Ten technology FAILS Nokia's N-Gage, Palm's Foleo, Motorola's Atrix, Apple's Newton MessagePad, HD DVD, Sony's Rolly, Sony's Mylo, Philips' CD-i, Commodore's CD-TV, IBM's PCJr, the Camputer's Lynx, Gizmondo, the Phantom, Atari's Jaguar, MySpace, Beenz - behind every iPad there are dozens and dozens of technology products that aspired to greatness …
Exactly, I did spend time in SL, and I did build things.. BUT the limiting factor was the finance side of things, you had to pay to upload files.. so your main source of content, which would be students and the un-employed looking for an escape, i.e. people with little money, can't get into the content creating...
Plus the SL viewer was shite and last I tried it, still is shite!
I love the idea though, of a virtual world you can visit for a bit of R&R, a pre-cursor to holodecks etc.. but nah.. not good enough to keep peopel interested...
I have one SL account, it's the free account.
I never spend a cent on it, I have 800 euro's in Linden Dollars for assing around second life.
These stories about how Second Life was too difficult for them reads to me like people going to the forest and explaining how they were unable to find any trees.
Clearly they have no concept on what trees actually are.
And articles like this one confirm to me that fact checking is not one of the mandatory steps in today's journalism.
as Playstation Home?
Similarish concept, though it looks like the latest Tony Hawks skateboard game, minus the wheels. This line from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Home could do with being rephrased:
"Home allows users to create a custom avatar, which can be groomed realistically."
" I understand how some people have no imagination or need to be directed on what to do, and if that is the case then SL is not for you, stick to the kiddie games like world of warcrack, or similar titles where you know what is expected of you and little imagination is required."
World of Warcraft is a game, as such it has well defined rules and objectives. Some people find competing with each other within this rule-set to be fun, others do not. Second Life is a simulator and as such has few rules and no objectives beyond the nebulous concept of 'be free and express yourself'. Unfortunately expressing yourself to any real extent in SL requires coughing up real world cash. The more you want to deviate from the norm the more money you have to pay.
Don't even get me started on the buggy client, lacklustre graphics engine or the fact that most of the actually interesting content is user created and yet those same creators have to pay the game developers real money for the privileged of making their simulator better.
I think that's a fair summary. A significant flow of new users, but most of them give up. It also struggles with more than a handful of people in the same place, and uses huge amounts of bandwidth.
As for the lass salubrious elements, there has been sex in such games since the days they were text-only.
I think Second Life is a technology that failed to deliver on the hype--I recall some hype from The Register--but it survives. There are better alternatives for corporations and schools, such as OpenSim, which allow everything to be on an internal network. I think Second Life is going to be the big public-access virtual world for a long time. It's going to be small.
It's not going to be much use in a world of mobile-phone data delivery to smartphones and tablets. Not enough screenspace, and too much data to be paid for.
There's this thing that allows you to see advertising, browse shop fronts and do lots of things online, or 'virtually' as some kids call it. It's called the Internet and doesn't involve walking around some bullshit world looking for stuff (using a tool called 'Google' one can find shopfronts and heart's desires immediately).
All I know is a handful of deluded academics, greedy pyramid sellers and PR departments love SL. A really, really good reason to hate it. I think I tried it once...entered 'the world' thought "this is shit", then never went back.
JDX - I managed to post rabid pro-iPad/Android/Blackberry/Win8 comments, dissing every other platform, in the review of the Google Nexus - the up/down ratio was interesting as was the fact that people will up or down vote the most stupid, illogical comments, if it doesn't say the right thing about their adopted mega-corporation...
Were you a regular, you would realise that The Register forums are full of people that stupid, in fact the intellect level evident from posts seems to have been in sharp decline for a number of years.
Mention Apple = hatred+bile+mindnummingly stupid commentary from the commentards.
Interestingly, the article mentioned several of the ancestors of the iPad, and it takes a certain sort of defective mind to fail to recognise they elegance of Apple's solution.
paris: because she has the same first initial as me, we are linked
there were a lot more items that should have been in that list but were not.... over the years there has been many a great product that just missed the mark, and ultimately replace by something not as good...
betamax video was far better than VHS, but was left behind... ARM processors, although now flourishing, imagine computing if ARM got the development that x86 cpus got ? RISC OS, again, still in development, but imagine if it got the audience windows got in the early days... Acorn Archimedes, 32bit processors 5 ti 6 years before the PC market !! , Saga Saturn Console... WAY before its time !! and while we are on saga, the SEGA Mega CD? video phones?....... mini disk, why did 8 track fail when compact cassettes flourish?
I can answer two of your points... Betamax wasn't 'far better' than VHS - it was a little better, but the tapes were too short to record anything like a movie without switching to slower speeds and negating the benefits. The later extended versions of Betamax were lower quality, while VHS kept improving. If you're talking about Beta, which was used by TV stations, that's a different animal - much higher quality (and much larger tapes)
And the reason 8 track failed was because of its short usable life... I'm old enough to remember trees on the side of the road draped in long gossamer strands of Dark Side of the Moon after someone's 8 track ate yet another tape. While 8 tracks were more convenient, cassettes were a lot more reliable.
Beta HiFi sound was indistinguishable from Vhs HiFi despite the 20% faster writing speed, but Beta mono was worse.
It only needed 1 decent sync pulse to work as it was designed to deal with bad signals.
Yes I did copy a few rental DVDs to SuperBetaHiF in anamorphic mode, best looking home video tapes I have seen until DV.
Also copied 2 films I had to get exchanges on, until I got the replacements back.
"Betamax wasn't 'far better' than VHS"
Quality WAS better on betamax and on the higher end machines the long play mode was still better than VHS , but it was all about cost.... JVC basically gave away VHS machines to the TV rental companies and initially licensed the format to other manufacturers at next to no cost....
The money was made back on the licensing of format to film distribution companies. The fact that VHS was in almost every video owning home made it a easy decision for the distributors to support it their end .
I know quite a few people that had bought betamax machines but supplemented it with vhs for film rental but used the betamax for personal recordings....
and where does V2000 or VCC come into the story..... much better than both Betamax and VHS but just arrived at the party too late !!
V2000 was better for trick play, but not outright picture quality, remember they all were helical scan systems and VHs had the smallest drum.
Beta 74.5mm
V2000 65mm
Vhs 62mm
Beta used the highest frequencies of the 3 for both colour and luminance.
Super formats, SVhs tried to be better but still used Vhs colour resolution so quite often looked like a water colour. For normal use the lower resolution but higher colour resolution meant that a Super Beta recording (300 line) was nicer to watch than SVhs (400 line). PAL never got ED Beta (500 line).
Please note these tests were carried out with a Panasonic SVhs and a Sony SuperBeta, decent tapes, decent TV via Scart.
Oh and for serial copying Beta holds out much better, no need for image enhancers either, you often saw the small print not suitable for Beta on them. Vhs->Vhs is a bit worse than Beta->Beta->Beta. Beta->SBeta->Vhs was better than Vhs->Vhs.
Copying - why?
Well it started on a SL-F1 copied to a SL-HF950, then to either a VTCM40 or a Panasonic I cannot remember the model of but cost my dad a lot.
Video Compact Cassette - the only format worse than Vhs
Total Bollox!
Beta copies of movies and shows I recorded in the early 80s on my Dad's machine (PAL) still play and look like I made 'em yesterday despite being played to death in the case of The Young Ones and The Revenge of the Pink Panther. I had no problem in getting films to fit without reducing the speed either.
Stuff I made on a top-of-the-line Sony VHS with a flying erase head and jog shuttle looked crap upon replay the first time.
You sir, are spouting "everyone knows" instead of proppa nollige.
I call shenanigans on your miserable head.
I recently archived a load of old recordings to hard disk.
Played back on the machine they were recorded on in the 1980s, via DV to convert to digital, then firewire.
A lot of recordings held up brilliantly, especially the ones on Pro-X L500s, some of them ended up on a professional DVD of a preserved railway, and my recordings were a lot better than the others they had from that period (I still remember his portable Vhs on a small trolley, I could carry my SLF1).
And the reason 8 track failed was because of its short usable life... I'm old enough to remember trees on the side of the road draped in long gossamer strands of Dark Side of the Moon after someone's 8 track ate yet another tape. While 8 tracks were more convenient, cassettes were a lot more reliable.
--------------
You can record stuff onto cassettes; 8 tracks were read-only.
You can record stuff onto cassettes; 8 tracks were read-only...
Actually, there was a stretch in the early '70s where you could get 8-track recorders, and some fairly high-end ones, too (at least inasumch as 8-track could ever be "high-end"). Many component systems offered by major manufacturers offered 8-track recorder options.
I once owned an 8-track recorder -- bought second-hand -- which I fooled around with for a while. Back in high school, an audio freak friend of mine owned a quadrophonic system -- talk about a technology FAIL -- with an 8-track recorder in it. Yeah, that's right, a quadrophonic 8-track recorder. Four mic inputs, four mics -- jeezus, we had fun with that thing. My friend used it to record his band's rehearsals.
>Yep, but Sony kit cost a bomb and - all the pr0n was on VHS. That was the real reason why VHS 'won'.
Sony explicitly barred pr0n from being ontheir Beta platform. Having learnt from history, they deliberately inferred that the would raise no such objection to 'adult content' studios releasing their content on Blu-Ray, during that Blu-Ray / HDDVD skirmish.
> Sony explicitly barred pr0n from being ontheir Beta platform. Having learnt from history, they deliberately inferred that the would raise no such objection to 'adult content' studios releasing their content on Blu-Ray, during that Blu-Ray / HDDVD skirmish.
Sony learning from history? That doesn't happen often!
And the reason 8 track failed was because of its short usable life... I'm old enough to remember trees on the side of the road draped in long gossamer strands of Dark Side of the Moon after someone's 8 track ate yet another tape. While 8 tracks were more convenient, cassettes were a lot more reliable...
...not to mention the fact during the course of an album, the 8-track cartridge player had to switch tracks four times, meaning that longer songs were often faded and split in odd places in the 8-track versions of albums. The listening experience of albums like Dark Side Of The Moon or Close To The Edge were pretty much shot to hell with that goddamn' KERCHUNK every fifteen or twenty minutes. The impact of the famous "side 2" of Abbey Road was murdered by track switching. Oh, yeah, and the hiss. CD aficiionados like to rag on cassettes for surface noise, but 8-tracks took the prize. HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS...
Cassettes were smaller, sounded better, and you could fit a whole album comfortably on one side of a 90-minute tape, or one side of an album comfortably on each side of a 60-minute tape. They got even better as time went on -- chromium oxide, metal oxide, 100-minute tapes...
(Spawn Of Satan icon because, well.. 8-tracks.)
It was a dual 25MHz CPU job, with the second reportedly shoehorned in after Sega got wind of the 33MHz CPU in the PlayStation. The result was a console that was an awkward steaming turd to code for.
Developers coded the simpler and quicker PS versions first, then porting to the Saturn some time later or never at all (sometimes a fat wad of Sony readies aided the decision making), with the product quality suffering along the way.
It was a dual 25MHz CPU job, with the second reportedly shoehorned in after Sega got wind of the 33MHz CPU in the PlayStation. The result was a console that was an awkward steaming turd to code for.
so, bloody lazy coders strike again !!!!
all coders want is machines they can just copy and paste code into difrent SDK's...
A small part of me really really really wants something like Bob for navigating my computer (though with proper 3D rendering). I know it'd be slow and clunky compared compared to a WIMP but it'd look damn cool and I could finally pretend I'm living in the VR future that sci-fi has been leading me to believe is just 'a few years away' ever since I learned to read.
Pointcast did have some logic ... it was back in the days when a 56k modem was cutting edge so surfing the web was a slow process so it seemed like a good idea that when you weren't using your PC instead of just running an inane screen saver your PC was actively downloading a collection of news stories/articles/etc from categories you'd said you were interested in ... this worked at its best in the US context where your modem dialled up to a local, and thus free, number so there was no cost associated in leaving your PC on connected all the time.
However, on the other side when it was at its height I spent a few months working in HP in Palo Alto and I remember reading a missive from the IT dept there telling people not to use PointCast on company PCs since there networking monitoring had detected that 25-30% of all the incoming network traffic to the HP intranet was coming from PointCast!
I loved Pointcast myself, not so much for the client but it made an awesome screen saver, with all the various things to look at, stock tickers, weather, news, etc. All of the animations were nice too, if it was around today I'd probably run it on a dedicated monitor just for the screen saver.
It did use quite a bit of bandwidth, I was consistently the top user of internet bandwidth at my company by a factor of about 10x mainly due to pointcast. Not that it was a problem for me, the IT folks (who were my friends) didn't care.
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