Decoder part in K8 takes about 5 percent of the total transistor budget.
Optimization for architectural inefficiency is more than just the decoder. Re-read my post. The X86 has a terribly small register set, bad branching behavior, and poor instruction pipelining in it's "native" form. To get around these issues we have AMD and Intel adding a massive virtual register set, register re-assignment, out-of-order execution, speculative execution (doing all the work but able to throw away results), scheduler, branch prediction, etc. Not to mention the trace cache, decode, micro-op translater, prefetch part used for hardware translation from X86 to uops. These all takes lots and lots transistors.
Now look at something that is designed to be an small efficient architecture (from a transistor standpoint) from the start like the SPU's on the Cell processor. It doesn't have any of these "optimization units" mentioned above and they are able to fit 8 of them in and a simplified PPC with hyperthreading in roughly the same space as a P4.
Most people who understand CPU architecture will tell you x86 is an old inefficient design
Actually, x86 is a very inefficient instruction set. However, the efficiency of the instruction set has been sidestepped mostly by on-the-fly hardware translation to a more efficient instruction set, large virtual register sets, out-of-order execution, and speculative execution. Neither AMD nor Intel CPU's operate on the x86 instruction set internally. Both of them translate x86 instructions into micro-ops internally and execute those instead -- believe it or not, they're doing in hardware much of what Transmeta was doing in software. The Pentium 4 doesn't even have a true L1 cache for instructions but rather uses an "execution trace cache" which has pre-translated micro-ops.
Furthermore, it's a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to CPUs. A lot of optimization for X86 occurs because of the vast amount of software (Windows, etc) that runs only on X86. This software is often less than efficient and the manufacturers (Intel and AMD) optimize for the software inefficiencies with things like branch prediction, dynamic fetching, out-of-order execution, etc. Unfortunately, the optimization units to deal with x86 inefficiencies end up costing nearly as many transistors as the units that actually do the work. Other architectures that are more efficient or ship less volume will get less optimization simply because there isn't a reason to throw more $$$ at these optimization units if the core architecture and Instruction Set (IS) are already efficient.
Video cards are not bound to a particular architecture. You can have a radically different video card programmed with a similar API (Direct X or Open GL). Perhaps this can be considered similar to the CPU markets where AMD and INTEL have different internal micro-architectures that interpret and execute the same API (of x86 instructions). However, if one architecture is much less effecient than another, it's easier to switch to the more efficient architecture with an intervening well-designed software abstraction layer in-between (DirectX/OpenGL) than to do the hardware-level translation (x86 procs). Video cards don't have to worry about the software compatibility as long as they can support a minimum number of DirectX/OpenGL features. And it seems like add-on (PCIx/AGP/etc) video cards *ALWAYS* have to worry about performance and price more than CPU's. There's a market for slower cheaper CPU's like the Semprom and Celeron but the only market for cheap video cards is in the MB/integrated category. People aren't going to get excited about an add-on video card that's slow.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write. Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD. They thanked him for what they had.
There's a common misconception that the founding fathers wanted us to have a Christian Nation. A lot of people even use the fact that we have "In God We Trust" our national motto - but they don't realize this is a modern vision, not one of our founding forefathers. The word "GOD" doesn't appear once in the original "The Constitution of the United States" or "The Bill of Rights" (the first ten amendments to the constitution) as written by our founding fathers.
As a matter of fact, the only mention of "religion" in either of these documents is in the first amendment:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The statement "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" serves to disavow Congress (or the Federal Government) from favoring or establishing or regulating religions. In otherwords, a separation of church and state -- No preference for God or Allah or Vishnu or even Xenu.
That's right -- search for yourself. "GOD" isn't there. As a matter of fact, the constitution still remains free of the word "GOD" despite every amendment that's been passed to this date.
Furthermore, the original Pledge of Allegiance appeared in 1892. The phrase "under God" was not added until 62 years later 1954 at the height of the McCarthy era and in the midst of his "Red Scare" as a way to distinguish the US from our "Godless" enemies.
There is a further misconception on the words "In God We Trust" on money. For nearly 100 years, the US mint did not print those words on coins or bills. There are two theories on how this wording was added to our money. The first involves records of letters from 1861 from a minister to the Sec. of the Treasury suggesting a single coin with the motto which was eventually minted in 1864. The second commonly held theory is that the idea "In God We Trust" came when the US was switching from a gold and silver standard to purely "virtual" (unbacked) monetary standard and the removal precious metals from coins. One senator asked, "Who can you trust if my paper bill isn't worth gold?" and another answered, "We can only trust in God". Anyhow, the motto "In God We Trust" was added to ALL coins in 1908. It wasn't mandatory on bills at all though until 1955.
The motto "In God We Trust" wasn't actually made our national motto until 1955 as well. Again, it was seen as a way of distinguishing ourselves at that time from our godless enemies, the communists.
Many individual politicians, presidents, and judges have seen fit to express their belief in God. I believe it is their right to express those beliefs as long as they don't force them upon others. However, NOTHING written into LAW by our founding fathers suggested that we, as a nation, be guided by "GOD". The only acts and laws passed have been much more recent and possibly less enlightened than our founding fathers. All of these laws and acts are subject to being found in violation of the Constitution (Amend 1 - separation of church and state) since they are mere laws and not amendments to the Constitution. Any could be overturned if the Supreme Court so ruled.
Maybe "In God We Trust" is a great motto, but we have the 1950's congress to thank for that as a motto and the Congress of 1908 to thank for adding it to our coins (bills were again in 1955), not our founding fathers.
Not L337 as ARM but you get ethernet, video output, 2X RAM (64 MB), internal "case" for HD. You can mod the firmware without a chip too if you don't mind soldering a few lines on the MB and following various xbox hacking guides on the net.
But an XBOX cheap when people throw theirs away for XBOX 360 and chip it:-) You can run Linux legally on it and put in any HD you want much cheaper (internal) than a USB drive.
1. Would you get the option to turn that off? Because I wouldn't want it randomly selecting songs from the 100GB on my HDD. I'd be picking what I wanted and only updating the list when I felt like.
Yes you can turn random fill off. You can also load what you want (select playlists) and have it random fill in the remainder. You can also have the random fill pick what you tell it you like more often. The shuffle can play songs in order or randomly. It's all pretty painless and easy not to mention elegantly done. I have a iPod shuffle and love it.
2. 1GB is nice for a day or 3 when you can change the songs every night, but doesn't help when you're going for a 4 week driving tour of the country and you've got the thing hooked to the car stereo. At that point give me a 60GB iRiver or Zen.
Yep... or a 60GB iPod. If you can't update, you're stuck with about 20 hours of music for the 1GB shuffle. Of course that 20 hours of music is about 240 songs or 20 CD's which is more than most people take in their car on a road trip anyhow.
But... You'd need to recharge the shuffle anyhow and as far as I can tell, recharge and play are mutually exclusive on my shuffle (at least when plugged into a computer).
However, there's no reason an iRiver or Zen HD playerswould be better than an iPod 60GB. As far as brand experience, I had an iRiver flash player and the DRM MP3 program to transfer files to it sucked compared to iTunes.
There are already FREE (BEER) solutions to e-filing your taxes for nearly everyone in nearly every state. No OSS person is going to take on the liability or complexity of the US tax code for "fun", especially when the FREE (BEER) solutions work so well and there are plenty of better projects to which you can devote your limited time.
The federal government has forms online and they also have a "Free File" for eligible taxpayers which is nearly everybody. Check out www.irs.gov for the site and a link to a variety of supported vendors who will e-file you for free using web-based forms.
I like www.taxact.com -- they are among the federal "Free File" vendors so you can use them for free and have the Fed gov't pay for it - just make sure you start at the www.irs.gov website or you'll have to pay for it. You can file the state with TaxAct for about $10 more but realize that MOST states (like IL where I live) have online FREE tax filing as well at their state websites.
However, if you're like me and want to do it at home instead of on the web for free, you can purchase TaxAct's fed and state for use at home for $20. Their software is very easy to use and asks you simple questionaire to make sure you get all your deductions. Additionally, TaxAct isn't as bloated and is not filled with crapware (like nasty DRM that writes to your root sector on your HD) like the other major vendors have done in the past. I don't work for or have any relation to taxact, but I do like them compared to other products and I would recommend them for people who want the actual program at home versus the FREE (BEER) solutions above.
The free online products allow you to file your taxes, guarantee accuracy of computations (not accuracy of what you enter OF COURSE!), print out your taxes for a personal copy, and verify their online filing. If you need a program, you can spend $20 for a fully guaranteed tax suite and save over the $175 or $69.99 charges mentioned in the post.
The combination of Hip hop and video games together is pretty big right now. A lot of rappers and hip hop artists are very vocal about their support for video games.
The new GTA has a very hip hop gangsta feel and a supporting soundtrack. NBA Ballers (a 1M+ platinum seller) has MC Supernatural and is full of underground jams.
Have you noticed the soundtrack even in Madden the last couple years has leaned more and more heavily towards "urban" music. I used to be on a team that was a Madden competitor and one of the things that was remarked in the design of the game was that we needed to target a more "urban" audience since that is where Madden gets a surprisingly large amount of their sales.
The rappers aren't necessarily the ones pushing for this. Quite a bit of it's coming from video game publishers who are putting more and more big name rappers and hip hop soundtracks in their products. At least from what I've seen, most of the times, the video games makers seek the musicians out, not the other way around... you only hear about musicians seeking to be on video game soundtracks for huge games like Doom.
... and in other news on the music-video game connection on the front page, iTunes is now selling video game soundtracks...
The MTV-ization of gaming culture has begun and it's not pretty. The people Spike, G4, and MTV call "gamers" are not the kids that grew up playing Nintendo; they're the kids that grew up beating up the kids that played Nintendo.
Home gaming is a commodity. What used to require thousands of dollars in an arcade to display primitive graphics has now been ecclipsed by inexpensive home machines for under $150 that offer compelling immersive experiences that compete with movies for your entertainment budget.
Gamers these days grew up with Doom, not Pacman.
Of course these kids are going to expect a little more glitz.
Does anyone remember early issues of Wired magazine. Hippest and Coolest magazine ever at the time -- awesome ads and graphics. It even had pretty good articles but the reason I stopped subscribing was the impossible to read text flow. I remember one article that had a flip out page and the text wrapped around the page on the back of the flipout and then back to the original page so you had to flip pages between lines of text... SERIOUSLY.
I've worked in the Video Games industry for just under 20 years (first game published in 1985). The last company I worked for expected 50-60 hour work weeks -- several people were fired from there for not working the mandatory extra 10-20 hours a week as "slackers". They scheduled me on one project where I had to convert 400,000 lines of assembler in 4 months. That's about 3,000 lines of code a day, converted and debugged. I managed to do it by working 100 hour weeks with 16-20 hour days for four months. My health was so bad at the end of the project I nearly had a liver failure from an infection that a healthy immune system would have easily fought off.
The company I currently work at had us working nights and weekends to finish projects and during crunch (the last project had an 8 month crunch!) many team members were working around 70-80 hours a week. Unfortunately, successes under crunches like these tell upper management that it's a good thing to work employees under heavy hours and a high workload situations.
Due to lobbied labor laws that prevent salaried software engineers from receiving overtime pay, the industry has taken this as a "pay a set fee, work'em as hard as you can" attitude. If they double the hours worked, they halve their perceived cost per man hour.
Not surprisingly, burn out rate and job-hopping are really high in the games industry. Too bad it's pretty much the same at nearly all video game companies that I know. Mandatory nights and weekends leave little personal time for any software developers -- especially commuters or employees with families.
Oh well, at least the team I'm on has a big enough title that when the royalties come in, we'll make a decent wage per hour, but if you're on a smaller title or working without royalties, you might make less per hour than a Walmart manager if you go into video games programming.
Stuff wants to live. There has to be a non zero probability that a small group of coca plants have a mutated gene
There by no means has to be a non-zero probability of a resistant gene to anything in a species. It's one of many reasons why extinctions occurs. Repeated use of a substance to control populations by culling MAY result in the development of a resistant population (by adding pressure to the selection preference for that resistance). However, in a population without resistance, it will merely wipe them out.
What's to keep you from dumping a nuclear battery into the trash and generating "real" nuclear waste? Dangerous stuff -- the type that can leak and poison groundwater for example.
How many consumers dump their rechargeables in the trash already rather than properly "recycling" or "disposing" them.
Hey Steve, nice to see you on this thread. It's been about ten years since we last chatted about graphics back on the Amiga days:-)
I agree with your time frame of a couple years. The stuff in the games industry has been moving crazy fast. Every time we hear about something at SIGGRAPH that can't be done "yet" in realtime, it seems to be about 2-3 years before the hardware is catching up and someone figures out a clever technique to do it.
Well that's good to know Stefanus. If your performance claims are true, I guess I'll have to take a look at Sh then:-) Now that MK6 is just about wrapped up, the guys on my team are eager to get a chance to learn and explore new technology for upcoming games.
And here's a question that's sure to anger the general Slashdot crowd -- however, the answer will be important in whether or not your language makes it into common usage in the game industry. How do you feel about the use of your technology in closed source proprietary products (like video games)?
I'm a graphics and systems programmer at Midway Games.
I think it will be a while before sh / GPU metaprogramming will be commonly used for "real" games programming. For example, their paper on Worley shaders claimed interactive rates of 14 FPS on a very simple single model for stone shading on the fastest video hardware (6800GT) currently available.
The benefit of HLSL and Cg are that they achieve performance close to or better than the PS/VS-Asembler implementations and are orders of magnitude easier to program. This allows them to be used on hundreds of objects per frame at video game "interactive" framerates (which usually starts at 30 FPS, with 60 FPS as a gold standard, and 300 FPS or other crazy numbers as the Doom/Quake standard for some reason).
Still it's good to see that there are languages evolving that will handle more complex shading algorithms and as the hardware becomes faster in 2 or 3 years from now, this may be practical for real-time use in video games.
Hyperthreading is REALLY good for allowing low work threads to be much more responsive under heavy system conditions. One of the places I've noticed hyperthreading really shines is allowing MS Windows systems to have a more responsive UI when the system is stressed out by heavy CPU workloads.
This is useful in programming because the editor keeps up nicely without going "away" for a couple seconds if I decide I want to make some changes or revisions to a file while compiling the rest of the project.
BTW, I'd also like to point out that the $250K engines are marketed towards a very different audience than most Slashdot readers. The guys who use these engines want to make the top hits that are going to SELL MILLIONS of units and make tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Slashdotters seem to be mostly interested in a engine they can use to make they can give away for free and "share" with the world.
First of all, I work in the REAL WORLD of games development.
That said, $250K is not cheap but it's not an exorbitant cost to license a full graphics engine and tool chain. That's the same order of magnitude cost as Criterion Renderware which many companies license (and is what we use at Midway Games for nearly all of our games including the upcoming Mortal Kombat 6). Of course, with Renderware you can license just the engine (without the tools like Renderware Studio / Physics) or the additional packages you like rather than everything and save some $$$.
You just have to put it in perspective that the engine license typically cost less than 2-3 Senior Engineers for a year. Plus most teams only have a couple really senior graphics guys and they tend to also be the senior system level guys as well. Do you want those guys stuck writing the graphics engine and supporting it for the whole game or do you want them making a better game?
If you really don't like Bush, Vote Kerry. You might not like Kerry, but if you want changes from what Bush is doing, voting for Libertarian or Constitionals is throwing away your vote.
Face the facts that our gov't is a two party system right now and if you genuinely don't like the guy in office, then a vote for anyone who has no chance of being elected doesn't help your cause.
Slashdot Mirror
Decoder part in K8 takes about 5 percent of the total transistor budget.
Optimization for architectural inefficiency is more than just the decoder. Re-read my post. The X86 has a terribly small register set, bad branching behavior, and poor instruction pipelining in it's "native" form. To get around these issues we have AMD and Intel adding a massive virtual register set, register re-assignment, out-of-order execution, speculative execution (doing all the work but able to throw away results), scheduler, branch prediction, etc. Not to mention the trace cache, decode, micro-op translater, prefetch part used for hardware translation from X86 to uops. These all takes lots and lots transistors.
Now look at something that is designed to be an small efficient architecture (from a transistor standpoint) from the start like the SPU's on the Cell processor. It doesn't have any of these "optimization units" mentioned above and they are able to fit 8 of them in and a simplified PPC with hyperthreading in roughly the same space as a P4.
Most people who understand CPU architecture will tell you x86 is an old inefficient design
Actually, x86 is a very inefficient instruction set. However, the efficiency of the instruction set has been sidestepped mostly by on-the-fly hardware translation to a more efficient instruction set, large virtual register sets, out-of-order execution, and speculative execution. Neither AMD nor Intel CPU's operate on the x86 instruction set internally. Both of them translate x86 instructions into micro-ops internally and execute those instead -- believe it or not, they're doing in hardware much of what Transmeta was doing in software. The Pentium 4 doesn't even have a true L1 cache for instructions but rather uses an "execution trace cache" which has pre-translated micro-ops.
Furthermore, it's a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to CPUs. A lot of optimization for X86 occurs because of the vast amount of software (Windows, etc) that runs only on X86. This software is often less than efficient and the manufacturers (Intel and AMD) optimize for the software inefficiencies with things like branch prediction, dynamic fetching, out-of-order execution, etc. Unfortunately, the optimization units to deal with x86 inefficiencies end up costing nearly as many transistors as the units that actually do the work. Other architectures that are more efficient or ship less volume will get less optimization simply because there isn't a reason to throw more $$$ at these optimization units if the core architecture and Instruction Set (IS) are already efficient.
Video cards are not bound to a particular architecture. You can have a radically different video card programmed with a similar API (Direct X or Open GL). Perhaps this can be considered similar to the CPU markets where AMD and INTEL have different internal micro-architectures that interpret and execute the same API (of x86 instructions). However, if one architecture is much less effecient than another, it's easier to switch to the more efficient architecture with an intervening well-designed software abstraction layer in-between (DirectX/OpenGL) than to do the hardware-level translation (x86 procs). Video cards don't have to worry about the software compatibility as long as they can support a minimum number of DirectX/OpenGL features. And it seems like add-on (PCIx/AGP/etc) video cards *ALWAYS* have to worry about performance and price more than CPU's. There's a market for slower cheaper CPU's like the Semprom and Celeron but the only market for cheap video cards is in the MB/integrated category. People aren't going to get excited about an add-on video card that's slow.
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write. Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD. They thanked him for what they had.
There's a common misconception that the founding fathers wanted us to have a Christian Nation. A lot of people even use the fact that we have "In God We Trust" our national motto - but they don't realize this is a modern vision, not one of our founding forefathers. The word "GOD" doesn't appear once in the original "The Constitution of the United States" or "The Bill of Rights" (the first ten amendments to the constitution) as written by our founding fathers. As a matter of fact, the only mention of "religion" in either of these documents is in the first amendment:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The statement "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" serves to disavow Congress (or the Federal Government) from favoring or establishing or regulating religions. In otherwords, a separation of church and state -- No preference for God or Allah or Vishnu or even Xenu.
That's right -- search for yourself. "GOD" isn't there. As a matter of fact, the constitution still remains free of the word "GOD" despite every amendment that's been passed to this date.
Furthermore, the original Pledge of Allegiance appeared in 1892. The phrase "under God" was not added until 62 years later 1954 at the height of the McCarthy era and in the midst of his "Red Scare" as a way to distinguish the US from our "Godless" enemies.
There is a further misconception on the words "In God We Trust" on money. For nearly 100 years, the US mint did not print those words on coins or bills. There are two theories on how this wording was added to our money. The first involves records of letters from 1861 from a minister to the Sec. of the Treasury suggesting a single coin with the motto which was eventually minted in 1864. The second commonly held theory is that the idea "In God We Trust" came when the US was switching from a gold and silver standard to purely "virtual" (unbacked) monetary standard and the removal precious metals from coins. One senator asked, "Who can you trust if my paper bill isn't worth gold?" and another answered, "We can only trust in God". Anyhow, the motto "In God We Trust" was added to ALL coins in 1908. It wasn't mandatory on bills at all though until 1955.
The motto "In God We Trust" wasn't actually made our national motto until 1955 as well. Again, it was seen as a way of distinguishing ourselves at that time from our godless enemies, the communists.
Many individual politicians, presidents, and judges have seen fit to express their belief in God. I believe it is their right to express those beliefs as long as they don't force them upon others. However, NOTHING written into LAW by our founding fathers suggested that we, as a nation, be guided by "GOD". The only acts and laws passed have been much more recent and possibly less enlightened than our founding fathers. All of these laws and acts are subject to being found in violation of the Constitution (Amend 1 - separation of church and state) since they are mere laws and not amendments to the Constitution. Any could be overturned if the Supreme Court so ruled.
Maybe "In God We Trust" is a great motto, but we have the 1950's congress to thank for that as a motto and the Congress of 1908 to thank for adding it to our coins (bills were again in 1955), not our founding fathers.
Not L337 as ARM but you get ethernet, video output, 2X RAM (64 MB), internal "case" for HD. You can mod the firmware without a chip too if you don't mind soldering a few lines on the MB and following various xbox hacking guides on the net.
But an XBOX cheap when people throw theirs away for XBOX 360 and chip it :-) You can run Linux legally on it and put in any HD you want much cheaper (internal) than a USB drive.
Of course, with 850GB per disc, a single scratch will wipe out a couple gigs of data.
1. Would you get the option to turn that off? Because I wouldn't want it randomly selecting songs from the 100GB on my HDD. I'd be picking what I wanted and only updating the list when I felt like.
Yes you can turn random fill off. You can also load what you want (select playlists) and have it random fill in the remainder. You can also have the random fill pick what you tell it you like more often. The shuffle can play songs in order or randomly. It's all pretty painless and easy not to mention elegantly done. I have a iPod shuffle and love it.
2. 1GB is nice for a day or 3 when you can change the songs every night, but doesn't help when you're going for a 4 week driving tour of the country and you've got the thing hooked to the car stereo. At that point give me a 60GB iRiver or Zen.
Yep... or a 60GB iPod. If you can't update, you're stuck with about 20 hours of music for the 1GB shuffle. Of course that 20 hours of music is about 240 songs or 20 CD's which is more than most people take in their car on a road trip anyhow.
But... You'd need to recharge the shuffle anyhow and as far as I can tell, recharge and play are mutually exclusive on my shuffle (at least when plugged into a computer).
However, there's no reason an iRiver or Zen HD playerswould be better than an iPod 60GB. As far as brand experience, I had an iRiver flash player and the DRM MP3 program to transfer files to it sucked compared to iTunes.
There are already FREE (BEER) solutions to e-filing your taxes for nearly everyone in nearly every state. No OSS person is going to take on the liability or complexity of the US tax code for "fun", especially when the FREE (BEER) solutions work so well and there are plenty of better projects to which you can devote your limited time.
The federal government has forms online and they also have a "Free File" for eligible taxpayers which is nearly everybody. Check out www.irs.gov for the site and a link to a variety of supported vendors who will e-file you for free using web-based forms.
I like www.taxact.com -- they are among the federal "Free File" vendors so you can use them for free and have the Fed gov't pay for it - just make sure you start at the www.irs.gov website or you'll have to pay for it. You can file the state with TaxAct for about $10 more but realize that MOST states (like IL where I live) have online FREE tax filing as well at their state websites.
However, if you're like me and want to do it at home instead of on the web for free, you can purchase TaxAct's fed and state for use at home for $20. Their software is very easy to use and asks you simple questionaire to make sure you get all your deductions. Additionally, TaxAct isn't as bloated and is not filled with crapware (like nasty DRM that writes to your root sector on your HD) like the other major vendors have done in the past. I don't work for or have any relation to taxact, but I do like them compared to other products and I would recommend them for people who want the actual program at home versus the FREE (BEER) solutions above.
The free online products allow you to file your taxes, guarantee accuracy of computations (not accuracy of what you enter OF COURSE!), print out your taxes for a personal copy, and verify their online filing. If you need a program, you can spend $20 for a fully guaranteed tax suite and save over the $175 or $69.99 charges mentioned in the post.
The combination of Hip hop and video games together is pretty big right now. A lot of rappers and hip hop artists are very vocal about their support for video games.
... and in other news on the music-video game connection on the front page, iTunes is now selling video game soundtracks...
The new GTA has a very hip hop gangsta feel and a supporting soundtrack. NBA Ballers (a 1M+ platinum seller) has MC Supernatural and is full of underground jams.
Have you noticed the soundtrack even in Madden the last couple years has leaned more and more heavily towards "urban" music. I used to be on a team that was a Madden competitor and one of the things that was remarked in the design of the game was that we needed to target a more "urban" audience since that is where Madden gets a surprisingly large amount of their sales.
The rappers aren't necessarily the ones pushing for this. Quite a bit of it's coming from video game publishers who are putting more and more big name rappers and hip hop soundtracks in their products. At least from what I've seen, most of the times, the video games makers seek the musicians out, not the other way around... you only hear about musicians seeking to be on video game soundtracks for huge games like Doom.
The MTV-ization of gaming culture has begun and it's not pretty. The people Spike, G4, and MTV call "gamers" are not the kids that grew up playing Nintendo; they're the kids that grew up beating up the kids that played Nintendo.
Home gaming is a commodity. What used to require thousands of dollars in an arcade to display primitive graphics has now been ecclipsed by inexpensive home machines for under $150 that offer compelling immersive experiences that compete with movies for your entertainment budget.
Gamers these days grew up with Doom, not Pacman. Of course these kids are going to expect a little more glitz.
Does anyone remember early issues of Wired magazine. Hippest and Coolest magazine ever at the time -- awesome ads and graphics. It even had pretty good articles but the reason I stopped subscribing was the impossible to read text flow. I remember one article that had a flip out page and the text wrapped around the page on the back of the flipout and then back to the original page so you had to flip pages between lines of text... SERIOUSLY.
I've worked in the Video Games industry for just under 20 years (first game published in 1985). The last company I worked for expected 50-60 hour work weeks -- several people were fired from there for not working the mandatory extra 10-20 hours a week as "slackers". They scheduled me on one project where I had to convert 400,000 lines of assembler in 4 months. That's about 3,000 lines of code a day, converted and debugged. I managed to do it by working 100 hour weeks with 16-20 hour days for four months. My health was so bad at the end of the project I nearly had a liver failure from an infection that a healthy immune system would have easily fought off.
The company I currently work at had us working nights and weekends to finish projects and during crunch (the last project had an 8 month crunch!) many team members were working around 70-80 hours a week. Unfortunately, successes under crunches like these tell upper management that it's a good thing to work employees under heavy hours and a high workload situations.
Due to lobbied labor laws that prevent salaried software engineers from receiving overtime pay, the industry has taken this as a "pay a set fee, work'em as hard as you can" attitude. If they double the hours worked, they halve their perceived cost per man hour.
Not surprisingly, burn out rate and job-hopping are really high in the games industry. Too bad it's pretty much the same at nearly all video game companies that I know. Mandatory nights and weekends leave little personal time for any software developers -- especially commuters or employees with families.
Oh well, at least the team I'm on has a big enough title that when the royalties come in, we'll make a decent wage per hour, but if you're on a smaller title or working without royalties, you might make less per hour than a Walmart manager if you go into video games programming.
Stuff wants to live. There has to be a non zero probability that a small group of coca plants have a mutated gene
There by no means has to be a non-zero probability of a resistant gene to anything in a species. It's one of many reasons why extinctions occurs. Repeated use of a substance to control populations by culling MAY result in the development of a resistant population (by adding pressure to the selection preference for that resistance). However, in a population without resistance, it will merely wipe them out.
The sales numbers that have been published for that week are as follows:
1. GBASP 35,280
2. PS2 22,470
3. Nintendo DS
4. PS2 Redesign
5. GC 4,368
6. GBA 633
7. Xbox 173
Note: The actual unit numbers for PStwo and NDS aren't listed so NDS is between 4K and 22K which is a fairly large rainge.
What's to keep you from dumping a nuclear battery into the trash and generating "real" nuclear waste? Dangerous stuff -- the type that can leak and poison groundwater for example.
How many consumers dump their rechargeables in the trash already rather than properly "recycling" or "disposing" them.
I happen to know a bit about that specific procedural model
:)
BTW, that's a minor understatement considering it's named after you - LOL
Hey Steve, nice to see you on this thread. It's been about ten years since we last chatted about graphics back on the Amiga days :-)
I agree with your time frame of a couple years. The stuff in the games industry has been moving crazy fast. Every time we hear about something at SIGGRAPH that can't be done "yet" in realtime, it seems to be about 2-3 years before the hardware is catching up and someone figures out a clever technique to do it.
Well that's good to know Stefanus. If your performance claims are true, I guess I'll have to take a look at Sh then :-) Now that MK6 is just about wrapped up, the guys on my team are eager to get a chance to learn and explore new technology for upcoming games.
And here's a question that's sure to anger the general Slashdot crowd -- however, the answer will be important in whether or not your language makes it into common usage in the game industry. How do you feel about the use of your technology in closed source proprietary products (like video games)?
I'm a graphics and systems programmer at Midway Games.
I think it will be a while before sh / GPU metaprogramming will be commonly used for "real" games programming. For example, their paper on Worley shaders claimed interactive rates of 14 FPS on a very simple single model for stone shading on the fastest video hardware (6800GT) currently available.
The benefit of HLSL and Cg are that they achieve performance close to or better than the PS/VS-Asembler implementations and are orders of magnitude easier to program. This allows them to be used on hundreds of objects per frame at video game "interactive" framerates (which usually starts at 30 FPS, with 60 FPS as a gold standard, and 300 FPS or other crazy numbers as the Doom/Quake standard for some reason).
Still it's good to see that there are languages evolving that will handle more complex shading algorithms and as the hardware becomes faster in 2 or 3 years from now, this may be practical for real-time use in video games.
Hyperthreading is REALLY good for allowing low work threads to be much more responsive under heavy system conditions. One of the places I've noticed hyperthreading really shines is allowing MS Windows systems to have a more responsive UI when the system is stressed out by heavy CPU workloads.
This is useful in programming because the editor keeps up nicely without going "away" for a couple seconds if I decide I want to make some changes or revisions to a file while compiling the rest of the project.
Why am I surprised ?? :)
BTW, I'd also like to point out that the $250K engines are marketed towards a very different audience than most Slashdot readers. The guys who use these engines want to make the top hits that are going to SELL MILLIONS of units and make tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Slashdotters seem to be mostly interested in a engine they can use to make they can give away for free and "share" with the world.
First of all, I work in the REAL WORLD of games development.
That said, $250K is not cheap but it's not an exorbitant cost to license a full graphics engine and tool chain. That's the same order of magnitude cost as Criterion Renderware which many companies license (and is what we use at Midway Games for nearly all of our games including the upcoming Mortal Kombat 6). Of course, with Renderware you can license just the engine (without the tools like Renderware Studio / Physics) or the additional packages you like rather than everything and save some $$$.
You just have to put it in perspective that the engine license typically cost less than 2-3 Senior Engineers for a year. Plus most teams only have a couple really senior graphics guys and they tend to also be the senior system level guys as well. Do you want those guys stuck writing the graphics engine and supporting it for the whole game or do you want them making a better game?
Vote Liberatarian or for the Constiutional Party.
If you really don't like Bush, Vote Kerry. You might not like Kerry, but if you want changes from what Bush is doing, voting for Libertarian or Constitionals is throwing away your vote.
Face the facts that our gov't is a two party system right now and if you genuinely don't like the guy in office, then a vote for anyone who has no chance of being elected doesn't help your cause.
How the heck would the color blue pay homage to Bill ?