Bill Gates I'm sure is perfectly content with his sleeping schedule.
The reason the Xbox exists is so that Sony doesn't dominate the TV platform like Microsoft was able to dominate the PC. The future is in media and communications when it comes to technology. If Bill Gates didn't have windows running on your TV, Sony would jump on the chance to do just that.
Blue Ray, HD DVD, all of these are just a passing ghost as true online delivery takes over. On-Demand is the future, everybody knows it, and what better way to position yourself for the HD future than to get your hardware online and in HD hooked up to potential customer's TVs? In my mind, games are nothing more than a trick to get customers to buy an HD, online media delivery platform.
I too own a dreamcast. However, the reason I didn't initially purchase one was clear, it had nothing to do with the PS2, it had everything to do with the Xbox. Look at the launch titles and features for the
Xbox:
Project Gotham, Jet Grind, DOA 3, and of course Halo. Hard Drive built in with Broadband content and an aftermarket HD cable.
Dreamcast:
MSR (essentially project gotham), Jet Grind, and DOA 2. Badass memory cards with screens built in and online functionality over the modem.
I remember looking at the dreamcast specs and looking at the Xbox specs and thinking to myself "I can wait a year and a half." I didn't end up waiting a year and a half, because of the obscene price drop, however I wish I had purchased one earlier, I still play Soul Caliber, DOA and from time to time MSR on my dreamcast. This isn't the first Xbox release that looks alot like a dreamcast release.
...the reason Dell offers a Linux machine for a higher price is because of the higher associated tech costs with supporting two operating systems. The Linux market has very little demand therefore the price is higher, Dell isn't just selling a computer, they're selling the support that goes with that computer. If you have to train your Indian tech support gurus to troubleshoot two operating systems, one of which many of the indian tech support 'gurus' have never even used before is an uphill battle Dell has to pay for.
The Gimp and Blender are very useful for integration into propreitary in-house pipelines because a large R&D team can build exactly what they need for their pipeline without having to start from scratch (ILM uses The Gimp for their touch up as well).
That doesn't however imply that an end user will find the same value.
I'm not "anti" Blender, I have a friend who actually implemented the shader system for Blender, as well as writing a renderer from scratch. But even he admits that compared to just about any of the commercial packages its mostly lame. Until very recently Blender didn't even support N-sided polygons. Competition in the 3d package world is extremely fierce (especially in the top 3), people develop preferences on packages based on extremely small differences. Its like a 911 Porsche showing up to a NASCAR race... it might be fast, but its just not ready for competition.
Beyond specialized pipeline integration, I see no commercial application for Blender at this time. It's because the top 3 are so "packed with features" that they are so effective. For the small to average sized production facility, a swiss army knife is what you need to finish on time and on budget. Maybe in the next few years Blender will become the do it all tool the industry is looking for. However for now, like Gimp, Blender seems stuck in a perpetual game of catchup, being unable to spend the millions necessary to engineer the innovation the industry demands.
Render farms run on all operating systems. A render farm is in fact not a cluster. How a render farm works is you network X number of computers and run a listening server on each one. Each server has all of the software necessary to render an image. An artist will send out a file to a host server which then propagates frames (or fractions of a frame) to each of the listening server. Each server works on its own task. As soon as a server finishes its frame or task it sends the file to a storage server and tells the host server its ready for another task.
The analogy is closer to distributed computing than to a cluster.
Also... the premiere rendering software used by modern 3d packages is Mental Ray. Mental Ray (usually behind the scenes) interprets.MI files which it then renders. Mental Ray runs on all platforms and as such could *theoretically* be rendered using a linux cluster, although I've never heard of someone actually doing that before.
Maya - Highly configurable, allowing proprietary studio pipelines to mesh nearly seamlessly. Extremely powerful rigging and modeling tools, however can be somewhat inaccessible to an artist without the resources of a larger studio.
Max - Designed with the end user in mind. Perfect for small teams that do not have access to a dedicated programmer since all steps of production are easily accessible. Overflowing with features targeting game developers and architects.
XSI - Invented IK, has pretty much maintained its lead as the best character animation package since SoftImage3D 15 years ago. Somewhere between Max and Maya in accessibility to an artist.
Rhino 3d - Small player, about 10 years old. Dedicated to becoming a top notch NURBS modeling package. With the industry moving towards SubDivision Polygonal modeling, it has unfortunately had to shift its focus to cad visualization tasks.
Lightwave 3d - Sports one of the fastest most innovative renderers around. However speed isn't as much of a concern in most production settings and as such has been somewhat relegated to TV episodic work.
Blender 3d - Will be discussed when it becomes something worth discussing. The GIMP of the 3d world.
Speaking from someone in the industry, you're all over hyped/worried about nothing.
First of all, the suggestion that Autodesk pro MS is complete bullshit. More than half of Discreet's products only run on Unix.
Second, speaking as a user of both Max and Maya, the two could see a bright future in collaboration. The two interfaces are just about identical thanks to years of blatantly ripping one another's innovations off. The two have been fighting so long that many of the programmers that developed ground breaking features for one, are now working for the other. Case in point, the lead programmer responsible for Maya's IK and rigging system was hired by Discreet to then implement the exact same functionality in MAX.
The third point I would like to make is that Alias has been bought and sold by so many people over the last couple of years, that finally settling down in a company that at least appreciates the 3d and film industry should do nothing but good things for it.
The industry pipeline is so firmly developed around Maya, there is no way that autodesk could cancel development just to simply kill its competitor. What most likely will happen is Alias will continue to exist just as it does today, or else some sort of HyperMerging of some of the best packages available today into one psychic lens of perfection. I would bet on the latter.
... you mean they might have heard my conversations about whether or not cowboy neal wears a cowboy hat! Because I'm always telling everyone I know he does, but I dont' want the government knowing that!
Actually "Podcasting" is less accurate since "podcasting" was around LONG before the Ipod it was called "Avantgo"ing. Anyone who was/is a customer of Avantgo should slap the next news report sudgesting this is a new phenomenon.
I believe they are refering to the people who don't know what a mHz is but want a really cool version of bejeweled.
Women now compose a majority of the online gamers, they just aren't playing a game running on the Quake engine. A 299 dollar Xbox is in essence attempting to appeal to those who don't need their Xbox 360s to be as fast as they are. They are in essence purchasing a Xbox Live 2.0 console so that they can play the latest Java/Flash styled games.
One of the fastest growing games markets is the 'non' gamer. The soccer mom. Xbox 360 lite isn't trying to attack the PS3, it's trying to impose on the Nintendo Revolution.
Ok I ran down my list of applications I use on an almost daily basis, and removed any items where an equivalent is available on Linux. I had two items that were available on Linux (XSI and PHP/MySQL)
Photoshop
Zbrush
Avid Xpress
Combustion
Steam SDK
Microsoft Office
Final Draft
Internet Explorer (Yeah I'm not a firefox person So what?)
Gmail Notifier
A few side bits but they don't count as applications:
The ability to have just about every single piece of hardware work on first boot.
The ability to install the OS in about 5 clicks.
The lack of weird quirks that have to be ironed out involving critical peripherals such as mice, keyboards and sound cards.
Networks that always seem work on the first try.
Printers that just work.
Ok I'll just summarize and rip off apple's line: "It just works."
I don't want to spend any time working ON my computer, I want to spend it all working WITH my computer. In order to install and maintain linux I find myself spending hours just getting the OS to a mostly functional point. Example: I should never have to work to get my mouse to be detected by the USB port. Sure "I have unbelievable control over how the mouse is detected" but I really don't care if I have any control over my USB ports as long as they always detect and run my plug and play peripherals.
Maybe someday Linux will be ready for even a notable portion of the masses, but until someone makes a large scale effort to discontinue the practice of Linux being "By engineers for engineers" and actually try to please some customers you'll never see any wide scale adaption. I know it's fun to write your own driver to get your keyboard to work every time you boot, but not all of use share that interest.
The UI could be a bouncing toilet seat that you have to play puzzles with and it still wouldn't change the fact that the availability of (at least for me) some of the most basic software necessary for day to day operations is severly lacking.
November 50.4
December 45.4
January 44.6
February 49.0
March 52.2
I challenge you to go for 5 months without any form of heater in sub 50 degree weather. That 500 watt AMD powered space heater makes all the difference.
I do heat my seattle apartment with my computer during the winter. Well not the whole apartment since 500 watts is quite insufficient to heat that large of space, but when I close my door my room stays quite comfortable.
Actually people severely exagerate the increase in storage requirements for future content.
An extremely highly detailed model will rarely ever break the 2MB mark. With say 50 characters and 100 props you're still looking at well under a gig.
Code won't take up a substantially larger block of the space, on a DVD the binary will be almost negligable.
Audio won't increase in size at all in the next gen games.
The only substantial increase in size will be in the realm of textures which will probably double in size. Again for 95% of the games out there, that'll be well within the 9 gig limit.
Can you think of a game that uses more than 6 GB now? There is not and will not be a game during the next generation that will require more than 9 GBs. Should in the unlikely event a game discover a use for more than 9 GBs, there is always the always appreciated multi disc shuffle.
In the last 6 years, I have seen little to no increase in storage demand from my games. For instance I'll use the ever bloated RPG genre, specifically Bioware's line as an example:
(Full Installs)
Baldur's Gate 1 (circa 1998): 500 megabytes
Baldur's Gate 2 (circa 2000): 1.2 gigs
NeverWinter Nights (Circa 2002): 2.1 gigs
Knights of the Old Republic (2003): 4.0 gigs
So about every 2 years, the largest games on the planet double in size. Two years from now, Bioware will probably have to release it's massive upcoming RPG on two DVDs for the 360, or simply employ a few compression algorithms on it's discs. But there is clearly no 45 GB demand in the forseeable future. DVD games are going to more than sufficient during this next generation.
The funniest part was the expression was on Micrsoft Accountants' faces when they were told that Microsoft would try to sell a loss leader to the same customer twice.
*snicker* I'm sure they would just love that.
If M$ is truly worthy of the dollar sign monicker, they're clearly bright enough to know that they don't want to sell a product to Joe Smith twice, in which they lose $100 dollars every time he buys it. The longer Joe User holds on to his Xbox and continues to buy games, the better Microsoft does financially. So let's put behind us all of these rediculous conspiracy theories that MS is going to try to milk the customer into buying two consoles.
If you want an HD-DVD player, it will always be cheaper to just buy an HD-DVD player when they become available. However, most likely most of you will just be buying it off of Netflix: Broadband by that point.
... and can you believe those bastards at Alienware, every time I plan to put down an order, they hoodwink me again and release the "fastest computer in the world". It's almost like they're trying to offer the most up-to-date technology as it's released to the public. I can NEVER seem to figure out when they're going to release the final spec gaming system, it's driving me crazy.
Why release half @$$ed webpages that only work on a small fraction of browsers such as Firefox. I've seen FAR too many slashdot linked pages that explicitely disallow IE users. That seems like a gross failure by the web developer to me if 80+% of your users can't view your page.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates I'm sure is perfectly content with his sleeping schedule.
The reason the Xbox exists is so that Sony doesn't dominate the TV platform like Microsoft was able to dominate the PC. The future is in media and communications when it comes to technology. If Bill Gates didn't have windows running on your TV, Sony would jump on the chance to do just that.
Blue Ray, HD DVD, all of these are just a passing ghost as true online delivery takes over. On-Demand is the future, everybody knows it, and what better way to position yourself for the HD future than to get your hardware online and in HD hooked up to potential customer's TVs? In my mind, games are nothing more than a trick to get customers to buy an HD, online media delivery platform.
I can see Bill's tear of joy right now.
I too own a dreamcast. However, the reason I didn't initially purchase one was clear, it had nothing to do with the PS2, it had everything to do with the Xbox. Look at the launch titles and features for the
Xbox: Project Gotham, Jet Grind, DOA 3, and of course Halo. Hard Drive built in with Broadband content and an aftermarket HD cable.
Dreamcast: MSR (essentially project gotham), Jet Grind, and DOA 2. Badass memory cards with screens built in and online functionality over the modem.
I remember looking at the dreamcast specs and looking at the Xbox specs and thinking to myself "I can wait a year and a half." I didn't end up waiting a year and a half, because of the obscene price drop, however I wish I had purchased one earlier, I still play Soul Caliber, DOA and from time to time MSR on my dreamcast. This isn't the first Xbox release that looks alot like a dreamcast release.
Does this mean the solution to physical security is to fill your hard drive with Pr0n so that it takes longer to copy?
Straight from an undergraduate's mouth. Secure your system with porn!
...the reason Dell offers a Linux machine for a higher price is because of the higher associated tech costs with supporting two operating systems. The Linux market has very little demand therefore the price is higher, Dell isn't just selling a computer, they're selling the support that goes with that computer. If you have to train your Indian tech support gurus to troubleshoot two operating systems, one of which many of the indian tech support 'gurus' have never even used before is an uphill battle Dell has to pay for.
The Gimp and Blender are very useful for integration into propreitary in-house pipelines because a large R&D team can build exactly what they need for their pipeline without having to start from scratch (ILM uses The Gimp for their touch up as well).
That doesn't however imply that an end user will find the same value.
I'm not "anti" Blender, I have a friend who actually implemented the shader system for Blender, as well as writing a renderer from scratch. But even he admits that compared to just about any of the commercial packages its mostly lame. Until very recently Blender didn't even support N-sided polygons. Competition in the 3d package world is extremely fierce (especially in the top 3), people develop preferences on packages based on extremely small differences. Its like a 911 Porsche showing up to a NASCAR race... it might be fast, but its just not ready for competition.
Beyond specialized pipeline integration, I see no commercial application for Blender at this time. It's because the top 3 are so "packed with features" that they are so effective. For the small to average sized production facility, a swiss army knife is what you need to finish on time and on budget. Maybe in the next few years Blender will become the do it all tool the industry is looking for. However for now, like Gimp, Blender seems stuck in a perpetual game of catchup, being unable to spend the millions necessary to engineer the innovation the industry demands.
*cough* Flame, Smoke, Flint and Inferno.
Render farms run on all operating systems. A render farm is in fact not a cluster. How a render farm works is you network X number of computers and run a listening server on each one. Each server has all of the software necessary to render an image. An artist will send out a file to a host server which then propagates frames (or fractions of a frame) to each of the listening server. Each server works on its own task. As soon as a server finishes its frame or task it sends the file to a storage server and tells the host server its ready for another task.
.MI files which it then renders. Mental Ray runs on all platforms and as such could *theoretically* be rendered using a linux cluster, although I've never heard of someone actually doing that before.
The analogy is closer to distributed computing than to a cluster.
Also... the premiere rendering software used by modern 3d packages is Mental Ray. Mental Ray (usually behind the scenes) interprets
Maya - Highly configurable, allowing proprietary studio pipelines to mesh nearly seamlessly. Extremely powerful rigging and modeling tools, however can be somewhat inaccessible to an artist without the resources of a larger studio. Max - Designed with the end user in mind. Perfect for small teams that do not have access to a dedicated programmer since all steps of production are easily accessible. Overflowing with features targeting game developers and architects. XSI - Invented IK, has pretty much maintained its lead as the best character animation package since SoftImage3D 15 years ago. Somewhere between Max and Maya in accessibility to an artist. Rhino 3d - Small player, about 10 years old. Dedicated to becoming a top notch NURBS modeling package. With the industry moving towards SubDivision Polygonal modeling, it has unfortunately had to shift its focus to cad visualization tasks. Lightwave 3d - Sports one of the fastest most innovative renderers around. However speed isn't as much of a concern in most production settings and as such has been somewhat relegated to TV episodic work. Blender 3d - Will be discussed when it becomes something worth discussing. The GIMP of the 3d world.
... as Autodesk rolls out Combustion 4 for Apple...
Speaking from someone in the industry, you're all over hyped/worried about nothing.
First of all, the suggestion that Autodesk pro MS is complete bullshit. More than half of Discreet's products only run on Unix.
Second, speaking as a user of both Max and Maya, the two could see a bright future in collaboration. The two interfaces are just about identical thanks to years of blatantly ripping one another's innovations off. The two have been fighting so long that many of the programmers that developed ground breaking features for one, are now working for the other. Case in point, the lead programmer responsible for Maya's IK and rigging system was hired by Discreet to then implement the exact same functionality in MAX.
The third point I would like to make is that Alias has been bought and sold by so many people over the last couple of years, that finally settling down in a company that at least appreciates the 3d and film industry should do nothing but good things for it.
The industry pipeline is so firmly developed around Maya, there is no way that autodesk could cancel development just to simply kill its competitor. What most likely will happen is Alias will continue to exist just as it does today, or else some sort of HyperMerging of some of the best packages available today into one psychic lens of perfection. I would bet on the latter.
... you mean they might have heard my conversations about whether or not cowboy neal wears a cowboy hat! Because I'm always telling everyone I know he does, but I dont' want the government knowing that!
...Epic Games released some new screens from Gears of War and chuckled. "Silly whiney fat man."
My bad... wrong company. "Audible"ing... it's been a while since I've had a handheld.
Actually "Podcasting" is less accurate since "podcasting" was around LONG before the Ipod it was called "Avantgo"ing. Anyone who was/is a customer of Avantgo should slap the next news report sudgesting this is a new phenomenon.
I believe they are refering to the people who don't know what a mHz is but want a really cool version of bejeweled.
Women now compose a majority of the online gamers, they just aren't playing a game running on the Quake engine. A 299 dollar Xbox is in essence attempting to appeal to those who don't need their Xbox 360s to be as fast as they are. They are in essence purchasing a Xbox Live 2.0 console so that they can play the latest Java/Flash styled games.
One of the fastest growing games markets is the 'non' gamer. The soccer mom. Xbox 360 lite isn't trying to attack the PS3, it's trying to impose on the Nintendo Revolution.
Ok I ran down my list of applications I use on an almost daily basis, and removed any items where an equivalent is available on Linux. I had two items that were available on Linux (XSI and PHP/MySQL)
Photoshop
Zbrush
Avid Xpress
Combustion
Steam SDK
Microsoft Office
Final Draft
Internet Explorer (Yeah I'm not a firefox person So what?)
Gmail Notifier
A few side bits but they don't count as applications:
The ability to have just about every single piece of hardware work on first boot.
The ability to install the OS in about 5 clicks.
The lack of weird quirks that have to be ironed out involving critical peripherals such as mice, keyboards and sound cards.
Networks that always seem work on the first try.
Printers that just work.
Ok I'll just summarize and rip off apple's line: "It just works."
I don't want to spend any time working ON my computer, I want to spend it all working WITH my computer. In order to install and maintain linux I find myself spending hours just getting the OS to a mostly functional point. Example: I should never have to work to get my mouse to be detected by the USB port. Sure "I have unbelievable control over how the mouse is detected" but I really don't care if I have any control over my USB ports as long as they always detect and run my plug and play peripherals.
Maybe someday Linux will be ready for even a notable portion of the masses, but until someone makes a large scale effort to discontinue the practice of Linux being "By engineers for engineers" and actually try to please some customers you'll never see any wide scale adaption. I know it's fun to write your own driver to get your keyboard to work every time you boot, but not all of use share that interest.
The UI could be a bouncing toilet seat that you have to play puzzles with and it still wouldn't change the fact that the availability of (at least for me) some of the most basic software necessary for day to day operations is severly lacking.
... several times, I am always shocked at how useless Linux is as a desktop OS.
November 50.4 December 45.4 January 44.6 February 49.0 March 52.2 I challenge you to go for 5 months without any form of heater in sub 50 degree weather. That 500 watt AMD powered space heater makes all the difference.
On a serious note...
I do heat my seattle apartment with my computer during the winter. Well not the whole apartment since 500 watts is quite insufficient to heat that large of space, but when I close my door my room stays quite comfortable.
Actually people severely exagerate the increase in storage requirements for future content.
An extremely highly detailed model will rarely ever break the 2MB mark. With say 50 characters and 100 props you're still looking at well under a gig.
Code won't take up a substantially larger block of the space, on a DVD the binary will be almost negligable.
Audio won't increase in size at all in the next gen games.
The only substantial increase in size will be in the realm of textures which will probably double in size. Again for 95% of the games out there, that'll be well within the 9 gig limit.
Can you think of a game that uses more than 6 GB now? There is not and will not be a game during the next generation that will require more than 9 GBs. Should in the unlikely event a game discover a use for more than 9 GBs, there is always the always appreciated multi disc shuffle.
In the last 6 years, I have seen little to no increase in storage demand from my games. For instance I'll use the ever bloated RPG genre, specifically Bioware's line as an example:
(Full Installs)
Baldur's Gate 1 (circa 1998): 500 megabytes
Baldur's Gate 2 (circa 2000): 1.2 gigs
NeverWinter Nights (Circa 2002): 2.1 gigs
Knights of the Old Republic (2003): 4.0 gigs
So about every 2 years, the largest games on the planet double in size. Two years from now, Bioware will probably have to release it's massive upcoming RPG on two DVDs for the 360, or simply employ a few compression algorithms on it's discs. But there is clearly no 45 GB demand in the forseeable future. DVD games are going to more than sufficient during this next generation.
HAHAHAAHA. That was very amusing.
The funniest part was the expression was on Micrsoft Accountants' faces when they were told that Microsoft would try to sell a loss leader to the same customer twice.
*snicker* I'm sure they would just love that.
If M$ is truly worthy of the dollar sign monicker, they're clearly bright enough to know that they don't want to sell a product to Joe Smith twice, in which they lose $100 dollars every time he buys it. The longer Joe User holds on to his Xbox and continues to buy games, the better Microsoft does financially. So let's put behind us all of these rediculous conspiracy theories that MS is going to try to milk the customer into buying two consoles.
If you want an HD-DVD player, it will always be cheaper to just buy an HD-DVD player when they become available. However, most likely most of you will just be buying it off of Netflix: Broadband by that point.
... and can you believe those bastards at Alienware, every time I plan to put down an order, they hoodwink me again and release the "fastest computer in the world". It's almost like they're trying to offer the most up-to-date technology as it's released to the public. I can NEVER seem to figure out when they're going to release the final spec gaming system, it's driving me crazy.
Why release half @$$ed webpages that only work on a small fraction of browsers such as Firefox. I've seen FAR too many slashdot linked pages that explicitely disallow IE users. That seems like a gross failure by the web developer to me if 80+% of your users can't view your page.