FWIW, I don't believe that Sony is tight about people releasing Playstation games, which is part of the reason why there are so freakin' many of them. What's more, there's even a hobbyist-programmable version (the black Playstation... can't remember the exact name).
The reason why a Playstation devkit costs $25,000 is the hardware, not because they're trying to control the market.
Compare this to the infamous NOA, who insist on approving every title released for their platforms. And charging you a licensing fee for the "privledge". And, in an oh-so-helpful-megacorp kind of way, doing you the "service" of manufacturing for you.
But I agree with the other posters here. PC development (especially with OpenGL) is the most attractive solution to me right now. Ease of porting, graphics hardware on a 6-month cycle rather than a several year cycle (this is a biggie)...
handheld gaming, of course, is a whole 'nother story.
... And one of my biggest complaints about apple is that they've sat on that feature set, more or less, ever since. the inability of the company to release a modern operating system (memory management, anyone?) has been irritating me for years now.
a bit of exaggeration, i know, but it really frustrates me.
i don't know if your "10-15 fps" figure is accurate, but i do know that mac 3d acceleration has lagged terribly behind pc standards: the macs that ship with 3d acceleration these days use a slowed down ati rage 128. this is a chipset that's well behind the technology curve at full speed. i understand that regular speed ati cards are available and 3dfx support is starting to appear, but in a world of cheap g400s and tnt2 ultras (i just picked up a creative tnt2 ultra for $165 delivered...), older expensive cards just don't cut it.
admittedly, this is a comment which is totally dependant on the trust you have in slashdot administration, but what make you think that/. insiders have access to "soft anonymous" user info? the article whic hwe are responding to specifically states :
"Due to popular demand, I've added an option to allow logged in users to post anonymously. If you use this option, you are every bit as anonymous as you would be if you had logged out, except if you have a +1 bonus, your comment will still get it. "
which leads me, trusting silly boy that i am, to think that they aren't tracking anonymous posts by logged in users. and if you can't allow yourself to trust them now, what would make you feel that you're not being tracked?
-- looking forward to getting moderator points one of these days...
> Since Windows doesn't fully run in 64-bit mode on the alpha even after all these years, are we supposed to believe that it suddenly runs in 64-bit mode on a brand new chip?
um, yes. 32-bit windows not "fully running in 64-bit mode" on the alpha doen't make me blow any fuses over the notion that 64-bit windows runs in 64-bit mode on a new processor. it would have done the same thing on the alpha platform as well, if alpha support hadn't been dropped.
for a while, it was a major possibility that the alpha version of win64 would be out before merced was available. microsoft isn't married to intel (politically) in the same way they once were.
when big companies buy software, usually a hefty portion of the deal (20-30% at the bottom end) is a maintenance contract. in a fair number of cases, the software and hardware costs are rendered totally insignificant by the price of maintenace and service.
a) there are no commercially available athlon motherboards
b) there are no commercially available athlons
the reason these reviews just all showed up is that they are old (well, not 1-2 days old) reviews that can only just now be printed due to the AMD NDA being lifted. the systems that these people are reviewing are the AMD (essentially reference) motherboards, with processors still warm from the chip fab.
William Gibson spoke to the CompSci classes at my college a few years ago. It was a good talk, and at one point the question of JM came up -- specifically, why he had gone on record endorsing such a piece of crap.
He may have been covering his ass, but what he said was, the film was great; he happily endorsed it in interviews; then they started doing test screenings, and the studio recut the whole film on the basis of the audience sugggestions, ruining it.
Just though I'd throw that in there. I love Neuromancer, but I'm a little apprehensive about the movie. Part of me wishes that WG kept his promise never to authorize another movie version.
it certainly looks like the PSX2 is going to leapfrog the PC in gaming performance, at least initially. but there are several important considerations that will keep it frm total world domination : cost -- the PSX2 could cost as much as $6-700, unless sony is willing to take some big stonking red ink for a while to get market share. how many people do you know who bought a neo-geo home system? development -- a PSX2 development environment is ~$60K, while a very competent PC dev machine is under $2K. and initial reports indicate that taking advantage of the playstation's full capabilities is no trivial task.
by the time game development is in full swing and all stages of the playstation pipeline are cost-efficient, gamer PCs very well may have caught up or surpassed them. the generation to generation leapfrogging of consoles and PCs probably hasn't gone away yet.
sounds like sour grapes to me. if you accept the premise that you have to work, why not have a job you enjoy? and if someone enjoys their job, why gripe about how awful that is?
no one complains that sucessful artists are pathetic for rhe reason that they do what they love (though they certainly may be pathetic for other reasons). working as a coder in a field you are interested in, solving interesting and challenging problems, collaborating with intelligent people... i don't see why it's so hard to accept why someone would enjoy that as work and recreation.
i know a lot of musicians. i know that for a lot of people, touring turns into a job. it's not fun anymore. but for a lot of people, playing music is doing what they love, and getting paid means that they effectively don't have to have a job. a lot of people have the same approach to programming. find a job in a field that you like. do something you'd be doing anyway, adn get paid for it. start a company with your friends.
pay a major pron site (persian kitty or playboy or something) to move to an IPv6-only network. i guarantee that ISPs will be forced by user demand to switch over asap.
never forget the power of the masturbation superhighway.
1. Intel makes a profit on all of their chips. With the possible exception of the bottom of the Celeron line, which may come in right at cost. So accusations of dumping are unlikely to fly in the courts.
2. If you really believed in competition, why would you announce that you are going to buy an Athlon "on principle"? If you said, "well, it costs more, but it performs better" then I could see that as supporting competition, but the nature of competition is to reward success to the best product on the market, and price will always be a factor in determining the 'best product'.
3. There is a lot of complaining about Intel 'announcing price cuts for an unreleased product', but this is just a rumor, not an announcement. However, AMD *has* announced prices for chips unlikely to make it to market in the next several months, so that customers could see how much cheaper a -2 month old 550 MHz Athlon is in comparison to a current PIII-550.
4. How else can Intel compete in the short term other than through determining their schedule of pricing? I'm sure that the R&D bosses are under the gun to deliver something to beat Athlon in the desktop market, but you can only design VLSI chips so rapidly.
I'm excited about Athlon (despite the name). I love the prospect of real cometition. I would love to own one. Or several. But I'm not going to blame Intel for reacting to AMD as if they were actually competing. And I'm positive that if the tables were reversed that AMD would be pushing aggressively on Intel.
concentric runs a private DSL network; they make a ppoint of establishing service where the local telco doens't reach yet. so you pay more because there's less piggybacking off the existing infrastructure.
this is incorrect. the 200 MHz bus speed is the chipset-processor bus. the chipset will still have memory bus speeds comparable to Intel systems, so until memory can run faster than Intel chipsets support you won't see much difference there.
no. the supreme court reviews cases when the federal circuit courts can't agree on the interpretation of the constituion, and on issues concerning the executive and legislative branches. size/controversy have little (ideally no) impact on the decision to accept a case.
There's shipping support for high-end audio cards like Emu's ASP, Echo's Gina/Layla/Darla, Emagic's I/O card and Yamaha's "midrange" 192XG.
that's what i'm looking forward to. my roommates get a layla system and we're looking at building a new system to run BeOS/Layla on. i am really looking forward to seeing how many tracks we can push through it.
this seems a bit predictable to me. the result will undoubtedly be that kasparov will win in a firly high but not huge number of moves. there is virtually no danger of either the "world" team winning, or having a particularly interesting game, as the vast majority of people following this game will be patzers who will pick a random move recommended by one of the analysts. the moves will all be safe, and predictable.
i don't believe that a group of people will ever be likely to beat the world champion. even a small group of grandmasters has a worse chance than any single one. it's a hallmark of top-level chess to make and execute a plan, and as soon as there is any on-board indecision about the plan, there is a weakness to exploit. multiple grandmasters are far more likely to have indecision about their plans than just one.
when i first heard the offer, i thought that it was going tobe kasparov playing an unlimited-game simul. which would be a Good Thing. especially since one of my coworkers pointed out that he could save a lot of time, especially in the beginning, because there would undoubtedly be a lot of people making the same first move, and then a lot of those people would make the same second move, etc.
The brain is very much holographic. While parts of the brain are used for specific functions, in cases of trauma the functioning gets taken up by the rest of the brain.
However, there is not likely to ever be "Brain Storage(tm)", because the brain doesn't store the information that it recieves from it's input devices (the nervous system). Rather, it stores it's interpretation of the input. So what you put in and what you get out are related by the most complex nonlinear (and constantly changing) transform function you could possibly imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, I don't believe that Sony is tight about people releasing Playstation games, which is part of the reason why there are so freakin' many of them. What's more, there's even a hobbyist-programmable version (the black Playstation... can't remember the exact name).
The reason why a Playstation devkit costs $25,000 is the hardware, not because they're trying to control the market.
Compare this to the infamous NOA, who insist on approving every title released for their platforms. And charging you a licensing fee for the "privledge". And, in an oh-so-helpful-megacorp kind of way, doing you the "service" of manufacturing for you.
But I agree with the other posters here. PC development (especially with OpenGL) is the most attractive solution to me right now. Ease of porting, graphics hardware on a 6-month cycle rather than a several year cycle (this is a biggie)...
handheld gaming, of course, is a whole 'nother story.
now this is the kind of crap that should be moderated down. ad hominem attacks are worthless.
i kept reading that subject line, at first, as "iMac is expendable".
which is a wee bit different than the intent.
i amuse myself sometimes.
... And one of my biggest complaints about apple is that they've sat on that feature set, more or less, ever since. the inability of the company to release a modern operating system (memory management, anyone?) has been irritating me for years now.
a bit of exaggeration, i know, but it really frustrates me.
i don't know if your "10-15 fps" figure is accurate, but i do know that mac 3d acceleration has lagged terribly behind pc standards: the macs that ship with 3d acceleration these days use a slowed down ati rage 128. this is a chipset that's well behind the technology curve at full speed. i understand that regular speed ati cards are available and 3dfx support is starting to appear, but in a world of cheap g400s and tnt2 ultras (i just picked up a creative tnt2 ultra for $165 delivered...), older expensive cards just don't cut it.
conform
admittedly, this is a comment which is totally dependant on the trust you have in slashdot administration, but what make you think that /. insiders have access to "soft anonymous" user info? the article whic hwe are responding to specifically states :
"Due to popular demand, I've added an option to allow logged in users to post anonymously. If you use this option, you are every bit as anonymous as you would be if you had logged out, except if you have a +1 bonus, your comment will still get it. "
which leads me, trusting silly boy that i am, to think that they aren't tracking anonymous posts by logged in users. and if you can't allow yourself to trust them now, what would make you feel that you're not being tracked?
-- looking forward to getting moderator points one of these days...
conform
> Since Windows doesn't fully run in 64-bit mode on the alpha even after all these years, are we supposed to believe that it suddenly runs in 64-bit mode on a brand new chip?
um, yes. 32-bit windows not "fully running in 64-bit mode" on the alpha doen't make me blow any fuses over the notion that 64-bit windows runs in 64-bit mode on a new processor. it would have done the same thing on the alpha platform as well, if alpha support hadn't been dropped.
for a while, it was a major possibility that the alpha version of win64 would be out before merced was available. microsoft isn't married to intel (politically) in the same way they once were.
... looks to me like most operating systems these days are proprietary.
dude! imagine quake3arena on a beowulf cluster running einsteinian-crypto-based 1GHz Athlons!
how many fps do you think it would get!?!!
when big companies buy software, usually a hefty portion of the deal (20-30% at the bottom end) is a maintenance contract. in a fair number of cases, the software and hardware costs are rendered totally insignificant by the price of maintenace and service.
a) there are no commercially available athlon motherboards
b) there are no commercially available athlons
the reason these reviews just all showed up is that they are old (well, not 1-2 days old) reviews that can only just now be printed due to the AMD NDA being lifted. the systems that these people are reviewing are the AMD (essentially reference) motherboards, with processors still warm from the chip fab.
maybe that explains why people get so mad when i "park" my car sometimes.
assuming that the unusable portion at the center of a CD has a radius of 1.25 inches, i get:
((5.25/2)^2*pi - (1.25)^2*pi) * 400 / 8
(21.6475 - 4.9087) * 50
~837 GigaBYTES per CD.
William Gibson spoke to the CompSci classes at my college a few years ago. It was a good talk, and at one point the question of JM came up -- specifically, why he had gone on record endorsing such a piece of crap.
He may have been covering his ass, but what he said was, the film was great; he happily endorsed it in interviews; then they started doing test screenings, and the studio recut the whole film on the basis of the audience sugggestions, ruining it.
Just though I'd throw that in there. I love Neuromancer, but I'm a little apprehensive about the movie. Part of me wishes that WG kept his promise never to authorize another movie version.
don't want a credit card but hate the hassle of not having one? get a visa debit card. perfect for:
* credit deadbeats
* conspiracy theorists
* kids trying to prove they're old enough to buy porn
* people who are too lazy to actually go to the bank
it certainly looks like the PSX2 is going to leapfrog the PC in gaming performance, at least initially. but there are several important considerations that will keep it frm total world domination : cost -- the PSX2 could cost as much as $6-700, unless sony is willing to take some big stonking red ink for a while to get market share. how many people do you know who bought a neo-geo home system? development -- a PSX2 development environment is ~$60K, while a very competent PC dev machine is under $2K. and initial reports indicate that taking advantage of the playstation's full capabilities is no trivial task.
by the time game development is in full swing and all stages of the playstation pipeline are cost-efficient, gamer PCs very well may have caught up or surpassed them. the generation to generation leapfrogging of consoles and PCs probably hasn't gone away yet.
sounds like sour grapes to me. if you accept the premise that you have to work, why not have a job you enjoy? and if someone enjoys their job, why gripe about how awful that is?
no one complains that sucessful artists are pathetic for rhe reason that they do what they love (though they certainly may be pathetic for other reasons). working as a coder in a field you are interested in, solving interesting and challenging problems, collaborating with intelligent people... i don't see why it's so hard to accept why someone would enjoy that as work and recreation.
i know a lot of musicians. i know that for a lot of people, touring turns into a job. it's not fun anymore. but for a lot of people, playing music is doing what they love, and getting paid means that they effectively don't have to have a job. a lot of people have the same approach to programming. find a job in a field that you like. do something you'd be doing anyway, adn get paid for it. start a company with your friends.
there's nothing wrong with enjoying your job.
pay a major pron site (persian kitty or playboy or something) to move to an IPv6-only network. i guarantee that ISPs will be forced by user demand to switch over asap.
never forget the power of the masturbation superhighway.
1. Intel makes a profit on all of their chips. With the possible exception of the bottom of the Celeron line, which may come in right at cost. So accusations of dumping are unlikely to fly in the courts.
2. If you really believed in competition, why would you announce that you are going to buy an Athlon "on principle"? If you said, "well, it costs more, but it performs better" then I could see that as supporting competition, but the nature of competition is to reward success to the best product on the market, and price will always be a factor in determining the 'best product'.
3. There is a lot of complaining about Intel 'announcing price cuts for an unreleased product', but this is just a rumor, not an announcement. However, AMD *has* announced prices for chips unlikely to make it to market in the next several months, so that customers could see how much cheaper a -2 month old 550 MHz Athlon is in comparison to a current PIII-550.
4. How else can Intel compete in the short term other than through determining their schedule of pricing? I'm sure that the R&D bosses are under the gun to deliver something to beat Athlon in the desktop market, but you can only design VLSI chips so rapidly.
I'm excited about Athlon (despite the name). I love the prospect of real cometition. I would love to own one. Or several. But I'm not going to blame Intel for reacting to AMD as if they were actually competing. And I'm positive that if the tables were reversed that AMD would be pushing aggressively on Intel.
seamus
concentric runs a private DSL network; they make a ppoint of establishing service where the local telco doens't reach yet. so you pay more because there's less piggybacking off the existing infrastructure.
this is incorrect. the 200 MHz bus speed is the chipset-processor bus. the chipset will still have memory bus speeds comparable to Intel systems, so until memory can run faster than Intel chipsets support you won't see much difference there.
no. the supreme court reviews cases when the federal circuit courts can't agree on the interpretation of the constituion, and on issues concerning the executive and legislative branches. size/controversy have little (ideally no) impact on the decision to accept a case.
that's what i'm looking forward to. my roommates get a layla system and we're looking at building a new system to run BeOS/Layla on. i am really looking forward to seeing how many tracks we can push through it.
--seamus
this seems a bit predictable to me. the result will undoubtedly be that kasparov will win in a firly high but not huge number of moves. there is virtually no danger of either the "world" team winning, or having a particularly interesting game, as the vast majority of people following this game will be patzers who will pick a random move recommended by one of the analysts. the moves will all be safe, and predictable.
i don't believe that a group of people will ever be likely to beat the world champion. even a small group of grandmasters has a worse chance than any single one. it's a hallmark of top-level chess to make and execute a plan, and as soon as there is any on-board indecision about the plan, there is a weakness to exploit. multiple grandmasters are far more likely to have indecision about their plans than just one.
when i first heard the offer, i thought that it was going tobe kasparov playing an unlimited-game simul. which would be a Good Thing. especially since one of my coworkers pointed out that he could save a lot of time, especially in the beginning, because there would undoubtedly be a lot of people making the same first move, and then a lot of those people would make the same second move, etc.
--seamus
The brain is very much holographic. While parts of the brain are used for specific functions, in cases of trauma the functioning gets taken up by the rest of the brain.
However, there is not likely to ever be "Brain Storage(tm)", because the brain doesn't store the information that it recieves from it's input devices (the nervous system). Rather, it stores it's interpretation of the input. So what you put in and what you get out are related by the most complex nonlinear (and constantly changing) transform function you could possibly imagine.
--conform