Actually, although Opterons theoretically scale up to 8 way, they really don't go beyond 4 way. I spoke to AMD representatives at LinuxWorld last month about it, as the place I work does complex fluid dynamics work, which can see significant benefits from 8 way SMP systems. This is the explaination I got from AMD as to why there aren't 8 way Opteron motherboards (despite the fact that they sell processors capable of going 8 way).
Each CPU having its own memory bus is great for a small number of CPUs. But as you add more CPUs, the complexity grows exponentially. Opteron systems are NUMA based, meaning RAM is local to a CPU. For one CPU to access another CPU's memory, it must request it from the other CPU. If you connect each CPU to every other CPU, the performance hit isn't too bad, but the complexity of the motherboard grows greatly. It very quickly becomes cost prohibitive. You can lower the number of connections needed by relaying the requests until they reach the correct processor, however, this results in extra latency. Building motherboards for more CPUs is a matter of balancing cost and performance. Very few people need more than 4 CPUs, and AMD seems rather content letting Intel sell Itaniums to those people.
Cooperative multitasking is only better than preemptive if your only concern is that a process uses the minimum amount of CPU time possible.
I don't care if my MP3 player decodes 1 second of audio in 90 ms instead of 100 ms. All I care is that it gets the 100 ms it needs every second.
Likewise, I don't care if we can shave 1 ms off the time necessary for the CPU to handle me clicking a button. I just care that the UI responds immediately.
Yes, I realize that real-time scheduling would be even better for the things I just said. But that's got its own set of problems. Preemptive multitasking is a compromise between different needs that works really work most of the time.
When using segmentation, there are two segment descriptor tables - the Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and the Local Descriptor Table (LDT). The idea is all the shared segments go into the GDT, and the application segments go into the LDT. When a context switch occurs, the kernel changes simply issues one instruction to tell the CPU to use a different LDT.
32 bit x86 chips have the write and execute flags combined in the page tables. The segment descriptors have seperate bits for them. Intel basically expected people to use segmentation on the 386 rather than paging, so the original paging implementation was a little subpar.
Segmentation offers much finer control over memory (allocations can be sized to the exact byte, with a fault generated on any out of bounds access) and a larger virtual address space (48 bits, accessed in segments up to 4 GB). The problem with segmentation is the kernel memory management becomes a lot more complicated, so OS developers have avoided using the segmentation. x86 chips are the only ones to provide segmentation support, so developers of portable OS's avoided the feature as well.
When AMD designed the x86-64 architecture, they had to design new page tables to deal with 64 addresses. While making that change, they also seperated the write & execute permission bits.
Having worked with Java bytecodes when I took compilers, I will say that you can get really close to the original program by looking at the bytecodes. You can't tell if someone used a while loop or a for loop, but you can still reconstruct the loop from the code.
The Java Virtual Machine is a stack machine - there are no CPU registers. There's a seperate memory store for local variables. That tends to make it easy to tell exactly what data is being operated on at any given time.
I've seen Java decompilers that return very clear, readable code.
You're forgetting that the GameCube and Xbox use ATI and NVidia chips for the graphics, respectively. Compare the Flipper chip or the GeForce derivative to the emotion engine if you want a fair comparison - the emotion engine looks pretty bad when you do that.
Before you complain the PS2 only has 4 megs of video memory, keep in mind that the GameCube only has 3 megs of video memory. The GameCube has 24 megs of main RAM, 16 megs of auxillary RAM (not directly CPU addressable - you need to use DMA to transfer data in/out of it), and 3 megs of video memory. In comparision, the PS2 has 32 megs of main memory and 4 megs of video memory. The Xbox has a unified memory architecture, with 64 megs of total RAM.
Also, Pentium chips perform floating point math at 80 bit precision.
First off, Miyamoto said in an interview that the timeline forks after Ocarina, and that WW follows the new fork.
Anyway, pay more attention to the Wind Waker story. It clearly happens right after Ocarina, as they tell you that Ganondorf has somehow escaped from the Scared Realm. In Link to the Past, Ganon is trapped in the Sacred Realm (which has become the Dark World) and is trying to escape. You kill him before he can, and when you bring the triforce back to the light world, the dark world ceases to exist. The two stories contradict.
Timeline 1 = Ocarina of Time -> Link to the Past -> Link's Awakening -> The Legend of Zelda -> The Adventure of Link
Timeline 2 = Ocarina of Time -> Majora's Mask -> Wind Waker
Wind Waker isn't innovative. It's simply the gameplay of Ocarina of Time mixed with the art style of Zelda 1 & Link to the Past.
The storyline isn't tied very well to previous games. They claimed that the ending of Ocarina of Time split the Zelda timeline. Wind Waker is in a different timeline than all the 2D games, which was necessary because its story completely contradicts the story of a Link to the Past.
Other than that, if the enemies could actually hurt you significantly, it would be a great game.
The problem with your analogy is that aluminum is useful for a lot of things, whereas diamonds (the kind that people pay a lot of money for, not industrial ones) are really only useful as jewelery. It's largely a status symbol.
You can find someone willing to sell you clothing for practically whatever price you want to pay. Despite the really cheap clothing available at Walmart, there's still plenty of stores around selling clothes for a lot more money. A lot of people would rather pay a little more to get clothing with a recognized brand name.
You can wait a year or two on the big name games and they'll still be in stores. With the smaller name games you can't, as they simply don't get restocked. Even Resident Evil for GameCube, a high selling game, was very difficult to find a year later.
Well at least by me, a lot of stores give you a few extra dollars off for preordering.
GameStop near me used to have a habit of charging $5 more than every other store did for a game. But if you preordered, they'd give you a $5 discount, so it was the same price as everywhere else. They've stopped both the price increase and the discount now. I mostly get my games from Sam Goody now, who gives me $3 off for preordering. If you sign up for their replay club, it adds up quick - you get a $5 off coupon every couple games you buy.
The GBA/GC link cable with Crystal Chronicals makes sense, as that game was really intended to be played multiplayer.
That's only true for PC games. Console games tend to take 6-12 months to be reduced in price. Games that totally bomb might get reduced in price sooner, whereas games that did really well will take forever to come down in price (notice how it took about 2 years for Halo to drop in price).
Unless you're planning on waiting a long time to get the game, you're better off buying it right away, as there's a decent number of stores that will give you a discount for preordering, or will sell it at a cheaper price for the first few days.
I dunno if I'd say it's alive and kicking. More like on life support.
The extent of its being "updated for modern hardware" is the kernel will save the full 32 bits of the CPU registers on a task switch. It's still running in real mode with 640k limits.
Breadbox has had the rights for almost 3 years now. They haven't really done anything significant in that time. Most of what they've done is minor bugfixes and finishing up the half finished apps that were sitting in the source tree.
Yes, New Deal went out of business. About 3 years ago cash was running low, and they signed a contract to get funding from investors. However, the money never showed up, so the company went under.
New Deal charged about $80, which included the operating system, the office suite, and a bunch of internet applications. If that's not worth $80, then you're just really damn cheap.
The last version to be officially released was a bit of a pain to get on the internet, as it didn't have a dialler application, and the ethernet support didn't work on a lot of networks. The next release had those issues fixed, but the company ran out of money right before going into production.
The PT-9000 was developed around 94, as it shared the same SDK as the Zoomer.
There was also the Nokia 9000 smartphone released in 96 or so. It was a ~$900 cellphone that opened up to reveal a screen and keyboard. It was pretty much a phone with a 386 in the same case. Supposedly it sold really well to business people - enough to prompt a second version of it, the 9110. Eventually Nokia created Symbian. I don't really know what prompted Nokia to start Symbian, considering they already had a fairly successful smartphone.
Just the size issue has seemed to completely stop and dupping scene for the Gamecube. Lots of crappy solutions for both the Xbox and the PS2, but no solutions crappy or otherwise for the Cube.
Did you not read what I just said? The issue isn't the size at all. You can't dupe the discs because they need a valid barcode on them, which can only be printed on the disc during manufacturing. You can't duplicate a GameCube disc unless you have a disc manufacturing plant.
It's very easy to prove that the barcode is required. Get a game disc you don't care about (i.e. a $10 ultimate codes disc), and put a small piece of tape over the barcode. The disc won't be recognized by the GameCube. Remove the tape and the disc will work again. Try whatever other methods of covering the barcode that it will take to satisfy you.
If you take the case off the GameCube, you can put a full sized disc in - but it won't recognize it due to the lack of a barcode.
Anyway, you missed the only obvious reason Nintendo would have for making discs that size--copy protection. Which I personally think is a pretty weak reason.
The size doesn't help with copy protection. Small discs are available.
The copy protection is done via a barcode printed on the inside of the disc, just before the data starts. The barcode has to be printed on the disc during manufacturing - it can't be burned on. That can be done with large discs just as easily - it's part of the DVD standard, although I've never heard of it being used anywhere else.
What makes you say that? Both Mozilla and Firefox support XPInstall to add components. The only difference I've seen is Firefox has the Extensions tab to show a list of what you've added.
It doesn't include an email app, WYSIWYG HTML editor or IRC client that I'm never going to use.
If you don't want those features, then don't install them. Do a custom install instead of a full install, and turn off the components you don't want. The extra stuff has been optional for years.
It still cost more to publish games on those mini-discs than if they had chosen a standard DVD drive.
That's only because Nintendo charges higher licensing fees. There might be a few cent difference in actual production costs, but nothing significant.
PlayStation games aren't made on normal discs either. You have to get the discs pressed by Sony. Their discs just happen to be closer to standard discs than Nintendo's, but there isn't much of a difference between any of the three. Remember, Panasonic released the Q, which was a GameCube that played DVDs. There were two motherboards in it, but a shared drive. GameCube discs can't be that different from normal DVDs then.
After 6 months or so of being unemployed, you are no longer counted as unemployed. Instead, you're counted as disheartened or something like that. Basically they figure you've gone so long without finding a job that you don't care anymore, and just sit around feeling miserable and don't look for a job.
Someone else probably knows more precisely what I mean; it's been 3 years since I took microeconomics, so I'm rusty.
Here's an important detail to remember when dealing with chargeback issues. Legally, your claim is not valid unless you submit it in writing. Calling up is not sufficient.
One credit card I really like is the Sears Card (not the in store card, but the MasterCard one). Their website fully explains to you all the details of chargebacks, and even provides a web form to automatically generate a letter you can print out and mail to handle chargeback issues.
To support your theory, here's a story I heard from my Uncle, who retired from Verizon about a year or two ago. He worked there for over twenty years. I forget the original company he started working for, but he ended up in Verizon after several mergers.
In the past, management positions were awarded to people who worked their way up through the ranks. That meant they understood how the phone networks worked, and in a crises, knew how to fix the problems.
Now, people are hired straight into management positions. When there's a crisis, they don't know what to do. They give orders which don't help the problem. The people below them ignore their orders and do what needs to be done. In the end, the problem gets solved and the management is unaware of why it really got solved.
Here in North Jersey, the analog phones worked fine during the blackout. The cell phone networks were completely overloaded. It was near impossible to make a call from a cell phone.
Ricky did try to infect Mike while he was asleep, but Julia stopped him. It wasn't clear why, but she seemed to want Mike to accept it. Perhaps it was just some of her emotions showing through, and she thought he would be safer if he accepted it willingly.
The ending definately needed a little more wrapping things up.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, although Opterons theoretically scale up to 8 way, they really don't go beyond 4 way. I spoke to AMD representatives at LinuxWorld last month about it, as the place I work does complex fluid dynamics work, which can see significant benefits from 8 way SMP systems. This is the explaination I got from AMD as to why there aren't 8 way Opteron motherboards (despite the fact that they sell processors capable of going 8 way).
Each CPU having its own memory bus is great for a small number of CPUs. But as you add more CPUs, the complexity grows exponentially. Opteron systems are NUMA based, meaning RAM is local to a CPU. For one CPU to access another CPU's memory, it must request it from the other CPU. If you connect each CPU to every other CPU, the performance hit isn't too bad, but the complexity of the motherboard grows greatly. It very quickly becomes cost prohibitive. You can lower the number of connections needed by relaying the requests until they reach the correct processor, however, this results in extra latency. Building motherboards for more CPUs is a matter of balancing cost and performance. Very few people need more than 4 CPUs, and AMD seems rather content letting Intel sell Itaniums to those people.
Cooperative multitasking is only better than preemptive if your only concern is that a process uses the minimum amount of CPU time possible.
I don't care if my MP3 player decodes 1 second of audio in 90 ms instead of 100 ms. All I care is that it gets the 100 ms it needs every second.
Likewise, I don't care if we can shave 1 ms off the time necessary for the CPU to handle me clicking a button. I just care that the UI responds immediately.
Yes, I realize that real-time scheduling would be even better for the things I just said. But that's got its own set of problems. Preemptive multitasking is a compromise between different needs that works really work most of the time.
When using segmentation, there are two segment descriptor tables - the Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and the Local Descriptor Table (LDT). The idea is all the shared segments go into the GDT, and the application segments go into the LDT. When a context switch occurs, the kernel changes simply issues one instruction to tell the CPU to use a different LDT.
32 bit x86 chips have the write and execute flags combined in the page tables. The segment descriptors have seperate bits for them. Intel basically expected people to use segmentation on the 386 rather than paging, so the original paging implementation was a little subpar.
Segmentation offers much finer control over memory (allocations can be sized to the exact byte, with a fault generated on any out of bounds access) and a larger virtual address space (48 bits, accessed in segments up to 4 GB). The problem with segmentation is the kernel memory management becomes a lot more complicated, so OS developers have avoided using the segmentation. x86 chips are the only ones to provide segmentation support, so developers of portable OS's avoided the feature as well.
When AMD designed the x86-64 architecture, they had to design new page tables to deal with 64 addresses. While making that change, they also seperated the write & execute permission bits.
Having worked with Java bytecodes when I took compilers, I will say that you can get really close to the original program by looking at the bytecodes. You can't tell if someone used a while loop or a for loop, but you can still reconstruct the loop from the code.
The Java Virtual Machine is a stack machine - there are no CPU registers. There's a seperate memory store for local variables. That tends to make it easy to tell exactly what data is being operated on at any given time.
I've seen Java decompilers that return very clear, readable code.
You're forgetting that the GameCube and Xbox use ATI and NVidia chips for the graphics, respectively. Compare the Flipper chip or the GeForce derivative to the emotion engine if you want a fair comparison - the emotion engine looks pretty bad when you do that.
Before you complain the PS2 only has 4 megs of video memory, keep in mind that the GameCube only has 3 megs of video memory. The GameCube has 24 megs of main RAM, 16 megs of auxillary RAM (not directly CPU addressable - you need to use DMA to transfer data in/out of it), and 3 megs of video memory. In comparision, the PS2 has 32 megs of main memory and 4 megs of video memory. The Xbox has a unified memory architecture, with 64 megs of total RAM.
Also, Pentium chips perform floating point math at 80 bit precision.
First off, Miyamoto said in an interview that the timeline forks after Ocarina, and that WW follows the new fork.
Anyway, pay more attention to the Wind Waker story. It clearly happens right after Ocarina, as they tell you that Ganondorf has somehow escaped from the Scared Realm. In Link to the Past, Ganon is trapped in the Sacred Realm (which has become the Dark World) and is trying to escape. You kill him before he can, and when you bring the triforce back to the light world, the dark world ceases to exist. The two stories contradict.
Timeline 1 = Ocarina of Time -> Link to the Past -> Link's Awakening -> The Legend of Zelda -> The Adventure of Link
Timeline 2 = Ocarina of Time -> Majora's Mask -> Wind Waker
I'm not sure where the Oracle games fit in.
Wind Waker isn't innovative. It's simply the gameplay of Ocarina of Time mixed with the art style of Zelda 1 & Link to the Past.
The storyline isn't tied very well to previous games. They claimed that the ending of Ocarina of Time split the Zelda timeline. Wind Waker is in a different timeline than all the 2D games, which was necessary because its story completely contradicts the story of a Link to the Past.
Other than that, if the enemies could actually hurt you significantly, it would be a great game.
The problem with your analogy is that aluminum is useful for a lot of things, whereas diamonds (the kind that people pay a lot of money for, not industrial ones) are really only useful as jewelery. It's largely a status symbol.
You can find someone willing to sell you clothing for practically whatever price you want to pay. Despite the really cheap clothing available at Walmart, there's still plenty of stores around selling clothes for a lot more money. A lot of people would rather pay a little more to get clothing with a recognized brand name.
You can wait a year or two on the big name games and they'll still be in stores. With the smaller name games you can't, as they simply don't get restocked. Even Resident Evil for GameCube, a high selling game, was very difficult to find a year later.
Well at least by me, a lot of stores give you a few extra dollars off for preordering.
GameStop near me used to have a habit of charging $5 more than every other store did for a game. But if you preordered, they'd give you a $5 discount, so it was the same price as everywhere else. They've stopped both the price increase and the discount now. I mostly get my games from Sam Goody now, who gives me $3 off for preordering. If you sign up for their replay club, it adds up quick - you get a $5 off coupon every couple games you buy.
The GBA/GC link cable with Crystal Chronicals makes sense, as that game was really intended to be played multiplayer.
That's only true for PC games. Console games tend to take 6-12 months to be reduced in price. Games that totally bomb might get reduced in price sooner, whereas games that did really well will take forever to come down in price (notice how it took about 2 years for Halo to drop in price).
Unless you're planning on waiting a long time to get the game, you're better off buying it right away, as there's a decent number of stores that will give you a discount for preordering, or will sell it at a cheaper price for the first few days.
The first two Communicators ran GEOS. The new ones don't. They're totally different products but happen to share the same name.
I dunno if I'd say it's alive and kicking. More like on life support.
The extent of its being "updated for modern hardware" is the kernel will save the full 32 bits of the CPU registers on a task switch. It's still running in real mode with 640k limits.
Breadbox has had the rights for almost 3 years now. They haven't really done anything significant in that time. Most of what they've done is minor bugfixes and finishing up the half finished apps that were sitting in the source tree.
Yes, New Deal went out of business. About 3 years ago cash was running low, and they signed a contract to get funding from investors. However, the money never showed up, so the company went under.
New Deal charged about $80, which included the operating system, the office suite, and a bunch of internet applications. If that's not worth $80, then you're just really damn cheap.
The last version to be officially released was a bit of a pain to get on the internet, as it didn't have a dialler application, and the ethernet support didn't work on a lot of networks. The next release had those issues fixed, but the company ran out of money right before going into production.
The PT-9000 was developed around 94, as it shared the same SDK as the Zoomer.
There was also the Nokia 9000 smartphone released in 96 or so. It was a ~$900 cellphone that opened up to reveal a screen and keyboard. It was pretty much a phone with a 386 in the same case. Supposedly it sold really well to business people - enough to prompt a second version of it, the 9110. Eventually Nokia created Symbian. I don't really know what prompted Nokia to start Symbian, considering they already had a fairly successful smartphone.
Just the size issue has seemed to completely stop and dupping scene for the Gamecube. Lots of crappy solutions for both the Xbox and the PS2, but no solutions crappy or otherwise for the Cube.
Did you not read what I just said? The issue isn't the size at all. You can't dupe the discs because they need a valid barcode on them, which can only be printed on the disc during manufacturing. You can't duplicate a GameCube disc unless you have a disc manufacturing plant.
It's very easy to prove that the barcode is required. Get a game disc you don't care about (i.e. a $10 ultimate codes disc), and put a small piece of tape over the barcode. The disc won't be recognized by the GameCube. Remove the tape and the disc will work again. Try whatever other methods of covering the barcode that it will take to satisfy you.
If you take the case off the GameCube, you can put a full sized disc in - but it won't recognize it due to the lack of a barcode.
Anyway, you missed the only obvious reason Nintendo would have for making discs that size--copy protection. Which I personally think is a pretty weak reason.
The size doesn't help with copy protection. Small discs are available.
The copy protection is done via a barcode printed on the inside of the disc, just before the data starts. The barcode has to be printed on the disc during manufacturing - it can't be burned on. That can be done with large discs just as easily - it's part of the DVD standard, although I've never heard of it being used anywhere else.
The UI is more easily configurable.
What makes you say that? Both Mozilla and Firefox support XPInstall to add components. The only difference I've seen is Firefox has the Extensions tab to show a list of what you've added.
It doesn't include an email app, WYSIWYG HTML editor or IRC client that I'm never going to use.
If you don't want those features, then don't install them. Do a custom install instead of a full install, and turn off the components you don't want. The extra stuff has been optional for years.
It still cost more to publish games on those mini-discs than if they had chosen a standard DVD drive.
That's only because Nintendo charges higher licensing fees. There might be a few cent difference in actual production costs, but nothing significant.
PlayStation games aren't made on normal discs either. You have to get the discs pressed by Sony. Their discs just happen to be closer to standard discs than Nintendo's, but there isn't much of a difference between any of the three. Remember, Panasonic released the Q, which was a GameCube that played DVDs. There were two motherboards in it, but a shared drive. GameCube discs can't be that different from normal DVDs then.
After 6 months or so of being unemployed, you are no longer counted as unemployed. Instead, you're counted as disheartened or something like that. Basically they figure you've gone so long without finding a job that you don't care anymore, and just sit around feeling miserable and don't look for a job.
Someone else probably knows more precisely what I mean; it's been 3 years since I took microeconomics, so I'm rusty.
Here's an important detail to remember when dealing with chargeback issues. Legally, your claim is not valid unless you submit it in writing. Calling up is not sufficient.
One credit card I really like is the Sears Card (not the in store card, but the MasterCard one). Their website fully explains to you all the details of chargebacks, and even provides a web form to automatically generate a letter you can print out and mail to handle chargeback issues.
To support your theory, here's a story I heard from my Uncle, who retired from Verizon about a year or two ago. He worked there for over twenty years. I forget the original company he started working for, but he ended up in Verizon after several mergers.
In the past, management positions were awarded to people who worked their way up through the ranks. That meant they understood how the phone networks worked, and in a crises, knew how to fix the problems.
Now, people are hired straight into management positions. When there's a crisis, they don't know what to do. They give orders which don't help the problem. The people below them ignore their orders and do what needs to be done. In the end, the problem gets solved and the management is unaware of why it really got solved.
Here in North Jersey, the analog phones worked fine during the blackout. The cell phone networks were completely overloaded. It was near impossible to make a call from a cell phone.
Mae was in the shed looking for thermite.
Ricky did try to infect Mike while he was asleep, but Julia stopped him. It wasn't clear why, but she seemed to want Mike to accept it. Perhaps it was just some of her emotions showing through, and she thought he would be safer if he accepted it willingly.
The ending definately needed a little more wrapping things up.