I'm sorry, but I'm fairly certain that these school districts have football teams along with swimming pools, etc. I know of a local school (Manheim Central) who prides itself on having a killer football team. God knows what would happen if one day they didn't have one. My guess is that the funding of the team always manages to get through.
I wonder if these same schools are struggling for a tech budget while sports are funded this way. That would be the first question I'd have for the Racine district (in the article).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against sports in school per se, BUT... I AM against funding non-academic activities over academic ones. What are the priorities for funding here?
"Funny, when I'm booting Windows, I often find myself wishing it was more like *nix in booting, so I could actually, you know, *see* whatever the hell it does while booting up."
Uh, you can - simply F8 and read the options at boot time. You can watch a lot of that going on in Safe Mode - more if you enable boot logging. The idea behind MacOS and Windows is that 95% of the users out there could care less about the technical side of things. Command line scares the crap out of techno-phobic people.
"Here's a hood... it can protect you in a snowstorm, or you can use it to rob a bank. Ban hoods!"
Check out this article from the 'Australian'...
"ITALY has banned Islamic burqas under tough terrorism laws that provide two-year jail terms and E2000 ($3200) fines for anyone caught covering their face in a public place.
The counter-terrorism package, passed by Italy's parliament yesterday, doubles the existing penalty for wearing a burqa or chador -- traditional robes worn by Muslim women to cover their faces -- or full-faced helmets or balaclavas in public.
Police can extract DNA samples without a suspect's consent, detain them for 24 hours without a lawyer present, and deport foreigners suspected of terrorism under the new legislation. Soldiers involved in counter-terrorism have been given the same stop-and-search powers.
The changes, approved in a rare show of bipartisanship, came as Italian police arrested a fugitive hunted by British police over the bungled bombing attempt in London on July 21. "
"we're all responsible for our ills, in one way or another."
Well... Kinda. To paraphrase Billy Joel, 'We didn't start the fire...' Most of use didn't implement these sorts of things or control the general direction. There's simply too much for one human brain to handle - and most humans aren't real technically minded to begin with.
All we can do is begin to address and redress already existing ills as we discover them. I believe we are only responsible if we know about it and do nothing.
Ahahaha! Yeah man, go! So funny, I have a couple for the same purpose (thankfully unused). Here's how I obtained my first sample in yet another short anecdote:
Many years ago, I worked for Electronics Boutique (don't get me started on THAT). We had an Amiga 500 (which I upgraded the memory with my own money to something USEFUL) and I used to run all manner of demos and the like on it.
We got a rare visit from a C= rep and I asked him for some more demos. He was happy to assist and within days I got 20+ discs with all sorts of stuff (mainly Newtek demos).
A few days later some of the games I had stopped working and then one day, everything faded out and I got this cryptic message:
'Something wonderful has happened Your AMIGA is alive !!! and, even better... Some of your disks are infected by a VIRUS !!! Another masterpiece of The Mega-Mighty SCA !!'
Yeah, GREAT. Guess where it came from? Yep. C=. How did I know? Because I never had any problems before I received the disks from the rep, and almost all of his disks had the virus INCLUDING THE WRITE PROTECTED ONES.
I called the rep back and tried to warn him, but apparently he wasn't in. Ever again. God, C= had a problem keeping people back then!:)
Funny, I'm trying to convert everyone at home also - hence my sig. If you see any future posts from me, I usually rotate the holidays from Labor Day to Thanksgiving to Christmas, Easter, etc.
It does amaze me though. I'm not a smart-ass about what I know, but when my parents or relatives DON'T take my advice about something technical it bothers me for some reason.:)
That funny comment reminded me of something I saw years ago touring the old Commodore plant in West Chester, PA.
Somewhere in the piles of stuff I have accumulated over the years I have a picture. It's a picture of a picture frame encompassing an internal floppy drive embedded in the drywall behind it.
The story goes that an engineer was up all hours of the night trying to debug a problem with his new floppy drive circuitry. After hours and hours of fruitless troubleshooting, he discovered that the problem wasn't with the circuitry, it was with the drive itself. The frustrated engineer picked up said floppy drive and whipped it at the wall - where it became one with it. The picture frame was later added for decoration.
Whose responsibility was it to insure that IBM's equipment wasn't used for nefarious purposes by Hitler's regime? Who was there to tell IBM that their equipment might be used to sort people like worthless cargo at concentration camps?
I would argue that it was EVERYONE'S responsibility - although no one seemed to think about it at that time. This time there is a clear indication what China is up to and that this equipment is clearly being used in a manner inconsistent with our values.
I sure didn't know the entire history there with Stern - thanks. But it doesn't change the overall landscape. Stern is there and no one else is. That said, I sure do miss Williams pinballs - best in the world for sure!
I think we can be reasonably sure that the next generation of consoles, while not living up to the extreme hype machine, will be extremely powerful nonetheless. Nintendo is simply not planning to keep up with them in the flash and glitz department - and that's ok with me. As long as they continue to produce quality games it may not matter to their main base of gamers.
Sony and MS have a lot to make up for - these machines aren't going to be cheap and in Sony's case, it seems as though they'll be eating half the cost on each unit themselves! These companies are huge and can write off a billion or two, but Nintendo is not in that position - they need to be cautious.
No, I don't see Sony or MS dropping out of the gaming market anytime soon, but my opinion is that Nintendo doesn't need them to. If they stay the course I think they'll get a reasonable share of the pie.
Stern Electronics is probably the best example I could give to refute those who think profitability is so bad.
Stern are the only remaining pinball manufacturers in the world. Midway/Williams, Gottlieb, Sega, Atari, you name it - all gone.
How did Stern survive? Well, they never were into the glitsy uber-electronic versions of pinball that Midway and Sega were killing themselves over. They simply did a simple thing: made FUN pinballs modestly.
Eventually, their competitors priced themselves out of the market or found more profitable venues (Midway's arcade division produces gambling machines). With Sony and Microsoft not even close to breaking even after all this time, you know the next generation will be even worse for them. The PS3 is practically a supercomputer in console form, and the 360 will be more powerful than just about any PC you can put together.
The ultimate question is: will they EVER turn a profit? I don't believe they will and in the meantime, Nintendo may experience a loss in sales to older, more demanding gamers, but they will continue to sail on through and IN THE BLACK.
Remember their past - it's no different than their future. It's strengths are:
- Low cost on console / handheld tech - LOTS of cool intellectual property like Mario and Pokemon - Appeals to younger kids who don't yet get all the killing and bloodfests competitor consoles push.
My son is 7 years old. Given the choice of consoles he is always going back to either the Gamecube in the den or his SNES (yeah, used to be mine) in his room. He needs games that require little or no reading ability and have a 'fun factor' like Mario Sunshine / World.
As long as Nintendo stays the course, parents like me will continue to choose them for their children. The Revoution - Nintendo's next console - is going to make a big deal about repackaging their older, still enjoyable, games. First person shooters and complicated racing/RPG/strategy games are out of the equation for my little boy at this stage.
Of course the idea of intellectual property works best in a capitalistic society - it is truly foreign to a Communist nation. Our 'Western obsession' has served us quite well so far.
What exactly will such a nation 'blow past us' on anyway? Democracy? Individual rights? Freedom of expression? That all plays into development of technology in the first place. Take that away and the impetus is gone also.
You know mother Russia also had a great deal of our technology for years but until the embargo of high tech stuff, they did very little development (or anything not military) on their own.
"Will Sony give you payola to load JLo's "Get Right" on your iPod? Is it enough to make you listen to it too?"
So I'm not the only one who thinks "Get Right" is the worst piece of garbage since UB40's "Red, Red, Wine?" It took 15+ years to knock that song off my most hated song list but JLo managed to do it.
God, that song is f*cking irritating! Sony would have to pay me A LOT indeed! It's the kind of song that, years from now, will still have a novelty following... Like "Ice, Ice, Baby"... Unfortunately.
" I agree; bin Laden is being assisted by a lot of people. Now why do you think that is?"
For the same reason Hitler was followed by normally well-adjusted people. He's formed a cult of personality and moves a lot of people to do bad things in his name. He has his reasons for hating the U.S., but apparently he loves our money and technology.
Bin Laden has (like Hitler) found a way to tap into the cultural and religous strengths of Arabs and twist it into something horrific. America has done NOTHING to warrent these types of attacks on innocent civilians.
I saw you equate Bush with Bin Laden in an earlier post and I can only think that you'd also agree that Camp Gitmo is somehow comparible to Soviet gulags and Pol Pot. Give me a physical break!
Do the country a favor will you? Put away your hatred (which is really fear) for G.W. and think what's best for the country. I think the DNC will find that they will win elections again when they learn how to do more than criticize and whine.
Sure seems like it - how something like this gets modded up I'll never know.
Why do they hate us? Well shit - it's not just the US/UK they hate after all! Let's compile a list shall we?
- The Russians (because of Afghanistan and Chechnya) - The east Indians (because of Kashmir) - The Isrealis (because of the Palistinians) - Anyone else who dares to defy 'Allah's Will' - whatever the Imam says it is this week.
The radicalized 'religion of peace' is destoying much progress made in the Arab world. Whole governments are being held hostage by these wackjobs and there is a common thread that a lot of people from the West do not understand - it's all about control.
With Democracy, with so-called human rights, women are given more power. In radical Islam, the women have less rights than most farm animals and here's the thing: THE MEN WANT TO KEEP IT THAT WAY. It is one of the many appealing reasons why this way of life is being defended by use of terror and intimidation at every level. It all starts (or started) at home.
When you see these videos (and yes, they were on Fox News also), you need to grasp them in context. Were these shots taken from the Sunni triangle after a few soldiers found their buddies burnt bodies strung up on a bridge somewhere? Were these people themselves intimidated to put up a fleeing suspect?
The images are never enough by themselves to tell the whole story.
It was stable. It had class. It was predictable in almost any environment. It scaled well between servers, ATMS, backend stuff and workstations. And, at least in the implementations I saw, it was efficient as hell.
I worked for Meridian Bank back in the early 90's as a simple integration tech. Everything was cool - then came the buyout. It's inevitable - every bank eventually gets bought by another bank, and it happened on my shift on fine day.
A lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of 'redundant' branches were closed. But for me, worse things happened. You see, Corestates was still using strung together DOS scripts and it was messy. User's workstations were downgraded to Novell/DOS/Win 3.11 with the OS loading on 4 or 16 Megabit Token Ring. On Audit Day (Wednesday), a user could expect to wait up to 15 minutes for their machine to boot into the network. It was ugly, the users hated us... Hell, I hated us! I didn't leave that job soon enough.
Everyone there missed their 32-bit OS and as this was one year before Windows 95, it would be several years before they started getting 95/NT on the desktop. The horror!
But my point is that it took a while - and let's not forget Sega's history. The Dreamcast happened right on the heels of the Saturn, a dismally designed failure.
The PS2 succeeded in spite of itself because game companies had more faith in Sony's ability to stay afloat and support (however poorly) it's machine for the long haul. That's a success of marketing more than anything.
RTFA and you'll see that the programmers are 'playing' with the new shader tech - it IS different in that it offers so much that coders will need to 'play' to figure out what can be acheived. That process takes development time.
And Anandtech's article on the Cell goes into great detail on the complexities of Cell's design. It's not insurmountable, but it IS going to take more dev time to get things right.
The good news for Sony is that their new baby is more balanced in power than the PS2 (4 MB GFX RAM - WHAT were they thinking?!) was.
Except that I don't trust Sony to come through with well documented, well written libraries - especially if the past is any indication. I think the 'reality' is that it will take time for all this to come together. A long time.
"Anandtech??? Give me a fucking break. x86 peecee fanboy site posts garbage article about console hardware."
Er... Anandtech has ALWAYS been even handed - and I've read that article. It was a step by step dissection of the Cell - mostly positive - but REALISTIC.
PS3 scene demos aren't full blown games. Time will tell but just don't be surprised if you're still playing the same three games six months after the PS3 launch.
Uhmmm.. Would you not agree that the Cell processor is a different processor than most? Figuring out how to keep 8 separate processors full (but not TOO full), is going to be bitch. Stop lying.
As to the DirectX rant, yeah.. Didn't work for the PC or Xbox, right? So... What MS should've done is completely start from scratch (like Sony again)? Are you really that stupid? Why not give the programmers stuff they understand?
Again, no reason to be upset. I'm sure the PS3 will do fine... Once the machine is actually released... Once polished game appear... Hmmmm...
Let's not get in a tiff over pre-rendering, ok? Plenty of THAT to go around!
Quite frankly (and don't take this the wrong way), I don't give a shit WHO comes out on top - although keep in mind that history has shown that the best designs usually lose.
All I'm saying is while I think it's just great that programmers have this wonderful, liberating machine, it IS significantly more complex and even alien to code for - don't try and BS people into believing otherwise.
The article suggests to me that the programmers are still 'playing' and 'discovering' with the hardware and that suggests to me that Sony hasn't done it's job in the software department. Like the PS2, a lot of stuff is probably going to have to be done from scratch.
If the XBOX 360 gets a 6 month jump on Sony, the results by the time the PS3 launches will be obvious. Sony's hardware may be more powerful in some respects, but the amount of work that needs to be done by the programmers is daunting.
While actual code is being written on the 360 side, my guess is the coders on the PS3 side are doing what this article suggests - feeling out the hardware. It means that a lot of the development environment is unfinished or at least unkempt. You've got a lot of power there, but learning to wield it is going to take quite some time - ESPECIALLY with the Cell processor.
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I'm sorry, but I'm fairly certain that these school districts have football teams along with swimming pools, etc. I know of a local school (Manheim Central) who prides itself on having a killer football team. God knows what would happen if one day they didn't have one. My guess is that the funding of the team always manages to get through.
I wonder if these same schools are struggling for a tech budget while sports are funded this way. That would be the first question I'd have for the Racine district (in the article).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against sports in school per se, BUT... I AM against funding non-academic activities over academic ones. What are the priorities for funding here?
"So, what are the players to do?"
Uh... Switch to soccer (footbol)?
GOOOOOOOOooooooooaaaaaaallllllll!!!
Opt-in Real Big?
"Funny, when I'm booting Windows, I often find myself wishing it was more like *nix in booting, so I could actually, you know, *see* whatever the hell it does while booting up."
Uh, you can - simply F8 and read the options at boot time. You can watch a lot of that going on in Safe Mode - more if you enable boot logging. The idea behind MacOS and Windows is that 95% of the users out there could care less about the technical side of things. Command line scares the crap out of techno-phobic people.
"Here's a hood ... it can protect you in a snowstorm, or you can use it to rob a bank. Ban hoods!"
Check out this article from the 'Australian'...
"ITALY has banned Islamic burqas under tough terrorism laws that provide two-year jail terms and E2000 ($3200) fines for anyone caught covering their face in a public place.
The counter-terrorism package, passed by Italy's parliament yesterday, doubles the existing penalty for wearing a burqa or chador -- traditional robes worn by Muslim women to cover their faces -- or full-faced helmets or balaclavas in public.
Police can extract DNA samples without a suspect's consent, detain them for 24 hours without a lawyer present, and deport foreigners suspected of terrorism under the new legislation. Soldiers involved in counter-terrorism have been given the same stop-and-search powers.
The changes, approved in a rare show of bipartisanship, came as Italian police arrested a fugitive hunted by British police over the bungled bombing attempt in London on July 21. "
"we're all responsible for our ills, in one way or another."
Well... Kinda. To paraphrase Billy Joel, 'We didn't start the fire...' Most of use didn't implement these sorts of things or control the general direction. There's simply too much for one human brain to handle - and most humans aren't real technically minded to begin with.
All we can do is begin to address and redress already existing ills as we discover them. I believe we are only responsible if we know about it and do nothing.
Ahahaha! Yeah man, go! So funny, I have a couple for the same purpose (thankfully unused). Here's how I obtained my first sample in yet another short anecdote:
:)
Many years ago, I worked for Electronics Boutique (don't get me started on THAT). We had an Amiga 500 (which I upgraded the memory with my own money to something USEFUL) and I used to run all manner of demos and the like on it.
We got a rare visit from a C= rep and I asked him for some more demos. He was happy to assist and within days I got 20+ discs with all sorts of stuff (mainly Newtek demos).
A few days later some of the games I had stopped working and then one day, everything faded out and I got this cryptic message:
'Something wonderful has happened Your AMIGA is alive !!! and, even better... Some of your disks are infected by a VIRUS !!! Another masterpiece of The Mega-Mighty SCA !!'
Yeah, GREAT. Guess where it came from? Yep. C=. How did I know? Because I never had any problems before I received the disks from the rep, and almost all of his disks had the virus INCLUDING THE WRITE PROTECTED ONES.
I called the rep back and tried to warn him, but apparently he wasn't in. Ever again. God, C= had a problem keeping people back then!
Funny, I'm trying to convert everyone at home also - hence my sig. If you see any future posts from me, I usually rotate the holidays from Labor Day to Thanksgiving to Christmas, Easter, etc.
:)
It does amaze me though. I'm not a smart-ass about what I know, but when my parents or relatives DON'T take my advice about something technical it bothers me for some reason.
That funny comment reminded me of something I saw years ago touring the old Commodore plant in West Chester, PA.
Somewhere in the piles of stuff I have accumulated over the years I have a picture. It's a picture of a picture frame encompassing an internal floppy drive embedded in the drywall behind it.
The story goes that an engineer was up all hours of the night trying to debug a problem with his new floppy drive circuitry. After hours and hours of fruitless troubleshooting, he discovered that the problem wasn't with the circuitry, it was with the drive itself. The frustrated engineer picked up said floppy drive and whipped it at the wall - where it became one with it. The picture frame was later added for decoration.
Whose responsibility was it to insure that IBM's equipment wasn't used for nefarious purposes by Hitler's regime? Who was there to tell IBM that their equipment might be used to sort people like worthless cargo at concentration camps?
I would argue that it was EVERYONE'S responsibility - although no one seemed to think about it at that time. This time there is a clear indication what China is up to and that this equipment is clearly being used in a manner inconsistent with our values.
I sure didn't know the entire history there with Stern - thanks. But it doesn't change the overall landscape. Stern is there and no one else is. That said, I sure do miss Williams pinballs - best in the world for sure!
I think we can be reasonably sure that the next generation of consoles, while not living up to the extreme hype machine, will be extremely powerful nonetheless. Nintendo is simply not planning to keep up with them in the flash and glitz department - and that's ok with me. As long as they continue to produce quality games it may not matter to their main base of gamers.
Sony and MS have a lot to make up for - these machines aren't going to be cheap and in Sony's case, it seems as though they'll be eating half the cost on each unit themselves! These companies are huge and can write off a billion or two, but Nintendo is not in that position - they need to be cautious.
No, I don't see Sony or MS dropping out of the gaming market anytime soon, but my opinion is that Nintendo doesn't need them to. If they stay the course I think they'll get a reasonable share of the pie.
Stern Electronics is probably the best example I could give to refute those who think profitability is so bad.
Stern are the only remaining pinball manufacturers in the world. Midway/Williams, Gottlieb, Sega, Atari, you name it - all gone.
How did Stern survive? Well, they never were into the glitsy uber-electronic versions of pinball that Midway and Sega were killing themselves over. They simply did a simple thing: made FUN pinballs modestly.
Eventually, their competitors priced themselves out of the market or found more profitable venues (Midway's arcade division produces gambling machines). With Sony and Microsoft not even close to breaking even after all this time, you know the next generation will be even worse for them. The PS3 is practically a supercomputer in console form, and the 360 will be more powerful than just about any PC you can put together.
The ultimate question is: will they EVER turn a profit? I don't believe they will and in the meantime, Nintendo may experience a loss in sales to older, more demanding gamers, but they will continue to sail on through and IN THE BLACK.
Remember their past - it's no different than their future. It's strengths are:
- Low cost on console / handheld tech
- LOTS of cool intellectual property like Mario and Pokemon
- Appeals to younger kids who don't yet get all the killing and bloodfests competitor consoles push.
My son is 7 years old. Given the choice of consoles he is always going back to either the Gamecube in the den or his SNES (yeah, used to be mine) in his room. He needs games that require little or no reading ability and have a 'fun factor' like Mario Sunshine / World.
As long as Nintendo stays the course, parents like me will continue to choose them for their children. The Revoution - Nintendo's next console - is going to make a big deal about repackaging their older, still enjoyable, games. First person shooters and complicated racing/RPG/strategy games are out of the equation for my little boy at this stage.
Can't wait for Mario DDR on the GC!
Of course the idea of intellectual property works best in a capitalistic society - it is truly foreign to a Communist nation. Our 'Western obsession' has served us quite well so far.
What exactly will such a nation 'blow past us' on anyway? Democracy? Individual rights? Freedom of expression? That all plays into development of technology in the first place. Take that away and the impetus is gone also.
You know mother Russia also had a great deal of our technology for years but until the embargo of high tech stuff, they did very little development (or anything not military) on their own.
"Will Sony give you payola to load JLo's "Get Right" on your iPod? Is it enough to make you listen to it too?"
So I'm not the only one who thinks "Get Right" is the worst piece of garbage since UB40's "Red, Red, Wine?" It took 15+ years to knock that song off my most hated song list but JLo managed to do it.
God, that song is f*cking irritating! Sony would have to pay me A LOT indeed! It's the kind of song that, years from now, will still have a novelty following... Like "Ice, Ice, Baby"... Unfortunately.
"Word to your mother"
Condoms!
" I agree; bin Laden is being assisted by a lot of people. Now why do you think that is?"
For the same reason Hitler was followed by normally well-adjusted people. He's formed a cult of personality and moves a lot of people to do bad things in his name. He has his reasons for hating the U.S., but apparently he loves our money and technology.
Bin Laden has (like Hitler) found a way to tap into the cultural and religous strengths of Arabs and twist it into something horrific. America has done NOTHING to warrent these types of attacks on innocent civilians.
I saw you equate Bush with Bin Laden in an earlier post and I can only think that you'd also agree that Camp Gitmo is somehow comparible to Soviet gulags and Pol Pot. Give me a physical break!
Do the country a favor will you? Put away your hatred (which is really fear) for G.W. and think what's best for the country. I think the DNC will find that they will win elections again when they learn how to do more than criticize and whine.
Sure seems like it - how something like this gets modded up I'll never know.
Why do they hate us? Well shit - it's not just the US/UK they hate after all! Let's compile a list shall we?
- The Russians (because of Afghanistan and Chechnya)
- The east Indians (because of Kashmir)
- The Isrealis (because of the Palistinians)
- Anyone else who dares to defy 'Allah's Will' - whatever the Imam says it is this week.
The radicalized 'religion of peace' is destoying much progress made in the Arab world. Whole governments are being held hostage by these wackjobs and there is a common thread that a lot of people from the West do not understand - it's all about control.
With Democracy, with so-called human rights, women are given more power. In radical Islam, the women have less rights than most farm animals and here's the thing: THE MEN WANT TO KEEP IT THAT WAY. It is one of the many appealing reasons why this way of life is being defended by use of terror and intimidation at every level. It all starts (or started) at home.
When you see these videos (and yes, they were on Fox News also), you need to grasp them in context. Were these shots taken from the Sunni triangle after a few soldiers found their buddies burnt bodies strung up on a bridge somewhere? Were these people themselves intimidated to put up a fleeing suspect?
The images are never enough by themselves to tell the whole story.
"That must explain why we still haven't caught bin Laden."
Yeah... You know they still haven't found that Holloway girl in Aruba either - and I assure you, that country's a LOT smaller.
Let's cut to the chase - Bin Laden is being assisted by people - a LOT of people. A guy can hide for a lifetime with that kind of help.
It was stable. It had class. It was predictable in almost any environment. It scaled well between servers, ATMS, backend stuff and workstations. And, at least in the implementations I saw, it was efficient as hell.
I worked for Meridian Bank back in the early 90's as a simple integration tech. Everything was cool - then came the buyout. It's inevitable - every bank eventually gets bought by another bank, and it happened on my shift on fine day.
A lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of 'redundant' branches were closed. But for me, worse things happened. You see, Corestates was still using strung together DOS scripts and it was messy. User's workstations were downgraded to Novell/DOS/Win 3.11 with the OS loading on 4 or 16 Megabit Token Ring. On Audit Day (Wednesday), a user could expect to wait up to 15 minutes for their machine to boot into the network. It was ugly, the users hated us... Hell, I hated us! I didn't leave that job soon enough.
Everyone there missed their 32-bit OS and as this was one year before Windows 95, it would be several years before they started getting 95/NT on the desktop. The horror!
But my point is that it took a while - and let's not forget Sega's history. The Dreamcast happened right on the heels of the Saturn, a dismally designed failure.
The PS2 succeeded in spite of itself because game companies had more faith in Sony's ability to stay afloat and support (however poorly) it's machine for the long haul. That's a success of marketing more than anything.
RTFA and you'll see that the programmers are 'playing' with the new shader tech - it IS different in that it offers so much that coders will need to 'play' to figure out what can be acheived. That process takes development time.
And Anandtech's article on the Cell goes into great detail on the complexities of Cell's design. It's not insurmountable, but it IS going to take more dev time to get things right.
The good news for Sony is that their new baby is more balanced in power than the PS2 (4 MB GFX RAM - WHAT were they thinking?!) was.
Except that I don't trust Sony to come through with well documented, well written libraries - especially if the past is any indication. I think the 'reality' is that it will take time for all this to come together. A long time.
"Anandtech??? Give me a fucking break. x86 peecee fanboy site posts garbage article about console hardware."
Er... Anandtech has ALWAYS been even handed - and I've read that article. It was a step by step dissection of the Cell - mostly positive - but REALISTIC.
PS3 scene demos aren't full blown games. Time will tell but just don't be surprised if you're still playing the same three games six months after the PS3 launch.
Uhmmm.. Would you not agree that the Cell processor is a different processor than most? Figuring out how to keep 8 separate processors full (but not TOO full), is going to be bitch. Stop lying.
As to the DirectX rant, yeah.. Didn't work for the PC or Xbox, right? So... What MS should've done is completely start from scratch (like Sony again)? Are you really that stupid? Why not give the programmers stuff they understand?
Again, no reason to be upset. I'm sure the PS3 will do fine... Once the machine is actually released... Once polished game appear... Hmmmm...
Let's not get in a tiff over pre-rendering, ok? Plenty of THAT to go around!
Quite frankly (and don't take this the wrong way), I don't give a shit WHO comes out on top - although keep in mind that history has shown that the best designs usually lose.
All I'm saying is while I think it's just great that programmers have this wonderful, liberating machine, it IS significantly more complex and even alien to code for - don't try and BS people into believing otherwise.
The article suggests to me that the programmers are still 'playing' and 'discovering' with the hardware and that suggests to me that Sony hasn't done it's job in the software department. Like the PS2, a lot of stuff is probably going to have to be done from scratch.
If the XBOX 360 gets a 6 month jump on Sony, the results by the time the PS3 launches will be obvious. Sony's hardware may be more powerful in some respects, but the amount of work that needs to be done by the programmers is daunting.
While actual code is being written on the 360 side, my guess is the coders on the PS3 side are doing what this article suggests - feeling out the hardware. It means that a lot of the development environment is unfinished or at least unkempt. You've got a lot of power there, but learning to wield it is going to take quite some time - ESPECIALLY with the Cell processor.