Apples and oranges comparisons are difficult. You can compare, but it's hard to compare figures, it's easier to let the the customer's eyeballs and wallet decide.
I too am disappointed with the Sony I have, a Japanese import. I'm not a PS2 developer, but I do program VLIW machines with similar complexity and parallelism, and you can see why it's a nightmare to code for by reading any -serious- article about the internals, eg in Microprocessor Report.
If the games are to get better, it will be because game developers use middleware that has been optimised for PS2 at great cost in time and effort, as opposed to each developer re-inventing the wheel, which must be becoming prohibitively expensive. I'm thinking stuff like Netimmerse, Alchemy, Renderware, Mathengine...
It's naive to ask here, but can anyone give me any useful feedback on my opinion regarding middleware?
Just from memory, nothing to quote from, isn't there something like 14% tax on video equipment imports to EU (hangover from anti-Japanese VCR protectionism in the '80s). Better not shout about that DVD drive.
Maybe there's nothing new, but did you publish a web page about what you did? Most things are easy if you know how or have the time to figure them out. So many people can code, so few can document what they did.
Another reply to the parent post complained about it being upped to +3. All the parent post is doing is "karma by association". It's so elite and cool to pirate stuff? B-ll-cks. Sure someone is doing it, it's bound to happen, and whoever did it gets my respect for their skills if not their morals, so where's the content in the post moderators?
Also, Sega make good games. Even the Sony fanboys admit that. So go kill the goose that lays the golden egg with more DC piracy. Then go for broke onn the playground social ladder and crack the Nintendo why don't you? Let Sony and MS slug it out and we'll all be the worse for it, bland sames, movie and sports tie-ins for ever.
If someone clones DC disks and these enter the retail channels, Sega can point out to customers how easy it is to spot a fake, look for the "(c) (tm) Sega Enterprises" message. [I don't have a disk to hand, don't nitpick the wording]. If the pirates reproduce the wording, IANAL, but Sega can use legal arguments to stop distribution such as trademark infringement. The point being, even a non-techie judge can read the writing, no need to go into subtle stuff about patents, clean room code and so on
Re:You can trace ... tell the Mail on Sunday
on
Quickie Twister
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· Score: 1
I came across (oo-er missus) amihotornot courtesy of the UK newspaper "Mail on Sunday" (it could have been the Daily Mail, the weekday version). Their woman reporter posted an appalling photo of herself, got 2.2.
What's really funny, is that these papers are forever scaremongering about the corrupting power of the internet, yet they print a double page article about a site which is so obviously exploitable in this way.
Someone could do really nicely making a
decent-spec PCI video card specifically to be a second head - not super-fast, but reasonable. Re-release the PCI TNT.
I very much agree about making PCI cards available. I like to keep an eye on whether or not they remain available, you'll be pleased to see that Creative make a shiny new PCI TNT2 board. I run a PCI TNT at home, with XFree4.0 it is certainly good enough to run Quake II.
No need to take my word about the video memory sizes, read the front page for this discussion. Still, there have been so many PS2 articles lately, it's no wonder we're going round in circles.
You can hook up a DC to a PC monitor via an (expensive) VGA adapter add-on, but there are lots of cheap PC monitors about so it isn't as siily as it sounds. It looks good, I use it to be able to play Japanese DC in Europe (PAL TV not NTSC).
PS2 is hampered by having 4Mbyte of video memory. You can't raise the resolution as much (I think DC has 8 Mbytes, could be mistaken).
Marginally off-topic, but losing your sight through cataracts makes you worry about retinal detachment. I should know, I have two such implants.
Anyway, did you know Harold Ridley came up with the idea for implantable lenses after pulling bits of cockpit plastic from the eyes of Royal Air Force Spitfire pilots, and noticing that the plastic didn't irritate?
I'm happy to deal with such things from people in a hurry with something to say, people learning the language, typos, whatever.
Not from people who can't be bothered to make the effort. If you're working late, do you drive home in this state? For all our sakes, learn when to get some sleep.
Picture is of a nuclear bomb, Sagan is arguing we could mess up by causing nuclear winter. As some
folks would point out, this doesn't destroy the planet or even life on Earth, but it's still a bad idea for any species bigger than bacteria.
You can't expect to stay upright in this rig without moving your head. Does the system cater for the motion induced parallax as you move your head? It's not as big an issue on flight simulators I believe, because things are generally far away, but moving around a room would likely make you feel ill because what you see and what your brain expects don't match up.
The engineering is impressive nevertheless, and any theme park application would likely be improved by induced nausea.
every schoolchild should be shown the last
episode of Cosmos. It's over a decade since I first saw it, and I still get those goosebumps
I've got the hardcover book of Cosmos, the one with the pictures in, not the lame mostly-text paperback. I can't bring myself to even look at that one picture in the last chapter. I think we both feel so spooked because Sagan gives you such an amazing sense of wonder, only to bring home how we could screw up 10+ billion years of hard work (locally) for essentially trivial reasons.
When scientists work on technology they hardly have affordability in mind.
It doesn't always follow that you can take a "breakthrough" and scale it down.
For example, I'm interested in 3D graphics on consumer hardware. Things are much better now, but a few years ago you'd see demos done on huge SGI machines apparently bought as status symbols. I recall some guy on a SGI training course asking the instructor about a bug in his program running on some big SGI iron - the instructor had to show some restraint, since the program was relying in 100% brute force, and could be made much faster by using even the most basic level of detail and culling algorithms.
I don't intend to imply that the student was somehow incompetent - for all I know he was a genius in nuclear physics or molecular chemistry or medical simulation and just using the SGI as a means to an end, his breakthrough in chemistry or physics or medicine
On the other hand, where is
the breakthrough in throwing big iron at a problem like VR? Doom impressed a lot of people in 1993 because they couldn't believe it was even possible on a PC, because they didn't have the right mindset, being used to big iron.
Kinda makes you think that these researchers really really need...
As anyone who saw the BBC's TV broadcast on wearables at Philips will have seen, there were (shock horror) both men and women actually working on technology there.
I am an unashamed XEmacs advocate, but sometimes I need an unbloated editor in a hurry. Vi is good, I can drive it, but sometimes I can't switch my mindset. I need an unbloated Emacs.
I came across MicroEmacs for Linux, at more or less the same version as used on my Atari ST ten years ago (I used it then for writing my own text editor from scratch, as a learning exercise, and as a model of how to do things right). There's a derived version Linus was involved in, with minimal bug fixes over about five years.
My point being you have to admire the MicroEmacs developers for achieving both usefulness and long term stability.
Where is the MPEG of it walking around someones house?
Take a look at Ella the Cat's homepage. OK, it's the original Aibo, but the movies are MPEG so you don't need a weird codec, and it is our house it's walking around.
Moore's Law happened, but it is no good for predicting the future.
Intel seem to think so - I quote from the Intel page I provide a link to:
Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend that has continued and is still remarkably accurate. It is the basis for many planners' performance forecasts.
26 years of evidence show the number of transistors increasing over time. It won't continue for ever, most people think we have another decade. So I'm saying we need to come
up with ideas on how to best use those transistors. If we are uninspired over the next decade, there's a danger that the computing horsepower (eg MIPS or some such vague metric) won't scale.
Or are we arguing in Philosophy 101? I guarantee that the sun will rise on Friday 13th October 2000. Sigh.
You should care. The x86 has had so much bolted onto it and the clock pushed up so high it's not that much of a surprise the 1.13GHz PIII ran out of steam recently. I program VLIW machines and there's some mileage left there, but I can see the writing on the wall; we need something else.
We've got at least a decade of Moore's Law left and we have to find some way of really using huge chip complexities. Putting many processors on a die is simple enough for the hardware guys (not to underestimate what they do at all). Just bloating a processor to make use of a whole chip is do-able, but what do you suggest other than tons of cache?
Figuring out how to use parallel processors is a big issue for the future IMHO. Maybe this one will bomb, but we should support their innovation.
Also, programming weird architectures is fun and teaches you stuff - as an example I went to a lecture on optimising code ar Siggraph, people liked it, the content was good, but some of the stuff was already second nature to us VLIW programmers.
Slashdot Mirror
Apples and oranges comparisons are difficult. You can compare, but it's hard to compare figures, it's easier to let the the customer's eyeballs and wallet decide.
I too am disappointed with the Sony I have, a Japanese import. I'm not a PS2 developer, but I do program VLIW machines with similar complexity and parallelism, and you can see why it's a nightmare to code for by reading any -serious- article about the internals, eg in Microprocessor Report.
If the games are to get better, it will be because game developers use middleware that has been optimised for PS2 at great cost in time and effort, as opposed to each developer re-inventing the wheel, which must be becoming prohibitively expensive. I'm thinking stuff like Netimmerse, Alchemy, Renderware, Mathengine ...
It's naive to ask here, but can anyone give me any useful feedback on my opinion regarding middleware?
Just from memory, nothing to quote from, isn't there something like 14% tax on video equipment imports to EU (hangover from anti-Japanese VCR protectionism in the '80s). Better not shout about that DVD drive.
Maybe there's nothing new, but did you publish a web page about what you did? Most things are easy if you know how or have the time to figure them out. So many people can code, so few can document what they did.
Another reply to the parent post complained about it being upped to +3. All the parent post is doing is "karma by association". It's so elite and cool to pirate stuff? B-ll-cks. Sure someone is doing it, it's bound to happen, and whoever did it gets my respect for their skills if not their morals, so where's the content in the post moderators?
Also, Sega make good games. Even the Sony fanboys admit that. So go kill the goose that lays the golden egg with more DC piracy. Then go for broke onn the playground social ladder and crack the Nintendo why don't you? Let Sony and MS slug it out and we'll all be the worse for it, bland sames, movie and sports tie-ins for ever.
writing on the inner part of the CD
If someone clones DC disks and these enter the retail channels, Sega can point out to customers how easy it is to spot a fake, look for the "(c) (tm) Sega Enterprises" message. [I don't have a disk to hand, don't nitpick the wording]. If the pirates reproduce the wording, IANAL, but Sega can use legal arguments to stop distribution such as trademark infringement. The point being, even a non-techie judge can read the writing, no need to go into subtle stuff about patents, clean room code and so on
I came across (oo-er missus) amihotornot courtesy of the UK newspaper "Mail on Sunday" (it could have been the Daily Mail, the weekday version). Their woman reporter posted an appalling photo of herself, got 2.2.
What's really funny, is that these papers are forever scaremongering about the corrupting power of the internet, yet they print a double page article about a site which is so obviously exploitable in this way.
Look here.
Someone could do really nicely making a decent-spec PCI video card specifically to be a second head - not super-fast, but reasonable. Re-release the PCI TNT.
I very much agree about making PCI cards available. I like to keep an eye on whether or not they remain available, you'll be pleased to see that Creative make a shiny new PCI TNT2 board. I run a PCI TNT at home, with XFree4.0 it is certainly good enough to run Quake II.
No need to take my word about the video memory sizes, read the front page for this discussion. Still, there have been so many PS2 articles lately, it's no wonder we're going round in circles.
You can hook up a DC to a PC monitor via an (expensive) VGA adapter add-on, but there are lots of cheap PC monitors about so it isn't as siily as it sounds. It looks good, I use it to be able to play Japanese DC in Europe (PAL TV not NTSC).
PS2 is hampered by having 4Mbyte of video memory. You can't raise the resolution as much (I think DC has 8 Mbytes, could be mistaken).
something like 10 MILLION Playstations (first one) already sold.
More like 70 (seventy) million as of Dec 99 ...
According to this report dated january 1999 anyway. It's not unusual for corporate policy to change when the people at the top change, and he has been there since 1949.
Realistic mundane hardware given a new lease of life by XFree86 4.0 (part of SuSE 7.0). Quake II is smooth and playable for the first time.
XFree86 4.0 shows that simply plugging in more expensive status symbol hardware isn't always the best thing to do.
Marginally off-topic, but losing your sight through cataracts makes you worry about retinal detachment. I should know, I have two such implants.
Anyway, did you know Harold Ridley came up with the idea for implantable lenses after pulling bits of cockpit plastic from the eyes of Royal Air Force Spitfire pilots, and noticing that the plastic didn't irritate?
Deal with it.
I'm happy to deal with such things from people in a hurry with something to say, people learning the language, typos, whatever.
Not from people who can't be bothered to make the effort. If you're working late, do you drive home in this state? For all our sakes, learn when to get some sleep.
Picture is of a nuclear bomb, Sagan is arguing we could mess up by causing nuclear winter. As some folks would point out, this doesn't destroy the planet or even life on Earth, but it's still a bad idea for any species bigger than bacteria.
You can't expect to stay upright in this rig without moving your head. Does the system cater for the motion induced parallax as you move your head? It's not as big an issue on flight simulators I believe, because things are generally far away, but moving around a room would likely make you feel ill because what you see and what your brain expects don't match up.
The engineering is impressive nevertheless, and any theme park application would likely be improved by induced nausea.
every schoolchild should be shown the last episode of Cosmos. It's over a decade since I first saw it, and I still get those goosebumps
I've got the hardcover book of Cosmos, the one with the pictures in, not the lame mostly-text paperback. I can't bring myself to even look at that one picture in the last chapter. I think we both feel so spooked because Sagan gives you such an amazing sense of wonder, only to bring home how we could screw up 10+ billion years of hard work (locally) for essentially trivial reasons.
When scientists work on technology they hardly have affordability in mind.
It doesn't always follow that you can take a "breakthrough" and scale it down.
For example, I'm interested in 3D graphics on consumer hardware. Things are much better now, but a few years ago you'd see demos done on huge SGI machines apparently bought as status symbols. I recall some guy on a SGI training course asking the instructor about a bug in his program running on some big SGI iron - the instructor had to show some restraint, since the program was relying in 100% brute force, and could be made much faster by using even the most basic level of detail and culling algorithms.
I don't intend to imply that the student was somehow incompetent - for all I know he was a genius in nuclear physics or molecular chemistry or medical simulation and just using the SGI as a means to an end, his breakthrough in chemistry or physics or medicine
On the other hand, where is the breakthrough in throwing big iron at a problem like VR? Doom impressed a lot of people in 1993 because they couldn't believe it was even possible on a PC, because they didn't have the right mindset, being used to big iron.
Kinda makes you think that these researchers really really need ...
As anyone who saw the BBC's TV broadcast on wearables at Philips will have seen, there were (shock horror) both men and women actually working on technology there.
I am an unashamed XEmacs advocate, but sometimes I need an unbloated editor in a hurry. Vi is good, I can drive it, but sometimes I can't switch my mindset. I need an unbloated Emacs.
I came across MicroEmacs for Linux, at more or less the same version as used on my Atari ST ten years ago (I used it then for writing my own text editor from scratch, as a learning exercise, and as a model of how to do things right). There's a derived version Linus was involved in, with minimal bug fixes over about five years.
My point being you have to admire the MicroEmacs developers for achieving both usefulness and long term stability.
P.S. --What it would look like if we took Q & R out of the alphabet
uee?
Where is the MPEG of it walking around someones house?
Take a look at Ella the Cat's homepage. OK, it's the original Aibo, but the movies are MPEG so you don't need a weird codec, and it is our house it's walking around.
Moore's Law happened, but it is no good for predicting the future.
Intel seem to think so - I quote from the Intel page I provide a link to:
Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend that has continued and is still remarkably accurate. It is the basis for many planners' performance forecasts.
26 years of evidence show the number of transistors increasing over time. It won't continue for ever, most people think we have another decade. So I'm saying we need to come up with ideas on how to best use those transistors. If we are uninspired over the next decade, there's a danger that the computing horsepower (eg MIPS or some such vague metric) won't scale.
Or are we arguing in Philosophy 101? I guarantee that the sun will rise on Friday 13th October 2000. Sigh.
You should care. The x86 has had so much bolted onto it and the clock pushed up so high it's not that much of a surprise the 1.13GHz PIII ran out of steam recently. I program VLIW machines and there's some mileage left there, but I can see the writing on the wall; we need something else.
We've got at least a decade of Moore's Law left and we have to find some way of really using huge chip complexities. Putting many processors on a die is simple enough for the hardware guys (not to underestimate what they do at all). Just bloating a processor to make use of a whole chip is do-able, but what do you suggest other than tons of cache?
Figuring out how to use parallel processors is a big issue for the future IMHO. Maybe this one will bomb, but we should support their innovation.
Also, programming weird architectures is fun and teaches you stuff - as an example I went to a lecture on optimising code ar Siggraph, people liked it, the content was good, but some of the stuff was already second nature to us VLIW programmers.