Video game releases aren't at all strict. The release lists sent to stores only have the ship date on them. The games get sold whenever they get in stock. I remember when Mario Sunshine came out, GameStop called me immediately after the shipment came in. When I got there they handed me a copy straight out of the shipping box.
I've noticed that GameStop usually gets games in the day after the ship date, whereas stores like Sam Goody get it 2-3 days after the ship date. In one case I can remember them getting a game in a week later than GameStop did.
I was at an SGI event about 2 years ago. I think it was a tour showing off their new graphics hardware. I met one of their higher up sales managers and talked with him for a while. Everything suggestion I made about trying to get into higher volume products got shot down with "SGI is not that type of company." He seemed fully aware that the number of customers for their products kept shrinking, but it seemed like they prefered it that way.
Oh, I also asked him if they had any plans of offering Opteron systems. He gave two reasons why they wouldn't. The first was that Itanium was capable of scaling up to around 100 processors in one system, whereas Opteron topped out at 8. The other reason was it would piss off Intel.
I downloaded Fedora 4 about 2 weeks ago using Azuerus. Grabbed the CD isos, then when it finished decided that I wanted the DVD so I downloaded that shortly after. Each downloaded at 1.2MB/s sustained, and only took somewhere around 30-60 seconds to ramp up to speed. This is with a cable modem. I've never tried anything to find out, but I'm assuming my connection was the limiting factor in my download speed.
Actually, a disk is not bootable unless the last two bytes of the first sector are 55h AAh. So theoretically, the system should skip over the disk if you change those bytes. I've never actually bothered to try it though.
I'm assuming the message has just existed from the days when hard disks were rare, and no one ever bothered to change it.
Honestly, if it's unreasonable to expect the government to pay for a mechanic to fix my car, why is it reasonable to expect the government to pay for a doctor to fix my broken leg?
Here's a few possible reasons off the top of my head. I'm not saying they are or are not correct, just tossing out whatever ideas I can think of:
1) A car is a luxury. You can argue about the practicality of living where you do without a car, but you always have the option of moving somewhere where you don't need a car.
Your leg isn't really a luxury, it's a basic part of you. You don't have the option of moving somewhere where you don't need to walk.
2) If you car breaks down, you have the option of waiting a while to save up money to fix it. If your car battery dies today, the only disadvantage to waiting a month to replace it is you can't use the car in the mean time.
If you break your leg, you have to get it treated right away. You will have serious consequences if you wait a month to treat it.
3) Getting a new car isn't a big deal. Odds are if you buy a new car it'll be better than the one you had.
You can't really get a new leg (at least not one that's comparable to a real one). We can't turn people into Darth Vader.
4) Society as a whole is better off if you don't fix your car and use mass transportation instead. Less pollution that way, and mass transportation tends to work better the more people there are using it.
If you don't treat your broken leg, you become more dependent on the people around you. More people with untreated broken legs just means a greater burden on the people around them.
Zelda: Majora's Mask required the RAM Expansion. Perfect Dark technically didn't require it, but without it you couldn't play the single player mode, and multiplayer was limited to 2 players.
Have you not been paying attention to the entire point of the thread? The issue being discussed is what could Apple do to make OS X not boot on a standard PC. We're not talking about making the systems entirely incompatible, just making it hard to get the system started.
When you boot a modern PC, it turns on with the hardware set up just like the original XT. A20 line disabled, crappy cascaded interrupt and DMA controllers in use, etc. Yes, a modern OS will disable that stuff as part of the boot process, but it does have to work with the old stuff for the early stages of the boot process.
As to the physical memory map, that certainly makes a big difference on the boot process. See zImage vs bzImage in the Linux kernel. You still have to load your kernel and do a decent amount of setup work within the 640KB limit before you can enable virtual memory.
So as you said, this stuff isn't really an issue once the OS is running. But the whole discussion is about making the boot process different.
I'll be very surprised if Intel fabricate a specialised x86 CPU just for them.
Why not? Although the Xbox CPU is based off a P3, it isn't a standard one. Custom cache size that falls between the Celeron and P3 in size. Possibly other differences, but I don't know for sure.
Intel gave MS an extremely low price in order to ensure AMD didn't get the contract instead. I would expect Apple's prices to be more in line with the prices other OEMs pay, so Intel could better afford a slightly customized chip for Apple.
Remember, a PC today is still based on the design of an XT. You've got bizarre things such as the 20th bit of the CPU addressing being disabled at boot time. Multiple interrupt controllers and DMA controllers cascaded off each other. You reboot a PC by sending a signal to the keyboard controller.
PC motherboards are really weirdly designed, and have accumulated quite the collection of weird hacks to work around the early flaws. Since Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility with older PCs, they can quite simply design a motherboard without all that crap in it. Enable the A20 line at boot. Replace the DMA and Interrupt controllers with better ones. Get rid of the memory gap between 640KB and 1MB.
Get rid of the legacy PC crap and it'll require some rather serious hacking to get the code to run on a standard PC.
You're forgetting one major factor about the CPU that does matter - endianness. You don't really have to know anything about endian issues if you are writing code that only runs on one type of CPU, and does not use the internet.
Take the following C code snippet:
FILE *file; int x = 1; file = fopen("test"); fwrite(&x, sizeof(int), 1, file); fclose(file);
Run it on an Intel CPU then on a PowerPC. Look at the contents of the file created. On the Intel CPU, you'll get 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00. On the PowerPC you'll get 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01. What one CPU sees as 1 the other sees as 2^24.
That's a huge issue with data stored to disk or sent over the network.
And it's not the open source stuff that's critical for the CPU switch to work. That stuff isn't why people use a Mac. It's Photoshop, Quark, etc. Some of the major Mac software was very slow to get ported to OS X. This port shouldn't be as bad to do, but it comes down to how willing the companies are to go along with it.
While Luigi's Mansion was short, it was the right length for what it was. They would've need to expand a lot on what Luigi could do to make the game longer. I always felt the game should've been released for $30 or so rather than $50, at which point the length wouldn't such an issue.
Wind Waker was rushed to release in time for the Christmas season in Japan. It's pretty clear it was intended to be longer - I think I heard 2 dungeons were cut. The obvious place for one of them is when you are looking for Jabun (or whatever the name of that giant fish is). You come to an island with nothing on it, then are sent somewhere else and Jabun just gives you a pearl, whereas the other pearls were in dungeons. The other dungeon cut probably would've been in the section where you go through dungeons with a 2nd character, but that's just a guess
I've haven't played Minish Cap yet, so I can't comment on that, but it was designed by Capcom rather than Nintendo, so blame them.
The last Zelda game Miyamoto really directed was Ocarina of Time. For that game, Eiji Aonuma was second in command. For Majora's Mask and Wind Waker, Aonuma was the lead and Miyamoto was more of a consultant. You can't really blame Miyamoto for any flaws in those games.
So you think that a 1Ghz cpu is going to be slowed down because someone's resume or board of directors presentation isn't binary anymore?
Oh puuuulllleeze.
That's not what I said at all. The parent post I was replying to said Word was slow to read/write files because they were memory dumps. That poster expected the XML files to be faster.
My comment compared the relative speeds of the two types of files. Of course loading an XML formatted resume on a modern computer won't be noticably different in speed. But it will be noticable when you get to large datafiles.
If the file format is more or less a straight memory dump, that should make it very quick to save/load, as you don't really have to parse it much. I'd expect a significant slowdown from a switch to XML files.
About a year ago I was doing 3D graphics programming. The program displayed the results of fluid dynamics simulations. Every vertex of the mesh had datapoints associated with it, which were used to generate a blue to red colorscale (think weather map style).
The feature I was adding drew an animated thin line through the 3D mesh tracking the path of a particle flowing through the mesh. The line color was interpolated from the data of the surrounding vertexes. The result was a 1 pixel line that very gradually changed color as it swirled through the model. In the middle of working on this feature, I was given a high end Dell LCD monitor. With the LCD, I simply wasn't able to make out the color changes clearly. I kept having to put my face right up to the monitor to get a decent idea of what colors were being drawn. I lasted about two days before switching back to a rather crappy CRT. Even with the old, low end CRT, the colors were much easier to distinguish from 2 feet away than on the LCD from a few inches away.
Also, once mid-afternoon came, the LCD became very difficult to see against the sunlight coming in from behind it. Didn't make a difference for the CRT.
Keep in mind that in the early days of Netscape, there was no W3C. Pure HTML really wasn't very good. HTML was about as capable of formatting things as Windows 3.1 Write was.
Blink certainly was a bad choice, but Netscape also created tags such as table and center.
For the 4.x browsers, Netscape created the layer tag. MS saw the beta, and decided to out do Netscape by creating a different standard and pushing it through the W3C before Netscape tried pushing theirs through. That's how things ended up like they did.
Netscape 6 was just the Mozilla release of the time with the name & logo changed. The Netscape 4.x code was horrible. The Mozilla team was almost ready to do a 5.0 beta release, but eventually decided it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than 4.x and would just piss people off more. A complete rewrite of the project was being done in parallel which was always intended to be used for 6.0. They underestimated the amount of work necessary to finish the 6.0 branch, and decided to completely skip 5.0 figuring 6.0 wasn't too far away.
1) I prefer a history window over a history sidebar.
2) Mozilla's history has more options (don't remember the specific differences, just remember getting frustrated with FireFox).
3) FireFox's Preferences window sucks. The expandable groups on the right side of the window are just plain awkward. What's there isn't organized all that logically.
4) FireFox's Preferences window has way too few options. You need to go into about:config for a lot of things, which is a pain in the ass if you don't already know the exact setting and value you need, which is 99% of the time.
5) The settings for things like type-ahead find aren't as nice as in Mozilla, and require going into about:config to change, which is a pain.
6) i've been using Netscape or Mozilla as my browser for almost 10 years now. Mozilla feels like a refined version of Netscape. FireFox feels like a knockoff of Internet Explorer. IE's UI never quite felt right to me.
7) I prefer having the search feature integrated into the URL bar.
8) I think Mozilla's Find dialog works better than FireFox's Find toolbar.
It's not that hard to see why Silicon Knights and Nintendo split up. What I find questionable is why they ever partnered in the first place.
Play through Eternal Darkness and then read some interviews with the head of Silicon Knights, Dennis Dyack. Their philosophy is "Games are all about story, followed by graphics. Oh yeah, there should be a little gameplay in there too." Nintendo's philosophy is more like "Let's start with really good gameplay, then add whatever graphics are appropriate. If we need a story, we'll throw on one no more complex than is necessary."
I really don't understand why Nintendo was ever interested in Silicon Knights, as their approach to games was just entirely contradictory to Nintendo's.
The N64 launched at $200. Nintendo talked about it launching for $250, but a month or so before the launch announced it would only cost $200. It was an effective strategy, as I knew a few people that planned on buying it after the first price drop ended up getting it at launch.
I think the SNES was $200 as well, but it came with Mario World and 2 controllers.
From a consumer standpoint, there isn't much difference between the formats other than capacity. With either one, you're going to need new hardware to use it.
The real difference is in the manufacturing end. HD-DVD is designed with the goal of minimizing the amount of changes needed at the existing manufacturing plants, making it cheaper and easier for existing manufacturers to upgrade. Considering that movies often come with extra discs without increasing the retail price, odds are that Blu Ray isn't expensive enough that a movie on a Blu Ray disc would sell for more than one on an HD-DVD disc.
Considering Blu Ray discs are now reaching more than double the size of HD-DVD's, I think it's enough of a difference to justify the additional one time cost of upgrading the manufacturing plants. By the time we get writable versions of these discs, we're all going to have terrabyte hard disks and complaining how it takes over 20 HD-DVD's to back up our system.
Tap the side of the bongos and it'll register a clap. Some people blow on the microphone, but it's a bad idea as your breath has moisture in it, which will eventually ruin the microphone.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot only posts a small percentage of the stories submitted each day. Each dupe posted is one less story you haven't read before that gets posted.
Video game releases aren't at all strict. The release lists sent to stores only have the ship date on them. The games get sold whenever they get in stock. I remember when Mario Sunshine came out, GameStop called me immediately after the shipment came in. When I got there they handed me a copy straight out of the shipping box.
I've noticed that GameStop usually gets games in the day after the ship date, whereas stores like Sam Goody get it 2-3 days after the ship date. In one case I can remember them getting a game in a week later than GameStop did.
I was at an SGI event about 2 years ago. I think it was a tour showing off their new graphics hardware. I met one of their higher up sales managers and talked with him for a while. Everything suggestion I made about trying to get into higher volume products got shot down with "SGI is not that type of company." He seemed fully aware that the number of customers for their products kept shrinking, but it seemed like they prefered it that way.
Oh, I also asked him if they had any plans of offering Opteron systems. He gave two reasons why they wouldn't. The first was that Itanium was capable of scaling up to around 100 processors in one system, whereas Opteron topped out at 8. The other reason was it would piss off Intel.
I downloaded Fedora 4 about 2 weeks ago using Azuerus. Grabbed the CD isos, then when it finished decided that I wanted the DVD so I downloaded that shortly after. Each downloaded at 1.2MB/s sustained, and only took somewhere around 30-60 seconds to ramp up to speed. This is with a cable modem. I've never tried anything to find out, but I'm assuming my connection was the limiting factor in my download speed.
Actually, a disk is not bootable unless the last two bytes of the first sector are 55h AAh. So theoretically, the system should skip over the disk if you change those bytes. I've never actually bothered to try it though.
I'm assuming the message has just existed from the days when hard disks were rare, and no one ever bothered to change it.
Honestly, if it's unreasonable to expect the government to pay for a mechanic to fix my car, why is it reasonable to expect the government to pay for a doctor to fix my broken leg?
Here's a few possible reasons off the top of my head. I'm not saying they are or are not correct, just tossing out whatever ideas I can think of:
1) A car is a luxury. You can argue about the practicality of living where you do without a car, but you always have the option of moving somewhere where you don't need a car.
Your leg isn't really a luxury, it's a basic part of you. You don't have the option of moving somewhere where you don't need to walk.
2) If you car breaks down, you have the option of waiting a while to save up money to fix it. If your car battery dies today, the only disadvantage to waiting a month to replace it is you can't use the car in the mean time.
If you break your leg, you have to get it treated right away. You will have serious consequences if you wait a month to treat it.
3) Getting a new car isn't a big deal. Odds are if you buy a new car it'll be better than the one you had.
You can't really get a new leg (at least not one that's comparable to a real one). We can't turn people into Darth Vader.
4) Society as a whole is better off if you don't fix your car and use mass transportation instead. Less pollution that way, and mass transportation tends to work better the more people there are using it.
If you don't treat your broken leg, you become more dependent on the people around you. More people with untreated broken legs just means a greater burden on the people around them.
Zelda: Majora's Mask required the RAM Expansion. Perfect Dark technically didn't require it, but without it you couldn't play the single player mode, and multiplayer was limited to 2 players.
Have you not been paying attention to the entire point of the thread? The issue being discussed is what could Apple do to make OS X not boot on a standard PC. We're not talking about making the systems entirely incompatible, just making it hard to get the system started.
When you boot a modern PC, it turns on with the hardware set up just like the original XT. A20 line disabled, crappy cascaded interrupt and DMA controllers in use, etc. Yes, a modern OS will disable that stuff as part of the boot process, but it does have to work with the old stuff for the early stages of the boot process.
As to the physical memory map, that certainly makes a big difference on the boot process. See zImage vs bzImage in the Linux kernel. You still have to load your kernel and do a decent amount of setup work within the 640KB limit before you can enable virtual memory.
So as you said, this stuff isn't really an issue once the OS is running. But the whole discussion is about making the boot process different.
They will not fix anything, as fixing things takes money.
Apple has always designed their own motherboards. It might be cheaper for them use the DMA and Interrupt controllers they currently use for PPC.
I'll be very surprised if Intel fabricate a specialised x86 CPU just for them.
Why not? Although the Xbox CPU is based off a P3, it isn't a standard one. Custom cache size that falls between the Celeron and P3 in size. Possibly other differences, but I don't know for sure.
Intel gave MS an extremely low price in order to ensure AMD didn't get the contract instead. I would expect Apple's prices to be more in line with the prices other OEMs pay, so Intel could better afford a slightly customized chip for Apple.
Remember, a PC today is still based on the design of an XT. You've got bizarre things such as the 20th bit of the CPU addressing being disabled at boot time. Multiple interrupt controllers and DMA controllers cascaded off each other. You reboot a PC by sending a signal to the keyboard controller.
PC motherboards are really weirdly designed, and have accumulated quite the collection of weird hacks to work around the early flaws. Since Apple doesn't care about backwards compatibility with older PCs, they can quite simply design a motherboard without all that crap in it. Enable the A20 line at boot. Replace the DMA and Interrupt controllers with better ones. Get rid of the memory gap between 640KB and 1MB.
Get rid of the legacy PC crap and it'll require some rather serious hacking to get the code to run on a standard PC.
You're forgetting one major factor about the CPU that does matter - endianness. You don't really have to know anything about endian issues if you are writing code that only runs on one type of CPU, and does not use the internet.
Take the following C code snippet:
FILE *file;
int x = 1;
file = fopen("test");
fwrite(&x, sizeof(int), 1, file);
fclose(file);
Run it on an Intel CPU then on a PowerPC. Look at the contents of the file created. On the Intel CPU, you'll get 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00. On the PowerPC you'll get 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01. What one CPU sees as 1 the other sees as 2^24.
That's a huge issue with data stored to disk or sent over the network.
And it's not the open source stuff that's critical for the CPU switch to work. That stuff isn't why people use a Mac. It's Photoshop, Quark, etc. Some of the major Mac software was very slow to get ported to OS X. This port shouldn't be as bad to do, but it comes down to how willing the companies are to go along with it.
While Luigi's Mansion was short, it was the right length for what it was. They would've need to expand a lot on what Luigi could do to make the game longer. I always felt the game should've been released for $30 or so rather than $50, at which point the length wouldn't such an issue.
Wind Waker was rushed to release in time for the Christmas season in Japan. It's pretty clear it was intended to be longer - I think I heard 2 dungeons were cut. The obvious place for one of them is when you are looking for Jabun (or whatever the name of that giant fish is). You come to an island with nothing on it, then are sent somewhere else and Jabun just gives you a pearl, whereas the other pearls were in dungeons. The other dungeon cut probably would've been in the section where you go through dungeons with a 2nd character, but that's just a guess
I've haven't played Minish Cap yet, so I can't comment on that, but it was designed by Capcom rather than Nintendo, so blame them.
The last Zelda game Miyamoto really directed was Ocarina of Time. For that game, Eiji Aonuma was second in command. For Majora's Mask and Wind Waker, Aonuma was the lead and Miyamoto was more of a consultant. You can't really blame Miyamoto for any flaws in those games.
So you think that a 1Ghz cpu is going to be slowed down because someone's resume or board of directors presentation isn't binary anymore?
Oh puuuulllleeze.
That's not what I said at all. The parent post I was replying to said Word was slow to read/write files because they were memory dumps. That poster expected the XML files to be faster.
My comment compared the relative speeds of the two types of files. Of course loading an XML formatted resume on a modern computer won't be noticably different in speed. But it will be noticable when you get to large datafiles.
If the file format is more or less a straight memory dump, that should make it very quick to save/load, as you don't really have to parse it much. I'd expect a significant slowdown from a switch to XML files.
About a year ago I was doing 3D graphics programming. The program displayed the results of fluid dynamics simulations. Every vertex of the mesh had datapoints associated with it, which were used to generate a blue to red colorscale (think weather map style).
The feature I was adding drew an animated thin line through the 3D mesh tracking the path of a particle flowing through the mesh. The line color was interpolated from the data of the surrounding vertexes. The result was a 1 pixel line that very gradually changed color as it swirled through the model. In the middle of working on this feature, I was given a high end Dell LCD monitor. With the LCD, I simply wasn't able to make out the color changes clearly. I kept having to put my face right up to the monitor to get a decent idea of what colors were being drawn. I lasted about two days before switching back to a rather crappy CRT. Even with the old, low end CRT, the colors were much easier to distinguish from 2 feet away than on the LCD from a few inches away.
Also, once mid-afternoon came, the LCD became very difficult to see against the sunlight coming in from behind it. Didn't make a difference for the CRT.
Keep in mind that in the early days of Netscape, there was no W3C. Pure HTML really wasn't very good. HTML was about as capable of formatting things as Windows 3.1 Write was.
Blink certainly was a bad choice, but Netscape also created tags such as table and center.
For the 4.x browsers, Netscape created the layer tag. MS saw the beta, and decided to out do Netscape by creating a different standard and pushing it through the W3C before Netscape tried pushing theirs through. That's how things ended up like they did.
Netscape 6 was just the Mozilla release of the time with the name & logo changed. The Netscape 4.x code was horrible. The Mozilla team was almost ready to do a 5.0 beta release, but eventually decided it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than 4.x and would just piss people off more. A complete rewrite of the project was being done in parallel which was always intended to be used for 6.0. They underestimated the amount of work necessary to finish the 6.0 branch, and decided to completely skip 5.0 figuring 6.0 wasn't too far away.
But why bother with a ton of extensions when Mozilla already does exactly what I want?
My personal gripe list on FireFox:
1) I prefer a history window over a history sidebar.
2) Mozilla's history has more options (don't remember the specific differences, just remember getting frustrated with FireFox).
3) FireFox's Preferences window sucks. The expandable groups on the right side of the window are just plain awkward. What's there isn't organized all that logically.
4) FireFox's Preferences window has way too few options. You need to go into about:config for a lot of things, which is a pain in the ass if you don't already know the exact setting and value you need, which is 99% of the time.
5) The settings for things like type-ahead find aren't as nice as in Mozilla, and require going into about:config to change, which is a pain.
6) i've been using Netscape or Mozilla as my browser for almost 10 years now. Mozilla feels like a refined version of Netscape. FireFox feels like a knockoff of Internet Explorer. IE's UI never quite felt right to me.
7) I prefer having the search feature integrated into the URL bar.
8) I think Mozilla's Find dialog works better than FireFox's Find toolbar.
It's not that hard to see why Silicon Knights and Nintendo split up. What I find questionable is why they ever partnered in the first place.
Play through Eternal Darkness and then read some interviews with the head of Silicon Knights, Dennis Dyack. Their philosophy is "Games are all about story, followed by graphics. Oh yeah, there should be a little gameplay in there too." Nintendo's philosophy is more like "Let's start with really good gameplay, then add whatever graphics are appropriate. If we need a story, we'll throw on one no more complex than is necessary."
I really don't understand why Nintendo was ever interested in Silicon Knights, as their approach to games was just entirely contradictory to Nintendo's.
Two reasons to turn off some of the pipelines:
a) They were defective, and this allows you to salvage the part.
b) People with too much money will gladly pay significantly more money for a slightly higher end version of the same card.
The N64 launched at $200. Nintendo talked about it launching for $250, but a month or so before the launch announced it would only cost $200. It was an effective strategy, as I knew a few people that planned on buying it after the first price drop ended up getting it at launch.
I think the SNES was $200 as well, but it came with Mario World and 2 controllers.
From a consumer standpoint, there isn't much difference between the formats other than capacity. With either one, you're going to need new hardware to use it.
The real difference is in the manufacturing end. HD-DVD is designed with the goal of minimizing the amount of changes needed at the existing manufacturing plants, making it cheaper and easier for existing manufacturers to upgrade. Considering that movies often come with extra discs without increasing the retail price, odds are that Blu Ray isn't expensive enough that a movie on a Blu Ray disc would sell for more than one on an HD-DVD disc.
Considering Blu Ray discs are now reaching more than double the size of HD-DVD's, I think it's enough of a difference to justify the additional one time cost of upgrading the manufacturing plants. By the time we get writable versions of these discs, we're all going to have terrabyte hard disks and complaining how it takes over 20 HD-DVD's to back up our system.
Tap the side of the bongos and it'll register a clap. Some people blow on the microphone, but it's a bad idea as your breath has moisture in it, which will eventually ruin the microphone.