My goodness, can you imagine a "workstation" running one of these nVidia cards with dual Itanic processors? Heck, if you got a university to run this configuration, you could bring Enron back from the brink. I see 20amp fuses in many homes going "POP" right now.
Why do your kids need to be on XP? You even said their games ran fine under '98. Why do they need Office XP to do their homework? If a pc running '98 and Office '97 (or Works for that matter) is capable, then why are you wasting time with XP or Linux? Unless of course you were just looking for an excuse to buy more hardware ('but honey, I have to give the kids our computer to run XP on, we of course will have to get a new one ourselves to replace it since it doesn't make any sense to give the kids the "new" computer.')
Teach your kids how to identify and use the best tool for the job without getting caught up in the technology. I guess when you say you're "cheap" as one of the reasons you want to switch to Linux (even though the intended use doesn't really fit in your case), you mean that your time and your kids time have no value? Oh and in the process you can teach them that time is an asset that you can never get back.
Actually your example just validated my point. That game systems are not as cpu bound, so manufacturers are focusing on making the gpu faster with only incremental increases in cpu performance.
I personally think (hope) this trend will slow as consoles are required to perform more game processing vs graphics processing. I'd love more time and thought (and cycles) to go into game logic and AI (e.g. sports games) and a heck of a lot less in graphics. I know that fancy graphics sells consoles, but gameplay is being left in the dust in many cases.
Actually I was referring to cpu's in the class that are being used by the respective game units. A 800mhz PIII uses significantly less juice than an 800Mhz Athlon. Yes, AMD was finally able to turn the tables on Intel in the wattage wars, but that was relatively recent and only above 1.4ghz. The original poster mentioned Transmeta, by which one can assume that we are not talking about 2.4ghz processors here.
I know that Sony has all that other stuff (and cool stuff it is), but my main point was that even with all that stuff, they don't enjoy the monopoly and the profits from that monopoly that M$ enjoys. Also, $2billion for the year still pales to $3.5billion for the quarter, even given the larger overall market that Sony participates in.
This directly opposes Focus on getting better games. While one or two good games might come from Joe and Tom working in their bedrooms for 8 months straight, most of todays games are massive efforts and the cost for playing helps to ensure that only those who are truely serious will play. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get my mitts on a dev kit cheaply, but games today are way more complex than the average person/small team can effectively deal with.
Manufacturing Xboxes that defeat region encoding and macrovision with small modifications would cause sales to skyrocket
Me thinks that your definition of "skyrocket" and M$'s definition of "skyrocket" might be orders of magnitude different. Who in the US (general game playing population) gives a flip about region encoding? Sure, beating Macrovision might be interesting and sell a few more boxes, but it's a GAME BOX, those features have no interest to GAMERS. This is especially accute concerning M$, since even as you mentioned they have made little inroads in Japan, and after all, isn't getting those hot Japanese titles months before they come here one of the primary reasons that the hardcore gamers care about region encoding.
Microsoft needs to switch to AMD or Transmeta chips, which pack more power for the buck, run cooler
Uh, which AMD chip runs cooler? Which Transmeta chip packs more power for the buck? Do you know the details for M$'s agreement with Intel to know if they could truely save money by switching. Could the other two companies afford to offer prices as low as Intel could?
Also, this will allow them to use cheaper graphics coprocessors by using a cheaper, more powerful main CPU
Isn't this bucking the trend? Aren't games systems moving towards ever more powerful graphics subsystems with modest increases in cpu performance. Sony gets away with using a ~300mhz (IIRC) cpu, I don't think that the console makers are too stressed out about raw CPU performance.
but if Microsoft takes these suggestions, their Xbox division will be well on its way to profitability
They need to produce better games than Sony and offer the user a better experience for the buck and most importantly, they need market share. The power of the last point is elegantly illustrated by Sony. PS1 was the market share (though long money losing) vehicle that allowed Sony to start cashing in once PS1 was established thus smoothing the road to much quicker profitability on PS2.
That is like saying that MacOS will drive Windows off the desktop
Not even close. This is like saying that IE will take over the browser market (four years ago). Hey, guess what, they did. Sony is not even in the same league as M$ as far as corporate resources. Not that Sony is a tiny company, obviously, but M$ not only has it's war chest, but they have a monopolistic hold on the OS/Business Suite market that affords them huge quarterly profits (3.5billion, yikes), they don't even have to dip into the warchest if they don't want to. Sony has no such single cash cow to suckle on. Note that Sony's profits for the last quarter were in the $350million range, a full 10% of M$!
Now I'm not saying that Sony can't compete, just that if M$ really, REALLY wanted to, they could easily outlast Sony in a battle of wills. Oh, one other point about M$ and profits, you have to remember that this was profits in a quarter that did NOT see the introduction of new versions of any of their major titles, esp new OS versions.
What's so absurd? Did you expect them to show a profit right off the bat? If so, then a lot more players would want a piece of that action. The fact is that they're trying to play in a new sandbox and the price for playing is high. However, the long term benefits from being the king of the sandbox can also be very high. By you're definition, no one should ever attempt to battle Sony/Nintendo because this is the type of financial situation any company would find itself in.
I dont think you understand TCP, you dont request a resend. TCP does that for you,
You misunderstood my statement. It wasen't made from the standpoint of someone using TCP, it was made from the standpoint of TCP itself. If it's looking at the UDP packets coming in and realizes one is missing, it will request that that missing packet be resent after some timeout period. TCP then also has to be able to handle the situation when two or more of the same packets arrive due to this behaviour.
but he makes it sound as TCP/IP is unique in this regard
I think he's just using it as an example that almost anyone can relate to in the internet age. And while it is obvious to those of us who code/administer/tinker with such things, but his use of the "hollywood actors" analogy would seem to point to the fact that his audience is not us.
I think it's a mistake to simply say that "high level languages make for buggier/bloated code". After all, many abstractions are created to solve common problems. If you don't have a string class then you'll either roll your own or have code that is complex and bug prone from calling 6 different functions to append a string. I don't think anyone would agree that it's better to write your own line drawing algorithm and have to program directly to the video card, vs calling one OpenGL method to do the same (well unless you need the absolute last word in performance, but that's another topic).
Well I'd agree up to a point. The fact is that FreeBSD is trying to solve a different problem/attract a different audience than XP/OSX. If FreeBSD was forced to add all the "features" of the other two in an attempt to compete in that space, then it would suffer mightily. You also have to take into account the level/type of programmers working on the these projects. While FreeBSD might have a core group of seasoned programmers working on it, the other two have a great range of programming experience working on it. A few guys who know what they're doing working on a smaller featureset would always produce better stuff than a large group of loosely coupled and widely differing talents working on a monsterous feature set.
Well I wouldn't say that it's reliable "because there are timeouts". AAMOF, timeouts just compicate things. So you timeout waiting for packet N, you request a resend of it, and in the interim, guess what, packet N shows up, now you have two N's. Your code is now more complex in having to deal with this situation. Timeouts are just another parameter used adjust the behaviour of the algorithms that control the protocol. Getting deterministic results from an undeterministic foundation involves making observations, accepting some compromises, making some simplifying assumptions, and then writing code that takes all those things into account to come up with something that usually works.
With a nuclear powered notebook on my lap I could save a load of money on future child support payments
Or those payments would kill you when you have to pay to house and feed those 15' tall kids (don't even mention how much it would cost to get a pair of Nikes for them)
Actually, very few "creationists" think that the generic concept that organisms evolve and mutate is false. AAMOF, a great many of the scientists/medical professionals are "creationists", so they obviously see it first hand. What they usually have a beef with is taking the concept and extrapolating it to an extreme to explain the origins of man.
After all, it's not a huge logical leap to say that to a creationist, "evolution" simply started at a point further along than many "evolutionists" want to start at.
So before you start calling others "lobotomized" and lacking in independant thinking, please go take a long hard look in the mirror.
Close. The stone had three languages saying the same thing. This book tells you how to do the same/similar things in different flavours of *nix, so the Rosetta stone theme matches nicely. Find what you want in the flavour you know, and then see what the other flavours look like.
They'll pull a Sun and change the name of the OS and version numbers. So Sun went from just SunOS to SunOS 5.x/Solaris 2.x/Solaris X. It's just a matter of time before Apple goes changes MacOS to iOS and starts the version numbers back at 1 (or in a Micro$oft like move, start them at 3). So MacOS 11 will become iOS/1.
Of course they could always do another M$ move and just rename it to MacOS'03.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I wasn't faulting their spelling (I know better than that), simply amused at the funny play on words.
some of the doe-doe's
Was that rare female of the spieces?
Easy, just run SPEC-brain.
My goodness, can you imagine a "workstation" running one of these nVidia cards with dual Itanic processors? Heck, if you got a university to run this configuration, you could bring Enron back from the brink. I see 20amp fuses in many homes going "POP" right now.
Why do your kids need to be on XP? You even said their games ran fine under '98. Why do they need Office XP to do their homework? If a pc running '98 and Office '97 (or Works for that matter) is capable, then why are you wasting time with XP or Linux? Unless of course you were just looking for an excuse to buy more hardware ('but honey, I have to give the kids our computer to run XP on, we of course will have to get a new one ourselves to replace it since it doesn't make any sense to give the kids the "new" computer.')
Teach your kids how to identify and use the best tool for the job without getting caught up in the technology. I guess when you say you're "cheap" as one of the reasons you want to switch to Linux (even though the intended use doesn't really fit in your case), you mean that your time and your kids time have no value? Oh and in the process you can teach them that time is an asset that you can never get back.
Actually your example just validated my point. That game systems are not as cpu bound, so manufacturers are focusing on making the gpu faster with only incremental increases in cpu performance.
I personally think (hope) this trend will slow as consoles are required to perform more game processing vs graphics processing. I'd love more time and thought (and cycles) to go into game logic and AI (e.g. sports games) and a heck of a lot less in graphics. I know that fancy graphics sells consoles, but gameplay is being left in the dust in many cases.
Actually I was referring to cpu's in the class that are being used by the respective game units. A 800mhz PIII uses significantly less juice than an 800Mhz Athlon. Yes, AMD was finally able to turn the tables on Intel in the wattage wars, but that was relatively recent and only above 1.4ghz. The original poster mentioned Transmeta, by which one can assume that we are not talking about 2.4ghz processors here.
From the horses mouth
I know that Sony has all that other stuff (and cool stuff it is), but my main point was that even with all that stuff, they don't enjoy the monopoly and the profits from that monopoly that M$ enjoys. Also, $2billion for the year still pales to $3.5billion for the quarter, even given the larger overall market that Sony participates in.
Keep it open, stupid
This directly opposes Focus on getting better games. While one or two good games might come from Joe and Tom working in their bedrooms for 8 months straight, most of todays games are massive efforts and the cost for playing helps to ensure that only those who are truely serious will play. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get my mitts on a dev kit cheaply, but games today are way more complex than the average person/small team can effectively deal with.
Manufacturing Xboxes that defeat region encoding and macrovision with small modifications would cause sales to skyrocket
Me thinks that your definition of "skyrocket" and M$'s definition of "skyrocket" might be orders of magnitude different. Who in the US (general game playing population) gives a flip about region encoding? Sure, beating Macrovision might be interesting and sell a few more boxes, but it's a GAME BOX, those features have no interest to GAMERS. This is especially accute concerning M$, since even as you mentioned they have made little inroads in Japan, and after all, isn't getting those hot Japanese titles months before they come here one of the primary reasons that the hardcore gamers care about region encoding.
Microsoft needs to switch to AMD or Transmeta chips, which pack more power for the buck, run cooler
Uh, which AMD chip runs cooler? Which Transmeta chip packs more power for the buck? Do you know the details for M$'s agreement with Intel to know if they could truely save money by switching. Could the other two companies afford to offer prices as low as Intel could?
Also, this will allow them to use cheaper graphics coprocessors by using a cheaper, more powerful main CPU
Isn't this bucking the trend? Aren't games systems moving towards ever more powerful graphics subsystems with modest increases in cpu performance. Sony gets away with using a ~300mhz (IIRC) cpu, I don't think that the console makers are too stressed out about raw CPU performance.
but if Microsoft takes these suggestions, their Xbox division will be well on its way to profitability
They need to produce better games than Sony and offer the user a better experience for the buck and most importantly, they need market share. The power of the last point is elegantly illustrated by Sony. PS1 was the market share (though long money losing) vehicle that allowed Sony to start cashing in once PS1 was established thus smoothing the road to much quicker profitability on PS2.
That is like saying that MacOS will drive Windows off the desktop
Not even close. This is like saying that IE will take over the browser market (four years ago). Hey, guess what, they did. Sony is not even in the same league as M$ as far as corporate resources. Not that Sony is a tiny company, obviously, but M$ not only has it's war chest, but they have a monopolistic hold on the OS/Business Suite market that affords them huge quarterly profits (3.5billion, yikes), they don't even have to dip into the warchest if they don't want to. Sony has no such single cash cow to suckle on. Note that Sony's profits for the last quarter were in the $350million range, a full 10% of M$!
Now I'm not saying that Sony can't compete, just that if M$ really, REALLY wanted to, they could easily outlast Sony in a battle of wills. Oh, one other point about M$ and profits, you have to remember that this was profits in a quarter that did NOT see the introduction of new versions of any of their major titles, esp new OS versions.
What's so absurd? Did you expect them to show a profit right off the bat? If so, then a lot more players would want a piece of that action. The fact is that they're trying to play in a new sandbox and the price for playing is high. However, the long term benefits from being the king of the sandbox can also be very high. By you're definition, no one should ever attempt to battle Sony/Nintendo because this is the type of financial situation any company would find itself in.
Yup, your right. Should of got to bed before 4 last night and I wouldn't be making stupid mistakes (well, at least not as many).
No my bad, I mis-typed. It should say IP, NOT UDP. The caffiene hasen't kicked in yet.
I thought that TCP used a sliding window to prevent the overhead of having to ack every packet?
I dont think you understand TCP, you dont request a resend. TCP does that for you,
You misunderstood my statement. It wasen't made from the standpoint of someone using TCP, it was made from the standpoint of TCP itself. If it's looking at the UDP packets coming in and realizes one is missing, it will request that that missing packet be resent after some timeout period. TCP then also has to be able to handle the situation when two or more of the same packets arrive due to this behaviour.
but he makes it sound as TCP/IP is unique in this regard
I think he's just using it as an example that almost anyone can relate to in the internet age. And while it is obvious to those of us who code/administer/tinker with such things, but his use of the "hollywood actors" analogy would seem to point to the fact that his audience is not us.
I think it's a mistake to simply say that "high level languages make for buggier/bloated code". After all, many abstractions are created to solve common problems. If you don't have a string class then you'll either roll your own or have code that is complex and bug prone from calling 6 different functions to append a string. I don't think anyone would agree that it's better to write your own line drawing algorithm and have to program directly to the video card, vs calling one OpenGL method to do the same (well unless you need the absolute last word in performance, but that's another topic).
Well I'd agree up to a point. The fact is that FreeBSD is trying to solve a different problem/attract a different audience than XP/OSX. If FreeBSD was forced to add all the "features" of the other two in an attempt to compete in that space, then it would suffer mightily. You also have to take into account the level/type of programmers working on the these projects. While FreeBSD might have a core group of seasoned programmers working on it, the other two have a great range of programming experience working on it. A few guys who know what they're doing working on a smaller featureset would always produce better stuff than a large group of loosely coupled and widely differing talents working on a monsterous feature set.
Well I wouldn't say that it's reliable "because there are timeouts". AAMOF, timeouts just compicate things. So you timeout waiting for packet N, you request a resend of it, and in the interim, guess what, packet N shows up, now you have two N's. Your code is now more complex in having to deal with this situation. Timeouts are just another parameter used adjust the behaviour of the algorithms that control the protocol. Getting deterministic results from an undeterministic foundation involves making observations, accepting some compromises, making some simplifying assumptions, and then writing code that takes all those things into account to come up with something that usually works.
With a nuclear powered notebook on my lap I could save a load of money on future child support payments
Or those payments would kill you when you have to pay to house and feed those 15' tall kids (don't even mention how much it would cost to get a pair of Nikes for them)
The only thing 'extreme' about the origins of man is the extreme conflict with the fairy tale ...
;)
Well by "extreme" I meant "going out to the end", not in the political (e.g. extremist) sense.
man was just *poofed* into existance
OK, so you believe that man was "randomized" into existance, doesn't sound any more plausable in my book.
How can you deny that you are an ape? Lack of independent thinking perhaps?
No, it's my primitive ape derived brain that prevents me from seeing the "obvious"
Actually, very few "creationists" think that the generic concept that organisms evolve and mutate is false. AAMOF, a great many of the scientists/medical professionals are "creationists", so they obviously see it first hand. What they usually have a beef with is taking the concept and extrapolating it to an extreme to explain the origins of man.
After all, it's not a huge logical leap to say that to a creationist, "evolution" simply started at a point further along than many "evolutionists" want to start at.
So before you start calling others "lobotomized" and lacking in independant thinking, please go take a long hard look in the mirror.
Close. The stone had three languages saying the same thing. This book tells you how to do the same/similar things in different flavours of *nix, so the Rosetta stone theme matches nicely. Find what you want in the flavour you know, and then see what the other flavours look like.
They'll pull a Sun and change the name of the OS and version numbers. So Sun went from just SunOS to SunOS 5.x/Solaris 2.x/Solaris X. It's just a matter of time before Apple goes changes MacOS to iOS and starts the version numbers back at 1 (or in a Micro$oft like move, start them at 3). So MacOS 11 will become iOS/1.
Of course they could always do another M$ move and just rename it to MacOS'03.
I first read it as Endian. I thought they were going after former 68000 developers.