I'll bet that if the Beatles (at their creative late-60s peak) were around today, they'd be making full use of every bit of technology available to them. Don't think of digital technology as making the creative process easier: think of it as allowing more ambition. Like Perl - it makes the possible easy, and the impossible possible.
I think Radiohead's "OK Computer" is an album that will stand the test of time. An enormous amount of digital manipulation went into that album, as well as the obvious guitar work. That's kind of analogous to the mixture of analogue (erm, that was real light going into Lucas' digital cameras) and purely CG work going on in Episode II.
Now, I don't think Episode II will be high art, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the technology won't lead to great works in the future. That's like suggesting that the electric guitar dulls creativity.
Uh, the compression you're talking about is Dynamic Compression: essentially a really fast volume control knob which automatically turns the volume up for quiet bits and down for loud bits -- compressing the dynamic range. It can be used creatively, for example this is what is used to get long sustained notes from electic guitars. It can be used on a whole mix to obtain a "pumping" sound (where the bits between drumbeats are made louder).
This has *absolutely nothing* to do with the data compression we're talking about here - I know it's easy to get confused, especially when there is also dynamic data compression around -- that's where the data compression rate changes according to the content.
Yes, though, lossy compression is becoming a bit of a pain in the arse -- I watch digital satellite TV a lot, and some channels clearly aren't paying for enough bandwidth. MPEG artefacts are rife and extremely distracting. --
Regardless of what the scientists eventually find out, there is no drawback whatsoever to using a headset for your cell phone. It frees up your hand to do whatever, and for the most part, they are more comfortable (and easier on your neck) than the phones themselves.
They're definitely a good idea if you feel you must use your phone while driving.
A lot of people, however, use headsets while their phone is in their pocket or clipped to their belt. It has been found (I forget where I read it) that just being those three feet closer to the ground means poorer reception, so the phone has to switch to a more powerful broadcast mode more often -- and this while the phone is close to your reproductive organs. How pleasant. This will also have an effect on battery life of course.
Ah, I remember the old days, when if you saw someone walking around a city street talking to themselves, they were mentally ill. Now they're probably just using the handsfree kit for their mobile... --
By your anti-American slant, I'm assuming you're a Brit. Well, what kind of fascination, wonderful games have come out of the UK, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Crumpets III D, Bow to the King? Face it, just like every other facet of the computer world, American's make the best computer games.
(takes the bait)
Well, it doesn't take a Briton to flame the Americans - Canadians also do a great job of it. But I've just spent a very pleasant month in the USA, so you'll get no Yank-bashing from me today.
In my humble opinion, the very best games come out of Japan. However, since you ask, here's a few games from Britain (many of them from Warwickshire, by the way, they were probably written within 20 miles of the seat I'm typing from right now):
Tomb Raider
Xenon 2
Micro Machines 1,2,3 and Micro Maniacs
Colin McRea Rally
Black & White
Dungeon Keeper
Republic (if you're out of touch, don't worry, you'll be hearing more about Republic very soon)
Lemmings
Grand Theft Auto
Goldeneye
Banjo Kazooie
Perfect Dark
Speedball 1 and 2
Theme Park
Um, Dizzy
The Pro Pinball series
Metropolis Street Racer
Elite
Revs
... and many, many more.
Seriously, Britain is a hotbed of games development, if only you pop your head out of the tiny world of FPSs for a moment. --
Seaman: OK, an extension of the Tamagochi idea in some ways, but pushed so far into the weird, you have to give it kudos. Voice recognition, for the first time on a console, too.
Crazy Taxi: a car game that's not just about racing, and is actually *fun*. Novel! (see also Driver, although that's not Sega)
Samba De Amigo: A Maraca-'em-up, say no more
Jet [Set|Grind] Radio: roller-skate around a city painting graffiti and evading the law, in Anime-style cell shaded graphics
Phantasy Star Online: A tradional console RPG, but 4 player online cooperative play.
Sadly, it appears innovation doesn't sell that well. The mainstream press and the buying public are not getting as excited about Dreamcast and its games as they are about X-Box and PS2 -- with their less than inspiring collection of games (I'm excited about PS2 Fantavision, but I need at least 2 more interesting games on release before I buy the console).
Nothing new there, I guess. Innovation doesn't sell too well in other media either -- witness the horde of indistinguishable sitcoms on TV... --
For several reasons (a proper RFC, a standard which is separate from its implementation, elegant extension of MIME, etc.) I've got a soft spot for S/MIME.
Yes, S/MIME as it stands relies on a hierarchical PKI, with the unappealing-to-some feature of a top-level root Certificate Authority - but it seems to me that PGP is edging in that direction anyway, as large bodies have begun to offer to sign PGP keys and act as trusted signers.
I strongly feel that both hackers and the Industry need to agree on a standard for encrypted/signed messages, and at the moment it appears to be hackers->PGP/GPG, industry->S/MIME
S/MIME has the advantage right now of being built into Navigator and Outlook by default.
I'd be curious to know what other Slashdotters think should happen, so that we can all settle on a common standard (or interoperate between standards) --
Only on Saturday, I was reading an opinion piece in MCV, the UK trade magazine for the gaming/interactive entertainment trade, in which someone high up in a games development company was calling for a £30 levy on every CDR, at the factory, simply because it could potentially be used to pirate software.
I guess this is outrageous to all of us - sure it would probably stop the piracy of PC and PSX games in its tracks -- but it would also prevent me from (say) backing up the digital photos I took on holiday, or burning audio CDRs of campfire songs I recorded onto minidisc a couple of months ago.
We need to be aware that those in charge of "content" are blinkered to this kind of legitimate use for storage media. We need to remind them that piracy isn't all it can be used for, else they will eventually persuade governments to go through with this kind of taxation.
NB: the same guy went on to say "without CDs, these people will use their hard disks. Tax those too." --
..they shouldn't be flamed for it by the 'leader' of OSS.
RMS is not "the leader of OSS". He rejects the phrase "Open Source" since he believes the term does not adequately put across the "freedom" part of Free Software. --
"These licenses only dictate what you can do to the code. Big deal. I've never even LOOKED at the KDE code...
These licences not only dictate what you can do to the code - they also dictate what other people can do to the code. This affects you directly. Whereas before the licenses forbade anyone porting a GPLd program such as (say) The GIMP to KDE, now it is legal.
As a parallel, I seldom look at the Linux kernel code, and I've never submitted a patch -- but the fact that others can and do results in a better engineered, better supported product.
This is pretty balanced stuff from RMS. He acknowledges that the KDE developers have their own set of beliefs, and that software freedom was not the big issue to them as it is to him. The man has principles, and this time, for once, he has chosen merely to state them, rather than to preach. (When he preaches, he preaches damn well...) --
The idea of virualizing an OS is hardly a new one. IBM tried to do something akin to this with OS2 and Windows 3.1...
I'm fairly sure that's not the case. Win/OS2 was more akin to WINE than to VMWare - a port of the Windows API rather than a virtual machine. (Port, because IBM had access to the Windows source - WINE do not have that luxury, so it's a reimplementation) --
"You, Mr. slim, are a Karma Whoooor of the worst kind."... "the same redundant Karma
Whoring that we see in every Slashdot story."
Now *this* is offtopic, but I felt I had to defend myself ("no score +1 bonus" in effect..)
Sure, what I said was pretty well known stuff, but there will be people reading who don't know it, and when I submitted it, it had not already been said by anyone else, therefore it was not redundant.
Not trolling, just honest
Trolling, but successfully.
If I'm such an appalling Karma Whore, why have I not posted a comment for several weeks?
(sigh... time was I ate personal attacks via the Net for breakfast. Now I'm getting soft and easily upset... ) --
I don't believe these patents in any way cover "the whole discipline"... and if they do there is plenty of prior art to see the patents off.
IBM's VM (AKA OS/390) has been doing virtual machines for longer than most Slashdot readers have had a computer. Emulators (and I was playing with XZX as long ago as 1995 -- it probably was around a while before then) are essentially no different.
All VMware did that was clever was to virtualise an x86. Virtualise (as opposed to emulate) because it does not need to emulate CPU operations, merely pass them on to to the real CPU. An S/390 is designed to facilitate this. For reasons I don't understand personally, apparently a PC isn't particularly friendly to this approach, so VMware did a great job in pulling it off.
I really like VMware, I use it every day (to run Lotus Notes. Bah.) - a Free equivalent would be lovely. --
Why would they do this? They want to sell X-boxen... making it outrageously expensive for small development companies to work on the platform will doom it. Even making it moderately expensive to do so would be pushing things; they'll want the cost of developing for the platform to be as low as possible, in order to entice more development for it early on.
Precisely because of the razor/blade console business model. If third parties can develop and distribute Xbox software without obtaining a license from Microsoft to do so, MS won't get their take form the software sales, and the whole business model goes down the pan.
Perhaps I misrepresented things though: the price of entry may not be that high (but still high enough that the average bedroom coder won't be able to get a look in), but you'll pay for the right to make and sell the end product.
One difference I'll grant you with Xbox is that you can easily develop for normal Windows, then port later.
I imagine something similar happened with the RPG Silver: basically a Final Fantasy-alike, it was developed initially for the PC, but always looked like something that would me more at home on a console. I imagine the PC version, with no development license to pay for, paved the way and attracted investors who funded the port to Dreamcast. --
I was with you right up to the part where you said old games 'require less than half the "skill" required in [new games]'.
I recently had a go at Super Mario Land on the NES, and let me tell you, that game is *hard* compared to today's gaming fare -- but then it had to be. The challenge made up for the lower quality graphics of the day. Today's games can be more like a ride; without too much skill, you get to travel through a series of vignettes.
... and that's just NES games. I can't last more than 30 seconds on many Commodore 64 and Spectrum games.
" Given that the product is still vapor and Microsoft hates everything that Linux and open source stand for, why is X-box getting such frequent news?"
Contrary to popular belief, Slashdot is not and never has been, a "Linux site" or even a "Free Software" site. Think of it as "stuff Rob and his friends find interesting". The stuff about Aibo and Space probes, "Mission to Mars" reviews, stuff about Lego -- that's nothing to do with Linux and Open Source either, and that still gets published.
Xbox is definitely "News for Nerds"; stop whingeing. And I dunno who else is with me, but I only despise Microsoft when what they're doing is wrong. I personally believe in Free Software on the server and the desktop, but I don't mind about proprietariness on gaming consoles -- good luck to 'em.
Lots of odd points in this post, which I felt I ought to respond to:
Microsoft certainly has the cash-cow, but do they have the creative smarts to become a content powerhouse like Sony?
Sony? A content powerhouse? OK, I can name some great games that came directly out of Sony (Kurushi, Parappa the Rapper) but you'll find that the "big name" games which really sold the Playstation were pretty much all developed by third parties (Crash Bandicoot -> Naughty Dog, Tekken -> Namco, Tomb Raider -> Core, Resident Evil -> Capcom etc.) and often published by third parties like Eidos, Activision, etc. too.
All of these third parties are free to develop on X-Box and Dreamcast. All the major 3rd pary developers (with the exception of EA ) have had a stab at Dreamcast development with some success. They will support X-Box, have no doubt. Microsoft does not need to become a master console game developer in order for X-Box to succeed.
Altering the system from a durable item (console + disk + game) to a mere temporary license to use for a limited period due to the "oh, so sorry, parts for your failed console are unavailable" is a subtle form of *BAIT and SWITCH* IMHO.
So you're asking for an end to hardware obsolescence? Blimey. Good luck! To be serious though, I'm a classic console collector, and to be honest, these things don't tend to go wrong - or if they do, they're either still supported, or so cheap to replace second hand, you're best off doing that. When they get so rare that the 2nd hand prices get too high, you can pretty much guarantee that emulators will have shown up that are mature enough to support the software 100%.
I'd be more inclined to worry about non-physical software distribution. We'll be seeing online-only console games soon. What happens to them when in 20 years time someone pulls the plug on the (proprietary, centrally run) game server?
I honestly don't see how the WulfStation project would "preserve the long term value of any PS2 games you may have" -- the project has nothing to do with gaming, after all.
The Dreamcast is certainly not free to develop for in any official sense. That's not to say it can't be done: details at this site. Basically, someone at Sega messed up, making it possible to burn a bootable CDR for Dreamcast. Bleem for Dreamcast took advantage of this: their product is not endorsed by Sega. Yes: MAME on Dreamcast is now (surely) a possibility.
Nobody (outside X-box product development) knows whether X-Box will be hackable in this way, but I think it's pretty safe to say they'll be sticking to the standard console business model of "if you want to develop for our console, pay us $$$ for the licenced devkit".
That's not to say that all emulators are "underground" or require illegally copied ROMs. Sega paid Steve Snake for his KGEN Genesis emulator for DOS, and packaged it together with the ROMS they own and a front-end, as a Sonic the Hedgehog collection for the PC. Sega are currently running a service called "Dream Library", where Dreamcast users can download legally licenced ROMS to play on Genesis, Master System and PC Engine emulators running on Dreamcast. --
This seems very odd to me. If you use one finger, surely that's the whole hand occupied, so why not make use of the other 4 fingers? What's more, the single finger you're using is going to be racing around the place like a mad thing, and that's going to be uncomfortable.
I prefer the idea of the Quinkey chording keyboard, which has been around since the mid 80s at least, where each finger (or thumb) stays on one of 5 home keys, and input depends on chords. I've never bothered to learn such a thing, but it seems ideal for wearables and any application where you require a hand free. --
I've had a read of the article, and I've read the serverbench page... Now, I may be being a little dense here; might have missed a hyperlink which would have explained it, but:
What sort of client/server are they testing? HTTP? SMB? FTP? SMTP? POP3? I can't see anything which specifies this... and until that's known, nobody can comment on the results. --
Somebody has got to figure out a better way to enter text data on small devices. Preferably one-handed.
Nokia's predictive text entry works very well: basically each numeric key represents three or four letters as normal. You hit a key once for each letter entered, and the phone finds a word from its dictionary which "fits", then you hit the "*" key to cycle through matching words. e.g. type "8436" and "them" shows up. Hit "*" and it changes to "then", "theo", "vien". If the word you want isn't there, you fall back on the old way of entering, wherupon the word is added to your personal dictionary. --
Sorry, I don't buy that. Apache was a great free software success before Sun and IBM leapt aboard -- indeed, it was Apache's ubiquity that led IBM to go with Apache rather than continue developing their own proprietary http server.
Yes, Apache would lack some key functionality without IBM/Sun's input, but without them, someone else would have done it. --
As someone has pointed out, it's too late to be thinking about this.
Why did you write a product, before thinking about what you were going to do with it. The best fit for Free Software is stuff which you do not intend to sell -- for example, you may have been contracted to produce a POS system for a retailer. Once you have fulfilled that contract, and got paid, *then* you are in a position to GPL the source (unless the contract forbids it).
If you "just wrote it" with no real use for it yourselves, then selling it, closed license, is probably the only way you'll make any money. The best Free Software products were written because the author needed the software to do their job: take Apache; writing software was not the author's job description -- running a tight Web server was. Writing Apache made their job easier; giving it away (and developing an Apache community) made their job easier still. --
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet that if the Beatles (at their creative late-60s peak) were around today, they'd be making full use of every bit of technology available to them. Don't think of digital technology as making the creative process easier: think of it as allowing more ambition. Like Perl - it makes the possible easy, and the impossible possible.
I think Radiohead's "OK Computer" is an album that will stand the test of time. An enormous amount of digital manipulation went into that album, as well as the obvious guitar work. That's kind of analogous to the mixture of analogue (erm, that was real light going into Lucas' digital cameras) and purely CG work going on in Episode II.
Now, I don't think Episode II will be high art, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the technology won't lead to great works in the future. That's like suggesting that the electric guitar dulls creativity.
--
>> StarWars episode II, as yet untitled film, has wrapped up shooting ahead of shedule.
>They were shooting it in England?
Yes.
But in UK English, "schedule" is spelt "schedule", we just don't pronounce the K. See also "Shweppes" the makers of the tonic water...
--
Uh, the compression you're talking about is Dynamic Compression: essentially a really fast volume control knob which automatically turns the volume up for quiet bits and down for loud bits -- compressing the dynamic range. It can be used creatively, for example this is what is used to get long sustained notes from electic guitars. It can be used on a whole mix to obtain a "pumping" sound (where the bits between drumbeats are made louder).
This has *absolutely nothing* to do with the data compression we're talking about here - I know it's easy to get confused, especially when there is also dynamic data compression around -- that's where the data compression rate changes according to the content.
Yes, though, lossy compression is becoming a bit of a pain in the arse -- I watch digital satellite TV a lot, and some channels clearly aren't paying for enough bandwidth. MPEG artefacts are rife and extremely distracting.
--
Regardless of what the scientists eventually find out, there is no drawback whatsoever to using a headset for your cell phone. It frees up your hand to do whatever, and for the most part, they are more comfortable (and easier on your neck) than the phones themselves.
They're definitely a good idea if you feel you must use your phone while driving.
A lot of people, however, use headsets while their phone is in their pocket or clipped to their belt. It has been found (I forget where I read it) that just being those three feet closer to the ground means poorer reception, so the phone has to switch to a more powerful broadcast mode more often -- and this while the phone is close to your reproductive organs. How pleasant. This will also have an effect on battery life of course.
Ah, I remember the old days, when if you saw someone walking around a city street talking to themselves, they were mentally ill. Now they're probably just using the handsfree kit for their mobile...
--
(takes the bait)
Well, it doesn't take a Briton to flame the Americans - Canadians also do a great job of it. But I've just spent a very pleasant month in the USA, so you'll get no Yank-bashing from me today.
In my humble opinion, the very best games come out of Japan. However, since you ask, here's a few games from Britain (many of them from Warwickshire, by the way, they were probably written within 20 miles of the seat I'm typing from right now):
Seriously, Britain is a hotbed of games development, if only you pop your head out of the tiny world of FPSs for a moment.
--
No originality in games?
Look to Sega, young man:
Seaman: OK, an extension of the Tamagochi idea in some ways, but pushed so far into the weird, you have to give it kudos. Voice recognition, for the first time on a console, too.
Crazy Taxi: a car game that's not just about racing, and is actually *fun*. Novel! (see also Driver, although that's not Sega)
Samba De Amigo: A Maraca-'em-up, say no more
Jet [Set|Grind] Radio: roller-skate around a city painting graffiti and evading the law, in Anime-style cell shaded graphics
Phantasy Star Online: A tradional console RPG, but 4 player online cooperative play.
Sadly, it appears innovation doesn't sell that well. The mainstream press and the buying public are not getting as excited about Dreamcast and its games as they are about X-Box and PS2 -- with their less than inspiring collection of games (I'm excited about PS2 Fantavision, but I need at least 2 more interesting games on release before I buy the console).
Nothing new there, I guess. Innovation doesn't sell too well in other media either -- witness the horde of indistinguishable sitcoms on TV...
--
For several reasons (a proper RFC, a standard which is separate from its implementation, elegant extension of MIME, etc.) I've got a soft spot for S/MIME.
Yes, S/MIME as it stands relies on a hierarchical PKI, with the unappealing-to-some feature of a top-level root Certificate Authority - but it seems to me that PGP is edging in that direction anyway, as large bodies have begun to offer to sign PGP keys and act as trusted signers.
I strongly feel that both hackers and the Industry need to agree on a standard for encrypted/signed messages, and at the moment it appears to be hackers->PGP/GPG, industry->S/MIME
S/MIME has the advantage right now of being built into Navigator and Outlook by default.
I'd be curious to know what other Slashdotters think should happen, so that we can all settle on a common standard (or interoperate between standards)
--
Only on Saturday, I was reading an opinion piece in MCV, the UK trade magazine for the gaming/interactive entertainment trade, in which someone high up in a games development company was calling for a £30 levy on every CDR, at the factory, simply because it could potentially be used to pirate software.
I guess this is outrageous to all of us - sure it would probably stop the piracy of PC and PSX games in its tracks -- but it would also prevent me from (say) backing up the digital photos I took on holiday, or burning audio CDRs of campfire songs I recorded onto minidisc a couple of months ago.
We need to be aware that those in charge of "content" are blinkered to this kind of legitimate use for storage media. We need to remind them that piracy isn't all it can be used for, else they will eventually persuade governments to go through with this kind of taxation.
NB: the same guy went on to say "without CDs, these people will use their hard disks. Tax those too."
--
..they shouldn't be flamed for it by the 'leader' of OSS.
RMS is not "the leader of OSS". He rejects the phrase "Open Source" since he believes the term does not adequately put across the "freedom" part of Free Software.
--
"These licenses only dictate what you can do to the code. Big deal. I've never even LOOKED at the KDE code...
These licences not only dictate what you can do to the code - they also dictate what other people can do to the code. This affects you directly. Whereas before the licenses forbade anyone porting a GPLd program such as (say) The GIMP to KDE, now it is legal.
As a parallel, I seldom look at the Linux kernel code, and I've never submitted a patch -- but the fact that others can and do results in a better engineered, better supported product.
This is pretty balanced stuff from RMS. He acknowledges that the KDE developers have their own set of beliefs, and that software freedom was not the big issue to them as it is to him. The man has principles, and this time, for once, he has chosen merely to state them, rather than to preach. (When he preaches, he preaches damn well...)
--
The idea of virualizing an OS is hardly a new one. IBM tried to do something akin to this with OS2 and Windows 3.1 ...
I'm fairly sure that's not the case. Win/OS2 was more akin to WINE than to VMWare - a port of the Windows API rather than a virtual machine. (Port, because IBM had access to the Windows source - WINE do not have that luxury, so it's a reimplementation)
--
"You, Mr. slim, are a Karma Whoooor of the worst kind." ... "the same redundant Karma
Whoring that we see in every Slashdot story."
Now *this* is offtopic, but I felt I had to defend myself ("no score +1 bonus" in effect..)
Sure, what I said was pretty well known stuff, but there will be people reading who don't know it, and when I submitted it, it had not already been said by anyone else, therefore it was not redundant.
Not trolling, just honest
Trolling, but successfully.
If I'm such an appalling Karma Whore, why have I not posted a comment for several weeks?
(sigh... time was I ate personal attacks via the Net for breakfast. Now I'm getting soft and easily upset... )
--
I don't believe these patents in any way cover "the whole discipline"... and if they do there is plenty of prior art to see the patents off.
IBM's VM (AKA OS/390) has been doing virtual machines for longer than most Slashdot readers have had a computer. Emulators (and I was playing with XZX as long ago as 1995 -- it probably was around a while before then) are essentially no different.
All VMware did that was clever was to virtualise an x86. Virtualise (as opposed to emulate) because it does not need to emulate CPU operations, merely pass them on to to the real CPU. An S/390 is designed to facilitate this. For reasons I don't understand personally, apparently a PC isn't particularly friendly to this approach, so VMware did a great job in pulling it off.
I really like VMware, I use it every day (to run Lotus Notes. Bah.) - a Free equivalent would be lovely.
--
Can anyone suggest a set of innocuous words which would trigger MI5's systems in the same way as echelon-baiting "iraq bomb IRA etc." sigs do?
Something which would irritate them, while not actually making me look guilty of anything I'm not would be nice.
--
Of course, what you do with a Dreamcast running NetBSD is up to you. Errr ... just what could you do with a Dreamcast running NetBSD?
Nethack.
Xpilot...
--
Why would they do this? They want to sell X-boxen... making it outrageously expensive for small development companies to work on the platform will doom it. Even making it moderately expensive to do so would be pushing things; they'll want the cost of developing for the platform to be as low as possible, in order to entice more development for it early on.
Precisely because of the razor/blade console business model. If third parties can develop and distribute Xbox software without obtaining a license from Microsoft to do so, MS won't get their take form the software sales, and the whole business model goes down the pan.
Perhaps I misrepresented things though: the price of entry may not be that high (but still high enough that the average bedroom coder won't be able to get a look in), but you'll pay for the right to make and sell the end product.
One difference I'll grant you with Xbox is that you can easily develop for normal Windows, then port later.
I imagine something similar happened with the RPG Silver: basically a Final Fantasy-alike, it was developed initially for the PC, but always looked like something that would me more at home on a console. I imagine the PC version, with no development license to pay for, paved the way and attracted investors who funded the port to Dreamcast.
--
I was with you right up to the part where you said old games 'require less than half the "skill" required in [new games]'.
I recently had a go at Super Mario Land on the NES, and let me tell you, that game is *hard* compared to today's gaming fare -- but then it had to be. The challenge made up for the lower quality graphics of the day. Today's games can be more like a ride; without too much skill, you get to travel through a series of vignettes.
... and that's just NES games. I can't last more than 30 seconds on many Commodore 64 and Spectrum games.
--
" Given that the product is still vapor and Microsoft hates everything that Linux and open source stand for, why is X-box getting such frequent news?"
Contrary to popular belief, Slashdot is not and never has been, a "Linux site" or even a "Free Software" site. Think of it as "stuff Rob and his friends find interesting". The stuff about Aibo and Space probes, "Mission to Mars" reviews, stuff about Lego -- that's nothing to do with Linux and Open Source either, and that still gets published.
Xbox is definitely "News for Nerds"; stop whingeing. And I dunno who else is with me, but I only despise Microsoft when what they're doing is wrong. I personally believe in Free Software on the server and the desktop, but I don't mind about proprietariness on gaming consoles -- good luck to 'em.
--
Sony? A content powerhouse? OK, I can name some great games that came directly out of Sony (Kurushi, Parappa the Rapper) but you'll find that the "big name" games which really sold the Playstation were pretty much all developed by third parties (Crash Bandicoot -> Naughty Dog, Tekken -> Namco, Tomb Raider -> Core, Resident Evil -> Capcom etc.) and often published by third parties like Eidos, Activision, etc. too.
All of these third parties are free to develop on X-Box and Dreamcast. All the major 3rd pary developers (with the exception of EA ) have had a stab at Dreamcast development with some success. They will support X-Box, have no doubt. Microsoft does not need to become a master console game developer in order for X-Box to succeed.
So you're asking for an end to hardware obsolescence? Blimey. Good luck! To be serious though, I'm a classic console collector, and to be honest, these things don't tend to go wrong - or if they do, they're either still supported, or so cheap to replace second hand, you're best off doing that. When they get so rare that the 2nd hand prices get too high, you can pretty much guarantee that emulators will have shown up that are mature enough to support the software 100%.
I'd be more inclined to worry about non-physical software distribution. We'll be seeing online-only console games soon. What happens to them when in 20 years time someone pulls the plug on the (proprietary, centrally run) game server?
I honestly don't see how the WulfStation project would "preserve the long term value of any PS2 games you may have" -- the project has nothing to do with gaming, after all.
--
The Dreamcast is certainly not free to develop for in any official sense. That's not to say it can't be done: details at this site. Basically, someone at Sega messed up, making it possible to burn a bootable CDR for Dreamcast. Bleem for Dreamcast took advantage of this: their product is not endorsed by Sega. Yes: MAME on Dreamcast is now (surely) a possibility.
Nobody (outside X-box product development) knows whether X-Box will be hackable in this way, but I think it's pretty safe to say they'll be sticking to the standard console business model of "if you want to develop for our console, pay us $$$ for the licenced devkit".
That's not to say that all emulators are "underground" or require illegally copied ROMs. Sega paid Steve Snake for his KGEN Genesis emulator for DOS, and packaged it together with the ROMS they own and a front-end, as a Sonic the Hedgehog collection for the PC. Sega are currently running a service called "Dream Library", where Dreamcast users can download legally licenced ROMS to play on Genesis, Master System and PC Engine emulators running on Dreamcast.
--
This seems very odd to me. If you use one finger, surely that's the whole hand occupied, so why not make use of the other 4 fingers? What's more, the single finger you're using is going to be racing around the place like a mad thing, and that's going to be uncomfortable.
I prefer the idea of the Quinkey chording keyboard, which has been around since the mid 80s at least, where each finger (or thumb) stays on one of 5 home keys, and input depends on chords. I've never bothered to learn such a thing, but it seems ideal for wearables and any application where you require a hand free.
--
I've had a read of the article, and I've read the serverbench page... Now, I may be being a little dense here; might have missed a hyperlink which would have explained it, but:
What sort of client/server are they testing? HTTP? SMB? FTP? SMTP? POP3? I can't see anything which specifies this... and until that's known, nobody can comment on the results.
--
Somebody has got to figure out a better way to enter text data on small devices. Preferably one-handed.
Nokia's predictive text entry works very well: basically each numeric key represents three or four letters as normal. You hit a key once for each letter entered, and the phone finds a word from its dictionary which "fits", then you hit the "*" key to cycle through matching words. e.g. type "8436" and "them" shows up. Hit "*" and it changes to "then", "theo", "vien". If the word you want isn't there, you fall back on the old way of entering, wherupon the word is added to your personal dictionary.
--
Sorry, I don't buy that. Apache was a great free software success before Sun and IBM leapt aboard -- indeed, it was Apache's ubiquity that led IBM to go with Apache rather than continue developing their own proprietary http server.
Yes, Apache would lack some key functionality without IBM/Sun's input, but without them, someone else would have done it.
--
As someone has pointed out, it's too late to be thinking about this.
Why did you write a product, before thinking about what you were going to do with it. The best fit for Free Software is stuff which you do not intend to sell -- for example, you may have been contracted to produce a POS system for a retailer. Once you have fulfilled that contract, and got paid, *then* you are in a position to GPL the source (unless the contract forbids it).
If you "just wrote it" with no real use for it yourselves, then selling it, closed license, is probably the only way you'll make any money. The best Free Software products were written because the author needed the software to do their job: take Apache; writing software was not the author's job description -- running a tight Web server was. Writing Apache made their job easier; giving it away (and developing an Apache community) made their job easier still.
--