This post hurts me. It hurts me very badly. I keep trying to swing my hand over my hair in the traditional "over his head" movement, but the miss is so wide that I keep either hitting the ceiling fan or throwing my shoulder out of socket.
then we have the sum of a geometric sequence... So the lightbeam will eventually emerge from these infinite mirrors. So what direction will the lightbeam be heading in? Up, or down? It depends on the last mirror- but there is no last mirror! Thus we have a paradox.
No, we don't. You've constructed a fallacy. You propose infinite mirrors stationed such that they maintain a repeating pattern of reflection, and then make postulations about what will happen at the end.
The very nature of an infinity is to not have an end. And the second you put an end there, it's no longer a geometric series, it's just a hideously long list of fractions. Of course, once you establish the endpoint of your series of fractions, then you can just test the list of mirrors for evenness; if it's even, it's going out in the same direction that it entered. But when you realize that the problem you're describing is essentially how to tell if an infinity is even or odd, you realize the preposterousness of the position.
I maintain that the nature of the Zeno paradox is being misunderstood. I have never believed it to be to show that a warrior could not outrace a tortoise. I've always believed it to be a challenge to rethink your notions of time, in comparing slices of time to longer stretches; people have an annoying tendency to treat them as if they're equivalent by ratio, which I don't believe at all.
Other than forcing refactorings, which seems silly to me (some things cannot be refactored to four functions; why set arbitrary limits?) you seem to be talking about Delphi.
Have a look at the serial number on the back. Then, look through the system manual. Nintendo calls it the AGB, which is the order the words go in Japanese. They've been doing that since a year before release, and so have I; it's a habit that's hard to break.
Besides, it's pedantically correct, and I'm pedantic.
This is exactly my point. None of those questions are suitable for ongoing classes. Hell, the four of those together shouldn't be more than an hour these days:
To burn a CD, you take the sound files you have, name them "001 - foo", "002 - bar" so that the order you want is alphanumeric order, hit select all, irght click, hit burn to CD. Done.
To hook up your printer or digital camera: put the wire in at both ends. Both major consumer OSes are essentially preloaded driver plug and play for all major consumer components these days, especially things like printers and cameras. If it doesn't work, hit the Microsoft Update button, let it log on, and come back in five minutes with a sandwich. Done.
To install a virus scanner, buy the CD. Put it in the drive. Hit install. Read the license. Hit yes and next a lot. Hit reboot when it tells you to. Done.
How to get a bigger hard disk could take half an hour. It's still pretty much put it in and it works, these days; ATA does a wonderful job of autodetection and negotiation. First, check if your warranty is voided by modifying the machine. If it isn't or if you don't care, unplug the thing and take the case screws out. Slide off the cover. Slide the hard drive into this hard drive shaped space, where the other hard drives are. Screw it in in at least three places for stability. At this point, anyone who's ever made a bookcase or made alterations to their building should be fine. Put the wide cable in, tab side with the notch. If your wide cable doesn't have an extra plug, swap it with the one that came with the drive. Otherwise, use the other cable. Put the skinny, stiff cable in the power thing. It won't go in upside down either; anyone who has a set of keys other than car keys understands this. Put the case back on. Plug it back in. Turn it on. Done.
Now, maybe it's me, but I got the impression that this guy meant ongoing classes - 12 classes, every saturday morning for three months, or something like that. If that's the case, people are going to want help with weird stuff. Things we wouldn't come up with. I say this because I used to do telephone technical support at an ISP, and people will call and ask for your help with whatever's bothering them. You'll get everything from how to make the various programs on a machine start working (they've installed so much and trampled so many drivers that much software can't run) to how to start writing video games.
All I'm saying is that, given the crowd here, he should be taking into account that some topics are overstated here, and many topics that would exist won't be mentioned. Not the obvious stuff, that takes five minutes to explain once, and then five minutes again every week for the rest of your life. I'm talking about things of a moderate complexity that enterprising individuals want to spend time learning to do correctly. And since we're generally more computer experienced than the norm, we're just going to not think of a lot of things. So, to remedy, I thought he ought to just ask the people he intends to service.
Market research, after a fashion. Or, if you prefer, good old fashioned (and hard to find) customer service worth a damn.
I mean, really, have you ever looked at the classes that CompUSA offers?
* This thing is a concoction of pure fantasy, or..
Yeah, because if there's one thing Sony is known for, it's taking a huge (and expensive) spot at E3, and announcing flights of fancy.
This is going to be the most colossal failure since ET for the 2600.
Maybe. But we've heard that before (Walkman, CD, Playstation.) Beta was profitable and competitive for almost ten years. Can you name a time Sony has made such a collosal blunder? (MD is popular in both Japan and Europe, fair warning.)
The specs of this thing if present in a system using todays technology (presumably a laptop), would be no less than $1000.
I'm not sure where you get this number. PC DVD players are $50 or so, and Sony's making them, not buying them, so I bet the small disc proprietary one, which is going to be produced in huge quantities compared to a normal drive run, and which will need less motor, will probably hit around $35. The screen isn't very big, comparatively; I'd wager that since the AGB screen costs nintendo 19 dollars, this one might very well be in the neighborhood of thirty. Wireless costs about $15 for a controller on pricewatch. USB is another $10, commodity. Sony has put MemoryStick everywhere; it doesn't matter what it costs them, because the media makes up for them quickly. The DSP can't be more than ten bucks. You can't even buy 8 or 2 meg SIMMs on pricewatch anymore, but 32megs of EDO goes for five bucks, so I imagine it's costing them a dollar, maybe two. I honestly have no idea what the CPUs cost, but I'm wagering that it's cheap, since they have a history of fabbing their own CPUs. Maybe ten bucks for both?
I count roughly $100-110 in hardware at commodity prices on PriceWatch. Add ten for the plastic and manufacturing, and another ten for batteries. Sony won't be paying commodity prices, but they will be paying for shelf space, which is effectively where commodity prices come from; I foresee this box costing them $120-$130 for the hardware, $40 for shelf space and shipping, and ~$10/unit for advertisement, giving a $175+-$10 neighborhood. Considering that manufacturers regularly take a bath on hardware to sell software, I can see this starting at $150, maybe even less.
Also keep in mind that this thing *must* have a rechargeable battery...using some technology we haven't heard of yet (unless they thing the average gamer will cotton to 5 hours of battery life).
This does admittedly worry me. My belief is that they're going to run two batteries in the thing, and that it's just gonna be heavy. Though it's not going to be made of lead, like an XBox ancho^h^h^h^h^hcontroller.
7.1 sound? Are you fucking kidding me?
Read the article. Then you'll understand. That's one of the many things it can do. (Besides, with its network connections, this thing looks like it's going to be as media-oriented as the PS2 is, maybe moreso. It's got the MPEG4 for a movie playback scheme, remember.)
So, try to envision being tethered to both a power cord *and* external speakers.
Yeah, just like the GameBoy's stereo sound card requires a speaker system, even though it's got a monaural speaker.
It's called "giving the user options."
I call bullshit.
You won't know until it comes out, but you lose, chummer. Sony won. $1000. Man, you should hit pricewatch when you say things like that. You think they're that prevalent because they screw up that badly on a regular basis?
other companies have previously released more technically competent portables
Um, like what? Find me a portable game system with two 333mHz CPUs, a reprogrammable DSP for sound, 8 meg of RAM and 2 meg of explicitly media inclined RAM, a hardware MPEG decoder, 1.8g disc storage, USB, WiFi, and a.5g+ capable flash reader.
Hint: it doesn't exist.
Please note that the AGB has anything but a vast library; that's one of the biggest complaints about it. The GB library is big, but it's too outdated, unlike the PS1. Moreover, as they're carts and quite expensive to manufacture, it's not reasonable to sell them for $10/disc like the PS1 library.
Read the article in english. What it says is that the sound card is a reprogrammable DSP, and that it can be rewritten for various sound setups, which currently include SRS, 7.1, Simulated 3D, and MP3 playback.
That is to say, the developer is going to have a lot of latitude in what they want to do with it. The box can be set up for movie playback - MPEG4 at a compression high enough for a movie on a disc - and it's got USB and WiFi. No doubt, among other things, it's going to be a portable movie player; for that, 7.1 will be useful. Moreover, enterprising developers will be able to reach out and touch network available devices - I believe this will include the PS3 - and use them as a gateway for audio and video.
It's the.1 thing that hurts on a hand-held with headphones. To get good enough bass, they have to tap a screw directly into you skull. Don't get me wrong, the results are amazing. And it allows you to also mount your head onto a tripod, so it can't be all bad. Just a little freaky.
Of course, Sony stole the technology from MS, who stole it from Apple, who stole it from Xerox Parc, who stole it from the ancient British; that's why it's now called VaioStyle Cabra Trepanning.NET X. And SCO's gonna sue all of them.
Yea, because realistic weather has always been a challenge for game designers... please, stop being a Sony fanboy. Sony's claims about the PS3 are *rediculous*.
Oh, come on. All game console makers have a portfolio of ludicruous claims. So do computer makers. Remember how the Pentium three made your internet faster, and the pentium four made it richer and more enjoyable?
Hell, a porsche gives you a big wang, right? Why shouldn't Sony brag about their winter rendering? I mean, the problem isn't the system, it's the developers. Ico was gorgeous.
Would it have been possible to make something that can take PS2 discs?
Yes, but for portables there are three problems. If you've seen the video of that guy putting CDs on a dremel and firing them into acrobatic feats, you realize the tremendous force that a spinning disc can contain. While a portable isn't likely to spin them that fast, consider the GameCube. Nintendo has frequently stated that the reason they waited so long to use disc media was because of the load times involved (though proper software hides them anyway, grumble.) When they made the minidisc format for the gamecube, it wasn't for antipiracy reasons like everyone thinks; pirate mass producers can make those discs just as easily as any others (so can I, with my DVD burner, actually; they put their standard barrage of copy protection in for that.) It's because the smaller disc carries quite a bit less weight, and so can be spun up and down much faster, dramatically reducong load times.
The portable will want small discs for a similar reason; above and beyond time, it has to worry about power. Spinning a disc isn't cheap, battery-wise. The smaller discs will cost a lot less energy to use.
Furthermore, the smaller discs are far less susceptible to wobble, both due to the lower weight and the shorter lever arm away from the spindle (as well as the proportionally larger spindle area.) So it's gonna skip a hell of a lot less for the same amount of shakage, before you consider whatever buffering systems they have in place.
For a variety of reasons, the smaller disc is a huge win for portables. Yes, they could have made something where the media is larger than a comfortable game system. But you're not going to see it any time soon, methinks.
OTOH, it wouldn't be unreasonable for the PS2 or PS3 to play the smaller discs. So maybe, though you'd have to replace your library, future small-disc titles might make crossplayability a selling point? Backwards compatability was and still is, for Sony, and I bet they'll remember what a boon a starting gate library is.
A hint to moderators: informative is for use when they're not guessing. This article is a prime example of why.
16:9 which is the wide screen ratio (TV is 4:1 or something like that, I'm too lazy to look it up)
A television is not four times as wide as it is tall. The NTSC TV resolution is 352x240, interlaced (ie, each frame is 352x120 woven.) It's very close to 4:3, which would be 320x240. (Some people will say that it is 4:3 because the pixels aren't square; the picture is 4:3, but the resolution aspect is 4.4:3. The PSP pixels, thankfully, are square. Thank god for VGA.) For reference, the GameBoy Advance is also widescreen, though less so, at 3:2 (240x160.)
Also, the screen, with the aspects involved, is about 9in^2, whereas the AGB is about 4in^2; it may sound like double, but since it's widescreen it doesn't feel that way. It's only half an inch taller (4x2.25 vs 2.32x1.75, roughly.) So it's more like two of them side by side. (Okay, maybe that's what you meant.)
That said, I don't think it's going to be 4-6 hours. Sony's not stupid; they've been making portables that are power efficient for decades. The MIPS is an excellent choice for low power consumption; combined with their laptop battery research, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them crank out 12 hours or more. Though the battery (cough generator cough) 's probably going to be a bit heavy. (Egon, I thought you said never to cross the beams?)
That's quite some time for Nintendo to get serious with its Gameboy.
And do what, a complete hardware overhaul? Release another portable? Do you have any idea how long the AGB was in development?
Face it: the AGB is, hardware-wise, just no match for this thing. It's not going to be, either; they could throw a hugely faster ARM in there, but it'd screw over a whole lot of software relying on to-the-machine timing. They could increase the memory on the thing, to a limit of 16 meg before they need fragmentation, but memory's not gonna do the trick. They're not going to change the screen, or the sound hardware. They're not gonna add wifi. They're not gonna add USB.
The AGB either needs to get its software in gear now at a rate that Nintendo has never seen, and start putting prices in the drink, or they can kiss their asses goodbye.
Maybe they ought to start printing and giving away eReader cards at the rate of one a week. That would cost them virtually nothing, and they'd get something out there.:D
It's awful because 99 percent of the gaming public would find it unintelligable
That's funny. My gaming friends have been calling me, excited as piss about the hardware specs. Methinks you underestimate the gaming populace's savvy. Let me translate for you, Kirk.
and the stats made MY eyes glaze over.
Eyedrops. This isn't that bad.
Dual MIPS4000 cores?
The MIPS 4000 is a CPU, often used for handhelds, in around the same class as the SH3. It's like an ARM spec; various people make them. A common example is the NEC VR-4121. I think Sony makes their own, but I'm not certain, and don't feel like looking. Dual core means that there will be two of them.
660nm laser diode to read a 60mm dual layer 1.8GB media disc?
660nm is the wavelength of the laser. This is like when we talk about blue-ray DVD and so forth; the japanese are used to referring to them by the wavelength measurement. IIRC, and I probably don't, that's almost blue-ray. The significance is that the wider wavelength lasers can deal with physically smaller areas on the disc, for reasons more complex than I care to explain.
60mm dual layer disc? 60mm is the size - think MiniDisc - and dual layer is exactly what it sounds like (remember, DVDs do that too.) 1.8gb should be obvious.
Hardware tesselator and surface mapper?
Did you balk when nVidia started hyping quincunx-antialiased vertex shaders? I didn't think so. They're just describing the kind of math behind the application of surfaces to 3d objects. A hardware tesselator is pretty impressive.
Reconfigrable multi-channel sound DSP?
This is pretty obvious.
Jeeeeezus who the hell cares (or even understands) besides the most hardcore geeks and hardware engineers in the videogame industry?
There are two answers to this. One is that most people who read sites like the one you're complaining about do in fact understand these things, and that in fact definitions aren't hard to look up on the 'net. The other, howver, is that it doesn't particularly matter if the consumer understands what they're being told.
"What's that," you say, aggravated? I stand by it. If you tell the consumer that they have a mipmapped phong shaded gouraud antialiaser with near buffer z-depth optimized culling and progressive scan interleave defenestration, their eyes are going to get big and round, and they will tremble from their knees to their wallets. Big words make it sound good. Automobile manufacturers have understood this for decades; that's why you know that the Cadillac has the Northstar engine, that Chevron has Techron added to their gasoline, and that you have a dual overhead cam instead of a single. Granted, some people know what a DOHC is. But few know why it's better, much less what the advantages of a V engine over an L or something else are. God forbid you try to tell them about their firing pin timing, or that they can replace their car's gas computer.:D
The truth of the matter is that if you can convince the consumer that it's good by rattling off big sounding words and then showing them something sparkly, then you've got their dollar. This was what made 3dFX, Ford, and PT Barnum. Sony is no exception; remember, their MD players are better because they have ATRAC, which every MD owner knows. (Astonishingly few know what it means.)
While all that is front and centre, why didn't the editors (of either ZDNet or Slashdot) include specs "real" people find important.
Because they've already been on SlashDot three or four times, and I don't think the story editor needs to karma whore. That said, since you appear to be google challenged, the device's size hasn't been announced; the screen is 480x272 at 2.9". The play time hasn't been announced, but industry rumors suggest 15 hours. It has a built in rechargable battery like the SP does. I don't know about the discs, but sleeves
By definition, SlashDotters are here because they're deeper into the community, the practices, and either the hobby or profession (for many, both) of computing.
We are going to have no idea whatsoever what Joe Average will want from a set of computer classes. Hey, we don't even know if you're dealing with residents, which won't want the same classes every year, or transients, which will want brief and to the point classes.
I suggest you take all the ideas that SlashDot comes up with, cull at least half of them, put them in a list, and put that list up in the business. Print it on flyers with five or so entries. Ask people to check which ones they would be interested in - maybe let them say sorta interested or very interested - and allow them to write in suggestions. Given that they'll be looking at other things of scale, they'll be able to input what's germane to them.
When you're writing down what you'd present, don't just come up with a topic and go. Think about it: what would Office 101 be? It's not going to be enough time to cover the whole suite. Some people will want document layout and setup in Word, like it was a publisher; some will want Excel and Access, for their small business (maybe tax stuff too.) Some will want to learn how to use Outlook, or Exchange, so that they can function in their corporate environment. Some will want to learn to make PowerPoint presentations.
You've got to remember that most people do not learn computer topics at the rate of a slashdotter. This isn't because they're dumb, or clueless, or any other such geek slander; it's because they have less context to bind to. I'm not stupid, but a mechanic is gonna pick up the specifics of fixing a foreign car way, way faster than I will, even though I likely have a better grasp of the underlying physics. You're going to need to allow a lot of time for basic cluestickery.
Maybe, here's a thought. Every month or so, offer a 101 course on one Office suite app. See how it goes, and have a second one prepared. If it goes well, do your second one while you prepare a sequel to the first.
Above all, don't get stuck in plans. The people that show up won't always be the same ones and they won't always want the same things. Some things (word) you'll be able to repeat. Prepare occasional side-tracks into the weird for geeks if you find them; if you don't, get ready to explain MS Project.
Basically, it's all about your audience, and we aren't your audience. What you get here is nothing better than a starting point.
There's some rather critical specs missing -- like the resolution of the display.
480x272, 2.9".
audio/video output jacks (although all 3 of these could be done via the unknown extention port).
And almost certainly will be. Jack consolidation has been a trend at Sony for a while. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the voltage suply comes from USB or Firewire, actually; if you have a playstation or a Vaio, you won't even need a power block, just a cable.
Video out? For a portable? Why? (though with jack consolidation, it'd be neat.)
There's absolutely no reason for 7.1 sound if you can't output the sound to an external receiver.
Yah, 7.1 sound is kind of weird sounding to me. Maybe it's for external connections. Maybe it's intended to go over the wireless; Sony's starting to push for home integration, and I kind of think that the PS3 is going to be their set-top whammy box. I mena, the PSX (the name for the new PS2, not the thing we all called the PSX, which they now call the PS) has a 120g hard drive and a DVD burner; tell me that's not a TiVo killer on its way. If the PS3 has wi-fi, maybe the idea is that the PSP could just sync to the PS3, pipe the phat sound out, and all is well.
OTOH, remember that a lot of soundcards used to call themselves 5.1 because they were 3d-sound fakable. Is there a dolby logo or something?
And if you can do that, you'd better be able to output the video too -- since I sure wouldn't play on a tiny little screen when my TV is right in front of me.
That's what they said about the Gameboy and the GameBoy advance, too. It's proven to be wrong. That said, with the plethora of ports and wifi, I wouldn't at all be surprised if the PS3 chains the PSP to your home entertainment system.
I mean, really, the Japanese. You've gotta love them.:D Who else is gonna make this sort of stuff? GE?
In the meantime, lately, Sony has been kicking ass and not even bothering to take names in the video game market. Their systems have consistently (ahem, twice, anyway, the PsOne notwithstanding) done exactly what was needed to win them a market. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Sony deal Nintendo a death blow, coming up.
For instance the GBA SP was ready MONTHS before it was released, maybe even when the original GBA came out, but it was too expensive for them to sell it.
You know, it's amusing, I'm in the industry on the N side, and I've never heard that. Do you have anything to back this up?
(The thing that made N hold out on the backlight was battery power, by the way, not cost.)
Um. That's not exactly true. There have been SNES quality handhelds a number of times (in fact, a few better-than-NES handhelds.) The things aren't that hard to make. Truth is, most palsm and the like run circles around the AGB, which is only an ARM7TDMI running at 16.7mHz, with a quarter meg of ram and some video stuff.
What Nintendo waited for, and what cost Sega, TurboGrafx, Atari, Bandai, and others the handheld war, was twofold. One was console cost, but that's not as big a del as everyone makes it out to be.
The big deal is and always has been battery life. Nintendo understands that if the game goes away every two hours, and you have to shell out $5 for new batteries, the kid is not going to be satisfied, and the console won't sell, since in honesty they sell on jealousy alone. If a kid doesn't like his AGB, the other kid won't want one. Nobody seems to understand this but Nintendo; that said, Nintendo makes a *huge* deal out of it to their developers (since they have access to bios calls that shut parts of the system down.)
Battery life is the reason that the AGB is popular a decade after the turbografx portable, which was significantly more powerful.
The screen is sorta big-ish, but not that huge. The CD drive (minidvd drive?) won't take that much space; look at MD players from a decade ago: they're not that thick. They won't be now, either. The controls? Ha! They're buttons on the surface. The space underneath is negligable. Haven't you ever taken one of these apart?
Look, it's not about miniaturization, or the SP wouldn't be half the size of the AGB less than two years later. It's about cost and power draw. The thing that made the backlight of the SP possible was the proprietary rechargable battery, and I expect Sony will have just as good if not a better one, owing to their laptop research.
Besides, Sony's been doing Miniaturization since five years before N stopped being a playing card company. I mean, come on, very few companies cram stuff into small places like they do.:D
What I want: a Dual Shock 2 with a big screen and some CPU built in. I think it's finally on its way.
I've written 120kLoc+ tiered apps in it. I'm not a guru, but I'm also not a clown. That said, hey, maybe you don't realize that the problems don't come until a certain scale of difficulty.
Yes, I have an axe to grind with the langauge: I hate it.
"No language in this office, except when we had Jim writing C, is harder to debug." I absolutly can not believe that. I have worked with many languages, and I have never found one esier. Most of the time it stops on the line that is broken!
(sighs) Well, I don't know what to tell you. I've worked in jobs with seven production languages: C++, various assemblies (they count as one language; they're not very different,) Delphi, Java (tomcat), PHP, perl, and VB. Java was, admittedly, a pain in the butt to debug too. But not this bad. I mean, when you start dealing with other component writer's errors, then you learn the importance of the facilities that you get in a language like Delphi (or, I'm told, C#, though I don't know this first hand. Wouldn't surprise me: same language designer.)
Now, granted, it is possible to write C that's less maintainable than assembly. Granted also, I ignored assembly when I said that, and also tossed the 4gls out the window (sql, mostly.) But, if you write *good* C++ using design patterns and eliminating all error cases at compile time when possible, you'll find that not only is there a drastic usability boost, but you end up dealing with fewer errors, and don't deal with VB's lethargy.
Clearly, you've got a point to prove about VB. And if I didn't have as much experience with it as I do, and if 95% of the people whose skills I know intimately and respect didn't agree with me, I might be inclined to give you the time of day.
By the way, Delphi stands on its own for maintainability. That language is *crazy* clean.
the problem I have had / I still have is that the managers / customers have an idea that something has to be done in a specific language or OS, period.
If they're a manager, give them an estimated time to completion in their idiot language and in the appropriate language(s). If they're a customer, give an estimated cost instead.
Um. You might want to look into the o'reilly and addison wesley catalogs. CVS: OReilly: Essential CVS, CVS Pocket Reference C++: Addison Wesley: Effective C++, More Effective C++, C++ Gotchas Mod_Python, Apache: each have multiple o'reilly books
Boost.python, doxygen: small use solutions in a bigger pool. Notably, for doxygen, you should consider looking into literate programming.
As far as books that are *really* about setting up a project in an intelligent way, try design patterns, fowler's refactoring, code complete, the practice of programming, the mythical man-month, agile software development. That phrase could mean anything.
Slashdot Mirror
This post hurts me. It hurts me very badly. I keep trying to swing my hand over my hair in the traditional "over his head" movement, but the miss is so wide that I keep either hitting the ceiling fan or throwing my shoulder out of socket.
(Score: 3, Insightful) my ass.
A stable, secure, low-cruft OS.
Maybe in the next ten years.
then we have the sum of a geometric sequence ... So the lightbeam will eventually emerge from these infinite mirrors. So what direction will the lightbeam be heading in? Up, or down? It depends on the last mirror- but there is no last mirror! Thus we have a paradox.
No, we don't. You've constructed a fallacy. You propose infinite mirrors stationed such that they maintain a repeating pattern of reflection, and then make postulations about what will happen at the end.
The very nature of an infinity is to not have an end. And the second you put an end there, it's no longer a geometric series, it's just a hideously long list of fractions. Of course, once you establish the endpoint of your series of fractions, then you can just test the list of mirrors for evenness; if it's even, it's going out in the same direction that it entered. But when you realize that the problem you're describing is essentially how to tell if an infinity is even or odd, you realize the preposterousness of the position.
I maintain that the nature of the Zeno paradox is being misunderstood. I have never believed it to be to show that a warrior could not outrace a tortoise. I've always believed it to be a challenge to rethink your notions of time, in comparing slices of time to longer stretches; people have an annoying tendency to treat them as if they're equivalent by ratio, which I don't believe at all.
What, you can't infer the meaning of in Soviet Russia, Black Hole eats you! ?
Other than forcing refactorings, which seems silly to me (some things cannot be refactored to four functions; why set arbitrary limits?) you seem to be talking about Delphi.
Have a look at the serial number on the back. Then, look through the system manual. Nintendo calls it the AGB, which is the order the words go in Japanese. They've been doing that since a year before release, and so have I; it's a habit that's hard to break.
Besides, it's pedantically correct, and I'm pedantic.
Now, maybe it's me, but I got the impression that this guy meant ongoing classes - 12 classes, every saturday morning for three months, or something like that. If that's the case, people are going to want help with weird stuff. Things we wouldn't come up with. I say this because I used to do telephone technical support at an ISP, and people will call and ask for your help with whatever's bothering them. You'll get everything from how to make the various programs on a machine start working (they've installed so much and trampled so many drivers that much software can't run) to how to start writing video games.
All I'm saying is that, given the crowd here, he should be taking into account that some topics are overstated here, and many topics that would exist won't be mentioned. Not the obvious stuff, that takes five minutes to explain once, and then five minutes again every week for the rest of your life. I'm talking about things of a moderate complexity that enterprising individuals want to spend time learning to do correctly. And since we're generally more computer experienced than the norm, we're just going to not think of a lot of things. So, to remedy, I thought he ought to just ask the people he intends to service.
Market research, after a fashion. Or, if you prefer, good old fashioned (and hard to find) customer service worth a damn.
I mean, really, have you ever looked at the classes that CompUSA offers?
The screen is 4.5", not 2.9". That's the AGB. My fault.
* This thing is a concoction of pure fantasy, or..
...using some technology we haven't heard of yet (unless they thing the average gamer will cotton to 5 hours of battery life).
Yeah, because if there's one thing Sony is known for, it's taking a huge (and expensive) spot at E3, and announcing flights of fancy.
This is going to be the most colossal failure since ET for the 2600.
Maybe. But we've heard that before (Walkman, CD, Playstation.) Beta was profitable and competitive for almost ten years. Can you name a time Sony has made such a collosal blunder? (MD is popular in both Japan and Europe, fair warning.)
The specs of this thing if present in a system using todays technology (presumably a laptop), would be no less than $1000.
I'm not sure where you get this number. PC DVD players are $50 or so, and Sony's making them, not buying them, so I bet the small disc proprietary one, which is going to be produced in huge quantities compared to a normal drive run, and which will need less motor, will probably hit around $35. The screen isn't very big, comparatively; I'd wager that since the AGB screen costs nintendo 19 dollars, this one might very well be in the neighborhood of thirty. Wireless costs about $15 for a controller on pricewatch. USB is another $10, commodity. Sony has put MemoryStick everywhere; it doesn't matter what it costs them, because the media makes up for them quickly. The DSP can't be more than ten bucks. You can't even buy 8 or 2 meg SIMMs on pricewatch anymore, but 32megs of EDO goes for five bucks, so I imagine it's costing them a dollar, maybe two. I honestly have no idea what the CPUs cost, but I'm wagering that it's cheap, since they have a history of fabbing their own CPUs. Maybe ten bucks for both?
I count roughly $100-110 in hardware at commodity prices on PriceWatch. Add ten for the plastic and manufacturing, and another ten for batteries. Sony won't be paying commodity prices, but they will be paying for shelf space, which is effectively where commodity prices come from; I foresee this box costing them $120-$130 for the hardware, $40 for shelf space and shipping, and ~$10/unit for advertisement, giving a $175+-$10 neighborhood. Considering that manufacturers regularly take a bath on hardware to sell software, I can see this starting at $150, maybe even less.
Also keep in mind that this thing *must* have a rechargeable battery
This does admittedly worry me. My belief is that they're going to run two batteries in the thing, and that it's just gonna be heavy. Though it's not going to be made of lead, like an XBox ancho^h^h^h^h^hcontroller.
7.1 sound? Are you fucking kidding me?
Read the article. Then you'll understand. That's one of the many things it can do. (Besides, with its network connections, this thing looks like it's going to be as media-oriented as the PS2 is, maybe moreso. It's got the MPEG4 for a movie playback scheme, remember.)
So, try to envision being tethered to both a power cord *and* external speakers.
Yeah, just like the GameBoy's stereo sound card requires a speaker system, even though it's got a monaural speaker.
It's called "giving the user options."
I call bullshit.
You won't know until it comes out, but you lose, chummer. Sony won. $1000. Man, you should hit pricewatch when you say things like that. You think they're that prevalent because they screw up that badly on a regular basis?
other companies have previously released more technically competent portables
.5g+ capable flash reader.
Um, like what? Find me a portable game system with two 333mHz CPUs, a reprogrammable DSP for sound, 8 meg of RAM and 2 meg of explicitly media inclined RAM, a hardware MPEG decoder, 1.8g disc storage, USB, WiFi, and a
Hint: it doesn't exist.
Please note that the AGB has anything but a vast library; that's one of the biggest complaints about it. The GB library is big, but it's too outdated, unlike the PS1. Moreover, as they're carts and quite expensive to manufacture, it's not reasonable to sell them for $10/disc like the PS1 library.
Pity; it would be cool.
Why?
;)
It's a HANDHELD!!!
Read the article in english. What it says is that the sound card is a reprogrammable DSP, and that it can be rewritten for various sound setups, which currently include SRS, 7.1, Simulated 3D, and MP3 playback.
That is to say, the developer is going to have a lot of latitude in what they want to do with it. The box can be set up for movie playback - MPEG4 at a compression high enough for a movie on a disc - and it's got USB and WiFi. No doubt, among other things, it's going to be a portable movie player; for that, 7.1 will be useful. Moreover, enterprising developers will be able to reach out and touch network available devices - I believe this will include the PS3 - and use them as a gateway for audio and video.
In my wet dreams.
It's the .1 thing that hurts on a hand-held with headphones. To get good enough bass, they have to tap a screw directly into you skull. Don't get me wrong, the results are amazing. And it allows you to also mount your head onto a tripod, so it can't be all bad. Just a little freaky.
Of course, Sony stole the technology from MS, who stole it from Apple, who stole it from Xerox Parc, who stole it from the ancient British; that's why it's now called VaioStyle Cabra Trepanning.NET X. And SCO's gonna sue all of them.
Yea, because realistic weather has always been a challenge for game designers ... please, stop being a Sony fanboy. Sony's claims about the PS3 are *rediculous*.
;)
Oh, come on. All game console makers have a portfolio of ludicruous claims. So do computer makers. Remember how the Pentium three made your internet faster, and the pentium four made it richer and more enjoyable?
Hell, a porsche gives you a big wang, right? Why shouldn't Sony brag about their winter rendering? I mean, the problem isn't the system, it's the developers. Ico was gorgeous.
Also, your spelling is ridiculous.
Would it have been possible to make something that can take PS2 discs?
Yes, but for portables there are three problems. If you've seen the video of that guy putting CDs on a dremel and firing them into acrobatic feats, you realize the tremendous force that a spinning disc can contain. While a portable isn't likely to spin them that fast, consider the GameCube. Nintendo has frequently stated that the reason they waited so long to use disc media was because of the load times involved (though proper software hides them anyway, grumble.) When they made the minidisc format for the gamecube, it wasn't for antipiracy reasons like everyone thinks; pirate mass producers can make those discs just as easily as any others (so can I, with my DVD burner, actually; they put their standard barrage of copy protection in for that.) It's because the smaller disc carries quite a bit less weight, and so can be spun up and down much faster, dramatically reducong load times.
The portable will want small discs for a similar reason; above and beyond time, it has to worry about power. Spinning a disc isn't cheap, battery-wise. The smaller discs will cost a lot less energy to use.
Furthermore, the smaller discs are far less susceptible to wobble, both due to the lower weight and the shorter lever arm away from the spindle (as well as the proportionally larger spindle area.) So it's gonna skip a hell of a lot less for the same amount of shakage, before you consider whatever buffering systems they have in place.
For a variety of reasons, the smaller disc is a huge win for portables. Yes, they could have made something where the media is larger than a comfortable game system. But you're not going to see it any time soon, methinks.
OTOH, it wouldn't be unreasonable for the PS2 or PS3 to play the smaller discs. So maybe, though you'd have to replace your library, future small-disc titles might make crossplayability a selling point? Backwards compatability was and still is, for Sony, and I bet they'll remember what a boon a starting gate library is.
A hint to moderators: informative is for use when they're not guessing. This article is a prime example of why.
16:9 which is the wide screen ratio (TV is 4:1 or something like that, I'm too lazy to look it up)
A television is not four times as wide as it is tall. The NTSC TV resolution is 352x240, interlaced (ie, each frame is 352x120 woven.) It's very close to 4:3, which would be 320x240. (Some people will say that it is 4:3 because the pixels aren't square; the picture is 4:3, but the resolution aspect is 4.4:3. The PSP pixels, thankfully, are square. Thank god for VGA.) For reference, the GameBoy Advance is also widescreen, though less so, at 3:2 (240x160.)
Also, the screen, with the aspects involved, is about 9in^2, whereas the AGB is about 4in^2; it may sound like double, but since it's widescreen it doesn't feel that way. It's only half an inch taller (4x2.25 vs 2.32x1.75, roughly.) So it's more like two of them side by side. (Okay, maybe that's what you meant.)
That said, I don't think it's going to be 4-6 hours. Sony's not stupid; they've been making portables that are power efficient for decades. The MIPS is an excellent choice for low power consumption; combined with their laptop battery research, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them crank out 12 hours or more. Though the battery (cough generator cough) 's probably going to be a bit heavy. (Egon, I thought you said never to cross the beams?)
And it's probably going to be front lit.
It's clearly Tachyon Grid Superstring Matrix theory. That would be the Geordi LaForge Institute of Big Words And Bigger Thoughts.
That's quite some time for Nintendo to get serious with its Gameboy.
:D
And do what, a complete hardware overhaul? Release another portable? Do you have any idea how long the AGB was in development?
Face it: the AGB is, hardware-wise, just no match for this thing. It's not going to be, either; they could throw a hugely faster ARM in there, but it'd screw over a whole lot of software relying on to-the-machine timing. They could increase the memory on the thing, to a limit of 16 meg before they need fragmentation, but memory's not gonna do the trick. They're not going to change the screen, or the sound hardware. They're not gonna add wifi. They're not gonna add USB.
The AGB either needs to get its software in gear now at a rate that Nintendo has never seen, and start putting prices in the drink, or they can kiss their asses goodbye.
Maybe they ought to start printing and giving away eReader cards at the rate of one a week. That would cost them virtually nothing, and they'd get something out there.
It's awful because 99 percent of the gaming public would find it unintelligable
:D
That's funny. My gaming friends have been calling me, excited as piss about the hardware specs. Methinks you underestimate the gaming populace's savvy. Let me translate for you, Kirk.
and the stats made MY eyes glaze over.
Eyedrops. This isn't that bad.
Dual MIPS4000 cores?
The MIPS 4000 is a CPU, often used for handhelds, in around the same class as the SH3. It's like an ARM spec; various people make them. A common example is the NEC VR-4121. I think Sony makes their own, but I'm not certain, and don't feel like looking. Dual core means that there will be two of them.
660nm laser diode to read a 60mm dual layer 1.8GB media disc?
660nm is the wavelength of the laser. This is like when we talk about blue-ray DVD and so forth; the japanese are used to referring to them by the wavelength measurement. IIRC, and I probably don't, that's almost blue-ray. The significance is that the wider wavelength lasers can deal with physically smaller areas on the disc, for reasons more complex than I care to explain.
60mm dual layer disc? 60mm is the size - think MiniDisc - and dual layer is exactly what it sounds like (remember, DVDs do that too.) 1.8gb should be obvious.
Hardware tesselator and surface mapper?
Did you balk when nVidia started hyping quincunx-antialiased vertex shaders? I didn't think so. They're just describing the kind of math behind the application of surfaces to 3d objects. A hardware tesselator is pretty impressive.
Reconfigrable multi-channel sound DSP?
This is pretty obvious.
Jeeeeezus who the hell cares (or even understands) besides the most hardcore geeks and hardware engineers in the videogame industry?
There are two answers to this. One is that most people who read sites like the one you're complaining about do in fact understand these things, and that in fact definitions aren't hard to look up on the 'net. The other, howver, is that it doesn't particularly matter if the consumer understands what they're being told.
"What's that," you say, aggravated? I stand by it. If you tell the consumer that they have a mipmapped phong shaded gouraud antialiaser with near buffer z-depth optimized culling and progressive scan interleave defenestration, their eyes are going to get big and round, and they will tremble from their knees to their wallets. Big words make it sound good. Automobile manufacturers have understood this for decades; that's why you know that the Cadillac has the Northstar engine, that Chevron has Techron added to their gasoline, and that you have a dual overhead cam instead of a single. Granted, some people know what a DOHC is. But few know why it's better, much less what the advantages of a V engine over an L or something else are. God forbid you try to tell them about their firing pin timing, or that they can replace their car's gas computer.
The truth of the matter is that if you can convince the consumer that it's good by rattling off big sounding words and then showing them something sparkly, then you've got their dollar. This was what made 3dFX, Ford, and PT Barnum. Sony is no exception; remember, their MD players are better because they have ATRAC, which every MD owner knows. (Astonishingly few know what it means.)
While all that is front and centre, why didn't the editors (of either ZDNet or Slashdot) include specs "real" people find important.
Because they've already been on SlashDot three or four times, and I don't think the story editor needs to karma whore. That said, since you appear to be google challenged, the device's size hasn't been announced; the screen is 480x272 at 2.9". The play time hasn't been announced, but industry rumors suggest 15 hours. It has a built in rechargable battery like the SP does. I don't know about the discs, but sleeves
By definition, SlashDotters are here because they're deeper into the community, the practices, and either the hobby or profession (for many, both) of computing.
We are going to have no idea whatsoever what Joe Average will want from a set of computer classes. Hey, we don't even know if you're dealing with residents, which won't want the same classes every year, or transients, which will want brief and to the point classes.
I suggest you take all the ideas that SlashDot comes up with, cull at least half of them, put them in a list, and put that list up in the business. Print it on flyers with five or so entries. Ask people to check which ones they would be interested in - maybe let them say sorta interested or very interested - and allow them to write in suggestions. Given that they'll be looking at other things of scale, they'll be able to input what's germane to them.
When you're writing down what you'd present, don't just come up with a topic and go. Think about it: what would Office 101 be? It's not going to be enough time to cover the whole suite. Some people will want document layout and setup in Word, like it was a publisher; some will want Excel and Access, for their small business (maybe tax stuff too.) Some will want to learn how to use Outlook, or Exchange, so that they can function in their corporate environment. Some will want to learn to make PowerPoint presentations.
You've got to remember that most people do not learn computer topics at the rate of a slashdotter. This isn't because they're dumb, or clueless, or any other such geek slander; it's because they have less context to bind to. I'm not stupid, but a mechanic is gonna pick up the specifics of fixing a foreign car way, way faster than I will, even though I likely have a better grasp of the underlying physics. You're going to need to allow a lot of time for basic cluestickery.
Maybe, here's a thought. Every month or so, offer a 101 course on one Office suite app. See how it goes, and have a second one prepared. If it goes well, do your second one while you prepare a sequel to the first.
Above all, don't get stuck in plans. The people that show up won't always be the same ones and they won't always want the same things. Some things (word) you'll be able to repeat. Prepare occasional side-tracks into the weird for geeks if you find them; if you don't, get ready to explain MS Project.
Basically, it's all about your audience, and we aren't your audience. What you get here is nothing better than a starting point.
There's some rather critical specs missing -- like the resolution of the display.
:D Who else is gonna make this sort of stuff? GE?
:D
480x272, 2.9".
audio/video output jacks (although all 3 of these could be done via the unknown extention port).
And almost certainly will be. Jack consolidation has been a trend at Sony for a while. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the voltage suply comes from USB or Firewire, actually; if you have a playstation or a Vaio, you won't even need a power block, just a cable.
Video out? For a portable? Why? (though with jack consolidation, it'd be neat.)
There's absolutely no reason for 7.1 sound if you can't output the sound to an external receiver.
Yah, 7.1 sound is kind of weird sounding to me. Maybe it's for external connections. Maybe it's intended to go over the wireless; Sony's starting to push for home integration, and I kind of think that the PS3 is going to be their set-top whammy box. I mena, the PSX (the name for the new PS2, not the thing we all called the PSX, which they now call the PS) has a 120g hard drive and a DVD burner; tell me that's not a TiVo killer on its way. If the PS3 has wi-fi, maybe the idea is that the PSP could just sync to the PS3, pipe the phat sound out, and all is well.
OTOH, remember that a lot of soundcards used to call themselves 5.1 because they were 3d-sound fakable. Is there a dolby logo or something?
And if you can do that, you'd better be able to output the video too -- since I sure wouldn't play on a tiny little screen when my TV is right in front of me.
That's what they said about the Gameboy and the GameBoy advance, too. It's proven to be wrong. That said, with the plethora of ports and wifi, I wouldn't at all be surprised if the PS3 chains the PSP to your home entertainment system.
I mean, really, the Japanese. You've gotta love them.
In the meantime, lately, Sony has been kicking ass and not even bothering to take names in the video game market. Their systems have consistently (ahem, twice, anyway, the PsOne notwithstanding) done exactly what was needed to win them a market. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see Sony deal Nintendo a death blow, coming up.
Thank god SCEA is down the street.
For instance the GBA SP was ready MONTHS before it was released, maybe even when the original GBA came out, but it was too expensive for them to sell it.
You know, it's amusing, I'm in the industry on the N side, and I've never heard that. Do you have anything to back this up?
(The thing that made N hold out on the backlight was battery power, by the way, not cost.)
Um. That's not exactly true. There have been SNES quality handhelds a number of times (in fact, a few better-than-NES handhelds.) The things aren't that hard to make. Truth is, most palsm and the like run circles around the AGB, which is only an ARM7TDMI running at 16.7mHz, with a quarter meg of ram and some video stuff.
:D
What Nintendo waited for, and what cost Sega, TurboGrafx, Atari, Bandai, and others the handheld war, was twofold. One was console cost, but that's not as big a del as everyone makes it out to be.
The big deal is and always has been battery life. Nintendo understands that if the game goes away every two hours, and you have to shell out $5 for new batteries, the kid is not going to be satisfied, and the console won't sell, since in honesty they sell on jealousy alone. If a kid doesn't like his AGB, the other kid won't want one. Nobody seems to understand this but Nintendo; that said, Nintendo makes a *huge* deal out of it to their developers (since they have access to bios calls that shut parts of the system down.)
Battery life is the reason that the AGB is popular a decade after the turbografx portable, which was significantly more powerful.
The screen is sorta big-ish, but not that huge. The CD drive (minidvd drive?) won't take that much space; look at MD players from a decade ago: they're not that thick. They won't be now, either. The controls? Ha! They're buttons on the surface. The space underneath is negligable. Haven't you ever taken one of these apart?
Look, it's not about miniaturization, or the SP wouldn't be half the size of the AGB less than two years later. It's about cost and power draw. The thing that made the backlight of the SP possible was the proprietary rechargable battery, and I expect Sony will have just as good if not a better one, owing to their laptop research.
Besides, Sony's been doing Miniaturization since five years before N stopped being a playing card company. I mean, come on, very few companies cram stuff into small places like they do.
What I want: a Dual Shock 2 with a big screen and some CPU built in. I think it's finally on its way.
I've written 120kLoc+ tiered apps in it. I'm not a guru, but I'm also not a clown. That said, hey, maybe you don't realize that the problems don't come until a certain scale of difficulty.
Yes, I have an axe to grind with the langauge: I hate it.
"No language in this office, except when we had Jim writing C, is harder to debug."
I absolutly can not believe that. I have worked with many languages, and I have never found one esier. Most of the time it stops on the line that is broken!
(sighs) Well, I don't know what to tell you. I've worked in jobs with seven production languages: C++, various assemblies (they count as one language; they're not very different,) Delphi, Java (tomcat), PHP, perl, and VB. Java was, admittedly, a pain in the butt to debug too. But not this bad. I mean, when you start dealing with other component writer's errors, then you learn the importance of the facilities that you get in a language like Delphi (or, I'm told, C#, though I don't know this first hand. Wouldn't surprise me: same language designer.)
Now, granted, it is possible to write C that's less maintainable than assembly. Granted also, I ignored assembly when I said that, and also tossed the 4gls out the window (sql, mostly.) But, if you write *good* C++ using design patterns and eliminating all error cases at compile time when possible, you'll find that not only is there a drastic usability boost, but you end up dealing with fewer errors, and don't deal with VB's lethargy.
Clearly, you've got a point to prove about VB. And if I didn't have as much experience with it as I do, and if 95% of the people whose skills I know intimately and respect didn't agree with me, I might be inclined to give you the time of day.
By the way, Delphi stands on its own for maintainability. That language is *crazy* clean.
the problem I have had / I still have is that the managers / customers have an idea that something has to be done in a specific language or OS, period.
;)
If they're a manager, give them an estimated time to completion in their idiot language and in the appropriate language(s). If they're a customer, give an estimated cost instead.
They'll see the light purty quick.
Um. You might want to look into the o'reilly and addison wesley catalogs.
CVS: OReilly: Essential CVS, CVS Pocket Reference
C++: Addison Wesley: Effective C++, More Effective C++, C++ Gotchas
Mod_Python, Apache: each have multiple o'reilly books
Boost.python, doxygen: small use solutions in a bigger pool. Notably, for doxygen, you should consider looking into literate programming.
As far as books that are *really* about setting up a project in an intelligent way, try design patterns, fowler's refactoring, code complete, the practice of programming, the mythical man-month, agile software development. That phrase could mean anything.