It's poor form because the statement / response format makes it appear as though Rob is having a two-sided conversation with them, when in fact he is shoving in his two bits without letting them respond in the same dialogue. He's giving himself the last word.
A response from the company in this thread would NOT be the means for them to have an equal say, either. A response lost in the middle of a huge thread is hardly equal footing to the bold type in the article.
I agree that Rob is abusing his poster's priveledge.
NINTENDO GAMECUBE Specifications
The peak figures listed are all for maximum instantaneous performance and cannot be achieved with the actual game. However, following the conventions in the game industry they are listed for your reference.
Wow, that's an extremely unusual thing for a hardware vendor to state up front about published specs. Kudos to Nintendo!
...comes packed-in with a 56k modem that may be used to post scores, exchange data with other players, download characters or play head-to-head on Nintendo's broadband Blue-Tooth network.
A 56K modem to communicate on a broadband Bluetooth network.
Those are three concepts that have nothing to do with each other. What was the author smoking?
What I don't get is why they don't want to fix it!
It's a security hole that costs them bandwidth. (which admittedly, Akamai isn't in short supply of, but still...) Every proxy request through Akamai costs them 2X the size of the response; once to get it from the source, once to send it to the client.
Also, it means that THEIR servers are distributing whatever illicit content is found. You can prove that little Johnny was able to download hate literature not from some random skinhead's machine, but straight from an Akamai.com machine.
I can't see what advantage the open proxy gives them. Why wouldn't they want to close it?
The disk will be holographic and will somewhat resemble a CD-ROM or DVD. That is, it will be a spinning, transparent plastic platter...
About the only thing I'm confident to say about handhelds 10 years from now, is that they won't have discs. Discs are cheap, but solid-state memory is almost cheap enough NOW for a portable computer. In 10 years, spinning discs will seem as antiquated as the spinning tape reels that adorn movie-computers.
I think that in general, the line between "live" and "archived" storage is going to be blurred more and more, in all computers. I don't expect that portables will distinguish between memory and mass storage at all.
Remember when the gameplay was what really mattered in games?
Yeah, that was back when the internet was all smart people, when music was all original, and when kids used to respect their elders.
Whatever.
Videogames have ALWAYS had cheap, crappy games outnumbering the well-made game by 5 to 1. There were lots of cheap Pong knockoffs, and it only got worse from there.
There is a whole lot of nostalgic rambling going on in this thread, and it's all bullshit. I'm a lifetime gamer, and I honestly don't think that there has ever been a year in which the benchmark for videogame quality has not been raised. It used to be a faster curve, perhaps, but that only stands to reason. People needed a while to figger out what these computer thingies could be used for.
There are LOTS of good games being produced now -- the best games ever made.
The nature of the improvement has changed though. It's not about coming up with completely original gameplay, though this still happens. It's more of a process of refinement. Of learning over time how to improve a base genre to make it even better.
It shouldn't be surprising that there aren't as many new genres. People have been searching for, and have found fundamental game structures that WORK. "But everything is just another FPS now". Well geez, no kidding. Playing a game where you're seeing a 3D world from a first person perspective is NEVER going to go away! You're there! You're in the world! It's immersive and it's a fantastic way to transport someone into a different world. And people aren't going to get tired of guns, they're pretty fundamental to most people's notion of excitement and adventure. So games combining the two are here forever. The improvements will come incrementally, as people learn how to improve this basic formula with better technology, better design, better multiplayer collaboration, and better storytelling.
The classics are also getting recognition in the form of a stamp. (Defender, on the Atari 2600 to be specific. Perfect choice IMHO -- that could be a photo of me 20 years ago...)
Technically, the mean has _nothing_ to do with being the center of the population. Only if you assume the population is evenly distributed can you say they'll be roughly the same.
I don't know if that applies here. I've seen too many 'spikes' -- crazy-smart people that are an order of magnitude ahead of the crowd. I suspect that they skew the curve so that well over half the population is 'below average'.
You should never give the opponent any information! Encoding message subjects by picture topic puts information in an insecure part of the message. In this case, they can look for trends in what sorts of images are sent when, and from whom to whom. It's not much, but it's something. There's no good reason to give up security on that part of the message. Pictures, like keys, should be chosen randomly.
In retaliation the Fearless leader apparently then pulled the plug on the Radeon's rollout at MacWorld, all but publicly spanking ATi for its indiscretions and replacing the display demo Cube's flashy Radeon card with the more mundane and stale Rage 128 Pro
The camera cant be changed in a game, at least not by a driver, because it hasnt got anything to do with any info stored on the video card.
Not necessarily true. In this case, the 'driver' isn't simply a hardware abstraction, it's the Direct3D or OpenGL implementation for the card. These APIs work at a higher level than 'draw this triangle here'. They encapsulate much of the scene and perform much of the geometry translation internally.
Games don't generally use them, but there are modes for OpenGL and D3D where you basically send the whole damn scene to the driver and say "here, render this."
It's not intended to be used all the time. I think the description from ASUS mentioned using a key to turn it on and off. All you need to do is glimpse wher the opponent is for a moment.
Somewhere in there was probably an explanation of why Cyclops can't open his eyes without huge bursts of ravening energy pouring from them, but we didn't get to see it.
The aspect that stuck out for me was that he had to fiddle with his visor to fire his beam. He looked like he was browsing through a Viewmaster during fight scenes.
The movie was shot in an around Toronto. Most of the shots at the school were done at Casa Loma, a castle that was built around the turn of the century by some crazy rich guy. I was married last June in the 'classroom' where Storm is teaching in one scene.
Nobody seemed to cry "you're not standards compliant" then; instead, they hailed Netscape for their "innovation" (now a tainted word after Microsoft abused it so.)
Not everybody. There just weren't nearly as many somebodies on the net back then. I distinctly remember typing in a long rant about <CENTER> on usenet shortly after Netscape 0.9 was released.
And of course people are still making fun of <BLINK>; that started on the day the new browser hit the net.
Product idea: a PCI card that renders MP3 to standard S/PDIF or optical that can be run directly into the back of your digital-enabled receiver....
This is just a SoundBlaster Live with an extra chip that can decode MP3 in hardware and save less than 5% of the overall CPU load. Not much point, especially as it is then specific to a certain audio file format.
Audio decompression is no longer demanding enough relative to modern CPUs to make this worthwhile. An SBlive and a reciever with a digital in is all you really need.
The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap </WHINE>
What's your point? Are you stating for the record that MP3 does not provide the absolute best audio fidelity available?
No shit.
MP3 serves it's purpose. It provides a perfectly acceptable listening experience for the rest of us non-anal-retentive people who carry MP3mans or play music on our PC while we work or play. It has good sound quality that any layman is hard pressed to distinguish from CD. And the 128Kbps bitrate gives an excellent tradeoff between quality and file size.
And what's up with cd anyway? Vinyl is the best medium for audio. (If only it didn't degrade so #$%^ fast.)
Ah, well. I know there's no point arguing with one of these luddite zealots.
The two companies are going to keep on doing the same things they always have, and they're going to continue to rub each other's backs for mutual advantage.
What advantage is this supposed to remove? Opening the APIs? This hasn't been an issue for some time now. The MS APIs are probably the best-documented in the industry.
Me, I'm looking forward to the frustrated whining of the anti-MS zealots as they try to figure out what ELSE to blame after MS completely fails to start dying after the splitup.
Well, as it turns out, either one or more of the hard disks and/or the motherboard's IDE adapter is broken.
If you buy crappy SCSI components they won't work properly either. Poor quality is not technology-specific.
...Screw this, I sez -- So I haul out a slower, older Adaptec 2940, plug in five surplus narrow SCSI devices, set IDs, set termination, off to the races.
IDE should've been humanely put down years ago. Thank you, oh thank you, to the budget PC industry for forcing a twisted, augmented, Frankensteined hack of disk interface down my throat at every turn.
Obviously, no one is forcing anything down anyone's throat, as you proved by dropping in a SCSI controller. Off to the races. IDE controllers are cheaper than dirt and there's no reason not to throw them onto motherboards.
Why should we all have to pay an insanely high premium for disk space? For equivalent performance? SCSI has it's place, but it's not in the average 1 HD, 1 CD, non-server machine.
I can't help but think what a difference it would have made to the PC world if someone (chipset or motherboard makers) had made SCSI onboard.
They did. It wasn't faster, and it was much more expensive. The economics are really very simple. SCSI isn't getting shoved out because of lack of availability, it's losing because manufacturers are charging an arm and a leg for it.
What is UP with SCSI, anyway? You pay an order of magnitude more for the controller, and 1.5-2x for every device thereafter. Sure, it's better tech, but nowhere close to TWICE as good. I can only picture some smug bastards at the hd companies cackling evilly at the folly of the users paying so much for technology that didn't cost them a penny more than IDE to make.
No crufty or incompatible parallel devices, no brain-dead BIOS limitations, no DMA-that-isn't.
Oh, this is an easy problem to fix. Simply set all your hardware on fire every 12 months, and buy the latest elegant, well-enginieered technology of the day.
Better hardware is out there, you only have to pay for it. Me, I'm happy that we have the option of suffering a few quirks and paying MUCH less.
It is as if someone looking through a window from home were to see a man slip and fall on a patch of ice while crossing the street well before witnesses on the sidewalk saw the mishap occur--a preview of the future. But Einstein's theory, and at least a shred of common sense, seem to survive because the effect could never be used to signal back in time to change the past--avert the accident, in the example.
I hear this supposed time travel 'paradox' cited all the time as a reason that FTL travel isn't possible. We can't send information faster than light because then we can 'see' events before an observer only a short distance away, and this is supposed to be a paradox.
What the heck am I missing? Are all these people stupid, or is it me? Why is it a paradox if information gets to someone at a distance before it gets to someone nearby? You're never going to get the information before the event occurs, so there's never any threat of paradox.
I can't believe the comments here. MS is showing off a platform that's gonna make PSII look like a Commodore64 against Amiga and every single frigging comment is biased against it.
They're showing a mockup of performance they hope to get, from an assumed platform that may be produced within the projected timeline.
I wonder what sort of response those screenshots would attract if say, Transmeta were behind X-box.
This happened, just a few months ago. Transmeta showed real applications running on real silicon.
I think any company showing canned mockup demos deserves to be slammed. Now, whether Transmeta would have been treated the same way is anyone's guess. But they had the good sense not to try it.
Slashdot Mirror
A response from the company in this thread would NOT be the means for them to have an equal say, either. A response lost in the middle of a huge thread is hardly equal footing to the bold type in the article.
I agree that Rob is abusing his poster's priveledge.
NINTENDO GAMECUBE Specifications
The peak figures listed are all for maximum instantaneous performance and cannot be achieved with the actual game. However, following the conventions in the game industry they are listed for your reference.
Wow, that's an extremely unusual thing for a hardware vendor to state up front about published specs. Kudos to Nintendo!
A 56K modem to communicate on a broadband Bluetooth network.
Those are three concepts that have nothing to do with each other. What was the author smoking?
It's a security hole that costs them bandwidth. (which admittedly, Akamai isn't in short supply of, but still...) Every proxy request through Akamai costs them 2X the size of the response; once to get it from the source, once to send it to the client.
Also, it means that THEIR servers are distributing whatever illicit content is found. You can prove that little Johnny was able to download hate literature not from some random skinhead's machine, but straight from an Akamai.com machine.
I can't see what advantage the open proxy gives them. Why wouldn't they want to close it?
About the only thing I'm confident to say about handhelds 10 years from now, is that they won't have discs. Discs are cheap, but solid-state memory is almost cheap enough NOW for a portable computer. In 10 years, spinning discs will seem as antiquated as the spinning tape reels that adorn movie-computers.
I think that in general, the line between "live" and "archived" storage is going to be blurred more and more, in all computers. I don't expect that portables will distinguish between memory and mass storage at all.
Yeah, that was back when the internet was all smart people, when music was all original, and when kids used to respect their elders.
Whatever.
Videogames have ALWAYS had cheap, crappy games outnumbering the well-made game by 5 to 1. There were lots of cheap Pong knockoffs, and it only got worse from there.
There is a whole lot of nostalgic rambling going on in this thread, and it's all bullshit. I'm a lifetime gamer, and I honestly don't think that there has ever been a year in which the benchmark for videogame quality has not been raised. It used to be a faster curve, perhaps, but that only stands to reason. People needed a while to figger out what these computer thingies could be used for.
There are LOTS of good games being produced now -- the best games ever made.
The nature of the improvement has changed though. It's not about coming up with completely original gameplay, though this still happens. It's more of a process of refinement. Of learning over time how to improve a base genre to make it even better.
It shouldn't be surprising that there aren't as many new genres. People have been searching for, and have found fundamental game structures that WORK. "But everything is just another FPS now". Well geez, no kidding. Playing a game where you're seeing a 3D world from a first person perspective is NEVER going to go away! You're there! You're in the world! It's immersive and it's a fantastic way to transport someone into a different world. And people aren't going to get tired of guns, they're pretty fundamental to most people's notion of excitement and adventure. So games combining the two are here forever. The improvements will come incrementally, as people learn how to improve this basic formula with better technology, better design, better multiplayer collaboration, and better storytelling.
This is not a bad thing.
The classics are also getting recognition in the form of a stamp. (Defender, on the Atari 2600 to be specific. Perfect choice IMHO -- that could be a photo of me 20 years ago...)
Technically, the mean has _nothing_ to do with being the center of the population. Only if you assume the population is evenly distributed can you say they'll be roughly the same.
I don't know if that applies here. I've seen too many 'spikes' -- crazy-smart people that are an order of magnitude ahead of the crowd. I suspect that they skew the curve so that well over half the population is 'below average'.
You should never give the opponent any information! Encoding message subjects by picture topic puts information in an insecure part of the message. In this case, they can look for trends in what sorts of images are sent when, and from whom to whom. It's not much, but it's something. There's no good reason to give up security on that part of the message. Pictures, like keys, should be chosen randomly.
In retaliation the Fearless leader apparently then pulled the plug on the Radeon's rollout at MacWorld, all but publicly spanking ATi for its indiscretions and replacing the display demo Cube's flashy Radeon card with the more mundane and stale Rage 128 Pro
Not necessarily true. In this case, the 'driver' isn't simply a hardware abstraction, it's the Direct3D or OpenGL implementation for the card. These APIs work at a higher level than 'draw this triangle here'. They encapsulate much of the scene and perform much of the geometry translation internally.
Games don't generally use them, but there are modes for OpenGL and D3D where you basically send the whole damn scene to the driver and say "here, render this."
It's not intended to be used all the time. I think the description from ASUS mentioned using a key to turn it on and off. All you need to do is glimpse wher the opponent is for a moment.
Yeah, as a 'misunderstood' demon that wanted a non-demon child, but had to keep killing his own little behorned demon-babies.
What a great partner for Mulder!
"What, I'm supposed to be impressed by some shape-shifting saucer-jockey? I'm a minion of Satan, baby. Fear me."
The aspect that stuck out for me was that he had to fiddle with his visor to fire his beam. He looked like he was browsing through a Viewmaster during fight scenes.
The movie was shot in an around Toronto. Most of the shots at the school were done at Casa Loma, a castle that was built around the turn of the century by some crazy rich guy. I was married last June in the 'classroom' where Storm is teaching in one scene.
YES!
If you have those things in place, you hardly need all the extra fancy crap -- you can probably accomplish it with smart application of DOM code.
In fact, if you were being hard core, you could probably drop browser CSS support and implement a working CSS parser with DOM and enough code. :)
Not everybody. There just weren't nearly as many somebodies on the net back then. I distinctly remember typing in a long rant about <CENTER> on usenet shortly after Netscape 0.9 was released.
And of course people are still making fun of <BLINK>; that started on the day the new browser hit the net.
He flew a T-16 back home. He used to bullseye womp-rats with it, and they're not much bigger than 2 metres.
This is just a SoundBlaster Live with an extra chip that can decode MP3 in hardware and save less than 5% of the overall CPU load. Not much point, especially as it is then specific to a certain audio file format.
Audio decompression is no longer demanding enough relative to modern CPUs to make this worthwhile. An SBlive and a reciever with a digital in is all you really need.
The whole napster debate pisses me off. You are not getting cd quality digital audio. You are getting 128k crap
</WHINE>
What's your point? Are you stating for the record that MP3 does not provide the absolute best audio fidelity available?
No shit.
MP3 serves it's purpose. It provides a perfectly acceptable listening experience for the rest of us non-anal-retentive people who carry MP3mans or play music on our PC while we work or play. It has good sound quality that any layman is hard pressed to distinguish from CD. And the 128Kbps bitrate gives an excellent tradeoff between quality and file size.
And what's up with cd anyway? Vinyl is the best medium for audio. (If only it didn't degrade so #$%^ fast.)
Ah, well. I know there's no point arguing with one of these luddite zealots.
The two companies are going to keep on doing the same things they always have, and they're going to continue to rub each other's backs for mutual advantage.
What advantage is this supposed to remove? Opening the APIs? This hasn't been an issue for some time now. The MS APIs are probably the best-documented in the industry.
Me, I'm looking forward to the frustrated whining of the anti-MS zealots as they try to figure out what ELSE to blame after MS completely fails to start dying after the splitup.
If you buy crappy SCSI components they won't work properly either. Poor quality is not technology-specific.
IDE should've been humanely put down years ago. Thank you, oh thank you, to the budget PC industry for forcing a twisted, augmented, Frankensteined hack of disk interface down my throat at every turn.
Obviously, no one is forcing anything down anyone's throat, as you proved by dropping in a SCSI controller. Off to the races. IDE controllers are cheaper than dirt and there's no reason not to throw them onto motherboards.
Why should we all have to pay an insanely high premium for disk space? For equivalent performance? SCSI has it's place, but it's not in the average 1 HD, 1 CD, non-server machine.
I can't help but think what a difference it would have made to the PC world if someone (chipset or motherboard makers) had made SCSI onboard.
They did. It wasn't faster, and it was much more expensive. The economics are really very simple. SCSI isn't getting shoved out because of lack of availability, it's losing because manufacturers are charging an arm and a leg for it.
What is UP with SCSI, anyway? You pay an order of magnitude more for the controller, and 1.5-2x for every device thereafter. Sure, it's better tech, but nowhere close to TWICE as good. I can only picture some smug bastards at the hd companies cackling evilly at the folly of the users paying so much for technology that didn't cost them a penny more than IDE to make.
No crufty or incompatible parallel devices, no brain-dead BIOS limitations, no DMA-that-isn't.
Oh, this is an easy problem to fix. Simply set all your hardware on fire every 12 months, and buy the latest elegant, well-enginieered technology of the day.
Better hardware is out there, you only have to pay for it. Me, I'm happy that we have the option of suffering a few quirks and paying MUCH less.
I hear this supposed time travel 'paradox' cited all the time as a reason that FTL travel isn't possible. We can't send information faster than light because then we can 'see' events before an observer only a short distance away, and this is supposed to be a paradox.
What the heck am I missing? Are all these people stupid, or is it me? Why is it a paradox if information gets to someone at a distance before it gets to someone nearby? You're never going to get the information before the event occurs, so there's never any threat of paradox.
They're showing a mockup of performance they hope to get, from an assumed platform that may be produced within the projected timeline.
I wonder what sort of response those screenshots would attract if say, Transmeta were behind X-box.
This happened, just a few months ago. Transmeta showed real applications running on real silicon.
I think any company showing canned mockup demos deserves to be slammed. Now, whether Transmeta would have been treated the same way is anyone's guess. But they had the good sense not to try it.
This information is available today. If you click on the #cid of a comment, it shows a breakdown of the moderation so far.
But it would be nice if this information were part of the header of each comment on the main page.