The PS3 did have a TV tuner called PlayTV although never built in, instead being a USB DVBT tuner. It's a mystery they didn't produce a model with one in it given the minimal expense that could lead to extra sales, especially in Japan where a TV tuner / BDR enabled PS3 would sell extremely well.
Anyway the story with Linux is well established by now. It was "crippled" in the sense that it was using a hypervisor, in particular to protect the GPU. This was to protect the game console underneath, to stop people developing exploits in Linux land which would allow the firmware to be modded. In the end that is exactly what prompted Linux to be canned. A hypervisor exploit was discovered which in time would have lead to a special Linux crack disk that people could simply boot to hack their firmware.
It should not surprise anybody that given the choice between protecting multi billion gaming platform and protecting a feature very few people used that they'd canned the feature. It sucks for people who used Linux but let's be honest here. Very few people actually did, certainly not most of the people braying about it loudly after the fact.
It also doesn't require much imagination to understand how devastating it would have been to the platform if custom firmware had become endemic. It would have doomed the platform, not only harming Sony but harming owners too. Think of all the premium title games you have played on the PS3 which might not exist at all if endemic piracy had made them economically unviable.
I can't make any sense of the 12GB option although Eurogamer hints that there is a dedicated external drive. So maybe Sony hope to hook people in with the cheaper price and then flog them the overpriced drive later. The real question for me is does the new PS3 let people replace the HDD like the older models. If so, if you have a spare HDD lying around you could pop the cover and stick it in or just buy one online.
The only other context I see it makes sense in is if Sony were to launch a cloud service where you could play certain games remotely and therefore didn't need much local space.
The upside for consumers is a smaller PS3 uses half the power of the original PS3. Half the power means far less heat to dissipate so it runs cooler too.
Because Opera Mini is a glorified remote picture viewer, not a proper web browser. Sometimes it has its uses, such as on low bandwidth or expensive data rates, but the experience can be quite poor on JS heavy sites. A more appropriate suggestion would be Dolphin Mini which is a wrapper around Webkit but provides a nicer interface. Or if space is not an issue Firefox, Dolphin full or Opera.
It's not hard to find complaints about their sales, e.g. here. Complaints like these are to be found wherever the things are sold. This is just a rotten firm and the more people who become aware of their shitty awful tactics, the sooner they'll go bust hopefully.
I'm sure even if I did want a powerful vacuum cleaner that there are other makes which can be purchased from a normal store which offer similar performance for a fixed and lower price. As it stands even my 60 euro bagless phillips is perfectly adequate for my needs and has lasted 3 years. I could stick 2000 euros in the bank (an amount which some people paid for their Kirby) and the interest alone would pay for replacement cleaners if and when they gave up the ghost.
You have a kirby because you were suckered into buying an overpriced vacuum cleaner from a company which specialises in high pressure sales tactics and borderline illegal activity.
Perhaps there really is some difference in the quality of vacuum cleaning from a Kirby but I suspect most people will comfort themselves with buying which costs 1/5th the price which is almost as good and weighs half as much. And buying it without some a salesman refusing to leave their house wearing them down for hours until they buy the thing.
DNT is better than nothing and I agree that some shady advertisers won't honour it. But the large ones will or they'll find themselves on the end of embarrassing stories from security researchers and possible lawsuits.
Ad blocking is obviously a better option but nothing is certain with that either. I can think of several ways to force people to either disable ad block or for ads to slip past with little chance of blocking them. It's only a matter of time for some advertisers to start offering those services and for some cash strapped sites to implement them.
What is clear to me is that ad blocking and DNT should be explicit opt-in decisions. Most users really don't care enough about their privacy and that suits the advertisers fine to take a hit from a small % of people motivated to block / DNT. But if the likes of IE enable it by default then I fully expect that many advertisers and sites will ignore the preferences or subvert them entirely.
I don't want to run incognito. Incognito disables add ons and has other limitations in functionality that I actually want. I just don't want the thing leaving a history of what I am looking at all over the place and would appreciate if it were able to do what other browsers like Firefox and Opera manager. Two settings - one to specify the number of days / urls to remember as history and another to clear on exit.
I like Chrome as a browser but got does it suck for privacy and settings in general. I want my browser to never rememer my browser history clear the cache automatically on exit. Does chrome do this? Possibly but damned if I can find the setting. Privacy is buried under "Advanced settings" and there is nothing that corresponds to clear on exit or don't remember history. Yes I can explicitly clear history but I dont always remember to do this and it's not acceptable I should have to either. Firefox can clear history on exit, why can't Chrome? I also note that if you use the sync service that all your bookmarks and other settings are sent to google in the clear. There is an option to encrypt them but that's not the default. Compare and contrast to Firefox where everything is encrypted before it gets sent up so Firefox is limited in what it knows.
So I stick with Firefox. It's a shame since Chrome actually works better on Linux than Firefox does but I'm not going to compromise my privacy or waste time writing scripts to workaround this deliberate deficiency in its privacy behaviour.
Nintendo have produced a console which is about on par with a PS3 or 360 only 5 years too late and they slap a premium on the device even compared to their rivals. It's ludicrous. About the only thing special about the device is some crappy tablet-like device which is itself overpriced. I just hope people with Wiis gathering dust in their cupboard remember the fact that gimmicks do not make a console succeed, good high quality titles do.
At least for the time being all 3 consoles are about on par which means they'll probably all enjoy the same cross-platform titles although the lack of storage space is not going to endear them to 3rd parties selling DLC or even digital copies at all. I also expect that Nintendo's usual arrogance to 3rd parties will ensure that the whiff of shovelware will haunt the platform as much as it did and does their other devices.
The watermark is probably the plan B for that. If someone manages to capture your image by taking a photo, using a VM, using RDP or whatever there is still a watermark to figure out who the culprit was and take action.
You can usually tell an app which is implemented in HTML5 because it just doesn't behave the way a native app does. Either the fonts are wrong, or it feels sluggish, or the menus are different, or the keyboard is inappropriate for the context or it's just off in some other way. I'm not surprised at all that a company with the resources of Facebook struggles to unify all the disparate HTML5 implementations on all the disparate operating systems and devices. There are probably so many differences, glitches and performance issues that perhaps they may have been better off using some other technology.
It just works properly out of the box. No nasty surprises, no alarming omissions or deviations from expected database behaviour. It's just a fast, reliable database which also happens to be open source and free.
I'm sure most of this applies to MySQL these days but historically it didn't and I never saw the attraction of a DB which went through a succession of backends in order to obtain the behaviour PostgreSQL always supplied. It doesn't help that MySQL is Oracle owned and all the issues with licencing and forking which have arisen out of that.
Microsoft are setting DNT on Windows 8 (and by extension their phones and tablets) so that competing advertising services like Google et al are shut out of their ecosystem. I bet whatever terms and conditions pop up when a Windows 8 starts for the first time, or via those Bing apps means that the DNT setting don't apply to Microsoft itself.
Most of the hate for GNOME is irrational. Yes it screws up in some ways but generally I think it works and produces an extremely clean, intuitive, attractive and extensible desktop experience. If I had to gripe it's that the control panel is too basic and some of the default behaviour is questionable. I should be able to choose the screen font size more than the basic accessibility font slider allows. I should be able to enable icons on the desktop without a tweak tool. I should be able to change the shutdown / standby behaviour from the control panel.
The biggest issue I have with GNOME is some apps waste a heck of a lot of vertical space when they're maximized due to the way that there is a global bar, then an application bar, then a menu, then some toolbars and finally the actual content. It looks ugly, especially in Firefox. Chrome works a lot better in GNOME 3 than Firefox does at the moment.
The performance cost of GNOME 3 is not high. I run it on a 4 year old laptop with an IGP and it works pretty well. In fact, if you have a GPU you should be glad that desktops have begun making use of it. Compositing pushes a lot of the work of building the desktop onto the graphics processor freeing up the CPU to be doing other stuff.
My Lumia 800 mounts under Linux but it's listed as a media device via MTP. That means I can use it to transfer files but not to update firmware or similar actions. The phone doesn't do OTA updates so I'd be screwed if I didn't have a Windows PC. Not that I expect it will receive many updates in future aside from 7.8.
HTC has been making smart phones and PDAs for longer than the iPhone existed and those post iPhone have very little in common. They certainly don't ape the "trade dress" of the iPhone or iPad which is what got Samsung in trouble. Neither the shape of their phones, nor with HTC "Sense" user interface looks remotely like anything from Apple except in superficial ways. Indeed Sense has appeared over the top of several smart phone operating systems, not just Android and doesn't resemble iOS either.
So I think HTC have good reason to tell Apple to go fuck themselves. They probably also benefit from Samsung's misfortune given that the two of them are the leading smart phone vendors on Android and therefore in direct competition even if they share the same ecosystem.
And bitcoin investors by virtue of buying bitcoins have saved the scammers a lot of effort by identifying themselves as easy marks. Much like how some scammers operate on church congregations, MLM members, timeshare owners, people who've bought cures "they" don't know want you to know etc. By virtue of the fact that rational people would run a mile from these things, the scammers know that those who remain are far richer pickings.
It's a ponzi sitting on top of a ponzi in this instance. People who convinced themselves that bitcoin is an "investment" and sunk a lot of money into it are just the kind of people who would be more susceptible to other kinds of scams. Especially if they're seeing their initial investment sink in value and are getting desperate to exit.
For conmen Bitcoin is attractive because they can cover their tracks more easily and don't have to deal with real banks who might stop transactions, freeze accounts or raise alarm bells that stop the con from being pulled off.
Diaspora could become a lot more popular if there were installers and scripts which allowed people to download, install and run the software with a minimal amount of effort. Not just on Linux but Windows and OS X too.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway the story with Linux is well established by now. It was "crippled" in the sense that it was using a hypervisor, in particular to protect the GPU. This was to protect the game console underneath, to stop people developing exploits in Linux land which would allow the firmware to be modded. In the end that is exactly what prompted Linux to be canned. A hypervisor exploit was discovered which in time would have lead to a special Linux crack disk that people could simply boot to hack their firmware.
It should not surprise anybody that given the choice between protecting multi billion gaming platform and protecting a feature very few people used that they'd canned the feature. It sucks for people who used Linux but let's be honest here. Very few people actually did, certainly not most of the people braying about it loudly after the fact.
It also doesn't require much imagination to understand how devastating it would have been to the platform if custom firmware had become endemic. It would have doomed the platform, not only harming Sony but harming owners too. Think of all the premium title games you have played on the PS3 which might not exist at all if endemic piracy had made them economically unviable.
The only other context I see it makes sense in is if Sony were to launch a cloud service where you could play certain games remotely and therefore didn't need much local space.
The upside for consumers is a smaller PS3 uses half the power of the original PS3. Half the power means far less heat to dissipate so it runs cooler too.
Because Opera Mini is a glorified remote picture viewer, not a proper web browser. Sometimes it has its uses, such as on low bandwidth or expensive data rates, but the experience can be quite poor on JS heavy sites. A more appropriate suggestion would be Dolphin Mini which is a wrapper around Webkit but provides a nicer interface. Or if space is not an issue Firefox, Dolphin full or Opera.
I'm sure even if I did want a powerful vacuum cleaner that there are other makes which can be purchased from a normal store which offer similar performance for a fixed and lower price. As it stands even my 60 euro bagless phillips is perfectly adequate for my needs and has lasted 3 years. I could stick 2000 euros in the bank (an amount which some people paid for their Kirby) and the interest alone would pay for replacement cleaners if and when they gave up the ghost.
Perhaps there really is some difference in the quality of vacuum cleaning from a Kirby but I suspect most people will comfort themselves with buying which costs 1/5th the price which is almost as good and weighs half as much. And buying it without some a salesman refusing to leave their house wearing them down for hours until they buy the thing.
"I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"
Ad blocking is obviously a better option but nothing is certain with that either. I can think of several ways to force people to either disable ad block or for ads to slip past with little chance of blocking them. It's only a matter of time for some advertisers to start offering those services and for some cash strapped sites to implement them.
What is clear to me is that ad blocking and DNT should be explicit opt-in decisions. Most users really don't care enough about their privacy and that suits the advertisers fine to take a hit from a small % of people motivated to block / DNT. But if the likes of IE enable it by default then I fully expect that many advertisers and sites will ignore the preferences or subvert them entirely.
I don't want to run incognito. Incognito disables add ons and has other limitations in functionality that I actually want. I just don't want the thing leaving a history of what I am looking at all over the place and would appreciate if it were able to do what other browsers like Firefox and Opera manager. Two settings - one to specify the number of days / urls to remember as history and another to clear on exit.
So I stick with Firefox. It's a shame since Chrome actually works better on Linux than Firefox does but I'm not going to compromise my privacy or waste time writing scripts to workaround this deliberate deficiency in its privacy behaviour.
At least for the time being all 3 consoles are about on par which means they'll probably all enjoy the same cross-platform titles although the lack of storage space is not going to endear them to 3rd parties selling DLC or even digital copies at all. I also expect that Nintendo's usual arrogance to 3rd parties will ensure that the whiff of shovelware will haunt the platform as much as it did and does their other devices.
The watermark is probably the plan B for that. If someone manages to capture your image by taking a photo, using a VM, using RDP or whatever there is still a watermark to figure out who the culprit was and take action.
You can usually tell an app which is implemented in HTML5 because it just doesn't behave the way a native app does. Either the fonts are wrong, or it feels sluggish, or the menus are different, or the keyboard is inappropriate for the context or it's just off in some other way. I'm not surprised at all that a company with the resources of Facebook struggles to unify all the disparate HTML5 implementations on all the disparate operating systems and devices. There are probably so many differences, glitches and performance issues that perhaps they may have been better off using some other technology.
Busting the developers out of jail
I'm sure most of this applies to MySQL these days but historically it didn't and I never saw the attraction of a DB which went through a succession of backends in order to obtain the behaviour PostgreSQL always supplied. It doesn't help that MySQL is Oracle owned and all the issues with licencing and forking which have arisen out of that.
Microsoft are setting DNT on Windows 8 (and by extension their phones and tablets) so that competing advertising services like Google et al are shut out of their ecosystem. I bet whatever terms and conditions pop up when a Windows 8 starts for the first time, or via those Bing apps means that the DNT setting don't apply to Microsoft itself.
The biggest issue I have with GNOME is some apps waste a heck of a lot of vertical space when they're maximized due to the way that there is a global bar, then an application bar, then a menu, then some toolbars and finally the actual content. It looks ugly, especially in Firefox. Chrome works a lot better in GNOME 3 than Firefox does at the moment.
The performance cost of GNOME 3 is not high. I run it on a 4 year old laptop with an IGP and it works pretty well. In fact, if you have a GPU you should be glad that desktops have begun making use of it. Compositing pushes a lot of the work of building the desktop onto the graphics processor freeing up the CPU to be doing other stuff.
My Lumia 800 mounts under Linux but it's listed as a media device via MTP. That means I can use it to transfer files but not to update firmware or similar actions. The phone doesn't do OTA updates so I'd be screwed if I didn't have a Windows PC. Not that I expect it will receive many updates in future aside from 7.8.
GNOME 3 is eminently usable. Whether it is configurable enough for power users is another matter entirely.
So I think HTC have good reason to tell Apple to go fuck themselves. They probably also benefit from Samsung's misfortune given that the two of them are the leading smart phone vendors on Android and therefore in direct competition even if they share the same ecosystem.
And bitcoin investors by virtue of buying bitcoins have saved the scammers a lot of effort by identifying themselves as easy marks. Much like how some scammers operate on church congregations, MLM members, timeshare owners, people who've bought cures "they" don't know want you to know etc. By virtue of the fact that rational people would run a mile from these things, the scammers know that those who remain are far richer pickings.
For conmen Bitcoin is attractive because they can cover their tracks more easily and don't have to deal with real banks who might stop transactions, freeze accounts or raise alarm bells that stop the con from being pulled off.
Diaspora could become a lot more popular if there were installers and scripts which allowed people to download, install and run the software with a minimal amount of effort. Not just on Linux but Windows and OS X too.
Not shit, just esoteric. You have a lower pool of talent to draw from than if the same project were implemented in a more popular language.