For console games they often start localization this late in the process. The result being that the game is released a few months later in Eu and a large number of people pirate the game. I have gotten "advanced copies" from the net for this very reason. A few times I have imported the games instead, but when you have things like XBox Live I'd have to buy the game twice; very annoying.
Translating to 50 laguages in Eu is annoying though. I have just one thing to get off my chest regrding that:
OTOH what modern OS today doesn't have the capacity to drive multiple monitors? And at that can do a better job than a HW only solution. (Such as provide different "task bars" for different monitors.)
In the old days Matrox was king as far as 2D was concerned, today it doesn't seem like that is true. Sure it's still what they claim, but for a modern 3D card 2D just isn't a challenge anymore. If all you need is good 2D there are a bunch of 5 year old Matrox cards that do that just as well as the new ones. (Besides 3-head, but you can use multiple cards instead.)
Why should people get the next Matrox card if all it offers is the same good 2D as we had for the last 10 years?
As the other reply suggested the biggest problem with comparing HW and SW development is that the initial costs as well as productions costs are not the same. (HW being a lot more expensive.)
Now I have some experience with HW development (within academics) and you can get an FPGA setup which will let you try some ideas out and it's a lot cheaper than doing real Si (it's often used for prototyping). A cheap such setup will probably set you back $500 (as a minimum) a setup which can handle anything advanced (like graphics) is on the order of $5000. With those kits you get some software so you can do some developing too. That's the bare minimum you need and already the costs are quite a bit over what a SW guy has to put up.
And lets be quite clear here, something like this will not let you make high performance chips like ATi or nVidia. I doubt you could even challenge the low players on the market with something develped like this.
The software you need for advanced chip design typically cost on the order of $50,000 - $100,000 PER MONTH in licensing costs. Actually producing chips and testing them is naturally somthing you do long after this (and it will take months from the time you submit your design to when you get somthing).
All that said I don't think that the battle is lost. The last years have brough technology like FPGAs which make HW for the home developer even remotely possible. Who knows what will happen in the future. And there are quite a few interesting projects like this going on at eg OpenCores which has a bunch of mainly CPUs you can download and load into eg a FPGA to play with.
But to answer your real question, when will we see some sort of OSS version of GForce? Probably never while the GForce is anything useful to have.
Considering that Zigbee has a distance about the same as Bluetooth (~10m) and furthermore has a lot lower bandwidth (Zigbee is 1Mbit) I doubt you'll use it to publicly distribute a DVD signal any time soon.
Zigbee is for stuff like remotes, not high bandwidth signals.
Actually the XBox is capable of 1080i out, but AFAIK the media players can't do it. I imagine a large reason for that is that they concentrate on making a good working media player before working on add-ons like that.
Using only the CPU I don't think you'll get an 1080i signal though, perhaps with some clever optimizations and use of the GPU though.
OTOH I think it's best to see reviews of this chips (in the article) performance in 1080i before buying it. Just because it supports it doesn't mean it supports it well.;-)
The last few times I've read internivews with him he has always seemed to be way out of line and clueless. This time he seemed to at least be aware that he's not clued in.
And I have to say that it was very refreshing to read an article like this and not have to see 50 references to why this new technology is better than Bluetooth and WiFi. He did go off a bit about Bluetooth regarding setup but later on came to the conclusion that it's a really hard problem.
From what I've read about ZigBee it's an interesting trechnology, I'm not quite sure what use it will have though. He mentiones things like light switches and letting VCRs automagically get the time but don't propose any real hints on how it would work. And most of all doesn't provide much hints on how it will protect itself from intruders, something we've seen issues in the real world from both Bluetooth and WiFi.
They changed the name from Nippon to Nihon after WW2 as it was felt that Nippon sounded to hard. But a lot of people (particularly older) still say Nippon.
The change in letters aren't so strange as they may seem as h and p in japanese are closely related and the second kanji in Nihon can be pronouced both hon and pon (as in the counter).
The easy and quite useful way to do it is to save a complete dir listing of the disk on HDD ( dir/s > DVD_N.txt in Win32 ). Then just search those files, it should even include the date/time it was written, ie the backup date of the file, which is useful.
Less than stellar is (as some AC pointed out) an euphorism for "like crap" more or less. I assume you are not a native english speaker or you would have known that, idiomatic expressions typically have slightly unclear meanings but if you want to understand a language it's something that really pays off if you learn them. (Your language will seem a lot more natural if you use such expressions.)
Unfortunately my quick search couldn't find any good online reference which contained this expression, I'm sure such places exist though.
Who would ever be stupid enough to actually code a website in C? You may as well go with Brainfuck while you're at it. It seems (to me) that valid competition is from Perl and PHP on the OSS side and.NET on the Windows side.
Sure you could make a custom mod in C/C++ for apache but I doubt you'd win that much performance and it'd be a bitch to code. Why not do your own HTTP server while you're at it?
Streaming really only mean that you get the file sequentially. As the original post pointed out you can get this effect already in BT by simply dividing the original file into subfiles and downloading those separately (sequentially naturally). That would not be the same files that BT divides the file into.
For a better, specialized, protocol I bet you could find some info if you looked for new implementations of the different multi-cast methods which exist. IIRC the people behind Swarmcast and OCN (Open Content Network) were developing some methods which could be used for streaming. (FYI Swarmcast is a predecessor to BT but quite a bit more advanced, it uses FEC which is a special way of redundantly coding information also used eg in satellite and multi cast applications.)
That said, I also go along the route that this (P2P TV) should be seen more as TiVo than live broadcasting. Doing it live would kind of ruin the entire concept of P2P.
Yes, that is a nice analogy, unfortunately it is deeply flawed. For it to be true with respect to engineering (or any kind of work really) it would be necessary for the board of directors to actually know everything before you start development. A movie/theatre director may know this because he has written (or at least gone over) the script and thus has a clear understanding of what is supposed to happen and when.
In a typical engineering project the entire idea is that no-one, least of all the board of directors, knows how it will be done in the end. If they knew that they would already have a product on the market after all.
So to use a new theatre analogy you'd have to compare it to impromptu-theatre. The entire idea is that you have to rely on the actors to do a good job and make decisions as they go along. If you can't do that than either you have the wrong actors or you are in the wrong place.
It's true that what ultimately caused the failure was that someone didn't go through the motions they were supposed to.
But here's an idea, what's the most common error ever to occur around computers? In my experience it's human errors (and I don't mean the humans that designed the OS or computer). Things like someone unplugging the computers to hook up a coffee machine, or rebooting it because it "sounded bad" or just tripping over the wire. Humans routinely do more stupid things than even "that OS".
Thus having a MISSION CRITICAL application depend on one (or more) of these humans doing some boring and quite unnecessary work is just a premonition that something bad is going to happen. If it was so bloody necessary that it should be restarted every X Days then/put that in the OS to begin with/. Or just schedule something on the computer so it automagically reboots in time.
IMHO the people who wrote the moronic checklist are the ones who made the mistake. The first rule should always be not the rely that people do right all the time (particularly when it's boring).
In what way is that better? His basic argument is "I like software patents because we have a lot of them". Well no wonder he likes them (I wonder how he feels about it now though). Or more exactly the stock-holders of SUN like it.
He also claims that SUN never has and never will use patents aggressively. That's nice, but what about all the other companies out there? It doesn't help me as a developer if I'm sued by some other company while SUN is nice enough not to.
Finally he doesn't even mention that a big problem with software patents (and patents in general) is that they are most useful for big companies who can pour money into getting a lot of them. For a small time developer you are shit out of luck if a big company would transgress on a patent you own. You just don't have the economic means to fight the legal battle.
Really, he makes a lot of good points in the Blog, but not regarding software patents.
You really have no idea how public key encryption systems work, do you? Your desire for me to to publish my IP, root passwords and RSA keys suggest that. Or are you trying to be clever and suggesting that if I don't provide the root password and IP then I'm somehow using "security through obscurity" and thus you somehow win?
Really, read up on cryptography (I bet there are some articles on Wikipedia, if not I may have to write some just for you) and get back to me when you can have a relevant conversation.
Now is it better to not have WiFi or an ethernet jack on the outside of your house from a security standpoint? Sure, you do provide an added risk. But if you run WiFi properly configured, firewalled and with encryption (like IPSec, not WEP) over it then there is no way anyone will read your email that way.
Of course they are free to sell the game which-ever way they want. My point is that that if you want to draw benefits from having an OSS game than it seems that giving away the code and selling the data is an idea that makes it possible to do both.
Now you have the case where many people may try the demo and conclude that it is lacking in some ways (in the interface) and thus not buy it. If some of those could alter the game and make it more enjoyable/playable then it would seem like a benefit for the producers to use that.
The biggest development in the last years as far as games are concerned is IMHO modding. Modding has provided a lot of garage groups the possibility to make what they want and at the same time the companies behind the games can sell them for a longer time.
It may be a better idea to release the source for free but not the data. (Or perhaps have demo data and then sell data for the complete game.)
From what I've seen of the game on their WWW and on the ArsTechnica forum I got the impression that this game could use some OSS additions. (No mouse support and strange keyboard layout eg.)
No, the statement that RSA is somehow "security through obscurity" is just plain incorrect.
STO is when you use unpublished methods and rely on the attacker not bothering to try to reverse-engineer your system as a method of protection. Examples are using XOR and similar cyphers in obfucated ways to hide the details.
So far RSA has not been compromised. Until such a time using RSA in open and peer reviewed protocols (remember that RSA etc are only a small part of the big security system) is in no way "Security Through Obscurity", it is in fact Best Practices (tm) and that is pretty fucking far from STO! And if a really good way to factor into primes comes up then you CHANGE the encryption scheme!
Most people have a grasp of just how many combinations there exist in a 2^1024 key. As far as we know the number of atoms in the universe (including dark matter and such) is on the order of 2^200. Now in RSA and other asymmetrical systems not all keys can be used, but still I'm willing to guestimate that a typical 2^1024 key has way more than 2^1000 valid keys (I can't be bothered to do a real estimate, and that's probably way to small).
Now consider that the Universe is Pretty Damned Big, yet the number of valid keys completely dwarfs that. It is hard to put into words just how completely unlikely you are to brute-force an RSA key (or any other key for that matter). Just imagine all the absurd unlikely events EVER happening to you in the same microsecond. Then multiply that by about 50 billion times and you'll still be ways off, but you'll get the idea.
In short, you are not going to brute force a key which is even 2^256, it's just not happening.
If you are that worried about someone tapping into your wireless systems do you also ensure that all your electronics is protected from people snooping on your electric signals? Or do you wear sunglasses and gloves all the time to protect you from someone trying to get a copy of your iris/retina or finger prints? That's a lot more likely than someone breaking your encrypted wireless communication.
Besides I'd rather have my precious data under my desk in encrypted form than in some bunker with a bunch of morons with explosives. No way to be sure what they end up shooting at when they are drunk and bored.
I guess it depends a lot on if you begin by hardening a system and then consider it "clean". While it is true that a secure system shouldn't have any programs "dialing home" I'm not sure I would trust it in the long run.
If we're talking your own box, sure. Because I know that if I fuck up that badly then I can deal with it. When people ask me for advice I ensure that their connection is locked on both ways. It saves me troubles down the road.
It's quite true that personal firewalls (which I think is a better term than software firewalls) which run on the computer they are supposed to protect have severe limitations. Their main function as I see it is to protect the users from their own stupidity and script kiddies. Not for determined hackers.
I think a big reason for it not having something like GPS built in is that the "s" in the name hints that it is intended for studio work. (Or so I've been told.)
Besides that, I think that it would be a lot more benefitial to have integrated Bluetooth for stuff like GPS link. Then those that don't want it don't need to pay a lot extra for it. The BT chip is pretty cheap, although I guess the software would set them back a bit.
You load your digital pictures onto your computer. Then play around with Photoshop/Gimp until you are satisfied. Next print the pictures/using a professional service/ such as Kodak or Fuji. You now have images that are (as far as quality and paper) identical to film.
Naturally you can edit the images in an image program and this allows you to actually make some really nice pictures. Cropping and such is quite hard to do with a normal film camera unless you pay a lot for the service, never mind dodging and burning.
The price is AFAIK pretty much the same as if you print your own. That printer paper/ink is stupid expensive and don't give you near the same quality.
Slashdot Mirror
For console games they often start localization this late in the process. The result being that the game is released a few months later in Eu and a large number of people pirate the game. I have gotten "advanced copies" from the net for this very reason. A few times I have imported the games instead, but when you have things like XBox Live I'd have to buy the game twice; very annoying.
Translating to 50 laguages in Eu is annoying though. I have just one thing to get off my chest regrding that:
"LEARN ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKERS!"
Sorry 'bout that, I feel better now.
OTOH what modern OS today doesn't have the capacity to drive multiple monitors? And at that can do a better job than a HW only solution. (Such as provide different "task bars" for different monitors.)
In the old days Matrox was king as far as 2D was concerned, today it doesn't seem like that is true. Sure it's still what they claim, but for a modern 3D card 2D just isn't a challenge anymore. If all you need is good 2D there are a bunch of 5 year old Matrox cards that do that just as well as the new ones. (Besides 3-head, but you can use multiple cards instead.)
Why should people get the next Matrox card if all it offers is the same good 2D as we had for the last 10 years?
Define decent.
As the other reply suggested the biggest problem with comparing HW and SW development is that the initial costs as well as productions costs are not the same. (HW being a lot more expensive.)
Now I have some experience with HW development (within academics) and you can get an FPGA setup which will let you try some ideas out and it's a lot cheaper than doing real Si (it's often used for prototyping). A cheap such setup will probably set you back $500 (as a minimum) a setup which can handle anything advanced (like graphics) is on the order of $5000. With those kits you get some software so you can do some developing too. That's the bare minimum you need and already the costs are quite a bit over what a SW guy has to put up.
And lets be quite clear here, something like this will not let you make high performance chips like ATi or nVidia. I doubt you could even challenge the low players on the market with something develped like this.
The software you need for advanced chip design typically cost on the order of $50,000 - $100,000 PER MONTH in licensing costs. Actually producing chips and testing them is naturally somthing you do long after this (and it will take months from the time you submit your design to when you get somthing).
All that said I don't think that the battle is lost. The last years have brough technology like FPGAs which make HW for the home developer even remotely possible. Who knows what will happen in the future. And there are quite a few interesting projects like this going on at eg OpenCores which has a bunch of mainly CPUs you can download and load into eg a FPGA to play with.
But to answer your real question, when will we see some sort of OSS version of GForce? Probably never while the GForce is anything useful to have.
A bit of my comment was slashed away by slashcode.
Zigbee is less than 1Mbit, which is the bandwidth of Bluetooth.
Considering that Zigbee has a distance about the same as Bluetooth (~10m) and furthermore has a lot lower bandwidth (Zigbee is 1Mbit) I doubt you'll use it to publicly distribute a DVD signal any time soon.
Zigbee is for stuff like remotes, not high bandwidth signals.
Actually the XBox is capable of 1080i out, but AFAIK the media players can't do it. I imagine a large reason for that is that they concentrate on making a good working media player before working on add-ons like that.
;-)
Using only the CPU I don't think you'll get an 1080i signal though, perhaps with some clever optimizations and use of the GPU though.
OTOH I think it's best to see reviews of this chips (in the article) performance in 1080i before buying it. Just because it supports it doesn't mean it supports it well.
The last few times I've read internivews with him he has always seemed to be way out of line and clueless. This time he seemed to at least be aware that he's not clued in.
And I have to say that it was very refreshing to read an article like this and not have to see 50 references to why this new technology is better than Bluetooth and WiFi. He did go off a bit about Bluetooth regarding setup but later on came to the conclusion that it's a really hard problem.
From what I've read about ZigBee it's an interesting trechnology, I'm not quite sure what use it will have though. He mentiones things like light switches and letting VCRs automagically get the time but don't propose any real hints on how it would work. And most of all doesn't provide much hints on how it will protect itself from intruders, something we've seen issues in the real world from both Bluetooth and WiFi.
They changed the name from Nippon to Nihon after WW2 as it was felt that Nippon sounded to hard. But a lot of people (particularly older) still say Nippon.
The change in letters aren't so strange as they may seem as h and p in japanese are closely related and the second kanji in Nihon can be pronouced both hon and pon (as in the counter).
The easy and quite useful way to do it is to save a complete dir listing of the disk on HDD ( dir /s > DVD_N.txt in Win32 ). Then just search those files, it should even include the date/time it was written, ie the backup date of the file, which is useful.
Wrong formatting so the link was stripped: comparison
For those interested there is an image which compares the two models on the Rebirth site.
Less than stellar is (as some AC pointed out) an euphorism for "like crap" more or less. I assume you are not a native english speaker or you would have known that, idiomatic expressions typically have slightly unclear meanings but if you want to understand a language it's something that really pays off if you learn them. (Your language will seem a lot more natural if you use such expressions.)
Unfortunately my quick search couldn't find any good online reference which contained this expression, I'm sure such places exist though.
Who would ever be stupid enough to actually code a website in C? You may as well go with Brainfuck while you're at it. It seems (to me) that valid competition is from Perl and PHP on the OSS side and .NET on the Windows side.
Sure you could make a custom mod in C/C++ for apache but I doubt you'd win that much performance and it'd be a bitch to code. Why not do your own HTTP server while you're at it?
Streaming really only mean that you get the file sequentially. As the original post pointed out you can get this effect already in BT by simply dividing the original file into subfiles and downloading those separately (sequentially naturally). That would not be the same files that BT divides the file into.
For a better, specialized, protocol I bet you could find some info if you looked for new implementations of the different multi-cast methods which exist. IIRC the people behind Swarmcast and OCN (Open Content Network) were developing some methods which could be used for streaming. (FYI Swarmcast is a predecessor to BT but quite a bit more advanced, it uses FEC which is a special way of redundantly coding information also used eg in satellite and multi cast applications.)
That said, I also go along the route that this (P2P TV) should be seen more as TiVo than live broadcasting. Doing it live would kind of ruin the entire concept of P2P.
Yes, that is a nice analogy, unfortunately it is deeply flawed. For it to be true with respect to engineering (or any kind of work really) it would be necessary for the board of directors to actually know everything before you start development. A movie/theatre director may know this because he has written (or at least gone over) the script and thus has a clear understanding of what is supposed to happen and when.
In a typical engineering project the entire idea is that no-one, least of all the board of directors, knows how it will be done in the end. If they knew that they would already have a product on the market after all.
So to use a new theatre analogy you'd have to compare it to impromptu-theatre. The entire idea is that you have to rely on the actors to do a good job and make decisions as they go along. If you can't do that than either you have the wrong actors or you are in the wrong place.
It's true that what ultimately caused the failure was that someone didn't go through the motions they were supposed to.
/put that in the OS to begin with/. Or just schedule something on the computer so it automagically reboots in time.
But here's an idea, what's the most common error ever to occur around computers? In my experience it's human errors (and I don't mean the humans that designed the OS or computer). Things like someone unplugging the computers to hook up a coffee machine, or rebooting it because it "sounded bad" or just tripping over the wire. Humans routinely do more stupid things than even "that OS".
Thus having a MISSION CRITICAL application depend on one (or more) of these humans doing some boring and quite unnecessary work is just a premonition that something bad is going to happen. If it was so bloody necessary that it should be restarted every X Days then
IMHO the people who wrote the moronic checklist are the ones who made the mistake. The first rule should always be not the rely that people do right all the time (particularly when it's boring).
If it requires a reboot every X days to continue functioning than it's not merely a "drill" thing. It's a bloody bug (sorry "feature").
In what way is that better? His basic argument is "I like software patents because we have a lot of them". Well no wonder he likes them (I wonder how he feels about it now though). Or more exactly the stock-holders of SUN like it.
He also claims that SUN never has and never will use patents aggressively. That's nice, but what about all the other companies out there? It doesn't help me as a developer if I'm sued by some other company while SUN is nice enough not to.
Finally he doesn't even mention that a big problem with software patents (and patents in general) is that they are most useful for big companies who can pour money into getting a lot of them. For a small time developer you are shit out of luck if a big company would transgress on a patent you own. You just don't have the economic means to fight the legal battle.
Really, he makes a lot of good points in the Blog, but not regarding software patents.
You really have no idea how public key encryption systems work, do you? Your desire for me to to publish my IP, root passwords and RSA keys suggest that. Or are you trying to be clever and suggesting that if I don't provide the root password and IP then I'm somehow using "security through obscurity" and thus you somehow win?
Really, read up on cryptography (I bet there are some articles on Wikipedia, if not I may have to write some just for you) and get back to me when you can have a relevant conversation.
Now is it better to not have WiFi or an ethernet jack on the outside of your house from a security standpoint? Sure, you do provide an added risk. But if you run WiFi properly configured, firewalled and with encryption (like IPSec, not WEP) over it then there is no way anyone will read your email that way.
Of course they are free to sell the game which-ever way they want. My point is that that if you want to draw benefits from having an OSS game than it seems that giving away the code and selling the data is an idea that makes it possible to do both.
Now you have the case where many people may try the demo and conclude that it is lacking in some ways (in the interface) and thus not buy it. If some of those could alter the game and make it more enjoyable/playable then it would seem like a benefit for the producers to use that.
The biggest development in the last years as far as games are concerned is IMHO modding. Modding has provided a lot of garage groups the possibility to make what they want and at the same time the companies behind the games can sell them for a longer time.
It may be a better idea to release the source for free but not the data. (Or perhaps have demo data and then sell data for the complete game.)
From what I've seen of the game on their WWW and on the ArsTechnica forum I got the impression that this game could use some OSS additions. (No mouse support and strange keyboard layout eg.)
No, the statement that RSA is somehow "security through obscurity" is just plain incorrect.
STO is when you use unpublished methods and rely on the attacker not bothering to try to reverse-engineer your system as a method of protection. Examples are using XOR and similar cyphers in obfucated ways to hide the details.
So far RSA has not been compromised. Until such a time using RSA in open and peer reviewed protocols (remember that RSA etc are only a small part of the big security system) is in no way "Security Through Obscurity", it is in fact Best Practices (tm) and that is pretty fucking far from STO! And if a really good way to factor into primes comes up then you CHANGE the encryption scheme!
Most people have a grasp of just how many combinations there exist in a 2^1024 key. As far as we know the number of atoms in the universe (including dark matter and such) is on the order of 2^200. Now in RSA and other asymmetrical systems not all keys can be used, but still I'm willing to guestimate that a typical 2^1024 key has way more than 2^1000 valid keys (I can't be bothered to do a real estimate, and that's probably way to small).
Now consider that the Universe is Pretty Damned Big, yet the number of valid keys completely dwarfs that. It is hard to put into words just how completely unlikely you are to brute-force an RSA key (or any other key for that matter). Just imagine all the absurd unlikely events EVER happening to you in the same microsecond. Then multiply that by about 50 billion times and you'll still be ways off, but you'll get the idea.
In short, you are not going to brute force a key which is even 2^256, it's just not happening.
If you are that worried about someone tapping into your wireless systems do you also ensure that all your electronics is protected from people snooping on your electric signals? Or do you wear sunglasses and gloves all the time to protect you from someone trying to get a copy of your iris/retina or finger prints? That's a lot more likely than someone breaking your encrypted wireless communication.
Besides I'd rather have my precious data under my desk in encrypted form than in some bunker with a bunch of morons with explosives. No way to be sure what they end up shooting at when they are drunk and bored.
I guess it depends a lot on if you begin by hardening a system and then consider it "clean". While it is true that a secure system shouldn't have any programs "dialing home" I'm not sure I would trust it in the long run.
If we're talking your own box, sure. Because I know that if I fuck up that badly then I can deal with it. When people ask me for advice I ensure that their connection is locked on both ways. It saves me troubles down the road.
It's quite true that personal firewalls (which I think is a better term than software firewalls) which run on the computer they are supposed to protect have severe limitations. Their main function as I see it is to protect the users from their own stupidity and script kiddies. Not for determined hackers.
I think a big reason for it not having something like GPS built in is that the "s" in the name hints that it is intended for studio work. (Or so I've been told.)
Besides that, I think that it would be a lot more benefitial to have integrated Bluetooth for stuff like GPS link. Then those that don't want it don't need to pay a lot extra for it. The BT chip is pretty cheap, although I guess the software would set them back a bit.
You load your digital pictures onto your computer. Then play around with Photoshop/Gimp until you are satisfied. Next print the pictures /using a professional service/ such as Kodak or Fuji. You now have images that are (as far as quality and paper) identical to film.
Naturally you can edit the images in an image program and this allows you to actually make some really nice pictures. Cropping and such is quite hard to do with a normal film camera unless you pay a lot for the service, never mind dodging and burning.
The price is AFAIK pretty much the same as if you print your own. That printer paper/ink is stupid expensive and don't give you near the same quality.