"Genius" indeed. Since when did you need to be genius to implement something as trivial as an mp3 player?
Have you seen 90% of the mp3 players on the market?
And having a good interface on this player will not fix the usability issues in other areas, such as the software side of things on the PC. I don't know what this player uses, and I hope it isn't MusicMatch, but the player's interface is only half of the usability equation. It's got to be easy to:
1) Rip music from CD onto the computer 2) Manage your music on your computer 3) (Optional) Buy music online 4) Sync your music collection from the computer to the player, being able to select various rules for selecting the music to sync 5) Access music on the player via multiple methods (artist, playlist, etc)
The iPod (with iTunes) has all of these things perfected. Most other solutions have (1) perfected and the others done, let's say, 'adequately'.
Also the iPod looks nicer than this Samsung player, but looks aren't a big issue (looks at his scratchy nano) when the player will be in your pocket most of the time. Fancy GUI effects are nice though, if they work to enhance the usability of the interface.
Personally I don't think this guy is a genius, but he is hard working and he has enough brain cells to grasp the concept of simplicity and usability. And that is something that a lot more programmers could benefit from learning.
Personally I've never bought an iTune and I don't own an iPod. I think Apple's DRM is awful and represents a major step back for us all. I think those that are investing in iTune digital libraries are suckers. You are basically betting that Apple's proprietary DRM laced format will be the standard for the rest of your life.
So you don't own an iPod and have never used iTMS. I guess that makes you the number one person to be commenting about it then. I also trust you don't download music from other music stores which provide songs in Microsoft's proprietary (albeit licensable) DRM encrusted WMA format.
Apple's DRM is pretty damn fair compared to other forms of DRM out there. At least you can burn a CD of your downloaded music. 7 times... until you alter the playlist you are burning. If Apple died, if the DRM format died, then you can always re-rip - and by that time you'd probably rip lossless, so the old tired 'lose quality by reripping' arguments are moot.
Maybe people like convenience, and know that they won't be listening to bloody Coldplay or chav-rap in ten years time.
If you want to argue against iTunes then argue against 128kbps AAC, when Apple could be serving 160kbps - 192kbps AAC. AAC is a better format than MP3 at these bitrates of course - 128kbps AAC being roughly equivalent in quality to 160kbps MP3, but the same can be said of WMA, OGG, etc.
"1 billion suckers"? More like "1 billion people who were able to get music without going out to the store, conveniently, for a small fee, possibly including music many stores don't carry or you can't get anymore". Who is the sucker exactly?
But yes, Revolution - doesn't require HDTV, will be cheaper, will try to bring new gameplay systems to the... sofa. It certainly bypasses the problems in the article.
XBox360 and PS3 are great for the (admittedly large number of) people with a HDTV and who are happy to connect the console to that HDTV (younger men, mainly). Of course games will still look good on a normal TV, especially if the extra power not being used on HD rendering is used to improve anti-aliasing instead.
I read that BOTH PS2 chips in the original release were each larger than the single Cell chip in the PS3. Of course you can't ignore the nVidia GPU either, which will be similarly massive...
But this is 2006. We have 12" wafers, not 8", meaning more dies per wafer for the same size die. We have better silicon, meaning higher yields for the same size die. We have redundancy on the Cell die, meaning higher yields. Probably the same for the GPU too.
If the nVidia GPU is going to cost $70 according to the Merryll Lynch report, then so will Cell... hell, maybe it'll be twice that due to some issue, so $140. That isn't the $240 they said. Neither will the BluRay be $350, but probably $150. $500 to make the PS3 sounds far more likely for a $399 at release console, and that's before accounting for other overestimates in the report.
I've got a PS2, and it does amaze me what developers have got from the hardware. I think it will be the same with the PS3 (and the XBox360) - if you think that the latest top end PC game looks good on the latest $1999 hardware setup today, then wait for a PS3 game in 2009 running on similar hardware, yet selling for $199. The greater speed of BluRay will be useful in that distant future, when games start needing to swap in 4GB of data into the 512MB memory, much in the same way that the PS2 swaps in massive amounts of data into its miniscule memory today in games like GTA:SA.
Support for AAC is fine (indeed my phone can play it, never mind my iPod), but the issue is support for Fairplay encrusted AAC, which is what Apple use for iTunes, with Fairplay being their quite reasonable DRM system, that will hopefully be licensed to other players at least within the next 5 years as a side effect of a court case or Apple suddenly becoming cooperative (lol).
I've never had a problem with AAC audio though - then again I rip at 160kbps VBR AAC. I often had popping issues with 128kbps MP3, but back when I used to rip in MP3 I was a 256kbps VBR user, again this had no issues.
Yeah, that's what I meant, but the time to do that is after the early adopter phase which should have given a year or two of expensive hardware being bought by media nerds, being tested for free, feedback absorbed, titles produced, and pricing levels tweaked to accepted levels.
Clearly Sony is scared they're going to lose out to HD-DVD early on without big guns backing BluRay, namely the PS3. Otherwise the PS3 would have been out earlier with a BluRay bump in 2008.
Or BluRay is merely a different laser and better motors, and thus is only incrementally more expensive than a DVD drive, processing logic (Cell in PS3's case) aside - and thus the $350 PS3 BluRay drive estimate from ML last week is even more laughable. In which case if AACS and other DRM issues are holding up the PS3, then Sony only has Sony to blame.
Ideally the best time to launch a next generation console is when the media format is established. DVD was established when the PS2 came out and popularised it.
I feel the PS3 is trying to establish the format itself, but that means the format is brand new at console launch, expensive, with first generation issues, speed, etc.
Cell too is very ambitious. In the long term I think it will be a good decision though.
In the end the PS3 will be marginally better than the XBox360, and is that worth being a year later? In addition, the PS3 looks fugly in its mockups, whereas the 360 appears to be quite nice.
ObRevolution: And let's not forget about Nintendo's new console either, that could beat them both on price and gameplay features.
The platformisation of a web browser's interface libraries.
Good work - a true cross-platform API with full interface features and themability. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris,...
I should have a look at it someday, it might be an interesting platform for writing mediumly complex GUI applications. How is the development tool environment though? Whilst I like a terminal and build scripts, not everyone does, and mass uptake would be restricted greatly if there was no Eclipse/etc plugin.
As a platform, or part of a platform, how does it compare with Java,.NET, etc?
These companies are so focused on restricting the usability of their products to protect imagined revenues that they aren't seeing the big picture - if there is a better, more usable, accessible, cheaper alternative available, people will use that.
The quality of piracy has gone up massively with internet distribution. Once pirates work out a system for ripping HD-DVDs and BluRay (and they will), then they can offer high quality films that will work on computers, older HDTV sets that people invested a lot in, and so on.
Functionality is a massive selling point, enough to make even people that actually do want to pay a fair price for the real thing think about getting the more functional version.
Sadly all this expensive work spent on restricting users will not bring in much more revenue to the companies - those people mainly pirate because they can't afford it otherwise, or wouldn't pay for it being stingy bastards. Instead they'll manage on the DVD resolution version - quality isn't a big issue for them either - students can't afford HDTV systems, stingy people have 20 year old televisions.
All very true, but you're preaching to the converted.
Instead tell your (if you are American) government to stop the RIAA riding roughshod all over you in the name of profit. Or do the equivalent in your area of the world.
And start supporting unencumbered music not sold by RIAA members, and give artists money by seeing them live.
You have to admit though that many Mac users would like to see Panther pictures, and this is a good way of propagating the trojan.
What can you do about it? User education is the only way.
Otherwise, mark downloaded files as 'downloaded', and when unzipping such files apply that to all files inside too. Upon first access to an 'downloaded' application you should ask the user if they want to run the application. For a real data file there's no issue, it'd open in Preview, etc. It would catch applications pretending to be datafiles though, and equally it wouldn't stop terminally retarded people running it. Hopefully other people would go 'hang on, this isn't an application...' and thus save their computer.
I agree, it's all about finger dexterity and muscle memory rather than actually attacking in an interesting manner.
Hell, it could even teach players basic martial arts moves with the heel and wrist controller ($49.99 additional) where you have to fight by doing the actual moves (roughly).
OTOH this could be quite dangerous unsupervised... and I don't want a load of ninja teenagers growing up over the next 10 years.
When it comes to 3D games, the OS will be backseat to the hardware.
In this laptop's case, it is an ATI X1600 family graphics processor.
That's pretty good, but it isn't a mobile variant of an nVidia 7800. Of course, these don't come in cheap laptops either.
Apart from that you will have Apple's slightly suboptimal OpenGL implementation, and possibly a layer of DirectX->OpenGL translation depending on how the game was ported.
Certainly this MacBook Pro will outperform the majority of PC laptops in games simply because the majority of PC laptops utilise integrated graphics - sometimes even at the $2000 pricepoint. However it will probably lose to any gamer or extreme performance PC laptops. Then again, they aren't $999 either.
Technically, when you're using Wine to run your own application which you can compile to the target architecture, there shouldn't be an issue apart from endianness fluff that might be exposed in the Windows API. Which is unlikely, given that Windows NT was available for Alpha, PowerPC,...
It'll probably be like any application that comes with its own GUI, networking, etc, library.
Hopefully Google will make it transparent enough to only need a single shared Wine install between different Google applications, rather than, for example, statically compiling Wine into it!
Every year I've been in Cambridge (since 1996) the winters have been bitterly cold, whilst not having the benefit of much snow. It's the nasty artic winds sweeping down off the North Sea, over the flat land straight into Cambridge. Grr!
Still, it cools our heads, allowing our brains to operate faster:p (if only)
I wouldn't be surprised if within the next year or two you get Expresscard graphics cards. It'd only be PCIe x1 (250MB/s bidirectional, so between AGP1x and AGP2x), and most likely in an external box rather than inside the expresscard, as it isn't the largest format in the world. If there's enough power provided by expresscard, that is...
on my Motorola A1000, that I bought from my provider during a sale for £1.
I guess I got my value out of it, but the phone controls are inadequate for platform games. However they're good enough to play Heretic with, less fine tuning required I guess.
For part time projects for programmers though, they're a great industry to get into. You don't have to learn complex 3D APIs, or spend months writing a bare game. You can do the bare game in a few evenings, create a few useful libraries for 2D gaming, write the game (80's style 8-bit ports usually) in a few more, and give it to your friends, or even see if you can sell it via a network provider and get a few quid back for your efforts.
Well, actually, I bet you could do a game that matches any Atari ST or Amiga game actually - you can do quite a lot with a >100MHz ARM processor, even if it is running a JVM. Smooth scrolling and lots of action certainly works (at 320x208 on my A1000), and I've seen parallax scrolling done as well.
The only difficulty with it for casual programmers is that each mobile platform needs its own customisation for the game - different screen sizes, processing capabilities (no parallax scrolling on the lower end hardware), etc. Which takes a lot of time if you want to spread the game wide and far.
Well, I suppose that Nokia's Linux based web tablet (770) has a pretty decent 800x480 display, and I bet that something like this chip would be quite a good match for it.
I don't know about mobile phones though - maybe the highest end communicator style phones... maybe.
Of course digital cameras are multifunction these days, and have large ridiculous DPI displays on them. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 3" 800x600 display on one soon. Again, this GPU would be good for that, and for playback of recorded video, and the 10MP capability suggests it might be targetted (in nVidia's dreams?) at high end consumer digital cameras (which will be 5MP to 8MP for the next couple of years).
You won't see it in a $200 phone though. Not this year or next anyway.
I bought CDs, ripped them using iTunes and put them on my iPod.
So how am I forced to use iTMS?
Admittedly I would like to see Fairplay licensed to other music store providers, as Apple has got the vast majority of the portable music market now. However it hasn't got it by foul means, simply by having a better product that people want.
Is 'music for iPods' a distinct market from 'music for portable music players'?
Are consumers getting harmed? Arguably iTMS is the most usable online music store. iTunes is the most usable music application. iPod is the most usable player. Nobody is forcing you to buy an iPod, use iTunes, or shop from iTMS. There are other options and they aren't niche - there's hundreds of WMA capable players on the market that can play DRM-encrusted WMA music from other stores. There's dozens of WMA music stores online.
I learnt to program on that - my parents wouldn't give me any games until I had 'learned' to use it.
So I typed in games from magazines, back when they did type-ins. Usually BASIC programs, sometimes with embedded machine code. I learnt by a process of osmosis, from adding new levels to games, to new features, then writing my own games.
Specs: 4MHz Z80A CPU, 64KB RAM, 32KB ROM, tape storage (built in), good keyboard - albeit colourful (ripped off of the Enterprise 64 I found out later). They were good times - computers with souls. My friend had a C64 which I thought sucked for programming but the games and sound were cool. At school I used RM Nimbus PC-kinda-compatibles. I remember playing an adventure game called 'L', which I quite liked. I managed to miss the BBC micro days though:(
Currently DVDs are 720 x 576 (PAL), which is good enough for me, at least for the next 5 to 10 years.
VHS degraded over time, was awkward to use, bulky, hard to navigate exactly, low resolution... DVD was a natural replacement and solved all of those issues.
Unless you have a 60" TV and can see the DVD encoding blocks and resolution. This is a niche market though - most people (especially in the UK and Europe) simply do not have massive TVs.
So unless DVDs suddenly start shipping with poor encoding, thus trying to make HiDef discs look better in comparison, no one is going to care. I'm going to buy £20 BluRays - I only watch most films a couple of times anyway - rental seems a better option even for DVDs, TV series are worth buying, but they're less likely to be in HD anyway, or not as worthy of HD. High BluRay prices will simply mean less sales to consumers of content, and more rentals.
A good film that's worth owning is like a good book. It doesn't need the resolution to be good, it's all about the content, the acting, the story. As long as the DVD is looked after, it's all that 90% of people will need. With clever filters DVD resolution can be upscaled very nicely as well, so it will look good on most HDTVs, as long as the DVD player is decent (+ progressive output). If you can afford a HDTV, then spare a bit more for a decent player, eh?
Cheers. Unfortunately the EPIA-800 doesn't have the MPEG2 hardware accelleration as it is a pretty old board.
I could get a new board, but then I could be better off simply getting something with more support anyway, even if the board wasn't as small - e.g., a micro-atx nForce board with integrated graphics (with the hardware accelleration) and an underclocked Sempron with passive cooling.
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"Genius" indeed. Since when did you need to be genius to implement something as trivial as an mp3 player?
Have you seen 90% of the mp3 players on the market?
And having a good interface on this player will not fix the usability issues in other areas, such as the software side of things on the PC. I don't know what this player uses, and I hope it isn't MusicMatch, but the player's interface is only half of the usability equation. It's got to be easy to:
1) Rip music from CD onto the computer
2) Manage your music on your computer
3) (Optional) Buy music online
4) Sync your music collection from the computer to the player, being able to select various rules for selecting the music to sync
5) Access music on the player via multiple methods (artist, playlist, etc)
The iPod (with iTunes) has all of these things perfected. Most other solutions have (1) perfected and the others done, let's say, 'adequately'.
Also the iPod looks nicer than this Samsung player, but looks aren't a big issue (looks at his scratchy nano) when the player will be in your pocket most of the time. Fancy GUI effects are nice though, if they work to enhance the usability of the interface.
Personally I don't think this guy is a genius, but he is hard working and he has enough brain cells to grasp the concept of simplicity and usability. And that is something that a lot more programmers could benefit from learning.
(yeah, mod me redundant)
... until you alter the playlist you are burning. If Apple died, if the DRM format died, then you can always re-rip - and by that time you'd probably rip lossless, so the old tired 'lose quality by reripping' arguments are moot.
Personally I've never bought an iTune and I don't own an iPod. I think Apple's DRM is awful and represents a major step back for us all. I think those that are investing in iTune digital libraries are suckers. You are basically betting that Apple's proprietary DRM laced format will be the standard for the rest of your life.
So you don't own an iPod and have never used iTMS. I guess that makes you the number one person to be commenting about it then. I also trust you don't download music from other music stores which provide songs in Microsoft's proprietary (albeit licensable) DRM encrusted WMA format.
Apple's DRM is pretty damn fair compared to other forms of DRM out there. At least you can burn a CD of your downloaded music. 7 times
Maybe people like convenience, and know that they won't be listening to bloody Coldplay or chav-rap in ten years time.
If you want to argue against iTunes then argue against 128kbps AAC, when Apple could be serving 160kbps - 192kbps AAC. AAC is a better format than MP3 at these bitrates of course - 128kbps AAC being roughly equivalent in quality to 160kbps MP3, but the same can be said of WMA, OGG, etc.
"1 billion suckers"? More like "1 billion people who were able to get music without going out to the store, conveniently, for a small fee, possibly including music many stores don't carry or you can't get anymore". Who is the sucker exactly?
Damn you! I wanted the first Revolution post :(
... sofa. It certainly bypasses the problems in the article.
But yes, Revolution - doesn't require HDTV, will be cheaper, will try to bring new gameplay systems to the
XBox360 and PS3 are great for the (admittedly large number of) people with a HDTV and who are happy to connect the console to that HDTV (younger men, mainly). Of course games will still look good on a normal TV, especially if the extra power not being used on HD rendering is used to improve anti-aliasing instead.
I read that BOTH PS2 chips in the original release were each larger than the single Cell chip in the PS3. Of course you can't ignore the nVidia GPU either, which will be similarly massive...
... hell, maybe it'll be twice that due to some issue, so $140. That isn't the $240 they said. Neither will the BluRay be $350, but probably $150. $500 to make the PS3 sounds far more likely for a $399 at release console, and that's before accounting for other overestimates in the report.
But this is 2006. We have 12" wafers, not 8", meaning more dies per wafer for the same size die. We have better silicon, meaning higher yields for the same size die. We have redundancy on the Cell die, meaning higher yields. Probably the same for the GPU too.
If the nVidia GPU is going to cost $70 according to the Merryll Lynch report, then so will Cell
I've got a PS2, and it does amaze me what developers have got from the hardware. I think it will be the same with the PS3 (and the XBox360) - if you think that the latest top end PC game looks good on the latest $1999 hardware setup today, then wait for a PS3 game in 2009 running on similar hardware, yet selling for $199. The greater speed of BluRay will be useful in that distant future, when games start needing to swap in 4GB of data into the 512MB memory, much in the same way that the PS2 swaps in massive amounts of data into its miniscule memory today in games like GTA:SA.
Support for AAC is fine (indeed my phone can play it, never mind my iPod), but the issue is support for Fairplay encrusted AAC, which is what Apple use for iTunes, with Fairplay being their quite reasonable DRM system, that will hopefully be licensed to other players at least within the next 5 years as a side effect of a court case or Apple suddenly becoming cooperative (lol).
I've never had a problem with AAC audio though - then again I rip at 160kbps VBR AAC. I often had popping issues with 128kbps MP3, but back when I used to rip in MP3 I was a 256kbps VBR user, again this had no issues.
Yeah, that's what I meant, but the time to do that is after the early adopter phase which should have given a year or two of expensive hardware being bought by media nerds, being tested for free, feedback absorbed, titles produced, and pricing levels tweaked to accepted levels.
Clearly Sony is scared they're going to lose out to HD-DVD early on without big guns backing BluRay, namely the PS3. Otherwise the PS3 would have been out earlier with a BluRay bump in 2008.
Or BluRay is merely a different laser and better motors, and thus is only incrementally more expensive than a DVD drive, processing logic (Cell in PS3's case) aside - and thus the $350 PS3 BluRay drive estimate from ML last week is even more laughable. In which case if AACS and other DRM issues are holding up the PS3, then Sony only has Sony to blame.
Ewww, really?
It looks so nice in photos, a bluish-white. How disappointing.
BluRay, Cell, ... it's going to add up.
Ideally the best time to launch a next generation console is when the media format is established. DVD was established when the PS2 came out and popularised it.
I feel the PS3 is trying to establish the format itself, but that means the format is brand new at console launch, expensive, with first generation issues, speed, etc.
Cell too is very ambitious. In the long term I think it will be a good decision though.
In the end the PS3 will be marginally better than the XBox360, and is that worth being a year later? In addition, the PS3 looks fugly in its mockups, whereas the 360 appears to be quite nice.
ObRevolution: And let's not forget about Nintendo's new console either, that could beat them both on price and gameplay features.
The platformisation of a web browser's interface libraries.
...
.NET, etc?
Good work - a true cross-platform API with full interface features and themability. Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris,
I should have a look at it someday, it might be an interesting platform for writing mediumly complex GUI applications. How is the development tool environment though? Whilst I like a terminal and build scripts, not everyone does, and mass uptake would be restricted greatly if there was no Eclipse/etc plugin.
As a platform, or part of a platform, how does it compare with Java,
These companies are so focused on restricting the usability of their products to protect imagined revenues that they aren't seeing the big picture - if there is a better, more usable, accessible, cheaper alternative available, people will use that.
The quality of piracy has gone up massively with internet distribution. Once pirates work out a system for ripping HD-DVDs and BluRay (and they will), then they can offer high quality films that will work on computers, older HDTV sets that people invested a lot in, and so on.
Functionality is a massive selling point, enough to make even people that actually do want to pay a fair price for the real thing think about getting the more functional version.
Sadly all this expensive work spent on restricting users will not bring in much more revenue to the companies - those people mainly pirate because they can't afford it otherwise, or wouldn't pay for it being stingy bastards. Instead they'll manage on the DVD resolution version - quality isn't a big issue for them either - students can't afford HDTV systems, stingy people have 20 year old televisions.
Um, oh yeah. Doh.
:p
Only so much space in my head for big cats.
All very true, but you're preaching to the converted.
Instead tell your (if you are American) government to stop the RIAA riding roughshod all over you in the name of profit. Or do the equivalent in your area of the world.
And start supporting unencumbered music not sold by RIAA members, and give artists money by seeing them live.
You have to admit though that many Mac users would like to see Panther pictures, and this is a good way of propagating the trojan.
What can you do about it? User education is the only way.
Otherwise, mark downloaded files as 'downloaded', and when unzipping such files apply that to all files inside too. Upon first access to an 'downloaded' application you should ask the user if they want to run the application. For a real data file there's no issue, it'd open in Preview, etc. It would catch applications pretending to be datafiles though, and equally it wouldn't stop terminally retarded people running it. Hopefully other people would go 'hang on, this isn't an application...' and thus save their computer.
I agree, it's all about finger dexterity and muscle memory rather than actually attacking in an interesting manner.
... and I don't want a load of ninja teenagers growing up over the next 10 years.
Hell, it could even teach players basic martial arts moves with the heel and wrist controller ($49.99 additional) where you have to fight by doing the actual moves (roughly).
OTOH this could be quite dangerous unsupervised
Oh, I'm not :)
I have a Mac and I write OpenGL stuff in Java when I get the opportunity.
When it comes to 3D games, the OS will be backseat to the hardware.
In this laptop's case, it is an ATI X1600 family graphics processor.
That's pretty good, but it isn't a mobile variant of an nVidia 7800. Of course, these don't come in cheap laptops either.
Apart from that you will have Apple's slightly suboptimal OpenGL implementation, and possibly a layer of DirectX->OpenGL translation depending on how the game was ported.
Certainly this MacBook Pro will outperform the majority of PC laptops in games simply because the majority of PC laptops utilise integrated graphics - sometimes even at the $2000 pricepoint. However it will probably lose to any gamer or extreme performance PC laptops. Then again, they aren't $999 either.
Technically, when you're using Wine to run your own application which you can compile to the target architecture, there shouldn't be an issue apart from endianness fluff that might be exposed in the Windows API. Which is unlikely, given that Windows NT was available for Alpha, PowerPC, ...
It'll probably be like any application that comes with its own GUI, networking, etc, library.
Hopefully Google will make it transparent enough to only need a single shared Wine install between different Google applications, rather than, for example, statically compiling Wine into it!
Tell me about it ...
:p
Every year I've been in Cambridge (since 1996) the winters have been bitterly cold, whilst not having the benefit of much snow. It's the nasty artic winds sweeping down off the North Sea, over the flat land straight into Cambridge. Grr!
Still, it cools our heads, allowing our brains to operate faster
(if only)
I wouldn't be surprised if within the next year or two you get Expresscard graphics cards. It'd only be PCIe x1 (250MB/s bidirectional, so between AGP1x and AGP2x), and most likely in an external box rather than inside the expresscard, as it isn't the largest format in the world. If there's enough power provided by expresscard, that is ...
on my Motorola A1000, that I bought from my provider during a sale for £1.
I guess I got my value out of it, but the phone controls are inadequate for platform games. However they're good enough to play Heretic with, less fine tuning required I guess.
For part time projects for programmers though, they're a great industry to get into. You don't have to learn complex 3D APIs, or spend months writing a bare game. You can do the bare game in a few evenings, create a few useful libraries for 2D gaming, write the game (80's style 8-bit ports usually) in a few more, and give it to your friends, or even see if you can sell it via a network provider and get a few quid back for your efforts.
Well, actually, I bet you could do a game that matches any Atari ST or Amiga game actually - you can do quite a lot with a >100MHz ARM processor, even if it is running a JVM. Smooth scrolling and lots of action certainly works (at 320x208 on my A1000), and I've seen parallax scrolling done as well.
The only difficulty with it for casual programmers is that each mobile platform needs its own customisation for the game - different screen sizes, processing capabilities (no parallax scrolling on the lower end hardware), etc. Which takes a lot of time if you want to spread the game wide and far.
Well, I suppose that Nokia's Linux based web tablet (770) has a pretty decent 800x480 display, and I bet that something like this chip would be quite a good match for it.
... maybe.
I don't know about mobile phones though - maybe the highest end communicator style phones
Of course digital cameras are multifunction these days, and have large ridiculous DPI displays on them. I wouldn't be surprised to see a 3" 800x600 display on one soon. Again, this GPU would be good for that, and for playback of recorded video, and the 10MP capability suggests it might be targetted (in nVidia's dreams?) at high end consumer digital cameras (which will be 5MP to 8MP for the next couple of years).
You won't see it in a $200 phone though. Not this year or next anyway.
... and it plays on my iPod.
I bought CDs, ripped them using iTunes and put them on my iPod.
So how am I forced to use iTMS?
Admittedly I would like to see Fairplay licensed to other music store providers, as Apple has got the vast majority of the portable music market now. However it hasn't got it by foul means, simply by having a better product that people want.
Is 'music for iPods' a distinct market from 'music for portable music players'?
Are consumers getting harmed? Arguably iTMS is the most usable online music store. iTunes is the most usable music application. iPod is the most usable player. Nobody is forcing you to buy an iPod, use iTunes, or shop from iTMS. There are other options and they aren't niche - there's hundreds of WMA capable players on the market that can play DRM-encrusted WMA music from other stores. There's dozens of WMA music stores online.
With a 12" green screen monitor! Woo.
:(
I learnt to program on that - my parents wouldn't give me any games until I had 'learned' to use it.
So I typed in games from magazines, back when they did type-ins. Usually BASIC programs, sometimes with embedded machine code. I learnt by a process of osmosis, from adding new levels to games, to new features, then writing my own games.
Specs: 4MHz Z80A CPU, 64KB RAM, 32KB ROM, tape storage (built in), good keyboard - albeit colourful (ripped off of the Enterprise 64 I found out later). They were good times - computers with souls. My friend had a C64 which I thought sucked for programming but the games and sound were cool. At school I used RM Nimbus PC-kinda-compatibles. I remember playing an adventure game called 'L', which I quite liked. I managed to miss the BBC micro days though
Currently DVDs are 720 x 576 (PAL), which is good enough for me, at least for the next 5 to 10 years.
... DVD was a natural replacement and solved all of those issues.
VHS degraded over time, was awkward to use, bulky, hard to navigate exactly, low resolution
Unless you have a 60" TV and can see the DVD encoding blocks and resolution. This is a niche market though - most people (especially in the UK and Europe) simply do not have massive TVs.
So unless DVDs suddenly start shipping with poor encoding, thus trying to make HiDef discs look better in comparison, no one is going to care. I'm going to buy £20 BluRays - I only watch most films a couple of times anyway - rental seems a better option even for DVDs, TV series are worth buying, but they're less likely to be in HD anyway, or not as worthy of HD. High BluRay prices will simply mean less sales to consumers of content, and more rentals.
A good film that's worth owning is like a good book. It doesn't need the resolution to be good, it's all about the content, the acting, the story. As long as the DVD is looked after, it's all that 90% of people will need. With clever filters DVD resolution can be upscaled very nicely as well, so it will look good on most HDTVs, as long as the DVD player is decent (+ progressive output). If you can afford a HDTV, then spare a bit more for a decent player, eh?
Cheers. Unfortunately the EPIA-800 doesn't have the MPEG2 hardware accelleration as it is a pretty old board.
I could get a new board, but then I could be better off simply getting something with more support anyway, even if the board wasn't as small - e.g., a micro-atx nForce board with integrated graphics (with the hardware accelleration) and an underclocked Sempron with passive cooling.