Does everything have to turn into a religious turf war where MS are concerned?
Listen: XBMP is a damn fine project running on damn fine and CHEAP hardware. It's ideal for running Linux or Win32 ports 'cos its essentially standard x86 hardware and it's officially the coolest way to play *media* (very vague term that) in the living room. You may be an uber-geek but most of us don't want big fat beige PCs from WalMart next to our TVs.
I don't care if MS lose or make money from my purchase - I just want to use the best tools for the job and XBMP on the XBox is this. In my house the Xbox remote control is used as much as the TV remote which says a lot about how useful non-geeks find it.
So is there any chance of quitting this sort of crap? I don't care about kernels, beowulf clusters or Linus I just want to play my media and the Xbox does it magnificently. Credit where credits due eh?
I spent 4 (pissed) hours last night with 2 player Joust thru MAME on my Xbox. The balance is superb and something new games could learn from - the difficulty level is rock hard but the environment and controls are so simple that no matter how I get killed I always think 'damn try harder next time' rather than 'stupid sucky unfair game' - theres not many like that made these days.
Thats true you need a modchip to develop anyway but many people like myself have first generation mod chips that aren't particularly compatible with xbox live. If you need live then it's useful but otherwise i'd agree.
Maybe but if it turns out the developers of XBMP are making a product that the public want, without all that DRM crap, then why shouldn't they take sales away from MS?
I use XBMP daily and it absolutely rocks - the only thing missing is MPC audio support but divx/xvid/mp3/jpg playback is nearly flawless and everyone who sees it is amazed (I even have my home videos I took with my DVCAM on there converted to XVid and its so much nicer than whipping out a VHS videotape)
Yeah but none of them can support the latest xvid and divx builds and, though you could get a firmware update, they're fewer and further between than open-source xbox software updates.
It should be the case, because then all you need to do is shell out bucks to increase the bandwidth and everything is fine.
Thinking about this, are there any websites that 'degrade' content depending on the cpu load, i.e. maybe sending lower-resolution jpegs while the server is stressed? Slashdot did something similar to this on 9/11, the front page was changed to reflect but this event. I don't think it was an automated process though.
I wouldn't call Linus an 'innovator' but he has certainly changes the software market and will probably end up having as much impact as the original IBM PC or Windows. I think the question was badly worded, do we want innovators or people who have made their mark on the market?
I didn't say you were American, or mention Kyoto. But this is a story about American legal action, and me mentioning the EU was relevant because it would outlaw the exact same thing over here.
I genuinely apologise if I upset you but your remark was crass. 'Skepticism, mysticism, irrationalism' - where the hell is the justification for that? Further, yes I am European (English actually) but have absolutely nothing at all in common with, for example, somebody French. We are all completely different (which is one of my problems with the EU). So I hope you'll qualify those remarks with exactly who you were referring to with them.
And much as I dislike a lot of what the EU get up to (like standardising the size/shape of bananas!) this ban on ink cartridge lock-ins sounds completely sensible, not only from a free market perspective but an environmental one too. The latter is something that seems well behind on the US Governments list of priorities...
Oh come on. Thats like me saying cars are a commodity and you saying 'no way it cost 500 dollars each for my leet gold wheel trims'
Look back to when PCs started, EVERYTHING was at a premium. Now Taiwanese companies knock out network and vga cards for less than 10UKP. Okay, they're crap but this is the point - PCs are a commodity and you CAN build a cheap ass PC that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. You also have the choice of a 400 dollar graphics card but you don't NEED one.
Hell, i've built a PC for my younger brothers with a mobo with onboard vga,lan,firewire,usb2 and sound. The motherboard cost me about 40 UKP (60 USD) - if that isn't commodity pricing then what is?
... so cue the comments about how great a Beo-bloody-wulf cluster this would make and how it'll be able to solve world peace despite the fact this is a carefully orchestrated scare tactic to keep ps2 owners from buying XBoxes (sp?)
Thing is it sounds impressive, but will that still be the case when it ships? If it was available now then of course things would be more interesting.
And Rambus: maybe this is their real market, PCs are too much of a commodity to employ their expensive memory. The only 'expensive' discrete component in a PC nowadays is Windows, and even that seems on the way out.
You can reduce the priority of the given app but any system processes used by it (api calls, drivers, software raid etc) can still use up that cpu/io anyway. Don't think I ever saw a workable solution for this, which is why i'm glad I don't have to write software anymore where I get told at the last minute 'oh by the way all the users will be running on the same citrix box'
It may be stupid for you to text. given the price, but don't assume we're all stupid because some of us get a good deal.
I'm with O2' web tariff here in the UK, which gives me 50minutes talk time a month to *any* UK landline or mobile, with 600 free texts a month. Bear in mind that unlike in the US caller pays, there are no charging for receiving texts or calls.
This costs me 10UKP a month, about 15USD. Texts are great - I can furtively gossip with my friends and lady while sat at work in front of a suit with a powerpoint presentation, try that with talking. Also it's a non-intrusive technology, unlike a phone ringing which may annoy the recepient at 3am but a text is received and can be read whenever. Plus I could write a book about just why people flirt over sms...
And the composing thing - believe me when in front of that powerpoint presentation I can text with one hand and the t9 predictive text means as long as you choose your words correctly it's as fast as one-handed on a keyboard. Or I can use my palmpilot keyboard to text via IR which appears to onlookers as if im taking notes from the suit...
Don't knock it if you don't know it. And further, it would be easier for governments to increase VAT on text messages instead which would have been even worse as businesses can generally reclaim VAT.
Don't be silly. No ink manufacturer, shoe company or anything would encourage parallel trading. For one, they can't control the brand i.e. they can't advertise something they can't sell so they can't portray the image, and also it tends to piss off government who as much as we might not like it have massive leverage over manufacturers, which lest we forget in this case are massive international concerns with interests that could be majorly damaged by a pissed off government.
Make no mistake: I live in the European Union (actually, England) and have no love at all for the EU, considering myself to my English rather than European not because I don't like them (because thats incorrect) but because I have nothing in common with most of them. Though I can see the interests in creating something that can compete with the Americas and China. But this is a damn good deal the EU thought up. Ink cartridges cost tons of environmental shit and they rip off consumers. Buying a $10 printer is an easy choice for Mr Average Joe because he doesn't think about the price of cartridges. Manufacturers rely on this and then rely on inertia to keep people buying cartridges at stupidly high prices. That's as artificial a market as I can imagine and it does nobody any good to keep it going.
This is a good thing. We all know about the razor blade/printer anology but it's gone too far with printers - they give them away with loads of big name PCs. Trouble is they're so crap, or the carts are so expensive that i'd never buy one of these bundles - these things aren't designed to handle an average users needs, they're designed to provide a revenue stream.
It's not the culture as much as the complexity. Even a project as 'simple' as a music player - how many people have written one of these? Lots. How many know mp3/aac/ogg/psy models/FFT transforms inside out ?? Not many. But they don't need to - all they need to do is take an OSS project like libmad or whatever and plug their interface code into that. The problem being, you're then reliant on how good the libmad programmers are. But maybe you also didn't know they used code from somewhere else.... Do I understand how mp3 works? Yes. Could I code an encoder or decoder, with the psymodel and FFT stuff? No.
So i'm reliant on lots of other coders and to be honest if I don't quite understand how a library works i'm not going to try and 'bulletproof' it against an unknown threat, lest I cock things up, apart from the usual bounds checking etc.
You could advertise your pc tinkering/fixing skills in the local newspaper. Plenty of people buy computers and do not have a clue - the going rate in the UK is 10-15UKP an hour or part of, approx 15-22 USD. Some of it's going to be routine and mundane ("I can't find my Bonzi Buddy...") but you get to meet loads of people and cut loose from the house for an hour at a time and i'd suspect most customers would come back again if you were good - i've never met anybody yet who only had an hours worth of questions about their computer...
And as we're coming up to Christmas, just think of all those computers that have been bought as presents and therefore the amount of stumped newbies on the 25th. You might be busy...
By the way, good luck with the new addition to the family, too!
seany
I was considering this for a while, the only problem being
A more interesting question is just how far you go to bulletproof your decoder/reader code from a malformed input, i.e. it's usually pretty easy to defensively code against a properly structured mp3 for example, but just how far do you go to protect against a deliberately malformed one?
Hang on... Microsoft also has thousands of 'very bright' programmers around the world. Your point is? The key is what motivates these programmers?
Much as I love the idea of OSS (and indeed I contribute myself) there are a lot of OSS coders who just want to write new, funky stuff - bug fixing and other stuff that could be termed 'patrolling the perimeter of the code' just isn't funky enough so it gets forgotten about.
MS coders used to be the same, because obviously they're driven by the dollar, dollars which would only be spent on their software if it had the wizziest new features. Now after a few years of being mercilessly slagged off for bad code they're doing something about it because Chairman Bill realises that it's gonna affect the bottom line if they don't. They are paying a lot of dollars to fix their own bugs - which you may laugh at but - hey - at least it's being done. Big-name OSS projects, such as the Apaches of this world are similar to MS in that they have a lot of people working on them and, more importantly, *willing* to work on them so project admins can crack the whip and get the juniors to do the same code security audits that MS are now doing.
There are however a lot of less well known OSS projects with worse code than anything Microsoft come up with. They neither have the dollars of MS or the cachet of a big OSS project so people just code whatever bits they want. Hence, their code is likely to be worse without sufficient peer review etc.
The point of all this being that inferring that OSS is better that MS because linux has 'thousands of very bright programers (sic) accross the world' is not only incorrect it's harmful to the acceptance of OSS when the most vocal advocates turn out to be dumb-asses who don't think before they type.
Slashdot Mirror
Does everything have to turn into a religious turf war where MS are concerned?
Listen: XBMP is a damn fine project running on damn fine and CHEAP hardware. It's ideal for running Linux or Win32 ports 'cos its essentially standard x86 hardware and it's officially the coolest way to play *media* (very vague term that) in the living room. You may be an uber-geek but most of us don't want big fat beige PCs from WalMart next to our TVs.
I don't care if MS lose or make money from my purchase - I just want to use the best tools for the job and XBMP on the XBox is this. In my house the Xbox remote control is used as much as the TV remote which says a lot about how useful non-geeks find it.
So is there any chance of quitting this sort of crap? I don't care about kernels, beowulf clusters or Linus I just want to play my media and the Xbox does it magnificently. Credit where credits due eh?
seany
I spent 4 (pissed) hours last night with 2 player Joust thru MAME on my Xbox. The balance is superb and something new games could learn from - the difficulty level is rock hard but the environment and controls are so simple that no matter how I get killed I always think 'damn try harder next time' rather than 'stupid sucky unfair game' - theres not many like that made these days.
Because it now comes with a 20gb drive.
Because it has a 10/100 ethernet port and FTP support.
Because it comes with ALL xvid/divx variants unlike that new Kiss xvid/dvd player which doesn't support qpel and gmc from the latest divx builds.
Because it lets you listen to shoutcast stations.
Because it can stream from smb shares on a pc or linux server
Should I go on?
Thats true you need a modchip to develop anyway but many people like myself have first generation mod chips that aren't particularly compatible with xbox live. If you need live then it's useful but otherwise i'd agree.
Maybe but if it turns out the developers of XBMP are making a product that the public want, without all that DRM crap, then why shouldn't they take sales away from MS?
I use XBMP daily and it absolutely rocks - the only thing missing is MPC audio support but divx/xvid/mp3/jpg playback is nearly flawless and everyone who sees it is amazed (I even have my home videos I took with my DVCAM on there converted to XVid and its so much nicer than whipping out a VHS videotape)
seany
Yeah but none of them can support the latest xvid and divx builds and, though you could get a firmware update, they're fewer and further between than open-source xbox software updates.
Yeah but maybe this is part of their point: us x86 crowd tend to get all hungup on mhz battles, like with intel vs amd etc.
It should be the case, because then all you need to do is shell out bucks to increase the bandwidth and everything is fine.
Thinking about this, are there any websites that 'degrade' content depending on the cpu load, i.e. maybe sending lower-resolution jpegs while the server is stressed? Slashdot did something similar to this on 9/11, the front page was changed to reflect but this event. I don't think it was an automated process though.
seany
How about Dave Theurer?
P ES T.html
http://www.geocities.com/arcadeclassics.geo/TEM
Or Shiguru Miyamoto, creator of Mario?
Lots of games programmers have revolutionised one thing or another, due to the cutting-edge nature of the market.
seany
I wouldn't call Linus an 'innovator' but he has certainly changes the software market and will probably end up having as much impact as the original IBM PC or Windows. I think the question was badly worded, do we want innovators or people who have made their mark on the market?
seany
I disagree, the POKEY chip in the Atari 8bit blew it away. It was even used in Atari arcade machines. The YM2419 in the Atari ST was awful though...
seany
Damn right! Sorry my original post wasn't too clear. It's strange me sticking up for the EU, never thought i'd do that...
cheers,
seany
I didn't say you were American, or mention Kyoto. But this is a story about American legal action, and me mentioning the EU was relevant because it would outlaw the exact same thing over here.
I genuinely apologise if I upset you but your remark was crass. 'Skepticism, mysticism, irrationalism' - where the hell is the justification for that? Further, yes I am European (English actually) but have absolutely nothing at all in common with, for example, somebody French. We are all completely different (which is one of my problems with the EU). So I hope you'll qualify those remarks with exactly who you were referring to with them.
seany
Agreed, the original poster is an idiot.
And much as I dislike a lot of what the EU get up to (like standardising the size/shape of bananas!) this ban on ink cartridge lock-ins sounds completely sensible, not only from a free market perspective but an environmental one too. The latter is something that seems well behind on the US Governments list of priorities...
Oh come on. Thats like me saying cars are a commodity and you saying 'no way it cost 500 dollars each for my leet gold wheel trims'
Look back to when PCs started, EVERYTHING was at a premium. Now Taiwanese companies knock out network and vga cards for less than 10UKP. Okay, they're crap but this is the point - PCs are a commodity and you CAN build a cheap ass PC that wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. You also have the choice of a 400 dollar graphics card but you don't NEED one.
Hell, i've built a PC for my younger brothers with a mobo with onboard vga,lan,firewire,usb2 and sound. The motherboard cost me about 40 UKP (60 USD) - if that isn't commodity pricing then what is?
seany
... so cue the comments about how great a Beo-bloody-wulf cluster this would make and how it'll be able to solve world peace despite the fact this is a carefully orchestrated scare tactic to keep ps2 owners from buying XBoxes (sp?)
Thing is it sounds impressive, but will that still be the case when it ships? If it was available now then of course things would be more interesting.
And Rambus: maybe this is their real market, PCs are too much of a commodity to employ their expensive memory. The only 'expensive' discrete component in a PC nowadays is Windows, and even that seems on the way out.
seany
You can reduce the priority of the given app but any system processes used by it (api calls, drivers, software raid etc) can still use up that cpu/io anyway. Don't think I ever saw a workable solution for this, which is why i'm glad I don't have to write software anymore where I get told at the last minute 'oh by the way all the users will be running on the same citrix box'
seany
It may be stupid for you to text. given the price, but don't assume we're all stupid because some of us get a good deal.
I'm with O2' web tariff here in the UK, which gives me 50minutes talk time a month to *any* UK landline or mobile, with 600 free texts a month. Bear in mind that unlike in the US caller pays, there are no charging for receiving texts or calls.
This costs me 10UKP a month, about 15USD. Texts are great - I can furtively gossip with my friends and lady while sat at work in front of a suit with a powerpoint presentation, try that with talking. Also it's a non-intrusive technology, unlike a phone ringing which may annoy the recepient at 3am but a text is received and can be read whenever. Plus I could write a book about just why people flirt over sms...
And the composing thing - believe me when in front of that powerpoint presentation I can text with one hand and the t9 predictive text means as long as you choose your words correctly it's as fast as one-handed on a keyboard. Or I can use my palmpilot keyboard to text via IR which appears to onlookers as if im taking notes from the suit...
Don't knock it if you don't know it. And further, it would be easier for governments to increase VAT on text messages instead which would have been even worse as businesses can generally reclaim VAT.
seany
Don't be silly. No ink manufacturer, shoe company or anything would encourage parallel trading. For one, they can't control the brand i.e. they can't advertise something they can't sell so they can't portray the image, and also it tends to piss off government who as much as we might not like it have massive leverage over manufacturers, which lest we forget in this case are massive international concerns with interests that could be majorly damaged by a pissed off government.
Make no mistake: I live in the European Union (actually, England) and have no love at all for the EU, considering myself to my English rather than European not because I don't like them (because thats incorrect) but because I have nothing in common with most of them. Though I can see the interests in creating something that can compete with the Americas and China. But this is a damn good deal the EU thought up. Ink cartridges cost tons of environmental shit and they rip off consumers. Buying a $10 printer is an easy choice for Mr Average Joe because he doesn't think about the price of cartridges. Manufacturers rely on this and then rely on inertia to keep people buying cartridges at stupidly high prices. That's as artificial a market as I can imagine and it does nobody any good to keep it going.
seany
This is a good thing. We all know about the razor blade/printer anology but it's gone too far with printers - they give them away with loads of big name PCs. Trouble is they're so crap, or the carts are so expensive that i'd never buy one of these bundles - these things aren't designed to handle an average users needs, they're designed to provide a revenue stream.
It's not the culture as much as the complexity. Even a project as 'simple' as a music player - how many people have written one of these? Lots. How many know mp3/aac/ogg/psy models/FFT transforms inside out ?? Not many. But they don't need to - all they need to do is take an OSS project like libmad or whatever and plug their interface code into that. The problem being, you're then reliant on how good the libmad programmers are. But maybe you also didn't know they used code from somewhere else.... Do I understand how mp3 works? Yes. Could I code an encoder or decoder, with the psymodel and FFT stuff? No.
So i'm reliant on lots of other coders and to be honest if I don't quite understand how a library works i'm not going to try and 'bulletproof' it against an unknown threat, lest I cock things up, apart from the usual bounds checking etc.
And how do we sort this out? I haven't a clue.
seany
ooops... missed the last bit out - ahem...
"I was considering this for a while, the only problem being that I was incapable of finishing a sentence"
You could advertise your pc tinkering/fixing skills in the local newspaper. Plenty of people buy computers and do not have a clue - the going rate in the UK is 10-15UKP an hour or part of, approx 15-22 USD. Some of it's going to be routine and mundane ("I can't find my Bonzi Buddy...") but you get to meet loads of people and cut loose from the house for an hour at a time and i'd suspect most customers would come back again if you were good - i've never met anybody yet who only had an hours worth of questions about their computer...
And as we're coming up to Christmas, just think of all those computers that have been bought as presents and therefore the amount of stumped newbies on the 25th. You might be busy...
By the way, good luck with the new addition to the family, too!
seany
I was considering this for a while, the only problem being
Fair enough I agree with that.
A more interesting question is just how far you go to bulletproof your decoder/reader code from a malformed input, i.e. it's usually pretty easy to defensively code against a properly structured mp3 for example, but just how far do you go to protect against a deliberately malformed one?
seany
Hang on... Microsoft also has thousands of 'very bright' programmers around the world. Your point is? The key is what motivates these programmers?
Much as I love the idea of OSS (and indeed I contribute myself) there are a lot of OSS coders who just want to write new, funky stuff - bug fixing and other stuff that could be termed 'patrolling the perimeter of the code' just isn't funky enough so it gets forgotten about.
MS coders used to be the same, because obviously they're driven by the dollar, dollars which would only be spent on their software if it had the wizziest new features. Now after a few years of being mercilessly slagged off for bad code they're doing something about it because Chairman Bill realises that it's gonna affect the bottom line if they don't. They are paying a lot of dollars to fix their own bugs - which you may laugh at but - hey - at least it's being done. Big-name OSS projects, such as the Apaches of this world are similar to MS in that they have a lot of people working on them and, more importantly, *willing* to work on them so project admins can crack the whip and get the juniors to do the same code security audits that MS are now doing.
There are however a lot of less well known OSS projects with worse code than anything Microsoft come up with. They neither have the dollars of MS or the cachet of a big OSS project so people just code whatever bits they want. Hence, their code is likely to be worse without sufficient peer review etc.
The point of all this being that inferring that OSS is better that MS because linux has 'thousands of very bright programers (sic) accross the world' is not only incorrect it's harmful to the acceptance of OSS when the most vocal advocates turn out to be dumb-asses who don't think before they type.
seany