacting goes away.
Jon
Mr. Katz,
While I respect the effort you put into this article, I can't help but be put off by the way you wrote it. I reads like some kind of lame WIRED magazine cultural-manifesto-wannabe, for crying out loud!
Record Industries: "clueless... fat, greedy... venal.. greedy... mega-corporations... dumb... ignorant..."
MP3: "stunning blitz... merciless assault... revolutionary..."
You paint your pictures in broad strokes to provoke a reaction in your reader. But in doing so, you're exaggerating the whole thing into ludicrousness:
"The generation of people now rapidly acquiring MP3's will probably never pay for CD's again in their lives."
Why not? Most of them are buying CDs NOW. If you want the music on a CD, buying the CD is a lot cheaper and safer than storing the MP3s on your always-overcrowded hard disk. And everywhere you go, the infrastructure for playing it is widely available and cheap. Plus, you won't lose all of your music when (yes, WHEN) your hard disk crashes.
There was a good point to the article, namely that the companies are behind the times. Not exactly breaking news, but a good point. And bringing Customdisc into the picture as a counter-example was also well done. But you blew the prose all out of proportion.
I don't like screeds, Mr. Katz. I started reading Slashdot because I wanted access to news that was factual, not preprocessed newsy-bits like all the other news outlets provide. Most of the time, modern bad journalism isn't worth the effort to sift the facts from the FUD. I don't want journalism. I want facts.
I hope you will continue to write for Slashdot, but I also hope you can take the high road and stick to the facts a little more closely.
Thank you for reading this.
Sincerely,
Jon Acheson