These days, every country or culture has their kinda-weird iconic individuals, and television has a lot to do with it. For example, I get the feeling that everybody in UK always knows what's going on with the cast of Big Brother.
Home PC do not come yet with 6GB or 8GB. Most new home PC still seem to have between 1GB and 4GB. Where the 4GB variety is rare because of the fact that most home PCs still come with a 32-bit operating system. 3GB seems to be the sweet spot for higher-end-home-pcs.
This is out-of-date info. RAM is cheap these days, and system-makers are stuffing their systems full of it. The usual OS to be installed on a new system is Vista 64. You can still find tons of systems where this is not true, but mostly they are just older models that are still being sold.
I just went to Newegg to check the numbers based on their selection, which is easy to do with their site. They have 162 pre-built desktop PCs. 87 of them have 4GB or more. Only 12 come with 3GB, but 20 come with 8GB. Laptops are a similar story. 160 total, 93 are 4GB or more.
I actually only discovered this because I bought a laptop myself a couple weeks ago and noticed that specs weren't really what I expected them to be. I don't usually look at prebuilt machines, but with a laptop, that's what I want. I looked online, and I looked in B&M stores. In the stores, the stuff was actually much higher-end, because online stores will list things that stores won't waste space on.
You may be right about seeing 16GB next year, though. I don't see that being sold anywhere currently, and for a home user even 8GB isn't really useful. With 6 on this machine now I would just turn the page file off if it weren't for the fact that a couple (very annoying) programs actually require one to even start up.
Kaz Hirai speaks perfect English. Which makes it pure spin. It's kinda his whole job. Still, he usually just ends up making things seem even worse than they really are.
Your argument contradicts itself. First you say that the system will be doing just fine because it has better graphics.
Then you compare it to the PS2, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that graphics do NOT sell the system -- the overall quality of the game library does. It also demonstrated how a console's success or failure is self-perpetuating: if you sell more units, more people make games for your system, so you sell more units.
Yes, the PS3 will certainly get some prettier games in the years to come. When it does, nobody will care. It didn't matter in the last generation, when Gamecube and XBox games looked miles better than the competition on the PS2, and it will matter even less now that everything looks pretty much 'good enough'.
Sony needs to give up on any hopes of 'winning' this round (and, internally, I expect that they already have). They have little chance of catching up to the 360 worldwide, these days they can't even consistently beat its sales in Japan. (Note that presently, that big game that selling Japanese 360s is Star Ocean, which isn't exactly the graphical powerhouse that you insist will sell systems.) Any thoughts about catching the Wii are pure fantasy. At this point Sony needs to be concerning themselves with turning a profit.
The way things have worked out, that lack of portability is a bit of a problem. They just don't have the market share to support it.
For most developers/publishers, the way to sell units of a 'hardcore' game is to make it for XBox and PC. (The Wii is a magical and weird thing; its success is special, I'm leaving it out here because frankly I don't understand it well enough.) That's the first place to go, that's where the install base is. Plus, it's cheaper -- no need to work with the difficult PS3 architecture. Maybe a port could be done afterwards, but it's not going to be a top priority.
So there's no REASON to figure out the Cell. Sure, Sony would LOVE it if people devoted themselves to it, but it would be an investment to figure it out, to gain access to a smaller market than they already have. That just doesn't make sense.
It seems like Sony was really banking on their brand being able to sell huge numbers of $600 systems. It's as if they thought they could match the PS2's sales performance, even though none of the conditions of its success were still present. If they had been right, programming for the PS3 would make more sense, but they weren't, and it doesn't.
Though what you describe is quite common, there are an increasing number of counter-examples. By all accounts, Mass Effect is better on the PC than on the XBox, because they actually improved the interface. (I only played the XBox version myself, so I can't speak to that myself.) Mirror's Edge has better physics capabilities on PC. And I just downloaded and played through the new PC demo of The Last Remnant, a game that was panned for its technical problems when released on the console, but it ran beautifully on my computer.
It looks like what's happening in a lot of cases is that developers go to consoles first, because that's where the most money is. But if that console is the 360, they practically already have a PC game made. The 'porting' ends up being a process of not simply making it work, but of making improvements, tailoring it to the platform, and taking advantage of the extra opportunities offered by a keyboard/mouse interface or increased memory or more powerful graphics cards. (And then the PC version is usually $10 cheaper. Hah!)
Obviously, GTAIV does not fit this description, which makes me glad I have the 360 version. However, I did get the PC version of Fallout 3, which was supposedly not even designed with a specific platform in mind; yet, along with what seems like half the people playing it on the PC, I'm having horrendous stability issues with it. Every time I shoot an enemy for the first time, there's about a 1/10 chance the game will crash, and that's just one trigger among many. And of course Bethesda has, again, relied on the mod community to make their interface less huge and obnoxious. Really, guys? You have a third of my screen, and we can only fit three lines of text there at a time, and then not even let me use the scroll wheel to move through them?
So, yeah, crappy ports exist. They're common, even. Mentally, I still file the word 'port' somewhere next to 'crap'. But that might be starting to change a bit.
As somebody who just read Watchmen for the first time a few months ago, I have to agree. Didn't feel 'dated' at all, it was just (like most writing) set in the past.
I really shouldn't be posting this at all. I don't know nearly enough Trek lore. Anyway...
Where is it stated that the Romulans lacked warp capability at the time that humans gained it? It makes sense that the Klingons could lack warp capability, I suppose, but I would assume that the Romulans would have needed warp technology to colonize space when they left Vulcan. Any sources that say they didn't are more than non-canon, they're nonsensical.
Besides, contradicting non-canon sources is not 'taking liberties.' As far as the continuity goes you can't consider that non-canon sources even exist. That's what non-canon means.
A few years ago, my father was in just such an accident. He was approaching a bend on an icy road, and a jacked-up truck came spinning out of control from the other direction. The back of the truck actually ended up going through the windshield -- that was the first point of contact.
Luckily, he got away without any permanent injury, but I still hate those trucks.
You can't make a body a requirement for a murder conviction. There are ways to make sure that the body is never found at all -- primarily, by destroying it.
The "release candidate" that fubared my bookmarks after upgrading from beta5, and also still chokes on the same AJAX apps that stopped working with beta5.
I don't know why they're even calling it a release candidate when it still has some pretty significant problems that were already widely reported with the previous version.
That may be, but on release day, 6AM, I was pulling about 6KB/s from their servers. I was real glad for the torrent links on the forums that let me download the whole thing in about 8 minutes. An 'official' torrent probably wouldn't have been a terrible idea.
Still, for Greenhouse's very first game, it wasn't bad. Apparently it was only that slow for a very short period of time.
Odd, my Ubuntu install on a machine with 2 IDE DVD drives, 2 IDE HDD's and 2 SATA HDD's never gave me any crap. Just asked where I wanted it installed. I didn't even know what grub was until I went to customize it later on.
That's my point. A decent programmer really should at least have a basic understanding of what is going on when their program runs. A person that never writes a program that doesn't have a GC running in it really should understand what that GC does and why. Memory management is a fundamental aspect of coding, and the fact that we do have fairly good tools to handle that annoyance for us for some applications doesn't change that. There are times when automatic garbage collection is a terrible solution, and a good programmer will recognize that problem and understand how to get around that.
BASIC? Actually, IMO, its simplicity makes it the perfect starting language. I think that an ideal progression would start with BASIC (for a very short time, perhaps, just to learn the most basic programming concepts), then move to something like C or C++, then possibly to Java or some other similar high-level language.
I can see why one might expect me to think of it as "Java-like," due to the ease of use. However, in the ways that matter for teaching and learning I would definitely say that it's more like C.
It is definitely true that if somebody goes on to actually write software in C++ or a similar language for a living, or even as a hobby, they will eventually get the hang of proper memory management, and I want to make it clear that I realize that.
The two most common progressions I have seen are people who first learn C or C++ then learn Java, and the reverse. I have noticed a couple things.
First of all, people seem to have the same amount of trouble learning the first language, whichever of those two comes first. C++ is generally "harder" and it does much less for you. Some things are less streamlined, the documentation is not as nice. You don't have that cool unified Java class library to draw from.
Meanwhile, for somebody learning Java as a first language -- even as a first OO language -- there are problems. A basic understanding of OO is pretty much a requirement for creating your own programs in Java, but in my experience really grasping OO is extremely difficult for most students if they don't have some simple function-based coding experience first. There's a sort of chicken-and-egg scenario there. It's difficult to understand OO without a little understanding of non-OO code, but Java doesn't provide any help in that area.
Obviously, people get over those issues, and usually very quickly. I'm just saying that in my experience the initial difficulty seems to be about the same.
Everybody's already discussed the ease of moving from one to the other to death. Moving from Java to C++ is difficult. You have to become more involved with things you didn't even have to think about before. People have a lot of trouble understanding the role of header files. Obviously memory management is a huge can of worms.
Moving from C++ to Java is actually kind of nice. You get to ease up on the memory management, you get access to the library (which is way nicer than the so-called standard C libs). It allows you to focus more on complex algorithmic details while people who learned in the other order are still trying to get the language itself down. I've also found that it gives you a better feel for the differences between lower- and higher-level languages -- speed and efficiency of execution balancing against speed and ease of creation.
People will learn what they need to know one way or another, I know. It just seems like starting with Java forces it to take more time and effort than it needs to.
Have you ever watched a group of people who started in Java try to allocate memory correctly? I have. It's not pleasant.
You're right. Understanding basic memory management is not within the scope of algorithms and data structures -- it's a prerequisite for it. Imagine trying to write a linked list class -- a pretty basic type of data structure -- without fully understanding how to free up memory.
Actually, in regards to QuickTime and iTunes, it doesn't simply show you iTunes. The ONLY update available for QuickTime is "QuickTime + iTunes". I have the most recent version of QuickTime, and I don't have iTunes installed, and it kept showing me that "update." Eventually I just disabled it. If you want to use the updater, you MUST install iTunes. Annoying.
Nintendo of America's president recently made what sounded like a subtle threat in regards to retailers that forced bundles on consumers:
"Retailers have already been given feedback that we are not big fans of that. We think it masks some of the price advantage we have versus our competition and, frankly, the consumer should decide what they want."
The truth is that Nintendo is producing a massive number of consoles. As far as I can tell, no other system, ever, has sold as many consoles as the Wii in its first year, except perhaps the Game Boy Advance. Even the mighty DS is a not-so-close third, and the PS2 took years to reach its lofty heights.
Slashdot Mirror
It ran a scan in 45 seconds? Maybe the reason it uses under 7MB of memory is that it isn't actually doing anything.
Which would be an improvement, actually, so I guess you're right.
These days, every country or culture has their kinda-weird iconic individuals, and television has a lot to do with it. For example, I get the feeling that everybody in UK always knows what's going on with the cast of Big Brother.
When all the manufacturers call USB sticks 'drives' too, we kinda have to go with it. The meaning of the word has changed.
Home PC do not come yet with 6GB or 8GB. Most new home PC still seem to have between 1GB and 4GB. Where the 4GB variety is rare because of the fact that most home PCs still come with a 32-bit operating system. 3GB seems to be the sweet spot for higher-end-home-pcs.
This is out-of-date info. RAM is cheap these days, and system-makers are stuffing their systems full of it. The usual OS to be installed on a new system is Vista 64. You can still find tons of systems where this is not true, but mostly they are just older models that are still being sold.
I just went to Newegg to check the numbers based on their selection, which is easy to do with their site. They have 162 pre-built desktop PCs. 87 of them have 4GB or more. Only 12 come with 3GB, but 20 come with 8GB. Laptops are a similar story. 160 total, 93 are 4GB or more.
I actually only discovered this because I bought a laptop myself a couple weeks ago and noticed that specs weren't really what I expected them to be. I don't usually look at prebuilt machines, but with a laptop, that's what I want. I looked online, and I looked in B&M stores. In the stores, the stuff was actually much higher-end, because online stores will list things that stores won't waste space on.
You may be right about seeing 16GB next year, though. I don't see that being sold anywhere currently, and for a home user even 8GB isn't really useful. With 6 on this machine now I would just turn the page file off if it weren't for the fact that a couple (very annoying) programs actually require one to even start up.
Kaz Hirai speaks perfect English. Which makes it pure spin. It's kinda his whole job. Still, he usually just ends up making things seem even worse than they really are.
Your argument contradicts itself. First you say that the system will be doing just fine because it has better graphics.
Then you compare it to the PS2, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that graphics do NOT sell the system -- the overall quality of the game library does. It also demonstrated how a console's success or failure is self-perpetuating: if you sell more units, more people make games for your system, so you sell more units.
Yes, the PS3 will certainly get some prettier games in the years to come. When it does, nobody will care. It didn't matter in the last generation, when Gamecube and XBox games looked miles better than the competition on the PS2, and it will matter even less now that everything looks pretty much 'good enough'.
Sony needs to give up on any hopes of 'winning' this round (and, internally, I expect that they already have). They have little chance of catching up to the 360 worldwide, these days they can't even consistently beat its sales in Japan. (Note that presently, that big game that selling Japanese 360s is Star Ocean, which isn't exactly the graphical powerhouse that you insist will sell systems.) Any thoughts about catching the Wii are pure fantasy. At this point Sony needs to be concerning themselves with turning a profit.
The way things have worked out, that lack of portability is a bit of a problem. They just don't have the market share to support it.
For most developers/publishers, the way to sell units of a 'hardcore' game is to make it for XBox and PC. (The Wii is a magical and weird thing; its success is special, I'm leaving it out here because frankly I don't understand it well enough.) That's the first place to go, that's where the install base is. Plus, it's cheaper -- no need to work with the difficult PS3 architecture. Maybe a port could be done afterwards, but it's not going to be a top priority.
So there's no REASON to figure out the Cell. Sure, Sony would LOVE it if people devoted themselves to it, but it would be an investment to figure it out, to gain access to a smaller market than they already have. That just doesn't make sense.
It seems like Sony was really banking on their brand being able to sell huge numbers of $600 systems. It's as if they thought they could match the PS2's sales performance, even though none of the conditions of its success were still present. If they had been right, programming for the PS3 would make more sense, but they weren't, and it doesn't.
Though what you describe is quite common, there are an increasing number of counter-examples. By all accounts, Mass Effect is better on the PC than on the XBox, because they actually improved the interface. (I only played the XBox version myself, so I can't speak to that myself.) Mirror's Edge has better physics capabilities on PC. And I just downloaded and played through the new PC demo of The Last Remnant, a game that was panned for its technical problems when released on the console, but it ran beautifully on my computer.
It looks like what's happening in a lot of cases is that developers go to consoles first, because that's where the most money is. But if that console is the 360, they practically already have a PC game made. The 'porting' ends up being a process of not simply making it work, but of making improvements, tailoring it to the platform, and taking advantage of the extra opportunities offered by a keyboard/mouse interface or increased memory or more powerful graphics cards. (And then the PC version is usually $10 cheaper. Hah!)
Obviously, GTAIV does not fit this description, which makes me glad I have the 360 version. However, I did get the PC version of Fallout 3, which was supposedly not even designed with a specific platform in mind; yet, along with what seems like half the people playing it on the PC, I'm having horrendous stability issues with it. Every time I shoot an enemy for the first time, there's about a 1/10 chance the game will crash, and that's just one trigger among many. And of course Bethesda has, again, relied on the mod community to make their interface less huge and obnoxious. Really, guys? You have a third of my screen, and we can only fit three lines of text there at a time, and then not even let me use the scroll wheel to move through them?
So, yeah, crappy ports exist. They're common, even. Mentally, I still file the word 'port' somewhere next to 'crap'. But that might be starting to change a bit.
As somebody who just read Watchmen for the first time a few months ago, I have to agree. Didn't feel 'dated' at all, it was just (like most writing) set in the past.
I really shouldn't be posting this at all. I don't know nearly enough Trek lore. Anyway...
Where is it stated that the Romulans lacked warp capability at the time that humans gained it? It makes sense that the Klingons could lack warp capability, I suppose, but I would assume that the Romulans would have needed warp technology to colonize space when they left Vulcan. Any sources that say they didn't are more than non-canon, they're nonsensical.
Besides, contradicting non-canon sources is not 'taking liberties.' As far as the continuity goes you can't consider that non-canon sources even exist. That's what non-canon means.
That shouldn't be a problem, since half the AJAX sites I visit haven't worked properly at all in Firefox since Beta 5.
A few years ago, my father was in just such an accident. He was approaching a bend on an icy road, and a jacked-up truck came spinning out of control from the other direction. The back of the truck actually ended up going through the windshield -- that was the first point of contact.
Luckily, he got away without any permanent injury, but I still hate those trucks.
You can't make a body a requirement for a murder conviction. There are ways to make sure that the body is never found at all -- primarily, by destroying it.
The "release candidate" that fubared my bookmarks after upgrading from beta5, and also still chokes on the same AJAX apps that stopped working with beta5.
I don't know why they're even calling it a release candidate when it still has some pretty significant problems that were already widely reported with the previous version.
That may be, but on release day, 6AM, I was pulling about 6KB/s from their servers. I was real glad for the torrent links on the forums that let me download the whole thing in about 8 minutes. An 'official' torrent probably wouldn't have been a terrible idea.
Still, for Greenhouse's very first game, it wasn't bad. Apparently it was only that slow for a very short period of time.
I used it for a bit of file-sharing. It was pretty amazing.
Odd, my Ubuntu install on a machine with 2 IDE DVD drives, 2 IDE HDD's and 2 SATA HDD's never gave me any crap. Just asked where I wanted it installed. I didn't even know what grub was until I went to customize it later on.
Not several seconds in advance of the person even consciously knowing which hand they were going to use...
That's my point. A decent programmer really should at least have a basic understanding of what is going on when their program runs. A person that never writes a program that doesn't have a GC running in it really should understand what that GC does and why. Memory management is a fundamental aspect of coding, and the fact that we do have fairly good tools to handle that annoyance for us for some applications doesn't change that. There are times when automatic garbage collection is a terrible solution, and a good programmer will recognize that problem and understand how to get around that.
BASIC? Actually, IMO, its simplicity makes it the perfect starting language. I think that an ideal progression would start with BASIC (for a very short time, perhaps, just to learn the most basic programming concepts), then move to something like C or C++, then possibly to Java or some other similar high-level language.
I can see why one might expect me to think of it as "Java-like," due to the ease of use. However, in the ways that matter for teaching and learning I would definitely say that it's more like C.
It is definitely true that if somebody goes on to actually write software in C++ or a similar language for a living, or even as a hobby, they will eventually get the hang of proper memory management, and I want to make it clear that I realize that.
The two most common progressions I have seen are people who first learn C or C++ then learn Java, and the reverse. I have noticed a couple things.
First of all, people seem to have the same amount of trouble learning the first language, whichever of those two comes first. C++ is generally "harder" and it does much less for you. Some things are less streamlined, the documentation is not as nice. You don't have that cool unified Java class library to draw from.
Meanwhile, for somebody learning Java as a first language -- even as a first OO language -- there are problems. A basic understanding of OO is pretty much a requirement for creating your own programs in Java, but in my experience really grasping OO is extremely difficult for most students if they don't have some simple function-based coding experience first. There's a sort of chicken-and-egg scenario there. It's difficult to understand OO without a little understanding of non-OO code, but Java doesn't provide any help in that area.
Obviously, people get over those issues, and usually very quickly. I'm just saying that in my experience the initial difficulty seems to be about the same.
Everybody's already discussed the ease of moving from one to the other to death. Moving from Java to C++ is difficult. You have to become more involved with things you didn't even have to think about before. People have a lot of trouble understanding the role of header files. Obviously memory management is a huge can of worms.
Moving from C++ to Java is actually kind of nice. You get to ease up on the memory management, you get access to the library (which is way nicer than the so-called standard C libs). It allows you to focus more on complex algorithmic details while people who learned in the other order are still trying to get the language itself down. I've also found that it gives you a better feel for the differences between lower- and higher-level languages -- speed and efficiency of execution balancing against speed and ease of creation.
People will learn what they need to know one way or another, I know. It just seems like starting with Java forces it to take more time and effort than it needs to.
Have you ever watched a group of people who started in Java try to allocate memory correctly? I have. It's not pleasant.
You're right. Understanding basic memory management is not within the scope of algorithms and data structures -- it's a prerequisite for it. Imagine trying to write a linked list class -- a pretty basic type of data structure -- without fully understanding how to free up memory.
Actually, in regards to QuickTime and iTunes, it doesn't simply show you iTunes. The ONLY update available for QuickTime is "QuickTime + iTunes". I have the most recent version of QuickTime, and I don't have iTunes installed, and it kept showing me that "update." Eventually I just disabled it. If you want to use the updater, you MUST install iTunes. Annoying.
Nintendo of America's president recently made what sounded like a subtle threat in regards to retailers that forced bundles on consumers:
"Retailers have already been given feedback that we are not big fans of that. We think it masks some of the price advantage we have versus our competition and, frankly, the consumer should decide what they want."
The truth is that Nintendo is producing a massive number of consoles. As far as I can tell, no other system, ever, has sold as many consoles as the Wii in its first year, except perhaps the Game Boy Advance. Even the mighty DS is a not-so-close third, and the PS2 took years to reach its lofty heights.