My iPod, when it came out of the box, lasted about 3 hours the first time. After I charged it, it regularly hit 8-10 hours. The iPod (and I presume the PSP as well), drains itself in a week or two. Factoring in the fact that the batteries don't come fully charged from the factory, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see life jump by 3x on the first charge.
In the first year of the N64's life, it outsold the PSX by far.
No duh. Sales start out high, and then taper off as the system get's older. As of 2000, Sony had sold 17 million units in Japan, while Nintendo had sold only 5 million units in Japan. Over the life of the systems, Sony sold 42 million PS1s, while Nintendo sold only 30 million N64s. The PS1 was definitely the big system of it's time.
Man. I want a fricking public apology from all the Nintendo weenies who spent the last few months saying "Oh, Sony says the battery life will be 4-6 hours, but that really means 1-2 hours!"
Hell, I'm not even a gamer and the Nintendo folks piss me off. They're like Mac users...
The only thing is takes to create video games is code, not $$$.
No, it takes artists, writers, designers, musicians, testers, etc. The code is only a small part of the overall thing. It's been shown that coders are willing to release their work for free, but to date, it has not been shown that all the other people required to make a good game are willing to do the same.
The DS is about 30% larger overall in volume. That is significant. The biggest problem with the DS is that extra 30% is in the height and depth. I own both an iPod and and a Rio Karma, and they differ in volume by the same amount as the DS and PSP (ie: the Karma is 30% larger). However, while the iPod is more than an inch longer, it is *far* more pocketable because it's 1/3 of an inch narrower and 1/3 of an inch thinner. Form factor is enormously important, and for portables, long and narrow is better than short and wide.
Notice the enormous difference in image quality? The point is, the PSP may have lower battery life when playing graphically complex games, but the DS can't play such games anyway, so it's not a fair comparison. The games on the PSP that have the same level of quality as DS games won't tax the hardware as much, and should result in much better battery life.
It really depends on what you play. If you're playing something like Gran Turismo the whole time, you're unlikely to get more than a few hours. However, you can't even play something like Gran Turismo on the DS, so that's not a fair comparison. If you're playing something like Pokemon, the type of stuff you'd play on the DS, then there is no reason you couldn't get 4-6 hours of battery life.
Also, I think people are really overestimating how much battery life people need. The iPod's original 8 hour battery life didn't stop it from selling, and listening to music is something that people can definitely do for a longer continuous time than playing a portable game. Look at it this way. A 5 hour battery life is long enough to last a flight between any two points in the US. I think that's going to be "good enough" for the market.
How is it a format that doesn't travel well? It's thin and narrow --- precisely the format that travels well. The DS, in contrast, is very bulky. Size is a very important characteristic for portable devices --- that's one reason why the iPod is so popular.
How true. It's interesting that people don't factor this into the cost of oil. Heck, if we didn't need middle eastern oil, we'd be able to save billions of dollars a year just in bribes!
It's not marketing at all, it's entirely descriptive.
"General purpose" -> it's meant to be used for general applications. Unlike a special-purpose language like Postscript, PHP, etc.
"Multi-paradigm" -> It supports multiple styles of programming (eg: object oriented, meta programming, aspect-oriented programming, procedural, etc). As opposed to "single-paradigm" languages like Java, that stress a single programming style.
I bet you just saw the word "paradigm" and jumped on it...
And how apulets are going to be extracted from serially executed code produced by a C compiler? Will the applications need to be written explicitely for Cell?
Most likely, you'll need some tools to explicitly specify parallelism. This might be a problem for some apps, but graphics and media apps are pretty easily parallelizable.
The specs assume that IBM can roll the thing out on a 0.065 micron process. If each APU is very simple, and has a long pipeline, then it's not hard to believe they can hit at least 4GHz.
Throughout the occupation, the US military has said that only a small fraction of insurgents are foreigners. Your statistics of 20-80 foreigners caught here and there back that up. Allawai claims that there are more, but the only reliable statistics, the US military's, suggest otherwise.
With regards to polls --- a poll this year showed that 41% of Iraqi's wanted Saddam back. Earlier polls show that the majority of Iraqi's want the United States out of Iraq. The United States is definitely selling something here --- American style democracy, and it will be interesting to see if people buy it.
American commanders put the numbers at 5%. This number has been pretty consistent throughout the occupation. The US military was always showing fairly low numbers for this statistic --- Allawi claimed higher numbers, but that's because those make him look good. The people who've actually have first-hand experience say something different.
Here is a news flash, most of the remaining insurgents are not iraqi freedom fighters. they are foreign terrorist
Remember the recent US military operation in Fallujah? According to the US general in charge, of the thousand men they captured during that operation, only fifteen were foreigners. The idea that the majority of rebels in Iraq are foreign terrorists is a myth created by the new Iraqi government to make themselves look good to the US, and supported by Americans that don't want to believe that the Iraqis might not want what we're selling.
MS has been content to maintain the industry at it's status quo. Linux has shook things up. I mean, you've got multibilion dollar companies now making millions a year with a product some kid dreamed up. You've got Microsoft naming Linux it's biggest threat. That's influence.
What do we do when we need to install a dependency? What do you do when you want to upgrade your system to the latest version? I don't see how double-clicking on a package in Synaptic is any more complicated than dragging a bundle into a special directory, and the former approach allows a lot of powerful management features that the latter doesn't.
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My iPod, when it came out of the box, lasted about 3 hours the first time. After I charged it, it regularly hit 8-10 hours. The iPod (and I presume the PSP as well), drains itself in a week or two. Factoring in the fact that the batteries don't come fully charged from the factory, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see life jump by 3x on the first charge.
That's GT4 Mobile for the PSP. It's a port of GT4 for the PS2.
Yes, it's slightly larger. Very slightly.
No, it's 30% larger. Just do the math. Moreover, it's 30% larger in all the wrong places.
In the first year of the N64's life, it outsold the PSX by far.
No duh. Sales start out high, and then taper off as the system get's older. As of 2000, Sony had sold 17 million units in Japan, while Nintendo had sold only 5 million units in Japan. Over the life of the systems, Sony sold 42 million PS1s, while Nintendo sold only 30 million N64s. The PS1 was definitely the big system of it's time.
It's a fricking dual processer machine with a vector unit that does bezier surface tesselation in hardware. And it's portable! That's *serious* tech.
Man. I want a fricking public apology from all the Nintendo weenies who spent the last few months saying "Oh, Sony says the battery life will be 4-6 hours, but that really means 1-2 hours!"
Hell, I'm not even a gamer and the Nintendo folks piss me off. They're like Mac users...
The only thing is takes to create video games is code, not $$$.
No, it takes artists, writers, designers, musicians, testers, etc. The code is only a small part of the overall thing. It's been shown that coders are willing to release their work for free, but to date, it has not been shown that all the other people required to make a good game are willing to do the same.
Graphics aren't everything. There's a wasteland of games out there that were little more than a bit of flash. And they're all but forgotten.
Graphics are a part of the whole package. A game may have great gameplay, but if it has terrible graphics, it's still missing omsething.
Hear hear!
Look at this picture. The DS looks way more bulky than the PSP.
The DS is about 30% larger overall in volume. That is significant. The biggest problem with the DS is that extra 30% is in the height and depth. I own both an iPod and and a Rio Karma, and they differ in volume by the same amount as the DS and PSP (ie: the Karma is 30% larger). However, while the iPod is more than an inch longer, it is *far* more pocketable because it's 1/3 of an inch narrower and 1/3 of an inch thinner. Form factor is enormously important, and for portables, long and narrow is better than short and wide.
Is Ridge Racer like Gran Turismo? Because Ridge Racer DS has been announced.
No, not at all. This is Ridge Racer DS. *This* is Gran Turismo.
Notice the enormous difference in image quality? The point is, the PSP may have lower battery life when playing graphically complex games, but the DS can't play such games anyway, so it's not a fair comparison. The games on the PSP that have the same level of quality as DS games won't tax the hardware as much, and should result in much better battery life.
The PSP is thinner and narrower than the DS, and only slightly longer. The DS is the one that's bulky.
It really depends on what you play. If you're playing something like Gran Turismo the whole time, you're unlikely to get more than a few hours. However, you can't even play something like Gran Turismo on the DS, so that's not a fair comparison. If you're playing something like Pokemon, the type of stuff you'd play on the DS, then there is no reason you couldn't get 4-6 hours of battery life.
Also, I think people are really overestimating how much battery life people need. The iPod's original 8 hour battery life didn't stop it from selling, and listening to music is something that people can definitely do for a longer continuous time than playing a portable game. Look at it this way. A 5 hour battery life is long enough to last a flight between any two points in the US. I think that's going to be "good enough" for the market.
How is it a format that doesn't travel well? It's thin and narrow --- precisely the format that travels well. The DS, in contrast, is very bulky. Size is a very important characteristic for portable devices --- that's one reason why the iPod is so popular.
How true. It's interesting that people don't factor this into the cost of oil. Heck, if we didn't need middle eastern oil, we'd be able to save billions of dollars a year just in bribes!
It's not marketing at all, it's entirely descriptive.
"General purpose" -> it's meant to be used for general applications. Unlike a special-purpose language like Postscript, PHP, etc.
"Multi-paradigm" -> It supports multiple styles of programming (eg: object oriented, meta programming, aspect-oriented programming, procedural, etc). As opposed to "single-paradigm" languages like Java, that stress a single programming style.
I bet you just saw the word "paradigm" and jumped on it...
And how apulets are going to be extracted from serially executed code produced by a C compiler? Will the applications need to be written explicitely for Cell?
Most likely, you'll need some tools to explicitly specify parallelism. This might be a problem for some apps, but graphics and media apps are pretty easily parallelizable.
The specs assume that IBM can roll the thing out on a 0.065 micron process. If each APU is very simple, and has a long pipeline, then it's not hard to believe they can hit at least 4GHz.
I think he means Carbon/Cocoa and UNIX. Or Mach and BSD. OS X really is quite an patch job. It works --- but it aint' pretty underneath.
Throughout the occupation, the US military has said that only a small fraction of insurgents are foreigners. Your statistics of 20-80 foreigners caught here and there back that up. Allawai claims that there are more, but the only reliable statistics, the US military's, suggest otherwise.
With regards to polls --- a poll this year showed that 41% of Iraqi's wanted Saddam back. Earlier polls show that the majority of Iraqi's want the United States out of Iraq. The United States is definitely selling something here --- American style democracy, and it will be interesting to see if people buy it.
American commanders put the numbers at 5%. This number has been pretty consistent throughout the occupation. The US military was always showing fairly low numbers for this statistic --- Allawi claimed higher numbers, but that's because those make him look good. The people who've actually have first-hand experience say something different.
Here is a news flash, most of the remaining insurgents are not iraqi freedom fighters. they are foreign terrorist
Remember the recent US military operation in Fallujah? According to the US general in charge, of the thousand men they captured during that operation, only fifteen were foreigners. The idea that the majority of rebels in Iraq are foreign terrorists is a myth created by the new Iraqi government to make themselves look good to the US, and supported by Americans that don't want to believe that the Iraqis might not want what we're selling.
MS has been content to maintain the industry at it's status quo. Linux has shook things up. I mean, you've got multibilion dollar companies now making millions a year with a product some kid dreamed up. You've got Microsoft naming Linux it's biggest threat. That's influence.
What do we do when we need to install a dependency? What do you do when you want to upgrade your system to the latest version? I don't see how double-clicking on a package in Synaptic is any more complicated than dragging a bundle into a special directory, and the former approach allows a lot of powerful management features that the latter doesn't.