Keep in mind that the online platform is a huge part of both PS3 and Xbox360. We know that this won't be a free service, this is something players have to pay for on a monthly basis, just like your existing MMOs. Most likely you pay $60 a game, then another $15 or $20 a month to give you access to all the online game services or whatever. Not everyone will be willing to pay that at first, but as the game library builds and as more people see how cool it is at their friends' house or whatever, the subscriptions will increase.
Plus, manufacturing costs will not always remain $900 a unit. They'll go down, just like they always do with PC hardware. I think Sony can easily take a $400-500 hit per unit long enough to get the costs down and get the online business booming.
Don't you need to keep IE installed for hitting Windows Update? When last I tried, it didn't work using Firefox. Admittedly, I don't spend much time in Windows so I'm pretty clueless if there's another way to do it.
Yes. To get the full benefit of Open Source, you need a big enough community to drive work for many different agendas rather than mostly one agenda.
OO is Open Source because it's Open Source licensed. The OpenOffice project falls somewhat short of achieving all of the benefits of an Open Source project due to a lack of community, and that in turn is due to some of Sun's decisions about the project policies and about their corporate communications concerning Open Source over several years.
I won't disagree with you about the fact that OOo is missing these benefits, or about why it's missing the benefits. I used to contribute towards GNOME somewhat, although I was far from a major contributor, and I saw the collaboration (and the bickering) between the companies involved like Sun, Red Hat, Eazel, and Ximian. Yeah, overall it has made Gnome much stronger and has been a good thing. But I don't think it is the reason why you can call Gnome an "open source project". Perhaps it's why you can call it a reasonably successful one, I don't know.
On the other hand, Eclipse is predominantly developed by IBM and, as far as I know, doesn't have the restrictions that you spoke of in OOo. I don't really know that much about Eclipse, but it seems to be fairly successful despite the fact that there aren't a huge number of other companies developing it along with IBM. Would it still be classified as an open source project?
I'm more familiar with Evolution. I'd call it an open source project, even though it was developed almost exclusively by Ximian/Novell employees. Is it not?
Sun hasn't every been successful at building a viable outside community for OpenOffice. And thus, it's not really an Open Source project, it's just Open Source licensed.
Huh? Sorry, Bruce, but you're going to have to explain this one because that just doesn't make much sense to me. Does "Open Source project" mean "something that's got an open source license and a big, de-centralized community of developers"?
After the FCC ruling regarding DSL lines, this might be a way for Internet providers to keep providing high-speed network connections once the telecoms close off their DSL lines and refuse to provide them for the other ISPs.
I never used MacOS a lot prior to X, so this connection never really occurred to me. But I think you're absolutely right.
I absolutely hate the floating toolbar system that GIMP uses, and I could just never figure out why it seemed like a good idea to the developers. My dislike of this system has nothing to do with Photoshop, either, because I've never used Photoshop. All my image editing experience has been using GIMP.
This has got to be about the best question I've seen asked on Slashdot in a long time.
I also work in the gaming industry right now (and am trying desperately to get out!) and I, too, wonder what exactly this means. My boss talks about AAA titles, and I ask him what it means. He just sort of dodges the question by trying that, "what, are you stupid?" kind of response.
It seems to be a buzzword roughly meaning "over-hyped, high-budget" and is well-loved by stuffy execs and wannabe big-shots.
Regardless of the performance loss, you're missing a critical point here. Direct3D is feature-locked, while OpenGL is extensible. If OpenGL is implemented on top of Direct3D, that means you're clamping its features to those that are exposed by Direct3D.
I have to say that I think her real motives here are just to gain back some support from the people in the middle who have mostly been lost to the Republicans. And that's a damned good motive to have.
That said, I don't agree with her. But I understand.
Too bad for you that the Transformers reference jokes were all done in the last/. article, so that post doesn't really deserve the "Funny" mod that it'll probably get anyway.
Bullshit. OpenGL 2.0 is not really any different than the previous versions of OpenGL except that some of the extensions are promoted to features.
You think GLSL is more risky to use than HLSL? Bullshit. It's not really that fundamentally different. Neither is Cg. It's like comparing C and Pascal. In fact, NVIDA's shader compiler is the same for all three languages. It's abstracted into a backend and a set of frontends for each language: Cg, GLSL, and HLSL. So, for NVIDIA hardware all three basically perform identically.
What is there to mention? When talking about the unified shader model, I got the impression that this guy's focus is more on NVIDIA's hardware design and not so much on how its features are exposed via its APIs. If you want someone from NVIDIA to talk about OpenGL, you probably want an interview from Mark Kilgard.
I actually agree. What's the point in having top-level domains when everyone who registers a domain ends up registering foo.{com,net,org,us,bar} at the same time? It's fucking stupid.
I think you shouldn't be allowed to register every version of the same domain.
L Ron Hubbard didn't wait thousands of years to start his psycho religion, and now that religion has half the fucktards in Hollywood dumping their money into it. With such a proven track record, why should the Jedi nerds wait thousands of years to start theirs?
Re:large functions in c++
on
Effective C#
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· Score: 1
No, C# 2.0 supports generics. Generics are not the same as templates. Templates in C++ are used at compile time, while generics in C# are used at runtime. They each seem to have pretty clear strengths and weaknesses when compared to one another, if you want to compare them.
One interesting thing to note is the focus on generic shaders. In all previous generation GPUs from both NVIDIA and ATI, the drivers have done a runtime substitution for shaders, in order to optimize certain parts of very populate games for certain hardware.
The 7800 is relying upon having a really robust general-purpose shader engine. For example, they recognized that the MADD instruction is being used a lot so they've got it supported in multiple ALUs rather than one.
This is important for the PS3, for obvious reasons. They don't have the luxury of being able to release drivers that perform these optimizations for the most popular games. It's also obviously not as necessary on the console, because the developers only have one piece of hardware that they need to develop against; PCs are a beast for developers who need to test against several generations of hardware from NVIDIA and ATI.
Keep in mind that NVIDIA has so far only released the 7800 GTX (the equivalent of their 'Ultra' names from before), and that we have expected these to be really expensive. Once they release the 7800 GT, we'll discover if they're actually pricing the video cards out of reach.
The Ultra and GTX boards are the super high-end enthusiast boards. And I doubt that Xbox 360 or PS3 GPUs will be better than the best PC GPUs even at the time of their release. If they are, it will be very short-lived. The PCs will continue to evolve, while the consoles will be what they are for like the next 5 years.
No, they've stated before that the RSX is not yet finished.
This is the GPU that was used at E3 for the PS3 demos. But this is not the same as the RSX GPU that is going to go into the PS3. They were just using the G70 because that's the best thing that they had immediately, and it's what they've been providing the PS3 developers to use until they can actually get RSX hardware to them. That's the same thing Microsoft was doing by sending Xbox 360 developers Apple PowerMac machines to develop with. It's not the final hardware, it's just "close enough" to work with.
I think I agree with you. But it's hard to speculate. NVIDIA's sales will determine if they're pricing it out of reach. If people buy it for $600 anyway, then they'll continue to price new boards at $600 when the 8000 series first comes out. If nobody buys this thing now, then hopefully they'll lower the price for the next series.
I tend to be loyal to NVIDIA for a few reasons. But from a purely practical point of view, I just think ATI's drivers tend to suck. It's really a shame, because I feel like, in general, they make pretty nice hardware. It's not always the most innovative hardware, but it's good. But their drivers suck and are buggy, and their OpenGL implementation is abysmal. Don't get me started on Linux drivers.
That said, ATI is working on rewriting their OpenGL implementation, and I heard they're expanding their Linux development team. If they begin to produce better drivers for Linux and OpenGL (Linux and Windows), then I would gladly welcome that competition for NVIDIA and would seriously give ATI some consideration.
Sorry about that link not working. It seems to work coming from Blue's News but otherwise you hit a stupid "register" page. The only part of the page that's relevant to my post is the part that I quoted, though.
First of all, people said that with the PS2 and Xbox generation consoles as well. Did it happen? No. Even if the Xbox 360 and PS3 are superior to the PC at the time of release, it won't last long. Multi-core CPUs are coming out and we've got the G70 and R520 GPUs coming out from NVIDIA and ATI, respectively.
Not only that, but a lot of game developers want to keep the PC going strong, believe it or not. For example, here's an interview with Mark Rein of Epic Games talking about licensing of the Unreal Engine 3. The interesting part here is:
You know, it used to be id, and Epic, and a few others aimed at all those high-level games, but now because everybody's doing PS3 and Xbox 360, they're all gonna be doing high-level games. So when they do bring them to the PC, they're gonna be great.
And we actually adjusted our pricing structure on Unreal Engine 3 basically to say "you're paying for all three whether you're using it or not, so you may as well do PC!"
We're evangelising to all our customers, we want them to do PC, because we make royalties, so the more they do...[laughs]
Consider also the huge cash cow that Grand Theft Auto has been for Rockstar Games. They release the game on Playstation2, and intentionally delay the release for PC. Why? Because it's the superior platform and they know that they can release improved graphics for it (actually not; they're actually basically down-sampling their textures and polygons for the PS2 release and releasing the "actual" stuff for PC with San Andreas). They do this because they know there are some hardcore fanboys who will pay for the same game multiple times. If PC falls behind briefly, it'll catch up again and the situation won't have changed at all. Hardcore fans will go back to buying games like GTA twice.
So no, PC gaming is not going to die. At least, that's my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind that the online platform is a huge part of both PS3 and Xbox360. We know that this won't be a free service, this is something players have to pay for on a monthly basis, just like your existing MMOs. Most likely you pay $60 a game, then another $15 or $20 a month to give you access to all the online game services or whatever. Not everyone will be willing to pay that at first, but as the game library builds and as more people see how cool it is at their friends' house or whatever, the subscriptions will increase. Plus, manufacturing costs will not always remain $900 a unit. They'll go down, just like they always do with PC hardware. I think Sony can easily take a $400-500 hit per unit long enough to get the costs down and get the online business booming.
Don't you need to keep IE installed for hitting Windows Update? When last I tried, it didn't work using Firefox. Admittedly, I don't spend much time in Windows so I'm pretty clueless if there's another way to do it.
On the other hand, Eclipse is predominantly developed by IBM and, as far as I know, doesn't have the restrictions that you spoke of in OOo. I don't really know that much about Eclipse, but it seems to be fairly successful despite the fact that there aren't a huge number of other companies developing it along with IBM. Would it still be classified as an open source project?
I'm more familiar with Evolution. I'd call it an open source project, even though it was developed almost exclusively by Ximian/Novell employees. Is it not?
After the FCC ruling regarding DSL lines, this might be a way for Internet providers to keep providing high-speed network connections once the telecoms close off their DSL lines and refuse to provide them for the other ISPs.
I never used MacOS a lot prior to X, so this connection never really occurred to me. But I think you're absolutely right.
I absolutely hate the floating toolbar system that GIMP uses, and I could just never figure out why it seemed like a good idea to the developers. My dislike of this system has nothing to do with Photoshop, either, because I've never used Photoshop. All my image editing experience has been using GIMP.
I also work in the gaming industry right now (and am trying desperately to get out!) and I, too, wonder what exactly this means. My boss talks about AAA titles, and I ask him what it means. He just sort of dodges the question by trying that, "what, are you stupid?" kind of response.
It seems to be a buzzword roughly meaning "over-hyped, high-budget" and is well-loved by stuffy execs and wannabe big-shots.
Regardless of the performance loss, you're missing a critical point here. Direct3D is feature-locked, while OpenGL is extensible. If OpenGL is implemented on top of Direct3D, that means you're clamping its features to those that are exposed by Direct3D.
I have to say that I think her real motives here are just to gain back some support from the people in the middle who have mostly been lost to the Republicans. And that's a damned good motive to have.
That said, I don't agree with her. But I understand.
Whoa, you guys get breaks at your job??
Too bad for you that the Transformers reference jokes were all done in the last /. article, so that post doesn't really deserve the "Funny" mod that it'll probably get anyway.
But what about the open source drivers? I still haven't found anything about those.
You think GLSL is more risky to use than HLSL? Bullshit. It's not really that fundamentally different. Neither is Cg. It's like comparing C and Pascal. In fact, NVIDA's shader compiler is the same for all three languages. It's abstracted into a backend and a set of frontends for each language: Cg, GLSL, and HLSL. So, for NVIDIA hardware all three basically perform identically.
What is there to mention? When talking about the unified shader model, I got the impression that this guy's focus is more on NVIDIA's hardware design and not so much on how its features are exposed via its APIs. If you want someone from NVIDIA to talk about OpenGL, you probably want an interview from Mark Kilgard.
I actually agree. What's the point in having top-level domains when everyone who registers a domain ends up registering foo.{com,net,org,us,bar} at the same time? It's fucking stupid.
I think you shouldn't be allowed to register every version of the same domain.
L Ron Hubbard didn't wait thousands of years to start his psycho religion, and now that religion has half the fucktards in Hollywood dumping their money into it. With such a proven track record, why should the Jedi nerds wait thousands of years to start theirs?
No, C# 2.0 supports generics. Generics are not the same as templates. Templates in C++ are used at compile time, while generics in C# are used at runtime. They each seem to have pretty clear strengths and weaknesses when compared to one another, if you want to compare them.
The 7800 is relying upon having a really robust general-purpose shader engine. For example, they recognized that the MADD instruction is being used a lot so they've got it supported in multiple ALUs rather than one.
This is important for the PS3, for obvious reasons. They don't have the luxury of being able to release drivers that perform these optimizations for the most popular games. It's also obviously not as necessary on the console, because the developers only have one piece of hardware that they need to develop against; PCs are a beast for developers who need to test against several generations of hardware from NVIDIA and ATI.
The Ultra and GTX boards are the super high-end enthusiast boards. And I doubt that Xbox 360 or PS3 GPUs will be better than the best PC GPUs even at the time of their release. If they are, it will be very short-lived. The PCs will continue to evolve, while the consoles will be what they are for like the next 5 years.
This is the GPU that was used at E3 for the PS3 demos. But this is not the same as the RSX GPU that is going to go into the PS3. They were just using the G70 because that's the best thing that they had immediately, and it's what they've been providing the PS3 developers to use until they can actually get RSX hardware to them. That's the same thing Microsoft was doing by sending Xbox 360 developers Apple PowerMac machines to develop with. It's not the final hardware, it's just "close enough" to work with.
I think I agree with you. But it's hard to speculate. NVIDIA's sales will determine if they're pricing it out of reach. If people buy it for $600 anyway, then they'll continue to price new boards at $600 when the 8000 series first comes out. If nobody buys this thing now, then hopefully they'll lower the price for the next series.
That said, ATI is working on rewriting their OpenGL implementation, and I heard they're expanding their Linux development team. If they begin to produce better drivers for Linux and OpenGL (Linux and Windows), then I would gladly welcome that competition for NVIDIA and would seriously give ATI some consideration.
No, they're replacing 'Ultra' with 'GTX' now. So this is the equivalent of the Ultra model from previous generations.
Sorry about that link not working. It seems to work coming from Blue's News but otherwise you hit a stupid "register" page. The only part of the page that's relevant to my post is the part that I quoted, though.
Not only that, but a lot of game developers want to keep the PC going strong, believe it or not. For example, here's an interview with Mark Rein of Epic Games talking about licensing of the Unreal Engine 3. The interesting part here is:
Consider also the huge cash cow that Grand Theft Auto has been for Rockstar Games. They release the game on Playstation2, and intentionally delay the release for PC. Why? Because it's the superior platform and they know that they can release improved graphics for it (actually not; they're actually basically down-sampling their textures and polygons for the PS2 release and releasing the "actual" stuff for PC with San Andreas). They do this because they know there are some hardcore fanboys who will pay for the same game multiple times. If PC falls behind briefly, it'll catch up again and the situation won't have changed at all. Hardcore fans will go back to buying games like GTA twice.So no, PC gaming is not going to die. At least, that's my opinion.