Microsoft would never approve such a thing for release. The security measures in the console require all executables they run to be signed with Microsoft's private key, and the day they let a Linux distro through their screening process, a chap with red skin, horns, and a pointy tail will be placing an order for several billion pairs of ice skates.
Hell, you can't even get access to real development tools for the 360 without "working on approved titles for licensed publishers" (see this page). The reasoning behind all this is not to be jerks or anything, but to avoid having everybody and his brother flooding the game market with titles of a quality that might most charitably be described as shitful--and thus to prevent a reoccurrence of the Great Video Game Crash of 1984.
Actually, on the Intellivision controllers, only the top pair of action buttons were wired together; the bottom pair were separate, though they were often treated as the same by the software.
The same I/O lines were used to read the disc/buttons (16-position disc encoded in 5 bits, plus 3 for the action buttons) and the keypad (a 4x3 matrix); occasionally, the software would get it wrong and interpret the disc/buttons as a keypad key. The classic example of this was the game Space Hawk, in which the combination of disc and button inputs occasionally triggered the "Hyperspace" button (from the keypad); Mattel "fixed" this by riffing a line in the manual about how your spaceman might occasionally hit a "black hole" that would send him into hyperspace, just as if you'd hit the key.
Right now, Bungie's developers are probably spending all their time doing whatever they have to do in the way of programming to make sure that Halo 2 will run dead-bang perfect on the Xbox 360.
Think about it. A large part of the 360's sales are going to be from people upgrading from the original Xbox, and they're going to want to bring their games over, since backward-compatibility has been announced as a feature...but only for "the top titles" at launch. And Halo 2 is the topmost of those "top titles"; it's been most-played game on Xbox Live practically since Day One. If the 360 can't run Halo 2 perfectly, there's going to be a lot of consoles getting returned, and later, not purchased.
So it would behoove Bungie and MS to spend whatever time it takes to make sure it's perfect, and then, once the heat's off, get busy on Halo 3 in all its next-generation glory. There's enough other native-360 launch titles to keep people busy for awhile.
Last I saw, Webb Interactive was little more than a holding company for 43% of Jabber, Inc. They used to have other technologies under their own banner, but those have all fallen by the wayside at this point. Google would have to buy out France Telecom and Intel if they wanted to get all of Jabber Inc. under their roof, but I don't see why they'd buy Webb rather than just buy out Webb's stake in Jabber, unless Webb won't sell any other way.
That's assuming it's even necessary to buy out Jabber. Likely, they'd just buy Jabber's server product, if the open-source server wasn't powerful enough to handle Google Talk's load. So they'd be Jabber Inc. customers, but not necessarily owners.
By the way, open-source Jabber development does not fall under Jabber Inc., but under the Jabber Software Foundation. Jabber Inc. sponsors the foundation and employs many of the core developers, though.
(disclaimer: somewhere in the back of my closet, I have old boxes of business cards from both Webb Interactive and Jabber, with my name on them)
You're thinking of the Xeon EM64T (Nocona) processors. They're pretty much Intel's knockoff of the AMD Opteron, which they came up with, I gather, because the Opteron was kicking the Itanium's ass.
I've got to try and get Helix Player working on my FC2 box...I want to watch this launch, at least from T-9:00 up through MECO. (And, of course, I'll still be holding my breath from "Go at throttle up" through SRB SEP.)
I'm pretty sure the origin of the present Slashdot Microsoft thumbnail is the cover of the May 1996 issue of Boardwatch magazine, which featured an illustration of "BillGatus of Borg." The accompanying story was about Microsoft's ongoing assimilation of software and Internet businesses.
At one time, Boardwatch was selling posters of that magazine cover. I wish I could find a copy of that image, or even a photo of that poster...
If I bought one of their Linspire laptops and installed Debian on it, I sure as hell wouldn't be calling their technical support, any more than I would if the OS I'd replaced had been Windows. I know where to find Acrobat, Flash, and Helix Player if I need them. I can also dig up libdvdcss and get it to work with Xine, if needed. I can read HOWTOs and figure out power management, assuming the hardware is supported. And QuickTime and Windows Media playback? Pfui! Small price to pay for having complete control of my system.
I acknowledge that there are people out there who aren't as comfortable with these things as I am. Hopefully Linspire will work OK for those kind of people.
The Micro Center in Denver, on Quincy just north of the Tech Center, is probably the best computer store in the metro area. Whenever I need some piece of hardware, that's generally the first place I look.
I'll have to take a peek at those Linspire notebooks...though, if I got one, I'd probably rather install Debian on it.
I dunno...we seem to have enough trouble with plants that are current species but that get introduced into new environments. A good example is the giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum), which was brought from the Caucasus in Russia into Europe and now infests portions of the U.S., and is pretty nasty stuff. (It was immortalized in a Genesis song from their progressive-rock days, "The Return of the Giant Hogweed.")
Not that this date tree will necessarily be as bad, mind you.
Mandating that a TV be able to receive DTV signals is basically dictating that the TV must receive a certain transmission mode, at a certain set of frequencies. Transmission modes and frequencies are what the FCC is all about.
However, the Broadcast Flag was about your TV deciding what it can do with the signal after it's been received. Once the signal is received, the FCC has no jurisdiction over it. The receiver antenna is the "point of demarcation" (to use a phone company term). At that point, the receiver can do whatever it likes with the signal it's picked up.
A good analogy might be closed-captioning: the FCC can mandate that TV signals contain closed-captioning information, and they can mandate that TV receivers be capable of displaying the captions, but they cannot mandate that the TV must display the captions at all times (and they don't--you have to turn captioning on to display the captions). Same sort of situation with the Broadcast Flag; while the FCC can mandate the presence of the flag in a signal, and they can mandate that TVs must be capable of handling the flag, they cannot mandate that TVs must honor the flag.
As I understand it, the broadcast flag was a software issue, not a hardware one. Manufacturers could just create a new version of the software that doesn't have broadcast flag support and load it into the new TVs. Shouldn't be too hard, as it's a matter of leaving code out.
Perhaps this is the reason why they don't have sarcasm on Betelgeuse (according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy); their brains lack the sensor to detect it. (In Mostly Harmless, Ford has to ask Arthur, "This is that thing you call sarcasm, isn't it?")
Yes. It was the episode where Dilbert lost "the knack," and his attempted launch of a space billboard resulted in disabling all satellites and knocking humanity back to medieval times.
The box went to SCO's lawyers, not SCO itself. SCO isn't permitted to even get near that server. They have to get outside experts to search that source for any SCO code...further increasing SCO's burn rate.
At least I can understand Slayer, which is pretty much, "If it moves, shoot it; if it doesn't move, shoot it anyway." I've never played any playlists other than Rumble Training and Rumble Pit, because I just don't know how those games are supposed to work...and when a round of Oddball or King of The Hill comes up in those two playlists, I just scramble like hell to keep up, but it's tough.
I estimate that I make my "quality bar" anywhere from half to three-quarters of the time. Sometimes I get as many as 10 kills before the game ends. Of course, a few nights ago I was in a Swords match where I managed 18 kills and still finished in the cellar...
The info in question is on this page. The Google cache of the page currently shows the tables as they used to be before the changeover.
The table in question is the one headed "Level" and "Maximum Match." The old table started out with Levels 0-5 allowing +5 levels, Levels 6-10 akllowing +6 levels, and on up to Levels 36 and up allowing +10 levels. The new table shows the maximum match for Level 1 is +10 levels, Level 2 is +9 levels, on up to Level 6 being +5 levels, then the maximum match slowly increases from there, with the curve getting steeper as you hit Level 30.
However, the XP-to-level table also shows that the XP required per level has dropped, starting with Level 4 and becoming more pronounced as levels increase. (Old Level 50 = 44500 XP, new Level 50 = 10250 XP) The XP exchange table has also become less steep the way it slopes off as the level difference increases, and the "Loss Factor" handicap table for low-level players now doesn't cause you to lose full XP until you hit Level 29.
It's difficult to interpret the effect of all of these changes, but I suspect that I'll probably be able to get back my old level easily enough once the addicts start zooming up into the 30s and 40s, which I expect they will soon. (Someone's already hit Level 22 in Rumble Pit play, and this is just the day after the stats got reset...)
I hear you. I was only Level 3 before the reset, and I'm probably going to wait a couple of weeks before playing ranked games again, just so most of the people who've been playing nonstop since November will have leveled up "beyond the horizon" and won't be put into the same game with me.all
(Though one thing I noticed, looking at the charts on bungie.net, is that the "horizons" have changed. Before, as Level 1, I could be sure none of my opponents would be higher than Level 5. Now that's been stretched to Level 10. Bad news for me, even though my usual "quality bar" for a Halo 2 match is just not finishing in last place...)
Slashdot Mirror
You mean "limit posting to all users who have 3 digits or less in their ID," don't you? :-)
Hell, you can't even get access to real development tools for the 360 without "working on approved titles for licensed publishers" (see this page). The reasoning behind all this is not to be jerks or anything, but to avoid having everybody and his brother flooding the game market with titles of a quality that might most charitably be described as shitful--and thus to prevent a reoccurrence of the Great Video Game Crash of 1984.
The same I/O lines were used to read the disc/buttons (16-position disc encoded in 5 bits, plus 3 for the action buttons) and the keypad (a 4x3 matrix); occasionally, the software would get it wrong and interpret the disc/buttons as a keypad key. The classic example of this was the game Space Hawk, in which the combination of disc and button inputs occasionally triggered the "Hyperspace" button (from the keypad); Mattel "fixed" this by riffing a line in the manual about how your spaceman might occasionally hit a "black hole" that would send him into hyperspace, just as if you'd hit the key.
(See also this site for more Intellivision info.)
Think about it. A large part of the 360's sales are going to be from people upgrading from the original Xbox, and they're going to want to bring their games over, since backward-compatibility has been announced as a feature...but only for "the top titles" at launch. And Halo 2 is the topmost of those "top titles"; it's been most-played game on Xbox Live practically since Day One. If the 360 can't run Halo 2 perfectly, there's going to be a lot of consoles getting returned, and later, not purchased.
So it would behoove Bungie and MS to spend whatever time it takes to make sure it's perfect, and then, once the heat's off, get busy on Halo 3 in all its next-generation glory. There's enough other native-360 launch titles to keep people busy for awhile.
That's assuming it's even necessary to buy out Jabber. Likely, they'd just buy Jabber's server product, if the open-source server wasn't powerful enough to handle Google Talk's load. So they'd be Jabber Inc. customers, but not necessarily owners.
By the way, open-source Jabber development does not fall under Jabber Inc., but under the Jabber Software Foundation. Jabber Inc. sponsors the foundation and employs many of the core developers, though.
(disclaimer: somewhere in the back of my closet, I have old boxes of business cards from both Webb Interactive and Jabber, with my name on them)
Come on, you all know the words! "Show me, show you, Kikkoman, Kikkoman! Show me, show you, Kikkoman! All right!"
"Meh!"
You're thinking of the Xeon EM64T (Nocona) processors. They're pretty much Intel's knockoff of the AMD Opteron, which they came up with, I gather, because the Opteron was kicking the Itanium's ass.
I've got to try and get Helix Player working on my FC2 box...I want to watch this launch, at least from T-9:00 up through MECO. (And, of course, I'll still be holding my breath from "Go at throttle up" through SRB SEP.)
At one time, Boardwatch was selling posters of that magazine cover. I wish I could find a copy of that image, or even a photo of that poster...
I acknowledge that there are people out there who aren't as comfortable with these things as I am. Hopefully Linspire will work OK for those kind of people.
I'll have to take a peek at those Linspire notebooks...though, if I got one, I'd probably rather install Debian on it.
Not that this date tree will necessarily be as bad, mind you.
However, the Broadcast Flag was about your TV deciding what it can do with the signal after it's been received. Once the signal is received, the FCC has no jurisdiction over it. The receiver antenna is the "point of demarcation" (to use a phone company term). At that point, the receiver can do whatever it likes with the signal it's picked up.
A good analogy might be closed-captioning: the FCC can mandate that TV signals contain closed-captioning information, and they can mandate that TV receivers be capable of displaying the captions, but they cannot mandate that the TV must display the captions at all times (and they don't--you have to turn captioning on to display the captions). Same sort of situation with the Broadcast Flag; while the FCC can mandate the presence of the flag in a signal, and they can mandate that TVs must be capable of handling the flag, they cannot mandate that TVs must honor the flag.
As I understand it, the broadcast flag was a software issue, not a hardware one. Manufacturers could just create a new version of the software that doesn't have broadcast flag support and load it into the new TVs. Shouldn't be too hard, as it's a matter of leaving code out.
I bet the respawns are gonna be pretty hard...
Perhaps this is the reason why they don't have sarcasm on Betelgeuse (according to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy); their brains lack the sensor to detect it. (In Mostly Harmless, Ford has to ask Arthur, "This is that thing you call sarcasm, isn't it?")
Yes. It was the episode where Dilbert lost "the knack," and his attempted launch of a space billboard resulted in disabling all satellites and knocking humanity back to medieval times.
And I think that applies just to first-party titles. Third parties can keep writing for Xbox as long as they think they can still sell.
Actually, I believe Red Dwarf had an answer to why the sound occurred...they called it the "Voosh-Whee Simulator."
My response to that line was always, "Yeah, and I bet Han can run the mile in less than 100 yards, too."
The box went to SCO's lawyers, not SCO itself. SCO isn't permitted to even get near that server. They have to get outside experts to search that source for any SCO code...further increasing SCO's burn rate.
At least I can understand Slayer, which is pretty much, "If it moves, shoot it; if it doesn't move, shoot it anyway." I've never played any playlists other than Rumble Training and Rumble Pit, because I just don't know how those games are supposed to work...and when a round of Oddball or King of The Hill comes up in those two playlists, I just scramble like hell to keep up, but it's tough.
I estimate that I make my "quality bar" anywhere from half to three-quarters of the time. Sometimes I get as many as 10 kills before the game ends. Of course, a few nights ago I was in a Swords match where I managed 18 kills and still finished in the cellar...
The table in question is the one headed "Level" and "Maximum Match." The old table started out with Levels 0-5 allowing +5 levels, Levels 6-10 akllowing +6 levels, and on up to Levels 36 and up allowing +10 levels. The new table shows the maximum match for Level 1 is +10 levels, Level 2 is +9 levels, on up to Level 6 being +5 levels, then the maximum match slowly increases from there, with the curve getting steeper as you hit Level 30.
However, the XP-to-level table also shows that the XP required per level has dropped, starting with Level 4 and becoming more pronounced as levels increase. (Old Level 50 = 44500 XP, new Level 50 = 10250 XP) The XP exchange table has also become less steep the way it slopes off as the level difference increases, and the "Loss Factor" handicap table for low-level players now doesn't cause you to lose full XP until you hit Level 29.
It's difficult to interpret the effect of all of these changes, but I suspect that I'll probably be able to get back my old level easily enough once the addicts start zooming up into the 30s and 40s, which I expect they will soon. (Someone's already hit Level 22 in Rumble Pit play, and this is just the day after the stats got reset...)
(Though one thing I noticed, looking at the charts on bungie.net, is that the "horizons" have changed. Before, as Level 1, I could be sure none of my opponents would be higher than Level 5. Now that's been stretched to Level 10. Bad news for me, even though my usual "quality bar" for a Halo 2 match is just not finishing in last place...)