Thoughts on the PS4

Now that Sony have gone and confirmed many of the rumours about the PS4 and its peripherals it got me to thinking.

It looks like the platform is basically going to be a PC. The design will be closed of course, but not for long. It'll only be a matter of time before the system is reverse-engineered and I believe it will be possible to create a WINE-style API emulation layer which will make the software playable on PCs (probably within some kind of virtualised environment so that GPU-level code can be translated).

It doesn't matter what the specs of the PS4 are now; Relative to a high-end, gaming PC they'll be nearly out of date by the time it finally ships. What this says to me is that Sony are going focus on multiplayer titles so that game license verification will be a mandatory part of the start-up process. In order words, they're going to move away from a proprietary hardware platform to a proprietary software one. Personally, I don't have a great opinion of their software efforts, although their user-facing efforts have been a bit more polished since the PS3's launch.

It seems inevitable that titles will be ripped and made downloadable by various parties on the Internet to be installed and played in single-player mode, for those titles that support single-player. This may be Sony's way of forcing the majority of people over to multi-player DLC, with a percentage off micro-transactions being Sony's expected revenue stream for the following 5 years. It remains to be seen whether someone will create a proxy server that can pretend to be Sony's network and allow people to connect together on their own private networks.

Interesting times ahead for Sony and I'm not sure whether they'll be up to the challenge. If the PS4 isn't going to be available until (realistically) early 2014, it certainly gives Microsoft plenty of advance notice of what they need to do to compete.

Cardinal Quest released

Finally got around to playing Cardinal Quest today. Far too easy but perhaps years of playing nethack and Halls of the Things has hardened me. Looks like the author is interested in developing it further though and adjusting the gameplay accordingly.

Visual6502 in this month's "Archaeology"

Nice to see the Visual6502 team getting some peer recognition for the work they're doing.

This is a great project not just for 6502 fans but for everyone who would like to see the history of microprocessors recorded down to the level of what was made and how, not just who made what and who owns what patents.

Can Internet access seriously be considered a human right?

I've read a lot over the last year or so about whether access to the Internet should be considered a human right and while I think some of the discussion is motivated by good intentions it shows just how out of touch a lot of the current technophiles are with the real world. Now the UN is weighing in and I just have to call BS on the whole thing. There are a lot more important things than Internet access: Food, clean water, shelter, sanitation, health care, freedom of speech, freedom of association, the list goes on and it's a long time before the Internet comes up.

How come the Internet is so important to the world? Surely it's more important that people have a roof over their head and the means to feed themselves and their family. If the UN wants to make a big hoo-ha over the Internet, should we now assume that we are entitled to be housed, clothed, fed and cared for by the state as a fundamental human right? Does this mean that banks are abusing mortgate defaulters by evicting them? Would a company be be denying someone their human right to make a living by firing them?

I mean, I can understand that people who are being oppressed find the Internet useful to communicate their oppression to the outside world but seriously, if they had a right to freedom of expression a lot more good would come of it than just touching the bleeding hearts of the disaffected westerner who wants to make it their cause of the month.

The ongoing saga of Microsoft vs Samba

At least we have another milestone on the road towards interoperability. How long until we get a definitive judgement on this and force Microsoft to play by the rules and pay up?

This really needs to be sorted out soon so that we can all settle down and use the solutions that work best for our own situations and get some proper work done. Personally I wonder if the problem now is going to be that nobody in Microsoft really knows how SMB works and the Samba team will probably have to educate them. If you look at how resource sharing is managed in Windows 7 you really have to wonder if the Windows development team (if that's an accurate way to describe them, I don't think there's much in the way of teamwork in MS) are living on the same planet as the rest of us.

When am I going to find a new laptop that suits me?

It's not that difficult really. All I want is:

• A decent keyboard which doesn't require contortions to reach the delete, backslash or cursor keys.
• A decent resolution screen (1600 x 1200 or 1920 x 1200) in something like a 14" or 15" form factor.
• A screen which is actually designed for presenting infromation, not doubling up as a mirror or fingerprint & dust magnet.
• Reasonably lightweight.
• WiFi and Ethernet drivers that don't chew up the CPU.
• Reasonably well-supported graphics drivers so that I don't end up finding that programs fall back to software rendering half the time, especially in web video.

I don't think that's too much too ask for, but with the current trend for shiny screens, dinky keyboards and netbook/tablet-style form factors I think I might have to go second-hand which is pretty sad. I think the truth is that my ideal laptop is out there and it's about 3 years old.

Sont, you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel now!

Apparently the lack of security on Sony's network was all due to "Anonymous" distracting Sony's crack team of network operatives from keeping the riff-raff out. If that's the best they can do as an excuse for yet another lapse of judgement it pretty much marks a major milestone on the decline of this company.