I object to PS3 and XBox 360 being termed "next generation". They're exactly the same as what we have now, just at higher resolutions. Resolutions hardly anybody has. Most people I know think they have HDTVs, and then I point out that they have merely EDTV, or a HD-Ready TV. I tell them to truly experience the XBox 360, they have to drop some serious $$$ for something that does 720P and a DTS system. Then they can go spend another $$$$ on a BluRay or HD-DVD player, and basically gamble whether they're getting another BetaMax.
High Definition is such a stupid direction the industries taking. People don't care, they aren't flocking to Best Buy to upgrade. I'm a geek who's into and actually understands all this crap, HDMI, 1080i vs 1080p, and so on, and I don't care. I really don't give a rats ass about high-definition anything, it doesn't improve the experience of TV, movies or console video games.
So Sony and MSFT have hitched their wagons to the HDTV "revolution" that isn't going to take place. They can only force upgrades, a la "buy a PS3 because we aren't making PS2 games anymore".
Now, Wii is different, watching the videos of the guy playing Red Steel, made me wonder "why didn't we have that before?" It looks like such a natural way to play an FPS, it looks like it may even be SUPERIOR to a keyboard and mouse. I'll have to wait and see. It seems like more of a gimmick, and something that will be here to stay. The first time I saw the NES control pad, I thought it was a cheesy gimmick, and could never replace the Wico Command Control I used with my C64. Games are played with joysticks, not stupid little boxes with buttons to move, I thought. I was wrong.
Wii and it's wii-mote are something different, and flunk or fail, actually innovative.
Of course it's all about the games, and a "killer app" can change everything overnight. Halo was MSFT's crutch for the XBox, but that seems like a fluke. It won't happen again with Halo 3. So far I see nothing coming down the pipe from Sony or MSFT that piques my interest. But damnit, I want to play some FPS with that pointer, and I want to be able to cheaply download some of nintendo's past hits. Right up my alley.
IMO, Wii is the only truly "next generation" system. It actually offeres something evolutionary over the last generation. All PS3 and XBox 360 seem to have is high prices, faulty hardware, and "new features" that would cost me 5 grand to be able to use.
I think Sony and MSFT going the high-end route is going to hurt them, and Nintendo just might rise back to the top. They seem most likely to put out the next "killer app" at this point.
Don't buy stuff on release day, or even release week or month.
If you can train yourself to not give a rats ass about hype, gaming is cheap, cheap, cheap.
Eventually EVERYTHING ends up in the $20 bin, maybe even in the $10 bin. I remember hearing what a great fantastical game MGS2 was for the PS2, well guess what, I saw it for 6.99 and picked it up. It's pretty good.
Sure I'm playing stuff thats months, and often years old, but fun games are still fun, and it saves me a ton of cash.
Browse the older pages on sites like 1up or whathaveyou, pick up old copies of game informer you see lying around. There's plenty of great old classic games, and just games that aren't brand new. I picked up Destroy all Humans for 14.99 the other week.
Works for consoles too. I completely ignore all the XBox 360 and PS3 hype (and that's all it is), and when I finally pick one up, it'll be for a third of what the early adopters paid.
Yessir, learned my lesson long ago. Paid full price for the dreamcast on 9/9/99, and full price for a couple of games. A year and a half later, the dreamcast was worth 20 bucks and the games were worth as close to nothing as you can get.
Especially ridiculous to me are those who need to have this years madden game. 60 bucks a year, for the same game as last year.
But, this is coming from someone who sort-of collects old consoles (like neo geo cd, saturn, 3DO, TG16) and has six old full sized arcade games, and would rather revisit XMen vs Streetfighter on his CPS2 system, than pay 60 bucks for Tekken A-Jillion.
Well, I remember that 3DNow was playing catch-up to SSE, and came later. 64 bit extensions was the first time Intel ever played catch-up to AMD, it's always been the other way around.
I'm not sure if they implemented it before or after AltiVec, but the concept of SIMD wasn't either Motorola's or Intel's design, Cray was using it in the 1970s, as per my original point, SIMD was what made a supercomputer "super".
These days, supercomputer generally means "big cluster", and I think it's about time the term got retired. It's more of a financial/logistic feat than a technical one. Most of the rigs on this list use standard gigabit ethernet interconnects, instead of something more esoteric (and faster). If I had the cash I could order 200,000 1U rackmounts from dell and make it into the top 10. Like I said, that would be quite a feat of finance and logistics, but that's all there is to it.
I'm asking seriously, because of all of the "cookbooks" and collection books of this sort that I've seen on the shelves at Borders, they're all full of things that a quick bit of googling could come up with. In fact, a little searching usually yields better solutions, and I'm convinced they're written by copy/pasting google results into the author's editor of choice.
I'm all for good dead-tree reference material, but I've been frustrated trying to find books that don't contain stuff-i-already-know, or stuff-i-can-get-free on the 'net.
I guess it can't be good for the dead tree tech manual industry, but so long as universities and colleges force students to buy the books (and a new revision of the same book every year), that's all fine and good.
Correction, MMX added SIMD-type functionality to the original pentium line, but MMX only worked on integers, and reused floating point registers, making the proc incapable of doing FP math and SIMD at the same time..
Ever since SIMD came to the desktop with the Pentium III, they've been "supercomputers", and the term doesn't mean what it used to.
Supercomputing used to be all about vector processing, and was the domain of Cray, et al. Now we all have the tech, and a "supercomputer" is no more than a suped up version of what's sitting on your desk - basically just big-ass clusters.
From TFA: GWT essentially exploits the browser as a run-time environment for lightweight GUI applications, and the result is much closer to what you might develop with Morfik, OpenLaszlo, or even Flash, than to normal Web applications
It seems more suitable for client development in intranet-type situations, rather than for stuff to go on the web at large. GWT is walled off from the traditional web page, it seems, and the article says there's no way to take values out of widgets to use in a form submission.
It's interesting, the company I'm working for finally caught "browser based applications" fever, and this is another possible platform we could use. Of course since we aren't a Java house, we'll end up using ASP.NET.
When I hear someone say what you said I think... "another hack who's never programmed anything, never will, but read some shit on slashdot about it and now believes he's an expert"
There's plenty of unreadable, unusable OO code out there, as well as plenty of well performing Java.
If the customer was so fucking savvy about linux, why is he wasting everybodys time in the store?
I'm getting a little bored of the "does it support linux" analogy to show how stupid somebody is. Everyone uses it, and it's dumb.
Linux is a fringe operating system. I've used it for about 15 years, and I've come to realize that nobody in a big box store has been trained to support it, or knows if device X works with linux. This is because nobody comes in looking to spend money on linux hardware.
They really don't. Real geeks order their parts online. Not just because it's cheaper, but because the actual ordering is the culmination of maybe an hour or more's research into the particular products suitibility for linux. I just went through this looking for a TV tuner to use in a MythTV project. Most dont work, or arent fully supported, so I'm not going to walk into a store and ask somebody who won't know - most linux users wouldn't even know.
In fact, I bet I could pick some random card off the shelf, walk up to Linus Torvalds himself, and ask "does this work with linux?" and he wouldn't know, and would probably blow me off with the same sort of answer.
Or I'll ask you, and when you're so smart and smug, after you answer "of course it works with linux", I'll ask "does it work with BeOS? NetBSD? How about OS/2? Does it have native 64 bit drivers for Windows? Vista drivers? MS DOS?" And the second you don't know I'll be like "A HA! I GOT YOU SUCKA!"
It's the customers job to educate him/herself, and the salesmans job is to sell. If grandma and grampa huckleberry bought a $5000 Vaio just to check their e-mail, because the salesman made up some techincal jibba-jabba, then it's on them. If he managed to sell them an extended warranty and a set of monster cables to hook it all up, then thats a job well done.
I've sent electronics out for "replacement" and gotten the exact same machine back, months later, with nothing fixed. I've sent machines out for "repair" and been returned the wrong machine.
My question, sir, is What do YOU do?
The whole PC service business is corrupt from Geek Squad and up. If I cant fix it myself, or RMA it for a brand new piece of equipment, it's junk. Even the masses have picked up on this. I claimed a PC on it's way to the trash a week ago, with nothing wrong except being clogged with malware. I've been told that it had been sent to both Best Buy and to the manufacturer, and that it couldn't be repaired.
So the story ends with me owning a fancy new (to me) 2.0ghz Celeron box, which makes a fine media server for the home.
Every "technician" is an idiot and a constant frustration for people who actually use and understand computers. They couldn't hack it in real computer science, so they fall back on their skills with "inserting PCI cards facing the right way" as their claim to geek status. This is true whether they "lead" or follow.
"I read a concise and simple explanation on thissite.com, but as a slashdotter, i figure there must be some kind of ill-concieved conspiracy theory behind all of it. If you could link Bill Gates to the answer, that would be appreciated."
Oh well, it's better than all of the stupid "do my homework for me" ask-slashdots.
I'm in Annapolis, and have had only a two-second power blip in the last week. I have plenty of friends on Kent island, nobody there has lost power.
Even lightning strikes just require a transformer be replaced.
It's when wind knocks trees onto the lines that knocks power out for the long term. All we've had is a bit of rain.
Anyways, power lines aren't underground because people have enough problems digging into phone, cable and gas lines. Nobody calls to have utilities marked before they dig.
I mean, I'm sure I could use up more than 200 teraflops with my "while (1);" program.
Re:Revolutionary Game and GPL'ed Engine
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What would be extra cool would be for them to release the original PAK files (ie; the full version game) for free, it can't be worth anything to them at this point.
Tenebrae was what I was thinking of when I posted a link to DarkPlaces, but it's another good version of Quake with fancy new graphics.
Re:Perfect time to re-install and re-play
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Re:blah blah
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
blah blah blah slashdot mods are fags blah blah blah everybody knows this blah blah blah karma is just a game to play blah blah no meaning blah blah blah kiss some linus ass and get your karma back blah blah browse at -1 for the good comments blah blah
Re:10 years!
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh bullshit.
Quake 4, Half Life 2, etc.. All the fun and more, with a healthy dose of jaw-dropping graphics.
Quit trying to get cred by waxing nostalgic for graphics that sucked.
I remember Quake fondly, one of my first University projects was to write a report analysing the usage of a particular language, and while most of the class jumped on the shiney new Java, or latest iteration of Visual Basic, and I did QuakeC. Got like a 97% on the project too, dragged down by a couple stupid typos.
It was fun pissing my roommate off by playing various Quake mods all hours of the night, and when he'd complain I could retort with "I'M RESEARCHING MY PROJECT ASSFACE"
Re:quake on a dual ISDN
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 1
And in the real world, you'd see about 10K.
Just like I've never seen anything faster than about 300K come through my "6 megabit" cablemodem.
Re:Still have it...
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Probably because about 8 people worldwide actually paid to unlock it. I know I didn't.
I warezeded it, so kudos to the real heroes: CLASS.
Re:Classic quotes
on
Quake is 10
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There were no GPUs in the mid 90s, the Voodoo/Voodoo 2 didn't have GPUs, they were mere rasterizers. The first GPU was nvidia with the GeForce 256, Aug 31 1999. It took a long while for it to really catch on, since it's just as easy to do the 3d to 2d conversion in memory (CPU).
The 3D engine used by Quake and Quake 2 was pure software, the CPU did all the heavy lifting geometry wise (and still does, for the most part). AFAIK, the 3d geometry part of it is still mainly CPU based, you can't just send every polygon in the world up to the GPU and expect it to sort the shit out in a timely fashion. BSP trees and face culling and all kindsa nifty hacks abound for such things.
We had no fancy hardware T&L business or programmable pixel shaders, and that's how we liked it.
I remember walking uphill 40 miles in the snow just to frag newbies with my nailgun.
blah blah blah Read the second newsgroup post blah blah blah (or maybe third). blah blah blah Duke Nukem is older blah blah blah Duke Nukem Forever blah blah blah Quake 4 is a Halo ripoff with Doom 3 graphics blah blah blah
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as you write it.
Probably just a little after you start writing all those AAA game titles for linux.
I object to PS3 and XBox 360 being termed "next generation". They're exactly the same as what we have now, just at higher resolutions. Resolutions hardly anybody has. Most people I know think they have HDTVs, and then I point out that they have merely EDTV, or a HD-Ready TV. I tell them to truly experience the XBox 360, they have to drop some serious $$$ for something that does 720P and a DTS system. Then they can go spend another $$$$ on a BluRay or HD-DVD player, and basically gamble whether they're getting another BetaMax.
High Definition is such a stupid direction the industries taking. People don't care, they aren't flocking to Best Buy to upgrade. I'm a geek who's into and actually understands all this crap, HDMI, 1080i vs 1080p, and so on, and I don't care. I really don't give a rats ass about high-definition anything, it doesn't improve the experience of TV, movies or console video games.
So Sony and MSFT have hitched their wagons to the HDTV "revolution" that isn't going to take place. They can only force upgrades, a la "buy a PS3 because we aren't making PS2 games anymore".
Now, Wii is different, watching the videos of the guy playing Red Steel, made me wonder "why didn't we have that before?" It looks like such a natural way to play an FPS, it looks like it may even be SUPERIOR to a keyboard and mouse. I'll have to wait and see. It seems like more of a gimmick, and something that will be here to stay. The first time I saw the NES control pad, I thought it was a cheesy gimmick, and could never replace the Wico Command Control I used with my C64. Games are played with joysticks, not stupid little boxes with buttons to move, I thought. I was wrong.
Wii and it's wii-mote are something different, and flunk or fail, actually innovative.
Of course it's all about the games, and a "killer app" can change everything overnight. Halo was MSFT's crutch for the XBox, but that seems like a fluke. It won't happen again with Halo 3. So far I see nothing coming down the pipe from Sony or MSFT that piques my interest. But damnit, I want to play some FPS with that pointer, and I want to be able to cheaply download some of nintendo's past hits. Right up my alley.
IMO, Wii is the only truly "next generation" system. It actually offeres something evolutionary over the last generation. All PS3 and XBox 360 seem to have is high prices, faulty hardware, and "new features" that would cost me 5 grand to be able to use.
I think Sony and MSFT going the high-end route is going to hurt them, and Nintendo just might rise back to the top. They seem most likely to put out the next "killer app" at this point.
People who have casual sex rarely break the 15 minute mark.
Interesting. Indeed.
Titties!
Don't buy stuff on release day, or even release week or month.
If you can train yourself to not give a rats ass about hype, gaming is cheap, cheap, cheap.
Eventually EVERYTHING ends up in the $20 bin, maybe even in the $10 bin. I remember hearing what a great fantastical game MGS2 was for the PS2, well guess what, I saw it for 6.99 and picked it up. It's pretty good.
Sure I'm playing stuff thats months, and often years old, but fun games are still fun, and it saves me a ton of cash.
Browse the older pages on sites like 1up or whathaveyou, pick up old copies of game informer you see lying around. There's plenty of great old classic games, and just games that aren't brand new. I picked up Destroy all Humans for 14.99 the other week.
Works for consoles too. I completely ignore all the XBox 360 and PS3 hype (and that's all it is), and when I finally pick one up, it'll be for a third of what the early adopters paid.
Yessir, learned my lesson long ago. Paid full price for the dreamcast on 9/9/99, and full price for a couple of games. A year and a half later, the dreamcast was worth 20 bucks and the games were worth as close to nothing as you can get.
Especially ridiculous to me are those who need to have this years madden game. 60 bucks a year, for the same game as last year.
But, this is coming from someone who sort-of collects old consoles (like neo geo cd, saturn, 3DO, TG16) and has six old full sized arcade games, and would rather revisit XMen vs Streetfighter on his CPS2 system, than pay 60 bucks for Tekken A-Jillion.
Just one little bears opinion.
Well, I remember that 3DNow was playing catch-up to SSE, and came later. 64 bit extensions was the first time Intel ever played catch-up to AMD, it's always been the other way around.
I'm not sure if they implemented it before or after AltiVec, but the concept of SIMD wasn't either Motorola's or Intel's design, Cray was using it in the 1970s, as per my original point, SIMD was what made a supercomputer "super".
These days, supercomputer generally means "big cluster", and I think it's about time the term got retired. It's more of a financial/logistic feat than a technical one. Most of the rigs on this list use standard gigabit ethernet interconnects, instead of something more esoteric (and faster). If I had the cash I could order 200,000 1U rackmounts from dell and make it into the top 10. Like I said, that would be quite a feat of finance and logistics, but that's all there is to it.
Than googling for cool perl scripts?
I'm asking seriously, because of all of the "cookbooks" and collection books of this sort that I've seen on the shelves at Borders, they're all full of things that a quick bit of googling could come up with. In fact, a little searching usually yields better solutions, and I'm convinced they're written by copy/pasting google results into the author's editor of choice.
I'm all for good dead-tree reference material, but I've been frustrated trying to find books that don't contain stuff-i-already-know, or stuff-i-can-get-free on the 'net.
I guess it can't be good for the dead tree tech manual industry, but so long as universities and colleges force students to buy the books (and a new revision of the same book every year), that's all fine and good.
Correction, MMX added SIMD-type functionality to the original pentium line, but MMX only worked on integers, and reused floating point registers, making the proc incapable of doing FP math and SIMD at the same time..
SSE was when intel "got it right".
And it's still not that commonly used a feature.
Ever since SIMD came to the desktop with the Pentium III, they've been "supercomputers", and the term doesn't mean what it used to.
Supercomputing used to be all about vector processing, and was the domain of Cray, et al. Now we all have the tech, and a "supercomputer" is no more than a suped up version of what's sitting on your desk - basically just big-ass clusters.
That's because that's what it is.
From TFA: GWT essentially exploits the browser as a run-time environment for lightweight GUI applications, and the result is much closer to what you might develop with Morfik, OpenLaszlo, or even Flash, than to normal Web applications
It seems more suitable for client development in intranet-type situations, rather than for stuff to go on the web at large. GWT is walled off from the traditional web page, it seems, and the article says there's no way to take values out of widgets to use in a form submission.
It's interesting, the company I'm working for finally caught "browser based applications" fever, and this is another possible platform we could use. Of course since we aren't a Java house, we'll end up using ASP.NET.
When I hear someone say what you said I think... "another hack who's never programmed anything, never will, but read some shit on slashdot about it and now believes he's an expert"
There's plenty of unreadable, unusable OO code out there, as well as plenty of well performing Java.
If the customer was so fucking savvy about linux, why is he wasting everybodys time in the store?
I'm getting a little bored of the "does it support linux" analogy to show how stupid somebody is. Everyone uses it, and it's dumb.
Linux is a fringe operating system. I've used it for about 15 years, and I've come to realize that nobody in a big box store has been trained to support it, or knows if device X works with linux. This is because nobody comes in looking to spend money on linux hardware.
They really don't. Real geeks order their parts online. Not just because it's cheaper, but because the actual ordering is the culmination of maybe an hour or more's research into the particular products suitibility for linux. I just went through this looking for a TV tuner to use in a MythTV project. Most dont work, or arent fully supported, so I'm not going to walk into a store and ask somebody who won't know - most linux users wouldn't even know.
In fact, I bet I could pick some random card off the shelf, walk up to Linus Torvalds himself, and ask "does this work with linux?" and he wouldn't know, and would probably blow me off with the same sort of answer.
Or I'll ask you, and when you're so smart and smug, after you answer "of course it works with linux", I'll ask "does it work with BeOS? NetBSD? How about OS/2? Does it have native 64 bit drivers for Windows? Vista drivers? MS DOS?" And the second you don't know I'll be like "A HA! I GOT YOU SUCKA!"
It's the customers job to educate him/herself, and the salesmans job is to sell. If grandma and grampa huckleberry bought a $5000 Vaio just to check their e-mail, because the salesman made up some techincal jibba-jabba, then it's on them. If he managed to sell them an extended warranty and a set of monster cables to hook it all up, then thats a job well done.
They ship things to you.
I've sent electronics out for "replacement" and gotten the exact same machine back, months later, with nothing fixed. I've sent machines out for "repair" and been returned the wrong machine.
My question, sir, is What do YOU do?
The whole PC service business is corrupt from Geek Squad and up. If I cant fix it myself, or RMA it for a brand new piece of equipment, it's junk. Even the masses have picked up on this. I claimed a PC on it's way to the trash a week ago, with nothing wrong except being clogged with malware. I've been told that it had been sent to both Best Buy and to the manufacturer, and that it couldn't be repaired.
So the story ends with me owning a fancy new (to me) 2.0ghz Celeron box, which makes a fine media server for the home.
Every "technician" is an idiot and a constant frustration for people who actually use and understand computers. They couldn't hack it in real computer science, so they fall back on their skills with "inserting PCI cards facing the right way" as their claim to geek status. This is true whether they "lead" or follow.
"I read a concise and simple explanation on thissite.com, but as a slashdotter, i figure there must be some kind of ill-concieved conspiracy theory behind all of it. If you could link Bill Gates to the answer, that would be appreciated."
Oh well, it's better than all of the stupid "do my homework for me" ask-slashdots.
I'm in Annapolis, and have had only a two-second power blip in the last week. I have plenty of friends on Kent island, nobody there has lost power.
Even lightning strikes just require a transformer be replaced.
It's when wind knocks trees onto the lines that knocks power out for the long term. All we've had is a bit of rain.
Anyways, power lines aren't underground because people have enough problems digging into phone, cable and gas lines. Nobody calls to have utilities marked before they dig.
They simply check the result by hand.
Call your broker, because it's a good time to invest in pencil and paper futures.
while( (int) 1.0 );
(its interpreted not compiled)
I mean, I'm sure I could use up more than 200 teraflops with my "while (1);" program.
What would be extra cool would be for them to release the original PAK files (ie; the full version game) for free, it can't be worth anything to them at this point.
Tenebrae was what I was thinking of when I posted a link to DarkPlaces, but it's another good version of Quake with fancy new graphics.
Better yet, play it with this.
blah blah blah slashdot mods are fags blah blah blah everybody knows this blah blah blah karma is just a game to play blah blah no meaning blah blah blah kiss some linus ass and get your karma back blah blah browse at -1 for the good comments blah blah
Oh bullshit.
Quake 4, Half Life 2, etc.. All the fun and more, with a healthy dose of jaw-dropping graphics.
Quit trying to get cred by waxing nostalgic for graphics that sucked.
I remember Quake fondly, one of my first University projects was to write a report analysing the usage of a particular language, and while most of the class jumped on the shiney new Java, or latest iteration of Visual Basic, and I did QuakeC. Got like a 97% on the project too, dragged down by a couple stupid typos.
It was fun pissing my roommate off by playing various Quake mods all hours of the night, and when he'd complain I could retort with "I'M RESEARCHING MY PROJECT ASSFACE"
And in the real world, you'd see about 10K.
Just like I've never seen anything faster than about 300K come through my "6 megabit" cablemodem.
Probably because about 8 people worldwide actually paid to unlock it. I know I didn't.
I warezeded it, so kudos to the real heroes: CLASS.
There were no GPUs in the mid 90s, the Voodoo/Voodoo 2 didn't have GPUs, they were mere rasterizers. The first GPU was nvidia with the GeForce 256, Aug 31 1999. It took a long while for it to really catch on, since it's just as easy to do the 3d to 2d conversion in memory (CPU).
The 3D engine used by Quake and Quake 2 was pure software, the CPU did all the heavy lifting geometry wise (and still does, for the most part). AFAIK, the 3d geometry part of it is still mainly CPU based, you can't just send every polygon in the world up to the GPU and expect it to sort the shit out in a timely fashion. BSP trees and face culling and all kindsa nifty hacks abound for such things.
We had no fancy hardware T&L business or programmable pixel shaders, and that's how we liked it.
I remember walking uphill 40 miles in the snow just to frag newbies with my nailgun.
blah blah blah Read the second newsgroup post blah blah blah (or maybe third). blah blah blah Duke Nukem is older blah blah blah Duke Nukem Forever blah blah blah Quake 4 is a Halo ripoff with Doom 3 graphics blah blah blah