You can have dependency problems is you just use RPM's however there are tools such as "app-get" and "yum" that reduce this issue to virtually zero although you do have to be careful of the repos you pick since they have to work with each other. Were people run into issues is having to many enabled repos.
To have all repos enabled and accepting all is just plain silly since you are going to have issues. What I do is to activate one repo at a time in a preferred order with the primary repo first. I never do an installation or an update without checking what I am getting and I will only answer "yes" when I am satisfied.
It no use winging at Sony why don't you petition the Games Producers. I don't remember hearing of Sony sending over the Goon squad to the Game producers to force them to make games for their machine. In case you are interested there are over 60 native PS3 games available now with many more to come and well over 3000 PS1 and PS2 (and more coming out) games that play on the PS3.
If you look at Xbox360 games they are mainly FPS or Shooters which are fairly easy to make since there are game engines available for this. If you like these then fine but IMHO they get repetitious quickly, that is why I have no interest in Xbox360 games. The same game engines can be ported to the PS3 but this takes time and to be honest why would you like clones of the games that are on the Xbox360. Programming for the PS3 is not any more difficult as it is for the Xbox360 or the PC it is just different. All Gaming companies have programmers who have varying skills so a programmer that is good with PC related programming may not be much good (and usually aren't) with PS3 programming even though the "base" programming language for this machine is C and C++. In reality the graphics artist would rarely program but just learn and utilise the graphics engine.
The biggest problem with producing a game is not really the programmers or artists it really is the all over development from the initial concept through to the actual production and distribution of a game and this sometime requires the budget of a Hollywood movie with all the risks that have to be taken. A single bad game as well as a bad movie can bankrupt a Game/Movie Company, so that is why we see the same old games and movies being repeats with maybe a little extra window dressing. It is a really brave game company that experiments today.
You do realise that CentOS is really a recompilation of Redhat source. In fact if you want you can install an RPM that makes it look like Redhat which Redhat will support. If you put Redhat on your machine you can change your repos which normally point to the Redhat repos or if you want a "satellite server" (this does cost but is great if you have many Linux machines). If you can maintain your own machines then you are still free to do this (change your primary repos) but you do need a license to access Redhat's repos.
As for yum there are many distributions that use it, CentOS (you can get commercial support for this if you want), Fedora and Scientific Linux to name a few. From Redhat ES 5 (dito CentOS 5) yum is the updating tool you should be using. The problem you do find with yum is picking the appropriate repos since some can cause issues with the software from primary repos. I always recommend that you update from your primary first then enable the other repos in order of confidence. IMHO never just update without checking what you are going to update first (eg. I never user the "-y" option when using the command line).
Yum for Redhat and also Fedora don't have proprietary code or codex's on their primary repos for very obvious reasons such as preventing possible litigation, however you are free to download and maintain from alternative repos that do have the code or codex's you want. Anyway if you have a Redhat maintenance contract for your company why would you download so-called "non-free" codex's and software, since you would be exposing your company to possible litigation. For home use, what you put on your machine is up-to you.
The HD-DVD and Blu-ray movie market is small and will not pick up till the adoption of HDTV gathers a decent momentum but unless people are going to buy 32" and above HDTV's you are going to be hard pressed to see much of a difference between a HD movie and an upscaled DVD movie. Once you get 40" and above HDTV's you can really start to pick the difference but that at the moment is a much smaller market.
The only way you are going to see a huge take up of HD movies is if the Movie companies drop support for DVD but to do this will really hurt Toshiba unless they can get HD-DVD as the main choice of the HD market and this is not going to happen. So like it or not we are going to have the two HD choices for the foreseeable future.
Even if you have a PS3 or Xbox360 add-on or even a dedicated HD player (Blu-ray or even HD-DVD) you can still watch the DVD version which will save you money and most players will upscale them to HDTV resolutions. For movie studios to just back HD-DVD but still release on DVD is rather silly since it won't really hurt the sales of Blu-ray players of which the PS3 is by far the greatest seller which is getting close to 5M world wide now and we are not up to one year of sales yet.
What is actually weird to some is that IBM, Sony and Toshiba are the developers of the Cell yet the HD-DVD consortium of which Toshiba is a member and the Blu-ray consortium of which Sony is a member are locked in quite a nasty slugging match. If you look at the DVD consortium Toshiba is a major member while Sony is a minor member. Both still get royalies from every DVD sale, however with regard to the Hi-Def disks if one is successful then the winer gets the royalties but unlike the Betamax/VHS war where Sony lost (they did not loose money though) this war is different. It is all or nothing for Toshiba but Sony has the PS3 and that uses Blu-ray so no matter what Sony is not going to lose, it is just that they may not get as much as they would like.
As far as HD movies go you are right that the market penetration is low but the HDTV market is taking off (try to buy a Glass TV most stores don't stock them) and you wont see any marked difference in HD movie preference for at least a year and while many people won't buy a dedicated Hi-Def movie player or recorder for a while (who can blame them) it will happen. The only thing that will speed the process is if all the major movie studios decide not to release movies on DVD. This won't happen since Toshiba has the most to loose, but like it or not once HDTV purchases start to exceed SDTV's I think you will see movie studios drop support for DVD, then and only then will things start to get interesting.
At the moment Blu-ray movies are outselling HD-DVD movies by approx 2 to 1 but it appears that the HD-DVD camp does not seem to realise that all native PS3 games are all Blu-ray as well and that is millions more disks sold. Combine Blu-ray movies and PS3 games and you have a massive Blu-ray disk sales lead over HD-DVD.
For the so-called statistics people to state that 60% of PS3 owners don't know that the PS3 can play Blu-ray movies is interesting, since the statement means (if you believe them) that 60% of all PS3 owners can't read or has never listened or read any article on the PS3. I wonder what their sample of PS3 owners was or was it from people who were thinking of buying a PS3 or never going to buy a PS3 or just some people off the street.
Microsoft is backing the HD-DVD consortium but I don't think they get any royalties on each HD-DVD disk sold unlike Toshiba. All Microsoft gets by backing HD_DVD is to hurt Sony who is their main competitor in the high definition game market although Nintendo has definitely muddied the water.
It appears "Kane and Lynch" and "army of Two" are cross-platform games and since Halo may take the lions share of the Xbox360 market in the months leading up to Christmas this may result in poor sales for this game on the Xbox360 (although it may pick up in the New Year). These games may actually do well on the PC and the PS3 platforms which could make developers think twice before developing on a console that does not return a profit. Still releasing on the Xbox360 at a similar time to Halo is IMHO asking for poor sales.
Still preference of a game depends on the individual and while games like Halo and Mario will do well not everyone likes (shock horror) those types of games so the wider the selection of games the better as far as I am concerned. The problem I see at the moment for all the so-called next-gen consoles is there is not a great variation in unique and innovative games although I am quite sure that many would disagree with me.
Microsoft is selling below cost to kill or damage a competitor, it is what they have been doing for a long time, of course to them this is "ruthless" business and ethics, integrity or morality does not even get a look in.
You are right with regard to the Studios placing a bet on HD-DVD winning but then again some very big Studios are betting on Blu-ray as well and since the PS3 can upscale DVD's (all movies will come out on DVD) you can still buy or rent any movie. To be fair an HD-DVD player can do the same but there are still many more Blu-ray players (you still have to include the PS3 despite what some people think) than HD-DVD players.
Neither Sony or Nintendo are stupid or arrogant enough to loose over $5 billion on a game console. The PS1 and PS2 consoles were no loss makers and at the moment we don't know what the loss (personally I think there is one) on the PS3 is despite some so called debatable "educated" guesses, although Sony did post a $250m loss compared to Microsoft's $1.5+ billion loss. On the Nintendo side I am not aware of any console that was a loss maker and that includes the Gamecube and N64.
Well if you have a Blu-ray player and you really would like to like to see one of the movies that come out exclusively on HD-DVD you can get the DVD and save some money since a good Blu-ray player will upscale a DVD on a HDTV but then again why would you want Shrek HD-DVD or Blu-ray for that matter when an upscaled DVD will look almost as nice.
If you don't have a HDTV and are not contemplating one in the next few years this is a non event, although for those people with PS3's (approaching 5M world wide) then Blu-ray is the way to go. Surprisingly people do use the PS3 to play movies upscaled DVD and Blu-ray as well as playing games and in a family environment that is the norm not the exception. Of course you cannot tell some Movie execs that as the following following article http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-fi -hddvd21aug21,0,3873825.story?coll=la-headlines-pe -business snippets mention:
Katzenberg and Rob Moore, Paramount's president of worldwide marketing and distribution, declined to comment on Internet reports that hefty payments were the motivating factor spurring the two studios. Are we surprised to read this?
Sony has sold 1.4 million PlayStation 3s in the U.S ( No over 1.8M). since launching the game console in November 2006, according to NPD Group. Ninety percent of Blu-ray movies are being played on the PlayStation 3, which consumers buy primarily to play video games, analyst Roden said. Hmmm I wonder how he arrived at that conclusion?
HP has a "Standards of Business Conduct" policy (as do many companies) and the Company in general tries to take an "ethical" approach to business practice. The problem is that even though what was done was reprehensible, un-ethical and IMHO stupid there was nothing in the "policy" that actually spelled out that this was not acceptable and this is a loophole to some people who hold and abuse power.
If something is patented then the description of that patent should enable replication by any third party who then can legally produce and/or use that thing for a "Reasonable" and "Non-discriminatory" payment to the patent holder for the life of that patent. So basically all patents are open, however if the patent is vague or obvious then it should never have been granted in the first place.
Getting back on topic. I think the following from the conclusion of the article says it all: "While Microsoft has granted patent use over the required portions of the specification that are described in detail the numerous undisclosed behaviours and inexplicit definitions are not covered, providing a legal as well as technical barrier to OOXML's implementation". I think we can quite easily arrive at the conclusion that to adopt OOXML is to adopt something that cannot easily be implemented by a third party, so we can assume this is a proprietary format that is dressed up to look like it is an open format.
Err Carly has not been the CEO of HP for a few years, Mark Hurd is the current CEO.
The problem you have here is what was done not actually illegal in the eyes of the Law. Unethical yes and definitely breaching HP's own conduct of standards. This does subject the person or persons subject to disciplinary action within the organisation which can be a sever reprimand to termination of employment.
While IANL for someone in an organisation to be jailed they must break the Law and be convicted of it. It could be put forward in a court that while certain people in HP acted inappropriately the Journalists also acted inappropriately in accepting what could be construed as getting data that could be used for "insider trading" which is actually illegal.
Many large companies actually try to foster a code of ethics within the company and with their customers but it only takes one to use questionable practices to breakdown this standard and expose the company to ridicule and possible litigation. Of course there are some companies that view ethics as a sigh of weakness.
I got my laptop with MS Windows Vista Ultimate and put Fedora 7 on it but not without creating a recovery disk of MS Vista. My reason for doing this is I normally sell my laptop every 12 months or so and I know that the person who buys it will want a MS Windows OS. Obviously I will give the prospective buyer the choice but I am about 99% certain of what they will pick.
From my own perspective Fedora 7 does what I want and does it really well but I would not recommend it to anyone but someone who is keen on maintaining a Linux distribution that will break on occasions. In other words a Linux/Unix System Admin who wants to keep their skills up to date. My family use Fedora 7 without any issues but I am the System Admin so it is my job to make sure they don't have issues. If I was asked what Linux distribution to recommend I would not hesitate but to mention Ubuntu however I would ask if they would let me install it for them first to make sure their hardware will work to their satisfaction. If a person wanted what is essentially a Microsoft centric product environment then I would just suggest they stick with MS Windows.
The Article IMHO was an excellent read and highlights the problems Linux has in getting accepted into the general population. I have said this before and will say it again, Linux will only get accepted when Government Organizations mandate it as a cost saving initiative (It is happening in some countries but slowly). When this happens Business will follow suit and then and only then will the general public follow.
Another way for Linux to be more acceptable is for the OS to get good native games but Games Developers don't seem willing to take the risk even though the Linux community is in the order of 10's of millions of people. What are they afraid of, after all MS Windows users seem to pirate games and most likely more than what Linux users would although this is open to debate.
The PS3 can read CD and DVD disks as well as Blu-ray disks (I am amazed people don't know this). You can install Linux from DVD or CD if you wish. In addition you can play PS2 (DVD/CD) or PS1 (CD) games, not to mention playing PS3 games on Blu-ray. You can even play DVD movies and it will upscale them as well.
The only thing the PS3 drive cannot do is burn disks but put on Linux and plug in a BD/DVD/CD burner via USB and it should work (I have not tried this though). I am not sure about HD-DVD but if you have Linux plus the appropriate software and a USB HD-DVD drive I can't see why not. Blu-ray and HD-DVD media is not cheap but then again neither was DVD media in 2000 and if you go back to the early 1990's neither was CD media. I can even go back to the 1980's and Betamax and VHS blank tapes were not what I would call cheap either.
Err no! The latest Sony firmware is 3.52 while the latest homebrew is 3.51 and if the latest game has a firmware update (eg. Twisted Metal had firmware 1.52) it won't install that firmware if you have later release homebrew firmware. You actually have to do this yourself manually, firmware from a game does not install automatically. Actually people who do homebrew are people who in the majority of case will keep their PSP up to date with the latest homebrew firmware.
This is not to say I am an advocate of homebrew or genuine Sony firmware for that matter although both add extra functionality to the PSP, however my son has a homebrew PSP which he brought and upgraded himself and he is very happy with it. Surprisingly he does buy genuine PSP games on occasions, but he won't buy movies unless they are at least 70% cheaper than their DVD equivalent. In many ways he prefers to download an "avi" and play it on his PC or on the PSP or even on our HDTV from the PSP via our PS3 and the result is quite good (not fantastic but definitely watchable).
Sony hasn't been "cool" about anything homebrew on the PSP (the device under discussion), doing everything they can to disable it with each firmware update.
To be fair if Sony does not try to disable "homebrew" with every firmware update then I can see massive litigation by companies like Nintento and Sega since with "homebrew" is is very easy to to play NES, SNES, Sega Master System and Megadrive games just to name a few. I can see Sony Execs turning to Nintendo and Sega saying "Well it's not our fault these terrible homebrew people are circumventing our updates and we are trying our best to stop it, but then again the DS has a thriving homebrew community and what are you doing about it?" Then both Nintento and Sony privately give themselves hi-fives for increased DS and PSP sales.
With regard to WiFi limiting the PSP to 222MHz I am not sure that this is a major problem. Too many people think that MHz or even GHz is a deciding factor in processor performance. It is not since you can have a 1GHz processor that can handle 5 to 10 threads that will outperform a 3GHz single threaded processor. There are many factors you have to take into account when looking as all over computer performance.
As for saying Sony is evil I do suggest you do some reading on Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony and you will find that they are multinational corporations and only one has been found guilty of being an monopoly. They have all been litigated against with some wins and losses. I have never heard or seen any of those companies do anything illegal maybe immoral, ruthless or unethical but these don't seem to count in business today. As for stupid, short-sighted or ill-advise this is not illegal although some people would like to think so.
The first time that someone loses a million dollars' worth of data or one of your consultant's laptops (with customer data) gets stolen, it will start happening. I don't have much sympathy for this kind of thing. I mean, it's kind of like saying, "Ideally, the money in the bank should be behind the counters with the tellers instead of just laying around in the lobby, but this is not happening." Make it happen. If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
I could not agree more with what you just said. Companies should never allow critical data to be stored on a company laptop and never on a personal laptop. Employee's and management must be security trained and aware.
This may not be for the corporate user but the way I backup my laptop is to use a 320GB disk and connect it to one of my USB ports and use "Clonezilla" to backup the image of my laptop. Your machine needs to be down while you generate the image. This works on MS Windows XP (should work on 2000, 2003 and Vista as well), Solaris and Fedora 7 (it should also work on any Linux machine). It can take approx 20 minutes to image approx 30GB of data across a USB 2 connection which actually creates an image directory on my hard disk (date time stamped and configurable). Recovery time is approximately the same as the backup time.
The "Clonzilla" software is open source and it will only backup and compress (again configurable) what it knows as data although for Solaris it assumed the whole of the disk (ie. a full disk image). A nice feature is being able to backup to an NFS mount or an ssh login which is my preferred method for remote image backups and this would work on a corporate ssh server (I can use my Laptop or any Unix machine) since you don't need to be root to actually do the image backup but you do in the case of "Clonezilla" need to boot form CD but only once every month or so. Backup and recovery are limited by your network speed.
An interesting feature of using an ssh server to collect image backups is you can easily maintain some images for corporate roll outs although you may have issues with MS Windows because of licensing. For Linux/Solaris you should not have any issues. Another feature is the ability to manually customise your disk partitions or even LVM volumes depending on the disks you are using by simply editing the configuration text files in the image directory on the ssh server or hard disk.
I have found that I only need one image backup per month for a laptop or every time I get a new kernel and with Fedora 7 that is approx every three weeks. You can use any good backup software for day to day backups of you personal data. Of course in the case of Linux/Unix you only need root and your home or users directory and recovery is very easy. You should be root to do the backup but you don't need to be root on the ssh server. For MS Windows you may have trouble backing up open files. Dataprotecter and EMC Networker are good enterprise backup products but your business is going to pay for them.
There are other imaging solutions some free and others not free it depends on what you want and how much you wish to spend. As I have said before "Clonezilla" works for me and is very user friendly (IMHO) flexible but it may not work for you (test, test, test and test some more). I would not recommend Fedora 7 if you want a stable Linux machine but a distribution like Ubuntu. For Linux, MS Windows and Solaris I have found "Clonezilla" is excellent for saving and restoring images to/from a USB disk or network machine.
It is always a good idea to consider the system disk fundamental layout and this applies equally to MS Windows as it does to Linux/Unix since you only need to image this not the user data since that should be done under a backup. As for backing up over 1 TB of user data well that opens up a whole new can of worms and if you have that on a corporate laptop I would make sure it is not a collection of MP3's, avi's or anything that does not pertain to your work (read KingSkippus post for more info), one audit and you could be in big trouble.
I highly doubt the Universe cares about us since it mainly consists of empty space and unless the matter and/or energy of the universe become sentient this will continue until the whole Universe dies. The interesting thing is some matter has become sentient and can look at the Universe with wonder and an inquiring mind. This is our species and at the moment we are only aware of one intelligent life form in our entire Universe, however the Universe is incomprehensibly huge and we would have to be arrogant to the point of stupidity to believe we are the only intelligent species.
Our species is fortunate to live in "interesting times" since there is so much to discover about the Universe and even if we could live for millions of years we would still be scratching the surface. This should not be viewed as a defeat but as a challenge which gives us a reason to live, learn and appreciate the wonder of it all. Unfortunately there are many people who view the very thought of even venturing into space as a waste of resources since they think we should get our own house in order first.
From my personal view the people who call space research a waste are consigning our species to oblivion since eventually we are going to run out of resources and that will result in suffering and death on a grand scale. To them this is "God's" will so when you hear or read this there is nothing you can say that will sway them. These are the same people who would quite happily burn a scientist or visionary at the stake because they did not agree with their narrow minded point of view. Fortunately these people are not in control but give them a chance and they would bring the human race back to the "Dark Ages" and what is frightening is they honestly believe they are doing the right thing.
Well I don't use MSM but I think it would have a problem picking IE since I don't have IE installed on my home laptop which only runs Fedora 7 nor do I want it. Actually as an exercise I tried clicking on Hotmail and it appears to work under Firefox although it does not have much choice. Still if it did not work I can always use Google Mail.
On my work computer (runs XP) Firefox is my default browser and it just works, although my work has a policy of supporting Mozilla and MS IE6 (IE7 is not acceptable as is Vista).
> Even still, I know that there's not many games out for it yet
Then you want to get some PS2 games since they smooth and upscale nicely from the PS3 via an HDMI or component connection on a HDTV. Unfortunately there are so many good PS2 games out there (Square/Enix games appear the best but Ubisoft are not bad either) you may forget to buy native PS3 games. Still you are going to save a lot of money if you take this path.
At the moment Oblivion is taking up too much of my time and I have only completed one gate (too many side quests). Every second or third day I switch to a PS2 game just for the break.
Actually the Gamecube (approx 10M) did almost as well as the Xbox except that Microsoft lost about US$5 billion while the Gamecube made a healthy profit although not as much as Nintendo would have liked. Off-topic I know but in the hand-held market the DS is outselling the PSP by over 2 to 1, still both Nintendo and Sony have made a nice profit out of the respective sales. Just because you don't sell a product as well as the competition and as long as you make a profit does not mean your product is a failure it just means that the competition makes more of a profit at least when comparing Nintendo's and Sony's gaming machines.
I have an Australian PS3 and backwards compatibility is done in software and we get approx 85% to 90% of games working properly. I have over 60 PS2 games and only one does not work and two others do have minor issues and all my PS1 games work. To me this is not bad considering the PS3 has only been available to us since the end of March.
It is annoying if your favourate game does not work though.
One feature of the PS3 is the ability to swap out your hard drive and replace it with a larger standard 2.5" drive if you want without voiding your warranty. In fact the PS3 booklet that comes with the machine details the steps on how to do this. You can use the old 60GB drive as a portable USB drive as well.
Because the PS3 does smooth and upscale your PS1/2 games to a HDTV some of your favorate games look so good you end up replaying them again (forget about the memory card reader just start again). You can even do like I did by being aware that some retailers will negotiate and you may be able to get a good trade in on your old PS2 plus a few games you are now tired off (US$407). Look around but be prepared to walk as well.
It never ceases to amaze me the mention of the PS3 not having many games. I can understand and sympathize if people said "The PS3 does not have many native games that I want or even like" (IMHO this is my personal view of the Wii and Xbox360 games as well). To answer this properly I will state this "The PS3 has more games available to it than the Xbox, Xbox360, Gamecube and Wii combined". What I did not say in that statement was you can play PS1 and PS2 games as well as PS3 games and the PS2 is still a variable platform with new games still coming out for it. Even so I very much doubt that many people have the cash to pay for the number of native PS3 games that are available now and they cost about the same as the Xbox360 and the Wii games. Taking the above into account I actually can save more money and have a wider choice of games than the other game consoles, so US$600 is cheap IMHO for what this machine can do and so far I have only talked about games.
I don't have a 46" HDTV (the original poster may though) I have a 37" HDTV (576p (PAL), 720p and 1080i) and in the US you can pick one of these up (mayby not PAL) at around US$700 or less if you negotiate (I got my 60GB PS3 for approx US$407). The PS3, Xbox360 and even the Wii still look good on smaller HDTV's, but of course once you get a 46" or bigger (If you can afford it) then only the PS3 and Xbox360 look good, the Wii is ok but you can really pick the difference in graphics.
Since I only use Fedora on my laptop I use "yum" and "rpm" to maintain packages although I am aware of "app-get" on other distros. If you don't like the command line you even have a nice GUI to install, maintain and even remove packages. I have found that if you use more than one repo ("livna" is a must for me) then you must be careful of the order you access them and stick to that order otherwise you will have issues. In fact the more varied repos the more chance of problems although a simple fix is to remove the offending package and reinstall it from up the tree (main repo down). Common sense, knowledge and confidence are essential here. So far my Fedora 7 is fully up to date which includes the latest kernel releases as well and I don't have any issues.
The fun really starts when you down load a source tar ball however I would not recommend this for beginners although if you want to learn I can assure you of an excellent, sometimes frustrating learning experience.
If you setup "Wine" on your Linux machine you can even install some MS Windows centric software but I always advise the person who wants to do this to be aware that not all will work or if they do the software may not work properly. Fun and games can be found here so I normally try to find a native Linux equivalent.
As far as games go, Linux is limited compared to native Microsoft centric games but then a Linux game will not normally work on a Microsoft OS. I have Zsnes and Fakenes both working well (both complied from source) so my emu needs are seen to. I have not found a native Sega emu yet (I use wine) but I can wait. Still I prefer console games over PC games and having seen the issues my son had to jump through to get Half Life 2 (purchased not pirated) working (it froze at the most inappropriate time) on his Windows PC I have no intention of going down that path.
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You can have dependency problems is you just use RPM's however there are tools such as "app-get" and "yum" that reduce this issue to virtually zero although you do have to be careful of the repos you pick since they have to work with each other. Were people run into issues is having to many enabled repos.
To have all repos enabled and accepting all is just plain silly since you are going to have issues. What I do is to activate one repo at a time in a preferred order with the primary repo first. I never do an installation or an update without checking what I am getting and I will only answer "yes" when I am satisfied.
It no use winging at Sony why don't you petition the Games Producers. I don't remember hearing of Sony sending over the Goon squad to the Game producers to force them to make games for their machine. In case you are interested there are over 60 native PS3 games available now with many more to come and well over 3000 PS1 and PS2 (and more coming out) games that play on the PS3.
If you look at Xbox360 games they are mainly FPS or Shooters which are fairly easy to make since there are game engines available for this. If you like these then fine but IMHO they get repetitious quickly, that is why I have no interest in Xbox360 games. The same game engines can be ported to the PS3 but this takes time and to be honest why would you like clones of the games that are on the Xbox360. Programming for the PS3 is not any more difficult as it is for the Xbox360 or the PC it is just different. All Gaming companies have programmers who have varying skills so a programmer that is good with PC related programming may not be much good (and usually aren't) with PS3 programming even though the "base" programming language for this machine is C and C++. In reality the graphics artist would rarely program but just learn and utilise the graphics engine.
The biggest problem with producing a game is not really the programmers or artists it really is the all over development from the initial concept through to the actual production and distribution of a game and this sometime requires the budget of a Hollywood movie with all the risks that have to be taken. A single bad game as well as a bad movie can bankrupt a Game/Movie Company, so that is why we see the same old games and movies being repeats with maybe a little extra window dressing. It is a really brave game company that experiments today.
You do realise that CentOS is really a recompilation of Redhat source. In fact if you want you can install an RPM that makes it look like Redhat which Redhat will support. If you put Redhat on your machine you can change your repos which normally point to the Redhat repos or if you want a "satellite server" (this does cost but is great if you have many Linux machines). If you can maintain your own machines then you are still free to do this (change your primary repos) but you do need a license to access Redhat's repos.
As for yum there are many distributions that use it, CentOS (you can get commercial support for this if you want), Fedora and Scientific Linux to name a few. From Redhat ES 5 (dito CentOS 5) yum is the updating tool you should be using. The problem you do find with yum is picking the appropriate repos since some can cause issues with the software from primary repos. I always recommend that you update from your primary first then enable the other repos in order of confidence. IMHO never just update without checking what you are going to update first (eg. I never user the "-y" option when using the command line).
Yum for Redhat and also Fedora don't have proprietary code or codex's on their primary repos for very obvious reasons such as preventing possible litigation, however you are free to download and maintain from alternative repos that do have the code or codex's you want. Anyway if you have a Redhat maintenance contract for your company why would you download so-called "non-free" codex's and software, since you would be exposing your company to possible litigation. For home use, what you put on your machine is up-to you.
The HD-DVD and Blu-ray movie market is small and will not pick up till the adoption of HDTV gathers a decent momentum but unless people are going to buy 32" and above HDTV's you are going to be hard pressed to see much of a difference between a HD movie and an upscaled DVD movie. Once you get 40" and above HDTV's you can really start to pick the difference but that at the moment is a much smaller market.
The only way you are going to see a huge take up of HD movies is if the Movie companies drop support for DVD but to do this will really hurt Toshiba unless they can get HD-DVD as the main choice of the HD market and this is not going to happen. So like it or not we are going to have the two HD choices for the foreseeable future.
Even if you have a PS3 or Xbox360 add-on or even a dedicated HD player (Blu-ray or even HD-DVD) you can still watch the DVD version which will save you money and most players will upscale them to HDTV resolutions. For movie studios to just back HD-DVD but still release on DVD is rather silly since it won't really hurt the sales of Blu-ray players of which the PS3 is by far the greatest seller which is getting close to 5M world wide now and we are not up to one year of sales yet.
What is actually weird to some is that IBM, Sony and Toshiba are the developers of the Cell yet the HD-DVD consortium of which Toshiba is a member and the Blu-ray consortium of which Sony is a member are locked in quite a nasty slugging match. If you look at the DVD consortium Toshiba is a major member while Sony is a minor member. Both still get royalies from every DVD sale, however with regard to the Hi-Def disks if one is successful then the winer gets the royalties but unlike the Betamax/VHS war where Sony lost (they did not loose money though) this war is different. It is all or nothing for Toshiba but Sony has the PS3 and that uses Blu-ray so no matter what Sony is not going to lose, it is just that they may not get as much as they would like.
As far as HD movies go you are right that the market penetration is low but the HDTV market is taking off (try to buy a Glass TV most stores don't stock them) and you wont see any marked difference in HD movie preference for at least a year and while many people won't buy a dedicated Hi-Def movie player or recorder for a while (who can blame them) it will happen. The only thing that will speed the process is if all the major movie studios decide not to release movies on DVD. This won't happen since Toshiba has the most to loose, but like it or not once HDTV purchases start to exceed SDTV's I think you will see movie studios drop support for DVD, then and only then will things start to get interesting.
At the moment Blu-ray movies are outselling HD-DVD movies by approx 2 to 1 but it appears that the HD-DVD camp does not seem to realise that all native PS3 games are all Blu-ray as well and that is millions more disks sold. Combine Blu-ray movies and PS3 games and you have a massive Blu-ray disk sales lead over HD-DVD.
For the so-called statistics people to state that 60% of PS3 owners don't know that the PS3 can play Blu-ray movies is interesting, since the statement means (if you believe them) that 60% of all PS3 owners can't read or has never listened or read any article on the PS3. I wonder what their sample of PS3 owners was or was it from people who were thinking of buying a PS3 or never going to buy a PS3 or just some people off the street.
Microsoft is backing the HD-DVD consortium but I don't think they get any royalties on each HD-DVD disk sold unlike Toshiba. All Microsoft gets by backing HD_DVD is to hurt Sony who is their main competitor in the high definition game market although Nintendo has definitely muddied the water.
It appears "Kane and Lynch" and "army of Two" are cross-platform games and since Halo may take the lions share of the Xbox360 market in the months leading up to Christmas this may result in poor sales for this game on the Xbox360 (although it may pick up in the New Year). These games may actually do well on the PC and the PS3 platforms which could make developers think twice before developing on a console that does not return a profit. Still releasing on the Xbox360 at a similar time to Halo is IMHO asking for poor sales.
Still preference of a game depends on the individual and while games like Halo and Mario will do well not everyone likes (shock horror) those types of games so the wider the selection of games the better as far as I am concerned. The problem I see at the moment for all the so-called next-gen consoles is there is not a great variation in unique and innovative games although I am quite sure that many would disagree with me.
Microsoft is selling below cost to kill or damage a competitor, it is what they have been doing for a long time, of course to them this is "ruthless" business and ethics, integrity or morality does not even get a look in.
You are right with regard to the Studios placing a bet on HD-DVD winning but then again some very big Studios are betting on Blu-ray as well and since the PS3 can upscale DVD's (all movies will come out on DVD) you can still buy or rent any movie. To be fair an HD-DVD player can do the same but there are still many more Blu-ray players (you still have to include the PS3 despite what some people think) than HD-DVD players.
Neither Sony or Nintendo are stupid or arrogant enough to loose over $5 billion on a game console. The PS1 and PS2 consoles were no loss makers and at the moment we don't know what the loss (personally I think there is one) on the PS3 is despite some so called debatable "educated" guesses, although Sony did post a $250m loss compared to Microsoft's $1.5+ billion loss. On the Nintendo side I am not aware of any console that was a loss maker and that includes the Gamecube and N64.
Well if you have a Blu-ray player and you really would like to like to see one of the movies that come out exclusively on HD-DVD you can get the DVD and save some money since a good Blu-ray player will upscale a DVD on a HDTV but then again why would you want Shrek HD-DVD or Blu-ray for that matter when an upscaled DVD will look almost as nice.
i -hddvd21aug21,0,3873825.story?coll=la-headlines-pe -business snippets mention:
If you don't have a HDTV and are not contemplating one in the next few years this is a non event, although for those people with PS3's (approaching 5M world wide) then Blu-ray is the way to go. Surprisingly people do use the PS3 to play movies upscaled DVD and Blu-ray as well as playing games and in a family environment that is the norm not the exception. Of course you cannot tell some Movie execs that as the following following article http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-f
Katzenberg and Rob Moore, Paramount's president of worldwide marketing and distribution, declined to comment on Internet reports that hefty payments were the motivating factor spurring the two studios. Are we surprised to read this?
Sony has sold 1.4 million PlayStation 3s in the U.S ( No over 1.8M). since launching the game console in November 2006, according to NPD Group. Ninety percent of Blu-ray movies are being played on the PlayStation 3, which consumers buy primarily to play video games, analyst Roden said. Hmmm I wonder how he arrived at that conclusion?
Well there are unsubstantiated http://www.latimes.com/business/printedition/la-fi -hddvd21aug21,0,3873825.story?page=2&coll=la-headl ines-pe-business rumors of $100M and $50M being handed out to the interested parties. But we all know that is not a bribe for them to push HD-DVD.
HP has a "Standards of Business Conduct" policy (as do many companies) and the Company in general tries to take an "ethical" approach to business practice. The problem is that even though what was done was reprehensible, un-ethical and IMHO stupid there was nothing in the "policy" that actually spelled out that this was not acceptable and this is a loophole to some people who hold and abuse power.
If something is patented then the description of that patent should enable replication by any third party who then can legally produce and/or use that thing for a "Reasonable" and "Non-discriminatory" payment to the patent holder for the life of that patent. So basically all patents are open, however if the patent is vague or obvious then it should never have been granted in the first place.
Getting back on topic. I think the following from the conclusion of the article says it all: "While Microsoft has granted patent use over the required portions of the specification that are described in detail the numerous undisclosed behaviours and inexplicit definitions are not covered, providing a legal as well as technical barrier to OOXML's implementation". I think we can quite easily arrive at the conclusion that to adopt OOXML is to adopt something that cannot easily be implemented by a third party, so we can assume this is a proprietary format that is dressed up to look like it is an open format.
Err Carly has not been the CEO of HP for a few years, Mark Hurd is the current CEO.
The problem you have here is what was done not actually illegal in the eyes of the Law. Unethical yes and definitely breaching HP's own conduct of standards. This does subject the person or persons subject to disciplinary action within the organisation which can be a sever reprimand to termination of employment.
While IANL for someone in an organisation to be jailed they must break the Law and be convicted of it. It could be put forward in a court that while certain people in HP acted inappropriately the Journalists also acted inappropriately in accepting what could be construed as getting data that could be used for "insider trading" which is actually illegal.
Many large companies actually try to foster a code of ethics within the company and with their customers but it only takes one to use questionable practices to breakdown this standard and expose the company to ridicule and possible litigation. Of course there are some companies that view ethics as a sigh of weakness.
I got my laptop with MS Windows Vista Ultimate and put Fedora 7 on it but not without creating a recovery disk of MS Vista. My reason for doing this is I normally sell my laptop every 12 months or so and I know that the person who buys it will want a MS Windows OS. Obviously I will give the prospective buyer the choice but I am about 99% certain of what they will pick.
From my own perspective Fedora 7 does what I want and does it really well but I would not recommend it to anyone but someone who is keen on maintaining a Linux distribution that will break on occasions. In other words a Linux/Unix System Admin who wants to keep their skills up to date. My family use Fedora 7 without any issues but I am the System Admin so it is my job to make sure they don't have issues. If I was asked what Linux distribution to recommend I would not hesitate but to mention Ubuntu however I would ask if they would let me install it for them first to make sure their hardware will work to their satisfaction. If a person wanted what is essentially a Microsoft centric product environment then I would just suggest they stick with MS Windows.
The Article IMHO was an excellent read and highlights the problems Linux has in getting accepted into the general population. I have said this before and will say it again, Linux will only get accepted when Government Organizations mandate it as a cost saving initiative (It is happening in some countries but slowly). When this happens Business will follow suit and then and only then will the general public follow.
Another way for Linux to be more acceptable is for the OS to get good native games but Games Developers don't seem willing to take the risk even though the Linux community is in the order of 10's of millions of people. What are they afraid of, after all MS Windows users seem to pirate games and most likely more than what Linux users would although this is open to debate.
The PS3 can read CD and DVD disks as well as Blu-ray disks (I am amazed people don't know this). You can install Linux from DVD or CD if you wish. In addition you can play PS2 (DVD/CD) or PS1 (CD) games, not to mention playing PS3 games on Blu-ray. You can even play DVD movies and it will upscale them as well.
The only thing the PS3 drive cannot do is burn disks but put on Linux and plug in a BD/DVD/CD burner via USB and it should work (I have not tried this though). I am not sure about HD-DVD but if you have Linux plus the appropriate software and a USB HD-DVD drive I can't see why not. Blu-ray and HD-DVD media is not cheap but then again neither was DVD media in 2000 and if you go back to the early 1990's neither was CD media. I can even go back to the 1980's and Betamax and VHS blank tapes were not what I would call cheap either.
Err no! The latest Sony firmware is 3.52 while the latest homebrew is 3.51 and if the latest game has a firmware update (eg. Twisted Metal had firmware 1.52) it won't install that firmware if you have later release homebrew firmware. You actually have to do this yourself manually, firmware from a game does not install automatically. Actually people who do homebrew are people who in the majority of case will keep their PSP up to date with the latest homebrew firmware.
This is not to say I am an advocate of homebrew or genuine Sony firmware for that matter although both add extra functionality to the PSP, however my son has a homebrew PSP which he brought and upgraded himself and he is very happy with it. Surprisingly he does buy genuine PSP games on occasions, but he won't buy movies unless they are at least 70% cheaper than their DVD equivalent. In many ways he prefers to download an "avi" and play it on his PC or on the PSP or even on our HDTV from the PSP via our PS3 and the result is quite good (not fantastic but definitely watchable).
Sony hasn't been "cool" about anything homebrew on the PSP (the device under discussion), doing everything they can to disable it with each firmware update.
To be fair if Sony does not try to disable "homebrew" with every firmware update then I can see massive litigation by companies like Nintento and Sega since with "homebrew" is is very easy to to play NES, SNES, Sega Master System and Megadrive games just to name a few. I can see Sony Execs turning to Nintendo and Sega saying "Well it's not our fault these terrible homebrew people are circumventing our updates and we are trying our best to stop it, but then again the DS has a thriving homebrew community and what are you doing about it?" Then both Nintento and Sony privately give themselves hi-fives for increased DS and PSP sales.
With regard to WiFi limiting the PSP to 222MHz I am not sure that this is a major problem. Too many people think that MHz or even GHz is a deciding factor in processor performance. It is not since you can have a 1GHz processor that can handle 5 to 10 threads that will outperform a 3GHz single threaded processor. There are many factors you have to take into account when looking as all over computer performance.
As for saying Sony is evil I do suggest you do some reading on Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony and you will find that they are multinational corporations and only one has been found guilty of being an monopoly. They have all been litigated against with some wins and losses. I have never heard or seen any of those companies do anything illegal maybe immoral, ruthless or unethical but these don't seem to count in business today. As for stupid, short-sighted or ill-advise this is not illegal although some people would like to think so.
The first time that someone loses a million dollars' worth of data or one of your consultant's laptops (with customer data) gets stolen, it will start happening. I don't have much sympathy for this kind of thing. I mean, it's kind of like saying, "Ideally, the money in the bank should be behind the counters with the tellers instead of just laying around in the lobby, but this is not happening." Make it happen. If you can't, at least make your management aware of the risks they're facing so that when something horrible happens, you've got a nice paper trail showing that you're not the scapegoat they're looking for.
I could not agree more with what you just said. Companies should never allow critical data to be stored on a company laptop and never on a personal laptop. Employee's and management must be security trained and aware.
This may not be for the corporate user but the way I backup my laptop is to use a 320GB disk and connect it to one of my USB ports and use "Clonezilla" to backup the image of my laptop. Your machine needs to be down while you generate the image. This works on MS Windows XP (should work on 2000, 2003 and Vista as well), Solaris and Fedora 7 (it should also work on any Linux machine). It can take approx 20 minutes to image approx 30GB of data across a USB 2 connection which actually creates an image directory on my hard disk (date time stamped and configurable). Recovery time is approximately the same as the backup time.
The "Clonzilla" software is open source and it will only backup and compress (again configurable) what it knows as data although for Solaris it assumed the whole of the disk (ie. a full disk image). A nice feature is being able to backup to an NFS mount or an ssh login which is my preferred method for remote image backups and this would work on a corporate ssh server (I can use my Laptop or any Unix machine) since you don't need to be root to actually do the image backup but you do in the case of "Clonezilla" need to boot form CD but only once every month or so. Backup and recovery are limited by your network speed.
An interesting feature of using an ssh server to collect image backups is you can easily maintain some images for corporate roll outs although you may have issues with MS Windows because of licensing. For Linux/Solaris you should not have any issues. Another feature is the ability to manually customise your disk partitions or even LVM volumes depending on the disks you are using by simply editing the configuration text files in the image directory on the ssh server or hard disk.
I have found that I only need one image backup per month for a laptop or every time I get a new kernel and with Fedora 7 that is approx every three weeks. You can use any good backup software for day to day backups of you personal data. Of course in the case of Linux/Unix you only need root and your home or users directory and recovery is very easy. You should be root to do the backup but you don't need to be root on the ssh server. For MS Windows you may have trouble backing up open files. Dataprotecter and EMC Networker are good enterprise backup products but your business is going to pay for them.
There are other imaging solutions some free and others not free it depends on what you want and how much you wish to spend. As I have said before "Clonezilla" works for me and is very user friendly (IMHO) flexible but it may not work for you (test, test, test and test some more). I would not recommend Fedora 7 if you want a stable Linux machine but a distribution like Ubuntu. For Linux, MS Windows and Solaris I have found "Clonezilla" is excellent for saving and restoring images to/from a USB disk or network machine.
It is always a good idea to consider the system disk fundamental layout and this applies equally to MS Windows as it does to Linux/Unix since you only need to image this not the user data since that should be done under a backup. As for backing up over 1 TB of user data well that opens up a whole new can of worms and if you have that on a corporate laptop I would make sure it is not a collection of MP3's, avi's or anything that does not pertain to your work (read KingSkippus post for more info), one audit and you could be in big trouble.
I highly doubt the Universe cares about us since it mainly consists of empty space and unless the matter and/or energy of the universe become sentient this will continue until the whole Universe dies. The interesting thing is some matter has become sentient and can look at the Universe with wonder and an inquiring mind. This is our species and at the moment we are only aware of one intelligent life form in our entire Universe, however the Universe is incomprehensibly huge and we would have to be arrogant to the point of stupidity to believe we are the only intelligent species.
Our species is fortunate to live in "interesting times" since there is so much to discover about the Universe and even if we could live for millions of years we would still be scratching the surface. This should not be viewed as a defeat but as a challenge which gives us a reason to live, learn and appreciate the wonder of it all. Unfortunately there are many people who view the very thought of even venturing into space as a waste of resources since they think we should get our own house in order first.
From my personal view the people who call space research a waste are consigning our species to oblivion since eventually we are going to run out of resources and that will result in suffering and death on a grand scale. To them this is "God's" will so when you hear or read this there is nothing you can say that will sway them. These are the same people who would quite happily burn a scientist or visionary at the stake because they did not agree with their narrow minded point of view. Fortunately these people are not in control but give them a chance and they would bring the human race back to the "Dark Ages" and what is frightening is they honestly believe they are doing the right thing.
Well I don't use MSM but I think it would have a problem picking IE since I don't have IE installed on my home laptop which only runs Fedora 7 nor do I want it. Actually as an exercise I tried clicking on Hotmail and it appears to work under Firefox although it does not have much choice. Still if it did not work I can always use Google Mail.
On my work computer (runs XP) Firefox is my default browser and it just works, although my work has a policy of supporting Mozilla and MS IE6 (IE7 is not acceptable as is Vista).
> Even still, I know that there's not many games out for it yet
Then you want to get some PS2 games since they smooth and upscale nicely from the PS3 via an HDMI or component connection on a HDTV. Unfortunately there are so many good PS2 games out there (Square/Enix games appear the best but Ubisoft are not bad either) you may forget to buy native PS3 games. Still you are going to save a lot of money if you take this path.
At the moment Oblivion is taking up too much of my time and I have only completed one gate (too many side quests). Every second or third day I switch to a PS2 game just for the break.
Actually the Gamecube (approx 10M) did almost as well as the Xbox except that Microsoft lost about US$5 billion while the Gamecube made a healthy profit although not as much as Nintendo would have liked. Off-topic I know but in the hand-held market the DS is outselling the PSP by over 2 to 1, still both Nintendo and Sony have made a nice profit out of the respective sales. Just because you don't sell a product as well as the competition and as long as you make a profit does not mean your product is a failure it just means that the competition makes more of a profit at least when comparing Nintendo's and Sony's gaming machines.
I have an Australian PS3 and backwards compatibility is done in software and we get approx 85% to 90% of games working properly. I have over 60 PS2 games and only one does not work and two others do have minor issues and all my PS1 games work. To me this is not bad considering the PS3 has only been available to us since the end of March.
It is annoying if your favourate game does not work though.
One feature of the PS3 is the ability to swap out your hard drive and replace it with a larger standard 2.5" drive if you want without voiding your warranty. In fact the PS3 booklet that comes with the machine details the steps on how to do this. You can use the old 60GB drive as a portable USB drive as well.
Because the PS3 does smooth and upscale your PS1/2 games to a HDTV some of your favorate games look so good you end up replaying them again (forget about the memory card reader just start again). You can even do like I did by being aware that some retailers will negotiate and you may be able to get a good trade in on your old PS2 plus a few games you are now tired off (US$407). Look around but be prepared to walk as well.
It never ceases to amaze me the mention of the PS3 not having many games. I can understand and sympathize if people said "The PS3 does not have many native games that I want or even like" (IMHO this is my personal view of the Wii and Xbox360 games as well). To answer this properly I will state this "The PS3 has more games available to it than the Xbox, Xbox360, Gamecube and Wii combined". What I did not say in that statement was you can play PS1 and PS2 games as well as PS3 games and the PS2 is still a variable platform with new games still coming out for it. Even so I very much doubt that many people have the cash to pay for the number of native PS3 games that are available now and they cost about the same as the Xbox360 and the Wii games. Taking the above into account I actually can save more money and have a wider choice of games than the other game consoles, so US$600 is cheap IMHO for what this machine can do and so far I have only talked about games.
I don't have a 46" HDTV (the original poster may though) I have a 37" HDTV (576p (PAL), 720p and 1080i) and in the US you can pick one of these up (mayby not PAL) at around US$700 or less if you negotiate (I got my 60GB PS3 for approx US$407). The PS3, Xbox360 and even the Wii still look good on smaller HDTV's, but of course once you get a 46" or bigger (If you can afford it) then only the PS3 and Xbox360 look good, the Wii is ok but you can really pick the difference in graphics.
Since I only use Fedora on my laptop I use "yum" and "rpm" to maintain packages although I am aware of "app-get" on other distros. If you don't like the command line you even have a nice GUI to install, maintain and even remove packages. I have found that if you use more than one repo ("livna" is a must for me) then you must be careful of the order you access them and stick to that order otherwise you will have issues. In fact the more varied repos the more chance of problems although a simple fix is to remove the offending package and reinstall it from up the tree (main repo down). Common sense, knowledge and confidence are essential here. So far my Fedora 7 is fully up to date which includes the latest kernel releases as well and I don't have any issues.
The fun really starts when you down load a source tar ball however I would not recommend this for beginners although if you want to learn I can assure you of an excellent, sometimes frustrating learning experience.
If you setup "Wine" on your Linux machine you can even install some MS Windows centric software but I always advise the person who wants to do this to be aware that not all will work or if they do the software may not work properly. Fun and games can be found here so I normally try to find a native Linux equivalent.
As far as games go, Linux is limited compared to native Microsoft centric games but then a Linux game will not normally work on a Microsoft OS. I have Zsnes and Fakenes both working well (both complied from source) so my emu needs are seen to. I have not found a native Sega emu yet (I use wine) but I can wait. Still I prefer console games over PC games and having seen the issues my son had to jump through to get Half Life 2 (purchased not pirated) working (it froze at the most inappropriate time) on his Windows PC I have no intention of going down that path.