Here's a good one for people who don't read these:
3.1 Web Player Prohibited Devices. You may not Use any Web Player on any non-PC device or with any embedded or device version of any operating system. For the avoidance of doubt, and by example only, you may not use a Web Player on any (a) mobile devices, set top boxes (STB), handhelds, phones, web pads, tablets and Tablet PCs that are not running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, game consoles, TVs, DVD players, media centers (excluding Windows XP Media Center Edition and its successors), electronic billboards or other digital signage, internet appliances or other internet-connected devices, PDAs, medical devices, ATMs, telematic devices, gaming machines, home automation systems, kiosks, remote control devices, or any other consumer electronics device, (b) operator-based mobile, cable, satellite, or television systems or (c) other closed system devices.
On Fedora with an extra repo enabled, I can easily yum install mplayer mplayer-plugin mplayer-gui and it works beautifully. On top of that, it works with the win32 codec DLLs as well, giving me plenty of proprietary playback capabilities.
The only problem I've ever had with mplayer was voice/video syncing, but that's gone now in my experience.
More interestingly, are there DRM systems out there that would effectively give full control of your works to anyone who gets a copy? In which case it would be very funny to completely ignore the act by using such a system.
I'm sure many excellent artists over the years have had contempt for da Vinci's work. Welcome to opinion.
Even if most artists respect da Vinci as a reputable artist, it doesn't mean they'd follow in his footsteps or believe that his way was the right way to do things for their own art.
In the same way, I think Carmack's a genius and I'd take anything he said about game programming and hardware and give it some serious thought before dismissing it, but you have to remember he has his own style and preferences and isn't necessarily "right" in his opinions for anyone but himself.
The Xbox360 may in fact be the right platform for ID software, and the PS3 might be the right platform for someone else.
The Playstation3 runs fine in 1080i mode, and in 1080p mode for that matter.
Your complaint is rather that the Playstation3 doesn't auto-scale games to an arbitrary resolution to match your TV (720p->1080i for example) or that your games aren't available in the resolution you like.
Oh wait, is it possible you should've bought a TV that actually handles 720p input and scales to 1080i on its own?:-)
I regularly see a lot of really uneducated remarks about Sony's PS3 release and its not your fault, but you need a background in manufacturing and electronics manufacturing especially to understand this.
The PS3 is CHEAP. Period. How do I say that? Well lets compare to plasma or LCD screens. They were over 10 times the price they are now just a few short years ago and when they were first introduced, they were fantastically expensive. Why? Because manufacturing was difficult and yields were low. So you ramp your prices up for early adopters who are willing to pay the premium, work out your manufacturing kinks in the meantime, get your costs down and start going mass-market.
The Playstation3 is no different. Sony has production problems -- more than they thought they would obviously too. Low yields mean the PS3 should be more like $2000 because they'd still have sold that one million (very low number) of units at that price, and been able to keep the ball rolling for better yields, then price cuts.
The PS3 wasn't $2000 because they don't want to position it as a luxury item (like a Bravia TV for example), but as a mass-market item.
Supply and demand, yields and basic business rules would all say the PS3 should've been launched at a higher price, not a lower one. They don't have the extra units to sell so why would they lower the price? Their problem right now isn't convincing people to buy one, its making enough of them reliably.
PS, I really don't care if your local Walmart has an extra unit in stock, we're talking a MILLION units here, not singletons in individual stores. Will the PS3 make 6 million sales at the current price? I wouldn't doubt it. Will they hit 25 million at this price? Probably not, but manufacturing will be cheaper down the road anyway.
Oh and "without a Bluray drive" is a pretty bad idea -- how on earth are you going to play PS3 games (which are all printed on Bluray discs)? Bluray isn't about movies. Its a storage format. Large optical storage discs happen to be good for movies. They're also good for video games, backups and other things. Taking bluray out of the PS3 means no PS3 games.
Do you have any idea how much PBS I've watched since having an HDTV for a year now? PBS in HD can be a truly beautiful experience. The stories were always informative I suppose, but from cooking shows to tours of aquariums to scenic vistas in nature or travel shows, HDTV really maximizes what they're trying to do with TV.
As for regular content, almost every show I watch is in HD these days (scroll to the very bottom for the list). I don't watch many shows just for their being in HD, but going from 1080i back down to 480i on a wide CRT is quite the unappealing adjustment, visually.
Porting the full Sun Java to the PS3 would be great, but for real development you'd need Sony (or NVidia)'s help getting the OpenGL acceleration working.
I play Wurm Online, a fairly involved persistent online fantasy simulator which runs in Java and JOGL and games like it could easily be made to work on the PS3 with PS3Linux, if the OpenGL acceleration were available.
By doing this, Novell is violating my copyright and the copyright of every contributor to free software by redistributing my software to people who do not have the ability to redistribute my software (with all rights they received therein). The GPL expressly forbids this, both in intent and in letter.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you're on crack.
Nothing prohibits any Novell customer from giving any non-Novell customer the source code and binaries to any GPL product contained in that distribution. Nothing in the GPL even begins to deal with things outside of the boundaries of Copyright law. That is to say, Copyright normally takes your rights away and the GPL allows you certain freedoms in contradiction to Copyright should you agree to uphold those ideals.
Those ideals are very simple, and none of them include giving away something that is normally expected to be paid for, like a warrantee. In fact, most GPL products expressly disclaim any warrantees to users in the first place, so I'm still not sure why you're upset.
You do realize that's all this is right? -- a warrantee agreement between Novell and its customers with permission from Microsoft.
None of my or your precious GPL freedoms are being taken away at all, and this hoopla is very confusing to me. Yeah yeah, the evil Microsoft signed an agreement with a Linux distributor, so what? I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy with six Linux PCs at home, but really, who cares? What matters is how the software is distributed and your rights to do whatever you want with the sources (which you would still have as a Novell customer).
You may not be able to transfer any additional warrantee Novell gives you w.r.t. Microsoft lawsuits that may or may not ever happen, but you wouldn't have had that without the agreement either.
Please, informed replies only. Flames are not helpful.
IMAP supports server-side E-mail notification and storage. Your mail client can cache the headers or the whole messages as they become available with no interaction on your part. IMAP servers can also handle multiple tasks simultaneously since commands are tagged (analogous to how TCQ works with hard drives) and can do server-side searching too.
What exactly can't IMAP do that is IMAP (the protocol's) fault?
I sell a lot of computers. There are three basic computers:
1) You want a server 2) You want a normal PC 3) You want a gaming PC
No "normal" PC people buy today for $1000 or more will play the games a PS3 or XBOX360 would play at those qualities. Sorry. If you want to spend two or three times more than the price of a PS3, sure. But that doesn't count, does it?
I've never understood people who don't get NVidia's situation. NVidia has licensed technologies that they don't have the legal right to open source. Maybe they could make more of their binary blob open source, maybe not. Maybe they DO use the same binary blob for Windows & Linux but the rest of the Windows driver is closed source, unlike the Linux one, who knows.
My point is, NVidia is stuck with releasing binary drivers or no drivers. They've paid for technology they can't reveal to the rest of us by contract. This happens all the time (it happened with Webcam drivers a little while back). These are often about compression schemes 3rd parties don't want you to know about so they can sell licenses to them.
Could NVidia try harder? Maybe. Do they try pretty hard for Linux as it is? Damn right.
E17 on Yellow Dog is actually an interesting choice -- Enlightenment uses optimized software libraries to render text and graphics that work just as well with or without OpenGL acceleration for its eye-candy. Since the PS3 doesn't yet come with hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers, Enlightenment should work very well with the very high speed framebuffer display device.
Does it do anything that you couldn't do with a much less expensive PC that you can install Linux on? I just don't get it.
Better question: can you do what the PS3 does for less than the $500 it costs? No.
You get a BDRom drive, high-end gaming system, HDMI capable output, 3.2GHz processor + SPUs, memory and a hard drive with USB ports and bluetooth support.
Tell me you can build one of those for $500. It also has to play really good 3D games, for which the video card will cost more than half of that price.
Excellent post -- it always bothers me that people still think about electricity as having to be generated "somewhere else". The transmission lines are the least efficient part of our entire electrical system, losing huge amounts of power to heat.
If we could cut down on how much of our electricity needs to reach the house across hundreds of km, we could cut down on the net energy required immensely.
Your stats are common but wrong about Internet use.
The highest number of Internet users in Canada for business use is farmers. The largest segment of the population by percentage wanting access to the Internet is seniors. Yes, teenagers use the Internet a lot, but also tend to have social lives (at least those not on Slashdot). Senior citizens more often than not are actually more connected to the world online than ever.
I'm not sure those stats are still correct, but that is what some leading research has shown up here in Canada at least.
Thanks, the first thought that went through my head as I read that summary was "really? A Slashdot editor is who's a climatologist?"
This is exactly why the BBC is asking for such information -- its not like one or two people complaining would lead them on this kind of search. They've probably heard numerous unverifiable reports and wants proof.
Those audiophiles won't download the music until it comes in dts or SACD format. I can hear the difference between CDs and SACDs... can you?
Yamaha produces some very high quality (low total harmonic distortion) receivers for reasonable money ($200 or so at J&R online actually) that will be severely better to normal peoples' ears than whatever they have now. You don't need to be an audiophile, you just need to know one who understands your budget and you'll be set.
Even on my modest system, I can definately hear a difference between FLAC and MP3, and definately between a well recorded CD and a mediocre one. The sound quality difference between a good CD and the dts soundtrack on some movies is immediately apparent to even casual listeners who've come over to watch a movie or two.
The problem isn't how many audiophiles there are, the problem is how few people have a sound system/headphones as good as their tastes. Many people I know settle for terrible speaker systems/earbuds because they don't realize "pretty damn good" is available for not too much cash. If people can't hear the difference with the equipment they have, they won't care about purchasing higher quality audio.
I ripped all my music to FLAC with tags and use Amarok as my music app on my PC. When I want MP3 or OGG versions of my music (for a portable device or when I burnt my "best of" DVD of MP3s for use in the livingroom), I use the TransKode script in Amarok to convert them on the fly (which copies the tags over as well).
The phone in your house probably uses a phone line, that's the part that plugs into the computer. The other jack on the computer plugs into the *real* wall jack, just like a modem used to. That way, you can still dial 911 with your phone over the PSTN since VoIP is nowhere near as reliable as old fashioned phone calls.
Meanwhile, you have Skype VoIP access through your/normal/ telephone you plugged into your PC (especially if you route *all* your phone wiring from your termination box through the PC first).
We honestly care what teenagers think BitTorrent is for? I know what teenagers think of lots of things and I'm not so sure I'd take my life-lessons from those thoughts either (my appologies to the under-20 slashdot crowd).
In all seriousness though, I use BitTorrent to download things like Linux DVDs and OpenOffice installations. I've been experimenting with it as a way of managing repository updates as well. I'm sure it works well for other large files too.
Slashdot Mirror
On Fedora with an extra repo enabled, I can easily yum install mplayer mplayer-plugin mplayer-gui and it works beautifully. On top of that, it works with the win32 codec DLLs as well, giving me plenty of proprietary playback capabilities.
The only problem I've ever had with mplayer was voice/video syncing, but that's gone now in my experience.
More interestingly, are there DRM systems out there that would effectively give full control of your works to anyone who gets a copy? In which case it would be very funny to completely ignore the act by using such a system.
I hate to reply to an AC, but here goes: neither of the posts you quoted were trolls or flamebait. What are you smoking exactly?
Thank-you for saying that.
I'm so sick and tired of people asking me about PODcasts. Its just a !@# downloadable music file. It doesn't need a special name.
"I recorded an MP3 of me talking about crap" just doesn't sound as cool as "PODcasting"?
I'm sure many excellent artists over the years have had contempt for da Vinci's work. Welcome to opinion.
Even if most artists respect da Vinci as a reputable artist, it doesn't mean they'd follow in his footsteps or believe that his way was the right way to do things for their own art.
In the same way, I think Carmack's a genius and I'd take anything he said about game programming and hardware and give it some serious thought before dismissing it, but you have to remember he has his own style and preferences and isn't necessarily "right" in his opinions for anyone but himself.
The Xbox360 may in fact be the right platform for ID software, and the PS3 might be the right platform for someone else.
The Playstation3 runs fine in 1080i mode, and in 1080p mode for that matter.
:-)
Your complaint is rather that the Playstation3 doesn't auto-scale games to an arbitrary resolution to match your TV (720p->1080i for example) or that your games aren't available in the resolution you like.
Oh wait, is it possible you should've bought a TV that actually handles 720p input and scales to 1080i on its own?
I regularly see a lot of really uneducated remarks about Sony's PS3 release and its not your fault, but you need a background in manufacturing and electronics manufacturing especially to understand this.
The PS3 is CHEAP. Period. How do I say that? Well lets compare to plasma or LCD screens. They were over 10 times the price they are now just a few short years ago and when they were first introduced, they were fantastically expensive. Why? Because manufacturing was difficult and yields were low. So you ramp your prices up for early adopters who are willing to pay the premium, work out your manufacturing kinks in the meantime, get your costs down and start going mass-market.
The Playstation3 is no different. Sony has production problems -- more than they thought they would obviously too. Low yields mean the PS3 should be more like $2000 because they'd still have sold that one million (very low number) of units at that price, and been able to keep the ball rolling for better yields, then price cuts.
The PS3 wasn't $2000 because they don't want to position it as a luxury item (like a Bravia TV for example), but as a mass-market item.
Supply and demand, yields and basic business rules would all say the PS3 should've been launched at a higher price, not a lower one. They don't have the extra units to sell so why would they lower the price? Their problem right now isn't convincing people to buy one, its making enough of them reliably.
PS, I really don't care if your local Walmart has an extra unit in stock, we're talking a MILLION units here, not singletons in individual stores. Will the PS3 make 6 million sales at the current price? I wouldn't doubt it. Will they hit 25 million at this price? Probably not, but manufacturing will be cheaper down the road anyway.
Oh and "without a Bluray drive" is a pretty bad idea -- how on earth are you going to play PS3 games (which are all printed on Bluray discs)? Bluray isn't about movies. Its a storage format. Large optical storage discs happen to be good for movies. They're also good for video games, backups and other things. Taking bluray out of the PS3 means no PS3 games.
Do you have any idea how much PBS I've watched since having an HDTV for a year now? PBS in HD can be a truly beautiful experience. The stories were always informative I suppose, but from cooking shows to tours of aquariums to scenic vistas in nature or travel shows, HDTV really maximizes what they're trying to do with TV.
As for regular content, almost every show I watch is in HD these days (scroll to the very bottom for the list). I don't watch many shows just for their being in HD, but going from 1080i back down to 480i on a wide CRT is quite the unappealing adjustment, visually.
Porting the full Sun Java to the PS3 would be great, but for real development you'd need Sony (or NVidia)'s help getting the OpenGL acceleration working.
I play Wurm Online, a fairly involved persistent online fantasy simulator which runs in Java and JOGL and games like it could easily be made to work on the PS3 with PS3Linux, if the OpenGL acceleration were available.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you're on crack.
Nothing prohibits any Novell customer from giving any non-Novell customer the source code and binaries to any GPL product contained in that distribution. Nothing in the GPL even begins to deal with things outside of the boundaries of Copyright law. That is to say, Copyright normally takes your rights away and the GPL allows you certain freedoms in contradiction to Copyright should you agree to uphold those ideals.
Those ideals are very simple, and none of them include giving away something that is normally expected to be paid for, like a warrantee. In fact, most GPL products expressly disclaim any warrantees to users in the first place, so I'm still not sure why you're upset.
You do realize that's all this is right? -- a warrantee agreement between Novell and its customers with permission from Microsoft.
None of my or your precious GPL freedoms are being taken away at all, and this hoopla is very confusing to me. Yeah yeah, the evil Microsoft signed an agreement with a Linux distributor, so what? I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy with six Linux PCs at home, but really, who cares? What matters is how the software is distributed and your rights to do whatever you want with the sources (which you would still have as a Novell customer).
You may not be able to transfer any additional warrantee Novell gives you w.r.t. Microsoft lawsuits that may or may not ever happen, but you wouldn't have had that without the agreement either.
Please, informed replies only. Flames are not helpful.
Check your ISP's IMAP server.
IMAP supports server-side E-mail notification and storage. Your mail client can cache the headers or the whole messages as they become available with no interaction on your part. IMAP servers can also handle multiple tasks simultaneously since commands are tagged (analogous to how TCQ works with hard drives) and can do server-side searching too.
What exactly can't IMAP do that is IMAP (the protocol's) fault?
I sell a lot of computers. There are three basic computers:
1) You want a server
2) You want a normal PC
3) You want a gaming PC
No "normal" PC people buy today for $1000 or more will play the games a PS3 or XBOX360 would play at those qualities. Sorry. If you want to spend two or three times more than the price of a PS3, sure. But that doesn't count, does it?
Those would be the morons who put their PS3s up for $14,000 as a buy it now?
These people have obviously never used Ebay before.
"Could care less" and "ain't got no chili left mam" fit in the same boat huh?
Good to know.
canadian
I've never understood people who don't get NVidia's situation. NVidia has licensed technologies that they don't have the legal right to open source. Maybe they could make more of their binary blob open source, maybe not. Maybe they DO use the same binary blob for Windows & Linux but the rest of the Windows driver is closed source, unlike the Linux one, who knows.
My point is, NVidia is stuck with releasing binary drivers or no drivers. They've paid for technology they can't reveal to the rest of us by contract. This happens all the time (it happened with Webcam drivers a little while back). These are often about compression schemes 3rd parties don't want you to know about so they can sell licenses to them.
Could NVidia try harder? Maybe. Do they try pretty hard for Linux as it is? Damn right.
E17 on Yellow Dog is actually an interesting choice -- Enlightenment uses optimized software libraries to render text and graphics that work just as well with or without OpenGL acceleration for its eye-candy. Since the PS3 doesn't yet come with hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers, Enlightenment should work very well with the very high speed framebuffer display device.
Better question: can you do what the PS3 does for less than the $500 it costs? No.
You get a BDRom drive, high-end gaming system, HDMI capable output, 3.2GHz processor + SPUs, memory and a hard drive with USB ports and bluetooth support.
Tell me you can build one of those for $500. It also has to play really good 3D games, for which the video card will cost more than half of that price.
Excellent post -- it always bothers me that people still think about electricity as having to be generated "somewhere else". The transmission lines are the least efficient part of our entire electrical system, losing huge amounts of power to heat.
If we could cut down on how much of our electricity needs to reach the house across hundreds of km, we could cut down on the net energy required immensely.
Your stats are common but wrong about Internet use.
The highest number of Internet users in Canada for business use is farmers. The largest segment of the population by percentage wanting access to the Internet is seniors. Yes, teenagers use the Internet a lot, but also tend to have social lives (at least those not on Slashdot). Senior citizens more often than not are actually more connected to the world online than ever.
I'm not sure those stats are still correct, but that is what some leading research has shown up here in Canada at least.
Thanks, the first thought that went through my head as I read that summary was "really? A Slashdot editor is who's a climatologist?"
This is exactly why the BBC is asking for such information -- its not like one or two people complaining would lead them on this kind of search. They've probably heard numerous unverifiable reports and wants proof.
Those audiophiles won't download the music until it comes in dts or SACD format. I can hear the difference between CDs and SACDs ... can you?
Yamaha produces some very high quality (low total harmonic distortion) receivers for reasonable money ($200 or so at J&R online actually) that will be severely better to normal peoples' ears than whatever they have now. You don't need to be an audiophile, you just need to know one who understands your budget and you'll be set.
Even on my modest system, I can definately hear a difference between FLAC and MP3, and definately between a well recorded CD and a mediocre one. The sound quality difference between a good CD and the dts soundtrack on some movies is immediately apparent to even casual listeners who've come over to watch a movie or two.
The problem isn't how many audiophiles there are, the problem is how few people have a sound system/headphones as good as their tastes. Many people I know settle for terrible speaker systems/earbuds because they don't realize "pretty damn good" is available for not too much cash. If people can't hear the difference with the equipment they have, they won't care about purchasing higher quality audio.
I ripped all my music to FLAC with tags and use Amarok as my music app on my PC. When I want MP3 or OGG versions of my music (for a portable device or when I burnt my "best of" DVD of MP3s for use in the livingroom), I use the TransKode script in Amarok to convert them on the fly (which copies the tags over as well).
Dear user, you have no clue.
/normal/ telephone you plugged into your PC (especially if you route *all* your phone wiring from your termination box through the PC first).
The phone in your house probably uses a phone line, that's the part that plugs into the computer. The other jack on the computer plugs into the *real* wall jack, just like a modem used to. That way, you can still dial 911 with your phone over the PSTN since VoIP is nowhere near as reliable as old fashioned phone calls.
Meanwhile, you have Skype VoIP access through your
We honestly care what teenagers think BitTorrent is for? I know what teenagers think of lots of things and I'm not so sure I'd take my life-lessons from those thoughts either (my appologies to the under-20 slashdot crowd).
In all seriousness though, I use BitTorrent to download things like Linux DVDs and OpenOffice installations. I've been experimenting with it as a way of managing repository updates as well. I'm sure it works well for other large files too.