Unless this person were working for Baidu to start with, I bet Baidu wouldn't touch then with a 20ft pole. Who on earth would hire someone who had just planted a trojan in their last place of work?
HD DVD uses evo format which is a different container format from m2ts. I think if you want to convert either HD DVD or Blu Ray content, you'd be better off using MeGUI since it has tools for extracting stream data and processing the content before output. MeGUI only works on Windows, but its virtually impossible to deal with HD content on other platforms anyway because of the crypto.
Email has traditionally been ignored because obtaining a S/MIME key cost money, the keys expired too quickly, encryption was slow and bloated the message, and the crypto experience in most email clients was positively user hostile. PGP / GPG solves some of the issues (hooray we don't have to pay $$$ to a CA for worthless trust and an expiring cert) but integration in email apps relies on plugins (e.g. Enigmail).
Put simply encrypting content is just too much effort for most people. I've only ever had dealings with one company that preferred to use crypto. No one else cares.
The only way crypto is going to see wider adoption is if its turned on by default and virtually a no-brainer to use. It has to be virtually transparent. I think it's well past the point of ever happening, although it might gain some traction if a major mail provider such as Google issued all users with a keypair, made it the default to sign outgoing messages.
The question is why Google or any other provider would bother to do that.
HandBrake is the de-facto standard for creating h.264 files on Mac, Linux and Windows systems. You should get to know it; you won't miss that crappy, proprietary DivX.
More accurately, it's a popular front-end for converting DVD content to MPEG-4 ASP & MPEG-4 AVC output. If you have more general file creation needs, such as trying to convert which isn't on a DVD you probably wouldn't be using using it.
Audiophiles are stupid. As long as something comes in a chunky heavy box with knobs, meters and valves they'll pay a substantial markup even if the innards are nothing special. Onkyo and Pioneer have both sold Blu Ray players which are almost the same as $100 Magnavox models sold in Walmart with a huge markup.
The really, really stupid audiophiles don't stop at $3500 though. Go and have a laugh at the Goldmundplayers. How does anyone ever manage to play a blu ray without a "magnetic damper". I expect if you cracked them open they'd be built around the same SOCs powering devices costing 1/20th the price.
I liked Shadow of the Colossus on the PS2 and part of the reason was the graphics. I like Uncharted 2 also in part because of the graphics. Both games are classics in their own right and I don't see any point of drawing a line in the sand and saying "graphics must be this sophisticated and no further".
As far as Shadow of the Colossus is concerned I know a great many people are wetting themselves at the thought that Sony might "remaster" it the way they did with God of War 1 & 2.
But how many zombies at once could Super Smash TV on the Super NES or Doom II on the PC show at once?
You're missing the point. The grandparent was claiming "There's nothing on the 360 that couldn't have been done on the x-box, if the developers had just cut back the complexity of the graphics; and it would have been no less fun.". I just provided an example of a game which was distinctly less fun and emasculated when someone cut back the complexity of the graphics and other areas to run it on a less powerful system.
I have never said that there weren't fun games on older consoles. Of course there are. But fun is not equated to (lack of) graphics, and indeed there are many games that couldn't exist at all in the form they do if not for the state of the art at the time they were made. It seems some people think it's okay for old games to have pushed the envelope graphically or otherwise when they appeared but somehow not okay for modern games to do the same. Which is a very weird position to take.
But your argument assumes that games have gotten better over time. Have they?
Define better. Is a 2010 pinball machine "better" than a 1910 bagatelle game? By what criteria? I'm sure people had great fun playing bagatelle 100 years ago.
Besides, I made no such assertion about betterness. What I did said "Do all these things guarantee a better game? Of course not, but they are powerful tools that can and should be used to deliver the best experience.".
There are plenty of classic titles which were state of the art at one time and pushed the hardware to the limit, so why shouldn't that be the case any more?
I've stopped caring about advances in graphics since about the time of the PS2. There are new things the current gen of consoles offer... networking, motion sensing, better storage... but if you look fundamentally at the games, I don't think the improved graphics make them any more fun. There's nothing on the 360 that couldn't have been done on the x-box, if the developers had just cut back the complexity of the graphics; and it would have been no less fun.
The "graphics don't matter" argument doesn't hold much water. If we go down that route, then through backwards induction there was nothing in the PS2 that couldn't be done on the PS1 with cut back graphics. And nothing on the PS1 that couldn't be done on the Sega Saturn. And nothing in the Sega Saturn to Sega Megadrive. And nothing in the Sega Megadrive to NES. And nothing in NES to Atari 2600. And nothing Atari 2600 to the Telstar. etc.
Except of course graphics wasn't the only thing that changed between console generations. Processing power, memory, storage, general throughput, controllers, number of players, modelling, animation, audio, networking, physics are all improved. Each generation was capable of delivering experiences that you simply couldn't get on the one before. Do all these things guarantee a better game? Of course not, but they are powerful tools that can and should be used to deliver the best experience.
An obvious example of this would be Dead Rising. The concept worked so well on the 360 because the console had the power to render hundreds of zombies. A veritable horde of them. When the game was ported to the Wii, even with cut down graphics, the game had been emasculated so you were lucky to see a dozen zombies at once. The game lost its soul in the transition. Some games simply do not translate well even if you cut down the graphics.
The main advantage of EXT3 over EXT2 is that, with journaling, if you ever need to fsck the data, it goes a LOT quicker. It's interesting to note that Google never felt it needed that functionality.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the data is transient, so why bother to recover it? If necessary, reimage the base OS - the transient stuff is going to get overwritten anyway.
The PS3 isn't a dog to program unless you take 1 million lines of conventional code and attempt to port it. If you architect in a manner which allows portability between PS3 and 360 then most of the code can be shared. There are architectural design design patterns which are equally suited to a conventional or Cell programming model. SPUs shouldn't even be a hard concept to grasp because in practice SPU tasks are a cross-between a thread and a GPU shader - basically a task highly suited for processing large amounts of data.
Indeed, the fact that virtually all 360 & PS3 games obviously share the same codebase and assets demonstrates how similar they are in most respects. It is almost invariably the Wii version which is written from scratch.
2) You cannot build once run everywhere. Its a myth. With J2ME phones, devs test and optimize for every supported handset, and it will be the same for Android.
It isn't a myth, at least not for desktop profile apps and higher. I regularly build Java applications exclusively on one platform and encounter minimal issues when they run on a completely different platform. Usually when these problems occur they are my own fault - path issues and the like.
Even on embedded devices such as J2ME, as long as you code to the relevant profile you stand a reasonable chance of your app running on other devices that comply to that profile. Even if you do encounter problems I guarantee you they are an order less complex than having to rebuild, repackage and redeploy binary executables for disparate platforms.
It certainly wouldn't hurt for Google (+ Android phone manufacturers) implementing some form of compliance testing because there would be nothing worse for the platform than if it shattered into dozens of semi compatible versions of the same thing.
Getting something to run on an Xbox 360, a PS3 and a Wii is very hard
The 360 and PS3 are quite similar from a performance, memory and graphical standpoint, so making code that runs for both platforms (and the PC) is probably a hell of a lot easier than for the Wii. The PS3 is probably the odd fish since it uses SPU tasks but it can still share virtually all of the graphical / audio assets and probably 80-90% of the code. Much of the code in places like EA / Ubisoft etc. is probably middleware anyway so a game coder hits the middleware and leaves it up to that to do the right thing for the platform it is on. To some extent the situation is analogous to Windows & Linux where apps like Firefox and OpenOffice manage to run on multiple platforms and they do so by abstracting and isolating the platform specific parts so the bulk of the code is common.
The Wii is the odd console one out. It doesn't have anything like the same performance characteristics which is probably why with few exceptions the Wii title is usually written from scratch (or code shared with the PS2).
It was an obvious fake. I really don't see how you can possibly think otherwise from the footage or reactions of people who saw it behind closed doors. For example Shane Satterfield of Spike TV said it was "not legit" and "smoke and mirrors".
All that said, I've no idea why you would think they haven't perfected motion and facial recognition for use in games, these have been solved problems for a fair while now to a level where they're useful in many games and applications and as pointed above, the same goes for voice recognition.
Even dedicated facial recognition systems for biometrics have a measurable % failure rate, and that's in optimal situations where the vendor can install proper lighting, high resolution cameras & image processing hardware. It is simply common sense that Microsoft have not perfected it, especially in a typically chaotic, badly lit home as seen through a cheap camera and a low-end CPU. Same goes for other things like speech recognition where even dedicated systems like TellMe screw up even when dealing with limited multiple choice menus.
Natural language processing and natural speech synthesis are still troublesome of course, but Natal neither tried to show these nor did it claim to - particularly in terms of natural language processing- where in the demo did you suppose that that happened exactly, or are you confusing natural language processing and speech recognition which are two entirely different technologies? Of course also as pointed out above, there was no suggestion Milo was thinking up what to say and using synthesised speech on the fly either- it was pretty obvious it was all pre-recorded as in pretty much every other game that's ever had speech in it.
Come off it. The demo heavily implied that "Milo" was reacting to the woman and understanding her speech and emotion, i.e. Calling her "Claire" several times, reacting to phrases in her speech, e.g. "thousands of people", recognizing a picture she drew etc. Peter Molyneux certainly didn't say anything to dispell that notion, instead throwing out hyperboles left and right and stating Milo recognized faces, voices, emotions.
There are plenty of proper demos of Natal that demonstrate what it can do without drinking the kool aid on an obvious fake demo. If you think you're going to see anything like that demo, I have a bridge to sell you. BTW Sony have been as guilty of fake demos too so Microsoft are not the only ones to stretch credulity way past breaking point.
Nice that there are newcomers to the party, but Amazon hedges its bets with a iPod Touch / iPhone Kindle App. So, you don't need these new things if you want e-books and video on the same device.
That might be fine if you love format restricted, DRM'd up the ass proprietary devices, but not so good if you don't.
Here is a tech demo showing a Peter Molyneux demonstration of a game using Natal.
Tech demo? More like total fabrication. Microsoft are merely insinuating they have perfected natural language processing, natural speech synthesis, perfect motion recognition and facial recognition amongst other things.
I'm sure Milo will turn up at some point but it will be a pale imitation of this. We'll realise that you can grunt and howl at Milo and get the same reactions.
Not really. I don't even have to load / cache or even look at the dross on the internet because there are countless search engines and directories that make targetted searching easy. URLs are largely easy to remember and most browsers have powerful bookmarks. Even if I do load a crap page by accident, it takes seconds and I can hit the back button to instantly return to where I was. I can even be in multiple places at the same time thanks to tabs. Furthermore, the web has information I actually want to look at, unlike Second Life. Even organisations with a SL presence rarely bother to make it more than a pale imitation of their web content.
Assuming all this wasn't an issue and I did find a decent location in SL, it's 3D nature makes it much more inconvenient to navigate around the "site". On the web I can navigate a site with up / down scrolling and clicking. In SL, I might have to walk up a set of stairs, turn a corner, click on something and then deal with whatever interface it chooses to implement, and then if I want to do something else, I might have to exit from there, walk down the hall, look up, and click again. 3D environments simply aren't a practical way to convey lots of information.
They could, but I doubt it would be cost beneficial to do it. There are some hybrid BD/DVD discs starting to appear with BD & DVD layers on the same side of the disk (which is possible because BD & DVD reside at different depths) but I expect production costs and facilities to produce them are both issues.
If anything they'll shove in a CD/DVD on its own, or possibly put the mandatory update that reads the format onto game disks for 6 months prior to any game requiring the extra space. Chances are most non-connected PS3s would be mopped up that way.
3D Blu Ray is backwards compatible. The same disc plays on older players as well as 3D enabled ones. The stream contains a base image that old players display, and new players take use additional data in the stream to construct another image to form the left & right images. As the format must be backwards compatible, older players must read the data from the start all the way to the end of the stream which means the disk format cannot change.
The Blu Ray spec is cast in stone - 25Gb single layer or 50Gb dual layer. There is not a chance in hell that video disks are going to appear supporting some other scheme unless it was backwards compatible. Even if every player was firmware upgradeable (unlikely), not every manufacturer would issue patches and only a small % of users would bother even if they did. There is no chance this would fly.
The only place where the tech seems viable is for PS3s and games. Sony control the firmware so they can make PS3s read any format they like. The biggest issue is not every PS3 owner is internet connected to receive updates so if they just push new disks out some PS3s won't read them. Ordinarily, they'd put a mandatory firmware update on the disk, but the disk is unreadable without the firmware... So Sony probably have to ensure that firmware is pushed out beforehand or pack DVDs in with the game with the necessary firmware.
The laughable part is Microsoft has been supported VML for over a decade. If they can render one vector language, what's the big deal about rendering SVG?
Not necessarily. Somebody hits the end point and something spawns the VM to handle the request, assuming its not up already. The server is completely oblivious to the situation and runs the same whether it was running on real hardware or virtual. It's a glorified equivalent of what inetd does right now.
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I realise all of that. MeGUI has a front end for most of those tools. The HD Streams extractor is sitting on top of eac3to for example.
Unless this person were working for Baidu to start with, I bet Baidu wouldn't touch then with a 20ft pole. Who on earth would hire someone who had just planted a trojan in their last place of work?
HD DVD uses evo format which is a different container format from m2ts. I think if you want to convert either HD DVD or Blu Ray content, you'd be better off using MeGUI since it has tools for extracting stream data and processing the content before output. MeGUI only works on Windows, but its virtually impossible to deal with HD content on other platforms anyway because of the crypto.
Put simply encrypting content is just too much effort for most people. I've only ever had dealings with one company that preferred to use crypto. No one else cares.
The only way crypto is going to see wider adoption is if its turned on by default and virtually a no-brainer to use. It has to be virtually transparent. I think it's well past the point of ever happening, although it might gain some traction if a major mail provider such as Google issued all users with a keypair, made it the default to sign outgoing messages.
The question is why Google or any other provider would bother to do that.
More accurately, it's a popular front-end for converting DVD content to MPEG-4 ASP & MPEG-4 AVC output. If you have more general file creation needs, such as trying to convert which isn't on a DVD you probably wouldn't be using using it.
The really, really stupid audiophiles don't stop at $3500 though. Go and have a laugh at the Goldmund players. How does anyone ever manage to play a blu ray without a "magnetic damper". I expect if you cracked them open they'd be built around the same SOCs powering devices costing 1/20th the price.
As far as Shadow of the Colossus is concerned I know a great many people are wetting themselves at the thought that Sony might "remaster" it the way they did with God of War 1 & 2.
You're missing the point. The grandparent was claiming "There's nothing on the 360 that couldn't have been done on the x-box, if the developers had just cut back the complexity of the graphics; and it would have been no less fun.". I just provided an example of a game which was distinctly less fun and emasculated when someone cut back the complexity of the graphics and other areas to run it on a less powerful system.
I have never said that there weren't fun games on older consoles. Of course there are. But fun is not equated to (lack of) graphics, and indeed there are many games that couldn't exist at all in the form they do if not for the state of the art at the time they were made. It seems some people think it's okay for old games to have pushed the envelope graphically or otherwise when they appeared but somehow not okay for modern games to do the same. Which is a very weird position to take.
Define better. Is a 2010 pinball machine "better" than a 1910 bagatelle game? By what criteria? I'm sure people had great fun playing bagatelle 100 years ago.
Besides, I made no such assertion about betterness. What I did said "Do all these things guarantee a better game? Of course not, but they are powerful tools that can and should be used to deliver the best experience.".
There are plenty of classic titles which were state of the art at one time and pushed the hardware to the limit, so why shouldn't that be the case any more?
The "graphics don't matter" argument doesn't hold much water. If we go down that route, then through backwards induction there was nothing in the PS2 that couldn't be done on the PS1 with cut back graphics. And nothing on the PS1 that couldn't be done on the Sega Saturn. And nothing in the Sega Saturn to Sega Megadrive. And nothing in the Sega Megadrive to NES. And nothing in NES to Atari 2600. And nothing Atari 2600 to the Telstar. etc.
Except of course graphics wasn't the only thing that changed between console generations. Processing power, memory, storage, general throughput, controllers, number of players, modelling, animation, audio, networking, physics are all improved. Each generation was capable of delivering experiences that you simply couldn't get on the one before. Do all these things guarantee a better game? Of course not, but they are powerful tools that can and should be used to deliver the best experience.
An obvious example of this would be Dead Rising. The concept worked so well on the 360 because the console had the power to render hundreds of zombies. A veritable horde of them. When the game was ported to the Wii, even with cut down graphics, the game had been emasculated so you were lucky to see a dozen zombies at once. The game lost its soul in the transition. Some games simply do not translate well even if you cut down the graphics.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the data is transient, so why bother to recover it? If necessary, reimage the base OS - the transient stuff is going to get overwritten anyway.
Indeed, the fact that virtually all 360 & PS3 games obviously share the same codebase and assets demonstrates how similar they are in most respects. It is almost invariably the Wii version which is written from scratch.
It isn't a myth, at least not for desktop profile apps and higher. I regularly build Java applications exclusively on one platform and encounter minimal issues when they run on a completely different platform. Usually when these problems occur they are my own fault - path issues and the like.
Even on embedded devices such as J2ME, as long as you code to the relevant profile you stand a reasonable chance of your app running on other devices that comply to that profile. Even if you do encounter problems I guarantee you they are an order less complex than having to rebuild, repackage and redeploy binary executables for disparate platforms.
It certainly wouldn't hurt for Google (+ Android phone manufacturers) implementing some form of compliance testing because there would be nothing worse for the platform than if it shattered into dozens of semi compatible versions of the same thing.
The 360 and PS3 are quite similar from a performance, memory and graphical standpoint, so making code that runs for both platforms (and the PC) is probably a hell of a lot easier than for the Wii. The PS3 is probably the odd fish since it uses SPU tasks but it can still share virtually all of the graphical / audio assets and probably 80-90% of the code. Much of the code in places like EA / Ubisoft etc. is probably middleware anyway so a game coder hits the middleware and leaves it up to that to do the right thing for the platform it is on. To some extent the situation is analogous to Windows & Linux where apps like Firefox and OpenOffice manage to run on multiple platforms and they do so by abstracting and isolating the platform specific parts so the bulk of the code is common.
The Wii is the odd console one out. It doesn't have anything like the same performance characteristics which is probably why with few exceptions the Wii title is usually written from scratch (or code shared with the PS2).
All that said, I've no idea why you would think they haven't perfected motion and facial recognition for use in games, these have been solved problems for a fair while now to a level where they're useful in many games and applications and as pointed above, the same goes for voice recognition.
Even dedicated facial recognition systems for biometrics have a measurable % failure rate, and that's in optimal situations where the vendor can install proper lighting, high resolution cameras & image processing hardware. It is simply common sense that Microsoft have not perfected it, especially in a typically chaotic, badly lit home as seen through a cheap camera and a low-end CPU. Same goes for other things like speech recognition where even dedicated systems like TellMe screw up even when dealing with limited multiple choice menus.
Natural language processing and natural speech synthesis are still troublesome of course, but Natal neither tried to show these nor did it claim to - particularly in terms of natural language processing- where in the demo did you suppose that that happened exactly, or are you confusing natural language processing and speech recognition which are two entirely different technologies? Of course also as pointed out above, there was no suggestion Milo was thinking up what to say and using synthesised speech on the fly either- it was pretty obvious it was all pre-recorded as in pretty much every other game that's ever had speech in it.
Come off it. The demo heavily implied that "Milo" was reacting to the woman and understanding her speech and emotion, i.e. Calling her "Claire" several times, reacting to phrases in her speech, e.g. "thousands of people", recognizing a picture she drew etc. Peter Molyneux certainly didn't say anything to dispell that notion, instead throwing out hyperboles left and right and stating Milo recognized faces, voices, emotions.
There are plenty of proper demos of Natal that demonstrate what it can do without drinking the kool aid on an obvious fake demo. If you think you're going to see anything like that demo, I have a bridge to sell you. BTW Sony have been as guilty of fake demos too so Microsoft are not the only ones to stretch credulity way past breaking point.
That might be fine if you love format restricted, DRM'd up the ass proprietary devices, but not so good if you don't.
Tech demo? More like total fabrication. Microsoft are merely insinuating they have perfected natural language processing, natural speech synthesis, perfect motion recognition and facial recognition amongst other things.
I'm sure Milo will turn up at some point but it will be a pale imitation of this. We'll realise that you can grunt and howl at Milo and get the same reactions.
Assuming all this wasn't an issue and I did find a decent location in SL, it's 3D nature makes it much more inconvenient to navigate around the "site". On the web I can navigate a site with up / down scrolling and clicking. In SL, I might have to walk up a set of stairs, turn a corner, click on something and then deal with whatever interface it chooses to implement, and then if I want to do something else, I might have to exit from there, walk down the hall, look up, and click again. 3D environments simply aren't a practical way to convey lots of information.
If anything they'll shove in a CD/DVD on its own, or possibly put the mandatory update that reads the format onto game disks for 6 months prior to any game requiring the extra space. Chances are most non-connected PS3s would be mopped up that way.
Being firmware upgradeable does not oblige vendors to actually issue upgrades, and they won't.
3D Blu Ray is backwards compatible. The same disc plays on older players as well as 3D enabled ones. The stream contains a base image that old players display, and new players take use additional data in the stream to construct another image to form the left & right images. As the format must be backwards compatible, older players must read the data from the start all the way to the end of the stream which means the disk format cannot change.
The only place where the tech seems viable is for PS3s and games. Sony control the firmware so they can make PS3s read any format they like. The biggest issue is not every PS3 owner is internet connected to receive updates so if they just push new disks out some PS3s won't read them. Ordinarily, they'd put a mandatory firmware update on the disk, but the disk is unreadable without the firmware... So Sony probably have to ensure that firmware is pushed out beforehand or pack DVDs in with the game with the necessary firmware.
The laughable part is Microsoft has been supported VML for over a decade. If they can render one vector language, what's the big deal about rendering SVG?
Not necessarily. Somebody hits the end point and something spawns the VM to handle the request, assuming its not up already. The server is completely oblivious to the situation and runs the same whether it was running on real hardware or virtual. It's a glorified equivalent of what inetd does right now.
An MMO is a different kettle of fish. I'm talking about the glorified matchmaking systems that most games use these days.