I've dumped both vi and emacs. Except for an occasional need to edit something from a console, there are numerous graphical editors which are far less arcane (font locking anyone?), more intuitive and simple to use than either of them.
For general programming, XML and HTML needs, Eclipse works excellently, not least because it's an IDE as well. Alternatively something like JEdit is great or Notepad++ on Win32. In fact Notepad++ on Windows has to be one of the best and fastest editors I've had the pleasure of using.
While folding@home is a (worthy) gimmick I see it more as a demonstration of what a console could do when it's not serving up games. Think of what a PC under your TV could do - video conferencing, home security, reminders, shopping lists, play movies, edit movies, act as a DVR - you name it. Modern consoles are as powerful as low-end PCs like the Mac Mini, so why shouldn't they do more than play games?
While some of the possibilities are fanciful, I hope that consoles are able to *something* when I'm not playing games on it. Even it just acts as a DVD or music player. After all, I have a finite number of plugs by my TV so why should I have 2 or 3 devices cluttering up the joint and consuming power when a console should be up do the job? Therefore, the PS3 (and to a lesser extent) the XBox 360 are very appealing to me. Not only will they play games, but when they're no doing that they can also play videos, music, photos, offer casual browsing capabilities and so forth. If the Linux in the PS3 is accesible and up to snuff, perhaps it can do other things too. All from a single box, a single PSU, a single TV connection, a single interface.
I don't think much of the Wii. It doesn't even offer DVD playback though you get (*gasp*) a photo viewer assuming your camera uses SD cards. For $50 more you'd be better off to get the far more powerful XBox 360 core. Especially if you have a hi-def TV but even if you don't.
Without wishing to appear like I'm defending hidden tracks or claiming they're crack proof... you only have to look at the copy protection on most PC CD / DVD games to know that it is possible to make discs that can't be copied by normal burners. Most crackers just Daemon Tools or similar instead to get around the protection. Commercial pirates might be able to do a bit for bit copy but then the track is still there, so that's no good, and the absence of the track might be the evidence the player needs to stop working.
But then you could think of other ways to refine this scheme such as embedding the region code IN the content, e.g. via a watermark which even survives recoding. Watermarking would be extremely hard to remove especially if you don't know where to find it.
Anyway, I wasn't proposing disabling the RFID reader in the player but in the media. Drill a.5mm hole where your RFID was and another on the other side for balance and the disc is now region free. Or run the disc through DVDDecrypters and play a copy. Or confuse the player with lots of RFIDs. Or buy a player without the reader. There are so many attack vectors in the concept that I wonder why they bother to propose it.
Most of the applications for RFID that are bandied around are pretty lame and better accomplished by conventional means. I think this is one of them.
How does RFID stop you from using out-of-region disks? Are manufacturers expected to put an RFID into each disc that the player can read to validate? What happens for recordable media? What happens if someone whips out their dremel and just disables the RFID? What happens if I lay one of more legitimate discs on top of the player when I try to play an illegal one? What about the millions of players and discs which wouldn't give a damn about playing these "protected" disks? etc.
This sounds like just another stupid application of RFID. For the all the effort involved it would be simpler to just embed a hidden track and read that.
Unless you consider the fuel required to manufacture the solar cells, including the vast amount of electricity consumed during manufacturing and refining of materials which mostly comes from burning coal and the transportation of raw materials and intermediate products over long distances using oil fuel.
What about the vast amount of electricity consumed during manufacturing and refining of an engine block? Or for that matter, sails, rigging and their mast? How much energy does it take to produce an aluminium or anodized steel mast or sailboard anyway? Is your sail made from dacron? I wonder how much energy it costs to synthesize and spin the 50 square meters that a modest boat might require.
And so on. In other words, it isn't worth mentioning these "vast amounts of electricity" unless you can demonstrate that they are substantially more what other forms of propulsion might require. My guess is that solar falls somewhere between wind and a diesel engine.
Exactly. The Wii is only a shade cheaper than an XBox 360 but technically inferior. Any franchise games that appear for it are more likely to be ports from the current generation of consoles than siblings with the XBox 360 or PS3. This is because the thing has neither the memory, CPU, graphics capability or controller to make porting from a 360 or PS3 straightforward. That alone means it will require a lot of exclusive content to make it worthwhile since it will suck big time by comparison otherwise. And the franchise games will dry up as the current-gens wind down. Another problem is that people think the controller is going to be some amazing pixel perfect wand when it can't be and won't be. The controller has benefits, but if people think they can slash the thing around in perfect synchrony as their online counterpart they will be sorely disappointed.
I'm intrigued that it supports AAC. This is a good move by Microsoft and I hope other makers now follow suit. I've always thought that MS-oriented devices have been contractually scared away from supporting AAC, but maybe this marks a change in attitude.
I have a large quantity of ripped songs in AAC format (chiefly because I'm too lazy to change my settings in iTunes). I don't have an iPod and I don't buy from the (ripoff) iTMS. So if devices began to appear that supported AAC, MP3 and WMA I would be all for them. These are for better or worse the major formats.
Strangely enough I already own a device which plays all major formats and ATRAC3 too - the Sony PSP. But it makes for a bulky music player so I wouldn't carry it around for the sake of its music abilities. It's great for movies though - far better than any iPod.
Let me ask you - who is more inclined to upload pictures, me who takes may be 2 or 3 snaps a week, or some amateur photographer decked out with a new SLR camera? The answer is far more likely to be the latter. Not only that, but as cameras cost more there are less models to choose from. Thus the great unwashed masses who upload 750,000 pics a day may do so from 300 different models. Whereas the other 250,000 come from a far smaller pool of (say) 50 expensive models that skew the results in their favour. Therefore it is no surprise that a Canon Digital Rebel comes out on top when it is patently obvious that only a small number of all users actually have one; not least because SLRs are hugely impractical cameras for casual photography. On top of that manufacturers could (and I'm not saying they did) skew results even further simply by uploading pics or encouraging their users to upload pics through the bundled software or other means.
Just because people using Flickr use certain camera types doesn't mean they're the best cameras. They might be, but then again it might be that people who've just spent a fortune on a digital camera are far more likley to upload pictures than casual users. It would even be easy to skew the results simply by dumping a load of pictures up on the site from a certain brand and make it appear that it is more popular than it is.
If not then the service stinks as much as Amazon's. In some ways more so since at least Amazon allows you to "rent" the movie (i.e. own it for 30 days).
No one is stopping Vista from implementing user access controls or other mechanisms to lock the leaky OS down. What they are objecting to are MS muscling into the firewall, antivirus, antispyware markets by installing or offering to install Windows Defender, preferentially promoting Windows Defender or using undocumented APIs in Windows Defender to make it run better than the competition. No doubt Bitlocker and other aspects of security could also be considered as preferentially pushing MS tech to the detriment of an existing market.
Using free software is easier said than done. In the real world there may be extremely good reasons for using commercial software from support, performance, scalability, tools, documentation etc. Besides, databases are extremely finnicky things - broadly similar in behaviour but extremely different in the details. Switching from one to another could cost far more in development effort than just paying Oracle the license to continue using theirs.
Well the effort is actually quite a bit more than what I propose. Aside from the greater technological challenges, it requires upgraded firmware on HD-DVD players. It's a good job there aren't many yet, but by the time this technology appears there might be. And people buying the disc for the DVD version have to put up with less features or lower movie quality because it only supports single layer DVD data. And there are bound to be gotchas for legacy DVD players or computers when faced with these disks.
Making a flipper is far easier. No firmware upgrade. No loss of quality or lack of features. No lock-in to HD-DVD or BD since the technique is applicable to both. It may even be easier to retool an existing production line to accomplish the feat.
Easier yet is to simply ship two discs. It might cost all of 10 cents to do. But I'm sure studios would go hysterical at the thought of that. After all, some people may give away their old discs when they upgrade to the new version.
Why am I reminded of the apocryphal story about Nasa spending millions on pens that could write in zero-G while the Russian astronauts just used a pencil? For all the ingenuity of this invention, what's to stop Sony or anyone else just printing the DVD on one side and the BD / HD-DVD on the other? It's called a flipper and means your DVD can be dual-layer just like it is now.
Why bother with this convoluted effort when you could just produce a flipper? One side could be dual-layer DVD. The other size an HD-DVD or even a BD. Double-sided, dual layer DVDs are already possible so the flipper could be a refinement of that technique.
Tom Bombadil isn't crucial to the plot. Aragorn could have simply said they were ancient Elvish weapons to remain consistent. Too bad he didn't, but the only people who were raging or even cared were Tolkien nerds who would have found something else to rage over even if he had. And they did.
Personally I think the barrow wights would have been a great scene to add, but I can't see how it could have been done without including Tom Bombadil in the movie. And that would have sucked all the pace and urgency out of the movie - as indeed it did in the book.
UMD was a flop because Sony thought they could sell the things for MORE than the equivalent DVD. If they had been half the price - the format may have taken off. Still, the silver lining is that Sony could still salvage something from the debacle - PSPs have a large memory capacity, large enough that if they produced an iTunes-like application that sold movies for $5-10 they could still make a killing.
A year ago a 1Gb memory stick would have set you back at least $99. Now it seems you can get a 2Gb card for less and a shitty movie thrown in too! Seriously though, I wonder if this signals that Sony is going to dump UMD for some kind of movie download service. It would actually make a great deal of sense, and if they did it right would make them far more money than UMDs ever did.
I hold a stock in Amazon. Even with a financial incentive to support Amazon, I think the pricing and the conditions are just dumb, dumb, dumb. Basically we're talking about an extremely shitty rental service - too expensive and too restrictive. Why the hell would I want to spend $9.99 or more on a movie which probably sells for the same or less on a DVD? Why should I use their lousy online service at a price that they (or a competitor) would send me a disc that I owned forever with no restrictions? The answer to these questions is I wouldn't. There is absolutely nothing in it for me to spend so much for so little.
I think if Amazon had sold movies for $5 on the same conditions then it would have sparked a revolution. At that point you're talking about a service offering semi-permanent movie ownership. You can't move or burn your movies but you can hang onto them as long as your PC is alive. A service like that that is basically a glorified rental model but it should be cheaper than buying the DVD.
I don't think the chip will be a slouch either. A decent G4 processor decked out with a decent GPU would be plenty fast. The problem I see is that the PS3 and 360 are faster yet and pretty close to each other feature-wise - similar CPUs, memory, storage, controllers, network. Then you have this Wii thing which is nowhere near the spec of either of them either by CPU, memory, resolution, sound, storage, controller or anything else. Clearly porting from 360 to PS3 or vice versa is going to be considerably easier than porting from 360 / PS3 to Wii. The whole game and all its graphics would have to be pruned to fit the Wii.
That naturally implies the Wii is going to have to rely a lot more on exclusive titles than either of the other consoles.
As for the Cell processor, I don't think anyone claims it will be 7x faster than a regular CPU, but it will absolutely scream at pushing data around which is what video games spend their lives doing. Whether it will be faster than the 3-core "Xenon" in the 360 is debateable. My guess is that it will be slower for general application logic but faster for pipelined operations and everything will even out. It seems very unlikely that the more conventional and conservative Wii chip will be a shade on either of them.
Not just that. The thing is likely to be slower, to have less system memory, a weird controller. All these mean that code written for the PS3 or 360 is very likely to require substantial reworking to function on the Wii. It's not so much a port as a rewrite. In fact I reckon that the task will be so difficult that you're far more likely to see Wii games coming from the GC / PS2 / Xbox direction than from the 360 / PS3 direction.
These are essentially upgraded versions of the Gamecube chip after all, right? With about twice the processing power and 30% less energy usage.
The specs are still unannounced, but I'd doubt they would blow anyone away. It does sound like a low power consumption powerpc chip - the kind of thing that might have seen light of day in a Mac Mini or a laptop if Apple had stuck with the PPC architecture. The Wii is very unlikely to need the computing power of either the XBox 360 or PS3 though since it has a lower screen res and therefore no reason to push as many polys around as those other platforms. Lower power also means the Wii can be aircooled which is a bonus.
The biggest problem for the Wii (aside from the controller) is that lower performance, lower memory, lower resolution etc. will mean that titles from the 360 or PS3 cannot be ported without substantial changes. The console is going to have to rely on exclusive content because the number of mainstream games that it shares (and shares favourably) against the other platforms is going to be pretty low.
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For general programming, XML and HTML needs, Eclipse works excellently, not least because it's an IDE as well. Alternatively something like JEdit is great or Notepad++ on Win32. In fact Notepad++ on Windows has to be one of the best and fastest editors I've had the pleasure of using.
While some of the possibilities are fanciful, I hope that consoles are able to *something* when I'm not playing games on it. Even it just acts as a DVD or music player. After all, I have a finite number of plugs by my TV so why should I have 2 or 3 devices cluttering up the joint and consuming power when a console should be up do the job? Therefore, the PS3 (and to a lesser extent) the XBox 360 are very appealing to me. Not only will they play games, but when they're no doing that they can also play videos, music, photos, offer casual browsing capabilities and so forth. If the Linux in the PS3 is accesible and up to snuff, perhaps it can do other things too. All from a single box, a single PSU, a single TV connection, a single interface.
I don't think much of the Wii. It doesn't even offer DVD playback though you get (*gasp*) a photo viewer assuming your camera uses SD cards. For $50 more you'd be better off to get the far more powerful XBox 360 core. Especially if you have a hi-def TV but even if you don't.
But then you could think of other ways to refine this scheme such as embedding the region code IN the content, e.g. via a watermark which even survives recoding. Watermarking would be extremely hard to remove especially if you don't know where to find it.
Anyway, I wasn't proposing disabling the RFID reader in the player but in the media. Drill a .5mm hole where your RFID was and another on the other side for balance and the disc is now region free. Or run the disc through DVDDecrypters and play a copy. Or confuse the player with lots of RFIDs. Or buy a player without the reader. There are so many attack vectors in the concept that I wonder why they bother to propose it.
Most of the applications for RFID that are bandied around are pretty lame and better accomplished by conventional means. I think this is one of them.
This sounds like just another stupid application of RFID. For the all the effort involved it would be simpler to just embed a hidden track and read that.
What about the vast amount of electricity consumed during manufacturing and refining of an engine block? Or for that matter, sails, rigging and their mast? How much energy does it take to produce an aluminium or anodized steel mast or sailboard anyway? Is your sail made from dacron? I wonder how much energy it costs to synthesize and spin the 50 square meters that a modest boat might require.
And so on. In other words, it isn't worth mentioning these "vast amounts of electricity" unless you can demonstrate that they are substantially more what other forms of propulsion might require. My guess is that solar falls somewhere between wind and a diesel engine.
Exactly. The Wii is only a shade cheaper than an XBox 360 but technically inferior. Any franchise games that appear for it are more likely to be ports from the current generation of consoles than siblings with the XBox 360 or PS3. This is because the thing has neither the memory, CPU, graphics capability or controller to make porting from a 360 or PS3 straightforward. That alone means it will require a lot of exclusive content to make it worthwhile since it will suck big time by comparison otherwise. And the franchise games will dry up as the current-gens wind down. Another problem is that people think the controller is going to be some amazing pixel perfect wand when it can't be and won't be. The controller has benefits, but if people think they can slash the thing around in perfect synchrony as their online counterpart they will be sorely disappointed.
But instead of Emmanuel Goldstein you have Osama Bin Laden. Now stand for your two minutes of hate.
I have a large quantity of ripped songs in AAC format (chiefly because I'm too lazy to change my settings in iTunes). I don't have an iPod and I don't buy from the (ripoff) iTMS. So if devices began to appear that supported AAC, MP3 and WMA I would be all for them. These are for better or worse the major formats.
Strangely enough I already own a device which plays all major formats and ATRAC3 too - the Sony PSP. But it makes for a bulky music player so I wouldn't carry it around for the sake of its music abilities. It's great for movies though - far better than any iPod.
Let me ask you - who is more inclined to upload pictures, me who takes may be 2 or 3 snaps a week, or some amateur photographer decked out with a new SLR camera? The answer is far more likely to be the latter. Not only that, but as cameras cost more there are less models to choose from. Thus the great unwashed masses who upload 750,000 pics a day may do so from 300 different models. Whereas the other 250,000 come from a far smaller pool of (say) 50 expensive models that skew the results in their favour. Therefore it is no surprise that a Canon Digital Rebel comes out on top when it is patently obvious that only a small number of all users actually have one; not least because SLRs are hugely impractical cameras for casual photography. On top of that manufacturers could (and I'm not saying they did) skew results even further simply by uploading pics or encouraging their users to upload pics through the bundled software or other means.
Just because people using Flickr use certain camera types doesn't mean they're the best cameras. They might be, but then again it might be that people who've just spent a fortune on a digital camera are far more likley to upload pictures than casual users. It would even be easy to skew the results simply by dumping a load of pictures up on the site from a certain brand and make it appear that it is more popular than it is.
If not then the service stinks as much as Amazon's. In some ways more so since at least Amazon allows you to "rent" the movie (i.e. own it for 30 days).
No one is stopping Vista from implementing user access controls or other mechanisms to lock the leaky OS down. What they are objecting to are MS muscling into the firewall, antivirus, antispyware markets by installing or offering to install Windows Defender, preferentially promoting Windows Defender or using undocumented APIs in Windows Defender to make it run better than the competition. No doubt Bitlocker and other aspects of security could also be considered as preferentially pushing MS tech to the detriment of an existing market.
Using free software is easier said than done. In the real world there may be extremely good reasons for using commercial software from support, performance, scalability, tools, documentation etc. Besides, databases are extremely finnicky things - broadly similar in behaviour but extremely different in the details. Switching from one to another could cost far more in development effort than just paying Oracle the license to continue using theirs.
Making a flipper is far easier. No firmware upgrade. No loss of quality or lack of features. No lock-in to HD-DVD or BD since the technique is applicable to both. It may even be easier to retool an existing production line to accomplish the feat.
Easier yet is to simply ship two discs. It might cost all of 10 cents to do. But I'm sure studios would go hysterical at the thought of that. After all, some people may give away their old discs when they upgrade to the new version.
Why am I reminded of the apocryphal story about Nasa spending millions on pens that could write in zero-G while the Russian astronauts just used a pencil? For all the ingenuity of this invention, what's to stop Sony or anyone else just printing the DVD on one side and the BD / HD-DVD on the other? It's called a flipper and means your DVD can be dual-layer just like it is now.
Why bother with this convoluted effort when you could just produce a flipper? One side could be dual-layer DVD. The other size an HD-DVD or even a BD. Double-sided, dual layer DVDs are already possible so the flipper could be a refinement of that technique.
Personally I think the barrow wights would have been a great scene to add, but I can't see how it could have been done without including Tom Bombadil in the movie. And that would have sucked all the pace and urgency out of the movie - as indeed it did in the book.
By taping an Archos multimedia to it with masking tape. Beat that!
UMD was a flop because Sony thought they could sell the things for MORE than the equivalent DVD. If they had been half the price - the format may have taken off. Still, the silver lining is that Sony could still salvage something from the debacle - PSPs have a large memory capacity, large enough that if they produced an iTunes-like application that sold movies for $5-10 they could still make a killing.
A year ago a 1Gb memory stick would have set you back at least $99. Now it seems you can get a 2Gb card for less and a shitty movie thrown in too! Seriously though, I wonder if this signals that Sony is going to dump UMD for some kind of movie download service. It would actually make a great deal of sense, and if they did it right would make them far more money than UMDs ever did.
I think if Amazon had sold movies for $5 on the same conditions then it would have sparked a revolution. At that point you're talking about a service offering semi-permanent movie ownership. You can't move or burn your movies but you can hang onto them as long as your PC is alive. A service like that that is basically a glorified rental model but it should be cheaper than buying the DVD.
Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow for $13.99 is a positive bargain!
That naturally implies the Wii is going to have to rely a lot more on exclusive titles than either of the other consoles.
As for the Cell processor, I don't think anyone claims it will be 7x faster than a regular CPU, but it will absolutely scream at pushing data around which is what video games spend their lives doing. Whether it will be faster than the 3-core "Xenon" in the 360 is debateable. My guess is that it will be slower for general application logic but faster for pipelined operations and everything will even out. It seems very unlikely that the more conventional and conservative Wii chip will be a shade on either of them.
Not just that. The thing is likely to be slower, to have less system memory, a weird controller. All these mean that code written for the PS3 or 360 is very likely to require substantial reworking to function on the Wii. It's not so much a port as a rewrite. In fact I reckon that the task will be so difficult that you're far more likely to see Wii games coming from the GC / PS2 / Xbox direction than from the 360 / PS3 direction.
The specs are still unannounced, but I'd doubt they would blow anyone away. It does sound like a low power consumption powerpc chip - the kind of thing that might have seen light of day in a Mac Mini or a laptop if Apple had stuck with the PPC architecture. The Wii is very unlikely to need the computing power of either the XBox 360 or PS3 though since it has a lower screen res and therefore no reason to push as many polys around as those other platforms. Lower power also means the Wii can be aircooled which is a bonus.
The biggest problem for the Wii (aside from the controller) is that lower performance, lower memory, lower resolution etc. will mean that titles from the 360 or PS3 cannot be ported without substantial changes. The console is going to have to rely on exclusive content because the number of mainstream games that it shares (and shares favourably) against the other platforms is going to be pretty low.