But the good news is that OpenGL ES is just different enough to break the vast majority apps that use the GPU on desktop Linux if your graphics drivers only implement OpenGL ES and not OpenGL. Try running Ubuntu on an OMAP. The lack of 3D acceleration support in any app (since they all expect OpenGL) is painful.
Indeed, it's quite impressive. Useful and completely intelligible speech at 1200 bits per second is amazing. That's rapidly approaching the point where the language content of the data is approaching the storage density of text. You can probably say "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." in two seconds or so. That's 45 bytes, while codec2 would require only about 300 bytes to record my voice reading the sentence. The fact that that's well under an under of magnitude blows my mind.
There are many cases where lower bitrates can be quite useful, not all of which involve sending the data over a network, or over RTP. Two-way radio and embedded storage are some examples. That said, my statement was more about objecting to your claim in the summary that Opus (which, bizarrely, is the name of my city's bus passes) was "as good or better than" when clicking the very link of that text shows data which immediately contradicts that. Opus does seem to be an impressive codec, but not for low bitrate uses. For example, there are codecs specifically targeted at very low bitrates, such as Codec2, that Opus isn't competitive with.
be as good or better than existing proprietary codecs over this whole space
Except upon clicking on that link, their own graph is showing that it's not as good for anything under ~12 kbps or so, when compared to AMR-WB and AMR-NB. Furthermore, they have no data on HE-AAC below 64 Kbps, when in fact HE-AAC only really starts to shine at substantially lower bitrates like 16-32 Kbps. Bitrates in the 4-16 range are particularly relevant since you see a lot of voice communication down there.
RG6 isn't a factor, since HD-SDI can run over fibre as well. The real savings comes from running many signals over a single ethernet cable (which at 100 GbE speeds would undoubtedly be fibre). That said, this study seems to ignore all cabling costs. It looks like their conclusions can be summed up as "An equivalent ethernet-based system has the same port costs as HD-SDI systems today, and the ethernet price will come down in the future, producing cost savings."
A couple of years ago, they did some kind of "super city elections". Pretty much every city and village of the province had elections held on the same day
This is how every municipal election works (I'd say "and has always worked" but I don't know how long it's been like that) in Quebec, and most of the rest of Canada too:
It has a native PDF reader, which supports pinch-to-zoom and dragging to scroll... What are you complaining about, exactly? That the screen refreshes too slowly while doing this?
Apple has also said it may use 'licensing agreements and threats of lawsuits' to prevent third-party adapters from hitting the market through at least 2012.
No, they didn't say that. Apple has not said anything (this is an unreleased product), let alone that they will use agreements and lawsuits to stop something. Is all of this stuff really true? Perhaps, but right now it's all "anonymous and unverifiable sources say the following hearsay", and attributing malice to statements Apple never made is silly.
Well, one thing that most people are bizarrely forgetting is that Pat Gelsinger worked at Intel for 30 years, from 1979 to 2009... He was one of the main architects/designers of the 486 (parts of his work still being in modern Intel chips), and he later went on to be Intel's CTO...
Are people surprised that he would favour Intel chips after all that? I mean, seriously.
It never WON'T be "too early", because 8K resolutions are way beyond the point of diminishing returns. 2K resolutions (1920x1080) that we have presently on high-end media like Blu-Ray are indistinguishable from 4K resolutions on anything but enormous movie-theatre sized screens. Heck, even in a movie theatre, the difference between 2K and 4K isn't all that big (helps if you know which theatres have which kind of projectors at your local megaplex).
Now, I won't argue that there aren't some places that do need 8K. On an IMAX level, there's some benefit to have there. But how many of you have a full sized IMAX screen in your living room? Because the percentage of people who have a television large enough to justify anything more than 2K is virtually non-existent. On top of that, no matter how big your screen is, there's a point where there's no more detail there to resolve. Your film camera is only focused so precisely...
If you take Crysis, which is still regarded as being one of the best looking PC games on the market even five years later, and you put it on both a 360 and a high-end PC, it doesn't look THAT different.
Does the PC look better? Sure. Better enough to make me want to run out and buy a new console? Not so much. Sure, the 360 looks lower res, and some of the effects are toned down or missing, but we're past the point where you can't do some certain effect or visual on a console, given enough render time. Previous generations were about adding additional capabilities; try doing pixel shaded fur on a PS1, for example. But after we hit DX9 capabilities, further improvements were just about doing things faster.
So yes, consoles will continue to get faster, but it's a game of diminishing returns. Throwing more polygons at a sphere doesn't help if you've already got pretty much enough polygons to make it look round. Even Carmack, who for many years was the granddaddy of eye candy, has said as much. I don't think there's anything that the GPU in a next-gen console will do that isn't at least technically possible on a current-gen console.
We're increasingly getting diminishing returns with new console generations; the difference in what you can do with a 7 year old XBox 360 and what you can do with a modern top-of-the-line gaming PC has not yet become compelling enough to justify new hardware.
I also don't see why staleness has anything to do with the console generation. There's nothing new in terms of story or gameplay that a new console would enable...
I resisted putting in adblock for a long time, wanting to support the sites that I frequented. When it was unobtrusive Google ads, it wasn't too bad, but that didn't help with the seizure-inducing animated gif ads... Whatever, I was willing to live with it. Then, more and more flash ads bombarded me. At first it was just annoying animations, but then they started blaring loud audio and obnoxious videos. That was when I drew the line and said "screw this, I can't be bothered" and just blocked everything.
You can't even use flashblock, since these days annoying ads can (and do) use HTML5, and I have little interest in using noscript, which is a huge inconvenience.
I tried it out. Latency wasn't great, but was tolerable. Major problem was image quality; no matter how fast a connection you threw at it, the bitrate never scaled high enough for good quality under high motion.
A 1000 km asteroid is rather enormous; it's estimated that a 10 km asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. That's got a mass of roughly one millionth that of the 1000 KM asteroid.
Suddenly we go from a billion times more powerful than we've ever detonated, to only one thousand times. That would seem to put it in the realm of feasibility; you build multiple much bigger bombs.
If we need a thousand times more than Tsar Bomba, that means we need a total of 50,000 megatons. An as-designed Tsar Bomba was twice as powerful, and had a yield ratio of roughly 4 megatons per ton, meaning we'd need to deliver 12,500 tons to the asteroid. That's a lot of mass to get off the planet, but probably within the realm of possibility for a concerted worldwide effort.
Besides, it would seem to me that you'd be better off spending the energy nudging the course of the asteroid rather than wasting energy trying to split the thing. A sufficiently large number of nuclear explosions on the same vector ought to do the trick far more cheaply.
The problem is that if you try to boycott every game publisher or developer that does stupid things like this, you'll shortly end up boycotting almost every company.
What, you need some sort of proof to back up the statement that porting an Android game to the Android-based Ouya will be simple? It's kind of a no-brainer... The Ouya SDK's customizations have mostly to do with payment-related stuff, not the actual interactions with the hardware or OS.
I'm not sure how your comment is related to the part of my post that you're quoting... You've taken a quote about the difficulty of porting code, and replied with a rant about the state of the Linux game publishing industry...
Sadly, Cider doesn't support Linux, but there are equivalent solutions (I believe Crossover has one). If you're already working with Cider, it would seem to make the porting job even easier.
I'm not sure how using Cider is all that bad. It's just another abstraction layer, not terribly different from any other library you might use to abstract functionality, and if you're specifically developing for it, you can work around specific bugs or idiosyncrasies.
It was to go a bit higher, but not substantially higher like Concorde did. I think I was assuming a 15% difference there, perhaps the altitude change would have bumped that up to 20%. But 20% isn't dramatic, Concorde was several TIMES faster.
Slashdot Mirror
But the good news is that OpenGL ES is just different enough to break the vast majority apps that use the GPU on desktop Linux if your graphics drivers only implement OpenGL ES and not OpenGL. Try running Ubuntu on an OMAP. The lack of 3D acceleration support in any app (since they all expect OpenGL) is painful.
Indeed, it's quite impressive. Useful and completely intelligible speech at 1200 bits per second is amazing. That's rapidly approaching the point where the language content of the data is approaching the storage density of text. You can probably say "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." in two seconds or so. That's 45 bytes, while codec2 would require only about 300 bytes to record my voice reading the sentence. The fact that that's well under an under of magnitude blows my mind.
There are many cases where lower bitrates can be quite useful, not all of which involve sending the data over a network, or over RTP. Two-way radio and embedded storage are some examples. That said, my statement was more about objecting to your claim in the summary that Opus (which, bizarrely, is the name of my city's bus passes) was "as good or better than" when clicking the very link of that text shows data which immediately contradicts that. Opus does seem to be an impressive codec, but not for low bitrate uses. For example, there are codecs specifically targeted at very low bitrates, such as Codec2, that Opus isn't competitive with.
be as good or better than existing proprietary codecs over this whole space
Except upon clicking on that link, their own graph is showing that it's not as good for anything under ~12 kbps or so, when compared to AMR-WB and AMR-NB. Furthermore, they have no data on HE-AAC below 64 Kbps, when in fact HE-AAC only really starts to shine at substantially lower bitrates like 16-32 Kbps. Bitrates in the 4-16 range are particularly relevant since you see a lot of voice communication down there.
Unfortunately, that also means that the MacMillan (tor) eBook that I want to buy is currently listed as $18.74, half a dollar more than the hardcover.
RG6 isn't a factor, since HD-SDI can run over fibre as well. The real savings comes from running many signals over a single ethernet cable (which at 100 GbE speeds would undoubtedly be fibre). That said, this study seems to ignore all cabling costs. It looks like their conclusions can be summed up as "An equivalent ethernet-based system has the same port costs as HD-SDI systems today, and the ethernet price will come down in the future, producing cost savings."
A couple of years ago, they did some kind of "super city elections". Pretty much every city and village of the province had elections held on the same day
This is how every municipal election works (I'd say "and has always worked" but I don't know how long it's been like that) in Quebec, and most of the rest of Canada too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_elections_in_Canada
It has a native PDF reader, which supports pinch-to-zoom and dragging to scroll... What are you complaining about, exactly? That the screen refreshes too slowly while doing this?
Apple has also said it may use 'licensing agreements and threats of lawsuits' to prevent third-party adapters from hitting the market through at least 2012.
No, they didn't say that. Apple has not said anything (this is an unreleased product), let alone that they will use agreements and lawsuits to stop something. Is all of this stuff really true? Perhaps, but right now it's all "anonymous and unverifiable sources say the following hearsay", and attributing malice to statements Apple never made is silly.
Well, one thing that most people are bizarrely forgetting is that Pat Gelsinger worked at Intel for 30 years, from 1979 to 2009... He was one of the main architects/designers of the 486 (parts of his work still being in modern Intel chips), and he later went on to be Intel's CTO...
Are people surprised that he would favour Intel chips after all that? I mean, seriously.
It never WON'T be "too early", because 8K resolutions are way beyond the point of diminishing returns. 2K resolutions (1920x1080) that we have presently on high-end media like Blu-Ray are indistinguishable from 4K resolutions on anything but enormous movie-theatre sized screens. Heck, even in a movie theatre, the difference between 2K and 4K isn't all that big (helps if you know which theatres have which kind of projectors at your local megaplex).
Now, I won't argue that there aren't some places that do need 8K. On an IMAX level, there's some benefit to have there. But how many of you have a full sized IMAX screen in your living room? Because the percentage of people who have a television large enough to justify anything more than 2K is virtually non-existent. On top of that, no matter how big your screen is, there's a point where there's no more detail there to resolve. Your film camera is only focused so precisely...
If you take Crysis, which is still regarded as being one of the best looking PC games on the market even five years later, and you put it on both a 360 and a high-end PC, it doesn't look THAT different.
Does the PC look better? Sure. Better enough to make me want to run out and buy a new console? Not so much. Sure, the 360 looks lower res, and some of the effects are toned down or missing, but we're past the point where you can't do some certain effect or visual on a console, given enough render time. Previous generations were about adding additional capabilities; try doing pixel shaded fur on a PS1, for example. But after we hit DX9 capabilities, further improvements were just about doing things faster.
So yes, consoles will continue to get faster, but it's a game of diminishing returns. Throwing more polygons at a sphere doesn't help if you've already got pretty much enough polygons to make it look round. Even Carmack, who for many years was the granddaddy of eye candy, has said as much. I don't think there's anything that the GPU in a next-gen console will do that isn't at least technically possible on a current-gen console.
We're increasingly getting diminishing returns with new console generations; the difference in what you can do with a 7 year old XBox 360 and what you can do with a modern top-of-the-line gaming PC has not yet become compelling enough to justify new hardware.
I also don't see why staleness has anything to do with the console generation. There's nothing new in terms of story or gameplay that a new console would enable...
I resisted putting in adblock for a long time, wanting to support the sites that I frequented. When it was unobtrusive Google ads, it wasn't too bad, but that didn't help with the seizure-inducing animated gif ads... Whatever, I was willing to live with it. Then, more and more flash ads bombarded me. At first it was just annoying animations, but then they started blaring loud audio and obnoxious videos. That was when I drew the line and said "screw this, I can't be bothered" and just blocked everything.
You can't even use flashblock, since these days annoying ads can (and do) use HTML5, and I have little interest in using noscript, which is a huge inconvenience.
I tried it out. Latency wasn't great, but was tolerable. Major problem was image quality; no matter how fast a connection you threw at it, the bitrate never scaled high enough for good quality under high motion.
http://xkcd.com/927/
Of course, these "rectennas" aren't really a proper replacement for QR codes, since QR codes work at a distance (depending on size).
It seems to work for Project Orion...
Not if they refused to stop for directions...
A 1000 km asteroid is rather enormous; it's estimated that a 10 km asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. That's got a mass of roughly one millionth that of the 1000 KM asteroid.
Suddenly we go from a billion times more powerful than we've ever detonated, to only one thousand times. That would seem to put it in the realm of feasibility; you build multiple much bigger bombs.
If we need a thousand times more than Tsar Bomba, that means we need a total of 50,000 megatons. An as-designed Tsar Bomba was twice as powerful, and had a yield ratio of roughly 4 megatons per ton, meaning we'd need to deliver 12,500 tons to the asteroid. That's a lot of mass to get off the planet, but probably within the realm of possibility for a concerted worldwide effort.
Besides, it would seem to me that you'd be better off spending the energy nudging the course of the asteroid rather than wasting energy trying to split the thing. A sufficiently large number of nuclear explosions on the same vector ought to do the trick far more cheaply.
You can reuse that (good quality) DVD-RW a lot more than 20 times too, what's your point?
I've never heard of anybody actually managing to wear out a good quality DVD-RW or CD-RW disk.
The problem is that if you try to boycott every game publisher or developer that does stupid things like this, you'll shortly end up boycotting almost every company.
What, you need some sort of proof to back up the statement that porting an Android game to the Android-based Ouya will be simple? It's kind of a no-brainer... The Ouya SDK's customizations have mostly to do with payment-related stuff, not the actual interactions with the hardware or OS.
I'm not sure how your comment is related to the part of my post that you're quoting... You've taken a quote about the difficulty of porting code, and replied with a rant about the state of the Linux game publishing industry...
Sadly, Cider doesn't support Linux, but there are equivalent solutions (I believe Crossover has one). If you're already working with Cider, it would seem to make the porting job even easier.
I'm not sure how using Cider is all that bad. It's just another abstraction layer, not terribly different from any other library you might use to abstract functionality, and if you're specifically developing for it, you can work around specific bugs or idiosyncrasies.
It was to go a bit higher, but not substantially higher like Concorde did. I think I was assuming a 15% difference there, perhaps the altitude change would have bumped that up to 20%. But 20% isn't dramatic, Concorde was several TIMES faster.