Posts by leon stok 49 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Feb 2010
I played Xenon 1 too death on the ST (though it killed me it wrapped back to level 1 upon 'finishing').
But Xenon 2 just didn't connect with me. It was just another horizontal shooter (with the same digital intro music on ST by the way) without the ground based action. Wings of Death blew it away on the ST in that genre ;)
For the last few years, consoles have been all about the exclusive content.
If you don't control the content, it is a race to the bottom where specs to don't really matter, if you're ending up playing the latest generic Android game.
Couple that with an eco-system where most games are either free or selling for a few dollar, it will be very hard to make the money a modern AAA game costs. (Then again, maybe I have too much faith in some companies that they won't finance one platform with sales from 'the big 3' console vendors)
Then again if they are going for the casual market, this is not the device for it. That market has been taken over by the mobile phone.
So where Valve has the content and the distribution platform (which might make it a credible platform) I don't see this device going anywhere.
Unless you are running Linux/BSD or something similar on your VMs, you're most likely going to have to license them with WIndows anyway.
(and looking at costs.. my last quote was almost 50% less for a Hyper-V solution compared to a VMware Enterprise cluster, with the same hardware, where the Hyper-V cluster also covered Windows license costs for all VM's)
I'm a happy VMWare user, but on costs they are not going to win this race.
Most unattended recycle points are designed to fit only bottles, cans, flat cardboard, while the electronic/chemicals/greens and other large item recycle points are attended by personnel. It's not that you have one chute for waste, and dump another bag in the recyclables container.
RFID bins have been around for a long time here (in the Netherlands) also due to fact that every local counsel tends to charge a different amount per time you open the bin. (some charge per time you open it, others a fixed fee per year, and others somewhere in between), so they would like to only collect from 'local people'.
I always thought the underground bins already had a data connection, but I guess that might the new part in this story (how they notify the trucks).
(by the way, there are also wheeliebins equipped with RFID to indicate the owner of the bin)
Given that you can drop the recyclables in a lot of places for free (electrical/electronic equipment, paper, glass, metal, plastic, greens) this does seem to increase recycling, by promoting separation and to only charge for the true waste.
Flytipping is not really such a big problem here as it seems to be in the UK (from what I've seen on telly at least, which might overstress the problem).
I don't have any real numbers on this though, and it might be a problem I'm not aware of in other areas in the Netherlands. (I'm really not an expert here, just somebody having to live with these bins for the last 12 years).
They'll still release a new dedicated games console. The disconnected market is still too profitable to miss.
But I'm sure this will save them a ton on components for backwards compatibility of PS3 and PS2 games.
By streaming theses games to other devices as well you can rent your old games to new 'gamers' (everybody with a bravia or other Sony device capable of playing it) while still making it interesting for people to buy new hardware.
And they might even use it (for the not so privacy conscious people) to stream other apps like a decent web-browser.
Haven't Sky, Microsoft, Sony, D-Link, Asus + the rest and Apple themselves been busy decoupling the screen from the UI using set-top boxes and game consoles?
I'm in no hurry to replace my lovely Panasonic plasma, but I'm much more flexible in replacing the box underneath it.
Then again, respect to Apple if they manage to start a yearly upgrade cycle for televisions.
Free UMD via personal transfer would never make sense as an option.
Since the UMD games do not have a serial code, you would get the game for every UMD you put in your PSP even if the same UMD has alread been 'converted'. I can see why this might not be an option.
I was more hoping for an in-store trade-in option, where you put a UMD in a reader, log on to your PSN account, and the device shreds the UMD after successful activation. (or just hand them in and receive a voucher).
from the Playstation blog:
'Sony Computer Entertainment plans to provide a new PlayStation Network account management website where users will be able to deactivate particular devices attached to their PlayStation Network account via their PC.'
which is nice, since before there was no way to remove broken devices, or systems you can't get to.
Do Microsoft Sony and Nintendo even release details on online game sales ?
This seems more a matter of wishful thinking from Nvidia for their investors, since they have relied on a steady upgrade cycle of graphics cards for quite a while. If this market is conceived as dwindling, their share value will go down with it.
I don't have the numbers at hand, but I don't think that their (mobile) chipset sales are on the same scale as their graphics chips sales.
I remember when Atari released the ATW, and after seeing it in action several times, I fell in love with the architecture.
It was not just Occam though that made this system so great, but also Helios, because it made the systems parallel DNA run from the CPU all the way up to the OS/GUI.
Such a shame it was just beyond mere mortals wallet, and the fact that Atari always had very special ideas about marketing actually was..
Who knows, maybe one day we'll get there again.
Initially similar features were announced for the PSP (using the PSP as mirror for an F1 game or remote display) but currently only some games provide remote play (also due to control issues with a single analogue stick, and inherent latency via WiFi) although playing music and movies works great via remote play. (which includes turning on a PS3 remotely).
(i have used this to watch movies stored on a NAS, played via PS3, streamed to PSP over the internet.)
First thoughts:
So the fact that each voxel has XYZ and RGB data, makes it possible to fit all this data in normal memory.. how ?
(and you'll lose all that nice shader action we've been seeing more and more of in the last few years..)
Transforming these data sets tends to be a hassle
(deforming/animating polygons is easy, just move the corners of the polygon, but here the whole data set changes, where each one of those volumetric pixels. oops atoms, has to change a bit, depending on location and angle relative to the movement.)
Maybe we'll see some hybrid form pop-up again (remember the game Comanche ?) but I don't see this taking over any time soon. (shading, shadowing and collision detection between polys and voxels is a nightmare as)
I applaud every new development in graphics, but this does not look very new.
Probably not this round, but Sony and others have been showing off colour e-ink for quite some time now.
Please let it be soon.. I tried reading on a phone or tablet, but I had to give up with terrible head-ache after a short time.
I borrowed an e-ink reader for a day or so and really love it, but it is near-impossible to read colour PDF files on it. Knowing my luck a colour reader will be released the day after I buy a B&W version.
Even reading about this forces me to 'focus on my breathing'.
Having seen my parents ripped off by pushing them to buy an absurdly priced HDMI cable when buying their all-in-one BR player set (thank God, I already gave them some UTP cables, or else those would have been 'Monster quality' as well), and being stopped 3 times already by my wife in a shop when in discussion with a sales c*nt ("e's not worth it luv!') it is more then overdue to stop this insanity.
Still It it not against the law to give consumers a choice to overspend, but I just can not blame some people to be overwhelmed by techno-babble and double-speak. The only thing 'we' can do is to spread the word.
Within a year most tellies will have all of this (give or take LED back-light due to various display techs) and it will be just such a conscious choice as HD(ready) was for most buyers.
You'll have early adopters caring about it, and the rest will just buy their new telly when a new one is needed, not when something new is available.
If you have a digital format audio format, with a 'quite well' documented decoding routine (PCM/AC3/DTS/DTS-MA) piped over a digital interface like HDMI.. how can sound differ between devices ?
You also don't compare PC quality by decoding a ZIP file and see which decodes it 'best'. It does it correct or it is broken.
So are you talking about analogue audio quality, or am I missing something completely here?
I had some issues like that, where it turned out the DNS from my ISP was crapping out occasionally. Setting DNS to opendns or google solved the issue for me. No issues like that at all for me (and being onine quite a bit..)
On the outages.. probably DDOS going on. i was able to sign in yesterday without much issues though.
It summarized that since the router stored no files for the user, the law is not applicable which deals with accessing files and information stored on a network.
It is not a clueless judge, just one who applies the law, both to the letter as well as the intention.
(the user breached the network to post on a site via that IP, not to get data from the network).
If the hacker would have accessed a computer, snooped traffic, or if the router had user files stored in it, the law would have been applicable, but in this case the law is outdated, and must be amended/updated to apply for this sort of cases.
It also seems to prohibit offering a judge 50k to swipe his/her finger over the print.
The print reader does seem to be the standard line-scanner type, so copying finger prints seems trivial in a practical situation, seeing how many nice shiny flat surfaces are available, should you 'find' such a knife.
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