Nintendo's had far more "must buy" games for the DS in Japan - Nintendogs being the main one. For the last week of April, the DS outsold the PSP 3 to 1.
Year-to-date this year the two were even, but the DS pulled out ahead the week after. (60K+ to 30K+ again).
I didn't know Rhode Island or Luxembourg had the second largest videogame market in the world...
Incidentally, the DS outsold the PSP in the US, too. it's just that release dates created more of a disparity in the US. In Japan they were released within 10 days of each other.
but HDTVs are getting picked up pretty fast, and console support could be a big sales driver - one of the main factors holding HDTV back is lack of content.
No way - it's price. Heck, progressive screen TVs are still in the severe minority, and they've got tons of content available in DVDs. HDTVs are still far too expensive - I doubt consoles (which will likely not be picked up en masse until they hit the $200 price point, which is what always happens) will be a driver for $1000++ TVs. The majority of homes in the US simply don't have that kind of disposable income.
I doubt HDTVs, or even progressive screen TVs, will be anywhere near the majority even by the time these guys are gone. But that's partly my pessimism.
Honestly, I have no idea why they don't bother including a VGA output as well to encourage people to set up "gaming areas" using a computer monitor. Then, Sony and Microsoft could start leveraging graphics power without putting a huge demand on developers (*). But instead, Microsoft with the Xbox made it almost impossible.
(*: The point here is that increasing the resolution is basically only programming. Increasing the polygon count, etc., requires much more development time and money than just upping the resolution. And if you've ever seen a high-level emulation of N64 games, it's amazing how much better they look just in higher resolution.)
[14:49] KraftBoy: if people dont dig the offering of Sony and/or MS, then Nintendo looks like a genius for purposefully underhyping the power of the console
Personally I think it's just because Nintendo doesn't like lying to the customer to get them addicted to numbers that can be fudged or made up depending on the phase of the moon. They'd rather get them hyped about the new games and/or gameplay. So they say something to entice the geeks (and to make media happy), but focus mainly on things that will get people interested.
Honestly, they showed software for the PS3 and Xbox. Woop-de-doo - it's Tekken 6 (or 9, or 54, or whatever), Halo 70145 (or whatever number it is) - blah. Let me guess - it looks just like the previous ones - but better!
Geez. Wonder when these companies are going to take the smart developers' hints that gamers really, really don't like numbers for sequels. Hell, even Final Fantasy uses roman numerals.
The main problem with the way that Sony and Microsoft are throwing out sequels is that if you miss one of them, you don't care. If I don't buy Halo 2, and just play Halo 3, will that be any different? Probably not. But you can't skip, for instance, a Zelda game. You'd know you missed something, because Majora's Mask is a completely different game than Wind Waker, than Twilight Princess will be. Ditto for the Mario games.
All that said, Xbox outsold Gamecube, and who made a profit?
Only in certain markets. GameCube demolished the Xbox in Japan, and the Xbox only managed to catch up to the GameCube in 2004. The Xbox's real success was in 3rd party titles, but that still doesn't guarantee that MS made much money, because they were basically giving away licenses to encourage development.
Anyway, c'mon: as of Jan 2005, the difference between the GameCube and Xbox in terms of consoles sold was less than 2 million out of 20 million, with almost all of that difference coming from the US market. It ain't much of a difference (considering Sony's at 80 million, they're both sitting at around 15%).
Interestingly enough, GC might actually win overall, as Xbox 360 will kill Xbox sales, and GC's still got the next Zelda. Especially in Japan, Zelda's huge, and Xbox is nonexistent in Japan. I actually think in the end, the GameCube will finish in 2nd place.
Come on, you accuse Sony and MS of making shit up then you pull all these predictions for what the games will look like out of your ass. Sure, maybe the 360 and PS3 won't be as great as they make out. Maybe they will. Let's wait and see...
I know this because Sony and MS did pull the numbers out of their ass.
15 times more powerful than the Xbox: 3 cores, running at ~5 times the clock speed of the original Xbox CPU = 15 times more powerful! Wow, what a creative number, and it's completely true, because "OMG MHz is teh rulez!"
This isn't new to Sony or Microsoft either. Sony's been doing it for a while. With the PlayStation, they use to quote triangles/second - but only if said triangles were completely raw (no textures, AA, etc.) which means the number is useless, whereas Nintendo quoted completely antialiased and textured polys, so their numbers were far lower, but actually pretty much comparable.
We are nowhere near our physical thresholds - the human eye can respond to a difference in line alignment of a few seconds of arc - the width of a pencil at 300 meters (look up hyperacuity). The eye can detect the presence of a single photon. But we're far, far away from that level of realism.
Of course the eye can detect a single photon... some of the time. In reality you need quite a few before you can reliably detect it. So saying it can detect a single photon is a little bit of a stretch - you'd need about 100 photons before you'd have a reasonable expectation that you've seen 1 - the eye's QE is about 1%.
Anyway, the angular stuff: that's resolution. And that's out of console manufacturer's hands, because it's dependent on consumer TVs.
MGS was a PlayStation game, and different enough from Metal Gear to warrant calling it a new franchise, in my opinion. I don't group Mario Kart into the Mario Bros. franchise, as they're different games.
This time around, they look to be a long way behind the curve performance wise.
No, they won't be. They're a long way behind on the "make up random numbers for E3 based on peak FLOPs numbers that could never be achieved" performance curve, but they won't be far behind on the actual performance curve. C'mon. Give me a break. Sony and Microsoft are literally making numbers up here.
Microsoft and Sony were both sloppy in the previous generation when it came to console design, and both of them look to be quite sloppy this time. I mean, really: Xbox 360 has 6 front ends and the system has shared graphics memory. So it needs serious amounts of memory bandwidth (good chance one of those threads is going to evict a cache line) and it's sharing it with the graphics card? What?
Nintendo knows how to make consoles without blunt force. The games will look surprisingly similar to this generation in terms of who's better: Revolution will look pretty much the same, but maybe a *little* worse, PS3 will look the best on some, but worse on others (too high a developer learning curve), and the Xbox 360 will probably look about equivalent to the Revolution on most games, with maybe a few being better.
Personally, I think Nintendo's biggest difficulty is that they lean much too hard on old franchises: Metroid, Zelda, Mario, Kirby, and so on.
Yah, I agree. Sony's much better. Those launch titles for the PS3? Tekken 6, Gran Turismo 5, Metal Gear Solid 4, Devil May Cry 4.
None of those franchises dates to before the PS1. Some were only from the PS2.
On the other hand, the new Zelda game is the 7th Zelda game to come out for a Nintendo console (8th, if you count Four Swords Adventures). And this spans 4 generations so far.
As for Mario, he's actually doing about the same: as for real Super Mario games, there have only been 7 games so far for 4 consoles.
Sony is averaging 2-3 games per franchise on each console. Nintendo is averaging about 1-2. Who's leaning too hard?
Handhelds were the last area they had a commanding lead over the opposition, and the PSP has blown that to hell.
Yah. Blew it completely to hell, 64,247 units to 38,778 in Japan last week.
Oh wait... the DS is the one leading the PSP. My bad. And when you consider that the GBA SP is still selling 10K-15K units/week, Nintendo owns 67% of the handheld units sold last week in Japan.
Overall the DS has outsold the PSP 2.2M units to 1.2M units. They aren't losing. And when the GB Micro enters the fray, things will likely get even stronger for Nintendo.
Why does everyone think Nintendo gives that much thought to the US market? I mean, really - we can all salivate over the Xbox 360, but in Japan, the Xbox was outsold by the original Gameboy Advance. I'm not even sure that it's made anymore. I could probably outsell the Xbox in Japan with a lemonade stand.
It's not like Nintendo's in any danger. Second place in Japan is still easily enough to sustain them, what with the silly amounts of cash they have available.
With intelligent design, the server wouldn't be tied to the console. All it needs to do is send ROMs, and those are architecture-independent. Old games never die. They're just too good. Nintendo literally could keep that market up forever. With each new console, it could play all previous console's games, and all of Nintendo's old stock stuff.
After Sony and Microsoft making a huge deal of the processing power of their hardware, the rumors that Revolution will only be 2 - 3 times more powerful then the Gamecube (as opposed to 15 or so times more powerful for PS3 vs PS2)is somewhat troubling.
That's because Sony and Microsoft both live in la-la land when it comes to actually marketing for games. The only reason they survive is because A) Sony is still riding the crest of the original PlayStation, and B) Microsoft has enough money to entice 3rd party developers, and has a good online model.
If Nintendo had the same 3rd party support that Microsoft and Sony did, they'd be dominating the market. Seriously. They're far, far better at marketing games.
The Xbox 360 will not be "10 times more powerful" than the original Xbox. No way. Maybe in some situations (see Apple's RDF: "10X faster in Photoshop. With this filter. On this size file. On Tuesdays.") but certainly not in general. Ditto with the PS3.
Anyway, let me explain the original comment: what do you know about the PS3?
To quote Ars Technica:
* Backwards compatibility with the Playstation and Playstation 2
* Support for Blu-Ray, DVD, CD-ROM, CDRW, DVD-ROM, DVD+R, and DVD-R formats.
* Storage options include a 2.5-inch removable hard drive, SD, Memory Stick Duo, and compact flash.
* Connectivity options include Bluetooth (for the controllers), 802.11b (for PSP connectivity), Gigabit Ethernet, and USB 2.0
* The Cell processor will run at 3.2GHz (same as the Xbox's 360's Xenon CPU)
* Main memory is 256MB of RDRAM, and the machine will also have 256MB of 700MHz GDDR VRAM. (Compare the Xbox 360's single pool of 512MB of GDDR 3 DRAM.)
* Video output can go as high as 1080p
But there is not a single word in there about what kind of games it will play. They showed a few tech demos, and a few sequels to current games. All of that gets basically lost in their marketing shuffle. Besides, while people may deride Nintendo for reusing old games, Sony is definitely rapidly running up there. Tekken 6? Gran Turismo 5? These properties are two generations old! Zelda is five generations old and only has 6 console games entirely.
In contrast, Nintendo's presentation was all about the games, and the way the next console will work. Just listen to what everyone's saying: "oh, playing that will be cool!" "oh, doing that will be cool!" even though Nintendo hasn't even announced one game for it.
Until we know exactly what the hardware specs for Revolution are, being worried about the console being underpowerered are premature.
Wait till the games come out, and decide for yourself. Hardware specs can be massively deceiving, as Sony and Microsoft traded the MHz myth for the "peak FLOPs" myth. Nintendo's not stupid. Their consoles are always extremely well designed from an architecture point of view. Sony and Microsoft, on the other hand, both tend to be a little sloppy and wasteful (*still* with a UMA for Xbox 360? bleah. At least it's got 10MB of eDRAM, but what a way to stall 6 threads at once by starving them of memory bandwidth by making the graphics processor steal it).
Slot load could easily accept both discs. Just need to have some sort of mechanism that tells whether or not you're inserting a mini-DVD or a normal DVD. Something like a pair of arms that pushes apart when you push in a DVD, and triggers a small switch if it pushes open enough that it's a real DVD. If not, it's a mini-DVD, and it knows the right distances for each.
And you wonder why it's not on the front page? I've been fairly hyped to see whatever Nintendo was doing after the PS3 excitement, but... it's all vapor so far.
Vapor? Pictures of the Xbox 360 leaked hit the front page of Slashdot. Pictures of the Revolution, and it's on games/. only.
It's not smaller, as far as your hands are concerned. It's wider. A little thinner, but really not much (maybe not even, I'm not sure those numbers are the 'unfolded' numbers). Smaller than the original GBA's 5.7", but still wider than the GBA SP.
I know this Micro returns to the GBA formfactor, but why?
Geh! I hate the SP formfactor. It cramps your hands at an odd angle. Just hold a SP, and look at your wrists. Now hold a GBA, and look at your wrists. The GBA formfactor is much, much more natural for your hands. My mother-in-law, who's a Tetris addict with arthritis, can confirm this as well.
I've been hoping that they'd release another GBA with the original GBA formfactor, but with an improved screen and hopefully equivalent battery life to the original GBA. Man, that'd make me happy. Screen size is no big deal - just move it an inch or two closer and it looks exactly the same. Resolution is all that matters.
So what's the definition of a fermion or a boson, and in this specific case, of a fermionic or bosonic nucleus? Bosons have integer spin, and fermions have half-integer (n+1/2, where n is a nonnegative integer) spin.
No, no no, and no no no.
Strictly speaking: the definition of a fermion is an object which is antisymmetric under interchange of the two particles. Or, for a more experimental definition: a fermion is an object which, in a free gas, shows a Fermi-Dirac distribution of velocities for a given temperature.
A boson is an object which is symmetric under interchange of the two particles. Similarly to the first definition, a boson is an object which, in a free gas, shows a Bose-Einstein distribution of velocities for a given temperature.
There is, of course, a third choice: a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. This only occurs if the particles involved are distinguishable from one another.
(There are, in fact, others as well - welcome to parastatistics.)
Your definition - from spin - arises only because of the Spin-Statistics Theorem. Not from definition. It's a wonderful theorem that Pauli proved. Great little book by Streater and Wightman, "PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That".
There are, in fact, "mathematical artifact particles" (ghost particles) which are used in QFT which have wrong statistics for their spin. It's extremely convenient to talk about these particles as if they actually exist, which is why it's important to remember that fermions and bosons are defined by their parity under interchange, and nothing else.
Granted, this tells you nothing about zero-G performance, but that can be easily determined by sticking an O2 generator on a satellite with an oxygen meter on the output. You don't need to have a human being present to actually verify that the oxygen is breathable.
Out of curiousity, how do you think the oxygen generator actually works? It doesn't just generate oxygen from nothing. It splits it from water, which is heavily recycled from the rest of the station.
Without it being actually at the ISS, it doesn't experience the same issues it would in a clean-room environment - long-term buildup from incompletely purified recycled water, etc. You could run it in a closed-loop system (O2 generator feeds fuel cell feeds O2 generator) but that wouldn't work the same as running it in a large station, as you don't have the same contaminants.
Plus, given that water is brought up from Earth all the time, you'd never be able to run an O2 generator in a satellite for as long as you run it in the ISS without refueling the satellite. That O2 generator is quite old at this point.
Ground-based testing won't work as well. It simply won't. You're talking about a system based around fluids, and they will simply work much differently in zero-G as opposed to Earth gravity.
In fact, if you read the current problems, they think that gas bubbles may have caused the current problems. Bubbles act vastly differently in space than they do on Earth.
When you are doing low level stuff you don't think in megabytes you think in blocks of bytes, usually in powers of 2 and then kilobyte has its place.
Just call it a kibibyte. Just write KiB. If you think the name is stupid, petition for new names. It's one letter. It also makes life simpler because you never again have to wonder whether or not they mean 1024 or 1000.
It has nothing to do with drive makers. It has everything to do with abusing a unit. The only reason "kilo = 1024" hasn't been hell is that the people who use it don't actually venture outside of their own discipline that often.
Let me explain: imagine a runner, who, every meter, transfers a total of 1kB every kilometer. How much does he transfer every meter? How much does he transfer every megameter?
1 kB/1 km should be 1 B/m. 1 kB/1 km in Mm should be 1 MB/Mm. Unit math is nice. By having a "special usage" of kilo for one particular unit, you completely and utterly destroy unit math.
As I've said elsewhere, the best answer is this: it is utterly ludicrous to expect a person to pull out a calculator to figure out how long it will take to transfer 2 GB of RAM over a 2GHz link that transfers 1 B per transfer. It should be 1 second.
The funny thing is that no one cares. If you stick an "i" in the sizes of RAM, no one will notice or care. We have special units all over the place - DVD and CD-ROM drive speeds are measured in "X" speeds (times the original speed of the medium). CPU speeds don't even list MHz/GHz anymore. We fudge transfer speeds all the time (100 Mbit/s for 100baseTX when that's the maximum raw speed).
The only people who need to think primarily in terms of 1024 bytes (or 1024*1024 bytes, or 1024*1024*1024 bytes) are OS authors, driver writers, and filesystem writers who want to split up address spaces by masking off bits in an address. Now ask yourself - are there more of them, or are there more of everyone else who's been taught the metric system? That's why I advocate telling people "just stop being lazy, and do it right."
There is no reason for ls to output info in GiB, MiB, KiB by default, for instance. No one needs to know that. Heck, it would be nice for ls to round properly, anyway. Listing a 43098112 file as 42MiB when it's 41.1MiB is just stupid. But that just stresses my point - computer programs are sloppy when it comes to filesizes, and no one cares. So if we don't care whether it's 41 MiB or 42 MiB, why do we care if it's listed in MiB or MB?
It's just silly to berate hard drive manufacturers for following a standard when computer programmers are so incredibly sloppy with terminology. Who cares why they did it? They're right. Saying that they did it for marketing reasons is just a way for computer programmers to feel better about themselves for continuing to be sloppy.
But they were easy to distinguish, always being listed in BITS rather than bytes.
Did you read the quote I posted? They're talking about bytes, not bits. You're telling me that a 2GHz link that transfers 1 byte per transfer runs at 1.8 GB/s? What part of "units should be consistent" didn't you understand?
Perhaps NIST should have re-defined "bytes" to equal "8.192 bits" to solve the problem
A byte is not 8 bits. A bit is a unit of data, whereas a byte is the smallest addressable unit of data in a computer. Hence the reason that a 9600 bit-per-second modem transfers 960 bytes per second. A byte is 10 bits on a serial line (well, for 8N1, at least). Not that you address data on a serial line, but when you put a "byte" on a serial line, you get 10 bits on the line.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... no? I said PS1, not PS2.
Actually, I'm missing the exact news reference I found, but here's a link to a Nintendo forum containing similar numbers (from a week previously).
Here. The numbers are from Media Create.
Nintendo's had far more "must buy" games for the DS in Japan - Nintendogs being the main one. For the last week of April, the DS outsold the PSP 3 to 1.
Year-to-date this year the two were even, but the DS pulled out ahead the week after. (60K+ to 30K+ again).
The DS did have a Christmas season by itself in the US and Japan
PSP was released on Dec. 12 in Japan. They both had a Christmas season there.
That's why the DS outselling the PSP in Japan is important. The DS had a few-month headstart in the US, but not in Japan, and it still won in Japan.
I didn't know Rhode Island or Luxembourg had the second largest videogame market in the world...
Incidentally, the DS outsold the PSP in the US, too. it's just that release dates created more of a disparity in the US. In Japan they were released within 10 days of each other.
but HDTVs are getting picked up pretty fast, and console support could be a big sales driver - one of the main factors holding HDTV back is lack of content.
No way - it's price. Heck, progressive screen TVs are still in the severe minority, and they've got tons of content available in DVDs. HDTVs are still far too expensive - I doubt consoles (which will likely not be picked up en masse until they hit the $200 price point, which is what always happens) will be a driver for $1000++ TVs. The majority of homes in the US simply don't have that kind of disposable income.
I doubt HDTVs, or even progressive screen TVs, will be anywhere near the majority even by the time these guys are gone. But that's partly my pessimism.
Honestly, I have no idea why they don't bother including a VGA output as well to encourage people to set up "gaming areas" using a computer monitor. Then, Sony and Microsoft could start leveraging graphics power without putting a huge demand on developers (*). But instead, Microsoft with the Xbox made it almost impossible.
(*: The point here is that increasing the resolution is basically only programming. Increasing the polygon count, etc., requires much more development time and money than just upping the resolution. And if you've ever seen a high-level emulation of N64 games, it's amazing how much better they look just in higher resolution.)
Technically speaking a cone or rod is activated by a single photon.
:)
1% of the time. Quantum efficiency.
You need to shove 100 photons to reliably get 1 activation. You can shove 1 photon 100 times, or 100 photons at once. Either or.
Given that the XBox 360 doesn't put out 1080p,
Most TVs are not HDTVs currently, though. They really only need to worry about good old NTSC TVs.
[14:49] KraftBoy: if people dont dig the offering of Sony and/or MS, then Nintendo looks like a genius for purposefully underhyping the power of the console
Personally I think it's just because Nintendo doesn't like lying to the customer to get them addicted to numbers that can be fudged or made up depending on the phase of the moon. They'd rather get them hyped about the new games and/or gameplay. So they say something to entice the geeks (and to make media happy), but focus mainly on things that will get people interested.
Honestly, they showed software for the PS3 and Xbox. Woop-de-doo - it's Tekken 6 (or 9, or 54, or whatever), Halo 70145 (or whatever number it is) - blah. Let me guess - it looks just like the previous ones - but better!
Geez. Wonder when these companies are going to take the smart developers' hints that gamers really, really don't like numbers for sequels. Hell, even Final Fantasy uses roman numerals.
The main problem with the way that Sony and Microsoft are throwing out sequels is that if you miss one of them, you don't care. If I don't buy Halo 2, and just play Halo 3, will that be any different? Probably not. But you can't skip, for instance, a Zelda game. You'd know you missed something, because Majora's Mask is a completely different game than Wind Waker, than Twilight Princess will be. Ditto for the Mario games.
All that said, Xbox outsold Gamecube, and who made a profit?
Only in certain markets. GameCube demolished the Xbox in Japan, and the Xbox only managed to catch up to the GameCube in 2004. The Xbox's real success was in 3rd party titles, but that still doesn't guarantee that MS made much money, because they were basically giving away licenses to encourage development.
Anyway, c'mon: as of Jan 2005, the difference between the GameCube and Xbox in terms of consoles sold was less than 2 million out of 20 million, with almost all of that difference coming from the US market. It ain't much of a difference (considering Sony's at 80 million, they're both sitting at around 15%).
Interestingly enough, GC might actually win overall, as Xbox 360 will kill Xbox sales, and GC's still got the next Zelda. Especially in Japan, Zelda's huge, and Xbox is nonexistent in Japan. I actually think in the end, the GameCube will finish in 2nd place.
Come on, you accuse Sony and MS of making shit up then you pull all these predictions for what the games will look like out of your ass. Sure, maybe the 360 and PS3 won't be as great as they make out. Maybe they will. Let's wait and see...
I know this because Sony and MS did pull the numbers out of their ass.
15 times more powerful than the Xbox: 3 cores, running at ~5 times the clock speed of the original Xbox CPU = 15 times more powerful! Wow, what a creative number, and it's completely true, because "OMG MHz is teh rulez!"
This isn't new to Sony or Microsoft either. Sony's been doing it for a while. With the PlayStation, they use to quote triangles/second - but only if said triangles were completely raw (no textures, AA, etc.) which means the number is useless, whereas Nintendo quoted completely antialiased and textured polys, so their numbers were far lower, but actually pretty much comparable.
We are nowhere near our physical thresholds - the human eye can respond to a difference in line alignment of a few seconds of arc - the width of a pencil at 300 meters (look up hyperacuity). The eye can detect the presence of a single photon. But we're far, far away from that level of realism.
Of course the eye can detect a single photon... some of the time. In reality you need quite a few before you can reliably detect it. So saying it can detect a single photon is a little bit of a stretch - you'd need about 100 photons before you'd have a reasonable expectation that you've seen 1 - the eye's QE is about 1%.
Anyway, the angular stuff: that's resolution. And that's out of console manufacturer's hands, because it's dependent on consumer TVs.
Metal Gear Solid 4.
MGS was a PlayStation game, and different enough from Metal Gear to warrant calling it a new franchise, in my opinion. I don't group Mario Kart into the Mario Bros. franchise, as they're different games.
They used to own 100% of the market. If my company's main product had just lost 33% market share, I'd be wetting myself.
Sold , not existing. In terms of existing units, Nintendo has something like 87% of the market.
This time around, they look to be a long way behind the curve performance wise.
No, they won't be. They're a long way behind on the "make up random numbers for E3 based on peak FLOPs numbers that could never be achieved" performance curve, but they won't be far behind on the actual performance curve. C'mon. Give me a break. Sony and Microsoft are literally making numbers up here.
Microsoft and Sony were both sloppy in the previous generation when it came to console design, and both of them look to be quite sloppy this time. I mean, really: Xbox 360 has 6 front ends and the system has shared graphics memory. So it needs serious amounts of memory bandwidth (good chance one of those threads is going to evict a cache line) and it's sharing it with the graphics card? What?
Nintendo knows how to make consoles without blunt force. The games will look surprisingly similar to this generation in terms of who's better: Revolution will look pretty much the same, but maybe a *little* worse, PS3 will look the best on some, but worse on others (too high a developer learning curve), and the Xbox 360 will probably look about equivalent to the Revolution on most games, with maybe a few being better.
Personally, I think Nintendo's biggest difficulty is that they lean much too
hard on old franchises: Metroid, Zelda, Mario, Kirby, and so on.
Yah, I agree. Sony's much better. Those launch titles for the PS3? Tekken 6, Gran Turismo 5, Metal Gear Solid 4, Devil May Cry 4.
None of those franchises dates to before the PS1. Some were only from the PS2.
On the other hand, the new Zelda game is the 7th Zelda game to come out for a Nintendo console (8th, if you count Four Swords Adventures). And this spans 4 generations so far.
As for Mario, he's actually doing about the same: as for real Super Mario games, there have only been 7 games so far for 4 consoles.
Sony is averaging 2-3 games per franchise on each console. Nintendo is averaging about 1-2. Who's leaning too hard?
Handhelds were the last area they had a commanding lead over the opposition, and the PSP has blown that to hell.
Yah. Blew it completely to hell, 64,247 units to 38,778 in Japan last week.
Oh wait... the DS is the one leading the PSP. My bad. And when you consider that the GBA SP is still selling 10K-15K units/week, Nintendo owns 67% of the handheld units sold last week in Japan.
Overall the DS has outsold the PSP 2.2M units to 1.2M units. They aren't losing. And when the GB Micro enters the fray, things will likely get even stronger for Nintendo.
Why does everyone think Nintendo gives that much thought to the US market? I mean, really - we can all salivate over the Xbox 360, but in Japan, the Xbox was outsold by the original Gameboy Advance. I'm not even sure that it's made anymore. I could probably outsell the Xbox in Japan with a lemonade stand.
It's not like Nintendo's in any danger. Second place in Japan is still easily enough to sustain them, what with the silly amounts of cash they have available.
With intelligent design, the server wouldn't be tied to the console. All it needs to do is send ROMs, and those are architecture-independent. Old games never die. They're just too good. Nintendo literally could keep that market up forever. With each new console, it could play all previous console's games, and all of Nintendo's old stock stuff.
That's because Sony and Microsoft both live in la-la land when it comes to actually marketing for games. The only reason they survive is because A) Sony is still riding the crest of the original PlayStation, and B) Microsoft has enough money to entice 3rd party developers, and has a good online model.
If Nintendo had the same 3rd party support that Microsoft and Sony did, they'd be dominating the market. Seriously. They're far, far better at marketing games.
The Xbox 360 will not be "10 times more powerful" than the original Xbox. No way. Maybe in some situations (see Apple's RDF: "10X faster in Photoshop. With this filter. On this size file. On Tuesdays.") but certainly not in general. Ditto with the PS3.
Anyway, let me explain the original comment: what do you know about the PS3?
To quote Ars Technica:
But there is not a single word in there about what kind of games it will play. They showed a few tech demos, and a few sequels to current games. All of that gets basically lost in their marketing shuffle. Besides, while people may deride Nintendo for reusing old games, Sony is definitely rapidly running up there. Tekken 6? Gran Turismo 5? These properties are two generations old! Zelda is five generations old and only has 6 console games entirely.
In contrast, Nintendo's presentation was all about the games, and the way the next console will work. Just listen to what everyone's saying: "oh, playing that will be cool!" "oh, doing that will be cool!" even though Nintendo hasn't even announced one game for it.
Until we know exactly what the hardware specs for Revolution are, being worried about the console being underpowerered are premature.
Wait till the games come out, and decide for yourself. Hardware specs can be massively deceiving, as Sony and Microsoft traded the MHz myth for the "peak FLOPs" myth. Nintendo's not stupid. Their consoles are always extremely well designed from an architecture point of view. Sony and Microsoft, on the other hand, both tend to be a little sloppy and wasteful (*still* with a UMA for Xbox 360? bleah. At least it's got 10MB of eDRAM, but what a way to stall 6 threads at once by starving them of memory bandwidth by making the graphics processor steal it).
Slot load could easily accept both discs. Just need to have some sort of mechanism that tells whether or not you're inserting a mini-DVD or a normal DVD. Something like a pair of arms that pushes apart when you push in a DVD, and triggers a small switch if it pushes open enough that it's a real DVD. If not, it's a mini-DVD, and it knows the right distances for each.
And you wonder why it's not on the front page? I've been fairly hyped to see whatever Nintendo was doing after the PS3 excitement, but... it's all vapor so far.
Vapor? Pictures of the Xbox 360 leaked hit the front page of Slashdot. Pictures of the Revolution, and it's on games/. only.
Pictures aren't vapor.
but my hands get cramped enough on the SP that I can't imagine anything smaller or thinner than that.
GB Micro: 4" wide, 0.7" thick
GBA SP: 3.2" wide, ~0.9" thick
It's not smaller, as far as your hands are concerned. It's wider. A little thinner, but really not much (maybe not even, I'm not sure those numbers are the 'unfolded' numbers). Smaller than the original GBA's 5.7", but still wider than the GBA SP.
I know this Micro returns to the GBA formfactor, but why?
Geh! I hate the SP formfactor. It cramps your hands at an odd angle. Just hold a SP, and look at your wrists. Now hold a GBA, and look at your wrists. The GBA formfactor is much, much more natural for your hands. My mother-in-law, who's a Tetris addict with arthritis, can confirm this as well.
I've been hoping that they'd release another GBA with the original GBA formfactor, but with an improved screen and hopefully equivalent battery life to the original GBA. Man, that'd make me happy. Screen size is no big deal - just move it an inch or two closer and it looks exactly the same. Resolution is all that matters.
So what's the definition of a fermion or a boson, and in this specific case, of a fermionic or bosonic nucleus?
Bosons have integer spin, and fermions have half-integer (n+1/2, where n is a nonnegative integer) spin.
No, no no, and no no no.
Strictly speaking: the definition of a fermion is an object which is antisymmetric under interchange of the two particles. Or, for a more experimental definition: a fermion is an object which, in a free gas, shows a Fermi-Dirac distribution of velocities for a given temperature.
A boson is an object which is symmetric under interchange of the two particles. Similarly to the first definition, a boson is an object which, in a free gas, shows a Bose-Einstein distribution of velocities for a given temperature.
There is, of course, a third choice: a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. This only occurs if the particles involved are distinguishable from one another.
(There are, in fact, others as well - welcome to parastatistics.)
Your definition - from spin - arises only because of the Spin-Statistics Theorem. Not from definition. It's a wonderful theorem that Pauli proved. Great little book by Streater and Wightman, "PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That".
There are, in fact, "mathematical artifact particles" (ghost particles) which are used in QFT which have wrong statistics for their spin. It's extremely convenient to talk about these particles as if they actually exist, which is why it's important to remember that fermions and bosons are defined by their parity under interchange, and nothing else.
Granted, this tells you nothing about zero-G performance, but that can be easily determined by sticking an O2 generator on a satellite with an oxygen meter on the output. You don't need to have a human being present to actually verify that the oxygen is breathable.
Out of curiousity, how do you think the oxygen generator actually works? It doesn't just generate oxygen from nothing. It splits it from water, which is heavily recycled from the rest of the station.
Without it being actually at the ISS, it doesn't experience the same issues it would in a clean-room environment - long-term buildup from incompletely purified recycled water, etc. You could run it in a closed-loop system (O2 generator feeds fuel cell feeds O2 generator) but that wouldn't work the same as running it in a large station, as you don't have the same contaminants.
Plus, given that water is brought up from Earth all the time, you'd never be able to run an O2 generator in a satellite for as long as you run it in the ISS without refueling the satellite. That O2 generator is quite old at this point.
Ground-based testing won't work as well. It simply won't. You're talking about a system based around fluids, and they will simply work much differently in zero-G as opposed to Earth gravity.
In fact, if you read the current problems, they think that gas bubbles may have caused the current problems. Bubbles act vastly differently in space than they do on Earth.
When you are doing low level stuff you don't think in megabytes you think in blocks of bytes, usually in powers of 2 and then kilobyte has its place.
Just call it a kibibyte. Just write KiB. If you think the name is stupid, petition for new names. It's one letter. It also makes life simpler because you never again have to wonder whether or not they mean 1024 or 1000.
It has nothing to do with drive makers. It has everything to do with abusing a unit. The only reason "kilo = 1024" hasn't been hell is that the people who use it don't actually venture outside of their own discipline that often.
Let me explain: imagine a runner, who, every meter, transfers a total of 1kB every kilometer. How much does he transfer every meter? How much does he transfer every megameter?
1 kB/1 km should be 1 B/m. 1 kB/1 km in Mm should be 1 MB/Mm. Unit math is nice. By having a "special usage" of kilo for one particular unit, you completely and utterly destroy unit math.
As I've said elsewhere, the best answer is this: it is utterly ludicrous to expect a person to pull out a calculator to figure out how long it will take to transfer 2 GB of RAM over a 2GHz link that transfers 1 B per transfer. It should be 1 second.
The funny thing is that no one cares. If you stick an "i" in the sizes of RAM, no one will notice or care. We have special units all over the place - DVD and CD-ROM drive speeds are measured in "X" speeds (times the original speed of the medium). CPU speeds don't even list MHz/GHz anymore. We fudge transfer speeds all the time (100 Mbit/s for 100baseTX when that's the maximum raw speed).
The only people who need to think primarily in terms of 1024 bytes (or 1024*1024 bytes, or 1024*1024*1024 bytes) are OS authors, driver writers, and filesystem writers who want to split up address spaces by masking off bits in an address. Now ask yourself - are there more of them, or are there more of everyone else who's been taught the metric system? That's why I advocate telling people "just stop being lazy, and do it right."
There is no reason for ls to output info in GiB, MiB, KiB by default, for instance. No one needs to know that. Heck, it would be nice for ls to round properly, anyway. Listing a 43098112 file as 42MiB when it's 41.1MiB is just stupid. But that just stresses my point - computer programs are sloppy when it comes to filesizes, and no one cares. So if we don't care whether it's 41 MiB or 42 MiB, why do we care if it's listed in MiB or MB?
It's just silly to berate hard drive manufacturers for following a standard when computer programmers are so incredibly sloppy with terminology. Who cares why they did it? They're right. Saying that they did it for marketing reasons is just a way for computer programmers to feel better about themselves for continuing to be sloppy.
But they were easy to distinguish, always being listed in BITS rather than bytes.
Did you read the quote I posted? They're talking about bytes, not bits. You're telling me that a 2GHz link that transfers 1 byte per transfer runs at 1.8 GB/s? What part of "units should be consistent" didn't you understand?
Perhaps NIST should have re-defined "bytes" to equal "8.192 bits" to solve the problem
A byte is not 8 bits. A bit is a unit of data, whereas a byte is the smallest addressable unit of data in a computer. Hence the reason that a 9600 bit-per-second modem transfers 960 bytes per second. A byte is 10 bits on a serial line (well, for 8N1, at least). Not that you address data on a serial line, but when you put a "byte" on a serial line, you get 10 bits on the line.
How hard is it to say 1.8 GB/s?
/. Second is s.
Let me repeat this again. A 2 GHz link that transfers 1 byte on every clock cycle.
Two giga-transfers of 1 byte per second.
Giga is G. Transfers are unitless. Byte is B. Per is
That's 2 GB/s.
Units are standards. Yes, we've been screwing around with them for a while. It's time for us to grow up and act like adults.
This isn't different than everyone else. This is the same as everyone else.