"Please, stop pointing out that while we brag about how much we love open source software, most of our exciting free applications are only available for Windows!"
At the risk of restarting this flame war, why would google make software for Linux? A lot of their stuff, like Google Earth, has no clear revenue stream for them on windows either. And hitting 93% of users is a lot more tempting than going for 3%.
Google is basically responsible for Firefox's income stream. I'd argue that does more for Linux than any other non-linux company out there.
So if they started in 2002, they've been going for 4 years. 4 years at 70 million dollars is 17.5 million dollars per year.
Assuming a 50% marketing, promotion, and etc cost, that leaves 8.75 million for staff and development. Assuming a generous 100,000 per year compensation package and 100,000 in per-employee support costs (office space, etc), that's a full-time staff of 44 developers.
44 developers, working full time, for 4 years. With a full marketing budget for a product that doesn't exist. Assume a 50/50 split between hardware and software, that's 22 people making the console and 22 people programming the interface, including artists.
70 million really should have been enough. Can you say "scam?"
It's grade inflation. Back in my day we honored inventive inventors. Now you just have to be an innovative inventor. Soon we'll be honoring just innovative innovators. Then improving improvers. incrementing incrementers. maintaining maintainers. standard standardizers. imperfect imperfectors.
Then you get dogs and cats living together, human sacrifice - mass hysteria. Hysterical hysteria.
Tech sites are to report all Google-related news, even in situations like these, where this Dell/Google alliance has apparently just gone from beta to stable.
Having lived in the Silicon Valley, I'd add a lack of anything better to do.
Seriously. The night life in the valley consists of maybe club paradise, the Edge, a few comedy clubs here and there, and the VERY occasional bar. Which lends itself to people staying at home, tinkering with their computers, reading, and watching an unfortunate amount of television.
People have a lot of freakish hobbies in the valley, mostly stemming from having nothing to do. People talk about starting their own companies, then do it, largely out of having nothing to do. They weld jet engines to the backs of cars, make networks of AI chatbots, reprogram furbies to say dirty things because it's more interesting than going to golfland.
Out here in Boston (where I live now) there is no shortage of great minds, great ideas, and people who say "I should have done that when I had the chance." There is just so much going on here, though, so much social competition, that you can't do it. You need to have at least a masters, a full-time relationship or two, and four hobbies, all of which must be social. The average person doesn't have nearly as much time to develop a pet project into a full business.
And so less gets made out here. Less crazy ideas get out of people's heads and are given a real chance to prove themselves. When they do, MIT has great financers. But if you're not making carbonated ice cream as a senior thesis, chances are you're just not going to finish your great idea.
Ever notice how people who want to buy a cellphone keep complaining that they can't just get a bloody phone? Lots of people don't want a digicam/game/text/browsing/fishing rod/floor wax device, they want an f'ing phone.
And now nokia is marketing "multimedia computers," which to me means a computer whose marketing department is trapped in 1992. Could they be any more out of touch with the market? Is this why they put the cartridge slot under the battery in the NGage?
Openign their browser... very cool. No longer selling phones... very dumb. I'll stick with my Treo, thank you, which happens to actually be a multimedia computer. And the Ericson which is just a phone. For when I need to, you know call people.
You might need to hit a few computer equpment flea markets, but you should be able to get a pair of bidirectional high-gain narrow focus antennas, and set them up with a line-of-site to a friend (or a craigslist friend) a mile away who has DSL.
The lag would be bad for gaming, but for surfing or downloading large files the system would work great. Have them pay the ISP a little bit more for twice the bandwidth, split the bill, and you're golden.
Of course, this is something I've done at a friend's ISP and the ping times were low / the falloff wasn't great. But still, with carefully aimed directional antennas you can get some great signal.
I do have to say, whoever approved that concept needs a solid kick. Mario Sunshine was an amazing game, and there was a lot of fun things to do once you got through the boring bit where you had to clean up the world. It's like making an amazingly kinetic bedbugs eyetoy game, but first you have to make the bed and fold the sheets for two hours.
I mean, really, cleaning up graffiti? Graffiti? Couldn't they come up with a concept that didn't sound like a punishment? What's next, "Mario Broccoli in the world of taking out the garbage and brushing your teeth for the full three minutes?"
Not to be too abrupt, but grandparent is right. In gamer circles and game development circles when you refer to 1st party, 2nd party, and 3rd party, you're talking about the console manufacturer's internal studios, the console manufacturer's owned studios, and studios which are independent. This has been standard nomclemature since Activision started.
If you're referring to the consumer, you generally say the consumer or (if you're not in marketing) the player. But really, the relationship is quite complicated.
For example, as a 3rd party developer, we actually sell our work to a 3rd party publisher. Who is a 2nd party to a different 3rd party publisher, who will probably handle the actual distribution this time. Who needs 1st party approval to sell it into the distribution chain. Who sells to the individual stores. Who sells it to consumers. In this case, under your definition if we're the 1st party, the consumer is actually the 6th party down the line.
So yes, in common usage 1st party developer is the console manufacturer, 2nd parties are the studios they own, and 3rd parties are independents. Wikipedia is correct.
"Not only are we teaching our students math, science, literature, and music, but we're also giving them experience with them the American legal system by inducing them to sue the F%$# out of us."
A friend of mine was looking for an original copy of Star Wars on DVD for a movie night. After looking around for a long time, he finally found someone selling a custom version of the trilogy. These are mastered from the lazerdisks, and have been remixed to match the originals as closely as possible. The audio had been re-edited with the original effects, title, etc. They also included four disks worth of bonus material collected from the LD's, VHS editions, Re-releases, TV interviews, holiday edition, etc.
In short, they sold him the definitive box set that Lucas wouldn't*. The customer support was great. The vid and audio quality was excellent. The extras and menus were nicely polished. And of course none of the people who actually produced or worked on the movie got any money at all.
*Rumor has it that at the end of 2006, Lucas will be selling a box set of the hexagy, that includes the revised revised special editions plus the original versions of the films as they appeared in theaters. This is great, and would be considered the definitive archival set, except that he's also planning a revised revised revised "definitive" edition on blu-ray for 2007. And after that definitive, final, this-is-really-it edition, they're working on a 3D version. Sigh.
As much as everyone here loves to create their own programs and websites, for professional jobs, it must be known that those that create the software should NOT be responsible for designing the interface.
While this may be true in some sense, things will still rely heavily upon implementation architecture. Good user interface is NOT about a pretty front end, but about a logical hierarchical control layout and a minimalist featureset. On a PC, a highly usable program should be possible without a single piece of art. The programmer should work with, not for, the designer and artist to create a great interface.
Really, one of the key parts of a great user interface is sending people home. Figure out the bare minimum of what you need, implement that in the most straightforward logical fashion, and go home to your wife / husband / slashdot. It will still have a learning curve for people who aren't working on it all day every day (like the developers), but it will be far more comprehensible than the average "let's pack every feature in" mess.
As a tech artist friend of mine likes to say "I want one button that says 'Do what I want,' and I want it to work."
To be fair, they're not actually suing their plaintiff. They're "agressively defending" themselves from a lawsuit HE brought against the iPod lawyers. They're also asking for legal fees if he loses, which is not uncommon to ask for.
Check the letter. The entire time he's talking about the terrible things being done to him by the iPod Lawyer's defense team.
He's not talking about a document format monoculture, he's talking about an application monoculture. Sure, document format monocultures come with their own dangers, but they're more like transmission mediums than points of failure. It's like the difference between sharing someone's language and sharing their DNA.
Viruses and other nasties generally rely upon faults in program implementation to infect and wreak havoc. Generally speaking, document formats are without fundamental flaws to exploit. And if they did have them, the format would be quickly revised.
TCP/IP is also a monoculture, but as a standard and a medium it's solid enough that there are few fundamental exploits, and those few have been known for many many years. Now if every router in the world were the same model Cisco, we'd have a monoculture again and we'd be all screwed.
The defense is that malicious authors shouldn't know what the recipient application will be. Say your virus spreads by infecting IM clients. Maybe you get lucky and bump into an AOL AIM client on the other end. Or maybe you bump into AIM on WinCE. Or you get Trillian, GAIM, PSI via a gateway, someone's cellphone, a custom chatbot, AIM over IE, or a million other applications, and you just can't infect them all. Or maybe you're an e-mail worm. You can infect outlook on windows, but how do you know you're not going to find yourself in Kmail, Thunderbird, TheBat, Pegasus Mail, Netscape mail, Pine, Elm, OSXMail, Evolution, Eudora, Gmail, Incredimail, Popcorn, Polarbar, etc. One of these may have the vulnerability you're looking for, but all of the rest won't.
And if a virus is infecting 10% of the computers in your office, instead of 100%, a whole lot more work will get done.
I'd add in a few basic skills to consider someone computer literate.
Program agnosticism: They should know roughly how chat programs work. This doesn't mean AIM, this means that they know enough that they can walk up to any chat system and make it do useful things. Same thing for e-mail clients. Same thing for Browsers. You should be able to give them a laptop loaded up with Windows or Knoppix or SkyOS, and they should be able to quickly muddle their way over to myspace.com.
Hardware knowledge: This is your power supply. When it breaks, things tend to smoke. This is a hard drive. When it breaks, it makes a "click click click Screeeeech!" noise. This is your graphics card. Also known as the hole you'll be pouring your money into for the rest of your life. I'm not saying everyone should have memorised the jumper settings on their motherboard. But they shouldn't be afraid to open the thing up and look or make changes.
Some Scripting: I don't care what scripting language. I don't care if you're talking Perl, Word macros, applescript, AutoHotKey, a command line script, an e-mail filter, or Java. If they can write things in a scripting language, even a completely visual handholding one, they're good. You don't need to fully program or compile. You don't even need to be that great at it. You just need to be able to think about the problem in terms of "how do I tell this computer how to do something."
At my company, the entire system is run by a benevolent AI known only as ALICE. If you visit any porn sites, ALICE will have you run out the building. If you start going to sites you normally don't, ALICE will get suspicious and have you run out the building. If you stop going to sites you normally do, or start getting some real work done, ALICE will get suspicious and have you run out the building.
If you want software installed, you have to ask her directly for it.
However, there is only one microphone terminal to access Alice. First you have to go into the basement vault, which is locked behind two keys which are 10 feet apart and have to be turned simultaneously. Thermal scanning ensures that only one person is in the room at any given time. Once you're through the door, you'll meet an old man by the name of Razael. Trust nothing this man tells you, but gain his confidence at all costs. After the swamp of misery, you'll find the server closet hidden in a disused lavatory. It's the disused lavatory with 5' thick reinforced steel and concrete walls. That's when the trouble starts.
There you will find an a NeXT cube and a Sparc station. Be warned, these are both cooled by Nitroglycerin, a highly volitile liquid explosive. You must synchronize the "keymaster" file on these two machines within 20 seconds using nothing more than an Appletalk network. Failure to succeed in this time frame will warm the Nitroglycerin enough to trigger a reaction that, when combined with the ball bearings and shards of glass stuffed in the machine, would be most unpleasant.
The keymaster file gets you as far as the login prompt on the mainframe. But if you want to talk to Alice you need the second layer password, that of the Lowest access User, or LUser. Only Razael knows that password. Once he has input it, immediately kill him. Don't worry, we have more. No, I'm not at liberty to explain that last sentence.
Be very careful with ALICE. She gets grumpy sometimes and is known to take things the wrong way. Once you have LUser access, just plug your microphone in and carefully ask ALICE for whatever it is that you need. You did bring a serial microphone with you, didn't you?
I remember back during the DVD John DeCess trial the lawyers were having a field day describing to the press the amount of damage he may have done. They bandied about numbers in the ten figures and above. And how this facilitates organized crime.
However, bootleg DVD's were on sale on the streets of NY long before the encryption was cracked. How? Simple. They just made a bitwise copy. They copied everything, copyprotection included, so it ran perfectly fine.
If nothing else, DeCss was just there to ensure that device manufacturers paid their fees. I assume HDMI is there for a similar reason.
480p is safe to assume for the Wii. NoJ has said they won't be getting into the HD wars, and it would be catastrophic for their system to try to push 720p volumes of pixels at it's power level. Better to compete while rendering fewer dots per pass.
1080p is the highest the PS3 will support. But from what I've heard high-def support isn't required for PS3 developers as it is for X360 developers. Expect to see a lot of PS3 games shipping with 720p as their max resolution (and rightfully so, it's a pretty good balance between resolution and effects-per-pixel).
The X360 is 1080i max.
To answer the grandparent poster, the PS3 was sold as the next movie platform for high-def televisions. Now it is getting slammed because the low-end won't support the image encryption standard Sony (and others) have forced onto us, making it potentially not a movie platform at all.
The Wii makes no pretention to High-def gaming, while the X360 is flagrantly about it while avoiding the movie debate. The PS3 on the other hand is the full deal, hundreds more than the competition, yet the part that may set it apart from the crowd is the part that simply may cease to work on a Hollywood whim.
It's not a question of whether HDMI is important or isn't. It's a question of achieving the standards set forth in your propoganda. Nintendo never said it had the most powerful console out there, it said it had a "powerful enough" gaming system with a nifty controller and a library of backcatalog games. Microsoft never said the 360 was a movie player, but rather an amazing Xbox Live delivery vehicle that had some solid gameplaying power and high-def graphics. Sony, however, always said the PS3 was going to be a movie box. But without HDMI (or HDMI upgradability), that could end at any moment. It's not important to Nintendo because they aren't selling based upon that. Sony is.
I have to agree that the fact that parent is modded 'Insightful' rather than 'Funny' proves conclusively that the moderation here is worse than nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
"Please, stop pointing out that while we brag about how much we love open source software, most of our exciting free applications are only available for Windows!"
At the risk of restarting this flame war, why would google make software for Linux? A lot of their stuff, like Google Earth, has no clear revenue stream for them on windows either. And hitting 93% of users is a lot more tempting than going for 3%.
Google is basically responsible for Firefox's income stream. I'd argue that does more for Linux than any other non-linux company out there.
So if they started in 2002, they've been going for 4 years. 4 years at 70 million dollars is 17.5 million dollars per year.
Assuming a 50% marketing, promotion, and etc cost, that leaves 8.75 million for staff and development. Assuming a generous 100,000 per year compensation package and 100,000 in per-employee support costs (office space, etc), that's a full-time staff of 44 developers.
44 developers, working full time, for 4 years. With a full marketing budget for a product that doesn't exist. Assume a 50/50 split between hardware and software, that's 22 people making the console and 22 people programming the interface, including artists.
70 million really should have been enough. Can you say "scam?"
Better question...
Why hide an argument that something is benign unless you don't want people to have a chance to refute it?
That's like claiming state security before secretly claiming you had nothing to do with something.
If you had nothing to do with it, you should be able to say that publically.
It's grade inflation. Back in my day we honored inventive inventors. Now you just have to be an innovative inventor. Soon we'll be honoring just innovative innovators. Then improving improvers. incrementing incrementers. maintaining maintainers. standard standardizers. imperfect imperfectors.
Then you get dogs and cats living together, human sacrifice - mass hysteria. Hysterical hysteria.
Tech sites are to report all Google-related news, even in situations like these, where this Dell/Google alliance has apparently just gone from beta to stable.
Anything from Google going out of beta is news.
Having lived in the Silicon Valley, I'd add a lack of anything better to do.
Seriously. The night life in the valley consists of maybe club paradise, the Edge, a few comedy clubs here and there, and the VERY occasional bar. Which lends itself to people staying at home, tinkering with their computers, reading, and watching an unfortunate amount of television.
People have a lot of freakish hobbies in the valley, mostly stemming from having nothing to do. People talk about starting their own companies, then do it, largely out of having nothing to do. They weld jet engines to the backs of cars, make networks of AI chatbots, reprogram furbies to say dirty things because it's more interesting than going to golfland.
Out here in Boston (where I live now) there is no shortage of great minds, great ideas, and people who say "I should have done that when I had the chance." There is just so much going on here, though, so much social competition, that you can't do it. You need to have at least a masters, a full-time relationship or two, and four hobbies, all of which must be social. The average person doesn't have nearly as much time to develop a pet project into a full business.
And so less gets made out here. Less crazy ideas get out of people's heads and are given a real chance to prove themselves. When they do, MIT has great financers. But if you're not making carbonated ice cream as a senior thesis, chances are you're just not going to finish your great idea.
No one gives money to someone who hasn't crashed at least 2 previous ventures.
2 out of 3 VC's would disagree with this statement.
Ever notice how people who want to buy a cellphone keep complaining that they can't just get a bloody phone? Lots of people don't want a digicam/game/text/browsing/fishing rod/floor wax device, they want an f'ing phone.
And now nokia is marketing "multimedia computers," which to me means a computer whose marketing department is trapped in 1992. Could they be any more out of touch with the market? Is this why they put the cartridge slot under the battery in the NGage?
Openign their browser... very cool. No longer selling phones... very dumb. I'll stick with my Treo, thank you, which happens to actually be a multimedia computer. And the Ericson which is just a phone. For when I need to, you know call people.
You might need to hit a few computer equpment flea markets, but you should be able to get a pair of bidirectional high-gain narrow focus antennas, and set them up with a line-of-site to a friend (or a craigslist friend) a mile away who has DSL.
The lag would be bad for gaming, but for surfing or downloading large files the system would work great. Have them pay the ISP a little bit more for twice the bandwidth, split the bill, and you're golden.
Of course, this is something I've done at a friend's ISP and the ping times were low / the falloff wasn't great. But still, with carefully aimed directional antennas you can get some great signal.
I do have to say, whoever approved that concept needs a solid kick. Mario Sunshine was an amazing game, and there was a lot of fun things to do once you got through the boring bit where you had to clean up the world. It's like making an amazingly kinetic bedbugs eyetoy game, but first you have to make the bed and fold the sheets for two hours.
I mean, really, cleaning up graffiti? Graffiti? Couldn't they come up with a concept that didn't sound like a punishment? What's next, "Mario Broccoli in the world of taking out the garbage and brushing your teeth for the full three minutes?"
Not to be too abrupt, but grandparent is right. In gamer circles and game development circles when you refer to 1st party, 2nd party, and 3rd party, you're talking about the console manufacturer's internal studios, the console manufacturer's owned studios, and studios which are independent. This has been standard nomclemature since Activision started.
If you're referring to the consumer, you generally say the consumer or (if you're not in marketing) the player. But really, the relationship is quite complicated.
For example, as a 3rd party developer, we actually sell our work to a 3rd party publisher. Who is a 2nd party to a different 3rd party publisher, who will probably handle the actual distribution this time. Who needs 1st party approval to sell it into the distribution chain. Who sells to the individual stores. Who sells it to consumers. In this case, under your definition if we're the 1st party, the consumer is actually the 6th party down the line.
So yes, in common usage 1st party developer is the console manufacturer, 2nd parties are the studios they own, and 3rd parties are independents. Wikipedia is correct.
"Not only are we teaching our students math, science, literature, and music, but we're also giving them experience with them the American legal system by inducing them to sue the F%$# out of us."
True Story.
A friend of mine was looking for an original copy of Star Wars on DVD for a movie night. After looking around for a long time, he finally found someone selling a custom version of the trilogy. These are mastered from the lazerdisks, and have been remixed to match the originals as closely as possible. The audio had been re-edited with the original effects, title, etc. They also included four disks worth of bonus material collected from the LD's, VHS editions, Re-releases, TV interviews, holiday edition, etc.
In short, they sold him the definitive box set that Lucas wouldn't*. The customer support was great. The vid and audio quality was excellent. The extras and menus were nicely polished. And of course none of the people who actually produced or worked on the movie got any money at all.
*Rumor has it that at the end of 2006, Lucas will be selling a box set of the hexagy, that includes the revised revised special editions plus the original versions of the films as they appeared in theaters. This is great, and would be considered the definitive archival set, except that he's also planning a revised revised revised "definitive" edition on blu-ray for 2007. And after that definitive, final, this-is-really-it edition, they're working on a 3D version. Sigh.
As much as everyone here loves to create their own programs and websites, for professional jobs, it must be known that those that create the software should NOT be responsible for designing the interface.
While this may be true in some sense, things will still rely heavily upon implementation architecture. Good user interface is NOT about a pretty front end, but about a logical hierarchical control layout and a minimalist featureset. On a PC, a highly usable program should be possible without a single piece of art. The programmer should work with, not for, the designer and artist to create a great interface.
Really, one of the key parts of a great user interface is sending people home. Figure out the bare minimum of what you need, implement that in the most straightforward logical fashion, and go home to your wife / husband / slashdot. It will still have a learning curve for people who aren't working on it all day every day (like the developers), but it will be far more comprehensible than the average "let's pack every feature in" mess.
As a tech artist friend of mine likes to say "I want one button that says 'Do what I want,' and I want it to work."
To be fair, they're not actually suing their plaintiff. They're "agressively defending" themselves from a lawsuit HE brought against the iPod lawyers. They're also asking for legal fees if he loses, which is not uncommon to ask for.
Check the letter. The entire time he's talking about the terrible things being done to him by the iPod Lawyer's defense team.
Next Generation reports on Sony's hopes that it will be able to prevent the resale of PS3 games.
They're going to succeed admirably. You can't resell something that nobody's buying.
He's not talking about a document format monoculture, he's talking about an application monoculture. Sure, document format monocultures come with their own dangers, but they're more like transmission mediums than points of failure. It's like the difference between sharing someone's language and sharing their DNA.
Viruses and other nasties generally rely upon faults in program implementation to infect and wreak havoc. Generally speaking, document formats are without fundamental flaws to exploit. And if they did have them, the format would be quickly revised.
TCP/IP is also a monoculture, but as a standard and a medium it's solid enough that there are few fundamental exploits, and those few have been known for many many years. Now if every router in the world were the same model Cisco, we'd have a monoculture again and we'd be all screwed.
The defense is that malicious authors shouldn't know what the recipient application will be. Say your virus spreads by infecting IM clients. Maybe you get lucky and bump into an AOL AIM client on the other end. Or maybe you bump into AIM on WinCE. Or you get Trillian, GAIM, PSI via a gateway, someone's cellphone, a custom chatbot, AIM over IE, or a million other applications, and you just can't infect them all. Or maybe you're an e-mail worm. You can infect outlook on windows, but how do you know you're not going to find yourself in Kmail, Thunderbird, TheBat, Pegasus Mail, Netscape mail, Pine, Elm, OSXMail, Evolution, Eudora, Gmail, Incredimail, Popcorn, Polarbar, etc. One of these may have the vulnerability you're looking for, but all of the rest won't.
And if a virus is infecting 10% of the computers in your office, instead of 100%, a whole lot more work will get done.
Hi! I have a helpful link for you.
I'd add in a few basic skills to consider someone computer literate.
Program agnosticism: They should know roughly how chat programs work. This doesn't mean AIM, this means that they know enough that they can walk up to any chat system and make it do useful things. Same thing for e-mail clients. Same thing for Browsers. You should be able to give them a laptop loaded up with Windows or Knoppix or SkyOS, and they should be able to quickly muddle their way over to myspace.com.
Hardware knowledge: This is your power supply. When it breaks, things tend to smoke. This is a hard drive. When it breaks, it makes a "click click click Screeeeech!" noise. This is your graphics card. Also known as the hole you'll be pouring your money into for the rest of your life. I'm not saying everyone should have memorised the jumper settings on their motherboard. But they shouldn't be afraid to open the thing up and look or make changes.
Some Scripting: I don't care what scripting language. I don't care if you're talking Perl, Word macros, applescript, AutoHotKey, a command line script, an e-mail filter, or Java. If they can write things in a scripting language, even a completely visual handholding one, they're good. You don't need to fully program or compile. You don't even need to be that great at it. You just need to be able to think about the problem in terms of "how do I tell this computer how to do something."
You kids and your unsecured computer systems.
At my company, the entire system is run by a benevolent AI known only as ALICE. If you visit any porn sites, ALICE will have you run out the building. If you start going to sites you normally don't, ALICE will get suspicious and have you run out the building. If you stop going to sites you normally do, or start getting some real work done, ALICE will get suspicious and have you run out the building.
If you want software installed, you have to ask her directly for it.
However, there is only one microphone terminal to access Alice. First you have to go into the basement vault, which is locked behind two keys which are 10 feet apart and have to be turned simultaneously. Thermal scanning ensures that only one person is in the room at any given time. Once you're through the door, you'll meet an old man by the name of Razael. Trust nothing this man tells you, but gain his confidence at all costs. After the swamp of misery, you'll find the server closet hidden in a disused lavatory. It's the disused lavatory with 5' thick reinforced steel and concrete walls. That's when the trouble starts.
There you will find an a NeXT cube and a Sparc station. Be warned, these are both cooled by Nitroglycerin, a highly volitile liquid explosive. You must synchronize the "keymaster" file on these two machines within 20 seconds using nothing more than an Appletalk network. Failure to succeed in this time frame will warm the Nitroglycerin enough to trigger a reaction that, when combined with the ball bearings and shards of glass stuffed in the machine, would be most unpleasant.
The keymaster file gets you as far as the login prompt on the mainframe. But if you want to talk to Alice you need the second layer password, that of the Lowest access User, or LUser. Only Razael knows that password. Once he has input it, immediately kill him. Don't worry, we have more. No, I'm not at liberty to explain that last sentence.
Be very careful with ALICE. She gets grumpy sometimes and is known to take things the wrong way. Once you have LUser access, just plug your microphone in and carefully ask ALICE for whatever it is that you need. You did bring a serial microphone with you, didn't you?
No? Oh dear, back to square one.
I remember back during the DVD John DeCess trial the lawyers were having a field day describing to the press the amount of damage he may have done. They bandied about numbers in the ten figures and above. And how this facilitates organized crime.
However, bootleg DVD's were on sale on the streets of NY long before the encryption was cracked. How? Simple. They just made a bitwise copy. They copied everything, copyprotection included, so it ran perfectly fine.
If nothing else, DeCss was just there to ensure that device manufacturers paid their fees. I assume HDMI is there for a similar reason.
480p is safe to assume for the Wii. NoJ has said they won't be getting into the HD wars, and it would be catastrophic for their system to try to push 720p volumes of pixels at it's power level. Better to compete while rendering fewer dots per pass.
1080p is the highest the PS3 will support. But from what I've heard high-def support isn't required for PS3 developers as it is for X360 developers. Expect to see a lot of PS3 games shipping with 720p as their max resolution (and rightfully so, it's a pretty good balance between resolution and effects-per-pixel).
The X360 is 1080i max.
To answer the grandparent poster, the PS3 was sold as the next movie platform for high-def televisions. Now it is getting slammed because the low-end won't support the image encryption standard Sony (and others) have forced onto us, making it potentially not a movie platform at all.
The Wii makes no pretention to High-def gaming, while the X360 is flagrantly about it while avoiding the movie debate. The PS3 on the other hand is the full deal, hundreds more than the competition, yet the part that may set it apart from the crowd is the part that simply may cease to work on a Hollywood whim.
It's not a question of whether HDMI is important or isn't. It's a question of achieving the standards set forth in your propoganda. Nintendo never said it had the most powerful console out there, it said it had a "powerful enough" gaming system with a nifty controller and a library of backcatalog games. Microsoft never said the 360 was a movie player, but rather an amazing Xbox Live delivery vehicle that had some solid gameplaying power and high-def graphics. Sony, however, always said the PS3 was going to be a movie box. But without HDMI (or HDMI upgradability), that could end at any moment. It's not important to Nintendo because they aren't selling based upon that. Sony is.
I don't forsee a rash of bloggers rushing out to crib chunks of Moby Dick
Did any of the other men here just cringe and cover themselves?
I have to agree that the fact that parent is modded 'Insightful' rather than 'Funny' proves conclusively that the moderation here is worse than nothing.
Or try a Remailer. Relatively safe, pretty anonymous. You wont' be able to hear back from them through most remailser, but some less secure ones will.
Another alternative includes free e-mail accounts logged into through public terminals.
BTW, nice job posting as Anonymous Coward.