It's time for a game of Six Degrees of Separation: Future Crew Edition
Next up was audio. The game used Scream Tracker S3M modules for music and Fast Tracker 2 XM modules for sound effects. Why both were not in the more advanced XM format, I do not know. Maybe XM for sound effects was a later addition, or maybe the composer preferred the S3M format.
The music's composer was Jonne Valtonen, however for any of you familiar with the PC demoscene, you'd probably better recognize him as Purple Motion. In the early-to-mid 90s, Purple Motion was a member of the Future Crew, the famous Finnish demo group responsible for the legendary demo Second Reality, the same demo on which Purple Motion was the principle musician.
The Future Crew often wrote their own tools; one of those tools was Scream Tracker. Purple Motion didn't write it (he wasn't a coder nor a member of the Future Crew at the time), but it was the tracker software he used for all of the Future Crew demos he worked on. Ultimately he's responsible for a number of the masterpieces written in Scream Tracker.
This brings us to Death Rally. When the Future Crew split up in 1995, the bulk of the members gravitated towards a new company started by former Future Crew members: Remedy Entertainment. Remedy is of course is the developer of Death Rally and Purple Motion was one of the Future Crew members to move to Remedy.
And thus, this is why the music for Death Rally is written in Scream Tracker 3. Death Rally's music composer came from the group that created Scream Tracker in the first place, and that was the tracker software that he had the bulk of his composing experience with. And while I obviously can't speak for him, I'd imagine he preferred S3M.
Well yes and no. PDF was created by Adobe, but it's actually an ISO standard (ISO 32000). Adobe does tend to extend it though...
Anyhow, it's not an Adobe plugin that's doing this. Apple writes their own PDF software, and indeed Mac OS X has had native PDF capabilities its whole life. This is a flaw in Apple's PDF handler - Adobe for once has nothing to do with this.
Just as a heads up to anyone thinking of buying and/or jailbreaking an iPhone 4, keep in mind that this is a userland jailbreak (like Spirit) and not a bootrom jailbreak like 24Kpwn. This is significant because this jailbreak only works on iOS versions with the vulnerable component, which means that Apple can and surely will patch it out in 4.1. This is also why Apple is signing their firmware: once they do release 4.1 they'll stop signing 4.0.x and it will be impossible to jailbreak new iPhone 4/3GSes as those devices will ship with 4.1 and it will be impossible to downgrade. Existing owners should be sure to backup their SHSH blobs using Cydia or Tiny Umbrella so that you can downgrade or reinstall 4.0.x in the future, otherwise you will be trapped just like new iPhone owners. 3G owners are also encouraged to backup their SHSH blobs, as Apple is soft-signing iOS 4.x on those devices (even though the hardware can't enforce it).
Anyhow, while I'm excited to see an iPhone 4 jailbreak, I'm a bit worried about the fact that it's another userland jailbreak. No one has successfully exploited the Apple bootrom since iBoot-359.3.2 was released last year, which is troubling. It's not possible to replicate the complete jailbreakability of the iPhone/3G without a bootrom exploit, and as iOS can quickly be updated to stamp out new userland exploits there's a distinct risk of the hackers running out of practical ways to jailbreak the platform through such limited means. Unless someone does find a new bootrom exploit, the "golden age" of jailbreaking has probably already sailed, and in the long run this is a very bad thing. The (practically) unhackable computer marches in on all fronts...
Does anyone know how is Sony supporting 3D BluRay on the PS3 when it requires HDMI 1.4? As I understand it, HDMI 1.4 is not a simple upgrade; it requires new generation transceivers on the source device which obviously can't apply to PS3s going back to 2006.
It's all smoke & mirrors (and some processing in the background). The primary limitation right now is the lens size, not the sensors or the quality of the lenses. You won't get a significantly better picture without increasing the size of the lens, which it doesn't look like Apple is doing.
At first like the submitter I thought this was only for the iPhone and iPad, but after checking the press release from AT&T it turns out it's for all Smartphones. So these are the new data plans for the iPhone, the iPad, the Nexus One (and all other Android phones), the N900 - everything.
AT&T claims that this will bring down bills for the average user, and I don't doubt this is true. However the better the Smartphone the easier it is to burn through data, so this seems to be a tactical strike against all high-end Smartphone users, and a blatant attempt to drive away iPad users (2GB for an entire month of browsing on a 10" device, really?). And this is timed to coincide with the launch of the next-gen iPhone, which is widely beleived to have a front-facing camera for video conferencing, which would burn through additional data. I also don't know how you're going to get away with significant video streaming on 2GB a month, but perhaps that's the idea?
Progress, it seems, is getting less for more. Ultimately the 5GB of data that actually came with an "unlimited" plan is now $25 + $30 in overages. It continues to amaze me just how far we've come since 2008...
Converse to the OP, I would appreciate it if the editors and submitters did not link to the print view.
My work monitor is a 27" 16:9 monitor - without table boundaries imposed on the text, the article is one giant mess because it's meant to be printed out on A4 paper in portrait mode, while my monitor is landscape and then some. The print view was never made to be read in a browser, which is why it not only breaks all the proper conventions of how to best layout text for reading, but it loses a lot of the formatting cues too such as blue hyperlinks.
Or to put it in more traditional Slashdot terms: my monitor is not printer, you insensitive clod. Please stick to using the human-readable view; if I want to use the print view I'll go there myself.
You're forgetting Eureka. They had a whole episode that went exactly as the GP proposed: antiperspirant saved the day when someone created a second sun.
It was every bit as awful as anyone could imagine.
This certainly accomplishes its goal, but the downsides are also pretty high. Variable backlighting means that color calibration goes completely and utterly out of whack - a different backlight level than what it was calibrated at changes the properties of the panel. So you can have more accurate darks, but you lose accurate colors in return.
If it were really that easy, telcos would already be doing so to get high-speed VDSL2 (U-verse and such) to more of their urban and suburban customers who are sitting just out of range of those services. They aren't doing this, so clearly there's a major catch.
On the Mac? Sure. On the iPhone however this would ultimately lead to a Flash plugin for Safari, at which point you'd be trapped on the animated, audible, CPU-eating hellhole that is the modern Internet without the ability to use Flashblock/AdBlock.
In all seriousness this is the best news I've heard all week. After having put up with Adobe's terrible Flash implementations on the Mac, I'm ecstatic that I won't have to put up with what would have been an even worse iPhone implementation.
While what the parent is saying is fundamentally true, note that hardware video decoding is a feature in a future version of Flash: 10.1. The current version of Flash does not have hardware video decoding, so the GP's comparison is with both platforms doing everything in software.
TFA says it's an Intel x86 based machine running Windows. The only thing Commodore about this thing is that it's built in to an oversized PC-style keyboard, and even that's a stretch. This is a Commodore in name only.
On the contrary, this has (almost) nothing to do with Windows - it has everything to do with old OSes. The IDEMA didn't approve the 4K sector standard until 2006; it was only in the late 90's that the first meaningful research was begun by IBM on whether 512B sectors would be an issue.
As it turns out, yes, 512B sectors would be an issue, and drive manufacturers would be best served by moving to larger sectors (with some arguing over whether to go to 1K or 4K). So the IDEMA hashed this out over the first half of the decade, and finally in 2006 approved the 4K specification.
The point of all of this is that software written at the turn of the century was all done well before changing drive sector sizes was a serious discussion. WinXP was released in 2001, Mac OS X 10.0 was in 2001, and of course Linux 2.4 was also in 2001. None of those OSes know what to do with anything other than a 512B sector - the only reason Windows factors in to this equation is that WinXP just happens to be with us (no doubt trying to eat our brains) while the other two are dead. Anything circa 2005 or later such as WinVista, Linux 2.6, and Mac OS X 10.5 know full well what to do with a 4K drive.
But even that is beside the point. You don't just make major jumps like this, you have to do it in a transition so that you don't break old hardware and old software alike. Even if XP/Lin2.4/MacOSX knew what to do with 4K sectors, at some point you'd run in to hardware, 3rd party devices, etc that would not. A transition is necessary to let old hardware and software get flushed out of the ecosystem, and as such we're still years out from consumer drives offering native 4K access.
In short: drives are pretending to have 512-byte sectors because there's a lot of old stuff, including Windows XP that can't deal with 4K sectors.
There's no question that it won't get any more security updates. Vulnerabilities have since been found in several OS X components that were patched in Leopard last year (2009-006) but not Tiger. It's dead, Jim.
For anyone who has been with Apple since the beginning of Mac OS X, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Mac OS X is on a definite upgrade treadmill: Apple wants to do a major OS update every 2 years and nothing is sacred - they're boldly going forward and they can't find reverse. More to the point, Apple has decided not to put a lot of effort in to supporting legacy operating systems, so they only do feature updates on the current OS, and security updates on the previous OS. In other words, 10.4 no longer gets security updates since it's 2 OSes back.
So to release new software with 10.4 compatibility is a dubious proposition, because you're deploying software on an OS with an ever-increasing number of security vulnerabilities which in turn may impact your product. In this case Moz is better off avoiding 10.4, not only to avoid the dangers of deploying software on a retired OS, but also so that they can focus further development on using the features of the 10.5+ API.
Welcome to the upgrade treadmill, guys. Not a lot of people like it, but that's the price of admission to Steve's world.
Sure, but would anyone read such a site? The Internet has a pretty bad SNR when it comes to politics, and Wordpress and other blog sites are notorious for their spam problems which makes it all the worse.
If you're saying something, then you want to be heard. If the politicians have forced anonymous speech down in to the same slums as spam, then even though it's not a fool-proof system they've still won in curtailing effective anonymous speech.
For anyone trying to grasp just where 10mil would fit in, here's how it would compared to some other games based on VGChartz' data:
Ahead of: Halo (any of them), Xbox 360 versions of Call of Duty (any of them), Myst, GTA4 (360), Gears of War (any of them), Final Fantasy 7, Gran Turismo 4
Some games it's behind: Starcraft (11mil), Gran Turismo 3 (15mil), The Sims (16mil), Super Mario Bros. 3 (17mil), GTA: San Andreas (PS2, 18mil), Mario Kart Wii (20mil), a massive number of handheld games (which sell well because they're cheap), and several pack-in titles such as Wii Sports (60mil), Super Mario Bros. 1 (40mil), and Super Mario World (20mil).
It's a good seller, but it's not close to being the best-selling game of even this generation of consoles (that would be Mario Kart). Unless it has long legs (which is entirely likely), it's not likely to cross any of the original Mario games other than SMB2, since it still needs another 7mil units to catch up to SMB3.
So even if AT&T loses their exclusivity, there won't be a big shift in the market so long as there's only a GSM phone. It won't work on T-Mobile's 3G network, so a T-Mobile iPhone would be very unattractive for most users.
It's possible (and even likely) that some of the others have done cross-licensing deals, but if everyone had done that, then there wouldn't be any phone manufacturers besides Sony Ericsson, Moto, and Nokia. Not everyone has valuable patents to cross-license; for example the army of dumbphone manufacturers in developing countries. If the only way to get Nokia's patents was to cross-license, they simply wouldn't exist.
There is a price at which Nokia will license their patents - however it looks like they aren't making it available to Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
I did not know about this. Thank you!
It's time for a game of Six Degrees of Separation: Future Crew Edition
The music's composer was Jonne Valtonen, however for any of you familiar with the PC demoscene, you'd probably better recognize him as Purple Motion. In the early-to-mid 90s, Purple Motion was a member of the Future Crew, the famous Finnish demo group responsible for the legendary demo Second Reality, the same demo on which Purple Motion was the principle musician.
The Future Crew often wrote their own tools; one of those tools was Scream Tracker. Purple Motion didn't write it (he wasn't a coder nor a member of the Future Crew at the time), but it was the tracker software he used for all of the Future Crew demos he worked on. Ultimately he's responsible for a number of the masterpieces written in Scream Tracker.
This brings us to Death Rally. When the Future Crew split up in 1995, the bulk of the members gravitated towards a new company started by former Future Crew members: Remedy Entertainment. Remedy is of course is the developer of Death Rally and Purple Motion was one of the Future Crew members to move to Remedy.
And thus, this is why the music for Death Rally is written in Scream Tracker 3. Death Rally's music composer came from the group that created Scream Tracker in the first place, and that was the tracker software that he had the bulk of his composing experience with. And while I obviously can't speak for him, I'd imagine he preferred S3M.
Well yes and no. PDF was created by Adobe, but it's actually an ISO standard (ISO 32000). Adobe does tend to extend it though...
Anyhow, it's not an Adobe plugin that's doing this. Apple writes their own PDF software, and indeed Mac OS X has had native PDF capabilities its whole life. This is a flaw in Apple's PDF handler - Adobe for once has nothing to do with this.
CVE-2009-2195 is in fact what allowed the previous Spirit jailbreak.
Just as a heads up to anyone thinking of buying and/or jailbreaking an iPhone 4, keep in mind that this is a userland jailbreak (like Spirit) and not a bootrom jailbreak like 24Kpwn. This is significant because this jailbreak only works on iOS versions with the vulnerable component, which means that Apple can and surely will patch it out in 4.1. This is also why Apple is signing their firmware: once they do release 4.1 they'll stop signing 4.0.x and it will be impossible to jailbreak new iPhone 4/3GSes as those devices will ship with 4.1 and it will be impossible to downgrade. Existing owners should be sure to backup their SHSH blobs using Cydia or Tiny Umbrella so that you can downgrade or reinstall 4.0.x in the future, otherwise you will be trapped just like new iPhone owners. 3G owners are also encouraged to backup their SHSH blobs, as Apple is soft-signing iOS 4.x on those devices (even though the hardware can't enforce it).
Anyhow, while I'm excited to see an iPhone 4 jailbreak, I'm a bit worried about the fact that it's another userland jailbreak. No one has successfully exploited the Apple bootrom since iBoot-359.3.2 was released last year, which is troubling. It's not possible to replicate the complete jailbreakability of the iPhone/3G without a bootrom exploit, and as iOS can quickly be updated to stamp out new userland exploits there's a distinct risk of the hackers running out of practical ways to jailbreak the platform through such limited means. Unless someone does find a new bootrom exploit, the "golden age" of jailbreaking has probably already sailed, and in the long run this is a very bad thing. The (practically) unhackable computer marches in on all fronts...
Does anyone know how is Sony supporting 3D BluRay on the PS3 when it requires HDMI 1.4? As I understand it, HDMI 1.4 is not a simple upgrade; it requires new generation transceivers on the source device which obviously can't apply to PS3s going back to 2006.
It's all smoke & mirrors (and some processing in the background). The primary limitation right now is the lens size, not the sensors or the quality of the lenses. You won't get a significantly better picture without increasing the size of the lens, which it doesn't look like Apple is doing.
At first like the submitter I thought this was only for the iPhone and iPad, but after checking the press release from AT&T it turns out it's for all Smartphones. So these are the new data plans for the iPhone, the iPad, the Nexus One (and all other Android phones), the N900 - everything.
AT&T claims that this will bring down bills for the average user, and I don't doubt this is true. However the better the Smartphone the easier it is to burn through data, so this seems to be a tactical strike against all high-end Smartphone users, and a blatant attempt to drive away iPad users (2GB for an entire month of browsing on a 10" device, really?). And this is timed to coincide with the launch of the next-gen iPhone, which is widely beleived to have a front-facing camera for video conferencing, which would burn through additional data. I also don't know how you're going to get away with significant video streaming on 2GB a month, but perhaps that's the idea?
Progress, it seems, is getting less for more. Ultimately the 5GB of data that actually came with an "unlimited" plan is now $25 + $30 in overages. It continues to amaze me just how far we've come since 2008...
Converse to the OP, I would appreciate it if the editors and submitters did not link to the print view.
My work monitor is a 27" 16:9 monitor - without table boundaries imposed on the text, the article is one giant mess because it's meant to be printed out on A4 paper in portrait mode, while my monitor is landscape and then some. The print view was never made to be read in a browser, which is why it not only breaks all the proper conventions of how to best layout text for reading, but it loses a lot of the formatting cues too such as blue hyperlinks.
Or to put it in more traditional Slashdot terms: my monitor is not printer, you insensitive clod. Please stick to using the human-readable view; if I want to use the print view I'll go there myself.
You're forgetting Eureka. They had a whole episode that went exactly as the GP proposed: antiperspirant saved the day when someone created a second sun.
It was every bit as awful as anyone could imagine.
This certainly accomplishes its goal, but the downsides are also pretty high. Variable backlighting means that color calibration goes completely and utterly out of whack - a different backlight level than what it was calibrated at changes the properties of the panel. So you can have more accurate darks, but you lose accurate colors in return.
If it were really that easy, telcos would already be doing so to get high-speed VDSL2 (U-verse and such) to more of their urban and suburban customers who are sitting just out of range of those services. They aren't doing this, so clearly there's a major catch.
On the Mac? Sure. On the iPhone however this would ultimately lead to a Flash plugin for Safari, at which point you'd be trapped on the animated, audible, CPU-eating hellhole that is the modern Internet without the ability to use Flashblock/AdBlock.
In all seriousness this is the best news I've heard all week. After having put up with Adobe's terrible Flash implementations on the Mac, I'm ecstatic that I won't have to put up with what would have been an even worse iPhone implementation.
While what the parent is saying is fundamentally true, note that hardware video decoding is a feature in a future version of Flash: 10.1. The current version of Flash does not have hardware video decoding, so the GP's comparison is with both platforms doing everything in software.
Adobe can't code their way out of a wet paper bag unless it's x86 Windows. So honest to $deity I hope not.
TFA says it's an Intel x86 based machine running Windows. The only thing Commodore about this thing is that it's built in to an oversized PC-style keyboard, and even that's a stretch. This is a Commodore in name only.
On the contrary, this has (almost) nothing to do with Windows - it has everything to do with old OSes. The IDEMA didn't approve the 4K sector standard until 2006; it was only in the late 90's that the first meaningful research was begun by IBM on whether 512B sectors would be an issue.
As it turns out, yes, 512B sectors would be an issue, and drive manufacturers would be best served by moving to larger sectors (with some arguing over whether to go to 1K or 4K). So the IDEMA hashed this out over the first half of the decade, and finally in 2006 approved the 4K specification.
The point of all of this is that software written at the turn of the century was all done well before changing drive sector sizes was a serious discussion. WinXP was released in 2001, Mac OS X 10.0 was in 2001, and of course Linux 2.4 was also in 2001. None of those OSes know what to do with anything other than a 512B sector - the only reason Windows factors in to this equation is that WinXP just happens to be with us (no doubt trying to eat our brains) while the other two are dead. Anything circa 2005 or later such as WinVista, Linux 2.6, and Mac OS X 10.5 know full well what to do with a 4K drive.
But even that is beside the point. You don't just make major jumps like this, you have to do it in a transition so that you don't break old hardware and old software alike. Even if XP/Lin2.4/MacOSX knew what to do with 4K sectors, at some point you'd run in to hardware, 3rd party devices, etc that would not. A transition is necessary to let old hardware and software get flushed out of the ecosystem, and as such we're still years out from consumer drives offering native 4K access.
In short: drives are pretending to have 512-byte sectors because there's a lot of old stuff, including Windows XP that can't deal with 4K sectors.
There was a live demo unit, it just wasn't on the floor. It was in their cubicle suite down in South Hall.
There's no question that it won't get any more security updates. Vulnerabilities have since been found in several OS X components that were patched in Leopard last year (2009-006) but not Tiger. It's dead, Jim.
For anyone who has been with Apple since the beginning of Mac OS X, this shouldn't come as a surprise. Mac OS X is on a definite upgrade treadmill: Apple wants to do a major OS update every 2 years and nothing is sacred - they're boldly going forward and they can't find reverse. More to the point, Apple has decided not to put a lot of effort in to supporting legacy operating systems, so they only do feature updates on the current OS, and security updates on the previous OS. In other words, 10.4 no longer gets security updates since it's 2 OSes back.
So to release new software with 10.4 compatibility is a dubious proposition, because you're deploying software on an OS with an ever-increasing number of security vulnerabilities which in turn may impact your product. In this case Moz is better off avoiding 10.4, not only to avoid the dangers of deploying software on a retired OS, but also so that they can focus further development on using the features of the 10.5+ API.
Welcome to the upgrade treadmill, guys. Not a lot of people like it, but that's the price of admission to Steve's world.
Sure, but would anyone read such a site? The Internet has a pretty bad SNR when it comes to politics, and Wordpress and other blog sites are notorious for their spam problems which makes it all the worse.
If you're saying something, then you want to be heard. If the politicians have forced anonymous speech down in to the same slums as spam, then even though it's not a fool-proof system they've still won in curtailing effective anonymous speech.
For anyone trying to grasp just where 10mil would fit in, here's how it would compared to some other games based on VGChartz' data:
Ahead of: Halo (any of them), Xbox 360 versions of Call of Duty (any of them), Myst, GTA4 (360), Gears of War (any of them), Final Fantasy 7, Gran Turismo 4
Some games it's behind: Starcraft (11mil), Gran Turismo 3 (15mil), The Sims (16mil), Super Mario Bros. 3 (17mil), GTA: San Andreas (PS2, 18mil), Mario Kart Wii (20mil), a massive number of handheld games (which sell well because they're cheap), and several pack-in titles such as Wii Sports (60mil), Super Mario Bros. 1 (40mil), and Super Mario World (20mil).
It's a good seller, but it's not close to being the best-selling game of even this generation of consoles (that would be Mario Kart). Unless it has long legs (which is entirely likely), it's not likely to cross any of the original Mario games other than SMB2, since it still needs another 7mil units to catch up to SMB3.
Correct.
So even if AT&T loses their exclusivity, there won't be a big shift in the market so long as there's only a GSM phone. It won't work on T-Mobile's 3G network, so a T-Mobile iPhone would be very unattractive for most users.
It's possible (and even likely) that some of the others have done cross-licensing deals, but if everyone had done that, then there wouldn't be any phone manufacturers besides Sony Ericsson, Moto, and Nokia. Not everyone has valuable patents to cross-license; for example the army of dumbphone manufacturers in developing countries. If the only way to get Nokia's patents was to cross-license, they simply wouldn't exist.
There is a price at which Nokia will license their patents - however it looks like they aren't making it available to Apple.