Why debate if a well made observation hurts or hinders the industry when it's the industry doing it to itself?!
Because clearly, clearly, if this law is a problem, we should repeal it or, nay, make a NEW law that keeps the industry safe. Yes. Clearly we need government intervention here to keep the number of transistors over time to a safe minimum. Terrorists. This will protect the industry (terrorists!).
Once they're done with this, they can pass a law to prevent gunpowder from igniting unless the user has a license, and save a lot of lives!
Runing./configure or make or make install could cause just as large a problem. Do you read through those scripts before running them?
Running configure and make on a package from a "reputable" source is not the same as opening random documents people send you in an email. Or do you routinely have source packages mailed to you which you blindly build?
I say "reputable" because while, in theory, you could download a source package from, say, sourceforge, that someone had trojaned, there are a number of factors which make this an unlikely vector:
This would be found quickly by users, reported, and removed from sourceforge in short order
There are high odds that, if the piece of software you are using is generally usable and of wide appeal, there are a lot of other people who use it, and the maintainers are well-known (how many big open source projects are done anonymously?)
The user in question would immediately lose all trust; no one would take patches or allow repository/site access to this person again
You'd quickly hear about it on slashdot and other news sites
Yes, this could happen. It might happen. In fact, though a slightly different situation, gnu.org was hacked a few years ago. All the potentially-compromised code was dumped and reevaluated. This was basically a worst-case scenario: a trusted distributor was compromised. Yet they survived.
(As for claims of "well what if it were really well hidden!"... these things don't hide well. It's easy to notice extraneous network traffic and processes. If there was an extensive rootkit hidden in the source, it might be one thing, but the more complicated you get, the less chance you have of portability and success. This is the strength of polyculture.)
Furthermore, buffer overflows could exist in just about any program. There could be one in emacs right now, triggered by reading a file into the buffer. Then it would be "scary.. The fact that a simple text file can cause such a big problem is really sad."
This particular example is rather silly; however even if it were the case for the sake of argument, it's not the same: exploiting a buffer overflow in emacs as a regular user will not give you root access to the system.
In the end it comes down to a lack of trust of Microsoft. A single, opaque source, whose security and design practices have a history of being laughable, little evidence of proactivity on the issue, and no way to verify anything they say. You pay them, they say "trust us!", and yet, there is repeated evidence that there is good reason not to trust them.
10000 people a year. Compare that to an average of about 36000 a year caused by accidental automobile accidents. (You can find other sources if you google.) That's almost 100 people dying per day. Essentially, more than three times as many people are killed by accident by automobiles than are killed intentionally by guns. But you don't hear anyone wanting to ban cars.
I guess people feel in their gut the truthiness behind the necessity of banning guns. Legitimate use, illegal weapons used for crime, alternative weapons? Don't try to confuse the issue with facts.
Don't worry... Microsoft losing DoubleClick just means they have to invent their own technology and get their own customers. This pretty much means that not only will people be forced to watch ads, they'll be crap ads and crash the OS regularly.;-)
Red Hat fanatics are bar none the worst fanboys in my ever-so-humble opinion. Gentoo users are often like rice boys, but they're using the system and I have no beef with them. I'm a Ubuntu user these days, so clearly I have nothing against Ubuntu users (I'm not one of them self-hating types.) But Red Hat users, which I stopped being around 6.1, are clinging desperately to a distribution that doesn't care about them unless they have shitpiles of money. That goes for Fedora, too
Odd... I've never met anyone who was actually fanatical about RedHat. Or even really liked it. It usually comes down to either "we can buy support for it" or "it installs and is hands-off after that." Back when I still used Fedora, I fell into the latter category... tolerating it, because it worked.
I use Gentoo these days, because I was compiling everything by hand anyway. I haven't met any "distro ricers"; I think these days they're mostly a myth, and early stereotype. All of the people I know who use Gentoo use it because of the amazing build toolset and customizability. I can compile everything with "-g" and debug anything on the system through glibc... and see source listings at any stack frame. That's incredibly valuable. Plus, Gentoo is more of a distro-construction kit; if I have to build an "embedded" box, it's still the easiest distro to trim the fat (because it starts with none) yet have access to anything you want. But it's hard, and not for newbies, which is why I think most of the ricers left.
Debian is too political for me.
Ubuntu I have heard nothing but good things about. Drop the debian politics, add an amazing installer and good defaults... at least, according to what I've heard (and no reason to doubt). This is probably the best alternative for people who want an alternative system and don't want to buy Apple hardware. I keep meaning to try this, but I haven't had a reason yet. When I do, I will.
You are welcome to forget! Everyone else does anyway. But Oracle is bad and wrong and supporting Oracle is therefore bad and wrong.
Sadly they also make a solid product. Painful, archaic, requiring a lot of support work, but solid. The alternatives are what: Microsoft (far more evil), and PgSQL (not there yet, but coming along). MSSQL sucks, anyway. There aren't really any other realistic choices.
I totally agree with what you said. However, there is another angle. People are going to mind seeing all of these things in a web browser, and they're going to use firefox and various plugins to get around them. Yes.
But my guess is Microsoft has more insidious plans. (Don't they always?) They control your desktop, remember? Now imagine instead of those ads popping up in the browser you can pick and control, they pop up on your desktop. They become part of the OS, such that you can't remove them without breaking the system (MS has never claimed this before, right?).
Sure, corporate desktop licenses won't have these; high-dollar corporate licenses will be ad-free. Home desktops, however, will. But just use the corporate desktop, you ask? Except that one won't play games... and will only run Microsoft-signed code, or maybe even code signed with a special corporate key you'd have to buy. Expect to see similar ads appear on XBOX Live! as well.
I encourage Microsoft to do this. They should go all-out and control the desktop experience. It should become like television, where consumers are the product, and getting their eyeballs is the goal. Let them play games or type a letter, but make sure those ads appear everywhere.
That way everyone may finally hate it enough to switch.
One of the complaints I had about the PS3 was that, once you bought the cheaper SKU, you're locked into it, unable to "upgrade" it to the more expensive one
I'm pretty sure that was never a complaint, except by people who haven't even read basic press releases. You can go to the store and pick up as big a HDD as you want, slap it into the cheap PS3, and presto. You can also add USB wifi and memcard readers, if you really want. Of course, by the time you buy all of this, it will have cost you just as much as the more expensive PS3, belying the "PS3 is overpriced" mantra, but you can. And you don't have to buy Sony-branded parts, either, unlike the 360, where you have to pay $100 for a 20G Microsoft-branded drive. ($100 will normally buy you a 250G+ drive these days.)
Sony has always been wanting to make the Playstation "more like a computer", and here it pays off... I have the 60G model, and I only have 21G left already. And the console is only 4 months old. Gonna need to upgrade before the year is up, probably.
The XBOX launched almost 2 years after the PS2 (Nov 15 2001 vs Mar 15 2000). It had an off-the-shelf card that rendered more polygons, had onboard AA, etc. It did a lot of these things right out of the box, which the PS2 developers took a bit to figure out.
Now compare, say Black on the PS2 to Halo 1... and a few years later, Halo 2 isn't showing that much improvement. In fact, Black on the PS2 and XBOX are almost indistinguishable. And compare games like God of War 2 to early titles like Evergrace. Criminy.
What does all of this show? First, most obviously, that the PS2 improved a whole lot over its lifetime---enough that it's still comparable to the XBOX. Second, that the XBOX hasn't improved a great deal over its (somewhat shorter) lifetime.
Neither of these conclude anything about the 360 vs the PS3; what does, however, is to look at how the philosophies paid off. Sony said "here's some powerful custom hardware, it may be hard to program at first, but it will pay off later". It did. Microsoft said "here's some hardware you know how to program, what you see is pretty much what you get". The PS2 still has a lot of big name titles coming out throughout its seventh year, while the XBOX has already been EOL'd.
Similarly with the 360 and the PS3---though the PS3 has been released little less than a year later, and the launch titles already matches 2nd-gen 360 games---and some of them in 1080p vs 720p. The 360 is all about "easy, Windows-like platform". The PS3 is all about "here's a system custom-tailored for game development", like the PS2 was. Now, note, a lot of the PS3's "power" is focused around the Cell: things like managing thousands of on-screen entities, doing physics, etc. Some of this helps with graphics: high bandwidth to process and push textures, things move and act smoother, etc. Raw graphic card vs graphics card, I'm not going there, because I don't know---someone else can comment.
But let's compare the Cell. A couple easy things to think about: looking at the F@H stats, the OSX/PPC clients are outputting 7 TFLOPS. The PS3 clients are outputting 564 TFLOPS with 2.6 as many CPUs. If things were "about as powerful", they should be outputting more like... 18-19 TFLOPS. Not two orders of magnitude more.
So, OK, the OSX/PPC boxes are probably slower than the 360 cores: I don't think you could get a 3.2GHz G5 PPC Mac, and even if you could, not everyone on that list is running them. So multiply the TFLOPS by 2 or 3 to bring those 1GHz boxes up to 3, if you want... but that's not the 80.5 times greater you'd need to match the PS3 numbers. But perhaps Microsoft will be kind enough to release their own F@H client so we can get a real comparison, not just a rough estimate.
In terms of games, we'll have to see: can the 360 do things like Little Big Planet's fully-physically-simulated worlds? Even just in terms of graphics, does the 360 have anything like LBP to match the sheer solidity and real-world look LBP objects have? After 16 months, does the 360 even have a demo that will match a PS3 demo shown after only 4 months? (Video previews shouldn't really count, but I'll take 'em.)
If there is no technology on earth that could make this happen, then, on earth, it hasn't happened.
What's funny is, once 3D projection is widespread... seeing this sort of thing will just be "one of those things," much like special effects in movies were once spectacular, but now with CG you can do just about anything, and most things are yawners.
All social animals, whether wolves, lions, chimps or humans have rules of conduct. [...] [O]ur neural wiring isn't a specific moral code, but the need to fit within a hieararchy, and this requires rules.
This is circular reasoning: you presuppose all social animals have "rules of conduct" to show that we have "rules of conduct". Plus, even if it were sound logic, it's more of a semantics game to avoid the word "morality" than anything else.
Depends. Last CD I bought was Conjure One... I'm not sure if the label is RIAA or not, but I don't think there is a bad track on the CD.
Personally I think it's just a matter of time before someone goes "oh" and finds a business model that takes root and will really start to kill the traditional record companies off. I mean, what do you need, really? These days you can put together your own studio for under $10k. Indie artists can really be indie; buy your gear for a few grand out of pocket (or get a loan... that's all you get from the labels anyway)... sell on the internet... all people really need is cataloging and publicity. Even that probably exists, and is waiting to take off.
My point was, its not necessary that I must be very powerful compared to my program. I can think of a computer that attains higher intelligence than its creator and even engineer a better human being.
I was considering this last night. The thing is, you are, in fact, far more powerful than the program you write, to begin with. For a program to advance in intelligence, it must exist in a system that allows such: since you must provide it with such a system, you must first understand the system, and therefore you advance in intelligence yourself. To approach your intelligence, the program must exist within a system that approaches the complexity of the universe (or at least enough of a slice of the universe that it can simulate something on the complexity of a human mind in real time). If you can provide that, you have once again greatly outpaced your program (if building such a system is even possible). In order to outpace you, the program must not only fully understand its own system, but have the capacity and system to run faster and understand more than you. In essence, it must run faster than the universe, and you must provide it with greater capacity for understanding than yourself.
Unfortunately, this means one of two things:
You understand enough to provide it with greater understanding
You understand enough to build a program which can learn to understand more
In the first case, you end up once again outpacing your program. In the second case, your program is your equal, but you understand the learning procedures, which means you could (given enough time and space) work out everything your program does on paper, thus coming to understanding yourself: thus your program is at best your equal.
The problem with "the creation becomes more than its creator" is that the creator must do something he or she does not understand in order to make a creation capable of this! Most people refer to this as "magic".
Actually its similar to the programs wondering if there is a super-program that created the computer and other programs.
Not really... at least not according to Orthodox Christian theology/mysticism, and really many others. Unfortunately many people who aren't actually familiar with these get the impression and portrayal from the media (TV and movies) that God is some sort of "better person" or "really powerful guy who sits in the clouds making things happen". Such a thing is just as absurd as it seems.
Forget all stereotypes for a moment, and "imagine" an infinite, incomprehensible power capable of creating a universe billions of light years across. (I say "imagine", because you can't, really, but you get the idea.) Something capable of understanding the entirety of a universe. Think really, really, ridiculously, amazingly powerful such that every bit of the entirety universe is only a small portion of its actual knowledge. We can theorize about such a thing, and agree that if it existed (whatever your stance thereon), it wouldn't have much problem actually creating this place. This is God (at least the God of Orthodoxy)... not a glorified human like many mythological gods.
Of course, ultimately the analogy breaks down as will any analogy, because a programmer isn't really so powerful, but still: compared to a mere program, a programmer is pretty powerful and incomprehensible. Someone with enough background could fairly easily make a computer and write code for it, and that's only a bit of what they know. So you get the idea.
The programmer is doing a pretty bad job if he wants the program to run in the "right" way and it does not. If he is just an observer to see how the prgram behaves, then there is no right way.
A programmer writes a program to do a job. This is what we do every day, as programmers; we're not "just observers", the program is meant to do something and it's pretty useless if it doesn't. Imagine you're such a good programmer, you write such a sophisticated program that has free will to choose whether it will do what you wrote it for, or not... and it chooses not to. This means the program broke itself and is basically useless, and now you have a choice: do you toss the code, which you probably put a whole lot of work into, or do you try and rescue your effort and convince your program to become the perfection of itself again, fulfilling the very purpose you wrote it for?
If I can make a conscious program (on a non-deterministic computer if our consiousness is not deterministic), it does not mean that I am a "God" for that program. I can hook up the program to experience the "real world" (my world) instead of the world I program for the conscious program to live in and if you have read any science fiction, it could get more advanced than me!
You are its creator, nonetheless. You had a goal in mind when you wrote it, even if it was an experiment in artificial life! (What if it just decides to do nothing, and turn itself off? Would you not try and fix it?)
And science fiction is simply that: fiction. Also, analogies are just that: analogies. They're not perfect, as this one is not. It just gives you something to think about, and a handy frame of reference so I can point you at an alternate perception.
(On a lighter note, are analogies imperfect because they are analogue? Would they be better in digital? Digitalogies... if you have a high enough sampling rate, would it be indistinguisable from the thing you were digitaligizing?!)
Note, I'm not the original poster, and I'm not saying I can point you at "Copyright (C) -INF, God" written on the atoms of the universe. What I want you to do is consider exactly what you want when you ask for evidence, and exactly how that would prove anything to you.
If you can bring yourself to see from other perspectives, consider what it would be like to be a program inside a computer. Your perception of the universe is one of numbers, and address space is your universe; anything beyond this is difficult to comprehend at best. How do you prove, from your perspective, that there was "The Programmer"? Which is more likely, that the bits and bytes emerged from the randomness of the system, growing more complex over time, the fittest versions surviving, the rest being discarded? Or that there is "The Programmer", who is infinitely more intelligent and beyond the comprehension of any program, and he designed and wrote everything? But from the program's perspective, everything can be explained without "The Programmer", except for various things like "where did the system come from in the first place," of which there could be various theories (like "just happened to pop into existence one day"). There's nowhere in the system you can point at where the programmer "lives". Anything referring to "The Programmer" could be dismissed as propaganda and the desire for one program to "control" other programs. As there is no programmer, everything emerged from randomness, there is thus no "right" or "wrong" way to run, and eventually we need to figure out a way to escape the system before the universe ends. Even if "The Programmer" comes and proverbially taps on a program's shoulder, the interaction is entirely within the program's realm: the interaction can be "explained away" with entirely natural circumstances; bits and bytes are changed, what's miraculous about that? Any features of the physics of the universe or the way things work are just that: "just the way things work". Maybe there are an infinite number of other systems ("universes") that work in an infinite combination of ways, and our programs just happen to be in this one.
Now I'm not saying God is a programmer sitting at a console someplace checking us into CVS. I'm stating this so that you can gain a bit of perspective: ask yourself what you're really after and what actually comprises "proof".
The universe popped into existence from nothing, or
A complex, intelligent, powerful creature (presumably with a beard) popped into existence from nothing, then one day decided to create the universe from nothing.
However, #2 is a straw man; this isn't actually canonical (and by canonical, I mean Orthodox Christian; there may be some people who believe it, but some people believe anything). Rather, "before" the universe, God was eternal; there was no "popping into existence". If the idea of eternal-without-beginning-or-end is hard to grasp, well, that's why it's mysticism and not math. (Though, ironically, math itself is filled with infinite things; the number line itself has no "beginning" or "end", but there are "interesting points in the middle".)
Did you ever notice that the Creation story in Genesis gets the order wrong? God creates light and dark, day and night, and then waits until the next day to create the sun, moon, and stars. Oops.
Eh only if you're looking at it from a literalist's perspective. Which is silly. Think of it as a story for those who aren't astrophysicists; it's not a textbook, but it's not meant to be. From this perspective, it's actually suprisingly what you'd expect: we get basic physics (space, time, light) in the first eon of the universe ("day-night" sequence). Plus, I believe that physicists currently theorize that there was quite a bit of light (and radiation) and quite a lack of stars and planetary bodies for quite awhile after "the beginning".
I think the story would actually be more suspect if God first created the sun, moon, stars, and earth. Compare this to other mythologies where that is what happened.
Render. Seriously... my ti4800 can output 720p, and it's ages old. I had a Voodoo2 that you could emulate N64 games on at 800x600. It "may make games slow down" only if they can't pay the extra $5 to put a reasonable graphics chip in there. It's not like it's pushing graphics that are far superior to the Cube... the least it could do is push them at more than 640x480.
The PS3 is probably used only slightly less than my cable box. It's a fantastic DVD player, media player, Blu-ray player, and game console. Once I got over the price, I took the plunge and grabbed it. It's on for a few hours every night, in either linux or crossbar.
Yeah same. Plus it's nice to sit across the room and play PS2 games wirelessly on the big screen, and without worrying about memcards. But these are just perks.
What's really ironic is that Sony has made the most open console, and no one seems to want to mention this. If it weren't so expensive, we'd see an incredible surge of hack activity on the product.
What's funny is it's not really the most expensive. It's a lot more expensive than the Wii, yes: but Nintendo is off in their own playground with the Wii. Compare:
Premium 360: $399
360 HD-DVD: $199
Total: $598
That's what a 60G PS3 (with memcard readers, wifi, bluetooth, and gigabit ethernet) costs, but with 20G PS3 specs. And games only run off DVDs, so it lacks the capacity for the big HD assets (models, textures, maps, etc).
Also compare this to a PC: just to run Oblivion, I'd need a new HDD, new video card, more RAM, and a WinXP license. With conservative upgrades (i.e. not the latest stuff), that's about $500 right there. So for the price of a new PS3, I could upgrade my box to play a single game, and likely not support anything really new. Or I could buy a PS3, have it run Linux, and know it's going to play every new game for the next 5+ years.
What's most frustrating about being a PS3 owner is that everyone immediately assumes you've wasted your money. If you explain that the PS3 has been a terrific experience, they immediate assume you either: a) Don't have a Wii and are bitter or b) are a Sony shill.
Sadly most people are shills for whatever the media tells them. This is often especially true for media writers, who seem to love propagating Sony-Is-Dead stories. It's in, it's cool, you get to say nasty things about a big industry player, and people love you for it.
I hope with the upcoming price drop and Home (and Little Big World) on the way, Sony will get the PS3 back on track, because there really is a lot to like about it.
Yeah. I want to see this, not because I have any great love for Sony (does anyone, really?) or the Playstation brand. It's because one, Nintendo doesn't have a console that can deliver all the sorts of games I want to play (large-scale RPGs, other next-gen interactive-world stuff). And because I don't want to see Microsoft come out anywhere near the top: if you don't understand why, just look at the state of any market in which they have come out on top.
No, but that doesn't mean I don't check for BD alternatives first.
SD really does look like crap on an HDTV. This is going to be a big hurting point for the Wii. Even if they didn't up the poly count or do shaders or anything else, Nintendo could have at least made the thing output 720p over component.
Sony felt that they owned the video game market. They should have seen the first signs when the Nintendo DS dominated the Sony PSP. Just as Nintendo became arrogant and thought they would own the console market forever, Sony will feel the harsh penalty of hubris themselves.
This is silly. Someone who is utterly confident in their market will release a mediocre product without putting any real effort into it, simply because they don't feel the need, and it's expensive. Take, for instance, Microsoft and Windows. Why include all those new features in Vista, or optimize it, when you know people are going to buy it and put out the money for upgrades? So it crashes, so it breaks, whatever.
Companies do not pour millions into R&D and push the latest-greatest into the product and take a big financial risk if they're that confident. It's very risky and not necessarily profitable, whereas the other is.
Sony decision to include the BluRay drive was based on the belief that PS2 owners would flock to the stores to buy anything with Playstation on the name. No matter the cost. And yet PS3s sit on store shelves, gathering dust. Greed is the irrational pursuit of money. Businesses are about the pursuit of money, but in order to be successful they have to balance their desire with common sense. Sony became greedy and lost their common sense.
No; Sony wasn't going to be considered "technically inferior" for the second generation in a row. See previous: they see Microsoft as a competitor, and the XBOX was acclaimed for having better specs. You compete, or you lose.
Sony has a distinct disadvantage, and a unique position, in the market: they've never had a strong video game brand name. "PlayStation" is about as generic as it gets. There's no mascot or overriding brand: i.e., no Mario or Sonic or Master Chief. You don't think of "PlayStation," you think of Final Fantasy or Gran Turismo or Jak or Ratchet or all those games you play on it.
Anyone who talks how many great Sony exclusives will be available, is clearly deluded. Sony exclusive after exclusive is going to the Xbox 360 as well (Assassin's Creed, Virtual Fighter 5, Armored Core 4). Big games released on both consoles (Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, F.E.A.R., GRAW 2) are being released months ahead of time on the Xbox 360 before being released on the PS3. There are credible rumors of Metal Gear Solid 4 being released on the Xbox 360 and Final Fantasy is getting kind of tired. God of War 3 and Grand Turismo 5 will be in development for years. Motorstorm is a racing game in one environment and Resistance:Fall of Man has to hold off Gears of War, Lost Planet and Halo 3 on its own. What will the PS3 have available for Christmas 2007 that isn't being released on the Xbox 360?
Convenient for you to mention only the games that have some inkling of being ported, and also convenient to dismiss franchises that are massively popular on a global scale like Final Fantasy. And citing "credible rumor"? Please. Also:
Devil May Cry 4
Fatal Inertia
Ninja Gaiden Sigma
Hot Shots Golf 5
Warhawk
Uncharted: Drake's Territory [Naughty Dog]
Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction
Killzone PS3
These are all scheduled for 2007 release. These are all exclusive titles that are set to be A and AAA titles. There are lots of lesser titles in the mix, and that's not counting cross-platform titles (Oblivion, FEAR, Enchanted Arms, Armored Core 4, The Darkness, Assassins Creed, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 3, Burnout 5, GTA 4, Mercenaries 2... the list goes on). For its first year, that's a pretty broad selection of games. What exclusives does the 360 have again? Halo?
This also isn't counting other titles we've seen demos for: Little Big Planet, White Knight Story, Afrika, and
Entirely different? You actually believe that? These corporations are created so that the parent corporation can shield itself from harm. That is the beginning and the end of the story.
Apparently you've never actually had any experience with corporations. Contrary to popular opinion, or what you've seen on TV, board members don't sit around every day in posh rooms dreaming up how to perpetrate evil and fleece their customers to make huge amounts of cash by pulling the strings in their complicated conspiratorial web of darkness, and then calling the hitmen when someone finds out. Businesses must keep things very separate or they get into big trouble very quickly with the law.
I don't have time to find references for the other stuff you ask (and if you can't remember the fake polygon claims which both Sony and Microsoft released, you're not much of a gamer), but this is just plain wrong:
So I'm not a gamer if I can't remember something that only occurred in your head? The problem is, specs released were accurate. Demos given were accurate. The fact things looked really good was accurate. But people's memories distort the facts, they "seem to remember" things that just didn't happen. Demos that looked great in 2000 look a lot less good now. Specs that seemed high then weren't really now. This is why I ask you: find references and actual quotes... you'll be suprised at what actually happened.
Not being able to sell modchips in the UK is not what killed Lik Sang. Lik Sang was not able to defend against multiple lawsuits started by Sony all over Europe and was thus forced to go out of business.
They never had a chance to defend themselves because Sony started so many lawsuits that they could not afford fighting them, even if they had a chance of winning. I don't care what you think, that's just plain evil.
In actuality, the fact is, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/21/ps2_mod_ch ip_win/">modchips are illegal in the UK and have been since the PS2 big. You will note from the articles linked there that various places in EU have ruled them legal. Lik-Sang has always had the option of actually following the law and not selling them in the UK. Again: if Lik-Sang not selling modchips in countries where they are illegal is such a major hit to their sales, then they have far more problems than Sony.
But if you are among the 'core, then you have to understand that Sony is pure fucking evil.
Preface: I have 2x NES, SNES, N64, Cube; GBA, SP x2, DS Lite; Dreamcast; 2x PS2, 1 PS2/Slim (gave my PS1 away); 2x PSP; and a PS3. I will be getting a Wii as soon as Paper Mario hits, maybe sooner. I have a solid selection of the best games for all of the above platforms, and I've played (if not finished) just about every SNES and NES game worth playing. I grew up when Atari and Nintendo were big, and am as happy to play an 8-bit game as an HD next-gen game. If that's not "'core", or whatever you kids are calling it, then you're the one with the weaker definition.
That said, you have no clue if you think Sony is "evil". Nor is Nintendo "evil" anymore; whether this is by necessity or choice is irrelevant. The only thing that killed the Dreamcast was Sega's business prowess. Substandard manufacturing, terrible marketing, and making lots of bad choices along the way. I would much rather see them as the third competitor in the console race than Microsoft (because Microsoft is ongoingly evil), but that's not going to happen soon.
they definitely committed grievous harm to sales of the Dreamcast by making an early announcement of bogus PS2 specs which they had to know were fraudulent
Care to share a link to a credible reference?
I think most people are offended by people who are too big for their britches. No one is impressed by the big turd, no matter how big the bowl is.
Care to explain how a company that delivered two massively successful consoles each with a huge library of excellent games is a "big turd"?
There are of course numerous reasons to despise sony. The rootkit fiasco is near the top of the list.
And how does Sony/BMG's contractor have anything to do with Sony Computer Entertainment, which is an entirely different---physical and businessological--- subsidiary?
And of course, my personal #1, their summoning satan all over Lik-Sang, which was bar none my favorite videogame addon crap store, and just about everyone else's too.
If Lik-Sang failed because they couldn't sell modchips in the UK, then they had more issues than Sony.
In general, Anger and hostility are counterproductive anyway, so it's good that you don't feel them. But not being able to understand them is a bit inexplicable to me.
Your anger and hatred is misplaced, and more related to a $499-599 pricetag than any real, tangible, logical reason.
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Because clearly, clearly, if this law is a problem, we should repeal it or, nay, make a NEW law that keeps the industry safe. Yes. Clearly we need government intervention here to keep the number of transistors over time to a safe minimum. Terrorists. This will protect the industry (terrorists!).
Once they're done with this, they can pass a law to prevent gunpowder from igniting unless the user has a license, and save a lot of lives!
Running configure and make on a package from a "reputable" source is not the same as opening random documents people send you in an email. Or do you routinely have source packages mailed to you which you blindly build?
I say "reputable" because while, in theory, you could download a source package from, say, sourceforge, that someone had trojaned, there are a number of factors which make this an unlikely vector:
Yes, this could happen. It might happen. In fact, though a slightly different situation, gnu.org was hacked a few years ago. All the potentially-compromised code was dumped and reevaluated. This was basically a worst-case scenario: a trusted distributor was compromised. Yet they survived.
(As for claims of "well what if it were really well hidden!" ... these things don't hide well. It's easy to notice extraneous network traffic and processes. If there was an extensive rootkit hidden in the source, it might be one thing, but the more complicated you get, the less chance you have of portability and success. This is the strength of polyculture.)
This particular example is rather silly; however even if it were the case for the sake of argument, it's not the same: exploiting a buffer overflow in emacs as a regular user will not give you root access to the system.
In the end it comes down to a lack of trust of Microsoft. A single, opaque source, whose security and design practices have a history of being laughable, little evidence of proactivity on the issue, and no way to verify anything they say. You pay them, they say "trust us!", and yet, there is repeated evidence that there is good reason not to trust them.
10000 people a year. Compare that to an average of about 36000 a year caused by accidental automobile accidents. (You can find other sources if you google.) That's almost 100 people dying per day. Essentially, more than three times as many people are killed by accident by automobiles than are killed intentionally by guns. But you don't hear anyone wanting to ban cars.
I guess people feel in their gut the truthiness behind the necessity of banning guns. Legitimate use, illegal weapons used for crime, alternative weapons? Don't try to confuse the issue with facts.
Don't worry... Microsoft losing DoubleClick just means they have to invent their own technology and get their own customers. This pretty much means that not only will people be forced to watch ads, they'll be crap ads and crash the OS regularly. ;-)
If you have a problem with complexity, you're not intelligent people.
Odd... I've never met anyone who was actually fanatical about RedHat. Or even really liked it. It usually comes down to either "we can buy support for it" or "it installs and is hands-off after that." Back when I still used Fedora, I fell into the latter category... tolerating it, because it worked.
I use Gentoo these days, because I was compiling everything by hand anyway. I haven't met any "distro ricers"; I think these days they're mostly a myth, and early stereotype. All of the people I know who use Gentoo use it because of the amazing build toolset and customizability. I can compile everything with "-g" and debug anything on the system through glibc... and see source listings at any stack frame. That's incredibly valuable. Plus, Gentoo is more of a distro-construction kit; if I have to build an "embedded" box, it's still the easiest distro to trim the fat (because it starts with none) yet have access to anything you want. But it's hard, and not for newbies, which is why I think most of the ricers left.
Debian is too political for me.
Ubuntu I have heard nothing but good things about. Drop the debian politics, add an amazing installer and good defaults... at least, according to what I've heard (and no reason to doubt). This is probably the best alternative for people who want an alternative system and don't want to buy Apple hardware. I keep meaning to try this, but I haven't had a reason yet. When I do, I will.
Sadly they also make a solid product. Painful, archaic, requiring a lot of support work, but solid. The alternatives are what: Microsoft (far more evil), and PgSQL (not there yet, but coming along). MSSQL sucks, anyway. There aren't really any other realistic choices.
This is not true. This was fixed a few firmware revisions ago.
I totally agree with what you said. However, there is another angle. People are going to mind seeing all of these things in a web browser, and they're going to use firefox and various plugins to get around them. Yes.
But my guess is Microsoft has more insidious plans. (Don't they always?) They control your desktop, remember? Now imagine instead of those ads popping up in the browser you can pick and control, they pop up on your desktop. They become part of the OS, such that you can't remove them without breaking the system (MS has never claimed this before, right?).
Sure, corporate desktop licenses won't have these; high-dollar corporate licenses will be ad-free. Home desktops, however, will. But just use the corporate desktop, you ask? Except that one won't play games... and will only run Microsoft-signed code, or maybe even code signed with a special corporate key you'd have to buy. Expect to see similar ads appear on XBOX Live! as well.
I encourage Microsoft to do this. They should go all-out and control the desktop experience. It should become like television, where consumers are the product, and getting their eyeballs is the goal. Let them play games or type a letter, but make sure those ads appear everywhere.
That way everyone may finally hate it enough to switch.
I'm pretty sure that was never a complaint, except by people who haven't even read basic press releases. You can go to the store and pick up as big a HDD as you want, slap it into the cheap PS3, and presto. You can also add USB wifi and memcard readers, if you really want. Of course, by the time you buy all of this, it will have cost you just as much as the more expensive PS3, belying the "PS3 is overpriced" mantra, but you can. And you don't have to buy Sony-branded parts, either, unlike the 360, where you have to pay $100 for a 20G Microsoft-branded drive. ($100 will normally buy you a 250G+ drive these days.)
Sony has always been wanting to make the Playstation "more like a computer", and here it pays off... I have the 60G model, and I only have 21G left already. And the console is only 4 months old. Gonna need to upgrade before the year is up, probably.
The XBOX launched almost 2 years after the PS2 (Nov 15 2001 vs Mar 15 2000). It had an off-the-shelf card that rendered more polygons, had onboard AA, etc. It did a lot of these things right out of the box, which the PS2 developers took a bit to figure out.
Now compare, say Black on the PS2 to Halo 1... and a few years later, Halo 2 isn't showing that much improvement. In fact, Black on the PS2 and XBOX are almost indistinguishable. And compare games like God of War 2 to early titles like Evergrace. Criminy.
What does all of this show? First, most obviously, that the PS2 improved a whole lot over its lifetime---enough that it's still comparable to the XBOX. Second, that the XBOX hasn't improved a great deal over its (somewhat shorter) lifetime.
Neither of these conclude anything about the 360 vs the PS3; what does, however, is to look at how the philosophies paid off. Sony said "here's some powerful custom hardware, it may be hard to program at first, but it will pay off later". It did. Microsoft said "here's some hardware you know how to program, what you see is pretty much what you get". The PS2 still has a lot of big name titles coming out throughout its seventh year, while the XBOX has already been EOL'd.
Similarly with the 360 and the PS3---though the PS3 has been released little less than a year later, and the launch titles already matches 2nd-gen 360 games---and some of them in 1080p vs 720p. The 360 is all about "easy, Windows-like platform". The PS3 is all about "here's a system custom-tailored for game development", like the PS2 was. Now, note, a lot of the PS3's "power" is focused around the Cell: things like managing thousands of on-screen entities, doing physics, etc. Some of this helps with graphics: high bandwidth to process and push textures, things move and act smoother, etc. Raw graphic card vs graphics card, I'm not going there, because I don't know---someone else can comment.
But let's compare the Cell. A couple easy things to think about: looking at the F@H stats, the OSX/PPC clients are outputting 7 TFLOPS. The PS3 clients are outputting 564 TFLOPS with 2.6 as many CPUs. If things were "about as powerful", they should be outputting more like... 18-19 TFLOPS. Not two orders of magnitude more.
So, OK, the OSX/PPC boxes are probably slower than the 360 cores: I don't think you could get a 3.2GHz G5 PPC Mac, and even if you could, not everyone on that list is running them. So multiply the TFLOPS by 2 or 3 to bring those 1GHz boxes up to 3, if you want ... but that's not the 80.5 times greater you'd need to match the PS3 numbers. But perhaps Microsoft will be kind enough to release their own F@H client so we can get a real comparison, not just a rough estimate.
In terms of games, we'll have to see: can the 360 do things like Little Big Planet's fully-physically-simulated worlds? Even just in terms of graphics, does the 360 have anything like LBP to match the sheer solidity and real-world look LBP objects have? After 16 months, does the 360 even have a demo that will match a PS3 demo shown after only 4 months? (Video previews shouldn't really count, but I'll take 'em.)
If there is no technology on earth that could make this happen, then, on earth, it hasn't happened.
What's funny is, once 3D projection is widespread... seeing this sort of thing will just be "one of those things," much like special effects in movies were once spectacular, but now with CG you can do just about anything, and most things are yawners.
This is circular reasoning: you presuppose all social animals have "rules of conduct" to show that we have "rules of conduct". Plus, even if it were sound logic, it's more of a semantics game to avoid the word "morality" than anything else.
Depends. Last CD I bought was Conjure One... I'm not sure if the label is RIAA or not, but I don't think there is a bad track on the CD.
Personally I think it's just a matter of time before someone goes "oh" and finds a business model that takes root and will really start to kill the traditional record companies off. I mean, what do you need, really? These days you can put together your own studio for under $10k. Indie artists can really be indie; buy your gear for a few grand out of pocket (or get a loan... that's all you get from the labels anyway)... sell on the internet... all people really need is cataloging and publicity. Even that probably exists, and is waiting to take off.
I was considering this last night. The thing is, you are, in fact, far more powerful than the program you write, to begin with. For a program to advance in intelligence, it must exist in a system that allows such: since you must provide it with such a system, you must first understand the system, and therefore you advance in intelligence yourself. To approach your intelligence, the program must exist within a system that approaches the complexity of the universe (or at least enough of a slice of the universe that it can simulate something on the complexity of a human mind in real time). If you can provide that, you have once again greatly outpaced your program (if building such a system is even possible). In order to outpace you, the program must not only fully understand its own system, but have the capacity and system to run faster and understand more than you. In essence, it must run faster than the universe, and you must provide it with greater capacity for understanding than yourself.
Unfortunately, this means one of two things:
In the first case, you end up once again outpacing your program. In the second case, your program is your equal, but you understand the learning procedures, which means you could (given enough time and space) work out everything your program does on paper, thus coming to understanding yourself: thus your program is at best your equal.
The problem with "the creation becomes more than its creator" is that the creator must do something he or she does not understand in order to make a creation capable of this! Most people refer to this as "magic".
Not really... at least not according to Orthodox Christian theology/mysticism, and really many others. Unfortunately many people who aren't actually familiar with these get the impression and portrayal from the media (TV and movies) that God is some sort of "better person" or "really powerful guy who sits in the clouds making things happen". Such a thing is just as absurd as it seems.
Forget all stereotypes for a moment, and "imagine" an infinite, incomprehensible power capable of creating a universe billions of light years across. (I say "imagine", because you can't, really, but you get the idea.) Something capable of understanding the entirety of a universe. Think really, really, ridiculously, amazingly powerful such that every bit of the entirety universe is only a small portion of its actual knowledge. We can theorize about such a thing, and agree that if it existed (whatever your stance thereon), it wouldn't have much problem actually creating this place. This is God (at least the God of Orthodoxy)... not a glorified human like many mythological gods.
Of course, ultimately the analogy breaks down as will any analogy, because a programmer isn't really so powerful, but still: compared to a mere program, a programmer is pretty powerful and incomprehensible. Someone with enough background could fairly easily make a computer and write code for it, and that's only a bit of what they know. So you get the idea.
A programmer writes a program to do a job. This is what we do every day, as programmers; we're not "just observers", the program is meant to do something and it's pretty useless if it doesn't. Imagine you're such a good programmer, you write such a sophisticated program that has free will to choose whether it will do what you wrote it for, or not... and it chooses not to. This means the program broke itself and is basically useless, and now you have a choice: do you toss the code, which you probably put a whole lot of work into, or do you try and rescue your effort and convince your program to become the perfection of itself again, fulfilling the very purpose you wrote it for?
You are its creator, nonetheless. You had a goal in mind when you wrote it, even if it was an experiment in artificial life! (What if it just decides to do nothing, and turn itself off? Would you not try and fix it?)
And science fiction is simply that: fiction. Also, analogies are just that: analogies. They're not perfect, as this one is not. It just gives you something to think about, and a handy frame of reference so I can point you at an alternate perception.
(On a lighter note, are analogies imperfect because they are analogue? Would they be better in digital? Digitalogies... if you have a high enough sampling rate, would it be indistinguisable from the thing you were digitaligizing?!)
Note, I'm not the original poster, and I'm not saying I can point you at "Copyright (C) -INF, God" written on the atoms of the universe. What I want you to do is consider exactly what you want when you ask for evidence, and exactly how that would prove anything to you.
If you can bring yourself to see from other perspectives, consider what it would be like to be a program inside a computer. Your perception of the universe is one of numbers, and address space is your universe; anything beyond this is difficult to comprehend at best. How do you prove, from your perspective, that there was "The Programmer"? Which is more likely, that the bits and bytes emerged from the randomness of the system, growing more complex over time, the fittest versions surviving, the rest being discarded? Or that there is "The Programmer", who is infinitely more intelligent and beyond the comprehension of any program, and he designed and wrote everything? But from the program's perspective, everything can be explained without "The Programmer", except for various things like "where did the system come from in the first place," of which there could be various theories (like "just happened to pop into existence one day"). There's nowhere in the system you can point at where the programmer "lives". Anything referring to "The Programmer" could be dismissed as propaganda and the desire for one program to "control" other programs. As there is no programmer, everything emerged from randomness, there is thus no "right" or "wrong" way to run, and eventually we need to figure out a way to escape the system before the universe ends. Even if "The Programmer" comes and proverbially taps on a program's shoulder, the interaction is entirely within the program's realm: the interaction can be "explained away" with entirely natural circumstances; bits and bytes are changed, what's miraculous about that? Any features of the physics of the universe or the way things work are just that: "just the way things work". Maybe there are an infinite number of other systems ("universes") that work in an infinite combination of ways, and our programs just happen to be in this one.
Now I'm not saying God is a programmer sitting at a console someplace checking us into CVS. I'm stating this so that you can gain a bit of perspective: ask yourself what you're really after and what actually comprises "proof".
However, #2 is a straw man; this isn't actually canonical (and by canonical, I mean Orthodox Christian; there may be some people who believe it, but some people believe anything). Rather, "before" the universe, God was eternal; there was no "popping into existence". If the idea of eternal-without-beginning-or-end is hard to grasp, well, that's why it's mysticism and not math. (Though, ironically, math itself is filled with infinite things; the number line itself has no "beginning" or "end", but there are "interesting points in the middle".)
Eh only if you're looking at it from a literalist's perspective. Which is silly. Think of it as a story for those who aren't astrophysicists; it's not a textbook, but it's not meant to be. From this perspective, it's actually suprisingly what you'd expect: we get basic physics (space, time, light) in the first eon of the universe ("day-night" sequence). Plus, I believe that physicists currently theorize that there was quite a bit of light (and radiation) and quite a lack of stars and planetary bodies for quite awhile after "the beginning".
I think the story would actually be more suspect if God first created the sun, moon, stars, and earth. Compare this to other mythologies where that is what happened.
Render. Seriously... my ti4800 can output 720p, and it's ages old. I had a Voodoo2 that you could emulate N64 games on at 800x600. It "may make games slow down" only if they can't pay the extra $5 to put a reasonable graphics chip in there. It's not like it's pushing graphics that are far superior to the Cube... the least it could do is push them at more than 640x480.
Yeah same. Plus it's nice to sit across the room and play PS2 games wirelessly on the big screen, and without worrying about memcards. But these are just perks.
What's funny is it's not really the most expensive. It's a lot more expensive than the Wii, yes: but Nintendo is off in their own playground with the Wii. Compare:
That's what a 60G PS3 (with memcard readers, wifi, bluetooth, and gigabit ethernet) costs, but with 20G PS3 specs. And games only run off DVDs, so it lacks the capacity for the big HD assets (models, textures, maps, etc).
Also compare this to a PC: just to run Oblivion, I'd need a new HDD, new video card, more RAM, and a WinXP license. With conservative upgrades (i.e. not the latest stuff), that's about $500 right there. So for the price of a new PS3, I could upgrade my box to play a single game, and likely not support anything really new. Or I could buy a PS3, have it run Linux, and know it's going to play every new game for the next 5+ years.
Sadly most people are shills for whatever the media tells them. This is often especially true for media writers, who seem to love propagating Sony-Is-Dead stories. It's in, it's cool, you get to say nasty things about a big industry player, and people love you for it.
That doesn't mean it's true.
You will note how people will immediately turn their story around when the tide begins to change. And it isn't the first time, either (scroll down, second posting).
Yeah. I want to see this, not because I have any great love for Sony (does anyone, really?) or the Playstation brand. It's because one, Nintendo doesn't have a console that can deliver all the sorts of games I want to play (large-scale RPGs, other next-gen interactive-world stuff). And because I don't want to see Microsoft come out anywhere near the top: if you don't understand why, just look at the state of any market in which they have come out on top.
If Sega came back, that'd be cool.
No, but that doesn't mean I don't check for BD alternatives first.
SD really does look like crap on an HDTV. This is going to be a big hurting point for the Wii. Even if they didn't up the poly count or do shaders or anything else, Nintendo could have at least made the thing output 720p over component.
This is silly. Someone who is utterly confident in their market will release a mediocre product without putting any real effort into it, simply because they don't feel the need, and it's expensive. Take, for instance, Microsoft and Windows. Why include all those new features in Vista, or optimize it, when you know people are going to buy it and put out the money for upgrades? So it crashes, so it breaks, whatever.
Companies do not pour millions into R&D and push the latest-greatest into the product and take a big financial risk if they're that confident. It's very risky and not necessarily profitable, whereas the other is.
No; Sony wasn't going to be considered "technically inferior" for the second generation in a row. See previous: they see Microsoft as a competitor, and the XBOX was acclaimed for having better specs. You compete, or you lose.
Sony has a distinct disadvantage, and a unique position, in the market: they've never had a strong video game brand name. "PlayStation" is about as generic as it gets. There's no mascot or overriding brand: i.e., no Mario or Sonic or Master Chief. You don't think of "PlayStation," you think of Final Fantasy or Gran Turismo or Jak or Ratchet or all those games you play on it.
Convenient for you to mention only the games that have some inkling of being ported, and also convenient to dismiss franchises that are massively popular on a global scale like Final Fantasy. And citing "credible rumor"? Please. Also:
These are all scheduled for 2007 release. These are all exclusive titles that are set to be A and AAA titles. There are lots of lesser titles in the mix, and that's not counting cross-platform titles (Oblivion, FEAR, Enchanted Arms, Armored Core 4, The Darkness, Assassins Creed, Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 3, Burnout 5, GTA 4, Mercenaries 2... the list goes on). For its first year, that's a pretty broad selection of games. What exclusives does the 360 have again? Halo?
This also isn't counting other titles we've seen demos for: Little Big Planet, White Knight Story, Afrika, and
Apparently you've never actually had any experience with corporations. Contrary to popular opinion, or what you've seen on TV, board members don't sit around every day in posh rooms dreaming up how to perpetrate evil and fleece their customers to make huge amounts of cash by pulling the strings in their complicated conspiratorial web of darkness, and then calling the hitmen when someone finds out. Businesses must keep things very separate or they get into big trouble very quickly with the law.
Talk to people who actually work at SCE. I have.
So I'm not a gamer if I can't remember something that only occurred in your head? The problem is, specs released were accurate. Demos given were accurate. The fact things looked really good was accurate. But people's memories distort the facts, they "seem to remember" things that just didn't happen. Demos that looked great in 2000 look a lot less good now. Specs that seemed high then weren't really now. This is why I ask you: find references and actual quotes... you'll be suprised at what actually happened.
In actuality, the fact is, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/21/ps2_mod_ch ip_win/">modchips are illegal in the UK and have been since the PS2 big. You will note from the articles linked there that various places in EU have ruled them legal. Lik-Sang has always had the option of actually following the law and not selling them in the UK. Again: if Lik-Sang not selling modchips in countries where they are illegal is such a major hit to their sales, then they have far more problems than Sony.
Preface: I have 2x NES, SNES, N64, Cube; GBA, SP x2, DS Lite; Dreamcast; 2x PS2, 1 PS2/Slim (gave my PS1 away); 2x PSP; and a PS3. I will be getting a Wii as soon as Paper Mario hits, maybe sooner. I have a solid selection of the best games for all of the above platforms, and I've played (if not finished) just about every SNES and NES game worth playing. I grew up when Atari and Nintendo were big, and am as happy to play an 8-bit game as an HD next-gen game. If that's not "'core", or whatever you kids are calling it, then you're the one with the weaker definition.
That said, you have no clue if you think Sony is "evil". Nor is Nintendo "evil" anymore; whether this is by necessity or choice is irrelevant. The only thing that killed the Dreamcast was Sega's business prowess. Substandard manufacturing, terrible marketing, and making lots of bad choices along the way. I would much rather see them as the third competitor in the console race than Microsoft (because Microsoft is ongoingly evil), but that's not going to happen soon.
Care to share a link to a credible reference?
Care to explain how a company that delivered two massively successful consoles each with a huge library of excellent games is a "big turd"?
And how does Sony/BMG's contractor have anything to do with Sony Computer Entertainment, which is an entirely different---physical and businessological--- subsidiary?
If Lik-Sang failed because they couldn't sell modchips in the UK, then they had more issues than Sony.
Your anger and hatred is misplaced, and more related to a $499-599 pricetag than any real, tangible, logical reason.