I disagree. I'd call myself an atheist, or a nihilist or even an antitheist, because I'm sincerely opposed to believing in some kind of deity or creator. But that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge other people believe in it, or judge them on it, It simply means my views don't match those of people who do believe. To each their own, I don't like collecting stamps either...
That's because most of the bible is an account of human history and humanity
Most of the Bible is fairy tales loosely based on vague occurrences, from some parts of human history, in some parts of the world, transcribed so many times it has about the same amount of truth in it as a Monthy Python movie. I wouldn't dare calling it an account of human history, humanity is way, way more than just the few Christian tidbits recorded in Bible.
Which would be nice if I were the sysadmin of all these Sun machines, not the developer who just needs to use them. Also it doesn't really matter what Sun does and doesn't ship with the OS if half of the sysadmins install it and half don't. That's the whole issue I have with Solaris, you never know what you can expect since most Solaris installations are such a big mess.
Thanks for the advice, I'll suggest to our customers who are running their $30 million machines in production to shut them all down to upgrade the computers inside;-). Switching OS's or hardware is not an option for existing applications, and I'm not the one who decides about this anyway, not even close.
Also, we've been testing with an 8-cpu M3000 (UltraSparc IV 64) a while ago, and it was still dog slow for our FPU- and memory intensive code, barely faster than a run-of-the-mill quadcore x86. It really is that bad for the purposes we use them for.
You're right, I was getting a little carried away. It happens a lot when Solaris is involved because I resent it so much...
Part of my frustration is probably because my knowledge of POSIX and other established *nix standards of yore, is lacking. But that's not the point. It's just remarkable how sensible and pleasant other OS's I have to work with (or worked with) can be, yet Solaris keeps being extremely frustrating in my experience.
The OS just appears to hate you for trying to be productive.
And it's exactly this thinking that makes Solaris userland so freaking horrible. Every time I log into a Solaris machine it's a nice binary-hunt for common tools I have no problem finding on BSD, OS X or Linux, and when I finally find them (in/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin,/usr/ccs/bin,/usr/sfw/bin,/usr/openwin/bin,/opt/SUNWPro/bin,/usr/ucb/bin) it turns out they support none of the options or switched normal people (as opposed to unix masochists) find useful. Why is sun tar so anal? Why doesn't cp -r copy symlinks? Why is there no sensible top, or killall? What's up with the completely nonstandard switches to ps? Why isn't vim included by default and why is Sun vi even more terrible than normal vi, which is already bad enough. It drives me crazy, every time I sit down to do something on a Sun machine I get really, really aggrevated, and I've been using and developing for the damn things (amongst many other *nix OS-es) for 5 years now. I'd much rather 'pollute my userland with GNU extensions' than be stuck in the 80's and guessing what is where and what support what every time I need to use a Solaris machine.
What's even worse than the Solaris userland? Developing for Solaris. The Sun CC suite is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever encounterd. It sometimes does the job if you don't push it too far with templates and stuff, but most of the time it simply doesn't work on 100% valid C++ code that has no issues whatsoever on any other platform. Or it works on Sun Studio X, but it fails in Y, to work again in version Z. Compiling even such simple parts of Boost as the shared_ptr headers is still not possible because the compiler is so brain-dead. If you want to build shared libraries on Sun you need to pass 10 different arcane options if your build is reasonably complex, because the sun linker will gladly fsck up where all your symbols end up which breaks a perfectly fine piece of software as soon as it is linked in with another binary that happens to define the same symbol. And the Sun Cstd library is full of those, symbols with ridiculously common symbol names that are just waiting to clash the moment you deploy your software from the testbench to the production environment. So just use gcc you might suggest? In theory that's a good idea if it weren't for the fact that if you need to link 1 (one) binary-only module (e.g. supplied by a third party) that was linked against the Sun libCstd, you're screwed, since you cannot combine that binary with the stlpor4t C++ standard libraries that actually _do_ work in all other cases. All this is not because of a bad sysadmin because it was the same thing all over again at 3 different jobs.
Also, Sun hardware is slow as a turd for what you pay for it, up to the point it's almost a joke, for some tasks. Sure they might have great threading performance but don't dare to try running FPU intensive code on it or stress the VM, my $400 C2D Dell laptop I develop on is literally 10 times faster than the $20,000 Sun Netra 240 the code is deployed to. It's all fine and dandy that Sun hardware scales to a zillion CPU's nicely, and that an UltraSparc is much more power-efficent than a Xeon, Opteron or Power6, but it's not really an advantage anymore if you need 10 of them to get decent performance out of it.
Summarizing: I absolutely HATE solaris from the bottom of my heart, I know I used to hate the 1995 HP/UX I used to deploy on, but after a few years of Solaris experience I'd switch to that without hesitation. I don't care about the fancy tech they put in like ZFS and dtrace, it's all too bad they fucked up they're development environment and userland up to the point that work that uses to be fun becomes one big nightmare, and you can't really count on anything anymore when you log into a Solaris box. Maybe OpenSolaris is better, but that'd only be because it has a GNU userland by default (or at l
If you'd ask me: it's still a slow piece of crap that has no particular place in the market if it weren't for (consumer) Microsoft Windows being x86-only, and now it's even worse than the original Atom since you get a crappy Intel GPU for free.
In the low-power segment: you are still better of with an ARM chip if you don't need Windows (it consumes less power), another x86 SoC if you absolutely need Windows but don't need anything else (which also consume less power) or a Via Nano if you are a consumer who likes Windows a lot but only do a little browsing and email (they are faster and comparable in terms of power consumption).
In the HTPC/Media center segment: the Atom + Nvidia ION platform was great, low-power/low-performance CPU with a GPU that does all the video decoding and OpenGL. Now you get an Intel GPU that is *still* not able to do full video-pipeline accelerated GPU decoding. Better get yourself an old Atom, or hopefully in the future a Via Nano + decent GPU.
In the Netbook segment: with the performance of the original Atom being nothing but abysmal unless you only use Notepad, you really want a Celeron ULV anyway. It's a much better design, in a whole different performance class than the Atom, and you don't get any of the stupid restrictions Intel puts on using the Atom.
In the embedded segment: you don't need x86 compatibility at all, so ARM would be your 1st choice.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see the point of a crippled and slow x86 CPU with a design based on 10-year old technology, which is forcibly coupled to an IGP that isn't able doing much more than rendering your desktop...
here isn't a sole in the world who buys apple because of their great hardware
Well I did, I bought my last 4 PC's specifically for the hardware _and_ the software.
Clue: there's more aspects to hardware than tech specs or CPU architecture. Think esthetics, ergonomics, durability, amount of write-off on your investment over time, etc. Many of Apple's computer products have no comparable alternative from another manufacturere, there's no Mac-Mini alternative that compares to it in terms of size and features, no iMac alternative with the same specifications and ethetics, no MacBook alternative with the same build quality and multitouch features, and so on. If you don't value these things, buy something else, but don't pretend as if there's a cheaper alternative from other vendors that compares on these aspects.
So I can just shell out $300 for a console that supports 5x the resolution as my TV
I don't need 5x the resolution of my TV, 1x is sufficient for me, the difference is almost impossible to see from 2 metres distance anyway. On the PC I always preferred framerate over resolution anyway, resolution is only relevant for typical PC setups, where you have your face almost inside your screen (which I don't find a comfortable way of gaming anyway).
is capable of running any software I can throw at it
I already have a PC for that, one that doesn't need ridiculous fans or cases to cool all kinds of crap inside just to support playing games. Which means it's cheaper, quieter and uses much less power.
has an input device with more than 6 buttons
Great one... First of all a console gamepad has 10 buttons, 2 analog triggers and 2 analog sticks. Second: how is having more buttons an advantage over having a game that allows you to control it with less buttons. I've honestly never perceived a lack of buttons a problem in any console game I've ever played. Maybe if you play WoW you need 100 sick macro's, but WoW is not my idea of fun anyway.
and that can support a near infinite range of 3rd party add-ons?
Care to explain what kinds of add-ons your talking about, because last time I checked there's 100s of different third-party gamepads, joysticks, steering wheels, headsets, I honestly wouldn't know what kind of 3rd-party addons I'm missing.
For $300 tacked onto the price of the PC you already bought, you could have a rig that would put your current consoles running on outdated tech to shame
That's simply untrue. Only if I make a trade-off between gaming capabilities and the desirability of my PC for everything unrelated to gaming I would be able to build a PC that might be 'sufficient' to run a few games for a year or so for $300 more than a console. My main PC is a laptop and an all-in-one, which are not upgradeable, but fit my usage pattern perfectly, and with the specs they have should last at least 5 years. A gaming rig priced equally exists, but has so many downsides (noise, form factor, uglyness, power consumption, ergonomics) that I wouldn't want to trade my $300 console for it no matter what.
I think you should just stop trying to project your own gaming preferences onto others by arguing that PC gaming is so superior, and console gaming is for 'kids who don't know where the real gaming is'. It's ridiculous.
I for one absolutely hate PC gaming, for exactly the reasons argued by other posters: I don't want to dick around with my hardware to play games, and I want my games to just work. I want them to just work when I'm on the couch, with a joypad, looking at my HDTV which I already had when I bought the console anyway. I don't wan't to be sitting behind a desk on a chair, using a mouse and keyboard. Also the fun element of the games I play doesn't come from graphics alone but from the gameplay itself, and last but not least I don't perceive graphics on modern consoles (PS3 and 360 in my case) as inferior or ugly, they might be if you compare them to a PC pixel-for-pixel, but that's not what I'm after, 2 metres from the TV the difference is almost invisible. My xbox + 2 controllers was $299 and I've had it for 3 years already and it's still going strong with many great games coming that don't even hit the PC. Most games I buy about half a year after release for ~15 to ~20 euro, and I buy only about 5 of them a year anyway. So you can twist your numbers any way you like but it doesn't impress me at all, and I think my setup is pretty representative of other console gamers.
The _only_ argument you could have made (but somehow failed to make) that would have made sense to me would have been genres: RTS's, sims & builders are stikk PC territory, and would literally be the only reason for me to sit behind a PC to play games (I absolutelty hate online FPS, so that's no issue for me).
Now what about if you aren't using LIVE? Nothing's going to stop you from running pirated games now, and it's probably going to be really cheap to get these "dead" consoles now. Life's good! If you buy a $50 or $100 used console and download a few games, you have already saved yourself the cost of a console. BAM!
Except that the last ban wave will cripple some offline features as well, such as HDD installs (a *big* loss since the DVD drive sounds like a jet engine when spinning), being able to move savegames to other consoles (no more playing you're savegames at a friends place), and I think even some of the media center functions. Also, you won't be getting any game patches anymore, which is also a major downside since so many console games are released full of bugs these days.
Mandriva is very easy to use, but also has all the power user features you can wish for easily available: by default there is a root account you can login to directly, unlike in Ubuntu. Installer supports more file system choices than most other distros (been running XFS at home for a long time).
I'd argue that linux newbies should better not have a root account they can log in to directly, and power users that _do_ need that so badly can probably figure out themselves that they only have to do 'sudo passwd root' once to enable root-logins in Ubuntu. Also I don't get your point about filesystems, last time I installed Ubuntu from scratch (8.04) I was able to pick tons of filesystems in the installer.
But don't get me wrong, you have a good point if you just meant to indicate that there's most likely a non-trivial demographic that would like Mandrive more than Ubuntu, just like with most other distro's (some people still love Slackware or Gentoo).
Stainless steel brake lines would last over 30+ years without requiring replacement or service. Also they're more expensive to produce (both material and manufacturing) than steel or copper (which is already heaps better than steel). Which means: higher production costs, less service and replacement revenue. From there to 'lower profits' is just basic calculus.
You can ask the equivalent question: why aren't all cars made out of aluminium while some are, e.g. BMW or Audi. I mean, it's lighter, doesn't oxidize, and not that much more expensive for car production if you count in all the extra layers of zinc, primer and paint that are necessary to rust-proff normal steel cars..
I've got news for you: Every commercial airliner you'll fly in during your life will have been "mass-produced."
The hallmark of mass production is assembly line production of identical products made from interchangeable parts.
Except that airplanes are not all identical (just mostly identical), are still hand-built (for the most part) while on the 'assembly line' (which isn't really an assembly line like in a car factory at all) and that they aren't produced en-masse (but built-to-order in small quantities).
Not trying to be pedantic but I think there's multiple ways to interpret 'mass-production' as something different from airplane manufacturing.
She will be if she wants to hook her new linux-powered media PC to her Sony Bravia TV, which has HDMI input but no SPDIF.
And before you bite: yes, I suggested analog because you won't hear any difference over the TV speakers anyway, but when that didn't work straight away either I took the plunge and scourged the interwebs to finally find out how to get the HDMI output working.
Well I know for a fact that I could do almost that using esound and artsd like 5 years ago, except for the 5.1 part (only stereo). Not that artsd or esound were fantastic, but at least both worked, both worked without requiring elaborate configuration, both worked straight on top of ALSA, neither had skipping or popping playback and also, neither of them ever broke a working configuration on any of my machines.
The whole idea behind PulseAudio sounds great, except that 99 out of 100 people simply want working sound out of the back of their computers, over any of the ports the card has available. If I have to spend 4 hours to get to that point, the thing is not ready for prime time.
Same here, yesterday I spent 4 hours on a media PC I built and configured for my brother in law, up to the point that everything worked at my place using SPDIF output (which already cost me 2 hours to get working in the first place). I arrive at his place, turns out he wants to use the HDMI output instead of the SPDIF. No problem, you'd guess, just go to the sound preferences and select HDMI, right? Not on linux you don;t and not with PulseAudio apparently. After dicking around with the 4 different mixers (gnome, alsmixer, pulseaudio) and 4 layers of configuration (gnome sound settings, pulseaudio settings, alsa settings, gstreamer settings) it turned out that I had to put a file called.asoundrc with some cryptic content in my home directory, and in some tab called 'switches' in the PulseAudio advanced settings had to check 4 boxes that did something with an 'iec958' (whatever that may be) and then, finally, it worked. Not very well by the way because the Ubuntu startup sound pops and stutters like hell, but after that it's more or less 'ok'.
I've been using Linux for over 10 years now and I've been telling people over and over again how even your grandma could use it, but sadly, I have to conclude that in some ways it still sucks balls for people who don't like fiddling around with obscure settings, configuration files, 4 layers of sound settings etc. I really love linux myself but let's face it, for example sound and wireless (damn wpasupplicant and 'wlan0: link not ready) are still lightyears behind Windows and (even more so) OS X in terms of usability.
AMD = ATI VIA = mostly down the small form factor road (to complement their Epia and Nano CPU's) these days SiS = are they even in the chipset business anymore? I can't remember seeing a motherboard with SiS chipset the last few years
So it seems AMD/ATI is the only 'real' competitor left
Even if the chances of success are low, they beat the pants off of the alternative!
Only if you don't care about throwing your money at something that has a pretty big chance of failure. Money that could also be spent having a good time while still alive.
You forgot how it's rubbish because the subscription fees for something like 5 years (the typicial lifespan of a console) would probably have to amount to at least the price of a decent console plus a few games each year, if they want to cover their costs. These huge gaming server rigs, bandwidth, power and game licenses don't come for free. Suppose 5 * 12 * $20, which would be $1200 already, which buys you a PS3 with 10 games. What I, as a consumer, would get in return, would be a 'gaming rig' that stops working when the network is down, most likely has worse visuals and and by construction would have worse input lag, and when I cancel my subscription I wouldn't have any games or consoles left. So I'd be getting an inferior service and no tangible goods, but would probably have to spend the
So yes, I also think it's complete and utter hype wank and rubbish, and I wish the fools that poured good money into this idea that serves no-one all the best.... Explaining it to their shareholders...
It's not the CUDA compiler that does the 'split it over multiple cores in any useful way' the OP was talking about, but the GPU itself
Also you could argue that having N processes execute the same task in parallel can be compared to automatically extract parallelism from a computer program, which is what compilers indeed cannot do in any useful ways. There's been ample attempts at that but it doesn't go much further than automatically parallelizing loops.
How does that work? In a proprietary project if your boss says "do this" you either do it or find another job
You don't work in software, do you? I've worked at 5 different companies as a software engineer, and in all of these jobs I've never had my boss tell me to fix the crappy parts of the software I was assigned to work on. Actually in neither of them my boss even took the time to look at the code itself. It always was "[we | customer x ] needs [feature | bugfix] y within z [hours | weeks | days]. Make it happen."
It has been abused for years, and as such ignorant people have the opinion that it's just a toy language, when really it's incredibly powerful.
Maybe the fact that it's so easily abused, used as a toy language out of ignorance, and that the stuff written in it is mostly badly-written crap that doesn't use it's incredibly powerful features already shows why you might say it's way too stupid to program manually.
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I disagree. I'd call myself an atheist, or a nihilist or even an antitheist, because I'm sincerely opposed to believing in some kind of deity or creator. But that doesn't mean I don't acknowledge other people believe in it, or judge them on it, It simply means my views don't match those of people who do believe. To each their own, I don't like collecting stamps either...
That's because most of the bible is an account of human history and humanity
Most of the Bible is fairy tales loosely based on vague occurrences, from some parts of human history, in some parts of the world, transcribed so many times it has about the same amount of truth in it as a Monthy Python movie. I wouldn't dare calling it an account of human history, humanity is way, way more than just the few Christian tidbits recorded in Bible.
Which would be nice if I were the sysadmin of all these Sun machines, not the developer who just needs to use them. Also it doesn't really matter what Sun does and doesn't ship with the OS if half of the sysadmins install it and half don't. That's the whole issue I have with Solaris, you never know what you can expect since most Solaris installations are such a big mess.
Thanks for the advice, I'll suggest to our customers who are running their $30 million machines in production to shut them all down to upgrade the computers inside ;-). Switching OS's or hardware is not an option for existing applications, and I'm not the one who decides about this anyway, not even close.
Also, we've been testing with an 8-cpu M3000 (UltraSparc IV 64) a while ago, and it was still dog slow for our FPU- and memory intensive code, barely faster than a run-of-the-mill quadcore x86. It really is that bad for the purposes we use them for.
You're right, I was getting a little carried away. It happens a lot when Solaris is involved because I resent it so much...
Part of my frustration is probably because my knowledge of POSIX and other established *nix standards of yore, is lacking. But that's not the point. It's just remarkable how sensible and pleasant other OS's I have to work with (or worked with) can be, yet Solaris keeps being extremely frustrating in my experience.
The OS just appears to hate you for trying to be productive.
To play his collection of Leisure Suit Larry and Police Quest games, I presume. And porn tetris, that also didn't work under Windows.
And it's exactly this thinking that makes Solaris userland so freaking horrible. Every time I log into a Solaris machine it's a nice binary-hunt for common tools I have no problem finding on BSD, OS X or Linux, and when I finally find them (in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/ccs/bin, /usr/sfw/bin, /usr/openwin/bin, /opt/SUNWPro/bin, /usr/ucb/bin) it turns out they support none of the options or switched normal people (as opposed to unix masochists) find useful. Why is sun tar so anal? Why doesn't cp -r copy symlinks? Why is there no sensible top, or killall? What's up with the completely nonstandard switches to ps? Why isn't vim included by default and why is Sun vi even more terrible than normal vi, which is already bad enough. It drives me crazy, every time I sit down to do something on a Sun machine I get really, really aggrevated, and I've been using and developing for the damn things (amongst many other *nix OS-es) for 5 years now. I'd much rather 'pollute my userland with GNU extensions' than be stuck in the 80's and guessing what is where and what support what every time I need to use a Solaris machine.
What's even worse than the Solaris userland? Developing for Solaris. The Sun CC suite is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever encounterd. It sometimes does the job if you don't push it too far with templates and stuff, but most of the time it simply doesn't work on 100% valid C++ code that has no issues whatsoever on any other platform. Or it works on Sun Studio X, but it fails in Y, to work again in version Z. Compiling even such simple parts of Boost as the shared_ptr headers is still not possible because the compiler is so brain-dead. If you want to build shared libraries on Sun you need to pass 10 different arcane options if your build is reasonably complex, because the sun linker will gladly fsck up where all your symbols end up which breaks a perfectly fine piece of software as soon as it is linked in with another binary that happens to define the same symbol. And the Sun Cstd library is full of those, symbols with ridiculously common symbol names that are just waiting to clash the moment you deploy your software from the testbench to the production environment. So just use gcc you might suggest? In theory that's a good idea if it weren't for the fact that if you need to link 1 (one) binary-only module (e.g. supplied by a third party) that was linked against the Sun libCstd, you're screwed, since you cannot combine that binary with the stlpor4t C++ standard libraries that actually _do_ work in all other cases. All this is not because of a bad sysadmin because it was the same thing all over again at 3 different jobs.
Also, Sun hardware is slow as a turd for what you pay for it, up to the point it's almost a joke, for some tasks. Sure they might have great threading performance but don't dare to try running FPU intensive code on it or stress the VM, my $400 C2D Dell laptop I develop on is literally 10 times faster than the $20,000 Sun Netra 240 the code is deployed to. It's all fine and dandy that Sun hardware scales to a zillion CPU's nicely, and that an UltraSparc is much more power-efficent than a Xeon, Opteron or Power6, but it's not really an advantage anymore if you need 10 of them to get decent performance out of it.
Summarizing: I absolutely HATE solaris from the bottom of my heart, I know I used to hate the 1995 HP/UX I used to deploy on, but after a few years of Solaris experience I'd switch to that without hesitation. I don't care about the fancy tech they put in like ZFS and dtrace, it's all too bad they fucked up they're development environment and userland up to the point that work that uses to be fun becomes one big nightmare, and you can't really count on anything anymore when you log into a Solaris box. Maybe OpenSolaris is better, but that'd only be because it has a GNU userland by default (or at l
If you'd ask me: it's still a slow piece of crap that has no particular place in the market if it weren't for (consumer) Microsoft Windows being x86-only, and now it's even worse than the original Atom since you get a crappy Intel GPU for free.
In the low-power segment: you are still better of with an ARM chip if you don't need Windows (it consumes less power), another x86 SoC if you absolutely need Windows but don't need anything else (which also consume less power) or a Via Nano if you are a consumer who likes Windows a lot but only do a little browsing and email (they are faster and comparable in terms of power consumption).
In the HTPC/Media center segment: the Atom + Nvidia ION platform was great, low-power/low-performance CPU with a GPU that does all the video decoding and OpenGL. Now you get an Intel GPU that is *still* not able to do full video-pipeline accelerated GPU decoding. Better get yourself an old Atom, or hopefully in the future a Via Nano + decent GPU.
In the Netbook segment: with the performance of the original Atom being nothing but abysmal unless you only use Notepad, you really want a Celeron ULV anyway. It's a much better design, in a whole different performance class than the Atom, and you don't get any of the stupid restrictions Intel puts on using the Atom.
In the embedded segment: you don't need x86 compatibility at all, so ARM would be your 1st choice.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see the point of a crippled and slow x86 CPU with a design based on 10-year old technology, which is forcibly coupled to an IGP that isn't able doing much more than rendering your desktop...
here isn't a sole in the world who buys apple because of their great hardware
Well I did, I bought my last 4 PC's specifically for the hardware _and_ the software.
Clue: there's more aspects to hardware than tech specs or CPU architecture. Think esthetics, ergonomics, durability, amount of write-off on your investment over time, etc. Many of Apple's computer products have no comparable alternative from another manufacturere, there's no Mac-Mini alternative that compares to it in terms of size and features, no iMac alternative with the same specifications and ethetics, no MacBook alternative with the same build quality and multitouch features, and so on. If you don't value these things, buy something else, but don't pretend as if there's a cheaper alternative from other vendors that compares on these aspects.
Allow me reverse your own fallacy:
So I can just shell out $300 for a console that supports 5x the resolution as my TV
I don't need 5x the resolution of my TV, 1x is sufficient for me, the difference is almost impossible to see from 2 metres distance anyway. On the PC I always preferred framerate over resolution anyway, resolution is only relevant for typical PC setups, where you have your face almost inside your screen (which I don't find a comfortable way of gaming anyway).
is capable of running any software I can throw at it
I already have a PC for that, one that doesn't need ridiculous fans or cases to cool all kinds of crap inside just to support playing games. Which means it's cheaper, quieter and uses much less power.
has an input device with more than 6 buttons
Great one... First of all a console gamepad has 10 buttons, 2 analog triggers and 2 analog sticks. Second: how is having more buttons an advantage over having a game that allows you to control it with less buttons. I've honestly never perceived a lack of buttons a problem in any console game I've ever played. Maybe if you play WoW you need 100 sick macro's, but WoW is not my idea of fun anyway.
and that can support a near infinite range of 3rd party add-ons?
Care to explain what kinds of add-ons your talking about, because last time I checked there's 100s of different third-party gamepads, joysticks, steering wheels, headsets, I honestly wouldn't know what kind of 3rd-party addons I'm missing.
For $300 tacked onto the price of the PC you already bought, you could have a rig that would put your current consoles running on outdated tech to shame
That's simply untrue. Only if I make a trade-off between gaming capabilities and the desirability of my PC for everything unrelated to gaming I would be able to build a PC that might be 'sufficient' to run a few games for a year or so for $300 more than a console. My main PC is a laptop and an all-in-one, which are not upgradeable, but fit my usage pattern perfectly, and with the specs they have should last at least 5 years. A gaming rig priced equally exists, but has so many downsides (noise, form factor, uglyness, power consumption, ergonomics) that I wouldn't want to trade my $300 console for it no matter what.
I think you should just stop trying to project your own gaming preferences onto others by arguing that PC gaming is so superior, and console gaming is for 'kids who don't know where the real gaming is'. It's ridiculous.
I for one absolutely hate PC gaming, for exactly the reasons argued by other posters: I don't want to dick around with my hardware to play games, and I want my games to just work. I want them to just work when I'm on the couch, with a joypad, looking at my HDTV which I already had when I bought the console anyway. I don't wan't to be sitting behind a desk on a chair, using a mouse and keyboard. Also the fun element of the games I play doesn't come from graphics alone but from the gameplay itself, and last but not least I don't perceive graphics on modern consoles (PS3 and 360 in my case) as inferior or ugly, they might be if you compare them to a PC pixel-for-pixel, but that's not what I'm after, 2 metres from the TV the difference is almost invisible. My xbox + 2 controllers was $299 and I've had it for 3 years already and it's still going strong with many great games coming that don't even hit the PC. Most games I buy about half a year after release for ~15 to ~20 euro, and I buy only about 5 of them a year anyway. So you can twist your numbers any way you like but it doesn't impress me at all, and I think my setup is pretty representative of other console gamers.
The _only_ argument you could have made (but somehow failed to make) that would have made sense to me would have been genres: RTS's, sims & builders are stikk PC territory, and would literally be the only reason for me to sit behind a PC to play games (I absolutelty hate online FPS, so that's no issue for me).
Now what about if you aren't using LIVE? Nothing's going to stop you from running pirated games now, and it's probably going to be really cheap to get these "dead" consoles now. Life's good! If you buy a $50 or $100 used console and download a few games, you have already saved yourself the cost of a console. BAM!
Except that the last ban wave will cripple some offline features as well, such as HDD installs (a *big* loss since the DVD drive sounds like a jet engine when spinning), being able to move savegames to other consoles (no more playing you're savegames at a friends place), and I think even some of the media center functions. Also, you won't be getting any game patches anymore, which is also a major downside since so many console games are released full of bugs these days.
Mandriva is very easy to use, but also has all the power user features you can wish for easily available: by default there is a root account you can login to directly, unlike in Ubuntu. Installer supports more file system choices than most other distros (been running XFS at home for a long time).
I'd argue that linux newbies should better not have a root account they can log in to directly, and power users that _do_ need that so badly can probably figure out themselves that they only have to do 'sudo passwd root' once to enable root-logins in Ubuntu. Also I don't get your point about filesystems, last time I installed Ubuntu from scratch (8.04) I was able to pick tons of filesystems in the installer.
But don't get me wrong, you have a good point if you just meant to indicate that there's most likely a non-trivial demographic that would like Mandrive more than Ubuntu, just like with most other distro's (some people still love Slackware or Gentoo).
Stainless steel brake lines would last over 30+ years without requiring replacement or service. Also they're more expensive to produce (both material and manufacturing) than steel or copper (which is already heaps better than steel). Which means: higher production costs, less service and replacement revenue. From there to 'lower profits' is just basic calculus.
You can ask the equivalent question: why aren't all cars made out of aluminium while some are, e.g. BMW or Audi. I mean, it's lighter, doesn't oxidize, and not that much more expensive for car production if you count in all the extra layers of zinc, primer and paint that are necessary to rust-proff normal steel cars..
I've got news for you: Every commercial airliner you'll fly in during your life will have been "mass-produced."
The hallmark of mass production is assembly line production of identical products made from interchangeable parts.
Except that airplanes are not all identical (just mostly identical), are still hand-built (for the most part) while on the 'assembly line' (which isn't really an assembly line like in a car factory at all) and that they aren't produced en-masse (but built-to-order in small quantities).
Not trying to be pedantic but I think there's multiple ways to interpret 'mass-production' as something different from airplane manufacturing.
iPod, iTunes :-P
She will be if she wants to hook her new linux-powered media PC to her Sony Bravia TV, which has HDMI input but no SPDIF.
And before you bite: yes, I suggested analog because you won't hear any difference over the TV speakers anyway, but when that didn't work straight away either I took the plunge and scourged the interwebs to finally find out how to get the HDMI output working.
Well I know for a fact that I could do almost that using esound and artsd like 5 years ago, except for the 5.1 part (only stereo). Not that artsd or esound were fantastic, but at least both worked, both worked without requiring elaborate configuration, both worked straight on top of ALSA, neither had skipping or popping playback and also, neither of them ever broke a working configuration on any of my machines.
The whole idea behind PulseAudio sounds great, except that 99 out of 100 people simply want working sound out of the back of their computers, over any of the ports the card has available. If I have to spend 4 hours to get to that point, the thing is not ready for prime time.
Same here, yesterday I spent 4 hours on a media PC I built and configured for my brother in law, up to the point that everything worked at my place using SPDIF output (which already cost me 2 hours to get working in the first place). I arrive at his place, turns out he wants to use the HDMI output instead of the SPDIF. No problem, you'd guess, just go to the sound preferences and select HDMI, right? Not on linux you don;t and not with PulseAudio apparently. After dicking around with the 4 different mixers (gnome, alsmixer, pulseaudio) and 4 layers of configuration (gnome sound settings, pulseaudio settings, alsa settings, gstreamer settings) it turned out that I had to put a file called .asoundrc with some cryptic content in my home directory, and in some tab called 'switches' in the PulseAudio advanced settings had to check 4 boxes that did something with an 'iec958' (whatever that may be) and then, finally, it worked. Not very well by the way because the Ubuntu startup sound pops and stutters like hell, but after that it's more or less 'ok'.
I've been using Linux for over 10 years now and I've been telling people over and over again how even your grandma could use it, but sadly, I have to conclude that in some ways it still sucks balls for people who don't like fiddling around with obscure settings, configuration files, 4 layers of sound settings etc. I really love linux myself but let's face it, for example sound and wireless (damn wpasupplicant and 'wlan0: link not ready) are still lightyears behind Windows and (even more so) OS X in terms of usability.
AMD = ATI
VIA = mostly down the small form factor road (to complement their Epia and Nano CPU's) these days
SiS = are they even in the chipset business anymore? I can't remember seeing a motherboard with SiS chipset the last few years
So it seems AMD/ATI is the only 'real' competitor left
Even if the chances of success are low, they beat the pants off of the alternative!
Only if you don't care about throwing your money at something that has a pretty big chance of failure. Money that could also be spent having a good time while still alive.
Who wants to live forever anyway...
You forgot how it's rubbish because the subscription fees for something like 5 years (the typicial lifespan of a console) would probably have to amount to at least the price of a decent console plus a few games each year, if they want to cover their costs. These huge gaming server rigs, bandwidth, power and game licenses don't come for free. Suppose 5 * 12 * $20, which would be $1200 already, which buys you a PS3 with 10 games. What I, as a consumer, would get in return, would be a 'gaming rig' that stops working when the network is down, most likely has worse visuals and and by construction would have worse input lag, and when I cancel my subscription I wouldn't have any games or consoles left. So I'd be getting an inferior service and no tangible goods, but would probably have to spend the
So yes, I also think it's complete and utter hype wank and rubbish, and I wish the fools that poured good money into this idea that serves no-one all the best.... Explaining it to their shareholders...
It's not the CUDA compiler that does the 'split it over multiple cores in any useful way' the OP was talking about, but the GPU itself
Also you could argue that having N processes execute the same task in parallel can be compared to automatically extract parallelism from a computer program, which is what compilers indeed cannot do in any useful ways. There's been ample attempts at that but it doesn't go much further than automatically parallelizing loops.
How does that work? In a proprietary project if your boss says "do this" you either do it or find another job
You don't work in software, do you? I've worked at 5 different companies as a software engineer, and in all of these jobs I've never had my boss tell me to fix the crappy parts of the software I was assigned to work on. Actually in neither of them my boss even took the time to look at the code itself. It always was "[we | customer x ] needs [feature | bugfix] y within z [hours | weeks | days]. Make it happen."
It has been abused for years, and as such ignorant people have the opinion that it's just a toy language, when really it's incredibly powerful.
Maybe the fact that it's so easily abused, used as a toy language out of ignorance, and that the stuff written in it is mostly badly-written crap that doesn't use it's incredibly powerful features already shows why you might say it's way too stupid to program manually.