SSX. And it is, EA Sports appear to not have contractual obligations with Sony.
http://ssxtricky.ea.com/xbox/xbox.html
Dave
Re:If you can't beat them, Join them
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 2
the DVD issues (with absolutely no information on their new drivers, other than that you can buy them with a $20 remote) have pretty much sealed that for me.
Are you getting something where the sound and video drop out of sync?
Dave
Re:If you can't beat them, Join them
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What happens when Sony goes out of business (unlikely, I admit) as other software companies that used this as an excuse for intrusive copy protection have?
Hmmm, good point. I could blabber something about escrow, but it'd be crap because there is no way Sony are putting 100,000 GT3 disks in a warehouse in case somebody like me scratches one. BTW - have you actually seen a GT3 disk? They have this messed up "PS" logo watermark on the read side. The read side. God, that'd be a bastard to pirate properly.
Placing the word backup in quotes as you did looks like it is meant to indirectly accuse anyone who makes backup copies of programs or games they have purchased of copyright infringement.
Guilty, but that's what the vast majority of modchips are used for, unfortunately. As an aside, I'm not exactly snow white when it comes to this issue myself. I have pirated (PC) games in the past - they generally get installed, cracked, and played for up to (generally) 24 hours. Anything that keeps my attention for longer than that warrants going out and buying a copy. For the last couple of years that's been Quake3 and UT, everything else has been chucked, forgotten, and not missed in the slightest.
For the PS2 this problem is solved with video game rental from your local video shop. SSX - buy. Ridge Racer - don't buy.
in this case, both Hasbro (Parker Bros parent) and Tolkien's estate (licensor of LotR franchise) still exist and still maintain legal departments.
And in the case of the Tolkien estate, I imagine they currently have a big stack of lawyers liberally spread across the globe to (attempt to) stop the production of fake LOTR merchandise.
Mind you, they've got much better and more profitable things to do than kick up a fuss about a half finished, unmarketable video game for a console that doesn't exist any more.
Dave
Re:If you can't beat them, Join them
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 2
I will not buy a PS2 until I can backup my game collection.
Yeah, right.
What Sony need to do is make it absolutely clear that a PS2 disc is only a carrier for some intellectual property you have licenced. If the disc gets borked, take it to a shop and ask for another - and they will swap it without even blinking. Of course, we have just about no chance of this actually happening, but it would get around a whole bunch of "backup" issues.
Is anyone else getting this? Has my IP fallen into some kinda white list for people who actually buy stuff across the net? Since when did Slashdot take to linking paid content?
I'd have given her an Athlon but the dustbunnies at her place are such that I'd be afraid of her burning the place down... remember that THG vid of the flaming Athlons?)
Dust bunnies don't kill Athlons. Neither does the fan failing, providing you have a motherboard that shuts the system down once the temperature goes too high. In order to kill their Athlon, THG had to run quake and pull both the heatsink and fan off. It only worked because there was nowhere for the heat to go when the processor was at 100%, and locked there, and the temperature rose faster than the sensor was able to detect.
Kinda unlikely to happen in the real world, unless you like playing Quake while your mates pull bits of your PC.
The P4 was designed for truly immense memory bandwidth and very large on chip cache. The current generation of P4 is suffering from the cache being significantly below it's design point, which is somewhere around the 2Mb mark. Obviously with a cache this big the latency of the ram itself isn't such a problem - hence Intel signing up to RDRAM.
Anyway, the actual question was:
but could it be that the company that everybody hates is actually the better way to go in this case?
Not really. There's not that much difference in bandwidth between DDR and RDRAM anyway. And Rambus need to go broke to remind the industry in general that we won't tolerate that kind of behaviour. Unfortunately they have some huge contracts, the PS2 being probably the biggest, so it seems unlikely they are going to go chapter 11 in the near future.
People writing JVM's understand about memory alignment though. Anyway, IIRC the memory alignment hassles on RDRAM are about getting the structures to fit in 128 byte chunks because that's the minimum amount that can be requested from RDRAM.
I think I remember a vague plan involving one way valves on the hydraulics. Basically it involves making it so the brakes and clutch can be applied, but not taken off again.
While living in Newcastle (a city in the UK with big joyriding problems) I was also considering padlocking the clutch to the floor - under a similar "won't notice it until it's too late" theory.
I always thought the OS/2 (warp onwards) kernel sounded good, purely from the idea of a fully re-entrant kernel that booted (including GUI) in 4Mb. So, this came as a pleasant surprise:
Another cool trick you can do with OS/2 is that you can turn off and on any additional CPUs you may have, on the fly.
Holy shit. And....
OS/2 (reportedly) scales wonderfully on machines up to 64 CPUs.
And so runs a good chance of being a kick arse server kernel. Are we going to see Debian/OS2?
With a price of $299 for the normal version and $399 for the version that supports SMP
OK, I'll bite. What were the first two? And why does this thing insist that I take more than twenty seconds to make a posting? Sheesh, it's only a few words...
that's the fault of your elementary school teachers
Aparrently my intake at my first primary school, for one reason or another, consisted entirely of kids that could already write. Myself excluded. Consquently I was never taught to write and ended up guessing. Badly.
Rant: Handwriting recognition. It'll never work. It can't ever work. People can't read my handwriting. I can't read my handwriting and consequently I've given up doing it for anything more important than a shopping list. And I usually fail to get something at the shops for exactly this reason.
I like that PDA's are sprouting keyboards, and I like the idea of attempting to use a Zaurus or similar for my email, but I'll probably be waiting for a Symbian based phone+pda combination. Once again, bring it on, the money's sitting in my bank account waiting for you to make things that don't suck.
It's possibly the cards. I had shitloads of grief from a 3c590 (whatever the 10/100 card is called) under FreeBSD. Posts to -questions and -hackers came back with "yeah, sucks dunnit". So it went in the bin to be replaced by a cheap-as-fuck realtek card. No problems since.
The PC running it currently has to be a fast machine, becuase of the Windows requirements. Linux however, could use much lower requirements.
Thing is, when you're making an automated saw for $100k, you don't give a toss about what kind of computer is needed to run it. You care about:
a, Making people buy the saw.
b, Making sure it doesn't break down.
And point b is where Linux wins. Even if we assume that NT doesn't fall over, you're still going to need a hard drive purely from a bloat point of view. In the embedded arena one huge advantage Linux has is that it can be put on 2Mb of flash that is soldered to the board. No moving parts = very happy automated saw manufacturer. Reducing the number of cables, connectors, fans etc. must also not be overlooked as a major way of increasing reliability of embedded systems.
Wouldn't it be great if your employee didn't feel like working that day, fired up regedit and made a few small changes ?
Not a problem, NT embedded wouldn't even have regedit on it.
Plus, when you start looking at the outrages licensing ammounts for Windows. Linux, starts looking VERY nice.
NT Embedded is $70/licence. Again, nothing in the $100k saw, especially if it reduces development costs. The good thing is that Linux is getting such a stronghold in the embedded arena that it looks very unlikely that developing for embedded NT would prove cost effective.
a large PDA company like Palm to start offearing it on a few Palm Pilots
Problems with the design requirements for low power kernels. A low power kernel basically has to get the processor back to sleep ASAP. Multi-user requirements (for instance) take a major back seat here. Luckily processors are getting much more efficient and moore's law is looking to pick up Linux on it's curve as it goes past. Go look at the power consumption vs mips figures for the Intel Xscale. Bloody stunning.
Dave
PS. Check out this bitch, then rejoice, for Linux rules in embedded.
MS doesn't care about the market for headless, extremely small embedded OS's
But that's the tragedy, actually they do. They're looking to leverage the foothold they have with SMB, borked Kerberos, ActiveDirectory etc. to make devices that appear on Microsoft networks nice and easily.
They've been at this for ages, since the early days of NT4 believe it or not. Luckily the embedded arena generally regards Linux as being a bit lardy (but is coming around real fast) and hence has basically no interest in attempting to embed NT.
In the beginning were file systems. A file system took what you wanted it to write and put it on the disk for you. And it was good.
But the users moaned "speed, we must have more speed" and indeed their call was echoed by the admins. So write ahead caching was invented so the users calls would return sooner, and once again all was peaceful with filesystems.
But then one day someone tripped over the power cable and the OS died. On recovery it was discovered that the filesystem was completely borked (due to some of it being in the write ahead cache when the power died) and lots of data was lost. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth so the journal was invented. A journal writes a list of things that the file system will do when it gets around to it, but writes this list to the drive so it doesn't get lost when the power is lost. Because the list is all in one place the journal is fast and once again there was peace.
Over the years slowly everyone, even Microsoft and even the Linux kernel made themselves journals but the BSD hackers (Greg Lehey?) realised you didn't really need one if you were careful about the order in which you wrote to the disk. And hence softupdates were invented, and are (arguably) very slightly faster. But mostly just different. Like Reiser, but that's another story entirely.
Gottit? Synchronous writes good, but slow. Async writes bad, but fast. Journaled writes good, and fast. Softupdates good and fast without a journal.
Slashdot Mirror
SSX. And it is, EA Sports appear to not have contractual obligations with Sony.
http://ssxtricky.ea.com/xbox/xbox.html
Dave
the DVD issues (with absolutely no information on their new drivers, other than that you can buy them with a $20 remote) have pretty much sealed that for me.
Are you getting something where the sound and video drop out of sync?
Dave
What happens when Sony goes out of business (unlikely, I admit) as other software companies that used this as an excuse for intrusive copy protection have?
Hmmm, good point. I could blabber something about escrow, but it'd be crap because there is no way Sony are putting 100,000 GT3 disks in a warehouse in case somebody like me scratches one. BTW - have you actually seen a GT3 disk? They have this messed up "PS" logo watermark on the read side. The read side. God, that'd be a bastard to pirate properly.
Placing the word backup in quotes as you did looks like it is meant to indirectly accuse anyone who makes backup copies of programs or games they have purchased of copyright infringement.
Guilty, but that's what the vast majority of modchips are used for, unfortunately. As an aside, I'm not exactly snow white when it comes to this issue myself. I have pirated (PC) games in the past - they generally get installed, cracked, and played for up to (generally) 24 hours. Anything that keeps my attention for longer than that warrants going out and buying a copy. For the last couple of years that's been Quake3 and UT, everything else has been chucked, forgotten, and not missed in the slightest.
For the PS2 this problem is solved with video game rental from your local video shop. SSX - buy. Ridge Racer - don't buy.
Dave
in this case, both Hasbro (Parker Bros parent) and Tolkien's estate (licensor of LotR franchise) still exist and still maintain legal departments.
And in the case of the Tolkien estate, I imagine they currently have a big stack of lawyers liberally spread across the globe to (attempt to) stop the production of fake LOTR merchandise.
Mind you, they've got much better and more profitable things to do than kick up a fuss about a half finished, unmarketable video game for a console that doesn't exist any more.
Dave
I will not buy a PS2 until I can backup my game collection.
Yeah, right.
What Sony need to do is make it absolutely clear that a PS2 disc is only a carrier for some intellectual property you have licenced. If the disc gets borked, take it to a shop and ask for another - and they will swap it without even blinking. Of course, we have just about no chance of this actually happening, but it would get around a whole bunch of "backup" issues.
Dave
WTF? "Purchase Full Text of Article"
Is anyone else getting this? Has my IP fallen into some kinda white list for people who actually buy stuff across the net? Since when did Slashdot take to linking paid content?
God, I remember whe... Purchase full text of rant
Dave
Eventually you won't be able to run any of the new games on Win98, and you'll have to make the choice
I dunno, I can't see... John Carmack for instance, falling for this shit.
Dave
I'd have given her an Athlon but the dustbunnies at her place are such that I'd be afraid of her burning the place down... remember that THG vid of the flaming Athlons?)
Dust bunnies don't kill Athlons. Neither does the fan failing, providing you have a motherboard that shuts the system down once the temperature goes too high. In order to kill their Athlon, THG had to run quake and pull both the heatsink and fan off. It only worked because there was nowhere for the heat to go when the processor was at 100%, and locked there, and the temperature rose faster than the sensor was able to detect.
Kinda unlikely to happen in the real world, unless you like playing Quake while your mates pull bits of your PC.
Dave
The P4 was designed for truly immense memory bandwidth and very large on chip cache. The current generation of P4 is suffering from the cache being significantly below it's design point, which is somewhere around the 2Mb mark. Obviously with a cache this big the latency of the ram itself isn't such a problem - hence Intel signing up to RDRAM.
Anyway, the actual question was:
but could it be that the company that everybody hates is actually the better way to go in this case?
Not really. There's not that much difference in bandwidth between DDR and RDRAM anyway. And Rambus need to go broke to remind the industry in general that we won't tolerate that kind of behaviour. Unfortunately they have some huge contracts, the PS2 being probably the biggest, so it seems unlikely they are going to go chapter 11 in the near future.
Wankers.
Dave
People writing JVM's understand about memory alignment though. Anyway, IIRC the memory alignment hassles on RDRAM are about getting the structures to fit in 128 byte chunks because that's the minimum amount that can be requested from RDRAM.
Or something like that.
Dave
Yes, thank you, it stopped me from having to say it.
I trust a bank because it's FDIC insured.
In short, don't trust banks, trust their precautions.
Dave
I think I remember a vague plan involving one way valves on the hydraulics. Basically it involves making it so the brakes and clutch can be applied, but not taken off again.
While living in Newcastle (a city in the UK with big joyriding problems) I was also considering padlocking the clutch to the floor - under a similar "won't notice it until it's too late" theory.
Dave
Is this just a cheap ploy to sell P4's?
It might be, but it's a wasted effort - I just ran a 300Kbit stream through a P2-233. Pretty good piece of code this, should be fun to pull apart.
Dave
Moderators: How exactly is this offtopic?
:(
Someone posts a wholly useless news article to the front page of slashdot, and someone takes the piss out of it. It's anything BUT offtopic.
Dave
I always thought the OS/2 (warp onwards) kernel sounded good, purely from the idea of a fully re-entrant kernel that booted (including GUI) in 4Mb. So, this came as a pleasant surprise:
Another cool trick you can do with OS/2 is that you can turn off and on any additional CPUs you may have, on the fly.
Holy shit. And....
OS/2 (reportedly) scales wonderfully on machines up to 64 CPUs.
And so runs a good chance of being a kick arse server kernel. Are we going to see Debian/OS2?
With a price of $299 for the normal version and $399 for the version that supports SMP
So that's a no then. Oh well.
Dave
OK, I'll bite. What were the first two? And why does this thing insist that I take more than twenty seconds to make a posting? Sheesh, it's only a few words...
Probably McAfee, or Symantec, or both. Be a pretty cool way of solving both the delivery and virus scanner problems in one fell swoop.
Dave
Yeah, I know. You're right, and it's not a flame.
that's the fault of your elementary school teachers
Aparrently my intake at my first primary school, for one reason or another, consisted entirely of kids that could already write. Myself excluded. Consquently I was never taught to write and ended up guessing. Badly.
Hey! I got modded down, shocker!
Dave
Rant: Handwriting recognition. It'll never work. It can't ever work. People can't read my handwriting. I can't read my handwriting and consequently I've given up doing it for anything more important than a shopping list. And I usually fail to get something at the shops for exactly this reason.
I like that PDA's are sprouting keyboards, and I like the idea of attempting to use a Zaurus or similar for my email, but I'll probably be waiting for a Symbian based phone+pda combination. Once again, bring it on, the money's sitting in my bank account waiting for you to make things that don't suck.
Dave
It's possibly the cards. I had shitloads of grief from a 3c590 (whatever the 10/100 card is called) under FreeBSD. Posts to -questions and -hackers came back with "yeah, sucks dunnit". So it went in the bin to be replaced by a cheap-as-fuck realtek card. No problems since.
Bugger 3com.
Dave
The PC running it currently has to be a fast machine, becuase of the Windows requirements. Linux however, could use much lower requirements.
Thing is, when you're making an automated saw for $100k, you don't give a toss about what kind of computer is needed to run it. You care about:
a, Making people buy the saw.
b, Making sure it doesn't break down.
And point b is where Linux wins. Even if we assume that NT doesn't fall over, you're still going to need a hard drive purely from a bloat point of view. In the embedded arena one huge advantage Linux has is that it can be put on 2Mb of flash that is soldered to the board. No moving parts = very happy automated saw manufacturer. Reducing the number of cables, connectors, fans etc. must also not be overlooked as a major way of increasing reliability of embedded systems.
Wouldn't it be great if your employee didn't feel like working that day, fired up regedit and made a few small changes ?
Not a problem, NT embedded wouldn't even have regedit on it.
Plus, when you start looking at the outrages licensing ammounts for Windows. Linux, starts looking VERY nice.
NT Embedded is $70/licence. Again, nothing in the $100k saw, especially if it reduces development costs. The good thing is that Linux is getting such a stronghold in the embedded arena that it looks very unlikely that developing for embedded NT would prove cost effective.
a large PDA company like Palm to start offearing it on a few Palm Pilots
Problems with the design requirements for low power kernels. A low power kernel basically has to get the processor back to sleep ASAP. Multi-user requirements (for instance) take a major back seat here. Luckily processors are getting much more efficient and moore's law is looking to pick up Linux on it's curve as it goes past. Go look at the power consumption vs mips figures for the Intel Xscale. Bloody stunning.
Dave
PS. Check out this bitch, then rejoice, for Linux rules in embedded.
MS doesn't care about the market for headless, extremely small embedded OS's
But that's the tragedy, actually they do. They're looking to leverage the foothold they have with SMB, borked Kerberos, ActiveDirectory etc. to make devices that appear on Microsoft networks nice and easily.
They've been at this for ages, since the early days of NT4 believe it or not. Luckily the embedded arena generally regards Linux as being a bit lardy (but is coming around real fast) and hence has basically no interest in attempting to embed NT.
Dave
In the beginning were file systems. A file system took what you wanted it to write and put it on the disk for you. And it was good.
But the users moaned "speed, we must have more speed" and indeed their call was echoed by the admins. So write ahead caching was invented so the users calls would return sooner, and once again all was peaceful with filesystems.
But then one day someone tripped over the power cable and the OS died. On recovery it was discovered that the filesystem was completely borked (due to some of it being in the write ahead cache when the power died) and lots of data was lost. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth so the journal was invented. A journal writes a list of things that the file system will do when it gets around to it, but writes this list to the drive so it doesn't get lost when the power is lost. Because the list is all in one place the journal is fast and once again there was peace.
Over the years slowly everyone, even Microsoft and even the Linux kernel made themselves journals but the BSD hackers (Greg Lehey?) realised you didn't really need one if you were careful about the order in which you wrote to the disk. And hence softupdates were invented, and are (arguably) very slightly faster. But mostly just different. Like Reiser, but that's another story entirely.
Gottit? Synchronous writes good, but slow. Async writes bad, but fast. Journaled writes good, and fast. Softupdates good and fast without a journal.
Dave
Where are my mod points when I need them?
Dave
FreeBSD. And life is a lot easier if you use PCI peripherals.
If you've got the time give 'em all a go.
Dave