The DOOM3 engine, Source, and Unreal Engine are all complete products. They have physics, AI, gameplay logic, networking, and a lot more built in. Unreal Engine even includes its own install system.
It's a cool tech demo, but it's a long way from being a competitive engine. You need more than pretty visuals to sell an engine, you need an environment that makes developing games cheaper.
Pinging slashdot.org [66.35.250.150] with 32 bytes of data:
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"On a different note, I'm currious as to how they are going to get 100mbit out there. On a 36Mhz ku band transponder, the maximum throughput is probably close to 200mbit using DVB-S2 (the latest and greatest satelite transmission codes). They are going to need a lot of transponders/bandwidth to provide satelite broadband to the boonies."
Dude, first of all, use the URL: tag, and second of all, use shortify to wrap NSFW URLs.
Using Shortify (with the NSFW option on the "More Options" page):
- Provides a warning page to those of us using computers at work or in public locations - Provides work users a way of avoiding having the URL sent over the pipe at all (the "NSFW warning" page doesn't actually contain the URL) - Provides users with a simple way of seeing the URL ("Show URL" button on the NSFW warning page) - Doesn't insert the (potentially offensive) URL into the Slashdot article
"It would be a big mistake for MS to launch the 360 with multiple versions. I don't think that there has ever been a successful console that launched with more than one version/price point."
PSP? It launched as a "barebones" system and also as a "Value Pack" system.
Well, my phone has an excellent calendar, task list, notepad, and contacts application. It syncs over-the-air so I don't have to deal with cables or worry about data loss. And it also has a damn-fine AIM client, pretty decent email client, SSH, and a darn fine web browser.
"You should be able to get away with a fully loaded Clamshell iBook for about $500. Yeah, you can also get a new Dell Inspiron lappie for a little more. But that Dell will be toast after a few weeks of being toted around in a kid's backpack. They are flimsy even for adults. Give one to a kid and it's dead meat."
Forget getting an iBook Clamshell.
The Panasonic Toughbook is not only more durable (mag-alloy chassis, spill-resistant keyboard, dust resistance), it's also cheaper (as low as $425 on eBay), faster (850MHz), and it has an XGA (1024x768) display.
No, it's not a Mac, but does it really make sense to get a notebook that is less durable, slower, has a tiny LCD display, and only runs an outdated version of Office and Mac OS?
"If you strip out all the useless stuff out of a cell phone (you know, to make it, gasp, act just like a phone) I don't see how it can be that much of a challenge to bring it down to the $20 range."
Well, first of all, you're assuming that the "useless stuff" is useless. Believe it or not, many people use their phones as more than just phones.
Second, this article describes *how* they can do just what you are talking about. Larger scale integration means a simpler PCB and fewer chips to manufacture and integrate. That saves costs.
A friend of mine has logged over *85 Days* (over 2000 hours) of playtime in WOW. The game has been out for approximately 250 days. That averages out to about 8 hours per day, every day, for the last 250 days. Or, put another way: my friend has spent HALF his time (16 non-sleep hours in the day) playing WOW since release. That's 56 hours a week, more than a "full-time" job and in the same ballpark as many technology jobs.
"as you don't count the power plant that burned (coal|oil|gas|atomic nuclei) and polluted somone else's back yard."
Tehcnically speaking, no "burning" occurs in a nuclear power plant. And, while the waste is dangerous, there isn't very much of it, and it can be (and usually is) isolated from the environment.
Re:LP's ??? You must be kidding..
on
10 Technologies MIA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Try listening to a 10 year old mildly scratched LP. Then try listening to a 10 year old mildly scratched CD."
That's funny, because a mildly scratched CD plays fine. CDs have error correction that is quite strong, so minor scratches aren't an issue.
Now, you can't take a knife to a CD and expect it to play properly. But you can't do that to an LP either.
You can drill holes in CDs, though, and they still play. Mostly.
"But things like cell phone signals, pager signals, FM/AM radio signals, TV signals, consumer frequency signals, etc. I have no choice in letting permeate my body."
Well, you could always go for shielding.
But you'd better not step out in the sun. It bombards us with a wide range of EM.
"If you want a real ISP with some amount of freedom and no connection resets every couple of hours, it would probably cost you about $70/mo for a 768kbps line from the phone company and maybe $80/mo for the service from an ISP. So about $150/mo for 768kbps DSL."
You're getting ripped if you're paying that much. Qwest offers 7mbit/1mbit DSL with "MSN" ISP for around $50 a month. If you don't install the MSN software (or if you use Linux), it's not so bad, and there aren't any connection resets.
"Of the two, Wiki is an actual valuable contribution to mankind."
And eBay isn't? The ability to find classic books, games, movies, albums, art - it's a valuable asset to a society.
eBay has helped facilitate the re-use of millions of computers. Thanks to eBay, anyone with $200 can get a decent used notebook. Thanks to eBay, I can buy an RCA CED system if I want. I can buy laserdiscs. I can buy a TRS-80 Portable or a 128k Mac.
"Crippled by multiple competing standards each touted by different competing companies. It retarded growth for years, whilst the rest of the world using GMS got on with the business of selling phones and services."
It also lead to the development of CDMA, the radio layer that powers more than half of the US mobile phone market. It also serves as the basis for the next generation of GSM.
"yes, I had to ensure my N. American GSM phone worked outside N. America because GSM here is on different frequencies here to everywhere else."
That has nothing to do with "too much compeititon" and everything to do with "the frequencies GSM ran on were already in use".
"A couple of weeks later I went to California and tried to do the same. It took them more 45 minutes to set me up on Cingular"
I don't know why you had so much trouble. With most of the prepaid packages, you purchase a phone and SIM from any number of locations (supermarket, gas station, etc.) and then pop the SIM in and dial a number on the phone.
"And then USD$10 didn't even last me a week of very light usage. What a rip-off. I used a third of that with heavier usage in the UK."
Well, now we have claims without numbers. How many minutes did you use? In how many calls? What kind of rate did you get on your prepaid?
The "US wireless sucks because Europe is so much better because it mandated GSM" post is a bunch of bullshit. We don't pay to call customer care. We pay less per minute (often more than 3x less), don't pay out the ass for GPRS or 1xRTT, often don't pay to call customers on the same network, and often don't pay for calls on nights or weekends.
I don't pay for calls today. It's a Friday. My friend now has 1000 "banked" minutes that he has saved from previous months. Another friend has a prepaid plan that's $0.10 a minute without any monthly charge. And, yes, even he gets in-network calling for free.
So, as far as your damn "pet issue", remember this: the fact that your fancy new UMTS phone offers better reception, better call quality, and higher bandwidth for data services comes from the work done by Qualcomm. Work that wouldn't have been done if GSM had been mandated.
*That's* why mandating technology is a *bad* idea - it eliminates the possibility of innovation. It eliminates the possibility of competition. EDGE wouldn't exist it CDMA2000 hadn't put the heat on. EFR and AMR wouldn't exist if CDMA hadn't gotten the upper edge on voice quality (which, thankfully, EFR regained).
Enjoy your GSM service. I do. So do over 60 million other US citizens. I have the ability to choose GSM. But I also have the ability to choose CDMA2000.
That may have been true in the past, but the fact is that the entire industry has changed over the last 20 years. While US brands still haven't matched Honda and Toyota as far as quality, according to CR, they are getting much closer. My Ford Taurus has 110,100 miles and it has required neither major engine work nor major transmission work. I replaced the plugs at 100,000, but other than that, it's just been air filters, tire rotation, and fluid changes.
It seems that Microsoft is under assult from many angles - rightfully so, in many cases. But what do your coworkers do when they see websites like this one? Do they clam up and ignore what might be legitimite criticism, or do they actually listen and learn? As the Linux guy at Microsoft, how do you keep from being ignored by the rest of Redmond?
" Have your webpages check to see what browser the client is using, and if it is IE7 (or hey, ANY version of IE) refuse to render the page and pop up a link to Mozilla or Firefox and tell the user that his current browser is broken, and a plague on the web, and that he should follow the given link and download a REAL broswer if he (or she) wants to see your content. (turn around is fair play I say!)"
You know what's cool about that? You get to be a complete ass while maintaining your smug superiority, and while cliaming to be doing the "right thing".
Maybe when you run a restaurant, you shouldn't serve African-Americans becacuse you don't like them either.
Telling people that you won't serve them because you don't like their choice of browser makes non-technical people think that the open-source community is just a bunch of exclusionist assholes.
And, you know what? If they just looked at you, they would be right.
"M$ is a software company who previous outsourced their manufacturing to Wistron Corp in China. You make it sound like Sony is not ready. They are more ready than M$."
Actually, the XBOX 360 was manufactured by Flextronics. I don't know about the XBOX 360.
"Sony is ALWAYS under production. They are a hardware company with already available assembly lines all the time."
Yes, and? There are *many* companies with the capability to manufacture a gaming system - and *they* have open assembly lines. Celestica, Flextronics, Compal, AsusTek, ECS - they all have the capacity to manufacture the XBOX 360.
Well, signed patches for one. And compatibility with practically every device on the planet. And hundreds of thousands more applications.
I run Debian on the server that powers http://shortify.com/. It's a fine OS. But sometimes I want to be able to play Half-Life 2 or WOW. That's where Windows comes in.
Slashdot Mirror
The DOOM3 engine, Source, and Unreal Engine are all complete products. They have physics, AI, gameplay logic, networking, and a lot more built in. Unreal Engine even includes its own install system.
It's a cool tech demo, but it's a long way from being a competitive engine. You need more than pretty visuals to sell an engine, you need an environment that makes developing games cheaper.
Pinging slashdot.org [66.35.250.150] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 66.35.250.150: bytes=32 time=49ms TTL=46
Reply from 66.35.250.150: bytes=32 time=44ms TTL=46
Reply from 66.35.250.150: bytes=32 time=37ms TTL=46
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Ping statistics for 66.35.250.150:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 37ms, Maximum = 49ms, Average = 42ms
"On a different note, I'm currious as to how they are going to get 100mbit out there. On a 36Mhz ku band transponder, the maximum throughput is probably close to 200mbit using DVB-S2 (the latest and greatest satelite transmission codes). They are going to need a lot of transponders/bandwidth to provide satelite broadband to the boonies."
It's probably Ka band, like WildBlue.
Dude, first of all, use the URL: tag, and second of all, use shortify to wrap NSFW URLs.
Using Shortify (with the NSFW option on the "More Options" page):
- Provides a warning page to those of us using computers at work or in public locations
- Provides work users a way of avoiding having the URL sent over the pipe at all (the "NSFW warning" page doesn't actually contain the URL)
- Provides users with a simple way of seeing the URL ("Show URL" button on the NSFW warning page)
- Doesn't insert the (potentially offensive) URL into the Slashdot article
Really, it's just common sense:
http://shortify.com/FB0
"It would be a big mistake for MS to launch the 360 with multiple versions. I don't think that there has ever been a successful console that launched with more than one version/price point."
PSP? It launched as a "barebones" system and also as a "Value Pack" system.
Well, my phone has an excellent calendar, task list, notepad, and contacts application. It syncs over-the-air so I don't have to deal with cables or worry about data loss. And it also has a damn-fine AIM client, pretty decent email client, SSH, and a darn fine web browser.
I don't consider any of those things "useless".
"But I think GSM will have to switch to some form of CDMA eventually anyway."
It already has. UMTS, the next generation of GSM, is based on CDMA technology.
Yeah, but it's not his real email address. He made it up on the spot.
"You should be able to get away with a fully loaded Clamshell iBook for about $500. Yeah, you can also get a new Dell Inspiron lappie for a little more. But that Dell will be toast after a few weeks of being toted around in a kid's backpack. They are flimsy even for adults. Give one to a kid and it's dead meat."
Forget getting an iBook Clamshell.
The Panasonic Toughbook is not only more durable (mag-alloy chassis, spill-resistant keyboard, dust resistance), it's also cheaper (as low as $425 on eBay), faster (850MHz), and it has an XGA (1024x768) display.
No, it's not a Mac, but does it really make sense to get a notebook that is less durable, slower, has a tiny LCD display, and only runs an outdated version of Office and Mac OS?
Here's an excellent interview with Scott Richter from The Daily Show: Scott Richter Interview (9.9MB, Windows Media)
"If you strip out all the useless stuff out of a cell phone (you know, to make it, gasp, act just like a phone) I don't see how it can be that much of a challenge to bring it down to the $20 range."
Well, first of all, you're assuming that the "useless stuff" is useless. Believe it or not, many people use their phones as more than just phones.
Second, this article describes *how* they can do just what you are talking about. Larger scale integration means a simpler PCB and fewer chips to manufacture and integrate. That saves costs.
A friend of mine has logged over *85 Days* (over 2000 hours) of playtime in WOW. The game has been out for approximately 250 days. That averages out to about 8 hours per day, every day, for the last 250 days. Or, put another way: my friend has spent HALF his time (16 non-sleep hours in the day) playing WOW since release. That's 56 hours a week, more than a "full-time" job and in the same ballpark as many technology jobs.
"as you don't count the power plant that burned (coal|oil|gas|atomic nuclei) and polluted somone else's back yard."
Tehcnically speaking, no "burning" occurs in a nuclear power plant. And, while the waste is dangerous, there isn't very much of it, and it can be (and usually is) isolated from the environment.
"Try listening to a 10 year old mildly scratched LP.
Then try listening to a 10 year old mildly scratched CD."
That's funny, because a mildly scratched CD plays fine. CDs have error correction that is quite strong, so minor scratches aren't an issue.
Now, you can't take a knife to a CD and expect it to play properly. But you can't do that to an LP either.
You can drill holes in CDs, though, and they still play. Mostly.
"But things like cell phone signals, pager signals, FM/AM radio signals, TV signals, consumer frequency signals, etc. I have no choice in letting permeate my body."
Well, you could always go for shielding.
But you'd better not step out in the sun. It bombards us with a wide range of EM.
"If you want a real ISP with some amount of freedom and no connection resets every couple of hours, it would probably cost you about $70/mo for a 768kbps line from the phone company and maybe $80/mo for the service from an ISP. So about $150/mo for 768kbps DSL."
You're getting ripped if you're paying that much. Qwest offers 7mbit/1mbit DSL with "MSN" ISP for around $50 a month. If you don't install the MSN software (or if you use Linux), it's not so bad, and there aren't any connection resets.
Comcast around here is 4mbit/384kbps for $50.
"Of the two, Wiki is an actual valuable contribution to mankind."
And eBay isn't? The ability to find classic books, games, movies, albums, art - it's a valuable asset to a society.
eBay has helped facilitate the re-use of millions of computers. Thanks to eBay, anyone with $200 can get a decent used notebook. Thanks to eBay, I can buy an RCA CED system if I want. I can buy laserdiscs. I can buy a TRS-80 Portable or a 128k Mac.
That's valuable to me.
"Crippled by multiple competing standards each touted by different competing companies. It retarded growth for years, whilst the rest of the world using GMS got on with the business of selling phones and services."
It also lead to the development of CDMA, the radio layer that powers more than half of the US mobile phone market. It also serves as the basis for the next generation of GSM.
"yes, I had to ensure my N. American GSM phone worked outside N. America because GSM here is on different frequencies here to everywhere else."
That has nothing to do with "too much compeititon" and everything to do with "the frequencies GSM ran on were already in use".
"A couple of weeks later I went to California and tried to do the same. It took them more 45 minutes to set me up on Cingular"
I don't know why you had so much trouble. With most of the prepaid packages, you purchase a phone and SIM from any number of locations (supermarket, gas station, etc.) and then pop the SIM in and dial a number on the phone.
"And then USD$10 didn't even last me a week of very light usage. What a rip-off. I used a third of that with heavier usage in the UK."
Well, now we have claims without numbers. How many minutes did you use? In how many calls? What kind of rate did you get on your prepaid?
The "US wireless sucks because Europe is so much better because it mandated GSM" post is a bunch of bullshit. We don't pay to call customer care. We pay less per minute (often more than 3x less), don't pay out the ass for GPRS or 1xRTT, often don't pay to call customers on the same network, and often don't pay for calls on nights or weekends.
I don't pay for calls today. It's a Friday. My friend now has 1000 "banked" minutes that he has saved from previous months. Another friend has a prepaid plan that's $0.10 a minute without any monthly charge. And, yes, even he gets in-network calling for free.
So, as far as your damn "pet issue", remember this: the fact that your fancy new UMTS phone offers better reception, better call quality, and higher bandwidth for data services comes from the work done by Qualcomm. Work that wouldn't have been done if GSM had been mandated.
*That's* why mandating technology is a *bad* idea - it eliminates the possibility of innovation. It eliminates the possibility of competition. EDGE wouldn't exist it CDMA2000 hadn't put the heat on. EFR and AMR wouldn't exist if CDMA hadn't gotten the upper edge on voice quality (which, thankfully, EFR regained).
Enjoy your GSM service. I do. So do over 60 million other US citizens. I have the ability to choose GSM. But I also have the ability to choose CDMA2000.
That may have been true in the past, but the fact is that the entire industry has changed over the last 20 years. While US brands still haven't matched Honda and Toyota as far as quality, according to CR, they are getting much closer. My Ford Taurus has 110,100 miles and it has required neither major engine work nor major transmission work. I replaced the plugs at 100,000, but other than that, it's just been air filters, tire rotation, and fluid changes.
"So - are you going with PS3, and its superior 1080p, next time around?"
I would if I had a 1080p TV. Until then, XBOX 360's 720p is plenty to drive the native resolution for my DLP setup.
No, it's not. And Slashdot has every right to give people crap for writing websites that don't work with Firefox.
That said, there *is* a difference between shoddy codding and intentional exclusion.
It seems that Microsoft is under assult from many angles - rightfully so, in many cases. But what do your coworkers do when they see websites like this one? Do they clam up and ignore what might be legitimite criticism, or do they actually listen and learn? As the Linux guy at Microsoft, how do you keep from being ignored by the rest of Redmond?
" Have your webpages check to see what browser the client is using, and if it is IE7 (or hey, ANY version of IE) refuse to render the page and pop up a link to Mozilla or Firefox and tell the user that his current browser is broken, and a plague on the web, and that he should follow the given link and download a REAL broswer if he (or she) wants to see your content. (turn around is fair play I say!)"
You know what's cool about that? You get to be a complete ass while maintaining your smug superiority, and while cliaming to be doing the "right thing".
Maybe when you run a restaurant, you shouldn't serve African-Americans becacuse you don't like them either.
Telling people that you won't serve them because you don't like their choice of browser makes non-technical people think that the open-source community is just a bunch of exclusionist assholes.
And, you know what? If they just looked at you, they would be right.
"M$ is a software company who previous outsourced their manufacturing to Wistron Corp in China. You make it sound like Sony is not ready. They are more ready than M$."
Actually, the XBOX 360 was manufactured by Flextronics. I don't know about the XBOX 360.
"Sony is ALWAYS under production. They are a hardware company with already available assembly lines all the time."
Yes, and? There are *many* companies with the capability to manufacture a gaming system - and *they* have open assembly lines. Celestica, Flextronics, Compal, AsusTek, ECS - they all have the capacity to manufacture the XBOX 360.
Well, signed patches for one. And compatibility with practically every device on the planet. And hundreds of thousands more applications.
I run Debian on the server that powers http://shortify.com/. It's a fine OS. But sometimes I want to be able to play Half-Life 2 or WOW. That's where Windows comes in.