Slashdot Mirror

That's not what makes his life worse. It's the multi-CPU aspect. Same as with the new Sony Cell chips making things diffucult.

Check out his other interview on the same topic

Oh, in case you think he's still just upset about your company 'rendering Steam somewhat irrelevent', check out what John Carmack of Id (DOOM 3) and Tim Sweeney of Epic Games (Unreal Tournament) have to say about the topic. Those two don't have any Steam to worry about, but agree with Gabe.

A Sony employee dismissing criticism of Sony. Who'd believe it...

When the makers of the big 3 FPS games all agree on it, I think there may just be a real issue.

But in terms of a fair evaluation and "no more mysteries", what they haven't covered is why transitions in the GUI are so much smoother than those achieved by Linux or Windows...

Arstechnica covered this. As I understand it, it's because the windowing system runs on the graphics hardware instead of on the CPU, allowing smooth window operations even when the CPU is heavily loaded.

I wouldn't suggest PDF is slow, it is used for display in OSX and before that Sun's CDE. When used as designed it is more than just a document format.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-gui/ma cos-x-gui-4.html

The UI was one of the more innovative things NeXT and Sun had going which neither were successful with until Apple produced OSX.

1. It's been around a lot longer than your software. The earliest reference I found in Google groups was 1991.
2. Winzip is free. What's that you say? It's not? I think I've seen a registered copy once or twice at work in the last 15 years. Winzip allows you to use the trial version forever. Does your software allow that?

Ars Technica publishes an excellent system guide every month. The most recent one came out only a day or so ago.

Which can be found here.

While they don't do benchmarks, it's updated every month and includes 3 different PCs designed for different people's needs. For people who complained that $1k is too much, they've managed to spend $500 on their cheapest PC (if you don't count a monitor, which firing squad doesn't include in their system). The $500 PC will also run WoW, San Andreas, HL2 just fine as well.

If you thought $1k was too much to spend on a box, definitely check it out (the updated every month thing is also very nice).

My primary source of tech news is probably Ars Technica. They don't have anywhere near the volume that Slashdot does, at least on the main page, but the stuff that goes up is very, very well-done.

They have a new sidebar with blog-style entries that reminds me a bit of Slashdot. ... this was just added. Even when the main page is static for a couple of days (not at all uncommon), there's a stream of little blurbs in the sidebar. And their forums are quite good.

On the whole, I'd call it at least an adequate replacement.... it's very strong in areas that Slashdot is very weak (original content, editorial quality), and with their bloggish thing, they're fair to middling where Slashdot is very strong (lots and lots of links.) If all you want is quantity, Ars won't hold up to Slashdot, but in many other areas, it's better.

In other news, the MPAA, RIAA, and similar organizations are still stumbling around like friggin morons, trying to kill all file sharing because it is fundamentally evil. God fobrbid they change their business model to avoid becoming obsolete.

Ars has a much more thorough and thoughtful take from someone who actually follows Apple and has some common sense.

Intel has been trying for years to advance the PC, but they keep getting held back by the mass-market nature of the platform. People would rather have older technology very cheaply than better technology that costs more.

It turns out that Intel filed trademarks for "Intel VIIV" and "Intel Inside VIIV" on December 16, 2004, and no one can figure it out. As a whole, VIIV is not a valid roman numeral. It could be considered, however, a rather strange way of writing 64,as in 64-bit, and perhaps this looks better to the marketing types than LXIV. If it's meant to signify "64," then let me be the first to vomit.

Depends on your definition of 'sweet'. :)

Yeah, it won't be bleeding edge, but it'll play most current games just fine. I usually use the Ars Technica Buyer's Guide, and they currently have a pretty sweet gaming box for $1,226, including an LCD monitor, 250GB hard drive and DVD-RW. Not too shabby.

I wonder if they'll start taking advantage of Cairo and Glitz. Doing so would let graphics cards accelerate GUI drawing via OpenGL, a la Quartz on OS X. Hardware accelerated GUIs are a hallmark of modern operating systems (OS X, Windows Vista), it'd be nice if Linux could join the party too.

Merek's problem is that when faced with evidence that their drugs might not be safe they spent over a $100 million a year on direct to consumer marketing. They delibrately concealed evidence that their drugs might be quite harmful and $250 million might not be enough of a penalty.

um btw they cracked dvd audio http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050706-5065 .html/

This gesture by Miro is an empty one. It seems to me that Miro has shot themselves in the foot over this Mambo Foundation and made themselves look awfully foolish. Right now they are attempting damage control by trying to appear like "good guys" with all these disingenuous gestures.

All the coding talent that was behind Mambo has since left to form their own foundation. To find out what the ex-developers of Mambo are up to, visit OpenSourceMatters

Disclosure: Yes, I'm the one who wrote the Mambo developer exodus report on Ars Technica.

Mambo originated from an Australian company known as Miro who decided to open source their code by putting it up on SourceForge and licensing it under the GPL. The open source community got a nice CMS and Miro had the open source community patching and improving its CMS. Everything went swimmingly for a while until Miro decided that it was taking back "their" code. Access to the code was shut off and the community vociferously objected. Fortunately because the code was GPL'd, the open source community was eventually able to pressure Miro to fork the code. And thus Mambo was born.

The Cell's core CPU is a PowerPC processor. And the PPC is a very good chip - the problem is that IBM decided that it should focus on Power5 and Cell, and neglected the G5 (and had some scaling issue, IIRC). The G5 wouldn't sell nearly as many units as Cell does, and the Power5 probably has a high margin (and is for their own server products). Again, IIRC, IBM tried to sell Apple on the Cell (so they could continue to fulfill their obligations to Apple without keeping up the G5), but Apple felt that the Cell wasn't really a good choice for general-purpose computing.

"Disclaimer: I'm not involved with Mambo in any way, but I have dealt with similar issues before."

Being that you are posting in the forums with an IP address from one of the Mambo Foundation Board Members' clients, I'm forced to say you are intentionally deceiving us.

There are more details at Ars Technica, providing a little more background to the events leading up to present.

Disclaimer: I am one of the developers involved, and will openly admit it. Sure wished everyone else could be as honest, and cannot wait to get things done proper.

Mitch Pirtle (spacemonkey)
OpenSourceMatters.org

This is pretty basic stuff - the less the hardware is used, the less power it will consume. If Spotlight, or any other app, is accessing the disk, then it will need power to do so. Likewise, if Spotlight is doing a bunch of searching through it's index that has to be loaded into RAM from the disk and those queries must be computed by the OS, then the disk and OS and RAM are all getting a workout.

What I recommend is that you check out what it is you are doing

What I recommend is that you read the Ars Technica article that the original poster linked to. The Spotlight indexer component is part of the kernel, and automatically maintains the search index database with all disk activity. Implicitly, this means that everything that used to involve one disk write operation will now involve at least an extra write and probably another seek & read, so you're at least doubling the amount of traffic going out to the disk.

It stands to reason that this would have a negative impact on battery life.

On the other hand, if this incrementally increased work is offset by not having to go searching across the whole disk every time you try to find something, then maybe you come out ahead anyway. And if the index is small enough to live in RAM -- probably not, but it seems possible -- then simple lookups may involve no disk access at all, if you're lucky. I have no idea if this is how it is implemented or how likely this is to work on the average laptop (512mb ram, how big is the index?), but it seems like a potentially big win for anyone that was already in the habit of doing a lot of searching.

While having LoZ:TP out in time for the Xbox 360 launch could steal away some of the Xbox 360's thunder and possibly change a few minds, I don't think it would do anything drastic. Slashing prices on the GameCube and offering bundles with the best games on the system already might be a better option.

If this article has any truth to it, Sony might be gearing up to drastically cut prices on the PS2. If Sony can do this, what's stopping Nintendo from lowering the price of a GameCube to $80 or less. I don't know what production costs are for one right now, but I think they could do it while remaining profitable if it suited their interests. Parents looking for a nice Christmas present for their children would be more willing to drop $80 - $100 than $300.

A great game on an old system isn't likely to push too many more sales or take away sales from competitors, but slashing the hell out of your price might do just that. Considering that Microsoft probably doens't want to lower the price of the current Xbox, firstly because it would cost them even more since they've been selling it at a loss already (it might be getting close to break even though), and secondly because the lower price would just cause more competition with their next generation console, which they might have a harder time selling than expected with all of the FUD from Sony.

Nintendo probably has some rough months ahead, but they've managed to stay out of the red quite well despite lackluster sales. Not to mention the mounds of money they've been accumulating from all the profitable times they've had for the past two decades.

Tim Sweeney would also agree. That makes the the lead developers for the top three game engines.

Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor

Finally, proof that Apple is over priced, under powered hardware.

Why does Carmack hate Apple so much?

Read up on the flavor of PPC that is in the XBOX 360...
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/xbox360 -2.ars
It's far different from the G4 and G5 that Apple currently uses.

BTW, if Apple loved PPC so much, why did they announce the switch to Pentium M ? :)

Comeon guys, your slipping. Ars had an article on this on the 11th. But, anyway, just because they PLAN to support other browsers down the road, doesn't mean that plan won't change....

Why all this fud about "if it comes installed, everyone will use it"? Why is that everyone uses winzip and winamp, then?

Netscape didn't lost the browser war because of not being installed by default. It helped, but that was not the main reason: Ars Technica sits down with Scott Collins from Mozilla.org:

"Ars: You mention mistakes made by Microsoft. What do you feel are mistakes that Mozilla has made in the past?"

One: There was a fundamental mistake made by Netscape management, twice, which cost us a release at the most inopportune time. I think we can attribute a great deal of our market share loss to this mistake that was pretty much based completely on lies from one executive, who has since left the company (and left very rich) and who was an impediment to everything that we did. He was an awful person, and it is completely on him that we missed a release. We had a "Netscape 5" that was within weeks of being ready to go, and this person said that we needed to ship something based on Gecko within 6 months instead. Every single engineer in the company told management "No, it will be two years at least before we ship something based on Gecko." Management agreed with the engineers in order to get 5.0 out.a

Three months later they came back and said "We've changed our mind, this other executive has convinced us, except now instead of six months, you need to do it in three months." Well, you can't put 50 pounds of [crap] in a ten pound bag, it took two years. And we didn't get out a 5.0, and that cost of us everything, it was the biggest mistake ever, and I put it all on the feet of this one individual, whom I will not name.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2005 /8/13/957, which points to the statistics from http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/12/HNfirefo xloses_1.html
Their view was that sampling errors were not discussed, and this affects the reliability of the numbers.

I must admit it's all my fault: I've been viewing Flash pages in IE because I haven't installed a Flash player to MoFo's Deer Park Alpha 2.

Yes, once again its another editor fuckup - why is everyone still so surprised that this happens? The 'editors' barely pay lip service to their title and I doubt very much that they read the comments either. At face value there is no real passion from the creators of the site - its just the same old shit day after day.

To explain further, Slashdot exists for one purpose: to make money for parent company OSDN. There is nothing wrong with that in itself but don't expect a high quality site the way its currently run. The Slashdot business model (if you can call it that) seems to be to provoke reaction from the loyal crowd of slashbots that frequent the site. Inflammatory / trollish stories (e.g here) and dupes cause the page hits (and therefore ad revenue) to go through the roof.

As a result, most of the comments I see on the stories are neither insightful, interesting or informative. There seems to be no real balanced discussion - something I feel is a product of the moderation system which rewards those who conform to the slashbot mindset and censors everything else. This democratic method of editing the comments is terrible - especially where technical issues are concerned, as a lot of nonsense is modded up by people who don't know otherwise.

You are probably wondering why I read Slashdot. Partly morbid curiosity and partly to laugh at both the flame wars which invevitably break out and the well crafted trolls.

To conclude, Slashdot is neither really "News for Nerds" nor is it "Stuff that matters". If you want the former, go to somewhere like arstechnica or kuroshin and if you want actual stuff that matters, the BBC are hard to beat.

If you can point me to a PC manufacturer that makes well designed and high quality products like Apple does than I'd be very much obliged.

The new push will be to have 8 very simple cores (albeit with advanced SSE4 units with even wider vector instructions such as 256 or 512 bits) and allow each core to run 2 or 4 threads. This won't be hyperthreading as hyperthreading is a form of SMT (although Intel may reuse the name). It will be a form of fine-grained multithreading that allows context switches on L1 or L2 cache misses, as well as other latent operations. Of course their will also be logic to allow all the threads to run equally.

Apart from SSE4, you've just described Suns' Niagara processor. See this blog entry of Jonathan Schwartz's for some nice pictures.

--paulj

The xbox team is lucky MS didn't go ahead with their desire to kill off the project after the first couple of years when it became clear that Sony was leaving them in the dust in sales.

Rushing such underpowered hardware out the door ahead of Sony and Nintendo is the life and death gamble the xbox team is having to make now that the amount of money they have to spend is significantly smaller than with the first xbox design.

MS's revenue growth has been on a straight line decline over the past five years, along with the stock price.

I wouldn't be surprised if the 360 never actually makes it to store shelves in November. And I would say it is even money on the thing getting canceled in the next year or two.

Having this new copy protection stuff should just seal the deal (great for studios, terrible for consumers). The fact that only one manufacturer is expected to ship a HD-DVD player this year (and for $1000) doesn't bode well. Early next year Sony will be shipping the PS3 which will not only play the blueray discs, but will also play PS1/2/3 games and DVDs. All for $500 (my guess at their "high price", but even at $700 it would be a bargain compared to $1000). There will be so many PS3 sales, it would be hard to beat that installed base even if HD-DVD was in the initial X-Box 360s (now we don't even know if that will happen).

The war is over. The only people who don't know it are the HD-DVD group.

Ars has a good comment up already here. Basically saying that there's nothing wrong with sequels per say (ie. Half-Life 2), but series like Madden where things seem to be changed just for the sake of changing them from year to year.

This is "absolutely and totally" wrong. First of all, a major portion of the Cell architecture is a 64-bit PowerPC core, flanked by assorted other DSP units. Second, IBM is the major architect of the Cell, which was not designed ex nihilo. See this Ars review: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1. ars

How does this compare with (setting aside marketshare for a minute here) Apple's implementation of compositing various 2D and 3D technologies onto the same screen in the latest OS, performance/efficiency-wise? (Not a graphics guru...)

Along these same lines, wasn't there a story/rumor a few months ago about possibly having a copy of the iTunes Music/Movie Store on the PS3?

That looks like it goes back to May 2005. Stranger thing have happened.

There you have your answer:

Even the lightest touches on the left side of the mouse registers a "button 1" event in Xev and keeping your finger millimeters off the surface during a click generates a "button 3" (right) click event. I personally believe that the logic chip checks the value of the left sensor when the mini switch is depressed (remember, this same switch is depressed regardless of which side you click on). If the left sensor registers any contact, a left-click event is dispatched and if the left sensor is not depressed, you can infer that the user is pushing on the right side.

Since Nintendo's not supporting HD, the Revolution only needs to put out a third of the pixels per frame as its competitors (assuming 720p HD; it's an even bigger difference for 1080i). You can have much more complex graphics if you don't need to support high resolution (or even medium, in this case). Revolution needn't be as powerful graphics-chip-wise to deliver quality as good or better than the 360 and PS3, only lower-res.

Where Revolution's graphics might fall short is in procedural synthesis (creating geometry on-the-fly on the CPU) and other streaming media, which Cell's SPE's and 360's multiple SMP cores excel at.

Hopefully, Revolution will provide enough branching oomph for truly next-gen AI, as the PPEs in the PS3 and 360 have poor branching performance and cache; they're insane at streaming media, which doesn't need branching nor cache, but are well below standard PC CPUs for AI.

yeah, it is pretty usefull for screen display. Better resolution and less current consumption

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050510-4887 .html

Let's not forget that Microsoft announced that 360s will ship with standard DVD drives and the HD-DVDs will be coming later (next year most likely).

No, they didn't.

Read this.

Scroll bars are a ubiquitous UI component. There's not really any way around them because we need to display more information than can fit on a screen. But they're terrible from an HCI standpoint, because the misstep rate is high and they're a difficult target to hit with a mouse. Since they're terrible and they can't be avoided, improvements are welcome. Scroll wheels are rediculously easy to use and the misstep rate is very low. They're very intuitive, almost as intuitive as a mouse itself. Therefore, they're a good idea.

You are right, scrolling is unavoidable in some circumstances (such as editing printout documents) but the scroll wheel rings too loud on the "add another poorly integrated feature" bell. I propose the much simpler solution of using the "hand" cursor to move around, in any read-only document like web pages it should be the default tool. And before anyone says the scroll wheel/ball is easier: why do we retain that mouse underneath the scroll wheel then?

On another note: if you're gonna buy the MM for Linux use, make sure the drivers support 2-dimensional scrolling since it's reportedly not functioning in windows.

"One-button proponents are very concerned for their users and family members"

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/mightymous e.ars/3

Look, Jacqui, I know you think Apple is a superior way of doing things. I have 2 powerbooks, and 3 iMacs in my home. I recommend them to my friends and family. But they aren't "my users", nor does a 2 button mouse intimidate any of them. And that includes my sister who could be the world's dumbest computer user.

But a two button mouse with scroll wheel has proven its value through daily use by perhaps a billion users.

Are there people who like 1 button? Yes. But there are probably as many who like 3 buttons. There has never been a study done that 1 is better than 2 is better than 3. And to claim that more than one confuses people is just B.S. its your gut feeling. There's no science behind it.

And they aren't "your" users. That's your ego talking.

...one-button simplicity (which continually comes back over and over in usability tests as the most suitable mouse solution for the majority of computer users, who are often very, very confused when they are told to "right click") ...

"Has Apple upgraded its stock mouse from rubber ball to optical yet?"

Apple was the first computer vendor to bundle an optical mouse as as standard feature with every machine, back in 2000.

Here is the Cisco information on the bug and patches

But this particular bug may not be the real news. The real news is running shell code on Cisco via an exploit. Or as Cisco puts it "Upon successful exploitation, the device may reload or be open to further exploitation." If this technique is not tied to this specific exploit but to architectural problems in IOS, Cisco worms could become a problem.

Given that Cisco had source code stolen, there is almost no limit to what a worm could do. Spyware on routers would be much more efficient.

I like the new look of Nautilus in browser mode:

        http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-12/images/naut ilus-browse.png

But what about a column view like the OS X Finder has?

        http://arstechnica.com/reviews/4q00/macosx-pb1/ima ges/column-view-big.gif

from the receptionist: http://members.arstechnica.com/x/mono/monkey.JPG

Shame on Grandma for buying her 14 year old a 17+ game. Shame on Rockstar for pushing a game with porn content to a lower rating. Shame on the parents for not watching what grandma buys for her grandchild.

As a parent myself, if a game with Porn is allowed to be rated 17+, I'll probably brush with a broad stroke and not allow any 17+ games in my home because I don't want to do the research on each game my kid brings home. That'll continue to the extent that if anyone is considering bringing such content into my home, they'll no longer be welcome (or the game'll be trashed and my child's gaming privelages will be removed). That even goes for if my little johnny is playing with jimmy down the street and I hear jimmy has 17+ rated games in his home, johnny won't be allowed to go to jimmy's house.

Just because Grandma did the wrong thing in buying a mature game for a 14 year old doesn't mean Rockstar is blameless. They're attempting to distrubute media that contains porn under a deficient rating.

From the posted article above, "The other option is, of course, to allow the government to mandate the ratings. Unsurprisingly, the gaming industry would rather do it themselves.". I agree.

It's not the fault of Rockstar, Wal-Mart, the ESRB, Toys-R-Us, Hillary Clinton, the game modders, the mod-chip manufacturer, the kid down the street that installed the mod-chip
I guess I see it as, all of the above are at fault, including Grandma. Little johnny shouldn't ever be exposed to porn.

With Sony's 10-year expected lifespan for the PS3 (and possible higher cost), I would expect it to have a larger feature set than the X360, allowing for things like HDTV PVR and hyper-definition music.

In an effort to increase the study of math and science at American universities, lawmakers are considering a bill that would pay up to $10,000 for student's accumulated loan interest through college. The benefits would be available to those studying math, science, engineering and technology, provided that after graduation students work in their fields for at least five years.