Except the IBM processors are pretty stonking too. The Cell is basically a 8-core processor - one general purpose CPU and 7 GPU-like cores for handling large amounts of data. Supposedly it is much, much faster than any Intel chip at floating point calculations. This may be why Sony worked with folding@home to produce a PS3 client - to demonstrate that the thing could kick seven shades of shit out of any standard PC when it comes to intensive number crunching. I expect IBM also have their eyes on the thing for all manner of applications, both large and small.
Since you can barely transfer files, this service is tantamount to a movie rental service since you only have so much space on your PC. And movie rental is significantly cheaper than $9.99, especially with the likes of Netflix. And besides, most of the movies in the service cost more than $9.99 - Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow is a bargain at $13.99. So why would anyone be insane enought to pay for this service?
It would be cheaper to buy the DVD in many cases, especially as they'd be in the bargain bin to begin with.
While I'd love a decent digital download service, this one just stinks. Either the movies should be mostly unencumbered and allow DVD burning, or the movies need to sell for reasonable rental prices. This service has turkey written all over it.
The only official answer I got was that XP needs regular defrags and a reboot at least once a week to work reliably.
That's nonsense. XP is very stable and file fragmentation just means your system is slower not less stable. If it does crash it is normally a bad driver, although perhaps a bad app could exhaust the system and trigger a problem. Perhaps that's why they warned you - their app might bleed the system to death.
Anyway fragmentation is very prominent on XP but I wonder if this isn't because XP has easy to use defrag tools that show your file fragmentation. Defrag tools for Linux are far more primitive and less interactive so people are less inclined to know even if it is happening. Even if a Linux drive is fragmented, there is precious little you can do about it unless you unmount it first since most tools won't work on a mounted drive.
I believe in this day and age that defrag should be built into the driver as an option. It must be possible to do a bit of defragging during normal disk activity to keep things under control without impeding the user or requiring a 4 hour defrag every 6 months or so.
More importantly usability and simplicity bring Linux mainstream. That doesn't mean the desktop should be retarded but it shouldn't be crowded out with silly settings and buttons that few people ever need or want to touch. GNOME does this, although it is still lacking refinement that you might find in OS X for example.
Eye candy is great but it should fall out of revamping the desktop to support hardware acceleration. Acceleration makes the desktop (and cairo based stuff) faster even if you have no intention enabling wibbly wobbly windows or other weird effects.
That would make sense. That was what I was referring to about caching the second disk. I think consoles should offer do that anyway - cache a disk and let you play from the harddisk with occasional verification that you have the original. Perhaps XBox 360 will offer that eventually though I'm not aware that it does now. Though to effective, they'll have to boost the HD size a bit. 20Gb represents space for about 4 single-layer DVD games which isn't much.
Cedega is the name of the games-oriented Win32 emulator for Linux from Transgaming. It is sold to end-users. Cider is their product for the Mac which is aimed at game developers. Crossover is the name of the Win32 emulator from Codeweavers for Linux and the Mac. Different companies, different branches of WINE. Ultimately they might all be based on WINE, but they have different target audiences in mind. Transgaming's offerings are squarely aimed at gamers and game companies. Crossover is more aimed at office / business environments.
I think more likely that most of the game will reside on the disk and MS will release episodic content online, or if double-disks come out that it will cache the second on the HD (if you have one). This may even explain why GTA4 is supposedly offering episodic content on the XBox 360 and not on the PS3. Perhaps the PS3 doesn't need episodic content since it can hold it all on disk.
Anyway, the XBox 360 Core system doesn't even have a hard drive so games companies can't even rely on that. And the premium system only has a 20Gb drive. Microsoft *could* upgrade the 360 to HD-DVD internally and put out DVD / HD-DVD versions of the same game but I wonder if the market would stand for it. More likely they're stuck with DVD since so many people still use it.
Putting them out with removable DVD drives when the production lines are already churning isn't an option. Besides, if you put them out with DVD then that becomes the lowest common denominator that you are stuck with forever. Just like on the XBox 360. A DVD might sound a lot of space but you only have to look at games like GTA: SA or MGS: III which *fill* a single layer disc already to know that it isn't enough for HD next gen consoles. Even if you use dual layer, all those extra polys, content, dolby surround sound could easily fill it up.
It sucks for Sony that they have all these delays but assuming they survive it, the console will be much better for it. Assuming it is a success then a few years down the line it will be XBox 360 people who will be moaning that their games have less content, or that they have to download half the game onto HD (another thing some owners may not have). I guess Sony's strategy is to take the tech hit now and reap the benefits down the line. Not only is PS3 future proofed but it seeds the market with BD players which has its own benefits on sales of BD content.
It seems fairly obvious that the most hyped next-gen machine by far is the Wii. I don't think either that you can claim that Sony is any worse than other console makers when it comes to proprietary formats or obsession with control. All console makers, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent copy protection and piracy.
Then there's enforced blu-ray, which they may see as a bonus, we may or may not, depending where our loyalties lie.
I think the inclusion of blu-ray is a good thing simply from the point of view of future proofing. When the PS2 came out most of its games were on CDs. These days PS2 games are almost exclusively DVD. Some titles even ship with 2 or 3 of them. If the PS2 had been restricted to CD, it would have been a disaster for the platform.
It seems pretty reasonable to assume that capacity requirements will continue to grow. Some might say that a DVD is enough (like 640k is enough) and perhaps it will be to begin with. No doubt lots of games will fit comfortably onto a single DVD. Yet I expect some games will make use of the extra capacity and some that fit on a DVD for one language will use a BD just to ship the same game with different localized content.
Then of course the thing is an HD movie player. That's reason for including it especially as Sony are pushing that standard over the competing one.
Wasn't planning on buying one for months anyway (let the suckers beta test it), but dumping a whole market for 6 months has got to hurt. Same thing happened with the PSP. It may well explain why PS3 hype has been pretty low key for something which is barely two months from release. Let's hope it goes well in the territories that it does sell into.
A more useful Mac port of WINE would be Cider / Cedega from Transgaming. That way Macs could play windows games. As the the Mac gaming market is pretty poor with ports appearing months, years, or never after their Windows counterparts, it might prove to be a lucrative market. I would think that it would be far more lucrative than on Linux. Currently Cider appears to be pitched at developers so Transgaming are probably hoping to ship the runtime on the CD with the game rather than sell an all-purpose solution to the public.
Except for the Virtual Boy, I can't think of any Nintendo system which was fatally flawed;
Perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but I've bought three generations of Gameboys, each promising to fix the flaws present in the previous model - sharper contrast, colour screens, backlighting etc. Only they fixed the flaw and introduced another one. I bought a GBA only to discover it had a screen so dark that it was close to unusable except at the right angle in the right kind of lighting.
These are two completely different products that sell to people for different reasons;
Mac Minis sell with a remote. Apple are pitching Front Row as a way of using your Mac as a multimedia device. There is quite a bit of overlap with the PS3 and with Viiv devices. Everyone is tryng to hit a sweet spot for a convergence device. Microsoft have screwed up badly because the 360 could have been that device but they hobbled it for Viiv & Windows Media Center. Besides, if the PS3 has Linux (and I have no idea if it will for certain or what state it will be in), then it could potentially take on any use that Linux could be used for, including computing. That is what I am referring to. People continue to refer to the PS3 as just a console when its clear that Sony's ambitions stretch much further than that.
know nothing of PS3 linux, but I remember (vaguely) PS2 Linux and I would say that it is probably just there to add a marketing bullet point on a poster somewhere;
The Linux for the PS2 was quite usable but there was no market for it and you had to buy an expensive kit to make it run Linux. It wasn't worth the bother. That doesn't mean Linux on the PS3 has to be the same way. For one thing it comes with networking and a harddrive built-in. For another you can just plug any USB peripheral into it such as a keyboard and mouse. Done right, it might turn the device into an incredibly useful, general purpose computer with a whole range of applications. Personally I don't believe that Sony will make it as useful as that, but I will reserve judgement until I see it.
Who says? The PSP was a pretty usable system and could be used just fine with ripped music & content. I know the homebrewers whined about some of its measures, but faced with pleasing a handful of homebrewers and protecting their platform from rampant piracy it was no surprise that Sony chose to block them out. The PS3 has the potential with Linux to keep the homebrew people happy and have copy protection. Certainly it cant be much worse than the XBox 360 which has been hobbled in all kinds of ways to make MS Windows Media Centre edition look more relevant.
Or you I could buy a computer (that you can make into a media center) and a Wii for that price (depending on the final Wii price point).
Why would you wish to buy two pieces of kit, one of which you'd have to hack to turn into a media center (a very inconvenient ugly one) when you can buy a single device which serves both purposes and should work straight from the box? I say "should" because of course we're talking about something which might genuinely suck when it is released (just as the Wii could). After all Sony have a patchy history with DRM and Nintendo has produced some fatally flawed systems in the past.
But so far I see nothing about the specification which makes me think it is particularly expensive for what it is. My original point was people wet themselves over the totally lackluster Mac Mini and then baulk at the similarly priced by considerably more powerful PS3.
The hardware looks extremely powerful and if the thing comes with Linux it could be a kickass system not just for games & multimedia but homebrew apps too.
Exactly. Segways have a genuine use for people who spend their lives going back and forth for their work, e.g. warehouse operators. These environments can be appropriately signposted and controlled by health and safety rules.
The same is not true of a pavement. All you expect on a pavement are people using their legs and occasional wheelchair users. Unless there is something wrong with you, you should not be permitted to operate any kind of vehicle including a Segway on the path. Take your chances on the road or walk like everybody else.
$600 also buys you wi-fi, a 60 Gb harddrive, 512Mb, a multi-core processor all of which combine to give you a games console, multimedia and internet system that sits under your TV. The price isn't particularly outrageous for its features if you compare it to the Mac Mini for example.
HDMI cables don't cost $60 unless you're mad enough to buy a super-duper gold plated shielded cables for no discernible difference in picture quality whatsoever. A $10 cable would do just fine. Sony could probably make / get them wholesale for $1.50. Even so, if composite is included and works at the highest resolutions then what's the big deal?
You'd have thought so, but apparently some people aren't even going to pay that much. $4000 would buy you a contractor for 8 days. If you're lucky you might have a semi-working GUI with big chunks of missing or bugged functionality at the end of that.
Your formatting example is pretty ludicrous. Of course you can manually pad text with spaces, just as you could write a technical document in notepad. But most people have neither the time, nor the inclination to do either. If my email program has (as it does) a button to bullet text I am going to use it and save myself 5 minutes worth of indentation. Perhaps you're a masochist or a luddite, but don't think that anyone else should deny themselves readily available tools for your benefit.
As for message sizes etc. big deal. HTML is not 5-6 times unless someone has changed the style every other word or embedded graphical content. My emails are typically around 30% larger and average out at less than 3k a piece which usually includes the quoted original email. I get email from lots of people and have yet to see any gross abuse of email. The worst I've seen is a few who put a small graphical signature. Big deal.
Not only do you expect someone to waste more time formatting plain text, but you want them to have their own 24/7 ftp server to link attachments to and maintain them in perpetuity. You want them to go to considerable extra pains just for your sake. You might be irked by someone sending you a foreign attachment but that is another matter altogether. Storage is cheap. My massive email box (which currently holds ~10000 normal received / sent messages going back 5 years is 250mb. If someone told me I could save 200Mb on my 250Gb harddrive by using text and no attachments I would have to laugh.
Your arguments may have just been relevant in 1995 but don't hold much water these days. Disk storage is cheap. Unix is just as capable as any other OS at handling email. Unix also has some great graphical email clients in Evolution, Thunderbird and KMail to name but a few. Perhaps if you had a disability such as blindness that I was aware of I might make an exception but not otherwise.
Frankly, if you can't convey your message with text, you don't have much to say.
Are you also reading Slashdot through Lynx? I just ask because it seems like a double standard to say we should restrict one medium to plain text while using rich text for another. And that "Give Pine a try" sure looks like a link to me. Could it be you're using HTML in a response to a Slashdot article?
Personally I appreciate HTML email simply because I can bullet / number items, do indentation and other basic formatting tasks. In other words, it saves me time. As it happens my email app (Thunderbird) can output formatted plaintext from my HTML editor, but I don't see why I should have make any special concessions to what the recipient may or may not have beyond this. Email is not stuck in the dark ages and any half decent reader should be able to process HTML, or RTF. I'm sure Pine could even do it (or invoke Lynx) to produce a plaintext equivalent from HTML input. I expect that someone has already written a script that does just that.
Skinned and skinnable versions of IE are ten-a-penny. Even apps like WinAmp and AIM have embedded IE browsers. Even NS 8.0 had an embedded IE browser (used for compatibility on certain broken pages). The selling point of this skin is that it allegedly protects your browsing habits when nothing could be further from the truth. IE has certain registry settings, and certain programmable interfaces that you could twiddle to modify its behaviour but at the end of the day it is a black box.
You just don't know what it is doing and you are stuck with whatever flaws and faults that IE has. If someone has installed some malicious BHO into IE then the chances are that it infects Browzar too. etc. The only way I would trust a browser like this was if it was totally self-contained, wrote no files of any kind and preferably ran from a boot disk or read-only medium. Alternately install Ubuntu, XP or similar using VMWare, set the VM to not save changes, and then use the browser in that. It should be plenty fast and wouldn't leave any tracks behind.
By freak accident, I reckon he swum above one, touched it as it went underneath and then bam, he got a stinger in the chest. Not so much a freak accident as a lesson in what happens if you touch a stringray in just the right place to trigger its automatic defence mechanism.
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Except the IBM processors are pretty stonking too. The Cell is basically a 8-core processor - one general purpose CPU and 7 GPU-like cores for handling large amounts of data. Supposedly it is much, much faster than any Intel chip at floating point calculations. This may be why Sony worked with folding@home to produce a PS3 client - to demonstrate that the thing could kick seven shades of shit out of any standard PC when it comes to intensive number crunching. I expect IBM also have their eyes on the thing for all manner of applications, both large and small.
It would be cheaper to buy the DVD in many cases, especially as they'd be in the bargain bin to begin with.
While I'd love a decent digital download service, this one just stinks. Either the movies should be mostly unencumbered and allow DVD burning, or the movies need to sell for reasonable rental prices. This service has turkey written all over it.
That's nonsense. XP is very stable and file fragmentation just means your system is slower not less stable. If it does crash it is normally a bad driver, although perhaps a bad app could exhaust the system and trigger a problem. Perhaps that's why they warned you - their app might bleed the system to death.
Anyway fragmentation is very prominent on XP but I wonder if this isn't because XP has easy to use defrag tools that show your file fragmentation. Defrag tools for Linux are far more primitive and less interactive so people are less inclined to know even if it is happening. Even if a Linux drive is fragmented, there is precious little you can do about it unless you unmount it first since most tools won't work on a mounted drive.
I believe in this day and age that defrag should be built into the driver as an option. It must be possible to do a bit of defragging during normal disk activity to keep things under control without impeding the user or requiring a 4 hour defrag every 6 months or so.
Why wouldn't they want to know about potentially up to 71 vulnerabilities plus numerous other bits of code to cleanup?
Eye candy is great but it should fall out of revamping the desktop to support hardware acceleration. Acceleration makes the desktop (and cairo based stuff) faster even if you have no intention enabling wibbly wobbly windows or other weird effects.
That would make sense. That was what I was referring to about caching the second disk. I think consoles should offer do that anyway - cache a disk and let you play from the harddisk with occasional verification that you have the original. Perhaps XBox 360 will offer that eventually though I'm not aware that it does now. Though to effective, they'll have to boost the HD size a bit. 20Gb represents space for about 4 single-layer DVD games which isn't much.
Cedega is the name of the games-oriented Win32 emulator for Linux from Transgaming. It is sold to end-users. Cider is their product for the Mac which is aimed at game developers. Crossover is the name of the Win32 emulator from Codeweavers for Linux and the Mac. Different companies, different branches of WINE. Ultimately they might all be based on WINE, but they have different target audiences in mind. Transgaming's offerings are squarely aimed at gamers and game companies. Crossover is more aimed at office / business environments.
Anyway, the XBox 360 Core system doesn't even have a hard drive so games companies can't even rely on that. And the premium system only has a 20Gb drive. Microsoft *could* upgrade the 360 to HD-DVD internally and put out DVD / HD-DVD versions of the same game but I wonder if the market would stand for it. More likely they're stuck with DVD since so many people still use it.
It sucks for Sony that they have all these delays but assuming they survive it, the console will be much better for it. Assuming it is a success then a few years down the line it will be XBox 360 people who will be moaning that their games have less content, or that they have to download half the game onto HD (another thing some owners may not have). I guess Sony's strategy is to take the tech hit now and reap the benefits down the line. Not only is PS3 future proofed but it seeds the market with BD players which has its own benefits on sales of BD content.
It seems fairly obvious that the most hyped next-gen machine by far is the Wii. I don't think either that you can claim that Sony is any worse than other console makers when it comes to proprietary formats or obsession with control. All console makers, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent copy protection and piracy.
I think the inclusion of blu-ray is a good thing simply from the point of view of future proofing. When the PS2 came out most of its games were on CDs. These days PS2 games are almost exclusively DVD. Some titles even ship with 2 or 3 of them. If the PS2 had been restricted to CD, it would have been a disaster for the platform.
It seems pretty reasonable to assume that capacity requirements will continue to grow. Some might say that a DVD is enough (like 640k is enough) and perhaps it will be to begin with. No doubt lots of games will fit comfortably onto a single DVD. Yet I expect some games will make use of the extra capacity and some that fit on a DVD for one language will use a BD just to ship the same game with different localized content.
Then of course the thing is an HD movie player. That's reason for including it especially as Sony are pushing that standard over the competing one.
Wasn't planning on buying one for months anyway (let the suckers beta test it), but dumping a whole market for 6 months has got to hurt. Same thing happened with the PSP. It may well explain why PS3 hype has been pretty low key for something which is barely two months from release. Let's hope it goes well in the territories that it does sell into.
This is the Commodore 64 in question
A more useful Mac port of WINE would be Cider / Cedega from Transgaming. That way Macs could play windows games. As the the Mac gaming market is pretty poor with ports appearing months, years, or never after their Windows counterparts, it might prove to be a lucrative market. I would think that it would be far more lucrative than on Linux. Currently Cider appears to be pitched at developers so Transgaming are probably hoping to ship the runtime on the CD with the game rather than sell an all-purpose solution to the public.
Perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but I've bought three generations of Gameboys, each promising to fix the flaws present in the previous model - sharper contrast, colour screens, backlighting etc. Only they fixed the flaw and introduced another one. I bought a GBA only to discover it had a screen so dark that it was close to unusable except at the right angle in the right kind of lighting.
These are two completely different products that sell to people for different reasons;
Mac Minis sell with a remote. Apple are pitching Front Row as a way of using your Mac as a multimedia device. There is quite a bit of overlap with the PS3 and with Viiv devices. Everyone is tryng to hit a sweet spot for a convergence device. Microsoft have screwed up badly because the 360 could have been that device but they hobbled it for Viiv & Windows Media Center. Besides, if the PS3 has Linux (and I have no idea if it will for certain or what state it will be in), then it could potentially take on any use that Linux could be used for, including computing. That is what I am referring to. People continue to refer to the PS3 as just a console when its clear that Sony's ambitions stretch much further than that.
know nothing of PS3 linux, but I remember (vaguely) PS2 Linux and I would say that it is probably just there to add a marketing bullet point on a poster somewhere;
The Linux for the PS2 was quite usable but there was no market for it and you had to buy an expensive kit to make it run Linux. It wasn't worth the bother. That doesn't mean Linux on the PS3 has to be the same way. For one thing it comes with networking and a harddrive built-in. For another you can just plug any USB peripheral into it such as a keyboard and mouse. Done right, it might turn the device into an incredibly useful, general purpose computer with a whole range of applications. Personally I don't believe that Sony will make it as useful as that, but I will reserve judgement until I see it.
Who says? The PSP was a pretty usable system and could be used just fine with ripped music & content. I know the homebrewers whined about some of its measures, but faced with pleasing a handful of homebrewers and protecting their platform from rampant piracy it was no surprise that Sony chose to block them out. The PS3 has the potential with Linux to keep the homebrew people happy and have copy protection. Certainly it cant be much worse than the XBox 360 which has been hobbled in all kinds of ways to make MS Windows Media Centre edition look more relevant.
Why would you wish to buy two pieces of kit, one of which you'd have to hack to turn into a media center (a very inconvenient ugly one) when you can buy a single device which serves both purposes and should work straight from the box? I say "should" because of course we're talking about something which might genuinely suck when it is released (just as the Wii could). After all Sony have a patchy history with DRM and Nintendo has produced some fatally flawed systems in the past.
But so far I see nothing about the specification which makes me think it is particularly expensive for what it is. My original point was people wet themselves over the totally lackluster Mac Mini and then baulk at the similarly priced by considerably more powerful PS3.
The hardware looks extremely powerful and if the thing comes with Linux it could be a kickass system not just for games & multimedia but homebrew apps too.
The same is not true of a pavement. All you expect on a pavement are people using their legs and occasional wheelchair users. Unless there is something wrong with you, you should not be permitted to operate any kind of vehicle including a Segway on the path. Take your chances on the road or walk like everybody else.
$600 also buys you wi-fi, a 60 Gb harddrive, 512Mb, a multi-core processor all of which combine to give you a games console, multimedia and internet system that sits under your TV. The price isn't particularly outrageous for its features if you compare it to the Mac Mini for example.
HDMI cables don't cost $60 unless you're mad enough to buy a super-duper gold plated shielded cables for no discernible difference in picture quality whatsoever. A $10 cable would do just fine. Sony could probably make / get them wholesale for $1.50. Even so, if composite is included and works at the highest resolutions then what's the big deal?
You'd have thought so, but apparently some people aren't even going to pay that much. $4000 would buy you a contractor for 8 days. If you're lucky you might have a semi-working GUI with big chunks of missing or bugged functionality at the end of that.
As for message sizes etc. big deal. HTML is not 5-6 times unless someone has changed the style every other word or embedded graphical content. My emails are typically around 30% larger and average out at less than 3k a piece which usually includes the quoted original email. I get email from lots of people and have yet to see any gross abuse of email. The worst I've seen is a few who put a small graphical signature. Big deal.
Not only do you expect someone to waste more time formatting plain text, but you want them to have their own 24/7 ftp server to link attachments to and maintain them in perpetuity. You want them to go to considerable extra pains just for your sake. You might be irked by someone sending you a foreign attachment but that is another matter altogether. Storage is cheap. My massive email box (which currently holds ~10000 normal received / sent messages going back 5 years is 250mb. If someone told me I could save 200Mb on my 250Gb harddrive by using text and no attachments I would have to laugh.
Your arguments may have just been relevant in 1995 but don't hold much water these days. Disk storage is cheap. Unix is just as capable as any other OS at handling email. Unix also has some great graphical email clients in Evolution, Thunderbird and KMail to name but a few. Perhaps if you had a disability such as blindness that I was aware of I might make an exception but not otherwise.
Are you also reading Slashdot through Lynx? I just ask because it seems like a double standard to say we should restrict one medium to plain text while using rich text for another. And that "Give Pine a try" sure looks like a link to me. Could it be you're using HTML in a response to a Slashdot article?
Personally I appreciate HTML email simply because I can bullet / number items, do indentation and other basic formatting tasks. In other words, it saves me time. As it happens my email app (Thunderbird) can output formatted plaintext from my HTML editor, but I don't see why I should have make any special concessions to what the recipient may or may not have beyond this. Email is not stuck in the dark ages and any half decent reader should be able to process HTML, or RTF. I'm sure Pine could even do it (or invoke Lynx) to produce a plaintext equivalent from HTML input. I expect that someone has already written a script that does just that.
You just don't know what it is doing and you are stuck with whatever flaws and faults that IE has. If someone has installed some malicious BHO into IE then the chances are that it infects Browzar too. etc. The only way I would trust a browser like this was if it was totally self-contained, wrote no files of any kind and preferably ran from a boot disk or read-only medium. Alternately install Ubuntu, XP or similar using VMWare, set the VM to not save changes, and then use the browser in that. It should be plenty fast and wouldn't leave any tracks behind.
By freak accident, I reckon he swum above one, touched it as it went underneath and then bam, he got a stinger in the chest. Not so much a freak accident as a lesson in what happens if you touch a stringray in just the right place to trigger its automatic defence mechanism.