The Nintendo Star Cube is the supposed name of Nintendo's new game console, currently codenamed "Dolphin". Nintendo will allegedly clear this up at a trade show in late August. Many people have trashed the "Star Cube" name, but I seriously think it sounds kinda cool.
This idea seems like an amazing market research tool. Imagine a banner ad bar that shows several different ads, and then records which one the user pays the most attention to. Or different single banner ads can be ranked by popularity. Now it seems there will be yet another level of passivity involved on the users' part in the field of market research.
On the other hand this ought to help UI designers streamline their UIs, by knowing precisely what areas the user pays the most attention to, and putting important information in those places.
But most importantly how about Quake? Mouse too slow for you? Just look at your attacker and shoot...people will become overnight railgods;)
I still don't understand what it is that's so special about the Dreamcast that would make a company pay licensing fees for the thing instead of developing a similar solution in-house.
The DC is more or less a Hitachi SH4 CPU along with a PowerVR graphics chip, a sound chip, a goofy CD drive (the "GD-ROM"), and a TV-out. Just about all the components in a Dreamcast, or their near equivalents, are not made by Sega.
What is it that comprises "Dreamcast technology" other than parts built by companies other than Sega? Why is this anything other than yet another "Internet Appliance" venture? I understand why Sega would want to get deeper into that market, I just don't understand what is so special about "Dreamcast technology."
I'd like to see other emulators ported to Dreamcast. Since Dreamcast can run Windows CE, any Win32-based emulator that doesn't use CPU-specific techniques such as dynamic recompilation would be relatively easy to port.
And while we're on the topic, why can't Sega release a public SDK for the Dreamcast so public domain stuff can be ported? There's a pretty decent effort going to port the Linux kernel to SH. It'd be really cool to see it on Dreamcast. No need to release the GD-ROM info to prevent pirates...all I want is to hook a hard drive/ethernet to it so I can roll my own Dreamcast software.
I'm wondering what has been done in the area of using Java serverside.
Java is notoriously slow. It's bad enough on the client side in an applet but it seems like a tremendous waste of cycles to use it on the server side. Granted (afaik) each instantiation of a servlet doesn't bring with it another VM process but the performance hit is still there. How does Sun get away with this?
Manufacturers can more easily tune their products specifically to excel on a given benchmark. The video card industry is particularly notorious for this--manufacturers have been known to tweak their videocards for particular benchmarks so their cards would look good in magazine reviews.
Tom's Hardware did a writeup on a misleading benchmark the first page of which is worth a look.
It seems awfully like products are tuned to do well on benchmarks, and an open-source benchmark would probably be pretty unreliable because of that.
Actually, you can get a Dreamcast and also one of these free ISPs...people have done it with NetZero. $200 + $0 $520... Can the Sega ISP also be used on the PC? Then it would seem like a much better deal.
Kudos to Celera for releasing the fruit fly genome to the public.
But this brings to the public eye yet again the concept of patenting gene sequences. Yeah, software patents are a concern to me, but patenting the code that makes me what I am really scares me.
I think what is needed is an 'HGPL' -- a Human General Public License, inspired by the GPL.
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The Nintendo Star Cube is the supposed name of Nintendo's new game console, currently codenamed "Dolphin". Nintendo will allegedly clear this up at a trade show in late August. Many people have trashed the "Star Cube" name, but I seriously think it sounds kinda cool.
You can make anything seem cooler by adding "cube" to the name. For example, "Sack of Shit" = bad, but "ShitCube" = good.
First the Nintendo Star Cube, now this. Cubes are big nowadays, it seems...
On the other hand this ought to help UI designers streamline their UIs, by knowing precisely what areas the user pays the most attention to, and putting important information in those places.
But most importantly how about Quake? Mouse too slow for you? Just look at your attacker and shoot...people will become overnight railgods ;)
"http://www" is now a household word. Imagine moving to "bxxp://www"...all those advertising dollars lost... ;)
Dreamcast does not use MIPS. It uses SuperH by Hitachi (specifically, the SH4).
Whatever you say...
The DC is more or less a Hitachi SH4 CPU along with a PowerVR graphics chip, a sound chip, a goofy CD drive (the "GD-ROM"), and a TV-out. Just about all the components in a Dreamcast, or their near equivalents, are not made by Sega.
What is it that comprises "Dreamcast technology" other than parts built by companies other than Sega? Why is this anything other than yet another "Internet Appliance" venture? I understand why Sega would want to get deeper into that market, I just don't understand what is so special about "Dreamcast technology."
You can do it with a Linux box acting as a PPP server...but you might as well wear a giant bullseye because Sega's lawyers will be knocking... ;)
And while we're on the topic, why can't Sega release a public SDK for the Dreamcast so public domain stuff can be ported? There's a pretty decent effort going to port the Linux kernel to SH. It'd be really cool to see it on Dreamcast. No need to release the GD-ROM info to prevent pirates...all I want is to hook a hard drive/ethernet to it so I can roll my own Dreamcast software.
Java is notoriously slow. It's bad enough on the client side in an applet but it seems like a tremendous waste of cycles to use it on the server side. Granted (afaik) each instantiation of a servlet doesn't bring with it another VM process but the performance hit is still there. How does Sun get away with this?
Tom's Hardware did a writeup on a misleading benchmark the first page of which is worth a look.
It seems awfully like products are tuned to do well on benchmarks, and an open-source benchmark would probably be pretty unreliable because of that.
We've always known that source can be a form of expression. Look at the obfuscated C contest.
Here's a better question: Will DC games be interoperable with their respective versions on the PSX2?
Actually, you can get a Dreamcast and also one of these free ISPs...people have done it with NetZero. $200 + $0 $520... Can the Sega ISP also be used on the PC? Then it would seem like a much better deal.
Kudos to Celera for releasing the fruit fly genome to the public.
But this brings to the public eye yet again the concept of patenting gene sequences. Yeah, software patents are a concern to me, but patenting the code that makes me what I am really scares me.
I think what is needed is an 'HGPL' -- a Human General Public License, inspired by the GPL.