The solution to the cellphone problem is to go for a prepaid account and to use a provider/plan/whatever that locks out premium calls (ringtones, international calls etc).
Then, they can have the cellphone to call you in emergencies AND to talk to their friends but you can keep a lid on the spending.
Does this (or any other open source stuff such as mplayer) cover whatever protocol is used by the microsoft server for streaming windows media cotent? (whatever it is)
Being able to play windows media streams is just as usefull as being able to play windows media files on a disk or web url or etc.
One reason some companies use large boxes, multiple boxes, boxes with lots of air, boxes with lots of foam/packing peanuts etc for products that are being shipped is to protect them if some UPS/FedEx/etc lacky plays "package football" with the box (I dont know if said lackies go out of their way to damage packages but everything I have heard suggests they arent exactly carefull either)
The problem for blizzard is that the original Starcraft is so popular (I expect that there are people out there who have machines that can play Starcraft but not Warcraft III) that if they released a new Starcraft, all the Starcraft players wouldnt want to buy it (cant run it, not enough players yet etc)
How come Nintendo can put Wi-Fi in the box when Microsoft is charging much higher prices for their console yet they also charge a fortune for that Wi-Fi dongle thing?
The carriers can't do anything. Just buy a SIM from them (or if they wont sell you a sim by itself, use the one from the phone you already have or buy whatever the cheapest phone is with the SIM and plan you want e.g. a phone thats heavily subsidised by the carrier) and use it in this phone. Thats why GSM is so good, you can use a GSM sim in any GSM phone and there is nothing the carriers can do about it. Same with UMTS 3G, you can use a 3G USIM in any phone.
Here in australia, some companies (e.g. "3") lock all their phones. Telstra (who I am with) only lock their prepaid phones (and only because they are subsidised by telstra)
I expect that the runtime environment (which may well be a port of the.NET runtime allowing for managed code) is signed by microsoft to run on the 360 in the usual way. And then, when you buy the kit, executables signed by your kit are locked to your copy of the runtime and engine and will not run on any other runtime unless signed by the matching devkit.
Given that microsoft has valid business reasons to prevent just anyone from running whatever homebrew they want (for example, microsoft probably has BIG business reasons to prevent XBMC 360 from becoming availble to just anyone), I see that the best way to allow greater distribution is to allow those developers who produce games that meet microsofts standards to have their game signed somehow and distributed over XBOX live. That way, developers can have their game more widely distributed but microsoft gets to prevent anything they dont like (i.e. emulators, network apps, media players that play formats MS doesnt want being played, games that don't meet MS standards etc)
Show the 360 users a 360MC for the 360 that can play the media formats XBMC can play (i.e. all the stuff that microsoft cant or wont touch) and maybe they will give up trying to make a mod chip. Oh and there needs to be MAME360 and MESS260 too to cover the emulation side (and with the power of the 360 CPUs you could certainly emulate anything with 8 and 16 bit CPUs including things like Neo-Geo and CPS2 that required too much memory and CPU for the original XBOX and probably a number of games using 32 bit CPUs too)
Provide those few apps in a way that doesnt require spending big bucks to play them and a sizable chunk of the "I want a mod chip to run homebrew code" market would be satisfied.
Why then hasnt someone written a plugin for mplayer or mpg123 or when open source implementations of MPEG4/h.323/whatever it is exist?
And dont answer "patents", all those flavors of MPEG (including MP3 audio) are patented and the open source players implement those so I see no reason "patents" would stop them implementing VC-1 too...
Basicly, the kind of "media PC" that people here are talking about would basicly have the following: 1.High definition video capture 2.PVR functionality 3.High definition video playback 4.Abillity to take media from your network and put it on this device to play it back and 5.Abillity to play as many video formats as possible
Media corps dont like any of these, they dont want people to be able to copy stuff from a network and play it in full HD on their big screen TVs. Or to record TV and watch it later. Or to buy (or hire) DVDs, rip them and watch the rip with upconverted video and all those "unskippable" trailers, logos and copyright warnings removed or disabled.
Why do you think Microsoft crippled the media functionlity of the XBOX 360? Precicly to prevent people putting video content (ripped from DVDs, downloaded from P2P etc) on their network somewhere and playing it on the 360.
Quake III does NOT use Objective C. If nothing else, it compiles on Visual Studio and unless microsoft has omitted it from the documentation somewhere, Visual Studio does NOT do Objective C.
As far as I know, xcode uses the apple port of GCC under the hood so unless there is something heavily tied into xcode here, one can just take the stuff from apple GCC source tree and port it to mainline GCC.
Plus, its more people who need to go through background checks and security clearences. Given that the NSA probobly handles stuff classified at levels above Top Secret that themselves are classified and only known to the NSA, how hard (and expensive) do you think it would be to find people who can run a power plant AND can be fully trusted to operate that close to all those secrets.
And what happens to the NSA when some kook with a backhoe takes out the linke from Cheyenne Mountain to Baltimore? Or when some terrorist disguised as a phone company worker or someone else innocent plugs a splice into the line somehow and eavesdrops on the NSAs traffic?
Sattelite links are no better, they can still be taken down or eavesdropped on if you are determined (plus the latency over a sattelite is huge)
But, its supported by Orrin Hatch, same guy who is behind a lot of other nasty IP related bills that have appeared on Slashdot. Which automatically makes it bad. (since Hatch has shown time and time again that he is a shill to big corps with lots of investment in IP)
What I can forsee is something for phones that lets you download songs from the ITMS over your phone internet link and then send the songs to a new bluetooth iPod over bluetooth. Perhaps the new iTunes phone will be one of the new 3G/GSM phones Motorola have debued recently...
IBM cant buy any SCO stock. If they do, it looks like IBM is "giving in" (i.e. buying them out instead of fighting).
Plus, thats assuming that they could convince those who hold the levers at SCO to sell up (if the rumors are true and Microsoft etc are the ones who are really behind SCO and the lawsuit, they are going to want to keep fighting to do as much damage to linux as they can)
Next day: Me: "Which candidate is this?" Them: Candidate B Me: Who is his opponent? Them: Candidate A Me: Okay. I'll vote for Candidate A. Thanks for interrupting my day.
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Wal-Mart matters to everyone, even those who dont shop there.
No mainstream games company is going to produce a game unless Wal-Mart will sell it.
The solution to the cellphone problem is to go for a prepaid account and to use a provider/plan/whatever that locks out premium calls (ringtones, international calls etc).
Then, they can have the cellphone to call you in emergencies AND to talk to their friends but you can keep a lid on the spending.
Does this (or any other open source stuff such as mplayer) cover whatever protocol is used by the microsoft server for streaming windows media cotent? (whatever it is)
Being able to play windows media streams is just as usefull as being able to play windows media files on a disk or web url or etc.
One reason some companies use large boxes, multiple boxes, boxes with lots of air, boxes with lots of foam/packing peanuts etc for products that are being shipped is to protect them if some UPS/FedEx/etc lacky plays "package football" with the box (I dont know if said lackies go out of their way to damage packages but everything I have heard suggests they arent exactly carefull either)
Maybe they should get the same guys who did the excellent HBO documentary "From The Earth To The Moon" to do it :)
The problem for blizzard is that the original Starcraft is so popular (I expect that there are people out there who have machines that can play Starcraft but not Warcraft III) that if they released a new Starcraft, all the Starcraft players wouldnt want to buy it (cant run it, not enough players yet etc)
Unless SUN releases the source code to the class libraries, java will never be Open Source.
How come Nintendo can put Wi-Fi in the box when Microsoft is charging much higher prices for their console yet they also charge a fortune for that Wi-Fi dongle thing?
The carriers can't do anything. Just buy a SIM from them (or if they wont sell you a sim by itself, use the one from the phone you already have or buy whatever the cheapest phone is with the SIM and plan you want e.g. a phone thats heavily subsidised by the carrier) and use it in this phone.
Thats why GSM is so good, you can use a GSM sim in any GSM phone and there is nothing the carriers can do about it. Same with UMTS 3G, you can use a 3G USIM in any phone.
Here in australia, some companies (e.g. "3") lock all their phones.
Telstra (who I am with) only lock their prepaid phones (and only because they are subsidised by telstra)
I expect that the runtime environment (which may well be a port of the .NET runtime allowing for managed code) is signed by microsoft to run on the 360 in the usual way. And then, when you buy the kit, executables signed by your kit are locked to your copy of the runtime and engine and will not run on any other runtime unless signed by the matching devkit.
Given that microsoft has valid business reasons to prevent just anyone from running whatever homebrew they want (for example, microsoft probably has BIG business reasons to prevent XBMC 360 from becoming availble to just anyone), I see that the best way to allow greater distribution is to allow those developers who produce games that meet microsofts standards to have their game signed somehow and distributed over XBOX live. That way, developers can have their game more widely distributed but microsoft gets to prevent anything they dont like (i.e. emulators, network apps, media players that play formats MS doesnt want being played, games that don't meet MS standards etc)
Show the 360 users a 360MC for the 360 that can play the media formats XBMC can play (i.e. all the stuff that microsoft cant or wont touch) and maybe they will give up trying to make a mod chip.
Oh and there needs to be MAME360 and MESS260 too to cover the emulation side (and with the power of the 360 CPUs you could certainly emulate anything with 8 and 16 bit CPUs including things like Neo-Geo and CPS2 that required too much memory and CPU for the original XBOX and probably a number of games using 32 bit CPUs too)
Provide those few apps in a way that doesnt require spending big bucks to play them and a sizable chunk of the "I want a mod chip to run homebrew code" market would be satisfied.
Why then hasnt someone written a plugin for mplayer or mpg123 or when open source implementations of MPEG4/h.323/whatever it is exist?
And dont answer "patents", all those flavors of MPEG (including MP3 audio) are patented and the open source players implement those so I see no reason "patents" would stop them implementing VC-1 too...
Whilst its not DosBox, I wouldnt be surprised if the PC emulation in MESS couldnt use the voodoo chip emulation from MAME...
Basicly, the kind of "media PC" that people here are talking about would basicly have the following:
1.High definition video capture
2.PVR functionality
3.High definition video playback
4.Abillity to take media from your network and put it on this device to play it back
and 5.Abillity to play as many video formats as possible
Media corps dont like any of these, they dont want people to be able to copy stuff from a network and play it in full HD on their big screen TVs.
Or to record TV and watch it later.
Or to buy (or hire) DVDs, rip them and watch the rip with upconverted video and all those "unskippable" trailers, logos and copyright warnings removed or disabled.
Why do you think Microsoft crippled the media functionlity of the XBOX 360? Precicly to prevent people putting video content (ripped from DVDs, downloaded from P2P etc) on their network somewhere and playing it on the 360.
I know you can get several phones from MOTO with airplane mode (I believe the V3I has it and probobly others like the SLVR or the V3X or others).
The new stuff they just announced may well have it too.
Quake III does NOT use Objective C. If nothing else, it compiles on Visual Studio and unless microsoft has omitted it from the documentation somewhere, Visual Studio does NOT do Objective C.
As far as I know, xcode uses the apple port of GCC under the hood so unless there is something heavily tied into xcode here, one can just take the stuff from apple GCC source tree and port it to mainline GCC.
Plus, its more people who need to go through background checks and security clearences.
Given that the NSA probobly handles stuff classified at levels above Top Secret that themselves are classified and only known to the NSA, how hard (and expensive) do you think it would be to find people who can run a power plant AND can be fully trusted to operate that close to all those secrets.
And what happens to the NSA when some kook with a backhoe takes out the linke from Cheyenne Mountain to Baltimore?
Or when some terrorist disguised as a phone company worker or someone else innocent plugs a splice into the line somehow and eavesdrops on the NSAs traffic?
Sattelite links are no better, they can still be taken down or eavesdropped on if you are determined (plus the latency over a sattelite is huge)
But, its supported by Orrin Hatch, same guy who is behind a lot of other nasty IP related bills that have appeared on Slashdot. Which automatically makes it bad. (since Hatch has shown time and time again that he is a shill to big corps with lots of investment in IP)
What I can forsee is something for phones that lets you download songs from the ITMS over your phone internet link and then send the songs to a new bluetooth iPod over bluetooth.
Perhaps the new iTunes phone will be one of the new 3G/GSM phones Motorola have debued recently...
I used to have the blaster master one, the metal gear one, the castlevania one, the wizzards & warriors one and I think the ninja gaiden one.
Although I dont remember actually playing any of those games on the NES.
IBM cant buy any SCO stock. If they do, it looks like IBM is "giving in" (i.e. buying them out instead of fighting).
Plus, thats assuming that they could convince those who hold the levers at SCO to sell up (if the rumors are true and Microsoft etc are the ones who are really behind SCO and the lawsuit, they are going to want to keep fighting to do as much damage to linux as they can)
Next day:
Me: "Which candidate is this?"
Them: Candidate B
Me: Who is his opponent?
Them: Candidate A
Me: Okay. I'll vote for Candidate A. Thanks for interrupting my day.
Now who do you vote for?