The Google Voice application would be more intrusive... it would basically replace your voicemail and SMS applications with its own, as I understood it. It would undermine the experience that Apple wants the user to have.
Now, the user should be able to do so, but it's a different situation. Spotify won't destroy the "experience" in any way, it's an app which provides access to a huge library of music - an online, gigantic itunes library. Competing with the need for downloading music onto iTunes? Yep. Changing the experience? Nah.
That's probably it. There's tons of music apps in the App Store. Some of the worst ones are by a company called "nutsie" - but probably due to limitations in the way they can stream the music. E.g., you can get an app that has all the songs on the Rock Band/Guitar Hero games, but it's a shuffle playlist, effectively. You can't pick the song you want to listen to (other than skipping forward), have to wait for the song to buffer, etc.
There are others, including apps with full albums in them.
False. Idiots designing Halo put strafe and walk on the same stick, instead of walk and turn. The other stick was turn and aim. My brain operates walking by forward/back and turn, because face it, you don't flatly walk forward/back/left/right, you walk forward and turn to go in other directions. This control scheme was wrong, and still is wrong.
But... it also puts movement on one thumstick, and aiming on another. In the traditional WASD keyboard layout, the mouse turns as well, A/D strafe left/right - they don't turn (because it'll mess up your aim). One thing a thumbstick does offer over a regular PC keyboard is the lack of a "Run" modifier, since a thumbstick allows for speed variations.
Either way, in any FPS, you strafe rather than turn most of the time (it's a huge disadvantage to turn and not face your opponent when trying to dodge his aim, while strafing lets you see your opponent and compensate your aim). Putting turn left/right in the forward/back control (A/D on WASD, left thumbstick on controller) means the strafing has to be moved elsewhere, and having two turn controls (mouse/right thumbstick) just makes a mess of things.
Also, I think most people strafe to avoid obstacles when they walk, rather than turn, walk around, then turn back (they move sideways to avoid the obstacle but still face the general direction).
As for avoiding network play - it'll suck, honestly. Take someone playing Xbox360 TF2 vs. PS3 TF2 (the PC users will cream them both - TF2 is a PC FPS and designed with PC controls in mind), and the PS3 user already is at an disadvantage because the PS3 port... stinks. Low framerates, stutters, etc. When trying to allow fair play, it's best to have everyone be stuck with the same disadvantages.
It stunk so badly Valve has given up on the PS3. Or hell, take Ghostbusters and see the annoying PS3 artifacting.
Or other games may have oddities during optimization that become huge (hidden) advantages - you can't use the same textures on both the PS3 and Xbox360 because they'll stink on one platform or the other due to different limitations in hardware. And the modified textures that you do use may give hidden advantages to one player over another. Subtle differences can bring on huge advantages quite easily. A map, just because of the way the textures are done may benefit the PS3, while a different map in the same game may benefit the Xbox360. It becomes almost impossible to avoid tilted competitions.
The trouncing would come due to the PS3's stronger horsepower being reflected in games while the X360 games stagnate. Since there is 'room to grow' in terms of BR versus DVD discs and SPUs to be tapped on the PS3, it is more future-proofed than the X360. As Microsoft wants to recoup development costs for the Xbox consoles, they will stick with the X360 longer which will make the PS3 look more and more favorable.
It's a huge balance. The PS3 hardware may be superior (we don't know - Sony's apparently not letting devs take advantage of all that power), but developers have shown immense creativity in creating games that work great still. The PS2 still has games coming out that aren't as crippled as you might think, and it's got nowhere near the specs of current-gen systems.
The balance is because if Sony is counting on the PS3 to last a long time as developers get comfortable with it, Nintendo or Microsoft might announce a next-gen system that's released way earlier than the PS4. The Wii, for example, could easily get a high-def version (I don't blame Nintendo for sticking with standard-def - not everyone has HDTVs for their kids). Or Microsoft might have something brewing in time when developers complain the Xbox360 is too slow.
The big issue for Sony right now is having to balance the Blu-Ray player market (really, who'd buy a standalone player now when Sony sells one that supports BD Live, will be supported with firmware updates for years to come (bugs be found in Blu-Ray still), lots of storage, and WiFI for $300?), against the gaming market. Hope may be for those "blu-ray players" be used as "game machines", but not always. Everyone who has asked me about blu-ray, I say "Buy a PS3 - don't bother with standalone players". Some of those may buy a game or two, but the others I know haven't.
Having a higher installed base of PS3s now won't mean much if only 2/3rds of them are used for gaming...
That's my suspicion. However, the ability to run applications without compromising your own privacy might encourage some of us paranoid technical folks to stop avoiding them.
Anyone who is bothered by access from third-party applications installed by friends/network/etc either has already, or should have after the publicity, simply disabled it.
What about privacy of your friends? Wasn't there already a quiz by the ACLU or someone that basically said "Look, this quiz can access your profile and the profiles of all your friends"?
Hell, if it did that much, it's worth it, considering everyone's got one of those people on their friend list.
I suppose the trend is unstoppable by now as we all jumped right into it with our credit and debit cards. Still, I'm always amazed that people willingly pay to pay, that is, give a fraction of the transaction to some third party, just for allowing the transaction to take place. In the good old days of cash, the passing of money from one hand to another was free. Now it appears that every time I need to pay for something, I need to pay a little more. Is that really acceptable? Am I the only one who's not too excited by this?
If it's between two people, cash handling is cheap. If it's for a small business (think corner store), handling cash is likewise cheap. But get bigger, say the Target/Best Buy/Wal-Marts of the world, and cash handling suddenly gets very expensive.
But first, about cash and two people - lots of people don't want to carry large amounts of cash. If you're buying something for $500, and you've got to meet someone at an unknown location, do you really want to carry $500 in easily-stealable cash, or would you rather have it billed to you later, possibly with legal protections and paper trails? After all, there's many a story about (probably dumb) sellers/buyers getting robbed of their merchandise/cash. That, and who really wants to carry more cash than they can afford to lose that instant on the street (muggings, pickpockets, etc)? Credit, and to a limited extent, debit cards help avoid the issue, somewhat. Debit cards being preferred since money can be withdrawn easily and someone can be forced to give up their PIN. (Why banks don't allow for a "distress" PIN, I don't know).
Back to the cost of handling cash - yes, handling cash is expensive. Any retail flunky can do the steps needed for a credit/debit transaction - the computer spits a number out, number is punched into machine (or computer can do that, too!), card is swiped or read (chip cards), and a piece of paper comes out signalling payment success or failure. For credit, one piece has signature (or with pin, store copy) which is slid into the drawer and another copy given to customer with receipt. Computer keeps track of everything.
Cashiers though, have it much tougher. At the retail level, the company has to trust you (or have big surveillance cameras similar to casinos), which automatically costs money - doing retail cash transactions means you probably earn a little more money than minimum wage to reduce temptation and the possibiliy of getting jumped from the back room to the cash register. Next, a whole lot of book-keeping goes on. A cashier has to "sign out" their cash trays, which have a specific amount of money in them (bills, coins, coin rolls). A smart cashier would count the money to ensure it's correct. Then they log into the register and enter in the starting cash amount. Finally, transactions are done.
At the end of the shift, they close out the register, and the register prints out the amount of cash the tray should have. The cashier then has to take the tray back, and count the cash in it to ensure they match. Often, they don't by a few dollars (happens - usually through wrong change), and the discrepancy noted. If it's big enough, then something has to happen, usually more training for the cashiers because of it. It's also why cashiers "make change" with each other - giving a $10 note to exchange for a $10 coin roll, for example, or breaking a 50 for 5 10s. The register doesn't care about the actually bills, just the totals. And bad things can happen when you're up short.
And then, at the end of the day, the money has to be deposited at the bank. If it's a particularly big day of takings or if there's a large amount of money at the end of the day ($100K+ isn't unusual for big box stores), then the armoured cars are brought in, which also cost a bit of money, to transport the cash to the bank. For your local corner store which may have a few thousand dollars per day, they use wallets and the depository slot.
I smell the makings of a new Michael Bay movie! A group of terrorists from (insert nation/region here) systematically take over all the robotic oil rigs and hold the world's oil supply hostage. And only one man can take them on to save the world!
Not quote the same plot, but since Michael Bay did have his fingers in the franchise, you did describe the last scene in the first "episode" of the Transformers cartoon... except it was robotic "terrorists" taking over an oil rig...
Yes but if you went to *business* school, or even just worked in a store sometime, you'd know that when a $2 item sells the business only gets about 50 cents of it, while the other $1.50 goes to rent/wages/et cetera. So the actual math is 0 + 0.50 (profit) - 2 (cost of purchase to review item) == negative $1.50
The actual cost is even worse.
For a $2 app, the developer gets $1.40 gross (Apple takes 30%). So for 1 review of that app, the developer has to spend $0.60 (lost to Apple), PLUS the cost of the reviewe itself. Maybe $1/review?
Hell, wasn't there an article awhile ago about someone using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to do this? It was a $5 app or so, and the guy paid you $6. Of course, this screws the reviewer since the developer could just "reject" the review and you'd be out $5...
Virus protection? If Mac vs PC guy has taught me anything, it's that MAC'S DON'T GET VIRUSES! Don't lie to me...
Heck, maybe it's also why Linux virus scanners exist. Besides the oddball Mac trojan, the Mac AV probably keeps up with PC viruses as well. Not because they can run them, but to avoid being a "carrier". If you use the Windows firesharing, many worms seek out the shares. It's possible those worms may find an open Mac share and infect files in there. The Mac won't get infected, but Windows PCs accessing those shares can become infected. Better the Mac catch it and quarantine...
Yes the website is up, but the tracker is still non-functional. How am I supposed to download my half-finished 10 GB torrents of "ifeelmyself.com" or "cdgirls.com" or "playboy.com" if the tracker is not working.:-(
Upgrade your torrent client. The decentralized tracker in many torrent clients is automatically used if the main tracker can't be reached. I grabbed a torrent yesterday and didn't realize it was a TPB one until I looked at its details. It's less efficient at finding seeds and such (because you don't know how big the "cloud" is), but if it's out there, it does work.
The only big issue with the decentralized tracker is it isn't searchable - it assumes you have the torrent file (or magnet link) acquired from some source already. That's what OpenBittorrent and the like are for.
Exactly, there are a -lot- of places in the USA where there are avid gamers who are stuck with sub-par connections. And using WoW is a terrible example, its like saying because there are a lot of people who play on Xbox Live don't have a single player, local multiplayer or system link option.
In a game, it makes no sense to leave out options that are obvious, LAN play is pretty obvious, even if 95% of the people buying your game won't use it, if it isn't difficult to code and maintain you have nothing to lose.
Or how about places where Internet access is a ripoff? Say, at an airport - you and your friends have an hour or two or four to kill. AIrport WiFi is normally $ARM or $LEG per minute, so a little ad-hoc WiFi LAN play seems doable. Hell, since most pay WiFI do DHCP but won't route packets out, you can probably game in infrastructure mode (it may not block packets on the network). Ditto on some hotels as well - many offer free wifi, a number is still pay access.
I'm pretty sure there's also plenty of valid locations where a bunch of friends are together with laptops but not necessarily internet access. Maybe even a university campus or something where not everyone has access. Or a road trip (WiFi works between cars). Or maybe even a field trip via greyhound bus or something.
Of course, the other question is... can you have more than one client behind a firewall? Known Battle.net issue was just that - someone would play SC, and another person can't get into b.net because of it.
It also proves that Apple follows a wrong path selling hardware. It has some nice software in its hands, and it could become an alternative to Microsoft/Google if they wanted to.
Apple DOESN'T want to. They are in a nice spot right now - they can sell fewer product, but at higher margins than the rest of the industry. They don't care that their sales volume is smaller, or their marketshare is 1/10th of their competitor. Once you start lusting after more people, it becomes a race to the bottom. It's why Apple has no computer to compete against the low-end PCs, why the mid-range Apples don't have features enthusiasts want (i.e., expandability), etc. It gets harder to meet the needs of more diverse set of people, and marginal costs to support the next customer rise faster than revenue gained from those extra customers.
The iPod is an irregularity, and while a money maker, you can tell Apple's not really liking having to sell a whole range of iPods - the line's pretty much stagnated except for the Touch. The only thing keeping them up there is that their competitors are equally stuck - unable to out-iPod the iPod.
This cannot be understated. The computer industry experienced exponential growth once it became open. It all started the day Compaq produced the first IBM PC clone. That day will only come for phones/PDAs when people can use any phone, with software from any company or individual, with any telephone service provider.
The cellphone industry already has seen this. 10 years ago, the cellphone population was nowhere near where it is now. Maybe 20 years ago if we include the rest of the world. Cellphones are everywhere. Nokia makes the vast majority of the phones sold, and thus, the vast majority of the phones sold can also run Java applets. There's very little growth left - those who want "a phone" have the low end (which is increasingly including stuff like cameras, mp3 players and such). Those who want an awesome email platform have the millions of Blackberry models out there. Those who want to surf the web have tons of phones that run WebKit. All Apple brought to the table was innovation - the only way to break into a crowded market. Even the iPhone's low marketshare makes Apple happy - they command a good chunk of industry revenues.
And we won't see open hardware and open OS distributions anytime soon - phones are embedded devices and highly customized to their hardware. Take a look at DD-WRT for open hardware and open OS, and see how many different binaries you need to support all those routers. And that's just because they all are based off similar hardware designs, but still there's no "install this software package and it'll configure itself" distribution.
As for the "any service provider" - we're already there. It's called GSM (or UMTS/LTE... 3GPP anyhow). Buy an unlocked phone. Buy a SIM card. Put latter into former. Make calls. Go to another country. Buy a new SIM card. Replace existing SIM. Make calls.
I recall that the PS2 used to have a Linux kit so that it could be sold with a lower tax as a computer, rather than a toy. I wonder if this was the case with the PS3 as well, now that the computer functionality is being removed.
At least with the PS3 slim you still get the "computer experience"! You have to agree to the EULA on first system startup, and every system update and to play some games as well. Also games you download from PSN, you have to "install" them (again with an EULA). Ditto with some games as well - they have to be "installed" on the hard disk to play them.
WRT Battle.net and StarCraft II, would you be making it so multiplayer play is possible with zero configuration on the firewall/router? If I invite 10 of my friends for a get-together, and we want to play StarCraft II, will that be possible without having to reconfigure my router? Or to do this, will it require using technologies like UPnP so SC II can open ports for each player?
Why is there no provision for offline play? Considering the way Blizzard games run so nicely on low-end hardware, if my friends and I are stuck at the airport waiting for a connection, it means we can't just setup an ad-hoc network and play SC II (especially since many airports charge $$$ per minute of Internet) to pass the time. Or even at low end motels/hotels where WiFi isn't necessarily available (or is costly)? (To be honest, I've seen even high-end hotels charge for Internet access, too, but it seems a waste that we all have to pay good money to get access to Battle.net so we can all play together).
What about offline play for single player? Or will single player also require battle.net?
at least in cali, those are not legal or enforceable.
on one contract job I was about to take, the employer wanted to lock me out of working in that specific area for something like 4 years. I laughed and told him he gets ZERO years of lock-out and that this is cali and not india;) we have -some- rules here (this is bowling, not nam, sparky; there are rules!).
I crossed out the offending lines and resubmitted the paperwork. they accepted it. they knew. and I knew. and they knew I knew;)
non-competes are illegal in most states. don't ever sign anything with a non-compete on it. you have the RIGHT to earn bread each day, to live on, dammit.
Except in this case, it's an agreement to not poach.
A non-compete prevents an employee from working at a competitor. A non-poach prevents a company from actively trying to hire another company's employees.
The difference is, a non-compete prevents employees from willingly seeking employment elsewhere, which is illegal. A non-poach prevents employers from actively trying to "steal" employees. In a non-poach, employees are free and willing to seek employment at the other company.
In this case, it would keep Palm from actively recruiting people from Apple, and Apple from actively recruiting from Palm. It does not prevent any Apple employee who wants to work at Palm from seeking employment at Palm on their own volition, and vice versa. Hell, Apple employees are free to work at Microsoft, if they wish, because there was no non-paoch agreement (that we know of) between the two companies.
It's the same deal between Apple and Google. Apple agrees not to recruit people from Google, and vice-versa, but individual employees are still free to leave and join the other.
These non-poaching agreements aren't really a big deal - they don't prevent employees from leaving and joining the other company (or any other). It just prevents companies from actively targeting employees at the other company. Examples include say, setting up a little booth off campus (but where employees walk by anyhow) offering jobs to them, having headhunters that will then call employees at their desks, or putting up billboards saying stuff like "Apple employee? Come work for Palm!" in full view of the Apple campus (EA did this to Radical - rented a billboard right outside the Radical offices).
At worst, it's a form of collusion between two companies which might be used to keep salaries low, but there's enough other companies out there that employees can work for.
It's like two car dealerships agreeing not to steal business away from each other - the customer is free to shop between the two (and haggle), but one dealer won't go and say "buy a car from me instead of this guy!" to customers visiting the other guy's lot.
Score 1 troll? Who marked that? Informative, if anything.
It's funny because it's true, sadly enough. Reverse the release dates of the Zune and Ipod. OH NO! MS put out a mp3 player first! It's going to suck! OH LOOK! Apple put out a mp3 player as well. They're not MS, so they're better AND cool because they put a superficial "COOL" edge on things.
Now put them back to their original dates. OH LOOK! Apple put out a mp3 player first! It's gotta be cool! They're such pioneers! And it's called Ipod! It makes me think that *I* matter because it's mine!.... sad.
Whens the last time you can think advertisters have footed the bill? Has the cost of your movie tickets dropped since they've introduced a half-hour of commericals into the movie theaters? Has the cost of your video games dropped since the inception of inline video game ad's?
Hardly. Relying on advertisers to lower the cost of new technology so that academia can reap its benefits is knowledge probably gained from an academic institute that is relying on advertisers to lower the cost of new technology.
Except print media relies on ads to pay the bills, The cost you pay tends to pay a very tiny portion of the actual cost production - most of that cost is distribution (printing, shipping to distributors, distributor markup, shipping to retailers, retailer markup, etc), which is how they can easily make subscriptions 50+% off the cover price.
In this case, the ads pay for the technology behind this. If it's successful, more advertisers would want it in more magazines, which implies that developments would make the technology cheaper. And when the technology gets cheap enough, it'll be everywhere.
Advertisers are paying for this, plus the normal ad fees. If it succeeds, it forms a demand for this technology, making it cheaper so everyone else can add video to their pages for little extra cost.
According to this 5000 respondent survey the failure rate is 54.2%, but the article points out that over 30 million consoles have been sold. I would place little confidence in the 5000 person survey. Who knows what this survey consisted of, was it a simple cookie-based web browser poll where the same person can vote over and over again? Do you really think retailers would put up with 1 out of 2 people returning the XBOX they bought there? And honestly using a blanket percentage for failure rate is just plain ol misleading. We need to know the Mean-Time-Before-Fail figure to really get a handle on the quality. So, I call BS on this whole thing.
Actually, this whole story is BS. A misreading that caused someone to think "OMG I CAN HAZ FIRST POST ON TEH INTERWEBZ!" (Part of the problem is the source is only within the print article, and not available online).
The actual figure is 54.2% of failures are DUE TO RRoD or E74 errors. That is NOT the same as 54.2% of ALL xboxes. I don't know the figure of how many xboxes have failed or the percentage thereof. However, of all the dead ones, 54.2% of them are from RRoD/E74. I think there was a high-side estimate that the actual failure rate was between 15-20%, or lower, but this was years ago, and a low-end estimate for 5-10%.
Firstly, the number doesn't pass the smoke test. 30M xboxes out there. If more than 1 in 2 die, that means Microsoft has had to deal with 15M+ warranty claims. Given the financials, unless the Xbox is made with gigantic margins, repairing 15M+ consoles would have a huge impact on Microsoft. Microsoft already took a big hit when they extended the warranty due to RRoD to 3 years, but the expected cost of the move was low enough that this doesn't make sense.
Also, Microsoft may be big, rich, and stupid, but I'm sure if they're seeing millions of units returned, they'd investigate and fix the problem since the likely margins on the product make it that a warranty repair costs money. A lot of warranty repairs would imply that the next revision would incorporate changes in an attempt to reduce warranty costs. Warranty costs money. It's almost a truism that the warranty costs to fix a product will outweigh the money made on that one product, and thus must be amortized over many units.
Finally, if the failure rate is so high, wouldn't news of such be all over the place? The media would have a field day with it. There should be tons of articles of "avoid the xbox360 - it'll die" or "the xbox360 makes extended warranty worth it!"
What puzzles me (apart from the amusing bit about decompiling something that was never compiled) is the prohibition on disassembly. Given the pretty much trivial mapping between assembly mnemonics and the actual binary files they distribute, it seems a silly thing to prohibit.
You lose a lot on a disassembly though.
Comments for one, and non-public symbols for another (including stuff like variable names, structure names and composition, etc), plus any oddball globals referenced through a base pointer. You lose enough that the disassembly is hard to look at, and this is stuff you lose with a basic 2-pass assembler.
More advanced assemblers include functionality like macros, call handling (write stuff like "function do_something(param1, param2, param3)", "call do_something(r0, local_variable, constant)", and "return blah" and the assembler sets up the callstack, figures out a place for the the locals, etc), even conditionals (write "if (variable > something)" than a series of compare/test and branch instructions) and structure support. Often called "high-level assembly" because it ends up appearing a mix of assembly and C. Far more advanced than the basic 2-pass, but less advanced than a full-fledged C compiler. It's a great way to generate entry points that are architecture ABI compliant, while for the fast call stuff you can use your normal branch instructions.
I have nightmarish pictures popping into my head of a waterfall of ethernet cables spewing from this with user's ports un-numbered with no network diagrams. People bashing on the server room door in a zombie like state muttering "MRRRHH FACEBOOK!" "TWWIIIITEEEuggggghh" with me inside screeching "NO! NO! I DONT KNOW WHAT PORT YOUR DESK IS! NO! I CAN'T MAKE THINGS GO FASTER!" before curling up in a ball listening to the hum of servers and the lamentations of the users outside the door desperately scratching to get in.
I would hope that 100,000 port switch would at least be a smart, if not managed, switch! It'll be faster to walk to the user's desk, find their MAC address, then query the switch by MAC to find the port.
No, the nightmare is when the switch has no ability to search by MAC, and no ability to dump the MAC table in a format convienient for copy-paste to something else for searching and best of all, unsorted. (Think switch with its own console...)
Paul Revere's famous "Midnight Ride" occurred on the night of April 18/April 19, 1774, when he and William Davies were instructed by Dr. Joseph Warren to ride from Boston to Arlington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of the movements of the British Army...
Fine. Except it was 1775, not 1774, he rode to Lexington, not Arlington, and it's William Dawes, not Davies.
But if any of the above were represented on Wikipedia as fact, how would you--not knowing any better--separate out the "bullshit"?
That's what references are for, and why Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, as comprehensive as it is, really shouldn't be used as source material. There may be errors in that article (this applies to any encyclopedia, even ones like Britannica). Use it for background on your paper/research/whatever, and use the handy-dandy citations as source materials in the quest for more source material. Like using GOogle as a companion research tool - Wikipedia to get a background and learn any jargon that may aid your ability to find source material.
Even in classes where Wikipedia is allowed, doesn't mean you should blindly copy whatever it says. You should treat it as if every prof says "you cannot use Wikipedia". Oh yes, you'll use it, but you won't cite it (which is fine, since the fact will be cited for you, and rather than cite Wikipedia, you'd cite the original source - the Wikipedia citation would be redundant).
It would be nice if they would have included an infrared port for universal remotes. The PS3 is reportedly the best Blu-Ray player, but it is hard to integrate into many people's home theaters because of the RF remote.
Yeah, unfortunately they didn't. My PS3 is almost exclusively used for Blu-Ray movies (most games I purchase for my Xbox360 - if Sony would allow developers to use the machine to the fullest rather than parcel out power over the years...)
However, there are options.
If you own a Harmony remote, the Logitech PS3 adapter is the best and cheapest option. And if you have a home theatre, you probably ought to pick up a Harmony.
But then again, if you have a Pronto or other such thing, you probably can find the remote codes for the PS3 adapter as well. If not, you have the IR2BT Tci, a pricey $150 adapter that supports basically whole system integration with its built-in RS-232 port and such. Cheaper option is the PS3toothfairy, which at $55 looks cheap, but you also need to spend $20 on a PS3 remote and install it (it fakes the PS3 button pad).
I will never buy a Kindle book, or a song from Apple, so long as they are locked to the vendor's devices.
You do realize the iTUnes Music Store has gone DRM-free, right? There was a big announcement awhile back about this, too...
The m4a's are as locked as you not having an AAC player. Which is pretty rare these days since practically all new MP3 players support AAC (except maybe your cheapo chinese ripoffs, but hey), and they work fine in Linux (I believe mplayer and VLC do it fine, and ffmpeg handles it just dandy).
For various reasons the industry in the US has shunned diesel for private vehicles. That has to change before any headway can be made.
Well, the big issue was diesel was much dirtier in North America (high sulfur content) than in Europe, and a lot of the technologies that make diesel cars behave like gas cars tend to require the clean diesel. These days though, I believe the legislation has made low-sulfur diesel mandatory, which is why we see VW and Mercedes starting to import more diesel cars.
Quite a change, really - drive a heavy SUV that gets 5L/100km or better (probably spewing less CO2 than the little car next to you...). Or the fact that the engine lacks the traditional diesel clatter normally associated with trucks, or hell, doesn't Mercedes have a thing that mixes ammonia or something with exhaust that makes the exhaust even cleaner still?
Actually these days middleware and the use of thirdparty engines is becoming hugely important. Thus the software part isn't an afterthought so much as outsourced to someone more competent. The biggest problem in porting tends to be when someone tries to bring a game developed for consoles to the PC, or vice versa. Essentially the console is dramatically underpowered versus contemporary PCs. So console games are developed "close to the metal" to gain as much power as possible from coding tricks, and therefore don't code well. PC games find themselves on a platform without the horsepower to run properly with a serious rewrite to add those sorts of tricks. Again, middleware can eliminate this sort of issue by dealing with the resource-squeezing in advance.
Not so much on current-gen consoles, where you have multiple GHz level CPUs and somewhat copious amounts of RAM (I'm excluding the Wii for the moment). The Xbox360 has three 3GHz PowerPC cores and 512MB of shared memory (CPU-GPU), while the PS3 has 2 3GHz PowerPC cores, 7 DSP cores, and 256MB of system RAM plus 256MB of VRAM for the GPU. This is enough so that they actually run an OS. The original Xbox ran everything in kernel mode, but the Xbox360 is powerful enough that the kernel-user mode switching isn't a big deal. Heck, it's probably multiprocess capable too, though you probably only have your game application, and the OS shell application (the one that handles the Guide button when you press it). I would expect the PS3 to have a similar architecture as well - an OS ("GameOS") that runs the games but is effectively a multitasking OS and the game runs in usermode.
Heck, horsepower wise, these consoles don't hold a lick to a gaming PC, but are probably fairly competitive to the usual sub-$500 PCs bought today, or more powerful.
Which may be why PC gaming is as bad as it is right now - it's hard writing a game to run on a $300 netbook with Intel graphics. Or a budget $500 PC, again with Intel level graphics. You pretty much have to step up to a $700+ PC if you want the hint of ATI or nVidia graphics. That and the quality of drivers most of these computers have.
The Wii is a special case - it's console design is similar to previous generations - software developers have full access to hardware, and its firmware basically is just hardware device drivers. It's why software updates are kinda wierd on the Wii - every game library release (IOS) isn't binary compatible, so when you start a game, it's gotta load the right version for each game, and your Wii has copies of every version up to that point. Honestly, I'm not sure why Nintendo doesn't just have the developer ship the IOS library with the game to save storage space in the flash.
Because the ability to run unsigned code directly on the hardware (e.g. not sandboxed as a user of the OS) is both great for homebrew development and the fundamental building block of a pure software loader for pirated games, this development is going to scare the hell out of the bean counters and the department heads. They're going to have to deploy most (if not all) of the tricks left in their bag of countermeasures, otherwise inside of a year the 360 will end up like the Wii and the Xbox 1 - completely and utterly cracked open for piracy.
You DO realize that pirated xbox360 games have been around since nearly the beginning right? It involved a little firmware patching to the DVD-ROM drive, and then a burned game would work just fine on the xbox360 as if it was the original. Heck, even Xbox Live can work, so you get all your achievements and multiplayer.
How do you think all those people got caught with pre-release copies of games and subsequently banned from Xbox Live?
While running unsigned code is a good thing (and it probably took this long because Microsoft offered a sanctioned method of homebrew), it probably won't be a big piracy deal. Games will start using new APIs that require updates, and people will get sick of single player soon enough because Xbox Live requires people to update to the latest version. At best, you'll have local multiplayer, which probably works until your friends want to bring over their live profiles. The current generation of consoles (except for the most part the Wii) have stronger online multiplayer components.
That's really why the Wii was more or less the first to be broken, followed a long while by the Xbox360, and then soon the PS3. All the homebrewers broke the Wii because they wanted to run their code on it. Microsoft offered a method, so those people went away and did that, and Sony has Linux, again a sanctioned homebrew method. Microsoft's cost money, so there was a bit of effort to those wanting a free solution, while Sony's doesn't, which means those wanting homebrew on the PS3 outside of Linux will be the few wanting to take advantage of the GPU.
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That's probably it. There's tons of music apps in the App Store. Some of the worst ones are by a company called "nutsie" - but probably due to limitations in the way they can stream the music. E.g., you can get an app that has all the songs on the Rock Band/Guitar Hero games, but it's a shuffle playlist, effectively. You can't pick the song you want to listen to (other than skipping forward), have to wait for the song to buffer, etc.
There are others, including apps with full albums in them.
But... it also puts movement on one thumstick, and aiming on another. In the traditional WASD keyboard layout, the mouse turns as well, A/D strafe left/right - they don't turn (because it'll mess up your aim). One thing a thumbstick does offer over a regular PC keyboard is the lack of a "Run" modifier, since a thumbstick allows for speed variations.
Either way, in any FPS, you strafe rather than turn most of the time (it's a huge disadvantage to turn and not face your opponent when trying to dodge his aim, while strafing lets you see your opponent and compensate your aim). Putting turn left/right in the forward/back control (A/D on WASD, left thumbstick on controller) means the strafing has to be moved elsewhere, and having two turn controls (mouse/right thumbstick) just makes a mess of things.
Also, I think most people strafe to avoid obstacles when they walk, rather than turn, walk around, then turn back (they move sideways to avoid the obstacle but still face the general direction).
As for avoiding network play - it'll suck, honestly. Take someone playing Xbox360 TF2 vs. PS3 TF2 (the PC users will cream them both - TF2 is a PC FPS and designed with PC controls in mind), and the PS3 user already is at an disadvantage because the PS3 port... stinks. Low framerates, stutters, etc. When trying to allow fair play, it's best to have everyone be stuck with the same disadvantages.
It stunk so badly Valve has given up on the PS3. Or hell, take Ghostbusters and see the annoying PS3 artifacting.
Or other games may have oddities during optimization that become huge (hidden) advantages - you can't use the same textures on both the PS3 and Xbox360 because they'll stink on one platform or the other due to different limitations in hardware. And the modified textures that you do use may give hidden advantages to one player over another. Subtle differences can bring on huge advantages quite easily. A map, just because of the way the textures are done may benefit the PS3, while a different map in the same game may benefit the Xbox360. It becomes almost impossible to avoid tilted competitions.
It's a huge balance. The PS3 hardware may be superior (we don't know - Sony's apparently not letting devs take advantage of all that power), but developers have shown immense creativity in creating games that work great still. The PS2 still has games coming out that aren't as crippled as you might think, and it's got nowhere near the specs of current-gen systems.
The balance is because if Sony is counting on the PS3 to last a long time as developers get comfortable with it, Nintendo or Microsoft might announce a next-gen system that's released way earlier than the PS4. The Wii, for example, could easily get a high-def version (I don't blame Nintendo for sticking with standard-def - not everyone has HDTVs for their kids). Or Microsoft might have something brewing in time when developers complain the Xbox360 is too slow.
The big issue for Sony right now is having to balance the Blu-Ray player market (really, who'd buy a standalone player now when Sony sells one that supports BD Live, will be supported with firmware updates for years to come (bugs be found in Blu-Ray still), lots of storage, and WiFI for $300?), against the gaming market. Hope may be for those "blu-ray players" be used as "game machines", but not always. Everyone who has asked me about blu-ray, I say "Buy a PS3 - don't bother with standalone players". Some of those may buy a game or two, but the others I know haven't.
Having a higher installed base of PS3s now won't mean much if only 2/3rds of them are used for gaming...
What about privacy of your friends? Wasn't there already a quiz by the ACLU or someone that basically said "Look, this quiz can access your profile and the profiles of all your friends"?
Hell, if it did that much, it's worth it, considering everyone's got one of those people on their friend list.
If it's between two people, cash handling is cheap. If it's for a small business (think corner store), handling cash is likewise cheap. But get bigger, say the Target/Best Buy/Wal-Marts of the world, and cash handling suddenly gets very expensive.
But first, about cash and two people - lots of people don't want to carry large amounts of cash. If you're buying something for $500, and you've got to meet someone at an unknown location, do you really want to carry $500 in easily-stealable cash, or would you rather have it billed to you later, possibly with legal protections and paper trails? After all, there's many a story about (probably dumb) sellers/buyers getting robbed of their merchandise/cash. That, and who really wants to carry more cash than they can afford to lose that instant on the street (muggings, pickpockets, etc)? Credit, and to a limited extent, debit cards help avoid the issue, somewhat. Debit cards being preferred since money can be withdrawn easily and someone can be forced to give up their PIN. (Why banks don't allow for a "distress" PIN, I don't know).
Back to the cost of handling cash - yes, handling cash is expensive. Any retail flunky can do the steps needed for a credit/debit transaction - the computer spits a number out, number is punched into machine (or computer can do that, too!), card is swiped or read (chip cards), and a piece of paper comes out signalling payment success or failure. For credit, one piece has signature (or with pin, store copy) which is slid into the drawer and another copy given to customer with receipt. Computer keeps track of everything.
Cashiers though, have it much tougher. At the retail level, the company has to trust you (or have big surveillance cameras similar to casinos), which automatically costs money - doing retail cash transactions means you probably earn a little more money than minimum wage to reduce temptation and the possibiliy of getting jumped from the back room to the cash register. Next, a whole lot of book-keeping goes on. A cashier has to "sign out" their cash trays, which have a specific amount of money in them (bills, coins, coin rolls). A smart cashier would count the money to ensure it's correct. Then they log into the register and enter in the starting cash amount. Finally, transactions are done.
At the end of the shift, they close out the register, and the register prints out the amount of cash the tray should have. The cashier then has to take the tray back, and count the cash in it to ensure they match. Often, they don't by a few dollars (happens - usually through wrong change), and the discrepancy noted. If it's big enough, then something has to happen, usually more training for the cashiers because of it. It's also why cashiers "make change" with each other - giving a $10 note to exchange for a $10 coin roll, for example, or breaking a 50 for 5 10s. The register doesn't care about the actually bills, just the totals. And bad things can happen when you're up short.
And then, at the end of the day, the money has to be deposited at the bank. If it's a particularly big day of takings or if there's a large amount of money at the end of the day ($100K+ isn't unusual for big box stores), then the armoured cars are brought in, which also cost a bit of money, to transport the cash to the bank. For your local corner store which may have a few thousand dollars per day, they use wallets and the depository slot.
Handling cash isn't "free" - it's very cheap
Not quote the same plot, but since Michael Bay did have his fingers in the franchise, you did describe the last scene in the first "episode" of the Transformers cartoon... except it was robotic "terrorists" taking over an oil rig...
The actual cost is even worse.
For a $2 app, the developer gets $1.40 gross (Apple takes 30%). So for 1 review of that app, the developer has to spend $0.60 (lost to Apple), PLUS the cost of the reviewe itself. Maybe $1/review?
Hell, wasn't there an article awhile ago about someone using the Amazon Mechanical Turk to do this? It was a $5 app or so, and the guy paid you $6. Of course, this screws the reviewer since the developer could just "reject" the review and you'd be out $5...
Heck, maybe it's also why Linux virus scanners exist. Besides the oddball Mac trojan, the Mac AV probably keeps up with PC viruses as well. Not because they can run them, but to avoid being a "carrier". If you use the Windows firesharing, many worms seek out the shares. It's possible those worms may find an open Mac share and infect files in there. The Mac won't get infected, but Windows PCs accessing those shares can become infected. Better the Mac catch it and quarantine...
Upgrade your torrent client. The decentralized tracker in many torrent clients is automatically used if the main tracker can't be reached. I grabbed a torrent yesterday and didn't realize it was a TPB one until I looked at its details. It's less efficient at finding seeds and such (because you don't know how big the "cloud" is), but if it's out there, it does work.
The only big issue with the decentralized tracker is it isn't searchable - it assumes you have the torrent file (or magnet link) acquired from some source already. That's what OpenBittorrent and the like are for.
Or how about places where Internet access is a ripoff? Say, at an airport - you and your friends have an hour or two or four to kill. AIrport WiFi is normally $ARM or $LEG per minute, so a little ad-hoc WiFi LAN play seems doable. Hell, since most pay WiFI do DHCP but won't route packets out, you can probably game in infrastructure mode (it may not block packets on the network). Ditto on some hotels as well - many offer free wifi, a number is still pay access.
I'm pretty sure there's also plenty of valid locations where a bunch of friends are together with laptops but not necessarily internet access. Maybe even a university campus or something where not everyone has access. Or a road trip (WiFi works between cars). Or maybe even a field trip via greyhound bus or something.
Of course, the other question is... can you have more than one client behind a firewall? Known Battle.net issue was just that - someone would play SC, and another person can't get into b.net because of it.
Apple DOESN'T want to. They are in a nice spot right now - they can sell fewer product, but at higher margins than the rest of the industry. They don't care that their sales volume is smaller, or their marketshare is 1/10th of their competitor. Once you start lusting after more people, it becomes a race to the bottom. It's why Apple has no computer to compete against the low-end PCs, why the mid-range Apples don't have features enthusiasts want (i.e., expandability), etc. It gets harder to meet the needs of more diverse set of people, and marginal costs to support the next customer rise faster than revenue gained from those extra customers.
The iPod is an irregularity, and while a money maker, you can tell Apple's not really liking having to sell a whole range of iPods - the line's pretty much stagnated except for the Touch. The only thing keeping them up there is that their competitors are equally stuck - unable to out-iPod the iPod.
This cannot be understated. The computer industry experienced exponential growth once it became open. It all started the day Compaq produced the first IBM PC clone. That day will only come for phones/PDAs when people can use any phone, with software from any company or individual, with any telephone service provider.
The cellphone industry already has seen this. 10 years ago, the cellphone population was nowhere near where it is now. Maybe 20 years ago if we include the rest of the world. Cellphones are everywhere. Nokia makes the vast majority of the phones sold, and thus, the vast majority of the phones sold can also run Java applets. There's very little growth left - those who want "a phone" have the low end (which is increasingly including stuff like cameras, mp3 players and such). Those who want an awesome email platform have the millions of Blackberry models out there. Those who want to surf the web have tons of phones that run WebKit. All Apple brought to the table was innovation - the only way to break into a crowded market. Even the iPhone's low marketshare makes Apple happy - they command a good chunk of industry revenues.
And we won't see open hardware and open OS distributions anytime soon - phones are embedded devices and highly customized to their hardware. Take a look at DD-WRT for open hardware and open OS, and see how many different binaries you need to support all those routers. And that's just because they all are based off similar hardware designs, but still there's no "install this software package and it'll configure itself" distribution.
As for the "any service provider" - we're already there. It's called GSM (or UMTS/LTE... 3GPP anyhow). Buy an unlocked phone. Buy a SIM card. Put latter into former. Make calls. Go to another country. Buy a new SIM card. Replace existing SIM. Make calls.
At least with the PS3 slim you still get the "computer experience"! You have to agree to the EULA on first system startup, and every system update and to play some games as well. Also games you download from PSN, you have to "install" them (again with an EULA). Ditto with some games as well - they have to be "installed" on the hard disk to play them.
It's the computer experience, on a console!
WRT Battle.net and StarCraft II, would you be making it so multiplayer play is possible with zero configuration on the firewall/router? If I invite 10 of my friends for a get-together, and we want to play StarCraft II, will that be possible without having to reconfigure my router? Or to do this, will it require using technologies like UPnP so SC II can open ports for each player?
Why is there no provision for offline play? Considering the way Blizzard games run so nicely on low-end hardware, if my friends and I are stuck at the airport waiting for a connection, it means we can't just setup an ad-hoc network and play SC II (especially since many airports charge $$$ per minute of Internet) to pass the time. Or even at low end motels/hotels where WiFi isn't necessarily available (or is costly)? (To be honest, I've seen even high-end hotels charge for Internet access, too, but it seems a waste that we all have to pay good money to get access to Battle.net so we can all play together).
What about offline play for single player? Or will single player also require battle.net?
Except in this case, it's an agreement to not poach.
A non-compete prevents an employee from working at a competitor.
A non-poach prevents a company from actively trying to hire another company's employees.
The difference is, a non-compete prevents employees from willingly seeking employment elsewhere, which is illegal. A non-poach prevents employers from actively trying to "steal" employees. In a non-poach, employees are free and willing to seek employment at the other company.
In this case, it would keep Palm from actively recruiting people from Apple, and Apple from actively recruiting from Palm. It does not prevent any Apple employee who wants to work at Palm from seeking employment at Palm on their own volition, and vice versa. Hell, Apple employees are free to work at Microsoft, if they wish, because there was no non-paoch agreement (that we know of) between the two companies.
It's the same deal between Apple and Google. Apple agrees not to recruit people from Google, and vice-versa, but individual employees are still free to leave and join the other.
These non-poaching agreements aren't really a big deal - they don't prevent employees from leaving and joining the other company (or any other). It just prevents companies from actively targeting employees at the other company. Examples include say, setting up a little booth off campus (but where employees walk by anyhow) offering jobs to them, having headhunters that will then call employees at their desks, or putting up billboards saying stuff like "Apple employee? Come work for Palm!" in full view of the Apple campus (EA did this to Radical - rented a billboard right outside the Radical offices).
At worst, it's a form of collusion between two companies which might be used to keep salaries low, but there's enough other companies out there that employees can work for.
It's like two car dealerships agreeing not to steal business away from each other - the customer is free to shop between the two (and haggle), but one dealer won't go and say "buy a car from me instead of this guy!" to customers visiting the other guy's lot.
Lest we forget
Choice quote: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
Except print media relies on ads to pay the bills, The cost you pay tends to pay a very tiny portion of the actual cost production - most of that cost is distribution (printing, shipping to distributors, distributor markup, shipping to retailers, retailer markup, etc), which is how they can easily make subscriptions 50+% off the cover price.
In this case, the ads pay for the technology behind this. If it's successful, more advertisers would want it in more magazines, which implies that developments would make the technology cheaper. And when the technology gets cheap enough, it'll be everywhere.
Advertisers are paying for this, plus the normal ad fees. If it succeeds, it forms a demand for this technology, making it cheaper so everyone else can add video to their pages for little extra cost.
Actually, this whole story is BS. A misreading that caused someone to think "OMG I CAN HAZ FIRST POST ON TEH INTERWEBZ!" (Part of the problem is the source is only within the print article, and not available online).
The actual figure is 54.2% of failures are DUE TO RRoD or E74 errors. That is NOT the same as 54.2% of ALL xboxes. I don't know the figure of how many xboxes have failed or the percentage thereof. However, of all the dead ones, 54.2% of them are from RRoD/E74. I think there was a high-side estimate that the actual failure rate was between 15-20%, or lower, but this was years ago, and a low-end estimate for 5-10%.
Firstly, the number doesn't pass the smoke test. 30M xboxes out there. If more than 1 in 2 die, that means Microsoft has had to deal with 15M+ warranty claims. Given the financials, unless the Xbox is made with gigantic margins, repairing 15M+ consoles would have a huge impact on Microsoft. Microsoft already took a big hit when they extended the warranty due to RRoD to 3 years, but the expected cost of the move was low enough that this doesn't make sense.
Also, Microsoft may be big, rich, and stupid, but I'm sure if they're seeing millions of units returned, they'd investigate and fix the problem since the likely margins on the product make it that a warranty repair costs money. A lot of warranty repairs would imply that the next revision would incorporate changes in an attempt to reduce warranty costs. Warranty costs money. It's almost a truism that the warranty costs to fix a product will outweigh the money made on that one product, and thus must be amortized over many units.
Finally, if the failure rate is so high, wouldn't news of such be all over the place? The media would have a field day with it. There should be tons of articles of "avoid the xbox360 - it'll die" or "the xbox360 makes extended warranty worth it!"
You lose a lot on a disassembly though.
Comments for one, and non-public symbols for another (including stuff like variable names, structure names and composition, etc), plus any oddball globals referenced through a base pointer. You lose enough that the disassembly is hard to look at, and this is stuff you lose with a basic 2-pass assembler.
More advanced assemblers include functionality like macros, call handling (write stuff like "function do_something(param1, param2, param3)", "call do_something(r0, local_variable, constant)", and "return blah" and the assembler sets up the callstack, figures out a place for the the locals, etc), even conditionals (write "if (variable > something)" than a series of compare/test and branch instructions) and structure support. Often called "high-level assembly" because it ends up appearing a mix of assembly and C. Far more advanced than the basic 2-pass, but less advanced than a full-fledged C compiler. It's a great way to generate entry points that are architecture ABI compliant, while for the fast call stuff you can use your normal branch instructions.
I would hope that 100,000 port switch would at least be a smart, if not managed, switch! It'll be faster to walk to the user's desk, find their MAC address, then query the switch by MAC to find the port.
No, the nightmare is when the switch has no ability to search by MAC, and no ability to dump the MAC table in a format convienient for copy-paste to something else for searching and best of all, unsorted. (Think switch with its own console...)
That's what references are for, and why Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, as comprehensive as it is, really shouldn't be used as source material. There may be errors in that article (this applies to any encyclopedia, even ones like Britannica). Use it for background on your paper/research/whatever, and use the handy-dandy citations as source materials in the quest for more source material. Like using GOogle as a companion research tool - Wikipedia to get a background and learn any jargon that may aid your ability to find source material.
Even in classes where Wikipedia is allowed, doesn't mean you should blindly copy whatever it says. You should treat it as if every prof says "you cannot use Wikipedia". Oh yes, you'll use it, but you won't cite it (which is fine, since the fact will be cited for you, and rather than cite Wikipedia, you'd cite the original source - the Wikipedia citation would be redundant).
Yeah, unfortunately they didn't. My PS3 is almost exclusively used for Blu-Ray movies (most games I purchase for my Xbox360 - if Sony would allow developers to use the machine to the fullest rather than parcel out power over the years...)
However, there are options.
If you own a Harmony remote, the Logitech PS3 adapter is the best and cheapest option. And if you have a home theatre, you probably ought to pick up a Harmony.
But then again, if you have a Pronto or other such thing, you probably can find the remote codes for the PS3 adapter as well. If not, you have the IR2BT Tci, a pricey $150 adapter that supports basically whole system integration with its built-in RS-232 port and such. Cheaper option is the PS3toothfairy, which at $55 looks cheap, but you also need to spend $20 on a PS3 remote and install it (it fakes the PS3 button pad).
You do realize the iTUnes Music Store has gone DRM-free, right? There was a big announcement awhile back about this, too...
The m4a's are as locked as you not having an AAC player. Which is pretty rare these days since practically all new MP3 players support AAC (except maybe your cheapo chinese ripoffs, but hey), and they work fine in Linux (I believe mplayer and VLC do it fine, and ffmpeg handles it just dandy).
Well, the big issue was diesel was much dirtier in North America (high sulfur content) than in Europe, and a lot of the technologies that make diesel cars behave like gas cars tend to require the clean diesel. These days though, I believe the legislation has made low-sulfur diesel mandatory, which is why we see VW and Mercedes starting to import more diesel cars.
Quite a change, really - drive a heavy SUV that gets 5L/100km or better (probably spewing less CO2 than the little car next to you...). Or the fact that the engine lacks the traditional diesel clatter normally associated with trucks, or hell, doesn't Mercedes have a thing that mixes ammonia or something with exhaust that makes the exhaust even cleaner still?
Not so much on current-gen consoles, where you have multiple GHz level CPUs and somewhat copious amounts of RAM (I'm excluding the Wii for the moment). The Xbox360 has three 3GHz PowerPC cores and 512MB of shared memory (CPU-GPU), while the PS3 has 2 3GHz PowerPC cores, 7 DSP cores, and 256MB of system RAM plus 256MB of VRAM for the GPU. This is enough so that they actually run an OS. The original Xbox ran everything in kernel mode, but the Xbox360 is powerful enough that the kernel-user mode switching isn't a big deal. Heck, it's probably multiprocess capable too, though you probably only have your game application, and the OS shell application (the one that handles the Guide button when you press it). I would expect the PS3 to have a similar architecture as well - an OS ("GameOS") that runs the games but is effectively a multitasking OS and the game runs in usermode.
Heck, horsepower wise, these consoles don't hold a lick to a gaming PC, but are probably fairly competitive to the usual sub-$500 PCs bought today, or more powerful.
Which may be why PC gaming is as bad as it is right now - it's hard writing a game to run on a $300 netbook with Intel graphics. Or a budget $500 PC, again with Intel level graphics. You pretty much have to step up to a $700+ PC if you want the hint of ATI or nVidia graphics. That and the quality of drivers most of these computers have.
The Wii is a special case - it's console design is similar to previous generations - software developers have full access to hardware, and its firmware basically is just hardware device drivers. It's why software updates are kinda wierd on the Wii - every game library release (IOS) isn't binary compatible, so when you start a game, it's gotta load the right version for each game, and your Wii has copies of every version up to that point. Honestly, I'm not sure why Nintendo doesn't just have the developer ship the IOS library with the game to save storage space in the flash.
You DO realize that pirated xbox360 games have been around since nearly the beginning right? It involved a little firmware patching to the DVD-ROM drive, and then a burned game would work just fine on the xbox360 as if it was the original. Heck, even Xbox Live can work, so you get all your achievements and multiplayer.
How do you think all those people got caught with pre-release copies of games and subsequently banned from Xbox Live?
While running unsigned code is a good thing (and it probably took this long because Microsoft offered a sanctioned method of homebrew), it probably won't be a big piracy deal. Games will start using new APIs that require updates, and people will get sick of single player soon enough because Xbox Live requires people to update to the latest version. At best, you'll have local multiplayer, which probably works until your friends want to bring over their live profiles. The current generation of consoles (except for the most part the Wii) have stronger online multiplayer components.
That's really why the Wii was more or less the first to be broken, followed a long while by the Xbox360, and then soon the PS3. All the homebrewers broke the Wii because they wanted to run their code on it. Microsoft offered a method, so those people went away and did that, and Sony has Linux, again a sanctioned homebrew method. Microsoft's cost money, so there was a bit of effort to those wanting a free solution, while Sony's doesn't, which means those wanting homebrew on the PS3 outside of Linux will be the few wanting to take advantage of the GPU.