No, this was addressed years ago when the GPLv3 draft was first released:
The "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version"
language in the GPL copying file is not - and has never been - part of the
actual License itself. It's part of the _explanatory_ text that talks
about how to apply the license to your program, and it says that _if_ you
want to accept any later versions of the GPL, you can state so in your
source code.
The Linux kernel has never stated that in general. Some authors have
chosen to use the suggested FSF boilerplate (including the "any later
version" language), but the kernel in general never has. http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/25/273
Regular old email can't be used to publish a blog to anyone in the world who cares to read it. You could use a blogging service, but then that could be hacked by some random hacker. Or, you could get an account with a hosting service and set up your own Wordpress site, but there again some random hacker could hack it, so that won't work for you either.
He was talking about privacy violation, if everything you put on Google+ is stuff you don't mind being public then there's not going to be any violation of privacy.
Torvalds has said in the past something about that he doesn't want to associate with "free software" (or at least FSF) types because they're so "extreme" or such (can't find a link sorry).
This probably isn't the link that you were referring to but in the discussion around GPLv3 he does mention that Linux has always been Open Source as opposed to Free Software and the FSF evangelizing Linux as a free software project is not something he advocates.
We're referring to launching apps during a work session.
And if you read my post you would see I don't use Start for that, just like I don't use LaunchPad on my Mac, it isn't that complicated.
It's not clear why a Mac user is lecturing Windows users on the virtues of Windows 8/Metro.
1. The concept of a "Mac user" and a "Windows user" is only used by small-minded zealots. You're trying desperately to label me because you don't like my point of view.
2. I didn't lecture anybody on the "virtues" of Windows 8/Metro.
You must be replying to the wrong post because nobody could have such a cognitive failure to have put that reply to this post.
FWIW I use both (well I also use Linux) so I don't see why that makes me a "Mac user" and not a "Windows user" but the point of my post is that I don't need to use Metro and you don't either, you choose to either through ignorance or some self-loathing which you feel gives you justification to complain. Why do you really use Metro?
It's clear that you don't use Windows for anything significant.
Your inability to refute the content of the post results in you needing to try to label me and then make stupid baseless assumptions about my usage.
This isn't a case of people just not wanting change - it's a case of trying to force a square peg (tablet/phone UI) in a round hole (desktop environment).
They fixed that in 8.1. They added a "When i sign in...go to the desktop instead of Start" so you aren't forced to use Start. Primarily I use a Mac but I also have a Windows desktop and laptop and I use them in the same way as I do the Mac. First thing I do when setting up Windows 8.1 is to check that checkbox just like I remove the LaunchPad application from the Dock in OSX, then I work in pretty much the same way on both because both have a Desktop, a Dock, a File Manager and a Search which gives me all the options I need to launch programs (I could use Start and LaunchPad but I personally don't like them, keep that stuff for smartphones).
Or you could buy a chromebook or one of the many android-based laptops (often tablet/laptop convertibles) or there's the dell xps developer editions which comes with linux pre-installed or Lenovo Thinkpads or failing all of that you could get a refund on the windows license if you dont want it as many people have done.
The only party with an interest in pretending Microsoft is the only game in town for pre-installed systems is Microsoft, there are in fact plenty of other options.
People are always telling objectors that the changes are both insignificant, and also so absolutely essential that they just need to get with the program.
Who is saying that they are essential? Using it may ultimately be essential due to the old operating system going EOL but the actual change in the UI is not essential and I don't recall anybody claiming it was. It is pretty insignificant, I don't know about you but I don't really spend much time using the start menu, I use it to launch my programs and that's about it, changing that doesn't really make much of a difference to me.
They didn't list it as using Mantle. The title of the article is "Mantle update, frame pacing fixes, and more arriving soon". The article first discusses Mantle, then goes on to discuss frame pacing then at the end is the only mention of LibreOffice in the article:
Finally, the Catalyst 14.1 driver is also the first HSA-enabled driver, which allows Kaveri APUs to intelligently cooperate with a GPU to share the workload. The only supporting applications listed by AMD at this time are LibreOffice v4.2.0.1+ and Core AfterShot Pro v1.2.0.6+, but it says more will come online soon.
At no point does it - or any other article or reference I can find - state anything whatsoever about LibreOffice using Mantle.
..."Finally, the Catalyst 14.1 driver is also the first HSA-enabled driver, which allows Kaveri APUs to intelligently cooperate with a GPU to share the workload. The only supporting applications listed by AMD at this time are LibreOffice v4.2.0.1+ and Core AfterShot Pro v1.2.0.6+, but it says more will come online soon."
It is the second link from MaximumPC.
That doesn't say anything about Mantle, in fact the source code contains no references to Mantle and the Mantle SDK hasn't even been publicly released. Summary is wrong, the link says nothing about Mantle in LibreOffice.
Without the Hatorade that you and dozens of other Hatebois are aiming at Apple for a far smaller problem.
Yeah, nobody ever hates on Microsoft for the RROD...lol you must be new here, actually you must be new to the internet entirely.
The point - which again was perfectly clear the first time - is that a shitty design flaw resulted in no press and no hate, because it wasn't Apple. Whereas if it were iPhone screens cracking which charging, you and the other Hatebois would be up in arms.
Because the Razr Maxx isn't very popular so if a couple of users had this problem (did it affect all users?) and they didn't actually voice their concerns about the problem then how exactly do you think it's going to get attention? Magic? Did somebody submit a story on/.? I'm not sure why you are getting so emotional about this, I had an RROD and it pissed me off, I had a YLOD on my PS3 and it pissed me off, I had a 2008 MBP that had the GPU fail and that pissed me off, if I had a Razr Maxx and the screen cracked that would piss me off too, but I don't.
I'm also not sure where you get the idea that i "hate" Apple, I have an iPhone which their warranty support has been excellent on, the 2008 MBP was fixed and I have a 2013 MBP now but my point is I just hope they got their shit together when engineering this one so it doesn't develop another GPU issue.
And if they're in the position of upgrading from pre-Ribbon Office then they're going to be looking at extensive retraining regardless.
If they were, but they aren't, in fact it's right there in the summary that they have spent in the order of 200 million pounds since 2010, the ribbon was introduced in 2007 and the version prior to that was 2003.
This isn't a win for Free Software, it's a win for Freeware. The reason for it is just cost and the way government IT projects are mismanaged I wouldn't count on there being much in the way of cost savings if they actually started to contribute back to it.
The reason why I give up is because you blindly refuse to see the forest for the trees. "Why doesn't it support feature X that would make it so much easier to load balance?" is the question no one is asking. Because that would increase development costs.
Wrong! These features were developed exactly for game developers in partnership with AMD.
The question everyone was and still is asking is "how can we make development cheaper? How can we make consoles even more like each other and PC?"
Rubbish, nobody is asking that as is proven by your lack of citation for every single one of your claims, you're just a liar.
I doubt that. I just know what I'm talking about, evidently you don't, in fact you can't even provide citation for any of your claims because you made them up. But even ignoring that it's very simple, and if you understand the subject matter you will be able to answer this question: Does the PC for example support zero buffer copies? And if so will use of them be beneficial? If you understand what this means you understand the impact this has on the ability to balance load between the CPU and GPU.
Whilst there are many cases like this (bindless graphics is another), this is the first one that springs to mind and should be very simple for you to understand.
1. Pretty much every dev that got the dev kit after specs that included 4GB ram xb1 were released. It was a bit of a storm, as many devs were clearly pushing MS to get 8GB by going public with it.
Citation? Having additional RAM does not diminish the benefit of additional highspeed cache, show me a developer who has said that because clearly if such a person exists he/she is a complete idiot, which is why I'm inclined to believe you are making that up.
2. No, I was obviously talking about comparable generations.
So how do 2 consoles of comparable generations morph?
3. Which is why we can only rely on the devs who have the dev kits. And they were pretty unanimous in pushing for systems that are as close as possible to current PC for practical ease of developing for multiple platforms.
Citation?
4. Where do you get the idea that they will let you code to the metal? Several devs stated that they in fact did want to code closer to the metal after announcement of Mantle, which followed explicit statements from both people with dev kits and demo units from sony and MS there will be no mantle backport and that devs will be coding in direct3d and opengl.
Because we can write shader and native assembly.
You make these vague claims about devs saying things but provide no evidence to support it. Also you failed to answer this question, it is one of the key points demonstrating how wrong you are which is why you avoided it so I'll ask it again: Does the PC for example support zero buffer copies? And if so will use of them be beneficial? If you understand what this means you understand the impact this has on the ability to balance load between the CPU and GPU.
Finally yes, I am suggesting exactly that because we know from all the developer comments that they are working with similar high-level instruction sets as ones that PC has - xbox uses modified direct3d and playstation uses modified opengl.
Everybody knows it's a modified DX and OGL, but additionally we know what extensions they support. Lets take an example and see if you can answer it: Does the PC for example support zero buffer copies? And if so will use of them be beneficial? If you understand what this means you understand the impact this has on the ability to balance load between the CPU and GPU.
You don't get to code "to the metal" on either system.
Rubbish, you don't write a game in DirectX or OpenGL, they are just graphics APIs. There is no reason I can't write CPU assembly code or shader assembly code (in fact in production virtually all console shader code is hand optimized assembly).
And just knowing what you're addressing through high level API will not grant you massive advantages for the system where you already have significant experience coding for.
Where do you get the idea that you are restricted to a high-level API?
And then there's the whole "many of PC games never tax the machine to full potential because they are built for previous generation of consoles, which are downright ancient". Again, the constraint there is the lowest common denominator.
So ultimately if - as you mentioned - the key idea is porting then a powerful gaming PC is pointless anyway.
AAA games already cost too much, and it's likely that developers will simply ignore ESRAM on XB1
Nope, just as they didn't ignore the 10MB EDRAM buffer on the 360.
Consoles have morphed from exotic hardware based single purpose platform to basically living room PCs.
Nope, the original XBox was basically PC hardware, the XBox360 was a PowerPC architecture (not much we didn't already know about that) with an AMD radeon-derived GPU.
it's x86/amd64+radeon
But unlike the PC version you actually know the architecture, instruction set, memory amount, memory bandwidth, number of ALUs, ALU clocks, CPU cores, CPU core clocks, etc... are you actually suggestion you cannot get a significant performance gain and efficient use of resources by knowing this? Really? You don't think a deterministic system is hugely advantageous for extracting performance?
Explain to me why you think CPU and RAM make stuff all difference to performance on PC games, why do you think they sit mostly unused?
I don't disagree with it. I merely point out that on current generation, advantage of these is going to be minimal because we already have unlocked all but the most arcane tricks for x86/amd64+radeon hardware.
Optimizations - yes to some degree - but on a PC you have many more abstractions to deal with the differences in hardware and drivers and so many unknowns that you simply cannot make optimizations for, consoles are much more deterministic because their hardware doesn't vary. Take one of the key technical differences between the XBox One and the Playstation 4, the xbox has 8GB of DDR3 main memory with a highspeed 32MB ondie ESRAM module, the playstation has 8GB of GDDR5. Now surely you understand that effective use of this configuration is a very import consideration in architecting games for these platforms right?
Knowing the specific single set of hardware will help, but not much as architecture in general is mostly well known. Fixing the specs to certain level is not that much of an advantage, especially when you consider that PC to which we're comparing will be far more powerful by the time that devs will need all those arcane tricks to squeeze power out of this generation of consoles.
The PC does become more powerful, but it is a case of throwing more hardware at the problem which is why for the most part the GPU ends up getting thrashed and most of the CPU cores are barely used at all. It is a flexible but inefficient platform because its configuration is inconsistent.
So yeah, you'll save money by outsourcing your IT staff and infrastructure to a cloud storage company, but when shit hits the fan you have no control over the servers you don't own.
What do you mean "when the shit hits the fan"? I mean i'm familiar with the expression but if there is a catastrophic hardware failure then whether it's their hardware or your hardware doesn't really make any difference, but at least if it's their hardware then you would have a clause in your SLA for restitution.
If cloud storage company X decides they need a higher payment to maintain your data, well you're kind of locked in and have to pay whatever they tell you too.
How are you locked in? It's just data, back it up somewhere else instead.
Consider the modern consoles of this generation. They have a lot of features that run in the background while you play games.
I never said they didn't, that's not the point I'm making at all.
As for offloading GPU tasks to CPU, there are several massive problems that make it completely not worth it, ranging from the fact that it's actually impossible to predict the GPU output in many tasks exactly (so if you for example offload a certain portion of the screen rendering to CPU software renderer
No, I didn't suggest that. What console developers do is to not just offload as much of the CPU tasks to the GPU like on PCs, the reason for this is that we know what the CPU is capable of and what its limits are so we can effectively utilise it, whereas on PCs we do not know this and as such it is more effective to just say "get the best GPU you can buy and we'll push as much work to that as possible".
Finally the argument about "constant console architechture" has become fairly redundant this generation, because the base underlying architecture is largely the same as modern PCs.
By 'constant console architecture' I mean that the architecture is constant, obviously. That the hardware in one xbox is the same as that in another xbox, which is unlike PCs. That is where the key difference is between developing for consoles and developing for PCs.
Just think about it for a minute, when you know exactly what architecture, instruction set, memory amount, memory bandwidth, number of ALUs, ALU clocks, CPU cores, CPU core clocks, etc... you have it is clearly easier to optimise and balance the load across those resources right? or do you disagree with that? On a PC developers don't know these things so it is easier to push as much of the load to the GPU and have the one key component to the system. This is also exactly the reason games get better over the lifetime of a console, because they are not just pushing everything onto the GPU, they are balancing the load across all the available resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that is the point.
"Or any later version".
No, this was addressed years ago when the GPLv3 draft was first released:
The "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version" language in the GPL copying file is not - and has never been - part of the actual License itself. It's part of the _explanatory_ text that talks about how to apply the license to your program, and it says that _if_ you want to accept any later versions of the GPL, you can state so in your source code.
The Linux kernel has never stated that in general. Some authors have chosen to use the suggested FSF boilerplate (including the "any later version" language), but the kernel in general never has.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/25/273
Linus attacking the FSF all the time is hard to explain and tends to come across as petty rivalry.
He isn't attacking the FSF, in fact he is saying their work on the GPLv2 is brilliant, he just doesn't subscribe to their ideology.
Why would you post anything else?
Private messaging, private groups, hangouts...
Is all the information you provide to and post on Google+ public? If so then you're right.
Regular old email can't be used to publish a blog to anyone in the world who cares to read it. You could use a blogging service, but then that could be hacked by some random hacker. Or, you could get an account with a hosting service and set up your own Wordpress site, but there again some random hacker could hack it, so that won't work for you either.
He was talking about privacy violation, if everything you put on Google+ is stuff you don't mind being public then there's not going to be any violation of privacy.
Torvalds has said in the past something about that he doesn't want to associate with "free software" (or at least FSF) types because they're so "extreme" or such (can't find a link sorry).
This probably isn't the link that you were referring to but in the discussion around GPLv3 he does mention that Linux has always been Open Source as opposed to Free Software and the FSF evangelizing Linux as a free software project is not something he advocates.
We're referring to launching apps during a work session.
And if you read my post you would see I don't use Start for that, just like I don't use LaunchPad on my Mac, it isn't that complicated.
It's not clear why a Mac user is lecturing Windows users on the virtues of Windows 8/Metro.
1. The concept of a "Mac user" and a "Windows user" is only used by small-minded zealots. You're trying desperately to label me because you don't like my point of view.
2. I didn't lecture anybody on the "virtues" of Windows 8/Metro.
You must be replying to the wrong post because nobody could have such a cognitive failure to have put that reply to this post.
FWIW I use both (well I also use Linux) so I don't see why that makes me a "Mac user" and not a "Windows user" but the point of my post is that I don't need to use Metro and you don't either, you choose to either through ignorance or some self-loathing which you feel gives you justification to complain. Why do you really use Metro?
It's clear that you don't use Windows for anything significant.
Your inability to refute the content of the post results in you needing to try to label me and then make stupid baseless assumptions about my usage.
This isn't a case of people just not wanting change - it's a case of trying to force a square peg (tablet/phone UI) in a round hole (desktop environment).
They fixed that in 8.1. They added a "When i sign in...go to the desktop instead of Start" so you aren't forced to use Start. Primarily I use a Mac but I also have a Windows desktop and laptop and I use them in the same way as I do the Mac. First thing I do when setting up Windows 8.1 is to check that checkbox just like I remove the LaunchPad application from the Dock in OSX, then I work in pretty much the same way on both because both have a Desktop, a Dock, a File Manager and a Search which gives me all the options I need to launch programs (I could use Start and LaunchPad but I personally don't like them, keep that stuff for smartphones).
Or you could buy a chromebook or one of the many android-based laptops (often tablet/laptop convertibles) or there's the dell xps developer editions which comes with linux pre-installed or Lenovo Thinkpads or failing all of that you could get a refund on the windows license if you dont want it as many people have done.
The only party with an interest in pretending Microsoft is the only game in town for pre-installed systems is Microsoft, there are in fact plenty of other options.
People are always telling objectors that the changes are both insignificant, and also so absolutely essential that they just need to get with the program.
Who is saying that they are essential? Using it may ultimately be essential due to the old operating system going EOL but the actual change in the UI is not essential and I don't recall anybody claiming it was. It is pretty insignificant, I don't know about you but I don't really spend much time using the start menu, I use it to launch my programs and that's about it, changing that doesn't really make much of a difference to me.
While ATI has listed LibreOffice for one of the few programs that use Mantle I can not find any other information on this?
They didn't list it as using Mantle. The title of the article is "Mantle update, frame pacing fixes, and more arriving soon". The article first discusses Mantle, then goes on to discuss frame pacing then at the end is the only mention of LibreOffice in the article:
Finally, the Catalyst 14.1 driver is also the first HSA-enabled driver, which allows Kaveri APUs to intelligently cooperate with a GPU to share the workload. The only supporting applications listed by AMD at this time are LibreOffice v4.2.0.1+ and Core AfterShot Pro v1.2.0.6+, but it says more will come online soon.
At no point does it - or any other article or reference I can find - state anything whatsoever about LibreOffice using Mantle.
It is the second link from MaximumPC.
That doesn't say anything about Mantle, in fact the source code contains no references to Mantle and the Mantle SDK hasn't even been publicly released. Summary is wrong, the link says nothing about Mantle in LibreOffice.
Without the Hatorade that you and dozens of other Hatebois are aiming at Apple for a far smaller problem.
Yeah, nobody ever hates on Microsoft for the RROD...lol you must be new here, actually you must be new to the internet entirely.
The point - which again was perfectly clear the first time - is that a shitty design flaw resulted in no press and no hate, because it wasn't Apple. Whereas if it were iPhone screens cracking which charging, you and the other Hatebois would be up in arms.
Because the Razr Maxx isn't very popular so if a couple of users had this problem (did it affect all users?) and they didn't actually voice their concerns about the problem then how exactly do you think it's going to get attention? Magic? Did somebody submit a story on /.? I'm not sure why you are getting so emotional about this, I had an RROD and it pissed me off, I had a YLOD on my PS3 and it pissed me off, I had a 2008 MBP that had the GPU fail and that pissed me off, if I had a Razr Maxx and the screen cracked that would piss me off too, but I don't.
I'm also not sure where you get the idea that i "hate" Apple, I have an iPhone which their warranty support has been excellent on, the 2008 MBP was fixed and I have a 2013 MBP now but my point is I just hope they got their shit together when engineering this one so it doesn't develop another GPU issue.
And if they're in the position of upgrading from pre-Ribbon Office then they're going to be looking at extensive retraining regardless.
If they were, but they aren't, in fact it's right there in the summary that they have spent in the order of 200 million pounds since 2010, the ribbon was introduced in 2007 and the version prior to that was 2003.
This isn't a win for Free Software, it's a win for Freeware. The reason for it is just cost and the way government IT projects are mismanaged I wouldn't count on there being much in the way of cost savings if they actually started to contribute back to it.
There's not really any reason you have to choose one over the other, just have both.
The reason why I give up is because you blindly refuse to see the forest for the trees. "Why doesn't it support feature X that would make it so much easier to load balance?" is the question no one is asking. Because that would increase development costs.
Wrong! These features were developed exactly for game developers in partnership with AMD.
The question everyone was and still is asking is "how can we make development cheaper? How can we make consoles even more like each other and PC?"
Rubbish, nobody is asking that as is proven by your lack of citation for every single one of your claims, you're just a liar.
I give up.
I doubt that. I just know what I'm talking about, evidently you don't, in fact you can't even provide citation for any of your claims because you made them up. But even ignoring that it's very simple, and if you understand the subject matter you will be able to answer this question:
Does the PC for example support zero buffer copies? And if so will use of them be beneficial? If you understand what this means you understand the impact this has on the ability to balance load between the CPU and GPU.
Whilst there are many cases like this (bindless graphics is another), this is the first one that springs to mind and should be very simple for you to understand.
1. Pretty much every dev that got the dev kit after specs that included 4GB ram xb1 were released. It was a bit of a storm, as many devs were clearly pushing MS to get 8GB by going public with it.
Citation? Having additional RAM does not diminish the benefit of additional highspeed cache, show me a developer who has said that because clearly if such a person exists he/she is a complete idiot, which is why I'm inclined to believe you are making that up.
2. No, I was obviously talking about comparable generations.
So how do 2 consoles of comparable generations morph?
3. Which is why we can only rely on the devs who have the dev kits. And they were pretty unanimous in pushing for systems that are as close as possible to current PC for practical ease of developing for multiple platforms.
Citation?
4. Where do you get the idea that they will let you code to the metal? Several devs stated that they in fact did want to code closer to the metal after announcement of Mantle, which followed explicit statements from both people with dev kits and demo units from sony and MS there will be no mantle backport and that devs will be coding in direct3d and opengl.
Because we can write shader and native assembly.
You make these vague claims about devs saying things but provide no evidence to support it. Also you failed to answer this question, it is one of the key points demonstrating how wrong you are which is why you avoided it so I'll ask it again:
Does the PC for example support zero buffer copies? And if so will use of them be beneficial? If you understand what this means you understand the impact this has on the ability to balance load between the CPU and GPU.
I don't think you understand. Several important developers specifically stated that they will not be able to afford to mess around with ESRAM.
Like who? And what exactly is so fundamentally different between the use of that and the 360 architecture?
Also, we are not talking original XBOX. Please do not change the subject.
You said they morphed from exotic hardware based single purpose platform which is untrue because the XBox was originally exactly that.
Finally yes, I am suggesting exactly that because we know from all the developer comments that they are working with similar high-level instruction sets as ones that PC has - xbox uses modified direct3d and playstation uses modified opengl.
Everybody knows it's a modified DX and OGL, but additionally we know what extensions they support. Lets take an example and see if you can answer it: Does the PC for example support zero buffer copies? And if so will use of them be beneficial? If you understand what this means you understand the impact this has on the ability to balance load between the CPU and GPU.
You don't get to code "to the metal" on either system.
Rubbish, you don't write a game in DirectX or OpenGL, they are just graphics APIs. There is no reason I can't write CPU assembly code or shader assembly code (in fact in production virtually all console shader code is hand optimized assembly).
And just knowing what you're addressing through high level API will not grant you massive advantages for the system where you already have significant experience coding for.
Where do you get the idea that you are restricted to a high-level API?
And then there's the whole "many of PC games never tax the machine to full potential because they are built for previous generation of consoles, which are downright ancient". Again, the constraint there is the lowest common denominator.
So ultimately if - as you mentioned - the key idea is porting then a powerful gaming PC is pointless anyway.
AAA games already cost too much, and it's likely that developers will simply ignore ESRAM on XB1
Nope, just as they didn't ignore the 10MB EDRAM buffer on the 360.
Consoles have morphed from exotic hardware based single purpose platform to basically living room PCs.
Nope, the original XBox was basically PC hardware, the XBox360 was a PowerPC architecture (not much we didn't already know about that) with an AMD radeon-derived GPU.
it's x86/amd64+radeon
But unlike the PC version you actually know the architecture, instruction set, memory amount, memory bandwidth, number of ALUs, ALU clocks, CPU cores, CPU core clocks, etc... are you actually suggestion you cannot get a significant performance gain and efficient use of resources by knowing this? Really? You don't think a deterministic system is hugely advantageous for extracting performance?
Explain to me why you think CPU and RAM make stuff all difference to performance on PC games, why do you think they sit mostly unused?
I don't disagree with it. I merely point out that on current generation, advantage of these is going to be minimal because we already have unlocked all but the most arcane tricks for x86/amd64+radeon hardware.
Optimizations - yes to some degree - but on a PC you have many more abstractions to deal with the differences in hardware and drivers and so many unknowns that you simply cannot make optimizations for, consoles are much more deterministic because their hardware doesn't vary. Take one of the key technical differences between the XBox One and the Playstation 4, the xbox has 8GB of DDR3 main memory with a highspeed 32MB ondie ESRAM module, the playstation has 8GB of GDDR5. Now surely you understand that effective use of this configuration is a very import consideration in architecting games for these platforms right?
Knowing the specific single set of hardware will help, but not much as architecture in general is mostly well known. Fixing the specs to certain level is not that much of an advantage, especially when you consider that PC to which we're comparing will be far more powerful by the time that devs will need all those arcane tricks to squeeze power out of this generation of consoles.
The PC does become more powerful, but it is a case of throwing more hardware at the problem which is why for the most part the GPU ends up getting thrashed and most of the CPU cores are barely used at all. It is a flexible but inefficient platform because its configuration is inconsistent.
So yeah, you'll save money by outsourcing your IT staff and infrastructure to a cloud storage company, but when shit hits the fan you have no control over the servers you don't own.
What do you mean "when the shit hits the fan"? I mean i'm familiar with the expression but if there is a catastrophic hardware failure then whether it's their hardware or your hardware doesn't really make any difference, but at least if it's their hardware then you would have a clause in your SLA for restitution.
If cloud storage company X decides they need a higher payment to maintain your data, well you're kind of locked in and have to pay whatever they tell you too.
How are you locked in? It's just data, back it up somewhere else instead.
Consider the modern consoles of this generation. They have a lot of features that run in the background while you play games.
I never said they didn't, that's not the point I'm making at all.
As for offloading GPU tasks to CPU, there are several massive problems that make it completely not worth it, ranging from the fact that it's actually impossible to predict the GPU output in many tasks exactly (so if you for example offload a certain portion of the screen rendering to CPU software renderer
No, I didn't suggest that. What console developers do is to not just offload as much of the CPU tasks to the GPU like on PCs, the reason for this is that we know what the CPU is capable of and what its limits are so we can effectively utilise it, whereas on PCs we do not know this and as such it is more effective to just say "get the best GPU you can buy and we'll push as much work to that as possible".
Finally the argument about "constant console architechture" has become fairly redundant this generation, because the base underlying architecture is largely the same as modern PCs.
By 'constant console architecture' I mean that the architecture is constant, obviously. That the hardware in one xbox is the same as that in another xbox, which is unlike PCs. That is where the key difference is between developing for consoles and developing for PCs.
Just think about it for a minute, when you know exactly what architecture, instruction set, memory amount, memory bandwidth, number of ALUs, ALU clocks, CPU cores, CPU core clocks, etc... you have it is clearly easier to optimise and balance the load across those resources right? or do you disagree with that?
On a PC developers don't know these things so it is easier to push as much of the load to the GPU and have the one key component to the system. This is also exactly the reason games get better over the lifetime of a console, because they are not just pushing everything onto the GPU, they are balancing the load across all the available resources.