Quake certainly was technically impressive, but I couldn't help being disappointed by it at the time. It just wasn't as good as Doom.
Yeah, Doom was the last iD game that was both an amazing engine and an amazing game. Since then, the "fun" has come from either licencees of the engine or modders. Speaking of...
None of this was Carmack's fault, of course. He can only be blamed for Quake C:).
Granted I was talking about graphical achievment since that seems to be what the award is for, but no paen to Quake is complete without singing the praises of Quake C! Oh, the sweet wonder of modifying not just the occasional feature but the very game logic using a C-like language, letting you turn Quake into anything from a class-based capture-the-flag game to an action-RPG (link may be broken). From a more universal perspective Quake C was crap, but it was also an original idea that basically created the huge and vibrant "mod" community that we know today. Though I will say that I've never forgiven Carmack for not including support for -arrays-, even statically sized ones. I even dug into the quake c compiler to discover that the bytecode quake c was compiled into didn't support any kind of pointer arithmetic. So annoying, but must... code... around... limitations...
PS3: - SIXAXIS controller, which if pronounced sloppily can sound like "sex-asses". - Motion sensing adds some potential. Sex joke quotient: 50.
Wii: - Name is inherently a phallus joke. - Controller is phallic object, and referred to as "Wii-mote". - Phallic object is "motion sensitive" - Phallic object vibrates. Sex joke quotient: 1 billion.
Because Sony has not made as many PS3s as Nintendo has made Wiis. Rather simple isn't it?
Well, that is the simplest answer and it is certainly a major factor.
Other peopel have pointed out (and after research I now have to agree) that the PS3 isn't selling in the USA (if any one wants ot buy a PS3, Circuit City has 60gig versions in stock).
Anecdotally, I was at Best Buy yesterday and they were still out of Wii (got a shipment that day but sold out very quickly) but had 12 PS3.
I can't claim anything definitive from that anecdotal evidence, but I'm do think it's quite plausible that the high price of the PS3 and it being functionally similar to the Xbox360 which has been out for a year has limited demand for the console such that they already have sufficient production. Or maybe the ones that weren't willing to wait in lines or track deliveries to every store in the region have given up on getting a PS3 for now and simply haven't noticed that the stores have them stocked. That hasn't happened with the Wii, obviously, as people are still scarfing up the consoles as fast as they arrive.
What made the dual shock so appealing to people though? I always found it to be a bit uncomfortable...
Dual analogs, as far as I can guess. That was the main thing it brought to the table, oh and maybe having rumble built in rather than an add-on. The N64 controller made analog control sticks the new standard in consoles, so Sony decided to include not one but two. The reason I've always found it uncomfortable is because since Sony wasn't certain that analog was going to take over -- and not to mess up existing games which used the D-pad -- they put the left analog stick down and to the right so it requires flexing the thumb just to touch the stick. Okay, that was fine for the PS1, but the bastards didn't move it for the PS2 or PS3, while every other controller swapped the dual shock's d-pad/left analog position so that the control you used 99% of the time -- the analog -- was in the most comfortable, natural position.
It's not the worst controller ever, and dual analog sticks was a good improvement, but I agree it isn't that spectacular.
That's my point. Congress basically treats the Commerce Clause like it gives them the power to do anything they want, so it's a damn good thing that at least some of the things Congress can't abuse it for are explicitly spelled out in the Bill of Rights.
How they decided the Clause to allow them to restrict solely in-state activity like CA's medical mj, and more importantly got SCOTUS to go along, I'll never figure out though. I'll just chalk it up to the usual cynical causes.
While it would be rather late to give an award, I do think Quake would be the most deserving of an award for graphics achievment certainly since and maybe before. Fully 3D environments with arbitrary geometry -- fairly complex geometry at that -- on hardware that had no business being able to render such a thing was quite an achievement. Throw on the lightmaps and you've got something even more impressive. Nothing looked like Quake at the time, and everything since is more detailed geometry, higher detailed textures, and better lighting/texture shader effects. Yay Quake! Of course the game itself wasn't that great, setting the precedent for all future iD games.:)
I particularly liked how they got good performance out of the game by requiring hours and hours of pre-processing on the maps to create visibility trees. There were even servers you could submit your maps to that would then run vis on them so hobbyists could save some time.
No, it doesn't! The Bill of Rights enumerates some of the more important rights reserved to the people. However, the Constitution strictly defines what Congress can do, not what they can't do; everything not specifically allowed them is supposed to be excluded from their power.
Right that being the logic by which some argued that a Bill of Rights defeated the whole purpose as it should, ideally, be redundant. Nevertheless, read any of the Bill of Rights and they say "Congress shall make no law..." and that was the basis of the argument.
Of course, they've been ignoring that inconvenience since the early 1800's, but hey, you gotta try.
Well yeah, which is why I'm glad they put in the Bill of Rights after all. Otherwise we'd see Congress claiming that the Commerce Clause grants them the power to regulate the speech in books sold across state lines.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
"Free to do anything except deny freedom to others" - i.e. maximal freedom for everyone, not just for you.
In your definition of free, are you restricted from owning slaves? The Bill of Rights puts restrictions on Congress, so we'd be more free without it?
P.S. I have nothing against the BSD license, but it's purpose is different. Arguments about it being "more free" miss the mark entirely and look at freedom only from a completely selfish perspective.
So? Here in Sydney, Australia it's been the coldest December for a long time. Stats from one spot in the world is pretty much meaningless in an immensely complex system like Earth's weather!
So? So you have an unusually cold winter in one place with normally warm winters, and unusually warm winters in a place normally cold and snow-deluged, and unusually rainy seasons in a dry place, and unusually dry season in a rainy place, oh and gigantic snowstorms in a place that normally has snow. Put it all together, and you get wild fluctuations and extremes of weather, which is exactly what one would expect from putting more energy into the weather system, as has been predicted.
i always love that they spout about 1998 - 2000 being the hottest on record, yet fail to mention most of that warming came from extra solar flare activity.
It's not solar flare activity, it's general solar output, and yes it gets mentioned and more importantly accounted for. It doesn't account for the warming, only 30% of the warming can be accounted for by solar output. The reduction in temperature drops overnight shows that a greater percentage of heat is being retained, which is very bad especially if the sun is producing more heat to be retained.
frankly i think it's pretty concited to think we would be able put much of a dent in the planets atmosphere on a GLOBAL scale.
I think it's conceited to think that your opinion on the egos of scientists can cause a change in the actual physical composition of the atmosphere. We are conceited, as a species, but nevertheless the evidence is clear that global CO2 levels are much higher now than they have been in over 300,000 years, and the timescale of the change leaves only human industrialization as the cause.
Have you seen pictures of the night side earth from space? Notice anything you wouldn't have seen two hundred years ago? I think's it's incredibly naive to think that humans cannot have a global effect.
You mean the model in which when you heat up water the solubility of CO2 decreases, so warmer temperatures would cause CO2 levels to increase?
Or the one in which CO2 increases cause a greenhouse effect so increasing CO2 levels cause warmer temperatures?
It's not "either or", it's both. It's called a feedback loop, look it up, since they're omni-present in nature. Anyone who doesn't realize that those two models are not contradictory but rather an indication of what can happen when we push the system too far should just stop talking about the subject.
Linux is an OS. Firefox is a desktop application. An OS differs from an application in many ways, including ease of installation and the impact to the rest of the desktop.
No kidding, I thought this was a ludicrous comparison when I read it too. Firefox achieved popular success because it runs on Windows. Can Linux do that? Uh, no, barring geeky stuff like vmware which itself doesn't have the same uptake as a web browser.
Plus when he talks about the Linux desktops being wedded to Linux even though Linux has failed to achieve Firefox-like success, he misses the whole friggen point of these desktops: to make Linux and other *nix more ammenable to being the "average user's" desktop! He's basically saying, give up on that, and try to be popular on Windows, assuming that's even possible.
The fact that a browser was the basis for comparison is telling--server-side apps are becoming more important & many of these do run on Linux.
It does hurt when the funding, research, and effort could be put to better uses. We ought to work on our needs such as learning about our own planet (there's so much that we don't know), and how our species is going to survive, since at the current rate, survival could become a problem fairly soon.
I highly doubt that the funding for this project would significantly impact research into our own planet to the extent that there is a will to learn about it, and I also highly doubt that the researchers for either endeavor would be the same people. So I see no reason we can't do both.
If the way that life-harboring star systems form, the way that life itself forms, and the way that intelligent life evolves is analogous across the universe then this may be the Golden Age of intelligent life throughout our galaxy.
Unfortunately the scales of "ages" in an astrological or geological sense are so much greater than those of human development that even if this perspective is true then it could still be very unlikely that our high-tech era overlaps appropriately with any other life forms'. A few extra million years in the formation of a planetary system is in the noise for those systems, but could guarantee that we'll be long gone before another sentient life form evolves on another planet (or vice versa, they may have come and gone long ago).
It would be nice if it came down to which format was more technically excellent. Yeah, I know, it doesn't work like that. It's sad.
Yeah, I used to feel the same way, that tech never seemed to win because it was better tech but because of externalities. Then I started to realise that those externalities are as much a part of the tech as what I as an engineer geek would call the tech. Is the format that plays only 1/10th of the movies really a better format even if it has higher resolution, better scratch resistance, or whatever else? In a very real and practical sense I'd say no. Just like a "better" Internet with newer routing protocols and every other wiz-bang thing you could improve about the internet wouldn't actually be any "better" if it never connected to more than 100 hosts.
I feel the same way about software licenses. People say "use whichever is best for the job!" but forget how significant an effect the software license can have on how the software does the job. I learned this the hard way when a very good hspice simulator wasn't up to the task because we didn't have enough licenses to run the simulations we needed in the time frame we needed them.
It depresses us geeks that our great work can be ruined by an accountant, marketer, or lawyer, but that's just the way it is. The product isn't done until the accountant, marketer, and lawyer get their hands on it -- because without them, it would never be a thing that is sold. I've learned to just accept this as part of engineering.
I do prefer libre, and frequently refer to free software as software libre as it's perfectly clear as libre == freedom. It's just it's not English so it's really just as confusing to English speakers as "free software" just in a different way. Just my opinion, but in English both "Liberty Software" and "Freedom Software" sound cumbersome.
The funny thing is that RMS chose "free" in part because it was unclear and would require discussion about the nature of freedom. Ha ha, silly goose, thinking people could handle more than a sound bite description of something before judging it!
Not sure how I can make this clearer: yes. What else can you use a GBA cart for? nothing, games. UMD? Now, nothing, just games. Its a wash. Except the UMDs are much cheaper to make.
Exactly, it's a wash. Now let me make my point clearer: "A wash" with something not intended in any way to be a standard media format is not a success at creating a standard media format. They wanted UMD to be a standard media format. It ended up as nothing but a game format for a specific game machine. That equals failure. "As much a standard as GBA carts" is failure because GBA carts are not a standard. GBA carts never wanted to be, so you can't call them a failure. UMD disks? Absolutely a failure.
Attribute what you like; we were discussing Sony's successes and failures at marketplace standards.
Yep, and the success of CD occured only when there was no competition, which makes it a rather poor example to analogize to current events.
But please keep that phrase "marketplace standards" in mind.
Ok, bad example. (You skipped Disney, conveniently.) Go wiki the Blu Ray consortium, you'll get a better list.
If Sony dropped BluRay, Disney would switch to HD-DVD. The members of the consortium who are only media providers have no vested interest in BluRay as such, for them it's about business arrangements which were they to fall through has no dramatic impact on them.
No, it would become yet another game format - this was covered above. Seriously, what are you not getting about that?
Is Sony interested in BluRay being just YAGF? Does Disney care about YAGF? I thought we were talking about marketplace standards for media formats. "The game format used in the PS3 and no other game consoles" is not a marketplace standard. What are you not getting about that?
If at the end of the day the only thing you can do with BluRay is play PS3 games, then yes, it failed. It will last for the lifetime of the PS3 and then be replaced by YAGF for PS4. In other words, BluRay will be for the PS3 what N64 carts were for the N64. Are N64 carts a standard media format? No, and they never tried to be. BluRay is trying to be, so if it is not, then it is a failure.
If you're seriously implying that BluRay being relegated to YAGF status would not be a dramatic failure for Sony and all the movie (as in not games) providers, you're delusional.
Sony is simply acting as the point man in this little fight, but I assure you they are hardly alone.
That's nice. They weren't alone on UMD or BetaMax either... until those formats failed, and their supporters jumped ship to the winner.
He'd have a good excuse if his first language was Spanish. Software libre is nice and clear, and sounds good too. "Liberty Software" is not ambiguous but sounds like crap, like mutual funds or collectable coins.
Here's the answer: don't buy HD-DVDs and BDs that require HDCP. Duh. Vote with your feet. If enough people really put their money where their mouth is (as opposed to what they normally do, which is just paying lip-service), and truly advocated that others do the same, it will make a difference. Sadly, most people are so weak in their convictions that when their favorite movie comes out requiring HDCP, they will just buy it no matter what.
Are these disks going to be labeled, or will it be like DRMed CDs which appear normal in all respects until you put them in your computer?
If the disc has the ICT flag set then the OS *must* obey it by shutting down all analogue connections (inc. vga and composite) and allowing only HDCP protected digital connections.
According to the license agreement, I assume, not any technical feature of the disk itself. So it's like I thought -- a policy enforced voluntarily by the OS -- and I was confused by wording.
The flaw with all these searches is that it assumes that any nearby civilizations are exactly at the same level of development as humanity.
It also assumes that 'level of development' is a linear progression and that they would necessarily develop the same technologies as we have. On an alien world, an alien lifeform may have completely different needs and thus completely different technology. For example, ocean-based life can already communicate over long distances using audio waves. Life on a venus-like world may be unable to use radar due to the atmosphere. And so on and so forth and just use your imagination.
Remember, it's the disc that actually needs to require it, the operating system only provides this as an option.
Sorry, I don't understand. How can the disc require HDCP? The OS is the only thing that can enforce such a requirement... how can the disc know that the computer does or does not have HDCP? The disc isn't software, it's data the OS reads and does with as it pleases, whether that be enforcing DRM standards or not. So I'm missing something.
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Quake certainly was technically impressive, but I couldn't help being disappointed by it at the time. It just wasn't as good as Doom.
:).
Yeah, Doom was the last iD game that was both an amazing engine and an amazing game. Since then, the "fun" has come from either licencees of the engine or modders. Speaking of...
None of this was Carmack's fault, of course. He can only be blamed for Quake C
Granted I was talking about graphical achievment since that seems to be what the award is for, but no paen to Quake is complete without singing the praises of Quake C! Oh, the sweet wonder of modifying not just the occasional feature but the very game logic using a C-like language, letting you turn Quake into anything from a class-based capture-the-flag game to an action-RPG (link may be broken). From a more universal perspective Quake C was crap, but it was also an original idea that basically created the huge and vibrant "mod" community that we know today. Though I will say that I've never forgiven Carmack for not including support for -arrays-, even statically sized ones. I even dug into the quake c compiler to discover that the bytecode quake c was compiled into didn't support any kind of pointer arithmetic. So annoying, but must... code... around... limitations...
PS3:
- SIXAXIS controller, which if pronounced sloppily can sound like "sex-asses".
- Motion sensing adds some potential.
Sex joke quotient: 50.
Wii:
- Name is inherently a phallus joke.
- Controller is phallic object, and referred to as "Wii-mote".
- Phallic object is "motion sensitive"
- Phallic object vibrates.
Sex joke quotient: 1 billion.
Winner: Wii. Wii always wins.
Because Sony has not made as many PS3s as Nintendo has made Wiis. Rather simple isn't it?
Well, that is the simplest answer and it is certainly a major factor.
Other peopel have pointed out (and after research I now have to agree) that the PS3 isn't selling in the USA (if any one wants ot buy a PS3, Circuit City has 60gig versions in stock).
Anecdotally, I was at Best Buy yesterday and they were still out of Wii (got a shipment that day but sold out very quickly) but had 12 PS3.
I can't claim anything definitive from that anecdotal evidence, but I'm do think it's quite plausible that the high price of the PS3 and it being functionally similar to the Xbox360 which has been out for a year has limited demand for the console such that they already have sufficient production. Or maybe the ones that weren't willing to wait in lines or track deliveries to every store in the region have given up on getting a PS3 for now and simply haven't noticed that the stores have them stocked. That hasn't happened with the Wii, obviously, as people are still scarfing up the consoles as fast as they arrive.
What made the dual shock so appealing to people though? I always found it to be a bit uncomfortable...
Dual analogs, as far as I can guess. That was the main thing it brought to the table, oh and maybe having rumble built in rather than an add-on. The N64 controller made analog control sticks the new standard in consoles, so Sony decided to include not one but two. The reason I've always found it uncomfortable is because since Sony wasn't certain that analog was going to take over -- and not to mess up existing games which used the D-pad -- they put the left analog stick down and to the right so it requires flexing the thumb just to touch the stick. Okay, that was fine for the PS1, but the bastards didn't move it for the PS2 or PS3, while every other controller swapped the dual shock's d-pad/left analog position so that the control you used 99% of the time -- the analog -- was in the most comfortable, natural position.
It's not the worst controller ever, and dual analog sticks was a good improvement, but I agree it isn't that spectacular.
That's my point. Congress basically treats the Commerce Clause like it gives them the power to do anything they want, so it's a damn good thing that at least some of the things Congress can't abuse it for are explicitly spelled out in the Bill of Rights.
How they decided the Clause to allow them to restrict solely in-state activity like CA's medical mj, and more importantly got SCOTUS to go along, I'll never figure out though. I'll just chalk it up to the usual cynical causes.
While it would be rather late to give an award, I do think Quake would be the most deserving of an award for graphics achievment certainly since and maybe before. Fully 3D environments with arbitrary geometry -- fairly complex geometry at that -- on hardware that had no business being able to render such a thing was quite an achievement. Throw on the lightmaps and you've got something even more impressive. Nothing looked like Quake at the time, and everything since is more detailed geometry, higher detailed textures, and better lighting/texture shader effects. Yay Quake! Of course the game itself wasn't that great, setting the precedent for all future iD games. :)
I particularly liked how they got good performance out of the game by requiring hours and hours of pre-processing on the maps to create visibility trees. There were even servers you could submit your maps to that would then run vis on them so hobbyists could save some time.
No, it doesn't! The Bill of Rights enumerates some of the more important rights reserved to the people. However, the Constitution strictly defines what Congress can do, not what they can't do; everything not specifically allowed them is supposed to be excluded from their power.
Right that being the logic by which some argued that a Bill of Rights defeated the whole purpose as it should, ideally, be redundant. Nevertheless, read any of the Bill of Rights and they say "Congress shall make no law..." and that was the basis of the argument.
Of course, they've been ignoring that inconvenience since the early 1800's, but hey, you gotta try.
Well yeah, which is why I'm glad they put in the Bill of Rights after all. Otherwise we'd see Congress claiming that the Commerce Clause grants them the power to regulate the speech in books sold across state lines.
Free means no restrictions, ironic the FSF's GPL forces restrictions, isn't it? What's your definition of free?
"Free to do anything except deny freedom to others" - i.e. maximal freedom for everyone, not just for you.
In your definition of free, are you restricted from owning slaves? The Bill of Rights puts restrictions on Congress, so we'd be more free without it?
P.S. I have nothing against the BSD license, but it's purpose is different. Arguments about it being "more free" miss the mark entirely and look at freedom only from a completely selfish perspective.
So? Here in Sydney, Australia it's been the coldest December for a long time. Stats from one spot in the world is pretty much meaningless in an immensely complex system like Earth's weather!
So? So you have an unusually cold winter in one place with normally warm winters, and unusually warm winters in a place normally cold and snow-deluged, and unusually rainy seasons in a dry place, and unusually dry season in a rainy place, oh and gigantic snowstorms in a place that normally has snow. Put it all together, and you get wild fluctuations and extremes of weather, which is exactly what one would expect from putting more energy into the weather system, as has been predicted.
That's the So.
i always love that they spout about 1998 - 2000 being the hottest on record, yet fail to mention most of that warming came from extra solar flare activity.
It's not solar flare activity, it's general solar output, and yes it gets mentioned and more importantly accounted for. It doesn't account for the warming, only 30% of the warming can be accounted for by solar output. The reduction in temperature drops overnight shows that a greater percentage of heat is being retained, which is very bad especially if the sun is producing more heat to be retained.
frankly i think it's pretty concited to think we would be able put much of a dent in the planets atmosphere on a GLOBAL scale.
I think it's conceited to think that your opinion on the egos of scientists can cause a change in the actual physical composition of the atmosphere. We are conceited, as a species, but nevertheless the evidence is clear that global CO2 levels are much higher now than they have been in over 300,000 years, and the timescale of the change leaves only human industrialization as the cause.
Have you seen pictures of the night side earth from space? Notice anything you wouldn't have seen two hundred years ago? I think's it's incredibly naive to think that humans cannot have a global effect.
You mean the model in which when you heat up water the solubility of CO2 decreases, so warmer temperatures would cause CO2 levels to increase?
Or the one in which CO2 increases cause a greenhouse effect so increasing CO2 levels cause warmer temperatures?
It's not "either or", it's both. It's called a feedback loop, look it up, since they're omni-present in nature. Anyone who doesn't realize that those two models are not contradictory but rather an indication of what can happen when we push the system too far should just stop talking about the subject.
Linux is an OS. Firefox is a desktop application. An OS differs from an application in many ways, including ease of installation and the impact to the rest of the desktop.
No kidding, I thought this was a ludicrous comparison when I read it too. Firefox achieved popular success because it runs on Windows. Can Linux do that? Uh, no, barring geeky stuff like vmware which itself doesn't have the same uptake as a web browser.
Plus when he talks about the Linux desktops being wedded to Linux even though Linux has failed to achieve Firefox-like success, he misses the whole friggen point of these desktops: to make Linux and other *nix more ammenable to being the "average user's" desktop! He's basically saying, give up on that, and try to be popular on Windows, assuming that's even possible.
The fact that a browser was the basis for comparison is telling--server-side apps are becoming more important & many of these do run on Linux.
Indeed, good point.
It does hurt when the funding, research, and effort could be put to better uses. We ought to work on our needs such as learning about our own planet (there's so much that we don't know), and how our species is going to survive, since at the current rate, survival could become a problem fairly soon.
I highly doubt that the funding for this project would significantly impact research into our own planet to the extent that there is a will to learn about it, and I also highly doubt that the researchers for either endeavor would be the same people. So I see no reason we can't do both.
No, he would not. Go to gnu.org and see that all the localized pages struggle pointlessly to translate Free as in Freedom:
Spanish: Libre, no gratuito
Heh, that's funny. Basically like saying "Cow as in cow, not orangutan".
to those two innocent hookers.
If the way that life-harboring star systems form, the way that life itself forms, and the way that intelligent life evolves is analogous across the universe then this may be the Golden Age of intelligent life throughout our galaxy.
Unfortunately the scales of "ages" in an astrological or geological sense are so much greater than those of human development that even if this perspective is true then it could still be very unlikely that our high-tech era overlaps appropriately with any other life forms'. A few extra million years in the formation of a planetary system is in the noise for those systems, but could guarantee that we'll be long gone before another sentient life form evolves on another planet (or vice versa, they may have come and gone long ago).
It would be nice if it came down to which format was more technically excellent. Yeah, I know, it doesn't work like that. It's sad.
Yeah, I used to feel the same way, that tech never seemed to win because it was better tech but because of externalities. Then I started to realise that those externalities are as much a part of the tech as what I as an engineer geek would call the tech. Is the format that plays only 1/10th of the movies really a better format even if it has higher resolution, better scratch resistance, or whatever else? In a very real and practical sense I'd say no. Just like a "better" Internet with newer routing protocols and every other wiz-bang thing you could improve about the internet wouldn't actually be any "better" if it never connected to more than 100 hosts.
I feel the same way about software licenses. People say "use whichever is best for the job!" but forget how significant an effect the software license can have on how the software does the job. I learned this the hard way when a very good hspice simulator wasn't up to the task because we didn't have enough licenses to run the simulations we needed in the time frame we needed them.
It depresses us geeks that our great work can be ruined by an accountant, marketer, or lawyer, but that's just the way it is. The product isn't done until the accountant, marketer, and lawyer get their hands on it -- because without them, it would never be a thing that is sold. I've learned to just accept this as part of engineering.
Some people clearly can't see the forest through the trees.
:)
You misspelled "vast ocean of self-delusion thousands of miles away from the forest".
I guess that's why some people prefer "Libre".
I do prefer libre, and frequently refer to free software as software libre as it's perfectly clear as libre == freedom. It's just it's not English so it's really just as confusing to English speakers as "free software" just in a different way. Just my opinion, but in English both "Liberty Software" and "Freedom Software" sound cumbersome.
The funny thing is that RMS chose "free" in part because it was unclear and would require discussion about the nature of freedom. Ha ha, silly goose, thinking people could handle more than a sound bite description of something before judging it!
Not sure how I can make this clearer: yes. What else can you use a GBA cart for? nothing, games. UMD? Now, nothing, just games. Its a wash. Except the UMDs are much cheaper to make.
Exactly, it's a wash. Now let me make my point clearer: "A wash" with something not intended in any way to be a standard media format is not a success at creating a standard media format. They wanted UMD to be a standard media format. It ended up as nothing but a game format for a specific game machine. That equals failure. "As much a standard as GBA carts" is failure because GBA carts are not a standard. GBA carts never wanted to be, so you can't call them a failure. UMD disks? Absolutely a failure.
Attribute what you like; we were discussing Sony's successes and failures at marketplace standards.
Yep, and the success of CD occured only when there was no competition, which makes it a rather poor example to analogize to current events.
But please keep that phrase "marketplace standards" in mind.
Ok, bad example. (You skipped Disney, conveniently.) Go wiki the Blu Ray consortium, you'll get a better list.
If Sony dropped BluRay, Disney would switch to HD-DVD. The members of the consortium who are only media providers have no vested interest in BluRay as such, for them it's about business arrangements which were they to fall through has no dramatic impact on them.
No, it would become yet another game format - this was covered above. Seriously, what are you not getting about that?
Is Sony interested in BluRay being just YAGF? Does Disney care about YAGF? I thought we were talking about marketplace standards for media formats. "The game format used in the PS3 and no other game consoles" is not a marketplace standard. What are you not getting about that?
If at the end of the day the only thing you can do with BluRay is play PS3 games, then yes, it failed. It will last for the lifetime of the PS3 and then be replaced by YAGF for PS4. In other words, BluRay will be for the PS3 what N64 carts were for the N64. Are N64 carts a standard media format? No, and they never tried to be. BluRay is trying to be, so if it is not, then it is a failure.
If you're seriously implying that BluRay being relegated to YAGF status would not be a dramatic failure for Sony and all the movie (as in not games) providers, you're delusional.
Sony is simply acting as the point man in this little fight, but I assure you they are hardly alone.
That's nice. They weren't alone on UMD or BetaMax either... until those formats failed, and their supporters jumped ship to the winner.
He'd have a good excuse if his first language was Spanish. Software libre is nice and clear, and sounds good too. "Liberty Software" is not ambiguous but sounds like crap, like mutual funds or collectable coins.
Here's the answer: don't buy HD-DVDs and BDs that require HDCP. Duh. Vote with your feet. If enough people really put their money where their mouth is (as opposed to what they normally do, which is just paying lip-service), and truly advocated that others do the same, it will make a difference. Sadly, most people are so weak in their convictions that when their favorite movie comes out requiring HDCP, they will just buy it no matter what.
Are these disks going to be labeled, or will it be like DRMed CDs which appear normal in all respects until you put them in your computer?
If the disc has the ICT flag set then the OS *must* obey it by shutting down all analogue connections (inc. vga and composite) and allowing only HDCP protected digital connections.
According to the license agreement, I assume, not any technical feature of the disk itself. So it's like I thought -- a policy enforced voluntarily by the OS -- and I was confused by wording.
The flaw with all these searches is that it assumes that any nearby civilizations are exactly at the same level of development as humanity.
It also assumes that 'level of development' is a linear progression and that they would necessarily develop the same technologies as we have. On an alien world, an alien lifeform may have completely different needs and thus completely different technology. For example, ocean-based life can already communicate over long distances using audio waves. Life on a venus-like world may be unable to use radar due to the atmosphere. And so on and so forth and just use your imagination.
Still, never hurts to check...
Remember, it's the disc that actually needs to require it, the operating system only provides this as an option.
Sorry, I don't understand. How can the disc require HDCP? The OS is the only thing that can enforce such a requirement... how can the disc know that the computer does or does not have HDCP? The disc isn't software, it's data the OS reads and does with as it pleases, whether that be enforcing DRM standards or not. So I'm missing something.