It's in the interpolation stage that most consumer cameras turn to junk. The fact that the mars rover takes a picture using an identical array (rather than a very-similar-array) with 3 different filters is what makes the image crisp. It's totally impractical in the consumer arena, however, because people would need to stand exactly still while their camera took 3 pictures.
Multi-layered sensors are in the works, however, one of which has been slashdotted. This would provide true image color with no interpolation, but failed to materialize in the year promised (last one).
If anyone has the slashdot link from a few years back, I'm sure it would be relevant to this discussion.
no-one has really done anything but pump graphics and move to bigger/cheaper storage for the past 20 years. the only real innovation has been sony's dual-function ps2, that provided cheap dvd capability to a market that was ready for it.
True, but bigger / faster has allowed for obvious, radical jumps in gameplay. Without that many jumps on the horizon, one would expect each generation of hardware to last progressively longer. I'm not saying this generation will last forever, I'm just saying it may last seven instead of five. Bigger / Faster needs to become much bigger and much faster if all that it means is characters jumping from 3k polygons to 15k polygons. PVR would be nice, but PVR wouldn't be everything. A PS2 and a Tivo is significantly cheaper than a PSX.
BTW, many consoles played VCD's before Sony's DVD player, and in other countries VCD's were a popular format. The Turboduo doubled as a computer CD player. I'd hardly call DVD's the only innovation in the field.
VR will be a pipe-dream alongside flying cars for a long time yet.
I can't understand why people have this belief. For VR to take off you need small, high resolution LCD screens, a fast graphics processor, and an accurate, realtime head tracking mechanism. LCD screens are coming along at just about the right rate for a release sometime during the next generation, the hardware systems now are powerful enough for the application, and yaw/pitch/roll head tracking can be done cheaply and quickly when using optical sensors. Why must this remain a pipe dream?
To prove this, they only need to show their code in their source in their product and show where it is identical within Linux's code.
Not quite. They also have to prove that the code originated from within one of SCO's companies and was not, for example, ripped from BSD or a programmer's manual of some sort. Considering how daunting this second task is, I'd be surprised by the validity of any case that at this point hadn't even attempted to prove the first task.
"If you ask me if they are still going to be in the console business in 2008, I would say no," he said
Interesting theory, and would be accurate if mindshare equaled success, but in the larger business world, you have to make money to stay afloat. If the XBox continues to hemmorage money indefinitely, Microsoft will cut it. If Sony's games division lost lots of money (ha ha), Sony would eventually cut it. If NEC's TurboDuo was still profitable, it would still be around. Nintendo is making money, by all accounts in quantity, and would be ludicrous to get out of the business that has served it so well for... Four generations of hardware.
Furthermore, with Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony all buying chips from IBM and ATI, development costs can be kept in line. Nintendo, having developed more gaming systems than all of their rivals combined (and having taught Sony how to build theirs), is in a pretty good position to create something amazing on a realistic budget. They do need to stop hiring case designers from Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, but overall they are in a good position to make good hardware. Remember, the GameCube is comparable in power to the XBox at a significantly lower price, and unlike Sony their designers have spent their time creating the next generation of system, rather than revising the old one so that it doesn't break every 6 months.
The market might be ripe for another console in 2 - 3 years, but we're getting to the point of diminished returns. With actual collision detection and *gasp* 64 colors, the Genesis was a significant jump over the NES in terms of graphics and gameplay. The PS1 jumped beyond that to actual, though extremely blocky, 3D, and unlimited CD storage. The PS2 smoothed out those hard edges into tasty NURBS and boosted storage again to DVD, while making gameplay far more fluid. And the next generation of consoles? You can always keep boosting draw distance, pushing poly performance, and making the world more persistent, but are those enough? The only things that I could see as compelling enough for an upgrade would be a return to VR (there's finally the power, you know), or a really good Havoc based physics co-processor. Even then it would be a tough sell.
This story is pretty stupid, like a lot of so-called tech news story posted at various sites, born of ignorance and perpetuated by folks too lazy to do any research, and analyzed by folks who know nothing about the topic.
Don't forget commented upon by extremely grumpy folks who feel so insulted by the wasted 5 seconds of their life spent skimming the summary of the story that they have to spend 30 minutes writing a response complaining about a lack of free upgrades and enumerating known problems with known workarounds.
I'm glad you like your Sigmarion III... It looks like a nice device. But at 4 times the size of an average palm pilot, I have to wonder why you didn't just get a Sony Picturebook. The Newton, while an interface standard that all other devices should aspire to, was also frickin huge.
I like the clarity of purpose of the palm pilot. True, it was conceived in a non-networked environment, but the functionality that they provided in a 68000 was both minimalist and astonishing. It wasn't conceived as a Laptop Lite, as you seem to want, but as an Organizer Plus. Keep appointments, backup passwords, organize your thoughts, plan strategies. SSH? "Real development work?" no, the 100 dollar Palm Pilot doesn't do as much as the 1,000 dollar Newton with it's powerful 20 MHZ arm processor and it's eventual TCP/IP stack. But that's not what it was envisioned for. Look at the internals sometime and realize just how much they have accomplished with so little.
That's not to say that I'm rushing out to buy a palm-based smart phone before OS6 ships, but know your tools before you complain that your hammer is defective because it doesn't drive your screws in.
when was the last time you saw rivets on the outside of you connectors like those USB ports?
The last time I modified my computer to add USB ports. They probably bought off-the-shelf motherboard to rear-panel usb adaptors, cut out some holes, and stuck them on the back. They stuck on everything else that way.
that power plug is INSANE looking.
It makes one wonder if the power adaptor is external... There is no way that thing would require 14 lines in if it wasn't doing some divying of current on the outside.
Surprisingly, nobody has commented on the ridiculousness of including an integrated cable modem. Forgetting standards warfare and integrated network protections, everyone who has cable internet access gets a cable modem for free. Why include it in already overpriced hardware?
I purchased a copy of Unreal Tournament 2003 on clearance from Target. The thing was, it lacked a valid registration code. It must have fallen out of the box. After a few minutes googling around, a CD keygen that worked was found and I was off.
Except that I wasn't. The server wouldn't accept the key for multiplayer. After hours of searching, no key, keygen, or crack online could be found that would allow my machine to communicate with Epic's servers. I was very effectively locked out.
I'm not saying this because I'm bitter: $5 for the single player experience was definitely worth it. I'm saying this because server-side authentication is a far better method of handling copy protection than safedisk. While companies invest large sums of money into having a crack arrive two weeks after a release instead of just one, server-side authentication is generally never broken.
There must be some room somewhere for an enterprising company to come in with a (gasp) color calculator, or one with more than 200k of RAM.
The TI-92 was top-of-the-line nearly 8 years ago... Color would make graphing multiple functions a joy instead of a chore, and 3D graphing of the type done by the calculators should be trivial by now. I know the 68000 is one of the most revered processors out there, but it is over 20 years old. The GBA beats the TI-92 hands down on screen, memory, processor speed... Add in Ti's proprietary math processors and you would have a beast to be reckoned with.
The Calculator industry used to be a vibrant area of change and advancement. What happened, Did TI just win the wars and then get complacent?
I believe my arguments apply to any understanding of how to program a machine to program itself to understand GO. Obviously a machine will not be able to understand every position. The quality of a position in go can be radically different based upon a single stone. And how is that quality to be quantified and judged, without interjecting a more than superficial understanding of the game? Through evolution? You're going to be spending a lot of time evolving there, to some equally ludicrous number.
I'm sorry, but living near MIT, and having worked with neural nets, there is a point where each fresh face puts their finger up and says either "Neural nets will solve everything" or "evolutionary programming will solve everything." Sorry, they have limitations.
And is it any surprise that my comment was modded interesting? Slashdot moderators always fall for really big numbers.
SCO might be a bubble, but with the attention it draws, it also has a very solid chance of not being a bubble.
Ah, glad to hear that mindshare still equals profit in the pre-collapse hearts of some analyists.
Professionals don't care how cool a technology is or how miserable SCO's actions are, they care about the changes in future revenue this could cause, how far that revenue is in the future, the risk associated with achieving that financial goal and the different profit scenarios associated with each level of risk.
Right. Because if they win, they win big. But they also have no case. This isn't a come-from-behind christmas story kind of no case, this is the Quixotic kind of no-case. No matter how many times you stab the windmill with your spoon, nobody will think you have killed a dragon. 100 million times potential ROI times 0% chance of success is still a terrible gamble.
Losing the GPL means that nobody gets to use Linux, not otherwise. Even with a smoking gun, the code can be excised, leaving SCO without a recurring revenue source.
The larger investors will be watching this stock VERY closely and would dump it way before you have any idea that SCO is going down.
Umm... We already know SCO is going down.
One aspect in their favor for you to consider is that of all of the posts here I don't see anyone giving this argument any credit at all.
Could that be that perhaps that dragon really is a windmill?
That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out.
Or you could simply be in violation of copyright law until a patch comes out, and pay the penalty. Neither way does SCO get a recurring revenue source, or a product to sell. Or, for that matter, damages.
But you're missing the point, you're talking about people who have made a LOT OF MONEY investing in companies, it's what they do. If SCO was just smoke and mirrors don't you think some analysts would be crying that?
Ah, you must be referring to those analysts who have proven their abilities at about 2000, 2001. That ones that valued Yahoo as a "strong buy" when it bought Geocities for about as much as Chrysler bought Volkswagon? Or the ones that applauded when AOL swallowed Warner Brothers?
Get off your horse. Financial analysts have given us exactly zero reason to have faith in their abilities in the past five years... Why should we intrinsically assume they are right now, just because they are all shouting at the same fevered, silly pitch?
Well, adaptive AI in gaming has always meant that the AI adapts to the player's skill level. What you want is a Learning AI, which in gaming generally means that an AI adjusts a slider to better counter a move that a player will make.
This isn't rocket science people. There have been, for example, nearly perfect Ai's that have played within the rules of a game and can still kick a player's tail. All games are developed with the idea in mind that every move has a counter, and every counter has a counter. Now, the AI development team knows the best instantaneous moves to counter other moves, and as they are the development team know most of the higher-level strategies that will be tried. If a development company wants an AI to beat you senseless, it can do so without changing the rules of the game. Is that fun? No. So you weaken it, and change difficulty levels around. Now you have a system that isn't learning, but is playing with the player. And playing is fun.
Right, but a sufficiently large search space will not be reached in a human time frame. You are talking about the number of open spaces left on a board with 361 possibilities for the first move, 129,960 possibilities for the second move, 46 million possibilities for the third move, etc. By move ten you have 33 septillion possibilities, and you still have no easy way to gauge whether or not the move was a good one. By the time each player has made 15 moves, or a solid start to a game, your search space is 20 google, and that's assuming no taking has taken place. Yes, you can do things with rotation and identical board positions, but 5 Google is still a lot for a 486. If you want the whole possibilities, trimmed down to only the best moves a computer can make at any given point, that's still a space of... little TI-92 programming here... 4*10^384 possible trees.
A Neural Net of Go would suffer from a similar problem of scale... You have 19x19 locations, with 3 possibilities at each. That's a learning space of 17 sexquinquagintillion, or 17 octovigintilliard for our british friends. We could again divide by 4 for each possible rotation, but 4*10^171 is still pretty big. Assuming each board discovered and knew the one "best" next move to make, the storage required would be enormous. If there are 10^81 atoms in the universe (a high estimate), and one were to further ludicrously assume that there are as many universes as there are atoms in this one, each QUARK in every atom would have to store a bit of data to have a pre-stored list of the best next moves. That's not including how much space would be required to store all of the associated failure rates with the other positions, let alone a system capable of reading it all. Learning computers require a lot more RAM than a straight programmed one. And unlike image recognition, blurry go boards just won't cut it.
Genetic programs and neural nets are great at some things, but certain problems don't play out so easily. Any program that will play well at Go will have to have some extremely high-level thinking, of which we are not capable of producing or breeding today. Otherwise, the sample space just falls apart.
Any executive wasting valuable company time worrying about unsanctioned copying should be fired immediately and replaced with someone who can keep their attention focused on factors they can control.
Unsanctioned copying is like the weather; it is going to happen whether you want it to or not. If the weather forecast predicts ten inches of rain for the year, but only nine actually fell, launching into histrionics about how someone must have "stolen" the other inch merely makes you look foolish. Likewise, it is the fundamental nature of computers to copy data. If you're an executive in this industry, you really ought to have figured that out by now. Stop bitching about the weather and focus instead on strategies to help your company survive the occasional slightly dry season.
Weather happens. If the person building your house neglects to build a roof, that person is negligent. If your real estate agent tells you to buy a house with no roof, that person is negligent. If your console company builds a platform with absolutely zero copy deterrent, your console company is negligent.
I'm not saying that PS1 copying was the end of the world, but I am saying that having not even token copy protection is a very bad move.
It's all about changing the economic balance for people, so that the hurdle of bypassing protection plus the risk if caught plus the intrinsic moral shame is more compelling than 50 dollars. For most people copying games from their friends copies, the risk is zero. And morals are dirt cheap these days.
Let me restate this. If the producer on a major project allowed a game to be released without any protection at all (even safedisk), they are going to have cost that company sales. Not as much as the RIAA (or BSA) might lead you to believe, but certainly some of the people who pirate are interested in you game enough to buy it.
As for store shelves: That's so Chinatown. People burn their own downloaded disks. No store would be caught selling gold disks to people... That problem is largely contained. But people burn their own all of the time. Copyprotection doesn't stop professional duplicators, because they have sufficient financial incentive to crack anything you throw at them. You do and did stop them through legal means. Individuals, on the other hand, need a form of dissuasion a little less invasive than an FBI raid.
The Electronic Arts comment was intended to be ironic, as I was already referencing IBM, and seemed like the most likely to setup an absolutely terrible service. Acclaim might possibly do worse, but I doubt they will survive for very much longer (I've been saying that for years, though).
Personally, I don't think that having developed hardware X will give company Y enough outsourcing pull to be able to outperform company Z, company Z being the upstart group of MIT and Harvard grads who have looked at the internals and who also want to sell consulting.
It seems that we're mostly in agreement, except for the fine line of whether or not a company can draw enough consulting services selling consoles without any additional technological encumberment (Yes, Sony, selling an obfuscated piece of hardware counts as an encumberment). While the optimist in my would love to see that happen, the pessimist is just not buying it.
The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones.
7 GHz!?!? I have serious difficulty believing that.
No, an order of magnitude overall. The PS2, for example, has many bottlenecks. Inadequate RAM for one, and tortured processor scheduling... Not to mention that terribly slow DVD drive. The PS2 was released in Japan in the beginning of '00. If Moore's law holds up, that means a system released in the second half of 2004 should be 8 times as powerful.
Here's an experiment for you to try some time: When your next-gen console comes out, claim it has anti-copying technology in it, but don't actually put any in (just stick in a delay loop for checkDiskIsValid()). See if anyone notices.
I'm betting they won't. Because the fact of the matter is, whatever effect anti-copying support has on sales, those effects are completely swamped out by larger issues, such as sales and marketing efforts, distribution deals, "network effects," and the vagaries of the buying public. If you have a successful platform, no one will much care that discs can be copied. And if you have a crap platform, copy protection won't save anyone's ass.
Developers were right ticked about the rampant piracy with the PS1. I've heard very reasonable estimates of a 10% sales loss due to piracy on that platform, and piracy there required soldering. While that 10% wouldn't have saved 3DO, it will keep a studio running for a long time if the game looks like it is doing well, because that money is entirely cream. 10% of sales of a successful game is another entire game that you can develop. Any executive that doesn't sweat those lost sales shouldn't be heading your team.And once again, that level of piracy was in spite of an actively modified protection scheme.
With the current relative rarity of DVD burners, piracy on the PS2 has been much less of an issue. But with burners just hitting the 100 dollar mark, if someone releases a platform without any copy protection at all, you can bet your tail it won't draw many developers. In fact, please do that. Bet your own tail. Don't advise other people to bet theirs, because they're going to lose it.
Why would publishers bother to get a license if anyone can write software for it?
Because the tech support is better? Because they can get a turnkey development system rather than have to locate and pay for expertise to cobble one together? Because they can get co-marketing support? Because "outsourcing" is still a buzzword among executive circles?
But Activision is large enough to take over all responsibilities in-house. Electronic Arts will probably create a consulting service better than what the console makers offers, and for less money. Truly terrible games will make it to market (worse than today), and half-assed unfinished ones will be pushed out the door without quality assurance. The IBM PC platform is arguably the creation of IBM, but do the millions of programmers out there flock to big blue when they're writing software?
Face it, without lock-in no XBox developer would be paying Microsoft's exhorbitant console developer fees... they would buy a copy of Visual C++ and put in the effort to change some function calls. Co-marketing only happens to a select few big boys, "outsourcing" is still fought against by notoriously protective game developers, and development systems for new consoles are pretty cobbled together as is. As for tech support?
You're talking about re-doing all of the mistakes that the industry made in the 2600 era. Somehow I don't think that is a good way to run a business. Many consoles fail for many reasons other than unmitigated access to the hardware for all developers and users. But no console has succeeded under such circumstances.
As a game player, I want a platform that everyone can develop for, can extend, and over which I have full rights. It's called a PC, and it set me back a grand. As a game developer, I want a target platform with known parameters, whose players purchase games instead of pirating them, and which has an extensive user base. That's a console, and they hit the sweet spot somewhere between 200 and 250 dollars.
Anyhow, if it's some AI, then it almost has to be some undergraduate/researcher with some new algorithm, so they probably have quite enough CPU power at hand.
I KNEW those SETI @ Home guys were up to something!
Re:Better examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
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Please tell me you have the name of the study / book to back that up. I've always felt that socioeconomic reasons were the cause of such discrepancies, and the source of potential non race-based cures. However, the idea that self-classification could have such a large effect on outcome is pretty stunning, yet should be predicted by current sociological theory.
What is it with this country's conception that anything which doesn't produce material wealth is inherently bad? Because videogames waste time Earth economies suffer. The same argument happend with Movies at the turn of the century and the "dread scourge" of pulp novels before that.
Here's a clue... People can't always produce. People need downtime to be creative. People need downtime to allow their muscles to rebuild and their minds to re-uptake neurotransmitters. If they weren't playing videogames they would likely be watching television or reading Slashdot. Saying that every moment of every day must be productive is, well, counterproductive.
I must say I am impressed... I had never thought Opera would be eclipsed in cool features, but there it is. Many of these things Opera should be doing right now.
Workspaces, for example. Opera has an integrated system for easily saving and restoring web sessions, and even features an undo for closing windows (yay!). But this feature is buried in a menu somewhere, requires an open / save dialog box, and generally could be a lot more intuitive. Despite having been in several iterations of the browser, few people have found it.
Site-specific preferences. People have wanted this for a long time now, and I'm glad to see someone is implementing it. Pity it wasn't Opera. Opera supports preference sets, and many of them contain site-specific information, but in no way can all preferences be set on a site-specific basis. From the description it sounds like you could, for example, set your Slashdot home page to be your user page. I may be reading this wrong... only February will tell.
Adding searches... This is just plain cool. While opera allows you to use one of many pre-defined searches through a variety of means (including typing "g " + subject into the address bar), adding any search would be a powerful and useful ability. Of course, Opera's more flexible interface would have to find ways to deal with this (an individual search bar? the agregate search bar? the address search method?), but it shouldn't be too difficult.
Sharing bookmarks on a LAN is both great and troublesome. How do you implement this easily and quickly in a Windows environment without Rendezvous?
Tabs aren't as big of a deal, honestly. Usually either you have few enough pages open that you can keep track of them by name, or you have so many open that thumbnails would be too cumbersome to use.
I've always been envious of OmniWeb's History Search ability, website update notifications, and inline spell checker. That latter is being addressed in opera 7.5, along with a few nifty other features. While I will continue to use Opera, not the least of which because I have a PC, OmniWeb appears to be shaping up to quite the must-have app. OmniWeb was originally slated to ship as the default browers for OSX. Now it looks like that was a great idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Simpson,
Homer Simpson,
He's the greatest guy in history.
From the
Town of Springfield,
He's about to hit a chestnut tree.
D'oh!
It was the only 22mhz MP3 I could find, the only one that would run on my computer at the time.
It's in the interpolation stage that most consumer cameras turn to junk. The fact that the mars rover takes a picture using an identical array (rather than a very-similar-array) with 3 different filters is what makes the image crisp. It's totally impractical in the consumer arena, however, because people would need to stand exactly still while their camera took 3 pictures.
Multi-layered sensors are in the works, however, one of which has been slashdotted. This would provide true image color with no interpolation, but failed to materialize in the year promised (last one).
If anyone has the slashdot link from a few years back, I'm sure it would be relevant to this discussion.
no-one has really done anything but pump graphics and move to bigger/cheaper storage for the past 20 years. the only real innovation has been sony's dual-function ps2, that provided cheap dvd capability to a market that was ready for it.
True, but bigger / faster has allowed for obvious, radical jumps in gameplay. Without that many jumps on the horizon, one would expect each generation of hardware to last progressively longer. I'm not saying this generation will last forever, I'm just saying it may last seven instead of five. Bigger / Faster needs to become much bigger and much faster if all that it means is characters jumping from 3k polygons to 15k polygons. PVR would be nice, but PVR wouldn't be everything. A PS2 and a Tivo is significantly cheaper than a PSX.
BTW, many consoles played VCD's before Sony's DVD player, and in other countries VCD's were a popular format. The Turboduo doubled as a computer CD player. I'd hardly call DVD's the only innovation in the field.
VR will be a pipe-dream alongside flying cars for a long time yet.
I can't understand why people have this belief. For VR to take off you need small, high resolution LCD screens, a fast graphics processor, and an accurate, realtime head tracking mechanism. LCD screens are coming along at just about the right rate for a release sometime during the next generation, the hardware systems now are powerful enough for the application, and yaw/pitch/roll head tracking can be done cheaply and quickly when using optical sensors. Why must this remain a pipe dream?
To prove this, they only need to show their code in their source in their product and show where it is identical within Linux's code.
Not quite. They also have to prove that the code originated from within one of SCO's companies and was not, for example, ripped from BSD or a programmer's manual of some sort. Considering how daunting this second task is, I'd be surprised by the validity of any case that at this point hadn't even attempted to prove the first task.
You forgot one.
"If you ask me if they are still going to be in the console business in 2008, I would say no," he said
Interesting theory, and would be accurate if mindshare equaled success, but in the larger business world, you have to make money to stay afloat. If the XBox continues to hemmorage money indefinitely, Microsoft will cut it. If Sony's games division lost lots of money (ha ha), Sony would eventually cut it. If NEC's TurboDuo was still profitable, it would still be around. Nintendo is making money, by all accounts in quantity, and would be ludicrous to get out of the business that has served it so well for... Four generations of hardware.
Furthermore, with Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony all buying chips from IBM and ATI, development costs can be kept in line. Nintendo, having developed more gaming systems than all of their rivals combined (and having taught Sony how to build theirs), is in a pretty good position to create something amazing on a realistic budget. They do need to stop hiring case designers from Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, but overall they are in a good position to make good hardware. Remember, the GameCube is comparable in power to the XBox at a significantly lower price, and unlike Sony their designers have spent their time creating the next generation of system, rather than revising the old one so that it doesn't break every 6 months.
The market might be ripe for another console in 2 - 3 years, but we're getting to the point of diminished returns. With actual collision detection and *gasp* 64 colors, the Genesis was a significant jump over the NES in terms of graphics and gameplay. The PS1 jumped beyond that to actual, though extremely blocky, 3D, and unlimited CD storage. The PS2 smoothed out those hard edges into tasty NURBS and boosted storage again to DVD, while making gameplay far more fluid. And the next generation of consoles? You can always keep boosting draw distance, pushing poly performance, and making the world more persistent, but are those enough? The only things that I could see as compelling enough for an upgrade would be a return to VR (there's finally the power, you know), or a really good Havoc based physics co-processor. Even then it would be a tough sell.
Well see. We always do.
Timex also sells the RFID enabled watches at the east-coast based Stop & Shop
This story is pretty stupid, like a lot of so-called tech news story posted at various sites, born of ignorance and perpetuated by folks too lazy to do any research, and analyzed by folks who know nothing about the topic.
Don't forget commented upon by extremely grumpy folks who feel so insulted by the wasted 5 seconds of their life spent skimming the summary of the story that they have to spend 30 minutes writing a response complaining about a lack of free upgrades and enumerating known problems with known workarounds.
I'm glad you like your Sigmarion III... It looks like a nice device. But at 4 times the size of an average palm pilot, I have to wonder why you didn't just get a Sony Picturebook. The Newton, while an interface standard that all other devices should aspire to, was also frickin huge.
I like the clarity of purpose of the palm pilot. True, it was conceived in a non-networked environment, but the functionality that they provided in a 68000 was both minimalist and astonishing. It wasn't conceived as a Laptop Lite, as you seem to want, but as an Organizer Plus. Keep appointments, backup passwords, organize your thoughts, plan strategies. SSH? "Real development work?" no, the 100 dollar Palm Pilot doesn't do as much as the 1,000 dollar Newton with it's powerful 20 MHZ arm processor and it's eventual TCP/IP stack. But that's not what it was envisioned for. Look at the internals sometime and realize just how much they have accomplished with so little.
That's not to say that I'm rushing out to buy a palm-based smart phone before OS6 ships, but know your tools before you complain that your hammer is defective because it doesn't drive your screws in.
when was the last time you saw rivets on the outside of you connectors like those USB ports?
The last time I modified my computer to add USB ports. They probably bought off-the-shelf motherboard to rear-panel usb adaptors, cut out some holes, and stuck them on the back. They stuck on everything else that way.
that power plug is INSANE looking.
It makes one wonder if the power adaptor is external... There is no way that thing would require 14 lines in if it wasn't doing some divying of current on the outside.
Surprisingly, nobody has commented on the ridiculousness of including an integrated cable modem. Forgetting standards warfare and integrated network protections, everyone who has cable internet access gets a cable modem for free. Why include it in already overpriced hardware?
I purchased a copy of Unreal Tournament 2003 on clearance from Target. The thing was, it lacked a valid registration code. It must have fallen out of the box. After a few minutes googling around, a CD keygen that worked was found and I was off.
Except that I wasn't. The server wouldn't accept the key for multiplayer. After hours of searching, no key, keygen, or crack online could be found that would allow my machine to communicate with Epic's servers. I was very effectively locked out.
I'm not saying this because I'm bitter: $5 for the single player experience was definitely worth it. I'm saying this because server-side authentication is a far better method of handling copy protection than safedisk. While companies invest large sums of money into having a crack arrive two weeks after a release instead of just one, server-side authentication is generally never broken.
Standard media can be copied. Accounts cannot.
There must be some room somewhere for an enterprising company to come in with a (gasp) color calculator, or one with more than 200k of RAM.
The TI-92 was top-of-the-line nearly 8 years ago... Color would make graphing multiple functions a joy instead of a chore, and 3D graphing of the type done by the calculators should be trivial by now. I know the 68000 is one of the most revered processors out there, but it is over 20 years old. The GBA beats the TI-92 hands down on screen, memory, processor speed... Add in Ti's proprietary math processors and you would have a beast to be reckoned with.
The Calculator industry used to be a vibrant area of change and advancement. What happened, Did TI just win the wars and then get complacent?
KidZare GRAduating with HarvardMBA's INmarkITing WITHout kNOWingPrOPeR usAGE of CAPitals or COMPoundWordz?.
PleaZe SUpporThEDuCATion of our ELItISt SUBurban EXEcutIVES. Becauz A MARKETingEXECUTIVE Is a teRRIBLEthIngTO waStE.
People buy games and hardware to play those games, not hardware and games to play on that hardware.
:)
I must say, slightly offtopic, this is the first time I've caught someone quoting me in a public forum. You've just made my day.
- Chris Canfield
I believe my arguments apply to any understanding of how to program a machine to program itself to understand GO. Obviously a machine will not be able to understand every position. The quality of a position in go can be radically different based upon a single stone. And how is that quality to be quantified and judged, without interjecting a more than superficial understanding of the game? Through evolution? You're going to be spending a lot of time evolving there, to some equally ludicrous number.
I'm sorry, but living near MIT, and having worked with neural nets, there is a point where each fresh face puts their finger up and says either "Neural nets will solve everything" or "evolutionary programming will solve everything." Sorry, they have limitations.
And is it any surprise that my comment was modded interesting? Slashdot moderators always fall for really big numbers.
Sorry, I was thinking of Ford buying Volvo. At the time, Volvo had a market cap of (I believe it was) 6 billion dollars.
If my memory is correct, and it has proven fallible at least once today, Yahoo bought Geocities for stock worth 4 billion.
SCO might be a bubble, but with the attention it draws, it also has a very solid chance of not being a bubble.
Ah, glad to hear that mindshare still equals profit in the pre-collapse hearts of some analyists.
Professionals don't care how cool a technology is or how miserable SCO's actions are, they care about the changes in future revenue this could cause, how far that revenue is in the future, the risk associated with achieving that financial goal and the different profit scenarios associated with each level of risk.
Right. Because if they win, they win big. But they also have no case. This isn't a come-from-behind christmas story kind of no case, this is the Quixotic kind of no-case. No matter how many times you stab the windmill with your spoon, nobody will think you have killed a dragon. 100 million times potential ROI times 0% chance of success is still a terrible gamble.
Losing the GPL means that nobody gets to use Linux, not otherwise. Even with a smoking gun, the code can be excised, leaving SCO without a recurring revenue source.
The larger investors will be watching this stock VERY closely and would dump it way before you have any idea that SCO is going down.
Umm... We already know SCO is going down.
One aspect in their favor for you to consider is that of all of the posts here I don't see anyone giving this argument any credit at all.
Could that be that perhaps that dragon really is a windmill?
That wouldn't generate anywhere near the revenue that they will if they can catch the Linux community cold and then force you to pay them or abandon your IT infrastructure until a patch comes out.
Or you could simply be in violation of copyright law until a patch comes out, and pay the penalty. Neither way does SCO get a recurring revenue source, or a product to sell. Or, for that matter, damages.
But you're missing the point, you're talking about people who have made a LOT OF MONEY investing in companies, it's what they do. If SCO was just smoke and mirrors don't you think some analysts would be crying that?
Ah, you must be referring to those analysts who have proven their abilities at about 2000, 2001. That ones that valued Yahoo as a "strong buy" when it bought Geocities for about as much as Chrysler bought Volkswagon? Or the ones that applauded when AOL swallowed Warner Brothers?
Get off your horse. Financial analysts have given us exactly zero reason to have faith in their abilities in the past five years... Why should we intrinsically assume they are right now, just because they are all shouting at the same fevered, silly pitch?
"What do they [SCO Investors] know that we don't?".
Where to find a good dealer?
Well, adaptive AI in gaming has always meant that the AI adapts to the player's skill level. What you want is a Learning AI, which in gaming generally means that an AI adjusts a slider to better counter a move that a player will make.
This isn't rocket science people. There have been, for example, nearly perfect Ai's that have played within the rules of a game and can still kick a player's tail. All games are developed with the idea in mind that every move has a counter, and every counter has a counter. Now, the AI development team knows the best instantaneous moves to counter other moves, and as they are the development team know most of the higher-level strategies that will be tried. If a development company wants an AI to beat you senseless, it can do so without changing the rules of the game. Is that fun? No. So you weaken it, and change difficulty levels around. Now you have a system that isn't learning, but is playing with the player. And playing is fun.
Right, but a sufficiently large search space will not be reached in a human time frame. You are talking about the number of open spaces left on a board with 361 possibilities for the first move, 129,960 possibilities for the second move, 46 million possibilities for the third move, etc. By move ten you have 33 septillion possibilities, and you still have no easy way to gauge whether or not the move was a good one. By the time each player has made 15 moves, or a solid start to a game, your search space is 20 google, and that's assuming no taking has taken place. Yes, you can do things with rotation and identical board positions, but 5 Google is still a lot for a 486. If you want the whole possibilities, trimmed down to only the best moves a computer can make at any given point, that's still a space of... little TI-92 programming here... 4*10^384 possible trees.
A Neural Net of Go would suffer from a similar problem of scale... You have 19x19 locations, with 3 possibilities at each. That's a learning space of 17 sexquinquagintillion, or 17 octovigintilliard for our british friends. We could again divide by 4 for each possible rotation, but 4*10^171 is still pretty big. Assuming each board discovered and knew the one "best" next move to make, the storage required would be enormous. If there are 10^81 atoms in the universe (a high estimate), and one were to further ludicrously assume that there are as many universes as there are atoms in this one, each QUARK in every atom would have to store a bit of data to have a pre-stored list of the best next moves. That's not including how much space would be required to store all of the associated failure rates with the other positions, let alone a system capable of reading it all. Learning computers require a lot more RAM than a straight programmed one. And unlike image recognition, blurry go boards just won't cut it.
Genetic programs and neural nets are great at some things, but certain problems don't play out so easily. Any program that will play well at Go will have to have some extremely high-level thinking, of which we are not capable of producing or breeding today. Otherwise, the sample space just falls apart.
Incorrect.
Any executive wasting valuable company time worrying about unsanctioned copying should be fired immediately and replaced with someone who can keep their attention focused on factors they can control.
Unsanctioned copying is like the weather; it is going to happen whether you want it to or not. If the weather forecast predicts ten inches of rain for the year, but only nine actually fell, launching into histrionics about how someone must have "stolen" the other inch merely makes you look foolish. Likewise, it is the fundamental nature of computers to copy data. If you're an executive in this industry, you really ought to have figured that out by now. Stop bitching about the weather and focus instead on strategies to help your company survive the occasional slightly dry season.
Weather happens. If the person building your house neglects to build a roof, that person is negligent. If your real estate agent tells you to buy a house with no roof, that person is negligent. If your console company builds a platform with absolutely zero copy deterrent, your console company is negligent.
I'm not saying that PS1 copying was the end of the world, but I am saying that having not even token copy protection is a very bad move.
It's all about changing the economic balance for people, so that the hurdle of bypassing protection plus the risk if caught plus the intrinsic moral shame is more compelling than 50 dollars. For most people copying games from their friends copies, the risk is zero. And morals are dirt cheap these days.
Let me restate this. If the producer on a major project allowed a game to be released without any protection at all (even safedisk), they are going to have cost that company sales. Not as much as the RIAA (or BSA) might lead you to believe, but certainly some of the people who pirate are interested in you game enough to buy it.
As for store shelves: That's so Chinatown. People burn their own downloaded disks. No store would be caught selling gold disks to people... That problem is largely contained. But people burn their own all of the time. Copyprotection doesn't stop professional duplicators, because they have sufficient financial incentive to crack anything you throw at them. You do and did stop them through legal means. Individuals, on the other hand, need a form of dissuasion a little less invasive than an FBI raid.
The Electronic Arts comment was intended to be ironic, as I was already referencing IBM, and seemed like the most likely to setup an absolutely terrible service. Acclaim might possibly do worse, but I doubt they will survive for very much longer (I've been saying that for years, though).
Personally, I don't think that having developed hardware X will give company Y enough outsourcing pull to be able to outperform company Z, company Z being the upstart group of MIT and Harvard grads who have looked at the internals and who also want to sell consulting.
It seems that we're mostly in agreement, except for the fine line of whether or not a company can draw enough consulting services selling consoles without any additional technological encumberment (Yes, Sony, selling an obfuscated piece of hardware counts as an encumberment). While the optimist in my would love to see that happen, the pessimist is just not buying it.
The minimum spec for next-gen consoles is an order of magnitude higher than their current ones.
7 GHz!?!? I have serious difficulty believing that.
No, an order of magnitude overall. The PS2, for example, has many bottlenecks. Inadequate RAM for one, and tortured processor scheduling... Not to mention that terribly slow DVD drive. The PS2 was released in Japan in the beginning of '00. If Moore's law holds up, that means a system released in the second half of 2004 should be 8 times as powerful.
Here's an experiment for you to try some time: When your next-gen console comes out, claim it has anti-copying technology in it, but don't actually put any in (just stick in a delay loop for checkDiskIsValid()). See if anyone notices.
I'm betting they won't. Because the fact of the matter is, whatever effect anti-copying support has on sales, those effects are completely swamped out by larger issues, such as sales and marketing efforts, distribution deals, "network effects," and the vagaries of the buying public. If you have a successful platform, no one will much care that discs can be copied. And if you have a crap platform, copy protection won't save anyone's ass.
Developers were right ticked about the rampant piracy with the PS1. I've heard very reasonable estimates of a 10% sales loss due to piracy on that platform, and piracy there required soldering. While that 10% wouldn't have saved 3DO, it will keep a studio running for a long time if the game looks like it is doing well, because that money is entirely cream. 10% of sales of a successful game is another entire game that you can develop. Any executive that doesn't sweat those lost sales shouldn't be heading your team.And once again, that level of piracy was in spite of an actively modified protection scheme.
With the current relative rarity of DVD burners, piracy on the PS2 has been much less of an issue. But with burners just hitting the 100 dollar mark, if someone releases a platform without any copy protection at all, you can bet your tail it won't draw many developers. In fact, please do that. Bet your own tail. Don't advise other people to bet theirs, because they're going to lose it.
Why would publishers bother to get a license if anyone can write software for it?
Because the tech support is better? Because they can get a turnkey development system rather than have to locate and pay for expertise to cobble one together? Because they can get co-marketing support? Because "outsourcing" is still a buzzword among executive circles?
But Activision is large enough to take over all responsibilities in-house. Electronic Arts will probably create a consulting service better than what the console makers offers, and for less money. Truly terrible games will make it to market (worse than today), and half-assed unfinished ones will be pushed out the door without quality assurance. The IBM PC platform is arguably the creation of IBM, but do the millions of programmers out there flock to big blue when they're writing software?
Face it, without lock-in no XBox developer would be paying Microsoft's exhorbitant console developer fees... they would buy a copy of Visual C++ and put in the effort to change some function calls. Co-marketing only happens to a select few big boys, "outsourcing" is still fought against by notoriously protective game developers, and development systems for new consoles are pretty cobbled together as is. As for tech support?
You're talking about re-doing all of the mistakes that the industry made in the 2600 era. Somehow I don't think that is a good way to run a business. Many consoles fail for many reasons other than unmitigated access to the hardware for all developers and users. But no console has succeeded under such circumstances.
As a game player, I want a platform that everyone can develop for, can extend, and over which I have full rights. It's called a PC, and it set me back a grand. As a game developer, I want a target platform with known parameters, whose players purchase games instead of pirating them, and which has an extensive user base. That's a console, and they hit the sweet spot somewhere between 200 and 250 dollars.
Get the fsck over yourself.
Anyhow, if it's some AI, then it almost has to be some undergraduate/researcher with some new algorithm, so they probably have quite enough CPU power at hand.
I KNEW those SETI @ Home guys were up to something!
Please tell me you have the name of the study / book to back that up. I've always felt that socioeconomic reasons were the cause of such discrepancies, and the source of potential non race-based cures. However, the idea that self-classification could have such a large effect on outcome is pretty stunning, yet should be predicted by current sociological theory.
Where did you get this information?
I should have added the word "securely" :).
Good idea, though, and should work for Opera. I'll try it.
What is it with this country's conception that anything which doesn't produce material wealth is inherently bad? Because videogames waste time Earth economies suffer. The same argument happend with Movies at the turn of the century and the "dread scourge" of pulp novels before that.
Here's a clue... People can't always produce. People need downtime to be creative. People need downtime to allow their muscles to rebuild and their minds to re-uptake neurotransmitters. If they weren't playing videogames they would likely be watching television or reading Slashdot. Saying that every moment of every day must be productive is, well, counterproductive.
I must say I am impressed... I had never thought Opera would be eclipsed in cool features, but there it is. Many of these things Opera should be doing right now.
Workspaces, for example. Opera has an integrated system for easily saving and restoring web sessions, and even features an undo for closing windows (yay!). But this feature is buried in a menu somewhere, requires an open / save dialog box, and generally could be a lot more intuitive. Despite having been in several iterations of the browser, few people have found it.
Site-specific preferences. People have wanted this for a long time now, and I'm glad to see someone is implementing it. Pity it wasn't Opera. Opera supports preference sets, and many of them contain site-specific information, but in no way can all preferences be set on a site-specific basis. From the description it sounds like you could, for example, set your Slashdot home page to be your user page. I may be reading this wrong... only February will tell.
Adding searches... This is just plain cool. While opera allows you to use one of many pre-defined searches through a variety of means (including typing "g " + subject into the address bar), adding any search would be a powerful and useful ability. Of course, Opera's more flexible interface would have to find ways to deal with this (an individual search bar? the agregate search bar? the address search method?), but it shouldn't be too difficult.
Sharing bookmarks on a LAN is both great and troublesome. How do you implement this easily and quickly in a Windows environment without Rendezvous?
Tabs aren't as big of a deal, honestly. Usually either you have few enough pages open that you can keep track of them by name, or you have so many open that thumbnails would be too cumbersome to use.
I've always been envious of OmniWeb's History Search ability, website update notifications, and inline spell checker. That latter is being addressed in opera 7.5, along with a few nifty other features. While I will continue to use Opera, not the least of which because I have a PC, OmniWeb appears to be shaping up to quite the must-have app. OmniWeb was originally slated to ship as the default browers for OSX. Now it looks like that was a great idea.