I have a nVidia 6800, bought for $300 a year ago, and it struggles with modern games. I've found that anything older than 6 months will not play modern games with all the eyecandy.
And truthfully, there are hardly any games that fit that description. Very few high-end PC games sell 100K+ units any more (mostly the big hits everyone knows, like Battlefield 2 and Half-Life 2), so they're barely worth the development cost as it is, let alone the additional cost of adding features only seen by a 0.05% of the market.
Lots of reports of noise and excessive heat from the first rount of MBPs. Apple's much touted fix resulted in the problem getting worse for many owners (see macintouch.com MBP reader reports). So these issues are still out there, and the heat issue is severe (MBP so hot you can't touch it in places near the keyboard).
Here's hoping that these issues are resolved this time around.
"Geek" is an emptier term, one that can mean "obsessive or heavily involved but not necessarily intellectually curious." People who follow motherboard and video card reviews are geeks. But that's more like a guy who lives in a trailer coveting a Trans Am with a big engine. Similarly, people who obsessively surf the web and post in dozens of forums are geeks, but that has nothing to do with intellectual curiosity. Ditto for reinstalling Linux all the time.
All sorts of problems: whining noises, extreme heat, random shutdowns. Apple eventually acknowledges them, offers a new motherboard revision to all MPB owners, but the word is that not only are these problems still there, but the heat issue has gotten worse.
Maybe Apple has been dodging these issues in the past by going with slower, less complex processors? In any case, they've given me a definite wait-and-see attitude.
Take John Carmack for example. He releases all his code with games after a while. Not only that... He's pretty much licensed out his engines to other companies before he does that. Yet we didn't see every single game using code from Quake or Doom and then ditching all their devs. In fact we usually see this companies hire on more.
Don't use John Carmack or id as an example of anything. They're essentially an indie developer that hit it big in the old days, made a ton of cash, and can do what they want. That's not the kind of developer the article is about.
Sure, everyone knows there's no way to mash an arbitrary file down 25x. There's a trivial proof for that. But in this case it sounds like they're talking about 25x compression across multiple files. That is, if you store two identical files, then the second is a pointer to the first. If you have a bunch of jpegs, then you cat them all together into a new file (while keeping the originals around), the new file is super small. At least that's how I read the article.
Regardless of that, the real problem isn't with the masses, its with the elite.
I'm not so sure. You ever go look at the energy usage of appliances in any store? The low-end budget models tend to use the most power, and those are the ones people getting hourly wages are buying. The Energy Star rated ones you'll pay a premium for.
Look at washing machines, for example. The ones that use the least water and electricity--by far--are front loading models. Now just try to find a front loading washing machine in a U.S. store that doesn't cost $800+.
Apple has shipped flawed products and failed to deal with the problems adequately (witness the current bunch of MacBook Pro issues).
Apple also has a track record of suddenly changing direction and dropping support for what were originally much-touted products (especially software tech, like OpenDoc).
Apple certainly doesnt have a stellar reputation for handling order foul ups and product returns. They're not bad, but still on par--maybe even a little below--Dell.
What Apple does do, on the whole, is build products with the customer in mind. They usually don't cut corners, even if that keeps the price high. You know if you buy a guitar from Gibson or an SLR camera from Nikon that you're getting what you paid for: a tool with some style and craftsmanship behind it.
I seem to recall (someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I trust) the same issue with the Atari 5200 [atarihq.com] way back in the day. When it was released, it was quite a powerful console -- but the games available for it were marginal.
"Powerful" needs qualification. Compared to the Atari 2600, yes, it was powerful. But realize that the 5200, released in 1982, used the same hardware from the Atari 400/800 released 2-3 years earlier. Most of the games for it were repackaged Atari 800 games, as well. A notable exception is that the 5200 only had 16K RAM, and many Atari 800 games required more, so lots of the cooler games were never ported to it.
I'm not knocking OS X. OS X is *the* OS at the moment, as far as I'm concerned. But essentially OS X is a solid implementation of old tech: UNIX kernel, object-oriented GUI toolkit, WIMP interface, etc. There's some nice behind-the-scenes work, such as moving most of the graphics to the GPU, but that doesn't change things on the surface. If you use Windows, OS X, and Linux, the key differences are in terms of polish and usability, but they're all more similar than different.
Or, get someone with a trackercord of delivering a modern OS. Like Maybe Linus.
Is *anyone* qualified for this? Linus, for example, just works on the low-level Liunx kernel. Vista is a kernel + the.net runtime + graphics layers + GUI + DirectX + user-level applications that ship with the OS.
Part of the problem is that they don't innovate. We've heard this all before and it is a tired horse but as a successful company, they copy what works from other innovative ideas that the public takes to.
But who really innovates these days? OS X is just BSD with a fairly standard (though usable) GUI on top of it. The entire Linux world is based on cloning an operating system from the early 1970s.
.net was one of Microsoft's bolder moves: the idea of moving the bulk of an operating system away from the classic bits-and-bytes world of C-like languages. Sure, there was Java and UCSD Pascal and others before, but not on such a grand scale. Unfortunately, the.net stuff is essentially all under the hood, and not something that translates directly to a better experience for users.
1. PSP games are generally expected to sell at lower prices than PS2 games. 2. The PSP is more or less a PS2, so it's not substantially cheaper to develop a 3D PSP game as opposed to a 3D PS2 game.
On Game Boy, for example, developers can get away with games that are less tech heavy, games that don't require teams of modellers and texturers and animators. Not so on the PSP. A PSP game is essentially a PS2 game from the developer's point of view, shovelware puzzle games excepted.
Depends what kind of movies you watch. Usually the people making comments like this are the ones who like to watch big special effecty movies:)
If you just want to see movies with good, solid acting and engaging plots, then there are plenty to choose from. But they're not going to be extravagant affairs like Star Wars and King Kong.
I do not mean any offence to Jacqui Cheng, but with the (notable) exception of the Dell comparison, this review was shallow at best. When I surf Ars I typically expect the nitty-gritty Hannibal type review, and instead we more or less have a completely mundane blog entry about someone's new toy. The writing style is all wrong for that site.
The Hannibal-type reviews tend to harp on the wrong details and are meaningless as a result. If he reviewed cars, he'd focus on the internal details of the fuel injector and braking system, and that's no help when you're looking at the car as a *whole*. That's why Hannibal is a good technical writer about low-level hardware issues, and not a good reviewer.
I remember an old c64 game, "Pogo Joe". It had this guy on a pogo stick that had to step on different squares to change their colors. Meanwhile, he had to run away from these monsters or you would lose a life. But you could crush the monsters' eggs before they hatched. All of this while you wer hearing a really funny (or fun) melody.
I know you're trying to make a point about how creativity has fallen by the wayside, and I agree with you, but you picked a bad example. Pogo Joe was one of many hopping and color changing games that attempted to capitalize on the popularity of Q*bert. So in reality, you've cited an unoriginal clone:)
Another good example: At one time was routine to x-ray pregnant women--this was before ultrasound--to get a look at the developing fetus. Now it looks ridiculous that anyone thought that was safe.
PS2 was cutting edge too when it was released. The GPU was better than what you could get for a PC, and in many ways it still smokes (better fill rate than the Xbox). The CPU wasn't anything too exciting, of course.
And in many cases, keep in mind the 80/20 rule of thumb. 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code. This does vary, but in many cases the amount of highly optimized code needed for good performance is very little.
That rule of thumb quite often doesn't apply to video games, at least high-end, complex video games. In such, you often see a flat profile, where the work is divided among a large number of functions, none of which stands out as a huge time sink.
(That said, I still think writing games in languages like Perl is a good idea.)
You do realize these laptops are 32 bit only? The 64 bit portable CPU (Merom core) will be available by year end (together with the matching desktop core - Conroe).
True, yes, but I think the general realization for 64-bit processors is that unless you're one of the few people who absolutely *needs* them (and you'd know it if you were), there's no benefit for most people. All other things being equal, 64-bit processors are SLOWER than the 32-bit equivalent, because you need that much more memory for pointers and the caching issues drag you down. The complicating factor is that "64-bit" for the x86 also means "nicer instruction set & more registers, " something that's not true for other processor families.
Damn straight. That old Atari/Commodore rivalry dies hard.
It's hard to say if one is better than the other, just that they were different.
In terms of raw sprite and sound power, the C64 wins, hands down. The Atari 800 had decent sound, but was limited to square waves. The C64 had multicolored sprites out of the box, unlike the Atari.
In terms of programmability and clean, well-planned design, the Atari 800 wins, hands down. Things that were considered advanced and painful tricks in the C64, like multiplexing sprites, removing the border, mixing graphics modes...these were designed-in from the get-go on the Atari machines as part of a more general purpose graphics system.
If UNIX has taught us anything, it is that we should focus on creating small, highly-specialized applications (be them software, cell phones, cameras, or whatnot). Similarly, what Windows has taught us is that massive, monolithic applications are often failure-prone, unwieldy, and overly expensive.
That's just plain silly. Even Rob Pike, in response to a question about the core UNIX philosophy of small tools responded: "Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."
He's right about paddles though. From arcades, to the Apple II, to the Atari 2600, paddle controllers were a staple. And look at all the classic games tied to paddles--Pong and Breakout for starters--and that paddles served as steering wheels for home driving games (like Night Driver).
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I have a nVidia 6800, bought for $300 a year ago, and it struggles with modern games. I've found that anything older than 6 months will not play modern games with all the eyecandy.
And truthfully, there are hardly any games that fit that description. Very few high-end PC games sell 100K+ units any more (mostly the big hits everyone knows, like Battlefield 2 and Half-Life 2), so they're barely worth the development cost as it is, let alone the additional cost of adding features only seen by a 0.05% of the market.
Lots of reports of noise and excessive heat from the first rount of MBPs. Apple's much touted fix resulted in the problem getting worse for many owners (see macintouch.com MBP reader reports). So these issues are still out there, and the heat issue is severe (MBP so hot you can't touch it in places near the keyboard).
Here's hoping that these issues are resolved this time around.
"Geek" is an emptier term, one that can mean "obsessive or heavily involved but not necessarily intellectually curious." People who follow motherboard and video card reviews are geeks. But that's more like a guy who lives in a trailer coveting a Trans Am with a big engine. Similarly, people who obsessively surf the web and post in dozens of forums are geeks, but that has nothing to do with intellectual curiosity. Ditto for reinstalling Linux all the time.
All sorts of problems: whining noises, extreme heat, random shutdowns. Apple eventually acknowledges them, offers a new motherboard revision to all MPB owners, but the word is that not only are these problems still there, but the heat issue has gotten worse.
Maybe Apple has been dodging these issues in the past by going with slower, less complex processors? In any case, they've given me a definite wait-and-see attitude.
Take John Carmack for example. He releases all his code with games after a while. Not only that... He's pretty much licensed out his engines to other companies before he does that. Yet we didn't see every single game using code from Quake or Doom and then ditching all their devs. In fact we usually see this companies hire on more.
Don't use John Carmack or id as an example of anything. They're essentially an indie developer that hit it big in the old days, made a ton of cash, and can do what they want. That's not the kind of developer the article is about.
Sure, everyone knows there's no way to mash an arbitrary file down 25x. There's a trivial proof for that. But in this case it sounds like they're talking about 25x compression across multiple files. That is, if you store two identical files, then the second is a pointer to the first. If you have a bunch of jpegs, then you cat them all together into a new file (while keeping the originals around), the new file is super small. At least that's how I read the article.
Regardless of that, the real problem isn't with the masses, its with the elite.
I'm not so sure. You ever go look at the energy usage of appliances in any store? The low-end budget models tend to use the most power, and those are the ones people getting hourly wages are buying. The Energy Star rated ones you'll pay a premium for.
Look at washing machines, for example. The ones that use the least water and electricity--by far--are front loading models. Now just try to find a front loading washing machine in a U.S. store that doesn't cost $800+.
Apple has shipped flawed products and failed to deal with the problems adequately (witness the current bunch of MacBook Pro issues).
Apple also has a track record of suddenly changing direction and dropping support for what were originally much-touted products (especially software tech, like OpenDoc).
Apple certainly doesnt have a stellar reputation for handling order foul ups and product returns. They're not bad, but still on par--maybe even a little below--Dell.
What Apple does do, on the whole, is build products with the customer in mind. They usually don't cut corners, even if that keeps the price high. You know if you buy a guitar from Gibson or an SLR camera from Nikon that you're getting what you paid for: a tool with some style and craftsmanship behind it.
Yes: for all their bluster, the Mac software architecture is outdated; Objective C on Mach is a 20 year old solution.
Okay, so Linux and Windows are based on much older solutions. What's your point?
I seem to recall (someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I trust) the same issue with the Atari 5200 [atarihq.com] way back in the day. When it was released, it was quite a powerful console -- but the games available for it were marginal.
"Powerful" needs qualification. Compared to the Atari 2600, yes, it was powerful. But realize that the 5200, released in 1982, used the same hardware from the Atari 400/800 released 2-3 years earlier. Most of the games for it were repackaged Atari 800 games, as well. A notable exception is that the 5200 only had 16K RAM, and many Atari 800 games required more, so lots of the cooler games were never ported to it.
Man, that's just dumb.
I'm not knocking OS X. OS X is *the* OS at the moment, as far as I'm concerned. But essentially OS X is a solid implementation of old tech: UNIX kernel, object-oriented GUI toolkit, WIMP interface, etc. There's some nice behind-the-scenes work, such as moving most of the graphics to the GPU, but that doesn't change things on the surface. If you use Windows, OS X, and Linux, the key differences are in terms of polish and usability, but they're all more similar than different.
Or, get someone with a trackercord of delivering a modern OS. Like Maybe Linus.
.net runtime + graphics layers + GUI + DirectX + user-level applications that ship with the OS.
Is *anyone* qualified for this? Linus, for example, just works on the low-level Liunx kernel. Vista is a kernel + the
But who really innovates these days? OS X is just BSD with a fairly standard (though usable) GUI on top of it. The entire Linux world is based on cloning an operating system from the early 1970s.
.net was one of Microsoft's bolder moves: the idea of moving the bulk of an operating system away from the classic bits-and-bytes world of C-like languages. Sure, there was Java and UCSD Pascal and others before, but not on such a grand scale. Unfortunately, the .net stuff is essentially all under the hood, and not something that translates directly to a better experience for users.
There are two conflicting issues:
1. PSP games are generally expected to sell at lower prices than PS2 games.
2. The PSP is more or less a PS2, so it's not substantially cheaper to develop a 3D PSP game as opposed to a 3D PS2 game.
On Game Boy, for example, developers can get away with games that are less tech heavy, games that don't require teams of modellers and texturers and animators. Not so on the PSP. A PSP game is essentially a PS2 game from the developer's point of view, shovelware puzzle games excepted.
1. More effects than plot/storyline
:)
Depends what kind of movies you watch. Usually the people making comments like this are the ones who like to watch big special effecty movies
If you just want to see movies with good, solid acting and engaging plots, then there are plenty to choose from. But they're not going to be extravagant affairs like Star Wars and King Kong.
I do not mean any offence to Jacqui Cheng, but with the (notable) exception of the Dell comparison, this review was shallow at best. When I surf Ars I typically expect the nitty-gritty Hannibal type review, and instead we more or less have a completely mundane blog entry about someone's new toy. The writing style is all wrong for that site.
The Hannibal-type reviews tend to harp on the wrong details and are meaningless as a result. If he reviewed cars, he'd focus on the internal details of the fuel injector and braking system, and that's no help when you're looking at the car as a *whole*. That's why Hannibal is a good technical writer about low-level hardware issues, and not a good reviewer.
I remember an old c64 game, "Pogo Joe". It had this guy on a pogo stick that had to step on different squares to change their colors. Meanwhile, he had to run away from these monsters or you would lose a life. But you could crush the monsters' eggs before they hatched. All of this while you wer hearing a really funny (or fun) melody.
:)
I know you're trying to make a point about how creativity has fallen by the wayside, and I agree with you, but you picked a bad example. Pogo Joe was one of many hopping and color changing games that attempted to capitalize on the popularity of Q*bert. So in reality, you've cited an unoriginal clone
Another good example: At one time was routine to x-ray pregnant women--this was before ultrasound--to get a look at the developing fetus. Now it looks ridiculous that anyone thought that was safe.
BluRay, Cell, ... it's going to add up.
PS2 was cutting edge too when it was released. The GPU was better than what you could get for a PC, and in many ways it still smokes (better fill rate than the Xbox). The CPU wasn't anything too exciting, of course.
The author does a good job of introducing SDL and the mechanics of a simple game. Nicely done!
And in many cases, keep in mind the 80/20 rule of thumb. 80% of the time is spent in 20% of the code. This does vary, but in many cases the amount of highly optimized code needed for good performance is very little.
That rule of thumb quite often doesn't apply to video games, at least high-end, complex video games. In such, you often see a flat profile, where the work is divided among a large number of functions, none of which stands out as a huge time sink.
(That said, I still think writing games in languages like Perl is a good idea.)
You do realize these laptops are 32 bit only? The 64 bit portable CPU (Merom core) will be available by year end (together with the matching desktop core - Conroe).
True, yes, but I think the general realization for 64-bit processors is that unless you're one of the few people who absolutely *needs* them (and you'd know it if you were), there's no benefit for most people. All other things being equal, 64-bit processors are SLOWER than the 32-bit equivalent, because you need that much more memory for pointers and the caching issues drag you down. The complicating factor is that "64-bit" for the x86 also means "nicer instruction set & more registers, " something that's not true for other processor families.
Damn straight. That old Atari/Commodore rivalry dies hard.
It's hard to say if one is better than the other, just that they were different.
In terms of raw sprite and sound power, the C64 wins, hands down. The Atari 800 had decent sound, but was limited to square waves. The C64 had multicolored sprites out of the box, unlike the Atari.
In terms of programmability and clean, well-planned design, the Atari 800 wins, hands down. Things that were considered advanced and painful tricks in the C64, like multiplexing sprites, removing the border, mixing graphics modes...these were designed-in from the get-go on the Atari machines as part of a more general purpose graphics system.
If UNIX has taught us anything, it is that we should focus on creating small, highly-specialized applications (be them software, cell phones, cameras, or whatnot). Similarly, what Windows has taught us is that massive, monolithic applications are often failure-prone, unwieldy, and overly expensive.
That's just plain silly. Even Rob Pike, in response to a question about the core UNIX philosophy of small tools responded: "Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl."
Oh, come off it.
He's right about paddles though. From arcades, to the Apple II, to the Atari 2600, paddle controllers were a staple. And look at all the classic games tied to paddles--Pong and Breakout for starters--and that paddles served as steering wheels for home driving games (like Night Driver).