In the latest Lovsan.* worm outbreak, the worm was programmed to generate a DDoS attack to www.windowsupdate.com, only the attack was not very successful because that domain was just a means of redirection to the real Windows Update site (windowsupdate.microsoft.com), so Microsoft just shut it down and avoided any harm.
But with this low-bandwidth exploit, which I believe is actually not a new idea, since IE uses a tricky method to increase speed by leaving persistent connections until they time out that could be exploited, now a worm can potentially DoS any website, even dynamically selecting the target from the users' IE favorites and performing the attack very quickly (maybe in a matter of hours) without having to rely it on being a widespread, coordinated DDoS or what the target OS/Server is.
The paper even claims that in order to protect a server from this type of attack you'd need to sacrifice a good deal of performance, which in most cases is not acceptable so many people can't really afford to implement defenses. Either a clever workaround is made for this exploit, or we have tough times ahead from worm outbreaks and script kiddies.
It doesn't really matter. I don't even think it's necessary for Apple to try and get a bigger marketshare. Most Apple users I know are really happy with their choices and sometimes it's their only choice, because of the software they run.
I can certainly see all Apple owners salivating for this one, so I believe eventually they'll own one. It's comparatively cheaper to a G4, after all.
Now, for me, I can't have a Mac as my main computer because the kind of software development I do is mostly x86-based (not Windows, mind you), but I am recommending buying Mac for everyone, because I don't like people around me to waste time learning how to use their computers, fix their crashes or remove that damn Blaster thing. Not to say MacOS X is indestructible or anything, but it's a big reliability leap for most Windows users.
At worst, I think they'll keep their marketshare, but I also believe people will have less of an argument not to buy a Mac.
Sorry for the following rant, but I've been in this industry long enough to know how it works.
First of all, saying the Xbox is the future is just fanboyism as the article totally lacks the journalism and the facts to support it.
In fact, even saying the Xbox is #2 is really the typical short-sighted american view of the market. The videogame industry is worldwide, and as such, you really need to view the market in total console and software sales. Xbox and GCN are actually exchanging #2 and #3 in total sales worldwide several times each quarter. But this is not actually the point, the point is that even if they were a solid #2, they are still a failure in terms of their own expectations.
Microsoft has made a lot of artificial gimmicks to support the Xbox in the market, and the lack of profits on the Xbox division should be enough for anybody to see that. They expected to be able to snatch most of the PS2 market within one generation and there is simply no sign of them being able to do that, even when spending billions in marketing and development, severely undercutting the price of the Xbox (losing upwards more than $150 per machine), sacrificing royalties and/or explicitely giving money to developers for exclusive games and features, or outright buying them.
I'm not saying which of the Xbox, GCN or PS2 are the most powerful, or has the best games, or yadda yadda. Pure and simple facts, see the Microsoft press releases regarding the Xbox before entering the market. You'll see that they completely ignore Nintendo, and regard Sony as their target and sole rival. The sad truth is, they are way far behind their own forecasts and they haven't captured but a tiny fraction of the supposedly huge market they would conquer in this generation. They are struggling with millions in revenue, but not a penny of profit, fighting for #2 with a company they chose to ignore.
And no, forecasts were not optimistic some long ago. It's annoying how anybody with Internet access can't even make a simple article without checking the facts.
This and this are some of the first news regarding Xbox, check that PS2 is the console mentioned as its target and Gamecube is quite simply ignored.
I ask... Is Xbox really "teh fu7ur3"? Seriously, had not Microsoft budgeted such a huge amount of money for this venture, the Xbox would never survive. And it's quite a waste of money not to be in #1 after all.
APIs are created for applications to be portable and sometimes compatible between platforms, but that's completely different from "full cross-platform compatibility". As you noted, APIs are NOT the same as hardware access, that's why you need a driver for in Windows or Linux, BESIDES the API implementation.
But, in the Xbox, as in all consoles, there is no discrete driver, so even if the DirectX programming interfaces are the same as in the PC, the actual resulting binaries have all the low-level access to the hardware hard-coded into them.
So, for the Xbox2 to be backwards-compatible, it will potentially need a wrapper, depending on the new chip design, and would presumably be implemented on the kernel inside the Boot ROM, similar to the PS2 implementation of texture filtering for PSOne titles. This could be a titanic task, and like in the PS2, compatibility may not be 100% achievable, rendering some or many games unplayable in the new console, depending again on the actual chip design.
As a result, I have no confidence in ATI what-so-ever, and that's why to this day I won't purchase a gamecube.
This is the most stupid argument I've ever seen against any console. It's like saying "I'll never buy an Apple computer because they use Motorola CPUs and Motorola's phones suck" then how about "I'll never buy an IBM Thinkpad because AIX sucks"?
Incredible... Now, seriously, the concept of "drivers" is not relevant on console development. Typically, the game engine itself is built with low-level calls to the hardware. And there are several companies working on middleware solutions, so most of the developers may actually never worry about hardware support.
ATI may have terrible driver support on Windows and Linux, but that's not where their strength lies. They were chosen by Microsoft because of their hardware (not only performance, but also price should have been an important factor why they dumped nVidia).
ATI's hardware in the Gamecube implementation is extremely well done, it's just a shame idiots like this can't appreciate the efficiency and elegance on its highly integrated design. And on top of that, reflect their ill-informed choices on the market, by buying overrated consoles like the Xbox instead.
Just to throw some facts around, the Gamecube has everything in terms of hardware capabilities the Xbox has. (Pixel/Vertex shaders? You BET! and bet again) The Xbox may still be around 20% more powerful in raw graphics performance, but this has a very high cost in power consumption, size and cost of the components.
FACTS: Gamecube sells for $150 WITH A PROFIT for Nintendo and consumes around 30W, while Microsoft sells the Xbox for $180 WITH A HUGE LOSS, consumes around 200W and on top of it, it's around 3 times as big, if not more. Hint: ATI's ArtX team and nVidia had a high influence on these facts for their respective consoles.
Now tell me why Microsoft wouldn't want a piece of the pie.
Yes, even Maya and Lightwave, in which both I'm slightly profficient, can sometimes be difficult to work with because the undo function doesn't go to the extent you need in some special cases. There are also some functions that are impossible to undo.
Many people working with these type of applications make a good habit of creating incremental versions of their work, so that most of the geometry is kept in different states in old files, ready to use either in case of errors, crashes or even as useful reference for the current work (for example, some old low polygon primitives can help speed up other stages of your work, like fine-tuning the animation), just look at how useful the "history" feature in Maya is.
The undo function is not a magical one, it can't do everything and sometimes the user still needs to be clever and go beyond what the application itself can do.
Somebody said it already but it needs to be stressed: We're not talking about an e-mail client, this is 3D modeling and animation software.
You don't seem to know which games actually have a relationship between lag and framerate. You also don't seem to have ever seen Kirby Air Ride, and you don't seem to be a Nintendo employee.
Apart from the fact that your so-called "New Technology Department" does not exit (you have quite some history on./ and other places, but I'll leave that to other people), if you were an employee you would know the details of a game that was shown two months ago at E3. (Hint: I have a reason to know all of this)
Well, after this little rant, I'll say something more on-topic.
Some racing games can compensate lag very well because quick reactions may not have a drastic effect on your vehicle's course (games like MotoGP). However, in racing games featuring weapons, lag can be very damaging because the reaction associated to attack and defense needs to be in real time, and sometimes the developers choose to pause the game while synchronizing the moves in order to keep fairness. And then it comes down to how many 15ms frames (not screen frames) are ok to lose without having to stop the game for sync (just look at Capcom Vs. SNK online on DC, PS2 and Xbox)
Contrary to what you said, Kirby Air Ride's simple controls could be suitable to Internet gaming without much trouble, but Mario Kart could pose a problem because the weapon system is an important gameplay feature. Miyamoto himself performed tests on the game and he was not satisfied with MK going online for this very reason.
But I bet you can just walk over to his office and ask, can't you?
Radeon owners? Well, that sounds a little bit misleading and should be differently worded, but certainly the nforce2 chipset has features that are not video specific and can be attractive to Radeon users.
The nforce2 uses a 128 bit memory architecture that benefits the system's memory bandwidth as a whole. The GART helps here because you can now combine this architecture with a separate AGP video card, neglecting the relatively lower-end video core inside the nforce2.
GART is an AGP bridge feature, not a Video Chip feature, and the nforce2 is the best AMD compatible chipset out there, combine that with the current best Video chipset out there, which right now happens to be a Radeon, and there you have it, Radeon owners like myself rejoicing:)
Games are a very complete form of expression, as such, they're able to convey or express complex messages or feelings to many of our senses simultaneously, but as I'm afraid happens with most other forms of expression, it just depends on who is trying to express something, how it is expressed and who is willing to receive it.
Many games are really complete works of art, you need people working in the plot and gameplay, music and graphics, so you practically have writers, musicians, painter and sculptors all working in a project, plus the coders and engineers to create an environment where all these elements can be merged. And on top of it, it's interactive, no other medium can ever give you that level of immersion.
Someone here mentioned having a bad experience playing PC games. Sure, I myself would say most FPS are just overrated pieces of crap, but I'd never underestimate the perception of those who are willing to appreciate a single element of the game that attracts them the most. Being the music or a single texture map.
I dare anyone to ever play Xenogears, FFVI, Metal Gear Solid, Zelda, Metroid and many other beatifully crafted games to the end, and not come out compelled on the powerful experience they can provide you. Some of them even make you question your own beliefs, some others will make you reflect upon your behavior. When an author is able to make you truly feel something, that's definitely art.
That said, I'm not pretending that ALL GAMES are art. Not all paintings, not all music, not all writings and certainly not all games are masterful pieces of art. But the subjective differences between those that can and those that can't be considered as art are what make our "art appreciation" skills meaningful.
I know you were being funny, but actually, a cluster in QNX is the easiest thing to do ever.
QNX's architecture is very much oriented towards message passing, and every piece of hardware is abstracted, even processors. This means you can have a lot of CPUs or machines working on a network running your applications and the load will be evenly distributed, without you having to specifically code your applications. Your only limit is your network performance and latency.
Hell, you'd need to code your application with special system calls for it to know it's not running locally!
I had a wonderful experience with QNX4 a couple of years ago. QNX4 back then didn't have SMP support, but I called QNX Support and they told me how to run one kernel on each CPU of my server and Voila! I had the equivalent of a cluster in one box. Performance was very good, too, context switching was not even worth to measure.
QNX Neutrino is even more powerful, and now it supports SMP... Beowulf clusters are sooo 1999...
Nop, what I meant is that they used code from BSD, which already fought a similar battle a long time ago. Of course, IANAL, but having their OS based on BSD should be enough to use the UNIX name at least for reference.
"Windows" is also a very generic term, and there you had Microsoft going after Lindows in the same way.
That case should provide enough precedence, although The Open Group may be doing this precisely to set precedence on the whole SCO fiasco. I smell something fishy about this.
Also, I'm a little confused on how can they say Apple used the trademark without a license. AFAIK Apple didn't use any source code from UNIX directly, they based Darwin from BSD, which in turn should have a clear relationship with the UNIX trademark, am I wrong?
Actually, I tried to do the same with an embedded system we developed at our company.
Thing is, laptop design and manufacturing is orders of magnitude more expensive than typical PCs. The motherboard design has a completely different approach, as there are other elements to care about, like the type of packaging for the chips (TSOP and such), the thermal design, power consumption, case design, etc. Then there are things like Pilot Runs and Engineering Verification Tests, which are three or four steps for a PC, while the same are performed six or seven times for laptops.
Because performance was the only thing Microsoft cared about when designing the Xbox, I can imagine the XPU and XCP (the chipsets on the Xbox) being a real pain to work with, even with their current design. Just look at the huge heatsink and fan inside the Xbox, and if you want to be really scared then look at the power consumption rate (around 200W when the other consoles and a typical laptop don't surpass 50W).
Just thinking about this would be enough to give the Xbox team a headache. I don't think they would ever consider it because performance is their only marketing advantage, and that could also hurt them if they want to make a portable system.
If you want a very good, efficient design in terms of "MIPS per Watt" and physical space, go for Gamecube, you have your laptop design right there: tiny motherboard, low power consumption, TSOPII chip packaging, expansion ports, etc., hell, it even sports a handle:) And there are battery/screen solutions so portability is also covered.
Also remember that with the GBA SP in the market, you can get the regular GBA at a lower price, meaning it's now easier to get those four GBAs to play The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords or Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and enjoy multiplayer madness.
There are many reasons to get a GBA and a Gamecube too, the connectivity shown in the two systems with great titles like Pac-Man is just awesome, I played it myself at the last E3 and I was amazed how such a simple idea could breathe life again into a 23-year old game.
Nintendo is pushing the connectivity very strongly as it is the only market advantage it has over Microsoft and Sony, and the gameplay ideas are getting better by the minute.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the next generation Sony tries to do the same with the PSP (they already tried with the Pocketstation), however, price may be an issue with the high specs announced for that machine. So, at least for now, it's easier to try and get more than one GBA and enjoy some of the innovative gameplay designs today.
First, as we all know, there are lies, damn lies and benchmarks. But a company cheating here can really be damaging to the industry.
In this day and age, the top of the line video cards have more than 100 million transistors, and have become increasingly "intelligent" in sorting and rearranging data, instructions and choosing algorithms to get the best performance out a given engine. Some engines perform better than the others under different circumstances, making benchmarks even more subjective than ever.
Furthermore, there's no established standard on what kind of resolutions, color depths, FSAA, etc. a game should run on, and therefore there's also no standard on how to create a base hardware architecture that can be used as a starting point for comparisons. Sure, we have the same basic features on every card (shaders, T&L, texture units, etc.), but each and every one is implemented in a completely different way and it changes radically every few generations of hardware, making yesterday's optimizations obsolete.
But all of this is actually just fine, because the different architectures and 3D engines combine in different ways in each generation to produce new results, not unlike genes. The 3D graphics industry is truly on a fast evolutionary path, and just comparing back to my old Riva would be enough to make Darwin jealous.
So, a company detecting a specific binary in order to optimize/cheat/whatever how the hardware works in a given situation is an artificial gain that destroys the whole purpose of having better hardware each generation in the first place, and is completely unforgivable for both nVidia and ATI.
They should instead work on improving the "intelligence" of their drivers and hardware, which could arguably provide better results in benchmarks without having to resort to stupid, cheap methods that will damage themselves and the entire industry in the long run.
So, as far as I'm concerned, Futuremark should keep doing what they can to prevent cheating, and the users must support this and every similar effort. The 3D graphics industry will be damned the day it becomes a code war between cheaters and moderators. (not unlike online video games, by the way)
Don't even bother to list the things they should include in the Live Action version, I believe they are already taking the story to a completely different path. Just look at the oversimplified summary of the series in the press release:
'"Neon Genesis Evangelion" is the story of a reluctant young hero, called upon to pilot an immense robotic weapon in battle against alien invaders.'
yeah, alien invaders, wait... ALIEN INVADERS?? I think this project is already beyond help. I already see them removing most of the religious references, to only focus on a couple of key events, like Shinji getting the Eva and the "aliens" trying to the end of the world (maybe even without mention of the 3rd impact).
I don't think we should even try to compare this movie to the untouchable anime classic. The same thing is happening to many other projects like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and it won't stop. The movie market segment (the general public) is just so very different from us geeks.
Sega and Namco already have a long term relationship in a joint venture the two of them went together with Nintendo when they created the Triforce, which is an Arcade Board based on the Gamecube architecture.
This joint venture is not likely to break in the near future, because Nintendo is practically giving them access to a revenue stream using not only the hardware, but also with high-profile franchises such as F-Zero and Star Fox, in exchange of their development expertise. I think this is going to work great and could help to define how things are going to be in the future. (e.g. show executives how things are done right)
It's widely known that merging with Sammy, EA or M$ would actually bring Sega to the black sooner than merging with Namco, because even Namco is not on a very strong financial situation by itself. But Sega developers like Namco the better, because it would be the only way they could stay at the company doing things the way they like.
Meanwhile, Sammy, EA and M$ have the same problem: They don't actually need Sega's developers. They'd basically buy it for the trademarks, branding and IP because they have very different methods on game design, development and marketing.
Mostly every Sega team would be in danger of being disbanded. There are people with different skills, different approaches to gaming and trained in different pieces of hardware. A merger with any of these three companies can only result in the loss of this core philosophy. EA likes very short development cycles with very poor execution, M$ likes exclusivity and Sammy likes amusement machines.
Imagine if Rez, Panzer Dragoon, Shenmue and many other great games could never exist were Sega under any of these three companies' wings. A situation like this can really be an issue for any potential buyer, because it can also affect the buying price, and that's where Sega and Sammy disagreed.
I truly felt something was wrong with this merger when I first heard about it. I remembered another merger Sega planned with Bandai some years ago, which failed miserably, possibly because of the same reasons.
The current consoles do have the processing power to efficiently decode an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 stream and play it on progressive scan rivaling the higher-end DVD players, but they just won't do it in the best way, because the manufacturers don't want the consoles to directly compete with DVD players as they only get revenue from the games, i.e. they don't get a royalty from someone playing a movie on their consoles. In fact, movies are the greatest competition for game companies. It's a grip, but on a different type of content.
The only reason why the three consoles play DVDs (yes, even the Gamecube in its Q version), is because it's an attractive feature, and a selling point. But they still don't support progressive scan for DVD (though the PS2 will, soon), they do integer approximations when decoding the frames, and the player functions leave a lot to be desired. Now guess what? It'd be the same for any broadband stream as long as there's no tie-up with a big content provider. Sony, of course is also a content powerhouse, but it's not going to happen at least in this generation of consoles.
Also, I disagree that a 1.5 Megabit connection would suffice to replace a DVD. DVD is also appreciated because of the high A/V quality, and while MPEG-4 may be able to achieve better video quality at less bitrate than MPEG-2, what about the audio, do we use 128Kb 5.1 channel Ogg/Vorbis or what? DTS 5.1 is encoded in a 1.5 Megabit stream by itself in many DVDs, and the low compression ratio is actually DTS' biggest competitive point. Simply put, saying a current broadband connection could replace the content a DVD provides is just inane.
Now, for the off-topic: I have experience working with Nintendo in several platforms along the years. I meet people from NCL every year at E3, and I can assure you there's no "New Technology Research Department" in Japan. I know VERY well, because I worked in a "second party" company that tried very hard to convince Nintendo to make new projects which were not 100% related to entertainment. Nintendo of course adamantly rejected those efforts so this Samir guy saying he's the "head" of such a department just annoys me to no end.
Furthermore, he can't be a "head", since there's no such position in a japanese company. And a New Technology Department is not the same thing as an R&D Department. He's just a well disguised troll.
I am involved in the videogames industry. In this generation of consoles, there has been a lot of controversy on the definition of broadband, since there's not a standard on the requirements for any given game and there's not a clear way for the user and the developer to know if they are met beforehand.
This causes a big problem for everybody. Developers have an inherent need to limit their bandwidth requirements and perform a lot of tests to reduce network problems, and it can really influence gameplay design; technical support and marketing can be a headache for the publisher and the experience for the user can be very frustrating if there is a simple latency problem, even if the bandwidth is high.
Every "broadband" user in this case says: "but I have broadband! Why can't I play?". Latency and bandwidth are very complex things to explain, and many factors can affect the videogame experience negatively. (number of hops, type of interface, firewalls, NATs, network traffic, just to name a few)
I performed extensive tests with the Dreamcast, the PS2, the GameCube and the Xbox, I can say not many games really require more than a 64K connection, but in many cases, while even the bandwidth of a 56K modem could suffice, a specific game may have a problem with the latency associated. That's why some games are labeled as "broadband only". Of course, it doesn't guarantee the connection will meet the game's requirements, but it minimizes the problem somewhat.
As it is, we used to have a better way of classifying the connection speed on dial-up modems. The diversity on interfaces and protocols (xDSL, Cable, WLAN, etc.) just render the term "broadband" useless.
I remember Ken Kutaragi (Playstation's main designer) saying something in a conference a couple years ago that went along the lines: "you call 1.5 Megabits/sec 'broadband'? But that's about the speed of a CDROM!" I wish Kutaragi extended the analogy to latency using CDROM seek and access time too.
We need a better way to refer to a modern Internet connection, period.
As someone who has been involved in development of computer boards (not just PCs), I can say pin compatibility is not aimed for the end-user's benefit, VIA C3 is not just intended to be a "replacement CPU". Although it could be used as such, it is not the biggest benefit of pin compatibility.
The main reason why it's desirable for Via to have a pin-compatible CPU with Intel's specification is because it shortens the development time and cost of a motherboard. It's easier and cheaper for the M/B manufacturer to design the board's layout if the signals are in the same place, because a re-layout of a M/B is very expensive in both time and money. (in some cases the full development can go upwards to several hundred thousand dollars)
Additionally, there are chipsets that can support both Intel and Via CPUs, (most notably some SIS SOC designs) making it even easier to make a M/B, but this fact it's not necessarily related to having interchangeable CPUs with a socket. Having a socket is of little to no use because Intel and Via CPU's are aimed at different market segments, anyway.
Remember the whole Slot-1/Slot-A fiasco? Intel developed the PII with a slot connector, and used patents/copyrights/trademarks/whatever to prevent AMD or any other CPU manufacturer to make pin-compatible CPUs. AMD then developed the Athlon to use exactly the same connector, although with different electrical specifications and pin definition. This move was aimed to facilitate the manufacturers' development and time-to-market efforts, never to give power to the end-user.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned this and everybody is easily misleaded into thinking this issue is not a important one. Maybe this shows just how few hardware development we have in the West.
When debating about lossy formats with variable parameters, it can easily get to the point of making a flamewar of "quality vs. bitrate", "MP3 vs. OGG vs. ATRAC vs. whatever".
But you're missing the point. You are talking about Sony, a big consumer electronics company, not about esoteric command line parameters.
On a regular Minidisc deck, you don't get to manage the ATRAC compression parameters and bitrate, and you get a very good quality and a real "guarantee" that if you are using all-Sony equipment, your recorded Minidiscs are going to sound just great. This is simple, and users love it.
Now, MP3 is a format that almost nobody but experienced people understands. As you said: "MP3s encoded at 128kbps CBR (constant bit rate) using an encoder such as Xing WILL result in poor-quality mp3s". Want to bet how many people sharing their MP3s collections on P2P know that? Popular MP3s on the 'Net are of average quality, at best. Most of them are real crap (well, some songs may not deserve any better).
ATRAC is a format users DON'T NEED to understand. Minidisc is a user-end oriented product, and a really good one at that. ATRAC even has full forward and backward compatibility, meaning you don't need to know which versions of encoded discs and decoder players you have for them to work perfectly.
Now, as other/.er noted, the MDLP and NetMD features were created by pure marketing necessity, Sony basically noticed some people are too stupid and don't give a damn about quality when presented with silly figures like "X hours of music on a disk".
MDLP and NetMD are there for a reason, it's comparable to the quality Kaaza lusers are used to from their crappy MP3s, while keeping the simplicity of the Minidisc format.
That's not entirely possible. Retailers also want their profit margin. You don't get product placement and shelf space if you don't give revenue. And short of Microsoft putting money on retailer's pockets directly, I don't see any way to make it free and penetrate the market as they wanted.
Xbox Live free inside the Xbox package could be a way, but remember Sega? I bet this approach might be effective, but pretty unpopular with shareholders and analysts because of Seganet's outcome.
Thing is, MS is making a huge gamble on the Xbox, because it may never be profitable. I wouldn't expect to see further gambles, though that's not out of the question, given MS track record of cornering the competition by any means.
MS needs something to offset the losses, and Xbox Live is bringing the same profit margins as a successful 1st party game, like Halo. Try to convince MS management to pass off that.
Sorry, but I am a developer and I worked on the Nintendo64 and I know the internal architecture of both N64 and GCN enough to know the technical data you're using as reference is all wrong.
First of all, the texture memory. There's a huge difference between "texture memory" and the 3MB you're referring to. The GCN has 1MB texture cache and 2MB framebuffer. these are very high performance 3MB of SRAM _ON-CHIP_. The on-chip memory is to speed up the rendering process by having the data close to the chip, similar to the data portion of a CPU's L1 cache. For a comparison, the N64 had a 4KB texture cache on-chip, so the GCN has 256 times more texture cache. The concept of "Texture Memory" is ancient and used in the past on professional workstation video cards.
Textures use MAIN memory, the GCN has 24MB of high performance 1T-SRAM and 16MB of DRAM, 40MB total. Additionally, it uses S3TC compression technology to bring down the bandwidth and memory usage by factors like 4:1 and 6:1, depending on size, complexity and color depth. There's also a proprietary vertex compression algorithm on hardware, so the GCN has far more than just 10 times the amount of RAM the N64 had.
Now to the Mini DVDs. You are missing the point when you say 1 DVD-9 = 6 GC discs, GCN has hardware assisted video decoding, and because Nintendo didn't choose DVD's MPEG2 format as the standard, they can use other formats if needed. In contrast, the PS2 has a very specific MPEG2 decoder, so while it could support other video formats, there's no reason to do otherwise because the support is already there, ditto with the Xbox. GCN now has a DivX codec, so a disc could fit more than two hours worth of video. And really, I dare you to find a game that has more than 1.5GB worth of content on the disc (not counting FMVs). Remember everything on the disc is also compressed in several formats to ease memory and bandwidth usage and to speed up loading times. Saying 1.5GB means "it won't see things like FFX with video intact" is just plain ignorant. You don't get FFX's video "intact", you get it encoded to MPEG2 from the original uncompressed video on Square's rendering farms. The only thing you should care about is the video quality, and everybody and their sisters know DivX gives you better quality at lower bitrates than MPEG2.
About the controller, I too have my gripes, I would've liked a more symmetric controller, like the PS2 one. But don't ever try to criticize the GCN controller when there's the horrible Xbox controller on the market. They changed it even after insisting: "but the focus groups' people said it was excellent!". CVS2 EO option? Ask any real player, nobody uses it on GCN. Get into Xbox Live, and you'll see many high-ranked players use EO _exclusively_.
The reason behind developers dropping features and making half-assed ports is because of time-to-market issues, not because the GCN has not a strong architecture. Just see what happened when porting Metal Gear Solid 2 to the Xbox. Isn't the Xbox supposedly a better console? Konami making a bad port? Even on Microsoft's money? Impossible!!! </sarcasm>
Truth is, Nintendo had a problem in getting developers to make multi-platform games that look and play as good (or bad) as they should, because they didn't throw enough money to the problem. They are doing it now with Sega, Namco, Capcom and EA, but having MS as competitors for 2nd place, they should've done it sooner.
To end this long rant, what you said about proprietary formats is half right. Nintendo controls their software distribution very closely, and in many ways wrong (I agree on the optical vs cart media thing). But that's because it's the only revenue maker they've got. Sony has the Consumer Electronics world in their hands and MS can afford to lose 100 million per month like they're doing and still be around for decades. Never forget Nintendo is the ONLY one making a living purely out of video games, period. Now tell me that's not a "true gamers" company.
What are they going to say? Their approach to "shared-source" is better? Open Source stifles competition and innovation? TCO is better in Windows Servers? These are some of their old arguments, and I would really like to see how they stand by them in front of real OSS developers.
But what I'm really interested in, is that they could very well bring some new elements to the table, as Microsoft so far has never discussed openly their stance on Open Source. This is a golden opportunity for us to debate important issues and walk out stronger, even if they really showed that our OSS/Free Software development environments suck (as if).
I would like to ask them new questions, not "What do you think it's wrong with the GPL?". or argue whether [open|closed] software is better, these are things we and them will never agree upon.
I'd ask them: "What are your long-term plans on opening your own source?" "Do you think your software can be improved by opening the source?"
Remember how the Mindcraft benchmarks accelerated the development of faster and better HTTP servers? Let them make their plans, and see if we can learn a thing or two.
As long as they don't give full freedom to developers like we do, there's no need to act afraid as if we were a company facing the competition and we're losing our "trade secrets" just by having a good talk with them.
Slashdot Mirror
I've learned to take CNets news with a grain of salt, since many times they just seem to editorialize stories and add in useless comments etc.
Sorry, but I don't see how is this different from /.
In the latest Lovsan.* worm outbreak, the worm was programmed to generate a DDoS attack to www.windowsupdate.com, only the attack was not very successful because that domain was just a means of redirection to the real Windows Update site (windowsupdate.microsoft.com), so Microsoft just shut it down and avoided any harm.
But with this low-bandwidth exploit, which I believe is actually not a new idea, since IE uses a tricky method to increase speed by leaving persistent connections until they time out that could be exploited, now a worm can potentially DoS any website, even dynamically selecting the target from the users' IE favorites and performing the attack very quickly (maybe in a matter of hours) without having to rely it on being a widespread, coordinated DDoS or what the target OS/Server is.
The paper even claims that in order to protect a server from this type of attack you'd need to sacrifice a good deal of performance, which in most cases is not acceptable so many people can't really afford to implement defenses. Either a clever workaround is made for this exploit, or we have tough times ahead from worm outbreaks and script kiddies.
It doesn't really matter. I don't even think it's necessary for Apple to try and get a bigger marketshare. Most Apple users I know are really happy with their choices and sometimes it's their only choice, because of the software they run.
I can certainly see all Apple owners salivating for this one, so I believe eventually they'll own one. It's comparatively cheaper to a G4, after all.
Now, for me, I can't have a Mac as my main computer because the kind of software development I do is mostly x86-based (not Windows, mind you), but I am recommending buying Mac for everyone, because I don't like people around me to waste time learning how to use their computers, fix their crashes or remove that damn Blaster thing. Not to say MacOS X is indestructible or anything, but it's a big reliability leap for most Windows users.
At worst, I think they'll keep their marketshare, but I also believe people will have less of an argument not to buy a Mac.
Sorry for the following rant, but I've been in this industry long enough to know how it works.
First of all, saying the Xbox is the future is just fanboyism as the article totally lacks the journalism and the facts to support it.
In fact, even saying the Xbox is #2 is really the typical short-sighted american view of the market. The videogame industry is worldwide, and as such, you really need to view the market in total console and software sales. Xbox and GCN are actually exchanging #2 and #3 in total sales worldwide several times each quarter. But this is not actually the point, the point is that even if they were a solid #2, they are still a failure in terms of their own expectations.
Microsoft has made a lot of artificial gimmicks to support the Xbox in the market, and the lack of profits on the Xbox division should be enough for anybody to see that. They expected to be able to snatch most of the PS2 market within one generation and there is simply no sign of them being able to do that, even when spending billions in marketing and development, severely undercutting the price of the Xbox (losing upwards more than $150 per machine), sacrificing royalties and/or explicitely giving money to developers for exclusive games and features, or outright buying them.
I'm not saying which of the Xbox, GCN or PS2 are the most powerful, or has the best games, or yadda yadda. Pure and simple facts, see the Microsoft press releases regarding the Xbox before entering the market. You'll see that they completely ignore Nintendo, and regard Sony as their target and sole rival. The sad truth is, they are way far behind their own forecasts and they haven't captured but a tiny fraction of the supposedly huge market they would conquer in this generation. They are struggling with millions in revenue, but not a penny of profit, fighting for #2 with a company they chose to ignore.
And no, forecasts were not optimistic some long ago. It's annoying how anybody with Internet access can't even make a simple article without checking the facts.
This and this are some of the first news regarding Xbox, check that PS2 is the console mentioned as its target and Gamecube is quite simply ignored.
I ask... Is Xbox really "teh fu7ur3"? Seriously, had not Microsoft budgeted such a huge amount of money for this venture, the Xbox would never survive. And it's quite a waste of money not to be in #1 after all.
APIs are created for applications to be portable and sometimes compatible between platforms, but that's completely different from "full cross-platform compatibility". As you noted, APIs are NOT the same as hardware access, that's why you need a driver for in Windows or Linux, BESIDES the API implementation.
But, in the Xbox, as in all consoles, there is no discrete driver, so even if the DirectX programming interfaces are the same as in the PC, the actual resulting binaries have all the low-level access to the hardware hard-coded into them.
So, for the Xbox2 to be backwards-compatible, it will potentially need a wrapper, depending on the new chip design, and would presumably be implemented on the kernel inside the Boot ROM, similar to the PS2 implementation of texture filtering for PSOne titles. This could be a titanic task, and like in the PS2, compatibility may not be 100% achievable, rendering some or many games unplayable in the new console, depending again on the actual chip design.
As a result, I have no confidence in ATI what-so-ever, and that's why to this day I won't purchase a gamecube.
This is the most stupid argument I've ever seen against any console. It's like saying "I'll never buy an Apple computer because they use Motorola CPUs and Motorola's phones suck" then how about "I'll never buy an IBM Thinkpad because AIX sucks"?
Incredible... Now, seriously, the concept of "drivers" is not relevant on console development. Typically, the game engine itself is built with low-level calls to the hardware. And there are several companies working on middleware solutions, so most of the developers may actually never worry about hardware support.
ATI may have terrible driver support on Windows and Linux, but that's not where their strength lies. They were chosen by Microsoft because of their hardware (not only performance, but also price should have been an important factor why they dumped nVidia).
ATI's hardware in the Gamecube implementation is extremely well done, it's just a shame idiots like this can't appreciate the efficiency and elegance on its highly integrated design. And on top of that, reflect their ill-informed choices on the market, by buying overrated consoles like the Xbox instead.
Just to throw some facts around, the Gamecube has everything in terms of hardware capabilities the Xbox has. (Pixel/Vertex shaders? You BET! and bet again) The Xbox may still be around 20% more powerful in raw graphics performance, but this has a very high cost in power consumption, size and cost of the components.
FACTS: Gamecube sells for $150 WITH A PROFIT for Nintendo and consumes around 30W, while Microsoft sells the Xbox for $180 WITH A HUGE LOSS, consumes around 200W and on top of it, it's around 3 times as big, if not more. Hint: ATI's ArtX team and nVidia had a high influence on these facts for their respective consoles.
Now tell me why Microsoft wouldn't want a piece of the pie.
Yes, even Maya and Lightwave, in which both I'm slightly profficient, can sometimes be difficult to work with because the undo function doesn't go to the extent you need in some special cases. There are also some functions that are impossible to undo.
Many people working with these type of applications make a good habit of creating incremental versions of their work, so that most of the geometry is kept in different states in old files, ready to use either in case of errors, crashes or even as useful reference for the current work (for example, some old low polygon primitives can help speed up other stages of your work, like fine-tuning the animation), just look at how useful the "history" feature in Maya is.
The undo function is not a magical one, it can't do everything and sometimes the user still needs to be clever and go beyond what the application itself can do.
Somebody said it already but it needs to be stressed: We're not talking about an e-mail client, this is 3D modeling and animation software.
Nice troll...
./ and other places, but I'll leave that to other people), if you were an employee you would know the details of a game that was shown two months ago at E3. (Hint: I have a reason to know all of this)
You don't seem to know which games actually have a relationship between lag and framerate. You also don't seem to have ever seen Kirby Air Ride, and you don't seem to be a Nintendo employee.
Apart from the fact that your so-called "New Technology Department" does not exit (you have quite some history on
Well, after this little rant, I'll say something more on-topic.
Some racing games can compensate lag very well because quick reactions may not have a drastic effect on your vehicle's course (games like MotoGP). However, in racing games featuring weapons, lag can be very damaging because the reaction associated to attack and defense needs to be in real time, and sometimes the developers choose to pause the game while synchronizing the moves in order to keep fairness. And then it comes down to how many 15ms frames (not screen frames) are ok to lose without having to stop the game for sync (just look at Capcom Vs. SNK online on DC, PS2 and Xbox)
Contrary to what you said, Kirby Air Ride's simple controls could be suitable to Internet gaming without much trouble, but Mario Kart could pose a problem because the weapon system is an important gameplay feature. Miyamoto himself performed tests on the game and he was not satisfied with MK going online for this very reason.
But I bet you can just walk over to his office and ask, can't you?
Radeon owners? Well, that sounds a little bit misleading and should be differently worded, but certainly the nforce2 chipset has features that are not video specific and can be attractive to Radeon users.
:)
The nforce2 uses a 128 bit memory architecture that benefits the system's memory bandwidth as a whole. The GART helps here because you can now combine this architecture with a separate AGP video card, neglecting the relatively lower-end video core inside the nforce2.
GART is an AGP bridge feature, not a Video Chip feature, and the nforce2 is the best AMD compatible chipset out there, combine that with the current best Video chipset out there, which right now happens to be a Radeon, and there you have it, Radeon owners like myself rejoicing
Games are a very complete form of expression, as such, they're able to convey or express complex messages or feelings to many of our senses simultaneously, but as I'm afraid happens with most other forms of expression, it just depends on who is trying to express something, how it is expressed and who is willing to receive it.
Many games are really complete works of art, you need people working in the plot and gameplay, music and graphics, so you practically have writers, musicians, painter and sculptors all working in a project, plus the coders and engineers to create an environment where all these elements can be merged. And on top of it, it's interactive, no other medium can ever give you that level of immersion.
Someone here mentioned having a bad experience playing PC games. Sure, I myself would say most FPS are just overrated pieces of crap, but I'd never underestimate the perception of those who are willing to appreciate a single element of the game that attracts them the most. Being the music or a single texture map.
I dare anyone to ever play Xenogears, FFVI, Metal Gear Solid, Zelda, Metroid and many other beatifully crafted games to the end, and not come out compelled on the powerful experience they can provide you. Some of them even make you question your own beliefs, some others will make you reflect upon your behavior. When an author is able to make you truly feel something, that's definitely art.
That said, I'm not pretending that ALL GAMES are art. Not all paintings, not all music, not all writings and certainly not all games are masterful pieces of art. But the subjective differences between those that can and those that can't be considered as art are what make our "art appreciation" skills meaningful.
I know you were being funny, but actually, a cluster in QNX is the easiest thing to do ever.
QNX's architecture is very much oriented towards message passing, and every piece of hardware is abstracted, even processors. This means you can have a lot of CPUs or machines working on a network running your applications and the load will be evenly distributed, without you having to specifically code your applications. Your only limit is your network performance and latency.
Hell, you'd need to code your application with special system calls for it to know it's not running locally!
I had a wonderful experience with QNX4 a couple of years ago. QNX4 back then didn't have SMP support, but I called QNX Support and they told me how to run one kernel on each CPU of my server and Voila! I had the equivalent of a cluster in one box. Performance was very good, too, context switching was not even worth to measure.
QNX Neutrino is even more powerful, and now it supports SMP... Beowulf clusters are sooo 1999...
Nop, what I meant is that they used code from BSD, which already fought a similar battle a long time ago. Of course, IANAL, but having their OS based on BSD should be enough to use the UNIX name at least for reference.
"Windows" is also a very generic term, and there you had Microsoft going after Lindows in the same way.
That case should provide enough precedence, although The Open Group may be doing this precisely to set precedence on the whole SCO fiasco. I smell something fishy about this.
Also, I'm a little confused on how can they say Apple used the trademark without a license. AFAIK Apple didn't use any source code from UNIX directly, they based Darwin from BSD, which in turn should have a clear relationship with the UNIX trademark, am I wrong?
Actually, I tried to do the same with an embedded system we developed at our company.
:) And there are battery/screen solutions so portability is also covered.
Thing is, laptop design and manufacturing is orders of magnitude more expensive than typical PCs. The motherboard design has a completely different approach, as there are other elements to care about, like the type of packaging for the chips (TSOP and such), the thermal design, power consumption, case design, etc. Then there are things like Pilot Runs and Engineering Verification Tests, which are three or four steps for a PC, while the same are performed six or seven times for laptops.
Because performance was the only thing Microsoft cared about when designing the Xbox, I can imagine the XPU and XCP (the chipsets on the Xbox) being a real pain to work with, even with their current design. Just look at the huge heatsink and fan inside the Xbox, and if you want to be really scared then look at the power consumption rate (around 200W when the other consoles and a typical laptop don't surpass 50W).
Just thinking about this would be enough to give the Xbox team a headache. I don't think they would ever consider it because performance is their only marketing advantage, and that could also hurt them if they want to make a portable system.
If you want a very good, efficient design in terms of "MIPS per Watt" and physical space, go for Gamecube, you have your laptop design right there: tiny motherboard, low power consumption, TSOPII chip packaging, expansion ports, etc., hell, it even sports a handle
Also remember that with the GBA SP in the market, you can get the regular GBA at a lower price, meaning it's now easier to get those four GBAs to play The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords or Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and enjoy multiplayer madness.
There are many reasons to get a GBA and a Gamecube too, the connectivity shown in the two systems with great titles like Pac-Man is just awesome, I played it myself at the last E3 and I was amazed how such a simple idea could breathe life again into a 23-year old game.
Nintendo is pushing the connectivity very strongly as it is the only market advantage it has over Microsoft and Sony, and the gameplay ideas are getting better by the minute.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the next generation Sony tries to do the same with the PSP (they already tried with the Pocketstation), however, price may be an issue with the high specs announced for that machine. So, at least for now, it's easier to try and get more than one GBA and enjoy some of the innovative gameplay designs today.
First, as we all know, there are lies, damn lies and benchmarks. But a company cheating here can really be damaging to the industry.
In this day and age, the top of the line video cards have more than 100 million transistors, and have become increasingly "intelligent" in sorting and rearranging data, instructions and choosing algorithms to get the best performance out a given engine. Some engines perform better than the others under different circumstances, making benchmarks even more subjective than ever.
Furthermore, there's no established standard on what kind of resolutions, color depths, FSAA, etc. a game should run on, and therefore there's also no standard on how to create a base hardware architecture that can be used as a starting point for comparisons. Sure, we have the same basic features on every card (shaders, T&L, texture units, etc.), but each and every one is implemented in a completely different way and it changes radically every few generations of hardware, making yesterday's optimizations obsolete.
But all of this is actually just fine, because the different architectures and 3D engines combine in different ways in each generation to produce new results, not unlike genes. The 3D graphics industry is truly on a fast evolutionary path, and just comparing back to my old Riva would be enough to make Darwin jealous.
So, a company detecting a specific binary in order to optimize/cheat/whatever how the hardware works in a given situation is an artificial gain that destroys the whole purpose of having better hardware each generation in the first place, and is completely unforgivable for both nVidia and ATI.
They should instead work on improving the "intelligence" of their drivers and hardware, which could arguably provide better results in benchmarks without having to resort to stupid, cheap methods that will damage themselves and the entire industry in the long run.
So, as far as I'm concerned, Futuremark should keep doing what they can to prevent cheating, and the users must support this and every similar effort. The 3D graphics industry will be damned the day it becomes a code war between cheaters and moderators. (not unlike online video games, by the way)
Don't even bother to list the things they should include in the Live Action version, I believe they are already taking the story to a completely different path. Just look at the oversimplified summary of the series in the press release:
'"Neon Genesis Evangelion" is the story of a reluctant young hero, called upon to pilot an immense robotic weapon in battle against alien invaders.'
yeah, alien invaders, wait... ALIEN INVADERS?? I think this project is already beyond help. I already see them removing most of the religious references, to only focus on a couple of key events, like Shinji getting the Eva and the "aliens" trying to the end of the world (maybe even without mention of the 3rd impact).
I don't think we should even try to compare this movie to the untouchable anime classic. The same thing is happening to many other projects like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and it won't stop. The movie market segment (the general public) is just so very different from us geeks.
Sega and Namco already have a long term relationship in a joint venture the two of them went together with Nintendo when they created the Triforce, which is an Arcade Board based on the Gamecube architecture.
This joint venture is not likely to break in the near future, because Nintendo is practically giving them access to a revenue stream using not only the hardware, but also with high-profile franchises such as F-Zero and Star Fox, in exchange of their development expertise. I think this is going to work great and could help to define how things are going to be in the future. (e.g. show executives how things are done right)
It's widely known that merging with Sammy, EA or M$ would actually bring Sega to the black sooner than merging with Namco, because even Namco is not on a very strong financial situation by itself. But Sega developers like Namco the better, because it would be the only way they could stay at the company doing things the way they like.
Meanwhile, Sammy, EA and M$ have the same problem: They don't actually need Sega's developers. They'd basically buy it for the trademarks, branding and IP because they have very different methods on game design, development and marketing.
Mostly every Sega team would be in danger of being disbanded. There are people with different skills, different approaches to gaming and trained in different pieces of hardware. A merger with any of these three companies can only result in the loss of this core philosophy. EA likes very short development cycles with very poor execution, M$ likes exclusivity and Sammy likes amusement machines.
Imagine if Rez, Panzer Dragoon, Shenmue and many other great games could never exist were Sega under any of these three companies' wings. A situation like this can really be an issue for any potential buyer, because it can also affect the buying price, and that's where Sega and Sammy disagreed.
I truly felt something was wrong with this merger when I first heard about it. I remembered another merger Sega planned with Bandai some years ago, which failed miserably, possibly because of the same reasons.
First, the on-topic discussion:
The current consoles do have the processing power to efficiently decode an MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 stream and play it on progressive scan rivaling the higher-end DVD players, but they just won't do it in the best way, because the manufacturers don't want the consoles to directly compete with DVD players as they only get revenue from the games, i.e. they don't get a royalty from someone playing a movie on their consoles. In fact, movies are the greatest competition for game companies. It's a grip, but on a different type of content.
The only reason why the three consoles play DVDs (yes, even the Gamecube in its Q version), is because it's an attractive feature, and a selling point. But they still don't support progressive scan for DVD (though the PS2 will, soon), they do integer approximations when decoding the frames, and the player functions leave a lot to be desired. Now guess what? It'd be the same for any broadband stream as long as there's no tie-up with a big content provider. Sony, of course is also a content powerhouse, but it's not going to happen at least in this generation of consoles.
Also, I disagree that a 1.5 Megabit connection would suffice to replace a DVD. DVD is also appreciated because of the high A/V quality, and while MPEG-4 may be able to achieve better video quality at less bitrate than MPEG-2, what about the audio, do we use 128Kb 5.1 channel Ogg/Vorbis or what? DTS 5.1 is encoded in a 1.5 Megabit stream by itself in many DVDs, and the low compression ratio is actually DTS' biggest competitive point. Simply put, saying a current broadband connection could replace the content a DVD provides is just inane.
Now, for the off-topic: I have experience working with Nintendo in several platforms along the years. I meet people from NCL every year at E3, and I can assure you there's no "New Technology Research Department" in Japan. I know VERY well, because I worked in a "second party" company that tried very hard to convince Nintendo to make new projects which were not 100% related to entertainment. Nintendo of course adamantly rejected those efforts so this Samir guy saying he's the "head" of such a department just annoys me to no end.
Furthermore, he can't be a "head", since there's no such position in a japanese company. And a New Technology Department is not the same thing as an R&D Department. He's just a well disguised troll.
I am involved in the videogames industry. In this generation of consoles, there has been a lot of controversy on the definition of broadband, since there's not a standard on the requirements for any given game and there's not a clear way for the user and the developer to know if they are met beforehand.
This causes a big problem for everybody. Developers have an inherent need to limit their bandwidth requirements and perform a lot of tests to reduce network problems, and it can really influence gameplay design; technical support and marketing can be a headache for the publisher and the experience for the user can be very frustrating if there is a simple latency problem, even if the bandwidth is high.
Every "broadband" user in this case says: "but I have broadband! Why can't I play?". Latency and bandwidth are very complex things to explain, and many factors can affect the videogame experience negatively. (number of hops, type of interface, firewalls, NATs, network traffic, just to name a few)
I performed extensive tests with the Dreamcast, the PS2, the GameCube and the Xbox, I can say not many games really require more than a 64K connection, but in many cases, while even the bandwidth of a 56K modem could suffice, a specific game may have a problem with the latency associated. That's why some games are labeled as "broadband only". Of course, it doesn't guarantee the connection will meet the game's requirements, but it minimizes the problem somewhat.
As it is, we used to have a better way of classifying the connection speed on dial-up modems. The diversity on interfaces and protocols (xDSL, Cable, WLAN, etc.) just render the term "broadband" useless.
I remember Ken Kutaragi (Playstation's main designer) saying something in a conference a couple years ago that went along the lines: "you call 1.5 Megabits/sec 'broadband'? But that's about the speed of a CDROM!" I wish Kutaragi extended the analogy to latency using CDROM seek and access time too.
We need a better way to refer to a modern Internet connection, period.
As someone who has been involved in development of computer boards (not just PCs), I can say pin compatibility is not aimed for the end-user's benefit, VIA C3 is not just intended to be a "replacement CPU". Although it could be used as such, it is not the biggest benefit of pin compatibility.
The main reason why it's desirable for Via to have a pin-compatible CPU with Intel's specification is because it shortens the development time and cost of a motherboard. It's easier and cheaper for the M/B manufacturer to design the board's layout if the signals are in the same place, because a re-layout of a M/B is very expensive in both time and money. (in some cases the full development can go upwards to several hundred thousand dollars)
Additionally, there are chipsets that can support both Intel and Via CPUs, (most notably some SIS SOC designs) making it even easier to make a M/B, but this fact it's not necessarily related to having interchangeable CPUs with a socket. Having a socket is of little to no use because Intel and Via CPU's are aimed at different market segments, anyway.
Remember the whole Slot-1/Slot-A fiasco? Intel developed the PII with a slot connector, and used patents/copyrights/trademarks/whatever to prevent AMD or any other CPU manufacturer to make pin-compatible CPUs. AMD then developed the Athlon to use exactly the same connector, although with different electrical specifications and pin definition. This move was aimed to facilitate the manufacturers' development and time-to-market efforts, never to give power to the end-user.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned this and everybody is easily misleaded into thinking this issue is not a important one. Maybe this shows just how few hardware development we have in the West.
When debating about lossy formats with variable parameters, it can easily get to the point of making a flamewar of "quality vs. bitrate", "MP3 vs. OGG vs. ATRAC vs. whatever".
/.er noted, the MDLP and NetMD features were created by pure marketing necessity, Sony basically noticed some people are too stupid and don't give a damn about quality when presented with silly figures like "X hours of music on a disk".
But you're missing the point. You are talking about Sony, a big consumer electronics company, not about esoteric command line parameters.
On a regular Minidisc deck, you don't get to manage the ATRAC compression parameters and bitrate, and you get a very good quality and a real "guarantee" that if you are using all-Sony equipment, your recorded Minidiscs are going to sound just great. This is simple, and users love it.
Now, MP3 is a format that almost nobody but experienced people understands. As you said: "MP3s encoded at 128kbps CBR (constant bit rate) using an encoder such as Xing WILL result in poor-quality mp3s". Want to bet how many people sharing their MP3s collections on P2P know that? Popular MP3s on the 'Net are of average quality, at best. Most of them are real crap (well, some songs may not deserve any better).
ATRAC is a format users DON'T NEED to understand. Minidisc is a user-end oriented product, and a really good one at that. ATRAC even has full forward and backward compatibility, meaning you don't need to know which versions of encoded discs and decoder players you have for them to work perfectly.
Now, as other
MDLP and NetMD are there for a reason, it's comparable to the quality Kaaza lusers are used to from their crappy MP3s, while keeping the simplicity of the Minidisc format.
That's not entirely possible. Retailers also want their profit margin. You don't get product placement and shelf space if you don't give revenue. And short of Microsoft putting money on retailer's pockets directly, I don't see any way to make it free and penetrate the market as they wanted.
Xbox Live free inside the Xbox package could be a way, but remember Sega? I bet this approach might be effective, but pretty unpopular with shareholders and analysts because of Seganet's outcome.
Thing is, MS is making a huge gamble on the Xbox, because it may never be profitable. I wouldn't expect to see further gambles, though that's not out of the question, given MS track record of cornering the competition by any means.
MS needs something to offset the losses, and Xbox Live is bringing the same profit margins as a successful 1st party game, like Halo. Try to convince MS management to pass off that.
Sorry, but I am a developer and I worked on the Nintendo64 and I know the internal architecture of both N64 and GCN enough to know the technical data you're using as reference is all wrong.
First of all, the texture memory. There's a huge difference between "texture memory" and the 3MB you're referring to. The GCN has 1MB texture cache and 2MB framebuffer. these are very high performance 3MB of SRAM _ON-CHIP_. The on-chip memory is to speed up the rendering process by having the data close to the chip, similar to the data portion of a CPU's L1 cache. For a comparison, the N64 had a 4KB texture cache on-chip, so the GCN has 256 times more texture cache. The concept of "Texture Memory" is ancient and used in the past on professional workstation video cards.
Textures use MAIN memory, the GCN has 24MB of high performance 1T-SRAM and 16MB of DRAM, 40MB total. Additionally, it uses S3TC compression technology to bring down the bandwidth and memory usage by factors like 4:1 and 6:1, depending on size, complexity and color depth. There's also a proprietary vertex compression algorithm on hardware, so the GCN has far more than just 10 times the amount of RAM the N64 had.
Now to the Mini DVDs. You are missing the point when you say 1 DVD-9 = 6 GC discs, GCN has hardware assisted video decoding, and because Nintendo didn't choose DVD's MPEG2 format as the standard, they can use other formats if needed. In contrast, the PS2 has a very specific MPEG2 decoder, so while it could support other video formats, there's no reason to do otherwise because the support is already there, ditto with the Xbox. GCN now has a DivX codec, so a disc could fit more than two hours worth of video. And really, I dare you to find a game that has more than 1.5GB worth of content on the disc (not counting FMVs). Remember everything on the disc is also compressed in several formats to ease memory and bandwidth usage and to speed up loading times. Saying 1.5GB means "it won't see things like FFX with video intact" is just plain ignorant. You don't get FFX's video "intact", you get it encoded to MPEG2 from the original uncompressed video on Square's rendering farms. The only thing you should care about is the video quality, and everybody and their sisters know DivX gives you better quality at lower bitrates than MPEG2.
About the controller, I too have my gripes, I would've liked a more symmetric controller, like the PS2 one. But don't ever try to criticize the GCN controller when there's the horrible Xbox controller on the market. They changed it even after insisting: "but the focus groups' people said it was excellent!". CVS2 EO option? Ask any real player, nobody uses it on GCN. Get into Xbox Live, and you'll see many high-ranked players use EO _exclusively_.
The reason behind developers dropping features and making half-assed ports is because of time-to-market issues, not because the GCN has not a strong architecture. Just see what happened when porting Metal Gear Solid 2 to the Xbox. Isn't the Xbox supposedly a better console? Konami making a bad port? Even on Microsoft's money? Impossible!!! </sarcasm>
Truth is, Nintendo had a problem in getting developers to make multi-platform games that look and play as good (or bad) as they should, because they didn't throw enough money to the problem. They are doing it now with Sega, Namco, Capcom and EA, but having MS as competitors for 2nd place, they should've done it sooner.
To end this long rant, what you said about proprietary formats is half right. Nintendo controls their software distribution very closely, and in many ways wrong (I agree on the optical vs cart media thing). But that's because it's the only revenue maker they've got. Sony has the Consumer Electronics world in their hands and MS can afford to lose 100 million per month like they're doing and still be around for decades. Never forget Nintendo is the ONLY one making a living purely out of video games, period. Now tell me that's not a "true gamers" company.
What are they going to say? Their approach to "shared-source" is better? Open Source stifles competition and innovation? TCO is better in Windows Servers? These are some of their old arguments, and I would really like to see how they stand by them in front of real OSS developers.
But what I'm really interested in, is that they could very well bring some new elements to the table, as Microsoft so far has never discussed openly their stance on Open Source. This is a golden opportunity for us to debate important issues and walk out stronger, even if they really showed that our OSS/Free Software development environments suck (as if).
I would like to ask them new questions, not "What do you think it's wrong with the GPL?". or argue whether [open|closed] software is better, these are things we and them will never agree upon.
I'd ask them: "What are your long-term plans on opening your own source?" "Do you think your software can be improved by opening the source?"
Remember how the Mindcraft benchmarks accelerated the development of faster and better HTTP servers? Let them make their plans, and see if we can learn a thing or two.
As long as they don't give full freedom to developers like we do, there's no need to act afraid as if we were a company facing the competition and we're losing our "trade secrets" just by having a good talk with them.