The SecurityFocus article has been updated with this note, saying that the U.S. denies having any plans for data-retention laws. Guess we'll have to wait until the plan is released to see.
Sorry for bolding, but it just occurred to me how sad it is that we can't take the government's word at face value anymore. What is this, marketing? (Irony intended)
You're not paying for the CD at all, you're paying for what's on it! So why should we tolerate 50 dollar games without batting an eye, but a 15 dollar music collection is "way too much"??
Using your own reasoning, it's because tapes were cheaper than CDs but provided the same content.
"Personally, I have plenty of time on my hands; I could vote on each new bill in 5 minutes each night (after reading it and doing a little research)."
That got me thinking, maybe it should be made mandatory for voters to do so every month, otherwise there would be an imbalance of power between those who are lazy or unaware, and those who aren't.
Speaking of laziness, most people won't be bothered to research each bill, and could be mislead by crafty wordings. Maybe people won't realize the implications of the bill. This would lead voters to believe what mass media says about each bill in review, so we'd be back to square one ("Television decides for us, tells us what to think about the matter, and then we just shrug and go to work.")
This sounds like a great approach, but I wonder what could be done about those problems? Has anyone else thought of anything? However I must say that if this were to be implemented, it would probably be better than what the USA has now... It's a very good suggestion.
Living in another country, I don't understand. Where does the patriotism come from? Where I live, we're not really brought up with a great sense of pride for our country, we just accept it as the place in which we live, from a purely objective point of view. In USA, it seems different... It seems as if every citizen has a great sense of pride for their country, and even politicians' advertisements are seen upon the clichéd US flag backdrop. Things are touted as "all american" or "america's #1," and people wear their flag as if it was a medal for doing something exceptional.
It's just not very common in my culture... and I'm not sure if that's because I'm a cultural recluse or what! At least, I don't think I am. I live in Montreal, Canada, btw. Does anyone else in Canada feel the same? Sure, I have a little smile when I see a Canadian band is topping the charts, but nothing other than that really...
I just had a 60GB Quantum hard drive fail on me less than a year and three months after I bought it. I've also had a 30GB Maxtor hard drive fail on me less than a year after I bought it. I'm not sure what caused it since I've had a 60GB Maxtor and one 6GB Western Digital which have lasted even longer in the same conditions (in the same PC) as the others. The ambient temperature in my case is 28C, and the hard drives are on 24/7, and their workload is above average. I do video editing.
I never wanted that to happen again so I bought an IBM Deskstar, which advertised vibration suppression and all sorts of other junk. I've begun to WANT to pay more simply because my data is that valuable to me. Unfortunately this announcement came at a time when I had discovered how important that was. Perhaps if they stressed data integrity in advertisements...
> Due to field rendering you have 2x the fillrate (and more vram) at 60fps than at 30fps.
Is it due to field rendering that the PS2 has a flickery look to its graphics? Then again, I also noticed that the GameCube and X-Box have such a look. I began thinking it was because these consoles used a higher resolution than the PSX.
When you play the PSX on TV, it appears as if interlacing doesn't occur, we see scanlines, so I figure they are drawing only half the lines. When you play PS2 on TV, interlacing does show up, and instead of scanlines more lines of resolution are drawn, so I thought the flickering was due to interlacing.
However, the Dreamcast doesn't have a flickery look to its graphics even though it does draw in a high resolution.
Since I don't think the X-Box and the GameCube render each field seperately, it doesn't appear that field rendering seems to be the cause of flickering, but I'm not sure.
I would love to have a viable, standardized, and commercial alternative to Windows. (Please don't read that as disrespectful to Linux) I would make an effort to use OS X on x86 fulltime.
It would be great (read: healthy) competition for Microsoft, it would offer an alternative just for the sake of having one, it would impress us geeks. But there's also benefits for Apple, they'd have more money coming in, a larger consumer base, and a much bigger community. It would also convince those who stay away from the high prices of Apple hardware (relative to PC, I mean) to give Apple a chance.
There are many more things available to consider cancelling before cancelling Futurama (or even The Tick for that matter). I don't mean to troll, but take a look at FOX's lineup, and I'm sure you can come up with at least a couple of things worth cancelling in comparison to Futurama.
For example, I'd rather watch Futurama than Temptation Island 2 (I'd even rather watch it than the Simpsons sometimes!)
At least a promise of continuing Futurama after The Simpsons is gone would be good...
Actually, id had planned to do a Mario 64 style Keen, but then Nintendo came out with Mario 64 later on and that kinda discouraged the Tom Hall.
Personally I'd like to see them do it, I'm sure they could do a great job. Who knows, maybe they have ideas nobody else ever thought of and could refine the genre. It's not like we have many similar games on the PC, so it would open up a whole new market on the PC!
Interesting, I wonder what other kinds of games id could be good at making? I know we've grown accustomed to them making FPSes, (and they do innovate on every new FPS they released), I'm wondering what other kinds of games they could be good at making.
Remember when they were talking about Quake coming out, and the battles were supposed to be akin to Virtua Fighter? That would be really wild! And you could supposedly pick up bodies, stack them, use them as shields...
Or when id software made Commander Keen, it took some wild imagination to come up with levels and ideas for that game.
id has a lot of imagination and I only drool at the possibilities, I wonder what their next game will be like after DOOM, since I'm sure they will have perfected the FPS genre! (Although a lot of us thought that when Quake 3 came out;)
I dunno, all I make is Kraft Dinner and easy stuff like that, and I've got the good ol' radio. I'm not a technological luddite, but I hardly see a purpose for this computer, and while my noodles are cooking it's not so hard to just go in the next room and catch a couple of glimpses of the TV. But do I really need to be in front of the media every minute of the day? Sometimes the kitchen's a nice break.
I kinda hate that because we don't get Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network in Canada, not even on satellite. I miss Nick At Night and Toonami! I know there's Global Prime but it's just not the same because there's no Spongebob! I don't know... are there any alternatives in Canada? By that I mean stations which have the same programming:)
Man, and I thought bullying ended in highschool. I can't believe there are immature people such as this working in corporations like Nickelodeon. Where does it end? Where do people finally learn about empathy, and open-mindedness?
It's no wonder that businesses are run the way they are, people like you push and shove your way to the top instead of working and earning their way to the top.
Actually, NexGen were the first to build a RISC CPU which decoded x86 instructions. Later on, AMD bought them. I don't know where Intel got the idea to start doing that...
Might be a bit off topic, but I wonder if MS got the idea for X-Box from Indrema? It's concievable.
For example, a good reason to have Indrema in every home was to have a Linux box where anyone could tool around and make their own software as well as enjoy & run commercial products.
Microsoft may have taken this thought and applied it to themselves... Wouldn't it be great for them to have a box in each living room running Microsoft products, able to expand in ways other than running games the way Indrema was going to? Perhaps they were shocked by the thought of having a Linux box in each living room doing those very things.
That's probably because they're going online with their PCs, of course PC online gaming will be popular to them!
What you don't notice are the other 80% of the population who don't go online and play FPSes with their PCs... Because why would they be talking to you online about FPSes?
Personally I've kinda been bored of FPSes since I finished DOOM II... online gaming was fun with Quake 2 for a while... but still, it's a fad and it's dying out.
Will ripping be optional? What if you only borrowed the CD from the library, or off a friend or something?
What if it's 70's smooth rock and you only wanted to use it to punish your children, but then it worked so well they made you swear never to play it again? And then they wanted to make sure it was gone so they melted the hard disk to get rid of data residue? And so now you're out one jukebox?
"Many of Electronic Arts' titles have been ported to both GameCube and Xbox and the first thing everyone seems to notice is that the slowdown problems that existed with the PS2 are now gone."
I've read the contrary, a review of SSX Tricky for the GameCube on IGN states the PS2 version of SSX Tricky was a lot faster and had better textures and an over-all clearer picture than the GameCube version. I wonder how he came to his conclusion? He never mentioned that, he assumed it was common knowledge. I didn't try the X-Box version of SSX Tricky as it wasn't out at the time (is it on X-Box at all?)
The PS2's Graphics Synthesizer is entirely too dependent on extreme parallelism in order to fill its 16 pixel pipelines which could be the cause of many of the slowdowns we've seen in games for the platform.
I don't think that's so evident, SEGA claims to have gotten Virtua Fighter 4 to do 63 million polygons/second on the PS2, and after seeing some screenshots running on the actual PS2 hardware, I don't doubt them one bit.
While the PS2's Emotion Engine has a lot of potential, developers have continuously stated that the platform is too difficult to program for.
Maybe so, Sony had recently released a tool that measures efficient use of the system, and apparently Gran Turismo 3 only uses 25% of the PS2's power (Official US PS Magazine Issue #52, Page 31). Games certainly will get better, and it's impressive to see how much growing room there is for developers. Developers mostly complained in the beginning that the PS2 was hard to program, but Sony's development kit wasn't complete. Once Sony had released debuggers for VU0 and VU1, things went a lot more smoothly and we were able to see games such as Metal Gear Solid 2. In any case, developers are doing pretty good considering the trouble they had with the Saturn which was also "plagued" by parallelism. I quote "plagued" because parallelism can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage.
I'm honestly not trying to flame Anand, but it seems like the way he drew his conclusions on the PS2 were sketchy at best:
Both the GameCube and Xbox are clearly superior to the PS2 in terms of the quality of the graphics seen in games available today. The transition from PS2 to GameCube and/or Xbox is a fairly large leap, but going between GameCube and Xbox is a bit less dramatic.
Statements like this appear opinionated to me... After playing the games I consider to be the top of the line in graphics for each system: Jak & Daxter (PS2), Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2), Gran Turismo 3 (PS2), Rogue Leader (GCN), Halo (X-Box), DOA3 (X-Box), Luigi's Mansion (GCN), Wave Race (GCN), Splashdown (PS2), I don't know how he can even say that. The games look as if they were all played on the same system, each game seemed pretty on-par with their peers.
Perhaps observations like these will be addressed in Part 3 of the "Hardware Behind the Consoles" series? Does anyone have any other suggestions on what to look into concerning the PS2 in Part 3?
Concerning the GameCube itself, though, the article was definitely worth the read. It explained the GameCube's hardware at exactly the technical level I was interested in, good job!
I actually have found myself having problems helping people with linux because I really can't see the problem from their point of view. It's hard for me to recognize what they will or won't know, and I tend to make assumptions, completely unintentionaly, about their knowledge base such that I end up just confusing them.
Good call, I've even had this problem while teaching people Windows myself. I skip over things that are so basic that I assume they know what I'm doing and don't bother to explain that part. Sometimes I go too fast for them to see how I got from point A to point B, because I figure something like "Open Control Panel" is enough for them.
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Sorry for bolding, but it just occurred to me how sad it is that we can't take the government's word at face value anymore. What is this, marketing? (Irony intended)
That seems totally feasable (unless they're written by Edith Bunker ;) ) Storeys on the other hand...
Using your own reasoning, it's because tapes were cheaper than CDs but provided the same content.
That got me thinking, maybe it should be made mandatory for voters to do so every month, otherwise there would be an imbalance of power between those who are lazy or unaware, and those who aren't.
Speaking of laziness, most people won't be bothered to research each bill, and could be mislead by crafty wordings. Maybe people won't realize the implications of the bill. This would lead voters to believe what mass media says about each bill in review, so we'd be back to square one ("Television decides for us, tells us what to think about the matter, and then we just shrug and go to work.")
This sounds like a great approach, but I wonder what could be done about those problems? Has anyone else thought of anything? However I must say that if this were to be implemented, it would probably be better than what the USA has now... It's a very good suggestion.
Living in another country, I don't understand. Where does the patriotism come from? Where I live, we're not really brought up with a great sense of pride for our country, we just accept it as the place in which we live, from a purely objective point of view. In USA, it seems different... It seems as if every citizen has a great sense of pride for their country, and even politicians' advertisements are seen upon the clichéd US flag backdrop. Things are touted as "all american" or "america's #1," and people wear their flag as if it was a medal for doing something exceptional.
It's just not very common in my culture... and I'm not sure if that's because I'm a cultural recluse or what! At least, I don't think I am. I live in Montreal, Canada, btw. Does anyone else in Canada feel the same? Sure, I have a little smile when I see a Canadian band is topping the charts, but nothing other than that really...
I never wanted that to happen again so I bought an IBM Deskstar, which advertised vibration suppression and all sorts of other junk. I've begun to WANT to pay more simply because my data is that valuable to me. Unfortunately this announcement came at a time when I had discovered how important that was. Perhaps if they stressed data integrity in advertisements...
I always thought that the move to .NET was so that MS could make a platform dedicated to the CLR, and I'm assuming that's what the X-Box 2 will be...
Is it due to field rendering that the PS2 has a flickery look to its graphics? Then again, I also noticed that the GameCube and X-Box have such a look. I began thinking it was because these consoles used a higher resolution than the PSX.
When you play the PSX on TV, it appears as if interlacing doesn't occur, we see scanlines, so I figure they are drawing only half the lines. When you play PS2 on TV, interlacing does show up, and instead of scanlines more lines of resolution are drawn, so I thought the flickering was due to interlacing.
However, the Dreamcast doesn't have a flickery look to its graphics even though it does draw in a high resolution.
Since I don't think the X-Box and the GameCube render each field seperately, it doesn't appear that field rendering seems to be the cause of flickering, but I'm not sure.
It would be great (read: healthy) competition for Microsoft, it would offer an alternative just for the sake of having one, it would impress us geeks. But there's also benefits for Apple, they'd have more money coming in, a larger consumer base, and a much bigger community. It would also convince those who stay away from the high prices of Apple hardware (relative to PC, I mean) to give Apple a chance.
Count me in!
For example, I'd rather watch Futurama than Temptation Island 2 (I'd even rather watch it than the Simpsons sometimes!)
At least a promise of continuing Futurama after The Simpsons is gone would be good...
Personally I'd like to see them do it, I'm sure they could do a great job. Who knows, maybe they have ideas nobody else ever thought of and could refine the genre. It's not like we have many similar games on the PC, so it would open up a whole new market on the PC!
Remember when they were talking about Quake coming out, and the battles were supposed to be akin to Virtua Fighter? That would be really wild! And you could supposedly pick up bodies, stack them, use them as shields...
Or when id software made Commander Keen, it took some wild imagination to come up with levels and ideas for that game.
id has a lot of imagination and I only drool at the possibilities, I wonder what their next game will be like after DOOM, since I'm sure they will have perfected the FPS genre! (Although a lot of us thought that when Quake 3 came out ;)
I'd also like to point out that none of my past posts were rated "Troll"...
I hope you notice the irony... anyway how is that a troll?
I dunno, all I make is Kraft Dinner and easy stuff like that, and I've got the good ol' radio. I'm not a technological luddite, but I hardly see a purpose for this computer, and while my noodles are cooking it's not so hard to just go in the next room and catch a couple of glimpses of the TV. But do I really need to be in front of the media every minute of the day? Sometimes the kitchen's a nice break.
I kinda hate that because we don't get Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network in Canada, not even on satellite. I miss Nick At Night and Toonami! I know there's Global Prime but it's just not the same because there's no Spongebob! I don't know... are there any alternatives in Canada? By that I mean stations which have the same programming :)
It's no wonder that businesses are run the way they are, people like you push and shove your way to the top instead of working and earning their way to the top.
Unfortunately it won't work on my PlayStation 2 or Toshiba DVD player... :/
Actually, NexGen were the first to build a RISC CPU which decoded x86 instructions. Later on, AMD bought them. I don't know where Intel got the idea to start doing that...
For example, a good reason to have Indrema in every home was to have a Linux box where anyone could tool around and make their own software as well as enjoy & run commercial products.
Microsoft may have taken this thought and applied it to themselves... Wouldn't it be great for them to have a box in each living room running Microsoft products, able to expand in ways other than running games the way Indrema was going to? Perhaps they were shocked by the thought of having a Linux box in each living room doing those very things.
What you don't notice are the other 80% of the population who don't go online and play FPSes with their PCs... Because why would they be talking to you online about FPSes?
Personally I've kinda been bored of FPSes since I finished DOOM II... online gaming was fun with Quake 2 for a while... but still, it's a fad and it's dying out.
Cheers! Happy new year!
Will ripping be optional? What if you only borrowed the CD from the library, or off a friend or something?
What if it's 70's smooth rock and you only wanted to use it to punish your children, but then it worked so well they made you swear never to play it again? And then they wanted to make sure it was gone so they melted the hard disk to get rid of data residue? And so now you're out one jukebox?
I've read the contrary, a review of SSX Tricky for the GameCube on IGN states the PS2 version of SSX Tricky was a lot faster and had better textures and an over-all clearer picture than the GameCube version. I wonder how he came to his conclusion? He never mentioned that, he assumed it was common knowledge. I didn't try the X-Box version of SSX Tricky as it wasn't out at the time (is it on X-Box at all?)
The PS2's Graphics Synthesizer is entirely too dependent on extreme parallelism in order to fill its 16 pixel pipelines which could be the cause of many of the slowdowns we've seen in games for the platform.
I don't think that's so evident, SEGA claims to have gotten Virtua Fighter 4 to do 63 million polygons/second on the PS2, and after seeing some screenshots running on the actual PS2 hardware, I don't doubt them one bit.
While the PS2's Emotion Engine has a lot of potential, developers have continuously stated that the platform is too difficult to program for.
Maybe so, Sony had recently released a tool that measures efficient use of the system, and apparently Gran Turismo 3 only uses 25% of the PS2's power (Official US PS Magazine Issue #52, Page 31). Games certainly will get better, and it's impressive to see how much growing room there is for developers. Developers mostly complained in the beginning that the PS2 was hard to program, but Sony's development kit wasn't complete. Once Sony had released debuggers for VU0 and VU1, things went a lot more smoothly and we were able to see games such as Metal Gear Solid 2. In any case, developers are doing pretty good considering the trouble they had with the Saturn which was also "plagued" by parallelism. I quote "plagued" because parallelism can be an advantage as well as a disadvantage.
I'm honestly not trying to flame Anand, but it seems like the way he drew his conclusions on the PS2 were sketchy at best:
Both the GameCube and Xbox are clearly superior to the PS2 in terms of the quality of the graphics seen in games available today. The transition from PS2 to GameCube and/or Xbox is a fairly large leap, but going between GameCube and Xbox is a bit less dramatic.
Statements like this appear opinionated to me... After playing the games I consider to be the top of the line in graphics for each system: Jak & Daxter (PS2), Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2), Gran Turismo 3 (PS2), Rogue Leader (GCN), Halo (X-Box), DOA3 (X-Box), Luigi's Mansion (GCN), Wave Race (GCN), Splashdown (PS2), I don't know how he can even say that. The games look as if they were all played on the same system, each game seemed pretty on-par with their peers.
Perhaps observations like these will be addressed in Part 3 of the "Hardware Behind the Consoles" series? Does anyone have any other suggestions on what to look into concerning the PS2 in Part 3?
Concerning the GameCube itself, though, the article was definitely worth the read. It explained the GameCube's hardware at exactly the technical level I was interested in, good job!
Good call, I've even had this problem while teaching people Windows myself. I skip over things that are so basic that I assume they know what I'm doing and don't bother to explain that part. Sometimes I go too fast for them to see how I got from point A to point B, because I figure something like "Open Control Panel" is enough for them.