Orson Scott Card is pretty horrible at commentary. It usually comes across as a one-sided, unintelligent, trollish opinion piece. Somewhat entertaining, but does little to further reasoned discourse. For an example of *good* commentary of the lexicon situation by a professional author, go no further than Neil Gaiman's blog Here and Here You will find a polite, detailed, and thought-out response (that he most likely whacked together in under an hour).
Next-Gen's report is based *only* on the videos the publishers have released and the press interview. As far as I am aware no press has posted a hands-on experience of Assassin's Creed. I would love to be corrected, since the game looks and sounds awesome, and I want to know more.
I don't think Microsoft could possibly drop the price to anything close to the Wii. It's $500 for the real system right now, and there's no way the new Nintendo System will cost more than $350, and there's no way Microsoft could drop their console price by more than $100 in a single year.
Thank you for backing me up. I don't think there was anything negative in any of my posts about Nintendo, I was simply discussing strategy. Is someone out to get me personally? Surprised that my previous post was modded "redundant" in the PS3 topic yesterday as well.
And lest this post be modded "Off-Topic", let me say this about the Wii: I will probably be buying one on launch, since I've owned every other Nintendo console. I am a Nintendo fanboy, truth be told. Looks fun, even if the graphics won't stand up to the 2 competitors.
1) So when MS announces their 360 price drop they can't factor in the price of the Wii
They can't do that. MS can announce a price drop up to the launch-day of the Wii or the PS3 without any trouble. Nintendo has to announch their launch price at least a couple months before their release date. Nintendo is biding their time so that people can get used to how awesome their system is before they drop the price hammer down.
Did you notice a lack of a pricing announcement? Something fishy here. They must not want to compete with the $200, $250 rumors going around, which means they are now planning a retail price of $300 or more. Perhaps the cost of 2 rumbling, speaker-enabled, ultra-gyroscopic controllers with an always-on internet box w/harddrive is pricier than the chintzy graphics would lead you to believe.
Or perhaps they realized that with their main competitor Sony selling their product basically for $600, they could afford to charge more, and scrapped the original pricing they were set to announce.
Well well, a bunch of interesting information released today. Let's just see what happened during the keynote...
Most brazen attempt at deflating the Nintendo buzz:
PS3 controllers are gyroscopic! Note that this is similar to, but not identical to the Nintendo control system. Nintendo controllers are gyroscopic, but they also have accelorometers, and a complete 3-d positioning system. You can control a plane with the PS3 controller, but it would be difficult or impossible to swing a sword or lob with a tennis racket, like the Nintendo controller is capable of. But Playstation is doing what it does best, coopting parts of the Nintendo controller (the only truly great thing they have offered for controller evolution is dual analog controls)
Biggest risk for Sony:
The pricing! It could work, as long as consumers realize they are getting a Next-Gen DVD player out of the deal. Figure that a Blue-Ray player or HD-DVD player will retail for $300 or more when the PS3 ships. That means for just $200 (or $300) more you get a next-gen console machine that is as fast or faster than the XBox 360. A $200 savings! The risk, of course, is that noone will care that it plays Blue-Ray, Microsoft will drop the 360 price by $50 when it comes out, and the Nintendo system will have been out for a month selling for only $250. That is tough competition.
Next-Generation graphics: Meh!
Well, okay, mostly meh. Lots of promo vids were shown, but you can never trust those. There was a very uninsipiring Gran Turismo HD, lots of "Wow, this is 1080p!" It's fine, but ya know, these resolutions have been running on computers for a long time now, and it isn't that much of a wow factor. What was most impressive was the upgrade in lighting and fluid animation on a few titles. Heavenly Sword looked, well, heavenly. and EA had an impressive line up of sports animation, culminating an an eerily realistic Tiger Woods mug shot. If EA can really put this kind of personality into their sports titles, I could be hooked. But realistically, it seems like this stuff could be showing up on the 360 with little problem. Perhaps the Wii could achieve this too, you know, if it wishes really hard upon its cute little heart.
So the E3 PS3 keynote was a solid performance from Sony, but of course there are still 2 more keynotes to come. PS3 dominance is by no means a sure thing.
Just because it has the name "Merrill Lynch" doesn't mean they know everything there is to know. The same people cast doom and gloom over the PS2 pricing, while Sony kept mum. After everything settled down, it turned out that when everyone thought that PS2 bled money with each unit sold for the first years, it was actually Breaking Even!
There are many many economies of scale that could potentially apply to the PS3, and the Cell. It's based on yield, true R&D costs, Blu-Ray DVD unit costs, and a slew of other things. And Sony has their finger in just about every part of that, meaning that it not only know exactly what those costs are, it can actively prevent them from getting too high. Too many faulty Cell chips? Sell them to put in Hitachi TVs that can make do with fewer SPEs!
*If* the PS3 sells for $399, I expect Sony will be making about $50 per machine. I expect the machine to sell for $350 give or take a few bucks.
The only effect that Hayo Miyazaki's movie "Howl's moving Castle" is going to have on Disney, is confirm their suspicion that they don't want to do 2D Animation anymore.
Frankly, there is no way the movie is going to make any money in the U.S. It looks like it will actually make less money than Spirited Away. And the reviews are such that I doubt it will get an Oscar either.
You can complain that this is due to the movie's limited release, poor marketing, yada yada, but the sad truth is that this movie has just opened about 20% wider than Spirited Away, and has made about 20% less money in those theaters. Where are the legion of fans? And since people are tending to like the film less, there won't be superior word of mouth either.
Ok, bringing this back to Disney, if a movie that makes over 220 million world-wide can't command a word-of-mouth of over a few million bucks in the US, what does that say about potentially *less* popular 2D offerings in the US? It means a lot of marketing money, for less punch. Better to spend the marketing money on 3D, where people are still vaguely interested just for the pretty graphics (though this fad is indeed dwindling).
That all said I am a huge Miyazaki fan, visited his museum in Japan, watched all the movies many many times... I am however realistic. I will pimp the movie to all my friends but I roll my eyes whenever someone mentions a conspiracy to keep Miyazaki down in the US.
Of course he "got" the genre. Read his collection of short stories, "Maps in a Mirror". He also has written one of the best learn-to-write books: "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy". 'Nuff said.
And yes, he is a conservative Mormon apologist, which is kind of scary. But it doesn't negate his abilities and knowledge as a writer.
Exactly. No matter what the eventual numbers are for the Cell, if you already have NVidia making a specialized GPU for your system, it would be foolish to waste general computing power on simple un-optomized vector graphics processing. A Cell SPE will be much more suited to AI, simulating physics, decoding sound, and so forth.
You bring up a good point. I gloss over it because the Emotion Engine would have had a bit of the same problems, yet developers eventually figured out how to use it... it all depends on the tools Sony ships to work with the platform, and also on how you view this parallel code executing.
Comparing it with trying to work with threads definitely brings up nightmare conditions. But I don't think it has to be a nightmare. We use mammoth parallelization all the time and with great success. We hand off all the rendering chores to the GPU when we give it a pointer to data and say "hey, display this", or more modernly a bunch of vectors n' stuff to send down the hardware accelerated pipeline.
The Cell hardware has the capability to get a developer in trouble, especially if you're trying to write data concurrently, and because you started from a design not specifically made for this chip. But if you focus on pipelines, with a design to avoid simultaneous writes, a lot of problems should vanish, and I believe this is the path people will take, if only because everyone seems to be viewing it as a glorified vector processor from a GPU.
There are so many people saying dumb things about the Cell and the upcoming PS3, I have to set some things straight. Here goes:
The Cell is just a PowerPC with some extra vector processing.
Not quite. The Cell is 9 complete yet simple CPU's in one. Each handles its own tasks with its own memory. Imagine 9 computers each with a really fast network connection to the other 8. You could problably treat them as extra vector processors, but you'd then miss out on a lot of potential applications. For instance, the small processors can talk to each other rather than work with the PowerPC at all.
Sony will have to sell the PS3 at an incredible loss to make it competitive.
Hardly. Sony is following the same game plan as they did with their Emotion Engine in the PS2. Everyone thought that they were losing 1-200 bucks per machine at launch, but financial records have shown that besides the initial R&D (the cost of which is hard to figure out), they were only selling the PS2 at a small loss initially, and were breaking even by the end of the first year. By fabbing their own units, they took a huge risk, but they reaped huge benefits. Their risk and reward is roughly the same now as it was then.
Apple is going to use this processor in their new machine.
Doubtful. The problem is that though the main CPU is PowerPC-based like current Apple chips, it is stripped down, and the Altivec support will be much lower than in current G5s. Unoptomized, Apple code would run like a G4 on this hardware. They would have to commit to a lot of R&D for their OS to use the additional 8 processors on the chip, and redesign all their tweaked Altivec code. It would not be a simple port. A couple of years to complete, at least.
The parallel nature will make it impossible to program.
This is half-true. While it will be hard, most game logic will be performed on the traditional PowerPC part of the Cell, and thus normal to program. The difficult part will be concentrated in specific algorithms, like a physics engine, or certain AI. The modular nature of this code will mean that you could buy a physics engine already designed to fit into the 128k limitation of the subprocessor, and add the hooks into your code. Easy as pie.
The Cell will do the graphics processing, leaving only rasterezation to the video card. Most likely false. The high-end video cards coming out now can process the rendering chain as fast as the Cell can, looking at the raw specs of 256Gflops from the Cell, as opposed to about 200GFlops from video cards. In two years, video cards will be capable of much more, and they are already optomized for this, where the Cell is not, so video cards will perform closer to the theoretical limits.
The OS will handle the 8 additional vector processors so the programmer doesn't need to.
Bwahahaha! No way. This is a delicate bit of coding that is going to need to be tweaked by highly-paid coders for every single game. Letting on OS predictively determine what code needs to get sent to what processor to run is insane in this case. The cost of switching out instructions is going to be very high, so any switch will need to be carefully considered by the designer, or the frame-rate will hit rock-bottom.
The Cell chip is too large to fab efficiently.
This is one myth that could be correct. The Cell is huge (relatively), and given IBM's problems in the recent past with making large, fast PowerPC chips, it's a huge gamble on the part of all parties involved that they can fab enough of these things.
My friend is currently contemplating switching the entire library to Firefox from IE, given the amount of popularity and usefulness it is gaining, especially extensions.
It is ironic then, that he will probably NOT be switching because, for one, of extensions, really the complete lack of extension managing tools and other similar architecture deployment tools, especially compared to IE, which he does want to get rid of if possible.
There is no easy way to deploy upgrades of firefox, especially to keep from clobbering or conflicting with extensions on a user's computer. There is no web-update style set of features to deal with viruses and the like.
He was also turned off from reading the Red Hat developers forums, since they were discussing making Firefox standard, and they were incredibly wary. when they were trying to get Netscape going with their enterprise clients it was a bitch, and after analysing things like the extensions registry in Firefox, they are forseeing a similar set of nightmares to deal with.
Needless to say, Firefox is nifty, but it isn't business-ready.
I know, the problems with all of these new-fangled train systems are completely insurmountable. Let's stick with the system of planes to take us everywhere! Heaven knows, they're extremly profitable.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five maglevs."
Rather, they RARELY compete on price. Macintosh will always cost more than mere regular vendors, because they offer unprecedented design and user interface. They want to be the Mercedes of the computer industries. They're more likely to introduce to you the limited Platinum edition Ipod offered for only a month at the low price of $599 than to give a discount on their current line.
Bottom line, discounted prices for Macintosh equates to lesser quality. Don't hold your breath for lower prices on the most popular gadget of the year.
Okay, this is more general science than just physics, but for those who want to learn in the fun way, try
The Science of Discworld, by Terry Pratchett. It sounds light, but the concepts, though skimmed over (appropriate for a book that tackles many branches of science), are well thought out.
Yes. The questions were obviously fed to an Alice-style bot, and they may have been slightly tweaked by the creator (can't tell since I only skimmed through the last set of answers). I am appalled first by Dr. Wallace, who it seems never intended to honestly answer his questions; secondly, by the majority of the slashdot readership, who couldn't see past his (in poor taste) joke.
That said, the reason I think most people fell for his scheme is that Dr. Wallace's comments were obviously written by a human being, they were just not written as responses to the submitted questions. Half-AI, half-human...
The first instance of "Packet" and '"acket Switching" was in Davies' 1967 paper "A digital Communications Network for Computers"
Again, something mentioned in the article. It has a link. It's okay for you to read it. There must be innumerable inventions that did not have a popular name until much later after they were invented.
Slashdot's previous article is a link to screenshots. This, though similar, is an actual movie, which is more impressive, and twice as funny, IMO.
I appreciate the thoroughness of it. Even the background characters are fully animated. The skeleton is totally peaches.
Please observe what he said:
I'm sure colorForth will be translated into these other representations. I, myself, will be exploring spoken colorForth. (As soon as I can decipher PC sound cards.)
This man is simply saying that he wrote colorForth for his needs. He would not write code that he would not use. Why should he? It is refreshingly frank and honest. Someone else who is color blind can write code for themself.
He is not against people with disability, but he is not your shepherd, and you are not a sheep.
So there aren't many tasks that require humongous processors to run. Am I the only one to notice that processors are becoming a small part of the machine?
Here are a whole bunch of things I need to upgrade my computer(s) to do so I will have a happier life:
A decent realtime mpeg2 hardware encoder that I can record TV with.
A secondary processor to view multiple tv feeds or chunk mpeg2 in software while I can still wordprocess without feeling like an idiot.
A 0.5 terabyte raid array so I can store all the content I own on computer, from photos to dvds, to music, to records of my bills.
There are plenty things I want to do that require a better computer. And I believe that many other people will desire the same thing once they see how unbelievably neat it all is. So is someone developing a killer app around all these things?
Hmmmmm....
------------- It is easy to control all that you see,
Object-oriented design and reusability is becoming the norm in the programming industry, but it simply does not make sense to fully implement this in schools. Students need to learn the fundamentals of good programming, and they aren't going to do that if the code they reuse already works and they just write wrappers. Writing code from scratch may be tough, it may look like it is not preparing you for your job, where you will be expected to share a project with maybe a hundred other people, but believe me, when people know you can be counted on to provide good code without help, your skills will be invaluable.
When I was in a graphics class, we had to put together a renderer from scratch (no OpenGL for us). Needless to say, it took weeks of labor to get something that raytraced some lousy planes and spheres. Not too hot.
But three guys in the class treated it like a job, and shared their code. They were working without advanced libraries just like the rest of us, but because they worked together, they modeled a whole room, with textures and other spiff doodads, and it was definitely the highlight of the class.
Of course they practically failed the course because of their actions. They failed to understand that the class was NOT about the product, but the process. It's about the skills, not a cool demo. Well, ok, it sucks if the teacher is teaching a bad process...
There is only one operating system designed to meet the eccentric running / not-running / purchased / not-purchased / new / dead status of Iridium...
Will they be purchasing Amiga next week or the week after?
------------ It is easy to control all that you see,
Slashdot Mirror
Orson Scott Card is pretty horrible at commentary. It usually comes across as a one-sided, unintelligent, trollish opinion piece. Somewhat entertaining, but does little to further reasoned discourse.
For an example of *good* commentary of the lexicon situation by a professional author, go no further than Neil Gaiman's blog
Here
and
Here
You will find a polite, detailed, and thought-out response (that he most likely whacked together in under an hour).
Next-Gen's report is based *only* on the videos the publishers have released and the press interview. As far as I am aware no press has posted a hands-on experience of Assassin's Creed. I would love to be corrected, since the game looks and sounds awesome, and I want to know more.
I don't think Microsoft could possibly drop the price to anything close to the Wii. It's $500 for the real system right now, and there's no way the new Nintendo System will cost more than $350, and there's no way Microsoft could drop their console price by more than $100 in a single year.
And lest this post be modded "Off-Topic", let me say this about the Wii: I will probably be buying one on launch, since I've owned every other Nintendo console. I am a Nintendo fanboy, truth be told. Looks fun, even if the graphics won't stand up to the 2 competitors.
They can't do that. MS can announce a price drop up to the launch-day of the Wii or the PS3 without any trouble. Nintendo has to announch their launch price at least a couple months before their release date. Nintendo is biding their time so that people can get used to how awesome their system is before they drop the price hammer down.
Or perhaps they realized that with their main competitor Sony selling their product basically for $600, they could afford to charge more, and scrapped the original pricing they were set to announce.
PS3 controllers are gyroscopic! Note that this is similar to, but not identical to the Nintendo control system. Nintendo controllers are gyroscopic, but they also have accelorometers, and a complete 3-d positioning system. You can control a plane with the PS3 controller, but it would be difficult or impossible to swing a sword or lob with a tennis racket, like the Nintendo controller is capable of. But Playstation is doing what it does best, coopting parts of the Nintendo controller (the only truly great thing they have offered for controller evolution is dual analog controls)
The pricing! It could work, as long as consumers realize they are getting a Next-Gen DVD player out of the deal. Figure that a Blue-Ray player or HD-DVD player will retail for $300 or more when the PS3 ships. That means for just $200 (or $300) more you get a next-gen console machine that is as fast or faster than the XBox 360. A $200 savings! The risk, of course, is that noone will care that it plays Blue-Ray, Microsoft will drop the 360 price by $50 when it comes out, and the Nintendo system will have been out for a month selling for only $250. That is tough competition.
Meh!
Well, okay, mostly meh. Lots of promo vids were shown, but you can never trust those. There was a very uninsipiring Gran Turismo HD, lots of "Wow, this is 1080p!" It's fine, but ya know, these resolutions have been running on computers for a long time now, and it isn't that much of a wow factor. What was most impressive was the upgrade in lighting and fluid animation on a few titles. Heavenly Sword looked, well, heavenly. and EA had an impressive line up of sports animation, culminating an an eerily realistic Tiger Woods mug shot. If EA can really put this kind of personality into their sports titles, I could be hooked. But realistically, it seems like this stuff could be showing up on the 360 with little problem. Perhaps the Wii could achieve this too, you know, if it wishes really hard upon its cute little heart.
So the E3 PS3 keynote was a solid performance from Sony, but of course there are still 2 more keynotes to come. PS3 dominance is by no means a sure thing.
There are many many economies of scale that could potentially apply to the PS3, and the Cell. It's based on yield, true R&D costs, Blu-Ray DVD unit costs, and a slew of other things. And Sony has their finger in just about every part of that, meaning that it not only know exactly what those costs are, it can actively prevent them from getting too high. Too many faulty Cell chips? Sell them to put in Hitachi TVs that can make do with fewer SPEs!
*If* the PS3 sells for $399, I expect Sony will be making about $50 per machine. I expect the machine to sell for $350 give or take a few bucks.
Frankly, there is no way the movie is going to make any money in the U.S. It looks like it will actually make less money than Spirited Away. And the reviews are such that I doubt it will get an Oscar either.
You can complain that this is due to the movie's limited release, poor marketing, yada yada, but the sad truth is that this movie has just opened about 20% wider than Spirited Away, and has made about 20% less money in those theaters. Where are the legion of fans? And since people are tending to like the film less, there won't be superior word of mouth either.
Ok, bringing this back to Disney, if a movie that makes over 220 million world-wide can't command a word-of-mouth of over a few million bucks in the US, what does that say about potentially *less* popular 2D offerings in the US? It means a lot of marketing money, for less punch. Better to spend the marketing money on 3D, where people are still vaguely interested just for the pretty graphics (though this fad is indeed dwindling).
That all said I am a huge Miyazaki fan, visited his museum in Japan, watched all the movies many many times... I am however realistic. I will pimp the movie to all my friends but I roll my eyes whenever someone mentions a conspiracy to keep Miyazaki down in the US.
And yes, he is a conservative Mormon apologist, which is kind of scary. But it doesn't negate his abilities and knowledge as a writer.
Exactly. No matter what the eventual numbers are for the Cell, if you already have NVidia making a specialized GPU for your system, it would be foolish to waste general computing power on simple un-optomized vector graphics processing. A Cell SPE will be much more suited to AI, simulating physics, decoding sound, and so forth.
Thanks for the correction.
Comparing it with trying to work with threads definitely brings up nightmare conditions. But I don't think it has to be a nightmare. We use mammoth parallelization all the time and with great success. We hand off all the rendering chores to the GPU when we give it a pointer to data and say "hey, display this", or more modernly a bunch of vectors n' stuff to send down the hardware accelerated pipeline.
The Cell hardware has the capability to get a developer in trouble, especially if you're trying to write data concurrently, and because you started from a design not specifically made for this chip. But if you focus on pipelines, with a design to avoid simultaneous writes, a lot of problems should vanish, and I believe this is the path people will take, if only because everyone seems to be viewing it as a glorified vector processor from a GPU.
That last myth is a good one. I had no idea!
Not quite. The Cell is 9 complete yet simple CPU's in one. Each handles its own tasks with its own memory. Imagine 9 computers each with a really fast network connection to the other 8. You could problably treat them as extra vector processors, but you'd then miss out on a lot of potential applications. For instance, the small processors can talk to each other rather than work with the PowerPC at all.
Hardly. Sony is following the same game plan as they did with their Emotion Engine in the PS2. Everyone thought that they were losing 1-200 bucks per machine at launch, but financial records have shown that besides the initial R&D (the cost of which is hard to figure out), they were only selling the PS2 at a small loss initially, and were breaking even by the end of the first year. By fabbing their own units, they took a huge risk, but they reaped huge benefits. Their risk and reward is roughly the same now as it was then.
Doubtful. The problem is that though the main CPU is PowerPC-based like current Apple chips, it is stripped down, and the Altivec support will be much lower than in current G5s. Unoptomized, Apple code would run like a G4 on this hardware. They would have to commit to a lot of R&D for their OS to use the additional 8 processors on the chip, and redesign all their tweaked Altivec code. It would not be a simple port. A couple of years to complete, at least.
This is half-true. While it will be hard, most game logic will be performed on the traditional PowerPC part of the Cell, and thus normal to program. The difficult part will be concentrated in specific algorithms, like a physics engine, or certain AI. The modular nature of this code will mean that you could buy a physics engine already designed to fit into the 128k limitation of the subprocessor, and add the hooks into your code. Easy as pie.
Bwahahaha! No way. This is a delicate bit of coding that is going to need to be tweaked by highly-paid coders for every single game. Letting on OS predictively determine what code needs to get sent to what processor to run is insane in this case. The cost of switching out instructions is going to be very high, so any switch will need to be carefully considered by the designer, or the frame-rate will hit rock-bottom.
This is one myth that could be correct. The Cell is huge (relatively), and given IBM's problems in the recent past with making large, fast PowerPC chips, it's a huge gamble on the part of all parties involved that they can fab enough of these things.
My friend is currently contemplating switching the entire library to Firefox from IE, given the amount of popularity and usefulness it is gaining, especially extensions.
It is ironic then, that he will probably NOT be switching because, for one, of extensions, really the complete lack of extension managing tools and other similar architecture deployment tools, especially compared to IE, which he does want to get rid of if possible.
There is no easy way to deploy upgrades of firefox, especially to keep from clobbering or conflicting with extensions on a user's computer. There is no web-update style set of features to deal with viruses and the like.
He was also turned off from reading the Red Hat developers forums, since they were discussing making Firefox standard, and they were incredibly wary. when they were trying to get Netscape going with their enterprise clients it was a bitch, and after analysing things like the extensions registry in Firefox, they are forseeing a similar set of nightmares to deal with.
Needless to say, Firefox is nifty, but it isn't business-ready.
I know, the problems with all of these new-fangled train systems are completely insurmountable. Let's stick with the system of planes to take us everywhere! Heaven knows, they're extremly profitable.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five maglevs."
Rather, they RARELY compete on price. Macintosh will always cost more than mere regular vendors, because they offer unprecedented design and user interface. They want to be the Mercedes of the computer industries. They're more likely to introduce to you the limited Platinum edition Ipod offered for only a month at the low price of $599 than to give a discount on their current line.
Bottom line, discounted prices for Macintosh equates to lesser quality. Don't hold your breath for lower prices on the most popular gadget of the year.
That said, the reason I think most people fell for his scheme is that Dr. Wallace's comments were obviously written by a human being, they were just not written as responses to the submitted questions. Half-AI, half-human...
- - - - - - - - -
Again, something mentioned in the article. It has a link. It's okay for you to read it. There must be innumerable inventions that did not have a popular name until much later after they were invented.
I appreciate the thoroughness of it. Even the background characters are fully animated. The skeleton is totally peaches.
I'm sure colorForth will be translated into these other representations. I, myself, will be exploring spoken colorForth. (As soon as I can decipher PC sound cards.)
This man is simply saying that he wrote colorForth for his needs. He would not write code that he would not use. Why should he? It is refreshingly frank and honest. Someone else who is color blind can write code for themself.
He is not against people with disability, but he is not your shepherd, and you are not a sheep.
Here are a whole bunch of things I need to upgrade my computer(s) to do so I will have a happier life:
- A decent realtime mpeg2 hardware encoder that I can record TV with.
- A secondary processor to view multiple tv feeds or chunk mpeg2 in software while I can still wordprocess without feeling like an idiot.
- A 0.5 terabyte raid array so I can store all the content I own on computer, from photos to dvds, to music, to records of my bills.
There are plenty things I want to do that require a better computer. And I believe that many other people will desire the same thing once they see how unbelievably neat it all is. So is someone developing a killer app around all these things? Hmmmmm....-------------
It is easy to control all that you see,
When I was in a graphics class, we had to put together a renderer from scratch (no OpenGL for us). Needless to say, it took weeks of labor to get something that raytraced some lousy planes and spheres. Not too hot.
But three guys in the class treated it like a job, and shared their code. They were working without advanced libraries just like the rest of us, but because they worked together, they modeled a whole room, with textures and other spiff doodads, and it was definitely the highlight of the class.
Of course they practically failed the course because of their actions. They failed to understand that the class was NOT about the product, but the process. It's about the skills, not a cool demo. Well, ok, it sucks if the teacher is teaching a bad process...
---------
It is easy to control all that you see,
Will they be purchasing Amiga next week or the week after?
------------
It is easy to control all that you see,