Has Sony done anything worthwhile?
- invented CD.
- invented Playstation and broke the NES/SNES monopoly.
the end
Also Umatic, Betacam, and C-format (with Ampex). DASH. The APR series. They did a good job with professional A/V gear, and their earlier reputation is probably built on the back of that.
With a tablet android version, they might finally have gotten me into android app development. I'm not sure exactly how this works, would I have to learn and use java or could I just use any language?
If you have an existing C/C++ codebase it is possible to hive parts of it off as a library (.so) and load it into your java code via JNI, but for the most part your user interface has to be written in Java and compiled into Dalvik bytecode.
As of Android 2.3 it is apparently possible to write the entire program in C/C++, using a special option in the manifest file and an Android-specific entrypoint. 2.3 also adds event hooks to help with getting input, but AFAIK there is still no way to get at the user interface. You can, however, do OpenGL (probably OpenGL SE, but not sure) and roll your own, but that's generally most useful for games and things rather than, say, a text editor (which Android could use a few more of).
There are a few gotchas when using the Native Development Kit - it's got most of POSIX but not everything. pthreads is a little iffy in places and it doesn't support unicode properly (Android doesn't use Unicode, it does something else). For example, passing a unicode string between C and C++ modules will cause a bus error, because unicode is 32 bits in C++, and 8 bits in C which caused a lot of head-scratching at first.
It sounds more like the Rambus affair to me. They sat in on the standard for SDRAM, and then, once the standard was in common use, sued everyone else making it for patent violations. A clause like this would have prevented that.
I don't know about you, but I'm reading that as "If you or one of your pawns sues anyone over WebM, you will not be allowed to use it yourself.". That seems reasonable enough to me.
IIRC, the UK does not extradite people if they face capital punishment in the country requesting it. Since the US does still practice it, this should ensure that he cannot be sent there unless there is a guarantee from the US that he will not face the death penalty.
That's assuming this rule applies to Assange, of course - it might only be for British citizens, I'm not sure.
In particular, a lot of Windows stuff (especially bespoke things) depends on closed-source libraries from defunct companies, companies that don't see a need to port to ARM and so on and so forth.
If you can get those ported too (assuming they don't also depend on something else, assuming it isn't written in VB6 etc) then you're golden. Otherwise, your application is basically stuck on x86-32. Most people on Win64 won't notice that, but you won't get away with that on ARM.
I'm not sure unaligned load or store works on ARM. Under CE and the Android NDK it causes an exception (and no, the code wasn't supposed to be doing that, it was a bug).
Something else which I only learned recently (and this may only be a GCC thing) - char on ARM is unsigned by default. This broke some code where I had set a char to -1 and later tried to compare it with an integer (0xff vs 0xffffffff).
What they have been doing recently is animating them.
The Invasion was given this treatment and frankly it's a bit jarring, since IIRC 6 out of the 8 episodes still exist, which means that there are two points where it jumps into animation and then back into live action for the next episode. Occasionally I think it might have been better to have animated the entire thing and kept it consistent...
Anti-water molecules, one would assume. Though diving into that lot would be more like Hiroshima than the 4th of July. I suppose it depends on how badly you want to kill your wife.
GPL states you must make the source code available, and it is, on developer.android.org
On many of these machines the OEM has modified the kernel, e.g. to make the CPU report a higher frequency than it actually uses, and also to support their weird hardware.
So yes, while you could run stock Debian on a ZT180 or something, you would likely have to do without things like sound, networking and the touchscreen etc.
I can't remember the specifics for what is missing on the ZT180, but it is a big problem for people who want to add new drivers, run Debian etc. I now run mine on a Debian someone made with the Zenithink kernel, and it is significantly more stable like that than it was with their crocked Android implementation. However, it doesn't have the USB mass storage driver and it's not going to be easy to add it without the source.
I use Yukon, but it's very fiddly to get going, especially when it comes to using it with 32-bit Windows games on a 64-bit linux install. Also I use a separate audio recorder and have to sync the start up later in iMovie.
Finally, Yukon writes things to its own weird uncompressed format, so something like "Secrets of Morrowind" had a vast, multi-gigabyte.seom file which then had to be filtered into mencoder to convert it into something that could be imported into iMovie for editing. One of them was about 20GB.
As with GLC mentioned by the AC, it works by hooking into OpenGL so only games which can output to OpenGL will work. I'll have to see if GLC is any better, because while Yukon works, it's not exactly point-and-click.
So, hopefully it should be something kind of like Solstheim in Bloodmoon, only much bigger... (Or maybe the same size, if the trend of shrinking the world down continues)
Please can we have a game where the wolves behave semi-sensibly and don't all have rabies...
Does it run on Android, iOS or and those horrible cheap "Windows tablets" that run CE 5.2? That kind of target is becoming pretty important now when it comes to making sure your website is usable.
"War makes wealth for the few, misery for the many. At the right time, Dirac Angestun Gesept will punish the former, bring aid and comfort to the latter."
What if I don't care about The Witcher 2 enough to download it even for free?
Their threats of punitive letters might prevent an unknown number of piracies, but it also prevents an unknown number of legitimate sales, including mine.
Well, taken at literal face value, they'll simply sue us for not liking it. From the summary: We are totally fair, but if you decide you will not buy it legally there is a chance you'll get a letter. We are talking about it right now.
I've had three of these now. I'm not sure how I would have reacted if I hadn't already read about this practice on The Register some months ago, but it's interesting nonetheless.
First time I humoured him for a little bit, told him that I wasn't running windows on any of my systems. When he started asking what OSes I was running, I ran off part of a list, then decided that it wasn't really his business anyway, told him so and hung up.
Second guy that tried it asked specifically about my Windows computer. This time I just laughed and put the phone down.
The third one got about that far at which point I again hung up. I do wonder if I should play along next time and ask him to confirm my IP address. As I understand it, the basic idea is to install LogMeIn or some other remote desktop software on the victim's machine.
An alliance of this sort most probably also means some price fixing deals already on the table. But if we get some decent capacity SSD's for reasonable price a bit sooner, for a few bucks more, I think its worth it.
Maybe. For <10nm MLC flash, I'd be impressed if the thing still has data on it by the end of the day...
So the primary targets are those who actually care about cult of celebrity and those who never read anything about protecting yourself online, interesting.
I don't know about you, but I was fascinated to learn that Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Tiger Woods, Tom Cruise, Bon Jovi and a numerous other such people had all died on the exact same day in some bizarre celebrity massacre.
Bizarrely, I heard rumours years ago about a 'Project Scimitar', which IIRC was basically a plan to port Sun's WABI to GEM Desktop, or in other words, make GEM under DRDOS able to run Windows 3.1 applications. Of course, Win32 was just starting then so it would probably have been a wasted effort.
What usually happens in my experience is that the data leaks into the analogue side. Might be a grounding issue, but my guess is that the blocking capacitors have failed since it did not do this when it was new.
I've had two USB soundcards go like that now - an Edirol UA-5 that I converted to act as a
standalone ADC (has its own power supply, I use an optical S/PDIF connection to the PC).
The other one is bus-powered and I simply don't use it. One of these days I'll try recapping the thing.
I'll agree that Samsung is on crack with the Tab - it's £680! And one of their executives thinks they're going to sell 10m of these things. Maybe it's just me, but I felt unhappy paying just under £200 for a ZT-180 (which tries way too hard to look like an iPad, it's embarrassing). Build quality could be better, it's a resistive screen and the battery life could be better too, but otherwise it seems to do the job fairly well.
If you're happy to do a little hackwork, there are a number of people who have figured out ways to activate support for the proper Android market on such devices. I haven't tried doing this myself yet, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Has Sony done anything worthwhile? - invented CD. - invented Playstation and broke the NES/SNES monopoly. the end
Also Umatic, Betacam, and C-format (with Ampex). DASH. The APR series. They did a good job with professional A/V gear, and their earlier reputation is probably built on the back of that.
With a tablet android version, they might finally have gotten me into android app development. I'm not sure exactly how this works, would I have to learn and use java or could I just use any language?
If you have an existing C/C++ codebase it is possible to hive parts of it off as a library (.so) and load it into your java code via JNI, but for the most part your user interface has to be written in Java and compiled into Dalvik bytecode.
As of Android 2.3 it is apparently possible to write the entire program in C/C++, using a special option in the manifest file and an Android-specific entrypoint. 2.3 also adds event hooks to help with getting input, but AFAIK there is still no way to get at the user interface. You can, however, do OpenGL (probably OpenGL SE, but not sure) and roll your own, but that's generally most useful for games and things rather than, say, a text editor (which Android could use a few more of).
There are a few gotchas when using the Native Development Kit - it's got most of POSIX but not everything. pthreads is a little iffy in places and it doesn't support unicode properly (Android doesn't use Unicode, it does something else).
For example, passing a unicode string between C and C++ modules will cause a bus error, because unicode is 32 bits in C++, and 8 bits in C which caused a lot of head-scratching at first.
It sounds more like the Rambus affair to me. They sat in on the standard for SDRAM, and then, once the standard was in common use, sued everyone else making it for patent violations. A clause like this would have prevented that.
I don't know about you, but I'm reading that as "If you or one of your pawns sues anyone over WebM, you will not be allowed to use it yourself.". That seems reasonable enough to me.
Point, but that's presumably the reason they're doing this.
IIRC, the UK does not extradite people if they face capital punishment in the country requesting it. Since the US does still practice it, this should ensure that he cannot be sent there unless there is a guarantee from the US that he will not face the death penalty.
That's assuming this rule applies to Assange, of course - it might only be for British citizens, I'm not sure.
In particular, a lot of Windows stuff (especially bespoke things) depends on closed-source libraries from defunct companies, companies that don't see a need to port to ARM and so on and so forth.
If you can get those ported too (assuming they don't also depend on something else, assuming it isn't written in VB6 etc) then you're golden. Otherwise, your application is basically stuck on x86-32. Most people on Win64 won't notice that, but you won't get away with that on ARM.
I'm not sure unaligned load or store works on ARM. Under CE and the Android NDK it causes an exception (and no, the code wasn't supposed to be doing that, it was a bug).
Something else which I only learned recently (and this may only be a GCC thing) - char on ARM is unsigned by default. This broke some code where I had set a char to -1 and later tried to compare it with an integer (0xff vs 0xffffffff).
What they have been doing recently is animating them.
The Invasion was given this treatment and frankly it's a bit jarring, since IIRC 6 out of the 8 episodes still exist, which means that there are two points where it jumps into animation and then back into live action for the next episode. Occasionally I think it might have been better to have animated the entire thing and kept it consistent...
Anti-water molecules, one would assume. Though diving into that lot would be more like Hiroshima than the 4th of July. I suppose it depends on how badly you want to kill your wife.
GPL states you must make the source code available, and it is, on developer.android.org
On many of these machines the OEM has modified the kernel, e.g. to make the CPU report a higher frequency than it actually uses, and also to support their weird hardware.
So yes, while you could run stock Debian on a ZT180 or something, you would likely have to do without things like sound, networking and the touchscreen etc.
I can't remember the specifics for what is missing on the ZT180, but it is a big problem for people who want to add new drivers, run Debian etc. I now run mine on a Debian someone made with the Zenithink kernel, and it is significantly more stable like that than it was with their crocked Android implementation. However, it doesn't have the USB mass storage driver and it's not going to be easy to add it without the source.
I use Yukon, but it's very fiddly to get going, especially when it comes to using it with 32-bit Windows games on a 64-bit linux install. Also I use a separate audio recorder and have to sync the start up later in iMovie.
Finally, Yukon writes things to its own weird uncompressed format, so something like "Secrets of Morrowind" had a vast, multi-gigabyte .seom file which then had to be filtered into mencoder to convert it into something that could be imported into iMovie for editing. One of them was about 20GB.
As with GLC mentioned by the AC, it works by hooking into OpenGL so only games which can output to OpenGL will work. I'll have to see if GLC is any better, because while Yukon works, it's not exactly point-and-click.
So, hopefully it should be something kind of like Solstheim in Bloodmoon, only much bigger... (Or maybe the same size, if the trend of shrinking the world down continues)
Please can we have a game where the wolves behave semi-sensibly and don't all have rabies...
Does it run on Android, iOS or and those horrible cheap "Windows tablets" that run CE 5.2? That kind of target is becoming pretty important now when it comes to making sure your website is usable.
"War makes wealth for the few, misery for the many. At the right time, Dirac Angestun Gesept will punish the former, bring aid and comfort to the latter."
I strongly suspect that that kind of bundling would have Microsoft nailed to the wall by the antitrust folks.
What if I don't care about The Witcher 2 enough to download it even for free?
Their threats of punitive letters might prevent an unknown number of piracies, but it also prevents an unknown number of legitimate sales, including mine.
Well, taken at literal face value, they'll simply sue us for not liking it. From the summary: We are totally fair, but if you decide you will not buy it legally there is a chance you'll get a letter. We are talking about it right now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
I've had three of these now. I'm not sure how I would have reacted if I hadn't already read about this practice on The Register some months ago, but it's interesting nonetheless.
First time I humoured him for a little bit, told him that I wasn't running windows on any of my systems. When he started asking what OSes I was running, I ran off part of a list, then decided that it wasn't really his business anyway, told him so and hung up.
Second guy that tried it asked specifically about my Windows computer. This time I just laughed and put the phone down.
The third one got about that far at which point I again hung up. I do wonder if I should play along next time and ask him to confirm my IP address. As I understand it, the basic idea is to install LogMeIn or some other remote desktop software on the victim's machine.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/07/scamware_cold_calling/
An alliance of this sort most probably also means some price fixing deals already on the table. But if we get some decent capacity SSD's for reasonable price a bit sooner, for a few bucks more, I think its worth it.
Maybe. For <10nm MLC flash, I'd be impressed if the thing still has data on it by the end of the day...
Moneybart intro
So the primary targets are those who actually care about cult of celebrity and those who never read anything about protecting yourself online, interesting.
I don't know about you, but I was fascinated to learn that Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Tiger Woods, Tom Cruise, Bon Jovi and a numerous other such people had all died on the exact same day in some bizarre celebrity massacre.
(And no, I didn't open any of them.)
Bizarrely, I heard rumours years ago about a 'Project Scimitar', which IIRC was basically a plan to port Sun's WABI to GEM Desktop, or in other words, make GEM under DRDOS able to run Windows 3.1 applications. Of course, Win32 was just starting then so it would probably have been a wasted effort.
I've had two USB soundcards go like that now - an Edirol UA-5 that I converted to act as a standalone ADC (has its own power supply, I use an optical S/PDIF connection to the PC). The other one is bus-powered and I simply don't use it. One of these days I'll try recapping the thing.
I'll agree that Samsung is on crack with the Tab - it's £680! And one of their executives thinks they're going to sell 10m of these things. Maybe it's just me, but I felt unhappy paying just under £200 for a ZT-180 (which tries way too hard to look like an iPad, it's embarrassing). Build quality could be better, it's a resistive screen and the battery life could be better too, but otherwise it seems to do the job fairly well.
If you're happy to do a little hackwork, there are a number of people who have figured out ways to activate support for the proper Android market on such devices. I haven't tried doing this myself yet, though.