And how many would be capable of running Yellow Dog Linux, what with it being a desktop OS and all? In the context of desktop computers, the future of the PPC is all but cast in stone.
If "it's working" here and elsewhere, where is the payoff for Yellow Dog? If people don't want to replace their systems, they're certainly not going to pop a Yellow Dog CD into the tray (assuming it even has one) and install a brand new OS.
And if as has been suggested most PPCs go into embedded systems, Yellow Dog is totally unsuitable. There are plenty of embedded solutions for Linux out there and I expect they all work quite well already.
It seems to me that YD has nowhere to go. They could offer a way to reuse old Macs (including the rack mounted ones), and there might be scope to cosy up to IBM, but what else is there? Personally I think it would be fantastic if Sony or someone licenced YD to produce a Linux for their console. The PS2 had a kit, so perhaps the same is possible for the PS3 as well - but hopefully cheaper than the last one.
Once biometrics take on, I daresay that it would be possible to pitch ads (a la The Minority Report) using facial recognition or even the smell of the person.
Imagine being somewhere like a casino (where you can bet they already or will soon will use face recognition on everyone). Cameras could be positioned in certain places to automatically recognise a person and change all the machines and signs within the proximity to be more appealing.
Hell, I bet a system could pitch different ads depending on whether a man, women, or kids were walking past based on their smell. For extra sophistication it could even detect BO & perfume as giveaways of the person's wealth and status.
I sat through a baseball game once. I have no idea the exact length of time it took to finish, but it felt like at least 3 hours, possibly more. It was by far the most boring dullest sport I've ever had to sit through. All the while you get raped on the concessions and the beer is literally pisswater. Cricket is no better either, however it has the saving grace that you can get quite drunk since most cricket grounds allow you to bring (some) alcohol and have a proper bar for the consumption of even more.
Do you seriously think hardware made by Microsoft (or Sony) could ever be used for making copies of digital content?
Why not? Sony sells MP3 players which ship with ripping software. Microsoft makes WMP which rips software. Both even fetch the track and album title from online!
What's the difference between a PC doing it and a console doing it? In some ways the console is arguably more secure since it is for all practical purposes tamper proof. The ripper could water mark the file with the box's MAC address or use a proprietary file format to prevent people sharing music. On top of that both MS & Sony could sell music tracks for use on the device and even stream radio channels etc. MS sell a "Media Center" version of XP which allows you to rip TV and radio.
The same for video. Let the thing be able to rip the main movie off a DVD and play it back. Where is the material harm to the studios? Doesn't Microsoft already licence its WMP codecs to Archos and others who do just this already?
The fact is that if I have a console, just sitting there next to my TV or hifi and the thing *could* rip and play songs & movies, then I see no reason that it shouldn't. MS have crippled this box so it's a dumb terminal to a windows media PC, when it is quite capable of streaming and ripping media in its own right. That just stinks.
Microsoft have already tried to push their own vector markup language called VML (surprise). I think it was proposed as a standard at one point, but it tanked. So I expect that even MS would be enthusiastic about SVG - it's already gotten enough momentum that it would be quite hard and rather pointless trying to go against it.
If there is a problem with SVG & many other W3C recommendations is that they're getting to be horribly, horrifically difficult to implement and implementing SVG (for example) means implementing a whole bunch of other specs first. Just look how long its taken for Firefox to get semi-decent support (which isn't even in 1.0) and SVG has almost been in development for as long as Mozilla has!
The XBox didn't outsell the PS2 for a number of reasons - that the PS2 already had a massive catalogue of titles, the XBox was more expensive for quite a while, the box looked ugly, the controller was clunky and well, it's Microsoft we're talking about here. In its favour it had better graphics, but in very few games did it actually matter that much.
Now is a HD essential to gaming? No I suppose not if a Gamecube is all you want out of your device. But if you're sick of loading times, or wish that a game got extra content, or that you got bug fixes then yes it.
Personally I'd want a HD simply because I want my next console live up to the hype and be useful for other things. A console with a HD that could play music & movies would be a fantastic device, or allow me to do casual web browsing. I'm personally that neither MS nor Sony went that extra inch and made the thing a PVR. I expect we'll see kits that do enable such functionality - assuming the thing has a harddrive.
You say games won't use it, but the fact is that the XBox could make them use it whether they're aware of it or not. The simplest example would be if it cached content as it was read from the disc so it didn't have to be reloaded each time. A second example would be if it acted like an ultra large memory card for saving games. Another example were if it were used to "hibernate" a game so someone could walk away and pick up where they left off the day before.
Then there are games which could use it. For example, to download patches, extra levels and so forth.
Then there is MS touting the box as a multimedia hub (although in reality it was more like a dumb terminal). A HD could mean that it could rip songs, movies etc. to disk and play them on demand. And MS could sell video on demand - films, shows, trailers and so on, as well as distributing firmware updates, patches and more on it.
It seems pretty strange that they're going to piss this all away which is what they're doing.
I'm somewhat surprised more companies haven't been trying to think up new and creative ways to make the consumer more likely to need to purchase a replacement.
That might work with the junk extras they ship (e.g. the shitty memory stick you get with the PSP means lots of people go out and buy a better one), but I'm sure that MS & Sony don't want you to have to buy or exchange your console for at least several years. They might eventually be selling them for a profit but you can bet your boots that they're selling at cost or at a loss for a while yet.
Interesting rumour but if that were the case, why not ship the thing with Firewire or USB2 and be done with it? Mp3 players and portable drives including ones that trickle charge through the cable are old hat.
Some add ons have been moderately successful - dance mats, the eye toy, those bongo drums for the GC. Not earth shatteringly successful, but enough to carve a niche for themselves.
Personally though, I don't see how a next gen console can do with an HD, unless it is a cynical marketing ploy to sell more memory cards. The fact is that without a HD, the console is useless for multimedia (convergence - what's that?), games load slower without caching, and you can't download extras or firmware updates from the internet.
Harddrives do cost money and perhaps no HD is seen as an obvious way of slashing the costs, but it's going to hobble the platform if some people have drives and others do not. Games will take the path of least resistance and not use the tech at all, or use it in a trivial manner. Like you say, the PS2 harddrive is worse than frigging useless (except ironically for piracy), partly because no game bothers to support it.
They could tenuously claim that if you were abducted they would need your phone to be report its position at any time. Of course if that were the case, one might suppose that they should have to obtain a court order or permission from a relative or guardian before sending a code to the device.
You probably could play all these but the controller system would likely kill the gameplay. I have a ZX Spectrum emulator for my pocket PC, but the thing is next to useless since so many games require keypresses. Even mouse oriented games would be a pain, since while the PSP has an analogue thumb pad, you would be required to use pixel precise movements - something which is easy with a mouse but not so easy with your left thumb.
Personally I wish Sony would embrace homebrew. They could do it in a way that shuts the door to piracy. For example, if they roped off certain functionality that games need such as high end 3D performance for unsigned apps, it would allow the vast majority of homebrew to run, but prevent pirates from taking advantage of the situation.
When you say "break the DRM" what you actually mean is reverse engineer the format so that RealPlayer users are be able to play songs that they bought legally on iTunes in the first place.
$3 a gallon is NOTHING. I hear people in the US whining about the price of fuel, but it's been more than that in the whole of Europe for a long time. For example, petrol in the UK is 90p per litre. There are just under 4 litres to a US gallon.
Part of that is the tax that most EU governments slap on the pump price to discourage driving big vehicles. And it's not left wing thinking either - the UK conservative government started a policy of raising fuel prices by quadrupling the effects of inflation. It was Labour who stopped it, partly because of fuel protests.
Personally I think in some ways it is a good thing it is high. There is no incentive for consumers or manufacturers to produce more efficient cars when it is so cheap that no one gives economy a second thought. People drive SUVs and fuel wasteful cars when all they do every day is use them to drive on highways between work, home and the mall. There should be financial penalties for that - if you want drive a tank then fine, but you're going to pay for the environment and health effects of that.
Fuel prices should might also get local governments thinking too when they decide to green light stripmalls, or out of town developments which *require* people drive everywhere.
Who knows, perhaps more centralized shops, and foot / bike friendly planning might have a positive impact on people's health and lifestyle.
We're talking about a speeding fine, not someone's life in jail. Absolutely no one would go to the extreme bother of falsifying a picture in such a way that the MD5 would match just to issue someone a ticket.
It's entirely possible that the article has been garbled in translation and there's another problem with the speed cameras, such as the ability to insert an MD5 and picture into the box without being able to detect it, but this too is an utterly ludicrous supposition. It would be virtually impossible to insert a photo and not have it stand out as glaringly obvious in some way - the timestamps on files and embedded into the actual picture, the weather conditions, obvious signs of tampering such as clone tools or airbrushing, the file format, other traffic etc.
And if its like the GATSO cameras in the UK, it's not just one picture - it's two, so you'd have to do twice as much fakery.
It would be easier to hire a car similar to whoever you want to incriminate, fit it with false plates and speed past the camera than to tamper with it after the fact.
I seriously, seriously doubt you could make another picture which appears untampered, that still loads as a picture with the exact same characteristics, looks the same (to a human), has the same MD5 as an existing picture and without tell tale signs such as garbage chunks or whatnot to fool the hasher.
This case seems to be more about some lawyer latching onto and exaggerating a theoretical flaw in MD5 to have photos ruled as invalid. To my mind it's no different than a lawyer trying to get their client off because of a slight, remote chance that someone else in the known universe there might have the exact same DNA or fingerprint as the suspect.
Come off it, this is silly. If an automated speed camera is not incapable of taking pictures to the satisfaction of the court they'll simply get tossed out. It's happened before.
That means taking two photos, painting stripes on the road, timestamping pictures, authenticating pictures, ensuring the licence plate and preferably the driver are clearly visible etc.
As to who runs it, either have the state run the cameras (government employees who have no axe to grind as you put it), or establish an independent auditor who has the ability to slap huge fines and revoke the remits of dishonest operators.
The UK seems not to have this problem. This is one of the (comparatively few) areas where the USA would benefit from taking our lead.
Oh it does all right. Looking back to my Uni days, I can recall at least 3 course books that were written by the people teaching them. To be honest I thought it was a frigging scam, especially seeing as student books cost a fortune. As a person of limited means (as I was at the time), I found it galling that I was lining the pockets of the person standing in front of me even when there were better books out there. Sometimes the books weren't even used much which was doubly annoying.
Strangely enough, it's those books which I got rid of the quickest. Some lecturers recommended well known and popular books and I still have some of them today.
To read the book you need to carry a computer around at all times. Want to read the book after the term is over? Tough shit.
I bet it's cheaper to buy the lousy book second hand anyway. You can even keep it forever if you like. I still have a few of my university books sitting around for reference, 15 years on.
Slashdot Mirror
And how many would be capable of running Yellow Dog Linux, what with it being a desktop OS and all? In the context of desktop computers, the future of the PPC is all but cast in stone.
And if as has been suggested most PPCs go into embedded systems, Yellow Dog is totally unsuitable. There are plenty of embedded solutions for Linux out there and I expect they all work quite well already.
It seems to me that YD has nowhere to go. They could offer a way to reuse old Macs (including the rack mounted ones), and there might be scope to cosy up to IBM, but what else is there? Personally I think it would be fantastic if Sony or someone licenced YD to produce a Linux for their console. The PS2 had a kit, so perhaps the same is possible for the PS3 as well - but hopefully cheaper than the last one.
Imagine being somewhere like a casino (where you can bet they already or will soon will use face recognition on everyone). Cameras could be positioned in certain places to automatically recognise a person and change all the machines and signs within the proximity to be more appealing.
Hell, I bet a system could pitch different ads depending on whether a man, women, or kids were walking past based on their smell. For extra sophistication it could even detect BO & perfume as giveaways of the person's wealth and status.
I sat through a baseball game once. I have no idea the exact length of time it took to finish, but it felt like at least 3 hours, possibly more. It was by far the most boring dullest sport I've ever had to sit through. All the while you get raped on the concessions and the beer is literally pisswater. Cricket is no better either, however it has the saving grace that you can get quite drunk since most cricket grounds allow you to bring (some) alcohol and have a proper bar for the consumption of even more.
XAML isn't the same thing as SVG. And the use of namespaces means the two could be contained within the same document.
Doh I meant music.
Why not? Sony sells MP3 players which ship with ripping software. Microsoft makes WMP which rips software. Both even fetch the track and album title from online!
What's the difference between a PC doing it and a console doing it? In some ways the console is arguably more secure since it is for all practical purposes tamper proof. The ripper could water mark the file with the box's MAC address or use a proprietary file format to prevent people sharing music. On top of that both MS & Sony could sell music tracks for use on the device and even stream radio channels etc. MS sell a "Media Center" version of XP which allows you to rip TV and radio.
The same for video. Let the thing be able to rip the main movie off a DVD and play it back. Where is the material harm to the studios? Doesn't Microsoft already licence its WMP codecs to Archos and others who do just this already?
The fact is that if I have a console, just sitting there next to my TV or hifi and the thing *could* rip and play songs & movies, then I see no reason that it shouldn't. MS have crippled this box so it's a dumb terminal to a windows media PC, when it is quite capable of streaming and ripping media in its own right. That just stinks.
If there is a problem with SVG & many other W3C recommendations is that they're getting to be horribly, horrifically difficult to implement and implementing SVG (for example) means implementing a whole bunch of other specs first. Just look how long its taken for Firefox to get semi-decent support (which isn't even in 1.0) and SVG has almost been in development for as long as Mozilla has!
You've also got UML & Xen. UML actually works pretty well but it does require a fair amount of preparation (and frustration) to get it up and running.
Now is a HD essential to gaming? No I suppose not if a Gamecube is all you want out of your device. But if you're sick of loading times, or wish that a game got extra content, or that you got bug fixes then yes it.
Personally I'd want a HD simply because I want my next console live up to the hype and be useful for other things. A console with a HD that could play music & movies would be a fantastic device, or allow me to do casual web browsing. I'm personally that neither MS nor Sony went that extra inch and made the thing a PVR. I expect we'll see kits that do enable such functionality - assuming the thing has a harddrive.
Then there are games which could use it. For example, to download patches, extra levels and so forth.
Then there is MS touting the box as a multimedia hub (although in reality it was more like a dumb terminal). A HD could mean that it could rip songs, movies etc. to disk and play them on demand. And MS could sell video on demand - films, shows, trailers and so on, as well as distributing firmware updates, patches and more on it.
It seems pretty strange that they're going to piss this all away which is what they're doing.
That might work with the junk extras they ship (e.g. the shitty memory stick you get with the PSP means lots of people go out and buy a better one), but I'm sure that MS & Sony don't want you to have to buy or exchange your console for at least several years. They might eventually be selling them for a profit but you can bet your boots that they're selling at cost or at a loss for a while yet.
Interesting rumour but if that were the case, why not ship the thing with Firewire or USB2 and be done with it? Mp3 players and portable drives including ones that trickle charge through the cable are old hat.
Personally though, I don't see how a next gen console can do with an HD, unless it is a cynical marketing ploy to sell more memory cards. The fact is that without a HD, the console is useless for multimedia (convergence - what's that?), games load slower without caching, and you can't download extras or firmware updates from the internet.
Harddrives do cost money and perhaps no HD is seen as an obvious way of slashing the costs, but it's going to hobble the platform if some people have drives and others do not. Games will take the path of least resistance and not use the tech at all, or use it in a trivial manner. Like you say, the PS2 harddrive is worse than frigging useless (except ironically for piracy), partly because no game bothers to support it.
And if it doesn't have a HD, there goes the already crippled multimedia support.
They could tenuously claim that if you were abducted they would need your phone to be report its position at any time. Of course if that were the case, one might suppose that they should have to obtain a court order or permission from a relative or guardian before sending a code to the device.
Personally I wish Sony would embrace homebrew. They could do it in a way that shuts the door to piracy. For example, if they roped off certain functionality that games need such as high end 3D performance for unsigned apps, it would allow the vast majority of homebrew to run, but prevent pirates from taking advantage of the situation.
See also Playfair, Hymn etc.
Part of that is the tax that most EU governments slap on the pump price to discourage driving big vehicles. And it's not left wing thinking either - the UK conservative government started a policy of raising fuel prices by quadrupling the effects of inflation. It was Labour who stopped it, partly because of fuel protests.
Personally I think in some ways it is a good thing it is high. There is no incentive for consumers or manufacturers to produce more efficient cars when it is so cheap that no one gives economy a second thought. People drive SUVs and fuel wasteful cars when all they do every day is use them to drive on highways between work, home and the mall. There should be financial penalties for that - if you want drive a tank then fine, but you're going to pay for the environment and health effects of that.
Fuel prices should might also get local governments thinking too when they decide to green light stripmalls, or out of town developments which *require* people drive everywhere.
Who knows, perhaps more centralized shops, and foot / bike friendly planning might have a positive impact on people's health and lifestyle.
It's entirely possible that the article has been garbled in translation and there's another problem with the speed cameras, such as the ability to insert an MD5 and picture into the box without being able to detect it, but this too is an utterly ludicrous supposition. It would be virtually impossible to insert a photo and not have it stand out as glaringly obvious in some way - the timestamps on files and embedded into the actual picture, the weather conditions, obvious signs of tampering such as clone tools or airbrushing, the file format, other traffic etc.
And if its like the GATSO cameras in the UK, it's not just one picture - it's two, so you'd have to do twice as much fakery.
It would be easier to hire a car similar to whoever you want to incriminate, fit it with false plates and speed past the camera than to tamper with it after the fact.
This case seems to be more about some lawyer latching onto and exaggerating a theoretical flaw in MD5 to have photos ruled as invalid. To my mind it's no different than a lawyer trying to get their client off because of a slight, remote chance that someone else in the known universe there might have the exact same DNA or fingerprint as the suspect.
That means taking two photos, painting stripes on the road, timestamping pictures, authenticating pictures, ensuring the licence plate and preferably the driver are clearly visible etc.
As to who runs it, either have the state run the cameras (government employees who have no axe to grind as you put it), or establish an independent auditor who has the ability to slap huge fines and revoke the remits of dishonest operators.
Deep Blue Sea of Death
Oh it does all right. Looking back to my Uni days, I can recall at least 3 course books that were written by the people teaching them. To be honest I thought it was a frigging scam, especially seeing as student books cost a fortune. As a person of limited means (as I was at the time), I found it galling that I was lining the pockets of the person standing in front of me even when there were better books out there. Sometimes the books weren't even used much which was doubly annoying.
Strangely enough, it's those books which I got rid of the quickest. Some lecturers recommended well known and popular books and I still have some of them today.
I bet it's cheaper to buy the lousy book second hand anyway. You can even keep it forever if you like. I still have a few of my university books sitting around for reference, 15 years on.