True, the heavyweights do lean towards PRMan (they can afford it), and PRMan has made good improvements in recent times. The alternatives have been quite functional (and at times rather more functional) and a good deal cheaper, which made e.g. Entropy very attractive to the smaller studios. Pixar certainly felt threatened enough to shut Exluna down.
I know The Core in particular had some shots rendered with Entropy, and houses like Blur prefer Brazil (perhaps since the author of Brazil used to work there). A lot of the smaller post houses don't feel the need to shell out the premium for PRMan, and have opted for one of the various alternatives.
PRMan might be The Standard, and they've brought it more up-to-date in the last year or two, but it's far from the only usable alternative.
A good point, but since most shops have multiple jobs in the render pipeline at a time, you could render one job on the GPU hardware, and another on the CPUs the old fasioned way.
Or, if the rendering is really just pure IEEE float calculations (and doesn't depend on e.g. differences in vendor sub-pixel accuracy), then it might be sufficiently similar and standard to be intermixed with CPU results after all.
General computing tasks, yes, AGP and GPUs are not so useful. For rendering though, they're near-ideal, even with AGP (though PCI Express would certainly be better).
PCI Express is a possibility, if you can find a motherboard with more than one x16 slot (or a GPU that fits an ordinary x1 slot). Doubt you will for some time, though.
And you wouldn't have to use top-of-the-line cards, either. Something mid-range, with more bang for the buck would do fine.
But yeah, one day. Great to see how the demand for better games has resulted in cool hw/sw like this flowing on to my own industry:-) Now we just need to figure out how the pr0n crowd can drive up demand for systems with multiple gigabytes of RAM...
PRMan is a fine product, but it has its limitations, as well as its price. There are numerous competitors, many of which use the same Renderman interface but offer more speed and/or more features at a lower price (BMRT and Entropy are[were] notable, and relevant, until Pixar squashed them with the threat of an expensive court case). Brazil, AIR, etc - these RIB-based renderers drop into the same place in the workflow.
Please explain to me why a dedicated rendering device from NVidia would be any better than your average UNIX or Linux machine?
Only if you explain why your average UNIX or Linux machine is better than a Commodore 64 or a PDA, which is also "in essence nothing but processor operations" etc:-) If you listed SPEED in there, you're on the right track.
A modern GPU has far more floating-point hardware than any general-purpose CPU, and it's all geared towards the process of rendering pixels. For certain tasks, one of those expensive dedicated rendering devices from nVidia could be better than FIFTY of your "average" UNIX or Linux machines! Is that enough of an advantage to consider?
Certainly true - more than Entropy's $1500 (when they sold it), more than many others, but still cheaper than PRMan's $3500 + $700/yr.
I think the point is not that it can render just like other engines, but that it can do so at a far greater speed (with a lot more flexibility and features than the PURE card). That would indeed be worth the money to all but the smallest studios - much faster feedback at full quality is an artist's dream, quite apart from the (more expensive) option of using it to accelerate your render farm.
What they don't really say anywhere is *how much* faster it is. There are many factors involved, but if you basically have 16 * 4 * 2 FP execution units running at 400 MHz in a highly parallel configuration, backed by 32 GB/s of bandwidth, there is quite a bit of potential there (~50 GFLOPS vs P4's ~2 GFLOPS?).
For a farm... If, say, it renders 5x faster than a given render machine, then that's 4 machines (and engine licences) you don't have to buy, which would easily cover the cost.
It's certainly possible that different hardware or even different drivers on the different machines doing the rendering can create subtle (or not-so-subtle) differences in each resulting frame, but standardising the hardware and drivers across machines should solve that completely.
You're right that the AGP port is asymmetric, but this is unlikely to be a bottleneck if they can do enough of the processing on the card.
For 3D rendering, especially non-realtime cinematic rendering, you have large source datasets - LOTS of geometry, huge textures, complex shaders - but a relatively small result. You also generally take long enough to render (seconds or even minutes, rather than fractions of a second) that the readback speed is not so much an issue.
Upload to the card is plenty fast enough (theoretical 2 GB/s, but achieved bandwidth is usually a lot less) to feed it the source data, if you're doing something intensive like global illumination (which will take a lot more time to render than the upload time). Readback speed (around 150 MB/s) is indeed a lot slower, but when your result is only e.g. 2048x1536x64 (FP16 OpenEXR format, 24 MB per image), you can typically read that back in 1/6 of a second. Not to say PCIe won't help, of course, in both cases.
Readback is more of an issue if you can't do a required processing stage on the GPU, and you have to retrieve the partially-complete image from the GPU, work on it, then send it back for more GPU processing etc, but with fairly generalised 32 bit float processing, you can usually get away with just using a different algorithm, even if it's less efficient, and keep it on the card.
Another issue might be running out of onboard RAM, but in most cases you can just dump source data instead & upload it again later.
Any meteorites that are capable of blasting rocks out of Earth's gravity well don't come around every million years, either. There probably haven't been more than a handful in the entire lifetime of the planet.
Then take into account the chances of:
said rocks being launched by the blast on just just such a trajectory as to thread their way across a billion-odd km, dodging various celestial bodies and getting just the right nudges from the various gravity fields to intersect Io's orbit right when it happens to be there (hint: NASA couldn't do this if they tried, not without course corrections)
said rocks not being vaporised by being flung out of the atmosphere at 40,000+ km/hr (escape velocity)
bacteria on said rocks surviving the blast, also not being vaporised
said bacteria surviving an extended space journey, vacuum, alternating near-absolute-zero and furnace temperatures with raw solar radiation etc
bacteria surviving impact with Io (and not landing in a pool of molten sulphur)
bacteria finding living conditions on Io that it can actually live in already (no time to gradually evolve an adaption; it's sink or swim time)
bacteria finding sufficient earth-style nutrients (oxygen and/or CO2, water, solar energy etc) at its landing site that it can live on (remember, this is Io we're talking about, not even Europa)
If all that can be considered "very likely indeed", I recommend you make some serious investments in lottery tickets.
Earth itself has been contaminated with martian rocks.
I, for one, welcome our new petrified microbe overlords... yep, they're a serious threat all right.
it probably would have heppened by now from meteor impacts.
Giant meteorites burning through our atmosphere & hitting the ground with such force that it blasts rocks containing live bacteria at escape velocity out past Mars & the asteroids, narrowly avoiding Jupiter's gravity well & gently touching down in a hospitable place on Io - and you call that probable? Like it happens on a daily basis.
If it DOES contaminate and take hold of the planet, then it was meant to be
What are you, some sort of predestinationist? It's OK to hang about in SARS clinics or have unprotected sex with AIDS sufferers, and if we get infected, well, "it was meant to be"?
From where I'm sitting, such an event would be our choice, the humans planning the mission, since we could by a simple choice not allow it the chance of happening.
Environmentalist wacko complaints aside, try to see it from a simple science viewpoint at least. Any life on Io (or Europa or underground lakes etc) can be viewed as a (very rare) experiment, with the potential to learn a lot about how life develops, and if we introduce external influences we run a real risk of contaminating the results.
That alone is enough reason to take every precaution.
Depends on the code. Does your PC's CPU & GPU have fully shared access to video memory? The Xbox does. That's a not-so-subtle difference.
Anything written for a PC's AGP bus would run faster on the PC, certainly. But code written for an Xbox that depended on its unified memory, e.g. using SSE to manipulate/collision-detect/etc with vertices that the GPU can then read directly, would be harder to do efficiently on a PC.
Sure you'd need a modchip to run XBMC etc, but you could just make an exact backup of your retail game, and it should work.
The only thing (that I'm aware of) that prevented people from duplicating retail discs is that an unmodded Xbox would only boot from the second layer of a DVD (or its dashboard on the HD). With dual-layer recordable discs becoming available, this might now be possible.
Stars are effectively point-sources
on
Sedna May Have A Moon
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I can't block out any of the stars in Orion with a pinhead
Atmospheric (or lens) diffraction, I'd say. If you were out in space, you could probably block it out with the tip of a pin.
When Mal takes on two new passengers - a young doctor and his unstable, telepathic sister - he gets much more than he bargained for. The pair are fugitives from the coalition dominating the universe, who will stop at nothing to reclaim the girl. The crew that was once used to skimming the outskirts of the galaxy unnoticed find themselves caught between the unstoppable military force of the Universal Alliance and the horrific, cannibalistic fury of the Reavers, savages who roam the very edge of space. Hunted by vastly different enemies, they begin to discover that the greatest danger to them may be on board "Serenity" herself.
Technical issues are not their only problem, look into the article I linked in my previous post.
Did you link to something? I missed that. Yes, nVidia have IP to do with shaders, but MS licenced that for DirectX, which is what is being used in Xbox. There is certainly wiggle room. nVidia's OpenGL extensions are another matter, but I'm not sure if any games on Xbox actually used OpenGL - few at most.
What's to stop some guy to find some exploit on the emulation code?
Sure it's possible to find new exploits on the new code, as with any new console, but you were talking about existing exploits still functioning, which they won't.
Oh yeah and Nintendo wasted all those years on the NES, the SNES and the N64
Nintendo has strong exclusive franchises which they established with those machines - MS doesn't (Halo is largely it, and even that's not exclusive). Nintendo's many carried-over franchises are responsible for probably the majority of Gamecube sales - they use that instead of backwards compatibility.
Your Ocarina of Time comment ties in with the franchise point, but it's not sufficient for MS:
Halo is not exclusive - if Xbox2 isn't attractive enough, people will wait for PC versions of Halo sequels (as some did with Halo1)
What other MS/Xbox franchises are there to entice people to buy a non-compatible Xbox2?
This is an issue that must be viewed from a business perspective and not only technical, MS will/won't include compatibility if and when it makes business sense, period.
I agree with that of course, I'm saying that MS can best leverage the whole Xbox1 cycle by playing off their major strength - the backwards compatibility of the Windows/DirectX API. To do otherwise is to abandon the most important things they've done with Xbox1 (except for setting up Live - they'll carry that over regardless, naturally).
The cost of including the HD and the benefits of potential compatibility that it brings will be weighed against the costs of a reasonably large flash drive, the lack of differentiation and the lessening of the player experience (longer load times, network delays, fewer game genres possible, limited functionality for non-Live subscribers etc). To me it seems to make more business sense to include the HD.
MS just bought a Wintel emulator that runs on a PowerPC.
- New GPU (again, with incompatible ISA, and don't start the stupid "DirectX API" thing here, I'm talking low-level pixel/vertex shader code and Nvidia's proprietary, probably heavily patented/copyrighted extensions)
ATi have said this can likely be overcome, with shader recompilation most likely.
- Keeping backwards compatibility could mean compatibility with some current Xbox hacks, like buffer overflows in some games and some BIOS stuff that could allow pirates to.dump "0 day" ROMs/ISOs immediately after the thing hits the market.
No chance. We're running under an emulator, remember? Anything that tries to step out of the sandbox gets killed immediately.
- The HDD has not proved to be a market advantage, in fact, it negatively affected Xbox sales in some markets (big, ugly, heavy, noisy consoles don't sell in Japan, vertical PS2 anyone?).
For every person that dislikes the extra size that comes from the HD, there's another that likes downloading content from Live, two that are grateful they don't have to buy extra flash cards, and a few more that like game features that use it (like faster loading, massive game saves, custom music tracks, game expansions [e.g as with DOA3] etc etc]. I would be willing to bet it'd be a net disadvantage, from polling the comments here. A better start to reducing size/noise/heat would be to take out the built-in PSU.
The current Xbox has some great games but it's never been interesting enough, neither from a technical standpoint nor as a game console.
Funny, I usually hear that the other way around:-)
Basically, as people have pointed out, no HD effectively means no backwards compatibility. And no backwards compatibility means everything they spent on establishing the original Xbox is wasted.
What's the one thing they'll be left with, after Xbox1's life is over? Brand awareness? Well, mixed feelings at best from the console community. Confidence in MS's ability to succeed in the market? Likewise. Popular, exclusive gaming franchises? Not many at all. Experience? Well yeah, but that's a very expensive training exercise.
What they will have is a library of popular software (remember that the Xbox did very well in selling multiple games to each owner). Windows has succeeded mostly because of backwards compatibility - they can't afford to throw away their one big advantage, especially having seen how it helped the PS2. And they can't afford to port (and enhance) every game that people might want, nor would everyone be delighted to buy them a second time.
Maybe they'll have to sell a separate $70 "Compatibility expansion kit", with a HD & the emulator (and maybe a couple of new features too), but if they don't offer backwards compatibility at all, they might as well write off the last few years/billions completely.
There's a good chance that his DVD player doesn't care about regions anyway. Certainly most here in Australia don't anymore.
Australia's consumer watchdog considers region coding to be a restriction of trade (wonder if that'll change, with the new US free trade agreement). I suspect a lot of countries outside the US feel similarly. Anyone know if Sri Lanka does?
Oh, and as far as bottlenecks go, when my internet pipe can bog down my harddrive, then I'll be concerned.
Dunno if it's occurred to you, but you can "read" data off a hard drive too, not just "download" to it. And better still, it doesn't have to involve your slow old net connection!
I've noticed that, when "reading" from my hard drive (for such things as loading my warez appz, copying/moving my pr0n, searching the IE cache to read my sister's hotmail etc), I still have to wait for it to finish sometimes, and dude, that sux0rz when you just know she's gonna step into the room any minute.
Does anyone else think the Recording Industry Association of America missed an obvious acronym when they failed to name themselves the American Recording Industry Association?
Mr Crombie said even after the long phase-in period, Australian beef farmers would still fail to get free trade with the US.
"After a transition period we had expected that all beef tariffs and quotas would vanish," Mr Crombie said.
"In contrast, under the agreement beef quotas will remain in perpetuity.
"And although all tariffs are eliminated, safeguard provisions are in place.
"These will result in tariffs being reimposed if there is even a minor downward movement in US beef prices - a drop of 6.5 per cent."
So basically, after 18 years we get to sell the US another 70,000 tonnes of beef (equivalent to only two days of US beef production), and the tariffs will be right back where they started if US beef prices drop slightly (so we can't even compete in the market). What exactly does this give us?
My uncle happens to be a significant (Australian) beef producer, and when speaking to him a couple of days ago, he seemed quite optimistic about the FTA. I wonder if he still is today.
Slashdot Mirror
I know The Core in particular had some shots rendered with Entropy, and houses like Blur prefer Brazil (perhaps since the author of Brazil used to work there). A lot of the smaller post houses don't feel the need to shell out the premium for PRMan, and have opted for one of the various alternatives.
PRMan might be The Standard, and they've brought it more up-to-date in the last year or two, but it's far from the only usable alternative.
Or, if the rendering is really just pure IEEE float calculations (and doesn't depend on e.g. differences in vendor sub-pixel accuracy), then it might be sufficiently similar and standard to be intermixed with CPU results after all.
General computing tasks, yes, AGP and GPUs are not so useful. For rendering though, they're near-ideal, even with AGP (though PCI Express would certainly be better).
PCI Express is a possibility, if you can find a motherboard with more than one x16 slot (or a GPU that fits an ordinary x1 slot). Doubt you will for some time, though.
And you wouldn't have to use top-of-the-line cards, either. Something mid-range, with more bang for the buck would do fine.
But yeah, one day. Great to see how the demand for better games has resulted in cool hw/sw like this flowing on to my own industry :-) Now we just need to figure out how the pr0n crowd can drive up demand for systems with multiple gigabytes of RAM...
PRMan is a fine product, but it has its limitations, as well as its price. There are numerous competitors, many of which use the same Renderman interface but offer more speed and/or more features at a lower price (BMRT and Entropy are[were] notable, and relevant, until Pixar squashed them with the threat of an expensive court case). Brazil, AIR, etc - these RIB-based renderers drop into the same place in the workflow.
Please explain to me why a dedicated rendering device from NVidia would be any better than your average UNIX or Linux machine?
Only if you explain why your average UNIX or Linux machine is better than a Commodore 64 or a PDA, which is also "in essence nothing but processor operations" etc :-) If you listed SPEED in there, you're on the right track.
A modern GPU has far more floating-point hardware than any general-purpose CPU, and it's all geared towards the process of rendering pixels. For certain tasks, one of those expensive dedicated rendering devices from nVidia could be better than FIFTY of your "average" UNIX or Linux machines! Is that enough of an advantage to consider?
Dang, I went and fed the troll, didn't I...
I think the point is not that it can render just like other engines, but that it can do so at a far greater speed (with a lot more flexibility and features than the PURE card). That would indeed be worth the money to all but the smallest studios - much faster feedback at full quality is an artist's dream, quite apart from the (more expensive) option of using it to accelerate your render farm.
What they don't really say anywhere is *how much* faster it is. There are many factors involved, but if you basically have 16 * 4 * 2 FP execution units running at 400 MHz in a highly parallel configuration, backed by 32 GB/s of bandwidth, there is quite a bit of potential there (~50 GFLOPS vs P4's ~2 GFLOPS?).
For a farm... If, say, it renders 5x faster than a given render machine, then that's 4 machines (and engine licences) you don't have to buy, which would easily cover the cost.
It's certainly possible that different hardware or even different drivers on the different machines doing the rendering can create subtle (or not-so-subtle) differences in each resulting frame, but standardising the hardware and drivers across machines should solve that completely.
For 3D rendering, especially non-realtime cinematic rendering, you have large source datasets - LOTS of geometry, huge textures, complex shaders - but a relatively small result. You also generally take long enough to render (seconds or even minutes, rather than fractions of a second) that the readback speed is not so much an issue.
Upload to the card is plenty fast enough (theoretical 2 GB/s, but achieved bandwidth is usually a lot less) to feed it the source data, if you're doing something intensive like global illumination (which will take a lot more time to render than the upload time). Readback speed (around 150 MB/s) is indeed a lot slower, but when your result is only e.g. 2048x1536x64 (FP16 OpenEXR format, 24 MB per image), you can typically read that back in 1/6 of a second. Not to say PCIe won't help, of course, in both cases.
Readback is more of an issue if you can't do a required processing stage on the GPU, and you have to retrieve the partially-complete image from the GPU, work on it, then send it back for more GPU processing etc, but with fairly generalised 32 bit float processing, you can usually get away with just using a different algorithm, even if it's less efficient, and keep it on the card.
Another issue might be running out of onboard RAM, but in most cases you can just dump source data instead & upload it again later.
Then take into account the chances of:
said rocks being launched by the blast on just just such a trajectory as to thread their way across a billion-odd km, dodging various celestial bodies and getting just the right nudges from the various gravity fields to intersect Io's orbit right when it happens to be there (hint: NASA couldn't do this if they tried, not without course corrections)
said rocks not being vaporised by being flung out of the atmosphere at 40,000+ km/hr (escape velocity)
bacteria on said rocks surviving the blast, also not being vaporised
said bacteria surviving an extended space journey, vacuum, alternating near-absolute-zero and furnace temperatures with raw solar radiation etc
bacteria surviving impact with Io (and not landing in a pool of molten sulphur)
bacteria finding living conditions on Io that it can actually live in already (no time to gradually evolve an adaption; it's sink or swim time)
bacteria finding sufficient earth-style nutrients (oxygen and/or CO2, water, solar energy etc) at its landing site that it can live on (remember, this is Io we're talking about, not even Europa)
If all that can be considered "very likely indeed", I recommend you make some serious investments in lottery tickets.
I, for one, welcome our new petrified microbe overlords... yep, they're a serious threat all right.
it probably would have heppened by now from meteor impacts.
Giant meteorites burning through our atmosphere & hitting the ground with such force that it blasts rocks containing live bacteria at escape velocity out past Mars & the asteroids, narrowly avoiding Jupiter's gravity well & gently touching down in a hospitable place on Io - and you call that probable? Like it happens on a daily basis.
If it DOES contaminate and take hold of the planet, then it was meant to be
What are you, some sort of predestinationist? It's OK to hang about in SARS clinics or have unprotected sex with AIDS sufferers, and if we get infected, well, "it was meant to be"?
From where I'm sitting, such an event would be our choice, the humans planning the mission, since we could by a simple choice not allow it the chance of happening.
Environmentalist wacko complaints aside, try to see it from a simple science viewpoint at least. Any life on Io (or Europa or underground lakes etc) can be viewed as a (very rare) experiment, with the potential to learn a lot about how life develops, and if we introduce external influences we run a real risk of contaminating the results.
That alone is enough reason to take every precaution.
Anything written for a PC's AGP bus would run faster on the PC, certainly. But code written for an Xbox that depended on its unified memory, e.g. using SSE to manipulate/collision-detect/etc with vertices that the GPU can then read directly, would be harder to do efficiently on a PC.
Maybe when PCIe is here.
The only thing (that I'm aware of) that prevented people from duplicating retail discs is that an unmodded Xbox would only boot from the second layer of a DVD (or its dashboard on the HD). With dual-layer recordable discs becoming available, this might now be possible.
Atmospheric (or lens) diffraction, I'd say. If you were out in space, you could probably block it out with the tip of a pin.
More info on this here.
More info here.
Wow, that many? They must have used a Beowulf cluster of lawyers for that case!
OK, what's my penance for that joke...
Did you link to something? I missed that. Yes, nVidia have IP to do with shaders, but MS licenced that for DirectX, which is what is being used in Xbox. There is certainly wiggle room. nVidia's OpenGL extensions are another matter, but I'm not sure if any games on Xbox actually used OpenGL - few at most.
What's to stop some guy to find some exploit on the emulation code?
Sure it's possible to find new exploits on the new code, as with any new console, but you were talking about existing exploits still functioning, which they won't.
Oh yeah and Nintendo wasted all those years on the NES, the SNES and the N64
Nintendo has strong exclusive franchises which they established with those machines - MS doesn't (Halo is largely it, and even that's not exclusive). Nintendo's many carried-over franchises are responsible for probably the majority of Gamecube sales - they use that instead of backwards compatibility.
Your Ocarina of Time comment ties in with the franchise point, but it's not sufficient for MS:
Halo is not exclusive - if Xbox2 isn't attractive enough, people will wait for PC versions of Halo sequels (as some did with Halo1)
What other MS/Xbox franchises are there to entice people to buy a non-compatible Xbox2?
This is an issue that must be viewed from a business perspective and not only technical, MS will/won't include compatibility if and when it makes business sense, period.
I agree with that of course, I'm saying that MS can best leverage the whole Xbox1 cycle by playing off their major strength - the backwards compatibility of the Windows/DirectX API. To do otherwise is to abandon the most important things they've done with Xbox1 (except for setting up Live - they'll carry that over regardless, naturally).
The cost of including the HD and the benefits of potential compatibility that it brings will be weighed against the costs of a reasonably large flash drive, the lack of differentiation and the lessening of the player experience (longer load times, network delays, fewer game genres possible, limited functionality for non-Live subscribers etc). To me it seems to make more business sense to include the HD.
MS just bought a Wintel emulator that runs on a PowerPC.
- New GPU (again, with incompatible ISA, and don't start the stupid "DirectX API" thing here, I'm talking low-level pixel/vertex shader code and Nvidia's proprietary, probably heavily patented/copyrighted extensions)
ATi have said this can likely be overcome, with shader recompilation most likely.
- Keeping backwards compatibility could mean compatibility with some current Xbox hacks, like buffer overflows in some games and some BIOS stuff that could allow pirates to.dump "0 day" ROMs/ISOs immediately after the thing hits the market.No chance. We're running under an emulator, remember? Anything that tries to step out of the sandbox gets killed immediately.
- The HDD has not proved to be a market advantage, in fact, it negatively affected Xbox sales in some markets (big, ugly, heavy, noisy consoles don't sell in Japan, vertical PS2 anyone?).
For every person that dislikes the extra size that comes from the HD, there's another that likes downloading content from Live, two that are grateful they don't have to buy extra flash cards, and a few more that like game features that use it (like faster loading, massive game saves, custom music tracks, game expansions [e.g as with DOA3] etc etc]. I would be willing to bet it'd be a net disadvantage, from polling the comments here. A better start to reducing size/noise/heat would be to take out the built-in PSU.The current Xbox has some great games but it's never been interesting enough, neither from a technical standpoint nor as a game console.
Funny, I usually hear that the other way around :-)
Basically, as people have pointed out, no HD effectively means no backwards compatibility. And no backwards compatibility means everything they spent on establishing the original Xbox is wasted.
What's the one thing they'll be left with, after Xbox1's life is over? Brand awareness? Well, mixed feelings at best from the console community. Confidence in MS's ability to succeed in the market? Likewise. Popular, exclusive gaming franchises? Not many at all. Experience? Well yeah, but that's a very expensive training exercise.
What they will have is a library of popular software (remember that the Xbox did very well in selling multiple games to each owner). Windows has succeeded mostly because of backwards compatibility - they can't afford to throw away their one big advantage, especially having seen how it helped the PS2. And they can't afford to port (and enhance) every game that people might want, nor would everyone be delighted to buy them a second time.
Maybe they'll have to sell a separate $70 "Compatibility expansion kit", with a HD & the emulator (and maybe a couple of new features too), but if they don't offer backwards compatibility at all, they might as well write off the last few years/billions completely.
Australia's consumer watchdog considers region coding to be a restriction of trade (wonder if that'll change, with the new US free trade agreement). I suspect a lot of countries outside the US feel similarly. Anyone know if Sri Lanka does?
Failing that, there's always a PC and DVD Region Free.
Dunno if it's occurred to you, but you can "read" data off a hard drive too, not just "download" to it. And better still, it doesn't have to involve your slow old net connection!
I've noticed that, when "reading" from my hard drive (for such things as loading my warez appz, copying/moving my pr0n, searching the IE cache to read my sister's hotmail etc), I still have to wait for it to finish sometimes, and dude, that sux0rz when you just know she's gonna step into the room any minute.
That'll teach him to drive both ways, simultaneously.
MS lawyers would be onto you faster than you could say "Santa Cruz Operation", but the irony is wonderful :-)
Too late, Australia's got it now :-)
Or maybe these guys just beat them to it...
I guess it only applies to US citizens these days. Unless they wear turbans...
Nope, not quite. From the SMH article:
Mr Crombie said even after the long phase-in period, Australian beef farmers would still fail to get free trade with the US.
"After a transition period we had expected that all beef tariffs and quotas would vanish," Mr Crombie said.
"In contrast, under the agreement beef quotas will remain in perpetuity.
"And although all tariffs are eliminated, safeguard provisions are in place.
"These will result in tariffs being reimposed if there is even a minor downward movement in US beef prices - a drop of 6.5 per cent."
So basically, after 18 years we get to sell the US another 70,000 tonnes of beef (equivalent to only two days of US beef production), and the tariffs will be right back where they started if US beef prices drop slightly (so we can't even compete in the market). What exactly does this give us?
My uncle happens to be a significant (Australian) beef producer, and when speaking to him a couple of days ago, he seemed quite optimistic about the FTA. I wonder if he still is today.
Riiight. It worked for you guys, after all...