There are more possible moves in chess than there are atoms in the universe. So will we have a computer that can churn through every single possibility in real time? Possible, but highly improbable within many generations from our life times, and likely in my imagination that it will never happen in the life of our universe.
You take a picture of that cute girl at the coffee shop. Snap her with the camera phone, erase all those pesky clothes, and let the algorithm do its thing.
You wait for the algorithm to finish, it says "Done", you get all excited and click the button to see the result, and.... * DOH *, it put all her clothes back on, albeit a different color and style.
You have no point to highlight. Releasing API's to make it easier to pass code to each SPE is by far the hard part of any of this.
Multi-threading in general isn't easy. Game developers generally don't do much multi-threading. I remember reading about John Carmack once "leaping forward and putting the audio code into a different thread".
Now, the PS3 has fairly slow processors, just a lot of them. To use 7 threads to get the power out of it is not only difficult, sometimes impossible given an algorithm or game.
Take it to the extreme if it'll help you, think about the following. Instead of 7 SPE's, pretend there are 4,000 SPE's, but each one only runs at 1.00mhz. Well, you've got yourself 4ghz (4,000mhz) of power in theory, good luck programming GTA IV to run on it. It will never happen in any amount of time that a development budget would allow, if it is even possible at all.
The PS3's development model of massive parallelism would of worked better if each core wasn't starved for memory and slow bus bandwidth etc...
Then you could write GTA IV using a single core, or main + a single SPE and get the same performance of the 360, but alas this isn't the case.
It'll probably be 10 years before massively parallelized games are mainstream and developers can write code to optimize for it as easy as writing single threaded code today.
Because the target audience has a slightly higher IQ level. Basically Simpsons is more mainstream.
A friend of mine hates Futurama because he doesn't get the jokes, "No fair, you changed the outcome by observing it!" -- The professor on a quantum horse race.
People don't like to feel dumb when watching TV, they want predictability and nice simple jokes that everyone can get.
I for one think Futurama is great, and they should even bump up the jokes a bit more:-)
I used to be a strict 80 column man. Often going way out of my way sometimes breaking functions down unnecessarily just to avoid tab indentations. Sometimes I would make my variable names a little too cryptic is non-local scoped members just to avoid hitting that 80 column barrier.
Now I use 90 columns, and I've hence matured my programming style to fit that. The ten additional columns really makes a world of difference for me when developing C++/Boost applications.
I do advocate using short cryptic names for variables when used in local scope. If you have a structure such as network_memory_stack_object and I'm using it in local scope, its going to be like: network_memory_stack_object n; maybe nmso; (acronym). You should be able to read it just fine. If its in an object then generally it gets a longer name.
You're little "complex" broadcom reverse engineering project is but a spec of paint on the moon that orbits our planet earth in terms of complexity when compared to the multi-megabyte nvidia driver binaries.
They show red, blue, and green. Really close to each other (E.G. DITHERING) to give you the appearance of a color to your brain.
All they are doing is dithering on a slightly bigger scale. In both cases it is an illusion, in both cases you get "millions" of colors, even though actually there are only a lousy THREE.
Mainly, looks like World of Warcraft finally has some competition, as I'm sure this Bird Watching MMO (BWMMO) probably requires slightly more skill than WoW does.
I am more and more impressed with Einstein every time something like this happens. To be able to sit in your house, thinking about the way the universe works, without a single real "test" to validate what you think, not even considering how science fiction off the way things like General Relativity is, bending space time fabric etc... That is just amazing to have it all proven "correct" a hundred years later.
Now the question will be, can we prove if String Theory is in fact correct. Tiny strings, massive membranes, 11 dimensions... it's even more "crazy sci-fi", but the math is good and that'll be really amazing if we can test it.
There is a new particle accelerator being built (largest in the world), which will help us detect the escaping of gravitrons if they do really exist, which wont prove string theory, but get us one step closer.
A) Ship a remote with no rubber grips, so it's slippery when player sweats B) Ship a baseball game that encourages the player to throw the remote hard to get a fast ball C) ??? (Remote smashes into Sony TV, putting a big crack in the screen) D) Profit!!! (for Sony... user buys another Sony TV)
The Wii Remote is very slick when your hands sweat (which will happen, it's a given). They put the strap on for a reason. Are you trying to say they put the strap on for "no reason"? Of course its to keep it there in the event that it slips out of your hand. Remember too, this is a game machine for kids, not just 30 year olds.
Then they ship a game that puts emphasis on whipping the controller hard for games like Baseball when you are the pitcher. The only way I could get 90+mph fast balls is if I "threw" the remote as hard as I could. Do this with sweaty hands, and sure the remote could go flying.
All they had to do was make the nylon part of the strap go through the remote, problem solved. If you threw the remote at 200mph it wouldn't leave your wrist then... no they had to put wimpy thin clear plastic 1mm thick string to hold it on...
Stop defending Nintendo, they screwed up.
A) Ship a remote with no rubber grips, so it's slippery when player sweats B) Ship a baseball game that encourages the player to throw the remote hard to get a fast ball C) ??? (Remote smashes into wall breaking into 30 pieces) D) Profit!!! (user buys another remote)
The Gamecube clearly from a number sold financial perspective LOST, dead last. You can't argue the real numbers. Unless you are picking Zelda, or Mario games exclusively, the GameCube was the wrong choice.
1) XBox360 $399
- Best graphics for HDTV gaming
- Best online experience
- Best media support with online movie/video purchases.
- Secondary HDTV movie because of HDTV addon and missing DVI/HDMI connection.
2) PS3 $599
- Second to the 360's graphics with launch titles.
- Unproven online gaming experience.
- In theory, we are lead to believe that the system won't be used to full potential until developers figure out how.
- Best HDTV movie support from integrated Blu-Ray player and full HDMI support.
3) Wii $249
- Most original user controller design giving a hopefully useful and non-gimiky method to playing todays games and designing new games that will only be available on the Wii
- Unproven online gaming experience.
- Only about twice as graphically capable as a Gamecube, most likely being about equivalent to the original XBox, perhaps a bit better.
- No HDTV movie experience, or even DVD experience.
So, if you agree with me (god I doubt that will happen), then it should be obvious the PS3 is the worst choice to make here if you absolutely had to run out on Sunday to buy a gaming system. It is absolutely the most financial risk, with no to-date benefits versus the Xbox 360 to the gamer. Note, the keyword is GAMER, not a movie watcher.
It's clear to me the winner is the Xbox 360 for HDTV online gaming experience. If you want a new way to play games, it's the Wii. In my book, the PS3 doesn't qualify for anything, Blu-Ray is too cutting edge, no movies to watch, no idea who will win the format war. The PS3 is too expensive. It's been shown in multiple games now that it suffers frame-rate and online play issues versus the 360's version of the same game.
Personally, at $250 and a way I can get my Wife to play some games, and have fun parties when people come over, I am absolutely picking up one of these little bad boys.
I'll wait a bit to give the PS3 a chance to redeem itself, and if it can't within the next half a year or a year, then I'm picking up a 360 for some HDTV online action. Heck the premium system will probably be $299 by then and maybe even come with a bigger hard disk.
The only thing the PS3's good for to me is to resell on ebay, which I won't do.
People are afraid they are making the wrong choice. They latch onto one idea, then try to get the rest to follow them. This ensures the longevity of the product if it has a big following, versus if they pick the wrong one and don't try to get friends to join them, they are left out in the cold.
Sure you can argue that you "can't go wrong with any of the three", but that's sorta been proven wrong, in that if you pick the Game Cube, you were left in the cold in the department of number of games in the console's library.
I don't think you win the market financially from the hard-core gamers. You win it from the rest of the population, which far out numbers the hard-core gamers.
"Hard-core gamers" by defintion can't imply mass market, because then they wouldn't be "hard core", they would just be "Average gamers".
Win the average gamer over, take the #1 Spot.
One could argue the "Hard-core gamers"'s machine is a PC gaming rig, not a silly console.
>> They are waiting in line 24 hours to buy a $600 console which the might be able to sell for $800, or might be stuck with owning or perhaps selling at a loss.
UHM, NO.
#1. They are going for ~ $3,500 USD on eBay right now. #2. If for some reason you couldn't sell yours, there is a nice little thing called a store return policy. Usually being 30 days.
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Any bible, just hurry before they are godless! Throw something fast!
There are more possible moves in chess than there are atoms in the universe. So will we have a computer that can churn through every single possibility in real time? Possible, but highly improbable within many generations from our life times, and likely in my imagination that it will never happen in the life of our universe.
I'd go more like this:
You take a picture of that cute girl at the coffee shop. Snap her with the camera phone, erase all those pesky clothes, and let the algorithm do its thing.
You wait for the algorithm to finish, it says "Done", you get all excited and click the button to see the result, and.... * DOH *, it put all her clothes back on, albeit a different color and style.
You have no point to highlight. Releasing API's to make it easier to pass code to each SPE is by far the hard part of any of this.
Multi-threading in general isn't easy. Game developers generally don't do much multi-threading. I remember reading about John Carmack once "leaping forward and putting the audio code into a different thread".
Now, the PS3 has fairly slow processors, just a lot of them. To use 7 threads to get the power out of it is not only difficult, sometimes impossible given an algorithm or game.
Take it to the extreme if it'll help you, think about the following. Instead of 7 SPE's, pretend there are 4,000 SPE's, but each one only runs at 1.00mhz. Well, you've got yourself 4ghz (4,000mhz) of power in theory, good luck programming GTA IV to run on it. It will never happen in any amount of time that a development budget would allow, if it is even possible at all.
The PS3's development model of massive parallelism would of worked better if each core wasn't starved for memory and slow bus bandwidth etc...
Then you could write GTA IV using a single core, or main + a single SPE and get the same performance of the 360, but alas this isn't the case.
It'll probably be 10 years before massively parallelized games are mainstream and developers can write code to optimize for it as easy as writing single threaded code today.
Because the target audience has a slightly higher IQ level. Basically Simpsons is more mainstream.
:-)
A friend of mine hates Futurama because he doesn't get the jokes, "No fair, you changed the outcome by observing it!" -- The professor on a quantum horse race.
People don't like to feel dumb when watching TV, they want predictability and nice simple jokes that everyone can get.
I for one think Futurama is great, and they should even bump up the jokes a bit more
Well, mathematically given an infinite amount of time you could receive the number 42 from a random number generator an infinite number of times.
Given an infinite amount of time, the Windows 95 source code could be spewed out perfectly in sequence from a true random number generator.
Too bad we won't live that long, because we all know how bad-ass the Win95 source code is.
I used to be a strict 80 column man. Often going way out of my way sometimes breaking functions down unnecessarily just to avoid tab indentations. Sometimes I would make my variable names a little too cryptic is non-local scoped members just to avoid hitting that 80 column barrier.
Now I use 90 columns, and I've hence matured my programming style to fit that. The ten additional columns really makes a world of difference for me when developing C++/Boost applications.
I do advocate using short cryptic names for variables when used in local scope. If you have a structure such as network_memory_stack_object and I'm using it in local scope, its going to be like: network_memory_stack_object n; maybe nmso; (acronym). You should be able to read it just fine. If its in an object then generally it gets a longer name.
Whats to stop them from having all those DSL customers all funneling through a 9600 baud connection?
Absolutely nothing, if they value their customers.
Yeah you are right, using a Hands Free on a phone is safer...
Talking to someone in person I am turning my head a lot to look at them while I speak, which is more dangerous.
You're little "complex" broadcom reverse engineering project is but a spec of paint on the moon that orbits our planet earth in terms of complexity when compared to the multi-megabyte nvidia driver binaries.
You silly little man.
They show red, blue, and green. Really close to each other (E.G. DITHERING) to give you the appearance of a color to your brain.
All they are doing is dithering on a slightly bigger scale. In both cases it is an illusion, in both cases you get "millions" of colors, even though actually there are only a lousy THREE.
Thank you, law suit avoided. Pheww.
Mainly, looks like World of Warcraft finally has some competition, as I'm sure this Bird Watching MMO (BWMMO) probably requires slightly more skill than WoW does.
I am more and more impressed with Einstein every time something like this happens. To be able to sit in your house, thinking about the way the universe works, without a single real "test" to validate what you think, not even considering how science fiction off the way things like General Relativity is, bending space time fabric etc... That is just amazing to have it all proven "correct" a hundred years later.
Now the question will be, can we prove if String Theory is in fact correct. Tiny strings, massive membranes, 11 dimensions... it's even more "crazy sci-fi", but the math is good and that'll be really amazing if we can test it.
There is a new particle accelerator being built (largest in the world), which will help us detect the escaping of gravitrons if they do really exist, which wont prove string theory, but get us one step closer.
That is, if it supports Divx, then I will NOT purchase one.
If it does NOT support Divx, then I will buy one.
Yeah you are right, maybe it's more like this:
A) Ship a remote with no rubber grips, so it's slippery when player sweats
B) Ship a baseball game that encourages the player to throw the remote hard to get a fast ball
C) ??? (Remote smashes into Sony TV, putting a big crack in the screen)
D) Profit!!! (for Sony... user buys another Sony TV)
You're right, I saw the same stuff, that Wii remote seems pretty damn strong!
:P
Maybe newer versions they'll use thinner plastic
No, I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you at all.
The Wii Remote is very slick when your hands sweat (which will happen, it's a given). They put the strap on for a reason. Are you trying to say they put the strap on for "no reason"? Of course its to keep it there in the event that it slips out of your hand. Remember too, this is a game machine for kids, not just 30 year olds.
Then they ship a game that puts emphasis on whipping the controller hard for games like Baseball when you are the pitcher. The only way I could get 90+mph fast balls is if I "threw" the remote as hard as I could. Do this with sweaty hands, and sure the remote could go flying.
All they had to do was make the nylon part of the strap go through the remote, problem solved. If you threw the remote at 200mph it wouldn't leave your wrist then... no they had to put wimpy thin clear plastic 1mm thick string to hold it on...
Stop defending Nintendo, they screwed up.
A) Ship a remote with no rubber grips, so it's slippery when player sweats
B) Ship a baseball game that encourages the player to throw the remote hard to get a fast ball
C) ??? (Remote smashes into wall breaking into 30 pieces)
D) Profit!!! (user buys another remote)
The Gamecube clearly from a number sold financial perspective LOST, dead last. You can't argue the real numbers. Unless you are picking Zelda, or Mario games exclusively, the GameCube was the wrong choice.
The way I see it, quite simply:
1) XBox360 $399
- Best graphics for HDTV gaming
- Best online experience
- Best media support with online movie/video purchases.
- Secondary HDTV movie because of HDTV addon and missing DVI/HDMI connection.
2) PS3 $599
- Second to the 360's graphics with launch titles.
- Unproven online gaming experience.
- In theory, we are lead to believe that the system won't be used to full potential until developers figure out how.
- Best HDTV movie support from integrated Blu-Ray player and full HDMI support.
3) Wii $249
- Most original user controller design giving a hopefully useful and non-gimiky method to playing todays games and designing new games that will only be available on the Wii
- Unproven online gaming experience.
- Only about twice as graphically capable as a Gamecube, most likely being about equivalent to the original XBox, perhaps a bit better.
- No HDTV movie experience, or even DVD experience.
So, if you agree with me (god I doubt that will happen), then it should be obvious the PS3 is the worst choice to make here if you absolutely had to run out on Sunday to buy a gaming system. It is absolutely the most financial risk, with no to-date benefits versus the Xbox 360 to the gamer. Note, the keyword is GAMER, not a movie watcher.
It's clear to me the winner is the Xbox 360 for HDTV online gaming experience. If you want a new way to play games, it's the Wii. In my book, the PS3 doesn't qualify for anything, Blu-Ray is too cutting edge, no movies to watch, no idea who will win the format war. The PS3 is too expensive. It's been shown in multiple games now that it suffers frame-rate and online play issues versus the 360's version of the same game.
Personally, at $250 and a way I can get my Wife to play some games, and have fun parties when people come over, I am absolutely picking up one of these little bad boys.
I'll wait a bit to give the PS3 a chance to redeem itself, and if it can't within the next half a year or a year, then I'm picking up a 360 for some HDTV online action. Heck the premium system will probably be $299 by then and maybe even come with a bigger hard disk.
The only thing the PS3's good for to me is to resell on ebay, which I won't do.
People are afraid they are making the wrong choice. They latch onto one idea, then try to get the rest to follow them. This ensures the longevity of the product if it has a big following, versus if they pick the wrong one and don't try to get friends to join them, they are left out in the cold.
Sure you can argue that you "can't go wrong with any of the three", but that's sorta been proven wrong, in that if you pick the Game Cube, you were left in the cold in the department of number of games in the console's library.
I don't think you win the market financially from the hard-core gamers. You win it from the rest of the population, which far out numbers the hard-core gamers.
"Hard-core gamers" by defintion can't imply mass market, because then they wouldn't be "hard core", they would just be "Average gamers".
Win the average gamer over, take the #1 Spot.
One could argue the "Hard-core gamers"'s machine is a PC gaming rig, not a silly console.
>> They are waiting in line 24 hours to buy a $600 console which the might be able to sell for $800, or might be stuck with owning or perhaps selling at a loss.
UHM, NO.
#1. They are going for ~ $3,500 USD on eBay right now.
#2. If for some reason you couldn't sell yours, there is a nice little thing called a store return policy. Usually being 30 days.
Thank you very much.
"FYI, on Linux, simply login out then in is enough to be sure to get all the new libraries."
...
Yeah, then all my glorious P2P downloads stop, as you said as a con for Windows.
I can arrange this to happen, just give me a few hours, k?
I put my wii in a wii-wii-pump to make it bigger cuz it looks so tiiiny next to the ginormus PS3.
I never said it would be a good joke.