Anyway, it's like everything else I suppose, commoditisation at the expense of research and development at the cutting edge.
Arcade games lost their spark many years ago, but I don't think it has anything at all to do with not being cutting edge. To compete with home systems, coin-ops started being novelty affairs, halfway between arcade games and amusement park rides. The games themselves were just rehashes of the same old ideas, mostly variations on racing or light gun games.
A Pee Cee with NVidia graphics hardware. What's so special about that? How does it compare with current arcade machines? I haven't set foot in an arcade in nearly 10 years.
There essentially aren't arcade machines any more. All but a handful of the coin-op developers have gotten out of the business, and arcades are all but dead. An interesting observation is that coin-op games tend to be much more low tech than what comes out for the PC. Most games go for the Big, Bright, Fast look, and the lighting is very simplistic, textures low density, and so on. That doesn't mean the games are bad, just that most arcade games would be just fine with PC hardware from 1998.
On the flipside, I'm not sure if using an operating system that's essentially designed to be a clone of UNIX from a user's point of view is the hallmark of the radical thinker.
Current Windows based software will not be compatible with the Longhorn filesystem.
And that means that Windows software in general is not going to be compatible. This is scary. It took a long, long time before developers caught up with all the changes introduced with Windows 95. MS-DOS games were still being released years later. Lots of good software written for MS-DOS was never brought over to Windows, because it was too much work. But MS-DOS sucked, so this didn't matter too much.
The short version: If Microsoft radically changes how things work for developers--and if it isn't for the better, just different--then developers are going be thrown into a turmoil and have hard choices to make. Those kind of decision points are what make and break companies. It may be the best place to finally say the hell with Microsoft, it's time to go elsewhere.
I'm not saying that Linux or OS X are the best options out there, but they may be better than what's coming.
So, basically we already have the entire entertainment industry boiling products down to the *lowest* common intellectual denominator, and this guy proposes that games design be further trimmed down and be based even *more* on more consumer polling data??? Great.
Sigh. No. "Mass market" simply means "not in an established, harcdore genre." People who get horny about the minor differences in weapons between various first person shooters and combo moves in fighting games...those are inbred fanboys. Designing for them is a mistake.
And I thought that we already live in an instant-gratification culture that has reduced our average attention span to below 10 seconds! And now we need more ego shooters and mario clones that don't require your brain to be used *at all*
Stories have largely been a failure in games. Even if the story would be good by itself, it is almost always completely ruined by being attached to a die/retry style of gameplay (I get to see this plot twist--for the fourteenth time!). And the better the story, the more linear the game. When I hear "games need better stories to advance," I think it's just a way of saying "I'm bored with what games currently have to offer me."
Upgrading a video card is usually simple, even though sometimes you need a certain level of motherboard for some cards. Upgrading the processor, is rarely easy. Intel changes so much so quickly that the upgradability of PCs is, and has been for some time, a myth.
64 bits is going to make a ridiculous difference to what I do.
Only if you're planning on having more than 4 gigabytes of memory. In almost all other cases, a 64-bit processor will be slower. It's amazing how few people catch on to this.
The only reason Apple could pull off the very small, very quiet LCD iMac styling is because power consumption and cooling are not issues with their current generation of chips. The "wind tunnel" sound of more recent Power Macs showed that cooling problems can really hurt a system. If these new chips require more extreme cooling systems, then they're outside the scope of traditional Apple products. Fast is good, but fast at all costs is not.
Heck, just by reading a Slashdot story I can instantly predict what most of the comments about it are going to be. So geeks love repetition as much as the average Mariah Carey fan.
I'm glad there is competition in the search engine marketplace. For too long, google has held an illegal monopoly, forcing geeks with a social conscience like myself to use a second-rate search engine that cannot afford google's patent royalties.
Whenever something good gets popular, there is always a backlash. You probably loved Google when it was beta, and now that it's even better you hate it, simply because everyone else likes it.
First of all it is not very smart to try to reduce code size by putting complicated instructions in the processor architecture.
A small team of undergraduates can architect an FPGA solution that beats high-end Pentium 4s by a factor of ten for specific problems. They'd never be able to design a general purpose CPU to get the same performance, however. Similarly, the reason 3D video cards have leapfrogged CPUs in terms of performance is because the former is much more specific in nature.
The general trouble with desktop CPUs is that they're designed in a vaccuum, to do everything passably well, but nothing spectacularly. This is why you often see hig-end PCs struggling to keep up with $150 game consoles.
The definition of "complicated instructions" has changed drastically over the years. RISC nuts see a subroutine-call-with-stack-push as complicated, so they break it into a whole bunch of instructions. Other archictectures, such as the ARM, can do this in a single cycle. Floating point math is hugely complicated from a hardware point of view. You have to stick a giant shifter in there to normalize the results, and we're talking about greater than 32-bit mantissas with 64-bit floats.
The only thing this eats up is cache; because the system has a correspondingly wider data bus, there isn't a hit in memory bandwidth (unless the designers are trying to be cheap bastards and give a 64-bit CPU the same data bus width you'd use for a 32-bit CPU).
As stated elsewhere, the Pentium has had a 64-bit bus from the get-go. Jumping to a 128-bit bus is a very expensive decision, especially as you're adding 64 additional pins to the package. Is that worth it across the board for the handful of applications that really need 64-bit pointers? No. Diminishing returns have seriously kicked in.
I have never personally seen any positive or negative bias toward "scripters" (a loaded term). I have seen close-mindedness on the part of C++ coders, though. There's a tendency to plead Turing completeness, deciding that Python is just a subset of C++, so what's the difference?
At the same time, I've noticed that the communities and forums involving languages that are easier to learn than C have a different flavor about them. For example, go through Usenet groups or forums about Delphi and Power Basic. Even though they're fine languages for Windows programming, there's the definite feeling that there are many more newbies and much less general programming knowledge.
I also think this question is a bit loaded, in that it appears to come from a scripting language programmer who feels he should be on equal footing with C++ programmers. It's not "C++ is awesome! " so much as that you can't write embedded code in Python, or that Python is the wrong choice for the Palm environment, or that you wouldn't write a Game Cube game in Python. So, yes, the C programmer has more doors open to him than the "scripter."
Even so, I remember when there was an Ask Slashdot about writing CGI scripts, and an appalling number of people said you should use C because "it is much faster."
There's been little difference between Windows and Linux and OS X, especially since XP was released. They're all variations on a theme. Linux is cleaner if you're writing command line applications, but it's just as messy as Windows if you're using KDE or Gnome or, good heavens, xlib.
But things are changing on the Windows side. Microsoft is poised to deprecate the entire Win32 API in favor of.net. Once that is done, then the Win32 underpinnings can be changed, then removed, and then.net will be the OS. As much as I hate to say it, that will be a huge win in reducing the complexity of the system.
Right now 4 GB of memory might be enough. But switching to 64 bit when we are already hitting the wall is not an option. The point with going to 64 bits now is that we can add memory past 4 GB without the headaches of moving to a new platform, since the transition is already done.
And this is great...if you're doing mainframe style computing and price is no object. Back in the day, given infinite funds, you could have purchased an Apple II or a VAX 11/780. The former, even with its 64K of memory, let you do about 80% of what you'd want to use the VAX for, and it's a lot easier to maintain, lower power, and fits on your desk.
Now we have a similar situation. 64-bit is "better," but in a loose "for maybe 5% of all computing tasks" kind of way. That's not a compelling reason to switch all desktop PCs over to 64-bit processors. If Intel--or any other company--tries to do that, then I'll just wait until the lower end mobile processor makers improve enough that I can avoid the bloated desktop market all together.
Re:Students think CDs are expensive? No surprise.
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 1
The problem is, when CDs first came out,the prices were outrageous, and we were told: "Price are high now, but as soon as volume gets up there close to cassettes, production prices will drop, and CDs will be cheaper." What a load of crap. Prices have continuously gone up
Not true. The bulk of CDs are still in the $16 range, which is where they were in the late 1980s. If you adjust for inflation, that's a net *decrease*. Even if you put the average CD price at $18, then that's still not an inflation-adjusted increase.
You can complain that CDs are too expensive, but you can't complain that they've been continually going up--period.
Students think CDs are expensive? No surprise.
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This is a weird thread. CDs have only gone up slightly in price over the last decade, and yet there are people moaning about how expensive they are. You don't see the same people moaning about video game prices, though, or a dozen other "overpriced" things. I don't think that there's much of a real movement in the "real world" about the price of CDs, just that there is now a precedent for complaining about the price of them, most of this complaining is coming from students or recent graduates, and not coincidentally, students get "free" high-bandwidth internet access.
I've also been seeing the argument that MP3s are easier to obtain and manage than CDs. That's only true if you have high bandwidth internet access and lots of free time.
Another argument is that configurability equals bloat. This is simply not the case with KDE. On the performance front due to constant optimization of code KDE has managed to actually improve performance while increasing the amount of things users can configure to make KDE match how they work. That's a good deal.
It's not code bloat that people are talking about here, it's application bloat. The more things there are to configure, the more buttons and dialogs and so on that you present to the user, and the harder it is to figure out what each of them is for.
If you're referring to that recent Red Herring article, my article was indeed "inspired" by it in the sense that I thought it was sensationlistic crap and I just couldn't take it anymore. For more info, see the news blurb that announces the article
Ah, good response. It would have been nice to see this mentioned in the Slashdot lead-in. Good article, too.
There was already a Slashdot story about this from a different source this year. This article covers exactly the same territory, and was most likely inspired by it.
I would say the bottleneck is AGP bandwidth and limited on-board high-speed memory on the graphics card.
I agree with you overall, except about AGP bandwidth. With 64MB and 128MB video cards, hardly anything is ever uploaded. Textures, geometry, etc., are all resident. What's left is not bandwidth heavy.
2:57 of video takes my 1GHz w/ 1GB RAM machine nearly 2 HOURS to render. Just for 3 stinking minutes of video!
So what you need is a dedicated hardware solution for video editing, not the usual 5-9% clockspeed boost that the latest ultra expensive CPU gets you. Surely you can get add in boards to do video compression and such? Even if they cost $5,000, it would be worth it if you got a 2x increase or better.
You mean it's been written with the latest design and coding ideas, to a high quality, tested, documentated and above all written by someone who cares about the program, without the bother of office politcs?
I agree!
No, I mean it's written by people without experience architecting large projects, so the result is verbose, brittle, and messy. Period.
There have been some disappointed posters, wondering why it isn't faster. Stop and think about it: Why would a 64-bit CPU be faster than a 32-bit CPU? It's not bus width, because Pentiums have always had 64-bit busses. It's not FPU width, because x86 FPUs have always been 80 bits internally. It's not 64-bit integer registers, because it's very rare indeed to need to do 64-bit integer math. It's not 64-bit pointers, because this is a machine with less than 4GB of memory. What it comes down to is that this processor is using slightly newer tech than AMD's previous chips, including a larger cache. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with being 64 bits, and hence the results are not mindblowing.
There's a persistant myth that a 64-bit processor is twice as fast as a 32-bit processor, which is completely incorrect.
Yup. Note that this doesn't tell you anything about the overall quality of the software, though. So much open source software tends to be writter by students with little experience ("this was my first large project") and it shows. Just because other people find and fix the bugs doesn't change this.
It's flamebait to point out that the line in the summary (which was obviously a joke, but nearly everyone here, in their haste to whore for some karma, didn't engage their brains first) is false?
Perhaps it would just be better for the editors to stop throwing in charged throwaway lines like that. They've becom standard on Slashdot, often with the throwaway being a shot at Microsoft or the RIAA, and then all the comments focus on that one phrase rather than the linked story.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, it's like everything else I suppose, commoditisation at the expense of research and development at the cutting edge.
Arcade games lost their spark many years ago, but I don't think it has anything at all to do with not being cutting edge. To compete with home systems, coin-ops started being novelty affairs, halfway between arcade games and amusement park rides. The games themselves were just rehashes of the same old ideas, mostly variations on racing or light gun games.
A Pee Cee with NVidia graphics hardware. What's so special about that? How does it compare with current arcade machines? I haven't set foot in an arcade in nearly 10 years.
There essentially aren't arcade machines any more. All but a handful of the coin-op developers have gotten out of the business, and arcades are all but dead. An interesting observation is that coin-op games tend to be much more low tech than what comes out for the PC. Most games go for the Big, Bright, Fast look, and the lighting is very simplistic, textures low density, and so on. That doesn't mean the games are bad, just that most arcade games would be just fine with PC hardware from 1998.
A large following of people who resist change?
On the flipside, I'm not sure if using an operating system that's essentially designed to be a clone of UNIX from a user's point of view is the hallmark of the radical thinker.
Current Windows based software will not be compatible with the Longhorn filesystem.
And that means that Windows software in general is not going to be compatible. This is scary. It took a long, long time before developers caught up with all the changes introduced with Windows 95. MS-DOS games were still being released years later. Lots of good software written for MS-DOS was never brought over to Windows, because it was too much work. But MS-DOS sucked, so this didn't matter too much.
The short version: If Microsoft radically changes how things work for developers--and if it isn't for the better, just different--then developers are going be thrown into a turmoil and have hard choices to make. Those kind of decision points are what make and break companies. It may be the best place to finally say the hell with Microsoft, it's time to go elsewhere.
I'm not saying that Linux or OS X are the best options out there, but they may be better than what's coming.
So, basically we already have the entire entertainment industry boiling products down to the *lowest* common intellectual denominator, and this guy proposes that games design be further trimmed down and be based even *more* on more consumer polling data??? Great.
Sigh. No. "Mass market" simply means "not in an established, harcdore genre." People who get horny about the minor differences in weapons between various first person shooters and combo moves in fighting games...those are inbred fanboys. Designing for them is a mistake.
And I thought that we already live in an instant-gratification culture that has reduced our average attention span to below 10 seconds! And now we need more ego shooters and mario clones that don't require your brain to be used *at all*
Stories have largely been a failure in games. Even if the story would be good by itself, it is almost always completely ruined by being attached to a die/retry style of gameplay (I get to see this plot twist--for the fourteenth time!). And the better the story, the more linear the game. When I hear "games need better stories to advance," I think it's just a way of saying "I'm bored with what games currently have to offer me."
Good old PC's, if you want to upgrade it's simple
Upgrading a video card is usually simple, even though sometimes you need a certain level of motherboard for some cards. Upgrading the processor, is rarely easy. Intel changes so much so quickly that the upgradability of PCs is, and has been for some time, a myth.
64 bits is going to make a ridiculous difference to what I do.
Only if you're planning on having more than 4 gigabytes of memory. In almost all other cases, a 64-bit processor will be slower. It's amazing how few people catch on to this.
The only reason Apple could pull off the very small, very quiet LCD iMac styling is because power consumption and cooling are not issues with their current generation of chips. The "wind tunnel" sound of more recent Power Macs showed that cooling problems can really hurt a system. If these new chips require more extreme cooling systems, then they're outside the scope of traditional Apple products. Fast is good, but fast at all costs is not.
Heck, just by reading a Slashdot story I can instantly predict what most of the comments about it are going to be. So geeks love repetition as much as the average Mariah Carey fan.
I'm glad there is competition in the search engine marketplace. For too long, google has held an illegal monopoly, forcing geeks with a social conscience like myself to use a second-rate search engine that cannot afford google's patent royalties.
Whenever something good gets popular, there is always a backlash. You probably loved Google when it was beta, and now that it's even better you hate it, simply because everyone else likes it.
First of all it is not very smart to try to reduce code size by putting complicated instructions in the processor architecture.
A small team of undergraduates can architect an FPGA solution that beats high-end Pentium 4s by a factor of ten for specific problems. They'd never be able to design a general purpose CPU to get the same performance, however. Similarly, the reason 3D video cards have leapfrogged CPUs in terms of performance is because the former is much more specific in nature.
The general trouble with desktop CPUs is that they're designed in a vaccuum, to do everything passably well, but nothing spectacularly. This is why you often see hig-end PCs struggling to keep up with $150 game consoles.
The definition of "complicated instructions" has changed drastically over the years. RISC nuts see a subroutine-call-with-stack-push as complicated, so they break it into a whole bunch of instructions. Other archictectures, such as the ARM, can do this in a single cycle. Floating point math is hugely complicated from a hardware point of view. You have to stick a giant shifter in there to normalize the results, and we're talking about greater than 32-bit mantissas with 64-bit floats.
The only thing this eats up is cache; because the system has a correspondingly wider data bus, there isn't a hit in memory bandwidth (unless the designers are trying to be cheap bastards and give a 64-bit CPU the same data bus width you'd use for a 32-bit CPU).
As stated elsewhere, the Pentium has had a 64-bit bus from the get-go. Jumping to a 128-bit bus is a very expensive decision, especially as you're adding 64 additional pins to the package. Is that worth it across the board for the handful of applications that really need 64-bit pointers? No. Diminishing returns have seriously kicked in.
I have never personally seen any positive or negative bias toward "scripters" (a loaded term). I have seen close-mindedness on the part of C++ coders, though. There's a tendency to plead Turing completeness, deciding that Python is just a subset of C++, so what's the difference?
At the same time, I've noticed that the communities and forums involving languages that are easier to learn than C have a different flavor about them. For example, go through Usenet groups or forums about Delphi and Power Basic. Even though they're fine languages for Windows programming, there's the definite feeling that there are many more newbies and much less general programming knowledge.
I also think this question is a bit loaded, in that it appears to come from a scripting language programmer who feels he should be on equal footing with C++ programmers. It's not "C++ is awesome! " so much as that you can't write embedded code in Python, or that Python is the wrong choice for the Palm environment, or that you wouldn't write a Game Cube game in Python. So, yes, the C programmer has more doors open to him than the "scripter."
Even so, I remember when there was an Ask Slashdot about writing CGI scripts, and an appalling number of people said you should use C because "it is much faster."
There's been little difference between Windows and Linux and OS X, especially since XP was released. They're all variations on a theme. Linux is cleaner if you're writing command line applications, but it's just as messy as Windows if you're using KDE or Gnome or, good heavens, xlib.
.net. Once that is done, then the Win32 underpinnings can be changed, then removed, and then .net will be the OS. As much as I hate to say it, that will be a huge win in reducing the complexity of the system.
But things are changing on the Windows side. Microsoft is poised to deprecate the entire Win32 API in favor of
Right now 4 GB of memory might be enough. But switching to 64 bit when we are already hitting the wall is not an option. The point with going to 64 bits now is that we can add memory past 4 GB without the headaches of moving to a new platform, since the transition is already done.
And this is great...if you're doing mainframe style computing and price is no object. Back in the day, given infinite funds, you could have purchased an Apple II or a VAX 11/780. The former, even with its 64K of memory, let you do about 80% of what you'd want to use the VAX for, and it's a lot easier to maintain, lower power, and fits on your desk.
Now we have a similar situation. 64-bit is "better," but in a loose "for maybe 5% of all computing tasks" kind of way. That's not a compelling reason to switch all desktop PCs over to 64-bit processors. If Intel--or any other company--tries to do that, then I'll just wait until the lower end mobile processor makers improve enough that I can avoid the bloated desktop market all together.
The problem is, when CDs first came out,the prices were outrageous, and we were told: "Price are high now, but as soon as volume gets up there close to cassettes, production prices will drop, and CDs will be cheaper." What a load of crap. Prices have continuously gone up
Not true. The bulk of CDs are still in the $16 range, which is where they were in the late 1980s. If you adjust for inflation, that's a net *decrease*. Even if you put the average CD price at $18, then that's still not an inflation-adjusted increase.
You can complain that CDs are too expensive, but you can't complain that they've been continually going up--period.
This is a weird thread. CDs have only gone up slightly in price over the last decade, and yet there are people moaning about how expensive they are. You don't see the same people moaning about video game prices, though, or a dozen other "overpriced" things. I don't think that there's much of a real movement in the "real world" about the price of CDs, just that there is now a precedent for complaining about the price of them, most of this complaining is coming from students or recent graduates, and not coincidentally, students get "free" high-bandwidth internet access.
I've also been seeing the argument that MP3s are easier to obtain and manage than CDs. That's only true if you have high bandwidth internet access and lots of free time.
From the article:
Another argument is that configurability equals bloat. This is simply not the case with KDE. On the performance front due to constant optimization of code KDE has managed to actually improve performance while increasing the amount of things users can configure to make KDE match how they work. That's a good deal.
It's not code bloat that people are talking about here, it's application bloat. The more things there are to configure, the more buttons and dialogs and so on that you present to the user, and the harder it is to figure out what each of them is for.
If you're referring to that recent Red Herring article, my article was indeed "inspired" by it in the sense that I thought it was sensationlistic crap and I just couldn't take it anymore. For more info, see the news blurb that announces the article
Ah, good response. It would have been nice to see this mentioned in the Slashdot lead-in. Good article, too.
There was already a Slashdot story about this from a different source this year. This article covers exactly the same territory, and was most likely inspired by it.
I would say the bottleneck is AGP bandwidth and limited on-board high-speed memory on the graphics card.
I agree with you overall, except about AGP bandwidth. With 64MB and 128MB video cards, hardly anything is ever uploaded. Textures, geometry, etc., are all resident. What's left is not bandwidth heavy.
2:57 of video takes my 1GHz w/ 1GB RAM machine nearly 2 HOURS to render. Just for 3 stinking minutes of video!
So what you need is a dedicated hardware solution for video editing, not the usual 5-9% clockspeed boost that the latest ultra expensive CPU gets you. Surely you can get add in boards to do video compression and such? Even if they cost $5,000, it would be worth it if you got a 2x increase or better.
You mean it's been written with the latest design and coding ideas, to a high quality, tested, documentated and above all written by someone who cares about the program, without the bother of office politcs?
I agree!
No, I mean it's written by people without experience architecting large projects, so the result is verbose, brittle, and messy. Period.
There have been some disappointed posters, wondering why it isn't faster. Stop and think about it: Why would a 64-bit CPU be faster than a 32-bit CPU? It's not bus width, because Pentiums have always had 64-bit busses. It's not FPU width, because x86 FPUs have always been 80 bits internally. It's not 64-bit integer registers, because it's very rare indeed to need to do 64-bit integer math. It's not 64-bit pointers, because this is a machine with less than 4GB of memory. What it comes down to is that this processor is using slightly newer tech than AMD's previous chips, including a larger cache. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with being 64 bits, and hence the results are not mindblowing.
There's a persistant myth that a 64-bit processor is twice as fast as a 32-bit processor, which is completely incorrect.
in other news....duh
Yup. Note that this doesn't tell you anything about the overall quality of the software, though. So much open source software tends to be writter by students with little experience ("this was my first large project") and it shows. Just because other people find and fix the bugs doesn't change this.
It's flamebait to point out that the line in the summary (which was obviously a joke, but nearly everyone here, in their haste to whore for some karma, didn't engage their brains first) is false?
Perhaps it would just be better for the editors to stop throwing in charged throwaway lines like that. They've becom standard on Slashdot, often with the throwaway being a shot at Microsoft or the RIAA, and then all the comments focus on that one phrase rather than the linked story.