I believe you can switch your iPhone SIM card over to some dumb phone, adjust your plan to include unlimited data for dumb phones (costs less than unlimited data for smart phones)... and then put that SIM card back in the iPhone.
A word of warning to anyone wanting to try...
For Rogers in Canada, the "cheap data plans for generic phones" (say the $7 all-you-can-leech instead of the "big" plan for iPhone) is locked to the IMEI number of your phone. The carrier has a list of IMEIs of all the phones it sold to subscribers.
When you power up a phone with a SIM card inside, the IMEI is transmitted to the carrier. If the IMEI is unknown (your phone is "unapproved") the cheap data plan is not in effect, and you pay through the nose.
This is all in the fine print that no one reads, though not that explicitly:)
This isn't so much of a problem, since you are able to see the caller's phone number and so you can decide whether you want to pay to talk to them.
Here in Canada the bundles are set up so that the voice mailbox is free (it costs you money to listen to messages), but the caller ID is extra (because you might not answer). Same reasonning for Call Waiting (it's a freebie because they charge you double for the two simultaneous calls).
Cell phone plans in Canada are such a racket, it's unbelievable.
Wait a minute. Do you pay when you receive text messages!?
Yes. Realize the sender also paid the same ridiculous rate to send his message to you, so in fact the phone company is double-dipping the bandwidth charge. Your head a splode indeed...
Does it boot with the Function keys "disabled" (as in, not mapped to F1-F12) by default? That's gotta be one of the most annoying misfeatures of recent keyboards...
I'm currently using a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro, and had to buy my latest one on eBay since they're discontinued. That's the last "decent" keyboard I've seen, everything after that is highly annoying to me.
I am not MS, but I don't really see much business value in rolling your own video controller. More likely the NIH syndrome kicked in, or some people were overly concerned about their job security. For the original Xbox, MS licensed the chip from NVIDIA. This seems like the right thing to do, but now you're bound to the will of the IP owner. As such, MS could not disclose a lot of information about the GPU (register specs, etc) to registered game developers.
This is no longer a problem on Xbox 360. Because they own the IP, MS is allowed to share as much information as it wants about the GPU, which is really helpful for 3D programmers.
In this case I seriously doubt it is a case of NIH...
For those who have never played the original Prince of Persia, it's a game so good it's still worth playing today. Indeed...
For those who don't know, the console version of Sands of Time also includes a full copy of the original game as an Easter Egg. The NTSC Xbox version of Sands of Time also includes a port of the PC version of Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (which is better than the original IMO).
The only problem I can see in downloading a game is "do you really own this game"? [...] I would be very surprised if you can back it up, so a hard disk failure [...] may mean the loss of games you have paid for.
You don't have a 360, do you?:)
Unlike the Wii, Xbox Live (and PlayStation Store) purchases are associated to your account, not your console. This means you can re-download them if needed once you bought them. No need to fear a hardware failure.
The interesting question is, can you re-download the free-for-a-limited-time games? Since you didn't really pay for it, I don't know if that counts as a purchase (I suspect it does, but I have no evidence to back that up).
The trade off between storage can be seen last gen. Look at the Xbox version of the Prince of Persia games compared to the Gamecube. The difference in music is easily identifiable and is caused by the Xbox using 9GB disks while the Gamecube used 1.5GB disks.
As someone who worked on Sands of Time, I can tell you that both versions used practically the same data, so the perceived difference is probably due to the superior sound output of the Xbox (5.1 vs ProLogic II). Graphically there were some minor improvements on the textures, models and lighting on Xbox, but essentially all platforms were identical -- you got the same game no matter which platform you had.
The Xbox version could fit on a GC disc (IIRC the entire game is about 1.2GB), but since we had the extra DVD space we included more stuff on it (bonus videos, ports of the original POP and POP2, etc). I don't recall which extras were present on the GC version.
They wouldn't be able to advertise their service as "unlimited".
Nonsense! Observe:
Subscribe to our unlimited* service!
(*) service not actually unlimited
Maybe it's different in the states, but here in Canada every ISP has been pulling the "unlimited" advertising stunt for as long as I can remember. Before it was in hours connected (for dialup), now it's in bandwidth usage...
I was lucky enough to have a real unlimited account with my local ISP (Videotron), but through the magic of small print and open TOS aggreements, they just redefined "unlimited" to mean "100GB/month" this week.
It's sad that "unlimited" now means "some seemingly big number to dupe people into subscribing".
Fully agree with you on the need for something like XMBC on the PS3. Actually, you don't even need to; it's already there in the XMB!
I was quite surprised to find that the built-in media streaming features of the PS3 are an almost perfect replacement to XBMC (I just got my PS3 last week, taking advantage of the "fire sale"). The PS3 can already access all your media shared via UPnP, like the Xbox 360 (and "recent" XBMC builds).
There is absolutely no comparison to the built-in streaming of the Xbox 360 -- the PS3 interface is actually usable, and the connection to your media server always works (on the 360 the "discovery" process is very hit-and-miss, and it often loses the connection after a PC or 360 reboot).
It's not quite XBMC yet, but it's close. I can finally stream HD content that my old Xbox 1 was struggling with....
Regarding transcoding, I've set up TVersity (which I already had for XBMC and Xbox 360) and couldn't be happier. The PS3 sees my DivX or x264 or mkv stuff as MPEG-2 streams, which (I assume) is less taxing on the CPU to transcode to than WMV. I can now stream 720p HD in realtime, something I couldn't do on the Xbox 360, using my "puny" P4 3.4GHz. Compared to the 360, there is no delay when starting a video, despite the fact that it is transcoded...!
So far the only problems is that transcoded media loses the AC3 sound (apparently this is a TVersity limitation, but I didn't really look into it), and you obviously can't REW/FFWD until the transcoding is completed. Videos can also be copied (thus transcoded) locally to the PS3 and then viewed with all features enabled, including a live preview in the XMB (so not safe for pr0n!). Apparently TVersity also has a transcode-and-save option but I didn't find it.
Another "awesome" feature (for tech-loving geeks) if you have a PSP is Remote Play. You can basically remote-control the PS3 from the PSP, and media played on the PS3 is streamed to the PSP, including your HD videos! Naturally they are downscaled quite a bit to be streamable, but it was quite amazing to be able to access all of my media, including videos, anywhere around the house from the PSP.
I think by now I sound like a Sony shill, but I assure you this is not the case, I am just truly impressed. With all the crap Sony is pulling recently, the last thing I expected is for the PS3 to actually replace my trusty XBMC box:)
I buy my consoles at Sam's Club or Wal-Mart. Broken 360? Drive to the store and exchange it.
I do the same here (I got tired of dealing with MS support). After getting back two b0rked 360s from MS, I bought a new one at Costco and returned the old one (basically a swap). Costco's policy is to always refund the sale, and if you want an exchange you just buy it again.
I've had one more Ring of Death since, so I did the "Costco swap" again. Overall I'm on my 5th Xbox now (2 died, 2 were broken-on-arrival).
One caveat though, some stores check serial numbers and refuse returns if the serial doesn't match what's on the invoice. However since Costco sells "sealed" bundles with extra stuff, they can't open them to check the serial numbers when you buy...:)
recently it started freezing up in the middle of play.
"Xbox is about to die."
Seriously, call 1-800-4MY-XBOX, they'll tell you if there is cause for concern (and they'll swap it out if so).
I'm on my fifth one already... Previous 4 died (and anyone who knows me knows I take extreme care of my stuff). I'm starting to believe the "self-destruct" conspiracy...:)
Ok, now I'm even more confused, the Vista 'Administrator' account is not analogous to the Unix 'root' account?
Exactly. An account with Administrator "privileges" is not root, it only has to click "Continue" instead of typing his/her password to perform system changes. Only Standard users require an Administrator account password to perform system changes; Administrators are "pre-approved" and just need to click to allow system changes.
In short: no account level can perform system changes without confirmation. Your account level only determines the amount of information you need to provide to allow the system changes to be performed (password or click).
[...] anybody who walks up to your computer while you're in the bathroom can make system changes without having to know the password to your 'Administrator' account?
Yes, exactly. But similar things can also occur with the sudo grace period, unless you take care to lock your session as you leave your desk (not a bad idea on either OS!). In this respect Vista is much worse than Linux.
If this is the case, I wouldn't award Microsoft the "caught up" award just yet.
Indeed... Thankfully I'm now free of this mess and finally managed to convert myself over to Linux:)
I don't think I explained Vista's behavior properly. My understanding is that a "Cancel or Allow" dialog is just that, equivalent to "Are you sure?". There is a separate (but similar) dialog that also escalates your privilege that shows up when you click on something that has a little shield icon.
If you are an administrator account, then it asks you for "Cancel or Continue" but not for your password (because in Vista, administrator != root). If you're running under a standard user account, then that dialog also requires the password for the administrator account to grant the request.
In any case I was just trying to point out that most of the nagging comes from borked legacy apps, not from Vista's "security design" itself (even if the end result is the same). New or updated apps must behave properly, and finally Windows developers can no longer ignore these issues. It only took Microsoft, what, 15 years to catch up to the Unix security model?:)
[...] I'm not a Vista user so I don't know when it does or does not prompt you for administrator access. I do however know that Vista will prompt you to "cancel or allow" the execution of user space processing that do not need administrator privileges to run.
The amount of "Cancel or Allow?" prompting in Vista is pretty much at the same level as the amount of sudo on Linux. However, most existing Windows software was written for XP/2K, where admin access is assumed, therefore many programs require admin rights for stupid reasons (writing files in the install dir, putting stuff in the global registry, etc). In XP/2K these rules couldn't be enforced since you were the admin all the time.
So today Vista's taking heat for always asking you for admin rights, but it's more of a byproduct of backward compatibility. If you run Vista-aware software (or rather, Windows software that doesn't try to write crap where it shouldn't), the level of nagging is tolerable.
The big difference compared to sudo is the "5-min grace period" where it remembers that you are root and doesn't ask for the password. In Vista there is a 5-10 second wait for the "Cancel or Allow?" dialog to pop up, and it will always pop up (sometimes more than once for the same program). The sudo grace period is a great productivity boost when you need to do several admin changes in a row; not so with Vista.
After a while I got tired of the constant nagging (the Windows software I tend to use does not have updates for Vista), so I installed Ubuntu and haven't looked back yet.:)
I think having two monitors is totally unnecessary, simply because they make very big single monitors now.
For me the major advantage of two monitors over a single huge one is that maximized windows only takes up a single monitor (half your desktop space). To accomplish the same result with a big monitor, you have to resort to third-party hacks to split your desktop into "virtual monitors" (in Windows anyway), and there's always that one app that doesn't work with it...
Backdoor nothing, I've long wondered how long until we see a virus that does this, holding the user's data hostage (unless they wire $x to some random account or whatever).
Something similar already happened, though it wasn't as bad. Back in the time of PC boot sector viruses (revealing my age here...) there was one of them that would start remapping sectors in the FAT. Of course the virus itself kept the remapping table, and patched accordingly at runtime, so you didn't notice anything funny. Once you detected and removed the virus (along with the remapping table!), your data was gone:)
I don't remember the name of the virus (I'm too lazy to google it right now), but a friend of mine got infected. Good times, good times... (not!)
What's wrong with the oldie-but-goodie Bomberman '93 now available for download
IMO the absolute best of the Bomberman series was Bomberman '94. Sadly it was only available in Japan, which means no VC release in North America. (Wake up Nintendo, lots of money to be made here at no cost!)
I actually bought '93 on VC thinking it was '94, serves me right for not double-checking in an emulator before buying...:)
The producers of the television show 24 have a great DVD marketing strategy -- show some new footage that takes place just before the yet-to-be-aired season and package it on the DVDs of the previous season as a bonus
For season 6 they pushed it a bit overboard I think - on the morning following the "4-hour premiere" broadcast, you could buy a DVD with those 4 episodes, and the bonus footage (the "bait") was scenes from the following week's episode...
It seems likely to me that MS has a trick to allow protected processes to be debugged. It's either a secret mode of Vista, or they have debug builds of Vista that allow this type of snooping to take place.
...which already allows one to "hijack" any executable and replace it with another, on a retail system (it's still there in Vista). No idea how/if it will work on a protected executable, though. It would certainly be an interesting experiment, but I don't have such a system here.
This trick is quite handy to stop services that you don't have rights to, by replacing them with dummy executables... *cough* corporate USB port disabling software *cough*:)
Are modded original Xbox consoles available for purchase where I live (that is, in the United States)? I seem to remember that eBay bans them.
You might have a hard time buying a pre-modded console, but seriously, half the fun is modding it yourself:) If you can't do it, you probably aren't the target audience (most of the homebrew software requires lots of tinkering, and that includes XBMC).
I've read that the softmods don't work too well in recent Xbox firmware.
That's not been my experience (last softmod I did was for a rev 1.6 w/o problems, not sure if they changed since?). The modchip is easier to recover from if you fuck up. Search for a bit and you'll find that current modchips are fairly easy to install (some without any soldering).
Before anyone complains, I am not advocating piracy, I don't care about backups, my Xbox 1 is dedicated to XBMC.
Or has Windows XB 360 been updated to be able to stream media from any HTTP or SMB server, not just Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition?
Actually yes, the Xbox 360 was recently updated to allow streaming of videos without Media Center (limited to MS-approved formats however). I know of at least one UPnP streaming server for Linux compatible with the 360 (TwonkyVision), although it doesn't do realtime transcoding (unlike TVersity on Windows).
If you want a "playback device" for your living room, a modded Xbox 1 with XBMC is a much better experience than the 360. XBMC recently added UPnP support as well, so you don't even need to mess with SMB shares anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect the iPhone SDK NDA bullshit will end with the end of the Android SDK NDA bullshit. Neither wants to show their cards first.
Nothing is stopping Google from signing up to get the Apple SDK... since ADC membership is open to everyone. That's what weird here.
What use is an NDA if anyone who wants the info is accepted?
I believe you can switch your iPhone SIM card over to some dumb phone, adjust your plan to include unlimited data for dumb phones (costs less than unlimited data for smart phones)... and then put that SIM card back in the iPhone.
A word of warning to anyone wanting to try...
For Rogers in Canada, the "cheap data plans for generic phones" (say the $7 all-you-can-leech instead of the "big" plan for iPhone) is locked to the IMEI number of your phone. The carrier has a list of IMEIs of all the phones it sold to subscribers.
When you power up a phone with a SIM card inside, the IMEI is transmitted to the carrier. If the IMEI is unknown (your phone is "unapproved") the cheap data plan is not in effect, and you pay through the nose.
This is all in the fine print that no one reads, though not that explicitly :)
This isn't so much of a problem, since you are able to see the caller's phone number and so you can decide whether you want to pay to talk to them.
Here in Canada the bundles are set up so that the voice mailbox is free (it costs you money to listen to messages), but the caller ID is extra (because you might not answer). Same reasonning for Call Waiting (it's a freebie because they charge you double for the two simultaneous calls).
Cell phone plans in Canada are such a racket, it's unbelievable.
Wait a minute. Do you pay when you receive text messages!?
Yes. Realize the sender also paid the same ridiculous rate to send his message to you, so in fact the phone company is double-dipping the bandwidth charge. Your head a splode indeed...
Is that even legal!?
Sadly, yes.
Does it boot with the Function keys "disabled" (as in, not mapped to F1-F12) by default? That's gotta be one of the most annoying misfeatures of recent keyboards...
I'm currently using a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro, and had to buy my latest one on eBay since they're discontinued. That's the last "decent" keyboard I've seen, everything after that is highly annoying to me.
This new one is close to a decent replacement...
This is no longer a problem on Xbox 360. Because they own the IP, MS is allowed to share as much information as it wants about the GPU, which is really helpful for 3D programmers.
In this case I seriously doubt it is a case of NIH...
For those who don't know, the console version of Sands of Time also includes a full copy of the original game as an Easter Egg. The NTSC Xbox version of Sands of Time also includes a port of the PC version of Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame (which is better than the original IMO).
Unlike the Wii, Xbox Live (and PlayStation Store) purchases are associated to your account, not your console. This means you can re-download them if needed once you bought them. No need to fear a hardware failure.
The interesting question is, can you re-download the free-for-a-limited-time games? Since you didn't really pay for it, I don't know if that counts as a purchase (I suspect it does, but I have no evidence to back that up).
The Xbox version could fit on a GC disc (IIRC the entire game is about 1.2GB), but since we had the extra DVD space we included more stuff on it (bonus videos, ports of the original POP and POP2, etc). I don't recall which extras were present on the GC version.
Subscribe to our unlimited* service!
(*) service not actually unlimited
Maybe it's different in the states, but here in Canada every ISP has been pulling the "unlimited" advertising stunt for as long as I can remember. Before it was in hours connected (for dialup), now it's in bandwidth usage...
I was lucky enough to have a real unlimited account with my local ISP (Videotron), but through the magic of small print and open TOS aggreements, they just redefined "unlimited" to mean "100GB/month" this week.
It's sad that "unlimited" now means "some seemingly big number to dupe people into subscribing".
I was quite surprised to find that the built-in media streaming features of the PS3 are an almost perfect replacement to XBMC (I just got my PS3 last week, taking advantage of the "fire sale"). The PS3 can already access all your media shared via UPnP, like the Xbox 360 (and "recent" XBMC builds).
There is absolutely no comparison to the built-in streaming of the Xbox 360 -- the PS3 interface is actually usable, and the connection to your media server always works (on the 360 the "discovery" process is very hit-and-miss, and it often loses the connection after a PC or 360 reboot).
It's not quite XBMC yet, but it's close. I can finally stream HD content that my old Xbox 1 was struggling with....
Regarding transcoding, I've set up TVersity (which I already had for XBMC and Xbox 360) and couldn't be happier. The PS3 sees my DivX or x264 or mkv stuff as MPEG-2 streams, which (I assume) is less taxing on the CPU to transcode to than WMV. I can now stream 720p HD in realtime, something I couldn't do on the Xbox 360, using my "puny" P4 3.4GHz. Compared to the 360, there is no delay when starting a video, despite the fact that it is transcoded...!
So far the only problems is that transcoded media loses the AC3 sound (apparently this is a TVersity limitation, but I didn't really look into it), and you obviously can't REW/FFWD until the transcoding is completed. Videos can also be copied (thus transcoded) locally to the PS3 and then viewed with all features enabled, including a live preview in the XMB (so not safe for pr0n!). Apparently TVersity also has a transcode-and-save option but I didn't find it.
Another "awesome" feature (for tech-loving geeks) if you have a PSP is Remote Play. You can basically remote-control the PS3 from the PSP, and media played on the PS3 is streamed to the PSP, including your HD videos! Naturally they are downscaled quite a bit to be streamable, but it was quite amazing to be able to access all of my media, including videos, anywhere around the house from the PSP.
I think by now I sound like a Sony shill, but I assure you this is not the case, I am just truly impressed. With all the crap Sony is pulling recently, the last thing I expected is for the PS3 to actually replace my trusty XBMC box
I've had one more Ring of Death since, so I did the "Costco swap" again. Overall I'm on my 5th Xbox now (2 died, 2 were broken-on-arrival).
One caveat though, some stores check serial numbers and refuse returns if the serial doesn't match what's on the invoice. However since Costco sells "sealed" bundles with extra stuff, they can't open them to check the serial numbers when you buy...
Seriously, call 1-800-4MY-XBOX, they'll tell you if there is cause for concern (and they'll swap it out if so).
I'm on my fifth one already... Previous 4 died (and anyone who knows me knows I take extreme care of my stuff). I'm starting to believe the "self-destruct" conspiracy...
Or is there a secret SD slot that I haven't found yet on my PSP? [Full disclosure - I don't like Sony either]
In short: no account level can perform system changes without confirmation. Your account level only determines the amount of information you need to provide to allow the system changes to be performed (password or click). Yes, exactly. But similar things can also occur with the sudo grace period, unless you take care to lock your session as you leave your desk (not a bad idea on either OS!). In this respect Vista is much worse than Linux.Indeed... Thankfully I'm now free of this mess and finally managed to convert myself over to Linux
I don't think I explained Vista's behavior properly. My understanding is that a "Cancel or Allow" dialog is just that, equivalent to "Are you sure?". There is a separate (but similar) dialog that also escalates your privilege that shows up when you click on something that has a little shield icon.
:)
If you are an administrator account, then it asks you for "Cancel or Continue" but not for your password (because in Vista, administrator != root). If you're running under a standard user account, then that dialog also requires the password for the administrator account to grant the request.
In any case I was just trying to point out that most of the nagging comes from borked legacy apps, not from Vista's "security design" itself (even if the end result is the same). New or updated apps must behave properly, and finally Windows developers can no longer ignore these issues. It only took Microsoft, what, 15 years to catch up to the Unix security model?
So today Vista's taking heat for always asking you for admin rights, but it's more of a byproduct of backward compatibility. If you run Vista-aware software (or rather, Windows software that doesn't try to write crap where it shouldn't), the level of nagging is tolerable.
The big difference compared to sudo is the "5-min grace period" where it remembers that you are root and doesn't ask for the password. In Vista there is a 5-10 second wait for the "Cancel or Allow?" dialog to pop up, and it will always pop up (sometimes more than once for the same program). The sudo grace period is a great productivity boost when you need to do several admin changes in a row; not so with Vista.
After a while I got tired of the constant nagging (the Windows software I tend to use does not have updates for Vista), so I installed Ubuntu and haven't looked back yet.
I don't remember the name of the virus (I'm too lazy to google it right now), but a friend of mine got infected. Good times, good times... (not!)
I actually bought '93 on VC thinking it was '94, serves me right for not double-checking in an emulator before buying...
This trick is quite handy to stop services that you don't have rights to, by replacing them with dummy executables... *cough* corporate USB port disabling software *cough*
That's not been my experience (last softmod I did was for a rev 1.6 w/o problems, not sure if they changed since?). The modchip is easier to recover from if you fuck up. Search for a bit and you'll find that current modchips are fairly easy to install (some without any soldering).
Before anyone complains, I am not advocating piracy, I don't care about backups, my Xbox 1 is dedicated to XBMC.
If you want a "playback device" for your living room, a modded Xbox 1 with XBMC is a much better experience than the 360. XBMC recently added UPnP support as well, so you don't even need to mess with SMB shares anymore.