So I was thinking that once the Intel transition is finished, a game written with OpenGL will be very easy to port for the Mac. This looks to me like a very good reason to develop new games with OpenGL: a near-automatic 3% increase in customer base, probably more than a 3% increase in game sales (less competition in the Mac market).
Either that, or the automatic porting tools for translating DirectX calls to OpenGL will get so good that even porting DirectX games to the Mac will be easy and sacrifice little in performance. Either way, this means more games for Mac, and this will be good for Linux on x86, because a game for OSX86 will probably not be too hard to run on Linux with Transgaming translation or some Mac/Linux equivalent.
The reason why Krikalev has all this mission time is that he's shockingly competent and comfortable in the very stressful environment of space. They've tried out many people, but from what I read, conditions that would cripple an ordinary tough guy don't get to Krikalev. I mean, come on, his other job is stunt pilot. This guy is a badass and I hope he fathers a superior race of superspacebeings.
Ha, good one! Yeah, let the whole planet burn, nothing really bad can happen so long we can keep the socialists from interfering with our precious markets! Preach da word brotha!
Right. This will be huge for Transgaming, suddently their apps will have a much larger customer base to sell to. That might also crank up the quality and quantity of the games that are made compatible.
I really don't think Apple cares about the gaming market segment, i.e., teenaged-or-twenty-something males.
Umm, do you seriously think any retail manufacturer, but especially any builder of computers, could write off this segment? I'd be surprised if the group you describe makes up less than 50% of Apple's customers.
I thought the same thing. The problem with FreeBSD is that they don't support much new hardware. The problem for Apple will be in writing drivers for all that old hardware. It seems like a good fit. I'm just not sure how hard it would be to adapt x86 FreeBSD drivers to work with the Mach kernel. Maybe they could build a porting tool to help automate the process? Surely the hobbyist community would step in, after all, Mach is open source.
So this idea of Apple really selling OSX to for all x86 machines doesn't sound to me as unworkable as the parent post makes it seem. And just like Apple's code monkeys were busy working on Marklar just in case Jobs decided to switch to x86, I bet there is a new gang of code monkeys maintaining a branch of OSX that is designed to run on "uncircumsised" hardware. Funny would be if a build of this got leaked!
Seriously, how many readers here have jobs that at one time or another required them to do a 50-hour work marathon with only bathroom breaks and short naps? Statisically, I think many more people die from this than from gaming, because this sort of situation is quite common at some jobs. It just (sadly) too routine and mundane to get widely reported.
This story is much less sad. I'd much rather game myself to death than work to death. Who knows what would have happened to this guy if he hadn't quit his job?
I think I was one of the whiners who complained last time that the first trailer gave away too much. I appreciate the warning this time around. Luckily I now forgot a lot of what happened in the first trailer. Good. I can't wait for the movie!
I totally agree. I bet this is what they will do. What's more, since they now have the luxury of shipping new game "guts" they can tweak them for 720p and allow the new GPU to process the hell out of the graphics, so that the same game will look substantially better on the 360 (since it doesn't have to be exactly the same game).
Also, since the 360 ships with a hard drive, they could just put the recompiled binaries for current games on the machine ahead of time.
I wouln't be surprised if this really was their plan. That's maybe why they say they'll only support the "most popular" games, to avoid having to cram the hard drive full of stuff.
I can imagine this working pretty well, that is, being pretty much seamless to the the normal Joe User. For the obscure games, they may program the 360 to pop up a window when the disk is inserted asking you if you want to download a "compatibility patch" from Microsoft. The Xbox1 disks pressed more recently might include this compatibility patch on them. Yeah, not exactly optimal, but not catastrophic either.
The bonus is that the recompiled games might be set to run explicitly in 720p and with all sorts of anti-aliasing and other fancy graphics stuff that the first xbox can't do. This may encourage people to buy the 360 just to see their favorite games looking better. (I wonder if the PS3 will offer something similar for PS2 games...)
From what I understand, emulating the CPU is not a problem. However, realtime emulation of the GPU is much harder. An optimized vector processor does not automatically have an easy time emulating a weaker but differently optimized vector processor. This is why Sony just included the PS1 GPU inside the PS2. Microsoft can't do that because Nvidia hates them and they would charge them a fortune for it. Check out this article for more details about this.
This is an absolutely absurd and annoying piece of technology. You can bet that this thing will be cracked very quickly, or tools will develop that capture the digital output stream of the DVD player. Then presto, it's in the wild, or at least copied onto another DVD without this stupid RF tag protection.
I don't know how much you know about academic publishing, but the reviewers for even the expensive journals work for free. Basically, it's professors doing all the research AND all the reviewing, they get no money for either, and the journal sells back all this content to those very same academics for incredibly huge sums. (In some cases thousands of $ for a quarterly journal.) Really, it's absurd.
The barrier to a better system is that many of the established "high prestige" journals are the culprits who are skimming money from universities in this way, and getting in the way of open communication among researchers. What's needed is for the top reviewers and submitters to emigrate en masse to more responsible academic publishers. Yeah, unlikely - unless something major like this goes down and kick-starts the process.
I find it interesting that though this tech is nowhere near production, they are already talking about a finished product that is unable to play HDTV signals. What's up with 1280x720? I mean, sure, I'd pay $400 for it, but even if the manufacturing costs will be $400, the retail cost will probably be at least double.
So yeah, this is neato, and I'm especially happy about CRT phosphors. I'm a sucker for the color richness of a CRT. I hope it doesn't flop. If I'm rich when this comes out, this might be my new TV. This is far from a slam dunk, though. I'd love to read more about why they aren't talking about 1080p.
Gah, I can't believe nobody has said this yet: If you are here on Slashdot, you probably know quite a bit about roleplaying games. If you're lucky to also have kids who are interested in this sort of thing, you're stupid if you don't take the opportunity to play with them.
Having just restarted an AD&D campaign with other thirty-somethings, I can tell you that we can get more out of this game at our "parenting" age than we could have when we played heavily in high school. This is not one of those parenting duties, it's one of those parenting privilidges. Plus, in this era of personal separation, RPGs seem like the single best way to really connect with people.
I'd rather protect kids from just about anything (video games, exploitative porn, TV, religion, cigarettes, etc.) before I even began to worry about RPG's.
What if Sony made enough money from all these sales that they could discount the monthly costs of the service for everyone else? Or what if it was enough so that all the "peon" accounts would be free, though if you didn't want to toil through the dreary lower levels and work your way up, you would have to pay to power up?
I think that really would be great! I mean, you sell a lot more crack when you fist hand it out for free. Oh, even better: Maybe all the free accounts would have perma-death (unless they can secure in-game means of resurrection) while the paid accounts have a "guardian angel" that auto-resurrects them. Or how about this: a flat-rate direct withdrawl of $5 from your bank account for every time you click "Yes, resurrect my character"? Mark my words, somebody is going to try this, and if they do it right, they will succeed!
If they really use the crack model, they will even let you download the game itself without cost, knowing that sooner or later, you'll find something in the game worth paying for with real money.
But before they do any of this, they need to get the bugs out of the in-game paying system, and maybe that's what this is.
So is this a something we should fear? No way! It will be great!
I've wanted to do something like this for a long time. The big kludge of the suggestion in the post is involves all the different wires you need to run (sound, DVI, USB) from the server to the places where people work. Oh, how I wish there were a standard one-cable solution to do all this, and without needing repeaters! How about a card you plug into the server that sends out all this over fiber, and then a standardized fiber-to-signal translator box?
I've thought about this a lot. Now that we have SMP and SLI graphics cards, it's realistic to consider the following: if you want two good computers in a house, is it better to get two separate systems, each with a good processor and graphics card, or is it better to get one multi-user system, with two processors and two SLI graphics cards? I think the second is obviously better, and it doesn't have to cost more (it does now only because ordinary people are not buying these yet). It's better because even if both stations are in full use, each will still have the processing/rendering power of one isolated system. For the times when only one is it use, it will have a lot more power at its disposal. The same reasoning applies for a 4-way system, etc. I think this is the way of the future. The quietest computer is one that lives in the basement. I hope that future houses will be designed like that: A big "mainframe" which sends I/O to monitors, peripherals and amps, but also the TV and stereo in the living room. This big computer should be somewhat expandable, so you can add CPUs and graphics processors when it's time to upgrade. Yeah, that would be awesome.
So how many HDTV's are there to which to hook a new Xbox? Enough to make "3 million sold by xmas" sound realistic? Ha!
Yes, if there were lots of HDTV's in living rooms already, it might be true that the "current generation of consoles is played out." But as it stands, there are precious few. Well, I guess we'll see what Xbox2 looks like and what games there will be. It took a while since the launch of the first Xbox to convince people that the games are worth buying. I suspect the same this time around. If they have a slow start they're dead; the PS3 with the Cell chip will bludgeon them once it's out. Their only hope is to win a big chunk of market share before then, to prevent people from buying the PS3. For living rooms with both, everybody will prefer PS3 versions of games, since the machine will be far more powerful.
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Either that, or the automatic porting tools for translating DirectX calls to OpenGL will get so good that even porting DirectX games to the Mac will be easy and sacrifice little in performance. Either way, this means more games for Mac, and this will be good for Linux on x86, because a game for OSX86 will probably not be too hard to run on Linux with Transgaming translation or some Mac/Linux equivalent.
The reason why Krikalev has all this mission time is that he's shockingly competent and comfortable in the very stressful environment of space. They've tried out many people, but from what I read, conditions that would cripple an ordinary tough guy don't get to Krikalev. I mean, come on, his other job is stunt pilot. This guy is a badass and I hope he fathers a superior race of superspacebeings.
Kudos, I don't remember the last time when someone R'd TFA and got first post on Slashdot. This, and good spelling! What strange new times!
Ha, good one! Yeah, let the whole planet burn, nothing really bad can happen so long we can keep the socialists from interfering with our precious markets! Preach da word brotha!
Thanks, funniest post today, sorry I don't have mod points.
Right. This will be huge for Transgaming, suddently their apps will have a much larger customer base to sell to. That might also crank up the quality and quantity of the games that are made compatible.
Umm, do you seriously think any retail manufacturer, but especially any builder of computers, could write off this segment? I'd be surprised if the group you describe makes up less than 50% of Apple's customers.
So this idea of Apple really selling OSX to for all x86 machines doesn't sound to me as unworkable as the parent post makes it seem. And just like Apple's code monkeys were busy working on Marklar just in case Jobs decided to switch to x86, I bet there is a new gang of code monkeys maintaining a branch of OSX that is designed to run on "uncircumsised" hardware. Funny would be if a build of this got leaked!
This story is much less sad. I'd much rather game myself to death than work to death. Who knows what would have happened to this guy if he hadn't quit his job?
I think I was one of the whiners who complained last time that the first trailer gave away too much. I appreciate the warning this time around. Luckily I now forgot a lot of what happened in the first trailer. Good. I can't wait for the movie!
I totally agree. I bet this is what they will do. What's more, since they now have the luxury of shipping new game "guts" they can tweak them for 720p and allow the new GPU to process the hell out of the graphics, so that the same game will look substantially better on the 360 (since it doesn't have to be exactly the same game).
I wouln't be surprised if this really was their plan. That's maybe why they say they'll only support the "most popular" games, to avoid having to cram the hard drive full of stuff.
I can imagine this working pretty well, that is, being pretty much seamless to the the normal Joe User. For the obscure games, they may program the 360 to pop up a window when the disk is inserted asking you if you want to download a "compatibility patch" from Microsoft. The Xbox1 disks pressed more recently might include this compatibility patch on them. Yeah, not exactly optimal, but not catastrophic either.
The bonus is that the recompiled games might be set to run explicitly in 720p and with all sorts of anti-aliasing and other fancy graphics stuff that the first xbox can't do. This may encourage people to buy the 360 just to see their favorite games looking better. (I wonder if the PS3 will offer something similar for PS2 games...)
From what I understand, emulating the CPU is not a problem. However, realtime emulation of the GPU is much harder. An optimized vector processor does not automatically have an easy time emulating a weaker but differently optimized vector processor. This is why Sony just included the PS1 GPU inside the PS2. Microsoft can't do that because Nvidia hates them and they would charge them a fortune for it. Check out this article for more details about this.
This is an absolutely absurd and annoying piece of technology. You can bet that this thing will be cracked very quickly, or tools will develop that capture the digital output stream of the DVD player. Then presto, it's in the wild, or at least copied onto another DVD without this stupid RF tag protection.
Huh? No direction finding in Google maps? Look again. They have it, the interface for it is excellent, and it actually gives decent directions.
The barrier to a better system is that many of the established "high prestige" journals are the culprits who are skimming money from universities in this way, and getting in the way of open communication among researchers. What's needed is for the top reviewers and submitters to emigrate en masse to more responsible academic publishers. Yeah, unlikely - unless something major like this goes down and kick-starts the process.
So yeah, this is neato, and I'm especially happy about CRT phosphors. I'm a sucker for the color richness of a CRT. I hope it doesn't flop. If I'm rich when this comes out, this might be my new TV. This is far from a slam dunk, though. I'd love to read more about why they aren't talking about 1080p.
Having just restarted an AD&D campaign with other thirty-somethings, I can tell you that we can get more out of this game at our "parenting" age than we could have when we played heavily in high school. This is not one of those parenting duties, it's one of those parenting privilidges. Plus, in this era of personal separation, RPGs seem like the single best way to really connect with people.
I'd rather protect kids from just about anything (video games, exploitative porn, TV, religion, cigarettes, etc.) before I even began to worry about RPG's.
In Korea, only old people speak Adult Korean.
I have a feeling a lot of excellent math departments will be looking to hire this guy from Utah.
I think that really would be great! I mean, you sell a lot more crack when you fist hand it out for free. Oh, even better: Maybe all the free accounts would have perma-death (unless they can secure in-game means of resurrection) while the paid accounts have a "guardian angel" that auto-resurrects them. Or how about this: a flat-rate direct withdrawl of $5 from your bank account for every time you click "Yes, resurrect my character"? Mark my words, somebody is going to try this, and if they do it right, they will succeed!
If they really use the crack model, they will even let you download the game itself without cost, knowing that sooner or later, you'll find something in the game worth paying for with real money.
But before they do any of this, they need to get the bugs out of the in-game paying system, and maybe that's what this is.
So is this a something we should fear? No way! It will be great!
I've thought about this a lot. Now that we have SMP and SLI graphics cards, it's realistic to consider the following: if you want two good computers in a house, is it better to get two separate systems, each with a good processor and graphics card, or is it better to get one multi-user system, with two processors and two SLI graphics cards? I think the second is obviously better, and it doesn't have to cost more (it does now only because ordinary people are not buying these yet). It's better because even if both stations are in full use, each will still have the processing/rendering power of one isolated system. For the times when only one is it use, it will have a lot more power at its disposal. The same reasoning applies for a 4-way system, etc. I think this is the way of the future. The quietest computer is one that lives in the basement. I hope that future houses will be designed like that: A big "mainframe" which sends I/O to monitors, peripherals and amps, but also the TV and stereo in the living room. This big computer should be somewhat expandable, so you can add CPUs and graphics processors when it's time to upgrade. Yeah, that would be awesome.
Yes, if there were lots of HDTV's in living rooms already, it might be true that the "current generation of consoles is played out." But as it stands, there are precious few. Well, I guess we'll see what Xbox2 looks like and what games there will be. It took a while since the launch of the first Xbox to convince people that the games are worth buying. I suspect the same this time around. If they have a slow start they're dead; the PS3 with the Cell chip will bludgeon them once it's out. Their only hope is to win a big chunk of market share before then, to prevent people from buying the PS3. For living rooms with both, everybody will prefer PS3 versions of games, since the machine will be far more powerful.
The radius of damage from this explosion is 6000 light years. Moving to a nearby solar system won't help.