The best way to develop for embedded devices is to do as much development as humanly possible on your PC where the tools are better, the debugging is better, the turnaround is better. Firing up an app for debugging on a PC takes seconds where it could take a minute on the real device.
In the case of web app development, the "emulator" is just a browser. If the TV is using Webkit then use something like Chrome for development. Probably 95% of the code and GUI could be developed and tested without going near a device.
There are probably dozens of xmlhttprequest wrappers floating around that do likewise.
But I would expect there is benefit of using jQuery for lots of things in a web 2.0 content. For all the fanfare JavaScript + HTML + CSS is a mess which breaks in different and subtle ways from one browser to the next. Using a good AJAX library or something like GWT is a good way to insulate the code from this brokeness and concentrate on application level problems.
I wouldn't accept Panasonic's answer either on this issue. If a reviewer doesn't know what jQuery is or why it might increase the quality of apps on their platform then they are simply not qualified to review code in the first place.
I expect most TVs these days are embedding webkit and have sufficient memory to cope with random webcontent. There might be a few using Netfront but even that is a relatively competent browser capable of handling modern content (to a lesser degree).
I don't think many titles have licenced their tech either, especially compared to Cry Engine or of course to Unreal Engine which is dominant. It's kind of ironic because Unreal started off life as a Quake knockoff and quickly took on a life of its own.
I really wanted to like Rage but it spent about an hour playing it and realised it just wasn't an interesting story (generic apocalyptic fare a la Fallout or Borderlands), and the engine for all its claims was delivering a largely linear FPS experience with a bit of driving thrown in. I think Fallout 3 / Vegas were better games within a similar setting.
Or maybe Zenimax are not too put out to see him go seeing as id haven't really produced a good game in the last ten years. I wonder if they even make a profit from id.
A simple reason not to trust them is they deliberately and continuously rearrange their privacy settings so you are never entirely sure what you are sharing and what you are not. It is not beyond the bounds of science that they could present a switch which enforces Default, Maximum or Custom security settings. Or a "please do not bug me about if I know person X or when is my birthday". But they don't do that.
Personally I don't care much about Facebook because I only have a few placeholder accounts. LinkedIn is worse because the information has to be real, and could potentially affect my career. And LinkedIn mines the fuck out of that info so I get a constant stream of unwelcome cold invites from recruitment agents and InMails. It's seriously annoying.
Google also has issues since its like a creeping barrage as they unify their services under a single TOS and become insistent that I merge accounts I never intended to be merged. The constant nagging over YouTube is seriously annoying.
Why should someone have to have "dealings with organised crime" simply to wish to protect their privacy? There are numerous reasons that someone might wish to keep their online life separate from their real life.
Because there are many reasons a company may protect a set top box.
They're contractually obliged to, e.g. by content providers
They don't want people to be able steal content, e.g by modifying the software to strip out the crypto and dump the unencrypted transport stream to a USB device.
The device is subsidized and being given away or sold at-or-below-cost. They don't want to subsidize freeloaders repurposing their device or suffering some Cuecat like debacle.
The box is tied to a service where tampering could give a person an unfair advantage, or interfere with the service of others, or let them grief, spam or otherwise annoy other people e.g. games console
They just don't like dealing with assholes who brick their devices and return them.
Even if the kernel had gone GPLv3, it would not meant set top boxes would suddenly be free. Why? Because the SoC providers would fork from the pre-v3 version and carry on and longer term jump ship to a BSD based SDK. The only loser would be the Linux kernel and all the contributors who spent so much time and effort porting it to embedded devices.
"Or any later version".
The kernel is licenced under GPLv2, not a later version. Using the GPLv2 doesn't grant someone the right to arbitrarily change the licence from v2 to v3. Read the legalise of the GPL and you will see that the program must explicitly say or later and the kernel doesn't.
The issue with GPLv3 was that it would have rendered the Linux kernel toxic. It would have precluded its use in embedded devices, appliances, set top boxes etc., it would have prevented binary blob drivers and it would have been nigh on impossible to do anyway given all the contributions by individuals and companies. So they left it the way it was. I expect even if Linus had tried to impose it (and fortunately he is too pragmatic for that), the kernel would have instantly forked from the pre-GPLv3 version and the GPLv3 version would have been DOA.
There is fake as in pseudonym, fake as in sockpuppet / troll and fake as in bot. Some people have legitimate reasons for wishing to remain anonymous while still being a real person behind that name. e.g. maybe someone is a victim of rape or domestic violence, or a political dissident, or simply values their personal privacy while wishing to use a network to collate their interests. Is it really that hard for Facebook to challenge a user in a manner which would confound a bot but verify there is a human on the other side? Is it really that hard for Facebook to establish a level of "trust" that the human is not some idiot troll or otherwise engaged in antisocial activity based on their posts?
Aside from that, some people enjoy anonymity simply by virtue of having a common name. I bet there are millions of real John Smiths who can hide in plain sight simply by virtue of their name. Yet someone with the unfortunate name Ammonia Bumblebee would be instantly and uniquely identifiable.
Anyway, I notice Facebook are pushing real identities more and some sites are requiring users sign on with a "verified" real account. But their manner of authentication is incredibly weak - provide a mobile telephone number. It is trivial to obtain a sim in many countries. e.g. in the UK every Poundland sells SIMs at the counter. Throw it into an old phone, use it to register on Facebook as "real", wait for the authentication code, and away you go. Pretty stupid really.
Just one gimmick item eh? What about the NES Zapper, or ROB, or Nintendo Scope, or Rumble Pak, or the Gameboy Camera etc. etc? And while they started off as accessories, in more recent consoles, the gimmick itself has become integral - the stylus / 2nd screen of the DS, the 3D in the 3DS (which most people turn off), the Wii Remote, the remote display of the Wii U. They do coast on gimmicks, increasingly so in recent times.
As for "back to its roots", the problem is it has never left its roots. Nintendo thinks it has a monopoly on fun, that only its own games matter, and treats 3rd parties like so much dog crap on the end of a stick. They can't think like that. 3rd parties need to make money too and will jump ship for Sony and Microsoft which know how to treat them better. But its probably way too late for that. WB have basically thrown in the towel by cancelling their Batman DLC and Ubisoft isn't far behind with rumours that Watch Dogs is cancelled.
The Wii U is dead man walking at least in the west. Which is why I suggest one route of recovery may be to target China or somewhere.
Nintendo's problem is and always has been they put the bare minimum spec hardware in their devices, make a big fanfare of some gimmick, charge an arm and a leg for it and hope they can coast far enough for the next gimmick to show up. It even works on occasion such as with the Wii. The problem is it didn't this time around. Perhaps people are suffering from gimmick fatigure or once bitten twice shy.
Just as bad for them is their appalling relationship with 3rd party publishers. Goodwill and faith is non-existent. The Wii's market share dwarfed the other consoles but it didn't translate to game sales (except for Nintendo). There were repeated stories of high quality, lauded titles simply not selling even when they did on other consoles. So 3rd parties just aimed lower and churned out shovelware.
For the Wii U, there was at least platform parity so theoretically costs could be shared with the 360 and PS3, but parity is fast disappearing as the XB1/PS4 take over. And hardware sales have been so dire that even with parity it's not worth the effort of porting. Hence we see one publisher after another shelve plans for the platform.
The only way I see Nintendo reinvigorating the Wii U is if they slash the price and also target markets like China where they might make some in roads. Meanwhile they need to cosy up to the 3rd parties and stop treating them like shit. Otherwise their outlook is pretty clear - they'll end up like SEGA with no hardware at all and will have to produce games on any platform. This might not be a bad thing either.
The Telegraph is a far right newspaper which is staunchly anti-EU, anti-science, anti-immigrant and pro UKIP. Perhaps such a secret deal has happened, but it wouldn't be the first time that this rag has embellished the facts to suit its own agenda.
Amazon has a lot of cloud storage and servers. They should just sell a cheap stick akin to Chromecast or the multitude of Android TV sticks which has a small amount of storage for Android apps running locally but also does streaming through the cloud. It shouldn't have to cost more than $100 even with a controller.
Most server code? Most server code is Java, Python, PHP or some other abstraction running over the hardware. Providing the runtime exists to support the abstraction it is largely irrelevant what architecture is powering it. I expect that operations that are already using Linux or some other Unix variant are well positioned to jump over. Windows based operations, not so much though Microsoft are in the cloud computing space too and this might motivate them to support ARM.
Why companies might do choose ARM really depends not on whether it is faster than Intel CPUs, but whether it is fast enough for the task at hand, and better in other regards such as power consumption, cooling, rack space etc. Google, Facebook, Amazon et al run enormous data centers running custom boot images and have teams capable of producing images for different architectures. This would seem to be the market that AMD is targeting.
Reading the spec of it, it doesn't seem that bad for the time, but it just didn't do anything people wanted from a computer and became obsolete as 16-bit home computers appeared. I think more likely that it managed to alienate the two groups of prospective buyers at the price point. People who wanted an actual PC were disappointed by a crappy PC-a-like which couldn't run much software and came with a sucky keyboard. And consumers who wanted a home computer baulked because the Commodore 64, Atari 800, ZX Spectrum all cost less (and had more games).
Also it didn't help that IBM are incapable of marketing products aimed at the home consumer market. I swear if they made a car it would come with a 2600 page instruction manual in 5 volumes, be operated by 50 dials, levers and switches positioned randomly around the cabin and would be immobile thanks to its 10 ton weight and triangular "wheels"
Brother make pretty good printers. I have an all-in-one inkjet which does a good job and most importantly for me lets me use 3rd party cartridges without issue. That said, I see absolutely no reason to buy a Dell badged version of any printer. It *will* cost more. It *will* be laden down with crapware. It *will* suffer from poorer support and possibly proprietary cartridges.
What's the point? It's just another thing Dell sell so they can nickel and dime people on their long march through to the checkout.
And that probably accounts for the fact that a $400 console produces an experience that a PC costing considerably more would struggle to match. It doesn't necessarily the game in question is any good or that optimized means framerate is the only consideration when producing the game, e.g. the producers might accept the odd frame rate dip to keep the resolution, draw distance or some other visual effect in place.
Bitcoin is a financial instrument and subject to the same laws that govern taxation, property and money laundering as other forms of financial instruments. Anyone running an exchange from the US is obligated to follow those laws. The general attitude so far has been "la la these laws don't apply to me" and strangely enough the authorities seem to have an issue with that, particularly when the exchange is laundering criminal proceeds.
I suspect nobody wants the Kinect because it was a useless gimmick that quickly wore out its welcome on the 360 and now its a useless gimmick on the XB1. Once bitten, twice shy. At least it was an optional extra for the 360. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft unbundle it from the XB1 so they can sell their console at the same price as the PS4.
So you've never seen a PC struggle to output a high frame rate before? Of course a PC platform has the advantage that you can throw $1000 of new hardware at a game to make it perform better, but perhaps then we're not comparing like with like.
The PS3 launched with pretty stringent restrictions on the amount of CPU and memory games could use and loosened up over time. Sony wasn't sure what they'd need for future features / firmware updates and so chose to play it safe. As the firmware matured and was optimized, they were able to release some of that surplus power to games to make use of.
I don't see Microsoft doing much different. Maybe they reserved the CPU/GPU for similar reasons and now they've figured they don't need to any more, or can wake the Kinect up when the user hits pause or starts talking. I'm sure the change if it happens has a lot to do with the recent criticism the XB1 received about resolution and GPU performance when compared to the PS4. It's doubtful they'll ever reach parity but perhaps they can boost performance enough that in most instances it is close enough.
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In the case of web app development, the "emulator" is just a browser. If the TV is using Webkit then use something like Chrome for development. Probably 95% of the code and GUI could be developed and tested without going near a device.
But I would expect there is benefit of using jQuery for lots of things in a web 2.0 content. For all the fanfare JavaScript + HTML + CSS is a mess which breaks in different and subtle ways from one browser to the next. Using a good AJAX library or something like GWT is a good way to insulate the code from this brokeness and concentrate on application level problems.
I wouldn't accept Panasonic's answer either on this issue. If a reviewer doesn't know what jQuery is or why it might increase the quality of apps on their platform then they are simply not qualified to review code in the first place.
I expect most TVs these days are embedding webkit and have sufficient memory to cope with random webcontent. There might be a few using Netfront but even that is a relatively competent browser capable of handling modern content (to a lesser degree).
Because uploading all your legal (sure) books to Google is an extremely well thought out plan.
I don't think many titles have licenced their tech either, especially compared to Cry Engine or of course to Unreal Engine which is dominant. It's kind of ironic because Unreal started off life as a Quake knockoff and quickly took on a life of its own.
I really wanted to like Rage but it spent about an hour playing it and realised it just wasn't an interesting story (generic apocalyptic fare a la Fallout or Borderlands), and the engine for all its claims was delivering a largely linear FPS experience with a bit of driving thrown in. I think Fallout 3 / Vegas were better games within a similar setting.
Or maybe Zenimax are not too put out to see him go seeing as id haven't really produced a good game in the last ten years. I wonder if they even make a profit from id.
Personally I don't care much about Facebook because I only have a few placeholder accounts. LinkedIn is worse because the information has to be real, and could potentially affect my career. And LinkedIn mines the fuck out of that info so I get a constant stream of unwelcome cold invites from recruitment agents and InMails. It's seriously annoying.
Google also has issues since its like a creeping barrage as they unify their services under a single TOS and become insistent that I merge accounts I never intended to be merged. The constant nagging over YouTube is seriously annoying.
Why should someone have to have "dealings with organised crime" simply to wish to protect their privacy? There are numerous reasons that someone might wish to keep their online life separate from their real life.
Even if the kernel had gone GPLv3, it would not meant set top boxes would suddenly be free. Why? Because the SoC providers would fork from the pre-v3 version and carry on and longer term jump ship to a BSD based SDK. The only loser would be the Linux kernel and all the contributors who spent so much time and effort porting it to embedded devices.
"Or any later version".
The kernel is licenced under GPLv2, not a later version. Using the GPLv2 doesn't grant someone the right to arbitrarily change the licence from v2 to v3. Read the legalise of the GPL and you will see that the program must explicitly say or later and the kernel doesn't.
The issue with GPLv3 was that it would have rendered the Linux kernel toxic. It would have precluded its use in embedded devices, appliances, set top boxes etc., it would have prevented binary blob drivers and it would have been nigh on impossible to do anyway given all the contributions by individuals and companies. So they left it the way it was. I expect even if Linus had tried to impose it (and fortunately he is too pragmatic for that), the kernel would have instantly forked from the pre-GPLv3 version and the GPLv3 version would have been DOA.
Aside from that, some people enjoy anonymity simply by virtue of having a common name. I bet there are millions of real John Smiths who can hide in plain sight simply by virtue of their name. Yet someone with the unfortunate name Ammonia Bumblebee would be instantly and uniquely identifiable.
Anyway, I notice Facebook are pushing real identities more and some sites are requiring users sign on with a "verified" real account. But their manner of authentication is incredibly weak - provide a mobile telephone number. It is trivial to obtain a sim in many countries. e.g. in the UK every Poundland sells SIMs at the counter. Throw it into an old phone, use it to register on Facebook as "real", wait for the authentication code, and away you go. Pretty stupid really.
As for "back to its roots", the problem is it has never left its roots. Nintendo thinks it has a monopoly on fun, that only its own games matter, and treats 3rd parties like so much dog crap on the end of a stick. They can't think like that. 3rd parties need to make money too and will jump ship for Sony and Microsoft which know how to treat them better. But its probably way too late for that. WB have basically thrown in the towel by cancelling their Batman DLC and Ubisoft isn't far behind with rumours that Watch Dogs is cancelled.
The Wii U is dead man walking at least in the west. Which is why I suggest one route of recovery may be to target China or somewhere.
Nintendo's problem is and always has been they put the bare minimum spec hardware in their devices, make a big fanfare of some gimmick, charge an arm and a leg for it and hope they can coast far enough for the next gimmick to show up. It even works on occasion such as with the Wii. The problem is it didn't this time around. Perhaps people are suffering from gimmick fatigure or once bitten twice shy. Just as bad for them is their appalling relationship with 3rd party publishers. Goodwill and faith is non-existent. The Wii's market share dwarfed the other consoles but it didn't translate to game sales (except for Nintendo). There were repeated stories of high quality, lauded titles simply not selling even when they did on other consoles. So 3rd parties just aimed lower and churned out shovelware. For the Wii U, there was at least platform parity so theoretically costs could be shared with the 360 and PS3, but parity is fast disappearing as the XB1/PS4 take over. And hardware sales have been so dire that even with parity it's not worth the effort of porting. Hence we see one publisher after another shelve plans for the platform. The only way I see Nintendo reinvigorating the Wii U is if they slash the price and also target markets like China where they might make some in roads. Meanwhile they need to cosy up to the 3rd parties and stop treating them like shit. Otherwise their outlook is pretty clear - they'll end up like SEGA with no hardware at all and will have to produce games on any platform. This might not be a bad thing either.
Short answer, nope.
The Telegraph is a far right newspaper which is staunchly anti-EU, anti-science, anti-immigrant and pro UKIP. Perhaps such a secret deal has happened, but it wouldn't be the first time that this rag has embellished the facts to suit its own agenda.
Amazon has a lot of cloud storage and servers. They should just sell a cheap stick akin to Chromecast or the multitude of Android TV sticks which has a small amount of storage for Android apps running locally but also does streaming through the cloud. It shouldn't have to cost more than $100 even with a controller.
Why companies might do choose ARM really depends not on whether it is faster than Intel CPUs, but whether it is fast enough for the task at hand, and better in other regards such as power consumption, cooling, rack space etc. Google, Facebook, Amazon et al run enormous data centers running custom boot images and have teams capable of producing images for different architectures. This would seem to be the market that AMD is targeting.
Also it didn't help that IBM are incapable of marketing products aimed at the home consumer market. I swear if they made a car it would come with a 2600 page instruction manual in 5 volumes, be operated by 50 dials, levers and switches positioned randomly around the cabin and would be immobile thanks to its 10 ton weight and triangular "wheels"
What's the point? It's just another thing Dell sell so they can nickel and dime people on their long march through to the checkout.
And that probably accounts for the fact that a $400 console produces an experience that a PC costing considerably more would struggle to match. It doesn't necessarily the game in question is any good or that optimized means framerate is the only consideration when producing the game, e.g. the producers might accept the odd frame rate dip to keep the resolution, draw distance or some other visual effect in place.
Bitcoin is a financial instrument and subject to the same laws that govern taxation, property and money laundering as other forms of financial instruments. Anyone running an exchange from the US is obligated to follow those laws. The general attitude so far has been "la la these laws don't apply to me" and strangely enough the authorities seem to have an issue with that, particularly when the exchange is laundering criminal proceeds.
I suspect nobody wants the Kinect because it was a useless gimmick that quickly wore out its welcome on the 360 and now its a useless gimmick on the XB1. Once bitten, twice shy. At least it was an optional extra for the 360. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft unbundle it from the XB1 so they can sell their console at the same price as the PS4.
So you've never seen a PC struggle to output a high frame rate before? Of course a PC platform has the advantage that you can throw $1000 of new hardware at a game to make it perform better, but perhaps then we're not comparing like with like.
I don't see Microsoft doing much different. Maybe they reserved the CPU/GPU for similar reasons and now they've figured they don't need to any more, or can wake the Kinect up when the user hits pause or starts talking. I'm sure the change if it happens has a lot to do with the recent criticism the XB1 received about resolution and GPU performance when compared to the PS4. It's doubtful they'll ever reach parity but perhaps they can boost performance enough that in most instances it is close enough.