TFA explained that the update tended to stop the affected units from doing anything useful - eg. playing games, connecting to the Internet. Which I'm sure does have the side effect that installing an alternate OS will no longer work, but I don't think this is quite how most people interpreted Sony's original description.
The article says that is the case for people who have not installed the update. That has been the case every time Sony releases an update (apart from a couple of non essential updates such as the one that updated the slideshow facility). It is not news.
The only real bit of news in there is that some people are experiencing infinite loops in the update process, which does suck.
It's fine if you want to play games. And the update is required if you want to play online games.
Both my and my flatmate's PS3 went through the update with no problems. It only becomes a "very expensive doorstop" if you don't use it to play games, or watch DVDs and blu-rays, the article is a bit flamebaitish because we already knew this would happen, and the update has a page which specifically informs you about the removal of the Other OS feature and then confirms (I think twice) that you really want to go through with it.
Anyone else will be unable to see what good can come of this, and they will continue to make whatever jokes they can about the iProduct (in the case of the iPad, perhaps a bunch of one-liner puns about menstruation).
Psht. We're all gentlemen here. Nobody on Slashdot would ever sink to such lows. That's the end of it. Argument over. Period.
First, it takes a couple of days for the CD to arrive unless I pay extra for postage. That by itself is most of the reason, given that I do pretty much all my shopping apart from food shopping at Amazon - it's pretty much always cheaper than going to a "real" shop. Secondly, I don't even have a CD drive on my netbook - which is my primary computer both at home and work - so I have to plug in an external CD drive to even use a CD, and also I have to have a CD ripping app configured the way I want it - which I'm not even sure I have on my current Ubuntu install. I have a machine at work that I can definitely do my rips on, but I prefer to just avoid CDs these days where I can. I even used to be one of those types that preferred CDs, I'll admit I enjoy having a large and impressive stack of CDs on some level, but now I have no use for CDs at all. The last bastion for them was in my car, but now I've installed a head unit with a USB slot, I'm 100% digital:)
Definitely agree about the large companies and lack of competition on content.. management in the entertainment industry is obviously just completely clueless about the realities of DRM and new distribution systems.
Ah, we don't have that service here in the UK yet, I didn't even know it existed. Shame, I've always thought Amazon provide excellent service and the DRM free MP3s just made me love them even more.
Me I'd probably just buy it on Amazon and then illegally download a watchable copy. I've done that a couple of times when I couldn't find some albums in the MP3 store, buy the CD and then just torrent the album.
The Sony movie store has similar deficiencies, I haven't bothered to use it yet on my PS3. Even the "HD" versions are probably going to be compressed to hell compared to a blu-ray.
Yeah I was generalising. Seeing a landspeed record attempt in person would be a pretty awesome thing, but I think that over time it would lose its appeal quicker than something like touring car racing, unless they made the challenge a bit more interesting than "get across this flat plane as fast as you can".
Yeah right! If it is so convenient, then why does only the most minute fraction of the population (all with the exact same set of personality characteristics) use it?
1) There's not many legal ways to download movies 2) Most people don't have fast enough connection yet, but they obviously will pretty soon, unless we have World War III.
I did download a couple of movies and received lots of music sent from my friends when I was a student. I buy all my stuff these days, and have even deleted basically all the stuff I was sent and acquired it legally.
I hate having to rip CDs and waste storage space on them. It's pointless. In the same vein I'd be happy to have all my movies on a media server, but I really cba ripping them all right now, and don't even have the tech to rip my blu-rays yet (nor do I want to waste money on a blu-ray drive just for ripping them when I already have a blu-ray player). I pay a flat fee each month to watch as many movies at the cinema as I wish - I'd be very happy to do the same thing with a streaming service for movies. Not everyone who wants convenience is a pirate.
Yeah I hate those lazy bastards that can't even be bothered to grow their own wheat and make their own bread, they're always taking the lazy way out. And don't even get me started on pre-sliced bread.
I'm really hoping that you were being sarcastic, but it's hard to tell. This isn't about laziness, it's about convenience and efficiency.
From the summary I thought this sounded more analogous to writing a GUI front end for a command line program rather than simply changing the graphics.. you add another layer on top that takes a high level command then performs the intended action in the application, but with less needless tedium.
Open source may technically be a better development model for those reasons, but you need to have interested developers to work on your projects, and the only way to get people interested in some projects is simply to pay them. It won't matter how open or closed the source is if nobody is interested in helping out. So closed source is just as good if not better than open source for that type of scenario, because it will get the hours of work it needs put in there. Even if a closed source equivalent does become available, it will probably be months or years later if only one guy is interested in the project rather than a team of contracted developers (yes I'm aware that more coders is not always a Good Thing for getting a project finished quickly, or at all).
Well, they do tend to have traction control and possibly even active stability control in modern F1 cars. They have massive slick tyres too so easing back on the throttle will quickly give you your grip back if you get into a power-slide (and that's basically what traction control and stability control do when they detect things are going slightly squiffy).
Counter-steering also becomes hard wired if you do enough sliding around in real life, or play enough computer games;) I panicked and stomped on the brakes the first time I slid on snow last winter, but when I started to learn the limits of my car (only just got it last summer, it's the first car I've owned that has rear wheel drive), I had a lot of fun and learned to anticipate and provoke it then go with it rather than fighting it:) You react to things a lot more quickly if you're actually expecting them (undergrad Psych tutorials ftw).
Actually, good point. This might make the market attractive enough that people like me would consider it worthwhile writing games in their spare time, and possibly expanding into full time. This is what I used to imagine doing when I was a teenager, but at the moment I'm just doing asset management web apps for work and don't really have any projects I'm interested in outside of work (though I am slightly tempted to submit something to the 2010 Simulated Car Racing Championship, I love cars and I love AI.. so it makes sense even though it would be almost trivial to create an AI that can drive round a track quickly if your level of grip stays constant and you have clearly defined track markers).
It's more fun watching fast cars navigate corners than watching fast cars go in a straight line. These cars are impressive, but not amazingly entertaining unless they crash. Actually I think the same of F1 when compared to stuff like Touring Cars, DTM and Rally Driving..
Minor point, but Amazon has never placed any restrictions on their MP3s, hence why I buy them.
Now that I have bought them, I probably will have no qualms downloading FLAC versions of the albums if I ever want better fidelity. Same goes for my DVD and blu-ray collection. I have bought Star Wars on DVD as well as VHS - and I bought a couple of things on blu-ray after previously getting the DVD, but I suppose I may as well just get a decent sized HDD and rip or download copies of all the movies I own onto it in the next couple of years. I really can't be arsed ripping all my movies though - it was bad enough going through my CD collection at a higher bit rate.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
Hmm, it seems I didn't even finish reading your whole first post earlier, was too busy expecting some flame directed towards Apple. The Newton was indeed a failure (though at a time when Apple was't really a 'cool' brand like it is now), and most tablets are failures. I don't expect the iPad to be a big hit in the same vein as the iPod or even the iPhone, but then again I seem to have a slightly higher than usual resistance to Steve's reality distortion field.
Then again as you say it would be great for watching movies, and surely there are some decent new game ideas that could be implemented on the relatively large multitouch capable screen. It would probably work pretty well for a guitar hero style game. There is already that "tap tap" game for the iPhone, except it's far too easy with just 3 possible notes or whatever it had, even on the hardest difficulty. It would also be good for RTSes and other point'n'click style games. In fact while we're considering unlikely scenarios, I hope it leads to a resurgence of point'n'click adventure gaming! Most browser and phone based games these days are absolute crap, yet people still love them.. they really don't know what they're missing.
Nope, not a misreply. I guess I just have no idea what you're referring to as I've not watched Dr Who properly since the 80s, sorry.
I thought you were commenting on my sig which you knew was from the April Fool's day chat roulette things and you were asking me to change it to avoid recalling painful memories, which is why I referred to a video. The Leeroy Jenkins video is just funny (even though I've never played WoW).
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
Except that the iPhone was technically shit, apart from its nice interface. Technically I think the iPad looks like a nice device again simply for the interface. I couldn't really see myself using it because I'd be taking 10 times longer to post to slashdot in my evenings like I'm doing just now.. but for simple browsing, facebook use, media viewing and maybe some light gaming I can see the iPad being pretty popular. There are a lot of wealthy casual users out there. Not saying it will be a great success, but Apple are gaining a lot of momentum and halo effect business with the iPod and iPhone. I wouldn't bet against it anyway.
Despite knowing myself that I would never have a use for it, I still want one just because it's the sort of device I've always wanted to have since seeing datapads on TNG. A jailbroken iPad would be one fun geek toy.
Clearly you have no sense of humour. Besides, they are already intentionally poisoning themselves for fuck's sake.. making it stronger would just be like giving people whisky, vodka and absinthe instead of beer.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA explained that the update tended to stop the affected units from doing anything useful - eg. playing games, connecting to the Internet. Which I'm sure does have the side effect that installing an alternate OS will no longer work, but I don't think this is quite how most people interpreted Sony's original description.
The article says that is the case for people who have not installed the update. That has been the case every time Sony releases an update (apart from a couple of non essential updates such as the one that updated the slideshow facility). It is not news.
The only real bit of news in there is that some people are experiencing infinite loops in the update process, which does suck.
It's fine if you want to play games. And the update is required if you want to play online games.
Both my and my flatmate's PS3 went through the update with no problems. It only becomes a "very expensive doorstop" if you don't use it to play games, or watch DVDs and blu-rays, the article is a bit flamebaitish because we already knew this would happen, and the update has a page which specifically informs you about the removal of the Other OS feature and then confirms (I think twice) that you really want to go through with it.
Anyone else will be unable to see what good can come of this, and they will continue to make whatever jokes they can about the iProduct (in the case of the iPad, perhaps a bunch of one-liner puns about menstruation).
Psht. We're all gentlemen here. Nobody on Slashdot would ever sink to such lows. That's the end of it. Argument over. Period.
I think he's referring to the fact that the iPhone and the iPad don't let the user run more than one app at once.
First, it takes a couple of days for the CD to arrive unless I pay extra for postage. That by itself is most of the reason, given that I do pretty much all my shopping apart from food shopping at Amazon - it's pretty much always cheaper than going to a "real" shop. Secondly, I don't even have a CD drive on my netbook - which is my primary computer both at home and work - so I have to plug in an external CD drive to even use a CD, and also I have to have a CD ripping app configured the way I want it - which I'm not even sure I have on my current Ubuntu install. I have a machine at work that I can definitely do my rips on, but I prefer to just avoid CDs these days where I can. I even used to be one of those types that preferred CDs, I'll admit I enjoy having a large and impressive stack of CDs on some level, but now I have no use for CDs at all. The last bastion for them was in my car, but now I've installed a head unit with a USB slot, I'm 100% digital :)
Definitely agree about the large companies and lack of competition on content.. management in the entertainment industry is obviously just completely clueless about the realities of DRM and new distribution systems.
I dunno.. the video of the actual experiment seems to indicate otherwise.
Ah, we don't have that service here in the UK yet, I didn't even know it existed. Shame, I've always thought Amazon provide excellent service and the DRM free MP3s just made me love them even more.
Me I'd probably just buy it on Amazon and then illegally download a watchable copy. I've done that a couple of times when I couldn't find some albums in the MP3 store, buy the CD and then just torrent the album.
The Sony movie store has similar deficiencies, I haven't bothered to use it yet on my PS3. Even the "HD" versions are probably going to be compressed to hell compared to a blu-ray.
7 is my pet name for 8.
Yeah I was generalising. Seeing a landspeed record attempt in person would be a pretty awesome thing, but I think that over time it would lose its appeal quicker than something like touring car racing, unless they made the challenge a bit more interesting than "get across this flat plane as fast as you can".
Crap - no vowels again! Oh well.. I name this table fhzbgyn. That's a 7 letter word, across two triple word scores! Sweet :D
Yeah right! If it is so convenient, then why does only the most minute
fraction of the population (all with the exact same set of personality
characteristics) use it?
1) There's not many legal ways to download movies
2) Most people don't have fast enough connection yet, but they obviously will pretty soon, unless we have World War III.
I did download a couple of movies and received lots of music sent from my friends when I was a student. I buy all my stuff these days, and have even deleted basically all the stuff I was sent and acquired it legally.
I hate having to rip CDs and waste storage space on them. It's pointless. In the same vein I'd be happy to have all my movies on a media server, but I really cba ripping them all right now, and don't even have the tech to rip my blu-rays yet (nor do I want to waste money on a blu-ray drive just for ripping them when I already have a blu-ray player). I pay a flat fee each month to watch as many movies at the cinema as I wish - I'd be very happy to do the same thing with a streaming service for movies. Not everyone who wants convenience is a pirate.
Yeah I hate those lazy bastards that can't even be bothered to grow their own wheat and make their own bread, they're always taking the lazy way out. And don't even get me started on pre-sliced bread.
I'm really hoping that you were being sarcastic, but it's hard to tell. This isn't about laziness, it's about convenience and efficiency.
From the summary I thought this sounded more analogous to writing a GUI front end for a command line program rather than simply changing the graphics.. you add another layer on top that takes a high level command then performs the intended action in the application, but with less needless tedium.
Open source may technically be a better development model for those reasons, but you need to have interested developers to work on your projects, and the only way to get people interested in some projects is simply to pay them. It won't matter how open or closed the source is if nobody is interested in helping out. So closed source is just as good if not better than open source for that type of scenario, because it will get the hours of work it needs put in there. Even if a closed source equivalent does become available, it will probably be months or years later if only one guy is interested in the project rather than a team of contracted developers (yes I'm aware that more coders is not always a Good Thing for getting a project finished quickly, or at all).
Well, they do tend to have traction control and possibly even active stability control in modern F1 cars. They have massive slick tyres too so easing back on the throttle will quickly give you your grip back if you get into a power-slide (and that's basically what traction control and stability control do when they detect things are going slightly squiffy).
Counter-steering also becomes hard wired if you do enough sliding around in real life, or play enough computer games ;) I panicked and stomped on the brakes the first time I slid on snow last winter, but when I started to learn the limits of my car (only just got it last summer, it's the first car I've owned that has rear wheel drive), I had a lot of fun and learned to anticipate and provoke it then go with it rather than fighting it :) You react to things a lot more quickly if you're actually expecting them (undergrad Psych tutorials ftw).
Actually, good point. This might make the market attractive enough that people like me would consider it worthwhile writing games in their spare time, and possibly expanding into full time. This is what I used to imagine doing when I was a teenager, but at the moment I'm just doing asset management web apps for work and don't really have any projects I'm interested in outside of work (though I am slightly tempted to submit something to the 2010 Simulated Car Racing Championship, I love cars and I love AI.. so it makes sense even though it would be almost trivial to create an AI that can drive round a track quickly if your level of grip stays constant and you have clearly defined track markers).
seems the mods missed Chat Roulette on AFD.. I've been wanting to do that for days now :P
It's more fun watching fast cars navigate corners than watching fast cars go in a straight line. These cars are impressive, but not amazingly entertaining unless they crash. Actually I think the same of F1 when compared to stuff like Touring Cars, DTM and Rally Driving..
*flush*
Shhhhh - you're cramping all the Sony haters' and sensationalists' styles with you logic and general lack of ignorance!
Minor point, but Amazon has never placed any restrictions on their MP3s, hence why I buy them.
Now that I have bought them, I probably will have no qualms downloading FLAC versions of the albums if I ever want better fidelity. Same goes for my DVD and blu-ray collection. I have bought Star Wars on DVD as well as VHS - and I bought a couple of things on blu-ray after previously getting the DVD, but I suppose I may as well just get a decent sized HDD and rip or download copies of all the movies I own onto it in the next couple of years. I really can't be arsed ripping all my movies though - it was bad enough going through my CD collection at a higher bit rate.
Hmm, it seems I didn't even finish reading your whole first post earlier, was too busy expecting some flame directed towards Apple. The Newton was indeed a failure (though at a time when Apple was't really a 'cool' brand like it is now), and most tablets are failures. I don't expect the iPad to be a big hit in the same vein as the iPod or even the iPhone, but then again I seem to have a slightly higher than usual resistance to Steve's reality distortion field.
Then again as you say it would be great for watching movies, and surely there are some decent new game ideas that could be implemented on the relatively large multitouch capable screen. It would probably work pretty well for a guitar hero style game. There is already that "tap tap" game for the iPhone, except it's far too easy with just 3 possible notes or whatever it had, even on the hardest difficulty. It would also be good for RTSes and other point'n'click style games. In fact while we're considering unlikely scenarios, I hope it leads to a resurgence of point'n'click adventure gaming! Most browser and phone based games these days are absolute crap, yet people still love them.. they really don't know what they're missing.
Nope, not a misreply. I guess I just have no idea what you're referring to as I've not watched Dr Who properly since the 80s, sorry.
I thought you were commenting on my sig which you knew was from the April Fool's day chat roulette things and you were asking me to change it to avoid recalling painful memories, which is why I referred to a video. The Leeroy Jenkins video is just funny (even though I've never played WoW).
Except that the iPhone was technically shit, apart from its nice interface. Technically I think the iPad looks like a nice device again simply for the interface. I couldn't really see myself using it because I'd be taking 10 times longer to post to slashdot in my evenings like I'm doing just now.. but for simple browsing, facebook use, media viewing and maybe some light gaming I can see the iPad being pretty popular. There are a lot of wealthy casual users out there. Not saying it will be a great success, but Apple are gaining a lot of momentum and halo effect business with the iPod and iPhone. I wouldn't bet against it anyway.
Despite knowing myself that I would never have a use for it, I still want one just because it's the sort of device I've always wanted to have since seeing datapads on TNG. A jailbroken iPad would be one fun geek toy.
Clearly you have no sense of humour. Besides, they are already intentionally poisoning themselves for fuck's sake.. making it stronger would just be like giving people whisky, vodka and absinthe instead of beer.