By picking open source for the Vietnam Government this is the start of a trend that will snowball to the public and private sector since if anyone wishes to correspond with any Government department they will have to use open formats which is one step from saying "Oh stuff it why should I pay for MS Windows and proprietary applications when I can use a Linux distribution with cheaper or free applications and still get my business done and save money in the process".
To those vendors who say. "My software does not run under Linux but MS Windows and I can't see why I should change". All the Vietnam Government has to say to those vendors. "Well guess who misses out on a Government contact":-)
I don't live in the US but I have found in Australia Gamecube second hand games stay at a significantly higher price than second hand PS2 games. Comparing PS2 game prices to PS3, Wii and Xbox360 game prices is no contest, the PS2 games are significantly cheaper usually between 30% and 50% and new games are still being made.
Seems game makers are not terribly interested in the piddly market for the PS3, and so there is no demand to upgrade to the PS3, because PS2 still plays a lot of new games.
Err where did you get that from, you have been listening to too many fan boys. There are almost 20 million PS3 world wide and considering the Xbox and the Gamecube only reached approx 24 million each over a four year period before they were discontinued so the PS3 has not done that badly considering that the PS3 has not even been out two years in European and Asian/Pacific markets although in the US and Japan it has been out just over two years. It is only the US market that has the Xbox360 leading the PS3 by a significant margin although that could change this year. Game designers can see this and many PS3 and Xbox360 games are coming out multi-platform with the small exception of some exclusives.
You are right in that the PS2 does get new games however if you have a decent HDTV you can see that the PS2 game graphics (also the Wii's) does not compare to the PS3 and the Xbox360 games. My PS3 does play PS2 games and the up-scaling to a HDTV does look nice but no more different than comparing upscaled DVD movies to BD movies. Still watchable and playable in the case of PS2 games though although I can't say the same for PS1 games unfortunately.
If you take a look at the PS2 library of games and their prices the PS2 has just about everything at the right price for everyone. All the other so-called "next gen" consoles in comparison to the choices on the PS2 pale in comparison.
I have a PS3 (backwards compatible) and a Gamecube (fairly well gathering dust now) that I mainly play and while I do have some good PS3 games I still find myself coming back to play PS2 games since the graphical difference between PS3 and PS2 games is not hugely significant compared to the graphics of PS1 games. Basically this means a good PS2 game on a BC PS3 looks graphically nice on a HDTV and for me there are still many PS2 games I would like to play at a price I can easily afford. I know many people would say "gameplay not graphics is more important" however my reply to that is good gameplay and good graphics make an excellent game while good gameplay and poor graphics makes for a mediocre game at best. Of course bad gameplay and excellent graphics still makes a bad game.
To put this in perspective my PS3 gets the following use. 5% to play DVD's, 10% to play Bluray, 25% to play PS3 games, 55% to play PS2 games, 2% to play PS1 games and 3% as a media centre. When I play PS1 games on my PS3 to my HDTV I remember how I originally liked the game and now even though the graphics has been unscaled to my HDTV the graphics would look better on a small standard def TV.
Of course, it does strike me that the order PS2, wii, 360, PS3 is increasing in price and decreasing in playtime, but I still think it's more related to game library, with the wii being an exception due to the controller.
From my perspective I don't have an Xbox360 (I don't like Microsoft so sue me) or a Wii even though I have had all the Nintendo machines from the NES to the Gamecube. Basically with the exception of the Gamecube which hardly gets played now I use my PS3 for about 2 to 5 hours a day whenever I can get my son off who would play GTA IV for 6 hours given the chance.
I have a PS2 with a good few games. When I bought a PS3 I didn't give any thought to whether it would play my PS2 games, because... I already have a PS2. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people who own PS2 games also own a PS2.
You are right however the PS2 backwards compatibility enhances the PS2 games graphics up to 1080p and while the game may not be graphically superior to a PS3 game the enhanced graphics do add to the enjoyment than if you actually played it on a PS2 to a SDTV or even a HDTV. Of course a bad game with good graphics is still just a bad game but a good game with enhanced graphics makes a good game even better.
Having a BC PS3 IMHO is much better than having a PS3 and PS2 since I don't have to switch output modes to my HDTV. I personally think that Sony should get a team together (if they haven't already) and write some software to allow backwards compatibility to all PS3's. I don't think this product would sell but if it was part of a firmware update then the PS3 would be very attractive to those people who could not afford a BC PS3 initially. Yes there would be development costs but you don't need to replace all the PS3 to do this.
Sony is the company of DRM, and the "no it's not better, but we control both the content and the player" Blu-Ray. The WORLD is not a big enough market for Sony to "give a shit about its customers".
All I can read from this is "I hate Sony for DRM" I guess you don't buy any music or games since Microsoft and Nintendo also use DRM as do nearly all movie and recoding companies.
In Australia only the first 60GB PS3 models had predominately software PS2 backwards compatibility and unlike the first PS3's in the US and Japan which used hardware for this which. the software emulation gave an approx 85% PS2 backwards compatibility which is fine providing you don't have any games you really like falling into that 15%. I do have the 60GB model and although I still have 6 months to go on my extended warranty I will pay to get it fixed if necessary since I still play PS2 games as well as PS3 games.
Australia's a small enough market that Sony just doesn't give a shit about its customers.
You are right Australia is a fairly small market however I can get any PS3 game from anywhere in the world and I know it will play on my PS3. There are three regions for PS3 games but there is no lockout although the same can't be said for PS2 games.
Ah! Finally, a good point. You won't be able to get rid of your old PS2 if you want a PS3. And there are many different PS3 models, all with different capabilities. Muddying up the product line was a stupid idea.
With the exception of PS2 backwards compatibility and the hard drive size all other attributes of the the PS3 have the same functionality since Sony started selling them. As for the hard disk you can put in any 2.5 inch SATA drive without voiding your warranty, the manual that comes with the PS3 actually documents how to do this. On a minor note the new PS3's don't have 4 USB's but 2 and they don't have the SD/MS/CF slots however the basic functionality has not changed although if you need these you can definitely buy adaptors for a few dollars that will will offer the same functionality.
The 360 is a great buy if you don't mind losing all your data and having to wait a week for turnaround after it fails (which happens about once a year).
It is always a good idea to backup your saved data to some other media and this applies to consoles as well as PC's and Servers. I can't speak for the Xbox360 but the PS3 menu makes it very easy to backup all your saves to any USB media device.
The problem is that the PS3 is beyond the "first part of it's lifespan" and it's still selling at below cost... and sales are dropping and XBox is mopping up the remnants by selling for even less.
What do you classify as a part of it's lifetime? The PS3 has only just been out 2 years in the US and Japan while in the rest of the world which has a population many time the size of the US and Japan has been out 1 year 9 months. Selling over 19 million is not bad over that length of time considering the Xbox and the Gamecube sold approx 24 million each over a four year period and then effectively killed their products. Even the PS2 is still doing quite well.
As for buying US$60 games (in Australia they are between AU$100 and AU$120) have you looked at the price of the Xbox360 and Wii games there appears to be very little difference in price for new games. In Australia Wii games are approx 5% to 10% cheaper than comparable Xbox360 and PS3 games although they do hold their price longer whereas the Xbox360 and PS3 games normally drop by a half within six months.
I do agree that US$60 (approx AU100) games are too expensive that is why I prefer to wait or even get PS2 games (mine has backwards compatibility) which do get enhanced on a HDTV and a good PS2 game on a BC PS3 does look and play really well in comparison to just playing the game on a PS2 and a SDTV.
If you look at many of the DVD's you get from most video stores most are badly scratched and sometimes unplayable. This says a lot about some people. BD is difficult but not impossible to scratch although fingermarks can make playback problematic however a quick wipe with a damp cloth fixes that.
This is not to say BD does not have problems it does. There was a case of a bad batch of BD movies that had "spots" all over them which made the movie difficult if not impossible to play. The end result, all people who had the issue returned them for a full refund or replacement.
How about the fact that there are way too many distrobutions, some of which are separated by nothing more than ideological lines?
Is this really a problem at least you have the option of choice rather than having a "one distro fits all" ala MS Windows.
The first part of the article talks about Linux packages such as "rpm" and "deb" but fails to mention package mangers. As for the rest of the article well it is possible to refute most of what the writer said but when you see something like the following what's the point.
If Linux will continue to draw regular PC users away from Windows, it'll need to have many of the same features as Windows. That includes for-pay network services that require Linux clients, such as remote backup.
This is the sort of comment you see from people who really are MS Windows centric and will criticise anything that is different. Oh! as for "pay for network services and remote backups" the Fortune 500 company I work for has been doing just that for Linux machines over the last couple of years.
Note: The article at least to me comes across as condescending, being quite happy to criticize but not really willing to praise any of the strengths of Linux.
You are definitely off-topic here since the discussion was on Linux file-systems, however you have brought up an interesting argument that has been running over the years. In reply I have always found that so called file extensions are meaningless in a Linux/Unix environment and in a MS Windows environment the dependency on file extensions is not a good way of managing your files, in fact this dependency on file extensions is one of the main reasons why many MS Windows users get fooled into running what they think is an innocuous file.
When using a GUI browser in Linux/Unix you can normally see what type of file you have because many decent browsers use the meta data in the file not the file extension and display the information accordingly. It is even easier on the command line where the command "file *" is a great way to list the attributes of each file. You can list thousands of files quickly by doing this.
To say you need to know how to distinguish executables from a normal files, in Linux/Unix you can see this in a decent browser or just use the command "ls -l" although I would definitely query why do you want to mix executables with non executables, since in Linux/Unix this is a poor approach to file management.
I have always found that running a command via a browser is risky unless you know what that command does. Executables in Linux/Unix rarely use the "exe" extension and are normally located in clearly defined directories such as "bin", "sbin" and even "lbin".
Being a mild Grammar Nazi I think having a capitol letter at the start of a new paragraph is a better way to express yourself:-)
Oh come on! GTA's attitude is best summed up by the advice "If you kill that hooker, you can get your money back." Comparing it to charity work is a bit silly.
Killing as many people as you can in GTA is quite acceptable however we cannot pick up a Hooker and bang her in a car, killing is ok but not the other thing, Think of the children!:-)
I would have thought that the developers and coders names are in the credits therefore you could say this game is copyright with particular peoples names being cited. It will be interesting to see what type of license they use and if certain people or companies try to plagiarise it.
Throwing some code, that you value, out into the world without your name on it isn't philanthropy, it's just stupidity.
I could not agree more, it is IMHO stupid releasing software that anyone can take and make their own although I am quite sure that many would disagree with you and me. Oh well that is their prerogative.
On a slightly different note. When making a game there are many people involved from concept artists, story developers (well maybe not for some FPS and Sports games), production coordinators, software coders and numerous others such as marketing etc. Most good commercial games are now starting to have budgets similar to Hollywood with quite a few people involved in the overall production of the game. With regard to the software would it be just the coders that put their reall names to their code or everyone involved which could be a legal minefield?
Another issue is if the game uses propriety libraries such as the gaming engine and if you can see the code you will find out what the PC, PS2 and Xbox library calls use, this alone may make releasing the source for a game like this open to litigation or just difficult to understand.
The problem is most people (I am including world here) don't have any clue about technology and appear quite happy not to learn. Back in the 1980's I used to train clerical, engineers and scientists on using Unix and I never met anyone I could not train, be it command line or GUI (I am still talking early 1980's).
When PC's finally started to make their appearance I found it harder to teach clerical people because they seemed to have developed a GUI based mentality and thought it was quite normal to boot their PC's many times a day, then PC viruses appeared and still people thought it was a normal hazard of using a computer. I think after a while people just feel so powerless they just give up.
Maybe I am very much in minority but when the company I work for brings out a web application or even a page that does not work in Firefox I normally complain. There are a few of us that do this and we enjoy annoying the web designers since the company has a policy of supporting both Firefox and MS IE so they have to fix the issue. They do try to ignore us in the hope that the problem goes away but that just makes us all the more vocal. Why don't we give up and roll over to the Microsoft way of thinking? I think the best answer to that, it's fun in a rather perverse way and it does not cost us anything and it does not upset management. It annoys the designers but it's very hard to browbeat senior Engineers.
I assume the article is for the US/Japanese model PS3 since the 60GB PS3 had full hardware backwards compatibility while the 80GB model had the PS2 Graphics Synthesiser and software emulation as did the 60GB PAL PS3.
The article states that only 57% of PS2 games worked on the emulator models. This is untrue it is more like 85% to 90% after Firmware 1.8 came out on 24th May 2007. Of course even 85% is not good if the games you like fall in the 15% of games that have issues ranging from freezing, artefacts or just can't read the disk.
Opening the PS2 to home-brew developers could make an impact in second and third world countries. While this won't stop piracy you may see a booming home grown market that the target consumers will pay for although the developers probably won't make that much for their efforts, still this may be a stepping stone to better things. The problem is most games will be worse than shovel-ware however you may see some highly innovative games as well although they would be few and far between. Still even one stellar or even quality game in a hundred could be a good thing.
Developing a game from inception through to final marketing to the consumer can be quite expensive, no matter what the development kit. If you develop a shooter and can get hold of a good level editor and engine you are well on your way to creating an FPS game reasonably cheaply (Standard or High Def hardly comes into the overall cost). The problem with this is the story line is virtually non existent (like that matters to some players) however it allows developers to produce FPS games quickly (Xbox360 and now PS3 cough!). When you develop a game that has a decent story, good graphics and/or is highly innovative the costs can be that of a Hollywood movie.
Just wait for next week's headline: Microsoft Trademarks a Colour!
It's been done by Cadbury for their purple logo and BP for their green logo . Also many other companies have trademarked a colour for their logos and some have actually sued people because they used the same colour in their own but different logos see Cadbury sues Darrell Lea . Of course trademarking a colour can also be a double edged sword and big companies have been sued by smaller ones successfully.
Typical example - how the hell does it make sense to drag a disk to the trash when you want to eject it? When you drag other files to the trash, they're deleted. Therefore, when you drag a disk to the trash, shouldn't it be erased?
I actually had to try that to see if it still works. That way of unmounting a volume has long been superseded by eject buttons displayed next to the volumes in the Finder's sidebar. And, of course, by the physical eject button on the keyboard (only for the DVD drive).
If the disk or flash card is a USB device all you need to do is click right and select "Unmount Volume". Of course you could just pull it out although there is always the possibility of file-system corruption especially if someone is writing to it at the time. MS Windows is not that much different since you have to select a very small icon to disconnect the drive.
That's a better reply than what I was thinking:
What kind of linux advocacy is it in 2008 where the answer to the problem is Writing a Script?
No. Not gonna happen. No-one in the windows world writes a script to search for a file, it shouldn't require that in linux either.
The simple answer is "It depends on the problem and the requirements to resolve it". If that means writing a script (Bash/Borne, Perl, name your poison) then so be it. The thing is that scripts coupled with standard Unix tools can get the job done quickly and efficiently but it really depends on what is required to solve the problem in the first place.
As far as finding a file goes I would use the command line and can hack a simple find with a grep match in a few seconds which will get results back quicker than a GUI tool. This is not to say that everyone should use the command line, on the contrary people should use what they are comfortable with and if that is a GUI and they are happy with the results then great.
In my opinion being closed minded to the command line is just as short sighted as the so called guru being closed minded to GUI based tools. They are both available in Linux/Unix and it is up to the user to decide what is the best way to approach a problem or ask for help and be open minded to reasonable answers.
Or beagle in Linux. Both Spotlight an Beagle predate windows desktop search. Which will still not search network drives making it useless for me.
Do you mean Samba mounts of MS Window drives or NFS mounts of MS Windows drives? Of course they have to be shared from MS Windows otherwise no one can search them including another MS Windows machine. If you can see a mount-point and have permission to read it then Linux/Unix utilities including GUI's as well can search.
Unix uses the word mount-point to signify the root of a file-system that may consist of a single disk a disk slice or even a virtual disk that could be terra-bytes or larger since the concept of a drive is really an anachronism carried over from the DOS days.
Does linux/windows have anything like "smart folders"? I can make a folder on my desktop of the last modified.doc files. Or last modified files containing X name. Or opened/created/modified within X days
Yes. Click or double click on you "Home" icon and in the explorer window you can drag/drop or make a link and drag/drop that onto your desktop. I am not talking about MS Windows I an talking about the Gnome or KDE desktop. It is different to MS Windows but it is IMHO much more efficient if you insist on using a GUI. Were do you think navigable windows came from in the first place? I will give you a hint, it was not MS Windows.
Actually, they don't even have to press enter. Spotlight searches as you type.
Shuttleworth's point here is that while we Slashdotters have slocate, find, grep, etc., what do the grandmothers and Microsoft expatriates have?
Actually an MS Windows refugee can use a GUI (native to KDE or even Gnome) for running find which can search on a variety of options which includes a simplified version of grep and is more in-line with what they would use in MS Windows. GUI searching is also avaiable for Open Office and many other GUI applications as well.
For the more adventurous the dreaded command line is available however I never try to push a novice to use the command line although I do suggest that they use simple commands initially if they need to do something that a GUI will not do or is time consuming to use.
I always suggest that a person learns what they need to get the job done and even though a GUI many be slower or not as elegant than the command line they should stick to the GUI until they are curious enough to move on.
If you are using Gnome and want to do a simplified find try "Places" then select "Search for Files". Of course if you want to bring up the command line window use "Applications" then "System Tools" and select "Konsole" (there are others - your choice). In a command line window type the following:
find . -print | grep -i "my_file_pattern"
or
find / -print | grep -i "my_file_pattern" ### This may take a while
or
find . -print | grep -i doc ### For.doc files
If you need more info type "info find" or "man find" or "info grep" or "man grep".
Writing shell scripts is a very good way to scare off an novice to Linux or Unix. I do agree that scripts are very useful (I use and write quite complex scripts all the time) but not for the novice.
The above combination of find and grep is very simple and even a novice will find this easy to do particularly when the can see how this is a stepping stone to more powerful commands. Of course if the someone has an aversion to the command line at least they have a GUI find command to use.
Linux and any other collaborative open source project could be sold theoretically, if all copyright holders would agree on the terms.
Err no! You would also have to get around the GPL as well and that has teeth if pushed. Once you license your software to GPL it is yours however you cannot just pull it and sell it off although forking can be done, but this can lead to a legal nightmare, however companies like Redhat (US128m profit this last quarter) seem to do very well and don't infringe the GPL.
The BSD parts of a Linux distribution can be brought in-house as long as the purchaser agrees to the BSD license. Taking a quick look through my Fedora 9 distribution (1790 packages) about 168 are BSD and 1118 are GPL (LGPL, GPL, GPL2 and GPL3) and 98 apache licenses with the rest a mixture. For anyone interested out of the GPL packages 66 are GPL3.
Forget about all the packages I have in Fedora 9, Linux is really the kernel and that is licensed under GPL2 so no one can really purchase it so anyone is free to add and if possible improve on it although it is up to the maintainers to decide if they want to include the changes in the official distribution.
How I arrived at the above (note: you don't need to be root to do the following):
When reading the article I could not help noticing he was saying that today it is younger adults who are having children rather than older adults. Were is the scientific method here? Yes there are some adults who are having children at a young age but there are also adults who are having children when they are much older. I guess he never studied history or even cultures.
If you look back in history it was not unusual for adults to have children (and many of them) when they were quite young, because the average life expectancy was much lower and infant mortality was considerably higher. It is only when you look at modern affluent societies do you notice that adults are postponing having children until they are in their late twenties or thirties. Of course depending on the economic and religious backgrounds of some societies not much has changed for hundreds and thousands of years.
If the author of this paper believes what he said then I suggest taking a long hard look at his scientific approach and point out which areas he is right and which are wrong instead of making an erroneous sweeping statement like he has done. Or is he just grandstanding?
Slashdot Mirror
By picking open source for the Vietnam Government this is the start of a trend that will snowball to the public and private sector since if anyone wishes to correspond with any Government department they will have to use open formats which is one step from saying "Oh stuff it why should I pay for MS Windows and proprietary applications when I can use a Linux distribution with cheaper or free applications and still get my business done and save money in the process".
:-)
To those vendors who say. "My software does not run under Linux but MS Windows and I can't see why I should change". All the Vietnam Government has to say to those vendors. "Well guess who misses out on a Government contact"
Seems game makers are not terribly interested in the piddly market for the PS3, and so there is no demand to upgrade to the PS3, because PS2 still plays a lot of new games.
Err where did you get that from, you have been listening to too many fan boys. There are almost 20 million PS3 world wide and considering the Xbox and the Gamecube only reached approx 24 million each over a four year period before they were discontinued so the PS3 has not done that badly considering that the PS3 has not even been out two years in European and Asian/Pacific markets although in the US and Japan it has been out just over two years. It is only the US market that has the Xbox360 leading the PS3 by a significant margin although that could change this year. Game designers can see this and many PS3 and Xbox360 games are coming out multi-platform with the small exception of some exclusives.
You are right in that the PS2 does get new games however if you have a decent HDTV you can see that the PS2 game graphics (also the Wii's) does not compare to the PS3 and the Xbox360 games. My PS3 does play PS2 games and the up-scaling to a HDTV does look nice but no more different than comparing upscaled DVD movies to BD movies. Still watchable and playable in the case of PS2 games though although I can't say the same for PS1 games unfortunately.
I have a PS3 (backwards compatible) and a Gamecube (fairly well gathering dust now) that I mainly play and while I do have some good PS3 games I still find myself coming back to play PS2 games since the graphical difference between PS3 and PS2 games is not hugely significant compared to the graphics of PS1 games. Basically this means a good PS2 game on a BC PS3 looks graphically nice on a HDTV and for me there are still many PS2 games I would like to play at a price I can easily afford. I know many people would say "gameplay not graphics is more important" however my reply to that is good gameplay and good graphics make an excellent game while good gameplay and poor graphics makes for a mediocre game at best. Of course bad gameplay and excellent graphics still makes a bad game.
To put this in perspective my PS3 gets the following use. 5% to play DVD's, 10% to play Bluray, 25% to play PS3 games, 55% to play PS2 games, 2% to play PS1 games and 3% as a media centre. When I play PS1 games on my PS3 to my HDTV I remember how I originally liked the game and now even though the graphics has been unscaled to my HDTV the graphics would look better on a small standard def TV.
Of course, it does strike me that the order PS2, wii, 360, PS3 is increasing in price and decreasing in playtime, but I still think it's more related to game library, with the wii being an exception due to the controller.
From my perspective I don't have an Xbox360 (I don't like Microsoft so sue me) or a Wii even though I have had all the Nintendo machines from the NES to the Gamecube. Basically with the exception of the Gamecube which hardly gets played now I use my PS3 for about 2 to 5 hours a day whenever I can get my son off who would play GTA IV for 6 hours given the chance.
I have a PS2 with a good few games. When I bought a PS3 I didn't give any thought to whether it would play my PS2 games, because... I already have a PS2. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people who own PS2 games also own a PS2.
You are right however the PS2 backwards compatibility enhances the PS2 games graphics up to 1080p and while the game may not be graphically superior to a PS3 game the enhanced graphics do add to the enjoyment than if you actually played it on a PS2 to a SDTV or even a HDTV. Of course a bad game with good graphics is still just a bad game but a good game with enhanced graphics makes a good game even better.
Having a BC PS3 IMHO is much better than having a PS3 and PS2 since I don't have to switch output modes to my HDTV. I personally think that Sony should get a team together (if they haven't already) and write some software to allow backwards compatibility to all PS3's. I don't think this product would sell but if it was part of a firmware update then the PS3 would be very attractive to those people who could not afford a BC PS3 initially. Yes there would be development costs but you don't need to replace all the PS3 to do this.
Sony is the company of DRM, and the "no it's not better, but we control both the content and the player" Blu-Ray. The WORLD is not a big enough market for Sony to "give a shit about its customers".
All I can read from this is "I hate Sony for DRM" I guess you don't buy any music or games since Microsoft and Nintendo also use DRM as do nearly all movie and recoding companies.
Australia's a small enough market that Sony just doesn't give a shit about its customers.
You are right Australia is a fairly small market however I can get any PS3 game from anywhere in the world and I know it will play on my PS3. There are three regions for PS3 games but there is no lockout although the same can't be said for PS2 games.
Ah! Finally, a good point. You won't be able to get rid of your old PS2 if you want a PS3. And there are many different PS3 models, all with different capabilities. Muddying up the product line was a stupid idea.
With the exception of PS2 backwards compatibility and the hard drive size all other attributes of the the PS3 have the same functionality since Sony started selling them. As for the hard disk you can put in any 2.5 inch SATA drive without voiding your warranty, the manual that comes with the PS3 actually documents how to do this. On a minor note the new PS3's don't have 4 USB's but 2 and they don't have the SD/MS/CF slots however the basic functionality has not changed although if you need these you can definitely buy adaptors for a few dollars that will will offer the same functionality.
The 360 is a great buy if you don't mind losing all your data and having to wait a week for turnaround after it fails (which happens about once a year).
It is always a good idea to backup your saved data to some other media and this applies to consoles as well as PC's and Servers. I can't speak for the Xbox360 but the PS3 menu makes it very easy to backup all your saves to any USB media device.
The problem is that the PS3 is beyond the "first part of it's lifespan" and it's still selling at below cost... and sales are dropping and XBox is mopping up the remnants by selling for even less.
What do you classify as a part of it's lifetime? The PS3 has only just been out 2 years in the US and Japan while in the rest of the world which has a population many time the size of the US and Japan has been out 1 year 9 months. Selling over 19 million is not bad over that length of time considering the Xbox and the Gamecube sold approx 24 million each over a four year period and then effectively killed their products. Even the PS2 is still doing quite well.
As for buying US$60 games (in Australia they are between AU$100 and AU$120) have you looked at the price of the Xbox360 and Wii games there appears to be very little difference in price for new games. In Australia Wii games are approx 5% to 10% cheaper than comparable Xbox360 and PS3 games although they do hold their price longer whereas the Xbox360 and PS3 games normally drop by a half within six months.
I do agree that US$60 (approx AU100) games are too expensive that is why I prefer to wait or even get PS2 games (mine has backwards compatibility) which do get enhanced on a HDTV and a good PS2 game on a BC PS3 does look and play really well in comparison to just playing the game on a PS2 and a SDTV.
If you look at many of the DVD's you get from most video stores most are badly scratched and sometimes unplayable. This says a lot about some people. BD is difficult but not impossible to scratch although fingermarks can make playback problematic however a quick wipe with a damp cloth fixes that.
This is not to say BD does not have problems it does. There was a case of a bad batch of BD movies that had "spots" all over them which made the movie difficult if not impossible to play. The end result, all people who had the issue returned them for a full refund or replacement.
How about the fact that there are way too many distrobutions, some of which are separated by nothing more than ideological lines?
Is this really a problem at least you have the option of choice rather than having a "one distro fits all" ala MS Windows.
The first part of the article talks about Linux packages such as "rpm" and "deb" but fails to mention package mangers. As for the rest of the article well it is possible to refute most of what the writer said but when you see something like the following what's the point.
If Linux will continue to draw regular PC users away from Windows, it'll need to have many of the same features as Windows. That includes for-pay network services that require Linux clients, such as remote backup.
This is the sort of comment you see from people who really are MS Windows centric and will criticise anything that is different. Oh! as for "pay for network services and remote backups" the Fortune 500 company I work for has been doing just that for Linux machines over the last couple of years.
Note: The article at least to me comes across as condescending, being quite happy to criticize but not really willing to praise any of the strengths of Linux.
You are definitely off-topic here since the discussion was on Linux file-systems, however you have brought up an interesting argument that has been running over the years. In reply I have always found that so called file extensions are meaningless in a Linux/Unix environment and in a MS Windows environment the dependency on file extensions is not a good way of managing your files, in fact this dependency on file extensions is one of the main reasons why many MS Windows users get fooled into running what they think is an innocuous file.
:-)
When using a GUI browser in Linux/Unix you can normally see what type of file you have because many decent browsers use the meta data in the file not the file extension and display the information accordingly. It is even easier on the command line where the command "file *" is a great way to list the attributes of each file. You can list thousands of files quickly by doing this.
To say you need to know how to distinguish executables from a normal files, in Linux/Unix you can see this in a decent browser or just use the command "ls -l" although I would definitely query why do you want to mix executables with non executables, since in Linux/Unix this is a poor approach to file management.
I have always found that running a command via a browser is risky unless you know what that command does. Executables in Linux/Unix rarely use the "exe" extension and are normally located in clearly defined directories such as "bin", "sbin" and even "lbin".
Being a mild Grammar Nazi I think having a capitol letter at the start of a new paragraph is a better way to express yourself
Oh come on! GTA's attitude is best summed up by the advice "If you kill that hooker, you can get your money back." Comparing it to charity work is a bit silly.
Killing as many people as you can in GTA is quite acceptable however we cannot pick up a Hooker and bang her in a car, killing is ok but not the other thing, Think of the children! :-)
Throwing some code, that you value, out into the world without your name on it isn't philanthropy, it's just stupidity.
I could not agree more, it is IMHO stupid releasing software that anyone can take and make their own although I am quite sure that many would disagree with you and me. Oh well that is their prerogative.
On a slightly different note. When making a game there are many people involved from concept artists, story developers (well maybe not for some FPS and Sports games), production coordinators, software coders and numerous others such as marketing etc. Most good commercial games are now starting to have budgets similar to Hollywood with quite a few people involved in the overall production of the game. With regard to the software would it be just the coders that put their reall names to their code or everyone involved which could be a legal minefield?
Another issue is if the game uses propriety libraries such as the gaming engine and if you can see the code you will find out what the PC, PS2 and Xbox library calls use, this alone may make releasing the source for a game like this open to litigation or just difficult to understand.
The problem is most people (I am including world here) don't have any clue about technology and appear quite happy not to learn. Back in the 1980's I used to train clerical, engineers and scientists on using Unix and I never met anyone I could not train, be it command line or GUI (I am still talking early 1980's).
When PC's finally started to make their appearance I found it harder to teach clerical people because they seemed to have developed a GUI based mentality and thought it was quite normal to boot their PC's many times a day, then PC viruses appeared and still people thought it was a normal hazard of using a computer. I think after a while people just feel so powerless they just give up.
Maybe I am very much in minority but when the company I work for brings out a web application or even a page that does not work in Firefox I normally complain. There are a few of us that do this and we enjoy annoying the web designers since the company has a policy of supporting both Firefox and MS IE so they have to fix the issue. They do try to ignore us in the hope that the problem goes away but that just makes us all the more vocal. Why don't we give up and roll over to the Microsoft way of thinking? I think the best answer to that, it's fun in a rather perverse way and it does not cost us anything and it does not upset management. It annoys the designers but it's very hard to browbeat senior Engineers.
That appears to only be 43% true.
http://www.hardcoreware.net/playstation-3-80gbs-ps2-backwards-compatibility-sucks/
I assume the article is for the US/Japanese model PS3 since the 60GB PS3 had full hardware backwards compatibility while the 80GB model had the PS2 Graphics Synthesiser and software emulation as did the 60GB PAL PS3.
The article states that only 57% of PS2 games worked on the emulator models. This is untrue it is more like 85% to 90% after Firmware 1.8 came out on 24th May 2007. Of course even 85% is not good if the games you like fall in the 15% of games that have issues ranging from freezing, artefacts or just can't read the disk.
Opening the PS2 to home-brew developers could make an impact in second and third world countries. While this won't stop piracy you may see a booming home grown market that the target consumers will pay for although the developers probably won't make that much for their efforts, still this may be a stepping stone to better things. The problem is most games will be worse than shovel-ware however you may see some highly innovative games as well although they would be few and far between. Still even one stellar or even quality game in a hundred could be a good thing.
Developing a game from inception through to final marketing to the consumer can be quite expensive, no matter what the development kit. If you develop a shooter and can get hold of a good level editor and engine you are well on your way to creating an FPS game reasonably cheaply (Standard or High Def hardly comes into the overall cost). The problem with this is the story line is virtually non existent (like that matters to some players) however it allows developers to produce FPS games quickly (Xbox360 and now PS3 cough!). When you develop a game that has a decent story, good graphics and/or is highly innovative the costs can be that of a Hollywood movie.
Just wait for next week's headline: Microsoft Trademarks a Colour!
It's been done by Cadbury for their purple logo and BP for their green logo . Also many other companies have trademarked a colour for their logos and some have actually sued people because they used the same colour in their own but different logos see Cadbury sues Darrell Lea . Of course trademarking a colour can also be a double edged sword and big companies have been sued by smaller ones successfully.
I actually had to try that to see if it still works. That way of unmounting a volume has long been superseded by eject buttons displayed next to the volumes in the Finder's sidebar. And, of course, by the physical eject button on the keyboard (only for the DVD drive).
If the disk or flash card is a USB device all you need to do is click right and select "Unmount Volume". Of course you could just pull it out although there is always the possibility of file-system corruption especially if someone is writing to it at the time. MS Windows is not that much different since you have to select a very small icon to disconnect the drive.
That's a better reply than what I was thinking: What kind of linux advocacy is it in 2008 where the answer to the problem is Writing a Script? No. Not gonna happen. No-one in the windows world writes a script to search for a file, it shouldn't require that in linux either.
The simple answer is "It depends on the problem and the requirements to resolve it". If that means writing a script (Bash/Borne, Perl, name your poison) then so be it. The thing is that scripts coupled with standard Unix tools can get the job done quickly and efficiently but it really depends on what is required to solve the problem in the first place.
As far as finding a file goes I would use the command line and can hack a simple find with a grep match in a few seconds which will get results back quicker than a GUI tool. This is not to say that everyone should use the command line, on the contrary people should use what they are comfortable with and if that is a GUI and they are happy with the results then great.
In my opinion being closed minded to the command line is just as short sighted as the so called guru being closed minded to GUI based tools. They are both available in Linux/Unix and it is up to the user to decide what is the best way to approach a problem or ask for help and be open minded to reasonable answers.
Or beagle in Linux. Both Spotlight an Beagle predate windows desktop search. Which will still not search network drives making it useless for me.
Do you mean Samba mounts of MS Window drives or NFS mounts of MS Windows drives? Of course they have to be shared from MS Windows otherwise no one can search them including another MS Windows machine. If you can see a mount-point and have permission to read it then Linux/Unix utilities including GUI's as well can search.
Unix uses the word mount-point to signify the root of a file-system that may consist of a single disk a disk slice or even a virtual disk that could be terra-bytes or larger since the concept of a drive is really an anachronism carried over from the DOS days.
Does linux/windows have anything like "smart folders"? I can make a folder on my desktop of the last modified .doc files. Or last modified files containing X name. Or opened/created/modified within X days
Yes. Click or double click on you "Home" icon and in the explorer window you can drag/drop or make a link and drag/drop that onto your desktop. I am not talking about MS Windows I an talking about the Gnome or KDE desktop. It is different to MS Windows but it is IMHO much more efficient if you insist on using a GUI. Were do you think navigable windows came from in the first place? I will give you a hint, it was not MS Windows.
Actually, they don't even have to press enter. Spotlight searches as you type. Shuttleworth's point here is that while we Slashdotters have slocate, find, grep, etc., what do the grandmothers and Microsoft expatriates have?
Actually an MS Windows refugee can use a GUI (native to KDE or even Gnome) for running find which can search on a variety of options which includes a simplified version of grep and is more in-line with what they would use in MS Windows. GUI searching is also avaiable for Open Office and many other GUI applications as well.
For the more adventurous the dreaded command line is available however I never try to push a novice to use the command line although I do suggest that they use simple commands initially if they need to do something that a GUI will not do or is time consuming to use.
I always suggest that a person learns what they need to get the job done and even though a GUI many be slower or not as elegant than the command line they should stick to the GUI until they are curious enough to move on.
find . -print | grep -i "my_file_pattern" .doc files
or
find / -print | grep -i "my_file_pattern" ### This may take a while
or
find . -print | grep -i doc ### For
If you need more info type "info find" or "man find" or "info grep" or "man grep".
Writing shell scripts is a very good way to scare off an novice to Linux or Unix. I do agree that scripts are very useful (I use and write quite complex scripts all the time) but not for the novice.
The above combination of find and grep is very simple and even a novice will find this easy to do particularly when the can see how this is a stepping stone to more powerful commands. Of course if the someone has an aversion to the command line at least they have a GUI find command to use.
Linux and any other collaborative open source project could be sold theoretically, if all copyright holders would agree on the terms.
Err no! You would also have to get around the GPL as well and that has teeth if pushed. Once you license your software to GPL it is yours however you cannot just pull it and sell it off although forking can be done, but this can lead to a legal nightmare, however companies like Redhat (US128m profit this last quarter) seem to do very well and don't infringe the GPL.
The BSD parts of a Linux distribution can be brought in-house as long as the purchaser agrees to the BSD license. Taking a quick look through my Fedora 9 distribution (1790 packages) about 168 are BSD and 1118 are GPL (LGPL, GPL, GPL2 and GPL3) and 98 apache licenses with the rest a mixture. For anyone interested out of the GPL packages 66 are GPL3.
Forget about all the packages I have in Fedora 9, Linux is really the kernel and that is licensed under GPL2 so no one can really purchase it so anyone is free to add and if possible improve on it although it is up to the maintainers to decide if they want to include the changes in the official distribution.
How I arrived at the above (note: you don't need to be root to do the following):
$ rpm -qa --queryformat '%{License}\n' |grep -i bsd|wc -l
168
$ rpm -qa --queryformat '%{License}\n' |grep -i gpl|wc -l
1118
$ rpm -qa --queryformat '%{License}\n' |grep -iE 'gpl3|gplv3'|wc -l
66
$ rpm -qa --queryformat '%{License}\n' |grep -i apache|wc -l
98
When reading the article I could not help noticing he was saying that today it is younger adults who are having children rather than older adults. Were is the scientific method here? Yes there are some adults who are having children at a young age but there are also adults who are having children when they are much older. I guess he never studied history or even cultures.
If you look back in history it was not unusual for adults to have children (and many of them) when they were quite young, because the average life expectancy was much lower and infant mortality was considerably higher. It is only when you look at modern affluent societies do you notice that adults are postponing having children until they are in their late twenties or thirties. Of course depending on the economic and religious backgrounds of some societies not much has changed for hundreds and thousands of years.
If the author of this paper believes what he said then I suggest taking a long hard look at his scientific approach and point out which areas he is right and which are wrong instead of making an erroneous sweeping statement like he has done. Or is he just grandstanding?