1) HD-DVD was an inferior technology.
2) HD-DVD was patent encumbered too, as any currently competitive method for recording data on a physical medium.
3) Blu-Ray does not have mandatory AACS for homemade discs - that's all you should care about unless you run a Blu-Ray pressing business.
4) Sony is by no means more evil than Microsoft.
5) The competition has run, it was fair and fierce, and in the end the market chose. Which is good for the users.
6) Microsoft couldn't care less about the greater good, as their history in the last two decades demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt.
7) The shit doesn't come from Sony, but from LG; sony is the "victim" here (notice the quotes).
Then they do know something, they just don't know everything. In this case, we obviously didn't know anything at all, so the only way one could say some event was "probable", it was out of prejudice.
As a confirmation of that, with the latest news, it appears that 1 technician died and 11 were wounded (we're not even talking about contaminated people).
(As a side note, not even the Japanese appear to be sure about what is happening exactly and if they will be able to avoid further damage, yet the IAEA already managed to rate the accident at one nice, reassuring grade below the Three Mile Island's one. Which makes me wonder how reliable it is to ask the bartender if the beer is good.)
How many people died from the Japanese nuclear accident? Zero, so far. How many will die? Donno, but probably 0.
"Donno" and "probably" can't stay in the same phrase. It's so easy to play the big men when it's other people finding caesium in their lungs.
Now let's see... how many anti-nuclear hippies died from doing too much LSD or ketamine or whatever it is they do? Probably thousands.
I wouldn't know, the 60s are over and LSD is so out of fashion. We should balance the count with yuppies who die in sex games involving rubber, cocaine and Nazi costumes.
How many people died in coal mine accidents? Beyond count.
You say that as if uranium grew on trees. Moreover, if you take into account what happened in soviet coal mines, you'll have to count what happened in soviet nuclear reactors, too.
Even if you could predict the future, it still wouldn't matter to me. Harming your own customers (who are definitely in a majority) to go after some (or even quite a few) 'pirates' is idiotic. It's a complete waste of time, as we've seen with DRM schemes.
All I'm asking for is the same meter of judgement to be applied to all corporations, besides Sony, who are imposing DRM schemes to their cusomers. That is, sadly, every one.
People don't believe these so-called 'studies' because they aren't accurate. To be accurate, they would literally have to not only prove that each and every 'pirate' would have bought the product otherwise, but they'd also have to accurately determine exactly how many 'pirates' exist in the first place. Both of these are near impossible tasks with the latter being difficult merely because of the giant scope of the internet.
Often we can satisfy our needs with less accuracy. Science, for example, works by figuring out simplified models, the scope where they can be applied, and their limitations in general, and then by validating them using measurements.
That's why when we want to know what current will flow in a conductor given the difference of voltage at its extremes, in most cases we can say "V/R" instead of integrating Maxwell's equations over the whole volume of the conductor.
That's why we can just suppose that a body left free in the void on Earth will fall in such a way that we'll see its center of mass accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 - we could as well, as you would probably require, calculate the gravitational/electric/magnetic interaction of every single particle the body is composed of, against every other one in the universe, but that would be difficult, merely because of the giant scope of the cosmos. And by the way, the results would be pretty much the same, if you can live with a very, very small error.
they evidently must have other instruments.
Then please, tell me this: what "instruments" are they using to find every single instance of 'piracy' present on the internet? That would indeed be an interesting piece of technology (no, looking at a few torrents isn't going to return an accurate result).
There's no need to perfectly know the precise extent of a problem before starting to do something to solve it.
To obtain a rough measurement of piracy the could base their expectations on the number of pirate copies confiscated by the police. Or the income of pirate game dealers as reported by the police.
Or they could compare the sales of some titles on a piracy-enabled console versus a piracy-proof one, with the results normalized to the price of the two consoles and of the title, and measured on a large enough sample of demographically homogeneous buyers.
If any of this shows that it's reasonable to think that the sale of even a single copy was lost due to piracy, then the corporations would be legitimated to spend whatever fraction of their own money they deem appropriate to prevent this from happening in the future.
Of course honest buyers will turn away from the "products" by whose DRM they feel they've been damaged, migrating to less DRM-ridden platforms. In the case of console video games, this isn't happening, as the DRM schemes found on console games are much less invasive than those found on open platforms such as the PC, and in general they're homogeneously distributed among the different console vendors.
Since developing games tends to have a cost
Cost incurred by choice of the developers. That aside, even if you truly believe that 'pirates' harm developers, any action taken against legitimate customers by the developers would still be the fault of the developers (and the 'pirates', in this scenario).
I feel pissed when I think that a part of the (to me) excess
PS3 game 'piracy'? If so, do you have any sources to back that up?
Of course PS3-specific piracy is still low - it has just started so its ecosystem hasn't fully developed yet. But turn your attention to equivalent systems on which piracy has been around for a longer time and you'll have your numbers: for example, google for some forum hosting xbox 360 dvd images and observe the download counts.
But when I go in shops and see that an original game costs as much as three days of work, while I know my friends are downloading the same game from torrents, I feel I'm being a bit exploited.
And why should this be blamed on 'piracy'? To the company itself, a 'pirate' is almost indistinguishable from someone who merely doesn't buy their product (in that neither grants them money). How exactly do we know who is a 'pirate' and who merely didn't buy the product (not counting anecdotal evidence, of course)? It's nearly impossible. Even spying on a few torrents won't accomplish anything. It's ridiculous to blame 'pirates' because corrupt corporations take actions that hurt the consumer based on unprovable assumptions.
I could start by pointing out that such foundations of scientific correctness are usually not requested when people state the opposite opinion than mine, i.e. "pirates don't harm the market".
I could go on by noting that the researches you want to see take time and cost money, and the only ones who actually have interest in paying for them are the hollywood / game publishers, and when they *do* publish their results, which unsurprisingly show they're having huge damages because of piracy, they are simply ignored or not believed by the community.
You say that such researches are impossible, and I could answer that apparently they aren't, because we have statistics about corruption, about tax evasion and so on. It's not that they can call people home and ask them "are you corrupt?" - they evidently must have other instruments. So the argument "if you can't count it, it didn't happen" isn't universally true.
But actually there's no need for all these words: my reasoning for feeling damaged by piracy is much simpler and has nothing to do with anectodal evidence, corrupt corporations and so on... I pay, I play; pirates don't pay, but play. Since developing games tends to have a cost, I suppose that if I wouldn't pay, they wouldn't play either. So I'm effectively paying for letting them play. I would be ok with that if it was in the form of some kind of tax to let poor children, as determined by some kind of ranking, enjoy games they couldn't afford. But as long as it is something more like "dumb people pay, smart people don't" you'll have a hard time convincing me it's ethical.
Perhaps where you live they're just 'a few'. But where I live, piracy is *massive*. For example, when the major satellite pay tv channels were "crackable", we literally saw parabolic dishes pop up on every roof and balcony. You could get a visual representation of piracy just by looking out from a window. The original PlayStation, although being a bit expensive, crushed all competition to the point that I haven't ever seen a single Sega Saturn or Nintendo64, only because it was so easy to make it read "backups": the urban legend circulating in that time was that Sony willingly made its protection weak because they just wanted to sell the hardware. The same can be said for the PS2 (which even didn't require a modchip at all) and for the current XBOX360.
I won't make the silly assumption that all "pirates" would buy original games if piracy was not possible - it's just false. But when I go in shops and see that an original game costs as much as three days of work, while I know my friends are downloading the same game from torrents, I feel I'm being a bit exploited.
In my opinion the article abuses of both hyperbole and ellipsis to present a subset of facts in a distorted way that conforms to the author's prejudicial concept that "Sony is evil".
- The PS3, even in its dumbed-down form, is still many times more open and interoperable than the XBOX 360, and surely million times more open than Nintendo's hardware.
- The same can be said for Sony's Android phones versus the iPhones and WP7 handsets.
- Sony's attempts to stop piracy and online cheating on their gaming platforms differ in no way from the equivalents efforts from competitors.
- The PS2 and PS3 were the only gaming consoles to *officially* support the installation of Linux.
As a consumer I don't feel I've ever been screwed by Sony, except perhaps by their ridiculously high prices.
I do feel I'm damaged by piracy, because it makes honest users pay for the dishonest users' fun. And it means that honest users' gameplay is spoiled by "tinkerers" and "innovators" that artificially dope their stats.
Besides the PS3, I have a PC that allows me to do all the tinkering and innovation I'd like to do - so Hotz's efforts are of no use to me.
All the Sony bashing I use to read here is no news for nerds, it's passive repeating of nerd memes.
The things I missed when I switched from Symbian to Android 1.6 were 3G video call / front facing camera, MIDP applets, programmable Bluetooth and BT file transfer, ad-hoc WLAN, Nokia maps, a decent camera, a detailed phone book, vCard support, a built-in file manager, zip compression, the PDF reader, the alarm clock not working when the phone is off, MTP support, a PC suite to sync stuff with the PC automatically when my phone was near the PC.
Most of these features were added by 3rd parties or with Android 2.0.
Why are the "Top Talents" going to go to Nokia instead of Google or Apple? It's easy to hand wave this in a bullet point, but it need *a lot* more concrete planning to even be a reasonable idea, let alone successful.
To target with their apps the oceanic market share of Nokia high and low end smartphones around the world.
Or, for being paid by Nokia - I read that many applications currently present in the WP7 app store were directly sponsored by Microsoft.
Symbian didn't get the developers' attention because its development tools (and deploying methods) were a pain. On the contrary, Qt was much appreciated by anyone who used it, and the Qt SDK was miles ahead of Carbide (the eclipse-based IDE for Symbian).
Can you point me to an Android phone which is not "locked"? I always buy phones from manufacturers, not carriers, and all the Android phones I've owned were locked at the bootloader.
Moreover, the big problem isn't the protection - root exploits are usually found soon, but then the new kernels you can install often miss some driver for 3D, bluetooth, 3G, GPS,...
The battle is on for the third tier phone OS. iOS and Android are the top two, everything else is an "also ran". This includes Palm's offering, Meego, Symbian, and WP7
Actually, in the world Symbian is the first smartphone OS by market share (37.6%), Android the second (22.7%), Blackberry the third (16.0%) and iOS the fourth (15.7%).
Microsoft is currently a distant fifth with a 4,2% market share, and that includes both Windows Mobile and WP7.
(source).
If Meego is superior then where is it? Is it a Marketing Deficiency? I went to buy a smartphone a few months ago, never once ran into a Meego phone, at least not that I know of.
Meego is not in shops because it's not finished yet. You couldn't buy a Meego phone a few months ago for the same reason you couldn't buy an Android phone in Q2 2008, even though Android's development started not later than 2005.
For comparison, the development of Meego started in February 2010.
No, the tax loophole involved shipping a CD with a toy BASIC interpreter with the console in UK. They did that on the PS2 (it was called YaBasic IIRC), which didn't support installing Linux at the time.
It's different: the slim PS3 had no Other OS because of cost cutting. The fat one kept it originally.
Hotz's [is this writing correct?:D] first hacking attempts were done on Linux, on a fat PS3, and required Linux (and a hardware glitch IIRC) to work. So Other OS was removed from the fat PS3 in response to his (failed) attempts.
Indeed - and I would have never foretold that I'd be saying this.
Anyway, I'm afraid that much of what I like in Windows comes from its "legacy" roots, and I won't feel safe until I see what Microsoft will do with Windows 8 after they've been exposed to the "bad examples" of iOS and ChromeOS;-) .
I wouldn't know. Unlike the 360, the PS3 has nice "HTPC" capabilities out of the box - meaning you can browse the internet, you can toss most kinds of media files into it and it will play them, and you can take out those media files if you wish. It's also expandable with off-the-shelf hard disks and supports off-the-shelf add-ons such as pendrives, USB-HID devices, UVC cameras, bluetooth keyboards (the Apple one finds its place in a living room). And it has an official TV tuner.
Yes, I know, it doesn't play Matroska files.
Anyway there are fanless Linux boxes for sale which draw much less power (and radiate much less heat) than a PS3.
This actually confirms my view, that hackers have no interest in "homebrew" whatsoever, but are just interested in ways to celebrate their ego. In fact, there are millions of way one could "challenge" himself by coding - fixing Linux bugs, improving Mesa's OpenGL, writing a software for the management of laundries - none of which would interfere with my legitimate personal desire to play by accepting Sony's rules.
I approve the work of hackers when they support the freedom of expression or they put in evidence how stupid it is for the media industry to spend so much money in DRM (especially since all that money will be paid by end users in the end, by higher prices). But I don't think this is the case. The PS3 was just that, a toy, and now it's broken.
If somebody sets a lion free, I don't blame the lion, I blame who set it free.
The pirates would have eventually accomplished this same task with or without the homebrew crowd
Perhaps. What's certain is that all PS3 exploits started on Linux, so shall we bet that the net result of this will be that Sony will think twice before adding the "Other Os" option in the PS4? Great.
It's their fault that the security on their console was so fragile (and it was, folks...)
With hindsight, every accomplishment seems easy. The fact is that the PS3 security, as broken as it was, kept it completely safe from piracy for four years - which is a world record. What lesson do you think that Sony, being the evil company that it is, will learn for the next console they make?
drop DRM completely and let piracy start from day zero;
put even more and more crazy DRM in the hope of lasting some more years this time.
Frankly I have no doubt, and once again as a moron^H^H^H^H^H honest user I'll be penalized.
This is like saying that Windows Update is an unauthorized access by Microsoft to a Windows installation that belongs to an end-user who never gave them permission to do whatever it is they needed remote root for (hint: the end-user gave them the permission, by accepting the EULA that appears the first time you run Windows Update, and every time the conditions change).
And this behaviour is not limited to consoles only: all online games for PC I've used, have a license agreement that grants to the maintainer of that game a permission to run a software on my machine monitoring the processes running on my system to ensure that I haven't tampered with the game code.
Woosh, I was in my turn sarcastically suggesting that there is a much more recent and appropriate precedent of a console manufacturer protecting online gaming on their platform.
Then they won't be able to buy a console at all, because Microsoft act much worse on their console (the 360 spits warning messages whose wording wouldn't feel out of context in "1984").
Nintendo, too, periodically release firmware updates to stop "homebrew", and warn that they have the right to brick your hardware if they discover you have made an "unauthorised use" of it.
I'm fine if Apple's tablets run a special-purpose, consumer-only OS that limits your freedom. If the Mac shows signs of going in the same direction, I have a bad feeling. If then Google releases a netbook with a locked boot loader that will only load Chrome OS, which in turn requires you to log in with your Google Account upon power up, I start to worry.
Perhaps RMS wasn't so paranoid when he warned against "the cloud" after all.
I don't understand why people can't buy a PC to develop "homebrew" software for it. It's more powerful and costs less.
All the efforts from hackers resulted in:
piracy (not that I care, but perhaps game developers do, and I like the games they develop)
no more Other OS
cheaters in online games
PC-like nuisances such as "serials"
draconian security measures which only harm honest users
I think the majority of console players know that a console is a closed box when they buy it. It's meant to play commercial games only. And a game is only meaningful if its code hasn't been tampered with by some of the players.
For those who are curious about the new PS3 security, it seems Sony has implemented something in 3.56 I mentioned here a few weeks ago that is the same as Microsoft uses to detect and ban 360's.
You're assuming that embedded chipset enjoy the same modularity and standards you can find in PCs. But in reality it's not always so; for example, most PC Bluetooth adapters follow the USB HCI standard and therefore require no specialized driver; Bluetooth adapters found in mobile phones, instead, are often implemented in a single chip that offers FM radio, GPS reception, Bluetooth and WLAN all multiplexed together in some custom way.
Slashdot Mirror
1) HD-DVD was an inferior technology.
2) HD-DVD was patent encumbered too, as any currently competitive method for recording data on a physical medium.
3) Blu-Ray does not have mandatory AACS for homemade discs - that's all you should care about unless you run a Blu-Ray pressing business.
4) Sony is by no means more evil than Microsoft.
5) The competition has run, it was fair and fierce, and in the end the market chose. Which is good for the users.
6) Microsoft couldn't care less about the greater good, as their history in the last two decades demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt.
7) The shit doesn't come from Sony, but from LG; sony is the "victim" here (notice the quotes).
As a confirmation of that, with the latest news, it appears that 1 technician died and 11 were wounded (we're not even talking about contaminated people).
(As a side note, not even the Japanese appear to be sure about what is happening exactly and if they will be able to avoid further damage, yet the IAEA already managed to rate the accident at one nice, reassuring grade below the Three Mile Island's one. Which makes me wonder how reliable it is to ask the bartender if the beer is good.)
How many people died from the Japanese nuclear accident? Zero, so far. How many will die? Donno, but probably 0.
"Donno" and "probably" can't stay in the same phrase. It's so easy to play the big men when it's other people finding caesium in their lungs.
Now let's see... how many anti-nuclear hippies died from doing too much LSD or ketamine or whatever it is they do? Probably thousands.
I wouldn't know, the 60s are over and LSD is so out of fashion. We should balance the count with yuppies who die in sex games involving rubber, cocaine and Nazi costumes.
How many people died in coal mine accidents? Beyond count.
You say that as if uranium grew on trees. Moreover, if you take into account what happened in soviet coal mines, you'll have to count what happened in soviet nuclear reactors, too.
Of course PS3-specific piracy is still low
Even if you could predict the future, it still wouldn't matter to me. Harming your own customers (who are definitely in a majority) to go after some (or even quite a few) 'pirates' is idiotic. It's a complete waste of time, as we've seen with DRM schemes.
All I'm asking for is the same meter of judgement to be applied to all corporations, besides Sony, who are imposing DRM schemes to their cusomers. That is, sadly, every one.
People don't believe these so-called 'studies' because they aren't accurate. To be accurate, they would literally have to not only prove that each and every 'pirate' would have bought the product otherwise, but they'd also have to accurately determine exactly how many 'pirates' exist in the first place. Both of these are near impossible tasks with the latter being difficult merely because of the giant scope of the internet.
Often we can satisfy our needs with less accuracy. Science, for example, works by figuring out simplified models, the scope where they can be applied, and their limitations in general, and then by validating them using measurements.
That's why when we want to know what current will flow in a conductor given the difference of voltage at its extremes, in most cases we can say "V/R" instead of integrating Maxwell's equations over the whole volume of the conductor.
That's why we can just suppose that a body left free in the void on Earth will fall in such a way that we'll see its center of mass accelerate at 9.8 m/s^2 - we could as well, as you would probably require, calculate the gravitational/electric/magnetic interaction of every single particle the body is composed of, against every other one in the universe, but that would be difficult, merely because of the giant scope of the cosmos. And by the way, the results would be pretty much the same, if you can live with a very, very small error.
they evidently must have other instruments.
Then please, tell me this: what "instruments" are they using to find every single instance of 'piracy' present on the internet? That would indeed be an interesting piece of technology (no, looking at a few torrents isn't going to return an accurate result).
There's no need to perfectly know the precise extent of a problem before starting to do something to solve it.
To obtain a rough measurement of piracy the could base their expectations on the number of pirate copies confiscated by the police. Or the income of pirate game dealers as reported by the police.
Or they could compare the sales of some titles on a piracy-enabled console versus a piracy-proof one, with the results normalized to the price of the two consoles and of the title, and measured on a large enough sample of demographically homogeneous buyers.
If any of this shows that it's reasonable to think that the sale of even a single copy was lost due to piracy, then the corporations would be legitimated to spend whatever fraction of their own money they deem appropriate to prevent this from happening in the future.
Of course honest buyers will turn away from the "products" by whose DRM they feel they've been damaged, migrating to less DRM-ridden platforms. In the case of console video games, this isn't happening, as the DRM schemes found on console games are much less invasive than those found on open platforms such as the PC, and in general they're homogeneously distributed among the different console vendors.
Since developing games tends to have a cost
Cost incurred by choice of the developers. That aside, even if you truly believe that 'pirates' harm developers, any action taken against legitimate customers by the developers would still be the fault of the developers (and the 'pirates', in this scenario).
I feel pissed when I think that a part of the (to me) excess
But where I live, piracy is *massive*.
PS3 game 'piracy'? If so, do you have any sources to back that up?
Of course PS3-specific piracy is still low - it has just started so its ecosystem hasn't fully developed yet. But turn your attention to equivalent systems on which piracy has been around for a longer time and you'll have your numbers: for example, google for some forum hosting xbox 360 dvd images and observe the download counts.
But when I go in shops and see that an original game costs as much as three days of work, while I know my friends are downloading the same game from torrents, I feel I'm being a bit exploited.
And why should this be blamed on 'piracy'? To the company itself, a 'pirate' is almost indistinguishable from someone who merely doesn't buy their product (in that neither grants them money). How exactly do we know who is a 'pirate' and who merely didn't buy the product (not counting anecdotal evidence, of course)? It's nearly impossible. Even spying on a few torrents won't accomplish anything. It's ridiculous to blame 'pirates' because corrupt corporations take actions that hurt the consumer based on unprovable assumptions.
I could start by pointing out that such foundations of scientific correctness are usually not requested when people state the opposite opinion than mine, i.e. "pirates don't harm the market".
I could go on by noting that the researches you want to see take time and cost money, and the only ones who actually have interest in paying for them are the hollywood / game publishers, and when they *do* publish their results, which unsurprisingly show they're having huge damages because of piracy, they are simply ignored or not believed by the community.
You say that such researches are impossible, and I could answer that apparently they aren't, because we have statistics about corruption, about tax evasion and so on. It's not that they can call people home and ask them "are you corrupt?" - they evidently must have other instruments. So the argument "if you can't count it, it didn't happen" isn't universally true.
But actually there's no need for all these words: my reasoning for feeling damaged by piracy is much simpler and has nothing to do with anectodal evidence, corrupt corporations and so on... I pay, I play; pirates don't pay, but play. Since developing games tends to have a cost, I suppose that if I wouldn't pay, they wouldn't play either. So I'm effectively paying for letting them play. I would be ok with that if it was in the form of some kind of tax to let poor children, as determined by some kind of ranking, enjoy games they couldn't afford. But as long as it is something more like "dumb people pay, smart people don't" you'll have a hard time convincing me it's ethical.
I won't make the silly assumption that all "pirates" would buy original games if piracy was not possible - it's just false. But when I go in shops and see that an original game costs as much as three days of work, while I know my friends are downloading the same game from torrents, I feel I'm being a bit exploited.
- The PS3, even in its dumbed-down form, is still many times more open and interoperable than the XBOX 360, and surely million times more open than Nintendo's hardware.
- The same can be said for Sony's Android phones versus the iPhones and WP7 handsets.
- Sony's attempts to stop piracy and online cheating on their gaming platforms differ in no way from the equivalents efforts from competitors.
- The PS2 and PS3 were the only gaming consoles to *officially* support the installation of Linux.
As a consumer I don't feel I've ever been screwed by Sony, except perhaps by their ridiculously high prices.
I do feel I'm damaged by piracy, because it makes honest users pay for the dishonest users' fun. And it means that honest users' gameplay is spoiled by "tinkerers" and "innovators" that artificially dope their stats.
Besides the PS3, I have a PC that allows me to do all the tinkering and innovation I'd like to do - so Hotz's efforts are of no use to me.
All the Sony bashing I use to read here is no news for nerds, it's passive repeating of nerd memes.
Most of these features were added by 3rd parties or with Android 2.0.
Why are the "Top Talents" going to go to Nokia instead of Google or Apple? It's easy to hand wave this in a bullet point, but it need *a lot* more concrete planning to even be a reasonable idea, let alone successful.
To target with their apps the oceanic market share of Nokia high and low end smartphones around the world.
Or, for being paid by Nokia - I read that many applications currently present in the WP7 app store were directly sponsored by Microsoft.
Symbian didn't get the developers' attention because its development tools (and deploying methods) were a pain. On the contrary, Qt was much appreciated by anyone who used it, and the Qt SDK was miles ahead of Carbide (the eclipse-based IDE for Symbian).
Moreover, the big problem isn't the protection - root exploits are usually found soon, but then the new kernels you can install often miss some driver for 3D, bluetooth, 3G, GPS, ...
The battle is on for the third tier phone OS. iOS and Android are the top two, everything else is an "also ran". This includes Palm's offering, Meego, Symbian, and WP7
Actually, in the world Symbian is the first smartphone OS by market share (37.6%), Android the second (22.7%), Blackberry the third (16.0%) and iOS the fourth (15.7%). Microsoft is currently a distant fifth with a 4,2% market share, and that includes both Windows Mobile and WP7.
(source).
If Meego is superior then where is it? Is it a Marketing Deficiency? I went to buy a smartphone a few months ago, never once ran into a Meego phone, at least not that I know of.
Meego is not in shops because it's not finished yet. You couldn't buy a Meego phone a few months ago for the same reason you couldn't buy an Android phone in Q2 2008, even though Android's development started not later than 2005. For comparison, the development of Meego started in February 2010.
As an example of this behaviour from a non-evil company, see what happened to the Linksys WRT54G between v4 and v5.
No, the tax loophole involved shipping a CD with a toy BASIC interpreter with the console in UK. They did that on the PS2 (it was called YaBasic IIRC), which didn't support installing Linux at the time.
It's different: the slim PS3 had no Other OS because of cost cutting. The fat one kept it originally. :D] first hacking attempts were done on Linux, on a fat PS3, and required Linux (and a hardware glitch IIRC) to work. So Other OS was removed from the fat PS3 in response to his (failed) attempts.
Hotz's [is this writing correct?
Anyway, I'm afraid that much of what I like in Windows comes from its "legacy" roots, and I won't feel safe until I see what Microsoft will do with Windows 8 after they've been exposed to the "bad examples" of iOS and ChromeOS ;-) .
Yes, I know, it doesn't play Matroska files.
Anyway there are fanless Linux boxes for sale which draw much less power (and radiate much less heat) than a PS3.
I approve the work of hackers when they support the freedom of expression or they put in evidence how stupid it is for the media industry to spend so much money in DRM (especially since all that money will be paid by end users in the end, by higher prices). But I don't think this is the case. The PS3 was just that, a toy, and now it's broken.
If somebody sets a lion free, I don't blame the lion, I blame who set it free.
Perhaps. What's certain is that all PS3 exploits started on Linux, so shall we bet that the net result of this will be that Sony will think twice before adding the "Other Os" option in the PS4? Great.
With hindsight, every accomplishment seems easy. The fact is that the PS3 security, as broken as it was, kept it completely safe from piracy for four years - which is a world record. What lesson do you think that Sony, being the evil company that it is, will learn for the next console they make?
Frankly I have no doubt, and once again as a moron^H^H^H^H^H honest user I'll be penalized.
And this behaviour is not limited to consoles only: all online games for PC I've used, have a license agreement that grants to the maintainer of that game a permission to run a software on my machine monitoring the processes running on my system to ensure that I haven't tampered with the game code.
Woosh, I was in my turn sarcastically suggesting that there is a much more recent and appropriate precedent of a console manufacturer protecting online gaming on their platform.
Then they won't be able to buy a console at all, because Microsoft act much worse on their console (the 360 spits warning messages whose wording wouldn't feel out of context in "1984").
Nintendo, too, periodically release firmware updates to stop "homebrew", and warn that they have the right to brick your hardware if they discover you have made an "unauthorised use" of it.
I'm fine if Apple's tablets run a special-purpose, consumer-only OS that limits your freedom. If the Mac shows signs of going in the same direction, I have a bad feeling. If then Google releases a netbook with a locked boot loader that will only load Chrome OS, which in turn requires you to log in with your Google Account upon power up, I start to worry.
Perhaps RMS wasn't so paranoid when he warned against "the cloud" after all.
All the efforts from hackers resulted in:
I think the majority of console players know that a console is a closed box when they buy it. It's meant to play commercial games only. And a game is only meaningful if its code hasn't been tampered with by some of the players.
You're assuming that embedded chipset enjoy the same modularity and standards you can find in PCs. But in reality it's not always so; for example, most PC Bluetooth adapters follow the USB HCI standard and therefore require no specialized driver; Bluetooth adapters found in mobile phones, instead, are often implemented in a single chip that offers FM radio, GPS reception, Bluetooth and WLAN all multiplexed together in some custom way.