According to the PR, pairing with the device pushes a java applet to the phone that allows you to browse the drive's filesystem, do file management, presumably push or stream files to the phone etc. Wifi connections may be more advanced, who knows.
Sure. The CPU won't be up to heavier tasks, but there's no reason it can't display a remote desktop on your home server for that.
I'm almost at that stage right now with my Hermes, to where I don't need my laptop as much anymore. With the right data plan & HSDPA/wifi I don't even need a local HDD. Built-in or BT keyboard is fine, the only thing that's lacking is the display - a mini-HDMI connector or built-in laser projector would enable a whole new class of computing.
Until then, this is a good way to beef up the storage of your smartphone.
Maybe sales of this will prompt Apple to add BT etc to future iPods. Maybe Apple are already planning to announce this next month, to "further revolutionise the phone industry". Maybe that's a team of Apple lawyers I hear, knocking at my door.
Sure, it's called a "laptop". Does everything, even phonecalls (with Skype or a 3G card), but it's unfortunately not that convenient.
Size and cost are limiting factors. One day UMPCs might get there, but until now a smartphone is about as close as you'll get. Of course, putting a 10-20GB HDD in a smartphone will double the size (and likely cost as well), so it's probably best to keep it a separate, optional extra for the time being.
I don't think that's the point, though. Who's going to transfer 10GB to or from their phone, in one go? It's just for a file archive you can access or stream from, music/video or docs or GPS maps etc. The bulk filling or backup would be done via USB2 to a PC, most likely.
Actually, it also supports USB On-The-Go, which will be handy for some devices like digital cameras and phones like the HTC Universal. The BluOnyx is a similar device, but has even less details - apparently they're "working on USB OTG" as well.
"Credit-card sized" is an abused term these days. And the Seagate press release is self-contradictory:
The DAVE reference design is about the size of a centimeter-thick credit card, with dimensions of 3.5 x 4.7 x.47 inches (61 x 89 x 12 mm) and weighing only 2.5 ounces (70 grams)
So which is it? 3.5 x 4.7 inches (89 x 120mm), or 61 x 89mm (2.4 x 3.5 inches)? The latter sounds more credit-card sized to me.
So how is this different from the Agere BluOnyx, announced 6 weeks ago? Looks remarkably similar to me.
Oh right. "DAVE Technology" is designed to hook seamlessly into the geek propensity for 2001 jokes. "BluOnyx" is clearly a rushed-to-market moniker which misses its target market completely.
Quite true, and many more costs besides. The artists have to bear the entire cost of creating and selling the album, before they get any royalties.
Fair enough, you say? Perhaps - except they don't get to keep it. That album, that they conceived, wrote, performed, recorded, marketed and paid for in full, is no longer theirs. Copyright for the album is owned by the LABEL, and NOT the artist. That really sucks.
Time to link to Steve Vai's words of experience too, on this and the many other nefarious clauses that appear in a standard label contract.
that is so lame. "we'll jump in the bandwagon only if we see other people are making money first"
Don't forget, Rare already pushed that bandwagon a year ago - Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero both have quite a bit of downloadable content. A lot of it is themes and gamer pictures, but they also released extra maps, online co-op and new game modes, some of it months after release. Some of it was picked up, a lot of it apparently wasn't.
I don't blame them for not rushing into it this time, especially after the reaction to downloadable content we've been seeing lately.
Doubt they'd care much if other companies copied their products. They depend on cheap exports, not original exports.
The thing that happened to every other country in China's situation was that individuals within the country started innovating, and wanted some return for that. They're the ones that are going to get pissed off by copies from other Chinese. That's what prompted the development of the concept of intellectual property in the first place (that, and patent laws).
Of course, this assumes individuals can actually get recompense for their innovations, something that doesn't happen in a pure communist system. Then again, China is no longer a pure communist system, and appears to be slowly but steadily moving in the capitalist direction.
How can you possibly compare the Xbox 360 and the amount of 'quality' games they have [...] when they've been out for a freakin' year and the other consoles have been out roughly 2 weeks?
Why should one not compare them? People are buying them right now - this is how things stand right now, and those 360 games are available today, to play today. What good are promises of future goodness, when you go to play a game today?
This is the whole point of getting to market a year sooner - to get that head start.
Xbox could support 720p games (though only a handful) because it had 64K of unified memory, system and video ram together. The framebuffer could be as large as you needed, 3MB for 480p (front and back) or 7MB for 720p, or more.
Details are sketchy of Wii's internal architecture, but if it has a more limited framebuffer size, 720p may simply not fit. Depending on how the graphics buses are arranged, it may need to put the Z buffer in certain areas of video memory too, who knows. The old Voodoo2 could not manage more than 800x600 (unless you stuck two of them together) due to framebuffer size limits.
At the least, you'd have to make a big tradeoff in speed & texture quality, even if you don't scale the hardware up. Any 720p games will be compared to X360/PS3, and suffer for it. Nintendo knew what they were doing; rather than try and compete on graphical quality (not their strength), they compete on price and controller innovation, as they have always done.
It's a nice idea for your console to run Linux - but an original Xbox will do that for a lot less money, and run all the cliche geek software. What does the PS3 offer over that?
Well, it's faster, and has more memory. A cheap PC would likely outperform it on that front, however, and would make cheaper clusters I expect. It'd also run all the usual Linux software without porting, recompiling or requiring new drivers.
It's got a Cell. Good geek cred, excellent number-cruncher (though IMHO the [expensive] new GeForce 8800 is a lot faster & more suitable for that purpose).
It's got a kick-arse graphics chip - but apparently this isn't accessible from the Linux side, the hypervisor prevents access. 2D graphics & software rendering only. Or so I've heard.
It's got a Blu-Ray drive. Nice, if you can find an application for that. Watching movies will be tricky though, and the PS3 side will already do that.
Emulators? Sorry. Cell's in-order, multiple SPE design is completely unsuited for the complex logic branching required by emulator software. And if it doesn't have hardware 3D, you might be able to manage SNES or even Amiga emulation, but nothing fancier, certainly not a Wii. Xbox 360 has enough trouble emulating an Xbox with 3 PPC cores and full 3D.
Really, the best reason to buy a PS3 is to play PS3 games, and maybe watch the odd movie. I certainly wouldn't buy one to run Linux until it arrives and we know a lot more about what is possible, and perhaps some useful software actually exists.
Intel's 80 core chip wasn't symmetric; most of those cores were stripped-down processors, not x86 standard. Like the Cell, only more so.
nVidia's G80, while not on the same chip, takes this to 128 cores. G90 will support full double-precision math. And although it's separate from the CPU, graphics cards are such a standard part of most systems that by the time five years have elapsed, you'll likely be able to get a quad-core x86 + 256-core DP gfx/HPC system for somewhat less than Intel's fancy new 80-core release alone.
Yeah, games are fine & all that, but I'm just happy for gamers to bring the economies of scale down for this-here plug-in supercomputer.
GPGPU is what will really make it stand out. Physics acceleration, Folding@Home, ray-traced audio, ray-traced window managers, fluid-simulator window managers, film-level 2D pixel processing (my field), realtime H.264 decode & encode... I'm just scratching the surface. High performance computing just got a whole lot cheaper.
Half-Life 2 was a great game, and looked great too. But if you want to see what a console can do, take a look at Ghost Recon:Advanced Warfare on the 360 sometime - better than HL2 IMHO.
Except, as another poster pointed out, less compression means larger files which in turn means longer load times.
The PS3 is not supposed to be short of horsepower, the Cell is well suited for decompressing video, and would not be doing much else during a cutscene anyway. There is no reason not to compress the video as much as you can, using the most sophisticated algorithm you have. With H.264 and VC1 you can get around 4-5x the compression ratio of MPEG2, for the same quality, and therefore load 4-5x faster (while the decompression is done in parallel).
Xbox Live Arcade games. Simple enough to render at 1080p, with full frame rate and AA. The existing ones won't, but they can be patched, and new ones certainly could.
No reason why full games couldn't run at 1080p either, just as with the PS3. There are always going to be a handful of games that are simply not that demanding. Ports of previous-gen driving games with identical textures but 1080p rendering, anyone?
32bit colour and T&L may not have set the world on fire when they were released, but that's hardly surprising. Since the hardware was new, no software yet took full advantage of them.
It's different today. Try running modern games without T&L today, even on a modern CPU, and watch your game crawl - if it plays at all. And see if you can get a gamer to play in 16 bit without noticing the difference (and complaining). The TNT and GeForce chips set the scene for modern graphics, just like the Voodoo & Voodoo 2 did in their time with real 3D acceleration, dedicated texture units, SLI etc.
3dfx made many mistakes, which resulted in them simply being out-innovated and out-executed by the competition while they struggled with their consequences of their poor business decisions. They showed the way, but Voodoo 5/6's multichip approach was never the right direction for the mainstream future.
Yes, HDMI is basically DVI-D. But it has many advantages, and few disadvantages.
It also carries 8 channels of uncompressed digital audio.
It has a smaller, more convenient physical connector.
It is specced to drive longer cable distances.
Also,
It supports, but does not require HDCP. Just like DVI.
Basically, the only thing DVI can do that HDMI can't is carry an analog video signal. But if you really want that, VGA is a lot more widely used.
For a wireless version, I'd be concerned about a number of things (hey, another bullet list!):
Cost (like it's really going to be cheaper than a cable, suure).
Compression (is it actually lossless? Even for 1080p?)
HDCP support (they say HDCP is OK - but how do they compress an HDCP-encoded stream? What do you have to give up, 1080p support? Do they decode, compress, then re-encrypt before sending?)
Sync (will the video sent wirelessly to my TV stay in sync with the audio sent by wire to my amp? Fat chance.)
Range (might get from my amp to my TV, but I bet it won't get out of the room)
Multiple devices (if it reaches, can it negotiate HDCP encryption with more than one TV?)
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According to the PR, pairing with the device pushes a java applet to the phone that allows you to browse the drive's filesystem, do file management, presumably push or stream files to the phone etc. Wifi connections may be more advanced, who knows.
Sure. The CPU won't be up to heavier tasks, but there's no reason it can't display a remote desktop on your home server for that.
I'm almost at that stage right now with my Hermes, to where I don't need my laptop as much anymore. With the right data plan & HSDPA/wifi I don't even need a local HDD. Built-in or BT keyboard is fine, the only thing that's lacking is the display - a mini-HDMI connector or built-in laser projector would enable a whole new class of computing.
Until then, this is a good way to beef up the storage of your smartphone.
Maybe sales of this will prompt Apple to add BT etc to future iPods. Maybe Apple are already planning to announce this next month, to "further revolutionise the phone industry". Maybe that's a team of Apple lawyers I hear, knocking at my door.
Sure, it's called a "laptop". Does everything, even phonecalls (with Skype or a 3G card), but it's unfortunately not that convenient.
Size and cost are limiting factors. One day UMPCs might get there, but until now a smartphone is about as close as you'll get. Of course, putting a 10-20GB HDD in a smartphone will double the size (and likely cost as well), so it's probably best to keep it a separate, optional extra for the time being.
54 Mb/s ought to be enough for anyone's pr0n.
I don't think that's the point, though. Who's going to transfer 10GB to or from their phone, in one go? It's just for a file archive you can access or stream from, music/video or docs or GPS maps etc. The bulk filling or backup would be done via USB2 to a PC, most likely.
Actually, it also supports USB On-The-Go, which will be handy for some devices like digital cameras and phones like the HTC Universal. The BluOnyx is a similar device, but has even less details - apparently they're "working on USB OTG" as well.
"Credit-card sized" is an abused term these days. And the Seagate press release is self-contradictory:
So which is it? 3.5 x 4.7 inches (89 x 120mm), or 61 x 89mm (2.4 x 3.5 inches)? The latter sounds more credit-card sized to me.
So how is this different from the Agere BluOnyx, announced 6 weeks ago? Looks remarkably similar to me.
Oh right. "DAVE Technology" is designed to hook seamlessly into the geek propensity for 2001 jokes. "BluOnyx" is clearly a rushed-to-market moniker which misses its target market completely.
Yes, it's called "Payola".
Quite true, and many more costs besides. The artists have to bear the entire cost of creating and selling the album, before they get any royalties.
Fair enough, you say? Perhaps - except they don't get to keep it. That album, that they conceived, wrote, performed, recorded, marketed and paid for in full, is no longer theirs. Copyright for the album is owned by the LABEL, and NOT the artist. That really sucks.
Time to link to Steve Vai's words of experience too, on this and the many other nefarious clauses that appear in a standard label contract.Don't forget, Rare already pushed that bandwagon a year ago - Kameo and Perfect Dark Zero both have quite a bit of downloadable content. A lot of it is themes and gamer pictures, but they also released extra maps, online co-op and new game modes, some of it months after release. Some of it was picked up, a lot of it apparently wasn't.
I don't blame them for not rushing into it this time, especially after the reaction to downloadable content we've been seeing lately.
Doubt they'd care much if other companies copied their products. They depend on cheap exports, not original exports.
The thing that happened to every other country in China's situation was that individuals within the country started innovating, and wanted some return for that. They're the ones that are going to get pissed off by copies from other Chinese. That's what prompted the development of the concept of intellectual property in the first place (that, and patent laws).
Of course, this assumes individuals can actually get recompense for their innovations, something that doesn't happen in a pure communist system. Then again, China is no longer a pure communist system, and appears to be slowly but steadily moving in the capitalist direction.
How can you possibly compare the Xbox 360 and the amount of 'quality' games they have [...] when they've been out for a freakin' year and the other consoles have been out roughly 2 weeks?
Why should one not compare them? People are buying them right now - this is how things stand right now, and those 360 games are available today, to play today. What good are promises of future goodness, when you go to play a game today?
This is the whole point of getting to market a year sooner - to get that head start.
Xbox could support 720p games (though only a handful) because it had 64K of unified memory, system and video ram together. The framebuffer could be as large as you needed, 3MB for 480p (front and back) or 7MB for 720p, or more.
Details are sketchy of Wii's internal architecture, but if it has a more limited framebuffer size, 720p may simply not fit. Depending on how the graphics buses are arranged, it may need to put the Z buffer in certain areas of video memory too, who knows. The old Voodoo2 could not manage more than 800x600 (unless you stuck two of them together) due to framebuffer size limits.
At the least, you'd have to make a big tradeoff in speed & texture quality, even if you don't scale the hardware up. Any 720p games will be compared to X360/PS3, and suffer for it. Nintendo knew what they were doing; rather than try and compete on graphical quality (not their strength), they compete on price and controller innovation, as they have always done.
It's a nice idea for your console to run Linux - but an original Xbox will do that for a lot less money, and run all the cliche geek software. What does the PS3 offer over that?
Well, it's faster, and has more memory. A cheap PC would likely outperform it on that front, however, and would make cheaper clusters I expect. It'd also run all the usual Linux software without porting, recompiling or requiring new drivers.
It's got a Cell. Good geek cred, excellent number-cruncher (though IMHO the [expensive] new GeForce 8800 is a lot faster & more suitable for that purpose).
It's got a kick-arse graphics chip - but apparently this isn't accessible from the Linux side, the hypervisor prevents access. 2D graphics & software rendering only. Or so I've heard.
It's got a Blu-Ray drive. Nice, if you can find an application for that. Watching movies will be tricky though, and the PS3 side will already do that.
Emulators? Sorry. Cell's in-order, multiple SPE design is completely unsuited for the complex logic branching required by emulator software. And if it doesn't have hardware 3D, you might be able to manage SNES or even Amiga emulation, but nothing fancier, certainly not a Wii. Xbox 360 has enough trouble emulating an Xbox with 3 PPC cores and full 3D.
Really, the best reason to buy a PS3 is to play PS3 games, and maybe watch the odd movie. I certainly wouldn't buy one to run Linux until it arrives and we know a lot more about what is possible, and perhaps some useful software actually exists.
Intel's 80 core chip wasn't symmetric; most of those cores were stripped-down processors, not x86 standard. Like the Cell, only more so.
nVidia's G80, while not on the same chip, takes this to 128 cores. G90 will support full double-precision math. And although it's separate from the CPU, graphics cards are such a standard part of most systems that by the time five years have elapsed, you'll likely be able to get a quad-core x86 + 256-core DP gfx/HPC system for somewhat less than Intel's fancy new 80-core release alone.
ATi has AVIVO, and they've been doing hardware-assisted encoding in a variety of formats for some time now. Google it up.
Yeah, games are fine & all that, but I'm just happy for gamers to bring the economies of scale down for this-here plug-in supercomputer.
GPGPU is what will really make it stand out. Physics acceleration, Folding@Home, ray-traced audio, ray-traced window managers, fluid-simulator window managers, film-level 2D pixel processing (my field), realtime H.264 decode & encode... I'm just scratching the surface. High performance computing just got a whole lot cheaper.
Cell? Never heard of it.
Half-Life 2 was a great game, and looked great too. But if you want to see what a console can do, take a look at Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfare on the 360 sometime - better than HL2 IMHO.
Except, as another poster pointed out, less compression means larger files which in turn means longer load times.
The PS3 is not supposed to be short of horsepower, the Cell is well suited for decompressing video, and would not be doing much else during a cutscene anyway. There is no reason not to compress the video as much as you can, using the most sophisticated algorithm you have. With H.264 and VC1 you can get around 4-5x the compression ratio of MPEG2, for the same quality, and therefore load 4-5x faster (while the decompression is done in parallel).
While you're at the dictionary, I think you better look up "sarcasm" too.
Even if US games work on your imported Japanese console, are local Blu-Ray movies going to play?
From what I've heard, game region locking is optional for the publisher, but Blu-Ray movie region locking is still there.
Besides, good luck trying to import one of those 100K launch units.
Xbox Live Arcade games. Simple enough to render at 1080p, with full frame rate and AA. The existing ones won't, but they can be patched, and new ones certainly could.
No reason why full games couldn't run at 1080p either, just as with the PS3. There are always going to be a handful of games that are simply not that demanding. Ports of previous-gen driving games with identical textures but 1080p rendering, anyone?
32bit colour and T&L may not have set the world on fire when they were released, but that's hardly surprising. Since the hardware was new, no software yet took full advantage of them.
It's different today. Try running modern games without T&L today, even on a modern CPU, and watch your game crawl - if it plays at all. And see if you can get a gamer to play in 16 bit without noticing the difference (and complaining). The TNT and GeForce chips set the scene for modern graphics, just like the Voodoo & Voodoo 2 did in their time with real 3D acceleration, dedicated texture units, SLI etc.
3dfx made many mistakes, which resulted in them simply being out-innovated and out-executed by the competition while they struggled with their consequences of their poor business decisions. They showed the way, but Voodoo 5/6's multichip approach was never the right direction for the mainstream future.
Yes, HDMI is basically DVI-D. But it has many advantages, and few disadvantages.
- It also carries 8 channels of uncompressed digital audio.
- It has a smaller, more convenient physical connector.
- It is specced to drive longer cable distances.
Also,Basically, the only thing DVI can do that HDMI can't is carry an analog video signal. But if you really want that, VGA is a lot more widely used.
For a wireless version, I'd be concerned about a number of things (hey, another bullet list!):
No viruses, check.
You're already wrong.
Promoting the myth of invulnerability is not going to help anyone except Apple's PR department.