Actually you could develop software for Sega's last console using GCC. Its also the only modern console that didn't have a proprietary bootloader (well, one that didn't have a way around it).
When you get right down to it though consoles are basically either built on industry standard parts or in house parts. You don't really NEED an OS on a console, and in my experience it slows things down mightily (Sega Dreamcast WinCE anyone?).
But it does seem to me that there's a big difference between "not as proprietary" and "nonproprietary". You've still got an OS whose inner workings are a secret, and that makes it proprietary.
Unless you can bootstrap the machine yourself with your own code its not nonproprietary.
Here in America we somehow got the crazy idea that you don't need a driver's license unless you actually drive.
Its crazy I know, but when I was riding in the back seat and I told the cop he didn't need to see my driver's license because I wasn't driving, he pulled his gun on me.
Oh yeah! "We". I'm sure you thought of it first. Not even a single mention of the Russian hackers who first came up with this easy hack. Not really brain surgery. Few people I know hacked up the board in less than few hours.
Very clever trick, but we all know where this is going:
In Soviet Russia, ATI Radeon 9700 can be turned into a 9500 with just a simple hack.
VMS is extremely easy to learn. Head over to HP's site and grab ALL the documentation for it (several thousand pages, you won't need to read much).
Once you've got them I'd recommend telnetting on over to Manson which mercifully for those of us who don't have access to our own Vax will let you play around with a guest account.
VMS feels a LOT like DOS though. If you're comfortable with DOS you can pick up the basics of VMS in a few hours.
Re:Oops! I See Another DMCA Prosecution Coming!
on
GPS Jamming for $50
·
· Score: 1
either that or they include Sweden in the axis of evil and forbid them from buying food anymore.
You have it backwards. The BIOS maker isn't telling the MB maker their customers aren't important.
No, they are telling MB customers that they aren't important.
I like your analogy with the piston manufacturer, but this is a simple marketing exercise. Its not a question of whether the MB designers are targetting their customers properly in this case, its a question of one of the MB designers' parts makers telling the end user "you aren't important", and I would tend to think that wouldn't sit well with the MB maker.
Consider someone going through a plant that manufacturers brakes specifically for new cars. They ask the tour guide "what are you doing to see to it that my car's brakes will function properly" and the tour guide answers "We didn't make the brakes for you, we made them for your car's manufacturer".
Again its not a question of whether or not the manufacturer his chosen the best part here, its a question of the part maker slapping the end user in the face.
I still think he should've been a tad more direct about answering that rather than just blithely saying "You aren't our REAL customers". That sort of like GM telling carowners "We don't care what you think, we sell our cars to dealers, not to you".
They are providing BIOS to motherboard manufacturers to put in motherboards that WE are supposed to buy. It seems like they should think a little beyond the initial transaction with the MB company here.
I know if I was a MB maker I wouldn't want someone I buy parts from telling my customers they aren't important.
Speaking of this, whatever happened to the BIOS lowlevel format option? My old Laser 386 allowed you to lowlevel format any of the harddrives through CMOS setup... it would seem like that's a pretty simple feature to add, and plenty useful.
It seems to me you're missing something about the "free market", I think we lost you before we finished "free".
Things have a specific value, yes. Things also have a specific cost. These are two distinct concepts.
That cost is not always equal to its value to you, and getting something at an agreed upon lower cost than you perceive it to be worth is not some terrible sin.
If you buy a bag of potato chips on sale does everyone call it welfare for the chip eater? If the company is selling the product for below its cost are you obligated to pay them the difference?
Mandrake made a business decision to give away its product for free. Many people took them up on that offer, and somewhere along the line they noticed that they don't make money doing that. So now we're supposed to go back and pay them extra? Sorry, it doen't work that way.
Assuming such an exploit exists, isn't it also equally plausible that someone who doesn't like the RIAA wrote such a worm that would appear to come from them in an effort to get them in legal trouble?
The only console ever that didn't require a hardware solution was the Sega Dreamcast. Even mod-chipping your system is something that's in the realm of a few enthusiasts.
I don't think any piece of Nintendo hardware has ever been "standards-compliant" even going all the way back to their floppy disks for the old NES. The Gamecube disc has a similar capacity to a DVD drive, and undoubtably borrows some of the technology, but that's nowhere close to a solution to how to read the data into a PC or how to create the media which is read in the opposite direction of a DVD drive.
I would think of Chinese (espc. HK) hackers had the ability to pirate GC games they'd already be doing so, even if the system isn't widespread available in their country.
N64 piracy mechanisms have been available for years now, be they zip drives or CD-based systems. Likewise for the SNES and NES systems, piracy has been done to death.
The Gamecube, on the other hand, his seen no piracy at all. The reason is that pirating would require the ability to read Gamecube discs on something other than a Gamecube, and would also require some medium to copy the contents onto that could then be played back on the cube.
If Nintendo is really worried about piracy here it would seem like rather than rereleasing a system that the HK folks have pirated to death for years they'd release their as yet uncracked current system.
More likely it seems to me that they're shipping inferior products to China because they'd be cheaper to make and sell and the Chinese don't have huge disposable incomes. Blaming it on piracy might be a way of sparing someone's feelings.
Either way, I don't think it's fair to say, "I liked your game... but not enough to pay for it. The reason I am pirating your games instead of paying you is because I wish it was better, so it's YOUR fault." That sort of reasoning is akin to blaming women for assaults because they were being "too provocative" or some s**t like that... that train of thought is just wrong.
actually that's not the same sort of reasoning at all. The actual analog would be a hooker taking your money and then refusing to sleep with you because you smell bad.
I'm still running OS/2 Warp 3.0 on my old P75 laptop. Toss Xfree86 and gcc on it and you can even recompile a lot of Linux apps to work properly with minimal alteration.
If you're looking to try out OS/2 I'd check eBay for it. My original 3.0 came on a CD, and my laptop was floppy only, and I managed to get a box set with all the docs for under $10 with shipping.
IBM does not, AFAIK, offer public domain licenses for it.
There is, however, a difference between "should be" and "must be". Nobody is suggesting a person be able to lie about his credentials with impunity here, rather it is suggested that the market decide just how qualified one needs to be.
If tomorrow it was legal to practice medicine without a license, would you go to the cheaper office with the "doctor" who has no degree or formal training?
In the case of the computer repairman, you have to ask yourself if anyone really benefits from A+ certification courses, or if they are just another needless expense designed to make a lot of money for the test writers. I've met dozens of A+ certies that I wouldn't let within 10 feet of one of my computers, and I've met medical doctors with official degrees all over their walls that it would never dawn on me to rely on for medical advice.
You've got to learn to think for yourself over who you trust rather than just expecting some bureaucrat in Washington to instinctively know who the best employee is for you in all cases.
Hate to say it man, but by this stage in the game there is little if anything you can do to effect your chances of not being laid off. The prospective buyer already knows approximately who is staying and who is going because they are already crunching the numbers on how to make such a deal work.
If you're a hard worker, skillful, and not making a hojillion dollars (unless you are really doing something almost no one else could do) you'll probably survive most buyouts. Take a look around your work area at people doing similar things and ask yourself, objectively "If I was an employer and could keep only one of the two, would it be him or me?".
A buyout WILL involve layoffs. Its sad to say, but if your current company was doing so well to begin with, they wouldn't be thinking of selling.
The most enjoyable part of the whole topic is the fact that you corrected me, and you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
Affected
1 : INCLINED, DISPOSED
2 a : given to affectation b : assumed artificially or falsely : PRETENDED
So tell me Captain English, which of those is the correct definition? According to m-w.com:
usage The confusion of the verbs affect and effect is not only quite common but has a long history. Effect was used in place of affect as early as 1494. If you think you want to use the verb effect but are not certain, check the definitions in this dictionary. The noun affect is sometimes mistakenly used for effect. Except when your topic is psychology, you will seldom need the noun affect.
So unless you thought I meant that the exploit had great fondness for OS/2, I stand uncorrected.
Try to keep in even further mind that VCDs are the REAL low end of digital video, and they've been 320x240 for a long time.
I didn't think we were talking about higher-than-DVD resolution portable video devices here, I thought it was a handheld (possibly little bigger than an iPAQ) sized video player.
I'm disappointed to hear that virtually all PDA's now feature "postage-stamp sized" screens because of the 320x240 thing, but keep in mind that the term originated in a day when getting fullscreen 320x240 out of Doom was supreme and postage stamp size meant you were lucky to get 90 pixels one way or the other on your 386.
I've got 20+ minute long DivX's that are perfectly watchable at 50 MB. So long as you're willing to keep it lowres (320x240) and not go nuts for really really highend sound you can fit a good 5 hours of video on a CD these days. If you're watching postage stamp sized AVI's you've either
a) forgotten to compress them or b) have your screen set to 8000x6000 resolution
Even if the thing was just a 20 GB hard drive with a DivX player about the caliber of the Sega Dreamcast's and a 320x240 screen I'd buy one.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually you could develop software for Sega's last console using GCC. Its also the only modern console that didn't have a proprietary bootloader (well, one that didn't have a way around it).
When you get right down to it though consoles are basically either built on industry standard parts or in house parts. You don't really NEED an OS on a console, and in my experience it slows things down mightily (Sega Dreamcast WinCE anyone?).
But it does seem to me that there's a big difference between "not as proprietary" and "nonproprietary". You've still got an OS whose inner workings are a secret, and that makes it proprietary.
Unless you can bootstrap the machine yourself with your own code its not nonproprietary.
Moreover, foresee the ability to develop games on a nonproprietary system, which is Windows based, something relatively unheard of today.
How nonproprietary can it possibly be if it's "Windows based"? Do they mean Xwindows?
Here in America we somehow got the crazy idea that you don't need a driver's license unless you actually drive.
Its crazy I know, but when I was riding in the back seat and I told the cop he didn't need to see my driver's license because I wasn't driving, he pulled his gun on me.
Very clever trick, but we all know where this is going:
In Soviet Russia, ATI Radeon 9700 can be turned into a 9500 with just a simple hack.
Once you've got them I'd recommend telnetting on over to Manson which mercifully for those of us who don't have access to our own Vax will let you play around with a guest account.
VMS feels a LOT like DOS though. If you're comfortable with DOS you can pick up the basics of VMS in a few hours.
either that or they include Sweden in the axis of evil and forbid them from buying food anymore.
Great, so I should be able to do that some time around 2015? :)
Seriously though, I was thinking more along the lines of a true OO from the ground up OS (maybe resembling squeak)
No, they are telling MB customers that they aren't important.
I like your analogy with the piston manufacturer, but this is a simple marketing exercise. Its not a question of whether the MB designers are targetting their customers properly in this case, its a question of one of the MB designers' parts makers telling the end user "you aren't important", and I would tend to think that wouldn't sit well with the MB maker.
Consider someone going through a plant that manufacturers brakes specifically for new cars. They ask the tour guide "what are you doing to see to it that my car's brakes will function properly" and the tour guide answers "We didn't make the brakes for you, we made them for your car's manufacturer".
Again its not a question of whether or not the manufacturer his chosen the best part here, its a question of the part maker slapping the end user in the face.
Nevermind that, I want smalltalkOS
I still think he should've been a tad more direct about answering that rather than just blithely saying "You aren't our REAL customers". That sort of like GM telling carowners "We don't care what you think, we sell our cars to dealers, not to you".
They are providing BIOS to motherboard manufacturers to put in motherboards that WE are supposed to buy. It seems like they should think a little beyond the initial transaction with the MB company here.
I know if I was a MB maker I wouldn't want someone I buy parts from telling my customers they aren't important.
Speaking of this, whatever happened to the BIOS lowlevel format option? My old Laser 386 allowed you to lowlevel format any of the harddrives through CMOS setup... it would seem like that's a pretty simple feature to add, and plenty useful.
It seems to me you're missing something about the "free market", I think we lost you before we finished "free".
Things have a specific value, yes.
Things also have a specific cost.
These are two distinct concepts.
That cost is not always equal to its value to you, and getting something at an agreed upon lower cost than you perceive it to be worth is not some terrible sin.
If you buy a bag of potato chips on sale does everyone call it welfare for the chip eater? If the company is selling the product for below its cost are you obligated to pay them the difference?
Mandrake made a business decision to give away its product for free. Many people took them up on that offer, and somewhere along the line they noticed that they don't make money doing that. So now we're supposed to go back and pay them extra? Sorry, it doen't work that way.
More likely the MPAA was not involved in the announcement because it was the RIAA's announcement, and not the MPAA's.
Slashdot and VA Software didn't promise to abandon requiring DRM in the RIAA announcement either... a conspiracy perhaps?
Assuming such an exploit exists, isn't it also equally plausible that someone who doesn't like the RIAA wrote such a worm that would appear to come from them in an effort to get them in legal trouble?
My very own personal legislator? I didn't even know I had one.
Legislators are people who do things to you, not for you.
That's nowhere near as funny as most of the "in soviet Russia" jokes...
The only console ever that didn't require a hardware solution was the Sega Dreamcast. Even mod-chipping your system is something that's in the realm of a few enthusiasts.
I don't think any piece of Nintendo hardware has ever been "standards-compliant" even going all the way back to their floppy disks for the old NES. The Gamecube disc has a similar capacity to a DVD drive, and undoubtably borrows some of the technology, but that's nowhere close to a solution to how to read the data into a PC or how to create the media which is read in the opposite direction of a DVD drive.
I would think of Chinese (espc. HK) hackers had the ability to pirate GC games they'd already be doing so, even if the system isn't widespread available in their country.
N64 piracy mechanisms have been available for years now, be they zip drives or CD-based systems. Likewise for the SNES and NES systems, piracy has been done to death.
The Gamecube, on the other hand, his seen no piracy at all. The reason is that pirating would require the ability to read Gamecube discs on something other than a Gamecube, and would also require some medium to copy the contents onto that could then be played back on the cube.
If Nintendo is really worried about piracy here it would seem like rather than rereleasing a system that the HK folks have pirated to death for years they'd release their as yet uncracked current system.
More likely it seems to me that they're shipping inferior products to China because they'd be cheaper to make and sell and the Chinese don't have huge disposable incomes. Blaming it on piracy might be a way of sparing someone's feelings.
actually that's not the same sort of reasoning at all. The actual analog would be a hooker taking your money and then refusing to sleep with you because you smell bad.
I'm still running OS/2 Warp 3.0 on my old P75 laptop. Toss Xfree86 and gcc on it and you can even recompile a lot of Linux apps to work properly with minimal alteration.
If you're looking to try out OS/2 I'd check eBay for it. My original 3.0 came on a CD, and my laptop was floppy only, and I managed to get a box set with all the docs for under $10 with shipping.
IBM does not, AFAIK, offer public domain licenses for it.
There is, however, a difference between "should be" and "must be". Nobody is suggesting a person be able to lie about his credentials with impunity here, rather it is suggested that the market decide just how qualified one needs to be.
If tomorrow it was legal to practice medicine without a license, would you go to the cheaper office with the "doctor" who has no degree or formal training?
In the case of the computer repairman, you have to ask yourself if anyone really benefits from A+ certification courses, or if they are just another needless expense designed to make a lot of money for the test writers. I've met dozens of A+ certies that I wouldn't let within 10 feet of one of my computers, and I've met medical doctors with official degrees all over their walls that it would never dawn on me to rely on for medical advice.
You've got to learn to think for yourself over who you trust rather than just expecting some bureaucrat in Washington to instinctively know who the best employee is for you in all cases.
Hate to say it man, but by this stage in the game there is little if anything you can do to effect your chances of not being laid off. The prospective buyer already knows approximately who is staying and who is going because they are already crunching the numbers on how to make such a deal work.
If you're a hard worker, skillful, and not making a hojillion dollars (unless you are really doing something almost no one else could do) you'll probably survive most buyouts. Take a look around your work area at people doing similar things and ask yourself, objectively "If I was an employer and could keep only one of the two, would it be him or me?".
A buyout WILL involve layoffs. Its sad to say, but if your current company was doing so well to begin with, they wouldn't be thinking of selling.
The most enjoyable part of the whole topic is the fact that you corrected me, and you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
Affected
1 : INCLINED, DISPOSED
2 a : given to affectation b : assumed artificially or falsely : PRETENDED
So tell me Captain English, which of those is the correct definition? According to m-w.com:
usage The confusion of the verbs affect and effect is not only quite common but has a long history. Effect was used in place of affect as early as 1494. If you think you want to use the verb effect but are not certain, check the definitions in this dictionary. The noun affect is sometimes mistakenly used for effect. Except when your topic is psychology, you will seldom need the noun affect.
So unless you thought I meant that the exploit had great fondness for OS/2, I stand uncorrected.
Try to keep in even further mind that VCDs are the REAL low end of digital video, and they've been 320x240 for a long time.
I didn't think we were talking about higher-than-DVD resolution portable video devices here, I thought it was a handheld (possibly little bigger than an iPAQ) sized video player.
I'm disappointed to hear that virtually all PDA's now feature "postage-stamp sized" screens because of the 320x240 thing, but keep in mind that the term originated in a day when getting fullscreen 320x240 out of Doom was supreme and postage stamp size meant you were lucky to get 90 pixels one way or the other on your 386.
I've got 20+ minute long DivX's that are perfectly watchable at 50 MB. So long as you're willing to keep it lowres (320x240) and not go nuts for really really highend sound you can fit a good 5 hours of video on a CD these days. If you're watching postage stamp sized AVI's you've either
a) forgotten to compress them
or
b) have your screen set to 8000x6000 resolution
Even if the thing was just a 20 GB hard drive with a DivX player about the caliber of the Sega Dreamcast's and a 320x240 screen I'd buy one.