if you never use the same random number twice. Sorting fails because if two or more elements have the same 'random' number assigned to them, they won't switch places compared to the other elements compared to whatever numbers the rest has. This means that it's less optimal.
So calling sorting a non-optimal randomization technique isn't always valid: assigning unique random numbers to the elements does work.
I mean, he needs to block the HV correcting the tables, and presses a button to do that. But... that requires serious timing, as the call is made and directly after that he has to block the memory access with the pulse. To me this seems impossible to do, or he can start jamming the signal BEFORE the call is made, but that would potentially ruin the call in the first place.
Taking the risk of developing a new technology is thus incentivized because you can be assured that your product won't be ripped off and sold for cheap, preventing you from making any profit (or just breaking even) off of what could have been a potentially expensive period of R&D beforehand. That's why it makes sense to have patents
In theory that sounds great. In practice however, the competitor can rip your innovation easily by building it a bit different and patent that too (as it's not 'the same'). The result is 2 patents for practically the same thing. If more competitors do that, we end up with a lot of patents for the same thing and nightmares waiting to happen.
In theory the competitors have to license the technology patent by the inventor. In practice they don't want to pay and try to work around it. If by patenting your own 'slightly different' approach is possible, they'll do it.
So in practice what you said is not going to work. True, the inventor likely has more costs than the 'me-too' product producer but they won't gain it back because the competition won't license their tech.
As showing a nipple or add nudity to a game will definitely make it be rated A for adult only and thus not sellable.
For the people who think this footage is not something to argue about because it's a 'game', consider a game where you have to shove as much jews as possible in a gas chamber. Yes, horrific and the lowest possible taste possible, but it's for the sake of the argument: it's then too just 'a game', however people will (and rightfully so) be horrified and declare it unacceptable.
What I then wonder is: why is this 'a game' and 'fantasy', and another example 'unacceptable' ?
The problem is that anything can install such a listening service on XP making it instantly vulnerable. That XP SP2/3 isn't vulnerable by default is a 'mitigating factor' in MS Security bulletin lingo, not a reason not to patch.
I don't understand why they're dragging their feet, as sooner or later something installs a listening service (or the user already has such a service) and it's over.
I don't really care about speed, all browsers are pretty fast. The main issue I have with for example Opera is that it doesn't always render HTML correctly (even in 10 RTM), and sometimes hangs when you resize windows. I rather like a correctly rendered page which is done in 0.012ms than a badly rendered page which is rendered in 0.003ms
The HTML renderer engine still requires some work
on
Opera 10.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
These issues are still not fixed in 10.0 RTM:
- VMWare server 2.0 interface doesn't render properly in 10.0: Select a VM and at the right you don't see any info appear. - '#' local links are resolved after everything is loaded: e.g. http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=277142&page=14#comment3054845 , this is slow, as all icons first have to be loaded before the local jump is made. This is annoying at forum sites - On Windows XP, Checkbox in webpage isn't styled but looks like Windows 95 checkbox. This is particularly present here at/., where all checkbox controls are rendered as windows 95 checkboxes. - Cookies set in javascript where the name has a ' ' in the name are not persisted. - Sometimes a combobox is rendered as a windows 95 combobox instead of a Windows XP / themed combo box, e.g. when you set the options like: Pink - In the default skin, on Windows XP, when you hover over the scrollbar at the right, the scrollbar is highlighted... pink - Bittorrent client is really really slow compared to Vuse for example
I think you and your team should start focusing on developing software for the client you have to write the software for, i.o.w. back to square 1 of Software Engineering. You and your team seem to have moved yourselves into an organizational mess which takes more time to manage than the actual software development.
Mind you, your client doesn't give a hoot HOW you created the software, which language it is written in, or that you eat 1001 bags of blue M&Ms during the making, all they care about is if the software does what they need it to do. So you should go write that software, how is up to you, but if that 'how' process is actually taking more time and energy than the software itself, you should perhaps abandone that process you called 'agile' and go back to Common Sense Software Engineering principles, like defining what functionality should be implemented and actually DO that.
I would have upmodded you but I already replied elsewhere. I didn't know it was a kort geding, as indeed there it's very important to show up. TPB should really get a better lawyer. OTOH, they might get sued in a lot of countries, so it's for them undoable to visit each and every one of them to go to a court hearing, I think.
I don't believe Brein has a good case against ISPs as they're not involved in the lawsuit: if Brein orders them to block a certain site, they can simply say they (ISPs) aren't ordered to do so because the site has to block the NL visitors, not an ISP, it would otherwise come down to censorship for the entire population ordered by civil court, which can never happen, as Brein is a civil organisation.
- if they appear in The Netherlands, they can be arrested.
No that's not true, it's not a criminal charge, it was in civil court. You can only be arrested if you have committed a crime. If they're not paying, according to the court, and they appear in the netherlands, the court could order to confiscate their belongings till the sum they have to pay is fulfilled, but that's about it. So i.o.w.: it's likely they just don't give a toss about this ruling.
if they continue to not block the Dutch, then BREIN may have a case for Dutch -ISPs- to block TPB as alternative means of getting TPB blocked.
No, as BREIN isn't associated with the public ministry (Openbaar Ministery) which is the authority which sues people/legal identities in criminal court. BREIN is a civil organisation like any other company or foundation, and therefore has no authority to order anything from anyone. An ISP isn't involved in this (otherwise phone companies should also be held liable when a criminal tells a mate to commit a crime) and therefore can't be ordered to do anything.
The judge is clearly not aware of what internet is. This is common among judges btw. I also find it weird that a civil organisation can censor the internet (through civil court) for people who aren't involved in the lawsuite.
I recall bank secrecy, I recall flight information etc. And isn't it so that a US law is seen as 'valid' across the globe in the US? If not, how can it be that people who have never visited the US are demanded by the US to be brought to them for 'justice' because they violated a US law. ?
and I can't upgrade my Windows XP box to 7 because there's no upgrade path either. This means that I have to upgrade to vista first, and then to 7. Like I have nothing better to do.
The other thing is that on my core 2 quad with 2gb ram, I never really run into delays of switching between processes, windows XP feels snappy (and 'feeling snappy' is mostly a user interface trick anyway), as the major bottleneck of all things done on a system is the harddisk.
I.o.w.: upgrading to 7 (if it were possible) will not give me much better hardware usage anyway than win XP does now. And no, I hate the 7 taskbar (as I have to fight with hidden settings to get my beloved quicklaunch back and I hate the grouping of icons).
Are you nuts? You can say what you want, with one restriction: our laws are mandatory over the ground rule that you can say what you want. So you can't insult someone because it's your opinion or discriminate one.
If I look at the 'Telegraaf' (the biggest newspaper) which is more and more moving towards PVV-level rightwing, I don't see how free speech is limited to the left side, on the contrary.
Your other remarks are also not true in the way you stated them. I agree with the PVV being anti-islam but I don't think they'll be the next government nor that they'll sent people back to morocco, simply because it's against the law (european law) and they're is no 'back', these people are born here so are legal dutch citizens
The Dutch government didn't state it wants any of this thing. The minister of education and culture asked a committee (with non parliament members!) how newspapers could be supported so they don't go bankrupt but at the same time the government isn't messing with how the papers run their company. He has 8 million euros for that. The committee calculated that that's not enough and advised to tax internet usage a bit so the total sum is larger.
That's it. It's an advice of a committee to a minister who then has to think about what to do with it. As the minister is a well known scientist and well aware of what internet etc. is, I don't think this advice will be made law.
Because Microsoft says they are? PS2 + ps3 combined still outsells the 360, month over month in the US. The Ps3 alone doesn't, but they still sell the Ps2 and there are still games coming out for the Ps2.
Across the globe, Sony isn't doing bad at all. Sure, I think they really would have liked to be outselling the 360 with the PS3 alone at this moment, but alas, it didn't happen. Big deal, they keep on selling the ps2 and look, it still works. Not everyone looks at the US as the center of the world: the rest of the world also counts, hell, in south america for example, all next-gen consoles are simply too expensive for the majority of the people.
Sony makes money for activision, so why should activision drop sony? It makes them money. So dropping the platform would LOSE them money, so they won't do that. Sony also knows that and I'm pretty sure they don't even pay attention to this nonsense.
The problem is more, like your comment, that a certain group of people think sony is in a tough spot and really on the brim to keel over and keep on repeating that whenever they can. That's the real problem for sony at the moment. Not activision's CEO whining about some licenses he has to pay for (which prices he knew up front).
Though Sony has the solution for this in-house: their own large group of 1st and 2nd party studios. The games they're creating and will create in the coming 2 years are going to make Sony enough money and will sell enough consoles that people who keep on repeating that they're in a tough spot and ready to keel over are not believed anymore.
In that light, MS has bigger problems. But that's an umpopular statement in gaming world with the large group of very vocal 360 followers online.;)
Windows 7 doesn't seem to have an upgrade mechanism from XP, so you're kindly asked to repave your disks and install Windows 7 on it. Or upgrade to Vista first of course.
So Gartner, how are all these business suppose to forget about Vista if they're then stuck with a situation where no upgrading is possible?
(yes I know about images, and centralized software installation management, but think about all those smaller businesses with 4-5 computers for example... )
i.o.w.: josh isn't payed to go hold your hand, share funny stories or go to the mall with you and your kids, he's payed to get the job done, whatever it takes.
If that makes life hell for his co-workers, the company should make a decision: what are we: an organization which purpose is to keep some group of people off the streets or a business? If it's the former, Josh has to go, as he'll force the rest of his coworkers to go back to the streets, however if it's the latter, the rest should either shutup or do their work as well, as they too aren't payed to babble for hours at the watercooler.
I think a story in a shooter in particular is really necessary because otherwise the game will become boring pretty quickly and the player will start wondering why s/he has to go there and click button X, why object O is at spot Y etc. A story gives meaning to all that, and the player thus is able to accept why things happen the way they did and why the environments/objects are the way they are. If you for example played Gears of war 1, there are numerous moments where you simply wonder why you're there, why you have to go there and why things happen the way they happen. Sure the shooting the crap out of every enemy is fun, but a story which gives meaning to the events makes a good experience a great experience (IMHO)
Reading the Edge Magazine review of KZ2, I get the feeling it is written by a person who clearly doesn't like FPS shooters, PS3's or both. Considering the fact that similar games on the 360 received high acclaim from Edge, it looks like Edge wasn't entirely fair with the review. At least, that's what the review tells me. KZ2 arrives a couple of months after GeOW2, it can't be that in those couple of months the requirements to be an entertaining shooter has become that much higher. The review has similarities with the Eurogamer review of Fear2 which was rewarded a 5/10, also completely off the mark.
Oh well... the rest of the reviews on metacritic are pretty positive.
It might look like that, but don't forget that MS has spend billions on R&D for years already, and if you closely look at what their successful products are, the ones which make them money, they're all me-too products. This means that R&D wasn't the base of the success nor the product, but marketing was.
In that light, it's a true waste to spend billions of dollars on research while in fact very little is really delivered. Sure, here and there products pop up with things which started in R&D, but as a whole, the influence of R&D on what MS release is really pretty minor.
So I can fully understand why shareholders get pissed off: the company makes billions in profit each year, but as a shareholder you don't see a lot of that in return.
I agree with you, that line was stupid: it automatically assumes that whoever is killed by a USA soldier is a bad person and should be killed no matter what.
Well the idea of sony was to advance the PS2 design further, in my opinion a broken design having two SIMD Vector processors doing everything
It's not broken, it's just an advanced system so a developer who wants to write really fast code has to know how it works. If you look at God of war 2 for example, what the engine can do on a system with 32MB of ram and a pretty slow CPU, it really shows that a skilled developer who knows what s/he's doing can get the results desired.
I.o.w.: a 'lamer' can't get the performance desired. Well, what a shame, ain't it? If one really understands what it takes to write 3D engine code, it shouldn't be hard to understand that what the PS3 offers is in theory not really broken, but an opportunity to really get results which are beyond what one could imagine.
Sure it's hard to write that code, but that's no different from writing solid, performing, scalable data-access code for example. It doesn't require thousands of developers to write that code: only a few are required, they can write the hard part, the rest of the developers can build on top of that. After all, a game is often mostly written in a script-like language of the engine or C/C++ utilizing engine libraries, not a lot of people developing games are really writing engine cores.
It also means that the Cell can't fiddle with video RAM directly. It's power could perhaps be better used if it could directly do operations at full speed on data in VRAM but it can't.
Everyone who has written assembler code for an Amiga 500 knows that this isn't true: if you have multiple processors fiddling with data in videomemory, they also share a bus, and that sharing is precisely why it makes it slow. At least compared to memory which is only for 1 processor.
Microsoft's 512MB memory runs at a very slow speed compared to the 3ghz frequency the PS3 cpu memory runs on. It's not a surprise why this is: the bus is shared: display hardware, video chip, main cpu, all have to utilize a bus to the same memory. To schedule all these requests, you have to use even/odd cycle schemes or similar, you can't use the bus all for one chip. 'DMA' only helps you if you own the bus to the memory, which is what the PS3 hardware gives you: very fast data crunchers in the CPU space and a videochip which can do whatever it wants in videomemory.
That the PS3 runs out of texture memory is not really an argument as well: one can easily generate/unpack textures in cpu memory for usage in video memory, as the speed difference is significant. Though what happens is that multi-platform engines in general tend to write most stuff in shaders and want to use a big main memory block for texture memory as that's easier and 'it works on xbox'. Porting it over to ps3 works, unless you have a need for more than a given threshold of texture memory, which gives problems which aren't easy to solve.
It's partly lazyness really: you've to solve it once and you can re-use the engine for multiple games on the multi-platforms you want to support. The question is: do you want to write that special SPU using optimization code or not? More and more studios are willing to do so. Not because they want to, but because they have to: once Sony starts releasing more and more games exclusively for PS3 developed using their maturing engines (e.g. KZ2, uncharted 2 etc.), keeping up with that for a multi-platform game really requires that PS3 optimizations are in place, otherwise the multi-platform game will suck in comparison with the ps3 exclusives. As Sony owns more studios than MS and nintendo combined, this is a matter of time.
Right? Ok, so next time one of your banks keels over due to greedy fingers of their 'managers', don't beg for government intervention. Let's see what you'll say after the economy collapses big time, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
if you never use the same random number twice. Sorting fails because if two or more elements have the same 'random' number assigned to them, they won't switch places compared to the other elements compared to whatever numbers the rest has. This means that it's less optimal.
So calling sorting a non-optimal randomization technique isn't always valid: assigning unique random numbers to the elements does work.
I mean, he needs to block the HV correcting the tables, and presses a button to do that. But... that requires serious timing, as the call is made and directly after that he has to block the memory access with the pulse. To me this seems impossible to do, or he can start jamming the signal BEFORE the call is made, but that would potentially ruin the call in the first place.
In theory that sounds great. In practice however, the competitor can rip your innovation easily by building it a bit different and patent that too (as it's not 'the same'). The result is 2 patents for practically the same thing. If more competitors do that, we end up with a lot of patents for the same thing and nightmares waiting to happen.
In theory the competitors have to license the technology patent by the inventor. In practice they don't want to pay and try to work around it. If by patenting your own 'slightly different' approach is possible, they'll do it.
So in practice what you said is not going to work. True, the inventor likely has more costs than the 'me-too' product producer but they won't gain it back because the competition won't license their tech.
As showing a nipple or add nudity to a game will definitely make it be rated A for adult only and thus not sellable.
For the people who think this footage is not something to argue about because it's a 'game', consider a game where you have to shove as much jews as possible in a gas chamber. Yes, horrific and the lowest possible taste possible, but it's for the sake of the argument: it's then too just 'a game', however people will (and rightfully so) be horrified and declare it unacceptable.
What I then wonder is: why is this 'a game' and 'fantasy', and another example 'unacceptable' ?
The problem is that anything can install such a listening service on XP making it instantly vulnerable. That XP SP2/3 isn't vulnerable by default is a 'mitigating factor' in MS Security bulletin lingo, not a reason not to patch.
I don't understand why they're dragging their feet, as sooner or later something installs a listening service (or the user already has such a service) and it's over.
I don't really care about speed, all browsers are pretty fast. The main issue I have with for example Opera is that it doesn't always render HTML correctly (even in 10 RTM), and sometimes hangs when you resize windows. I rather like a correctly rendered page which is done in 0.012ms than a badly rendered page which is rendered in 0.003ms
These issues are still not fixed in 10.0 RTM:
- VMWare server 2.0 interface doesn't render properly in 10.0: Select a VM and at the right you don't see any info appear. /., where all checkbox controls are rendered as windows 95 checkboxes.
- '#' local links are resolved after everything is loaded: e.g. http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=277142&page=14#comment3054845 , this is slow, as all icons first have to be loaded before the local jump is made. This is annoying at forum sites
- On Windows XP, Checkbox in webpage isn't styled but looks like Windows 95 checkbox. This is particularly present here at
- Cookies set in javascript where the name has a ' ' in the name are not persisted.
- Sometimes a combobox is rendered as a windows 95 combobox instead of a Windows XP / themed combo box, e.g. when you set the options like: Pink
- In the default skin, on Windows XP, when you hover over the scrollbar at the right, the scrollbar is highlighted... pink
- Bittorrent client is really really slow compared to Vuse for example
ref: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightly-less-awful-resume.html
I think you and your team should start focusing on developing software for the client you have to write the software for, i.o.w. back to square 1 of Software Engineering. You and your team seem to have moved yourselves into an organizational mess which takes more time to manage than the actual software development.
Mind you, your client doesn't give a hoot HOW you created the software, which language it is written in, or that you eat 1001 bags of blue M&Ms during the making, all they care about is if the software does what they need it to do. So you should go write that software, how is up to you, but if that 'how' process is actually taking more time and energy than the software itself, you should perhaps abandone that process you called 'agile' and go back to Common Sense Software Engineering principles, like defining what functionality should be implemented and actually DO that.
I would have upmodded you but I already replied elsewhere. I didn't know it was a kort geding, as indeed there it's very important to show up. TPB should really get a better lawyer. OTOH, they might get sued in a lot of countries, so it's for them undoable to visit each and every one of them to go to a court hearing, I think.
I don't believe Brein has a good case against ISPs as they're not involved in the lawsuit: if Brein orders them to block a certain site, they can simply say they (ISPs) aren't ordered to do so because the site has to block the NL visitors, not an ISP, it would otherwise come down to censorship for the entire population ordered by civil court, which can never happen, as Brein is a civil organisation.
But with dutch judges, one never knows...
No that's not true, it's not a criminal charge, it was in civil court. You can only be arrested if you have committed a crime. If they're not paying, according to the court, and they appear in the netherlands, the court could order to confiscate their belongings till the sum they have to pay is fulfilled, but that's about it. So i.o.w.: it's likely they just don't give a toss about this ruling.
No, as BREIN isn't associated with the public ministry (Openbaar Ministery) which is the authority which sues people/legal identities in criminal court. BREIN is a civil organisation like any other company or foundation, and therefore has no authority to order anything from anyone. An ISP isn't involved in this (otherwise phone companies should also be held liable when a criminal tells a mate to commit a crime) and therefore can't be ordered to do anything.
The judge is clearly not aware of what internet is. This is common among judges btw. I also find it weird that a civil organisation can censor the internet (through civil court) for people who aren't involved in the lawsuite.
I recall bank secrecy, I recall flight information etc. And isn't it so that a US law is seen as 'valid' across the globe in the US? If not, how can it be that people who have never visited the US are demanded by the US to be brought to them for 'justice' because they violated a US law. ?
and I can't upgrade my Windows XP box to 7 because there's no upgrade path either. This means that I have to upgrade to vista first, and then to 7. Like I have nothing better to do.
The other thing is that on my core 2 quad with 2gb ram, I never really run into delays of switching between processes, windows XP feels snappy (and 'feeling snappy' is mostly a user interface trick anyway), as the major bottleneck of all things done on a system is the harddisk.
I.o.w.: upgrading to 7 (if it were possible) will not give me much better hardware usage anyway than win XP does now. And no, I hate the 7 taskbar (as I have to fight with hidden settings to get my beloved quicklaunch back and I hate the grouping of icons).
Are you nuts? You can say what you want, with one restriction: our laws are mandatory over the ground rule that you can say what you want. So you can't insult someone because it's your opinion or discriminate one.
If I look at the 'Telegraaf' (the biggest newspaper) which is more and more moving towards PVV-level rightwing, I don't see how free speech is limited to the left side, on the contrary.
Your other remarks are also not true in the way you stated them. I agree with the PVV being anti-islam but I don't think they'll be the next government nor that they'll sent people back to morocco, simply because it's against the law (european law) and they're is no 'back', these people are born here so are legal dutch citizens
The Dutch government didn't state it wants any of this thing. The minister of education and culture asked a committee (with non parliament members!) how newspapers could be supported so they don't go bankrupt but at the same time the government isn't messing with how the papers run their company. He has 8 million euros for that. The committee calculated that that's not enough and advised to tax internet usage a bit so the total sum is larger.
That's it. It's an advice of a committee to a minister who then has to think about what to do with it. As the minister is a well known scientist and well aware of what internet etc. is, I don't think this advice will be made law.
Because Microsoft says they are? PS2 + ps3 combined still outsells the 360, month over month in the US. The Ps3 alone doesn't, but they still sell the Ps2 and there are still games coming out for the Ps2.
Across the globe, Sony isn't doing bad at all. Sure, I think they really would have liked to be outselling the 360 with the PS3 alone at this moment, but alas, it didn't happen. Big deal, they keep on selling the ps2 and look, it still works. Not everyone looks at the US as the center of the world: the rest of the world also counts, hell, in south america for example, all next-gen consoles are simply too expensive for the majority of the people.
Sony makes money for activision, so why should activision drop sony? It makes them money. So dropping the platform would LOSE them money, so they won't do that. Sony also knows that and I'm pretty sure they don't even pay attention to this nonsense.
The problem is more, like your comment, that a certain group of people think sony is in a tough spot and really on the brim to keel over and keep on repeating that whenever they can. That's the real problem for sony at the moment. Not activision's CEO whining about some licenses he has to pay for (which prices he knew up front).
Though Sony has the solution for this in-house: their own large group of 1st and 2nd party studios. The games they're creating and will create in the coming 2 years are going to make Sony enough money and will sell enough consoles that people who keep on repeating that they're in a tough spot and ready to keel over are not believed anymore.
In that light, MS has bigger problems. But that's an umpopular statement in gaming world with the large group of very vocal 360 followers online. ;)
Windows 7 doesn't seem to have an upgrade mechanism from XP, so you're kindly asked to repave your disks and install Windows 7 on it. Or upgrade to Vista first of course.
So Gartner, how are all these business suppose to forget about Vista if they're then stuck with a situation where no upgrading is possible?
(yes I know about images, and centralized software installation management, but think about all those smaller businesses with 4-5 computers for example... )
i.o.w.: josh isn't payed to go hold your hand, share funny stories or go to the mall with you and your kids, he's payed to get the job done, whatever it takes.
If that makes life hell for his co-workers, the company should make a decision: what are we: an organization which purpose is to keep some group of people off the streets or a business? If it's the former, Josh has to go, as he'll force the rest of his coworkers to go back to the streets, however if it's the latter, the rest should either shutup or do their work as well, as they too aren't payed to babble for hours at the watercooler.
I think a story in a shooter in particular is really necessary because otherwise the game will become boring pretty quickly and the player will start wondering why s/he has to go there and click button X, why object O is at spot Y etc. A story gives meaning to all that, and the player thus is able to accept why things happen the way they did and why the environments/objects are the way they are. If you for example played Gears of war 1, there are numerous moments where you simply wonder why you're there, why you have to go there and why things happen the way they happen. Sure the shooting the crap out of every enemy is fun, but a story which gives meaning to the events makes a good experience a great experience (IMHO)
Reading the Edge Magazine review of KZ2, I get the feeling it is written by a person who clearly doesn't like FPS shooters, PS3's or both. Considering the fact that similar games on the 360 received high acclaim from Edge, it looks like Edge wasn't entirely fair with the review. At least, that's what the review tells me. KZ2 arrives a couple of months after GeOW2, it can't be that in those couple of months the requirements to be an entertaining shooter has become that much higher. The review has similarities with the Eurogamer review of Fear2 which was rewarded a 5/10, also completely off the mark.
Oh well... the rest of the reviews on metacritic are pretty positive.
It might look like that, but don't forget that MS has spend billions on R&D for years already, and if you closely look at what their successful products are, the ones which make them money, they're all me-too products. This means that R&D wasn't the base of the success nor the product, but marketing was.
In that light, it's a true waste to spend billions of dollars on research while in fact very little is really delivered. Sure, here and there products pop up with things which started in R&D, but as a whole, the influence of R&D on what MS release is really pretty minor.
So I can fully understand why shareholders get pissed off: the company makes billions in profit each year, but as a shareholder you don't see a lot of that in return.
I agree with you, that line was stupid: it automatically assumes that whoever is killed by a USA soldier is a bad person and should be killed no matter what.
It's not broken, it's just an advanced system so a developer who wants to write really fast code has to know how it works. If you look at God of war 2 for example, what the engine can do on a system with 32MB of ram and a pretty slow CPU, it really shows that a skilled developer who knows what s/he's doing can get the results desired.
I.o.w.: a 'lamer' can't get the performance desired. Well, what a shame, ain't it? If one really understands what it takes to write 3D engine code, it shouldn't be hard to understand that what the PS3 offers is in theory not really broken, but an opportunity to really get results which are beyond what one could imagine.
Sure it's hard to write that code, but that's no different from writing solid, performing, scalable data-access code for example. It doesn't require thousands of developers to write that code: only a few are required, they can write the hard part, the rest of the developers can build on top of that. After all, a game is often mostly written in a script-like language of the engine or C/C++ utilizing engine libraries, not a lot of people developing games are really writing engine cores.
Everyone who has written assembler code for an Amiga 500 knows that this isn't true: if you have multiple processors fiddling with data in videomemory, they also share a bus, and that sharing is precisely why it makes it slow. At least compared to memory which is only for 1 processor.
Microsoft's 512MB memory runs at a very slow speed compared to the 3ghz frequency the PS3 cpu memory runs on. It's not a surprise why this is: the bus is shared: display hardware, video chip, main cpu, all have to utilize a bus to the same memory. To schedule all these requests, you have to use even/odd cycle schemes or similar, you can't use the bus all for one chip. 'DMA' only helps you if you own the bus to the memory, which is what the PS3 hardware gives you: very fast data crunchers in the CPU space and a videochip which can do whatever it wants in videomemory.
That the PS3 runs out of texture memory is not really an argument as well: one can easily generate /unpack textures in cpu memory for usage in video memory, as the speed difference is significant. Though what happens is that multi-platform engines in general tend to write most stuff in shaders and want to use a big main memory block for texture memory as that's easier and 'it works on xbox'. Porting it over to ps3 works, unless you have a need for more than a given threshold of texture memory, which gives problems which aren't easy to solve.
It's partly lazyness really: you've to solve it once and you can re-use the engine for multiple games on the multi-platforms you want to support. The question is: do you want to write that special SPU using optimization code or not? More and more studios are willing to do so. Not because they want to, but because they have to: once Sony starts releasing more and more games exclusively for PS3 developed using their maturing engines (e.g. KZ2, uncharted 2 etc.), keeping up with that for a multi-platform game really requires that PS3 optimizations are in place, otherwise the multi-platform game will suck in comparison with the ps3 exclusives. As Sony owns more studios than MS and nintendo combined, this is a matter of time.
"Big government: bad!"...
Right? Ok, so next time one of your banks keels over due to greedy fingers of their 'managers', don't beg for government intervention. Let's see what you'll say after the economy collapses big time, eh?
Sony's 'Home' is really not comparable with Microsoft's new avatars/Xbox UI. Home is a virtual world, MS' UI is just that, a UI.