The Saturn was more powerful than the PSX overall, PSX was easier to program for, so while PSX never had anything to compare to virtua fighter 2, dead or alive, or nights in the graphics catagory, PSX was easier, this was the excuse for it getting more support.
I'm going to take issue with you here. I've never seen 3D graphics on a Saturn game that could match the PSX's best. Saturn may have had more pure CPU power, with its dual CPU's, but the hardware wasn't really oriented towards 3D.
I'm not dissing the Saturn- I'm seriously thinking of hunting down a used one- but I just don't think it could match the PSX in 3D from the games I've played.
Lets assume 50 percent of DC owners now own a PS2, this means 250,000 copies of VF4 will sell in the USA.
Tne only other thing to assume, is that PS2 fans will somehow be overnight Sega fans, these same people who hated VF and refused to buy Saturn, and Dreamcast now rushing to the stores to buy VF4
This reasoning is silly. So only previous Dreamcast owners will buy VF4? And only previous VF3 owners will buy VF4? Just in my immediate circle of friends, there's 5-6 cases of people who bought VF4 that don't fit your criteria.
Also, VF3 was pretty boring in my opinion. Rented it, didn't like it. VF4 is much better! VF4 is a much better game, and it's available on a system that has what, 5-10x as many owners as the Dreamcast did? Also, VF4 is getting mad advertising on television. I didn't see ANY for VF3.
Granted, a PS2 owner has a lot more games in general to choose from than a DC owner, but then again there aren't really many great fighting games on PS2 at this point, either. The PS2 is still behind in this respect in my opinion- I probably would have bought VF3 on Dreamcast if there weren't so many other great fighting games.
The car manufacturers have another very good reason for keeping the electonics systems relatively simple- so they WORK BETTER. Each flaw costs them millions of dollars in recalls or warrantied repairs. The less extraneous shit they cram into the electronics, the less is likely to go wrong.
Maybe commerical software engineers will realize this, some day?;-)
Opening and surfing through your picture collection is totatly dependent on your HD speed
It probably isn't, although it depends on what browser you're using. For example, since we're talking Windows, JASC's Paint Shop Pro has a very very fast image browser, rendering a whole directory of 100-200 MB worth of pictures into thumbnails in under ten seconds or so. That browser is probably fairly HDD-bound.
The thumbnail browser built into Windows Explorer, at least in Win2K, is dog-slow by comparison. It slowly renders the thumbnails one-by-one, and is clearly 6-7 times slower (total estimates here! I'm not at my home computer). I don't know what Word's image browser is like, but if it's anything like 2K Explorer's, then it's absolutely, positively not HDD-bound.
Now, I'm not saying a faster HDD won't speed up your system- of course it will. But it's not even close to the limiting factor in everyday use, which the original post ridiculously claimed was the "number one" bottleneck or something like that. It probably "feels" faster to you because you're expecting it to be faster.
Benchmarks generally blow your statements out of the water and back up what I'm saying. Look at overall system benchmarks comparing slower and faster HDD's, like this one, which is a roundup of 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives. There's not much difference in overall system performance.
For the past few years, about 4-6 by my estimation, the real bottleneck in all PC systems has been the HD. Most speed problems can easily be solved by getting a HD that spins @ double the speed.
For all common PC usage scenarios, I completely disagree! I think you're almost completely wrong.
The hard drive is not a performance bottleneck of any kind for desktop use, unless you're performing work like video capture/editing, or if you've got a serious RAM deficiency and you're constantly paging memory to/from disk.
With any kind of modern hard drive, even 5400rpm ones, you've got ideal burst transfer rates of around around 50MB/sec, and sustained transfer of around 25-30MB/sec. Even chopping those transfer rates in half to allow for real-world conditions, think about how much data you're moving back and forth from the hard drive. The answer is: not much. Even large applications are typically a few megs in size, and rarely greater that 10-20MB even including all the associated libraries that need to be loaded.
Additionally, assuming you haven't got a RAM shortage, once the applications are launched, they STAY in RAM. So even a slow hard drive would make your application load more slowly (perhaps by a few seconds) but they'd run just as quickly once they're loaded.
For most tasks, the hard drive is absolutely not the bottleneck. For a few tasks (games, rendering, scientific apps, kernel recompiles) it's the CPU. For games, it's a combination of the video cade and the CPU.
In a lot of underpowered consumer systems, a lack of ram is the real killer. In this case, HDD speed *does* come into play since the swap file's constantly being thrashed, but if it's constantly thrashing your rig is gonna be slow even with a very fast HDD.
The REAL bottleneck in an average desktop PC, though, is the user. Watch the CPU usage... unless you're running a SETI@HOME or something in the background, the CPU is idle about 99.9999% of the time. Most casual users would be unable to tell the difference between a 800mhz with a 5400rpm hdd, and 2.4ghz PC with a 10,000mhz SCSI hdd... aside from the noise, of course.;-)
I know! I was just bitching about how unfunny Slashdot is on every April Fools' day, but then I saw the "First Post (Score: 5; Insightful)" and cracked up. Soon the whole office was laughing... well, the programmers, anyway.:)
That's a scary thought. If you think about it, they could maybe hide people inside the cargo containers, and then have them emerge from the containers to overtake the plane. I'm sure security on these planes is quite lax compared to commuter planes.
I don't know if that's totally possible... I'm sure the cargo containers are stacked quite deeply. I'm sure lots of containers are effectively buried under others.
MSNBC has had some articles that have been extremely critical of Microsoft in the past, especially noting Windows bug and during the DOJ trial.
Say what you will about them, but I've always found MSNBC to be QUITE impartial when it comes to reporting on Microsoft. And believe me... whenever I read Microsoft stories on MSNBC, I always have my eyes wide open for signs of bias. Haven't found it yet though- I must say they've done a damn good job in the articles I've seen.
Interestng. The other reply to my post actually described a worse experience than I had.
Anyway, FWIW, my problems have happened over the course of several years, over multiple POP3 clients on multiple computers and internet connections. I just wanted to emphasize that it's not a flaky connection on my part or something, I dunno.
I wouldn't call them horrible or anything... they're mostly-reliable:)
Yahoo wants more revenue from this service. They run a quality email service.
Well now, I disagree with you there. I'd absolutely not call them a "quality" mail service. Frequently, I find myself unable to connect via POP3 because my password failed to authenticate on their servers (odd, since the password is stored on my mail client software, and it's never been changed). Over the past years I've gotten this error lots of times. Sometimes many times over the course of a day, soemtimes only once per week.
So, I don't have a problem with them charging for it, but I'm not going to give them my money for what I consider to be a fairly lackluster job they've done. I mean, thanks for the free email guys, but I don't think you're worth the money.
Take one of these impressive little boards and couple it with a Nvida nForce chipset? I would pounce on one of these...
The nForce chipset really only has GF2MX graphics though-not exactly a powerhouse. I'd rather have an AGP slot so I can put a real performer in there. Then it's a hell of a LAN party box. Give me 1AGP/1PCI over 2PCI anyday!
Having said that, though... I've got a SV24 and I'm loving the heck out of it. It's a lot of fun and a great conversation piece too. In fact it's even a great LAN party box without a spiffy vid card... just as a server, not necessarily the box you'd game on.
One more note- the videoout on the SV24 is much sharper than the TV-out on the several nVidia cards I've tried.
Try rendering a scene with a tracing depth of 1, then try it with a depth of 10. Big difference.
I suppose letting the user adjust the raytracing depth would provide an easy way to let the user adjust the balance between frame rate and graphical detail.
Current games usually have about 20 different variables you can tweak to achieve the same result, but it's often hard to tell which variables are actually having an effect, let alone what some of them do!
I was poking fun at the original post because in my mind, for the disparate groups of developers to band together and make The One Office Suite to Challenge Microsoft Office, they'd either have to start (largely) from scratch, or basically take one of the existing open office suites and all work on that from now on.
It's not that the original post was wrong... as a matter of fact, it was probably right, but it was such an oversimplification as to invite a little fun-poking. Saying "all office suite developers should collaborate to produce a true competitor to MS Office" is like saying "We should all be able grow wings and fly and beer should be free". It's right, but how should it be done?
The project is so big, to compete with MSO, that perhaps all the different groups (OpenOffice, KDEOffice, Gnome office, Gnumeric, Abiword, etc) should all collaborate somehow and make a killer product. Then maybe we'd have a MSO killer.
Sure! Because combining 4-5 totally different codebases that do the same thing always results in a product that's 4-5 times better!
It just looks like a comic book-ish artist's depiction to me. The eyes don't look to be drawn in the anime style, although the pastel hues look somewhat animeish. God, I can't believe I'm discussing this in such detail... ok I'm stopping now:)
You see this sort of thing (powered and/or cloaking exosuits) in anime, but you also see it in every other walk of science fiction too. ex: Starship Troopers, every other comic book ever published, etc, etc.
Neither of the articles mentions anime either. I'm just wondering where the "anime" reference in the article title came from. Left field, apparently, unless I missed something! (which is entirely likely)
Why do you need ATA-100 for gaming? Games don't access the hard drive all that much, unless you're low on RAM and your peecee is swapping memory. Current IDE HDD's can only sustain 40-50MB/sec transfer anyway, and even bursting I don't think they get close to 100mb/sec.
Agree with my point or not, but I didn't contradict myself. My original point was that top game players can be on a par with top chess players mentally, although it's a different kind of mental ability (less complex, more real-time).
It's sort of like saying that the Hoover Dam and the Great Pyramids are both among the world's greatest feats of engineering. Nobody's saying they're the same damn thing... much like I went out of my way to indicate that chess and gaming represent two different types of mental acuity.
Slashdot Mirror
The Saturn was more powerful than the PSX overall, PSX was easier to program for, so while PSX never had anything to compare to virtua fighter 2, dead or alive, or nights in the graphics catagory, PSX was easier, this was the excuse for it getting more support.
I'm going to take issue with you here. I've never seen 3D graphics on a Saturn game that could match the PSX's best. Saturn may have had more pure CPU power, with its dual CPU's, but the hardware wasn't really oriented towards 3D.
I'm not dissing the Saturn- I'm seriously thinking of hunting down a used one- but I just don't think it could match the PSX in 3D from the games I've played.
Lets assume 50 percent of DC owners now own a PS2, this means 250,000 copies of VF4 will sell in the USA.
Tne only other thing to assume, is that PS2 fans will somehow be overnight Sega fans, these same people who hated VF and refused to buy Saturn, and Dreamcast now rushing to the stores to buy VF4
This reasoning is silly. So only previous Dreamcast owners will buy VF4? And only previous VF3 owners will buy VF4? Just in my immediate circle of friends, there's 5-6 cases of people who bought VF4 that don't fit your criteria.
Also, VF3 was pretty boring in my opinion. Rented it, didn't like it. VF4 is much better! VF4 is a much better game, and it's available on a system that has what, 5-10x as many owners as the Dreamcast did? Also, VF4 is getting mad advertising on television. I didn't see ANY for VF3.
Granted, a PS2 owner has a lot more games in general to choose from than a DC owner, but then again there aren't really many great fighting games on PS2 at this point, either. The PS2 is still behind in this respect in my opinion- I probably would have bought VF3 on Dreamcast if there weren't so many other great fighting games.
The car manufacturers have another very good reason for keeping the electonics systems relatively simple- so they WORK BETTER. Each flaw costs them millions of dollars in recalls or warrantied repairs. The less extraneous shit they cram into the electronics, the less is likely to go wrong.
;-)
Maybe commerical software engineers will realize this, some day?
Opening and surfing through your picture collection is totatly dependent on your HD speed
It probably isn't, although it depends on what browser you're using. For example, since we're talking Windows, JASC's Paint Shop Pro has a very very fast image browser, rendering a whole directory of 100-200 MB worth of pictures into thumbnails in under ten seconds or so. That browser is probably fairly HDD-bound.
The thumbnail browser built into Windows Explorer, at least in Win2K, is dog-slow by comparison. It slowly renders the thumbnails one-by-one, and is clearly 6-7 times slower (total estimates here! I'm not at my home computer). I don't know what Word's image browser is like, but if it's anything like 2K Explorer's, then it's absolutely, positively not HDD-bound.
Now, I'm not saying a faster HDD won't speed up your system- of course it will. But it's not even close to the limiting factor in everyday use, which the original post ridiculously claimed was the "number one" bottleneck or something like that. It probably "feels" faster to you because you're expecting it to be faster.
Benchmarks generally blow your statements out of the water and back up what I'm saying. Look at overall system benchmarks comparing slower and faster HDD's, like this one, which is a roundup of 5400rpm and 7200rpm drives. There's not much difference in overall system performance.
For the past few years, about 4-6 by my estimation, the real bottleneck in all PC systems has been the HD. Most speed problems can easily be solved by getting a HD that spins @ double the speed.
;-)
For all common PC usage scenarios, I completely disagree! I think you're almost completely wrong.
The hard drive is not a performance bottleneck of any kind for desktop use, unless you're performing work like video capture/editing, or if you've got a serious RAM deficiency and you're constantly paging memory to/from disk.
With any kind of modern hard drive, even 5400rpm ones, you've got ideal burst transfer rates of around around 50MB/sec, and sustained transfer of around 25-30MB/sec. Even chopping those transfer rates in half to allow for real-world conditions, think about how much data you're moving back and forth from the hard drive. The answer is: not much. Even large applications are typically a few megs in size, and rarely greater that 10-20MB even including all the associated libraries that need to be loaded.
Additionally, assuming you haven't got a RAM shortage, once the applications are launched, they STAY in RAM. So even a slow hard drive would make your application load more slowly (perhaps by a few seconds) but they'd run just as quickly once they're loaded.
For most tasks, the hard drive is absolutely not the bottleneck. For a few tasks (games, rendering, scientific apps, kernel recompiles) it's the CPU. For games, it's a combination of the video cade and the CPU.
In a lot of underpowered consumer systems, a lack of ram is the real killer. In this case, HDD speed *does* come into play since the swap file's constantly being thrashed, but if it's constantly thrashing your rig is gonna be slow even with a very fast HDD.
The REAL bottleneck in an average desktop PC, though, is the user. Watch the CPU usage... unless you're running a SETI@HOME or something in the background, the CPU is idle about 99.9999% of the time. Most casual users would be unable to tell the difference between a 800mhz with a 5400rpm hdd, and 2.4ghz PC with a 10,000mhz SCSI hdd... aside from the noise, of course.
innovative urban designs to take advantage of the desert environment (think ubiquitous solar power)
:)
I laughed out loud because at first, I thought you said "innovative turban designs"....
I know! I was just bitching about how unfunny Slashdot is on every April Fools' day, but then I saw the "First Post (Score: 5; Insightful)" and cracked up. Soon the whole office was laughing... well, the programmers, anyway. :)
That's a scary thought. If you think about it, they could maybe hide people inside the cargo containers, and then have them emerge from the containers to overtake the plane. I'm sure security on these planes is quite lax compared to commuter planes.
I don't know if that's totally possible... I'm sure the cargo containers are stacked quite deeply. I'm sure lots of containers are effectively buried under others.
Did you see the tapes of Bin Laden released after the bombing? He seemed to indicate that they were suprised the towers totally collapsed.
Yeah, "Flamebait" seems a little harsh, eh? Unfunny, maybe, but not flamebait.
They should totally have a huge building with signs that say "THIS IS WHERE THE SERVERS ARE, GUYS!"
Because it's so obvious, terrorists would think it's a trap and totally not look there.
MSNBC has had some articles that have been extremely critical of Microsoft in the past, especially noting Windows bug and during the DOJ trial.
Say what you will about them, but I've always found MSNBC to be QUITE impartial when it comes to reporting on Microsoft. And believe me... whenever I read Microsoft stories on MSNBC, I always have my eyes wide open for signs of bias. Haven't found it yet though- I must say they've done a damn good job in the articles I've seen.
Interestng. The other reply to my post actually described a worse experience than I had.
:)
Anyway, FWIW, my problems have happened over the course of several years, over multiple POP3 clients on multiple computers and internet connections. I just wanted to emphasize that it's not a flaky connection on my part or something, I dunno.
I wouldn't call them horrible or anything... they're mostly-reliable
Yahoo wants more revenue from this service. They run a quality email service.
Well now, I disagree with you there. I'd absolutely not call them a "quality" mail service. Frequently, I find myself unable to connect via POP3 because my password failed to authenticate on their servers (odd, since the password is stored on my mail client software, and it's never been changed). Over the past years I've gotten this error lots of times. Sometimes many times over the course of a day, soemtimes only once per week.
So, I don't have a problem with them charging for it, but I'm not going to give them my money for what I consider to be a fairly lackluster job they've done. I mean, thanks for the free email guys, but I don't think you're worth the money.
Take one of these impressive little boards and couple it with a Nvida nForce chipset? I would pounce on one of these...
The nForce chipset really only has GF2MX graphics though-not exactly a powerhouse. I'd rather have an AGP slot so I can put a real performer in there. Then it's a hell of a LAN party box. Give me 1AGP/1PCI over 2PCI anyday!
Having said that, though... I've got a SV24 and I'm loving the heck out of it. It's a lot of fun and a great conversation piece too. In fact it's even a great LAN party box without a spiffy vid card... just as a server, not necessarily the box you'd game on.
One more note- the videoout on the SV24 is much sharper than the TV-out on the several nVidia cards I've tried.
Try rendering a scene with a tracing depth of 1, then try it with a depth of 10. Big difference.
I suppose letting the user adjust the raytracing depth would provide an easy way to let the user adjust the balance between frame rate and graphical detail.
Current games usually have about 20 different variables you can tweak to achieve the same result, but it's often hard to tell which variables are actually having an effect, let alone what some of them do!
Point taken. :)
I was poking fun at the original post because in my mind, for the disparate groups of developers to band together and make The One Office Suite to Challenge Microsoft Office, they'd either have to start (largely) from scratch, or basically take one of the existing open office suites and all work on that from now on.
It's not that the original post was wrong... as a matter of fact, it was probably right, but it was such an oversimplification as to invite a little fun-poking. Saying "all office suite developers should collaborate to produce a true competitor to MS Office" is like saying "We should all be able grow wings and fly and beer should be free". It's right, but how should it be done?
The project is so big, to compete with MSO, that perhaps all the different groups (OpenOffice, KDEOffice, Gnome office, Gnumeric, Abiword, etc) should all collaborate somehow and make a killer product. Then maybe we'd have a MSO killer.
Sure! Because combining 4-5 totally different codebases that do the same thing always results in a product that's 4-5 times better!
lol. *I* got it, dude. ^_^
It just looks like a comic book-ish artist's depiction to me. The eyes don't look to be drawn in the anime style, although the pastel hues look somewhat animeish. God, I can't believe I'm discussing this in such detail... ok I'm stopping now :)
If this isn't modded up +200 Funny/Insightful/SOMETHING I'm leaving Slashdot forever.
...Besides, if they were really ANIME-based, these suits would be easily pilotable by 13 year-olds.
In fact, they'd probably be pilotable ONLY by 13-year olds, as the result of some plot twist!
You see this sort of thing (powered and/or cloaking exosuits) in anime, but you also see it in every other walk of science fiction too. ex: Starship Troopers, every other comic book ever published, etc, etc.
Neither of the articles mentions anime either. I'm just wondering where the "anime" reference in the article title came from. Left field, apparently, unless I missed something! (which is entirely likely)
Why do you need ATA-100 for gaming? Games don't access the hard drive all that much, unless you're low on RAM and your peecee is swapping memory. Current IDE HDD's can only sustain 40-50MB/sec transfer anyway, and even bursting I don't think they get close to 100mb/sec.
Agree with my point or not, but I didn't contradict myself. My original point was that top game players can be on a par with top chess players mentally, although it's a different kind of mental ability (less complex, more real-time).
It's sort of like saying that the Hoover Dam and the Great Pyramids are both among the world's greatest feats of engineering. Nobody's saying they're the same damn thing... much like I went out of my way to indicate that chess and gaming represent two different types of mental acuity.