If you forget to lock your apartment, does that entitle all and sundry to walk off with your possessions? If you don't lock down your network, does that entitle me to take your bandwidth, possibly exceed your monthly allowance, possibly incur you additional charges, probably degrade your own performance? I suspect the answer varies from place to place. I would argue that while it might be the user's fault for not securing their LAN properly, that does not entitle you to steal service from it which is what the law may construe you as doing.
I can't see how wi-fi access is `potentially illegal` unless you mean if you're using someone's wi-fi service illegally, but in that case you'd have to offer the same disclaimer about using cars, PCs, shoes etc...
I say potentially illegal because if you fire up a wifi device in downtown Boston (for example), the chances are that there will be 10 access points within range of you. Of those, probably 2 or 3 are usable. But since most have non-obvious names such as "AP01", "WLAN" and so on, who is to say which of them is free and which are merely not locked down properly? Which of those is your hotel's wifi and which is the business next door's or the apartment across the street? I know you could possibly ring reception and find out but what if you didn't? What if you just assumed you were using the hotel's free wifi but it wasn't? Is what you did illegal or could you feign ignorance? Does feigning ignorance cut it in the face of the law?
I use Vodafone in Ireland and the 3G service is IMHO a total ripoff. The price for WAP (internet) is 2 cents per kilobyte! Hence the reason that Vodafone would be laughing if you used their service for VOIP. On top of that they'll rape you if you ever roam on your phone, even on other Vodafone networks.
Now this particular article refers to wi-fi so it's probably not 3G. But since Vodafone subsidize and customize their handsets you can virtually guarantee that no phone of theirs will support it, or if they do it will be crippled in some way. They are not alone to do this. All the major phone networks will cripple any feature which allows you to bypass their pricing structure.
Therefore the only other possible way I can see this working is if you (an individual or a business) bought some special MS enabled, GSM phone handsets at full cost (since there would be no subsidy) and then set about to use it in wi-fi mode around the office (and equipped hotels, conf centers) and GSM mode elsewhere. This seems highly implausible to say the least. Wi-fi & VOIP isn't anywhere remotely as reliable or tolerant as a regular cell phone even when you're standing right beside the access point.
3G internet costs a fortune to use (it's a total scam). I think Vodafone would actually be delighted if you were foolish enough to use VOIP over 3G. MS might make it "free" to call fellow MS Office licensees, but the internet access isn't free.
The other possibility is that the phone has some kind of wi-fi capabilties that connects to a local wireless network. I'm sure that will be the first feature to be crippled when you buy your Vodafone / O2 / Orange / T-Mobile branded phone.
But even assuming it weren't, how is this any different from what you can do with Skype now? I use my iPaq & Skype to make calls from hotels all the time. I too can call other Skype users for free, and landlines & mobiles. They don't have to buy MS Office or even be running Windows. The biggest problem with wi-fi access is that coverage spotty, potentially expensive, potentially illegal, and there is no roaming or moving at all. And you can kiss goodbye to your battery life. On top of that, workers are expected to be using a Microsoft enable phone with Microsoft Office.
It all sounds like a pipe dream to me. Of course because MS is a huge gorilla they might be able to foist this on some networks, especially the concept of site wide coverage (i.e. it works anywhere on the company premises), but that's about it IMHO.
It does sound outrageously expensive. I imagine though I have never built such a device that a thin case + BTX motherboard + HD + tuner + IR controller, mouse & keyboard wouldn't set you back more than $500. Slap Myth TV on it and you have a tinker toy which can become a useful PVR / media system with some work.
One thing that has bothered me about mythtv when I've looked at the docs is how horribly painful it is to build and configure. Just getting DVD playback functionality requires a zilion libs. Just trying to wade through the instructions of setting it up completely puts it out of the hands of regular home users.
I wonder if there is an easy way to use it which does not require reading a dozen HTPC howtos. I have no problem building kit myself, but I'm not a masochist either. It strikes me that an analogy is that MS Media Center edition is like a portakabin - ugly but it arrives prebuilt and does what it's meant to do. Conversely, MythTV is like a pile of bricks, concrete, pipes being dumped on your site from which you can build any beautiful quirky thing you like. Sometimes you just want the latter if it means having something that actually works. MythTV doesn't have to be a pile of bricks, it could be the Huf house of PVRs if someone put the effort into making it work straight from the CD.
For now, the headphone market seems something like this: wireless, portable, stylish. Pick two.
Problem is that "wireless" headphones require yet another dock / charger cluttering your desk in order to work. So they're not really wireless at all. And those rechargeable batteries make the head set bulk. Look forward to strange looks as people wonder if you're attending a Dr Who convention dressed as a cyberman.
Any tagger who is caught should have all of their property defaced with gloss paint - their shoes, clothes, music, everything. Just empty a tin of the stuff all over their property and see how they like it.
Seriously, why wouldn't a company want a secure flexible internal IM system, for free, instead of an expensive proprietary system?
Our company uses something called Lotus Sametime. Ever heard of it? Me neither until I joined. I've heard of Lotus of course, but not Sametime. Basically it's an AIM-a-like for corporate environments. Now you ask why they use it... because (and this are the only reasons as far as I can see) it has some screensharing / whiteboarding capabilities, its authentication can be tied into your corporate id & password and the directory hooks into LDAP. If there were something available in open source which was comparable, as robust and included a web-based UI for screenshare meetings, I am pretty certain they would consider switching. As there probably isn't, that's your answer.
I don't particularly like Sametime but it does do what it's meant to do, more or less. It's certainly not flashy, is Windows-only and more insidiously requires IE Java to do the screen sharing but it works. I expect that site licences also plays a part in its continuing favour in our org. IMHO a site licence is a great way to chain a company to your tech - once they bought it, they're scared to switch away for fear of losing "value" on the deal.
There is another unwritten advantage of a proprietary IM system. It stops your employees wasting time chatting to all their buddies on AIM, jabber etc. instead of doing work.
The PSP started off being able to play games, UMDs and MP3. Later upgrades saw the addition of a web browser, a viewer for Sony's wireless video system, AAC and more. Despite doing so much it seems to be selling quite nicely.
As long as Sony don't shoot themselves in the head (and I wouldn't put it past them) I imagine the PS3 will be an excellent games system first and foremost and with luck an excellent multimedia jukebox. Of course Sony being Sony they'll promptly royally fuck things up by putting some petty restrictions into their software to stop it being as useful as it could be.
Sometimes you need to use managed extensions, just as with Java you need to use JNI. For example you might have a lump of legacy code which is too hard to rewrite, or a 3rd party DLL with no.NET equivalent and therefore you must wrap it.
The problem is that Microsoft make it far too easy. Far too easy by half. With JNI you feel the pain a lot more and are therefore encouraged to use Java if at all possible, which as it happens is usually not too hard because the APIs and 3rd party market is massive.
The market is not so mature with.NET and there is so much legacy crap that everyone wants the lazy way out rather than do a rewrite or stick with what they have. Many.NET apps are actually a mix of ActiveX, native DLLs and CLR compliant code and have absolutely no chance of ever working properly on other platforms. The cynic in me says Microsoft are aware of this which is why they're making it even easier to pollute the code with unmanaged & managed code.
The sick thing is that the payoff of switching to.NET diminishes almost to nothing if you include large chunks of C++ or VB6 (through ActiveX). What happens is your app picks up 2 or 3 runtimes where there used to be one and is therefore a memory hog whose performance is much worse than C++ and not appreciably better than VB6.
I have a PSP and I haven't bought a single video UMD on principle. To my mind, I would have to be frigging stupid to buy a movie for 20 euros when the same movie is available at better quality with more features on DVD for substantially less. When they start flogging them at 8 euros they might be tempting but not for what they cost now. If I really want to watch a film on a PSP, I can rip one myself from my DVD collection and console myself with a slightly reduced framerate and an extra 20 euros in my pocket.
UMD movies are very nice to watch and I reckon there is a niche there for portable devices that play them. But it's not going to take off while Sony is bending their customers over and raping them.
Vista requires a certain level of 3d graphic card & cpu power... by limiting Halo 2's release to Vista, MS doesn't have to code the game to run on older hardware.
Well that's just dumb. For starters, Microsoft always lie about the minimum requirements for their operating systems so if you upgraded you may find it sucks worse performance wise than it did before. And secondly games always say what their requirements are right there on the box. If Halo 2 says it needs some high end machine then that's what you should have if you want to play it.
Though I find the idea that you need a high spec machine to be extremely dubious. Even modern games like FEAR, Doom3 & Half Life 2 played on my old 1.8Ghz box with an acceptable framerate. I certainly had to turn down some of the detail but they were playable. Unless Halo 2 is some grossly inefficient pig of a game, it would play on that level spec too.
Personally the game I'm looking forward to is Crysis - the newly announced sequel to Far Cry. The technical demos look awesome.
Would you like to meet my friend, VHS? He cost $25 a pop back in 1980, had no features, and was a linear format that degraded over each use. Maybe being from the past makes me naive (sorry no dots for you), but, it seems that the point of this article -- although factual -- is totally irrelavent.
Except of course Blu ray will never be as cheap as the comparable DVD which will never be as cheap as the comparable VHS. Why? Because each time, the manufacturers take the opportunity to hike the prices as far as they think they can push them.
At startup there may be high costs, but this all about brinkmanship - how high they can make the prices and still get people to buy them. I don't believe it has much at all to do with manufacturing costs or features and more with the knowledge that they can gouge early adopters for $$$. Then later they lower the prices to what they should have been to begin with.
In their defence the manufactures only charge what people are prepared to pay - capitalism - but I think they are deluding themselves when there are two competing brand new formats with nothing particularly compelling about either of them. HD is nice and all but most DVDs look just fine at higher resolutions anyway. I think that most people, including a lot of videophiles will stick with DVD and wait to see which one "wins". Especially since there will be precious few HD titles for at least a year and most of them ill deserving of it.
I'm no l33t programmer, but I would have thought that some type of hardware abstraction layer would insulate most development from the idiosyncracies of the processor, thus negating the need for very strict testing except on maybe the most demanding apps.
In theory yes, but in practice you need to build and test on every platform you intend to deploy on. I'm sure Apple provide all sorts of macros for endian issues but that doesn't negate the likelihood that you will get caught on something, especially if whatever it is you're writing is video / audio related or reads data from a disk such as a game. The only way to iron out the bugs is to test and support both platforms. That obviously implies > 1x QA & support for both hardware platforms. It's obviously untenable and I expect that every software maker will dump the universal format as soon as humanly possible.
But right now there are applications that can run on BOTH platforms (Intel and PPC). So, why not just keep the option open and have applications be Universal and then it doesn't matter what Chip is inside. It will just simply run.
The thing is, it doesn't just simply run. If you're application developer you now have to run a complete QA cycle on two totally disparate architectures. Or choose to develop on x86 or PPC and hope it works on the other. QA costs an absolute fortunate so most companies know and Apple certainly does that PPC and Universal binaries are a stepping stone. I doubt that if all but the most mainstream apps even pay lip service to it in a couple of years from now. PPC users will basically be left hanging out to dry and I seriously doubt Apple is going to produce a Rosetta for PPC anytime soon.
If Adobe figured out some way to lock down Photoshop so that it couldn't be pirated as commonly as it is currently.
A simple way would be to watermark all images until you register the product with a valid serial number. Aside from degrading the image quality, it would assist in tracking you down, should you be so foolish as to web up anything you created with your illegal installation.
People (like me!) complained for years that Photoshop only existed on the Mac and PC, and so, finally, Adobe ported version 3.0 (at apparently great expense) to the SGI. Unfortunately, it was a monumental failure -- Adobe sold perhaps hundreds of copies.
My understanding is that Photoshop on the PC & Mac share virtually 100% of the application source because both sit on a cross-platform framework. Considering that Adobe already produce Acrobat products on Linux, I wonder how technically infeasible a port to would be. My guess is "not very" and even "I bet they have a port running in a lab already". So why isn't it out there? Even assuming some guy had built it internally, it would still cost $$$ to QA, bugfix, document and sell. Perhaps there simply isn't the market out there for it.
I don't care what uber powerful features it supports. If simple operations can be an exercise in frustration then the UI needs fixing.
A simple example which bugged me this weekend. I needed extra space to draw in so I resized the canvas. But I can't actually paint there! Why? Because the canvas size changed but the layer size didn't. This is so stupid. I only had one layer, so why didn't it ask me if I wanted to resize the layer too, or even provide that as a persistent checkbox preference in the Canvas size dialog? GIMP is replete with stupid little things like this. Such as the foreground / background colour selector where it is entirely non obvious how it works with the same tooltip covering 4 distinct actions. Or the scale selection (as far as it works in Win32) does not support proportional scaling and the grabber behaviour is totally insane.
Rather than attempting to play the same complex notes as Photoshop (another lousy experience IMHO), perhaps they should be simplifying its day to day use first. Make the next version a usability & bug fixing release only. People wouldn't be pining so much for Photoshop or any other decent tool if the one which ships with Linux didn't make them want to gnaw their own arm off with frustration.
Exactly. Searching people going into the grounds makes security theatre but it means zip if the terrorists simply laced the hotdog mustard with botulism or some equally novel attack. Hell, I bet even that huge snaking line of people waiting to go through the metal detector and pat downs would make an extremely tempting target.
I agree with you completely. I do not understand people that are totally anti-Rights-management.
The problem with DRM is not DRM per se but the odious way it is implemented. There is no common architecture for DRM. Every player from Microsoft, Real, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Sony et al. all want to inflict their own wretched DRM system onto us. Frequently that DRM restricts data by time, or ties it to a computer, or requires a special player / reader. It's just one big bloody mess and it means the market is shattered into dozens of competing factions, all of whom are trying to foist their tech onto people for whom proprietary tech is repellant.
What is worse is that digital content is not significantly cheaper than it's physical real world counterparts, yet it is laden with all kinds of restrictions on how you can move it around, even to other devices you own. Look at iTMS- $10 for an album when a real physical CD hardly costs much more. Yet you can resell your physical CD to someone else. Or lend it to a friend. You can't do that with your downloaded tracks.
If DRM were an open architecture which used water marking and other passive techniques to tag content without restricting it, I am sure most people would be quite happy to use it.
because after all the delays, hype, anticipation..
DNF means nothing to most gamers since I doubt most have even heard of the original. Assuming the game to be any good it will sell in droves. If it sucks, then it won't. I doubt the collective memories of gamers of a certain age who recall the original will have much to do with it one way or the other.
After all, HL2 took an age and a half to arrive too *and* was plagued by deployment problems *and* hype / anticipation. Yet it still sold by the bucket load and picked up more gongs than anyone can count.
I truly doubt that DNF is a HL2, but if it is, then it would be a pleasant surprise.
All I know is that there's a lot of noise about the 360, yet not all that many people seem to have one.
And hopefully for good reason. Unless you're some kind of modder or have more money than sense, there is absolutely no point buying a revision A console. There aren't many games, what games there are are generally mediocre, new consoles always have faults, the prices are sky high, and in the case of the XBox / PS3, all that new hardware is pretty much wasted without a nice big HD screen to play it on.
May as well wait six months for the bundles to improve, for the bugs to be fixed and for some actual games to arrive which make the thing worth buying.
You might understand it that way, but you'd be wrong. All Wine does is implement the published API of Windows using Linux commands. Absolutely no reverse engineering is done.
Sorry, that can't be true. The Win32 documentation is fairly comprehensive, but it is absolutely horrible on the fringes. There is NO WAY you could implement an API from it and expect it to be able to run real world apps. The docs for RPC, OLE, Shell, Common Controls, Win16 are particularly atrocious. More likely you code to the API and then discover the 101 ways that apps break the APIs and the 101 ways that the APIs differ from the specs through test cases and you make your changes accordingly.
On top of that, the header files alone are filled with macros, switches, messages, uuids, flags which aren't even mentioned in the docs, or whose underlying values are not specified.
So perhaps there is not reverse engineering in the sense of disassembling Windows to see what is going on, but there certainly is reverse engineering of the APIs via test cases and headers by looking up the real headers.
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If you forget to lock your apartment, does that entitle all and sundry to walk off with your possessions? If you don't lock down your network, does that entitle me to take your bandwidth, possibly exceed your monthly allowance, possibly incur you additional charges, probably degrade your own performance? I suspect the answer varies from place to place. I would argue that while it might be the user's fault for not securing their LAN properly, that does not entitle you to steal service from it which is what the law may construe you as doing.
I say potentially illegal because if you fire up a wifi device in downtown Boston (for example), the chances are that there will be 10 access points within range of you. Of those, probably 2 or 3 are usable. But since most have non-obvious names such as "AP01", "WLAN" and so on, who is to say which of them is free and which are merely not locked down properly? Which of those is your hotel's wifi and which is the business next door's or the apartment across the street? I know you could possibly ring reception and find out but what if you didn't? What if you just assumed you were using the hotel's free wifi but it wasn't? Is what you did illegal or could you feign ignorance? Does feigning ignorance cut it in the face of the law?
Now this particular article refers to wi-fi so it's probably not 3G. But since Vodafone subsidize and customize their handsets you can virtually guarantee that no phone of theirs will support it, or if they do it will be crippled in some way. They are not alone to do this. All the major phone networks will cripple any feature which allows you to bypass their pricing structure.
Therefore the only other possible way I can see this working is if you (an individual or a business) bought some special MS enabled, GSM phone handsets at full cost (since there would be no subsidy) and then set about to use it in wi-fi mode around the office (and equipped hotels, conf centers) and GSM mode elsewhere. This seems highly implausible to say the least. Wi-fi & VOIP isn't anywhere remotely as reliable or tolerant as a regular cell phone even when you're standing right beside the access point.
The other possibility is that the phone has some kind of wi-fi capabilties that connects to a local wireless network. I'm sure that will be the first feature to be crippled when you buy your Vodafone / O2 / Orange / T-Mobile branded phone.
But even assuming it weren't, how is this any different from what you can do with Skype now? I use my iPaq & Skype to make calls from hotels all the time. I too can call other Skype users for free, and landlines & mobiles. They don't have to buy MS Office or even be running Windows. The biggest problem with wi-fi access is that coverage spotty, potentially expensive, potentially illegal, and there is no roaming or moving at all. And you can kiss goodbye to your battery life. On top of that, workers are expected to be using a Microsoft enable phone with Microsoft Office.
It all sounds like a pipe dream to me. Of course because MS is a huge gorilla they might be able to foist this on some networks, especially the concept of site wide coverage (i.e. it works anywhere on the company premises), but that's about it IMHO.
And if you use Eclipse get Subclipse. It integrates perfectly.
... the craft will be called Mohammed 1 and will be an emblazoned with a likeness of the prophet.
One thing that has bothered me about mythtv when I've looked at the docs is how horribly painful it is to build and configure. Just getting DVD playback functionality requires a zilion libs. Just trying to wade through the instructions of setting it up completely puts it out of the hands of regular home users.
I wonder if there is an easy way to use it which does not require reading a dozen HTPC howtos. I have no problem building kit myself, but I'm not a masochist either. It strikes me that an analogy is that MS Media Center edition is like a portakabin - ugly but it arrives prebuilt and does what it's meant to do. Conversely, MythTV is like a pile of bricks, concrete, pipes being dumped on your site from which you can build any beautiful quirky thing you like. Sometimes you just want the latter if it means having something that actually works. MythTV doesn't have to be a pile of bricks, it could be the Huf house of PVRs if someone put the effort into making it work straight from the CD.
Problem is that "wireless" headphones require yet another dock / charger cluttering your desk in order to work. So they're not really wireless at all. And those rechargeable batteries make the head set bulk. Look forward to strange looks as people wonder if you're attending a Dr Who convention dressed as a cyberman.
Any tagger who is caught should have all of their property defaced with gloss paint - their shoes, clothes, music, everything. Just empty a tin of the stuff all over their property and see how they like it.
Our company uses something called Lotus Sametime. Ever heard of it? Me neither until I joined. I've heard of Lotus of course, but not Sametime. Basically it's an AIM-a-like for corporate environments. Now you ask why they use it... because (and this are the only reasons as far as I can see) it has some screensharing / whiteboarding capabilities, its authentication can be tied into your corporate id & password and the directory hooks into LDAP. If there were something available in open source which was comparable, as robust and included a web-based UI for screenshare meetings, I am pretty certain they would consider switching. As there probably isn't, that's your answer.
I don't particularly like Sametime but it does do what it's meant to do, more or less. It's certainly not flashy, is Windows-only and more insidiously requires IE Java to do the screen sharing but it works. I expect that site licences also plays a part in its continuing favour in our org. IMHO a site licence is a great way to chain a company to your tech - once they bought it, they're scared to switch away for fear of losing "value" on the deal.
There is another unwritten advantage of a proprietary IM system. It stops your employees wasting time chatting to all their buddies on AIM, jabber etc. instead of doing work.
As long as Sony don't shoot themselves in the head (and I wouldn't put it past them) I imagine the PS3 will be an excellent games system first and foremost and with luck an excellent multimedia jukebox. Of course Sony being Sony they'll promptly royally fuck things up by putting some petty restrictions into their software to stop it being as useful as it could be.
The problem is that Microsoft make it far too easy. Far too easy by half. With JNI you feel the pain a lot more and are therefore encouraged to use Java if at all possible, which as it happens is usually not too hard because the APIs and 3rd party market is massive.
The market is not so mature with .NET and there is so much legacy crap that everyone wants the lazy way out rather than do a rewrite or stick with what they have. Many .NET apps are actually a mix of ActiveX, native DLLs and CLR compliant code and have absolutely no chance of ever working properly on other platforms. The cynic in me says Microsoft are aware of this which is why they're making it even easier to pollute the code with unmanaged & managed code.
The sick thing is that the payoff of switching to .NET diminishes almost to nothing if you include large chunks of C++ or VB6 (through ActiveX). What happens is your app picks up 2 or 3 runtimes where there used to be one and is therefore a memory hog whose performance is much worse than C++ and not appreciably better than VB6.
UMD movies are very nice to watch and I reckon there is a niche there for portable devices that play them. But it's not going to take off while Sony is bending their customers over and raping them.
Well that's just dumb. For starters, Microsoft always lie about the minimum requirements for their operating systems so if you upgraded you may find it sucks worse performance wise than it did before. And secondly games always say what their requirements are right there on the box. If Halo 2 says it needs some high end machine then that's what you should have if you want to play it.
Though I find the idea that you need a high spec machine to be extremely dubious. Even modern games like FEAR, Doom3 & Half Life 2 played on my old 1.8Ghz box with an acceptable framerate. I certainly had to turn down some of the detail but they were playable. Unless Halo 2 is some grossly inefficient pig of a game, it would play on that level spec too.
Personally the game I'm looking forward to is Crysis - the newly announced sequel to Far Cry. The technical demos look awesome.
Except of course Blu ray will never be as cheap as the comparable DVD which will never be as cheap as the comparable VHS. Why? Because each time, the manufacturers take the opportunity to hike the prices as far as they think they can push them.
At startup there may be high costs, but this all about brinkmanship - how high they can make the prices and still get people to buy them. I don't believe it has much at all to do with manufacturing costs or features and more with the knowledge that they can gouge early adopters for $$$. Then later they lower the prices to what they should have been to begin with.
In their defence the manufactures only charge what people are prepared to pay - capitalism - but I think they are deluding themselves when there are two competing brand new formats with nothing particularly compelling about either of them. HD is nice and all but most DVDs look just fine at higher resolutions anyway. I think that most people, including a lot of videophiles will stick with DVD and wait to see which one "wins". Especially since there will be precious few HD titles for at least a year and most of them ill deserving of it.
In theory yes, but in practice you need to build and test on every platform you intend to deploy on. I'm sure Apple provide all sorts of macros for endian issues but that doesn't negate the likelihood that you will get caught on something, especially if whatever it is you're writing is video / audio related or reads data from a disk such as a game. The only way to iron out the bugs is to test and support both platforms. That obviously implies > 1x QA & support for both hardware platforms. It's obviously untenable and I expect that every software maker will dump the universal format as soon as humanly possible.
The thing is, it doesn't just simply run. If you're application developer you now have to run a complete QA cycle on two totally disparate architectures. Or choose to develop on x86 or PPC and hope it works on the other. QA costs an absolute fortunate so most companies know and Apple certainly does that PPC and Universal binaries are a stepping stone. I doubt that if all but the most mainstream apps even pay lip service to it in a couple of years from now. PPC users will basically be left hanging out to dry and I seriously doubt Apple is going to produce a Rosetta for PPC anytime soon.
A simple way would be to watermark all images until you register the product with a valid serial number. Aside from degrading the image quality, it would assist in tracking you down, should you be so foolish as to web up anything you created with your illegal installation.
My understanding is that Photoshop on the PC & Mac share virtually 100% of the application source because both sit on a cross-platform framework. Considering that Adobe already produce Acrobat products on Linux, I wonder how technically infeasible a port to would be. My guess is "not very" and even "I bet they have a port running in a lab already". So why isn't it out there? Even assuming some guy had built it internally, it would still cost $$$ to QA, bugfix, document and sell. Perhaps there simply isn't the market out there for it.
A simple example which bugged me this weekend. I needed extra space to draw in so I resized the canvas. But I can't actually paint there! Why? Because the canvas size changed but the layer size didn't. This is so stupid. I only had one layer, so why didn't it ask me if I wanted to resize the layer too, or even provide that as a persistent checkbox preference in the Canvas size dialog? GIMP is replete with stupid little things like this. Such as the foreground / background colour selector where it is entirely non obvious how it works with the same tooltip covering 4 distinct actions. Or the scale selection (as far as it works in Win32) does not support proportional scaling and the grabber behaviour is totally insane.
Rather than attempting to play the same complex notes as Photoshop (another lousy experience IMHO), perhaps they should be simplifying its day to day use first. Make the next version a usability & bug fixing release only. People wouldn't be pining so much for Photoshop or any other decent tool if the one which ships with Linux didn't make them want to gnaw their own arm off with frustration.
Exactly. Searching people going into the grounds makes security theatre but it means zip if the terrorists simply laced the hotdog mustard with botulism or some equally novel attack. Hell, I bet even that huge snaking line of people waiting to go through the metal detector and pat downs would make an extremely tempting target.
The problem with DRM is not DRM per se but the odious way it is implemented. There is no common architecture for DRM. Every player from Microsoft, Real, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Sony et al. all want to inflict their own wretched DRM system onto us. Frequently that DRM restricts data by time, or ties it to a computer, or requires a special player / reader. It's just one big bloody mess and it means the market is shattered into dozens of competing factions, all of whom are trying to foist their tech onto people for whom proprietary tech is repellant.
What is worse is that digital content is not significantly cheaper than it's physical real world counterparts, yet it is laden with all kinds of restrictions on how you can move it around, even to other devices you own. Look at iTMS- $10 for an album when a real physical CD hardly costs much more. Yet you can resell your physical CD to someone else. Or lend it to a friend. You can't do that with your downloaded tracks.
If DRM were an open architecture which used water marking and other passive techniques to tag content without restricting it, I am sure most people would be quite happy to use it.
DNF means nothing to most gamers since I doubt most have even heard of the original. Assuming the game to be any good it will sell in droves. If it sucks, then it won't. I doubt the collective memories of gamers of a certain age who recall the original will have much to do with it one way or the other.
After all, HL2 took an age and a half to arrive too *and* was plagued by deployment problems *and* hype / anticipation. Yet it still sold by the bucket load and picked up more gongs than anyone can count.
I truly doubt that DNF is a HL2, but if it is, then it would be a pleasant surprise.
And hopefully for good reason. Unless you're some kind of modder or have more money than sense, there is absolutely no point buying a revision A console. There aren't many games, what games there are are generally mediocre, new consoles always have faults, the prices are sky high, and in the case of the XBox / PS3, all that new hardware is pretty much wasted without a nice big HD screen to play it on.
May as well wait six months for the bundles to improve, for the bugs to be fixed and for some actual games to arrive which make the thing worth buying.
Sorry, that can't be true. The Win32 documentation is fairly comprehensive, but it is absolutely horrible on the fringes. There is NO WAY you could implement an API from it and expect it to be able to run real world apps. The docs for RPC, OLE, Shell, Common Controls, Win16 are particularly atrocious. More likely you code to the API and then discover the 101 ways that apps break the APIs and the 101 ways that the APIs differ from the specs through test cases and you make your changes accordingly.
On top of that, the header files alone are filled with macros, switches, messages, uuids, flags which aren't even mentioned in the docs, or whose underlying values are not specified.
So perhaps there is not reverse engineering in the sense of disassembling Windows to see what is going on, but there certainly is reverse engineering of the APIs via test cases and headers by looking up the real headers.