so what exactly is new here? i personally think this isn't newsworthy since that's all intel has been for the past 5+ years.
anybody who doesn't use an opteron for their servers or an athlon 64 for their computers has some serious issues - because intel's main competitor has faster, cooler, and cheaper processors.
when i submitted the story, i meant "free" as in "you don't have to pay for it to use it and you can use it as much as you want for free" not free as in open source.
it's about as close to open source as microsoft gets.
looking at microsoft's timeline, there hasn't been such a large gap between windows operating system versions since 3.1 - 95.
i think that's somewhat important to point out since the rest of their timeline is full of significant updates, and lately microsoft has given fewer and less useful updates than they used to. it was actually worth buying win95 over 3.1, and it was actually worth getting win2000 over those.
as bad as it may seem, microsoft is slipping in the innovation department, an area at which they never really excelled in the first place.
"Uh, yeah. Good point. Because a sinking ship (full of people no less) has no environmental impact. If you don't care about the dead people, at least the diesel fuel? That works for you?"
never mind the diesel, the nuclear reactor seems like it would have larger environmental impact than a temporary loud noise.
however, the fact is, in the millitary, environmental issues come second to defense. however this may seem, that's the way it is, although usually the millitary tends to address environmental issues after the weapons are used for the first time (i.e. atomic bomb). so i guess it's better than not addressing concerns like this at all.
plus, how many torpedoes are going to be fired anyway? the subs just sit around waiting for war, it's not like they constantly fire away at each other.
manufacterers of photo printers could easily get more people using their devices if they didn't skimp so much on ink. the ink cartridges have so little ink it's horribly pathetic.
it's for this reason that i switched over to a laser printer for my normal stuff and i just use a supermarket/WalMart for my photos (when i even bother printing them)
with the particular laser printer I bought, which was about $99, I get 2500 prints per $30 toner cartridge ($50 if i don't buy online).
there's more money to be made for the photo printer companies in getting more people to print at home (because they find it more convenient/faster anyway) than there is money to be made by ripping off consumers with small amounts of ink. if they doubled the amount of ink, they could advertise that their prints cost 13 cents a piece to make and they could at the very least double their sales for that particular model.
everybody knows that the price of a printer doesn't matter, it makes more sense to look at the price/size of the ink, because after a few refills the price of the printer is insignificant.
while optimizing projects for maximum fun is great, it doesn't actually increase productivity unless the project itself is a productive project. i'd rather have a slow project than a fast one that's end result is useless.
slow as in how fast they can run mobile applications. phones still run crummy 2D games and are still slower than a gameboy advance with only a few (expensive) exceptions.
slow as in their user interface, in many cases, uses more resources than the phones have to offer. i don't mind a slow phone as long as it doesn't try to win you over with impossibly slow eye-candy
and by useless i mean the fact that #1 the voice quality still sucks, #2 they still get dropped calls, and #3 the only real new feature that phones have gotten are cameras that have low quality and phones that don't let you transfer your phonos without sending them through the network (and paying). there are literally no new features unless you spend $400-500 on a phone.
this isn't even realistic. phones have been the same, weak, slow, useless crap for the last 10 years. even if these phones are plausibile, they are totally unergonomic and unrealistic. i mean what planet are these guys on?
even if any of these devices become plausible, the cell phone companies won't touch them because they don't involve ripping off the customer for $3 ringtones
furthermore, isn't it easier to just push buttons rather than to remember stupid gestures that you have to act out in public and look like a complete idiot?
"The free cheese whets my appetite and makes me more inclined to buy a half pound of the stuff for later."
the problem here is that people are downloading the entire show, not just a 10 minute clip of it.
the other problem is that HBO is a $10 a month service. people have no incentive to pay for HBO's content if they can just download their the torrents of all of HBO's shows.
as much as we don't like corperations for their anti-piracy measures, this IS piracy and downloading Rome episodes IS illegal and this is way more obvious, costly piracy unlike music piracy. where music is overpriced and doesn't take all that much time to make, for $10 a month getting dozens of shows and hundreds of movies to watch a month is a pretty low price for what you get, really HBO isn't ripping you off like the music industry does.
sometimes i think that slashdotters are willing to excuse piracy for reasons like corperations are evil, it's your right to pirate stuff, they didn't offer the content at a decent price, or they have restrictive DRM, etc, but the fact is that having all these things isn't illegal and if you don't like it then dont buy their products, and it doesn't give you the right to blatantly pirate their stuff.
if people keep pirating TV shows then someday the broadcast flag will pass in congress. people can't abuse their ability to tape shows for PERSONAL use, because the more TV show bittorents get popular, the more popular the idea of restrictive DRM will be on television sets.
so instead of renting a movie for $3 and being able to play it an infinite amount of time in a week, I will be compelled to pay the same amount for a disposable media that I can only play once?
Sure...it takes away late fees. But seriously, anybody who thinks this could get off the ground is insane.
You can't sell products that go backwards in time. None of the Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, or this thing alternatives to the DVD will catch on because the fact is that DVDs are still more convenient than these crazy new formats.
how can these huge email services be economical? just by signing up they have to spend about $10 on you.
the type of ad support probably gets more and more intrusive as the services get larger and larger amounts of storage to give away. I wouldn't trust such a service, especially since 100 Megabytes (or less) suits me just fine, and that can be supported using normal ad revenue and not any of the personalized crap that gathers your info and throws ads at you based on your info.
as for the rest of us who actually pay attention to the tech world, this is NO breakthrough as there are already a ton of fanless power supplies out there.
"C) Make the game a Revolution exclusive, severely limiting their potential audience, and thus potential sales."
so...then maybe more people should buy the revolution, then the audience wouldn't be limited.
with a cheaper price than the competition, an innovative controller, and of course the download catalog, and free wireless online, i don't see how the revolution won't gain sales over the gamecube.
xbox 360 and ps3 are just the same games with prettier graphics for a high price filled with marketing garbage.
i don't understand how i'm confined. makes no sense at all.
if i use my PC or iPod, that's not really confining. plus, any idiot can get their music off of their ipod, it's as simple as viewing hidden folders. not to mention the availibility of free (legal) software that has that ability.
so how does this new flash memory free me up when i can just get current flash memory and copy my stuff as much as I want? i'm not really being confined at all. even with DRM, i can still play it on my ipod, my PC, and burn CDs to play on bazillions of devices. i can't even think of any other uses i would really want for my DRMed music.
hmm...maybe sandisk is making excuses here...maybe they know that consumers don't actually want copy protection built in to their flash memory.
i'm glad that someone has made this hack for the PSP
however, sometimes i wish (especially for portable consoles) that consoles would support homebrew code by the first party providing a free - $200 development kit so that you could make homebrew code. I think it would be way more fun to be able to do things from a computer science class on consoles and play around with the unique aspects of consoles.
i also find it sad that in order to unlock the full potential of the PSP's capability the software actually has to be "downgraded" - essentially sony's PSP firmware releases have scarce features with tons of lockdown features.
you can't say it's a failure until you find out how the sales figures are. surely cingular will heavily advertise it, and just the fact that it has itunes will mean it will be somewhat popular.
what other phone do you know of with built in stereo speakers? the phone is alone in a class, it has itunes, and it's a pretty good value, i don't see how it will be a "failure"
don't forget it takes pictures, videos, has bluetooth, and onboard flash memory for music. it has plenty of features for a decent price and to me it looks like a hot item.
some of you were expecting some kind of amazing do all ipod device with 4GB of memory, or something, and that's not going to happen (yet) with a phone especially because apple didn't even make this device, motorola did.
ipod starter: plays in mono sound - $199 ipod home: plays 5 songs a day - $299 ipod professional: plays songs as long as you activate your ipod - $399 ipod ultimate: lets you tweak options that you could have tweaked anyway but we hid them away in the cheaper versions - $499
if you need to be 10 feet from your computer, why bother?
if wimax takes off, a phone with support for that would be very useful. i really don't know much about wimax besides what it generally is, but even if whoever sets it up charges money for it, if you could use a city-wide internet access for all your (free) phone calls, internet browsing, etc., then, well, that'd be pretty awesome.
Jay Echouafni, the 38-year-old satellite TV mogul who allegedly ordered and funded the cyberhits, went on the lam last year, and remains a fugitive from a federal indictment out of Los Angeles.
the worst part is that this guy is still out there and hasn't been caught yet. hopefully it's only a matter of time before he's nabbed
In fact, all in all there are probably several times as many different variations on the iPod as there will be on Windows Vista. So, uh, what was your point again?
having different drive capacities and colors makes sense. but there's no reason to just disable features in the OS and call it "starter edition". a 60 GB ipod actually costs more than a 20 GB ipod to make. however, the price of making a CD that contains Vista Ultimate costs Microsoft not a penny more than it does to make a Starter Edition CD.
whereas the differnt incompatibilities of the different version of Windows confuse and frustrate, with the exception of the ipod shuffle all the ipods have the exact same user interface and the exact same controls.
Multidisc is inconvenient and pulls gamers out of the game. Something many developers wish to avoid
So changing a disc every 20 hours is inconvenient?
some of the best PS1 (and best selling) games were multi-disc. metal gear solid, final fantasy are prime examples.
How many dual layered DVDs would it take to equal the capacity of an 8 layered 200 gigabyte blu ray? (yea, they exist)
who cares? when are you going to need 200GB in a disc? games don't need it, and movies don't need it unless the resolution is higher. well, the PS3 can only output 1080p. so there you go, you really don't need more than 20-50GB.
i also noticed that some of you are saying how awesome HDTV looks in comparision to standard definition. first off, i have an HDTV, it's a 50 incher, and really, there simply isn't a problem with DVD quality. it's bright, vibrant, and it's cheap and gets the job done, and all the details that i would want to see i can.
and some of you pointed out how it isn't cheap. it's just not true. someone said how a 24" TV was "only" $900. well, i can get a perfectly good CRT job for $120 at the same size. for $900, only getting 24" of screen space is too high for the average consumer.
which is why the PS3 will fail. they want it to be a long term device. they even were talking about how they never wanted to reduce the price. well, if they want the PS3 to last 10 years, MS and Nintendo are going to come out with new cosoles 5 years into the PS3's life cycle. they will easily overpower the PS3 and will probably be cheaper, easier to develop for, and have more features, because no matter how powerful you make a console, in 5 years you can outclass it. the 3DO is a good example.
does ANYONE think this is a good idea? i mean, some things that/. readers can't tolerate, the typical american consumer doesn't care about.
but seriously, is there a single person in the entire world who thinks this is a step forewards? is there going to be a single gamer, grandma, IT guy, programmer, homework-doer, or first-time computer buyer who actually thinks this is a good idea?
why wouldn't microsoft want to make things more simple for the consumer. the ipod + itunes combo is an outstanding example of how simplicity, reliability, and having a complete system can win over consumers even if the device is overpriced at times, and if other MP3 players have more features.
i'm guessing that "starter edition" really means "windows xp home edition SP3" and i'm guessing that the only ones worth purchasing would be professional and ultimate, which will probably cost $300 and $400, respectively.
for the market that microsoft is aiming for (idiots), don't you think that this is going to be just a little too confusing? there are 3 different home editions for God's sake!
Now, both houses and the executive branch are run by the same (centerally controlled) party
they're you're votes. maybe if the democratic party hadn't changes so much in the past 30 years then their leaders would have a chance of being elected. but at this point the democratic party is nothing like it used to be. republicans are going to have control of congress as long as the democratic party continues to squabble about who they want to be, and as long as they continue to vote in strange ways on issues that matter to people.
at this point the democratic party should be scrapped and liberals should get a new party that is more unified, intelligent, and rational. republicans are getting somewhere because of (most) of those reasons. at least they are unified and have some real leaders instead of the whiny losers that the democrats have.
Slashdot Mirror
so what exactly is new here? i personally think this isn't newsworthy since that's all intel has been for the past 5+ years.
anybody who doesn't use an opteron for their servers or an athlon 64 for their computers has some serious issues - because intel's main competitor has faster, cooler, and cheaper processors.
when i submitted the story, i meant "free" as in "you don't have to pay for it to use it and you can use it as much as you want for free" not free as in open source.
it's about as close to open source as microsoft gets.
looking at microsoft's timeline, there hasn't been such a large gap between windows operating system versions since 3.1 - 95.
i think that's somewhat important to point out since the rest of their timeline is full of significant updates, and lately microsoft has given fewer and less useful updates than they used to. it was actually worth buying win95 over 3.1, and it was actually worth getting win2000 over those.
as bad as it may seem, microsoft is slipping in the innovation department, an area at which they never really excelled in the first place.
"Uh, yeah. Good point. Because a sinking ship (full of people no less) has no environmental impact. If you don't care about the dead people, at least the diesel fuel? That works for you?"
never mind the diesel, the nuclear reactor seems like it would have larger environmental impact than a temporary loud noise.
however, the fact is, in the millitary, environmental issues come second to defense. however this may seem, that's the way it is, although usually the millitary tends to address environmental issues after the weapons are used for the first time (i.e. atomic bomb). so i guess it's better than not addressing concerns like this at all.
plus, how many torpedoes are going to be fired anyway? the subs just sit around waiting for war, it's not like they constantly fire away at each other.
manufacterers of photo printers could easily get more people using their devices if they didn't skimp so much on ink. the ink cartridges have so little ink it's horribly pathetic.
it's for this reason that i switched over to a laser printer for my normal stuff and i just use a supermarket/WalMart for my photos (when i even bother printing them)
with the particular laser printer I bought, which was about $99, I get 2500 prints per $30 toner cartridge ($50 if i don't buy online).
there's more money to be made for the photo printer companies in getting more people to print at home (because they find it more convenient/faster anyway) than there is money to be made by ripping off consumers with small amounts of ink. if they doubled the amount of ink, they could advertise that their prints cost 13 cents a piece to make and they could at the very least double their sales for that particular model.
everybody knows that the price of a printer doesn't matter, it makes more sense to look at the price/size of the ink, because after a few refills the price of the printer is insignificant.
while optimizing projects for maximum fun is great, it doesn't actually increase productivity unless the project itself is a productive project. i'd rather have a slow project than a fast one that's end result is useless.
slow as in how fast they can run mobile applications. phones still run crummy 2D games and are still slower than a gameboy advance with only a few (expensive) exceptions.
slow as in their user interface, in many cases, uses more resources than the phones have to offer. i don't mind a slow phone as long as it doesn't try to win you over with impossibly slow eye-candy
and by useless i mean the fact that #1 the voice quality still sucks, #2 they still get dropped calls, and #3 the only real new feature that phones have gotten are cameras that have low quality and phones that don't let you transfer your phonos without sending them through the network (and paying). there are literally no new features unless you spend $400-500 on a phone.
"...which can be charged by bio-energy"
uhh...okay spock.
this isn't even realistic. phones have been the same, weak, slow, useless crap for the last 10 years. even if these phones are plausibile, they are totally unergonomic and unrealistic. i mean what planet are these guys on?
even if any of these devices become plausible, the cell phone companies won't touch them because they don't involve ripping off the customer for $3 ringtones
furthermore, isn't it easier to just push buttons rather than to remember stupid gestures that you have to act out in public and look like a complete idiot?
"The free cheese whets my appetite and makes me more inclined to buy a half pound of the stuff for later."
the problem here is that people are downloading the entire show, not just a 10 minute clip of it.
the other problem is that HBO is a $10 a month service. people have no incentive to pay for HBO's content if they can just download their the torrents of all of HBO's shows.
as much as we don't like corperations for their anti-piracy measures, this IS piracy and downloading Rome episodes IS illegal and this is way more obvious, costly piracy unlike music piracy. where music is overpriced and doesn't take all that much time to make, for $10 a month getting dozens of shows and hundreds of movies to watch a month is a pretty low price for what you get, really HBO isn't ripping you off like the music industry does.
sometimes i think that slashdotters are willing to excuse piracy for reasons like corperations are evil, it's your right to pirate stuff, they didn't offer the content at a decent price, or they have restrictive DRM, etc, but the fact is that having all these things isn't illegal and if you don't like it then dont buy their products, and it doesn't give you the right to blatantly pirate their stuff.
if people keep pirating TV shows then someday the broadcast flag will pass in congress. people can't abuse their ability to tape shows for PERSONAL use, because the more TV show bittorents get popular, the more popular the idea of restrictive DRM will be on television sets.
so instead of renting a movie for $3 and being able to play it an infinite amount of time in a week, I will be compelled to pay the same amount for a disposable media that I can only play once?
Sure...it takes away late fees. But seriously, anybody who thinks this could get off the ground is insane.
You can't sell products that go backwards in time. None of the Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, or this thing alternatives to the DVD will catch on because the fact is that DVDs are still more convenient than these crazy new formats.
how can these huge email services be economical? just by signing up they have to spend about $10 on you.
the type of ad support probably gets more and more intrusive as the services get larger and larger amounts of storage to give away. I wouldn't trust such a service, especially since 100 Megabytes (or less) suits me just fine, and that can be supported using normal ad revenue and not any of the personalized crap that gathers your info and throws ads at you based on your info.
thank you for the Antec advertisement, Taco
as for the rest of us who actually pay attention to the tech world, this is NO breakthrough as there are already a ton of fanless power supplies out there.
list of all fanless powersupplies already availible on newegg
in fact, this antec supply still has a fan. how is this a breakthrough? how is this worth posting?
oh i forgot, it's NOT, it's and ADVERTISEMENT.
"C) Make the game a Revolution exclusive, severely limiting their potential audience, and thus potential sales."
so...then maybe more people should buy the revolution, then the audience wouldn't be limited.
with a cheaper price than the competition, an innovative controller, and of course the download catalog, and free wireless online, i don't see how the revolution won't gain sales over the gamecube.
xbox 360 and ps3 are just the same games with prettier graphics for a high price filled with marketing garbage.
i don't understand how i'm confined. makes no sense at all.
if i use my PC or iPod, that's not really confining. plus, any idiot can get their music off of their ipod, it's as simple as viewing hidden folders. not to mention the availibility of free (legal) software that has that ability.
so how does this new flash memory free me up when i can just get current flash memory and copy my stuff as much as I want? i'm not really being confined at all. even with DRM, i can still play it on my ipod, my PC, and burn CDs to play on bazillions of devices. i can't even think of any other uses i would really want for my DRMed music.
hmm...maybe sandisk is making excuses here...maybe they know that consumers don't actually want copy protection built in to their flash memory.
i'm glad that someone has made this hack for the PSP
however, sometimes i wish (especially for portable consoles) that consoles would support homebrew code by the first party providing a free - $200 development kit so that you could make homebrew code. I think it would be way more fun to be able to do things from a computer science class on consoles and play around with the unique aspects of consoles.
i also find it sad that in order to unlock the full potential of the PSP's capability the software actually has to be "downgraded" - essentially sony's PSP firmware releases have scarce features with tons of lockdown features.
you can't say it's a failure until you find out how the sales figures are. surely cingular will heavily advertise it, and just the fact that it has itunes will mean it will be somewhat popular.
what other phone do you know of with built in stereo speakers? the phone is alone in a class, it has itunes, and it's a pretty good value, i don't see how it will be a "failure"
don't forget it takes pictures, videos, has bluetooth, and onboard flash memory for music. it has plenty of features for a decent price and to me it looks like a hot item.
some of you were expecting some kind of amazing do all ipod device with 4GB of memory, or something, and that's not going to happen (yet) with a phone especially because apple didn't even make this device, motorola did.
yeah, really.
ipods aren't like this:
ipod starter: plays in mono sound - $199
ipod home: plays 5 songs a day - $299
ipod professional: plays songs as long as you activate your ipod - $399
ipod ultimate: lets you tweak options that you could have tweaked anyway but we hid them away in the cheaper versions - $499
if you need to be 10 feet from your computer, why bother?
if wimax takes off, a phone with support for that would be very useful. i really don't know much about wimax besides what it generally is, but even if whoever sets it up charges money for it, if you could use a city-wide internet access for all your (free) phone calls, internet browsing, etc., then, well, that'd be pretty awesome.
Jay Echouafni, the 38-year-old satellite TV mogul who allegedly ordered and funded the cyberhits, went on the lam last year, and remains a fugitive from a federal indictment out of Los Angeles.
the worst part is that this guy is still out there and hasn't been caught yet. hopefully it's only a matter of time before he's nabbed
In fact, all in all there are probably several times as many different variations on the iPod as there will be on Windows Vista. So, uh, what was your point again? having different drive capacities and colors makes sense. but there's no reason to just disable features in the OS and call it "starter edition". a 60 GB ipod actually costs more than a 20 GB ipod to make. however, the price of making a CD that contains Vista Ultimate costs Microsoft not a penny more than it does to make a Starter Edition CD. whereas the differnt incompatibilities of the different version of Windows confuse and frustrate, with the exception of the ipod shuffle all the ipods have the exact same user interface and the exact same controls.
Multidisc is inconvenient and pulls gamers out of the game. Something many developers wish to avoid So changing a disc every 20 hours is inconvenient? some of the best PS1 (and best selling) games were multi-disc. metal gear solid, final fantasy are prime examples. How many dual layered DVDs would it take to equal the capacity of an 8 layered 200 gigabyte blu ray? (yea, they exist) who cares? when are you going to need 200GB in a disc? games don't need it, and movies don't need it unless the resolution is higher. well, the PS3 can only output 1080p. so there you go, you really don't need more than 20-50GB. i also noticed that some of you are saying how awesome HDTV looks in comparision to standard definition. first off, i have an HDTV, it's a 50 incher, and really, there simply isn't a problem with DVD quality. it's bright, vibrant, and it's cheap and gets the job done, and all the details that i would want to see i can. and some of you pointed out how it isn't cheap. it's just not true. someone said how a 24" TV was "only" $900. well, i can get a perfectly good CRT job for $120 at the same size. for $900, only getting 24" of screen space is too high for the average consumer. which is why the PS3 will fail. they want it to be a long term device. they even were talking about how they never wanted to reduce the price. well, if they want the PS3 to last 10 years, MS and Nintendo are going to come out with new cosoles 5 years into the PS3's life cycle. they will easily overpower the PS3 and will probably be cheaper, easier to develop for, and have more features, because no matter how powerful you make a console, in 5 years you can outclass it. the 3DO is a good example.
does ANYONE think this is a good idea? i mean, some things that /. readers can't tolerate, the typical american consumer doesn't care about.
but seriously, is there a single person in the entire world who thinks this is a step forewards? is there going to be a single gamer, grandma, IT guy, programmer, homework-doer, or first-time computer buyer who actually thinks this is a good idea?
why wouldn't microsoft want to make things more simple for the consumer. the ipod + itunes combo is an outstanding example of how simplicity, reliability, and having a complete system can win over consumers even if the device is overpriced at times, and if other MP3 players have more features.
i'm guessing that "starter edition" really means "windows xp home edition SP3" and i'm guessing that the only ones worth purchasing would be professional and ultimate, which will probably cost $300 and $400, respectively.
for the market that microsoft is aiming for (idiots), don't you think that this is going to be just a little too confusing? there are 3 different home editions for God's sake!
Now, both houses and the executive branch are run by the same (centerally controlled) party
they're you're votes. maybe if the democratic party hadn't changes so much in the past 30 years then their leaders would have a chance of being elected. but at this point the democratic party is nothing like it used to be. republicans are going to have control of congress as long as the democratic party continues to squabble about who they want to be, and as long as they continue to vote in strange ways on issues that matter to people.
at this point the democratic party should be scrapped and liberals should get a new party that is more unified, intelligent, and rational. republicans are getting somewhere because of (most) of those reasons. at least they are unified and have some real leaders instead of the whiny losers that the democrats have.