And my previous point stands. Only the largest of companies can currently afford 10GigE optical equipment. ThePlanet, a large hosting company with several dozen gigabits of bandwidth has been wanting to move some of their connections from GigE over to 10GigE for a while. Unfortunately, the cost and availability of the equipment to handle 10 gigabits per second has been a stumbling block.
Those terms imply consumer acceptance. Even the fastest consumer hard drives can't saturate a 1 gigabit ethernet connection. Consumers don't even need 10 gigabit, why would they want 100 gigabit?
Besides, while 1 gigabit ethernet has gained consumer acceptance over the years, with more and more consumer-level products supporting it, the vast majority of consumer networks are still 100 megabit. Most new computers might have onboard gigabit ethernet, but since manufacturers keep putting 100 megabit switches in convergence products (routers with onboard switches), nobody can use gigabit.
Of course, I realize that the article uses these terms in relation to large companies, but I don't think they can be used in that context. Even so, the current equipment to handle 10 gigabit connections is quite expensive even for large corporations, the cost of 100 gigabit would be prohibitive.
I don't think you could compare 1989 usenet and bulletin boards to something like Digg or Google News. Usenet and bulletin boards are also not customized. Unless you consider reading a dozen different newsgroups to be customized.
With an RSS aggregator, you choose the subjects you're interested in and they all arrive in one go.
On the other hand, for all I know, there was some BBS that specialized in aggregating news from various newsgroups. Still, network access wasn't as prevalent then as the internet is now;)
In order to get the same amount of digital audio on a data CD as on an audio CD, you use roughly 1.2 megabits for the audio bitrate. I was incorrect about DVDs using 24-bit audio, though.
You have to look past the lossy/lossless compression issue though. For the VAST majority of people, lossy audio at sufficiently high bitrate is indistinguishable from lossless. I'm not talking about audiophiles here, but regular average Joe.
CD quality lossy MP3 compression happens at about 192kbit for most people. Assuming a linear increase in storage requirements to go to 24-bit/96khz, that is a 4x increase in bandwidth. We're up to 768kbit of MP3.
Now, MP3 is not the most efficient audio codec available. Both AAC and Vorbis provide significantly higher quality at the same bitrate. Both AAC and Vorbis were available in 2001. A rough rule of thumb seems to indicate that these newer codecs are up to a third more efficient, so we can drop the bandwidth usage down to 576kbit. Now, we want 5.1 audio, and we're using 2 channels. I'm going to assume that the bass channel isn't going to use any appreciable bandwidth (After all, we're already encoding bass for each individual channel). While a linear assumption would say that this would take us up to 1440kbit, that would be ignoring joint stereo (not the intensity stereo part of it, but the M/S Stereo part) and other similar techniques that take advantage of redundancy. I'm not sure what sort of efficiency JS lends to the stream, but I'm pretty sure that it is enough to bring us down to 1.2 megabits at a reasonable quality.
Now, I also don't know what kind of bitrate increase is required to go up to 24kbit/96khz. I'm betting that that isn't a linear increase too, but I'll play it safe and stick with that assumption.
Do you think that I'm cutting the quality down too much in order to get the 5.1 audio into the 1.2megabit range? Fine. Let's just consider pure quality.
Assume AAC/Vorbis at 320kbit for a stereo signal. Even audiophiles can't tell lossy and lossless audio apart at bitrates that high. Now, multiply by four to go from 16-bit 44.1khz to 24/96 (Yes, I know that 96/44.1 is 2.17, but close enough). That is about 1.25 megabits per second, and it will sound significantly better than an audio CD to even the most demanding audiophiles.
Please keep in mind than when I say "going from" 16 to 24 kbit, I'm not talking about upsampling. I'm talking about encoding 16-bit source audio vs encoding 24-bit source audio.
They were right about the customized newspapers, though. They essentially describe RSS-by-fax. Keep in mind that the internet didn't exist in the 1980s, so fax seemed the logical method of delivery.
They DID get a surprising amount correct, though. The big thing they missed out on is the internet (and the ubiquity of it). It supplants a lot of their other predictions.
Their pridictions about optical storage going up 50x in size from 656MB was a bit off. By 2001, I think we only had DVD-RW, a mere ~15x increase. By 2006, though, we've got 50GB BluRay rewritables, a 78x increase. So they were just off by a few years.
Another interesting thing they got right was CD-ROMs being able to store higher quality sound than audio CDs. A CD-ROM today can store 24-bit 96khz 5.1 audio with a greater playing time than a similar audio CD. So the quality increase is there too (~1.2 megabits is a LOT of bits to work with for compressed digital audio), and the technology to do so was around in 2001 (DVDs, for example, use compressed 24-bit audio).
You're beginning to get the point. When he tried to run his own company and set his own creative process, he failed miserably.
Essentialy he grossly underestimated the amount of work required, horribly mismanaged his enormous team (he assumed that more people is better), and (here's the big thing), wasted enormous amounts of money on lavish offices and expenses.
Had they not blown all their money on useless things, they might have survived the post-daiketana implosion.
The interesting thing to note is that the company had two branches. The one that John Romero headed up failed spectacularly, while the other branch actually produced several games with decent sales. This other branch managed to survive a few additional years, and just recently closed in Feb 2005.
That's the thing, though. Labour law is a provincial affair, and Quebec labour law is quite different from the rest of Canada or the US. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that Ubisoft's non-compete agreements will be ruled invalid.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the Quebec government subsidizes Ubisoft. As the article mentions, 50% of Ubisoft employee salaries are paid by the government. Does Ubisoft really have any right to a non-compete clause when the government is paying half the salary? I would still disagree with a non-compete clause with no subsidy at all, but when you have a 50% subsidy, it is insane.
Talking about non-compete being standard "in the industry" doesn't matter. This is not "the industry", this is Quebec. We tend towards a civil-law legal system, not common-law. This means that while jurisprudence is considered, more stock is held in the SPIRIT of the law rather than past rulings about the law. Regardless of what the rest of "the industry" does, any ruling on a non-compete clause would be based on violation of Quebec law.
My guess is that if a final ruling is rendered, the non-compete clause will be declared invalid. That seems in line with the attitude here. However, IANAL.
"Well, what I keep thinking is that possibly I had an operation. And somehow the memory is gone...And I'm trying to figure it out...I think of it all the time. I don't remember this, and why I don't remember that."
How does he know he keeps thinking that? How does he know he thinks of it all the time? Is he simply assuming that because he is thinking about it now he must think about it often in general?
Making a connection to Coral is an OUTGOING connection. You only need to forward ports for INCOMMING connections.
So, the people who "don't know how to configure their routers" can still uses it, which means that it ISN'T generally useless.
Now, firewalls that restrict outgoing traffic, that's another story. But there are ways around this. HTTP proxies through Hamachi or SSH tunnels for example. Or if the only connection to the outside world that your workplace gives you is their own transparent HTTP proxy, TCP over HTTP. That's where TCP packets are encapsulated and sent as HTTP requests. The overhead isn't as bad as it sounds since the endpoints simply create neverending HTTP GET and PUT (or GET and POST) requests. Proxies have to let these through due to all the bad web servers that don't report Content-Length.
Does it matter if Linux or Windows boots first? Whichever succeeds first will allow the other to suceed almost immediately thereafter.
Any method that can boot Windows is guarunteed to allow Linux to boot. And any method that Linux uses to boot is a backdoor (admittedly less so) that Windows can exploit.
For example, consider the worst case scenario. Linux is bootable through some means which requires source modification that Windows can't do. If you can boot Linux, you can boot Xen. And if you can boot Xen, you can run Windows inside of Xen (with Xen 3.0 on modern CPUs with the virtualization extensions, which the iMac should have) at native speeds.
The downside in that worst-case scenario is hardware support; Xen doesn't have Xen-aware Win32 video drivers. As I understand it, the two current solutions are to use VESA mode, or an emulated VGA device. And of course VNC and remote desktop.
Anyhow, my point is that if Linux boots on an iMac, you should be able to run Windows without the overhead of VMware or QEMU.
I think that this may be more about gaining leverage in pushing content to iTunes. Steve Jobs is now the single largest Disney shareholder. That gives him a LOT of swing in the company. Disney also owns ABC, if I'm not mistaken. Now, if Jobs says to the board that he wants all of Disney's movies and all of ABC's shows on iTunes, he's got a lot of pull. While he might have been able to convince them before when he didn't own a huge chunk of Disney, now that he does own a hefty chunk of the company any such move is almost certain to succeed.
I agree, that accuracy is uselessly low. I mean, imagine this:
1) Take low-quality speech with lots of background noise 2) Run it through a bad voice recognition system 3) Run it through a bad translator 4) Run it through a bad text-to-speech engine
It would be a miracle if a human could even understand the output after so many steps of badness.
I'm not kidding either. I tried IBM ViaVoice five or six years ago. It was absolutely horrible and almost impossible to even train. Perhaps it has improved since then, but now we're talking about working with NO training.
Next, machine translators. Ever tried to translate anything with Babelfish or Google Language Tools? The results are barely comprehensible. I speak both English and French, (Quebec anglophone), and while I can read the source French text just fine, I can barely make sense of the English translation. Google is supposedly working on some statistical translation that will be worlds better, but they haven't shown anything publicly yet. Now, take the badly recognized speech and translate it badly.
Next, take our badly recognized badly translated text and run it through a text-to-speech engine. You know, the ones that sound perfectly natural and identical to a human for half the words and devolve into tonal nightmares for the other half.
This is doomed to failure with modern technology. As you said, 80% is horrible, and they're currently only at 60%. That is barely more than half the speech.
There are a boatload of video solutions for the DS. Most are gameboy games and as such are limited to GBA screen res, but some use PassMe type devices to run at native DS resolution.
Multilayer is already used for, IIRC, virtually all modern games. Anything that needs more than 4.5GB is going to be multilayer. Nobody is complaining about that.
People are complaining about multi-disc. The complaint seems to not be gameplay related, but manufacturing cost. It costs more to press two CDs than one. It isn't just the cost of pressing a disc, which is pennies, but the cost of setting up the manufacturing pipeline for two seperate discs.
The singleplayer/multiplayer split may or may not work out well, since multiplayer games usually use assets from the singleplayer part. FPS games are well suited for multiple discs simply because different levels use different monsters, different textures, different sounds, different music, etc. Common stuff can sometimes be cached on a hard drive to make more room on subsequent discs.
Games like GTA can still be split up onto multiple discs. While the world itself is fairly static, there is a definite mission progression that would allow some of the assets to be split between two discs. As previously mentioned, cacheing as much of the content shared between discs on a hard-drive would allow for maximum space on the second disc.
But even if half the data must be shared on both discs, you still get 1.5 discs worth of space. With modern compression in a game like GTA, audio isn't likely to take up much space. But audio, models, animation, all this stuff that would change with each mission and only be played once could benefit.
As I said previously, I have to wonder if the cost of making two DVDs (360) would even be more than that of making a single BD-ROM (PS3).
The interesting thing is that I have an extremely short attention span. The list of games that I've completed is 10% the size of the list of games that I've finished 50 to 90 percent of. And yet, HL1 and HL2 were able to hold my attention the WHOLE way through. I've even finished all the HL1 expansions, even though their quality was not on par with the original.
There is something about HL1 and HL2 that has kept someone like me with an extremely short attention span focused on it long enough to play through it multiple times. I think that the method of story delivery plays a large part; it makes the experience more immersive, more real.
I'm assuming you're using hotswap bays. That means your drives are in handy little cases with handles and all. Why not just build a special shelf with several hundred little slots shaped for the hotswap cases? Pull a drive from a PC, slide it into a slot.
I think HL1/HL2 has it perfectly right. The perspective should never leave first-person. Keep the camera locked in the player's eyes. Any cutscenes that need to take place, do that in-game, in-engine, from the player's perspective.
Even when HL2 had fixed pov cutscenes (the teleporter, the citadel, etc), it was still from the first person POV, and you could still look around.
Even if you have your character talking and holding conversations, keep that from the first person perspective.
I'll admit that there are some times that I think cutscenes are OK. Beginning and end of game (Even HL2's intro, while still first-person, sort of blurred the line), not so bad. But the rest, no reason it should be anything but first person perspective. And with modern engines, no reason that even the beginning and end stuff shouldn't be in-engine.
Didn't Final Fantasy 7 ship on 4 CDs? Of course, they probably could have fit that onto once CD if they had more powerful hardware to use more modern (or just more complex) compression. Still.
Anyhow, I would imagine it costs less to press two DVDs than it does to press one BD-ROM.
It doesn't matter if the acting isn't up to par. It's a fan production, and nobody is forcing you to watch it. I mean, they have fun MAKING it, isn't that enough? And some of us think it is cool to see the enormous amount of former guest-stars, main stars, writers, Roddeberry family, etc, putting on a good show.
Personally, I can look past the acting. The CG is a bit annoying, since while it LOOKS good they have the Enterprise doing loop-de-loops that even the Defiant couldn't dream of pulling off. Watching the 60s show, the ship didn't move very fast. I'd be OK with modern-day trek style ship movement, but it is a bit disconcerting seeing the CG Enterprise move as if somebody is waving it around in front of a camera;)
The GabeCube cost as little as half as much as the PS2 and XBox during their lifespans (GameCube is currently priced at $99 Canadian with the XBox at $199 Canadian). Despite costing half as much, the GameCube occupied a distand third place in market share.
If anything sells the Revolution, it won't be low price. Otherwise the GameCube would have dominated the market for the same reason.
Software like Transitive's QuickTransit (Apple licenses it as "Rosetta") is setting new records for emulation speed due to integration with the native operating system and caching
QuickTransit is already available with a Itanium back-end (allowing x86, MIPS, POWER/PowerPC code to run on an Itanium)... And considering the insanely high number of registers on the Itanium (16x that of the x86), emulation should be extremely fast.
Besides, I read another article not too long ago saying that this was a bumper year for the game industry. I guess it just goes to show how unreliable the game press are.
I have had the same problem with my notebook. When I plug it in to certain plugs, it refuses to draw power from the AC, and beeps very loud very fast until I unplug it. If I plug it in to a different plug, it is fine, and then when I put it back in the "problem" plug it is fine again.
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And my previous point stands. Only the largest of companies can currently afford 10GigE optical equipment. ThePlanet, a large hosting company with several dozen gigabits of bandwidth has been wanting to move some of their connections from GigE over to 10GigE for a while. Unfortunately, the cost and availability of the equipment to handle 10 gigabits per second has been a stumbling block.
Those terms imply consumer acceptance. Even the fastest consumer hard drives can't saturate a 1 gigabit ethernet connection. Consumers don't even need 10 gigabit, why would they want 100 gigabit?
Besides, while 1 gigabit ethernet has gained consumer acceptance over the years, with more and more consumer-level products supporting it, the vast majority of consumer networks are still 100 megabit. Most new computers might have onboard gigabit ethernet, but since manufacturers keep putting 100 megabit switches in convergence products (routers with onboard switches), nobody can use gigabit.
Of course, I realize that the article uses these terms in relation to large companies, but I don't think they can be used in that context. Even so, the current equipment to handle 10 gigabit connections is quite expensive even for large corporations, the cost of 100 gigabit would be prohibitive.
I don't think you could compare 1989 usenet and bulletin boards to something like Digg or Google News. Usenet and bulletin boards are also not customized. Unless you consider reading a dozen different newsgroups to be customized.
;)
With an RSS aggregator, you choose the subjects you're interested in and they all arrive in one go.
On the other hand, for all I know, there was some BBS that specialized in aggregating news from various newsgroups. Still, network access wasn't as prevalent then as the internet is now
What do you think speed profiles are called? They're tiers. Either you pay $35/mth for 3mbit or you pay $50/mth for 5mbit.
In order to get the same amount of digital audio on a data CD as on an audio CD, you use roughly 1.2 megabits for the audio bitrate. I was incorrect about DVDs using 24-bit audio, though.
You have to look past the lossy/lossless compression issue though. For the VAST majority of people, lossy audio at sufficiently high bitrate is indistinguishable from lossless. I'm not talking about audiophiles here, but regular average Joe.
CD quality lossy MP3 compression happens at about 192kbit for most people. Assuming a linear increase in storage requirements to go to 24-bit/96khz, that is a 4x increase in bandwidth. We're up to 768kbit of MP3.
Now, MP3 is not the most efficient audio codec available. Both AAC and Vorbis provide significantly higher quality at the same bitrate. Both AAC and Vorbis were available in 2001. A rough rule of thumb seems to indicate that these newer codecs are up to a third more efficient, so we can drop the bandwidth usage down to 576kbit. Now, we want 5.1 audio, and we're using 2 channels. I'm going to assume that the bass channel isn't going to use any appreciable bandwidth (After all, we're already encoding bass for each individual channel). While a linear assumption would say that this would take us up to 1440kbit, that would be ignoring joint stereo (not the intensity stereo part of it, but the M/S Stereo part) and other similar techniques that take advantage of redundancy. I'm not sure what sort of efficiency JS lends to the stream, but I'm pretty sure that it is enough to bring us down to 1.2 megabits at a reasonable quality.
Now, I also don't know what kind of bitrate increase is required to go up to 24kbit/96khz. I'm betting that that isn't a linear increase too, but I'll play it safe and stick with that assumption.
Do you think that I'm cutting the quality down too much in order to get the 5.1 audio into the 1.2megabit range? Fine. Let's just consider pure quality.
Assume AAC/Vorbis at 320kbit for a stereo signal. Even audiophiles can't tell lossy and lossless audio apart at bitrates that high. Now, multiply by four to go from 16-bit 44.1khz to 24/96 (Yes, I know that 96/44.1 is 2.17, but close enough). That is about 1.25 megabits per second, and it will sound significantly better than an audio CD to even the most demanding audiophiles.
Please keep in mind than when I say "going from" 16 to 24 kbit, I'm not talking about upsampling. I'm talking about encoding 16-bit source audio vs encoding 24-bit source audio.
They were right about the customized newspapers, though. They essentially describe RSS-by-fax. Keep in mind that the internet didn't exist in the 1980s, so fax seemed the logical method of delivery.
They DID get a surprising amount correct, though. The big thing they missed out on is the internet (and the ubiquity of it). It supplants a lot of their other predictions.
Their pridictions about optical storage going up 50x in size from 656MB was a bit off. By 2001, I think we only had DVD-RW, a mere ~15x increase. By 2006, though, we've got 50GB BluRay rewritables, a 78x increase. So they were just off by a few years.
Another interesting thing they got right was CD-ROMs being able to store higher quality sound than audio CDs. A CD-ROM today can store 24-bit 96khz 5.1 audio with a greater playing time than a similar audio CD. So the quality increase is there too (~1.2 megabits is a LOT of bits to work with for compressed digital audio), and the technology to do so was around in 2001 (DVDs, for example, use compressed 24-bit audio).
You're beginning to get the point. When he tried to run his own company and set his own creative process, he failed miserably.
Essentialy he grossly underestimated the amount of work required, horribly mismanaged his enormous team (he assumed that more people is better), and (here's the big thing), wasted enormous amounts of money on lavish offices and expenses.
Had they not blown all their money on useless things, they might have survived the post-daiketana implosion.
The interesting thing to note is that the company had two branches. The one that John Romero headed up failed spectacularly, while the other branch actually produced several games with decent sales. This other branch managed to survive a few additional years, and just recently closed in Feb 2005.
That's the thing, though. Labour law is a provincial affair, and Quebec labour law is quite different from the rest of Canada or the US. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that Ubisoft's non-compete agreements will be ruled invalid.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the Quebec government subsidizes Ubisoft. As the article mentions, 50% of Ubisoft employee salaries are paid by the government. Does Ubisoft really have any right to a non-compete clause when the government is paying half the salary? I would still disagree with a non-compete clause with no subsidy at all, but when you have a 50% subsidy, it is insane.
Talking about non-compete being standard "in the industry" doesn't matter. This is not "the industry", this is Quebec. We tend towards a civil-law legal system, not common-law. This means that while jurisprudence is considered, more stock is held in the SPIRIT of the law rather than past rulings about the law. Regardless of what the rest of "the industry" does, any ruling on a non-compete clause would be based on violation of Quebec law.
My guess is that if a final ruling is rendered, the non-compete clause will be declared invalid. That seems in line with the attitude here. However, IANAL.
From an interview with him:
"Well, what I keep thinking is that possibly I had an operation. And somehow the memory is gone...And I'm trying to figure it out...I think of it all the time. I don't remember this, and why I don't remember that."
How does he know he keeps thinking that? How does he know he thinks of it all the time? Is he simply assuming that because he is thinking about it now he must think about it often in general?
No, you don't need to forward port 8090.
Making a connection to Coral is an OUTGOING connection. You only need to forward ports for INCOMMING connections.
So, the people who "don't know how to configure their routers" can still uses it, which means that it ISN'T generally useless.
Now, firewalls that restrict outgoing traffic, that's another story. But there are ways around this. HTTP proxies through Hamachi or SSH tunnels for example. Or if the only connection to the outside world that your workplace gives you is their own transparent HTTP proxy, TCP over HTTP. That's where TCP packets are encapsulated and sent as HTTP requests. The overhead isn't as bad as it sounds since the endpoints simply create neverending HTTP GET and PUT (or GET and POST) requests. Proxies have to let these through due to all the bad web servers that don't report Content-Length.
Does it matter if Linux or Windows boots first? Whichever succeeds first will allow the other to suceed almost immediately thereafter.
Any method that can boot Windows is guarunteed to allow Linux to boot. And any method that Linux uses to boot is a backdoor (admittedly less so) that Windows can exploit.
For example, consider the worst case scenario. Linux is bootable through some means which requires source modification that Windows can't do. If you can boot Linux, you can boot Xen. And if you can boot Xen, you can run Windows inside of Xen (with Xen 3.0 on modern CPUs with the virtualization extensions, which the iMac should have) at native speeds.
The downside in that worst-case scenario is hardware support; Xen doesn't have Xen-aware Win32 video drivers. As I understand it, the two current solutions are to use VESA mode, or an emulated VGA device. And of course VNC and remote desktop.
Anyhow, my point is that if Linux boots on an iMac, you should be able to run Windows without the overhead of VMware or QEMU.
I think that this may be more about gaining leverage in pushing content to iTunes. Steve Jobs is now the single largest Disney shareholder. That gives him a LOT of swing in the company. Disney also owns ABC, if I'm not mistaken. Now, if Jobs says to the board that he wants all of Disney's movies and all of ABC's shows on iTunes, he's got a lot of pull. While he might have been able to convince them before when he didn't own a huge chunk of Disney, now that he does own a hefty chunk of the company any such move is almost certain to succeed.
I agree, that accuracy is uselessly low. I mean, imagine this:
1) Take low-quality speech with lots of background noise
2) Run it through a bad voice recognition system
3) Run it through a bad translator
4) Run it through a bad text-to-speech engine
It would be a miracle if a human could even understand the output after so many steps of badness.
I'm not kidding either. I tried IBM ViaVoice five or six years ago. It was absolutely horrible and almost impossible to even train. Perhaps it has improved since then, but now we're talking about working with NO training.
Next, machine translators. Ever tried to translate anything with Babelfish or Google Language Tools? The results are barely comprehensible. I speak both English and French, (Quebec anglophone), and while I can read the source French text just fine, I can barely make sense of the English translation. Google is supposedly working on some statistical translation that will be worlds better, but they haven't shown anything publicly yet. Now, take the badly recognized speech and translate it badly.
Next, take our badly recognized badly translated text and run it through a text-to-speech engine. You know, the ones that sound perfectly natural and identical to a human for half the words and devolve into tonal nightmares for the other half.
This is doomed to failure with modern technology. As you said, 80% is horrible, and they're currently only at 60%. That is barely more than half the speech.
There are a boatload of video solutions for the DS. Most are gameboy games and as such are limited to GBA screen res, but some use PassMe type devices to run at native DS resolution.
Multilayer is already used for, IIRC, virtually all modern games. Anything that needs more than 4.5GB is going to be multilayer. Nobody is complaining about that.
People are complaining about multi-disc. The complaint seems to not be gameplay related, but manufacturing cost. It costs more to press two CDs than one. It isn't just the cost of pressing a disc, which is pennies, but the cost of setting up the manufacturing pipeline for two seperate discs.
The singleplayer/multiplayer split may or may not work out well, since multiplayer games usually use assets from the singleplayer part. FPS games are well suited for multiple discs simply because different levels use different monsters, different textures, different sounds, different music, etc. Common stuff can sometimes be cached on a hard drive to make more room on subsequent discs.
Games like GTA can still be split up onto multiple discs. While the world itself is fairly static, there is a definite mission progression that would allow some of the assets to be split between two discs. As previously mentioned, cacheing as much of the content shared between discs on a hard-drive would allow for maximum space on the second disc.
But even if half the data must be shared on both discs, you still get 1.5 discs worth of space. With modern compression in a game like GTA, audio isn't likely to take up much space. But audio, models, animation, all this stuff that would change with each mission and only be played once could benefit.
As I said previously, I have to wonder if the cost of making two DVDs (360) would even be more than that of making a single BD-ROM (PS3).
The interesting thing is that I have an extremely short attention span. The list of games that I've completed is 10% the size of the list of games that I've finished 50 to 90 percent of. And yet, HL1 and HL2 were able to hold my attention the WHOLE way through. I've even finished all the HL1 expansions, even though their quality was not on par with the original.
There is something about HL1 and HL2 that has kept someone like me with an extremely short attention span focused on it long enough to play through it multiple times. I think that the method of story delivery plays a large part; it makes the experience more immersive, more real.
I'm assuming you're using hotswap bays. That means your drives are in handy little cases with handles and all. Why not just build a special shelf with several hundred little slots shaped for the hotswap cases? Pull a drive from a PC, slide it into a slot.
I think HL1/HL2 has it perfectly right. The perspective should never leave first-person. Keep the camera locked in the player's eyes. Any cutscenes that need to take place, do that in-game, in-engine, from the player's perspective.
Even when HL2 had fixed pov cutscenes (the teleporter, the citadel, etc), it was still from the first person POV, and you could still look around.
Even if you have your character talking and holding conversations, keep that from the first person perspective.
I'll admit that there are some times that I think cutscenes are OK. Beginning and end of game (Even HL2's intro, while still first-person, sort of blurred the line), not so bad. But the rest, no reason it should be anything but first person perspective. And with modern engines, no reason that even the beginning and end stuff shouldn't be in-engine.
Didn't Final Fantasy 7 ship on 4 CDs? Of course, they probably could have fit that onto once CD if they had more powerful hardware to use more modern (or just more complex) compression. Still.
Anyhow, I would imagine it costs less to press two DVDs than it does to press one BD-ROM.
It doesn't matter if the acting isn't up to par. It's a fan production, and nobody is forcing you to watch it. I mean, they have fun MAKING it, isn't that enough? And some of us think it is cool to see the enormous amount of former guest-stars, main stars, writers, Roddeberry family, etc, putting on a good show.
;)
Personally, I can look past the acting. The CG is a bit annoying, since while it LOOKS good they have the Enterprise doing loop-de-loops that even the Defiant couldn't dream of pulling off. Watching the 60s show, the ship didn't move very fast. I'd be OK with modern-day trek style ship movement, but it is a bit disconcerting seeing the CG Enterprise move as if somebody is waving it around in front of a camera
Still, I enjoy it.
The GabeCube cost as little as half as much as the PS2 and XBox during their lifespans (GameCube is currently priced at $99 Canadian with the XBox at $199 Canadian). Despite costing half as much, the GameCube occupied a distand third place in market share.
If anything sells the Revolution, it won't be low price. Otherwise the GameCube would have dominated the market for the same reason.
Software like Transitive's QuickTransit (Apple licenses it as "Rosetta") is setting new records for emulation speed due to integration with the native operating system and caching
QuickTransit is already available with a Itanium back-end (allowing x86, MIPS, POWER/PowerPC code to run on an Itanium)... And considering the insanely high number of registers on the Itanium (16x that of the x86), emulation should be extremely fast.
"Also doing excellently was EA"
Is excellently even a word?
Besides, I read another article not too long ago saying that this was a bumper year for the game industry. I guess it just goes to show how unreliable the game press are.
I have had the same problem with my notebook. When I plug it in to certain plugs, it refuses to draw power from the AC, and beeps very loud very fast until I unplug it. If I plug it in to a different plug, it is fine, and then when I put it back in the "problem" plug it is fine again.