MS are not allowing developers to use the HD DVD drive for games
A symptom of another problem with the console industry, one that's been around since the launch of the Playstation 1 or even before: manufacturers are telling developers what they CAN NOT do with the hardware.
In the early generations of console gaming, developers were allowed and even encouraged to exploit the system in ways that the hardware designers never expected. The Atari 2600 hardware was designed to run Pong-like games; that the developers found ways to abuse the display chip to create Pitfall or Adventure or even Space Invaders is amazing. Undocumented features of the NES were used in games as simple as Super Mario Bros. (to keep the score area at the top of the screen static where the rest scrolled, for example).
If a developer has a great concept for a 360 game but requires use of the HD-DVD drive to bring it to fruition, why should Microsoft stand in the way?
Make it fit-in with the user's environment. If possible, on GNOME, you want to follow the GNOME HIG. Ditto for Mac. On Windows, follow the 'User Experience Guidelines.' But this shouldn't be your overriding priority.
Remember that each of those projects had one or more genuine HCI experts involved in the drafting of their guidelines. Do you know HCI better than the top experts in the field?
Read the guidelines. Learn them. Understand them thoroughly. Heck, read the guidelines from platforms other than the one you're targeting, too. You'll find a lot of concepts that are common across all platforms; these you MUST not ignore.
It is sometimes necessary to deviate from published interface guidelines, but you need to have a REALLY GOOD justification for doing so, and personal intuition doesn't make the grade.
Quite a few people have pointed out that large numbers of (supposedly) "ex"-CIA analysts are doing the writing and editing for most of the major media - even including some of the (supposedly) left wing "alternative" media
Since the topic is media criticism, perhaps you would like to try applying some critical thinking to those claims.
The thing about the media industry is, anybody can get a job in it -- maybe not as an editor, but as a receptionist, a copy clerk, a janitor. I worked in "the major media" for years, and the idea that the movers and shakers are CIA operatives is patently insane.
2/1/2007 Today, Theo de Raadt declared that henceforth he would "be nice to people"
It's true, Slashdot subscribers really CAN see stories in the future!
(D/M/Y is equally stupid as M/D/Y as a date representation. It's still a mid-endian format, with the most significant digits (century, millennium) tucked away in the middle instead of being at one end or the other.)
If the licensing outlay is cheap and competitive enough, it would kill Sony.
Just like 3DO licensees Panasonic, Sanyo and Goldstar leveraged that common platform to kill their closest competitors: Philips CDi and Pioneer LaserActive!
But is an Xbox 3D0 -- sorry, Xbox 360 -- likewise an Xbox 360?
Some have hard drives; others do not. Some have HD-DVD drives attached; others do not. Some have HDMI ports and the necessary hardware to drive them; others do not.
I would say that the fragmentation you are concerned about has already begun.
The integration between a PS3 and a PSP (both abilities available at launch and things that have been talked about coming around int he future) is what made me want to get a PS3...
I agree that there's some exciting potential there, but what I've seen so far has been underwhelming. Why can't I download content to my portable through my existing home PC and Wifi network? Why do I have to buy and use a set-top console from the same company for what should be a simple
It stunk of vendor lock-in when Sony did it, and if Nintendo is going to require me to own a Wii to get downloadable content for my DS, that shall stink too.
It sounds silly, but Nintendo definately needs to get DVD playback on the Wii going
I agree that it sounds silly, because it is. Nobody's refusing to buy a Wii because it doesn't have DVD playback. Most households have a DVD player hooked up to their TVs already, and those that don't yet can get one at K-Mart for under $30 now. It's not worth Nintendo's time to add the feature.
Those things ought to be in bubble-packs at the local drugstore, alongside the cheap calculators, electronic dictionaries, and other low end electronics.
Casio, HP, and TI are still charging $90 for the same models of graphing calculator that I used in high school Trigonometry class fifteen years ago.
I don't think they'd take very kindly to a $100 general-purpose computer being sold alongside their ancient artifacts.
Does it bother you that much that these journalists want to make it easier for the general public to understand how big data storage they are talking about?
Scientific notation makes that goal extremely simple to obtain. Or at least, it would, if journalists could trust that their audiences had the basic high-school level understanding that they ought to have.
Concepts like "million" and "billion" are hard to visualize and even harder to distinguish, and that's without the regionalization issue over whether 1 billion means 1 thousand million or 1 million million.
Trolls aside, this was the plan all along. OLPC is, as Mr Negroponte has been quoted often enough as saying, "an education project, not a laptop project".
He can say that as often as he likes, but the project is still named "One Laptop Per Child", not "Education For Every Child".
Whether by intent or side-effect, the OLPC project has resulted in some fantastic innovations in low-end portable computer design. And though the software aspects of the OLPC project are just as innovative, I think it's disingenuous of Negroponte to give the hardware such short shrift.
It's small, light, waterproof, and is quite capable.
Water resistant, not waterproof. I'm planning to use mine in the kitchen on occasion, and am happy not to have to worry about accidental splashes of liquid onto it, but I sure wouldn't try using it in the bathtub.
A person claiming responsibility for some of the XO's innovations has left the OLPC in order to be compensated for her inventions. I don't see the problem with this.
As long as the OLPC Foundation is never compelled to pay licensing fees to the new corporation for technology originally conceived for OLPC's benefit, I don't see a problem, either.
Even though I'm eagerly anticipating receiving the reward for my Give One, Get One donation, I know that it's not designed for users like me. If a commercial laptop is developed that uses many of the innovations of the XO-1, I'll be one of the first in line for it.
they spend huge sums on Oprah books and Brittany Spears CDs.
*facepalm* I understand that she may not be your thing, but Britney's been part of the cultural zeitgeist for nearly 10 years now. And you're still misspelling her name?
A few years ago I tried to donate a box full of recent technical books to the local library; THEY REFUSED TO TAKE THEM.
Sounds to me like the library may be wising up to one of its more noticeable defects. Technical books tend to be big and heavy and have a short shelf life; it's not an efficient use of resources to research purchase decisions, make purchases, process and catalog the books, maintain shelf space for them, and then weed through them all every year to toss out what's become obsolete.
The library I worked in during high school still had books like "Programming in BASIC on the Commodore PET" -- and this was in the mid-90s! It's actually better for a library to have no narrow-purpose technical books at all than to have stacks full of books that have been useless for 20 years.
Are NSF files sound waves (like WAV, AIFF) or note tracks (like MIDI and MOD)?
They are NES machine code, basically.
An NSF is typically "ripped" by disassembling an NES ROM image and then stripping out all the instructions and data structures that have nothing to do with controlling the sound generator hardware.
It's a series of events, much like the MIDI format is, but operating at a lower level than MIDI. An NSF event might represent "set the divider frequency of oscillator 1 to 112", for example, instead of a MIDI event like "play pitch B Flat below Middle C".
Given an intelligent enough translation process, much NSF music could be converted to good-sounding MIDI sequences, but you'll always get a more accurate reproduction by emulating the sound circuitry of an NES and recording its output as a waveform.
And most MIDI synths do. The software synth driver that came free with your AC97 integrated audio is going to sound like crap, yes, but the very same data played back through a $5,000 arranger workstation keyboard will sound much better. And data customized specifically FOR that keyboard will sound fantastic.
For converting chiptunes to ringtones, MIDI synthesis will probably provide all the fidelity you'd need. The tone generators in modern handsets are, in a lot of ways, the descendants of the PSG and FM sound chips used in 8- and 16-bit game consoles of yore.
The last thing a company wants is to have personal information lost because a server was stolen.
Why bother breaking into a server facility -- which typically have several hard-to-circumvent layers of physical security -- when some dumbass C[EFT]O is going to leave a notebook PC full of unencrypted business intelligence on the passenger seat of his Acura?
By the time somebody responds to the OnStar alarm, the window's already smashed and 10 million customer records compromised.
Fewer and fewer ISPs operate news servers anymore. Those that even care about offering newsgroups are contracting with pay services like Giganews -- and my current ISP's plan with them caps me at a measly 2GB of downloads per month. I could raise that cap, but it would cost me money.
So if your goal is to download massive amounts of data with questionable origin and legality without paying for the privilege, NNTP is no longer a practical option for most of us.
Is it just coincidence that 2007 was also the year that "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" was a huge hit? Maybe it's fun to dance to, but it's also the most musically and grammatically illiterate tune I think I've ever heard. It makes Salt N Pepa's "Push It" sound like a Mozart opera in comparison.
So you didn't know if it was or wasn't illegal, but thought the guy should be reported anyway?
It's not my job to ascertain whether something is or isn't legal. That's what police and courts are for.
If I see a guy on the street working on a bike chain with a hacksaw, I'm going to alert a policeman. I have no obligation to figure out by myself whether the guy is a thief or just a bike owner who lost the key for his lock, but it wouldn't be the right thing to just look the other way, either.
MS actually does have patents on some fairly innovative things (example: ClearType) that are pretty clever.
The concept of subpixel rendering predates Microsoft's ClearType by at least ten years. Maybe the Microsoft implementation is particularly elegant, but the basic premise was used by Apple II and Atari Lynx software long before MS Marketing created a bullet point out of it.
Switch statements are syntactic sugar. They're really not needed. Nested if/then/else do the same thing.
All statements in all high-level programming languages are syntactic sugar. Switch statempts, for loops, if/then/else, even GOTO -- they're all just sweeteners so the programmer doesn't have to think about native JMP and BEQ assembly instructions.
(Also, assembly is just syntactic sugar for machine code.)
Perl, as usual, is taking the approach that plain refined sugar is not enough; some coders prefer turbinado, and some prefer aspartame, and some prefer corn syrup. Thus we end up with ten different flavors of code, all dialects of the same language.
People used to optimise everything way back when, but now I suspect that most people just let the faster processor take care of things rather than trying to squeeze every nanosecond of performance out of their apps:(
Thank God for that.
I'm glad that coders today can use high-level tools and languages without having to spend half their time on performance tweaking.
Take as an example a game like Halo (or Guitar Hero, or World of Warcraft, or whatever your favorite modern game is). If the developers of these titles had to execute the same amount of care in optimization as developers did on the Atari 2600 -- where often, the author had to unroll simple countdown loops because they could not afford the overheard of DEC and BEQ instructions -- yes, the game kernel would probably run twice as fast. But on the other hand, each game would take a decade to complete!
I'd happily trade some (but not all) efficiency in program execution for an increase in efficiency in program authoring. And that's exactly what we've done.
Slashdot Mirror
MS are not allowing developers to use the HD DVD drive for games
A symptom of another problem with the console industry, one that's been around since the launch of the Playstation 1 or even before: manufacturers are telling developers what they CAN NOT do with the hardware.
In the early generations of console gaming, developers were allowed and even encouraged to exploit the system in ways that the hardware designers never expected. The Atari 2600 hardware was designed to run Pong-like games; that the developers found ways to abuse the display chip to create Pitfall or Adventure or even Space Invaders is amazing. Undocumented features of the NES were used in games as simple as Super Mario Bros. (to keep the score area at the top of the screen static where the rest scrolled, for example).
If a developer has a great concept for a 360 game but requires use of the HD-DVD drive to bring it to fruition, why should Microsoft stand in the way?
Make it fit-in with the user's environment. If possible, on GNOME, you want to follow the GNOME HIG. Ditto for Mac. On Windows, follow the 'User Experience Guidelines.' But this shouldn't be your overriding priority.
Remember that each of those projects had one or more genuine HCI experts involved in the drafting of their guidelines. Do you know HCI better than the top experts in the field?
Read the guidelines. Learn them. Understand them thoroughly. Heck, read the guidelines from platforms other than the one you're targeting, too. You'll find a lot of concepts that are common across all platforms; these you MUST not ignore.
It is sometimes necessary to deviate from published interface guidelines, but you need to have a REALLY GOOD justification for doing so, and personal intuition doesn't make the grade.
Quite a few people have pointed out that large numbers of (supposedly) "ex"-CIA analysts are doing the writing and editing for most of the major media - even including some of the (supposedly) left wing "alternative" media
Since the topic is media criticism, perhaps you would like to try applying some critical thinking to those claims.
The thing about the media industry is, anybody can get a job in it -- maybe not as an editor, but as a receptionist, a copy clerk, a janitor. I worked in "the major media" for years, and the idea that the movers and shakers are CIA operatives is patently insane.
2/1/2007
Today, Theo de Raadt declared that henceforth he would "be nice to people"
It's true, Slashdot subscribers really CAN see stories in the future!
(D/M/Y is equally stupid as M/D/Y as a date representation. It's still a mid-endian format, with the most significant digits (century, millennium) tucked away in the middle instead of being at one end or the other.)
If the licensing outlay is cheap and competitive enough, it would kill Sony.
Just like 3DO licensees Panasonic, Sanyo and Goldstar leveraged that common platform to kill their closest competitors: Philips CDi and Pioneer LaserActive!
An Xbox is an Xbox is an Xbox.
But is an Xbox 3D0 -- sorry, Xbox 360 -- likewise an Xbox 360?
Some have hard drives; others do not. Some have HD-DVD drives attached; others do not. Some have HDMI ports and the necessary hardware to drive them; others do not.
I would say that the fragmentation you are concerned about has already begun.
The integration between a PS3 and a PSP (both abilities available at launch and things that have been talked about coming around int he future) is what made me want to get a PS3...
I agree that there's some exciting potential there, but what I've seen so far has been underwhelming. Why can't I download content to my portable through my existing home PC and Wifi network? Why do I have to buy and use a set-top console from the same company for what should be a simple
It stunk of vendor lock-in when Sony did it, and if Nintendo is going to require me to own a Wii to get downloadable content for my DS, that shall stink too.
It sounds silly, but Nintendo definately needs to get DVD playback on the Wii going
I agree that it sounds silly, because it is. Nobody's refusing to buy a Wii because it doesn't have DVD playback. Most households have a DVD player hooked up to their TVs already, and those that don't yet can get one at K-Mart for under $30 now. It's not worth Nintendo's time to add the feature.
Those things ought to be in bubble-packs at the local drugstore, alongside the cheap calculators, electronic dictionaries, and other low end electronics.
Casio, HP, and TI are still charging $90 for the same models of graphing calculator that I used in high school Trigonometry class fifteen years ago.
I don't think they'd take very kindly to a $100 general-purpose computer being sold alongside their ancient artifacts.
Does it bother you that much that these journalists want to make it easier for the general public to understand how big data storage they are talking about?
Scientific notation makes that goal extremely simple to obtain. Or at least, it would, if journalists could trust that their audiences had the basic high-school level understanding that they ought to have.
Concepts like "million" and "billion" are hard to visualize and even harder to distinguish, and that's without the regionalization issue over whether 1 billion means 1 thousand million or 1 million million.
Trolls aside, this was the plan all along. OLPC is, as Mr Negroponte has been quoted often enough as saying, "an education project, not a laptop project".
He can say that as often as he likes, but the project is still named "One Laptop Per Child", not "Education For Every Child".
Whether by intent or side-effect, the OLPC project has resulted in some fantastic innovations in low-end portable computer design. And though the software aspects of the OLPC project are just as innovative, I think it's disingenuous of Negroponte to give the hardware such short shrift.
It's small, light, waterproof, and is quite capable.
Water resistant, not waterproof. I'm planning to use mine in the kitchen on occasion, and am happy not to have to worry about accidental splashes of liquid onto it, but I sure wouldn't try using it in the bathtub.
A person claiming responsibility for some of the XO's innovations has left the OLPC in order to be compensated for her inventions. I don't see the problem with this.
As long as the OLPC Foundation is never compelled to pay licensing fees to the new corporation for technology originally conceived for OLPC's benefit, I don't see a problem, either.
Even though I'm eagerly anticipating receiving the reward for my Give One, Get One donation, I know that it's not designed for users like me. If a commercial laptop is developed that uses many of the innovations of the XO-1, I'll be one of the first in line for it.
they spend huge sums on Oprah books and Brittany Spears CDs.
*facepalm* I understand that she may not be your thing, but Britney's been part of the cultural zeitgeist for nearly 10 years now. And you're still misspelling her name?
A few years ago I tried to donate a box full of recent technical books to the local library; THEY REFUSED TO TAKE THEM.
Sounds to me like the library may be wising up to one of its more noticeable defects. Technical books tend to be big and heavy and have a short shelf life; it's not an efficient use of resources to research purchase decisions, make purchases, process and catalog the books, maintain shelf space for them, and then weed through them all every year to toss out what's become obsolete.
The library I worked in during high school still had books like "Programming in BASIC on the Commodore PET" -- and this was in the mid-90s! It's actually better for a library to have no narrow-purpose technical books at all than to have stacks full of books that have been useless for 20 years.
Are NSF files sound waves (like WAV, AIFF) or note tracks (like MIDI and MOD)?
They are NES machine code, basically.
An NSF is typically "ripped" by disassembling an NES ROM image and then stripping out all the instructions and data structures that have nothing to do with controlling the sound generator hardware.
It's a series of events, much like the MIDI format is, but operating at a lower level than MIDI. An NSF event might represent "set the divider frequency of oscillator 1 to 112", for example, instead of a MIDI event like "play pitch B Flat below Middle C".
Given an intelligent enough translation process, much NSF music could be converted to good-sounding MIDI sequences, but you'll always get a more accurate reproduction by emulating the sound circuitry of an NES and recording its output as a waveform.
No, MIDI doesn't suck, most MIDI songs do
And most MIDI synths do. The software synth driver that came free with your AC97 integrated audio is going to sound like crap, yes, but the very same data played back through a $5,000 arranger workstation keyboard will sound much better. And data customized specifically FOR that keyboard will sound fantastic.
For converting chiptunes to ringtones, MIDI synthesis will probably provide all the fidelity you'd need. The tone generators in modern handsets are, in a lot of ways, the descendants of the PSG and FM sound chips used in 8- and 16-bit game consoles of yore.
The last thing a company wants is to have personal information lost because a server was stolen.
Why bother breaking into a server facility -- which typically have several hard-to-circumvent layers of physical security -- when some dumbass C[EFT]O is going to leave a notebook PC full of unencrypted business intelligence on the passenger seat of his Acura?
By the time somebody responds to the OnStar alarm, the window's already smashed and 10 million customer records compromised.
Haven't they heard of NNTP?
Fewer and fewer ISPs operate news servers anymore. Those that even care about offering newsgroups are contracting with pay services like Giganews -- and my current ISP's plan with them caps me at a measly 2GB of downloads per month. I could raise that cap, but it would cost me money.
So if your goal is to download massive amounts of data with questionable origin and legality without paying for the privilege, NNTP is no longer a practical option for most of us.
Is it just coincidence that 2007 was also the year that "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" was a huge hit? Maybe it's fun to dance to, but it's also the most musically and grammatically illiterate tune I think I've ever heard. It makes Salt N Pepa's "Push It" sound like a Mozart opera in comparison.
See, the Dune references were too easy. We dotters like a challenge, we want to work for our lame jokes.
In Soviet Russia, lame jokes work for YOU!
That's the All-Seeing Eye of Ra, and you've really pissed Him off with your flippancy. No solar power for j00.
Being that it was Teh j00s that actually BUILT the pyramids, I think it's only fair that the copyright on them should revert into their hands.
So you didn't know if it was or wasn't illegal, but thought the guy should be reported anyway?
It's not my job to ascertain whether something is or isn't legal. That's what police and courts are for.
If I see a guy on the street working on a bike chain with a hacksaw, I'm going to alert a policeman. I have no obligation to figure out by myself whether the guy is a thief or just a bike owner who lost the key for his lock, but it wouldn't be the right thing to just look the other way, either.
MS actually does have patents on some fairly innovative things (example: ClearType) that are pretty clever.
The concept of subpixel rendering predates Microsoft's ClearType by at least ten years. Maybe the Microsoft implementation is particularly elegant, but the basic premise was used by Apple II and Atari Lynx software long before MS Marketing created a bullet point out of it.
The article raises a good point -- how DOES one "dump the ROM" off a floppy diskette?
Switch statements are syntactic sugar. They're really not needed. Nested if/then/else do the same thing.
All statements in all high-level programming languages are syntactic sugar. Switch statempts, for loops, if/then/else, even GOTO -- they're all just sweeteners so the programmer doesn't have to think about native JMP and BEQ assembly instructions.
(Also, assembly is just syntactic sugar for machine code.)
Perl, as usual, is taking the approach that plain refined sugar is not enough; some coders prefer turbinado, and some prefer aspartame, and some prefer corn syrup. Thus we end up with ten different flavors of code, all dialects of the same language.
People used to optimise everything way back when, but now I suspect that most people just let the faster processor take care of things rather than trying to squeeze every nanosecond of performance out of their apps :(
Thank God for that.
I'm glad that coders today can use high-level tools and languages without having to spend half their time on performance tweaking.
Take as an example a game like Halo (or Guitar Hero, or World of Warcraft, or whatever your favorite modern game is). If the developers of these titles had to execute the same amount of care in optimization as developers did on the Atari 2600 -- where often, the author had to unroll simple countdown loops because they could not afford the overheard of DEC and BEQ instructions -- yes, the game kernel would probably run twice as fast. But on the other hand, each game would take a decade to complete!
I'd happily trade some (but not all) efficiency in program execution for an increase in efficiency in program authoring. And that's exactly what we've done.