Re:Why haven't you fired Kdawson yet?
on
Ask Rob Malda
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· Score: 1
Slashdot is definitely much less annoying now that I ignore kdawson posts.
On a side note, the best/. editor ever was Simoniker! Is there some way we can get him back? I'll offer to pay his salary.
"Everyone knows" that all the most awesome, hardcore Japanese games don't make it to the US because, overall, the US audience needs dumbed-down, easier games.
Everyone is wrong. Comparing mainstream audiences, Japanese gamers actually prefer easier, less-complex titles with more linear storytelling and less control and decision-making from the user. This is most evident in sports games. US/EU sports titles never make it in Japan in part because they are far too complex and a bit too difficult. JP sports titles rarely make it elsewhere because the gameplay seems dumbed-down and unrealistic.
In the case of the "lost levels", the game wasn't that popular in Japan either, while our so-called SMW2 has enjoyed enduring popularity in Japan, across multiple releases on multiple consoles. The problem with the SMB sequel wasn't just that it was too hard, it is that it's not that good. It's too much of a rehash of the first SMB and all the added difficulty comes from gimmicky and poorly-tested elements; it's more often annoying than it is hard.
As for RPG's not coming to the US, the problem here isn't that we aren't good enough for the excellent Japanese RPGs. The bigger problems are:
Preferences. Japanese players like simpler, more linear games (you might even say "dumbed-down") with fewer skill-based elements and more emphasis on storytelling and presentation. They are also more tolerant of silliness.
Costs. An RPG requires hundreds or thousands of times the translation effort of an action title. Margins are not always very high and many producers and distributors simply don't want to deal with such large up-front costs. Even extremely popular games like Nintendo's Animal Crossing and Zelda get delayed by months so they can be translated.
Prior to 1996, RPGs were niche titles outside of Japan anyhow.
If you confine your analysis to only hardcore gamer audiences, the comparison becomes completely different. For instance, nobody can touch the Japanese elite at 2d arcade shooters, while on the other hand the Japanese are nonexistent in the FPS scene. But in both cases, the hardcore communities are completely unrepresentative of the mainstream audiences.
I have to reply, because there are too many things wrong in this post for it to have such a high score.
The Little Ice Age in Europe from 1400-1850 is now thought to have been caused by an abnormal lack of SUNSPOTS.
Sunspots cause the sun to give off alot more heat/energy than a nicely uniformed surface sun does.
Sunspots don't cause more energy to come from the sun - the fact is that sunspots are cooler than the rest of the sun's surface. Sunspots are, however, symptoms of an active sun. Just as low levels of sunspots occur when the sun is less active.
Too bad we only have about 1,000 years of data on sunspots.
Sunspots have been directly observed and recorded in reasonable detail only since Galileo's time. But in another sense, we actually have data going back much farther than that. During periods of high solar activity, the sun bombards the earth with a larger number of subatomic particles. This type of radiation results in constant isotope formation - in particular, this is why things left exposed on the earth's surface keep a constant concentration of Carbom 14. Isotope ratio measurements have in fact been used to infer changes in solar activity for periods during which nobody was recording sunspot counts.
Also, while higher solar activity heats the earth, the main part of the effect is actually very indirect. Most of the extra heating associated with a hotter sun cannot be explained by radiation alone. What happens is that the higher particle flux strengthens the earth's magnetosphere, and somewhat ironically, this means the atmosphere is better protected from being eroded away by solar wind precisely when solar wind is most dense! The slightly thicker "blanket" of atmosphere allows the earth to retain a bit more heat.
This fact doesn't completely debunk the manmade global warming hypothesis. Changes in solar activity probably "only" account for 75% of the climate change since the end of the Little Ice Age. The other 25% could all easily be the work of mankind. But there are two reasons I don't think we should panic yet. First, there's mounting evidence that the Medieval Warm Period (which preceded the Little Ice Age) peaked at levels even warmer than what we now experience. So modern temperatures aren't really unprecedented. Secondly, all of the four previous interglacials peaked at much higher temperatures than ours has. So, a very long view of climate shows that on fairly regular intervals, the earth experiences temperatures similar to those we now have, even without any help from mankind.
I usually have to use a 1x1 JPG of the colour for the background
Obviously you don't realize that jpegs use macroblocks ranging in size from 8x8 to 16x16. The image size in bytes would be no larger (and possibly much smaller, depending on the encoder) if it were an 8x8 pixel block of solid color.
The Dreamcast did have some internal flash memory, and one of the things it was used for was storing serial numbers (essentially CD keys) for PSO. However, the discs were identical, of course.
I have firsthand info showing that people are falling for these scams every day. They are practically falling over themselves to rush private documents (copies of license, signature, banking info) to scammers in order to receive their cut of $5,500,000 or whatever. They jump through hoops to sell their junk on ebay to some Nigerian who insists on unusual and complicated means of payment (as well as dictates every other detail of the transaction).
I have no doubt that scambaiters are helping fix the problem, but we're nowhere near critical mass yet.
and this Altavista thing probably has nothing to do with it. As others have pointed out, Altavista doesn't have anything to offer anyway.
A certain site I help run has shown what many other people are seeing: MSN's search robot is absolutely going crazy lately. It purposely retrieves files of all kinds - it's done about 4.5GB of traffic on my site because it's downloading large videos! What's a search engine going to do with all these videos?
Besides that, it visits the forums as often as many of the regulars do. It's FAR more aggressive than googlebot.
It's rather obvious that MSN's new search engine is going to be both more complete and more up-to-date than anything else that's out there. I love google right now, but I wonder how they're going to stand up to MS.
If you're interested in Ikaruga, you might like this ikaruga fansite, where there are scoreboards, discussion forums, and replay videos of experts playing each level.
and has been for years, for HP, Compaq, and quite a few others. These types of services have gone under the name "UPS Logistics," though nowadays "Supply Chain Solutions" seems to be the favorite moniker.
Every so often a new huge customer signs up, every so often an old one leaves. A seller of mid-to-upper range servers used to move all kinds of equipment back and forth to customers this way without it ever leaving UPS's hands -- and the customer usually doesn't know this!
Many of the agreements are basically just warehousing - you order a bunch of Sprint phones, and boxes full of brand new phones are pulled off of a shelf in some warehouse UPS runs, and a special nightly trailer pickup takes them to a major air hub that's right across town. Other agreements do involve repair. So, there's fundamentally absolutely nothing new about this story, other than that Toshiba laptops are now involved.
No disrespect to Kiken, but his videos are nothing compared to the cream-of-the-crop selection available at ikaruga.co.uk. Incidentally, the guy who did the chapter 4 video available there has since improved on it quite a lot, but he hasn't been doing video capture lately. For something more optimal, check out the chapter 4 prototype mode video.
Not true - the R3xx was in the works well before ATI bought ArtX. There's probably almost no similarity between the chips.
It's rather common for Gamecube games to use per-pixel shading, but the relevant extra work is done on the CPU rathern than the GPU. This isn't a new thing - even in the previous generation, such things were sometimes done.
There's nothing interesting in this video. The only true movie footage in it is from the original trilogy.
The video quality sucks BIGTIME. It is a 15fps video of someone pointing a digital still camera at a TV, and most of the viewing area is taken up by stuff outside of that TV screen.
Besides being half the framerate of ordinary NTSC TV, the avi contains terrible sound. The sound is UNCOMPRESSED PCM - single channel, 8 bit, 11024 samples per second. That's why the sound quality is such total shit.
The video is motion jpeg, which is nothing but a series of jpeg files, one for each frame. Generally this type of video takes up several times more space than a comparable quality mpeg-1 video file, let alone DivX. mjpeg is very commonly used with digital cameras, though...
There are, and always have been, a massive amount of misconceptions on this topic, so I'll try to cover most of them in one post.
Gamecube discs spin clockwise, just like almost every other drive. Try opening the lid while a game is being read so you can see for yourself.
The small (8cm) physical size of the Gamecube discs has nothing to do with copy protection; Nintendo just liked small discs. 8cm discs are not new, and writable discs of this size are not hard to acquire. 8cm DVD-RAM discs are popular for digital recording applications, although that may be 100% irrelevant if the GCN's laser doesn't read that type of medium in the first place...
The copying of Gamecube disc images is NOT done by just popping the disc in a computer's drive and reading it. If this is even feasible or practical, it is NOT how dumping is being done right now. Dumping is being done by tricking the only networked Gamecube game (PSO) into reading the disc's contents and sending it out over the network.
This still leaves MANY mysteries as to the precise format of the disc:
So far as I know, it's still not confirmed whether the tracks spiral differently on Gamecube discs
It's not known how well the dumps reflect what's really on the disc at the low level - when the system reads the disc, it might be decrypting, as well, or ignoring other information that the BIOS will strictly require to ensure the disc is legit. IOW, perhaps the dumps are hopelessly different from the format a GCN disc needs to be in
One of the important (and well-known) copyright mechanisms is a barcode-like section of the far innermost track of GCN discs (look closely at a game and you can see it - no, not that one, further to the inside). It is probably just not possible to replicate this on any writable DVD format.
And just to reinforce the point, since many people won't understand it - this DUMPING does NOT allow anyone to play pirated games. It is not even clear what steps are necessary to get to that point. It's rather impressive, really - the PSX, Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox were all cracked by the time they'd been out this long, yet the Gamecube remains a mystery. A good thing, IMO.
Where do you get that figure from? Firstly, it's probably unachievable with real-world woven CNT ropes of any significant size. Secondly, 50 GPa would be reasonably adequate as material for a space elevator. Plus, 50 GPa definitely can be achieved or even exceeded.
FWIW, the theoretical limit of CNTsis thought to be around 300GPa.
That's about 100 GPa too high, I think.
It turns out this topic is not entirely new:
on
A Unified Calculus?
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· Score: 5, Informative
The relationship between the discrete time scales approach and the unification of calculus has been widely known since S. Hilger published "Ein Masskettenkalkul mit Andwendung auf Zentrumsmannigfaltigkeiten" in 1988as his Ph.D. thesis. The problem remained for other to, um, elaborate on the connection. Martin Bohner, as one of the few individuals taking a great interest in this somewhat narrow area of the field, turns out to be the prime mover in the progress in the field. The really important development is that more people are going to take interest now and they will publish new and interesting results. Bohner's key accomplishment so far is proving to the community that this topic is worthy of more interest.
Not sure on the original Gameboy, but I'd guess 160x160.
Close: 160x144.
As to games that won't work... Any game that has a tilt sensor in the cartridge won't work.
You are probably right, but there may actually be a way to get it to work. You could insert the cartridge into the GCN's peripheral, and use the GBA as the controller (the peripheral lets you do this). If the GBA had a blank cartridge in it with just the MEMS tilt sensor in it... well, anyway, that's how Kirby's Tilt 'n Tumble 2 - or whatever they call it - is going to work, if they ever release it.
Aw, screw it, it'd be easier to just use the GCN controller and use the analog stick for tilt...
As it turns out, the most important growth-limiting nutrient for algae is usually iron. In fact, the sprinkling of iron filings in the ocean has often been proposed as a way to reverse or slow down the rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Apparently the total potential CO2 removal from iron "seeding" could be enormous.
I don't know what propaganda push you're referring to, but maybe that's because I didn't see any of the ads. It's certainly a valid complaint against Sega that they shafted their loyal customers. But I think a console is best measured by the quality of its games, and the DC's library is downright excellent. It's still the console I play the most, and I have a list of games I still want to get - a couple of which are yet to be released. The PS2 now has a good software lineup also, but it had a disappointing lineup until the 2nd half of 2001. It is also weak at texturing due to its lack of any hardware support for texture compression. The overall performance gap between the two consoles is actually not that large, and if you look at the first generation of games for both systems (Tekken vs. Soul Calibur, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 vs. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2) the Dreamcast games actually look better.
On behalf of level-headed DC fanboys everywhere, I apologize over the jerk who modded you.It's something that happens in every article that mentions a game console. It's especially bad in PS2 articles, but only because the PS2 fanboys are more numerous.
I take it you know that because you've played all the popular Dreamcast games, and found them worthless? Or is it possible that you're making broad comments about a system that you actually don't know much about? Just curious.
[snipped discussion about latency, which I agree with]
Personally I think a UMA was an amazingly stupid architecture for a video game system [...snip...]which is what the X-Box is doing (wasting money).
I agree entirely with this paragraph also.
I wasn't trying to say whether or not the X-Box is more powerful than the GC or not: what I was trying to say was whether or not developers will need time to figure out the system. In the GC's case, I think that's definitely true - developers have probably never worked with a system that's so disjoint like this - they may need time to figure out which accesses go at what time to get optimum speed. But the X-Box is a standard system: it's a P3 on a UMA, with a GeForce 3 graphics card (roughly). They're used to systems like this, especially Microsoft and all the PC developers who port games over. I don't think there will BE any 'tricks' that they can learn over time to make the system faster.
I don't think the GeForce 3 is a good comparison. The Xbox's graphics chip is called the NV2A; it is a different chip than the one on the GeForce 3 and it's less powerful. But it is more powerful than a GeForce 2. I also see room for a certain kind of learning curve on the Xbox: its GPU has a programmable pixel shader, which is a very new thing in the graphics world, and currently no other console has it. Actually, the Gamecube can do per-pixel shading also - in software, on the CPU. Rareware is bragging about fur shading effects in Starfox Adventures when it comes out, see: http://www.rareware.co.uk/master_frameset_ss/starf ox_ss_set.html.
About MusyX, tools for using it are provided to all Gamecube developers, so it's definitely an important part of the GC's sound advantage. I'm still blown away that in The Battle for Naboo for the N64, Factor 5 included about 40 minutes of audio commentary speech - as a hidden feature to unlock! MusyX tools are also used on the Gameboy Advance.
The Xbox's DDR-SDRAM averages about 75% of its optimal bandwidth numbers, while 1T-SRAM performs at closer to 90% of optimal. This still leaves the Xbox with the advantage, with about twice the effective memory bandwidth.
There are still some caveats, though. As you mentioned, the Xbox is UMA, so other uses (like sound) are competing with 3d-rendering for bandwidth. Also, the GC can perform up to 8 different texture operations on an object without having to do any extra memory reads or writes; the Xbox can only perform 4 texture layers, and after that it has to use up some memory bandwidth on extra reads and writes. The GC also has a much larger cache on its graphics chip, so it doesn't need so much bandwidth in the first place.
Overall I still think the Xbox gets a slight graphical advantage, but it costs $100 more and none of Nintendo's games will ever come to it, so the GC is more interesting to me.
GC has amazing amounts of sustained bandwidth that the X-Box doesn't have.
I like the Gamecube better, but this statement just isn't true. The Xbox achieves somewhat higher memory bandwidth, although the Gamecube uses its bandwidth more efficiently in several ways. Overall the Xbox is a bit more graphically powerful than the Gamecube. And both in turn are visibly more powerful than the PS2, which also happens to be the most bandwidth-inefficient console out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is definitely much less annoying now that I ignore kdawson posts. On a side note, the best /. editor ever was Simoniker! Is there some way we can get him back? I'll offer to pay his salary.
"Everyone knows" that all the most awesome, hardcore Japanese games don't make it to the US because, overall, the US audience needs dumbed-down, easier games.
Everyone is wrong. Comparing mainstream audiences, Japanese gamers actually prefer easier, less-complex titles with more linear storytelling and less control and decision-making from the user. This is most evident in sports games. US/EU sports titles never make it in Japan in part because they are far too complex and a bit too difficult. JP sports titles rarely make it elsewhere because the gameplay seems dumbed-down and unrealistic.
In the case of the "lost levels", the game wasn't that popular in Japan either, while our so-called SMW2 has enjoyed enduring popularity in Japan, across multiple releases on multiple consoles. The problem with the SMB sequel wasn't just that it was too hard, it is that it's not that good. It's too much of a rehash of the first SMB and all the added difficulty comes from gimmicky and poorly-tested elements; it's more often annoying than it is hard.
As for RPG's not coming to the US, the problem here isn't that we aren't good enough for the excellent Japanese RPGs. The bigger problems are:
- Preferences. Japanese players like simpler, more linear games (you might even say "dumbed-down") with fewer skill-based elements and more emphasis on storytelling and presentation. They are also more tolerant of silliness.
- Costs. An RPG requires hundreds or thousands of times the translation effort of an action title. Margins are not always very high and many producers and distributors simply don't want to deal with such large up-front costs. Even extremely popular games like Nintendo's Animal Crossing and Zelda get delayed by months so they can be translated.
- Prior to 1996, RPGs were niche titles outside of Japan anyhow.
If you confine your analysis to only hardcore gamer audiences, the comparison becomes completely different. For instance, nobody can touch the Japanese elite at 2d arcade shooters, while on the other hand the Japanese are nonexistent in the FPS scene. But in both cases, the hardcore communities are completely unrepresentative of the mainstream audiences.More uniquely, the same guy also has what is probably the world's only complete page on lego logic circuits.
The Little Ice Age in Europe from 1400-1850 is now thought to have been caused by an abnormal lack of SUNSPOTS. Sunspots cause the sun to give off alot more heat/energy than a nicely uniformed surface sun does.
Sunspots don't cause more energy to come from the sun - the fact is that sunspots are cooler than the rest of the sun's surface. Sunspots are, however, symptoms of an active sun. Just as low levels of sunspots occur when the sun is less active.
Too bad we only have about 1,000 years of data on sunspots.
Sunspots have been directly observed and recorded in reasonable detail only since Galileo's time. But in another sense, we actually have data going back much farther than that. During periods of high solar activity, the sun bombards the earth with a larger number of subatomic particles. This type of radiation results in constant isotope formation - in particular, this is why things left exposed on the earth's surface keep a constant concentration of Carbom 14. Isotope ratio measurements have in fact been used to infer changes in solar activity for periods during which nobody was recording sunspot counts.Also, while higher solar activity heats the earth, the main part of the effect is actually very indirect. Most of the extra heating associated with a hotter sun cannot be explained by radiation alone. What happens is that the higher particle flux strengthens the earth's magnetosphere, and somewhat ironically, this means the atmosphere is better protected from being eroded away by solar wind precisely when solar wind is most dense! The slightly thicker "blanket" of atmosphere allows the earth to retain a bit more heat.
This fact doesn't completely debunk the manmade global warming hypothesis. Changes in solar activity probably "only" account for 75% of the climate change since the end of the Little Ice Age. The other 25% could all easily be the work of mankind. But there are two reasons I don't think we should panic yet. First, there's mounting evidence that the Medieval Warm Period (which preceded the Little Ice Age) peaked at levels even warmer than what we now experience. So modern temperatures aren't really unprecedented. Secondly, all of the four previous interglacials peaked at much higher temperatures than ours has. So, a very long view of climate shows that on fairly regular intervals, the earth experiences temperatures similar to those we now have, even without any help from mankind.
Obviously you don't realize that jpegs use macroblocks ranging in size from 8x8 to 16x16. The image size in bytes would be no larger (and possibly much smaller, depending on the encoder) if it were an 8x8 pixel block of solid color.
The Dreamcast did have some internal flash memory, and one of the things it was used for was storing serial numbers (essentially CD keys) for PSO. However, the discs were identical, of course.
I have no doubt that scambaiters are helping fix the problem, but we're nowhere near critical mass yet.
root@hostname:/var/www/html# mknod REALLYIMPORTANTVIDEO.avi c 1 9
A certain site I help run has shown what many other people are seeing: MSN's search robot is absolutely going crazy lately. It purposely retrieves files of all kinds - it's done about 4.5GB of traffic on my site because it's downloading large videos! What's a search engine going to do with all these videos?
Besides that, it visits the forums as often as many of the regulars do. It's FAR more aggressive than googlebot.
It's rather obvious that MSN's new search engine is going to be both more complete and more up-to-date than anything else that's out there. I love google right now, but I wonder how they're going to stand up to MS.
If you're interested in Ikaruga, you might like this ikaruga fansite, where there are scoreboards, discussion forums, and replay videos of experts playing each level.
There are also some Radiant Silvergun videos.
</spam>
Every so often a new huge customer signs up, every so often an old one leaves. A seller of mid-to-upper range servers used to move all kinds of equipment back and forth to customers this way without it ever leaving UPS's hands -- and the customer usually doesn't know this!
Many of the agreements are basically just warehousing - you order a bunch of Sprint phones, and boxes full of brand new phones are pulled off of a shelf in some warehouse UPS runs, and a special nightly trailer pickup takes them to a major air hub that's right across town. Other agreements do involve repair. So, there's fundamentally absolutely nothing new about this story, other than that Toshiba laptops are now involved.
Yes, I do work for them.
No disrespect to Kiken, but his videos are nothing compared to the cream-of-the-crop selection available at ikaruga.co.uk. Incidentally, the guy who did the chapter 4 video available there has since improved on it quite a lot, but he hasn't been doing video capture lately. For something more optimal, check out the chapter 4 prototype mode video.
It's rather common for Gamecube games to use per-pixel shading, but the relevant extra work is done on the CPU rathern than the GPU. This isn't a new thing - even in the previous generation, such things were sometimes done.
or at least, this is consistent with the number of usenet posts.
- Gamecube discs spin clockwise, just like almost every other drive. Try opening the lid while a game is being read so you can see for yourself.
- The small (8cm) physical size of the Gamecube discs has nothing to do with copy protection; Nintendo just liked small discs. 8cm discs are not new, and writable discs of this size are not hard to acquire. 8cm DVD-RAM discs are popular for digital recording applications, although that may be 100% irrelevant if the GCN's laser doesn't read that type of medium in the first place...
- The copying of Gamecube disc images is NOT done by just popping the disc in a computer's drive and reading it. If this is even feasible or practical, it is NOT how dumping is being done right now. Dumping is being done by tricking the only networked Gamecube game (PSO) into reading the disc's contents and sending it out over the network.
- This still leaves MANY mysteries as to the precise format of the disc:
- So far as I know, it's still not confirmed whether the tracks spiral differently on Gamecube discs
- It's not known how well the dumps reflect what's really on the disc at the low level - when the system reads the disc, it might be decrypting, as well, or ignoring other information that the BIOS will strictly require to ensure the disc is legit. IOW, perhaps the dumps are hopelessly different from the format a GCN disc needs to be in
- One of the important (and well-known) copyright mechanisms is a barcode-like section of the far innermost track of GCN discs (look closely at a game and you can see it - no, not that one, further to the inside). It is probably just not possible to replicate this on any writable DVD format.
And just to reinforce the point, since many people won't understand it - this DUMPING does NOT allow anyone to play pirated games. It is not even clear what steps are necessary to get to that point. It's rather impressive, really - the PSX, Dreamcast, PS2, and Xbox were all cracked by the time they'd been out this long, yet the Gamecube remains a mystery. A good thing, IMO.Where do you get that figure from? Firstly, it's probably unachievable with real-world woven CNT ropes of any significant size. Secondly, 50 GPa would be reasonably adequate as material for a space elevator. Plus, 50 GPa definitely can be achieved or even exceeded.
FWIW, the theoretical limit of CNTsis thought to be around 300GPa.
That's about 100 GPa too high, I think.
The relationship between the discrete time scales approach and the unification of calculus has been widely known since S. Hilger published "Ein Masskettenkalkul mit Andwendung auf Zentrumsmannigfaltigkeiten" in 1988as his Ph.D. thesis. The problem remained for other to, um, elaborate on the connection. Martin Bohner, as one of the few individuals taking a great interest in this somewhat narrow area of the field, turns out to be the prime mover in the progress in the field. The really important development is that more people are going to take interest now and they will publish new and interesting results. Bohner's key accomplishment so far is proving to the community that this topic is worthy of more interest.
Close: 160x144.
As to games that won't work... Any game that has a tilt sensor in the cartridge won't work.
You are probably right, but there may actually be a way to get it to work. You could insert the cartridge into the GCN's peripheral, and use the GBA as the controller (the peripheral lets you do this). If the GBA had a blank cartridge in it with just the MEMS tilt sensor in it... well, anyway, that's how Kirby's Tilt 'n Tumble 2 - or whatever they call it - is going to work, if they ever release it.
Aw, screw it, it'd be easier to just use the GCN controller and use the analog stick for tilt...
As it turns out, the most important growth-limiting nutrient for algae is usually iron. In fact, the sprinkling of iron filings in the ocean has often been proposed as a way to reverse or slow down the rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Apparently the total potential CO2 removal from iron "seeding" could be enormous.
On behalf of level-headed DC fanboys everywhere, I apologize over the jerk who modded you .It's something that happens in every article that mentions a game console. It's especially bad in PS2 articles, but only because the PS2 fanboys are more numerous.
I take it you know that because you've played all the popular Dreamcast games, and found them worthless? Or is it possible that you're making broad comments about a system that you actually don't know much about? Just curious.
Personally I think a UMA was an amazingly stupid architecture for a video game system [...snip...]which is what the X-Box is doing (wasting money).
I agree entirely with this paragraph also.
I wasn't trying to say whether or not the X-Box is more powerful than the GC or not: what I was trying to say was whether or not developers will need time to figure out the system. In the GC's case, I think that's definitely true - developers have probably never worked with a system that's so disjoint like this - they may need time to figure out which accesses go at what time to get optimum speed. But the X-Box is a standard system: it's a P3 on a UMA, with a GeForce 3 graphics card (roughly). They're used to systems like this, especially Microsoft and all the PC developers who port games over. I don't think there will BE any 'tricks' that they can learn over time to make the system faster.
I don't think the GeForce 3 is a good comparison. The Xbox's graphics chip is called the NV2A; it is a different chip than the one on the GeForce 3 and it's less powerful. But it is more powerful than a GeForce 2. I also see room for a certain kind of learning curve on the Xbox: its GPU has a programmable pixel shader, which is a very new thing in the graphics world, and currently no other console has it. Actually, the Gamecube can do per-pixel shading also - in software, on the CPU. Rareware is bragging about fur shading effects in Starfox Adventures when it comes out, see: http://www.rareware.co.uk/master_frameset_ss/starf ox_ss_set.html.
About MusyX, tools for using it are provided to all Gamecube developers, so it's definitely an important part of the GC's sound advantage. I'm still blown away that in The Battle for Naboo for the N64, Factor 5 included about 40 minutes of audio commentary speech - as a hidden feature to unlock! MusyX tools are also used on the Gameboy Advance.
There are still some caveats, though. As you mentioned, the Xbox is UMA, so other uses (like sound) are competing with 3d-rendering for bandwidth. Also, the GC can perform up to 8 different texture operations on an object without having to do any extra memory reads or writes; the Xbox can only perform 4 texture layers, and after that it has to use up some memory bandwidth on extra reads and writes. The GC also has a much larger cache on its graphics chip, so it doesn't need so much bandwidth in the first place.
Overall I still think the Xbox gets a slight graphical advantage, but it costs $100 more and none of Nintendo's games will ever come to it, so the GC is more interesting to me.
I like the Gamecube better, but this statement just isn't true. The Xbox achieves somewhat higher memory bandwidth, although the Gamecube uses its bandwidth more efficiently in several ways. Overall the Xbox is a bit more graphically powerful than the Gamecube. And both in turn are visibly more powerful than the PS2, which also happens to be the most bandwidth-inefficient console out there.