Orchestrating four separate processors with DMA accesses flying over limited bus power is tricky.
Quite true, the Xbox is much easier platform to develop for if you want a typical game. PS2 is a bitch, reminds me of the Saturn. Unlike the Saturn though, the huge volume of shipped PS2 systems will give good developers the push they need to get out of their one-processor, one thread mindset.
As for 'simulating deformable shapes on a per-pixel basis' I've been in the graphics trade for five years, and have never heard such a made up bunch of junk.
The Slashdot audience is made up of computing professionals with a wide array of knowledge. I use terms to facilitate communication, not to shout to the world that I know arcane terminology.
You want deformable shapes? Cool;
No, what I want is beer and a good curry.
Don't get all hot and bothered because someone things that the PS2 has a bit of untapped potential left in it. The Xbox will do fine and there are plenty of fun games to make for it. I'm really looking forward to Myst IV.
there is nothing that I can not do with Terminal Services that I can do with a keyboard/mouse, even over a 56k dialup.
How do you send over the Ctrl-Alt-Del when you server does the daily BSOD. Do you have a trained monkey that randomly hits the reset button every hour or so?
The XBox has some fantastic hardware, but it puts the developer in a DirectX 8.1 sandbox. If the game is a 3D, with textures and snazy vertex shading, then the Xbox hardware is wonderfull.
If the programmer needs somthing else: like generateing all the textures using algorithms, or simulating deformable shapes on a per-pixel basis, that the design like the massivly parrallel and massivly flexible PS2 really shines.
Anand had a great example of this: Electronic A rts just used one of the the PS2 vector units to encode Dolby 5.1. sound. Thats flexible.
It's kinda like compairing the Atari 2600 to the ColecoVision - the Atari was really felxible but limited in processing power, but Coleco had a wonderfull sprite chip and a great processor.
Unfortunatly the Coleco design was inflexable, and Atari programmers were able for move the 2600 from being a pong macheine, into generating alomost thoushands of colors and thousands of sounds. The Coleco had decent games, but nobody was able to coax anything truly unique out of it.
Security by obscurity may or may not be effective - depends on who is trying to read your mail and how much time/money/effort they want to spend.
Agreed.
The point I was trying to make, was because people use the same algotithm, it's easy to just throw computing resources at a decryption problem. If everybody used ad-hoc encryption, a little rot13 here, a mix of RSA on top of that, followed by some bothched LZW compression - then you would have to throw human resources on the problem, and that gets expensive.
Beacuse RSA is perceived to be almost perfect, nobodty uses one time pads - and that would really piss off the powers that be. RSA.
A parasitic open-source user gives back to the community though the network effect. One more Linux user, no matter how parasitic, is on less user of proprietary software with proprietary protocols - and that person will help persuade others to join.
I've always thought that popular ecncryption schemes were sort of a boon to the people who need to decrypt them - instead of a million differing schemes, there is just a few with just a few differing amounts of 'bitness.' It makes their job so much easier to know that 80% of the people out there are using the same algorithm.
Linux is not a gaming platform - we've seen a plethora of evidence for this.
FYI: The developers kit for the PS2 (The 'Tool' box) runs Linux. PS2 home kits now can run Linux. More importantly - most consoles are evolving to a cross-platform development model. You can take a decently programmed PC game and get it to run on an Xbox and GameCube with only a bit of fuss (If you don't need a bunch of storage on the GameCube.)
I'm not aware that there is a large active office for collecting those revenues.
Here in Washington state (with our ~ 8.6% rate) - businesess have their books audited once in a while to see of we've been sending off the apprpriate excise/use tax to the state from our out of state purchases.
Aside: Most businesses here in WA have to pay 2% Business and Occupation taxes - but if you are an airplane manufacturere (Boeing) or software manufacturer (Microsoft) it just so happens that your rate is close to zero. Funny how a little clout bends the laws...
AIDS is completely avoidable. Just don't have unprotected sex with strangers, and don't share needles if you insist on injecting drugs.
People who aquired their HIV before 1993 have my sympathy. After 1993, with a few exceptions, they have my scorn.
We, as a country, should help to the best of our abilities the ones who diden't know any better - the others we should view as a Darwinian cleaing of the stupid-gene.
While I disagree with the "Blame America First * " tone of your rant, I can second the motion on the economics of bio-warfare and weapons in general. It takes a shed load of money to make the first of any type of weapon, but the second one off the assembly line is cheap. We, and the rest of the industrial world, have been selling cheap weapons to countries that have neither the inteligence nor the ability to make them themselves. If a country is smart enough to produce their own nuke - then by definition they must a decent economy, and hence have a bit of civilisation. Countries that have to buy nukes are a different mater.
We can see the same effect with hand-guns here in America. The people who are collecters and manufacturers of hand-guns are smart enough not to use them without dire need (Gun shows are one of the least crime infected places in the world) - but the gang-thug who doesen't have the inteligence to make a gun himself, doesen't have the repect that goes with it.
* "Blame America First" is a Trademark of Noam Chomsky. Used without permission.
Mr. Tanaka: You have failed the SuperK - Dr. E.! Our German contacts are not pleased with the latest ramifications of the 'device.'
Dr. E.: Wah! But the Gaia force was in alignment, this can not be!
Mr. Tanaka: Your latest failure is being undue attention to our cause.
Dr. E.: Wah! But Pretty-Girl likes to SCUBA in the detector. Makes fresh-wind in water and boom - becomes divine-wind chain reaction.
Mr X.: Doctor, your failure is now at hand!
Dr. E: Wah! I give my body to the Emperor! Pretty-Girl, be saying Goodbye! (Slice) (Slice)
I've used FreeBSD exclusively for servers due to the fact that each release marked as 'stable' is in fact, very stable. Will the 2.4 branch fill this role, of stability, and provide a path for me to switch? What policies will you use to determine if something is worthwhile for the 2.4 branch?
why Nintendo elected to go with the 3 inch disc instead.
Nintendo isen't in the video game business for popularity, they are in it to make money. The 3 inch disks help with copy protection, and Nintendo wants you to use their system to by $50 Nintendo games, and not buy $12 DVD's from Sony/Universal/MGM etc.
Take a look at Nintendo's dicision to use a cartridge format for the N64: A lot of people don't realise, that although the N64 lost the popularity race to the PS1, they made vast quantities of money due to the relative lack of piracy, and the fact that the N64 sold a lot of 1st party Nintendo-produced games.
Nintendo doesen't view Microsoft and Sony as their real competition - their competition is Disney.
So yes, the 3" disk is bad from a consumer standpoint, but it makes all the sense in the world for Nintendo. If you reall want a GameCube/DVD player check out the Panasonic version: http://gear.ign.com/articles/306678p1.html
The cost/benifit ratio should be considered though: instead of rushing out an spending $60 on an ATA133 controller, one could buy another hard drive and put the pair of drives in a striped RAID array and quicken the performace of most read opereraions. I know you can coax FreeBSD (with a bit of effort) to boot from a software striped array, and if you buy a Promise IDE RAID controller ($50), you can coax Windows 2000 and Linux to boot off the striped array.
SCSI is dead for Desktops - but for workstatios and small servers, nothing beats the 15,000 RPM SCSI offerings from IBM and Segate. If IBM or Segate offer these drives in an IDE configuration, then SCSI will be truly dead.
Given the current speed of IDE hard drivers - ATA 66 is overkill let alone ATA 133. Hell, ATA 33 is overkill for all but the fastest drives out there. The only benifit you will see, is that the drives onboard RAM-chip cache can be accesses quicker, and that moving from an older IDE spec will get you the new fangled sheiled cables that may help with reliability.
what would happen if VA goes under? Would they sell Slashdot to someone?
According to the troll community, they would be sold to the same charnel house that *BSD was sold to.
Re:There are alternatives... besides proprietary
on
SourceForge Drifting
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The parent post is a shill for Microsoft. Freedomtoinnovate.net had a booth at the Microsoft shareholder meeting. Basicly, Distributedcopyright.org is just Microsoft's Shared-Source(TM) painted with a bit of gloss. I don't think Microsoft is actually serious about Shared-Source(TM), they just want to distract free-software developers. And as Balmer says, it's all about the Developers,Developers,Developers.
There are pens for writing PC board
My limited experiece with conductive ink makes me think the stuff woulden't work too well on a searing hot processor. It doesn't adhear to smooth surfaces too well that are under stress - a circut board would be fine, but a processor that goes though heat cycles, would make me think that it would flake off over time. The Mac people probably get away with it because the PowerPC processors run cooler than the electricity hungry Athlon. Just my $.02 ($.01 after taxes.)
There's one easy thing that Boeing pushed for, but passangers diden't like: rear facing seats. Rear facing seats would spread the force of an impact though you body, rather that snap you in half with a seat belt. Passengers diden't like it though - it was just too strange.
Slashdot Mirror
Orchestrating four separate processors with DMA accesses flying over limited bus power is tricky.
Quite true, the Xbox is much easier platform to develop for if you want a typical game. PS2 is a bitch, reminds me of the Saturn. Unlike the Saturn though, the huge volume of shipped PS2 systems will give good developers the push they need to get out of their one-processor, one thread mindset.
As for 'simulating deformable shapes on a per-pixel basis' I've been in the graphics trade for five years, and have never heard such a made up bunch of junk.
The Slashdot audience is made up of computing professionals with a wide array of knowledge. I use terms to facilitate communication, not to shout to the world that I know arcane terminology.
You want deformable shapes? Cool;
No, what I want is beer and a good curry.
Don't get all hot and bothered because someone things that the PS2 has a bit of untapped potential left in it. The Xbox will do fine and there are plenty of fun games to make for it. I'm really looking forward to Myst IV.
there is nothing that I can not do with Terminal Services that I can do with a keyboard/mouse, even over a 56k dialup.
How do you send over the Ctrl-Alt-Del when you server does the daily BSOD. Do you have a trained monkey that randomly hits the reset button every hour or so?
The XBox has some fantastic hardware, but it puts the developer in a DirectX 8.1 sandbox. If the game is a 3D, with textures and snazy vertex shading, then the Xbox hardware is wonderfull.
o mbat.JPG
If the programmer needs somthing else: like generateing all the textures using algorithms, or simulating deformable shapes on a per-pixel basis, that the design like the massivly parrallel and massivly flexible PS2 really shines.
Anand had a great example of this: Electronic A rts just used one of the the PS2 vector units to encode Dolby 5.1. sound. Thats flexible.
It's kinda like compairing the Atari 2600 to the ColecoVision - the Atari was really felxible but limited in processing power, but Coleco had a wonderfull sprite chip and a great processor.
Unfortunatly the Coleco design was inflexable, and Atari programmers were able for move the 2600 from being a pong macheine, into generating alomost thoushands of colors and thousands of sounds. The Coleco had decent games, but nobody was able to coax anything truly unique out of it.
The Atari 2600 went from Combat http://outerspace.terra.com.br/special/historia/c
to psudo 3D Poleposition http://www.whimsey.com/z26/POLEPSN.GIF due to it's fexibility.
Perhaps the PS2 will do a likewise transformation.
Security by obscurity may or may not be effective - depends on who is trying to read your mail and how much time/money/effort they want to spend.
Agreed.
The point I was trying to make, was because people use the same algotithm, it's easy to just throw computing resources at a decryption problem. If everybody used ad-hoc encryption, a little rot13 here, a mix of RSA on top of that, followed by some bothched LZW compression - then you would have to throw human resources on the problem, and that gets expensive.
Beacuse RSA is perceived to be almost perfect, nobodty uses one time pads - and that would really piss off the powers that be. RSA.
A nicly wrapped box of Hot Grits! Complete it with a bow, and a card with Ms. Portman on the front.
Even the parasites give back:
A parasitic open-source user gives back to the community though the network effect. One more Linux user, no matter how parasitic, is on less user of proprietary software with proprietary protocols - and that person will help persuade others to join.
So what about my 1024-bit RSA private key?
I've always thought that popular ecncryption schemes were sort of a boon to the people who need to decrypt them - instead of a million differing schemes, there is just a few with just a few differing amounts of 'bitness.' It makes their job so much easier to know that 80% of the people out there are using the same algorithm.
Linux is not a gaming platform - we've seen a plethora of evidence for this.
FYI: The developers kit for the PS2 (The 'Tool' box) runs Linux. PS2 home kits now can run Linux. More importantly - most consoles are evolving to a cross-platform development model. You can take a decently programmed PC game and get it to run on an Xbox and GameCube with only a bit of fuss (If you don't need a bunch of storage on the GameCube.)
I'm not aware that there is a large active office for collecting those revenues.
Here in Washington state (with our ~ 8.6% rate) - businesess have their books audited once in a while to see of we've been sending off the apprpriate excise/use tax to the state from our out of state purchases.
Aside: Most businesses here in WA have to pay 2% Business and Occupation taxes - but if you are an airplane manufacturere (Boeing) or software manufacturer (Microsoft) it just so happens that your rate is close to zero. Funny how a little clout bends the laws...
AIDS is completely avoidable. Just don't have unprotected sex with strangers, and don't share needles if you insist on injecting drugs.
People who aquired their HIV before 1993 have my sympathy. After 1993, with a few exceptions, they have my scorn.
We, as a country, should help to the best of our abilities the ones who diden't know any better - the others we should view as a Darwinian cleaing of the stupid-gene.
While I disagree with the "Blame America First * " tone of your rant, I can second the motion on the economics of bio-warfare and weapons in general. It takes a shed load of money to make the first of any type of weapon, but the second one off the assembly line is cheap. We, and the rest of the industrial world, have been selling cheap weapons to countries that have neither the inteligence nor the ability to make them themselves. If a country is smart enough to produce their own nuke - then by definition they must a decent economy, and hence have a bit of civilisation. Countries that have to buy nukes are a different mater.
We can see the same effect with hand-guns here in America. The people who are collecters and manufacturers of hand-guns are smart enough not to use them without dire need (Gun shows are one of the least crime infected places in the world) - but the gang-thug who doesen't have the inteligence to make a gun himself, doesen't have the repect that goes with it.
* "Blame America First" is a Trademark of Noam Chomsky. Used without permission.
Slap one of these on your packages to see if it's been abused during transit: http://www.pitrone.com/dropntellprices.html
Helps keep your shipper honest!
Mr. Tanaka: You have failed the SuperK - Dr. E.! Our German contacts are not pleased with the latest ramifications of the 'device.'
Dr. E.: Wah! But the Gaia force was in alignment, this can not be!
Mr. Tanaka: Your latest failure is being undue attention to our cause.
Dr. E.: Wah! But Pretty-Girl likes to SCUBA in the detector. Makes fresh-wind in water and boom - becomes divine-wind chain reaction.
Mr X.: Doctor, your failure is now at hand!
Dr. E: Wah! I give my body to the Emperor! Pretty-Girl, be saying Goodbye! (Slice) (Slice)
From the InforSync:
Part of the surprise is also that the keyboard isn't in the QWERTY layout, but instead an ABCDEF "calculator-like" layout.
This sucks. We all know why. Bleah.
I've used FreeBSD exclusively for servers due to the fact that each release marked as 'stable' is in fact, very stable. Will the 2.4 branch fill this role, of stability, and provide a path for me to switch? What policies will you use to determine if something is worthwhile for the 2.4 branch?
why Nintendo elected to go with the 3 inch disc instead.
Nintendo isen't in the video game business for popularity, they are in it to make money. The 3 inch disks help with copy protection, and Nintendo wants you to use their system to by $50 Nintendo games, and not buy $12 DVD's from Sony/Universal/MGM etc.
Take a look at Nintendo's dicision to use a cartridge format for the N64: A lot of people don't realise, that although the N64 lost the popularity race to the PS1, they made vast quantities of money due to the relative lack of piracy, and the fact that the N64 sold a lot of 1st party Nintendo-produced games.
Nintendo doesen't view Microsoft and Sony as their real competition - their competition is Disney.
So yes, the 3" disk is bad from a consumer standpoint, but it makes all the sense in the world for Nintendo. If you reall want a GameCube/DVD player check out the Panasonic version: http://gear.ign.com/articles/306678p1.html
For God's sake, please use a word processor with a spell checker if you can't spell.
Rather than post something interesting, you just can't wait to tear somthing down. A smart lad you must be.
Posting without the +1 bonus, 'cause I'm probably dealing with a troll.
Jeez, if you use 15K RPM drives for "small servers", then what do you use for big ones? ;-)
;)
I attach the server on a fast moving electric motor, For Even More RPM! Bwaa Ha Ha!
The cost/benifit ratio should be considered though: instead of rushing out an spending $60 on an ATA133 controller, one could buy another hard drive and put the pair of drives in a striped RAID array and quicken the performace of most read opereraions. I know you can coax FreeBSD (with a bit of effort) to boot from a software striped array, and if you buy a Promise IDE RAID controller ($50), you can coax Windows 2000 and Linux to boot off the striped array.
SCSI is dead for Desktops - but for workstatios and small servers, nothing beats the 15,000 RPM SCSI offerings from IBM and Segate. If IBM or Segate offer these drives in an IDE configuration, then SCSI will be truly dead.
Given the current speed of IDE hard drivers - ATA 66 is overkill let alone ATA 133. Hell, ATA 33 is overkill for all but the fastest drives out there. The only benifit you will see, is that the drives onboard RAM-chip cache can be accesses quicker, and that moving from an older IDE spec will get you the new fangled sheiled cables that may help with reliability.
what would happen if VA goes under? Would they sell Slashdot to someone?
According to the troll community, they would be sold to the same charnel house that *BSD was sold to.
The parent post is a shill for Microsoft. Freedomtoinnovate.net had a booth at the Microsoft shareholder meeting. Basicly, Distributedcopyright.org is just Microsoft's Shared-Source(TM) painted with a bit of gloss. I don't think Microsoft is actually serious about Shared-Source(TM), they just want to distract free-software developers. And as Balmer says, it's all about the Developers,Developers,Developers.
There are pens for writing PC board
My limited experiece with conductive ink makes me think the stuff woulden't work too well on a searing hot processor. It doesn't adhear to smooth surfaces too well that are under stress - a circut board would be fine, but a processor that goes though heat cycles, would make me think that it would flake off over time. The Mac people probably get away with it because the PowerPC processors run cooler than the electricity hungry Athlon. Just my $.02 ($.01 after taxes.)
There's one easy thing that Boeing pushed for, but passangers diden't like: rear facing seats. Rear facing seats would spread the force of an impact though you body, rather that snap you in half with a seat belt. Passengers diden't like it though - it was just too strange.