The problem with that idea is that in practice the PS3 isn't really any more powerful than the 360. 360 games usually look better and often play smoother.
Well, perhaps in theory the CPU/RAM architecture is better. I'm not sure about the GPU, which of course matters a great deal for games.
However, the issue is that the CPU/RAM is only better if you write the game specifically for the PS3. If you write the game to work on any platform chances are you aren't doing all that hand-assembly mentioned in the parent post. If you write generic code then the PS3 is actually at a disadvantage, because it is so different from most other architectures.
In closing: Yes it is difficult, but it is by no means a slow chip if you program it the way it was intended to. And it might not be the best chip for all applications.
I'll grant that it might be way faster than x86 if you write all your software well and specifically target it.
However, if you're working on a cross-platform release, chances are you aren't going to do that. You're going to write one set of source files, with a few optimizations per platform, and then let the compiler do all the work. That means that you'll end up with medicore code for all platforms, and excellent code for none of them. The x86 does just fine with mediocre code, and the cell struggles.
If everybody owned a PS3 then no doubt people would take the time to write excellent code for it. It isn't as well-suited for generic multi-platform code.
Agreed. You can write a program optimized for any ordinary architecture out there (PC (running windows, linux, whatever), Mac, xbox, even cell phones), or you can write it optimized for this odd highly parallel architecture that is ps3. Chances are you're going to write it first and foremost for everything else, and then do your best port to the ps3. The last thing you will do is come up with some crazy hyper-optimized stuff for the ps3 that won't run anywhere else.
Oh sure, the cell phone version is going to need some simplification, and the libraries/etc are a little different from directx to the mac and so on. However, all of those devices have in common that you use a graphics API to control the GPU, you have a bucket of RAM, and you have a few processor cores that are all equivalent and which run threads. The only difference is how fast those individual components are, and how much RAM there is.
PS3's biggest problem seems to be that it was the oddball.
I doubt the space station has sufficient propulsion to actually de-orbit. Plus, it de-orbits on its own anyway due to drag - it needs re-boosts to keep it up there, from spacecraft.
You probably could put it into a spin and burn up all the propellant, making it almost impossible to recover. Maybe you could even get it to fly apart that way. However, a controlled de-orbit is likely not possible except over the course of years.
I believe it. The last time gas was super-expensive was right before the whole stock market crashed. Overnight the prices seemed to plummet. Sure, the economy slowed down, but it isn't like millions of people lost their money overnight - most of that money loss was still numbers on spreadsheets at that point.
What changed was that everybody with money in hedge funds lost their shirts, and could no longer afford to buy oil futures. Without constant upwards pressure the price collapsed. As long as people keep buying into the bubble it will continue to inflate. It is only when people run out of money for tulip bulbs that things go south.
Look, the UN will still shut down any site the US asks it to. Additionally, they'll also shut down any site that China, Mozambique, Iran, or Syria asks it to.
I do want to get DNS outside of US control, but handing it over to the UN is NOT the solution.
The next round people see non-profit, they'll be less likely to have good expectations on a tech non-profit.
Does that really matter much? I contribute to a non-profit, and I'd be contributing to it whether anybody else liked what I was doing or not. People contribute financially because they like what we're doing.
I think that Pi became a bit of a victim of its own hype. A bunch of guys decided to do something nice, and they really did do something nice, and will continue to do nice things. Then everybody else is upset that they didn't actually cure cancer. If you really wanted a bazillion units shipped on day 1, then call Michael Dell, but don't expect to pay $35 for them.
"Guys, they're a non profit. Demand was too great. That's not a BAD thing. Yes, you have to wait. That does not mean that it was the worst launch ever."
???
The NFL is a non-profit too. Because they're a non-profit, you expect things to be poorly done?
Comparing what is practically a volunteer effort to the NFL is a bit of a joke. Frankly, if they were looking to be a "non-profit" in the sense that the NFL is I wouldn't want to have anything to do with it. The NFL is basically a fortune 500 company that just has committed to never paying a dividend or liquidating. The NFL commissioner probably gets paid as much as just about any CEO out there.
I view the Raspberry Pi as more of a community effort, and frankly if they were just another big company selling a product I doubt it would have gotten the same interest.
That's nice, but I just bought a brand new VGA-only monitor a few weeks ago. I was shocked that they still made them, but it was $50 cheaper than anything comparable that used DVI, and for what I was using it for it didn't make sense to spend money just to have a particular connector technology - it wasn't like I had 20 meter cable runs.
I'm not going to knock the Pi too much, but the lack of VGA definitely is limiting.
Sounds a lot like prior restraint to me, regardless of whether a court is signing off or not. Who gave the court the legal authority to prevent somebody from publishing something? Last time I checked it wasn't the US Constitution...
If you want to sue somebody for libel after the fact, go ahead. Courts aren't authorized to order somebody not to publish something before they actually do it. Of course, that apparently isn't stopping them from actually doing it.
So, CD quality isn't CD quality by your definition. If the guy pressing the CD did a digital recording of a 20 year old cassette tape, it will sound even lousier than the 96kbps mp3 example.
Likewise, if it was recorded by sampling a microphone with 48 bits of range at 100kHz with the ADC only 1 mm from the microphone in a room so shielded that you can't pick up stray EM with a SQUID, and was then digitally edited and mastered using the best engineer in the industry, but the person singing into the microphone was Brittany Spears, then your CD is going to be useless for anything but making ears bleed.
The codec certainly is CD quality - it very accurately reproduces the sound that was recorded. When you apply the term quality to a recording medium generally all people mean is that what goes out is the same as what went into the recorder.
In any case, the article is about how the audio was mastered, not the merits of the recording medium per-se, lossy or not.
When I came up through school you wrote code which accounted for every exception
Well, in the business world they could be paying you to code for EVERY exception. Or they could pay you to code for the ones that come up most often and have you add 3 more features. Or, they could pay you to only code for the ones that come up most often and then have you spend the time you saved doing the work that the guy next to you used to do before they canned him.
If you're telling me that if I write buggy software I could end up like Microsoft, then I'm going to get out there and start writing buggy software! Spending a million dollars now to make $100M next year but at the risk of maybe having to waste an extra $10M five years from now is financially a VERY good deal. Especially if the alternative is that you spend $2M now and release your code a year after your competitor who locked up the market with their much buggier code, and then you go bankrupt.
It isn't like everybody is using Facebook because it was the best social networking architecture to come along. It was good enough and it was around at the right time with good marketing, so it took off. Google+ is better in almost every way you could measure, but it is struggling to catch up, simply because it happened later.
Better still - why not make network interfaces configurable per-user. If one user account messes up the network configuration, those interfaces aren't visible to any other account on the system...
And then you have my $300 workgroup color laser printer that was working great for years until a few weeks ago, and now I can't get it to work with the latest cups...
One of these days I'll get around to getting it working again. Maybe. Until then I guess I'll be using the windows drivers. Ironically enough this printer was pre-64-bit windows and yet its drivers work just fine on 64-bit win7.
I disagree - why should installing a printer have to be a system-level function? You can install an extension in firefox without root, but it only impacts your personal use of the application. Why can't printing be any different? Why can't networks be any different?
Sure, nothing wrong with having a set of system-level printers or interfaces. However, let users add to them in a way visible only to themselves.
As far as networks go - I'm not sure why network interfaces should have to be defined at a system level. Why shouldn't each user be able to have their own set of interfaces, and a routing table to go with it?
It seems like a more Plan-9-like solution would help here. In Plan 9 there really isn't a root per-se - there is the default configuration that everything inherits, but then every process is free to deviate from it. A process in Plan 9 can replace/bin/bash if it wants to, as long as it does it in a way that no other process sees.
Absolutely. And that is why this is a bunch of geeks doing non-profit work, and not something with a team of marketing experts. The very thing that would add the convenience you seek would likely also destroy the mission of the organization.
Yup - composition has to be thought out end-to-end. This is the same issue with most 3D versions of films these days - they aren't composed for 3D. I've only seen 2-3 3D films that were decent - most are far superior in 2D due to composition. Honestly, only Avatar really impressed me (from a visual/composition standpoint - let's set aside the story for now). It was clear that how the film would come out in 3D was thought into every aspect of the process.
My wife recently ordered a stack of photos from walmart and was offered the "true digital image" option or whatever they call it. Basically it is a narrower 4x6 variant that has the aspect of most popular digital cameras, so that you don't get the top/bottom crop that you get if you directly print many digital prints on 4x6.
The issue was that she had actually 4x6 cropped half of her photos, and not cropped the other half. Walmart printed half on 4x6, and the other half on the narrower size. This caused considerable stress as she didn't understand why they got two different treatments and I couldn't satisfactorily explain the situation to her.
Then factor in that I think my DSLR actually does take 2:3 ratio shots which print fine at 4x6 without cropping and now you get different behavior based on what camera was used.
Conclusion: most humans lack the part of the brain required to understand aspect ratios. It probably is right next to the part that confers understanding of trigonometry and calculus...
Hmm, I'll have to maybe watch the later seasons of DS9 and Voyager. I had abandoned both after the first season or two. At the time TNG was at its apex, and the new shows really seemed to be going nowhere great. My sense of DS9 at the time was that it was a soap-opera about life in the marketplace section of a space station, and I forget most of my Voyager impressions but I think I stuck with that one even less. Maybe I didn't have the same issues with Enterprise since I didn't have TNG to compare it to any longer.
Looking back the earlier TNG episodes were pretty mixed. It's all relative I suppose...
Hey, it is a non-profit run by geeks - not a well-coordinated and funded marketing engine.
If they really knew what they were doing they'd still manufacture them for $40, but then they'd realize that the demand was really high and so they'd sell them for $10 less than the mini-ITX competition (WAY more than the current price). With the profits to be made from the initial hype no doubt they'd have money to build a ton before shipping them.
This is largely an amateur operation, and should be judged as such. I for one am impressed!
Well, Amazon would be great for selling the thing (no doubt they could easily handle the load), but they don't actually make anything.
So, instead of a website that says "register interest" with no way to buy one, you'd have a nice Amazon site with reviews from people who don't have one yet, lots of pictures, and a big sold out and a dimmed-out buy button.
It isn't like Amazon can sell unmanufactured product.
Well, when you think about it this unit has the potential to be a one-size-fits-all solution for numerous problems. The cost is starting to approach the chip in a toaster and yet the thing can do anything a PC can do (sans horsepower), but potentially do it while running on a few AA batteries worth of juice. Anybody who makes kiosks, DVRs, in-car entertainment, or even cheap PCs should be looking at this.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that idea is that in practice the PS3 isn't really any more powerful than the 360. 360 games usually look better and often play smoother.
Well, perhaps in theory the CPU/RAM architecture is better. I'm not sure about the GPU, which of course matters a great deal for games.
However, the issue is that the CPU/RAM is only better if you write the game specifically for the PS3. If you write the game to work on any platform chances are you aren't doing all that hand-assembly mentioned in the parent post. If you write generic code then the PS3 is actually at a disadvantage, because it is so different from most other architectures.
In closing: Yes it is difficult, but it is by no means a slow chip if you program it the way it was intended to. And it might not be the best chip for all applications.
I'll grant that it might be way faster than x86 if you write all your software well and specifically target it.
However, if you're working on a cross-platform release, chances are you aren't going to do that. You're going to write one set of source files, with a few optimizations per platform, and then let the compiler do all the work. That means that you'll end up with medicore code for all platforms, and excellent code for none of them. The x86 does just fine with mediocre code, and the cell struggles.
If everybody owned a PS3 then no doubt people would take the time to write excellent code for it. It isn't as well-suited for generic multi-platform code.
Agreed. You can write a program optimized for any ordinary architecture out there (PC (running windows, linux, whatever), Mac, xbox, even cell phones), or you can write it optimized for this odd highly parallel architecture that is ps3. Chances are you're going to write it first and foremost for everything else, and then do your best port to the ps3. The last thing you will do is come up with some crazy hyper-optimized stuff for the ps3 that won't run anywhere else.
Oh sure, the cell phone version is going to need some simplification, and the libraries/etc are a little different from directx to the mac and so on. However, all of those devices have in common that you use a graphics API to control the GPU, you have a bucket of RAM, and you have a few processor cores that are all equivalent and which run threads. The only difference is how fast those individual components are, and how much RAM there is.
PS3's biggest problem seems to be that it was the oddball.
I doubt the space station has sufficient propulsion to actually de-orbit. Plus, it de-orbits on its own anyway due to drag - it needs re-boosts to keep it up there, from spacecraft.
You probably could put it into a spin and burn up all the propellant, making it almost impossible to recover. Maybe you could even get it to fly apart that way. However, a controlled de-orbit is likely not possible except over the course of years.
I believe it. The last time gas was super-expensive was right before the whole stock market crashed. Overnight the prices seemed to plummet. Sure, the economy slowed down, but it isn't like millions of people lost their money overnight - most of that money loss was still numbers on spreadsheets at that point.
What changed was that everybody with money in hedge funds lost their shirts, and could no longer afford to buy oil futures. Without constant upwards pressure the price collapsed. As long as people keep buying into the bubble it will continue to inflate. It is only when people run out of money for tulip bulbs that things go south.
I dunno, the biologists tell me that breeding is all it takes to turn a paramecium into a person....
Look, the UN will still shut down any site the US asks it to. Additionally, they'll also shut down any site that China, Mozambique, Iran, or Syria asks it to.
I do want to get DNS outside of US control, but handing it over to the UN is NOT the solution.
The next round people see non-profit, they'll be less likely to have good expectations on a tech non-profit.
Does that really matter much? I contribute to a non-profit, and I'd be contributing to it whether anybody else liked what I was doing or not. People contribute financially because they like what we're doing.
I think that Pi became a bit of a victim of its own hype. A bunch of guys decided to do something nice, and they really did do something nice, and will continue to do nice things. Then everybody else is upset that they didn't actually cure cancer. If you really wanted a bazillion units shipped on day 1, then call Michael Dell, but don't expect to pay $35 for them.
"Guys, they're a non profit. Demand was too great. That's not a BAD thing. Yes, you have to wait. That does not mean that it was the worst launch ever."
???
The NFL is a non-profit too. Because they're a non-profit, you expect things to be poorly done?
Comparing what is practically a volunteer effort to the NFL is a bit of a joke. Frankly, if they were looking to be a "non-profit" in the sense that the NFL is I wouldn't want to have anything to do with it. The NFL is basically a fortune 500 company that just has committed to never paying a dividend or liquidating. The NFL commissioner probably gets paid as much as just about any CEO out there.
I view the Raspberry Pi as more of a community effort, and frankly if they were just another big company selling a product I doubt it would have gotten the same interest.
That's nice, but I just bought a brand new VGA-only monitor a few weeks ago. I was shocked that they still made them, but it was $50 cheaper than anything comparable that used DVI, and for what I was using it for it didn't make sense to spend money just to have a particular connector technology - it wasn't like I had 20 meter cable runs.
I'm not going to knock the Pi too much, but the lack of VGA definitely is limiting.
Sounds a lot like prior restraint to me, regardless of whether a court is signing off or not. Who gave the court the legal authority to prevent somebody from publishing something? Last time I checked it wasn't the US Constitution...
If you want to sue somebody for libel after the fact, go ahead. Courts aren't authorized to order somebody not to publish something before they actually do it. Of course, that apparently isn't stopping them from actually doing it.
So, CD quality isn't CD quality by your definition. If the guy pressing the CD did a digital recording of a 20 year old cassette tape, it will sound even lousier than the 96kbps mp3 example.
Likewise, if it was recorded by sampling a microphone with 48 bits of range at 100kHz with the ADC only 1 mm from the microphone in a room so shielded that you can't pick up stray EM with a SQUID, and was then digitally edited and mastered using the best engineer in the industry, but the person singing into the microphone was Brittany Spears, then your CD is going to be useless for anything but making ears bleed.
The codec certainly is CD quality - it very accurately reproduces the sound that was recorded. When you apply the term quality to a recording medium generally all people mean is that what goes out is the same as what went into the recorder.
In any case, the article is about how the audio was mastered, not the merits of the recording medium per-se, lossy or not.
When I came up through school you wrote code which accounted for every exception
Well, in the business world they could be paying you to code for EVERY exception. Or they could pay you to code for the ones that come up most often and have you add 3 more features. Or, they could pay you to only code for the ones that come up most often and then have you spend the time you saved doing the work that the guy next to you used to do before they canned him.
If you're telling me that if I write buggy software I could end up like Microsoft, then I'm going to get out there and start writing buggy software! Spending a million dollars now to make $100M next year but at the risk of maybe having to waste an extra $10M five years from now is financially a VERY good deal. Especially if the alternative is that you spend $2M now and release your code a year after your competitor who locked up the market with their much buggier code, and then you go bankrupt.
It isn't like everybody is using Facebook because it was the best social networking architecture to come along. It was good enough and it was around at the right time with good marketing, so it took off. Google+ is better in almost every way you could measure, but it is struggling to catch up, simply because it happened later.
I would generally agree, but perhaps with the limitation that those devices should only be visible to the user who mounted them.
Better still - why not make network interfaces configurable per-user. If one user account messes up the network configuration, those interfaces aren't visible to any other account on the system...
And then you have my $300 workgroup color laser printer that was working great for years until a few weeks ago, and now I can't get it to work with the latest cups...
One of these days I'll get around to getting it working again. Maybe. Until then I guess I'll be using the windows drivers. Ironically enough this printer was pre-64-bit windows and yet its drivers work just fine on 64-bit win7.
I disagree - why should installing a printer have to be a system-level function? You can install an extension in firefox without root, but it only impacts your personal use of the application. Why can't printing be any different? Why can't networks be any different?
Sure, nothing wrong with having a set of system-level printers or interfaces. However, let users add to them in a way visible only to themselves.
As far as networks go - I'm not sure why network interfaces should have to be defined at a system level. Why shouldn't each user be able to have their own set of interfaces, and a routing table to go with it?
It seems like a more Plan-9-like solution would help here. In Plan 9 there really isn't a root per-se - there is the default configuration that everything inherits, but then every process is free to deviate from it. A process in Plan 9 can replace /bin/bash if it wants to, as long as it does it in a way that no other process sees.
Absolutely. And that is why this is a bunch of geeks doing non-profit work, and not something with a team of marketing experts. The very thing that would add the convenience you seek would likely also destroy the mission of the organization.
Were those 31st-century humans sleeping at the wheel during First Contact, or did they simply anticipate that there was never really a threat?
Yup - composition has to be thought out end-to-end. This is the same issue with most 3D versions of films these days - they aren't composed for 3D. I've only seen 2-3 3D films that were decent - most are far superior in 2D due to composition. Honestly, only Avatar really impressed me (from a visual/composition standpoint - let's set aside the story for now). It was clear that how the film would come out in 3D was thought into every aspect of the process.
My wife recently ordered a stack of photos from walmart and was offered the "true digital image" option or whatever they call it. Basically it is a narrower 4x6 variant that has the aspect of most popular digital cameras, so that you don't get the top/bottom crop that you get if you directly print many digital prints on 4x6.
The issue was that she had actually 4x6 cropped half of her photos, and not cropped the other half. Walmart printed half on 4x6, and the other half on the narrower size. This caused considerable stress as she didn't understand why they got two different treatments and I couldn't satisfactorily explain the situation to her.
Then factor in that I think my DSLR actually does take 2:3 ratio shots which print fine at 4x6 without cropping and now you get different behavior based on what camera was used.
Conclusion: most humans lack the part of the brain required to understand aspect ratios. It probably is right next to the part that confers understanding of trigonometry and calculus...
Hmm, I'll have to maybe watch the later seasons of DS9 and Voyager. I had abandoned both after the first season or two. At the time TNG was at its apex, and the new shows really seemed to be going nowhere great. My sense of DS9 at the time was that it was a soap-opera about life in the marketplace section of a space station, and I forget most of my Voyager impressions but I think I stuck with that one even less. Maybe I didn't have the same issues with Enterprise since I didn't have TNG to compare it to any longer.
Looking back the earlier TNG episodes were pretty mixed. It's all relative I suppose...
Hey, it is a non-profit run by geeks - not a well-coordinated and funded marketing engine.
If they really knew what they were doing they'd still manufacture them for $40, but then they'd realize that the demand was really high and so they'd sell them for $10 less than the mini-ITX competition (WAY more than the current price). With the profits to be made from the initial hype no doubt they'd have money to build a ton before shipping them.
This is largely an amateur operation, and should be judged as such. I for one am impressed!
Well, Amazon would be great for selling the thing (no doubt they could easily handle the load), but they don't actually make anything.
So, instead of a website that says "register interest" with no way to buy one, you'd have a nice Amazon site with reviews from people who don't have one yet, lots of pictures, and a big sold out and a dimmed-out buy button.
It isn't like Amazon can sell unmanufactured product.
Well, when you think about it this unit has the potential to be a one-size-fits-all solution for numerous problems. The cost is starting to approach the chip in a toaster and yet the thing can do anything a PC can do (sans horsepower), but potentially do it while running on a few AA batteries worth of juice. Anybody who makes kiosks, DVRs, in-car entertainment, or even cheap PCs should be looking at this.