The difference between Star Wars and Red Planet is that Star Wars does not even pretend to be scientifically correct. Taking place "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away," it is patently obvious that most anything can, and will, happen. That, and the fact that the technology is never really explained, make Star Wars more of a fantasy movie than sci-fi. Recall Arthur C Clarke's famous adage "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Incidentally, I hated the metachlorine bullshit that Lucas pulled out of his ass in Episode 1.)
As far as I can tell, Red Planet is a badly directed pseudo-science movie with no plot to hold it together.
The question of which is better - psx or n64 - largely depends on what kind of games you like. btw, I'm one of the unlucky souls who bought an N64 the week it came out because Square said they would do FF7 on it, and then had to get a Playstation when Square changed loyalties.)
The memory of this, and the subsequent fact that the N64 had very few good 3rd party supporters since (Rare being the obvious exception), leaves me thinking 2 things:
1. "Inferior" consoles can win against "superior" consoles. The N64 had great hardware for sure, and the psx's sucked royally. Personally, I'm not quite sure which out of the PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox has the "best" hardware; however, I fear that Joe Blow consumer will think the Xbox does. The hope that Nintendo and Sony will scrape the floor with Microsoft remains.
2. As a previous poster noted, where Square goes has a massive effect on many people's buying decisions. In Japan, it permanently crippled the N64. I fear, at the back of my mind, that Square's appraisal of the next-gen market will result in a move to the Xbox. It's possible. It would seem quite unlikely, given how much Square has already invested into Sony. (I don't think PlayOnline could make a neat and tidy transitition to Microsoft; after all, aren't they using GSCubes for the content servers?) But then again, Square's commitment to Nintendo seemed obvious too, and the switch to Sony was something nobody expected. The question then becomes: would I give in to evil, just to play Final Fantasy? Hard to say, but damnit, I hope I don't have to make that decision.
Jeez, I think I take this stuff a bit too seriously at times.
Well, it already is a Beowulf cluster in a sense, so that's slightly erroneous. I bet it would crank out Seti@home results like nobody's business though! oh, err, uhm, nevermind.
>I had thought Sony did have some kind of library
>now that developers could use
I've been thinking about this for a while myself. The GameCube, Xbox etc are claimed to be innately better than the PS2 becuase of their anti-aliasing features, but what's stopping PS2 developers from having the hardware render a frame at say, 1.5 times the resolution, and shrink it down to send it off to the TV? I'm sure the hardware could handle it. Or is not as simple as that? I'm not too technologically minded in terms of 3d graphics and such.
And plus all the college types who can just plug the PS2 ethernet adapter into the campus network (not that college students would have enough money to buy one though:).
>Er, the Sony Playstation 2 uses Linux for the OS.
Close, but wrong. The PS2 uses Linux as its development environment.
This brings up a good point, though, tied to why I think the Xbox and the Indrema will never succeed against the established Big 3 (Nintendo, Sony, and Sega, of course). Their consoles have no OS (Dreamcast only runs WinCE while web browsing). Any OS, any APIs, introduce significant overhead, whether it's trimmed Win2k bloat or a leaner Linux. If a console developer wants to tweak the absolute max performance out of a console, I garuantee you they don't write their game in Visual C++ 6.0. They write in assembly, directly to the hardware. The Indrema won't have a big of a handicap as the Xbox, as I'm sure Linux scales down better than Windows.
There's a big reason why quicktime runs millions of times better on a mac than a pc - Apple ported basically all of their Mac OS foundation code to the PC to get Quicktime up and running. So, it's a bunch of unoptimized code running on the wrong platform. Similarly, Microsoft did the same thing for all their Mac products.
It totally depends on the nature of the product, and the service it provides, to decide whether or not the hacking of it will be good and bad for a company's income.
Taking the examples of the i-Opener, TiVo, iPaq, etc, the actual hardware can't be reverse enginneered per se. Most people in the world don't have the skill to build a computer from scratch. However, the software running on the hardware is much more easily hackable, which is why we have the Linux on the i-Opener hacks, etc. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, because the company is still making money from selling the hardware, right? But, what if the company intended to take a loss on selling the hardware, and make their money on the service they provide to their machines, which, as I understand it, is what a lot of these set-top box sellers intended to do. Granted, if your consumers are running linux instead of running WebTV, or whatever, the company makes little money. So naturally they wouldn't like it.
Incidentally, video game consoles have always been sold in the same way; undercut the hardware WAY down, and make money on licensing and $50 games. It will be interesting to see what happens when people try and reverse engineer the latest generation of consoles, ie the PS2 and the Xbox. Given that they both have hard drives, it might be pretty easy to do.
Of course, if they had simply sold the hardware for a profit instead of a loss, then this whole mess wouldn't have happened. But then again, the hardware would have to cost $500 instead of $200, and nobody would buy it then, so maybe it's a Catch 22.
Actually, Final Fantasy 7 is not generally considered the best Square has to offer. Final Fantasy 6 and 8 are almost certainly better, and Chrono Cross is probably better than either. You might want to give it another chance.
Hehehe, excuse my laughter, but my school has a lab of about 20 celeron 400's running NT 4.0. Our sysadmin spends most of his time scurrying around showing people what to do after a BSOD (ie press restart). Our print servers (just NT boxes) go down several times a day. Perhaps it's because the hardware sucks (ever heard of PerScholas? nope, didn't think so), or maybe because they only have 64 megs of RAM, but either way, it's a mark against Wintel.
I think no one else is becuase it is incredibly expensive, and only some one like Square has the money and resources to pull this off, and make millions. Maybe in a few years, the doors will start to open.
I feel compelled to respond, becuase you obviously haven't any Square games other than the Final Fantasies. I'll grant you that the plots are sometimes a bit cookie-cuttered (Final Fantasy 7's extensive backstory is an exception), but what about Square's other main development team, the Chrono/Xenogears people? Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears are all incredible games with very deep and philosophical plots. And for your standard medieval politcal drama, try Final Fantasy Tactics or Vagrant Story.
You should think before you make broad assumptions.
>Sometimes I wish someone like IBM would issue a
>distro, just so there would be a real player with
>a serious service commitment behind the product.
What about SGI? I guess their distro is heavily Redhat based, but I think they modify it a bit. But then again, maybe nobody takes them seriously these days.
These new TLD's are a bad idea, imo. As if it isn't hard enough to remember any given url, this will now make it a good bit harder, given the essentially unlimited number of new TLD's. Perhaps a few new ones, like say.xxx to easily denote porn sites, might be nice to increase the name space, but really, most of the proposed tld's are way too long to easily remember, and the rest are obviously centered on one company's web site. Oh yeah, and I DID see.dot.
And I, personally, love it. It totally 0wnz Winamp in almost all respects, except that it can't do full-screen viz plugins at any res. higher than 640*480. I hope the Mac OS port is Carbonized, at least. So, the way I see it, if mp3 decoding takes up minimal cpu time these days, then Sonique takes up the slack with its crazy skins and visual plugins.
Does anybody know exactly how many DBZ episodes there are? My guess is somewhere above 300, but
god, given how slow the story advances, its probably something like 500.
Ah yes, MULTIVAC. Anybody remember the short story "The Last Question?" I love that one. If we believe Asimov, the ultimate computer is one moved into hyperspace and fused with Man's consciousness.
"And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light-
Right, and if I recall, those mini black holes should be exploding right about now (in a cosmic time frame), and that's taken, what, 6 billion years? Of course that is "fast" compared to standard size black holes, which would probably take much longer than the entire life span of the universe to explode. Nonetheless, our radio telescopes should have seen at least a few of these events, and I don't think we have, so it makes you wonder if mini black holes really exist.
Of course, they've been slowly radiating all the time, but the actual explosion takes a long time in human terms.
My guess is that a DOS attack would be the network security equivilent of a nuke. Blunt, imprecise, but very powerful, and there's nothing to do to stop it. A DDOS, is of course, even worse, because it makes the detection and tracking part so much harder. No wait, I take that back, a DDOS, like a nuke, can be noticed quite easily, but, like an ICBM, it might be hard to tell where it's coming from.
My metaphors are getting a bit batty, but I think you see my point. So if a DOS turns the whole security model "on its head," as you put it, what can be done about it besides weathering the storm?
Connectix comes to mind here; they make a variety of Mac emulators, such as Virtual PC and Virtual Game Station. Sony sued them over VGS, their PSX emulator. As I recall, Connectix won, because they hadn't copied the PSX's BIOS to write their emulator. The way I see it, these server emulators should be entirely legal if the developers did their reverse engineering without copying any of Verant's code.
Other parallels: what about OpenNap? I don't exactly know how that works, but I don't think Napster has sued anybody over it.
Actually, I think Apple's marketshare is about 5%, and Linux is around 4.3%. Mind you, the Linux user base is no doubt growing a lot faster than the Mac OS user base, giving this whole article a lot more credence. Though frankly, Microsoft acknowledged Linux as their primary competetion long before its marketshare was almost as large as Apple's, for the obvious reason that while Linux has only 4.3% marketshare of the total market, it and Apache control something like 60% of the server market. This scares Microsoft greatly, and has for a while, so I think that Linux has been much more of a competitor to Microsoft than Apple for a good long time
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The difference between Star Wars and Red Planet is that Star Wars does not even pretend to be scientifically correct. Taking place "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away," it is patently obvious that most anything can, and will, happen. That, and the fact that the technology is never really explained, make Star Wars more of a fantasy movie than sci-fi. Recall Arthur C Clarke's famous adage "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Incidentally, I hated the metachlorine bullshit that Lucas pulled out of his ass in Episode 1.)
As far as I can tell, Red Planet is a badly directed pseudo-science movie with no plot to hold it together.
I see a big difference.
The question of which is better - psx or n64 - largely depends on what kind of games you like. btw, I'm one of the unlucky souls who bought an N64 the week it came out because Square said they would do FF7 on it, and then had to get a Playstation when Square changed loyalties.)
The memory of this, and the subsequent fact that the N64 had very few good 3rd party supporters since (Rare being the obvious exception), leaves me thinking 2 things:
1. "Inferior" consoles can win against "superior" consoles. The N64 had great hardware for sure, and the psx's sucked royally. Personally, I'm not quite sure which out of the PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox has the "best" hardware; however, I fear that Joe Blow consumer will think the Xbox does. The hope that Nintendo and Sony will scrape the floor with Microsoft remains.
2. As a previous poster noted, where Square goes has a massive effect on many people's buying decisions. In Japan, it permanently crippled the N64. I fear, at the back of my mind, that Square's appraisal of the next-gen market will result in a move to the Xbox. It's possible. It would seem quite unlikely, given how much Square has already invested into Sony. (I don't think PlayOnline could make a neat and tidy transitition to Microsoft; after all, aren't they using GSCubes for the content servers?) But then again, Square's commitment to Nintendo seemed obvious too, and the switch to Sony was something nobody expected. The question then becomes: would I give in to evil, just to play Final Fantasy? Hard to say, but damnit, I hope I don't have to make that decision.
Jeez, I think I take this stuff a bit too seriously at times.
> 1.imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
Well, it already is a Beowulf cluster in a sense, so that's slightly erroneous. I bet it would crank out Seti@home results like nobody's business though! oh, err, uhm, nevermind.
Aye.
>I had thought Sony did have some kind of library
>now that developers could use
I've been thinking about this for a while myself. The GameCube, Xbox etc are claimed to be innately better than the PS2 becuase of their anti-aliasing features, but what's stopping PS2 developers from having the hardware render a frame at say, 1.5 times the resolution, and shrink it down to send it off to the TV? I'm sure the hardware could handle it. Or is not as simple as that? I'm not too technologically minded in terms of 3d graphics and such.
Don't forget Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross. Holy crap, those two games kick so much ass.
Herzog what? Was that an RPG?
And plus all the college types who can just plug the PS2 ethernet adapter into the campus network (not that college students would have enough money to buy one though :).
Even better than .uptight, how about .anal? Oh, wait, nevermind... ;)
>Er, the Sony Playstation 2 uses Linux for the OS.
Close, but wrong. The PS2 uses Linux as its development environment.
This brings up a good point, though, tied to why I think the Xbox and the Indrema will never succeed against the established Big 3 (Nintendo, Sony, and Sega, of course). Their consoles have no OS (Dreamcast only runs WinCE while web browsing). Any OS, any APIs, introduce significant overhead, whether it's trimmed Win2k bloat or a leaner Linux. If a console developer wants to tweak the absolute max performance out of a console, I garuantee you they don't write their game in Visual C++ 6.0. They write in assembly, directly to the hardware. The Indrema won't have a big of a handicap as the Xbox, as I'm sure Linux scales down better than Windows.
There's a big reason why quicktime runs millions of times better on a mac than a pc - Apple ported basically all of their Mac OS foundation code to the PC to get Quicktime up and running. So, it's a bunch of unoptimized code running on the wrong platform. Similarly, Microsoft did the same thing for all their Mac products.
It totally depends on the nature of the product, and the service it provides, to decide whether or not the hacking of it will be good and bad for a company's income.
Taking the examples of the i-Opener, TiVo, iPaq, etc, the actual hardware can't be reverse enginneered per se. Most people in the world don't have the skill to build a computer from scratch. However, the software running on the hardware is much more easily hackable, which is why we have the Linux on the i-Opener hacks, etc. This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, because the company is still making money from selling the hardware, right? But, what if the company intended to take a loss on selling the hardware, and make their money on the service they provide to their machines, which, as I understand it, is what a lot of these set-top box sellers intended to do. Granted, if your consumers are running linux instead of running WebTV, or whatever, the company makes little money. So naturally they wouldn't like it.
Incidentally, video game consoles have always been sold in the same way; undercut the hardware WAY down, and make money on licensing and $50 games. It will be interesting to see what happens when people try and reverse engineer the latest generation of consoles, ie the PS2 and the Xbox. Given that they both have hard drives, it might be pretty easy to do.
Of course, if they had simply sold the hardware for a profit instead of a loss, then this whole mess wouldn't have happened. But then again, the hardware would have to cost $500 instead of $200, and nobody would buy it then, so maybe it's a Catch 22.
Actually, Final Fantasy 7 is not generally considered the best Square has to offer. Final Fantasy 6 and 8 are almost certainly better, and Chrono Cross is probably better than either. You might want to give it another chance.
The Resident Evil movie got canned a long long time ago, I thought.
Hehehe, excuse my laughter, but my school has a lab of about 20 celeron 400's running NT 4.0. Our sysadmin spends most of his time scurrying around showing people what to do after a BSOD (ie press restart). Our print servers (just NT boxes) go down several times a day. Perhaps it's because the hardware sucks (ever heard of PerScholas? nope, didn't think so), or maybe because they only have 64 megs of RAM, but either way, it's a mark against Wintel.
I think no one else is becuase it is incredibly expensive, and only some one like Square has the money and resources to pull this off, and make millions. Maybe in a few years, the doors will start to open.
I feel compelled to respond, becuase you obviously haven't any Square games other than the Final Fantasies. I'll grant you that the plots are sometimes a bit cookie-cuttered (Final Fantasy 7's extensive backstory is an exception), but what about Square's other main development team, the Chrono/Xenogears people? Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears are all incredible games with very deep and philosophical plots. And for your standard medieval politcal drama, try Final Fantasy Tactics or Vagrant Story.
You should think before you make broad assumptions.
>Sometimes I wish someone like IBM would issue a
>distro, just so there would be a real player with
>a serious service commitment behind the product.
What about SGI? I guess their distro is heavily Redhat based, but I think they modify it a bit. But then again, maybe nobody takes them seriously these days.
The problem comes when goat.kids redirects to goat.sex. ;)
These new TLD's are a bad idea, imo. As if it isn't hard enough to remember any given url, this will now make it a good bit harder, given the essentially unlimited number of new TLD's. Perhaps a few new ones, like say .xxx to easily denote porn sites, might be nice to increase the name space, but really, most of the proposed tld's are way too long to easily remember, and the rest are obviously centered on one company's web site. Oh yeah, and I DID see .dot.
And I, personally, love it. It totally 0wnz Winamp in almost all respects, except that it can't do full-screen viz plugins at any res. higher than 640*480. I hope the Mac OS port is Carbonized, at least. So, the way I see it, if mp3 decoding takes up minimal cpu time these days, then Sonique takes up the slack with its crazy skins and visual plugins.
Does anybody know exactly how many DBZ episodes there are? My guess is somewhere above 300, but
god, given how slow the story advances, its probably something like 500.
Ah yes, MULTIVAC. Anybody remember the short story "The Last Question?" I love that one. If we believe Asimov, the ultimate computer is one moved into hyperspace and fused with Man's consciousness.
"And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
And there was light-
Hehe, Asimov rules.
Right, and if I recall, those mini black holes should be exploding right about now (in a cosmic time frame), and that's taken, what, 6 billion years? Of course that is "fast" compared to standard size black holes, which would probably take much longer than the entire life span of the universe to explode. Nonetheless, our radio telescopes should have seen at least a few of these events, and I don't think we have, so it makes you wonder if mini black holes really exist.
Of course, they've been slowly radiating all the time, but the actual explosion takes a long time in human terms.
My guess is that a DOS attack would be the network security equivilent of a nuke. Blunt, imprecise, but very powerful, and there's nothing to do to stop it. A DDOS, is of course, even worse, because it makes the detection and tracking part so much harder. No wait, I take that back, a DDOS, like a nuke, can be noticed quite easily, but, like an ICBM, it might be hard to tell where it's coming from.
My metaphors are getting a bit batty, but I think you see my point. So if a DOS turns the whole security model "on its head," as you put it, what can be done about it besides weathering the storm?
Connectix comes to mind here; they make a variety of Mac emulators, such as Virtual PC and Virtual Game Station. Sony sued them over VGS, their PSX emulator. As I recall, Connectix won, because they hadn't copied the PSX's BIOS to write their emulator. The way I see it, these server emulators should be entirely legal if the developers did their reverse engineering without copying any of Verant's code.
Other parallels: what about OpenNap? I don't exactly know how that works, but I don't think Napster has sued anybody over it.
Actually, I think Apple's marketshare is about 5%, and Linux is around 4.3%. Mind you, the Linux user base is no doubt growing a lot faster than the Mac OS user base, giving this whole article a lot more credence. Though frankly, Microsoft acknowledged Linux as their primary competetion long before its marketshare was almost as large as Apple's, for the obvious reason that while Linux has only 4.3% marketshare of the total market, it and Apache control something like 60% of the server market. This scares Microsoft greatly, and has for a while, so I think that Linux has been much more of a competitor to Microsoft than Apple for a good long time