The Sega Saturn was inferrior.
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
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· Score: 3, Informative
The PSX had an internal MPEG decoder (allowing higher-quality, fullscreen playback of MPEG files than the SH2-bound softdecoding the Sega Saturn used), a 3D acceleration engine based around triangles instead of quads. Its SH2 CPUs were slower (even if there were two of them, not all games took advantage of SMP), and its overall MIPS level was lover than than of the PSX. It was also very hard to program for, as the SMP locking was beyond most game programmers, or wasn't really as beneficial as Sega had hoped. A shame, because the SMP parts were more expensive to build -- which led to Sega losing money on each unit.
The PSX won because of its games, possible because 3rd party people had an easy-to-use developer kit which provided easy MPEG playback for cut scenes, an easier to write for 3D engine (triangles vs. quads againt, remember the NV1? It failed because it was quad-based), and because it was easier to write UMP games than SMP ones (although Yu had Virtua Fighter running with each processor computing one of the players' characters, this was the exception).
Sometimes, superior systems do win even if people seem to think something else was superior (although the PS2 is another discussion;)).
There is a limit to what hardware can do. Programmers always sacrifice cheap CPU cycles for quicker development time, so you can enjoy the software sooner, and in a more reasonable way. That's why Quake3 has a VM for running extensions, instead of "QuakeC" which probably was usable on your P66. Modern software is designed for modern machines. Perhaps Netscape 3 would help you out.
You really should put your override preferences in user.js so that changes to prefs.js won't be a problem. There is a reason why prefs.js starts with: # Mozilla User Preferences// This is a generated file! Do not edit!
Mabye if you knew more about the history, you'd be better educated.
WinAmp (1996), then QT4 (1999, iirc), then Media Player 7 (2001ish) is the timeline.
The problem with being cross-platform is that different platforms support different widgets. This is why QT and Moz will look like Win32 apps, but still wrap the "real" widgets with the XUL cross-platform ones.
The average broadband cost in Canada is 35$ CDN, or about 20$ US a month. Everyone has it, except for people who can't have broadband due to being out of service ranges.
There are lite (sic) packages which go for 20-25$/month, and provide up to 7k/s down (twice an average 56k for a little more than the 20$ separate line might cost), regular packages hovering around 35-40$, special introduction schemes, etc! The only problem is that there aren't any "pay more for more" high-end packages around. My ISP only offers one, which is about 140$ US a month for 300k/s down, 80k/s up.
A lot of places do meter the access a bit, but mainly in provinces other than the one I'm in.
And the result of all this? Much, much higher adoption rates than in the US. Plus, Canadians have been enjoying broadband since late 1996, so we've had a bit of a head-start in terms of mindshare.
Spammers don't care about people who receive email and don't respond, so they won't try and change their signatures to get past the system. Terrorists, OTOH, are smarter than that, and have different goals.
"What may be more alarming is that evidence from the September 11 investigation shows that Atta already knew the kernel idea behind this algorithm. Newsweek reported[21] that in the weeks before September 11, Atta and his conspirators practiced their attack by boarding the exact same target flights they intended to later hijack (same planes, same times, same origins and destinations). They wanted to ensure that they didn't raise any suspicions or red flags. This is a clear demonstration of Atta's cleverness. Like Atta, terrorists are smart. They already know this algorithm. And they are already using it."
This is part of a paper about defeating the system written by Samidh Chakrabarti and Aaron Strauss over at MIT. You really should read it.
"Even better, it seems to eat up time normally occupied by traditional video gameplay, which is basically useless (other than purely mindless entertainment). All-in-all, sounds like a good thing."
Maybe you haven't sat down and observed people who've played a lot of video games vs. people who haven't.
When you're gaming, you're right in the action! You have to keep everything in your mind, solve puzzles, memorize things quickly, watch for key frames to strike on, and more! It brings many skills into play, not the least of which is learning and memorization. You can always spot habitual gamers because they only have to go somewhere once to have memorized the route (this is especially noticable in people who play FPSes competitively enough that a path to a weapon from any point on the map is the difference between winning or losing). They're also quick to pick up on things, like how to operate a particular program (if they're good gamers), because they will explore the interface the way they'd explore a dungeon. Games also introduce new skills in an easy form that people can absorb at their own rate (like the car maintenance sense and knowledge of how upgrades/repairs work in general in Sega GT, or the communication and socialization habits in Animal Crossing).
Gamers of the sort I mention tend to be more alert, have quicker response times, and have an active imagination. Exactly the kind of people I'd like the world to have more of.
(Note: that paragraph is part of an article about the costs of entertainment, comparing music, DVDs, and video games for the gaming section of my website).
300,000,000 million citizens does not mean 300,000,000 people who are all in the same age and income range.
2.5 kid nuclear families are ~5 people (if we round down), which divides to 60,000,000. This doesn't account for seniors, low income people, or high income people. But it's more accurate than nearly everyone owns 2 TVs.
If most of them (2/3rds) owned 2 TVs, and everyone else owned 1 TV/family, then it'd be about: 100,000,000 TVs tops. Or about 1/5th of what you just projected.
Don't you think that's a littre more accurate, NeuroManson? You can't just spew random statistics and hope they're correct. You have to justify the numbers, or you'll fall into various traps when modelling systems without actually examining those systems.
Leaving out the technical arguments about working with a fixed platform versus multiple possible platforms, each bringing its own (incomplete) implementation of a standard (see Carmack's own comments about this), and how you can get such things as Doom 3 running on a lil' ol' Xbox:
Gaming, as a user experience, is vastly different between PCs and dedicated gaming machines. The experience (general case) is better with consoles, which is why the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood or the record labels.
I really don't understand how you could've read my description of market penetration as somehow being a way of saying that consoles are "more powerful" than computers. If you'd like to explain how you made the: Step 1: consoles have a better market penetration Step 2: ??? Step 3: consoles are more powerful than PCs jump, I'd like to hear it so I can warn other people to not follow a similar jump of logic.
Gaming, as a user experience, is vastly different between PCs and dedicated gaming machines. The experience (general case) is better with consoles, which is why the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood or the record labels.
Blizzard was doing console gaming long before they were a big PC name.
"Rock N' Roll Racing may very well be my favorite racing game of all time. Created in 1993 by Silicon and Synapse (the guys who also made Lost Vikings 1 & 2 for the SNES, and who turned out to be Blizzard Entertainment, makers of Warcraft I, II, & III, Diablo I & II, and Starcraft for PC),"
Console gaming has always been the arena of true gaming, and will always be so because a dedicated machine engineered to game will always have greater market penetration than a general purpose machine which can play games.
Was in 1999. It was fairly slow on my K6-III 400, which didn't help matters much.
The game would probably be fairly compatible with the VMWare I use for Windows stuff, but I lost my taste for it so completely that I just don't enjoy it. I even participated in the Anarchy Online beta when they gave a key to *EVERYONE* who asked for one. It sucked. Slow, buggy, and really boring.
I'm happy with Animal Crossing, though:) Nintendo is starting to kick ass on the Gamecube.
This acknowledges that UO wants to cater more to the casual gamer.
Who is the casual gamer? The casual gamer is someone who just does not have time to spend levelnig mindlessly like some 13-year-olds do, nor do they wish to have UO be their only non-work related fun. They still want to participate in the fun quests, and other great parts of UO, without having to deal with month after month of macroing, doing repetitive tasks, and being PKed by the aftermentioned 13-year-olds who do nothing but school and UO.
Naturally there will be an uproar by players who are jealous they didn't buy a preleveled character, and by other people who feel "leet" because they've spent 3 weeks fishing they skills up, but they're not the intended audience of this.
I stopped playing UO a long, long time ago. Why? Because after a summer of playing UO, I was still PKed a lot. Often times losing some cool stuff. You see people outside of the banks all the time giving stuff away because they don't want to play anymore, and don't want the items to go to waste.
The folks behind UO are trying to strike a balance between casual gamers, and people who like to do this sort of thing every day, for years on end. I'm not sure if they can ever make it close to perfect, but I applaud the choice they are offering to the gaming population at large.
"Yeah you'll be executed for warez. Goddamnit, get a grip on reality."
Because I'm reminded (by enforced viewing) by the FBI warning about the punishment of a quarter of a million US dollors fine for the act of copying a DVD movie I own, I would say that it's not as farfetched as it may seem.
The only way the companies can enforce rules around these crimes of convienence is to make the punishments so harsh, so outlandish, as to make it unthinkable it the first place. You can see this effect if you look. I know one friend of my who freaked out when I proposed copying a tape I'd rented way back in the early 1990s. He was afraid something Really Bad would happen, because the warnings after all the movies threatened.
Because they want reviewers to hear a 100% non-lossy encoded copy for review, not some MP3.
Now, if they had a small FLAC supporting device, that idea might work out better. But again, if I can hear it, I can copy it. The headphone jack connects easily to any recorder, digital or otherwise.
then I think you'd better tell these guys to throw in the towel.
The fact is that, thanks to Mono, C# is actually supported and has a compiler/environment provided by more than Microsoft. And I think more will come along as time goes by. Java has Sun and IBM, C# has Microsoft and Ximian.
We have: teach C# to make your graduates more employable, and more successful -- leading to potentially more donations from alumni
OR
teach C# to make your graduates more employable, and more successful -- leading to potentially more donations from alumni AND GET PAID FROM MICROSOFT.
Either way, the courses are going to be the same. That they get some money on the side is fine by me, as long as the pass on the savings to students by reducing CS tuition. When you're a student who has to dedicate over 50% of your income to school, you appreciate what the school can do to get more money from corporations instead of you.
I prefer a full picture when finding out about something, not half of one. Especially online, where someone may be happening by, and might want more information about everything, I think the post helped a lot.
Slashdot was created way back in 1996/1997. By the time traffic grew to the point where serious money was required to run it, Hemos (Jett Bates) took over as the guy who sold ads to advertisers. Ad money was fairly easy to get back then, so this worked out well. Their little company, Blockstackers, created the AdFu, Slashcode, and many other projects.
Andover, a very respectably REAL LIFE publication with years of experience, noticed Slashdot and thought it'd add well to their Andover.net online version. So they entered into negotiations with Rob and Jeff. Around this time, Jack Byrar (one of the colunmsts of Andover, now working on Newsforge where I used to work) wrote some articles about Linux use that got the/. flame treatment. Which was ironic, as the Andover.net buyout thing was put up a week or so later. As Jack said, "don't mess with us -- or we'll buy you out;)"
One of the contract requirements was that the core (Jeff, Rob, Jon Pater) have complete veto control over everything. If Andover wanted Slashdot to change its layout, they had could say no and not be fired (or face any other negative reactions).
But then VA Research (recently renamed VA Linux Systems) decided to buy out Andover.net and create OSDN. VA had owned the odd site (I know they had Segfault as an employee thing, but I'm not sure if they bought Freshmeat or Andover did, it's been a while), but they needed something to wrap around their Sourceforge idea (recently stolen from Bowie J. Poag, as Bowie tells it).
Anyways, the integration of many, many diverse sites, each running their own homebrew perl or PHP code didn't end up working out as well as originally hoped. OSDN became a bigger and bigger bit of branding, but the sites themselves didn't support anything like single sign on (although cross-site searching works, AFAIK). Plus, when you think that VA's only big income sources were incredibly low margin hardware and Andover's online advertising, you see why they made some of the decisions they did in 2000 and 2001.
First, they bought Linux.com, created Newsforge.com, and tried to make their dead-tree break with Open magazine. It worked out well enough that Open magazine broke even in the first year, but they needed to restructure seriously in 2001. They divested themselves of Open, and they divested themselves of some sites (like Kuro5hin, which I'm also associated with).
Slashdot (and the rest of OSDN) started to get more invasive advertising around this time too, as a way of getting more revenue from advertisers.
VA Linux Systems are basically a value-added Linux software for business systems company, with OSDN tacked on. How it will work out, I don't know. If they hadn't restructured in 2001, they would've been out of money by now. We'll see what their next SEC filling says.
Slashdot Mirror
The PSX had an internal MPEG decoder (allowing higher-quality, fullscreen playback of MPEG files than the SH2-bound softdecoding the Sega Saturn used), a 3D acceleration engine based around triangles instead of quads. Its SH2 CPUs were slower (even if there were two of them, not all games took advantage of SMP), and its overall MIPS level was lover than than of the PSX. It was also very hard to program for, as the SMP locking was beyond most game programmers, or wasn't really as beneficial as Sega had hoped. A shame, because the SMP parts were more expensive to build -- which led to Sega losing money on each unit.
;)).
The PSX won because of its games, possible because 3rd party people had an easy-to-use developer kit which provided easy MPEG playback for cut scenes, an easier to write for 3D engine (triangles vs. quads againt, remember the NV1? It failed because it was quad-based), and because it was easier to write UMP games than SMP ones (although Yu had Virtua Fighter running with each processor computing one of the players' characters, this was the exception).
Sometimes, superior systems do win even if people seem to think something else was superior (although the PS2 is another discussion
I'm not going to try and load Quake 3 on a P66.
There is a limit to what hardware can do. Programmers always sacrifice cheap CPU cycles for quicker development time, so you can enjoy the software sooner, and in a more reasonable way. That's why Quake3 has a VM for running extensions, instead of "QuakeC" which probably was usable on your P66. Modern software is designed for modern machines. Perhaps Netscape 3 would help you out.
You really should put your override preferences in user.js so that changes to prefs.js won't be a problem. There is a reason why prefs.js starts with: // This is a generated file! Do not edit!
# Mozilla User Preferences
Mabye if you knew more about the history, you'd be better educated.
WinAmp (1996), then QT4 (1999, iirc), then Media Player 7 (2001ish) is the timeline.
The problem with being cross-platform is that different platforms support different widgets. This is why QT and Moz will look like Win32 apps, but still wrap the "real" widgets with the XUL cross-platform ones.
That'd be correct, Mr. McGregor.
As you'd know if you went to inoshiro.com and read the FAQ, ^^^ :)
The average broadband cost in Canada is 35$ CDN, or about 20$ US a month. Everyone has it, except for people who can't have broadband due to being out of service ranges.
There are lite (sic) packages which go for 20-25$/month, and provide up to 7k/s down (twice an average 56k for a little more than the 20$ separate line might cost), regular packages hovering around 35-40$, special introduction schemes, etc! The only problem is that there aren't any "pay more for more" high-end packages around. My ISP only offers one, which is about 140$ US a month for 300k/s down, 80k/s up.
A lot of places do meter the access a bit, but mainly in provinces other than the one I'm in.
And the result of all this? Much, much higher adoption rates than in the US. Plus, Canadians have been enjoying broadband since late 1996, so we've had a bit of a head-start in terms of mindshare.
Spammers don't care about people who receive email and don't respond, so they won't try and change their signatures to get past the system. Terrorists, OTOH, are smarter than that, and have different goals.
"What may be more alarming is that evidence from the September 11 investigation shows that Atta already knew the kernel idea behind this algorithm. Newsweek reported[21] that in the weeks before September 11, Atta and his conspirators practiced their attack by boarding the exact same target flights they intended to later hijack (same planes, same times, same origins and destinations). They wanted to ensure that they didn't raise any suspicions or red flags. This is a clear demonstration of Atta's cleverness. Like Atta, terrorists are smart. They already know this algorithm. And they are already using it."
This is part of a paper about defeating the system written by Samidh Chakrabarti and Aaron Strauss over at MIT. You really should read it.
"Even better, it seems to eat up time normally occupied by traditional video gameplay, which is basically useless (other than purely mindless entertainment). All-in-all, sounds like a good thing."
Maybe you haven't sat down and observed people who've played a lot of video games vs. people who haven't.
When you're gaming, you're right in the action! You have to keep everything in your mind, solve puzzles, memorize things quickly, watch for key frames to strike on, and more! It brings many skills into play, not the least of which is learning and memorization. You can always spot habitual gamers because they only have to go somewhere once to have memorized the route (this is especially noticable in people who play FPSes competitively enough that a path to a weapon from any point on the map is the difference between winning or losing). They're also quick to pick up on things, like how to operate a particular program (if they're good gamers), because they will explore the interface the way they'd explore a dungeon. Games also introduce new skills in an easy form that people can absorb at their own rate (like the car maintenance sense and knowledge of how upgrades/repairs work in general in Sega GT, or the communication and socialization habits in Animal Crossing).
Gamers of the sort I mention tend to be more alert, have quicker response times, and have an active imagination. Exactly the kind of people I'd like the world to have more of.
(Note: that paragraph is part of an article about the costs of entertainment, comparing music, DVDs, and video games for the gaming section of my website).
300,000,000 million citizens does not mean 300,000,000 people who are all in the same age and income range.
2.5 kid nuclear families are ~5 people (if we round down), which divides to 60,000,000. This doesn't account for seniors, low income people, or high income people. But it's more accurate than nearly everyone owns 2 TVs.
If most of them (2/3rds) owned 2 TVs, and everyone else owned 1 TV/family, then it'd be about: 100,000,000 TVs tops. Or about 1/5th of what you just projected.
Don't you think that's a littre more accurate, NeuroManson? You can't just spew random statistics and hope they're correct. You have to justify the numbers, or you'll fall into various traps when modelling systems without actually examining those systems.
Leaving out the technical arguments about working with a fixed platform versus multiple possible platforms, each bringing its own (incomplete) implementation of a standard (see Carmack's own comments about this), and how you can get such things as Doom 3 running on a lil' ol' Xbox:
Gaming, as a user experience, is vastly different between PCs and dedicated gaming machines. The experience (general case) is better with consoles, which is why the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood or the record labels.
I really don't understand how you could've read my description of market penetration as somehow being a way of saying that consoles are "more powerful" than computers. If you'd like to explain how you made the:
Step 1: consoles have a better market penetration
Step 2: ???
Step 3: consoles are more powerful than PCs
jump, I'd like to hear it so I can warn other people to not follow a similar jump of logic.
Gaming != game.
Gaming, as a user experience, is vastly different between PCs and dedicated gaming machines. The experience (general case) is better with consoles, which is why the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood or the record labels.
You could've made +5 if you'd said:
"Slashdot: News for Zergs. Stuff that mutates."
Or maybe you're forgetting Rock'n'Roll Racing, done by our good friends at Blizzard a decade ago.
How about The Lost Vikings?
Blizzard was doing console gaming long before they were a big PC name.
"Rock N' Roll Racing may very well be my favorite racing game of all time.
Created in 1993 by Silicon and Synapse (the guys who also made Lost Vikings
1 & 2 for the SNES, and who turned out to be Blizzard Entertainment, makers
of Warcraft I, II, & III, Diablo I & II, and Starcraft for PC),"
Console gaming has always been the arena of true gaming, and will always be so because a dedicated machine engineered to game will always have greater market penetration than a general purpose machine which can play games.
Was in 1999. It was fairly slow on my K6-III 400, which didn't help matters much.
:) Nintendo is starting to kick ass on the Gamecube.
The game would probably be fairly compatible with the VMWare I use for Windows stuff, but I lost my taste for it so completely that I just don't enjoy it. I even participated in the Anarchy Online beta when they gave a key to *EVERYONE* who asked for one. It sucked. Slow, buggy, and really boring.
I'm happy with Animal Crossing, though
This acknowledges that UO wants to cater more to the casual gamer.
Who is the casual gamer? The casual gamer is someone who just does not have time to spend levelnig mindlessly like some 13-year-olds do, nor do they wish to have UO be their only non-work related fun. They still want to participate in the fun quests, and other great parts of UO, without having to deal with month after month of macroing, doing repetitive tasks, and being PKed by the aftermentioned 13-year-olds who do nothing but school and UO.
Naturally there will be an uproar by players who are jealous they didn't buy a preleveled character, and by other people who feel "leet" because they've spent 3 weeks fishing they skills up, but they're not the intended audience of this.
I stopped playing UO a long, long time ago. Why? Because after a summer of playing UO, I was still PKed a lot. Often times losing some cool stuff. You see people outside of the banks all the time giving stuff away because they don't want to play anymore, and don't want the items to go to waste.
The folks behind UO are trying to strike a balance between casual gamers, and people who like to do this sort of thing every day, for years on end. I'm not sure if they can ever make it close to perfect, but I applaud the choice they are offering to the gaming population at large.
One who hasn't used qmail in a while!
"Yeah you'll be executed for warez. Goddamnit, get a grip on reality."
Because I'm reminded (by enforced viewing) by the FBI warning about the punishment of a quarter of a million US dollors fine for the act of copying a DVD movie I own, I would say that it's not as farfetched as it may seem.
The only way the companies can enforce rules around these crimes of convienence is to make the punishments so harsh, so outlandish, as to make it unthinkable it the first place. You can see this effect if you look. I know one friend of my who freaked out when I proposed copying a tape I'd rented way back in the early 1990s. He was afraid something Really Bad would happen, because the warnings after all the movies threatened.
A CD player with cheap headphones, or an MP3 device with cheap headphones... think about it.
Plus, the lossy encoding looms large in the mind of audiophiles. That's why FLAC is being developed.
Because they want reviewers to hear a 100% non-lossy encoded copy for review, not some MP3.
Now, if they had a small FLAC supporting device, that idea might work out better. But again, if I can hear it, I can copy it. The headphone jack connects easily to any recorder, digital or otherwise.
then I think you'd better tell these guys to throw in the towel.
The fact is that, thanks to Mono, C# is actually supported and has a compiler/environment provided by more than Microsoft. And I think more will come along as time goes by. Java has Sun and IBM, C# has Microsoft and Ximian.
We have: teach C# to make your graduates more employable, and more successful -- leading to potentially more donations from alumni
OR
teach C# to make your graduates more employable, and more successful -- leading to potentially more donations from alumni AND GET PAID FROM MICROSOFT.
Either way, the courses are going to be the same. That they get some money on the side is fine by me, as long as the pass on the savings to students by reducing CS tuition. When you're a student who has to dedicate over 50% of your income to school, you appreciate what the school can do to get more money from corporations instead of you.
I prefer a full picture when finding out about something, not half of one. Especially online, where someone may be happening by, and might want more information about everything, I think the post helped a lot.
Slashdot was created way back in 1996/1997. By the time traffic grew to the point where serious money was required to run it, Hemos (Jett Bates) took over as the guy who sold ads to advertisers. Ad money was fairly easy to get back then, so this worked out well. Their little company, Blockstackers, created the AdFu, Slashcode, and many other projects.
/. flame treatment. Which was ironic, as the Andover.net buyout thing was put up a week or so later. As Jack said, "don't mess with us -- or we'll buy you out ;)"
Andover, a very respectably REAL LIFE publication with years of experience, noticed Slashdot and thought it'd add well to their Andover.net online version. So they entered into negotiations with Rob and Jeff. Around this time, Jack Byrar (one of the colunmsts of Andover, now working on Newsforge where I used to work) wrote some articles about Linux use that got the
One of the contract requirements was that the core (Jeff, Rob, Jon Pater) have complete veto control over everything. If Andover wanted Slashdot to change its layout, they had could say no and not be fired (or face any other negative reactions).
But then VA Research (recently renamed VA Linux Systems) decided to buy out Andover.net and create OSDN. VA had owned the odd site (I know they had Segfault as an employee thing, but I'm not sure if they bought Freshmeat or Andover did, it's been a while), but they needed something to wrap around their Sourceforge idea (recently stolen from Bowie J. Poag, as Bowie tells it).
Anyways, the integration of many, many diverse sites, each running their own homebrew perl or PHP code didn't end up working out as well as originally hoped. OSDN became a bigger and bigger bit of branding, but the sites themselves didn't support anything like single sign on (although cross-site searching works, AFAIK). Plus, when you think that VA's only big income sources were incredibly low margin hardware and Andover's online advertising, you see why they made some of the decisions they did in 2000 and 2001.
First, they bought Linux.com, created Newsforge.com, and tried to make their dead-tree break with Open magazine. It worked out well enough that Open magazine broke even in the first year, but they needed to restructure seriously in 2001. They divested themselves of Open, and they divested themselves of some sites (like Kuro5hin, which I'm also associated with).
Slashdot (and the rest of OSDN) started to get more invasive advertising around this time too, as a way of getting more revenue from advertisers.
VA Linux Systems are basically a value-added Linux software for business systems company, with OSDN tacked on. How it will work out, I don't know. If they hadn't restructured in 2001, they would've been out of money by now. We'll see what their next SEC filling says.
You are hired by OSDN, and approved by Rob Malda.
Your money comes from OSDN, but Rob has complete veto power.