Regarding the DS: You don't have Meteos or even Kirby yet, either. But, oddly enough, you do have Another Code, which isn't do out in NA until the end of September (under the name "Trace Memory").
So, they probably meant that "we're not going to bother offer games in high resolutions. But, if you want, you can output to a nice screen." So expect their games to be running at 480i (or MAYBE 480p).
Almost every first/second party, and many third party games published on the Gamecube from the very start have supported 480p. If you're going to be outputting to a nice screen, the signal NEEDS to be at least 480p; modern monitors will not recognize anything less.
Are you sure those numbers are accurate, or telling the whole story? The movie versions of Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat would never have received sequels if the first ones were not decently profitable.
I agree with most of your points but have a few corrections:
GCN's cd's spin backwards relative to normal disks
No, they spin clockwise just like (practically) every other optical disc under the sun. The ARE different in that the data is read from the outer edge toward the center -- the "start" of the disc is on the edge, and if it's only half-full, then it's the center portion that will be blank. This is uncommon among optical discs, but it makes sense -- for any modern drive, read spead increases as you move towards the edge; by concentrating the data there the GameCube achieves a higher mean read speed on non-full discs.
I think slashdot people don't realize that 99.9% of people just don't have enough skill to read a tutorial on modding their PSP and putting the ROM's on to it.
To be fair, I'd say it's more like 75% don't have the skill. The other 24.9% realize it simply isn't worth the trouble and have better things to do with their time (and money).
If the deal was with AMD, it might almost be believable. But not Intel. And certainly not on stock 32-bit x86 processors.
Further points:
1. How do they expect to able to announce this and not kill their laptop and desktop sales for the next 15 months or so?
2. Steve Jobs is notorious for hating leaked announcements. "inside source"? This could be one colossal troll.
3. None of the typical Apple rumors sites seem to have heard anything more on this.
4. Just because IBM has had problems with designing/manufacturing faster PowerPC chips doesn't mean the architecture is at a dead end; by all accounts PowerPC offers many advantages over x86 on a very basic level.
4b. The x86 instruction set would be a pretty significant step BACKWARDS, architecturally. x86-64 fixes this, more or less, but it's AMD whose proven most successful at this, and not Intel. Intel has tried to come out with a way to move beyond x86's limitations, and has consistently fallen back to favouring designs that instead manage to make x86 faster (and it is to their credit that they've managed this for so long). Nonetheless, the *only* reason to choose straight x86 is its backwards compatability -- which has no value to Apple. The possibilities for a gradual transition to 64 bits -- a transition Apple is currently halfway through -- under x86 are, at best, no better than that posed by PowerPC and the G5.
5. If Apple is sticking with PPC, but simply "shopping elsewhere" for future chips... Intel is about the last place on Earth that would want to help make faster/better PPC cpus; they have too much invested in competing technologies and (afaik) none of the licensing for PPC.
I agree: I don't think Apple is this stupid. But it's one helluva way to build anticipation for an announcement on Monday, and if the result is egg all over CNet's face, well, that would be pretty funny.
GameCube games will not be downloadable, however the console will play them directly -- simply slip the tiny disc into the slot-loader and away you go. It's likely PlayStation / GameBoy style backwards compatability, not straight emulation.
The announcements about downloading and playing older games mentioned only NES, SNES, and N64 games as candidates for download.
Not only has GameCube game-downloading not been announced, I'd say it's an infeasible thing to expect at this time. N64 cartridges, at their largest, are only 64MB; almost all are 32MB or less. This is a far cry from the 1.5 GB discs used by the GameCube -- particularly when it comes to downloading over WiFi or storing internally (Nintendo has not announced details regarding a harddrive, but it's safe to assume that if there is one it will be fairly small to keep prices low).
Although details have not been announced, I'd expect that at any given moment the Revolution might not store more than a handful of ROMs -- instead, it could archive your savegames for them and simply download the ROMs as needed; for the network speeds and ROMs they'll be dealing with it should only take a few moments (less than 30secs) to download -- as opposed to possibly hours for a GameCube disc.
"Yeah, yeah, Sony's girlfriend may be a bit more attractive, but does she put out? Make no mistake: The XBox 360's penis is much, much larger, and it gets used all the time."
I don't think it is necessary to outsource the PSP. If demand continues like this, they can keep the price at $250 much longer and sell more units. When demand starts to drop, just lower the price a little. Demand is not at such a high level as to justify a second factory without it oversaturating the market.
While Sony has always been fond of generating hype with holiday release shortages, most console sales are something of a now-or-never purchase -- if someone wants to buy it, you'd best be able to sell it to them now lest you those them forever.
Current sales figures show that the PSP is ridiculously far aware from any sort of market saturation; it's stupid to suggest that's an issue. And what would "oversaturating the market" be? Everyone who might ever possibly want one already owns five? (Although, given Sony's fault rates,... )
The original poster suggested that the DS lacked software and wasn't selling. The grandparent was simply pointing out that this obviously isn't true. It's hard to find recent data on the hardware sales (best I got was this) but all signs suggest that it's very possible that the DS is currently out-selling the PSP.
Returning to the question of software: essentially everyone who went to E3 said that there were a lot of very interesting, very promising DS games on display.... whereas it seemed like the PSP had been completely forgotten; the only stuff only display was something like Frogger and yet another racing game. (I exagerrate, but not by much.)
It seems some of the bitterness is due to his disappointment after he managed to snag a coveted Media pass, unlike those lowly serfs who wallow around with their "Exhibits Only" passes, only to find out that it doesn't mean squat.
E3, for all intents and purposes, is a public event -- anyone who truly wants to go and has the means to get there can find the means to get in.
Re:Could someone please explain how this works?
on
Four GPU Motherboard
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· Score: 1
Sadly, no one yet offers a solution that provides memory-sharing between GPUs, and you end using a lot of very expensive, fast memory to duplicate the same texture and geometry data on each card.
It seems like a collosal waste to me; given that the memory represents a large proportion of the cost of a high-end gfx card, one would think they'd borrow some knowledge from SMP designs to make better use of it.
Credit card numbers have a number of properties encoded in them, including a simple checksum. It would take only a trivial amount of processing to rule out the vast majority of the numbers generated by your script.
Clearly, technology is doing something. Technology and society are so tightly tied together that you can't untangle one from the other without destroying something.
Which is why a simple technological "fix" to a primarily social problem is rarely effective.
Stated alternately: It's hard to entirely fix a social problem with a technological solution, but careful use of techonology can really, really help.
Why is it so hard to accept that prodominately child-like games is not a sound marketing strategy in an increasingly competative market?
Because it is a sound marketing strategy.
Without conceding the fallacy that "Nintendo only makes kiddie games !!!1!!!one", I'd like to point out that compared to Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are essentially bottomless pits of money. Nintendo can't compete on their terms, because Sony and MS can at a moment's notice price those terms out of Nintendo's league by simply throwing more money at marketing and development.
So Nintendo, in an increasingly competetive market, instead focuses on those niches that the other guys are ignoring. Step 3, profit.
(Sega's mistake was to try to compete on Sony's terms when they didn't have the money to do it; they pushed too hard, too fast, and all Sony had to do was buy a bit of hype to completely undermine them)
Nintendo does not need to dominate the games industry to be successful; their stated intent is to simply make great games, and to be profitable in doing so. Is part of this a bruised ego talking? Sure, probably. But I challenge you to point out any situation where someone tried to openly compete on even terms with the-steamroller-that-is-Microsoft and came away successful. Nintendo's attitude seems quite sensible to me.
I have a laptop and 3 monitors that are comfortably capable of at least 1920 x 1200, and I can (& occasionally do) play games at that resolution. Do you have a 1080p-capable TV? Can you afford one? (they cost more than a full-on PC) Can you even *buy* one? I can't, not yet.
And how many thousands of dollars have you spent on all this equipment? Even bleeding-edge GPUs still struggle at 1920x1200 for any recent game, and 1920x1200-capable screens are also priced at a premium. While I agree that most people probably have higher-res monitors than TVs, and that 1080p TVs are still too expensive, I wouldn't confuse "what I already have" with "what it would cost to buy from scratch".
Don't expect many console games to actually support 1080 (i or p), however. The simpler ones might, but most will be tuned to run best at the more common (and easier) resolution of 720p.
Probably true for Xbox360; however, Sony has stated quite explicitly that 1080p will the standard internal resolution for all PS3 games. Of course, this is Sony, so you'll have to wait and see what they're saying a year from now.
I agree that Lucas seriously misused the droids -- underusing them for exposition, and overplaying them for comic relief. Jar Jar was a surrogate 3PO for TPM, only far more annoying and with none of the charm.
---EP 3 MINOR SPOILER WARNING--- That said, I did enjoy the moment in RotS where R2 warbles something to the effect of "Dude, seriously, I'm telling you Anakin as gone fucking baby-killing evil", which 3PO dismisses as something like "Oh, well, I'm sure he's just under a lot of stress".
No, he said that the only characters who would be common across all nine film would be the droids. Anything set after RotJ would almost by necessity not include any (other) characters from the prequels, because by the time RotJ ends they're all either dead or irrelevant/unimportant.
He never said the prequels couldn't include characters from 4-6; the over-arching plot of 1-3 is pretty much what it had been suggested it would be.
Lucas has, in recent years, basically said he had no idea what the plot for a sequel trilogy would be -- there are countless threads of father/son, failure/redemption parallels between 1-3 and 4-6 to tie them together; the (hypothetical) stories for any later movies would almost necessarily either be a retread of those themes, or suffer a disconnect by lacking them.
It's worth pointing out that the Cell processor is not exclusively IBM's; it was jointly developed with Sony and Toshiba, and all three share in its ownership.
Sony's stake in its development was, primarily, to get a powerhouse for the PS3, but also with the long-term intent of using it as a scalable design for all sorts of embedded/set-top-box applications, and the potential for use in workstations.
IBM's stake is, to some degree, that they're the ones who are actually capable of fabricating the chips.
But, yeah, it's been the stated intent of all three partners from the very start to get as many Cell chips in as many places as they can.
Have you ever been to an Auto Show? Or a football game?
Oh, wait, those are only for low-life shmucks who aren't ashamed of being attracted to women and aren't smart enough to spend all their time toying with computers.
A modern, refined individual, such as one whose declared hobby is 'video games' surely cannot indulge in such vulgar interests.
You're about two years out-of-date. Socket 939 and 754 processors with the same performance rating are now more or less the same price. (If you ignore the non-64-bit Sempron line)
Motherboards for both come at a range of prices, but tend to be in the standard $80-120 range. 754 ones may tend to be slightly less, but not significantly.
Opteron processors and early Athlon 64 FX processors (which were basically rebranded Opterons) run on Socket 940 and require ECC RAM; this is natural as they're targetted at the server market. No other Athlon 64 processors carry this requirement.
Basically, if you're looking to get a half-way decent AMD computer nowadays, there's no real reason not to get a Socket 939 processor with a PCIe motherboard; it's faster, more future-proof, and doesn't really cost any more.
Help Wanted: Can you surf for porn at least 8 hours a day? Self-motivated, goal-oriented individual needed full-time. Pay commensurate with experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps you should read up on the central limit theorem.
Just wait until someone tells Ballmer that he can't integrate it.
Regarding the DS: You don't have Meteos or even Kirby yet, either. But, oddly enough, you do have Another Code, which isn't do out in NA until the end of September (under the name "Trace Memory").
So, they probably meant that "we're not going to bother offer games in high resolutions. But, if you want, you can output to a nice screen." So expect their games to be running at 480i (or MAYBE 480p).
Almost every first/second party, and many third party games published on the Gamecube from the very start have supported 480p. If you're going to be outputting to a nice screen, the signal NEEDS to be at least 480p; modern monitors will not recognize anything less.
Are you sure those numbers are accurate, or telling the whole story? The movie versions of Resident Evil and Mortal Kombat would never have received sequels if the first ones were not decently profitable.
I agree with most of your points but have a few corrections:
GCN's cd's spin backwards relative to normal disks
No, they spin clockwise just like (practically) every other optical disc under the sun. The ARE different in that the data is read from the outer edge toward the center -- the "start" of the disc is on the edge, and if it's only half-full, then it's the center portion that will be blank. This is uncommon among optical discs, but it makes sense -- for any modern drive, read spead increases as you move towards the edge; by concentrating the data there the GameCube achieves a higher mean read speed on non-full discs.
I think slashdot people don't realize that 99.9% of people just don't have enough skill to read a tutorial on modding their PSP and putting the ROM's on to it.
To be fair, I'd say it's more like 75% don't have the skill. The other 24.9% realize it simply isn't worth the trouble and have better things to do with their time (and money).
If the deal was with AMD, it might almost be believable. But not Intel. And certainly not on stock 32-bit x86 processors.
... Intel is about the last place on Earth that would want to help make faster/better PPC cpus; they have too much invested in competing technologies and (afaik) none of the licensing for PPC.
Further points:
1. How do they expect to able to announce this and not kill their laptop and desktop sales for the next 15 months or so?
2. Steve Jobs is notorious for hating leaked announcements. "inside source"? This could be one colossal troll.
3. None of the typical Apple rumors sites seem to have heard anything more on this.
4. Just because IBM has had problems with designing/manufacturing faster PowerPC chips doesn't mean the architecture is at a dead end; by all accounts PowerPC offers many advantages over x86 on a very basic level.
4b. The x86 instruction set would be a pretty significant step BACKWARDS, architecturally. x86-64 fixes this, more or less, but it's AMD whose proven most successful at this, and not Intel. Intel has tried to come out with a way to move beyond x86's limitations, and has consistently fallen back to favouring designs that instead manage to make x86 faster (and it is to their credit that they've managed this for so long). Nonetheless, the *only* reason to choose straight x86 is its backwards compatability -- which has no value to Apple. The possibilities for a gradual transition to 64 bits -- a transition Apple is currently halfway through -- under x86 are, at best, no better than that posed by PowerPC and the G5.
5. If Apple is sticking with PPC, but simply "shopping elsewhere" for future chips
I agree: I don't think Apple is this stupid. But it's one helluva way to build anticipation for an announcement on Monday, and if the result is egg all over CNet's face, well, that would be pretty funny.
GameCube games will not be downloadable, however the console will play them directly -- simply slip the tiny disc into the slot-loader and away you go. It's likely PlayStation / GameBoy style backwards compatability, not straight emulation.
The announcements about downloading and playing older games mentioned only NES, SNES, and N64 games as candidates for download.
Not only has GameCube game-downloading not been announced, I'd say it's an infeasible thing to expect at this time. N64 cartridges, at their largest, are only 64MB; almost all are 32MB or less. This is a far cry from the 1.5 GB discs used by the GameCube -- particularly when it comes to downloading over WiFi or storing internally (Nintendo has not announced details regarding a harddrive, but it's safe to assume that if there is one it will be fairly small to keep prices low).
Although details have not been announced, I'd expect that at any given moment the Revolution might not store more than a handful of ROMs -- instead, it could archive your savegames for them and simply download the ROMs as needed; for the network speeds and ROMs they'll be dealing with it should only take a few moments (less than 30secs) to download -- as opposed to possibly hours for a GameCube disc.
I don't think it is necessary to outsource the PSP. If demand continues like this, they can keep the price at $250 much longer and sell more units. When demand starts to drop, just lower the price a little. Demand is not at such a high level as to justify a second factory without it oversaturating the market.
... )
While Sony has always been fond of generating hype with holiday release shortages, most console sales are something of a now-or-never purchase -- if someone wants to buy it, you'd best be able to sell it to them now lest you those them forever.
Current sales figures show that the PSP is ridiculously far aware from any sort of market saturation; it's stupid to suggest that's an issue. And what would "oversaturating the market" be? Everyone who might ever possibly want one already owns five? (Although, given Sony's fault rates,
The original poster suggested that the DS lacked software and wasn't selling. The grandparent was simply pointing out that this obviously isn't true. It's hard to find recent data on the hardware sales (best I got was this) but all signs suggest that it's very possible that the DS is currently out-selling the PSP.
Returning to the question of software: essentially everyone who went to E3 said that there were a lot of very interesting, very promising DS games on display.... whereas it seemed like the PSP had been completely forgotten; the only stuff only display was something like Frogger and yet another racing game. (I exagerrate, but not by much.)
The sad part, is that any time someones says innovation is dead, the ONLY counterexample people can point to, is Katamary.
That's more a comment on people's short memory spans and tendencies towards sensationalism than anything else.
It seems some of the bitterness is due to his disappointment after he managed to snag a coveted Media pass, unlike those lowly serfs who wallow around with their "Exhibits Only" passes, only to find out that it doesn't mean squat.
E3, for all intents and purposes, is a public event -- anyone who truly wants to go and has the means to get there can find the means to get in.
Sadly, no one yet offers a solution that provides memory-sharing between GPUs, and you end using a lot of very expensive, fast memory to duplicate the same texture and geometry data on each card.
It seems like a collosal waste to me; given that the memory represents a large proportion of the cost of a high-end gfx card, one would think they'd borrow some knowledge from SMP designs to make better use of it.
Credit card numbers have a number of properties encoded in them, including a simple checksum. It would take only a trivial amount of processing to rule out the vast majority of the numbers generated by your script.
Clearly, technology is doing something. Technology and society are so tightly tied together that you can't untangle one from the other without destroying something.
Which is why a simple technological "fix" to a primarily social problem is rarely effective.
Stated alternately: It's hard to entirely fix a social problem with a technological solution, but careful use of techonology can really, really help.
Why is it so hard to accept that prodominately child-like games is not a sound marketing strategy in an increasingly competative market?
Because it is a sound marketing strategy.
Without conceding the fallacy that "Nintendo only makes kiddie games !!!1!!!one", I'd like to point out that compared to Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are essentially bottomless pits of money. Nintendo can't compete on their terms, because Sony and MS can at a moment's notice price those terms out of Nintendo's league by simply throwing more money at marketing and development.
So Nintendo, in an increasingly competetive market, instead focuses on those niches that the other guys are ignoring. Step 3, profit.
(Sega's mistake was to try to compete on Sony's terms when they didn't have the money to do it; they pushed too hard, too fast, and all Sony had to do was buy a bit of hype to completely undermine them)
Nintendo does not need to dominate the games industry to be successful; their stated intent is to simply make great games, and to be profitable in doing so. Is part of this a bruised ego talking? Sure, probably. But I challenge you to point out any situation where someone tried to openly compete on even terms with the-steamroller-that-is-Microsoft and came away successful. Nintendo's attitude seems quite sensible to me.
I have a laptop and 3 monitors that are comfortably capable of at least 1920 x 1200, and I can (& occasionally do) play games at that resolution. Do you have a 1080p-capable TV? Can you afford one? (they cost more than a full-on PC) Can you even *buy* one? I can't, not yet.
And how many thousands of dollars have you spent on all this equipment? Even bleeding-edge GPUs still struggle at 1920x1200 for any recent game, and 1920x1200-capable screens are also priced at a premium. While I agree that most people probably have higher-res monitors than TVs, and that 1080p TVs are still too expensive, I wouldn't confuse "what I already have" with "what it would cost to buy from scratch".
Don't expect many console games to actually support 1080 (i or p), however. The simpler ones might, but most will be tuned to run best at the more common (and easier) resolution of 720p.
Probably true for Xbox360; however, Sony has stated quite explicitly that 1080p will the standard internal resolution for all PS3 games. Of course, this is Sony, so you'll have to wait and see what they're saying a year from now.
I agree that Lucas seriously misused the droids -- underusing them for exposition, and overplaying them for comic relief. Jar Jar was a surrogate 3PO for TPM, only far more annoying and with none of the charm.
---EP 3 MINOR SPOILER WARNING---
That said, I did enjoy the moment in RotS where R2 warbles something to the effect of "Dude, seriously, I'm telling you Anakin as gone fucking baby-killing evil", which 3PO dismisses as something like "Oh, well, I'm sure he's just under a lot of stress".
No, he said that the only characters who would be common across all nine film would be the droids. Anything set after RotJ would almost by necessity not include any (other) characters from the prequels, because by the time RotJ ends they're all either dead or irrelevant/unimportant.
He never said the prequels couldn't include characters from 4-6; the over-arching plot of 1-3 is pretty much what it had been suggested it would be.
Lucas has, in recent years, basically said he had no idea what the plot for a sequel trilogy would be -- there are countless threads of father/son, failure/redemption parallels between 1-3 and 4-6 to tie them together; the (hypothetical) stories for any later movies would almost necessarily either be a retread of those themes, or suffer a disconnect by lacking them.
#9) When constructing your tin-foil hat, make sure the shiny side is facing outwards.
It's worth pointing out that the Cell processor is not exclusively IBM's; it was jointly developed with Sony and Toshiba, and all three share in its ownership.
Sony's stake in its development was, primarily, to get a powerhouse for the PS3, but also with the long-term intent of using it as a scalable design for all sorts of embedded/set-top-box applications, and the potential for use in workstations.
IBM's stake is, to some degree, that they're the ones who are actually capable of fabricating the chips.
But, yeah, it's been the stated intent of all three partners from the very start to get as many Cell chips in as many places as they can.
Have you ever been to an Auto Show? Or a football game?
Oh, wait, those are only for low-life shmucks who aren't ashamed of being attracted to women and aren't smart enough to spend all their time toying with computers.
A modern, refined individual, such as one whose declared hobby is 'video games' surely cannot indulge in such vulgar interests.
You're about two years out-of-date. Socket 939 and 754 processors with the same performance rating are now more or less the same price. (If you ignore the non-64-bit Sempron line)
Motherboards for both come at a range of prices, but tend to be in the standard $80-120 range. 754 ones may tend to be slightly less, but not significantly.
Opteron processors and early Athlon 64 FX processors (which were basically rebranded Opterons) run on Socket 940 and require ECC RAM; this is natural as they're targetted at the server market. No other Athlon 64 processors carry this requirement.
Basically, if you're looking to get a half-way decent AMD computer nowadays, there's no real reason not to get a Socket 939 processor with a PCIe motherboard; it's faster, more future-proof, and doesn't really cost any more.
Non-simians need not apply.