Child porn is illegal not because it is "sick" or "disgusting". It is illegal because by definition the creation of it requires a (heinous) illegal act-- the sexual abuse of children.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think the so-called "moral majority" see it the same way. If this were the case, then surely the creation and distribution of child pornography need not be illegal: international laws forbidding child abuse would suffice. Law enforcement agencies would still be interested in child porn under these circumstances, of course, since the material depicted would help them trace and apprehend child abuser (and by the way, as I see it, abuse is abuse, sexual or not).
However, many of us live in democracies, and I get the impression that large numbers of voters think that posession and distribution of child porn should be a crime (and there's logic there: by creating a demand for the material, maybe you are encouraging more abuse).
Legislating against "virtual" porn is getting dangerously close to 1984-style "thought crime" IMHO. Don't just include CG -- there were some pretty sickening pen & ink drawings floating around alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless as far back as my Internet experience goes (circa 1993).
On a positive note, UK parliamentarians are discussing ways to protect minors in Net chatrooms. The Lords are apparently keen to avoid the spectre of "thought crime". Phew. --
I've heard this argument (roughly: "mankind isn't causing global warming -- it's a normal, natural shift in the planet's temperature") several times.
The point is moot. Whatever the cause, it's going to cause problems for mankind (water levels rising, habitable permafrost melting away, places which were previously only tolerably hot becoming too warm to set foot in, blah blah blah).
We're faced with a choice: either adapt to it, or slow it down (or to me more realistic, a little of both).
However, the levels of CO2 in the air have shot up wildly in the last 2 centuries, and the mechanism by which this is said to cause warming seems pretty logical to me. I'll bet industrialisation and forest depletion is at least a contributary factor. --
Aside from the fact that both the products you mention are BSD licence, meaning you can do what the hell you like with the code as long as you retain the author's copyright notice -- let's just explore the hypothetical situation if they had been GPL code.
If you really want to disrespect the wishes of GPL code authors, you might want to look at what the TiVo guys did to implement their proprietary filesystem on Linux.
What they did (or near as dammit) was write something akin to the NFS mounting code, except using UNIX sockets instead of IP sockets. This code had to be part of the Linux kernel, and was hence GPL. Then they wrote a closed-source piece of filesystem code which ran as root in userland. The GPL code in the kernel would then mount the filesystem being exported by the closed-source fileserver code.
This was legal, if not in the spirit of things.
So, you could write a program which proxies IPC messages and SSLifies them, and make it GPL. In fact such a thing might be a valuable tool to the community, since they could easily reuse it in all sorts of situations. Your closed-source program would use this GPL'd component's services to reach the outside world in an SSLified manner.
Oh, by the way, we call SSL TLS these days, for some reason unknown to me... --
SCMS is a pain in the arse, especially since it applies equally to all material: I recorded some material of my own onto minidisc, and I can only make first generation copies of it: this means for example, I can't make a backup, edit that backup down, then copy the edited version.
The accusation in the article about portable minidisc recorders only having a digital in socket is a red herring however -- I'm certain this is only a matter of keeping down cost and size. I have a full-size minidisc deck, and that most certainly has a digital out, which I can routinely use to copy from minidisc to minidisc. --
There's nothing to stop anyone rolling their own distro which supports (say) RPM. And if you think this box is going to have something like RedHat on it you're fundamentally misunderstanding the product.
Unless you hack it, this thing is *not* going to have a bash prompt. You won't have your own directory in/home/. GCC won't be an installable option. Think of something like TiVo -- that runs Linux, but as far as the user is concerned it's more like a VCR than a computer.
Yeah, this'll go a bit further than TiVo in that it'll be able to install new software off the Net, and it'll have some derivative of Mozilla on board, but even that will feel more like browsing the web on (say) a Dreamcast, than it will feel like using a PC. --
Here's what I'd expect to see in order for it to be a better buy than a general purpose PC
Low cost - $400 seems pretty good to me
Quiet operation - can't see how they're going to run an Intel chip with no fan, but if I'm going to watch movies with this thing in my room, I want it to be as quiet as possible -- ideally silent
Sofa-friendly user interface. I'm certain Nokia will develop a terrific remote-centric UI for this thing. After all the UI on their phones is great. Of course you'd need a keyboard for email and (to an extent) Web browsing.Of course, an enterprising team of Open Source hackers could come up with something suitable given the inclination.
lack of hassle -- I love to tinker with computers, but that's not what this is for. One would expect to get this thing home at lunchtime, and have it set to record the 10 o' clock movie before going to the pub that evening.
My girlfriend recently shopped around the Web for a mobile phone. Our PC was out of action for a while (turned out an IDE cable had worked loose) so she was using the Dreamcast browser.
Several major sites used client-side features which meant she could not use the site even to browse the products (DreamKey's lack of https support meant that whatever happened she had to make the actual purchase over the phone) -- the sites she couldn't browse went straight out of the window. Those companies lost a sale because of their dependence on esoteric browser features.
Set-top-box net access is growing in the UK, with thinks like the Bush Internet TV, OnDigital's OnNet service, and things like Dreamcast. That potential fot lost sales is growing, and I'm sure that as time goes by, the people who watch the bottom line are going to catch on to this.
I can see a time in the near future when not only do web design contracts stipulate browser independence, but also things like accessibility to the disabled. If you ran a high-street shop, you wouldn't turn blind folks away at the door -- they might buy something. Why would you treat them any different on a web-commerce site? --
Re:This would only benefit spammers
on
Norway Bans Spam
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· Score: 2
The spammer would just leach addresses from the list. Who said spammers have morals?
Even if this were an opt-out scheme, how would that benefit them? I once added my address to a public list of addresses which did not want spam -- the hope being that spammers would remove these addresses from their mailing lists by their own free will. That project didn't really get anywhere, and I'm assuming that's down to spammers just being lazy.
However, I got one mail that said "Hah! You put your name on a list of people who don't want spam -- fools, can't you see spammers will use this list and you'll get even more spam". That doesn't make sense to me: spam is a form of advertising. Legit advertisers go to great lengths to reach as targetted an audience as possible. Why would a spammer go out of their way to get a load of addresses for people who are virtually guaranteed to be unreceptive, hostile, or even litiginous?
What I'd really like to know, though, is this: spam is very common. Is it therefore profitable? I honestly can't say I've *ever* recieved spam containing a tempting proposition. --
Although I'm certain the MPAA has nobody's best interests at heart except its own, here's what I think will happen based on the situation with Digital TV in Europe:
The copy protection scheme will be enabled on certain channels (e.g. Pay per view video-on-demand channels) but not enabled on traditional channels.
This is exactly how it works with Macrovision protected broadcasts in Europe. Timeshifting is such a well established habit, the consumer won't tolerate losing it, and the broadcaster doesn't object to short-term timeshifting (as opposed to taping all the Simpsons and keeping them in an archive [oops]).
Pay per view video on demand means there's no need for short-term timeshifting any more, and so the consumer has less of a legitimate reason to gripe.
I can see this being the case until some bright spark comes up with a way to enforce a "use-by" date on recorded material (a la DivX) such that the broadcaster can set a maximum time during which timeshifting is allowed. That'll be a nuicance, but to be fair, entirely within the copyright holder's rights.
S/MIME is the way to do email with X509 certificates, and Netscape Communicator is one mail app which uses S/MIME.
You can manipulate S/MIME messages (encrypt, decrypt, sign, verify) using OpenSSL at the command line. I'd love to see mutt hacked to front-end OpenSSL smime the way it can with PGP.
There are those who would argue that X509 is evil, thanks to its strict hierarchical structure (where Verisign's root CA is the big daddy of everything), and that only PGP gives the power to the people -- but from a pragmatic point of view, X509 is everywhere thanks to SSL etc. and if you want to be able to do secure email with the world, S/MIME is the way to go. PGP is attempting to converge with the S/MIME standard in any case. --
Don't worry - you'll still need ping to verify your routing, test your interfaces, that kind of thing. You can leave your 'Story about Ping' on your O'Reilly shelf... --
I can't wait to start kicking the asses of all the Dreamcasters when they attempt to beat me at Quake 3 (that's the one that's out for DC, right?) with their little gamepad toy. Mouse and keyboard all the way, baby!
So few words, so many holes to pick. First of all, as many people have already pointed out, DC mouse and keyboard are available. Secondly, why on earth would you be so eager to thrash gamers with inferior control methods, instead of having a decent game against a well matched opponent? Thirdly, are you aware that there are many games besides Quake, some of which aren't even first-person shooters!. I expect games such as Phantasy Star Online to play much better with a pad than with a keyboard+mouse. Fourth, "little gamepad toy"... um, you are aware that the Dreamcast is sold as a toy; the intention is to have fun. In this context "toy" is not a great way of demeaning the Dreamcast. Incidentally I rate the Dreamcast pad as being among the best console controllers ever made. I know there are those who disagree, but it fits beautifully in my hands, the analogue control is great and the analoge shoulder triggers are inspired. On games like Jet Set Radio you forget the controller's there.
I wonder how much money the casual DC player is going to spend just so they can play games via broadband, though?
Well, the short answer is:
Dreamcast $150
Game $40 (? no sure about US prices)
Broadband adapter $60
Cable modem service $20/month (?)
... but I imagine the main market for broadband adapters will be people who have broadband for their computer, but prefer to play their games on a console. My lowly Cyrix 200 PC is perfectly good for email, web browsing, MP3, but hopeless for the current batch of games. I could spend £300 or more upgrading to the point where it's gaming-ready, but it's cheaper and easier to just buy a console, not to mention the better (IMO) games available. With the broadband adapter a person can use the one broadband account for both console gaming *and* PC internet use.
Unfortunately, there are some games I just can't let myself miss out on -- and Monkey Island 4 means I'm going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade that PC anyway (but Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Sonic Adventure meant I equally had to own a Dreamcast). --
There's no excuse for not planning for the future, and this is what Sega has done. If this system flops before the XBox and the PS2 and the GameCube, then good. They were slow and they didn't look forward far enough... killer flaws in the video game world.
First company to produce a modem for a console (with the Saturn NetLink); first console with online functions as standard (Dreamcast with its built-in modem); first console with broadband -- and you're saying Sega are slow? I guess you're going to argue next that PS2 was quick to market (coming a year later than Dreamcast, with online functioned vaguely promised for some time in the coming year), or that XBox and GameCube show better timeliness (XBox's launch date is bound to slip again, while GameCube doesn't even *have* a launch date AFAIK). --
That's not a misconception at all. I think you need to look at the definition of an "Object Oriented" language. You'll see that to be OO a language must support certain things like inheritance, polymorphism, run time binding (dynamic binding) and many other fun things that you can't do in procedural languages. C doesn't support any of those.
Since g++ (the GNU C++ compiler) is written in C, C and C++ are equivalent. In fact, all programming languages are equivalent. You could write OO code in a big pile of NAND gates if you really put your mind to it... or on a Turing machine... or on a Neural Net... etc. Basic language theory, that.
Just because a language doesn't provide the syntactic niceties of (say) Eiffel, doesn't mean you can't create objects with methods and inheritance, and ask them to run said methods. --
I wonder how much C++ code is actually OO, though?
I've seen any number of C++ books which are effectively C books, using cout instead of printf, with an object orientation chapter tagged on as an afterthought.
I'll bet a lot of Windows programs use OO to work with the GUI (because MFC makes them) but have an underlying program structure that's procedural to the core.
I've no doubt that OO is heavily used, but you can't get comparisoms just by counting how many programs were built with a C++ compiler. --
Properly implemented, code re-use can pay off immediately.
I don't know very much about OO -- I learned about it at University (in Eiffel) but it never 'clicked' and I always found OO design to be something of a strain. I only mention this to demonstrate my bias:)
However, you seem to be implying that code re-use is something you only get from OO, and that just doesn't make sense to me. I really only code in C and Perl these days, and I reuse code all the time.
In the UK you can easily pick up a 32" 16:9 set that does PAL, SECAM and NTSC, for under £600. They stock them in supermarkets -- pile 'em high brands like Bush and Wharfedale. Maybe £800 for something posh like a Sony WEGA.
I'm talking about the base models without fripperies like VGA input and surround sound (I advocate buying a seperate AV amp anyhow). --
As far as I can tell, broadcasters pay for bandwidth, and they can cram as many or as few channels into that bandwidth as they choose. Watching British SkyDigital it's fairly easy to tell which channels are being broadcast at a high bitrate (PPV movies, BBC, Sky 1, etc) and which are being compressed to death (UK Living, Rapture, etc.).
Even on the high bitrate channels, you're likely to see some blockiness in certain tricky scenes (swirling mist / fog / smoke seems most vulnerable), but on the cheaper channels you'll see it quite clearly on easier subjects such as graduated-fill skies, moving backgrounds on in-car shots etc.
Things are confused a little by channels such as The Box (and its clones) where the video source is presumably a hard disk full of MPEGs, so the whole thing is going through MPEG compression/decompression at least twice - they probably compress those videos quite a lot to conserve disk space, then decompress them in real time before compressing them again for broadcast on a low bitrate channel. --
All I Want is Widescreen Movies [...] At home. Widescreen displays are hugely priced here.
... and I assume this is the reason why so many "widescreen edition" DVDs are still produced in non-anamorphic widescreen. This is unforgiveable. NTSC has few enough lines already, and letterboxing on the media wastes them even further.
Newer 4:3 TVs can do 16:9 pictures (squeezing all the lines into less of the screen) and even the lowliest DVD player can do its own letterboxing if need be, so there is *no* reason for studios to keep releasing these shoddy non-anamorphic goods. --
On the question of tape versus disk, the big advantage of disk is random access. It's of little value in video entertainment which is mostly watched serially with very few jumps.
For me, random access is a major part of what makes DVD a nice format. "Instant" chapter selection is a real boon, especially on material which is naturally episodic, such as a season's worth of a TV series. So-far-underused DVD features such as branching are also dependant on random access.
Random access is what gives TiVo so many selling points over any tape-based technology, and some of those features will carry forward to DVD-R video.
HDTV is appealing, and for once Europe is behind on this (Digital TV is now commonplace in Europe, but it is all broadcast in PAL resolution -- broadcasters want to pay for as little bandwidth as possible and some of the small-time channels have quite visible MPEG artefacts as a result). What would be required for consumer uptake would be a smooth upgrade path -- say a "HDTV-ready" reciever which outputs both a high-resolution picture and a downsampled NTSC/PAL signal. --
Sod Nethack. I'm holding out for Xpilot. Remember the DC has a modem, and optional Ethernet.
Many people are already writing emulators and homebrew games using "baby" OSs such as Dan Potter's newlib -- but IMHO a good NetBSD or Linux port would enable ports of things like MAME to be done fairly trivially. I'm *dying* to have MAME on my DC.
NB: Some of the newer games emulated by MAME just won't fit in the DC's RAM. The MAME binary is bloated due to the sheer number of games it supports. I'd expect to see a limited number of games supported by DC MAME, and I'd also expect to see it split into a number of smaller binaries, each supporting a subset of games. --
Most European TVs these days accept both NTSC and PAL signals from DVDs, games consoles and the like. I'm not sure where you'd stand recieving analogue RF signals, but you could get around that with a VCR tuner or something. More of a worry for Americans would be that Americans use Component Video for high quality video inputs, Europe uses RGB. --
It's amusing that Sony makes region free DVD players:)
I don't believe they do: however many resellers chip Sony DVD players to remove region fixing, Macrovision etc, then sell them as new with their own warranty. --
Yes, 16:9 TVs are common over here in Europe. I was staggered on a visit to the US, going into the Sony Centre in Chicago and seeing only one widescreen TV among the dozens of flash TVs on show.
The DVD zoning situation is an example of consumer power! The fact is that Region 1 DVDs are usually a far better proposition for European buyers -- they come out earlier, they're cheaper, and they generally have more extra features. The situation is gradually getting better, but for the moment region-locked players don't sell. Most manufacturers seem to get around it by putting in a backdoor, then leaking said backdoor to the net. Needless to say the DVD consortium are none too happy, but screw 'em! A number of resellers also sell chipped DVD players.
The main problem brought about by the lack of 16:9 TVs in the States is the number or R1 DVDs that are non-anamorphic widescreen. This means us European viewers have to zoom the (already low resolution NTSC) picture in order to fill our screens. DVD buyers -- insist on anamorphic widescreen.
As for importing kit to the US -- I don't expect a step-up transformer should be all that expensive. I think less than $40. I suspect if you shop around a lot of the kit will be switchable to 110v, or even auto-detect the voltage -- do check this though. --
Slashdot Mirror
Child porn is illegal not because it is "sick" or "disgusting". It is illegal because by definition the creation of it requires a (heinous) illegal act-- the sexual abuse of children.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think the so-called "moral majority" see it the same way. If this were the case, then surely the creation and distribution of child pornography need not be illegal: international laws forbidding child abuse would suffice. Law enforcement agencies would still be interested in child porn under these circumstances, of course, since the material depicted would help them trace and apprehend child abuser (and by the way, as I see it, abuse is abuse, sexual or not).
However, many of us live in democracies, and I get the impression that large numbers of voters think that posession and distribution of child porn should be a crime (and there's logic there: by creating a demand for the material, maybe you are encouraging more abuse).
Legislating against "virtual" porn is getting dangerously close to 1984-style "thought crime" IMHO. Don't just include CG -- there were some pretty sickening pen & ink drawings floating around alt.binaries.pictures.tasteless as far back as my Internet experience goes (circa 1993).
On a positive note, UK parliamentarians are discussing ways to protect minors in Net chatrooms. The Lords are apparently keen to avoid the spectre of "thought crime". Phew.
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I've heard this argument (roughly: "mankind isn't causing global warming -- it's a normal, natural shift in the planet's temperature") several times.
The point is moot. Whatever the cause, it's going to cause problems for mankind (water levels rising, habitable permafrost melting away, places which were previously only tolerably hot becoming too warm to set foot in, blah blah blah).
We're faced with a choice: either adapt to it, or slow it down (or to me more realistic, a little of both).
However, the levels of CO2 in the air have shot up wildly in the last 2 centuries, and the mechanism by which this is said to cause warming seems pretty logical to me. I'll bet industrialisation and forest depletion is at least a contributary factor.
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Aside from the fact that both the products you mention are BSD licence, meaning you can do what the hell you like with the code as long as you retain the author's copyright notice -- let's just explore the hypothetical situation if they had been GPL code.
If you really want to disrespect the wishes of GPL code authors, you might want to look at what the TiVo guys did to implement their proprietary filesystem on Linux.
What they did (or near as dammit) was write something akin to the NFS mounting code, except using UNIX sockets instead of IP sockets. This code had to be part of the Linux kernel, and was hence GPL. Then they wrote a closed-source piece of filesystem code which ran as root in userland. The GPL code in the kernel would then mount the filesystem being exported by the closed-source fileserver code.
This was legal, if not in the spirit of things.
So, you could write a program which proxies IPC messages and SSLifies them, and make it GPL. In fact such a thing might be a valuable tool to the community, since they could easily reuse it in all sorts of situations. Your closed-source program would use this GPL'd component's services to reach the outside world in an SSLified manner.
Oh, by the way, we call SSL TLS these days, for some reason unknown to me...
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SCMS is a pain in the arse, especially since it applies equally to all material: I recorded some material of my own onto minidisc, and I can only make first generation copies of it: this means for example, I can't make a backup, edit that backup down, then copy the edited version.
The accusation in the article about portable minidisc recorders only having a digital in socket is a red herring however -- I'm certain this is only a matter of keeping down cost and size. I have a full-size minidisc deck, and that most certainly has a digital out, which I can routinely use to copy from minidisc to minidisc.
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There's nothing to stop anyone rolling their own distro which supports (say) RPM. And if you think this box is going to have something like RedHat on it you're fundamentally misunderstanding the product.
/home/. GCC won't be an installable option. Think of something like TiVo -- that runs Linux, but as far as the user is concerned it's more like a VCR than a computer.
Unless you hack it, this thing is *not* going to have a bash prompt. You won't have your own directory in
Yeah, this'll go a bit further than TiVo in that it'll be able to install new software off the Net, and it'll have some derivative of Mozilla on board, but even that will feel more like browsing the web on (say) a Dreamcast, than it will feel like using a PC.
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An answer to a question no one asked.
Hmmm.
"There seems to be all sorts of stuff on this World-Wide Web thing, but I can't afford a PC, what should I do?"
"I want to email my son but I don't want to learn to use one of those complicated computers. Isn't there an easier way?"
"Society is in danger of splitting into Information haves and have-nots, what can be done to lower the price of admission?"
"My e-retail site's sales have reached a plateau. If only there was a way for the pool of potential customers to grow"
"Damn, I've got to stay late at work and I'm going to miss Brookside. If only I could telnet my VCR from work and tell it to record it."
Need any more? I could do this all day.
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My girlfriend recently shopped around the Web for a mobile phone. Our PC was out of action for a while (turned out an IDE cable had worked loose) so she was using the Dreamcast browser.
Several major sites used client-side features which meant she could not use the site even to browse the products (DreamKey's lack of https support meant that whatever happened she had to make the actual purchase over the phone) -- the sites she couldn't browse went straight out of the window. Those companies lost a sale because of their dependence on esoteric browser features.
Set-top-box net access is growing in the UK, with thinks like the Bush Internet TV, OnDigital's OnNet service, and things like Dreamcast. That potential fot lost sales is growing, and I'm sure that as time goes by, the people who watch the bottom line are going to catch on to this.
I can see a time in the near future when not only do web design contracts stipulate browser independence, but also things like accessibility to the disabled. If you ran a high-street shop, you wouldn't turn blind folks away at the door -- they might buy something. Why would you treat them any different on a web-commerce site?
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The spammer would just leach addresses from the list. Who said spammers have morals?
Even if this were an opt-out scheme, how would that benefit them? I once added my address to a public list of addresses which did not want spam -- the hope being that spammers would remove these addresses from their mailing lists by their own free will. That project didn't really get anywhere, and I'm assuming that's down to spammers just being lazy.
However, I got one mail that said "Hah! You put your name on a list of people who don't want spam -- fools, can't you see spammers will use this list and you'll get even more spam". That doesn't make sense to me: spam is a form of advertising. Legit advertisers go to great lengths to reach as targetted an audience as possible. Why would a spammer go out of their way to get a load of addresses for people who are virtually guaranteed to be unreceptive, hostile, or even litiginous?
What I'd really like to know, though, is this: spam is very common. Is it therefore profitable? I honestly can't say I've *ever* recieved spam containing a tempting proposition.
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Although I'm certain the MPAA has nobody's best interests at heart except its own, here's what I think will happen based on the situation with Digital TV in Europe:
The copy protection scheme will be enabled on certain channels (e.g. Pay per view video-on-demand channels) but not enabled on traditional channels.
This is exactly how it works with Macrovision protected broadcasts in Europe. Timeshifting is such a well established habit, the consumer won't tolerate losing it, and the broadcaster doesn't object to short-term timeshifting (as opposed to taping all the Simpsons and keeping them in an archive [oops]).
Pay per view video on demand means there's no need for short-term timeshifting any more, and so the consumer has less of a legitimate reason to gripe.
I can see this being the case until some bright spark comes up with a way to enforce a "use-by" date on recorded material (a la DivX) such that the broadcaster can set a maximum time during which timeshifting is allowed. That'll be a nuicance, but to be fair, entirely within the copyright holder's rights.
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S/MIME is the way to do email with X509 certificates, and Netscape Communicator is one mail app which uses S/MIME.
You can manipulate S/MIME messages (encrypt, decrypt, sign, verify) using OpenSSL at the command line. I'd love to see mutt hacked to front-end OpenSSL smime the way it can with PGP.
There are those who would argue that X509 is evil, thanks to its strict hierarchical structure (where Verisign's root CA is the big daddy of everything), and that only PGP gives the power to the people -- but from a pragmatic point of view, X509 is everywhere thanks to SSL etc. and if you want to be able to do secure email with the world, S/MIME is the way to go. PGP is attempting to converge with the S/MIME standard in any case.
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Don't worry - you'll still need ping to verify your routing, test your interfaces, that kind of thing. You can leave your 'Story about Ping' on your O'Reilly shelf...
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So few words, so many holes to pick. First of all, as many people have already pointed out, DC mouse and keyboard are available. Secondly, why on earth would you be so eager to thrash gamers with inferior control methods, instead of having a decent game against a well matched opponent? Thirdly, are you aware that there are many games besides Quake, some of which aren't even first-person shooters!. I expect games such as Phantasy Star Online to play much better with a pad than with a keyboard+mouse. Fourth, "little gamepad toy"... um, you are aware that the Dreamcast is sold as a toy; the intention is to have fun. In this context "toy" is not a great way of demeaning the Dreamcast. Incidentally I rate the Dreamcast pad as being among the best console controllers ever made. I know there are those who disagree, but it fits beautifully in my hands, the analogue control is great and the analoge shoulder triggers are inspired. On games like Jet Set Radio you forget the controller's there.
I wonder how much money the casual DC player is going to spend just so they can play games via broadband, though?
Well, the short answer is:
... but I imagine the main market for broadband adapters will be people who have broadband for their computer, but prefer to play their games on a console. My lowly Cyrix 200 PC is perfectly good for email, web browsing, MP3, but hopeless for the current batch of games. I could spend £300 or more upgrading to the point where it's gaming-ready, but it's cheaper and easier to just buy a console, not to mention the better (IMO) games available. With the broadband adapter a person can use the one broadband account for both console gaming *and* PC internet use.
Unfortunately, there are some games I just can't let myself miss out on -- and Monkey Island 4 means I'm going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade that PC anyway (but Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Sonic Adventure meant I equally had to own a Dreamcast).
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There's no excuse for not planning for the future, and this is what Sega has done. If this system flops before the XBox and the PS2 and the GameCube, then good. They were slow and they didn't look forward far enough... killer flaws in the video game world.
First company to produce a modem for a console (with the Saturn NetLink); first console with online functions as standard (Dreamcast with its built-in modem); first console with broadband -- and you're saying Sega are slow? I guess you're going to argue next that PS2 was quick to market (coming a year later than Dreamcast, with online functioned vaguely promised for some time in the coming year), or that XBox and GameCube show better timeliness (XBox's launch date is bound to slip again, while GameCube doesn't even *have* a launch date AFAIK).
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That's not a misconception at all. I think you need to look at the definition of an "Object Oriented" language. You'll see that to be OO a language must support certain things like inheritance, polymorphism, run time binding (dynamic binding) and many other fun things that you can't do in procedural languages. C doesn't support any of those.
Since g++ (the GNU C++ compiler) is written in C, C and C++ are equivalent. In fact, all programming languages are equivalent. You could write OO code in a big pile of NAND gates if you really put your mind to it... or on a Turing machine... or on a Neural Net... etc. Basic language theory, that.
Just because a language doesn't provide the syntactic niceties of (say) Eiffel, doesn't mean you can't create objects with methods and inheritance, and ask them to run said methods.
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I wonder how much C++ code is actually OO, though?
I've seen any number of C++ books which are effectively C books, using cout instead of printf, with an object orientation chapter tagged on as an afterthought.
I'll bet a lot of Windows programs use OO to work with the GUI (because MFC makes them) but have an underlying program structure that's procedural to the core.
I've no doubt that OO is heavily used, but you can't get comparisoms just by counting how many programs were built with a C++ compiler.
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Properly implemented, code re-use can pay off immediately.
:)
I don't know very much about OO -- I learned about it at University (in Eiffel) but it never 'clicked' and I always found OO design to be something of a strain. I only mention this to demonstrate my bias
However, you seem to be implying that code re-use is something you only get from OO, and that just doesn't make sense to me. I really only code in C and Perl these days, and I reuse code all the time.
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In the UK you can easily pick up a 32" 16:9 set that does PAL, SECAM and NTSC, for under £600. They stock them in supermarkets -- pile 'em high brands like Bush and Wharfedale. Maybe £800 for something posh like a Sony WEGA.
I'm talking about the base models without fripperies like VGA input and surround sound (I advocate buying a seperate AV amp anyhow).
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As far as I can tell, broadcasters pay for bandwidth, and they can cram as many or as few channels into that bandwidth as they choose. Watching British SkyDigital it's fairly easy to tell which channels are being broadcast at a high bitrate (PPV movies, BBC, Sky 1, etc) and which are being compressed to death (UK Living, Rapture, etc.).
Even on the high bitrate channels, you're likely to see some blockiness in certain tricky scenes (swirling mist / fog / smoke seems most vulnerable), but on the cheaper channels you'll see it quite clearly on easier subjects such as graduated-fill skies, moving backgrounds on in-car shots etc.
Things are confused a little by channels such as The Box (and its clones) where the video source is presumably a hard disk full of MPEGs, so the whole thing is going through MPEG compression/decompression at least twice - they probably compress those videos quite a lot to conserve disk space, then decompress them in real time before compressing them again for broadcast on a low bitrate channel.
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All I Want is Widescreen Movies [...] At home. Widescreen displays are hugely priced here.
... and I assume this is the reason why so many "widescreen edition" DVDs are still produced in non-anamorphic widescreen. This is unforgiveable. NTSC has few enough lines already, and letterboxing on the media wastes them even further.
Newer 4:3 TVs can do 16:9 pictures (squeezing all the lines into less of the screen) and even the lowliest DVD player can do its own letterboxing if need be, so there is *no* reason for studios to keep releasing these shoddy non-anamorphic goods.
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On the question of tape versus disk, the big advantage of disk is random access. It's of little value in video entertainment which is mostly watched serially with very few jumps.
For me, random access is a major part of what makes DVD a nice format. "Instant" chapter selection is a real boon, especially on material which is naturally episodic, such as a season's worth of a TV series. So-far-underused DVD features such as branching are also dependant on random access.
Random access is what gives TiVo so many selling points over any tape-based technology, and some of those features will carry forward to DVD-R video.
HDTV is appealing, and for once Europe is behind on this (Digital TV is now commonplace in Europe, but it is all broadcast in PAL resolution -- broadcasters want to pay for as little bandwidth as possible and some of the small-time channels have quite visible MPEG artefacts as a result). What would be required for consumer uptake would be a smooth upgrade path -- say a "HDTV-ready" reciever which outputs both a high-resolution picture and a downsampled NTSC/PAL signal.
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Sod Nethack. I'm holding out for Xpilot. Remember the DC has a modem, and optional Ethernet.
Many people are already writing emulators and homebrew games using "baby" OSs such as Dan Potter's newlib -- but IMHO a good NetBSD or Linux port would enable ports of things like MAME to be done fairly trivially. I'm *dying* to have MAME on my DC.
NB: Some of the newer games emulated by MAME just won't fit in the DC's RAM. The MAME binary is bloated due to the sheer number of games it supports. I'd expect to see a limited number of games supported by DC MAME, and I'd also expect to see it split into a number of smaller binaries, each supporting a subset of games.
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Most European TVs these days accept both NTSC and PAL signals from DVDs, games consoles and the like. I'm not sure where you'd stand recieving analogue RF signals, but you could get around that with a VCR tuner or something. More of a worry for Americans would be that Americans use Component Video for high quality video inputs, Europe uses RGB.
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It's amusing that Sony makes region free DVD players :)
I don't believe they do: however many resellers chip Sony DVD players to remove region fixing, Macrovision etc, then sell them as new with their own warranty.
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Yes, 16:9 TVs are common over here in Europe. I was staggered on a visit to the US, going into the Sony Centre in Chicago and seeing only one widescreen TV among the dozens of flash TVs on show.
The DVD zoning situation is an example of consumer power! The fact is that Region 1 DVDs are usually a far better proposition for European buyers -- they come out earlier, they're cheaper, and they generally have more extra features. The situation is gradually getting better, but for the moment region-locked players don't sell. Most manufacturers seem to get around it by putting in a backdoor, then leaking said backdoor to the net. Needless to say the DVD consortium are none too happy, but screw 'em! A number of resellers also sell chipped DVD players.
The main problem brought about by the lack of 16:9 TVs in the States is the number or R1 DVDs that are non-anamorphic widescreen. This means us European viewers have to zoom the (already low resolution NTSC) picture in order to fill our screens. DVD buyers -- insist on anamorphic widescreen.
As for importing kit to the US -- I don't expect a step-up transformer should be all that expensive. I think less than $40. I suspect if you shop around a lot of the kit will be switchable to 110v, or even auto-detect the voltage -- do check this though.
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