OS X on generic hardware -- it's not a matter of IF, but WHEN. Considering the fact that people have already managed to get Windows (somewhat) working on something as non-PC as Xbox, I'm expecting to see OS X/Intel running shortly on all our crappy no-name boxes, despite what Apple might wish.
Despite this, I don't think it will necessarily diminish Apple's hardware revenue stream (but it certainly won't increase it) -- witness the fact that iPod sales aren't exactly in trouble despite everyone and their dog in the electronics world having their own cheaper MP3 players. Apple has always been known for its quality (certain iBooks excepted... =P) and industrial design.
Also, with the more carefully controlled Mac hardware combinations, they can hopefully avoid driver hell that plagues even the best PC installations due the myriad of hardware possibilities -- anything else is just "not supported" officially, and that peace of mind might be enough of a value proposition for many, especially educational users.
The IBM Cell workstations used for PS3 dev run a version of the Linux kernel to handle development I/O tasks: file transfers, communications with the PC host, starting/restarting programs etc. The game itself does not run in a Linux environment.
This is similar to the T10K PS2 devkits running Linux (on a separate X86 processor) to do similar purposes.
As with the PS2, the consumer PS3 console itself uses a custom bare-bones kernel; it is NOT Linux based, although I could certainly see Linux being ported to it, like Sony did with the PS2.
From a developer's point of view
on
PS3 vs. Xbox 360
·
· Score: 1, Troll
Although I work for a competitor of both of them, I still spent the better part of the past two days soaking every bit of news and opinion on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 (nonstop clicking on the reload button, with literally over a dozen window and tabs on every gaming and tech site) -- the consoles which are going to be battling it out for control over the gaming scene for the rest of this decade.
General consensus seems to indicate the PS3 has much more raw horsepower, and the demos floored me like they did everyone else. But numbers tell surprisingly little.
Intellectually, I'm getting more and more fascinated with GPGPU techniques; essentially, using the GPU as a general purpose stream processor to handle stuff other than rendering, like physics. The main limitation of these techniques has been the horribly assymetric AGP bus on the PC in terms of readback from video RAM (ie, retrieving your results your GPU computed for use in your game). PCIe removes the bandwidth disparity, but there's still latency and bus contention issues to deal with, so it's no panacea. I don't know what interconnect they're using on the PS3, but as long as CPU and GPU use separate memory banks, you'll run into this issue. UMA seems like it will be a logical approach to solving this issue, even though raw bandwidth seems to be less.
The Ageia PPU seems to be interesting too... too bad it's not incorporated into any of this crop of consoles. Let's hope though they don't lock you into any specific proprietary API (cough... 3Dfx... Glide... ack...)
Please Sony, get a good compiler team this time, or just acquire one. gcc has never been known for its performance -- on any platform. Furthermore, it looks like that both the Xbox 360 and the Cell PPC cores are strictly in-order units, putting the onus of scheduling and thus performance squarely in the hands of the compiler writers.
I'm hopeing we can have something on the Cell that's the equivalent of the Intel C++ Compiler for their platforms or IBM's XLR compiler for PPC (MS should just adopt this for the Xbox 360), and support for OpenMP as well. Seems that Cell still has remanents of the PS2 EE/VU design decisions -- explicit DMA transfers to/from SPUs, relatively little cache to work with, so a philosophical learning curve will still be there, it seems, for PC-weaned devs, unless they get some rocking middleware.
The little things amazed me as well. Xbox 360 supporting PSP connectivity. The PS3 having not only Memory Stick slots, but SD and CF as well. With the two heavyweights of the industry both jumping on the "universal convergence" bandwagon, might this be the era that we finally see this holy grail of consumer electronics kick-started after decades of failed promises?
Well, it's gonna be an interesting few years, that's for sure.
Disclaimer: my own personal opinion only, and only formed from publically-announced information.
Yahoo is now managed by the marketing and business people; Google continues to be run by the engineers.
Yahoo seems to be overfocusing on 'monetizing' every part of their portal (eg, IMvironments, annoying interrupting ads in Yahoo groups, etc etc) compared to Google which focuses on technical innovation first, capitalization later through quality (Adwords) rather than intentional forcing of it.
Until this fundamental management difference is overcome, Yahoo's corporate culture will be counter productive to competing with Google directly.
I believe the NAT traversal is done by routing via super-nodes which are not behind a NAT or firewall. Is this a valid assumption for the future? In other words, what if every host is behind a NAT or firewall -- it seems that way, given the increased security conciousness of hardware and software makers, that sometime in the near future, firewalling will be the norm and default, not the exception?
What exactly is knighthood?
on
Sir Peter Molyneux?
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
For us non-Brits, what exactly does being knighted confer on you? What are the benefits if any?
How selective is it? How many people are knighted, and how often?
Crashing is probably the precise reason why MS is rumored to be not having a HD in Xbox2/Xenon -- putting a hard drive in a console used by kids and likely to be picked up, moved, jolted, dropped, etc. is a bad idea.
I shoot primarily in RAW mode with my Canon EOS 10D, which produce files much larger than your average JPEG, on the order of 5-6 MB each, so even GB sized flash cards fill up quickly, especially during special event shoots like weddings, etc.
Using the iPod as an image tank would really be useful for me... but does the iPod support copying the RAW files? (I know the RAW files are camera specific, but I don't really care about viewing them, I just want to store them...)
Microsoft did not write their own JPEG code; rather they used the freely available implementation from the Independent JPEG group. The flaw is actually in the IJG code, not any Microsoft code.
Indeed, Netscape, which also uses that code for its JPEG decoding had that flaw (but it was fixed earlier, and of course, it did not make the news nearly as much as this Microsoft issue, owing to its much smaller market share.)
But most off the shelf software have disclaimers expressly stating they are not to be used in mission critical situations. Eg:
"technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage."
Nintendo have always been sceptical of the "Everything and the kitchen sink" approach that Microsoft and Sony have taken with their consoles. They do but one thing -- gaming -- but do it well, unlike their other competitors who want to be a DVD player/CD player/PC/Internet terminal/TiVo. Their philosophy is to focus on one thing -- gaming, and make it our core competency, continuing to come out with seminal hits that people synonimize with the video game industry, Mario, Zelda, and so on.
They are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I do believe that because of Nintendo's laser-sharp and well-defined focus, that Sony and Microsoft's leads will be short lived in the next generation.
Are you saying that this won't be a threat at the Republican convention as well? Really, how is this unique to the Democrats -- wouldn't this be a problem at ANY convention or large gathering with a lot of laptops?
It seems the UK court ruled on the basis that modchips can be used to circumvent copy protection by allowing the use of recordable media. However, the other use of modchips is to play purchased import games, and there exist so-called "anti-piracy" modchips that allow the latter, while disallowing the former.
Bypassing region codes (as opposed to copy protection) is certainly not illegal, at worst, ambiguous under UK law -- for example, the vast majority of DVD players sold in the UK are modded to be region free as well.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but there's one architectural decision that I foresee to be the potential cause of major problems: the fact that each IHV's driver is responsible for the high-level compilation of the shading language, rather than having a common runtime do it, as with DirectX HLSL, where it is compiled into a intermediate binary token format, after which is then passed on to the driver and turned into a vendor-specific and optimized binary format.
The core competencies of graphics IHVs are generally not in compiler writing -- writing a good optimizing compiler is still a "black art" significantly more difficult than writing a hardware driver, and it will be very annoying if compiler bugs show up on some vendors' drivers and some don't, forcing developers to work around them -- or different compilers optimize things differently.
At least with DirectX, there's guaranteed to exist one common compiler that's written by a company with years of experience in optimizing compilers.
Of course, the philosophy of OpenGL is counter to DirectX in that there's no one Big Company controlling it all, but at the very least, there needs to be some standard token bytecode defined and standarized by the ARB, and a reference compiler design, as well as a compliance suite to verify compiler correctness and language compliance.
Even a cursory follower of international affairs probably knows just how, ahem, "effective" the paper tiger that is the UN has been in accomplishing their intended goals and ensuring their resolutions are adhered to in places such as Iraq, Palestine, etc, while not being bogged down in internecine politics...
Although spam is different from war and peace, I see the same issue here. If one rogue nation chooses to defy UN law, there's not too much they can do...
It would be the ultimate geek tech marriage: the ultimate geek music player with the ultimate geek car.
Apparently, these guys have modded the Prius audio/touch screen system to control a XM receiver, complete with onscreen title display, so I imagine it can't be that hard to support an iPod as well, right, especially if Apple were to help?
Xbox live is, from what I understand, more of a matchmaking/lobby service. Actual game traffic for most game genres is still transmitted on a P2P basis. Bandwith and CPU requirements are therefore much less than a client/server architecture.
Look at Blizzard, they have Battle.net -- free, hugely successful, and they're rolling in profits nonethelsss.
I've heard Iwata-san pontificate on this multiple times. He believes MS and (to a lesser extent) Sony have staked too much on online games without thinking through the costs for consumers. To be honest, I agree... for most games in other genres, other than some clearly community-centric and dynamic examples, such as MMORPGS and virtual communities like Second Life, it's not reasonable for users to pay $50 or so for a game, and then pay a monthly fee to play.
The gaming industry needs to make money. But nickel and diming players, especially the younger set that consitutes the bread and butter still, may cause a backlash and revolt like what is happening now in music, and movies.
Game consoles actually are making better and better educational platforms these days.
We've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Chinese governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Deng Xiaoping to teach Chinese youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X on generic hardware -- it's not a matter of IF, but WHEN. Considering the fact that people have already managed to get Windows (somewhat) working on something as non-PC as Xbox, I'm expecting to see OS X/Intel running shortly on all our crappy no-name boxes, despite what Apple might wish.
Despite this, I don't think it will necessarily diminish Apple's hardware revenue stream (but it certainly won't increase it) -- witness the fact that iPod sales aren't exactly in trouble despite everyone and their dog in the electronics world having their own cheaper MP3 players. Apple has always been known for its quality (certain iBooks excepted... =P) and industrial design.
Also, with the more carefully controlled Mac hardware combinations, they can hopefully avoid driver hell that plagues even the best PC installations due the myriad of hardware possibilities -- anything else is just "not supported" officially, and that peace of mind might be enough of a value proposition for many, especially educational users.
The IBM Cell workstations used for PS3 dev run a version of the Linux kernel to handle development I/O tasks: file transfers, communications with the PC host, starting/restarting programs etc. The game itself does not run in a Linux environment.
This is similar to the T10K PS2 devkits running Linux (on a separate X86 processor) to do similar purposes.
As with the PS2, the consumer PS3 console itself uses a custom bare-bones kernel; it is NOT Linux based, although I could certainly see Linux being ported to it, like Sony did with the PS2.
Although I work for a competitor of both of them, I still spent the better part of the past two days soaking every bit of news and opinion on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 (nonstop clicking on the reload button, with literally over a dozen window and tabs on every gaming and tech site) -- the consoles which are going to be battling it out for control over the gaming scene for the rest of this decade.
General consensus seems to indicate the PS3 has much more raw horsepower, and the demos floored me like they did everyone else. But numbers tell surprisingly little.
Intellectually, I'm getting more and more fascinated with GPGPU techniques; essentially, using the GPU as a general purpose stream processor to handle stuff other than rendering, like physics. The main limitation of these techniques has been the horribly assymetric AGP bus on the PC in terms of readback from video RAM (ie, retrieving your results your GPU computed for use in your game). PCIe removes the bandwidth disparity, but there's still latency and bus contention issues to deal with, so it's no panacea. I don't know what interconnect they're using on the PS3, but as long as CPU and GPU use separate memory banks, you'll run into this issue. UMA seems like it will be a logical approach to solving this issue, even though raw bandwidth seems to be less.
The Ageia PPU seems to be interesting too... too bad it's not incorporated into any of this crop of consoles. Let's hope though they don't lock you into any specific proprietary API (cough... 3Dfx... Glide... ack...)
Please Sony, get a good compiler team this time, or just acquire one. gcc has never been known for its performance -- on any platform. Furthermore, it looks like that both the Xbox 360 and the Cell PPC cores are strictly in-order units, putting the onus of scheduling and thus performance squarely in the hands of the compiler writers.
I'm hopeing we can have something on the Cell that's the equivalent of the Intel C++ Compiler for their platforms or IBM's XLR compiler for PPC (MS should just adopt this for the Xbox 360), and support for OpenMP as well. Seems that Cell still has remanents of the PS2 EE/VU design decisions -- explicit DMA transfers to/from SPUs, relatively little cache to work with, so a philosophical learning curve will still be there, it seems, for PC-weaned devs, unless they get some rocking middleware.
The little things amazed me as well. Xbox 360 supporting PSP connectivity. The PS3 having not only Memory Stick slots, but SD and CF as well. With the two heavyweights of the industry both jumping on the "universal convergence" bandwagon, might this be the era that we finally see this holy grail of consumer electronics kick-started after decades of failed promises?
Well, it's gonna be an interesting few years, that's for sure.
Disclaimer: my own personal opinion only, and only formed from publically-announced information.
Yahoo is now managed by the marketing and business people; Google continues to be run by the engineers.
Yahoo seems to be overfocusing on 'monetizing' every part of their portal (eg, IMvironments, annoying interrupting ads in Yahoo groups, etc etc) compared to Google which focuses on technical innovation first, capitalization later through quality (Adwords) rather than intentional forcing of it.
Until this fundamental management difference is overcome, Yahoo's corporate culture will be counter productive to competing with Google directly.
I believe the NAT traversal is done by routing via super-nodes which are not behind a NAT or firewall. Is this a valid assumption for the future? In other words, what if every host is behind a NAT or firewall -- it seems that way, given the increased security conciousness of hardware and software makers, that sometime in the near future, firewalling will be the norm and default, not the exception?
For us non-Brits, what exactly does being knighted confer on you? What are the benefits if any?
How selective is it? How many people are knighted, and how often?
There were these things called UN Sanctions...
What countries did Iraq's net connection go through?
And how did the US get the email addresses?
The Slammer worm caused significant outages in Bank of America's ATMs.
Crashing is probably the precise reason why MS is rumored to be not having a HD in Xbox2/Xenon -- putting a hard drive in a console used by kids and likely to be picked up, moved, jolted, dropped, etc. is a bad idea.
I shoot primarily in RAW mode with my Canon EOS 10D, which produce files much larger than your average JPEG, on the order of 5-6 MB each, so even GB sized flash cards fill up quickly, especially during special event shoots like weddings, etc.
Using the iPod as an image tank would really be useful for me... but does the iPod support copying the RAW files? (I know the RAW files are camera specific, but I don't really care about viewing them, I just want to store them...)
A transistor radio was among their first ever products that were exported, no?
Indeed, Netscape, which also uses that code for its JPEG decoding had that flaw (but it was fixed earlier, and of course, it did not make the news nearly as much as this Microsoft issue, owing to its much smaller market share.)
http://www.openwall.com/advisories/OW-002-netscape -jpeg/
But most off the shelf software have disclaimers expressly stating they are not to be used in mission critical situations. Eg:
"technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as on-line control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines, or weapons systems, in which the failure of Java technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage."
And at a price HIGHER than the Japanese price... this has got to be a first for any Japanese electronics company!
Nintendo have always been sceptical of the "Everything and the kitchen sink" approach that Microsoft and Sony have taken with their consoles. They do but one thing -- gaming -- but do it well, unlike their other competitors who want to be a DVD player/CD player/PC/Internet terminal/TiVo. Their philosophy is to focus on one thing -- gaming, and make it our core competency, continuing to come out with seminal hits that people synonimize with the video game industry, Mario, Zelda, and so on.
They are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I do believe that because of Nintendo's laser-sharp and well-defined focus, that Sony and Microsoft's leads will be short lived in the next generation.
Are you saying that this won't be a threat at the Republican convention as well? Really, how is this unique to the Democrats -- wouldn't this be a problem at ANY convention or large gathering with a lot of laptops?
At least it's better than the TV tax in the UK, for instance.
It seems the UK court ruled on the basis that modchips can be used to circumvent copy protection by allowing the use of recordable media. However, the other use of modchips is to play purchased import games, and there exist so-called "anti-piracy" modchips that allow the latter, while disallowing the former.
Bypassing region codes (as opposed to copy protection) is certainly not illegal, at worst, ambiguous under UK law -- for example, the vast majority of DVD players sold in the UK are modded to be region free as well.
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but there's one architectural decision that I foresee to be the potential cause of major problems: the fact that each IHV's driver is responsible for the high-level compilation of the shading language, rather than having a common runtime do it, as with DirectX HLSL, where it is compiled into a intermediate binary token format, after which is then passed on to the driver and turned into a vendor-specific and optimized binary format.
The core competencies of graphics IHVs are generally not in compiler writing -- writing a good optimizing compiler is still a "black art" significantly more difficult than writing a hardware driver, and it will be very annoying if compiler bugs show up on some vendors' drivers and some don't, forcing developers to work around them -- or different compilers optimize things differently.
At least with DirectX, there's guaranteed to exist one common compiler that's written by a company with years of experience in optimizing compilers.
Of course, the philosophy of OpenGL is counter to DirectX in that there's no one Big Company controlling it all, but
at the very least, there needs to be some standard token bytecode defined and standarized by the ARB, and a reference compiler design, as well as a compliance suite to verify compiler correctness and language compliance.
Imagine the possilbities for bluejacking!
Even a cursory follower of international affairs probably knows just how, ahem, "effective" the paper tiger that is the UN has been in accomplishing their intended goals and ensuring their resolutions are adhered to in places such as Iraq, Palestine, etc, while not being bogged down in internecine politics...
Although spam is different from war and peace, I see the same issue here. If one rogue nation chooses to defy UN law, there's not too much they can do...
It would be the ultimate geek tech marriage: the ultimate geek music player with the ultimate geek car.
Apparently, these guys have modded the Prius audio/touch screen system to control a XM receiver, complete with onscreen title display, so I imagine it can't be that hard to support an iPod as well, right, especially if Apple were to help?
Xbox live is, from what I understand, more of a matchmaking/lobby service. Actual game traffic for most game genres is still transmitted on a P2P basis. Bandwith and CPU requirements are therefore much less than a client/server architecture.
Look at Blizzard, they have Battle.net -- free, hugely successful, and they're rolling in profits nonethelsss.
I've heard Iwata-san pontificate on this multiple times. He believes MS and (to a lesser extent) Sony have staked too much on online games without thinking through the costs for consumers. To be honest, I agree... for most games in other genres, other than some clearly community-centric and dynamic examples, such as MMORPGS and virtual communities like Second Life, it's not reasonable for users to pay $50 or so for a game, and then pay a monthly fee to play.
The gaming industry needs to make money. But nickel and diming players, especially the younger set that consitutes the bread and butter still, may cause a backlash and revolt like what is happening now in music, and movies.
Game consoles actually are making better and better educational platforms these days.
We've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Chinese governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Deng Xiaoping to teach Chinese youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing the results of this experiment in China, and will likely expand to other developing countries if it goes well.