Three in Ireland just launched free internet up to 15GB per month on a pay as you go scheme. Top up by 20 euros and you get internet, free calls to other Three users and other stuff for a month, plus the 20 call credit for landline / other network calls. Not bad but I don't know how their broadband will work in practice since it's likely to be swamped with new subscribers.
I think there are two reasons for the Honeycomb closed source thing.
The public reason that the code is a mess and broken. This might be true. Tablets don't need a voice call stack so all that stuff is going to be bitrotten in 3.x. It's also likely that all the new apps were initially hardcoded to work well at 1280x800 and were broken at other sizes. There might also be the usual performance / footprint issues that are not such a big deal on a better specced tablet which might be for other devices. So yes I think this is a legit reason of sorts.
Amazon is coming out with tablets, probably imminently. Knowing Amazon they will be locked down so they only work with apps from their store, books from their store, videos from their store etc. By Google denying them Android 3.x they could either force them into the wilderness or back to the negotiating table.
I suppose the first excuse will disappear when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out and 3.x and 2.x get merged together once more. Perhaps by then we'll also see what happens with Amazon.
Exactly. It's price. The premium manufacturers are competing on price with the iPad, when they should be competing with each other. It's stupid. Anyone prepared to pay silly money for a tablet has probably already bought an iPad. Manufacturers are being too greedy and it's hurting sales. There is no reason IMO that a decent 10" capacitive tablet with 16GB, dual core, wifi should cost more than €300. Stuff like GPS, compass, rear camera, 3G etc. is nice to have, not essential.
Archos are releasing a 101 G9 model in September and it's looking extremely promising from the specs. It's even expandable to 3G via an inexpensive expansion that doubles up as a PC usb modem. If it sells well it might act as the cluebat to beat some sense into the other manufacturers.
Does anybody else perceive this as a kill-switch ploy between that of corporate and government?
More likely it is the government asking for a way to monitor tweets in real time surreptitiously based on various geo filters. e.g. all tweets from particular IPs / cells coming from a particular region. I wouldn't be surprised if they also wanted the ability for tweets to be modified, delayed, lost etc. and to send out tweets to people based on geographic location too.
Exactly, their efforts are futile. 2600 roms are so small that someone could zip up the entire ROM collection in a few MB. They cannot stamp on this sort of thing no matter how much they tried so why even bother? I think Atari would have been better served by working with the emulator authors to bundle up their code and some ROMs for sale on smart phones and split the proceeds.
Because some quasi-develepor exec probably sold them on the idea that their decades-old intellectual property could become sellable again on the mobile/embedded platform market but first they need to kill off the community that formed around these games?
The chance that they could monetize this stuff is pretty much zero. Most 2600 games were bloody awful and people who have the need to play them for nostalgia can easily obtain roms and perfect emulators from numerous places already.
Indian workers are cheap but they are well educated. I expect the theory was to take advantage of their smarts but at a fraction of the cost. The problem is no one thought there might be cultural and economic reasons why these savings wouldn't materialise.
Hands up who thinks a bunch of no-name Chinese OEMs would honour a GPLv3 licenced smart phone OS any more than they do a GPLv2 + BSD OS. Oooh a termination clause - now they're afraid!
If the FSF really wants to make a difference they should quit their usual politik and whining and throw their weight behind a viable alternative smart phone OS. Or build one. Maybe MeeGo or something. Do something equivalent to CyanogenMod which flashes phones with the new phone stack and demonstrate this brave new world. Perhaps it would be popular enough that even a phone manufacturer picks it up and uses it for real.
That or the FSF can whine from the sidelines wondering why people choose a working, functional smart phone OS rather than the non existent one in their heads.
Can't iOS apps read SMS messages then? I know several apps on Android which do it (with the owners consent). e.g. the Prey Project allows you to send an SMS to a stolen phone to activate tracking.
I think it was more likely a symptom of a lot of western companies jumping on India as the solution to their problems. All at once. Workers were in demand and could literally hop from one big multinational to another because they were all constantly hiring. Spend six months in a place, stick it on the CV and head off to the next firm. Rinse and repeat.
As for the other factors, no I think it was more a cultural thing. I supervised maybe half a dozen projects going on in India and proactivity was non existent. I was constantly asked "how do we fix this?", "what do I do?" etc. Never once did anyone come to me and say they'd found a problem and here was how they were thinking of fixing it. That's something I can appreciate since it suggests someone who knows what they are doing. I may as well have done the projects myself the amount of handholding I did for them. Projects would take 2-3x as long as they should have and would have.
I don't think management thought this all the way through. To them it was all about daily rates not realising it probably cost more in time and bug fixing / maintenance of poor code.
The problem with outsourcing is often the savings are illusory. I worked in a company that moved a pile of work to new offices they built in India. Indian workers got paid less which means greater savings right? Except the Indians were joining and leaving as if the place was a revolving door. No knowledge was retained at all. They'd stay long enough to get their free trip to the US or whatever perk and then leave for somewhere else. On top of that the quality of work was very poor, there was zero initiative by staff to improve or take tasks on by themselves. It meant someone in a different office had to hold these guy's hands and practically dictate a solution otherwise you got shit. In the end the penny dropped that this thing was a disaster and they sold the entire operation to an outsourcing firm. The sad part is they continue to use the outsourcing firm for production support.
I think there are times when outsourcing works, but looking at the balance sheets is not necessarily a good indicator. I also wonder why the US or Europe tolerates the situation the way it is. That enormous deficit is in part because the US has gone from being a producer to being a consumer. One would have thought that tipping the scales the other way would be a huge priority of any government. And if that means leaning on the likes of Amazon through cajoling & encouragement then so be it.
... that can't be achieved by writing an app? In Android (for example) an app can listen to SMS messages and do anything it likes in response, e.g. set off an audible alarm. This app could even be baked into the phone, or available from marketplace or some official site. I assume iOS can do the same right?
I don't care what the original series was like and neither should anybody else. The movies should stand or fall on their own merits and frankly they fall. As I said Bay makes great explosions and CG. He simply doesn't bother to put anything resembling a coherent plot, script or decent acting in there to justify any of the explosions and CG. It's just bad film making.
It's the cinematic equivalent paying to have someone shout "you people are stupid" at you while explosions and lights go off for two hours. I don't accept the usual excuses that follow that oh it's just a popcorn summer film, it's not meant to make sense blah blah. It is possible to make exciting, intelligent, well acted ACTION movies. Just not in Michael Bay movies.
No, no, a thousand times no. This makes both the PS3 and Xbox 360 utterly unsuitable as a stand alone media player. In order to play these files anyway you now have to transcode them or use PS3MediaServer to transcode them on the fly, either way there is a loss of quality and a need to have another [powerful] computer active at the same time. Or you could have one quiet little HTPC connected to your TV which would perform this task better, run quieter... and yes, cost more.
You don't have to transcode either MP4 or DIVX + AC3 AVI files to play them on the PS3. They play superbly well. And M2TS files. If you have an MKV your choice is to either transcode, remux or possibly run it through MeGUI if you have to. MKV says nothing of the audio / video codecs but usually they're ones the PS3 can handle so you can remux to MP4 or M2TS.
Netfront has been around for eternity and it's always been a heap of crap. But you can run Firefox on your HTPC.
Sure you could but I wouldn't see browsing as something people want to do that often through their TV anyway. They have laptops, tablets etc. for that. The browser in the PS3 is poor though and it is desperately overdue a revamp.
All the Transformers movies stunk. As does pretty much anything with his name attached as a director. The simple reason being that he is better at directing explosions and CG than he is at getting a good performance out of actors, choosing good scripts, or creating stories which makes any sense. It's all about the explosions.
Ridley Scott pays precious little attention to history in any of his movies (witness historical abuses like 1492, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood) so why should he pay any more attention to the future?
Actually it's easy enough to use the PS3 through a DLNA server. Windows 7 Home Premium comes with a server in the OS so it's a small effort to set up. Personally I use a Synology NAS (which is excellent kit btw) and stream from that. Put the PS3 on the same network as the server and UPnP should take care of the rest.
Generally it makes an excellent media box allowing content to be played locally, from physical media or remotely over http or DLNA. There are a couple of major issues with the PS3 for media streaming which can be an impediment:
Local content is restricted to 4GB max size. I don't know if that applies to streamed content.
The PS3 doesn't support MKV container formats. Instead you use AVI (for DIVX format) or MP4 (for AVC H264) and you're good to go.
It would be nice if it supported MKV + the codecs they already support + subtitles. Hopefully the format has gained enough industry traction for Sony to consider supporting it.
Web browsing is poor on the PS3. There have been off / on rumours of something changing in that department for a while but nothing concrete. The issue is Sony uses a licenced browser called Netfront and it's a heap of crap. It would be nice if they used something based off Webkit or even licenced Opera Mini but most likely if an update occurs it will just be a bumped version of Netfront. Better than nothing I suppose.
Who the would trust Sony with their CC Info at this point and why would I want a PS3 without PSN?
One might reasonably apply that question to any random website. Besides Sony have had their kicking and it's likely their security is much better than the industry average.
My dad won a CD-i and offloaded it on me. I had precisely one title for it - Four Weddings and a Funeral. The MPEG-1 quality was so shocking and chunky even back in the day that I wasn't even remotely interested in expanding the collection. The thing lived in a plastic bag until I got rid of it somehow. I saw a few games running in stores but they looked awful too. Lemmings was perhaps semi passable but then you needed to use the crappy controller rendering it virtually unplayable. It was a lame duck of a system.
I think Commodore's CDTV was more interesting but ahead of it's time. After all it was an Amiga, but that too didn't exactly set the world on fire and the video playback was an expensive add-on. If it did it out of the box it might have been a better proposition. What amazed me was that video CDs actually took of in Asia and were available long after they were dead and buried in the West.
The problem with Android tablets is that they really aren't up to par with iPad. They look and feel clumsy, they don't have the same app economy that iPad has and most of all Android devices suffer from fragmentation. I really wish someone would come up with a better device. Microsoft's Courier looked great, so I hope they work on similar concept with Nokia.
Most of the top end Android tablets (i.e. those running Android 3.0) are easily on par with the iPad. The OS is far better thought out than the iPad and multitasking isn't some afterthought. The apps some way to go and from experience writing apps this is probably due to the greater diversity of form factors and the layout models you need to produce to make them work properly.
I think a larger problem is that their price is on par with the iPad and the iPad is expensive. Once tablet manufacturers start dropping their prices they're going to sell a lot better.
There is absolutely no reason at all that a 9-10" tablet with capacitive screen, wifi, 16GB flash, 1GB ram, dual core couldn't retail for less than €300 and still make a profit. Stuff like 3G, compass, GPS, even rear facing camera could all be jettisoned if necessary since it's largely superfluous for what most tablets will be used for in the first place.
It doesn't matter if their incitement brought about actual harm or not but whether it potentially could have. And it's no different in the US. If I pay an undercover cop to whack my wife, I can't claim at my trial that I should go free since he was a cop and therefore she was in no danger. I can't blog calling for the execution of particular judges, even pointing out where they live and claim innocence merely because none of my readers acted on my incitement. Simply put, if someone encourages someone to perform a crime with the reasonable expectation that it could happen then they are guilty regardless of the outcome.
Downloading isn't listed so maybe not. But I'd point out that it appears AT&T have removed the restriction and it was something that could be circumvented easily anyway.
I didn't think EQ was hard to play so much as being a primitive precursor to WOW. Things EQ that pioneered were often implemented crudely that when WOW appeared it appeared refined by comparison. For example corpse dragging was a huge pain in the arse. And camping. And trains. And the unbearable hassle of travelling huge distances. And crafting. And all the nerfing (e.g. moss covered twig). As was the broken economy. As was the shitty fullscreen client.
I do have EQ to thank for training me in spotting grind. WOW is more refined but the grind is just as bad. LOTRO had a lot of grind too when it was subscription based but they seem to have loosened off a lot. I assume that now the game is F2P they want people to progress rather than get stuck otherwise they won't be buying expansions, level packs, mounts and everything else that comes with progression.
Where is the limit with political speech ? Is that forbidden to state the opinion that violent action is the only way to bring change in a corrupt system ? Not that I defend this opinion, but the fact that is is censored disturbs me deeply.
You really think these idiots were doing making a political statement or exercising free speech? They were both arranging riots and one even turned up for his riot.
As for the limits of free speech, the UK has plenty of it but it does not include inciting (encouraging) people to commit serious offences. Doing so will see you charged with a crime.
The US may have different boundaries and way of framing free speech. But free speech doesn't mean there are no limits. For example and just randomly, Connecticut has a law against inciting injuries against persons or property which likely would have applied to defendants writing similar remarks there. I expect most states would have statutes for incitement, criminal intent, threatening behaviour, conspiracy or a raft of other overlapping criminal acts that would have applied to these two.
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Three in Ireland just launched free internet up to 15GB per month on a pay as you go scheme. Top up by 20 euros and you get internet, free calls to other Three users and other stuff for a month, plus the 20 call credit for landline / other network calls. Not bad but I don't know how their broadband will work in practice since it's likely to be swamped with new subscribers.
I suppose the first excuse will disappear when Ice Cream Sandwich comes out and 3.x and 2.x get merged together once more. Perhaps by then we'll also see what happens with Amazon.
Archos are releasing a 101 G9 model in September and it's looking extremely promising from the specs. It's even expandable to 3G via an inexpensive expansion that doubles up as a PC usb modem. If it sells well it might act as the cluebat to beat some sense into the other manufacturers.
Does anybody else perceive this as a kill-switch ploy between that of corporate and government?
More likely it is the government asking for a way to monitor tweets in real time surreptitiously based on various geo filters. e.g. all tweets from particular IPs / cells coming from a particular region. I wouldn't be surprised if they also wanted the ability for tweets to be modified, delayed, lost etc. and to send out tweets to people based on geographic location too.
Exactly, their efforts are futile. 2600 roms are so small that someone could zip up the entire ROM collection in a few MB. They cannot stamp on this sort of thing no matter how much they tried so why even bother? I think Atari would have been better served by working with the emulator authors to bundle up their code and some ROMs for sale on smart phones and split the proceeds.
Because some quasi-develepor exec probably sold them on the idea that their decades-old intellectual property could become sellable again on the mobile/embedded platform market but first they need to kill off the community that formed around these games?
The chance that they could monetize this stuff is pretty much zero. Most 2600 games were bloody awful and people who have the need to play them for nostalgia can easily obtain roms and perfect emulators from numerous places already.
Indian workers are cheap but they are well educated. I expect the theory was to take advantage of their smarts but at a fraction of the cost. The problem is no one thought there might be cultural and economic reasons why these savings wouldn't materialise.
If the FSF really wants to make a difference they should quit their usual politik and whining and throw their weight behind a viable alternative smart phone OS. Or build one. Maybe MeeGo or something. Do something equivalent to CyanogenMod which flashes phones with the new phone stack and demonstrate this brave new world. Perhaps it would be popular enough that even a phone manufacturer picks it up and uses it for real.
That or the FSF can whine from the sidelines wondering why people choose a working, functional smart phone OS rather than the non existent one in their heads.
Can't iOS apps read SMS messages then? I know several apps on Android which do it (with the owners consent). e.g. the Prey Project allows you to send an SMS to a stolen phone to activate tracking.
As for the other factors, no I think it was more a cultural thing. I supervised maybe half a dozen projects going on in India and proactivity was non existent. I was constantly asked "how do we fix this?", "what do I do?" etc. Never once did anyone come to me and say they'd found a problem and here was how they were thinking of fixing it. That's something I can appreciate since it suggests someone who knows what they are doing. I may as well have done the projects myself the amount of handholding I did for them. Projects would take 2-3x as long as they should have and would have.
I don't think management thought this all the way through. To them it was all about daily rates not realising it probably cost more in time and bug fixing / maintenance of poor code.
I think there are times when outsourcing works, but looking at the balance sheets is not necessarily a good indicator. I also wonder why the US or Europe tolerates the situation the way it is. That enormous deficit is in part because the US has gone from being a producer to being a consumer. One would have thought that tipping the scales the other way would be a huge priority of any government. And if that means leaning on the likes of Amazon through cajoling & encouragement then so be it.
... that can't be achieved by writing an app? In Android (for example) an app can listen to SMS messages and do anything it likes in response, e.g. set off an audible alarm. This app could even be baked into the phone, or available from marketplace or some official site. I assume iOS can do the same right?
It's the cinematic equivalent paying to have someone shout "you people are stupid" at you while explosions and lights go off for two hours. I don't accept the usual excuses that follow that oh it's just a popcorn summer film, it's not meant to make sense blah blah. It is possible to make exciting, intelligent, well acted ACTION movies. Just not in Michael Bay movies.
No, no, a thousand times no. This makes both the PS3 and Xbox 360 utterly unsuitable as a stand alone media player. In order to play these files anyway you now have to transcode them or use PS3MediaServer to transcode them on the fly, either way there is a loss of quality and a need to have another [powerful] computer active at the same time. Or you could have one quiet little HTPC connected to your TV which would perform this task better, run quieter... and yes, cost more.
You don't have to transcode either MP4 or DIVX + AC3 AVI files to play them on the PS3. They play superbly well. And M2TS files. If you have an MKV your choice is to either transcode, remux or possibly run it through MeGUI if you have to. MKV says nothing of the audio / video codecs but usually they're ones the PS3 can handle so you can remux to MP4 or M2TS.
Netfront has been around for eternity and it's always been a heap of crap. But you can run Firefox on your HTPC.
Sure you could but I wouldn't see browsing as something people want to do that often through their TV anyway. They have laptops, tablets etc. for that. The browser in the PS3 is poor though and it is desperately overdue a revamp.
All the Transformers movies stunk. As does pretty much anything with his name attached as a director. The simple reason being that he is better at directing explosions and CG than he is at getting a good performance out of actors, choosing good scripts, or creating stories which makes any sense. It's all about the explosions.
Ridley Scott pays precious little attention to history in any of his movies (witness historical abuses like 1492, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood) so why should he pay any more attention to the future?
Generally it makes an excellent media box allowing content to be played locally, from physical media or remotely over http or DLNA. There are a couple of major issues with the PS3 for media streaming which can be an impediment:
It would be nice if it supported MKV + the codecs they already support + subtitles. Hopefully the format has gained enough industry traction for Sony to consider supporting it.
Web browsing is poor on the PS3. There have been off / on rumours of something changing in that department for a while but nothing concrete. The issue is Sony uses a licenced browser called Netfront and it's a heap of crap. It would be nice if they used something based off Webkit or even licenced Opera Mini but most likely if an update occurs it will just be a bumped version of Netfront. Better than nothing I suppose.
Who the would trust Sony with their CC Info at this point and why would I want a PS3 without PSN?
One might reasonably apply that question to any random website. Besides Sony have had their kicking and it's likely their security is much better than the industry average.
I think Commodore's CDTV was more interesting but ahead of it's time. After all it was an Amiga, but that too didn't exactly set the world on fire and the video playback was an expensive add-on. If it did it out of the box it might have been a better proposition. What amazed me was that video CDs actually took of in Asia and were available long after they were dead and buried in the West.
The problem with Android tablets is that they really aren't up to par with iPad. They look and feel clumsy, they don't have the same app economy that iPad has and most of all Android devices suffer from fragmentation. I really wish someone would come up with a better device. Microsoft's Courier looked great, so I hope they work on similar concept with Nokia.
Most of the top end Android tablets (i.e. those running Android 3.0) are easily on par with the iPad. The OS is far better thought out than the iPad and multitasking isn't some afterthought. The apps some way to go and from experience writing apps this is probably due to the greater diversity of form factors and the layout models you need to produce to make them work properly.
I think a larger problem is that their price is on par with the iPad and the iPad is expensive. Once tablet manufacturers start dropping their prices they're going to sell a lot better.
There is absolutely no reason at all that a 9-10" tablet with capacitive screen, wifi, 16GB flash, 1GB ram, dual core couldn't retail for less than €300 and still make a profit. Stuff like 3G, compass, GPS, even rear facing camera could all be jettisoned if necessary since it's largely superfluous for what most tablets will be used for in the first place.
It doesn't matter if their incitement brought about actual harm or not but whether it potentially could have. And it's no different in the US. If I pay an undercover cop to whack my wife, I can't claim at my trial that I should go free since he was a cop and therefore she was in no danger. I can't blog calling for the execution of particular judges, even pointing out where they live and claim innocence merely because none of my readers acted on my incitement. Simply put, if someone encourages someone to perform a crime with the reasonable expectation that it could happen then they are guilty regardless of the outcome.
Downloading isn't listed so maybe not. But I'd point out that it appears AT&T have removed the restriction and it was something that could be circumvented easily anyway.
I do have EQ to thank for training me in spotting grind. WOW is more refined but the grind is just as bad. LOTRO had a lot of grind too when it was subscription based but they seem to have loosened off a lot. I assume that now the game is F2P they want people to progress rather than get stuck otherwise they won't be buying expansions, level packs, mounts and everything else that comes with progression.
Well they confessed and plead guilty. What else is there for court to do except fill out some paper work and sentence them?
Where is the limit with political speech ? Is that forbidden to state the opinion that violent action is the only way to bring change in a corrupt system ? Not that I defend this opinion, but the fact that is is censored disturbs me deeply.
You really think these idiots were doing making a political statement or exercising free speech? They were both arranging riots and one even turned up for his riot.
As for the limits of free speech, the UK has plenty of it but it does not include inciting (encouraging) people to commit serious offences. Doing so will see you charged with a crime.
The US may have different boundaries and way of framing free speech. But free speech doesn't mean there are no limits. For example and just randomly, Connecticut has a law against inciting injuries against persons or property which likely would have applied to defendants writing similar remarks there. I expect most states would have statutes for incitement, criminal intent, threatening behaviour, conspiracy or a raft of other overlapping criminal acts that would have applied to these two.