I know you could buy a harddrive and a LAN, but the point was it doesn't out of the box. To get the PS2 up to being a Linux machine cost you something like $150 on top of the price of the console. What's the point? As it happens I have a network adapter myself so I know you can get the stuff. It's just the expense of doing so and the end result don't make it a worthwhile proposition. On the other hand, Linux for the PS3 (or even the PSP via a UMD) would be a good proposition. I'm actually surprised that Sony don't do one for the PSP since homebrewers wouldn't have a reason to bitch about firmware anymore - let them boot from Linux on UMD and run apps off their memory stick. It might even shift a few PSPs simply because it would be a great toy.
The point however is that it was a big pain to get Linux and when you did it was pretty useless.
As for a PC that does Linux for $100 - maybe. But would you stick it beside your TV? Does it have a video out? Does it play next-gen console games too? Or music? Or blu-ray & DVDs? Is it wireless? etc.
Consoles have little excuse for *just* playing games these days. Why do I need 4 devices under my TV anyway when a PS3 / XBox 360 has the potential of replacing 3 of them - CD/DVD player, games console, and VCR / PVR (via a dongle of some kind). These consoles can do other things, assuming they aren't crippled in the firmware. My feeling is that the XBox 360 was deliberately crippled to make it a client of a Windows Media PC (e.g. the streaming of video content only). It could have ripped movies or at least offered PVR functionality if the firmware allowed it. The XBox 360 went from being a media hub to being a dumb client. I have no idea if the PS3 will be similarly crippled. The PS3 has enormous potential but whether it makes good on that or goes through its own retardation (thanks to Sony BMG or some other division freaking out over it) remains to be seen.
I'll let other people find out for me what it can / can't do after it goes on sale. At that point I'll make my mind up if I want one and I'll certainly take my time to buy it if I do.
As it happens, Ireland is actually a place where the system should have stood a good chance of working. Car insurance is extremely expensive for young male drivers. A system that could cut the bills in half should be seen as a good thing. I doubt the bad drivers would go for it, but the good ones in normal vehicles could.
BTW the reason that insurance is expensive is because there are a lot of chavs / monkeys in that age bracket who stand a good chance of crashing, killing or maiming. The funniest thing I ever saw was a protest against high car insurance for young drivers. It passed through the town I was in at the time. Without exaggeration, every single driver in the parade was a monkey in a Astra GT (or cars of similar ilk) modded with spoilers, paintjobs, loudspeakers, custom horns etc. This parade of idiots made the insurance companies' case for them.
I don't care if Sony uses it as a tax dodge so long as the system is useful. It could even work to Sony's advantage. After all, a PS3 armed with Linux is a computer, and in theory just as capable of doing anything that you can do with Linux on a normal PC, except of course the PS3 is armed with a video out, is always on (or more likely to be on), has wireless and is fairly cheap. I disagree that it will be as "significant" (i.e. useless) as the PS2. The PS2 had no harddrive, no LAN, no standby mode (where when you turn on it resumes from where you left). Even the USB was mangled so standard devices don't work. Later small form factor PS2s can't even install a HD. Once you kitted it out with Linux you had an underpowered and mostly useless system.
All models of the PS3 have a harddrive, bluetooth & USB, and the more expensive one has wireless too. If Linux shipped out of the box, it would make the PS3 really, really useful for a whole raft of things. Let's hope Sony do ship it out of the box, or intend to offer it as an online download for their service. It would be a wasted opportunity if they don't.
Liberal compared to what? With a new crippling "feature" with every patch? With people desprately downgrading their software at every turn? With UMD proving to be BetaMax2005?
Liberal compared to what Sony had every right to make it. It could have been far worse. As it stands it plays ripped movies & music in a variety of formats, including WMA & AAC. From Sony that's very liberal. The only people desperately trying to downgrade are pirates and homebrewers. Now I'm the first to support homebrew, but it is entirely understandable that Sony defend their system from piracy. Piracy would kill the PSP stone dead.
There has been talk (which I don't believe 100%) that the PS3 will have Linux out of the box. That would enable the PS3 to support the homebrew scene quite adequately and should make everyone happy. Homebrewers can programme to the Linux APIs making them happy. Sony don't have to expose the same APIs used by games making them happy. I'd love for it to happen, simply because it would be pretty awesome. But I have a feeling that if it appears at all that will be a separate install at some unspecified point in the future.
Oh wait, we're dealing with Sony, the company that has shipped BluRay drives which won't play BluRay disks:
And is that Sony being evil or simply some kind of cock up?
While I can't say for certain if I'll buy a PS3 (let the early adopter suckers beta test it first), I know that I want something that does more than just play games. I only have a finite amount of space and plug sockets by my TV and multi-function device is more useful to me. If the PS3 can play movies, stream (& rip) music, be a passable web browser and even possibly even support Linux (and by extension homebrew, emulation etc.), that makes it well worth the money.
At that point you're talking about something almost akin to the Intel Viiv architecture but undercutting it by a large margin. It is probably Viiv and Windows Media Center which forced the XBox 360 to have such crippled multi-media support. Let's hope Sony learn from their mistakes (and from the relatively liberal DRM in the PSP) and come up with the goods.
No, my "problem" is that Apple and Microsoft and Sony set their rippers to use their proprietary format by default and no amount of education will cause more than a small percentage of users to switch to MP3. If you think any different, you clearly don't recognize or understand the power of the default.
If MP3 is unencumbered, and WMA / AAC files are unprotected when someone rips their own CDs, where is the harm in all players playing unprotected WMA / AAC files? Obviously there is a monopolistic harm (Apple's monopoly in this case), but anything that tears down the barriers between formats is a good thing from the customer's point of view. I expect the RIAA would whine about it, but its hard to see why - after all it's no worse than MP3. It's hard to see why they even whine about copy protection at all. Lossless copy protection strippers exist for all the major formats so its not like they're benefiting from it much anyway. They'd be better off to make music ubiquitous and cheap and then no one would be bothering with P2P for songs anyway.
Strange as it may sound, there is a device that plays MP3 and unprotected WMA & AAC - the Sony PSP. Who'd have thought Sony would produce a device which is actually one of the better ones for supporting multiple music formats? It's just too bad that Sony are as bad themselves, flogging that dead horse called ATRAC3 in their other devices. Still, the PSP demonstrates that a device can play the major formats.
Hmm, perhaps the US model is different so I'll refer to GSM. Most likely your plane would be kitted out with a picocell and jammers to ensure you didn't inadvertantly connect to another service. To use your phone, you'd have to "roam" through the picocell and then be raped at whatever phone rate they chose for you to make and receive calls. You'd probably be looking at least 1 euro a minute, and probably more. Other services like texting would also be high.
On the plus side, your phone would be so close to the cell that it would use less power.
I worked in Mountain View for a while. It wasn't unusual to be leaving at 8pm in the evening. But having said that, I was being paid an enormous salary, the atmosphere and environment was relaxed and there were perks like free food and soda for doing so. I expect Chinese sweatshops don't let their staff lie around on beanbags or play table football when they feel like it.
It's clunky and plugs into the USB 2.0 port and needs it's own PSU. If that is how the HD DVD drive will work for XBox 360, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Games are never going to play off it and indeed no games maker would ever bother when the firmly ingrained default is the DVD format. It would have been far, far better to support HD DVD from the beginning. The XBox 360 is going to find itself hitting problems a few years down the road when games start demanding more capacity, or when the makers want to release a disc with multiple locales on it to save on production costs.
It's a WMA player that also happens to play MP3, although just like Apple, Microsoft will ensure that the defaults are set to WMA, as well as only selling WMA content. MP3 is considered "legacy" by these companies. Not because it's noticeably of lower quality, but because they both want to lock you into their proprietary format.
I wish one of them (i.e. Microsoft) would just concede to the other and be done with it - let us buy our music from anywhere and play it on any device. Or at least reach a pact where each supports the other's unprotected format, at least allowing some interchange between devices for content people may have ripped for themselves.
The VM would be running inside the firewall, I would be running remote desktop from outside via VPN. So despite the VM being slower it would still be massively faster since Clearcase packets only travel around the LAN, not over the WAN.
If you've ever used the piece of shit otherwise known as Clearcase the difference would be night and day. Even with broadband and a VPN, the thing is literally 100 times slower than when you're on a LAN with the server. The thing sends out hundreds of packets just to do the simplest operations. Terrible design.
VMWare is great if your users have a sedentary needs from their PCs but if you're expecting them to do anything remotely intensive such as play a video clip, then you may as well forget it. Especially over a network.
My experience tells me that a VM feels 1/3 the speed of the native OS its running on. That's fine for word processing etc., but as I said, forget anything intensive. Personally I wouldn't mind using a VM myself for most of my work. I work from home over a VPN, and some of the tools I have to use like Clearcase are abysmal over the WAN. It'd be faster to do all my development from a VM, even with the slower compile times.
If someone wants an IM device then surely there are plenty of pocket pc models capable of working with a hotspot. Some even have a thumbboard or can be connected to a mini keyboard. And the same goes for phone devices (e.g. Blackberry). This Sony thing seems kind of stupid really.
Besides, why didn't they stick this functionality into the PSP. A PSP costs nearly half what this Mylo does. I'm sure a revamped PSP could feature a thumb board, or a connector to stick one on. This in addition to being able to play music, games, video, stream video, browse the web etc.
And with that aside, how are we protecting the nation's railways, malls, gas stations, and all other manner of targets?
Exactly. If you were a terrorist, why go to the bother of smuggling stuff past x ray machines, suspicious security guards, fellow passengers etc. Wouldn't be simpler and just as effective to blow up a truck outside a random office block? Or a cineplex? Or (ironically) right beside the huge snaking queue waiting to go through airport security.
What's to stop a terrorist walking straight through the X-Ray screener with the liquid swallowed in a condom? Or just a conventional sold explosive shoved up his backside?
Perhaps random rectal and mouth exams are in order. Also passengers should sedated and cuffed nude with their arms outstretched for the duration of the journey.
A system that incorrectly identifies 8% of respondents as terrorists is a useless system. Some people freak out when accused of something even if they didn't do it. Given that tens of thousands of people pass through an airport in a regular day it means you're meant to detain and disrupt hundreds of travellers. Given that the average number of terrorists passing through an airport is diminishingly small, this system would be a total waste of time and money.
If the intent is to scare would be terrorists, I suggest they could achieve the same effect with a pretend system that lights a bulb when the security officer doesn't like the answer he is hearing.
The PS3 allegedly supports Linux in the shipping model. Of course this sort of feature is the first to go when the pips begin to squeak so who knows if its true. Certainly if it did happen, it could spell a revolution. It finally means the homebrewers get what they've always wanted and at the same time, Sony get to keep their copy protection and possibly classify their consoles as computers for tax purposes.
I'm hoping that the PS3 (as has been suggested) ships with a decent and usable version of Linux. That opens the possibility of using the PS3 for almost any functionality, not just games. Of course Sony have screwed things up in the past, so I don't hold a great deal of confidence in what they might offer. Still, the Microsoft thing looks like some cheezy game development kit which only produces games that you can share with other developers. Doesn't sound very compelling to me.
The problem with OpenOffice is that its a massive project (120000+ files) and incredibly daunting to build with many inter-dependencies on non-trivial 3rd party packages. How many eyeballs actually look at the code, and can you say for sure that it is any more than for MS Office?
Now don't get me wrong. I *only* use OO for home use (MSO is required for office work), but it would be incredibly bad assumption that OO has less exploits than MSO. It's simply that the bad guys have bigger fish to fry. OO is a teeny target compared to MSO but as more and more businesses and governments start to use it, that situation will change. OO has many of the same flaws as MSO including macro scripting, so it seems likely that sooner or later someone might produce something bad that works through it. It's not the scripting that worries me, but what objects are visible through the scripting, the sandbox model and whether scripting should be an all or nothing affair. For example, should a script have unfettered ability to do what it likes with any available class or should be restricted to a subset. Does OO allow you to import any dangerous packages into a BeanShell script, or restrict you to safe and security audited ones?
Slashdot Mirror
The point however is that it was a big pain to get Linux and when you did it was pretty useless.
As for a PC that does Linux for $100 - maybe. But would you stick it beside your TV? Does it have a video out? Does it play next-gen console games too? Or music? Or blu-ray & DVDs? Is it wireless? etc.
Consoles have little excuse for *just* playing games these days. Why do I need 4 devices under my TV anyway when a PS3 / XBox 360 has the potential of replacing 3 of them - CD/DVD player, games console, and VCR / PVR (via a dongle of some kind). These consoles can do other things, assuming they aren't crippled in the firmware. My feeling is that the XBox 360 was deliberately crippled to make it a client of a Windows Media PC (e.g. the streaming of video content only). It could have ripped movies or at least offered PVR functionality if the firmware allowed it. The XBox 360 went from being a media hub to being a dumb client. I have no idea if the PS3 will be similarly crippled. The PS3 has enormous potential but whether it makes good on that or goes through its own retardation (thanks to Sony BMG or some other division freaking out over it) remains to be seen.
I'll let other people find out for me what it can / can't do after it goes on sale. At that point I'll make my mind up if I want one and I'll certainly take my time to buy it if I do.
BTW the reason that insurance is expensive is because there are a lot of chavs / monkeys in that age bracket who stand a good chance of crashing, killing or maiming. The funniest thing I ever saw was a protest against high car insurance for young drivers. It passed through the town I was in at the time. Without exaggeration, every single driver in the parade was a monkey in a Astra GT (or cars of similar ilk) modded with spoilers, paintjobs, loudspeakers, custom horns etc. This parade of idiots made the insurance companies' case for them.
All models of the PS3 have a harddrive, bluetooth & USB, and the more expensive one has wireless too. If Linux shipped out of the box, it would make the PS3 really, really useful for a whole raft of things. Let's hope Sony do ship it out of the box, or intend to offer it as an online download for their service. It would be a wasted opportunity if they don't.
Liberal compared to what Sony had every right to make it. It could have been far worse. As it stands it plays ripped movies & music in a variety of formats, including WMA & AAC. From Sony that's very liberal. The only people desperately trying to downgrade are pirates and homebrewers. Now I'm the first to support homebrew, but it is entirely understandable that Sony defend their system from piracy. Piracy would kill the PSP stone dead.
There has been talk (which I don't believe 100%) that the PS3 will have Linux out of the box. That would enable the PS3 to support the homebrew scene quite adequately and should make everyone happy. Homebrewers can programme to the Linux APIs making them happy. Sony don't have to expose the same APIs used by games making them happy. I'd love for it to happen, simply because it would be pretty awesome. But I have a feeling that if it appears at all that will be a separate install at some unspecified point in the future.
Oh wait, we're dealing with Sony, the company that has shipped BluRay drives which won't play BluRay disks:
And is that Sony being evil or simply some kind of cock up?
At that point you're talking about something almost akin to the Intel Viiv architecture but undercutting it by a large margin. It is probably Viiv and Windows Media Center which forced the XBox 360 to have such crippled multi-media support. Let's hope Sony learn from their mistakes (and from the relatively liberal DRM in the PSP) and come up with the goods.
No, my "problem" is that Apple and Microsoft and Sony set their rippers to use their proprietary format by default and no amount of education will cause more than a small percentage of users to switch to MP3. If you think any different, you clearly don't recognize or understand the power of the default.
Strange as it may sound, there is a device that plays MP3 and unprotected WMA & AAC - the Sony PSP. Who'd have thought Sony would produce a device which is actually one of the better ones for supporting multiple music formats? It's just too bad that Sony are as bad themselves, flogging that dead horse called ATRAC3 in their other devices. Still, the PSP demonstrates that a device can play the major formats.
On the plus side, your phone would be so close to the cell that it would use less power.
Terrorists can coordinate their attacks using something called a wristwatch. Perhaps these should be banned from flights too.
I worked in Mountain View for a while. It wasn't unusual to be leaving at 8pm in the evening. But having said that, I was being paid an enormous salary, the atmosphere and environment was relaxed and there were perks like free food and soda for doing so. I expect Chinese sweatshops don't let their staff lie around on beanbags or play table football when they feel like it.
It's clunky and plugs into the USB 2.0 port and needs it's own PSU. If that is how the HD DVD drive will work for XBox 360, I don't see what all the fuss is about. Games are never going to play off it and indeed no games maker would ever bother when the firmly ingrained default is the DVD format. It would have been far, far better to support HD DVD from the beginning. The XBox 360 is going to find itself hitting problems a few years down the road when games start demanding more capacity, or when the makers want to release a disc with multiple locales on it to save on production costs.
I wish one of them (i.e. Microsoft) would just concede to the other and be done with it - let us buy our music from anywhere and play it on any device. Or at least reach a pact where each supports the other's unprotected format, at least allowing some interchange between devices for content people may have ripped for themselves.
If you've ever used the piece of shit otherwise known as Clearcase the difference would be night and day. Even with broadband and a VPN, the thing is literally 100 times slower than when you're on a LAN with the server. The thing sends out hundreds of packets just to do the simplest operations. Terrible design.
My experience tells me that a VM feels 1/3 the speed of the native OS its running on. That's fine for word processing etc., but as I said, forget anything intensive. Personally I wouldn't mind using a VM myself for most of my work. I work from home over a VPN, and some of the tools I have to use like Clearcase are abysmal over the WAN. It'd be faster to do all my development from a VM, even with the slower compile times.
Besides, why didn't they stick this functionality into the PSP. A PSP costs nearly half what this Mylo does. I'm sure a revamped PSP could feature a thumb board, or a connector to stick one on. This in addition to being able to play music, games, video, stream video, browse the web etc.
AOL move from data mining to actual mining
Dear Jack, Go fuck yourself. Wait in line like everyone else. Sincerely Take Two
Just because some online play might be free doesn't mean that online content will be, or that online play is even very sophisticated.
The one at the top of page 8 is laugh out loud funny.
Exactly. If you were a terrorist, why go to the bother of smuggling stuff past x ray machines, suspicious security guards, fellow passengers etc. Wouldn't be simpler and just as effective to blow up a truck outside a random office block? Or a cineplex? Or (ironically) right beside the huge snaking queue waiting to go through airport security.
Perhaps random rectal and mouth exams are in order. Also passengers should sedated and cuffed nude with their arms outstretched for the duration of the journey.
If the intent is to scare would be terrorists, I suggest they could achieve the same effect with a pretend system that lights a bulb when the security officer doesn't like the answer he is hearing.
The PS3 allegedly supports Linux in the shipping model. Of course this sort of feature is the first to go when the pips begin to squeak so who knows if its true. Certainly if it did happen, it could spell a revolution. It finally means the homebrewers get what they've always wanted and at the same time, Sony get to keep their copy protection and possibly classify their consoles as computers for tax purposes.
I'm hoping that the PS3 (as has been suggested) ships with a decent and usable version of Linux. That opens the possibility of using the PS3 for almost any functionality, not just games. Of course Sony have screwed things up in the past, so I don't hold a great deal of confidence in what they might offer. Still, the Microsoft thing looks like some cheezy game development kit which only produces games that you can share with other developers. Doesn't sound very compelling to me.
Now don't get me wrong. I *only* use OO for home use (MSO is required for office work), but it would be incredibly bad assumption that OO has less exploits than MSO. It's simply that the bad guys have bigger fish to fry. OO is a teeny target compared to MSO but as more and more businesses and governments start to use it, that situation will change. OO has many of the same flaws as MSO including macro scripting, so it seems likely that sooner or later someone might produce something bad that works through it. It's not the scripting that worries me, but what objects are visible through the scripting, the sandbox model and whether scripting should be an all or nothing affair. For example, should a script have unfettered ability to do what it likes with any available class or should be restricted to a subset. Does OO allow you to import any dangerous packages into a BeanShell script, or restrict you to safe and security audited ones?