I support your opinion, but I'd like to add a different perspective
By 15, one can assume that most children are responsible and intellegent enough to remain unattended and not get 'into trouble'. But, that assumption only applies when the child is well aware of the dangers they're facing. The internet is not TV, and parents shouldn't assume that it is. The internet is a collaboration vector where bad people can talk to your children. Some are real perverts and some are worse. You have to educate them! Give them the tools to know the dangers of surfing the internet. Hell, I remember being in high school 10 years ago and being taught by our librarian on what not to do in chat forums, etc..
Maybe these people really don't know that meeting some guy at a diner, coffee shop, mall, hotel can be a pretty stupid idea no matter what. If I was a parent, i'd tell them if they ever want to meet anyone online that they: A. Allow me to meet them at the same time. I don't really want to enforce standards on my child's association as long as it isn't a serious disruption. If the kid told a peophile that, they'd most likely move along to the next victim. B. Tell them that they have to meet each other during school hours on school campus with lots of people around. It disconnects me from the situation which may be worrying, but it seems like a natural detraction for people with nefarious intentions.
Are there programs in school like intro to computers courses that talk about this type of thing? If it isn't, I don't think the schools are doing their job. If the child was molested because they had used a school computer, you can damn bet the school would've been liable as well. But, if the school took steps to educate the children what NOT to do, then the parent wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Now that brings along the most stark and difficult problem of all. Many parent are throwing their kids on the internet but know absolutely nothing about protecting their children online. Nadda. They say don't talk to strangers, but you can't be so vague on the internet. They're all stangers! Parents should find a good resource on best practices in dealing with their child's online experience. I wouldn't say that blocking is the key. I think teaching your children to be better more savey surfers will go a lot further than any type of technological barrier.
Or, they'll have an on-machine license that'll be checked when a flumotion-nonfree gstreamer stream gets triggered. How they'd handle leaked internet keys is a more interesting problem for them to solve. Maybe its a combination of online 'checkup' once and a while. Who know, maybe they don't have any of that and its just in the good-will of the populace to do the right thing.
I can't see the difference here. The -system driver- crapped out when they tried to access ram over the 32 bit line. What does that at all have to do with application memory environments? If a driver was created for a system that supports > 32 bits of address space, you'd expect every kernel-driver thats compiled for the system to have the exact same support. If the driver runs in user space, its up to the OS to NOT assign it ram in the > 32bit space. There's no better way to look at it. If its userspace, its probably the kernels fault. If its in kernel space, its probably the drivers fault.
But, what it definitely isn't is a segmentation point between PC's and MAC's, which is a distinction that has nothing to do with anything.
1. You, the engineer needed to buy two tools to do the same job. 2. Somewhere in a factory far far away, someone needed to develop two molds, one for the metric set, one for the imperial set and all the other overhead involved with selling two different products.
I agree the most Americans wouldn't want to learn something new and would rather begrudge the rest of the world (as per the norm) by doing things your own way. Think of yourselves as the Sony of countries. You only inter operate when its in your best interest.
Although it definitely is possible to capture this amount of data, the -average- consumer won't be able to utilize it. And don't forget that the best way to crunch the data down for disk access is to encode it in runtime. So the real requirement for hi-def capture is probably along the lines of a 4 x striped array with hardware codec encoder that supports 1920x1080.
This is all feasible, but its a solution for the commercial pirates, not ordinary people. Plus, there have already been 'HDMI decoder' breakouts that were available a while back. As long as HDMI is performed by 'a chip', some enterprising hacker is going to start ripping those chips out of of cheap HDMI receivers to make pass through adapters which are sold to pirates that could afford this costly endeavor.
Oh and when you're capturing, unless you have a DVI capture card (do these exist?), you'll need to convert the signal to analog. In which case, you'd probably want to consider oversampling by 2x just to make sure you got the right frame timing which would double the bit rate requirements.
That was my exact point, that this 'game profile' would only be able to access certain directories/registery entries in order to keep state/saves/patches, and the rest should be explicitly blocked.
This is effectively a chroot, but since the Windows API has no concept of CHROOT, they'd need to clean up a whole bunch of their process/user access restrictions at the same time.
No, you're just not paying attention. The artical's author was talking about downloading and installing the game requires a lot more hoops to just through in order to function. He never mentions that his applications needed any type of secret sauce thats being held back from him. Why don't you try reading the artical again.
If Microsoft was really paranoid about Vista security, they'd make install profiles that could be completely sandboxed into their own zone diasabling everything but needed funations. For games, allow network TCP/UDP sockets, specific pre-determined disk folders for saves, specific pre-determined registry locations, and directx*. Thats it. The game shouldn't be allowed access to my user files, system files, IE configuration, modify my startup files, call any non-whitelisted API entry, installation ActiveX controls, or any other embedded-into-system file.
Once they make this 'Windows Game Profile 1.0' and they say you can do X, Y, and Z, but not A, B and C, we'll be in a lot better place. It'll mean that games that meet the "Windows Game Profile 1.0" spec don't need to be tested against the riggors of installation, it'll just mean that during runtime, the application binaries are limited in what the system allows it to perform. All in all, this would mean a more stable OS, and a simpler install. The tradeoff is that developers will be restricted from using API's that they probably shouldn't be using anyways. (Anyone not following the spec/profile could just release games as they do today).
Of course, that would mean that Microsoft would have an immutable, simple, straight-forward API to implement games on Windows. Could they not implement this because it means that -alternative- Windows implementations (Wine) would have too easy of a time porting?
Can't say much about the game, but how do they -peg- RL currency to the entropia currency? If the US dollar goes up 10% does that mean that the developers all of a sudden are 10% less profitable? Or, is there a system in the game to handle currency volitility? Can one simply hold entropia dollars then sell them off when the dollar is high? Is there a transaction penalty? Ah, too many questions, too little time.
"B) Don't support the formats they know will be wanted by the users"
I think you're dreaming if there are any more than a pittance of users that are thinking: "I need my Hi-Def movies played on my computer and I'll only buy the OS that supports it."
Think about the 'market' for HiDef Computer users. You have
1. Very very small market of people that use computers directly as home theatre devices (I do this for web browsing/games)
2. Very very small market of users that would spend a few hundred dollars more to view HiDef DVD's on their computer monitors (When auto-upscaled DVD's do the job nicely already)
Make no mistake, Microsoft chose this path. They weren't told to spend untold millions of dollars to change their entire rendering and display systems (which isn't even finished yet) just to bow down to the media giants. Well, that is unless they're stupid or gutless, both of which Microsoft isn't.
The only annoyance I've ever had with Win2k drivers on brand new hardware is that ATI stopped linking the newest Catalyst drivers on their Win2k page, but if you go to the XP page, the drivers work great anyways. WDM made the driver boundary between supporting XP and 2k almost brain dead except for the device profiles that didn't exist in 2000 (bluetooth, etc..).
Sadly, the OS was almost completely ignored as a consumer desktop in the ramp up to XP which is a real shame because I still think its the best Windows version they've ever released.
And of course you fall into the unassuming group number three that holds the high candle to liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of the higher good... but thats completely off topic.
I don't think your system really counts for beans, but just use your grouping scheme, I'll make some revisions:
1. Windows BOFH - They hate Windows XP because is has tons of bugs, bloated, annoying spyware, and things that don't work right. They hate windows because frankly windows can be a very unpleasant experience. Sadly, many of the people in this group shouldn't be here at all. A large group of these people will always gripe about current OS, or current PC, or anything else. Its not because they really hate it; they only comment on the negatives in things. Since Windows has so many annoyances, its easier to pick on it than your car, house, neighbors, toaster oven, etc...
2. Evangelicals - Well, you consider group #2 right above primate. I can't really comment on those terms. There are very zealous people who write about GNU things as the only choice and maybe a few are blinded by their own zeal, but for the most part, they search for alternatives in the open source space and stay away from locked in solutions. Think of these guys as the libertarians of software.
3. Programmers - Since I am a programmer and have many programmer friends, I can tell you that this definitely doesn't happen. I talk about solutions to frank, and he says do it in Linux. John says it can be done so easily in Windows, and Josephine finds it infinitely better in Java. We never agree on anything. The only difference is because actually get paid to work on these technologies, we have to be literate in them. The programmers that have a one-OS mentality usually suffer from another apathy disease wherein they just "Do my very specific job and continue doing it till the day I die and ignore any technology that comes out unless it means being unemployed in which case I'll learn that technology".
4. ADRA - Paid Java developer who uses Windows 2000 for games and Linux for everything else. Our first date would be a long walk on the beach followed by GNU for dinner.
Don't worry about it. The cell phone's transmitter won't kill you. Its the cell tower broadcasting to every man, woman, and child. That's why there isn't a correlation =)
"only Vista is going to have DirectX 10. Gamers will buy it eventually." Or revolt. I've bought a Wii, so Microsoft and their ever more pointless (to me) OS can just go to hell =)
Just to chime in here, airlines that have spare cargo room in their planes actually ship cargo that aren't from the passengers. You could think of them like those dedicated UPS / Fedex / etc.. planes that also shipping meat bags.
To the originator of the 747 efficiency debate, although the 747 at maximum capacity can still spew a lot of nasty wasteage when they're filled filled to capacity, they're almost always sitting near the 100% threshold. Airlines spend millions of dollars to make sure their planes get the highest profit/cost ratios and frankly, that correlates with their waste expenditures.
Now, you're a family man, 2 kids and wifie. You drive your big auto from Seattle to New York. According to your own admission, the car is at maximum capacity. No? Well we'd better ask around to share the car with some of the jones' down the street or maybe in the next city to fill up the car. What? You'd never do that, ever? What does that say about the test then? The best synthetic situation in the world is fine until you actually APPLY it to the real world.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not very partial to QT, but the title of the article is horribly named. The title implies that the body encompases a general approach to cross-platform development. It doesn't. The article is about "Cross-platform QT development". More importantly, no alternatives are mentioned. The entire development piece is about using QT based technologies to tackel the cross-platform problem. All of this is well and great, but don't sell the article as -the- solution when its a very specific howto implement X for problem Y.
-- The Lineup -- Loved the wait in line for 8 hours... really.. the rain, not so much. Seeing all the poor parents with their kids show up an hour before openning, even more depressing. Getting my sweety hands on the Wii, priceless.
The EB I got my console at was rather isolated so I didn't expect a ton of people to show up. Even so, over 300% of the crowd that wanted it were turned away.
The other problem with such a small store was games. Every twilight princess had been pre-oredered. Guess what, they were taking pre-orders for the games up to the night before. Since pre-ordering for the console was over months ago, I didn't even consider that the games would be pre-orderable up to last bloody night. The really sad part of this whole thing is there are probably a large number of people who pre-ordered the games and have no console and a few people like me who have the console but can't play the choice games since they were all pre-ordered. So I'm forced to hunt them down at other stores when stock comes in. That annoyance rests squarely on EB in my mind. Don't allow pre-orders of games unless they have a system pre-order you fcking tools!
Everyone in line was great, and I can't praise them enough for making the wait tolerable and at times a lot of fun.
-- The Wii -- Firstly, the controllers are a lot smaller than I expected. There was no problem in them fitting my gigantic hands though, so no problems there. I have noticed that the sensing of the remotes isn't as good as it could be. I'm not sure if this is realted to my enormous television (50") or maybe the placement of the sensor bar, but I did notice the system just plain act wierd once and a while. I hope a system patch will eventually come out to deal with the issue. It wasn't bad enough to stop playing, it just wasn't always consistent.
The system setup was fun and interesting. Wi-Fi was a snap, the setup of the rest was almost brain-dead. There were two system updates on launch. They took around 3-min a piece on my reletively fast broadband.
The Weather and News channels were dead. The pictures channel was empty since I didn't have an SD card (why no out-of-box support for USB media?). The shopping channel had games, but I decided to hold off getting into them until I had seen the rest of the system.
I had a few friends over when I got it so the first thing we did was set up all their Mii's (character avatars). Everyone enjoyed this function and I'm glad it was included. My other friend bought a Wii, so maybe we'll do a Mii parade... Seriously Nintendo, there must be something better that you could do with that. How about an embedded sims or something of the sort? Btw: There is the equivalent of friend codes in the Wii, just in case you misses the memo.
-- Wii Sports -- I jumped into Wii Sports next to see how to use the controls in a gaming situation. I tried each game in turn to get a feel for them all. The controls were definitly hard to get used to the first while. I was doing quite poorly since the wii-mote's behaviour sometimes felt erratic in how it recognized things. After a while, I understood how to use the controls well enough to get through most of the games, and have a lot more fun. Tennis is really fun. I got a little (physically) tired playing it after a while. Baseball was ok. It was simple and low impact fatigue. Bowling is a sport I hate in real life and it hasn't changed here. Golf was pretty fun and not very fatigueing. It had a lot more problems with my wii-motes though. I tried and tried to find the 'right' way of doing it, but what I did perfectly right one time would be perfectly wrong the next. Frustrating at times, but still a fun game. Boxing was really fun to play, makes good use of both controllers, but man does it tire me out. Jab Jab Jab Swing Miss Block Dodge!! ACK There are a few training / testing modes in the game as well. This seems right out of brain age, but for workouts. I can say that this sports title was fun to play if a little fatiguing at times. I enjoyd it because a little extra fitness in my daily nerd life could never hurt.
Anyways, I hope that gives some insights into what you can expect out of the Wii whenever you get yours.
There -is- a market for HD formats. They're technophiles that have more money than common sense. Really, if the new formats were identical in cost to DVDs with identical copyright restrictions and 100% compatible across the board, they'd become the natural migration path of the home entertainment system. Even if it costed a little more most would at least give it a second thought.
I don't know about any of you, but I (who knows many many geeks) don't know a single person who is even concidering Hidef DVD's. Most could care less. Think about it this way, how many of your peers are drooling over HD formats (or already bought in) vs. how many of your friends download inferior-than-dvd quality movies off the internet. Quality isn't everything if the cost doesn't justify the expense. It just seems that instead of slashing profits to get adoption, manufacturers and studios would rather make healthy profits off the pathetic number of units they do ship. Hidef DVD's are turning into the new DVD-Audio, the latest buzz word to spend more on overpriced hardware. Get over it.
I never saw Microsoft fan-boys before I visited the blog. Funny how every comment was almost exactly like "Thanks, thats great!" with only one guy bringing up any kind of discussion. I guess its one of the big differences between open communities and broadcast communities. I use the term broadcast to refer to closed box discussions performed inside corp vs. the open discussion of all developers, customers, onlookers, etc..
Not trying to start a flame here, but it was strange seeing people who -like- Microsoft!
Ah, sweet memories. I remeber spending quite some time hacking the Deep freeze demo at comdex years ago (think win95 timeframe?). I did it, but it took a very long time, and it definitly wasn't trivial for a geek.
I found it a good tool, but like everything else it isn't invulnerable to different attack vectors (physical). I'd recomend this in combination with other solutions like off-computer imaging solutions for times when the tool is compromized and firewalls just because you should always use 'physical' protection.
When Oracle says they're missing an OS, I don't see Oracle 'making' the OS. I see Oracle buying Novell, or Redhat, or maybe one of the more marginal linux distros. Who actually believes that Oracle would build an OS from 'the ground up' when they can buy the expertise from an entrenched distro...
4. You probably can be sued for hosting the content. But, Google may be able to deny penalty by declaring that they didn't know the content was copyrighted. I don't know if a service like google can declare common carrier for things like this, but it seems the perfect legal protection if they could. Once notified of the infringement, they could be liable for the damages incured afterwards.
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I support your opinion, but I'd like to add a different perspective
By 15, one can assume that most children are responsible and intellegent enough to remain unattended and not get 'into trouble'. But, that assumption only applies when the child is well aware of the dangers they're facing. The internet is not TV, and parents shouldn't assume that it is. The internet is a collaboration vector where bad people can talk to your children. Some are real perverts and some are worse. You have to educate them! Give them the tools to know the dangers of surfing the internet. Hell, I remember being in high school 10 years ago and being taught by our librarian on what not to do in chat forums, etc..
Maybe these people really don't know that meeting some guy at a diner, coffee shop, mall, hotel can be a pretty stupid idea no matter what. If I was a parent, i'd tell them if they ever want to meet anyone online that they:
A. Allow me to meet them at the same time. I don't really want to enforce standards on my child's association as long as it isn't a serious disruption. If the kid told a peophile that, they'd most likely move along to the next victim.
B. Tell them that they have to meet each other during school hours on school campus with lots of people around. It disconnects me from the situation which may be worrying, but it seems like a natural detraction for people with nefarious intentions.
Are there programs in school like intro to computers courses that talk about this type of thing? If it isn't, I don't think the schools are doing their job. If the child was molested because they had used a school computer, you can damn bet the school would've been liable as well. But, if the school took steps to educate the children what NOT to do, then the parent wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Now that brings along the most stark and difficult problem of all. Many parent are throwing their kids on the internet but know absolutely nothing about protecting their children online. Nadda. They say don't talk to strangers, but you can't be so vague on the internet. They're all stangers! Parents should find a good resource on best practices in dealing with their child's online experience. I wouldn't say that blocking is the key. I think teaching your children to be better more savey surfers will go a lot further than any type of technological barrier.
Who cares? If your system of government doesn't work to keep you alive, move to one that does! Whats more important your life or your patriation?
Or, they'll have an on-machine license that'll be checked when a flumotion-nonfree gstreamer stream gets triggered. How they'd handle leaked internet keys is a more interesting problem for them to solve. Maybe its a combination of online 'checkup' once and a while. Who know, maybe they don't have any of that and its just in the good-will of the populace to do the right thing.
I can't see the difference here. The -system driver- crapped out when they tried to access ram over the 32 bit line. What does that at all have to do with application memory environments? If a driver was created for a system that supports > 32 bits of address space, you'd expect every kernel-driver thats compiled for the system to have the exact same support. If the driver runs in user space, its up to the OS to NOT assign it ram in the > 32bit space. There's no better way to look at it. If its userspace, its probably the kernels fault. If its in kernel space, its probably the drivers fault.
But, what it definitely isn't is a segmentation point between PC's and MAC's, which is a distinction that has nothing to do with anything.
You're own example proves the cost.
1. You, the engineer needed to buy two tools to do the same job.
2. Somewhere in a factory far far away, someone needed to develop two molds, one for the metric set, one for the imperial set and all the other overhead involved with selling two different products.
I agree the most Americans wouldn't want to learn something new and would rather begrudge the rest of the world (as per the norm) by doing things your own way. Think of yourselves as the Sony of countries. You only inter operate when its in your best interest.
Although it definitely is possible to capture this amount of data, the -average- consumer won't be able to utilize it. And don't forget that the best way to crunch the data down for disk access is to encode it in runtime. So the real requirement for hi-def capture is probably along the lines of a 4 x striped array with hardware codec encoder that supports 1920x1080.
This is all feasible, but its a solution for the commercial pirates, not ordinary people. Plus, there have already been 'HDMI decoder' breakouts that were available a while back. As long as HDMI is performed by 'a chip', some enterprising hacker is going to start ripping those chips out of of cheap HDMI receivers to make pass through adapters which are sold to pirates that could afford this costly endeavor.
Oh and when you're capturing, unless you have a DVI capture card (do these exist?), you'll need to convert the signal to analog. In which case, you'd probably want to consider oversampling by 2x just to make sure you got the right frame timing which would double the bit rate requirements.
That was my exact point, that this 'game profile' would only be able to access certain directories/registery entries in order to keep state/saves/patches, and the rest should be explicitly blocked.
This is effectively a chroot, but since the Windows API has no concept of CHROOT, they'd need to clean up a whole bunch of their process/user access restrictions at the same time.
No, you're just not paying attention. The artical's author was talking about downloading and installing the game requires a lot more hoops to just through in order to function. He never mentions that his applications needed any type of secret sauce thats being held back from him. Why don't you try reading the artical again.
If Microsoft was really paranoid about Vista security, they'd make install profiles that could be completely sandboxed into their own zone diasabling everything but needed funations. For games, allow network TCP/UDP sockets, specific pre-determined disk folders for saves, specific pre-determined registry locations, and directx*. Thats it. The game shouldn't be allowed access to my user files, system files, IE configuration, modify my startup files, call any non-whitelisted API entry, installation ActiveX controls, or any other embedded-into-system file.
Once they make this 'Windows Game Profile 1.0' and they say you can do X, Y, and Z, but not A, B and C, we'll be in a lot better place.
It'll mean that games that meet the "Windows Game Profile 1.0" spec don't need to be tested against the riggors of installation, it'll just mean that during runtime, the application binaries are limited in what the system allows it to perform. All in all, this would mean a more stable OS, and a simpler install. The tradeoff is that developers will be restricted from using API's that they probably shouldn't be using anyways. (Anyone not following the spec/profile could just release games as they do today).
Of course, that would mean that Microsoft would have an immutable, simple, straight-forward API to implement games on Windows. Could they not implement this because it means that -alternative- Windows implementations (Wine) would have too easy of a time porting?
Can't say much about the game, but how do they -peg- RL currency to the entropia currency? If the US dollar goes up 10% does that mean that the developers all of a sudden are 10% less profitable? Or, is there a system in the game to handle currency volitility? Can one simply hold entropia dollars then sell them off when the dollar is high? Is there a transaction penalty? Ah, too many questions, too little time.
"B) Don't support the formats they know will be wanted by the users"
I think you're dreaming if there are any more than a pittance of users that are thinking: "I need my Hi-Def movies played on my computer and I'll only buy the OS that supports it."
Think about the 'market' for HiDef Computer users. You have
1. Very very small market of people that use computers directly as home theatre devices (I do this for web browsing/games)
2. Very very small market of users that would spend a few hundred dollars more to view HiDef DVD's on their computer monitors (When auto-upscaled DVD's do the job nicely already)
Make no mistake, Microsoft chose this path. They weren't told to spend untold millions of dollars to change their entire rendering and display systems (which isn't even finished yet) just to bow down to the media giants. Well, that is unless they're stupid or gutless, both of which Microsoft isn't.
The only annoyance I've ever had with Win2k drivers on brand new hardware is that ATI stopped linking the newest Catalyst drivers on their Win2k page, but if you go to the XP page, the drivers work great anyways. WDM made the driver boundary between supporting XP and 2k almost brain dead except for the device profiles that didn't exist in 2000 (bluetooth, etc..).
Sadly, the OS was almost completely ignored as a consumer desktop in the ramp up to XP which is a real shame because I still think its the best Windows version they've ever released.
And of course you fall into the unassuming group number three that holds the high candle to liberty, freedom, and the pursuit of the higher good... but thats completely off topic.
I don't think your system really counts for beans, but just use your grouping scheme, I'll make some revisions:
1. Windows BOFH - They hate Windows XP because is has tons of bugs, bloated, annoying spyware, and things that don't work right. They hate windows because frankly windows can be a very unpleasant experience.
Sadly, many of the people in this group shouldn't be here at all. A large group of these people will always gripe about current OS, or current PC, or anything else. Its not because they really hate it; they only comment on the negatives in things. Since Windows has so many annoyances, its easier to pick on it than your car, house, neighbors, toaster oven, etc...
2. Evangelicals - Well, you consider group #2 right above primate. I can't really comment on those terms. There are very zealous people who write about GNU things as the only choice and maybe a few are blinded by their own zeal, but for the most part, they search for alternatives in the open source space and stay away from locked in solutions. Think of these guys as the libertarians of software.
3. Programmers - Since I am a programmer and have many programmer friends, I can tell you that this definitely doesn't happen. I talk about solutions to frank, and he says do it in Linux. John says it can be done so easily in Windows, and Josephine finds it infinitely better in Java. We never agree on anything. The only difference is because actually get paid to work on these technologies, we have to be literate in them. The programmers that have a one-OS mentality usually suffer from another apathy disease wherein they just "Do my very specific job and continue doing it till the day I die and ignore any technology that comes out unless it means being unemployed in which case I'll learn that technology".
4. ADRA - Paid Java developer who uses Windows 2000 for games and Linux for everything else. Our first date would be a long walk on the beach followed by GNU for dinner.
Hello, what about the original NES gun? I really really hate you America!
Don't worry about it. The cell phone's transmitter won't kill you. Its the cell tower broadcasting to every man, woman, and child. That's why there isn't a correlation =)
"only Vista is going to have DirectX 10. Gamers will buy it eventually."
Or revolt. I've bought a Wii, so Microsoft and their ever more pointless (to me) OS can just go to hell =)
Just to chime in here, airlines that have spare cargo room in their planes actually ship cargo that aren't from the passengers. You could think of them like those dedicated UPS / Fedex / etc.. planes that also shipping meat bags.
To the originator of the 747 efficiency debate, although the 747 at maximum capacity can still spew a lot of nasty wasteage when they're filled filled to capacity, they're almost always sitting near the 100% threshold. Airlines spend millions of dollars to make sure their planes get the highest profit/cost ratios and frankly, that correlates with their waste expenditures.
Now, you're a family man, 2 kids and wifie. You drive your big auto from Seattle to New York. According to your own admission, the car is at maximum capacity. No? Well we'd better ask around to share the car with some of the jones' down the street or maybe in the next city to fill up the car. What? You'd never do that, ever? What does that say about the test then? The best synthetic situation in the world is fine until you actually APPLY it to the real world.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm not very partial to QT, but the title of the article is horribly named. The title implies that the body encompases a general approach to cross-platform development. It doesn't. The article is about "Cross-platform QT development". More importantly, no alternatives are mentioned. The entire development piece is about using QT based technologies to tackel the cross-platform problem. All of this is well and great, but don't sell the article as -the- solution when its a very specific howto implement X for problem Y.
-- The Lineup --
Loved the wait in line for 8 hours... really.. the rain, not so much. Seeing all the poor parents with their kids show up an hour before openning, even more depressing. Getting my sweety hands on the Wii, priceless.
The EB I got my console at was rather isolated so I didn't expect a ton of people to show up. Even so, over 300% of the crowd that wanted it were turned away.
The other problem with such a small store was games. Every twilight princess had been pre-oredered. Guess what, they were taking pre-orders for the games up to the night before. Since pre-ordering for the console was over months ago, I didn't even consider that the games would be pre-orderable up to last bloody night. The really sad part of this whole thing is there are probably a large number of people who pre-ordered the games and have no console and a few people like me who have the console but can't play the choice games since they were all pre-ordered. So I'm forced to hunt them down at other stores when stock comes in. That annoyance rests squarely on EB in my mind. Don't allow pre-orders of games unless they have a system pre-order you fcking tools!
Everyone in line was great, and I can't praise them enough for making the wait tolerable and at times a lot of fun.
-- The Wii --
Firstly, the controllers are a lot smaller than I expected. There was no problem in them fitting my gigantic hands though, so no problems there. I have noticed that the sensing of the remotes isn't as good as it could be. I'm not sure if this is realted to my enormous television (50") or maybe the placement of the sensor bar, but I did notice the system just plain act wierd once and a while. I hope a system patch will eventually come out to deal with the issue. It wasn't bad enough to stop playing, it just wasn't always consistent.
The system setup was fun and interesting. Wi-Fi was a snap, the setup of the rest was almost brain-dead. There were two system updates on launch. They took around 3-min a piece on my reletively fast broadband.
The Weather and News channels were dead. The pictures channel was empty since I didn't have an SD card (why no out-of-box support for USB media?). The shopping channel had games, but I decided to hold off getting into them until I had seen the rest of the system.
I had a few friends over when I got it so the first thing we did was set up all their Mii's (character avatars). Everyone enjoyed this function and I'm glad it was included. My other friend bought a Wii, so maybe we'll do a Mii parade... Seriously Nintendo, there must be something better that you could do with that. How about an embedded sims or something of the sort? Btw: There is the equivalent of friend codes in the Wii, just in case you misses the memo.
-- Wii Sports --
I jumped into Wii Sports next to see how to use the controls in a gaming situation. I tried each game in turn to get a feel for them all. The controls were definitly hard to get used to the first while. I was doing quite poorly since the wii-mote's behaviour sometimes felt erratic in how it recognized things. After a while, I understood how to use the controls well enough to get through most of the games, and have a lot more fun.
Tennis is really fun. I got a little (physically) tired playing it after a while.
Baseball was ok. It was simple and low impact fatigue.
Bowling is a sport I hate in real life and it hasn't changed here.
Golf was pretty fun and not very fatigueing. It had a lot more problems with my wii-motes though. I tried and tried to find the 'right' way of doing it, but what I did perfectly right one time would be perfectly wrong the next. Frustrating at times, but still a fun game.
Boxing was really fun to play, makes good use of both controllers, but man does it tire me out. Jab Jab Jab Swing Miss Block Dodge!! ACK
There are a few training / testing modes in the game as well. This seems right out of brain age, but for workouts. I can say that this sports title was fun to play if a little fatiguing at times. I enjoyd it because a little extra fitness in my daily nerd life could never hurt.
Anyways, I hope that gives some insights into what you can expect out of the Wii whenever you get yours.
There -is- a market for HD formats. They're technophiles that have more money than common sense. Really, if the new formats were identical in cost to DVDs with identical copyright restrictions and 100% compatible across the board, they'd become the natural migration path of the home entertainment system. Even if it costed a little more most would at least give it a second thought.
I don't know about any of you, but I (who knows many many geeks) don't know a single person who is even concidering Hidef DVD's. Most could care less. Think about it this way, how many of your peers are drooling over HD formats (or already bought in) vs. how many of your friends download inferior-than-dvd quality movies off the internet. Quality isn't everything if the cost doesn't justify the expense. It just seems that instead of slashing profits to get adoption, manufacturers and studios would rather make healthy profits off the pathetic number of units they do ship. Hidef DVD's are turning into the new DVD-Audio, the latest buzz word to spend more on overpriced hardware. Get over it.
I never saw Microsoft fan-boys before I visited the blog. Funny how every comment was almost exactly like "Thanks, thats great!" with only one guy bringing up any kind of discussion. I guess its one of the big differences between open communities and broadcast communities. I use the term broadcast to refer to closed box discussions performed inside corp vs. the open discussion of all developers, customers, onlookers, etc..
Not trying to start a flame here, but it was strange seeing people who -like- Microsoft!
Yup =)
Ah, sweet memories. I remeber spending quite some time hacking the Deep freeze demo at comdex years ago (think win95 timeframe?). I did it, but it took a very long time, and it definitly wasn't trivial for a geek.
I found it a good tool, but like everything else it isn't invulnerable to different attack vectors (physical). I'd recomend this in combination with other solutions like off-computer imaging solutions for times when the tool is compromized and firewalls just because you should always use 'physical' protection.
When Oracle says they're missing an OS, I don't see Oracle 'making' the OS. I see Oracle buying Novell, or Redhat, or maybe one of the more marginal linux distros. Who actually believes that Oracle would build an OS from 'the ground up' when they can buy the expertise from an entrenched distro...
4. You probably can be sued for hosting the content. But, Google may be able to deny penalty by declaring that they didn't know the content was copyrighted. I don't know if a service like google can declare common carrier for things like this, but it seems the perfect legal protection if they could. Once notified of the infringement, they could be liable for the damages incured afterwards.