What annoys me about MS stuff is that they have to prominently display the company name everywhere. You can't just have Internet Explorer, no it has to be Microsoft Internet Explorer. Word? Nope, Microsoft Word. And now these media players, and surprise surprise, stenciled on the screen is the word "microsoft". The difference between MS and Apple is that my iBook simply says iBook G4 and has a little Apple logo on screen at the top left. OK, it has the Apple logo on the back of the screen but that is cute and I don't see it although others do so that is cool. My iPod? Nope, no Apple logos on the thing other than a small one engraved on the back. The screen shows the logo when it first starts but after that, nothing.
When I am using Windows, I know it is Microsoft, I don't need to have it splattered all over the place. Not to mention just how tacky the MS stuff looks, simply no class. Yuk.
Funny, it has absolutely no problems playing Max Payne 2 at high quality. The GF4MX420 I have in my system was cheap but it provides plenty of grunt for the latest games. I think the problem is with Halo itself, it is likely a poor port from the Xbox. Still, I think Halo is not that great a game, it is all a bit samey. I have pretty much given up on it and am enjoying Max Payne 2 now instead.
As I have said before I work in a computer game shop and just last week I had a chap come in who was disabled. We have several customers in wheelchairs but they all have full use of both hands but this chap was a first for me as he had had a stroke and was partially paralysed down his right side in addition to the problem that had put him in the chair in the first place.
Anyway, he asked exactly this question and I didn't have an answer for him but I did suggest he either ask slashdot or keep an eye out for suggestions of this sort. If he is reading this "Hi" by the way, looks like you made it to the right place:-)
Anyway, it does seem like there should be a market for this sort of device, disabled people seem to be attracted to games machines, I guess it is more of an escape for them than it is for those of us with full use of our bodies. Roll on "Better than life"!
I regularly play games on my projection TV (DLP so no worries about burn). I also play PC games on it. Picture quality isn't all that different, resolution and textures are better on the PC but consoles do OK too. Control, I agree though, keyboard and mouse are sometimes better than a console controller, I dearly wish that the PS2 versions of Medal of Honour supported my USB keyboard and mouse, some games do such as Half-life and Red Faction so I don't see why more console games don't support it.
The resolution of a machine like the PS2 is limited yes, the graphics hardware is actually capable of SXGA resolution, I can run X11 on my Linux PS2 kit at 1280x1024 16 bit. However, for games it is likely that higher resolutions would eat up too much memory or other resources to make the game playable. I don't see why they don't provide progressive output more frequently though, some games do so why not all?
I think the real question is how much longer will PCs be able to claim the high ground of better control and higher resolution? I suspect the next generation of consoles will close the gap so that it is virtually invisible at which point the need to constantly upgrade a PC to play the latest game will become a thing of the past.
Question, what is the deal with Halo on the PC? It is awful. Was the game this bad on the XBox? It is repetitive and the graphics aren't all that great (played on Athlon 2200+ with GeForce 4MX graphics card). I expected so much more....
I have a PS2 and GCN for my console gaming needs. I also have a PC (Athlon XP2200+ running Windows XP) for gaming and a G4 iBook for most of my computing needs with Linux providing services, used to have a Linux laptop but the Mac does everything and then some. The GCN cost wasn't an issue as the machine was really that cheap and the combination of the PS2, GCN and PC give me the widest range of games. I did consider an Xbox for a while but the only game I was considering was Halo which I have since got on the PC (and frankly can't see what the fuss is all about).
At the end of the day, the choice for games I think should be a PS2 or Xbox and then you should also get a GCN. The real killer app turns out to be the GameBoy player.
I work in a major game retailer in the UK and I have to agree that it is looking pretty grim. Sales of hardware have been very slack, a couple of weeks ago we did well but that was the last pay day before Christmas, the week after we sold far fewer. The latest games have so far proven uninspiring. The only game I have really enjoyed (and therefore sold a lot of) is Simpsons Hit and Run. I bought Medal of Honour Rising Sun and am struggling to find much good to say about it. Prince of Persia is graphically nice but somewhat brief. Manhunt just doesn't hit the mark and True Crime is a dead loss. You just have to look at the game returns or trade ins to see what games are worth having. Simpsons Hit and Run doesn't come back, all the others I listed have are already on the second hand shelves.
I think the big surprise is the popularity of the GameCube. For the first time since I started working in the shop I sold more GCs than the other two consoles put together.
Personally, I think I'm going to drag out my N64 and have another go through Goldeneye. Perhaps they should look at putting out an updated version of that for the GameCube or even the other platforms. Heck, even the original version done like the recent Zelda pack would be a great seller. It destroys all the other Bond games.
Look, OS X is insecure.
This isn't the OS you're looking for, stay with Windows, all will be well......
These people just don't get stats, Windows has more viruses and so on not because it has 10x the market share of anything else but because it is much more vulnerable. Even when Windows systems are in the minority (eg web servers) they still suffer far greater security problems than any other platform.
Sheesh!
A couple of years ago I visited MS in Redmond to see if there was some way my then company could work with MS. We had a very encouraging two hour discussion and I was told that MS would very much like to work with us. I had demo'd our software on a Linux laptop running KDE (so I don't think they noticed it wasn't Windows) and mentioned that as we were a Linux based company we would use Mono to integrate with.NET. The response was "We don't work with Linux companies, I'll get you a cab" and that was that.
While it is clear that they don't like Linux, I think it is also apparent that they will not condone anyone using Linux/Mono as a development platform instead of Windows/.NET and they will very obviously move to kill it by incompatibility as soon as it shows the slightest chance of being a threat.
It can't be stated often enough that all the effort MS or others put into pointing out the flaws in Linux does nothing but show us where to concentrate our efforts.
They would be far far better served by just keeping their gobs shut. Unfortunately, a company that is driven by marketing rather than technology will always be drawn to try and tear down the opposition.
So, keep 'em coming MS, no point in learning from past mistakes (Mindcraft!)
I recently started working part-time in a UK shop and have been steadily selling consoles for the last few weeks in the build up to Christmas. What I noticed is that when the price of the GCN dropped to 79 there was a flurry of sales but that appears to have dried up somewhat now. PS2 sales have been steady and strong, DVD playback is surprisingly still important to people, as is the wide choice of games including PS1 games (great for younger kids). Xbox is barely shifting despite currently being bundled with four games. I've sold 1 Xbox, 3 GCN and a lot of PS2s in five days of work.
I currently own a PS2 and GCN. Might get an Xbox but I doubt it as the two consoles and PC give me plenty of choice.
...building a games system based on commodity PC hardware actually works against you in the long run as it doesn't get cheaper over time in the same way that the more custom designs such as PS2 and GCN have.
What? Are you claiming that x86 chip and mobo prices have remained constant for the last few years? How naive of me to believe that they were getting cheaper over time just because the numbers after the pound signs were shrinking so fast!
Not at all, what happens is that when you go to a shop to buy some new kit you end up getting just that; something that is newer and faster than the previous equivalent for the same money. The older stuff just gets discontinued.
With consoles it doesn't work that way, they are a fixed standard and in the case of the PS2 for instance the current machine is cheaper to make because Sony has been able to combine components and reduce the process. With the Xbox using commodity components it doesn't get this benefit.
If MS was to upgrade the hardware weekly as with normal PCs then the Xbox would be 3x as powerful today as it was in its original form, but that is not how consoles work so it actually doesn't get any cheaper to make. It doesn't have the volumes of normal PCs, or of the PS2 even so it will always be expensive. Interesting that the GCN is so cheap to make though, neat little box.
Why should Xbox2 use x86? The x86 32 bit family will still be around, or a 64 bit decendent anyway, but I think the experience with the Xbox is that building a games system based on commodity PC hardware actually works against you in the long run as it doesn't get cheaper over time in the same way that the more custom designs such as PS2 and GCN have. Besides which, the next Xbox will likely not be a 32 bit chip so it is sensible to move to another platform and use x86 emulation (eg virtual PC/Xbox) to allow the playing of old games. A move to something based on Power5 would likely give the necessary increase in processing grunt to take on the PS3 and that is going to be something MS will really want to do. The only reason the Xbox was slightly more powerful than the PS2 was it was so late.
Of course, it is still debatable that MS should even bother to do an Xbox2. The move into media PCs, along with a standardisation on games that can run directly from a DVD-ROM rather than installing on the HD would negate the need for the expense of selling an Xbox system. Get a standard PC into the living room and make it play games as well as a console and you would have a winner........
I have liked alphas since I first laid hands on one back in 1993 when it was running OSF.
I have a few of them kicking around my house, a couple of EV6s and an EV4 that still does sterling service.
Alphas were always fast, both integer and floating point, however it was the FP performance that really made them popular for scientific applications. Once the EV6s arrived the integer performance increased considerably over the previous EV5s with the addition of four integer pipelines (EV5s had two each for integer and FP) and also register renaming and instruction reordering. Alphas have 32 64 bit integer registers and 32 floating point registers, but an additional 32 showed up in the EV6 which allows the processor to do a lot more work per clock cycle along with the extra pipelines and out of order execution. The other great thing that EV6 introduced (well, actually the 21164PC chip introduced it but it wasn't as useful as the 264 EV6) was MVI. This is the equivalent of the Intel SSE/MMX instructions but the MVI instructions had direct access to memory as they were 64 bits wide just like any other instruction on the chip. This meant it was trivial to load up a 64 bit word and then do parallel work on the data such as sum or max.
Instructions also executed very quickly, typical of a RISC chip, and the processors had very large caches for their day (2MB being typical but server chips had much more than that). Even access to main memory was very quick, the EV6 bus was also used on the Athlon for this reason.
So, you essentially had in Alpha a processor that has able to crunch integer and FP data very quickly, had a fat bus to memory with a cache large enough to be useful and lots of general purpose registers, extended parallel instructions that worked easily with the existing instruction set, one which looks like an high level language it is that easy to use. They also had very high clock speeds for their day and used those cycles very efficiently, Alphas were running over 500Mhz when Intel was putting out sub 200Mhz 32 bit chips that struggled to do more than a no-op in the time that an Alpha could do a fourier transform!
Unlike Itanic, the Alpha was designed to make compilers easy to write, Compaq released the DEC compiler to work under Linux and it was amazing to see the boost in speed that came about when that was used. The fact that the EV6 was so smart meant that the compiler didn't need to be all that clever to make code that Alpha could run very quickly. It was pretty simple to avoid cache misses and other performance sapping problems.
Compared with other processors of their day such as SPARC the Alpha was at least twice as quick if not more. It is only as Compaq took over and took their foot of the pedal and speed ramps dried up that other architectures caught up but it took some time. If they had continued to keep pace with die shrinks and clock speed increases Alpha would have been embarrassing its competitors even today, in fact it still is if you witness the fact that HP won't release benchmarks for EV7 until Itanium can beat it.
So, yes, Alpha was great and I haven't even touched upon EV7 as I never got my hands on one and I'm not likely to now. Damn HP. Damn them to hell!
From what I have heard it is quite likely that Alpha EV8 technology will live on as the next gen Itanium, effectively something like the current Pentium where the Itanium instruction set will be wrapped around and Alpha style core with translation to make it seem like an Itanium. Yuk.
Well, I'm an audiophile. Not as much as I used to be but that is largely because I got a system that satisfied me. What was I looking for? Music. Simple really, I wanted to hear the music presented in a realistic way. It is not about numbers, it is about how the thing sounds.
What do I look for? Yes, I know all the fluffy words and have used them myself but here is how it really works in words we can all understand.
Soundstage - there needs to be a third dimension to the sound, classical music should sound like the guy at the back with the triangle is really at the back and not just very small. There also needs to be horizontal accuracy, you should be able to pick out separate instruments and they should sound life size. You would know it if you heard it. No-one has listened to my system and not walked away amazed at what can be achieved.
Bass - this needs to play tunes. It is all too easy to produce fat bass that doesn't play any part in the sound apart from just booming. This is one reason why sub woofers are such a bad idea. The bass should also have detail, a bass note should not just go "boooooooommmmm", it should also go "bwangoommamamooom". That sounds nuts but again once you hear it you will understand.
Mid range - very important, vocals need to sound like a person, a good system will produce a lifelike breathing voice. Especially listen to how 's' sounds. Often it will sound like 'ethz', nasty. Compressed audio is notorious for this effect. Unfortunately, crossovers in speakers can be a real killer, this is where planar speakers such as electrostats and ribbons have a real win over conventional setups. The crossover is generally placed somewhere out of harms way. My speakers have a crossover at 900hz where the ribbon takes over and goes on up from there. This makes for a very smooth sound and that realism I want.
Treble - detail detail detail. You don't want treble that just goes "plish", "tish" or "fish". It needs to have a fine quality, again compressed audio can sound clipped. Listen to the decay of a cymbal. Often it with go "TISH......" when it should go "Tishhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......". Also, there should be a sound of the hit (transient) and then a nice metalic ring. MP3 often loses the transient and the ring becomes more of a hiss. To the normal listener this sounds like the treble is there but again, listen to a good system and it becomes obvious what the deal is.
If the sound has good depth, bass detail, midrange humanity and high frequency attack and clarity then you are doing pretty well. Compressed audio will compromise all of these so you need to make a choice based on the needs of the situation.
Interesting how audiophiles and Linux users have many similar characteristics though. I think it boils down to caring about your experience. I certainly use Linux because I can control my environment and it lets me tailor the system to my needs. The same is true with my audio system.
Sales of the GCN are just a blip for the moment. There are lots of people who already have a PS2 or XBOX who are interested in the GCN simply because it has some really nice games. I know, I have a GCN that I bought just for Rogue Squadron II. However, as the PS2 is still the most popular system with the greatest selection of games it makes no sense to drop the price yet.
Now the XBOX is a different case entirely, it really needs to be cheaper.
I suspect Sony will keep the price where it is in the run up to Christmas and then drop it early next year.
This is really useful. SGI, with full access to both Linux and SysV code have done an "exhaustive investigation" (what no phantom MIT mathematicians?) and concluded that there are some fragments of code that are common but trivial in number and type (likely already public domain).
So, either there is a stack of code in SysV that SGI doesn't have access to, or there is no actionable similarity between Linux and SysV and SCO is full of crap. Take your pick.
Re:I thought Apollo 1 was the last pure Oxygen shi
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The Return of Apollo?
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Hmmm - I thought they went to a Nitrogen/Oxygen mix after the Apollo 1 fire?
I believe you are right. They also got shot of all the flamable materials that had got into the capsule, most obvious example was the large amount of velcro that the astronauts just loved but burned like an SOB.
I wonder if this whole thing with billing Linux users is a ploy from SCO to show that as the users have the right to the source code of Linux that they should pay, thus showing to the PHBs out there that MS or traditional UNIX are safer and more 'free' than Linux?
In comparing it with the Honda engine in an Audi, the difference is that the users can't make copies of the engine. The GPL allows the users to be producers and maybe that is the point that SCO is trying to make?
Attacking the GPL is their best chance at this point in time, or maybe that is what the puppet masters want anyway.
You: Hi. My Inspiron laptop is busted - the PC-Card slot is fried.
Dell: OK, service tag?
You: 8xchyyw
Dell: OK. What do Windows diagnostics say?
You: Windows? This is running Linux.
Dell: Sorry sir, your laptop is supposed to be running Windows, and is now out of warranty.
You: What? How could running Linux possibly void my warranty?
Dell: Please read your EULA again, sir. Have a nice day. *click*
Heh:-)
I bought a Toshiba laptop some years back and found that the 's' key didn't work. Clearly a hardware fault. I took it to the shop where I bought it and booted into Linux as that was the default.
I tried typing omething and it wa obviou that the '' key didn't work. No amount of typing '' would reult in anything.
The person at the customer service desk refused to even consider this fault until I rebooted into Windows XP (which I had fortunately kept around for use with my NetMD). Since Windows also showed the fault they accepted the problem, but..... DUH!
TiVO is head and shoulders above Sky+....
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Open Source at TiVo
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here in the UK. Sky is plugging their Sky+ box like mad, it costs the same per month to subscribe as my TiVO and yet it can only record 'some' series, has only 20 hours of capacity with no chance of hacking it, and reports from owners I have spoken to show that it is very unreliable. Nor does it have wishlists, suggestions and all the other cools stuff that TiVO offers.
I wish Sky had chosen to go with TiVO for their box, and I wish others would do the same. Why must they always create their own poor imitation? Is it to be able to be closed source? Do they fear that going with TiVO would somehow result in GPL taint?
Sadly today you can't buy a new TiVO in the UK but the service continues, why wouldn't it? Money for old rope once you have a user base.
Oh, so you'd run SCO's UnixWare without reservations then? After all, it's THE Unix now. Technology isn't everything, the ideology of the vendor matters, too. In that respect Apple is no better than Microsoft, they just have better designers.
Huh? Hold on one minute bucko. SCO's actions do not make UnixWare bad. It is UNIX albeit old and crumbly (which does make it bad). Besides, the thing SCO can't get their head around is that UNIX is about the 'style' rather than the particular codebase. Hence Linux is UNIX in the sense that it implements the style but does so from the point of reimplementation. FreeBSD on which OS X is based does so from a more direct ancestry. However, they are all intertwined.
Comments making out that Apple is the same as Microsoft and SCO are also unfair. Apple has had a bad reputation over the years and deserved it but since OS X they have not only built an OS on opensource, they have followed the requirements to do so. Look at Safari using KHTML. They have built a nice little browser that works well and uses a GPL rendering engine. They have improved it and released those improvements back under GPL. That is good, lets see if MS or SCO would do the same thing? I think Apple has proven that everything MS and SCO say about GPL is a complete fiction, proprietary and GPL software make a great team.
While it is a shame that there isn't going to be an Aqua version of OOo 1.x the X11 version works, it is basically the same as the Linux version which Linux users seem to be happy with. Slow to start, granted, but X11 is now a standard feature of OS X and it did allow the code to work on the platform.
Hopefully with 2.0 they will get to the point of having code that is truely portable rather than the current situation. It would also be nice if OOo for X11 used Gnome themes, maybe they can get that into 2.0 as well.
I don't get all these nasty comments about Macs. I don't actually own one, been a Linux user since 1994 and before that I was a SUNOS guy. Never really liked Macs but I could see that people found them easy to use so that was fine. OSX is by far the best of both worlds, my next laptop is almost certainly going to be a powerbook, doesn't mean I won't continue to like Linux, its all UNIX, its all good.
The one thing I find odd is the lie that is simplicity. Macs are a doddle to use and yet they are clearly also nice secure systems. Windows is less easy to use and yet easier to write viruses and trojans for. Chewbacca defense? It does not make sense! If Macs were as common as PCs they still wouldn't suffer the same level of viruses and worms as Windows does. Same is true for Linux. Besides which, what if we had 25% Windows, 25% Linux, 25% Macs and 25% others. I bet Windows would still have by far the greatest number of viruses etc.
Cool off guys. Macs are good. Its all UNIX and that is good. A little bit more of this and Windows will be the minority just as it should be.
The point is anyone who can afford a projector system,isn't going to be using a PS2 for a DVD player, unless their system has limited scart connections. Complaining about the noise of the PS2's fan, which the parent post did, was pretty weird as well, considering the noise the cooling system on a projector makes...
I agree. I only paid 800 quid for my first projector and that was very noisy. The new one is much quieter, not whisper quiet, but not intrusive like the old one was. The noise of the PS2 would probably compete with it but wouldn't be much of an issue. However, in the spare room on the little 28" set the noise is quite irritating, subjectively more so than the noise of the projector in the main room.
Still, I love playing GTA:Vice City or any of the racing games on the projector, great fun, amost immersive. The DTS soundtrack on Vice City is really neat too.
Those bulbs are ultra sensitive, even with their long lamp life. One bump may or may not destroy it, then you are out of some cash. I think he means 200 bucks too. Projection systems are probably not something that you want to invest in when you have kids under the age of 12... or if you ever leave your kids above the age of 12 home alone in the house. It's bound to cost you $$$$$. Hed.
Hmmmm. I'm on my second projector now, I replaced the first one because the bulbs had a life of 500 hours and cost $400 a time. I had replaced the bulb once and that lasted three years of reasonable use. I lugged that projector around quite a lot and the bulb ran the course. In the end it was getting dim but still worked. That old projector was very robust. I bought the new one because the cost was the same as 3 bulbs on the old projector, and the lamp life was 6x the old one. Also, the picture quality was vastly improved. The only thing is to make sure that the projector is allowed to cool off before the power is cut. Do that and the bulb should last the expected time. These little portable projectors are pretty robust but I do agree that I wouldn't like to let kids near it. However, I wouldn't say that the bulbs are "ultra sensitive", just take care and follow the instructions in the manual.
Slashdot Mirror
What annoys me about MS stuff is that they have to prominently display the company name everywhere. You can't just have Internet Explorer, no it has to be Microsoft Internet Explorer. Word? Nope, Microsoft Word. And now these media players, and surprise surprise, stenciled on the screen is the word "microsoft". The difference between MS and Apple is that my iBook simply says iBook G4 and has a little Apple logo on screen at the top left. OK, it has the Apple logo on the back of the screen but that is cute and I don't see it although others do so that is cool. My iPod? Nope, no Apple logos on the thing other than a small one engraved on the back. The screen shows the logo when it first starts but after that, nothing.
When I am using Windows, I know it is Microsoft, I don't need to have it splattered all over the place. Not to mention just how tacky the MS stuff looks, simply no class. Yuk.
Funny, it has absolutely no problems playing Max Payne 2 at high quality. The GF4MX420 I have in my system was cheap but it provides plenty of grunt for the latest games. I think the problem is with Halo itself, it is likely a poor port from the Xbox. Still, I think Halo is not that great a game, it is all a bit samey. I have pretty much given up on it and am enjoying Max Payne 2 now instead.
As I have said before I work in a computer game shop and just last week I had a chap come in who was disabled. We have several customers in wheelchairs but they all have full use of both hands but this chap was a first for me as he had had a stroke and was partially paralysed down his right side in addition to the problem that had put him in the chair in the first place.
:-)
Anyway, he asked exactly this question and I didn't have an answer for him but I did suggest he either ask slashdot or keep an eye out for suggestions of this sort. If he is reading this "Hi" by the way, looks like you made it to the right place
Anyway, it does seem like there should be a market for this sort of device, disabled people seem to be attracted to games machines, I guess it is more of an escape for them than it is for those of us with full use of our bodies. Roll on "Better than life"!
I regularly play games on my projection TV (DLP so no worries about burn). I also play PC games on it. Picture quality isn't all that different, resolution and textures are better on the PC but consoles do OK too. Control, I agree though, keyboard and mouse are sometimes better than a console controller, I dearly wish that the PS2 versions of Medal of Honour supported my USB keyboard and mouse, some games do such as Half-life and Red Faction so I don't see why more console games don't support it.
The resolution of a machine like the PS2 is limited yes, the graphics hardware is actually capable of SXGA resolution, I can run X11 on my Linux PS2 kit at 1280x1024 16 bit. However, for games it is likely that higher resolutions would eat up too much memory or other resources to make the game playable. I don't see why they don't provide progressive output more frequently though, some games do so why not all?
I think the real question is how much longer will PCs be able to claim the high ground of better control and higher resolution? I suspect the next generation of consoles will close the gap so that it is virtually invisible at which point the need to constantly upgrade a PC to play the latest game will become a thing of the past.
Question, what is the deal with Halo on the PC? It is awful. Was the game this bad on the XBox? It is repetitive and the graphics aren't all that great (played on Athlon 2200+ with GeForce 4MX graphics card). I expected so much more....
I have a PS2 and GCN for my console gaming needs. I also have a PC (Athlon XP2200+ running Windows XP) for gaming and a G4 iBook for most of my computing needs with Linux providing services, used to have a Linux laptop but the Mac does everything and then some. The GCN cost wasn't an issue as the machine was really that cheap and the combination of the PS2, GCN and PC give me the widest range of games. I did consider an Xbox for a while but the only game I was considering was Halo which I have since got on the PC (and frankly can't see what the fuss is all about).
At the end of the day, the choice for games I think should be a PS2 or Xbox and then you should also get a GCN. The real killer app turns out to be the GameBoy player.
I work in a major game retailer in the UK and I have to agree that it is looking pretty grim. Sales of hardware have been very slack, a couple of weeks ago we did well but that was the last pay day before Christmas, the week after we sold far fewer. The latest games have so far proven uninspiring. The only game I have really enjoyed (and therefore sold a lot of) is Simpsons Hit and Run. I bought Medal of Honour Rising Sun and am struggling to find much good to say about it. Prince of Persia is graphically nice but somewhat brief. Manhunt just doesn't hit the mark and True Crime is a dead loss. You just have to look at the game returns or trade ins to see what games are worth having. Simpsons Hit and Run doesn't come back, all the others I listed have are already on the second hand shelves.
I think the big surprise is the popularity of the GameCube. For the first time since I started working in the shop I sold more GCs than the other two consoles put together.
Personally, I think I'm going to drag out my N64 and have another go through Goldeneye. Perhaps they should look at putting out an updated version of that for the GameCube or even the other platforms. Heck, even the original version done like the recent Zelda pack would be a great seller. It destroys all the other Bond games.
Look, OS X is insecure. This isn't the OS you're looking for, stay with Windows, all will be well...... These people just don't get stats, Windows has more viruses and so on not because it has 10x the market share of anything else but because it is much more vulnerable. Even when Windows systems are in the minority (eg web servers) they still suffer far greater security problems than any other platform. Sheesh!
Yeah, I know, big surprise.
.NET. The response was "We don't work with Linux companies, I'll get you a cab" and that was that.
A couple of years ago I visited MS in Redmond to see if there was some way my then company could work with MS. We had a very encouraging two hour discussion and I was told that MS would very much like to work with us. I had demo'd our software on a Linux laptop running KDE (so I don't think they noticed it wasn't Windows) and mentioned that as we were a Linux based company we would use Mono to integrate with
While it is clear that they don't like Linux, I think it is also apparent that they will not condone anyone using Linux/Mono as a development platform instead of Windows/.NET and they will very obviously move to kill it by incompatibility as soon as it shows the slightest chance of being a threat.
It can't be stated often enough that all the effort MS or others put into pointing out the flaws in Linux does nothing but show us where to concentrate our efforts.
They would be far far better served by just keeping their gobs shut. Unfortunately, a company that is driven by marketing rather than technology will always be drawn to try and tear down the opposition.
So, keep 'em coming MS, no point in learning from past mistakes (Mindcraft!)
I recently started working part-time in a UK shop and have been steadily selling consoles for the last few weeks in the build up to Christmas. What I noticed is that when the price of the GCN dropped to 79 there was a flurry of sales but that appears to have dried up somewhat now. PS2 sales have been steady and strong, DVD playback is surprisingly still important to people, as is the wide choice of games including PS1 games (great for younger kids). Xbox is barely shifting despite currently being bundled with four games. I've sold 1 Xbox, 3 GCN and a lot of PS2s in five days of work.
I currently own a PS2 and GCN. Might get an Xbox but I doubt it as the two consoles and PC give me plenty of choice.
Not at all, what happens is that when you go to a shop to buy some new kit you end up getting just that; something that is newer and faster than the previous equivalent for the same money. The older stuff just gets discontinued.
With consoles it doesn't work that way, they are a fixed standard and in the case of the PS2 for instance the current machine is cheaper to make because Sony has been able to combine components and reduce the process. With the Xbox using commodity components it doesn't get this benefit.
If MS was to upgrade the hardware weekly as with normal PCs then the Xbox would be 3x as powerful today as it was in its original form, but that is not how consoles work so it actually doesn't get any cheaper to make. It doesn't have the volumes of normal PCs, or of the PS2 even so it will always be expensive. Interesting that the GCN is so cheap to make though, neat little box.
Why should Xbox2 use x86? The x86 32 bit family will still be around, or a 64 bit decendent anyway, but I think the experience with the Xbox is that building a games system based on commodity PC hardware actually works against you in the long run as it doesn't get cheaper over time in the same way that the more custom designs such as PS2 and GCN have. Besides which, the next Xbox will likely not be a 32 bit chip so it is sensible to move to another platform and use x86 emulation (eg virtual PC/Xbox) to allow the playing of old games. A move to something based on Power5 would likely give the necessary increase in processing grunt to take on the PS3 and that is going to be something MS will really want to do. The only reason the Xbox was slightly more powerful than the PS2 was it was so late.
Of course, it is still debatable that MS should even bother to do an Xbox2. The move into media PCs, along with a standardisation on games that can run directly from a DVD-ROM rather than installing on the HD would negate the need for the expense of selling an Xbox system. Get a standard PC into the living room and make it play games as well as a console and you would have a winner........
I have liked alphas since I first laid hands on one back in 1993 when it was running OSF.
I have a few of them kicking around my house, a couple of EV6s and an EV4 that still does sterling service.
Alphas were always fast, both integer and floating point, however it was the FP performance that really made them popular for scientific applications. Once the EV6s arrived the integer performance increased considerably over the previous EV5s with the addition of four integer pipelines (EV5s had two each for integer and FP) and also register renaming and instruction reordering. Alphas have 32 64 bit integer registers and 32 floating point registers, but an additional 32 showed up in the EV6 which allows the processor to do a lot more work per clock cycle along with the extra pipelines and out of order execution. The other great thing that EV6 introduced (well, actually the 21164PC chip introduced it but it wasn't as useful as the 264 EV6) was MVI. This is the equivalent of the Intel SSE/MMX instructions but the MVI instructions had direct access to memory as they were 64 bits wide just like any other instruction on the chip. This meant it was trivial to load up a 64 bit word and then do parallel work on the data such as sum or max.
Instructions also executed very quickly, typical of a RISC chip, and the processors had very large caches for their day (2MB being typical but server chips had much more than that). Even access to main memory was very quick, the EV6 bus was also used on the Athlon for this reason.
So, you essentially had in Alpha a processor that has able to crunch integer and FP data very quickly, had a fat bus to memory with a cache large enough to be useful and lots of general purpose registers, extended parallel instructions that worked easily with the existing instruction set, one which looks like an high level language it is that easy to use. They also had very high clock speeds for their day and used those cycles very efficiently, Alphas were running over 500Mhz when Intel was putting out sub 200Mhz 32 bit chips that struggled to do more than a no-op in the time that an Alpha could do a fourier transform!
Unlike Itanic, the Alpha was designed to make compilers easy to write, Compaq released the DEC compiler to work under Linux and it was amazing to see the boost in speed that came about when that was used. The fact that the EV6 was so smart meant that the compiler didn't need to be all that clever to make code that Alpha could run very quickly. It was pretty simple to avoid cache misses and other performance sapping problems.
Compared with other processors of their day such as SPARC the Alpha was at least twice as quick if not more. It is only as Compaq took over and took their foot of the pedal and speed ramps dried up that other architectures caught up but it took some time. If they had continued to keep pace with die shrinks and clock speed increases Alpha would have been embarrassing its competitors even today, in fact it still is if you witness the fact that HP won't release benchmarks for EV7 until Itanium can beat it.
So, yes, Alpha was great and I haven't even touched upon EV7 as I never got my hands on one and I'm not likely to now. Damn HP. Damn them to hell!
From what I have heard it is quite likely that Alpha EV8 technology will live on as the next gen Itanium, effectively something like the current Pentium where the Itanium instruction set will be wrapped around and Alpha style core with translation to make it seem like an Itanium. Yuk.
As I said, Damn HP.
I see the usual audiophile bashing has started.
Well, I'm an audiophile. Not as much as I used to be but that is largely because I got a system that satisfied me. What was I looking for? Music. Simple really, I wanted to hear the music presented in a realistic way. It is not about numbers, it is about how the thing sounds.
What do I look for? Yes, I know all the fluffy words and have used them myself but here is how it really works in words we can all understand.
Soundstage - there needs to be a third dimension to the sound, classical music should sound like the guy at the back with the triangle is really at the back and not just very small. There also needs to be horizontal accuracy, you should be able to pick out separate instruments and they should sound life size. You would know it if you heard it. No-one has listened to my system and not walked away amazed at what can be achieved.
Bass - this needs to play tunes. It is all too easy to produce fat bass that doesn't play any part in the sound apart from just booming. This is one reason why sub woofers are such a bad idea. The bass should also have detail, a bass note should not just go "boooooooommmmm", it should also go "bwangoommamamooom". That sounds nuts but again once you hear it you will understand.
Mid range - very important, vocals need to sound like a person, a good system will produce a lifelike breathing voice. Especially listen to how 's' sounds. Often it will sound like 'ethz', nasty. Compressed audio is notorious for this effect. Unfortunately, crossovers in speakers can be a real killer, this is where planar speakers such as electrostats and ribbons have a real win over conventional setups. The crossover is generally placed somewhere out of harms way. My speakers have a crossover at 900hz where the ribbon takes over and goes on up from there. This makes for a very smooth sound and that realism I want.
Treble - detail detail detail. You don't want treble that just goes "plish", "tish" or "fish". It needs to have a fine quality, again compressed audio can sound clipped. Listen to the decay of a cymbal. Often it with go "TISH......" when it should go "Tishhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......". Also, there should be a sound of the hit (transient) and then a nice metalic ring. MP3 often loses the transient and the ring becomes more of a hiss. To the normal listener this sounds like the treble is there but again, listen to a good system and it becomes obvious what the deal is.
If the sound has good depth, bass detail, midrange humanity and high frequency attack and clarity then you are doing pretty well. Compressed audio will compromise all of these so you need to make a choice based on the needs of the situation.
Interesting how audiophiles and Linux users have many similar characteristics though. I think it boils down to caring about your experience. I certainly use Linux because I can control my environment and it lets me tailor the system to my needs. The same is true with my audio system.
Sales of the GCN are just a blip for the moment. There are lots of people who already have a PS2 or XBOX who are interested in the GCN simply because it has some really nice games. I know, I have a GCN that I bought just for Rogue Squadron II. However, as the PS2 is still the most popular system with the greatest selection of games it makes no sense to drop the price yet.
Now the XBOX is a different case entirely, it really needs to be cheaper.
I suspect Sony will keep the price where it is in the run up to Christmas and then drop it early next year.
This is really useful. SGI, with full access to both Linux and SysV code have done an "exhaustive investigation" (what no phantom MIT mathematicians?) and concluded that there are some fragments of code that are common but trivial in number and type (likely already public domain).
So, either there is a stack of code in SysV that SGI doesn't have access to, or there is no actionable similarity between Linux and SysV and SCO is full of crap. Take your pick.
I believe you are right. They also got shot of all the flamable materials that had got into the capsule, most obvious example was the large amount of velcro that the astronauts just loved but burned like an SOB.
I wonder if this whole thing with billing Linux users is a ploy from SCO to show that as the users have the right to the source code of Linux that they should pay, thus showing to the PHBs out there that MS or traditional UNIX are safer and more 'free' than Linux?
In comparing it with the Honda engine in an Audi, the difference is that the users can't make copies of the engine. The GPL allows the users to be producers and maybe that is the point that SCO is trying to make?
Attacking the GPL is their best chance at this point in time, or maybe that is what the puppet masters want anyway.
Heh :-)
I bought a Toshiba laptop some years back and found that the 's' key didn't work. Clearly a hardware fault. I took it to the shop where I bought it and booted into Linux as that was the default.
I tried typing omething and it wa obviou that the '' key didn't work. No amount of typing '' would reult in anything.
The person at the customer service desk refused to even consider this fault until I rebooted into Windows XP (which I had fortunately kept around for use with my NetMD). Since Windows also showed the fault they accepted the problem, but..... DUH!
here in the UK. Sky is plugging their Sky+ box like mad, it costs the same per month to subscribe as my TiVO and yet it can only record 'some' series, has only 20 hours of capacity with no chance of hacking it, and reports from owners I have spoken to show that it is very unreliable. Nor does it have wishlists, suggestions and all the other cools stuff that TiVO offers.
I wish Sky had chosen to go with TiVO for their box, and I wish others would do the same. Why must they always create their own poor imitation? Is it to be able to be closed source? Do they fear that going with TiVO would somehow result in GPL taint?
Sadly today you can't buy a new TiVO in the UK but the service continues, why wouldn't it? Money for old rope once you have a user base.
Oh, so you'd run SCO's UnixWare without reservations then? After all, it's THE Unix now. Technology isn't everything, the ideology of the vendor matters, too. In that respect Apple is no better than Microsoft, they just have better designers.
Huh? Hold on one minute bucko. SCO's actions do not make UnixWare bad. It is UNIX albeit old and crumbly (which does make it bad). Besides, the thing SCO can't get their head around is that UNIX is about the 'style' rather than the particular codebase. Hence Linux is UNIX in the sense that it implements the style but does so from the point of reimplementation. FreeBSD on which OS X is based does so from a more direct ancestry. However, they are all intertwined.
Comments making out that Apple is the same as Microsoft and SCO are also unfair. Apple has had a bad reputation over the years and deserved it but since OS X they have not only built an OS on opensource, they have followed the requirements to do so. Look at Safari using KHTML. They have built a nice little browser that works well and uses a GPL rendering engine. They have improved it and released those improvements back under GPL. That is good, lets see if MS or SCO would do the same thing? I think Apple has proven that everything MS and SCO say about GPL is a complete fiction, proprietary and GPL software make a great team.
While it is a shame that there isn't going to be an Aqua version of OOo 1.x the X11 version works, it is basically the same as the Linux version which Linux users seem to be happy with. Slow to start, granted, but X11 is now a standard feature of OS X and it did allow the code to work on the platform.
Hopefully with 2.0 they will get to the point of having code that is truely portable rather than the current situation. It would also be nice if OOo for X11 used Gnome themes, maybe they can get that into 2.0 as well.
I don't get all these nasty comments about Macs. I don't actually own one, been a Linux user since 1994 and before that I was a SUNOS guy. Never really liked Macs but I could see that people found them easy to use so that was fine. OSX is by far the best of both worlds, my next laptop is almost certainly going to be a powerbook, doesn't mean I won't continue to like Linux, its all UNIX, its all good.
The one thing I find odd is the lie that is simplicity. Macs are a doddle to use and yet they are clearly also nice secure systems. Windows is less easy to use and yet easier to write viruses and trojans for. Chewbacca defense? It does not make sense! If Macs were as common as PCs they still wouldn't suffer the same level of viruses and worms as Windows does. Same is true for Linux. Besides which, what if we had 25% Windows, 25% Linux, 25% Macs and 25% others. I bet Windows would still have by far the greatest number of viruses etc.
Cool off guys. Macs are good. Its all UNIX and that is good. A little bit more of this and Windows will be the minority just as it should be.
The point is anyone who can afford a projector system,isn't going to be using a PS2 for a DVD player, unless their system has limited scart connections. Complaining about the noise of the PS2's fan, which the parent post did, was pretty weird as well, considering the noise the cooling system on a projector makes...
I agree. I only paid 800 quid for my first projector and that was very noisy. The new one is much quieter, not whisper quiet, but not intrusive like the old one was. The noise of the PS2 would probably compete with it but wouldn't be much of an issue. However, in the spare room on the little 28" set the noise is quite irritating, subjectively more so than the noise of the projector in the main room.
Still, I love playing GTA:Vice City or any of the racing games on the projector, great fun, amost immersive. The DTS soundtrack on Vice City is really neat too.
Those bulbs are ultra sensitive, even with their long lamp life. One bump may or may not destroy it, then you are out of some cash. I think he means 200 bucks too. Projection systems are probably not something that you want to invest in when you have kids under the age of 12... or if you ever leave your kids above the age of 12 home alone in the house. It's bound to cost you $$$$$. Hed.
Hmmmm. I'm on my second projector now, I replaced the first one because the bulbs had a life of 500 hours and cost $400 a time. I had replaced the bulb once and that lasted three years of reasonable use. I lugged that projector around quite a lot and the bulb ran the course. In the end it was getting dim but still worked. That old projector was very robust. I bought the new one because the cost was the same as 3 bulbs on the old projector, and the lamp life was 6x the old one. Also, the picture quality was vastly improved. The only thing is to make sure that the projector is allowed to cool off before the power is cut. Do that and the bulb should last the expected time. These little portable projectors are pretty robust but I do agree that I wouldn't like to let kids near it. However, I wouldn't say that the bulbs are "ultra sensitive", just take care and follow the instructions in the manual.