Did anyone else shudder at the image of senior citizens ambling down the street in robot suits? Just imagine the damage potential.
Bah, don't worry about it. They won't make it past ten miles an hour, regardless of what the suits can do. I'm more worried about the damage potential of a kid of the punk-ass variety.
PPC Open firmware... Flash PS3 with new firmware... Cheap Cell based Linux box...
Naw, never mind, you are probably right. Most likely, nobody will want to do anything with the 20 million PPC boxes coming out over the next few years. Nobody ever uses hardware in unintended ways.
Not that I am suggesting that this will be something that can be put directly on a PS3, but it may prove interesting, and educational to people wanting to make low level software...
That's why you don't allow calculators on that part of the test. It would be unreasonable to expect a teacher to be absolutely 100% familiar with the features of every single claculator on the market. It would be equally unreasonable to demand that a student buy a particular model.
But, by simply saying that since you are expected to know how to do something on your own, you have to do it on your own, you side-step the problem. We used to have tests in calculus, where part was calculator-allowed, and part was calculator-banned. That way, we all had to know the fundamentals of cranking through an integral by hand, but also had to know how to work our calculators. (well, technically, you could have done numerical integrals by hand, you just would have had to be really fast...)
Even so, there must be some variations that can be used. I found this by googling : powdered gall nuts, copper sulfate crystals, gum arabic, and water. There will be some variations in all of those items. The gall nuts in particular, must have some chemical variations depending on where they are grown, likewise water varies a bit from one region to another.
So, you basically want two inks. Not a completely different ink for each book. Just two inks. Then, you can use a binary code, alternating between the two (both valid, but slightly chemically distinct) inks. If you are lucky, the two inks will show up slightly different under UV. If not, you need a small sample from each of the first 32 (letters | pages | paragraphs) to get the unique 32 bit ID. A few bits to identify the individual, a few bits to identify which torah (his first, second, third, etc.)
There must be some soil additive in which you can grow gall nuts so that they glow (more | less) under UV. Then, anybody with a portable UV light and an internet connection can look for the glowing pattern and look it up in some hypothetical torah registry.
Steve mentioned that going forward, Intel processors have a higher "performance per watt" (whatever that is) than the PowerPC roadmap promises.
Uh, how is "performance per watt" at all an ambiguous term? Either they go faster at the same number of watts, or they go the same speed at fewer watts. There are only three words, and I'm not sure which of them you find so mind boggling.
Indeed, this will be a huge blow to Apple marketing. The PowerPC chips have always had some interesting feature, or excelled at some particular benchmark. Maybe they were faster, maybe they were slower. That's not the point. It was always possible to benchmark some obscure x86 worst case scenario to "prove" that they were selling the fastest computer in the world, ever.
Now, they will have negligible margins on Dell in the benchmarks. If they go a sane route and stay with OpenBoot or similar, they will still need video cards that don't depend on ugly PC BIOS, so they are still unlikely to be kings of 3D.
I understand the technical issues, but I would be surprised if IBM wasn't able to clean up their act with all the PPC chips they will be moving for embedded systems (game consoles as well as misc. other)
If it is going to take 300 hours to climb the elevator into orbit, does it make that big of a difference if you have to ride a boat for a day to get there? And, remember, most of what gets launched will be equipment, not people. Most of that wouldn't be flown anyway.
I don't see why that should be so surprising. I use a Windows XP or Debian box at work. I do lots of google searches related to my job. Constantly need to look up error messages which I have never seen, and things like that.
At home, I use a Mac. I read my email, and slashdot. And that is about all the web surfing I do at home. So, my personal "install base" is that I regularly use one PC and one Mac. But, my pasge views are far far higher on the PC, particularly at a place like google.
Now, somebody who uses a Mac professionally is more likely to be running Final Cut Pro, or something like that. Their job doesn't demand much web browsing. If they have a problem, or need a driver update, they call me, and I track it down for them. They will use whatever they have at home for the majority of their web browsing.
Also, I know many people who hang onto ancient Macs which couldn't run OS-X, and would be a glorious adventure to get on the web. I know people who have PC's of the same vintage, but it seems more common with Macs.
Oh, right. I have a mental block against DOS whenever I'm not at work. I simply forget it exists on weekends and holidays. I'll have to deal with DOS network drivers tomorrow. It will make me sad. But,, when I get home, I will once again be complete unaware of its existence. I think it is some sort of psychosis. I refuse to have any DOS machines at home, but have damn near everything else.
BTW, you are an evil fugly bastard for reminding me of it on a holiday. Jerk.:)
Keeping your code portable helps eliminate stupid assumptions, which make your software useless when the dominant platform changes. Once, all the world was a VAX, and people did stupid things. Then, the world changed. They kept doing stupid things.
Think, for example, about 64 bit cleanliness. A piece of software which supported Alpha, UltraSPARC64 and SGI's MIPS64, and so on, wouold have been fairly trivial to port to IA64, and AMD64, and PPC64 when they started to become significant. OTOH, code which assumed it was running on a 386 would have been a pain in the ass to port to even just AMD64.
Also, by supporting a broad spectrum of compilers, you will probably be able to understand what is going wrong when you compiler of choice changes. Witness code breakage on gcc3. Devs who had already ported their software to a variety of compilers were better able to respond to any issues, and fix their code.
Many monoculturalists make stupid endian-ness assumptions. Now, Mac OS X is becoming a significant market. If you have stupid endian-ness assumptions, then you may wind up having to basically rewrite in order to gain access to those millions of potential customers/users.
Imagine if OpenGL only supported SGI and 386. Or libtiff only worked on i386. People just wouldn't use them. Things like that get used because they are ubiquitous, and you can build them anywhere.
IF the input source of the analog converter has a low autocorrelation - in other words, what has gone before has little or no bearing on what is happening now. Crinkling cellophane into a mic *by itself* is a poor choice for randomness because of the relatively long periods of quiet, and because the microphone and input circuits will "color" the signal (specifically, the signal will be low passed by the input circuits and bandpassed by the microphone's response curve, both of which increase the autocorrelation of the signal).
It is traditional to just take the lowest order bit(s) from an analog source. The DAC on your sound card almost certainly doesn't have 16 real bits of precision. So, make some measurements to verify it doesn't have some systematic error (more likely to be a one or a zero), and sample at relatively "long" intervals, like every quarter second, so that there is no particular corellation between the samples. Do a little testing to verify that something tragic isn't happening, and you should be all set. No real need to crinkle the cellophane, since you are using the noise of the DAC, not the sound itself, but whatever floats your boat...
What do you mean "increasing?" Are you saying that dictionaries should only use Old English? You know, the dead language which used "thorn" as one of the letters. Ever try to read an original excerpt of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, for example? Language references must always grow and adapt with the language. Otherwise, they couldn't include a definition for computer which talked about a machine, or include the word "television." All words were new at some point. Some will fall out of use and stop being put in mainstream dictionaries. It's the circle of life, dude.
Seriously, what is the official year after which new words can't be in dictionaries?
It is pretty sad when the dictionary people don't know the real meaning of a word. They say in their introduction that it is merely to fit into a small space. That is not squinching. Dag nabbit. Also, the definition of w00t mis-spells the word, and gives no explanation. It is subtler than what they claim. more useful, and intriguing.
1. Linus didn't say that, Raymond did. 2. By your own analysis, all famous open-source projects should be bug-free, right? Like Firefox, right?
Stop drinking the kool-aid. Open source is not a panacea for all software development problems, and Raymond made a lot of sweeping generalities in the book you're quoting, many which make for great sound bites but are absolutely irrelevant.
Certainly, no reasonable person will suggest that if you make some horrible software, putting the source on an ftp server will magically cause it to work perfectly, or all the bugs to be instantly found. Open source software does, however have some merits.
Suppose a team is trying to track down a bug in some software they wrote, but they can't find it. Everything looks right. Well, then that's pretty much it. They just keep looking. With open source, you have a chance that some random stranger will approach a problem with a fresh set of eye balls, and ask, "What the hell were you smoking!!??!!" I know I have been immensely helped by having a friend looking at my code, and he has been immensely helped by having me look at his. Whenever some 3rd party can look things over, he isn't emotionally attached to early design decisions, and he hasn't already convinced himself that something is correct. The only was to do that with proprietary software is to bring in a consultant. That's usually expensive, and it would be embarassing to the devs if he found major problems.
Another advantage to OSS is that knowing your code will be seen by others forces you to be a bit less likely to name your variables bob and fish, and freddybob. Obviously, no proprietary developer should do anything like that, but we have all gotten caught up in trying to make a prototype, knowing about the weaknesses of the prototype, realising the schedule is short, and declaring the prototype "good enough." You try to convince your boss you need more time to do a proper rewrite, with an extensible architecture that will better accommodate growth. He says tough banannas. Then, you wind up trying to bolt on the features for version 2 and 3, onto what was supposed to be just a prototype. Madness ensues. Whereas, doing a public release from day 1 means you would be embarrassed if people saw your prototype, so you are a little more likely to try to do it right.
So, yeah, I agree with you that zealots have to much faith in OSS, and probably unjustified criticism of proprietary software, but on even footing, with competant developers on both sides, the ability of OSS to leverage more "outside proofreaders" does suggest that it has the potential to be a bit higher quality on the average. Not perfect. Not always better. But, still, not a bad idea.
I agree. I assume this is simply a CYA measure to prevent abuse. Otherwise, somebody would fork a kernel-kicthensink branch, and merge video en-/de-coding, deCSS, GIF compression, and everything else that might be covered by a apatent into some sort of crazy uberkernel. Multimedia projects could then throw out their code, and take the code from the protected kernel (which would be the same code, anyway) and declare themselves safe from Nokia and anybody who might follow in their footsteps.
Then, when Nokia realises they have some obscure patent on sending video to a cell phone, it would be harder to stop the open-source clone.
Also, if they patent something related to their cell phones, they might want to stop people from writing a fullfeatured driver for linux, which unlocks all sorts of features that are only supported in the expensive version of the phone.
Huzzah! You seem to be one of the few people posting who understand the implications of a closed source toolchain. By placing yourself at the mercy of a vendor, any vendor, you are begging to be screwed. When the old compiler is no longer available, and the new compiler is slightly incompatible, and only has support for new devices, you are forced to jump through all sorts of hoops to try and support old platforms with your software. This is in $Vendor$'s best interests because people will spend money on $Version++$ instead of the old one. They will do this because all new software only supports the new stuff.
Now, if we imagine something like gcc, at any time, anybody can port $version$ to $platform$. If you can't do it personally, but have a business interest in it, you can pay somebody to backport support for Objective Fortran++, or whatever. Or, forward-port support for $platform$.
A closed toolchain means the users are guaranteed that $platform$ will eventually be obsolete. It doesn't matter if it is MS, a good company, or a bad company. The company will be motivated by selling you $version++$.
I'd assume the "sci fi" misconception stems from the fact that it takes place in the future, and there are space ships and aliens, and they travel to different planets, and a robot is a main character. It amazes me the number of people who don't realise that it is a historical medical drama. Really just a Dr. Quinn rip off.
I agree it is unlikely, but not completely impossible. They want to get money from licensed developers, so naturally, there will be some degree of closure.
But, what if the when the console boots, if it detects it is trying to boot unsigned code, it declares:
Warning : You are trying to run code not approved by Nintendo. Doing so will void your warranty, and may damage the system. For best experiences, only run software with the Nintendo seal of approval!
Anybody trying to actually sell software would want to get the license in order to avoid panicking their market. Anybody doing homebrew won't care. Homebrew dev's get experience with the console, and maybe game design schools even adopt it. Lots of free software is avilable, people can run Linux web servers, so people buy Revolutions. Because lots of people have revolutions, some of them buy games.
The big drawback of course, is making piracy so easy. If homebrewers can run their own code, they can run somebody else's, too.
Except of course its not like TV at all which scans in horizontal lines.
The picture was scanned from the right hand side in vertical strips. As the picture is being scanned, the viewed Mars Odyssey is moving from right to left. The camera is also rotating from right to left.
You do realise that they could have published the picture at absolutely any angle, and it still would have been correct, right? Because there is no real physical distinction between vertical and horizontal. Try this : Turn your head. Isn't that cool?
Oh, wait, now you will probably say the analohy to a raster scanning TV is completely wrong because it looks like it is going bottom to top. turn the other way!
The situation must be the same with Windows Media Player for the Mac as well. Although it recently got updated to play the WMV9 format, its a horrible application. With some WMVs that I double click on it asks me to "Check the filename" or some crap and does not play. You can't play more than one movie at a time or queue them or put them in a playlist or anything. Its amusing that when you launch multiple WMVs from the command line 'open' command or by selecting multiple ones in the finder and launching them Windows Media Player will decide to only play the last one for you.
Yes, I have the MS WMP for OSX on my iBook. It is quite bad. I assume it only exists so that Mac users will complain about the user experience, and see how much better WMP is on Windows. I try to use VLC whenever possible, and I do have quite good luck, but the dreaded "WM9" / "WMV3" whatchmacallit codec won't play in VLC. Heck, on OSX, even VLC doesn't have that great of an interface. AFAICT, I can't scale the controller window, which makes jumping to a specific point in a large movie a bit inconvenient....
What's worse, with WM9 clips, I usually get a "hardware license inconsistent" error message. As I understand that, it means that the DRM license is only available for x86 windows machines. Of course, I hate DRM enough that I would probably just refuse to let WMP get the license, and not bother with the clip, as I do on Windows. But, still, it would be nice if it was *possible* to play it!
I'm not sure what MS actually gains from having their own video codec, but I can say that I definitely don't gain anything from it. MPEGs are fine. While I'm on the subject, Apple's Quicktime Player is almost as bad as the Windows Media player, with the exception that Quicktime player is also nagware.
By having their own codec, they can ease us onto their DRM platform, and show us how much better WMV plays on Windows (and nothing else.) Control. Lock-in. Just like the bugs in IE. If IE rendered the same as any other browser, everybody could easily switch browsers, and stop being tied to Windows.
QT player is not great, but aside from the occasional nags (only once per boot, IIRC, and I tend to get ~1 month uptime on my iBook because I am lazy about installing the updates - hooray for sleep mode), it certainly isn't as bad as WMP/mac. It will allow multiple open windows, and none of the formats it plays have DRM. And, I can close a window without quitting the program. I hate having to completely reopen WMP every time I want to play a video. It's only a few seconds, but it pisses me off. It's un-mac-like.
Dag nabbit. I just got a 512 MB SD card for my PDA, under the assumption I'd never really need more on a Palm Pilot. (Enough for a few episodes of MPEG-1 TV shows, I don't need to carry a whole season with me at all times...)
Is there any way to squash it onto a 512 MB card? Can I get a slightly older version anywhere?
IMHO, it makes sense for game *developers,* just not gamers. A developer working on a game coming out in two years will wantto make sure it can take full advantage of 512 MB - 1 GB of video memory. Aside from that, animators and scientific vis people will be interested in it. Anything where you are making the scene, and you know that you will have > 512 MB of textures in a frame.
Past that, yeah, it's just a matter of bragging rights. I know people who will buy it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, don't worry about it. They won't make it past ten miles an hour, regardless of what the suits can do. I'm more worried about the damage potential of a kid of the punk-ass variety.
PPC Open firmware... Flash PS3 with new firmware... Cheap Cell based Linux box...
Naw, never mind, you are probably right. Most likely, nobody will want to do anything with the 20 million PPC boxes coming out over the next few years. Nobody ever uses hardware in unintended ways.
Not that I am suggesting that this will be something that can be put directly on a PS3, but it may prove interesting, and educational to people wanting to make low level software...
That's why you don't allow calculators on that part of the test. It would be unreasonable to expect a teacher to be absolutely 100% familiar with the features of every single claculator on the market. It would be equally unreasonable to demand that a student buy a particular model.
But, by simply saying that since you are expected to know how to do something on your own, you have to do it on your own, you side-step the problem. We used to have tests in calculus, where part was calculator-allowed, and part was calculator-banned. That way, we all had to know the fundamentals of cranking through an integral by hand, but also had to know how to work our calculators. (well, technically, you could have done numerical integrals by hand, you just would have had to be really fast...)
Even so, there must be some variations that can be used. I found this by googling : powdered gall nuts, copper sulfate crystals, gum arabic, and water. There will be some variations in all of those items. The gall nuts in particular, must have some chemical variations depending on where they are grown, likewise water varies a bit from one region to another.
So, you basically want two inks. Not a completely different ink for each book. Just two inks. Then, you can use a binary code, alternating between the two (both valid, but slightly chemically distinct) inks. If you are lucky, the two inks will show up slightly different under UV. If not, you need a small sample from each of the first 32 (letters | pages | paragraphs) to get the unique 32 bit ID. A few bits to identify the individual, a few bits to identify which torah (his first, second, third, etc.)
There must be some soil additive in which you can grow gall nuts so that they glow (more | less) under UV. Then, anybody with a portable UV light and an internet connection can look for the glowing pattern and look it up in some hypothetical torah registry.
Uh, how is "performance per watt" at all an ambiguous term? Either they go faster at the same number of watts, or they go the same speed at fewer watts. There are only three words, and I'm not sure which of them you find so mind boggling.
Indeed, this will be a huge blow to Apple marketing. The PowerPC chips have always had some interesting feature, or excelled at some particular benchmark. Maybe they were faster, maybe they were slower. That's not the point. It was always possible to benchmark some obscure x86 worst case scenario to "prove" that they were selling the fastest computer in the world, ever.
Now, they will have negligible margins on Dell in the benchmarks. If they go a sane route and stay with OpenBoot or similar, they will still need video cards that don't depend on ugly PC BIOS, so they are still unlikely to be kings of 3D.
I understand the technical issues, but I would be surprised if IBM wasn't able to clean up their act with all the PPC chips they will be moving for embedded systems (game consoles as well as misc. other)
Color me worried.
If it is going to take 300 hours to climb the elevator into orbit, does it make that big of a difference if you have to ride a boat for a day to get there? And, remember, most of what gets launched will be equipment, not people. Most of that wouldn't be flown anyway.
I don't see why that should be so surprising. I use a Windows XP or Debian box at work. I do lots of google searches related to my job. Constantly need to look up error messages which I have never seen, and things like that.
At home, I use a Mac. I read my email, and slashdot. And that is about all the web surfing I do at home. So, my personal "install base" is that I regularly use one PC and one Mac. But, my pasge views are far far higher on the PC, particularly at a place like google.
Now, somebody who uses a Mac professionally is more likely to be running Final Cut Pro, or something like that. Their job doesn't demand much web browsing. If they have a problem, or need a driver update, they call me, and I track it down for them. They will use whatever they have at home for the majority of their web browsing.
Also, I know many people who hang onto ancient Macs which couldn't run OS-X, and would be a glorious adventure to get on the web. I know people who have PC's of the same vintage, but it seems more common with Macs.
Yes, it is all about generating more revenue for registrars. No, the bulk of real sites will not abandon .com or .org or whatever.
At best, there will be a few fairly well known sites in the TLD, and a significant chunk of duplication between name.com and name.whatever
I'm unsure what infirmity of mind would cause one to genuinely believe otherwise.
Oh, right. I have a mental block against DOS whenever I'm not at work. I simply forget it exists on weekends and holidays. I'll have to deal with DOS network drivers tomorrow. It will make me sad. But,, when I get home, I will once again be complete unaware of its existence. I think it is some sort of psychosis. I refuse to have any DOS machines at home, but have damn near everything else.
:)
BTW, you are an evil fugly bastard for reminding me of it on a holiday. Jerk.
Keeping your code portable helps eliminate stupid assumptions, which make your software useless when the dominant platform changes. Once, all the world was a VAX, and people did stupid things. Then, the world changed. They kept doing stupid things.
Think, for example, about 64 bit cleanliness. A piece of software which supported Alpha, UltraSPARC64 and SGI's MIPS64, and so on, wouold have been fairly trivial to port to IA64, and AMD64, and PPC64 when they started to become significant. OTOH, code which assumed it was running on a 386 would have been a pain in the ass to port to even just AMD64.
Also, by supporting a broad spectrum of compilers, you will probably be able to understand what is going wrong when you compiler of choice changes. Witness code breakage on gcc3. Devs who had already ported their software to a variety of compilers were better able to respond to any issues, and fix their code.
Many monoculturalists make stupid endian-ness assumptions. Now, Mac OS X is becoming a significant market. If you have stupid endian-ness assumptions, then you may wind up having to basically rewrite in order to gain access to those millions of potential customers/users.
Imagine if OpenGL only supported SGI and 386. Or libtiff only worked on i386. People just wouldn't use them. Things like that get used because they are ubiquitous, and you can build them anywhere.
It is traditional to just take the lowest order bit(s) from an analog source. The DAC on your sound card almost certainly doesn't have 16 real bits of precision. So, make some measurements to verify it doesn't have some systematic error (more likely to be a one or a zero), and sample at relatively "long" intervals, like every quarter second, so that there is no particular corellation between the samples. Do a little testing to verify that something tragic isn't happening, and you should be all set. No real need to crinkle the cellophane, since you are using the noise of the DAC, not the sound itself, but whatever floats your boat...
What do you mean "increasing?" Are you saying that dictionaries should only use Old English? You know, the dead language which used "thorn" as one of the letters. Ever try to read an original excerpt of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, for example? Language references must always grow and adapt with the language. Otherwise, they couldn't include a definition for computer which talked about a machine, or include the word "television." All words were new at some point. Some will fall out of use and stop being put in mainstream dictionaries. It's the circle of life, dude.
Seriously, what is the official year after which new words can't be in dictionaries?
It is pretty sad when the dictionary people don't know the real meaning of a word. They say in their introduction that it is merely to fit into a small space. That is not squinching. Dag nabbit. Also, the definition of w00t mis-spells the word, and gives no explanation. It is subtler than what they claim. more useful, and intriguing.
Certainly, no reasonable person will suggest that if you make some horrible software, putting the source on an ftp server will magically cause it to work perfectly, or all the bugs to be instantly found. Open source software does, however have some merits.
Suppose a team is trying to track down a bug in some software they wrote, but they can't find it. Everything looks right. Well, then that's pretty much it. They just keep looking. With open source, you have a chance that some random stranger will approach a problem with a fresh set of eye balls, and ask, "What the hell were you smoking!!??!!" I know I have been immensely helped by having a friend looking at my code, and he has been immensely helped by having me look at his. Whenever some 3rd party can look things over, he isn't emotionally attached to early design decisions, and he hasn't already convinced himself that something is correct. The only was to do that with proprietary software is to bring in a consultant. That's usually expensive, and it would be embarassing to the devs if he found major problems.
Another advantage to OSS is that knowing your code will be seen by others forces you to be a bit less likely to name your variables bob and fish, and freddybob. Obviously, no proprietary developer should do anything like that, but we have all gotten caught up in trying to make a prototype, knowing about the weaknesses of the prototype, realising the schedule is short, and declaring the prototype "good enough." You try to convince your boss you need more time to do a proper rewrite, with an extensible architecture that will better accommodate growth. He says tough banannas. Then, you wind up trying to bolt on the features for version 2 and 3, onto what was supposed to be just a prototype. Madness ensues. Whereas, doing a public release from day 1 means you would be embarrassed if people saw your prototype, so you are a little more likely to try to do it right.
So, yeah, I agree with you that zealots have to much faith in OSS, and probably unjustified criticism of proprietary software, but on even footing, with competant developers on both sides, the ability of OSS to leverage more "outside proofreaders" does suggest that it has the potential to be a bit higher quality on the average. Not perfect. Not always better. But, still, not a bad idea.
I agree. I assume this is simply a CYA measure to prevent abuse. Otherwise, somebody would fork a kernel-kicthensink branch, and merge video en-/de-coding, deCSS, GIF compression, and everything else that might be covered by a apatent into some sort of crazy uberkernel. Multimedia projects could then throw out their code, and take the code from the protected kernel (which would be the same code, anyway) and declare themselves safe from Nokia and anybody who might follow in their footsteps.
Then, when Nokia realises they have some obscure patent on sending video to a cell phone, it would be harder to stop the open-source clone.
Also, if they patent something related to their cell phones, they might want to stop people from writing a fullfeatured driver for linux, which unlocks all sorts of features that are only supported in the expensive version of the phone.
I reccomend writing *on* the monitor, rather than on a sticky note on the monitor. They aren't *that* sticky!
One toolbar to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them...
Huzzah! You seem to be one of the few people posting who understand the implications of a closed source toolchain. By placing yourself at the mercy of a vendor, any vendor, you are begging to be screwed. When the old compiler is no longer available, and the new compiler is slightly incompatible, and only has support for new devices, you are forced to jump through all sorts of hoops to try and support old platforms with your software. This is in $Vendor$'s best interests because people will spend money on $Version++$ instead of the old one. They will do this because all new software only supports the new stuff.
Now, if we imagine something like gcc, at any time, anybody can port $version$ to $platform$. If you can't do it personally, but have a business interest in it, you can pay somebody to backport support for Objective Fortran++, or whatever. Or, forward-port support for $platform$.
A closed toolchain means the users are guaranteed that $platform$ will eventually be obsolete. It doesn't matter if it is MS, a good company, or a bad company. The company will be motivated by selling you $version++$.
I'd assume the "sci fi" misconception stems from the fact that it takes place in the future, and there are space ships and aliens, and they travel to different planets, and a robot is a main character. It amazes me the number of people who don't realise that it is a historical medical drama. Really just a Dr. Quinn rip off.
I agree it is unlikely, but not completely impossible. They want to get money from licensed developers, so naturally, there will be some degree of closure.
But, what if the when the console boots, if it detects it is trying to boot unsigned code, it declares:
Warning : You are trying to run code not approved by Nintendo. Doing so will void your warranty, and may damage the system. For best experiences, only run software with the Nintendo seal of approval!
Anybody trying to actually sell software would want to get the license in order to avoid panicking their market. Anybody doing homebrew won't care. Homebrew dev's get experience with the console, and maybe game design schools even adopt it. Lots of free software is avilable, people can run Linux web servers, so people buy Revolutions. Because lots of people have revolutions, some of them buy games.
The big drawback of course, is making piracy so easy. If homebrewers can run their own code, they can run somebody else's, too.
Yes, I have the MS WMP for OSX on my iBook. It is quite bad. I assume it only exists so that Mac users will complain about the user experience, and see how much better WMP is on Windows. I try to use VLC whenever possible, and I do have quite good luck, but the dreaded "WM9" / "WMV3" whatchmacallit codec won't play in VLC. Heck, on OSX, even VLC doesn't have that great of an interface. AFAICT, I can't scale the controller window, which makes jumping to a specific point in a large movie a bit inconvenient....
What's worse, with WM9 clips, I usually get a "hardware license inconsistent" error message. As I understand that, it means that the DRM license is only available for x86 windows machines. Of course, I hate DRM enough that I would probably just refuse to let WMP get the license, and not bother with the clip, as I do on Windows. But, still, it would be nice if it was *possible* to play it!
By having their own codec, they can ease us onto their DRM platform, and show us how much better WMV plays on Windows (and nothing else.) Control. Lock-in. Just like the bugs in IE. If IE rendered the same as any other browser, everybody could easily switch browsers, and stop being tied to Windows.
QT player is not great, but aside from the occasional nags (only once per boot, IIRC, and I tend to get ~1 month uptime on my iBook because I am lazy about installing the updates - hooray for sleep mode), it certainly isn't as bad as WMP/mac. It will allow multiple open windows, and none of the formats it plays have DRM. And, I can close a window without quitting the program. I hate having to completely reopen WMP every time I want to play a video. It's only a few seconds, but it pisses me off. It's un-mac-like.
Dag nabbit. I just got a 512 MB SD card for my PDA, under the assumption I'd never really need more on a Palm Pilot. (Enough for a few episodes of MPEG-1 TV shows, I don't need to carry a whole season with me at all times...)
Is there any way to squash it onto a 512 MB card? Can I get a slightly older version anywhere?
IMHO, it makes sense for game *developers,* just not gamers. A developer working on a game coming out in two years will wantto make sure it can take full advantage of 512 MB - 1 GB of video memory. Aside from that, animators and scientific vis people will be interested in it. Anything where you are making the scene, and you know that you will have > 512 MB of textures in a frame.
Past that, yeah, it's just a matter of bragging rights. I know people who will buy it anyway.