This is the same crap Intel tried to sell us with their shared memory AGP video cards and soft modems back in the day.
Accelerated hardware makes sense -- it may not be efficient in terms of transistors but its much more predictably efficient in terms of bottlenecks.
You have a CPU that sends off primitives to a GPU and you don't have a cache coherency problem in your calculations because the GPU is handling a completely different thing than the CPU and on its own bus with its own memory.
Now if you want to invent CPUs with multiple cores with multiple possibly independant switching pathways to main memory... oh never mind, that's the Alpha and AMD's using Hypertransport already.
So after shaking my head in silence for a minute I need to get this out:
I'm supposed to change my hand positions so I'll be better off in the off-chance of an airbag deployment (very very rare compared to say, cornering on the road) instead of in the better-for-driving-accuracy positions.
Yeah, that makes sense.
How about this: airbags suck, and this is yet another proof.
Lets cover B first... most audiophiles are aware of the fact that audio uses such low frequencies (compared to say, light) at such low power levels (compared to say, your halogen light bulb) that digital connections make almost no difference.
Case in point -- do you have fibre optics connecting your rear speakers to your amplifier? Of course not. You have "normal" analogue wiring going 10, 15, 20 feet to them. In a THX certified theatre, that non-digital wiring will run hundreds of feet with no audible signal quality issues. Your ear simply can't tell.
Secondly, I said audiophiles wouldn't want to use HDMI cables to connect both audio and video at the same time since one goes to the TV/projector and the other goes to the pre/pro/amplifier. These are two seperate devices in midrange to high-end systems and therefore require seperate cabling.
Back to the first point -- do your research. The "its digital, duh" argument is getting stupid. A basic review of any testing would show you that component video cables give equal performance to HDMI cables at 1080i at least. Also, they can actually perform better in some circumstances (go Google it yourself). In one obvious case -- if you do have interferance issues, the analogue signal will have less visible quality issues than a degraded digital signal. You may get a slight change in the red hues for a 60th of a second instead of an MPEG decoder melt-down effect all over your screen.
Please, honestly, go look it up and quit believing what you're told about digital signals.
Thank you for pointing this out. I'm incredulous at the number of people seemingly incapable of tying their shoes while carrying on a conversation... I drink coffee and drive, why not change stereo stations and drive? Why not talk to my wife or 4yr old while driving?
Besides, that crap on the steering wheel encourages poor hand positioning. I like to drive at 10&2 as per my driving lessons way back (or the one-handed 12 o'clock position). Never do I have my fingers or thumbs anywhere near the area of the steering wheel that has controls on it (there's a reason Ferrari's paddle shifters are where they are).
Why not make good UIs for car consoles with nice big finger-recognizable control surfaces? PS, when its cold out, I want to be able to turn the knobs with gloves on.
It would still be a problem -- just like Windows XP requiring a username before completing the installation is a problem in other circumstances.
Believe it or not, the "user" is not always the one setting up the machine in question. The default (or "a" default password) needs to be configured and told to the user reliably. Now you do that with a dozen new ATMs to a bank and see how pissed they get at you or how fast someone writes the password on a sticky note.
Yes, they need to do better security if they're using the default password.
Yes, the person who set the machine to "active" with real cash in it before changing the default password should be fired.
gp was saying to push down the price of compliance for low wattage transmitters (people, not objects). That is to say, for persons engaging in low wattage transmission.
Yeah cause, god forbid someone borrow the little dpad controller design from Nintendo or the concept of wireless controllers from (some 3rd party) or having a menu button (like most DVD players). I don't care if they borrow from each other; I care if they lie (we invented this, this is new!) and I care if they make it work well.
I'm pretty sure I haven't heard Sony claim they invented something new that wasn't in fact their own and from history I'd say they'll do a good job of making it all work together well. My only concern would be the initial product hardware quality (from PS2 launch memories).
Which is the opposite of a Nintendo (and later) controller(s).
On an NES, your "joystick" (dpad) is on the left, not right. And the buttons are on the right, not left. With a traditional C64/Atari/etc. joystick, your right hand steers and your left hand button mashes.
Don't forget that the high-end PS3 will have open pricing in Japan, so those 100k units will be priced through the roof if there's high demand for them.
Forget what HD output? Component video cables provide equal (or better) quality output to HDMI (especially to those of us with CRT HDTV sets). HDMI is only barely interesting for newer resolutions and encryption (ugh) and its ability to carry audio as well (which no HiFi geek or audiophile wants anyway).
I'm currently using (and plan to continue using) component video cables to my TV and coax digital audio cables to my receiver for the near future. When I buy a new receiver with DTS Master audio support, I'll be going to new audio cables. If and when LCD or Plasma TVs look as good at variable resolutions as my CRT, I might use HDMI for video only.
Yes yes, I know, in a few years, some discs might be encoded so that I need HDCP to play them on my TV at all. For the reasonable future, it would seem that movie companies care more about sales figures though and won't be setting that bit.
Quake 3 Arena is one of the worst multiplayer FPS games... compared to Quake 2 even. I remember when I bought Q3A and played it for hours then went online with it and realized how much better Quake 2 was (with community mods of course). I spent many many hours playing Q2:UT (Urban Terror) and trust me, low res doesn't cut it when you're playing anything semi-realistic (sneaking, strategizing, not running around jumping like an idiot spraying anything that moves with bullets).
I'm sure there are many ranges of hard core FPS gamer, but those who work as teams and want to hit what they're looking at accurately from more than 10 feet away like their games running at more than 640x480.
The tutorial guy for Psi Ops' telekinesis skill says something like "now just pick up that guard, bounce him off the wall a few times until he's dead." You can pick up that bad guy shooting at you and throw him at his buddy... or catch grenades in mid-air and toss them back (hard, but fun).
Very fun game, under promoted (like many others on the PS2).
How could you possibly challenge me on FPSes and then use a console game? Seriously. There's not a single FPS that can even touch PC FPSes...YET.
The only thing limiting FPSs on the console is resolution. Aiming with a wireless pointing device will not help anything IMHO. I can't think of anyone that would rather aim with a stick at their TV than with a mouse or joystick. A real light gun? maybe. Those are a pain too.
Of course I know solid frame rates are important; or else you can't aim properly at all -- the other people jump around seemingly randomly. I've been playing FPSs since before 3D accelerated Quake came out and was the first person I knew with a 3dfx card. Again, when I say resolution is important, I assume that anyone making a console game guarantees their framerate intrinsically (most console game makers are pretty good at that) and thats the beauty of console game design -- you can guarantee what your customers experience will be like.
I've never gotten tired playing for 3-6 hours straight of anything from Quake to Enemy Territory to anything else. I have a well laid out keyboard and mouse and its at very high sensitivity for good accuracy with low movement.
PS, we were talking about what will make the next generation of consoles better -- not PC games -- and console gaming lacks in only one area, not framerate, but resolution. Game design is primarily up to the game makers, not the console makers. Consider the controls for Prince of Persia versus those for God of War for example.
Best shooter I've played in a long time: Black. Awsome graphics, great enemies, fun physics (blowing stuff up is good; having the tree you're hiding behind blown away is freaky).
What would make it better? A stupid laggy aiming device that makes my arm sore when I play for hours on end or high definition output with more accurate aiming at distances without having to resort to using a zoom feature?
The graphics arms race isn't just about numbers, its about beauty and accuracy. Sure, Zelda will look just as good in low def or high def, but I guarantee you the next Grandia will look awesome in High Def and shooters play much better in high def.
PS, since you're a "hard core" FPS player, I'd like to know why you think graphics resolutions don't matter -- I've never met a FPSer who didn't grab as many pixels as he/she could get out of their graphics card/screen in PC gaming. You just can't see / aim at low res on a TV or monitor. 1920x1080 is a beautiful thing.
a) You realize there are excellent scratch-resistant coatings available for use on BD discs right?
b) I'm sure we'll all get our first taste of Sony's online network when the PS3 is actually launched, then we can judge.
c) At its worst, a cell processor is still over 3GHz, not at all like a 386, and with a much faster memory pipeline. With a little mental arithmetic you realize its more powerful running just one of its cores than most PCs are today.
d) You've never written a video game and thought about how much is parallelizable have you? AI systems, sound calculations, physics and collisions can all be run in parallel without any nasty loops taking up one core or the other the whole time.
e) The APIs available for the cell processory (including entire physics packages, 3D packages, etc.) are numerous. They've been available (some for free, some not) for almost a year now but you still need to learn to write your own code around them which, granted, is hard on a new CPU architecture.
I'm with you -- I don't mind that my Yamaha receiver requires space above it for cooling (see pictures), but please, please would people try to stick to sane form factors for A/V gear? I know its neat to have little cubes here and little top-loading thingies there, but they are very inefficient to lay out.
That's why I'd rather they build it into a nice ATX desktop-like case like this one from Antec, which IMHO would be perfect.
I'll note the parent posted as AC -- I wouldn't admit that I didn't know what the GP was talking about. I've been writing Windows code in various languages since Windows 3.0 and Borland C++ and I know exactly what he's complaining about. I've got a few dozen more myself (including the terrible async networking classes in MFC42).
Ever wondered why IE corrupted large downloads? You try writing good software with those classes.
Microsoft has often been quoted as saying internally that the Windows API is their most valuable product. Making a platform for others to write Windows API based software on was one of their primary concerns. To be honest, some of what Microsoft did was really nice... the common TAPI and MAPI interfaces are ugly, but useful for example.
The point is that there's no guarantee anyone will design the games to work at 1080p at all (it would be too slow perhaps?). That said, they'll upconvert your 720p or 1080i games to 1080p so they look "right" on a 1080p digital display.
Upconversion is not the same as original content. Digg has an uneducated comment about how upconversion of DVDs makes high definition movie content less attractive (on the future PS3) -- upconverted DVDs don't look anywhere near as good as true HD original content. I watch HDTV television (heavily compressed over satellite) and it looks a whole lot cleaner, crisper and with much better contrast than upconverted DVD content ever will (on my nice new Oppo upconverting DVD player no less).
Sure the upconverted Oppo Digital DVD output is better than having the TV rescale the image but actual HD content is a lot better. I mean, a LOT better.
In my experience, Google no longer caches websites that haven't been indexable in some time. That is to say, if you remove the page or even better -- replace it with an empty one that links to an excluded page, Google should (and most likely will) remove the cache of the originally indexed page. I'd expect this to happen within a month or so (from my experience).
This is in no way Google's fault. Google caches sites, the Internet archive caches sites, its up to you as a webmaster to put limits on it with the well-publicized "robots.txt" restrictions available to you.
The problem here lies in the definition of the act first and foremost:
Is this an original real legitimate copy of Windows off the back of a truck? Its genuine but stolen?
Is it an original real legitimate copy of Windows copied onto new media with fake packaging? The software is genuine but illegally copied and the overall package is an imposter.
Is it a modified version of Windows so as to no longer be software-identical? Then it is not at all genuine.
Last time I watched my machine grind into the dirt loading iTunes I decided I'd never use it again.
Why, oh why isn't the iTunes music store a normal HTML website viewable from any normal HTML web browser?
Only the 'listen' and 'buy it' links need to reference the iTunes software at all. I don't mind being able to browse the store with iTunes, but its stupid to require it. Firefox runs circles around that embedded crap.
For one thing, a lot of people are designing database schemas (for MySQL and Postgres alike) that have no business doing so. Their designs are bad and no amount of intelligent RDBMS will fix that.
To give credit where credit is due however, many of those people are just using MySQL or Postgres or another SQL database system for upward mobility. They write a small tracking program for their music collection and it becomes unwiedly so they move to MySQL for storage. Would it work in a BDB or CDB format instead? Probably a lot faster to be honest, but SQL is a nice query language even if its serious overkill for tracking one person's CDs.
PS, no I don't care if you own thousands of CDs -- go look up DJB's constant database format.
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This is the same crap Intel tried to sell us with their shared memory AGP video cards and soft modems back in the day.
... oh never mind, that's the Alpha and AMD's using Hypertransport already.
Accelerated hardware makes sense -- it may not be efficient in terms of transistors but its much more predictably efficient in terms of bottlenecks.
You have a CPU that sends off primitives to a GPU and you don't have a cache coherency problem in your calculations because the GPU is handling a completely different thing than the CPU and on its own bus with its own memory.
Now if you want to invent CPUs with multiple cores with multiple possibly independant switching pathways to main memory
So after shaking my head in silence for a minute I need to get this out:
I'm supposed to change my hand positions so I'll be better off in the off-chance of an airbag deployment (very very rare compared to say, cornering on the road) instead of in the better-for-driving-accuracy positions.
Yeah, that makes sense.
How about this: airbags suck, and this is yet another proof.
Lets cover B first ... most audiophiles are aware of the fact that audio uses such low frequencies (compared to say, light) at such low power levels (compared to say, your halogen light bulb) that digital connections make almost no difference.
Case in point -- do you have fibre optics connecting your rear speakers to your amplifier? Of course not. You have "normal" analogue wiring going 10, 15, 20 feet to them. In a THX certified theatre, that non-digital wiring will run hundreds of feet with no audible signal quality issues. Your ear simply can't tell.
Secondly, I said audiophiles wouldn't want to use HDMI cables to connect both audio and video at the same time since one goes to the TV/projector and the other goes to the pre/pro/amplifier. These are two seperate devices in midrange to high-end systems and therefore require seperate cabling.
Back to the first point -- do your research. The "its digital, duh" argument is getting stupid. A basic review of any testing would show you that component video cables give equal performance to HDMI cables at 1080i at least. Also, they can actually perform better in some circumstances (go Google it yourself). In one obvious case -- if you do have interferance issues, the analogue signal will have less visible quality issues than a degraded digital signal. You may get a slight change in the red hues for a 60th of a second instead of an MPEG decoder melt-down effect all over your screen.
Please, honestly, go look it up and quit believing what you're told about digital signals.
Thank you for pointing this out. I'm incredulous at the number of people seemingly incapable of tying their shoes while carrying on a conversation ... I drink coffee and drive, why not change stereo stations and drive? Why not talk to my wife or 4yr old while driving?
Besides, that crap on the steering wheel encourages poor hand positioning. I like to drive at 10&2 as per my driving lessons way back (or the one-handed 12 o'clock position). Never do I have my fingers or thumbs anywhere near the area of the steering wheel that has controls on it (there's a reason Ferrari's paddle shifters are where they are).
Why not make good UIs for car consoles with nice big finger-recognizable control surfaces? PS, when its cold out, I want to be able to turn the knobs with gloves on.
It would still be a problem -- just like Windows XP requiring a username before completing the installation is a problem in other circumstances.
Believe it or not, the "user" is not always the one setting up the machine in question. The default (or "a" default password) needs to be configured and told to the user reliably. Now you do that with a dozen new ATMs to a bank and see how pissed they get at you or how fast someone writes the password on a sticky note.
Yes, they need to do better security if they're using the default password.
Yes, the person who set the machine to "active" with real cash in it before changing the default password should be fired.
gp was saying to push down the price of compliance for low wattage transmitters (people, not objects). That is to say, for persons engaging in low wattage transmission.
Yeah cause, god forbid someone borrow the little dpad controller design from Nintendo or the concept of wireless controllers from (some 3rd party) or having a menu button (like most DVD players). I don't care if they borrow from each other; I care if they lie (we invented this, this is new!) and I care if they make it work well.
I'm pretty sure I haven't heard Sony claim they invented something new that wasn't in fact their own and from history I'd say they'll do a good job of making it all work together well. My only concern would be the initial product hardware quality (from PS2 launch memories).
Which is the opposite of a Nintendo (and later) controller(s).
On an NES, your "joystick" (dpad) is on the left, not right. And the buttons are on the right, not left. With a traditional C64/Atari/etc. joystick, your right hand steers and your left hand button mashes.
I think you missed the comparison somehow.
Don't forget that the high-end PS3 will have open pricing in Japan, so those 100k units will be priced through the roof if there's high demand for them.
Forget what HD output? Component video cables provide equal (or better) quality output to HDMI (especially to those of us with CRT HDTV sets). HDMI is only barely interesting for newer resolutions and encryption (ugh) and its ability to carry audio as well (which no HiFi geek or audiophile wants anyway).
I'm currently using (and plan to continue using) component video cables to my TV and coax digital audio cables to my receiver for the near future. When I buy a new receiver with DTS Master audio support, I'll be going to new audio cables. If and when LCD or Plasma TVs look as good at variable resolutions as my CRT, I might use HDMI for video only.
Yes yes, I know, in a few years, some discs might be encoded so that I need HDCP to play them on my TV at all. For the reasonable future, it would seem that movie companies care more about sales figures though and won't be setting that bit.
Quake 3 Arena is one of the worst multiplayer FPS games ... compared to Quake 2 even. I remember when I bought Q3A and played it for hours then went online with it and realized how much better Quake 2 was (with community mods of course). I spent many many hours playing Q2:UT (Urban Terror) and trust me, low res doesn't cut it when you're playing anything semi-realistic (sneaking, strategizing, not running around jumping like an idiot spraying anything that moves with bullets).
I'm sure there are many ranges of hard core FPS gamer, but those who work as teams and want to hit what they're looking at accurately from more than 10 feet away like their games running at more than 640x480.
The tutorial guy for Psi Ops' telekinesis skill says something like "now just pick up that guard, bounce him off the wall a few times until he's dead." You can pick up that bad guy shooting at you and throw him at his buddy ... or catch grenades in mid-air and toss them back (hard, but fun).
Very fun game, under promoted (like many others on the PS2).
The only thing limiting FPSs on the console is resolution. Aiming with a wireless pointing device will not help anything IMHO. I can't think of anyone that would rather aim with a stick at their TV than with a mouse or joystick. A real light gun? maybe. Those are a pain too.
Of course I know solid frame rates are important; or else you can't aim properly at all -- the other people jump around seemingly randomly. I've been playing FPSs since before 3D accelerated Quake came out and was the first person I knew with a 3dfx card. Again, when I say resolution is important, I assume that anyone making a console game guarantees their framerate intrinsically (most console game makers are pretty good at that) and thats the beauty of console game design -- you can guarantee what your customers experience will be like.
I've never gotten tired playing for 3-6 hours straight of anything from Quake to Enemy Territory to anything else. I have a well laid out keyboard and mouse and its at very high sensitivity for good accuracy with low movement.
PS, we were talking about what will make the next generation of consoles better -- not PC games -- and console gaming lacks in only one area, not framerate, but resolution. Game design is primarily up to the game makers, not the console makers. Consider the controls for Prince of Persia versus those for God of War for example.
Best shooter I've played in a long time: Black. Awsome graphics, great enemies, fun physics (blowing stuff up is good; having the tree you're hiding behind blown away is freaky).
What would make it better? A stupid laggy aiming device that makes my arm sore when I play for hours on end or high definition output with more accurate aiming at distances without having to resort to using a zoom feature?
The graphics arms race isn't just about numbers, its about beauty and accuracy. Sure, Zelda will look just as good in low def or high def, but I guarantee you the next Grandia will look awesome in High Def and shooters play much better in high def.
PS, since you're a "hard core" FPS player, I'd like to know why you think graphics resolutions don't matter -- I've never met a FPSer who didn't grab as many pixels as he/she could get out of their graphics card/screen in PC gaming. You just can't see / aim at low res on a TV or monitor. 1920x1080 is a beautiful thing.
a) You realize there are excellent scratch-resistant coatings available for use on BD discs right?
b) I'm sure we'll all get our first taste of Sony's online network when the PS3 is actually launched, then we can judge.
c) At its worst, a cell processor is still over 3GHz, not at all like a 386, and with a much faster memory pipeline. With a little mental arithmetic you realize its more powerful running just one of its cores than most PCs are today.
d) You've never written a video game and thought about how much is parallelizable have you? AI systems, sound calculations, physics and collisions can all be run in parallel without any nasty loops taking up one core or the other the whole time.
e) The APIs available for the cell processory (including entire physics packages, 3D packages, etc.) are numerous. They've been available (some for free, some not) for almost a year now but you still need to learn to write your own code around them which, granted, is hard on a new CPU architecture.
Have you played Psi Ops (PS2)? That's a great game -- you get to pick people up and toss them with excellent soft-body collision detection.
...
Mmmm, hours of fun throwing dead people around a room at each other with a Wiimote
I'm with you -- I don't mind that my Yamaha receiver requires space above it for cooling (see pictures), but please, please would people try to stick to sane form factors for A/V gear? I know its neat to have little cubes here and little top-loading thingies there, but they are very inefficient to lay out.
That's why I'd rather they build it into a nice ATX desktop-like case like this one from Antec, which IMHO would be perfect.
I'll note the parent posted as AC -- I wouldn't admit that I didn't know what the GP was talking about. I've been writing Windows code in various languages since Windows 3.0 and Borland C++ and I know exactly what he's complaining about. I've got a few dozen more myself (including the terrible async networking classes in MFC42).
... the common TAPI and MAPI interfaces are ugly, but useful for example.
Ever wondered why IE corrupted large downloads? You try writing good software with those classes.
Microsoft has often been quoted as saying internally that the Windows API is their most valuable product. Making a platform for others to write Windows API based software on was one of their primary concerns. To be honest, some of what Microsoft did was really nice
The point is that there's no guarantee anyone will design the games to work at 1080p at all (it would be too slow perhaps?). That said, they'll upconvert your 720p or 1080i games to 1080p so they look "right" on a 1080p digital display.
Upconversion is not the same as original content. Digg has an uneducated comment about how upconversion of DVDs makes high definition movie content less attractive (on the future PS3) -- upconverted DVDs don't look anywhere near as good as true HD original content. I watch HDTV television (heavily compressed over satellite) and it looks a whole lot cleaner, crisper and with much better contrast than upconverted DVD content ever will (on my nice new Oppo upconverting DVD player no less).
Sure the upconverted Oppo Digital DVD output is better than having the TV rescale the image but actual HD content is a lot better. I mean, a LOT better.
So its a state based on race, like 90% of the other places on the planet.
... oh never mind.
China is primarily chinese people, Japan is
Sure, its descriminatory, no, it probably shouldn't happen, but this is much better IMHO than discrimination on beliefs.
I'm pretty sure saying you're a christian in the UAE is still a bad move, for example, no matter if you're yellow, white, black, etc.
You probably want to read Google's Guide for Webmasters and the Robots Exclusion guides.
In my experience, Google no longer caches websites that haven't been indexable in some time. That is to say, if you remove the page or even better -- replace it with an empty one that links to an excluded page, Google should (and most likely will) remove the cache of the originally indexed page. I'd expect this to happen within a month or so (from my experience).
No guarantees.
This is in no way Google's fault. Google caches sites, the Internet archive caches sites, its up to you as a webmaster to put limits on it with the well-publicized "robots.txt" restrictions available to you.
The problem here lies in the definition of the act first and foremost:
Is this an original real legitimate copy of Windows off the back of a truck? Its genuine but stolen?
Is it an original real legitimate copy of Windows copied onto new media with fake packaging? The software is genuine but illegally copied and the overall package is an imposter.
Is it a modified version of Windows so as to no longer be software-identical? Then it is not at all genuine.
Last time I watched my machine grind into the dirt loading iTunes I decided I'd never use it again.
Why, oh why isn't the iTunes music store a normal HTML website viewable from any normal HTML web browser?
Only the 'listen' and 'buy it' links need to reference the iTunes software at all. I don't mind being able to browse the store with iTunes, but its stupid to require it. Firefox runs circles around that embedded crap.
For one thing, a lot of people are designing database schemas (for MySQL and Postgres alike) that have no business doing so. Their designs are bad and no amount of intelligent RDBMS will fix that.
To give credit where credit is due however, many of those people are just using MySQL or Postgres or another SQL database system for upward mobility. They write a small tracking program for their music collection and it becomes unwiedly so they move to MySQL for storage. Would it work in a BDB or CDB format instead? Probably a lot faster to be honest, but SQL is a nice query language even if its serious overkill for tracking one person's CDs.
PS, no I don't care if you own thousands of CDs -- go look up DJB's constant database format.