I must admit I'm unsure as to the aftereffects of a cow tipping, but would not some form of padding reduce the cruelty?
Granted, I do know that the only natural position cows lay down in is on their bellies, not their sides... Not sure how a cow would get back up after a tipping. Of course if it were mythbusters, they could rig a crane to help the cow up. Combined with the padding the cow might end up nothing more than annoyed.
I've got at least two dozen loaded, but SessionSaver is by far the most useful. Browser crashes (Because FireFox does crash with some regularity) are no longer a problem since I just open the browser again and all my stuff is back, even messages I was typing and cookies. I also now frequently simply close the browser window with lots of tabs open, and then re-open Firefox when I want to resume surfing. I save the memory (Firefox is pretty bloated memory-wise and has memory leaks, or one of my extensions do), and when I re-open the browser SessionSaver handles everything.
Second favourite is MediaPlayerConnectivity. Third favourite is probably Google Suggest.
1) So, Microsoft never was and never will be a monopoly or anti-competitive, because there are always other operating systems?
2) As I said, if developers drop prices, so will the stores. The used price will always be a raw deal for everybody but the store.
3) I never said the entire use game market, only the megastores that are doing the damage. Used cars don't suddenly get a brand new extended warranty with the original manufacturer every time somebody buys it used. Game developers have to because of the bad press they'd get if they didn't. When you buy a game, there is a certain expectation by the manufacturer that you will probably use the game for a while before stopping. While you are using it you are costing them money. They need to provide you with support, provide server resources for you, etc. If you use the game more than they expect, oh well, it averages out. But if the megastores cause 50% of all game sales to be used, suddenly the average is way higher. So it's not ONLY about hurting existing sales.
I'd almost like a clause in the licence that states that if the game was resold through a large commercial store, the game comes with no support (no patches) and does not function in multiplayer mode other than LAN play. Of course that's getting a bit silly, but something needs to be done before the smaller developers get pushed out of the market. Nobody is weeping for EA, but people like Epic could run into trouble, especially since their prices are already so far below market average.
First off, I take it you've never been to a used book store? Never used eBay, an auction, or even Goodwill?
Think of Chapters (in Canada) or Barnes & Nobles promoting used books before new books, and you'd be closer. Used book stores don't push the kind of volume as megastores do in new products. Ebay/auctions also mainly involve people selling directly to other people.
What's so special about game developers that they deserve protection from their products being resold used that the rest of the world doesn't have?
Because with a book, once the publisher prints and sells it, that is the end of their involvement. Game developers are expected to provide warranties, support, and online resources (servers) for games after sale, and they often do even when the users don't have a right to it.
I don't see a problem with selling or purchasing used games at a small fraction of the cost of a new package as long as the games themselves are marked as used and aren't already 'tied' to an individual like most MMO's are.
A small cost, perhaps. But go to EB Games and they pay you something like $6 for a $60 game, and then sell the used copy for $50. I'd actually not be oppose to reselling MMOs, since they have a monthly fee attached in addition to the boxed cost. So companies are getting paid for the after-sale resources consumed by a used buyer.
Secondly, if a developer can't get the majority of people to purchase their games at the new game price point, that's a good sign their product deserves the bargin bin or that they need to lower their prices.
The most vocal opponent to megastores selling use games for slightly under retail price is Mark Rein, I believe, or one of the other guys from Epic. They also happen to make very popular games that ALSO happen to be some of the lowest priced big-budget games on the market. It's not about matching the used product's pricepoint; as soon as a game developer lowers prices, the megastores would lower THEIR used price to slightly under the new retail price. Developers can't win.
Use a ULV (Ultra Low voltage) Pentium M processor and as much onboard (video, audio, network, IDE, etc) the motherboard as possible. Use as small a motherboard as possible. For hard drives, get larger and slower.
Alternatively, get a used thin & light laptop and four 3.5" IDE hard drive enclosures.
I'm not sure what uses less power per gig: large (400GB+?) 5400RPM desktop drives, or 120GB 5400RPM notebook drives. The notebook drives can be powered right off USB, so they use less power PER drive, but per gig I'm not sure, since you need three or four drives to equal one 400GB desktop drive.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster promised to sue the Kansas board of education if they did this, and at least one lawyer seemed to be pledging pro-bono support. So, when does the lawsuit start?
Discouraging used game sales is a good thing, since stores refuse to stop hurting developers. Doing it this way is very bad, since they are compromising user rights and preventing casual sales.
I'm not against casual used sales (Selling to friends, ebay, lending), but I am against stores like BestBuy ripping off customers by paying out next to nothing and reselling for almost retail, while promoting these before new sales. This screws the original owners, the buyers (Paying too much and sometimes getting a void warranty) AND the developers.
For AAC, unlock the files after purchase with Hymn. For WMA, decode to WAV and re-encode as VBR MP3. Both are fast. And forget about Sony due to their position on compromising computer security and user trust in order to protect their music that is already available via P2P.
I did turn it off, mainly because water doesn't play a major part in the game, I find bloom distracting, and I find depth of view (I assume you mean depth of field?) annoying. The game still needed ~2GB of memory (which few gamers have) and a videocard/CPU out of proportion with the graphical quality. The game needed twice as much memory as Quake 4, and ran slower.
Is there a Creative Commons equivalent for software licenses?
Yes, it's called the "Creative Commons". More information can be found at creativecommons.org
Seriously though, did you miss the popup on the Creative Commons licence generator that lets you specify content type? Did you miss the content type called "Interactive"? What did you think that applied to?
I briefly beta'd during the stress test. I was unimpressed.
The character creation process was the only truely interesting part of the game. The rest was utterly repetetive to the point of boredom. Kill all enemies of type X from location Y. Now do that for the next 10 missions. Now do the same thing with a different enemy type for another 10 missions.
The engine is also horrible. It requires a ridiculous amount of memory (You get tons of swapping on 1GB of RAM, so really you need 2GB), and has insanely low framerates for an engine that doesn't look much better than Quake 3 with greater viewing distances.
The boredom combined with painful performance turned me off of the game.
Which would explain why Linksys (Cisco) WRT54G wireless routers (Can be found for under $50 US) can form a mesh with custom firmware, but why Linksys' own default firmware doesn't support it.
Their "new" mesh stuff seems to go beyond a simple mesh, but considering how their own existing wireless devices can pretty much already do what they're announcing, I'm not seeing anything truly special here.
And I would imagine that most of the "new" stuff could be added to existing mesh-supporting firmware.
You can extend that argument. The more people that use Cedega, the more people are going to be calling up game companies with support problems running the game under Cedega. The game company will of course reply that running their Windows games under Linux is not supported, but the more people complain the greater the pressure to DO something about it.
That would either force the game companies to provide a native linux port, or contribute to Cedega to make sure their game runs well. Either way, it's a win for users in my book. And even though some developers might choose to help fix Cedega, it does lead to more Linux ports than before, so it's an improvement either way.
But is it not an abstraction layer over the related linux APIs? In that case, it is similar to emulation in that it has to translate all the API calls to native API calls. That takes time, though I'll conceed that the time it takes to translate is much lower than the time it takes to execute. Still, there IS a performance hit.
I suspect that the reason Cedega often runs faster than Windows boxes are a combination of less background services involved, and very good translation that sometimes picks translations that are more efficient than the direct equivalent.
The PS3 Cell has seven DSP cores tuned to do the sort of number-crunching necessary for decoding and rendering. A Cell DSP can work on 8 half-precision floats per clock while x86(-64) can only work with 4 single-precision per clock at best since current x86 CPUs only have one MAC (multiply-accumulate) block in their FPUs. So, a single 1+8 Cell can churn out 16X as many half-precision floats as a x86 CPU can churn out its lowest (overkill) precision. A 8xOpteron system would be less than half-way to matching a single cell's DSP power.
So then it looks like semi-customized hardware is required. The Cell is an ideal candidate. If a single x86 processor can handle an HD stream, and a Cell SPE is 16x more powerful, perhaps one could do the work with just one Cell processor (8 SPEs + 1 PPE) rather than two (16+2).
The 3GB/s RAM bandwidth was only the output buffer's write bandwidth assuming (an impossible) single-pass decoding. You also needs another 3GB/s to be passed on to the projector at the same minimum rate so, there goes another 3GB/s. The DSPs can do some processing re-ordering to reduce RAM reads and writes but chances are that the processing will need an average of at least two passes (read+write) so that is another 12GB/s + another 6GB/s for frames where many pixels hit three passes as a safety margin. Add RAM latency and idle cycles, the target flies to 30GB/s and beyond. With DDR2-533, this would mean going with octuple channels.
As for bandwidth, well, toss some GDDR3 at the problem and you're much improved over DDR2. GDDR3 has about 22.4GB/s of bandwidth. The XBOX 360 uses it for system RAM and video RAM. The PS3 uses it for video, with XDR RAM (25.6GB/s) for system memory. The GPU is attached to both memory systems, and the CPU and GPU are linked via a bus that can move data from CPU to GPU at 20GB/s.
So by my estimates, we can pipe 6 of those GB/s towards the GPU (Output buffer + compositing + output to projector). That brings the remaining bandwidth down to ~24GB/s. That's pretty close to the PS3's capabilities. The XDR system memory has much lower latency than DDR-2, though, so you can probably shave off some of what you added for RAM latency.
Come to think of it, assuming a Cell SPE (DSP) can decode 1/8 of a UHD stream (or 2 HD streams if you go the split route) the PS3 would need very little modification in order do the task. It'd need some changes to the graphics subsystem to handle outputting at such a high resolution. But with the PS3's launch price, and considering Sony already sells at a loss, such a system (Ignoring storage) could probably be made for one or two thousand dollars.
That is, of course, assuming a single Cell is up to the task.
You don't have to worry about packing it into a single chip. You can throw a multi-processor multi-core system at it, or as I mentioned previously, something based on the Cell architechture. The SPEs might lack a branch predictor, but they're great at raw number crunching, which is why one cell processor can decode 8 or 9 HD streams at a time. I have no idea how many HD streams a single Opteron core can handle, but quad-opteron systems with 8 cores total are still easily available.
Memory bandwidth shouldn't be too big of a concern. DDR2-533 gives you about 4.5 to 6 GB/s in practice, looking at some benchmarks. I would imagine dual-channel would increase that further, along with multi-core and multi-processor systems having seperate memory controllers per-processor. I'm going to wager a guess that memory bandwidth isn't that big of a problem. Splitting the video, though, totally eliminates the issue; the decoding doesn't even have to be done by one computer, as it can all be composited together later.
Who said that people had to transcode it back to DVD res before sharing it? Nothing is stopping people from transcoding it to 720p or 1080p. I've actually seen TV content at 720p available via BitTorrent, ripped from the original HD streams. People regularly swap DVD-R encodes of movies, at 4.7GB a pop, so moving the data isn't an issue.
So getting your hands on a UHD source does give you the benefit of being able to make an HD encode when the only other encodes available are DVD hand-cam recordings. Heck, the UHD --> HD stream would look better than an eventual DVD release.
400Mbps seems like a reasonable worst-case scenario but I would expect full-frame single-stream video to go a fair bit lower given that HD has 6X SD's resolution but uses less than 3X as much bandwidth. Even 300Mbps total would probably still be conservative.
I'll conceed that, you would probably see lower than 400mbit. But this still involves the problem with decoding it. Does any hardware exist that could decode such a massive MPEG-2 stream? Certainly no general purpose processor can, and I cringe at the cost of a dedicated MPEG-2 decoder that could handle such a stream.
By splitting up the stream, you are sacrificing bandwidth for decodability. But you can gain that back. In a short while when the Cell (or whatever processor technology) has advanced to the point that it can decode h.264 (Probably not that far off), you can get the bandwidth down to what it would be with one single MPEG-2 stream, but it will still be easier to decode because the job can be split up.
On the other hand, if there is some way to evenly divide the job of decoding an MPEG-2 stream among multiple processors, then my entire argument is pointless.
The 100 megabit fiber link for distribution isn't going to fly, I think. The cost isn't minor, for one. Let's assume you get it at bargain prices, roughly $1000 US/mth (Cogent, for example). That is no small expense. On the other hand, the cost of burning a few blue ray discs (which works with 16 HD streams or one giant stream) per-theater is going to be way less. A few dollars per film, versus perhaps a hundred per film. Not to mention safer, as far as the MPAA is probably concerned. I don't think they'd go for the idea of transferring their stuff over the internet, encrypted or not. And yes, it HAS to go over the public internet, because there is no single data network that can get your data to every movie theater in the world that is going to play your film. Nobody has that kind of coverage.
Processing one stream encoded is going to be nigh impossible to decode. Only by splitting it up are you going to be able to decode the thing without spending a ridiculous amount of money on the problem. As I pointed out, two Cell chips could decode an MPEG-2 SHV video, so long as it is split up into 16 HD streams. Cell's SPEs have no branch predictors, but are monsters at raw number crunching, and each of the SPEs on a Cell can decode a seperate HD stream. I'm not certain about how well the task of decoding a video can be split up among processors, but I don't think you could create a device that would cost only a few thousand dollars that could decode an SHV stream without splitting it up. Yes, there is a bit more redundancy to exploit, but I don't think the possible advantages are worth it. I think you're actually going to increase the processing requirements beyond what 16 individual HD streams would need, because stuff like motion compensation is going to have to consider a way larger image, among other things.
A gigabit is a high estimate, given. HD streams are 25mgbit MPEG-2, as I understand it. 16x that is 400mbit. So let's go for 400mbit as our assumption.
A RAID array is dangerous. You're relying mightly heavily on something that can so easily be affected by things such as the location of the stripe on the disk, or any sort of fragmentation. Hard drives can push 30 or 40 megabytes at their slowest points, yes, but that is only during a contiguous read. Start fragmenting stuff and that number plummets.
This actually leads to another good reason to cut the SHV stream up into 16 HD streams; easier to get faster storage. With one big honking stream, you need the entire thing to be on one logical volume; a RAID array. You have to be able to get at LEAST a gigabit off that single logical volume, and that's going to be mighty difficult. However, as soon as you start splitting up the stream, it becomes easier. Take 16 hard drives. 16 seperate hard drives. Each one stores one of the HD streams. To store a feature-length movie, each drive only has to be a cheap 40GB 7200RPM drive (That's enough for about 3.5 hours). Each drive only has to sustain a ~3.2 MB/s read speed, possible even with fragmentation. Drives don't have to be in RAID, but can be independent disks on their own SATA channels.
Assuming Sony/Toshiba/IBM ever make an actual ATX Cell motherboard with semi-standard components, at some point in the future you could build a box to decode this with off-the-shelf software. Grab a full-tower case with room for 16 hard drives, pop in 3 or 4 SATA cards to handle the drives, put them on a dual-processor Cell motherboard, and you're set.
The two processors have 16 SPEs combined (One for each HD stream), and 2 PPEs (More traditional processors). The SPEs do the decoding work, the two PPEs handle compositing (not a major task), system stuff, drive reads, etc. Total cost of the system, not including software? I'd guess somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 US. A cost that is likely to be a hell of a lot less than whatever projector is needed to get the resulting video onto a screen;)
Distribution is more of a problem. At 400mbit we're talking 0.5TB for the whole shebang (Audio is extra, yes, but still inconsequential processor and bitrate-wise compared to the video). Distributing that is a problem. Tape-based storage doesn't go that big, no optical format exists that goes that large, and hard-drives are rather delicate for distribution. About all I could think of is that the movie be distributed on 16 seperate optical discs (Blu ray or HDDVD), one per HD stream. One would copy it onto the decoding box before performance. Come to think of it, distributing 16 optical discs to a theater isn't that big a deal; they would still take up a lot less space and cost a lot less to produce than the current huge canisters of films shipped to movie theaters.
I am not so convinced that Valve would. Source seems to have been designed with zero effort towards future portability. The engine is deeply reliant on Direct3D, DirectSound, etc.
I think it would be more likely that Valve would simply make sure their products work well with Cedega (Yes, I've been calling it "Cegeda", I'm an idiot). Cedega can already run Source-based games reasonably well, and a bit of tweaking from Valve both on their side and in the form of contributions to Cedega could make it a rock-solid combination.
Is it a good combination for linux gamers? Perhaps not. Is it a good combination for Valve? Possible. It might lead to a good linux "port" with a lot less effort than rewriting the engine for another platform. From Valve's point of view that might make more sense.
It should be noted that Counter-Strike: Source (probably the most popular Source-based product) already runs extremely well under Cedega. Some help from Valve would allow it to run flawlessly.
Does this mean I'm opposed to linux ports? No! I'm just pointing out that this situation may not lead to more linux ports.
Cegeda poses an interesting possibility though. Imagine if games, instead of targetting Windows, Linux, or OSX, simply targetted Cedega with an eye towards keeping it compatible with Windows. Cedega could turn into a sort of intermediate environment, much like Microsoft's. Games targetted at Cedega could potentially run properly on all platforms with little extra effort.
It's certainly possible. Sony's Cell processor, for example, might be a really stupid design for a gaming console, but the SPEs are damned good at decoding video. I recall the PS3's Cell chip being able to decode something like 8 HD streams, one per each SPE. So really, with UHD being 16x the resolution of HD (Going by the article's figures, not bothering to check them) you only need two cell processors to decode an MPEG-2 UHD stream. Assuming, of course, that the UHD stream is really 16 individual HD streams stitched together. This is not exactly a hurculean task, it is one that is eminently possible with current consumer-level hardware. It's not even very expensive.
The problem comes down to storage. Even at one gigabit, a DVD would only store a little over a minute of video. A dual-layer blu-ray disc with 50GB of storage would make it for almost 7 minutes. Hard-drives are out of the question because they can only read at about half a gigabit for the fastest of them. (of course DVD suffers the same problem). Some sort of custom high-speed tape solution might work. Really, though, you need either a MASSIVE RAID array, or a holographic disc. Holographic discs, IIRC, are not currently that far beyond traditional optical discs. They represent a potential in the future, but for now they're not a huge advantage.
One practical solution might be an array of 25 blu-ray disc readers, with the 100 HD video streams split up among them. The total read speed would certainly be high enough, and that would give you enough storage space for almost any movie up to almost 3 hours in length. This would keep the cost somewhat reasonable, and might actually work. All this requires of the BD readers is that they support a 4x readspeed, where 1x is the speed needed to read an HD stream. 4 HD streams is only 5 megabytes per second, which is not unreasonable for such a high-density optical medium.
Using QuickTime is just as bad as using WMV, since it locks you in to ONE player. I would imagine it's not an option.
I'm going to go ahead and say that using ISO MPEG-4 in an AVI file format is probably as platform neutral as you can get. Most MPEG-4 supporting hardware should be able to read it (DVD players), most Windows PCs with DivX, XviD, ffdshow, etc, should be able to play it (Perhaps even using Windows built in MPEG-4 codec? The one that became DivX 3?), and linux box should be able to play it, and Apple PCs should be able to play it with similar requirements to Windows PCs.
I can understand wanting high quality if you're going to use it in a movie theater, but it would seem to me that 24 gigabits are overkill. Totally ignoring the audio bitrates (which is inconsequential), 7680x4320 is about a hundred times the number of pixels as DVD (720x480). Consumer DVDs go up to about 10mbit. This means that this "SHV" stuff should only need about ONE GIGABIT total, and because the resolution is so high you could probably decrease that a lot before anybody would notice. After all, if the compression artifacts are smaller than the human eye can see, then there is still room to decrease bitrate.
I'm assuming, of course, that they're using MPEG-2. If they were using something more modern like MPEG-4 or h.264, then you could probably get the bitrate down to 500mbit or so. Of course, no matter what codec you choose, you're going to need dozens of decoder chips.
Using 24 gigabits for this is the equivalent of 240 megabit DVDs. That's way beyond overkill. A DVD would be able to store something like 5 minutes of video, assuming it could read that fast.
No, because they would have to bundle Cegeda with Lindows too, and support that. South Korea is effectively the world headquarters of gaming, and the PC varieties of those games run on Windows, NOT Linux. Unless you want the people to overthrow the government, you're going to need to provide them with some way of playing their games on their new Linux-based PCs.
Of course, I would imagine that if Microsoft pulled out of South Korea, a more likely scenario is that the whole country would just pirate Windows. With Microsoft out of the picture, the government could even support it by providing a country-wide Windows Update proxy/server/cache/whatever.
Because no matter what the linux zealots say, Linux is NOT ready for the desktop. You and I might not have any problems setting up a Linux workstation, but when I think of grandparents everywhere trying to install Debian, nothing good can come of it.
Linspire is targetted at Windows users. They've tried to make it easier to install, use, and maintain. Obviously lots of linux zealots hate it because they feel it's "dumbing down" Linux, but that's the only way Linux is going to capture any significant marketshare in the desktop space. The vast majority of people are not capable of installing and managing a Linux installation, you can't switch over an entire country to a traditional Linux distribution, because you'll effectively destroy most of the PCs in the country when users fail to properly install the OS.
Copyright prevents copies and plagiarism. You're not banning a book, because the original is still available.
Patenting a storyline can prevent two completely different books from existing at the same time. For example, take a simple storyline. Then generalize it. "Character's transportation fails in a hostile environment, leading to a struggle for survival."
That would cover a heck of a lot of possible storylines, wouldn't it? Now, obviously the patents haven't gone that far yet, but they're not far off. It's not a big leap. Even with more specific storylines, you can tell a similar story in extremely different ways and have vastly different things happen. It's a slippery slope, and it would appear that the USPTO just took a running leap onto that slope.
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I must admit I'm unsure as to the aftereffects of a cow tipping, but would not some form of padding reduce the cruelty?
Granted, I do know that the only natural position cows lay down in is on their bellies, not their sides... Not sure how a cow would get back up after a tipping. Of course if it were mythbusters, they could rig a crane to help the cow up. Combined with the padding the cow might end up nothing more than annoyed.
I've got at least two dozen loaded, but SessionSaver is by far the most useful. Browser crashes (Because FireFox does crash with some regularity) are no longer a problem since I just open the browser again and all my stuff is back, even messages I was typing and cookies. I also now frequently simply close the browser window with lots of tabs open, and then re-open Firefox when I want to resume surfing. I save the memory (Firefox is pretty bloated memory-wise and has memory leaks, or one of my extensions do), and when I re-open the browser SessionSaver handles everything.
Second favourite is MediaPlayerConnectivity. Third favourite is probably Google Suggest.
1) So, Microsoft never was and never will be a monopoly or anti-competitive, because there are always other operating systems?
2) As I said, if developers drop prices, so will the stores. The used price will always be a raw deal for everybody but the store.
3) I never said the entire use game market, only the megastores that are doing the damage. Used cars don't suddenly get a brand new extended warranty with the original manufacturer every time somebody buys it used. Game developers have to because of the bad press they'd get if they didn't. When you buy a game, there is a certain expectation by the manufacturer that you will probably use the game for a while before stopping. While you are using it you are costing them money. They need to provide you with support, provide server resources for you, etc. If you use the game more than they expect, oh well, it averages out. But if the megastores cause 50% of all game sales to be used, suddenly the average is way higher. So it's not ONLY about hurting existing sales.
I'd almost like a clause in the licence that states that if the game was resold through a large commercial store, the game comes with no support (no patches) and does not function in multiplayer mode other than LAN play. Of course that's getting a bit silly, but something needs to be done before the smaller developers get pushed out of the market. Nobody is weeping for EA, but people like Epic could run into trouble, especially since their prices are already so far below market average.
First off, I take it you've never been to a used book store? Never used eBay, an auction, or even Goodwill?
Think of Chapters (in Canada) or Barnes & Nobles promoting used books before new books, and you'd be closer. Used book stores don't push the kind of volume as megastores do in new products. Ebay/auctions also mainly involve people selling directly to other people.
What's so special about game developers that they deserve protection from their products being resold used that the rest of the world doesn't have?
Because with a book, once the publisher prints and sells it, that is the end of their involvement. Game developers are expected to provide warranties, support, and online resources (servers) for games after sale, and they often do even when the users don't have a right to it.
I don't see a problem with selling or purchasing used games at a small fraction of the cost of a new package as long as the games themselves are marked as used and aren't already 'tied' to an individual like most MMO's are.
A small cost, perhaps. But go to EB Games and they pay you something like $6 for a $60 game, and then sell the used copy for $50. I'd actually not be oppose to reselling MMOs, since they have a monthly fee attached in addition to the boxed cost. So companies are getting paid for the after-sale resources consumed by a used buyer.
Secondly, if a developer can't get the majority of people to purchase their games at the new game price point, that's a good sign their product deserves the bargin bin or that they need to lower their prices.
The most vocal opponent to megastores selling use games for slightly under retail price is Mark Rein, I believe, or one of the other guys from Epic. They also happen to make very popular games that ALSO happen to be some of the lowest priced big-budget games on the market. It's not about matching the used product's pricepoint; as soon as a game developer lowers prices, the megastores would lower THEIR used price to slightly under the new retail price. Developers can't win.
Use a ULV (Ultra Low voltage) Pentium M processor and as much onboard (video, audio, network, IDE, etc) the motherboard as possible. Use as small a motherboard as possible. For hard drives, get larger and slower.
Alternatively, get a used thin & light laptop and four 3.5" IDE hard drive enclosures.
I'm not sure what uses less power per gig: large (400GB+?) 5400RPM desktop drives, or 120GB 5400RPM notebook drives. The notebook drives can be powered right off USB, so they use less power PER drive, but per gig I'm not sure, since you need three or four drives to equal one 400GB desktop drive.
The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster promised to sue the Kansas board of education if they did this, and at least one lawyer seemed to be pledging pro-bono support. So, when does the lawsuit start?
Discouraging used game sales is a good thing, since stores refuse to stop hurting developers. Doing it this way is very bad, since they are compromising user rights and preventing casual sales.
I'm not against casual used sales (Selling to friends, ebay, lending), but I am against stores like BestBuy ripping off customers by paying out next to nothing and reselling for almost retail, while promoting these before new sales. This screws the original owners, the buyers (Paying too much and sometimes getting a void warranty) AND the developers.
For AAC, unlock the files after purchase with Hymn. For WMA, decode to WAV and re-encode as VBR MP3. Both are fast. And forget about Sony due to their position on compromising computer security and user trust in order to protect their music that is already available via P2P.
I did turn it off, mainly because water doesn't play a major part in the game, I find bloom distracting, and I find depth of view (I assume you mean depth of field?) annoying. The game still needed ~2GB of memory (which few gamers have) and a videocard/CPU out of proportion with the graphical quality. The game needed twice as much memory as Quake 4, and ran slower.
Is there a Creative Commons equivalent for software licenses?
Yes, it's called the "Creative Commons". More information can be found at creativecommons.org
Seriously though, did you miss the popup on the Creative Commons licence generator that lets you specify content type? Did you miss the content type called "Interactive"? What did you think that applied to?
I briefly beta'd during the stress test. I was unimpressed.
The character creation process was the only truely interesting part of the game. The rest was utterly repetetive to the point of boredom. Kill all enemies of type X from location Y. Now do that for the next 10 missions. Now do the same thing with a different enemy type for another 10 missions.
The engine is also horrible. It requires a ridiculous amount of memory (You get tons of swapping on 1GB of RAM, so really you need 2GB), and has insanely low framerates for an engine that doesn't look much better than Quake 3 with greater viewing distances.
The boredom combined with painful performance turned me off of the game.
Which would explain why Linksys (Cisco) WRT54G wireless routers (Can be found for under $50 US) can form a mesh with custom firmware, but why Linksys' own default firmware doesn't support it.
Their "new" mesh stuff seems to go beyond a simple mesh, but considering how their own existing wireless devices can pretty much already do what they're announcing, I'm not seeing anything truly special here.
And I would imagine that most of the "new" stuff could be added to existing mesh-supporting firmware.
You can extend that argument. The more people that use Cedega, the more people are going to be calling up game companies with support problems running the game under Cedega. The game company will of course reply that running their Windows games under Linux is not supported, but the more people complain the greater the pressure to DO something about it.
That would either force the game companies to provide a native linux port, or contribute to Cedega to make sure their game runs well. Either way, it's a win for users in my book. And even though some developers might choose to help fix Cedega, it does lead to more Linux ports than before, so it's an improvement either way.
But is it not an abstraction layer over the related linux APIs? In that case, it is similar to emulation in that it has to translate all the API calls to native API calls. That takes time, though I'll conceed that the time it takes to translate is much lower than the time it takes to execute. Still, there IS a performance hit.
I suspect that the reason Cedega often runs faster than Windows boxes are a combination of less background services involved, and very good translation that sometimes picks translations that are more efficient than the direct equivalent.
The PS3 Cell has seven DSP cores tuned to do the sort of number-crunching necessary for decoding and rendering. A Cell DSP can work on 8 half-precision floats per clock while x86(-64) can only work with 4 single-precision per clock at best since current x86 CPUs only have one MAC (multiply-accumulate) block in their FPUs. So, a single 1+8 Cell can churn out 16X as many half-precision floats as a x86 CPU can churn out its lowest (overkill) precision. A 8xOpteron system would be less than half-way to matching a single cell's DSP power.
So then it looks like semi-customized hardware is required. The Cell is an ideal candidate. If a single x86 processor can handle an HD stream, and a Cell SPE is 16x more powerful, perhaps one could do the work with just one Cell processor (8 SPEs + 1 PPE) rather than two (16+2).
The 3GB/s RAM bandwidth was only the output buffer's write bandwidth assuming (an impossible) single-pass decoding. You also needs another 3GB/s to be passed on to the projector at the same minimum rate so, there goes another 3GB/s. The DSPs can do some processing re-ordering to reduce RAM reads and writes but chances are that the processing will need an average of at least two passes (read+write) so that is another 12GB/s + another 6GB/s for frames where many pixels hit three passes as a safety margin. Add RAM latency and idle cycles, the target flies to 30GB/s and beyond. With DDR2-533, this would mean going with octuple channels.
As for bandwidth, well, toss some GDDR3 at the problem and you're much improved over DDR2. GDDR3 has about 22.4GB/s of bandwidth. The XBOX 360 uses it for system RAM and video RAM. The PS3 uses it for video, with XDR RAM (25.6GB/s) for system memory. The GPU is attached to both memory systems, and the CPU and GPU are linked via a bus that can move data from CPU to GPU at 20GB/s.
So by my estimates, we can pipe 6 of those GB/s towards the GPU (Output buffer + compositing + output to projector). That brings the remaining bandwidth down to ~24GB/s. That's pretty close to the PS3's capabilities. The XDR system memory has much lower latency than DDR-2, though, so you can probably shave off some of what you added for RAM latency.
Come to think of it, assuming a Cell SPE (DSP) can decode 1/8 of a UHD stream (or 2 HD streams if you go the split route) the PS3 would need very little modification in order do the task. It'd need some changes to the graphics subsystem to handle outputting at such a high resolution. But with the PS3's launch price, and considering Sony already sells at a loss, such a system (Ignoring storage) could probably be made for one or two thousand dollars.
That is, of course, assuming a single Cell is up to the task.
You don't have to worry about packing it into a single chip. You can throw a multi-processor multi-core system at it, or as I mentioned previously, something based on the Cell architechture. The SPEs might lack a branch predictor, but they're great at raw number crunching, which is why one cell processor can decode 8 or 9 HD streams at a time. I have no idea how many HD streams a single Opteron core can handle, but quad-opteron systems with 8 cores total are still easily available.
Memory bandwidth shouldn't be too big of a concern. DDR2-533 gives you about 4.5 to 6 GB/s in practice, looking at some benchmarks. I would imagine dual-channel would increase that further, along with multi-core and multi-processor systems having seperate memory controllers per-processor. I'm going to wager a guess that memory bandwidth isn't that big of a problem. Splitting the video, though, totally eliminates the issue; the decoding doesn't even have to be done by one computer, as it can all be composited together later.
Who said that people had to transcode it back to DVD res before sharing it? Nothing is stopping people from transcoding it to 720p or 1080p. I've actually seen TV content at 720p available via BitTorrent, ripped from the original HD streams. People regularly swap DVD-R encodes of movies, at 4.7GB a pop, so moving the data isn't an issue.
So getting your hands on a UHD source does give you the benefit of being able to make an HD encode when the only other encodes available are DVD hand-cam recordings. Heck, the UHD --> HD stream would look better than an eventual DVD release.
400Mbps seems like a reasonable worst-case scenario but I would expect full-frame single-stream video to go a fair bit lower given that HD has 6X SD's resolution but uses less than 3X as much bandwidth. Even 300Mbps total would probably still be conservative.
I'll conceed that, you would probably see lower than 400mbit. But this still involves the problem with decoding it. Does any hardware exist that could decode such a massive MPEG-2 stream? Certainly no general purpose processor can, and I cringe at the cost of a dedicated MPEG-2 decoder that could handle such a stream.
By splitting up the stream, you are sacrificing bandwidth for decodability. But you can gain that back. In a short while when the Cell (or whatever processor technology) has advanced to the point that it can decode h.264 (Probably not that far off), you can get the bandwidth down to what it would be with one single MPEG-2 stream, but it will still be easier to decode because the job can be split up.
On the other hand, if there is some way to evenly divide the job of decoding an MPEG-2 stream among multiple processors, then my entire argument is pointless.
The 100 megabit fiber link for distribution isn't going to fly, I think. The cost isn't minor, for one. Let's assume you get it at bargain prices, roughly $1000 US/mth (Cogent, for example). That is no small expense. On the other hand, the cost of burning a few blue ray discs (which works with 16 HD streams or one giant stream) per-theater is going to be way less. A few dollars per film, versus perhaps a hundred per film. Not to mention safer, as far as the MPAA is probably concerned. I don't think they'd go for the idea of transferring their stuff over the internet, encrypted or not. And yes, it HAS to go over the public internet, because there is no single data network that can get your data to every movie theater in the world that is going to play your film. Nobody has that kind of coverage.
Processing one stream encoded is going to be nigh impossible to decode. Only by splitting it up are you going to be able to decode the thing without spending a ridiculous amount of money on the problem. As I pointed out, two Cell chips could decode an MPEG-2 SHV video, so long as it is split up into 16 HD streams. Cell's SPEs have no branch predictors, but are monsters at raw number crunching, and each of the SPEs on a Cell can decode a seperate HD stream. I'm not certain about how well the task of decoding a video can be split up among processors, but I don't think you could create a device that would cost only a few thousand dollars that could decode an SHV stream without splitting it up. Yes, there is a bit more redundancy to exploit, but I don't think the possible advantages are worth it. I think you're actually going to increase the processing requirements beyond what 16 individual HD streams would need, because stuff like motion compensation is going to have to consider a way larger image, among other things.
;)
A gigabit is a high estimate, given. HD streams are 25mgbit MPEG-2, as I understand it. 16x that is 400mbit. So let's go for 400mbit as our assumption.
A RAID array is dangerous. You're relying mightly heavily on something that can so easily be affected by things such as the location of the stripe on the disk, or any sort of fragmentation. Hard drives can push 30 or 40 megabytes at their slowest points, yes, but that is only during a contiguous read. Start fragmenting stuff and that number plummets.
This actually leads to another good reason to cut the SHV stream up into 16 HD streams; easier to get faster storage. With one big honking stream, you need the entire thing to be on one logical volume; a RAID array. You have to be able to get at LEAST a gigabit off that single logical volume, and that's going to be mighty difficult. However, as soon as you start splitting up the stream, it becomes easier. Take 16 hard drives. 16 seperate hard drives. Each one stores one of the HD streams. To store a feature-length movie, each drive only has to be a cheap 40GB 7200RPM drive (That's enough for about 3.5 hours). Each drive only has to sustain a ~3.2 MB/s read speed, possible even with fragmentation. Drives don't have to be in RAID, but can be independent disks on their own SATA channels.
Assuming Sony/Toshiba/IBM ever make an actual ATX Cell motherboard with semi-standard components, at some point in the future you could build a box to decode this with off-the-shelf software. Grab a full-tower case with room for 16 hard drives, pop in 3 or 4 SATA cards to handle the drives, put them on a dual-processor Cell motherboard, and you're set.
The two processors have 16 SPEs combined (One for each HD stream), and 2 PPEs (More traditional processors). The SPEs do the decoding work, the two PPEs handle compositing (not a major task), system stuff, drive reads, etc. Total cost of the system, not including software? I'd guess somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 US. A cost that is likely to be a hell of a lot less than whatever projector is needed to get the resulting video onto a screen
Distribution is more of a problem. At 400mbit we're talking 0.5TB for the whole shebang (Audio is extra, yes, but still inconsequential processor and bitrate-wise compared to the video). Distributing that is a problem. Tape-based storage doesn't go that big, no optical format exists that goes that large, and hard-drives are rather delicate for distribution. About all I could think of is that the movie be distributed on 16 seperate optical discs (Blu ray or HDDVD), one per HD stream. One would copy it onto the decoding box before performance. Come to think of it, distributing 16 optical discs to a theater isn't that big a deal; they would still take up a lot less space and cost a lot less to produce than the current huge canisters of films shipped to movie theaters.
I am not so convinced that Valve would. Source seems to have been designed with zero effort towards future portability. The engine is deeply reliant on Direct3D, DirectSound, etc.
I think it would be more likely that Valve would simply make sure their products work well with Cedega (Yes, I've been calling it "Cegeda", I'm an idiot). Cedega can already run Source-based games reasonably well, and a bit of tweaking from Valve both on their side and in the form of contributions to Cedega could make it a rock-solid combination.
Is it a good combination for linux gamers? Perhaps not. Is it a good combination for Valve? Possible. It might lead to a good linux "port" with a lot less effort than rewriting the engine for another platform. From Valve's point of view that might make more sense.
It should be noted that Counter-Strike: Source (probably the most popular Source-based product) already runs extremely well under Cedega. Some help from Valve would allow it to run flawlessly.
Does this mean I'm opposed to linux ports? No! I'm just pointing out that this situation may not lead to more linux ports.
Cegeda poses an interesting possibility though. Imagine if games, instead of targetting Windows, Linux, or OSX, simply targetted Cedega with an eye towards keeping it compatible with Windows. Cedega could turn into a sort of intermediate environment, much like Microsoft's. Games targetted at Cedega could potentially run properly on all platforms with little extra effort.
It's certainly possible. Sony's Cell processor, for example, might be a really stupid design for a gaming console, but the SPEs are damned good at decoding video. I recall the PS3's Cell chip being able to decode something like 8 HD streams, one per each SPE. So really, with UHD being 16x the resolution of HD (Going by the article's figures, not bothering to check them) you only need two cell processors to decode an MPEG-2 UHD stream. Assuming, of course, that the UHD stream is really 16 individual HD streams stitched together. This is not exactly a hurculean task, it is one that is eminently possible with current consumer-level hardware. It's not even very expensive.
The problem comes down to storage. Even at one gigabit, a DVD would only store a little over a minute of video. A dual-layer blu-ray disc with 50GB of storage would make it for almost 7 minutes. Hard-drives are out of the question because they can only read at about half a gigabit for the fastest of them. (of course DVD suffers the same problem). Some sort of custom high-speed tape solution might work. Really, though, you need either a MASSIVE RAID array, or a holographic disc. Holographic discs, IIRC, are not currently that far beyond traditional optical discs. They represent a potential in the future, but for now they're not a huge advantage.
One practical solution might be an array of 25 blu-ray disc readers, with the 100 HD video streams split up among them. The total read speed would certainly be high enough, and that would give you enough storage space for almost any movie up to almost 3 hours in length. This would keep the cost somewhat reasonable, and might actually work. All this requires of the BD readers is that they support a 4x readspeed, where 1x is the speed needed to read an HD stream. 4 HD streams is only 5 megabytes per second, which is not unreasonable for such a high-density optical medium.
Using QuickTime is just as bad as using WMV, since it locks you in to ONE player. I would imagine it's not an option.
I'm going to go ahead and say that using ISO MPEG-4 in an AVI file format is probably as platform neutral as you can get. Most MPEG-4 supporting hardware should be able to read it (DVD players), most Windows PCs with DivX, XviD, ffdshow, etc, should be able to play it (Perhaps even using Windows built in MPEG-4 codec? The one that became DivX 3?), and linux box should be able to play it, and Apple PCs should be able to play it with similar requirements to Windows PCs.
I can understand wanting high quality if you're going to use it in a movie theater, but it would seem to me that 24 gigabits are overkill. Totally ignoring the audio bitrates (which is inconsequential), 7680x4320 is about a hundred times the number of pixels as DVD (720x480). Consumer DVDs go up to about 10mbit. This means that this "SHV" stuff should only need about ONE GIGABIT total, and because the resolution is so high you could probably decrease that a lot before anybody would notice. After all, if the compression artifacts are smaller than the human eye can see, then there is still room to decrease bitrate.
I'm assuming, of course, that they're using MPEG-2. If they were using something more modern like MPEG-4 or h.264, then you could probably get the bitrate down to 500mbit or so. Of course, no matter what codec you choose, you're going to need dozens of decoder chips.
Using 24 gigabits for this is the equivalent of 240 megabit DVDs. That's way beyond overkill. A DVD would be able to store something like 5 minutes of video, assuming it could read that fast.
could he really support all of South Korea
No, because they would have to bundle Cegeda with Lindows too, and support that. South Korea is effectively the world headquarters of gaming, and the PC varieties of those games run on Windows, NOT Linux. Unless you want the people to overthrow the government, you're going to need to provide them with some way of playing their games on their new Linux-based PCs.
Of course, I would imagine that if Microsoft pulled out of South Korea, a more likely scenario is that the whole country would just pirate Windows. With Microsoft out of the picture, the government could even support it by providing a country-wide Windows Update proxy/server/cache/whatever.
Because no matter what the linux zealots say, Linux is NOT ready for the desktop. You and I might not have any problems setting up a Linux workstation, but when I think of grandparents everywhere trying to install Debian, nothing good can come of it.
Linspire is targetted at Windows users. They've tried to make it easier to install, use, and maintain. Obviously lots of linux zealots hate it because they feel it's "dumbing down" Linux, but that's the only way Linux is going to capture any significant marketshare in the desktop space. The vast majority of people are not capable of installing and managing a Linux installation, you can't switch over an entire country to a traditional Linux distribution, because you'll effectively destroy most of the PCs in the country when users fail to properly install the OS.
Copyright prevents copies and plagiarism. You're not banning a book, because the original is still available.
Patenting a storyline can prevent two completely different books from existing at the same time. For example, take a simple storyline. Then generalize it. "Character's transportation fails in a hostile environment, leading to a struggle for survival."
That would cover a heck of a lot of possible storylines, wouldn't it? Now, obviously the patents haven't gone that far yet, but they're not far off. It's not a big leap. Even with more specific storylines, you can tell a similar story in extremely different ways and have vastly different things happen. It's a slippery slope, and it would appear that the USPTO just took a running leap onto that slope.