Wow! I thought the community might struggle to follow last week's masterpiece, but this chap has produced a truly worthy successor. It's humbling to see such a master at work.
Still a few mods short of the coveted 'full-house' but there's still time. Would any moderators care to fill the gaps on his scorecard?
-- "Fruity smells are what I like" - Debbie Gibson
The story had little in the way of explainations. How on earth could the OS hobble a CD-ripper like that? All the OS would see is an application writing a few million bits to a file.
I enjoy/. interviews because they're people I haven't heard from before, and whose opinion's I wouldn't ordinarily come across.
It's not like there's a shortage of interviews with games developers out there. I can't believe one of the followup posters *still* hasn't heard enough from Peter Molyneux.
Very well done indeed. Very sharp, all too believable and yet quite fantastically silly at the same time. The baffled array of moderations is a tribute to your truly exquisite sense of satire. I look forward to your next work with great anticipation.
the income from ads will be used to reduce
the price to the consumer...
yeah.
sure. Your attitude might be justified if it were down to goodwill on the part of publishers, but it isn't; it's a question of market forces. The games industry isn't a monopoly or a cartel, you know. A publisher that didn't pass on the savings would be at a disadvantage to one that did.
I never got the point of invasive ads at all; I get very annoyed at being interrupted, and end up associating frustration and irritation with the product in question.
Done well, product placement can be pretty good though. For a nice example see Syndicate Wars - it had clips of 'Manga Video' movies playing on billboards, and the overall effect was excellent, very Blade Runner-esque. Made me want to buy the videos advertised too.
Yes, Sony has changed position by pushing the hardware first and software second, but Cringely doesn't mention that this is part of a very well-thought-out strategy. Sell enough consoles and developers will have no choice but to write games for it.
Every game that comes out for it will be ported right over to the pc and windows, no wait time since the xbox uses directx.
Not true at all. Most games are going to make extensive use of GeForce3-specific functionality. Porting such engines to the PC means generalising them so they can run on 3D hardware with much more limited features, this is not at all a simple matter.
Umm, this post is somewhat at odds with what I understood SOAP to be. Isn't it an open standard?
There's a spec here, and it certainly doesn't appear to be 'single vendor' as you put it (see here)
Q: Am I seriously missing something here?
Get the HDD+ethernet card (out soon), and the hardware would be capable of the same things as a regular PC.
The CPU is good, the graphics hardware could do a pretty sweet OpenGL (if you overlook the criminally limited blendmodes), it's got a DVD drive, firewire, USB and it comes in a nice box with pretty blinkenlights.
What's more, Sony heavily subsidises the hardware.
Sony would be *paying* you to use Linux; have you no sense of irony, man?
Not sure about the 'innovation' part either.
They innovated once, a decade ago, then sat around looking pleased with themselves for 10 years while Mr. Gates did an end-run around them.
I guess Apple is finally giving up and falling in line with the rest of the industry when it comes to shipping a screwed up OS with missing features
Your joking, right? You don't consider multiprocessing, preemptive multitasking and memory-protection to be features? In my book, an OS lacking *all 3* of these features (eg MacOS) is the textbook definition of 'screwed up', as you put it.
-- The only thing holding MacOS together is all the bugs holding hands
Slashdot Mirror
Still a few mods short of the coveted 'full-house' but there's still time. Would any moderators care to fill the gaps on his scorecard?
-- "Fruity smells are what I like" - Debbie Gibson
The original short story is 'Super Toys Last all Summer Long' and it's by Brian Aldiss, not Asimov.
The story had little in the way of explainations. How on earth could the OS hobble a CD-ripper like that? All the OS would see is an application writing a few million bits to a file.
I enjoy /. interviews because they're people I haven't heard from before, and whose opinion's I wouldn't ordinarily come across.
It's not like there's a shortage of interviews with games developers out there. I can't believe one of the followup posters *still* hasn't heard enough from Peter Molyneux.
Very well done indeed. Very sharp, all too believable and yet quite fantastically silly at the same time. The baffled array of moderations is a tribute to your truly exquisite sense of satire. I look forward to your next work with great anticipation.
Request for new moderation category:
-1, Non-sequitur
the income from ads will be used to reduce the price to the consumer...
yeah.
sure.
Your attitude might be justified if it were down to goodwill on the part of publishers, but it isn't; it's a question of market forces. The games industry isn't a monopoly or a cartel, you know. A publisher that didn't pass on the savings would be at a disadvantage to one that did.
I never got the point of invasive ads at all; I get very annoyed at being interrupted, and end up associating frustration and irritation with the product in question.
Done well, product placement can be pretty good though. For a nice example see Syndicate Wars - it had clips of 'Manga Video' movies playing on billboards, and the overall effect was excellent, very Blade Runner-esque. Made me want to buy the videos advertised too.
Go read Snowcrash. This is Lurpak, dude.
I thought that Brazil was a glaring omission; >15 years old, and still 100 times more relevant than crap like The Net and Hackers.
Incidentally, is Tron really 'hand-painted' as the article asserts? I thought it was B&W footage over proto-CG.
Yes, Sony has changed position by pushing the hardware first and software second, but Cringely doesn't mention that this is part of a very well-thought-out strategy. Sell enough consoles and developers will have no choice but to write games for it.
Every game that comes out for it will be ported right over to the pc and windows, no wait time since the xbox uses directx.
Not true at all. Most games are going to make extensive use of GeForce3-specific functionality. Porting such engines to the PC means generalising them so they can run on 3D hardware with much more limited features, this is not at all a simple matter.
mistakes are directly purportional to dead men
Man down! Man down!
Indeed.
If you don't play nice with other people, soon they won't play with you at all.
Please don't feed the trolls.
Umm, this post is somewhat at odds with what I understood SOAP to be. Isn't it an open standard? There's a spec here, and it certainly doesn't appear to be 'single vendor' as you put it (see here)
Q: Am I seriously missing something here?
Get the HDD+ethernet card (out soon), and the hardware would be capable of the same things as a regular PC.
The CPU is good, the graphics hardware could do a pretty sweet OpenGL (if you overlook the criminally limited blendmodes), it's got a DVD drive, firewire, USB and it comes in a nice box with pretty blinkenlights.
What's more, Sony heavily subsidises the hardware.
Sony would be *paying* you to use Linux; have you no sense of irony, man?
Playstation2 is *kind of* 64bit:
sizeof(int)==4
sizeof(long)==8
sizeof(void*)==4 (IIRC)
Not sure about the 'innovation' part either.
They innovated once, a decade ago, then sat around looking pleased with themselves for 10 years while Mr. Gates did an end-run around them.
I guess Apple is finally giving up and falling in line with the rest of the industry when it comes to shipping a screwed up OS with missing features
Your joking, right? You don't consider multiprocessing, preemptive multitasking and memory-protection to be features? In my book, an OS lacking *all 3* of these features (eg MacOS) is the textbook definition of 'screwed up', as you put it.
-- The only thing holding MacOS together is all the bugs holding hands
They've really dug themselves a hole with the X thing, what with there being no Roman numeral for zero.
Your l33t r3n/\m1NG sk1llZ will make all your s0nGz impossible for others to locate, somewhat defeating the whole point of Napster.
Or better yet, some Limp Biscuit.
Does that mean you want motorcycles banned?