Yes. And it has nothing to do with establishing a secure connection between two machines over the internet, something that happens billions of times every single day. If you're intent on breaking SSL, I can think of consideraly more tempting targets than communication between a PS3 and a server.
They could do that too, but running the test against servers would make the feature more useful to end users and might provide Sony with some useful metrics.
Most people will in one way or another. But I'm sure they could still implement an offline mode where you insert the disc at least once every month to get the same functionality. The leakage due to piracy would be marginal.
Re:Not THAT surprising...
on
Region-free PS3
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well the backup excuse could be done away with if the HD was able to cache game content so you didn't need the disc in the drive to play it. How to stop people playing copies this way? Make them enter a registration code. Every so often it sends the code off to Sony. If more than one PS3 is found to have used the game with the same code, it challenges you to insert the disc to continue. Since this will affect few people, it makes HD gaming virtually transparent while allowing the original disc to stay in the keepcase.
Why would you buy a copy of OpenOffice, or an office suite that looks exactly like it but is called something else?
StarOffice comes with a whole bunch of clipart, templates, labels, a level of support and has been QA'd to death. But otherwise it looks and feels just like OpenOffice. I guess that the extra bits make it look a lot more attractive to OEMs or corporates looking to use it. The downside is all that rigorous QA doesn't come for free so the release cycles lag behind the more freewheeling open source version.
The same happened with Netscape branded browser. The NS version (with the exception of v8) was *always* more stable than the Mozilla it came from thanks to extra QA and was better thanks to useful goodies like a spellchecker. The flipside was Mozilla was such a fast moving target that there often compelling reasons to use the latest Mozilla just to get the speed / memory improvements.
I've never met such an irritating, insidious service as GoDaddy. On the surface it sounds great - cheap domain names, cheap hosting, cheap this and that. But as soon as you sign up you discover you've just bought a crippled service and you're going to be nickel and dimed to death to improve it. Advanced functionality is disabled, "value add" software is beta or plain out of date, the user interface is pretty crap, there's no shell and you're constantly spammed by GoDaddy both by email and through ads on the gateways you pass through to work your accounts & email.
In their favour, the hosting more or less works as intended, but in my experience the hosting software is pretty awful. As soon as my hosting is up I'm off to somewhere else.
Sure. Oracle's seen the writing on the wall here, thus we have Oracle Express.
I suspect that Oracle Express is more pitched in the same space as MS SQL Server Express (and MSDE before it) - as a database engine for development and small deployments and a shoe-in for the commercial products if / when they are needed. IBM do likewise. Perhaps the penny has dropped that MS is getting a lot of business this way.
To be honest, I reckon Postgres & MySQL should be producing "express" versions too for XP. That doesn't mean they should be deliberately crippled, but they should be available packaged in a distribution containing just the database engine, ADO.NET, ODBC drivers and perhaps a command line tool or so. Throw out all the help, admin tools, headers, libs etc. That allows app developers to deploy them with their own applications rather than a hulking 50+Mb download which is what the likes of MSDE / Oracle Express require for the same functionality.
Just as with the commercial counterparts, the express version is also a shoe-in for larger distributed deployments if the need arises.
Quotes are delayed 20 minutes just like you would expect. The disclaimer is right under the chart.
Except it wasn't delayed and it still isn't delayed. For example, check out the timestamp on this quote for AMZN compared to this post - "Real-Time ECN: 35.92 -0.31 (-0.86%) Mar 21, 3:01PM ET". It states quite clearly it is a realtime quote. Other symbols like IBM and even more obscure ones also show realtime quotes.
I thought you had to pay a lot of money per user to display realtime quotes. Is Google really doing that, or are we about to seem them get slapped by the NYSE & Nasdaq?
And yet in the previous story, users are seemingly rushing off to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 alpha. Sometimes you really do need to state the obvious.
I think there is a difference between a program which at worst might destroy your OS, but realistically is just going to crash more often, and a physical device costing thousands which at worst could burn your house down. With you, your family and any other residents inside it.
Lot's of people do not want a hand-crank $200 device because it doesn't look cool, and it won't do EVERYTHING their $600 laptop can do.
I think it looks cool and I sure as hell know that millions of others would too. But putting cool aside, it's how practical it is that wows me. I'd never take my laptop away with me unless I was doing business work. It's too bulky, needs wires, a case etc. I absolutely hate leaving it in the hotel room. When I'm on holiday I still want some computing access in the hotel but I don't want to haul a laptop so my solution has been to use my PDA which does wireless browsing. But the browsing is pretty horrible and of course I can't type, making it a pain to enter a url or even respond to email.
I see these handcrank machines as being the perfect compromise between a PDA and a laptop - a machine with a keyboard & controller that is more than adequate for browsing, email, wordprocessing, spreadsheet, games etc. but in a small, light, rugged form factor and requires no cables. Toss them into your backpack. You could take a cable to charge it, but if you don't want to, you can still crank it. Better yet if its instant on as it probably would be if everything runs in memory.
I truly believe these things could take the market by storm. That assumes the OS and software works of course, but if it's running Linux, something like QTopia and has a few apps like an Opera or Firefox browser and KWord then I don't see why not.
If you want or need to use a $600 laptop then that's fine, but a lot of people wouldn't. And I specifically said Origami. I reckon that Bill perceives these cheap handcrank devices as a threat to his latest pen based windows device. These things cost a frigging fortune and every single previous pen based effort has flopped - the last one leaked so much memory you had to reboot it every day. The last thing he needs now is a device costing a tenth that does everything most of what a large portion of prospective Origami / laptop users actually want to do. The pen part is a gimmick anyway for most people. Of course there are other reasons he doesn't like it, but the timing suggests Origami as being the reason for this comment.
Of course all my enthusiasm is based on supposition. I'm hoping there will be a consumer version sometime this decade. I'm hoping that they won't screw it up in some way, or hike the price to $400. I'm hoping the OS won't suck. It might suck big time. But assuming they do everything right, and actually release and sell a commercial product cheaply enough, I think these things will be as ubiquitous as iPods.
If these handcranked machines were selling for $200 tomorrow in a consumer model, I'd buy one like a shot. Bill can scoff, but a rugged device with a keyboard that requires no power supply and can do wireless and simple productivity tasks is a KILLER DEVICE. I can well imagine these things becoming almost the iPods of the the computing world. The likes of Starbucks would be filled with people using these things, taking them out of their bags, cranking them up for instant browsing goodness with just enough juice for a coffee or two. The great part is they're so cheap and sturdy that you wouldn't need to carry them around like newborn children - just throw them into the bag with your other stuff and away you go.
I reckon if anything that Bill is scared because if these things ever did become consumer devices that his shitty Origami project would go down the tubes just like all their predecessors. After all, how many would buy some lousy pen device costing thousands when something costing a tenth could do all they need.
It's not just consumers either. I can well see these things being useful in warehouses and other places where you need computer access but not the bother of having devices on charge all the time.
On the other hand Vista has NEW products, such as the new Explorer and IE; if.NET really is as powerful as Microsoft claims, why not write them in.NET?
The simple answer is because.NET's performance is inferior to compiled code..NET may be faster than VB6 but its performance is roughly the same as Java's. This equates to mediocre performance in client side application code. You probably wouldn't feel it in some dumb database query viewer, or in some moderately static UI, but you sure as hell would if you tried to implement a browser with it. MS could cheat of course and simply wrap an C++ coded browser engine in.NET but from my experience, that would give you the worst of two worlds - the overhead of.NET, and the instability / exploitability of C++. If you're going to use C++ in any substantial way you may as well stick with it throughout.
Personally I have no problems with client apps coded in.NET & Java but it's a case of the best tool for the job. Java &.NET work better in high latency environments (e.g. servers) where code execution time is dwarfed by network / database latency and the return in terms of stability more than pays for itself.
It's easy to decompile HTML, JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby, Perl etc. too. I've even browsed through code MS used for their "Active" desktop around IE4.0 because it was all HTML, JS & VBS.
Anyway, source for some user-land tools such as Wordpad & Notepad (two candidates for replacement) are already available and part of MS Developer Studio sample code. So I hardly see the harm from being able to decompile a.NET app equivalent. Besides, if you or they were absolutely paranoid about people decompiling your code, you run it through an obfuscator first. Then all of the property names, symbols, code etc. get scrambled around and given random names making it pretty much impossible to follow what is going on.
but I'm beginning to think Ubuntu has replaced Mandrake/riva as the No 1 user-friendly distro.
I disagree. I disagree because because my experience of Mandrake is that the user experience has been far worse than its rivals and if you asked me what the No.1 User Friendly distro was a few years back, it certainly wouldn't be Mandrake. Red Hat perhaps, SUSE probably not, but no way Mandrake. The "Drak" tools were consistently buggy, marred by horrible usability issues, not very task oriented and were slapped onto the side of the desktop with the finesse of tractor welded to a car. User friendly implies usability and I recall Mandrake tools couldn't even get simple things right like the order of buttons on message boxes. I used it from about 6.3 to 8.0 and my experience was that each progressive release got buggier and buggier and I finally gave up on it. I revisited it for 9.1 and 9.2 and it was just as bad - worse even since the fundamental issues with the usability never seem to be fixed.
The only thing in my book which set Mandrake apart from Red Hat, SUSE or whoever was a larger number of packages on the CD and bleeding edge version numbers. I wouldn't hold SUSE's config up as an example of usable either, but it was at at least reliable and consistent. It's even almost pleasant to use in SUSE 10, assuming you run a KDE desktop.
I do like Ubuntu though. I think the shitty brown theme is horrid, but the integration and use of GNOME tools makes for a seamless and very pleasant desktop experience. That's what Linux should be like and its about time that it is. Now distros are paying attention to usability, Linux may finally start to appear on a few more desktops.
How would it slaughter the games makers? Homebrew writers would be restricted to using the APIs that were exposed through Linux which almost certainly aren't going to compete with the ones games makers use. And such a kit certainly wouldn't allow them to pirate games either since the whole Linux thing gets in the way. All this does is allow tinkerers and others with bespoke requirements to suddenly find new and innovative ways of using their PSPs. The only effect of a devkit is an increase in sales to such people, who might buy a few games while they're at it.
Linux is software. Sell it on a UMD for $60 and people will buy it, especially if it works nicely and allows people to tinker around with it, writing their own apps that run from a memory stick. Sony even used to sell Linux for PS2 but it was hamstrung by the need to buy a keyboard, mouse, network expansion & harddrive. None of this is necessary for a PSP - just a UMD, somewhere to download dev tools from and the rest will take care of itself.
Seriously. Sell the thing on UMD with a downloadable cross-platform set of compilers and let the homebrew people have at it. Then everyone's happy - the user for having a bunch of cool new things to run, the homebrew scene for having official endorsements, and the games makers since running homebrew over Linux and through different APIs effectively kills any notions of piracy.
I don't doubt it. My point was about ease of installation and administration out of the box. On Postgres wins hands down on XP. On Linux I'd say (from my experience with Ubuntu) that the situation is reversed.
Even so, aside from domain hosting or other environments where I have no choice I don't think I'd touch MySQL with a barge pole. I think I'd prefer a proper, albeit slower DB than one which puts speed over database integrity.
It looks stupid. Any person wearing this in a non-professional capacity may as well have "asshole" stamped on their head. Being a nerd is not a profession.
It's heavy and the posture required to use it for any length of time is silly. Try holding an empty coffee mug the way the screenshot shows the device being used for a minute. Bet your arm starts to ache. This thing would definitely have to be able to prop up on a table.
All the buttons are on the right hand side. Too bad for lefties who want to use their device. They'll have to reach over the screen to push a button and possibly obscure whatever it was that was prompting them to push the button in the first place. That or they'll have this hunk o' crap on their writing hand.
I wouldn't pooh pooh such a device completely, after all it might have some profession use, especially in another form factor, but its hard to say what that use it might be to professionals. I imagine that no cop or fireman is going to want this thing clanging off everything while they're doing their jobs.
PostgreSQL is hard to install and administer. Really, I think this is a matter of taste. If you are used to MySQL, then yes, there is a learning curve. OTOH, I'm used to PostgreSQL and find myself having to learn MySQL, and MySQL feels just as weird and unintuitive to me as PostgreSQL might to a long-time PostgreSQL user.
Can't speak of Linux / Unix but on XP, Postgres is a doddle to install and administer. After a fairly small download, double click the installer, answer a few questions about ports and its installed as a service. To administer it you fire up pgAdminIII and get an excellent GUI for creating users, running queries and so forth. It also has excellent online documentation in HTML format, plus all the drivers, libs & headers you need to get it work in a dozen different ways.
In fact Postgres is such a breeze to install on XP that it is easier by miles than MS SQL Sever, or Oracle, both of which require lengthy and complex installs to complete.
MySQL is also fairly easy to install XP (it has an installer too), and also installs as a service and HTML help. But I wouldn't say its as easy for Postgres. For one thing you don't get an admin tool (or the dev kit) which means it's considerably more difficult to administer.
I'm sure this would pose no problem for people who love being stuck in a console based admin tool, but personally I prefer the more productive environment offered by pgAdminIII... when it works which is usually most of the time although it has the odd quirk.
One thing I appreciate about both products is how small they are. SQL Server is basically an entire CD to install. Oracle is multiple CD. Both are far too huge for pretty much most uses any individual or small outfit might have for a database.
So definitely on XP, Postgres is far easier to install, administer and use than MySQL. I can't say I've used either in anger, but I was able to hook Postgres up via the ODBC driver to OpenOffice Base and use that as a front end for data entry for some experimental work I was doing.
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No it isn't. It's nothing like it at all. We're talking about a way here for someone to play a game from the hard drive without inserting the disc.
Yes. And it has nothing to do with establishing a secure connection between two machines over the internet, something that happens billions of times every single day. If you're intent on breaking SSL, I can think of consideraly more tempting targets than communication between a PS3 and a server.
To play games off the harddrive. A slightly more intrusive check could also be implemented for offline mode.
Even if it did, what's to prevent spoofing the 'ok to play' message via a proxy server?
Ever heard of encryption?
They could do that too, but running the test against servers would make the feature more useful to end users and might provide Sony with some useful metrics.
Most people will in one way or another. But I'm sure they could still implement an offline mode where you insert the disc at least once every month to get the same functionality. The leakage due to piracy would be marginal.
Well the backup excuse could be done away with if the HD was able to cache game content so you didn't need the disc in the drive to play it. How to stop people playing copies this way? Make them enter a registration code. Every so often it sends the code off to Sony. If more than one PS3 is found to have used the game with the same code, it challenges you to insert the disc to continue. Since this will affect few people, it makes HD gaming virtually transparent while allowing the original disc to stay in the keepcase.
StarOffice comes with a whole bunch of clipart, templates, labels, a level of support and has been QA'd to death. But otherwise it looks and feels just like OpenOffice. I guess that the extra bits make it look a lot more attractive to OEMs or corporates looking to use it. The downside is all that rigorous QA doesn't come for free so the release cycles lag behind the more freewheeling open source version.
The same happened with Netscape branded browser. The NS version (with the exception of v8) was *always* more stable than the Mozilla it came from thanks to extra QA and was better thanks to useful goodies like a spellchecker. The flipside was Mozilla was such a fast moving target that there often compelling reasons to use the latest Mozilla just to get the speed / memory improvements.
In their favour, the hosting more or less works as intended, but in my experience the hosting software is pretty awful. As soon as my hosting is up I'm off to somewhere else.
I suspect that Oracle Express is more pitched in the same space as MS SQL Server Express (and MSDE before it) - as a database engine for development and small deployments and a shoe-in for the commercial products if / when they are needed. IBM do likewise. Perhaps the penny has dropped that MS is getting a lot of business this way.
To be honest, I reckon Postgres & MySQL should be producing "express" versions too for XP. That doesn't mean they should be deliberately crippled, but they should be available packaged in a distribution containing just the database engine, ADO.NET, ODBC drivers and perhaps a command line tool or so. Throw out all the help, admin tools, headers, libs etc. That allows app developers to deploy them with their own applications rather than a hulking 50+Mb download which is what the likes of MSDE / Oracle Express require for the same functionality.
Just as with the commercial counterparts, the express version is also a shoe-in for larger distributed deployments if the need arises.
Except it wasn't delayed and it still isn't delayed. For example, check out the timestamp on this quote for AMZN compared to this post - "Real-Time ECN: 35.92 -0.31 (-0.86%) Mar 21, 3:01PM ET". It states quite clearly it is a realtime quote. Other symbols like IBM and even more obscure ones also show realtime quotes.
I thought you had to pay a lot of money per user to display realtime quotes. Is Google really doing that, or are we about to seem them get slapped by the NYSE & Nasdaq?
I think there is a difference between a program which at worst might destroy your OS, but realistically is just going to crash more often, and a physical device costing thousands which at worst could burn your house down. With you, your family and any other residents inside it.
Just the launch titles. What about a few months down the line?
I think it looks cool and I sure as hell know that millions of others would too. But putting cool aside, it's how practical it is that wows me. I'd never take my laptop away with me unless I was doing business work. It's too bulky, needs wires, a case etc. I absolutely hate leaving it in the hotel room. When I'm on holiday I still want some computing access in the hotel but I don't want to haul a laptop so my solution has been to use my PDA which does wireless browsing. But the browsing is pretty horrible and of course I can't type, making it a pain to enter a url or even respond to email.
I see these handcrank machines as being the perfect compromise between a PDA and a laptop - a machine with a keyboard & controller that is more than adequate for browsing, email, wordprocessing, spreadsheet, games etc. but in a small, light, rugged form factor and requires no cables. Toss them into your backpack. You could take a cable to charge it, but if you don't want to, you can still crank it. Better yet if its instant on as it probably would be if everything runs in memory.
I truly believe these things could take the market by storm. That assumes the OS and software works of course, but if it's running Linux, something like QTopia and has a few apps like an Opera or Firefox browser and KWord then I don't see why not.
If you want or need to use a $600 laptop then that's fine, but a lot of people wouldn't. And I specifically said Origami. I reckon that Bill perceives these cheap handcrank devices as a threat to his latest pen based windows device. These things cost a frigging fortune and every single previous pen based effort has flopped - the last one leaked so much memory you had to reboot it every day. The last thing he needs now is a device costing a tenth that does everything most of what a large portion of prospective Origami / laptop users actually want to do. The pen part is a gimmick anyway for most people. Of course there are other reasons he doesn't like it, but the timing suggests Origami as being the reason for this comment.
Of course all my enthusiasm is based on supposition. I'm hoping there will be a consumer version sometime this decade. I'm hoping that they won't screw it up in some way, or hike the price to $400. I'm hoping the OS won't suck. It might suck big time. But assuming they do everything right, and actually release and sell a commercial product cheaply enough, I think these things will be as ubiquitous as iPods.
I reckon if anything that Bill is scared because if these things ever did become consumer devices that his shitty Origami project would go down the tubes just like all their predecessors. After all, how many would buy some lousy pen device costing thousands when something costing a tenth could do all they need.
It's not just consumers either. I can well see these things being useful in warehouses and other places where you need computer access but not the bother of having devices on charge all the time.
The simple answer is because .NET's performance is inferior to compiled code. .NET may be faster than VB6 but its performance is roughly the same as Java's. This equates to mediocre performance in client side application code. You probably wouldn't feel it in some dumb database query viewer, or in some moderately static UI, but you sure as hell would if you tried to implement a browser with it. MS could cheat of course and simply wrap an C++ coded browser engine in .NET but from my experience, that would give you the worst of two worlds - the overhead of .NET, and the instability / exploitability of C++. If you're going to use C++ in any substantial way you may as well stick with it throughout.
Personally I have no problems with client apps coded in .NET & Java but it's a case of the best tool for the job. Java & .NET work better in high latency environments (e.g. servers) where code execution time is dwarfed by network / database latency and the return in terms of stability more than pays for itself.
Anyway, source for some user-land tools such as Wordpad & Notepad (two candidates for replacement) are already available and part of MS Developer Studio sample code. So I hardly see the harm from being able to decompile a .NET app equivalent. Besides, if you or they were absolutely paranoid about people decompiling your code, you run it through an obfuscator first. Then all of the property names, symbols, code etc. get scrambled around and given random names making it pretty much impossible to follow what is going on.
I disagree. I disagree because because my experience of Mandrake is that the user experience has been far worse than its rivals and if you asked me what the No.1 User Friendly distro was a few years back, it certainly wouldn't be Mandrake. Red Hat perhaps, SUSE probably not, but no way Mandrake. The "Drak" tools were consistently buggy, marred by horrible usability issues, not very task oriented and were slapped onto the side of the desktop with the finesse of tractor welded to a car. User friendly implies usability and I recall Mandrake tools couldn't even get simple things right like the order of buttons on message boxes. I used it from about 6.3 to 8.0 and my experience was that each progressive release got buggier and buggier and I finally gave up on it. I revisited it for 9.1 and 9.2 and it was just as bad - worse even since the fundamental issues with the usability never seem to be fixed.
The only thing in my book which set Mandrake apart from Red Hat, SUSE or whoever was a larger number of packages on the CD and bleeding edge version numbers. I wouldn't hold SUSE's config up as an example of usable either, but it was at at least reliable and consistent. It's even almost pleasant to use in SUSE 10, assuming you run a KDE desktop.
I do like Ubuntu though. I think the shitty brown theme is horrid, but the integration and use of GNOME tools makes for a seamless and very pleasant desktop experience. That's what Linux should be like and its about time that it is. Now distros are paying attention to usability, Linux may finally start to appear on a few more desktops.
How would it slaughter the games makers? Homebrew writers would be restricted to using the APIs that were exposed through Linux which almost certainly aren't going to compete with the ones games makers use. And such a kit certainly wouldn't allow them to pirate games either since the whole Linux thing gets in the way. All this does is allow tinkerers and others with bespoke requirements to suddenly find new and innovative ways of using their PSPs. The only effect of a devkit is an increase in sales to such people, who might buy a few games while they're at it.
Linux is software. Sell it on a UMD for $60 and people will buy it, especially if it works nicely and allows people to tinker around with it, writing their own apps that run from a memory stick. Sony even used to sell Linux for PS2 but it was hamstrung by the need to buy a keyboard, mouse, network expansion & harddrive. None of this is necessary for a PSP - just a UMD, somewhere to download dev tools from and the rest will take care of itself.
Seriously. Sell the thing on UMD with a downloadable cross-platform set of compilers and let the homebrew people have at it. Then everyone's happy - the user for having a bunch of cool new things to run, the homebrew scene for having official endorsements, and the games makers since running homebrew over Linux and through different APIs effectively kills any notions of piracy.
Even so, aside from domain hosting or other environments where I have no choice I don't think I'd touch MySQL with a barge pole. I think I'd prefer a proper, albeit slower DB than one which puts speed over database integrity.
I wouldn't pooh pooh such a device completely, after all it might have some profession use, especially in another form factor, but its hard to say what that use it might be to professionals. I imagine that no cop or fireman is going to want this thing clanging off everything while they're doing their jobs.
Can't speak of Linux / Unix but on XP, Postgres is a doddle to install and administer. After a fairly small download, double click the installer, answer a few questions about ports and its installed as a service. To administer it you fire up pgAdminIII and get an excellent GUI for creating users, running queries and so forth. It also has excellent online documentation in HTML format, plus all the drivers, libs & headers you need to get it work in a dozen different ways.
In fact Postgres is such a breeze to install on XP that it is easier by miles than MS SQL Sever, or Oracle, both of which require lengthy and complex installs to complete.
MySQL is also fairly easy to install XP (it has an installer too), and also installs as a service and HTML help. But I wouldn't say its as easy for Postgres. For one thing you don't get an admin tool (or the dev kit) which means it's considerably more difficult to administer.
I'm sure this would pose no problem for people who love being stuck in a console based admin tool, but personally I prefer the more productive environment offered by pgAdminIII... when it works which is usually most of the time although it has the odd quirk.
One thing I appreciate about both products is how small they are. SQL Server is basically an entire CD to install. Oracle is multiple CD. Both are far too huge for pretty much most uses any individual or small outfit might have for a database.
So definitely on XP, Postgres is far easier to install, administer and use than MySQL. I can't say I've used either in anger, but I was able to hook Postgres up via the ODBC driver to OpenOffice Base and use that as a front end for data entry for some experimental work I was doing.
Woah