It was exotic for the time, but most of the principles are little different from GPGPU programming. You write programs called kernels that are loaded onto the SPU, you feed them data, the kernel processes the data and the result is used for something else. Nowadays people write similar programs using OpenCL or CUDA.
I expect the main difficulty in porting from PS3 to PS4 is the effort of converting all those programs between two broadly similar but different in the detail systems. The GPU shaders too were written for NVidia processors and now have to be converted / rewritten. And working through all the hacks, shortcuts and bad assumptions that come from dealing with code which has been crunched out to work on one specific platform and not another.
So it's mostly drudgery. I expect virtually all of the assets and much of the higher level code is reusable.
Now, where will my less-tech-savy family get a build which doesn't contain it?
Your "less-tech-savy family" doesn't give a rat's ass about DRM. Nor do the majority of people. And for those that do, well this will prove the motivation to find 3rd party build for themselves, or follow the instructions to disable the functionality in Firefox or even produce their own build.
I guarantee you that far more people would prefer a browser that supports Netflix (and any other premium video provider) out of the box.
And person can also "get" a cable or satellite TV stream. The "getting" is not the problem so much as decrypting it.
The principle is the same regardless of the medium - the video / audio in the stream is encrypted with a key which changes frequently. The DRM supplies the key when the stream asks for it. That's what EME facilitates - an extra events on video / audio objects to say "I need a key" and an api to plug it in. It doesn't say where this key comes from or how the video object uses it to decrypt the data.
I expect most browsers will support a "null" DRM and a couple of DRM schemes from commercial providers. The "sandbox" is to obfuscate how the DRM gets the key and caches it, and how it decrypts the data.
No DRM is uncrackable of course but some have stood the test of time better than others. Theoretically any cable / sat stream can be decrypted but it's about doing it in a timely fashion which is the problem. I expect the second line of defence is to watermark content (eg with IP address, timestamp, user id) so that even if it falls down the analogue hole or is ripped, that there is at least a way to find out where it originated from.
So, GM is installing a 3G/4G modem feeding a WiFi hotspot using standard protocols that anything with a WiFi connection can talk to, and this is a "proprietary" solution?
Yes it's proprietary if it only works to their service. If they said you could stick any 3G modem SIM in there, then it would be okay but IMO it's still overkill when most people would already have data in their phones. It is more likely they want to share the data from their phones to the car than the other way around.
They could work with industry to produce a external antenna protocol for bluetooth - i.e. you tether your phone to the car and utilise the car's antenna for 3G/4G. In addition the phone could act as a hotspot for in car services and other phones in the vehicle. But hey they would be too useful. Instead, pay GM $5 for a proprietary solution instead.
Because Linux is the name of the kernel and also the name used to call distributions of Linux (the kernel). Context normally makes it clear what the word means and if necessary it is appropriately qualified. Whereas GNU/Linux is just sour grapes.
Yes it should have been secure out of the box but this really doesn't seem like a big deal either terms of liklihood of happening, or in the fix required to secure it - some kind of "do you want to remember device XYZ which is trying to talk over NFC?" dialog.
I've never seen one of these cameras and I doubt many other people have either. Nor does it seem likely that there are hackers standing by to "touch" the powered up, wifi connected camera with an NFC phone without the owner of the camera noticing. And when all is said a relatively trivial patch would correct the issue.
Here in Ireland - Tesco Mobile sells the Alcatel T'Pop Black for €29 PAYG and Vodafone sells a Samsung Galaxy Pocket Neo for €39 PAYG. That's retail price including VAT, albeit sim locked and you have to wait 12 months to unlock them. Undoubtedly these are pretty shitty by smart phone standards but they run Android and would probably be fine as a spare / temporary phone, a portable hotspot, a kid phone, a GPS tracker for running or whatever.
Most phone sellers will sell a few candy bar phones below that price for between €9.99 and €29 which are all very basic even by feature phone standards.
The big deal is it's a story which lends itself perfectly to endless speculation. CNN can waste hours of its news cycle wheeling out pundits to explain how aircraft work, how transponders work, how accidents happen, how terrorists hijack planes, how the planes crash, how planes are found, how blackboxes work, how debris fields spread etc. In the absence of hard information, they and their guests can prattle on for days or weeks like this.
I think the biggest win is the full screen / maximized mode which reclaims more vertical space. I don't think the curved tabs are a good idea since it makes the text area narrower (clipping more text with an ellipsis) and puts in useless curvy whitespace. I think settings should have stayed on the left since it is less discoverable and obvious on the right - the opposite side from where people expect menus to be.
They aren't banned. Paleo "hacks" are often experimenting with figuring out how much of which kinds of tubers and carbs may be beneficial.
Pick up any paleo diet book and in the first chapter it will arbitrarily put foods into good or bad columns. Rice, potatoes, yams, manoc, casava, grains, pseudo grains, legumes (incuding peas & beans) are invariably in the bad column. There is no reason for this other than... because.
Some books might feebly attempt to justify wheat or dairy because of allergies, but if that's the case then how come mustard, celery, shellfish, tree nuts are okay? They may feebly attempt to justify potatoes, rice, grain etc. as cultivated products but why doesn't that rule cover virtually every modern variety of animal, fruit and veg which is cultivated and bears little relation to its wild counterpart.
Hilariously I've even seen sunflower seeds described as good but sunflower oil described as bad. Despite seeds being near 50% oil and that being how the oil is pressed. Why? Because.
No book bothers to provide a rational argument for these things because there is no evidence that paleolithic people ate the way diets advise, or that their health for what it was wasn't due to the lower population, less stress, less competition for resources and a vigorous outdoor life.
And yes they would have eaten chocolate cake if they could obtain it. In the absence of chocolate cake, there are Africans today who get into a little raft and paddle around in the dark trying to catch crocodiles.
Way to miss the point. Paleo is just doing what every other diet does - cutting calorific intake. It's just it takes the bullshit to a whole new level with a bunch of hand wavey pseudo science which isn't supported by archeology or even by its own assertions. It's just a fad sitting on top of a well established fact - eat less calories than you burn and you lose weight.
Tubers like potatos, yams etc. are banned by the paleo diet. And rice, grains and even pseudograins. It doesn't so much replicate a paleolithic diet so much as arbitrarily ban high calorie foods and concoct a backstory to justify that.
Genuine paleolithic people would have eaten anything edible that was worth the effort / risk of obtaining around them - animals, bugs, reptiles, fish, birds, eggs, shellfish, seeds, nuts (incl chestnuts), roots, starchy tubers, berries, fruit, fungus and even grain. Presumably their physical activity was higher than ours too and thus their calorific intake would have been higher to maintain the same weight. There is evidence of that they ground up grain and other starches, presumably because they were nutritious.
Maybe paleo "works" but only the same way other diets work.
All diets work exactly the same way - cut the calories you eat until you consume less than you use in your daily exertions.
All the pseudo scientific bullshit that fad diets come out with on top of this is just that - bullshit. Paleo pretends that it's a diet that our paleolithic ancestors followed (it isn't), that our bodies aren't accustomed to eating certain food items like grains (they are), and that if we live like cavemen we'll lose weight. What it boils down to is that it simply bans high carb foods containing starch, sugar and oil and a natural consequence is lower calorie intake.
So pretty much like every other diet although some diets are probably easier to stick to than others. I hear the nothing-but-gluten bread and water diet can also work wonders for people trying to drop a dress size.
There is a kind of meat glue called transglutaminase. It allows that meat to be stuck together, cut into steak shapes and sold as such. It has been implicated in fraud, particularly in restaurants who charge full whack for a steak which is made from offcuts. Not only is it deceptive but the potential for bacterial infection is higher. So consumers are clearly not as discerning as you think or the fraud wouldn't work.
Then of course there are the openly "chopped and shaped" steaks sold in the freezer aisle as well as burgers, meatballs etc. For people who can't afford real steak but still want meat. While they don't taste as good as a real steak, they're still edible.
And what makes a steak? It's the muscle fibres that make the "grain", the tenderness from aging the muscle to break it down, the fat that gives it moisture, and the flavour running through it. I don't think any of those things are insurmountable for an artificial meat. e.g. meat fibre could be achieved by growing meat in strands, bunching them together with the odd strip of fat, glued and formed into a long tube which is cut into 1/2 sections. Voila steak. It might not compare to a 20 day aged steak but it would probably pass muster over the kinds of steaks people more ordinarily buy. And stuff like burgers & meat balls should be relatively trivial.
But to get to that point, production costs have to be comparable with standard meat production. I think the bigger problem is persuading people to eat it at all. Animals don't die to make it but there is still a grossness about the idea of meat grown in a vat which will must be overcome.
Quorn doesn't taste like fungus. It tastes very much like chicken and is rather tasty. In the UK & Ireland it's sold in a variety of formats as minced / cubed pieces as well as fillets, sausages, rashers, pies, lasagnas etc. The cubed format is great for stir fries, curries etc. The breaded fillets are awesome. The mince is not so good as a substitute for beef because the texture isn't right for it.
As for why you might prefer it to chicken - well who says you need to prefer it. Think of it as another choice of ingredient to use from time to time. I find it quorn to be quite convenient especially when I don't want to spend 10 minutes cutting chicken breasts up into bits.
The majority of games in existence nails doors and windows shut. Without bothering to justify why they're shut, or by throwing in a generic "door is locked" animation when the character tries to open them, or by stacking up debris / chairs against the door to justify why it can't be opened. First person shooters are the lamest at doing this - Call of Duty etc. where a heavily armed, fit man can't even knock a pane of glass in or kick / shoot a door open or climb over a modest obstacle. Why? Because fuck you for asking that's why.
More likely it's because their lame engine or AI cannot cope with a dynamic environment properly, or their collision detection / physics get all confused by someone shooting through a door or window, or simply because they can't be bothered to make it work properly.
I don't see it as the problem of a new designer to solve, so much as the entire industry, particularly those who produce tools & middleware for physics, collisions and destructible environments. If the likes of Unreal Engine allows a building to collapse or take damage (e.g. a tank putting a hole in a wall) or to kick open a door then it is likely that many games would make use of that.
How can they possibly detect a camera in all or even most circumstances without getting a bunch of false positives? The whole patent reads like a bunch of speculative, base covering horseshit to be honest.
Stuff like Day of Defeat would often appear on free weekend demos. It's hardly surprising that people kicked off a download and never got around to playing it. Same for other titles which are multiplayer modes, tech demos and so forth. I also expect the likes of Humble Bundle has meant people have gotten download codes for games they've redeemed but never bothered to run. I know I've a few games in my list which are like that.
It's virtually impossible to reach high office without being a millionaire or being bankrolled by a millionaire and other rich interest groups. It's virtually impossible to reach high office without belonging to one of two political parties. Is it any wonder at all that democracy has been corrupted?
It would be nice to see some practical proposals that could be implemented to remedy this.
The 4 is made by LG, the 7 by ASUS and the 10 by Samsung. So aside from the software they run, they could all be wildly different in their performance characteristics. Of the three I think ASUS is the one which I would trust the least with its quality control and parts.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect the main difficulty in porting from PS3 to PS4 is the effort of converting all those programs between two broadly similar but different in the detail systems. The GPU shaders too were written for NVidia processors and now have to be converted / rewritten. And working through all the hacks, shortcuts and bad assumptions that come from dealing with code which has been crunched out to work on one specific platform and not another.
So it's mostly drudgery. I expect virtually all of the assets and much of the higher level code is reusable.
Now, where will my less-tech-savy family get a build which doesn't contain it?
Your "less-tech-savy family" doesn't give a rat's ass about DRM. Nor do the majority of people. And for those that do, well this will prove the motivation to find 3rd party build for themselves, or follow the instructions to disable the functionality in Firefox or even produce their own build.
I guarantee you that far more people would prefer a browser that supports Netflix (and any other premium video provider) out of the box.
I doubt your rights will be affected in the slightest. If you don't want DRM, disable it or use a build which doesn't contain it.
The principle is the same regardless of the medium - the video / audio in the stream is encrypted with a key which changes frequently. The DRM supplies the key when the stream asks for it. That's what EME facilitates - an extra events on video / audio objects to say "I need a key" and an api to plug it in. It doesn't say where this key comes from or how the video object uses it to decrypt the data.
I expect most browsers will support a "null" DRM and a couple of DRM schemes from commercial providers. The "sandbox" is to obfuscate how the DRM gets the key and caches it, and how it decrypts the data.
No DRM is uncrackable of course but some have stood the test of time better than others. Theoretically any cable / sat stream can be decrypted but it's about doing it in a timely fashion which is the problem. I expect the second line of defence is to watermark content (eg with IP address, timestamp, user id) so that even if it falls down the analogue hole or is ripped, that there is at least a way to find out where it originated from.
So, GM is installing a 3G/4G modem feeding a WiFi hotspot using standard protocols that anything with a WiFi connection can talk to, and this is a "proprietary" solution?
Yes it's proprietary if it only works to their service. If they said you could stick any 3G modem SIM in there, then it would be okay but IMO it's still overkill when most people would already have data in their phones. It is more likely they want to share the data from their phones to the car than the other way around.
They could work with industry to produce a external antenna protocol for bluetooth - i.e. you tether your phone to the car and utilise the car's antenna for 3G/4G. In addition the phone could act as a hotspot for in car services and other phones in the vehicle. But hey they would be too useful. Instead, pay GM $5 for a proprietary solution instead.
Because Linux is the name of the kernel and also the name used to call distributions of Linux (the kernel). Context normally makes it clear what the word means and if necessary it is appropriately qualified. Whereas GNU/Linux is just sour grapes.
It's a wifi connected android device. Getting the patch to people is a matter of pushing an updated app or firmware next time it checks for updates.
Yes it should have been secure out of the box but this really doesn't seem like a big deal either terms of liklihood of happening, or in the fix required to secure it - some kind of "do you want to remember device XYZ which is trying to talk over NFC?" dialog.
I've never seen one of these cameras and I doubt many other people have either. Nor does it seem likely that there are hackers standing by to "touch" the powered up, wifi connected camera with an NFC phone without the owner of the camera noticing. And when all is said a relatively trivial patch would correct the issue.
Most phone sellers will sell a few candy bar phones below that price for between €9.99 and €29 which are all very basic even by feature phone standards.
The big deal is it's a story which lends itself perfectly to endless speculation. CNN can waste hours of its news cycle wheeling out pundits to explain how aircraft work, how transponders work, how accidents happen, how terrorists hijack planes, how the planes crash, how planes are found, how blackboxes work, how debris fields spread etc. In the absence of hard information, they and their guests can prattle on for days or weeks like this.
The Clangers do.
So aside from insults and some lame "do the research" cop out you have nothing of value to add.
I think the biggest win is the full screen / maximized mode which reclaims more vertical space. I don't think the curved tabs are a good idea since it makes the text area narrower (clipping more text with an ellipsis) and puts in useless curvy whitespace. I think settings should have stayed on the left since it is less discoverable and obvious on the right - the opposite side from where people expect menus to be.
They aren't banned. Paleo "hacks" are often experimenting with figuring out how much of which kinds of tubers and carbs may be beneficial.
Pick up any paleo diet book and in the first chapter it will arbitrarily put foods into good or bad columns. Rice, potatoes, yams, manoc, casava, grains, pseudo grains, legumes (incuding peas & beans) are invariably in the bad column. There is no reason for this other than... because.
Some books might feebly attempt to justify wheat or dairy because of allergies, but if that's the case then how come mustard, celery, shellfish, tree nuts are okay? They may feebly attempt to justify potatoes, rice, grain etc. as cultivated products but why doesn't that rule cover virtually every modern variety of animal, fruit and veg which is cultivated and bears little relation to its wild counterpart.
Hilariously I've even seen sunflower seeds described as good but sunflower oil described as bad. Despite seeds being near 50% oil and that being how the oil is pressed. Why? Because.
No book bothers to provide a rational argument for these things because there is no evidence that paleolithic people ate the way diets advise, or that their health for what it was wasn't due to the lower population, less stress, less competition for resources and a vigorous outdoor life.
And yes they would have eaten chocolate cake if they could obtain it. In the absence of chocolate cake, there are Africans today who get into a little raft and paddle around in the dark trying to catch crocodiles.
Way to miss the point. Paleo is just doing what every other diet does - cutting calorific intake. It's just it takes the bullshit to a whole new level with a bunch of hand wavey pseudo science which isn't supported by archeology or even by its own assertions. It's just a fad sitting on top of a well established fact - eat less calories than you burn and you lose weight.
Genuine paleolithic people would have eaten anything edible that was worth the effort / risk of obtaining around them - animals, bugs, reptiles, fish, birds, eggs, shellfish, seeds, nuts (incl chestnuts), roots, starchy tubers, berries, fruit, fungus and even grain. Presumably their physical activity was higher than ours too and thus their calorific intake would have been higher to maintain the same weight. There is evidence of that they ground up grain and other starches, presumably because they were nutritious.
Maybe paleo "works" but only the same way other diets work.
All the pseudo scientific bullshit that fad diets come out with on top of this is just that - bullshit. Paleo pretends that it's a diet that our paleolithic ancestors followed (it isn't), that our bodies aren't accustomed to eating certain food items like grains (they are), and that if we live like cavemen we'll lose weight. What it boils down to is that it simply bans high carb foods containing starch, sugar and oil and a natural consequence is lower calorie intake.
So pretty much like every other diet although some diets are probably easier to stick to than others. I hear the nothing-but-gluten bread and water diet can also work wonders for people trying to drop a dress size.
Then of course there are the openly "chopped and shaped" steaks sold in the freezer aisle as well as burgers, meatballs etc. For people who can't afford real steak but still want meat. While they don't taste as good as a real steak, they're still edible.
And what makes a steak? It's the muscle fibres that make the "grain", the tenderness from aging the muscle to break it down, the fat that gives it moisture, and the flavour running through it. I don't think any of those things are insurmountable for an artificial meat. e.g. meat fibre could be achieved by growing meat in strands, bunching them together with the odd strip of fat, glued and formed into a long tube which is cut into 1/2 sections. Voila steak. It might not compare to a 20 day aged steak but it would probably pass muster over the kinds of steaks people more ordinarily buy. And stuff like burgers & meat balls should be relatively trivial.
But to get to that point, production costs have to be comparable with standard meat production. I think the bigger problem is persuading people to eat it at all. Animals don't die to make it but there is still a grossness about the idea of meat grown in a vat which will must be overcome.
As for why you might prefer it to chicken - well who says you need to prefer it. Think of it as another choice of ingredient to use from time to time. I find it quorn to be quite convenient especially when I don't want to spend 10 minutes cutting chicken breasts up into bits.
More likely it's because their lame engine or AI cannot cope with a dynamic environment properly, or their collision detection / physics get all confused by someone shooting through a door or window, or simply because they can't be bothered to make it work properly.
I don't see it as the problem of a new designer to solve, so much as the entire industry, particularly those who produce tools & middleware for physics, collisions and destructible environments. If the likes of Unreal Engine allows a building to collapse or take damage (e.g. a tank putting a hole in a wall) or to kick open a door then it is likely that many games would make use of that.
How can they possibly detect a camera in all or even most circumstances without getting a bunch of false positives? The whole patent reads like a bunch of speculative, base covering horseshit to be honest.
Stuff like Day of Defeat would often appear on free weekend demos. It's hardly surprising that people kicked off a download and never got around to playing it. Same for other titles which are multiplayer modes, tech demos and so forth. I also expect the likes of Humble Bundle has meant people have gotten download codes for games they've redeemed but never bothered to run. I know I've a few games in my list which are like that.
It would be nice to see some practical proposals that could be implemented to remedy this.
The 4 is made by LG, the 7 by ASUS and the 10 by Samsung. So aside from the software they run, they could all be wildly different in their performance characteristics. Of the three I think ASUS is the one which I would trust the least with its quality control and parts.