There have been rumors about a new Kid Ikarus for Revolution/Wii since a year or so, I guess the Pit appearing in Super Smash Brothers makes that rumor even more likely to be true.
The DS always communicates using the physical protocol of 2mbit IEEE802.11b. It however doesn't always implement the full 802.11b protocol stack and IP. What you call Ni-Fi is just a subset of IEEE802.11b using a custom protocol instead of IP. It doesn't support 11mbit or 54mbit transfer modes. So while it is compatible with 11mbit and 54mbit equipment, you can really say it supports IEEE 802.11g.
I thought all the big flash devices where using some kind of multi-bit technology that makes it possible to save two or more bits per transistor/cell. But "The 16 Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors" sounds like they got one transistor per bit+ some logic, drivers etc.
It isn't a mass transit replacement. It is more like a solution to replace both mass transit and cars. You go to the next station and request transportation from A->B and the computer controlled routing takes care of everything else. Getting a free vehicles to you and finding a fast way to B. It also knows about all of the other vehicles, so it can prevent traffic jams.
Most of the time cars are just standing around without being used, taking up valueable space and resources. With PRT you could reduce the number of vehicles to much smaller number because their utilization is much better. You also don't need as much space for parking and the tracks would take up a lot less space because the computer controlled routing is way more efficient than human drivers.
Imho it is a great idea, but it is completely unlikely to get implemented in a democracy. If people would get rid of their cars and all switch to PRT we would get a transportation system that would be cheaper, faster, easier to use, safer and wouldn't depend on oil. But people like having their own cars and it would initially be a huge investment. I can only see someone like China trying it on a large scale, because they can just ban cars at will.
Look at the kernel mailing lists, IBM already submited the first set of patches. Basically Linux runs on the PPE, the full PPC core inside the cell, and there are system calls to execute special SPE binaries running on the SPEs (the subprocessors).
No matter what Sony tells you, but the cell is really not very suited for that kind of task. The cell gets its speed from the 7 SPE units, but to use the SPEs you need to rewrite your code to run on the SPE and many algorithm don't run well on a SPE.
So almost all workload would run on the general purpose PPE, and the SPEs would stay idle and useless.
You might say: still nicer than the G5 because the PPE is running at 3.2 ghz and not quite a bit under 3 ghz like the G5, so even the PPE should be faster than a G5, right?
Wrong. IBM removed a lot of stuff from the PPC core to make the PPE, especially branch prediction and out-of-order execution. Without these quite complex features the PPC core is able to run at 3.2 ghz but it is still a lot slower than the G5.
So you might ask now: why did they do that if it is slower than than the G5 core now?
The answer is simple: the die size of the PPE is smaller than the die size of a G5, so they are cheaper to manufacture. Thanks to the higher clockspeed that comes with the simpler design they can claim back a bit of the performance that was lost by removing brach prediction and OoO execution.
He said ovarian cancer not breast cancer. While he got a slight chance to get breast cancer, ovarian cancer is completely impossible without ovaries, just like it is impossible for a female to get testicular cancer.
Fine for algorithmic or complex flow without branch prediction?
And about managing the cache by yourself: that sounds like almost the same stupid mistake Intel made when they designed the Itanium, wrongly assumed hardware stuff could be done just as well by the compiler or the programmer. What makes it even worse is that programmers nearly always believe the hype of strategies like that. After all they are good programmers, so they should be able to do that little cache management by themself, can't be that hard right?
Uh, it is not like it is cool to be a 'geek' here (I'm german.) or something. It is just that Germany is the third most powerful economy in the world with about one third of the population of the US. So it is not really surprising german engineers invented their share of stuff.
I think the real reason why german teams dominate the Robo World Cup is because soccer is popular as a regular sport here and taken very seriously as a sport, so the Robo Cup teams take their work very serious, too. I don't think germans would be very successful if it was Robo baseball or american football or any other niche sport.
Actually it is possible. BUT not from a single frame but from a video. Do a search on citeseer or google on "superresolution" and you will find a bunch of papers about how to guess single high res frames from a video.
The brain is damn good at that too btw. Try it, reduce a video to a really small resolution, watch it and you will be impressed about how much you can recognize when it moves.
I thought about that at first too, but isn't the MAME logo part of the GPLed MAME package? The GPL got only a few restrictions on usage and I don't think anyone thought about trademarking parts of a software package.
Well, Sony is part of the 3C group, so they either get their license fees for the ps2 back or don't pay the full amount from the start and there are no DVD patent charges on the xbox, you pay them when you buy the remote. (One reason why the third party remotes have no trouble being a lot cheaper than the original, they just don't pay these fees.) So very likely the reason why the XBox is at $150 is that it is selling enough at that price, it is expensive to make and Microsoft doesn't want to lose more on hardware sales than needed. The PS2 should be pretty cheap to make, it is almost 2 years older than Gamecube and XBox and built quality is clearly not as good as their competitors. The reason why the PS2 is at $150 is that they are dominating the market and still selling more than Microsoft and Nintendo. I think the PS2 is going to drop to $100 after the XBox 2/Next/whatever launch.
FAIR-USE rules in Germany aren't like the FAIR-USE rules in the USA. Until peer2peer came, nearly all private copies of books,music or movies were legal under German fair-use rules. It legal to make a copy and give the copy as a present to a friend for example. Or make a copy and sell your original copy. You're not allowed to make money with these copies and you're not allowed to give them to strangers. But you can happly trade copies with your friends.
It isn't really FAIR-USE but legal private copying. When the law was made, it was pretty clear that there is no way to stop private copying without a police state and criminalizing a huge part of your citizens. Because of that, the lawmakers allowed private copying but also decided that copyright holders have get a compensation. (like this copyright levy) Imho a very good and fair idea.
Now there are just two basic problems with this system:
these days all the equipment and media is multifunctional and can be used for a lot of things. So people using their CD/DVD-R to backup their data, etc. are paying copyright levy, too.
the media industry effectively outlawed private legal copying by successfully lobbying for a law that makes braking copy protections illegal
(and there is no adjustment in the distribution of the copyright levys, so they still get money from the levy while their stuff isn't legal to copy )
At $110 the ceiva seems to be bargain, if you wouldn't need that expensive subscription. If you could emulate the ceiva server or exchange the Ceiva firmware to something more useful it could be a really nice device.
Not really, it is common knowledge that Nvidia's linux binary drivers are much better than Ati's. Not only the performance is better in Nvidia's drivers but they are also more compatible. People often had problems getting ATI's binary drivers working, while Nvidia's drivers are working without problem in most configurations and even problems like 4k stacks were fixed withhin a reasonable time.
GC stores just the framebuffer in internal RAM of the graphic chip. Textures are staying in the RAM (and some small texture caches), not much better from a bandwidth perspective, but the programmer doesn't need to care about it. Of course this wouldn't work out with RDRAM instead of the 1T-SRAM used in the Gamecube.
The 7.5 million/s isn't average. Look at the PDF I posted, page 32:"fastest so far seems to be 125k polys at 60fps" and on page 13 from rendering analysis: "52,000 polys per frame - min 10k - max 145k", but that 145k/frame figure is very likely at 30fps, as 60% of the games aren't running at 60Hz as the performance analysis also tells.
The PS2 is certainly not a bad machine, but it isn't nearly as fast as Sony's marketing was suggesting and as you already said it is quite old compared to both XBox and Gamecube.
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There have been rumors about a new Kid Ikarus for Revolution/Wii since a year or so, I guess the Pit appearing in Super Smash Brothers makes that rumor even more likely to be true.
The DS always communicates using the physical protocol of 2mbit IEEE802.11b. It however doesn't always implement the full 802.11b protocol stack and IP. What you call Ni-Fi is just a subset of IEEE802.11b using a custom protocol instead of IP. It doesn't support 11mbit or 54mbit transfer modes. So while it is compatible with 11mbit and 54mbit equipment, you can really say it supports IEEE 802.11g.
It got a built in lithium-ion pack, but it is replaceable by the user.
I thought all the big flash devices where using some kind of multi-bit technology that makes it possible to save two or more bits per transistor/cell.
But "The 16 Gbit device holds 16.4 billion functional transistors" sounds like they got one transistor per bit+ some logic, drivers etc.
Wouldn't that be very dangerous? Wouldn't the artifical block suck in matter and become bigger and bigger, ultimately sucking in our solar system?
But especially in Japan, the Nintendo DS is pretty much killing the PSP. The DS is outselling the PSP by a factor of 2 or more since a while.
Japanese hardware sales for August 8 - August 14:
System - Weekly sales
1. NDS - 103,095
2. PS2 - 37,041
3. PSP - 25,100
4. GBASP - 19,958
5. NGC - 3,799
6. GBA - 708
7. XBX - 202
And software sales wise it is even worse, there is rarely a PSP software title in the top10, but almost always a bunch of DS titles.
It isn't a mass transit replacement. It is more like a solution to replace both mass transit and cars. You go to the next station and request transportation from A->B and the computer controlled routing takes care of everything else. Getting a free vehicles to you and finding a fast way to B. It also knows about all of the other vehicles, so it can prevent traffic jams.
i t
Most of the time cars are just standing around without being used, taking up valueable space and resources. With PRT you could reduce the number of vehicles to much smaller number because their utilization is much better.
You also don't need as much space for parking and the tracks would take up a lot less space because the computer controlled routing is way more efficient than human drivers.
Wikipedia got a lot of info without flash:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Rapid_Trans
Imho it is a great idea, but it is completely unlikely to get implemented in a democracy. If people would get rid of their cars and all switch to PRT we would get a transportation system that would be cheaper, faster, easier to use, safer and wouldn't depend on oil. But people like having their own cars and it would initially be a huge investment.
I can only see someone like China trying it on a large scale, because they can just ban cars at will.
Look at the kernel mailing lists, IBM already submited the first set of patches. Basically Linux runs on the PPE, the full PPC core inside the cell, and there are system calls to execute special SPE binaries running on the SPEs (the subprocessors).
No matter what Sony tells you, but the cell is really not very suited for that kind of task. The cell gets its speed from the 7 SPE units, but to use the SPEs you need to rewrite your code to run on the SPE and many algorithm don't run well on a SPE.
So almost all workload would run on the general purpose PPE, and the SPEs would stay idle and useless.
You might say: still nicer than the G5 because the PPE is running at 3.2 ghz and not quite a bit under 3 ghz like the G5, so even the PPE should be faster than a G5, right?
Wrong. IBM removed a lot of stuff from the PPC core to make the PPE, especially branch prediction and out-of-order execution. Without these quite complex features the PPC core is able to run at 3.2 ghz but it is still a lot slower than the G5.
So you might ask now: why did they do that if it is slower than than the G5 core now?
The answer is simple: the die size of the PPE is smaller than the die size of a G5, so they are cheaper to manufacture. Thanks to the higher clockspeed that comes with the simpler design they can claim back a bit of the performance that was lost by removing brach prediction and OoO execution.
He said ovarian cancer not breast cancer. While he got a slight chance to get breast cancer, ovarian cancer is completely impossible without ovaries, just like it is impossible for a female to get testicular cancer.
Fine for algorithmic or complex flow without branch prediction?
And about managing the cache by yourself: that sounds like almost the same stupid mistake Intel made when they designed the Itanium, wrongly assumed hardware stuff could be done just as well by the compiler or the programmer. What makes it even worse is that programmers nearly always believe the hype of strategies like that. After all they are good programmers, so they should be able to do that little cache management by themself, can't be that hard right?
Uh, it is not like it is cool to be a 'geek' here (I'm german.) or something. It is just that Germany is the third most powerful economy in the world with about one third of the population of the US. So it is not really surprising german engineers invented their share of stuff.
I think the real reason why german teams dominate the Robo World Cup is because soccer is popular as a regular sport here and taken very seriously as a sport, so the Robo Cup teams take their work very serious, too. I don't think germans would be very successful if it was Robo baseball or american football or any other niche sport.
Afaik downgrading is not possible.
Actually it is possible. BUT not from a single frame but from a video. Do a search on citeseer or google on "superresolution" and you will find a bunch of papers about how to guess single high res frames from a video.
The brain is damn good at that too btw. Try it, reduce a video to a really small resolution, watch it and you will be impressed about how much you can recognize when it moves.
I thought about that at first too, but isn't the MAME logo part of the GPLed MAME package? The GPL got only a few restrictions on usage and I don't think anyone thought about trademarking parts of a software package.
If you don't agree with their definition, you can still go out and buy the game for your kid.
Well, Sony is part of the 3C group, so they either get their license fees for the ps2 back or don't pay the full amount from the start and there are no DVD patent charges on the xbox, you pay them when you buy the remote. (One reason why the third party remotes have no trouble being a lot cheaper than the original, they just don't pay these fees.)
So very likely the reason why the XBox is at $150 is that it is selling enough at that price, it is expensive to make and Microsoft doesn't want to lose more on hardware sales than needed. The PS2 should be pretty cheap to make, it is almost 2 years older than Gamecube and XBox and built quality is clearly not as good as their competitors. The reason why the PS2 is at $150 is that they are dominating the market and still selling more than Microsoft and Nintendo. I think the PS2 is going to drop to $100 after the XBox 2/Next/whatever launch.
It isn't really FAIR-USE but legal private copying. When the law was made, it was pretty clear that there is no way to stop private copying without a police state and criminalizing a huge part of your citizens. Because of that, the lawmakers allowed private copying but also decided that copyright holders have get a compensation. (like this copyright levy) Imho a very good and fair idea.
Now there are just two basic problems with this system:
Someone already figured out how to get linux running on it and made a page about it on sourceforge
At $110 the ceiva seems to be bargain, if you wouldn't need that expensive subscription. If you could emulate the ceiva server or exchange the Ceiva firmware to something more useful it could be a really nice device.
To be exact most houses in Europe are connected using 400V three phase current, neutral point to one of the phases is 400/(2*sin(pi/3)) =~ 230V.
Shutdown maybe but I don't believe they kept the money.
Not really, it is common knowledge that Nvidia's linux binary drivers are much better than Ati's. Not only the performance is better in Nvidia's drivers but they are also more compatible. People often had problems getting ATI's binary drivers working, while Nvidia's drivers are working without problem in most configurations and even problems like 4k stacks were fixed withhin a reasonable time.
GC stores just the framebuffer in internal RAM of the graphic chip. Textures are staying in the RAM (and some small texture caches), not much better from a bandwidth perspective, but the programmer doesn't need to care about it. Of course this wouldn't work out with RDRAM instead of the 1T-SRAM used in the Gamecube.
The 7.5 million/s isn't average. Look at the PDF I posted, page 32:"fastest so far seems to be 125k polys at 60fps" and on page 13 from rendering analysis: "52,000 polys per frame - min 10k - max 145k", but that 145k/frame figure is very likely at 30fps, as 60% of the games aren't running at 60Hz as the performance analysis also tells.
The PS2 is certainly not a bad machine, but it isn't nearly as fast as Sony's marketing was suggesting and as you already said it is quite old compared to both XBox and Gamecube.