The interface is the XMB from the PSP -- if you haven't seen it, just search 'xmb' on Google Video or Youtube.
Media can be streamed over the network (doing it myself) as of the last firmware update, or can be stored on the hard drive, or on a USB-attached device, or on a flash card in one of the slots.
High definition media can be your own rips or downloaded from Sony, but is restricted to stereo audio it would appear (no dolby digital / dts passthrough on audio). This would be my only major complaint (I like good audio in my recorded shows), but otherwise it works very well.
I'm sure that they considered FlOw, Super Rub'a'Dub, Calling all Cars and the like as well.
Of course I'd include anything from the Ratchet & Clank series as casual gaming too, but there's also Lemmings and Qbert on the PS3 if you really like.
The reason is that programmers cannot reliably write long running process code. Programs crashed all the time in Multics. Something Multics wasn't very good at handling back in the 1960s. There was some research done and it was observed that programmers could write code for short lived processes fairly well but not long lived.
So, one lessoned learn from from the failure Multics is that programmers do not write reliable, long running code.
This is one of the reasons I love daemontools by DJB. I run tcpserver to launch sshd even, so that SSHD isn't running all the time -- it gets executed if a connection comes in and not before. tcpserver is nice and small and easy to audit for long-running bugs.
Using 'launcher' programs to load the parts of a system that are needed when they're needed would make many systems more reliable, IMHO, not just network servers.
There are a lot of easy ways to benefit from parallel programming. Think of something as simple as "find / -print0 | afio -o | nice gzip -7 > backup.afio.gz". Building up a list of files on the filesystem need not slow down the process of reading each file to back it up, nor should the compression delay the prior processes, except in terms of buffer space.
A webcam chat application should be handling retrieving data from your webcam, receiving data from the network, codecs and sending data to the network in separate threads so as to avoid processing delays using simple semaphores and buffers.
There are a lot of applications that handle things linearly that really don't have to be that linear -- or could work as assembly lines with buffer space (FIFOs) in between.
As to the OpenGL aspect, drivers are not available for alternative OS's at this time (like Linux) which can be installed on the hardware, but USB works fine as does the hard drive (I'm running Ubuntu on my PS3, thank-you very much).
Writing software that runs from within Sony's XMB is another story; that requires a license (as with all game systems) but those who have such a license don't have to look up some strange new specification for their software at an API level -- that's what standards are for.
As for hardware support, I've plugged USB cameras, memory sticks and hard drives into my PS3 and all of them worked perfectly with no drivers from within the XMB. Blutooth devices are similarly seamless. Any 2.5" Serial-ATA hard drive can be installed and formatted within the PS3.
While for example Oblivion's AI was fun, it was annoying that you could get caught feeding on someone one day as a vampire then return the next and not have the person freak out when they saw you again.
"Freaking out" would be a nice feature in a game AI;-)
He's the guy that inadequately describes complex systems then gets into arguments about how they ought to be implemented because his implementations and his protocol descriptions don't always overlap.
That said, he's a fairly important player in the Internet world, despite needing a bit of a rethink on how he writes RFCs.
tinydns has a nice option to make one address expire at a specific time and another take its place (or just start serving a record at a specific time, or have a record stop working at a specific time). When it gets close to the expiry time, the existing record's TTL is reduced accordingly to prevent problems as well -- its quite a nice feature really for IP changes.
I've become addicted to being able to watch actual HD content from my PS3's XMB and now over the network with DLNA.
Anyone else notice that Sony this round is actually going with standards compliance? HDMI connector (not just some proprietary one), DLNA for A/V streaming, USB for connectors/devices, S-ATA user-replaceable hard drive, right down to their software development (OpenGL, GNU tools, etc.).
I'm impressed, although I'm sure some anti-Sony rant will follow this.
That is to say, the correct thing to say to any police officer is exactly what you said to your mom as a kid... "nothing":-)
"What are you doing in your car sir?" - "Nothing." "What are you doing with that money sir?" - "Nothing." "What are you doing with that woman sir?" - "Nothing."
That reminds me of my all-nighter days with a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans and a pot of hot water for strong tea. Tylenol with Codeine for the headaches.
A great example of a pretty flash site that's utterly useless as a website (sure, its a nice brochure, but do you want to tell me how to bookmark the actual Moka Express page to send to my mother?)
What on earth does reducing CO2 have to do with pollution? We have water that's barely safe to drink and diseases all over the world caused by a lack of clean drinking water and/or air pollution, and yet we who don't want to displace our coastal lifestyle are hung up on global warming being more important.
Far be it for me to point out to people dying right now from major problems we can prevent right now. I'm sick and tired of people whining about Global Warming as though somehow the millions of children dying around the world cared.
Who benefits the most from all this climate change talk exactly? Who benefits financially? Now think about it. Global Warming may be preventable, it may be here to change, or it may not be happening, but its far less important to me than most other world issues going on right now.
What pisses me off is paying this levy, and yet it is illegal for me to actually take advantage of it. So what's the point? What am I paying for?
You're misinformed. Its perfectly legal because of this levy for you (in Canada) to grab a CD off a friend, rip it to your computer or burn a copy, then hand it back to him or her. Americans have no such legal right. Its also legal for you to make private copies of broadcast works for your own listening pleasure, even if the artist or station tells you not to.
Private copy rights are protected right now in Canada. Keep it that way, levy or no levy. Personally, I like the levy -- it gives me something to throw back in the face of any politician who tries to take away those rights.
Company: "You have 112 unpaid invoices." Human being: "What are the invoice numbers?" Company: "We won't tell you." Human being: "Then how am I supposed to pay them?" Company: "You aren't. We're just going to threaten you with them until we do what we want."
Stop recording my phone calls with a certain unnamed CD seller.
But seriously, after telling them I had no invoices and no proof I owed them a penny and demanded they provide it before calling again (or else face harassment charges), they stopped calling.
I've had similar experiences. People that know I use this "Linux" thing will approach me saying they downloaded a LiveCD at my recommendation and like it and installed it and have such and such a problem with their studio audio card or whatever and I help them work through it. When they start telling me about how they edited their xorg.conf file and didn't like VIM or something I usually stand somewhat mouth-agape at the person who was afraid to find out what a registry is fiddling with their Linux machine (and impressed).
You know what I've noticed though? Linux users don't say "don't touch that, its dangerous" they just say "oh its easy, just edit your xorg.conf file" (even if its not). Windows people say "don't touch the registry, its evil, you could break stuff" (and they're right). We have different 'do it yourself' cultures.
That's the kicker, isn't it? Real evidence. Its amazing how many lawsuits the RIAA appears to launch without any. Just a suspicion... even evidence that something bad is happening isn't evidence that a specific person committed a crime.
If Walmart bulk-sued its customers every time something went missing from the shelves...
The FC6 Xen configuration was downright easy. Reboot into Xen kernel, run virt-manager, type in the URL for the install image, pick a virtual hard drive file/partition/lv, specify an amount of ram and number of CPUs and click finish.
Repeat.
Granted, I only used it for installing other FC6 images, but it was very simple.
Device manufacturers have a lot to lose in the Linux fight -- if there's no competition to Windows, they know what their prices and support (and leverage) will look like. Just look at Dell testifying against Microsoft during the anti-trust lawsuits. I wouldn't be surprised if many larger device companies openly wished alternatives like Linux would mature even more into their markets if they're not using it already.
Bring one of the leaflets next time you go in to pass out to others in line.
It ends with...
Well what did you think of that story?
What? You thought it was a stupid story?
Well so do we. However, this story is the core belief in the religion known as Scientology.* If people knew about this story then most people would never get involved in it. This story is told to you when you reach one of their secret levels called OT III. After that you are supposed to telepathically communicate with these body thetans to make them go away. You have to pay a lot of money to get to this level and do this (or you have to work very hard for the organisation on extremely low pay for many years).
We are telling you this story as a warning. If you become involved with Scientology then we would like you to do so with your eyes open and fully aware of the sort of material it contains.
Yeah, he's probably sure. Most of the Christian Bible we have is available in Greek because the New Testament was primarily written in Greek and Old Testament was translated into Greek from Hebrew in the late BC era. Feel free to grab a Zondervan NIV study bible from a local book store and read the translation information in the intro -- its quite informative about source materials and methodology.
Web 2.0 is a lot like Flash. There are good uses for it and it can even enhance the user experience and design. It can also be overused and abused very easily.
Take Google Maps as an example of good and bad use. It works very well, helps the user make use of the site and has a nice simple and easy-to-use design. However, users can't easily bookmark pages and expect them to work (Yahoo! maps corrects this problem by constantly updating the URI instead of just a 'link to this page' HREF).
Dynamic pages with dynamic data are all well and good, but my back button should still work, my bookmarks should do what I expect, and the content should be indexable by Google without hacks. It should also still look good and be easily navigable. We went through this with Flash (and still are) and with imagemaps and frames before that.
Actually the last time this came up a few companies commented that Microsoft was stupid for claiming these patents against Linux users because they had lots of patents that Microsoft was probably violating as well. Don't quote me on this but the likes of Nokia and IBM come to mind. There are a lot of hidden patent portfolios out there... you don't want to be as high-profile as Microsoft and start stepping on toes.
Slashdot Mirror
The interface is the XMB from the PSP -- if you haven't seen it, just search 'xmb' on Google Video or Youtube.
Media can be streamed over the network (doing it myself) as of the last firmware update, or can be stored on the hard drive, or on a USB-attached device, or on a flash card in one of the slots.
High definition media can be your own rips or downloaded from Sony, but is restricted to stereo audio it would appear (no dolby digital / dts passthrough on audio). This would be my only major complaint (I like good audio in my recorded shows), but otherwise it works very well.
I'm sure that they considered FlOw, Super Rub'a'Dub, Calling all Cars and the like as well.
Of course I'd include anything from the Ratchet & Clank series as casual gaming too, but there's also Lemmings and Qbert on the PS3 if you really like.
This is one of the reasons I love daemontools by DJB. I run tcpserver to launch sshd even, so that SSHD isn't running all the time -- it gets executed if a connection comes in and not before. tcpserver is nice and small and easy to audit for long-running bugs.
Using 'launcher' programs to load the parts of a system that are needed when they're needed would make many systems more reliable, IMHO, not just network servers.
There are a lot of easy ways to benefit from parallel programming. Think of something as simple as "find / -print0 | afio -o | nice gzip -7 > backup.afio.gz". Building up a list of files on the filesystem need not slow down the process of reading each file to back it up, nor should the compression delay the prior processes, except in terms of buffer space.
A webcam chat application should be handling retrieving data from your webcam, receiving data from the network, codecs and sending data to the network in separate threads so as to avoid processing delays using simple semaphores and buffers.
There are a lot of applications that handle things linearly that really don't have to be that linear -- or could work as assembly lines with buffer space (FIFOs) in between.
As to the OpenGL aspect, drivers are not available for alternative OS's at this time (like Linux) which can be installed on the hardware, but USB works fine as does the hard drive (I'm running Ubuntu on my PS3, thank-you very much).
Writing software that runs from within Sony's XMB is another story; that requires a license (as with all game systems) but those who have such a license don't have to look up some strange new specification for their software at an API level -- that's what standards are for.
As for hardware support, I've plugged USB cameras, memory sticks and hard drives into my PS3 and all of them worked perfectly with no drivers from within the XMB. Blutooth devices are similarly seamless. Any 2.5" Serial-ATA hard drive can be installed and formatted within the PS3.
Are you done with the FUD now?
While for example Oblivion's AI was fun, it was annoying that you could get caught feeding on someone one day as a vampire then return the next and not have the person freak out when they saw you again.
;-)
"Freaking out" would be a nice feature in a game AI
He's the guy that inadequately describes complex systems then gets into arguments about how they ought to be implemented because his implementations and his protocol descriptions don't always overlap.
That said, he's a fairly important player in the Internet world, despite needing a bit of a rethink on how he writes RFCs.
tinydns has a nice option to make one address expire at a specific time and another take its place (or just start serving a record at a specific time, or have a record stop working at a specific time). When it gets close to the expiry time, the existing record's TTL is reduced accordingly to prevent problems as well -- its quite a nice feature really for IP changes.
I've become addicted to being able to watch actual HD content from my PS3's XMB and now over the network with DLNA.
Anyone else notice that Sony this round is actually going with standards compliance? HDMI connector (not just some proprietary one), DLNA for A/V streaming, USB for connectors/devices, S-ATA user-replaceable hard drive, right down to their software development (OpenGL, GNU tools, etc.).
I'm impressed, although I'm sure some anti-Sony rant will follow this.
That is to say, the correct thing to say to any police officer is exactly what you said to your mom as a kid ... "nothing" :-)
"What are you doing in your car sir?" - "Nothing."
"What are you doing with that money sir?" - "Nothing."
"What are you doing with that woman sir?" - "Nothing."
I considered inventing a response of the sort myself, but yours made me laugh sufficiently. Thank-you. :-)
;-)
One more "organic" and I was going to punch the screen
That reminds me of my all-nighter days with a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans and a pot of hot water for strong tea. Tylenol with Codeine for the headaches.
A great example of a pretty flash site that's utterly useless as a website (sure, its a nice brochure, but do you want to tell me how to bookmark the actual Moka Express page to send to my mother?)
... ugh.
I hate all-Flash web designers
After all, the kid who drove the car for his buddy who robbed a corner store at gunpoint deserves not to get a job and pay taxes when he's 45.
What on earth does reducing CO2 have to do with pollution? We have water that's barely safe to drink and diseases all over the world caused by a lack of clean drinking water and/or air pollution, and yet we who don't want to displace our coastal lifestyle are hung up on global warming being more important.
Far be it for me to point out to people dying right now from major problems we can prevent right now. I'm sick and tired of people whining about Global Warming as though somehow the millions of children dying around the world cared.
Who benefits the most from all this climate change talk exactly? Who benefits financially? Now think about it. Global Warming may be preventable, it may be here to change, or it may not be happening, but its far less important to me than most other world issues going on right now.
You're misinformed. Its perfectly legal because of this levy for you (in Canada) to grab a CD off a friend, rip it to your computer or burn a copy, then hand it back to him or her. Americans have no such legal right. Its also legal for you to make private copies of broadcast works for your own listening pleasure, even if the artist or station tells you not to.
Private copy rights are protected right now in Canada. Keep it that way, levy or no levy. Personally, I like the levy -- it gives me something to throw back in the face of any politician who tries to take away those rights.
Stop recording my phone calls with a certain unnamed CD seller.
But seriously, after telling them I had no invoices and no proof I owed them a penny and demanded they provide it before calling again (or else face harassment charges), they stopped calling.
I've had similar experiences. People that know I use this "Linux" thing will approach me saying they downloaded a LiveCD at my recommendation and like it and installed it and have such and such a problem with their studio audio card or whatever and I help them work through it. When they start telling me about how they edited their xorg.conf file and didn't like VIM or something I usually stand somewhat mouth-agape at the person who was afraid to find out what a registry is fiddling with their Linux machine (and impressed).
You know what I've noticed though? Linux users don't say "don't touch that, its dangerous" they just say "oh its easy, just edit your xorg.conf file" (even if its not). Windows people say "don't touch the registry, its evil, you could break stuff" (and they're right). We have different 'do it yourself' cultures.
That's the kicker, isn't it? Real evidence. Its amazing how many lawsuits the RIAA appears to launch without any. Just a suspicion ... even evidence that something bad is happening isn't evidence that a specific person committed a crime.
...
If Walmart bulk-sued its customers every time something went missing from the shelves
The FC6 Xen configuration was downright easy. Reboot into Xen kernel, run virt-manager, type in the URL for the install image, pick a virtual hard drive file/partition/lv, specify an amount of ram and number of CPUs and click finish.
Repeat.
Granted, I only used it for installing other FC6 images, but it was very simple.
Device manufacturers have a lot to lose in the Linux fight -- if there's no competition to Windows, they know what their prices and support (and leverage) will look like. Just look at Dell testifying against Microsoft during the anti-trust lawsuits. I wouldn't be surprised if many larger device companies openly wished alternatives like Linux would mature even more into their markets if they're not using it already.
It ends with
Yeah, he's probably sure. Most of the Christian Bible we have is available in Greek because the New Testament was primarily written in Greek and Old Testament was translated into Greek from Hebrew in the late BC era. Feel free to grab a Zondervan NIV study bible from a local book store and read the translation information in the intro -- its quite informative about source materials and methodology.
Web 2.0 is a lot like Flash. There are good uses for it and it can even enhance the user experience and design. It can also be overused and abused very easily.
Take Google Maps as an example of good and bad use. It works very well, helps the user make use of the site and has a nice simple and easy-to-use design. However, users can't easily bookmark pages and expect them to work (Yahoo! maps corrects this problem by constantly updating the URI instead of just a 'link to this page' HREF).
Dynamic pages with dynamic data are all well and good, but my back button should still work, my bookmarks should do what I expect, and the content should be indexable by Google without hacks. It should also still look good and be easily navigable. We went through this with Flash (and still are) and with imagemaps and frames before that.
Actually the last time this came up a few companies commented that Microsoft was stupid for claiming these patents against Linux users because they had lots of patents that Microsoft was probably violating as well. Don't quote me on this but the likes of Nokia and IBM come to mind. There are a lot of hidden patent portfolios out there ... you don't want to be as high-profile as Microsoft and start stepping on toes.