While that seems true on the surface it's not necessarily the case. There are very advanced automation systems associated with aviation which can go so far as to land a commercial jetliner carrying 300+ passengers in zero visibility at > 150 mph where no human possibly could (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland). And in an airplane there are MANY collision scenarios that you must constantly be aware of, not only from other aircraft but buildings, ground, animals (including birds or animals on the runway). You must also be aware of changing weather conditions that drastically affect flying, mechanical failure, etc.
I completely agree. You can imagine any emergency scenario you want with combinations of black ice, sand, curves, blowouts, etc. But a human being has to rely on what they've experienced to help them react to those situations and I'm willing to bet that most people are unprepared for that scenario. On the other hand, a computer which has been programmed for that scenario, or has learned from it, can easily benefit the entire population of cars via a software update. A computer can make real time assessments of weather, tire wear, etc to determine the best possible course of action. Most people I see around here can't even be expected to turn on their lights in inclement weather let alone know how to reactor to uncommon emergency situations.
I have to respectfully disagree. All of the situations that you've mentioned thus far are well within the realm of possibilities given current and near term technological advancements. Human beings will always be limited to 1) their imperfect memory of the route being driven assuming they've driven it before and 2) their sole source of input which is the visual electromagnetic spectrum. Driving doesn't require true AI, in my opinion. There are only so many things that can happen from a programmatic standpoint and it really boils down to collision avoidance. You have a route and a volume of space that you occupy along that route at any given time. Either something (an object, person, animal, etc) is going to occupy the same volume at the same time or it isn't. Collision detection is very easy to program, and the technology is sufficiently advanced at this point to be able to detect objects both big and large and make real-time assessments to determine the action that leads to the best chance for survival of both the object and the car. Those calculations are performed by a computer operating much faster and with near-instantaneous reaction time compared to its human equivalent that has to spend time deciding whether it's best to accelerate, brake, swerve (or a combination of those) and then perform the muscle actuations to initiate that action.
Remember, too, that a computer system can have access to near-perfect data such as GPS records for the route, as well as other object/road input systems beyond just the visual spectrum. That's not to say the right this minute we have a perfect set of data for every road, but certainly for the majority of traveled roads we have a pretty complete picture which could be used to provide the car's route in the absence of visual feedback. When it snows here, 4 lanes turns into 2 because humans can't see the lane boundaries, but that's not a limitation for a computer system programmed with the road trajectory to within inches. You may be able to interpolate where the road is 300 feet in front of you, but someone not familiar with the area might not. I drive on some country roads around here where, during a blizzard, you have no feedback about the roads location except for the random house every 1/4 mile. If I didn't know that road was perfect straight, I'd be off of it in no time. An advanced optics system can see further, clearer and more completely than ANY human.
I'm not trying to say that this whole process is trivial and there are reasons why it will take a long time to develop and implement. But I don't believe that there are any reasons which can't be overcome with present day technology.
Not exactly, at least not an off-the-shelf processor that's currently be sold or marketed by AMD. It also uses a memory architecture more akin to a graphics card but with 8GB of GDDR5 memory with a throughput nearly 3X higher than a $2000 Intel Xeon processor. That is NOT cheap memory. While it's possible that the CPU/APU/GPU could be considered commodity or off-the-shelf hardware, the remainder of the internals are custom designed and built for this console, much like they are for the other consoles. It certainly will come at some expense and you can darn well bet that it's not going to come in at the same price as the currently 6-year-old PS3 hardware.
One of the problems that the Wii U faces right now is that it's not the cheapest option. I'm sure Nintendo would like it to be, but it's not. For less money, you can get an XBox 360 or PS3, and while they sure are old at this point, they still have tons of life left in them. We'll be seeing new releases on those consoles for many more years to come. In addition to that, you get blu-ray (ps3) or dvd (xbox) player, netflix, amazon, vudu, last.fm (xbox), hbo (xbox), Syfy (xbox), VEVO (xbox), Youtube, ESPN (xbox), Hulu, the list goes on. So what is the Wii U bringing to the table, for extra money and a smaller game selection, that will drive buyers to pick one up.
If you ask me, where Nintendo dropped the ball was in their Network/Internet multiplayer implementation. It was a CHORE to try and play a game with a friend on the Wii (what's your ump-teen digit numerical user id?). They had the elements in place including a cool blue glow on the console to let you know you received a message, but it was nothing compared to the Xbox Live / PSN service. I don't know enough about the Wii U to know how or if they've addressed it, but it's another hurdle they face since their competition is now entrenched with tens of millions of consoles out there with connected users accustomed to playing games with one another. You have to convince them that they, and their friends, need to buy one to continue their co-op and competitive gaming quests with one another, and I don't think Nintendo can pull that off.
If the PS4 ends up being cheaper than the original PS3 (and I wouldn't count on it just yet), it would only be because the Blu-Ray technology has come way down in price, they're certainly sparing little expense based on the other specs they've released.
No, Nintendo doesn't care about people who want to buy Halo 27 or CoD 12, they're more interested in the people that want Mario 33, or Mario Kart 18, or Paperboy... But, pray tell, of the 10 Wii U exclusive titles out right now, which ones should the hypothetical Wii U purchaser be looking at?
Well you could throw it away (tell me which dumpster you leave it in please, or you could pay $129-$199 for Apple to replace the battery for you so that it's brand new again.
Doesn't seem like that pice is entirely out to lunch unless you shop the cheap 3rd party batteries for laptops. The OEM ones I've seen are generally around $100 anyway. Your call.
You're probably right, I just don't deal with anything that big so it's foreign to me. Heck, I have to max out a Dell R910 to get anywhere close to 6 figures and I'm still short, and that seems like overkill for whatever this company would need. I only pick on Sun cause they're one of the few where I've seen preconfigured systems (SPARC systems) starting in the 6 figure range. I sure haven't seen it in the X86 world. Thanks for the info.
I honestly wasn't trying to flame, I'm legitimately curious as to whether he shot a single $100,000 machine or that's just a number the authorities are throwing out there as the "intrinsic worth" of the machine, e.g., includes the cost of recreating the data stored, etc.
At that price it just sounds more like a huge Sun SPARC system or something, I'm just curious what.
Well, I still have to point people to online outlet/refurbished stores (Apple, Dell) when they're buying new computers, so there's still a lot of learning left to do!
Many retailers are like this. Best Buy offers, occasionally, decent discounts online. However, if you go into the brick and mortar store they won't match their price online. Even going so far as to let you go up to one of their demo laptops, order the product from their website with in-store pickup, and then waiting for them to process the online order. This just infuriates me.
Well personally, since you pretty much have to link your iPhone to a single iTunes on a single computer, it was a pain when a new OS got rolled out and I had to wait until I got home (if I was traveling, etc) to get the update. Furthermore, it means that you're in a similar situation to the one being discussed, where you have no way of guaranteeing that iPhone's are all running the same OS version. At least they have the option to, that's a plus that Android phones right now can't claim.
Not necessarily, the "downside" to the Apple model is that you're never forced to upgrade and you can't do it over the air. There are plenty of people still running phones on the 2.x series of iPhone OS.
That's a very good point, they should pull those games from the market if they're going to go forward with this. They have an obligation to inform people that these games may not work as advertised.
There are plenty of DOS games that I enjoyed playing, good luck getting them to run now. Got a dos driver for your embedded RealTek audio card? How about a dos driver for your wireless mouse? Fretting about not being able to play a 15-year-old game just seems silly to me. That's what technology does to things, we constantly move forward and at some point it doesn't make sense to carry along support for old things. I have a library of Beta tapes, where can i buy a new Beta player? Hell, I can't remember the last time i saw a new movie on VHS at the store. OS X 10.6 doesn't run on PPC macs, Windows 7 doesn't support some XP programs, etc. It's convenient to blame the manufacturer and claim they're purposefully screwing the consumers but at some point you have to let go. What about all of those Windows XP users that want to play the latest DirectX 11 games... too bad.
My point is, as a consumer you have to ready yourself for the 6 year life that most software carries nowadays. And if that frustrates you then you best find another source of entertainment.
For this reason I truly appreciated the way that Halo 3 handles this. It keeps track of your completion and difficulty on a level-by-level basis, including playing single vs. co-op. That way, you still get game completion credit for having played every level, but only the the "hard difficulty completion" achievement if you played all of the levels on hard difficulty. So at the end of the game if you played two levels on normal, you can go back and just play those two levels on hard to wrap things up.
I completely agree with you and have often thought the same thing. Difficulty in multi-player games is "technically" a different challenge than dynamic difficulty in a single player game. As previously mentioned, single player dynamics can be easily, if not poorly, adjusted by increasing enemy count, etc. But multiplayer adds the dimension that you have to adjust the ratio of difficulty between two players. Something should be done to put both teams on even ground. Whether that's through ramping up health or biasing weapon spawns to the losing team, or just making the best players stand out more by glowing or something, there are things that can and should be done to make it easier to have a fair fight when a group of players get together to game. We've already seen this sort of thing starting and we have no farther to look than Rock Band / Guitar Hero that allow players of multiple skill levels to play at the same time.
GCD and OpenMP have very little in common. OpenMP is a language extension. It requires the programmer to understand what environment their program is going to run in, what variables can be shared and how, etc. GCD merely asks you to identify blocks of code that are independent and it handles parsing them out to threads, variable replication, etc. It's the difference between providing detailed blueprints of a car (the OpenMP way) and just saying "I want a car" (the GCD way). You can *almost* think of GCD as a user-friendly frontend for OpenMP.
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While that seems true on the surface it's not necessarily the case. There are very advanced automation systems associated with aviation which can go so far as to land a commercial jetliner carrying 300+ passengers in zero visibility at > 150 mph where no human possibly could (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland). And in an airplane there are MANY collision scenarios that you must constantly be aware of, not only from other aircraft but buildings, ground, animals (including birds or animals on the runway). You must also be aware of changing weather conditions that drastically affect flying, mechanical failure, etc.
This guy for one: http://www.google.com/about/jobs/lifeatgoogle/self-driving-car-test-steve-mahan.html
And to suggest that the team(s) working on this (Google and others) hasn't/haven't "thought this through" is just plain ignorant.
I completely agree. You can imagine any emergency scenario you want with combinations of black ice, sand, curves, blowouts, etc. But a human being has to rely on what they've experienced to help them react to those situations and I'm willing to bet that most people are unprepared for that scenario. On the other hand, a computer which has been programmed for that scenario, or has learned from it, can easily benefit the entire population of cars via a software update. A computer can make real time assessments of weather, tire wear, etc to determine the best possible course of action. Most people I see around here can't even be expected to turn on their lights in inclement weather let alone know how to reactor to uncommon emergency situations.
I have to respectfully disagree. All of the situations that you've mentioned thus far are well within the realm of possibilities given current and near term technological advancements. Human beings will always be limited to 1) their imperfect memory of the route being driven assuming they've driven it before and 2) their sole source of input which is the visual electromagnetic spectrum. Driving doesn't require true AI, in my opinion. There are only so many things that can happen from a programmatic standpoint and it really boils down to collision avoidance. You have a route and a volume of space that you occupy along that route at any given time. Either something (an object, person, animal, etc) is going to occupy the same volume at the same time or it isn't. Collision detection is very easy to program, and the technology is sufficiently advanced at this point to be able to detect objects both big and large and make real-time assessments to determine the action that leads to the best chance for survival of both the object and the car. Those calculations are performed by a computer operating much faster and with near-instantaneous reaction time compared to its human equivalent that has to spend time deciding whether it's best to accelerate, brake, swerve (or a combination of those) and then perform the muscle actuations to initiate that action.
Remember, too, that a computer system can have access to near-perfect data such as GPS records for the route, as well as other object/road input systems beyond just the visual spectrum. That's not to say the right this minute we have a perfect set of data for every road, but certainly for the majority of traveled roads we have a pretty complete picture which could be used to provide the car's route in the absence of visual feedback. When it snows here, 4 lanes turns into 2 because humans can't see the lane boundaries, but that's not a limitation for a computer system programmed with the road trajectory to within inches. You may be able to interpolate where the road is 300 feet in front of you, but someone not familiar with the area might not. I drive on some country roads around here where, during a blizzard, you have no feedback about the roads location except for the random house every 1/4 mile. If I didn't know that road was perfect straight, I'd be off of it in no time. An advanced optics system can see further, clearer and more completely than ANY human.
I'm not trying to say that this whole process is trivial and there are reasons why it will take a long time to develop and implement. But I don't believe that there are any reasons which can't be overcome with present day technology.
Not exactly, at least not an off-the-shelf processor that's currently be sold or marketed by AMD. It also uses a memory architecture more akin to a graphics card but with 8GB of GDDR5 memory with a throughput nearly 3X higher than a $2000 Intel Xeon processor. That is NOT cheap memory. While it's possible that the CPU/APU/GPU could be considered commodity or off-the-shelf hardware, the remainder of the internals are custom designed and built for this console, much like they are for the other consoles. It certainly will come at some expense and you can darn well bet that it's not going to come in at the same price as the currently 6-year-old PS3 hardware.
One of the problems that the Wii U faces right now is that it's not the cheapest option. I'm sure Nintendo would like it to be, but it's not. For less money, you can get an XBox 360 or PS3, and while they sure are old at this point, they still have tons of life left in them. We'll be seeing new releases on those consoles for many more years to come. In addition to that, you get blu-ray (ps3) or dvd (xbox) player, netflix, amazon, vudu, last.fm (xbox), hbo (xbox), Syfy (xbox), VEVO (xbox), Youtube, ESPN (xbox), Hulu, the list goes on. So what is the Wii U bringing to the table, for extra money and a smaller game selection, that will drive buyers to pick one up.
If you ask me, where Nintendo dropped the ball was in their Network/Internet multiplayer implementation. It was a CHORE to try and play a game with a friend on the Wii (what's your ump-teen digit numerical user id?). They had the elements in place including a cool blue glow on the console to let you know you received a message, but it was nothing compared to the Xbox Live / PSN service. I don't know enough about the Wii U to know how or if they've addressed it, but it's another hurdle they face since their competition is now entrenched with tens of millions of consoles out there with connected users accustomed to playing games with one another. You have to convince them that they, and their friends, need to buy one to continue their co-op and competitive gaming quests with one another, and I don't think Nintendo can pull that off.
If the PS4 ends up being cheaper than the original PS3 (and I wouldn't count on it just yet), it would only be because the Blu-Ray technology has come way down in price, they're certainly sparing little expense based on the other specs they've released.
No, Nintendo doesn't care about people who want to buy Halo 27 or CoD 12, they're more interested in the people that want Mario 33, or Mario Kart 18, or Paperboy ... But, pray tell, of the 10 Wii U exclusive titles out right now, which ones should the hypothetical Wii U purchaser be looking at?
Well you could throw it away (tell me which dumpster you leave it in please, or you could pay $129-$199 for Apple to replace the battery for you so that it's brand new again.
http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro/service/battery/
Doesn't seem like that pice is entirely out to lunch unless you shop the cheap 3rd party batteries for laptops. The OEM ones I've seen are generally around $100 anyway. Your call.
You're probably right, I just don't deal with anything that big so it's foreign to me. Heck, I have to max out a Dell R910 to get anywhere close to 6 figures and I'm still short, and that seems like overkill for whatever this company would need. I only pick on Sun cause they're one of the few where I've seen preconfigured systems (SPARC systems) starting in the 6 figure range. I sure haven't seen it in the X86 world. Thanks for the info.
I honestly wasn't trying to flame, I'm legitimately curious as to whether he shot a single $100,000 machine or that's just a number the authorities are throwing out there as the "intrinsic worth" of the machine, e.g., includes the cost of recreating the data stored, etc.
At that price it just sounds more like a huge Sun SPARC system or something, I'm just curious what.
A single $100,000 server? Must be a Sun errrr Oracle machine. You can buy a hell of a lot of Dell's for $100,000.
Well, I still have to point people to online outlet/refurbished stores (Apple, Dell) when they're buying new computers, so there's still a lot of learning left to do!
Doesn't Amazon also allow you to preview the first chapter of most of their books before you buy?
Many retailers are like this. Best Buy offers, occasionally, decent discounts online. However, if you go into the brick and mortar store they won't match their price online. Even going so far as to let you go up to one of their demo laptops, order the product from their website with in-store pickup, and then waiting for them to process the online order. This just infuriates me.
Correction, only idiots "pay" MSRP for anything in this day and age.
The Xbox 360 has supported H.264 for over a year now ...
http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/gamesandmedia/movies/videofaq/viewvideoplaybackfaq.aspx
Well personally, since you pretty much have to link your iPhone to a single iTunes on a single computer, it was a pain when a new OS got rolled out and I had to wait until I got home (if I was traveling, etc) to get the update. Furthermore, it means that you're in a similar situation to the one being discussed, where you have no way of guaranteeing that iPhone's are all running the same OS version. At least they have the option to, that's a plus that Android phones right now can't claim.
Not necessarily, the "downside" to the Apple model is that you're never forced to upgrade and you can't do it over the air. There are plenty of people still running phones on the 2.x series of iPhone OS.
Thanks for the link!
That's a very good point, they should pull those games from the market if they're going to go forward with this. They have an obligation to inform people that these games may not work as advertised.
There are plenty of DOS games that I enjoyed playing, good luck getting them to run now. Got a dos driver for your embedded RealTek audio card? How about a dos driver for your wireless mouse? Fretting about not being able to play a 15-year-old game just seems silly to me. That's what technology does to things, we constantly move forward and at some point it doesn't make sense to carry along support for old things. I have a library of Beta tapes, where can i buy a new Beta player? Hell, I can't remember the last time i saw a new movie on VHS at the store. OS X 10.6 doesn't run on PPC macs, Windows 7 doesn't support some XP programs, etc. It's convenient to blame the manufacturer and claim they're purposefully screwing the consumers but at some point you have to let go. What about all of those Windows XP users that want to play the latest DirectX 11 games ... too bad.
My point is, as a consumer you have to ready yourself for the 6 year life that most software carries nowadays. And if that frustrates you then you best find another source of entertainment.
For this reason I truly appreciated the way that Halo 3 handles this. It keeps track of your completion and difficulty on a level-by-level basis, including playing single vs. co-op. That way, you still get game completion credit for having played every level, but only the the "hard difficulty completion" achievement if you played all of the levels on hard difficulty. So at the end of the game if you played two levels on normal, you can go back and just play those two levels on hard to wrap things up.
I completely agree with you and have often thought the same thing. Difficulty in multi-player games is "technically" a different challenge than dynamic difficulty in a single player game. As previously mentioned, single player dynamics can be easily, if not poorly, adjusted by increasing enemy count, etc. But multiplayer adds the dimension that you have to adjust the ratio of difficulty between two players. Something should be done to put both teams on even ground. Whether that's through ramping up health or biasing weapon spawns to the losing team, or just making the best players stand out more by glowing or something, there are things that can and should be done to make it easier to have a fair fight when a group of players get together to game. We've already seen this sort of thing starting and we have no farther to look than Rock Band / Guitar Hero that allow players of multiple skill levels to play at the same time.
GCD and OpenMP have very little in common. OpenMP is a language extension. It requires the programmer to understand what environment their program is going to run in, what variables can be shared and how, etc. GCD merely asks you to identify blocks of code that are independent and it handles parsing them out to threads, variable replication, etc. It's the difference between providing detailed blueprints of a car (the OpenMP way) and just saying "I want a car" (the GCD way). You can *almost* think of GCD as a user-friendly frontend for OpenMP.