I believe it's the JIT engine for javascript, which by it's very nature needs to generate native code and is therefore not so simple to port. The rest of it should compile cleanly on 64, at least webkit does anyway.
The people i know who have had ipods fail on them, had them fail after several years by which time a newer model was available and their older one would have been in need of a new battery anyway... The failure just hastened their desire to replace it with a new model. The xbox 360 on the other hand, is the current model... if it fails, you can only replace it with something exactly the same. If you had an older xbox which failed, replacing it with a 360 wouldn't necessarily be an option either, since not all of your existing games would run.
It's good business for MS then, release an unreliable console knowing that most of your customers will buy a replacement if it dies.
With the price of games, after you've invested in a few the price of a machine isn't so high... It would be extremely annoying to have a big stack of games that you can't play.
A friend of mine bought a DM8000, and yes they are very pricey... It has a 400MHz cpu, and a hardware decoder for mpeg2/h.264, so using vlc it will play anything that can be played on such a spec of system, not sure if divx/xvid would play correctly. I only have the DM800, which has a slower cpu than the 8000, most of the videos i want to play on it are h.264 encoded anyway which it plays using the hardware support. It handles 720p video perfectly, and i don't have any 1080p video to try with it.
There was never an Alpha/Linux version, tho you could run the Digital Unix version through a binary compatibility layer. I have never really used NT for Alpha, tho i do know it had up to IE5 and a port of Mozilla at one point.
A corporation's only goal is to make profit via any means necessary... MS have done their fair share of harm to other parties in the pursuit of profit, and i4i are doing exactly the same thing. Can you honestly say that were the situations reversed, MS would not be doing exactly the same as i4i is doing, including choosing the most favorable court? MS have plenty of patents, and have threatened to use them against various things including Linux, the reason they don't pursue an aggressive strategy is because they have products on sale which most likely infringe patents held by other companies and the reprisals could cause them major harm.
The BSA is not concerned with end users, they are concerned with large businesses who have large amounts of software... The RIAA on the other hand, targets end users who cannot defend themselves and cannot afford the ridiculous amounts of money they are asking for.
Also, entertainment is optional, people can easily do without it, so having last year's britney song won't force you to buy the latest one... BSA members on the other hand, typically bring customers back through various lock-in schemes, which rely on them and those they communicate with using their software. If a significant portion of those users started using something else then they would be forced to interoperate, thus losing their biggest method for keeping customers. Pirated copies ensure the widest possible distribution of their lockin strategy.
Physical theft is considered a crime, because it deprives someone of a good... Copyright infringement on the other hand, does not deprive anyone, and it is impossible to prove that something would have been purchased had it not been available for free. Infact, it has been shown that copyright infringement has actually increased sales of various things, as it increases the product exposure, at least assuming the product is any good... If the product is really lousy, then people might tell their friends how crap it was and discourage them from purchasing it.. They would do this anyway, but you lose out on ripping off the original people with crap.
He is corrupt, that's a given... However, he has nowhere near the level of power and influence that Hitler did in his day... Who's to say what he would do if given the power to do so?
I typically run DBAN (if possible, assuming the drive is working), and then use thermite to destroy the drive... If you open it up and stuff thermite between the platters and add a generous helping around them and set it off, the drive will end up totally molten and form an alloy of the platter and the iron created by the thermite reaction.
I used this method to destroy 3 drives, and it was impossible to tell how many drives went in to form the resulting lump of metal.
Drives with aluminum cases turn to liquid almost instantly, the steel cased ones are a bit tougher but still melt.
Sure, anyone can give out the source for free but in many cases, especially with embedded devices, the value is in the whole package...
Take the dreambox satellite receivers as an example, the software is all gpl and there are various cheap chinese clones, however these chinese clones are considered inferior products.
Products using closed source software still get cloned too, look at all the chinese cloned cisco routers...
Coming at it from another angle, every couple of years there's an article about how even in the Western world, some absurdly large proportion of companies use pirated software. What makes you think that the GPL will make them suddenly compliant?
Because by far and away the vast majority of these companies only use "pirated" software internally... The GPL does not apply if you are just using the software internally, it only applies if you are distributing it to third parties. Using GPL software would eliminate the vast majority of corporate use of non legitimate software.
XTV lets subscribers decide when and where they watch the content they choose and build their own personal playlist.
As a subscriber, i would like to record tv and then watch it on my linux based laptop when i'm working away on business (because the hotels typically have very poor choices of channels), yet their "official" systems provide no way to do this - only unofficial systems provide this...
From the subscribersâ(TM) viewpoint, it doesnâ(TM)t get any better.
As a subscriber, a dreambox seems to be considerably better than an xtv device.
It doesn't give them a competitive advantage, it gives them the same advantages you had (ie ready made code, no need to write from scratch), but if all they do is use your code unchanged then they are at a disadvantage - having at best a direct clone of your product but no value-add and probably very poor service if they don't employ any developers who understand the code. If on the other hand, they employ developers to make improvements and fixes to the code, then you can also benefit from them.
Picking up Linux and modifying it to suit your needs is often much cheaper than the alternatives of licensing a proprietary system or paying developers to write one from scratch... The advantages of using Linux need to be weighed up against having to release sourcecode.
If people use Linux and play by the rules, then you get a huge amount of improvements from a large number of companies using it, further increasing the usefulness of linux.
The dreamboxes also record data unencrypted, even if you are recording an encrypted channel... The "official" boxes typically keep the data encrypted on disk such that you lose access to it if you cancel your subscription, and you are limited to the storage capacity of your box - you cant hookup extra drives, create backups to dvd or use network shares.
It's easy enough to clone a dreambox and nothing wrong with that, it's the fake boxes that are the problem (boxes falsely branded as official dreambox devices)... You could even take the dreambox software and recompile it to run on an x86 pc. Fake boxes occur regardless of the software being open source or not, a lot of cisco routers get cloned in china for instance, and they run official ios images.
The ARM design is also licensed out and companies embed the ARM cores with all kinds of other hardware, so what you were using to play 720p HD may well have been an ARM core with a hardware video decoder integrated.
DEC ported Netscape to Alpha, and it was far more stable than other versions thanks to their work... OpenOffice is available in a 64bit version for x86-64, and would probably compile on Alpha too. I have used Linux on most of the architectures it supports, and used to use an Alphastation as my primary workstation.
Sparc is a different story, unlike x86-64, sparc was designed from the beginning to have 64bit support in the future, such that even in 32bit mode you have access to the full array of registers and can still perform 64bit computations natively. Typically a sparc system will run a 64bit kernel so it can address all of its memory, and then run a 32bit userland for 99% of the applications, because 32bit uses less memory and usually performs better. 64bit is only used when absolutely necessary.
Video drivers won't be an issue on ARM based laptops, because whoever designs the machine will be primarily targeting linux and therefore ensure that whatever video hardware it has, supports linux. Like Apple building macs... Flash is also already available for linux/arm (such as the nokia n800 tablets). Commercial games aren't a big target for netbooks, so it's unlikely to be of much concern either.
The guts of an iphone, stuck in the back of a small flatscreen monitor would do just fine... Modern javascript interpreters are much faster than old ones, and modern embedded hardware is more than capable of running a web browser.
You want the least hardware possible, to use very little power and have very little to go wrong.
There are also a huge number of embedded developers, developing apps for phones and other embedded devices which often use ARM processors...
Putting windows on a POS device is actually a pretty dumb idea...
An Atom might cost $10 to manufacture, but how much does it cost to buy? If you use windows, how much does that cost for every device? How about any additional software you need on every device, eg AV? The increased cost of rolling out updates, because windows includes a lot of features which serve no purpose to you and yet still need to be updated? Increased maintenence/support costs for the above, because there is now far more to go wrong than there would be on an embedded system? The security implications, not just the risk of being hacked but what about end users who figure out how to crash your POS app, reach a windows desktop and install arbitrary apps? The extra power used by a more complex device?
Development time and cost is a very trivial part of the overall cost, especially if you plan on selling lots of units because the development costs only occur once, but the resultant costs of using windows recur for every individual unit you produce. Trying to skimp on the up front costs by hiring cheap windows developers is likely to cost you a lot more in the long run.
What drives x86 uptake in such devices is not the up front cost, it's often a case of the people making decisions not knowing that anything else exists.
That's "progress"... As hardware gets faster, software designers find new more inefficient ways to waste the extra capability of the hardware while dressing it up with buzzwords, fancy graphics and marketing.
"Cloud computing" is just one example, the prevalence of increasingly high level languages that seem to be getting progressively slower too, and the use of fancy graphical effect on interfaces that just detract form usability is another.
Incidentally, they are piggybacking on top of http because creating a new more efficient protocol would go one of two ways... An open standards protocol, which microsoft would ignore and wouldn't see widespread use... A proprietary protocol created by microsoft which would be resisted by many, cause dangerous lockin and possibly attract antitrust regulators again.
You don't need a killer app, nor killer features... You need good marketing... If google market this heavily, and make sure that it's cheap people will come.
Most non technical people i know who have computers, use them for very little, mostly browsing and the occasional email or IM program. If they could buy a small, quiet appliance that only did these things but did so in a simple manner and cost a lot less then they would jump at the chance...
Most people hate noisy computers, and consider them too expensive and too complicated, and resent having to get someone else to help them fix things, and resent having to pay extra to keep them running (repairs, av subscriptions etc). For joe average, a simple appliance that performs their limited needs and nothing else is perfect.
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I believe it's the JIT engine for javascript, which by it's very nature needs to generate native code and is therefore not so simple to port. The rest of it should compile cleanly on 64, at least webkit does anyway.
The people i know who have had ipods fail on them, had them fail after several years by which time a newer model was available and their older one would have been in need of a new battery anyway... The failure just hastened their desire to replace it with a new model.
The xbox 360 on the other hand, is the current model... if it fails, you can only replace it with something exactly the same.
If you had an older xbox which failed, replacing it with a 360 wouldn't necessarily be an option either, since not all of your existing games would run.
It's good business for MS then, release an unreliable console knowing that most of your customers will buy a replacement if it dies.
With the price of games, after you've invested in a few the price of a machine isn't so high... It would be extremely annoying to have a big stack of games that you can't play.
A friend of mine bought a DM8000, and yes they are very pricey...
It has a 400MHz cpu, and a hardware decoder for mpeg2/h.264, so using vlc it will play anything that can be played on such a spec of system, not sure if divx/xvid would play correctly.
I only have the DM800, which has a slower cpu than the 8000, most of the videos i want to play on it are h.264 encoded anyway which it plays using the hardware support. It handles 720p video perfectly, and i don't have any 1080p video to try with it.
For Digital Unix and possibly OpenVMS...
There was never an Alpha/Linux version, tho you could run the Digital Unix version through a binary compatibility layer. I have never really used NT for Alpha, tho i do know it had up to IE5 and a port of Mozilla at one point.
A corporation's only goal is to make profit via any means necessary...
MS have done their fair share of harm to other parties in the pursuit of profit, and i4i are doing exactly the same thing.
Can you honestly say that were the situations reversed, MS would not be doing exactly the same as i4i is doing, including choosing the most favorable court?
MS have plenty of patents, and have threatened to use them against various things including Linux, the reason they don't pursue an aggressive strategy is because they have products on sale which most likely infringe patents held by other companies and the reprisals could cause them major harm.
The BSA is not concerned with end users, they are concerned with large businesses who have large amounts of software... The RIAA on the other hand, targets end users who cannot defend themselves and cannot afford the ridiculous amounts of money they are asking for.
Also, entertainment is optional, people can easily do without it, so having last year's britney song won't force you to buy the latest one... BSA members on the other hand, typically bring customers back through various lock-in schemes, which rely on them and those they communicate with using their software. If a significant portion of those users started using something else then they would be forced to interoperate, thus losing their biggest method for keeping customers. Pirated copies ensure the widest possible distribution of their lockin strategy.
Physical theft is considered a crime, because it deprives someone of a good...
Copyright infringement on the other hand, does not deprive anyone, and it is impossible to prove that something would have been purchased had it not been available for free.
Infact, it has been shown that copyright infringement has actually increased sales of various things, as it increases the product exposure, at least assuming the product is any good... If the product is really lousy, then people might tell their friends how crap it was and discourage them from purchasing it.. They would do this anyway, but you lose out on ripping off the original people with crap.
He is corrupt, that's a given...
However, he has nowhere near the level of power and influence that Hitler did in his day... Who's to say what he would do if given the power to do so?
Look on ebay...
You need iron oxide and aluminum powder, it's all there... Some magnesium ribbon could be useful as a fuse too.
I typically run DBAN (if possible, assuming the drive is working), and then use thermite to destroy the drive... If you open it up and stuff thermite between the platters and add a generous helping around them and set it off, the drive will end up totally molten and form an alloy of the platter and the iron created by the thermite reaction.
I used this method to destroy 3 drives, and it was impossible to tell how many drives went in to form the resulting lump of metal.
Drives with aluminum cases turn to liquid almost instantly, the steel cased ones are a bit tougher but still melt.
How much does a CD cost in bulk?
Just press a CD with the sourcecode and put it in the box with everything else...
Sure, anyone can give out the source for free but in many cases, especially with embedded devices, the value is in the whole package...
Take the dreambox satellite receivers as an example, the software is all gpl and there are various cheap chinese clones, however these chinese clones are considered inferior products.
Products using closed source software still get cloned too, look at all the chinese cloned cisco routers...
Coming at it from another angle, every couple of years there's an article about how even in the Western world, some absurdly large proportion of companies use pirated software. What makes you think that the GPL will make them suddenly compliant?
Because by far and away the vast majority of these companies only use "pirated" software internally... The GPL does not apply if you are just using the software internally, it only applies if you are distributing it to third parties. Using GPL software would eliminate the vast majority of corporate use of non legitimate software.
People making such decisions are acting irresponsibly if they are making such decisions without being in full possession of the facts.
That XTV page is insulting...
XTV lets subscribers decide when and where they watch the content they choose and build their own personal playlist.
As a subscriber, i would like to record tv and then watch it on my linux based laptop when i'm working away on business (because the hotels typically have very poor choices of channels), yet their "official" systems provide no way to do this - only unofficial systems provide this...
From the subscribersâ(TM) viewpoint, it doesnâ(TM)t get any better.
As a subscriber, a dreambox seems to be considerably better than an xtv device.
It doesn't give them a competitive advantage, it gives them the same advantages you had (ie ready made code, no need to write from scratch), but if all they do is use your code unchanged then they are at a disadvantage - having at best a direct clone of your product but no value-add and probably very poor service if they don't employ any developers who understand the code.
If on the other hand, they employ developers to make improvements and fixes to the code, then you can also benefit from them.
Picking up Linux and modifying it to suit your needs is often much cheaper than the alternatives of licensing a proprietary system or paying developers to write one from scratch... The advantages of using Linux need to be weighed up against having to release sourcecode.
If people use Linux and play by the rules, then you get a huge amount of improvements from a large number of companies using it, further increasing the usefulness of linux.
The dreamboxes also record data unencrypted, even if you are recording an encrypted channel... The "official" boxes typically keep the data encrypted on disk such that you lose access to it if you cancel your subscription, and you are limited to the storage capacity of your box - you cant hookup extra drives, create backups to dvd or use network shares.
It's easy enough to clone a dreambox and nothing wrong with that, it's the fake boxes that are the problem (boxes falsely branded as official dreambox devices)... You could even take the dreambox software and recompile it to run on an x86 pc. Fake boxes occur regardless of the software being open source or not, a lot of cisco routers get cloned in china for instance, and they run official ios images.
The ARM design is also licensed out and companies embed the ARM cores with all kinds of other hardware, so what you were using to play 720p HD may well have been an ARM core with a hardware video decoder integrated.
DEC ported Netscape to Alpha, and it was far more stable than other versions thanks to their work...
OpenOffice is available in a 64bit version for x86-64, and would probably compile on Alpha too. I have used Linux on most of the architectures it supports, and used to use an Alphastation as my primary workstation.
Sparc is a different story, unlike x86-64, sparc was designed from the beginning to have 64bit support in the future, such that even in 32bit mode you have access to the full array of registers and can still perform 64bit computations natively. Typically a sparc system will run a 64bit kernel so it can address all of its memory, and then run a 32bit userland for 99% of the applications, because 32bit uses less memory and usually performs better. 64bit is only used when absolutely necessary.
Video drivers won't be an issue on ARM based laptops, because whoever designs the machine will be primarily targeting linux and therefore ensure that whatever video hardware it has, supports linux. Like Apple building macs...
Flash is also already available for linux/arm (such as the nokia n800 tablets).
Commercial games aren't a big target for netbooks, so it's unlikely to be of much concern either.
The guts of an iphone, stuck in the back of a small flatscreen monitor would do just fine...
Modern javascript interpreters are much faster than old ones, and modern embedded hardware is more than capable of running a web browser.
You want the least hardware possible, to use very little power and have very little to go wrong.
There are also a huge number of embedded developers, developing apps for phones and other embedded devices which often use ARM processors...
Putting windows on a POS device is actually a pretty dumb idea...
An Atom might cost $10 to manufacture, but how much does it cost to buy?
If you use windows, how much does that cost for every device?
How about any additional software you need on every device, eg AV?
The increased cost of rolling out updates, because windows includes a lot of features which serve no purpose to you and yet still need to be updated?
Increased maintenence/support costs for the above, because there is now far more to go wrong than there would be on an embedded system?
The security implications, not just the risk of being hacked but what about end users who figure out how to crash your POS app, reach a windows desktop and install arbitrary apps?
The extra power used by a more complex device?
Development time and cost is a very trivial part of the overall cost, especially if you plan on selling lots of units because the development costs only occur once, but the resultant costs of using windows recur for every individual unit you produce. Trying to skimp on the up front costs by hiring cheap windows developers is likely to cost you a lot more in the long run.
What drives x86 uptake in such devices is not the up front cost, it's often a case of the people making decisions not knowing that anything else exists.
That's "progress"...
As hardware gets faster, software designers find new more inefficient ways to waste the extra capability of the hardware while dressing it up with buzzwords, fancy graphics and marketing.
"Cloud computing" is just one example, the prevalence of increasingly high level languages that seem to be getting progressively slower too, and the use of fancy graphical effect on interfaces that just detract form usability is another.
Incidentally, they are piggybacking on top of http because creating a new more efficient protocol would go one of two ways...
An open standards protocol, which microsoft would ignore and wouldn't see widespread use...
A proprietary protocol created by microsoft which would be resisted by many, cause dangerous lockin and possibly attract antitrust regulators again.
You don't need a killer app, nor killer features...
You need good marketing... If google market this heavily, and make sure that it's cheap people will come.
Most non technical people i know who have computers, use them for very little, mostly browsing and the occasional email or IM program. If they could buy a small, quiet appliance that only did these things but did so in a simple manner and cost a lot less then they would jump at the chance...
Most people hate noisy computers, and consider them too expensive and too complicated, and resent having to get someone else to help them fix things, and resent having to pay extra to keep them running (repairs, av subscriptions etc). For joe average, a simple appliance that performs their limited needs and nothing else is perfect.