The University of Calgary has a new Computer Science concentration (to go with Theoretical Computing, Software Engineering, etc) called "Games Design" that's about designing video games.
It's being billed as the first of its kind in North America: Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science with a Concentration in Computer Game Design. The (tacky) webpage for the concentration is here: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~becker/GamesConc/
The real issue with this service is that they haven't set the yearly rate yet. Next year this service could be 20 dollars a month if MS so desired...we don't know. The other sad point is that they aren't stopping 3rd parties from charging over and above the normal Live fee for their games. Example: Sega has announced they will charge for PSO on Live...so this could get really pricy!
And what's stopping people from just buying a new Starters Pack for $49.99/year, including a new headset?
It won't ever be more than $49.99/year, otherwise people would just buy a new starter's pack and sign up again...
an abusive monopoly. No other company can just throw this kind of money away in this market. The only reason why people are not saying something is because Sony is actually beating Microsoft's stupidity.
It's incredibly common in the console industry to sell the hardware below cost and make up for it eventually in game sales and when the hardware drops in production cost.
The PS2 started out being sold at a big-ish loss also.
I have heard that Halo is the only good game (ie reason to buy) an xbox - no its out on PC the one reason to buy an xbox is gone.
Except it's not out on the PC now, it's slated to come out in Summer 2003. A full year and 3/4 after Halo came out, and also right around the time Halo 2 should be coming out on the Xbox.
Maybe MS is trying to get the PC gamers to play the nearly 2 year old version of Halo, and if they like it they'll need to buy an Xbox to enjoy Halo 2.
Either way, I don't think it'll affect Xbox sales negatively at all. If people were going to buy Xbox for Halo, they would have done it in the 2 years before the PC version came out...
And its the games that lost it, Sony just locked up GTA till 2004, and EA decided that its online components for its games will only work on PS2 (they had some problems with xbox live), and the FF series is only on ps2 (or pc for 11). Stick a fork in it, its done.
And here I was thinking that not everybody had the same taste.
GTA is still available on the PC. EA Online games will still be available on the PC (and probably Xbox next year -- see how much money MS will throw their way to make it worth their while).
You also conveniently forgot to mention some of the most interesting Xbox exclusives: Halo, Blinx (must read, if you don't know what it is), Ninja Gaiden, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Crazy Taxi 3, etc.
It's certainly not done, it's just getting started.
The Microsoft XBox production volume is flat and declining. Everyone will tell you that. There is countless evidence from NVidia and Intel press releases, to anecdotal evidence that in Europe and Japan, XBox has only managed a meager 200,000 per territory.
A lot of people would disagree with this, considering MS just announced today it sold 500,000 in Europe.
Not to mention with the recent pricecuts my local retailers are sold out of Xboxes (and PS2s, though). Not that it means much.:)
Why would they want to "own" everything?
on
XBox Live Network
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· Score: 4, Insightful
These are some of the more superficial reasons for why they want to have all online games go through Xbox Live:
* Stats tracking across all games. Uses of this will be bragging rights, and even the ability to challenge someone around your skill level to a certain game. * Consistent interfaces and features across all online games. ig, mandatory support of the voice headset (players can use it optionally, and if they use it they can use the built in voice morphing software and mute players they don't want to hear.) * Ability to keep a buddy list of people you enjoy playing with, showing online/offline status and to talk to them. * Ability to challenge other users to play even a completely different game than you've got in the machine. The Xbox actually supports you challenging people to a different game, at which point you swap the DVD while it keeps you connected and you boot up into the other game and immediately play with those people. * Ability to pay a flat fee and play unlimited games online for that month/year. Nintendo and Sony opted for a route where developers can charge per game played, or what have you. The real reason EA doesn't want to support Xbox Live, IMHO, is because I think they plan to offer a "play all EA Sports games for $9.95/mo" type deal, which isn't allowed under Xbox Live.
And there's a video from the old CES show that has a "simulation" of Xbox Live (3m53s long): http://www.xboxmaniak.com/?page=video2&nbr=7
It looks pretty impressive, IMHO. I'm hoping they're smart enough not to charge an arm and a leg.
Yeah,right. Don't even think for one moment that Microsoft has *ANY* intention of letting EA use Microsoft's servers to host/create games that would include PS2/GameCube players. Microsoft's online scam is only for XBox games and don't you ever forget that. I never said a single thing about talking to PS2/GC players.
What makes you think PS2 players can play against GC players either?:D
I thought it was understood that consoles will only play with consoles of the same type...
A company shows some integrity by trying to protect it's customers and you ask "why should they care"? The appropriate response should be "thank you!". We complain every day about companies that don't respect their customers, and run said companies with apparent abandon, only eyeing the almighty dollar as the goal. That's contagious and habit forming. The next concession to the companies integrity is that much easier and the customer is the one that ultimately pays the price. It's decisions like this one by Sony that move to gain the respect of their customers. That's the best business move you can make, and will garner more of that dollar goal in the long term from those customers.
That's sort of right.
This article is blown way out of proportion, Slashdot-esque in "let's slant this against MS so it looks like they're doomed!".
Xbox Live means you pay one flat fee for unlimited online games, all hosted on fat-piped MS servers. You can even challenge someone to a completely different game than you're currently playing, swap the DVD (it keeps you connected) and put in the new DVD and challenge your opponent.
MS wants everyone on the Xbox Live servers so this is possible. They want players to be used to a familiar, easy to use interface and not play with complicated pricing schemes and subscriptions.
EA (and Sony) aren't doing this because they want to pretect customer's integrity, they're doing it so they can make more money. Why settle for a fraction of the $10/mo when you can charge gamers $10/mo for each and every EA Sports game they want to play online?
That's what they're doing.
And why does everyone keep forgetting that Sony is an integral part of the MPAA and RIAA? Yeah, they're really here for customer's rights...
To top it off, while the original chip was a run-of-the-mill Celeron die
Why is this such a popular misconception? Having 128KB L2 cache doesn't make it a Celeron.
It is a Pentium III, with 128KB L2 cache. There IS a difference. Pentium IIIs have 8-way associative L2 caches, Celerons have 4-way, which has a performance delta of about 5-10% between them.
It's not a run of the mill Celeron, it's still custom, which throws off a huge chunk of your post.
And they don't use DDR4000 memory, it's simple DDR200 (PC1600).
And I'm very sure the yields have improved dramatically on the XGPU chip in particular. When it was first made the fastest desktop GPU on the 0.15u TSMC process was 200MHz, and it's now 300MHz. Nvidia tweaks the cores around so performance doesn't change but yields should improve, and TSMC constantly improves their 0.15 process as well.
The HDs and DVDs will also drop in price.
You seem to think that because most of the components were "low cost to begin with" it wouldn't make much difference. All of those price drops add up pretty quick.
Recent estimates I've seen placed production costs on the Xbox today at $225-$300 per box, which means they were breaking even or making a profit for a bit on the hardware...
Much of the stuff mentioned in the article is confirmed and true, but this is a blatant lie to me: Van's Hardware is reporting that MS is backing x86-64 over Intel's IA-64
Windows XP has been running on IA-64 for ages now, Nvidia's got drivers for it, why would they support x86-64 OVER IA-64? Why not both? It appears they're doing both, and I've seen absolutely nothing to say otherwise.
It wouldn't make any sense for MS not to support both ISAs. It's entirely possible (it's been done already), so why not keep them out there?
The fact that I can't watch DVDs without dashing out more dough for the remote, and the news of scratched DVDs in Japan didn't make it look any better.
It was a tradeoff. The DVD Consortium charges something like $20 on all DVD playback devices. MS didn't have to pay that if they made the DVD playback optional, as an addon, which is why the Playback kit is $25.
It's still a better deal than the PS2. For the PS2 you need memory cards to play. Usually multiple memory cards too. 8MB, something like $20 each. Ripoff.
If you want to use any more than 2 controllers with the PS2, you must spend even more money (I think it's $30) on multi-tap to get 4 controller jacks.
If you want a HD and ethernet, you gotta wait a bit then pay $150 for the addon (which makes the box bigger and bulkier than the Xbox).
Sony knows how to milk people for money. And the sad thing is it still works, simply because they convinced everyone the PS2 was the best thing since sliced bread on its launch and it now has a huge install base. Sony's smart like that, which is why they'll be around for a while.
And multiplayer gaming is great, but there is nothing that would indicate thus far that people would honestly prefer to play games across the Internet than against someone in the same room. For a true multiplayer experience, Nintendo leads the way, if only because of SSBM.
Why can't you do both? There's not mutually exclusive.
Imagine having you and 3 other friends on one team in Halo, playing in the same room, while having 4 of your friends elsewhere also playing in the same room.
You could even use your voice headsets to taunt them as if they were in the same room.:)
Or, even better, bring your Xbox over to his house and hook them together with standard crossover cables. LAN gaming! In the same room.
Nintendo's dropping the ball on multiplayer. All they have is local multiplayer, 4 players, with a 56K/ethernet addon expected soon. But they haven't announced what they plan to do with it, while MS and Sony at least have planned for it and are set to launch them in the summer.
Gate wanted it to run Windows, as in, the real thing. He wanted everyone to see the familiar Windows GUI, he wanted multitasking (he wanted MSN Messenger running while the game was running). The Xbox guys shot all these down and he caved in.
It's true the Xbox runs a stripped down Win2K kernel (500KB of RAM used or something like that), it runs all code at ring0, it runs 1 process but supports multiple threads, and has built in drivers.
1. Compared to the Ninendo system and the playstation 2, the Xbox was _huge_, and ugly. I guess it really is just a PC stuffed into a black box. I was surprised at its size; bigger even than my old colecovision. This is progress?
Indeed. The Xbox has built in hard drive and ethernet. The PS2 is larger when you add on the ($150) ethernet/HD addon, and it doesn't sit nearly as nice in a home theatre cabinet.
2. The game controllers were uncomfortably large for my (adult, male) hands. Did you see the small controllers there? They're called Xbox Controller S, and they're the Japanese controllers, made for people who prefer smaller controllers (I love the default one, myself, though.)
3. the graphics were good, and the games they were demoing were good, but not so much better than the other systems. And there weren't that many games available for it. Check this out: They probably didn't look too much better because of the setup. On an HDTV, with DD5.1 surround, there's a huge presentation difference.
4. Compared to the playstation2, which game in an elegantly small package, had a ridiculously huge selection of games, and controllers that fit my hand, i could see no compelling benefits for buying the xbox. The nintendo system also looked interesting, because of the totally far-out games they were demoing (i'm not sure what is in the water at nintendo HQ... those people have fantastic imaginations.) Unfortunately that's too common a view. It's like people saying they don't understand why people buy a BMW over a Ford. Both get you where you need to go, one is nicer and comes with more stuff.:)
The Xbox has built in ethernet. Historically, video game peripherals don't sell, save memory cards and controllers. Which means even though the PS2 is getting a HD/ethernet addon pack, it'll have a low adoption rate (not to mention the high price). Which means you won't get many true multiplayer games on it. Sony's online plan revolves around a GameSpy Arcade-type approach, where software will simply connect you p2p with another console, or the game developer makes their own dedicated server. MS' is more like the MSN Gaming Zone: They're spending TONS of money, and are employing more people than it took to develop the Xbox, to make Xbox Online a reality. There will be voice headsets that come and you hook into the back of the controller, complete with voice morphing, plus high-speed dedicated servers for online games, rather than p2p gaming (although you can do p2p gaming right now with GameSpy arcade on Xbox).
Xbox is also far more appropriate for a home theatre set up. It supports HDTV resolutions, it supports in-game Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding on the fly, it's got longer controller cables (9.5 feet vs 6 feet), and it sits far nicer in a home theatre cabinet than PS2 or Gamecube.
As for game selection: Just wait till E3. Not that the current game selection is bad, it's just that the PS2 had a 1.5 year head start. Look at the PS2's first year vs. the Xbox's. Xbox is off to a much better start...
And with companies like Acclaim announcing they're developing more Xbox games next year than PS2 or Gamecube, expect even more soon.
And people who say "XBox 2 and 3 will rule!" - I once again repeat - developers do NOT develop for a system that the producer doesn't seem to be interested in supporting. That's what killed Sega. It'll kill MS too, if they don't wake up.
I'm not sure if you understand how MS is handling the Xbox. At least when compared with Nintendo, they're supporting it MORE than Nintendo is.
Do you know who Ken Lobb is? He used to be a bigwig at Nintendo. The Klobb gun in Goldeneye 007 is named after him. He just did an interview yesterday with IGN Xbox: http://xbox.ign.com/articles/357/357007p1.html
To quote:
IGN: What would you say are the greatest differences between Nintendo and Microsoft as game companies.
Ken Lobb:One starts with an N, and one with an M. Neither starts with an S.
OK, in reality, Microsoft is really focused on this industry with a strong focus towards where we're heading over the next several years. There is a lot of effort being spent on what's going to happen over the next year, but just as much time, effort, and money is involved in planning on the next decade.
Wait for E3. MS is expected to announce dozens of new original games, and most importantly, outline the online plan.
Have you seen the headsets you'll get to play online with Xbox?
Online Play, with the built in ethernet and HD, will be Xbox's killer app.
Historically, no peripherals for game consoles aside from memory cards and controllers have sold well, at all. Which means even though Sony wants to make even more money by charging people for an external HD + ethernet, not many people will adopt it. Since not many people adopt it, not many real online games will come out for it.
Xbox, on the other hand, is going to launch with many online games, since all Xboxes are broadband capable without buying $100-$150 of extra equipment.
Online is the killer app. Coupled with the voice headsets (even come with voice morphing so people can't hear your crackling adolescent voice;))
On a side note, I wonder how anyone can declare a winner here at all? In the Americas, the Xbox was a huge success. There are tons of great games out for it (Halo, Rallisport, DOA3, Gunvalkyrie, Wreckless to name just a few) and tons more on the way, all exclusives: Toejam and Earl III, Unreal Championship, Project Ego, LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring, Metal Gear Solid X (MGS2 with graphical enhancements and you can play as Snake too), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Midtown Madness 3, MechAssault, Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter, etc).
They're both winners. I actually think the Xbox did very damn well against Sony and Nintendo, considering the brand name recongnition those guys have. People bought the PS2 originally because it was PS2. It had ZERO good games for the first year. Now it's getting all kinds of good games, simply because enough people bought it already it makes sense to develop for it.
Hardware wise, it's entirely inferior to the Xbox. Its wide install base, which sprung up from impulse buyers, is what keeps it afloat.
It worked for the PS2, but it may not work very well when the PS3 and Xbox^2 go head to head.
DiVX will just fade away the same as MPEG-4 due to it's too greedy nature. Much like Microsoft has faded away due to its greedy nature.;)
Greedyness has nothing to do with a product's death. If they can make more money and convince more people to use their solution rather than "better" Open Source products, then they will. In fact, a company that is more "greedy" is more likely to survive, since they'll have more money to push around.
While most of your post was spot-on you left some remnants of the PS2 fanclub around. I'll help you clean them up:
Gross overgeneralization. The XBOX is the only thing that's a repackaged PC. The PS2, which currently dominates the market by a huge margin, is quite far from a PC architecturally. The GameCube, while using something resembling a PPC, is otherwise architecturally quite remote from a PC. The XBOX may take all its RAM from the same pool (which as has been discussed isn't really a good thing), but that's not much different from what we do now (I've seen cheap SiS motherboards with onboard video that use system RAM for video RAM. Big deal, XBOX.) The Xbox is, actually, less of a PC than the Gamecube is. Not many PCs have a Unified Memory Architecture. The Gamecube doesn't. It's got dedicated system RAM, dedicated video RAM, etc. Like a PC.
The Gamecube uses a modified G3 (PowerPC 750, whatever). The Xbox uses a modified Pentium III (NOT a modified Celeron. Pentium III's have 8-way L2 caches, Celerons 4-way, a performance difference of ~10%).
I'd actually go as far as saying as the GC and Xbox are both architecturally fairly close to PCs, but that doesn't matter. They don't function the same, and they're specialized to run games better.
The PS2's is a lot different from a PC, you're right. But it's generally accepted that Sony/Toshiba made a huge mistake with the Emotion Engine. The Vector units are WAY too hard to program for, not to mention all of the obvious bottlenecks in the system (4MB VRAM?)
"The Internet Browser shouldn't be a product bought and sold in the marketplace. It's a very basic product at its heart, and should be included with PCs to begin with."
you know what? That's just what I feel about operating systems. Okay, so say for the sake of argument Dell and Red Hat merge and begin bundling Red Hat with PCs, rather than Windows.
Could Microsoft go run to the DoJ and complain that giving away Red Hat Linux for free with Dell computers (and no Windows came installed) was driving them out of business?
Except of course that Ballmer is telling a big, fat lie: Microsoft has already produced a stripped-down version of Windows. It's called Windows XP Embedded. Well, hey! That's cool. I didn't know Windows XP Embedded ran all programs that run under Windows XP. That's because they don't.
It's possible to strip out hundreds of thousands of lines of code from a product to produce a skin-n-bones approach. I don't think they ever argued that it wasn't. They argued that they shouldn't have to, and won't, castrate their product and remove components and have it so you can plug in this part to do this and that part to do that: it's a nightmare, and probably very unstable, and definitely inconsistent. Not what they want Windows to be.
Also, look at it this way: if you can't take a browser away from the OS without breaking it, then you've got a pretty shitty product in the first place. Now, even I can't believe that MS Windows is that shitty, so IMHO Steve Ballmer is trying to pull a fast one here. It is feasible - it might cost a whole lot of money, but it is definitely feasible. Or, if it isn't, it is unavoidable proof that MS Windows was never a well-designed OS in the first place...so, which one is it going to be? It's possible to remove the browser. Everyone knows that. The problem is, how do you deal with all the programs that rely on the MS HTML rendering engine that's ASSUMED to be in every version of Windows by many programs?
Why are we getting so upset over the internet browser? Why not the file browser too? Windows Explorer took marketshare from things like Midnight Commander.;)
Let's face it, Internet Browsers are essential components of modern PCs, and logically should be bundled with the OS. Nobody is stopping consumers from downloading Mozilla, Opera, KMelon, or any of those other browsers on their computer. It comes with a very basic, simple web browser that suffices for the vast majority of consumers. That's how it is.
As much as people love to hate Microsoft, I can't fault them for bundling IE. It's a logical decision. I realize it basically drove Netscape out of business...but the real question is, what business? The Internet Browser shouldn't be a product bought and sold in the marketplace. It's a very basic product at its heart, and should be included with PCs to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
The University of Calgary has a new Computer Science concentration (to go with Theoretical Computing, Software Engineering, etc) called "Games Design" that's about designing video games.
It's being billed as the first of its kind in North America: Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science with a Concentration in Computer Game Design. The (tacky) webpage for the concentration is here: http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~becker/GamesConc/
And what's stopping people from just buying a new Starters Pack for $49.99/year, including a new headset?
It won't ever be more than $49.99/year, otherwise people would just buy a new starter's pack and sign up again...
It's incredibly common in the console industry to sell the hardware below cost and make up for it eventually in game sales and when the hardware drops in production cost.
The PS2 started out being sold at a big-ish loss also.
Maybe MS is trying to get the PC gamers to play the nearly 2 year old version of Halo, and if they like it they'll need to buy an Xbox to enjoy Halo 2.
Either way, I don't think it'll affect Xbox sales negatively at all. If people were going to buy Xbox for Halo, they would have done it in the 2 years before the PC version came out...
And its the games that lost it, Sony just locked up GTA till 2004, and EA decided that its online components for its games will only work on PS2 (they had some problems with xbox live), and the FF series is only on ps2 (or pc for 11). Stick a fork in it, its done.
And here I was thinking that not everybody had the same taste.
GTA is still available on the PC.
EA Online games will still be available on the PC (and probably Xbox next year -- see how much money MS will throw their way to make it worth their while).
You also conveniently forgot to mention some of the most interesting Xbox exclusives: Halo, Blinx (must read, if you don't know what it is), Ninja Gaiden, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Crazy Taxi 3, etc.
It's certainly not done, it's just getting started.
The Microsoft XBox production volume is flat and declining. Everyone will tell you that. There is countless evidence from NVidia and Intel press releases, to anecdotal evidence that in Europe and Japan, XBox has only managed a meager 200,000 per territory.
:)
A lot of people would disagree with this, considering MS just announced today it sold 500,000 in Europe.
Not to mention with the recent pricecuts my local retailers are sold out of Xboxes (and PS2s, though). Not that it means much.
These are some of the more superficial reasons for why they want to have all online games go through Xbox Live:
* Stats tracking across all games. Uses of this will be bragging rights, and even the ability to challenge someone around your skill level to a certain game.
* Consistent interfaces and features across all online games. ig, mandatory support of the voice headset (players can use it optionally, and if they use it they can use the built in voice morphing software and mute players they don't want to hear.)
* Ability to keep a buddy list of people you enjoy playing with, showing online/offline status and to talk to them.
* Ability to challenge other users to play even a completely different game than you've got in the machine. The Xbox actually supports you challenging people to a different game, at which point you swap the DVD while it keeps you connected and you boot up into the other game and immediately play with those people.
* Ability to pay a flat fee and play unlimited games online for that month/year. Nintendo and Sony opted for a route where developers can charge per game played, or what have you. The real reason EA doesn't want to support Xbox Live, IMHO, is because I think they plan to offer a "play all EA Sports games for $9.95/mo" type deal, which isn't allowed under Xbox Live.
And there's a video from the old CES show that has a "simulation" of Xbox Live (3m53s long): http://www.xboxmaniak.com/?page=video2&nbr=7
It looks pretty impressive, IMHO. I'm hoping they're smart enough not to charge an arm and a leg.
Yeah,right. Don't even think for one moment that Microsoft has *ANY* intention of letting EA use Microsoft's servers to host/create games that would include PS2/GameCube players. Microsoft's online scam is only for XBox games and don't you ever forget that.
:D
I never said a single thing about talking to PS2/GC players.
What makes you think PS2 players can play against GC players either?
I thought it was understood that consoles will only play with consoles of the same type...
A company shows some integrity by trying to protect it's customers and you ask "why should they care"? The appropriate response should be "thank you!". We complain every day about companies that don't respect their customers, and run said companies with apparent abandon, only eyeing the almighty dollar as the goal. That's contagious and habit forming. The next concession to the companies integrity is that much easier and the customer is the one that ultimately pays the price. It's decisions like this one by Sony that move to gain the respect of their customers. That's the best business move you can make, and will garner more of that dollar goal in the long term from those customers.
That's sort of right.
This article is blown way out of proportion, Slashdot-esque in "let's slant this against MS so it looks like they're doomed!".
Xbox Live means you pay one flat fee for unlimited online games, all hosted on fat-piped MS servers. You can even challenge someone to a completely different game than you're currently playing, swap the DVD (it keeps you connected) and put in the new DVD and challenge your opponent.
MS wants everyone on the Xbox Live servers so this is possible. They want players to be used to a familiar, easy to use interface and not play with complicated pricing schemes and subscriptions.
EA (and Sony) aren't doing this because they want to pretect customer's integrity, they're doing it so they can make more money. Why settle for a fraction of the $10/mo when you can charge gamers $10/mo for each and every EA Sports game they want to play online?
That's what they're doing.
And why does everyone keep forgetting that Sony is an integral part of the MPAA and RIAA? Yeah, they're really here for customer's rights...
To top it off, while the original chip was a run-of-the-mill Celeron die
Why is this such a popular misconception? Having 128KB L2 cache doesn't make it a Celeron.
It is a Pentium III, with 128KB L2 cache. There IS a difference. Pentium IIIs have 8-way associative L2 caches, Celerons have 4-way, which has a performance delta of about 5-10% between them.
It's not a run of the mill Celeron, it's still custom, which throws off a huge chunk of your post.
And they don't use DDR4000 memory, it's simple DDR200 (PC1600).
And I'm very sure the yields have improved dramatically on the XGPU chip in particular. When it was first made the fastest desktop GPU on the 0.15u TSMC process was 200MHz, and it's now 300MHz. Nvidia tweaks the cores around so performance doesn't change but yields should improve, and TSMC constantly improves their 0.15 process as well.
The HDs and DVDs will also drop in price.
You seem to think that because most of the components were "low cost to begin with" it wouldn't make much difference. All of those price drops add up pretty quick.
Recent estimates I've seen placed production costs on the Xbox today at $225-$300 per box, which means they were breaking even or making a profit for a bit on the hardware...
Much of the stuff mentioned in the article is confirmed and true, but this is a blatant lie to me:
:)
Van's Hardware is reporting that MS is backing x86-64 over Intel's IA-64
Windows XP has been running on IA-64 for ages now, Nvidia's got drivers for it, why would they support x86-64 OVER IA-64? Why not both? It appears they're doing both, and I've seen absolutely nothing to say otherwise.
It wouldn't make any sense for MS not to support both ISAs. It's entirely possible (it's been done already), so why not keep them out there?
I think Van Smith's a little off here.
6 MB cache? The UltraSparc III has an 8 MB cache. Intel is still playing catch-up.
The UltraSparc III has off-die L3 cache. The Intel chip would be on-die.
Off-die L3 cache isn't too hard to do, and it's significantly slower.
The fact that I can't watch DVDs without dashing out more dough for the remote, and the news of scratched DVDs in Japan didn't make it look any better.
It was a tradeoff. The DVD Consortium charges something like $20 on all DVD playback devices. MS didn't have to pay that if they made the DVD playback optional, as an addon, which is why the Playback kit is $25.
It's still a better deal than the PS2. For the PS2 you need memory cards to play. Usually multiple memory cards too. 8MB, something like $20 each. Ripoff.
If you want to use any more than 2 controllers with the PS2, you must spend even more money (I think it's $30) on multi-tap to get 4 controller jacks.
If you want a HD and ethernet, you gotta wait a bit then pay $150 for the addon (which makes the box bigger and bulkier than the Xbox).
Sony knows how to milk people for money. And the sad thing is it still works, simply because they convinced everyone the PS2 was the best thing since sliced bread on its launch and it now has a huge install base. Sony's smart like that, which is why they'll be around for a while.
And multiplayer gaming is great, but there is nothing that would indicate thus far that people would honestly prefer to play games across the Internet than against someone in the same room. For a true multiplayer experience, Nintendo leads the way, if only because of SSBM.
:)
Why can't you do both?
There's not mutually exclusive.
Imagine having you and 3 other friends on one team in Halo, playing in the same room, while having 4 of your friends elsewhere also playing in the same room.
You could even use your voice headsets to taunt them as if they were in the same room.
Or, even better, bring your Xbox over to his house and hook them together with standard crossover cables. LAN gaming! In the same room.
Nintendo's dropping the ball on multiplayer. All they have is local multiplayer, 4 players, with a 56K/ethernet addon expected soon. But they haven't announced what they plan to do with it, while MS and Sony at least have planned for it and are set to launch them in the summer.
Ermm...I guess you didn't hear about Sega bringing the Xbox hardware to the arcades.
IGN also has a writeup: http://xbox.ign.com/articles/099/099035p1.html
I wonder about this quote then:
Gate wanted it to run Windows, as in, the real thing. He wanted everyone to see the familiar Windows GUI, he wanted multitasking (he wanted MSN Messenger running while the game was running). The Xbox guys shot all these down and he caved in.
It's true the Xbox runs a stripped down Win2K kernel (500KB of RAM used or something like that), it runs all code at ring0, it runs 1 process but supports multiple threads, and has built in drivers.
1. Compared to the Ninendo system and the playstation 2, the Xbox was _huge_, and ugly. I guess it really is just a PC stuffed into a black box. I was surprised at its size; bigger even than my old colecovision. This is progress?
:)
Indeed. The Xbox has built in hard drive and ethernet. The PS2 is larger when you add on the ($150) ethernet/HD addon, and it doesn't sit nearly as nice in a home theatre cabinet.
2. The game controllers were uncomfortably large for my (adult, male) hands.
Did you see the small controllers there? They're called Xbox Controller S, and they're the Japanese controllers, made for people who prefer smaller controllers (I love the default one, myself, though.)
3. the graphics were good, and the games they were demoing were good, but not so much better than the other systems. And there weren't that many games available for it.
Check this out:
They probably didn't look too much better because of the setup. On an HDTV, with DD5.1 surround, there's a huge presentation difference.
4. Compared to the playstation2, which game in an elegantly small package, had a ridiculously huge selection of games, and controllers that fit my hand, i could see no compelling benefits for buying the xbox. The nintendo system also looked interesting, because of the totally far-out games they were demoing (i'm not sure what is in the water at nintendo HQ... those people have fantastic imaginations.)
Unfortunately that's too common a view. It's like people saying they don't understand why people buy a BMW over a Ford. Both get you where you need to go, one is nicer and comes with more stuff.
The Xbox has built in ethernet. Historically, video game peripherals don't sell, save memory cards and controllers. Which means even though the PS2 is getting a HD/ethernet addon pack, it'll have a low adoption rate (not to mention the high price). Which means you won't get many true multiplayer games on it. Sony's online plan revolves around a GameSpy Arcade-type approach, where software will simply connect you p2p with another console, or the game developer makes their own dedicated server. MS' is more like the MSN Gaming Zone: They're spending TONS of money, and are employing more people than it took to develop the Xbox, to make Xbox Online a reality. There will be voice headsets that come and you hook into the back of the controller, complete with voice morphing, plus high-speed dedicated servers for online games, rather than p2p gaming (although you can do p2p gaming right now with GameSpy arcade on Xbox).
Xbox is also far more appropriate for a home theatre set up. It supports HDTV resolutions, it supports in-game Dolby Digital 5.1 encoding on the fly, it's got longer controller cables (9.5 feet vs 6 feet), and it sits far nicer in a home theatre cabinet than PS2 or Gamecube.
As for game selection: Just wait till E3. Not that the current game selection is bad, it's just that the PS2 had a 1.5 year head start. Look at the PS2's first year vs. the Xbox's. Xbox is off to a much better start...
And with companies like Acclaim announcing they're developing more Xbox games next year than PS2 or Gamecube, expect even more soon.
I'm not sure if you understand how MS is handling the Xbox. At least when compared with Nintendo, they're supporting it MORE than Nintendo is.
Do you know who Ken Lobb is? He used to be a bigwig at Nintendo. The Klobb gun in Goldeneye 007 is named after him. He just did an interview yesterday with IGN Xbox: http://xbox.ign.com/articles/357/357007p1.html
To quote:
Wait for E3. MS is expected to announce dozens of new original games, and most importantly, outline the online plan.
;))
Have you seen the headsets you'll get to play online with Xbox?
Online Play, with the built in ethernet and HD, will be Xbox's killer app.
Historically, no peripherals for game consoles aside from memory cards and controllers have sold well, at all. Which means even though Sony wants to make even more money by charging people for an external HD + ethernet, not many people will adopt it. Since not many people adopt it, not many real online games will come out for it.
Xbox, on the other hand, is going to launch with many online games, since all Xboxes are broadband capable without buying $100-$150 of extra equipment.
Online is the killer app.
Coupled with the voice headsets (even come with voice morphing so people can't hear your crackling adolescent voice
On a side note, I wonder how anyone can declare a winner here at all?
In the Americas, the Xbox was a huge success. There are tons of great games out for it (Halo, Rallisport, DOA3, Gunvalkyrie, Wreckless to name just a few) and tons more on the way, all exclusives: Toejam and Earl III, Unreal Championship, Project Ego, LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring, Metal Gear Solid X (MGS2 with graphical enhancements and you can play as Snake too), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Midtown Madness 3, MechAssault, Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter, etc).
They're both winners. I actually think the Xbox did very damn well against Sony and Nintendo, considering the brand name recongnition those guys have. People bought the PS2 originally because it was PS2. It had ZERO good games for the first year. Now it's getting all kinds of good games, simply because enough people bought it already it makes sense to develop for it.
Hardware wise, it's entirely inferior to the Xbox.
Its wide install base, which sprung up from impulse buyers, is what keeps it afloat.
It worked for the PS2, but it may not work very well when the PS3 and Xbox^2 go head to head.
There's a few big name games announced for Xbox Online already, including Unreal Championship (Unreal 2) and Sega's Phantasy Star Online 2.
Plus it's pretty much a given that MS will bring Asheron's Call 2 to the Xbox (AC1 was a better game than EQ, IMHO, and AC2 looks REALLY sweet...).
DiVX will just fade away the same as MPEG-4 due to it's too greedy nature. ;)
Much like Microsoft has faded away due to its greedy nature.
Greedyness has nothing to do with a product's death. If they can make more money and convince more people to use their solution rather than "better" Open Source products, then they will. In fact, a company that is more "greedy" is more likely to survive, since they'll have more money to push around.
While most of your post was spot-on you left some remnants of the PS2 fanclub around. I'll help you clean them up:
Gross overgeneralization. The XBOX is the only thing that's a repackaged PC. The PS2, which currently dominates the market by a huge margin, is quite far from a PC architecturally. The GameCube, while using something resembling a PPC, is otherwise architecturally quite remote from a PC. The XBOX may take all its RAM from the same pool (which as has been discussed isn't really a good thing), but that's not much different from what we do now (I've seen cheap SiS motherboards with onboard video that use system RAM for video RAM. Big deal, XBOX.)
The Xbox is, actually, less of a PC than the Gamecube is. Not many PCs have a Unified Memory Architecture. The Gamecube doesn't. It's got dedicated system RAM, dedicated video RAM, etc. Like a PC.
The Gamecube uses a modified G3 (PowerPC 750, whatever).
The Xbox uses a modified Pentium III (NOT a modified Celeron. Pentium III's have 8-way L2 caches, Celerons 4-way, a performance difference of ~10%).
I'd actually go as far as saying as the GC and Xbox are both architecturally fairly close to PCs, but that doesn't matter. They don't function the same, and they're specialized to run games better.
The PS2's is a lot different from a PC, you're right. But it's generally accepted that Sony/Toshiba made a huge mistake with the Emotion Engine. The Vector units are WAY too hard to program for, not to mention all of the obvious bottlenecks in the system (4MB VRAM?)
"The Internet Browser shouldn't be a product bought and sold in the marketplace. It's a very basic product at its heart, and should be included with PCs to begin with."
you know what? That's just what I feel about operating systems.
Okay, so say for the sake of argument Dell and Red Hat merge and begin bundling Red Hat with PCs, rather than Windows.
Could Microsoft go run to the DoJ and complain that giving away Red Hat Linux for free with Dell computers (and no Windows came installed) was driving them out of business?
Except of course that Ballmer is telling a big, fat lie: Microsoft has already produced a stripped-down version of Windows. It's called Windows XP Embedded.
;)
Well, hey! That's cool. I didn't know Windows XP Embedded ran all programs that run under Windows XP. That's because they don't.
It's possible to strip out hundreds of thousands of lines of code from a product to produce a skin-n-bones approach. I don't think they ever argued that it wasn't. They argued that they shouldn't have to, and won't, castrate their product and remove components and have it so you can plug in this part to do this and that part to do that: it's a nightmare, and probably very unstable, and definitely inconsistent. Not what they want Windows to be.
Also, look at it this way: if you can't take a browser away from the OS without breaking it, then you've got a pretty shitty product in the first place. Now, even I can't believe that MS Windows is that shitty, so IMHO Steve Ballmer is trying to pull a fast one here. It is feasible - it might cost a whole lot of money, but it is definitely feasible. Or, if it isn't, it is unavoidable proof that MS Windows was never a well-designed OS in the first place...so, which one is it going to be?
It's possible to remove the browser. Everyone knows that. The problem is, how do you deal with all the programs that rely on the MS HTML rendering engine that's ASSUMED to be in every version of Windows by many programs?
Why are we getting so upset over the internet browser? Why not the file browser too? Windows Explorer took marketshare from things like Midnight Commander.
Let's face it, Internet Browsers are essential components of modern PCs, and logically should be bundled with the OS. Nobody is stopping consumers from downloading Mozilla, Opera, KMelon, or any of those other browsers on their computer. It comes with a very basic, simple web browser that suffices for the vast majority of consumers. That's how it is.
As much as people love to hate Microsoft, I can't fault them for bundling IE. It's a logical decision. I realize it basically drove Netscape out of business...but the real question is, what business? The Internet Browser shouldn't be a product bought and sold in the marketplace. It's a very basic product at its heart, and should be included with PCs to begin with.