..has recently been released, this is the massively updated layer beneath OS X 10.2 (aka jaguar aka jagwire). At the moment only the PPC binary installer is available, the x86 version is apparently on it's way, until then there's always the older 1.4.1 x86 version.
IMHO it's good that Apple are keeping both the source and binary Darwin distribs up to date. A Whole bunch of the engineers at apple are heavily committed to open-sourcing (and not just those you'd expect like Jordan Hubbard). Using the Darwin Core and something like Fink or DarwinPorts you can end up with a nice and 'free' OS with Xfree86, KDE et al.
Re:No wonder Nvidia is largely considered better!
on
Anand Tours ATI and NVIDIA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I fully agree. Last year I was at GDCE doing research at tying to get info from both ATI and nVidia for articles I was writing. all the people from ATI I met were fantastic, I spoke to a few of the heavy engineers (huge kudos to Alex Vlachos and Jason Mitchell) along with the PR and Product Management people. They all went massively went out of their way to help me and inform me, answering any questions I had, burning me cd's of demos, pics, info, etc and following up further technical questions via e-mails and phone calls after the conference was over. This was the overall attitude of ATI at the conference. Next we come to nVidia, I repeatedly came up against a brick wall, the case was the same for other developers, with David Kirk doing a fine politician-style non-answering of questions after his presentation. You generally got the impression that there were a select few that may be lucky enough to be given certain information, but it was very much on nVidia's terms. Fair enough, companies have secrets which they need to keep, but from my experiences with the companies, ATI are far far more open. If anything this article backs that up. Would you prefer a bundle of photos or a chance to talk with a variety of the actual engineers?
AFAIK iSync is in beta and will be available pretty much on schedule - end of september. I think Apple are using ical to push their.mac services for now rather than it's integration with iSync, which I'm sure will follow.
iCal uses an industry-standard iCalendar (.ics) specification. This is a text file that can be easily shared on the Internet. For more information on the iCalendar format, see http://www.imc.org/pdi/ or RFC2445.
So yes, it's documented rather well and is far from a proprietary thing, you can relatively easily setup your own.mac iCal style server:)
Mac's have had DMA support for a long time in both hardware and software, see this technote and the Developer Notes on hardware here for details. This includes the original clamshell iBooks. The iBooks may not have the fastest drives or interfaces but I don't think this is the problem. It's much more likely a Virtual Memory issue with lots of caching going on. check the contents of/private/var/vm/ for the number of 80Mb swapfiles you have, also try issuing vm_stat from the CLI to see whats going on. Two suggestions, either get more RAM or setup a 'clean' swap-drive partition.
...I may read it if there was a downloadable version (other than AvantGo). But the combination of the bad comments here, my trudge through the first few paragraphs and the lack of an easy way to get it onto my Zaurus so I can read it on the toilet means I'll probably give the full thing a miss. I'm not convinced that it's aimed at the 'geek demographic' either, whatever that is;)
So we have an article which misses a few important points at the generally iffy barefeats, this is then compounded by the comment "cannot access the memory any faster than the cheaper and slower SDRAM" which misses the mark even further. It's a real shame when these things spread around as "the truth" especially on somewhere like slashdot. Yes the new motherboards are not full DDR, this is mainly because the processors available from Motorola cannot handle DDR FSB's and therefore a full DDR motherboard. This is a shame, but it is far from crippled DDR RAM. Many early DDR RAM x86 motherboards were the same, only the RAM was DDR, not the full motherboard and processor FSB. While this does mean there is still a bottleneck (in certain tasks) between the processor and other components there are advantages to having DDR RAM. The tests at barefeats are using purely CPU limited operations, which will obviously show no real improvement as there has been no CPU or bus change (although the new 1Ghz procs have only 1Mb of DDR L3 cache versus the old 2Mb DDR and a 167Mhz bus version is available). What DDR RAM will help with is when there are a variety of components (CPU, HD, network, AGP, PCI, Firewire, etc) all vying for valuable memory bandwidth. It's these 'real-world' situations when we will see a performance increase. If you just run single process, purely CPU intensive tasks then maybe these machines aren't for you, but if you run a lot of stuff at the same time, or anything that uses CPU, HD, AGP etc intensively and concurrently then you should see an improvement. Things like Quartz Extreme will be throwing a LOT of data at the AGP bus, with DDR RAM this won't have to wait it's turn while say your CPU is busy grabbing all the bandwidth. I'd say many users have a lot of HD, CPU, GPU and network activity going on simultaneously, especially 'power' users. Hopefully we'll see some more benchmarks that show a variety of tasks being performed on these new machines once more people (and more reputable sites) get hold of the machines. While not fulfilling everyones dreams, I'm sure that the statements about the DDR RAM additions being a "waste" or "crippled" will be shown to be entirely false.
It will be very interesting to see how the rendering and composting compares to Apple's Quartz in OS X. Quartz brought a lot of nice effects to OS X, but slowed down the responsiveness of the GUI, especially on older hardware. At the time there was no way of using GPU's to directly accelerate a Postscript-based engine. Quartz Extreme has partially got around this by sending parts of the process through OpenGL. So how will this implementation get around the limitations of hardware acceleration and even in an 'unaccelerated' form how will it perform? Definitely one to watch methinks.
....all/. editors have been fitted with electrodes so you can force them to press accept for any story you submit. http://mindcontrol.slashdot.org/involuntarysubmiss ion.pl hmm actually that url brings some other possibilities to mind....
This isn't really the issue. I've been using various *nix derivatives on Apple hardware for years, most recently OS's like LinuxPPC - the precursor to penguinppc - and YDL (Yellow Dog Linux). Apple have had a hand in these efforts to some degree as well as creating A/UX some years back. But OS X in any of it's incarnations is not about competing directly with Linux, although this is one of it's effects. It's about bringing a friendly Mac OS to Mac users, hiding most of the sexy underpinnings from the users - although leaving them accessible to those of us who like playing:) Apple engineers themselves are giving a huge amount back to the community in the form of submitting code changes to the main trees oif many open projects, just look at the work done on gcc3. It's great that you can run Linux on Apple hardware, it's great that it performs extremely well, but it's not what everyone wants. What is good is that people have the choice. I suspect most people who bought Xserve's want an easily setup and administered friendly OS to use, else it's likely they would have gone for a purer Linux server, if cost was the only factor. The update for OS X Server may not be free, but for an unlimited user license, it still compares well to non-Linux solutions. That said, I do think Apple should be more loyal to those early adopters of hardware like the Xserve, it does seem people are being penalised for buying them ASAP. NOt a good PR move and no way to increase or hold on to loyal Mac heads.
"This is good news to people who just bought an expensive XServe with expensive Mac OS X Server "
OS X 10.2 is quite an expensive upgrade and the server version even moreso, especially when extras which bring out the most of 10.2 like QuicktimePro and.mac are included. That said, saying that the Xserve and OS X Server are expensive is ridiculous. The Xserve is an extremely well priced server for what it does, especially compared to competing servers. Also the version of OS X server included with the Xserve gives you unlimited clients, unlike say Windows 2k. If you don't believe Appl'es comments on this, there's always LinuxWorld's take on the subject: http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0724.m acx.html It's great news that Apple are taking note of criticism and opening up the up-to-date program, but don't confuse this argument by saying that the initial products themselves are expensive.
Yep, I've spent a while living in HK and there was an interesting period when through a number of reasons (including one video-rental chain gaining dominance then going under) VHS vanished. The fact that VCD's can be picked up on just about every corner in HK for HK$20 (ie a tenth of the cost of a DVD) or so helps too. And no, these are the legit ones! Most legit VCD's in HK have export licenses though, ie your not allowed to.
Re:Now begins the hardest part...
on
Ogg Vorbis 1.0
·
· Score: 1
the guys behind the scenes at the beeb were testing ogg vorbis streaming for a while - http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/ . Unfortunately the trail is now over although there are people trying to bring the streams back permanently. I really hope they do as the streams are now only in Real formats after Quicktime support was taken down last year.
From the website: Xbox Games: Project Gotham Racing, Halo, Tony Hawk, DOA, NFL Fever GameCube Games: Super Monkey Ball, Soccer Slam, SSX Tricky PlayStation2 Games: Gran Turismo, Virtua Fighter 4 I remember playing Doom on a projection screen at work years ago (okay so the training room was empty and I was supposed to be setting up the network, but you've gotta 'test' these things somehow) and it was great:) I agree with previous comments about how well these games will scale up tho. It will certainly be interesting to see which console (and game) ends up coming out on top in terms of eye-candy on screens this size...
I remember getting interested in the idea of asynchronous computing back in my Acorn using days. At the time Acorn had set up ARM and sent the company off on it's merry way, but all the users and developers of Acorn machines were looking for something a bit faster - ain't that always the way. The two big things that were setting the community buzzing were the collaboration with Digital (the now well known StrongARM chip) and the AMULET (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/amulet/) project at the University of Manchester. I've moved on from using Acorns but now own a number of ARM based devices - the Sharp Zaurus and Gameboy Advance. Forgive my soppy reminiscence, but it's good to see that even though Acorn themselves are no more (and even with RISC OS 4 the community is even smaller than it used to be) seeds which they planted and projects they were involved with are still going and being innovative. "From little Acorns grow...."
http://www.lucasarts.com/products/swkotor/ Useful , if for no other reason than the oh so perty trailer. http://www.lucasarts.com/products/swkotor/movies .j sp?ID=trailer Also handy to get a few more specs, gaze at artwork and rant in the forums;)
XServe - this was in effect part of WWDC, not during it, but the events were definitely linked. This is the only of the mentioned products that would really be considered a major launch and was specifically targeted to be launched at a non-consumer level event. eMac - Launch as a consumer machine was not in line with any of the larger events, launch as an education machine for that sector is again not something that would be considered a Keynote event. iPod - Was launched at MacExpo 2001, a UK event, good enough for a product launch, but obviously not good enough for Steve himself;) iBook - the redisigne was merely a product tweak, the same happened with the TiPb. Although many people including myself saw these revisions I cannot see a major PR event being based around Steve saying "Hey, there's a slightly faster processor and better GPU". Okay, so I'm being a bit nit-picky and am second-guessing Apple's thoughts and moves to a degree, but I don't believe Apple saw the above things as good PR opportunities and certainly not as Keynote material. On the other hand they do see Jaguar as this and have already made this view clear. Purely the fact that they were talking about it and publicly calling it by it's development name shows the hype they are creating, they'll want to release it with a bang. The sooner Apple get a better version of OS X out the door the better, but I believe a few more weeks of tweaking along with the chance for Steve to run around on stage at an event the world (at least the Mac world) will be focused on is something that Apple will not miss.
..or other big events are generally the only time Apple release anything new. Only minor updates to hardware and software are released in-between MacWorld's, Seybold's et al, Steve never being one to miss a big PR opportunity. This was one of the reasons for the axing of Apple sponsorship of the UK MacWorld and the re-scheduling of other apple events worldwide; if there isn't a big launch for Steve to put a show on about, then it's not worth the bother (in Apple's opinion). With this in mind I really can't see Apple not releasing Jaguar earlier than September, here they have both the Seybold (September 9-12 in San Francisco, CA) and Apple Expo Europe (September 10-14 in Paris). The extra time would certainly help tidy up any lose ends to make 10.2 all it is hoped it will be, as well as worth the expected upgrade fee.
I've been using the Ictopus and watching it's development for a while now (well, whenever I'm in HK) and find it a great system. Being able to get on trains, busses, ferries etc without having to fiddle about with small change is great. You can even get watches with Octopus functionality built-in (handy for kids). With 7-11's accepting them for small purchases, kids can again use their bus-fares for buying beer and fags!
..well in fact it's nice that for a change Europe was ahead on the recent price cuts of both the GC and xbox. Both are great consoles and both are reaching a price-mark that your average gamer can afford, and that's what consoles are all about. I really hope th GC holds its own and doesn't get pushed out by Sony or M$, with Sega out of the console hardware market, they're the only old-skool manufacturer left after all. ANother Gc variant worth checking out is the Panasonic Q. It's only officially availible in Japan, but plays just about everything you could wish for (mp3s, VCD's, DVD's, games etc and is availible modded to bypass zoning). http://www.dvdgame.jp/ and http://cube.ign.com/articles/097/097782p1.html
I certainly did, I remember being a kid/teenager and watching quite a few. I guess it depends on a number of age and social factors tho;) Accessibility may have changed in some ways, but getting a load of ppl round to watch an unreleased film used to be a big social occasion when I was younger. One video would get passed around god knows how many people.
For years people have been watching pirated videos copied from studios or screeners. The quality was often not been great, but neither are a lot of the first digital copies of films to appear. People have been copying radio, tv, vinyl, tapes, cd's etc for years. Copying and sharing is not a new thing, but it's being made out to be by certain organisations. I remember people making a fuss when recordable audio and video cassettes arrived on the scene. Have these killed the industry? No, they've grown larger and created new industries. Methodology may have changed, but what people do has not, well, not a great deal. Maybe new avenues have been opened, but isn't that what the Internet is all about? Opening new doors, broadening horizons, breaking down barriers. Lets not use new technology to create extra barriers to peoples freedom and creativity.
Looks like a good card, but there's still no mention of support for non Windows, non x86 or non DirectX support. In some of the earlier 'previews' there was talk of OpenGL 2.0, which I'm sure this card will theoretically be compliant with (once the ARB settle on the specs of course). But what of support for Linux, BSD, OS X. Does the hardware support both big and little endian? It's fair that Matrox are pushing the DirectX 8.1 (and 9 no doubt) and Windows thing now, but when will we hear about other possibilities?
Slashdot Mirror
..has recently been released, this is the massively updated layer beneath OS X 10.2 (aka jaguar aka jagwire). At the moment only the PPC binary installer is available, the x86 version is apparently on it's way, until then there's always the older 1.4.1 x86 version. IMHO it's good that Apple are keeping both the source and binary Darwin distribs up to date. A Whole bunch of the engineers at apple are heavily committed to open-sourcing (and not just those you'd expect like Jordan Hubbard). Using the Darwin Core and something like Fink or DarwinPorts you can end up with a nice and 'free' OS with Xfree86, KDE et al.
I fully agree. Last year I was at GDCE doing research at tying to get info from both ATI and nVidia for articles I was writing. all the people from ATI I met were fantastic, I spoke to a few of the heavy engineers (huge kudos to Alex Vlachos and Jason Mitchell) along with the PR and Product Management people. They all went massively went out of their way to help me and inform me, answering any questions I had, burning me cd's of demos, pics, info, etc and following up further technical questions via e-mails and phone calls after the conference was over. This was the overall attitude of ATI at the conference.
Next we come to nVidia, I repeatedly came up against a brick wall, the case was the same for other developers, with David Kirk doing a fine politician-style non-answering of questions after his presentation. You generally got the impression that there were a select few that may be lucky enough to be given certain information, but it was very much on nVidia's terms.
Fair enough, companies have secrets which they need to keep, but from my experiences with the companies, ATI are far far more open. If anything this article backs that up. Would you prefer a bundle of photos or a chance to talk with a variety of the actual engineers?
AFAIK iSync is in beta and will be available pretty much on schedule - end of september. I think Apple are using ical to push their .mac services for now rather than it's integration with iSync, which I'm sure will follow.
iCal uses an industry-standard iCalendar (.ics) specification. This is a text file that can be easily shared on the Internet. For more information on the iCalendar format, see http://www.imc.org/pdi/ or RFC2445. So yes, it's documented rather well and is far from a proprietary thing, you can relatively easily setup your own .mac iCal style server :)
Mac's have had DMA support for a long time in both hardware and software, see this technote and the Developer Notes on hardware here for details. This includes the original clamshell iBooks. The iBooks may not have the fastest drives or interfaces but I don't think this is the problem. It's much more likely a Virtual Memory issue with lots of caching going on. check the contents of /private/var/vm/ for the number of 80Mb swapfiles you have, also try issuing vm_stat from the CLI to see whats going on. Two suggestions, either get more RAM or setup a 'clean' swap-drive partition.
...then open up your Q3A console and type "/r_stereo 1" followed by "/vid_restart" ;)
(change the value of cg_stereoSeparation to suit your taste)
...I may read it if there was a downloadable version (other than AvantGo). But the combination of the bad comments here, my trudge through the first few paragraphs and the lack of an easy way to get it onto my Zaurus so I can read it on the toilet means I'll probably give the full thing a miss. ;)
I'm not convinced that it's aimed at the 'geek demographic' either, whatever that is
So we have an article which misses a few important points at the generally iffy barefeats, this is then compounded by the comment "cannot access the memory any faster than the cheaper and slower SDRAM" which misses the mark even further. It's a real shame when these things spread around as "the truth" especially on somewhere like slashdot.
Yes the new motherboards are not full DDR, this is mainly because the processors available from Motorola cannot handle DDR FSB's and therefore a full DDR motherboard. This is a shame, but it is far from crippled DDR RAM. Many early DDR RAM x86 motherboards were the same, only the RAM was DDR, not the full motherboard and processor FSB. While this does mean there is still a bottleneck (in certain tasks) between the processor and other components there are advantages to having DDR RAM. The tests at barefeats are using purely CPU limited operations, which will obviously show no real improvement as there has been no CPU or bus change (although the new 1Ghz procs have only 1Mb of DDR L3 cache versus the old 2Mb DDR and a 167Mhz bus version is available). What DDR RAM will help with is when there are a variety of components (CPU, HD, network, AGP, PCI, Firewire, etc) all vying for valuable memory bandwidth. It's these 'real-world' situations when we will see a performance increase. If you just run single process, purely CPU intensive tasks then maybe these machines aren't for you, but if you run a lot of stuff at the same time, or anything that uses CPU, HD, AGP etc intensively and concurrently then you should see an improvement. Things like Quartz Extreme will be throwing a LOT of data at the AGP bus, with DDR RAM this won't have to wait it's turn while say your CPU is busy grabbing all the bandwidth. I'd say many users have a lot of HD, CPU, GPU and network activity going on simultaneously, especially 'power' users. Hopefully we'll see some more benchmarks that show a variety of tasks being performed on these new machines once more people (and more reputable sites) get hold of the machines. While not fulfilling everyones dreams, I'm sure that the statements about the DDR RAM additions being a "waste" or "crippled" will be shown to be entirely false.
It will be very interesting to see how the rendering and composting compares to Apple's Quartz in OS X. Quartz brought a lot of nice effects to OS X, but slowed down the responsiveness of the GUI, especially on older hardware. At the time there was no way of using GPU's to directly accelerate a Postscript-based engine. Quartz Extreme has partially got around this by sending parts of the process through OpenGL.
So how will this implementation get around the limitations of hardware acceleration and even in an 'unaccelerated' form how will it perform? Definitely one to watch methinks.
....all /. editors have been fitted with electrodes so you can force them to press accept for any story you submit. http://mindcontrol.slashdot.org/involuntarysubmiss ion.pl
hmm actually that url brings some other possibilities to mind....
This isn't really the issue. I've been using various *nix derivatives on Apple hardware for years, most recently OS's like LinuxPPC - the precursor to penguinppc - and YDL (Yellow Dog Linux). Apple have had a hand in these efforts to some degree as well as creating A/UX some years back. But OS X in any of it's incarnations is not about competing directly with Linux, although this is one of it's effects. It's about bringing a friendly Mac OS to Mac users, hiding most of the sexy underpinnings from the users - although leaving them accessible to those of us who like playing :) Apple engineers themselves are giving a huge amount back to the community in the form of submitting code changes to the main trees oif many open projects, just look at the work done on gcc3.
It's great that you can run Linux on Apple hardware, it's great that it performs extremely well, but it's not what everyone wants. What is good is that people have the choice.
I suspect most people who bought Xserve's want an easily setup and administered friendly OS to use, else it's likely they would have gone for a purer Linux server, if cost was the only factor. The update for OS X Server may not be free, but for an unlimited user license, it still compares well to non-Linux solutions. That said, I do think Apple should be more loyal to those early adopters of hardware like the Xserve, it does seem people are being penalised for buying them ASAP. NOt a good PR move and no way to increase or hold on to loyal Mac heads.
"This is good news to people who just bought an expensive XServe with expensive Mac OS X Server "
.mac are included. That said, saying that the Xserve and OS X Server are expensive is ridiculous. The Xserve is an extremely well priced server for what it does, especially compared to competing servers. Also the version of OS X server included with the Xserve gives you unlimited clients, unlike say Windows 2k. If you don't believe Appl'es comments on this, there's always LinuxWorld's take on the subject: http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2002/0724.m acx.html
OS X 10.2 is quite an expensive upgrade and the server version even moreso, especially when extras which bring out the most of 10.2 like QuicktimePro and
It's great news that Apple are taking note of criticism and opening up the up-to-date program, but don't confuse this argument by saying that the initial products themselves are expensive.
Yep, I've spent a while living in HK and there was an interesting period when through a number of reasons (including one video-rental chain gaining dominance then going under) VHS vanished. The fact that VCD's can be picked up on just about every corner in HK for HK$20 (ie a tenth of the cost of a DVD) or so helps too. And no, these are the legit ones! Most legit VCD's in HK have export licenses though, ie your not allowed to.
the guys behind the scenes at the beeb were testing ogg vorbis streaming for a while - http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/ . Unfortunately the trail is now over although there are people trying to bring the streams back permanently. I really hope they do as the streams are now only in Real formats after Quicktime support was taken down last year.
From the website: :)
Xbox Games: Project Gotham Racing, Halo, Tony Hawk, DOA, NFL Fever
GameCube Games: Super Monkey Ball, Soccer Slam, SSX Tricky
PlayStation2 Games: Gran Turismo, Virtua Fighter 4
I remember playing Doom on a projection screen at work years ago (okay so the training room was empty and I was supposed to be setting up the network, but you've gotta 'test' these things somehow) and it was great
I agree with previous comments about how well these games will scale up tho. It will certainly be interesting to see which console (and game) ends up coming out on top in terms of eye-candy on screens this size...
I remember getting interested in the idea of asynchronous computing back in my Acorn using days. At the time Acorn had set up ARM and sent the company off on it's merry way, but all the users and developers of Acorn machines were looking for something a bit faster - ain't that always the way. The two big things that were setting the community buzzing were the collaboration with Digital (the now well known StrongARM chip) and the AMULET (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/amulet/) project at the University of Manchester. I've moved on from using Acorns but now own a number of ARM based devices - the Sharp Zaurus and Gameboy Advance. Forgive my soppy reminiscence, but it's good to see that even though Acorn themselves are no more (and even with RISC OS 4 the community is even smaller than it used to be) seeds which they planted and projects they were involved with are still going and being innovative. "From little Acorns grow...."
http://www.lucasarts.com/products/swkotor/l , if for no other reason than the oh so perty trailer. s .j sp?ID=trailer ;)
Usefu
http://www.lucasarts.com/products/swkotor/movie
Also handy to get a few more specs, gaze at artwork and rant in the forums
XServe - this was in effect part of WWDC, not during it, but the events were definitely linked. This is the only of the mentioned products that would really be considered a major launch and was specifically targeted to be launched at a non-consumer level event. ;)
eMac - Launch as a consumer machine was not in line with any of the larger events, launch as an education machine for that sector is again not something that would be considered a Keynote event.
iPod - Was launched at MacExpo 2001, a UK event, good enough for a product launch, but obviously not good enough for Steve himself
iBook - the redisigne was merely a product tweak, the same happened with the TiPb. Although many people including myself saw these revisions I cannot see a major PR event being based around Steve saying "Hey, there's a slightly faster processor and better GPU".
Okay, so I'm being a bit nit-picky and am second-guessing Apple's thoughts and moves to a degree, but I don't believe Apple saw the above things as good PR opportunities and certainly not as Keynote material. On the other hand they do see Jaguar as this and have already made this view clear. Purely the fact that they were talking about it and publicly calling it by it's development name shows the hype they are creating, they'll want to release it with a bang. The sooner Apple get a better version of OS X out the door the better, but I believe a few more weeks of tweaking along with the chance for Steve to run around on stage at an event the world (at least the Mac world) will be focused on is something that Apple will not miss.
..or other big events are generally the only time Apple release anything new. Only minor updates to hardware and software are released in-between MacWorld's, Seybold's et al, Steve never being one to miss a big PR opportunity. This was one of the reasons for the axing of Apple sponsorship of the UK MacWorld and the re-scheduling of other apple events worldwide; if there isn't a big launch for Steve to put a show on about, then it's not worth the bother (in Apple's opinion).
With this in mind I really can't see Apple not releasing Jaguar earlier than September, here they have both the Seybold (September 9-12 in San Francisco, CA) and Apple Expo Europe (September 10-14 in Paris). The extra time would certainly help tidy up any lose ends to make 10.2 all it is hoped it will be, as well as worth the expected upgrade fee.
I've been using the Ictopus and watching it's development for a while now (well, whenever I'm in HK) and find it a great system. Being able to get on trains, busses, ferries etc without having to fiddle about with small change is great. You can even get watches with Octopus functionality built-in (handy for kids).
With 7-11's accepting them for small purchases, kids can again use their bus-fares for buying beer and fags!
..well in fact it's nice that for a change Europe was ahead on the recent price cuts of both the GC and xbox. Both are great consoles and both are reaching a price-mark that your average gamer can afford, and that's what consoles are all about. I really hope th GC holds its own and doesn't get pushed out by Sony or M$, with Sega out of the console hardware market, they're the only old-skool manufacturer left after all. ANother Gc variant worth checking out is the Panasonic Q. It's only officially availible in Japan, but plays just about everything you could wish for (mp3s, VCD's, DVD's, games etc and is availible modded to bypass zoning). http://www.dvdgame.jp/ and http://cube.ign.com/articles/097/097782p1.html
I certainly did, I remember being a kid/teenager and watching quite a few. I guess it depends on a number of age and social factors tho ;)
Accessibility may have changed in some ways, but getting a load of ppl round to watch an unreleased film used to be a big social occasion when I was younger. One video would get passed around god knows how many people.
For years people have been watching pirated videos copied from studios or screeners. The quality was often not been great, but neither are a lot of the first digital copies of films to appear. People have been copying radio, tv, vinyl, tapes, cd's etc for years. Copying and sharing is not a new thing, but it's being made out to be by certain organisations. I remember people making a fuss when recordable audio and video cassettes arrived on the scene. Have these killed the industry? No, they've grown larger and created new industries. Methodology may have changed, but what people do has not, well, not a great deal. Maybe new avenues have been opened, but isn't that what the Internet is all about? Opening new doors, broadening horizons, breaking down barriers. Lets not use new technology to create extra barriers to peoples freedom and creativity.
Looks like a good card, but there's still no mention of support for non Windows, non x86 or non DirectX support.
In some of the earlier 'previews' there was talk of OpenGL 2.0, which I'm sure this card will theoretically be compliant with (once the ARB settle on the specs of course). But what of support for Linux, BSD, OS X. Does the hardware support both big and little endian?
It's fair that Matrox are pushing the DirectX 8.1 (and 9 no doubt) and Windows thing now, but when will we hear about other possibilities?
...and thanks for all the fish.
nuff said.