Windows Media Center Edition has problems, especially with DRM, that prevent it being any good as a a real home media center. Does XBMC have those problems?
In the meantime, I think the dream project you're looking for is LinuxMCE. It should run on PS3s soon, now that PS3s are finally more than a toy since they can harness the SPUs for media. And 1080p, not just 1080i. As Linux, it's a lot more flexible, and a new UI is in design now (but the architecture is open for any UI people want to make).
Unless you want to play Blu-Ray discs, which is the HD.
Also, it's not able to be a mediacenter right now, not like a Linux PS3. By the time Wii has the Linux features of PS3, the PS3 version will consume a lot less power, as it's dropped chips and gone 45nm.
That power isn't just wasted (unless you're just playing MP3s). The higher power consumption is the greater processing, which is the more multimedia.
It takes a lot more HW than that available on mini-ITX to cleanly display 1080P HD on HDMI, and the Cell does that nicely. Especially since the only drivers for those mini-ITX machines that do HD are proprietary, running only under Windows (not Linux). The next generation of PS3, probably out for Christmas, will use the new 45nm Cell process which cuts power quite a lot. Newer PS3s already eliminated PS2 and PS1 chips and their power consumption. In fact, the Cell has better performance per watt than x86 chips (or GPU chips) do.
Also, PS3 Linux is officially supported and encouraged by Sony, as is using the SPUs for, say, video drivers, as I mentioned. No firmware patches are necessary (except for what they add/fix in the user's interest).
Maybe there are better machines for torrent clients. But for HD playback, the PS3 is really good, and getting better. Especially if you want to watch a Blu-Ray disc.
1080P MPG4 (and WMV) is working well, though the actual driver has some reported instabilities, and isn't integrated with X yet. However, the developer is wrapping them up, and by the time you get one and get Ubuntu installed on it, it'll probably be ready. Or a few weeks later. Check the links I included to PSUbuntu and jump when you think it's ready.
You are correct. Though at $500 the PS3 is pretty cheap, considering it includes a Blu-Ray player, HDMI output at 1080P, WiFi/Bluetooth, and a popular game console.
Linux access to the RSX is a dead end hacking safari that Sony seems committed to stopping. The SPU acceleration that's now available is plenty good enough.
The PSUbuntu site I linked to has howtos and other good advice. It's not exactly "concisely summarized", but it's got the info to make PS3 a Linux media center, often collected into one place. But it could use some help. Why don't you help out, maybe making a bunch of.deb packages out of what are still just HowTos and components of the complete solution?
When Sony released the PS3 in November 2006, Yellow Dog Linux was ready to run on it.
But Ubuntu is a better Linux for desktops, and it's more popular than YDL. Plus, I like the idea of a Linux that's not so closely connected to Sony, and still works well.
There's no Slashdot boycott of Sony products. That's just some Anonymous blathering Coward yammering that nobody actually does.
I didn't say that Linux on Wii isn't an impressive hack, or worth doing if you want to just hack something, which is perfectly admirable. Wii homebrew is certainly just getting started, if Linux doesn't even run on it already. It's been just getting started for a while now. Sony doesn't need to release an SDK, because Linux is the SDK (along with the IBM and other Cell SDKs that come with the PS3 Linux). And that "channel" is called the Web.
Like I said, PS3 is wide open. Even the lockouts of the RSX don't really matter, because the rest of the HW is open, and powerful enough that the RSX isn't missed. A PS3 already looks like a great PVR platform just using USB tuners, and the PlayTV will indeed probably beat TiVo at its own game. The unavailability of TiVo in Europe means that beating that game is even more important there, because that game will be between Sony's PlayTV and the Linux PlayTV (and other PVRs, even USB on PS3). It's the game that counts.
And there are different games. If the game is just getting Linux up and running, you've got to play that one on Wii. Because it's already won on PS3. If the game is using the console for more entertainment than just an impressive hack, the PS3 runs Linux and multimedia. If you want both, you can help make the SPU multimedia support more complete. Which, when won, will allow playing all kinds of other games, including making PS3 games. Well before that's available for the Wii, and with a much more impressive platform.
I don't know which codecs. The MPG, WMV and AVI files I've test have all worked. The HD files come from ftp://mpeg:mpeg@ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/MPEG/. The SPU driver developer's latest notes indicated they're working on x264 right now, so maybe they don't work yet, but the developer is really fast at this stuff when they're working on it.
The PS3 has been running Linux on its Cell CPU's PPC core for several releases now, including several official Ubuntu PS3 releases. Sony does lock out the RSX graphics chip to Linux, but the Cell's 6 SPUs (pipelined DSPs) are wide open for development. And now that developers have ported video drivers to the SPUs, the PS3 is a hot little multimedia PC. I watch downloaded 1080P HD videos (and regular upsampled MPG/WMV/AVI/etc) right on the same 50" HDMI TV I surf the web (and watch Blu-Ray discs) and program with. And when Sony releases the PlayTV 2-channel DVB TV tuner for PS3 next month, I expect my Linux PS3 will beat TiVo at its own game, too.
The Wii is just getting started as "homebrew". Its HW isn't nearly as screaming as the PS3, nor as designed to be open for Linux. Hacking it sounds like a fun toy, which is why people buy the Wii. But the PS3 is already starting to be a Linux platform more interesting than even its gaming. A few more leaps forward on the PS3 and the Wii will look so 21st Century.
The judge should have been able to set against the frivolous lawyers a "strike" that would add up towards disbarment if they did it again. Given repeated frivolity found by courts, lawyers should get a warning, a fine, a suspension and finally disbarment as the strikes accumulate over time, perhaps resetting once a year or 5 or 10 or 20 if not repeated. Perhaps several strikes assigned at once when the frivolity is really serious and the judge wants to push them towards disbarment, or out completely.
Then lawyers will be a lot more careful about flooding the courts with these worthless cases just because they have nothing better to do (and the client pays). That's their sworn job anyway, as "officers of the court", but they don't honor that oath without teeth when they break it - they're lawyers. And for those who see good cases get rejected just because they're not open/shut for lazy lawyers, that kind of refusal is also grounds for suing lawyers; suits in which the judges typically look very critically on the lawyers who should be staying out of trouble. Maybe that counterbalance needs stronger teeth, too, but there's certainly plenty of ways to get these lawyers to respect the merits of a case, whether trying or refusing it.
I dunno, but it shouldn't. The prior art shows that these Utahrds didn't "invent" this "device", but rather merely codified something. Something fairly obvious. FWIW, my company was both US and Canadian, with offices, workers and work on the project done in both countries. Though not in Utah. Nothing ever gets made up there except cold fusion frauds and nonsense religions.
No, I was pretty smart. Not only smart enough to "invent" it, but smart enough to have made a lot of money just selling it, not stopping anyone else selling it.
In 1995, I invented a magstrip card sold at all 700 Shoppers Drug Mart convenience stores in Canada. The card was good for a pair of tickets to either a Toronto Raptors or Vancouver Grizzlies game, the 2 new NBA teams we were hired to help launch. In the SDM store was a kiosk that was a Mac with Netscape on a a private TCP/IP network identical to the Internet, but not connected to it, just to its own hosts around Canada. Some of these hosts had the webservers and DBs running the ticket dealing app. Swiping the card unlocked the kiosk, navigating the websites sold the tickets, which when printed deleted credit from the cards.
That app and those cards were precisely the same as these music gift cards, for a product that happened not to be music, but otherwise identical - a trivial difference. So this post constitutes my notification of prior art. Apple and Starbucks can pay me now to use it invalidate these Utahrds' entire patent.
Without legal liability scaring them into respecting our privacy, everyone who gets a copy of our medical data will be selling them to the same kinds of people who currently collect emails for spam lists. And just outsourcing the processing to leaky places either selling them or just too cheap to secure them from people who will just crack the "vaults" without paying.
There's already "doctor patient confidentiality", but from what I can see that's not sending crooked or incompetent doctors (or their clerks or records agencies) to jail or paying damages. And of course they won't so long as the AMA is a bigger lobby than the EFF.
If the time is right for Microsoft to ruin some big corporation by buying it out, why doesn't it just by out Microsoft, it's only real competition. That's how life is for a monopoly.
Really, Microsoft's problem is that it's too big and doesn't do anything interesting on its own. Helping it buy some other huge corp is going in exactly the wrong direction. Microsoft should be spitting up, not borging yet another corp out of business.
A Firefox plugin that de/encrypts GMail right in the browser, that's stored encrypted at Google could be really good. Maybe even a GPG Javascript frame around the GMail frame that contains the encrypted message.
But the real chance to get everyone using encrypted email is as people switch to mobile phones as their messaging terminal. A Java email app for that, or maybe a mobile Opera plugin, could really catch on.
Wait until someone's genome is copied without their permission from when they donate blood, and the privacy backlash leaves blood banks dry, patients dying.
Individuals should get the same explicit copyright protection on our personal data, including our genetic and other health data, as corporations get on recorded products. Personal data must be destroyed once the transaction for which it was initially transmitted is complete, with short timeouts, unless explicitly permitted into some specified other scope. Violations should be criminal violations of our privacy rights.
Probably we need a Constitutional Privacy Amendment to make indisputable the force and clarity of this protection of our rights. The Fourth Amendment already protects our private data, but the government hasn't been enforcing it. Since the 4th is itself redundant to the Constitution's lack of a created power to invade our privacy, it's clear that the fundamental line between private and public that is the basis of our liberty must be reiterated strongly or be ignored.
As our entire world becomes defined by the Info Age, the people better get our government to properly protect our privacy soon, or there will be blood.
Cheney's already in charge. Impeaching Bush would just force Cheney to waste more time as spokesmodel, and put someone else in the Cheney Bunker at the controls.
Besides, who says we can't impeach Cheney? Though it'll be harder to find someone to blow him.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows Media Center Edition has problems, especially with DRM, that prevent it being any good as a a real home media center. Does XBMC have those problems?
In the meantime, I think the dream project you're looking for is LinuxMCE. It should run on PS3s soon, now that PS3s are finally more than a toy since they can harness the SPUs for media. And 1080p, not just 1080i. As Linux, it's a lot more flexible, and a new UI is in design now (but the architecture is open for any UI people want to make).
Link?
FWIW, a $150 diff isn't much, when games cost $40-50. And the higher PS3 price, if true, still gets you more HW, including a Blu-Ray player.
Unless you want to play Blu-Ray discs, which is the HD.
Also, it's not able to be a mediacenter right now, not like a Linux PS3. By the time Wii has the Linux features of PS3, the PS3 version will consume a lot less power, as it's dropped chips and gone 45nm.
That power isn't just wasted (unless you're just playing MP3s). The higher power consumption is the greater processing, which is the more multimedia.
It takes a lot more HW than that available on mini-ITX to cleanly display 1080P HD on HDMI, and the Cell does that nicely. Especially since the only drivers for those mini-ITX machines that do HD are proprietary, running only under Windows (not Linux). The next generation of PS3, probably out for Christmas, will use the new 45nm Cell process which cuts power quite a lot. Newer PS3s already eliminated PS2 and PS1 chips and their power consumption. In fact, the Cell has better performance per watt than x86 chips (or GPU chips) do.
Also, PS3 Linux is officially supported and encouraged by Sony, as is using the SPUs for, say, video drivers, as I mentioned. No firmware patches are necessary (except for what they add/fix in the user's interest).
Maybe there are better machines for torrent clients. But for HD playback, the PS3 is really good, and getting better. Especially if you want to watch a Blu-Ray disc.
Pretty wide.
1080P MPG4 (and WMV) is working well, though the actual driver has some reported instabilities, and isn't integrated with X yet. However, the developer is wrapping them up, and by the time you get one and get Ubuntu installed on it, it'll probably be ready. Or a few weeks later. Check the links I included to PSUbuntu and jump when you think it's ready.
I don't know what you're talking about. The Wii costs $400. The PS3 costs $400.
Also, if you're not running Linux on the Wii (which you're not), then you're not able to run Linux. That'll be true in the 24th Century, too.
You are correct. Though at $500 the PS3 is pretty cheap, considering it includes a Blu-Ray player, HDMI output at 1080P, WiFi/Bluetooth, and a popular game console.
Linux access to the RSX is a dead end hacking safari that Sony seems committed to stopping. The SPU acceleration that's now available is plenty good enough.
.deb packages out of what are still just HowTos and components of the complete solution?
The PSUbuntu site I linked to has howtos and other good advice. It's not exactly "concisely summarized", but it's got the info to make PS3 a Linux media center, often collected into one place. But it could use some help. Why don't you help out, maybe making a bunch of
a fun toy, which is why people buy the Wii
When Sony released the PS3 in November 2006, Yellow Dog Linux was ready to run on it.
But Ubuntu is a better Linux for desktops, and it's more popular than YDL. Plus, I like the idea of a Linux that's not so closely connected to Sony, and still works well.
There's no Slashdot boycott of Sony products. That's just some Anonymous blathering Coward yammering that nobody actually does.
I didn't say that Linux on Wii isn't an impressive hack, or worth doing if you want to just hack something, which is perfectly admirable. Wii homebrew is certainly just getting started, if Linux doesn't even run on it already. It's been just getting started for a while now. Sony doesn't need to release an SDK, because Linux is the SDK (along with the IBM and other Cell SDKs that come with the PS3 Linux). And that "channel" is called the Web.
Like I said, PS3 is wide open. Even the lockouts of the RSX don't really matter, because the rest of the HW is open, and powerful enough that the RSX isn't missed. A PS3 already looks like a great PVR platform just using USB tuners, and the PlayTV will indeed probably beat TiVo at its own game. The unavailability of TiVo in Europe means that beating that game is even more important there, because that game will be between Sony's PlayTV and the Linux PlayTV (and other PVRs, even USB on PS3). It's the game that counts.
And there are different games. If the game is just getting Linux up and running, you've got to play that one on Wii. Because it's already won on PS3. If the game is using the console for more entertainment than just an impressive hack, the PS3 runs Linux and multimedia. If you want both, you can help make the SPU multimedia support more complete. Which, when won, will allow playing all kinds of other games, including making PS3 games. Well before that's available for the Wii, and with a much more impressive platform.
I don't know which codecs. The MPG, WMV and AVI files I've test have all worked. The HD files come from ftp://mpeg:mpeg@ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/MPEG/. The SPU driver developer's latest notes indicated they're working on x264 right now, so maybe they don't work yet, but the developer is really fast at this stuff when they're working on it.
The PS3 has been running Linux on its Cell CPU's PPC core for several releases now, including several official Ubuntu PS3 releases. Sony does lock out the RSX graphics chip to Linux, but the Cell's 6 SPUs (pipelined DSPs) are wide open for development. And now that developers have ported video drivers to the SPUs, the PS3 is a hot little multimedia PC. I watch downloaded 1080P HD videos (and regular upsampled MPG/WMV/AVI/etc) right on the same 50" HDMI TV I surf the web (and watch Blu-Ray discs) and program with. And when Sony releases the PlayTV 2-channel DVB TV tuner for PS3 next month, I expect my Linux PS3 will beat TiVo at its own game, too.
The Wii is just getting started as "homebrew". Its HW isn't nearly as screaming as the PS3, nor as designed to be open for Linux. Hacking it sounds like a fun toy, which is why people buy the Wii. But the PS3 is already starting to be a Linux platform more interesting than even its gaming. A few more leaps forward on the PS3 and the Wii will look so 21st Century.
The judge should have been able to set against the frivolous lawyers a "strike" that would add up towards disbarment if they did it again. Given repeated frivolity found by courts, lawyers should get a warning, a fine, a suspension and finally disbarment as the strikes accumulate over time, perhaps resetting once a year or 5 or 10 or 20 if not repeated. Perhaps several strikes assigned at once when the frivolity is really serious and the judge wants to push them towards disbarment, or out completely.
Then lawyers will be a lot more careful about flooding the courts with these worthless cases just because they have nothing better to do (and the client pays). That's their sworn job anyway, as "officers of the court", but they don't honor that oath without teeth when they break it - they're lawyers. And for those who see good cases get rejected just because they're not open/shut for lazy lawyers, that kind of refusal is also grounds for suing lawyers; suits in which the judges typically look very critically on the lawyers who should be staying out of trouble. Maybe that counterbalance needs stronger teeth, too, but there's certainly plenty of ways to get these lawyers to respect the merits of a case, whether trying or refusing it.
I dunno, but it shouldn't. The prior art shows that these Utahrds didn't "invent" this "device", but rather merely codified something. Something fairly obvious. FWIW, my company was both US and Canadian, with offices, workers and work on the project done in both countries. Though not in Utah. Nothing ever gets made up there except cold fusion frauds and nonsense religions.
No, I was pretty smart. Not only smart enough to "invent" it, but smart enough to have made a lot of money just selling it, not stopping anyone else selling it.
Because I'm not a jackass.
I also created online coupons for Nabisco in 1999.
If I'm so smart, why didn't I patent these "inventions"?
Because I'm not a jackass.
In 1995, I invented a magstrip card sold at all 700 Shoppers Drug Mart convenience stores in Canada. The card was good for a pair of tickets to either a Toronto Raptors or Vancouver Grizzlies game, the 2 new NBA teams we were hired to help launch. In the SDM store was a kiosk that was a Mac with Netscape on a a private TCP/IP network identical to the Internet, but not connected to it, just to its own hosts around Canada. Some of these hosts had the webservers and DBs running the ticket dealing app. Swiping the card unlocked the kiosk, navigating the websites sold the tickets, which when printed deleted credit from the cards.
That app and those cards were precisely the same as these music gift cards, for a product that happened not to be music, but otherwise identical - a trivial difference. So this post constitutes my notification of prior art. Apple and Starbucks can pay me now to use it invalidate these Utahrds' entire patent.
Without legal liability scaring them into respecting our privacy, everyone who gets a copy of our medical data will be selling them to the same kinds of people who currently collect emails for spam lists. And just outsourcing the processing to leaky places either selling them or just too cheap to secure them from people who will just crack the "vaults" without paying.
There's already "doctor patient confidentiality", but from what I can see that's not sending crooked or incompetent doctors (or their clerks or records agencies) to jail or paying damages. And of course they won't so long as the AMA is a bigger lobby than the EFF.
If the time is right for Microsoft to ruin some big corporation by buying it out, why doesn't it just by out Microsoft, it's only real competition. That's how life is for a monopoly.
Really, Microsoft's problem is that it's too big and doesn't do anything interesting on its own. Helping it buy some other huge corp is going in exactly the wrong direction. Microsoft should be spitting up, not borging yet another corp out of business.
Oh, by the way, thanks for the nice compliment. Appreciated, especially since I usually get flames or silence.
A Firefox plugin that de/encrypts GMail right in the browser, that's stored encrypted at Google could be really good. Maybe even a GPG Javascript frame around the GMail frame that contains the encrypted message.
But the real chance to get everyone using encrypted email is as people switch to mobile phones as their messaging terminal. A Java email app for that, or maybe a mobile Opera plugin, could really catch on.
Wait until someone's genome is copied without their permission from when they donate blood, and the privacy backlash leaves blood banks dry, patients dying.
Individuals should get the same explicit copyright protection on our personal data, including our genetic and other health data, as corporations get on recorded products. Personal data must be destroyed once the transaction for which it was initially transmitted is complete, with short timeouts, unless explicitly permitted into some specified other scope. Violations should be criminal violations of our privacy rights.
Probably we need a Constitutional Privacy Amendment to make indisputable the force and clarity of this protection of our rights. The Fourth Amendment already protects our private data, but the government hasn't been enforcing it. Since the 4th is itself redundant to the Constitution's lack of a created power to invade our privacy, it's clear that the fundamental line between private and public that is the basis of our liberty must be reiterated strongly or be ignored.
As our entire world becomes defined by the Info Age, the people better get our government to properly protect our privacy soon, or there will be blood.
Cheney's already in charge. Impeaching Bush would just force Cheney to waste more time as spokesmodel, and put someone else in the Cheney Bunker at the controls.
Besides, who says we can't impeach Cheney? Though it'll be harder to find someone to blow him.