HD-DVD's DRM is about as onerous as DVDs. Less so, in fact, since they dropped the pesky region codes out of HD-DVD.
You make it sound like HD DVD's DRM is DVD minus region coding, which is far from the truth. First you have AACS, which like you said is optional in the HD DVD spec, however it's in there and no one is honestly expecting studios not to use it. It will be used for the majority of the releases, and like CSS before it, it will probably be thoroughly broken. This isn't much comfort however, since I still won't be able to watch the movies on my laptop running Linux legally. In the end I will probably be able to do it, but I'll still be a criminal (depending on where I live of course).
Then there's also the notion of the protected path. I don't know in which part of the spec this fits into, but no player will display an image unless it can be sure that the path between it and the display device is secure. Which I suspect is why I've yet to see a single review of a Blu-ray or HD DVD title that includes some proper screenshots as opposed to photos taken of the television screen. If this doesn't ring some alarm bells...
If you insist on falling for the "1080p is better" Sony marketing material, yeah, the player costs are the same.
Honestly, I can't see that much difference even between 720p and 1080p. But maybe it's due to my eyesight not being the best. It isn't the resolution that makes me want to watch movies in so-called HD anyway, it's the improved color depth and lack of compression artifacts I've seen in almost all HD titles I've sampled so far.
Actually, the Blu-Ray spec is finalized, according to the Blu-Ray folk.
I wasn't aware they finally finalized it. But my point was that, like you said, it wasn't finalized when the first players got released. So people who bought the hardware are going to get upset somewhere down the line.
Personally, I hope HD-DVD wins - it's a far more consumer friendly format.
I agree with the majority of what you said, HD DVD is _marginally_ better than Blu-ray when it comes to certain aspects. But personally I still think the consumer is getting a crappy deal no matter which one he ends up picking.
Exactly, choice is when you have several solutions open to you which are different from one another. In the end you can choose the one that best fits your needs and it'll be due to it offering a different range of functionality and/or due to it being priced differently.
When it comes to Blu-ray and HD-DVD they're _exactly_ the same once you get past the different specs.
Hi-def video? Check Hi-def/Lossless audio? Check Media price? Same Player price? Almost the same Onerous DRM? Check
Sure, there are some differences, but an average consumer isn't going to be worried about the Blu-ray spec not being finalized or the media storage space. Functionality and price are the same.
So no, HD DVD isn't an alternative to Blu-ray, it _is_ Blu-ray. And vice versa. All you have to "choose" from is who you want to see receive royalty payments.
And by the way... greedy, DRM loving companies are sadly the only reason I'm not enjoying the recently released, and lovingly restored, Blade Runner in HD. Fuck. you.
No, it not like that. GNU/Linux is a kernel and not a distribution, while Vista is a distribution.
Your analogy should be like Red Hat Capable, but then it does not work.
No, GNU/Linux is the combination of the GNU userland tools and the Linux kernel. A distribution is a combination of GNU/Linux and several other applications that run on top of it, all nicely packaged and ready to be used in a (hopefully) coherent manner.
In any case, Vista can be considered a term that applies to several different versions, or distributions if you want to call them that, of MS's operating system, of which there are five. All of these versions have different capabilities, even if the core of them stays the same. So to say that a computer is Vista capable is the same as saying that a computer is Linux capable. It doesn't mean much if you don't qualify this statement further with exactly what version of Vista or what distribution of Linux the "capable" part is referring to.
It seems that more and more often we're returning to the good old days of caveat emptor. In the past few months I've seen quite a few number of shady advertisements that, if not exactly illegal, certainly push the boundaries of the law.
Example: my cable company is running this huge ad campaign promising net access at X Mbps for $Y per month. Fantastic deal... until you read the fine print where it's stated that it's a time limited promotion and that after 6 months it's X/2 Mbps for $Y*2 per month, or something to that effect.
Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see and things have always been like this, but when MS starts arguing about the definition of "capable" and saying it's all explained in the fine print, it's a bit like saying "Well, you should have been more careful, you should have been aware of the fine print, it's all explained there." In other words, caveat emptor.
It's like labeling a PC "Linux Capable", someone buys it after reading all the articles about compiz and bling and rotating cubes, is ultimately disappointed, goes to the vendor and gets told that the computer they just purchased can clearly run BusyBox, a version of Linux.
Is/. using targeted ads now? I was reading this story using the RSS feed and the annoying embedded ad image proudly (and weirdly) announced:
"Using Tomcat but need to do more? Discover WebSphere Application Server."
Re:Release Candidate or Beta --what's the diff?
on
KDE 4.0 RC 1 Released
·
· Score: 1
Maybe someone can correct on this if I'm wrong. What makes this a Release Candidate and not a Beta?
While I agree that in the case of KDE 4.0 they are really abusing the RC moniker (and "Beta" before that), it kinda makes sense if you're not aiming for a stable and feature complete 4.0 release. Aaron Seigo has said many times that the development is already taking far too long, and at some point they have to put it out there for people to test or risk turning into another E17.
So a RC makes a kind of twisted sense since they're only aiming at getting KDE4 out the door so that people can start testing and building upon it. They shouldn't really be calling it a.0, which denotes a fairly stable release, but there you go.
Also, it has to be said, that the only part of KDE 4.0 that's still lagging behind and buggy as hell at this point is Plasma. Unfortunately this is also the most visible part of it, and most people will judge the entire package based on it. I fear it will alienate a lot of people who think that KDE 4.0 = KDE4.
Plus, they already have release parties scheduled, so a RC at this point is pretty much a necessity;)
I don't know about those other works you mentioned, but there are quite a few books published about the Tolkien universe that as far as I know have not been sanctioned by the Tolkien Estate, or whoever holds the rights. Two that I own and just quickly browsed over are "The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth" by Robert Foster and "The Atlas of Tolkien's Middle-Earth" by Karen Wynn Fonstad. I'm not sure how one should go about trying to determine if these works have been "sanctioned" or not, but they bear very little reference to anyone other than the respective authors.
Maybe you mean there is little evidence this sort of thing is common practice when there is vast amounts of money involved. Both of these works were published when there was still no mention of a LotR movie trilogy. So what has changed from say, 10 years ago, is not the letter of the law, it's simply that there are people making a lot more money from Tolkien's works.
Except for the fact, of course, that the player isn't really the issue, being the cheapest component in the entire equation. The real financial burden on people opting for either format right now is risking having their entire movie collection obsolete in a few years time, and if they want to continue watching them they'll have to buy them all over again on the 'winning' format.
Making backup copies for your own use falls well within fair use of the media you just bought. The only people who don't seem to think so are those who have been brainwashed by the media at large to think it's somehow a crime to safeguard your investment in a product that isn't exactly cheap.
But in any case not everyone keeps their media in a hallowed shrine, never to be touched by others, like you apparently do. People have friends, who sometimes also handle the media. I'm not going to be all prissy if someone leaves a fingerprint or a minor scratch on my games. But over time these start to add up.
There's also another instance where I always wish I could make backup copies. When I buy used games the disc media is sometimes in pretty bad shape, since everyone's definition of "cosmetic scratches" varies wildly. I've never had one that has outright failed, but I'd feel a lot better if I could transfer the data on the disc to a new one and use that instead.
Kroes personally negotiated with Microsoft President Steve Ballmer in a number of conversations including over a meal at a restaurant near her home town of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, she said. Wow, wow, what? Would this be the kind of restaurant that has a lot of, you know... *chairs* lying around?
Am I the only one who's slightly worried about getting on a plane sporting a few million dollar's worth of navigation systems which can be defeated by a $129.99 piece of consumer electronics? I mean, it's not like this is blown out of proportion is it?
Mandatory to implement, or mandatory to use? It's never mandatory to use, even if DRM gets implemented, unless you want to display protected content. So yes, I believe you could still display your desktop just fine. The software playing a movie, for example, would just refuse to do so if the whole path wasn't protected. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, I've never messed around with HDCP and hopefully never will.
My point, however, was that by being _mandatory_ to implement license fee requiring DRM on an otherwise license fee free spec, would give hardware manufacturers pause for thought. Profit margins on the hardware business are already razor thin without extra fees on top. I believe this is the reason HDMI hasn't really taken off with graphics cards manufacturers and the reason DisplayPort adoption will probably slow down if DRM becomes mandatory.
The bad news is that DisplayPort supports DRM. Both HDCP and DPCP (DisplayPort Content Protection). Like you said, it isn't mandatory yet, but future revisions of the standard will almost surely make it so, which is why I'm not in a hurry to upgrade.
So why not just use HDMI. Here DisplayPort has a huge advantage: it doesn't require licensing fees. This means that every manufacturer in China and Taiwan could implement this overnight.
However... implementing HDCP/DPCP does require a license fee, so if it becomes mandatory there will be a fee to pay anyway, thus negating the biggest advantage DisplayPort has over HDMI. Don't you just love DRM?
Probably the reason they went with a Twisted Metal sequel is to make easy money. This is the same with every publisher. After one title under their belt along with some slush funds, they can proceed with a creative/risky venture. OR... they realize people buy sequels and proceed with more of the same in order to generate even _more_ easy money. Risky venture, easy money, risky venture easy money... hmmmm I'm sure they'll have a really tough time deciding.
(doesn't apply to all developers, but definitely to most of them)
I'm trying really hard to think of a studio that accurately predicted the Wii's success and oriented themselves accordingly, it wasn't just EA. Proof of this is that after all this time after the launch there are still very few truly stellar games for the system apart from Nintendo's titles.
Instead they're all running around in a panic and screaming: "Titles for the Wii are coming, don't worry!". The problem is that this is a re-deployment of resources brought upon by the unexpected market share of a system, instead of that system's uniques features. Or in other words, it was a bean counter along the corporate hierarchy who said "Holy cow, this is thing is selling like hot cakes, we need games out NOW" instead of some developer taking a look at the cool new control system and saying "You know, I could really do something amazing with this" and proceeding to annoy bean counters to realize his idea.
The end result is that this first flood of titles is crap, taking very little advantage of the Wii's control system. Things will get worse before they get better, as was the case with the DS's early life cycle.
I don't see an problem with Microsoft banning people with DVD drives modified to play copied games. It makes it fair for the honest people who payed good money to play. I'm an honest person who has paid good money to play, I resent the implication that just because I make backup copies for personal use I'm a criminal and end up being locked out of a subset of the console's functionality.
"We have stated in the past that customers can only enjoy access to the Xbox LIVE community through the use of a genuine, unmodified, Xbox console and we will continue to enforce this rule to ensure the integrity of our service, the protection of our partners and the benefits of our users." I fail to see how a modification of a DVD drive will somehow make it less fair on the rest of the people who use an online service.
By the way, I don't even own an Xbox360, so I'm not whining Microsoft locked me out after having accepted their terms. However, I do consider that the ability to make backup copies falls under fair use of something I paid for, and which is unrelated (to anyone but Microsoft) to another service I might be purchasing from them (LIVE).
I also have a bad feeling about this. They could pull it off and turn the FF series on its head, turning it into something interesting and fresh, but given their recent history I'm somewhat worried.
Square's troubles began in 2001 with the awful FF: Spirits Within. It was supposed to be the greatest thing ever, but instead ended up costing Square so much money they had to resort to that tried and tested way of making money in the video games industry: recycle old content.
FF X-2 came along, and it was awful, then the merger with Enix which I suppose is also tied to Square's monetary woes, and finally Advent Children which is cast from the same mold as Spirits Within.. jaw dropping to look at, but not much substance.
Then the recent story about remakes and now this. It doesn't look too good in my humble opinion.
But there is an upside. In all likelihood we'll eventually see a remake of FF VII, which, as much as I hate recycling, I admit I'm curious to see.
Well, if you use your "main machine" only as a file server, then it isn't really your main machine anymore, is it?:)
I'm in a situation similar to yours. I've also used Slackware for as long as I've been using Linux and even though I've used all sorts of other distros, including SUSE at work, I keep coming back to it. I also use OS X heavily since my laptop is a Mac and I run pretty much the same set of tools there as I do in Slackware.
If you're comparing OS X to Linux in terms of desktop use (i.e. users who don't know, and don't want to know, what's going on under the hood) then obviously OS X wins hands down. Linux is slowly improving and I believe it will eventually reach the point where you mostly won't have to worry about that, but it will never be as good as OS X since the real added value Apple brings to their machines is that they also control the hardware OS X runs on.
If Linux only had to be installed in a very small set of hardware configurations I believe it would catch up to OS X very quickly.
I like OS X, I really do, but I'd never trade the flexibility a Linux machine provides me with for a little bit more ease of use. Not to mention you can have one up and running dirt cheap, but that's another matter.
Well, WEP has already been demonstrated to be _extremely_ insecure, up to the point of an attacker cracking the WEP key in minutes, which is exactly what gave rise to WPA/WPA2. It deters casual intrusion, nothing more, and it won't stop a determined attacker by any means.
As for MAC filtering, it's also pretty useless since it's almost trivial to spoof a MAC address. An attacker only has to listen to legitimate network traffic to determine an authorized MAC address and then spoof it. I don't even have it enabled on my access point.
Sorry to sound so dire, but WPA/WPA2 is really the only viable security measure:)
I think Nintendo might have been aiming for DS usage on public hotspots, rather than in secure networks.
This is probably on the top of my wish list too. I wonder how many people, like me, aren't willing to compromise the security of their home network by enabling WEP on them?
The wireless connection on the DS is nifty, but presently it's useless for the security conscious.
Hear, hear. I wish people (i.e. the media at large) would stop perpetuating the myth that DRM has something to do with preventing piracy.
Can you play DRM restricted tracks bought from iTunes on any player other than the iPod? No? Then DRM has achieved it purpose.
Personally both the 360 and PS3 hold no interest to me whatsoever, and I've been playing games since the heady days of Monkey Island and FF VI. Both of them have very strong corporate agendas behind them, and they don't include gaming (remember, the thing you buy a GAMES console for?)
Microsoft wants to push Windows and their own online services into the living room, and they're not exactly responsible in the way they approach business. Sony on the other hand wants to push Blu-ray, not to mention having a recent history of treating customers like criminals which doesn't bode well for the DRM side of things.
Not to say that Nintendo didn't have its share of monopoly leveraging going on in the late 80's when they were convicted of anti-competitive behaviour, but they've since been brought down by market forces and appear to have gained a new focus. Kinda like the IBM of today.
Maybe every company needs to be brought down every once in a while when they get too big and turn too greedy in order for them to remember why people liked their products in the first place.
So in short, it's the Revolution for me. It's likely to be cheap, doesn't come with DRM bundled, takes an innovative approach to the controller (we hope) and it's built for gaming, period. The alternative is more of the same along with questionable agendas which may, or may not be, in my best interest.
Why is it that you can walk up to any book store and pick up titles that were written centuries ago, or purchase movies that date as far back as 1912.. and yet you can't even play a game anymore that came out 5-7 years ago?
One might argue that it's due to technical reasons, butthat'snoexcuse is it?
Why do we find ourselves donating our precious time hacking away at emulators and virtual machines when it should be the people who made the games in the first place that should be supporting them? Does the game industry hold their own products in so little regard that it has already decided that future generations can't enjoy them?
Sure, there's the odd overpriced nostalgia pack put out every now and then, but that's just a drop in the ocean.
I actually consider this to be a pretty serious security risk for the reasons many others have already pointed out. The average user isn't going to change the password, or mess with port forwarding, let alone upgrade the firmware.
The sad truth is that linksys has gone down the drain since being acquired by Cisco. I own a BEFSX41 and for the past 3 or 4 firmware revisions things have been constantly broken. Either various yahoo services just plain don't work, DynDNS support was broken at one point, VPN tunnels having a tendency to drop and the unit itself prone to various (seemingly) random reboots. This wasn't the fault of one faulty firmware revision, these were all problems that kept cropping up on successive firmware releases to the point that I had to skip a few of them and their much needed security fixes just to keep something working. They'll fix something only to have broken something else in the process.
If this remote admin issue is specific to one firmware release, which according to some it is, then I'm assuming the WRT54G is just another victim of whatever faulty firmware submission process linksys has implemented internally.
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You make it sound like HD DVD's DRM is DVD minus region coding, which is far from the truth. First you have AACS, which like you said is optional in the HD DVD spec, however it's in there and no one is honestly expecting studios not to use it. It will be used for the majority of the releases, and like CSS before it, it will probably be thoroughly broken. This isn't much comfort however, since I still won't be able to watch the movies on my laptop running Linux legally. In the end I will probably be able to do it, but I'll still be a criminal (depending on where I live of course).
Then there's also the notion of the protected path. I don't know in which part of the spec this fits into, but no player will display an image unless it can be sure that the path between it and the display device is secure. Which I suspect is why I've yet to see a single review of a Blu-ray or HD DVD title that includes some proper screenshots as opposed to photos taken of the television screen. If this doesn't ring some alarm bells...
Honestly, I can't see that much difference even between 720p and 1080p. But maybe it's due to my eyesight not being the best. It isn't the resolution that makes me want to watch movies in so-called HD anyway, it's the improved color depth and lack of compression artifacts I've seen in almost all HD titles I've sampled so far.
I wasn't aware they finally finalized it. But my point was that, like you said, it wasn't finalized when the first players got released. So people who bought the hardware are going to get upset somewhere down the line.
I agree with the majority of what you said, HD DVD is _marginally_ better than Blu-ray when it comes to certain aspects. But personally I still think the consumer is getting a crappy deal no matter which one he ends up picking.
Exactly, choice is when you have several solutions open to you which are different from one another. In the end you can choose the one that best fits your needs and it'll be due to it offering a different range of functionality and/or due to it being priced differently.
When it comes to Blu-ray and HD-DVD they're _exactly_ the same once you get past the different specs.
Hi-def video? Check
Hi-def/Lossless audio? Check
Media price? Same
Player price? Almost the same
Onerous DRM? Check
Sure, there are some differences, but an average consumer isn't going to be worried about the Blu-ray spec not being finalized or the media storage space. Functionality and price are the same.
So no, HD DVD isn't an alternative to Blu-ray, it _is_ Blu-ray. And vice versa. All you have to "choose" from is who you want to see receive royalty payments.
And by the way... greedy, DRM loving companies are sadly the only reason I'm not enjoying the recently released, and lovingly restored, Blade Runner in HD. Fuck. you.
No, GNU/Linux is the combination of the GNU userland tools and the Linux kernel. A distribution is a combination of GNU/Linux and several other applications that run on top of it, all nicely packaged and ready to be used in a (hopefully) coherent manner.
In any case, Vista can be considered a term that applies to several different versions, or distributions if you want to call them that, of MS's operating system, of which there are five. All of these versions have different capabilities, even if the core of them stays the same. So to say that a computer is Vista capable is the same as saying that a computer is Linux capable. It doesn't mean much if you don't qualify this statement further with exactly what version of Vista or what distribution of Linux the "capable" part is referring to.
It seems that more and more often we're returning to the good old days of caveat emptor. In the past few months I've seen quite a few number of shady advertisements that, if not exactly illegal, certainly push the boundaries of the law.
Example: my cable company is running this huge ad campaign promising net access at X Mbps for $Y per month. Fantastic deal... until you read the fine print where it's stated that it's a time limited promotion and that after 6 months it's X/2 Mbps for $Y*2 per month, or something to that effect.
Maybe I'm just seeing what I want to see and things have always been like this, but when MS starts arguing about the definition of "capable" and saying it's all explained in the fine print, it's a bit like saying "Well, you should have been more careful, you should have been aware of the fine print, it's all explained there." In other words, caveat emptor.
It's like labeling a PC "Linux Capable", someone buys it after reading all the articles about compiz and bling and rotating cubes, is ultimately disappointed, goes to the vendor and gets told that the computer they just purchased can clearly run BusyBox, a version of Linux.
Is /. using targeted ads now? I was reading this story using the RSS feed and the annoying embedded ad image proudly (and weirdly) announced:
"Using Tomcat but need to do more? Discover WebSphere Application Server."
While I agree that in the case of KDE 4.0 they are really abusing the RC moniker (and "Beta" before that), it kinda makes sense if you're not aiming for a stable and feature complete 4.0 release. Aaron Seigo has said many times that the development is already taking far too long, and at some point they have to put it out there for people to test or risk turning into another E17.
So a RC makes a kind of twisted sense since they're only aiming at getting KDE4 out the door so that people can start testing and building upon it. They shouldn't really be calling it a .0, which denotes a fairly stable release, but there you go.
Also, it has to be said, that the only part of KDE 4.0 that's still lagging behind and buggy as hell at this point is Plasma. Unfortunately this is also the most visible part of it, and most people will judge the entire package based on it. I fear it will alienate a lot of people who think that KDE 4.0 = KDE4.
Plus, they already have release parties scheduled, so a RC at this point is pretty much a necessity ;)
I don't know about those other works you mentioned, but there are quite a few books published about the Tolkien universe that as far as I know have not been sanctioned by the Tolkien Estate, or whoever holds the rights. Two that I own and just quickly browsed over are "The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth" by Robert Foster and "The Atlas of Tolkien's Middle-Earth" by Karen Wynn Fonstad. I'm not sure how one should go about trying to determine if these works have been "sanctioned" or not, but they bear very little reference to anyone other than the respective authors.
Maybe you mean there is little evidence this sort of thing is common practice when there is vast amounts of money involved. Both of these works were published when there was still no mention of a LotR movie trilogy. So what has changed from say, 10 years ago, is not the letter of the law, it's simply that there are people making a lot more money from Tolkien's works.
Except for the fact, of course, that the player isn't really the issue, being the cheapest component in the entire equation. The real financial burden on people opting for either format right now is risking having their entire movie collection obsolete in a few years time, and if they want to continue watching them they'll have to buy them all over again on the 'winning' format.
Making backup copies for your own use falls well within fair use of the media you just bought. The only people who don't seem to think so are those who have been brainwashed by the media at large to think it's somehow a crime to safeguard your investment in a product that isn't exactly cheap.
But in any case not everyone keeps their media in a hallowed shrine, never to be touched by others, like you apparently do. People have friends, who sometimes also handle the media. I'm not going to be all prissy if someone leaves a fingerprint or a minor scratch on my games. But over time these start to add up.
There's also another instance where I always wish I could make backup copies. When I buy used games the disc media is sometimes in pretty bad shape, since everyone's definition of "cosmetic scratches" varies wildly. I've never had one that has outright failed, but I'd feel a lot better if I could transfer the data on the disc to a new one and use that instead.
Miss Kroes, I salute you.
Am I the only one who's slightly worried about getting on a plane sporting a few million dollar's worth of navigation systems which can be defeated by a $129.99 piece of consumer electronics? I mean, it's not like this is blown out of proportion is it?
My point, however, was that by being _mandatory_ to implement license fee requiring DRM on an otherwise license fee free spec, would give hardware manufacturers pause for thought. Profit margins on the hardware business are already razor thin without extra fees on top. I believe this is the reason HDMI hasn't really taken off with graphics cards manufacturers and the reason DisplayPort adoption will probably slow down if DRM becomes mandatory.
However... implementing HDCP/DPCP does require a license fee, so if it becomes mandatory there will be a fee to pay anyway, thus negating the biggest advantage DisplayPort has over HDMI. Don't you just love DRM?
(doesn't apply to all developers, but definitely to most of them)
I'm trying really hard to think of a studio that accurately predicted the Wii's success and oriented themselves accordingly, it wasn't just EA. Proof of this is that after all this time after the launch there are still very few truly stellar games for the system apart from Nintendo's titles.
Instead they're all running around in a panic and screaming: "Titles for the Wii are coming, don't worry!". The problem is that this is a re-deployment of resources brought upon by the unexpected market share of a system, instead of that system's uniques features. Or in other words, it was a bean counter along the corporate hierarchy who said "Holy cow, this is thing is selling like hot cakes, we need games out NOW" instead of some developer taking a look at the cool new control system and saying "You know, I could really do something amazing with this" and proceeding to annoy bean counters to realize his idea.
The end result is that this first flood of titles is crap, taking very little advantage of the Wii's control system. Things will get worse before they get better, as was the case with the DS's early life cycle.
By the way, I don't even own an Xbox360, so I'm not whining Microsoft locked me out after having accepted their terms. However, I do consider that the ability to make backup copies falls under fair use of something I paid for, and which is unrelated (to anyone but Microsoft) to another service I might be purchasing from them (LIVE).
I also have a bad feeling about this. They could pull it off and turn the FF series on its head, turning it into something interesting and fresh, but given their recent history I'm somewhat worried.
Square's troubles began in 2001 with the awful FF: Spirits Within. It was supposed to be the greatest thing ever, but instead ended up costing Square so much money they had to resort to that tried and tested way of making money in the video games industry: recycle old content.
FF X-2 came along, and it was awful, then the merger with Enix which I suppose is also tied to Square's monetary woes, and finally Advent Children which is cast from the same mold as Spirits Within.. jaw dropping to look at, but not much substance.
Then the recent story about remakes and now this. It doesn't look too good in my humble opinion.
But there is an upside. In all likelihood we'll eventually see a remake of FF VII, which, as much as I hate recycling, I admit I'm curious to see.
Exactly the opposite for me, I have a Powerbook G4 and consider its keyboard among the best I've ever used (Thinkpads are also nice).
;)
As for the room being cold, there's an easy solution for that:
1. Turn on the Macbook Pro in there
2. Open a terminal
3. Run "openssl speed"
4. Enjoy your new tropical climate
Well, if you use your "main machine" only as a file server, then it isn't really your main machine anymore, is it? :)
I'm in a situation similar to yours. I've also used Slackware for as long as I've been using Linux and even though I've used all sorts of other distros, including SUSE at work, I keep coming back to it. I also use OS X heavily since my laptop is a Mac and I run pretty much the same set of tools there as I do in Slackware.
If you're comparing OS X to Linux in terms of desktop use (i.e. users who don't know, and don't want to know, what's going on under the hood) then obviously OS X wins hands down. Linux is slowly improving and I believe it will eventually reach the point where you mostly won't have to worry about that, but it will never be as good as OS X since the real added value Apple brings to their machines is that they also control the hardware OS X runs on.
If Linux only had to be installed in a very small set of hardware configurations I believe it would catch up to OS X very quickly.
I like OS X, I really do, but I'd never trade the flexibility a Linux machine provides me with for a little bit more ease of use. Not to mention you can have one up and running dirt cheap, but that's another matter.
Well, WEP has already been demonstrated to be _extremely_ insecure, up to the point of an attacker cracking the WEP key in minutes, which is exactly what gave rise to WPA/WPA2. It deters casual intrusion, nothing more, and it won't stop a determined attacker by any means.
:)
As for MAC filtering, it's also pretty useless since it's almost trivial to spoof a MAC address. An attacker only has to listen to legitimate network traffic to determine an authorized MAC address and then spoof it. I don't even have it enabled on my access point.
Sorry to sound so dire, but WPA/WPA2 is really the only viable security measure
I think Nintendo might have been aiming for DS usage on public hotspots, rather than in secure networks.
This is probably on the top of my wish list too. I wonder how many people, like me, aren't willing to compromise the security of their home network by enabling WEP on them?
The wireless connection on the DS is nifty, but presently it's useless for the security conscious.
Hear, hear. I wish people (i.e. the media at large) would stop perpetuating the myth that DRM has something to do with preventing piracy. Can you play DRM restricted tracks bought from iTunes on any player other than the iPod? No? Then DRM has achieved it purpose.
Personally both the 360 and PS3 hold no interest to me whatsoever, and I've been playing games since the heady days of Monkey Island and FF VI. Both of them have very strong corporate agendas behind them, and they don't include gaming (remember, the thing you buy a GAMES console for?)
Microsoft wants to push Windows and their own online services into the living room, and they're not exactly responsible in the way they approach business. Sony on the other hand wants to push Blu-ray, not to mention having a recent history of treating customers like criminals which doesn't bode well for the DRM side of things.
Not to say that Nintendo didn't have its share of monopoly leveraging going on in the late 80's when they were convicted of anti-competitive behaviour, but they've since been brought down by market forces and appear to have gained a new focus. Kinda like the IBM of today.
Maybe every company needs to be brought down every once in a while when they get too big and turn too greedy in order for them to remember why people liked their products in the first place.
So in short, it's the Revolution for me. It's likely to be cheap, doesn't come with DRM bundled, takes an innovative approach to the controller (we hope) and it's built for gaming, period. The alternative is more of the same along with questionable agendas which may, or may not be, in my best interest.
Why is it that you can walk up to any book store and pick up titles that were written centuries ago, or purchase movies that date as far back as 1912.. and yet you can't even play a game anymore that came out 5-7 years ago?
One might argue that it's due to technical reasons, but that's no excuse is it?
Why do we find ourselves donating our precious time hacking away at emulators and virtual machines when it should be the people who made the games in the first place that should be supporting them? Does the game industry hold their own products in so little regard that it has already decided that future generations can't enjoy them?
Sure, there's the odd overpriced nostalgia pack put out every now and then, but that's just a drop in the ocean.
I actually consider this to be a pretty serious security risk for the reasons many others have already pointed out. The average user isn't going to change the password, or mess with port forwarding, let alone upgrade the firmware.
The sad truth is that linksys has gone down the drain since being acquired by Cisco. I own a BEFSX41 and for the past 3 or 4 firmware revisions things have been constantly broken. Either various yahoo services just plain don't work, DynDNS support was broken at one point, VPN tunnels having a tendency to drop and the unit itself prone to various (seemingly) random reboots. This wasn't the fault of one faulty firmware revision, these were all problems that kept cropping up on successive firmware releases to the point that I had to skip a few of them and their much needed security fixes just to keep something working. They'll fix something only to have broken something else in the process.
If this remote admin issue is specific to one firmware release, which according to some it is, then I'm assuming the WRT54G is just another victim of whatever faulty firmware submission process linksys has implemented internally.