> Why didn't Sony make the PS4 hardware more like that of the PS3?
There are 2 parts to the answer: hardware + software.
SCEA, the games division of Sony, is NOT in the hardware business -- they are in the entertainment business. SAY WHAT?! But you ask "They designed all the hardware for the PS1, PS2, and PS3. What changed??"
Designing and Developing custom hardware is incredibly expensive. Sony was in the RED for about 4 years due to paying an expensive development cost on the PS3. The PS2 GPU - the GS - had a hardware bug where one of the Z-Test modes was completely broken! Sony was not going to repeat that same costly mistakes.
There is a reason commodity off-the-shelf hardware is cheap. Mass produced, and "good enough", which means "fast enough." Why pay engineers to "re-invent" the wheel for an CPU + GPU when there are already OTHER companies out there who have sunk a ton of man-hours and money into producing them??
Second, by using standard hardware, instead of fast "esoteric" hardware, you make it easier for developers.
Developers were constantly complaining to SCEA saying that while the PS3 had more power then the Xbox360 the XBox360 was vastly easier to develop for. Microsoft had a better compiler + IDE compared to the SN toolchain (which Sony eventually bought.)
> Then less effort would be needed to ensure PS3 games are portable to the newer system.
This doesn't make any financial sense.
The PS3 has 1 CPU (PowerPC Cell / PPE) plus 6 co-processors (SPE). The SPEs have 256KB of RAM but are EXTREMELY fast. The SPEs have their own assembly language.
The multi-core x86 means SCEA didn't have to focus on A) a compiler for the PowerPC Cell, and B) another compiler for the SPE. They can leverage GCC x86 across the board especially with x86 having 4 - 8 cores now.
> I'll bet when development started, Sony hadn't finalized PS4 plans.
That's correct. The PS4 was in development for about 4+ years. Naughty Dog's focus wasn't on writing a game for unannounced hardware whose specs were volatile but to finish and ship a game on a known platform. (Disclaimer: I used to work for SCEA.)
> I'd blame the managers for suddenly springing a new platform on them after the game was done.
That's exactly right. Short-term Profits vs Long-Term thinking.
Someone needs to mod your post up as +Informative.
> And denying people the ability to yell "fire" in a crowded theater is also "the opposite of freedom."
For the last smegging time, the "fire-theater" issue is about property rights NOT free speech.
If there is NO fire, you are under an implicit social contract as to NOT create PANIC. If there IS a fire, you are also under an implicit social contract to INFORM everyone of the DANGER.
The road to freedom must be balanced with the destination of moderation.
There is an old cliche:
"Be liberal with others, be conservative with yourself"
> Yep. So are Excessive taxation without representation
FTFY.
Your analogy is also flawed.
DRM is NOT needed to stream video. In contradistinction government can't function without taxes for now (because are not yet spiritually mature enough to know how to self-govern yet)
> there are three things that catch bugs before you even get to a debugger:
Yes, but the "hard" bugs are the ones that happen at run-time. Those depends on the context such as Networking, Rendering, and AI bugs that can be a real PITA to track down.
Race Conditions, and Deadlock are hairiest ones.
There has to be a comprehensive list someplace aside from the usual
* Bohrbugs: Most of the bugs that we come across are reproducible, and are known as Bohrbugs. * Heisenbugs: All experienced programmers have faced situations where the bug that crashed the software just disappears when the software is restarted * Mandelbugs: When the cause of the bug is too complex to understand, and the resulting bug appears chaotic, * Schroedinbug: Sometimes, you look into the code, and find that it has a bug or a problem that should never have allowed it to work in the first place
> The average ranking is not rank = up - down. It's rank = p1*up - p2*down. Where p1 is the size of the population which would rank it up, and p2 is the size of the population which would rank it down. A minority viewpoint consequently gets a disproportionate number of unfair downvotes simply because it's a minority viewpoint, and thus has to garner a lot more upvotes just to obtain an equal ranking to a majority viewpoint.
You've just discussed / discovered the fundamental problem with a democracy.:-) You know the old joke: "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
In government, the US used a 2-stage Republic system to overcome the weaknesses of democracy:
* The House of Representatives is based on state population size * The Senate has 2 senators represent each state.
> A moderating/ranking system which only allows upvotes simply generates different results from a moderating system which allows both upvotes and downvotes.
IMHO I've found that a moderation system that only allows upvotes to be (mostly) useless. It is far better to be able to downvote / mark trolls / incorrect information so others can get a quick sense of SNR.
Reddit's moderation system is garbage compared/. for 2 reasons:
1. you have no "context" for why something was upvoted or downvoted 2. You end up with a massive circlejerk from the Redditards. Hell I've asked a question and still been downvoted!?!? Next month, I point out the same question and get upvoted like crazy.
On older sites where the majority aren't our brainless emo teens you can have a civil disagreement.
Sacramento's weather sucks ass in the summer. One of my best friends lives there -- I hate the weather -- even though the rest of the city is OK.
At least in the Bay Area / San Jose you are relatively close to the water to provide a much more stable temperature other the hell hole hot weather of Sacramento. Summers in contrast in San Jose are beautiful -- not to hot, not to cold.
> For those of us who depend on Photoshop for print work Gimp does not cut it.
Agreed. GIMP is still missing Layer Effects.
At least it supports nested layer groups, and all the blend modes, finally.
Every few years I try to load a logo I made with Photoshop Creative Suite into GIMP and see if it will display correctly. Every few years it slowly inches towards rendering correctly.
> Why would you need a string reverse in the first place?
Given an integer, say -123, you typically peel off the digits one at a time in the one's place to allow for printing in an arbitrary base (say bases 2, 8, 10, 16; binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal respectively). For example:
// assume buffer has ceil( log( 2^(8*sizeof(int)-1) / log( base ) ) bytes + 1 byte sign space int itoa( int n, char* buffer, int base = 10 ) {
int digit, negative = (n < 0), remain = (negative) ? -n : n;// remain = abs(n)
char *end = buffer;
while( remain >= base ) {
digit = remain % base;
remain = remain / base;
*end++ = ('0' + digit);
}
*end++ = ('0' + (remain % 10));// last digit
if( negative )
*end++ = '-';
*end = 0; // TODO: StringReverse( text );
return (end - buffer);// return string width }
This becomes the string '3' '2' '1', '-' which is reversed.
It is possible to write itoa so no push() pop() or strrev() is needed at all by putting the character digits in the proper place when the mod is done in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! Classic.
Is this the first reference to "Film at 11" at 2:10 ?
n/t see subject.
> Why didn't Sony make the PS4 hardware more like that of the PS3?
There are 2 parts to the answer: hardware + software.
SCEA, the games division of Sony, is NOT in the hardware business -- they are in the entertainment business. SAY WHAT?! But you ask "They designed all the hardware for the PS1, PS2, and PS3. What changed??"
Designing and Developing custom hardware is incredibly expensive. Sony was in the RED for about 4 years due to paying an expensive development cost on the PS3. The PS2 GPU - the GS - had a hardware bug where one of the Z-Test modes was completely broken! Sony was not going to repeat that same costly mistakes.
There is a reason commodity off-the-shelf hardware is cheap. Mass produced, and "good enough", which means "fast enough." Why pay engineers to "re-invent" the wheel for an CPU + GPU when there are already OTHER companies out there who have sunk a ton of man-hours and money into producing them??
Second, by using standard hardware, instead of fast "esoteric" hardware, you make it easier for developers.
Developers were constantly complaining to SCEA saying that while the PS3 had more power then the Xbox360 the XBox360 was vastly easier to develop for. Microsoft had a better compiler + IDE compared to the SN toolchain (which Sony eventually bought.)
> Then less effort would be needed to ensure PS3 games are portable to the newer system.
This doesn't make any financial sense.
The PS3 has 1 CPU (PowerPC Cell / PPE) plus 6 co-processors (SPE). The SPEs have 256KB of RAM but are EXTREMELY fast. The SPEs have their own assembly language.
The multi-core x86 means SCEA didn't have to focus on A) a compiler for the PowerPC Cell, and B) another compiler for the SPE. They can leverage GCC x86 across the board especially with x86 having 4 - 8 cores now.
For the full story will want to see these:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* http://www.wired.com/2013/11/p...
* http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...
> I'll bet when development started, Sony hadn't finalized PS4 plans.
That's correct. The PS4 was in development for about 4+ years. Naughty Dog's focus wasn't on writing a game for unannounced hardware whose specs were volatile but to finish and ship a game on a known platform. (Disclaimer: I used to work for SCEA.)
> I'd blame the managers for suddenly springing a new platform on them after the game was done.
That's exactly right. Short-term Profits vs Long-Term thinking.
Someone needs to mod your post up as +Informative.
Freedom should never sell out its values.
or
You can sell your values but you can't buy morality.
Agreed. Here is an old joke ..
"A liberal will interpret the constitution, a conservative will quote it!"
> And denying people the ability to yell "fire" in a crowded theater is also "the opposite of freedom."
For the last smegging time, the "fire-theater" issue is about property rights NOT free speech.
If there is NO fire, you are under an implicit social contract as to NOT create PANIC.
If there IS a fire, you are also under an implicit social contract to INFORM everyone of the DANGER.
The road to freedom must be balanced with the destination of moderation.
There is an old cliche:
"Be liberal with others, be conservative with yourself"
> Yep. So are Excessive taxation without representation
FTFY.
Your analogy is also flawed.
DRM is NOT needed to stream video. In contradistinction government can't function without taxes for now (because are not yet spiritually mature enough to know how to self-govern yet)
> You can't "optimize" a bubble sort into a quick sort.
At the risk of being rude, you are not really understanding what optimization actually means.
You need to take a step back from the trees and look at the forest.
Sorting is defined as:
* Input: Given a set of unordered data
* Output: Return a set of ordered data
Optimization entails both macro and micro efficiency.
The algorithm determines the high level efficiency.
The programming language may offer low level efficiency.
For example you could write CRC32 without any table usage:
But with a table approach it becomes the much simper:
Code copy pasted from Stephan Brumme
> there are three things that catch bugs before you even get to a debugger:
Yes, but the "hard" bugs are the ones that happen at run-time. Those depends on the context such as Networking, Rendering, and AI bugs that can be a real PITA to track down.
Race Conditions, and Deadlock are hairiest ones.
There has to be a comprehensive list someplace aside from the usual
* syntax (compile time)
-- variable mis-spelt
* logic
-- classic "fencepost" bug
* run-time
-- race conditions
-- deadlock
On a half serious note:
* Bohrbugs: Most of the bugs that we come across are reproducible, and are known as Bohrbugs.
* Heisenbugs: All experienced programmers have faced situations where the bug that crashed the software just disappears when the software is restarted
* Mandelbugs: When the cause of the bug is too complex to understand, and the resulting bug appears chaotic,
* Schroedinbug: Sometimes, you look into the code, and find that it has a bug or a problem that should never have allowed it to work in the first place
http://www.opensourceforu.com/...
True, but it is more fun to have your own post +5 with 0 comments. :-)
> The average ranking is not rank = up - down. It's rank = p1*up - p2*down. Where p1 is the size of the population which would rank it up, and p2 is the size of the population which would rank it down. A minority viewpoint consequently gets a disproportionate number of unfair downvotes simply because it's a minority viewpoint, and thus has to garner a lot more upvotes just to obtain an equal ranking to a majority viewpoint.
You've just discussed / discovered the fundamental problem with a democracy. :-) You know the old joke: "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
In government, the US used a 2-stage Republic system to overcome the weaknesses of democracy:
* The House of Representatives is based on state population size
* The Senate has 2 senators represent each state.
> A moderating/ranking system which only allows upvotes simply generates different results from a moderating system which allows both upvotes and downvotes.
IMHO I've found that a moderation system that only allows upvotes to be (mostly) useless. It is far better to be able to downvote / mark trolls / incorrect information so others can get a quick sense of SNR.
Reddit's moderation system is garbage compared /. for 2 reasons:
1. you have no "context" for why something was upvoted or downvoted
2. You end up with a massive circlejerk from the Redditards. Hell I've asked a question and still been downvoted!?!? Next month, I point out the same question and get upvoted like crazy.
On older sites where the majority aren't our brainless emo teens you can have a civil disagreement.
> ZFS is great, but it's not perfect
Serious question: I'm curious as to what those would be?
The license?
> Not until they do that for cash.
Exactly. Cash is anonymous. Why isn't BitCoin allowed to be as well?
Sacramento's weather sucks ass in the summer. One of my best friends lives there -- I hate the weather -- even though the rest of the city is OK.
At least in the Bay Area / San Jose you are relatively close to the water to provide a much more stable temperature other the hell hole hot weather of Sacramento. Summers in contrast in San Jose are beautiful -- not to hot, not to cold.
> For those of us who depend on Photoshop for print work Gimp does not cut it.
Agreed. GIMP is still missing Layer Effects.
At least it supports nested layer groups, and all the blend modes, finally.
Every few years I try to load a logo I made with Photoshop Creative Suite into GIMP and see if it will display correctly. Every few years it slowly inches towards rendering correctly.
Once they have something like this ... #47009861
It is trivial to extend itoa() to include base support up to hex. You change 3 lines.
e.g.
> Why would you need a string reverse in the first place?
Given an integer, say -123, you typically peel off the digits one at a time in the one's place to allow for printing in an arbitrary base (say bases 2, 8, 10, 16; binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal respectively). For example:
This becomes the string '3' '2' '1', '-' which is reversed.
It is possible to write itoa so no push() pop() or strrev() is needed at all by putting the character digits in the proper place when the mod is done in the first place.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
/sarcasm Keep focusing on the messenger instead of the message.
Nice find!
Bunch of fun puzzles on Page 66. :-)
I'm seeing similar results:
2.6 GHz i7, MacBook Pro Retina 15-inch Late 2013, OSX 10.9.2
* Chrome 34.0.1847.131: 28699
* Firefox: 29.0.1: 21743
* Firefox 29.0: 21515
* Safari 7.0.3 (9537.75.14): 18303
Test / Chrome / Firefox / Safari .. 24856 .. 21234 .. 24166 .. 17283 .. 25745 .. 24910 .. 24124 .. 25726 .. 17415 .. 27887 .. 2361 .. 1656 ..13226 .. 11951 .. 9522 ..12525 .. 30688 .. 20607 .. 15698 .. 12221 .. 29329 .. 15985 .. 38645 .. 17554 .. 44601 .. 26002 .. 19636 .. 36069 .. 35278 .. 26763 .. 67528 .. 24031 .. 24644 .. 41874
Richards 33336
Deltablue 37568
Crypto 28108
Raytrace 66451
EarleyBoyer 50226
Regexp 4847
Splay 12501
SplayLat 21808
NavierStokes 27317
pdf.js 24889
Mandreel 30117
MandreelLat 23967
GBEmulator 58589
CodeLode 19132
Box2DWeb 45047
zlib 41246
Typescript 38301
> Techs who have been around before the year 2000 tend to have this policy.
Exactly: Don't fix what isn't broken.
> This is why I will never buy an Android phone again. The lack of guaranteed updates is a huge problem.
Is Apple really any better though?
Try getting iOS updates to the original iPad. Mine is stuck on iOS5. :-(
I'm using iOS6 on iPhone 5 but I don't see any other vendor doing a better job of support. Apple isn't interested in fixing bugs in iOS6.
Agreed. Forced obsolescence is NOT the answer.
I rip my CD with Exact Audio Copy to FLAC and/or use iTunes and rip to Apple Lossless.
These days Amazone has "InstantRip" so I can immediately download and listen as 256 kbps .mp3s are "good enough" for most music.