As with the original Playstation is bad PAL conversions. PAL has higher res and runs at 50hz, and despite the delay in the release all that has been done to most release games is to put borders round the screen and not compensate for the 60hz->50hz switch. As a result games like Tekken Tag are completely ruined - at least to anyone who has played a full speed version. Ridge Racer has been tweaked and is actually *faster* than the Japanese version (not played the US version so I've no idea about that). Unfortunately they seem to have neglected to speed up the computer-controlled cars, which sort of wrecks the game.
Can't fault Fantavision though, that game is truly amazing. As to whether or not the console is worth the 300GBP it's being sold for.. well I'll leave that up to others. Personally I'd be going for an import model though, if I had the cash. As it is, it's back to F355 on my Dreamcast..:)
--
Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
Nice. And it will take only a few weeks and then there is a crack which will mask the Files so that they can not be tracked anymore...
A quick read of the article made the solution obvious to me. All they're doing is an MD5 sum of the MP3 - so all that needs to be done is to put random data in the comments field of the ID3 tag and hey presto, the MD5 sum is different. --
Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
The real obstacle for the take-up of wireless LANs is something that's been around for quite a while and probably isn't going to go away any time soon: government legislation. Here in the EU (I'm in Britain but most such legislation is controlled by the EU now) there is very tight legislation on what can be broadcast without a license, even over a very small distance. With all the concerns over mobile telephone radiation, power-line radiation and whatever else I really can't see this changing anytime soon.
--
Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
I used to work for a large OEM and almost every week at our technical meeting there would be questions about Microsoft licensing, often this issue in particular. I spoke to Microsoft about this on one occasion, and their line was basically
"You're on the Microsoft select program, we let you press your own Windows CDs and give you licenses for next to nothing, if you wish things to say this way then don't ship systems without an OS".
Unfortunately I didn't have the authority and the MD didn't have the courage to do anything about the situation.
--
Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
This guy writes emulators for a living. He hates Mac OS X. In trust, this shouldn't be all that surprising, after all, Mac OS X is based on BSD. There are thousands of free BSD-compatible programs out there, and from the reports so far, the majority will compile and run on Mac OS X without any code editing at all. This therefore negates the need for emulators; why emulate something when you can just recompile the source for the system you're running on?
Having said this, his point about backwards comptibility is certainally vaild, but might the best decision for him therefore to write a BSD-based Mac OS 9/8/7 emulator allowing Mac OS X people to run their old apps? --
Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
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--
Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
To be perfectly honest it really surprises me that any organisation that needs to be 100% sure of security would use proprietry software. I realise defense budgets are stretched, but surely shouldn't they have a team of people either coding their own systems or evaluating free ones?
This should provide a good rebutal to the silly 'I wouldn't want to run an operating system where just anyone can edit the source!' comment that was made last week.
If you find banners annoying (as I do), simply filter them out with something like Junkbuster, or my favoured solution, Squid and sleezeball. All those annoying flashing ads get replaced with a nice transparent gif. And so the advertising companies still pay my favourite sites, I occasionally click on those transparent gifs too.
If google wants to add banners, I say good luck to them. I won't be viewing the adverts, but they'll be getting revenue that will keep their service going. As long as the banners don't get in the way of the service, as they have on search engines such as Altavista, then that's fine. It's only when the websites become oriented around products rather than the service that there's a problem. IMO, this is far more likely to happen if they don't display adverts, revenues will no doubt be sapped and may force them into a position where a buyout is necessary. I somehow doubt any company which would buy them out would run the service half as well as the current google owners.
I thought the whole point of Debian was that their releases weren't 'sludgey'. If Debian follow the 'sludgey' model, even if its not in their main release, what then makes them different from any other distro? The fact they use deb packaging rather than RPM? As far as I'm concerned all this does is make Debian a slightly more 'free' RedHat.
*ahem* *cough* Need I point out that the propietary "GD-ROM" has not seemed to hurt the Sega Dreamcast at all?
Quite. In fact, perhaps it would have been better had they not let the drive read normal CDs/CDRs at all, to stop all those naughty warez d00dz from copying their games.
The reason Nintendo had problems before was the simple extra cost of producing cartidges - these things had up to 64MB of ROM in them. How could Nintendo compete price-point wise when a CD only costs a fraction of that? This shouldn't be an issue with the new Nintendo console.
Of course, I somehow doubt it will stop the aforementioned 'naughty warez d00dz' - the PS2 has been cracked, the Dreamcast has, and I'll eat my hat (after buying one first) if the Gamecube isn't.
Has anyone noticed that the controller looks like a cross between a PS2 dual-shock controller (for overall styling/layout) and the Dreamcast controller (for position of the analog/ditigal controls + buttons).
It certainally looks a lot more comfortable than the DC controller though, that thing sucks (Virtua Tennis has given me a serious case of sore-thumb). IMO Nintendo have always done the best gamepad design, the NES might not have been super-ergonomic (what was at that time), but the d-pad rocked. The SNES controller added more buttons and those now-ubiquitous sholder buttons. The piece de-resistance really was the N64 controller, it just oozed quality. If you have one, you might not have noticed that without a rumble/memory pack in it balances perfectly on your finger.
Sony may have stolen the show with their dual-shock for a bit, but I have faith in Nintendo and know that both the GB Advance and Game Cube will perform brilliantly.
Besides, lets face it, we all know that the games are where its at, and you can't beat the big N for that (aided and abetted by Rare of course).
Can you tell I'm excited about this?:))
This doesn't mean that the fight against filtering software should stop - a worst case scenario could be where only those in the know can access information, with the rest of the world just being force-fed approved content.
Plus, surely if this is used in a big way it's going to severely increase the load on akamai's servers?
Let's face it, is there really much point in Intel demo'ing this shit when:
1. They're demoing it now. This means the official release date will probably be at the end of the year and you might actually be able to buy one sometime next year. Of course, even then you'll have to wait a while 'cos Intel can't produce anything near the required quantities.
2. What good is all that extra CPU power really going to do you? Compile a Linux kernel in a couple of minutes? Big deal.
What we really need is an end to these ridiculous memory wars and a serious drop in memory prices.
He misses the ENTIRE point of the killer app of modern gaming: MULTIPLAYER capability. Sony's strategy is hinging on A) urging
developers to assume an internet connection and B) creating an infrastructure to support the consoles. Sega may have caught onto that concept
first, but Sony has wholeheartedly adopted the same view that internet multiplay will be an essential component of newer games.
It has? Sony have no plans for a modem device, and are planning only broadband support for the PS2 (understandibly, the amss-market are far less likely to accept lag in games). But broadband is far from mass-market outside Japan. Multiplayer console gaming is still all about multiple people crowded around one system and one screen. I don't see this changing in the near future. The console user is a completely different beast to the PC gamer. Whilst the PC gamer's primary concern is the game itself, the console gamer's primary concern is fun. There's something far too solitary about internet games playing - without being able to see your opponents for all you know you could be playing some new AI routine. A good indicator of this is the fact that the Microsoft X-Box proudly displays four joypad ports on the front. With HDTV andever-increasing viewing sizes for televisions multiplayer single-screen gaming still has a lot of life left in it.
Is that they have to pitch these things where they can be used by the most people. I suspect the number of people who have a home network is relativly small. The number of people with a telephone line is significantly greater (although as it happens I have no land-line, just a mobile and ethernet:)).
Fortunately TiVO have already said that they have no objections to people hacking these things, and given that they run on Linux how hard can it be to put in a network card? I'm not familiar with the ins-and-outs of the TiVO (i'm in the UK and they're not out here yet:() but presumably it just dials the TiVO ISP and gets the details. Even if it gets it from centralised servers, from the way TiVO have acted so far I wouldn't be surprised if they were prepared to set up an Internet site for those with hacked ethernet TiVOs, as long as you're prepared to still pay the $9.95/month of course:)
IMO we won't see devices like this with ethernet capabilities until ethernet is far more ubiquitous.
Here in the UK those that want to use the Sky Digital Television service must agree to permanently connect the box to a telephone line, so it can upload data such as which pay-for films you've been watching. At present I would expect this trend to continue..
From what I can make out from across the pond the Republicans are always trying to bribe you with your own money (wasn't a 20% tax cut their ridiculous promise last time?).
No doubt Mr. Katz will have something to say on this...
The thing that BOTH Micro$oft and Linux could learn from Novell is integration. Netware Administrator (NWadmin for the uninitiated) does
everything. No, I mean *everything*.
This is exactly what Linuxconf is trying to do, and pretty sucessfully so far too. User administration, sendmail setup, apache setup, bind, wu-ftpd, system services, all from one app.
But what is the point in creating a non-compatible alternative? More to the point *how* can you - after all, with everything open-sourced there's no way you can stop people from making things cross-compatible.
A good example here is KDE vs Gnome. Want to run a Gnome app on KDE? No problem, as long as you've got the right libraries installed. Likewise the other way. With technologies like CORBA we should see even closer compatility.
Now they can release a wrist-watch which gives unix-time!
Actually, when you think about it it could be more useful than it seems at first. Once linux boots on it, how hard is it going to be to add a copy of mpg123 and have it as an MP3 player as well?
Of course, like 95% of the other geeks that read slashdot my first thought was 'Kool! I could telnet into my wristwatch!':)
Slashdot Mirror
As with the original Playstation is bad PAL conversions. PAL has higher res and runs at 50hz, and despite the delay in the release all that has been done to most release games is to put borders round the screen and not compensate for the 60hz->50hz switch. As a result games like Tekken Tag are completely ruined - at least to anyone who has played a full speed version. Ridge Racer has been tweaked and is actually *faster* than the Japanese version (not played the US version so I've no idea about that). Unfortunately they seem to have neglected to speed up the computer-controlled cars, which sort of wrecks the game. :)
Can't fault Fantavision though, that game is truly amazing. As to whether or not the console is worth the 300GBP it's being sold for.. well I'll leave that up to others. Personally I'd be going for an import model though, if I had the cash. As it is, it's back to F355 on my Dreamcast..
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
Nice. And it will take only a few weeks and then there is a crack which will mask the Files so that they can not be tracked anymore...
A quick read of the article made the solution obvious to me. All they're doing is an MD5 sum of the MP3 - so all that needs to be done is to put random data in the comments field of the ID3 tag and hey presto, the MD5 sum is different.
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
The real obstacle for the take-up of wireless LANs is something that's been around for quite a while and probably isn't going to go away any time soon: government legislation.
Here in the EU (I'm in Britain but most such legislation is controlled by the EU now) there is very tight legislation on what can be broadcast without a license, even over a very small distance. With all the concerns over mobile telephone radiation, power-line radiation and whatever else I really can't see this changing anytime soon.
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
Point-Counterpoin t: Technology
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
I used to work for a large OEM and almost every week at our technical meeting there would be questions about Microsoft licensing, often this issue in particular. I spoke to Microsoft about this on one occasion, and their line was basically
"You're on the Microsoft select program, we let you press your own Windows CDs and give you licenses for next to nothing, if you wish things to say this way then don't ship systems without an OS".
Unfortunately I didn't have the authority and the MD didn't have the courage to do anything about the situation.
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
This was already covered a month ago, on August 24th, the day after the unveiling (August 23rd).
Sorry guys...
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
Let us say Microsoft does sue Linux for NTFS support. That means:
That Linux is good enough for them to worry about.
They publicise the fact the Linux has NTFS support
They publicise Linux in general
They unleash thousands of press articles on how Microsoft is scared and is having to rely on lawsuits to compete.
By keeping quiet:
Far less people would know Linux had NTFS support
They can keep up the pretence that they don't need to worry about those pseudo-Marxist hippie long haired hackers are up to.
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
This guy writes emulators for a living. He hates Mac OS X. In trust, this shouldn't be all that surprising, after all, Mac OS X is based on BSD. There are thousands of free BSD-compatible programs out there, and from the reports so far, the majority will compile and run on Mac OS X without any code editing at all. This therefore negates the need for emulators; why emulate something when you can just recompile the source for the system you're running on?
Having said this, his point about backwards comptibility is certainally vaild, but might the best decision for him therefore to write a BSD-based Mac OS 9/8/7 emulator allowing Mac OS X people to run their old apps?
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
Auto-apologiser
Had a row with your girlfriend and said some things you didn't mean? No problem, with Auto-Apologiser TM an apology is sent before you even know you're sorry!
Please note that in the free-to-use version, this option is sponsered by Interflora.
Argument strategy advisor
Having an argument with a cow-orker but not sure of the best strategy to take? Argument Strategy Advisor TM will let you know!
Fact-finder
Are you a wannabe President of the USA who has trouble remembering pesky little things like who runs Pakistan? With Fact-finder TM you need never worry, just type your emails and it auto-corrects you facts for you!
Contract Negitiator
No more worrying about how much you're really worth, with Contract Negotiator TM you'll get the amount you really deserve!
-- Piracy is a vicitmless crime, like punching someone in the dark.
To be perfectly honest it really surprises me that any organisation that needs to be 100% sure of security would use proprietry software. I realise defense budgets are stretched, but surely shouldn't they have a team of people either coding their own systems or evaluating free ones?
This should provide a good rebutal to the silly 'I wouldn't want to run an operating system where just anyone can edit the source!' comment that was made last week.
Wouldn't that be Mac compatible?
Nah, it was VBscript virus so it ran just fine on the aliens computers.
I always find it funny how alien investigators never mention how alien races were present at ASCII standards meetings...
If you find banners annoying (as I do), simply filter them out with something like Junkbuster, or my favoured solution, Squid and sleezeball. All those annoying flashing ads get replaced with a nice transparent gif. And so the advertising companies still pay my favourite sites, I occasionally click on those transparent gifs too.
If google wants to add banners, I say good luck to them. I won't be viewing the adverts, but they'll be getting revenue that will keep their service going. As long as the banners don't get in the way of the service, as they have on search engines such as Altavista, then that's fine. It's only when the websites become oriented around products rather than the service that there's a problem. IMO, this is far more likely to happen if they don't display adverts, revenues will no doubt be sapped and may force them into a position where a buyout is necessary. I somehow doubt any company which would buy them out would run the service half as well as the current google owners.
I thought the whole point of Debian was that their releases weren't 'sludgey'. If Debian follow the 'sludgey' model, even if its not in their main release, what then makes them different from any other distro? The fact they use deb packaging rather than RPM?
As far as I'm concerned all this does is make Debian a slightly more 'free' RedHat.
GNUPG isn't affected - so those of us who like a software free-as-in-speech don't have an problem.
It can only affect you if you get a key from an untrusted source. For most /.ers this won't be an issue.
So basically, don't panic just yet. Of course, this will no doubt start a number of 'many eyes of open-source' arguments.
*ahem* *cough* Need I point out that the propietary "GD-ROM" has not seemed to hurt the Sega Dreamcast at all?
Quite. In fact, perhaps it would have been better had they not let the drive read normal CDs/CDRs at all, to stop all those naughty warez d00dz from copying their games.
The reason Nintendo had problems before was the simple extra cost of producing cartidges - these things had up to 64MB of ROM in them. How could Nintendo compete price-point wise when a CD only costs a fraction of that? This shouldn't be an issue with the new Nintendo console.
Of course, I somehow doubt it will stop the aforementioned 'naughty warez d00dz' - the PS2 has been cracked, the Dreamcast has, and I'll eat my hat (after buying one first) if the Gamecube isn't.
Has anyone noticed that the controller looks like a cross between a PS2 dual-shock controller (for overall styling/layout) and the Dreamcast controller (for position of the analog/ditigal controls + buttons).
:))
It certainally looks a lot more comfortable than the DC controller though, that thing sucks (Virtua Tennis has given me a serious case of sore-thumb). IMO Nintendo have always done the best gamepad design, the NES might not have been super-ergonomic (what was at that time), but the d-pad rocked. The SNES controller added more buttons and those now-ubiquitous sholder buttons. The piece de-resistance really was the N64 controller, it just oozed quality. If you have one, you might not have noticed that without a rumble/memory pack in it balances perfectly on your finger.
Sony may have stolen the show with their dual-shock for a bit, but I have faith in Nintendo and know that both the GB Advance and Game Cube will perform brilliantly.
Besides, lets face it, we all know that the games are where its at, and you can't beat the big N for that (aided and abetted by Rare of course). Can you tell I'm excited about this?
If they *do* put adverts in space how long will it be before someone comes out with 'Sky junkbuster' which filters them all out again?
This doesn't mean that the fight against filtering software should stop - a worst case scenario could be where only those in the know can access information, with the rest of the world just being force-fed approved content.
Plus, surely if this is used in a big way it's going to severely increase the load on akamai's servers?
Let's face it, is there really much point in Intel demo'ing this shit when:
1. They're demoing it now. This means the official release date will probably be at the end of the year and you might actually be able to buy one sometime next year. Of course, even then you'll have to wait a while 'cos Intel can't produce anything near the required quantities.
2. What good is all that extra CPU power really going to do you? Compile a Linux kernel in a couple of minutes? Big deal.
What we really need is an end to these ridiculous memory wars and a serious drop in memory prices.
He misses the ENTIRE point of the killer app of modern gaming: MULTIPLAYER capability. Sony's strategy is hinging on A) urging developers to assume an internet connection and B) creating an infrastructure to support the consoles. Sega may have caught onto that concept first, but Sony has wholeheartedly adopted the same view that internet multiplay will be an essential component of newer games.
It has? Sony have no plans for a modem device, and are planning only broadband support for the PS2 (understandibly, the amss-market are far less likely to accept lag in games). But broadband is far from mass-market outside Japan. Multiplayer console gaming is still all about multiple people crowded around one system and one screen. I don't see this changing in the near future. The console user is a completely different beast to the PC gamer. Whilst the PC gamer's primary concern is the game itself, the console gamer's primary concern is fun. There's something far too solitary about internet games playing - without being able to see your opponents for all you know you could be playing some new AI routine.
A good indicator of this is the fact that the Microsoft X-Box proudly displays four joypad ports on the front. With HDTV andever-increasing viewing sizes for televisions multiplayer single-screen gaming still has a lot of life left in it.
Is that they have to pitch these things where they can be used by the most people. I suspect the number of people who have a home network is relativly small. The number of people with a telephone line is significantly greater (although as it happens I have no land-line, just a mobile and ethernet :)).
:() but presumably it just dials the TiVO ISP and gets the details. Even if it gets it from centralised servers, from the way TiVO have acted so far I wouldn't be surprised if they were prepared to set up an Internet site for those with hacked ethernet TiVOs, as long as you're prepared to still pay the $9.95/month of course :)
Fortunately TiVO have already said that they have no objections to people hacking these things, and given that they run on Linux how hard can it be to put in a network card? I'm not familiar with the ins-and-outs of the TiVO (i'm in the UK and they're not out here yet
IMO we won't see devices like this with ethernet capabilities until ethernet is far more ubiquitous.
Here in the UK those that want to use the Sky Digital Television service must agree to permanently connect the box to a telephone line, so it can upload data such as which pay-for films you've been watching. At present I would expect this trend to continue..
From what I can make out from across the pond the Republicans are always trying to bribe you with your own money (wasn't a 20% tax cut their ridiculous promise last time?).
No doubt Mr. Katz will have something to say on this...
The thing that BOTH Micro$oft and Linux could learn from Novell is integration. Netware Administrator (NWadmin for the uninitiated) does everything. No, I mean *everything*.
This is exactly what Linuxconf is trying to do, and pretty sucessfully so far too. User administration, sendmail setup, apache setup, bind, wu-ftpd, system services, all from one app.
But what is the point in creating a non-compatible alternative? More to the point *how* can you - after all, with everything open-sourced there's no way you can stop people from making things cross-compatible.
A good example here is KDE vs Gnome. Want to run a Gnome app on KDE? No problem, as long as you've got the right libraries installed. Likewise the other way. With technologies like CORBA we should see even closer compatility.
Now they can release a wrist-watch which gives unix-time!
:)
Actually, when you think about it it could be more useful than it seems at first. Once linux boots on it, how hard is it going to be to add a copy of mpg123 and have it as an MP3 player as well?
Of course, like 95% of the other geeks that read slashdot my first thought was 'Kool! I could telnet into my wristwatch!'