It should be noted that the AGP bus in general has snooping turned off; the GART in the northbridge handles all of the memory access therefore it can and should always tell when memory is being accessed (therefore you can't rely on caching video memory like you would on a PCI card). Without snooping on DMA transactions this speeds the bus up somewhat. It also lacks the interrupt routing lines. What this basically means though, is that without a bridge chip, it ISN'T exactly the same as a PCI slot - if you put more than one device on there, only the first will work, and even if you could, you'd effectively trash memory every time you did PCI DMA.
As PCI ('frame mode') you're right, it's just a 66MHz 32-bit PCI slot. In fact we make two board designs at the place I work, one of which puts an AGP slot onto a 66MHz 32-bit PCI bus (and it works fine up to the point of having a 3.3V keyed slot, and the industry moving on to 1.5 and 0.8V devices) and one which has a 66MHz 32-bit PCI slot which we ship an AGP riser for. Everything Just Works (tm).
AGP specs *also* has a USB connection routed to it but I dare say it's not been connected on most motherboards since the dawn of AGP 2.0 (everyone seems to use I2C on the card and talk via some kind of PCI configuration/register space logic instead).
There is plenty of stuff you can do with AGP but seriously who'd want to these days. You're picking up old boards now, trying to do "cool" geeky things with them? What for? You're too cheap to move to PCI Express?:)
The reason gcc and XFree86 have become so big and messy is precisly because they have had so much corporate support.
I think it's because they are BIG projects, not because they have BIG contributions from corporate sponsors. Who's sponsoring X these days? Did you see the Xgl stuff just released? Oh my GOD it must suck ass, because it's written on Novell's dime, right?
And I think gcc has managed the complexity fairly well--doing a multi-language multi-target compiler completely in C is a really tough task.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Codewarrior, plenty of other compiler vendors manage it just the same:)
There is no correlation whatsoever between "big bloaty crappy code" and "big corporations". Microsoft's development teams on Office, Windows etc. are intentionally kept small and in tight little groups (this is ironically why Office uses it's own toolbars and not the ones in MFC) in order to get around your "too many crappy engineers" notion. There is a lot more accountability in corporations (Microsoft, again, is a good example of accountability of checked-in code being directed at the head of the checker-in).
I think what spoils most major projects in Open Source is that there are way too many TRANSIENT engineers who do not contribute regularly to the code, maybe signing up to add a single feature or patch, and leaving the project for better things. Those developers that do it for a long time end up backing up these transients for the rest of the project lifetime. They don't have time to do this properly and are overstretched as it is.
It's not about talent (I assume everyone who contributes has some talent) but you have your lovely gourmet soup, and someone comes in and adds salt.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds salt.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds chili powder.. and another adds more carrots.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds chili powder.. once they're in, what you have is a bowl of spicy carrot water and not edible soup. The Chef looking after it was too busy tending to the other courses.
(I think it's a consequence of having too many engineers, many of which are mediocre).
How do big companies tend to produce that, but you forgot all those huge, bloated, never-controlled-by-a-corporation projects like GCC, XFree86, and suchlike?
Too many cooks spoiling the broth IS what causes it, but why make the dig at big companies?
Mozilla has gotten new developers since Firefox, NOT because it's not controlled by AOL/Netscape anymore.
I wish developers would be less pretentious about their choice of projects. Surely successful projects which have significant amounts of corporate backing, both financial and in terms of management, are some of the better projects to work on. You have defined goals, a great infrastructure to work in, and nobody ever complained about the way Mozilla was being run before The Foundation (in fact The Foundation works exactly the same way for every developer in terms of bug tracking, IRC events, software testing and releases, as it did during AOL's tenure)
OpenOffice could get more developers if it had some unsubstantial hype or managed to get a bunch of new features it already had (get rid of Java and implement everything the same way, some other way:) but not just because Sun would have dropped it. I actually think OpenOffice (like Seamonkey becoming a tiny little sideproject in view of Firefox's popularity) would suffer for it.
I find it really odd that people are checking out payscales and how much they could be "paid" for doing this.
Remember guys, it's Amazon credit you get. 3 cents for every image clicky thing, is 3 cents off your next DVD purchase. Now, Amazon sell a lot of things but they don't sell rent checks, electricity bill payments or have a partnership with Speakeasy to fund your ADSL. How are you going to EAT if you need to shop at Amazon?
I guess you could buy items and resell them on eBay? Use your first $70 from eBay to sign up to Amazon Prime in order to get fast FedEx delivery of your goods and get a high turnaround.
Essentially this is great marketing for Amazon though; for the things you CAN buy at Amazon, by doing this work you are forced to shop there. For the small amount of credit the vast majority of people will gain, they will retreive it on the markups and variable discounts that they put on most products.
.. I think you would be pretty f**king shitty as an IT admin if you moved to Linux because you simply had anti-Microsoft SENTIMENTS or liebral (sic) pseudo-political moralistic motives.
Saying "anti-Microsoft sentiment is paranoia" is total bull. Like Kurt Cobain said, just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you. There is plenty of anti-Microsoft sentiment to go around, but you can't put "because Gates sucks and Micro$haft are evil" on a proposal for funding to move from Windows Datacenter to a Linux cluster.
However moving to Linux on it's merits, and having a sly little grin on your face for being able to finally ditch the bloated OS you hate (for a bloated distro that you hate slightly less), is probably very very high in comparison to the people who moved across purely as a technical endeavour. There are plenty of valid cases to make for moving for that proposal, report etc.
It's not really amazing, PowerPC is meant to be low power, it's a design feature of the core across all the processor lines. Why does the 970 take 90W? Because it has a front side bus that is half the core clock and two FPUs with a seperate 4-unit vector processing system:)
The front side bus and it's i/o voltage and I suspect whatever serialiser/deserialiser is stuck to it is what gives the "unwanted" power consumption in my opinion. Moving the memory controller inside the chip removes a high speed external bus (and all it's problems) from the equation, allowing it to be clocked at core speed and leaving only the RAM interface as being power hungry.
There's nothing wrong with being paid in stock options.
But of course; Steve Jobs' stock options are now worth more than any paper salary he could ever have wished for. It's actually a way to get around tax and fiddle the SEC, IRS and stockmarket reports to show the company makes a ridiculous profit (i.e. $4bn profit instead of $4bn profit minus $800 million bonus to the boss).
I think Steve Jobs is worth it. One of the few in the limelight who can really say that he earned his deal. I can pick out a bunch of energy company bosses, airline bosses etc. that really do pick their own salaries, and really cannot be said to earn it (especially when they get fired for embezzlement or fraud or dumping toxic waste in the water table ON TOP of not being a top-notch CEO, and get multi-million dollar severance fees as part of their contracts:)
You're right in there are good guys, and I said somewhere in this thread that you couldn't ban or modify it in a law because it's hard to define it to include good guys and exclude bad guys.. but it's the thought that counts.
Maybe companies would pay attention if shareholders just sold out their stock when the CEO and board vote themselves outrageous salaries and bonus schemes? The stock price will go through the floor as a result, sending a message.
Well XBox had to wait until Halo until it had it's killer app.
Would it be so bad to wait for Halo 3 in the same way?
There are so many advantages to a limited launch; lack of supply could be said to encourage demand on launch day (i.e. cause frenzy, which is good to get on the news).
Printing limited software of certain titles could manipulate the sales of less popular titles by making less of the MOST popular titles available (spreading the load across bundles, and forcing people to impulse buy the other games when the one they wanted wasn't available).
Limited volume on the Live! service means they can ramp things up and make sure load balancing is okay, and that the service works without too many people hammering it too hard.
At the end of the day everyone who wanted X box and Z game will buy it eventually, Microsoft won't lose a single diehard sale by having a limited launch. The rest of the world will wait for Black Friday and the Christmas sales.
You do realise how much Apple stock is worth these days?
As far as I recall Jobs was rehired on $1 a year and use of the Apple private jet; I think right now he is pulling in a reasonable salary (not extortionate but to the point that 2-3% raise would buy a house for a normal person)
Most CEO's get their pay raises voted on through the board of directors of the company, and any majority shareholders that aren't on the board.
Of course they can all also vote themselves the same outrageous pay raises..
A salary increase cap I doubt you could push through - you'd have to rule out the fringe cases where a guy DID earn $4m bonus a year (for instance, turning a company around from bankruptcy - I imagine a couple of airline bosses are hoping they can swing this)
What I suppose could happen is that salary raises and bonuses are capped based on percentages of profit margins and difference between previous years (if it's profits up, add a percent or two, if profits are down, reduce a percent or two), and written into company charters.
How much could Bill Gates grant himself per year if he had a 3% pay raise and a further 2% bonus on a good year? How about Steve Jobs? It's probably no better than the current "corruption":(
1. The game publishers COULD be delaying to ensure they pass certification, you're right. I never said Microsoft were delaying it but they could be processing certifications more strictly before launch to ensure a good launch
2. I am fairly sure most of it is beaurocracy right now on both ends
3. Microsoft probably are doing some rudimentary testing on each game, in order to make sure it boots, interacts with XBox Live!, uses memory cards in certain approved ways (i.e. not in exploitable ways:) so that the user gets a pleasurable experience until at least the first level starts.
4. It probably does cost money but is a write-off compared to the loss on the console hardware.
They could print discs the week before and get them to store shelves. They are 3 weeks until launch.. so they have 2 weeks to certify and print discs for the runup week. They also have fabs in many countries, I'd wager; I never said print them on launch day from a single hut on Microsoft Campus and hope they can get them to Japan overnight.
Best Buy etc. have their orders in and Microsoft can fulfil them at leisure. Last time I participated in a console launch (Playstation 2), we had consoles and games THE DAY BEFORE launch day. Not before.
Microsoft's certification is a GOOD thing. If they are delaying games to get them through the certification process - like drivers going through basic WHQL compatibility and regression testing - then they will arrive on your doorstep with less bugs.
This means a better reception for your console!
If Certification is granted and manufacturing can start the next day (we will assume Microsoft have some dedicated factories for this and won't be put at the bottom of the list for some subcontracted DVD fab) then they can print hundreds of thousands per day, and millions per week.
Launch units are meant to top 3 million WORLDWIDE, so they may start certifying them next week for production, and still be ready with every title of a 20-title line-up with equal share of the market.
You might get shortages of the standalone copies of popular titles but.. that's life on launch day. Since most retailers are bundling, the popularity of the titles is defined on what they THINK they can sell - and they have already been "sold" as preorders to retailers. This would determine the numbers they NEED to produce.
I would think launch day is the BEST time to make a fast production run of exactly the right amount, to cut down on wastage and warehouse stock at all levels.
Usually, to reduce part count. AltiVec on a PowerPC performs better than a dedicated DSP in a lot of operations, for the cost involved, and you get to do all kinds of other stuff with the unit besides specialised FMAC or encryption or so on (which AltiVec has, and does just fine).
If these chips have the AltiVec/VMX unit, are 64bit like they say, and low-power like they say, then they will find uses just like Freescale are pitching 1.5-2GHz single and dual core chips (7448, 8641, 8641D) for the same markets now.
With regards to an SoC with PCI-Express channels though I disagree with the use of power ratings; PCI-Express is power hungry by design.
5-15W for the dual core chip is one thing but I/O voltage is going to be what decides whether they use the chip or not. The Freescale solution is that they can carry on offering the 7448 with the same processor core, which has no real I/O capability, so people can stay with low power peripherals and northbridges. You sacrifice part count for power consumption there.. but trade-offs are trade-offs.
Blu-Ray, for all it's "industry support" is going to cost 10x more to implement for the industry than HD-DVD to retool all the DVD production lines in the world to make the new format. HD-DVD works, it's cheap to produce, there really IS no major advantage to the higher capacity of Blu-Ray that any consumer would notice, and the crazy content protection devices have no fair-use workarounds on Blu-Ray to compare to HD-DVD's right to "at least one managed copy".
It's just this way because the companies involved are too scared to slap their dicks on the table and get a tape measure, right? Because the cheaper, Just-Works, proven-technology evolutionary thing really should be the way to go, and not the expensive, convoluted, confusing, "OMG MORE GIGABYTESSSS!!!" still-improving-antiscratch-coating format?
Problem in the reasoning: I know the article is about why Intel over AMD, but they repeat that quote that Intel have a roadmap with processors of diminutive power ratings that "Freescale and IBM weren't going to have".
ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY WRONG AND BULLSHIT.
Freescale and IBM already have processors which scale the sub-watt handheld line running PowerPC code, and processors from 400MHz to 1.7GHz taking from 3 to 20W for higher performance code, dual core PCI-Express, Gigabit LAN integrated chip is around the corner. This is undercutting Intel's power margins right now for more functionality.
There is arguably a performance difference: if Intel are running 2GHz dual core chips and Freescale are only pushing out 1.5GHz at the same time, but there are plenty of benchmarks using SSE and AltiVec which show plenty of performance improvements by going via PowerPC than Intel code (see MacSTL at www.pixelglow.com) including Freescale versions of algorithms which Intel also provide in their proprietary math libs and compilers.
So. We know they chose Intel over AMD because of financial might and R&D budgets. I'm afraid saying "IBM and Freescale weren't going the same places" is saying that IBM and Freescale would be throwing away their entire established market. Remember Freescale alone has a revenue mere millions lower than Intel's, and IBM's R&D budget outclasses Intel's. Combined they are a larger force. POWER is on the rise.
The real reason: let's recap. Jobs is a control freak and a nutjob, who's sole purpose in life is to be in the public's eye with "impossible" products and "chic" solutions. Processor architectures aren't chic anymore, Macs sell because of case design and user interface improvements. Performance, certainly not power consumption, doesn't come into it for consumers.
They're making a name for themselves this week! Lots of rumours and speculation over Apple. I sense backhanders in return for hype:)
Bad journalism or maybe just useless English composition skills: it is rumoured that Apple want flash memory. Then they say they *WILL* be used in 4GB iPod Mini's. How can you have an unconfirmed rumour and attach such certainty in it?
Surely this is just so they can work around the slowing hard disk density trends, where disks are struggling to get past 160GB and stay reliable and small.
Business users? Backups? It's nothing of the sort. You can bet Dell just want to sell a 320GB striped-disk gamer laptop, and Alienware won't be far behind..
Count the number of $40 DVD players Walmart sells each year.
And Target. And Best Buy. Pick stores and see the cheap DVD player models. See how many are sold over and over and over.
I am gonna tell you now they vastly outsell Sony Playstation 2 consoles.
Lots of people don't want a $499 games console but they sure wanna rent movies from Blockbuster, with the cheapest hardware they can get.
The VHS/Betamax hardware war was won because JVC licensed the format out to every manufacturer who wanted to make a machine. Not because "everyone will want a Sony box to play Betamax! Because it's Sony!", but because consumers could pick any damn thing and play any damn thing.
You think too much like a geek; and not a consumer.
I think there is a lot to be said about the backing on both sides. Blu-Ray seems to have some cute advantages but mostly it's hype about storage density. I wonder if that extra space really makes up for the extra cost of manufacture, just so it plays on Sony Playstation boxes.
There are a buttload more DVD players in the world than there are PS2's. And a buttload of them are made very cheaply in China, Taiwan, Indonesia etc. - you think they will rally around the more expensive technology for drives and media, in order to gain 10GB of space?
I wonder actually what is so different between the two formats.. the way it's encoded on the disk, right? Isn't this a SOFTWARE issue (drive firmware) more than anything, or is there really some strangeness involved that I am missing.
Maybe the dual-layer (and triple-layer) technologies use incompatible ways of focussing the laser; but isn't that also down to software and the use of another lens (like CDRW/DVD drives have already..)
I dunno, really.. I don't have access to the specs. Who does? Who can make a really informed statement that dual-format drives will be possible?
The trouble then is which format will the industry pick?
I would say HD-DVD - because it's inherent cheapness (same disc layout as DVD, same manufacturing facilities and little changes to machinery will make it as cheap if not cheaper than DVD). Blu-Ray requires people to retool.
Blu-Ray may end up being the custom format that runs the Playstation 3, like UMD is the custom format that runs the PSP, Matsushita's discs were the custom format that ran the Gamecube, and GD-ROM was the custom format that ran the Dreamcast.
Besides Sony releasing their own movies in Blu-Ray format for the PS3 and a clutch of Sony & Samsung players, why would any cheap-ass (and we're all cheapasses at heart) bother with it? Remember in the VHS/Betamax war, Sony lost at the end of the day. They are not infallible and we shouldn't just think that because they have the Playstation that they will not lose again.
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I was wondering the same thing myself. Fools.
:)
It should be noted that the AGP bus in general has snooping turned off; the GART in the northbridge
handles all of the memory access therefore it can and should always tell when memory is being accessed
(therefore you can't rely on caching video memory like you would on a PCI card). Without snooping on
DMA transactions this speeds the bus up somewhat. It also lacks the interrupt routing lines. What this
basically means though, is that without a bridge chip, it ISN'T exactly the same as a PCI slot - if
you put more than one device on there, only the first will work, and even if you could, you'd
effectively trash memory every time you did PCI DMA.
As PCI ('frame mode') you're right, it's just a 66MHz 32-bit PCI slot. In fact we make two board
designs at the place I work, one of which puts an AGP slot onto a 66MHz 32-bit PCI bus (and it works
fine up to the point of having a 3.3V keyed slot, and the industry moving on to 1.5 and 0.8V devices)
and one which has a 66MHz 32-bit PCI slot which we ship an AGP riser for. Everything Just Works (tm).
AGP specs *also* has a USB connection routed to it but I dare say it's not been connected on most
motherboards since the dawn of AGP 2.0 (everyone seems to use I2C on the card and talk via some
kind of PCI configuration/register space logic instead).
There is plenty of stuff you can do with AGP but seriously who'd want to these days. You're picking
up old boards now, trying to do "cool" geeky things with them? What for? You're too cheap to move
to PCI Express?
I think it's because they are BIG projects, not because they have BIG contributions from corporate sponsors. Who's sponsoring X these days? Did you see the Xgl stuff just released? Oh my GOD it must suck ass, because it's written on Novell's dime, right?
And I think gcc has managed the complexity fairly well--doing a multi-language multi-target compiler completely in C is a really tough task.
Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Codewarrior, plenty of other compiler vendors manage it just the same :)
There is no correlation whatsoever between "big bloaty crappy code" and "big corporations". Microsoft's development teams on Office, Windows etc. are intentionally kept small and in tight little groups (this is ironically why Office uses it's own toolbars and not the ones in MFC) in order to get around your "too many crappy engineers" notion. There is a lot more accountability in corporations (Microsoft, again, is a good example of accountability of checked-in code being directed at the head of the checker-in).
I think what spoils most major projects in Open Source is that there are way too many TRANSIENT engineers who do not contribute regularly to the code, maybe signing up to add a single feature or patch, and leaving the project for better things. Those developers that do it for a long time end up backing up these transients for the rest of the project lifetime. They don't have time to do this properly and are overstretched as it is.
It's not about talent (I assume everyone who contributes has some talent) but you have your lovely gourmet soup, and someone comes in and adds salt.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds salt.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds chili powder.. and another adds more carrots.. and another adds pepper.. and another adds chili powder.. once they're in, what you have is a bowl of spicy carrot water and not edible soup. The Chef looking after it was too busy tending to the other courses.
(I think it's a consequence of having too many engineers, many of which are mediocre).
How do big companies tend to produce that, but you forgot all those huge, bloated, never-controlled-by-a-corporation projects like GCC, XFree86, and suchlike?
Too many cooks spoiling the broth IS what causes it, but why make the dig at big companies?
Mozilla has gotten new developers since Firefox, NOT because it's not controlled by AOL/Netscape anymore.
I wish developers would be less pretentious about their choice of projects. Surely successful projects
which have significant amounts of corporate backing, both financial and in terms of management, are some
of the better projects to work on. You have defined goals, a great infrastructure to work in, and nobody
ever complained about the way Mozilla was being run before The Foundation (in fact The Foundation works
exactly the same way for every developer in terms of bug tracking, IRC events, software testing and
releases, as it did during AOL's tenure)
OpenOffice could get more developers if it had some unsubstantial hype or managed to get a bunch of new
features it already had (get rid of Java and implement everything the same way, some other way
not just because Sun would have dropped it. I actually think OpenOffice (like Seamonkey becoming a tiny
little sideproject in view of Firefox's popularity) would suffer for it.
I find it really odd that people are checking out payscales and how much they could be "paid" for doing this.
Remember guys, it's Amazon credit you get. 3 cents for every image clicky thing, is 3 cents off your next DVD purchase. Now, Amazon sell a lot of things but they don't sell rent checks, electricity bill payments or have a partnership with Speakeasy to fund your ADSL. How are you going to EAT if you need to shop at Amazon?
I guess you could buy items and resell them on eBay? Use your first $70 from eBay to sign up to Amazon Prime in order to get fast FedEx delivery of your goods and get a high turnaround.
Essentially this is great marketing for Amazon though; for the things you CAN buy at Amazon, by doing this work you are forced to shop there. For the small amount of credit the vast majority of people will gain, they will retreive it on the markups and variable discounts that they put on most products.
Very very clever.
.. I think you would be pretty f**king shitty as an IT admin if you moved to Linux because you simply had anti-Microsoft SENTIMENTS or liebral (sic) pseudo-political
moralistic motives.
Saying "anti-Microsoft sentiment is paranoia" is total bull. Like Kurt Cobain said, just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you. There is plenty of anti-Microsoft sentiment to go around, but you can't put "because Gates sucks and Micro$haft are evil" on a proposal for funding to move from Windows Datacenter to a Linux cluster.
However moving to Linux on it's merits, and having a sly little grin on your face for being able to finally ditch the bloated OS you hate (for a bloated distro that you hate slightly less), is probably very very high in comparison to the people who moved across purely as a technical endeavour. There are plenty of valid cases to make for moving for that proposal, report etc.
It's not really amazing, PowerPC is meant to be low power, it's a design feature of the core across all the processor lines. Why does the 970 take 90W? Because it has a front side bus that is half the core clock and two FPUs with a seperate 4-unit vector processing system :)
The front side bus and it's i/o voltage and I suspect whatever serialiser/deserialiser is stuck to it is what gives the "unwanted" power consumption in my opinion. Moving the memory controller inside the chip removes a high speed external bus (and all it's problems) from the equation, allowing it to be clocked at core speed and leaving only the RAM interface as being power hungry.
There's nothing wrong with being paid in stock options.
:)
But of course; Steve Jobs' stock options are now worth more than any paper salary he could ever have wished for. It's actually a way to get around tax and fiddle the SEC, IRS and stockmarket reports to show the company makes a ridiculous profit (i.e. $4bn profit instead of $4bn profit minus $800 million bonus to the boss).
I think Steve Jobs is worth it. One of the few in the limelight who can really say that he earned his deal. I can pick out a bunch of energy company bosses, airline bosses etc. that really do pick their own salaries, and really cannot be said to earn it (especially when they get fired for embezzlement or fraud or dumping toxic waste in the water table ON TOP of not being a top-notch CEO, and get multi-million dollar severance fees as part of their contracts
You're right in there are good guys, and I said somewhere in this thread that you couldn't ban or modify it in a law because it's hard to define it to include good guys and exclude bad guys.. but it's the thought that counts.
Maybe companies would pay attention if shareholders just sold out their stock when the CEO and board vote themselves outrageous salaries and bonus schemes? The stock price will go through the floor as a result, sending a message.
Well XBox had to wait until Halo until it had it's killer app.
Would it be so bad to wait for Halo 3 in the same way?
There are so many advantages to a limited launch; lack of supply could be said to encourage demand on launch day (i.e. cause frenzy, which is good to get on the news).
Printing limited software of certain titles could manipulate the sales of less popular titles by making less of the MOST popular titles available (spreading the load across bundles, and forcing people to impulse buy the other games when the one they wanted wasn't available).
Limited volume on the Live! service means they can ramp things up and make sure load balancing is okay, and that the service works without too many people hammering it too hard.
At the end of the day everyone who wanted X box and Z game will buy it eventually, Microsoft won't lose a single diehard sale by having a limited launch. The rest of the world will wait for Black Friday and the Christmas sales.
Neko
Define "incestuous boards" and I am sure you can then ban it.
Pretty hard to define though isn't it...?
Being paid in stock options is still being paid.
You do realise how much Apple stock is worth these days?
As far as I recall Jobs was rehired on $1 a year and use of the Apple private jet; I think right now he is pulling in a reasonable salary (not extortionate but to the point that 2-3% raise would buy a house for a normal person)
Most CEO's get their pay raises voted on through the board of directors of the company, and any majority shareholders that aren't on the board.
:(
Of course they can all also vote themselves the same outrageous pay raises..
A salary increase cap I doubt you could push through - you'd have to rule out the fringe cases where a guy DID earn $4m bonus a year (for instance, turning a company around from bankruptcy - I imagine a couple of airline bosses are hoping they can swing this)
What I suppose could happen is that salary raises and bonuses are capped based on percentages of profit margins and difference between previous years (if it's profits up, add a percent or two, if profits are down, reduce a percent or two), and written into company charters.
How much could Bill Gates grant himself per year if he had a 3% pay raise and a further 2% bonus on a good year? How about Steve Jobs?
It's probably no better than the current "corruption"
1. The game publishers COULD be delaying to ensure they pass certification, you're right. I never said Microsoft were delaying it but they could be processing certifications more strictly before launch to ensure a good launch
2. I am fairly sure most of it is beaurocracy right now on both ends
3. Microsoft probably are doing some rudimentary testing on each game, in order to make sure it boots, interacts with XBox Live!, uses memory cards in certain approved ways (i.e. not in exploitable ways
4. It probably does cost money but is a write-off compared to the loss on the console hardware.
They could print discs the week before and get them to store shelves. They are 3 weeks until launch.. so they have 2 weeks to certify and print discs for the runup week. They also have fabs in many countries, I'd wager; I never said print them on launch day from a single hut on Microsoft Campus and hope they can get them to Japan overnight.
Best Buy etc. have their orders in and Microsoft can fulfil them at leisure. Last time I participated in a console launch (Playstation 2), we had consoles and games THE DAY BEFORE launch day. Not before.
Microsoft's certification is a GOOD thing. If they are delaying games to get them through the certification process - like drivers going through basic WHQL compatibility and regression testing - then they will arrive on your doorstep with less bugs.
This means a better reception for your console!
If Certification is granted and manufacturing can start the next day (we will assume Microsoft have some dedicated factories for this and won't be put at the bottom of the list for some subcontracted DVD fab) then they can print hundreds of thousands per day, and millions per week.
Launch units are meant to top 3 million WORLDWIDE, so they may start certifying them next week for production, and still be ready with every title of a 20-title line-up with equal share of the market.
You might get shortages of the standalone copies of popular titles but.. that's life on launch day. Since most retailers are bundling, the popularity of the titles is defined on what they THINK they can sell - and they have already been "sold" as preorders to retailers. This would determine the numbers they NEED to produce.
I would think launch day is the BEST time to make a fast production run of exactly the right amount, to cut down on wastage and warehouse stock at all levels.
Why do DSP on a general purpose CPU?
Usually, to reduce part count. AltiVec on a PowerPC performs better than a dedicated DSP in a lot of operations, for the cost involved, and you get to do all kinds of other stuff with the unit besides specialised FMAC or encryption or so on (which AltiVec has, and does just fine).
If these chips have the AltiVec/VMX unit, are 64bit like they say, and low-power like they say, then they will find uses just like Freescale are pitching 1.5-2GHz single and dual core chips (7448, 8641, 8641D) for the same markets now.
With regards to an SoC with PCI-Express channels though I disagree with the use of power ratings; PCI-Express is power hungry by design.
5-15W for the dual core chip is one thing but I/O voltage is going to be what decides whether they use the chip or not. The Freescale solution is that they can carry on offering the 7448 with the same processor core, which has no real I/O capability, so people can stay with low power peripherals and northbridges. You sacrifice part count for power consumption there.. but trade-offs are trade-offs.
XBox DOESN'T use HD-DVD, so no impact at all.
Blu-Ray, for all it's "industry support" is going to cost 10x more to implement for the industry than HD-DVD to retool all the DVD production lines in the world to make the new format. HD-DVD works, it's cheap to produce, there really IS no major advantage to the higher capacity of Blu-Ray that any consumer would notice, and the crazy content protection devices have no fair-use workarounds on Blu-Ray to compare to HD-DVD's right to "at least one managed copy".
It's just this way because the companies involved are too scared to slap their dicks on the table and get a tape measure, right? Because the cheaper, Just-Works, proven-technology evolutionary thing really should be the way to go, and not the expensive, convoluted, confusing, "OMG MORE GIGABYTESSSS!!!" still-improving-antiscratch-coating format?
Neko
Problem in the reasoning: I know the article is about why Intel over AMD, but they repeat that quote that Intel have a roadmap with processors of diminutive power ratings that "Freescale and IBM weren't going to have".
ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY WRONG AND BULLSHIT.
Freescale and IBM already have processors which scale the sub-watt handheld line running PowerPC code, and processors from 400MHz to 1.7GHz taking from 3 to 20W for higher performance code, dual core PCI-Express, Gigabit LAN integrated chip is around the corner. This is undercutting Intel's power margins right now for more functionality.
There is arguably a performance difference: if Intel are running 2GHz dual core chips and Freescale are only pushing out 1.5GHz at the same time, but there are plenty of benchmarks using SSE and AltiVec which show plenty of performance improvements by going via PowerPC than Intel code (see MacSTL at www.pixelglow.com) including Freescale versions of algorithms which Intel also provide in their proprietary math libs and compilers.
So. We know they chose Intel over AMD because of financial might and R&D budgets. I'm afraid saying "IBM and Freescale weren't going the same places" is saying that IBM and Freescale would be throwing away their entire established market. Remember Freescale alone has a revenue mere millions lower than Intel's, and IBM's R&D budget outclasses Intel's. Combined they are a larger force. POWER is on the rise.
The real reason: let's recap. Jobs is a control freak and a nutjob, who's sole purpose in life is to be in the public's eye with "impossible" products and "chic" solutions. Processor architectures aren't chic anymore, Macs sell because of case design and user interface improvements. Performance, certainly not power consumption, doesn't come into it for consumers.
Designed for it, aggregate servers and load sharing, the works.
They're making a name for themselves this week! Lots of rumours and speculation :)
over Apple. I sense backhanders in return for hype
Bad journalism or maybe just useless English composition skills: it is rumoured
that Apple want flash memory. Then they say they *WILL* be used in 4GB iPod
Mini's. How can you have an unconfirmed rumour and attach such certainty in it?
Neko
Surely this is just so they can work around the slowing hard disk density trends,
where disks are struggling to get past 160GB and stay reliable and small.
Business users? Backups? It's nothing of the sort. You can bet Dell just want to
sell a 320GB striped-disk gamer laptop, and Alienware won't be far behind..
Neko
We have a good relationship with everyone who is not a dickhead.
Dale Rahn is a nice guy, who had some tangible problems with the way our
engineering team operates. It's a shame about his boss, though.
Count the number of $40 DVD players Walmart sells each year.
And Target. And Best Buy. Pick stores and see the cheap DVD player models. See
how many are sold over and over and over.
I am gonna tell you now they vastly outsell Sony Playstation 2 consoles.
Lots of people don't want a $499 games console but they sure wanna rent movies from
Blockbuster, with the cheapest hardware they can get.
The VHS/Betamax hardware war was won because JVC licensed the format out to every
manufacturer who wanted to make a machine. Not because "everyone will want a Sony
box to play Betamax! Because it's Sony!", but because consumers could pick any
damn thing and play any damn thing.
You think too much like a geek; and not a consumer.
Neko
I think there is a lot to be said about the backing on both sides. Blu-Ray seems to
have some cute advantages but mostly it's hype about storage density. I wonder if
that extra space really makes up for the extra cost of manufacture, just so it
plays on Sony Playstation boxes.
There are a buttload more DVD players in the world than there are PS2's. And a
buttload of them are made very cheaply in China, Taiwan, Indonesia etc. - you
think they will rally around the more expensive technology for drives and media,
in order to gain 10GB of space?
Neko
We finally get on Slashdot and nobody mentions the bloody company name!
:)
ARGH!
http://www.genesi.lu/
Neko
Same laser wavelength too.
I wonder actually what is so different between the two formats.. the way it's
encoded on the disk, right? Isn't this a SOFTWARE issue (drive firmware) more
than anything, or is there really some strangeness involved that I am missing.
Maybe the dual-layer (and triple-layer) technologies use incompatible ways of
focussing the laser; but isn't that also down to software and the use of another
lens (like CDRW/DVD drives have already..)
I dunno, really.. I don't have access to the specs. Who does? Who can make a
really informed statement that dual-format drives will be possible?
The trouble then is which format will the industry pick?
I would say HD-DVD - because it's inherent cheapness (same disc layout as DVD,
same manufacturing facilities and little changes to machinery will make it as cheap
if not cheaper than DVD). Blu-Ray requires people to retool.
Blu-Ray may end up being the custom format that runs the Playstation 3, like UMD
is the custom format that runs the PSP, Matsushita's discs were the custom format that ran the Gamecube, and GD-ROM was the custom format that ran the Dreamcast.
Besides Sony releasing their own movies in Blu-Ray format for the PS3 and a clutch of Sony & Samsung players, why would any cheap-ass (and we're all cheapasses at heart) bother with it? Remember in the VHS/Betamax war, Sony lost at the end of the day. They are not infallible and we shouldn't just think that because they have the Playstation that they will not lose again.
Neko