Even if their app store takes off, it's still going to be the same rinky-dink app-store style games you see on phones, plus emulators. And with such a small market base, I can't see many serious developers writing for it, so, at best, you can expect the usual ports and half-assed clones of popular IOS/Android games.
Granted, I don't see how anyone can play [S]NES on a touch screen (I've tried), but $500 is too steep for a [S]NES emulator. So you come up with a smartphone without the phone, and a game system without the games. Thus going back to my original point: it's over-engineered and crazy expensive, it's putting itself up against smartphones AND the big-name game consoles, and it doesn't dazzle on either front. It's not price-competitive, not power or feature competitive.
I'm not saying it's not a cool idea, or even that I wouldn't love having one to play with, but not at $500. I can't say how far above the "Sweet spot" (price/volume intersection) they are, but I can say for certain that the price alone cost them 1 sale. I'd not even be put off by a 3-month wait at a more sensible price.
To be fair, there are issues with the Pandora, but it's still pretty damn cool.
There are a couple of interesting games that are somewhat Pandora specific (like Super Geometry Dust), but as usual it's mostly fantastic for emulators where you've got
SNES Sega Megadrive (Americans call it the Sega Genesis) MAME ScummVM Residual (Grim Fandango)
Which are all pretty much spot on
Then you have some more work in progress ones, like
Playstation (playable enough for FF7 but some annoying lag in places) Amiga (ugly UI to select stuff) N64 (playable for Mario 64, but it's not ideal)
And probably a couple of others that I've completely forgotten.
I'm hoping that the UI improves as well - something like meego would absolutely rock, and it should work quite well
Or alternatively, the BBC could simply say "we won't pay that, we'll just cut you guys off" and then see how long it takes them to stop any talk of charging.
I'm sure that they will do really well selling an internet service that can't view the IPlayer.
Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
Covers it. Of course, that stopped with the A500+, but by then you could get AMOS/Blitz fairly easily (or at least minimal versions of it, as they were included on magazine cover disks)
I think it's bad public policy to have DRM affecting HD content, but this is more like DVD encryption than say, Blu-ray.
Ie, it has very little effect on technical people at all.
To be honest, I wonder what the point is - this isn't going to stop it being distributed over the Internet - the only reasonable argument is that it stops people from being unable to move HD signals from their generic boxes to other generic boxes - thus trying to up the sales of blu-ray.
I think this could be a long term boon to be honest - very few freeview boxes realistically allow you to pull content off them (at least with any ease) at the moment, and most people other than videophiles don't really care that much about HD content versus SD content.
Given that you can make SD copies of things on these boxes it might actually be a net gain.
Also if freesat is an example of it in use, then it shouldn't impact mythtv users at all.
Tunbridge Wells Council collect rubbish every 2 weeks, and on the alternate week collect compostable waste and (paper) recycling.
Or at least, they did 3 years ago. I doubt it's changed
It is nowhere near as good as Sevenoaks council (where I live now), which collects rubbish every week, and has the brilliant recycling bags, which are everywhere now. They also have excellent recycling statistics.
Most of it comes from the fact that councils have to pay heavy fees to landfill rubbish, whereas they can make money (or at least lose less) on recycling. Thus they want to try and encourage people to recycle where possible. This ties into the fact that people have so little respect for local council elections that they elect people who really have no clue about democracy or using the media. The fact that they don't work on shaming people into recycling more, and applying pressure to local shops (perhaps on the threat of higher rates or otherwise) into providing better facilities (say a discount for using bags, or a charge) instead (which is very easy to explain to council tax payers), or even for the stronger suggestions actually put it to a public vote if they so choose, which wouldn't be too tricky.
The PowerVR is still unfortunate, however your choices for mobile devices are pretty much the PowerVR or Mali (and I've not yet seen a Mali device), and ARM are pretty tight fisted with documentation as well
All three languages have both interpreters and compilers (ocaml is part of the base distribution, haskell has a number of compilers, and Erlang apparently has a compiler)
They all support concurrency, all in slightly different ways. They all have a lot of libraries.
Ocaml is sort of a functional language that includes object oriented features and also has very good performance numbers. It allows mutable updates, including arrays and references. For threading I believe it has the usual mutexes and so on, but nothing more sophisticated (but I could be wrong)
Haskell is a pure functional language. It tends to be a test bed for programming language ideas. It has some interesting features that can screw with your mind - it's lazy (which means that it only evaluates things when required), and pure (manipulating state can be interesting). It has mutex support, but also (in GHC) support for software transactional memory, which can be used to simulate erlang style concurrency.
Not really an expert on Erlang, but to my knowledge it pushes you to a 'mini-server' model, where you write each component as a mini server which then performs a single job, and you then spend most of your time sending messages to other processes. The Erlang system then distributes this across multiple machines for you and handles fault tolerance etc.
Having had good experiences with my Radeon with the DRI drivers, I decided to purchase a computer with integrated radeon graphics.
And I really really truly regret it.
The main purpose of this computer was TV-Out, a feature only supported by the proprietary firegl drivers. The version I first got (8.16.20) didn't feature any overscan controls, so it sat in the middle of our television. After a couple of releases of this, we got 8.21.something which broke it even more - in fact, now you could only see the top third of any video you were watching with XV. At the same time of course, there was no 3d support at all.
Since then, I got a VGA->RGB Scart cable, and I've been able to switch back to the free drivers. The quality is significantly better - working 3d, a full screen picture and snappier menus. I plan to be very very careful when buying ATI again.
I don't think it has tesselation on GPU (as far as I know)
but what else am I missing? What other key features offered by D3D10 aren't supported by OpenGL and which are? Obviously companies are going to offer some extensions, but has anything been suggested?
Perhaps people expected some of their top selling titles like PGR and PGR2 to be backwards compatible?
Or some of the reasons to buy an Xbox - the quirky games that show off why you should own one, like JSRF and TJ&E3.
At the end of it all, I feel quite annoyed that I bought some cross-platform titles on the Xbox, because if I'd bought them on the Gamecube I'd be more assured of backwards compatibility.
Lack of backwards compatibility has pretty much cost them a sale to me. I was expecting it to get better and, let's be blunt, it hasn't. It feels like the team has been disbanded, IE style.
I would never have bought a DS if it wasn't for the GBA backcompat, and to be honest, the backcompat in the Wii sweetens the deal (probably would have bought one anyway).
Not any more. Sky+ is different hardware and only works with Sky. It also looks nothing like the Tivo.
Used to own one, now slowly replacing it with a Myth box.
Re:My first experience with C#
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
Umm, I'm too lazy to dig up references, but you're not *meant* to do that with Java. You're only meant to manipulate the UI from the UI thread.
IU think that setText is about the only safe function. We've had actual problems that have been caused by manipulating UI state from the wrong thread.
What you should have done in your thread is something like
private class myThread extends Thread { public void run() { SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() { public void run() { jTextPane1.setText("Hello from a thread"); } }); } }
"A dynamically typed language, such as Ruby or Python, has no such restriction. Just as you can create new objects at runtime, so too can you create new classes. This leads into the territory of metaclasses and dynamic class factories, which is beyond the scope of languages like Java or C#."
???
I accept you can't add a new method to String.class, but you can define new classes at runtime. Java has a bunch of add-on packages for it, and.NET has it as part of the built in stuff to my knowledge (Reflection.Emit).
Both languages can load classes dynamically - a good example would be Apache Derby which translates SQL queries into compiled java classes, which can then of course be jitted at some point. Also, reflection tends to work by generating new classes at runtime. Slap -verbose:gc onto your java command line at some point and see which classes are flushed.
Re:Don't confuse dynamic with weak typing
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
Other than using JNI, when is Java static/weak?
Besides, the "weak/strong" 'typing' to which you refer too isn't so much the typing, but how sound the operational semantics are - are there any cases when the language can lead to strange and wacky error conditions. Using the phrase "sound" and "unsound" instead of strong and weak might be somewhat better.
Also, surely the existence of unsafePerformIO and arguably even the FFI could make Haskell unsound?
My big beef with the dynamic typing camp is that they seem to believe that static typing only buys you the power of Java and that you have to specify every type. Every argument against Java and for something else utterly ignores typing - basically saying "look, we can pass an anonymous function to a list, which Java can't do, and because Java is statically typed and we're not then it must be down to static typing", ignoring the fact that you can do the same in a lot of fine statically typed languages. The expressivity of Java is the problem, not the level of typing or otherwise.
Interestingly enough, speed cameras in Kent (SouthEast of England) now say how effective the cameras were just before you reach them. Hearts and minds at a guess. The one near us has had a "48% reduction in accidents" since being installed (or it could have been casualities - I'll look more closely next time I go past).
Most people who think they can drive safely at 90mph probably can't.
Woah, you should be careful with this. Different VMs have different unspecified behaviours and it's very easy to rely upon unspecified behaviours (such as.toString()) on DOM Text nodes which differs between IBM and Sun.
Always worth testing on the different VMs, they're not alike as you would think.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if their app store takes off, it's still going to be the same rinky-dink app-store style games you see on phones, plus emulators. And with such a small market base, I can't see many serious developers writing for it, so, at best, you can expect the usual ports and half-assed clones of popular IOS/Android games.
The OpenPandora's stuff is mostly on http://repo.openpandora.org/ now. It seems to coordinate the other places.
Granted, I don't see how anyone can play [S]NES on a touch screen (I've tried), but $500 is too steep for a [S]NES emulator. So you come up with a smartphone without the phone, and a game system without the games. Thus going back to my original point: it's over-engineered and crazy expensive, it's putting itself up against smartphones AND the big-name game consoles, and it doesn't dazzle on either front. It's not price-competitive, not power or feature competitive.
I'm not saying it's not a cool idea, or even that I wouldn't love having one to play with, but not at $500. I can't say how far above the "Sweet spot" (price/volume intersection) they are, but I can say for certain that the price alone cost them 1 sale. I'd not even be put off by a 3-month wait at a more sensible price.
To be fair, there are issues with the Pandora, but it's still pretty damn cool.
There are a couple of interesting games that are somewhat Pandora specific (like Super Geometry Dust), but as usual it's mostly fantastic for emulators where you've got
SNES
Sega Megadrive (Americans call it the Sega Genesis)
MAME
ScummVM
Residual (Grim Fandango)
Which are all pretty much spot on
Then you have some more work in progress ones, like
Playstation (playable enough for FF7 but some annoying lag in places)
Amiga (ugly UI to select stuff)
N64 (playable for Mario 64, but it's not ideal)
And probably a couple of others that I've completely forgotten.
I'm hoping that the UI improves as well - something like meego would absolutely rock, and it should work quite well
Or alternatively, the BBC could simply say "we won't pay that, we'll just cut you guys off" and then see how long it takes them to stop any talk of charging.
I'm sure that they will do really well selling an internet service that can't view the IPlayer.
Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
Pretty sure the A500 shipped with BASIC.
Of course, I don't have it lying around here so I can't check too much...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaBASIC
Covers it. Of course, that stopped with the A500+, but by then you could get AMOS/Blitz fairly easily (or at least minimal versions of it, as they were included on magazine cover disks)
I think it's bad public policy to have DRM affecting HD content, but this is more like DVD encryption than say, Blu-ray.
Ie, it has very little effect on technical people at all.
To be honest, I wonder what the point is - this isn't going to stop it being distributed over the Internet - the only reasonable argument is that it stops people from being unable to move HD signals from their generic boxes to other generic boxes - thus trying to up the sales of blu-ray.
I think this could be a long term boon to be honest - very few freeview boxes realistically allow you to pull content off them (at least with any ease) at the moment, and most people other than videophiles don't really care that much about HD content versus SD content.
Given that you can make SD copies of things on these boxes it might actually be a net gain.
Also if freesat is an example of it in use, then it shouldn't impact mythtv users at all.
Is there really DRM on Freesat?
It doesn't work. I have freesat, and I have raw h264 transport streams sitting on my disk.
That said, I run mythtv, which seems to support it well.
Force alarm then - nothing to see here.
Direct Debits have that handy guarantee though.
Otherwise known as the "charge the wrong amount, payment goes bye bye" guarantee.
Plus, they are significantly more convenient for most payments.
Or better, a building society cheque.
Like a banker's draft, only free
And the first bank to do this will suffer scary amounts of capital flight as half their customers shut their bank account.
It's a bluff.
Tunbridge Wells Council collect rubbish every 2 weeks, and on the alternate week collect compostable waste and (paper) recycling.
Or at least, they did 3 years ago. I doubt it's changed
It is nowhere near as good as Sevenoaks council (where I live now), which collects rubbish every week, and has the brilliant recycling bags, which are everywhere now. They also have excellent recycling statistics.
Most of it comes from the fact that councils have to pay heavy fees to landfill rubbish, whereas they can make money (or at least lose less) on recycling. Thus they want to try and encourage people to recycle where possible. This ties into the fact that people have so little respect for local council elections that they elect people who really have no clue about democracy or using the media. The fact that they don't work on shaming people into recycling more, and applying pressure to local shops (perhaps on the threat of higher rates or otherwise) into providing better facilities (say a discount for using bags, or a charge) instead (which is very easy to explain to council tax payers), or even for the stronger suggestions actually put it to a public vote if they so choose, which wouldn't be too tricky.
The 3GS is a Cortex A-8, which would be faster than the A-5.
It's clocked at 600Mhz and is dual issue. As well as that they have a beefier 3d chip as well.
The A-9 is more exciting as it is multi-core and out of order.
The DSP instruction set is documented.
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ug/spru732g/spru732g.pdf
The PowerVR is still unfortunate, however your choices for mobile devices are pretty much the PowerVR or Mali (and I've not yet seen a Mali device), and ARM are pretty tight fisted with documentation as well
Brief answer:
All three languages have both interpreters and compilers (ocaml is part of the base distribution, haskell has a number of compilers, and Erlang apparently has a compiler)
They all support concurrency, all in slightly different ways. They all have a lot of libraries.
Ocaml is sort of a functional language that includes object oriented features and also has very good performance numbers. It allows mutable updates, including arrays and references. For threading I believe it has the usual mutexes and so on, but nothing more sophisticated (but I could be wrong)
Haskell is a pure functional language. It tends to be a test bed for programming language ideas. It has some interesting features that can screw with your mind - it's lazy (which means that it only evaluates things when required), and pure (manipulating state can be interesting). It has mutex support, but also (in GHC) support for software transactional memory, which can be used to simulate erlang style concurrency.
Not really an expert on Erlang, but to my knowledge it pushes you to a 'mini-server' model, where you write each component as a mini server which then performs a single job, and you then spend most of your time sending messages to other processes. The Erlang system then distributes this across multiple machines for you and handles fault tolerance etc.
oh, ATI free drivers are fantastic, and for low end stuff, I'd rather have the free drivers.
But yeah, Nvidia drivers if I want performance.
Having had good experiences with my Radeon with the DRI drivers, I decided to purchase a computer with integrated radeon graphics.
And I really really truly regret it.
The main purpose of this computer was TV-Out, a feature only supported by the proprietary firegl drivers. The version I first got (8.16.20) didn't feature any overscan controls, so it sat in the middle of our television. After a couple of releases of this, we got 8.21.something which broke it even more - in fact, now you could only see the top third of any video you were watching with XV. At the same time of course, there was no 3d support at all.
Since then, I got a VGA->RGB Scart cable, and I've been able to switch back to the free drivers. The quality is significantly better - working 3d, a full screen picture and snappier menus. I plan to be very very careful when buying ATI again.
OpenGL2 has this unified shading model
:)
I don't think it has tesselation on GPU (as far as I know)
but what else am I missing? What other key features offered by D3D10 aren't supported by OpenGL and which are? Obviously companies are going to offer some extensions, but has anything been suggested?
Just curious
Toejam and Earl FTW
(same screen, but if one player gets stuck behind, it splits the screen)
Perhaps people expected some of their top selling titles like PGR and PGR2 to be backwards compatible?
Or some of the reasons to buy an Xbox - the quirky games that show off why you should own one, like JSRF and TJ&E3.
At the end of it all, I feel quite annoyed that I bought some cross-platform titles on the Xbox, because if I'd bought them on the Gamecube I'd be more assured of backwards compatibility.
Lack of backwards compatibility has pretty much cost them a sale to me. I was expecting it to get better and, let's be blunt, it hasn't. It feels like the team has been disbanded, IE style.
I would never have bought a DS if it wasn't for the GBA backcompat, and to be honest, the backcompat in the Wii sweetens the deal (probably would have bought one anyway).
Not any more. Sky+ is different hardware and only works with Sky. It also looks nothing like the Tivo.
Used to own one, now slowly replacing it with a Myth box.
Umm, I'm too lazy to dig up references, but you're not *meant* to do that with Java. You're only meant to manipulate the UI from the UI thread.
IU think that setText is about the only safe function. We've had actual problems that have been caused by manipulating UI state from the wrong thread.
What you should have done in your thread is something like
private class myThread extends Thread {
public void run() {
SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
jTextPane1.setText("Hello from a thread");
}
});
}
}
"A dynamically typed language, such as Ruby or Python, has no such restriction. Just as you can create new objects at runtime, so too can you create new classes. This leads into the territory of metaclasses and dynamic class factories, which is beyond the scope of languages like Java or C#."
.NET has it as part of the built in stuff to my knowledge (Reflection.Emit).
???
I accept you can't add a new method to String.class, but you can define new classes at runtime. Java has a bunch of add-on packages for it, and
Both languages can load classes dynamically - a good example would be Apache Derby which translates SQL queries into compiled java classes, which can then of course be jitted at some point. Also, reflection tends to work by generating new classes at runtime. Slap -verbose:gc onto your java command line at some point and see which classes are flushed.
Other than using JNI, when is Java static/weak?
Besides, the "weak/strong" 'typing' to which you refer too isn't so much the typing, but how sound the operational semantics are - are there any cases when the language can lead to strange and wacky error conditions. Using the phrase "sound" and "unsound" instead of strong and weak might be somewhat better.
Also, surely the existence of unsafePerformIO and arguably even the FFI could make Haskell unsound?
My big beef with the dynamic typing camp is that they seem to believe that static typing only buys you the power of Java and that you have to specify every type. Every argument against Java and for something else utterly ignores typing - basically saying "look, we can pass an anonymous function to a list, which Java can't do, and because Java is statically typed and we're not then it must be down to static typing", ignoring the fact that you can do the same in a lot of fine statically typed languages. The expressivity of Java is the problem, not the level of typing or otherwise.
Interestingly enough, speed cameras in Kent (SouthEast of England) now say how effective the cameras were just before you reach them. Hearts and minds at a guess. The one near us has had a "48% reduction in accidents" since being installed (or it could have been casualities - I'll look more closely next time I go past).
Most people who think they can drive safely at 90mph probably can't.
Where's PGR 1&2 (both games with massive live communities)
Burnout?
Pretty piss poor list. I'm annoyed I didn't get the Burnouts on the PS2 - at least then I could have played them on a PS3.
Woah, you should be careful with this. Different VMs have different unspecified behaviours and it's very easy to rely upon unspecified behaviours (such as .toString()) on DOM Text nodes which differs between IBM and Sun.
Always worth testing on the different VMs, they're not alike as you would think.