i used 2 different machines, intel and amd, with 3 or 4 cards from 5200 to 440mx and a 6600, all seem to crash randomly with the nvidia driver:) and it is up to today (well 2 months ago)
Depends on two things : the XOrg version and the binary driver. But I don't use Xinerama. Anyway, none of my Linux machines ever crash anymore with the binary drivers (I still would prefer free drivers).
so my only point is: being a formal and self educated linux/unix admin for years, i still find that it is a lot easier to slap a $200 dvd player on the shelf. it is 480p, it is silent, it never crashed, and if i feed fresh dogpoo into it, it will play it without downloading a codec. or dumping core....
I agree. Except that my MPlayer never downloaded codecs, and the only times it did a thing similar to dumping core is with broken files that couldn't even start playing on anything else.
i guess i just got old, and got sick of messing around for half an hour to play a movie, i just want to press the control of the remote for the AMP, the projector, and the DVD player and i do not want to figure out why something is just not the right way...
Exactly my take too. Except I had a completely different experience : I messed sometimes for hours with Windows to make it work, when Windows was connected to my rear projector, even though it was working the day before. And it still couldn't play every file. And the wife was very unhappy. Then, Geexbox saved me all these troubles, but still could not play everything. Now, I have two machines that can play everything I throw at them : my MythTV Media Center and my main box. The fact is that my wife uses the Media Center way more than me. It just works and record things she asked for. Today again, she was surprised and pleased to see the box recorded a show that restarted, which was stopped during the summer vacations. She wasn't even aware of it.
and yes, i use mplayer once in a while, but no, i prefer using my windows machine for ANY media file, just for the sake of the ignorent webdesigners, that sometimes make it totally impossible to use and watch a media file in a browser anything other than IE... other than that: only to look into videos and/or to rip them if i cannot watch them on time before i have to return them....
All the family uses MPlayer, knowing it or not, and none ever had one problem playing any media file.
btw i might be wrong, but i think subtitles are in text format on dvd's too, but i might be wrong on them... maybe i am not that interested in that to even make a search on it:)
Subtitles on DVD are images, they never were text. To dump them, you actually have to do OCR.
But that still does not make the CCS problem go away, that I have experienced just by randomly inserting 1 out of 50 discs into my linux machine (where I many times peek into movies BTW, so I do not have to turn on the projector and all the sound devices)....
You clearly misunderstood the problem, as the code you're talking about is an improvement upon the one used to dump every DVD you see on illegal networks. I still have to find one of these DVD that could not be dumped due to CSS (not CCS) error. That's just stupid, as once you know how to crack it, it just can't fail, unless you have hardware issues (scratched DVD for example).
so you can throw PEBKAC and all the insults, if using linux for that was an easier solution i would do that...
Linux is an easier solution, as that's what I use since months at home for all the family, and I'm not the only one. It just works.
Can you use a HDTV output of an NVIDIA card, without using the NON-binary driver of Xorg ? I do not know, but while the binary driver is so crappy, that I had to put a matrix450 back into my wirk machine to restore system stability, I would say: i do not think so.
The driver is in far better shape since months too. It won't crash anymore for playing videos and watching TV at least, and even playing emulated games. However, I've seen a lot of box freeze, but that was due to motherboard chipset problems (AGP setting too high) or the graphic card overheating.
You know that the binary driver still does not allow safe suspend and hybernation, and is super unstable when using xinerama ?
Which is not a problem for a Media Center, at least using MythTV, it's not a problem. Unless your motherboard doesn't support wakeup, which I doubt. Safe suspend and hybernation highly depends on your components, and it's rarely safe. I wouldn't trust them on a media center.
I know it rocks, and can do a lot, but I still haven't found a solution, that makes me go : wow, I must run that as my media player, it supports EVERYTHING I want, and it is super stable.
No luck ! When I finished my MythTV setup, I actually went : WOW, it does even MORE than I wanted and is super stable ! The thing just tags along since months. It never failed me once.
the NVIDIA driver just dumps core, and crashes my card so bad, no XDM/KDM/GDM restart is possible, and have to restart the whole crap...
This happened to me when I finished. As I trust Linux 100 % (I use it since 2001, and it never failed me once, each time I have such problems, that's an hardware problem), I searched a hardware problem. I just lowered the AGP rate setting in the BIOS and it never froze again. I have a fanless 5200 card. Perhaps you have the same problem. Again, the thing never failed once in months of intensive usage : everything is transcoded to XVid.
little small problems, that I would have tolerated 5 years ago when I just wanted to use Linux for EVERYTHING just as you now, but now I better focus on whatever gives the best solution, and leave the hacking for projects I enjoy after all, not make my life more miserable, when I just want to lay back, press the button and watch a movie WITH DTS, IN HDTV, correct subtitles, and aspect ratio.....
Heh, I have the same state of mind, and wanted the same thing as you. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything that worked out of the box (no Knoppmyth, no nothing). As I have my own automated Linux from scratch that I trust 100 %, I finally decided to lose these 20 hours compiling everything. So I can understand you couldn't make it work with pre made distros.
What counts with your drives is not sequential rate at all. Access time is what counts. I use a very old 4 GB SCSI drive as swap (half of it is swap, I have 1 GB of memory). I tried to use swap on my latest SATA drive, and the system instantly felt more sluggish. The old SCSI drive just trounces the SATA drive, and I'm sure the sequential rate of the SATA drive is far higher, but the access time of the old SCSI drive is far better : I just don't notice it when it's swapping !
And what's this BS about swapping in/out a large job ? What kind of large job would you use on a PC with PATA disks ? J2EE jobs ? Huge Mono jobs ? I have a hard time seeing the need for 20 MB/s sequential rate even if your data was sequentially written in your swap file, which I'm sure they aren't. Anyway, like I said, my very old SCSI drive do better than the latest SATA drives, except perhaps Raptors, which I haven't tested, but they have a better access time than ordinary SATA drives.
Yes, swap is useful in any situation when you don't know if you'll have enough RAM to run everything. And RAM can be so "cheap" as you say, but disk is still far cheaper.
With swap, you also have some way to find out that you're running out of memory. You can monitor it, and you can also sometimes see a performance decrease (if it's a desktop), though you'll probably not notice it with SCSI disks. But you still have the monitor, right ?
Tell me exactly how your pathological problem is any indication of usefulness of swap ?
This is plain stupid. With or without swap, you would still leak that memory, and your OS would still be at risk. The most useful thing to do would have been to limit the max amount of memory for each process, or just for the one causing these leaks.
Right now, it's on servers, and virtually nobody uses it as a desktop machine outside of uber-geeks and a few of their family
Where did you take your numbers ? Are you talking about some USA region ? You clearly have no clue or have an agenda against Linux. Your comment is pure flamebait with nothing to back it up.
That number is so small that any hardware CEO that decides to spend any significant amount of money on the Linux market should be fired
And yet, a lot of hardware manufacturers provide FOSS drivers for Linux. The last device I bought (from a french company called Devolo, which makes CPL products) even came with free drivers for Linux and how to install them.
You're not going to get that kind of market share until it's easy to use (I put a DVD movie in the drive, and it plays)
Actually, the trolls like you are clearly the biggest problem. You just don't put a DVD movie in the drive and it works on Windows. Even if that was true, consumer oriented commercial distros already do that too. This is not the problem at all. The problem is just bigots like ESR vying for attention, that talk about an highly unlikely iPod generation consumer that knows how to install a WiFi network. Or a grandma installing a networked printer. Same stupid example.
Personally, I think that Linux will always be relegated to geeks and hobbysists and geek hobbyists
Your'e entitled to your opinion.
I don't see it solving any significant problems that Windows has, because Windows is so mature at this point
Yeah right. You trolls are so obvious. So I guess all he people that migrated to Linux when I said I was not supporting their Windows anymore but only Linux, are nuts ? Windows has magically solved all its virus and insecurity problems overnight ? Programs to do anything on Windows are now gratis and easy to find ? You mean there's a Windows somewhere that now can do what my Linux Media Center can do ? And that can do what my current workstation can do for the entire family ? The browser or the mail client on Windows aren't even on par with what I use now, not even talking about the DE ! Pure flamebait again.
There's very little reason for the average person to use it, other than saving a hundred bucks
What ? You mean the average person know how and finds it easy to pirate all these softwares without which Windows is utterly useless ? Last time I checked (yesterday), Windows was still a mess to deal with audio/video codecs, photo management and edition. Last time I checked (2 years ago), the fraction of what I do that you could do on Windows cost in the 30,000 , and the desktop oriented things cost in the 4500 . I'm not counting the Media Center, there's just nothing on Windows or in the consumer land that can do everything it does now. So where did you get your hundred bucks ? Are you telling us that you're a pirate and that pirated software is easy to handle for an average user ?
Most sane people aren't going to put themselves through that for $100, and if they do, then they are the kind of people who wouldn't shovel out a few hundred bucks for a new video card, anyway
What ? You're telling me people that don't want to shovel out a few hundred bucks for a new video card are a tiny percent of sane people ? You need a reality check : PC gamers are not the majority of desktop users, far from it. They're not even a majority of gamers (when you count console gamers).
I really don't care who wins. Competition is a good thing because it forces companies to innovate, increase quality, or reduce prices
Huh ? So then you should care who wins, and this should be Nintendo. Unless you have no understanding of the two companies that actually : - don't innovate - don't increase quality - don't reduce prices
With no competition their next console could be like the VirtualBoy
With no competition, their next console could be like the DS Lite. Anyway, what's count is the games, not the console.
I hope all the companies do well and continue to bring us better things at a competitive price
While the nerd crowd here can look at the Wii (uh, that name...) and be pleased with the innovative interface, the low price, the focus on gameplay over graphics and yes, substance... this isn't how the marketing will flow
OK. So the stage is set : Slashdot = nerds, their opinion has no value. This comes from someone who feels compelled to express an opinion about the name of a console. And someone that believe only nerds thinks innovative interface, low price, focus on gameplay over graphics, are good things. I guess you're part of those that predicted that the PSP would mop the floor with the DS...
Microsoft will counter, having anticipated this for years, and probably roll out their own add-on HD drive as well - more marketing insanity to follow
Wow ! So now, non-nerds people will be amazed by a thing called HD in a console that was out one year before, and that they weren't even aware of ?
Nintendo will of course do their own marketing push, but don't be surprised if you hate the approach they take
I'm sure I won't. I never was actually.
Big N is after 'the rest of us', the non-gamer, and will appropriately tailor their messaging to this end. That means, more girls, more moms, more people who do not typically play video games. Yes, there will be Metroid and a few others to keep the original fans happy. But it will not be the juggernaut that Sony and MS will unleash
You seem to have problem thinking that these games for non-gamers can appeal to gamers too. The DS was not a reality check enough to you I guess.
the people who put it there are you guys, buying the kind of games you like. That's where most of the money is
The DS just proved you are wrong. The money is everywhere, but you have to go and take it. The DS proves most of the money for games is NOT on hardcore gamers. Actually, the Sims proved it too, but you have a problem admitting hardcore 3D USA gamers are a minority. People who bought Super Mario Bros are what put the game industry there, not people playing Halo.
Nintendo is gambling big time with this new machine
Like with the DS. Not taking risks won't make you go anywhere.
Sony and Microsoft are taking the safe route, MS the safest of all
That must be why PS2 is outselling XBox360 by 25+ times in Japan today. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the Wii and PS3 outsell the total number of XBox360 when they launch in Japan, in 2 months time.
It may not make for great headlines to the crusty gamer crowd here who appreciates Nintendo's willingness to break the mold, but for general 'consumption' I acutally tend to agree with the market analysis of FTA
To me, the XBox360 is already a failure. I think most of the buyers of XBox360 have bought it already. People don't wait till the other products are out to buy, or that means they're actually waiting for the new products. When I see the number of people buying PS2 instead of XBox360 in Japan, and knowing most of the XBox360 buyers live in the USA, I have a very hard time believing the XBox360 will have even 30 % of the market. As for the PS3, I don't know.
When you surround yourself with people who think exactly like you, it's hard to see that other people think differently
I think this applies mainly to yourself.
It gives the illusion that everybody out there is just like you and will be buying a Wii first. This is not true. Nintendo still has the kiddy image
This is not true at all. If we believed what you're saying, that would mean Nintendo DS sells poorly. It still is outselling the PSP (sells 3 times more) in Japan to this day. And it's the same everywhere, perhaps not by 3 times as much, but still outselling everything. Or perhaps the kiddy image is what people want ? And no, this is not a Slashdot opinion, these are hard facts.
The PS3 will be seen as the more mature console and will thus appeal to the teen/early 20s crowd
Cool, now what makes you believe the Wii won't do the same ?
It is funny to read slashdot posts that are already claiming victory for the Wii when it isn't out yet
It is funny to you. To me, it was funny seeing people claiming victory for a piece of hardware with better polygons/s, with better resolutions,... Seems like all these people forgot it's about gameplay, not hardware. The Wii excitement is about gameplay, which I think is a good thing.
Wait until the bugs have been ironed out. Wait until a price drop...then decide what I will purchase. It seems like most people on here are terrible consumers...that drool over things that don't exist yet
This just shows you have absolutely no idea what Nintendo is, and how great consumer oriented products they always did, with great support.
While Nintendo does have a good reputation, they have made plenty of stupid mistakes in the past to warrant caution
These mistakes weren't on the consumer side though, and hurt mainly themselves. So you're wrong on this one. And keep in mind that the Nintendo home (not handheld) consoles always were the most difficult to crack games on, so most Nintendo home customers are true customers, not people buying the hardware and pirating hundreds of games.
I always find it interesting when people predict the Wii's success at this stage in the game. Most people were rather down on the DS when it was first announced ("What a gimmick...", etc.), what makes us so sure, now, that the we'll be any better at predicting the success of the Wii?
Perhaps because the people like me, who were never down on the DS, and rather said it would probably be a great success, also see the Wii as a probable great success. You see, I saw first hand that the DS and the Gamecube were really appealing, specially when your wife starts playing them more than yourself, and even asks you to come and play some multiplayer games. And the "most people" you talk about were actually USA heavy 3D/FPS gamers oriented.
Why would you want to jump through the hoops to get DS homebrew working when you can get a faster handheld designed specifically for homebrew, the GP2X? 200MHz CPU with 200MHz second core, 64MB of RAM, SD slot takes up to 4GB of storage, runs Linux. What more could you want?
What more ? Let me see : - touchscreen - dual screen - microphone - protected screen - better price - quality (hard to break, good lit screen) - smaller - being able to play new innovative games - have a high chance of being compatible with one home console and games for this console (the Wii)
Is this enough ?
"A touchscreen" you say? Just get a PDA. Any idiot can develop WinCE applciations, and anyone with half a brain can install Linux on it to run craploads of OSS games and apps.
But I have all that on my DS, why on earth would I go with 2 items, when 1 is cheaper and better ?
Because people aren't aware of this or don't want to jump through the hoops, whereas they already have a DS
These are only a few of the reasons actually.
Don't trivialize the importance of marketing, i.e., letting people know your product actually exists. How many consumers have a DS? How many have a GP2X? How many have heard of the DS? The GP2X?
Which company makes the DS ? Which makes the GP2X ? Do you really think the company making the GP2X has as much marketing money as Nintendo ? What makes you believe the people making the GP2X trivialize the importance of marketing ?
When the open source community understands the importance of actually *reaching* people, and bringing the products *to* them, they will have a better understanding of why so few home users use Linux-based OS's or FireFox, or OpenOffice
You're just a stupid troll. How come "open source community" came into this discussion, are you actually believing "GP2X = open source community" ? You also believe that the community is not reaching to people and bringing the products to them ? FYI the open source community understands pretty well what prevents home users access to "Linux-based OS's or FireFox, or OpenOffice" (like preventing any OS to be preinstalled on new computers), and no, that's not because they're not trying, that's all because of one company. Nintendo is not behaving like this evil company at all, but GP2X just doesn't have the money, the features, the price, the quality, and the brand of Nintendo handheld. Your cheap shots at FOSS community are just pathetic.
There is a (unfortunately) Win only utility that comes with the M3 for loading roms to the M3
This is irrelevant, as, like explained in the manual, you can just put your ROM file on the M3, and most will work. If it doesn't work, you can just pick the right patch file found on the CD, and put it in the right directory. So the Win only app is more convenient, but you can actually do it by hand, or just launch the app through Wine on Linux.
Also, that document is a complete lie. I don't care that it's in the kernel tree. There's lots of wrong stuff in there
BS, the document is not a lie, the document provides an explanation. An explanation can be false, it's still not a lie, just a bad explanation. And sorry, but I think GKH has way more authority than you on what is right or wrong in this explanation, as he did lots of the drivers in the kernel.
A driver does not have to be in the tree to be stable, running driver, and the driver being in the kernel tree doesn't mean that it is either stable or running
Yeah right. Meanwhile, real life shows us that what you describe is exceptions rather than a rule. The driver being in the kernel means you can bug the Linux kernel devs to make it work with each new release of the kernel (hence stable). The driver not being in the kernel means they won't do anything about it, and you have no way of knowing if the driver will work or not. The basic premise is that the maintainer of a driver would support his driver in the Linux kernel tree.
And I should know, as I have written multiple closed-source Linux device drivers, two of which have open-source versions in the kernel that have at various times either not worked, or worked poorly, and both of which perform signifigantly worse than the closed version
Now I wonder how you can have the guts to write that. So you basically admit that you do closed drivers that have equivalent Free Software ones, though they used to be worse in Free Software version. And then you complain about the unstable API document and want to be taken seriously ? But you know what, I'd rather praise the guys who made the FOSS drivers. Of course they were worse at first, but now, we have correct free drivers, and that's way better than being stuck with hope of endless support for the closed ones. Support that you say is better, but we have no way to know if that's even true.
Go actually read that document. The argument it makes is that a stable kernel/driver API is a bad idea because the kernel/driver API is unstable. It's a circular argument
BS, where is the circular argument ? It explains quite well why the kernel/driver API is unstable, and no, it's not because "stable kernel/driver API is a bad idea", which would make a circular argument. Go actually read the document.
One, there isn't enough agreement amongst the diversity of kernel developers to ever come up with a stable API
BS, the main reason is discussed in the document, and history has shown the document is right.
two, there is no dicipline amongst the people in charge to maintain that stability even if a consensus was reached, and three, there are some who would like to keep the interface unstable merely to keep this argument for open source drivers valid
What you say is just a pure troll. The discipline is to make the kernel work better no matter what, and to not get stuck by in-kernel stable interface, which you see as an issue. You just can't accept that, that's your main issue.
People who make Open Source never ask such question, so perhaps MS should make their engineers think of why this is so, instead of asking others. They are the company with lots of great minds, aren't they ? Is this question even relevant at all ?
That's part of the reason that media centers are useless : they just can't play all video and audio codecs. Heck, only my man PC MPlayer could play everything (even HD content with my old Athlon MP 2200+). So when wife saw the file worked on the main PC, and then tried to watch it on the big screen in the living room, it would not work. That's why I bought a Shuttle at first : to just launch GeexBox and play everyhting. Now I've installed MythTV on it. Since I've installed my MythTV media center, which uses MPlayer and plays everthing, the KiSS is never used anymore.
let's explore why Media PCs are not a popular hardware buy
No need to, it's pretty simple actually : no one of them has all the necessary features, thus justifying the price, and they all got useless features too.
First of all, you need hardware aside from the PC itself for a media experience
This is irrelevant. My wife is crazy about the media center I built, and would be as much crazy about it on a small TV set, especially since we're still using SD. She actually told me the image quality was worse on the media center. One week later, she was using the beast like mad without any complaint about its quality. My set is a 52" rear projection TV, so it's not digital (using SVideo, that's why the quality was not the same), and the media PC is still extremely useful.
a decent Media PC (running Windows), needs slightly more expensive hardware than a standard budget PC. Basically, you are bulding a pimped out gamer's machine, as no one is going to buy a Media PC to "check their email." They'd get a budget PC
So Windows is the big problem here. My media PC running MythTV is nothing like a pimped out gamer's machine. It's a Shuttle box with an Athlon 1800+ and a NVidia FX5200 card with 768 MB RAM (the swap is NEVER touched by the OS, 512 would be enough). Of course that's for SD. It would be just enough to play HD. When I go HD, well, I'll have to go Dual Core, but that's because there's a high possibility it will be the best peformance/price solution for playing HD. That's also because on Linux, the closed graphic drivers have no support for H264 acceleration.
People are going to want to play games, and impress their friends. And you need that video input/output functionality
You are not going to play PC games in the living room, you are going to play games designed for that, which means console type games. My MythTV setup has numerous console games and things like DDR games, with USB adapters for a mat and console joypads. One of the thing I can't understand, is the keyboard in media center sold. This makes no sense, people don't want complicated things like that in their living room, they just want a remote or a simple device (mat, joypads,...). Nothing should require typing or using a mouse (hence no PC type games). You're not going to impress anyone with your PC games that need powerful video cards. Putting 2-4 people around my MythTV box is always a success.
Next, sound card. Whatever Turtlebeach or Soundblaster offer from idrange on upwards (need something nice to drive those 6 speakers, and to provide 3D audio without taxing the processor)
If you don't have a receiver, don't use 5.1 sound ! The cheap embedded card is enough for AC3 or DTS passthrough SPDIF, and the 2.0 Dolby surround sound. No need to have an expensive card at all.
Keyboard/Mouse-> Logitech or MS, Wireless (bluetooth, more range), USB
That I can't understand, keyboard and mouse are not made for the living room. I removed them long ago.
Case -> something stylish. Common failing here, most Media PC cases are horrible to look at, work with, or upgrade. Something slick, that is easily upgradeable, but easy to work with
My Shuttle is perfect on top of one of the speakers.
Add all this up, and you have a fairly expensive PC. Sure, you could swap in cheaper components, or argue that you could get by with some of the onboard stuff, but this is a MediaPC, something that is a PC that works well with Media. And multimedia traditionally requires both horsepower and space
That's not entirely true on Linux. Horsepower is useful to play HD content, that's true, but mostly support is a necessity. With support for acceleration in the driver, my Athlon 1800+ could play HD content. Horsepower is also useful for encoding time, as my MythTV is setup to reencode all the video (except live ones) to Xvid (I use SD, it would be H264 for HD). This saves a lot of space
They have admitted that the last generation or two they have lacked diversity
Huh ? When did they admit that ? That's just not true. They just alienated 3rd parties, believeing they would follow nonetheless, not the same thing at all. The first big they lost was Squaresoft and FFVII : big mistake.
they are trying to increase the diversity of titles through both new internal projects and by actively courting 3rd parties (something they failed to do with the last two generations)
Again that's not true, Nintendo always diversified. Their own titles were just not enough. The low number of titles was the problem.
that's a handheld and almost entirely a different market and one Nintendo has ALWAYS dominated
Which was the case with the NES and the SNES too. So this point is plain wrong. When the PSP arrived, lots of people predicted the loss of Nintendo, based on the success of the Playstation, I found this strange, and rightfully so, as they were all wrong. Nintendo actually took risks with their handheld to improve the experience, you just failed to notice that.
Nintendo seems to be forming themselves an excellent position in terms of diversity
Seems to ? What an understatement !
Regardless, this looks like a generation where there may not actually be one dominant player and the market may actually be fairly well spread out among the Big Three
To me, that seems like wishful thinking from american audience. There is no big three to start with. XBox 360 was selling as much or less than Gamecube in Japan (that means very little), and PS2 is far outselling it. Only the american market supported the XBox sales, and the sales are already pretty low for the 360. The only real contenders, even with the XBox 360 one year advance, are bound to be PS3 and Wii, and I am predicting one of them will sell like mad on price alone, and not the other.
there aren't any absolutely compelling applications that make me want to move to Linux from OS X. While the concepts of OSS and GPLv2 are great and worthwhile and make me supportive in general, in actual usage there isn't anything that comes close to being a "killer app"
That's because you're not looking for that at all. So of course you can't find any.
My perception (which I am sure a few people are about to tell me is wholly wrong) is that there isn't any exciting development in the end user application space
There are plenty, especially on Linux. And why "a few" people will tell you you're wrong ? Perhaps nobody will tell you anything and just ignore you. You talk like you're some kind of authority. Reading what you said just shows you're not any authority, just a Mac lover. Nothing wrong with that, but you're clearly not qualified to talk about exciting software outside the Mac.
Where is the application that beats the pants off of Final Cut Pro, or even iMovie? Where is the amazing application that does something that nobody developing for OS X or Windows has even thought of yet?
Again, there are a lot of them, you just dismiss them as not important, as long as they're not on your platform of choice.
In some ways, this parallels the situation with PC Gamers not interested in moving to OS X
This example is just stupid : you compare games and OS, like apples and oranges. Comparing console (Sony and Nintendo ones, not XBox like) gamers and PC gamers would be more accurate.
I'm not saying that it will be easy for such a project to materialize and mature. It's going to mean an awfully lot of hard work, probably without the same opportunities for financial rewards
You don't know what you're talking about, so you can't know how hard it will be. You need no excuse for not moving to Linux, it's just not compatible with your needs yet, nothing wrong with that.
With the exception of servers and anti-virus software, Linux is far, far away from being a serious threat to Windows
You're right, that's why MS constantly disparages Linux desktop, and put a european billion dollar fund to prevent desktop Linx from gaining any market share. Oh wait...
But that's not really a game at that point. It's a rendered movie
It's a rendered movie in a game, it's still part of the game.
You're just watching. So then how is that different from a film that makes you cry?
A film is not just some 10 minutes cut from here and there, so what you say is just stupid. A film is a hole, just like these games are a whole, composed of interactive moments and cut scenes. Seems to be a difficult concept to grasp for you.
That's my big problem with the FF series and games like it; they've become movies
They're not. You just can't watch them like movies. You have to interact with the game.
Sure, you can hit a few buttons here and there to make you think you're "playing", but really it's just to get you to the next cut-scene
And if you're not playing when hitting those few buttons, what are you doing exactly ? Are you saying that a 3 years old can play these games too ? You forgot that there's a direction pad too. I think you don't even understand what a game is. You know, there are games that are only cut scenes and still images, where you make choices at some moments, on what you want to do next.
I certainly know that games can frighten. Playing Metroid on my NES in a dark room at midnight finally getting to the Mother Brain freaked me out. 'Course I was ten, but still, that was scary
You know, BioHazard will frighten older people just as much if not more. It was even censored before translation into Resident Evil.
Almost two years ago if someone pointed to this dual screened mutant and said,
Some said it, but it seems hard to do with an USA centric view.
-It would lead a gaming renaissance in Japan, making the Japanese game market larger than America so far in the year 2006
This is BS and american centric view : japanese game market was always bigger. It wasn't when you didn't count handhelds.
It would outsell the PSP in all markets
Only hardcore 3D (mostly FPS) 20-ish gamers believed the contrary. I'm an old time gamer, and hearing the arguments of pro PSP people was sufficient to know it would not succeed (things about specs and screen and 3D, nothing about fun games).
It would be very popular among girls too. -And popular among older people with a game called 'Brain Age'. This demographic the industry thought was impossible to reach
That was Nintendo's goal. It was a matter of believing if they would succeed or not. Knowing the quality behind Nintendo, I thought they could succeed (but was not sure of it).
Animal Crossing Wild World would outsell Final Fantasy 12 in Japan (could Final Fantasy 3 outsell FF12?) -A game called Nintendogs will outsell Halo and is set to outsell Halo 2
Same phenomenom as for The Sims. When you add female players, you have a far bigger market.
-Companies like Electronic Arts will struggle on the system as they do not know how to deal with disruption technology. But smaller companies like Atlus shall rise
I'm not surprised at all !
Let's not forget a new 2D Mario (after fifteen years) turning the markets on fire everywhere
This one amazes me. Even though I know Super Mario is the most sold game ever.
And many people thought Nintendo had gone mad in late 2004 (just as many thought they had gone mad with the Wii)
I was never part of these people. To someone that love games (not just FPS, games) the DS value was pretty obvious. The GBA value was obvious already. But the american game article makers don't know what to say about a game, they just know how to talk about frames per second and polygons. They will have a hard time talking about handheld games.
Where is the PSP? Well, the software for the PSP is abysmal in Japan. The DS sales lead over the PSP in Japan is so gigantic that if you begin to combine PSP markets, the PSP still doesn't outsell the DS
Do you mean "if you combine Sony consoles sales ?". Yes, the DS Lite is selling like mad in Japan.
So what is different? Nintendo sees the DS's true competition of those who aren't interested in games at all. The company mission is taking affect: "Make as many gamers as possible."
You mean : Nintendo reached their goal. Nothing is different. Nintendo started with the GBA, and saw which games attracted female and older people.
Japan had been in a slow decline and analysts were wondering if it worth the effort to 'win' Japan anymore
That was obvious BS from american journalists. I still wonder how these people can put so much crap, for the sake of an american centric view. More amazing : how come people believed this in the USA ?
Everyone predicted the PSP would do to the DS what Playstation did to the Nintendo consoles
That's BS again. I'm starting to think you were part of those hardcore 3D 20-ish gamers. Playstation didn't do anything to the Nintendo consoles : the attitude of Nintendo was the problem, making them lose some big sellers (like Squaresoft) at the time. So the N64 was a disaster. And not everyone predicted what you say, only the sellers of articles for the hardcore gamers (like most online sites). And those same articles were in denial for a year at least, some still are. Man, I even saw people saying the XBox360 would be a hit, people surprised that it isn't, people saying it will sell more when PS3 and Wii are out (what flawed logic is that ?) !!! Meanwhile, the DS
You know, even earlier this year, I felt that Nintendo was struggling, and I'm a big nintendo fan. Always have been. It pained me to no end to think of one of my favorite gaming companies being toppled by the evil empire of Sony
You know what, I can recognise american players pretty easily (I may be wrong sometimes). These are people that think what is happening in the USA is the same as what happens everywhere in the world. Nintendo is not an american company, Nintendo was never struggling either. Nintendo lost market share in home console market and that's all. Their handheld always sold very well actually. But american people, focused on 3D and the like, didn't even consider handheld, but spoke of only XBox and Sony home consoles.
But at any rate, what can I say? I picked up a DS in January or February, and ever since then it's had so much momentum build up it's insane
The momentum was even before the DS launch, only hardcore 3D gamers didn't see it. You know, those that were blinded by PSP, and still are.
Before now, though, what I'd seen from Nintendo was the regurgitation of the same old and tired, though beloved, franchises - yip-de-fucking-doo, another Gamecube Mario game, another Metroid, another Zelda
Saying the Nintendo franchise are old and tired is pure ignorance. Each occurrence have innovation, they are nothing like old and tired, as most are different actually. You could say that for the Pokemon franchise though.
And the GBA? Christ. It'd already become a no-man's-land of awful movie and children's cartoon franchises. Speak to me no more of Nickelodeon games, nor Barbie (see subscript)
Again a USA centric view. GBA games market is nothing like that actually. That's also on e of the thing that tells me the success of the consoles is decided in Japan : american companies can't do better than sequels and movie/cartoon franchises. A movie/cartoon franchise can be good though.
What Nintendo has done is offered a complete package. We have an entirely new hardware package, the DS. It has an entirely new control interface, the touchscreen, combined with the familiar D-pad and shoulder buttons that, if you don't know them already, are pretty intuitive to learn - a fusion of new and old
You're two years late on this. What we've got is a gaming platform for all ages, not just for hardcore 3D 20-ish gamers, those that won't play FPS on a handheld. Nintendo said it would do it and succeeded. And I hope the Wii will succeed where the Gamecube failed : do the same for home consoles.
Will Nintendo falter in the future? It's felt shaky before, but as we can see, bounced back in a pretty big way
That's your limited view again. Nintendo never felt shaky before. That was sensationalist "journalists" that wanted clicks, saying Nintendo made far less than the year before, which was only because the year before was amazing, so when they did very well the year after, it was looking worse obviously.
I hope they can keep on top of it, restore market dominance, and then, do the unthinkable in that position - keep on producing innovative games and hardware that are fun to play
Nintendo never stopped doing this. Again you didn't notice because of the lost market share of N64, regained a little with Gamecube. Nintendo had to change their attitude. What lost them from the start was their attitude with Squaresoft and FFVII. This was their biggest mistake. But they are recovering now. Seeing Square Enix titles on the handhelds and even on the Gamecube shows they're in good shape to regain their old position.
It's moments like this that makes me glad that Nintendo lost the huge market share. Now they have to actually do something to make money
What are you smoking ? Nintendo never lost the huge market share. It lost it if you bypass handheld sales, which were always going strong. And they always made money too. Now, it's even worse for (bad) competitors, as Nintendo has a big chance of getting back a huge share of home consoles share with the Wii. Fortunately, Nintendo is the only console vendor that still makes consoles for fun games, not just for 3D and high specs.
Well, unfortunately, ATI doesn't see it that way. Their profit margins are razor thin. They're not about to sink more than token effort into supporting a minority user base
What is this nonsense ? We bought the product like anybody else, so we are entitled to have support. Besides, we are not asking for effort from them to support us, just some docs so that we support ourselves. Try at least to understand what this is about.
They would make negative profit
That's not what happened to NVidia. NVidia won the movie studios market thanks to their (limited) support.
To them, if you want to use their products, you can use them the way they're intended
That's what we are trying to do but we can't because they do not provide us what we need. Too bad for them. Do you realise that the current situation is that ATI cards are a "no go" ? Even if you have 3D support, you have no kind of support for accelerated MPEG2 or MPEG4 viewing, which you pay for.
Otherwise, buy something else
That's exactly what we do.
The fact that something else doesn't exist is not their probem. This is a business we're talking about, and in business, profit is the top concern. If you want to do humanitarian work, you start a non-profit
What BS is that ? We PAID for the card. In case you can't understand, I repeat : we PAID for the card like anyone else using Windows. So where did you find the humanitarian work ? Morons like you will ensure we do not buy any ATI card anymore. The fact that it's better to use the integrated chipset from Intel or Via instead of ATI (as at least, you don't pay for features you can't use) should be a hint to you that sth is very wrong with ATI. And I was a BIG supporter of ATI before.
For the most part, don't expect non-business things to come out of businesses. (There are exceptions, but ATI isn't one of them.)
Except that providing drivers so that we can use your hardware is the basics of a business like ATI.
Slashdot Mirror
i used 2 different machines, intel and amd, with 3 or 4 cards from 5200 to 440mx and a 6600, all seem to crash randomly with the nvidia driver :)
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... other than that: only to look into videos and/or to rip them if i cannot watch them on time before i have to return them....
... maybe i am not that interested in that to even make a search on it:)
and it is up to today (well 2 months ago)
Depends on two things : the XOrg version and the binary driver. But I don't use Xinerama.
Anyway, none of my Linux machines ever crash anymore with the binary drivers (I still would prefer free drivers).
so my only point is: being a formal and self educated linux/unix admin for years, i still find that it is a lot easier to slap a
$200 dvd player on the shelf. it is 480p, it is silent, it never crashed, and if i feed fresh dogpoo into it, it will play it without downloading a codec. or dumping core
I agree. Except that my MPlayer never downloaded codecs, and the only times it did a thing similar to dumping core is with broken files that couldn't even start playing on anything else.
i guess i just got old, and got sick of messing around for half an hour to play a movie, i just want to press the control of the remote for the AMP, the projector, and the DVD player and i do not want to figure out why something is just not the right way
Exactly my take too. Except I had a completely different experience : I messed sometimes for hours with Windows to make it work, when Windows was connected to my rear projector, even though it was working the day before. And it still couldn't play every file. And the wife was very unhappy. Then, Geexbox saved me all these troubles, but still could not play everything. Now, I have two machines that can play everything I throw at them : my MythTV Media Center and my main box.
The fact is that my wife uses the Media Center way more than me.
It just works and record things she asked for. Today again, she was surprised and pleased to see the box recorded a show that restarted, which was stopped during the summer vacations. She wasn't even aware of it.
and yes, i use mplayer once in a while, but no, i prefer using my windows machine for ANY media file, just for the sake of the ignorent webdesigners, that sometimes make it totally impossible to use and watch a media file in a browser anything other than IE
All the family uses MPlayer, knowing it or not, and none ever had one problem playing any media file.
btw i might be wrong, but i think subtitles are in text format on dvd's too, but i might be wrong on them
Subtitles on DVD are images, they never were text.
To dump them, you actually have to do OCR.
But that still does not make the CCS problem go away, that I have experienced just by randomly inserting 1 out of 50 discs into my linux machine (where I many times peek into movies BTW, so I do not have to turn on the projector and all the sound devices) ....
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You clearly misunderstood the problem, as the code you're talking about is an improvement upon the one used to dump every DVD you see on illegal networks. I still have to find one of these DVD that could not be dumped due to CSS (not CCS) error. That's just stupid, as once you know how to crack it, it just can't fail, unless you have hardware issues (scratched DVD for example).
so you can throw PEBKAC and all the insults, if using linux for that was an easier solution i would do that
Linux is an easier solution, as that's what I use since months at home for all the family, and I'm not the only one. It just works.
Can you use a HDTV output of an NVIDIA card, without using the NON-binary driver of Xorg ? I do not know, but while the binary driver is so crappy, that I had to put a matrix450 back into my wirk machine to restore system stability, I would say: i do not think so.
The driver is in far better shape since months too. It won't crash anymore for playing videos and watching TV at least, and even playing emulated games. However, I've seen a lot of box freeze, but that was due to motherboard chipset problems (AGP setting too high) or the graphic card overheating.
You know that the binary driver still does not allow safe suspend and hybernation, and is super unstable when using xinerama ?
Which is not a problem for a Media Center, at least using MythTV, it's not a problem. Unless your motherboard doesn't support wakeup, which I doubt.
Safe suspend and hybernation highly depends on your components, and it's rarely safe. I wouldn't trust them on a media center.
I know it rocks, and can do a lot, but I still haven't found a solution, that makes me go : wow, I must run that as my media player, it supports EVERYTHING I want, and it is super stable.
No luck ! When I finished my MythTV setup, I actually went : WOW, it does even MORE than I wanted and is super stable ! The thing just tags along since months. It never failed me once.
the NVIDIA driver just dumps core, and crashes my card so bad, no XDM/KDM/GDM restart is possible, and have to restart the whole crap
This happened to me when I finished. As I trust Linux 100 % (I use it since 2001, and it never failed me once, each time I have such problems, that's an hardware problem), I searched a hardware problem.
I just lowered the AGP rate setting in the BIOS and it never froze again. I have a fanless 5200 card. Perhaps you have the same problem.
Again, the thing never failed once in months of intensive usage : everything is transcoded to XVid.
little small problems, that I would have tolerated 5 years ago when I just wanted to use Linux for EVERYTHING just as you now, but now I better focus on whatever gives the best solution, and leave the hacking for projects I enjoy after all, not make my life more miserable, when I just want to lay back, press the button and watch a movie WITH DTS, IN HDTV, correct subtitles, and aspect ratio
Heh, I have the same state of mind, and wanted the same thing as you. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything that worked out of the box (no Knoppmyth, no nothing). As I have my own automated Linux from scratch that I trust 100 %, I finally decided to lose these 20 hours compiling everything. So I can understand you couldn't make it work with pre made distros.
What you say is plain wrong.
What counts with your drives is not sequential rate at all. Access time is what counts.
I use a very old 4 GB SCSI drive as swap (half of it is swap, I have 1 GB of memory). I tried to use swap on my latest SATA drive, and the system instantly felt more sluggish. The old SCSI drive just trounces the SATA drive, and I'm sure the sequential rate of the SATA drive is far higher, but the access time of the old SCSI drive is far better : I just don't notice it when it's swapping !
And what's this BS about swapping in/out a large job ? What kind of large job would you use on a PC with PATA disks ? J2EE jobs ? Huge Mono jobs ? I have a hard time seeing the need for 20 MB/s sequential rate even if your data was sequentially written in your swap file, which I'm sure they aren't. Anyway, like I said, my very old SCSI drive do better than the latest SATA drives, except perhaps Raptors, which I haven't tested, but they have a better access time than ordinary SATA drives.
Yes, swap is useful in any situation when you don't know if you'll have enough RAM to run everything.
And RAM can be so "cheap" as you say, but disk is still far cheaper.
With swap, you also have some way to find out that you're running out of memory. You can monitor it, and you can also sometimes see a performance decrease (if it's a desktop), though you'll probably not notice it with SCSI disks. But you still have the monitor, right ?
Tell me exactly how your pathological problem is any indication of usefulness of swap ?
This is plain stupid. With or without swap, you would still leak that memory, and your OS would still be at risk. The most useful thing to do would have been to limit the max amount of memory for each process, or just for the one causing these leaks.
Right now, it's on servers, and virtually nobody uses it as a desktop machine outside of uber-geeks and a few of their family
Where did you take your numbers ?
Are you talking about some USA region ?
You clearly have no clue or have an agenda against Linux.
Your comment is pure flamebait with nothing to back it up.
That number is so small that any hardware CEO that decides to spend any significant amount of money on the Linux market should be fired
And yet, a lot of hardware manufacturers provide FOSS drivers for Linux. The last device I bought (from a french company called Devolo, which makes CPL products) even came with free drivers for Linux and how to install them.
You're not going to get that kind of market share until it's easy to use (I put a DVD movie in the drive, and it plays)
Actually, the trolls like you are clearly the biggest problem. You just don't put a DVD movie in the drive and it works on Windows. Even if that was true, consumer oriented commercial distros already do that too.
This is not the problem at all. The problem is just bigots like ESR vying for attention, that talk about an highly unlikely iPod generation consumer that knows how to install a WiFi network. Or a grandma installing a networked printer. Same stupid example.
Personally, I think that Linux will always be relegated to geeks and hobbysists and geek hobbyists
Your'e entitled to your opinion.
I don't see it solving any significant problems that Windows has, because Windows is so mature at this point
Yeah right. You trolls are so obvious. So I guess all he people that migrated to Linux when I said I was not supporting their Windows anymore but only Linux, are nuts ?
Windows has magically solved all its virus and insecurity problems overnight ?
Programs to do anything on Windows are now gratis and easy to find ?
You mean there's a Windows somewhere that now can do what my Linux Media Center can do ? And that can do what my current workstation can do for the entire family ?
The browser or the mail client on Windows aren't even on par with what I use now, not even talking about the DE !
Pure flamebait again.
There's very little reason for the average person to use it, other than saving a hundred bucks
What ? You mean the average person know how and finds it easy to pirate all these softwares without which Windows is utterly useless ?
Last time I checked (yesterday), Windows was still a mess to deal with audio/video codecs, photo management and edition. Last time I checked (2 years ago), the fraction of what I do that you could do on Windows cost in the 30,000 , and the desktop oriented things cost in the 4500 . I'm not counting the Media Center, there's just nothing on Windows or in the consumer land that can do everything it does now.
So where did you get your hundred bucks ? Are you telling us that you're a pirate and that pirated software is easy to handle for an average user ?
Most sane people aren't going to put themselves through that for $100, and if they do, then they are the kind of people who wouldn't shovel out a few hundred bucks for a new video card, anyway
What ? You're telling me people that don't want to shovel out a few hundred bucks for a new video card are a tiny percent of sane people ? You need a reality check : PC gamers are not the majority of desktop users, far from it. They're not even a majority of gamers (when you count console gamers).
I really don't care who wins. Competition is a good thing because it forces companies to innovate, increase quality, or reduce prices
Huh ? So then you should care who wins, and this should be Nintendo. Unless you have no understanding of the two companies that actually :
- don't innovate
- don't increase quality
- don't reduce prices
With no competition their next console could be like the VirtualBoy
With no competition, their next console could be like the DS Lite.
Anyway, what's count is the games, not the console.
I hope all the companies do well and continue to bring us better things at a competitive price
Like game and console prices that go up and up ?
While the nerd crowd here can look at the Wii (uh, that name...) and be pleased with the innovative interface, the low price, the focus on gameplay over graphics and yes, substance... this isn't how the marketing will flow
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OK. So the stage is set : Slashdot = nerds, their opinion has no value. This comes from someone who feels compelled to express an opinion about the name of a console.
And someone that believe only nerds thinks innovative interface, low price, focus on gameplay over graphics, are good things.
I guess you're part of those that predicted that the PSP would mop the floor with the DS
Microsoft will counter, having anticipated this for years, and probably roll out their own add-on HD drive as well - more marketing insanity to follow
Wow ! So now, non-nerds people will be amazed by a thing called HD in a console that was out one year before, and that they weren't even aware of ?
Nintendo will of course do their own marketing push, but don't be surprised if you hate the approach they take
I'm sure I won't. I never was actually.
Big N is after 'the rest of us', the non-gamer, and will appropriately tailor their messaging to this end. That means, more girls, more moms, more people who do not typically play video games. Yes, there will be Metroid and a few others to keep the original fans happy. But it will not be the juggernaut that Sony and MS will unleash
You seem to have problem thinking that these games for non-gamers can appeal to gamers too. The DS was not a reality check enough to you I guess.
the people who put it there are you guys, buying the kind of games you like. That's where most of the money is
The DS just proved you are wrong. The money is everywhere, but you have to go and take it. The DS proves most of the money for games is NOT on hardcore gamers.
Actually, the Sims proved it too, but you have a problem admitting hardcore 3D USA gamers are a minority.
People who bought Super Mario Bros are what put the game industry there, not people playing Halo.
Nintendo is gambling big time with this new machine
Like with the DS. Not taking risks won't make you go anywhere.
Sony and Microsoft are taking the safe route, MS the safest of all
That must be why PS2 is outselling XBox360 by 25+ times in Japan today. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if the Wii and PS3 outsell the total number of XBox360 when they launch in Japan, in 2 months time.
It may not make for great headlines to the crusty gamer crowd here who appreciates Nintendo's willingness to break the mold, but for general 'consumption' I acutally tend to agree with the market analysis of FTA
To me, the XBox360 is already a failure. I think most of the buyers of XBox360 have bought it already. People don't wait till the other products are out to buy, or that means they're actually waiting for the new products. When I see the number of people buying PS2 instead of XBox360 in Japan, and knowing most of the XBox360 buyers live in the USA, I have a very hard time believing the XBox360 will have even 30 % of the market.
As for the PS3, I don't know.
When you surround yourself with people who think exactly like you, it's hard to see that other people think differently
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I think this applies mainly to yourself.
It gives the illusion that everybody out there is just like you and will be buying a Wii first. This is not true. Nintendo still has the kiddy image
This is not true at all. If we believed what you're saying, that would mean Nintendo DS sells poorly. It still is outselling the PSP (sells 3 times more) in Japan to this day.
And it's the same everywhere, perhaps not by 3 times as much, but still outselling everything.
Or perhaps the kiddy image is what people want ? And no, this is not a Slashdot opinion, these are hard facts.
The PS3 will be seen as the more mature console and will thus appeal to the teen/early 20s crowd
Cool, now what makes you believe the Wii won't do the same ?
It is funny to read slashdot posts that are already claiming victory for the Wii when it isn't out yet
It is funny to you. To me, it was funny seeing people claiming victory for a piece of hardware with better polygons/s, with better resolutions,
Seems like all these people forgot it's about gameplay, not hardware.
The Wii excitement is about gameplay, which I think is a good thing.
Wait until the bugs have been ironed out. Wait until a price drop...then decide what I will purchase. It seems like most people on here are terrible consumers...that drool over things that don't exist yet
This just shows you have absolutely no idea what Nintendo is, and how great consumer oriented products they always did, with great support.
While Nintendo does have a good reputation, they have made plenty of stupid mistakes in the past to warrant caution
These mistakes weren't on the consumer side though, and hurt mainly themselves. So you're wrong on this one.
And keep in mind that the Nintendo home (not handheld) consoles always were the most difficult to crack games on, so most Nintendo home customers are true customers, not people buying the hardware and pirating hundreds of games.
I always find it interesting when people predict the Wii's success at this stage in the game. Most people were rather down on the DS when it was first announced ("What a gimmick...", etc.), what makes us so sure, now, that the we'll be any better at predicting the success of the Wii?
Perhaps because the people like me, who were never down on the DS, and rather said it would probably be a great success, also see the Wii as a probable great success.
You see, I saw first hand that the DS and the Gamecube were really appealing, specially when your wife starts playing them more than yourself, and even asks you to come and play some multiplayer games.
And the "most people" you talk about were actually USA heavy 3D/FPS gamers oriented.
Why would you want to jump through the hoops to get DS homebrew working when you can get a faster handheld designed specifically for homebrew, the GP2X? 200MHz CPU with 200MHz second core, 64MB of RAM, SD slot takes up to 4GB of storage, runs Linux. What more could you want?
What more ? Let me see :
- touchscreen
- dual screen
- microphone
- protected screen
- better price
- quality (hard to break, good lit screen)
- smaller
- being able to play new innovative games
- have a high chance of being compatible with one home console and games for this console (the Wii)
Is this enough ?
"A touchscreen" you say? Just get a PDA. Any idiot can develop WinCE applciations, and anyone with half a brain can install Linux on it to run craploads of OSS games and apps.
But I have all that on my DS, why on earth would I go with 2 items, when 1 is cheaper and better ?
Because people aren't aware of this or don't want to jump through the hoops, whereas they already have a DS
These are only a few of the reasons actually.
Don't trivialize the importance of marketing, i.e., letting people know your product actually exists. How many consumers have a DS? How many have a GP2X? How many have heard of the DS? The GP2X?
Which company makes the DS ? Which makes the GP2X ? Do you really think the company making the GP2X has as much marketing money as Nintendo ?
What makes you believe the people making the GP2X trivialize the importance of marketing ?
When the open source community understands the importance of actually *reaching* people, and bringing the products *to* them, they will have a better understanding of why so few home users use Linux-based OS's or FireFox, or OpenOffice
You're just a stupid troll.
How come "open source community" came into this discussion, are you actually believing "GP2X = open source community" ?
You also believe that the community is not reaching to people and bringing the products to them ?
FYI the open source community understands pretty well what prevents home users access to "Linux-based OS's or FireFox, or OpenOffice" (like preventing any OS to be preinstalled on new computers), and no, that's not because they're not trying, that's all because of one company.
Nintendo is not behaving like this evil company at all, but GP2X just doesn't have the money, the features, the price, the quality, and the brand of Nintendo handheld.
Your cheap shots at FOSS community are just pathetic.
There is a (unfortunately) Win only utility that comes with the M3 for loading roms to the M3
This is irrelevant, as, like explained in the manual, you can just put your ROM file on the M3, and most will work.
If it doesn't work, you can just pick the right patch file found on the CD, and put it in the right directory.
So the Win only app is more convenient, but you can actually do it by hand, or just launch the app through Wine on Linux.
Also, that document is a complete lie. I don't care that it's in the kernel tree. There's lots of wrong stuff in there
BS, the document is not a lie, the document provides an explanation. An explanation can be false, it's still not a lie, just a bad explanation.
And sorry, but I think GKH has way more authority than you on what is right or wrong in this explanation, as he did lots of the drivers in the kernel.
A driver does not have to be in the tree to be stable, running driver, and the driver being in the kernel tree doesn't mean that it is either stable or running
Yeah right. Meanwhile, real life shows us that what you describe is exceptions rather than a rule.
The driver being in the kernel means you can bug the Linux kernel devs to make it work with each new release of the kernel (hence stable).
The driver not being in the kernel means they won't do anything about it, and you have no way of knowing if the driver will work or not.
The basic premise is that the maintainer of a driver would support his driver in the Linux kernel tree.
And I should know, as I have written multiple closed-source Linux device drivers, two of which have open-source versions in the kernel that have at various times either not worked, or worked poorly, and both of which perform signifigantly worse than the closed version
Now I wonder how you can have the guts to write that. So you basically admit that you do closed drivers that have equivalent Free Software ones, though they used to be worse in Free Software version. And then you complain about the unstable API document and want to be taken seriously ?
But you know what, I'd rather praise the guys who made the FOSS drivers. Of course they were worse at first, but now, we have correct free drivers, and that's way better than being stuck with hope of endless support for the closed ones. Support that you say is better, but we have no way to know if that's even true.
Go actually read that document. The argument it makes is that a stable kernel/driver API is a bad idea because the kernel/driver API is unstable. It's a circular argument
BS, where is the circular argument ? It explains quite well why the kernel/driver API is unstable, and no, it's not because "stable kernel/driver API is a bad idea", which would make a circular argument. Go actually read the document.
One, there isn't enough agreement amongst the diversity of kernel developers to ever come up with a stable API
BS, the main reason is discussed in the document, and history has shown the document is right.
two, there is no dicipline amongst the people in charge to maintain that stability even if a consensus was reached, and three, there are some who would like to keep the interface unstable merely to keep this argument for open source drivers valid
What you say is just a pure troll. The discipline is to make the kernel work better no matter what, and to not get stuck by in-kernel stable interface, which you see as an issue. You just can't accept that, that's your main issue.
Why is this a problem or even a downside to MS ?
People who make Open Source never ask such question, so perhaps MS should make their engineers think of why this is so, instead of asking others. They are the company with lots of great minds, aren't they ?
Is this question even relevant at all ?
That's part of the reason that media centers are useless : they just can't play all video and audio codecs.
Heck, only my man PC MPlayer could play everything (even HD content with my old Athlon MP 2200+).
So when wife saw the file worked on the main PC, and then tried to watch it on the big screen in the living room, it would not work.
That's why I bought a Shuttle at first : to just launch GeexBox and play everyhting. Now I've installed MythTV on it.
Since I've installed my MythTV media center, which uses MPlayer and plays everthing, the KiSS is never used anymore.
let's explore why Media PCs are not a popular hardware buy
...). Nothing should require typing or using a mouse (hence no PC type games).
No need to, it's pretty simple actually : no one of them has all the necessary features, thus justifying the price, and they all got useless features too.
First of all, you need hardware aside from the PC itself for a media experience
This is irrelevant. My wife is crazy about the media center I built, and would be as much crazy about it on a small TV set, especially since we're still using SD.
She actually told me the image quality was worse on the media center. One week later, she was using the beast like mad without any complaint about its quality.
My set is a 52" rear projection TV, so it's not digital (using SVideo, that's why the quality was not the same), and the media PC is still extremely useful.
a decent Media PC (running Windows), needs slightly more expensive hardware than a standard budget PC. Basically, you are bulding a pimped out gamer's machine, as no one is going to buy a Media PC to "check their email." They'd get a budget PC
So Windows is the big problem here. My media PC running MythTV is nothing like a pimped out gamer's machine. It's a Shuttle box with an Athlon 1800+ and a NVidia FX5200 card with 768 MB RAM (the swap is NEVER touched by the OS, 512 would be enough). Of course that's for SD. It would be just enough to play HD.
When I go HD, well, I'll have to go Dual Core, but that's because there's a high possibility it will be the best peformance/price solution for playing HD.
That's also because on Linux, the closed graphic drivers have no support for H264 acceleration.
People are going to want to play games, and impress their friends. And you need that video input/output functionality
You are not going to play PC games in the living room, you are going to play games designed for that, which means console type games.
My MythTV setup has numerous console games and things like DDR games, with USB adapters for a mat and console joypads.
One of the thing I can't understand, is the keyboard in media center sold. This makes no sense, people don't want complicated things like that in their living room, they just want a remote or a simple device (mat, joypads,
You're not going to impress anyone with your PC games that need powerful video cards. Putting 2-4 people around my MythTV box is always a success.
Next, sound card. Whatever Turtlebeach or Soundblaster offer from idrange on upwards (need something nice to drive those 6 speakers, and to provide 3D audio without taxing the processor)
If you don't have a receiver, don't use 5.1 sound ! The cheap embedded card is enough for AC3 or DTS passthrough SPDIF, and the 2.0 Dolby surround sound.
No need to have an expensive card at all.
Keyboard/Mouse-> Logitech or MS, Wireless (bluetooth, more range), USB
That I can't understand, keyboard and mouse are not made for the living room. I removed them long ago.
Case -> something stylish. Common failing here, most Media PC cases are horrible to look at, work with, or upgrade. Something slick, that is easily upgradeable, but easy to work with
My Shuttle is perfect on top of one of the speakers.
Add all this up, and you have a fairly expensive PC. Sure, you could swap in cheaper components, or argue that you could get by with some of the onboard stuff, but this is a MediaPC, something that is a PC that works well with Media. And multimedia traditionally requires both horsepower and space
That's not entirely true on Linux.
Horsepower is useful to play HD content, that's true, but mostly support is a necessity. With support for acceleration in the driver, my Athlon 1800+ could play HD content. Horsepower is also useful for encoding time, as my MythTV is setup to reencode all the video (except live ones) to Xvid (I use SD, it would be H264 for HD).
This saves a lot of space
They have admitted that the last generation or two they have lacked diversity
Huh ?
When did they admit that ? That's just not true. They just alienated 3rd parties, believeing they would follow nonetheless, not the same thing at all.
The first big they lost was Squaresoft and FFVII : big mistake.
they are trying to increase the diversity of titles through both new internal projects and by actively courting 3rd parties (something they failed to do with the last two generations)
Again that's not true, Nintendo always diversified. Their own titles were just not enough. The low number of titles was the problem.
that's a handheld and almost entirely a different market and one Nintendo has ALWAYS dominated
Which was the case with the NES and the SNES too. So this point is plain wrong.
When the PSP arrived, lots of people predicted the loss of Nintendo, based on the success of the Playstation, I found this strange, and rightfully so, as they were all wrong.
Nintendo actually took risks with their handheld to improve the experience, you just failed to notice that.
Nintendo seems to be forming themselves an excellent position in terms of diversity
Seems to ? What an understatement !
Regardless, this looks like a generation where there may not actually be one dominant player and the market may actually be fairly well spread out among the Big Three
To me, that seems like wishful thinking from american audience. There is no big three to start with. XBox 360 was selling as much or less than Gamecube in Japan (that means very little), and PS2 is far outselling it. Only the american market supported the XBox sales, and the sales are already pretty low for the 360.
The only real contenders, even with the XBox 360 one year advance, are bound to be PS3 and Wii, and I am predicting one of them will sell like mad on price alone, and not the other.
there aren't any absolutely compelling applications that make me want to move to Linux from OS X.
While the concepts of OSS and GPLv2 are great and worthwhile and make me supportive in general, in actual usage there isn't anything that comes close to being a "killer app"
That's because you're not looking for that at all. So of course you can't find any.
My perception (which I am sure a few people are about to tell me is wholly wrong) is that there isn't any exciting development in the end user application space
There are plenty, especially on Linux. And why "a few" people will tell you you're wrong ? Perhaps nobody will tell you anything and just ignore you.
You talk like you're some kind of authority. Reading what you said just shows you're not any authority, just a Mac lover. Nothing wrong with that, but you're clearly not qualified to talk about exciting software outside the Mac.
Where is the application that beats the pants off of Final Cut Pro, or even iMovie? Where is the amazing application that does something that nobody developing for OS X or Windows has even thought of yet?
Again, there are a lot of them, you just dismiss them as not important, as long as they're not on your platform of choice.
In some ways, this parallels the situation with PC Gamers not interested in moving to OS X
This example is just stupid : you compare games and OS, like apples and oranges.
Comparing console (Sony and Nintendo ones, not XBox like) gamers and PC gamers would be more accurate.
I'm not saying that it will be easy for such a project to materialize and mature. It's going to mean an awfully lot of hard work, probably without the same opportunities for financial rewards
You don't know what you're talking about, so you can't know how hard it will be.
You need no excuse for not moving to Linux, it's just not compatible with your needs yet, nothing wrong with that.
With the exception of servers and anti-virus software, Linux is far, far away from being a serious threat to Windows
...
You're right, that's why MS constantly disparages Linux desktop, and put a european billion dollar fund to prevent desktop Linx from gaining any market share. Oh wait
But that's not really a game at that point. It's a rendered movie
It's a rendered movie in a game, it's still part of the game.
You're just watching. So then how is that different from a film that makes you cry?
A film is not just some 10 minutes cut from here and there, so what you say is just stupid.
A film is a hole, just like these games are a whole, composed of interactive moments and cut scenes.
Seems to be a difficult concept to grasp for you.
That's my big problem with the FF series and games like it; they've become movies
They're not. You just can't watch them like movies. You have to interact with the game.
Sure, you can hit a few buttons here and there to make you think you're "playing", but really it's just to get you to the next cut-scene
And if you're not playing when hitting those few buttons, what are you doing exactly ?
Are you saying that a 3 years old can play these games too ?
You forgot that there's a direction pad too. I think you don't even understand what a game is.
You know, there are games that are only cut scenes and still images, where you make choices at some moments, on what you want to do next.
I certainly know that games can frighten. Playing Metroid on my NES in a dark room at midnight finally getting to the Mother Brain freaked me out. 'Course I was ten, but still, that was scary
You know, BioHazard will frighten older people just as much if not more. It was even censored before translation into Resident Evil.
Almost two years ago if someone pointed to this dual screened mutant and said,
Some said it, but it seems hard to do with an USA centric view.
-It would lead a gaming renaissance in Japan, making the Japanese game market larger than America so far in the year 2006
This is BS and american centric view : japanese game market was always bigger. It wasn't when you didn't count handhelds.
It would outsell the PSP in all markets
Only hardcore 3D (mostly FPS) 20-ish gamers believed the contrary. I'm an old time gamer, and hearing the arguments of pro PSP people was sufficient to know it would not succeed (things about specs and screen and 3D, nothing about fun games).
It would be very popular among girls too.
-And popular among older people with a game called 'Brain Age'. This demographic the industry thought was impossible to reach
That was Nintendo's goal. It was a matter of believing if they would succeed or not. Knowing the quality behind Nintendo, I thought they could succeed (but was not sure of it).
Animal Crossing Wild World would outsell Final Fantasy 12 in Japan (could Final Fantasy 3 outsell FF12?)
-A game called Nintendogs will outsell Halo and is set to outsell Halo 2
Same phenomenom as for The Sims. When you add female players, you have a far bigger market.
-Companies like Electronic Arts will struggle on the system as they do not know how to deal with disruption technology. But smaller companies like Atlus shall rise
I'm not surprised at all !
Let's not forget a new 2D Mario (after fifteen years) turning the markets on fire everywhere
This one amazes me. Even though I know Super Mario is the most sold game ever.
And many people thought Nintendo had gone mad in late 2004 (just as many thought they had gone mad with the Wii)
I was never part of these people. To someone that love games (not just FPS, games) the DS value was pretty obvious. The GBA value was obvious already.
But the american game article makers don't know what to say about a game, they just know how to talk about frames per second and polygons.
They will have a hard time talking about handheld games.
Where is the PSP? Well, the software for the PSP is abysmal in Japan. The DS sales lead over the PSP in Japan is so gigantic that if you begin to combine PSP markets, the PSP still doesn't outsell the DS
Do you mean "if you combine Sony consoles sales ?". Yes, the DS Lite is selling like mad in Japan.
So what is different? Nintendo sees the DS's true competition of those who aren't interested in games at all. The company mission is taking affect: "Make as many gamers as possible."
You mean : Nintendo reached their goal. Nothing is different. Nintendo started with the GBA, and saw which games attracted female and older people.
Japan had been in a slow decline and analysts were wondering if it worth the effort to 'win' Japan anymore
That was obvious BS from american journalists. I still wonder how these people can put so much crap, for the sake of an american centric view.
More amazing : how come people believed this in the USA ?
Everyone predicted the PSP would do to the DS what Playstation did to the Nintendo consoles
That's BS again. I'm starting to think you were part of those hardcore 3D 20-ish gamers.
Playstation didn't do anything to the Nintendo consoles : the attitude of Nintendo was the problem, making them lose some big sellers (like Squaresoft) at the time.
So the N64 was a disaster.
And not everyone predicted what you say, only the sellers of articles for the hardcore gamers (like most online sites).
And those same articles were in denial for a year at least, some still are.
Man, I even saw people saying the XBox360 would be a hit, people surprised that it isn't, people saying it will sell more when PS3 and Wii are out (what flawed logic is that ?) !!!
Meanwhile, the DS
You know, even earlier this year, I felt that Nintendo was struggling, and I'm a big nintendo fan. Always have been. It pained me to no end to think of one of my favorite gaming companies being toppled by the evil empire of Sony
You know what, I can recognise american players pretty easily (I may be wrong sometimes). These are people that think what is happening in the USA is the same as what happens everywhere in the world.
Nintendo is not an american company, Nintendo was never struggling either. Nintendo lost market share in home console market and that's all.
Their handheld always sold very well actually. But american people, focused on 3D and the like, didn't even consider handheld, but spoke of only XBox and Sony home consoles.
But at any rate, what can I say? I picked up a DS in January or February, and ever since then it's had so much momentum build up it's insane
The momentum was even before the DS launch, only hardcore 3D gamers didn't see it. You know, those that were blinded by PSP, and still are.
Before now, though, what I'd seen from Nintendo was the regurgitation of the same old and tired, though beloved, franchises - yip-de-fucking-doo, another Gamecube Mario game, another Metroid, another Zelda
Saying the Nintendo franchise are old and tired is pure ignorance. Each occurrence have innovation, they are nothing like old and tired, as most are different actually.
You could say that for the Pokemon franchise though.
And the GBA? Christ. It'd already become a no-man's-land of awful movie and children's cartoon franchises. Speak to me no more of Nickelodeon games, nor Barbie (see subscript)
Again a USA centric view. GBA games market is nothing like that actually. That's also on e of the thing that tells me the success of the consoles is decided in Japan : american companies can't do better than sequels and movie/cartoon franchises. A movie/cartoon franchise can be good though.
What Nintendo has done is offered a complete package. We have an entirely new hardware package, the DS. It has an entirely new control interface, the touchscreen, combined with the familiar D-pad and shoulder buttons that, if you don't know them already, are pretty intuitive to learn - a fusion of new and old
You're two years late on this. What we've got is a gaming platform for all ages, not just for hardcore 3D 20-ish gamers, those that won't play FPS on a handheld.
Nintendo said it would do it and succeeded. And I hope the Wii will succeed where the Gamecube failed : do the same for home consoles.
Will Nintendo falter in the future? It's felt shaky before, but as we can see, bounced back in a pretty big way
That's your limited view again. Nintendo never felt shaky before. That was sensationalist "journalists" that wanted clicks, saying Nintendo made far less than the year before, which was only because the year before was amazing, so when they did very well the year after, it was looking worse obviously.
I hope they can keep on top of it, restore market dominance, and then, do the unthinkable in that position - keep on producing innovative games and hardware that are fun to play
Nintendo never stopped doing this. Again you didn't notice because of the lost market share of N64, regained a little with Gamecube.
Nintendo had to change their attitude. What lost them from the start was their attitude with Squaresoft and FFVII. This was their biggest mistake.
But they are recovering now. Seeing Square Enix titles on the handhelds and even on the Gamecube shows they're in good shape to regain their old position.
It's moments like this that makes me glad that Nintendo lost the huge market share. Now they have to actually do something to make money
What are you smoking ?
Nintendo never lost the huge market share. It lost it if you bypass handheld sales, which were always going strong.
And they always made money too.
Now, it's even worse for (bad) competitors, as Nintendo has a big chance of getting back a huge share of home consoles share with the Wii.
Fortunately, Nintendo is the only console vendor that still makes consoles for fun games, not just for 3D and high specs.
Well, unfortunately, ATI doesn't see it that way. Their profit margins are razor thin. They're not about to sink more than token effort into supporting a minority user base
What is this nonsense ? We bought the product like anybody else, so we are entitled to have support.
Besides, we are not asking for effort from them to support us, just some docs so that we support ourselves.
Try at least to understand what this is about.
They would make negative profit
That's not what happened to NVidia. NVidia won the movie studios market thanks to their (limited) support.
To them, if you want to use their products, you can use them the way they're intended
That's what we are trying to do but we can't because they do not provide us what we need.
Too bad for them. Do you realise that the current situation is that ATI cards are a "no go" ? Even if you have 3D support, you have no kind of support for accelerated MPEG2 or MPEG4 viewing, which you pay for.
Otherwise, buy something else
That's exactly what we do.
The fact that something else doesn't exist is not their probem. This is a business we're talking about, and in business, profit is the top concern. If you want to do humanitarian work, you start a non-profit
What BS is that ? We PAID for the card. In case you can't understand, I repeat : we PAID for the card like anyone else using Windows.
So where did you find the humanitarian work ? Morons like you will ensure we do not buy any ATI card anymore.
The fact that it's better to use the integrated chipset from Intel or Via instead of ATI (as at least, you don't pay for features you can't use) should be a hint to you that sth is very wrong with ATI.
And I was a BIG supporter of ATI before.
For the most part, don't expect non-business things to come out of businesses. (There are exceptions, but ATI isn't one of them.)
Except that providing drivers so that we can use your hardware is the basics of a business like ATI.