What the IBM 5100 really represents, in retrospect, is the beginning of the turnaround for IBM in the minds of the public. It's difficult to think of another example of a company so large and so universally despised eventually becoming the (mostly) developer friendly company it is today.
By allowing their teams to skirt the system occasionally, we've seen truly open hardware (PowerPC) availablity, open source contributions, free training seminars for developers, etc. The 5100 was the first great example of the success that a little rule-breaking can bring to the company.
IMO, it was exactly that product and the example that it was to IBM internally that allowed IBM to do the one thing no one was entirely sure it would be able to do in the age of personal computers -- survive.
My hat's off to the improvements IBM has made in the last 25 years, and I hope that those lessons won't be forgotten over the next 25 years.
I see no excitement there. A game doesn't need any of those things. When I play a game, I sit down at my PC/console, start it up, play for an hour (or a few hours) then turn it off. There's no reason or advantage to it sending me emails, SMS, blogs, etc. If it needs to tell me something, it can pop up something in the HUD. And I sure as hell wouldn't want it calling or texting me and costing me money.
I understand your sentiment and a few years ago I would have wholeheartledly shared it. But I would
have also thought that there was no market for millions of inane posts about someone's cat. Looking at today we can see advertisements for cellphones where the main selling point
is integration with MySpace. Although people like yourself that want to keep the gaming experience "pure" (and by comparison there are plenty of folks who just "want a damn phone!") are important to developers, we do need to recognize this growing segment of people that want to connect up all their toys.
The closed game experience is not something that will go away - I hope that there will always be those types of games, and that you'll always be able to find something you like. The excitement comes from the new possibility of connecting the toys of the players that want them to be connected.
And, yes, some of this has been tried and has failed before. That doesn't mean that there is absolutely no way to make it work.
That the console video game industry must change is nothing new. In order to survive in the
industry, game developers must have one skill more than any other, and that is the capacity to
adapt to change. Fifteen years ago it was about getting the maximum value from the minimum number
of sprites. A little over ten years ago programmers and artists needed to learn to make 3D models, animations, cameras, etc. very quickly in order to get the first generation of 3D games out the door. Since that time, "game designer" has become an accepted industry position and games are no longer designed on a whiteboard by the lead programmer and producer. And of course, network programming, multi-core programming, complex materials and shaders, etc. have all changed the way games are made.
"This is one of the reasons Square Enix will collaborate with Taito, a company that produces physical hardware," he said. "In our talks with Taito, ideas for an actual physical product have come up. In any case, we will be releasing some 'thing.' It's interesting in that it's not the sort of thing you expect from Square Enix."
The only real suggestion that's being made here is that the interface between the gamer and the game will change. But we've seen that happen as well. From the floor pad and the light gun to the eye toy and the Wii controller, the interface is being adapted all the time.
Certainly even integration with toys has been considered before - but it's often been rejected due to the expense and the low-profit margin for the developer (making an already niche application even more expensive.)
The real excitement now, I think, is that there are so many options at once for console games to connect with the other things. Games can potentially connect to cellphones via SMS (or even voice!); to the player while he's away using IM or email; post updates on blogs; control local bluetooth devices; or sync with handhelds and PDAs.
Yesterday developers needed to create the devices that changed how players interact with their games. Today these devices already exist in the hands of our players and what we need to do is find creative ways to take advange of that.
This Year's Interactive Achievement Award Winners
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The Videogame Oscars
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· Score: 3, Informative
The Interactive Achievement Awards have been presented annually since 1998.
Interactive Achievement Award recipients are determined by a vote of
qualified Academy members. As such, selection as an Interactive Academy
award finalist or recipient represents the strongest possible peer
recognition.
----
9th Annual Interactive Achievement Award Winners
The award winners in each category are as follows:
Game of the Year:
Overall . God of War Computer . Battlefield Console . God of War Outstanding Innovation in Gaming . Guitar Hero
Outstanding Achievement:
Animation . God of War Art Direction . Shadow of the Colossus Soundtrack . Guitar Hero Original Music Composition . God of War Sound Design . God of War Story and Character Development . Call of Duty: Big Red One Game Play Engineering (Tie) . Nintendogs - Guitar Hero Online Game Play . Battlefield 2 Visual Engineering . Shadow of the Colossus Game Design . Guitar Hero
Outstanding Character Performance:
Male . God of War Female . Jade Empire
(Game of the Year In) Genre Awards:
Sports . SSX On Tour First-Person Action . Battlefield 2 Role-Playing . Jade Empire Fighting . Soul Calibur 3 Action/ Adventure . God of War Racing . Need For Speed: Most Wanted Children's . We Love Katamari Downloadable . WIK: Fable of Souls Family . Guitar Hero Simulation . The Movies Strategy . Civilization IV Massively Multiplayer / Persistent World (Tie) . City Villains - Guild Wars Handheld . Nintendogs Cellular . Ancient Empires II
AIAS Hall of Fame Honoree Richard Garriott is the ninth member to be inducted and joins an already impressive fraternity of gaming icons, including Trip Hawkins, Peter Molyneux, Yu Suzuki, Will Wright, John Carmack, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. Garriott is best known for creating and publishing the best-selling Ultima series, including the first commercially successful online game, Ultima Online.
It'd seem to me that a lot of the development trickery will be in getting a proper compiler and specialized libs out there that take advantage of this parallelism without requiring massive changes to how the average developer has to write their code.
Certainly people are working on that very idea. However, it's a long way off and not likely to happen in the lifetime of this version of the processor. Both XLC (IBM's optimizing compiler) and GCC have a very difficult time vectorizing (i.e. taking advantage of the SIMD instruction sets) within a single processor. IBM has released a Cell SDK for managing the PPU/SPU at a higher level, which should make the transition slightly easier for some developers, but on the whole - there is no way around the fact that the final algorithms and data design are very different when targetting a Cell.
Most of the bitching we've heard from developers so far hasn't been that the cell sucks but that their existing codebases don't take advantage of it's design and they don't want to make a rewrite that locks them into the platform.
These developers that are bitching are just the decendants of the developers that were bitching when games moved from 2D to 3D. That caused a major upheaval as well. We lost a lot of programmers in that transition, we're bound to lose some here too. But times change and multi-processing has been a long time coming - it's not going anywhere. The Cell may be a hit, or not - but the software techniques will be the basis of what we do for quite a while.
from the article and if the ps3 cell cpu is even half the processor than this monster is i say that game companies will need a lot of real programmers to make real good games (as if they cared).
1. Some of us do care, actually. 2. The Cell processor described is exactly the processor in the PS3. 3. Yes, regardless of what some would like to believe, there is no magic. It's different, but it's the way things are going, so some of us are adapting the way develop. It'll take work, and maybe a little time, but that's always been our job - we get hardware and we figure out how to do something cool with it. 4. It is actually really fun to work on and very impressive.
Written in C, a significant part of the Full-System Simulator's simulation capability is directly attributed to its simulation multitasking framework component. Developed as a robust, high-performance alternative to conventional process and thread programming, the multitasking framework is a lightweight, multitasking scheduling framework that provides a complete set of facilities for creating and scheduling threads, manipulating time delays, and applying a variety of interthread communication policies and mechanisms to simulation events.
The simulator runs a Redhat kernel, so the programming model will be familiar. Also both SCE's (gcc-based) and IBM's (XLC) compilers are available for both the PPU and SPU.
IBM will also be releasing Cell-based Blade servers next year, so pick one up if you're serious about development!
Re:More like 3.90 processors
on
How The 360 Works
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· Score: 4, Informative
> Because the two threads in the chips share arithmetic and floating point units and whatnot, > they get best case throughput of 1.3x a single threaded chip. This is according to Sony who has the same PPU on their PS3.
I don't mean to be too pedantic here, but you are not correct.
The Cell PPU unit and the XBOX360 PPC unit are not the same. They are related by the fact that they are both PPC designs, but that is as far as it goes. The XBOX360 PPC has two fixed-point, two floating-point and two VMX units per core - thread switching is done on fetch stalls. The Cell PPU has two register files but only single fixed-point, floating-point and VMX units - threading is accomplished by switching between the register files. The branch prediction units are also different, and the caches, and the memory mapping. As a matter of fact, the only thing the two processors share is an instruction set and an IBM invoice.
The number you (mis-)quote originally came from a lecture in an SCEA conference. You apparently don't understand the context under which it was said, and thus why it makes no sense to discuss here - nor do you appear to understand the NDA which, if you heard this directly from SCEA, are under. Although much of the Cell design and tools are public knowledge, it is necessary to keep confidential that non-public information which you have access to if you wish to continue to have access to it.
> No, actually, that's only four. There were only four Star Trek TV series ever made. > I don't see where you people are getting five, let alone six.
1. Star Trek (The Original Series) 1966-1969 2. Star Trek (The Animated Series) 1973-1974 3. Star Trek: The Next Generation 1987-1994 4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 1993-1999 5. Star Trek: Voyager 1995-2001 6. Star Trek: Enterprise 2001-2005
You may be right. As a game programmer I, along with the most of the artists I've worked with, have been strictly Alias for over ten years now - since we moved to 3D games. Alias on the SGI then Maya on the PC. But when I heard this announcement today, I decided I was going to check out Blender soon. I want to make sure that years of investment into the next set of tools can't be so easily undone. It's going to be a very hard move, but no one believes that Autodesk isn't going to screw this up.
Please read the entire comment before moderating. Thanks.
From the parent:
[...] They really do enjoy making hair braids from Taco's pubes. Zonk put one around his phallus; it looked like the little crown of thorns Lord Baby Jesus wore. Good luck getting people to pick up Dapper Drake if it's ever to sit next to Microsoft Windows on the shelf. There's really a cold chance in hell a single unit will ever sell outside of geekdom. Just my two cents of course. Take it or leave it, but come one... gay duck? The only gay duck around here is Taco. (CowboyNeal is in actual fact a gay fuck.)
Linus Torvalds (and myself) are entitled to apolgies from GrokLaw, and SCO regarding their false and misleading claims Linus missappropriated trade secrets or infringed their copyrights and that I was involved in a scheme with SCO to further their false, misleading, and libelous allegations. Groklaw has also posted numerous emails and comments attributed to me which I did not author which libel Linus and myself, and were designed to create and perpetuate animosity in the Linux Community.
... and... I thank Linus Torvalds for being a true friend and working with me to resolve these issues, despite all the heat and mud flying around.
Seems like he's just trying to associate his name as closely as he can with Linus (and thus represent an "official" linux line)... Or maybe he and Linus really are buddies...
Okay Fabian needs to relax. Take a deep breath! He made two fundamental mistakes which probably cost him to waste time he could have spent on something more productive, or at least personally gratifying... (Although bitching about Slashdot posts can be gratifying, I suppose.)
1. He took Slashdot comments personally. This is something we see all the time. Let this serve as/another/ warning to all future Slashdotees -- People hidden behind anonymity, even experienced onces, like drivers, will forget that there are real people on the other side of the conversation.
2. He treats Slashdot comments as well-thought responses to his articles. For Pete's sake come on! This is the place where professionals, interested parties, and random wannabes can foam at the mouth and say the first thing that comes to mind. Hell man, comments are moderated by popular vote! This is not exactly a medium of high academic quality. And that's just fine. Sometimes first impressions are what you want, sometimes they're complete BS, but they only give you an insight in to where some people would/start/ thinking about a problem, not where they would end up after careful consideration after research and practice.
In the end Fabian, you're probably gonna get flamed for your response as well. If you want it for the intention, cool. If not you should probably just let it go...
There's quite a lot posted there. Mostly referring to images, but here's a couple excerpts -- It was slashdotted while I was reading it...
TALES OF FUTURE PAST It wasn't that long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now; the world isn't going to crash into the Sun or anything like that. What I mean is that we had a future that we could clearly imagine. The future wasn't tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. It was a place with a form, a structure, a style. True, we didn't know exactly what the future would be like, but we knew that it had to be one of a few alternatives; some good, some very bad. The future was a world with a distinct architecture. It had its own way of speaking. It had its own technology. It was for all intents and purposes a different land where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently, and even thought differently. It was where scientists were wizards, where machines were magically effective and efficient, where tyrants were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and where the heavens were fairyland where dreams could literally come true.
A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we're there, the phrase seems as odd as building a causeway to five o'clock. As Midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.
Boy, were we off base. It isn't simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain really expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did not come to pass, others that were and weren't predicted did. We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.
Still, there was a romantic innocence about the 20th century's view of the future. It was a sort of plastic Camelot; in both senses of the term. So, settle on you jetpack, hitch up you blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!
FUTURE CITY This is Frank R. Paul's depiction of a city of the future and is pretty typical of such predictions. The city is a massive pile of steel, plastic and glass put together in a way that not only has no past, but actively rejects it. It is a place of heroic technology with skyscrapers the size of whole districts, Roof-top aerodromes, wide pedestrian boulevards, and metal roadways strangely devoid of traffic. There are even urban space launch pads where giant rockets are winched upright before blasting off to the heavens. Noise regulations, Smoise regulations.
Depends on how it's being counted -- What's the range of a "location"? (city? county? miles?) What's being rated? (number of studios? dollars revenue?)
But, if I were to hazard a guess -- #1 San Fransisco bay area #2 Los Angeles / San Diego area
The EU is out contributing to a piece of software that the entire world will benefit from. What's happening in the United States? Well...we have a couple of big corporate interests donating some money. That's about it. Government spending is for promoting overseas use of Microsoft products. Sigh.
The EU is contributing to a project that primarily based in the EU. The Stichting Blender Foundation is based in The Netherlands. An EU country. Therefore, the financial contributions do not leave the EU -- this is a major point. Certainly, developers / contributors are from all around the world, but it is much easier to justify contributing to the "local" (well at least Euro-based) economy that it is to justify contibuting to a foriegn economy. Also, although a very cool project, the claim that "the entire world will benefit from [it]" is dubious at best. In the grand scale of things, Blender is totally insignificant.
There are days when the U S of A has an awfully hard time inspiring patriotism in me...
If all it takes for the USA to "inspire patriotism in [you]" is to throw a few thousand at an open source package then 1. you are a cheap vote and 2. look around, there are quite a lot of projects that have been sponsored by the US government which the world now benefits from. The simpliest example is the internet itself.
AS is basically a mental disorder that, for all intents and purposes, defines the average geek.
From: http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/aswhatisit.htm l Individuals with AS can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Persons with AS show marked deficiencies in social skills, have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. They often have obsessive routines and may be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest. They have a great deal of difficulty reading nonverbal cues (body language) and very often the individual with AS has difficulty determining proper body space. Often overly sensitive to sounds, tastes, smells, and sights, the person with AS may prefer soft clothing, certain foods, and be bothered by sounds or lights no one else seems to hear or see. It's important to remember that the person with AS perceives the world very differently. Therefore, many behaviors that seem odd or unusual are due to those neurological differences and not the result of intentional rudeness or bad behavior, and most certainly not the result of "improper parenting".
By definition, those with AS have a normal IQ and many individuals (although not all), exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a specific area. Because of their high degree of functionality and their naivete, those with AS are often viewed as eccentric or odd and can easily become victims of teasing and bullying. While language development seems, on the surface, normal, individuals with AS often have deficits in pragmatics and prosody. Vocabularies may be extraordinarily rich and some children sound like "little professors." However, persons with AS can be extremely literal and have difficulty using language in a social context.
Well, I haven't seen anything either -- So it is only safe to assume that the source follows normal copyrights, and you may not redistribute it in any way without permission. Until there is some announcement from NewTek that says otherwise, this is their code and only their code -- it can be used for "reference" or your personal source-code museum, but not much else.
And I would say at least these apply: (Quoted from the site above)
# You have discovered the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP). # You are the first to think of the FUSSP. # You started looking for the FUSSP after observing that it is impossible to filter more than 99% of spam with fewer than 0.1% false positives by currently available mechanisms. # You don't plan to make a fortune from the FUSSP, but you do expect fame as its generous and public spirited netizen inventor. # You are deeply hurt and angry because you are not respected as "spam fighter." # People don't see the value of the FUSSP because they have axes to grind, are jealous, or are too stupid to understand it. # You learned how to stop spam during the more than six whole weeks you've been fighting it. # The FUUSP assumes that your attention is so important that strangers, other than advertisers, from will pay money to send you mail. # You cannot name several potentially fatal flaws in the FUSSP. # All you need to do to get the FUSSP implemented and deployed is to publish an RFC or get a law passed. # You don't recognize any significant difference between deploying and implementing the FUSSP. # You plan to publish an RFC mandating the FUSSP but have never heard of RFC 2223 or RFC 2026. # Inventing the FUSSP did not require that you know the difference between RFC 821 and RFC 822 or that they have been replaced by RFC 2821 and RFC 2822. # You don't know the relevance of "consensus" or "IESG approval" to publishing RFCs. # Spammers won't ignore, subvert, or exploit the FUSSP if you publish it as an RFC. # The FUSSP depends on spammers or mail recipients changing their behavior without any immediate gain. # The FUSSP won't be effective until it has been deployed at more than 60% of SMTP servers and that's not a problem. # Your job is done after having explained the FUSSP to the IETF or The Industry.. # Programmers will drop everything to implement the FUSSP. # You know that SMTP has no authentication and have never heard of SMTP-AUTH, SMTP-TLS, S/MIME, or PGP. # You know that the failure of SMTP servers to authenticate the SMTP clients of strangers is a major bug in SMTP instead of an expression of a primary design goal. # The FUSSP requires a small number of central servers to handle certificates, act as "pull servers" for bulk mail, account for mail charges, or whatever, but that is not a problem.
** Well, in this case worse -- It requires a whole banking system!
# The FUSSP requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers. # You have found that most Internet users would be happy to pay $5/month to avoid spam and do not know the prices of anti-virus software or data. # You have never heard of RFC 2554 or RFC 2487 and the FUSSP includes fixing the lack of authentication in SMTP. # The FUSSP involves replacing SMTP. # Your definition of spam differs significantly from "unsolicited bulk email." # You frequently use math, statistics, and information theory, and almost as frequently notice people hiding grins or stifling laughs.
Slashdot Mirror
What the IBM 5100 really represents, in retrospect, is the beginning of the turnaround for IBM in the minds of the public. It's difficult to think of another example of a company so large and so universally despised eventually becoming the (mostly) developer friendly company it is today.
By allowing their teams to skirt the system occasionally, we've seen truly open hardware (PowerPC) availablity, open source contributions, free training seminars for developers, etc. The 5100 was the first great example of the success that a little rule-breaking can bring to the company.
IMO, it was exactly that product and the example that it was to IBM internally that allowed IBM to do the one thing no one was entirely sure it would be able to do in the age of personal computers -- survive.
My hat's off to the improvements IBM has made in the last 25 years, and I hope that those lessons won't be forgotten over the next 25 years.
I understand your sentiment and a few years ago I would have wholeheartledly shared it. But I would have also thought that there was no market for millions of inane posts about someone's cat. Looking at today we can see advertisements for cellphones where the main selling point is integration with MySpace. Although people like yourself that want to keep the gaming experience "pure" (and by comparison there are plenty of folks who just "want a damn phone!") are important to developers, we do need to recognize this growing segment of people that want to connect up all their toys.
The closed game experience is not something that will go away - I hope that there will always be those types of games, and that you'll always be able to find something you like. The excitement comes from the new possibility of connecting the toys of the players that want them to be connected.
And, yes, some of this has been tried and has failed before. That doesn't mean that there is absolutely no way to make it work.
The only real suggestion that's being made here is that the interface between the gamer and the game will change. But we've seen that happen as well. From the floor pad and the light gun to the eye toy and the Wii controller, the interface is being adapted all the time.
Certainly even integration with toys has been considered before - but it's often been rejected due to the expense and the low-profit margin for the developer (making an already niche application even more expensive.)
The real excitement now, I think, is that there are so many options at once for console games to connect with the other things. Games can potentially connect to cellphones via SMS (or even voice!); to the player while he's away using IM or email; post updates on blogs; control local bluetooth devices; or sync with handhelds and PDAs.
Yesterday developers needed to create the devices that changed how players interact with their games. Today these devices already exist in the hands of our players and what we need to do is find creative ways to take advange of that.
From: http://www.interactive.org/awards/IAA-9/winners.as p
The Interactive Achievement Awards have been presented annually since 1998.
Interactive Achievement Award recipients are determined by a vote of
qualified Academy members. As such, selection as an Interactive Academy
award finalist or recipient represents the strongest possible peer
recognition.
----
9th Annual Interactive Achievement Award Winners
The award winners in each category are as follows:
Game of the Year:
Overall . God of War
Computer . Battlefield
Console . God of War
Outstanding Innovation in Gaming . Guitar Hero
Outstanding Achievement:
Animation . God of War
Art Direction . Shadow of the Colossus
Soundtrack . Guitar Hero
Original Music Composition . God of War
Sound Design . God of War
Story and Character Development . Call of Duty: Big Red One
Game Play Engineering (Tie) . Nintendogs - Guitar Hero
Online Game Play . Battlefield 2
Visual Engineering . Shadow of the Colossus
Game Design . Guitar Hero
Outstanding Character Performance:
Male . God of War
Female . Jade Empire
(Game of the Year In) Genre Awards:
Sports . SSX On Tour
First-Person Action . Battlefield 2
Role-Playing . Jade Empire
Fighting . Soul Calibur 3
Action/ Adventure . God of War
Racing . Need For Speed: Most Wanted
Children's . We Love Katamari
Downloadable . WIK: Fable of Souls
Family . Guitar Hero
Simulation . The Movies
Strategy . Civilization IV
Massively Multiplayer /
Persistent World (Tie) . City Villains - Guild Wars
Handheld . Nintendogs
Cellular . Ancient Empires II
AIAS Hall of Fame Honoree Richard Garriott is the ninth member to be inducted and joins an already impressive fraternity of gaming icons, including Trip Hawkins, Peter Molyneux, Yu Suzuki, Will Wright, John Carmack, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Sid Meier and Shigeru Miyamoto. Garriott is best known for creating and publishing the best-selling Ultima series, including the first commercially successful online game, Ultima Online.
It'd seem to me that a lot of the development trickery will be in getting a proper compiler and specialized libs out there that take advantage of this parallelism without requiring massive changes to how the average developer has to write their code.
Certainly people are working on that very idea. However, it's a long way off and not likely to happen in the lifetime of this version of the processor. Both XLC (IBM's optimizing compiler) and GCC have a very difficult time vectorizing (i.e. taking advantage of the SIMD instruction sets) within a single processor. IBM has released a Cell SDK for managing the PPU/SPU at a higher level, which should make the transition slightly easier for some developers, but on the whole - there is no way around the fact that the final algorithms and data design are very different when targetting a Cell.
Most of the bitching we've heard from developers so far hasn't been that the cell sucks but that their existing codebases don't take advantage of it's design and they don't want to make a rewrite that locks them into the platform.
These developers that are bitching are just the decendants of the developers that were bitching when games moved from 2D to 3D. That caused a major upheaval as well. We lost a lot of programmers in that transition, we're bound to lose some here too. But times change and multi-processing has been a long time coming - it's not going anywhere. The Cell may be a hit, or not - but the software techniques will be the basis of what we do for quite a while.
from the article and if the ps3 cell cpu is even half the processor than this monster is i say that game companies will need a lot of real programmers to make real good games (as if they cared).
1. Some of us do care, actually.
2. The Cell processor described is exactly the processor in the PS3.
3. Yes, regardless of what some would like to believe, there is no magic. It's different, but it's the way things are going, so some of us are adapting the way develop. It'll take work, and maybe a little time, but that's always been our job - we get hardware and we figure out how to do something cool with it.
4. It is actually really fun to work on and very impressive.
IBM will also be releasing Cell-based Blade servers next year, so pick one up if you're serious about development!
> Because the two threads in the chips share arithmetic and floating point units and whatnot,
> they get best case throughput of 1.3x a single threaded chip. This is according to Sony who has the same PPU on their PS3.
I don't mean to be too pedantic here, but you are not correct.
The Cell PPU unit and the XBOX360 PPC unit are not the same. They are related by the fact that they are both PPC designs, but that is as far as it goes. The XBOX360 PPC has two fixed-point, two floating-point and two VMX units per core - thread switching is done on fetch stalls. The Cell PPU has two register files but only single fixed-point, floating-point and VMX units - threading is accomplished by switching between the register files. The branch prediction units are also different, and the caches, and the memory mapping. As a matter of fact, the only thing the two processors share is an instruction set and an IBM invoice.
The number you (mis-)quote originally came from a lecture in an SCEA conference. You apparently don't understand the context under which it was said, and thus why it makes no sense to discuss here - nor do you appear to understand the NDA which, if you heard this directly from SCEA, are under. Although much of the Cell design and tools are public knowledge, it is necessary to keep confidential that non-public information which you have access to if you wish to continue to have access to it.
> No, actually, that's only four. There were only four Star Trek TV series ever made.
> I don't see where you people are getting five, let alone six.
1. Star Trek (The Original Series) 1966-1969
2. Star Trek (The Animated Series) 1973-1974
3. Star Trek: The Next Generation 1987-1994
4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 1993-1999
5. Star Trek: Voyager 1995-2001
6. Star Trek: Enterprise 2001-2005
You may be right. As a game programmer I, along with the most of the artists I've worked with, have been strictly Alias for over ten years now - since we moved to 3D games. Alias on the SGI then Maya on the PC. But when I heard this announcement today, I decided I was going to check out Blender soon. I want to make sure that years of investment into the next set of tools can't be so easily undone. It's going to be a very hard move, but no one believes that Autodesk isn't going to screw this up.
From the parent:
Or it could be said that Bill just took his own advice. Depends on what he was looking to accomplish.
Here's the action: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=317&item=5947720145&rd=1 which is currently at $14,999.00.
... and another guy : http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=317&item=5949241580&rd=1 trying the same thing but for a week instead of 30 days.
Also the homepage: http://www.humanadspace.com/
Toys represent everything that's wrong with modern western civilization. They enforce the notion that there is a difference between "work" and "play".
I guess the producers at EA read Slashdot after all...
Interesting bit:
... and ...
... Or maybe he and Linus really are buddies...
Linus Torvalds (and myself) are entitled to apolgies from GrokLaw, and SCO regarding
their false and misleading claims Linus missappropriated trade secrets or infringed their
copyrights and that I was involved in a scheme with SCO to further their false,
misleading, and libelous allegations. Groklaw has also posted numerous emails and
comments attributed to me which I did not author which libel Linus and myself, and
were designed to create and perpetuate animosity in the Linux Community.
I thank Linus Torvalds for being a true friend and working with me to resolve these
issues, despite all the heat and mud flying around.
Seems like he's just trying to associate his name as closely as he can with Linus (and thus represent an "official" linux line)
Sorry, you're right. I forgot:
3. Slashdot comments are not always entirely accurate.
Okay Fabian needs to relax. Take a deep breath! He made two fundamental mistakes which probably cost him to waste time he could have spent on something more productive, or at least personally gratifying... (Although bitching about Slashdot posts can be gratifying, I suppose.)
/another/ warning to all future Slashdotees -- People hidden behind anonymity, even experienced onces, like drivers, will forget that there are real people on the other side of the conversation.
/start/ thinking about a problem, not where they would end up after careful consideration after research and practice.
1. He took Slashdot comments personally. This is something we see all the time. Let this serve as
2. He treats Slashdot comments as well-thought responses to his articles. For Pete's sake come on! This is the place where professionals, interested parties, and random wannabes can foam at the mouth and say the first thing that comes to mind. Hell man, comments are moderated by popular vote! This is not exactly a medium of high academic quality. And that's just fine. Sometimes first impressions are what you want, sometimes they're complete BS, but they only give you an insight in to where some people would
In the end Fabian, you're probably gonna get flamed for your response as well. If you want it for the intention, cool. If not you should probably just let it go...
There's quite a lot posted there. Mostly referring to images, but here's a couple excerpts -- It was slashdotted while I was reading it...
TALES OF FUTURE PAST
It wasn't that long ago that we had a future. I mean, we have one now; the world isn't going to crash into the Sun or anything like that. What I mean is that we had a future that we could clearly imagine. The future wasn't tomorrow, next week, next year, or next century. It was a place with a form, a structure, a style. True, we didn't know exactly what the future would be like, but we knew that it had to be one of a few alternatives; some good, some very bad. The future was a world with a distinct architecture. It had its own way of speaking. It had its own technology. It was for all intents and purposes a different land where people dressed differently, talked differently, ate differently, and even thought differently. It was where scientists were wizards, where machines were magically effective and efficient, where tyrants were at least romantically evil rather than banal, and where the heavens were fairyland where dreams could literally come true.
A few years ago, people talked about building a bridge to the 21st century. Now that we're there, the phrase seems as odd as building a causeway to five o'clock. As Midnight brought in the year 2000 (or 2001 if you prefer), something odd began to sink in. For people of my generation, who had lived through the tarnished promises of the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the Computer Age, and the This That and Another Age, the year 2001 was a gateway. We waited twenty, thirty, forty years and some longer to pass though that gate into a time when spaceships the size of ocean liners plied between colonised planets, where cities were colourful collections of brand new towers without a single old building or blade of grass, where people wore jumpsuits like they were the togas of a technocratic Rome, where robots were our powerful and obedient servants, and where jetpacks were as common as galoshes.
Boy, were we off base. It isn't simply that the predictions were wrong. No one with half a brain really expected that sort of accuracy. And true, though some marvels did not come to pass, others that were and weren't predicted did. We certainly live very different lives from that of our fathers and grandfathers. That is not in dispute. But what did not happen is what many expected, though never talked about much. Assuming that we dodged the 1984, Brave New World bullet, our future was supposed to be a sort of technocratic, atomic-powered, computer-controlled, antiseptic, space-travelling Jerusalem that would at last free us from the curse of Eden and original sin. We expected some how, some way that we would be on the road to being freed from the human condition. We expected a sort of bloodless, benign French Revolution with Hugo Gernsback as our Voltaire and Carl Sagan as our Robespierre. And what did we get? The City of Man with Tivo. The fact is, science fiction and popular science had set the bar so high that only the Second Coming with ray guns would have satisfied.
Still, there was a romantic innocence about the 20th century's view of the future. It was a sort of plastic Camelot; in both senses of the term. So, settle on you jetpack, hitch up you blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!
FUTURE CITY
This is Frank R. Paul's depiction of a city of the future and is pretty typical of such predictions. The city is a massive pile of steel, plastic and glass put together in a way that not only has no past, but actively rejects it. It is a place of heroic technology with skyscrapers the size of whole districts, Roof-top aerodromes, wide pedestrian boulevards, and metal roadways strangely devoid of traffic. There are even urban space launch pads where giant rockets are winched upright before blasting off to the heavens. Noise regulations, Smoise regulations.
The iconic image of the future is the city
Depends on how it's being counted --
What's the range of a "location"? (city? county? miles?)
What's being rated? (number of studios? dollars revenue?)
But, if I were to hazard a guess --
#1 San Fransisco bay area
#2 Los Angeles / San Diego area
A list of some of the google features available:t ml
http://www.google.com/help/features.h
The EU is out contributing to a piece of software that the entire world will benefit from. What's happening in the United States? Well...we have a couple of big corporate interests donating some money. That's about it. Government spending is for promoting overseas use of Microsoft products. Sigh.
The EU is contributing to a project that primarily based in the EU. The Stichting Blender Foundation is based in The Netherlands. An EU country. Therefore, the financial contributions do not leave the EU -- this is a major point.
Certainly, developers / contributors are from all around the world, but it is much easier to justify contributing to the "local" (well at least Euro-based) economy that it is to justify contibuting to a foriegn economy.
Also, although a very cool project, the claim that "the entire world will benefit from [it]" is dubious at best. In the grand scale of things, Blender is totally insignificant.
There are days when the U S of A has an awfully hard time inspiring patriotism in me...
If all it takes for the USA to "inspire patriotism in [you]" is to throw a few thousand at an open source package then 1. you are a cheap vote and 2. look around, there are quite a lot of projects that have been sponsored by the US government which the world now benefits from. The simpliest example is the internet itself.
That said -- this is great news for blender.org!
AS is basically a mental disorder that, for all intents and purposes, defines the average geek.
m l
From: http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/aswhatisit.ht
Individuals with AS can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Persons with AS show marked deficiencies in social skills, have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. They often have obsessive routines and may be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest. They have a great deal of difficulty reading nonverbal cues (body language) and very often the individual with AS has difficulty determining proper body space. Often overly sensitive to sounds, tastes, smells, and sights, the person with AS may prefer soft clothing, certain foods, and be bothered by sounds or lights no one else seems to hear or see. It's important to remember that the person with AS perceives the world very differently. Therefore, many behaviors that seem odd or unusual are due to those neurological differences and not the result of intentional rudeness or bad behavior, and most certainly not the result of "improper parenting".
By definition, those with AS have a normal IQ and many individuals (although not all), exhibit exceptional skill or talent in a specific area. Because of their high degree of functionality and their naivete, those with AS are often viewed as eccentric or odd and can easily become victims of teasing and bullying. While language development seems, on the surface, normal, individuals with AS often have deficits in pragmatics and prosody. Vocabularies may be extraordinarily rich and some children sound like "little professors." However, persons with AS can be extremely literal and have difficulty using language in a social context.
Well, I haven't seen anything either --
So it is only safe to assume that the source follows normal copyrights, and you may not redistribute it in any way without permission. Until there is some announcement from NewTek that says otherwise, this is their code and only their code -- it can be used for "reference" or your personal source-code museum, but not much else.
Need a file, know the filename, archie will find a dozen places that the file exists
So will google --
Search: "Index of" filename
From the parent: Warning Signs of a Flawed Proposal
And I would say at least these apply:
(Quoted from the site above)
# You have discovered the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP).
# You are the first to think of the FUSSP.
# You started looking for the FUSSP after observing that it is impossible to filter more than 99% of spam with fewer than 0.1% false positives by currently available mechanisms.
# You don't plan to make a fortune from the FUSSP, but you do expect fame as its generous and public spirited netizen inventor.
# You are deeply hurt and angry because you are not respected as "spam fighter."
# People don't see the value of the FUSSP because they have axes to grind, are jealous, or are too stupid to understand it.
# You learned how to stop spam during the more than six whole weeks you've been fighting it.
# The FUUSP assumes that your attention is so important that strangers, other than advertisers, from will pay money to send you mail.
# You cannot name several potentially fatal flaws in the FUSSP.
# All you need to do to get the FUSSP implemented and deployed is to publish an RFC or get a law passed.
# You don't recognize any significant difference between deploying and implementing the FUSSP.
# You plan to publish an RFC mandating the FUSSP but have never heard of RFC 2223 or RFC 2026.
# Inventing the FUSSP did not require that you know the difference between RFC 821 and RFC 822 or that they have been replaced by RFC 2821 and RFC 2822.
# You don't know the relevance of "consensus" or "IESG approval" to publishing RFCs.
# Spammers won't ignore, subvert, or exploit the FUSSP if you publish it as an RFC.
# The FUSSP depends on spammers or mail recipients changing their behavior without any immediate gain.
# The FUSSP won't be effective until it has been deployed at more than 60% of SMTP servers and that's not a problem.
# Your job is done after having explained the FUSSP to the IETF or The Industry..
# Programmers will drop everything to implement the FUSSP.
# You know that SMTP has no authentication and have never heard of SMTP-AUTH, SMTP-TLS, S/MIME, or PGP.
# You know that the failure of SMTP servers to authenticate the SMTP clients of strangers is a major bug in SMTP instead of an expression of a primary design goal.
# The FUSSP requires a small number of central servers to handle certificates, act as "pull servers" for bulk mail, account for mail charges, or whatever, but that is not a problem.
** Well, in this case worse -- It requires a whole banking system!
# The FUSSP requires that anyone wanting to send mail obtain a certificate that will be checked by all SMTP servers.
# You have found that most Internet users would be happy to pay $5/month to avoid spam and do not know the prices of anti-virus software or data.
# You have never heard of RFC 2554 or RFC 2487 and the FUSSP includes fixing the lack of authentication in SMTP.
# The FUSSP involves replacing SMTP.
# Your definition of spam differs significantly from "unsolicited bulk email."
# You frequently use math, statistics, and information theory, and almost as frequently notice people hiding grins or stifling laughs.