Photorealism is not innovation. If it is, Valve should be the one getting the credit for at least mimiccing how the human eye sees.
Huh? Do you honestly think that Valve are the people who came up with High Dynamic Range rendering? If it's not that, what are you talking about? Simulating a 50mm lens?
Maybe Gartner just realized the obvious. I do not like Gartner's FUD. They told everybody to forget about Linux, it will never mature. It did. For 15 years now they are telling everybody that VMS will die. VMS 8.2 was released a few months ago, 8.3 will follow in another few months, and big companies pay big bucks for it. I guess we will see more FUD à la Gartner as long as there are customers paying for it.
They also told everyone to drop Microsoft and switch to Linux. I trust them about as far as I can throw them - they're fickle.
And where in the store is it sold? You would only know it if you went to a college bookstore or maybe their website. You won't find it at CompUSA. Then you need a student ID, or teacher credentials. Middle schools in poor small Mid - West towns do not issue student ID cards.
Er, yes, you will find it at CompUSA. You've never looked, have you?
Re:Cause or Risk Factor? (warning pro-smoking)
on
Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 1
Smoking may well be beneficial to a small number of people. Particularly for certain kinds of pain management, I would expect nicotine to be an effective stimulant. However, you'd almost certainly be safer with a nicotine patch, and the rest of us around you would definitely be better off.
Nicotine patches can only deliver 1/10th of the nicotine a smoker will get through a cigarette; in higher doses it causes a number of side effects. The only way to get around the side effects is via inhalation. (Unfortunately).
Re:Cause or Risk Factor? (warning pro-smoking)
on
Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 1
And as for regular establishments, well this time period is a far cry from the 60's. You have more non smokers than smokers so you lose more business from non smokers not wanting to go in a smoke filled place than you would with losing business from a smoker not wanting to go in a non-smoking place. Just my 2 cents on the subject...
That's not actually the case. For example, in Marystown the smoking ban was reversed because of two major side effects to the local economy: firstly, bars were going out of business due to reduced custom, and secondly because no facilities were provided for smokers (nowhere to put them when they were finished), the streets were littered in cigarette butts.
And, of course, in general smokers drink more than non-smokers, and so provide more income than an equivalent non-smoker.
Re:Cause or Risk Factor? (warning pro-smoking)
on
Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 1
Why on earth would you take antibiotics for a sinus infection, since most are viral? And nothing more than an inconvience.
Then it's not a sinus infection in the case you're describing. It's just sinus pressure caused by inflamed and clogged sinuses due to a viral infection - and viral infections trigger histamine responses, causing the aforementioned symptoms. The sinuses themselves aren't infected - but histamine reactions affect your whole system, not just the area of infection.
In a true sinus infection, bacteria has invaded the sinuses, causing inflammation and pressure. Your mucus will typically be thick yellow or green - not clear and runny with bits of green or yellow in it. And you'd know it, as the big difference is the amount of pain involved. Much more than a sinus headache.
Re:Cause or Risk Factor? (warning pro-smoking)
on
Safe Cigarettes?
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· Score: 1
Your 80 year old doctor might smoke two packs a day, but my mother died age 48 of smoking related disease. She had a healthy diet, too. You can't draw a conclusion on the safety of smoking from a sample of two (you and your doctor).
Which smoking related disease if you don't mind me asking? You can't draw a conclusion either. My mother died of cancer. She smoked two packs a day. She died of a cancer which statistically only affects 85 year old peruvian women (cholangio carcinoma - a tumor wrapped around her hepatic artery at her gall bladder). Correlation? Sure. Causation? Who knows. Ultimately it's bad genes - ADD seems to run in my family, and one way of self-medicating for it (and getting all that yummy norepinephrine into your system) is smoking.
As far as passive smoking -vs- unhealthy diets, if someone on the next table eats a bag of pork rinds, my eyes don't start to water and I don't leave the building smelling like an ash-tray. If someone on the next table eats the world's healthiest dinner but lights up, I end up leaving smelling like an ash tray. That's the difference - a person's unhealthy diet doesn't affect nearby strangers but their smoking will. That's the main problem with second hand smoke. I couldn't care less if it's totally harmless to me in the long term - in the short term it gives me what feels like an allergic reaction (stuffiness, watering eyes, lethargy) which isn't very pleasant. That's why there is a move on to ban smoking in public places. In the privacy of your own home, knock yourself out - I couldn't care less whether you smoke marijuana or tobacco. But in enclosed public spaces, please refrain from it - those of us who don't smoke find it at best smelly, at worst, feeling a bit ill.
Bars and restaurants aren't public places. Sorry. They're private establishments.
"...despite the lack of any evidence to suggest that there are any detectable consequences to periodic outdoor exposure, or occasional indoor exposure to secondhand smoke." "...certainly, those who spend most days indoors with a smoker are exposed to harmful levels of secondhand smoke, but the "smoking ban" mob has twisted those studies quite dishonestly..." I guess my question would be: Why should I be exposed at all? If you want to do it in your own home, fine... but when you bring it to where I am, then it intrudes upon me. You say that there aren't any 'detectable consequences'. I would argue that point. But since you agree there is a 'harmful level'. Where does that begin? Are you saying that I should endanger myself day in and day out at a restaurant, just because you don;t believe there is a risk to me? I would think you would agree that it would take les for a developing child/baby to inhale for it to be a risk. If there is an infant in the restaurant, then obviously the risk for that child goes up. If you don;t have these smoking bans, then you are limiting the places we are allowed to go. At least you can still smoke, just not there. You can go in, just not smoke there. If you don;t have the bans, then we cannot go in, no matter what. Why do smokers think they should be allowed to smoke anywhere they choose?
Then go to a non-smoking restaurant or bar. There are plenty of them around. Leave some of the bars, however, for those patrons who like to smoke while drinking. Which you'll find, typically, is most of them.
If you don't like that idea, then why not (if you're in a state which does so) get them to change the rules so that bars don't have to serve food. That way you end up with a bunch of non-smoking restaurants, and a mix of non-smoking and smoking bars. Everyone's happy that way.
If your argument, however, is that you don't see why you should have to put up with smoke in (insert name of bar here) because it's bad for your health, regardless of whether or not there are other, non-smoking bars, you might want to consider the rights of the owner and whether or not they're going to care about you as a customer. You see, a word to the wise: smokers drink more.
They are certainly not a free market property right. copyrights: government regulation reguarding the supply and demand of information - hmmm sounds pretty socialist to me.
Take copyright away, however, and you destroy all free markets that are based on creating anything that is not a physical good or service.
Which means: don't code or write for a living. Don't make movies, don't make albums. Get a job as a check out clerk, or go dig ditches, or make chairs.
Not a good solution if your skills and talent lie in any of the things that will go away. Or do you want to go back to the original royalty system - where only a few star people were paid by the rich to do things for them?
Also, do you really need 24p for an indie film? Seems like that'd be the kind of thing you would want to upgrade to when you're working with someone else's money.
I can live with low-resolution CCDs, I can live with shooting on MiniDV tape, I can shoot in 4:3 (with an anamorphic lens) but I can't live without 24p - the main reason being that when you blow it up for a print to show in a theatre, if you're not shooting 24p, you end up with interlace artefacts.
The cameras are getting cheaper though. There's a basically broadcast quality 1080p camera that Panasonic's releasing this month for $6000. Sure you need to pay more than that to get the recording media, but it's start.
I would not rate a 30-40% webserver marketshare as 'incredibly tiny', and yet Red Hat, the most popular Linux distribution for servers has 0 unpatched vulnerabilities whilst Windows Server 2003 suffers from 8 unpatched vulnerabilities and Windows XP Professional suffers from a full 26 vulnerabilities one or more of which are marked as as highly critical.
Just wondering... how can Red Hat have no vulnerabilities, when the 2.6 linux kernel alone has 15 unpatched vulnerabilities?
Perhaps you don't understand how to read those pages?
Microsoft have been incredibly slow to realise that Windows can always go back to being what it was when it first got really successful at version 3.1, a GUI. Most people don't know what an OS even is, and wouldn't be aware of any difference (except increased stablility) if what they bought from Microsoft was a GUI for Linux instead of an actual operating system with GUI built in. Taking this approach (albeit with a Unix core) hasn't hurt Apple's OSX.
What would the point of that be precisely? The NT kernel is better than the Linux kernel anyway.
Clerks was done on twenty thousand dollars, if I remember correctly. And Clerks was awesome.
I agree. Although it was actually closer to $27,000, which ballooned to $230,000 after post production costs were included. (See IMDB).
Although the problems with doing it that way were: 1. Had to be shot on black & white with no real time for reshoots. (Kevin has himself stated that he really wanted to shoot on Color stock, but couldn't afford to). 2. Pretty much limited to locations he could beg borrow or steal. Not a bad thing with the script, but the script was written around the locations he could get - rather than writing the script the way he wanted to, and then just getting the locations that were in it. 3. Bad sound & audio in general. (No money for audio engineers, or recording in stereo - a lot had to be cleaned up afterwards). 4. Pretty much everything was shot at night. (I hate doing this to actors). 5. Shot on 16mm. Like, ow. 6. Those costs don't include things like blowing up to 35mm, prints, post production sound, titling, etc etc.
Clerks is a great film - but it was limited by being done on the budget that Kevin had to work with. There are films I want to make, but the cheapest one starts at $150,000 and the costs only go up from there. Sure, I could try to write stories which don't require that kind of budget, but they're not the kinds of stories that I'm good at coming up with. Even the ones with limited or no special effects, shooting on digital require a lot of money. (It costs $635 a day to rent a really low-end 24p camera).
That was my point. We don't give value to those things because we don't feel they deserve our attention, hence Hollywood failed since its job is to appeal to potential customers and make them believe its products are worth something.
I think you're missing my point entirely. I'm saying you don't give those things value, because you download them illegally for free. Doing so by itself diminishes their value in your eyes - regardless of whatever actual value they may or may not have had if you'd actually paid to see them.
I'm sure that the XBOX 360 will be a fun online gaming system, but it will never eclipse the PS3.
Sorry to tell you this, but from everything I've seen as a developer for both systems, it already has.
First of all, the PS3 will have 50GB Blu-Ray storage and full online and networking capacity.... and 512Mb of memory. Do you have any idea how slow transfer rates are getting data off a Blu-Ray drive? No, you don't. Neither do Sony, by the way - they haven't successfully created a Blu-Ray drive yet.
OK, you're right, the PS2 definately lacked in that department, but the PS3 is going to have the same if not better network support.
Really? They've not published any plans or specs on it.
The CEO of Sony has already said the removable hard drive for the PS3 will be preloaded with Linux.
I'm sure that will be a great selling point. (yes, that's sarcasm)
Please recall that the CEO of Sony also said that you'd be able to pull rendering power from all the PS3s around you over the network while they're idle - ignoring the fact that it's pointless to do so given the latency once you get to the first router in the way. The latency is already longer than the amount of time it takes to render a single frame in HD; it's not going down any time soon. Sony have made lots of false promises in the past like this - it's funny how people forget them.
So I believe your point to be mute.
The word is moot, not mute.
Let us assume that the PS3 and XBOX 360 will have the same online capabilities (which apparently they will). With that said, how can standard DVD functionality even stand up to a 50GB Bluray functionality? (Not to mention the raw graphical and CPU capabilities of the PS3 are going to likely eclipse the 360)
The fun thing about raw graphical and CPU capabilities is that that's all they are - RAW capabilities - and it's not easy to make use of them. Look at the Cell architecture (it's up on IBM's site). That's not a CPU - that's a chain of dedicated DSPs, being fed by a single general purpose CPU. The XBOX has 6 general purpose CPU cores. That's a HUGE difference. PS3's architecture is marginally better than the PS2 architecture. Sure, the CPUs are faster, but that's about all you can say. Remember the claims they made for the Emotion Engine? Remember how stupid those claims seemed when the PS2 finally came out?
Personally, I don't see why we are moving past the DVD just yet, only recently did they stop making VHS and only those people who can afford the HDTVs of today will be buying this new media to get the extra few pixels out of it.
DVD first came out in 1996. It took 5 years before it went anywhere remotely mainstream. You won't be able to buy a cheap television that isn't HD in 5 years.
That argument would have a basis if those movies deserved my money. Before I gave up Hollywood completely I was deleting 99% of the movies I downloaded halfway through seeing them. Just imagine how wasteful it would have been to pay for all of them.
You do know that it's a well known psychological effect that when people don't pay for something, or pay very little for something, it has much less value to them, right?
It shouldn't cost millions to make a movie. Personally, I don't know why you would pay an actor over a million dollars to act in a movie. It's not that hard of a job, and they don't need that much money. Perhaps if they paid the actors less, the movies would cost less to buy or see. You could say that having a person like Tom Cruise in a movie will sell it more, but that shouldn't be the case. He's actually not that great of an actor, and I couldn't care less who was in what movie. The person should fit the role.
Apparently you have no idea how much effort and how many people it takes to make a movie. Using unknown actors, I figured that a 110 minute long script I want to film will take about $1.5million to make. That's doing it as cheap as I can, while keeping production values akin to mainstream films.
It's a sad fact that money has a huge influence on government, and that Bill Gates has more influence on government that probably thousands of regular voters combined. Google used to be above all this, but if they're not?
Microsoft used to above this. They had ZERO political cachet - they didn't believe in lobbying, period. Then Sun Microsystems, AOL, Oracle, Netscape and a few others funded by the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capital firm decided that it'd be a fun thing to make huge lobbying donations through a combination of personal and private donations.
So, after the antitrust suit which resulted from their lobbying efforts got started, Microsoft started lobbying in Washington. After all, when your government decides to shake you down, you'd better start paying up if you know what's good for you.
Which is probably OK considering that VHS (mediocre technology) beat out Betamax (superior technology).
VHS had longer recording times than BetaMax, for minimally better (for 99% of people - and yes, I'm one of those 1% who actually care) visual quality. For most people, it was the better technology.
You see, it depends on what matters to you. It's not necessarily what matters to the majority of people.
I have purchased tens of thousands of tunes over the decades. Why should I have to pay for them again and again every time the media changes?
That's a completely different argument to the one you've been making so far in this thread. You're wrong on the copyright side of things - you're right on this one.
Ralph Giles of Xiph.org did an interview, where if I remember correctly he said that Microsoft, or rather Bungie, which Microsoft owns, used Ogg in Halo 2 and Speex in Xbox Live.
That'd be rather odd, given that the XDK uses WMA 8 64kbps variable encoding as standard.
Re:What sort of security vulnerabilities..
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
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· Score: 1
It requires at least read access to the file system, and read/write access to the registry, to save window positions, etc. It will also, apparently, have access to the windows api and data read/write capabilities.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Why?
I mean, seriously, do you know anything about programming? Just because you use an API which accesses the registry in your app, that doesn't mean that your app has free reign to access the registry.
So unless you find a security flaw in the API, there is no security hole here - because you don't get direct access to the Windows API.
Those of us with a fucking clue who actually work in the console biz have been working our way to the promised land for years now. And with the PS3 we have arrived. You guys haven't seen anything yet with what we are doing and will be doing with the PS3/Cell/RSX hardware. It is a game/graphics programmers dream system.
Coulda fooled me. What games company do you work for?... silence...
Right. Thought so. Meanwhile, some of us who actually work in the industry are looking at the Cell architecture and scratching our heads in pain. It looks like the pain of developing for a PS2, x6.
Slashdot Mirror
Photorealism is not innovation. If it is, Valve should be the one getting the credit for at least mimiccing how the human eye sees.
Huh? Do you honestly think that Valve are the people who came up with High Dynamic Range rendering? If it's not that, what are you talking about? Simulating a 50mm lens?
Maybe Gartner just realized the obvious. I do not like Gartner's FUD. They told everybody to forget about Linux, it will never mature. It did. For 15 years now they are telling everybody that VMS will die. VMS 8.2 was released a few months ago, 8.3 will follow in another few months, and big companies pay big bucks for it. I guess we will see more FUD à la Gartner as long as there are customers paying for it.
They also told everyone to drop Microsoft and switch to Linux. I trust them about as far as I can throw them - they're fickle.
And where in the store is it sold? You would only know it if you went to a college bookstore or maybe their website. You won't find it at CompUSA. Then you need a student ID, or teacher credentials. Middle schools in poor small Mid - West towns do not issue student ID cards.
Er, yes, you will find it at CompUSA. You've never looked, have you?
Smoking may well be beneficial to a small number of people. Particularly for certain kinds of pain management, I would expect nicotine to be an effective stimulant. However, you'd almost certainly be safer with a nicotine patch, and the rest of us around you would definitely be better off.
Nicotine patches can only deliver 1/10th of the nicotine a smoker will get through a cigarette; in higher doses it causes a number of side effects. The only way to get around the side effects is via inhalation. (Unfortunately).
And as for regular establishments, well this time period is a far cry from the 60's. You have more non smokers than smokers so you lose more business from non smokers not wanting to go in a smoke filled place than you would with losing business from a smoker not wanting to go in a non-smoking place. Just my 2 cents on the subject...
That's not actually the case. For example, in Marystown the smoking ban was reversed because of two major side effects to the local economy: firstly, bars were going out of business due to reduced custom, and secondly because no facilities were provided for smokers (nowhere to put them when they were finished), the streets were littered in cigarette butts.
And, of course, in general smokers drink more than non-smokers, and so provide more income than an equivalent non-smoker.
Why on earth would you take antibiotics for a sinus infection, since most are viral? And nothing more than an inconvience.
Then it's not a sinus infection in the case you're describing. It's just sinus pressure caused by inflamed and clogged sinuses due to a viral infection - and viral infections trigger histamine responses, causing the aforementioned symptoms. The sinuses themselves aren't infected - but histamine reactions affect your whole system, not just the area of infection.
In a true sinus infection, bacteria has invaded the sinuses, causing inflammation and pressure. Your mucus will typically be thick yellow or green - not clear and runny with bits of green or yellow in it. And you'd know it, as the big difference is the amount of pain involved. Much more than a sinus headache.
Your 80 year old doctor might smoke two packs a day, but my mother died age 48 of smoking related disease. She had a healthy diet, too. You can't draw a conclusion on the safety of smoking from a sample of two (you and your doctor).
Which smoking related disease if you don't mind me asking? You can't draw a conclusion either. My mother died of cancer. She smoked two packs a day. She died of a cancer which statistically only affects 85 year old peruvian women (cholangio carcinoma - a tumor wrapped around her hepatic artery at her gall bladder). Correlation? Sure. Causation? Who knows. Ultimately it's bad genes - ADD seems to run in my family, and one way of self-medicating for it (and getting all that yummy norepinephrine into your system) is smoking.
As far as passive smoking -vs- unhealthy diets, if someone on the next table eats a bag of pork rinds, my eyes don't start to water and I don't leave the building smelling like an ash-tray. If someone on the next table eats the world's healthiest dinner but lights up, I end up leaving smelling like an ash tray. That's the difference - a person's unhealthy diet doesn't affect nearby strangers but their smoking will. That's the main problem with second hand smoke. I couldn't care less if it's totally harmless to me in the long term - in the short term it gives me what feels like an allergic reaction (stuffiness, watering eyes, lethargy) which isn't very pleasant. That's why there is a move on to ban smoking in public places. In the privacy of your own home, knock yourself out - I couldn't care less whether you smoke marijuana or tobacco. But in enclosed public spaces, please refrain from it - those of us who don't smoke find it at best smelly, at worst, feeling a bit ill.
Bars and restaurants aren't public places. Sorry. They're private establishments.
"...despite the lack of any evidence to suggest that there are any detectable consequences to periodic outdoor exposure, or occasional indoor exposure to secondhand smoke." "...certainly, those who spend most days indoors with a smoker are exposed to harmful levels of secondhand smoke, but the "smoking ban" mob has twisted those studies quite dishonestly..." I guess my question would be: Why should I be exposed at all? If you want to do it in your own home, fine... but when you bring it to where I am, then it intrudes upon me. You say that there aren't any 'detectable consequences'. I would argue that point. But since you agree there is a 'harmful level'. Where does that begin? Are you saying that I should endanger myself day in and day out at a restaurant, just because you don;t believe there is a risk to me? I would think you would agree that it would take les for a developing child/baby to inhale for it to be a risk. If there is an infant in the restaurant, then obviously the risk for that child goes up. If you don;t have these smoking bans, then you are limiting the places we are allowed to go. At least you can still smoke, just not there. You can go in, just not smoke there. If you don;t have the bans, then we cannot go in, no matter what. Why do smokers think they should be allowed to smoke anywhere they choose?
Then go to a non-smoking restaurant or bar. There are plenty of them around. Leave some of the bars, however, for those patrons who like to smoke while drinking. Which you'll find, typically, is most of them.
If you don't like that idea, then why not (if you're in a state which does so) get them to change the rules so that bars don't have to serve food. That way you end up with a bunch of non-smoking restaurants, and a mix of non-smoking and smoking bars. Everyone's happy that way.
If your argument, however, is that you don't see why you should have to put up with smoke in (insert name of bar here) because it's bad for your health, regardless of whether or not there are other, non-smoking bars, you might want to consider the rights of the owner and whether or not they're going to care about you as a customer. You see, a word to the wise: smokers drink more.
They are certainly not a free market property right. copyrights: government regulation reguarding the supply and demand of information - hmmm sounds pretty socialist to me.
Take copyright away, however, and you destroy all free markets that are based on creating anything that is not a physical good or service.
Which means: don't code or write for a living. Don't make movies, don't make albums. Get a job as a check out clerk, or go dig ditches, or make chairs.
Not a good solution if your skills and talent lie in any of the things that will go away. Or do you want to go back to the original royalty system - where only a few star people were paid by the rich to do things for them?
Also, do you really need 24p for an indie film? Seems like that'd be the kind of thing you would want to upgrade to when you're working with someone else's money.
I can live with low-resolution CCDs, I can live with shooting on MiniDV tape, I can shoot in 4:3 (with an anamorphic lens) but I can't live without 24p - the main reason being that when you blow it up for a print to show in a theatre, if you're not shooting 24p, you end up with interlace artefacts.
The cameras are getting cheaper though. There's a basically broadcast quality 1080p camera that Panasonic's releasing this month for $6000. Sure you need to pay more than that to get the recording media, but it's start.
I would not rate a 30-40% webserver marketshare as 'incredibly tiny', and yet Red Hat, the most popular Linux distribution for servers has 0 unpatched vulnerabilities whilst Windows Server 2003 suffers from 8 unpatched vulnerabilities and Windows XP Professional suffers from a full 26 vulnerabilities one or more of which are marked as as highly critical.
Just wondering... how can Red Hat have no vulnerabilities, when the 2.6 linux kernel alone has 15 unpatched vulnerabilities?
Perhaps you don't understand how to read those pages?
Microsoft have been incredibly slow to realise that Windows can always go back to being what it was when it first got really successful at version 3.1, a GUI. Most people don't know what an OS even is, and wouldn't be aware of any difference (except increased stablility) if what they bought from Microsoft was a GUI for Linux instead of an actual operating system with GUI built in. Taking this approach (albeit with a Unix core) hasn't hurt Apple's OSX.
What would the point of that be precisely? The NT kernel is better than the Linux kernel anyway.
Clerks was done on twenty thousand dollars, if I remember correctly. And Clerks was awesome.
I agree. Although it was actually closer to $27,000, which ballooned to $230,000 after post production costs were included. (See IMDB).
Although the problems with doing it that way were:
1. Had to be shot on black & white with no real time for reshoots. (Kevin has himself stated that he really wanted to shoot on Color stock, but couldn't afford to).
2. Pretty much limited to locations he could beg borrow or steal. Not a bad thing with the script, but the script was written around the locations he could get - rather than writing the script the way he wanted to, and then just getting the locations that were in it.
3. Bad sound & audio in general. (No money for audio engineers, or recording in stereo - a lot had to be cleaned up afterwards).
4. Pretty much everything was shot at night. (I hate doing this to actors).
5. Shot on 16mm. Like, ow.
6. Those costs don't include things like blowing up to 35mm, prints, post production sound, titling, etc etc.
Clerks is a great film - but it was limited by being done on the budget that Kevin had to work with. There are films I want to make, but the cheapest one starts at $150,000 and the costs only go up from there. Sure, I could try to write stories which don't require that kind of budget, but they're not the kinds of stories that I'm good at coming up with. Even the ones with limited or no special effects, shooting on digital require a lot of money. (It costs $635 a day to rent a really low-end 24p camera).
That was my point. We don't give value to those things because we don't feel they deserve our attention, hence Hollywood failed since its job is to appeal to potential customers and make them believe its products are worth something.
I think you're missing my point entirely. I'm saying you don't give those things value, because you download them illegally for free. Doing so by itself diminishes their value in your eyes - regardless of whatever actual value they may or may not have had if you'd actually paid to see them.
I'm sure that the XBOX 360 will be a fun online gaming system, but it will never eclipse the PS3.
... and 512Mb of memory. Do you have any idea how slow transfer rates are getting data off a Blu-Ray drive? No, you don't. Neither do Sony, by the way - they haven't successfully created a Blu-Ray drive yet.
Sorry to tell you this, but from everything I've seen as a developer for both systems, it already has.
First of all, the PS3 will have 50GB Blu-Ray storage and full online and networking capacity.
OK, you're right, the PS2 definately lacked in that department, but the PS3 is going to have the same if not better network support.
Really? They've not published any plans or specs on it.
The CEO of Sony has already said the removable hard drive for the PS3 will be preloaded with Linux.
I'm sure that will be a great selling point. (yes, that's sarcasm)
Please recall that the CEO of Sony also said that you'd be able to pull rendering power from all the PS3s around you over the network while they're idle - ignoring the fact that it's pointless to do so given the latency once you get to the first router in the way. The latency is already longer than the amount of time it takes to render a single frame in HD; it's not going down any time soon. Sony have made lots of false promises in the past like this - it's funny how people forget them.
So I believe your point to be mute.
The word is moot, not mute.
Let us assume that the PS3 and XBOX 360 will have the same online capabilities (which apparently they will). With that said, how can standard DVD functionality even stand up to a 50GB Bluray functionality? (Not to mention the raw graphical and CPU capabilities of the PS3 are going to likely eclipse the 360)
The fun thing about raw graphical and CPU capabilities is that that's all they are - RAW capabilities - and it's not easy to make use of them. Look at the Cell architecture (it's up on IBM's site). That's not a CPU - that's a chain of dedicated DSPs, being fed by a single general purpose CPU. The XBOX has 6 general purpose CPU cores. That's a HUGE difference. PS3's architecture is marginally better than the PS2 architecture. Sure, the CPUs are faster, but that's about all you can say. Remember the claims they made for the Emotion Engine? Remember how stupid those claims seemed when the PS2 finally came out?
Personally, I don't see why we are moving past the DVD just yet, only recently did they stop making VHS and only those people who can afford the HDTVs of today will be buying this new media to get the extra few pixels out of it.
DVD first came out in 1996. It took 5 years before it went anywhere remotely mainstream. You won't be able to buy a cheap television that isn't HD in 5 years.
(Not an entirely bad form, as Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain was a really well done situational non-drama)
I'd have called it a romantic comedy, actually. And there was a dramatic line to the plot too. How exactly are you defining "non-drama" here?
That argument would have a basis if those movies deserved my money. Before I gave up Hollywood completely I was deleting 99% of the movies I downloaded halfway through seeing them. Just imagine how wasteful it would have been to pay for all of them.
You do know that it's a well known psychological effect that when people don't pay for something, or pay very little for something, it has much less value to them, right?
It shouldn't cost millions to make a movie. Personally, I don't know why you would pay an actor over a million dollars to act in a movie. It's not that hard of a job, and they don't need that much money. Perhaps if they paid the actors less, the movies would cost less to buy or see. You could say that having a person like Tom Cruise in a movie will sell it more, but that shouldn't be the case. He's actually not that great of an actor, and I couldn't care less who was in what movie. The person should fit the role.
Apparently you have no idea how much effort and how many people it takes to make a movie. Using unknown actors, I figured that a 110 minute long script I want to film will take about $1.5million to make. That's doing it as cheap as I can, while keeping production values akin to mainstream films.
It's a sad fact that money has a huge influence on government, and that Bill Gates has more influence on government that probably thousands of regular voters combined. Google used to be above all this, but if they're not?
Microsoft used to above this. They had ZERO political cachet - they didn't believe in lobbying, period. Then Sun Microsystems, AOL, Oracle, Netscape and a few others funded by the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers venture capital firm decided that it'd be a fun thing to make huge lobbying donations through a combination of personal and private donations.
So, after the antitrust suit which resulted from their lobbying efforts got started, Microsoft started lobbying in Washington. After all, when your government decides to shake you down, you'd better start paying up if you know what's good for you.
Which is probably OK considering that VHS (mediocre technology) beat out Betamax (superior technology).
VHS had longer recording times than BetaMax, for minimally better (for 99% of people - and yes, I'm one of those 1% who actually care) visual quality. For most people, it was the better technology.
You see, it depends on what matters to you. It's not necessarily what matters to the majority of people.
I have purchased tens of thousands of tunes over the decades. Why should I have to pay for them again and again every time the media changes?
That's a completely different argument to the one you've been making so far in this thread. You're wrong on the copyright side of things - you're right on this one.
Ralph Giles of Xiph.org did an interview, where if I remember correctly he said that Microsoft, or rather Bungie, which Microsoft owns, used Ogg in Halo 2 and Speex in Xbox Live.
That'd be rather odd, given that the XDK uses WMA 8 64kbps variable encoding as standard.
It requires at least read access to the file system, and read/write access to the registry, to save window positions, etc. It will also, apparently, have access to the windows api and data read/write capabilities.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Why?
I mean, seriously, do you know anything about programming? Just because you use an API which accesses the registry in your app, that doesn't mean that your app has free reign to access the registry.
So unless you find a security flaw in the API, there is no security hole here - because you don't get direct access to the Windows API.
Those of us with a fucking clue who actually work in the console biz have been working our way to the promised land for years now. And with the PS3 we have arrived. You guys haven't seen anything yet with what we are doing and will be doing with the PS3/Cell/RSX hardware. It is a game/graphics programmers dream system.
... silence ...
Coulda fooled me. What games company do you work for?
Right. Thought so. Meanwhile, some of us who actually work in the industry are looking at the Cell architecture and scratching our heads in pain. It looks like the pain of developing for a PS2, x6.