I was very impressed with the video of it in use. It must be using a secondary CPU or dedicated controller for the LCD as there's no way the little 8bit ATMega could update the LCD that smoothly on its own. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these!
It was just a video playing across a bunch of windows - didn't seem very interractive to me. Oh, apart from entering a message and seeing video loops of the letters at the end. Maybe I'm just jaded by the WebGL work I've seen recently, but this didn't really impress me that much.Probably didn't help that I hated the video and the music, but meh.
I fail to see how adding a redirect to their homepage and posting some phone numbers is on par with hacking a dead girl's phone and deleting her voicemail. Plus all the other reprehensible shenanigans the NotW staff were up to (and if they were doing it, there's a fair chance other areas of the empire were doing the same.)
You know that a well implemented hardware authenticator cannot be defeated by a key logger, right? (code is based on the date/time, and one-time only - so even if the attacker entered the exact same details as you, it wouldn't gain them access.)
The problem most websites have is one of users choosing insecure login details, either through ignorance, laziness or disinterest. Although this is not a huge problem if it's front-end users, the same problem exists with admins, and those with elevated privileges. The most secure fortress is little protection if the passcode to open the front door is "1234".
I don't think this problem can be fixed by "forcing" users to choose long passwords, or to have a different password on every site they use. As we've seen, they simply won't do it, and why should they? It's different if you have a technical, or security-related background, and understand the risks - the average Joe isn't interested in spending the effort to maintain and organise a secure list of passwords in an offline location.
i think the only way this can be fixed is by using SecureID style authentication - either with stand-alone units, mobile apps, or units built into laptops or keyboards (separate from the other components). Obviously it would need to be physically separated from the machine being used to login (or at least sandboxed, in the case of a mobile app). We just need a good cross-platform authentication API that's easy for developers to implement, and cheap hardware/free software for the client.
Well I actually bought the Galaxy Tab AFTER my original iPad, so what you're saying makes no sense. The iPad was older.
I have tried out more recent Android phones, and the input lag still irritates me. Anyway, everyone has their preferences - I'm not frothing at the mouth and making outrageous claims, just giving my experience of the two platforms.
I've yet to see anything on Android that gives a user-experience anywhere close to the iPad. I bought the original Galaxy Pad at about the same time I bought the iPad ; I've had it around 4 months, and can count on 1 hand the number of times I've used it. The interface just doesn't seem as though it can quite keep up with the user, slow to launch apps, just didn't take to it. The iPad (and now the iPad2) I use every day.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things I don't like about Apple - I hate iTunes with a passion, and the fact I'm forced to use it with the iPad, but there's little that's challenging the iPad at the moment...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean that the PS3 has to create 4 images per frame for 3D for 2 players? At 1080p this is a LOT of pixels to push. I'd wondered whether this sort of thing was possible some time back, but assumed it would not be feasible as the frame rates would need to be lowered too much. If it works as advertised though, I'm definitely up for getting one! (and I'd written Sony off)
Initially I was referring to the latest live release of Firefox (3.6). On my system my test (linked from story) runs at ~34fps. Firefox 4.0 Beta hits ~97fps and IE9 ~311fps. That's quite a performance gap. The test is mostly rendering polygons in a quick little JS 3D engine, with some canvas->canvas blitting & rotation mixed in. Note that both Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 4.0 appear to be CPU bound, where IE is bound by the resolution of the interval timer (I assume), as it's only using 2-3% CPU.
Well in my own (albeit not very scientific) testing with canvas/js performance. It's running at around 10x the speed of Firefox. Much faster for sites with a lot of Canvas animation (as their own demos display - Firefox stutters along badly, while IE9 is so fast some of the tests are a blur.) I'm primarily a Firefox user, but it's hard to ignore this huge performance difference.
Another option is to pick up an old arcade machine from an operator for next to nothing and canibalize the sticks and buttons from that (or just buy them from Ebay, they're not expensive)
I don't think bandwidth is an issue in this design. I mean, once the initial data is copied to the RAM on the gameduino, how much really has to change per frame for the average sprite based game with a scrolling background? If you're just scrolling horizontally, you only need to change less than 40 bytes for each 8 pixels moved, and updating the coordinates and character mappings for a few sprites isn't exactly a massive task, nor is checking for collisions as it's hardware based.
I think one thing that could be added to really enhance it would be multiple character-based layers, as used in the later 80's arcade games - maybe even with hardware zooming. That would allow some pretty nice fake 3d effects.
I'd love to see a vector-based version of this made - as in the arduino would just fill memory on the shield with a draw list (like that used on the old Atari vector games: http://www.kfu.com/~nsayer/games/vecops.txt ) - although it wouldn't be a true vector engine, deflecting the beam, a facsimile could be made, I'm sure. It would be way cool to see a copy of Tempest up and running on something like this!
I've heard horror stories about Virgin Media's gaming performance from friends - it convinced me not to switch from Eclipse (who I'm still with) to Virgin media, despite their claims of being the fastest provider. People have told me they're getting almost modem-speed performance from their 100MBs package during peak hours.
If you read the article you'd see it's likely to use a streaming service like onLive - the device itself only needs enough horsepower to accept player input and display the video stream coming back from the gaming servers. Even openGL is pretty irrelevent.
Not sure about "owning the iPad". There's a lot of things to dislike about Apple - i'm certainly no fanboi - but the user interface response of the iPad isn't one of them. I was looking at Android tablets just yesterday, tried out a Galaxy Tab in the flesh and it seemed clunky and slow compared to my iPad. This is before I'd read any reviews that basically also slammed the performance. With my iPad, it responds instantly to swipes and taps, the Galaxy seemed to be having serious problems responding to events - especially in its web browser. Yes, it's a cheaper device, but the specs are not far from the ones in the iPad.
I'm working on apps for both iOS and Android at the moment (don't bother looking on my website - hasn't been updated for about 10 years;-) ) and the difference in performance on both the devices and the emulators is striking. Obviously it doesn't help that the Android tablets are currently running operating systems designed for phones. I'll be interested to see how Honeycomb performs on live kit. I really hope it does fix the performance problems.
I might as well rant about the Android emulator while I'm on it - it's virtually unusable on any hardware I have - a well specced iMac, and even my gaming rig with 12GB RAM and an i7 950 can only run it at about 70% of the speed of an old Google G1! (528mhz phone with 192MB RAM) I mean come on! The iPhone simulator is doing the same job, and easily outpaces the hardware phone. I was using emulators 10 years ago on a PC with far lower specs that ran flawlessly. The excuses for the lamentable performance that I've read are centered around the Android emulator being an accurate emulation of all aspects of the platform. This is all well and good, but if it means it's too slow to accurately emulate the speed of even the slowest hardware, then it's pointless. I hope to god that someone at Google is sorting this out, because bad toolsets are one of the biggest turnoffs to developers.
Running on an i7 930 here, CPU usage spiked momentarily when loading the page with 1800+ comments on it, but after loading, it's using less CPU than iTunes. Have to see how it runs on my iPad though...
Dude, if you consider a 19 hour download "instant gratification" you must be the spawn of a tortoise and a sloth.
Not to mention the idiocy of spending another 19 hours downloading a failm again ever time you get the urge to watch it - tying up your net connection in the meantime, meaning everything else you do is going to run like ass.
No thanks, I'll spend 15 seconds dropping a BD into my PS3 and watching the film while you stagnate, watching a progress bar creep very, very, very slowly across your screen.
As a developer this is exactly the reason I've moved to iPhone development, and away from Java on mobile devices. Nokia, Samsung etc ruined it for themselves by introducing conflicting extensions and quirks to their platforms, along with expensive certification schemes in partnership with the carriers that made distribution as a small company or sole developer prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Apple smoothed this out no end with its single store and platform.
I'm no fanboy of Apple, or anyone else, but increased fragmentation, and the "embrace and extend" attitudes of phone manufacturers could well end up frustrating Android developers in much the same way.
Seriously though, he's on his own private plane. What the hell was he going to do, throw them at the pilot?! I think some airport security just enjoy the feeling power. A bit like Jobs I guess.
This is just SO ridiculous I'm surprised the US govt thinks even the retard hicks in the South would believe it. Here we have a man who's released military documents on his website (for the greater good) and, unless he's a complete idiot, which he's not, KNOWS he's under surveilance with every move scrutinised. Suddenly, just before he's about to release more documents he thinks "fuck it" and goe out on the town to rape a couple of women.
Guess the Obama administration's just as corrupt as all the previous money-grabbing, self-serving hypocrites who've held office in the 'States.
I used to write a lot of Javascript games - way back when NS4 and IE4 were the browsers of choice. e.g. Donkey Kong, with all 4 levels of the original (plays a bit too fast on modern browsers) http://www.smashcat.org/arcade/dkong/ . Also wrote versions of Tempest (for IE4 using VML), Frogger, Pengo, Pole Position, etc.
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I was very impressed with the video of it in use. It must be using a secondary CPU or dedicated controller for the LCD as there's no way the little 8bit ATMega could update the LCD that smoothly on its own. I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these!
Love or hate him, no-one can deny the guy achieved a hell of a lot in his life. Even though he'd resigned his post the man still had a lot to offer.
RIP Steve.
It was just a video playing across a bunch of windows - didn't seem very interractive to me. Oh, apart from entering a message and seeing video loops of the letters at the end. Maybe I'm just jaded by the WebGL work I've seen recently, but this didn't really impress me that much.Probably didn't help that I hated the video and the music, but meh.
In contrast to your understanding of how the UK functions, you'll find that our Queen is not actually involved in the judicial process.
I fail to see how adding a redirect to their homepage and posting some phone numbers is on par with hacking a dead girl's phone and deleting her voicemail. Plus all the other reprehensible shenanigans the NotW staff were up to (and if they were doing it, there's a fair chance other areas of the empire were doing the same.)
This is happening in the UK, not the US.
You know that a well implemented hardware authenticator cannot be defeated by a key logger, right? (code is based on the date/time, and one-time only - so even if the attacker entered the exact same details as you, it wouldn't gain them access.)
The problem most websites have is one of users choosing insecure login details, either through ignorance, laziness or disinterest. Although this is not a huge problem if it's front-end users, the same problem exists with admins, and those with elevated privileges. The most secure fortress is little protection if the passcode to open the front door is "1234".
I don't think this problem can be fixed by "forcing" users to choose long passwords, or to have a different password on every site they use. As we've seen, they simply won't do it, and why should they? It's different if you have a technical, or security-related background, and understand the risks - the average Joe isn't interested in spending the effort to maintain and organise a secure list of passwords in an offline location.
i think the only way this can be fixed is by using SecureID style authentication - either with stand-alone units, mobile apps, or units built into laptops or keyboards (separate from the other components). Obviously it would need to be physically separated from the machine being used to login (or at least sandboxed, in the case of a mobile app). We just need a good cross-platform authentication API that's easy for developers to implement, and cheap hardware/free software for the client.
Well I actually bought the Galaxy Tab AFTER my original iPad, so what you're saying makes no sense. The iPad was older.
I have tried out more recent Android phones, and the input lag still irritates me. Anyway, everyone has their preferences - I'm not frothing at the mouth and making outrageous claims, just giving my experience of the two platforms.
I've yet to see anything on Android that gives a user-experience anywhere close to the iPad. I bought the original Galaxy Pad at about the same time I bought the iPad ; I've had it around 4 months, and can count on 1 hand the number of times I've used it. The interface just doesn't seem as though it can quite keep up with the user, slow to launch apps, just didn't take to it. The iPad (and now the iPad2) I use every day.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of things I don't like about Apple - I hate iTunes with a passion, and the fact I'm forced to use it with the iPad, but there's little that's challenging the iPad at the moment...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean that the PS3 has to create 4 images per frame for 3D for 2 players? At 1080p this is a LOT of pixels to push. I'd wondered whether this sort of thing was possible some time back, but assumed it would not be feasible as the frame rates would need to be lowered too much. If it works as advertised though, I'm definitely up for getting one! (and I'd written Sony off)
Initially I was referring to the latest live release of Firefox (3.6). On my system my test (linked from story) runs at ~34fps. Firefox 4.0 Beta hits ~97fps and IE9 ~311fps. That's quite a performance gap. The test is mostly rendering polygons in a quick little JS 3D engine, with some canvas->canvas blitting & rotation mixed in. Note that both Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 4.0 appear to be CPU bound, where IE is bound by the resolution of the interval timer (I assume), as it's only using 2-3% CPU.
Well in my own (albeit not very scientific) testing with canvas/js performance. It's running at around 10x the speed of Firefox. Much faster for sites with a lot of Canvas animation (as their own demos display - Firefox stutters along badly, while IE9 is so fast some of the tests are a blur.) I'm primarily a Firefox user, but it's hard to ignore this huge performance difference.
Another option is to pick up an old arcade machine from an operator for next to nothing and canibalize the sticks and buttons from that (or just buy them from Ebay, they're not expensive)
I don't think bandwidth is an issue in this design. I mean, once the initial data is copied to the RAM on the gameduino, how much really has to change per frame for the average sprite based game with a scrolling background? If you're just scrolling horizontally, you only need to change less than 40 bytes for each 8 pixels moved, and updating the coordinates and character mappings for a few sprites isn't exactly a massive task, nor is checking for collisions as it's hardware based.
I think one thing that could be added to really enhance it would be multiple character-based layers, as used in the later 80's arcade games - maybe even with hardware zooming. That would allow some pretty nice fake 3d effects.
I'd love to see a vector-based version of this made - as in the arduino would just fill memory on the shield with a draw list (like that used on the old Atari vector games: http://www.kfu.com/~nsayer/games/vecops.txt ) - although it wouldn't be a true vector engine, deflecting the beam, a facsimile could be made, I'm sure. It would be way cool to see a copy of Tempest up and running on something like this!
I've heard horror stories about Virgin Media's gaming performance from friends - it convinced me not to switch from Eclipse (who I'm still with) to Virgin media, despite their claims of being the fastest provider. People have told me they're getting almost modem-speed performance from their 100MBs package during peak hours.
Avoid.
If you read the article you'd see it's likely to use a streaming service like onLive - the device itself only needs enough horsepower to accept player input and display the video stream coming back from the gaming servers. Even openGL is pretty irrelevent.
What the fuck does that mean?
Not sure about "owning the iPad". There's a lot of things to dislike about Apple - i'm certainly no fanboi - but the user interface response of the iPad isn't one of them. I was looking at Android tablets just yesterday, tried out a Galaxy Tab in the flesh and it seemed clunky and slow compared to my iPad. This is before I'd read any reviews that basically also slammed the performance. With my iPad, it responds instantly to swipes and taps, the Galaxy seemed to be having serious problems responding to events - especially in its web browser. Yes, it's a cheaper device, but the specs are not far from the ones in the iPad.
I'm working on apps for both iOS and Android at the moment (don't bother looking on my website - hasn't been updated for about 10 years ;-) ) and the difference in performance on both the devices and the emulators is striking. Obviously it doesn't help that the Android tablets are currently running operating systems designed for phones. I'll be interested to see how Honeycomb performs on live kit. I really hope it does fix the performance problems.
I might as well rant about the Android emulator while I'm on it - it's virtually unusable on any hardware I have - a well specced iMac, and even my gaming rig with 12GB RAM and an i7 950 can only run it at about 70% of the speed of an old Google G1! (528mhz phone with 192MB RAM) I mean come on! The iPhone simulator is doing the same job, and easily outpaces the hardware phone. I was using emulators 10 years ago on a PC with far lower specs that ran flawlessly. The excuses for the lamentable performance that I've read are centered around the Android emulator being an accurate emulation of all aspects of the platform. This is all well and good, but if it means it's too slow to accurately emulate the speed of even the slowest hardware, then it's pointless. I hope to god that someone at Google is sorting this out, because bad toolsets are one of the biggest turnoffs to developers.
Running on an i7 930 here, CPU usage spiked momentarily when loading the page with 1800+ comments on it, but after loading, it's using less CPU than iTunes. Have to see how it runs on my iPad though...
Personally I like it.
Dude, if you consider a 19 hour download "instant gratification" you must be the spawn of a tortoise and a sloth.
Not to mention the idiocy of spending another 19 hours downloading a failm again ever time you get the urge to watch it - tying up your net connection in the meantime, meaning everything else you do is going to run like ass.
No thanks, I'll spend 15 seconds dropping a BD into my PS3 and watching the film while you stagnate, watching a progress bar creep very, very, very slowly across your screen.
As a developer this is exactly the reason I've moved to iPhone development, and away from Java on mobile devices. Nokia, Samsung etc ruined it for themselves by introducing conflicting extensions and quirks to their platforms, along with expensive certification schemes in partnership with the carriers that made distribution as a small company or sole developer prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Apple smoothed this out no end with its single store and platform.
I'm no fanboy of Apple, or anyone else, but increased fragmentation, and the "embrace and extend" attitudes of phone manufacturers could well end up frustrating Android developers in much the same way.
Seriously though, he's on his own private plane. What the hell was he going to do, throw them at the pilot?! I think some airport security just enjoy the feeling power. A bit like Jobs I guess.
This is just SO ridiculous I'm surprised the US govt thinks even the retard hicks in the South would believe it. Here we have a man who's released military documents on his website (for the greater good) and, unless he's a complete idiot, which he's not, KNOWS he's under surveilance with every move scrutinised. Suddenly, just before he's about to release more documents he thinks "fuck it" and goe out on the town to rape a couple of women.
Guess the Obama administration's just as corrupt as all the previous money-grabbing, self-serving hypocrites who've held office in the 'States.
I used to write a lot of Javascript games - way back when NS4 and IE4 were the browsers of choice. e.g. Donkey Kong, with all 4 levels of the original (plays a bit too fast on modern browsers) http://www.smashcat.org/arcade/dkong/ . Also wrote versions of Tempest (for IE4 using VML), Frogger, Pengo, Pole Position, etc.