Every major console, including handhelds, runs a custom OS anyway. Even the Xbox isn't really running Windows. The fact that they're running Linux means they probably wanted to avoid reinventing the wheel since it already has a mature kernel and useful userland tools. The GUI will probably still be 90%+ custom-built.
Actually, Nintendo is probably the last company to go with anyhting more sophisticated than a BIOS architecture. DS, DSi, Wii - they have a boot BIOS that does the system initializations, and a pile of BIOS library calls, but that's it. There's no inherent support for process/thread creation, memory management, or other things. Filesystem support is via a library that gets built into the binary, as is stuff like Nintendo Wi-Fi connection (the TCP/IP stack is built into the game, not the hardware ROM). DItto on the Wii - that's why there's so many different versions of the IOS software - each revision Nintendo makes means the system portion has to be part of the firmware update (there's practically no binary compatibility). Effectively, the Wii and DS hardware act like an old PC running DOS - games touch bare metal, make calls into the BIOS to do things, but otherwise have free reign over the system. This is basically the old console model of how things work, and why the Wii/DS can't do a lot of things people expect. The 3DS is supposed to fix this, however.
The PS3, PSP, Xbox and Xbox360 do have what most people consider a proper OS, though the Xbox one is limited in that it's meant to run a game that never terminates, and it's run in kernel mode. PS3, PSP and Xbox360 run games in user mode now for security reasons. It's also why these consoles support fancy things like background downloads and the like.
The Xbox really is running Windows, but it's running a lot less of it, and it has a shiny new GUI that does a lot less.
Windows in a walled garden is still windows just as surely as OSX in a walled garden is still OSX. They can re-add as much of it as they are willing to put effort into.
Walled-garden OS X is also known as "iOS" these days. The iPhone was touted as running a stripped down version of OS X way back when it was first announced. It still is a stripped version of OS X, too. The early jailbreakers (before the App Store) simply created their own Objective-C cross compiler, and grabbed the headers from the standard OS X dev tools, though things like UIKit had to be re-engineered a bit.
Exactly. We need warning labels on things that are really harmful. There is a difference between something that is harmful if you drink 2 liters of it and something where 5 drops can kill you, but warning labels often lack this important difference. Warning labels don't help society but rather harms them because no one will read the label because they expect it to be all stupid things so people ignore things that are really dangerous.
Someone once said that the sum of human intelligence is a constant, and in general, people are idiots. Whereas most of us go through life knowing that touching a hot stove will burn us and we should never do it, there exists a growing population that sees that as an instant jackpot. Touch stove, get burned, sue! Then do it again and sue! Lather, rinse, repeat.
Alas, the rate these people die out isn't enough to clean the gene pool. Then again, the lure of free money probably just pollutes it again.
And you know the laptop warning sticker (which already exist on some laptops - one of mine says "PC base will beocme hot during use") will lead to lap-detecting devices in laptop tat automatically shut down if they detect the laptop getting too hot and on a lap...
I wonder how long until we have no way of distinguishing a bot from a person. existing CAPTCHAs don't work all that well, and I can't see future ones working much better for very long. The Cylons are among us! Any one of us could be one!
Well, CAPTCHAs worked because they relied on vision tests - a skill that humans still do better than computers, but computer vision is already quite advanced. Then the countermeasures came where CAPTCHAs started getting so distorted that it was impossible to determine the code (I remember a forum I signed up for - too more than 15 tries and a cookie reset).
However, there are still difficult-for-computer-but-easy-on-humans tasks that can be done. I'm surprised no one's yet hooked a way into the Amazon Mechanical Turk or the like. Perhaps a simple one can be where you show a panoramic view along a busy street. Then you ask the question "What is the name of the store at number 763?" Or "What is the street number of ZZZ Supermarkets along this street?". "There is a large group of friends gathered near XXX store. How many people are in the group?"
Or simpler ones - if your forum or other thing is about a specific topic, ask a question about that topic. Or even self-referential ones. "What of the following will an art thief steal? A) Mona Lisa, B) Big screen HDTV, C) Cellphone, D) Money".
Might as well advance the state of things like image recognition and natural language queries while we're at it.
It would be interesting to see how this affects battery life. I love my Eris, but the battery life on the stock battery is pretty suck. Would something like Skype drain a battery faster than calling someone using the 'phone' portion of the device?
Yes, but mostly during a call, and a tiny bit less when idle. When the phone is idle, the main CPU is basically stopped and drawing very little power. Having Skype in the background does nothing to affect this as it's also waiting for a control datagram and thus blocked waiting.
However, the phone may be maintaining a data channel waiting for the datagram to come - this can involve a bit more power from the modem to keep the channel alive, and a tiny bit of main CPU to handle higher layer data connection administrivia (keep-alives and the like).
But during a call, the power goes up a lot. During a normal voice call, the main CPU again shuts down as it's not needed for the most part and the audio is routed direct to the modem where it's compressed, encoded and sent over the air by dedicated hardware. Using something like Skype, however, means the audio has to go tot he main CPU, where the Skype application then encodes it into packets, and those packets are then passed to the OS (also running on the main CPU) as network data. It goes down the network stack, then down to the data port of the modem where the modem then packages it for over the air. But an active data connection also costs more power, and the main CPU is active during a VoIP call but idle during a normal voice call, both of which add significant drain to the battery.
If you're on the phone a lot, VoIP may require you to carry an extra battery. If you're like me who hardly makes a call longer than 30 seconds a couple of times per day, you won't notice the extra drain.
Apple's controls are well known. In fact, they're probably the closest you get to console-style controls from the big three except they're open to everyone.
If you want to write code and not worry about approvals and crap like that, there are three major platforms you can write for - PC, Mac, and Android. Heck, I'm sure other than the Google Marketplace, the other marketplaces for Android probably excercise some control as well.
I guess I'm just getting tired of all these posts of "whine whine whine Apple approvals suck whine whine whine". Apple's not forcing you to code for their platform, so if you don't like it, don't. There's no law (yet) that says everyone must write for the iPhone. We all know Apple's approval process sucks. It's well publicized in many mass media publications already and has been since the app store opened 2 years ago. I know lots of people who won't write an app for iPhone out of fear of it getting rejected. (Some refuse to write for Android too, but that's more of a "I can't afford to support and test on a million different phones" than "I refuse to subject myself to Apple's draconian policies").
Or is it more a case of "I don't like to write for iPhone but it's the only way I can make money"?
As for Adidas, they did what any business would do - they withdrew, which is their right. If enough people do that, Apple may relent. If not, they risk having their iAd platform rendered marginalized. But that's a business decision only Apple can make, and if others are happy about it, good, if not, they'll leave.
Heck, I don't know what ads Adidas was trying to do, but they could've been highly annoying and distracting ones that really, no one would've wanted.
On the Atari 5200/SuperSystem (really A400 computers without keyboards). In an era when everything was digital (like Pac-man and Dig Dug) having analog sucked.
The irony is, maybe a few years after that analog joysticks came back into vogue as PCs decided to be better and offer analog joysticks. Even these days the sticks are all analog, before they're quantized and sent over USB. And in this modern era, we have both digital and analog sticks in our gamepads, with one console preferring digital control first (and putting the analog somewhat out of the way), another preferring analog (while the digital goes mostly unused because it's not that great, so it becomes 4 more buttons).
Even today Microsoft Sam on a quad core 3.3Ghz machine with 4gb of RAM hasn't really gained a lot of ground past Parsec's onboard computer 29 years ago on a single core 300khz machine with 16kb of (usable) RAM. Yeah speech synth was a hardware add-on, might have had it's own processor and ram but they sure as hell weren't any denser than what the chassis had.
Microsoft's TTS implementation sucked. Apple has been doing TTS research for a LONG while now, and I believe even the 90's version of MacInTalk is far superior to what Microsoft has provided currently. It's the reason why iTunes ships with its own version of the OS X TTS engine - the VoiceOver functionality requires it (on pre-10.5 Macs as it can't render to a file, and on Windows because Sam really sucks). I believe some of the worst voices in MacOS have starred in TV shows and movies to give characters a robotic appeal. (That, and they're cheap and non-unionized and all that).
About the worst TTS system used to this date is what Stephen Hawking uses - it's not a great system, but Hawking as stated it's one thing he'll not change ever (being it's so characteristic). His wheelchair computer has been updated with the latest in computing technology, and this word selecting software equally rewritten (but the UI has been kept identical for the most part, obviously), but the TTS hardware board is pretty much original (though flaky and power-hungry).
This isn't a new problem - I think/. reported on it a couple of years ago. Sure it wasn't a UDID, but it was the phone number or other more identifiers. ICCID and IMEI is probably more risky to leak out - the UDID doesn't really tell you much of anything. It doesn't tell you the phone model, the user's phone number (which can change), ICCID, IMEI, etc. unless it's purposely linked. All it identifies is the particular piece of hardware.
And naturally, jailbreakers have solutions for all this.
First, there's UDIDFaker, which changes your UDID on a per-app basis. On iOS 4.x, the GUI doesn't work, but you can manually edit the plist file with the app and UDID you desire to use.
Seocnd, there's Firewall IP, which pops up a dialog whenever an app wants to open a network connection, where you can control which connections fail and which ones succeed.
There used to be a blog that tested apps and reported what was sent back to the user - it's not a new problem, but a very old one...
On the other hand, the official WoW message boards have become a cesspool. If they have one OPTIONAL Real ID-only forum, then I guarantee that it'll quickly become the best one they host.
The same will probably happen in-game. Real ID enabled players will probably be better behaved on average, since they've (theoretically) got their actual identity on the line.
It'll be interesting to see it play out.
Happened on the SC2 forums as well.
When you first link your SC2 game to your account, SC2 presented a nice "Name this character" prompt. Turns out, unless you read a little dense block of text on the left side of the screen, what it really meant is "Choose your handle". So predictably, many people use their first names. If you had read the block of text on the left (which was marked as "news" and was basically one huge paragraph, right int he middle of which said something like "choose your name carefully as you cannot change it". No confirmation or anything either, you entered you name, clicked "OK", and nothing saying that you cannot change it - you just get in.
No confirmations, no indications otherwise that you were doing anything more than creating a local profile. Until you actually wait while logging in to read that paragraph out of boredom.
It caused a fairly big thread in the Sc2 forums and basically ruined SC2 for me for a couple of weeks. In the end I got it resolved (Blizzard gave people who used their first names a chance to change it). The thread promptly stopped the moment Blizzard also announced paid name changes.
It might have worked to keep the trolls and other stuff out of the forums, but the whole thing ended up sounding like a great way to monetize even the trivialest of things (courtesy Activision). Put something in the fine print, mislead people into doing something they wouldn't otherwise do if they knew the full consequences, and monetize the result.
Considering Bungie is now with Activision, it's also going to be a downhill ride for them. Probably get great games still, but it's all the crap around it that's gonna suck.
Call me a pessimist, but I am not sure if it really is that great especally since the display used does not have any head tracking whatsoever, which means if you want 3d you have your head in a certain focus point relative to the display, while it looks neat as a gimmic, I can imagine it being a major pain in the long run.
This isn't too bad for a portable system because you would tend to move the device so your eyes are in the sweet spot anyways (the screens are so small that you wouldn't want to move it too far away and off-center. Even if it was a relatively narrow sweet spot it would still be OK since most people play with it in their faces. Also, if you're playing on your side, you would tend to still orient the device so it's level with your eyes.
If it was non-portable, it would be a fail because there's no way to make the sweet spot that wide. This limits the potential of glasses-less 3D TVs, as well as limits the effect of current glasses 3D TVs. There's a reason all the 3DTV displays have you standing - if you cock your head off horizontal the effect diminishes. No more slouching sideways in front of the 3DTV!
Who said they had to be modifiable at run time? Most shared libraries you run on your computer are not modifiable at run time, certainly not by non-privileged users. You would still require the dynamic library to be signed just like the regular code you run. It would be nice if you would think about why these decisions would-be made, from a technical point, before you make these kinds of statements.
So I know that your apps are popular. I also know your app has access to some valuable data, so I design a game app that has a hidden payload of replacing one of your shared libraries and grabs the user's valuable data. A perfect crime, as it's your app that gets blamed for the data theft. My data stealing game? Scot-free.
Remember, one of the design decisions on the iPhone and Android is application separation. iPhone apps run isolated from each other in a chroot-like environment. They can't write willy-nilly all over the filesystem because that's bad (imagine replacing your password manager app with a rigged one that will transmit all your passwords), only to strictly controlled locations and with strictly controlled access.
Android apps undergo a bit more separation - each app runs under a separate user account as well.
Both obviously don't run apps under root. (Jailbroken iOS apps can have root access, obviously).
The goal is to prevent malware from spreading throughout the OS. You can accomplish a lot using read-only filesystems, but you don't want to have a virus go an infect every app on the phone. So isolating apps from each other is a good way to prevent a malware app that gets downloaded (iOS or Android) from trying to infect the user's entire device. Unfortunately, isolating apps also means the developer has to jump through hoops in order to actually try to share stuff.
It's just like that Android tablet by Samsung - why is there no announcement on price? Even subsidized prices if you must. Rumored pricing has it expensive, though.
And now this thing comes out with a ton of nice specs, but no pricing.
Heck, at least Jobs announced the iPad's price when he did the iPad keynote.
Yeah, and they also disabled a useful 3rd party adapter - the Cross Battle Adapter. Without out I'd find the PS3 almost unusable as the controller cramps up my hand.
At least the Cross Battle Adapter lets me use the nicer (IMHO) Xbox360 controller with the PS3.
Sony, you've kicked me off of PSn because I refused to update. So now I don't buy anything off PSN. I was interested in Move, but ever since this year, you seem to be saying to never buy another PS3 game or spend money on a PS3 ever again. And now you broke the only reason I played with the PS3.
All you've done is made my PS3 a nice blu-ray player. But even that's going away as 3D Blu-Rays lose all uncompressed audio playback - PCM or bitstream (on the slims).
If you are a customer of theirs, immediately cancel your service and tell them why you are doing it. that ought to send the right message.
Even more interesting would be to examine their IP space, and send DMCA notices to all of them. This could be something that 4chan can do. Eventually, you'll have 3 notices sent to each and every IP address which should mean they've disconnected everyone. After all, if they do it blatantly, they might just not bother doing the necessary legwork to verify every notice.
Let's just see what happens when their entire customer base gets disconnected and start filing petitions with their state attorney-general over loss of service they've paid for.
Keep doing this and they'll find out what life's like to be without revenue for 6 months - disconnected users won't continue paying for service they don't get, after all.
Today's paper had a similar Op-Ed piece about needing better copyright enforcement.
The complaint is the same - people who leak unaired episodes onto the 'net, and thus they need stronger laws to protect that.
What I don't get is why don't they try to find the origin of the leak? If it costs as much as they claim, surely the one leaking it onto the 'net in the first place would be the best place to go, than the thousands of others to play whack-a-mole with.
A simple case of "clean your own house before shitting in everyone else's" or some such. It's just like camcording a movie - no one likes watching camcorded crap, especially since a leaked DVD screener offers far better quality and presentation.
Perhaps these production companies would rather sue everyone the horse visited after it left the barn, than to actually close the barn door. Fix the leaks first that's letting everyone download unreleased episodes prior to airing first, rather than trying to go after everyone who's spreading the leaked episodes. It's easier that way because no law can prevent it from spreading.
The web page did say something was happening today
on
GOG.com Not Really Gone
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· Score: 2, Informative
All the people who said they had failed was either reading a bad summary or didn't check it out for themselves.
Their temporary page had two things.
First, was, they "could not continue operating like this". Now, that can mean they're going out of business, or it can mean something else. The literal translation is, "change is happening". That change could be "this site is dead", or it could be "please wait for the new and improved GoG 2.0".
Secondly, they said "you will be able to download all your games on Wednesday". So something was happening today. If they were shutting down, it's a last-gasp download mania.
Fact is, they didn't say "GoG.com is now closed for business, we thank all our customers for the past 2 years". It's also sort of unprofessional, because it screws everyone who bought a game just before they shut down, but haven't downloaded it yet (which is a dick move).
I'm not so sure. The ipad/tablets are just taking the place of netbooks. In my opinion netbooks were just underpowered and cramped laptops. The ipad/tablets remove the cramped aspect of the netbook and slap on a touch based gui. It seems to me that it's just the natural evolution of the netbook, taking it's shortcomings and addressing them. So I suppose if netbooks were a toy to you, then by all means, believe that the ipad is a toy as well.
You're missing one of the important aspects of netbooks. They run real operating systems (i.e., not phone OSes). They don't limit you to whatever the manufacturer (be it Apple or anyone else) wants to sell you in their app store.
That's the point. A tablet shouldn't run a regular OS. It's been proven with the success of Windows 3.1 for Pen Tablets, Windows XP Tablet Edition, Origami, Tablet PCs, and so on.
Touch UIs are different, period. Sure it's nice if you could run Windows 7 on it, or Linux, or what have you, but you're contending with the limited interaction available with a touch screen. That's why despite running a cut-down version of OS X, Apple didn't port the OS X UI libraries to iOS, they invented a new UI API. Touch interaction is different enough that a developer needs to spend time and think how the interactions have to work.
An example - there is no "right click" with a touch UI. Try to get through your day by using your keyboard and only the left button of your mouse. It'll be a fairly long day. With full OSes, we've had to emulate this with stuff like active digitizers and buttons on the stylus, or tap-and-hold (which works because most apps don't use left-click-and-hold as a valid input response).
Another example - dragging on a touch screen is hard, the further you go, the more likely it is somewhere along the line you'll end up with a pen up detection. If you have a stylus, you can probably press hard during the drag (risking scratching the screen) to help minimize this.
MOre things to be concerned about with a touch interface - double-tapping is hard, some UI elements may be too hard to hit reliably etc. OTOH, things like gestures and "flicking" is easy, so you want to design your UI based on the ability for a finger to flick through easily. Flicking with a mouse is hard, though - can be done, but it's not likely to be any good (which is why we have the mouse wheel).
The things really available to a touch screen are simple taps, and small gestures. And the targets ought to be nice and big with spacing between targets to allow for misses.
Running a full OS On a tablet is cool. But then the UI limitations get old, quick, and the workarounds get annoying. Then you come up with some brilliant guy who uses a spinner control where the up/down button fits on a 1-line high textbox. Hitting it precisely can be really difficult and you'll probably hit the wrong arrow a good portion of the time.
So you lock your car after parking it in your garage? Do you also lock yourself in your bedroom when retiring at night after locking the front door?
Car analogy is apt. house one, not so much.
I think the better analogy would be a gated community where the front door is guarded by a security guard that basically takes down details (names, registrations, calls homeowner to verify), and there's a fence running around the neighbourhood.
In some countries, apartments are like this where entry/exits are controlled by security.
But even in this case, each individual PC is like an apartment or a house, and you'll find people still lock their doors, because there's always a chance of a visitor getting by security, or one of your neighbours covets your TV and wants to take it.
The security guard keeps out "the rest of the world" (the internet), so it's the main firewall. But each locked house is a host in the neighourhood "network" and the doors are locked because even though most of the riff-raff is kept out, there is always the chance of an attack from the inside. Be it a visitor to another house deciding to go shopping around the neighbourhood, or just a kid playing a prank.
Actually, the answer is to do things in an even more archaic manner and let us fend for ourselves.
Just document the damn printers and let anyone who's interested write a "driver" for them.
Although if you can't print something then you're probably one of those people that can't use a computer at all without constant hand holding from someone with the slightest bit of persistence.
Buy better printers. Get one that supports PostScript (or an unlicensed compatible version - Brother calls it BrotherScript), or one that supports PCL. Practically all OSes support printing to a PostScript printer and many newer ones support PCL as well. You can go brain dead and work without the PPD (PostScript Printer Description - basically lists the capabilities of the device) file and still end up with decent printouts.
Because PSN requires 3.42 firmware at least, and the jailbreak works on 3.41 only. (Jailbreaks for earlier editions of firmware are coming down).
So Sony can't really ban you if they can't even allow your PS3 to log into PSN in the first place (Sony needs you to log in so it can do a hardware inventory of what's installed).
The good news is the games i want for PS3 came out before the OtherOS patch, so I lost practically nothing. It still works as a blu-ray player, too. So it seems the only thing Sony did to me was tell me "Don't spend money on PS3", which I'll happily oblige. After all, all the PS3 exclusives I want I've got, and the non-PS3 exclusives, well, hey, I have my Xbox360.
No, I'm not interested in the "Kinect Lite" that Sony calls Move that's really just a flipped-around wiimote (c'mon, the Wii's been out just a couple of months less than the PS3, and it doesn't require "calibration"). I will, however, get a Kinect because it looks to be some cool technology in there (3D cameras, Kinect can pan/tilt automatically to adjust itself to you).
At least with the jailbreak I can get more use out of my PS3. 3D gaming and blu-ray? Not really interested (I don't have a 3D TV, and because of technical limitations, it's 720p only...).
I have all three systems, and the PS3's got the most time as a blu-ray player. Hell, I even bought a game for PS3 just to try out playing a game on the PS3.
While you're correct about the rereleses of the three novels originally released by Del Rey, the Evolutions rerelease shouldn't be expanded; it'll just be the same content as before, but in two mass-market paperbacks instead of one hardcover or trade paperback.
They're actually expanded.
In an interview with Frank O'Connor (head honcho at Microsoft's 343 Industries (MS's Halo IP division, essentially)), he mentioned the books were split to make them more affordable and there were two new short stories in them.
I can't remember which interview it was said though - but it was mentioned...
Read the books. Seriously. The Halo series is decent and fun, and certainly has its moments...but it's hardly deserving of the legendary status people have applied to it. The books, however...the books are amazing. The storyline makes for a great series of sci-fi novels, and are all page-turners.
The best Halo experience isn't on a TV screen, but in a book. Just a bit of advice.
I will agree with this. The books are quite good, especially the ones by Nylund.
Halo Reach itself is in an interesting spot because a lot of prior details have been fleshed out by the later books (which explore earlier parts of the Halo universe), and it has to take place before Halo: The Fall of Reach (the first book, and the prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved (game), which is also in book form as Halo: The Flood).
I suppose the part I wish to have is Halo 2 and 3 done up in book form (the first three books cover the events just prior to Halo: CE (The Fall of Reach), Halo CE itself (The Flood) and the period between Halo: CE and Halo 2 (First strike).
Just FYI for anyone considering getting the books, Microsoft is re-releasing the first three and Evolutions with more backmatter and other content (but not altering the main story itself). The Fall of Reach was released last month (August 3rd), while The Flood is due to be released at the end of this month (Sept. 30 according to Amazon). October and November will see the re-release of Halo Evolutions as a split 2-volume set (volume 1 in october, volume 2 in november), while December sees the re-release of First Strike just before the holidays.
Greg Bear's books on the Forerunners is due to be released in January. So if you haven't got the books yet, you might want to wait for the new editions. No word on whether or not the 4th through 6th books in the series will be re-released though.
Doesn't exactly seem likely to happen, given there's no sign of a PC release for Halo 3 or ODST yet.
Highly unlikely there will be a PC release. First of all, Microsoft has the rights to the Halo universe (they acquired them when they bought Bungie, and when they spun off Bungie, they kept Halo). Secondly, Bungie and Activision have an exclusive 10 year partnership. Thus, it's highly unlikely that Bungie can license Halo but not have it published by Microsoft Game Studios.
Third, well, I think Halo 2 on PC didn't do terribly well, mostly because it required Vista. So with potential returns like that, it's not likely that Halo 3, ODST or Reach will ever make it to PC.
It isn't the last Halo game ever - after all, Microsoft owns the rights to Halo and you can be sure they're going to capitalize on it, but this will probably be the last Halo game from Bungie for a long while.
What I'm dying to know is where you got the idea that it was imposed, and why you think it's a bad idea for chargers to have a common plug.
Because it still has compatibility problems. Phones have had USB mini ports for years now, yet they always seem to make things so the chargers are incompatible with each other. Some use the ID pin to determine if it's a charger (so they can drop >500mA to charge faster). Some use special resistors on the D+/D- lines to determine charge current compatibility (Apple - 100mA, 500mA, 1A, 2A) (this is because the ID pin is only valid on USB mini and USB micro connectors). Others use the USB charging spec requiring D+/D- lines shorted together so they can detect chargers (but they can't identify what kind of charger - so they draw as much as the charger can supply - which could be problematic for cheap chargers).
A proper USB device cannot draw more than 100mA without enumeration, and there are plenty of devices out there that can't supply more than 100mA. USB charge spec also specifies this until the battery is charged up enough that you can run the main CPU to perform a charger identification and/or enumeration so you can ramp up current to 500mA (enumerated), or whatever your designed current draw is with your charger.
Forcing everyone to use USB micro connectors has the same problems already seen with USB mini - incompatible chargers, chargers that won't charge other devices, etc. It's such a mess that pretty much the only way to do it universally is to have "smart chargers" where they enumerate the device and choose a "charging" configuration. Then at least there can be negotiations in charge rates so the charger and device can choose the best supported charge rate.
Wine is a nightmare to configure. The regular home user isn't going to put up with it. End of discussion.
So you buy something like CrossOver, which is WINE internally but with nice UI tools and stupidly simple setup.
There's a reason why CodeWeavers can stay in business selling WINE (and donating some profits to WINE/hiring WINE devs).
It was pretty trivial to set up last time I tried it - install their package, run it and I had Steam running in no time at all. Ditto getting HL/HL2 running.
Speaking of vaporware, what ever happened to the Origami Project? It really looked like it had potential.Reply to This
They were around. I saw the Samsung model at Fry's one day. Problem was, "cheap tablets" they were - they were like paving stones in size and thickness.
But the complaints on the features were numerous. First, sub-GHz CPU, lame one at that (800MHz Celeron I think?) - so we're talking netbook specs here. A 7" screen that was a really high res 800x480. A battery life somewhere aorund the couple of hours mark. And it still required special stylii because it ran Windows XP Tablet Edition, which requires active digitizers. And while it was cheap, at $1200, it wasn't *that* cheap.
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Actually, Nintendo is probably the last company to go with anyhting more sophisticated than a BIOS architecture. DS, DSi, Wii - they have a boot BIOS that does the system initializations, and a pile of BIOS library calls, but that's it. There's no inherent support for process/thread creation, memory management, or other things. Filesystem support is via a library that gets built into the binary, as is stuff like Nintendo Wi-Fi connection (the TCP/IP stack is built into the game, not the hardware ROM). DItto on the Wii - that's why there's so many different versions of the IOS software - each revision Nintendo makes means the system portion has to be part of the firmware update (there's practically no binary compatibility). Effectively, the Wii and DS hardware act like an old PC running DOS - games touch bare metal, make calls into the BIOS to do things, but otherwise have free reign over the system. This is basically the old console model of how things work, and why the Wii/DS can't do a lot of things people expect. The 3DS is supposed to fix this, however.
The PS3, PSP, Xbox and Xbox360 do have what most people consider a proper OS, though the Xbox one is limited in that it's meant to run a game that never terminates, and it's run in kernel mode. PS3, PSP and Xbox360 run games in user mode now for security reasons. It's also why these consoles support fancy things like background downloads and the like.
Walled-garden OS X is also known as "iOS" these days. The iPhone was touted as running a stripped down version of OS X way back when it was first announced. It still is a stripped version of OS X, too. The early jailbreakers (before the App Store) simply created their own Objective-C cross compiler, and grabbed the headers from the standard OS X dev tools, though things like UIKit had to be re-engineered a bit.
Someone once said that the sum of human intelligence is a constant, and in general, people are idiots. Whereas most of us go through life knowing that touching a hot stove will burn us and we should never do it, there exists a growing population that sees that as an instant jackpot. Touch stove, get burned, sue! Then do it again and sue! Lather, rinse, repeat.
Alas, the rate these people die out isn't enough to clean the gene pool. Then again, the lure of free money probably just pollutes it again.
And you know the laptop warning sticker (which already exist on some laptops - one of mine says "PC base will beocme hot during use") will lead to lap-detecting devices in laptop tat automatically shut down if they detect the laptop getting too hot and on a lap...
Well, CAPTCHAs worked because they relied on vision tests - a skill that humans still do better than computers, but computer vision is already quite advanced. Then the countermeasures came where CAPTCHAs started getting so distorted that it was impossible to determine the code (I remember a forum I signed up for - too more than 15 tries and a cookie reset).
However, there are still difficult-for-computer-but-easy-on-humans tasks that can be done. I'm surprised no one's yet hooked a way into the Amazon Mechanical Turk or the like. Perhaps a simple one can be where you show a panoramic view along a busy street. Then you ask the question "What is the name of the store at number 763?" Or "What is the street number of ZZZ Supermarkets along this street?". "There is a large group of friends gathered near XXX store. How many people are in the group?"
Or simpler ones - if your forum or other thing is about a specific topic, ask a question about that topic. Or even self-referential ones. "What of the following will an art thief steal? A) Mona Lisa, B) Big screen HDTV, C) Cellphone, D) Money".
Might as well advance the state of things like image recognition and natural language queries while we're at it.
Yes, but mostly during a call, and a tiny bit less when idle. When the phone is idle, the main CPU is basically stopped and drawing very little power. Having Skype in the background does nothing to affect this as it's also waiting for a control datagram and thus blocked waiting.
However, the phone may be maintaining a data channel waiting for the datagram to come - this can involve a bit more power from the modem to keep the channel alive, and a tiny bit of main CPU to handle higher layer data connection administrivia (keep-alives and the like).
But during a call, the power goes up a lot. During a normal voice call, the main CPU again shuts down as it's not needed for the most part and the audio is routed direct to the modem where it's compressed, encoded and sent over the air by dedicated hardware. Using something like Skype, however, means the audio has to go tot he main CPU, where the Skype application then encodes it into packets, and those packets are then passed to the OS (also running on the main CPU) as network data. It goes down the network stack, then down to the data port of the modem where the modem then packages it for over the air. But an active data connection also costs more power, and the main CPU is active during a VoIP call but idle during a normal voice call, both of which add significant drain to the battery.
If you're on the phone a lot, VoIP may require you to carry an extra battery. If you're like me who hardly makes a call longer than 30 seconds a couple of times per day, you won't notice the extra drain.
Apple's controls are well known. In fact, they're probably the closest you get to console-style controls from the big three except they're open to everyone.
If you want to write code and not worry about approvals and crap like that, there are three major platforms you can write for - PC, Mac, and Android. Heck, I'm sure other than the Google Marketplace, the other marketplaces for Android probably excercise some control as well.
I guess I'm just getting tired of all these posts of "whine whine whine Apple approvals suck whine whine whine". Apple's not forcing you to code for their platform, so if you don't like it, don't. There's no law (yet) that says everyone must write for the iPhone. We all know Apple's approval process sucks. It's well publicized in many mass media publications already and has been since the app store opened 2 years ago. I know lots of people who won't write an app for iPhone out of fear of it getting rejected. (Some refuse to write for Android too, but that's more of a "I can't afford to support and test on a million different phones" than "I refuse to subject myself to Apple's draconian policies").
Or is it more a case of "I don't like to write for iPhone but it's the only way I can make money"?
As for Adidas, they did what any business would do - they withdrew, which is their right. If enough people do that, Apple may relent. If not, they risk having their iAd platform rendered marginalized. But that's a business decision only Apple can make, and if others are happy about it, good, if not, they'll leave.
Heck, I don't know what ads Adidas was trying to do, but they could've been highly annoying and distracting ones that really, no one would've wanted.
The irony is, maybe a few years after that analog joysticks came back into vogue as PCs decided to be better and offer analog joysticks. Even these days the sticks are all analog, before they're quantized and sent over USB. And in this modern era, we have both digital and analog sticks in our gamepads, with one console preferring digital control first (and putting the analog somewhat out of the way), another preferring analog (while the digital goes mostly unused because it's not that great, so it becomes 4 more buttons).
Microsoft's TTS implementation sucked. Apple has been doing TTS research for a LONG while now, and I believe even the 90's version of MacInTalk is far superior to what Microsoft has provided currently. It's the reason why iTunes ships with its own version of the OS X TTS engine - the VoiceOver functionality requires it (on pre-10.5 Macs as it can't render to a file, and on Windows because Sam really sucks). I believe some of the worst voices in MacOS have starred in TV shows and movies to give characters a robotic appeal. (That, and they're cheap and non-unionized and all that).
About the worst TTS system used to this date is what Stephen Hawking uses - it's not a great system, but Hawking as stated it's one thing he'll not change ever (being it's so characteristic). His wheelchair computer has been updated with the latest in computing technology, and this word selecting software equally rewritten (but the UI has been kept identical for the most part, obviously), but the TTS hardware board is pretty much original (though flaky and power-hungry).
This isn't a new problem - I think /. reported on it a couple of years ago. Sure it wasn't a UDID, but it was the phone number or other more identifiers. ICCID and IMEI is probably more risky to leak out - the UDID doesn't really tell you much of anything. It doesn't tell you the phone model, the user's phone number (which can change), ICCID, IMEI, etc. unless it's purposely linked. All it identifies is the particular piece of hardware.
And naturally, jailbreakers have solutions for all this.
First, there's UDIDFaker, which changes your UDID on a per-app basis. On iOS 4.x, the GUI doesn't work, but you can manually edit the plist file with the app and UDID you desire to use.
Seocnd, there's Firewall IP, which pops up a dialog whenever an app wants to open a network connection, where you can control which connections fail and which ones succeed.
There used to be a blog that tested apps and reported what was sent back to the user - it's not a new problem, but a very old one...
Happened on the SC2 forums as well.
When you first link your SC2 game to your account, SC2 presented a nice "Name this character" prompt. Turns out, unless you read a little dense block of text on the left side of the screen, what it really meant is "Choose your handle". So predictably, many people use their first names. If you had read the block of text on the left (which was marked as "news" and was basically one huge paragraph, right int he middle of which said something like "choose your name carefully as you cannot change it". No confirmation or anything either, you entered you name, clicked "OK", and nothing saying that you cannot change it - you just get in.
No confirmations, no indications otherwise that you were doing anything more than creating a local profile. Until you actually wait while logging in to read that paragraph out of boredom.
It caused a fairly big thread in the Sc2 forums and basically ruined SC2 for me for a couple of weeks. In the end I got it resolved (Blizzard gave people who used their first names a chance to change it). The thread promptly stopped the moment Blizzard also announced paid name changes.
It might have worked to keep the trolls and other stuff out of the forums, but the whole thing ended up sounding like a great way to monetize even the trivialest of things (courtesy Activision). Put something in the fine print, mislead people into doing something they wouldn't otherwise do if they knew the full consequences, and monetize the result.
Considering Bungie is now with Activision, it's also going to be a downhill ride for them. Probably get great games still, but it's all the crap around it that's gonna suck.
This isn't too bad for a portable system because you would tend to move the device so your eyes are in the sweet spot anyways (the screens are so small that you wouldn't want to move it too far away and off-center. Even if it was a relatively narrow sweet spot it would still be OK since most people play with it in their faces. Also, if you're playing on your side, you would tend to still orient the device so it's level with your eyes.
If it was non-portable, it would be a fail because there's no way to make the sweet spot that wide. This limits the potential of glasses-less 3D TVs, as well as limits the effect of current glasses 3D TVs. There's a reason all the 3DTV displays have you standing - if you cock your head off horizontal the effect diminishes. No more slouching sideways in front of the 3DTV!
So I know that your apps are popular. I also know your app has access to some valuable data, so I design a game app that has a hidden payload of replacing one of your shared libraries and grabs the user's valuable data. A perfect crime, as it's your app that gets blamed for the data theft. My data stealing game? Scot-free.
Remember, one of the design decisions on the iPhone and Android is application separation. iPhone apps run isolated from each other in a chroot-like environment. They can't write willy-nilly all over the filesystem because that's bad (imagine replacing your password manager app with a rigged one that will transmit all your passwords), only to strictly controlled locations and with strictly controlled access.
Android apps undergo a bit more separation - each app runs under a separate user account as well.
Both obviously don't run apps under root. (Jailbroken iOS apps can have root access, obviously).
The goal is to prevent malware from spreading throughout the OS. You can accomplish a lot using read-only filesystems, but you don't want to have a virus go an infect every app on the phone. So isolating apps from each other is a good way to prevent a malware app that gets downloaded (iOS or Android) from trying to infect the user's entire device. Unfortunately, isolating apps also means the developer has to jump through hoops in order to actually try to share stuff.
One thing I seem to have missed is the price.
How much is this thing? $500?
It's just like that Android tablet by Samsung - why is there no announcement on price? Even subsidized prices if you must. Rumored pricing has it expensive, though.
And now this thing comes out with a ton of nice specs, but no pricing.
Heck, at least Jobs announced the iPad's price when he did the iPad keynote.
Yeah, and they also disabled a useful 3rd party adapter - the Cross Battle Adapter. Without out I'd find the PS3 almost unusable as the controller cramps up my hand.
At least the Cross Battle Adapter lets me use the nicer (IMHO) Xbox360 controller with the PS3.
Sony, you've kicked me off of PSn because I refused to update. So now I don't buy anything off PSN. I was interested in Move, but ever since this year, you seem to be saying to never buy another PS3 game or spend money on a PS3 ever again. And now you broke the only reason I played with the PS3.
All you've done is made my PS3 a nice blu-ray player. But even that's going away as 3D Blu-Rays lose all uncompressed audio playback - PCM or bitstream (on the slims).
Even more interesting would be to examine their IP space, and send DMCA notices to all of them. This could be something that 4chan can do. Eventually, you'll have 3 notices sent to each and every IP address which should mean they've disconnected everyone. After all, if they do it blatantly, they might just not bother doing the necessary legwork to verify every notice.
Let's just see what happens when their entire customer base gets disconnected and start filing petitions with their state attorney-general over loss of service they've paid for.
Keep doing this and they'll find out what life's like to be without revenue for 6 months - disconnected users won't continue paying for service they don't get, after all.
Today's paper had a similar Op-Ed piece about needing better copyright enforcement.
The complaint is the same - people who leak unaired episodes onto the 'net, and thus they need stronger laws to protect that.
What I don't get is why don't they try to find the origin of the leak? If it costs as much as they claim, surely the one leaking it onto the 'net in the first place would be the best place to go, than the thousands of others to play whack-a-mole with.
A simple case of "clean your own house before shitting in everyone else's" or some such. It's just like camcording a movie - no one likes watching camcorded crap, especially since a leaked DVD screener offers far better quality and presentation.
Perhaps these production companies would rather sue everyone the horse visited after it left the barn, than to actually close the barn door. Fix the leaks first that's letting everyone download unreleased episodes prior to airing first, rather than trying to go after everyone who's spreading the leaked episodes. It's easier that way because no law can prevent it from spreading.
All the people who said they had failed was either reading a bad summary or didn't check it out for themselves.
Their temporary page had two things.
First, was, they "could not continue operating like this". Now, that can mean they're going out of business, or it can mean something else. The literal translation is, "change is happening". That change could be "this site is dead", or it could be "please wait for the new and improved GoG 2.0".
Secondly, they said "you will be able to download all your games on Wednesday". So something was happening today. If they were shutting down, it's a last-gasp download mania.
Fact is, they didn't say "GoG.com is now closed for business, we thank all our customers for the past 2 years". It's also sort of unprofessional, because it screws everyone who bought a game just before they shut down, but haven't downloaded it yet (which is a dick move).
That's the point. A tablet shouldn't run a regular OS. It's been proven with the success of Windows 3.1 for Pen Tablets, Windows XP Tablet Edition, Origami, Tablet PCs, and so on.
Touch UIs are different, period. Sure it's nice if you could run Windows 7 on it, or Linux, or what have you, but you're contending with the limited interaction available with a touch screen. That's why despite running a cut-down version of OS X, Apple didn't port the OS X UI libraries to iOS, they invented a new UI API. Touch interaction is different enough that a developer needs to spend time and think how the interactions have to work.
An example - there is no "right click" with a touch UI. Try to get through your day by using your keyboard and only the left button of your mouse. It'll be a fairly long day. With full OSes, we've had to emulate this with stuff like active digitizers and buttons on the stylus, or tap-and-hold (which works because most apps don't use left-click-and-hold as a valid input response).
Another example - dragging on a touch screen is hard, the further you go, the more likely it is somewhere along the line you'll end up with a pen up detection. If you have a stylus, you can probably press hard during the drag (risking scratching the screen) to help minimize this.
MOre things to be concerned about with a touch interface - double-tapping is hard, some UI elements may be too hard to hit reliably etc. OTOH, things like gestures and "flicking" is easy, so you want to design your UI based on the ability for a finger to flick through easily. Flicking with a mouse is hard, though - can be done, but it's not likely to be any good (which is why we have the mouse wheel).
The things really available to a touch screen are simple taps, and small gestures. And the targets ought to be nice and big with spacing between targets to allow for misses.
Running a full OS On a tablet is cool. But then the UI limitations get old, quick, and the workarounds get annoying. Then you come up with some brilliant guy who uses a spinner control where the up/down button fits on a 1-line high textbox. Hitting it precisely can be really difficult and you'll probably hit the wrong arrow a good portion of the time.
Car analogy is apt. house one, not so much.
I think the better analogy would be a gated community where the front door is guarded by a security guard that basically takes down details (names, registrations, calls homeowner to verify), and there's a fence running around the neighbourhood.
In some countries, apartments are like this where entry/exits are controlled by security.
But even in this case, each individual PC is like an apartment or a house, and you'll find people still lock their doors, because there's always a chance of a visitor getting by security, or one of your neighbours covets your TV and wants to take it.
The security guard keeps out "the rest of the world" (the internet), so it's the main firewall. But each locked house is a host in the neighourhood "network" and the doors are locked because even though most of the riff-raff is kept out, there is always the chance of an attack from the inside. Be it a visitor to another house deciding to go shopping around the neighbourhood, or just a kid playing a prank.
Buy better printers. Get one that supports PostScript (or an unlicensed compatible version - Brother calls it BrotherScript), or one that supports PCL. Practically all OSes support printing to a PostScript printer and many newer ones support PCL as well. You can go brain dead and work without the PPD (PostScript Printer Description - basically lists the capabilities of the device) file and still end up with decent printouts.
Sony can't ban you from PSN.
Because PSN requires 3.42 firmware at least, and the jailbreak works on 3.41 only. (Jailbreaks for earlier editions of firmware are coming down).
So Sony can't really ban you if they can't even allow your PS3 to log into PSN in the first place (Sony needs you to log in so it can do a hardware inventory of what's installed).
The good news is the games i want for PS3 came out before the OtherOS patch, so I lost practically nothing. It still works as a blu-ray player, too. So it seems the only thing Sony did to me was tell me "Don't spend money on PS3", which I'll happily oblige. After all, all the PS3 exclusives I want I've got, and the non-PS3 exclusives, well, hey, I have my Xbox360.
No, I'm not interested in the "Kinect Lite" that Sony calls Move that's really just a flipped-around wiimote (c'mon, the Wii's been out just a couple of months less than the PS3, and it doesn't require "calibration"). I will, however, get a Kinect because it looks to be some cool technology in there (3D cameras, Kinect can pan/tilt automatically to adjust itself to you).
At least with the jailbreak I can get more use out of my PS3. 3D gaming and blu-ray? Not really interested (I don't have a 3D TV, and because of technical limitations, it's 720p only...).
I have all three systems, and the PS3's got the most time as a blu-ray player. Hell, I even bought a game for PS3 just to try out playing a game on the PS3.
They're actually expanded.
In an interview with Frank O'Connor (head honcho at Microsoft's 343 Industries (MS's Halo IP division, essentially)), he mentioned the books were split to make them more affordable and there were two new short stories in them.
I can't remember which interview it was said though - but it was mentioned...
I will agree with this. The books are quite good, especially the ones by Nylund.
Halo Reach itself is in an interesting spot because a lot of prior details have been fleshed out by the later books (which explore earlier parts of the Halo universe), and it has to take place before Halo: The Fall of Reach (the first book, and the prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved (game), which is also in book form as Halo: The Flood).
I suppose the part I wish to have is Halo 2 and 3 done up in book form (the first three books cover the events just prior to Halo: CE (The Fall of Reach), Halo CE itself (The Flood) and the period between Halo: CE and Halo 2 (First strike).
Just FYI for anyone considering getting the books, Microsoft is re-releasing the first three and Evolutions with more backmatter and other content (but not altering the main story itself). The Fall of Reach was released last month (August 3rd), while The Flood is due to be released at the end of this month (Sept. 30 according to Amazon). October and November will see the re-release of Halo Evolutions as a split 2-volume set (volume 1 in october, volume 2 in november), while December sees the re-release of First Strike just before the holidays.
Greg Bear's books on the Forerunners is due to be released in January. So if you haven't got the books yet, you might want to wait for the new editions. No word on whether or not the 4th through 6th books in the series will be re-released though.
Highly unlikely there will be a PC release. First of all, Microsoft has the rights to the Halo universe (they acquired them when they bought Bungie, and when they spun off Bungie, they kept Halo). Secondly, Bungie and Activision have an exclusive 10 year partnership. Thus, it's highly unlikely that Bungie can license Halo but not have it published by Microsoft Game Studios.
Third, well, I think Halo 2 on PC didn't do terribly well, mostly because it required Vista. So with potential returns like that, it's not likely that Halo 3, ODST or Reach will ever make it to PC.
It isn't the last Halo game ever - after all, Microsoft owns the rights to Halo and you can be sure they're going to capitalize on it, but this will probably be the last Halo game from Bungie for a long while.
Because it still has compatibility problems. Phones have had USB mini ports for years now, yet they always seem to make things so the chargers are incompatible with each other. Some use the ID pin to determine if it's a charger (so they can drop >500mA to charge faster). Some use special resistors on the D+/D- lines to determine charge current compatibility (Apple - 100mA, 500mA, 1A, 2A) (this is because the ID pin is only valid on USB mini and USB micro connectors). Others use the USB charging spec requiring D+/D- lines shorted together so they can detect chargers (but they can't identify what kind of charger - so they draw as much as the charger can supply - which could be problematic for cheap chargers).
A proper USB device cannot draw more than 100mA without enumeration, and there are plenty of devices out there that can't supply more than 100mA. USB charge spec also specifies this until the battery is charged up enough that you can run the main CPU to perform a charger identification and/or enumeration so you can ramp up current to 500mA (enumerated), or whatever your designed current draw is with your charger.
Forcing everyone to use USB micro connectors has the same problems already seen with USB mini - incompatible chargers, chargers that won't charge other devices, etc. It's such a mess that pretty much the only way to do it universally is to have "smart chargers" where they enumerate the device and choose a "charging" configuration. Then at least there can be negotiations in charge rates so the charger and device can choose the best supported charge rate.
So you buy something like CrossOver, which is WINE internally but with nice UI tools and stupidly simple setup.
There's a reason why CodeWeavers can stay in business selling WINE (and donating some profits to WINE/hiring WINE devs).
It was pretty trivial to set up last time I tried it - install their package, run it and I had Steam running in no time at all. Ditto getting HL/HL2 running.
They were around. I saw the Samsung model at Fry's one day. Problem was, "cheap tablets" they were - they were like paving stones in size and thickness.
But the complaints on the features were numerous. First, sub-GHz CPU, lame one at that (800MHz Celeron I think?) - so we're talking netbook specs here. A 7" screen that was a really high res 800x480. A battery life somewhere aorund the couple of hours mark. And it still required special stylii because it ran Windows XP Tablet Edition, which requires active digitizers. And while it was cheap, at $1200, it wasn't *that* cheap.