I'm no sony fanboy, but the simple fact is that the ps3 is still the best bluray player in terms of price and features
Really? The new slim, and reduced price existing PS3s are $300. Newegg (good prices, but I'm sure not the cheapest around) has 7 players for $200 or less (1 under $100!). Another 7 that are under $290.
Of *course* it is cheaper than any console + a bluray player. But the argument that it is the best bluray player for price and features is old and hasn't been true for a while.
Actually power consumption can be more of a concern for a server in a large server farm than it is for a laptop. It is one of the reasons blade servers don't actually do that well - you can't power a full rack of them with out some very extreme power (and cooling) solutions.
When building a large server farm power consumption very quickly becomes more important than any other factor including processor speed.
Yes, that is true. They have stated intentions to offer such a feature in the future but it is not yet available.
The problem with trading prims, is what if player A buys land enough for 500 prims, and gives all his 500 prims to player B. Now player A decides he no longer wants his land in that sim. Either a) that land is now worthless because you can't build anything on it (all the prims are now owned by player B or b) player B will suddenly (and beyond his control) lose 500 prims they thought they had. Which situation is right? I don't like either.
The difficulty then is probably not the coding/development but rather finding the right system.
To understand the changes you need to know something about the game. The game is made up of a series of 256m*256m connected squares of virtual land. Each one of these squares is a 'sim' and is an individual rack mounted computer (currently around 40 of these in the game).
Each 'sim' is limited in total 'prims' (the basic building blocks for creating anything). Before the latest change that was 10,000 prims per 'sim', after the change it is now 15,000.
What could, and did, happen is someone with very little land could make it impossible for anyone else in that 'sim' to build anything at all.
The first attempt to handle this was through an economy - prims cost money to rez, and money to maintain as did land. This worked well except for a key factor - money was global, the problem was local. The larger the game got (the more sims they added) the worse the situation got. You could still amass enough money to own a small piece of land and most of the prims in the sim.
Another problem with that system is it was way, way, way too complicated. You ended up with Tax on land, primitives (based on size and height) and lights. And you got bonuses and stipends and 'caps' so the money doesn't accumulate in unused accounts and weeee isn't that fun. Stipends were based on ratings compared to other users and could fluctate greatly.
Another side effect of that was there was really no way to plan for a big project. Taxes could fluctuate and grow as the project got larger and there was no way to tell what your stipend/bonus (weekly money paid to you) would be in 3 weeks.
So to solve many problems they tied the amount of prims you could use directly to the percent of the land on that 'sim' that you own. You own 10% of the land? Then you can use 10% of the prims. Now there is no more really confusing taxes. You can plan for builds because the number of prims you can have is known at the start and doesn't change. And no one can come next to you and build their giant leggo toilet of 9,000 prims just so you can't build.
The other half of the story is that these virtual land plots and objects are all being hosted on servers, maintained and run by the makers of the game. Previously everyone was charged the same monthly rate whether they used very little resources or a whole lot. The new pricing allows people to pay anything from no monthly fee ($10 one time) to hundreds of dollars a month depending on how much resources they use. The simplest method is to charge based on land ownership, especially now that prim usage is also tied to land ownership.
The end result? Now you can play for no monthly cost (how many people don't play MMOs just because they don't want to pay every month?), or you can get a substantial amount of land for the same price they were currently paying (1536sqm for existing members), or they can get more land for more money up to an entire sim for $200 a month.
I agree. The accessment that it is a flop I think is offbase. They are basically saying for a game not to be a flop it has to get subscriber numbers in the first 6 months that are close to that of a 4 year old franchise with 5 expansions/extensions???
I don't even buy into a MMOG until its been out 6mo or more. Gives them time to fix it and hopefully add some content.
Here, I don't like Sims Online, I was in the beta and the game is not for me. But I have to admit it isn't a flop. In 6 months, less than 1/8th the time EQ has been around gathering players, Sims online already has 1/5th the number of subscribers. What I would be interested in seeing is numbers of what EQ was at 6mo.
So much misconception. Here is an overview of the economics of SL.
SL is a virtual world where the real limited resource is server sersources (cpu cycles, memory, bandwith etc.). So they create in game money and tie it to those resources.
They use the standard US/Canadian/AU $ sign for their money. You want to upload a texture it costs $... in game/fake money. Same to upload a sound.
It also costs money to build stuff - in game/fake money. At no point is it Real World money.
There is a set pool of money, some things are taxed and that money goes into the pool. Buying land costs money but you can always sell it to get all your money back. 'Rezing primitives' costs money, but you can get it back by deleting them. AND IN BOTH CASES IT IS LINDEN $, SECOND LIFE $, NOT REAL $.
Real money doesn't enter the equation. The credit card is only for age verification.
Please take the time to learn what you are talking about before spouting to the world absolute nonsense. Thanks
Dude you be playing the wrong game. SL currently does not deal with real money at all.
When it does it will be of the flat montly fee to play type thing other 'standard' MMOGs use.
There is no RL $ -> SL $ thing going on. That's Planet Entropia. Not SL.
The credit card is for age verification and is not charged or, to my knowledge, kept. They have a very nice privacy policy and from the 4+ months I have been beta testing it they have done very well by it.
The minimum age for this stage of the Alpha/Beta is 18. This is because the measures to keep under age people out of the Mature areas are not yet in place. And thus.... credit card.
You are not charged, and to my knowledge after signing up your card information is ditched.
The issue isn't that it's called broadband. The service is broadband. However it is slow broadband, not 'high speed broadband'. I would argue that 'High speed' broadband would start in the range of 640kbps, if not 1mbps.
Last time I returned a software for an exchange (the media was defective) they wrote all over my reciept. And the policy says "Abosultly no refunds or exchanges without a reciept."
I doubt very much that this run around method would work in any reliable way. Maybe once or twice by fluke.
LOL I know of no software store that will allow you to return opened software for anything other than a trade in for the same software title. And how does that help someone who disagrees with the EULA?
Why? Piracy. They don't want you taking home WinXP, copying it, writing down any numbers, installing it and then returning it the next day to get your money back.
Thats it. This amazing technology boils down to autorun installing a CD player on your computer that sends the data back to the label. Don't agree, don't install, and you just use your standard CD player, winamp or whatever, to play the CD. The concern would be if the music was encrypted or formated in some way that only by using their program could you play it. But then you wouldn't be able to play it in a standard CD player.
First,.5% of 2.5mil is 12,500 not 125,000, putting your "people downloading" number at 7,500. Or did you mean 1 it 20 people with a PPC is going to try linux?
Well the PC market they deal with every release, if we use your same percentages, is:
95% of 50mil = 47,500,000..5% of that is 237,000, half of which you think will download as soon as it comes out - 118,500 people. Unless you did mean 5% not.5% in which case 1,185,000 people try to download on every major release.
Since their system is set up to handle, at least marginally well, the 118 thousand people, I don't think it will have a problem with 7.5 thousand people.
Actually my point is you are only paying for one day of insurance. It costs the car rental place.37 cents more for that one day. When you do it at home, the insurance company is not going to only increase your rate for that one day. They are going to increase it for a good long period of time. Hence, an increase of 37 cents a day is about $135 a year.
If you're selling "tools" to illegaly copy these games, you're committing a crime, because the tool has no legitimate purpose.
Actually I was very seriously considering buying one of these so I could learn to program for the GBA. Compilers do exist, and I have even seen a few articles about programing the GBA that interested me. I am currently in college and want to 'break into' the computer / console game industry. One of the best ways to do that (if you don't know someone in the business) is to create a demo, show off your skills. Emulators are nice, but never 100% accurate. So who can I sue for the damage to my career not being able to get one of these is going to cause? =)
Operator overloading is easily the feature I miss most out of Java.
Operator overloading when used in an intelligent maner can increase code readability (and thus increase re-use and reduce time when manipulating old code).
The times I have seen this code in java:
myClassOne.objectInClassOne.someCommonFuntion(myCl assTwo.ocjectInClassTwo);
Are you telling me that this is the most readable solution?
Now I admit the possibility to be an idiot is there. You can overload a + operator to subtract numbers, but if that is happening in your team it may be time to reconsider some people's position in the team.
'Self Healing' scares me. I'm not entirely sure why, but I want to be in control of my computer. I'm afraid that with 'self healing' my computer can install things I don't want installed, uninstall things I do want and send all my information to Big Brother.
Now if it was open source, distributed OS with self healing I might be ok, I guess I just object to giving that much control to a large coorporation whos main concern is profits and not my privacy.
IDG books creates (or created) a Master Reference serires. I bought C++ Master Reference and it is the best pure reference C++ book I have ever seen. Alphabetical listing of keywords, concepts, functions everything! It has short specific examples and is inteligently cross referenced. They created a Java reference for version 1.1, and have a Visual Basic and an HTML reference available.
However when I contacted them I was told they had no intention of ever making a newer version of the Java Master Reference, which is one I would really like. I understand the 1 year delay problem with an evolving language, but Java 1.3 was a milestone and there should be an alphabetical reference for it.
I would also use a "Master Reference" for Perl, C#, and some common APIs (directx opengl). These last may exist in some form (by another company), I have not done an extensive search for them.
Actually FLOPS (floating operations per second) are too specific to be a general benchmark. They work good for gaming consoles and graphics cards because in those cases nearly every calculation involves floating points. In general processors floating point processors are only a subset of the whole processor and aren't always the most important factor.
MIPS (million instructions per second) is better, but this gets back into RISC or CISC issues. How much work does one instruction do? Not that the current MHZ system is any better in this regard. Hmm I guess then in that sense MIPS would be a good replacement for MHZ. However why would you want to move to another inaccurate measure of performance?
The factor that clockless computers have that most closly relates to MHZ is IPS or instructions per second. This is an average, obviously. One problem that this doesn't cover though is IPP or instructions per program. Related to the old RISC and CISC concepts, some computers need more instructions to get the same work done. If a standard can be found for determining IPP and some method of combining IPP and IPS can be found that makes sense in a performance measurement way.....
The fact that games main purpose is entertainment adds to the argument for them being art, it doesn't take it away. Film, plays, concerts etc. are all considered art ('fine art'), and their primary focus is entertainment. Video games are just another form.
Firingsquad has a article on this as well. It seems the texture quality is hit rather severely with no way to disable this feature (aside from the quackifier). They (firingsquad) also post their own quackifier, source code included, because they weren't 100% sure that the quackifier did only what it was supposed to do.
It seems the real problems are these:
* Quake3 is more a benchamrk than a game right now, so it seems to have been optimized soly to improve benchmark scores.
* There is no way to dissable it.
* It overrides ingame quality settings.
* ATI tried to hide the fact that it does what it does.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no sony fanboy, but the simple fact is that the ps3 is still the best bluray player in terms of price and features
Really? The new slim, and reduced price existing PS3s are $300. Newegg (good prices, but I'm sure not the cheapest around) has 7 players for $200 or less (1 under $100!). Another 7 that are under $290.
Of *course* it is cheaper than any console + a bluray player. But the argument that it is the best bluray player for price and features is old and hasn't been true for a while.
Actually power consumption can be more of a concern for a server in a large server farm than it is for a laptop. It is one of the reasons blade servers don't actually do that well - you can't power a full rack of them with out some very extreme power (and cooling) solutions.
When building a large server farm power consumption very quickly becomes more important than any other factor including processor speed.
Ok you guys that are having problems because your wives don't like you playing video games can just be quiet...
My wife stole my World of Warcraft beta, AFTER she declined my offer to apply for her too.
On a similar note, she plays as much or more City of Heros as I do.
As soon as the pre-installed IE was actually capable or rendering webpages with anything resembling accuracy/ability then Netscape lost its share.
Yes, that is true. They have stated intentions to offer such a feature in the future but it is not yet available. The problem with trading prims, is what if player A buys land enough for 500 prims, and gives all his 500 prims to player B. Now player A decides he no longer wants his land in that sim. Either a) that land is now worthless because you can't build anything on it (all the prims are now owned by player B or b) player B will suddenly (and beyond his control) lose 500 prims they thought they had. Which situation is right? I don't like either. The difficulty then is probably not the coding/development but rather finding the right system.
To understand the changes you need to know something about the game. The game is made up of a series of 256m*256m connected squares of virtual land. Each one of these squares is a 'sim' and is an individual rack mounted computer (currently around 40 of these in the game).
Each 'sim' is limited in total 'prims' (the basic building blocks for creating anything). Before the latest change that was 10,000 prims per 'sim', after the change it is now 15,000.
What could, and did, happen is someone with very little land could make it impossible for anyone else in that 'sim' to build anything at all.
The first attempt to handle this was through an economy - prims cost money to rez, and money to maintain as did land. This worked well except for a key factor - money was global, the problem was local. The larger the game got (the more sims they added) the worse the situation got. You could still amass enough money to own a small piece of land and most of the prims in the sim.
Another problem with that system is it was way, way, way too complicated. You ended up with Tax on land, primitives (based on size and height) and lights. And you got bonuses and stipends and 'caps' so the money doesn't accumulate in unused accounts and weeee isn't that fun. Stipends were based on ratings compared to other users and could fluctate greatly.
Another side effect of that was there was really no way to plan for a big project. Taxes could fluctuate and grow as the project got larger and there was no way to tell what your stipend/bonus (weekly money paid to you) would be in 3 weeks.
So to solve many problems they tied the amount of prims you could use directly to the percent of the land on that 'sim' that you own. You own 10% of the land? Then you can use 10% of the prims. Now there is no more really confusing taxes. You can plan for builds because the number of prims you can have is known at the start and doesn't change. And no one can come next to you and build their giant leggo toilet of 9,000 prims just so you can't build.
The other half of the story is that these virtual land plots and objects are all being hosted on servers, maintained and run by the makers of the game. Previously everyone was charged the same monthly rate whether they used very little resources or a whole lot. The new pricing allows people to pay anything from no monthly fee ($10 one time) to hundreds of dollars a month depending on how much resources they use. The simplest method is to charge based on land ownership, especially now that prim usage is also tied to land ownership.
The end result? Now you can play for no monthly cost (how many people don't play MMOs just because they don't want to pay every month?), or you can get a substantial amount of land for the same price they were currently paying (1536sqm for existing members), or they can get more land for more money up to an entire sim for $200 a month.
I agree. The accessment that it is a flop I think is offbase. They are basically saying for a game not to be a flop it has to get subscriber numbers in the first 6 months that are close to that of a 4 year old franchise with 5 expansions/extensions???
I don't even buy into a MMOG until its been out 6mo or more. Gives them time to fix it and hopefully add some content.
Here, I don't like Sims Online, I was in the beta and the game is not for me. But I have to admit it isn't a flop. In 6 months, less than 1/8th the time EQ has been around gathering players, Sims online already has 1/5th the number of subscribers. What I would be interested in seeing is numbers of what EQ was at 6mo.
You don't pay RW $$.
... in game/fake money. Same to upload a sound.
So much misconception. Here is an overview of the economics of SL.
SL is a virtual world where the real limited resource is server sersources (cpu cycles, memory, bandwith etc.). So they create in game money and tie it to those resources.
They use the standard US/Canadian/AU $ sign for their money. You want to upload a texture it costs $
It also costs money to build stuff - in game/fake money. At no point is it Real World money.
There is a set pool of money, some things are taxed and that money goes into the pool. Buying land costs money but you can always sell it to get all your money back. 'Rezing primitives' costs money, but you can get it back by deleting them. AND IN BOTH CASES IT IS LINDEN $, SECOND LIFE $, NOT REAL $.
Real money doesn't enter the equation. The credit card is only for age verification.
Please take the time to learn what you are talking about before spouting to the world absolute nonsense. Thanks
Dude you be playing the wrong game. SL currently does not deal with real money at all.
When it does it will be of the flat montly fee to play type thing other 'standard' MMOGs use.
There is no RL $ -> SL $ thing going on. That's Planet Entropia. Not SL.
The credit card is for age verification and is not charged or, to my knowledge, kept. They have a very nice privacy policy and from the 4+ months I have been beta testing it they have done very well by it.
The minimum age for this stage of the Alpha/Beta is 18. This is because the measures to keep under age people out of the Mature areas are not yet in place. And thus.... credit card.
You are not charged, and to my knowledge after signing up your card information is ditched.
The issue isn't that it's called broadband. The service is broadband. However it is slow broadband, not 'high speed broadband'. I would argue that 'High speed' broadband would start in the range of 640kbps, if not 1mbps.
Last time I returned a software for an exchange (the media was defective) they wrote all over my reciept. And the policy says "Abosultly no refunds or exchanges without a reciept."
I doubt very much that this run around method would work in any reliable way. Maybe once or twice by fluke.
LOL I know of no software store that will allow you to return opened software for anything other than a trade in for the same software title. And how does that help someone who disagrees with the EULA?
Why? Piracy. They don't want you taking home WinXP, copying it, writing down any numbers, installing it and then returning it the next day to get your money back.
autorun.ini
Thats it. This amazing technology boils down to autorun installing a CD player on your computer that sends the data back to the label. Don't agree, don't install, and you just use your standard CD player, winamp or whatever, to play the CD. The concern would be if the music was encrypted or formated in some way that only by using their program could you play it. But then you wouldn't be able to play it in a standard CD player.
The problem I see is that 84.324 looks like a random number not a time. I think it needs another decimal.
Either 84.32.4 or 8.43.24 or even 84.3.24.
First, .5% of 2.5mil is 12,500 not 125,000, putting your "people downloading" number at 7,500. Or did you mean 1 it 20 people with a PPC is going to try linux?
.5% of that is 237,000, half of which you think will download as soon as it comes out - 118,500 people. Unless you did mean 5% not .5% in which case 1,185,000 people try to download on every major release.
Well the PC market they deal with every release, if we use your same percentages, is:
95% of 50mil = 47,500,000.
Since their system is set up to handle, at least marginally well, the 118 thousand people, I don't think it will have a problem with 7.5 thousand people.
Actually my point is you are only paying for one day of insurance. It costs the car rental place .37 cents more for that one day. When you do it at home, the insurance company is not going to only increase your rate for that one day. They are going to increase it for a good long period of time. Hence, an increase of 37 cents a day is about $135 a year.
"Why is it then that my insurance gets to jack my rates two hundred bucks a year when I get one lousy ticket?"
.37 * 365 = $135. Going up $200 is a bit much maybe but not as much as you made it seem.
If you're selling "tools" to illegaly copy these games, you're committing a crime, because the tool has no legitimate purpose.
Actually I was very seriously considering buying one of these so I could learn to program for the GBA. Compilers do exist, and I have even seen a few articles about programing the GBA that interested me. I am currently in college and want to 'break into' the computer / console game industry. One of the best ways to do that (if you don't know someone in the business) is to create a demo, show off your skills. Emulators are nice, but never 100% accurate. So who can I sue for the damage to my career not being able to get one of these is going to cause? =)
Operator overloading is easily the feature I miss most out of Java. Operator overloading when used in an intelligent maner can increase code readability (and thus increase re-use and reduce time when manipulating old code). The times I have seen this code in java: myClassOne.objectInClassOne.someCommonFuntion(myCl assTwo.ocjectInClassTwo);
Are you telling me that this is the most readable solution?
Now I admit the possibility to be an idiot is there. You can overload a + operator to subtract numbers, but if that is happening in your team it may be time to reconsider some people's position in the team.
'Self Healing' scares me. I'm not entirely sure why, but I want to be in control of my computer. I'm afraid that with 'self healing' my computer can install things I don't want installed, uninstall things I do want and send all my information to Big Brother.
Now if it was open source, distributed OS with self healing I might be ok, I guess I just object to giving that much control to a large coorporation whos main concern is profits and not my privacy.
IDG books creates (or created) a Master Reference serires. I bought C++ Master Reference and it is the best pure reference C++ book I have ever seen. Alphabetical listing of keywords, concepts, functions everything! It has short specific examples and is inteligently cross referenced. They created a Java reference for version 1.1, and have a Visual Basic and an HTML reference available.
However when I contacted them I was told they had no intention of ever making a newer version of the Java Master Reference, which is one I would really like. I understand the 1 year delay problem with an evolving language, but Java 1.3 was a milestone and there should be an alphabetical reference for it.
I would also use a "Master Reference" for Perl, C#, and some common APIs (directx opengl). These last may exist in some form (by another company), I have not done an extensive search for them.
Actually FLOPS (floating operations per second) are too specific to be a general benchmark. They work good for gaming consoles and graphics cards because in those cases nearly every calculation involves floating points. In general processors floating point processors are only a subset of the whole processor and aren't always the most important factor.
MIPS (million instructions per second) is better, but this gets back into RISC or CISC issues. How much work does one instruction do? Not that the current MHZ system is any better in this regard. Hmm I guess then in that sense MIPS would be a good replacement for MHZ. However why would you want to move to another inaccurate measure of performance?
The factor that clockless computers have that most closly relates to MHZ is IPS or instructions per second. This is an average, obviously. One problem that this doesn't cover though is IPP or instructions per program. Related to the old RISC and CISC concepts, some computers need more instructions to get the same work done. If a standard can be found for determining IPP and some method of combining IPP and IPS can be found that makes sense in a performance measurement way.....
The fact that games main purpose is entertainment adds to the argument for them being art, it doesn't take it away. Film, plays, concerts etc. are all considered art ('fine art'), and their primary focus is entertainment. Video games are just another form.
Firingsquad has a article on this as well. It seems the texture quality is hit rather severely with no way to disable this feature (aside from the quackifier). They (firingsquad) also post their own quackifier, source code included, because they weren't 100% sure that the quackifier did only what it was supposed to do.
It seems the real problems are these:
* Quake3 is more a benchamrk than a game right now, so it seems to have been optimized soly to improve benchmark scores.
* There is no way to dissable it.
* It overrides ingame quality settings.
* ATI tried to hide the fact that it does what it does.