This should be marked as insightful. My experience is that the iBook and Powerbook, for things I am interested in, scale very closely Mhz for Mhz with my Athlon XP desktop. That means that the 866 Mhz Powerbook was only about 57% as fast as my 1.46 Ghz Athlon desktop. However, I primarily used it for programming and these are compiler benchmarks (gcc on both platforms). For other tasks, the G3 and G4 scale slightly better.
But, after my rather long-winded paragraph, the G3 and G4 seemed to have much better battery life than similar Intel-based laptops did. If they can do something similar with the G5 and get a 2.0 - 3.0 Ghz laptop out next year for a reasonable price, I'd probably buy that rather than a similar (mobile) Athlon64-based laptop. Battery life on a laptop is very important. That said, many people I know primarily plug their laptops in to AC and use them as ultraportable desktops. And the iBook and Powerbook systems I used had as significant problems with heat as did the much faster Intel-based laptops. The Powerbook, for example, actually burned my legs when I was wearing shorts.
This is a good point... that they don't really need to emulate the rest of the operating system, nor do they need to emulate the drivers. I still doubt you'd have enough processing power to do it but I'll accept that it is at least a good possibility.
I'm sure, then, that backwards compatibility is very important to you. Take a look around other owners of PS2s, though, and you'll find this just doesn't hold for the vast majority of them.
What _is_ important is how many (and how many good) games are available at launch. Leave out backward compatibility _and_ ship without many good games and you are asking for a world of hurt.
The CPU may not mean much when it comes to porting (and I agree with you here) but if one of the parent articles is right and the XBox 2 ships without a hard drive, porting a PC game would be a royal pain in the behind.
They can still code just like they do for the PC games. Just make sure you port DirectX, etc. etc. Virtually nothing in modern games is programmed down to the assembly level. Yes, porting to a non-ix86 platform requires recoding and would likely require more optimisation but the coding itself wouldn't be any more difficult on the XBox 2 than on the XBox 1.
Yes, Microsoft has no intentions of making the XBox 2 backward-compatible with the XBox 1. They decided it doesn't make enough business sense (how many people do you know who buy PS1 games to play on their PS2?). They could be wrong, you can debate that if you wish. If they are able to get a good selection of A1 games available at launch (they couldn't do this with the XBox 1 and even now, the selection is seriously lacking), it is unlikely to seriously impact sales.
This would be great as far as I am concerned. However, ix86 is still the cheapest instruction set for the performance available for a general-purpose PC. I don't see any benefit, and considerable problems, with Microsoft divorcing itself from the ix86 instruction set. Don't forget, of course, that Microsoft already tried something similar back in the NT days and ended up abandoning all non-ix86 platforms.
Of course, ix86 isn't the be-all and end-all, not by a long shot. I'd rather run PowerPC, myself, if the price was right.
Deciding between AMD and Intel, both using ix86, is a lot different between deciding between Intel (or AMD) (ix86) and IBM (PowerPC). These are completely different instruction sets. I just don't see Microsoft trying this tactic as a means to get NVidia as their graphics chip supplier, it just seems too much of a stretch.
I agree that the PowerPC architecture is fairly good at emulating Intel's. But it just isn't _that_ good. The stats I've seen show the G5 at 2 Ghz capable of emulating an Intel P3 at approximately 400 Mhz. Now, I could be out by an order of magnitude here but I don't think so. There's also some benefit potentially realisable from Microsoft dynamically recompiling ix86-code to PowerPC code in the XBox 2. But it just wouldn't help enough.
Based on what happened with the Xbox 1 and the fact that Microsoft needs to be getting the hardware to their developers fairly soon, we are likely looking at a modification of the G5 processor running between 1.5 Ghz and 2.0 Ghz. 1.5 Ghz is pretty much the minimum, I expect, but I'd be slightly surprised to see a 2.0 Ghz chip in the Xbox 2. The modifications, however, will slow things down compared to Apple's G5. Less cache, optimised for reduced heat, lower power, that sort of thing. Sure, the XBox 2 will have better dedicated video and probably dedicated audio processing than the current top-end Apple G5 systems but the CPU itself will be less powerful.
And you'd struggle to emulate ix86 at 733 Mhz on a current 2.0 Ghz G5. Cripple the chip (aka optimise-for-console) and maintain fairly strict requirements of being able to emulate everything the ix86 can do at 733 Mhz, and you just cannot pull it off.
Give it a 4 Ghz G5 with all the bells and whistles and this isn't a problem any more (most likely).
You have shown a correlation. Unfortunately, you have not shown causation. Apparently, the market research shows that backwards compatibility is only important at launch and then, only if you don't have a solid set of high-quality games available for that platform. Of course, the XBox didn't have this stable of games (and really only has KotOR now) upon release. I don't recall what the PS2 had. If it had GT3, that was almost enough to carry the platform there and then even without PS1 compatibility.
The question really comes down to this. How many people do you know who own a PS2 and play PS1 games on it? Not a single person I know does this. That's not to say that _you_ might not know people who do, only that this does not represent the average user. Most people who buy a PS2 only want to play PS2 games on it. They are unlikely to buy a PS1 game. They may already own some PS1 games but if so, they could just use their PS1 to play them on.
Nothing has been officially announced but I will bet you the purchase and shipping price of an XBox 2 that it will not run XBox 1 games.
There are several reasons why this is true, not least of which the use of the CPU which would make emulation troublesome at best. I am not sure what speed of G5 the XBox 2 will contain but it wouldn't be fast enough to provide a 733 Mhz x86 in emulation. IBM is already talking about stripping down the CPU, removing some of the cache, etc.
You can count this as FUD if you want. You can assume I know no more than you do about the XBox 2. But you'll see when they announce the full specs, the XBox 2 cannot run XBox 1 games.
Nope. With the current design specifications of the XBox 2, it would be impossible even with the use of Virtual PC for them to make it backwards compatible with the XBox 1. I suppose if they released the XBox 2 in, say, 2010 or with different specifications than they are currently using, they could do it. But it won't happen. The XBox 2 will not run games from the XBox 1.
KDevelop does have something similar to intellisense. I'm not convinced (really, one way or another) whether it is better or worse than that of Visual Studio as I only rarely use it. But it is useful from time to time.
The page you list interested me when I first saw it. I emailed Borland and asked if they were fully compliant with the latest ANSI C++ standards. They replied back stating they were not. They were in the high-90 percents but were not at 100%. Note that the web page does not state their compiler is fully ANSI-compliant, either.
The PIPED Act will start being enforced for private companies on January 1st, 2004 here in Canada. You can read about this legislation here. This will make it illegal to scan your driver's license and store it in a computer and/or share with other companies without your knowledge and consent.
Canadian law (appropriate here as they are working in Montreal) strictly limits the scope of a non-compete. You can sign all you want but a non-compete that restricts you for longer than six months (or is it a year?) and/or a large geographic location (50 km, I think, but I'm not a lawyer) is meaningless. That is, even if you sign it, it is unenforcable.
I know Bioware, for example, is very careful about this. The non-compete agreement you sign with them would let you work in Red Deer if you wanted (Red Deer is about 150 km south of Edmonton). Not that there are any other game companies of note in Alberta, mind you.
It may be enforcable if they pay you your full salary during the time you aren't allowed to work for a competing company (and are no longer working for your ex-company).
What right does a company have, anyway, to prevent you from using your skills to earn a living in your chosen profession?
Interesting. I never got a response from his management company but they may have been swamped. This is very sad that he couldn't get EMI to release his latest album as a CD. I wish him luck, I've seen him in concert and, while his music is rather light for my tastes, I enjoy listening to him.
Note that my brother's computer runs Windows, not Linux. The CD didn't work in his Windows computer that met all the requirements specified on the back of the album. This issue has nothing to do with Linux.
If the place you purchase the album from specifies or implies it is a CD, they are falsely advertising their products. Now, I know in Canada you are not allowed even misleading advertising but I believe it may be different in the U.S. You may be allowed misleading advertising there, just no outright lies. Anyway, if a company is misrepresenting a product to you in order to get you to hand them money for this product, that is illegal. If you catch them at it, they must offer you a refund (and, I believe, stop doing this in the future).
If you buy this and the place you buy it from specifies or implies that it is a CD, return it. They are required by law (at least in Canada and in the U.S.) to accept it for a full refund.
My brother just bought David Usher's latest album. It played in the car but not in his laptop and that's where he spends most of his time listening to music. Note that his laptop met all the requirements listed on the back cover, it just wouldn't play... no CD audio, no WMA, nothing. And of course, it would prevent him from transferring the music to an iPod if it would play only WMA. He took the thing back to Music World. We wrote complaints to EMI Music, Music World, and David Usher's management company saying he didn't appreciate being assumed to be a music pirate, he didn't appreciate misleading notifications on the album cover (stating that it would work in his computer), and that he did not appreciate having his Fair Use rights curtailed.
There was no response, of course, despite claims by at least one company that they would respond within x business days.
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This should be marked as insightful. My experience is that the iBook and Powerbook, for things I am interested in, scale very closely Mhz for Mhz with my Athlon XP desktop. That means that the 866 Mhz Powerbook was only about 57% as fast as my 1.46 Ghz Athlon desktop. However, I primarily used it for programming and these are compiler benchmarks (gcc on both platforms). For other tasks, the G3 and G4 scale slightly better.
But, after my rather long-winded paragraph, the G3 and G4 seemed to have much better battery life than similar Intel-based laptops did. If they can do something similar with the G5 and get a 2.0 - 3.0 Ghz laptop out next year for a reasonable price, I'd probably buy that rather than a similar (mobile) Athlon64-based laptop. Battery life on a laptop is very important. That said, many people I know primarily plug their laptops in to AC and use them as ultraportable desktops. And the iBook and Powerbook systems I used had as significant problems with heat as did the much faster Intel-based laptops. The Powerbook, for example, actually burned my legs when I was wearing shorts.
Both of them? KotOR and which other game?
This is a good point... that they don't really need to emulate the rest of the operating system, nor do they need to emulate the drivers. I still doubt you'd have enough processing power to do it but I'll accept that it is at least a good possibility.
I'm sure, then, that backwards compatibility is very important to you. Take a look around other owners of PS2s, though, and you'll find this just doesn't hold for the vast majority of them.
What _is_ important is how many (and how many good) games are available at launch. Leave out backward compatibility _and_ ship without many good games and you are asking for a world of hurt.
The CPU may not mean much when it comes to porting (and I agree with you here) but if one of the parent articles is right and the XBox 2 ships without a hard drive, porting a PC game would be a royal pain in the behind.
They can still code just like they do for the PC games. Just make sure you port DirectX, etc. etc. Virtually nothing in modern games is programmed down to the assembly level. Yes, porting to a non-ix86 platform requires recoding and would likely require more optimisation but the coding itself wouldn't be any more difficult on the XBox 2 than on the XBox 1.
Yes, Microsoft has no intentions of making the XBox 2 backward-compatible with the XBox 1. They decided it doesn't make enough business sense (how many people do you know who buy PS1 games to play on their PS2?). They could be wrong, you can debate that if you wish. If they are able to get a good selection of A1 games available at launch (they couldn't do this with the XBox 1 and even now, the selection is seriously lacking), it is unlikely to seriously impact sales.
This would be great as far as I am concerned. However, ix86 is still the cheapest instruction set for the performance available for a general-purpose PC. I don't see any benefit, and considerable problems, with Microsoft divorcing itself from the ix86 instruction set. Don't forget, of course, that Microsoft already tried something similar back in the NT days and ended up abandoning all non-ix86 platforms.
Of course, ix86 isn't the be-all and end-all, not by a long shot. I'd rather run PowerPC, myself, if the price was right.
Deciding between AMD and Intel, both using ix86, is a lot different between deciding between Intel (or AMD) (ix86) and IBM (PowerPC). These are completely different instruction sets. I just don't see Microsoft trying this tactic as a means to get NVidia as their graphics chip supplier, it just seems too much of a stretch.
I agree that the PowerPC architecture is fairly good at emulating Intel's. But it just isn't _that_ good. The stats I've seen show the G5 at 2 Ghz capable of emulating an Intel P3 at approximately 400 Mhz. Now, I could be out by an order of magnitude here but I don't think so. There's also some benefit potentially realisable from Microsoft dynamically recompiling ix86-code to PowerPC code in the XBox 2. But it just wouldn't help enough.
Based on what happened with the Xbox 1 and the fact that Microsoft needs to be getting the hardware to their developers fairly soon, we are likely looking at a modification of the G5 processor running between 1.5 Ghz and 2.0 Ghz. 1.5 Ghz is pretty much the minimum, I expect, but I'd be slightly surprised to see a 2.0 Ghz chip in the Xbox 2. The modifications, however, will slow things down compared to Apple's G5. Less cache, optimised for reduced heat, lower power, that sort of thing. Sure, the XBox 2 will have better dedicated video and probably dedicated audio processing than the current top-end Apple G5 systems but the CPU itself will be less powerful.
And you'd struggle to emulate ix86 at 733 Mhz on a current 2.0 Ghz G5. Cripple the chip (aka optimise-for-console) and maintain fairly strict requirements of being able to emulate everything the ix86 can do at 733 Mhz, and you just cannot pull it off.
Give it a 4 Ghz G5 with all the bells and whistles and this isn't a problem any more (most likely).
You have shown a correlation. Unfortunately, you have not shown causation. Apparently, the market research shows that backwards compatibility is only important at launch and then, only if you don't have a solid set of high-quality games available for that platform. Of course, the XBox didn't have this stable of games (and really only has KotOR now) upon release. I don't recall what the PS2 had. If it had GT3, that was almost enough to carry the platform there and then even without PS1 compatibility.
The question really comes down to this. How many people do you know who own a PS2 and play PS1 games on it? Not a single person I know does this. That's not to say that _you_ might not know people who do, only that this does not represent the average user. Most people who buy a PS2 only want to play PS2 games on it. They are unlikely to buy a PS1 game. They may already own some PS1 games but if so, they could just use their PS1 to play them on.
Nothing has been officially announced but I will bet you the purchase and shipping price of an XBox 2 that it will not run XBox 1 games.
There are several reasons why this is true, not least of which the use of the CPU which would make emulation troublesome at best. I am not sure what speed of G5 the XBox 2 will contain but it wouldn't be fast enough to provide a 733 Mhz x86 in emulation. IBM is already talking about stripping down the CPU, removing some of the cache, etc.
You can count this as FUD if you want. You can assume I know no more than you do about the XBox 2. But you'll see when they announce the full specs, the XBox 2 cannot run XBox 1 games.
Nope. With the current design specifications of the XBox 2, it would be impossible even with the use of Virtual PC for them to make it backwards compatible with the XBox 1. I suppose if they released the XBox 2 in, say, 2010 or with different specifications than they are currently using, they could do it. But it won't happen. The XBox 2 will not run games from the XBox 1.
There will be no backwards compatibility between the XBox 2 and the XBox. Trust me on this one.
KDevelop does have something similar to intellisense. I'm not convinced (really, one way or another) whether it is better or worse than that of Visual Studio as I only rarely use it. But it is useful from time to time.
No. VMWare is a virtualiser rather than an emulator. You need to emulate the ix86 instruction set on a Mac in order to run ix86 software.
Microsoft has nothing to do with this. It's the Royal Bank of Canada. Come on, that information was widely published today.
The page you list interested me when I first saw it. I emailed Borland and asked if they were fully compliant with the latest ANSI C++ standards. They replied back stating they were not. They were in the high-90 percents but were not at 100%. Note that the web page does not state their compiler is fully ANSI-compliant, either.
The PIPED Act will start being enforced for private companies on January 1st, 2004 here in Canada. You can read about this legislation here. This will make it illegal to scan your driver's license and store it in a computer and/or share with other companies without your knowledge and consent.
Anyone know if there's a similar list for Canada?
Canadian law (appropriate here as they are working in Montreal) strictly limits the scope of a non-compete. You can sign all you want but a non-compete that restricts you for longer than six months (or is it a year?) and/or a large geographic location (50 km, I think, but I'm not a lawyer) is meaningless. That is, even if you sign it, it is unenforcable.
I know Bioware, for example, is very careful about this. The non-compete agreement you sign with them would let you work in Red Deer if you wanted (Red Deer is about 150 km south of Edmonton). Not that there are any other game companies of note in Alberta, mind you.
It may be enforcable if they pay you your full salary during the time you aren't allowed to work for a competing company (and are no longer working for your ex-company).
What right does a company have, anyway, to prevent you from using your skills to earn a living in your chosen profession?
Interesting. I never got a response from his management company but they may have been swamped. This is very sad that he couldn't get EMI to release his latest album as a CD. I wish him luck, I've seen him in concert and, while his music is rather light for my tastes, I enjoy listening to him.
Note that my brother's computer runs Windows, not Linux. The CD didn't work in his Windows computer that met all the requirements specified on the back of the album. This issue has nothing to do with Linux.
If the place you purchase the album from specifies or implies it is a CD, they are falsely advertising their products. Now, I know in Canada you are not allowed even misleading advertising but I believe it may be different in the U.S. You may be allowed misleading advertising there, just no outright lies. Anyway, if a company is misrepresenting a product to you in order to get you to hand them money for this product, that is illegal. If you catch them at it, they must offer you a refund (and, I believe, stop doing this in the future).
If you buy this and the place you buy it from specifies or implies that it is a CD, return it. They are required by law (at least in Canada and in the U.S.) to accept it for a full refund.
My brother just bought David Usher's latest album. It played in the car but not in his laptop and that's where he spends most of his time listening to music. Note that his laptop met all the requirements listed on the back cover, it just wouldn't play... no CD audio, no WMA, nothing. And of course, it would prevent him from transferring the music to an iPod if it would play only WMA. He took the thing back to Music World. We wrote complaints to EMI Music, Music World, and David Usher's management company saying he didn't appreciate being assumed to be a music pirate, he didn't appreciate misleading notifications on the album cover (stating that it would work in his computer), and that he did not appreciate having his Fair Use rights curtailed.
There was no response, of course, despite claims by at least one company that they would respond within x business days.
No. The Recording Industry Association of America does not get money directly from Canada's 'media tax'. Canada is a different country.