Hmm, funny, you along with many others fail to recognize that Sony Music isn't the same as Sony Computer Entertainment, and outsourced that piece of software development in the first place.
Most of the other issues you list are PR silliness, very few are actually problematic. The PSN breach? Dozens of other major internet companies have had entire lists of customers and credit information pillaged in the last ten years, but we were all good and hard on Sony about it.
But yes, way to be exactly the Slashdotter i was speaking of.
For the record: we Slashdotters often get upset at companies for not innovating and yet while Sony actually invents new technologies on a regular basis, we give them a hard time for it. From Minidisc to Memory Stick. Sad really.
Some people are very small-minded and hold the very few public PR failures a given company may have up as a totem to their evil nature.
cf. Sony Music's rootkit code for the other one that comes up all the time on Slashdot.
Companies that are better at hiding their evil ways get a free ride somehow among geeks, which makes no sense to me. Sadly, not all geeks are smart, some are just geeky.
Nintendo is notorious for being very anal about who they allow to be licensees.
Sony on the other hand has the Minis program, as well as having on several occasions helped small studios publish games on the system that would best be qualified as niche or strange. I'm including Flow and Flower, the strange guitar music shooting game whose name I can never remember, and that art house project that everyone played through just for the trophies.
(I'm not leaving out Microsoft on purpose; I'm just not as familiar with their programs although I'm certain they're easier to access than Nintendo)
I think you actually fail to understand the concept of interference. Hardware that isn't physically damaged in any way by the interference and goes on with its day still may not be able to maintain a high enough S/N ratio to function as the user desires.
Several of the industrial control systems I deal with every day do exactly this all the time. They run a continuous feed printer and dump their output with every entry. Sure, the system is also polled by computer and the data easily analyzed, but if there's tampering, there's proof.
I point out that Sony takes in indies all the time and that if you think you're too small you're just not trying because they're perfectly willing to work with you.
They did not lose $20k... they spent $20k on marketing. If you're in business and you don't understand spending money on marketing your product, you're probably not a very big business.
No matter what you may believe on the subject, marketing can make or break a business, and good marketing is often worth spending a lot of money on. Just ask Coke, Pepsi, Dominos Pizza, Apple, etc.
It costs you $20k to fill orders at a loss for which your hope is that many of those people will either want to buy more at full price or create buzz about your product among their friends and associates. Eventually it will either pay off or not, but the immediate cost isn't worth discussing as though it were burned money.
I own four bookshelf shelves of video games. I regularly have people I know drop off a game I haven't played, or loan out a game they haven't. Sometimes they're recent, more often they're not.
If you decide you want to play online, the $10 online multiplayer cost is still much cheaper than even the $40 or $20 discount version of the game at the store, so yes, even then.
I stopped playing PC games when my console started giving me a better overall experience while sitting on my couch playing on a big screen.
I like my games on disc despite having a 15Mbit connection... because strangely, my limit is only 30GB/mo. Discs also give me something to trade or pass off to friends, downloads don't.
Last I checked, patents are supposed to be for working devices with a working copy kept on file at the office or instructions detailed enough that another person could recreate and prove that it works.
The algorithm alone may be patented, but a working example should be included. The fact that one may not be is oft cited as another example of how much the modern patent system sucks.
"More apps" sucks because users expect all their apps to show in the first place.
I'd be happier if like a bloated "start" menu, only the categories were shown with an MRU list at the side. By defaulting to showing 'some' applications, users browse through those expecting it to be exhaustive, and its not.
The Gnome shell most certainly is slow, even with hardware acceleration. Compare with bare-bones Blackbox first, for a baseline of how blazingly fast a WM can be. Now try out the latest Enlightenment DR and scratch your head at why a huge feature-bloated monster like E could possibly be more responsive than Gnome. After that, give OSX a try. Strange, that runs on *nix too and doesn't suck so hard on similar hardware. A lot of people run Linux on Macbooks, its not that hard to compare really.
On top of that, you've got the instability... the latest Fedora Gnome3 goes into never never land on me regularly and needs restarting "alt-f2, 'r', " all day... jeez. Net benefit of using a Gnome shell? Negative. No feature benefits whatsoever over now-ancient shells and slower than most of them.
While I agree that we need xattr style metadata that describes the file in some circumstances, I think most use-cases are simply misunderstanding the concept of a proper file structure.
That said, it would be great to be able to do interesting things from the *nix command-line like:
Where "}" is a delimiter I invented that allows selection of subsections of a file.
A formatted data file with subsections and metadata can be a pain to manipulate with good old CLI tools, and being able to specify a subsection of that data to parse or manipulate while ignoring the rest would be quite nice.
If its security is important to you, you're fully capable of funding your own audit from a third party, either solo or as a group effort. Put together a requirements list, find out a price, and start asking others to chip in until you can afford it.
You're also free to Google for "OpenBSD exploit" and look at all the (very few) results for actual remote exploits.
OpenBSD has always had much more intelligent (secure) default settings for its installed services and packages than Linux or Windows, but I don't administer any OpenBSD boxes regularly myself because its a bit of a pain for day to day patches and updates compared to Linux. There's a trade-off to be made between security and hours available in the week.
I believe you misunderstand the concept of file streams.
Extensions are a form of file typing, like MIME is. The extension you mention above is just a part of the naming of the file. Streams are not (although can be accessed as such from applications that do not understand streams natively, such as notepad).
I switched to E DR16 and then Blackbox for quite a while. A minimalist desktop that just lets me work is pretty awesome. The only thing I missed was Gnome applets. Now with Gnome 3, those are gone anyway so I'm not missing anything I suppose.
Which is so much easier than "open calendar" *tap new appointment* "Set my mother's router" *click time*
That's how long it takes me on Android.
I skipped the twice I have to click on the voice activation widget (once on the main screen, once on the keyboard), but its hardly relevant.
Do I think Siri is cool? Sure. I had almost exactly that functionality on my Newton MessagePads (by Apple) in the mid nineties. It was called 'assist' and I loved it. I still want assist back, and I want it text based (like it was then) not voice activated, so I can jot down commands without sharing them with the entire subway car. After all, I can click voice on the android keyboard any time I want to fill in text by voice anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, funny, you along with many others fail to recognize that Sony Music isn't the same as Sony Computer Entertainment, and outsourced that piece of software development in the first place.
Most of the other issues you list are PR silliness, very few are actually problematic. The PSN breach? Dozens of other major internet companies have had entire lists of customers and credit information pillaged in the last ten years, but we were all good and hard on Sony about it.
But yes, way to be exactly the Slashdotter i was speaking of.
For the record: we Slashdotters often get upset at companies for not innovating and yet while Sony actually invents new technologies on a regular basis, we give them a hard time for it. From Minidisc to Memory Stick. Sad really.
Some people are very small-minded and hold the very few public PR failures a given company may have up as a totem to their evil nature.
cf. Sony Music's rootkit code for the other one that comes up all the time on Slashdot.
Companies that are better at hiding their evil ways get a free ride somehow among geeks, which makes no sense to me. Sadly, not all geeks are smart, some are just geeky.
Nintendo is notorious for being very anal about who they allow to be licensees.
Sony on the other hand has the Minis program, as well as having on several occasions helped small studios publish games on the system that would best be qualified as niche or strange. I'm including Flow and Flower, the strange guitar music shooting game whose name I can never remember, and that art house project that everyone played through just for the trophies.
(I'm not leaving out Microsoft on purpose; I'm just not as familiar with their programs although I'm certain they're easier to access than Nintendo)
I think you actually fail to understand the concept of interference. Hardware that isn't physically damaged in any way by the interference and goes on with its day still may not be able to maintain a high enough S/N ratio to function as the user desires.
Several of the industrial control systems I deal with every day do exactly this all the time. They run a continuous feed printer and dump their output with every entry. Sure, the system is also polled by computer and the data easily analyzed, but if there's tampering, there's proof.
I'm having a moment recalling when I demonstrated rpm2cpio to someone once and they were instantly happier.
I'm okay with binary logging, but I don't think the system proposed is the right way to do it.
I point out that Sony takes in indies all the time and that if you think you're too small you're just not trying because they're perfectly willing to work with you.
They did not lose $20k ... they spent $20k on marketing. If you're in business and you don't understand spending money on marketing your product, you're probably not a very big business.
No matter what you may believe on the subject, marketing can make or break a business, and good marketing is often worth spending a lot of money on. Just ask Coke, Pepsi, Dominos Pizza, Apple, etc.
It costs you $20k to fill orders at a loss for which your hope is that many of those people will either want to buy more at full price or create buzz about your product among their friends and associates. Eventually it will either pay off or not, but the immediate cost isn't worth discussing as though it were burned money.
I own four bookshelf shelves of video games. I regularly have people I know drop off a game I haven't played, or loan out a game they haven't. Sometimes they're recent, more often they're not.
If you decide you want to play online, the $10 online multiplayer cost is still much cheaper than even the $40 or $20 discount version of the game at the store, so yes, even then.
I stopped playing PC games when my console started giving me a better overall experience while sitting on my couch playing on a big screen.
I usually do OS installs over network, but USB works too :)
I like my games on disc despite having a 15Mbit connection ... because strangely, my limit is only 30GB/mo. Discs also give me something to trade or pass off to friends, downloads don't.
Last I checked, patents are supposed to be for working devices with a working copy kept on file at the office or instructions detailed enough that another person could recreate and prove that it works.
The algorithm alone may be patented, but a working example should be included. The fact that one may not be is oft cited as another example of how much the modern patent system sucks.
"More apps" sucks because users expect all their apps to show in the first place.
I'd be happier if like a bloated "start" menu, only the categories were shown with an MRU list at the side. By defaulting to showing 'some' applications, users browse through those expecting it to be exhaustive, and its not.
The Gnome shell most certainly is slow, even with hardware acceleration. Compare with bare-bones Blackbox first, for a baseline of how blazingly fast a WM can be. Now try out the latest Enlightenment DR and scratch your head at why a huge feature-bloated monster like E could possibly be more responsive than Gnome. After that, give OSX a try. Strange, that runs on *nix too and doesn't suck so hard on similar hardware. A lot of people run Linux on Macbooks, its not that hard to compare really.
On top of that, you've got the instability ... the latest Fedora Gnome3 goes into never never land on me regularly and needs restarting "alt-f2, 'r', " all day ... jeez. Net benefit of using a Gnome shell? Negative. No feature benefits whatsoever over now-ancient shells and slower than most of them.
No, I don't use KDE to compare.
So you don't know how to use the 'parent' button under a post I take it?
Big quotes are unnecessary, both on USENET and here.
Sigh.
*snicker* ... cause I don't have mod points today lol
The math isn't even that hard once you realize how DLP works. DLP plus a huge version of an inkjet printer nozzle.
While I agree that we need xattr style metadata that describes the file in some circumstances, I think most use-cases are simply misunderstanding the concept of a proper file structure.
That said, it would be great to be able to do interesting things from the *nix command-line like:
cat somecomplexfile.dat}meta=text | grep somethinginteresting
Where "}" is a delimiter I invented that allows selection of subsections of a file.
A formatted data file with subsections and metadata can be a pain to manipulate with good old CLI tools, and being able to specify a subsection of that data to parse or manipulate while ignoring the rest would be quite nice.
If its security is important to you, you're fully capable of funding your own audit from a third party, either solo or as a group effort. Put together a requirements list, find out a price, and start asking others to chip in until you can afford it.
You're also free to Google for "OpenBSD exploit" and look at all the (very few) results for actual remote exploits.
OpenBSD has always had much more intelligent (secure) default settings for its installed services and packages than Linux or Windows, but I don't administer any OpenBSD boxes regularly myself because its a bit of a pain for day to day patches and updates compared to Linux. There's a trade-off to be made between security and hours available in the week.
I believe you misunderstand the concept of file streams.
Extensions are a form of file typing, like MIME is. The extension you mention above is just a part of the naming of the file. Streams are not (although can be accessed as such from applications that do not understand streams natively, such as notepad).
NTFS already has resource forks as well. Almost nobody uses them but they're there.
You could however make a law stating guaranteeing the freedoms ACTA takes away.
"... the right to circumvent any physical or digital provision designed to restrict access to media or data owned by the individual."
tl;dr
lol
I switched to E DR16 and then Blackbox for quite a while. A minimalist desktop that just lets me work is pretty awesome. The only thing I missed was Gnome applets. Now with Gnome 3, those are gone anyway so I'm not missing anything I suppose.
Which is so much easier than "open calendar" *tap new appointment* "Set my mother's router" *click time*
That's how long it takes me on Android.
I skipped the twice I have to click on the voice activation widget (once on the main screen, once on the keyboard), but its hardly relevant.
Do I think Siri is cool? Sure. I had almost exactly that functionality on my Newton MessagePads (by Apple) in the mid nineties. It was called 'assist' and I loved it. I still want assist back, and I want it text based (like it was then) not voice activated, so I can jot down commands without sharing them with the entire subway car. After all, I can click voice on the android keyboard any time I want to fill in text by voice anyway.