Posts by DrXym 5327 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2007
Reviewers didn't want stand up and say this game is good because it wasn't a good game. It was a clunky, linear, dated first person shooter with long load times. I'm not surprised it turned out that way given the history of the project. I expect Gearbox were handed a pile of unfinished crap, a hard deadline and had to turn it into an actual product come what may. I don't blame them for that but at the same time they should take the criticism.
Sony sued Geohot for circumventing DRM controls (including releasing a root key) which allowed the PS3 to play pirated content. Left unchecked it would have destroyed the PS3 as a viable gaming console. Game sales would have fallen off a cliff, premium titles would be replaced by a sea of shovelware and the platform would die a slow and painful death. Just like on the DS and Wii.
So it's no wonder they sued the guy and the law was in place to let them do it too.
I doubt Sony would give a crap about you hacking a tablet unless there was a financial risk in it, e.g. if rooting let you play pirated PS1 titles. Even then I think the threat and loss would be so small that they wouldn't think it worth pursuing.
The PSP doubles up as a game controller via remote play over wifi so I don't see why something similar couldn't be done over bluetooth assuming the PS3 firmware supported it. A few PS3 games support keyboard and mouse for example so perhaps it would be useful for them, or to Rockband / DJ style games as a piano, turntable etc.
Beyond that I think there is massive scope for a bluetooth standard where devices like the PS3, TVs, amp, aircon unit are able to describe their user interface to a remote tablet and have the tablet render them on screen. Even better would be proper bidirectional communication so the tablet almost acts like an extension to the device.
I have a bluetooth remote for the PS3 and it has to be one of the easiest remotes I have. That is in no small part because it doesn't have to be pointed at the device, or have a clear line of sight or even be in the same room. Just poke the buttons and the unit responds. Conversely I have a Humax PVR device and the bloody thing needs precision aiming for it to respond which isn't helped by the clumsy UI.
In this particular case I don't even see why it couldn't act as a remote for the PS3. The tablet has bluetooth, the PS3 has bluetooth. Both are made by the same company. What's the problem. Fix the tablet and / or the PS3 firmware and it would happen.
I wish more devices would dump IR to be honest. Bluetooth is just more useful and I assume that a tablet featuring bluetooth should be able to manage those devices as well. It could be bidirectional too so that smart remotes could display stuff like key layouts & functions, context senstive menus, album cover, current track, volume, help, or anything else the device felt like conveying.
Race conditions are sporadic and often you don't even know they're happening except by analysing some vague runtime error for hours. Even if you write code with concurrency in mind you might still screw up in some way which is non too obvious and requires lots of excruciating debugging.
So you run this application the first time. Even if the developers are standing over it, it may *seem* to work but you have no way of knowing for sure. And if the environment changes in some way, e.g. CPU load, hardware upgrade, network congestion or whatnot then even if the plan were originally functioning it may no longer do so under changed conditions. Also, developers aren't likely to be standing over at deployment so who is observing to see that the thing seems to work?
Perhaps the paper accounts for some of these things, but I reckon multithreading will be as hard as its always been. The best way to avoid race conditions is to isolate the concurrent part as much as possible. Make the API a blackbox so that caller doesn't care how stuff gets done, just that it is. And then inside the blackbox make best use the facilities the language provides. e.g. Java implements various useful concurrency patterns such as thread pools and executors. And make sure it's written by someone who knows what they're doing rather than just slathering synchronized keywords all over the entry points.
How many "hardcore" games has Nintendo actually released for the Wii?
In the West at least, from the minute it left the gate it has been predominantly casual titles and Nintendo led that charge. Wii Fitness, Wii Sports, Mario etc. There are a few hardcore titles on the Wii but not enough.
Various 3rd parties have also commented on how badly the hardcore stuff sold suggesting the people who bought a Wii weren't interested in it and Nintendo isn't doing enough to attract those sorts of gamers. I doubt the endemic piracy helped either. An undiscerning audience and piracy explain why the platform is mostly casual titles with many of them being shovelware.
""I cannot begin to guess why this little comet became such a big internet sensation," Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Programme Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in the statement."
Some people are very vocal and very delusional. Given the significance of comets in prophecies, cataclysmic theories (Velikovsky etc.) it is not surprising that reality takes a back seat in their minds.
Whether you join a social media site or not is irrelevant. These scripts are still handing out cookies and still tracking you. True, if you are not a member of a site they cannot precisely track you. But it can still be used to deliver targetted ads, affect search results, ad keywords that build up over time. And we've seen with the likes of never-cookie research that Facebook, Google et al could restore a cookie a lot of the time and you would never know. I bet just looking at the IP address range and a fingerprint of your browser's public settings (screen res, fonts, plugins etc.) would reinstate a cookie 99.99% of the time.
NoScript would work to block the scripts but I imagine sometimes the +1 / Like have a use so I would prefer to see something which puts a placeholder where the Like / +1 would go and if you chose to click on the placeholder, *then* it would pull the script in. i.e. unless you click you don't get the script and no script = no cookie.
I think if you want to protect your privacy that you absolutely have to block these in addition to ads.
I wonder if someone has an add-on that detects requests to these +1 / Like scripts (e.g. https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js) and replaces the content with a little placeholder which you must explicitly click to enable the script to be included for that site or page.
I saw a few on display in a phone shop the other day. It's hard to gauge what they feel like since they were bolted to the wall but they looked pretty chunky. If that chunk is extra battery then great but if it's no better than any other device I think it's not doing itself any favours. The Windows Phone UI is quite slick but I don't think users of iOS or Android would find anything about it to write home about.
Sack 90% of the sales staff and provide merchants with a fair, transparent and equitable online mechanism to create and control their own campaigns. It's the pressure sales and grossly unfair terms & cuts of the profits that have caused Groupon to be hated and abandoned by the kinds of business they should be attracting.
The only "deals" you see once Groupon has burned through the local economy are for shit like fish pedicures, eyebrow waxes and so on. Where the business can invent some arbitrary inflated price for their treatment to compensate for the "discount" and Groupon's cut.
What am I saying? I hope Living Social, Groupon and the plague of similar services die a painful death.
You see a project which could be saved if they bothered to change direction but they don't? A project with obvious flaws which have an obvious remedy? A project which is doomed to fail?
That's the Playbook. You could see the wheels coming off this thing when they lamely stated the thing couldn't even read email without tethering it to a phone.
The hardware and OS look fine, it's just the business functionality which sucks. RIM's one selling point is email on the go and business friendly solutions. They appear to be doing everything with this product (and screwups like the recent email blackout) to drive businesses to examine other solutions.
Its high scores are more a testament to Rockstar's ability to threaten, bribe, cajole and otherwise exact the scores they wanted. I expect in a more impartial objective environment it would have scored 80-90%. Still a good score but nothing like the ridiculous scores it did get.
The whole show will repeat for GTA V. Watch how bloggers squeal over their "exclusive" all expenses paid jollies to preview events. Watch as sites speculate over the minutae of some bullshots (pictures which were not rendered in game). Watch as sites and magazines breathlessly gush hyperbole and 10/10 scores in exchange for exclusive review rights and advertising tie-ins.
It all happened last time. Expect it to happen again. Just don't trust any of it.
"As for dumping 9/11 truthers, creationists, holocaust deniers into a collective bucket is insulting. I would love to see you 'overwhelming evidence' for non-creationism."
Perhaps it's insulting, it's also true. See "ClimateGate" as a prime example. Climate change deniers had a field day quote mining those emails, attempting to infer a conspiracy where none existed. The most common example was people screeching over the word "trick" as if it were a scientist attempting to falsify data.
The simple fact is the denier movement has to reach for the phony baloney bag of tricks because they don't have any evidence of their own. So they attempt to mislead their audience with mined quotes, pseudo science and so on hoping in the confusion that somehow their other-theory wins by default. Just like creationists, 9/11 truthers and so on.
"What is a Climate sceptic?"
Think 9/11 truther, creationist, holocaust denier and you won't be far from the mark. In each case they deny something which is supported by overwhelming evidence. Obviously they have no evidence to the contrary so they attempt to undermine the evidence through pseudo science, quote mining, nit picking, putting undue weight on less trustworthy results and so forth.
I think I'll eventually install Cyanogenmod on my HTC Desire at some point but it's a shame this stuff is not there in Android from the beginning. I think the upfront permissions model isn't sufficient and if other parties can augment security I wonder why Google can't.
"Winblows" has far more users and those users are far more likely to run some arbitrary attachment. So it has a larger attack surface and a larger install base to do damage with.
There are exploits for other platforms. Indeed anyone who jail breaks iOS is relying on them and the Mac is usually the first to go in Pwn2Own competitions.
When you install an app, Android says what permissions an app needs. Problem is the app doesn't tell you what it needs the permission for and there is no way to interactively veto / divert requests which are made once you install the app.
This causes a problem because an app might legitimately need access to phone calls (e.g. because it's a contact manager) but a user has no way of vetoing requests in case it turns out to be malicious and is surreptitiously ringing premium numbers in the middle of the night.
Even aside from malicious apps, some apps have annoying behaviour that a user should be able to curb. e.g. The facebook app tracks my location, even firing up GPS to ask for it. I find this incredibly annoying even if the rest of the app is okay. I'd like to be able to tell the OS, that when the Facebook app asks for location to give it either a fake location or one which has been made more vague through some distortion. Basically dummy the behaviour and feed it a duff value. Perhaps when Facebook are fed crap data they might provide a setting not to bother asking for it.
Basically Android needs a better trust model, something that lets me set a trust level for apps (implicit, interactive, or custom) where I intercept & veto certain actions or farm them off to dummy behaviours. A combination of UAC and a traditional Unix jail.
Amazon would be more fearful of you ripping the content you own (more accurately licenced), or are streaming / renting than they are of you obtaining a cheap tablet. Chances are they're even contractually obliged to protect the content by the content providers. So signing the firmware would be just one step to stop piracy but I imagine there are others too ranging from watermarking, encryption & decryption (done in hardware), protected flash and so on.
The answer as always is don't buy a proprietary device locked to a proprietary service. Amazon are under no obligation to make it easy to crack and in fact its in their interests that you can't crack it, at least into a form that compromises their service or content.
As the adage goes, if Henry Ford asked his customers what they wanted they'd have asked for faster horses. I think Microsoft is being bold to try a new tiled interface and I assume that they will do what they always do and provide some "classic" mode for people who prefer the old way. I see nothing wrong with that in the slightest.
My beef with WP7.5 is how crippled the application programming API and the cage they're building around what users may do with their device. It's not even a golden cage, more of a silver plated cage.
Multitasking is pretty well understood even amongst non technical types - stuff happens while you're doing other stuff. The only thing WinPho 7.5 supports that way is streaming audio, e.g. you can run Spotify in 7.5 and it streams audio while you do something else.
But what about other types of multitasking? e.g. Voip, GPS trackers / navigation, instant messengers, download clients etc.? Do background agents cater for that? Not really.
There are two kinds of agent. Periodic agents are lightweight agents which are allowed to run for 25 seconds tops before they're terminated and may run only once every 30 minutes. Even that granularity is not guaranteed. So they might be useful for periodically checking your mail but tough if you want to poll any faster or use it for for instant messages.
Resource intensive agents (i.e. those that crunch numbers, background download a file) are allowed to run for 10 minutes tops and will not run unless the phone is charging (!). Oh and the screen has to be locked (i.e. not running while any other app is in the foreground).
You can have up to 6 periodic agents and only 1 resource intensive agent running at any one time. The restrictions are so severe IMO that they're worse than useless you may as well ignore the feature altogether and write some tiles and apps and hope users don't notice. BTW I'm not making any of this up, see for yourself:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202942(v=vs.92).aspx
Being able to show a list of apps currently in a suspended state in the background isn't multitasking. It's app switching. It might ease flitting between various apps but it's not the same at all as multitasking which would imply multiple applications running at the same time with preemptive, or cooperative multitasking.
Instead WinPho 7.5 has things called background agents which are for running stuff in the background which might be regarded as lightweight non-interactive asynchronous job, usually scheduled, but nothing comparable to true multi tasking. It would poll or do something in the background and notify the foreground to update a tile or the app its associated with. It's analog in Android might be a service class which is there for a similar purpose.
I've frequently said that charging stupid money for Android is a bad idea. People who are going to spend a fortune on a tablet will buy an iPad. But lots of people either cannot or will not pay stupid money and android devices will clean up if they sell for a lower price.
I can buy a €300 android 3.2 10" device right now and I expect before long that most high end devices will be €350 or less for their base models.
TV shows allegedly created or written by Gene Roddenberry were coming out ten years after he carked it. Given how bad most of them were I assume they just raided his reject bin, random thoughts and other papers and sold shows based on what they found.
I wonder if the same shit will be pulled by Apple for a while, name whoring Steve Jobs even for products that were in early stages of development when he died or where his input was minimal.
You can get BBC & ITV through Freesat HD. It's easy too. Cancel Sky, unplug the Sky box, buy a Freesat HD box and plug it in and setup. Done.
There aren't many HD channels it has to be said, but there are plenty of channels and the number is likely to expand further as Astra 1N, 2F, G & H appear.
Mobile phone CPUs contain the CPU, GPU, cache, ram and hardware accelerated bits & bobs for video, audio and so on. It's entirely possible that a device may appear on paper to be slower but in practice is faster or feels faster because graphics performance is better or memory access is faster, or the pipeline is kept filled, or the cache is larger or any other reason. I have no idea if that is the case with this new phone, just saying.
Opera Mobile shares many of the same criticisms levelled at Firefox - large download, slow layout etc. So if Firefox is no use for someone's requirements then chances are Opera is too. That is why I focussed on Opera Mini.
It is also complete and utter nonsense to claim Opera Mobile has better HTML5 support or layout than Firefox. Toms Hardware runs a "grand prix" testing the major browsers and Opera is bumping along in last place for HTML5 support at present. In its favour, turbo mode would be useful, but it doesn't support extensions like adblockers so what you gain in bandwidth you lose by making more requests and rendering more junk to the screen.
Opera Mini is fine provided:
a) You don't mind Opera knowing all your browsing history which is exactly what happens right now.
b) You can put up with the sometimes questionable layout choices it makes
c) Don't intend to use any web application that has rich user experience, e.g. sites which are heavy with DOM / AJAX
d) Are stuck on a tiny screen, not a tablet
e) You just want to browse sites on the internet, not on your local intranet
If none of these things apply then you should really be using ether Chrome or Firefox. Firefox has pretty poor performance on phones but I imagine it works well enough on tablets and has one of the best layout engines. If the UI goes native then I expect performance will improve sufficiently that it will be a good choice even on phones.
Newton launched in 1993 and was canned by 1998. I wouldn't exactly call it an auspicious endeavour for Apple. Indeed Jobs killed the program. And Apple wasn't the first to produce PDAs either. Psion had PDAs before the Newton and they and Palm arguably had vastly more success popularizing the format.
You don't need to be a computer scientist to use Android either. As 500 million sold devices could attest to. It's not hard to use even in its vanilla form and most common versions of it will be polished a bit more than that.
In fact out of all smart phone operating systems, I'd say it is the one least tied to a computer at all. Windows Phone and iOS (at least version 4 and below) have an implied requirement that you own a computer to sync the device, install firmware updates etc.
As for why it is available on cheap phones, that one is easy - because it doesn't impose high system requirements. Phone manufacturers can choose how much CPU, memory, resolution etc. they put in their phones and the price they charge. The result is a flourishing ecosystem of phones in various makes, shapes and sizes to suit all tastes and budgets. Perhaps Windows Phone wouldn't have had such a lacklustre start if it had been as flexible itself.
The reality is not everyone needs all those minutes and data and even if you did there are PAYG plans which offer them, e.g. 3 gives 300 minutes, 3000 texts and unlimited data for £15. So I buy a 4S for 500 and 24x15 topups = £860.
Still on 3, if I were to take a contract with them I pay £99 up front + 24x35 = £939.
The contract offers more minutes (2000 vs 300) so if you were a heavy user it might be justified. But if you're not, why spent £80 more over two years for a network locked phone and be stuck in a contract that prevents you jumping if a better deal appears elsewhere?
330MB is NOT enough storage for apps. Yes you can move resources out to SD card, but it increases app startup time and has other detrimental side effects. It's still a useful feature but one which shouldn't be required in a modern phone such as this.
The tweak tool is better than nothing at all but arguably virtually everything it provides access to should have been made available from a settings dialog.
GNOME Shell itself is a good experience, definitely on the right track, but it needs to be configurable to some degree, even for regular users, and definitely for power users. Not KDE levels of configurability or anywhere close, but the basics such as being able to set fonts, name workspaces, manage extensions and so on.
"That's a graphics card/driver issue, not Ubuntu."
Well Ubuntu put the dist together so arguably it is their fault to some extent. For example the open source ATI / AMD Radeon turn the display to mush for a few seconds during startup, and occasionally when the desktop is getting going. It just looks ugly.
Unity is a great UI on a netbook screen. Things like the global menu and maximize behaviour make best use of the limited space. BUT not everyone has a netbook and Unity sucks rocks on anything larger.
Global menus incur an annoying amount of mouse travel on large screens and you can't even see an app's menu unless the app is the active window and you mouse up to the top. It's just bad design.
Other annoyances would include:
Hover scrollbars. They are awful. You have to look back as far as Open Look WM to find a scroll bar user hostile as this monstrosity.
Unity is a space hog. What looks good on a small netbook screen looks ridiculous scaled up over 4x+ the area. For example click on the Unity button and the entire screen is eaten up to display 8 lousy icons.
Ubuntu store is EVERYWHERE. Click on the Ubuntu icon with the intent of running apps on your own machine and observe as half of the space is occupied suggesting apps on the store. Sorry Ubuntu but you're just being annoying. Put a store tab in the panel but leave the rest alone.
So sorry Unity you suck. The sad part is that some better defaults and some settings available from a simple configuration dialog could do wonders to make it somewhat pleasant to use. How hard is it to have checkboxes to disable global menus and those godawful scrollbars?
I still use Ubuntu but these days it's with GNOME Shell 3.2. Despite it's bad rap, GNOME shell is a remarkably usable interface. It too has some deficiencies and needs tweaking but generally speaking it's a far better thought out thing than Unity. By miles.
Adobe or someone else will produce tools which spit out the HTML5 equivalent of Flash anims. I expect when it happens that people will discover that performance and stability is as godawful as it is with Flash. Worse probably since the JS / content will be take longer to download and will be in contention with other JS code residing in the page.
Some of the responses on this discussion border on the paranoid and ridiculous. Microsoft knows which side their bread is buttered on. They'll offer a way for desktop installations to run in "classic" mode or something which marginalizes how metro works. Enterprises will demand nothing less. It might still mean the start menu changes a bit but it always changes from one release to next so I really don't see what the problem is.
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