No, not at all. Clearly you need a LTE network to test on. Rather I'm commenting on what seems to be the irrational exuberance around the internet for LTE. Half the internet is convinced that Apple is going to drop AT&T for Verizon LTE in 2010 for example, which is silly. Many people (users and/. techies alike) seem to be looking at LTE as if it's going to shake up the entire cellular industry real soon now (TM), and that's not the case. Even those of us on the bleeding edge are going to be using 3G phones for the next few years, so all the LTE network deployments in the world aren't going to make handset service any better in that time frame.
More emphasis should be placed on what carriers (particularly the American carriers) are doing with respect to HSPA+ and higher speed grades of HSDPA, both of which are still significantly faster than current 3G tiers and more importantly have associated chipsets that are available right now. It seems like we're going to hit an extremely stagnant period for cellular network development if everyone is going to be building networks for phones that are many years off.
If Verizon is getting ready to build a partial network to do testing, where does this put the development and production of the necessary chipsets?
The last I heard, the LTE chipsets necessary for high-power devices (laptop cards, etc) were not expected before late 2010. Chipsets for low-power devices (phones) were a couple of years farther out - 2012 or later. Has this changed, or is this still the right timetable?
It's cool that Verizon is building a LTE network, but if we're years away from having devices that can use it, I guess I don't see the point of it or why everyone is so excited.
Actually you had it right, it is the top 5 browsers. From the AP
would see a Web page prompting them to pick from five of the most popular browsers in Europe.
Microsoft said the list of browsers would be reviewed twice a year based on usage data for the previous six months.
Why the top 5, and not the top 6 or 4? I'd have to assume it's because there are 5 major browsers: IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. This fits all of them, and it's likely that either Chrome or Opera is in the #5 slot, so anything less would be at risk of either the 800lb gorilla or the EU's only home-grown browser not making the list.
Still, you're right, the problem with this solution is that it helps maintain status quo. The browser monopoly has been replaced with what amounts to a browser cartel - no one is going to want to be bumped off of that list. Which is why all of the proposed solutions suck in some way: You enforce status quo with a limited list, you create virtual anarchy with a list of all browsers, and you screw over users with no browser.
The browser ballot solution is a lousy solution, and I don't want to be around for the can of worms it creates.
How many carriers are under 500,000 in the states?
None that own their own networks, which I suspect is the the other half of the point. Letting their vassals have their "exclusive" phones doesn't really change anything for Verizon.
The key factor appears to be the content of the pornography. The feds may have given up on prosecuting the tamest stuff, but they have not given up on prosecuting the most hardcore material. The Extreme Associates Wikipedia article gives you an idea of what they're being prosecuted for:
Extreme Teen 24[1]: contains a scene of a naive supposed young girl being talked into having sex by an older man. The actress involved was over 18, however dressed and acted like a young girl.[8]
Cocktails 2[1]: various scenes of women drinking vomit, saliva and other bodily fluids.[17] It was the director's cut version of the film that was cited in the case.[1]
Ass Clowns 3: a female journalist is being raped by a gang led by Osama bin Laden; the journalist is freed and the gang members killed. The director's cut version also contains a scene where Jesus steps off the cross and has sex with an angel.
1001 Ways to Eat My Jizz:
Forced Entry[15]: The film depicts the beating, rape and murder of women by a serial killer, who is eventually killed by a mob of vigilantes.[15] There are three scenes which graphically portray rape and murder, and women are also spat on.[8] Extreme's website called it their "most controversial movie" and "a stunningly disturbing look at a serial killer, satanic rituals, and the depths of human depravity."[15] Forced Entry was directed by Lizzy Borden and released in 2002. Again it was the director's cut version of the film that was cited in the case.[1]
.
Similarly, Max Hardcore was put in the slammer early this year for similar material:
Hardcore's films generally consist of rough sex with women who act like underage girls.[3] For example in Hollywood Hardcore 13 he says to Cloey Adams, "If you're a good girl, I'll take you to McDonald's later and get you a Happy Meal."[3] He then urinates in her mouth, and Adams asks, "What do you think of your little princess now Daddy?"[3] In several of his films Max stretches the actress's anus or vagina with a speculum, then urinates into it, after which the actress sucks the urine out through a hose.[3] Although the actresses in Little's movies appear to dress and act in a way as to suggest that they are a young, possibly under the age of consent, but all of the actresses used were over the legal age of 18. In his film Max Extreme 4, an actress stated during one verbal exchange that she was 12 years-old[4].
The short and long of the matter is that vague obscenity laws are still on the books, and technically all porn is still illegal because someone somewhere is going to find it obscene. The Feds know they can't win however, so they are choosing to prosecute whomever makes the stuff that offends them the most. Nothing has really been worked out since the 70s, the Feds just can't keep prosecuting everyone like they used to.
Apparently proofreading has gone out of style with the Slashdot editors, since they let the summary get the pricing and details all wrong. The prices Comcast gives in TFA are for WiMAX + Comcast HSI, not just the WiMAX service. Furthermore they're the introductory prices, not the final prices. I'm just going to rip off the DSL Reports piece on this, since they get it right.
Comcast today gave their rebranded version of Clearwire Mobile WiMax service a new name: "Comcast High-Speed 2Go." According to a Comcast press release, the new service launches tomorrow in Portland. The "up to 4Mbps" service will launch everywhere Clearwire deploys Mobile WiMax -- a plan that should see nine cities live by the end fo this year. According to Comcast, the company is offering two different wireless data plans:
Comcast High-Speed 2go Metro service costs $49.99 for twelve months ($72.95 thereafter) and comes with 12Mbps Comcast home broadband service and a Wi-Fi router. The service uses a Mobile WiMax data card that will obviously only work in areas where there's Comcast/Clearwire Mobile WiMax.
Comcast High-Speed 2go Nationwide service costs $69.99 ($92.95 thereafter) and also comes with Comcast 12Mbps home broadband service and a home Wi-Fi router. The service uses a dual-mode data card that allows users to float between Clearwire's Mobile WiMax network and Sprint's 3G EVDO network.
You can of course compare this to standalone Clearwire pricing. Comcast tells us existing double and triple play customers will be able to add Mobile WiMax service on to their current bundles for $30 more a month. Comcast invested roughly a billion dollars into the Sprint and Clearwire joint venture -- and is buying bandwidth wholesale from the new operator.
Comcast's wireless service won't involve voice product initially, though the carrier suggests that may change. As for caps, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas tells us that Comcast is "deferring to Clearwire's TOS on usage" while customers are connected to the Clearwire network. Clearwire's service comes with 200MB, 2GB and unlimited flavors, so we'll have to wait and see which "deferment" Comcast chooses. When connected to the Sprint EVDO network, customers are restricted to just 5 gigabytes of usage per month.
Once you factor out the first-year incentives, what Comcast is doing is reselling WiMAX for $30 a month on top of your current bill, and they are reselling WiMAX + Sprint's 3G service for $50 a month on top of your current bill.
The 3G service comes with the standard 5GB cap (making it slightly cheaper than regular plans since pro-rated it's $20, while stand-alone plans usually start at $30), while the WiMAX service is undefined. Clear has a $30 tier, but it's only 200MB. Presumably Comcast is getting a better deal here and reselling the $40 package that comes with a 2GB plan, but someone is going to have to find out the finer details on that since Comcast isn't spilling the beans on the matter.
Back in 2008, I had a chance to catch Intel's keynote presentation for CES. One of the first items they started out with was an augmented-reality/reality-overlay presentation, based on where they wanted to be in 5 years with the newly announced Atom. In the presentation, Intel had a smartphone-shaped device with a camera and microphone connected to a computer behind the stage. Up front they had a mock Chinese street that the presenters moved through, pointing the camera at various items. They were showcasing items such as real-time translation of signs or menus (the English text drawn about the item) and how the software was able to relate information about the mock restaurant and its menu items to reviews and general information about the dishes. They also had a quick session with an actress speaking Mandarin to show off speech recognition and translation of that.
It was probably one of the cooler things I've ever seen, even if the entire thing had been set up to go off without a hitch. The basic input hardware (cameras and mics) are already in smartphones, so it's just a matter of the processors catching up in the next however-many years it takes. I don't expect it's going to change the world, but something resembling a Star Trek Universal Translator (or a Bablefish) combined with some basic image recognition like TFA shows and some basic semantic web abilities to tie things together (largely so that it's faster to find things) would be a handy thing to have.
I doubt it will be GPLed that soon given that Wolfenstein is just coming out. If it's anything like how Q3 was handled, they're going to wait until some time after the last commercial game is released. Carmack had to wait for nearly a year to release the Q3 source code since someone new had licensed it shortly before he wanted to release it in 2004 (I think it was for the video game tie-in for UPN's abysmal Game Over)
I intended to release the Q3 source under the GPL by the end of 2004, but we had another large technology licensing deal go through, and it would be poor form to make the source public a few months after a company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for full rights to it. True, being public under the GPL isn't the same as having a royalty free license without the need to disclose the source, but I'm pretty sure there would be some hard feelings.
Previous source code releases were held up until the last commercial license of the technology shipped, but with the evolving nature of game engines today, it is a lot less clear. There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2, and the remaining licensees of Q3 technology intend to continue their internal developments along similar lines, so there probably won't be nearly as sharp a cutoff as before. I am still committed to making as much source public as I can, and I won't wait until the titles from the latest deal have actually shipped, but it is still going to be a little while before I feel comfortable doing the release.
After reading TFA, I get the impression that besides the GPL violations, the choice of license for ScummVM is itself an issue. The ScummVM developers seem to have no specific interest in getting the code back, rather they just want to be credited for their work on ScummVM and are proud of the fact that it was used in a commercial title. Accordingly, it strikes me that ScummVM was wrapped in entirely the wrong license.
This seems like a textbook case for using the MIT license or some other non-copyleft license where the authors are attributed, but the code isn't forced open. You see this on other projects like LUA or the Vorbis reference decoder, where they are commonly used in commercial games with great success, including Wii games. If the ScummVM developers are as disinterested in the copyleft aspects of the GPL as they seem to be, then they should be looking at relicensing ScummVM under a more permissive license, which would avoid these kinds of snafus. If you just want attribution, it's much easier to just ask for that then to get in these boondoggles of asking for the code and tools too.
As much as I love AMD, I would like to know what the submitter was thinking calling it a battleground. It's only a fair fight for AMD so long as Intel's not interested - AMD (and their manufacturing partner née subsidiary) can't match Intel's manufacturing abilities. AMD doesn't have an Ultra Low Voltage chip; Intel has a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo that runs at 10W, meanwhile it's murky at best for AMD's competing chip line, the Neo. The only specs given out to the press for the new fual core version, which is 18W for the 1.6GHz version, with the chip still being built on the 65nm process which hobbles AMD from the start. Bear in mind that the Neo is Athlon 64 based, which means that it's not clock-for-clock competitive with the Core 2 Duo (you'd need a Phenom II-based core for that). In other words, the Intel chip eats less power and gets more performance at the same time.
So if Intel's serious about this, it's only a battle so long as they don't decide to crush AMD with products and pricing. Intel is light years ahead of AMD in the mobile space due to their process technology advantage. Even TFA points out that they expect 8 hours out of the Intel CPUs, but only 5 hours out of the AMD CPUs. It's entirely lop-sided in Intel's favor.
Now TFA does mention AMD will have Congo later this year, but even if that's 45nm (AMD has not commented on that matter), it's unlikely that they'd be able to meet Intel's power envelope. When you look at the desktop chips this stuff is derived from, the Phenom II takes more transistors and as a result power than the Core 2 Duo, and that's only to reach a clock-for-clock parity. Congo wouldn't change this.
They're not going to get much appreciation, because while custom levels are a nice thing to have, they're not high on the list of problems people have with L4D1. There's a good Yahtezeeism from his review of Little Big Planet that drives this point home:
If a game that stands up by itself wants to release level design and modding tools, than Brillo Bananas: good modding communities are the sprinkling of cinnamon on a delicious trifle and hence relying on user made content is like eating heaped spoonfuls of cinnamon right from the jar. I don't want to have to wade through waste-high rendering runoff to get to the good levels, especially when I can do that by just playing the story mode: you know, the levels designed by professional fucking level designers. If I buy a house, I want an architect to design it. If I design it myself, it may have a more personal touch, but it's going to fall over very fast and even if it doesn't the giant fiberglass breasts on the front will be very tacky and the neighbors will complain when the gingerbread garage starts to smell.
L4D1 is not yet "a game that stands up by itself" like HL2 or TF2 are. It was $50 and shipped short of content that was promised by Valve but instead rolled in to L4D2. Most people don't want modding tools at this point, they want enough professionally developed content to finish the game - something that satisfies players' baser needs. Then, if the game were finished, the modding tools would be a great addition to get even more out of the game.
So no, you're not going to find a ton of appreciation for Valve releasing the SDK. User made content is not a replacement for true professional content, particularly content Valve said they were going to give out long, long ago.
The article seems to be more hype than anything else, but it does hit on a couple of good points.
Yes, the iPhone platform has shaken up the industry, due to the digital distribution of games. This has a lot to do with timing (you need oodles of cheap flash memory for this) but it also builds on the fundamentals of how the iTunes store has built up over the years. It's clearly proven that digital distribution of games can be viable, and you're going to see a lot of this in the future. Both to sell games that would never be viable retail releases due to pricing (micro transactions come to gaming), and because everyone wants to cut Gamestop out of the loop.
And no, the iPhone platform has not shaken up the industry, due to hardware designs. The hardware is fundamentally that of a phone. The processor is overpowered and the GPU is underpowered for gaming, and the whole thing eats too much power when you ramp up the *PUs. The DS gets something ungodly (10+ hours) and even the PSP can do 5+ hours with its better graphics. The controls are also lacking - a touch screen is good for some things (e.g. Solitaire) and bad for others (e.g. Super Mario Brothers). iPhoneOS 3.0 will allow what amounts to button caddies, but since buttons aren't standard they can't be counted on. The hardware means it's an additional avenue for gaming, but it's not necessarily a threat to traditional handhelds like the DS/PSP.
Actually it wouldn't be MS that fixes anything. The guide data comes from Zap2It. If there's a guide data issue, then Zap2It is not listing the correct data.
For varying levels of "defeated" at least. That's just an HDMI to VGA converter, apparently one that has a valid HDCP handshake, but none the less one that's ultimately only useful for taking advantage of the analog hole. A HDMI->HDMI/DVI HDCP stripper would be far more useful, and much more impressive. Who even has a RGB input on their TV these days?
The PSP Go can enable the industry to sell games cheaper - while not dropping quality
Sure, it can, but will it? One of the issues with digital downloads is that they don't necessarily respond to pricing influences like physical products do, and as a result prices are insulated and tend to stay higher. If we take a look at Steam for example, Valve wants $40 for Left 4 Dead, while Best Buy will sell it to you for $30. Or if we take a look at PSP games on the PSN store, they'll sell you the 1st-party racing game Wipeout Pure for $16, but even those evil bastards at Gamestop will sell you the game used for $7, or $15 (still $1 cheaper!) if they have new copies in stock.
Sony does not currently price digitally distributed PSP games at a reasonable level. A physical copy can virtually always be found for cheaper than a digital copy, and sales in the real world can drive that down even further. For the most part, it's foolish to buy from Sony's store so long as you have a UMD drive to play games with.
If Sony wants to go the iTunes Store model, they need to reevaluate their pricing structure. The iTunes model works because even though there's lot of crap, there's still a lot of good stuff that's competition to force down prices, and Apple's liberal pricing model will let you do that. A store and system that does little beyond locking you in to paying retail prices for new games for the rest of all time is going to be a hard thing to sell to people that know they can do better.
Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO. Oracle just recently purchased Sun (makers of ZFS), so the OP is postulating whether Apple pulling ZFS is a product of Cisco not working on/opening up ZFS to Apple like Sun did.
You'll have to excuse them, the people who are freaking out about this are all in the midst of the Five Stages of Acquisition. They've long since reached Infatuation, and are now having trouble with the Justification step. Swing a piece of gold-pressed latinum in front of their faces, and like any Ferengi they'll get over it.
Barring the fact that Verizon uses CMDA and not GSM for a moment, Verizon would still have to significantly change their operating policies to hope to get the iPhone. As it stands their favorite activity it to neuter any and every phone they offer, so that it only offers a handful of features Verizon approves of. If Verizon got the iPhone, they would be chomping at the bit to disable Bluetooth, turn-by-turn directions, app updates over cellular, etc. This is in stark contrast to how Apple likes to do things, and Apple would never stand for it.
Sprint would probably be happy to get the iPhone, but they're consistently about 2 inches from death so I'm not sure Apple wants such a partner. That leaves T-Mobile, the only 3G provider with even worse coverage than all the rest. The iPhone would likely crush their underbuilt system in a single blow, not unlike what it did to AT&T.
The moral of the story is that all of the carriers suck. But for what Apple wants to do, AT&T likely sucks the least.
Custom Firmware is a bit of a misnomer. For the PSP-3000 (and last sub-model of the 2000, T88v3) it's not possible to replace the built-in firmware with a truly custom firmware, as Sony does signature checking that would keep the PSP from loading unsigned firmware. This is different from the early PSPs, where it was possible to fake out the device and make it accept any firmware.
Anyhow, this isn't a custom firmware in the traditional sense, rather it's more of a injection attack of the PSP's operating system. Normally unsigned code is blocked by the OS, but there's a vulnerability in the TIFF decoder that allows for executing such code. Using the ChickHEN tool (a compromised TIFF file and a payload) the OS's signature checks can be compromised by injecting replacement files in to the running OS, which the PSP happily complies with. With the check disabled, the PSP will run unsigned code for homebrew, but it lacks the drivers necessary to run backup/pirated games. This is an important distinction, because the ChickHEN tool has been around for a few weeks now and is not what TFA is talking about.
This latest hack (5.03 GEN-A) finally takes it one step further and uses the ability to run unsigned code to inject the additional drivers needed to make the PSP treat ISOs on a Memory Stick as a UMD game. This hack isn't necessary to run homebrew, it's solely for running commercial games. Notably it's still entirely a runtime attack, and if the PSP cold boots it will return to normal operation.
This is to Sony's advantage (what little good news there is, at least), because the hardware has not been compromised in any way. As PSPs can not be flashed with earlier firmware versions, all PSPs running firmware versions later than 5.03 can not be attacked as the TIFF vulnerability was fixed. This limits the number of vulnerable units to old units that haven't been upgraded, as new units will come with the fixed firmware. Of course this doesn't preclude another software vulnerability being found in the OS or a hardware attack, but usable software vulnerabilities are very rare, and a hardware attack would be the equivalent of the Holy Grail at this point.
Anyhow, since it's not a real custom firmware, it's not necessarily a viable long-term hack. Users will never be able to upgrade their firmware, so any software that requires a later firmware version (and can't be trivially bypassed by lying to it) would be unusable in hacked PSPs. Sony no doubt will be working to isolate hacked PSPs in this manner.
The GP was right though, ACID isn't a standard compliance test. It's a bug test. ACID features are specifically picked to make a test that the authors know will fail on current browsers. It's basically a fancy bug list for IE, Firefox, and WebKit. I'm not sure Opera's even a consideration for them, which makes passing the test all the easier if the ACID authors aren't writing things specifically to throw a wrench in your browser.
XP suffers greatly from the lack of I/O prioritization. Indexing under Vista (and later) doesn't have the same wallop, since the indexer is a low-priority item that properly yields to other applications attempting to use a hard drive.
I'm not sure who "us" in "owned by all of us American citizens" is supposed to be. I know I'm a citizen, and my neighbor is one too. But the last time I checked, Google is not a United States citizen. Only people can be citizens. People are people, my dog thinks he's people, and even Soylent Green is people, but Google is not a member of the "people" class.
Perhaps the lawyer meant "owned by all of the American citizens" or "owned by all of you American Citizens". Because if Google's not a citizen, they sure can't own any radio spectrum. Unless Google things they own something that doesn't belong to them...
Slashdot Mirror
We already had an article about this Saturday. I don't see anything new in TFA that would not make this a dupe.
No, not at all. Clearly you need a LTE network to test on. Rather I'm commenting on what seems to be the irrational exuberance around the internet for LTE. Half the internet is convinced that Apple is going to drop AT&T for Verizon LTE in 2010 for example, which is silly. Many people (users and /. techies alike) seem to be looking at LTE as if it's going to shake up the entire cellular industry real soon now (TM), and that's not the case. Even those of us on the bleeding edge are going to be using 3G phones for the next few years, so all the LTE network deployments in the world aren't going to make handset service any better in that time frame.
More emphasis should be placed on what carriers (particularly the American carriers) are doing with respect to HSPA+ and higher speed grades of HSDPA, both of which are still significantly faster than current 3G tiers and more importantly have associated chipsets that are available right now. It seems like we're going to hit an extremely stagnant period for cellular network development if everyone is going to be building networks for phones that are many years off.
If Verizon is getting ready to build a partial network to do testing, where does this put the development and production of the necessary chipsets?
The last I heard, the LTE chipsets necessary for high-power devices (laptop cards, etc) were not expected before late 2010. Chipsets for low-power devices (phones) were a couple of years farther out - 2012 or later. Has this changed, or is this still the right timetable?
It's cool that Verizon is building a LTE network, but if we're years away from having devices that can use it, I guess I don't see the point of it or why everyone is so excited.
Actually you had it right, it is the top 5 browsers. From the AP
Why the top 5, and not the top 6 or 4? I'd have to assume it's because there are 5 major browsers: IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. This fits all of them, and it's likely that either Chrome or Opera is in the #5 slot, so anything less would be at risk of either the 800lb gorilla or the EU's only home-grown browser not making the list.
Still, you're right, the problem with this solution is that it helps maintain status quo. The browser monopoly has been replaced with what amounts to a browser cartel - no one is going to want to be bumped off of that list. Which is why all of the proposed solutions suck in some way: You enforce status quo with a limited list, you create virtual anarchy with a list of all browsers, and you screw over users with no browser.
The browser ballot solution is a lousy solution, and I don't want to be around for the can of worms it creates.
None that own their own networks, which I suspect is the the other half of the point. Letting their vassals have their "exclusive" phones doesn't really change anything for Verizon.
It sounds like it's closer to paying people to be your groupie, since it's not an equal peer-peer relationship.
The key factor appears to be the content of the pornography. The feds may have given up on prosecuting the tamest stuff, but they have not given up on prosecuting the most hardcore material. The Extreme Associates Wikipedia article gives you an idea of what they're being prosecuted for:
.
Similarly, Max Hardcore was put in the slammer early this year for similar material:
The short and long of the matter is that vague obscenity laws are still on the books, and technically all porn is still illegal because someone somewhere is going to find it obscene. The Feds know they can't win however, so they are choosing to prosecute whomever makes the stuff that offends them the most. Nothing has really been worked out since the 70s, the Feds just can't keep prosecuting everyone like they used to.
Apparently proofreading has gone out of style with the Slashdot editors, since they let the summary get the pricing and details all wrong. The prices Comcast gives in TFA are for WiMAX + Comcast HSI, not just the WiMAX service. Furthermore they're the introductory prices, not the final prices. I'm just going to rip off the DSL Reports piece on this, since they get it right.
Once you factor out the first-year incentives, what Comcast is doing is reselling WiMAX for $30 a month on top of your current bill, and they are reselling WiMAX + Sprint's 3G service for $50 a month on top of your current bill.
The 3G service comes with the standard 5GB cap (making it slightly cheaper than regular plans since pro-rated it's $20, while stand-alone plans usually start at $30), while the WiMAX service is undefined. Clear has a $30 tier, but it's only 200MB. Presumably Comcast is getting a better deal here and reselling the $40 package that comes with a 2GB plan, but someone is going to have to find out the finer details on that since Comcast isn't spilling the beans on the matter.
Back in 2008, I had a chance to catch Intel's keynote presentation for CES. One of the first items they started out with was an augmented-reality/reality-overlay presentation, based on where they wanted to be in 5 years with the newly announced Atom. In the presentation, Intel had a smartphone-shaped device with a camera and microphone connected to a computer behind the stage. Up front they had a mock Chinese street that the presenters moved through, pointing the camera at various items. They were showcasing items such as real-time translation of signs or menus (the English text drawn about the item) and how the software was able to relate information about the mock restaurant and its menu items to reviews and general information about the dishes. They also had a quick session with an actress speaking Mandarin to show off speech recognition and translation of that.
It was probably one of the cooler things I've ever seen, even if the entire thing had been set up to go off without a hitch. The basic input hardware (cameras and mics) are already in smartphones, so it's just a matter of the processors catching up in the next however-many years it takes. I don't expect it's going to change the world, but something resembling a Star Trek Universal Translator (or a Bablefish) combined with some basic image recognition like TFA shows and some basic semantic web abilities to tie things together (largely so that it's faster to find things) would be a handy thing to have.
I doubt it will be GPLed that soon given that Wolfenstein is just coming out. If it's anything like how Q3 was handled, they're going to wait until some time after the last commercial game is released. Carmack had to wait for nearly a year to release the Q3 source code since someone new had licensed it shortly before he wanted to release it in 2004 (I think it was for the video game tie-in for UPN's abysmal Game Over)
After reading TFA, I get the impression that besides the GPL violations, the choice of license for ScummVM is itself an issue. The ScummVM developers seem to have no specific interest in getting the code back, rather they just want to be credited for their work on ScummVM and are proud of the fact that it was used in a commercial title. Accordingly, it strikes me that ScummVM was wrapped in entirely the wrong license.
This seems like a textbook case for using the MIT license or some other non-copyleft license where the authors are attributed, but the code isn't forced open. You see this on other projects like LUA or the Vorbis reference decoder, where they are commonly used in commercial games with great success, including Wii games. If the ScummVM developers are as disinterested in the copyleft aspects of the GPL as they seem to be, then they should be looking at relicensing ScummVM under a more permissive license, which would avoid these kinds of snafus. If you just want attribution, it's much easier to just ask for that then to get in these boondoggles of asking for the code and tools too.
As much as I love AMD, I would like to know what the submitter was thinking calling it a battleground. It's only a fair fight for AMD so long as Intel's not interested - AMD (and their manufacturing partner née subsidiary) can't match Intel's manufacturing abilities. AMD doesn't have an Ultra Low Voltage chip; Intel has a 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo that runs at 10W, meanwhile it's murky at best for AMD's competing chip line, the Neo. The only specs given out to the press for the new fual core version, which is 18W for the 1.6GHz version, with the chip still being built on the 65nm process which hobbles AMD from the start. Bear in mind that the Neo is Athlon 64 based, which means that it's not clock-for-clock competitive with the Core 2 Duo (you'd need a Phenom II-based core for that). In other words, the Intel chip eats less power and gets more performance at the same time.
So if Intel's serious about this, it's only a battle so long as they don't decide to crush AMD with products and pricing. Intel is light years ahead of AMD in the mobile space due to their process technology advantage. Even TFA points out that they expect 8 hours out of the Intel CPUs, but only 5 hours out of the AMD CPUs. It's entirely lop-sided in Intel's favor.
Now TFA does mention AMD will have Congo later this year, but even if that's 45nm (AMD has not commented on that matter), it's unlikely that they'd be able to meet Intel's power envelope. When you look at the desktop chips this stuff is derived from, the Phenom II takes more transistors and as a result power than the Core 2 Duo, and that's only to reach a clock-for-clock parity. Congo wouldn't change this.
They're not going to get much appreciation, because while custom levels are a nice thing to have, they're not high on the list of problems people have with L4D1. There's a good Yahtezeeism from his review of Little Big Planet that drives this point home:
L4D1 is not yet "a game that stands up by itself" like HL2 or TF2 are. It was $50 and shipped short of content that was promised by Valve but instead rolled in to L4D2. Most people don't want modding tools at this point, they want enough professionally developed content to finish the game - something that satisfies players' baser needs. Then, if the game were finished, the modding tools would be a great addition to get even more out of the game.
So no, you're not going to find a ton of appreciation for Valve releasing the SDK. User made content is not a replacement for true professional content, particularly content Valve said they were going to give out long, long ago.
The article seems to be more hype than anything else, but it does hit on a couple of good points.
Yes, the iPhone platform has shaken up the industry, due to the digital distribution of games. This has a lot to do with timing (you need oodles of cheap flash memory for this) but it also builds on the fundamentals of how the iTunes store has built up over the years. It's clearly proven that digital distribution of games can be viable, and you're going to see a lot of this in the future. Both to sell games that would never be viable retail releases due to pricing (micro transactions come to gaming), and because everyone wants to cut Gamestop out of the loop.
And no, the iPhone platform has not shaken up the industry, due to hardware designs. The hardware is fundamentally that of a phone. The processor is overpowered and the GPU is underpowered for gaming, and the whole thing eats too much power when you ramp up the *PUs. The DS gets something ungodly (10+ hours) and even the PSP can do 5+ hours with its better graphics. The controls are also lacking - a touch screen is good for some things (e.g. Solitaire) and bad for others (e.g. Super Mario Brothers). iPhoneOS 3.0 will allow what amounts to button caddies, but since buttons aren't standard they can't be counted on. The hardware means it's an additional avenue for gaming, but it's not necessarily a threat to traditional handhelds like the DS/PSP.
Actually it wouldn't be MS that fixes anything. The guide data comes from Zap2It. If there's a guide data issue, then Zap2It is not listing the correct data.
For varying levels of "defeated" at least. That's just an HDMI to VGA converter, apparently one that has a valid HDCP handshake, but none the less one that's ultimately only useful for taking advantage of the analog hole. A HDMI->HDMI/DVI HDCP stripper would be far more useful, and much more impressive. Who even has a RGB input on their TV these days?
Sure, it can, but will it? One of the issues with digital downloads is that they don't necessarily respond to pricing influences like physical products do, and as a result prices are insulated and tend to stay higher. If we take a look at Steam for example, Valve wants $40 for Left 4 Dead, while Best Buy will sell it to you for $30. Or if we take a look at PSP games on the PSN store, they'll sell you the 1st-party racing game Wipeout Pure for $16, but even those evil bastards at Gamestop will sell you the game used for $7, or $15 (still $1 cheaper!) if they have new copies in stock.
Sony does not currently price digitally distributed PSP games at a reasonable level. A physical copy can virtually always be found for cheaper than a digital copy, and sales in the real world can drive that down even further. For the most part, it's foolish to buy from Sony's store so long as you have a UMD drive to play games with.
If Sony wants to go the iTunes Store model, they need to reevaluate their pricing structure. The iTunes model works because even though there's lot of crap, there's still a lot of good stuff that's competition to force down prices, and Apple's liberal pricing model will let you do that. A store and system that does little beyond locking you in to paying retail prices for new games for the rest of all time is going to be a hard thing to sell to people that know they can do better.
Larry Ellison, the Oracle CEO. Oracle just recently purchased Sun (makers of ZFS), so the OP is postulating whether Apple pulling ZFS is a product of Cisco not working on/opening up ZFS to Apple like Sun did.
You'll have to excuse them, the people who are freaking out about this are all in the midst of the Five Stages of Acquisition. They've long since reached Infatuation, and are now having trouble with the Justification step. Swing a piece of gold-pressed latinum in front of their faces, and like any Ferengi they'll get over it.
Barring the fact that Verizon uses CMDA and not GSM for a moment, Verizon would still have to significantly change their operating policies to hope to get the iPhone. As it stands their favorite activity it to neuter any and every phone they offer, so that it only offers a handful of features Verizon approves of. If Verizon got the iPhone, they would be chomping at the bit to disable Bluetooth, turn-by-turn directions, app updates over cellular, etc. This is in stark contrast to how Apple likes to do things, and Apple would never stand for it.
Sprint would probably be happy to get the iPhone, but they're consistently about 2 inches from death so I'm not sure Apple wants such a partner. That leaves T-Mobile, the only 3G provider with even worse coverage than all the rest. The iPhone would likely crush their underbuilt system in a single blow, not unlike what it did to AT&T.
The moral of the story is that all of the carriers suck. But for what Apple wants to do, AT&T likely sucks the least.
Custom Firmware is a bit of a misnomer. For the PSP-3000 (and last sub-model of the 2000, T88v3) it's not possible to replace the built-in firmware with a truly custom firmware, as Sony does signature checking that would keep the PSP from loading unsigned firmware. This is different from the early PSPs, where it was possible to fake out the device and make it accept any firmware.
Anyhow, this isn't a custom firmware in the traditional sense, rather it's more of a injection attack of the PSP's operating system. Normally unsigned code is blocked by the OS, but there's a vulnerability in the TIFF decoder that allows for executing such code. Using the ChickHEN tool (a compromised TIFF file and a payload) the OS's signature checks can be compromised by injecting replacement files in to the running OS, which the PSP happily complies with. With the check disabled, the PSP will run unsigned code for homebrew, but it lacks the drivers necessary to run backup/pirated games. This is an important distinction, because the ChickHEN tool has been around for a few weeks now and is not what TFA is talking about.
This latest hack (5.03 GEN-A) finally takes it one step further and uses the ability to run unsigned code to inject the additional drivers needed to make the PSP treat ISOs on a Memory Stick as a UMD game. This hack isn't necessary to run homebrew, it's solely for running commercial games. Notably it's still entirely a runtime attack, and if the PSP cold boots it will return to normal operation.
This is to Sony's advantage (what little good news there is, at least), because the hardware has not been compromised in any way. As PSPs can not be flashed with earlier firmware versions, all PSPs running firmware versions later than 5.03 can not be attacked as the TIFF vulnerability was fixed. This limits the number of vulnerable units to old units that haven't been upgraded, as new units will come with the fixed firmware. Of course this doesn't preclude another software vulnerability being found in the OS or a hardware attack, but usable software vulnerabilities are very rare, and a hardware attack would be the equivalent of the Holy Grail at this point.
Anyhow, since it's not a real custom firmware, it's not necessarily a viable long-term hack. Users will never be able to upgrade their firmware, so any software that requires a later firmware version (and can't be trivially bypassed by lying to it) would be unusable in hacked PSPs. Sony no doubt will be working to isolate hacked PSPs in this manner.
The GP was right though, ACID isn't a standard compliance test. It's a bug test. ACID features are specifically picked to make a test that the authors know will fail on current browsers. It's basically a fancy bug list for IE, Firefox, and WebKit. I'm not sure Opera's even a consideration for them, which makes passing the test all the easier if the ACID authors aren't writing things specifically to throw a wrench in your browser.
XP suffers greatly from the lack of I/O prioritization. Indexing under Vista (and later) doesn't have the same wallop, since the indexer is a low-priority item that properly yields to other applications attempting to use a hard drive.
I'm not sure who "us" in "owned by all of us American citizens" is supposed to be. I know I'm a citizen, and my neighbor is one too. But the last time I checked, Google is not a United States citizen. Only people can be citizens. People are people, my dog thinks he's people, and even Soylent Green is people, but Google is not a member of the "people" class.
Perhaps the lawyer meant "owned by all of the American citizens" or "owned by all of you American Citizens". Because if Google's not a citizen, they sure can't own any radio spectrum. Unless Google things they own something that doesn't belong to them...