Thats a matter for the companies to decide. iD software for example, decided to release the Doom source code, but explicitly not the Doom graphics and data files, they could have done, if they wanted to, but since Doom is still being ported to and sold on every small and embedded platform under the sun, it wasn't in their interests to do so.
You sir have hit the proverbial nail on the equally proverbial head. Much of the decline in innovation and quality of the gaming industry can be put down to the absurd costs of development and the way that no one person (or even a small group) can develop competative games on even the current generation of consoles.
OpenBSD has excelent Sparc support, and I for one am very happy about it, Sparcs make excelent firewalls and servers for small environments, mine currently has a quad fast ethernet card in the back thus meaning I dont need an extra hub in the server cupboard (just the four rooms it connects to) and combined with OpenBSD's excelent packet filter and rock solid security (which is even stronger on sparc since it can take advantage of quirks of the archetecture to defend against some attacks better) it makes an ideal server for me, runs nicely and doesn't even push the sparc that hard.
Joke or otherwise, Sparcs are awesome machines (for some roles), and OpenBSD is an awesome system.
The fact is that most people don't really want all this crap on their phones.
I'm afraid that from my limited observations, you're quite wrong. I agree that some people, my mother, for example, agree with you and don't want their phones to do anything more than be phones. Then again, 9 times out of 10 my mother doesn't even take her phone with her (and I got her one that does almost nothing beyond being a phone, b/w screen, no bluetooth, no wap, ok it has games and ringtones but she never goes into them).
Most people who actually want a phone (and want to use it for more than just emergencies), it would appear want most (if not all) of the features on offer. WAP was a disaster, really badly designed and massively over priced, so rightly, nobody wants to use it (and I'll bet that pretty much everyone who does use it, goes through the google wap to web portal, what a wonderful bit of code that is). Many people enjoy having mp3 (or equivalent) ringtones, and not just teenagers. They can be very annoying if people listen to them as music via the loudspeakers in public places, but to indicate when the phone is ringing, its helpful and just cool to be able to personalise it (mine plays the music from zero wing, I can always recognise my phone).
Cameraphones are beginning to come out using 2 megapixel cameras, which will make them more useful for everyone, but many people (who don't transfer the images off the phone) still enjoy and make widespread use of the traditional 640x480 ultra grainy ones, since on a phone screen the images look fine, most people never realise how crap the camera really is. Cameras work for one simple reason: most people would not carry a camera around with them 24/7, but most people do carry their phone with them everywhere, thus enabling them to take quick snaps of things they otherwise would not be able to. One of the first pictures I ever took with my phone was of one of those "smart" payphones showing a blue screen of death, and its become something of a hobby, whenever I'm out and see something other than a computer showing a windows error message, I snap a quick piccie of it... I'm not goina carry around a digital camera for that purpose, but a cameraphone does the job nicely.
A few phones (Nokia 9500 specifically) have started adding WiFi to their list of features, which gets a lot of use since around here at least you can quite often find free wifi connections and its large screen make surfing the web (the real web, not wap) very easy. It is useful to be able to look things up when your out, like, comparing the price in the shop with the prices on ebay, or getting directions to where your going. Also, email is a useful function to have. I've sat in the middle of a forrest at night, and by the light of the moon typed an email to my gf about how beautiful it is and how I wished she was there.
These features are used, and are desired.
Maybe not everyone uses every feature, some features are rarely used at all, but its still very nice to have them there when you need them, and its not just the uber-geeks who want them, nor is it just the teenagers.
Not to mention that many programs depend on the current security model, changing it would break many things, and not just security tools, but all manner of everyday apps which shouldnt need root permissions to run, but do because the programmers took it as the norm and failed to test on a locked down system.
People in the US are generally lazy, people in Japan are generally extremely productive. Its not a matter of race, but culture. Americans are just brought up differently from the Japanese, who have the strongest work ethic of anywhere afaik, and have a totally different attitude to buisness.
Not at all. Slightly different example, but I'm in the process of cracking my Nintendo DS, but not so I can play pirate games, infact, with the hardware I have, I cant do that. But I can write homebrew stuff on it, and yes, run linux, if I so desire, but with no x, and no wifi, there isnt too much point in linux yet, for me at least, I'm more interested in writing games for it.
Y'know I was asked to fix a machine once where this fool had gone through his windoze directory like that... when I opened a config file and it asked me where it could find notepad, I promptly called him an idiot and fdisked the machine before doing a full reinstall.
Fact: Google is a buisness. Fact: Buisnesses exist to make money. Fact: Google makes most of its money from advertising. Fact: People need to look at (and act (click) upon them) adverts for them to make money. Obviousness: Covering more languages allows more people to use the service. Obviousness: The more people that use the service, the more adverts they will see, and the more they will click upon. Thus, the more money google with recieve from their clicks.
Therefore "By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue"
I wasnt advocating either macOS or windoze. I've not used macs enough to really comment, however Im gettting really pissed off with windoze, but, yeah, was simply pointing out that you can compare apples to oranges in this case, just about.
Yeah except people dont buy macs to run windoze on. (Yes I know, linux geeks buy macs to run linux on, but any linux geek worth his name can make it run on virtually any hardware so they dont count in this argument)
Exactly, I would call C a "high level assembly language", I ment more things like VB (which is still useful as a windoze scripting language, its original design goal I believe), and Java, which having been exposed to briefly, I refuse to touch with a very long stick.
I could not agree more, having learned basic as a kid, in several flavors, and then moving onto vb6, I got so disgusted with the whole thing (not least that vb6 is so full of annoying bugs that anything big you want to write needs to be done entirely via api calls for such simple things as window creation and drawing of standard looking scrollbars) that I've totally regressed and am now learning assembly and am blissfully happy at the level of control and new abilities I have. One day I might learn C, but I've been scared off high level languages for good.
How about teaching these kids some assembly? Something nice like 68k assembly, you could get a load of old 68k based systems (my vote is for Atari ST's) and teach them simple things, like how to manipulate bitmaps on screen, which leads nicely into the writing of little games, and nothing motivates kids more than games. Assembly isnt that hard really, especially on a nice big endian CISC like the 68k, and it'll give them serious insight when they come to learn C ("ah-ha, so a for loop is just a dbra!").
In England we have a license fee, a kind of tax on televisions, if you own one, you are required to pay, and the money from that goes to fund the BBC, which has no commercial advertising. However, we also have independant TV stations, both on terrestrial broardcasting, and via cable and satalite, which do have advertising on them (even when you pay for the cable/satalite service).
No, they wouldnt, it is more than two miles offshore and thus in international waters, however, they would be attacking british citizens, which would not be taken lightly.
You have amazing timing however, I've just (about half an hour ago) come home from a holiday in essex, and sealand is visible from where I was. Its not the kinda place which gets mentioned very often.
The french might have had such an objection, I dont know, but it was rejected by a majority of 648 to 14, which means it was more than just the french who objected to it, and makes it very unlikely it (or anything similar) will be back for a looong time.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats a matter for the companies to decide. iD software for example, decided to release the Doom source code, but explicitly not the Doom graphics and data files, they could have done, if they wanted to, but since Doom is still being ported to and sold on every small and embedded platform under the sun, it wasn't in their interests to do so.
Damn! Where are my mod points when I need them?
You sir have hit the proverbial nail on the equally proverbial head. Much of the decline in innovation and quality of the gaming industry can be put down to the absurd costs of development and the way that no one person (or even a small group) can develop competative games on even the current generation of consoles.
OpenBSD has excelent Sparc support, and I for one am very happy about it, Sparcs make excelent firewalls and servers for small environments, mine currently has a quad fast ethernet card in the back thus meaning I dont need an extra hub in the server cupboard (just the four rooms it connects to) and combined with OpenBSD's excelent packet filter and rock solid security (which is even stronger on sparc since it can take advantage of quirks of the archetecture to defend against some attacks better) it makes an ideal server for me, runs nicely and doesn't even push the sparc that hard.
Joke or otherwise, Sparcs are awesome machines (for some roles), and OpenBSD is an awesome system.
The fact is that most people don't really want all this crap on their phones.
I'm afraid that from my limited observations, you're quite wrong. I agree that some people, my mother, for example, agree with you and don't want their phones to do anything more than be phones. Then again, 9 times out of 10 my mother doesn't even take her phone with her (and I got her one that does almost nothing beyond being a phone, b/w screen, no bluetooth, no wap, ok it has games and ringtones but she never goes into them).
Most people who actually want a phone (and want to use it for more than just emergencies), it would appear want most (if not all) of the features on offer. WAP was a disaster, really badly designed and massively over priced, so rightly, nobody wants to use it (and I'll bet that pretty much everyone who does use it, goes through the google wap to web portal, what a wonderful bit of code that is). Many people enjoy having mp3 (or equivalent) ringtones, and not just teenagers. They can be very annoying if people listen to them as music via the loudspeakers in public places, but to indicate when the phone is ringing, its helpful and just cool to be able to personalise it (mine plays the music from zero wing, I can always recognise my phone).
Cameraphones are beginning to come out using 2 megapixel cameras, which will make them more useful for everyone, but many people (who don't transfer the images off the phone) still enjoy and make widespread use of the traditional 640x480 ultra grainy ones, since on a phone screen the images look fine, most people never realise how crap the camera really is. Cameras work for one simple reason: most people would not carry a camera around with them 24/7, but most people do carry their phone with them everywhere, thus enabling them to take quick snaps of things they otherwise would not be able to. One of the first pictures I ever took with my phone was of one of those "smart" payphones showing a blue screen of death, and its become something of a hobby, whenever I'm out and see something other than a computer showing a windows error message, I snap a quick piccie of it... I'm not goina carry around a digital camera for that purpose, but a cameraphone does the job nicely.
A few phones (Nokia 9500 specifically) have started adding WiFi to their list of features, which gets a lot of use since around here at least you can quite often find free wifi connections and its large screen make surfing the web (the real web, not wap) very easy. It is useful to be able to look things up when your out, like, comparing the price in the shop with the prices on ebay, or getting directions to where your going. Also, email is a useful function to have. I've sat in the middle of a forrest at night, and by the light of the moon typed an email to my gf about how beautiful it is and how I wished she was there.
These features are used, and are desired.
Maybe not everyone uses every feature, some features are rarely used at all, but its still very nice to have them there when you need them, and its not just the uber-geeks who want them, nor is it just the teenagers.
Actually its a real pain in the backside getting the url out of the BBC's player window as its all built with javascript.
0 12da6800315e8/bb/09012da68003170d_16x9_bb.ram
u dio/9012da6800315e8/bb/09012da68003170d_16x9_bb.ra ?title="BBC"&author=""©right="(C) British Broadcasting Corporation"
To save everone the trouble, here is the url for the ram file
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news_web/audio/9
and here's the rtsp address to the actual content
rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/news/media/avdb/news_web/a
Not to mention that many programs depend on the current security model, changing it would break many things, and not just security tools, but all manner of everyday apps which shouldnt need root permissions to run, but do because the programmers took it as the norm and failed to test on a locked down system.
You make one significant error in your logic.
People in the US are generally lazy, people in Japan are generally extremely productive. Its not a matter of race, but culture. Americans are just brought up differently from the Japanese, who have the strongest work ethic of anywhere afaik, and have a totally different attitude to buisness.
Its called sarcasm, you might want to look it up some time.
As a european, I too wish they would do that.
Not at all. Slightly different example, but I'm in the process of cracking my Nintendo DS, but not so I can play pirate games, infact, with the hardware I have, I cant do that. But I can write homebrew stuff on it, and yes, run linux, if I so desire, but with no x, and no wifi, there isnt too much point in linux yet, for me at least, I'm more interested in writing games for it.
Y'know I was asked to fix a machine once where this fool had gone through his windoze directory like that... when I opened a config file and it asked me where it could find notepad, I promptly called him an idiot and fdisked the machine before doing a full reinstall.
The police dont go round threatening to sue middle aged disabled women of stealing gangster rap music at 4 in the morning.
It seems to me to be common sense.
Fact: Google is a buisness.
Fact: Buisnesses exist to make money.
Fact: Google makes most of its money from advertising.
Fact: People need to look at (and act (click) upon them) adverts for them to make money.
Obviousness: Covering more languages allows more people to use the service.
Obviousness: The more people that use the service, the more adverts they will see, and the more they will click upon. Thus, the more money google with recieve from their clicks.
Therefore "By indexing the material, Google hopes to attract more visitors to its Web site and spawn more searches that generate advertising revenue"
Pah! When my college caught me hacking into their network they offered me a job :)
:)
(I had full rights over everything, yay me! but I only *used* it once to access a file I needed for some homework during the summer holidays
I wasnt advocating either macOS or windoze. I've not used macs enough to really comment, however Im gettting really pissed off with windoze, but, yeah, was simply pointing out that you can compare apples to oranges in this case, just about.
Yeah except people dont buy macs to run windoze on. (Yes I know, linux geeks buy macs to run linux on, but any linux geek worth his name can make it run on virtually any hardware so they dont count in this argument)
Exactly, I would call C a "high level assembly language", I ment more things like VB (which is still useful as a windoze scripting language, its original design goal I believe), and Java, which having been exposed to briefly, I refuse to touch with a very long stick.
Because working on the real hardware is just plain more fun.
Im currently writing games and demos on the Atari Jaguar btw, now thats a fun system for assembly heads.
I could not agree more, having learned basic as a kid, in several flavors, and then moving onto vb6, I got so disgusted with the whole thing (not least that vb6 is so full of annoying bugs that anything big you want to write needs to be done entirely via api calls for such simple things as window creation and drawing of standard looking scrollbars) that I've totally regressed and am now learning assembly and am blissfully happy at the level of control and new abilities I have. One day I might learn C, but I've been scared off high level languages for good.
How about teaching these kids some assembly? Something nice like 68k assembly, you could get a load of old 68k based systems (my vote is for Atari ST's) and teach them simple things, like how to manipulate bitmaps on screen, which leads nicely into the writing of little games, and nothing motivates kids more than games. Assembly isnt that hard really, especially on a nice big endian CISC like the 68k, and it'll give them serious insight when they come to learn C ("ah-ha, so a for loop is just a dbra!").
No, not quite.
In England we have a license fee, a kind of tax on televisions, if you own one, you are required to pay, and the money from that goes to fund the BBC, which has no commercial advertising. However, we also have independant TV stations, both on terrestrial broardcasting, and via cable and satalite, which do have advertising on them (even when you pay for the cable/satalite service).
D'oh!, no, scub what I said about the distance, but... yeah, go read the fine article instead hehe.
No, they wouldnt, it is more than two miles offshore and thus in international waters, however, they would be attacking british citizens, which would not be taken lightly.
You have amazing timing however, I've just (about half an hour ago) come home from a holiday in essex, and sealand is visible from where I was. Its not the kinda place which gets mentioned very often.
Its pretty simple, once you know the trick. For a hint, it involves three xor's (such a useful little operator).
Technically heavy objects do fall faster, but they have to be very heavy indeed (small moon or bigger).
Nonsense!
The french might have had such an objection, I dont know, but it was rejected by a majority of 648 to 14, which means it was more than just the french who objected to it, and makes it very unlikely it (or anything similar) will be back for a looong time.