The reason people are buying these is becase they have too much money, as evidenced by buying a Xbox360 at this point in the game, and having spent all that moneny and not being able to buy many games, a few cheap downloads start looking pretty attractive. Once prices come down, and somehting resembling mainstream buyers enter the market this situation will correct itself.
Sony makes hardware that is difficult to program. But game developers have a financial gun to their heads and will ultimately do whatever it takes.
Remember how the XBox looked set to eat the PS2's lunch? However after 5 years of hardcore low level programming on freakish hardware the latest round of PS2 titles look just as good as the XBox titles.
Frankly the PS3 is a *lot* easier to program than the PS2. All the complaining is coming from PC developers (a.k.a the current crop of Unreal engine licensees) who never touched the PS2 and don't know the meaning of pain.
The weak developers will die out, and the rest will push the PS3 way further than the XBox360.
Why, the ability to say, "Yep, and we did it all with one language."
And the fact that I can actually debug all the code that goes into one of our games. I love debugging a C++ callstack that goes in and out of an interpreter a few times. It's bad enough having ten programmers with different approaches to programming without mixing langauges.
Mixing langauges essentially means that a person who introduces a new langauge gets to build themselves (and a few of their pals) a little ghetto where other programmers are afraid to walk at night.
Because the two threads in the chips share arithmetic and floating point units and whatnot, they get best case throughput of 1.3x a single threaded chip.
This is according to Sony who has the same PPU on their PS3.
Self destruct will only be implemented on the PS3. Think about it. Do you want to take support calls for products that "accidentialy" self distruct? Only people trying to protect something like the expensive right to run on a console would do somehting like that.
Am I the only one here who feels he just saw a paid advertisment on slashdot?
Here is a better site linked to by slashdot a while back: http://distrowatch.com/
Am I the only one who thinks we should nuke the hell out for the martian ice caps? 10-20 large H-Bombs should get things sturred up, and move chemicals into the atmosphere. Yeah... I'd say we already have terraforming. Silos and silos of it just waiting to go.
Hopefully by the time the radiation settles down, things should be ready to support life. And if not? It would make great TV.
Rememebr the US fallback plan if they didn't get to the moon and back? They were going to hit it with a big enough nuke to be seen on earth. The whole point of course beeing a pissing contest with the Russians.
Nuke mars t-shirts anyone? Remember you heard it here first.
Thanks I stand corrected. If they had pulled this off it I would have been impressed.
Of course they would have pre-compiled the code, so it was just the failure to transition the entire thing to a new langauge. Which is actually quite understandable with an operating system release.
And I wish we'd stop deluding oursleves into believeing that somehow the cool, geeky-tweeky OSs are the same ones that users want to buy and, subsequently, actually use.
Funny thing is, so called "power users" influence the buying habits of the masses. It is just like the perfume companies that market to the trendy 30 year olds with power suits because other women imitate them. People consult any nerds they know before making the big step of buying a computer hoping for some inside tips.
The people who make purchasing descisions for large companies are also computer nerds. You can see this in the slow adoption of desktop linux in large corps and government.
Really though, you just need to take a pill, the guy was just posting some grade A nerd humor.
An OS should be *safer* than an application as complex as a web browser. E.g. a browser has a very hairy syntax parser, a java-script interpreter tightly integrated in, media decompressors/handlers and a layout engine all glued together. There is no seperation between all the functionality and a kernel that tries to isloate clients of that functionality.
Anyone wan't to compare the complexity of the OS system call interface vs. the compexity of the "interfaces" exposed by a web browser? Somehow an OS seems easier to lock down to me.
Why doesn't firefox have the ability to "jail" itself? I'd be very happy if it locked itself away in some directory.
Funny, I am shocked that anyone seriously thought they would write an OS on top of a virtual machine. Writing core OS functions on top of a virtual machine is pure lunacy. Crazy talk. La la la...
Remember when people made fun of M$ for using C++ in WinNT? Ok so times have changed but that doesn't mean that you write perfomance sensitive code that will be used by billions of people on top of an interpreter. Consider the cost/benifit ratio of the extra development effort. After all, they are writing the next windows OS, not some random application.
They manufacture the part with identical pixel pipelines, and if one of them is flawed they can just disble it. This is a common technique in silicon manufacturing. E.g. the celeron is a pentium with the flawed half it's cache disabled.
Flaws happen, and at say 20% rate per chip that is a lot of your profits. If you your design is redundant and can survive with parts disabled you can recover a lot of that 20%.
As another example the Cell processor has one SPU disabled in the PS3.
The flaws may not be visible in all games, or occur frequently. Thats why lots of people report the card working fine. The maker has better testing.
Of course it is possible that they also crippled a few that were just fine...
How much modification can I make to the linux kernel before it is not the linux kernel? E.g. if I made it into a user-space image manipulation program that ran under windows? Here is the crux of my concern: if you liscence something to a open source program, you have given a liscence to the whole world to use it but under ambiguous terms. The only real restriction that I can see here is that the code has to remian GPL and that you need to prove some ancestry to the kernel, which can be a total farce involving a few copy commands... Otherwise if the version with their code has to come directly from Linus then they have seriously encumbered the kernel and that fails their GPL requirement. To sum up, if you are going to open up your technology to one open source project you should really open it up to everyone. Not to slag Nokia here, what they have done is great, and to be lauded, just if you are going to bring a case of beer to the party, you shouldn't write your friends names on the box. It's not cool and people will snag a bottle if they feel like it anyhow.
You are doing e-commerce on a box shared with other users you don't know anything about?!? Local root exploits are an order of magnitude more common than remote ones. If security is as important to you as you claim, you should shell out the extra clams.
One would think that a company with as many good games as Ubi would have found a buyer by now. Apparently they have been looking for a long time. I guess it could reflect their large size and the fact that all non-publishing game companies have been trying to sell themselves lately... Anyhow, just as long as it isn't EA I wish them luck. I wonder why EA is too stupid to see that the employees of a French company with cool IP wouldn't stay long if they were bought out by an American company that grinds out shovel-ware? Of course being part of a company that can't seem to sell is not a morale boost either.
Cute. It isn't that we can't find people who will take the risks, it's our safety obsessive culture that cannot tolerate your suggestion. Sure the money would be far better spent on foreign aid, in terms of lives per dollar, but public sentiment isn't rational. And NASA depends on public sentiment for it's cash, not the delivery of a product.
It is their job it to try and keep you on the phone as long as possible, but you are wasting both their time and yours by following social norms and trying to wait long enough to jam a "no thanks, goodbye" in there.
Just hang up on them the moment you realize what is going on. You both will be better off.
Wow, I never had this much trouble posting on slashdot before. Try making a joke in XML. Your screwed... First it rejects repeated tags and then silently deletes the tags it doesn't like.
<parenthesis>
<parenthesis>
a
<comma>
b
</parenthesis>
c </parenthesis>
I expect they are just covering their asses agianst being sued for helping some kid take down google. If they prohibit modification/distribution then legally they are not providing something you can use in an exploit. If you are going to take down google with this, what the hell do you care about the copyright.
Ok, tell them they are using firefox. The window says firefox on it in case they forget.
But set the firefox icon on the taskbar to the IE symbol. That way "people" can still use the internet. "The red and blue what??? I just need to use the internet and I can't find the internet button."
Saying that everybody is content with IE and doesn't want to give it up is actully assuming they know what IE is!!! To most users there is this "e" shaped button "that starts up the web." And they don't waste time worrying about what a program is, and how "using the web" is somehow different if they switch one of those program things. Thats the kind of nerdy crap that you involve yourself in.
When you tell them that they will be more secure using Firefox they let you install it because they have no idea what you are talking about and don't want to "be unsafe." They might notice the window looks a little different, but pretty quickly they realise you didin't "break the internet" and they forget about it.
One more time for the record. Most computer users have no idea what anything is that they are using. They have been trained to click on the right icons/propmts to the point where they can do what the need to do, and after that they (rightfully?) don't care, are not interested and think you are a loser if you try to explain any of it.
I am not trying to flame here. I happen to be a computer programmer, but I write software that gets used in-house by non-technical people, and after a while you realise that they just want to click as few buttons WITH PLAIN ENGLISH LABELS as possible so they can just get their job done.
Seriously. Source code control systems are good for any kind of in-house content distribution. Check in your.mp3 collection, a live binaries, a working install of everything... Cygwin...
Slashdot Mirror
The reason people are buying these is becase they have too much money, as evidenced by buying a Xbox360 at this point in the game, and having spent all that moneny and not being able to buy many games, a few cheap downloads start looking pretty attractive. Once prices come down, and somehting resembling mainstream buyers enter the market this situation will correct itself.
Sony makes hardware that is difficult to program. But game developers have a financial gun to their heads and will ultimately do whatever it takes.
Remember how the XBox looked set to eat the PS2's lunch? However after 5 years of hardcore low level programming on freakish hardware the latest round of PS2 titles look just as good as the XBox titles.
Frankly the PS3 is a *lot* easier to program than the PS2. All the complaining is coming from PC developers (a.k.a the current crop of Unreal engine licensees) who never touched the PS2 and don't know the meaning of pain.
The weak developers will die out, and the rest will push the PS3 way further than the XBox360.
Why, the ability to say, "Yep, and we did it all with one language."
And the fact that I can actually debug all the code that goes into one of our games. I love debugging a C++ callstack that goes in and out of an interpreter a few times. It's bad enough having ten programmers with different approaches to programming without mixing langauges.
Mixing langauges essentially means that a person who introduces a new langauge gets to build themselves (and a few of their pals) a little ghetto where other programmers are afraid to walk at night.
Because the two threads in the chips share arithmetic and floating point units and whatnot, they get best case throughput of 1.3x a single threaded chip. This is according to Sony who has the same PPU on their PS3.
Self destruct will only be implemented on the PS3. Think about it. Do you want to take support calls for products that "accidentialy" self distruct? Only people trying to protect something like the expensive right to run on a console would do somehting like that.
Am I the only one here who feels he just saw a paid advertisment on slashdot? Here is a better site linked to by slashdot a while back: http://distrowatch.com/
Am I the only one who thinks we should nuke the hell out for the martian ice caps? 10-20 large H-Bombs should get things sturred up, and move chemicals into the atmosphere. Yeah... I'd say we already have terraforming. Silos and silos of it just waiting to go.
Hopefully by the time the radiation settles down, things should be ready to support life. And if not? It would make great TV.
Rememebr the US fallback plan if they didn't get to the moon and back? They were going to hit it with a big enough nuke to be seen on earth. The whole point of course beeing a pissing contest with the Russians.
Nuke mars t-shirts anyone? Remember you heard it here first.
Its like the US, slow to anger
What?!? The first thing that most people in the world think of when the US is mentioned is ongoing military activity.
Like the war in Iraq. It was provoked by somehthing real?
Thanks I stand corrected. If they had pulled this off it I would have been impressed.
Of course they would have pre-compiled the code, so it was just the failure to transition the entire thing to a new langauge. Which is actually quite understandable with an operating system release.
those extra layers make such a negligble difference
Interpreted code can often be 10x slower. I guess it depends on your definition of negligble.
And I wish we'd stop deluding oursleves into believeing that somehow the cool, geeky-tweeky OSs are the same ones that users want to buy and, subsequently, actually use.
Funny thing is, so called "power users" influence the buying habits of the masses. It is just like the perfume companies that market to the trendy 30 year olds with power suits because other women imitate them. People consult any nerds they know before making the big step of buying a computer hoping for some inside tips.
The people who make purchasing descisions for large companies are also computer nerds. You can see this in the slow adoption of desktop linux in large corps and government.
Really though, you just need to take a pill, the guy was just posting some grade A nerd humor.
An OS should be *safer* than an application as complex as a web browser. E.g. a browser has a very hairy syntax parser, a java-script interpreter tightly integrated in, media decompressors/handlers and a layout engine all glued together. There is no seperation between all the functionality and a kernel that tries to isloate clients of that functionality.
Anyone wan't to compare the complexity of the OS system call interface vs. the compexity of the "interfaces" exposed by a web browser? Somehow an OS seems easier to lock down to me.
Why doesn't firefox have the ability to "jail" itself? I'd be very happy if it locked itself away in some directory.
Funny, I am shocked that anyone seriously thought they would write an OS on top of a virtual machine. Writing core OS functions on top of a virtual machine is pure lunacy. Crazy talk. La la la...
Remember when people made fun of M$ for using C++ in WinNT? Ok so times have changed but that doesn't mean that you write perfomance sensitive code that will be used by billions of people on top of an interpreter. Consider the cost/benifit ratio of the extra development effort. After all, they are writing the next windows OS, not some random application.
They manufacture the part with identical pixel pipelines, and if one of them is flawed they can just disble it. This is a common technique in silicon manufacturing. E.g. the celeron is a pentium with the flawed half it's cache disabled.
Flaws happen, and at say 20% rate per chip that is a lot of your profits. If you your design is redundant and can survive with parts disabled you can recover a lot of that 20%.
As another example the Cell processor has one SPU disabled in the PS3.
The flaws may not be visible in all games, or occur frequently. Thats why lots of people report the card working fine. The maker has better testing.
Of course it is possible that they also crippled a few that were just fine...
How much modification can I make to the linux kernel before it is not the linux kernel? E.g. if I made it into a user-space image manipulation program that ran under windows? Here is the crux of my concern: if you liscence something to a open source program, you have given a liscence to the whole world to use it but under ambiguous terms. The only real restriction that I can see here is that the code has to remian GPL and that you need to prove some ancestry to the kernel, which can be a total farce involving a few copy commands... Otherwise if the version with their code has to come directly from Linus then they have seriously encumbered the kernel and that fails their GPL requirement. To sum up, if you are going to open up your technology to one open source project you should really open it up to everyone. Not to slag Nokia here, what they have done is great, and to be lauded, just if you are going to bring a case of beer to the party, you shouldn't write your friends names on the box. It's not cool and people will snag a bottle if they feel like it anyhow.
You are doing e-commerce on a box shared with other users you don't know anything about?!? Local root exploits are an order of magnitude more common than remote ones. If security is as important to you as you claim, you should shell out the extra clams.
One would think that a company with as many good games as Ubi would have found a buyer by now. Apparently they have been looking for a long time. I guess it could reflect their large size and the fact that all non-publishing game companies have been trying to sell themselves lately... Anyhow, just as long as it isn't EA I wish them luck. I wonder why EA is too stupid to see that the employees of a French company with cool IP wouldn't stay long if they were bought out by an American company that grinds out shovel-ware? Of course being part of a company that can't seem to sell is not a morale boost either.
Cute. It isn't that we can't find people who will take the risks, it's our safety obsessive culture that cannot tolerate your suggestion. Sure the money would be far better spent on foreign aid, in terms of lives per dollar, but public sentiment isn't rational. And NASA depends on public sentiment for it's cash, not the delivery of a product.
Maybe we should admit that the software Patent concept is just wrong?
I case you missed it, the best part of all is that America tries to export this lunacy to the rest of the world as IP reform.
How screwed up is your government? The word reform would be recoiling in horror if it even cared anymore.
It is their job it to try and keep you on the phone as long as possible, but you are wasting both their time and yours by following social norms and trying to wait long enough to jam a "no thanks, goodbye" in there.
Just hang up on them the moment you realize what is going on. You both will be better off.
Wow, I never had this much trouble posting on slashdot before. Try making a joke in XML. Your screwed... First it rejects repeated tags and then silently deletes the tags it doesn't like.
<parenthesis>
<parenthesis>
a
<comma>
b
</parenthesis>
c
</parenthesis>
Trying to get this past the lameness filter...
a
b
I expect they are just covering their asses agianst being sued for helping some kid take down google. If they prohibit modification/distribution then legally they are not providing something you can use in an exploit. If you are going to take down google with this, what the hell do you care about the copyright.
Ok, tell them they are using firefox. The window says firefox on it in case they forget.
But set the firefox icon on the taskbar to the IE symbol. That way "people" can still use the internet. "The red and blue what??? I just need to use the internet and I can't find the internet button."
Saying that everybody is content with IE and doesn't want to give it up is actully assuming they know what IE is!!! To most users there is this "e" shaped button "that starts up the web." And they don't waste time worrying about what a program is, and how "using the web" is somehow different if they switch one of those program things. Thats the kind of nerdy crap that you involve yourself in.
When you tell them that they will be more secure using Firefox they let you install it because they have no idea what you are talking about and don't want to "be unsafe." They might notice the window looks a little different, but pretty quickly they realise you didin't "break the internet" and they forget about it.
One more time for the record. Most computer users have no idea what anything is that they are using. They have been trained to click on the right icons/propmts to the point where they can do what the need to do, and after that they (rightfully?) don't care, are not interested and think you are a loser if you try to explain any of it.
I am not trying to flame here. I happen to be a computer programmer, but I write software that gets used in-house by non-technical people, and after a while you realise that they just want to click as few buttons WITH PLAIN ENGLISH LABELS as possible so they can just get their job done.
Seriously. Source code control systems are good for any kind of in-house content distribution. Check in your .mp3 collection, a live binaries, a working install of everything... Cygwin...