What backwards compatibility are you talking about? PS2 or PS1? The current regular PS3 consoles can play most PS1 games, but the new PS3 Slim consoles cannot. However, I've never heard of any patch that removes backwards compatibility where it exists in the console. Here's what can play what:
All PS3 consoles should be able to play PS1 games, and Sony even sells some on their PS store on the PS3.
PS3: original 60GB console release had hardware chips for PS2 compatibility. As far as I know, this was the only PS3 console ever capable of playing PS2 games. There might have been an early 80GB version capable of it too, but the 80GB re-release did NOT have the PS2 compatibility chips.
PS3: original 40GB and 160GB, 80GB re-release: cannot, and never could play PS2 titles. PS3 Slim: No PS2 compatibility.
I guess the only way to do this is through a CD key that locks the game to the console. Then the console could allow for burned discs, but it requires online activation.
The downside is that you couldn't loan your game out (or sell it.. there would have to be a revocation abillity) or play it on a different console even in the same household.
Thank heavens for the old modded cases! They couldn't detect that. You boot the PS2 with a boot dvd that stops the dvd drive, open up the top of the case, remove the boot DVD, add in the burned DVD, click a button, and it loads the game. That's how I played Final Fantasy X International (not released in the US) and Katamari Damacy (when I never thought a game that wacky and Japanese would get a US release).
They refused to learn from history (most notably 3DO) and concentrate on games above everything else and royally screwed themselves
Eeeeeeh. I would say they learned from history, their own history. It worked out for Sony when Nintendo insisted on sticking with those horrid ROM cartridges but the PSX came with a CD drive. It worked out extremely well for Sony when the PS2 came with a DVD drive -- many people got the console just for use as a decent DVD player. They hoped that the same thing would happen with the PS3 and the Blu-Ray drive. For the most part, they were correct; people who weren't gamers bought the console as it was the best Blu-Ray player at the time. Somehow they dropped the ball when it comes to games, and I'm still not quite sure how that is (though the difficulty of programming the console appears to be a big part of the problem), but their own history showed that they were more than capable of focusing on both areas (games + hardware) and succeeding in both at the same time.
If you have to abstract the description of the product to some ridiculous qualifiers such as "the only currently commercially available device that contains cell processor" instead of basing your expectations of what you'd expect a "current gaming console" to do then you probably just lost the reasonable person debate
That's hardly a ridiculous qualifier; Sony was seriously marketing the PS3 that way up to its launch. No, they weren't doing it in gaming magazines, but they had the grand plan that render farms could be made of Sony PS3 racks, that complex computationally-intense scientific tasks could be done via clusters of PS3s. Kotaku or IGN weren't talking about it, but other sectors were.
Unfortunately the PS3 never really lived up to the promise.
When I think of editing save games, I think of unlocking hidden levels and acquiring characters that otherwise require stupid conditions be met. What you're suggesting is simply cheating.
Sony's (well, console manufacturers in general) dilemma is that there's no way to get rid of one without getting rid the other.
This has actually been a long-standing knock against Jeopardy -- you can be more intelligent than your opponents, but lose handily to someone with twitchy reflexes. Except for the college and teen tournaments, everyone who comes on Jeopardy seems to be about the same age.
Watson doesn't know what they other players questions are so such a mistake is understandable.
It doesn't? I watched the NOVA special on the design of Watson, and one of the features explicitly added was the parsing of other players' wrong answers. Did that fall by the wayside? Could they not perfect the voice recognition?
Doubtful. As impressive as their win is, and as much as they've learned from it, they mostly have a computer that's really good at Jeopardy. I don't think that it could answer an essay question in a satisfactory manner.
We still have a long way to go despite how far we've come.
It might not be good at writing an essay, but it could be a fantastic research tool for finding out information to put in your essay. Far better than, say, Google for searching for specifics.
The promise of Watson is that, better that other systems I've seen, it's better able to pick out exactly what you're asking about from a giant database. There's so much information overload now, that's a useful skill.
People want robots that are perfectly human. They do not want robots that are near-human, so evolutionary steps tend to garner more negative reactions than positive ones.
One of the ways that Watson could be different is that Watson is writing its own rules. Instead of playing with the ruleset that it was given, it refines and adds its own rules to deal with failure, learning and reacting.
I've been doing end-user support long enough and with enough Linux and UNIX experience to know the flaws that the systems can have, and that when a user comes to me with a strange problem that it's quite likely some obscure bug that we hit that no one else has seen. We run into that a lot.
you could implement the same pattern in any language that supports regex.
The problem is, I've dealt with regexes in enough languages to see that every language does things just a little differently with different extensions. That actually makes trying to move regexes between languages a fairly difficult prospect, especially since those horrible-looking things are difficult to debug.
I believe he is referring to FDR's "New Deal" era government work projects to help curb unemployment, by using the government to employ people doing civic works projects--- Like building the national highway system, and several civic drainage and municipal water reservoirs.
Probably, but that was a little before the end of the depression, wasn't it?
I have no problems investing responsibly in infrastructure. Lord knows we need it.
The people in favor of this are under the impression that people will USE the high-speed rail once it's built. I don't see it; it's fitting a square peg into a round hole.
The US is in a unique situation, in that they control the world's reserve currency. So they can print money, but export the inflation to other countries, like China, which has its currency pegged to the USD. No wonder they are experiencing double-digit inflation. Essentially, there's no short term downside to just printing money and continuing business as usual.
.... other than devaluing our currency and encouraging other nations to move away from the US Dollar.
Until the budget is balanced, we don't need shit like this.
So you'll happily accept cutting your ridiculous military expenditure right?
Absolutely.
Or allow the government to negotiate drug and medical procedure prices with private industry and use its negotiating power as a large buyer in Medicare/Tricare right? You expect government to buy everything else at the cheapest possible price, why subsidize pharmaceuticals?
Makes sense to me.
Or stop subsidizing ethanol production which promotes overproduction, artificial food inflation by diverting food production to uneconomic fuel production and socializes rural industry at the cost of urban individuals?
Absolutely, ethanol is another boondoggle like the high-speed rail would be. It has more to do with midwest political power than any sensible environmental policy.
All of those would save substantially more than you are worried about in terms of year-on-year expenditure. But it doesn't fit into everyone's "omg the sky is falling" bullshit.
I'm open to cutting quite a bit because we have to. I don't see the point in a high-speed rail line that will cost several times more than is currently being proposed, will not be completed on schedule, and will not make money because people won't use it anyway. It seems like a waste of money and just because we waste tons of money on other nonsense (Iraq, military bases, ethanol, other subsidies, etc) shouldn't be an invitation to waste even more money here.
Slashdot Mirror
No one cares. When you follow a user around commenting on whatever he writes on, then you're the person with the problem.
What backwards compatibility are you talking about? PS2 or PS1? The current regular PS3 consoles can play most PS1 games, but the new PS3 Slim consoles cannot. However, I've never heard of any patch that removes backwards compatibility where it exists in the console. Here's what can play what:
All PS3 consoles should be able to play PS1 games, and Sony even sells some on their PS store on the PS3.
PS3: original 60GB console release had hardware chips for PS2 compatibility. As far as I know, this was the only PS3 console ever capable of playing PS2 games. There might have been an early 80GB version capable of it too, but the 80GB re-release did NOT have the PS2 compatibility chips.
PS3: original 40GB and 160GB, 80GB re-release: cannot, and never could play PS2 titles.
PS3 Slim: No PS2 compatibility.
I guess the only way to do this is through a CD key that locks the game to the console. Then the console could allow for burned discs, but it requires online activation.
The downside is that you couldn't loan your game out (or sell it.. there would have to be a revocation abillity) or play it on a different console even in the same household.
Thank heavens for the old modded cases! They couldn't detect that. You boot the PS2 with a boot dvd that stops the dvd drive, open up the top of the case, remove the boot DVD, add in the burned DVD, click a button, and it loads the game. That's how I played Final Fantasy X International (not released in the US) and Katamari Damacy (when I never thought a game that wacky and Japanese would get a US release).
They refused to learn from history (most notably 3DO) and concentrate on games above everything else and royally screwed themselves
Eeeeeeh. I would say they learned from history, their own history. It worked out for Sony when Nintendo insisted on sticking with those horrid ROM cartridges but the PSX came with a CD drive. It worked out extremely well for Sony when the PS2 came with a DVD drive -- many people got the console just for use as a decent DVD player. They hoped that the same thing would happen with the PS3 and the Blu-Ray drive. For the most part, they were correct; people who weren't gamers bought the console as it was the best Blu-Ray player at the time. Somehow they dropped the ball when it comes to games, and I'm still not quite sure how that is (though the difficulty of programming the console appears to be a big part of the problem), but their own history showed that they were more than capable of focusing on both areas (games + hardware) and succeeding in both at the same time.
If you have to abstract the description of the product to some ridiculous qualifiers such as "the only currently commercially available device that contains cell processor" instead of basing your expectations of what you'd expect a "current gaming console" to do then you probably just lost the reasonable person debate
That's hardly a ridiculous qualifier; Sony was seriously marketing the PS3 that way up to its launch. No, they weren't doing it in gaming magazines, but they had the grand plan that render farms could be made of Sony PS3 racks, that complex computationally-intense scientific tasks could be done via clusters of PS3s. Kotaku or IGN weren't talking about it, but other sectors were.
Unfortunately the PS3 never really lived up to the promise.
When I think of editing save games, I think of unlocking hidden levels and acquiring characters that otherwise require stupid conditions be met. What you're suggesting is simply cheating.
Sony's (well, console manufacturers in general) dilemma is that there's no way to get rid of one without getting rid the other.
It's not going to take 30 years for that system to fit in your pocket and cost $20. It's going to take 5 or 10.
Why 5 or 10? Devices as fast and sophisticated as the supercomputers of 2006 or 2001 are not available pocket-sized or for $20 today.
This has actually been a long-standing knock against Jeopardy -- you can be more intelligent than your opponents, but lose handily to someone with twitchy reflexes. Except for the college and teen tournaments, everyone who comes on Jeopardy seems to be about the same age.
Watson doesn't know what they other players questions are so such a mistake is understandable.
It doesn't? I watched the NOVA special on the design of Watson, and one of the features explicitly added was the parsing of other players' wrong answers. Did that fall by the wayside? Could they not perfect the voice recognition?
Doubtful. As impressive as their win is, and as much as they've learned from it, they mostly have a computer that's really good at Jeopardy. I don't think that it could answer an essay question in a satisfactory manner.
We still have a long way to go despite how far we've come.
It might not be good at writing an essay, but it could be a fantastic research tool for finding out information to put in your essay. Far better than, say, Google for searching for specifics.
The promise of Watson is that, better that other systems I've seen, it's better able to pick out exactly what you're asking about from a giant database. There's so much information overload now, that's a useful skill.
People want robots that are perfectly human. They do not want robots that are near-human, so evolutionary steps tend to garner more negative reactions than positive ones.
No one has, it's not even out yet!
One of the ways that Watson could be different is that Watson is writing its own rules. Instead of playing with the ruleset that it was given, it refines and adds its own rules to deal with failure, learning and reacting.
Watson's answer was correct - he just didn't phrase it the way they want.
Ah, but the whole point of Watson was that it understand the nuances of human language. Context, phrasing, and so forth.
And technically, the answer was wrong -- there was nothing wrong with the gymnist's leg. It was that one leg was missing that was the problem.
Hey you don't need to convince me, I'm just the interpreter. ;-)
So what you're saying is that, to an outside observer, you are indistinguishable from an atheist?
It sounds like he still believes in God, but perhaps not what man has to say about God.
Eight out of Nine for me.
I've been doing end-user support long enough and with enough Linux and UNIX experience to know the flaws that the systems can have, and that when a user comes to me with a strange problem that it's quite likely some obscure bug that we hit that no one else has seen. We run into that a lot.
you could implement the same pattern in any language that supports regex.
The problem is, I've dealt with regexes in enough languages to see that every language does things just a little differently with different extensions. That actually makes trying to move regexes between languages a fairly difficult prospect, especially since those horrible-looking things are difficult to debug.
I believe he is referring to FDR's "New Deal" era government work projects to help curb unemployment, by using the government to employ people doing civic works projects--- Like building the national highway system, and several civic drainage and municipal water reservoirs.
Probably, but that was a little before the end of the depression, wasn't it?
I have no problems investing responsibly in infrastructure. Lord knows we need it.
The people in favor of this are under the impression that people will USE the high-speed rail once it's built. I don't see it; it's fitting a square peg into a round hole.
The US is in a unique situation, in that they control the world's reserve currency. So they can print money, but export the inflation to other countries, like China, which has its currency pegged to the USD. No wonder they are experiencing double-digit inflation. Essentially, there's no short term downside to just printing money and continuing business as usual.
.... other than devaluing our currency and encouraging other nations to move away from the US Dollar.
Until the budget is balanced, we don't need shit like this.
So you'll happily accept cutting your ridiculous military expenditure right?
Absolutely.
Or allow the government to negotiate drug and medical procedure prices with private industry and use its negotiating power as a large buyer in Medicare/Tricare right? You expect government to buy everything else at the cheapest possible price, why subsidize pharmaceuticals?
Makes sense to me.
Or stop subsidizing ethanol production which promotes overproduction, artificial food inflation by diverting food production to uneconomic fuel production and socializes rural industry at the cost of urban individuals?
Absolutely, ethanol is another boondoggle like the high-speed rail would be. It has more to do with midwest political power than any sensible environmental policy.
All of those would save substantially more than you are worried about in terms of year-on-year expenditure. But it doesn't fit into everyone's "omg the sky is falling" bullshit.
I'm open to cutting quite a bit because we have to. I don't see the point in a high-speed rail line that will cost several times more than is currently being proposed, will not be completed on schedule, and will not make money because people won't use it anyway. It seems like a waste of money and just because we waste tons of money on other nonsense (Iraq, military bases, ethanol, other subsidies, etc) shouldn't be an invitation to waste even more money here.
Invented computer? USA. First transcontinental railroad? USA. Invented internet? USA.
Yeah, sounds like "catching up" to me.
The US has the habit of inventing incredible products that other nations perfect and sell back to us.
China is communist in name only.
Hey, I thought they were a peoples' republic...