Your choice in Operating System does little to mitigate bad coding. eBay has never been known for their technical wizardry and coding sophistication. It wouldn't surprise me if their back doors were wide open. (If you knew where to look.) For example, instead of having secure B2B messaging channels between different offices and departments, they might use machine formatted Internet Email that gets decoded by machine on the other side. Which would mean that a lot of "financial information" could be travelling over "their email system".
10:1 says the guy is an employee who lost his gruntles.
From what I understand, many of the in-game crashes are actually caused by the Wii being unable to handle a loss of wireless connectivity while playing a game. So you may want to ensure that your Wii is within a good range of your access point, and that you're using the channel that gets the best reception.
My Wii is sitting about 5 inches above the access point, so the only time it crashes is when I mess up the setInterval() in my Javascript code.;D
From this link (sorry, the only one I could find for power output rather than watt/hour consumption):
It is estimated that the present rate of US energy consumption - for ALL purposes - is about 3.345 Terawatts.
By those estimates, 50 megawatts is only 0.0015% of the national power output. (And I'm counting consoles that aren't in the United States.) If we assume that the Wii will become as popular as the PS2 was (37.1 million units in the United States alone), we come up with 371 Megawatts, or about 0.011% of national power capacity.
Now let me throw some other figures back at you. The PS2 slurps about 45W to play games and DVDs (x37.1 million), the GameCube drinks about 40 watts (x12.7 million), and the XBox is estimated to gulp about 100 watts to play (x24 million). Standby power* for the XBox is 6 watts, 2 watts for the PS2, and 0.4 watts for the GameCube. During gameplay, the last generation of consoles were using:
If you were to take the average gameplay and DVD watching time of each console and work out the figures, do you think that replacing all of the existing consoles with Wiis would increase the overall power usage, or decrease the overall power usage? Some back-of-the-envelope figures of my own suggest that using nothing but Wiis would save power over the current situation. So I repeat, 10 watts is nothing.
Such products already exist. They go by the name of Thin Client, among others. The thin clients I have had experience with I have found lacking. They each lacked the ability to be easily upgraded to keep up with current web technology.
If thin clients start deploying the Opera Browser, that could change. Look at the Nintendo Wii for an example: Full AJAX Support, DOM 2 APIs, WHATWG compliant*, Flash, SVG, etc. All it's missing is Java, which has a variety of OSS options on which to base a plugin.
* The Audio object doesn't actually do anything, but it's on their list of Things to Do(TM)
Do you consider your television to be "off" when you press the power switch? That's the exact same state as the Wii is in. It barely trickles power in that state. If you want your electronics to be in a powerless mode (fairly unnatural for modern electronics) you need to either find the cutoff switch (like on the PS2 or the power supply of most PCs) or pull the plug.
Why does the WII require so much bloody power for network?
So much bloody power? 10 watts is nothing. It's the power usage of some incandescent night lights. So take your pick: Leave the Wii on, or keep the bad monsters away.:P
One of the most interesting stats were the console idle power usage: 'Wii - 1.3 watts, Wii (Connect 24 On) - 9.6 watts, Xbox 360 - 2.5 watts, PlayStation 3 - 1.9 watts. Nothing significant here; you're looking at spending about $0.20 USD a month to keep the PS3 plugged in, which isn't much. The Wii requires 10 Watts to run Connect24 (which will connect to Nintendo's online service and notify you of system updates) racking up a cost of about $1 a month which is nothing too significant, but still about 5X more than if it were just turned off. Turn Connect24 off, and it's back down to normal.
There are two things that consumers need to be aware of about these items:
1. The Wii's power usage when turned on is only a few watts more. So if you play your consoles, the cost of using WiiConnect24 is going to be significantly less than the cost of regularly using your PS3.
2. If you really don't want the Wii to standby, you can do a full shutdown at any time by holding down the power button. If you hold it down for long enough, the light should turn red. That means that the Wii is full off. This also works for the rare circumstances in which the Wii crashes. (Most commonly seen in the beta of the Opera Web Browser.)
Anything related to long-term habitation of man in space - or are you going to wait until you go to Mars for that?
Bad answer. We've already done a great deal of experimentation on that during Moon Missions, Sky Lab, and Mir. We know enough to where it can wait until the next Space Station or Moon Base is built. Especially if you look at it from the point of view right now, which is that we've already conducted those experiments with the ISS, so why keep it around when we can use that information to build a cheaper, easier to reach Space Station using the Ares V?
Tell you what. Name just one experiment that justifies the billions of dollars spent on the ISS. Only one. Preferrably an experiment that couldn't have been done cheaper from a dedicated satellite package.
You mean after Space Lab? They used the Mir, for one.
I presume you mean Sky Lab? Space Lab is what NASA used to carry out short-term experiments. Mir wasn't available to NASA until it was nearing its End Of Life.
Apart from that, they waited until the ISS was done.
Exactly. They waited. Because the experiments weren't that important. And they're not important enough now to justify the terrible ROI we're seeing.
I don't think they need a new hardware revision for that. The Wii (like the early Gamecubes) uses a custom cable connector. That connector sends the data in its own format that can then be translated into Composite or Component. (Depending on which "cables" you use.) I imagine that an HDMI "cable" for the existing hardware is not out of the question. Just not very useful at the moment.
I have read elsewhere rumblings that the complete hardware setup in the Wii is ready to support DVD playback but Nintendo are waiting on software from a third party that is being developed to enable such a feature.
The drive is basically a DVD drive with custom firmware that reads disks encoded at Constant Angular Velocity rather than Constant Linear Velocity. (Basically, the disc always spins at the same speed in the Wii/Gamecube while regular DVDs slow down as the laser approaches the edge of the disc.) A simple firmware update would probably "fix" the drive to be able to read both types of discs. Unfortunately, drives that aren't rated for movie use are more likely to burn out early. (Something that happened to a lot of PS2s.) So Nintendo will probably release a different console with a sturdier drive. Something for which they'll pass the cost along to the consumer.
it certainly is better suited than the Space Shuttle for anything that takes more than a week.
The extended life support modules of some of the Space Shuttles make them capable of flight times exceeding a month. For long term experiments, the shuttle has a cargo bay to deploy modules into orbit as necessary. It can then come back and retrieve them at a later date. The fact that the Shuttle is not used in this manner suggests that the experiments being conducted on the ISS are not as important as we're being lead to believe.
I'd love to see some analysis about which excel features actually get used. I think PivotTables are fantastic, but I'd be surprised if 5% of the installs of excel have ever been used to make or view one.
It's funny, because I don't use PivotTables all that much. However, I do use charting. And I use the data import/export abilities. I deal in incredibly large reports on a regular basis. (Too much data for Google's solution to handle.) I occasionally do database imports. (Though I find OpenOffice to be more useful for that.) I always use the double-click sizing to format large documents. I have sheets that need many of the complex data format options that Excel offers. Etc, etc, etc.
I don't even use Excel that much, and yet it takes me no time at all to start finding the holes in Google's offering. I really am glad to see them taking a stab at an office productivity suite, but it's nowhere near ready.
[Google Office Stuff] for $50 a year per employee. By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange
Is that really a fair comparison, though? Google's email is great, but their Spreadsheet and Word Processor solutions are nowhere near as sophisticated as MS Office. And in an office environment, many of those differences do matter.
I haven't played with Google Calendar enough, but would it be a workable replacement for the Outlook calendar? i.e. Can you schedule meetings with a simple invite rather than telling everyone to put it on their calendar? Can other users see your unavailable periods when scheduling?
I hate to give Microsoft props, but there are features that are critical to the office use of software. If Google doesn't provide those features, they will not be able to compete at all. Which means that the supposed "leverage" with Microsoft would be nothing more than hogwash.
Heh, heh, heh. It's so much fun pissing off the fanboi trolls. I especially love the constant "OMG, you quoted X" routine. Priceless. Shall I quote Playstation Magazine next? I'm sure you'll throw in there, "OMG, I can't believe you quoted Playstation Magazine!" You're such a predictable little trolley-wolley!
436,000 is only for the U.S. I said North America.
Second of all, adding your inflated 500,000 to the 1.1 million* they sold from launch to December puts them at 1.6 million. Adding MS' 300,000 to their 4.5 million* in NA puts them at 4.8 million.
I was speaking of total units worldwide at that point. Sorry, I should have clarified. Estimated worldwide units of XBox 360 are ~10 million while Wii sales are currently estimated to be approching 5 million units. If you lowball the figures, the estimates come out to about 9 million vs. 4 million respectively. That's still a LOT of units. Of course, lack of Japanese sales are really hurting the 360.
Despite the optimistic math, your point is solid. Good month for Nintendo.
you tried to save face by linking to a fucking zdnet.com article?
I'm sorry. Did that hurt your fanboy feelings?
Run PS2 game on pre-1.5 on 480p set - perfect image quality.
BZZT! That is incorrect, sir! Running a 480p game at 480p works fine. Running a 480i game on the PS3, period, causes the issue. Specifically, there's a horizontal scaler that resamples the 480i output to the PS3's native 480p resolution. The problem was that this appears to have been done with naive line doubling, creating massive graphical problems. This has nothing to do with scaling 480p output to 1080p.
Since ZDNet hurts your fanboi feelings, here's a nice Beyond3D post about the issue. I hope they don't use too many technical terms for you. We wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.
There was no change to PS1 or PS2 emulation with any firmware update - due to the fact that PS2 emulation is DONE IN HARDWARE.
Not quite. The Wii does Gamecube "emulation" in hardware, because it's bascially the same hardware with higher specs. The PS3 is a bit more complex in that PS2 programs would not be able to interact with the hardware correctly. As such, it uses a combination of emulation and original PS2 chips to provide PS2 compatibility. Things can and do break because of this.
Don't bother replying dimwit.
Who knew that feeding the trolls could be so much fun? Just keep digging your hole, friend. One bit 'o dirt at a time!
Do you see a lot of screen corruption and jagged edges where there should be straight lines? If so, you need to download and install firmware update 1.5.
The only problem that existed was with the PS3's scaling of the frambuffer for 720 and 1080 tv sets.
From the same article at the top of this post:
One problem that this update doesn't fix is the upscale issue for PS1 or PS2 games. I've been told that a fix for these issues is also in the pipeline.
It's not news because it means demand is high (that's an acceptable excuse the first month and a half). It's news because it means Nintendo has dropped the ball.
When was the last time Nintendo sold 500,000 consoles per month during a non-holiday season in just North America? Dude, that is a LOT of consoles. So many that the Wii has sold almost half as many units as the XBox 360 has sold in its entire lifetime. So many that Nintendo has already sold about 1/4 of the units that the Gamecube sold in its entire lifetime.
Think about that. 1/4 the number of Gamecubes in 1/4 of a year. Wow. I'd hate to be the guy who management is leaning on to improve Nintendo's production capacity.
There are about 20-30 games out of the gigantic Playstation library of games, some 8000-9000, that don't function properly on the PS3.
Correction: There are 20-30 games (see sibling who disputes this figure) that don't function on the PS3. During the month of January, there was a far higher number of games (easily over 50%) that didn't function properly. To be specific, the PS2 emulation wasn't providing the full graphical quality of the PS2. As a result, the games were looking outright terrible when played on a PS3.
Sony recently fixed this problem with the release of the 1.5 patchset for the PS3.
Those lessons apply to all space activities. i.e. The more you do it, the more you learn. The problem is that the ISS's is a station with no mission. Meaning that those things are the only thing it does. For a station of the size and complexity of the ISS, that's a waste of money.
Slashdot Mirror
Your choice in Operating System does little to mitigate bad coding. eBay has never been known for their technical wizardry and coding sophistication. It wouldn't surprise me if their back doors were wide open. (If you knew where to look.) For example, instead of having secure B2B messaging channels between different offices and departments, they might use machine formatted Internet Email that gets decoded by machine on the other side. Which would mean that a lot of "financial information" could be travelling over "their email system".
10:1 says the guy is an employee who lost his gruntles.
From what I understand, many of the in-game crashes are actually caused by the Wii being unable to handle a loss of wireless connectivity while playing a game. So you may want to ensure that your Wii is within a good range of your access point, and that you're using the channel that gets the best reception.
;D
My Wii is sitting about 5 inches above the access point, so the only time it crashes is when I mess up the setInterval() in my Javascript code.
Sorry, that second calc is supposed to have a "during standby" after it. So 223.28 megawatts for standby.
5,000,000 Wiis * 10W = 50 megawatts
From this link (sorry, the only one I could find for power output rather than watt/hour consumption):
By those estimates, 50 megawatts is only 0.0015% of the national power output. (And I'm counting consoles that aren't in the United States.) If we assume that the Wii will become as popular as the PS2 was (37.1 million units in the United States alone), we come up with 371 Megawatts, or about 0.011% of national power capacity.
Now let me throw some other figures back at you. The PS2 slurps about 45W to play games and DVDs (x37.1 million), the GameCube drinks about 40 watts (x12.7 million), and the XBox is estimated to gulp about 100 watts to play (x24 million). Standby power* for the XBox is 6 watts, 2 watts for the PS2, and 0.4 watts for the GameCube. During gameplay, the last generation of consoles were using: during playtime, and: If you were to take the average gameplay and DVD watching time of each console and work out the figures, do you think that replacing all of the existing consoles with Wiis would increase the overall power usage, or decrease the overall power usage? Some back-of-the-envelope figures of my own suggest that using nothing but Wiis would save power over the current situation. So I repeat, 10 watts is nothing.
* Based on web searches. Actual values may vary.
If thin clients start deploying the Opera Browser, that could change. Look at the Nintendo Wii for an example: Full AJAX Support, DOM 2 APIs, WHATWG compliant*, Flash, SVG, etc. All it's missing is Java, which has a variety of OSS options on which to base a plugin.
* The Audio object doesn't actually do anything, but it's on their list of Things to Do(TM)
Do you consider your television to be "off" when you press the power switch? That's the exact same state as the Wii is in. It barely trickles power in that state. If you want your electronics to be in a powerless mode (fairly unnatural for modern electronics) you need to either find the cutoff switch (like on the PS2 or the power supply of most PCs) or pull the plug.
So much bloody power? 10 watts is nothing. It's the power usage of some incandescent night lights. So take your pick: Leave the Wii on, or keep the bad monsters away.
There are two things that consumers need to be aware of about these items:
1. The Wii's power usage when turned on is only a few watts more. So if you play your consoles, the cost of using WiiConnect24 is going to be significantly less than the cost of regularly using your PS3.
2. If you really don't want the Wii to standby, you can do a full shutdown at any time by holding down the power button. If you hold it down for long enough, the light should turn red. That means that the Wii is full off. This also works for the rare circumstances in which the Wii crashes. (Most commonly seen in the beta of the Opera Web Browser.)
Bad answer. We've already done a great deal of experimentation on that during Moon Missions, Sky Lab, and Mir. We know enough to where it can wait until the next Space Station or Moon Base is built. Especially if you look at it from the point of view right now, which is that we've already conducted those experiments with the ISS, so why keep it around when we can use that information to build a cheaper, easier to reach Space Station using the Ares V?
Tell you what. Name just one experiment that justifies the billions of dollars spent on the ISS. Only one. Preferrably an experiment that couldn't have been done cheaper from a dedicated satellite package.
I presume you mean Sky Lab? Space Lab is what NASA used to carry out short-term experiments. Mir wasn't available to NASA until it was nearing its End Of Life.
Exactly. They waited. Because the experiments weren't that important. And they're not important enough now to justify the terrible ROI we're seeing.
I don't think they need a new hardware revision for that. The Wii (like the early Gamecubes) uses a custom cable connector. That connector sends the data in its own format that can then be translated into Composite or Component. (Depending on which "cables" you use.) I imagine that an HDMI "cable" for the existing hardware is not out of the question. Just not very useful at the moment.
The drive is basically a DVD drive with custom firmware that reads disks encoded at Constant Angular Velocity rather than Constant Linear Velocity. (Basically, the disc always spins at the same speed in the Wii/Gamecube while regular DVDs slow down as the laser approaches the edge of the disc.) A simple firmware update would probably "fix" the drive to be able to read both types of discs. Unfortunately, drives that aren't rated for movie use are more likely to burn out early. (Something that happened to a lot of PS2s.) So Nintendo will probably release a different console with a sturdier drive. Something for which they'll pass the cost along to the consumer.
The ISS has only been available in the last few years. What was NASA doing in the other 20 years that these experiments were so cruicial in?
The extended life support modules of some of the Space Shuttles make them capable of flight times exceeding a month. For long term experiments, the shuttle has a cargo bay to deploy modules into orbit as necessary. It can then come back and retrieve them at a later date. The fact that the Shuttle is not used in this manner suggests that the experiments being conducted on the ISS are not as important as we're being lead to believe.
It's funny, because I don't use PivotTables all that much. However, I do use charting. And I use the data import/export abilities. I deal in incredibly large reports on a regular basis. (Too much data for Google's solution to handle.) I occasionally do database imports. (Though I find OpenOffice to be more useful for that.) I always use the double-click sizing to format large documents. I have sheets that need many of the complex data format options that Excel offers. Etc, etc, etc.
I don't even use Excel that much, and yet it takes me no time at all to start finding the holes in Google's offering. I really am glad to see them taking a stab at an office productivity suite, but it's nowhere near ready.
Is that really a fair comparison, though? Google's email is great, but their Spreadsheet and Word Processor solutions are nowhere near as sophisticated as MS Office. And in an office environment, many of those differences do matter.
I haven't played with Google Calendar enough, but would it be a workable replacement for the Outlook calendar? i.e. Can you schedule meetings with a simple invite rather than telling everyone to put it on their calendar? Can other users see your unavailable periods when scheduling?
I hate to give Microsoft props, but there are features that are critical to the office use of software. If Google doesn't provide those features, they will not be able to compete at all. Which means that the supposed "leverage" with Microsoft would be nothing more than hogwash.
The Ares V will be better than the Saturn V. That's why the CEV program is so important to the future of manned space travel.
Heh, heh, heh. It's so much fun pissing off the fanboi trolls. I especially love the constant "OMG, you quoted X" routine. Priceless. Shall I quote Playstation Magazine next? I'm sure you'll throw in there, "OMG, I can't believe you quoted Playstation Magazine!" You're such a predictable little trolley-wolley!
:D
Oh, and you're still wrong. Have a nice day!
436,000 is only for the U.S. I said North America.
I was speaking of total units worldwide at that point. Sorry, I should have clarified. Estimated worldwide units of XBox 360 are ~10 million while Wii sales are currently estimated to be approching 5 million units. If you lowball the figures, the estimates come out to about 9 million vs. 4 million respectively. That's still a LOT of units. Of course, lack of Japanese sales are really hurting the 360.
Indeed.
Back atcha!
I'm sorry. Did that hurt your fanboy feelings?
BZZT! That is incorrect, sir! Running a 480p game at 480p works fine. Running a 480i game on the PS3, period, causes the issue. Specifically, there's a horizontal scaler that resamples the 480i output to the PS3's native 480p resolution. The problem was that this appears to have been done with naive line doubling, creating massive graphical problems. This has nothing to do with scaling 480p output to 1080p.
Since ZDNet hurts your fanboi feelings, here's a nice Beyond3D post about the issue. I hope they don't use too many technical terms for you. We wouldn't want you to hurt yourself.
Not quite. The Wii does Gamecube "emulation" in hardware, because it's bascially the same hardware with higher specs. The PS3 is a bit more complex in that PS2 programs would not be able to interact with the hardware correctly. As such, it uses a combination of emulation and original PS2 chips to provide PS2 compatibility. Things can and do break because of this.
Who knew that feeding the trolls could be so much fun? Just keep digging your hole, friend. One bit 'o dirt at a time!
O RLY?
Here's a description of the original problem. (With videos and screenshots.)From the same article at the top of this post:
Doh! There goes that theory.
When was the last time Nintendo sold 500,000 consoles per month during a non-holiday season in just North America? Dude, that is a LOT of consoles. So many that the Wii has sold almost half as many units as the XBox 360 has sold in its entire lifetime. So many that Nintendo has already sold about 1/4 of the units that the Gamecube sold in its entire lifetime.
Think about that. 1/4 the number of Gamecubes in 1/4 of a year. Wow. I'd hate to be the guy who management is leaning on to improve Nintendo's production capacity.
Correction: There are 20-30 games (see sibling who disputes this figure) that don't function on the PS3. During the month of January, there was a far higher number of games (easily over 50%) that didn't function properly. To be specific, the PS2 emulation wasn't providing the full graphical quality of the PS2. As a result, the games were looking outright terrible when played on a PS3.
Sony recently fixed this problem with the release of the 1.5 patchset for the PS3.
Those lessons apply to all space activities. i.e. The more you do it, the more you learn. The problem is that the ISS's is a station with no mission. Meaning that those things are the only thing it does. For a station of the size and complexity of the ISS, that's a waste of money.