The BR drive is slowly killing the PS3. Sony chose to push their new format rather than do what is good for the gamer.
You say that, but if they can pull it off, they are uniquely positioned to make a killing from all of the HD screens that people in Japan, Europe & America are in the process of buying. They'll kill HD DVD in the process and make money from the royalties of a standard that they control, as well as the console that supports that standard unlike its main rival.
The cutscenes aren't pre-rendered (they're rendered with the game engine) but neither are they in-game as some modern game engines deliver. Anyway as mentioned elsewhere on another part of this topic, I think the GTA engine is getting very tired and it desperately needs a revamp. GTA's ability to render an entire city is stunning, the physics are great, but the AI is brain dead, peds & vehicles materialise out of thin air and there is precious few interiors or interaction with the environement. Even a diehard GTA'er like myself is going to steer clear of the next game if it doesn't undergo radical upgrade.
GTA: LCS was a very good game. A few missions were pretty boring, but personally I think its a symptom of the moulding GTA engine than the platform. GTA is getting long in the tooth and the novelty wears off a bit if you've played GTA before.
Even so, I thought that the game had excellent graphics (indistinguishable from the PS2), the missions were generally quite involving, there was a hell of lot of content, it was extremely well produced and the game was well suited to the handheld. The only gripe I had were occasional camera control problems caused by the lack of a second analogue controller. Otherwise the game is a classic and a recommended title.
It's just too bad that other makers don't put as much effort into their ports as Rockstar did.
I'd say that GTA has shifted a lot of PSPs but one thing I noticed when I bought mine was the retailers tried to fuck the consumer with a 10 euro price hike for GTA over other games. Perhaps they had to for some reason, but it could hardly have helped sales. Fortunately (gawd bless 'em) the Argos catalogue had GTA selling for 40 euros at the time (already 5 euros cheaper than most places sell PSP titles) so I snapped up a copy.
Anyway GTA on the PSP demonstrates that the UMD can produce games that play, look and perform virtually the same as their PS2 cousins. Loading time for GTA is plenty fast on the PSP. The only annoyance was the camera control which was more awkward due to the single analogue stick on the device. If Rockstar can cram the GTA III world with new content and vehicles into a PSP then no other game maker has an excuse for poor loading or content.
Potentially this would piss off the commercial game makers greatly. But I can think of an obvious way that they could do this and keep the commercial / homebrew crowds happy. Sell Linux on a UMD and provide some cross-compiler tools that enable people to hack it, running code that they download to a memory stick. The PS2 had Linux so it must be possible. Unlike PS2 where a harddrive was required, the PSP has enough memory on a stick that it could work just as well.
This has many advantages. a) The PSP becomes a fantastic hacker toy (Linux in your pocket etc.) b) the homebrew people have an outlet and will release some great apps of their own which increase the value of owning a PSP, c) the game makers don't feel threatened since any homebrew requires you run the Linux UMD and possibly don't gain full access to the hardware anyway.
It's a win for everyone. Sony would even make money from it if they sold Linux like they do their other titles.
The reviews in Games Domain aren't as gushing as your last example. I'd say they come somewhere close your first example in tone. If a game truly meh you can generally tell from the tone. A good game gets a ton of superlatives chucked in with screenshots. A boring game gets a rote rundown of all the modes and features of the game but no excitement. I doubt they can trash a game they don't like, but assuming you can read between the lines you can normally get a fair idea of their opinion. Also, a preview is a good way to get an in-depth description of the game, so it's worth reading just to get more information about the title.
Of course other game sites seem a lot more whorish when it comes to promoting unreleased titles. For example IGN run extended features about games such as The Godfather which have been in development for ages. Strangely enough, all the hype for this one title is making me think it's going to suck horribly.
what evidence does the company have that these files were even there in the first place?
Quite. A lot if not all secure deletes rename the file and then overwrite it multiple times. Are they complaining that the laptop had multiple deleted files called "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"? It seems a tad hard to claim that as grounds of a crime when you have no idea what was in those files.
Though if it were, I can think of a great feature for the next generation of secure deletes - use the defrag APIs to move chunks of other data over the data you're trying to destroy and fill the rest of the disk with zeroes.
Actually, your "average DIVX encoded movie" is as close to DVD quality as makes no difference. I don't know what you've been watching, but a straight DVD to divx/xvid rip is almost identical, when done right. Your average CAM/TC/TS rip is obviously worse but you would expect that to be the case.
I've done several DIVX rips and I don't think the quality is comparable to DVD. It's watchable but certainly not comparable.
Others are realizing that it's just not worth the effort to rush, pay more and stand in line to watch a movie when they can just download it online or buy it on PPV and watch it in the comfort of their homes a couple of months later.
The problem is that to download at anything like cinema quality for home viewing, you're talking about files of many gigabytes. Even discounting bandwidth limits, that's still a lot of hours worth of downloading to grab all of that. And it's not just a problem for the consumer - Amazon or whoever would have to have the hardware to be pushing out tens of thousands of movies in parallel AND still make some money from the service after the studios have taken a cut. You hear the RIAA whinging about iTMS selling 4Mb tracks for.99. Now imagine trying to make money pushing 150x the data for for (say) $6.
That's a tough proposition.
So tough in fact that the first casuality of online movies is quality. Broadcast quality takes too much bandwidth. You'd be lucky to get something which was remotely comparable to a DVD or even satellite. You'd be lucky to get something that compares to your average DIVX encoded movie. And of course whatever you bought would also be DRM'd up the ass, ensuring that unless you had WMP with the proper rights, that your movie is as useful as a CD snapped in half.
Apple's players do not cost more (well, sometimes there is a $10 or $20 difference up or down)
That's not my experience. Amazon sell a 4gb Archos Gmini XS100 for $137 compared with $249 for the equivalent 4gb iPod Nano. So the iPod is $112 less for a player with essentially the same functionality, albeit with a colour screen and an ever so slightly smaller form factor. I expect you could find a cheaper model with a colour screen if such functionality were desired.
My point is not that this Gmini is any better player (I don't know if it is) but that there is a premium for Apple products. They're always at the top end of the price scale. That is what I call the Apple tax. Some people are probably delighted to pay for a stylish device that just works. A lot of people would be delighted to pay less for any device that just work.
That's my point. The original poster scoffed at copycat devices simply because its a copycat device. Personally I think that if Apple aren't careful, they'll see people deserting in droves. It hasn't happened yet, but if MS or Sony pull their fingers out of their DRM encoded arses and produce a simple alternative it may well do.
I'm not defending the Samsung, but the fact is that Apple's players cost considerably more than some MP3 players with the same memory capacity that I could mention. And Apple have the advantage of economies of scale, iTMS and a dominant market position to help keep their costs down.
Windows 3.1 had overlapping windows-a-plenty but the program manager was sucky alright.
The point I was making was you can't scoff at a look-a-like. Windows was an enormous success because it took the same WIMP concepts as MacOS used and made them work on "inferior" and considerably cheaper PCs.
Since you need it spelt out... my point is that Windows 3.1 was arguably a look-a-like of MacOS in many respects and Microsoft still kicked Apple's ass all over the shop.
Just because the iPod looks pretty and its DRM is the least evil, doesn't mean it will always be that way. Just like with the Mac vs Windows, a lot of people will stop paying the Apple tax if something cheaper comes along that as good a job.
These competitors sniping ineffectually at Apple's heels in the digital music player space need to realize that they will always be playing second fiddle (ha ha) as long as their players look remotely like iPods.
And I'm sure that if I were to dig into Google Groups that Mac zealots were saying the same thing about Windows 3.1 when it first appeared.
Seriously though, I want a music player that plays MP3, AAC, WMA and (for completeness) OGG out of the box, looks pretty, where DRM is supported for each favorite music format and where the software that doesn't suck and lets you choose which format is right for the user. Can it be that hard to do?
The Enigmail extension for T-Bird works as a front-end to GPG.
And very well it works too. I've been using it to communicate with someone who insists on encrypting their mail and it works fine. The biggest problem with it is that it somewhat assumes a familiarity with GPG in the first place to import keys and so on.
It works much better than SMIME which apps like Mozilla, Outlook Express have supported natively for years. SMIME is close to being unusable. It's not those app's faults (although the companys are partly to blame for adopting the standard). It's just that getting a cert for email is like extracting teeth and the encryption is horribly slow and bloated.
It could be an extension, but if you're savvy enough to look for a phishing extension (or any kind of extension) then you're probably not going to click on a phishing link in the first place.
An extension would protect people who don't need protection.
A better solution is one that by default puts a warning over any dubious link and lets the user decide. If you're an expert user and the warning annoys you, you are in a position to disable it from the prefs. Everyone else can benefit from greater security out of the box.
How this warning manifests itself is another thing, but I suggest that scanning a url for hex encoding, non-ASCII characters, domains that do not match the link text, domains that resemble well known domains, and perhaps even a downloadable "hotlist" of phishing url patterns would be a good start.
The need for anti-phishing in mozilla was identified 4 years ago. The problem was that it was raised as bugs in bugzilla and issues like that attract comments like flies to dogshit. I saw anti-phishing bugs with hundreds and hundreds of CCs and comments. No one could agree to anything and coded solutions were ignored for pointless debate. I hope this time around, they just implement SOMETHING. If it sucks, it's still better than nothing at all.
Anyway, I'd argue that Thunderbird needs it much more than Firefox. Most phishing starts with the inbox. Links in email that use dodgy hex encoding, raw IPs, IPv6, point to domains that differ than the anchor text etc. should be highlighted. And popular targets such as banks, ebay, Paypal, Amazon etc. should be explicitly identified. I'd also like Thunderbird to add a phishing filter rule so that I can automatically toss the 20+ phishing emails I get a day straight in the junk folder without accidentally training the bayesian filter to kill genuine emails from Amazon, PayPal etc.
Since you have no idea where your oil comes from, the only way to stop funding terrorists is to drive smaller more fuel efficient vehicles. Ironically the US is the terrorist's biggest ally since so many people see nothing wrong with driving a hulking SUV to work for the daily commute.
When my old Sony VAIO died, I cried. It had no CD-rom, no floppy, and was so thin and tiny that it went everywhere.
Which is why that if ever these hand cranked $100 laptops appear in a commercial version, I will be first in line to get one. They're going to be insanely useful things - imagine not having to lug cables or anything else except a paperback sized box for browsing and word processing whenever and wherever you liked - on the beach, in a coffee shop, on a train. Sling it into a bag, crank it up and you're set.
I recall going to Hong Kong at the height of the changeable phone cover craze. You could buy a new phone cover over there that cost a couple of dollars that sold in the UK for 20 pounds. The quality was the same - in fact higher since the sheer choice of covers to choose from was unreal.
It just goes to show what the markup is on accessories. A case for an iPod which could be a few lousy bits of neoprene stitched together could well sell for $30. It's no wonder Apple want in - there are suckers aplenty who buy such tat even if their iPod is going to be obsolete by the same time next year.
I have a fair idea what enterprise users want - something that works like Outlook, is compatible with MS Exchange but frees them of the semi-annual upgrade cycle.
Evolution is the perfect solution for that. It's problem is that it's Linux only. If someone produced a decent port, it be a drop-in replacement. As in, a "point it at your exchange server and carry on working" replacement.
Thunderbird has more work to do, but again, the Exchange plugin is there to be used and combined with Sunbird it could also do the same task.
I don't think saying the end of the year is an unreasonable goal, assuming that both projects thought it worthy of putting their minds towards. Given the potential rewards, it seems like something that should be very high priority.
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You say that, but if they can pull it off, they are uniquely positioned to make a killing from all of the HD screens that people in Japan, Europe & America are in the process of buying. They'll kill HD DVD in the process and make money from the royalties of a standard that they control, as well as the console that supports that standard unlike its main rival.
The cutscenes aren't pre-rendered (they're rendered with the game engine) but neither are they in-game as some modern game engines deliver. Anyway as mentioned elsewhere on another part of this topic, I think the GTA engine is getting very tired and it desperately needs a revamp. GTA's ability to render an entire city is stunning, the physics are great, but the AI is brain dead, peds & vehicles materialise out of thin air and there is precious few interiors or interaction with the environement. Even a diehard GTA'er like myself is going to steer clear of the next game if it doesn't undergo radical upgrade.
Even so, I thought that the game had excellent graphics (indistinguishable from the PS2), the missions were generally quite involving, there was a hell of lot of content, it was extremely well produced and the game was well suited to the handheld. The only gripe I had were occasional camera control problems caused by the lack of a second analogue controller. Otherwise the game is a classic and a recommended title.
It's just too bad that other makers don't put as much effort into their ports as Rockstar did.
Anyway GTA on the PSP demonstrates that the UMD can produce games that play, look and perform virtually the same as their PS2 cousins. Loading time for GTA is plenty fast on the PSP. The only annoyance was the camera control which was more awkward due to the single analogue stick on the device. If Rockstar can cram the GTA III world with new content and vehicles into a PSP then no other game maker has an excuse for poor loading or content.
Potentially this would piss off the commercial game makers greatly. But I can think of an obvious way that they could do this and keep the commercial / homebrew crowds happy. Sell Linux on a UMD and provide some cross-compiler tools that enable people to hack it, running code that they download to a memory stick. The PS2 had Linux so it must be possible. Unlike PS2 where a harddrive was required, the PSP has enough memory on a stick that it could work just as well.
This has many advantages. a) The PSP becomes a fantastic hacker toy (Linux in your pocket etc.) b) the homebrew people have an outlet and will release some great apps of their own which increase the value of owning a PSP, c) the game makers don't feel threatened since any homebrew requires you run the Linux UMD and possibly don't gain full access to the hardware anyway.
It's a win for everyone. Sony would even make money from it if they sold Linux like they do their other titles.
Of course other game sites seem a lot more whorish when it comes to promoting unreleased titles. For example IGN run extended features about games such as The Godfather which have been in development for ages. Strangely enough, all the hype for this one title is making me think it's going to suck horribly.
... everytime the little bastard thinks he can misbehave and not pay attention.
Quite. A lot if not all secure deletes rename the file and then overwrite it multiple times. Are they complaining that the laptop had multiple deleted files called "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"? It seems a tad hard to claim that as grounds of a crime when you have no idea what was in those files.
Though if it were, I can think of a great feature for the next generation of secure deletes - use the defrag APIs to move chunks of other data over the data you're trying to destroy and fill the rest of the disk with zeroes.
I've done several DIVX rips and I don't think the quality is comparable to DVD. It's watchable but certainly not comparable.
The problem is that to download at anything like cinema quality for home viewing, you're talking about files of many gigabytes. Even discounting bandwidth limits, that's still a lot of hours worth of downloading to grab all of that. And it's not just a problem for the consumer - Amazon or whoever would have to have the hardware to be pushing out tens of thousands of movies in parallel AND still make some money from the service after the studios have taken a cut. You hear the RIAA whinging about iTMS selling 4Mb tracks for .99. Now imagine trying to make money pushing 150x the data for for (say) $6.
That's a tough proposition.
So tough in fact that the first casuality of online movies is quality. Broadcast quality takes too much bandwidth. You'd be lucky to get something which was remotely comparable to a DVD or even satellite. You'd be lucky to get something that compares to your average DIVX encoded movie. And of course whatever you bought would also be DRM'd up the ass, ensuring that unless you had WMP with the proper rights, that your movie is as useful as a CD snapped in half.
"$112 less" == "$112 more" :) I inverted the sentence while editing it and forgot about the comparison operator :)
That's not my experience. Amazon sell a 4gb Archos Gmini XS100 for $137 compared with $249 for the equivalent 4gb iPod Nano. So the iPod is $112 less for a player with essentially the same functionality, albeit with a colour screen and an ever so slightly smaller form factor. I expect you could find a cheaper model with a colour screen if such functionality were desired.
My point is not that this Gmini is any better player (I don't know if it is) but that there is a premium for Apple products. They're always at the top end of the price scale. That is what I call the Apple tax. Some people are probably delighted to pay for a stylish device that just works. A lot of people would be delighted to pay less for any device that just work.
That's my point. The original poster scoffed at copycat devices simply because its a copycat device. Personally I think that if Apple aren't careful, they'll see people deserting in droves. It hasn't happened yet, but if MS or Sony pull their fingers out of their DRM encoded arses and produce a simple alternative it may well do.
I'm not defending the Samsung, but the fact is that Apple's players cost considerably more than some MP3 players with the same memory capacity that I could mention. And Apple have the advantage of economies of scale, iTMS and a dominant market position to help keep their costs down.
The point I was making was you can't scoff at a look-a-like. Windows was an enormous success because it took the same WIMP concepts as MacOS used and made them work on "inferior" and considerably cheaper PCs.
Since you need it spelt out... my point is that Windows 3.1 was arguably a look-a-like of MacOS in many respects and Microsoft still kicked Apple's ass all over the shop.
Just because the iPod looks pretty and its DRM is the least evil, doesn't mean it will always be that way. Just like with the Mac vs Windows, a lot of people will stop paying the Apple tax if something cheaper comes along that as good a job.
And I'm sure that if I were to dig into Google Groups that Mac zealots were saying the same thing about Windows 3.1 when it first appeared.
Seriously though, I want a music player that plays MP3, AAC, WMA and (for completeness) OGG out of the box, looks pretty, where DRM is supported for each favorite music format and where the software that doesn't suck and lets you choose which format is right for the user. Can it be that hard to do?
My thoughts too. There is a Linux BIOS project. Could something be written that makes EFI boot into a Linux BIOS which then allows Vista to be booted?
And very well it works too. I've been using it to communicate with someone who insists on encrypting their mail and it works fine. The biggest problem with it is that it somewhat assumes a familiarity with GPG in the first place to import keys and so on.
It works much better than SMIME which apps like Mozilla, Outlook Express have supported natively for years. SMIME is close to being unusable. It's not those app's faults (although the companys are partly to blame for adopting the standard). It's just that getting a cert for email is like extracting teeth and the encryption is horribly slow and bloated.
An extension would protect people who don't need protection.
A better solution is one that by default puts a warning over any dubious link and lets the user decide. If you're an expert user and the warning annoys you, you are in a position to disable it from the prefs. Everyone else can benefit from greater security out of the box.
How this warning manifests itself is another thing, but I suggest that scanning a url for hex encoding, non-ASCII characters, domains that do not match the link text, domains that resemble well known domains, and perhaps even a downloadable "hotlist" of phishing url patterns would be a good start.
Anyway, I'd argue that Thunderbird needs it much more than Firefox. Most phishing starts with the inbox. Links in email that use dodgy hex encoding, raw IPs, IPv6, point to domains that differ than the anchor text etc. should be highlighted. And popular targets such as banks, ebay, Paypal, Amazon etc. should be explicitly identified. I'd also like Thunderbird to add a phishing filter rule so that I can automatically toss the 20+ phishing emails I get a day straight in the junk folder without accidentally training the bayesian filter to kill genuine emails from Amazon, PayPal etc.
Since you have no idea where your oil comes from, the only way to stop funding terrorists is to drive smaller more fuel efficient vehicles. Ironically the US is the terrorist's biggest ally since so many people see nothing wrong with driving a hulking SUV to work for the daily commute.
Which is why that if ever these hand cranked $100 laptops appear in a commercial version, I will be first in line to get one. They're going to be insanely useful things - imagine not having to lug cables or anything else except a paperback sized box for browsing and word processing whenever and wherever you liked - on the beach, in a coffee shop, on a train. Sling it into a bag, crank it up and you're set.
It just goes to show what the markup is on accessories. A case for an iPod which could be a few lousy bits of neoprene stitched together could well sell for $30. It's no wonder Apple want in - there are suckers aplenty who buy such tat even if their iPod is going to be obsolete by the same time next year.
doh by semi-annual I mean bi-annual
Evolution is the perfect solution for that. It's problem is that it's Linux only. If someone produced a decent port, it be a drop-in replacement. As in, a "point it at your exchange server and carry on working" replacement.
Thunderbird has more work to do, but again, the Exchange plugin is there to be used and combined with Sunbird it could also do the same task.
I don't think saying the end of the year is an unreasonable goal, assuming that both projects thought it worthy of putting their minds towards. Given the potential rewards, it seems like something that should be very high priority.