You know, I read your post and thought "He's right, but he should be able to provide a reference...". So I went to look for one, but it seems according to the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature and NASA You're just plain wrong. The name of Earth's moon is "Moon". Luna just happens to be the Italian word for it.
Oops, sorry, you're right. For some reason I was under the impression that 3Com had only spun off the OS company, and not hardware production. It seems that I was incorrect. (My palm IIIx says 3Com in the corner, but it must have been manufactured before the spinoff.)
I would understand your arguement if the system in question was a current generation system. However PS1 is yesterdays news, and it also just happens to have one of the largest games bases available. Now that they're not putting more money in to PS1 (I know, they're selling PSOne's, but hold off on that for a sec) they're going to want as many people as possible to purchase the games (which are in essence just cash cows to SCEA now that none of them are really under active development anymore). Since these games presumably are not going to be released for PC in the future, the only ones who benifit from a sale are the distributors (SCEA). For this reason, Sony has released the PSOne which is a playstation that limits "chipping". Having a PC emulator would simply create a platform for their games similar to PSOne except that they'll make a huge profit on selling the "system" since there is no manufacturing overhead. Sony can only make money with this. Especially if they enhance it.
Of course Palm only makes the operating system, not the devices themselves... Furthermore, Calling it a palm pilot is in violation of the Pilot pen corp.'s trademark. Is somebody going to sue NCR for this?
Packet writing in 2.2.17+ and 2.4.0+ works just fine with no special patches. Just mount away read-write (as long as you built your kernel with read-write support). Though it is marked experimental and dangerous, I haven't had any trouble with the two drives I have here. You can also use any file system you wish. It doesn't have to be UDF. It doesn't work with CD-RW yet though.
Wasn't Moore talking about transistor density? Why does everyone think he was talking about processor power? More transistors != more power necissarily.
Yes, but while they are generating this technology, there are people out there that are working on fuel cells. The two technologies are progressing at roughly equal speeds, and by the time we see these easily availabe (10-15 years) then your problem should be fixed. All you'll have is water. (Well, I guess it depends on where they get the hydrogen from, but hopefully you would use solar energy or nuclear for that.)
Actually, it can be much easier to hear the artifacts with a good set of headphones. Of course, most people don't happen to have a good set of headphones, and if they do they may still be plugging them into their PC soundcard which will introduce more noise then you can hear in the mp3. Do your DAC outside the PC and get a good set of headphones from Sennheiser or Grado, and you'll be suprised how obvious the artifacts are. Especially in 128kpbs mp3s.
Read my comment again, and tell me where I said that the data had to come off of a CD. Of course you can't get higher then CD quality audio off of a CD, but that doesn't mean that you can't store higer quality audio in an mp3. You can, however, store higher then CD quality audio in wave files, or on DAT, or (gasp) on an analog tape.
Secondly, I pulled those numbers out of my ass knowing that they'd be more then sufficient. lame allows 320kbps/48khz which will give you better sound quality them most studios can provide. Certainly better than CD quality.
It sounds to me like you wanted to be a programmer and not a computer scientist. My college (WPI) fortunatly had a distinction between the two, and you could get a "Computers with applications" degree if you wanted what you call "practical knowledge". What you learn as a Computer Science major is practical if your chosen career is as a computer scientist and you wish to design and optimize algorithms. These positions however are harder to get, because these days a rapid prototype qualifies as a product.
The adoption of MP3 has convinced me that a lot of people don't really listen to music.
This thread has convinced me that alot of people people don't actually understand technology. mp3 can be better than CD quality depending on the sampling rate and frequency. It is true that 128kbps/44.1khz sounds like ass, but at ~384kbps/96khz with the right encoder, mp3 has better sound quality then a CD. Besides, any pop music you buy has been compressed during mastering (analog compression, but the same effect) to the point where music on CDs these days sounds like shit anyway.
Where did you go to school? Only the math and physics professors at my school didn't teach english.
Besides, what happened to going into a career area because you like it? I had no idea what the job prospects were like when I went for a CS degree. I did it because I was interested in it. If you do it for any other reason you probably shouldn't be there.
Some people much more knowledgeable then me in this area say this:
A railgun consists of two parallel conductors, the "rails," bridged by a non-ferromagnetic conducting armature. The railgun is fired by creating a current loop that flows from some large power source, down one rail, across the slug, and back up the other rail. This current loop induces an enormous magnetic field which, in turn, pushes the armature down the rails with a force proportional to the magnitude of the current, the separation distance of the rails, and the magnetic field.
So, while the projectile is propelled by a magnetic field in both cases, a "rail" gun uses a specific method (rails+ conductive armature) to generate the field. For more information see railgun.org
There is something important to remember about all of this. This only applies to low end "consumer/home PC" market. The high end area will still need the general purpose flexability, and since there is still money in that market they'll get it. The bottom line is that you're not going to loose the ability to do what you do now with your current PCs, but you'll have to pay alot more to get a machine to do what you want because it will be labeled "Server class". Now the software end of things is another story, and hopefully free software (The RMS definition) will save us.
The hyper-marketing-droids ay mega-chip-corporation wont believe that consumers will be able to handle not comparing chips by Mhz/Ghz raitngs, and you will see what they did to CD-ROM drives. 12.5Ghz Max!
The way that >4Gb of memory is implemented on IA-32 is basically a hack, and if you have > 4Gb of memory there is a performance hit.
Either way, there are many advantages to having a 64 bit virtual address space even if you don't have enough ram to to use up the larger physical address space.
Here's the problem. Bandwidth providers charge you for access to the network. They also charge the sites for access to the network. Who benifits in this senerio? Not the content providers, that's for sure. The internet as it is right now is not set up to support content provision as a business model. Companies that are trying to should take note of that. Sell a product, or don't plan on making any money... You can't really....
Would you pay for content if the infrastructure was secure, inexpensive, and allowed the content to prosper?
This will never happen. You may get two of you three requirements but it will never be both in a company's best interests and feasable to implement all three...
Secure and inexpensive? well then it'll probably go bust for lack of funds and the content will suffer... Besides, I doubt any company out there will be able to resist the appeal of dipping in to the logs and selling some data.
Secure, and encourages content growth? They're going to have to charge alot for that... pennies a page at least. That's alot. I'm serious.
Inexpensive and encourages good content? The people running sites have to pay for bandwith. It's pricy... For a smaller site (bandwith is cheaper in bulk) It can cost a few cents per impression (ok, maybe $0.01, but that's still alot if you get slashdotted or such...) If the system is inexpensive, that money needs to come from somewhere. Where? Well they're going to sell your data. How's that for secure?
Maybe beople would buy it if it existed, but it can't so why are we even bothering to discuss it?
A port is another story entirely. There's nothing wrong with ports usually, it's when the game is designed for multiple platforms from the ground up. (With a port, they concentrated on the right things initially and then the game was good enough to warrent consideration on other platforms)
Anyway, I believe that at least all of the EA-Sports games are available for Nintendo platforms and just abaout all others. EA is one of the few companies that does it right though. Mayby this has a bearing on their individual contract because I can't think of anyone else who develops the same games for nintendo and other platforms... Shady contracts are another story entirely either way.
Attitudes like yours really irritate me. When a developer spends their time making a game that will run on multiple platforms two thigs happen.
First the game is limited by the technology of the least innovative platform minus the performance hit of any abstraction layers etc... Second, lots of time is spent making the game work on other platforms instead of paying attention to details, and the details can make or break a game. This is why almost all games that are developed with more then one platform target to start with usually suck.
A perfect recent example of this is Oni. Oni is a great concept for a game. The gameplay is good too. But the details aren't there. The sound can get distorted or latent, when people fall down the stairs they land horizontal instead of at the slope of the stairs, the clipping sucks, they didn't spend enough time choosing their textures... The list goes on.
One last point. The console industry isn't the computer industry (yet). Lets hope it doesn't become the same. Let's look at why: The PC industry started off by making varied and innovative hardware. Then, when IBM clones came out hardware innovation stopped in the consumer space, and we've been stuck with the same outdated underdesigned hack of a hardware platform in the mainstream for the last 20 years. Now, in 2001 you have the console gaming industry with some really new and innovative hardware archetectures like the PS2 and the Gamecube. Do you really think that the software will benifit from having to run on such varied hardware? No, it wont, so what will happen is that all of the future game systems will have to be extremely similar in order to compete in the market. There won't be any innovation in the console hardware industry anymore.
It's ok if you can't get every game for every console. It's ok if you end up with more then one console. In the end there will be a larger variety of game types and amazing hardware out there. That would be great!
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I read your post and thought "He's right, but he should be able to provide a reference...". So I went to look for one, but it seems according to the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature and NASA You're just plain wrong. The name of Earth's moon is "Moon". Luna just happens to be the Italian word for it.
The actual claims in the patent don't mention "Credit card sized". Actually they don't mention any dimentions at all.
Duh, I meant speak english. Of course they didn't teach it!
Oops, sorry, you're right. For some reason I was under the impression that 3Com had only spun off the OS company, and not hardware production. It seems that I was incorrect. (My palm IIIx says 3Com in the corner, but it must have been manufactured before the spinoff.)
I would understand your arguement if the system in question was a current generation system. However PS1 is yesterdays news, and it also just happens to have one of the largest games bases available. Now that they're not putting more money in to PS1 (I know, they're selling PSOne's, but hold off on that for a sec) they're going to want as many people as possible to purchase the games (which are in essence just cash cows to SCEA now that none of them are really under active development anymore). Since these games presumably are not going to be released for PC in the future, the only ones who benifit from a sale are the distributors (SCEA). For this reason, Sony has released the PSOne which is a playstation that limits "chipping". Having a PC emulator would simply create a platform for their games similar to PSOne except that they'll make a huge profit on selling the "system" since there is no manufacturing overhead. Sony can only make money with this. Especially if they enhance it.
Of course Palm only makes the operating system, not the devices themselves... Furthermore, Calling it a palm pilot is in violation of the Pilot pen corp.'s trademark. Is somebody going to sue NCR for this?
BTW, if you want to create UDF filesystems, you need the UDF utilities which you can get from http://freshmeat.net/projects/udf/
I'm not sure we're on the same page as to how fuel cells work. The ones I'm aware of existing presently run on hydrogen and oxygen.
Wasn't Moore talking about transistor density? Why does everyone think he was talking about processor power? More transistors != more power necissarily.
Yes, but while they are generating this technology, there are people out there that are working on fuel cells. The two technologies are progressing at roughly equal speeds, and by the time we see these easily availabe (10-15 years) then your problem should be fixed. All you'll have is water. (Well, I guess it depends on where they get the hydrogen from, but hopefully you would use solar energy or nuclear for that.)
Actually, it can be much easier to hear the artifacts with a good set of headphones. Of course, most people don't happen to have a good set of headphones, and if they do they may still be plugging them into their PC soundcard which will introduce more noise then you can hear in the mp3. Do your DAC outside the PC and get a good set of headphones from Sennheiser or Grado, and you'll be suprised how obvious the artifacts are. Especially in 128kpbs mp3s.
Secondly, I pulled those numbers out of my ass knowing that they'd be more then sufficient. lame allows 320kbps/48khz which will give you better sound quality them most studios can provide. Certainly better than CD quality.
It sounds to me like you wanted to be a programmer and not a computer scientist. My college (WPI) fortunatly had a distinction between the two, and you could get a "Computers with applications" degree if you wanted what you call "practical knowledge". What you learn as a Computer Science major is practical if your chosen career is as a computer scientist and you wish to design and optimize algorithms. These positions however are harder to get, because these days a rapid prototype qualifies as a product.
This thread has convinced me that alot of people people don't actually understand technology. mp3 can be better than CD quality depending on the sampling rate and frequency. It is true that 128kbps/44.1khz sounds like ass, but at ~384kbps/96khz with the right encoder, mp3 has better sound quality then a CD. Besides, any pop music you buy has been compressed during mastering (analog compression, but the same effect) to the point where music on CDs these days sounds like shit anyway.
Besides, what happened to going into a career area because you like it? I had no idea what the job prospects were like when I went for a CS degree. I did it because I was interested in it. If you do it for any other reason you probably shouldn't be there.
So, while the projectile is propelled by a magnetic field in both cases, a "rail" gun uses a specific method (rails+ conductive armature) to generate the field. For more information see railgun.org
What are you talking about? This sounds nothing like what a true rail gun is because it is nothing like what a rail gun is.
There is something important to remember about all of this. This only applies to low end "consumer/home PC" market. The high end area will still need the general purpose flexability, and since there is still money in that market they'll get it. The bottom line is that you're not going to loose the ability to do what you do now with your current PCs, but you'll have to pay alot more to get a machine to do what you want because it will be labeled "Server class". Now the software end of things is another story, and hopefully free software (The RMS definition) will save us.
Right, but who said these chips aren't targeted at servers? That's what I'll be using them for :)
The hyper-marketing-droids ay mega-chip-corporation wont believe that consumers will be able to handle not comparing chips by Mhz/Ghz raitngs, and you will see what they did to CD-ROM drives. 12.5Ghz Max!
The way that >4Gb of memory is implemented on IA-32 is basically a hack, and if you have > 4Gb of memory there is a performance hit.
Either way, there are many advantages to having a 64 bit virtual address space even if you don't have enough ram to to use up the larger physical address space.
Here's the problem. Bandwidth providers charge you for access to the network. They also charge the sites for access to the network. Who benifits in this senerio? Not the content providers, that's for sure. The internet as it is right now is not set up to support content provision as a business model. Companies that are trying to should take note of that. Sell a product, or don't plan on making any money... You can't really....
This will never happen. You may get two of you three requirements but it will never be both in a company's best interests and feasable to implement all three...
Secure and inexpensive? well then it'll probably go bust for lack of funds and the content will suffer... Besides, I doubt any company out there will be able to resist the appeal of dipping in to the logs and selling some data.
Secure, and encourages content growth? They're going to have to charge alot for that... pennies a page at least. That's alot. I'm serious.
Inexpensive and encourages good content? The people running sites have to pay for bandwith. It's pricy... For a smaller site (bandwith is cheaper in bulk) It can cost a few cents per impression (ok, maybe $0.01, but that's still alot if you get slashdotted or such...) If the system is inexpensive, that money needs to come from somewhere. Where? Well they're going to sell your data. How's that for secure?
Maybe beople would buy it if it existed, but it can't so why are we even bothering to discuss it?
A port is another story entirely. There's nothing wrong with ports usually, it's when the game is designed for multiple platforms from the ground up. (With a port, they concentrated on the right things initially and then the game was good enough to warrent consideration on other platforms)
Anyway, I believe that at least all of the EA-Sports games are available for Nintendo platforms and just abaout all others. EA is one of the few companies that does it right though. Mayby this has a bearing on their individual contract because I can't think of anyone else who develops the same games for nintendo and other platforms... Shady contracts are another story entirely either way.
Attitudes like yours really irritate me. When a developer spends their time making a game that will run on multiple platforms two thigs happen.
First the game is limited by the technology of the least innovative platform minus the performance hit of any abstraction layers etc... Second, lots of time is spent making the game work on other platforms instead of paying attention to details, and the details can make or break a game. This is why almost all games that are developed with more then one platform target to start with usually suck.
A perfect recent example of this is Oni. Oni is a great concept for a game. The gameplay is good too. But the details aren't there. The sound can get distorted or latent, when people fall down the stairs they land horizontal instead of at the slope of the stairs, the clipping sucks, they didn't spend enough time choosing their textures... The list goes on.
One last point. The console industry isn't the computer industry (yet). Lets hope it doesn't become the same. Let's look at why: The PC industry started off by making varied and innovative hardware. Then, when IBM clones came out hardware innovation stopped in the consumer space, and we've been stuck with the same outdated underdesigned hack of a hardware platform in the mainstream for the last 20 years. Now, in 2001 you have the console gaming industry with some really new and innovative hardware archetectures like the PS2 and the Gamecube. Do you really think that the software will benifit from having to run on such varied hardware? No, it wont, so what will happen is that all of the future game systems will have to be extremely similar in order to compete in the market. There won't be any innovation in the console hardware industry anymore.
It's ok if you can't get every game for every console. It's ok if you end up with more then one console. In the end there will be a larger variety of game types and amazing hardware out there. That would be great!