The cynic might point out that the Chinese Government did this mostly by relaxing some of their oppression and finally let their people take part (in a limited way) in the global economy.
Isn't it also likely given Google's distributed nature that they are still in the process of removing the censorship, and sometimes you may get a censored result and sometimes you may not.
Yes, it is safe to assume that a Star Wars MMO will be a smash hit that lives forever. After all, Star Wars Galaxies is still an unstoppable juggernaut, right?
The 8600 is plenty fast enough to be comparable to a 7950.
At any rate, the published minimum specs are grossly higher than what the game actually needs according to what a bunch of the closed beta testers said they needed. The only caveat is that ATI cards are more problematic than nVidia cards for some reason.
What part of Firefly do you think needed a reboot? The whole point of these reboots is to drop the decades of cruft that have dogged down a series and made it impossible to create anything new thanks to all of the baggage. Firefly has a (too) short lived TV run and a movie. There's not really any baggage to drop.
The only thing I'd change is the dumbass execs that cancelled it before its time.
Macrovision? It required special equipment, but that equipment wasn't terribly expensive or difficult to find. The biggest advantage to Disney is that because VHS tapes wear out with repeated viewings and because kids love to watch the same movies over and over again, they had a built-in audience of parents that would need to repurchase the movies at regular intervals. They didn't have to worry about people dubbing the tape and then redubbing it whenever the copy wore out.
It never really slowed down pirates though, just honest people.
Sure, just burn a 90 minute CD in Mode-2 and you'll get around 950MB worth of data on it. You'll also probably have a disc that almost nobody can read, and will be very prone to data loss due to physical damage.
Ironically, people who bought PS2s to use them as DVD players back in the day were burned when it turned out the PS2 was a pretty marginal DVD player. Overlay (subtitle) support in particular was iffy on a lot of disks (flickering, improper fill, etc...).
The faster processor might actually be a boon in this case. Voice recognition tends to improve considerably as you throw more computer resources at it, and the upgraded CPU in this beast could really come into play in this case.
I take it you don't have any graphics intensive games on there? Bigger games on the Apple App Store can run dozens or even hundreds of megs. Even the Apple developed Texas Hold-em app is over 10MB. 190MB is an embarrassment, plain and simple. I hope that's a typo and it's actually limited to 190GB or something.
It's something I'd like to see in the USB3 spec: A standard (but optional) way for the driver to pop up a window and ask the user for input. Make sure Microsoft is on board and agrees to patch Vista and Win7 include it in the first release of their USB stack as well. It would be more difficult to support on Linux, but not impossible. Backwards compatibility would be a concern though.
Maybe a better place would be in the ATA driver? I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more laptop drives with built-in hardware encryption. Having a BIOS prompt pop up and ask you for the key to your drive would be nice.
If it can be merely "bypassed" then it doesn't seem like it was encryption at all, just password protection. If this is the case, then they might be in trouble for misrepresenting their product in the advertising.
I suspect most of us agree with you on that - However, the legality between the two differs radically. Stripping DRM for purposes of interoperability might count as a protected use (IANAL); downloading a torrent definitely does not. Also, keep in mind that publishers have increasingly tried to play the "X different products" game, claiming that the dead-tree edition requires a separate purchase from the eBook which requires a separate purchase from the audiobook (even if digitally produced) - Geeks tend to scoff at that sort of thinking, but the courts sadly haven't caught on to it as nothing more than a shell-game yet.
Stripping the DRM so you can use it on a different device than the manufacturer intended is a pretty clear cut and dried violation of the DMCA. Every single time you do it, you are facing a fine of $250,000 and jail time.
It's not impossible to get better results out of lower bitrates, but you have to pay the penalty elsewhere, typically in encode/decode complexity.
If your decode hardware is fixed (it's generic HDTV hardware), then there is much less room for improvement, and half the bitrate is an enormous drop. It's no surprise that the BBC viewers complained.
If you read the article it tells you that the supercomputer has 256 Opteron 250s (2.4Ghz) and was built 3 years ago.
If you have a parallizable problem that can be solved with CUDA, you can get absolutely incredible performance out of off-of-the-shelf GPUs these days.
That picture represents a tiny tiny 11 arc-minute square of the sky (according to Wikipedia, it's like looking through a 1mm x 1mm square hole from 1m away) and it is absolutely jam packed with galaxies, each one containing millions of stars.
If the CIA came out and made such a strong statement like that, every intelligence agency in the world would hear "Our operatives are working for CNN and are in your country." It would be a bloodbath.
Uh, I thought the point was that these people only want games to be for kids. This seem to be doing exactly what they want. I don't see how this is "punishment".
You don't need a whole lot of CPU time and memory to make a usable interface, it does take careful design and thought about how people work. Usability studies wouldn't hurt either.
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The cynic might point out that the Chinese Government did this mostly by relaxing some of their oppression and finally let their people take part (in a limited way) in the global economy.
Isn't it also likely given Google's distributed nature that they are still in the process of removing the censorship, and sometimes you may get a censored result and sometimes you may not.
The laws of physics says that their claim is total bullshit unless their Blackberry has a nonstandard 1mW battery pack.
How does this not sap energy from your orbit? Is it basically a roundabout way of converting reaction mass into electricity?
Yes, it is safe to assume that a Star Wars MMO will be a smash hit that lives forever. After all, Star Wars Galaxies is still an unstoppable juggernaut, right?
The 8600 is plenty fast enough to be comparable to a 7950.
At any rate, the published minimum specs are grossly higher than what the game actually needs according to what a bunch of the closed beta testers said they needed. The only caveat is that ATI cards are more problematic than nVidia cards for some reason.
Has any MMO ever launched with the high end content in place?
What part of Firefly do you think needed a reboot? The whole point of these reboots is to drop the decades of cruft that have dogged down a series and made it impossible to create anything new thanks to all of the baggage. Firefly has a (too) short lived TV run and a movie. There's not really any baggage to drop.
The only thing I'd change is the dumbass execs that cancelled it before its time.
Macrovision? It required special equipment, but that equipment wasn't terribly expensive or difficult to find. The biggest advantage to Disney is that because VHS tapes wear out with repeated viewings and because kids love to watch the same movies over and over again, they had a built-in audience of parents that would need to repurchase the movies at regular intervals. They didn't have to worry about people dubbing the tape and then redubbing it whenever the copy wore out.
It never really slowed down pirates though, just honest people.
Sure, just burn a 90 minute CD in Mode-2 and you'll get around 950MB worth of data on it. You'll also probably have a disc that almost nobody can read, and will be very prone to data loss due to physical damage.
Ironically, people who bought PS2s to use them as DVD players back in the day were burned when it turned out the PS2 was a pretty marginal DVD player. Overlay (subtitle) support in particular was iffy on a lot of disks (flickering, improper fill, etc...).
The faster processor might actually be a boon in this case. Voice recognition tends to improve considerably as you throw more computer resources at it, and the upgraded CPU in this beast could really come into play in this case.
I take it you don't have any graphics intensive games on there? Bigger games on the Apple App Store can run dozens or even hundreds of megs. Even the Apple developed Texas Hold-em app is over 10MB. 190MB is an embarrassment, plain and simple. I hope that's a typo and it's actually limited to 190GB or something.
It's something I'd like to see in the USB3 spec: A standard (but optional) way for the driver to pop up a window and ask the user for input. Make sure Microsoft is on board and agrees to patch Vista and Win7 include it in the first release of their USB stack as well. It would be more difficult to support on Linux, but not impossible. Backwards compatibility would be a concern though. Maybe a better place would be in the ATA driver? I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more laptop drives with built-in hardware encryption. Having a BIOS prompt pop up and ask you for the key to your drive would be nice.
If it can be merely "bypassed" then it doesn't seem like it was encryption at all, just password protection. If this is the case, then they might be in trouble for misrepresenting their product in the advertising.
You're 43 and your highest paying job ever is stuffing boxes for Amazon? Have you ever considered furthering your education?
Stripping the DRM so you can use it on a different device than the manufacturer intended is a pretty clear cut and dried violation of the DMCA. Every single time you do it, you are facing a fine of $250,000 and jail time.
It's not impossible to get better results out of lower bitrates, but you have to pay the penalty elsewhere, typically in encode/decode complexity.
If your decode hardware is fixed (it's generic HDTV hardware), then there is much less room for improvement, and half the bitrate is an enormous drop. It's no surprise that the BBC viewers complained.
If you read the article it tells you that the supercomputer has 256 Opteron 250s (2.4Ghz) and was built 3 years ago. If you have a parallizable problem that can be solved with CUDA, you can get absolutely incredible performance out of off-of-the-shelf GPUs these days.
I was wondering how much this number jumped up since Americans started buying HDTVs. It's a completely useless statistic regardless though.
That picture represents a tiny tiny 11 arc-minute square of the sky (according to Wikipedia, it's like looking through a 1mm x 1mm square hole from 1m away) and it is absolutely jam packed with galaxies, each one containing millions of stars.
Real developers have trouble getting even small numbers of apps approved, and yet somehow these guys have literally a thousand crappy knockoff apps?
If the CIA came out and made such a strong statement like that, every intelligence agency in the world would hear "Our operatives are working for CNN and are in your country." It would be a bloodbath.
Uh, I thought the point was that these people only want games to be for kids. This seem to be doing exactly what they want. I don't see how this is "punishment".
You don't need a whole lot of CPU time and memory to make a usable interface, it does take careful design and thought about how people work. Usability studies wouldn't hurt either.