The errors call into question his overall credibility as a 'guru'.
He states that he has introduced floating point into the C program (to make it a tad 'tougher'), when he hasn't even done that! He's trying to asssign a floating point number to a long (which is an extended int, maybe he meant double?) so the compiler is just going to chop that number to a (long) int for him, hopefully at least giving him a warning which I guess he ignored. This guy holds a masters degree in CS?
Nobody is expecting him to come up with a perfect benchmark, but 1) he could at least know something about what he's talking about before he talks about it and 2) there's plenty of existing benchmarks for web performance that he could have used rather than creating his own questionable benchmark.
For what its worth, I run FreeBSD, not Linux, so it's not that I disagree with his results, just the way they were obtained.
Seems similar to the arguments about how calculators ruin kid's arithmetic skills. At one level, its true (and you can debate for hours with different educators as to whether kids should be given calculators early on, or only later when they can do the basics easily themselves), but at another level these devices provide a bit of augmentation that can be quite useful.
In any case, the article sounds a bit overblown to me. Of the people I know who use computers or PDAs to store lots of information, none of them has anything near the memory problems that are described in that article. In fact, the people I know who use the devices actually have quite keen memories, both short & long term.
One in ten people forgetting where they are going, etc? Because of overuse of a PDA? If this is even true, it sounds like there might be some other factors involved there (stress of IT-heavy workers?).
I'm not arguing that a system that allows for decompilation is a bad thing, I'm just pointing out that many large corportations are likely to take issue with it.
Well, its likely that the content for this Dreamcast hybrid will be specially tailored for it. ie, they won't be trying to serve you existing games like Shenmue (3 discs + a bonus disc).
SOME existing games could be served this way (some games are quite small in terms of total megabytes of data, Virtua Tennis springs to mind as a quality game but (relatively) small in size), but I'd bet they are largely going to focus on smaller games or perhaps cut down episodic versions of full games.
This is an interesting question, it'll be fun to watch what happens.
Java is in pretty much the same boat with regards to decompilation. There are Java compilers that can take.class files and spit out valid and VERY readable Java source code (basically you only lose the comments and the original names of any member-local variables). Sun hasn't done anything at all about this, they just completely ignore the issue as far as I've seen. There are obfuscators that do a pretty good job of confusing the available automatic decompilers, but none of them are from Sun or officially sanctioned (and they tend to cause 'odd' Java code which seems more likely to break JVMs).
Of course, Java has been primarily a server side technology, so its not as much of an issue... With.NET Microsoft is currently targetting the server mainly but I agree it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Will they actually release an MSIL of Office 11 (or whatever), knowing that it could be decompiled into fairly readable C#? Not likely.
the one thing that none of these DRM solutions address is the fact that it only takes *ONE* person to crack the system and it all falls apart. When confronted by this fact, the proponents of DRM systems will say 'well, yes, but we just want to keep honest people honest...This is to stop the casual copier'.
Which is just bullshit. The 'honest people' are going to get the decrypted versions of these files over systems like Napster or, since Napster is going full-on-corporate gnutella, cutemx, or whatever pop up to replace these if they disappear. They won't know or care that the original file had to be hacked using some obscure hacked Windows kernal with 'Secure Audio Path' code disabled. And I'm ignoring, for now, the fact that anyone can still just rip the original CD and ignore the music company's 'approved' digital version of the file (at least until they supplant CDs with something that has more protetion built in).
The core problem is this: Many people have already gotten used to the free distribution of this type of media...Since this is the case, systems designed only to keep 'honest people honest' are doomed to failure because the 'dishonest' people (the hacker/cracker/whateveryouwanttocallthem) will disable any protections and then get the unprotected versions out onto these distribution channels where the honest ignorant people are.
C# is byte-code compiled, like Java. So, in a way, you're both right. It is both compiled but also interpreted (from byte-code to native code) at run time.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing Microsoft give Sony a run for its money.
Right now, Sony is essentially the Microsoft of the console business. With so many installed users (on the PlayStation 1) they can pretty much dictate the future of the industry -- or at least this is how they have been acting as of late.
I'm personally quite glad that they pulled a boner on the PS2 launch, and I hope Microsoft (and Nintendo) use the screwup to their advantage to inject some more competition into the console arena.
While the Dreamcast had some minor problems at launch (as stated), I don't think that was their downfall. I think it has more to do with Sony pulling a play from Microsoft's book and announcing vapor (at the time) in the form of PS2 to get consumers to see the Dreamcast as obsolete out of the gate (in comparison to technology that was more than a year off).
Anyway, if the screwups were their downfall, I guess Sony is fucked because their PS2 launch was far worse than the Dreamcast launch, especially in parts of Europe and Japan where there were many hardware glitches that require unit replacements (far more costly than CD replacements, ala the Dreamcast batch of screwy CDs at launch). Here in the USA its months after launch and you still can't find a PS2 for sale in most retail outlets -- they have plenty of games for sale, of course, since there's not many PS2 owners to buy them.
XBox is no more vaporous than GameCube. Many people at CES saw it running games/demos and game developers have been playing around with it for a while now.
Considering the XBox is primarily a standardized PC platform with some really good multimedia processors and a unified memory architecture, its hard to say if it ever was vapor, even before it was completed. The question on XBox isnt whether Microsoft/Intel and NVidia can get the hardware together, its whether or not great games will be developed for it...And so far, looking at the signed developer list, things look pretty good.
Indrema, on the otherhand, always smacked of a cheap IPO ploy not much better than LinuxOne..So I'll be real surprised if/when I see that box available for sale.
The Dreamcast has a far wider selection of games. Don't get me wrong, the N64 has some great games, but they tend to fall into 4 genres: 3D platform titles (Mario64, Banjo-Kazooie), Kart Racers (Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing), action-RPGs (the two Zelda games, Gauntlet Legends (though its mostly action)) and FPSes (Goldeneye, Perfect Dark..which many people seem to love, but being a PC FPS player, I can't seem to get into these). .
The N64 doesn't have a very extensive library of games. And of the games that are available, 99% of the ones that are worth playing are either from Nintendo themselves or Rare, which contributes to the lack of game diversity.
Dreamcast, on the other hand, has FPSes (Quake3, including mouse/keyboard support), platform games (Rayman 2, Sonic Adventures), rhythm dancing games (Space Channel 5, Dance Dance Revolution), action-RPGs (Soul Reaver), traditional console-RPGs (Grandia 2, Skies of Arcadia), plenty of fighting games (Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive, VF3), and hard-to-categorize games like Shenmue.
The short version of my long-winded post is this:
Get an N64 if you love Nintendo (or Rare's)games. The selection is not large, but the games available are almost all of the highest quality.
Even when it was brand new, the Dreamcast sold for less than $300. Its not like the cost of a car or such.
There's more than enough games available for it to make it worth the $300 purchase: Space Channel 5, Virtua Tennis, Rayman 2, MDK 2, Sonic Adventure 1 (and 2), Shenmue (though I didn't care for it much myself, plenty of other people seem to like it), NFL2K1, NBA2K1, Soul Reaver, Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive 2, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, etc, etc, etc (there are many many more good games).
The simple fact is, consoles die. They are built to become obsolete eventually. This is not Dreamcast specific. Even if Sega kept making hardware, they'd most likely be pimping a 'Dreamcast 2' next year, and you'd still have the problem of the original Dreamcast support being dropped.
How did this get moderated as insightful? It is clearly a troll.
As others have mentioned, very few titles use Windows CE on the Dreamcast -- its optional. And those that do do not crash (believe me, I've played a good amount of Sega Rally 2, and never once did it crash (Blue Screen or otherwise)
And in terms of the killer-app for game consoles being a system that uses Linux? I am a Linux user and believe some of the Open Source rhetoric (but not all of it), but this just doesn't follow. The technology support for games even on current Linux systems is one of its main drawbacks -- despite the best efforts of the xfree/DRI people and Loki (SDL, etc), Linux as a gaming platform is still lagging several years behind Windows or even MacOS.
Someone with mod points: Please mod the parent post UP.
Almost every single post to this thread has jumped to the wrong conclusions, due at least partially to the MISLEADING writeup posted above.
This isn't about Sega trying to curb piracy or create a successor to the Dreamcast, this is simple one of the first unveiled uses for the 'Dreamcast on a chip' that Sega wants to license out to many companies as they get *out* of the hardware business.
Admittedly, the screwup could be pinned on MSNBC, because their headline states that SEGA is announcing this -- which, if you read their own article, is wrong, its Pace who is announcing it. However, it would be nice if the editors did more than skim a story before passing on the sensationalist crap.
Considering the current level of VA Linux stock, CmdrTaco might be able to pay the $10,000 but he'd have to bow out when someone else raises it to $10,050
I've got to "third" this point of view. I use Win2k Pro as my primary desktop and the ONLY crash I've had in the past year (including when I was using the last 2 betas) is when the Gravis Xterminator beta gamepad driver (for MAME, of course) bluescreened me. It has since been uninstalled and no crashes since.
One issue that this article doesn't bring up, and that many software engineering books ignore, is that sometimes all of the processes in the world won't help your software be more stable because of reliance on other software.
What I mean by this is, outside of embedded programming of small devices and game console programming, nobody writes programs 100% from scratch anymore (and even in embedded systems and consoles this is changing as they add standard OSes and libraries and JVMs to support the programmer).
So, not only do you have to worry about YOUR code not sucking, but you have to rely on all the DLLs or.so shared libraries you use not sucking, the underlying OS not sucking (sure, Microsoft has been the biggest name guilty of this in the past, but every OS has its share of kernel bugs, including Linux and *BSD), the JVM not sucking (heh heh, good luck on that one) if using Java, the C++ compiler you use not sucking and adhering to the standard, etc.
This problem actually seems to only be getting worse as the world moves increasingly towards net-based software. Anyone who has written Java for the client (either applet or full blown application) can tell you that write once, run anywhere is a joke because each different JVM has its own set of annoying and incompatible bugs..Likewise even simple scripting tends to be incompatible between different versions of the same browser (Netscape and IE both guilty) let alone different vendor's browsers.
Unfortunately there's so much suckage that is ingrained into current systems (and no, its not confined to Microsoft platforms, don't kid yourself) that some amount of suckiness is unavoidable no matter how careful you are.
Also, be creative. Plan. Take their curricula vitae with you. Keep the cream, and spread the rest around. Your new employers may thank you, and so might your employee friends.
Do not do this without the advice of a lawyer! Many people have been sued for 'raiding' companies that they have left. Also, lawsuits in this sector are getting worse than ever now that all these companies are failing -- its almost like an extra source of revenue. Just look at what NetZero has been doing lately...
Just to be clear here, Nintendo isn't suing over the contents of a magazine. They are suing over the content of a seperate strategy guide, like those you find in CompUSA for every game (most are official and authorized though).
Of course, I'm not defending Nintendo here, I think what they are doing is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The errors call into question his overall credibility as a 'guru'.
He states that he has introduced floating point into the C program (to make it a tad 'tougher'), when he hasn't even done that! He's trying to asssign a floating point number to a long (which is an extended int, maybe he meant double?) so the compiler is just going to chop that number to a (long) int for him, hopefully at least giving him a warning which I guess he ignored. This guy holds a masters degree in CS?
Nobody is expecting him to come up with a perfect benchmark, but 1) he could at least know something about what he's talking about before he talks about it and 2) there's plenty of existing benchmarks for web performance that he could have used rather than creating his own questionable benchmark.
For what its worth, I run FreeBSD, not Linux, so it's not that I disagree with his results, just the way they were obtained.
In any case, the article sounds a bit overblown to me. Of the people I know who use computers or PDAs to store lots of information, none of them has anything near the memory problems that are described in that article. In fact, the people I know who use the devices actually have quite keen memories, both short & long term.
One in ten people forgetting where they are going, etc? Because of overuse of a PDA? If this is even true, it sounds like there might be some other factors involved there (stress of IT-heavy workers?).
I'm not arguing that a system that allows for decompilation is a bad thing, I'm just pointing out that many large corportations are likely to take issue with it.
SOME existing games could be served this way (some games are quite small in terms of total megabytes of data, Virtua Tennis springs to mind as a quality game but (relatively) small in size), but I'd bet they are largely going to focus on smaller games or perhaps cut down episodic versions of full games.
Java is in pretty much the same boat with regards to decompilation. There are Java compilers that can take .class files and spit out valid and VERY readable Java source code (basically you only lose the comments and the original names of any member-local variables). Sun hasn't done anything at all about this, they just completely ignore the issue as far as I've seen. There are obfuscators that do a pretty good job of confusing the available automatic decompilers, but none of them are from Sun or officially sanctioned (and they tend to cause 'odd' Java code which seems more likely to break JVMs).
Of course, Java has been primarily a server side technology, so its not as much of an issue... With .NET Microsoft is currently targetting the server mainly but I agree it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. Will they actually release an MSIL of Office 11 (or whatever), knowing that it could be decompiled into fairly readable C#? Not likely.
Which is just bullshit. The 'honest people' are going to get the decrypted versions of these files over systems like Napster or, since Napster is going full-on-corporate gnutella, cutemx, or whatever pop up to replace these if they disappear. They won't know or care that the original file had to be hacked using some obscure hacked Windows kernal with 'Secure Audio Path' code disabled. And I'm ignoring, for now, the fact that anyone can still just rip the original CD and ignore the music company's 'approved' digital version of the file (at least until they supplant CDs with something that has more protetion built in).
The core problem is this: Many people have already gotten used to the free distribution of this type of media...Since this is the case, systems designed only to keep 'honest people honest' are doomed to failure because the 'dishonest' people (the hacker/cracker/whateveryouwanttocallthem) will disable any protections and then get the unprotected versions out onto these distribution channels where the honest ignorant people are.
C# is byte-code compiled, like Java. So, in a way, you're both right. It is both compiled but also interpreted (from byte-code to native code) at run time.
Right now, Sony is essentially the Microsoft of the console business. With so many installed users (on the PlayStation 1) they can pretty much dictate the future of the industry -- or at least this is how they have been acting as of late.
I'm personally quite glad that they pulled a boner on the PS2 launch, and I hope Microsoft (and Nintendo) use the screwup to their advantage to inject some more competition into the console arena.
Anyway, if the screwups were their downfall, I guess Sony is fucked because their PS2 launch was far worse than the Dreamcast launch, especially in parts of Europe and Japan where there were many hardware glitches that require unit replacements (far more costly than CD replacements, ala the Dreamcast batch of screwy CDs at launch). Here in the USA its months after launch and you still can't find a PS2 for sale in most retail outlets -- they have plenty of games for sale, of course, since there's not many PS2 owners to buy them.
Considering the XBox is primarily a standardized PC platform with some really good multimedia processors and a unified memory architecture, its hard to say if it ever was vapor, even before it was completed. The question on XBox isnt whether Microsoft/Intel and NVidia can get the hardware together, its whether or not great games will be developed for it...And so far, looking at the signed developer list, things look pretty good.
Indrema, on the otherhand, always smacked of a cheap IPO ploy not much better than LinuxOne..So I'll be real surprised if/when I see that box available for sale.
The Dreamcast has a far wider selection of games. Don't get me wrong, the N64 has some great games, but they tend to fall into 4 genres: 3D platform titles (Mario64, Banjo-Kazooie), Kart Racers (Mario Kart, Diddy Kong Racing), action-RPGs (the two Zelda games, Gauntlet Legends (though its mostly action)) and FPSes (Goldeneye, Perfect Dark..which many people seem to love, but being a PC FPS player, I can't seem to get into these). .
The N64 doesn't have a very extensive library of games. And of the games that are available, 99% of the ones that are worth playing are either from Nintendo themselves or Rare, which contributes to the lack of game diversity.
Dreamcast, on the other hand, has FPSes (Quake3, including mouse/keyboard support), platform games (Rayman 2, Sonic Adventures), rhythm dancing games (Space Channel 5, Dance Dance Revolution), action-RPGs (Soul Reaver), traditional console-RPGs (Grandia 2, Skies of Arcadia), plenty of fighting games (Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive, VF3), and hard-to-categorize games like Shenmue.
The short version of my long-winded post is this:
Get an N64 if you love Nintendo (or Rare's)games. The selection is not large, but the games available are almost all of the highest quality.
Get a Dreamcast if you want diversity.
Get both if you can afford it.
Even when it was brand new, the Dreamcast sold for less than $300. Its not like the cost of a car or such.
There's more than enough games available for it to make it worth the $300 purchase: Space Channel 5, Virtua Tennis, Rayman 2, MDK 2, Sonic Adventure 1 (and 2), Shenmue (though I didn't care for it much myself, plenty of other people seem to like it), NFL2K1, NBA2K1, Soul Reaver, Soul Calibur, Dead or Alive 2, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, etc, etc, etc (there are many many more good games).
The simple fact is, consoles die. They are built to become obsolete eventually. This is not Dreamcast specific. Even if Sega kept making hardware, they'd most likely be pimping a 'Dreamcast 2' next year, and you'd still have the problem of the original Dreamcast support being dropped.
As others have mentioned, very few titles use Windows CE on the Dreamcast -- its optional. And those that do do not crash (believe me, I've played a good amount of Sega Rally 2, and never once did it crash (Blue Screen or otherwise)
And in terms of the killer-app for game consoles being a system that uses Linux? I am a Linux user and believe some of the Open Source rhetoric (but not all of it), but this just doesn't follow. The technology support for games even on current Linux systems is one of its main drawbacks -- despite the best efforts of the xfree/DRI people and Loki (SDL, etc), Linux as a gaming platform is still lagging several years behind Windows or even MacOS.
Almost every single post to this thread has jumped to the wrong conclusions, due at least partially to the MISLEADING writeup posted above.
This isn't about Sega trying to curb piracy or create a successor to the Dreamcast, this is simple one of the first unveiled uses for the 'Dreamcast on a chip' that Sega wants to license out to many companies as they get *out* of the hardware business.
Admittedly, the screwup could be pinned on MSNBC, because their headline states that SEGA is announcing this -- which, if you read their own article, is wrong, its Pace who is announcing it. However, it would be nice if the editors did more than skim a story before passing on the sensationalist crap.
the point of them is that they're so cheap it doesn't really matter if they get lost or destroyed.
Considering the current level of VA Linux stock, CmdrTaco might be able to pay the $10,000 but he'd have to bow out when someone else raises it to $10,050
I guess Diablo 2 is worth the Windows bootup for him but the AI trailer isn't.
I think you are overlooking the fact that some movies feature hot chicks NAKED!
I've got to "third" this point of view. I use Win2k Pro as my primary desktop and the ONLY crash I've had in the past year (including when I was using the last 2 betas) is when the Gravis Xterminator beta gamepad driver (for MAME, of course) bluescreened me. It has since been uninstalled and no crashes since.
What I mean by this is, outside of embedded programming of small devices and game console programming, nobody writes programs 100% from scratch anymore (and even in embedded systems and consoles this is changing as they add standard OSes and libraries and JVMs to support the programmer).
So, not only do you have to worry about YOUR code not sucking, but you have to rely on all the DLLs or .so shared libraries you use not sucking, the underlying OS not sucking (sure, Microsoft has been the biggest name guilty of this in the past, but every OS has its share of kernel bugs, including Linux and *BSD), the JVM not sucking (heh heh, good luck on that one) if using Java, the C++ compiler you use not sucking and adhering to the standard, etc.
This problem actually seems to only be getting worse as the world moves increasingly towards net-based software. Anyone who has written Java for the client (either applet or full blown application) can tell you that write once, run anywhere is a joke because each different JVM has its own set of annoying and incompatible bugs..Likewise even simple scripting tends to be incompatible between different versions of the same browser (Netscape and IE both guilty) let alone different vendor's browsers.
Unfortunately there's so much suckage that is ingrained into current systems (and no, its not confined to Microsoft platforms, don't kid yourself) that some amount of suckiness is unavoidable no matter how careful you are.
Isn't having George W Bush as president punishment enough for all of us?
But what if he was the murderer who killed his sister? Then I think he'd be pretty happy about it.
Do not do this without the advice of a lawyer! Many people have been sued for 'raiding' companies that they have left. Also, lawsuits in this sector are getting worse than ever now that all these companies are failing -- its almost like an extra source of revenue. Just look at what NetZero has been doing lately...
Of course, I'm not defending Nintendo here, I think what they are doing is wrong.