When I was a young'un, I created a Quake map of the local Laser Tag joint. I even was working on a mod that changed the weapons to behave more along the rules of the game. Even worse, my mod gibbed you if you tried to illegally cross the center barrier. (*gasp!*) Should I have been arrested as a terrorist? Maybe I was planning to run in with a Phazer pistol and start shooting the place up?!? Actually, I suppose it's worse than that, because I did actually run in and start shooting the place up with a Phazer pistol. Oh noes!
I'm sorry, but the idea of creating a school map for you and your friends to play is something that goes back as far as Doom. Kids create these environments because they're familiar, not because they want to go shooting up the place. Only Jack Thompson believes that unbalanced people "train" for killing on these games. The truth of the matter is that ole' Jack is full of sh*t. His claim on Fox news that a previous shooter had created maps of his school turned out to be bunk. He had created maps for Counter Strike, but nothing even vaguely related.
If this map disturbed parents (which is an understandable concern given recent events), then the school's action should have been to evaluate the individual, not immediately kick him out of school. Pretty much all of the shooters in recent history were known to be mentally unbalanced prior to the shootings. An evaluation of the individual's mental state and school records would clarify if he was a threat or not. If not (which it doesn't sound like in this case), you ask them to discontinue the behavior, delete the maps, and go about school as usual. But instead, we give these kids a real reason to hate the faculty. Way to go guys.
Just because you're reading his blog doesn't mean that he's not the Editor-in-Chief of 1-Up. Which, methinks, makes him "press". Now be a good boy and go apologize.:P
See, I read the same thing. Except I read it as "Obama's Space Dream". I was rather disappointed when I realized there was a "My" in there. I might have considered voting for him if he had a good space plan. Instead I'm thinking of avoiding his Web 2.0-ness. There's too much crap in the world already to be having another President adding to it.:-/
Anyone have a better candidate for President? How about Steve Jobs?:-P
Figures. The funniest part of that quote is missing! Before Von Neumann uttered that sentence, he first stated that "The generation of random numbers is far too important to leave to chance.":-P
A very well reasoned argument. The only way such large page sizes would make sense is in the case of an object-oriented system where all memory is allocated on common heaps. e.g. Java-based or some other system that favors abstract references over fixed memory pointers. Combined with technologies like generational garbage collectors, the OS could potentially manage paging on a heap by heap basis. Of course, if you take that route it becomes just as easy to page based on the individual objects rather than their heap. (i.e. You'd keep a "storage" heap on disk.)
The only problem with that approach is then you'd need to reinvent paging to provide memory map type of services. It would be feasible, and the logic could even be encapsulated in a ByteBuffer-type of class, but it would be more work for something we already have.
why AKAIAmBatman is wrong is because this is absolutely not about the performance of rendering.
It seems the goal for Tamarin is only a 10x improvement. That means that C# will still be 1000 times faster than the improved Tamarin engine.
These two statements immediately kill your credibilty. A 1000x improvement in performance would mean that the current Javascript engines are some of the worst interpreters known to man. I can assure you that they are not. Tamarin, in fact, is a just-in-time compiler, meaning that it approaches the performance levels of native code. If the C# code appears to run 1000x faster, it's because there's a bottleneck elsewhere in the pipeline.
Specifically, the operations performed by Javascript engines are often extremely slow. I can rarely get more than 30 frames per second out of video games written for the DOM. Anything too complicated easily drops to 15 fps or less. This isn't caused by the Javascript. In fact, very little Javascript is running at all! It's the limitations of the DOM rendering engine. Canvas bypasses this by offering a 2D rendering surface. This means that in most browsers you get a performance level on par with a surface like the GDI. If and when browser developers start using DirectDraw or SDL surfaces for Canvas operations, you'll start seeing graphical performance on par with nearly anything you can do on the desktop. An OpenGL context would similarly be able to reach levels approaching your average OpenGL program. The 3D card would be doing all the work.
Silverlight is not necessary. Flash and Java were both products of the days before we had advanced web technologies. We are barely a few steps away from making both of them redundant in the web browser. And now Microsoft wants to try and embrace, extend, and extinguish the market with a 10 year old design with some new polish. Brilliant.
Actually, it is mentioned in the spec; albeit briefly: "A future version of this specification will probably define a 3d context (probably based on the OpenGL ES API)."
Basically, it's been reserved and pointed to as a future point of development. Opera seems to be the most eager to develop this part of the spec, but so far they haven't released anything. As I was saying, if Microsoft wants to accelerate web development they'd look at helping the WHATWG by defining and implementing that part of the spec. That would give them a huge lead over their competitors without locking in the web to Internet Explorer.
Also, nothing in the 2D spec prevents hardware acceleration behind the scenes. It simply isn't defined either way.:-)
Parent is correct. Pretty much every paging-capable microprocessor in existence uses 4K memory blocks, thus why they're the natural size for a hard disk. In the x86 world, the next step up is 4MB blocks. Burst performance of modern hard disks is quite good, but I have to wonder if 4MB blocks would be helpful or harmful to overall system performance? It might reduce the number of pages, that's for sure.
Microsoft pulled the wool over your eyes. They were showing you a DOM app that needed to modify the rendering tree in order to make a move. This is similar to a 3D Scene Graph, but without the hardware acceleration. When Microsoft showed you the Silverlight app, they were showing you a hardware-accelerated drawing program. The very purpose for which Canvas was created.
As for the AI speed (assuming that the performance issues weren't entirely being caused by the DOM manipulations), Silverlight still uses Javascript for scripting. If it can run so much faster in their CLR scripting why don't they use their new Javascript engine in Internet Explorer?
In case you think I'm joking, that is exactly what Mozilla is doing with their new Tamarin engine. The new engine is faster and more feature rich, ergo it's being integrated into the browser platform. To make matters even more interesting, Mozilla and Adobe are sharing the development of the engine, so that they can both use it. Mozilla in the browser, Adobe in Flash.
I'm sorry. Microsoft is pulling a fast one on you. There is no need for Silverlight other than to lock you into Microsoft technology.
The Core CLR will include the garbbage collection, type system, generics and many of the other key features that are part of the CLR on the desktop. It won't include COM interop support and other features "that you don't need inside a browser," the Microsoft execs say.
Which is to say that it's being ported just for Silverlight. Silverlight depends on XAML. (Originally expanded to Extensible Avalon Markup Language.) XAML is the serialized form of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) vector drawing commands. WPF is based around.NET 3.0. Thus XAML consists of references to the.NET objects. That's why the CLR is required in pared-down form.
Microsoft is literally porting a chunk of Windows Vista to provide gee-whiz effects. Thus the use of Silverlight will always tie you back to Microsoft. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
The Core CLR shows up as part of the Silverlight SDK that Redmond is open sourcing.
That's great. Now if Microsoft would actually implement a few web standards (rather than spewing out more Microsoft "standards") I might actually trust them. As it happens, though, I don't. Internet Explorer has the absolute worst track record of all the modern web browsers. It's fairly straight forward to tune Javascript/DOM code to run in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. But Internet Explorer? Meh. Let's just say that it adds another 30-50% to the project time.
Now Microsoft wants to broadcast their wonderful multimedia technology that will enhance the web, be cross-platform, show cool multimedia-type stuff that we can already do with SVG or Canvas. Woohoo. Whoopdedoo. Wow.
Not.
This smacks of yet another Microsoft embrace, extend, and extinguish stratgey. "Yeah, guys. Come on in. Here's the Silverlight plugin which works on Macs. We're going to be real buds with these Mac peoples! We're even porting a teeny bit of the CLR (ed: And you thought Java was browser bloat?) to make our XAML/Avalon/WPF technology work for you guys. Oh, did we mention that Macs are kind of slow? (ed: They are now!)"
Next version: "We haven't seen enough customers demand support for the Mac. So we're dropping the plugin for that platform and adding some amazing new features to the Windows version." *FWHHOOOSH* Extinguished.
If Microsoft really wanted to compete, they'd be the first to implement the OpenGL API for the Canvas tag that the WHATWG has been working on. Oh, but wait! That wouldn't be Window-y enough. It would have to be the DirectX API through Javascript, dontchaknow.:-/
As for 8K, as recently as 2006 people were designing games to run on modern computers that were entirely under 4K.
To be pedantic for a moment (since I happen to know a thing or two about the Java4K contest), the contest is not about trying to get Java programs to run in 4K of memory. It's about creating the best game possible with only 4K of code/asset space. The games can potentially eat up hundreds of megs of memory at runtime. As long as they fit within 4K on disk, it doesn't matter. This has lead to a variety of compression and space optimization techniques that have helped the contest push the boundaries of what is possible with so little asset space.:-)
Not to mention that special "something" that Apple has and Microsoft clearly does not have. I don't claim to know what it is--I don't own a Mac--I'm bicurious about OSX and I don't know why... is it the bash kernel?
There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item.
Excuse me, Mr. Balmer? Subsidized by who or what?
Maybe Balmer knows something I don't (always possible), but methinks that he needs to go back to CEO school* for lessons on how to pay attention to your competition. In specific, the reason why the iPhone is going to cost $500 is because it's not being subsidized by cell phone contracts. Jobs is trying to change the rules in that respect. Like Nintendo, Apple wants to make a profit off of every hardware unit sold. Any money that comes in through the surplus channels of additional content or features will simply be creme.
My 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune.
I can see how that went: "Here uncle, take this Zune player. It's FREE! That way I can tell everyone that my 85 year old uncle has a Zune, but doesn't want an iPod."
Uncle: "Have you lost your marbles, sonny-boy!?! What in tarnashun' does your old uncle here need with this Dune player?"
Balmer: "Zune..."
Uncle: "Don't interrupt me when I'm talking boy! You think you're so sh'mart with yer fancy electronics company!"
Balmer: "Technically soft-"
Uncle: "I said DON'T INTERRUPT ME!"
Blamer: "Um. Sorry."
Uncle: "That's better. Now get rid of this piece of junk. Did I ever tell you about the time I was flying over Iwo Jima and ended up in a blazing dogfight? I think it was 1942..."
Balmer: *sigh*
Two months later...
Blamer: "My 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune."
Reporter: "Oooooo..."
* I hear that he didn't finish his Dark Lord training with Jeff Skilling...:P
8KB. How the hell did anyone make games that ran in 8KB? Talk about dedication to your art.
Of course, the answer is that they didn't. It was true that the GameBoy had only 8KB of RAM, but when you've got a socket for nearly unlimited ROM, that 8KB doesn't matter as much. All the graphics, sounds, code, and other space wasters are all in a read-only section of memory while the teeny-tiny information on the X and Y positions of characters is contained in the (suddenly quite massive) 8KB of memory.
If you want to talk bad, let's talk about the Atari 2600's 128 bytes of RAM.;-)
Now if you're paying attention, you may have just realized why the PSP needs so much internal memory. That's right, it has to load all of the graphics, sound, code, and other assets off the UMD disk and into main memory. Thus it requires significantly greater RAM capacity than the DS, which uses an advanced form of the venerable ROM chip. Yet the increase in memory gives the programmer options on whether or not to load those assets into main RAM (say, because they're compressed in the ROM chip) or stream them directly from the chip.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that the design makes the DS superior to the PSP, but it certainly demonstrates how clever Nintendo is in building gaming systems. Very few hardware designers would even dream of designing seemingly underpowered machines the way Nintendo does. Yet Nintendo consistently demonstrates that they know how to focus on games, not hardware features that may or may not be necessary.
"There's nothing to compare as long as Linux operating systems got nothing compared to the Windows Device Manager. Windows > Linux."
Perhaps you could try having a balanced viewpoint? Believe it or not, little things like the lack of centralized device management DO bug the living starch out of your average user. They can barely get around a Windows machine and you want them to hunt all over creation for their device options? Even Macs have a centralized control panel!
Ubuntu has been helping Linux make great strides in user friendliness. But some of the core usability issues have gone all of 15 years without being repaired. Instead we concern ourselves over Beryl vs. Aero. Who frickn' cares? Neither one is going to make my computer do what I want it to do any better.
P.S. Cygwin - For those times when you can't use a real operating system.
You know, neither one of those gaffes were uttered by Kutaragi. "Riiiidge Racer!" was Kaz Harai's, and the "Massive Damage" thing was a representative of the company that makes Genji. (Who's name escapes me at the moment.) What Kutaragi actually said when he stepped down was, "Inside this body, is powerful and elegant system!"
The reporters weren't quite sure how to take it until he explained that he was working at Sony for far "too cheap". "Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It's a question of what you can do with that Ken Kutaragi. If you can have an amazing experience, I believe price is not a problem."
At that point the media wrote him off as another Sony loon. Some guy was on hand to tell Kutaragi that he's going to, "beat you" and that "it's going going to hurt". When asked why, he responded, "because... I don't know!" At that point his buddy stepped in and said that he, "heard that [Ken Kutaragi's] graphics were awesome!"
This *is* slightly better than you make it sound, as Adobe is effectively giving away a free development environment. However, this mostly just replaces the open source stuff like MTASC, so it's like it's earth shattering. But it is a step in the right direction. Especially since having a free SDK could save experienced developers thousands of dollars on purchasing Adobe's cruddy IDEs.
The problem isn't the choice, it's the follow-through. Open Source software maintains its momentum as long as there is an itch to scratch. As soon as that itch is satisfied, the work stops. Even if the code is unsuitable for your average joe. Technically, this is where the commercial distributions are supposed to pick up the slack and do the rest of the work. You know, offer an integrated Linux environment. Something to make all that money we're throwing at them worth something. But they don't. And I have no idea why.
Perhaps the most telling event was when I got a copy of Sun's Java Desktop System. It was a complete SUSE-based distro with Sun's unified desktop on top of it. I forget what the exact problem was, but in order to change a *BASIC* system setting, the instructions required that I directly edit a system file.
Excuse me?
This little gaffe was repeated by Mandrake with its command-line audio setup. RedHat with its inability to automatically handle its own damn package format. So on and so forth. I forget how many times integrated tools should have existed, and... well... didn't. I won't even get into the "broken by design" GUI choices of GNOME.
Now Ubuntu has been slowly trying to push this back; to make Linux a bit more user-friendly. But it's just one distro among many. There needs to be a concerted effort from all companies that SELL Linux. They need to give as good of an experience as they can possibly give. Simply repackaging the same software with a new GUI theme isn't going to cut it. They need to actually spend some money on covering the gaps that the unpaid community isn't going to cover. (I mean, let's be reasonable. They're not getting paid to develop a boring dialog and test flipping the switch 300 different ways.)
The development tools themselves are fine. In fact, Java is pretty well covered by Eclipse and Netbeans. If Linux distros make more of an effort to integrate the (now OPEN SOURCE!) Java into the system, they can make developer's lives even easier. Mono is also an acceptable choice, but the key thing is to get it integrated. Make your commercial Operating Systems FEEL like commercial Operating Systems. Not hobby OSes that have a nice coat of paint on them. In other words, maybe you commercial guys could pull your weight a little? Maybe?
* Ok, you can start flaming me now. I'm sure I've said something that offends distro X fanboys. Bring it on so I can ignore it.:-/
20+ years ago the C64, to many, was a video game console
This is a terminally backwards assessment of what happened. The C64 was very much a home computer that happened to play Video Games. (And play them well, mind you.) Its only real nod to home console design was the cartridge port, something which practically none of the games used.
Consider for a moment: The C64 was a descendant of the Commodore PET. Would anyone think of the Commodore PET as a video game console? Not very likely, eh?
The reason why the C64 was so good at games was because Trameil felt that his computers weren't flashy enough to keep the market's interest. With Atari also making home computers, he felt that the best way to "win" the computer war (Jack was all about "business is war") was to make his machines the best darn video-gaming computers on the market. Thus starting with the VIC-20, Commodore began making computers with sophisticated graphics and sound capabilities. With the memory boost to 64K and the addition of a high-res, 40 character text mode, the Commodore 64 managed to become both an incredible home machine for "serious" BASIC application and an unsurpassed system for "fun" game programs.
I know, I own one. And the UI drives me insane. It is poorly thought out, and reminds me of the interfaces pre Windows 3.11 (Not including X of the day).
Thank you! I knew I couldn't be the only one who thought that Motorola couldn't UI design their way out of a paper bag. Such a nice phone, but so crippled by so many UI idiosynchrasies. On top of that, the action buttons are always backwards just so that Motorola can be different from Nokia. Guys, that's not different, that's stupid. If your competitor is kicking your ass in some area learn from them.
Don't even get me started on the travesty that is the "Q" phone. Dear God, did anyone at Motorola actually try to use that thing? For even 30 seconds?
Meh. Sorry for the tangent. Now back to your regularly scheduled program.
Does it matter? Characters in games don't take your bearings with sights, either.
The point is to make it *feel* as real as possible. Being computer games, a little behind the scenes cheating can make that computationally feasible. Reaper was a start.:)
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a young'un, I created a Quake map of the local Laser Tag joint. I even was working on a mod that changed the weapons to behave more along the rules of the game. Even worse, my mod gibbed you if you tried to illegally cross the center barrier. (*gasp!*) Should I have been arrested as a terrorist? Maybe I was planning to run in with a Phazer pistol and start shooting the place up?!? Actually, I suppose it's worse than that, because I did actually run in and start shooting the place up with a Phazer pistol. Oh noes!
I'm sorry, but the idea of creating a school map for you and your friends to play is something that goes back as far as Doom. Kids create these environments because they're familiar, not because they want to go shooting up the place. Only Jack Thompson believes that unbalanced people "train" for killing on these games. The truth of the matter is that ole' Jack is full of sh*t. His claim on Fox news that a previous shooter had created maps of his school turned out to be bunk. He had created maps for Counter Strike, but nothing even vaguely related.
If this map disturbed parents (which is an understandable concern given recent events), then the school's action should have been to evaluate the individual, not immediately kick him out of school. Pretty much all of the shooters in recent history were known to be mentally unbalanced prior to the shootings. An evaluation of the individual's mental state and school records would clarify if he was a threat or not. If not (which it doesn't sound like in this case), you ask them to discontinue the behavior, delete the maps, and go about school as usual. But instead, we give these kids a real reason to hate the faculty. Way to go guys.
Just because you're reading his blog doesn't mean that he's not the Editor-in-Chief of 1-Up. Which, methinks, makes him "press". Now be a good boy and go apologize. :P
See, I read the same thing. Except I read it as "Obama's Space Dream". I was rather disappointed when I realized there was a "My" in there. I might have considered voting for him if he had a good space plan. Instead I'm thinking of avoiding his Web 2.0-ness. There's too much crap in the world already to be having another President adding to it. :-/
:-P
Anyone have a better candidate for President? How about Steve Jobs?
Indeed. Here's a few:
Those are the ones off the top of my head. There are quite a few more out there in the wild.
Figures. The funniest part of that quote is missing! Before Von Neumann uttered that sentence, he first stated that "The generation of random numbers is far too important to leave to chance." :-P
A very well reasoned argument. The only way such large page sizes would make sense is in the case of an object-oriented system where all memory is allocated on common heaps. e.g. Java-based or some other system that favors abstract references over fixed memory pointers. Combined with technologies like generational garbage collectors, the OS could potentially manage paging on a heap by heap basis. Of course, if you take that route it becomes just as easy to page based on the individual objects rather than their heap. (i.e. You'd keep a "storage" heap on disk.)
The only problem with that approach is then you'd need to reinvent paging to provide memory map type of services. It would be feasible, and the logic could even be encapsulated in a ByteBuffer-type of class, but it would be more work for something we already have.
Something to ponder, anyway.
Don't take this the wrong way, but....
Actually, take it however you want. You sir, are an idiot.
Flash indeed. Hrumph.
These two statements immediately kill your credibilty. A 1000x improvement in performance would mean that the current Javascript engines are some of the worst interpreters known to man. I can assure you that they are not. Tamarin, in fact, is a just-in-time compiler, meaning that it approaches the performance levels of native code. If the C# code appears to run 1000x faster, it's because there's a bottleneck elsewhere in the pipeline.
Specifically, the operations performed by Javascript engines are often extremely slow. I can rarely get more than 30 frames per second out of video games written for the DOM. Anything too complicated easily drops to 15 fps or less. This isn't caused by the Javascript. In fact, very little Javascript is running at all! It's the limitations of the DOM rendering engine. Canvas bypasses this by offering a 2D rendering surface. This means that in most browsers you get a performance level on par with a surface like the GDI. If and when browser developers start using DirectDraw or SDL surfaces for Canvas operations, you'll start seeing graphical performance on par with nearly anything you can do on the desktop. An OpenGL context would similarly be able to reach levels approaching your average OpenGL program. The 3D card would be doing all the work.
Silverlight is not necessary. Flash and Java were both products of the days before we had advanced web technologies. We are barely a few steps away from making both of them redundant in the web browser. And now Microsoft wants to try and embrace, extend, and extinguish the market with a 10 year old design with some new polish. Brilliant.
Oh, boo hoo. Go play some tetris: http://java.dnsalias.com/tetris/
Actually, it is mentioned in the spec; albeit briefly: "A future version of this specification will probably define a 3d context (probably based on the OpenGL ES API)."
:-)
Basically, it's been reserved and pointed to as a future point of development. Opera seems to be the most eager to develop this part of the spec, but so far they haven't released anything. As I was saying, if Microsoft wants to accelerate web development they'd look at helping the WHATWG by defining and implementing that part of the spec. That would give them a huge lead over their competitors without locking in the web to Internet Explorer.
Also, nothing in the 2D spec prevents hardware acceleration behind the scenes. It simply isn't defined either way.
Parent is correct. Pretty much every paging-capable microprocessor in existence uses 4K memory blocks, thus why they're the natural size for a hard disk. In the x86 world, the next step up is 4MB blocks. Burst performance of modern hard disks is quite good, but I have to wonder if 4MB blocks would be helpful or harmful to overall system performance? It might reduce the number of pages, that's for sure.
Dude. CANVAS. Hello?
Microsoft pulled the wool over your eyes. They were showing you a DOM app that needed to modify the rendering tree in order to make a move. This is similar to a 3D Scene Graph, but without the hardware acceleration. When Microsoft showed you the Silverlight app, they were showing you a hardware-accelerated drawing program. The very purpose for which Canvas was created.
As for the AI speed (assuming that the performance issues weren't entirely being caused by the DOM manipulations), Silverlight still uses Javascript for scripting. If it can run so much faster in their CLR scripting why don't they use their new Javascript engine in Internet Explorer?
In case you think I'm joking, that is exactly what Mozilla is doing with their new Tamarin engine. The new engine is faster and more feature rich, ergo it's being integrated into the browser platform. To make matters even more interesting, Mozilla and Adobe are sharing the development of the engine, so that they can both use it. Mozilla in the browser, Adobe in Flash.
I'm sorry. Microsoft is pulling a fast one on you. There is no need for Silverlight other than to lock you into Microsoft technology.
From TFA:
Which is to say that it's being ported just for Silverlight. Silverlight depends on XAML. (Originally expanded to Extensible Avalon Markup Language.) XAML is the serialized form of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) vector drawing commands. WPF is based around
Microsoft is literally porting a chunk of Windows Vista to provide gee-whiz effects. Thus the use of Silverlight will always tie you back to Microsoft. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Now where are the DOM 2 Events, Microsoft?
That's great. Now if Microsoft would actually implement a few web standards (rather than spewing out more Microsoft "standards") I might actually trust them. As it happens, though, I don't. Internet Explorer has the absolute worst track record of all the modern web browsers. It's fairly straight forward to tune Javascript/DOM code to run in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. But Internet Explorer? Meh. Let's just say that it adds another 30-50% to the project time.
Now Microsoft wants to broadcast their wonderful multimedia technology that will enhance the web, be cross-platform, show cool multimedia-type stuff that we can already do with SVG or Canvas. Woohoo. Whoopdedoo. Wow.
Not.
This smacks of yet another Microsoft embrace, extend, and extinguish stratgey. "Yeah, guys. Come on in. Here's the Silverlight plugin which works on Macs. We're going to be real buds with these Mac peoples! We're even porting a teeny bit of the CLR (ed: And you thought Java was browser bloat?) to make our XAML/Avalon/WPF technology work for you guys. Oh, did we mention that Macs are kind of slow? (ed: They are now!)"
Next version: "We haven't seen enough customers demand support for the Mac. So we're dropping the plugin for that platform and adding some amazing new features to the Windows version." *FWHHOOOSH* Extinguished.
If Microsoft really wanted to compete, they'd be the first to implement the OpenGL API for the Canvas tag that the WHATWG has been working on. Oh, but wait! That wouldn't be Window-y enough. It would have to be the DirectX API through Javascript, dontchaknow.
To be pedantic for a moment (since I happen to know a thing or two about the Java4K contest), the contest is not about trying to get Java programs to run in 4K of memory. It's about creating the best game possible with only 4K of code/asset space. The games can potentially eat up hundreds of megs of memory at runtime. As long as they fit within 4K on disk, it doesn't matter. This has lead to a variety of compression and space optimization techniques that have helped the contest push the boundaries of what is possible with so little asset space.
From the horse's mouth...
Excuse me, Mr. Balmer? Subsidized by who or what?
Maybe Balmer knows something I don't (always possible), but methinks that he needs to go back to CEO school* for lessons on how to pay attention to your competition. In specific, the reason why the iPhone is going to cost $500 is because it's not being subsidized by cell phone contracts. Jobs is trying to change the rules in that respect. Like Nintendo, Apple wants to make a profit off of every hardware unit sold. Any money that comes in through the surplus channels of additional content or features will simply be creme.
I can see how that went: "Here uncle, take this Zune player. It's FREE! That way I can tell everyone that my 85 year old uncle has a Zune, but doesn't want an iPod."
Uncle: "Have you lost your marbles, sonny-boy!?! What in tarnashun' does your old uncle here need with this Dune player?"
Balmer: "Zune..."
Uncle: "Don't interrupt me when I'm talking boy! You think you're so sh'mart with yer fancy electronics company!"
Balmer: "Technically soft-"
Uncle: "I said DON'T INTERRUPT ME!"
Blamer: "Um. Sorry."
Uncle: "That's better. Now get rid of this piece of junk. Did I ever tell you about the time I was flying over Iwo Jima and ended up in a blazing dogfight? I think it was 1942..."
Balmer: *sigh*
Two months later...
Blamer: "My 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune."
Reporter: "Oooooo..."
* I hear that he didn't finish his Dark Lord training with Jeff Skilling...
Of course, the answer is that they didn't. It was true that the GameBoy had only 8KB of RAM, but when you've got a socket for nearly unlimited ROM, that 8KB doesn't matter as much. All the graphics, sounds, code, and other space wasters are all in a read-only section of memory while the teeny-tiny information on the X and Y positions of characters is contained in the (suddenly quite massive) 8KB of memory.
If you want to talk bad, let's talk about the Atari 2600's 128 bytes of RAM.
Now if you're paying attention, you may have just realized why the PSP needs so much internal memory. That's right, it has to load all of the graphics, sound, code, and other assets off the UMD disk and into main memory. Thus it requires significantly greater RAM capacity than the DS, which uses an advanced form of the venerable ROM chip. Yet the increase in memory gives the programmer options on whether or not to load those assets into main RAM (say, because they're compressed in the ROM chip) or stream them directly from the chip.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that the design makes the DS superior to the PSP, but it certainly demonstrates how clever Nintendo is in building gaming systems. Very few hardware designers would even dream of designing seemingly underpowered machines the way Nintendo does. Yet Nintendo consistently demonstrates that they know how to focus on games, not hardware features that may or may not be necessary.
"There's nothing to compare as long as Linux operating systems got nothing compared to the Windows Device Manager. Windows > Linux."
Perhaps you could try having a balanced viewpoint? Believe it or not, little things like the lack of centralized device management DO bug the living starch out of your average user. They can barely get around a Windows machine and you want them to hunt all over creation for their device options? Even Macs have a centralized control panel!
Ubuntu has been helping Linux make great strides in user friendliness. But some of the core usability issues have gone all of 15 years without being repaired. Instead we concern ourselves over Beryl vs. Aero. Who frickn' cares? Neither one is going to make my computer do what I want it to do any better.
P.S. Cygwin - For those times when you can't use a real operating system.
You know, neither one of those gaffes were uttered by Kutaragi. "Riiiidge Racer!" was Kaz Harai's, and the "Massive Damage" thing was a representative of the company that makes Genji. (Who's name escapes me at the moment.) What Kutaragi actually said when he stepped down was, "Inside this body, is powerful and elegant system!"
The reporters weren't quite sure how to take it until he explained that he was working at Sony for far "too cheap". "Is it not nonsense to compare the charge for dinner at the company cafeteria with dinner at a fine restaurant? It's a question of what you can do with that Ken Kutaragi. If you can have an amazing experience, I believe price is not a problem."
At that point the media wrote him off as another Sony loon. Some guy was on hand to tell Kutaragi that he's going to, "beat you" and that "it's going going to hurt". When asked why, he responded, "because... I don't know!" At that point his buddy stepped in and said that he, "heard that [Ken Kutaragi's] graphics were awesome!"
This *is* slightly better than you make it sound, as Adobe is effectively giving away a free development environment. However, this mostly just replaces the open source stuff like MTASC, so it's like it's earth shattering. But it is a step in the right direction. Especially since having a free SDK could save experienced developers thousands of dollars on purchasing Adobe's cruddy IDEs.
The problem isn't the choice, it's the follow-through. Open Source software maintains its momentum as long as there is an itch to scratch. As soon as that itch is satisfied, the work stops. Even if the code is unsuitable for your average joe. Technically, this is where the commercial distributions are supposed to pick up the slack and do the rest of the work. You know, offer an integrated Linux environment. Something to make all that money we're throwing at them worth something. But they don't. And I have no idea why.
:-/
Perhaps the most telling event was when I got a copy of Sun's Java Desktop System. It was a complete SUSE-based distro with Sun's unified desktop on top of it. I forget what the exact problem was, but in order to change a *BASIC* system setting, the instructions required that I directly edit a system file.
Excuse me?
This little gaffe was repeated by Mandrake with its command-line audio setup. RedHat with its inability to automatically handle its own damn package format. So on and so forth. I forget how many times integrated tools should have existed, and... well... didn't. I won't even get into the "broken by design" GUI choices of GNOME.
Now Ubuntu has been slowly trying to push this back; to make Linux a bit more user-friendly. But it's just one distro among many. There needs to be a concerted effort from all companies that SELL Linux. They need to give as good of an experience as they can possibly give. Simply repackaging the same software with a new GUI theme isn't going to cut it. They need to actually spend some money on covering the gaps that the unpaid community isn't going to cover. (I mean, let's be reasonable. They're not getting paid to develop a boring dialog and test flipping the switch 300 different ways.)
The development tools themselves are fine. In fact, Java is pretty well covered by Eclipse and Netbeans. If Linux distros make more of an effort to integrate the (now OPEN SOURCE!) Java into the system, they can make developer's lives even easier. Mono is also an acceptable choice, but the key thing is to get it integrated. Make your commercial Operating Systems FEEL like commercial Operating Systems. Not hobby OSes that have a nice coat of paint on them. In other words, maybe you commercial guys could pull your weight a little? Maybe?
* Ok, you can start flaming me now. I'm sure I've said something that offends distro X fanboys. Bring it on so I can ignore it.
This is a terminally backwards assessment of what happened. The C64 was very much a home computer that happened to play Video Games. (And play them well, mind you.) Its only real nod to home console design was the cartridge port, something which practically none of the games used.
Consider for a moment: The C64 was a descendant of the Commodore PET. Would anyone think of the Commodore PET as a video game console? Not very likely, eh?
The reason why the C64 was so good at games was because Trameil felt that his computers weren't flashy enough to keep the market's interest. With Atari also making home computers, he felt that the best way to "win" the computer war (Jack was all about "business is war") was to make his machines the best darn video-gaming computers on the market. Thus starting with the VIC-20, Commodore began making computers with sophisticated graphics and sound capabilities. With the memory boost to 64K and the addition of a high-res, 40 character text mode, the Commodore 64 managed to become both an incredible home machine for "serious" BASIC application and an unsurpassed system for "fun" game programs.
Here, you might find this of interest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUEI7mm8M7Q
Thank you! I knew I couldn't be the only one who thought that Motorola couldn't UI design their way out of a paper bag. Such a nice phone, but so crippled by so many UI idiosynchrasies. On top of that, the action buttons are always backwards just so that Motorola can be different from Nokia. Guys, that's not different, that's stupid. If your competitor is kicking your ass in some area learn from them.
Don't even get me started on the travesty that is the "Q" phone. Dear God, did anyone at Motorola actually try to use that thing? For even 30 seconds?
Meh. Sorry for the tangent. Now back to your regularly scheduled program.
Does it matter? Characters in games don't take your bearings with sights, either.
:)
The point is to make it *feel* as real as possible. Being computer games, a little behind the scenes cheating can make that computationally feasible. Reaper was a start.