So if a friend rolls 6 dice unseen by you, then asks you to guess the numbers, is he intentionally screwing you any more than if he rolled each die after you made your guess? It's exactly the same situation, internally.
The point of the article was not that it was not random, because it is. They claim that the result is pre-determined, which is true - it is randomly selected at the start of the game. In that particular game, the outcome was chosen - 5 wins, then a loss - by a statistically random process. The fact that the outcomes were chosen at the start of the game rather than during the game is immaterial - the outcomes would be the same. The "reproducability" of the game that shows up when using an emulator is deliberate, as I point out elsewhere, but this does not affect the odds of winning.
Where the confusion lies (which also seems deliberate) is that the user's actual choice - high or low - does not affect the outcome. It is pure chance, even if it leads you to think otherwise. Worse, the games the article uses as examples appear to deliberately misrepresent the odds; that is the real issue at stake.
If the slot machine uses a pseudo random number generator, there's no problem with replaying the full sequence of random numbers leading up to the power failure, provided the initial seed was known.
If the RNG was that predictable, punters would quickly find a way to take advantage of it. Usually the sequence is made less predictable by re-seeding from an outside variable, such as the number of milliseconds between games, or an external sensor value.
At least in the machines I've worked with, it's virtually impossible to predict what the outcome of a game will be until the game has started. The outcome is randomly determined then, for all user choices, and recorded. After that, the game is simply played out, and the only choice a user has is whether to nudge or not.
This means that the results of the game are still truly random, but the maximum amount of the winnings is determined randomly at the start of each game. The overall odds are as designed into the machine. At no point does the machine decide "this player has won too much, and I need to even things out" - it is still entirely possible for a player to win the jackpot 10 times running. It's just very very unlikely. Slot machines are a game of pure chance, and no more.
If you pay money to play a certain game, the designers shouldn't be allowed to make you play a different game
This is the real issue at hand. Certainly the design of the game used in the article is clearly intended to mislead the user into thinking they have a better chance than they do (none of the machines I worked with was ever that blatant - they always presented such choices as entirely 50-50 odds, double or nothing, which is what they were).
One could argue that technically the player is not being ripped off, that they're getting exactly the same odds all the time (i.e. a little less than even), but it seems clear that the designers of that game wanted to misrepresent the odds, at least. Whether this is legal depends UK law, and probably on the disclaimers on the machine. I'd certainly agree that it's morally reprehensible.
IIRC, some machines are weighted for numerous small payouts, to appeal to one type of player, and other machines are weighted toward less frequent but larger payouts, to appeal to another type of player.
Additionally, the % return is chosen according to the expected amount of usage. A small club might choose a lower % (higher return) to make more from the machine, while a larger club with more players might choose a machine with a more attractive (to the player) % of return - he would make less from the machine, but since players might view the machine as "paying out more", they might play it more often. In Vegas, the sheer scale of the operation (thousands of players 24 hours a day) make it feasible to use machines with far higher percentages, approaching (but never reaching) 100%, and the high returning machines simply attract even more players.
The machine does not "decide that you've won enough" in order to meet its percentages (which would indeed be illegal). It is still a true random process, just with known odds.
The overall return is determined purely statistically. The fact that in the long run you will lose out does not alter the possibility that you might win the jackpot three times running, only the probability.
Incorrect - slot machines are provably random. There is indeed a real chance that you could win the jackpot, and that chance is as unpredictable as they know how to make it.
However, the probabilities are strictly controlled. Statistically it is quite possible to predict in the long run how many games result in jackpots, in exactly the same way that the results of flipping a coin cannot be predicted individually, but are obvious over a large number of samples.
As many people here have posted, the point of the article is more about people being misled as to the nature of the game.
Perhaps someone in the UK could give us the wording on one of these machines? I would lay money that the game is only ever described as purely a "game of chance". I'd expect that the wording on the machine never actually states anywhere that the user's choice makes a difference, only that by using the "nudge" feature, they could "double their winnings"! (which is quite true).
I'd bet that nowhere does it explicitly claim that the user's choice directly affects the outcome, other than by deciding whether or not to play.
BTW, the RNG used is more considerably random than you describe, at least in the machines I'm familiar with. The RNG is reseeded not only by the clock or by an external souce (such as a network host or real-world entropy input), but is commonly reseeded many times a second, between games.
In the example they gave, they supplied a RAM snapshot where the RNG was at a known state - a cold boot would almost certainly give you a different seed each time. Anything else is of course a major vulnerability, and you can be sure this is well-known to slot machine manufacturers.
As you say, the "gamble" in the middle of the gameplay is not which one you choose, but whether you play at all.
This might not be what the player expected, but they can't complain they're being ripped off - the results are as purely random as they expected, in fact more so, since the user cannot affect the outcome. Naturally IANAL, especially a British one, but I do know that in Australia the law requires that the user cannot affect the outcome.
Clearly the issue at hand is not whether the user is being ripped off, but merely illegally misled. One would have to carefully examine the wording on the machine to be sure. Morally, you could argue that being misled as to the nature of the game is wrong, but I prefer to think that, since it's common knowledge that "the house always wins" (especially so with slot machines), anyone who plays slot machines deserves everything they get (which, 87% of the time, is an emptier wallet).
The emulator sounds like it is operating correctly - the game, and all double-up/nudge results, are determined at the start of the game. The article proves that this is pre-determined, but not that players are being ripped off. The nudge results (at least in the slot machine software I wrote) were exactly a fifty-fifty chance, regardless of choice (and this was a legal requirement - slot machines are games of pure chance; no user skill element is allowed, regardless of how it appears).
The game on the page you mention wins four nudges and loses the fifth, but the page itself is misleading. It suggests choosing Low then High then Low again in order to win the first four games, but it fails to mention that it does not matter what you choose! You can choose High then Low then High again, and the numbers will be different but the result will be the same - you will always win the first four games and lose the fifth, regardless of your choice.
(Disclaimer: I'm too lazy to download the emulator and confirm this myself, but logically (and from my experience) it must be so - I'd happily make a bet of it;-)
The flip side of this is that, if you win, you can choose either HI or LO, and still win.
I can confirm that the slot machine software does in fact pre-determine the results of the double-up in advance, at the moment the user starts the game. The result of a double-up (win or lose) is completely random, fifty-fifty, so people are not being ripped off, but replaying the game will give the same win or lose result regardless of the "hi or lo" choice.
The reason for this is entirely so that, if the game is interrupted for some reason (by e.g. a power failure), the results will be exactly the same - which is what is being observed by the emulator. This is the only way to be completely fair.
This might upset some people who hold onto the belief that slot machines are in some way a game of skill, but they're not - they are pure chance, and are legally required to be (at least in Victoria, Australia, when I wrote slot machine software a few years ago).
The rules of the game are explained, but I very much doubt the wording states that your choice explicitly determines the outcome. Legally the machine must give a completely random result, and it has to do it in a way that can be duplicated if interrupted (for reasons I've explained elsewhere in this thread).
Doubtless people are misled into thinking their choice affects the outcome, but they are not being ripped off. They simply need to read their "contract" more carefully.
There's absolutely no need to make payout decisions before play starts.
Maybe not before play starts, but there are other reasons to make payout decisions at the start of the game.
One of these is the requirement in some countries that the machine be able to completely duplicate its anticipated behaviour in the event of a power failure.
Suppose you were a punter who'd just rolled 4 aces on a 5 roll machine, with the last ace spinning down into place - and the power fails. When power is restored, the machine must be able replay that same game in its entirety.
This does not mean that games need be determined before the player even starts the game, only that once started, it must be finished.
Though I doubt I am one of the friends of which you speak, I have written slot machine ("pokies") software for Tatts Victoria.
I can confirm that it's heavily regulated, and the RNG used is carefully analysed for randomness, with the the payoff tables (and to a lesser degree, the ordering of the symbols on "fruit machine" types) controlling the payout (which usually varies between 83% and 91%)
The results are only "pre-determined" at the time of the user starting the roll, but are completely random nonetheless. In other words, when the user pulls the arm (if the machine has an arm), the results of the roll (and any related results, e.g. from a "double-up") are randomly pre-selected, then the reels are spun to those positions.
What struck me most was the incredible security and redundancy the system has. In Victoria, the legal accounting requirements are very stringent, and the manufacturers themselves have a long list of attacks they have to be proof against (from long experience - everything from massive magnetic fields to electrical cattle prods have been used to defeat a slot machine's defenses).
For example, not only is the casing solid steel, locked and with mil-spec proofing against EMI, the CPU board and coin trays are both locked within separate steel compartments within the unit, and each requires a different key to unlock. All locks have failsafe mechanisms to record opening, and the cabinet door has a randomly-pulsed optical sensor as well.
Particularly, the win-loss game data is recorded into triple-battery-backed static RAM, in multiple CRC'd locations, with the same data being recorded simultaneously onto physical counters, printed in duplicate to a roll of paper (on some machines), and sent in real-time via encrypted LAN to a central host, which must verify all large payouts. Every coin and every game must be accounted for under any circumstance, particularly power failure in the middle of a game.
The coin sensors and payout mechanisms were equally sophisticated, and had to accurately deal with punters feeding large numbers of coins very rapidly into the machines, whilst still defeating "coin-on-a-string" style attacks.
It was an interesting project, but involved considerably more than I first expected. I can say that, after many all-nighters testing, I have come to truly dislike the sound of a slot machine:-/ (Ironically, for some years my next job required me to go to tradeshows in Las Vegas - from the very moment you step off the plane, you're assaulted by pokies on all sides)
Uh, GPRS is a link protocol; it just gets the data in & out of the phone. You don't use it directly. Also, GPRS speeds will vary dramatically per phone, depending on how many 13.4 Kb/s download channels the phone uses (between 1 & 7, typically 2-4, or 26-53 Kb/s).
WAP is a browsing protocol for fetching stripped-down websites. It can use GRPS, or it can operate over a standard 9.6 Kb/s GSM data connection (or equivalent). It's a very different thing to GPRS - comparing them makes no sense.
That "8 hours per frame" would be for a single CPU.
168 days / 8 CPUs = 21 days.
However, they don't just render the final version of the movie once & then release it. There are countless test renders, animation tweaks, re-renders, texture adjustments, further re-rendering, alternate lighting setups, re-rendering, slightly different camera angles, yet more re-renders, the script for that scene is rewritten from scratch and the whole process repeats until finally the scene is cut for pacing reasons.
It all takes a god-awful amount of CPU time, and it's all completely necessary:-)
That "innovative design", while suitable for multithreaded vector processing, is far more difficult to apply efficiently to general-purpose computing tasks. It so happens that a "high-clockrates design" (which the Xbox isn't particularly) is actually much more suitable as a home computer.
A single CPU that is 2x as fast as 2 individual CPUs can still do the work those CPUs do, as well as being able to perform single-threaded-only tasks at twice the speed. And it's enormously easier to write efficient software for.
Bugs are where your software does not do what you expected it to do. They seem to be unavoidable, with complex systems. Only by long-term term exhaustive testing can you increase your confidence that your software is bug-free.
Crashes are where your software catastrophically and unrecoverably fails, to the point where it cannot gracefully recover. Those should be avoidable, with the right tools. There are also crashes caused by unavoidable hardware failures, but that's a different problem.
Correct programming practices do of course reduce crashes (and bugs), but it seems to me a well-designed language could make it impossible to write code that crashes, only code that is incorrect (and occasionally even correct;-) e.g. Java eliminates pointers from C, since bad pointers are a major cause of crashes. By using only references, you cannot read or overwrite random or out-of-date memory.
I'm hardly an expert on language design, but it seems to me that while bugs may never be completely eliminated, crashes could be.
Plug in a cheapo pair of LCD shutter glasses, and it's as 3D as anything else out there. These cards do true 3D calculations (surfaces instead of volumes). It's up to the display system as to what you actually see.
In fact, recent consumer hardware also support 3D voxel textures, and can simulate a voxel system by using multiple parallel surfaces as "slices". And unlike the voxel-only systems of which you speak, they can actually do 32 bit colour & texturing too:-)
why I would then want to use an source, such as MP3, that would sound the same on a £50 stereo
While MP3 does contain less information than the CD it was encoded from, I very much doubt you will hear any difference between a well-encoded high-bitrate (256-320 kb/s) MP3 and a CD, even on a £5000 stereo. I can't, and neither can my friends, even on their £5000 stereos.
Although most downloaded MP3s (or worse, internet radio stations) are crappy, quality rips of your own CD collection can sound just as good (and be far more easy to sort through) than the stack of CDs they came from.
Likewise using Cat 5 cables or, even worse, WiFi, for linking parts of the sound system seems pointless.
Well, if the signal is digital, a Cat5 or even wireless connection will do just fine. I do know a guy who uses a balanced AES/EBU cable, but even he admits it's total overkill. You can get identical results running an S/PDIF signal through much crappier wire - that's the whole point of a digital signal.
And as other people have said, Cat5 is actually very well suited for analog speaker wire. Audio enthusiasts have been making very high quality cables out of braided Cat5 for years, with results comparable to name-brand cables costing $100s/m. You don't have to spend a fortune, though of course the name brands don't want you to know that. Google on Cat5 speaker cable and you'll see what I mean.
TiVo only works (well, the guide part & therefore most of its nice stuff) within the USA. I lived in Canada - not good enough, had to build my own ATi AiW setup. Now I live in Australia, and I can't even do that. DigiGuide, here I come.
Homebrew solutions are still the only solution for most of the world's population
Screen:
Apple - 17 in. widescreen
Dell - 15.4 in widescreen
Winner: Apple
Screen:
Apple - 1440 x 900
Dell - 1920 x 1440
Winner: Dell, most definitely
Wireless Networking:
Apple - builtin card and antennas
Dell - PC card can be added for extra
Winner: Apple
Wireless Networking:
Apple - builtin card and antennas
Dell - builtin MiniPCI card and antennas ($99 option - still cheaper)
Winner: tie
Thickness and weight:
Apple - 1 in. 6.8 lbs.
Dell: 1.52 in. 6.9 lbs
Winner: Apple
Dimensions:
Apple - 15.4 x 10.2 x 1.0 in.
Dell - 14.2 x 10.9 x 1.6 in.
Winner: Apple is thinner, Dell is shorter
Max Memory:
Apple - 1 GB
Dell - 2 GB
Winner: Dell (who uses 512 MB, esp. if running Shake/etc?)
People have already pointed out that a 4200 Go trounces an 440 Go. WinXP also comes with Movie Maker 2, Windows Media Player etc, which have similar functionality to the bundled Apple utilities.
While I admire the look of the Powerbooks, for my usage (mobile media workstation & code development), I require high resolution, fast CPU & gfx, and lots of memory. For me, the Dell wins out comfortably, and the cheaper price is icing. YMMV, of course.
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So if a friend rolls 6 dice unseen by you, then asks you to guess the numbers, is he intentionally screwing you any more than if he rolled each die after you made your guess? It's exactly the same situation, internally.
The point of the article was not that it was not random, because it is. They claim that the result is pre-determined, which is true - it is randomly selected at the start of the game. In that particular game, the outcome was chosen - 5 wins, then a loss - by a statistically random process. The fact that the outcomes were chosen at the start of the game rather than during the game is immaterial - the outcomes would be the same. The "reproducability" of the game that shows up when using an emulator is deliberate, as I point out elsewhere, but this does not affect the odds of winning.
Where the confusion lies (which also seems deliberate) is that the user's actual choice - high or low - does not affect the outcome. It is pure chance, even if it leads you to think otherwise. Worse, the games the article uses as examples appear to deliberately misrepresent the odds; that is the real issue at stake.
If the slot machine uses a pseudo random number generator, there's no problem with replaying the full sequence of random numbers leading up to the power failure, provided the initial seed was known.
If the RNG was that predictable, punters would quickly find a way to take advantage of it. Usually the sequence is made less predictable by re-seeding from an outside variable, such as the number of milliseconds between games, or an external sensor value.
At least in the machines I've worked with, it's virtually impossible to predict what the outcome of a game will be until the game has started. The outcome is randomly determined then, for all user choices, and recorded. After that, the game is simply played out, and the only choice a user has is whether to nudge or not.
This means that the results of the game are still truly random, but the maximum amount of the winnings is determined randomly at the start of each game. The overall odds are as designed into the machine. At no point does the machine decide "this player has won too much, and I need to even things out" - it is still entirely possible for a player to win the jackpot 10 times running. It's just very very unlikely. Slot machines are a game of pure chance, and no more.
If you pay money to play a certain game, the designers shouldn't be allowed to make you play a different game
This is the real issue at hand. Certainly the design of the game used in the article is clearly intended to mislead the user into thinking they have a better chance than they do (none of the machines I worked with was ever that blatant - they always presented such choices as entirely 50-50 odds, double or nothing, which is what they were).
One could argue that technically the player is not being ripped off, that they're getting exactly the same odds all the time (i.e. a little less than even), but it seems clear that the designers of that game wanted to misrepresent the odds, at least. Whether this is legal depends UK law, and probably on the disclaimers on the machine. I'd certainly agree that it's morally reprehensible.
IIRC, some machines are weighted for numerous small payouts, to appeal to one type of player, and other machines are weighted toward less frequent but larger payouts, to appeal to another type of player.
Additionally, the % return is chosen according to the expected amount of usage. A small club might choose a lower % (higher return) to make more from the machine, while a larger club with more players might choose a machine with a more attractive (to the player) % of return - he would make less from the machine, but since players might view the machine as "paying out more", they might play it more often. In Vegas, the sheer scale of the operation (thousands of players 24 hours a day) make it feasible to use machines with far higher percentages, approaching (but never reaching) 100%, and the high returning machines simply attract even more players.
The machine does not "decide that you've won enough" in order to meet its percentages (which would indeed be illegal). It is still a true random process, just with known odds.
The overall return is determined purely statistically. The fact that in the long run you will lose out does not alter the possibility that you might win the jackpot three times running, only the probability.
Incorrect - slot machines are provably random. There is indeed a real chance that you could win the jackpot, and that chance is as unpredictable as they know how to make it.
However, the probabilities are strictly controlled. Statistically it is quite possible to predict in the long run how many games result in jackpots, in exactly the same way that the results of flipping a coin cannot be predicted individually, but are obvious over a large number of samples.
And if the result is randomly determined ahead of time? How would you describe that, without calling it both "random" and "predetermined"?
As many people here have posted, the point of the article is more about people being misled as to the nature of the game.
Perhaps someone in the UK could give us the wording on one of these machines? I would lay money that the game is only ever described as purely a "game of chance". I'd expect that the wording on the machine never actually states anywhere that the user's choice makes a difference, only that by using the "nudge" feature, they could "double their winnings"! (which is quite true).
I'd bet that nowhere does it explicitly claim that the user's choice directly affects the outcome, other than by deciding whether or not to play.
BTW, the RNG used is more considerably random than you describe, at least in the machines I'm familiar with. The RNG is reseeded not only by the clock or by an external souce (such as a network host or real-world entropy input), but is commonly reseeded many times a second, between games.
In the example they gave, they supplied a RAM snapshot where the RNG was at a known state - a cold boot would almost certainly give you a different seed each time. Anything else is of course a major vulnerability, and you can be sure this is well-known to slot machine manufacturers.
As you say, the "gamble" in the middle of the gameplay is not which one you choose, but whether you play at all.
This might not be what the player expected, but they can't complain they're being ripped off - the results are as purely random as they expected, in fact more so, since the user cannot affect the outcome. Naturally IANAL, especially a British one, but I do know that in Australia the law requires that the user cannot affect the outcome.
Clearly the issue at hand is not whether the user is being ripped off, but merely illegally misled. One would have to carefully examine the wording on the machine to be sure. Morally, you could argue that being misled as to the nature of the game is wrong, but I prefer to think that, since it's common knowledge that "the house always wins" (especially so with slot machines), anyone who plays slot machines deserves everything they get (which, 87% of the time, is an emptier wallet).
The emulator sounds like it is operating correctly - the game, and all double-up/nudge results, are determined at the start of the game. The article proves that this is pre-determined, but not that players are being ripped off. The nudge results (at least in the slot machine software I wrote) were exactly a fifty-fifty chance, regardless of choice (and this was a legal requirement - slot machines are games of pure chance; no user skill element is allowed, regardless of how it appears).
The game on the page you mention wins four nudges and loses the fifth, but the page itself is misleading. It suggests choosing Low then High then Low again in order to win the first four games, but it fails to mention that it does not matter what you choose! You can choose High then Low then High again, and the numbers will be different but the result will be the same - you will always win the first four games and lose the fifth, regardless of your choice.
(Disclaimer: I'm too lazy to download the emulator and confirm this myself, but logically (and from my experience) it must be so - I'd happily make a bet of it ;-)
The flip side of this is that, if you win, you can choose either HI or LO, and still win.
I can confirm that the slot machine software does in fact pre-determine the results of the double-up in advance, at the moment the user starts the game. The result of a double-up (win or lose) is completely random, fifty-fifty, so people are not being ripped off, but replaying the game will give the same win or lose result regardless of the "hi or lo" choice.
The reason for this is entirely so that, if the game is interrupted for some reason (by e.g. a power failure), the results will be exactly the same - which is what is being observed by the emulator. This is the only way to be completely fair.
This might upset some people who hold onto the belief that slot machines are in some way a game of skill, but they're not - they are pure chance, and are legally required to be (at least in Victoria, Australia, when I wrote slot machine software a few years ago).
The rules of the game are explained, but I very much doubt the wording states that your choice explicitly determines the outcome. Legally the machine must give a completely random result, and it has to do it in a way that can be duplicated if interrupted (for reasons I've explained elsewhere in this thread).
Doubtless people are misled into thinking their choice affects the outcome, but they are not being ripped off. They simply need to read their "contract" more carefully.
There's absolutely no need to make payout decisions before play starts.
Maybe not before play starts, but there are other reasons to make payout decisions at the start of the game.
One of these is the requirement in some countries that the machine be able to completely duplicate its anticipated behaviour in the event of a power failure.
Suppose you were a punter who'd just rolled 4 aces on a 5 roll machine, with the last ace spinning down into place - and the power fails. When power is restored, the machine must be able replay that same game in its entirety.
This does not mean that games need be determined before the player even starts the game, only that once started, it must be finished.
Though I doubt I am one of the friends of which you speak, I have written slot machine ("pokies") software for Tatts Victoria.
I can confirm that it's heavily regulated, and the RNG used is carefully analysed for randomness, with the the payoff tables (and to a lesser degree, the ordering of the symbols on "fruit machine" types) controlling the payout (which usually varies between 83% and 91%)
The results are only "pre-determined" at the time of the user starting the roll, but are completely random nonetheless. In other words, when the user pulls the arm (if the machine has an arm), the results of the roll (and any related results, e.g. from a "double-up") are randomly pre-selected, then the reels are spun to those positions.
What struck me most was the incredible security and redundancy the system has. In Victoria, the legal accounting requirements are very stringent, and the manufacturers themselves have a long list of attacks they have to be proof against (from long experience - everything from massive magnetic fields to electrical cattle prods have been used to defeat a slot machine's defenses).
For example, not only is the casing solid steel, locked and with mil-spec proofing against EMI, the CPU board and coin trays are both locked within separate steel compartments within the unit, and each requires a different key to unlock. All locks have failsafe mechanisms to record opening, and the cabinet door has a randomly-pulsed optical sensor as well.
Particularly, the win-loss game data is recorded into triple-battery-backed static RAM, in multiple CRC'd locations, with the same data being recorded simultaneously onto physical counters, printed in duplicate to a roll of paper (on some machines), and sent in real-time via encrypted LAN to a central host, which must verify all large payouts. Every coin and every game must be accounted for under any circumstance, particularly power failure in the middle of a game.
The coin sensors and payout mechanisms were equally sophisticated, and had to accurately deal with punters feeding large numbers of coins very rapidly into the machines, whilst still defeating "coin-on-a-string" style attacks.
It was an interesting project, but involved considerably more than I first expected. I can say that, after many all-nighters testing, I have come to truly dislike the sound of a slot machine :-/ (Ironically, for some years my next job required me to go to tradeshows in Las Vegas - from the very moment you step off the plane, you're assaulted by pokies on all sides)
... like it's a good thing :-/
Uh, GPRS is a link protocol; it just gets the data in & out of the phone. You don't use it directly. Also, GPRS speeds will vary dramatically per phone, depending on how many 13.4 Kb/s download channels the phone uses (between 1 & 7, typically 2-4, or 26-53 Kb/s).
WAP is a browsing protocol for fetching stripped-down websites. It can use GRPS, or it can operate over a standard 9.6 Kb/s GSM data connection (or equivalent). It's a very different thing to GPRS - comparing them makes no sense.
some 300 machines, each with eight processors.
That "8 hours per frame" would be for a single CPU.
168 days / 8 CPUs = 21 days.
However, they don't just render the final version of the movie once & then release it. There are countless test renders, animation tweaks, re-renders, texture adjustments, further re-rendering, alternate lighting setups, re-rendering, slightly different camera angles, yet more re-renders, the script for that scene is rewritten from scratch and the whole process repeats until finally the scene is cut for pacing reasons.
It all takes a god-awful amount of CPU time, and it's all completely necessary :-)
That "innovative design", while suitable for multithreaded vector processing, is far more difficult to apply efficiently to general-purpose computing tasks. It so happens that a "high-clockrates design" (which the Xbox isn't particularly) is actually much more suitable as a home computer.
A single CPU that is 2x as fast as 2 individual CPUs can still do the work those CPUs do, as well as being able to perform single-threaded-only tasks at twice the speed. And it's enormously easier to write efficient software for.
They're not the same thing.
Bugs are where your software does not do what you expected it to do. They seem to be unavoidable, with complex systems. Only by long-term term exhaustive testing can you increase your confidence that your software is bug-free.
Crashes are where your software catastrophically and unrecoverably fails, to the point where it cannot gracefully recover. Those should be avoidable, with the right tools. There are also crashes caused by unavoidable hardware failures, but that's a different problem.
Correct programming practices do of course reduce crashes (and bugs), but it seems to me a well-designed language could make it impossible to write code that crashes, only code that is incorrect (and occasionally even correct ;-) e.g. Java eliminates pointers from C, since bad pointers are a major cause of crashes. By using only references, you cannot read or overwrite random or out-of-date memory.
I'm hardly an expert on language design, but it seems to me that while bugs may never be completely eliminated, crashes could be.
And the whining about all the whining about dupe comments? Where does that fit in?
Plug in a cheapo pair of LCD shutter glasses, and it's as 3D as anything else out there. These cards do true 3D calculations (surfaces instead of volumes). It's up to the display system as to what you actually see.
:-)
In fact, recent consumer hardware also support 3D voxel textures, and can simulate a voxel system by using multiple parallel surfaces as "slices". And unlike the voxel-only systems of which you speak, they can actually do 32 bit colour & texturing too
HardOCP too.
why I would then want to use an source, such as MP3, that would sound the same on a £50 stereo
While MP3 does contain less information than the CD it was encoded from, I very much doubt you will hear any difference between a well-encoded high-bitrate (256-320 kb/s) MP3 and a CD, even on a £5000 stereo. I can't, and neither can my friends, even on their £5000 stereos.
Although most downloaded MP3s (or worse, internet radio stations) are crappy, quality rips of your own CD collection can sound just as good (and be far more easy to sort through) than the stack of CDs they came from.
Likewise using Cat 5 cables or, even worse, WiFi, for linking parts of the sound system seems pointless.
Well, if the signal is digital, a Cat5 or even wireless connection will do just fine. I do know a guy who uses a balanced AES/EBU cable, but even he admits it's total overkill. You can get identical results running an S/PDIF signal through much crappier wire - that's the whole point of a digital signal.
And as other people have said, Cat5 is actually very well suited for analog speaker wire. Audio enthusiasts have been making very high quality cables out of braided Cat5 for years, with results comparable to name-brand cables costing $100s/m. You don't have to spend a fortune, though of course the name brands don't want you to know that. Google on Cat5 speaker cable and you'll see what I mean.
TiVo only works (well, the guide part & therefore most of its nice stuff) within the USA. I lived in Canada - not good enough, had to build my own ATi AiW setup. Now I live in Australia, and I can't even do that. DigiGuide, here I come.
Homebrew solutions are still the only solution for most of the world's population
Xbox does support OpenGL too (ICD provided by nVidia).
Apple - 17 in. widescreen
Dell - 15.4 in widescreen
Winner: Apple
Screen:
Apple - 1440 x 900
Dell - 1920 x 1440
Winner: Dell, most definitely
Wireless Networking:
Apple - builtin card and antennas
Dell - PC card can be added for extra
Winner: Apple
Wireless Networking:
Apple - builtin card and antennas
Dell - builtin MiniPCI card and antennas ($99 option - still cheaper)
Winner: tie
Thickness and weight:
Apple - 1 in. 6.8 lbs.
Dell: 1.52 in. 6.9 lbs
Winner: Apple
Dimensions:
Apple - 15.4 x 10.2 x 1.0 in.
Dell - 14.2 x 10.9 x 1.6 in.
Winner: Apple is thinner, Dell is shorter
Max Memory:
Apple - 1 GB
Dell - 2 GB
Winner: Dell (who uses 512 MB, esp. if running Shake/etc?)
People have already pointed out that a 4200 Go trounces an 440 Go. WinXP also comes with Movie Maker 2, Windows Media Player etc, which have similar functionality to the bundled Apple utilities.
While I admire the look of the Powerbooks, for my usage (mobile media workstation & code development), I require high resolution, fast CPU & gfx, and lots of memory. For me, the Dell wins out comfortably, and the cheaper price is icing. YMMV, of course.