A Look At the Rare Hybrid Console Built By Sony and Nintendo 37

Posted by Soulskill on Friday July 03, 2015 @01:20PM from the not-a-case-of-hybrid-vigor dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Long before Sony and Nintendo were rivals, the two companies were partners for a brief time. In 1988 the duo started work on SNES-CD, a video game media format that was supposed to augment the cartridge-based SNES by adding support for higher-capacity CDs. In 1991 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Sony introduced the "Play Station" (yes, with a space) but it never saw the light of day. Now, more than two decades later, Imgur user DanDiebold has uploaded images of the unreleased console. This particular model (about 200 Play Station prototypes were created) confirms that the system was supposed to be compatible with existing SNES titles as well as titles to be released in the SNES-CD format. In other words, it would have been the world's first hybrid console: game developers and gamers alike would be able to use both SNES cartridges and CDs. If you want to learn more about this particular prototype, check out the following thread on Assembler Games.

Comment Re:What about migrating phones? (Score 2) 80

by Rathus on Friday August 02, 2013 @05:25PM (#44461263) Attached to: Google Announces Android Device Manager For Later This Month

It doesn't, sadly. It just reinstalls all your apps you've purchased. At Google I/O this year they did however unveil a way to devs to store your saved games in a secure section of google drive including features like conflict resolution (merging saves from 2 different devices). It's up to the devs to actually make use of these features however.

Digia Releases Qt 5.1 With Preliminary Support For Android and iOS 86

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 04, 2013 @07:49PM from the file-formats-matter-more-than-os dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Finnish software and services firm Digia, which bought Qt from Nokia back in August, has released version 5.1 of the cross-platform application framework. Among the changes are 'significant improvements' to Qt Quick and preliminary support for Android and iOS. The latter means Qt on Android and iOS are both considered Technology Previews, letting developers start building for the two mobile operating systems and porting apps from other platforms by reusing the same code base. Although most of the Qt functionality and tool integration is already in place to start developing mobile apps, Digia promises complete ports to Android and iOS will come with the release of Qt 5.2 'later this year.'"

Chinese Submersible Planning For Record Dive 69

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 02, 2011 @10:51AM from the under-miles-of-water dept.

An anonymous reader writes "You may have heard that China sent a manned research sub down to the ocean deep this summer, marking a personal depth record of 5,000 meters (next year it will aim for a world record of 7,000 meters). Here's a story about the sub based on an interview with its designer in Wuxi, China. It's got some interesting new details: the designer had never actually seen a submersible before he set out to build the deepest diving research sub in the world; all the stuff he's built before has ended up in warehouses because the Chinese government only funded technological development, not use."

LinkedIn Hurries To Address Privacy Stumble 58

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 12, 2011 @09:33AM from the somebody's-getting-fired dept.

swandives writes "LinkedIn will make changes to a 'social advertising' feature that has been criticized for using members' names and photographs in advertisements on its website. Amid mounting criticism, the social networking service says it has been 'listening' to its users and 'could have communicated' its intentions with the new ad feature more clearly. As a result, it said, it will change how the advertisements appear. If a LinkedIn user 'follows' a company or service on LinkedIn, the ad feature can display the user's name and photo in advertisements for that company. LinkedIn said its goal was to deliver more useful ads, but some LinkedIn users complained it was a privacy violation, particularly because they have to opt out of the feature rather than opt in. It will be interesting to see whether the changes affect stocks, especially since the network's IPO in May, when shares closed at more than double the initial price, prompting concerns over another dot-com bubble."

Comment Re:More bloat... (Score 1) 285

by Rathus on Tuesday February 10, 2009 @01:00PM (#26799057) Attached to: Firefox 3.2 Plans Include Natural Language, Themes

Not to let Firefox off the hook, but the link in that bug loads a tag list, which the page writer geniusly decided to non-breaking space the entire thing. It's essentially treating almost 1 Mbyte of text as a single word 90,000 letters long (850,000 including font sizing tags). I replaced one of the non-breaking spaces with a normal space and the page loads instantly and type ahead search works perfect.

You can't necessarily blame Firefox every time a web designer makes a bad choice.

Hydrocarbon Rain Swells Titan's Lakes 110

Posted by kdawson on Saturday January 31, 2009 @07:11PM from the singin'-in-the-methane dept.

Rob Carr writes "According to the Cassini team, 'Recent images of Titan from NASA's Cassini spacecraft affirm the presence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons by capturing changes in the lakes brought on by rainfall.' The northern lakes are now larger following a period in which hydrocarbon clouds covered their skies. (The research was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.) This change adds to the evidence these areas are indeed hydrocarbon lakes. But this discovery raises several more questions: where is the methane in the atmosphere coming from, and how long can this complex hydrocarbon cycle on Titan go on? The new evidence emphasizes the need for another mission to Titan."

Open-Source DRM Ready To Take On Big Guns 520

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday October 23, 2008 @11:29AM from the when-good-code-goes-bad dept.

Barence writes "An open-source digital rights management (DRM) scheme says it's ready to supplant Apple and Microsoft as the world's leading copy protection solution. Marlin, which is backed by companies such as Sony and Samsung, has just announced a new partner program that aims to drive the DRM system into more consumer devices. 'It works in a way that doesn't hold consumers hostage,' Talal Shamoon told PC Pro. 'It allows you to protect and share content in the home, in a way that people own the content, not the devices.' When asked about the biggest problem of DRM — that customers hate it — he argued that 'the biggest problem with DRM is people have implemented it badly. Make DRM invisible and people will use it.'"

Comment Re:DVD Player? (Score 5, Informative) 150

by Rathus on Monday May 26, 2008 @02:10AM (#23541477) Attached to: Unofficial Homebrew Channel For the Wii

It's not that Nintendo is worried about the platform being secure, it's that every console sold would incur a lisencing fee for DVD's Copy Protection (CSS), therefore increasing the cost of each Wii for Nintendo, and directly then for the consumer. Given this decision was made long before the Wii's success was known.

There are also people who mention the Wii's DVD drive is not meant for continious access, and that DVD playing would cause the drives to wear out faster. Why ruin a $300 system instead of a $30 DVD player?