I would guess two reasons, which are related. IE was VERY popular a few years ago. It was a relativly good browser, up to date, and thanks to Windows coming with IE by default it held a massive market share. The biggest competitors were Opera (not free) and Netscape. Even Macs had IE. If you made a website, you had to make it work in IE, and making it work in something else was a luxury, it wasn't that necessary.
I think what we are seeing is the result of that, at least in part. Web sites were designed for that and things have continued. You update your site, update your site, update your site. It's still setup for that browser. You may bother to fix it for FF and such.
Don't get me wrong, I HATE this. I especially hate sites that tell me I must use IE then work fine when I tell Safari to fake being IE. And this is becoming less of an issue as the market share of Macs goes up, and FF reaches like 20% here in the US and up to 50% in some European countries (see story from the other day).
Ignoring other browsers used to be safe. Now it can mean a big share of the market.
Also, in the (smaller) shop where I work, things MUST work on IE simply because it is such a big part of the market. That said, we all use FireFox and design for it first then go fix stuff for IE. Safari tends to work with whatever FireFox does for the most part.
PS: Installing IE tab is not a solution. Saying you are "FireFox compatible with IE tab" is like saying a paddle boat is gas compatible when you duct-tape an outboard motor on it.
YouTube works. I've used it. In fact, I heard that was one of the original reasons the browser beta was delayed was so they could update flash and make YouTube work.
They are selling people Wiis. That is just a troll comment. The fact they are so popular they can't produce them fast enough is not Nintendo's fault.
The fingering charts were already done for the first game. These are not new songs where they had to create this. The data already existed. They want to sell new songs that haven't been in either game for $2... I could understand that better. But I see this as an insult. The song was already recorded, they didn't need to redo that either. These specific tracks should not be this expensive.
I really REALLY like Harmonix. For the rest of this comment, I'm going to assume this is MS's doing, as I like Harmonix and think they are nicer to their users than this.
Let's review. I bought Guitar Hero, and loved it. I bought Guitar Hero 2, and loved it. I've been considering buying Guitar Hero 2 for the 360 (I'd have to buy a 360, which I plan to do when there are enough games I like) because of the downloadable content. I really love the game. I'm glad they are releasing songs from the original (come on Ziggy Stardust!). But let's get real.
Cost to buy all the tracks I liked from iTunes: $50 or so (since they didn't release a soundtrack for a music game... shame).
Or I can also get copies of the songs for Guitar Hero 2 for the 360, in groups of 3, at the low low price of OVER DOUBLE WHAT iTUNES CHARGES. Get serious. No go. I would be questioning a $1 price. This is insane. How about you let me stick my LEGAL, PURCHASED copy of the game in the drive and play the songs off it or copy them to the hard drive so I can play them? Sell me a $10 unlocker that lets me do this.
I was thinking of getting GH2 for the 360. I was thinking of maybe paying the $80 again. Forget it. If this is what songs will cost, they can just forget it.
Love to. That's not the mandate. We've talked about it, but we're not doing it (yet). All our web stuff is JSP and we reuse a ton of code (since we remake the same little sites over and over for a fair number of our tasks, just chaning little bits). But the problem is we're a small company and it has to get done fast. It is simply faster for us and what we are doing right now to just copy an existing site and change the little bits than set up the templating system or other such things.
It's all about time. We're moving in that direction as we convince management of the return (and things get worse as they want more and bigger changes). But things started with a "do this fast, not right, we'll fix it later" and snowballed from there.
A full rewrite of the front end is scheduled for the next major release, but it's been pushed back before.
I develop two things for a living. I work on a server back-end, and on the web front-end. The back end is easy. It's all Java, it's fun to develop for (there is challenge in some things, for example).
Then there are tons of front-end things I do. I hate them. It's developing the same code OVER and OVER (since we basically make copies of some parts to be used numerous times) and the glue code always has to go in there and is a pain. Then there is the scripting. Besides making things display right (which is a pain across numerous browsers), there is the functionality. "We want a select all checkbox." "When you update this date, it should update that date, unless this date is before than date except when...". Javascript is HIDEOUS. Can we just replace it with Python or Java even PHP?
Our problems are all user based. The users want it to work like a desktop application, but want it to be web based. It should respond fast and do all this checking and such, but it can't be a real application. You should be able to move forward and backwards without things going weird (can be tough to do in the stateless-ness of the web) but it can't be a real application.
We want an application, but we want it to be web based. We want it fast, but it must be made in HTML and Javascript. Blah blah blah.
I would LOVE to do more desktop applications. I wish I could.
I wish users would get over this stupid "lets put everything on the web" stuff. There is a fair amount of what we do that I can see being web based (like most of the reporting type stuff external users use). But all the management stuff we use in house would be a much better fit to a real application than the web applications we are using now.
Please, PLEASE.... bring desktop applications into vogue. Java allows right-once-run-anywhere to just as high a degree as HTML/JavaScrpit, if not more. Takes less bandwidth. Can run much faster. Can do client side stuff easier.
It should be firmware only. Even the XBox was powerful enough that it should have been able to play DVDs without the help of hardware. At this point, I think all the consoles actually have hardware assisted DVD playback features (like MPEG2 decoding or other helpful little bits). The 'Cube could play DVD quality video, there is no doubt in my mind that the Wii should be able to play it without hardware additions.
Cute. Like I said, one month of Apple "slippage" doesn't mean that Apple is dying, or that Vista is taking its sales. This is especially true based on the points that I mentioned. I still see little compelling in Vista but there was enough in OS X to make me switch and very glad I did. I've seen and helped other people switch since then and they are all happy too. Everyone I know who is knowledgeable about computers (it's a hobby, profesional career, etc) basically seems to think that OS X is superior and most have Macs (or plan to get one when their current computer gets too old). The hold outs? Gamers.
Even the "lay" people that I've seen switch have been extremely happy with it.
I see no reason to believe that Vista is going to take OS X's market share, or that Apple has anything to worry about. Frankly, I'd be amazed if Apple didn't continue to gain on Windows. Look at the trends of how Apple has been doing (especially in the laptop market). If there weren't $350 bargain basement PCs, Apple would be wiping the floor with PCs.
As for global warming, I'm not positive it's happening, but I'm not positive it's not. I'd just like to remind you of the impending ice age that was predicted in 70s or so, the world overpopulation and famine predicted in the 60s, and how we were supposed to run out of oil by the 90s. Doubting any of these was enough to get you called an idiot or told you were in denial.
Maybe global warming does exist. I think the Earth is warming. But where is the proof that it's humans doing it and not mostly or all a natural warming cycle? Mars is getting hotter, is that because of global warming and our fault too? Or maybe it has to do with the sun. Where is the proof that global warming is irreversible. Where is the proof that the sea level will rise 20 feet and not just 5 inches. Maybe it will go up 20 feet, but it may take 400 years.
Watch this: The Great Global Warming Swindle. You don't have to believe it, but it provides a counterpoint. Is Gore right, exaggerating, or wrong? Time will tell. Wikipedia has an article about it here.
But shouting down any doubters as idiots, ignorant, or foolish doesn't exactly give credibility. How valid can your point be if you won't let people debate it with you.
Can we get real? Apple's market share dropped for one month? Let's see what could cause that:
People waiting for Leopard
People waiting for CS 3 to come out (this was February after all)
Vista's sales jump (in both hardware and software) from heavy promotion and tons of news coverage
There. That took about 3 seconds to think up. When Vista has displaced Apple for 3 months in a row, we can talk. Until then this is stupid hype designed to make Vista look like it isn't a dog sales wise (when from MS you would think it would have started selling like Windows 95 did). Plus, this is the PowerPC share that dropped. They are old and slow as hell (I'm using one). Now that CS3 is out (and was about to come out by the time they did this survey) you'd be an IDIOT to buy one. So the Intel side didn't jump up. People are probably waiting for CS3 (to put their requisitions in at work), or for Leopard (coming any time now, June 21st at the latest).
The PSP has had problems from day 1. I own one. I regret it. I haven't touched it in a long time. Their biggest mistake? The control scheme. NO SECOND ANALOG STICK. Considering how Sony really popularized that (during the PS1 time frame) and everyone uses it these days, not having it on the console is a huge mistake. It makes things tough for many of the games out there. Katamari got a weird control scheme, no good camera control in FPSes or 3D platformers (NOTE: I own a DS, which I love, but I think they should have put one analog stick on it). The games draught (as I see it) is the biggest problem. There is only ONE game I can think of that I am looking forward to: God of War for the PSP and I don't even think that has been officially announced.
How to improve it at this point? Better games, pure and simple. There have been so many games I've played in the past year or two on my DS compared to a tiny handful on my PSP.
Opening some kind of homebrew (even if regulated and locked down) would give me new interest because then I could make stuff and try other peoples. That wouldn't solve the games problem, but it would help some.
Interesting system, problems in design, I regret I purchased it (especially considering it's original price).
As I remember, that figure is only given so it can be compared to traditional techniques. Polygons are "free" in ray-tracing. It doesn't matter if you have one giant polygon, or 100,000 little ones; they should render at roughly the same speed (memory and such makes up for the difference). Since you only draw what's visible (where in rasterized drawing you have to draw everything, tricks help reduce overdraw but it's still there) it doesn't matter how many polygons you have. Ray-tracing is relatively constant in needed power (where tradition GPUs go from next to nothing for standing next to a wall in a FPS to tons of power to draw a full landscape).
The catch in all this is reflections. The more reflections you do, the slower things get. Some reflections (like those used to make a color cast when a white object is next to a red object) aren't bad, but to accurately draw a group of mirrors could be devastating to performance (as the light ray may hit mirror 1, then 2, then 3, then 7, then a surface).
I'm no expert, this is based on what I remember/have learned looking into the subject.
Um... no. Ray tracing, by definition, CAN be hardware-accelerated. All that it is is tracing the path of light beams to build the image. It can be hardware accelerated. There have been projects in the past (university students, and even companies) to make hardware accelerators for ray-tracing.
I'd love to see that definition that say it is not hardware-accelerated.
Note that the RSX (the graphics powerhouse) is not being used at all and could cut things down. Real time ray-tracing on a lower level (say 720p) may be feasible on one PS3 using both chips. You won't run your game with it (unless you render at 480p and upscale or something), but you could use it for cut-scenes or menus or other things where you don't have the overhead of traditional games processing (AI, etc.).
Also, one SPE on each console was dedicated to compressing the resulting image (to save bandwidth), and an additional SPE was used on the client to decode the images. That means there were 5 + 5 + 4 = 14 SPEs doing actual ray-tracing. That's just a hair over 2 machines if they didn't have to deal with the encoding/decoding process. Add the RSX in and this looks like it may be feasible to me (again, not for game-play where you have to run AI and such).
Still, quite cool and shows you what a PS3 is capable of in some situations.
I first tried assembly when I was 16 or so, and made a simple little DOS TSR type thing (despite the fact we were way out of the DOS era at the time). I've done little bits here and there (plus a college course on micro-controllers, but obviously that wasn't x86). I didn't mean to give the impression it was 20 years ago, but the last time I messed with x86 assembly was probably 5 years ago which in my time frame is quite a long time.
I'm not claiming to be an expert. I never said "I design micro-architectures for a living". I asked a question based on what I knew from reading about this kind of stuff since it interests me. I am to processor designers what someone with a car hobby is to a mechanic. I know some stuff, I follow it, it interests me, but I'm not claiming to be a hard authority.
I don't do assembly programming as a job. I've read about all the architectures and their internal structures, the improvements that x86-64 brought, etc. But I code Java for a living. I just have no need to remember those exact numbers. I know from experience and reading that -64 increased the number of registers. I remember trying my hand at assembly programming YEARS and YEARS ago and there were certain instructions that could only operate on certain registers, you couldn't use whatever you wanted (like with a 68k). All registers were not equal, where I believe with the -64 they mostly are (for integer stuff).
Yes but it is being used less and less. No one really uses the 16 bit support and such in Linux. In the future even the 32 bit support will be used less. When MS drops compatibility at some point (they can't keep going forever) they can put in a software emulation layer. The demand to run 8 and 16 bit DOS programs won't keep being worth it forever. When that happens, after a few years it will be possible to start dropping those portions of the chip since they are so little used and we have emulators at this point (like BOCHS) that could take over for running 286 code.
At this point, does it matter as much? As we move on the future is clearly x86-64 which is MASSIVELY cleaned up compared to x86 and is really rather clean compared to that. Sure at this point we still boot into 8086 mode and have to switch up to x86-64 but that's not that important, it only lasts a short while.
As we move off of x86 onto -64, are things really still that bad? Memory isn't segmented, you have like 32 different registers, you don't have operands tied to registers (all add instructions must use AX or something like that) as some 16/32 bit instructions were.
Of course, we should have used a nice clean architecture like 68k from the start, but that wasn't what was in the first IBM.... and we all know how things went from there.
I'd like to comment on SSX. It's the last game for the Wii I played. I will admit that I wasn't great with the control scheme, but I know that would have changed with a little more time. I spent enough time that I began to glimpse just how good the controls could be, but I've been playing the SSX series since the first so my brain is a little hard-wired.
That said, from my time with it I would have considered it a mediocre game. SSX 3 was a MASSIVE achievement and I think just about perfect. SSX On Tour (or whatever the last one was) was good, but it just didn't have that same smooth coherent feel of SSX 3, and I felt it was trying to hard to be metal. That said, I INSTANTLY recognized most of the tracks that I played on the game for the Wii. The game has so much recycled content, I just felt it an insult, like they didn't even try. They wanted a new control scheme. Good for them. They couldn't make new tracks, or at least re-mix the parts of the old ones better? Instead I felt like I was playing a "best of" game with a control scheme that I couldn't get the hang of (for the short time I spent with the game). These two things combined made me put the game down. I didn't want to invest the time in the control scheme to play the tracks I've played before.
I really like the series, but I'm still afraid that it hit it's zenith with 3.
Complaints aside, I'm glad to see someone really trying with the Wiimote in something other than an FPS or party game. I can't wait to see what comes out in the future if this is an indicator of what's to come. I find myself rather un-impressed by the "let's take Prince of Persia and make them push the Wiimote to punch" style so many companies seem to want to use. Zelda did a decent job with this, even if it was still obvious that it was designed for the 'cube in many ways.
I tend to like fixed cameras. Most of the time I find that having the camera under my control is because they couldn't get the logic half-decent, and had to do it to make the game playable. There have been a few instances where it has annoyed me, but by and large I think they did a very good job with it.
As for Shadow of the Colossus, you have to remember that the scenes were VERY simple, except for the Colossus and the main character. Plus the game had noticeable frame-rate issues. So to combine that with the rest of the stuff in the scenes in GOW II probably would have been a problem.
Still, both games look fantastic and could pass as next-gen if they were just anti-aliased.
I've been playing GOW II recently and I have to say it's a FANTSTIC game. It looks great on my TV at widescreen and 480p, and it's a blast to play. Despite the fact that they to handicap Kratos (he was a god at the end of the last game, they had to do SOMETHING) they've done an excelelnt job in the parts I've played so far and handling his abilities, story telling, and keeping me hooked. The camera works great (because it's scripted). Loads are fast. For the most part, it's a textbook case of how to do a great game.
The only complaint I have is the visual tearing which is by no means infrequent. It looks like VSYNC was turned off. It is rather annoying. I'm really sorry that made it through QA (probably done to keep the frame rate up, but in a game like this with so much fast moving stuff it is quite noticeable).
Still, games like this and Shadow of the Colossus have come out of the PS2. I'd be happy with God of War II on a next-gen console if it was just anti-aliased. I can't wait to see what people can pull out of the PS3 and 360 4-5 years from now. Can you imagine what people would have said if you had Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, or God of War (1/2) near the PS2 launch. That would have blown people's minds of what "next-generation" could be at the time.
See that makes sense. But NBC isn't buying YouTube, in this case they are making their own (and that is where the buying comes in). You can buy a popular site and declare yourself cool, but you can't build a site against a juggernaut and think you can make it cool with astroturfing or whatever promotions they plan to use.
No they didn't, and that's the point. MySpace was already cool, they bought it and didn't really change it. They didn't MAKE it cool. And more importantly, they didn't compete against MySpace to do it. NBC is looking to try to make their clone cool, when YouTube already exists and gained much of it's early popularity though content they won't allow.
Let's not forget that Google tried to take on YouTube (in a way), and failed. They ended up buying YouTube.
NBC wants to make another YouTube, they have to compete against the original. And with the kind of restrictions that will likely be placed on it, I don't think they'll succeed at all.
They aren't starting something new in a new market. They aren't taking an existing small market and trying to expand it. They are trying to kill a very poplar and nice Goliath.
I think that Apple and such do this one of two ways. First is supply control. If you decide to sell Apple stuff to low, Apple can always "lower" your supply. You'd learn.
More likely though is profit margin. Everyone wants to sell iPods. The things just sell and sell. Well if Apple sells them to you so you only make $20 or so on each one, you're unlikely to try to discount them $15 to get more sales. This essentially forces a price floor.
As for this case, what I heard about it (on NPR, just a blurb, haven't read summary yet) was that a company found someone online selling their product at below the invoice. This would be like my Apple example above, only someone was online selling brand new iPods for $50 under retail prices and still making money, and in this example this is below the price even Apple could afford to sell it at. I don't know how the other store managed to do this, but this is what they are trying to prevent. The ability to set a price floor at whatever you want and artificially hold prices up is just a nice benefit of this ruling, should it be made.
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I would guess two reasons, which are related. IE was VERY popular a few years ago. It was a relativly good browser, up to date, and thanks to Windows coming with IE by default it held a massive market share. The biggest competitors were Opera (not free) and Netscape. Even Macs had IE. If you made a website, you had to make it work in IE, and making it work in something else was a luxury, it wasn't that necessary.
I think what we are seeing is the result of that, at least in part. Web sites were designed for that and things have continued. You update your site, update your site, update your site. It's still setup for that browser. You may bother to fix it for FF and such.
Don't get me wrong, I HATE this. I especially hate sites that tell me I must use IE then work fine when I tell Safari to fake being IE. And this is becoming less of an issue as the market share of Macs goes up, and FF reaches like 20% here in the US and up to 50% in some European countries (see story from the other day).
Ignoring other browsers used to be safe. Now it can mean a big share of the market.
Also, in the (smaller) shop where I work, things MUST work on IE simply because it is such a big part of the market. That said, we all use FireFox and design for it first then go fix stuff for IE. Safari tends to work with whatever FireFox does for the most part.
PS: Installing IE tab is not a solution. Saying you are "FireFox compatible with IE tab" is like saying a paddle boat is gas compatible when you duct-tape an outboard motor on it.
YouTube works. I've used it. In fact, I heard that was one of the original reasons the browser beta was delayed was so they could update flash and make YouTube work.
They are selling people Wiis. That is just a troll comment. The fact they are so popular they can't produce them fast enough is not Nintendo's fault.
The fingering charts were already done for the first game. These are not new songs where they had to create this. The data already existed. They want to sell new songs that haven't been in either game for $2... I could understand that better. But I see this as an insult. The song was already recorded, they didn't need to redo that either. These specific tracks should not be this expensive.
I really REALLY like Harmonix. For the rest of this comment, I'm going to assume this is MS's doing, as I like Harmonix and think they are nicer to their users than this.
Let's review. I bought Guitar Hero, and loved it. I bought Guitar Hero 2, and loved it. I've been considering buying Guitar Hero 2 for the 360 (I'd have to buy a 360, which I plan to do when there are enough games I like) because of the downloadable content. I really love the game. I'm glad they are releasing songs from the original (come on Ziggy Stardust!). But let's get real.
Cost to buy all the tracks I liked from iTunes: $50 or so (since they didn't release a soundtrack for a music game... shame).
Or I can also get copies of the songs for Guitar Hero 2 for the 360, in groups of 3, at the low low price of OVER DOUBLE WHAT iTUNES CHARGES. Get serious. No go. I would be questioning a $1 price. This is insane. How about you let me stick my LEGAL, PURCHASED copy of the game in the drive and play the songs off it or copy them to the hard drive so I can play them? Sell me a $10 unlocker that lets me do this.
I was thinking of getting GH2 for the 360. I was thinking of maybe paying the $80 again. Forget it. If this is what songs will cost, they can just forget it.
This is an insult. No more, no less.
Love to. That's not the mandate. We've talked about it, but we're not doing it (yet). All our web stuff is JSP and we reuse a ton of code (since we remake the same little sites over and over for a fair number of our tasks, just chaning little bits). But the problem is we're a small company and it has to get done fast. It is simply faster for us and what we are doing right now to just copy an existing site and change the little bits than set up the templating system or other such things.
It's all about time. We're moving in that direction as we convince management of the return (and things get worse as they want more and bigger changes). But things started with a "do this fast, not right, we'll fix it later" and snowballed from there.
A full rewrite of the front end is scheduled for the next major release, but it's been pushed back before.
I develop two things for a living. I work on a server back-end, and on the web front-end. The back end is easy. It's all Java, it's fun to develop for (there is challenge in some things, for example).
Then there are tons of front-end things I do. I hate them. It's developing the same code OVER and OVER (since we basically make copies of some parts to be used numerous times) and the glue code always has to go in there and is a pain. Then there is the scripting. Besides making things display right (which is a pain across numerous browsers), there is the functionality. "We want a select all checkbox." "When you update this date, it should update that date, unless this date is before than date except when...". Javascript is HIDEOUS. Can we just replace it with Python or Java even PHP?
Our problems are all user based. The users want it to work like a desktop application, but want it to be web based. It should respond fast and do all this checking and such, but it can't be a real application. You should be able to move forward and backwards without things going weird (can be tough to do in the stateless-ness of the web) but it can't be a real application.
We want an application, but we want it to be web based. We want it fast, but it must be made in HTML and Javascript. Blah blah blah.
I would LOVE to do more desktop applications. I wish I could.
I wish users would get over this stupid "lets put everything on the web" stuff. There is a fair amount of what we do that I can see being web based (like most of the reporting type stuff external users use). But all the management stuff we use in house would be a much better fit to a real application than the web applications we are using now.
Please, PLEASE.... bring desktop applications into vogue. Java allows right-once-run-anywhere to just as high a degree as HTML/JavaScrpit, if not more. Takes less bandwidth. Can run much faster. Can do client side stuff easier.
It should be firmware only. Even the XBox was powerful enough that it should have been able to play DVDs without the help of hardware. At this point, I think all the consoles actually have hardware assisted DVD playback features (like MPEG2 decoding or other helpful little bits). The 'Cube could play DVD quality video, there is no doubt in my mind that the Wii should be able to play it without hardware additions.
Check out the entry on Dictionary.com. If you look under verb, the entry numbered 15 says:
It is a perfectly valid use, and not a metaphor. That said... you can see what people here at /. are think about when the word "mating" is used.
Cute. Like I said, one month of Apple "slippage" doesn't mean that Apple is dying, or that Vista is taking its sales. This is especially true based on the points that I mentioned. I still see little compelling in Vista but there was enough in OS X to make me switch and very glad I did. I've seen and helped other people switch since then and they are all happy too. Everyone I know who is knowledgeable about computers (it's a hobby, profesional career, etc) basically seems to think that OS X is superior and most have Macs (or plan to get one when their current computer gets too old). The hold outs? Gamers.
Even the "lay" people that I've seen switch have been extremely happy with it.
I see no reason to believe that Vista is going to take OS X's market share, or that Apple has anything to worry about. Frankly, I'd be amazed if Apple didn't continue to gain on Windows. Look at the trends of how Apple has been doing (especially in the laptop market). If there weren't $350 bargain basement PCs, Apple would be wiping the floor with PCs.
As for global warming, I'm not positive it's happening, but I'm not positive it's not. I'd just like to remind you of the impending ice age that was predicted in 70s or so, the world overpopulation and famine predicted in the 60s, and how we were supposed to run out of oil by the 90s. Doubting any of these was enough to get you called an idiot or told you were in denial.
Maybe global warming does exist. I think the Earth is warming. But where is the proof that it's humans doing it and not mostly or all a natural warming cycle? Mars is getting hotter, is that because of global warming and our fault too? Or maybe it has to do with the sun. Where is the proof that global warming is irreversible. Where is the proof that the sea level will rise 20 feet and not just 5 inches. Maybe it will go up 20 feet, but it may take 400 years.
Watch this: The Great Global Warming Swindle. You don't have to believe it, but it provides a counterpoint. Is Gore right, exaggerating, or wrong? Time will tell. Wikipedia has an article about it here.
But shouting down any doubters as idiots, ignorant, or foolish doesn't exactly give credibility. How valid can your point be if you won't let people debate it with you.
Can we get real? Apple's market share dropped for one month? Let's see what could cause that:
There. That took about 3 seconds to think up. When Vista has displaced Apple for 3 months in a row, we can talk. Until then this is stupid hype designed to make Vista look like it isn't a dog sales wise (when from MS you would think it would have started selling like Windows 95 did). Plus, this is the PowerPC share that dropped. They are old and slow as hell (I'm using one). Now that CS3 is out (and was about to come out by the time they did this survey) you'd be an IDIOT to buy one. So the Intel side didn't jump up. People are probably waiting for CS3 (to put their requisitions in at work), or for Leopard (coming any time now, June 21st at the latest).
Non-story.
The PSP has had problems from day 1. I own one. I regret it. I haven't touched it in a long time. Their biggest mistake? The control scheme. NO SECOND ANALOG STICK. Considering how Sony really popularized that (during the PS1 time frame) and everyone uses it these days, not having it on the console is a huge mistake. It makes things tough for many of the games out there. Katamari got a weird control scheme, no good camera control in FPSes or 3D platformers (NOTE: I own a DS, which I love, but I think they should have put one analog stick on it). The games draught (as I see it) is the biggest problem. There is only ONE game I can think of that I am looking forward to: God of War for the PSP and I don't even think that has been officially announced.
How to improve it at this point? Better games, pure and simple. There have been so many games I've played in the past year or two on my DS compared to a tiny handful on my PSP.
Opening some kind of homebrew (even if regulated and locked down) would give me new interest because then I could make stuff and try other peoples. That wouldn't solve the games problem, but it would help some.
Interesting system, problems in design, I regret I purchased it (especially considering it's original price).
As I remember, that figure is only given so it can be compared to traditional techniques. Polygons are "free" in ray-tracing. It doesn't matter if you have one giant polygon, or 100,000 little ones; they should render at roughly the same speed (memory and such makes up for the difference). Since you only draw what's visible (where in rasterized drawing you have to draw everything, tricks help reduce overdraw but it's still there) it doesn't matter how many polygons you have. Ray-tracing is relatively constant in needed power (where tradition GPUs go from next to nothing for standing next to a wall in a FPS to tons of power to draw a full landscape).
The catch in all this is reflections. The more reflections you do, the slower things get. Some reflections (like those used to make a color cast when a white object is next to a red object) aren't bad, but to accurately draw a group of mirrors could be devastating to performance (as the light ray may hit mirror 1, then 2, then 3, then 7, then a surface).
I'm no expert, this is based on what I remember/have learned looking into the subject.
Um... no. Ray tracing, by definition, CAN be hardware-accelerated. All that it is is tracing the path of light beams to build the image. It can be hardware accelerated. There have been projects in the past (university students, and even companies) to make hardware accelerators for ray-tracing.
I'd love to see that definition that say it is not hardware-accelerated.
Note that the RSX (the graphics powerhouse) is not being used at all and could cut things down. Real time ray-tracing on a lower level (say 720p) may be feasible on one PS3 using both chips. You won't run your game with it (unless you render at 480p and upscale or something), but you could use it for cut-scenes or menus or other things where you don't have the overhead of traditional games processing (AI, etc.).
Also, one SPE on each console was dedicated to compressing the resulting image (to save bandwidth), and an additional SPE was used on the client to decode the images. That means there were 5 + 5 + 4 = 14 SPEs doing actual ray-tracing. That's just a hair over 2 machines if they didn't have to deal with the encoding/decoding process. Add the RSX in and this looks like it may be feasible to me (again, not for game-play where you have to run AI and such).
Still, quite cool and shows you what a PS3 is capable of in some situations.
I first tried assembly when I was 16 or so, and made a simple little DOS TSR type thing (despite the fact we were way out of the DOS era at the time). I've done little bits here and there (plus a college course on micro-controllers, but obviously that wasn't x86). I didn't mean to give the impression it was 20 years ago, but the last time I messed with x86 assembly was probably 5 years ago which in my time frame is quite a long time.
I'm not claiming to be an expert. I never said "I design micro-architectures for a living". I asked a question based on what I knew from reading about this kind of stuff since it interests me. I am to processor designers what someone with a car hobby is to a mechanic. I know some stuff, I follow it, it interests me, but I'm not claiming to be a hard authority.
I don't do assembly programming as a job. I've read about all the architectures and their internal structures, the improvements that x86-64 brought, etc. But I code Java for a living. I just have no need to remember those exact numbers. I know from experience and reading that -64 increased the number of registers. I remember trying my hand at assembly programming YEARS and YEARS ago and there were certain instructions that could only operate on certain registers, you couldn't use whatever you wanted (like with a 68k). All registers were not equal, where I believe with the -64 they mostly are (for integer stuff).
Yes but it is being used less and less. No one really uses the 16 bit support and such in Linux. In the future even the 32 bit support will be used less. When MS drops compatibility at some point (they can't keep going forever) they can put in a software emulation layer. The demand to run 8 and 16 bit DOS programs won't keep being worth it forever. When that happens, after a few years it will be possible to start dropping those portions of the chip since they are so little used and we have emulators at this point (like BOCHS) that could take over for running 286 code.
At this point, does it matter as much? As we move on the future is clearly x86-64 which is MASSIVELY cleaned up compared to x86 and is really rather clean compared to that. Sure at this point we still boot into 8086 mode and have to switch up to x86-64 but that's not that important, it only lasts a short while.
As we move off of x86 onto -64, are things really still that bad? Memory isn't segmented, you have like 32 different registers, you don't have operands tied to registers (all add instructions must use AX or something like that) as some 16/32 bit instructions were.
Of course, we should have used a nice clean architecture like 68k from the start, but that wasn't what was in the first IBM.... and we all know how things went from there.
I'd like to comment on SSX. It's the last game for the Wii I played. I will admit that I wasn't great with the control scheme, but I know that would have changed with a little more time. I spent enough time that I began to glimpse just how good the controls could be, but I've been playing the SSX series since the first so my brain is a little hard-wired.
That said, from my time with it I would have considered it a mediocre game. SSX 3 was a MASSIVE achievement and I think just about perfect. SSX On Tour (or whatever the last one was) was good, but it just didn't have that same smooth coherent feel of SSX 3, and I felt it was trying to hard to be metal. That said, I INSTANTLY recognized most of the tracks that I played on the game for the Wii. The game has so much recycled content, I just felt it an insult, like they didn't even try. They wanted a new control scheme. Good for them. They couldn't make new tracks, or at least re-mix the parts of the old ones better? Instead I felt like I was playing a "best of" game with a control scheme that I couldn't get the hang of (for the short time I spent with the game). These two things combined made me put the game down. I didn't want to invest the time in the control scheme to play the tracks I've played before.
I really like the series, but I'm still afraid that it hit it's zenith with 3.
Complaints aside, I'm glad to see someone really trying with the Wiimote in something other than an FPS or party game. I can't wait to see what comes out in the future if this is an indicator of what's to come. I find myself rather un-impressed by the "let's take Prince of Persia and make them push the Wiimote to punch" style so many companies seem to want to use. Zelda did a decent job with this, even if it was still obvious that it was designed for the 'cube in many ways.
I tend to like fixed cameras. Most of the time I find that having the camera under my control is because they couldn't get the logic half-decent, and had to do it to make the game playable. There have been a few instances where it has annoyed me, but by and large I think they did a very good job with it.
As for Shadow of the Colossus, you have to remember that the scenes were VERY simple, except for the Colossus and the main character. Plus the game had noticeable frame-rate issues. So to combine that with the rest of the stuff in the scenes in GOW II probably would have been a problem.
Still, both games look fantastic and could pass as next-gen if they were just anti-aliased.
I've been playing GOW II recently and I have to say it's a FANTSTIC game. It looks great on my TV at widescreen and 480p, and it's a blast to play. Despite the fact that they to handicap Kratos (he was a god at the end of the last game, they had to do SOMETHING) they've done an excelelnt job in the parts I've played so far and handling his abilities, story telling, and keeping me hooked. The camera works great (because it's scripted). Loads are fast. For the most part, it's a textbook case of how to do a great game.
The only complaint I have is the visual tearing which is by no means infrequent. It looks like VSYNC was turned off. It is rather annoying. I'm really sorry that made it through QA (probably done to keep the frame rate up, but in a game like this with so much fast moving stuff it is quite noticeable).
Still, games like this and Shadow of the Colossus have come out of the PS2. I'd be happy with God of War II on a next-gen console if it was just anti-aliased. I can't wait to see what people can pull out of the PS3 and 360 4-5 years from now. Can you imagine what people would have said if you had Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, or God of War (1/2) near the PS2 launch. That would have blown people's minds of what "next-generation" could be at the time.
See that makes sense. But NBC isn't buying YouTube, in this case they are making their own (and that is where the buying comes in). You can buy a popular site and declare yourself cool, but you can't build a site against a juggernaut and think you can make it cool with astroturfing or whatever promotions they plan to use.
No they didn't, and that's the point. MySpace was already cool, they bought it and didn't really change it. They didn't MAKE it cool. And more importantly, they didn't compete against MySpace to do it. NBC is looking to try to make their clone cool, when YouTube already exists and gained much of it's early popularity though content they won't allow.
Let's not forget that Google tried to take on YouTube (in a way), and failed. They ended up buying YouTube.
NBC wants to make another YouTube, they have to compete against the original. And with the kind of restrictions that will likely be placed on it, I don't think they'll succeed at all.
They aren't starting something new in a new market. They aren't taking an existing small market and trying to expand it. They are trying to kill a very poplar and nice Goliath.
(yes, I know)
I think that Apple and such do this one of two ways. First is supply control. If you decide to sell Apple stuff to low, Apple can always "lower" your supply. You'd learn.
More likely though is profit margin. Everyone wants to sell iPods. The things just sell and sell. Well if Apple sells them to you so you only make $20 or so on each one, you're unlikely to try to discount them $15 to get more sales. This essentially forces a price floor.
As for this case, what I heard about it (on NPR, just a blurb, haven't read summary yet) was that a company found someone online selling their product at below the invoice. This would be like my Apple example above, only someone was online selling brand new iPods for $50 under retail prices and still making money, and in this example this is below the price even Apple could afford to sell it at. I don't know how the other store managed to do this, but this is what they are trying to prevent. The ability to set a price floor at whatever you want and artificially hold prices up is just a nice benefit of this ruling, should it be made.
That is, if you're a manufacturer.