Either someone has their numbers wrong, or Sony is planning to have an extra 100K units available by the end of November. Either way, this means there will be even less units than recently stated, which was also less units than previously promised.
The 100K discrepancy isn't that hard to figure out. They're planning on shipping 400K in the US and 100K in Japan. The real question is how 400K + 800K by end of year in the US + 100K + ???K by end of year in Japan = 2.4Million. I have a hard time believing that they're somehow going to manufacture and ship 1.1Million consoles for Japan if they can't launch with any more than 100K.
Sony should just hurry up and use a shotgun on their foot instead of a pistol.
The best advice for Sony right now is to make sure they get their whole head in front of the shotgun.
At least, if they are shipping more units in November but after launch, this is better than the 360, where they didn't send out additional shipments for a few weeks after initial release.
The Xbox 360 had a slow trickle of consoles going out nearly every single day. The biggest problems were at the retailers' ends -- refusing shipments because Microsoft sent the consoles by UPS but the store only accepts shipments from their distribution center, holding the consoles for a "re-release" a month after the actual release (Best Buy, I'm looking at you. You bastards), employees hoarding the consoles for ebay sales, etc. Microsoft definitely had supply issues, but they made as much as they could as quickly as they could and shipped them out ASAP. And they eventually did own up to their problems. Do you really expect Sony to do as much? Kutaragi's personal distortion field will be used to spin this in a positive light for Sony and damn the facts.
Why are people making comparisons between HD standards that I personally:
1) Won't need. Current DVD produce is fine.
2) Can't afford. Bring prices down for HD TVs, HD cable boxes, HD cable, HD players, etc.
3) Don't want. *cough* DRM *cough* and too few selections for movies, currently anyway.
Obviously you're not the target audience. That said, I think you're a little confused on price. HDTVs are available for as little as $500 (depending on size and technology). HD cable boxes are "free". HD cable itself generally only costs an extra $5/mo ($10/mo if you want it with a DVR), depending on the carrier. Upconverting DVD players are available for $100 or less. Granted, HD-DVD players ($500) and BD players ($1000) are still expensive, but that's because they're brand new technology. DVD players were expensive when they were first released, as well. You couldn't go down to the corner market and pick up a $35 DVD player back in 1997. Complaining about price at this point in the life of HD video disc players is just silly.
DRM and movie selection will sort itself out. Remember the old DivX from Circuit City? It had a much more restrictive DRM model than DVD, and it died a horrible death (like Blu-Ray players, DivX players could phone home and brick your player if they wanted to). Early adopters don't care, but they're the only ones who'll get burned here. The rest of us are taking a "Wait and see" attitude. My current bet is that BD's phone-home feature will eventually accidentally disable a bunch of players, causing more awareness of that feature and prompting more people to use HD-DVD which doesn't have the same feature. Then the HD-DVD DRM will ultimately be cracked (just like DVDs), and your DRM argument will be moot.
Movie selection always starts off poor. What was available when DVDs first shipped in 1997? Twister and a bunch of IMAX crap. Wait a couple years (after the format war is over), and if HD-DVD or BD really catches on studios will release more and more movies. Besides, you can still play your old DVD movies in the new players, unlike the VHS to DVD switch.
I watch movies for the content and story, NOT for the blemishes on the actors faces. My 19" screens and standard DVDs are good enough. That said, HD is good for sporting events. That's all I'd use it for.
Most people watch movies for the content (even if that "content" is simply what hot actor or actress is in the movie). Hardware reviewers watch movies for the blemishes, but that's because they're providing a service to help you choose the best hardware for your budget. Would you use OpenOffice.org if its UI was purple and green? Why not? It still works just the same, and you can ignore purple and green.
As for your 19" screens, some of us don't like to sit in front of the computer to watch a movie. We have nice couches and big screen TVs so we can sit back in comfort and enjoy the show rather than hunching up over a desk.
Why invest three years in a mod when you know the environment is hostile?
That's a good question. Bungie (and Microsoft) have been historically non-hostile with regards to Halo properties (see Red vs. Blue, for example). However, in just about every case where Bungie/Microsoft have given implicit or explicit approval, the authors of such works came to them before-hand (or soon afterwards). So, given that Bungie is fan-friendly, and that there are probably more than a few Microsoft and Bungie employees who would love to play a Halo RTS, why didn't the Halogen guys talk to Microsoft three years ago?
Same thing retard. A composite is a component and vice versa, they are cables for christ's sake.
Okay, "retard". Composite video uses a single cable for the video signal. Component video uses three cables. In theory, you could use three composite video cables together as a component cable, but that's really not possible when you're dealing with consoles that have a proprietary connector on one end. In the case of the Xbox 360, the cable has three leads for component output, one lead for composite output, two leads for analog stereo audio output, one jack for digital optical audio output, and a switch that will enable either the component leads or the composite lead (but not both at the same time).
But I think there is an assumption that the people running the polls will not allow a team of hackers to sit there at the Diebold machine prodding and prying at it, soldering logic boards onto it, and all the other funky stuff they've been doing to Diebold machines to make them mess up. I could just drive a truck into it, that would be even easier than hacking it!
It's not people at the polling place that they're concerned with. Its the corrupt officials who get to take the machine home with them, who could replace valid vote data with a trumped up memory card showing a clear majority win for whoever is paying them the most. The "tag" on the metal cover is supposed to prove that the machine has not been tampered with. This article proves that you can tamper with the data all you like without breaking that tag.
In a sense, this is even worse than a hacker attacking the machine right at the polling place. In this scenario, you feel like you've excercised your right to vote and contributed to the process of making things better, but in reality your vote never got counted at all. It was replaced by a dummy vote.
However, I think in most peoples cases, if they have the means to use HDMI, they probably already have an HDMI cable.
I wouldn't bet on that. TVs don't ship with HDMI cables. Upconverting DVD players, HD-DVD players, and Blu-Ray players don't ship with HDMI cables. HDMI-capable cable and satellite STBs don't ship with HDMI cables. A user who bought a set with HDMI and an upconverting DVD player might have bought an HDMI cable (I would hope so, as upconverting DVD players won't upconvert over component!), but if they did then they're using that for the DVD player. Why would they want to swap back and forth between the DVD player and the PS3?
No he really did mean composite (aka 'RCA' cables). Composite cables are still the default included with all consoles. No way are they including component cables with their consoles when they can overcharge you for a cable that isn't required for it to connect to all TV's.
If they don't ship a component cable in the box then they're not even matching the Xbox 360. The "real" Xbox 360 package (ie, not the Core) ships with a dual component/composite cable. The only reason you'd ever need to buy a separate cable is if you want to use S-Video or VGA.
Way to go Sony! At least you can milk some money from your suckers^Wcustomers while you crash and burn.
Two main things to remember here: Dom Inspector and the Web Developer Toolbar. Dom Inspector to find where what you're looking for lives in the code, and the Web Developer extension (for Firefox) to edit the CSS and see changes reflected in realtime, as well as way, way more stuff than I could possibly mention here, including "view generated source".
For IE, you should look at the IE Developer Toolbar. It does for IE much of what Firefox's DOM Inspector and Web Developer Toolbar can do. Works with IE6 and IE7.
Yes, I know, IE is "teh evil", but sometimes you have to work with IE-only pages, or pages that do things in different ways for IE and Firefox. It's nice to have a tool in your toolbox that will let you inspect things in IE just as you would in Firefox.
You know, it's odd how one word can change a phrase. The traditional phrase is, "innocent until proven guilty," which implies that you may never be proven guilty. Your turn of phrase, "innocent before proven guilty," implies that you're going to be proven guilty, but you're currently innocent.
I can't recommend them highly enough. Pick-up-after-a-few-rings, by-a-person-who-can-talk-dBs-and-DNS grade service, 24/7.
Funny, when I was with them three years ago, they were piss-poor terrible. Constantly mischarging me (there's no way a 1.5/384 ADSL line is $250/mo, even three years ago, especially when the exact same line with Concentric/XO through Covad and Verizon was $60/mo), giving me the run around on service problems ("It's not your modem," a month later, "No, really, it's not your modem," a month after that, "Oh, your modem's warranty is up so replacement will cost you $150? It's your modem, and we'll need that check, please") and just otherwise being a bunch of sneaky, greedy bastards. Everybody always talks smack about the CLEC and ILEC during installation, but Covad and Verizon had their bits done over a week before they were scheduled, and Speakeasy couldn't get their fingers out of their asses long enough to provision my service until the previously agreed-upon date, never mind that it was a simple database insert on their end unlike the actual "physical labor" the loop provider was able to do ahead of schedule. I was with them for a little over a year and a half, and I only switched because Concentric/XO (whom I loved!) got out of the residential DSL market. Comcast has their own set of problems, but so far they've been nowhere near as bad as Speakeasy.
All this proves is that anybody can get bad service anywhere, but I share because it's important that people don't go into a contract with Speakeasy thinking they can do no wrong. Maybe they've changed in the past three years (I wouldn't know, my house is out of DSL distance), but I rather doubt it.
Oh, yeah, and this was in a well-connected suburb (Kirkland) of their main Seattle office, so it wasn't like I was in some brand new market where they were still trying to work out the kinks.
How about Steve Polge, probably unknown to many. He created the Reaper Bot for Quake which got lead him to a job at Epic Games working on the A.I. for Unreal at the basics for Botmatch which in the end resulted in Unreal Tournament.
Or David "Zoid" Kirsch, who built the first CTF mod for Quake, which lead to his efforts on the Linux ports of Quake 1 and 2 and eventually landed him with Retro working on the Metroid Prime series.
Quake was a revolutionary time period in the history of games. It marked the first time enthusiasts could really create full-on games (Doom modding was pretty limited) based on a commercial engine, for free. As mentioned, the ubiquitous CTF game mode you find in everything these days was created by an individual modder. Squad-based strategy was pioneered by the guys who wrote TeamFortress. You could find just about anything, from racing games to flying games to future or fantasy games and just about anything in between. The modern FPS landscape owes its very existence to those original modders, and yet we barely even remember their names. How sad.
I'm an ignoramus when it comes to display technology, but I was under the impression that our computer monitors stopped being subject to burning once we graduated to VGA technology, even when we use CRTs. Certainly I haven't seen burnin on any monitor since that transition. I assume this is because of the specific kind of phosphor used in VGA CRTs -- and not used in plasma displays.
It's still quite possible to get burn-in on a VGA monitor (a co-worker down the hall from me has a monitor with the Windows Server 2003 login screen burned into it). It's more difficult to do, but it's still quite possible, especially if the monitor is miscalibrated (contrast too high, for example).
Re:Turning the computer inside out
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A New Kind of OS
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Having the KDE libraries being object-oriented and manipulatable over RPC and DCOP is a step towards a possible document-centric future.
Sounds a lot like Microsoft's COM, because, well, KPart == COM (not exactly, and I don't believe they interoperate, but there's no reason they couldn't as COM boils down to little more than a vtable layout specification). Microsoft's been doing that in one form or another for something like 15 years now. The "the browser is just a shell that can load a browser object, or a file system object, or a document object, or..." concept that lies behind Konqueror is exactly what Internet Explorer 4 was nearly 10 years ago (and still is).
As we've seen with COM, just having the technology doesn't necessarily mean it's going to lead to this kind of loose coupling. However, not having the technology means you'll never get loose coupling, so kudos for OLE and COM and KPart and CORBA (though CORBA is typically way too heavy) and Beans and all of the other "component software" technologies.
Must be a slow news day. I read through the entire article and I didn't find anything substantial. He spends 6 paragraphs on the first "page" explaining how cool (and "weird") it would be to attach adaptive intelligence to our workflow. (His example is, what if the computer knew when NOT to bother you with email?)
You think that's great? You should read the "Opera 8.0 vs. Pocket IE" review. 3/4s of the first page of the review is spent explaining what a web browser and web server are (in horribly bad terms, no less).
When you set up appointments for our cable guy to come fix something, the company will only narrow down "when will he appear" to one day. Can you imagine a dentist working that way? "Come any time during the day for a tooth cleaning". Yeah right. Is the service this abominably bad, where they even refuse to make timely appointments, elsewhere?
Most companies will narrow it down to a 4 hour window. They can't be 100% exact because the tech has other appointments during the day and there's no way to know what will be wrong at one of the other appointments. It could be a 5 minute in-and-out with a new STB or modem, or it could be a multi-hour troubleshooting job. As well, you have to take travel into account. If the previous appointment is all the way across town and it takes a bit longer than expected, the tech is going to show up late for his appointment with you. (BTW, I'm not apologizing for them. Even a 4 hour window sucks, but you have to understand the reasons for it)
That said, most places will allow you to specify a two hour time window if you can get one of the first appointments of the day. For example, a normal window might be 8am to 12pm, but you can request 8am to 10am and they might be able to accomodate. Also, you can request that the tech call you when he's on his way to your appointment. That way you can still try to get some work done during the day, and only leave for home when the tech says he's on his way.
During the winter, it was so bad and so regular, I could predict the signal dropoff time to within 1/2 hour, based on the outside temp.
Soudns almost exactly like a problem I had with Comcast when I first moved into my house. The previous owners used a dish for TV, and since the house is just out of DSL range I have to assume they used dialup for an internet connection. That's relevant because when I moved in I switched everything over to cable (cable TV, cable internet, screw the phone line). During the day, the cable connection was rock solid. Which was useless to me, since I work during the day. During the night, the cable internet connection (but not TV!) would go out as it cooled down. After 8 tech visits, three cable modems, and four months a tech finally thought to check the line at the street. Turns out there was some water damage (rust!) that caused an intermittent connection. During the warm day it would expand just enough to make a connection, but at night as it cooled down the connection would go away. Apparently it still made enough of a connection for TV to get through, but not for internet. A minute later, he had repaired the connection and left, and I haven't had problems since. This was during the spring, so I can just imagine how bad it would've gotten if they hadn't found the problem by winter.
Temperature-related issues like this can be very hard to diagnose, specifically because the techs will never come out at night. If the issue is caused by cooling temperatures at night and the techs come at 10 in the morning, of course the problem's not going to reproduce. I just had to keep getting them to send out techs until I got one that actually knew a thing or two.
In your case, the damage may have been farther up the line, especially if the entire neighborhood had the same problem. In that case, the only thing you can do is to get your neighbors to call in and complain as well. It's like a power outage. If only one person calls in, they're not going to do anything. If three people call in, they might be able to triangulate the position of the problem and think about fixing it. If hundreds of people call in, they know they have a problem and a tech will be immediately dispatched. So, when you have problems like this, call! And get your neighbors to call! If you don't, the service company isn't going to give a crap because you're not making any noise.
What good is wiping software if it leaves tell-tale traces that files have been wiped. For example I know that PGP's wipe renames files as aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.... which would be a sure sign that someone has been wiping data. Perhaps it's better to wipe the files, uninstall the wiper, remove all registry entries and then fill the drive to 100% with crap (e.g. by copying your Windows system folder over and over) and then a full system defrag, followed by a registry / page defrag followed by yet more crap copying.
Too much work. Better to uninstall the offending software, delete all files you downloaded, and then take an image of the drive. Imaging software won't carry over deleted nodes, so now you have a pristine image without the incriminating evidence. Then you can buy another hard drive (with cash!), deploy the clean image, and then "lose" (smash, burn, bury, drown, etc) the "bad" hard drive. There, all evidence gone, no way to find it, and no way to prove that your current hard drive isn't the hard drive you've always had (because the image should carry over file timestamps and such).
Of course, you need to be prescient to be able to do this correctly, as I would expect the RIAA to start confiscating computers or hard drives to try to prevent this in the future. Whether they can do that or not, I don't know (IANAL). My default assumption would be that they couldn't, since these are civil matters and not arrests. That doesn't mean they wouldn't find a way, or try anyway.
First, let me be clear that I was not trying to suggest anything of a conspiracy between Microsoft and Mozilla. I don't really know where you got that from. My question falls out of previous posters who noted that Firefox installs fine on the Vista Betas and that Microsoft does a lot of non-standard things in their browser. The non-standard issue can make pages targeted at IE incompatable with Firefox and the like.
Sorry, I must've projected all of the other conspiracy theory posts onto yours. As I understand it, and I've not used Vista yet so I may be wrong, the current Firefox 2 betas don't work on Vista, and the Firefox 1.5.x branch may end up with some appcompat tweaking behind the scenes by Vista. I assume the former will be the meat of the talks, figuring out why Firefox 2 doesn't work. The latter may be a smaller part, getting 1.5.x updated so that it won't need to go through a round of appcompat on first run.
If the "IE only" pages were the sole result of poor programing and testing on the developers part, then why would microsoft care about backwards compatability. I'm not suggesting that developers shouldn't be more responisble in creating pages that can be accessed by everybody that should be able to access them, but that a part of the responsability does fall onto microsoft for not adhearing to the standards strictly enough.
I should clarify. Most "IE-only" pages are that way for one of two reasons: either they explicitly check UA strings and block non-IE (bad developer!), or they use IE-specific bits and pieces like ActiveX controls without an equivalent plugin for Firefox (bad developer, but usually not quite as bad since this kind of thing tends to happen only on intranets). "Compatibility" usually revolves around layout and rendering issues. IE6 obviously had some major problems with layout (understatement!), and the IE7 team is trying to strike a balance between not horribly breaking sites that try to work around IE6 shortcomings (some misalignment and such is okay, but missing or unusable UI elements are not) and doing things better in IE7. An example would be alpha transparency on PNGs. IE6 could do it through a filter hack. IE7 can do it natively. IE7 will still support the filter hack, though. However, if a website is doing a browser check and blocks non-IE, there's nothing IE7 can do about that.
I believe most of the Windows Live sites are still doing a browser check (bad!), but they're actively supporting Firefox. Most of this comes through the use of the Atlas framework, which does target Firefox as well as IE (and should also work on Opera and possibly Safari/Konq).
Xbox Live is going to be a pay service. So why if someone who uses Firefox can't access their system would they give microsoft money.
What? Xbox Live already is a pay service (for the Gold level, anyway). Besides, it has nothing to do with browsers. Windows Live is a conglomeration of services, some for-pay (Windows Live Custom Domains), some ad-supported (Windows Live Messenger), some free that will probably be ad-supported out of beta (Windows Live.com).
Interestingly enough, I can browse the Windows Live Custom Domains page just fine with Firefox (I don't subscribe, so I don't know if there's broken functionality under the subscription), and I can do the same at Windows Live.com, Windows Live Expo, Windows Live Local, and Windows Live Gallery (and those are just the ones I tried right now). So what's the problem with Firefox and Windows Live?
My assumption is that it really wouldn't be all that difficult for them to change IE7 to be standards compliant, if that's really what they want to do. Perhaps they will allow Firefox the ability to run the non-standards compliant IE-geared pages without the need for IE. Or, perhaps Microsoft is looking to finally separate their web browser with their file browser.
Why must everything be a conspiracy theory? Firefox is a popular, widely-used web browser. If it has problems on Vista, that's bad for Vista. Microsoft is doing the responsible thing and working with developers of popular applications to make sure that they work well (btw, Microsoft does the exact same thing with many other non-OSS developers as well, but you don't hear about it because it's not news). This is not an attempt to merge the IE and Firefox codebases or anything silly like that. It's just Business As Usual(tm) for a company that provides a platform (OS).
As for your Windows Live conspiracy theory in the sibling comment, have you been paying attention at all? One of the main goals of Windows Live is to work on all "uplevel" browsers. For now, some sites only work on IE and some sites only work on IE and Firefox (live.com supposedly has support for Opera 9 beta releases as well), but these sites are also all beta at the moment (though unlike Google, Microsoft does plan to take them out of beta -- for example, both Expo and Windows Live Messenger have dropped the beta moniker). The Live.com team in particular has worked with Opera to make sure live.com works in their browser, and I assume part of this Firefox dialog is to work with the Live.com team to figure out how to allow a parent page to resize iframes when the content of the iframe changes (IE6 can do that, IE7 can do that but for a bug in beta 3, but Firefox can't. That's why you get ugly scroll bars on live.com in Firefox). However, I expect that discussion will be weighted more towards Firefox helping the Live.com guys rather than the Live.com guys dictating requirements to Firefox. The Live.com team has also hinted at trying to work with Apple to support Safari, but they might be barking up the wrong tree (should be talking to the Konqueror developers instead).
And finally, most "IE-only" pages are IE-only because the idiot developer used a browser check to limit what browsers and versions they support. Good web developers know you should never do this, instead using object detection to handle different browsers, but there's a distinct lack of good web developers out there.
I wonder if the SCO will sue Arch for that? (Actually with SCO's track record they probably will.)
SCO probably won't, but how long do you think it'll take before The Tetris Company, LLC, sends them a cease and desist? As background, The Tetris Company seems to think that they have a copyright or trademark on the actual gameplay of Tetris, which is complete bunk. They do have a trademark on the name, which might cause problems in this case (the embedded tetris clone is called "Tetrix", which is a bit close to "Tetris" for comfort). Unfortunately, the kind of people who make tetris clones tend to be independent developers doing it for fun or to hone their skills, and generally don't have the financial means to fight the lengthy court battle necessary to prove The Tetris Company wrong. See Quinn, for example.
No, unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, you're better off embedding a breakout clone, or pong clone, or asteroids clone, etc instead of a tetris clone. You're just asking for trouble.
Oh come on, before you start bashing them - look, they have a nice Tetris game for you to play while it installs!
That's got to be worth something, no?
Sure, if the year is 1999 and the distro is Caldera.
I just got a new Samsung 50" Plasma. I've used almost nothing but my 360. There are always little health bars in the corner. I was very worried about burn in, but I think burn-in has been completely debunked arround here. There is no such problem in modern plasma screens. My model isn't even the latest and greatest with the "dedicated game mode". It just works.
Burn-in is a potential problem in CRTs and Plasma displays because they ultimately use the same technology to represent colors -- phosphors. The two display types use different technologies to excite the phosphors, but plasma is still a phosphor-based display. Compare that to LCD or DLP, where color is generated by light (via filters on the subpixels in an LCD, or a color wheel in a DLP). Phosphors wear out with use, and burn-in happens when they wear out unevently. There are ways to combat this, but you cannot totally eliminate it in phosphor-based displays:
Turn down your contrast. Brighter pixels will wear out the phosphor more quickly. Most TVs ship in a "torch" mode, which looks good in the store but is way too bright for normal usage. It's a good idea to have your set calibrated after a break-in period. (This is a good idea for LCD and DLP displays as well, but CRTs and Plasmas need it to tweak colors as the phosphors age.)
Get a set that shifts pixels. By occasionally shifting the image around by a few pixels, you'll spread the image out across more phosphors. This makes it less likely for static images to burn in (or more precisely, it will cause surrounding pixels to wear out at around the same frequency, which makes any burn-in you might suffer seem less by smoothing out the sharp edges).
Always use the set in full-screen mode (on widescreen sets). If you don't like everything looking shorter and fatter, use a sidebar mode with a ~50% gray color rather than black, and that periodically adjusts the position of the interior picture. The gray sidebars will keep the unused phosphors in the sidebars wearing out about the same as the interior phosphors, and shifting the interior image position will help smooth out any sharp edges on the under-burn.
CRTs and plasmas are both good display technologies, and they've come a long way from years past where burn-in was a common issue, but they do still inherently have the potential to burn in. Modern sets do try to prevent burn-in as much as possible without user intervention (well, except for "torch mode"), but you still should be a little careful about how you use the set.
But so far, most of the 3rd party controllers for consoles are cheaper imitations of the originals with BAD gimmicks (autofire). The one's I've really liked have been extremely rare... WaveBird, the NegCon....
Console controllers are just a little bit more complex than mice. Anyway, third-party controllers don't usually suck because of the gimmicks, but because the primary functionality is sub-par. The joysticks are too sloppy, or the buttons are too hard to press, or the ergonomics are bad, etc. Some third-party manufacturers like Logitech generally do a good job, but I would stay away from most others.
Also, the WaveBird isn't a third-party controller. It works because it's the standard first-party Gamecube controller (with sticks with the correct amount of resistance, and buttons that work when you hit them, and ergonomics that don't cramp your hand), with the addition of a wireless transmitter and battery compartment.
You just need to know what to outsource and what to do in-house. If you're an up-and-coming motion capture and 3D animation studio, then it might be worthwhile to try to innovate in the motion capture space. If instead you're an indie game developer that just happens to need motion capture for your next game, you're better off outsourcing the motion capturing and focusing on innovation in your game design and gameplay.
Just because you can outsource something doesn't mean you have to outsource everything.
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The 100K discrepancy isn't that hard to figure out. They're planning on shipping 400K in the US and 100K in Japan. The real question is how 400K + 800K by end of year in the US + 100K + ???K by end of year in Japan = 2.4Million. I have a hard time believing that they're somehow going to manufacture and ship 1.1Million consoles for Japan if they can't launch with any more than 100K.
The best advice for Sony right now is to make sure they get their whole head in front of the shotgun.
The Xbox 360 had a slow trickle of consoles going out nearly every single day. The biggest problems were at the retailers' ends -- refusing shipments because Microsoft sent the consoles by UPS but the store only accepts shipments from their distribution center, holding the consoles for a "re-release" a month after the actual release (Best Buy, I'm looking at you. You bastards), employees hoarding the consoles for ebay sales, etc. Microsoft definitely had supply issues, but they made as much as they could as quickly as they could and shipped them out ASAP. And they eventually did own up to their problems. Do you really expect Sony to do as much? Kutaragi's personal distortion field will be used to spin this in a positive light for Sony and damn the facts.
Obviously you're not the target audience. That said, I think you're a little confused on price. HDTVs are available for as little as $500 (depending on size and technology). HD cable boxes are "free". HD cable itself generally only costs an extra $5/mo ($10/mo if you want it with a DVR), depending on the carrier. Upconverting DVD players are available for $100 or less. Granted, HD-DVD players ($500) and BD players ($1000) are still expensive, but that's because they're brand new technology. DVD players were expensive when they were first released, as well. You couldn't go down to the corner market and pick up a $35 DVD player back in 1997. Complaining about price at this point in the life of HD video disc players is just silly.
DRM and movie selection will sort itself out. Remember the old DivX from Circuit City? It had a much more restrictive DRM model than DVD, and it died a horrible death (like Blu-Ray players, DivX players could phone home and brick your player if they wanted to). Early adopters don't care, but they're the only ones who'll get burned here. The rest of us are taking a "Wait and see" attitude. My current bet is that BD's phone-home feature will eventually accidentally disable a bunch of players, causing more awareness of that feature and prompting more people to use HD-DVD which doesn't have the same feature. Then the HD-DVD DRM will ultimately be cracked (just like DVDs), and your DRM argument will be moot.
Movie selection always starts off poor. What was available when DVDs first shipped in 1997? Twister and a bunch of IMAX crap. Wait a couple years (after the format war is over), and if HD-DVD or BD really catches on studios will release more and more movies. Besides, you can still play your old DVD movies in the new players, unlike the VHS to DVD switch.
Most people watch movies for the content (even if that "content" is simply what hot actor or actress is in the movie). Hardware reviewers watch movies for the blemishes, but that's because they're providing a service to help you choose the best hardware for your budget. Would you use OpenOffice.org if its UI was purple and green? Why not? It still works just the same, and you can ignore purple and green.
As for your 19" screens, some of us don't like to sit in front of the computer to watch a movie. We have nice couches and big screen TVs so we can sit back in comfort and enjoy the show rather than hunching up over a desk.
That's a good question. Bungie (and Microsoft) have been historically non-hostile with regards to Halo properties (see Red vs. Blue, for example). However, in just about every case where Bungie/Microsoft have given implicit or explicit approval, the authors of such works came to them before-hand (or soon afterwards). So, given that Bungie is fan-friendly, and that there are probably more than a few Microsoft and Bungie employees who would love to play a Halo RTS, why didn't the Halogen guys talk to Microsoft three years ago?
Okay, "retard". Composite video uses a single cable for the video signal. Component video uses three cables. In theory, you could use three composite video cables together as a component cable, but that's really not possible when you're dealing with consoles that have a proprietary connector on one end. In the case of the Xbox 360, the cable has three leads for component output, one lead for composite output, two leads for analog stereo audio output, one jack for digital optical audio output, and a switch that will enable either the component leads or the composite lead (but not both at the same time).
It's not people at the polling place that they're concerned with. Its the corrupt officials who get to take the machine home with them, who could replace valid vote data with a trumped up memory card showing a clear majority win for whoever is paying them the most. The "tag" on the metal cover is supposed to prove that the machine has not been tampered with. This article proves that you can tamper with the data all you like without breaking that tag.
In a sense, this is even worse than a hacker attacking the machine right at the polling place. In this scenario, you feel like you've excercised your right to vote and contributed to the process of making things better, but in reality your vote never got counted at all. It was replaced by a dummy vote.
I wouldn't bet on that. TVs don't ship with HDMI cables. Upconverting DVD players, HD-DVD players, and Blu-Ray players don't ship with HDMI cables. HDMI-capable cable and satellite STBs don't ship with HDMI cables. A user who bought a set with HDMI and an upconverting DVD player might have bought an HDMI cable (I would hope so, as upconverting DVD players won't upconvert over component!), but if they did then they're using that for the DVD player. Why would they want to swap back and forth between the DVD player and the PS3?
If they don't ship a component cable in the box then they're not even matching the Xbox 360. The "real" Xbox 360 package (ie, not the Core) ships with a dual component/composite cable. The only reason you'd ever need to buy a separate cable is if you want to use S-Video or VGA.
Way to go Sony! At least you can milk some money from your suckers^Wcustomers while you crash and burn.
For IE, you should look at the IE Developer Toolbar. It does for IE much of what Firefox's DOM Inspector and Web Developer Toolbar can do. Works with IE6 and IE7.
Yes, I know, IE is "teh evil", but sometimes you have to work with IE-only pages, or pages that do things in different ways for IE and Firefox. It's nice to have a tool in your toolbox that will let you inspect things in IE just as you would in Firefox.
You know, it's odd how one word can change a phrase. The traditional phrase is, "innocent until proven guilty," which implies that you may never be proven guilty. Your turn of phrase, "innocent before proven guilty," implies that you're going to be proven guilty, but you're currently innocent.
You'd make an excellent politician!
Funny, when I was with them three years ago, they were piss-poor terrible. Constantly mischarging me (there's no way a 1.5/384 ADSL line is $250/mo, even three years ago, especially when the exact same line with Concentric/XO through Covad and Verizon was $60/mo), giving me the run around on service problems ("It's not your modem," a month later, "No, really, it's not your modem," a month after that, "Oh, your modem's warranty is up so replacement will cost you $150? It's your modem, and we'll need that check, please") and just otherwise being a bunch of sneaky, greedy bastards. Everybody always talks smack about the CLEC and ILEC during installation, but Covad and Verizon had their bits done over a week before they were scheduled, and Speakeasy couldn't get their fingers out of their asses long enough to provision my service until the previously agreed-upon date, never mind that it was a simple database insert on their end unlike the actual "physical labor" the loop provider was able to do ahead of schedule. I was with them for a little over a year and a half, and I only switched because Concentric/XO (whom I loved!) got out of the residential DSL market. Comcast has their own set of problems, but so far they've been nowhere near as bad as Speakeasy.
All this proves is that anybody can get bad service anywhere, but I share because it's important that people don't go into a contract with Speakeasy thinking they can do no wrong. Maybe they've changed in the past three years (I wouldn't know, my house is out of DSL distance), but I rather doubt it.
Oh, yeah, and this was in a well-connected suburb (Kirkland) of their main Seattle office, so it wasn't like I was in some brand new market where they were still trying to work out the kinks.
Or David "Zoid" Kirsch, who built the first CTF mod for Quake, which lead to his efforts on the Linux ports of Quake 1 and 2 and eventually landed him with Retro working on the Metroid Prime series.
Quake was a revolutionary time period in the history of games. It marked the first time enthusiasts could really create full-on games (Doom modding was pretty limited) based on a commercial engine, for free. As mentioned, the ubiquitous CTF game mode you find in everything these days was created by an individual modder. Squad-based strategy was pioneered by the guys who wrote TeamFortress. You could find just about anything, from racing games to flying games to future or fantasy games and just about anything in between. The modern FPS landscape owes its very existence to those original modders, and yet we barely even remember their names. How sad.
It's still quite possible to get burn-in on a VGA monitor (a co-worker down the hall from me has a monitor with the Windows Server 2003 login screen burned into it). It's more difficult to do, but it's still quite possible, especially if the monitor is miscalibrated (contrast too high, for example).
Sounds a lot like Microsoft's COM, because, well, KPart == COM (not exactly, and I don't believe they interoperate, but there's no reason they couldn't as COM boils down to little more than a vtable layout specification). Microsoft's been doing that in one form or another for something like 15 years now. The "the browser is just a shell that can load a browser object, or a file system object, or a document object, or ..." concept that lies behind Konqueror is exactly what Internet Explorer 4 was nearly 10 years ago (and still is).
As we've seen with COM, just having the technology doesn't necessarily mean it's going to lead to this kind of loose coupling. However, not having the technology means you'll never get loose coupling, so kudos for OLE and COM and KPart and CORBA (though CORBA is typically way too heavy) and Beans and all of the other "component software" technologies.
You think that's great? You should read the "Opera 8.0 vs. Pocket IE" review. 3/4s of the first page of the review is spent explaining what a web browser and web server are (in horribly bad terms, no less).
Most companies will narrow it down to a 4 hour window. They can't be 100% exact because the tech has other appointments during the day and there's no way to know what will be wrong at one of the other appointments. It could be a 5 minute in-and-out with a new STB or modem, or it could be a multi-hour troubleshooting job. As well, you have to take travel into account. If the previous appointment is all the way across town and it takes a bit longer than expected, the tech is going to show up late for his appointment with you. (BTW, I'm not apologizing for them. Even a 4 hour window sucks, but you have to understand the reasons for it)
That said, most places will allow you to specify a two hour time window if you can get one of the first appointments of the day. For example, a normal window might be 8am to 12pm, but you can request 8am to 10am and they might be able to accomodate. Also, you can request that the tech call you when he's on his way to your appointment. That way you can still try to get some work done during the day, and only leave for home when the tech says he's on his way.
Soudns almost exactly like a problem I had with Comcast when I first moved into my house. The previous owners used a dish for TV, and since the house is just out of DSL range I have to assume they used dialup for an internet connection. That's relevant because when I moved in I switched everything over to cable (cable TV, cable internet, screw the phone line). During the day, the cable connection was rock solid. Which was useless to me, since I work during the day. During the night, the cable internet connection (but not TV!) would go out as it cooled down. After 8 tech visits, three cable modems, and four months a tech finally thought to check the line at the street. Turns out there was some water damage (rust!) that caused an intermittent connection. During the warm day it would expand just enough to make a connection, but at night as it cooled down the connection would go away. Apparently it still made enough of a connection for TV to get through, but not for internet. A minute later, he had repaired the connection and left, and I haven't had problems since. This was during the spring, so I can just imagine how bad it would've gotten if they hadn't found the problem by winter.
Temperature-related issues like this can be very hard to diagnose, specifically because the techs will never come out at night. If the issue is caused by cooling temperatures at night and the techs come at 10 in the morning, of course the problem's not going to reproduce. I just had to keep getting them to send out techs until I got one that actually knew a thing or two.
In your case, the damage may have been farther up the line, especially if the entire neighborhood had the same problem. In that case, the only thing you can do is to get your neighbors to call in and complain as well. It's like a power outage. If only one person calls in, they're not going to do anything. If three people call in, they might be able to triangulate the position of the problem and think about fixing it. If hundreds of people call in, they know they have a problem and a tech will be immediately dispatched. So, when you have problems like this, call! And get your neighbors to call! If you don't, the service company isn't going to give a crap because you're not making any noise.
Too much work. Better to uninstall the offending software, delete all files you downloaded, and then take an image of the drive. Imaging software won't carry over deleted nodes, so now you have a pristine image without the incriminating evidence. Then you can buy another hard drive (with cash!), deploy the clean image, and then "lose" (smash, burn, bury, drown, etc) the "bad" hard drive. There, all evidence gone, no way to find it, and no way to prove that your current hard drive isn't the hard drive you've always had (because the image should carry over file timestamps and such).
Of course, you need to be prescient to be able to do this correctly, as I would expect the RIAA to start confiscating computers or hard drives to try to prevent this in the future. Whether they can do that or not, I don't know (IANAL). My default assumption would be that they couldn't, since these are civil matters and not arrests. That doesn't mean they wouldn't find a way, or try anyway.
Sorry, I must've projected all of the other conspiracy theory posts onto yours. As I understand it, and I've not used Vista yet so I may be wrong, the current Firefox 2 betas don't work on Vista, and the Firefox 1.5.x branch may end up with some appcompat tweaking behind the scenes by Vista. I assume the former will be the meat of the talks, figuring out why Firefox 2 doesn't work. The latter may be a smaller part, getting 1.5.x updated so that it won't need to go through a round of appcompat on first run.
I should clarify. Most "IE-only" pages are that way for one of two reasons: either they explicitly check UA strings and block non-IE (bad developer!), or they use IE-specific bits and pieces like ActiveX controls without an equivalent plugin for Firefox (bad developer, but usually not quite as bad since this kind of thing tends to happen only on intranets). "Compatibility" usually revolves around layout and rendering issues. IE6 obviously had some major problems with layout (understatement!), and the IE7 team is trying to strike a balance between not horribly breaking sites that try to work around IE6 shortcomings (some misalignment and such is okay, but missing or unusable UI elements are not) and doing things better in IE7. An example would be alpha transparency on PNGs. IE6 could do it through a filter hack. IE7 can do it natively. IE7 will still support the filter hack, though. However, if a website is doing a browser check and blocks non-IE, there's nothing IE7 can do about that.
I believe most of the Windows Live sites are still doing a browser check (bad!), but they're actively supporting Firefox. Most of this comes through the use of the Atlas framework, which does target Firefox as well as IE (and should also work on Opera and possibly Safari/Konq).
What? Xbox Live already is a pay service (for the Gold level, anyway). Besides, it has nothing to do with browsers. Windows Live is a conglomeration of services, some for-pay (Windows Live Custom Domains), some ad-supported (Windows Live Messenger), some free that will probably be ad-supported out of beta (Windows Live.com).
Interestingly enough, I can browse the Windows Live Custom Domains page just fine with Firefox (I don't subscribe, so I don't know if there's broken functionality under the subscription), and I can do the same at Windows Live.com, Windows Live Expo, Windows Live Local, and Windows Live Gallery (and those are just the ones I tried right now). So what's the problem with Firefox and Windows Live?
Why must everything be a conspiracy theory? Firefox is a popular, widely-used web browser. If it has problems on Vista, that's bad for Vista. Microsoft is doing the responsible thing and working with developers of popular applications to make sure that they work well (btw, Microsoft does the exact same thing with many other non-OSS developers as well, but you don't hear about it because it's not news). This is not an attempt to merge the IE and Firefox codebases or anything silly like that. It's just Business As Usual(tm) for a company that provides a platform (OS).
As for your Windows Live conspiracy theory in the sibling comment, have you been paying attention at all? One of the main goals of Windows Live is to work on all "uplevel" browsers. For now, some sites only work on IE and some sites only work on IE and Firefox (live.com supposedly has support for Opera 9 beta releases as well), but these sites are also all beta at the moment (though unlike Google, Microsoft does plan to take them out of beta -- for example, both Expo and Windows Live Messenger have dropped the beta moniker). The Live.com team in particular has worked with Opera to make sure live.com works in their browser, and I assume part of this Firefox dialog is to work with the Live.com team to figure out how to allow a parent page to resize iframes when the content of the iframe changes (IE6 can do that, IE7 can do that but for a bug in beta 3, but Firefox can't. That's why you get ugly scroll bars on live.com in Firefox). However, I expect that discussion will be weighted more towards Firefox helping the Live.com guys rather than the Live.com guys dictating requirements to Firefox. The Live.com team has also hinted at trying to work with Apple to support Safari, but they might be barking up the wrong tree (should be talking to the Konqueror developers instead).
And finally, most "IE-only" pages are IE-only because the idiot developer used a browser check to limit what browsers and versions they support. Good web developers know you should never do this, instead using object detection to handle different browsers, but there's a distinct lack of good web developers out there.
SCO probably won't, but how long do you think it'll take before The Tetris Company, LLC, sends them a cease and desist? As background, The Tetris Company seems to think that they have a copyright or trademark on the actual gameplay of Tetris, which is complete bunk. They do have a trademark on the name, which might cause problems in this case (the embedded tetris clone is called "Tetrix", which is a bit close to "Tetris" for comfort). Unfortunately, the kind of people who make tetris clones tend to be independent developers doing it for fun or to hone their skills, and generally don't have the financial means to fight the lengthy court battle necessary to prove The Tetris Company wrong. See Quinn, for example.
No, unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, you're better off embedding a breakout clone, or pong clone, or asteroids clone, etc instead of a tetris clone. You're just asking for trouble.
Sure, if the year is 1999 and the distro is Caldera.
Burn-in is a potential problem in CRTs and Plasma displays because they ultimately use the same technology to represent colors -- phosphors. The two display types use different technologies to excite the phosphors, but plasma is still a phosphor-based display. Compare that to LCD or DLP, where color is generated by light (via filters on the subpixels in an LCD, or a color wheel in a DLP). Phosphors wear out with use, and burn-in happens when they wear out unevently. There are ways to combat this, but you cannot totally eliminate it in phosphor-based displays:
- Turn down your contrast. Brighter pixels will wear out the phosphor more quickly. Most TVs ship in a "torch" mode, which looks good in the store but is way too bright for normal usage. It's a good idea to have your set calibrated after a break-in period. (This is a good idea for LCD and DLP displays as well, but CRTs and Plasmas need it to tweak colors as the phosphors age.)
- Get a set that shifts pixels. By occasionally shifting the image around by a few pixels, you'll spread the image out across more phosphors. This makes it less likely for static images to burn in (or more precisely, it will cause surrounding pixels to wear out at around the same frequency, which makes any burn-in you might suffer seem less by smoothing out the sharp edges).
- Always use the set in full-screen mode (on widescreen sets). If you don't like everything looking shorter and fatter, use a sidebar mode with a ~50% gray color rather than black, and that periodically adjusts the position of the interior picture. The gray sidebars will keep the unused phosphors in the sidebars wearing out about the same as the interior phosphors, and shifting the interior image position will help smooth out any sharp edges on the under-burn.
CRTs and plasmas are both good display technologies, and they've come a long way from years past where burn-in was a common issue, but they do still inherently have the potential to burn in. Modern sets do try to prevent burn-in as much as possible without user intervention (well, except for "torch mode"), but you still should be a little careful about how you use the set.Console controllers are just a little bit more complex than mice. Anyway, third-party controllers don't usually suck because of the gimmicks, but because the primary functionality is sub-par. The joysticks are too sloppy, or the buttons are too hard to press, or the ergonomics are bad, etc. Some third-party manufacturers like Logitech generally do a good job, but I would stay away from most others.
Also, the WaveBird isn't a third-party controller. It works because it's the standard first-party Gamecube controller (with sticks with the correct amount of resistance, and buttons that work when you hit them, and ergonomics that don't cramp your hand), with the addition of a wireless transmitter and battery compartment.
You just need to know what to outsource and what to do in-house. If you're an up-and-coming motion capture and 3D animation studio, then it might be worthwhile to try to innovate in the motion capture space. If instead you're an indie game developer that just happens to need motion capture for your next game, you're better off outsourcing the motion capturing and focusing on innovation in your game design and gameplay.
Just because you can outsource something doesn't mean you have to outsource everything.