NXE

First, there is that firmware upgrade. Everyone gets it, and everyone will be pleased. Like a fresh coat of paint, it doesn’t change the fundenmentals but looks new. There is some notable features, like the “run from hard disk” function that make finally make the hardware silent.

Also, seeing that upgrade, I do think that the plan all along was to go toward a clone of Steam for 360 games. Seen in that light, the choice of DVD for the optical drive (as opposed to bluray or HDDVD) becomes obvious: it puts a 10GB size limit, that albeit somewhat big for many, shouldn’t be too painful over broadband.

Lineup

When asked how he thought the PS3’s Christmas software line-up compares to the Xbox 360’s, Maguire replied: “I think we’ve never been in a stronger situation. This is the first year for me that I can sit back and think, ‘yeah we’ve got five super strong titles’. Some of them ground breaking by creating almost a new genre and the others stiarting to really use the strength of the Cell chip and the graphics. When I look at LittleBigPlanet, when I look at Resistance, when I look at MotorStorm, and then I look at things like Abba on SingStar, before we even get into Killzone next year, I think we’ve got a line-up really to be proud of.” (Source)

Big budget FPS: Gears of Wars 2, checked. Song game: Lips, checked, bonus: ability for the user to plug an USB device to sing over its own songs and get a score for that. Exclusive first party titles: Banjo Kazooie & Fable 2, checked. Exclusive title stolen to Sony: Final Fantasy XIII, checked.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Little Big Planet

Announced hyped as the big Christmas title, I think only disappointment awaits Sony. Not only a western player prefers to play games, not create them, but Sony will understand why Microsoft put its policies against user originated content. Nonetheless, that following video leaked, showing a prototype of a similar project by Microsoft’s research team.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hardware

The Xbox is noisy, the Xbox has (had?) a big failure rate, but now, it’s so cheap. The Arcade pack was something like 179€, now every model gets an 40€ mail in rebate, so the Xbox is as expensive as basic PS2 packs, at least 100€ cheaper than the Wii, and almost 3 times cheaper than the PS3. Global panic helping, sales of the Xbox 360 are double of that of its competitor; plus attach rate is as high as it could get, so third party titles are usually more polished on the 360.

Competitors ?

Well, I’m a little more on the handheld devices, and if the DSi wasn’t region locked, I would have bought it for Christmas. At least Nintendo succeded in shifting global eyeballs from Sony PSP 3000, a sleek capable device hindered by a screen that is seen as faulty by many gamers, absolutely no lineup and a renewed protection against jailbreaking custom firmware. The worst about custom firmware is that they make the PSP better, even if you don’t want to pirate games, under custom firmware, games have very short loading times, battery life double, and homebrew software makes it much complete. And did I mention that an homebrew plugin allow composite output for games ?

Also, I can’t help but think bad about Sony refunding its DVB adapter for the PS3 because the French government allowed MPEG4 streams for HD content and Sony wouldn’t rewrite the driver to support these streams.

Star Wars The Force Unleashed

I like the Play-Asia site, because, after Liksang disappeared was murdered, it became the best way to buy Japanese games & stuff online. Last week, I bought “Gears of Wars”, “Assassin’s Creed” and “Mass Effect” for less than 70€ shipped. Not the deal of the year but that’s sealed new games.

Every week, there is a special, this is the current one. Read all the fine print, this offer is for an Asian version game (region free), only English language, somewhere around €25 shipped.
Voir la page sur Play-Asia

Metacritic Reviews:

If you were selected for the preview program, you’ll have a surprise this morning for your dear 360.
If the screen stay black early on the update, wait a litlle and reboot using  Y + RT to reset video settings.

- It’s like a rebirth, fresh and new, like the first day.
- They copied our achievements, we copy their Miis.

Still have the “copy game on hard disc” feature to test.

—————–

Si vous avez été sélectionné pour le preview program, vous avez une surprise qui vous attend ce matin.
Si l’écran reste noir au reboot, l’astuce de Y + RT pour faire un reset de la résolution marche a merveille.

Premières impressions:
- Ca apporte un vent de fraicheur pour la Xbox
- Oui, c’est des clones de Mii, mais bon, les autres ont/vont volé les achievements.

Me reste a tester la copie sur disque dur (tout le monde dors encore)

Les autres photos / The other pictures

Well, I’m into embedded linux, so I was more than happy to be allowed to attend the first day of the Netfilter 2008 Workshop. The test below is very much in the “weblog” style, mean how I felt the conferences. These notes were written that day, so there could will be misunderstandings.

You will hopefully be able to find accurate summaries and PowerPoints at this page, hosted by the kind sponsor of the day.

Vyatta

They develop UI for routers: making “Linux as easy as Cisco to configure” seems to be their motto. They distribute and support a Debian-based distribution targeted to serve as a firewall. (Beige-boxes are extremely powerful these days) Most of the highlights were on the CLI they developed.

This CLI is very ingenious: it’s a hack of bash that takes a directory structure as the command list, making it very simple to extend.

“show network interface” will parse a default file at “show/network/interfaces”.

That file contain

• Help text: to provide some simple online help. (or maybe just using an “help <command>” statement.
• Commands to execute
• Auto-completion choices: should just print on stdout list of acceptable inputs. (if available) For the sake of keeping it simple, the real user’s input wasn’t checked against that output.
• Acceptable parameters: list of parameters and their respective types. The list was very simple, something like integer/text/ip address/…

I think that’s a very good idea, surely worth reusing somewhere. I also like the idea of modifying bash to handle another range of commands.

Linux multi-queues Networking

GET THAT PDF.

ComX networks

That’s a Danish ISP that uses firewalls on the ISP side to perform access control for their consumers. The implementation uses a lot of iptables chains, so the speaker has an opportunity to speak about optimizations.

Very interesting talk that seems to confirm that iptables performance is proportional to the chain’s length. His solution: branch often. If you have a chain that is 1000 steps long, having even a 3-levels tree (2 switchs: S - 5 branches - 4 branches -  Exit)  make it 50 steps long in the worst case scenario. Obviously, deciding how to split is the key to performance gains, so he made programs that used his knowledge of the network to write firewall commands.

Another factor of optimization is its use of libipt to commit new rules to the kernel, it is faster, and a big bonus point is that the operation becomes atomic: it’s exactly what we need for our firewall. Even if we use DROP policies, this is always a good idea.

NFQueues

Good idea, but the show quickly turned into a joke. Guess we don’t have any serious application for an firewall that need to make transactions with the userspace to check if a packet should be accepted.

Eole

This one was about a server suite for schools funded by the French government. The keys point I will remember is that: Anybody who isn’t a developer can’t understand the difference between freeware and open source. All they see is that “OpenOffice is like Office, only it’s cheaper, it’s free”.

Also why is that software is successful is because there is a lot of wizard, and because they very heavily worked on the use-cases to make sure that the system administrator can’t compromise the security of the network by mistake.

Ulogd

Need more info, still not sure about performance hit…

Conntrack Tools

Another joke one, but it’s because the guest didn’t show up.

Ipset

Ok, still blurry in my head, something in the line that ipset was an alternative to iptables. We need iptables because it is very convenient and powerful. Also ipset is very simple, so it isn’t sufficient for most uses.

The presentation was very technical, the guest is the archetype of the “eastern European geek”, love that, but still, hard to follow, then I understood:

You can use ipset with iptables. Ipset provides the “bitmap abstraction”. Bitmap can represent an ip address range or a port range. Bitmaps can be as large as 65k (16 bit), but the big point is that checking if a given element is in the set is a fast, fixed time, operation. (Move then add then compare)

We could use that property to segregate two classes of devices (or access permissions) within the same subnet.

Imagine that a important file was corrupted or erased from your disc. You don’t have backups. Vista can still try to save the day! The default behavior of Vista is to use up to 15% of your internal hard drive space to make copies of important files: it include mainly Windows files but also files in your user profile.

Not as flashy or as complete as Apple’s version, but could save the day. And no, this isn’t Microsoft copying Mac OSX features as this one can be found since Windows Server 2003.

Also, in more personal news, using the new VMWare 6.5 with a paravirtualized kernel allowed me to finally have a Linux virtual machine that doesn’t seems to eat CPU cycles when it’s doing nothing. (Still eat half a gig of RAM, time to upgrade to Windows x64…)

The open nature of the PC wasn’t inherently what brought it greater success. The open nature of the PC meant that it could spawn an ecosystem of third party hardware vendors, sure. It also meant that it could be cheaply cloned by other manufacturers, ensuring competition that drove down the price of hardware. The net result? x86 is ubiquitous, sufficiently so that even Apple use a basically standard x86 platform these days. Low prices and the wide availability of software that people wanted to run bought the PC the marketplace, with Microsoft being the real winners. Apple hardware remained more expensive for years, and the compelling MacOS software was mostly limited to areas like DTP. Nobody else had any incentive to buy a Mac.

Now, let’s look at the phone market. Third party hardware vendors? No real distinction between the iphone and anything else. Sure, anything remotely clever has to plug into the dock port, but developing something to work with that also gets you into the ludicrously huge ipod market. Other phone accessories are either batteries, chargers or headphones. That’s really not going to be what determines market success. (Source)

And then he writes about Symbian and Windows Mobile handsets, say negative words and I’m saying to myself that “it’s just another one of these open source idealist that bash any closed source app they see”. But it’s 7:10am and I’m already late for work so I flag the post and ran away. A few hours later, sugar in my coffee give me enough energy to make me able to actually read the post, and worse, to even agree with most of it.

On one hand because eye candy count: especially on appliances, but also on computers. Not only the iPhone UI make the device easy and pleasant to use; but it also masks some of its flaws.

On the other hand, as much I am willing to curse anybody that badmouth shareware, (a very good model that pushed everywhere computers to everybody) as an owner of both a Windows Mobile phone and another low-end, “only java” phone, I had to search for software for these platforms, a task that brings back awful and degrading memories. (Even if in the end, I found what I searched)

The world is (mostly) isn’t fair. Users don’t care about developers. Worse, any user that I know that is able to make difference between freeware (Windows Gallery) and Open Source (F-Spot) is also developer.

Apple proved a thing: users don’t care about paying a buck to get Sudoku on their phone if:

• The process is simple. It’s a phone, it’s a Sudoku game, and I don’t want to check compatibility lists.
• The process is sure: both in the meaning that there won’t be fraud during billing and that the game will enforce certain quality requirements.

If Apple making sure that the apps won’t break the phone is a good idea, as a developer, Apple saying that “you can’t do better than Apple and so you shouldn’t try”, or banishing whole software categories (Interpreters, VMs, turn by turn navigation, VoIP, podcast downloader…) leaves competitors some “attack surface” to get (or conserve) market share.

The “jailbreak community”, (people hacking their Apple hardware to allow third party software) uses repositories to sort and qualify software. Same kind of repositories as Debian uses: there is the safe one, the one for more advanced users, the one with beta software and so on. For Android (or OpenMoko, or Symbian or Windows Mobile, or Java…) to catch up, getting repositories that are fully and extensively sorted and that only contain the most valuable and usable apps could be a step in the right direction.

Dans mon humble opinion, la couleur n’a que peu d’importance dans une très grande quantité de matières. En plus dire que l’on rejette une technologie mature en phase de production de masse pour attendre une technologie au stade du prototype me semble une “mauvaise excuse”. Que le papier électronique couleur n’existe pas dans une perspective de court terme, il n’y avait pas besoin de faire un appel d’offres.

Enfin, si je m’emporte sur le sujet, c’est que je suis un fervent défenseur du papier électronique. Certes, c’est pas fais pour tous, ni pour dans toutes les situations, mais les opportunités qu’ouvre cette nouvelle technologie. En effet, le coût de distribution d’un ouvrage devient nul, ne reste qu’a payer les redevances de droit d’auteur ainsi que (éventuellement) de mise en page.

Donc oui, récupérer une copie gratuitement des Misérables, ou toute autre œuvre étudiée en pré-bac sur son lecteur personnel serait à la fois facile, souhaitable, juste et légale.

Petit rappel: cette technologie permet d’avoir des écrans inertes qui ont les mêmes propriétés optiques que le papier. Un document imprimé sur du papier (légèrement) gris, c’est a quoi ressemble un de ces écrans.

Surcouf, a well know retailer in Paris, in it’s September/October issue, is helping you to choose between HD-DVD & Bluray. (Evidence below)

It’s easy to laugh, but I do understand that removing a page implies to design another one.