Of course Java isn't an OS. How is that relevant? The idea is that moving away from Windows-targetted applications to applications that can run equally well on Linux for small solutions or IBM's own systems for larger solutions has the potential to pose a threat to Windows.
Websphere may have sucked in the past, but it's getting a lot better these days, and is still a *much* bigger contender than.NET according to all the surveys I've seen (other than the ZDNet one that Microsoft tried to rig, that is...)
NanoGator: "I'm NOT PRO DMCA. Why's everybody assume I'm on their side?"
Chill. I wasn't assuming that - just making a DMCA-related quip, this being a DMCA-related thread, and eyes being perfect devices for recording copyrighted material for later mental playback.
NanoGator: "Look at their site! They immediately link to several emulators sites."
Now it's my turn to be blind - the only link to an 'emulator' site (GBAEMU.com) is actually a dev site as well - the top news article today is about the release of a new version of another GBA SDK.:)
Other than that, there's no mention of emulators at all, except in the bar at the top which is a description of the unit itself, not any software emulation.
The only software on the site is for the hardware they're selling itself, and the software patches for games allow it to be used for yet another purpose which either *is* legal or *should* be - combining multiple games to a single cartridge so that you only need to carry one around with you. Pirates wouldn't need the patches - they'd just download pre-patched versions of the games from their Warez sites.
NanoGator: "Yet I don't see an SDK for it. I don't see links to how to develop games on it."
Were your eyes seized for contravening the DMCA?
Go to the Visoly.com web page. Left hand side, under 'Links' are links to three development sites. At least two of those contain full compiler suites for Linux and Windows for developing GBA games.
No, they aren't. They were deemed subject to seizure by US customs after an anonymous tip-off was received notifying Nintendo that they were being used to memorise and replay certain aspects of their copyrighted games.
It's not the screen that's the problem: it's only with certain games
It is the screen that's the problem. Games attempt to compensate for its deficiencies by brightening the sprites, but it's still abysmal for even the brightest of games in less-than-perfect light, and the angle of light falling on it has to be perfect.
Is something bigger/better coming in the next few months?
No. And if it were, it probably wouldn't make much of a difference - GBA's predecessors have seen off superior technology in the past without blinking. If you think MS has a monopoly on the OS market, it's nothing compared to what Nintendo has in handheld gaming.:)
About the only thing that could make a dent in that would be Sony and/or MS entering the handheld market, and that isn't going to happen for a while, if at all.
No, it is not always there. Obviously, because it wasn't in this case. If you look at the internet options in IE you'll see that there's an upper limit on the size of that folder - this file was about an order of magnitude larger than that size. Hence the insta-delete.
You think that's bad - a friend of mine borrowed his brother's PC to check his e-mail. While he was typing a response, the huge download his brother had been carrying out in the background finished, and IE popped up the dialogue copying the file from its temporary location to the selected download location - of course, this appeared over the telnet session my friend was using, and the next time he hit space the cancel button was pressed, resulting in the whole download being lost (no it wasn't cached - the file was much larger than the maximum cache size). A triumph of good user interface design.:)
They 'reproduce' by taking the programs evolved by the more successful robots and combining them - pretty standard GP stuff, really. Those new programs are then fed back into the environment and allowed to evolve some more.
You're missing the point. Sysadmins should behave in such a way that when they crucify users that get out of line and then set the crosses on fire, the users think that they *are* being nice to them.
You'll never become a true BOFH unless you understand the basics...
And how soon they forget - wasn't all that long ago that *Nintendo*, not Sony had a monopoly on the console market.
Still, Nintendo have shown that even with this child-friendly aura around them and without quality third-party support they can do perfectly respectably in terms of sales figures, and make more profit than their competition, so at the end of the day, who cares?
Or just find a developer willing to hide it in their game as an Easter Egg feature and slip it past MS 'quality' control. A developer who doesn't mind never working in the industry again, of course...;)
I know the sprite and background memory is separate - I was referring to the idea that it might be possible to use sprites to generate a Mode 7 background effect (badly) - hence I wasn't referring to the actual background memory but that part that would be used for storing the sprite 'background'.
As for lining up the sprites at the joint, getting them to cover the screen correctly shouldn't be hard, but I agree that lack of sub-pixel rendering would result in extremely ugly seams.
Anyway, as you say, the right way to do this is with rotation/scrolling backgrounds, so it's just idle thought to see if what I'd mistakenly said could actually be doable. I'm very much of the opinion that it could - just that it wouldn't be worth it and it wouldn't work very well.:)
Good point, well made. Just a bit of a thinko there. Although in theory at least you *could* use sprites for the same effect if you didn't mind eating most of your sprite memory and/or having extremely chunky backgrounds.:)
FYI GBA doesn't have Mode 7 hardware either - Mode7esque effects are normally achieved by messing with the hardware sprite registers between scanlines.
So far, Java seems like a stinker to me. I've never written a Java program, never more than glanced over reference books about it, but I have a hunch that it won't be a very successful language.
I didn't bother reading your discussion of why you don't think Java will be a very successful language (too late, by the way - it already is), but I have a hunch that all of your points were invalid.
And it's not as if we haven't seen things getting even more dubious in recent Bond films, what with discovering that Mr Bond is a 'cunning linguist'.;)
He gave the lectures one year, and it wasn't actually as bad as I might have expected (decided to watch them for comedy value as much as anything else).
Among other things on there is a complete (Russian) version of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought you were expected to pay good money for that sort of thing...
Any area where you really do have to fit a large number of PCs into a small area - we've recently outfitted a training room, and small footprint has been one of the most important deciding factors in purchasing the hardware. We ended up going with slimline PCs and LCD monitors, but if the budget had stretched a little bit further, devices like this might have been ideal.
Jadetec also call their MicroPC the world's smallest. Since the e-Space site seems to be a little bit Slashdotted right now, I can't compare the sizes directly, but Jadetec's offering claims:
There are some good uses of this sort of technology as well, beyond targetted adverts. Being able to draw on what other people like to watch to suggest things to see, for example. If I like programs A and B, and the vast majority of people who also like them like program C as well, the system should be recommending that I try it. A step forward from the single-user service that TiVo offers.
And exactly how good is gcc at generating Emotion Engine code these days? Does compiled code automatically make use of the vector units where appropriate? (Clue: the answer is 'no'...)
If you're thinking of using that emulator for anything other than coding, give up now. You aren't going to come close to running PS2 games in real time in an emulator for a long time. Just look at some of the insane bandwidth accessing the scratch RAM in the GS, or the capabilities of VU0 and VU1.
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Of course Java isn't an OS. How is that relevant? The idea is that moving away from Windows-targetted applications to applications that can run equally well on Linux for small solutions or IBM's own systems for larger solutions has the potential to pose a threat to Windows.
Websphere may have sucked in the past, but it's getting a lot better these days, and is still a *much* bigger contender than .NET according to all the surveys I've seen (other than the ZDNet one that Microsoft tried to rig, that is...)
NanoGator: "I'm NOT PRO DMCA. Why's everybody assume I'm on their side?"
:)
Chill. I wasn't assuming that - just making a DMCA-related quip, this being a DMCA-related thread, and eyes being perfect devices for recording copyrighted material for later mental playback.
NanoGator: "Look at their site! They immediately link to several emulators sites."
Now it's my turn to be blind - the only link to an 'emulator' site (GBAEMU.com) is actually a dev site as well - the top news article today is about the release of a new version of another GBA SDK.
Other than that, there's no mention of emulators at all, except in the bar at the top which is a description of the unit itself, not any software emulation.
The only software on the site is for the hardware they're selling itself, and the software patches for games allow it to be used for yet another purpose which either *is* legal or *should* be - combining multiple games to a single cartridge so that you only need to carry one around with you. Pirates wouldn't need the patches - they'd just download pre-patched versions of the games from their Warez sites.
NanoGator: "Yet I don't see an SDK for it. I don't see links to how to develop games on it."
Were your eyes seized for contravening the DMCA?
Go to the Visoly.com web page. Left hand side, under 'Links' are links to three development sites. At least two of those contain full compiler suites for Linux and Windows for developing GBA games.
No, they aren't. They were deemed subject to seizure by US customs after an anonymous tip-off was received notifying Nintendo that they were being used to memorise and replay certain aspects of their copyrighted games.
It is the screen that's the problem. Games attempt to compensate for its deficiencies by brightening the sprites, but it's still abysmal for even the brightest of games in less-than-perfect light, and the angle of light falling on it has to be perfect.
No. And if it were, it probably wouldn't make much of a difference - GBA's predecessors have seen off superior technology in the past without blinking. If you think MS has a monopoly on the OS market, it's nothing compared to what Nintendo has in handheld gaming. :)
About the only thing that could make a dent in that would be Sony and/or MS entering the handheld market, and that isn't going to happen for a while, if at all.
No, it is not always there. Obviously, because it wasn't in this case. If you look at the internet options in IE you'll see that there's an upper limit on the size of that folder - this file was about an order of magnitude larger than that size. Hence the insta-delete.
You think that's bad - a friend of mine borrowed his brother's PC to check his e-mail. While he was typing a response, the huge download his brother had been carrying out in the background finished, and IE popped up the dialogue copying the file from its temporary location to the selected download location - of course, this appeared over the telnet session my friend was using, and the next time he hit space the cancel button was pressed, resulting in the whole download being lost (no it wasn't cached - the file was much larger than the maximum cache size). A triumph of good user interface design. :)
They 'reproduce' by taking the programs evolved by the more successful robots and combining them - pretty standard GP stuff, really. Those new programs are then fed back into the environment and allowed to evolve some more.
You're missing the point. Sysadmins should behave in such a way that when they crucify users that get out of line and then set the crosses on fire, the users think that they *are* being nice to them.
You'll never become a true BOFH unless you understand the basics...
And how soon they forget - wasn't all that long ago that *Nintendo*, not Sony had a monopoly on the console market.
Still, Nintendo have shown that even with this child-friendly aura around them and without quality third-party support they can do perfectly respectably in terms of sales figures, and make more profit than their competition, so at the end of the day, who cares?
Or just find a developer willing to hide it in their game as an Easter Egg feature and slip it past MS 'quality' control. A developer who doesn't mind never working in the industry again, of course... ;)
I know the sprite and background memory is separate - I was referring to the idea that it might be possible to use sprites to generate a Mode 7 background effect (badly) - hence I wasn't referring to the actual background memory but that part that would be used for storing the sprite 'background'.
:)
As for lining up the sprites at the joint, getting them to cover the screen correctly shouldn't be hard, but I agree that lack of sub-pixel rendering would result in extremely ugly seams.
Anyway, as you say, the right way to do this is with rotation/scrolling backgrounds, so it's just idle thought to see if what I'd mistakenly said could actually be doable. I'm very much of the opinion that it could - just that it wouldn't be worth it and it wouldn't work very well.
Good point, well made. Just a bit of a thinko there. Although in theory at least you *could* use sprites for the same effect if you didn't mind eating most of your sprite memory and/or having extremely chunky backgrounds. :)
FYI GBA doesn't have Mode 7 hardware either - Mode7esque effects are normally achieved by messing with the hardware sprite registers between scanlines.
I didn't bother reading your discussion of why you don't think Java will be a very successful language (too late, by the way - it already is), but I have a hunch that all of your points were invalid.
And it's not as if we haven't seen things getting even more dubious in recent Bond films, what with discovering that Mr Bond is a 'cunning linguist'. ;)
He gave the lectures one year, and it wasn't actually as bad as I might have expected (decided to watch them for comedy value as much as anything else).
Among other things on there is a complete (Russian) version of Terry Pratchett's Soul Music. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought you were expected to pay good money for that sort of thing...
Any area where you really do have to fit a large number of PCs into a small area - we've recently outfitted a training room, and small footprint has been one of the most important deciding factors in purchasing the hardware. We ended up going with slimline PCs and LCD monitors, but if the budget had stretched a little bit further, devices like this might have been ideal.
Jadetec also call their MicroPC the world's smallest. Since the e-Space site seems to be a little bit Slashdotted right now, I can't compare the sizes directly, but Jadetec's offering claims:
There are some good uses of this sort of technology as well, beyond targetted adverts. Being able to draw on what other people like to watch to suggest things to see, for example. If I like programs A and B, and the vast majority of people who also like them like program C as well, the system should be recommending that I try it. A step forward from the single-user service that TiVo offers.
And exactly how good is gcc at generating Emotion Engine code these days? Does compiled code automatically make use of the vector units where appropriate? (Clue: the answer is 'no'...)
If you're thinking of using that emulator for anything other than coding, give up now. You aren't going to come close to running PS2 games in real time in an emulator for a long time. Just look at some of the insane bandwidth accessing the scratch RAM in the GS, or the capabilities of VU0 and VU1.