Hair metal was the epitomy of Human expression, it is the great star that our society will be judged by for centuries to come. like Homer's epics and Wagner's opera hair metal is simply our greatest legacy to the future.
It's the best coffee maker you will ever own. Bar none. You basically make espresso and add water, often called an Americano. Quoted for truth. I have one and it is simply the best coffee ever. And without milk or dilution it makes an espresso comparable to a $3000 dollar machine. for $20! In addition it makes a great chai, just place a tea-bag in the bottom or a teaspoon of loose leaf. Stir, set for 20sec then press. Add it to a cup of heated milk and it is better than anything you can buy at starbucks. (although not quite as good as a samovar, it works much more consistantly with cheap teabags.)
This is only a problem for 1080i screens that don't support 720p (all 12 of them), and likewise 720p screens that don't support 1080i/p (are there even any of these?).
For first and second generation HDTVs this is 99% of them. In fact dual mode support only became common in the last year with sub $2000 systems. The reason is that ALL output devices except playstation 3 support proper scaling, thats just the way the standards work, the TVs are fixed sizes and the devices scale accordingly.
And for this reason I cannot even contemplate buying a ps3 as I have a nice 54" screen that would be unusable for half of the games, and I am not about to buy another one just 2 years later. And for the record my 360 does this seemlessly, i have never had it go out of sync, or reduce resolution.
As an actual Games Programmer, in Graphics engines, I have to agree with you. The other thing to note is that ray tracing is by no means a speed benchmark as it is very implementation and scene specific. We had real time raytracing of in the demo scene 10 years ago and earlier. On a system 1/1000 or less the power of the PS3. And it would be a simple matter to whip up a similar pc demo. You'd just have to tweak the settings controlling density of rays for antialiasing and reflection calculations, it probably wouldn't be distinguishable.
Since I am actually a Game programmer I am finally qualified to answer an ask slashdot question, (rather than just guessing and pretending to be an expert:)
The original poster is right. You will not get a programming position without group programming skills. Online trade schools are not taken seriously. If you want to go the quick way I would recommend a 2 year trade school, such as Guild Hall, on campus at SMU.
There is a lot of variance in programming positions. The good paying jobs require an intense background in mathematics, probably the single greatest skill in game programmer. Most of my co-workers have double majors in CS mathematics or minors in mathematics.
In conclusion, I would recommend a 4 year cs degree with a minor in mathematics. Do it in a town with lots of Game programs, at a college with a Game Development focus area. THe other key to getting jobs is to intern every year of college withing the industry. Jobs will fall into your lap when you graduate.
Are you suggesting that programmers debug by rerunning the program until it justs works then declaring it finished? I know its a joke, but it shows a huge lack of any experience or knowledge the the software engineering process. The basic process for both "sorts" of engineers is the same. Plan->Build->Verify->Correct->(repeat). The methods by which these are accomplished are as different as night and day, but require similar temperments and skill levels.
That is pretty scary. Its possible that your power supplies are just throwing away the surplus rather than balancing it. With the setup you describe a 300w power supply should still be sufficient. I am running a single core athalon w/radeon 9800 and 4 HDs. In idle (but not power saving mode) i am hitting around 120-150W, my powersupply is underpowered, but not by much. While running battlefield at full res I occasionally brown out. (reboot)
Even at those insane rates, and assuming your computers ALWAYS use their power supplies maximum rated power (technically impossible) that is still only $60 a month. Most computers only draw half their power supply rating and even less when in power saving mode. Do you really leave the monitors on all day? Kill-o-watt's spot metering is just not accurate for computers because their power consumption varies by 75% with simple application changes. But my guess is that you don't have kill-o-watt, you are just using the power supply ratings (2x250) for the sake of argument.
Like I said in my follow up, the other major offender in my house (besides AC and refridgerator) was incandescent light bulbs. A single 4 bulb chandelier will take more electricity than a massive 300W power supply at full draw and 100W monitor. My biggest savings in doller/per KWh was replacing all my light bubls with 10 and 15watt compact flourescents.
I had an 8 bulb chandelier which turned out to be the single most expensive device in my house, who would have guessed.
Obviously I bought a new refridgerator. A 10 year old refridgerator is just not efficient anymore.
But the scariest thing I found during my power audit was that each incandescent lightbulb was taking more power than my computer at rest. A single chandelier in my house accounted for 1/4 of my electrical bill. By replacing all the lightbulbs with compact flourescent I was able to shave a 3rd off my monthly bill. (still quite high because of an old ac system).
In conclusion your computer is such a minor contribution to electricity that you shouldn't even be considering it before you fix the big offenders.
Your 2 pcs at 500w are averaging between 4 and 6c an hour. At full load without power saving, and turned on 24:7 the worst case scenario is $30-$40 a month. In a real world situation this would probably average around $15 dollars a month. An actually meter on my computer (150 watt power supply, with power saving features) showed that I was averaging around $8 a month.
On the other hand, your "energy saving" refridgerator will cost many times this amount. Mine averages around $70 a month worth of electricity.
You should pick up a meter from home depot, you plug it between the computer and the wall it has a small window with a dial ticking off the KWh.
It never got the attention it deserved because.... (drumroll)... it was on the Mac. Despite the fact that it gets brought up in EVERY conversation about game history, none of us ever saw it, so it continues to rate a ~0 on the influence meter.
Technically with the minimum 15%-20% VAT tax (always included in price) that is nearly the same as the US price ($600-700) depending on VAT. Of course they aren't flying off the shelves here in the US.
I get nightmares about the *millions* of ignorant forum posters who just make up numbers to support whatever claim they are gibbering irrationaly about.
And I think my sig has something to say about it, this not a new phenomenon:)
Apparently the freedom you believe in is not your own, it is the freedom to be screwed by companies that make defective products. mmm "Freedom" you must like it hot.
I have always wondered why people vote against their own interests to help companies, parties and people who's only interest is to screw them as hard and fast as possible. All your argument really proves is that you, and implicitly us Americans, are just not smart consumers or voters.
The supposed "poor AI" was based on the "poor branch prediction" on the PS3, right? Guess what? It is false information spread by Microsoft. The SPEs have an instruction called Branch Hint. If coded properly, it can theoretically have a better branch prediction than the Xbox360. Are you arguing with me or with yourself? The AI on both systems is great, there is just 3x as much time for AI processing on the 360, so developers will make it more complex. "poor branch prediction"? where do you come up with this stuff, the processors have basically identical pipelines. The 360 just has 3 of them. Thats all. I doubt the person who made up that attack on the PS3 (which you attempted to strawman attack me with) even knew what it meant. The SPEs branch prediction doesn't matter and the core processors have no differences as far as I can tell.
Probably because you are stupid. The specs have been out for a nearly a year now. The 360 has the exact same IBM powerpc core processor, just 3x as many of them as the PS3. The vector units are too brain dead for AI and have to be chained together to use their full potential, so basically you have a quick matrix transform, vs 3x as much cpu power, and a video card 1.5x as powerful.
I'm not a fanboy, I am a game graphics programmer. (but yes perhaps I am a little irritated over the difficulty level as well)
Multiverse seems to be like all the other freeware engines out there, homemade. And this isn't even a real game announcement, just a sort of open invitation for someone to come along and develop a MMORPG for them.
Until they actually announce a studio willing to develop it and sign the final licensing contracts this is not news. A vague wish to hire someone else to develop a firefly game (which they don't even own the concept of), for their homebrew freeware engine is not a frontpage slashdot story (unless the crappy homebrew engine happens to run on linux).
I use a mitsubishi 54" DLP for gaming and there is absolutely no lag. This is true for every input, device, and game system I have tried with it. In some of the first generation TVs you had change the settings for the inputs that required lagless operation, but this hasn't been a problem in any modern HDTV that I have seen. And by modern I mean the last 3 years. Don't let fud like this scare you out of getting a great looking and much cheaper DLP screen. If it has lag, which is very unlikely then take it back and get a different model.
The drive still has to physically position the head. Do you think that only PC dvd drives have moving parts? In your world are console dvd drives operated via some magic not available to normal consumers? Perhaps it's alien technology, woooooooo spooky.
On a side note: this problem is the reason that many console game dvds are filled with blank data. So that the most of the important data gets written near the edge of the disc. The edge of the disc is faster because the head has to move less distance to seek through the same amount of data.
HD AV cables support 1080p, the standard is analog your TV just has to know how to sync the signal. Its the digital interfaces which are bandwidth limited.
As for the show of hands: I have a 54" HD DLP Television and I am enjoying the 360s HD output quite a lot. These TVs are no longer in the 5000 dollar range. I got the most vivid one in it's class for way under $2000. I mean you can get a 40" one with only 2 inputs at walmart for under $800. At this price it costs less than my 35" CRT low def television did. The 1080p thing has just made the previous generation models dirt cheap. You guys have no excuse to keep moaning about HD adoption. It costs less than a pc upgrade.
Don't be too qujick to blame those pesky foreigners. It's also likely that the majority of applicants were simply more skilled than you. The difference between a coder who is still in college and a professional with 5 or ten years of experience is immense. You say this was a simple CS lab type project. It is very likely that some of the coders already had usable code in their own library to accomplish the purpose of this task.
I personally have bid 8 hours on projects which would be considered complete network applications. I know in college these projects would have taken me 2-3 weeks to complete. Which is why I can get projects bidding 10x that per hour now.
Sustained actual transfers of 100GB/s or more are possible between SPEs. Cell reads from RSX local memory are at 16MB/s (not 16mb/s, which is equivalent to sending one smoke signal per minute from a camp fire), but this is pretty much irrelevant.
No. The SPEs are all hooked into a single ring buffer with a maximum speed of 96B per tick. Assuming that data must be both read and written to be processed, this limits the performance to 45GB/s (because of the 3tick cost of each r/w operation)
This means that with each SPEs running a program on different data, only a fraction of the theoretical power of the processors can ever be used. IBM has managed to actually use most of this power in a demonstration by splitting up the code for a matrix operation between multiple SPEs because of the ring nature of the bus pasing down data to the next processor does not saturate it. And you thought PS2 microcode syncronization was difficult?:) This would allow you to get close to the theoretical processing power limit. But only with low-data highly parralel functions. eg: definately not collision detection or physics simulation.
I will try to clear up a little of your confusion.
> You assumed that the MGS4 trailer was pre-rendered cutscene, > that obviously shows that you have little knowledge of the PlayStation > and MGS. MGS has NEVER used pre-rendered cutscenes.. blah blah blah
I never said it was prerendered. You simply misunderstood they way these things work. In-game cut scenes use different models than the regular game. That is because the artists need more detailed control of the animations. They can be much more complex because artists can focus on the elements used in that specific cut-scene. Therefor even when rendered in-game cutscenes are a bad estimate of actual gameplay experience. This is why you so often see xbox cutscenes in commercials rather than actual gameplay. Sure it is rendered real time but it will always look the best possible quality.
> The original Xbox CANNOT produce similar quality as MGS4. Snake's > hair alone would cause the original Xbox to be at its limitation.
60,000 polys for hair alone! My GOD call the nobel prize committee! Even if you wanted to waste this many polys on something that could be done with similar quality and 5k polys. What is so spectacular about 60k? They XBOX could do this at its native resolution withou too much difficulty, its not an impressive number, even the ps2 could do it, although you would only be able to render hair and nothing else.
> Finally, where did you hear that the Xbox360 can push 3x more polygons > than the PS3? Your ass? You are NOT a developer, and it is obvious from > your lack of knowledge in the subject.
Well I didn't say 3x. It depends on what you are rendering. But the simplest limitation is the clock speed and the number of pipelines. I am not saying PS3 is worst, since it can do a lot more shader ops per second (3x as many). But it can only do them on half as many polys at a lower clock speed. This is all academic anyway since total performance is a combination of many things. But I deal with 400k poly models every day, and I just wasn't impressed by the demo.
Slashdot Mirror
Hair metal was the epitomy of Human expression, it is the great star that our society will be judged by for centuries to come. like Homer's epics and Wagner's opera hair metal is simply our greatest legacy to the future.
Here is a picture of it in its original b&w glory from another angle.
5 /1N153484776EFF37MIP0757R0M1.JPG
With the rover driving over that area.
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/all/1/n/28
It does look a lot like track prints in mud.
In addition it makes a great chai, just place a tea-bag in the bottom or a teaspoon of loose leaf. Stir, set for 20sec then press. Add it to a cup of heated milk and it is better than anything you can buy at starbucks. (although not quite as good as a samovar, it works much more consistantly with cheap teabags.)
For first and second generation HDTVs this is 99% of them. In fact dual mode support only became common in the last year with sub $2000 systems. The reason is that ALL output devices except playstation 3 support proper scaling, thats just the way the standards work, the TVs are fixed sizes and the devices scale accordingly.
And for this reason I cannot even contemplate buying a ps3 as I have a nice 54" screen that would be unusable for half of the games, and I am not about to buy another one just 2 years later. And for the record my 360 does this seemlessly, i have never had it go out of sync, or reduce resolution.
As an actual Games Programmer, in Graphics engines, I have to agree with you. The other thing to note is that ray tracing is by no means a speed benchmark as it is very implementation and scene specific. We had real time raytracing of in the demo scene 10 years ago and earlier. On a system 1/1000 or less the power of the PS3. And it would be a simple matter to whip up a similar pc demo. You'd just have to tweak the settings controlling density of rays for antialiasing and reflection calculations, it probably wouldn't be distinguishable.
Since I am actually a Game programmer I am finally qualified to answer an ask slashdot question, (rather than just guessing and pretending to be an expert :)
The original poster is right. You will not get a programming position without group programming skills. Online trade schools are not taken seriously.
If you want to go the quick way I would recommend a 2 year trade school, such as Guild Hall, on campus at SMU.
There is a lot of variance in programming positions. The good paying jobs require an intense background in mathematics, probably the single greatest skill in game programmer. Most of my co-workers have double majors in CS mathematics or minors in mathematics.
In conclusion, I would recommend a 4 year cs degree with a minor in mathematics. Do it in a town with lots of Game programs, at a college with a Game Development focus area. THe other key to getting jobs is to intern every year of college withing the industry. Jobs will fall into your lap when you graduate.
Regards
Are you suggesting that programmers debug by rerunning the program until it justs works then declaring it finished? I know its a joke, but it shows a huge lack of any experience or knowledge the the software engineering process. The basic process for both "sorts" of engineers is the same. Plan->Build->Verify->Correct->(repeat). The methods by which these are accomplished are as different as night and day, but require similar temperments and skill levels.
That is pretty scary. Its possible that your power supplies are just throwing away the surplus rather than balancing it. With the setup you describe a 300w power supply should still be sufficient. I am running a single core athalon w/radeon 9800 and 4 HDs. In idle (but not power saving mode) i am hitting around 120-150W, my powersupply is underpowered, but not by much. While running battlefield at full res I occasionally brown out. (reboot)
Even at those insane rates, and assuming your computers ALWAYS use their power supplies maximum rated power (technically impossible) that is still only $60 a month. Most computers only draw half their power supply rating and even less when in power saving mode. Do you really leave the monitors on all day?
Kill-o-watt's spot metering is just not accurate for computers because their power consumption varies by 75% with simple application changes.
But my guess is that you don't have kill-o-watt, you are just using the power supply ratings (2x250) for the sake of argument.
Like I said in my follow up, the other major offender in my house (besides AC and refridgerator) was incandescent light bulbs. A single 4 bulb chandelier will take more electricity than a massive 300W power supply at full draw and 100W monitor. My biggest savings in doller/per KWh was replacing all my light bubls with 10 and 15watt compact flourescents.
I had an 8 bulb chandelier which turned out to be the single most expensive device in my house, who would have guessed.
Obviously I bought a new refridgerator. A 10 year old refridgerator is just not efficient anymore.
But the scariest thing I found during my power audit was that each incandescent lightbulb was taking more power than my computer at rest. A single chandelier in my house accounted for 1/4 of my electrical bill.
By replacing all the lightbulbs with compact flourescent I was able to shave a 3rd off my monthly bill. (still quite high because of an old ac system).
In conclusion your computer is such a minor contribution to electricity that you shouldn't even be considering it before you fix the big offenders.
Your 2 pcs at 500w are averaging between 4 and 6c an hour. At full load without power saving, and turned on 24:7 the worst case scenario is $30-$40 a month. In a real world situation this would probably average around $15 dollars a month.
An actually meter on my computer (150 watt power supply, with power saving features) showed that I was averaging around $8 a month.
On the other hand, your "energy saving" refridgerator will cost many times this amount. Mine averages around $70 a month worth of electricity.
You should pick up a meter from home depot, you plug it between the computer and the wall it has a small window with a dial ticking off the KWh.
It never got the attention it deserved because.... (drumroll)... it was on the Mac. Despite the fact that it gets brought up in EVERY conversation about game history, none of us ever saw it, so it continues to rate a ~0 on the influence meter.
Technically with the minimum 15%-20% VAT tax (always included in price) that is nearly the same as the US price ($600-700) depending on VAT. Of course they aren't flying off the shelves here in the US.
I get nightmares about the *millions* of ignorant forum posters who just make up numbers to support whatever claim they are gibbering irrationaly about.
:)
And I think my sig has something to say about it, this not a new phenomenon
Apparently the freedom you believe in is not your own, it is the freedom to be screwed by companies that make defective products. mmm "Freedom" you must like it hot.
I have always wondered why people vote against their own interests to help companies, parties and people who's only interest is to screw them as hard and fast as possible. All your argument really proves is that you, and implicitly us Americans, are just not smart consumers or voters.
Regards,
I doubt the person who made up that attack on the PS3 (which you attempted to strawman attack me with) even knew what it meant. The SPEs branch prediction doesn't matter and the core processors have no differences as far as I can tell.
Regards
Probably because you are stupid. The specs have been out for a nearly a year now. The 360 has the exact same IBM powerpc core processor, just 3x as many of them as the PS3. The vector units are too brain dead for AI and have to be chained together to use their full potential, so basically you have a quick matrix transform, vs 3x as much cpu power, and a video card 1.5x as powerful.
I'm not a fanboy, I am a game graphics programmer. (but yes perhaps I am a little irritated over the difficulty level as well)
Regards,
Multiverse seems to be like all the other freeware engines out there, homemade. And this isn't even a real game announcement, just a sort of open invitation for someone to come along and develop a MMORPG for them.
Until they actually announce a studio willing to develop it and sign the final licensing contracts this is not news. A vague wish to hire someone else to develop a firefly game (which they don't even own the concept of), for their homebrew freeware engine is not a frontpage slashdot story (unless the crappy homebrew engine happens to run on linux).
I use a mitsubishi 54" DLP for gaming and there is absolutely no lag. This is true for every input, device, and game system I have tried with it. In some of the first generation TVs you had change the settings for the inputs that required lagless operation, but this hasn't been a problem in any modern HDTV that I have seen. And by modern I mean the last 3 years.
Don't let fud like this scare you out of getting a great looking and much cheaper DLP screen. If it has lag, which is very unlikely then take it back and get a different model.
Regards.
The drive still has to physically position the head. Do you think that only PC dvd drives have moving parts? In your world are console dvd drives operated via some magic not available to normal consumers? Perhaps it's alien technology, woooooooo spooky.
On a side note: this problem is the reason that many console game dvds are filled with blank data. So that the most of the important data gets written near the edge of the disc. The edge of the disc is faster because the head has to move less distance to seek through the same amount of data.
HD AV cables support 1080p, the standard is analog your TV just has to know how to sync the signal. Its the digital interfaces which are bandwidth limited.
As for the show of hands:
I have a 54" HD DLP Television and I am enjoying the 360s HD output quite a lot. These TVs are no longer in the 5000 dollar range. I got the most vivid one in it's class for way under $2000. I mean you can get a 40" one with only 2 inputs at walmart for under $800. At this price it costs less than my 35" CRT low def television did. The 1080p thing has just made the previous generation models dirt cheap. You guys have no excuse to keep moaning about HD adoption. It costs less than a pc upgrade.
Don't be too qujick to blame those pesky foreigners. It's also likely that the majority of applicants were simply more skilled than you. The difference between a coder who is still in college and a professional with 5 or ten years of experience is immense.
You say this was a simple CS lab type project. It is very likely that some of the coders already had usable code in their own library to accomplish the purpose of this task.
I personally have bid 8 hours on projects which would be considered complete network applications. I know in college these projects would have taken me 2-3 weeks to complete. Which is why I can get projects bidding 10x that per hour now.
Regards,
Sustained actual transfers of 100GB/s or more are possible between SPEs.
:) This would allow you to get close to the theoretical processing power limit. But only with low-data highly parralel functions. eg: definately not collision detection or physics simulation.
Cell reads from RSX local memory are at 16MB/s (not 16mb/s, which is equivalent to sending one smoke signal per minute from a camp fire), but this is pretty much irrelevant.
No. The SPEs are all hooked into a single ring buffer with a maximum speed of 96B per tick. Assuming that data must be both read and written to be processed, this limits the performance to 45GB/s (because of the 3tick cost of each r/w operation)
This means that with each SPEs running a program on different data, only a fraction of the theoretical power of the processors can ever be used.
IBM has managed to actually use most of this power in a demonstration by splitting up the code for a matrix operation between multiple SPEs because of the ring nature of the bus pasing down data to the next processor does not saturate it. And you thought PS2 microcode syncronization was difficult?
Regards,
I will try to clear up a little of your confusion.
> You assumed that the MGS4 trailer was pre-rendered cutscene,
> that obviously shows that you have little knowledge of the PlayStation
> and MGS. MGS has NEVER used pre-rendered cutscenes.. blah blah blah
I never said it was prerendered. You simply misunderstood they way these things work. In-game cut scenes use different models than the regular game. That is because the artists need more detailed control of the animations. They can be much more complex because artists can focus on the elements used in that specific cut-scene.
Therefor even when rendered in-game cutscenes are a bad estimate of actual gameplay experience. This is why you so often see xbox cutscenes in commercials rather than actual gameplay. Sure it is rendered real time but it will always look the best possible quality.
> The original Xbox CANNOT produce similar quality as MGS4. Snake's
> hair alone would cause the original Xbox to be at its limitation.
60,000 polys for hair alone! My GOD call the nobel prize committee! Even if you wanted to waste this many polys on something that could be done with similar quality and 5k polys. What is so spectacular about 60k? They XBOX could do this at its native resolution withou too much difficulty, its not an impressive number, even the ps2 could do it, although you would only be able to render hair and nothing else.
> Finally, where did you hear that the Xbox360 can push 3x more polygons
> than the PS3? Your ass? You are NOT a developer, and it is obvious from
> your lack of knowledge in the subject.
Well I didn't say 3x. It depends on what you are rendering. But the simplest limitation is the clock speed and the number of pipelines. I am not saying PS3 is worst, since it can do a lot more shader ops per second (3x as many). But it can only do them on half as many polys at a lower clock speed. This is all academic anyway since total performance is a combination of many things. But I deal with 400k poly models every day, and I just wasn't impressed by the demo.