Regarding the coming of next gen consoles my thoughts are "I'll believe it when I see it!". Sure Nintendo may come up with something truly revolutionary, or we may just get a good console (like GC). Either is fine by me.
PS3 may turn out to be a power monster with the Cell processors, but most likely it'll "mearly" be another good console. (Sony seem to hype their hardware a lot, if you recall the PS2 supercomputer hype.) "I'll believe it when I see it!" is my reaction.
Either way I (and other gamers, as in not fanbois) will win. We'll get more consoles and games than we'll be able to play; and that's fine by me.
Regarding the PSP vs(*sigh*)DS things. Your PSP "facts" are a little off. You don't need special programs to copy music or movies to the PSP. MP3's are "drag and drop" as any memorycard but movies require some added work. They need to be in a special naming format to work. Hopefully Sony will do something about that in an update.
You need to re-encode the AVI files since the hardware isn't capable of playing TV resolution files. The programs used are standard though, the same can be used to re-encode for mobile phones or PDAs as well as PSP.
Comparing the PSP and DS it seems like PSP is (as you say) a normal console in a portable format. The DS is "just another" gameboy (with new nifty things). I own a PSP and will get a DS once I start seeing some interesting games for it.
It's a wonder you can cope with playing games at all if you don't have the coordination skills to keep track of 4 buttons at the same time. Besides many other consoles have the same basic "diamond" shaped button layout so once you get that you'll do fine.
Play some quick games like fighters and you'll get used to the button layout in no-time.
Aren't you pretty much doomed to third party crap for the other systems.
Well you're half right. On Xbox (I don't own a PS2 yet) your best bet is the Logitech wireless controller. OTOH the controller is vastly superior to both the standard XBox controllers (it's between small and large controller in size, with button layout of the smaller) and vastly superior to the WaveBird. (I own a GB as well FYI.)
It is more expensive than the WB though. But since Nintendo EU hates their customers it's not that much more expensive. And the added price is IMHO motivated with rumble and automatic turn off/on.
The Wavebird is a thing of beauty.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder I guess. My bet is that you just haven't tried the other wireless controllers though. They are better than the WB (IMHO).
IOW you mean that game designers are people who come up with some idea ("Swat and terrorists fight it out on special maps.") and then let someone else do the actual work?
Getting ideas is the easy part. Sitting down and getting it done is hard. If you include actually herding a group of people into producing what you intended (with additions from the group) then you'd be talking doing real work.
Problem is that in order to get a lot of people to listen to you and help you out you'll need to have something to show. And that requires initial work (and quite a lot of it).
Both of these use Flash for it's intended purpose as a way of creating animation. When you create animations for online services using Flash or other SVG-ish formats is a good idea.
Using a SVG format as your only way of accessing the content is not only a bad idea but the really bad idea. Particularly when you can create the same effect with standard DHTML et al.
The reason "real" solution like DHTML hasn't been chosen instead is because they haven't been around for as long. And the support in early browsers was piss-poor resulting in that Flash was used instead.
While I'm sure she'd kick his ass in a normal sparring match it should be mentioned that one thing that is very useful in fighting is mass. My own experience from sparring tells me that a person with less mass than me will have to be quite a bit better in order to do significant damage.
Typically women have less mass/muscle mass then men. As such they have a lot harder time in sparring (same goes for small/light people in general). People who haven't actually practiced martial art tend to greatly overestimate their capabilities though. And most people don't really have a good grasp on just how much a kick can hurt, even if there's not much power behind it. (With power you break things, without it it mearly hurt like hell.)
At least my SE T630 can't handle that page. It may be an issue with the Vodaphone gateway as well though. But I do doubt that a normal Feature-phone can handle that massive content. This includes most modern 3G phones which can really draw benefits from an online search.
My bet is that they did that page in order to work with mobile devices like Palms and Smartphones (Symbian based or similar).
Reminds me of an interview I read with Terry Pratchett. He said that his book "Mort" was up for a movie with an American movie studio. They had made a script out of it and presented it to the descision makers, their comment was "Really good! But lose the Death character, it's too depressing."
For those that don't know that book is about how Death takes on an apprentice (Mort). He's pretty crusial to the plot.
I was considering to just mod this down but here I go and bite instead.
Did it ever occur to you that:
1) Anyone capable of downloading music is also capable of (or learning) to download games. 2) There are no emulators for current gen consoles (yet). 3) All current gen consoles have been hacked and can play copied games.
"-1, Haven't thought think through" would be a more appropriate mod.
As I write this post, there are no other posts dealing with the technical details of this. There are no posts dealing with the implications of this development. Is this truly one of those "who cares" stories. 20GB. Nothing special.
On the other hand, if the technology allows us to multiply the capacity of $200 drives tenfold, then I might care. The thought of a 2 TB drive for a couple of hundred bucks makes me salivate
Sadly that wouldn't work as the bits stored on a 1.8" disk are a lot smaller than those stored on a normal disk. Because of this is is a lot easier to make them stand up on the disk without falling over. Also most larger desktop disks spin quite a lot faster (7200RPM or over) and if the bits are standing up they will fall down because of the centripetal fources.
If you think this post sounds like BS you could just read the article with the technical details from last week and get the facts.
I saw it again at a friends on DVD and skipped to that part. I think the reason it was kind of exiting is because you were bored to tears with the Sound of Music part.
Anything that was action became very appreciated.
Same goes for the Yoda battle.
The only good Star Wars stories I've seen the last years has been the KOTOR games. Those are actually good.
Naturally all of this depends on what you are trying to do. If it's a matter of maintaining the source then using a disto will cover most of that. It will ensure that you automatically update to the latest version and help out with conversion between versions. Doing that yourself isn't adviced.
Now it is true that just because you have the source doesn't mean that it's easy or even practical to implement some change. The point is that it is possible, even if the original maintainer quits the project.
People disagree that you can get locked into OSS. I am saying it happens *all the time*. If I am going to get locked into something, I'd much rather it be something that is at least user friendly, documentated, supported, etc. I already stated that I think you can get "locked-in" into any program. Very few programs are made to be entirely interchangeable.
And working on something with good documentation and support is really nice. But to imply what this must mean closes source products seems a bit harsh. With OSS you can get a lot more support from the community around the software than with closed source variants. Support as in patches and things like that.
You need a network card which supports it as well as a mainboard which supports it (or with built in networking, that usually supports it).
To start it up you send a "magic" package to the NIC which tells it to boot. AFAIK it's just MAC level package with all FF in the data field or something like that. The NIC will then boot the computer just as if you had pressed the power key.
Just FYI, both SanDisk and Lexar have Memory Stick memory. I rather like it compared to the other formats since the form-factor seems smaller than the others. Duo seems to be the smallest standard memory standard, although I have seen really small SD card versions (which did need adaptors though).
I can say that the PSP is a worthy purchase. But they are pretty expensive.
Because Exchange had tools to import or because Notes had tools to export? Once you are in Exchange you're likely to have a much harder time to migrate away from it. And with Exchang you'll have a fun time migrating the clients as well.
Your original point was that you can get "locked into" OSS software as well. Naturally this is true. What I (and most others here I bet) don't agree on is that this should be more common or be harder to avoid than with propriatary software.
With OSS you always have the choice to do something about it yourself.
This may be very useful if you work with DSP type applications. I have no idea where the article came up with the conclusion that
automatically generates code for signal-processing applications - applications that help make computers run faster and cheaper. I fail to see what DSP applications have to do with making the computer run faster.
The application is probably nice though. And DSP applications have quite specific types of data flow so I bet they can do some really good optimisations.
Won't help you if you don't do signal processing though.
A dual layer DVD would require multiple DVDs for a backup. And the media you back up to (DVD-r) is most likely less reliable than the source (pressed DVD). And that many DVDs will take a lot of space.
You also lose random access and other stuff like that which you get with HDD based backup.
Besides, when you consider space (physical volume) it's hard to find a more compact media than HDDs.
These statements about programming productivity given X language spouted as truisms still make me grind my teeth.
Your points on this topic are valid. Specifically wrt comparing Java and C++.
When it comes to comparing productivity in languages there are many diffrent variables. The three (I'm sure you can think of more) that IMHO differ a lot between C/C++, Java and Python are code compactness, code accuracy and libraries.
Often parts of these are related, eg Python has a rather high code compactness and coupled with powerful standard libraries this means that very little code can do a lot.
In my experience Java and C/C++ are about equal when it comes to code compactness. All are quite verbose languages, although you can do "hacks" in C/C++ which in Java requires a lot of type-casting. Scripting languages and eg Haskell as a functional language have much more compact code. This may translate to faster to write and easier to understand code. (In the case of eg Perl this isn't necessarily so. But that's more compact due to obscurity instead of clearness.)
By code accuracy (not a very good name for it) I mean that the code works like you think it should. Issues that appear due to eg memory or runtime issues are detrimental to this. A language which make it easy to catch errors and handle them at compile time get high ratings in this area. It doesn't really have anything to do with logical errors in the code, if the coder has a poor understanding of the problem no language can help. This is an area where C/C++ suffers compared to eg Java. In my experience you spend a lot more time in C/C++ chasing down memory issues and runtime segfaults than in a GC language.
Libraries are probably the most important part though. Good libraries can make you extremey productive as well as making the code easier to understand. In this aspect Java and scripting langages typically triumph over C/C++. Naturally STL, Boost etc are all work-arounds for this, but it takes a lot more knowledge for the coder to know about these than standard libraries. (The discussion is really about poor/normal coders after all.)
However, your implication that memory management in a non-GC language is so difficult (and leaks so prevalent) equalizes the greater memory footprint of a GC language is a little baffling. It's simply not that difficult, particularly with the maturity of memory checking toolkits and a variety of well developed smart pointer libraries.
True. But again, the discussion was not so competent or sloppy programmers and programs that run a long time.
It turns out that when programs and datasets get bigger (and increasing storage and transmission capacities are driven by the same processes that drive Moore's exponential speedup), internal computational overhead often increases at a worse-than-linear rate Yes, naturally. Not many algorithms are less than O(n) when they operate on large datasets.
The data is larger both because there is some "sloppyness" but also becuase the data is a lot more complex today than 10 years ago. Back then MP3's were really neat and the thought of having your computer chew through multi GB data like DVDs for processing were not very common.
Bloat and complexity increases, but so does "useability".
And you will find very few of game development houses dealing in Java!
You find very few 3D engines coded in Java. But you also find that the majority of games today use internal scripting languages. These are often standard languages such as Java, Python or Lua.
Right tool for the job. As another poster wrote, don't write everything in one language. And sloppy coding in C/C++ may very well turn out slower than a sloppy coding in eg Python.
And yes I agree that C# and Java are very similar. I have never doubted that. C++ is not really the same thing though, mainly due to lack of a standard set of libraries and memory management.
I've even seen some academic research papers on the topic of developing more effective input systems for consoles. For XBox this ment using the two analog sticks for selections and buttons/triggers to input.
It may be easier with the analog nub on the PSP than the cursors. (Cursors could be used for navigation.)
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding the coming of next gen consoles my thoughts are "I'll believe it when I see it!". Sure Nintendo may come up with something truly revolutionary, or we may just get a good console (like GC). Either is fine by me.
PS3 may turn out to be a power monster with the Cell processors, but most likely it'll "mearly" be another good console. (Sony seem to hype their hardware a lot, if you recall the PS2 supercomputer hype.) "I'll believe it when I see it!" is my reaction.
Either way I (and other gamers, as in not fanbois) will win. We'll get more consoles and games than we'll be able to play; and that's fine by me.
Regarding the PSP vs(*sigh*)DS things. Your PSP "facts" are a little off. You don't need special programs to copy music or movies to the PSP. MP3's are "drag and drop" as any memorycard but movies require some added work. They need to be in a special naming format to work. Hopefully Sony will do something about that in an update.
You need to re-encode the AVI files since the hardware isn't capable of playing TV resolution files. The programs used are standard though, the same can be used to re-encode for mobile phones or PDAs as well as PSP.
Comparing the PSP and DS it seems like PSP is (as you say) a normal console in a portable format. The DS is "just another" gameboy (with new nifty things). I own a PSP and will get a DS once I start seeing some interesting games for it.
It's a wonder you can cope with playing games at all if you don't have the coordination skills to keep track of 4 buttons at the same time. Besides many other consoles have the same basic "diamond" shaped button layout so once you get that you'll do fine.
Play some quick games like fighters and you'll get used to the button layout in no-time.
Well you're half right. On Xbox (I don't own a PS2 yet) your best bet is the Logitech wireless controller. OTOH the controller is vastly superior to both the standard XBox controllers (it's between small and large controller in size, with button layout of the smaller) and vastly superior to the WaveBird. (I own a GB as well FYI.)
It is more expensive than the WB though. But since Nintendo EU hates their customers it's not that much more expensive. And the added price is IMHO motivated with rumble and automatic turn off/on.
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder I guess. My bet is that you just haven't tried the other wireless controllers though. They are better than the WB (IMHO).
So does Firefox (1.0.3). At least when I go ctrl-D I get a few fields where I can fill in name, folder and details.
IOW you mean that game designers are people who come up with some idea ("Swat and terrorists fight it out on special maps.") and then let someone else do the actual work?
Getting ideas is the easy part. Sitting down and getting it done is hard. If you include actually herding a group of people into producing what you intended (with additions from the group) then you'd be talking doing real work.
Problem is that in order to get a lot of people to listen to you and help you out you'll need to have something to show. And that requires initial work (and quite a lot of it).
Both of these use Flash for it's intended purpose as a way of creating animation. When you create animations for online services using Flash or other SVG-ish formats is a good idea.
Using a SVG format as your only way of accessing the content is not only a bad idea but the really bad idea. Particularly when you can create the same effect with standard DHTML et al.
The reason "real" solution like DHTML hasn't been chosen instead is because they haven't been around for as long. And the support in early browsers was piss-poor resulting in that Flash was used instead.
While I'm sure she'd kick his ass in a normal sparring match it should be mentioned that one thing that is very useful in fighting is mass. My own experience from sparring tells me that a person with less mass than me will have to be quite a bit better in order to do significant damage.
Typically women have less mass/muscle mass then men. As such they have a lot harder time in sparring (same goes for small/light people in general). People who haven't actually practiced martial art tend to greatly overestimate their capabilities though. And most people don't really have a good grasp on just how much a kick can hurt, even if there's not much power behind it. (With power you break things, without it it mearly hurt like hell.)
They were probably too early. Swarmcast is technically superior to Bittorrent and also have added bonuses that it can be used with multicasting.
BT is easier and came at a time when a new carrier was needed. Thus it reached a larger audience and took off.
At least my SE T630 can't handle that page. It may be an issue with the Vodaphone gateway as well though. But I do doubt that a normal Feature-phone can handle that massive content. This includes most modern 3G phones which can really draw benefits from an online search.
My bet is that they did that page in order to work with mobile devices like Palms and Smartphones (Symbian based or similar).
Sometimes it helps if you add a larger heatsink, or disable WiFi stuff.
I do see your point though, I'm not particularly likely to get consumer-wares from DLink again.
Reminds me of an interview I read with Terry Pratchett. He said that his book "Mort" was up for a movie with an American movie studio. They had made a script out of it and presented it to the descision makers, their comment was "Really good! But lose the Death character, it's too depressing."
For those that don't know that book is about how Death takes on an apprentice (Mort). He's pretty crusial to the plot.
I was considering to just mod this down but here I go and bite instead.
Did it ever occur to you that:
1) Anyone capable of downloading music is also capable of (or learning) to download games.
2) There are no emulators for current gen consoles (yet).
3) All current gen consoles have been hacked and can play copied games.
"-1, Haven't thought think through" would be a more appropriate mod.
Sadly that wouldn't work as the bits stored on a 1.8" disk are a lot smaller than those stored on a normal disk. Because of this is is a lot easier to make them stand up on the disk without falling over. Also most larger desktop disks spin quite a lot faster (7200RPM or over) and if the bits are standing up they will fall down because of the centripetal fources.
If you think this post sounds like BS you could just read the article with the technical details from last week and get the facts.
I saw it again at a friends on DVD and skipped to that part. I think the reason it was kind of exiting is because you were bored to tears with the Sound of Music part.
Anything that was action became very appreciated.
Same goes for the Yoda battle.
The only good Star Wars stories I've seen the last years has been the KOTOR games. Those are actually good.
Ahh yes. That's because the US is the third world of mobile phones. ;-)
But it still seems like most phones have USB cables available from the manufacturer.
Naturally all of this depends on what you are trying to do. If it's a matter of maintaining the source then using a disto will cover most of that. It will ensure that you automatically update to the latest version and help out with conversion between versions. Doing that yourself isn't adviced.
Now it is true that just because you have the source doesn't mean that it's easy or even practical to implement some change. The point is that it is possible, even if the original maintainer quits the project.
People disagree that you can get locked into OSS. I am saying it happens *all the time*. If I am going to get locked into something, I'd much rather it be something that is at least user friendly, documentated, supported, etc.
I already stated that I think you can get "locked-in" into any program. Very few programs are made to be entirely interchangeable.
And working on something with good documentation and support is really nice. But to imply what this must mean closes source products seems a bit harsh. With OSS you can get a lot more support from the community around the software than with closed source variants. Support as in patches and things like that.
No, it is only used to start the computer if it is turned off. It's short for "Wake-on-Lan" after all.
They might have extended the protocol, but if the computer is running it seems like running the request through the OS would be the sensible thing.
BTW, WOL doesn't let you do anything with the computer. You can only turn it on, then it will continue with a normal boot.
It isn't a software thing. It's done in hardware.
You need a network card which supports it as well as a mainboard which supports it (or with built in networking, that usually supports it).
To start it up you send a "magic" package to the NIC which tells it to boot. AFAIK it's just MAC level package with all FF in the data field or something like that. The NIC will then boot the computer just as if you had pressed the power key.
Just FYI, both SanDisk and Lexar have Memory Stick memory. I rather like it compared to the other formats since the form-factor seems smaller than the others. Duo seems to be the smallest standard memory standard, although I have seen really small SD card versions (which did need adaptors though).
I can say that the PSP is a worthy purchase. But they are pretty expensive.
If you want it free (beer) I'd say PSPVideo9 is a good choice. They have a tutorial on how to recode from DVD source and from avi source.
If you want to pay for it I seems more generous to give money to eg FFMpeg or the other programs these tools are front-ends for.
I do find that the video quality on the PSP is really good. I still have to try getting a widescreen movie to work though.
Because Exchange had tools to import or because Notes had tools to export? Once you are in Exchange you're likely to have a much harder time to migrate away from it. And with Exchang you'll have a fun time migrating the clients as well.
Your original point was that you can get "locked into" OSS software as well. Naturally this is true. What I (and most others here I bet) don't agree on is that this should be more common or be harder to avoid than with propriatary software.
With OSS you always have the choice to do something about it yourself.
This may be very useful if you work with DSP type applications. I have no idea where the article came up with the conclusion that
automatically generates code for signal-processing applications - applications that help make computers run faster and cheaper.
I fail to see what DSP applications have to do with making the computer run faster.
The application is probably nice though. And DSP applications have quite specific types of data flow so I bet they can do some really good optimisations.
Won't help you if you don't do signal processing though.
A dual layer DVD would require multiple DVDs for a backup. And the media you back up to (DVD-r) is most likely less reliable than the source (pressed DVD). And that many DVDs will take a lot of space.
You also lose random access and other stuff like that which you get with HDD based backup.
Besides, when you consider space (physical volume) it's hard to find a more compact media than HDDs.
Your points on this topic are valid. Specifically wrt comparing Java and C++.
When it comes to comparing productivity in languages there are many diffrent variables. The three (I'm sure you can think of more) that IMHO differ a lot between C/C++, Java and Python are code compactness, code accuracy and libraries.
Often parts of these are related, eg Python has a rather high code compactness and coupled with powerful standard libraries this means that very little code can do a lot.
In my experience Java and C/C++ are about equal when it comes to code compactness. All are quite verbose languages, although you can do "hacks" in C/C++ which in Java requires a lot of type-casting. Scripting languages and eg Haskell as a functional language have much more compact code. This may translate to faster to write and easier to understand code. (In the case of eg Perl this isn't necessarily so. But that's more compact due to obscurity instead of clearness.)
By code accuracy (not a very good name for it) I mean that the code works like you think it should. Issues that appear due to eg memory or runtime issues are detrimental to this. A language which make it easy to catch errors and handle them at compile time get high ratings in this area. It doesn't really have anything to do with logical errors in the code, if the coder has a poor understanding of the problem no language can help. This is an area where C/C++ suffers compared to eg Java. In my experience you spend a lot more time in C/C++ chasing down memory issues and runtime segfaults than in a GC language.
Libraries are probably the most important part though. Good libraries can make you extremey productive as well as making the code easier to understand. In this aspect Java and scripting langages typically triumph over C/C++. Naturally STL, Boost etc are all work-arounds for this, but it takes a lot more knowledge for the coder to know about these than standard libraries. (The discussion is really about poor/normal coders after all.)
True. But again, the discussion was not so competent or sloppy programmers and programs that run a long time.
It turns out that when programs and datasets get bigger (and increasing storage and transmission capacities are driven by the same processes that drive Moore's exponential speedup), internal computational overhead often increases at a worse-than-linear rate
Yes, naturally. Not many algorithms are less than O(n) when they operate on large datasets.
The data is larger both because there is some "sloppyness" but also becuase the data is a lot more complex today than 10 years ago. Back then MP3's were really neat and the thought of having your computer chew through multi GB data like DVDs for processing were not very common.
Bloat and complexity increases, but so does "useability".
You find very few 3D engines coded in Java. But you also find that the majority of games today use internal scripting languages. These are often standard languages such as Java, Python or Lua.
Right tool for the job. As another poster wrote, don't write everything in one language. And sloppy coding in C/C++ may very well turn out slower than a sloppy coding in eg Python.
And yes I agree that C# and Java are very similar. I have never doubted that. C++ is not really the same thing though, mainly due to lack of a standard set of libraries and memory management.
I've even seen some academic research papers on the topic of developing more effective input systems for consoles. For XBox this ment using the two analog sticks for selections and buttons/triggers to input.
It may be easier with the analog nub on the PSP than the cursors. (Cursors could be used for navigation.)