That is correct. The DS's ARM processor does not have all the same modes that the GBA's does, specifically not those that emulate the Z80-like instruction set of the original GameBoy and GameBoy Color.
If I were Sony, I wouldn't have developed UMD in the first place, after the collossal failure of its predecessor, the MiniDisc. I would have shunted the "proprietary and developed-in-house is good" mentality altogether and replaced both the UMD drive and the Memory Stick Duo slot with a plain CompactFlash port.
A typical full-length movie with H.264 video encoding and stereo sound will fit on a 512MB CompactFlash-type card easily. Using plain old ROM in them instead of Flash memory would bring the sale price down, and be cheaper to manufacture.
Perhaps someone should tell them that a company called Free offers access up to 20 Megabits for 30/month in France.
Why?
Customers in Seattle can't and won't go to a company in France to get their wireless fix. They are not competitors.
Re:Never write off Microsoft...
on
Gates on Google
·
· Score: 1
Or, put another way, Microsoft is competing on all fronts. You can bet your bottom dollar that's the way Bill Gates sees it and that he likes it that way too.
The German armies tried to compete on multiple fronts during WWII, and look how well that worked out for them.
(Apologies for Godwinning the conversation, but it really is an appropriate comparison to make, at that one level.)
Now, think about how many windows you have open right now.
I have eleven, plus desktop and taskbar.
At 1600x1200x24bit, even if all of these were fullscreen (including the taskbar), that would be only about 75MB of raw texture data. Frankly, if anyone has seven times as many windows open as I do, they need to reconsider their work management habits.
(Yes, this assumes that VRAM only stores the finished window as a texture, and not the window plus subcomponents of every window, as Quartz Extreme does.)
We should thank these people that are willing to pay for the bleeding edge graphics performance. They enable us to pay bottom dollar for yesterdays technology that performs 90% as well.
They are also the reason why the drivers for our "yesterday's technology" cards are buggy and incomplete and will never be properly fixed -- all the developer resources get been shifted to writing new, buggy drivers each time the hardware designers bring out something new.
Knowing the Dartmouth student body, this plan isn't likely to meet with widespread approval until they find a way to deliver campus-wide Wireless Drinking.
I think they know their business better than you do. No, I KNOW they know their business better than you do.
No, I don't. You know why? Because the Times does not run articles with headlines like "Bicycles Are Fun!". They run headlines like "Manufacturer recalls 10,000 cycles due to faulty frame weld." That's not the kind of attention any bike manufacturer would want.
Shout "I would never pay them for this!" all you want, but it's not like you were ever paying them anything to begin with.
CONSUMER: Microsoft just offered us Office free for 5 years when they found out we were considering an open source alternative to our operating system. Word can even read all these open format files we have created in OpenOffice - let the migration begin!
OPENOFFICE: Oh dear.
I think the last line here was supposed to read.
OPENOFFICE: Alright then, see ya in five years, suckers. Microsoft isn't going to give you a free ride FOREVER--they can't afford to. But we can, and we'll be waiting for you.
The examples he gives are so far in the past that they are hardly relevent now.
They're only irrelevant if the RIAA has substantially changed their practices since. Do you think they have?
They still charge artists a whopping big percentage for media breakage in transit, even though 99% of media shipped in the last 15 years has been CDs, not delicate vinyl platters...
It costs about $2 and under to print a single CD with artwork. Why then don't CD's cost $4?
A sheaf of architectural plans to build a house from costs a few dozen dollars to print. Why then do houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to design and build?
The media for music distribution is cheap, and in the case of MP3 sharing almost too cheap to meter. But the cost of content development and production is still substantial. That cost, too, is falling as prosumer grade audio systems get cheaper and better continuously, but because the time and effort of humans who work to make music is a relatively fixed cost, the production expense will never go away.
Why don't CD's cost closer to $10 than $20? Well, the middlemen have to pay for their coke habits and legal crusades against college kids somehow...
Nevermind the PowerMac. Why is the PowerBOOK line still so expensive compared to the new iMacs?
A box with a 17" LCD and 512MB of RAM will set you back about $1300 for the iMac, and about $2600 for the PowerBook.
For twice the price of a low-end desktop, you get a notebook with an integrated keyboard, trackpad, and battery. You also get a slower, last-generation CPU, a slower, smaller hard drive, and an inferior graphics card.
Anyone who argues over the English linguistic accuracy in the Star Wars movies is forgetting that the series happened "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."
Letting the government control the Internet is letting it control the press.
Well, better shut down all those public libraries, then. Can't have the government controlling (and by "controlling" I mean "providing") access to any type of information.
For that matter, any laptop with a PCMCIA slot and a $10 802.11 card will let you access the Internet from any of dozens of free wireless hotspots in every major city.
Which is great, but only if you live in a major city.
What if you live in Bumf*ck Iowa, where the only communications infrastructure you have are the brittle old telephone lines that were erected 80 years ago? The local baby-Bell won't spend a cent on upgrades because there's not enough users to make it profitable.
The reaction to this announcement triggered the most vicious backlash I have ever witnessed as the website feedback forum went beserk.
I think you just answered your own question there.
Content = value. If you're providing me content, I may consider paying you for it, if I feel the value is great enough. But if I'M the one providing content to YOU, as is the case with users posting on websites' forums, don't expect me to do you TWO favors and give you my money as well.
In the realm of printed material, a publisher that will offer to publish any paper you write if you pay them enough is called a SCAM (or an "academic journal"). I'll pay to READ content, but not to CREATE content.
I read that WAY too fast, and thought it said "Slartibartfast fires first", and that made me think about what George Lucas would do if tasked to produce a "HHGTG Special Edition".
nothing much more of a historically grown apocalyptic chaos. With one of the crappiest programming languages ever as a cornerstone of its technology. A weedy mumbojumbo of wanna-be virtual machines, wanna-be server daemons, makeshift security layers, obstrusive user management and pseudo operating systems and a bazillion proprietary variants of said programmin language. With features bolted on left right and center.
I agree. While the concept was a good idea, the sheer amount of historical cruft that now clutters up Unix is... huh? You were talking about databases?
It's interesting to note that MS has finally figured out that the "n-tier" was a dumb idea.
Except it's not. N-tier without an appropriate form of CACHING, now there's a dumb idea. But a properly designed n-tiered architecture can be more scalable and ultimately more functional than a flat architecture could.
How many times have we heard of huge sites going down because databases become corrupt or unrecoverable, or of the huge resource strain (memory and CPU) from a large database?
How many times? Not all that many, in my experience. How many times when the sites were running off a hardy RDBMS like Oracle, rather than something in the MySQL range? Even fewer.
Of course, "websites going down" is not exactly the best indicator of database reliability in the first place...
While you're proposing making databases more like filesystems, what Reiser and others are actually doing is trying to make filesystems more like databases. That's an important distinction to note -- databases are the superior design.
Doesn't the FSF already serve the "Clearinghouse" role you propose for many of the larger GPL'd products?
I'm sure to be modded down for this, since I'm pointing out a drawback of the GPL, but legal expenses are a part of doing business, any kind of business. Companies will never respect the terms of the GPL unless they face financial damages for failing to do so. If the author/copyright owner of a GPL'd work is unable or unwilling to pursue legal action, the risk of facing consequences is near-zero.
Consider an installation of 50 or more access points. This requires lots of conduits, outlet boxes, electrical wiring and the time of a qualified electrician.
Consider that the people who will be WORKING at these access points will have lamps, PDA chargers, coffee makers, etc., that all require AC mains power. Do you want to be the one to explain to them how much money the company saved by not installing any outlets?
Again, it's a moderately reasonable idea for dense, people-free network environments like server rooms. For anywhere else, not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
That is correct. The DS's ARM processor does not have all the same modes that the GBA's does, specifically not those that emulate the Z80-like instruction set of the original GameBoy and GameBoy Color.
If I were Sony, I wouldn't have developed UMD in the first place, after the collossal failure of its predecessor, the MiniDisc. I would have shunted the "proprietary and developed-in-house is good" mentality altogether and replaced both the UMD drive and the Memory Stick Duo slot with a plain CompactFlash port.
A typical full-length movie with H.264 video encoding and stereo sound will fit on a 512MB CompactFlash-type card easily. Using plain old ROM in them instead of Flash memory would bring the sale price down, and be cheaper to manufacture.
Too late now, I guess.
Perhaps someone should tell them that a company called Free offers access up to 20 Megabits for 30/month in France.
Why?
Customers in Seattle can't and won't go to a company in France to get their wireless fix. They are not competitors.
Or, put another way, Microsoft is competing on all fronts. You can bet your bottom dollar that's the way Bill Gates sees it and that he likes it that way too.
The German armies tried to compete on multiple fronts during WWII, and look how well that worked out for them.
(Apologies for Godwinning the conversation, but it really is an appropriate comparison to make, at that one level.)
Now, think about how many windows you have open right now.
I have eleven, plus desktop and taskbar.
At 1600x1200x24bit, even if all of these were fullscreen (including the taskbar), that would be only about 75MB of raw texture data. Frankly, if anyone has seven times as many windows open as I do, they need to reconsider their work management habits.
(Yes, this assumes that VRAM only stores the finished window as a texture, and not the window plus subcomponents of every window, as Quartz Extreme does.)
We should thank these people that are willing to pay for the bleeding edge graphics performance. They enable us to pay bottom dollar for yesterdays technology that performs 90% as well.
They are also the reason why the drivers for our "yesterday's technology" cards are buggy and incomplete and will never be properly fixed -- all the developer resources get been shifted to writing new, buggy drivers each time the hardware designers bring out something new.
Knowing the Dartmouth student body, this plan isn't likely to meet with widespread approval until they find a way to deliver campus-wide Wireless Drinking.
The trend with the New York Times is to charge as much money for access to their information that they can get.
That being the trend for every media company, EVER, it does not surprise me that the Times has chosen to go along with it.
These guys are dumber than dirt.
I think they know their business better than you do. No, I KNOW they know their business better than you do.
No, I don't. You know why? Because the Times does not run articles with headlines like "Bicycles Are Fun!". They run headlines like "Manufacturer recalls 10,000 cycles due to faulty frame weld." That's not the kind of attention any bike manufacturer would want.
Shout "I would never pay them for this!" all you want, but it's not like you were ever paying them anything to begin with.
CONSUMER: Microsoft just offered us Office free for 5 years when they found out we were considering an open source alternative to our operating system. Word can even read all these open format files we have created in OpenOffice - let the migration begin!
OPENOFFICE: Oh dear.
I think the last line here was supposed to read.
OPENOFFICE: Alright then, see ya in five years, suckers. Microsoft isn't going to give you a free ride FOREVER--they can't afford to. But we can, and we'll be waiting for you.
The examples he gives are so far in the past that they are hardly relevent now.
They're only irrelevant if the RIAA has substantially changed their practices since. Do you think they have?
They still charge artists a whopping big percentage for media breakage in transit, even though 99% of media shipped in the last 15 years has been CDs, not delicate vinyl platters...
It costs about $2 and under to print a single CD with artwork.
Why then don't CD's cost $4?
A sheaf of architectural plans to build a house from costs a few dozen dollars to print. Why then do houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to design and build?
The media for music distribution is cheap, and in the case of MP3 sharing almost too cheap to meter. But the cost of content development and production is still substantial. That cost, too, is falling as prosumer grade audio systems get cheaper and better continuously, but because the time and effort of humans who work to make music is a relatively fixed cost, the production expense will never go away.
Why don't CD's cost closer to $10 than $20? Well, the middlemen have to pay for their coke habits and legal crusades against college kids somehow...
Nevermind the PowerMac. Why is the PowerBOOK line still so expensive compared to the new iMacs?
A box with a 17" LCD and 512MB of RAM will set you back about $1300 for the iMac, and about $2600 for the PowerBook.
For twice the price of a low-end desktop, you get a notebook with an integrated keyboard, trackpad, and battery. You also get a slower, last-generation CPU, a slower, smaller hard drive, and an inferior graphics card.
Where's the value?
Anyone who argues over the English linguistic accuracy in the Star Wars movies is forgetting that the series happened "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."
Speaks backwards Yoda does, PS.
Letting the government control the Internet is letting it control the press.
Well, better shut down all those public libraries, then. Can't have the government controlling (and by "controlling" I mean "providing") access to any type of information.
For that matter, any laptop with a PCMCIA slot and a $10 802.11 card will let you access the Internet from any of dozens of free wireless hotspots in every major city.
Which is great, but only if you live in a major city.
What if you live in Bumf*ck Iowa, where the only communications infrastructure you have are the brittle old telephone lines that were erected 80 years ago? The local baby-Bell won't spend a cent on upgrades because there's not enough users to make it profitable.
Where's your opportunity to get online now?
Is this a trend I should worry about?
Hmm. Is it?
The reaction to this announcement triggered the most vicious backlash I have ever witnessed as the website feedback forum went beserk.
I think you just answered your own question there.
Content = value. If you're providing me content, I may consider paying you for it, if I feel the value is great enough. But if I'M the one providing content to YOU, as is the case with users posting on websites' forums, don't expect me to do you TWO favors and give you my money as well.
In the realm of printed material, a publisher that will offer to publish any paper you write if you pay them enough is called a SCAM (or an "academic journal"). I'll pay to READ content, but not to CREATE content.
I read that WAY too fast, and thought it said "Slartibartfast fires first", and that made me think about what George Lucas would do if tasked to produce a "HHGTG Special Edition".
*shudder*
Post a SPOILER WARNING next time, asshole.
PS: the answer is 42.
nothing much more of a historically grown apocalyptic chaos. With one of the crappiest programming languages ever as a cornerstone of its technology. A weedy mumbojumbo of wanna-be virtual machines, wanna-be server daemons, makeshift security layers, obstrusive user management and pseudo operating systems and a bazillion proprietary variants of said programmin language. With features bolted on left right and center.
/usr/local/bin/color "surprised" > /dev/me
I agree. While the concept was a good idea, the sheer amount of historical cruft that now clutters up Unix is... huh? You were talking about databases?
$
It's interesting to note that MS has finally figured out that the "n-tier" was a dumb idea.
Except it's not. N-tier without an appropriate form of CACHING, now there's a dumb idea. But a properly designed n-tiered architecture can be more scalable and ultimately more functional than a flat architecture could.
How many times have we heard of huge sites going down because databases become corrupt or unrecoverable, or of the huge resource strain (memory and CPU) from a large database?
How many times? Not all that many, in my experience. How many times when the sites were running off a hardy RDBMS like Oracle, rather than something in the MySQL range? Even fewer.
Of course, "websites going down" is not exactly the best indicator of database reliability in the first place...
While you're proposing making databases more like filesystems, what Reiser and others are actually doing is trying to make filesystems more like databases. That's an important distinction to note -- databases are the superior design.
Doesn't the FSF already serve the "Clearinghouse" role you propose for many of the larger GPL'd products?
I'm sure to be modded down for this, since I'm pointing out a drawback of the GPL, but legal expenses are a part of doing business, any kind of business. Companies will never respect the terms of the GPL unless they face financial damages for failing to do so. If the author/copyright owner of a GPL'd work is unable or unwilling to pursue legal action, the risk of facing consequences is near-zero.
Consider an installation of 50 or more access points. This requires lots of conduits, outlet boxes, electrical wiring and the time of a qualified electrician.
Consider that the people who will be WORKING at these access points will have lamps, PDA chargers, coffee makers, etc., that all require AC mains power. Do you want to be the one to explain to them how much money the company saved by not installing any outlets?
Again, it's a moderately reasonable idea for dense, people-free network environments like server rooms. For anywhere else, not so much.
20 Watts? Great, that's almost enough to run 10% of my desktop PC.
And yes, I've already factored in an estimate that 1/3 of the power used by my current runs-on-AC computer is lost as waste heat.