"Don't get me wrong, it would be great if Sun made Java open source, but what they have now is not evil."
Is it non-Free? Yes? Then it is evil. I'm not RMS, I don't even practice what I preach (I dual-boot Windows and Fedora), but an ideal is at least something to hold on to and strive for.
Free as in freedom is the way to go. Don't accept anything less as the optimal solution - doing so just leads us further down the path where Free software becomes the exception, not the norm.
-Erwos (displaying his idealistic zeal for the day)
They're outselling the PS2 by 50% - surely, that shouldn't be described as "barely outselling".
As for the low number compared to what we expected, I suspect it's because the supply channel problems were only resolved near the middle of April. There's no serious evidence that there are piles of 360s in shops everywhere - indeed, someone recently mentioned that it was only last week that Newegg was even able to get any.
There's no hard proof that this is sustainable, but after Sony's poor E3 showing, I suspect 360 sales will be even stronger in May. But that's only my opinion...
The answer seems clear to me: the huge jump in Xbox 360 sales is starting to drive software sales again. The 360 is finally the best-selling console, and consumers are buying new games for it. If there's continued demand for the 360 (and I doubt they've hit anything near saturation yet), game sales should keep on going up.
"Multi-platform releases for the GC would often be the same price as they were for the other systems (around $50 at release), but generally everything else (exclusive third party and first party) was on average about $40 or less."
Not every game for every other platform was $50, either, so this point is somewhat non-sensical. My point stands: the prices were approximately the same.
"On top of that, the GC was easier to develop for than the Xbox and PS2, but not by that large of a margin. The gap has widen this generation though. The Wii is substantially easier to cope with than either the PS3 or the 360 if for no other reason than it is essentially a beefed up Gamecube."
That's one way of looking at it. Another view is that devs will have to significantly rewrite their multiplatform releases because the Wii is so much different than the other two consoles in terms of graphical capabilities and controls.
The 360 has Xbox backwards-compat, too, although it's admittedly somewhat lackluster in some cases. I was just playing Halo on it the other day, in fact.
Note that I said "PowerPC architecture". Duh, your chip's internal architecture is going to have quite a lot of impact on IPC. The fact that it's using the PowerPC instruction set ARCHITECTURE is not inherently going to raise it, though. Stuff like pipeline length and the quality of your branch predictor are extremely important, as you've already pointed out.
Performance isn't going to scale linearly with more CPUs, but if you think modern games can't fill three threads, you need to re-examine the problem yourself. I've done a fair bit of multi-threaded programming in my time - it isn't so difficult, provided you keep your wits about you, and have good software engineering.
The 360's RAM is higher bandwidth than the Wii's. 1T-SRAM was impressive when the Gamecube came out - it's not so much anymore.
The 360 (and PS3) is also using a PowerPC architecture chip, but architecture does not inherently impact IPC. Your entire point makes no sense. Unless you can give us some actual benchmarks, it's easier to simply assume they have the same IPC. In any event, it has 1/6 of the power according to your calculations, so I don't see your problem.
Jaggies get _better_ with resolution increases. Start Quake3, and then try running it at 640x480 and then 1600x1200, no AA. If you think there's fewer jaggies at 640x480, you need to get your eyes checked.
"the geometry in the image will be as high as anything on the PS3/XBox 360, the Textures are as high resolution as anything on the PS3/XBox 360 and the Particle effects are as nice as anything on the PS3/XBox 360"
This is, at best, wishful thinking. The Wii has very little in the way of texture memory - if they do what they did to the rest of the system, about a meg and a half, but let's assume it's really 10mb. The 360 has 512mb of shared RAM - presumably, more than 64mb of this could be dedicated to textures. The CPU is running at 729mhz last I checked, which is 1/3 of _one_ of the 360's cores - good luck trying to generate the same geometry. Even if you could, the comparatively low resolution (480p) is going to make it look like a jaggy mess - and there's not exactly much power to spare for fancy AA.
There is some serious delusion on the part of some Nintendo fans on how well this system is really going to be able to compete in the graphics department. I personally don't think it matters - Nintendo has obviously staked the system on the controller and Virtual Console, not the graphics. Whether that's a mistake or not, we shall see...
That's a bit of a strawman argument, because most wikipedia critics aren't really proposing any of those things, except for the accountability.
Indeed, it's quite the opposite. The critics of Wikipedia are complaining that WP:OFFICE is now being used to protect living people (that Peppers guy), clamp down on stuff that'll get them sued ("moral responsibility"), and so forth. If they had more accountability, they'd actually have to defend their actions.
The difference is, last generation, the price was $300. This generation, Sony's expecting people to pay double or 2/3 more. Microsoft only asked for 1/3 more, which is actually _less_ than Sony's previous generation price hike of 1/2 more.
While it's great that the Revolution seems to be prompting some new and interesting gameplay, this could be a warning signal that third-party support might not be as extensive as hoped, since they're apparently unable to port the 360/PS3 version over without making it "inferior".
This is slightly offtopic, but I'm hoping some people will catch this question and give me their advice. Please resist the temptation to mod it down.
I work full time as a software engineer (eg, I design and write software). I graduated with a degree in CS and Economics a year and a half ago from a well-ranked state school, but my GPA wasn't very good. Getting married, getting a job, and growing up a bit has changed me a lot, though, and I want to increase my education.
I'm thinking of trying to get a Masters of Software Engineering (MSwE) from UMUC. I don't have the time or financial situation to go back to regular UMD for a MS in CS full-time, much as I would like to, and I've heard anecdotes that the department doesn't like to waste time on part-time students. And, frankly, I don't really care for another two years of algorithms - that's not what I'm interested in as a professional (although, obviously, I try to keep on top of new developments).
Is this worth my time? I don't want to spend 3 years on this, and then find out that employers see it as a joke degree, and actually have it _devalue_ me. But I would like to go back and get some graduate education, even if the school is less than stellar.
I'm not sure I agree. Generals with the Zero Hour expansion was a fantastically good game, even compared to favorites like RA2 or WC3, and the ratings it got seemed to reflect this. If they can pull off another Generals-level performance, C&C 3 will be an EXCELLENT game.
Whatever you do, DO NOT allow remote root logins. Ever!
root is the one account that attackers can be reasonably sure exists on your computer. Allowing remote access to it allows them to hammer it with dictionary, brute force, and social engineering attacks from relative safety.
If you're the only admin on the computer, su into root is fine - if anything goes wrong, it's your fault anyways. Otherwise, use sudo to maintain high levels of auditability and least privileged access.
The whole "cameras in cell phones" craze is starting to cause some problems for me. Many DoD installations do not let you take camera phones onsite. This has the effect of severely limiting my cell phone choices, so that I'm stuck with "crackberry" or "super cheap", neither of which is terribly appealing. What happened to a nice, mid-range phone with no camera? It's not even that I don't like a camera integrated into it - it's just not an option for me. This insanity is even starting to creep into PDA phones - witness the Treo 650's digital camera, for instance.
It's gotten to the point where I'm thinking of switching from Sprint to Nextel, just because Nextel's phones actually seem more reasonable for my (and my wife's) usage. Interestingly, the Sprint rep I spoke with said I could do this, and they even had a group for going from Sprint -> Nextel!
I've never understood how so much of the whole Slashdot crowd can't tell the difference between EDTV and HDTV sources. The difference is just massive - I can tell you VERY easily whether I'm watching a particular TV show on DVD or HDTV video, because the HDTV source is just SO much better, even when the DVD is upscaled. Maybe it's because Best Buy and Circuit City use trashy sources - or, more likely, it's the "I don't have it, so it sucks" segment showing their ugly faces.
Trust me, 720p with the same triangle count looks much, much better than 480p. If you don't believe me, try experimenting with an Xbox 360's display settings.
Ubuntu is the distro of the week, nothing more. I remember that, a bare two years ago, everyone and their dog was ditching Red Hat for Gentoo. Let's face it: no one talks about Gentoo in the enterprise anymore as the Next Big Thing (tm). While it's sad that some sys-admins are adherents to "distro of the week" fever, Red Hat's recent press release that 99 out of 100 of their biggest contracts stayed on is revealing as to what serious sysadmins are doing.
RHEL has some genuine advantages over most other distros, such as RHN's administration capabilities and guaranteed five-year support. Besides that, the Red Hat brand-name is invaluable, because people know them. They also have tons and tons of money in the bank, so they're far more reliable than Canonical.
In other words, for a company that signed its own death wish, they've been doing quite well lately, and have managed to outlast and survive their competitors. Maybe Ubuntu will be a serious competitor in the future, but they aren't right now.
I mean, really, this is hardly the earth-shattering revelation I was expecting. Walmart sells cheap stuff. Company wants to sell expensive stuff. Company decides not to go with Walmart. There weren't any death threats or dirty tricks, just some calm discussion and reasonable logic.
I don't see why it's news that branding and quality are important. Even the folks running Walmart are not so dense - they just like to feed off that lower part of the retail sector. Historical note: the United States got its start in the textile industry not by producing higher quality stuff than you'd find in, say, Britain, but by producing lower quality stuff that was "good enough", but much cheaper. America got a reputation for cheap, lousy material - but then again, everyone bought it, even when better-but-more-expensive local material was available
It's fairly common to put up a lot of empty boxes in a store front to act as advertising.
That said, the supply situation, as you alluded to, is getting better. Once that's set, I would expect Microsoft to finally start marketing it heavily (there's been practically nothing going on the past few months).
"IBM is buying a lot from Novell, and not from redhat."
You're joking, right? This statement alone disqualifies whatever else you have to say, because it's obvious YOU HAVE NO CLUE. Red Hat and IBM have a close partnership. IBM constantly plays it up whenever they come with the sales pitches. You can get RHEL on practically anything IBM sells. You're going to have to quantify your statement with hard facts before anyone believes it. You can do that, right?
Note that I'm not arguing IBM doesn't have a close relationship with SuSE (Novell, now), too.
"So I really think that Novell will survive and will have a huge market, more market than RedHat, they are not so cocky about them self as RedHat, Novell wants money, not fame..."
That's a laughable assertion. You don't think there are huge egos at Novell? The reason you keep hearing about Red Hat on Slashdot is that they're continually giving to the community. Aiglx, GFS, scheduler enhancements, gcc development, etc. - if Red Hat gets fame and ego boosts like that, they're A-OK in my book. The folks at Novell are starting to realize this - which is why you're seeing them open-source more and more stuff, and backpedal somewhat on their "hybrid open-source proprietary" philosophy they were pitching shortly after the merger (it didn't win them many friends).[1]
You obviously have some rather pre-conceived notions about Red Hat and Novell. Sorry if the facts get in the way.
I think SuSE is a fine distro, but Novell is flailing about to a large extent with regards to how to evolve itself. They'll probably survive, but it's going to be painful.
Slashdot Mirror
"Don't get me wrong, it would be great if Sun made Java open source, but what they have now is not evil."
Is it non-Free? Yes? Then it is evil. I'm not RMS, I don't even practice what I preach (I dual-boot Windows and Fedora), but an ideal is at least something to hold on to and strive for.
Free as in freedom is the way to go. Don't accept anything less as the optimal solution - doing so just leads us further down the path where Free software becomes the exception, not the norm.
-Erwos (displaying his idealistic zeal for the day)
I guess you don't understand that you linked to the March sales stats, do you? April's are much different.
-Erwos
They're outselling the PS2 by 50% - surely, that shouldn't be described as "barely outselling".
As for the low number compared to what we expected, I suspect it's because the supply channel problems were only resolved near the middle of April. There's no serious evidence that there are piles of 360s in shops everywhere - indeed, someone recently mentioned that it was only last week that Newegg was even able to get any.
There's no hard proof that this is sustainable, but after Sony's poor E3 showing, I suspect 360 sales will be even stronger in May. But that's only my opinion...
-Erwos
The answer seems clear to me: the huge jump in Xbox 360 sales is starting to drive software sales again. The 360 is finally the best-selling console, and consumers are buying new games for it. If there's continued demand for the 360 (and I doubt they've hit anything near saturation yet), game sales should keep on going up.
We'll see.
-Erwos
"Multi-platform releases for the GC would often be the same price as they were for the other systems (around $50 at release), but generally everything else (exclusive third party and first party) was on average about $40 or less."
Not every game for every other platform was $50, either, so this point is somewhat non-sensical. My point stands: the prices were approximately the same.
"On top of that, the GC was easier to develop for than the Xbox and PS2, but not by that large of a margin. The gap has widen this generation though. The Wii is substantially easier to cope with than either the PS3 or the 360 if for no other reason than it is essentially a beefed up Gamecube."
That's one way of looking at it. Another view is that devs will have to significantly rewrite their multiplatform releases because the Wii is so much different than the other two consoles in terms of graphical capabilities and controls.
The 360 has Xbox backwards-compat, too, although it's admittedly somewhat lackluster in some cases. I was just playing Halo on it the other day, in fact.
-Erwos
"but MS has said it can't be done do to the reason above."
Microsoft said no such thing. If they did, let's see a source.
-Erwos
Highly unlikely. The Gamecube was easier to develop for (using your criterion, anyways), and games for that went at the same price as everyone else's.
-Erwos
Note that I said "PowerPC architecture". Duh, your chip's internal architecture is going to have quite a lot of impact on IPC. The fact that it's using the PowerPC instruction set ARCHITECTURE is not inherently going to raise it, though. Stuff like pipeline length and the quality of your branch predictor are extremely important, as you've already pointed out.
Performance isn't going to scale linearly with more CPUs, but if you think modern games can't fill three threads, you need to re-examine the problem yourself. I've done a fair bit of multi-threaded programming in my time - it isn't so difficult, provided you keep your wits about you, and have good software engineering.
-Erwos
The 360's RAM is higher bandwidth than the Wii's. 1T-SRAM was impressive when the Gamecube came out - it's not so much anymore.
The 360 (and PS3) is also using a PowerPC architecture chip, but architecture does not inherently impact IPC. Your entire point makes no sense. Unless you can give us some actual benchmarks, it's easier to simply assume they have the same IPC. In any event, it has 1/6 of the power according to your calculations, so I don't see your problem.
Jaggies get _better_ with resolution increases. Start Quake3, and then try running it at 640x480 and then 1600x1200, no AA. If you think there's fewer jaggies at 640x480, you need to get your eyes checked.
-Erwos
"the geometry in the image will be as high as anything on the PS3/XBox 360, the Textures are as high resolution as anything on the PS3/XBox 360 and the Particle effects are as nice as anything on the PS3/XBox 360"
This is, at best, wishful thinking. The Wii has very little in the way of texture memory - if they do what they did to the rest of the system, about a meg and a half, but let's assume it's really 10mb. The 360 has 512mb of shared RAM - presumably, more than 64mb of this could be dedicated to textures. The CPU is running at 729mhz last I checked, which is 1/3 of _one_ of the 360's cores - good luck trying to generate the same geometry. Even if you could, the comparatively low resolution (480p) is going to make it look like a jaggy mess - and there's not exactly much power to spare for fancy AA.
There is some serious delusion on the part of some Nintendo fans on how well this system is really going to be able to compete in the graphics department. I personally don't think it matters - Nintendo has obviously staked the system on the controller and Virtual Console, not the graphics. Whether that's a mistake or not, we shall see...
-Erwos
That's a bit of a strawman argument, because most wikipedia critics aren't really proposing any of those things, except for the accountability.
Indeed, it's quite the opposite. The critics of Wikipedia are complaining that WP:OFFICE is now being used to protect living people (that Peppers guy), clamp down on stuff that'll get them sued ("moral responsibility"), and so forth. If they had more accountability, they'd actually have to defend their actions.
-Erwos
The difference is, last generation, the price was $300. This generation, Sony's expecting people to pay double or 2/3 more. Microsoft only asked for 1/3 more, which is actually _less_ than Sony's previous generation price hike of 1/2 more.
-Erwos
While it's great that the Revolution seems to be prompting some new and interesting gameplay, this could be a warning signal that third-party support might not be as extensive as hoped, since they're apparently unable to port the 360/PS3 version over without making it "inferior".
-Erwos
Fortunately, I don't even think it's online - it's a real classroom program.
-Erwos
This is slightly offtopic, but I'm hoping some people will catch this question and give me their advice. Please resist the temptation to mod it down.
I work full time as a software engineer (eg, I design and write software). I graduated with a degree in CS and Economics a year and a half ago from a well-ranked state school, but my GPA wasn't very good. Getting married, getting a job, and growing up a bit has changed me a lot, though, and I want to increase my education.
I'm thinking of trying to get a Masters of Software Engineering (MSwE) from UMUC. I don't have the time or financial situation to go back to regular UMD for a MS in CS full-time, much as I would like to, and I've heard anecdotes that the department doesn't like to waste time on part-time students. And, frankly, I don't really care for another two years of algorithms - that's not what I'm interested in as a professional (although, obviously, I try to keep on top of new developments).
Is this worth my time? I don't want to spend 3 years on this, and then find out that employers see it as a joke degree, and actually have it _devalue_ me. But I would like to go back and get some graduate education, even if the school is less than stellar.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
-Erwos
I'm not sure I agree. Generals with the Zero Hour expansion was a fantastically good game, even compared to favorites like RA2 or WC3, and the ratings it got seemed to reflect this. If they can pull off another Generals-level performance, C&C 3 will be an EXCELLENT game.
-Erwos
Whatever you do, DO NOT allow remote root logins. Ever!
root is the one account that attackers can be reasonably sure exists on your computer. Allowing remote access to it allows them to hammer it with dictionary, brute force, and social engineering attacks from relative safety.
If you're the only admin on the computer, su into root is fine - if anything goes wrong, it's your fault anyways. Otherwise, use sudo to maintain high levels of auditability and least privileged access.
-Erwos
The whole "cameras in cell phones" craze is starting to cause some problems for me. Many DoD installations do not let you take camera phones onsite. This has the effect of severely limiting my cell phone choices, so that I'm stuck with "crackberry" or "super cheap", neither of which is terribly appealing. What happened to a nice, mid-range phone with no camera? It's not even that I don't like a camera integrated into it - it's just not an option for me. This insanity is even starting to creep into PDA phones - witness the Treo 650's digital camera, for instance.
It's gotten to the point where I'm thinking of switching from Sprint to Nextel, just because Nextel's phones actually seem more reasonable for my (and my wife's) usage. Interestingly, the Sprint rep I spoke with said I could do this, and they even had a group for going from Sprint -> Nextel!
-Erwos
I've never understood how so much of the whole Slashdot crowd can't tell the difference between EDTV and HDTV sources. The difference is just massive - I can tell you VERY easily whether I'm watching a particular TV show on DVD or HDTV video, because the HDTV source is just SO much better, even when the DVD is upscaled. Maybe it's because Best Buy and Circuit City use trashy sources - or, more likely, it's the "I don't have it, so it sucks" segment showing their ugly faces.
Trust me, 720p with the same triangle count looks much, much better than 480p. If you don't believe me, try experimenting with an Xbox 360's display settings.
-Erwos
Ubuntu is the distro of the week, nothing more. I remember that, a bare two years ago, everyone and their dog was ditching Red Hat for Gentoo. Let's face it: no one talks about Gentoo in the enterprise anymore as the Next Big Thing (tm). While it's sad that some sys-admins are adherents to "distro of the week" fever, Red Hat's recent press release that 99 out of 100 of their biggest contracts stayed on is revealing as to what serious sysadmins are doing.
RHEL has some genuine advantages over most other distros, such as RHN's administration capabilities and guaranteed five-year support. Besides that, the Red Hat brand-name is invaluable, because people know them. They also have tons and tons of money in the bank, so they're far more reliable than Canonical.
In other words, for a company that signed its own death wish, they've been doing quite well lately, and have managed to outlast and survive their competitors. Maybe Ubuntu will be a serious competitor in the future, but they aren't right now.
-Erwos
Quick fact: all of Microsoft's first party titles were $50, too. Draw your own conclusions.
-Erwos
I mean, really, this is hardly the earth-shattering revelation I was expecting. Walmart sells cheap stuff. Company wants to sell expensive stuff. Company decides not to go with Walmart. There weren't any death threats or dirty tricks, just some calm discussion and reasonable logic.
I don't see why it's news that branding and quality are important. Even the folks running Walmart are not so dense - they just like to feed off that lower part of the retail sector. Historical note: the United States got its start in the textile industry not by producing higher quality stuff than you'd find in, say, Britain, but by producing lower quality stuff that was "good enough", but much cheaper. America got a reputation for cheap, lousy material - but then again, everyone bought it, even when better-but-more-expensive local material was available
-Erwos
It's fairly common to put up a lot of empty boxes in a store front to act as advertising.
That said, the supply situation, as you alluded to, is getting better. Once that's set, I would expect Microsoft to finally start marketing it heavily (there's been practically nothing going on the past few months).
-Erwos
I know some people who think their entire universe is STILL a kiddush cup![1]
-Erwos
[1] Interpret this as you will - upon reflection, there's a lot of meanings to it.
"IBM is buying a lot from Novell, and not from redhat."
You're joking, right? This statement alone disqualifies whatever else you have to say, because it's obvious YOU HAVE NO CLUE. Red Hat and IBM have a close partnership. IBM constantly plays it up whenever they come with the sales pitches. You can get RHEL on practically anything IBM sells. You're going to have to quantify your statement with hard facts before anyone believes it. You can do that, right?
Note that I'm not arguing IBM doesn't have a close relationship with SuSE (Novell, now), too.
"So I really think that Novell will survive and will have a huge market, more market than RedHat, they are not so cocky about them self as RedHat, Novell wants money, not fame..."
That's a laughable assertion. You don't think there are huge egos at Novell? The reason you keep hearing about Red Hat on Slashdot is that they're continually giving to the community. Aiglx, GFS, scheduler enhancements, gcc development, etc. - if Red Hat gets fame and ego boosts like that, they're A-OK in my book. The folks at Novell are starting to realize this - which is why you're seeing them open-source more and more stuff, and backpedal somewhat on their "hybrid open-source proprietary" philosophy they were pitching shortly after the merger (it didn't win them many friends).[1]
You obviously have some rather pre-conceived notions about Red Hat and Novell. Sorry if the facts get in the way.
I think SuSE is a fine distro, but Novell is flailing about to a large extent with regards to how to evolve itself. They'll probably survive, but it's going to be painful.
-Erwos
[1] I received several sales pitches from them.