I think the biggest thing with this isn't that you can make your own projector for a home theatre system (most people would probably be better off getting a designed system for that) but it does open up interesting other DIY projects.
A few weeks back was the project where 2 projectors + cameras were turned into a realtime 2D fighter (it was called "kick ass kung fu" or something like that). Now if you have to pay $1500 per projector something like that is quite hard to afford, but if you "roll your own" it's possible.
This can make all kinds of other nerat projects possible because you have an affordable way of making multiple projector displays.
I can't understand why Sony would want to withdraw WiFi from the PS3 spec, though.
That's because they are not removing the WiFi from the PS3. They are removing the/router/ functionality.
Originally it was supposed to have 3 extra Gbit ethernet connections on the back allowing you to use the PS3 as a networking router. I guess they came to their senses and figured out that no-one wants a console to be a router when a dedicated router which is quiet is dirt cheap.
Most systems have a way of differentiating between actions where the player has full knowledge of outcome (eg shooting someone), partial knowledge (sneaking) and no knowledge (perhaps hiding an object? hard to think of true no knowledge examples). The idea is that if you try to sneak you can know eg if you step on a twig, but you don't know if the enemy heard you. To solve that both player and DM rolls and only the DM knows the answer, but the player knows his result and hence can guess the outcome.
This works better with systems that roll multiple dices though.
She said that about the last one as well. And who died? Some character which the reader had no attachment to. But she spent a lot of time trying to build that character during the book, just like the book before that. Almost as obvious as "red shirt guy" in Star Trek.
The point is that in the world of TNG (and other SF for that matter) humans don't have to produce anything. We can replicate/auto-factory produce pretty much anything we want. Some things (like star ships) take a lot of resources and have to be managed but basic things like food or a house are for all purposes free.
So you can basically spend your entire life without producing anything worthwhile and still not be a substantial drain on the rest of humanity.
I don't believe that communism will ever work in the situation we have now. Basically because it ignores the fact that most people are stupid, and those that are not stupid typically want to look after themselves. The old axiom that "power yields corruption" has been demonstrated as true many times in history. If you remove something like "limited resources" from the equation then we may have a world were things are better. (Though I kind of doubt it.)
Why don't you try one before making up your mind? I had mine for a few months and I really like it. I've even seen some PSPs in shops here in Sweden now (demo exes).
BTW if you want to play a quick "pick me up" game on the PSP you just put it in sleep mode. Then it starts up in a second right were you left it. I played through most of Tony Hawk that way.
I have never been able to make the disk pop out. Although I have to say that I don't feel confortable bending it like that.
Now the entire "but toddlers don't know that" argument is moot. As I'm sure you know the biggest gaming market is males 25+ years old. Because they have the money to spend on toys like this. I doubt many teenagers will be getting PSPs (compared to 25+) so if they can't control themselves I say fuck the spoiled brats and let them buy a new console. Seriously, you won't ruin the PSP by anything less than violence and not that many consumer devices handle that well.
I bet I could snap off the top screen on the DS. That doesn't mean I'll go about saying it's a poor quality device or that it's unsuitable for people to own. (Unless they often have the urge to snap things in half.)
It would surprise me if they were good. I had the opportunity to take a course in optimising compilers for multi-processor/vector computers. The bottom line for that course was that optimising for such computers are always hard. If you do it with a language like C it's often even harder. The reason being that the C programming language lacks a way to properly (explicitly) note parallellism. Furthermore it is still too low level for it to be possible to properly change code around without unpredictable behaviour.
Wouldn't it make more sense to begin developing multi-threaded games on consoles though? Since they are always identical you know what you have. I imagine that attempting to develop for a PC with 1-4 CPUs with 1 or 2 cores each with or without hyperthreading is a nightmare to develop for. There is just no way you can make the game dependent on the added CPU power. Instead you'll have to ensure that the game works fine on lowest common denominator systems and then scales up to work on more powerful systems.
Naturally this will mean that we'll never see games that require muli-core/processor computers until those are the norm. The next gen consoles will be around for a few years and will stay the same all that time. If you intend to develop a few games for them it will make sense that you try to learn how to handle the power in them.
So I actually predict the opposite of you. I think we'll see game developers using multi-threading in consoles first. Then this will be pushed to PC games as dual-core/threading processors become more popular.
My last two PCs were SMP. Besides the bragging rights I never had any use for that in games though.
Time will tell, but it seemed (to me) like it was more a report from some disgruntled developers who felt unappreciated than a factual analysis. As the grandparent said, this is all hearsay from unspecified developers, so take it with a grain of salt.
They even claim that they don't use the multiple cores / SPE units. Well of course it's going to suck then! If I used a modern PC and limited myself to 16MB of RAM and swapped everything to disk then the application would suck as well, it doesn't have all that much with my PCs power to do though.
It's up to the developer to optimize their code and ensure that it is being scheduled properly.
I'd love to hear from a developer that is actually doing everything they can at the low level to optimize data flow. What's their experience with keeping the processors fed with data?
I imagine that the compilers for these systems will be doing a lot of optimizations as well. But it will mean that the developers will need to write their code in a way to help the compiler to optimize.
If you just port stuff from PC/old consoles then naturally the perfomance will suck. The game developers will just have to learn how to code multi-threaded realtime apps instead of single threaded stuff. I do imagine that there will be a big gap between what the good and the bad of the next gen developers can squeese out of the consoles.
When the PS2 was released there was a lot of bitching and moaning from developers that it was too hard to develop for. After a game or so they learned though and began to pump out better and better games.
That's kind of the beauty of console game. The hardware stays the same but the games get better and better.
The books I have in the Penguin collection are typically too low quality to be used for libraries. It's just not worth the effort and cost to wrap them in plastic and tag them with bar codes.
Same reason why many (most) libraries don't accept donated books. They are just not high enough quality to be useful for them.
If you look at their site they have pretty well defined conditions where for how to return a product. (Basically they require it to be in a "good as new" condition and with everything included.) If you fulfill that you can send it back within 30 days of purchase. That seems like enough time to try it out.
If you are worried about it look for other user comments and see if anyone has had problems with returning their their products. If others have had no problems then is seems reasonable that they are trustworthy.
And just a little point. Just because you can walk into a store doesn't mean you'll get what you want. I've personally experienced that when I tried to get help with a broken graphics card which I couldn't find the receipt for. I couldn't get any money back no matter what. (Even the manufacturer refused to help me.)
A small upcoming company like this has a lot more to lose if they get dissatisfied customer rep than a large chain. So in that way I'd probably give them the benefit of a doubt until they mess up.
Finally at least here in Sweden there a consumer representatives which you can contact if a company mistreats you. I assume the same is available in the US so if you were to get in problems report the company.
Never - ever use RAID cards with cheap driver based RAID! It's better to just use what-ever solution is available in your OS natively. The reason being that if your hardware fails you can have problems making the array work again with the new replacement.
Basically the sort of RAID you get from integrated RAID solutions combine the worst parts of harware RAID with the worst parts of software RAID.
This project seems like a really neat project as far as I'm concerned. It's quite a techical achivement too, as correctly finding the player in the video-strem is not a trivial task. And it seems like it is integrated quite well into the game.
My phones crash all the time. Might have something to do with me developing on them though.
After a while you get very used to the old "it's not responding, just yank the battery". Naturally such bugs should be removed from a system before delivery.
SwarmCast used a method like this a few years before BitTorrent arrived at the scene. It used FEC (forward error codes, used in eg satellite communications) to code data to keep down the risk of block scarcity.
Pretty neat idea, quite suitable for mutli-casting too.
Well, technically you are correct, but that's only because 1/2 is a fraction. Actually, we're at 55% at the moment. I have to say that I didn't know that it was this much power that was generated from water. Although it should perhaps be clarified that it is basically only water plants, the amounts from other revewable sources is less than 10% combined.
Again, it's a matter of context (as I'm not about to get into the "it's impossible to create energy" debate). Take the hydro-electric dams as examples. What form of energy is easiest to get from them, if not electrical? You misunderstand me.
My point is that as an energy form (ie compared to thermic, kinetic etc) electrical is the most valuable and harders to transform to. (Since you are so trigger-happy with the smart-arse comments.)
Because of this electrical energy is the most valuable form we have and it shouldn't be wasted on something like heating. (Unless it's absolutely necessary.)
And to make this absolutely clear, I'm talking about direct electrical heating. Using electrical energy as part of a heat-pump or something similar is another thing.
Even of electricity was free (and presumably generated using all renewable and non-polluting sources as, may I remind you, 55% of our electricity currently is) Just want to join in on the smart-arse commenting and point out that just because an energy form is renewable doesn't mean it's free. Particularly if the wear and tear on facilities are high.
But I understand what you mean.
we should rather burn coal, oil or wood to heat our homes in the winter? Dioxines and greenhouse gases be damned, we have principles to uphold! Yeah, because that's what I said. Stop being so damned argumentative and attribute things to me that I never said.
Transforming electrical energy into thermal energy is stupid, any book on physics will tell you that. The original point of this thread was precisely that, since we get thermal energy is a by product in any case why not use the electrical energy for something useful and generate heat as well? I believe the original idea was to make a processing cluster in form of radiators, perhaps not the most useful idea but it demonstrates the idea.
And I don't propose that we burn oil instead, there are plenty of smart ways to generate heat without direct heating using electricity.
Even here in Sweden only a fraction of our energy comes from renewable sources. And while I'm personally a supporter of nuclear power I would even think of putting it in the same group of energy producers as wind, solar or water.
Besides, electrical energy is the most valuable for of energy as it's the most versetile and hardest to create. Heat is an energyform that is a byproduct of most other forms of energy transformation. Heating using electricity is a humoungous waste of effort and even if electricity was free it shouldn't be done.
It is still better to design houses to keep heat in (or out depending on season) and use other methods to heat.
Point is, right now a lot of people will be getting new TV sets. The reason being that Eu is moving to digital broadcasting and HDTV at the same time. Furthermore as HD-DVD starts to appear on the market the reasons to get HDTV increases. (Right now there is basically no content in Eu.)
My guess is that HDTV will have it's breakthrough within the next 5 years (just like CD and DVD took a long time to catch on but then a lot of people got them at the same time). If Revolution doesn't do HDTV that may lower their sales in the long run.
No I don't consider $200+ video cards mid-range, my idea of mid-range is $150ish to $100ish. I'd agree with the first poster that a $200 card is "mid-range". Perhaps higher mid-range but it's certainly not high-range ($400+ cards). And cards that cost less than $100 are not the kind of cards you'd use for much gaming anyways.
$200 is what I'd expect to pay for a card that plays games well enough to be fun.
Also keep in mind that next gen consoles have more power than even high-end systems today. Well, besides the Revolution perhaps, we don't know much about it yet.
Technically, it might be the right choice at this time, but it could hurt Nintendo. Yes I bet that non-HD makes a lot of sense *right now*. But a next gen console will have to last for a couple of years, 2010 is a reasonable guess as to when we will see next gen consoles.
The Revolution will not even be released for another year or so and even by then non-HD may seem a little passé compared to today. I guess they may still change their minds, just like I hope Sony decides to include a HDD as standard.
I believe Japan has a rather high number of HDTV, and here in Eu they are beginning to roll them out right now. Considering that we (Eu) are also beginning to move to digital TV at the same time it's possible that they combine HDTV and digital broadcasting as one big push. Combined with the quite eminent arrival of HD-DVD/Bluray we might find that HDTV is coming quite soon to Eu at least.
I would think that at least most "serious" gamers will have a HDTV connected to their consoles before this console generation is over. That might end up hurting Nintendo as their Revolution will age a lot faster than the others.
There has already been comments on Cell-Core vs Cell-SPE so I'll be brief.
The problem (and this is a very real problem for all processors, not just Cell or consoles) is getting data into and out of the processor in a timely fasion. If a processor (core/SPE/whatever) doesn't have input data or if it's unable to send data out of the chip then it stalls. If it stalls then that processor part can't get any work done until this block is resolved. This is why it's important to manage input and output of the CPU in order to keep the processor working as much as possible.
Besides this little misunderstanding you can't have "2 running the data", a processor (of any kind) doesn't work that way. The processor itself loads data from memory as part of the operations it executes. So each of them "runs their data" on their own just fine.
And the Cell doesn't have 5 of anything, it has one core and 8 SPE (vector units). Finally if you have 3 actions (data, sound, graphics) and 5 cores to execute them on that gives you 243 different combinations. (And this is counting many duplicates as sound-sound-gfx is calculated separately from sound-gfx-sound.) In any case it's pretty far from an infinate amount of combinations.
"Hannibal" over at ArsTechnica has some great no-nonsense articles (1 and 2) on both the Cell and the X360. I recommend that you read them as he tends to dispell the hype and misunderstandings quite well.
Slashdot Mirror
Or look at the free article over on Toms Hardware (http://www17.tomshardware.com/howto/20041113/inde x.html). It just seems a bit unnecessary to plug a pay site when he just wants basic info.
I think the biggest thing with this isn't that you can make your own projector for a home theatre system (most people would probably be better off getting a designed system for that) but it does open up interesting other DIY projects.
A few weeks back was the project where 2 projectors + cameras were turned into a realtime 2D fighter (it was called "kick ass kung fu" or something like that). Now if you have to pay $1500 per projector something like that is quite hard to afford, but if you "roll your own" it's possible.
This can make all kinds of other nerat projects possible because you have an affordable way of making multiple projector displays.
I can't understand why Sony would want to withdraw WiFi from the PS3 spec, though.
/router/ functionality.
That's because they are not removing the WiFi from the PS3. They are removing the
Originally it was supposed to have 3 extra Gbit ethernet connections on the back allowing you to use the PS3 as a networking router. I guess they came to their senses and figured out that no-one wants a console to be a router when a dedicated router which is quiet is dirt cheap.
Most systems have a way of differentiating between actions where the player has full knowledge of outcome (eg shooting someone), partial knowledge (sneaking) and no knowledge (perhaps hiding an object? hard to think of true no knowledge examples). The idea is that if you try to sneak you can know eg if you step on a twig, but you don't know if the enemy heard you. To solve that both player and DM rolls and only the DM knows the answer, but the player knows his result and hence can guess the outcome.
This works better with systems that roll multiple dices though.
She said that about the last one as well. And who died? Some character which the reader had no attachment to. But she spent a lot of time trying to build that character during the book, just like the book before that. Almost as obvious as "red shirt guy" in Star Trek.
The point is that in the world of TNG (and other SF for that matter) humans don't have to produce anything. We can replicate/auto-factory produce pretty much anything we want. Some things (like star ships) take a lot of resources and have to be managed but basic things like food or a house are for all purposes free.
So you can basically spend your entire life without producing anything worthwhile and still not be a substantial drain on the rest of humanity.
I don't believe that communism will ever work in the situation we have now. Basically because it ignores the fact that most people are stupid, and those that are not stupid typically want to look after themselves. The old axiom that "power yields corruption" has been demonstrated as true many times in history. If you remove something like "limited resources" from the equation then we may have a world were things are better. (Though I kind of doubt it.)
Why don't you try one before making up your mind? I had mine for a few months and I really like it. I've even seen some PSPs in shops here in Sweden now (demo exes).
BTW if you want to play a quick "pick me up" game on the PSP you just put it in sleep mode. Then it starts up in a second right were you left it. I played through most of Tony Hawk that way.
I have never been able to make the disk pop out. Although I have to say that I don't feel confortable bending it like that.
Now the entire "but toddlers don't know that" argument is moot. As I'm sure you know the biggest gaming market is males 25+ years old. Because they have the money to spend on toys like this. I doubt many teenagers will be getting PSPs (compared to 25+) so if they can't control themselves I say fuck the spoiled brats and let them buy a new console. Seriously, you won't ruin the PSP by anything less than violence and not that many consumer devices handle that well.
I bet I could snap off the top screen on the DS. That doesn't mean I'll go about saying it's a poor quality device or that it's unsuitable for people to own. (Unless they often have the urge to snap things in half.)
It would surprise me if they were good. I had the opportunity to take a course in optimising compilers for multi-processor/vector computers. The bottom line for that course was that optimising for such computers are always hard. If you do it with a language like C it's often even harder. The reason being that the C programming language lacks a way to properly (explicitly) note parallellism. Furthermore it is still too low level for it to be possible to properly change code around without unpredictable behaviour.
Wouldn't it make more sense to begin developing multi-threaded games on consoles though? Since they are always identical you know what you have. I imagine that attempting to develop for a PC with 1-4 CPUs with 1 or 2 cores each with or without hyperthreading is a nightmare to develop for. There is just no way you can make the game dependent on the added CPU power. Instead you'll have to ensure that the game works fine on lowest common denominator systems and then scales up to work on more powerful systems.
Naturally this will mean that we'll never see games that require muli-core/processor computers until those are the norm. The next gen consoles will be around for a few years and will stay the same all that time. If you intend to develop a few games for them it will make sense that you try to learn how to handle the power in them.
So I actually predict the opposite of you. I think we'll see game developers using multi-threading in consoles first. Then this will be pushed to PC games as dual-core/threading processors become more popular.
My last two PCs were SMP. Besides the bragging rights I never had any use for that in games though.
Time will tell, but it seemed (to me) like it was more a report from some disgruntled developers who felt unappreciated than a factual analysis. As the grandparent said, this is all hearsay from unspecified developers, so take it with a grain of salt.
They even claim that they don't use the multiple cores / SPE units. Well of course it's going to suck then! If I used a modern PC and limited myself to 16MB of RAM and swapped everything to disk then the application would suck as well, it doesn't have all that much with my PCs power to do though.
I imagine that the compilers for these systems will be doing a lot of optimizations as well. But it will mean that the developers will need to write their code in a way to help the compiler to optimize.
If you just port stuff from PC/old consoles then naturally the perfomance will suck. The game developers will just have to learn how to code multi-threaded realtime apps instead of single threaded stuff. I do imagine that there will be a big gap between what the good and the bad of the next gen developers can squeese out of the consoles.
When the PS2 was released there was a lot of bitching and moaning from developers that it was too hard to develop for. After a game or so they learned though and began to pump out better and better games.
That's kind of the beauty of console game. The hardware stays the same but the games get better and better.
The books I have in the Penguin collection are typically too low quality to be used for libraries. It's just not worth the effort and cost to wrap them in plastic and tag them with bar codes.
Same reason why many (most) libraries don't accept donated books. They are just not high enough quality to be useful for them.
If you look at their site they have pretty well defined conditions where for how to return a product. (Basically they require it to be in a "good as new" condition and with everything included.) If you fulfill that you can send it back within 30 days of purchase. That seems like enough time to try it out.
If you are worried about it look for other user comments and see if anyone has had problems with returning their their products. If others have had no problems then is seems reasonable that they are trustworthy.
And just a little point. Just because you can walk into a store doesn't mean you'll get what you want. I've personally experienced that when I tried to get help with a broken graphics card which I couldn't find the receipt for. I couldn't get any money back no matter what. (Even the manufacturer refused to help me.)
A small upcoming company like this has a lot more to lose if they get dissatisfied customer rep than a large chain. So in that way I'd probably give them the benefit of a doubt until they mess up.
Finally at least here in Sweden there a consumer representatives which you can contact if a company mistreats you. I assume the same is available in the US so if you were to get in problems report the company.
Never - ever use RAID cards with cheap driver based RAID! It's better to just use what-ever solution is available in your OS natively. The reason being that if your hardware fails you can have problems making the array work again with the new replacement.
Basically the sort of RAID you get from integrated RAID solutions combine the worst parts of harware RAID with the worst parts of software RAID.
Let me guess: You don't have many friends, right?
This project seems like a really neat project as far as I'm concerned. It's quite a techical achivement too, as correctly finding the player in the video-strem is not a trivial task. And it seems like it is integrated quite well into the game.
My phones crash all the time. Might have something to do with me developing on them though.
After a while you get very used to the old "it's not responding, just yank the battery". Naturally such bugs should be removed from a system before delivery.
SwarmCast used a method like this a few years before BitTorrent arrived at the scene. It used FEC (forward error codes, used in eg satellite communications) to code data to keep down the risk of block scarcity.
Pretty neat idea, quite suitable for mutli-casting too.
Well, technically you are correct, but that's only because 1/2 is a fraction. Actually, we're at 55% at the moment.
I have to say that I didn't know that it was this much power that was generated from water. Although it should perhaps be clarified that it is basically only water plants, the amounts from other revewable sources is less than 10% combined.
Again, it's a matter of context (as I'm not about to get into the "it's impossible to create energy" debate). Take the hydro-electric dams as examples. What form of energy is easiest to get from them, if not electrical?
You misunderstand me.
My point is that as an energy form (ie compared to thermic, kinetic etc) electrical is the most valuable and harders to transform to. (Since you are so trigger-happy with the smart-arse comments.)
Because of this electrical energy is the most valuable form we have and it shouldn't be wasted on something like heating. (Unless it's absolutely necessary.)
And to make this absolutely clear, I'm talking about direct electrical heating. Using electrical energy as part of a heat-pump or something similar is another thing.
Even of electricity was free (and presumably generated using all renewable and non-polluting sources as, may I remind you, 55% of our electricity currently is)
Just want to join in on the smart-arse commenting and point out that just because an energy form is renewable doesn't mean it's free. Particularly if the wear and tear on facilities are high.
But I understand what you mean.
we should rather burn coal, oil or wood to heat our homes in the winter? Dioxines and greenhouse gases be damned, we have principles to uphold!
Yeah, because that's what I said. Stop being so damned argumentative and attribute things to me that I never said.
Transforming electrical energy into thermal energy is stupid, any book on physics will tell you that. The original point of this thread was precisely that, since we get thermal energy is a by product in any case why not use the electrical energy for something useful and generate heat as well? I believe the original idea was to make a processing cluster in form of radiators, perhaps not the most useful idea but it demonstrates the idea.
And I don't propose that we burn oil instead, there are plenty of smart ways to generate heat without direct heating using electricity.
Even here in Sweden only a fraction of our energy comes from renewable sources. And while I'm personally a supporter of nuclear power I would even think of putting it in the same group of energy producers as wind, solar or water.
Besides, electrical energy is the most valuable for of energy as it's the most versetile and hardest to create. Heat is an energyform that is a byproduct of most other forms of energy transformation. Heating using electricity is a humoungous waste of effort and even if electricity was free it shouldn't be done.
It is still better to design houses to keep heat in (or out depending on season) and use other methods to heat.
Point is, right now a lot of people will be getting new TV sets. The reason being that Eu is moving to digital broadcasting and HDTV at the same time. Furthermore as HD-DVD starts to appear on the market the reasons to get HDTV increases. (Right now there is basically no content in Eu.)
My guess is that HDTV will have it's breakthrough within the next 5 years (just like CD and DVD took a long time to catch on but then a lot of people got them at the same time). If Revolution doesn't do HDTV that may lower their sales in the long run.
No I don't consider $200+ video cards mid-range, my idea of mid-range is $150ish to $100ish.
I'd agree with the first poster that a $200 card is "mid-range". Perhaps higher mid-range but it's certainly not high-range ($400+ cards). And cards that cost less than $100 are not the kind of cards you'd use for much gaming anyways.
$200 is what I'd expect to pay for a card that plays games well enough to be fun.
Also keep in mind that next gen consoles have more power than even high-end systems today. Well, besides the Revolution perhaps, we don't know much about it yet.
Technically, it might be the right choice at this time, but it could hurt Nintendo.
Yes I bet that non-HD makes a lot of sense *right now*. But a next gen console will have to last for a couple of years, 2010 is a reasonable guess as to when we will see next gen consoles.
The Revolution will not even be released for another year or so and even by then non-HD may seem a little passé compared to today. I guess they may still change their minds, just like I hope Sony decides to include a HDD as standard.
I believe Japan has a rather high number of HDTV, and here in Eu they are beginning to roll them out right now. Considering that we (Eu) are also beginning to move to digital TV at the same time it's possible that they combine HDTV and digital broadcasting as one big push. Combined with the quite eminent arrival of HD-DVD/Bluray we might find that HDTV is coming quite soon to Eu at least.
I would think that at least most "serious" gamers will have a HDTV connected to their consoles before this console generation is over. That might end up hurting Nintendo as their Revolution will age a lot faster than the others.
There has already been comments on Cell-Core vs Cell-SPE so I'll be brief.
The problem (and this is a very real problem for all processors, not just Cell or consoles) is getting data into and out of the processor in a timely fasion. If a processor (core/SPE/whatever) doesn't have input data or if it's unable to send data out of the chip then it stalls. If it stalls then that processor part can't get any work done until this block is resolved. This is why it's important to manage input and output of the CPU in order to keep the processor working as much as possible.
Besides this little misunderstanding you can't have "2 running the data", a processor (of any kind) doesn't work that way. The processor itself loads data from memory as part of the operations it executes. So each of them "runs their data" on their own just fine.
And the Cell doesn't have 5 of anything, it has one core and 8 SPE (vector units). Finally if you have 3 actions (data, sound, graphics) and 5 cores to execute them on that gives you 243 different combinations. (And this is counting many duplicates as sound-sound-gfx is calculated separately from sound-gfx-sound.) In any case it's pretty far from an infinate amount of combinations.
"Hannibal" over at ArsTechnica has some great no-nonsense articles (1 and 2) on both the Cell and the X360. I recommend that you read them as he tends to dispell the hype and misunderstandings quite well.
I think he's going for the Chewbacca defense.