But unlike the IE-NS analogy where giving a binary application away for free doesn't increase per copy cost. The XBox is a tangible product that costs $$ to produce. Once IE reached a certain code base the cost drops Significantly to sustain. Giving away code is as easy as the copy command. Giving away an XBox is not. Even Microsoft with their Billions cannot afford the kind of drain giving away hardware would entail. Unless of course they start charging for IE.
MS is no longer interested in selling the XBox. They're interested in selling the monthly online service that will soon be available for it, and they continue to be interested in selling software.
They also continue to be interested in establishing a foothold in your living room so that they can blend your television (your eyes) into the.NET communication infrastructure.
The money to be earned from games will be dwarfed by the money to be gained by establishing a monopolistic control over real-time communications, which would seem to be Microsoft's current goal.
Why hasn't it been copied? Simple: Apple has a history of suing people for copying their desktop look+feel, so one can only assume they'd do the same for their case design. No-one would dare risk it.
Use a 65816 or even a 6502. Don't plan on making this your main machine. Just go with what's easy to build, because you're going to make a hell of a lot of mistakes.
The advantage of a simple processor with a narrow bus and address space and with well-defined behaviors is that you're going to spend a whole lot less time debugging bad traces and similar basic mistakes, and more time getting at the real meat of the system.
You might also grab a copy of Embedded Systems or similar and grab one of the many microcontrollers advertised therein, with a decent amount of RAM and basic I/O controllers on the chip. Getting memory working involves a lot of busywork, connecting pins over and over and over and over and over.
Another user suggested getting the C64 programmer's reference manual and looking at the schematic in the back. This would be a good start. Look at at least a few reference designs before anything else. Most of the really old systems had complete schematics available so your average electronics repair shop could troubleshoot them.
One of my favorite tactics
on
Disconnecting
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· Score: 2
One of my favorite tactics, when I left AOL (I'd had it for a couple months while doing a lot of business traveling), was the syrupy sweet girl on the phone, after numerous other attempts at keeping me on, telling me that I really had a neat handle, and that she might like to use it herself. "You know I can do that if you go. I hope you won't miss it!"
The funny thing is - part of me was bothered by the thought of somebody else assuming my identity, even if I'd never handed it out as an email address or visited any forum where anyone would see it. AOL was just a relatively convenient way of getting on the 'net to do real work in hotel rooms. That feeling of disturbance lasted about two seconds before I laughed at myself for being an ass.
Matrox have been trying to push the three head idea for a while now. A few games even support using two and three heads, putting extra stats and controls on a side screen, or even extending the game enough to give you a view in your peripheral vision.
They have a few screenshots of different games which they've tricked into supporting it at the first link above. And I have to admit - it makes me a little drooly.:)
It's also a brilliant move for Matrox: If they keep throwing out 3 head cards at a premium price - after buying one Matrox 3-headed card, who's not going to keep purchasing Matrox cards? If you got this set-up, would you disable one or two of your gaming monitors just to get the new nvidia whizbang that might be 10-20% faster?
This is all exceptionally cool. If it's not a hoax, the specs are nothing short of amazing. I've been a big Matrox fan from day one, and it's hurt to see them relegated to a tiny side booth on the floor at GDC and Siggraph.
I hope they're getting ready to make an explosion at Siggraph this year.:)
But the big question is - where the hell did all this come from? Did they hire a few people away from nvidia? Did they run across some brand new wunderkind? Or is this what happens when you shelve new product development for a few years and focus on delivering a new product three years, not six months from now?
Is the architecture modular and well-designed enough that Matrox can continue to compete when the other guys catch up?
The thing works with 10 bit resolution
has 5 outputs, and 2 display controllers (dunno how they will have 3 monitors attached)
Matrox have typically driven two displays with each display controller. Even the single head MGA400s had the logic for a 2nd display, if memory serves.
The computing needs of Pixar undoubtedly rely heavily on vector math. Therefore, using a computer architecture that is expressly optimized for vector math is probably a good idea for them.
Vector math and bandwidth. All current Mac designs are utterly choked when dealing with large data sets, owing to the 133MHz RAM clock.
If you want a good idea of the relative speeds for render farms, take a look at some Maya benchmarks. The 933MHz G4s with 2MB L2 cache realize about 2/3 the speed of 1GHz Intel chips, and about half the speed of 1GHz AMD parts.
I don't know how well-tuned Maya is for the G4 vector instructions, but one would expect that Pixar would have less of a programming budget for these kinds of optimazations than a company who's actually selling the software in a competitive market.
I can't imagine that it would be too difficult for pixar to port their current rendering software over to OS X... plus it would be a great advantage for pixar (having the connection through steve jobs to apple), as they would almost be guaranteed apple's top notch technology. (or is this a false assumption?)
To play devil's advocate:
Apple's top notch technology wouldn't be good for the renderfarms. Those are all about speed, and the fastest Mac is about half as fast as the fastest PC. And Macs really fall short on memory-intensive tasks in dual processor configurations, owing to the slower bus speed. (The fastest Mac memory bus is 133MHz. The fastest PC bus is effectively over 1GHz.)
Even if Pixar got the Macs for free and had to pay market price for the PC racks, it's likely that the cost of electricity from the additional machines needed would take away the Apple benefit in under two years. This is to say nothing of extra maintenance when there are twice as many machines, the value of the extra space used, and the cost of porting the render farm software over to the new system architecture.
MS also frequently makes acceptance of 3rd party games contingent on the inclusion of a few XBox-only features. Sony (and presumably Nintendo) frequently do this as well. All three are guilty of the tactic the original poster describes, although MS may be pursuing it a bit more strongly than most.
Is it me, or did he sound like compiler output?
"Not to my knowledge"
"No, It's not."
Never anything helpful;)
To the contrary - if this had been an interview with a commercial product, he'd never have said no, he would have implied that they were working on or investigating every feature mentioned, and he'd have turned bad points into positive spin.
This was frank, refreshing and to the point. Short and factual is good.
I'm a game developer, and I shudder to think of 8 year olds playing Grand Theft Auto.
That said, this is not the way to go about keeping kids from playing these games.
I wish game consoles had parental lockout controls so games could be tamed down on a case by case basis, leaving the decision to parents, not to government. I wouldn't mind at all spending the extra time to disable some of the bloodier bits in my game when a lockout was active. Much less harm here, and much more effective.
I'd like to go on record now, saying that I would never let my children read Senator Mary Landrieu's unconstitutional propaganda. I consider it hateful, and therefor it falls within her definition of.prn material.
Accordingly, she's to be stripped of her existing campaign site, and to be moved into the.prn domain.
The.prn qualifications being entirely subjective, it's safe to say that all other domain banishments will be similarly arbitrary.
I know zero about python. I use C and C++ almost exclusively.
From a high level view, what makes python great? Where is python one of the best tools for the job? What are its strengths, and where is it most often used?
I'm curious. Are there areas where OS/2 still enjoys a lot of popularity? Are there any tasks to which OS/2 is still better suited than most other choices?
Stability and near POSIX compliant shell support were strong draws for OS/2 seven years ago, but free UNIXes and NT/Cygwin (and more recently, Mac OS X) have caught up in these areas. It's surprising to find that OS/2 has still got a relatively large following.
Viewsonic VP201mb [viewsonic.com] and VP230mb [viewsonic.com] are the some nicest LCD monitors. I've no idea how good their color-fidelity is, though.
I have a VP201mb at home and at work. I will not go back to using CRTs after using one. Contrast is very uniform across the display, it has a very wide viewing angle, and the refresh is very fast. It doesn't suffer from the excessive ghosting that many cheaper/older models do.
LCDs react more quickly at warmer temperatures. The monitor itself seems to run a little warmer than my other LCDs, which I'm not as happy with. I've wondered if this contributes to the decrease in LCD reaction lag.
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and
distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
Not creepy at all. It makes the loopholes quite clear.
The MSGPL license, for GPL implementations of MS protocols need only include the clause that changes must be available in source code form or in binary digits tattooed across the backside of the author, and that a license fee of one wet honey glazed ham is due if the software is used consecutively for more than sixty thousand years.
Slashdot Mirror
They also continue to be interested in establishing a foothold in your living room so that they can blend your television (your eyes) into the .NET communication infrastructure.
The money to be earned from games will be dwarfed by the money to be gained by establishing a monopolistic control over real-time communications, which would seem to be Microsoft's current goal.
Use a 65816 or even a 6502. Don't plan on making this your main machine. Just go with what's easy to build, because you're going to make a hell of a lot of mistakes.
The advantage of a simple processor with a narrow bus and address space and with well-defined behaviors is that you're going to spend a whole lot less time debugging bad traces and similar basic mistakes, and more time getting at the real meat of the system.
You might also grab a copy of Embedded Systems or similar and grab one of the many microcontrollers advertised therein, with a decent amount of RAM and basic I/O controllers on the chip. Getting memory working involves a lot of busywork, connecting pins over and over and over and over and over.
Another user suggested getting the C64 programmer's reference manual and looking at the schematic in the back. This would be a good start. Look at at least a few reference designs before anything else. Most of the really old systems had complete schematics available so your average electronics repair shop could troubleshoot them.
The funny thing is - part of me was bothered by the thought of somebody else assuming my identity, even if I'd never handed it out as an email address or visited any forum where anyone would see it. AOL was just a relatively convenient way of getting on the 'net to do real work in hotel rooms. That feeling of disturbance lasted about two seconds before I laughed at myself for being an ass.
If it's not a technical problem, it's damned close.
Where did you hear this?
They have a few screenshots of different games which they've tricked into supporting it at the first link above. And I have to admit - it makes me a little drooly. :)
It's also a brilliant move for Matrox: If they keep throwing out 3 head cards at a premium price - after buying one Matrox 3-headed card, who's not going to keep purchasing Matrox cards? If you got this set-up, would you disable one or two of your gaming monitors just to get the new nvidia whizbang that might be 10-20% faster?
I hope they're getting ready to make an explosion at Siggraph this year. :)
But the big question is - where the hell did all this come from? Did they hire a few people away from nvidia? Did they run across some brand new wunderkind? Or is this what happens when you shelve new product development for a few years and focus on delivering a new product three years, not six months from now?
Is the architecture modular and well-designed enough that Matrox can continue to compete when the other guys catch up?
And is Matrox (I hope) back?
Matrox have typically driven two displays with each display controller. Even the single head MGA400s had the logic for a 2nd display, if memory serves.
Vector math and bandwidth. All current Mac designs are utterly choked when dealing with large data sets, owing to the 133MHz RAM clock.
If you want a good idea of the relative speeds for render farms, take a look at some Maya benchmarks. The 933MHz G4s with 2MB L2 cache realize about 2/3 the speed of 1GHz Intel chips, and about half the speed of 1GHz AMD parts.
I don't know how well-tuned Maya is for the G4 vector instructions, but one would expect that Pixar would have less of a programming budget for these kinds of optimazations than a company who's actually selling the software in a competitive market.
Apple's top notch technology wouldn't be good for the renderfarms. Those are all about speed, and the fastest Mac is about half as fast as the fastest PC. And Macs really fall short on memory-intensive tasks in dual processor configurations, owing to the slower bus speed. (The fastest Mac memory bus is 133MHz. The fastest PC bus is effectively over 1GHz.)
Even if Pixar got the Macs for free and had to pay market price for the PC racks, it's likely that the cost of electricity from the additional machines needed would take away the Apple benefit in under two years. This is to say nothing of extra maintenance when there are twice as many machines, the value of the extra space used, and the cost of porting the render farm software over to the new system architecture.
MS also frequently makes acceptance of 3rd party games contingent on the inclusion of a few XBox-only features. Sony (and presumably Nintendo) frequently do this as well. All three are guilty of the tactic the original poster describes, although MS may be pursuing it a bit more strongly than most.
This was frank, refreshing and to the point. Short and factual is good.
That said, this is not the way to go about keeping kids from playing these games.
I wish game consoles had parental lockout controls so games could be tamed down on a case by case basis, leaving the decision to parents, not to government. I wouldn't mind at all spending the extra time to disable some of the bloodier bits in my game when a lockout was active. Much less harm here, and much more effective.
Give me a wealth of TV viewing choices with no commercials, no product placement, and honest and open non-marketing agendas, and I'm all over it.
With the types of users who are now coming to Mac OS X, is this going to change?
Accordingly, she's to be stripped of her existing campaign site, and to be moved into the .prn domain.
The .prn qualifications being entirely subjective, it's safe to say that all other domain banishments will be similarly arbitrary.
Here's the rest of the picture --
Scientists have just discovered steroids?
From a high level view, what makes python great? Where is python one of the best tools for the job? What are its strengths, and where is it most often used?
I hope that other countries follow suit.
Just because names can be made longer doesn't mean that they should.
.jp2 is sufficiently clear, and it won't clutter diretory listings. Save the longer, more descriptive extensions for more obscure things.
Stability and near POSIX compliant shell support were strong draws for OS/2 seven years ago, but free UNIXes and NT/Cygwin (and more recently, Mac OS X) have caught up in these areas. It's surprising to find that OS/2 has still got a relatively large following.
I have a VP201mb at home and at work. I will not go back to using CRTs after using one. Contrast is very uniform across the display, it has a very wide viewing angle, and the refresh is very fast. It doesn't suffer from the excessive ghosting that many cheaper/older models do.
LCDs react more quickly at warmer temperatures. The monitor itself seems to run a little warmer than my other LCDs, which I'm not as happy with. I've wondered if this contributes to the decrease in LCD reaction lag.
Not creepy at all. It makes the loopholes quite clear.
The MSGPL license, for GPL implementations of MS protocols need only include the clause that changes must be available in source code form or in binary digits tattooed across the backside of the author, and that a license fee of one wet honey glazed ham is due if the software is used consecutively for more than sixty thousand years.