It doesn't allow you to reflash your PSP with CFW, but it does exploit a vulnerability which lets it temporarily boot a customized version, which does allow you all the benefits you'd normally have. The best part from a warranty standpoint is that there really isn't anything left behind on the PSP itself that could be used as evidence of doing something which voids it. Ie, it doesn't actually reflash the system so without a specially formatted memory stick, it boots up clean.
Are you seriously trying to say that as a geek you couldn't figure out how to get FreeBSD installed on a system? Or that other geeks attempting to benchmark various *nix distros somehow can't figure it out?
It's really not rocket science here. The installer for FreeBSD is more or less a text (curses) based equivalent of Ubuntu's installer. Just (off the top of my head, the specifics I'm sure have changed over time) "express -> "A" for use entire disk" -> standard -> "A" for auto defaults -> "All" for install all the base packages (personally I usually do with just the bare minimum) -> choose CD or FTP install -> let it do it's thing.
You don't get much more hand-holding than that without using a GUI-centric *nix distro like Ubuntu, FC or SuSe.
Yea, that's pretty much why I stopped using gentoo. Although, if you're 'hardcore' enough to recompile every single package, I'm surprised that you're not using distcc and ccache. Fairly trivial to setup, and works quite well. It's been a few years since I've really cared enough, but at one point I had about 10 Late P4's netbooting gentoo all running distcc. I found it pretty cool. Not particularly useful for anything else, mind you.
Most public libraries keep on hand an extensive collection of historical periodicals. So if a student did use a print media for his sources, the professor could just use the facilities to temporarily use one of the stored periodicals. But with the interwebs, you can't really legally make a backup or a version that's freely accessible by the public with no extra fees than the initial cost of the media (Ie, library pays $1 for the newspaper, all patrons can now view that paper for free).
I think that's what the GP was trying to say: Print media has the ability to be physically stored and viewed without (much - microfilm/fiche) technology. Fee-based internet subscription services generally can't legally (As per the agreement) be viewed by anyone other than the original account holder.
Unless I missed something, I'm pretty sure one of the major causes of the high levels of piracy in their games was the price.
I've looked at pricing from them and other linux game retailers, and I was blown away at how disproportionate the pricing was. Some old game I played 10 years ago, and can get for $3 off steam? $30 on their site. I'm not exaggerating either, you see things like that across the board.
I understand it costs money to port the games, but anyone with the slightest understanding of market forces knows that the higher a price you put on an item, the fewer of them sell. Compound that with a supply that is much cheaper, and it's no wonder units don't sell like they should. Especially when the cheaper units often run just fine under WINE or the like.
Why is that fishy? The pacemaker talks to the base station unit, reporting it's status. The only thing connected to the internet is the base station. It doesn't need an IP address any more than a wireless HID does when attached to a computer.
This isn't even very new, really. Devices like this already exist, they just use telephony to literally "phone home" instead of the intarwebernets
Yea, lots of OSes do this out of the box now. You'll need to do a tad more than just shove a Ultra 10 between your router and the rest of your home network, though.
No, it'd still be worth it. Right now hardware acceleration (using the GPU to generate graphics) is done via sending instructions to the GPU which then do all the work of rendering the scene and sending out to your display.
What they're talking about is having the *CPU* render the scene, or at least part of it and then handing *THAT* off to the display.
The problem that the GP was talking about is that there's only so much BW available on the system bus and with alot of things going on, it's possible to max out that BW and actually cause a degradation of performance if it's not handled correctly.
I could do that, and I'd thought about it. But I just wanted to use it as an example of what I went through (as an experienced Unix/Linux guy), and why you would NEED to use the CLI and have at least a basic understanding of it.
Sure, I can fix most of these issues that pop up, and I've even hacked little patches into my own kernel before to support hardware I own, but I think it's unreasonable to expect the same from your average windows user. Trust me, if it's not just as simple as pointy clicky it's almost too much for them.
I can assume they are typical if the majority of devices on which I install an OS have issues after an update. Let's take my three machines, for example:
1) Desktop - Update from 8.10->9.04 broke Hardware video acceleration with an ATI card. Status: Permanently unaccelerated until I revert back to 8.10 (which ain't happening because I don't have the time, really). Not a huge deal to me, but still a 'problem'.
2) Laptop #1 - Update from 8.10->9.04 seriously broke my wifi on the laptop. As in, it's so flakey it's totally unusable. Updating to the latest madwifi (or whatever they're calling themselves now) svn code? Doesn't help. Solution? Revert back to 8.10 (Lots of CLI usage here btw).
3) Laptop #2 - No way in hell am I updating this one past 8.10, with the last two having issues, I can only imagine what would break this time. Audio? Video accel? Wifi again?! 8.10 is fine for what I do with this unit.
I love linux, but really. You NEED the CLI in linux to fix anything which breaks. And if you upgrade, you will very likely be breaking or messing something or another up.
Anyways, my point wasn't updates break things, even though it may seem that way. It's that things in linux can't be unbroken without massive CLI usage and the understanding of the underpinnings of the OS.
That is of course if just a wipe and reinstall can't fix it, which will be the likely course of action from the less savy windows converts.
That's not true. I've installed Ubuntu on three different computers (two laptops and a desktop) and with pretty much every major update (8.10->9.04 for example), I needed to use the CLI to fix crap. Hell, even recently I (in vain) attempted to get my ATI card to work properly with hardware acceleration in 9.04 and had to drop into CLI to fix my now-broken X.org.
Look in the forums of any distro (even Ubuntu) and I bet you'll find the vast majority of the fixes don't start with "goto System->Preferences/Administration..." but "open a terminal, and paste this into the shell".
Are you kidding? You must not have an iPhone. Anyone could get away with this as long as they changed the name. Hell, you could probably grossly miscategorize it as an RPG and still get it in the app store.
Sure they could. Just don't name it the same thing. Ever LOOK at the app store lately? If you want any ordinary app, there's dozens of clones of just about anything you can think of - grocery lists, sip clients, nagios monitors, ssh clients, CIDR/subnet utils, notepads, flashlights, levels, etc.. Now, if you go over to the games, you'll see certain companies churn out the EXACT SAME game, just titled differently.. Like Ninjas, Pirates, Samurai, Soldiers, Tanks, Robots. I'm not kidding, either. They are all completely identical games except for the name and some in-game text.
If that stuff can get by, someone else can take the code, call it SuperPlaneAttack or something and get it in the iTunes Store. I think the App Store examination process is modeled after the US Patent system with some of the totally random stuff that gets let in/rejected, but whatever. It's not stopping anyone from trying. Certainly didn't stop these guys.
Totally. I'm glad you're already modded +informative, but honestly if it was me and I'd gone that far only to have some schmuck developer telling me that my months of hard work and fees to get this published should be given out for free, I'd give him the finger and release it the way these people did already. I wouldn't have even bothered to lower the price, $6 is totally reasonable for a very good piece of software. And if you're not sure if you'll like it, there's always the source.. Feel free to fiddle away and see if you'd like it on your iPhone.
I don't know why there's all these people spouting that they should be releasing it for free. I wonder how many of them maintain some sort of GPL software as part of their work, and how they'd feel if their boss said to them "Every hour you spend on working on X GPL'd app and sending back patches will be personal time and you won't be compensated for it. Oh, and by the way, your next three months will be fiddling around with GPL'd app X. Have fun."
I think they should relax the restrictions somewhat on the PSN. As someone who has all of the current-gen consoles and bought both hard copies and games off each console's virtual store, I have to say that Sony's is the most lacking for content. Unfortunately, the XBox with his shovelware marketplace and "community games" is just utter crap. 99% of the stuff that shows up on there is just outright garbage, and really shouldn't be on there (IE: There's one "Community Game" that amounts to clicking the A button several times to "win" it - for $2. I made more complex games in grade school during the 80's, and they were considered crap then).
I honestly think the Wii has the best marketplace. It might actually be even more restricted than the PSN or XBL, but the huge catalog of 80's/90's console games as well as very select newer games is nice.
One last note though, I think that if you looked you'd see much less cruft in the PSN store than on XBL or the iPhone store (Which, imo, is just flooded with crappy mmo games, me-too apps and publishers releasing texts individually.. I could go on)
Piracy and high-end hardware isn't the problem with PC gaming today. The piracy part is caused mostly from two factors:
The Demos (When there are demos) released aren't very representative of the end product, and often misrepresent a game by only letting you play a small portion of it. Compare any demo these days to the "demo" for Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 1/2, or Quake. The first episode/group of levels was free, and served as a very good demo. You knew exactly what you were getting when you finally ponied up the money for the full version. Most game demos nowadays throw you halfway in the campaign somewhere and show you something which really has very little bearing on the actual game, but seems cool at first glance.
The other aspect is the shittacular DRM they're putting on games these days (Starforce, TAGES, etc) quite often cause serious problems when trying to actually play the game (Limited registrations, activations, etc). And that is driving people to get cracks for the games they bought, which gets them into the piracy scene (As they are the ones who release the cracks for the DRM).
The part of the high-end hardware has always been there, it always will be. There have always been developers pushing the graphics of the current-gen as far as they could and there have always been vendors trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their hardware. Mostly, the only problems have been at the driver layer and that seems to come and go in waves from vendor to vendor.
All things said, I'm both a console and PC gamer. I've got a newer rig I play games on, and I've got all the current-gen consoles, and I can honestly say I usually have more fun playing games on one of the three consoles rather than on the PC. The only exception might be first-person shooters. But I've never really liked playing FPS games with a gamepad/joystick.
I've actually had this happen to me with two different computers and two different drivers. On one, the drivers for an ATI card I was using no longer worked after upgrading my ubuntu dist from 8.x to 9.04. On the other, my wireless card suddenly became flakey after a kernel upgrade and no amount of recompiling anything helped. (Well, getting the newest code from the madwifi svn helped some, but it was still pretty much unusable for anything other than email/light surfing).
I see there's people saying windows' drivers are horrible, and compared to linux's drivers, windows' drivers are fantastically inescapably awesome in this regard. I don't remember the last time a service pack had rendered some random bit of hardware nearly unusable or kept my computer from properly booting.
I see that there's several versions of BIND in the pkgsrc binary packages tree, wouldn't a new patched one show up there fairly quickly? That would solve you having to recompile anything. Not that BIND generally takes a long time to compile on fairly modern hardware..
After all these years, I still feel sad that Aeries died in FF7. I think the thing for me with the FF series is that they really do concentrate on the writing and character development, more so than I believe other game series do. Some of the events in the games really do make you think. As a whole, I think the series so far has come a long way since FF1 showed up.
Maybe the genre has died out commercially, but roguelike scene from which the Beholder series and DM came from is still going strong. There's quite a few First-Person dungeon spelunking games out there as well as the traditional rogue top-down view games.
If you like the old adventure games like the King's Quest etc, a whole ton of them just came out on Steam fairly recently.
As for the Sci-Fi space shooters, X3 is fairly popular, and I'm sure you could find a few others that fit into that genre.
On the whole I agree - I would love to see Lucas Arts re-release all the old XW/TF games.
Hey, you immediately assumed all the games on the wii are shovelware. They're not, I own all three current-gen consoles and lots of games including Mass Effect and Sins, which isn't a console game. The vast majority of the games for the wii are fairly inventive with the controls. Sure, there's a good share of party games out for it, but that's what the wii was designed around. If you look deeper, you'd see that while the graphics for the wii doesn't have the uber-shiny whiz-bang super-glowing-snot effects of the other consoles, the good games really stand out and don't need all that flash.
As for Mass Effect and Sins being shovelware - it depends. One is a yet-another-space-rts (Sins doesn't even have a campaign story to go through) and an RPG that has an antagonist that's so generic you couldn't make him more bland. I didn't find either terribly inspiring. Just bad choices to put up against "wii shovelware", really.
The problem really lies in the fact that the old SD TVs cannot display the same Hi-Def signals that the HD TVs can (480p, 720 and 1080). So if your console put out a HD signal like even 480p, the old SD TVs would just sit there blank as they wouldn't have a usable signal.
The HD TVs would be just fine, and I suppose you might get some benefit from hooking a bunch of various sized HD TVs up, but that wouldn't really help the problem at hand.
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I take it you have never used the app store. I could see it working beautifully.
It doesn't allow you to reflash your PSP with CFW, but it does exploit a vulnerability which lets it temporarily boot a customized version, which does allow you all the benefits you'd normally have. The best part from a warranty standpoint is that there really isn't anything left behind on the PSP itself that could be used as evidence of doing something which voids it. Ie, it doesn't actually reflash the system so without a specially formatted memory stick, it boots up clean.
Are you seriously trying to say that as a geek you couldn't figure out how to get FreeBSD installed on a system? Or that other geeks attempting to benchmark various *nix distros somehow can't figure it out?
It's really not rocket science here. The installer for FreeBSD is more or less a text (curses) based equivalent of Ubuntu's installer. Just (off the top of my head, the specifics I'm sure have changed over time) "express -> "A" for use entire disk" -> standard -> "A" for auto defaults -> "All" for install all the base packages (personally I usually do with just the bare minimum) -> choose CD or FTP install -> let it do it's thing.
You don't get much more hand-holding than that without using a GUI-centric *nix distro like Ubuntu, FC or SuSe.
The cake is a lie.
Yea, that's pretty much why I stopped using gentoo. Although, if you're 'hardcore' enough to recompile every single package, I'm surprised that you're not using distcc and ccache. Fairly trivial to setup, and works quite well. It's been a few years since I've really cared enough, but at one point I had about 10 Late P4's netbooting gentoo all running distcc. I found it pretty cool. Not particularly useful for anything else, mind you.
Most public libraries keep on hand an extensive collection of historical periodicals. So if a student did use a print media for his sources, the professor could just use the facilities to temporarily use one of the stored periodicals. But with the interwebs, you can't really legally make a backup or a version that's freely accessible by the public with no extra fees than the initial cost of the media (Ie, library pays $1 for the newspaper, all patrons can now view that paper for free).
I think that's what the GP was trying to say: Print media has the ability to be physically stored and viewed without (much - microfilm/fiche) technology. Fee-based internet subscription services generally can't legally (As per the agreement) be viewed by anyone other than the original account holder.
Unless I missed something, I'm pretty sure one of the major causes of the high levels of piracy in their games was the price.
I've looked at pricing from them and other linux game retailers, and I was blown away at how disproportionate the pricing was. Some old game I played 10 years ago, and can get for $3 off steam? $30 on their site. I'm not exaggerating either, you see things like that across the board.
I understand it costs money to port the games, but anyone with the slightest understanding of market forces knows that the higher a price you put on an item, the fewer of them sell. Compound that with a supply that is much cheaper, and it's no wonder units don't sell like they should. Especially when the cheaper units often run just fine under WINE or the like.
Why is that fishy? The pacemaker talks to the base station unit, reporting it's status. The only thing connected to the internet is the base station. It doesn't need an IP address any more than a wireless HID does when attached to a computer.
This isn't even very new, really. Devices like this already exist, they just use telephony to literally "phone home" instead of the intarwebernets
Yea, lots of OSes do this out of the box now. You'll need to do a tad more than just shove a Ultra 10 between your router and the rest of your home network, though.
No, it'd still be worth it. Right now hardware acceleration (using the GPU to generate graphics) is done via sending instructions to the GPU which then do all the work of rendering the scene and sending out to your display.
What they're talking about is having the *CPU* render the scene, or at least part of it and then handing *THAT* off to the display.
The problem that the GP was talking about is that there's only so much BW available on the system bus and with alot of things going on, it's possible to max out that BW and actually cause a degradation of performance if it's not handled correctly.
I could do that, and I'd thought about it. But I just wanted to use it as an example of what I went through (as an experienced Unix/Linux guy), and why you would NEED to use the CLI and have at least a basic understanding of it.
Sure, I can fix most of these issues that pop up, and I've even hacked little patches into my own kernel before to support hardware I own, but I think it's unreasonable to expect the same from your average windows user. Trust me, if it's not just as simple as pointy clicky it's almost too much for them.
I can assume they are typical if the majority of devices on which I install an OS have issues after an update. Let's take my three machines, for example:
1) Desktop - Update from 8.10->9.04 broke Hardware video acceleration with an ATI card. Status: Permanently unaccelerated until I revert back to 8.10 (which ain't happening because I don't have the time, really). Not a huge deal to me, but still a 'problem'.
2) Laptop #1 - Update from 8.10->9.04 seriously broke my wifi on the laptop. As in, it's so flakey it's totally unusable. Updating to the latest madwifi (or whatever they're calling themselves now) svn code? Doesn't help. Solution? Revert back to 8.10 (Lots of CLI usage here btw).
3) Laptop #2 - No way in hell am I updating this one past 8.10, with the last two having issues, I can only imagine what would break this time. Audio? Video accel? Wifi again?! 8.10 is fine for what I do with this unit.
I love linux, but really. You NEED the CLI in linux to fix anything which breaks. And if you upgrade, you will very likely be breaking or messing something or another up.
Anyways, my point wasn't updates break things, even though it may seem that way. It's that things in linux can't be unbroken without massive CLI usage and the understanding of the underpinnings of the OS.
That is of course if just a wipe and reinstall can't fix it, which will be the likely course of action from the less savy windows converts.
They, should as they are both part of the Arachnida family. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnida
That's not true. I've installed Ubuntu on three different computers (two laptops and a desktop) and with pretty much every major update (8.10->9.04 for example), I needed to use the CLI to fix crap. Hell, even recently I (in vain) attempted to get my ATI card to work properly with hardware acceleration in 9.04 and had to drop into CLI to fix my now-broken X.org.
Look in the forums of any distro (even Ubuntu) and I bet you'll find the vast majority of the fixes don't start with "goto System->Preferences/Administration ..." but "open a terminal, and paste this into the shell".
Are you kidding? You must not have an iPhone. Anyone could get away with this as long as they changed the name. Hell, you could probably grossly miscategorize it as an RPG and still get it in the app store.
Sure they could. Just don't name it the same thing. Ever LOOK at the app store lately? If you want any ordinary app, there's dozens of clones of just about anything you can think of - grocery lists, sip clients, nagios monitors, ssh clients, CIDR/subnet utils, notepads, flashlights, levels, etc.. Now, if you go over to the games, you'll see certain companies churn out the EXACT SAME game, just titled differently.. Like Ninjas, Pirates, Samurai, Soldiers, Tanks, Robots. I'm not kidding, either. They are all completely identical games except for the name and some in-game text.
If that stuff can get by, someone else can take the code, call it SuperPlaneAttack or something and get it in the iTunes Store. I think the App Store examination process is modeled after the US Patent system with some of the totally random stuff that gets let in/rejected, but whatever. It's not stopping anyone from trying. Certainly didn't stop these guys.
Totally. I'm glad you're already modded +informative, but honestly if it was me and I'd gone that far only to have some schmuck developer telling me that my months of hard work and fees to get this published should be given out for free, I'd give him the finger and release it the way these people did already. I wouldn't have even bothered to lower the price, $6 is totally reasonable for a very good piece of software. And if you're not sure if you'll like it, there's always the source.. Feel free to fiddle away and see if you'd like it on your iPhone.
I don't know why there's all these people spouting that they should be releasing it for free. I wonder how many of them maintain some sort of GPL software as part of their work, and how they'd feel if their boss said to them "Every hour you spend on working on X GPL'd app and sending back patches will be personal time and you won't be compensated for it. Oh, and by the way, your next three months will be fiddling around with GPL'd app X. Have fun."
I think they should relax the restrictions somewhat on the PSN. As someone who has all of the current-gen consoles and bought both hard copies and games off each console's virtual store, I have to say that Sony's is the most lacking for content. Unfortunately, the XBox with his shovelware marketplace and "community games" is just utter crap. 99% of the stuff that shows up on there is just outright garbage, and really shouldn't be on there (IE: There's one "Community Game" that amounts to clicking the A button several times to "win" it - for $2. I made more complex games in grade school during the 80's, and they were considered crap then).
I honestly think the Wii has the best marketplace. It might actually be even more restricted than the PSN or XBL, but the huge catalog of 80's/90's console games as well as very select newer games is nice.
One last note though, I think that if you looked you'd see much less cruft in the PSN store than on XBL or the iPhone store (Which, imo, is just flooded with crappy mmo games, me-too apps and publishers releasing texts individually.. I could go on)
Piracy and high-end hardware isn't the problem with PC gaming today. The piracy part is caused mostly from two factors:
The Demos (When there are demos) released aren't very representative of the end product, and often misrepresent a game by only letting you play a small portion of it. Compare any demo these days to the "demo" for Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 1/2, or Quake. The first episode/group of levels was free, and served as a very good demo. You knew exactly what you were getting when you finally ponied up the money for the full version. Most game demos nowadays throw you halfway in the campaign somewhere and show you something which really has very little bearing on the actual game, but seems cool at first glance.
The other aspect is the shittacular DRM they're putting on games these days (Starforce, TAGES, etc) quite often cause serious problems when trying to actually play the game (Limited registrations, activations, etc). And that is driving people to get cracks for the games they bought, which gets them into the piracy scene (As they are the ones who release the cracks for the DRM).
The part of the high-end hardware has always been there, it always will be. There have always been developers pushing the graphics of the current-gen as far as they could and there have always been vendors trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their hardware. Mostly, the only problems have been at the driver layer and that seems to come and go in waves from vendor to vendor.
All things said, I'm both a console and PC gamer. I've got a newer rig I play games on, and I've got all the current-gen consoles, and I can honestly say I usually have more fun playing games on one of the three consoles rather than on the PC. The only exception might be first-person shooters. But I've never really liked playing FPS games with a gamepad/joystick.
I've actually had this happen to me with two different computers and two different drivers. On one, the drivers for an ATI card I was using no longer worked after upgrading my ubuntu dist from 8.x to 9.04. On the other, my wireless card suddenly became flakey after a kernel upgrade and no amount of recompiling anything helped. (Well, getting the newest code from the madwifi svn helped some, but it was still pretty much unusable for anything other than email/light surfing).
I see there's people saying windows' drivers are horrible, and compared to linux's drivers, windows' drivers are fantastically inescapably awesome in this regard. I don't remember the last time a service pack had rendered some random bit of hardware nearly unusable or kept my computer from properly booting.
I see that there's several versions of BIND in the pkgsrc binary packages tree, wouldn't a new patched one show up there fairly quickly? That would solve you having to recompile anything. Not that BIND generally takes a long time to compile on fairly modern hardware..
After all these years, I still feel sad that Aeries died in FF7. I think the thing for me with the FF series is that they really do concentrate on the writing and character development, more so than I believe other game series do. Some of the events in the games really do make you think. As a whole, I think the series so far has come a long way since FF1 showed up.
Maybe the genre has died out commercially, but roguelike scene from which the Beholder series and DM came from is still going strong. There's quite a few First-Person dungeon spelunking games out there as well as the traditional rogue top-down view games.
If you like the old adventure games like the King's Quest etc, a whole ton of them just came out on Steam fairly recently.
As for the Sci-Fi space shooters, X3 is fairly popular, and I'm sure you could find a few others that fit into that genre.
On the whole I agree - I would love to see Lucas Arts re-release all the old XW/TF games.
Hey, you immediately assumed all the games on the wii are shovelware. They're not, I own all three current-gen consoles and lots of games including Mass Effect and Sins, which isn't a console game. The vast majority of the games for the wii are fairly inventive with the controls. Sure, there's a good share of party games out for it, but that's what the wii was designed around. If you look deeper, you'd see that while the graphics for the wii doesn't have the uber-shiny whiz-bang super-glowing-snot effects of the other consoles, the good games really stand out and don't need all that flash.
As for Mass Effect and Sins being shovelware - it depends. One is a yet-another-space-rts (Sins doesn't even have a campaign story to go through) and an RPG that has an antagonist that's so generic you couldn't make him more bland. I didn't find either terribly inspiring. Just bad choices to put up against "wii shovelware", really.
The problem really lies in the fact that the old SD TVs cannot display the same Hi-Def signals that the HD TVs can (480p, 720 and 1080). So if your console put out a HD signal like even 480p, the old SD TVs would just sit there blank as they wouldn't have a usable signal.
The HD TVs would be just fine, and I suppose you might get some benefit from hooking a bunch of various sized HD TVs up, but that wouldn't really help the problem at hand.