The two analog sticks are used. Extensively, in fact. The left stick controls movement and the right stick controls the camera. The D-pad has its own functions (namely targeting and selecting the party leader) and can no longer be used for movement, which is fine with me as I've always prefered using the analog stick anyway. So in short, with the way the controls are set up in FFXII playing the game without two analog sticks would be quite impossible.
The DualShock isn't a PS2 controller, anyway. It's a PS1 controller that's supported for legacy purposes. Every PS2 I've ever seen comes bundled with a DS2. You shouldn't be too surprised that you can't play some PS2 games without a PS2 controller.
You know, I'm not going to pay $500 for a PS3 either. (Yes, I said $500. Why does everyone quote the $600 price when the cheaper version of the PS3--quite unlike the cheaper version of the XBox 360--is not in any way crippled? Oh no, it lacks some fancy output to plug into my nonexistent HDTV. The horror.) However, when the PS3 drops in price (And it will drop in price. A large portion of the price is due to the bleeding edge Blu-Ray stuff which is basically due to the blue laser diode. When those start being manufactured in greater numbers and the technology becomes more mature I would expect the price of that component to drop by an order of magnitude.) then I will probably purchase one. Which is more than I can say about the XBox 360, a system that holds little interest to me.
See, that's why I only use Model Ms: Smashing the keyboard on the monitor breaks the monitor, not the keyboard. In retrospect that may not be a
good thing...
"Concessions"?! The fantasy aspects are what make Shadowrun Shadowrun, and are in my opinion the best part of the game system. No, it's not "true Gibson cyberpunk" and it's not supposed to be! If that's what you want there are a ton of games with a setting like that (for instance, Cybepunk). Gibson can whine about Shadowrun all he wants, but that just says to me that he's too busy dwelling on how they changed things from 'his' setting and missing out on one of the most interesting (not necessarily original, but interesting) settings out there.
First off, I should note that I am a nuclear/particle physicist so I actually know something about this stuff.
Yeah, the vast majority of string theory is probably crap. But what people don't seem to realize is that 99% of what all theorists say is crap. That 1% that actually manages to get something right gets all the fame and tends to be the only ones the general public hears about, but the sad truth is that most theorists take the shotgun approach: They try to come up with as many different theories as possible in the hope that one of them might actually turn out to be right.
The article seems to imply that the existence of string theorists is preventing advancement in particle physics. That's BS. The reason why there haven't been any new dramatic discoveries in particle physicists in the past few years is because there haven't been any new experiments! Science is experimental in nature. Progress is made with new experiments. The theorists can speculate all they want but no consensus will be reached until somebody tests it. Unfortunately experiments in particle physics have become so massive and expensive that progress has slowed significantly.
Actually, there have been many discoveries in less traditional aspects of particle physics...neutrino mass for instance. So I'm not even entirely sure what the article is complaining about. Yeah, traditional accelerator experiments haven't done much since the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab, but again it's because there haven't been any new experiments since then. Other than RHIC, which focuses on a very different kind of physics (and RHIC has also been producing many interesting new results).
When the LHC finally comes online expect a flurry of new discoveries. Until then the theorists can speculate all they want. If they weren't wasting their time on string theory they would be wasting their time on something else.
Huh? I am a particle physicist (well, a graduate student, anyway) but I've never heard *anyone* talk about the 'Law of Conservation of Strangeness'. Never. Strangeness conservation, sure, but nobody calls it a law.
BTW, I agree with the GP. The term 'Law' in science is only still used for historical reasons.
Yes, cell is bigger than the Xbox 360's chip, but one factor they are completely ignoring is the fact that one SPE will be disabled. It does not matter which SPE is disabled, and this redundancy (which the 360 doesn't have) will improve yields. You can't simply say chip A is bigger so it will cost more.
In any event, the prices listed for both chips look closer to what the chips would cost if they were sold at retail, not the manufacturing cost.
On the subject of the drive:
Yes, blu-ray will cost more. Primarily it needs a more expensive laser than DVD. But as others have mentioned you can't compare the cost of a stand-alone blu-ray player to the cost of including blu-ray in a powerful machine like the PS3. The PS3 can use its own processor to decode blu-ray stuff. $300 for blu-ray is kind of ridiculous.
Though I doubt it's ever going to be implemented...
But you could just require that if a company wants to distribution something with DRM they also provide a DRM-free copy to the Library of Congress or similar entity, that can be stored until the copyright expires (heh, like that will ever happen...) and then be made available to the public.
Of course, you have to take steps to ensure that whatever medium it's on is actually readable 100 years from now...
You might as well save your money and watch fansubs because the bootlegs you're buying are no better for the creators.
Yes, you are buying bootlegs. Sometimes the quality of bootlegs can be very high and you may not think it, but based on your description I'm 99% sure you're buying bootlegs. Just the fact that they are region free is clue enough (I know of no legitimate DVD manufacturer that produces region free anime...yes, it's theoretically possible, but nobody does). Anyway, check out the Pirate Anime FAQ.
'I assure you, no one at AMD woke up one day in 2001 and said "hey, I have a completely new idea for how to design system architecture. Let's start a consortium and make this an industry standard."'
When the hell did I ever claim that?
AMD was working on Hypertransport technology for years before any products were ever released, originally under the name Lightning Data Transport. Here's a random press release from '99 (that took approximately 5 seconds of googling...)
For the record I never claimed anything about whether SGI people are working for Nvidia or not. It's irrelevant. You said Nvidia created Hypertransport, which is just plain untrue so I felt I should correct you. Yes, there are similarities between crossbar. It's simply a case of convergent design, not grand conspiracies. And yeah, the consortium was formed later. I never said it wasn't. But again you missed the point (namely that it's not Nvidia's technology, as you claimed).
But you continue to respond with absurd strawman arguments and a whole lot of 'I know a guy' crap and this simply isn't worth any more of my time. I at least attempt to provide sources, which is apparently beneath you. Or maybe you realize that if you actually did some research you'd be proven wrong.
Either your memory is clouded or your friend is an idiot. Hypertransport is 100% AMD technology. Sure, they may have worked with Nvidia for the purpose of Nvidia's particular implementation of it (AMD is very good at working with their technology partners), but Nvidia did not have a thing to do with the creation of Hypertransport. AMD based their entire K8 architecture around Hypertransport. You seem to imply that Hypertransport depends on IP rights that Nvidia owns, which is laughable. Hypertransport is an open standard managed by the Hypertransport Consortium. If Nvidia owned the rights to the technology then how come ATI, their biggest competitor, is also using it?
But since I don't expect you to take my word for it, here are some links:
The problem is, starting with the need and then looking for a solution is not necessarily the most efficient way to do things.
The entire point of research is exploring the domain of the unknown. If you know where to look for the solution then odds are somebody already found that solution. The reason we do research is that we don't know. Researching one field can lead to applications in a completely different field. Solutions cross boundaries. It's never entirely clear what the next big thing is going to be until you've found it.
An 'interesting problem' means something we don't understand (that is what is interesting to researchers, anyway). The goal of research is to understand it. It is entirely possible that by doing so our increased understanding will yield practical applications in many different fields. It is also possible that there won't be any practical applications at all. But you don't know until you do it.
If you just say 'go build a better mousetrap' then certainly one can go out and try to design the best possible mousetrap with existing technologies. But that isn't research, it's engineering. Engineering is good. Engineering is important. But there are a lot of things that are just entirely outside the scope of engineering. Nobody is going to try to build a better mousetrap by spending several years exploring the properties of different alloys to try and find one that is stronger or lighter. And certainly if all the mousetrap makers in the world had a department of people trying to do that it would be rather inefficient. But for some reason when the public funds a group of people to explore the properties of materials we don't really understand you consider it to be intellectual masturbation. Heck, maybe it is, but it's also the only way to make real progress.
What the hell is wrong with not wanting cable? Have you watched TV lately? It's all crap. I don't want cable either, and it has nothing to do with being an 'slow adopter' or not.
Fermi also said that at a time when we were constantly discovering new mesons and baryons and QCD had not yet been developed to put it all together yet.
These days we know that mesons are baryons are not fundamental. Remembering the names of the fundamental particles really isn't that hard and it's worth your time:
Six kinds of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom Six kinds of leptons: electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino Force carriers: photon, W+, W-, Z0, gluon
That's it for the standard model. Most people will agree that the graviton should be added to the list of force carriers, although nobody has observed one yet. There's also the Higgs (or possibly a family of Higgs particles), which hopefully the LHC will either observe or disprove. Then you start getting into stranger possibilities like supersymmetry (which is reasonably well supported by theory) and various whack-job theories (which aren't).
Since you never see bare quarks (a subject of last year's Nobel Prize, I believe) it's worthwhile to know some of the more common baryons (for instance, protons and neutrons) and mesons (learn your pions...and maybe kaons). But trying to memorize them all is pretty pointless, as you can have a lot of different combinations of quarks (especially when you start talking about excited states). Check the Particle Data Group (http://pdg.lbl.gov/) if you need to look up info on a particular particle.
Your objection to a monorail doesn't really apply here. Seattle doesn't have any existing structures to recycle. With the exception of the bus tunnel there isn't a foot of track anywhere in Seattle. When they built the bus tunnel they did put track in with the idea of possibly running a rail system through the tunnel at some point in the future, however it turns out they didn't put the right kind of track in so for the light rail system it has to all be taken out and replaced anyway.
That said I still think the monorail project was horribly mismanaged and I'm glad it's dead, but not for the reasons you state.
As a Seattle resident, let me tell you that the Simpson's episode in question is all too close to the truth. This entire monorail project has been a poorly planned poorly executed mess that has resulted in ridiculous and unfair taxes (I own a car but rarely drive. But because I own a car in the last year I spent more on monorail tax than I did on gas.) that line the pockets of beaurocrats and middlemen. I'm glad to see it canned, but wish they did so a year ago...
"Give credit where it's due. Without Windows 95 we'd all be running OS/2 by now and the Internet wouldn't be nearly as accessible."
Um...that's some kind of a joke, right?
Microsoft didn't give a shit about the internet in the early days. They were pushing their own proprietary Prodigy/Compuserve-esque solution. OS/2 had everything you needed for internet access built in well before Windows ever did.
Slashdot Mirror
On the subject of FFXII:
The two analog sticks are used. Extensively, in fact. The left stick controls movement and the right stick controls the camera. The D-pad has its
own functions (namely targeting and selecting the party leader) and can no longer be used for movement, which is fine with me as I've always prefered
using the analog stick anyway. So in short, with the way the controls are set up in FFXII playing the game without two analog sticks would be quite
impossible.
The DualShock isn't a PS2 controller, anyway. It's a PS1 controller that's supported for legacy purposes. Every PS2 I've ever seen comes bundled
with a DS2. You shouldn't be too surprised that you can't play some PS2 games without a PS2 controller.
Funny, I live in Seattle and quite a few locals say the same kinds of things about the women here...
And you know, I used to live in NYC and met a lot of cool people there. So your mileage may vary.
You know, I'm not going to pay $500 for a PS3 either. (Yes, I said $500. Why does everyone quote the $600 price when the cheaper version of the
PS3--quite unlike the cheaper version of the XBox 360--is not in any way crippled? Oh no, it lacks some fancy output to plug into my nonexistent
HDTV. The horror.) However, when the PS3 drops in price (And it will drop in price. A large portion of the price is due to the bleeding edge
Blu-Ray stuff which is basically due to the blue laser diode. When those start being manufactured in greater numbers and the technology becomes more
mature I would expect the price of that component to drop by an order of magnitude.) then I will probably purchase one. Which is more than I can say
about the XBox 360, a system that holds little interest to me.
See, that's why I only use Model Ms: Smashing the keyboard on the monitor breaks the monitor, not the keyboard. In retrospect that may not be a good thing...
"Concessions"?! The fantasy aspects are what make Shadowrun Shadowrun, and are in my opinion the best part of the game system. No, it's not "true
Gibson cyberpunk" and it's not supposed to be! If that's what you want there are a ton of games with a setting like that (for instance, Cybepunk).
Gibson can whine about Shadowrun all he wants, but that just says to me that he's too busy dwelling on how they changed things from 'his' setting
and missing out on one of the most interesting (not necessarily original, but interesting) settings out there.
First off, I should note that I am a nuclear/particle physicist so I actually know something about this stuff.
Yeah, the vast majority of string theory is probably crap. But what people don't seem to realize is that 99% of what all theorists say is crap. That 1% that actually manages to get something right gets all the fame and tends to be the only ones the general public hears about, but the sad truth is that most theorists take the shotgun approach: They try to come up with as many different theories as possible in the hope that one of them might actually turn out to be right.
The article seems to imply that the existence of string theorists is preventing advancement in particle physics. That's BS. The reason why there haven't been any new dramatic discoveries in particle physicists in the past few years is because there haven't been any new experiments! Science is experimental in nature. Progress is made with new experiments. The theorists can speculate all they want but no consensus will be reached until somebody tests it. Unfortunately experiments in particle physics have become so massive and expensive that progress has slowed significantly.
Actually, there have been many discoveries in less traditional aspects of particle physics...neutrino mass for instance. So I'm not even entirely sure what the article is complaining about. Yeah, traditional accelerator experiments haven't done much since the discovery of the top quark at Fermilab, but again it's because there haven't been any new experiments since then. Other than RHIC, which focuses on a very different kind of physics (and RHIC has also been producing many interesting new results).
When the LHC finally comes online expect a flurry of new discoveries. Until then the theorists can speculate all they want. If they weren't wasting their time on string theory they would be wasting their time on something else.
Huh? I am a particle physicist (well, a graduate student, anyway) but I've never heard *anyone* talk about the 'Law of Conservation of Strangeness'.
Never. Strangeness conservation, sure, but nobody calls it a law.
BTW, I agree with the GP. The term 'Law' in science is only still used for historical reasons.
On the subject of the processor:
Yes, cell is bigger than the Xbox 360's chip, but one factor they are completely ignoring is the fact that one SPE will be disabled. It does not matter which SPE is disabled, and this redundancy (which the 360 doesn't have) will improve yields. You can't simply say chip A is bigger so it will cost more.
In any event, the prices listed for both chips look closer to what the chips would cost if they were sold at retail, not the manufacturing cost.
On the subject of the drive:
Yes, blu-ray will cost more. Primarily it needs a more expensive laser than DVD. But as others have mentioned you can't compare the cost of a stand-alone blu-ray player to the cost of including blu-ray in a powerful machine like the PS3. The PS3 can use its own processor to decode blu-ray stuff. $300 for blu-ray is kind of ridiculous.
Always has been, always will be ;)
Though I doubt it's ever going to be implemented...
But you could just require that if a company wants to distribution something with DRM they also provide a DRM-free copy to the Library of Congress or similar entity, that can be stored until the copyright expires (heh, like that will ever happen...) and then be made available to the public.
Of course, you have to take steps to ensure that whatever medium it's on is actually readable 100 years from now...
You might as well save your money and watch fansubs because the bootlegs you're buying are no better for the creators.
Yes, you are buying bootlegs. Sometimes the quality of bootlegs can be very high and you may not think it, but based on your description I'm 99% sure you're buying bootlegs. Just the fact that they are region free is clue enough (I know of no legitimate DVD manufacturer that produces region free anime...yes, it's theoretically possible, but nobody does). Anyway, check out the Pirate Anime FAQ.
'I assure you, no one at AMD woke up one day in 2001 and said "hey, I have a completely new idea for how to design system architecture. Let's start a consortium and make this an industry standard."'
When the hell did I ever claim that?
AMD was working on Hypertransport technology for years before any products were ever released, originally under the name Lightning Data Transport. Here's a random press release from '99 (that took approximately 5 seconds of googling...)
For the record I never claimed anything about whether SGI people are working for Nvidia or not. It's irrelevant. You said Nvidia created Hypertransport, which is just plain untrue so I felt I should correct you. Yes, there are similarities between crossbar. It's simply a case of convergent design, not grand conspiracies. And yeah, the consortium was formed later. I never said it wasn't. But again you missed the point (namely that it's not Nvidia's technology, as you claimed).
But you continue to respond with absurd strawman arguments and a whole lot of 'I know a guy' crap and this simply isn't worth any more of my time. I at least attempt to provide sources, which is apparently beneath you. Or maybe you realize that if you actually did some research you'd be proven wrong.
Just for fun, Wikipedia
Either your memory is clouded or your friend is an idiot. Hypertransport is 100% AMD technology. Sure, they may have worked with Nvidia for the purpose of Nvidia's particular implementation of it (AMD is very good at working with their technology partners), but Nvidia did not have a thing to do with the creation of Hypertransport. AMD based their entire K8 architecture around Hypertransport. You seem to imply that Hypertransport depends on IP rights that Nvidia owns, which is laughable. Hypertransport is an open standard managed by the Hypertransport Consortium. If Nvidia owned the rights to the technology then how come ATI, their biggest competitor, is also using it?
But since I don't expect you to take my word for it, here are some links:
"HyperTransport technology was invented at AMD"
AMD products that use Hypertransport
Consortium Members
"SGI's crossbar architecture (now called the Nvidia Hypertransport)"
Um...Hypertransport is an original technology developed by AMD and licensed by Nvidia (and others). It doesn't have a thing to do with SGI.
"and $300 graphics cards using SGI graphics processors"
While aspects of the technology are similar (which really is kind of inevitable), again Nvidia's cards are very much original designs.
The coffee keeps you going and the beer makes sure you don't have to care too much.
"These countries have loads of good engineers and they can't be held hotage to someone in Seattle."
As a resident of Seattle I can assure you that there isn't nearly enough hotage here.
Sadly you won't find any fossils of orcs and trolls because after they die they turn into gold (and XP).
This unique property means they were hunted to extinction by local adverturers ages ago, so don't expect to find any live ones either.
The problem is, starting with the need and then looking for a solution is not necessarily the most efficient way to do things.
The entire point of research is exploring the domain of the unknown. If you know where to look for the solution then odds are somebody already found that solution. The reason we do research is that we don't know. Researching one field can lead to applications in a completely different field. Solutions cross boundaries. It's never entirely clear what the next big thing is going to be until you've found it.
An 'interesting problem' means something we don't understand (that is what is interesting to researchers, anyway). The goal of research is to understand it. It is entirely possible that by doing so our increased understanding will yield practical applications in many different fields. It is also possible that there won't be any practical applications at all. But you don't know until you do it.
If you just say 'go build a better mousetrap' then certainly one can go out and try to design the best possible mousetrap with existing technologies. But that isn't research, it's engineering. Engineering is good. Engineering is important. But there are a lot of things that are just entirely outside the scope of engineering. Nobody is going to try to build a better mousetrap by spending several years exploring the properties of different alloys to try and find one that is stronger or lighter. And certainly if all the mousetrap makers in the world had a department of people trying to do that it would be rather inefficient. But for some reason when the public funds a group of people to explore the properties of materials we don't really understand you consider it to be intellectual masturbation. Heck, maybe it is, but it's also the only way to make real progress.
What the hell is wrong with not wanting cable? Have you watched TV lately? It's all crap. I don't want cable either, and it has nothing to do with being an 'slow adopter' or not.
Fermi also said that at a time when we were constantly discovering new mesons and baryons and QCD had not yet been developed to put it all together yet.
These days we know that mesons are baryons are not fundamental. Remembering the names of the fundamental particles really isn't that hard and it's worth your time:
Six kinds of quarks: up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom
Six kinds of leptons: electron, muon, tau, electron neutrino, muon neutrino, tau neutrino
Force carriers: photon, W+, W-, Z0, gluon
That's it for the standard model. Most people will agree that the graviton should be added to the list of force carriers, although nobody has observed one yet. There's also the Higgs (or possibly a family of Higgs particles), which hopefully the LHC will either observe or disprove. Then you start getting into stranger possibilities like supersymmetry (which is reasonably well supported by theory) and various whack-job theories (which aren't).
Since you never see bare quarks (a subject of last year's Nobel Prize, I believe) it's worthwhile to know some of the more common baryons (for instance, protons and neutrons) and mesons (learn your pions...and maybe kaons). But trying to memorize them all is pretty pointless, as you can have a lot of different combinations of quarks (especially when you start talking about excited states). Check the Particle Data Group (http://pdg.lbl.gov/) if you need to look up info on a particular particle.
'To think that a bulb gives off light in "infinite" (lower limit time angle of tau) blows my mind.'
What the frick are you talking about?
No, seriously. I mean this as a physicist: the above statement was completely incoherent.
Oh well, if your mind was blown I guess I can't blame you.
Your objection to a monorail doesn't really apply here. Seattle doesn't have any existing structures to recycle. With the exception of the bus tunnel there isn't a foot of track anywhere in Seattle. When they built the bus tunnel they did put track in with the idea of possibly running a rail system through the tunnel at some point in the future, however it turns out they didn't put the right kind of track in so for the light rail system it has to all be taken out and replaced anyway.
That said I still think the monorail project was horribly mismanaged and I'm glad it's dead, but not for the reasons you state.
As a Seattle resident, let me tell you that the Simpson's episode in question is all too close to the truth. This entire monorail project has been a poorly planned poorly executed mess that has resulted in ridiculous and unfair taxes (I own a car but rarely drive. But because I own a car in the last year I spent more on monorail tax than I did on gas.) that line the pockets of beaurocrats and middlemen. I'm glad to see it canned, but wish they did so a year ago...
The first part of the process:
2H2O->2H2+O2
The second part of the process:
2H2+O2->2H2O
And we're going to get net energy out of this how exactly?
Somebody ought to tell these people about the laws of thermodynamics.
"Give credit where it's due. Without Windows 95 we'd all be running OS/2 by now and the Internet wouldn't be nearly as accessible."
Um...that's some kind of a joke, right?
Microsoft didn't give a shit about the internet in the early days. They were pushing their own proprietary Prodigy/Compuserve-esque solution. OS/2 had everything you needed for internet access built in well before Windows ever did.