Now all you have to do is wait and see how much of the market the 360 captures, and you may be on to something.
It's not an excelent number until you know if the console is a success or not, and that is far from certain at this point. Come back in two years and we'll talk.
Funny the U.S. government targets Phil Zimmermann for three years but hardly raises so much as an eye when an encryption enabled OS is distributed.
Yeah, who would have thought that after well over a decade, huge advances in technology and the understanding of technology, 8 national, and 4 presidential elections that the policies of a large country might have changed somewhat.
We'd better hold on to those old outdated policies, rather than change with the times and correct our mistakes lest some anti-US-government blowhard be able to make a vague and unfounded accusation of hypocracy.
That's almost certainly what you're thinking of when you are picturing using a lens to focus. Now, because the source is a laser, imagine that the light originating from the source is just a single ray rather than the cone shown in the image. Now there's no need for a lens in the middle to achieve a tightly focused point on the target surface.
I can usually get the same stuff elsewhere on the net for less money.
Yeah, but not much less... Certainly not enough to justify the service difference.
I bought a video card from Newegg in September. The card died last week, and the manufacturer wasn't going to honor the warranty, so Newegg is replacing it and dealing with the manufacturer for me. Well worth the extra $3 or $4 that I spent by not buying it from some random yahoo store that happened to be the lowest price on pricewatch.
For some subset of the population, I'm sure you're absolutely correct, but you can't say that about everybody.
There are many people who make a concious decision about their sexual alignment for social, political, or practical reasons too. Where do you think the term '4 year queer' comes from? It goes both ways too. There are people who decide they want to be gay for one reason or another just as much as there are people who decide they're going to be straight. There are people who don't choose their sexual preference, but there are also people who *do* choose their sexual preference. Often the people who are most vocal about their minority sexuality are the ones that consiously decided what their sexuality was going to be (be it for attention, or whatever), rather than the people who are the way they are.
Just because you decided to let nature take it's course doesn't mean everybody else does too.
You can be absolutely positive that if the PS3 sells for $500/unit it will sell nowhere near 500k units in one day in the U.S.
That's why you can be absolutely positive that the PS3 won't be priced at $500.
Sony has never gone to market with the most expensive console, even though all the "experts" have always predicted that every upcoming Sony console would be more expensive than the competition.
Sony wants to let people thing that it's going to cost $500 so people will think it's a bargain when it comes out at $349.
From a consumer perspective, the store is misusing its position (being one of the few stores with a limited stock of the product) to force you to pay higher costs that you don't want to pay to get extra products you don't want just so you can have the core product that you DID want.
That's par for the course in every other market.
Ever looked into buying a new car that is particularly popular? They never have one for the MSRP. Convieniently the only ones they have in stock have options you didn't need, and cost a fortune, like $1500 for the premium stereo system that isn't as good as a $500 after-market job. etc...
It's the price you pay for having to have the latest/most popular crap, when the more common and/or older stuff works just as well or (in the case of video game consoles) better (the 360 doesn't have very many games out yet) for less money.
Oh, and it can attract the attention of the Federal Trade Commission for anti-consumer practices.
Please name a single law they violated. Was anything not as advertised? (No) Did they corner the market? (No)...
A store [...] cannot use its disclosed policy to refuse the return of defective merchandise. When the item purchased is defective, you can choose a repair, replacement or refund. This right is contained in the Implied Warranty of Merchantability law. Under that law, merchants cannot limit your remedies.
I *hate* the phone voice. Phones, unlike people's ears, can pick up your voice when you use quiet, directed speech. You can talk on your cell phone such that the person on the other end can hear you fine, but somebody 3 feet away can't make out what you're saying. People who use a loud "phone voice" are fucking morons.
As a solution, I propose that cell phones be made such that talking too loudly cuts you off. It'll make the problem worse for a little while, and then solve it entirely.
Don't you think most of those people already went out and bought an HDTV? Most of those early HDTV sales are for non-HDCP sets. I know a lot of very pissed off people who own HD big-screens that won't support HD-DVD.
If they wanted this technology to take hold, they needed to get it out in time for the early adopters. Fucking the early adopters is the best way to kill your market.
Worst of all, this crap isn't even going to slow down piracy. It's only going to screw the honest guys.
I think that the first problem is that people WILL BE expecting the ps3 to run at 1080p
That's total BS.
90%+ of the people buying the PS3 and the Xbox 360 will be expecting it to drive an SD 480i or 576i display. The talk about HD capabilities are just posturing for the gaming media. Most people don't, and won't have HD displays for this console generation.
Hair and cloth simulations are much, much harder to pull off realtime in single-processor systems
You don't see them, not so much because they're hard (they *are* hard), but because they're made even harder by the shortcuts taken by the typical 2D accelerator. A lot of a scene you see in "real time" on modern video hardware is pre-rendered in the form of texture maps and bump maps. Rather than shift paradigm, we have iteratively increased the number of transformations per frame that can be done on these pre-renered surfaces, but that means graphics processors are becoming more and more specialized for a task that is basically incompatable with realistic fabric and hair rendering.
Most likely I will have been upgraded to Vista by the time this comes out
And updated to an HDCP compatable monitor so your output isn't artifically blurred in the process?
I don't know about you, but I can't afford a new monitor and a new copy of Windows just so I can do the same shit I've been doing with Windows 2000 and XP (lets face facts, there are no important functional differences between the two, except that one is still supported and the other isn't) just so I can have DRM and a two year old mediocre first person shooter.
But you can probably count on your fingers the number of developers who are using GPUs for anything other than rendering pixels,
And for good reason. GPUs are designed to render pixels, not do other stuff.
Taking an arbitrary program and turning it into something that would run well on a GPU (or a Cell SPU)
I don't understand why you think I'm saying that those two things are equivalent. Taking an arbitrary program and turning it into something that would run well on a GPU would be unusual. You're talking about running code written for a single purpose on a processor designed for a different purpose. Hopefully the specialized processor you're getting your task to run on was actually designed to run that particular type of task you're trying to run.
Programming your Foo SPU to run your Foo task shouldn't be any harder than programming your pixel shader to shade pixels.
but this page is really quite embarassing for the author's parents and any physics teacher's they've ever had
This page is probably there because the author enjoys making people who know better and are uptight about it get hot under the collar. In other words, he's trolling. If that's the case, the author would have to have a pretty decent grasp of the concepts he is mocking in order to know exactly which buttons to push.
Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt. Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical.
That would be a lovely argument if changes in position were measured in velocity.
You describe spacial travel as the dx, not the dx/dt. It stands to reason that you would describe time travel with the dt, not as some rate of travel we haven't come up with yet.
you hand optimize (and design) your program for the cell.
Every parallel architecture I've ever programmed for had nice APIs for offloading and directing tasks to the various available processing units. There shouldn't be much 'hand-optimization' involved in the sense you're implying.
Developers who write code that takes advantage of GPUs in modern gaming PCs are already familliar with this style programming, and the ones that understand the architecture instead of memorizing the APIs or program out of a cookbook should have no trouble adapting.
Portable development units come mounted on their side in a 19" enclosure with a handle on top, semi-attractive looking trim pieces, and appropriate power supplies and cooling on the inside. They cost about three times what you'd pay for a standard rackmount production model.
You used them as programable DSPs. The CPU couldn't actually do the hard work fast enough... The chip did the 'hard' work, and they just made the CPU do more work than a full modem.
It's a hell of a paradigm shift for programmers to go from writing code that targets one CPU to code that deliberately splinters tasks across a bank of specialized processors.
You mean specialized processors like FPUs, 3d audio accelerators, 3d video accelerators (and the sub-processing units contained in video accelerators), encryption and TCP offload engines, WinModems, MPEG encoder/decoders, and platform management controllers?
Yeah, they'll have a real hard time adjusting... In 1982.
Slashdot Mirror
Now all you have to do is wait and see how much of the market the 360 captures, and you may be on to something.
It's not an excelent number until you know if the console is a success or not, and that is far from certain at this point. Come back in two years and we'll talk.
Funny the U.S. government targets Phil Zimmermann for three years but hardly raises so much as an eye when an encryption enabled OS is distributed.
Yeah, who would have thought that after well over a decade, huge advances in technology and the understanding of technology, 8 national, and 4 presidential elections that the policies of a large country might have changed somewhat.
We'd better hold on to those old outdated policies, rather than change with the times and correct our mistakes lest some anti-US-government blowhard be able to make a vague and unfounded accusation of hypocracy.
Take a look at this image: http://mas450.syntheticholography.org/reading/othe r_handouts/astigmatism/schematic/sym-focus.gif
That's almost certainly what you're thinking of when you are picturing using a lens to focus. Now, because the source is a laser, imagine that the light originating from the source is just a single ray rather than the cone shown in the image. Now there's no need for a lens in the middle to achieve a tightly focused point on the target surface.
I can usually get the same stuff elsewhere on the net for less money.
Yeah, but not much less... Certainly not enough to justify the service difference.
I bought a video card from Newegg in September. The card died last week, and the manufacturer wasn't going to honor the warranty, so Newegg is replacing it and dealing with the manufacturer for me. Well worth the extra $3 or $4 that I spent by not buying it from some random yahoo store that happened to be the lowest price on pricewatch.
You do not Choose your sexual preference .
For some subset of the population, I'm sure you're absolutely correct, but you can't say that about everybody.
There are many people who make a concious decision about their sexual alignment for social, political, or practical reasons too. Where do you think the term '4 year queer' comes from? It goes both ways too. There are people who decide they want to be gay for one reason or another just as much as there are people who decide they're going to be straight. There are people who don't choose their sexual preference, but there are also people who *do* choose their sexual preference. Often the people who are most vocal about their minority sexuality are the ones that consiously decided what their sexuality was going to be (be it for attention, or whatever), rather than the people who are the way they are.
Just because you decided to let nature take it's course doesn't mean everybody else does too.
You can be absolutely positive that if the PS3 sells for $500/unit it will sell nowhere near 500k units in one day in the U.S.
That's why you can be absolutely positive that the PS3 won't be priced at $500.
Sony has never gone to market with the most expensive console, even though all the "experts" have always predicted that every upcoming Sony console would be more expensive than the competition.
Sony wants to let people thing that it's going to cost $500 so people will think it's a bargain when it comes out at $349.
From a consumer perspective, the store is misusing its position (being one of the few stores with a limited stock of the product) to force you to pay higher costs that you don't want to pay to get extra products you don't want just so you can have the core product that you DID want.
That's par for the course in every other market.
Ever looked into buying a new car that is particularly popular? They never have one for the MSRP. Convieniently the only ones they have in stock have options you didn't need, and cost a fortune, like $1500 for the premium stereo system that isn't as good as a $500 after-market job. etc...
It's the price you pay for having to have the latest/most popular crap, when the more common and/or older stuff works just as well or (in the case of video game consoles) better (the 360 doesn't have very many games out yet) for less money.
Oh, and it can attract the attention of the Federal Trade Commission for anti-consumer practices.
Please name a single law they violated. Was anything not as advertised? (No) Did they corner the market? (No)...
"opened discs may only be exchanged for another copy of the same disc"
Virtually every state has a law saying that return policy is illegal.
In Massachusetts, for example:
A store [...] cannot use its disclosed policy to refuse the return of defective merchandise. When the item purchased is defective, you can choose a repair, replacement or refund. This right is contained in the Implied Warranty of Merchantability law. Under that law, merchants cannot limit your remedies.
"cell phone voice."
I *hate* the phone voice. Phones, unlike people's ears, can pick up your voice when you use quiet, directed speech. You can talk on your cell phone such that the person on the other end can hear you fine, but somebody 3 feet away can't make out what you're saying. People who use a loud "phone voice" are fucking morons.
As a solution, I propose that cell phones be made such that talking too loudly cuts you off. It'll make the problem worse for a little while, and then solve it entirely.
That's all I need.
Don't you think most of those people already went out and bought an HDTV? Most of those early HDTV sales are for non-HDCP sets. I know a lot of very pissed off people who own HD big-screens that won't support HD-DVD.
If they wanted this technology to take hold, they needed to get it out in time for the early adopters. Fucking the early adopters is the best way to kill your market.
Worst of all, this crap isn't even going to slow down piracy. It's only going to screw the honest guys.
I think that the first problem is that people WILL BE expecting the ps3 to run at 1080p
That's total BS.
90%+ of the people buying the PS3 and the Xbox 360 will be expecting it to drive an SD 480i or 576i display. The talk about HD capabilities are just posturing for the gaming media. Most people don't, and won't have HD displays for this console generation.
Err... That should have sayd "3D accelerator", of course.
Hair and cloth simulations are much, much harder to pull off realtime in single-processor systems
You don't see them, not so much because they're hard (they *are* hard), but because they're made even harder by the shortcuts taken by the typical 2D accelerator. A lot of a scene you see in "real time" on modern video hardware is pre-rendered in the form of texture maps and bump maps. Rather than shift paradigm, we have iteratively increased the number of transformations per frame that can be done on these pre-renered surfaces, but that means graphics processors are becoming more and more specialized for a task that is basically incompatable with realistic fabric and hair rendering.
Most likely I will have been upgraded to Vista by the time this comes out
And updated to an HDCP compatable monitor so your output isn't artifically blurred in the process?
I don't know about you, but I can't afford a new monitor and a new copy of Windows just so I can do the same shit I've been doing with Windows 2000 and XP (lets face facts, there are no important functional differences between the two, except that one is still supported and the other isn't) just so I can have DRM and a two year old mediocre first person shooter.
Travel cases for rackmount musical equipment make nice shells for your single piece of otherwise rackmount-only computer equipment.
But you can probably count on your fingers the number of developers who are using GPUs for anything other than rendering pixels,
And for good reason. GPUs are designed to render pixels, not do other stuff.
Taking an arbitrary program and turning it into something that would run well on a GPU (or a Cell SPU)
I don't understand why you think I'm saying that those two things are equivalent. Taking an arbitrary program and turning it into something that would run well on a GPU would be unusual. You're talking about running code written for a single purpose on a processor designed for a different purpose. Hopefully the specialized processor you're getting your task to run on was actually designed to run that particular type of task you're trying to run.
Programming your Foo SPU to run your Foo task shouldn't be any harder than programming your pixel shader to shade pixels.
but this page is really quite embarassing for the author's parents and any physics teacher's they've ever had
This page is probably there because the author enjoys making people who know better and are uptight about it get hot under the collar. In other words, he's trolling. If that's the case, the author would have to have a pretty decent grasp of the concepts he is mocking in order to know exactly which buttons to push.
Spatial velocity is given as dx/dt. Velocity in time(dt/dt) is nonsensical.
That would be a lovely argument if changes in position were measured in velocity.
You describe spacial travel as the dx, not the dx/dt. It stands to reason that you would describe time travel with the dt, not as some rate of travel we haven't come up with yet.
you hand optimize (and design) your program for the cell.
Every parallel architecture I've ever programmed for had nice APIs for offloading and directing tasks to the various available processing units. There shouldn't be much 'hand-optimization' involved in the sense you're implying.
Developers who write code that takes advantage of GPUs in modern gaming PCs are already familliar with this style programming, and the ones that understand the architecture instead of memorizing the APIs or program out of a cookbook should have no trouble adapting.
Portable development units come mounted on their side in a 19" enclosure with a handle on top, semi-attractive looking trim pieces, and appropriate power supplies and cooling on the inside. They cost about three times what you'd pay for a standard rackmount production model.
the Cell cpu's along with the bga memory they use are fused directly to the logic board
That's not uncommon for Pentium blades either. The socket increases the width, and that space is better used for cooling.
You used them as programable DSPs. The CPU couldn't actually do the hard work fast enough... The chip did the 'hard' work, and they just made the CPU do more work than a full modem.
It's a hell of a paradigm shift for programmers to go from writing code that targets one CPU to code that deliberately splinters tasks across a bank of specialized processors.
You mean specialized processors like FPUs, 3d audio accelerators, 3d video accelerators (and the sub-processing units contained in video accelerators), encryption and TCP offload engines, WinModems, MPEG encoder/decoders, and platform management controllers?
Yeah, they'll have a real hard time adjusting... In 1982.
I have numbers now... From the US Department of energy. High pressure sodium is still the winner in light per watt for outdoor lighting by 40%.