Except it can't be removed. Any software that depends on it breaks. It'd be like removing libc and expecting all of your Linux apps to continue working without a problem.
The EU can't do that. It would be a violation of several trade treaties. The EU would have to violate those treaties, which opens up a can of WTO whoopass.
They would pay the fines and withdrawl from Europe. You can't be fined for non-compliant business practices if you don't do business in Europe.
What Microsoft would be looking at is the cost of compliance vs the cost of not doing business in Europe. When the cost of not doing business in Europe is cheaper than the cost of compliance, that will be the route they take. When you're getting fined 1.4B/year, and your unit only makes a profit of 1.1B/year worldwide, you're going to pull out of Europe.
In my opinion, the EU isn't interested in market balance in so much as it is in using fines as a source of income, especially given that their current complaints center around the fact that the WMP-less version of windows won't run software that depends on WMP...
"Yeah, the latest version of Windows Media Player can't be stripped from Windows because it's part of the OS." Only to be proved dead wrong.
I suppose you missed the noise where some software that ran on the "reduced media edition" version of XP didn't function correctly (because they depended on the WMP activex controls).
Why on earth can't Windows 2000 do this?
They're using APIs that don't exist on Win2k. They can backport the APIs, but they claim that isn't worth the effort to do so; given the audience that Win2k is targeted at (servers) I can't say I can particularly fault their logic...
MS should just tell it as it is, we hope you upgrade to take more money from, albeit in more euphemistic way OR simply state another valid reason. We'd rather not have to do regression testing on an older platform. Again, find a euphemism.
Translated: "I want Microsoft to support all their software for all of eternity, giving me essentially their latest version of a product for free, but I still want it to look and work like the version I originally bought."
Once you've activated five times you're up shit creek.
Wrong. You can activate as many times as you want on the same hardware without a problem. Modify the hardware enough, and you'll have to phone in to get an activation code, which takes all of 5 minutes (on a bad day) if you're on the up & up.
Now it is MORE integrated--to the point that they CAN'T possibly make a Windows 2000 version?
You've got it backwards. Integration would mean that they can't take it out of the operating system. In this case, they're they're trying to use operating system functionality that doesn't exist on Win2k.
While $8k a semester may put a large dent in your pocket, it is not an abnormal sum of money to be paying for a college education. I went to a podunk school in the middle of Missouri and it cost me more than $8k a semester.
I still think you're making shit up. What MOBO was it? What NIC? What sound card? What graphics card?
That's a myth. XP ships with drivers for some common peripherals, most NICs, and some partial drivers for popular video cards that aren't any better than Vesa except that they support better resolutions and color depth. ...after which you run windows update, and get the rest of the drivers installed.
Windows comes with drivers to support a wide range of hardware, and any popular Nvidia video card would have been in that list.
With all the "XP hotshots" you claim are around, it should have been trivial for one of them to download the needed drivers and burn them to cd. Yet you claim you had to dig out some old driver discs and overnight them.
On top of that, you're bitching about the cost of Word while not complaining about the cost of textbooks. The student edition of the Office Suite is typically less than $100, which is less than 80% of the textbooks you'll have to purchase throughout your time at college.
And I hate to break it to you, but $8k a semester is not expensive tuition.
The PS3 has a PPC core with 7 SPE units (an SPE is a "cell core") as the 'main' processor (there are 8 SPEs on the die, but one is disabled, supposedly to improve yields). I won't get into why the SPEs aren't as cool as they've been hyped to be (they're a neat idea, but not very practicle and it will be exceedingly difficult to get anything resembling optimal performance out of them).
The RSX is a completely separate chip connected to two busses, just as you would expect a tranditional GPU to be -- one to VRAM (max 22.4gb/s), and one to system memory (max 25.6gb/s).
Supposedly they were using a pair of Nvidia G70 cards in an SLI configuration... Unless the PS3 RSX chip is going to stomp two of Nvidia's next generation video cards (highly unlikely) the PS3 won't be capable of anything like what they demo'd.
Re:Quick Summary and opinion
on
Inside the Xbox 360
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· Score: 2, Informative
1) Yes it is better. The designer doesn't "fit" a mathamatical curve -- the software handles that under the hood for them. They choose a circle and manipulate it, or they choose points to deform on a line and manipulate it.
It is definately less information... one "shape" may have more data than a single vertex, but it has far less data than a similar shape made out of vertexes. This reduces the amount of data that must be transfered over the system bus, which is critical in this context.
The other advantage to this methodology is that the rendering software can dynamically vary the number of vertexes it generates based on the rendering load.
2) They applied for one and got it. Remember, patents don't cover ideas -- they cover how you implement an idea.
You actually have read nothing about how the SPEs work, have you?
The SPEs can't feed the video card. They don't have direct access to the system bus. They also can't handle the audio, as they don't have direct access to the system bus. They can pull chunks to and from ram. At best the SPEs can transform some of the data before the processor sends it to the various components, but those are operations typically performed by the hardware and not by the processor.
The SPEs do not have integer units, and their logic instruction set is 'limited' at best. That rules out AI.
The CPU is where most of the game logic is going to reside; the SPEs can't do it.
The lack of direct access to memory and the limited amount of 'memory' available to all 7 SPEs drops their utility severely. The architecture of the chip forces a programmer to waste a number of cycles keeping the processor cache, main memory, and SPE working set in sync; I'd be singing a different tune if the processor managed to keep all of these things in sync for free, but it doesn't.
That's an aweful lot of processing power to waste serving a glorified dsp... so while the cpu is busy with its "care and feeding" tasks for the cells, what will be taking care of the AI? The audio? Feeding the graphics card?
I think we both agree with each other, except for different reasons.:)
Sony can *claim* to have an advantage in is floating point math (on paper), but as I was saying I'm not convinced that they can get anywhere close to reaching their projected figures (unless you're doing something where you don't care about syncronization of data, like particle effects; though that had better be some damn impressive snow given how much Sony is banking on the cell architecture...).
I'm incredibly impressed with the xbox360 specs -- much more so than with the PS3. They've got a monster of a graphics subsystem in that thing... I've got to imagine that the engineers at MS are incredibly happy at this point.
Sony has a theoretical advantage in floating point math. And I'm not particularly convinced that (based on the cell architecture) cells can be used efficiently in a useful manner (syncronization between main memory, the cpu/cpu cache, and their small working cache sucks up a lot of cycles).
do you consider features that require the user to do something insecure (like run as a local administrator) in order for that feature to work a bug
The answer to this is clearly no, if you consider running as a local administrator an insecure operation; there are some things only a privledged user can do. Otherwise there would be no point in having a local administrator account.
Do you consider system defaults that can cause the user to perform an action they didn't intend to do (such as launching a hostile executable) a security bug?
Anytime the user performs an action, and the computer does exactly what it is supposed to do in response to that action, it is not a bug. The problem you are describing is one of usability and user education. There are many locations where the design of the UI encourages the user to blindly click ok. There are other locations where the user doesn't know enough to make a correct decision.
Are these security bugs? I don't think so. Are they problems with the way the software is constructed? Yes.
Why do I get the feeling that the person they were talking to was referring to how they plan on emulating the x86 processor by using JIT compilation to translate x86 instructions to PPC instructions?
Fanboy my ass...you said that they were nearly equal, which is clearly not the case.
GT4 was a huge disappointment for me. It was GT3 with more cars (where "more cars" is mostly "a version of a different car with a different paint scheme"). There was no remarkable improvement on any aspect of the game (physics, graphics, multiplayer, or sound). Unless you're referring to the "picture mode", in which case I'd hardly use that as a basis of comparison.
That being said, it is still a good game (the Grand Tourismo series is my favorite PS series of games), but I would hardly be using it as an example of how the PS2 keeps up with the Xbox.
Slashdot Mirror
Except it can't be removed. Any software that depends on it breaks. It'd be like removing libc and expecting all of your Linux apps to continue working without a problem.
The EU can't do that. It would be a violation of several trade treaties. The EU would have to violate those treaties, which opens up a can of WTO whoopass.
What would most likely happen is that compainies would import Microsoft software from a location outside of the EU.
They would pay the fines and withdrawl from Europe. You can't be fined for non-compliant business practices if you don't do business in Europe.
What Microsoft would be looking at is the cost of compliance vs the cost of not doing business in Europe. When the cost of not doing business in Europe is cheaper than the cost of compliance, that will be the route they take. When you're getting fined 1.4B/year, and your unit only makes a profit of 1.1B/year worldwide, you're going to pull out of Europe.
In my opinion, the EU isn't interested in market balance in so much as it is in using fines as a source of income, especially given that their current complaints center around the fact that the WMP-less version of windows won't run software that depends on WMP...
"Yeah, the latest version of Windows Media Player can't be stripped from Windows because it's part of the OS." Only to be proved dead wrong.
I suppose you missed the noise where some software that ran on the "reduced media edition" version of XP didn't function correctly (because they depended on the WMP activex controls).
Why on earth can't Windows 2000 do this?
They're using APIs that don't exist on Win2k. They can backport the APIs, but they claim that isn't worth the effort to do so; given the audience that Win2k is targeted at (servers) I can't say I can particularly fault their logic...
MS should just tell it as it is, we hope you upgrade to take more money from, albeit in more euphemistic way OR simply state another valid reason. We'd rather not have to do regression testing on an older platform. Again, find a euphemism.
Translated: "I want Microsoft to support all their software for all of eternity, giving me essentially their latest version of a product for free, but I still want it to look and work like the version I originally bought."
Once you've activated five times you're up shit creek.
Wrong. You can activate as many times as you want on the same hardware without a problem. Modify the hardware enough, and you'll have to phone in to get an activation code, which takes all of 5 minutes (on a bad day) if you're on the up & up.
http://aumha.org/win5/a/wpa.php
They released a security update, which added no new features.
Now it is MORE integrated--to the point that they CAN'T possibly make a Windows 2000 version?
You've got it backwards. Integration would mean that they can't take it out of the operating system. In this case, they're they're trying to use operating system functionality that doesn't exist on Win2k.
JavaScript != Java! Sun has absolutely nothing to do with this whatsoever.
While $8k a semester may put a large dent in your pocket, it is not an abnormal sum of money to be paying for a college education. I went to a podunk school in the middle of Missouri and it cost me more than $8k a semester.
I still think you're making shit up. What MOBO was it? What NIC? What sound card? What graphics card?
That's a myth. XP ships with drivers for some common peripherals, most NICs, and some partial drivers for popular video cards that aren't any better than Vesa except that they support better resolutions and color depth.
...after which you run windows update, and get the rest of the drivers installed.
I'm pulling out the BS flag.
Windows comes with drivers to support a wide range of hardware, and any popular Nvidia video card would have been in that list.
With all the "XP hotshots" you claim are around, it should have been trivial for one of them to download the needed drivers and burn them to cd. Yet you claim you had to dig out some old driver discs and overnight them.
On top of that, you're bitching about the cost of Word while not complaining about the cost of textbooks. The student edition of the Office Suite is typically less than $100, which is less than 80% of the textbooks you'll have to purchase throughout your time at college.
And I hate to break it to you, but $8k a semester is not expensive tuition.
You don't understand it.
The PS3 has a PPC core with 7 SPE units (an SPE is a "cell core") as the 'main' processor (there are 8 SPEs on the die, but one is disabled, supposedly to improve yields). I won't get into why the SPEs aren't as cool as they've been hyped to be (they're a neat idea, but not very practicle and it will be exceedingly difficult to get anything resembling optimal performance out of them).
The RSX is a completely separate chip connected to two busses, just as you would expect a tranditional GPU to be -- one to VRAM (max 22.4gb/s), and one to system memory (max 25.6gb/s).
It isn't part of what IBM "opened".
Unless they add a massive pipe between the GPU and memory, it isn't going to happen. What they have available in the specs they listed won't cut it.
Supposedly they were using a pair of Nvidia G70 cards in an SLI configuration ... Unless the PS3 RSX chip is going to stomp two of Nvidia's next generation video cards (highly unlikely) the PS3 won't be capable of anything like what they demo'd.
1) Yes it is better. The designer doesn't "fit" a mathamatical curve -- the software handles that under the hood for them. They choose a circle and manipulate it, or they choose points to deform on a line and manipulate it.
... one "shape" may have more data than a single vertex, but it has far less data than a similar shape made out of vertexes. This reduces the amount of data that must be transfered over the system bus, which is critical in this context.
It is definately less information
The other advantage to this methodology is that the rendering software can dynamically vary the number of vertexes it generates based on the rendering load.
2) They applied for one and got it. Remember, patents don't cover ideas -- they cover how you implement an idea.
Patents cover the process of how you get from point A to point B. Patents do not cover "point B".
They didn't say that the very existence of PGP indicated criminal intent, it say that it may be used to prove criminal intent. Slightly different.
You actually have read nothing about how the SPEs work, have you?
The SPEs can't feed the video card. They don't have direct access to the system bus. They also can't handle the audio, as they don't have direct access to the system bus. They can pull chunks to and from ram. At best the SPEs can transform some of the data before the processor sends it to the various components, but those are operations typically performed by the hardware and not by the processor.
The SPEs do not have integer units, and their logic instruction set is 'limited' at best. That rules out AI.
The CPU is where most of the game logic is going to reside; the SPEs can't do it.
The lack of direct access to memory and the limited amount of 'memory' available to all 7 SPEs drops their utility severely. The architecture of the chip forces a programmer to waste a number of cycles keeping the processor cache, main memory, and SPE working set in sync; I'd be singing a different tune if the processor managed to keep all of these things in sync for free, but it doesn't.
That's an aweful lot of processing power to waste serving a glorified dsp ... so while the cpu is busy with its "care and feeding" tasks for the cells, what will be taking care of the AI? The audio? Feeding the graphics card?
I think we both agree with each other, except for different reasons. :)
... I've got to imagine that the engineers at MS are incredibly happy at this point.
Sony can *claim* to have an advantage in is floating point math (on paper), but as I was saying I'm not convinced that they can get anywhere close to reaching their projected figures (unless you're doing something where you don't care about syncronization of data, like particle effects; though that had better be some damn impressive snow given how much Sony is banking on the cell architecture...).
I'm incredibly impressed with the xbox360 specs -- much more so than with the PS3. They've got a monster of a graphics subsystem in that thing
Sony has a theoretical advantage in floating point math. And I'm not particularly convinced that (based on the cell architecture) cells can be used efficiently in a useful manner (syncronization between main memory, the cpu/cpu cache, and their small working cache sucks up a lot of cycles).
do you consider features that require the user to do something insecure (like run as a local administrator) in order for that feature to work a bug
The answer to this is clearly no, if you consider running as a local administrator an insecure operation; there are some things only a privledged user can do. Otherwise there would be no point in having a local administrator account.
Do you consider system defaults that can cause the user to perform an action they didn't intend to do (such as launching a hostile executable) a security bug?
Anytime the user performs an action, and the computer does exactly what it is supposed to do in response to that action, it is not a bug. The problem you are describing is one of usability and user education. There are many locations where the design of the UI encourages the user to blindly click ok. There are other locations where the user doesn't know enough to make a correct decision.
Are these security bugs? I don't think so. Are they problems with the way the software is constructed? Yes.
Why do I get the feeling that the person they were talking to was referring to how they plan on emulating the x86 processor by using JIT compilation to translate x86 instructions to PPC instructions?
Fanboy my ass...you said that they were nearly equal, which is clearly not the case.
GT4 was a huge disappointment for me. It was GT3 with more cars (where "more cars" is mostly "a version of a different car with a different paint scheme"). There was no remarkable improvement on any aspect of the game (physics, graphics, multiplayer, or sound). Unless you're referring to the "picture mode", in which case I'd hardly use that as a basis of comparison.
That being said, it is still a good game (the Grand Tourismo series is my favorite PS series of games), but I would hardly be using it as an example of how the PS2 keeps up with the Xbox.