Higher FPS would make motion a lot sharper (less motion blur), but it won't solve the stuttering. Stuttering is caused by some CMOS-based HD cameras (like the very popular Red One) having rolling shutter, where they capture the image in chunks instead of all at once. Find an old PC game, turn off vsync, and look at the nasty tearing you get when it tries to render 100fps onto your 60fps monitor in a rolling fashion. Same issue -- high FPS won't solve it.
and all this will happen again. Anyone who's been around long enough will remember that Sony has a history of exaggeration when it comes to their consoles.
My guess is that it'll have a modern programmable GPU with even more features than the PS3 has. Some guy in marketing heard that, and suddenly it's more powerful than the PS3.
You're right. Windows Phone 7 is very cloud-focused -- so much that they didn't bother to expose the APIs for local databases. The data usage is definitely going to be higher than other less-connected devices. My best guess is that these people might have unrealistic expectations as to the amount of data these services use and are getting excessive push notifications, either from having too many live tiles or just ones that update too frequently. Next to that, a live tile might be crashing and perhaps the phone is sending debug information back home. The reports of using 3G even when wifi is available are interesting though, and suggest there might be another problem.
That said, in my experience it still doesn't use a significant amount of data. I have a Windows Phone 7 device, and am using a lot of those cloud services. Instant email sync for two accounts (one fairly high-traffic), twitter, a few other live tiles, and the tracking service that occasionally wakes up GPS to ping MS with your location in case you lose your phone. When I'm at home it all goes over wifi like it's supposed to. I'm about 2/3rd of the way through my billing cycle and I'm still very very far under my bandwidth limit.
I don't know what uses there are for a keyboard displays like this and the Optimus. It's one hell of a cool gimmick and is sure to be a great conversation starter, but to actually use it? I hardly ever look at my keyboard. I don't want to!
Forums can still be useful, you just need other people separate from the creators to filter things first.
Based on my own experience with large forums, about 10% of the posts will be good ideas and positive remarks, 10% will be actionable bug reports, and the rest will be a mix of unhelpful criticism, bad ideas, useless bug reports, and off-topic. Wading through all that will wear anybody down.
I completely understand creators not wanting to deal with that. Find some users who've been reliably helpful for a long time, and make them part of the team as moderators. Part of their job is to filter stuff and forward the useful posts to you. The moderators need to be good and unbiased, of course, or you risk creating a nasty disconnect with your community (see Valve with Left 4 Dead).
Also note that 32-bit operating systems can still make use of larger system memory sizes. Kernel memory usage is limited, and each process might only see 2GB of it (or more, in some special cases), but the operating system can easily divvy out 8GB+ of RAM between them all.
When I saw "Microsoft takes on Go", I thought of Google Go. It only adds to the confusion that both F# and Go attempt to solve some concurrency issues, though I thought it odd to compete with an imperative language using a functional one. I had to do a double-take to understand it was talking about a game.
Sheesh, I need sleep. And perhaps to stop learning so many useless programming languages.
I read the summary title and thought - for once - some insane game company had enabled PCs to play in the same games with consoles. But no... PC gamers just performed more "team actions" in their own isolated world than console gamers did in theirs.
The game could be more popular on PC than consoles, or perhaps just more "serious" (and maybe older) players on PCs. Hell, maybe the PC version just got cracked and it didn't involve many players at all. Who knows. Slightly interesting, with so little data, only slightly.
There's a good chance you've been to one of their sites before. Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, and io9 are their bigger ones I can recall -- I'm sure there are others. I personally read Gizmodo and io9 quite often, though I've never made an account with them.
If their claims to be consulting an "independent security firm" are true, then it appears they also realize they're incompetent and are bringing in outside help to school them on proper security.
We've learned many lessons from this experience, both as a tech team, as a company, and as individuals. If there's one lesson nearly all of us learned, it's that we can and must be smarter with passwords. Lifehacker is a great resource for password advice (and there are many others). I suggest you start here: http://lifehacker.com/184773/geek-to-live-choose-and-remember-great-passwords.
It seems they're at least beginning to learn, though.
They also mention that they're going to let users use OAuth to log in. It's not clear if they'll be moving all accounts to OAuth, or if they're going to keep using unsalted crypt() for users who want to keep their account local.
Who cares? If it's interesting, it's interesting. In this case it's not really very interesting, but I don't see a point in attaching a stigma because of the submitter. It's not like it's possible for the editors to pay any less attention to the submissions to let something slide!
So how can IT and businesses that allow iPhones, iPads, and Androids trust that the new generation of mobile devices won't become Trojan horses for malware?
You don't trust them. Just like you should be doing with desktops/laptops, don't setup services in a way that they allow a phone to ruin your data.
Windows Phone has an Xbox Live app that lets you check up on your friends' activities, chat with them, and receive game invites. Game invites and perhaps chatting are really useful features, but needing to open a slow-loading app every time you want to check on those makes it real impractical in use. It needs smoother integration with the phone.
It's always seemed odd to me that there are separate apps for each social network. Phones should have a plugin system that allows any network to get first-class integration.
+1. I played the hell out of UT2004, but for some reason never really got into UT3. Despite decent initial sales figures on launch day, the game bombed with everyone I know. After a few months the community was very small, and it stayed that way despite attempts to grow it by majorly dropping the price so soon after launch. I can't see a Linux port bringing in any significant amount of players.
The only thing this study shows is the most popular passwords used by people who don't care about security.
Good passwords will be reasonably unique. When you try to find the most common passwords, of course the bad ones will bubble up to the top, even if only a fraction of a percent of people use them. This list might be interesting, but it doesn't really show anything significant about Gawker's users.
I've got a Winphone7 phone and I develop apps for it, so take this as you want.
I don't see why anyone with an interest in Winphone7 would be surprised. Especially a developer. Microsoft has stated numerous times that the current Winphone7 is an early, bare-minimum release, and that they'll be bringing out major updates in 2011 to bring feature parity (both on the user and developer sides) with other smart phones. I'm sure accessibility features are on their list of improvements.
The "providing compatibility with assistive technology used by the blind." comes across as a guilt trip to me, because it implies they singled out that industry when they finally broke compatibility. They didn't. On Winphone7, you develop for a mostly-Silverlight-but-sometimes-not platform using.NET. This broke compatibility with ALL old apps that ran on Winmo6.5, not just accessibility ones.
Accessibility may be one of the tougher problems to solve, as their current interface was designed from the ground up to be touch-centric. You pan around the screen than I've seen in any other phone. The OS does have pretty good voice recognition baked in -- it'll probably be the easiest thing to get working for everything. Letting people zoom in could also help, but the standard widgets and Visual Studio templates don't re-flow well to aspect ratios, so you'll have to pan twice (once between pages and once over the current page), which could get cumbersome.
and by "encrypted" do they mean "we're idiots and stored something other than a salt + hash of the passwords"?
They used crypt(), which means it's going to be relatively easy to crack everything in the file even if the users' passwords were strong. Why anyone would use crypt() for password hashing is beyond me.
There is less surface area to cover, and the architecture has potential to be more standardized. I'd say it will probably be easier to maintain security with a few big clouds than with 800 random smaller datacenters.
(Note, nothing says they need to use Amazon or Microsoft's cloud -- they can make their own.)
The summary (and TFA) is misleading. This client isn't the first to support trackerless downloading. Most clients support DHT and PEX, and have for some time. You just need a single peer to bootstrap yourself, and you're good to go.
What Tribbler has done is created a P2P torrent search engine. I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago), but it does appear they put some thought into making their feature set more user-friendly, with categorization ("Channels") and such.
Phones just have a much larger market right out of the door. PSP/DS are toys. They're for gamers, and seen by many as for children. But everyone has a phone, and it's not seen as childish to play games on them if you've got some time to kill. Phone games also have a lot more casual games than PSP/DS.
Unlike 3G networks, which lose download speed with more users, the analog signal would provide a consistent speed no matter how many users there were.
Gentlemen, I think we've found our solution. With 4G, we need to first convert the digital signal to analog before transmission. Network congestion will be a thing of the past!
Michael Jackson's Moonwalker is one of my favorite old-school games. Dancing your enemies to death and transforming into a robot to save captured children from overtly sexual enemies. It's such a ridiculous game that it can be a lot of hilarious fun to play with friends.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, just like smoking bans. Because when I read comics in public, I force everyone around me to participate in breathing in dangerous chemicals.
what the fuck does it matter if it affects them?
Higher FPS would make motion a lot sharper (less motion blur), but it won't solve the stuttering. Stuttering is caused by some CMOS-based HD cameras (like the very popular Red One) having rolling shutter, where they capture the image in chunks instead of all at once. Find an old PC game, turn off vsync, and look at the nasty tearing you get when it tries to render 100fps onto your 60fps monitor in a rolling fashion. Same issue -- high FPS won't solve it.
and all this will happen again. Anyone who's been around long enough will remember that Sony has a history of exaggeration when it comes to their consoles.
My guess is that it'll have a modern programmable GPU with even more features than the PS3 has. Some guy in marketing heard that, and suddenly it's more powerful than the PS3.
You're right. Windows Phone 7 is very cloud-focused -- so much that they didn't bother to expose the APIs for local databases. The data usage is definitely going to be higher than other less-connected devices. My best guess is that these people might have unrealistic expectations as to the amount of data these services use and are getting excessive push notifications, either from having too many live tiles or just ones that update too frequently. Next to that, a live tile might be crashing and perhaps the phone is sending debug information back home. The reports of using 3G even when wifi is available are interesting though, and suggest there might be another problem.
That said, in my experience it still doesn't use a significant amount of data. I have a Windows Phone 7 device, and am using a lot of those cloud services. Instant email sync for two accounts (one fairly high-traffic), twitter, a few other live tiles, and the tracking service that occasionally wakes up GPS to ping MS with your location in case you lose your phone. When I'm at home it all goes over wifi like it's supposed to. I'm about 2/3rd of the way through my billing cycle and I'm still very very far under my bandwidth limit.
I don't know what uses there are for a keyboard displays like this and the Optimus. It's one hell of a cool gimmick and is sure to be a great conversation starter, but to actually use it? I hardly ever look at my keyboard. I don't want to!
Forums can still be useful, you just need other people separate from the creators to filter things first.
Based on my own experience with large forums, about 10% of the posts will be good ideas and positive remarks, 10% will be actionable bug reports, and the rest will be a mix of unhelpful criticism, bad ideas, useless bug reports, and off-topic. Wading through all that will wear anybody down.
I completely understand creators not wanting to deal with that. Find some users who've been reliably helpful for a long time, and make them part of the team as moderators. Part of their job is to filter stuff and forward the useful posts to you. The moderators need to be good and unbiased, of course, or you risk creating a nasty disconnect with your community (see Valve with Left 4 Dead).
Also note that 32-bit operating systems can still make use of larger system memory sizes. Kernel memory usage is limited, and each process might only see 2GB of it (or more, in some special cases), but the operating system can easily divvy out 8GB+ of RAM between them all.
When I saw "Microsoft takes on Go", I thought of Google Go. It only adds to the confusion that both F# and Go attempt to solve some concurrency issues, though I thought it odd to compete with an imperative language using a functional one. I had to do a double-take to understand it was talking about a game.
Sheesh, I need sleep. And perhaps to stop learning so many useless programming languages.
I read the summary title and thought - for once - some insane game company had enabled PCs to play in the same games with consoles. But no... PC gamers just performed more "team actions" in their own isolated world than console gamers did in theirs.
The game could be more popular on PC than consoles, or perhaps just more "serious" (and maybe older) players on PCs. Hell, maybe the PC version just got cracked and it didn't involve many players at all. Who knows. Slightly interesting, with so little data, only slightly.
There's a good chance you've been to one of their sites before. Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, and io9 are their bigger ones I can recall -- I'm sure there are others. I personally read Gizmodo and io9 quite often, though I've never made an account with them.
If their claims to be consulting an "independent security firm" are true, then it appears they also realize they're incompetent and are bringing in outside help to school them on proper security.
We've learned many lessons from this experience, both as a tech team, as a company, and as individuals. If there's one lesson nearly all of us learned, it's that we can and must be smarter with passwords. Lifehacker is a great resource for password advice (and there are many others). I suggest you start here: http://lifehacker.com/184773/geek-to-live-choose-and-remember-great-passwords.
It seems they're at least beginning to learn, though.
They also mention that they're going to let users use OAuth to log in. It's not clear if they'll be moving all accounts to OAuth, or if they're going to keep using unsalted crypt() for users who want to keep their account local.
Who cares? If it's interesting, it's interesting. In this case it's not really very interesting, but I don't see a point in attaching a stigma because of the submitter. It's not like it's possible for the editors to pay any less attention to the submissions to let something slide!
So how can IT and businesses that allow iPhones, iPads, and Androids trust that the new generation of mobile devices won't become Trojan horses for malware?
You don't trust them. Just like you should be doing with desktops/laptops, don't setup services in a way that they allow a phone to ruin your data.
Windows Phone has an Xbox Live app that lets you check up on your friends' activities, chat with them, and receive game invites. Game invites and perhaps chatting are really useful features, but needing to open a slow-loading app every time you want to check on those makes it real impractical in use. It needs smoother integration with the phone.
It's always seemed odd to me that there are separate apps for each social network. Phones should have a plugin system that allows any network to get first-class integration.
+1. I played the hell out of UT2004, but for some reason never really got into UT3. Despite decent initial sales figures on launch day, the game bombed with everyone I know. After a few months the community was very small, and it stayed that way despite attempts to grow it by majorly dropping the price so soon after launch. I can't see a Linux port bringing in any significant amount of players.
The only thing this study shows is the most popular passwords used by people who don't care about security.
Good passwords will be reasonably unique. When you try to find the most common passwords, of course the bad ones will bubble up to the top, even if only a fraction of a percent of people use them. This list might be interesting, but it doesn't really show anything significant about Gawker's users.
I've got a Winphone7 phone and I develop apps for it, so take this as you want.
I don't see why anyone with an interest in Winphone7 would be surprised. Especially a developer. Microsoft has stated numerous times that the current Winphone7 is an early, bare-minimum release, and that they'll be bringing out major updates in 2011 to bring feature parity (both on the user and developer sides) with other smart phones. I'm sure accessibility features are on their list of improvements.
The "providing compatibility with assistive technology used by the blind." comes across as a guilt trip to me, because it implies they singled out that industry when they finally broke compatibility. They didn't. On Winphone7, you develop for a mostly-Silverlight-but-sometimes-not platform using .NET. This broke compatibility with ALL old apps that ran on Winmo6.5, not just accessibility ones.
Accessibility may be one of the tougher problems to solve, as their current interface was designed from the ground up to be touch-centric. You pan around the screen than I've seen in any other phone. The OS does have pretty good voice recognition baked in -- it'll probably be the easiest thing to get working for everything. Letting people zoom in could also help, but the standard widgets and Visual Studio templates don't re-flow well to aspect ratios, so you'll have to pan twice (once between pages and once over the current page), which could get cumbersome.
and by "encrypted" do they mean "we're idiots and stored something other than a salt + hash of the passwords"?
They used crypt(), which means it's going to be relatively easy to crack everything in the file even if the users' passwords were strong. Why anyone would use crypt() for password hashing is beyond me.
There is less surface area to cover, and the architecture has potential to be more standardized. I'd say it will probably be easier to maintain security with a few big clouds than with 800 random smaller datacenters. (Note, nothing says they need to use Amazon or Microsoft's cloud -- they can make their own.)
The summary (and TFA) is misleading. This client isn't the first to support trackerless downloading. Most clients support DHT and PEX, and have for some time. You just need a single peer to bootstrap yourself, and you're good to go.
What Tribbler has done is created a P2P torrent search engine. I'm not sure if they're the first either (I swear I remember reading about some other client with P2P search a couple years ago), but it does appear they put some thought into making their feature set more user-friendly, with categorization ("Channels") and such.
Phones just have a much larger market right out of the door. PSP/DS are toys. They're for gamers, and seen by many as for children. But everyone has a phone, and it's not seen as childish to play games on them if you've got some time to kill. Phone games also have a lot more casual games than PSP/DS.
Unlike 3G networks, which lose download speed with more users, the analog signal would provide a consistent speed no matter how many users there were.
Gentlemen, I think we've found our solution. With 4G, we need to first convert the digital signal to analog before transmission. Network congestion will be a thing of the past!
Michael Jackson's Moonwalker is one of my favorite old-school games. Dancing your enemies to death and transforming into a robot to save captured children from overtly sexual enemies. It's such a ridiculous game that it can be a lot of hilarious fun to play with friends.
My understanding is that you need to register as press, and Assange was denied it when he tried.