At the time Microsoft was hedging their bets as everyone ranted about the next generation of RISC chips storming the market. Endlessly we'd hear about how the x86 line was dead, and the only improvements would be to move to the next generation (Intel themselves was heavily focusing on RISC as well -- think of the i860).
We never did because those alternatives never delivered on their promise. Ever since 680x0 processors, the highest performance per dollar crown has been held, with only a couple of very short term or niche exceptions, by the x86 line. When given the option of running software on a variety of platforms, customers always ended up buying the x86.
Look at Linux -- so many platforms supported, yet on the desktop and up level, overwhelmingly it's run on x86. This has been the cast over its history. Part of the problem is the consumer thinks "I've spent X$ on software. If I move to platform B I would have wasted X$." so on of the primary reasons we're still with x86 is investment in software.
As for linux. choice isn't good. People get overwhelmed easily. So anythign more then 2 or 3 choices makes them go cross eyed and buy windows. I myself operate mostly on windows occasionally on red hat/mandrake and very rarely mac OSX.
The post mentions RISC is easier to make a compiler for. The x86 isn't strictly CISC and the difference between CISC and RISC had become less meaningful int he past decade since most instructions are translated into a RISC like micro code anyways. Power derivatives had some major advantages in design philosophy over the x86 but there wasn't enough advancement to keep up with the x86. Tons of money + a inferior starting design can still equal a faster end chip. a core2duo is still faster then a similiarly priced G5.
I prefer real bread to any "white" bread. Rye, sour dough, French bread. ect.. "white" bread feels like I'm eating peanut butter without the peanuts after a few chews.
Not the chinese. Their favorite method is to find someone of chinese origins and then convince them that sharing information is a duty of one sort another, patriotic or for the good of any family they still have back in China. That's an over simplification, but the chinese methods are much more passive and much harder to "catch" than traditional western espionage techniques.
I think you paint with a over broad brush. Remember the guy they arrested for espinoge had those charges dropped. I wouldn't over estimate Chinese patriotism to their homeland. Ther eis a reason why WE left.
I guess I can understand polygraphy IF it's at all accurate. After all, they are dealing with dangerous (from a proliferation standpoint) materials and experiments critical to national security. As for drug testing, I think it should only happen if an employee is exhibiting other problems at work, if then. And it also depends what drug is being tested for. Is there any evidence that enjoying the occasional herbal treat harms work performance in any material way?
I think a drug test is meaningless. I know a significant numbe rof recreational pot and E users to function fine at work. I think a credit check is better. One check and it will tell you the likelyhood of Scientist x selling yoru secrets to the chinese/russians/islamists/EU. People who tend to do these things tend to have financial problems ot start with.
Actually, if MS killed off Office for the Mac, it wouldn't make a lot of difference. People use Macs for audio, video and graphics work, which you can't do in Windows.
Actually the majority of the tools needed to do video/audio on a Mac have equivilents ont he PC. The Artistic types simply prefer the mac or need retraining to use a PC as efficiently. To them it's not worth it but there isn't a real reason for the difference, and hasn't been for some time. Some of the nice Max onyl tools do provide some reason but there are equivalents on the PC side.
Releasing OSX for the PC would allow Apple to compete with MS on MS's own level without hampering the end user with Apples expensive hardware requirements.
About 50% of the Apple advantage is the hardware and how it "just works". The majority of stability issues on a non malware/worm infested Windows Pc is due to poor drivers. Apple would be stupid to step into that mire.
First off, I'm not european. Not even of european decent. I'm not sure where you got that impression from. I'm canadian. If moral high ground is needed then I suppose thats it. I don't think so. It's a another red herring. Weather I'm from Canada, England, or Russia a critisism based on fact is a valid critisism regaurdless of the source.
Secondly, I didn't notice any international feeling the US should have been in Aceh in indonesia or Somalia. The US wasn't and had no interest to and as far as I've seen no one wanted them there. Perhaps the Aceh penisula residents might have liked the help but There wasn't a widespread international outcry to have the US there. As for Somalia, Dalair would have liked a significant force and a free hand to quell the genocide btu again there isn't any widspread desire for a US force to do so. You are correct that it's become popular to critisise the Us but don't mistake critisism for hate. It's less hate then annoyance at the immense hubris and self importance of the Americans. You do far far less for the world then your media says you do and most of the world would prefer your absence then yoru presence. The exceptions being S. Korea, most Japanese, and Taiwan. Isreal also doesn't mind your money.
Thirdly, I pointed out the UN was a corrupt and ineffective organization. I said they grumble a lot about UN payments but I don't care ifthe US does or not. The UN isn't very useful anymore now that the current 4 world powers are mroe or less allied. The EU, Russia, China, and the US. The UN has become a forumn for petty dictators to feel self important.
Forthly, You were much less significatn in WWI and WWII as your history books imply. It's your supplies (bought at a fair market value) and the threat of your re-enforcement that had a more of an effect in the european theatre. In the pacific theatre in WWII, the victory was almost all yours. But in europe your effect was more psychological then military. In both instances you came late to the fight, when the enemy was already on their heals and then went on to try and claim glory. If you look at the casualty and kill counts of each nations or even the participations in major victories you'll notice a particular absence of Americans. The threat of 10,000 men a month re-enforcing the british did more to the germans then any particular battalion of Americans themselves. Most of the Intelligence, code breaking and actual war was fought by the russian, the british common wealth and allied free european nations in both wars in europe. Most of the turning points in WWI were bought with Canadian and Australian blood. Most of terrortorial gain in WWII was done by the very same countries.
You might was to view more info about those wars. also viet nam. If you want to use vietnam as a example of the US maintaining it's commitments you'd have to be stupid. Remember the US pulled out after cobbling together a farce of an armistice. Months later the N. Vietnamese overwhelmed the S. vietnamese and caused a massive refugee situation. It was a prime example of a country being abbandonned after the US got tired of playing cowboys and communists.
The US is a economic power with a large military. It often breaks international agreements such as their free trade agreement. And the last 40 years of it's history has severely tarnished it's good image it had before the 60's. The majority of this can be attributed to the cavalier nature of it's foriegn policy and it's inability to see it's own faults.
I do. I vote. What else would you like me to do, rebel against the government? Sorry, not happening.
No, just advising to to stop tyring to wash your hands of yoru gov actions. Vote the other way would also help.
I would agree, but that's not exactly what you said to begin with. You said there were self-serving policies, and to that I replied that there's no reason why a government wouldn't be self-serving. And you cannot even try to say that European governments have not done this in the past, do not do it in the present, will not do it in the future, or would not do it to a greater extent if they had the power. to say that would be incredibly foolish.
Complete red herring, what does europes past have to do with the words anger at the US's present. The Europeans currently to keep the agreements they sign. The US will renege. See NAFTa vs the US tarrifs on softwood lumber. The WTO already said all tarrifs were illegal but they mostly persist. It is a pretty big mark on the US reputation.
I really hope this isn't what they teach in history books where you come from. First of all, whenever a problem arises somewhere in the world, we ALWAYS hear European countries complaining that the US doesn't do enough to help. I'm sorry if your media doesn't expose you to such things, or maybe it does and you don't listen, but it always happens. Secondly, America rebuilt/built _several_ nations? Okay, so we come and defeat your enemy TWICE when Europe has been the cause of near global annihilation (hmm, both world wars), then rebuilt all of Europe and protected you from the Soviets. No, there's no need to thank us or anything. Instead you should just stab us in the back and complain all the time. That's a great way to treat the people who died for you.
I think it's your media that been lying to you. I've been to europe, Asia and south america. Of everyone I've ever spoken to its not "God why doesn't the US do more" and more "God the US sure are bastards. I wish they'd get the fuck out." I think you've mistaken the UN calls for the US to pay it's over due UN fees for a plea for the US to do more. It isn't. It's just one ineffective corrupt organization asking another ineffective corrupt organization to pay monies it owes.
Now this is my favorite part. Where did you learn this "leave us the fuck alone" attitude from? Was it from the Africans whose continent Europe split up between the major powers? Or maybe the South Africans who were massacred (men, women, and children) by the British? Or perhaps the native Indians whose country was persecuted by the British for many years? Oh, I got it, maybe it was from the Americans who got sick of your self-serving policies, unfair trading practices, and incredible taxes and then threw you out to establish our own nation. Really sucks to see us doing so well, doesn't it?
All arabs I have ever med hold this opinion. As does all main land chinese, as does the europeans I've met. The attitude has been unanimous. No one one wants you there intefereing and profiteering. You don't help, you sell snake oil and kill people. Britian and europe did that in the past, had massive rebelions and could no longer maintain it. You'll notice, it seem America is learning the same lesson: colonialism is expensive.
This does not negate the fact that the PS3's "amazing blu ray optical disc!" at 50gb is effectively useless because the machine has 256/256mb of ram to work with, so all that extra storage space is BUNK unless the disc / drive is terrifyingly fast (it's not) and streams like GTA3 OR if the machine has / had more ram (it doesn't)
The PS3 may or may not be cool in some other areas but from a game perspective, unless you're talking FMV, the huge optical drive is abso-freaking-loutely useless.
The 360 has a similiar limitation of 512 megs of system ram shared between CPU/GPU. The 360 has 700 mhz GDDR3 ram, while the Ps3 has 256 of 700 GDDR3 RAM and 256 of XDR DRAM. It's split betewwn GPU and CPU but the GPU can access the XDR ram. The HD will basically make your argument useless as the slow optical speeds would be offset byt the universal availability of of an HD. The blu ray just make multi disc games less likely. With dialogue being a major part of most RPGS and Adventures games we may see a lot more of the space on a DVD taken up by that, and perhaps HD textures. Although a you sort of pointed out the low memory size would require either sophisticated texture caching.
I think this community is a bit hard ont he machine. It will be a bitch to program for well. But it does have a slight apparent lead over the 360 with a bigger distinction possible if they can work out what to use those 6 available SPU's for.
By the way, the existence of Gitmo is not a crime, and it was created a long time ago, it's not something new. The way they treat prisoners and the abuses of freedom that go on are crimes, and you may be surprised to know that a lot of Americans disapprove of these policies. In fact, there are millions of Americans who hate the policies of the government that have gotten us into so much trouble, but our frustration and anger are directed at the right place: the people who are responsible for these actions. Not a whole country in general, stereotyping 300 million people.
Your representatives act on yrou behalf. You cannot wash yoru hands of it so easily. Do somethign about it or deal with the stigma.
I think what you're forgetting is that every country works towards its own interests, and all European nations have gone through the same things, including tremendous amounts of genocide, splitting up continents into parts of their domain, and ridiculous import taxes as well as unfair trading policies. The only difference is that the US is the one with the power now, so the US can better do these things now, as compared with how the old European empires used to be able to, but now cannot (without creating the EU).
Your forgetting that it's rarely in the interests of the american people in general these things are done. Iraq, the soft wood lumber tarrifs, and Corn crop subsidies are polcies and actions that hurt americans in general while enrching a few individuals.
You wanna talk about hypocrisy? Every country out there is hypocritical. A lot of European nations yell at America for not doing enough when something goes wrong somewhere on the planet, but then get all pissy when America actually does step in and do something. Well you can't have it both ways. Not to mention we give more to help other countries than any other place in the world.
Actually the critisism is more along the lines of "leave us the fuck alone" as opposed to "why aren't you helping". I haven't heard much about people thinking america should have helped. The general concensus is that most of the world would rather not take your heavily conditional help. America did rebuild/build several nations, Germany, Japan, and Isreal partly but the last 40 years or so, you have not been able or willing to do that.
Its statistically omprobable to seperate a munchinking foul mouthed 12 year old from a newbie. The Xbox match making system does not solve this. Just as battle.net, lvl 1 is meaningless and your just as likely to be throughly ass kicked by a lvl 1 or a lvl 15 only the top tiers are meaningful.
Actually, it mostly because America is the center of the global corprate empires and tends to bully other nations in the persuit of it's interests. People resent being meddled with (all of the middle east) and resent being puppets (most of the US small allies), they also resent unfair deals (notable free trade violations of the US), cavalier foriegn polciies (the bush admin has a pretty cavalier attitude), and hippocritical actions (Chastizing china on human rights then condoning torture and creating Guitmo and invading Iraq).
This bluray crap is just a joke, look.... go to any torrent site, and you can already get 4-7 ps3 games, all under 8gig.
So much for this "GAMES REQUIRE BLURAY" crap.
The only reason backward compat sux is because MS switched from Nvidia to ATI, now if MS just paid that $30 per 360 for an aditional Nvidia original chip in each box you would have 100% backward compat since emulating the pentium would be a snap. I agree thats MSs biggest failures is to kill the original xbox. They still could have made a small xbox and cheap to all the 3rd world/cheaper nations. NOTE to MS: its still worth growing your cheaper pregen base so that they can be a future updater. Sony has at least that right with the ps2 still going strong.
Oddly no one seems to bring this up.
MS : promises Backwards compatability response: Slashdot is optimistic Sony : Promises backwards compatability response: Slashdot is skeptical
MS : Delivers on a few dozen games, largely ignores the rest response: Slashdot Says it was a engineering feat Sony: Delivers Bc on all but a few dozen games response: Slashdot says Sony dropped the ball on those titles
It's not quiet so clear cut because we don't like the 360 either. But the 360 didn't give you BC, they gave us limited emulation of a few titles. the Wii and PS3 had BC.
From the almost viral effect the Wii is having, in a couple of years we might see 100 million households with Wiis that are just getting bored of it. Remember the old shampoo commercial? "I told 2 friends, then they told 2 friends" etc. Every last person who's been over to play with my Wii (insert joke here) is now lining up every weekend trying to get one. Once they have it, every one of their friends will be doing the same.
I've noticed this effect with The DS. I bring it over with nintendogs and all of a sudden every girl in the room is surrounding me and asking how much it is.
I should have bought stock in nintendo, I sold 12 DS's to my circle of friends already.
Peripheral hardware does 1/10 the business of out of the box hardware. Even if both Sony and MS ship a wiimote ripp off, the adoption rate will be less then 100% and that means Nintendo will maintaina lead. Just as the HD-DVD add-on will not be a selling factor for the 360 but bluray will be for the PS3 becaus it's out of the box. Ditto with the wiimote and any sony/MS wiimote clones.
Online gaming still doesn't appeal to a wider audience. The whole "ass kicked by foul mouthed 12 year old" factor discourages wide enthusiasm for online gaming. Xbox live is only used by about 1/2 of all 360's and less then 1/5 of all xboxes. I mean the free accounts. Less then half of those renew. It's nto a huge motivating factor.
Good point, although its moot to the end user, isn't it? Worth pointing out that the PS2 accomplished this in exactly the same way - the audio chip for the PS2 was actually a shrunken main CPU from a PS1
mentioned as much in my post. 150MB extra background image is a far cry from 1536MB extra RAM though.
Upon reading the rest of that thread, I am very clearly out of my depth. Apologies for my hamfisted attempts to explain why consoles can get away with less memory.
Part of the reason a PC/Linux boxen/Mac needs more ram is context switches. Even a high priority process like a game still context switches to the OS once in a while. So that means you either have to dump all of the game to disk then page in the Os stuff or else you get enough ram to put the OS in memory and only page game content. For a Console there isn't the same massive context switch so you can get away with much less. There is a significant difference. at idle state my Os is 100mb in memory (well it's XP), virtual memory and pending disc writes all have to be kept there to, making 512 mandatory and 2gb greatly deesired. A console can have 100-1500 mb less. the only thing a console must put in memory is textures, game data.
There were all kinds of promises around the PS2 that were not met; you'll quite often see someone mention how the PS2 was supposed to have "Toy Story graphics in Realtime" or that games like Metal Gear were supposed to be so detailed and interactive that you could "shoot paperclips off of a desk".,/i>
You may want to sorce those comments. The toy story one is a common one that has been mis attributed. That was gaming press. Sony never said that. Ditto with MGS.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect he meant the quote to be taken as "Think of how great games will be in the future" but I think it really says "You're paying $600 for a system based on promised performance which the PS3 will never meet".
What did they actually promise? They haven't been hyping any actual numbers or targets. Just an idea. So you can you not live up ot "better graphics" and "more complicated AI". The Ps2 did actually deliver on almost all of it's promises with a bit of a caviet that the AA sucked. Think MGS3, Ico, Shadow of the collosus, FFXII. All delivered solid graphics on ancient hardware.
As odd as the plot was I cared a lot when Aeris died in FFVII. I got upset that the nameless one was condemned to hell and Deionarra story in torment upset me too. The Atmosphere of fratal frame also affected me. I agree completely it's all about well crafted story and atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
We never did because those alternatives never delivered on their promise. Ever since 680x0 processors, the highest performance per dollar crown has been held, with only a couple of very short term or niche exceptions, by the x86 line. When given the option of running software on a variety of platforms, customers always ended up buying the x86.
Look at Linux -- so many platforms supported, yet on the desktop and up level, overwhelmingly it's run on x86. This has been the cast over its history. Part of the problem is the consumer thinks "I've spent X$ on software. If I move to platform B I would have wasted X$." so on of the primary reasons we're still with x86 is investment in software.
As for linux. choice isn't good. People get overwhelmed easily. So anythign more then 2 or 3 choices makes them go cross eyed and buy windows. I myself operate mostly on windows occasionally on red hat/mandrake and very rarely mac OSX.
The post mentions RISC is easier to make a compiler for. The x86 isn't strictly CISC and the difference between CISC and RISC had become less meaningful int he past decade since most instructions are translated into a RISC like micro code anyways. Power derivatives had some major advantages in design philosophy over the x86 but there wasn't enough advancement to keep up with the x86. Tons of money + a inferior starting design can still equal a faster end chip. a core2duo is still faster then a similiarly priced G5.
I prefer real bread to any "white" bread. Rye, sour dough, French bread. ect.. "white" bread feels like I'm eating peanut butter without the peanuts after a few chews.
Not the chinese. Their favorite method is to find someone of chinese origins and then convince them that sharing information is a duty of one sort another, patriotic or for the good of any family they still have back in China. That's an over simplification, but the chinese methods are much more passive and much harder to "catch" than traditional western espionage techniques.
I think you paint with a over broad brush. Remember the guy they arrested for espinoge had those charges dropped. I wouldn't over estimate Chinese patriotism to their homeland. Ther eis a reason why WE left.
I guess I can understand polygraphy IF it's at all accurate. After all, they are dealing with dangerous (from a proliferation standpoint) materials and experiments critical to national security. As for drug testing, I think it should only happen if an employee is exhibiting other problems at work, if then. And it also depends what drug is being tested for. Is there any evidence that enjoying the occasional herbal treat harms work performance in any material way?
I think a drug test is meaningless. I know a significant numbe rof recreational pot and E users to function fine at work. I think a credit check is better. One check and it will tell you the likelyhood of Scientist x selling yoru secrets to the chinese/russians/islamists/EU. People who tend to do these things tend to have financial problems ot start with.
Actually, if MS killed off Office for the Mac, it wouldn't make a lot of difference. People use Macs for audio, video and graphics work, which you can't do in Windows.
Actually the majority of the tools needed to do video/audio on a Mac have equivilents ont he PC. The Artistic types simply prefer the mac or need retraining to use a PC as efficiently. To them it's not worth it but there isn't a real reason for the difference, and hasn't been for some time. Some of the nice Max onyl tools do provide some reason but there are equivalents on the PC side.
Releasing OSX for the PC would allow Apple to compete with MS on MS's own level without hampering the end user with Apples expensive hardware requirements.
About 50% of the Apple advantage is the hardware and how it "just works". The majority of stability issues on a non malware/worm infested Windows Pc is due to poor drivers. Apple would be stupid to step into that mire.
First off, I'm not european. Not even of european decent. I'm not sure where you got that impression from. I'm canadian. If moral high ground is needed then I suppose thats it. I don't think so. It's a another red herring. Weather I'm from Canada, England, or Russia a critisism based on fact is a valid critisism regaurdless of the source.
Secondly, I didn't notice any international feeling the US should have been in Aceh in indonesia or Somalia. The US wasn't and had no interest to and as far as I've seen no one wanted them there. Perhaps the Aceh penisula residents might have liked the help but There wasn't a widespread international outcry to have the US there. As for Somalia, Dalair would have liked a significant force and a free hand to quell the genocide btu again there isn't any widspread desire for a US force to do so. You are correct that it's become popular to critisise the Us but don't mistake critisism for hate. It's less hate then annoyance at the immense hubris and self importance of the Americans. You do far far less for the world then your media says you do and most of the world would prefer your absence then yoru presence. The exceptions being S. Korea, most Japanese, and Taiwan. Isreal also doesn't mind your money.
Thirdly, I pointed out the UN was a corrupt and ineffective organization. I said they grumble a lot about UN payments but I don't care ifthe US does or not. The UN isn't very useful anymore now that the current 4 world powers are mroe or less allied. The EU, Russia, China, and the US. The UN has become a forumn for petty dictators to feel self important.
Forthly, You were much less significatn in WWI and WWII as your history books imply. It's your supplies (bought at a fair market value) and the threat of your re-enforcement that had a more of an effect in the european theatre. In the pacific theatre in WWII, the victory was almost all yours. But in europe your effect was more psychological then military. In both instances you came late to the fight, when the enemy was already on their heals and then went on to try and claim glory. If you look at the casualty and kill counts of each nations or even the participations in major victories you'll notice a particular absence of Americans. The threat of 10,000 men a month re-enforcing the british did more to the germans then any particular battalion of Americans themselves. Most of the Intelligence, code breaking and actual war was fought by the russian, the british common wealth and allied free european nations in both wars in europe. Most of the turning points in WWI were bought with Canadian and Australian blood. Most of terrortorial gain in WWII was done by the very same countries.
You might was to view more info about those wars. also viet nam. If you want to use vietnam as a example of the US maintaining it's commitments you'd have to be stupid. Remember the US pulled out after cobbling together a farce of an armistice. Months later the N. Vietnamese overwhelmed the S. vietnamese and caused a massive refugee situation. It was a prime example of a country being abbandonned after the US got tired of playing cowboys and communists.
The US is a economic power with a large military. It often breaks international agreements such as their free trade agreement. And the last 40 years of it's history has severely tarnished it's good image it had before the 60's. The majority of this can be attributed to the cavalier nature of it's foriegn policy and it's inability to see it's own faults.
I do. I vote. What else would you like me to do, rebel against the government? Sorry, not happening.
No, just advising to to stop tyring to wash your hands of yoru gov actions. Vote the other way would also help.
I would agree, but that's not exactly what you said to begin with. You said there were self-serving policies, and to that I replied that there's no reason why a government wouldn't be self-serving. And you cannot even try to say that European governments have not done this in the past, do not do it in the present, will not do it in the future, or would not do it to a greater extent if they had the power. to say that would be incredibly foolish.
Complete red herring, what does europes past have to do with the words anger at the US's present. The Europeans currently to keep the agreements they sign. The US will renege. See NAFTa vs the US tarrifs on softwood lumber. The WTO already said all tarrifs were illegal but they mostly persist. It is a pretty big mark on the US reputation.
I really hope this isn't what they teach in history books where you come from. First of all, whenever a problem arises somewhere in the world, we ALWAYS hear European countries complaining that the US doesn't do enough to help. I'm sorry if your media doesn't expose you to such things, or maybe it does and you don't listen, but it always happens. Secondly, America rebuilt/built _several_ nations? Okay, so we come and defeat your enemy TWICE when Europe has been the cause of near global annihilation (hmm, both world wars), then rebuilt all of Europe and protected you from the Soviets. No, there's no need to thank us or anything. Instead you should just stab us in the back and complain all the time. That's a great way to treat the people who died for you.
I think it's your media that been lying to you. I've been to europe, Asia and south america. Of everyone I've ever spoken to its not "God why doesn't the US do more" and more "God the US sure are bastards. I wish they'd get the fuck out." I think you've mistaken the UN calls for the US to pay it's over due UN fees for a plea for the US to do more. It isn't. It's just one ineffective corrupt organization asking another ineffective corrupt organization to pay monies it owes.
Now this is my favorite part. Where did you learn this "leave us the fuck alone" attitude from? Was it from the Africans whose continent Europe split up between the major powers? Or maybe the South Africans who were massacred (men, women, and children) by the British? Or perhaps the native Indians whose country was persecuted by the British for many years? Oh, I got it, maybe it was from the Americans who got sick of your self-serving policies, unfair trading practices, and incredible taxes and then threw you out to establish our own nation. Really sucks to see us doing so well, doesn't it?
All arabs I have ever med hold this opinion. As does all main land chinese, as does the europeans I've met. The attitude has been unanimous. No one one wants you there intefereing and profiteering. You don't help, you sell snake oil and kill people. Britian and europe did that in the past, had massive rebelions and could no longer maintain it. You'll notice, it seem America is learning the same lesson: colonialism is expensive.
This does not negate the fact that the PS3's "amazing blu ray optical disc!" at 50gb is effectively useless because the machine has 256/256mb of ram to work with, so all that extra storage space is BUNK unless the disc / drive is terrifyingly fast (it's not) and streams like GTA3 OR if the machine has / had more ram (it doesn't)
The PS3 may or may not be cool in some other areas but from a game perspective, unless you're talking FMV, the huge optical drive is abso-freaking-loutely useless.
The 360 has a similiar limitation of 512 megs of system ram shared between CPU/GPU. The 360 has 700 mhz GDDR3 ram, while the Ps3 has 256 of 700 GDDR3 RAM and 256 of XDR DRAM. It's split betewwn GPU and CPU but the GPU can access the XDR ram. The HD will basically make your argument useless as the slow optical speeds would be offset byt the universal availability of of an HD. The blu ray just make multi disc games less likely. With dialogue being a major part of most RPGS and Adventures games we may see a lot more of the space on a DVD taken up by that, and perhaps HD textures. Although a you sort of pointed out the low memory size would require either sophisticated texture caching.
I think this community is a bit hard ont he machine. It will be a bitch to program for well. But it does have a slight apparent lead over the 360 with a bigger distinction possible if they can work out what to use those 6 available SPU's for.
By the way, the existence of Gitmo is not a crime, and it was created a long time ago, it's not something new. The way they treat prisoners and the abuses of freedom that go on are crimes, and you may be surprised to know that a lot of Americans disapprove of these policies. In fact, there are millions of Americans who hate the policies of the government that have gotten us into so much trouble, but our frustration and anger are directed at the right place: the people who are responsible for these actions. Not a whole country in general, stereotyping 300 million people.
Your representatives act on yrou behalf. You cannot wash yoru hands of it so easily. Do somethign about it or deal with the stigma.
I think what you're forgetting is that every country works towards its own interests, and all European nations have gone through the same things, including tremendous amounts of genocide, splitting up continents into parts of their domain, and ridiculous import taxes as well as unfair trading policies. The only difference is that the US is the one with the power now, so the US can better do these things now, as compared with how the old European empires used to be able to, but now cannot (without creating the EU).
Your forgetting that it's rarely in the interests of the american people in general these things are done. Iraq, the soft wood lumber tarrifs, and Corn crop subsidies are polcies and actions that hurt americans in general while enrching a few individuals.
You wanna talk about hypocrisy? Every country out there is hypocritical. A lot of European nations yell at America for not doing enough when something goes wrong somewhere on the planet, but then get all pissy when America actually does step in and do something. Well you can't have it both ways. Not to mention we give more to help other countries than any other place in the world.
Actually the critisism is more along the lines of "leave us the fuck alone" as opposed to "why aren't you helping". I haven't heard much about people thinking america should have helped. The general concensus is that most of the world would rather not take your heavily conditional help. America did rebuild/build several nations, Germany, Japan, and Isreal partly but the last 40 years or so, you have not been able or willing to do that.
Its statistically omprobable to seperate a munchinking foul mouthed 12 year old from a newbie. The Xbox match making system does not solve this. Just as battle.net, lvl 1 is meaningless and your just as likely to be throughly ass kicked by a lvl 1 or a lvl 15 only the top tiers are meaningful.
Actually, it mostly because America is the center of the global corprate empires and tends to bully other nations in the persuit of it's interests. People resent being meddled with (all of the middle east) and resent being puppets (most of the US small allies), they also resent unfair deals (notable free trade violations of the US), cavalier foriegn polciies (the bush admin has a pretty cavalier attitude), and hippocritical actions (Chastizing china on human rights then condoning torture and creating Guitmo and invading Iraq).
Everyoen hates a hippocrite.
I,>Dude, stop posting on behalf of sony.
This bluray crap is just a joke, look.... go to any torrent site, and you can already get 4-7 ps3 games, all under 8gig.
So much for this "GAMES REQUIRE BLURAY" crap.
The only reason backward compat sux is because MS switched from Nvidia to ATI, now if MS just paid that $30 per 360 for an aditional
Nvidia original chip in each box you would have 100% backward compat since emulating the pentium would be a snap. I agree thats MSs
biggest failures is to kill the original xbox. They still could have made a small xbox and cheap to all the 3rd world/cheaper nations.
NOTE to MS: its still worth growing your cheaper pregen base so that they can be a future updater. Sony has at least that right
with the ps2 still going strong.
Oddly no one seems to bring this up.
MS : promises Backwards compatability
response: Slashdot is optimistic
Sony : Promises backwards compatability
response: Slashdot is skeptical
MS : Delivers on a few dozen games, largely ignores the rest
response: Slashdot Says it was a engineering feat
Sony: Delivers Bc on all but a few dozen games
response: Slashdot says Sony dropped the ball on those titles
It's not quiet so clear cut because we don't like the 360 either. But the 360 didn't give you BC, they gave us limited emulation of a few titles. the Wii and PS3 had BC.
From the almost viral effect the Wii is having, in a couple of years we might see 100 million households with Wiis that are just getting bored of it. Remember the old shampoo commercial? "I told 2 friends, then they told 2 friends" etc. Every last person who's been over to play with my Wii (insert joke here) is now lining up every weekend trying to get one. Once they have it, every one of their friends will be doing the same.
I've noticed this effect with The DS. I bring it over with nintendogs and all of a sudden every girl in the room is surrounding me and asking how much it is.
I should have bought stock in nintendo, I sold 12 DS's to my circle of friends already.
Peripheral hardware does 1/10 the business of out of the box hardware. Even if both Sony and MS ship a wiimote ripp off, the adoption rate will be less then 100% and that means Nintendo will maintaina lead. Just as the HD-DVD add-on will not be a selling factor for the 360 but bluray will be for the PS3 becaus it's out of the box. Ditto with the wiimote and any sony/MS wiimote clones.
Online gaming still doesn't appeal to a wider audience. The whole "ass kicked by foul mouthed 12 year old" factor discourages wide enthusiasm for online gaming. Xbox live is only used by about 1/2 of all 360's and less then 1/5 of all xboxes. I mean the free accounts. Less then half of those renew. It's nto a huge motivating factor.
Actually, I think the Final Fantasies (post-12) are going back to Nintendo.
No, the Wii is getting a FF: crystal chronicles sequel. !3 if confirmed to be PS3 exclusive. no plans after that so far.
If I remember correctly Harry Potter was always going to be seven books.
And Guid^H^H^H^H Voldemort shot first.
Good point, although its moot to the end user, isn't it? Worth pointing out that the PS2 accomplished this in exactly the same way - the audio chip for the PS2 was actually a shrunken main CPU from a PS1
You mean I/O controller.
mentioned as much in my post. 150MB extra background image is a far cry from 1536MB extra RAM though.
Upon reading the rest of that thread, I am very clearly out of my depth. Apologies for my hamfisted attempts to explain why consoles can get away with less memory.
Part of the reason a PC/Linux boxen/Mac needs more ram is context switches. Even a high priority process like a game still context switches to the OS once in a while. So that means you either have to dump all of the game to disk then page in the Os stuff or else you get enough ram to put the OS in memory and only page game content. For a Console there isn't the same massive context switch so you can get away with much less. There is a significant difference. at idle state my Os is 100mb in memory (well it's XP), virtual memory and pending disc writes all have to be kept there to, making 512 mandatory and 2gb greatly deesired. A console can have 100-1500 mb less. the only thing a console must put in memory is textures, game data.
There were all kinds of promises around the PS2 that were not met; you'll quite often see someone mention how the PS2 was supposed to have "Toy Story graphics in Realtime" or that games like Metal Gear were supposed to be so detailed and interactive that you could "shoot paperclips off of a desk".,/i>
You may want to sorce those comments. The toy story one is a common one that has been mis attributed. That was gaming press. Sony never said that. Ditto with MGS.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect he meant the quote to be taken as "Think of how great games will be in the future" but I think it really says "You're paying $600 for a system based on promised performance which the PS3 will never meet".
What did they actually promise? They haven't been hyping any actual numbers or targets. Just an idea. So you can you not live up ot "better graphics" and "more complicated AI". The Ps2 did actually deliver on almost all of it's promises with a bit of a caviet that the AA sucked. Think MGS3, Ico, Shadow of the collosus, FFXII. All delivered solid graphics on ancient hardware.
As odd as the plot was I cared a lot when Aeris died in FFVII. I got upset that the nameless one was condemned to hell and Deionarra story in torment upset me too. The Atmosphere of fratal frame also affected me. I agree completely it's all about well crafted story and atmosphere.