so they spent the last few years making each version look different ("native"), and now they want to make them all look the same again? great.
how about:
1) the crashes and memleaks that are still there. firefox is currently using 2.3GB RAM on my Mint11 system and it's only been running a few hours since it last crashed.
2) the horrendously inefficient database format used for local storage. anyone tried using FF over NFS? it takes twice as long to start as opera, and about 5x as long as Chromium.
Now i realise not the same people work on that stuff as on UI design, but that picture of the airflow around sports car? Slide8. hilarious. someone is getting paid to produce this rubbish? depressing.
is that since the xbox split, XBMC mainline has changed to a new "Addon" system, meaning all current plugins wouldn't work on the Xbox - that is, if it weren't for this X4X v3 work. the range of plugins available now have made even LAN shares of "aquired" content pretty much obselete..
check out:
iPlayer (if in the UK)
Icefilms
Navi-X
and others: http://www.xbmc4xbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1877
prepare to be blown away if you've not used XBMC for a few years.. and the Xbox is still good enough for almost all the plugin content as that's SD Xvid anyway for streaming.
who said anything about KDE? that netbook is runnning Mint9 and Gnome. one of the most common setups there is.
and before you say upgrade the RAM, that's difficult on an Aspire One!
ah i see this regularly on my netbook with 512MB RAM and a slow SSD; just by having too many firefox tabs open. didn't realise it was a known problem. yes very annoying indeed. thanks for bringing it up...
presumably if this helps under heavy cpu load, it may benefit older systems the most? is this true? anyone tried on single core? have read RTFA and they use some i7 thing that i would umm expect to be responsive;)
the N64 had unified memory, so it was a (4MB-RD)RAM upgrade. it cost about £20 (i dont think thats cheap) and was very hard to find. only a few games required it (DK64, ZeldaMM,..) the 1st of which it shipped with. you probably know the N64 was not a very succesful console, but not due to the RAM.
anyway 1) this doesnt make sense now that RAM is so relatively cheap vs the entire cost of the console 2) yes the constant specs are definately a +ve of consoles that MS f**ks with at their peril.
now back on topic:
IMHO has botched the launch of the xbox2 by not including the HD-DVD-ROM, they should have waited a few months for this and several other things to be included.
say no to carrying around dvds. get an Archos AV5x0 (disclaimer: i have one and love it) and the DS (i don't have, waiting for less plasticky v2) for games. it's the geek solution.
see, that was interesting and added something new to the discussion. where are the mod points? i hadn't considered the maximum distance, and how you would design around that?
why can't they just allow a bit more space between the disc and tray? (assuming it's hitting the tray). i mean this hardly sounds like rocket science to solve. just have the spindle lift the disc further off, or have the tray move slightly down, whatever.
has no one here tried wearing skin tight lycra lately? put it on any man and you can see his dick and balls. its bound to be unsuitable for a giant screen family viewing - it's not complicated or unique to this guy. they just have to strap his dick down with tape or something, no digital er.. manipulation necessary (or used, apparently). the root problem is men should not be wearing skin tight lycra, if they are being filmed.. (speaking from experience as a cyclist here).
just would like to know please before i roll this out on my lan, if it's good enough for general use (by ordinary people), or if i should wait for beta2 or whatever. just tried it and like the cool scrolling etc. many thanks for any advice on stability/crash bugs/regressions from 1.5. thanks!
the Mac must be kinda neat to handle 5 rips going on at once. my 2Ghz PC has enough trouble with one (EAC) at a time. just curious if anyone knows a good way to do that on a PC, or if my system is just set up wrong (you need SCSI drives or something to lower cpu usage?)
isn't such a rich person also going to want the files copied to their computer afterwards? seems like the company ought to send a tech 'round with the box of burnt DVDs to import those damn files into iTunes or whatever, and get the tagging how the person likes. (i'm serious, someone who can't/won't rip won't want to do this step either!).
yes agreed adaptation is hard but about your 2nd point.. movies like (/me looks at collection) Magnolia, Amorres Perros or even Pulp Fiction manage to tell several related stories at once. Okay, they are not books, but could work as books. The problem i have with movies like the one being discussed is precisely that they set the audience (intellectual) expectations too low... which makes them BORING - I love movies that make the audience work out the plots and need repeat viewings. (note, I have not seen this one yet). So yeah, i think you generalised a bit too much that's all.
great until your baggie springs a leak or some kid knocks the pot over... if you applied this to the xbox360, you'd need a bucket. next to your expensive media equipment. can't see MS recommending that one;)
i thought you were going to say you drilled holes in the PSU case (unplug first, and take shell off, of course)
that's my point, that the 9GB limitation is likely to restrict design of games within a few years, i believe. having more space on one disc could reasonably make a difference to what kind of games are practical, because of this need to reduce disk swapping. producing high res content quickly eats space.
windows group policy editor doesnt seem to allow windows profiles larger than 30MB (including registry, because exlude registry doesnt seem to work either). i wish it did.. anyone know how to raise it a bit please, i want something like 50-100MB
build a classy HTPC in the case of your choice (mine is smaller than anything else (ooh am i going to slashdot them?) in my stack and powerful enough to run N64 emus and possibly later systems), say screw the new games, and play anything from about 1970 to 2000. I'm half serious.
fair enough, i missed that, but most of my responses are about mechanical bits.
of course i'm aware that a project that big has many departments. most of my points still stand i think, this was a bizarre set of answers that *appears* to suggest a disconnect between makers and customers.
no i don't think you can make text bigger 'cos everyone would use it to shout, it would be annoying.
yes, i hate Sony for their anti-genuine-consumer (anti the majority) stance, and the cheaters for their anti-genuine-player (anti the majority) stance. it looks like my view is, would you believe it, in the majority. Both groups (Sony and cheaters exploiting this) are in the wrong. Not so hard to follow is it. Now stop trolling please (aimed at grandparent? not parent)
this is a seriously bizarre article - several times i thought i was reading a joke
Xbox.com: Is Xbox 360 really twice as powerful as Xbox?
JR: Yes. Xbox had less than 100 watts of power; Xbox 360 has over 200 watts./
boom boom! oh wait, the lead engineer actually seems pleased that his work consumes more power, which means nothing relevant except that it costs the consumer more to run.
"two 60mm fans"
"when the water boils and becomes steam, the steam rises and moves the heat higher into the fins where the air flow from the fans can extract the heat more efficiently. Once the steam is cooled it condenses and flows back down the pipe as water to the copper base of the heat sink, which is attached to the processor to continue the condensing and cooling processes cycle."
yah, complicate much?
"thermal algorithm firmware that reads the diode temperatures and adjust the fan RPMs by altering the fan voltage"
changing fan speed equals changing pitch and this is known to be more annoying that a constant low level sound. this is why for htpcs it's not generally recommended to have variable fan speed. i think this machine is going to be annoyingly loud if this was what they did for noise reduction.
"RoHS compliant [...] I'm thinking that probably has nothing to do with the Rodents of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride."
this is actually funny, but most consumers (teenage gamers?!) don't care about env. standards i think, as much as.. games, looks and anything else. i wish it weren't so.
"The internal metal part of Xbox 360 is the Faraday cage".
whoop de doo, this has been standard in electronics for decades.
then he went on to say something about cheesecloth and diesel which didn't make much sense.
i'm really unimpressed. this is a games console not an engineering experiment. let's review what a game console should be imho:
a) cheap and simple
b) low cost to run
c) reliable (relates to above two)
d) fun!
now someone please tell me this was a joke and this guy is not the lead engineer for Xbox360. it sounds like this machine is going to tank hard if this was the sort of person behind it. troll mod away!
Slashdot Mirror
so they spent the last few years making each version look different ("native"), and now they want to make them all look the same again? great. how about: 1) the crashes and memleaks that are still there. firefox is currently using 2.3GB RAM on my Mint11 system and it's only been running a few hours since it last crashed. 2) the horrendously inefficient database format used for local storage. anyone tried using FF over NFS? it takes twice as long to start as opera, and about 5x as long as Chromium. Now i realise not the same people work on that stuff as on UI design, but that picture of the airflow around sports car? Slide8. hilarious. someone is getting paid to produce this rubbish? depressing.
is that since the xbox split, XBMC mainline has changed to a new "Addon" system, meaning all current plugins wouldn't work on the Xbox - that is, if it weren't for this X4X v3 work. the range of plugins available now have made even LAN shares of "aquired" content pretty much obselete.. check out: iPlayer (if in the UK) Icefilms Navi-X and others: http://www.xbmc4xbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1877 prepare to be blown away if you've not used XBMC for a few years.. and the Xbox is still good enough for almost all the plugin content as that's SD Xvid anyway for streaming.
who said anything about KDE? that netbook is runnning Mint9 and Gnome. one of the most common setups there is. and before you say upgrade the RAM, that's difficult on an Aspire One!
ah i see this regularly on my netbook with 512MB RAM and a slow SSD; just by having too many firefox tabs open. didn't realise it was a known problem. yes very annoying indeed. thanks for bringing it up...
presumably if this helps under heavy cpu load, it may benefit older systems the most? is this true? anyone tried on single core? have read RTFA and they use some i7 thing that i would umm expect to be responsive ;)
any chance of backport of this e.g. to .35 kernel for use in ubuntu maverick? i could use that :)
or even to .32 for use in 10.04 LTS..
anyway 1) this doesnt make sense now that RAM is so relatively cheap vs the entire cost of the console 2) yes the constant specs are definately a +ve of consoles that MS f**ks with at their peril.
now back on topic:
IMHO has botched the launch of the xbox2 by not including the HD-DVD-ROM, they should have waited a few months for this and several other things to be included.
say no to carrying around dvds. get an Archos AV5x0 (disclaimer: i have one and love it) and the DS (i don't have, waiting for less plasticky v2) for games. it's the geek solution.
see, that was interesting and added something new to the discussion. where are the mod points? i hadn't considered the maximum distance, and how you would design around that?
why can't they just allow a bit more space between the disc and tray? (assuming it's hitting the tray). i mean this hardly sounds like rocket science to solve. just have the spindle lift the disc further off, or have the tray move slightly down, whatever.
has no one here tried wearing skin tight lycra lately? put it on any man and you can see his dick and balls. its bound to be unsuitable for a giant screen family viewing - it's not complicated or unique to this guy. they just have to strap his dick down with tape or something, no digital er.. manipulation necessary (or used, apparently). the root problem is men should not be wearing skin tight lycra, if they are being filmed.. (speaking from experience as a cyclist here).
just would like to know please before i roll this out on my lan, if it's good enough for general use (by ordinary people), or if i should wait for beta2 or whatever. just tried it and like the cool scrolling etc. many thanks for any advice on stability/crash bugs/regressions from 1.5. thanks!
the Mac must be kinda neat to handle 5 rips going on at once. my 2Ghz PC has enough trouble with one (EAC) at a time. just curious if anyone knows a good way to do that on a PC, or if my system is just set up wrong (you need SCSI drives or something to lower cpu usage?)
isn't such a rich person also going to want the files copied to their computer afterwards? seems like the company ought to send a tech 'round with the box of burnt DVDs to import those damn files into iTunes or whatever, and get the tagging how the person likes. (i'm serious, someone who can't/won't rip won't want to do this step either!).
yes agreed adaptation is hard but about your 2nd point.. movies like (/me looks at collection) Magnolia, Amorres Perros or even Pulp Fiction manage to tell several related stories at once. Okay, they are not books, but could work as books. The problem i have with movies like the one being discussed is precisely that they set the audience (intellectual) expectations too low... which makes them BORING - I love movies that make the audience work out the plots and need repeat viewings. (note, I have not seen this one yet). So yeah, i think you generalised a bit too much that's all.
great until your baggie springs a leak or some kid knocks the pot over... if you applied this to the xbox360, you'd need a bucket. next to your expensive media equipment. can't see MS recommending that one ;)
i thought you were going to say you drilled holes in the PSU case (unplug first, and take shell off, of course)
that's my point, that the 9GB limitation is likely to restrict design of games within a few years, i believe. having more space on one disc could reasonably make a difference to what kind of games are practical, because of this need to reduce disk swapping. producing high res content quickly eats space.
games bigger than 9GB are not that hard to envisage (and disc changing sucks).
interesting, and at first counter-intuitive to use RW. anyone else got information on this?
windows group policy editor doesnt seem to allow windows profiles larger than 30MB (including registry, because exlude registry doesnt seem to work either). i wish it did.. anyone know how to raise it a bit please, i want something like 50-100MB
build a classy HTPC in the case of your choice (mine is smaller than anything else (ooh am i going to slashdot them?) in my stack and powerful enough to run N64 emus and possibly later systems), say screw the new games, and play anything from about 1970 to 2000. I'm half serious.
Science biases scientists' science?
Religion doesn't bias religious' religion?
How about science biases scientists' religion?
And religion biases the religious' science?
I say: How about religion and science staying the f**k out of each other's business?
of course i'm aware that a project that big has many departments. most of my points still stand i think, this was a bizarre set of answers that *appears* to suggest a disconnect between makers and customers.
no i don't think you can make text bigger 'cos everyone would use it to shout, it would be annoying.
yes, i hate Sony for their anti-genuine-consumer (anti the majority) stance, and the cheaters for their anti-genuine-player (anti the majority) stance. it looks like my view is, would you believe it, in the majority. Both groups (Sony and cheaters exploiting this) are in the wrong. Not so hard to follow is it. Now stop trolling please (aimed at grandparent? not parent)
Xbox.com: Is Xbox 360 really twice as powerful as Xbox?
JR: Yes. Xbox had less than 100 watts of power; Xbox 360 has over 200 watts./
boom boom! oh wait, the lead engineer actually seems pleased that his work consumes more power, which means nothing relevant except that it costs the consumer more to run.
"two 60mm fans"
"when the water boils and becomes steam, the steam rises and moves the heat higher into the fins where the air flow from the fans can extract the heat more efficiently. Once the steam is cooled it condenses and flows back down the pipe as water to the copper base of the heat sink, which is attached to the processor to continue the condensing and cooling processes cycle."
yah, complicate much?
"thermal algorithm firmware that reads the diode temperatures and adjust the fan RPMs by altering the fan voltage"
changing fan speed equals changing pitch and this is known to be more annoying that a constant low level sound. this is why for htpcs it's not generally recommended to have variable fan speed. i think this machine is going to be annoyingly loud if this was what they did for noise reduction.
"RoHS compliant [...] I'm thinking that probably has nothing to do with the Rodents of Unusual Size from The Princess Bride."
this is actually funny, but most consumers (teenage gamers?!) don't care about env. standards i think, as much as.. games, looks and anything else. i wish it weren't so.
"The internal metal part of Xbox 360 is the Faraday cage".
whoop de doo, this has been standard in electronics for decades.
then he went on to say something about cheesecloth and diesel which didn't make much sense.
i'm really unimpressed. this is a games console not an engineering experiment. let's review what a game console should be imho:
a) cheap and simple
b) low cost to run
c) reliable (relates to above two)
d) fun!
now someone please tell me this was a joke and this guy is not the lead engineer for Xbox360. it sounds like this machine is going to tank hard if this was the sort of person behind it. troll mod away!