Interesting link. I'm don't doubt that MS strongly suspected Sony would maintain backwards compatibility but I'm also quite sure that they'd rather not deal with the headache of backwards compatibility if Sony had welched.
Yeah right dolt. That's why they waited until Sony announced their plans for backwards compatibility before revising their own. It was clearly a contingency "we don't want to do this if Sony doesn't" feature. No they do have to do it, and it'll be interesting to see how and what level of emulation that can do with two disparate architectures.
As for bashing MS, I wasn't. It was an observation, and probably close to the truth as it happens.
Your two lines of screechy overreaction, remind me of the old days of C64 vs Spectrum, Amiga vs Atari, Mac vs PC etc. There were a lot of ignorant zealots in those 'wars' too. I guess some losers are so emotionally invested in a piece of kit that it is a religion to them, and woe betide anyone who passes comment about their beloved platform.
Look at how emulators work on PCs for the answer. The chances are that XBox backwards compatibility is a near total emulation of the earlier platform, at least the machine code instructions. Some games might be more CPU intensive than others and might not run fast enough on the new box. Others might bypass the system or play cute tricks to get the most out of the GPU and not work either. Others might run, but look imperfect due to differences in the graphics or audio.
Fixing all of this is non-trivial. I guess MS could ship with the emulator in firmware or sell it as an add on DVD - it could install onto the hard drive so they're not constrained by firmware.
Microsoft waited to hear if the PS 3 was going to be backwards compatible before saying the same themselves. I wonder what this does to their release plans.
If the machine produces structurally identical white diamonds then there is no way the guy can know. Perhaps you're thinking of yellow diamonds which look good to be true.
Oh the Mac had piracy too. But it just seemed less because there was less software and certainly less games for it.
I think what sidelined the Mac was the ridiculously expensive and confounding range of systems, and the very real perception that MacOS was extremely crusty. PCs had proper pre-emptive multitasking from OS/2 and then Win95. Macs didn't get it until 4 years ago. Even my G4 Mac shipped with MacOS 9 and it was simply a horrible experience.
OS X goes a long way to changing that, as does simplification of the product line but it has meant that the PC market has had a decade to explode.
Apple stands little chance of ever supplanting the PC although it might become mainstream enough to appear in the high street. Macs are still more expensive than PCs, but at least they use standard connectors now - it used to annoy me no end that I have to get fleeced by my local old-style Apple dealers because I couldn't buy the kit anywhere else.
Now I know you're being dense or contrary. I reckon both. For most setups a PVR doesn't need a tuner - the one in your existing stb is sufficient. My sat box has a tuner as I'm sure your's does. It would have been fairly straightforward to accept an HDCP input as well as output and daisy chain the signal via XBox. I am also sure that a company with Microsoft's clout could produce an HDCP to lan specification too. Indeed, that is more or less what streaming from a Windows media player is tantamount to.
As for the Windows media comment, I can see that flew by you as well. At the announce spec, the XBox is more than capable of being a PVR on its own, and an MP3 player and a media jukebox. That some insist that you can stream from a Windows media PC shows just shows how crippled and un-"digital hub"-like this thing really is. It's not a media hub so much as a crippled terminal for Windows media PCs.
Stop being an apologist for them and admit they blew it. It doesn't mean that Sony will get it right, but MS screwed up first.
As an addendum, for the EU market; I'd say Sony could even build a PS/3 with a Satellite tuner built-in. Sony already do various tuners, e.g. for Sky. A console that could do what Sky+ does (Sky+ is a PVR) and be a top-notch console would be a killer device as far as I'm concerned.
It doesn't need tuners, at least in Europe. Scart ensures that any box in the chain gets a video signal. And as the XBox is touting an Eye-Toy style device, it clearly has the ability to accept an incoming video signal from elsewhere too.
Therefore I reject that argument. Even if a tuner were a necessary add-on, it would certainly be cheaper than what the current blurb leads me to expect I would need for a PVR - a Windows media PC. Having to stream from a PC to an XBox is quite obviously an exercise in pointlessness. No one in their right mind is going to leave a PC on, on the off-chance that they might want to record a programme from their main TV on it. No one is even going to have their DirecTV / Sky box plumbed into their decoder *and* PC in the first place.
And no the machine wouldn't be more expensive. As I said, most EU users would be fine, and US users might at most have to fork out for a supplemental tuner. More likely they'd just attach the XBox between their DirecTV box and their TV. It's certainly far, far cheaper than some Windows media box + network, that's for sure.
As for PS/3, I have no idea what it will offer. But a PVR is a screamingly obvious feature and they don't have a Windows media albatross hanging around their neck. So I hope they see some sense and just offer a PVR. For me it would be a compelling feature. PVRs are in themselves several hundred euros. A game console that offered it out of the box would be an instant winner.
I certainly hope so. I think gcj is intriguing and what I've read of gcj, even more so.
The issue I see is that Mono is stealing a march on "mindshare", paradoxically because there is no.NET for Linux. Because Java has several free commercial implementations, there is less issue (perhaps because less people care about the definition of "free") with replacing them with something like Kaffe or gcj.
Personally I really hope Java wins. I program.NET and Java and there's nothing between them as languages. It's like comparing a Draper to a Bosch drill to me. What is different is the philosophy and the attachments.
By philsophy I mean that it is practically heresy to write something platform specific in Java, but it is commonplace in.NET. In fact what I write during my day job doesn't stand a cat's chance in hell of working under Mono, simply because of the number of Win32 / MS dependencies it contains.
And by attachments I mean the sheer breadth of standards and functionality in Java. Unlike.NET, Sun defines a standard and you can pick between the implementations of that standard. e.g. there are a multitude of JSP implementations. I like that a lot. With.NET you get.NET or nothing at all.
No but you might subscribe for listings. And no doubt MS could try to flog you MSN, video on demand, music and other crap at the same time. They'd make money, even if no one bought a single game, which I'd have a hard time believing.
Sony already produces PVRs and MP3 players so I don't see what the issue would be. Even the PSP plays MP3 music. It's not illegal, and assuming they have the brains to tie their box in with some kind of VOD / MOD online store, the vast majority of users would be using it for legitimate, wholesome and extremely profitable reasons anyway.
If they start enforcing ATRAC or UMD they will have effectively shot themselves in the foot. A user should be able to stick a CD into the machine and rip it complete with track listings. Perhaps its unrealistic to expect it might do DVDs but it can certainly do TV.
I'm not a fan of Sony by any means BTW (I despise their past insistence on proprietary tech). I just don't like what I see from MS and I'm hoping that Sony have become smarter than that. I should hope they have gained a clue, after the long running and recently conceded debacle concerning their ATRAC walkmans. UMD wouldn't be much use anyway since the picture quality would be atrocious.
Ask Sony if backwards compatibility is worth the trouble. It's not important how many people play PS1 games now but how many played them around launch time when there is a dearth of titles for the new box but plenty for the old one. It's about continuity - reassuring Mum & Dad that the new console doesn't render Johnny's old games obsolete.
It's interesting that you mention iTMS. Imagine that Apple produced iPod2 which dumped AAC for something else which is supposedly superior. Would that be a dumb thing or a smart thing to do considering how much people had invested already in AAC?
As for the PVR, yes there is a way to make money from it. A shitload of money. You sell listings. You bundle them with your XBox Live Platinum subscriptions and make even more money. You sell video & music on demand. You bundle everything into an MSN sub and make even more money.
The next question is why. A PVR is a glorified codec streaming to a hard drive. The next generation XBox could easily fulfill this role. It has a hard drive, internet (for VOD / TV listings) and more than enough CPU to handle the job.
It makes no sense whatsoever, especially considering that Windows media PCs are as rare and as useful as hens teeth.
It had better, or it's going to have serious problems convincing people to use it.
Aside from that, if the BBC site is correct, it seems that device is not a digital media hub at all. It seems rather stupid (to say the least) that they didn't think to make the thing a PVR. The last generation of boxes had the excuse, but a PVR / media station is almost an expectation of something which expects to occupy a permenant space by the TV.
Still, it'll be interesting to see what Sony produce. If they have sense, they will make it a PVR, and a media jukebox, and a kickass console with backwards compatibility. If it can do all those things when the XBox can't then I don't see they have much to worry about. Better yet if they make it hackable - not so hackable that people can easily pirate games but just enough that people can play around with the box and produce cool things for it.
The difference with MSDE is that a) it's free and b) it fills an important role.
I write applications that work with a local database or across the network to SQL server. Previously I'd use MSDAC / ODBC to access either. Unfortunately, MS Access is very long in the tooth and doesn't support stored procedures. So you have to litter your code with lots of SQL. Then you must work around any differences that exist between Access & SQL server, maintaining two code paths or restricting yourself to a common subset of functionality.
With MSDE it's different. It is SQL server. It means that I can write stored procedures that work in either mode and I can remove all that dodgy SQL from the client app. There is little difference codewise except where the DSN points at. Oh and SQL server is much, much better than MS Access.
What does Microsoft get out of it? Consistency, scalability - apps written to MSDE scale up much better than apps written to Access. That means more sales for them.
Personally I'd like to see every DB company do it. Hell, even PostgresSQL 8.0 for Win32 is pretty close to acting like MSDE dataengine already. If it also shipped in a smaller, restributable form sans the pgAdmin GUI tool and documentation it would be pretty nice indeed. They might even steal a few away from going the MSDE -> SQL Server route.
The battery life could be measured in minutes if you tried to use it for anything heavy duty. And if you're not doing heavy duty stuff, what's the point of lugging a hulking great laptop around again?
Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris is the bait to use Sun hardware which is where Sun makes its money - hardware and support. If people use RHEL, Novell Linux or whatnot, they can buy Dells, IBMs, you name it and none of the money goes to to Sun. Concerning OpenSolaris, I wouldn't get my hopes up about it being comparable to commercial Solaris. Most likely it will be comparable to Fedora - a moving, unsupported target where Sun test stuff before stuffing it in the branded release.
Now Linux support for Java is a shades of grey thing. Who's to say that Sun won't suddenly declare it to be a "tier 2" platform, or drop Linux altogether knowing IBM will have to pick up support, or stick all the cool optimizations in Solaris and then six months later in Linux. There's lots of things they could do "queer the pitch" in favour of Solaris and I'm sure none of them are particularly pleasant.
The amount of J2EE development is immense and unless Java is properly supported on Linux all that investment will go somewhere else. Yes, Sun support Linux these days, but who's to say they will two years from now? Or if they do that it'll be free? After all Sun have been quite hostile to Linux recently and I'm sure it has occured to them to use Java as a stick to entice people to use Solaris.
The amount of Java in the corporate domain is huge. And with good reason. J2EE is fantastic and nothing, be it Perl, Ruby, Python etc. even slightly compares to what you can do with Java.
An open source implementation that was interchangeable would have an immense impact on the takeup of Linux.
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It runs PalmOS so where's the Linux part come in?
Interesting link. I'm don't doubt that MS strongly suspected Sony would maintain backwards compatibility but I'm also quite sure that they'd rather not deal with the headache of backwards compatibility if Sony had welched.
As for bashing MS, I wasn't. It was an observation, and probably close to the truth as it happens.
Your two lines of screechy overreaction, remind me of the old days of C64 vs Spectrum, Amiga vs Atari, Mac vs PC etc. There were a lot of ignorant zealots in those 'wars' too. I guess some losers are so emotionally invested in a piece of kit that it is a religion to them, and woe betide anyone who passes comment about their beloved platform.
Fixing all of this is non-trivial. I guess MS could ship with the emulator in firmware or sell it as an add on DVD - it could install onto the hard drive so they're not constrained by firmware.
Microsoft waited to hear if the PS 3 was going to be backwards compatible before saying the same themselves. I wonder what this does to their release plans.
If the machine produces structurally identical white diamonds then there is no way the guy can know. Perhaps you're thinking of yellow diamonds which look good to be true.
I just bet you work in a call center too.
I think what sidelined the Mac was the ridiculously expensive and confounding range of systems, and the very real perception that MacOS was extremely crusty. PCs had proper pre-emptive multitasking from OS/2 and then Win95. Macs didn't get it until 4 years ago. Even my G4 Mac shipped with MacOS 9 and it was simply a horrible experience.
OS X goes a long way to changing that, as does simplification of the product line but it has meant that the PC market has had a decade to explode.
Apple stands little chance of ever supplanting the PC although it might become mainstream enough to appear in the high street. Macs are still more expensive than PCs, but at least they use standard connectors now - it used to annoy me no end that I have to get fleeced by my local old-style Apple dealers because I couldn't buy the kit anywhere else.
As for the Windows media comment, I can see that flew by you as well. At the announce spec, the XBox is more than capable of being a PVR on its own, and an MP3 player and a media jukebox. That some insist that you can stream from a Windows media PC shows just shows how crippled and un-"digital hub"-like this thing really is. It's not a media hub so much as a crippled terminal for Windows media PCs.
Stop being an apologist for them and admit they blew it. It doesn't mean that Sony will get it right, but MS screwed up first.
As an addendum, for the EU market; I'd say Sony could even build a PS/3 with a Satellite tuner built-in. Sony already do various tuners, e.g. for Sky. A console that could do what Sky+ does (Sky+ is a PVR) and be a top-notch console would be a killer device as far as I'm concerned.
Therefore I reject that argument. Even if a tuner were a necessary add-on, it would certainly be cheaper than what the current blurb leads me to expect I would need for a PVR - a Windows media PC. Having to stream from a PC to an XBox is quite obviously an exercise in pointlessness. No one in their right mind is going to leave a PC on, on the off-chance that they might want to record a programme from their main TV on it. No one is even going to have their DirecTV / Sky box plumbed into their decoder *and* PC in the first place.
And no the machine wouldn't be more expensive. As I said, most EU users would be fine, and US users might at most have to fork out for a supplemental tuner. More likely they'd just attach the XBox between their DirecTV box and their TV. It's certainly far, far cheaper than some Windows media box + network, that's for sure.
As for PS/3, I have no idea what it will offer. But a PVR is a screamingly obvious feature and they don't have a Windows media albatross hanging around their neck. So I hope they see some sense and just offer a PVR. For me it would be a compelling feature. PVRs are in themselves several hundred euros. A game console that offered it out of the box would be an instant winner.
Apologies, that first line should have said "and what I've read of gcj 4.0, even more so."
The issue I see is that Mono is stealing a march on "mindshare", paradoxically because there is no
Personally I really hope Java wins. I program
By philsophy I mean that it is practically heresy to write something platform specific in Java, but it is commonplace in
And by attachments I mean the sheer breadth of standards and functionality in Java. Unlike
No but you might subscribe for listings. And no doubt MS could try to flog you MSN, video on demand, music and other crap at the same time. They'd make money, even if no one bought a single game, which I'd have a hard time believing.
Except it says "sir" and "humbly" a lot more.
If they start enforcing ATRAC or UMD they will have effectively shot themselves in the foot. A user should be able to stick a CD into the machine and rip it complete with track listings. Perhaps its unrealistic to expect it might do DVDs but it can certainly do TV.
I'm not a fan of Sony by any means BTW (I despise their past insistence on proprietary tech). I just don't like what I see from MS and I'm hoping that Sony have become smarter than that. I should hope they have gained a clue, after the long running and recently conceded debacle concerning their ATRAC walkmans. UMD wouldn't be much use anyway since the picture quality would be atrocious.
It's interesting that you mention iTMS. Imagine that Apple produced iPod2 which dumped AAC for something else which is supposedly superior. Would that be a dumb thing or a smart thing to do considering how much people had invested already in AAC?
As for the PVR, yes there is a way to make money from it. A shitload of money. You sell listings. You bundle them with your XBox Live Platinum subscriptions and make even more money. You sell video & music on demand. You bundle everything into an MSN sub and make even more money.
It makes no sense whatsoever, especially considering that Windows media PCs are as rare and as useful as hens teeth.
Aside from that, if the BBC site is correct, it seems that device is not a digital media hub at all. It seems rather stupid (to say the least) that they didn't think to make the thing a PVR. The last generation of boxes had the excuse, but a PVR / media station is almost an expectation of something which expects to occupy a permenant space by the TV.
Still, it'll be interesting to see what Sony produce. If they have sense, they will make it a PVR, and a media jukebox, and a kickass console with backwards compatibility. If it can do all those things when the XBox can't then I don't see they have much to worry about. Better yet if they make it hackable - not so hackable that people can easily pirate games but just enough that people can play around with the box and produce cool things for it.
I write applications that work with a local database or across the network to SQL server. Previously I'd use MSDAC / ODBC to access either. Unfortunately, MS Access is very long in the tooth and doesn't support stored procedures. So you have to litter your code with lots of SQL. Then you must work around any differences that exist between Access & SQL server, maintaining two code paths or restricting yourself to a common subset of functionality.
With MSDE it's different. It is SQL server. It means that I can write stored procedures that work in either mode and I can remove all that dodgy SQL from the client app. There is little difference codewise except where the DSN points at. Oh and SQL server is much, much better than MS Access.
What does Microsoft get out of it? Consistency, scalability - apps written to MSDE scale up much better than apps written to Access. That means more sales for them.
Personally I'd like to see every DB company do it. Hell, even PostgresSQL 8.0 for Win32 is pretty close to acting like MSDE dataengine already. If it also shipped in a smaller, restributable form sans the pgAdmin GUI tool and documentation it would be pretty nice indeed. They might even steal a few away from going the MSDE -> SQL Server route.
In other words, yet another Star Trek / B5 wannabe.
Dorks who risk their job for some lousy film deserve to be fired. See it at the weekend for fucks sake.
The battery life could be measured in minutes if you tried to use it for anything heavy duty. And if you're not doing heavy duty stuff, what's the point of lugging a hulking great laptop around again?
Now Linux support for Java is a shades of grey thing. Who's to say that Sun won't suddenly declare it to be a "tier 2" platform, or drop Linux altogether knowing IBM will have to pick up support, or stick all the cool optimizations in Solaris and then six months later in Linux. There's lots of things they could do "queer the pitch" in favour of Solaris and I'm sure none of them are particularly pleasant.
The amount of Java in the corporate domain is huge. And with good reason. J2EE is fantastic and nothing, be it Perl, Ruby, Python etc. even slightly compares to what you can do with Java.
An open source implementation that was interchangeable would have an immense impact on the takeup of Linux.