Bricking didn't originate with iPhone jailbreaking and has been around for considerably longer. I can remember encountering the term for the first time while tinkering with a Linksys WRT-54g back in 2003 and it was already old by then.
Just because the iPhone can be bricked doesn't mean Apple invented the brick!
Third party 2Gb SD cards work fine already on the Wii. I have a San Disk Extreme II 2Gb card and it works fine - the only cards that don't work are SDHC cards (which Nintendo have never said they would support).
Regardless of how fast your SD card is the controller in the Wii is painfully slow. Hopefully what Nintendo means by "dramatically easier" copying is some firmware tweaks that improve the transfer rate to something half decent.
It's not their fault that Microsoft and Nintendo won't support them.
Erm it is their fault that Microsoft and Nintendo won't support them in exactly the same way that the reverse is true. All games consoles have propriatory lockouts, encryption, patents and a barage of high paid lawyers protecting them.
All console manufacturers viciously protect their technology and will crush any third party that makes a device to play their games (remember Bleem?).
Breach of the peace also applies in England and is equally 'elastic'. The current favourite by police at the moment (especially the PSCO wannabe cops) is the Terrorism Act 2006 which can be very easily stretched to include pretty much anything. I'm surprised that this stunt didn't get flagged up as suspicious (aka terrorist) behaviour.
Kudos to these guys for pulling this off though. How they managed to set up a drum kit on one of the Metrolink trams and on the travelator in Sainsbury's supermarket in Fallowfield (which is at a 45 degree angle!) is crazy.
Not wanting to rain on your parade or anything but just because a platform has Java on it doesn't mean that it will run Eclipse. Eclipse uses SWT which uses JNI calls to the underlying window manager - this JNI code needs to be ported to the OS before you can run Eclipse.
You can still run Eclipse on far more platforms than VS...
The problem with sending attachments through email is that email attachments use MIME which usual ends up using Base64 encoding. This results in a significant overhead (37% being a typical figure) that you wouldn't get for using alternative protocols (http/ftp).
It's another example of a fairly simple protocol being extended to handle things that it wasn't originally meant to - The original email specs were for 7bit ASCII text so all email data must be transferred as 7bit ASCII.
I use the latest version of Eclipse (Europa aka 3.3) at work with fairly large projects on similar hardware. With on the fly compilation running there is minimal slowdown. The only times that there is real slowdown is when I do a large refactoring on a project.
The speed of on the fly compilation in Eclipse does owe a lot to the built in incremental compiler which is blisteringly fast (for a compiler).
Not to mention. We don't even use the same GSM frequencies. I don't know if that's because what the FCC decided to open up, but you can't even bring over a phone from the Europe because it won't work on our frequencies.
The frequency issue isn't an issue any more. The majority of European phones are now tri or quad band and will work with the US frequencies.
This is one of the most sensible posts I have seen on freedom for a long time.
The fundamental part of freedom that people do not understand is that freedom restricts people. Every bit of 'freedom' that is granted to one person results in a restriction to someone. The freedom to live without fear of being attacked places the restriction on other people that they cannot attack you.
Many people confuse freedom with anarchy. I use anarchy here to mean a state where there is no government or enforcement of rules (not chaos as some people believe). It is impossible to have a state of 100% freedom and it is also impossible to have freedom without imposing limitations.
Bond most likely isn't going to happen since Rare is owned by Microsoft now.
What is worse is that the Bond franchise is owned by EA. So even if Nintendo got permission from Microsoft (which is possible considering Rare are still releasing GBA/DS games), they would still need to get permission from EA...
Assuming that the new "Griffin" processor is anything like the old Turions then there should be nothing stopping you building a media PC around the new technology. I'm currently in the process of building a media PC myself around a Turion MT37 (2GHz Athlon 64 with 1MB cache) that used to live in an old laptop.
A better solution is to pick an easy to remember phrase or quote, take the first letter of each word and then jig it around a bit.
An example of this would be taking the line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" from Wilred Owen's poem. This could be converted into the password Ded&ppM!
As long as you pick a memorable phrase and you use semi-intelligent substitution for non-alphanumeric character, you will have a strong password that is resistant to dictionary attacks and easy to remember.
What I want to know is when will we actually see any benefits from this?
From TFA:
Tamarin is expected to make its Mozilla debut with Mozilla 2. Mozilla 2 is not actually a product release but is the version of the underlying framework. Mozilla 2 is not expected to be ready by 2008 at the earliest. Firefox 3 will be based on the Mozilla 1.9 framework, it is not sure at this time which Firefox release will use the Mozilla 2 framework.
So we have FX 3 being based on Mozilla 1.9 which means it will most likely be at least FX 3.5/4 (depending on the naming convention). Which means there isn't going to be a release that uses this until sometime between the tail end of 2008 and 2010.
I know there is going to be some serious amount of work involved but 2-4 years? That's a lot of technology advances...
This strikes me as a really bad sign. Sony has given developers 25Gb of storage and they are filling it already - This implies to me that either developers are being lax about how much space their games require or Sony is forcing them to use inefficient data formats.
Developers have 3 times the amount of storage on a disc than the previous generation (over 20 times if you count the gamecube). Some of the biggest games on the original Xbox were nowhere near the 9Gb limit, IIRC Morrowind was a mere 5Gb.
I don't know what the data rate is on the BluRay drives in the PS3 but no matter how high they are there's going to be serious amounts of loading from disc. If all this space is just for high def cut scenes then it isn't too bad.. but isn't the PS3 meant to be the death of this practice due to it's enormous power?
Well it's certainly like the PSP interface. Which is good and bad. It means that it's going to be pretty easy to use but it seems a bit underwelming considering the power of the PS3, especially if it's true that one of the Cell SPUs are dedicated to running the GUI...
The pop up menu during games seems a poor to me - white icons on a screen without a frame or background? I can see that being an issue with some games.
...City analysts believe could wipe billions off the market value of operators such as Vodafone.
Right... just like the PocketPC version of Skype did... this stuff only works reliably (well.. kinda...) over WiFi which limits you to your home, internet cafes, random unsecured WiFi points (not that I condone wardriving or any other illegal use of other peoples access points) and (for those who are lucky) WiFi enabled metropolitan areas. Now where is it that most people use there mobile phones? I think you'll find that the majority of calls are made where there is no WiFi connectivity. I know that most of the time I'm away from an access point, and yes I do have a Windows Mobile PocketPC Edition device that has Skype on it.
I'm not too sure on the business model that the US mobile operators use but in the UK a large chunk of the revenue comes from line rental with most calls being made with inclusive minutes (there are 'Pay as you Go' plans but I've yet to find a PocketPC phone on these plans yet). Mobile operators aren't going to give a monkey's if you use Skype or your free minutes, they already have your money. The only real threat is from the PocketPC PDAs (the non-phone ones) that aren't linked to a mobile network and generate no revenue for mobile operators.
And as a side note - last time I checked Vodafone don't sell any Windows Mobile powered devices (at least in the UK) so they aren't really going to be affected by this unless everyone jumps ship to another operator.
Developers want to get on developing titles for the 360 not mucking around with XBox titles
Assuming something silly like 5% of a game is binaries or nVidia specific - 5% of say 6Gb is going to be in the region of 300Mb multiply this up by say a dozen games and you're suddenly up to 3 or 4Gb of storage just for binaries. And remember this has to be downloaded via XBL...
Going down the recompile route is not feasible. Developers won't take the time to port games and you end up with a logistical nightmare when trying to distribute the ports. And then you still have to deal with the issue of shoddy ports - and yes these will happen.
The only choices are either extra hardware or emulation.
RENTAMARK.COM offers it expert services to any third party who may be engaged in trademark litigation and needs a trademark expert to testify to damages, likelihood of confusion and/or to prepare a survey.
Oh how I want someone who is being litigated to try to use their service!
You say that the American(?) rating system is to simple and that a single letter is not enough to show parents why they might or might not want their kids to play a game. In the UK and most of Europe the PEGI rating system (http://www.pegi.info/) is used which gives games an age rating (3+, 7+, 12+, 16+ and 18+) as well as having icons to show the reason for the classification - violence, sex, drugs etc. An example of this would be Halo which has 16+ & "Violence" ratings.
In the UK certain games are also classified by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in a similar manner to films, for games namely 12, 15 and 18. While the PEGI ratings are merely for guidance the BBFC ratings are legally enforced by large fines and prison terms.
From personal experience of working in a shop selling computer games I can say that both systems categorically DO NOT WORK! The PEGI system is ignored by almost everyone as they feel that if a game was bad it would have a BBFC rating and many parents don't seem to take an 18 BBFC rating seriously. A typical response when you inform a parent of the content of the game is that their kids have already played it round a mates house.
A classic example of this happened last week when a customer was looking for a game for their daughter and had asked whether the Playboy game would be suitable as they enjoyed the Sims. After telling the customer the nature of the game they decided that it wouldn't be suitable so picked up a copy of GTA: San Andreas(!), after telling the customer that you can go round shooting hookers in the game they turned round and said that they were not fussed as the daughter played it regually at a friend's house.
The main issue at the moment is not the ratings systems themselves, it is the way that violent games are constantly advertised in all forms of media ranging from magazines to TV and even on the sides of buses (at least in the UK). Kids are constantly being bombarded with advertising for violent games and are putting pressure on parents who are either ignorant to the content, don't care about the content or both. Once one kid has a copy of certain game, their friends will play it and so the pressure moves on to another parent and so on.
While I am not against violent or adult games parents need to start becoming aware of the issues at stake and start listening to the advice (and regulations!) about game content.
As long as you abide by the license of the code, you can do that. Open source and all that...
I might be wrong but I'm not convinced that they are fully abiding by the license agreement. To quote the Mozilla Public Licence:
Any Modification which You create or to which You contribute must be made available in Source Code form under the terms of this License either on the same media as an Executable version or via an accepted Electronic Distribution Mechanism to anyone to whom you made an Executable version available
Now looking at the licence agreement for downloading Netscape 8 you find this statement:
19. USE AND AVAILABILITY OF OPEN SOURCE CODE. Portions of the Browser were created using Firefox source code from the Mozilla Foundation....The version of the Firefox source code modified by Netscape is also available from the Mozilla Foundation and via FTP from Netscape, and its use is also governed by the MPL.
Now I've looked at ftp.netscape.com and ftp.mozilla.org and I can't find any source code to do with Netscape. Now is it Netscape being lazy, them flaunting the agreement or have I overlooked some hidden public ftp site where this is published?
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Bricking didn't originate with iPhone jailbreaking and has been around for considerably longer. I can remember encountering the term for the first time while tinkering with a Linksys WRT-54g back in 2003 and it was already old by then.
Just because the iPhone can be bricked doesn't mean Apple invented the brick!
Third party 2Gb SD cards work fine already on the Wii. I have a San Disk Extreme II 2Gb card and it works fine - the only cards that don't work are SDHC cards (which Nintendo have never said they would support).
Regardless of how fast your SD card is the controller in the Wii is painfully slow. Hopefully what Nintendo means by "dramatically easier" copying is some firmware tweaks that improve the transfer rate to something half decent.
With most DVDs you couldn't hook up a video recorder to your DVD player as the discs were protected using Macrovision as well as CSS.
It's not their fault that Microsoft and Nintendo won't support them.
Erm it is their fault that Microsoft and Nintendo won't support them in exactly the same way that the reverse is true. All games consoles have propriatory lockouts, encryption, patents and a barage of high paid lawyers protecting them.
All console manufacturers viciously protect their technology and will crush any third party that makes a device to play their games (remember Bleem?).
Breach of the peace also applies in England and is equally 'elastic'. The current favourite by police at the moment (especially the PSCO wannabe cops) is the Terrorism Act 2006 which can be very easily stretched to include pretty much anything. I'm surprised that this stunt didn't get flagged up as suspicious (aka terrorist) behaviour.
Kudos to these guys for pulling this off though. How they managed to set up a drum kit on one of the Metrolink trams and on the travelator in Sainsbury's supermarket in Fallowfield (which is at a 45 degree angle!) is crazy.
Not wanting to rain on your parade or anything but just because a platform has Java on it doesn't mean that it will run Eclipse. Eclipse uses SWT which uses JNI calls to the underlying window manager - this JNI code needs to be ported to the OS before you can run Eclipse.
You can still run Eclipse on far more platforms than VS...
OpenSSH can be hacked to use the hardware encryption engines using instructions on this site: http://www.logix.cz/michal/devel/padlock/index.xp? show_selected=1&msgid=407.
I've done this in the past when I used to run Gentoo on an Epia MII. Combined with the XvMC support it was a cracking MythTV/mini server.
The problem with sending attachments through email is that email attachments use MIME which usual ends up using Base64 encoding. This results in a significant overhead (37% being a typical figure) that you wouldn't get for using alternative protocols (http/ftp).
It's another example of a fairly simple protocol being extended to handle things that it wasn't originally meant to - The original email specs were for 7bit ASCII text so all email data must be transferred as 7bit ASCII.
I use the latest version of Eclipse (Europa aka 3.3) at work with fairly large projects on similar hardware. With on the fly compilation running there is minimal slowdown. The only times that there is real slowdown is when I do a large refactoring on a project.
The speed of on the fly compilation in Eclipse does owe a lot to the built in incremental compiler which is blisteringly fast (for a compiler).
This is one of the most sensible posts I have seen on freedom for a long time.
The fundamental part of freedom that people do not understand is that freedom restricts people. Every bit of 'freedom' that is granted to one person results in a restriction to someone. The freedom to live without fear of being attacked places the restriction on other people that they cannot attack you.
Many people confuse freedom with anarchy. I use anarchy here to mean a state where there is no government or enforcement of rules (not chaos as some people believe). It is impossible to have a state of 100% freedom and it is also impossible to have freedom without imposing limitations.
Assuming that the new "Griffin" processor is anything like the old Turions then there should be nothing stopping you building a media PC around the new technology. I'm currently in the process of building a media PC myself around a Turion MT37 (2GHz Athlon 64 with 1MB cache) that used to live in an old laptop.
A better solution is to pick an easy to remember phrase or quote, take the first letter of each word and then jig it around a bit.
An example of this would be taking the line "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" from Wilred Owen's poem. This could be converted into the password Ded&ppM!
As long as you pick a memorable phrase and you use semi-intelligent substitution for non-alphanumeric character, you will have a strong password that is resistant to dictionary attacks and easy to remember.
Now all we need is somebody to connect a KVM (switch) to a KVM (virtualisation) machine that's running a KVM (Java KVM)!
I just know that someone is going to comment on KVM overlords soon...
What I want to know is when will we actually see any benefits from this?
From TFA:
So we have FX 3 being based on Mozilla 1.9 which means it will most likely be at least FX 3.5/4 (depending on the naming convention). Which means there isn't going to be a release that uses this until sometime between the tail end of 2008 and 2010.
I know there is going to be some serious amount of work involved but 2-4 years? That's a lot of technology advances...
I currently have 10 windows open (in Windows sadly) which include the following:
So does that count as 10? or would 40 be a more realistic number?
The number of windows open can be a misleading metric as a window can be a single function or it could be a highly complex IDE or even another OS!
This strikes me as a really bad sign. Sony has given developers 25Gb of storage and they are filling it already - This implies to me that either developers are being lax about how much space their games require or Sony is forcing them to use inefficient data formats.
Developers have 3 times the amount of storage on a disc than the previous generation (over 20 times if you count the gamecube). Some of the biggest games on the original Xbox were nowhere near the 9Gb limit, IIRC Morrowind was a mere 5Gb.
I don't know what the data rate is on the BluRay drives in the PS3 but no matter how high they are there's going to be serious amounts of loading from disc. If all this space is just for high def cut scenes then it isn't too bad.. but isn't the PS3 meant to be the death of this practice due to it's enormous power?
The pop up menu during games seems a poor to me - white icons on a screen without a frame or background? I can see that being an issue with some games.
Right... just like the PocketPC version of Skype did... this stuff only works reliably (well.. kinda...) over WiFi which limits you to your home, internet cafes, random unsecured WiFi points (not that I condone wardriving or any other illegal use of other peoples access points) and (for those who are lucky) WiFi enabled metropolitan areas. Now where is it that most people use there mobile phones? I think you'll find that the majority of calls are made where there is no WiFi connectivity. I know that most of the time I'm away from an access point, and yes I do have a Windows Mobile PocketPC Edition device that has Skype on it.
I'm not too sure on the business model that the US mobile operators use but in the UK a large chunk of the revenue comes from line rental with most calls being made with inclusive minutes (there are 'Pay as you Go' plans but I've yet to find a PocketPC phone on these plans yet). Mobile operators aren't going to give a monkey's if you use Skype or your free minutes, they already have your money. The only real threat is from the PocketPC PDAs (the non-phone ones) that aren't linked to a mobile network and generate no revenue for mobile operators.
And as a side note - last time I checked Vodafone don't sell any Windows Mobile powered devices (at least in the UK) so they aren't really going to be affected by this unless everyone jumps ship to another operator.
This ain't gonna happen, for 2 main reasons:
Going down the recompile route is not feasible. Developers won't take the time to port games and you end up with a logistical nightmare when trying to distribute the ports. And then you still have to deal with the issue of shoddy ports - and yes these will happen.
The only choices are either extra hardware or emulation.
Anyone want to make use of their "Expert Witness" services? http://rentamark.com/Expert_Witness/expert_witness .html/
Oh how I want someone who is being litigated to try to use their service!
You say that the American(?) rating system is to simple and that a single letter is not enough to show parents why they might or might not want their kids to play a game. In the UK and most of Europe the PEGI rating system (http://www.pegi.info/) is used which gives games an age rating (3+, 7+, 12+, 16+ and 18+) as well as having icons to show the reason for the classification - violence, sex, drugs etc. An example of this would be Halo which has 16+ & "Violence" ratings.
In the UK certain games are also classified by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) in a similar manner to films, for games namely 12, 15 and 18. While the PEGI ratings are merely for guidance the BBFC ratings are legally enforced by large fines and prison terms.
From personal experience of working in a shop selling computer games I can say that both systems categorically DO NOT WORK! The PEGI system is ignored by almost everyone as they feel that if a game was bad it would have a BBFC rating and many parents don't seem to take an 18 BBFC rating seriously. A typical response when you inform a parent of the content of the game is that their kids have already played it round a mates house.
A classic example of this happened last week when a customer was looking for a game for their daughter and had asked whether the Playboy game would be suitable as they enjoyed the Sims. After telling the customer the nature of the game they decided that it wouldn't be suitable so picked up a copy of GTA: San Andreas(!), after telling the customer that you can go round shooting hookers in the game they turned round and said that they were not fussed as the daughter played it regually at a friend's house.
The main issue at the moment is not the ratings systems themselves, it is the way that violent games are constantly advertised in all forms of media ranging from magazines to TV and even on the sides of buses (at least in the UK). Kids are constantly being bombarded with advertising for violent games and are putting pressure on parents who are either ignorant to the content, don't care about the content or both. Once one kid has a copy of certain game, their friends will play it and so the pressure moves on to another parent and so on.
While I am not against violent or adult games parents need to start becoming aware of the issues at stake and start listening to the advice (and regulations!) about game content.
I also noticed this during the installer - http://img11.echo.cx/my.php?image=netscape7qx.png Which gave me a good laugh!