I've installed WipEout HD on two consoles, so that's not the case. I also had to redownload the activation key when I put a new HDD in my PS3, and this counted as another download from my 5 console limit...
The ACCC responded to my complaint regarding this latest move of Sony's and they are looking into the matter. Whether or not anything will come of it is anyone's guess, but the ACCC do have a history of standing up for the consumer and not being afraid of multinational corporations.
Specifically, they're looking into the sale of a PS3 with OtherOS support being removed after the sale. The issues raised are being considered in the context of the Trade Practices Act 1974.
TRADE PRACTICES ACT 1974 - SECT 70 Supply by description
(1) Where there is a contract for the supply (otherwise than by way of sale by auction) by a corporation in the course of a business of goods to a consumer by description, there is an implied condition that the goods will correspond with the description, and, if the supply is by reference to a sample as well as by description, it is not sufficient that the bulk of the goods corresponds with the sample if the goods do not also correspond with the description.
(2) A supply of goods is not prevented from being a supply by description for the purposes of subsection (1) by reason only that, being exposed for sale or hire, they are selected by the consumer.
Implied undertakings as to quality or fitness
(1) Where a corporation supplies (otherwise than by way of sale by auction) goods to a consumer in the course of a business, there is an implied condition that the goods supplied under the contract for the supply of the goods are of merchantable quality, except that there is no such condition by virtue only of this section:
(a) as regards defects specifically drawn to the consumer's attention before the contract is made; or
(b) if the consumer examines the goods before the contract is made, as regards defects which that examination ought to reveal.
(2) Where a corporation supplies (otherwise than by way of sale by auction) goods to a consumer in the course of a business and the consumer, expressly or by implication, makes known to the corporation or to the person by whom any antecedent negotiations are conducted any particular purpose for which the goods are being acquired, there is an implied condition that the goods supplied under the contract for the supply of the goods are reasonably fit for that purpose, whether or not that is a purpose for which such goods are commonly supplied, except where the circumstances show that the consumer does not rely, or that it is unreasonable for him or her to rely, on the skill or judgment of the corporation or of that person.
corporations don't make laws or form government you silly twit.
You must be new round here.
It's called the "golden rule" - he who has the gold, makes the rules. From where I'm sitting, corporations have most of the gold, and there sure are a lot of laws being made in their favour at the moment.
Plus, corporations may not form government, but they sure do field people who form government - Halliburton anyone?
If you need centralised administration and monitoring of these controls, then you can use a Mac OS X Server - which can now be had in the Mac mini Server which has dual 500GB hard drives so you can mirror them and costs under a grand.
No, it isn't Elemental boron and borates are non-toxic to humans and animals (approximately similar to table salt). The LD50 (dose at which there is 50% mortality) for animals is about 6 g per kg of body weight. Substances with LD50 above 2 g are considered non-toxic.
If it stops a 9mm shell, it'll stop the little barbed prongs that a taser shoots. But they might catch in the clothing anyway, so you might still get shocked. Unless this stuff is conductive enough to short it out, or insulating enough to protect you.
No, it doesn't work that way. A "bulletproof" vest is relatively easy to get through with a sharp blade - most bullet resistant materials will use lots of strong fibres to tangle the bullet up in on it's way through, whereas a sharp knife (or a pointed barb that's not spinning) will penetrate relatively easily.
"I'm betting that they looked at Apple's margins on hardware, and saw potential in doing the same with Sun's hardware business."
Are you freaking crazy? Sun's margins on hardware make Apple's margins look like small change. Having sold both in my career, there are retail margins of 8% on Apple hardware and anywhere up to 20-30% on Sun hardware. That's just the margins that the resellers make. Then there are the margins that Apple or Sun make themselves. Apple's are generally worked out to be around 30%, and I'd shit a brick of Sun's margins on hardware were anywhere less than this...
You're right, there is a paragraph in the EULA that Sony are using to justify this "upgrade" however if such an upgrade conflicts with the law, then I'm afraid that it's the law that wins out over the EULA.
I don't believe they have dropped the hypervisor - that's one of the major security strongpoints and partly what has kept the PS3 from being totally pwned by now... From the osnews article you linked, they say (with emphasis mine)
I’m sorry that you are frustrated by the lack of comment specifically regarding the withdrawal of support for OtherOS on the new PS3 slim. The reasons are simple: The PS3 Slim is a major cost reduction involving many changes to hardware components in the PS3 design. In order to offer the OtherOS install, SCE would need to continue to maintain the OtherOS hypervisor drivers for any significant hardware changes – this costs SCE. One of our key objectives with the new model is to pass on cost savings to the consumer with a lower retail price. Unfortunately in this case the cost of OtherOS install did not fit with the wider objective to offer a lower cost PS3.
What I read into this is that they don't want to keep updating the hypervisor drivers for OtherOS support with the major hardware changes they made for the Slim, not that they're dropping the hypervisor altogether...
I don't know if America has anything like the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission but if you do, I'd urge you to raise this issue with them (and if you're in Australia, please get onto the case).
This is a simple case of a company changing the specs on a product that you have bought, after you've bought it and changing it in an adverse fashion. It is removing a feature that you have paid for and have possibly had for years, without offering any workaround or compensation.
Sony claim that the update is not mandatory, and that it is entirely your choice if you wish to install it or not, but the simple fact is that by not installing the patch, you lose even more functionality than if you do install it. No PSN. No Playstation Store. On online gaming. No access to new games that require this or a newer firmware. No access to bluray content that requires this or a newer version of the firmware. Etc.
Here's the text of the submission I made to the ACCC (you're limited to 1500 characters)
Sony have recently released a firmware update for the PlayStation 3 Games Console. From what I can see, all this update does is remove a feature from the console. The feature removed is the "Other OS" support - the ability to install another operating system, such as Linux, on the PS3 and use it as a general purpose computer.
Sony claim that the update is not mandatory, however by not installing this update, you lose access to the PlayStation Network, so any games that require this for online play will no longer work. One of the main reasons for owning a PS3 is the online gameplay component.
"Consumers and organizations that currently use the “Other OS” feature can choose not to upgrade their PS3 systems, although the following features will no longer be available; Ability to sign in to PlayStation Network and use network features that require signing in to PlayStation Network, such as online features of PS3 games and chat Playback of PS3 software titles or Blu-ray Disc videos that require PS3 system software version 3.21 or later Playback of copyright-protected videos that are stored on a media server (when DTCP-IP is enabled under Settings) Use of new features and improvements that are available on PS3 system software 3.21 or later"
If it's anything like search on apple.com, then forget it.
Just the other day, I went to www.apple.com/downloads and tried to search for a software update that I knew existed. I couldn't find it even when I searched for it's exact name. Their search is absolutely useless. I eventually found the download by doing a google search.
Here's an example. I want to find the recently released (as in the past week) download for the combo installer for the Mac OS X 10.6.3 update. Here are the search results from Apple for a search for "10.6.3 combo". Fail. and here are the results from Google - the first result returned is the one I want. Done.
I challenge you to go out and find a hard disk, any hard disk, for sale today that has a number of sectors on the disk that bears any relation whatsoever to an even power of two.
Everything not binary-represented-information related used base-10.
Everything binary-represented-information related (computing related, bandwidth related etc) used base 2, because the most important thing is how much information is being passed around or stored, and base-2 is the natural unit for measuring information, which comes in bits, and whose complexity is related to powers of the number of bits.
Now the situation is even more simple. Everything uses base 10 as that's what we naturally count with.
Oh this makes me sooooo grumpy. FFS, who does the International System of Units think they are. 1024 does equal 1 kilobyte... always has been. That's what I was taught in school. If I had answered 1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte, it would of been zero marks.
I was taught a heap of stuff in school that was later proven to be either slightly incorrect or flat-out wrong. The three primary colours are Red, Yellow and Blue. Pluto is the 9th planet of the Solar System. Pascal (and by extension Modula 2) is the best language to code in....
Hard drives, on the other hand, have nothing that is fundamentally based on a power of 2.
Well--except that pesky material on the surface of a disk that can store either a '1' state or a '0' state. Most people call that a 'bit'. Strangely enough, that 'binary' state is conducive to measuring in powers of two...
Yes, except for that pesky fact that the number of 0's and 1's that you can fit on a platter in a disk is a completely arbitrary number and has no relation to a number that is an even power of two. RAM on the other hand, due to the way it is constructed and addressed, does have an inherent relation to a number that is a power of two.
A better comparison would be using metric units in the US, because metrics are based on SI and imperial units are more like the weird way bits and bytes are counted into kilobytes, megabytes etc.
Saying that 1024 is a kilo never made any sense to anyone. I'm really glad we're finally entering an age where computers represent datasizes in units people can understand.
Now I am beginning to understand the resistance to change here. It's imperial versus metric all over again. People arbitrarily defined 1kB = 1024B and 1MB = 1048576 B because it was as convenient at the time as using inches and gallons, and now they don't want to change.
I work mostly on OS X and this so-called feature annoys me to no end. I do not know the size of my files anymore, I have to go to the terminal just to know the size of a file
Mate, seriously, when does it matter if that word document is 156kB or 156kiB? Or that jpeg is 290,149 bytes rather than 283,357? I know that whenever I've been checking the size of files, I've been rounding them off in my head for years anyway...
We actually sat down and did the math one time and for his Wii, 360, PS3 and enough controllers for 4 players on each, it came out to over $2,500 for just the console hardware. You can easily buy two very good gaming systems for less money over the course of the lifespan of a console generation.
So you can buy two PCs (that can have one, or at most two people playing at once) or you can buy three consoles and enough peripheral hardware to have four people playing at once on each console and... consoles are more expensive?
Consoles are also more convenient. Turn it on. Put in a disc, or load a game off the hard drive. Play. Turn it off. Easy.
With a recent docco I saw claiming that 95% of the universe had to be Dark Matter and Dark Energy, this simply didn't make sense - and not in the way that Quantum Mechanics doesn't make sense, but in a truly "This just can't be the way it is, how come we are so special we're living made out of stuff that just 5% of the universe is made out of, why aren't we made from dark matter as well?"
Apparently not - from TFA:
I’ll note: this has nothing to do with dark matter. As it happens, 90% of the matter in the Universe is in a form that emits no light, but affects other matter through gravity. We know it exists, and you can find out why here. We know it exists locally, in nearby galaxies and clusters of galaxies, too. This new result doesn’t affect that, since the now un-hidden galaxies are very far away, like many billions of light years away. They can’t possibly affect nearby galaxies, so they don’t account for dark matter.
I don't know if you noticed my sig, but I'm pretty familiar with what Apple have been up to these past few years;-)
What I was getting at was that, in general, programmers simply don't have the time or money to really optimise their code and now that computers are, for all intents and purposes, fast enough to not really worry about optimisations.
Apple are doing a lot of good, as you mention, with things like Grand Central Dispatch, but the multiprocessing features in earlier versions of OS X, and even more OS 9, were nothing that was in any major way any better than that offered by, say, Windows or other Unix based OSs. In fact, in the Mac OS 9 days, the multiprocessing capabilities of Mac OS lagged quite far behind that of Windows NT at the time.
Since when have OS designers optimised their code to milk every cycle from the available CPUs? They haven't, they just wait for hardware to get faster to keep up with the code.
If you're targeting ships, especially carriers, over water there isn't a lot of terrain to get in the way, and not too many people to hear the sonic boom. Carriers on the other hand, are generally the best protected ships in a fleet, with things like anti missile missiles and metalstorm batteries, not to mention other ships, to protect them.
If you're coming in towards a carrier, the faster you're going, the harder you are going to be to acquire as a target and then hit with defences.
If the vast majority of people with FaceBook/MySpace/Whatever accounts really gave a fuck about their privacy and freedom, they wouldn't have opened accounts in the first place.
More than a few people I know are "conscientious objectors" and don't have accounts on social network sites. Everyone else knows fully well what they are sharing and don't really care (myself included)
Slashdot Mirror
I've installed WipEout HD on two consoles, so that's not the case. I also had to redownload the activation key when I put a new HDD in my PS3, and this counted as another download from my 5 console limit...
And how, pray tell, do you get this on the PS3?
The ACCC responded to my complaint regarding this latest move of Sony's and they are looking into the matter. Whether or not anything will come of it is anyone's guess, but the ACCC do have a history of standing up for the consumer and not being afraid of multinational corporations.
Specifically, they're looking into the sale of a PS3 with OtherOS support being removed after the sale. The issues raised are being considered in the context of the Trade Practices Act 1974 .
corporations don't make laws or form government you silly twit.
You must be new round here.
It's called the "golden rule" - he who has the gold, makes the rules. From where I'm sitting, corporations have most of the gold, and there sure are a lot of laws being made in their favour at the moment.
Plus, corporations may not form government, but they sure do field people who form government - Halliburton anyone?
Don't create work for yourself and reinvent the wheel... Most of what you want to do is already built in to Mac OS X.
Check out the Parental Controls - there is a good quick movie on Parental Controls that shows what can easily be done.
If you need centralised administration and monitoring of these controls, then you can use a Mac OS X Server - which can now be had in the Mac mini Server which has dual 500GB hard drives so you can mirror them and costs under a grand.
No, it isn't
Elemental boron and borates are non-toxic to humans and animals (approximately similar to table salt). The LD50 (dose at which there is 50% mortality) for animals is about 6 g per kg of body weight. Substances with LD50 above 2 g are considered non-toxic.
If it stops a 9mm shell, it'll stop the little barbed prongs that a taser shoots. But they might catch in the clothing anyway, so you might still get shocked. Unless this stuff is conductive enough to short it out, or insulating enough to protect you.
No, it doesn't work that way. A "bulletproof" vest is relatively easy to get through with a sharp blade - most bullet resistant materials will use lots of strong fibres to tangle the bullet up in on it's way through, whereas a sharp knife (or a pointed barb that's not spinning) will penetrate relatively easily.
Are you freaking crazy? Sun's margins on hardware make Apple's margins look like small change. Having sold both in my career, there are retail margins of 8% on Apple hardware and anywhere up to 20-30% on Sun hardware. That's just the margins that the resellers make. Then there are the margins that Apple or Sun make themselves. Apple's are generally worked out to be around 30%, and I'd shit a brick of Sun's margins on hardware were anywhere less than this...
That's obviously a fake, as they didn't sign off with the obligatory:
"Get a dog up ya, mate"
You're right, there is a paragraph in the EULA that Sony are using to justify this "upgrade" however if such an upgrade conflicts with the law, then I'm afraid that it's the law that wins out over the EULA.
I don't believe they have dropped the hypervisor - that's one of the major security strongpoints and partly what has kept the PS3 from being totally pwned by now...
From the osnews article you linked, they say (with emphasis mine)
I don't know if America has anything like the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission but if you do, I'd urge you to raise this issue with them (and if you're in Australia, please get onto the case).
This is a simple case of a company changing the specs on a product that you have bought, after you've bought it and changing it in an adverse fashion. It is removing a feature that you have paid for and have possibly had for years, without offering any workaround or compensation.
Sony claim that the update is not mandatory, and that it is entirely your choice if you wish to install it or not, but the simple fact is that by not installing the patch, you lose even more functionality than if you do install it. No PSN. No Playstation Store. On online gaming. No access to new games that require this or a newer firmware. No access to bluray content that requires this or a newer version of the firmware. Etc.
Here's the text of the submission I made to the ACCC (you're limited to 1500 characters)
If it's anything like search on apple.com, then forget it.
Just the other day, I went to www.apple.com/downloads and tried to search for a software update that I knew existed. I couldn't find it even when I searched for it's exact name. Their search is absolutely useless. I eventually found the download by doing a google search.
Here's an example. I want to find the recently released (as in the past week) download for the combo installer for the Mac OS X 10.6.3 update.
Here are the search results from Apple for a search for "10.6.3 combo". Fail.
and here are the results from Google - the first result returned is the one I want. Done.
I challenge you to go out and find a hard disk, any hard disk, for sale today that has a number of sectors on the disk that bears any relation whatsoever to an even power of two.
Before, the situation was simple.
Everything not binary-represented-information related used base-10.
Everything binary-represented-information related (computing related, bandwidth related etc) used base 2, because the
most important thing is how much information is being passed around or stored, and base-2 is the natural unit for
measuring information, which comes in bits, and whose complexity is related to powers of the number of bits.
Now the situation is even more simple. Everything uses base 10 as that's what we naturally count with.
Oh this makes me sooooo grumpy. FFS, who does the International System of Units think they are. 1024 does equal 1 kilobyte ... always has been. That's what I was taught in school. If I had answered 1000 bytes = 1 kilobyte, it would of been zero marks.
I was taught a heap of stuff in school that was later proven to be either slightly incorrect or flat-out wrong. The three primary colours are Red, Yellow and Blue. Pluto is the 9th planet of the Solar System. Pascal (and by extension Modula 2) is the best language to code in....
Things change.
Hard drives, on the other hand, have nothing that is fundamentally based on a power of 2.
Well--except that pesky material on the surface of a disk that can store either a '1' state or a '0' state. Most people call that a 'bit'. Strangely enough, that 'binary' state is conducive to measuring in powers of two...
Yes, except for that pesky fact that the number of 0's and 1's that you can fit on a platter in a disk is a completely arbitrary number and has no relation to a number that is an even power of two. RAM on the other hand, due to the way it is constructed and addressed, does have an inherent relation to a number that is a power of two.
A better comparison would be using metric units in the US, because metrics are based on SI and imperial units are more like the weird way bits and bytes are counted into kilobytes, megabytes etc.
Saying that 1024 is a kilo never made any sense to anyone. I'm really glad we're finally entering an age where computers represent datasizes in units people can understand.
Now I am beginning to understand the resistance to change here. It's imperial versus metric all over again. People arbitrarily defined 1kB = 1024B and 1MB = 1048576 B because it was as convenient at the time as using inches and gallons, and now they don't want to change.
I work mostly on OS X and this so-called feature annoys me to no end. I do not know the size of my files anymore, I have to go to the terminal just to know the size of a file
Mate, seriously, when does it matter if that word document is 156kB or 156kiB? Or that jpeg is 290,149 bytes rather than 283,357? I know that whenever I've been checking the size of files, I've been rounding them off in my head for years anyway...
We actually sat down and did the math one time and for his Wii, 360, PS3 and enough controllers for 4 players on each, it came out to over $2,500 for just the console hardware. You can easily buy two very good gaming systems for less money over the course of the lifespan of a console generation.
So you can buy two PCs (that can have one, or at most two people playing at once) or you can buy three consoles and enough peripheral hardware to have four people playing at once on each console and... consoles are more expensive?
Consoles are also more convenient. Turn it on. Put in a disc, or load a game off the hard drive. Play. Turn it off. Easy.
With a recent docco I saw claiming that 95% of the universe had to be Dark Matter and Dark Energy, this simply didn't make sense - and not in the way that Quantum Mechanics doesn't make sense, but in a truly "This just can't be the way it is, how come we are so special we're living made out of stuff that just 5% of the universe is made out of, why aren't we made from dark matter as well?"
Apparently not - from TFA:
I don't know if you noticed my sig, but I'm pretty familiar with what Apple have been up to these past few years ;-)
What I was getting at was that, in general, programmers simply don't have the time or money to really optimise their code and now that computers are, for all intents and purposes, fast enough to not really worry about optimisations.
Apple are doing a lot of good, as you mention, with things like Grand Central Dispatch, but the multiprocessing features in earlier versions of OS X, and even more OS 9, were nothing that was in any major way any better than that offered by, say, Windows or other Unix based OSs. In fact, in the Mac OS 9 days, the multiprocessing capabilities of Mac OS lagged quite far behind that of Windows NT at the time.
Since when have OS designers optimised their code to milk every cycle from the available CPUs? They haven't, they just wait for hardware to get faster to keep up with the code.
If you're targeting ships, especially carriers, over water there isn't a lot of terrain to get in the way, and not too many people to hear the sonic boom. Carriers on the other hand, are generally the best protected ships in a fleet, with things like anti missile missiles and metalstorm batteries, not to mention other ships, to protect them.
If you're coming in towards a carrier, the faster you're going, the harder you are going to be to acquire as a target and then hit with defences.
If the vast majority of people with FaceBook/MySpace/Whatever accounts really gave a fuck about their privacy and freedom, they wouldn't have opened accounts in the first place.
More than a few people I know are "conscientious objectors" and don't have accounts on social network sites. Everyone else knows fully well what they are sharing and don't really care (myself included)