Second, most (read: almost all) XBox games have 5.1 Dolby Digital. Whoever told you otherwise either wanted to mislead you, or was an idiot. Yes, Pro Logic II sounds almost as good as Dolby Digital under average conditions, but with quality (read: expensive... alas) speakers and a well crafted channel layout, Dolby Digital is clearer and enjoys far superior surround separation.
Third, my XBox has crashed once or twice. Then again, so has my PS2 and so has my GameCube. None of the systems are any more flakey than the other though.... so I don't know where you're coming from on that.
Fourth, load times on the XBox are no different than on the GameCube, and most of the time, are better. Read any head-to-head review a la IGN and compare any game with your own eyes. Your friends are lying to you, once again.
Finally, the notion that Halo 2 is -less- graphically intense than RS3 is a farce. Discounting the fact that Halo 2 hasn't even been released yet for an actually accounting of it's graphical worth, all signs indicate that Halo 2 will indeed be the most intensive piece of software for any console.
I'm honestly not surprised you don't own an XBox... If I based my purchasing decision on such enormous misinformation I probably wouldn't have bought one either.
Xbox is a hamstrung Celeron (128k of L2 cache), with UNIFIED MEMORY, and a CISC CPU running Windows.
XBox is also nForce based (it was one of first volume-shipment nForce based systems, iirc), which means that it's quite a bit faster than a similairly built Celeron 733 based PC. That said, to say that the Xbox is just a PC is correct, but still...
As it would turn out it's about on the level of a GameCube in terms of hardware power, but without the advantage of a console game library.
Listen, I realise you are huffing solvents, but please, try to come down before you post. While the "Gecko" CPU in the GameCube is arguably as powerful or more so than the Intel CPU in the XBox, the real difference is in the GPU. The NV21 (aka X-GPU) in the XBox is much faster than the Flipper in the GameCube, and has the added benefit of hardware based pixel and vertex shader units (a la the GeForce3, aka the NV20).
Also, thanks to the aforementioned nForce chipset, the XBox has a hardware based ICE for Dolby Digital, thus saving the CPU from having to actually do any of the encoding work. When it all comes out in the wash, the XBox is much more powerful than the GameCube.
I wouldn't mod you as a troll... you're clearly not being inflamatory... but if there was a "grossly misinformed" mod, you'd get that instead.
You sound a lot like a reporter that was interviewing then-PM Trudeau in 1970 during a small time frame where the War Measures Act was imposed on the country, basically suspending all civil liberties. Lots of armed personel were running/standing around and the reporter made a note of this to the PM.
That said, the world could use another glorious man like P.E. Trudeau. "Just watch me." he said.
When terrorists struck Canada in the form of the FLQ (as small scale as it was compared to 9/11), Trudeau dealt with it swiftly and, as history is showing is, more or less correctly.
Years later, the FLQ is all but extinct, and the concept of Quebec seperation is at an all time low. Even the once pro-seperatist Bloq Quebecois are now focussing more on pro-Quebec legislation than seperation.
A certain president could learn much from Trudeau.
Yes, but this is true of pretty much any GUI. As much "wiggle" as KDE or OS X give you, they ultimately do lock you into the paradigm as prescribed by the designer. To say that MacOS X makes you work "it's way" is fine, but don't act like KDE doesn't do the same.
You should remember that game development is a business, and that the PS2 will sell far more units than a PC version. Most people will just pirate the PC version anyways (as evidenced by the article in question), but on the other hand, most people will buy the PS2 version.
On top of that, Rockstar has an exclusivity agreement with Sony because games like this sell consoles.
Take all that together... you're lucky you're getting a PC version of San Andreas at all.
$500 for a comparable Athlon? I don't know where you buy your kit dude, but here in chinatown (the cheapest hardware I can find), a comparable Athlon64 machine would cost me around $1300-$1600 once you factor in all the ports (firewire 800, etc) and the license for Windows XP.
That said, if you want to argue that "with the PC, you don't have to buy a license" than keep it to yourself. I don't want to have to smack you with this trout.
Microsoft SQL Server is in fact Sybase. This is why they're so similar (Transact SQL, etc). Way back when, when MS needed a SQL Database for the initital releases of Windows NT 3.1, they basically licensed the code from Sybase and ported it to Windows.
That said...
If you do need to spend money on a databse, stick with Oracle.:)
This makes much sense, considering that nVidia was born out of ex-SGI employees who were pissed that SGI didn't think that making commodity 3D cards was worth their time.
The commercial players are merely standing on the shoulders of the community, picking and choosing what they like and more often than not making a mess of it.
Now, now. Technically, the commercial players were the ones to develop most of the tools that the "community" is now duplicating in an OSS model.
While there are countless examples of innovation in the OSS world, a lot of the projects are just OSS clones of already available and vastly more mature commercial products. While I think this is a good thing, just who is standing on what shoulders here?
Although I agree with the sentiment that some of the commercial players are only paying lip-service to the concept of "open source", I find open source zealots who don't understand the enormous imporantance of commerical software companies equally annoying.
...I know some of stuff is harder to cipher, but even a literate monkey...
There are literate monkeys now? Where have I been?
At least you were honest enough to add the word "total".:P Then again, why be a zealot of a second rate OS? The OS X zealot I understand... but Linux?? *grin*
While I agree with you to some extent, I also disagree. The point that the parent was trying to make was that installing software on OS X with Installer.app is worlds easier than on Linux. No, it's not tough to download and rpm --install or even build from source... I do this all day on Solaris (mind, sans rpm, but meh) and it's second nature for most of us. The point is that double-click, click to confirm is still easier and less time consuming. On the topic of dependecies, yes it's no sweat to go and fetch them, but once again, while your fetching your dependencies, I'm already using my app on OS X.
The other issue comes from the overall expectation and the difference between Linux and OS X in that regard. On OS X, if you double-click an application icon and it doesn't run, there is generally something wrong with the application. On the other hand, how many of us have struggled with some command line tool that has ambiguous switches or had to ln -s some libraries because there is a version mismatch with some of your.so's? Not tough, but certainly not nearly as convenient. On Linux, this is often not considered to be a problem. I guess the difference is in targets markets... OS X apps are almost always targetted at people who quite simply have no interest in Googling for the correct answer. There's nothing wrong with wanting to... it's just a different type of end user.
Of course, Fink on OS X makes all of this moot for *NIX applications, but I digress. Actually, most of the reason why I use OS X is because my professional life has me reaching for bash$ to solve half my problems and my overwhelming laziness has me longing to just double-click on something the rest of the time.
I also think a lot of problems the parent is complaining about come from the ever increasing number of "flavors" of Linux floating around. What are they up to now, 100 or more? On one hand this is great, because it's a distribution for almost every need. On the other hand, it makes support and releasing applications in binary format a hassle sometimes. OS X solves this problem by being the one and only OS X. If it says it works with 10.3, 999/1000 times it'll run on your copy of 10.3. Then again, often if it says it works on Linux, it's referring to Red Hat. This would be fine, but sometimes even if you have Red Hat, an application that was built for a slightly older version still requires some tweaking. Once again.. no biggy.. but it's more than zero effort.
Before someone mods me down for the Linux comment... be sure to check this link.
The shells in OS X seem to be about the same as a Linux shell.
Colored directory listings (which you can do in OS X easily enough) aside, it's the same shell. Early versions of OS X used tcsh as the default IIRC, but bash is the default for Panther and I'm pretty sure for Jaguar as well.
Going to "Setings->Legal" on my iPod clearly shows the PortalPlayer logo, as well as legal jargon about PortalPlayer technology being used, and PortalPlayer's involvement in the iPod's guts is well documented.
He's probably talking about the fact that Apple doesn't offer the specs for the hardware inside the iPod so that he can run Linux on it and listen to Ogg... this is just my guess, but it's probably correct.
Mind, if he had looked at an iPod for a few minutes, he would have noticed that the guts of the iPod run on technology from PortalPlayer
Apple can't open what it doesn't own...
At any rate... you best remember that this is the same type of person who would likely complain that they can't get easy access to the instruction set documentation for the processor in their stereo receiver.... ie.... best just ignore him.
If I had the points left, I'd mod him down as a troll.
For anyone who is interested, Rendezvous is Apple's implementation of of ZeroConf
While Apple's Rendezvous overview gives some decent information, the ZeroConf site provides a lot of good technical resources.
Apple really needed ZeroConf as they transitioned to all-IP networking. Although OS X supports AppleTalk, the AppleTalk protocol has clearly seen it's day and the world is clearly moving to IP-only. Previously, when Macintosh machines were largely communicating via AppleTalk, all of the things that ZeroConf addresses were handled by the AppleTalk protocol suite (service discovery, address allocation, etc), and this ease of use that is signature to the Macintosh is important for Apple to maintain.
That said, Apple releasing this code is pretty significant, as aside from this project, there hasn't been much use of ZeroConf in the wild.
Am I the only one who is could care less about Tiger and more about XCode 2? I hope not. I'm not that much of a loser, am I?:)
Two words, one hyphenated:
auto-vectorizing compiler.
For those wondering what this is... what really sets the G4 and the G5 apart from the P4 and Opteron is the presence of the VMX/Altivec/Velocity Engine unit (to use AIM/Motorola/Apple nomenclature). This unit allows you to process up to 4 32-bit values (128-bits) at the same time with one instruction (Single Instruction, Multiple Data).
Intel CPU's do have this technology as well, although it's half the width (64-bits at a time, rather than 128-bit).
When Apple posts benchmarks showing their machines to be faster than x86 machines, the benchmarks almost always make heavy use of these SIMD instructions... and rightly so. A vectorized application can be enormously fast compared to it's analog floating point/integer application.
The problem is that the SIMD instructions are relatively tough to use... you have to be very careful when taking advantage of them, otherwise your applications could actually run -slower-.
With the auto-vectorizing version of GCC included with XCode 2, we could start to see see some very respectable performance coming out of Macintosh applications in the future. Obviously you probably won't be able to simply recompile your application, but surely taking advantage of the auto-vectorization will be far easier than writing to the standard vec_x functions.
One has to wonder if the issue of violence in the world isn't just a grand movement to keep up with the Jones'. Obviously, there has never been a unified attempt to lay down arms by all parties involved. Alas, I have long come to terms with the idea that people are just intelligent animals, and our instincts often best our reasoning.
Mind, I have to commend you for being at least -rationally- pro-military. The difference between a war against the tangible (a nation or a clear aggressor) and the intangible (terror, or much more comically, drugs) is something that so very few people really articulate. What scares me more is that for most, it's not just an issue of articulation.
Because I haven't seen any 2000+ CPU opteron clusters that are ranked (or are expected to be ranked) in the top 5 of all supercomputers on the planet for performance.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, I'm well aware of what UMA is.
Second, most (read: almost all) XBox games have 5.1 Dolby Digital. Whoever told you otherwise either wanted to mislead you, or was an idiot. Yes, Pro Logic II sounds almost as good as Dolby Digital under average conditions, but with quality (read: expensive... alas) speakers and a well crafted channel layout, Dolby Digital is clearer and enjoys far superior surround separation.
Third, my XBox has crashed once or twice. Then again, so has my PS2 and so has my GameCube. None of the systems are any more flakey than the other though.... so I don't know where you're coming from on that.
Fourth, load times on the XBox are no different than on the GameCube, and most of the time, are better. Read any head-to-head review a la IGN and compare any game with your own eyes. Your friends are lying to you, once again.
Finally, the notion that Halo 2 is -less- graphically intense than RS3 is a farce. Discounting the fact that Halo 2 hasn't even been released yet for an actually accounting of it's graphical worth, all signs indicate that Halo 2 will indeed be the most intensive piece of software for any console.
I'm honestly not surprised you don't own an XBox... If I based my purchasing decision on such enormous misinformation I probably wouldn't have bought one either.
OK.. well, I'll have back your access to the charter of rights and freedoms, and you're ability to claim you live in a fully sovereign nation.
:p
Yes, I am from Ontario.
No, the 10% of the population in western Canada isn't insignificant....
Just the ones living in Alberta. Texas north. Bah.
Xbox is a hamstrung Celeron (128k of L2 cache), with UNIFIED MEMORY, and a CISC CPU running Windows.
XBox is also nForce based (it was one of first volume-shipment nForce based systems, iirc), which means that it's quite a bit faster than a similairly built Celeron 733 based PC. That said, to say that the Xbox is just a PC is correct, but still...
As it would turn out it's about on the level of a GameCube in terms of hardware power, but without the advantage of a console game library.
Listen, I realise you are huffing solvents, but please, try to come down before you post. While the "Gecko" CPU in the GameCube is arguably as powerful or more so than the Intel CPU in the XBox, the real difference is in the GPU. The NV21 (aka X-GPU) in the XBox is much faster than the Flipper in the GameCube, and has the added benefit of hardware based pixel and vertex shader units (a la the GeForce3, aka the NV20).
Also, thanks to the aforementioned nForce chipset, the XBox has a hardware based ICE for Dolby Digital, thus saving the CPU from having to actually do any of the encoding work. When it all comes out in the wash, the XBox is much more powerful than the GameCube.
I wouldn't mod you as a troll... you're clearly not being inflamatory... but if there was a "grossly misinformed" mod, you'd get that instead.
You sound a lot like a reporter that was interviewing then-PM Trudeau in 1970 during a small time frame where the War Measures Act was imposed on the country, basically suspending all civil liberties. Lots of armed personel were running/standing around and the reporter made a note of this to the PM.
That said, the world could use another glorious man like P.E. Trudeau. "Just watch me." he said.
When terrorists struck Canada in the form of the FLQ (as small scale as it was compared to 9/11), Trudeau dealt with it swiftly and, as history is showing is, more or less correctly.
Years later, the FLQ is all but extinct, and the concept of Quebec seperation is at an all time low. Even the once pro-seperatist Bloq Quebecois are now focussing more on pro-Quebec legislation than seperation.
A certain president could learn much from Trudeau.
Yes, but this is true of pretty much any GUI. As much "wiggle" as KDE or OS X give you, they ultimately do lock you into the paradigm as prescribed by the designer. To say that MacOS X makes you work "it's way" is fine, but don't act like KDE doesn't do the same.
Anyone else find it ironic to see a criminal promising to crack down on criminals?
You should remember that game development is a business, and that the PS2 will sell far more units than a PC version. Most people will just pirate the PC version anyways (as evidenced by the article in question), but on the other hand, most people will buy the PS2 version.
On top of that, Rockstar has an exclusivity agreement with Sony because games like this sell consoles.
Take all that together... you're lucky you're getting a PC version of San Andreas at all.
Anyways, PS2 70001 (slim one) - $159 at Walmart.
Are you on drugs?
$500 for a comparable Athlon? I don't know where you buy your kit dude, but here in chinatown (the cheapest hardware I can find), a comparable Athlon64 machine would cost me around $1300-$1600 once you factor in all the ports (firewire 800, etc) and the license for Windows XP.
That said, if you want to argue that "with the PC, you don't have to buy a license" than keep it to yourself. I don't want to have to smack you with this trout.
I'm sorry but Apple fanboys should just stay out of this conversation. Apple keeps far tighter control over hardware and OS than Microsoft.
This from a Linux fanboy. Pot... kettle is on the phone. Something about being black...
See the laundry list of other replies for reasons why your feet are stuffed into your mouth.
Ever consider that maybe some people won't -want- to run Linux on it?
Live in fantasy-land all you want.. the vast majority of the people buying this chip will -want- Solaris on it, even if given a choice.
How this got modded up to is beyond me.
Microsoft SQL Server is in fact Sybase. This is why they're so similar (Transact SQL, etc). Way back when, when MS needed a SQL Database for the initital releases of Windows NT 3.1, they basically licensed the code from Sybase and ported it to Windows.
:)
That said...
If you do need to spend money on a databse, stick with Oracle.
This makes much sense, considering that nVidia was born out of ex-SGI employees who were pissed that SGI didn't think that making commodity 3D cards was worth their time.
Where are my mod points when I need them.
Idiot.
while (point > yourHead)
comment = false;
The commercial players are merely standing on the shoulders of the community, picking and choosing what they like and more often than not making a mess of it.
Now, now. Technically, the commercial players were the ones to develop most of the tools that the "community" is now duplicating in an OSS model.
While there are countless examples of innovation in the OSS world, a lot of the projects are just OSS clones of already available and vastly more mature commercial products. While I think this is a good thing, just who is standing on what shoulders here?
Although I agree with the sentiment that some of the commercial players are only paying lip-service to the concept of "open source", I find open source zealots who don't understand the enormous imporantance of commerical software companies equally annoying.
There are literate monkeys now? Where have I been?
At least you were honest enough to add the word "total". :P Then again, why be a zealot of a second rate OS? The OS X zealot I understand... but Linux?? *grin*
While I agree with you to some extent, I also disagree. The point that the parent was trying to make was that installing software on OS X with Installer.app is worlds easier than on Linux. No, it's not tough to download and rpm --install or even build from source... I do this all day on Solaris (mind, sans rpm, but meh) and it's second nature for most of us. The point is that double-click, click to confirm is still easier and less time consuming. On the topic of dependecies, yes it's no sweat to go and fetch them, but once again, while your fetching your dependencies, I'm already using my app on OS X.
The other issue comes from the overall expectation and the difference between Linux and OS X in that regard. On OS X, if you double-click an application icon and it doesn't run, there is generally something wrong with the application. On the other hand, how many of us have struggled with some command line tool that has ambiguous switches or had to ln -s some libraries because there is a version mismatch with some of your .so's? Not tough, but certainly not nearly as convenient. On Linux, this is often not considered to be a problem. I guess the difference is in targets markets... OS X apps are almost always targetted at people who quite simply have no interest in Googling for the correct answer. There's nothing wrong with wanting to... it's just a different type of end user.
Of course, Fink on OS X makes all of this moot for *NIX applications, but I digress. Actually, most of the reason why I use OS X is because my professional life has me reaching for bash$ to solve half my problems and my overwhelming laziness has me longing to just double-click on something the rest of the time.
I also think a lot of problems the parent is complaining about come from the ever increasing number of "flavors" of Linux floating around. What are they up to now, 100 or more? On one hand this is great, because it's a distribution for almost every need. On the other hand, it makes support and releasing applications in binary format a hassle sometimes. OS X solves this problem by being the one and only OS X. If it says it works with 10.3, 999/1000 times it'll run on your copy of 10.3. Then again, often if it says it works on Linux, it's referring to Red Hat. This would be fine, but sometimes even if you have Red Hat, an application that was built for a slightly older version still requires some tweaking. Once again.. no biggy.. but it's more than zero effort.
Before someone mods me down for the Linux comment... be sure to check this link.
The shells in OS X seem to be about the same as a Linux shell.
Colored directory listings (which you can do in OS X easily enough) aside, it's the same shell. Early versions of OS X used tcsh as the default IIRC, but bash is the default for Panther and I'm pretty sure for Jaguar as well.
Actually, yes.
Going to "Setings->Legal" on my iPod clearly shows the PortalPlayer logo, as well as legal jargon about PortalPlayer technology being used, and PortalPlayer's involvement in the iPod's guts is well documented.
Why not read first?
He's probably talking about the fact that Apple doesn't offer the specs for the hardware inside the iPod so that he can run Linux on it and listen to Ogg... this is just my guess, but it's probably correct.
Mind, if he had looked at an iPod for a few minutes, he would have noticed that the guts of the iPod run on technology from PortalPlayer
Apple can't open what it doesn't own...
At any rate... you best remember that this is the same type of person who would likely complain that they can't get easy access to the instruction set documentation for the processor in their stereo receiver.... ie .... best just ignore him.
If I had the points left, I'd mod him down as a troll.
For anyone who is interested, Rendezvous is Apple's implementation of of ZeroConf
While Apple's Rendezvous overview gives some decent information, the ZeroConf site provides a lot of good technical resources.
Apple really needed ZeroConf as they transitioned to all-IP networking. Although OS X supports AppleTalk, the AppleTalk protocol has clearly seen it's day and the world is clearly moving to IP-only. Previously, when Macintosh machines were largely communicating via AppleTalk, all of the things that ZeroConf addresses were handled by the AppleTalk protocol suite (service discovery, address allocation, etc), and this ease of use that is signature to the Macintosh is important for Apple to maintain.
That said, Apple releasing this code is pretty significant, as aside from this project, there hasn't been much use of ZeroConf in the wild.
Am I the only one who is could care less about Tiger and more about XCode 2? I hope not. I'm not that much of a loser, am I? :)
... what really sets the G4 and the G5 apart from the P4 and Opteron is the presence of the VMX/Altivec/Velocity Engine unit (to use AIM/Motorola/Apple nomenclature). This unit allows you to process up to 4 32-bit values (128-bits) at the same time with one instruction (Single Instruction, Multiple Data).
Two words, one hyphenated:
auto-vectorizing compiler.
For those wondering what this is
Intel CPU's do have this technology as well, although it's half the width (64-bits at a time, rather than 128-bit).
When Apple posts benchmarks showing their machines to be faster than x86 machines, the benchmarks almost always make heavy use of these SIMD instructions... and rightly so. A vectorized application can be enormously fast compared to it's analog floating point/integer application.
The problem is that the SIMD instructions are relatively tough to use... you have to be very careful when taking advantage of them, otherwise your applications could actually run -slower-.
With the auto-vectorizing version of GCC included with XCode 2, we could start to see see some very respectable performance coming out of Macintosh applications in the future. Obviously you probably won't be able to simply recompile your application, but surely taking advantage of the auto-vectorization will be far easier than writing to the standard vec_x functions.
One has to wonder if the issue of violence in the world isn't just a grand movement to keep up with the Jones'. Obviously, there has never been a unified attempt to lay down arms by all parties involved. Alas, I have long come to terms with the idea that people are just intelligent animals, and our instincts often best our reasoning.
Mind, I have to commend you for being at least -rationally- pro-military. The difference between a war against the tangible (a nation or a clear aggressor) and the intangible (terror, or much more comically, drugs) is something that so very few people really articulate. What scares me more is that for most, it's not just an issue of articulation.
Because I haven't seen any 2000+ CPU opteron clusters that are ranked (or are expected to be ranked) in the top 5 of all supercomputers on the planet for performance.
[[your clue] release]
As a Canadian, I find this embarrassing.
You're out of the club. Please pack your things and move out immediately. I don't care where you go, though I hear Iraq is nice this time of year.
An eye for an eye, and the whole world is blind.
A better solution for a violent world if for all of us to renounce violence.