Am I the only one who doesn't see a difference between paying $5 for Boardwalk and $5 for that +5 Mega Item of Doom to complete my Doom Set of Items?
If that happened when you are playing you'd call the guy an asshole and problbly all quit the game after he passed the money. And people do walk away. Notice hwo everyone flocked to WOW.. notice wow have all of the high level items soul bound.
5) Sony's repeated (and mostly false) claims that the Playstation would totally blow the Dreamcast away graphically and that people should wait for the PS2
I agree with the mostly... not because the hardware couldn't do it, but simply because it takes that much effort. Compare MGS 3 with anythign ont he Dream cast....
Ask these questions: How much money did nintendo make? How much money did MS xbox division make? How well are the total numbers for the GC vs total numbers for the xbox.
This will tell who dying... no one. Nintendo has it's niche. Like Apple. You can't kill them. They will always be profitable if not mainstream.
I will go for the xbox one just based on superior graphics (unless it was designed for another system and ported poorly
Xbox > PS2 in graphics but Xbox ~ GC. The differences are slight, Hardly anyone will notice except with a side by side comparison. Given all of the must have titles on the PS2 and GC and the rather piddly amoutn on the xbox I'd buy a GC (and did) and a Ps2( I did) before a xbox (damn it I have too much money I did that too)... for the xbox all I play is halo.. I spent 400 bucks for basically 2 games. For the ps2 my library is huge and the GC I have all of the core games a true gamer needs.
Square doesn't determine a console's popularity. A console's popularity helps determine where Square goes.
Theres something known as a "king maker". Basically in a tight fight between two factions, sometimes a smaller but influenctial third party chooses the winner. Square was the king maker in the Nintendo vs Sony fight and has been fairly influenctial in the MS vs Sony fight.
We're not playing god. We're playing "code monkey". The language just happens to be DNA and we're reverse engineering a set of programs doen by a vastly supurior coder... sorta like a VB programmer trying to understand and modify the vi source code.
What you call natural, I call childish. I think if the "Athiests" and "critial thinkers" were as sophisticated as you suggest, they wouldn't feel the need to ridicule. Most of the time, insults come from fear or ignorance.
Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world. That's not a comfortable feeling. We feel better if we are able to rationally take apart offending ideas, but, failing that, we will mostly settle for just shouting them down when we are among those who we feel sure will agree one way or the other. Frankly, 99% of the/. community lacks the scientific background to really understand and refute the claims of Creationists.
I think that's a better explanation of the insults than any supposed smartness.
Thats trying to cats creationists as "defenders of the faith" while everybody else is athiests who despise god... how ever I'm a christian (baptist) and I think creationists are idiots.
Funny, the only people I see talking about creationism in this thread are the folks who are looking for an excuse to belittle creationists. But at the time I loaded the comments there were zero creationist post and 3 posts making fun of creationists.
Tell me again, who was taking the discussion off topic?
Try reading at -1. That might help the creationists show up.
Because, I believe, things like this lend support to descent-with-modification views of macroevolution. The one I'm familiar with is Tierra, and, as I recall, it is very simple. You write a single program that simply makes copies of itself, and introduces random errors into the code it replicated at random times. This is very similar to the way microevolution works. In this digital environment, though, where you can breed billions of generations in hours, new "organisms" arise which were never anticipated (and nowhere near coded beforehand).
It's a matter of debate how accurately these "digial organisms" reflect what is really going on in nature, but on the face of it they seem to show that macroevolution, i.e., specication, does occur, and perhaps occurs with less effort than people think. The jump between microevolution and macroevolution is where most evolutionary biologists and creation "scientists" split, i.e., the latter think it's impossible for one species to evolve into another.
Of course, none of this is helped by the fact that nobody has a precise idea of what exactly constitutes a "species." Anyways, this is why both sides of the fence get riled up over these "experiments" in digital evolution.
I know you posted a mostly neutral post. But by selecting to use creationist terms you lend credit to their argument where there is none. There is only evolution, micro and macro are terms the creationist use to sand box all the undeniable proof of evolution and ask we prove something else. They say speciation happens because they can't deny it. They then ask us to prove something that has nothing to do with evolution. (namely asking us to show a non microbiotic example of having one thing evolve into another).
A species only evolves, it may speciate but it will not evolve into a exsisting specie. And also, there isnt' two sides ina debate. Theres two side screamign at each other, with one side using facts figures and examples while the other side uses the bible and circular logic.
You need to examine their rhetoric closer. If they won't believe it with actual evolutionary examples before them, an artificial one won't do it either.
I don't see them changing their mind, even if all the apes in the LA zoo spontanious evolved into talking mostly hairless humanoids.
Apparently, sexual reproduction conferred some powerful advantage, given how early it developed in the history of life
I had always figured it allowed you to excise bad genes without nessasarily endign that line. So if a mutation that made you harvest 10 units more energy in envirometn x happened to occurs on one that made you die 50% of the time befor eyou could reproduce, you could seperate the two out. (easy if their on seperate chromosomes, a bit harder but still possible on the same chromosome.)
Yes they have for PC games, although not this centralized and in depth.
Many games have had statistics as in depth try this one.
Bungies made a good game props to them. But they didn't innovate that much. Their like Blizzard, they make good polished games by learning fromt he mistakes of the innovators. Their rarely innovators themselves.
.... for the retraining of people to use new iterations of MS products.
So many people support this completely false dichotomy between not need to train for MS stuff or retraining for other products.
This is nonsense of course since people do need retraining even if you remain a 100% MS serf, er, client.
So my point is, retraining costs are a red herring that MS fanboys repeat incesantly, without noticing the profitable business of the publishers of WIndows for dummies series.
Do you work in an office with non-technical people? We're technical people. To us Vi or pine or word or outlook is simply a different tool to use. To some of my co-workers email is outlook and nothing else. They sincerly beleive that e icon is the only way to the internet. I don't mean retarinign programmers, I mean retraining the secratary ect... if the current product is good enough, and the next better one is better but not significantly so, then people wont' switch.
There is no false dichonomy. Linux isn't a small change from windows.
The market created a competitor, or put another way, a competitor evolved much like a bacteria in the presence of antibiotics. MS's traditional pills dont work anymore, they've killed off what they could, allowing what remains to have room to thrive. In a way, MS created modern OSS.
OSS is a great academic tool, interesting project come out of it. It has yet to spawn a Windows killer, or even a mild flu.
"its OS is actually good and people really like it."
As much as you can make fun of it, windows is exactly what most people need. Simple OS that runs on a lot of different hardware in different price ranges, thats just good enough to do the job. It gives just enough options to seem configurable but is just rigid enough not to be over whelming. For yoru average 100 iq, with 2.5 kids and a dog it's just fine. For your power user it lacks a lot. For your tin foil hatter, Linux GURU, kernel hacker, ect.. it is the anti-thesis of all that is holy.
When that happens, Businesses will start looking at things like licensing, performance and cost of software...
Nice rose-tinted glasses. Business will take one look at how much it will cost to retrain all their non-technical people, and simply decide thats it's not worth it. With MS products, most people train at home with their home PC's. I work in an office where 90% of the people won't touch the mac in the office because it's unfamiliar and "hard" to use.
MS has become a natural monopoly, it'll be hard to shake them without huge and invasive government intervention. No matter how sweet OSX gets you can't make dumb people switch. They just aren't comfortable with change.
This might not be an issue for a game console, but for a workstation, wouldn't the Cell's context-switching overhead be rather huge? From what I have read so far, it seems each SPE has 256 KB of local storage, plus another 2 KB for the main register file (128 16-byte registers) and whatever other state information it needs. Since there are 8 of these things, we're talking over 2 MB of state to swap in and out. Would that still be considered a drop in the bucket for most scheduling schemes?
Do you really need context switch when you have 1 real processor and 8 mini processors on di? It provides a semi- hard limit to multi tasking but context switchign is only req when you assign tasks that cannot be divided up amoung the 8 mini-CPUS and the main cpu on di. So only when you have a crazy amoutn of active proccesses that require contant attention. But you can imagine a system where the OS is ont he main, and the 5 most important processes run on the first 5 sub chips while the last 3 handles anythign with context switched liek daemons ect..
How much will a PS3 cost to manufacture? If I was a computer company, I could buy them without the game-specific stuff, load on linux, and sell them as cheep alternative computers.. but that's just me. (assuming linux and friends are compiled for CELL in the next few months of course).
The problem wiht that is a ps3 won't be anywhere close to a GP machine. It's going to require a lot of driver tweeaks, a load of hardware reconfiguration, defeat the drm. By the time someone figures hwo to do that cheap, computers will already be more powerful at a similiar cost so theres no incentive except nerd prestige.
Here's a list of the online gaming communities that are stupider than battle.net:
--
Obviously sarcasm but battle net still is better then the other match making systems because theres still enough people to find a game even in starcraft (7 years old). Warcraft 3 has a much improved match makign scheme and finding griefers is much rarer. Battle nets match makign for war 3 is better then any other I've used.
I know when people mention the Xbox-2 a group always mention backwards compatability like a crazed console fan boy and then the rest of us tell them why it would be very hard due to architectural differences. We take it as a given that the ps3 will be backwards compatable and it seems the design fo the cell seems to have backwards compatability in mind. It's veyr loosly structured to be similiar (to my primitive knowlege of the chip layouts in the ps2) to the EE chip.
I've got some Karma to burn so I'm going to say this anyway. If you're concerned about saying this if you felt it would be too damaging to your Slashdot Karma, it pretty much explains why you think the guy shouldn't say anything remotely controversial.
Also, Slashdot Karma's not so important. Get a life.
ooh the irony. on slashdotter nitpicking a post and then telling them to get a life.
where could one accurately define a line as to what firing is appropriate and what isn't?
When one adversly effects ones employers. IE. not working, slandering company in significant way, betrayign company secrets. Ect... And the Managers are the ones to make the call on this.
Because the masses expect freedom of speech and opinion, but the people in power don't like to grant it.
To a lot of people, this is like an alarm going off. But to a lot of cynics, this is just run-of-the-mill stuff that's expected to happen regularly.
More like "Because the masses expect freedom of speech and expect not to suffer any consquences for this speech". Google didn't censor him. They fired him. An anology: It's be yoru right to protest for animal right for PETA, but it's my right to file charges if you threw paint on my leather jacket.
Slashdot Mirror
The game console market doesn't work the way MS thinks it works.
Bill gates: It didn't fail? Inconceivable!
Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Am I the only one who doesn't see a difference between paying $5 for Boardwalk and $5 for that +5 Mega Item of Doom to complete my Doom Set of Items?
If that happened when you are playing you'd call the guy an asshole and problbly all quit the game after he passed the money. And people do walk away. Notice hwo everyone flocked to WOW.. notice wow have all of the high level items soul bound.
5) Sony's repeated (and mostly false) claims that the Playstation would totally blow the Dreamcast away graphically and that people should wait for the PS2
I agree with the mostly... not because the hardware couldn't do it, but simply because it takes that much effort. Compare MGS 3 with anythign ont he Dream cast....
MS has billions of money to dump into development of games
Their shareholders will severly limit that. They have maybe two to four years left. If they arent' profitable someone will yank the chain.
Ninetendo is dieing
Ask these questions: How much money did nintendo make? How much money did MS xbox division make? How well are the total numbers for the GC vs total numbers for the xbox.
This will tell who dying... no one. Nintendo has it's niche. Like Apple. You can't kill them. They will always be profitable if not mainstream.
I will go for the xbox one just based on superior graphics (unless it was designed for another system and ported poorly
Xbox > PS2 in graphics but Xbox ~ GC. The differences are slight, Hardly anyone will notice except with a side by side comparison. Given all of the must have titles on the PS2 and GC and the rather piddly amoutn on the xbox I'd buy a GC (and did) and a Ps2( I did) before a xbox (damn it I have too much money I did that too)... for the xbox all I play is halo.. I spent 400 bucks for basically 2 games. For the ps2 my library is huge and the GC I have all of the core games a true gamer needs.
Square doesn't determine a console's popularity. A console's popularity helps determine where Square goes.
Theres something known as a "king maker". Basically in a tight fight between two factions, sometimes a smaller but influenctial third party chooses the winner. Square was the king maker in the Nintendo vs Sony fight and has been fairly influenctial in the MS vs Sony fight.
Do we have a right to play God?
We're not playing god. We're playing "code monkey". The language just happens to be DNA and we're reverse engineering a set of programs doen by a vastly supurior coder... sorta like a VB programmer trying to understand and modify the vi source code.
What you call natural, I call childish. I think if the "Athiests" and "critial thinkers" were as sophisticated as you suggest, they wouldn't feel the need to ridicule. Most of the time, insults come from fear or ignorance.
/. community lacks the scientific background to really understand and refute the claims of Creationists.
Even when we believe they are false, ideas like Creationism threaten to unravel the framework by which we understand the world. That's not a comfortable feeling. We feel better if we are able to rationally take apart offending ideas, but, failing that, we will mostly settle for just shouting them down when we are among those who we feel sure will agree one way or the other. Frankly, 99% of the
I think that's a better explanation of the insults than any supposed smartness.
Thats trying to cats creationists as "defenders of the faith" while everybody else is athiests who despise god... how ever I'm a christian (baptist) and I think creationists are idiots.
Funny, the only people I see talking about creationism in this thread are the folks who are looking for an excuse to belittle creationists. But at the time I loaded the comments there were zero creationist post and 3 posts making fun of creationists.
Tell me again, who was taking the discussion off topic?
Try reading at -1. That might help the creationists show up.
Because, I believe, things like this lend support to descent-with-modification views of macroevolution. The one I'm familiar with is Tierra, and, as I recall, it is very simple. You write a single program that simply makes copies of itself, and introduces random errors into the code it replicated at random times. This is very similar to the way microevolution works. In this digital environment, though, where you can breed billions of generations in hours, new "organisms" arise which were never anticipated (and nowhere near coded beforehand).
It's a matter of debate how accurately these "digial organisms" reflect what is really going on in nature, but on the face of it they seem to show that macroevolution, i.e., specication, does occur, and perhaps occurs with less effort than people think. The jump between microevolution and macroevolution is where most evolutionary biologists and creation "scientists" split, i.e., the latter think it's impossible for one species to evolve into another.
Of course, none of this is helped by the fact that nobody has a precise idea of what exactly constitutes a "species." Anyways, this is why both sides of the fence get riled up over these "experiments" in digital evolution.
I know you posted a mostly neutral post. But by selecting to use creationist terms you lend credit to their argument where there is none. There is only evolution, micro and macro are terms the creationist use to sand box all the undeniable proof of evolution and ask we prove something else. They say speciation happens because they can't deny it. They then ask us to prove something that has nothing to do with evolution. (namely asking us to show a non microbiotic example of having one thing evolve into another).
A species only evolves, it may speciate but it will not evolve into a exsisting specie. And also, there isnt' two sides ina debate. Theres two side screamign at each other, with one side using facts figures and examples while the other side uses the bible and circular logic.
You need to examine their rhetoric closer. If they won't believe it with actual evolutionary examples before them, an artificial one won't do it either.
I don't see them changing their mind, even if all the apes in the LA zoo spontanious evolved into talking mostly hairless humanoids.
Apparently, sexual reproduction conferred some powerful advantage, given how early it developed in the history of life
I had always figured it allowed you to excise bad genes without nessasarily endign that line. So if a mutation that made you harvest 10 units more energy in envirometn x happened to occurs on one that made you die 50% of the time befor eyou could reproduce, you could seperate the two out. (easy if their on seperate chromosomes, a bit harder but still possible on the same chromosome.)
Yes they have for PC games, although not this centralized and in depth.
Many games have had statistics as in depth try this one.
Bungies made a good game props to them. But they didn't innovate that much. Their like Blizzard, they make good polished games by learning fromt he mistakes of the innovators. Their rarely innovators themselves.
.... for the retraining of people to use new iterations of MS products.
So many people support this completely false dichotomy between not need to train for MS stuff or retraining for other products.
This is nonsense of course since people do need retraining even if you remain a 100% MS serf, er, client.
So my point is, retraining costs are a red herring that MS fanboys repeat incesantly, without noticing the profitable business of the publishers of WIndows for dummies series.
Do you work in an office with non-technical people? We're technical people. To us Vi or pine or word or outlook is simply a different tool to use. To some of my co-workers email is outlook and nothing else. They sincerly beleive that e icon is the only way to the internet. I don't mean retarinign programmers, I mean retraining the secratary ect... if the current product is good enough, and the next better one is better but not significantly so, then people wont' switch.
There is no false dichonomy. Linux isn't a small change from windows.
The market created a competitor, or put another way, a competitor evolved much like a bacteria in the presence of antibiotics. MS's traditional pills dont work anymore, they've killed off what they could, allowing what remains to have room to thrive. In a way, MS created modern OSS.
OSS is a great academic tool, interesting project come out of it. It has yet to spawn a Windows killer, or even a mild flu.
"its OS is actually good and people really like it."
As much as you can make fun of it, windows is exactly what most people need. Simple OS that runs on a lot of different hardware in different price ranges, thats just good enough to do the job. It gives just enough options to seem configurable but is just rigid enough not to be over whelming. For yoru average 100 iq, with 2.5 kids and a dog it's just fine. For your power user it lacks a lot. For your tin foil hatter, Linux GURU, kernel hacker, ect.. it is the anti-thesis of all that is holy.
When that happens, Businesses will start looking at things like licensing, performance and cost of software...
Nice rose-tinted glasses. Business will take one look at how much it will cost to retrain all their non-technical people, and simply decide thats it's not worth it. With MS products, most people train at home with their home PC's. I work in an office where 90% of the people won't touch the mac in the office because it's unfamiliar and "hard" to use.
MS has become a natural monopoly, it'll be hard to shake them without huge and invasive government intervention. No matter how sweet OSX gets you can't make dumb people switch. They just aren't comfortable with change.
This might not be an issue for a game console, but for a workstation, wouldn't the Cell's context-switching overhead be rather huge? From what I have read so far, it seems each SPE has 256 KB of local storage, plus another 2 KB for the main register file (128 16-byte registers) and whatever other state information it needs. Since there are 8 of these things, we're talking over 2 MB of state to swap in and out. Would that still be considered a drop in the bucket for most scheduling schemes?
Do you really need context switch when you have 1 real processor and 8 mini processors on di? It provides a semi- hard limit to multi tasking but context switchign is only req when you assign tasks that cannot be divided up amoung the 8 mini-CPUS and the main cpu on di. So only when you have a crazy amoutn of active proccesses that require contant attention. But you can imagine a system where the OS is ont he main, and the 5 most important processes run on the first 5 sub chips while the last 3 handles anythign with context switched liek daemons ect..
How much will a PS3 cost to manufacture?
If I was a computer company, I could buy them without the game-specific stuff, load on linux, and sell them as cheep alternative computers.. but that's just me. (assuming linux and friends are compiled for CELL in the next few months of course).
The problem wiht that is a ps3 won't be anywhere close to a GP machine. It's going to require a lot of driver tweeaks, a load of hardware reconfiguration, defeat the drm. By the time someone figures hwo to do that cheap, computers will already be more powerful at a similiar cost so theres no incentive except nerd prestige.
Here's a list of the online gaming communities that are stupider than battle.net:
--
Obviously sarcasm but battle net still is better then the other match making systems because theres still enough people to find a game even in starcraft (7 years old). Warcraft 3 has a much improved match makign scheme and finding griefers is much rarer. Battle nets match makign for war 3 is better then any other I've used.
I know when people mention the Xbox-2 a group always mention backwards compatability like a crazed console fan boy and then the rest of us tell them why it would be very hard due to architectural differences. We take it as a given that the ps3 will be backwards compatable and it seems the design fo the cell seems to have backwards compatability in mind. It's veyr loosly structured to be similiar (to my primitive knowlege of the chip layouts in the ps2) to the EE chip.
I've got some Karma to burn so I'm going to say this anyway.
If you're concerned about saying this if you felt it would be too damaging to your Slashdot Karma, it pretty much explains why you think the guy shouldn't say anything remotely controversial.
Also, Slashdot Karma's not so important. Get a life.
ooh the irony. on slashdotter nitpicking a post and then telling them to get a life.
where could one accurately define a line as to what firing is appropriate and what isn't?
When one adversly effects ones employers. IE. not working, slandering company in significant way, betrayign company secrets. Ect... And the Managers are the ones to make the call on this.
Because the masses expect freedom of speech and opinion, but the people in power don't like to grant it.
To a lot of people, this is like an alarm going off. But to a lot of cynics, this is just run-of-the-mill stuff that's expected to happen regularly.
More like "Because the masses expect freedom of speech and expect not to suffer any consquences for this speech". Google didn't censor him. They fired him. An anology: It's be yoru right to protest for animal right for PETA, but it's my right to file charges if you threw paint on my leather jacket.