How about experience with the greed of American business coupled with the fact that although getting to the moon and back is rocket science, it's just rocket science. All it takes is money, good ground control, decent computers, good shielding, and a decent vehicle. All of which an American corporation would be willing to underwrite for a shot at 10-20 billion USD. Especially given the goodwill that being the first private industry on the moon would produce - and the promise that they could use the vehicles delivered for space tourism and paid experimental science if they can make it reusable.
Basically, is the United States willing to cede space to China and Russia?
More likely Japan, Europe and private industry.
The ESA and JAXA are doing impressive things. Bigelow Aerospace and SpaceX are both seemingly leading the private sector space industries and are doing so for a tiny fraction of the cost that NASA does things for. NASA needs to break free of its government contractor roots in order to ever do anything meaningful again with a sane budget.
I'd like to amplify that point by noting that vision in video games, even with the newer 3d display technology, is far from human quality. The dynamic range of the human eye is pretty impressive, and if you take an individual with good night vision and one with more average night vision, you'll have trouble finding a happy medium in rendering settings that won't leave the user feeling disoriented.
Leaving out peripheral vision, you still have the uncomfortable divorcing of visual and sound information from tactile feedback and the lack of proprioception breaking immersion. You get a sort of "uncanny valley"-like effect with existing VR which makes it very difficult for a person to ever be fully comfortable with the first person viewpoint (for instance, jumping, climbing, etc) in that the closer you get to reality, the more the user will miss those missing senses.
However, with third-person perspective, you lose a great deal of the expectations. People understand the concept of working through a proxy - my parents used me for a remote control when I was a kid to change the channels on our old TV. My mother could understand Super Mario Brothers, but wouldn't touch Doom. With a proxy you don't expect to feel their pain or feel the earth move under their feet or to know exactly what they're doing at all times. You're accustomed to being divorced from other people by exactly the kind of disconnect present in the player/videogame relationship. You have to make up with empathy and attentiveness what is missing in sensation.
By acting through a proxy you place the player in a position with which they are familiar (from television, movies, even novels) wherein they are an observer of what happens to the main character. This immediately gives the player something to sympathize with.
In addition, certain cinematic events which would not be as easy to convey in first person are immediately accessible in third person. Suspense is built when the player can see something that the proxy could not. An increased sense of competence on the part of the player is built when their proxy can intercept incoming attacks from a direction they weren't even looking, giving them the sort of Bruce Lee/Batman bad-ass sensation for little expenditure. By being able to see a majority of their proxy's body, they are more confident when attempting jumps because they can see where the proxy's feet are, how fast they're moving, and observe their stride length without breaking line of sight with the gap they're attempting to cross.
First-person perspective can be quite immersive and add that a kind of verisimilitude to the "everything's collapsing around you" scene that you feel less when you can see all around you (compare Half-Life 2: Episode 1 &2's environmental collapses to those of God of War or Super Metroid). First-person cameras can make reflex aiming extremely comfortable and provide an extremely believable scope/binocular experience. First-person cameras do make it a lot easier to look straight up. But they're not necessarily the best thing for immersion in all games.
If the cloud takes off, the idea would be that there wouldn't be anywhere that was away from a Wi-Fi hotspot that is either public or something that everybody needs to buy into in order to keep up with the Joneses.
Point taken. I lost a bit of efficiency when space requirements made me swap sides with my second display so that I can't close windows as quickly just by flicking the mouse to the upper right.
As a result, I came to rely more on key combinations for closing windows (ctrl-w, alt-f4), but it's just not the same.
My mouse-fu degrades rapidly with age but they keep obligingly changing interface paradigms on me to accommodate my stately decay. By the time I'm old and shaky it will all be gestural anyway.
It takes me roughly a half second longer to target and acquire the title bar when maximized with all tabs open.
Then again, I play a lot of video games and work with Photoshop and InDesign a lot, so maybe I'm more accurate with mousing than the average user.
I recommend you watch James Burke's excellent series "Connections" for a bit of insight about how fast technology was actually moving in the 1950s and 1960s. He covers rather comprehensively the history of many of the core technologies of the 20th century (from the perspective of the 1970s), predicts a good deal of the change that was to come in the next 20 years, and shows that all of history has been incremental improvement. He traces the nuclear bomb back to the invention of the plow in a completely logical fashion.
The rate of change hasn't slowed - only how surprised we are by change. We who grew up in the US in the 70s and 80s (and to a lesser degree the 90s) are jaded by technological change. This is partly because our science fiction and people like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics showed us where they thought we'd be, assuming the Cold War spirit of unlimited funding for science and a sense of national pride in our scientific advancement continued at the rate it seemed that it was going to. It didn't.
We still have the industry giants dreaming up what the future will look like, but the long term is out of the vocabulary of most of the business world. If you can't show quarterly profits, you're wasting money. Government funding of scientific advancement is nowhere near Cold War levels because we're not racing anybody anymore.
We may not be making leaps and bounds in chemistry, material physics, energy production, etc because we may already have sufficient understanding of how things work that barring some as-yet-undiscovered loopholes, we may never see the technological change in energy production that occurred between, say, 1890 and 1950. Going from gunpowder and petrol to fission/fusion/fission bombs is one hell of a leap.
However, we've been literally doubling the number of transistors that can be cheaply placed on a single chip since 1958 - over 50 years. To sustain that rate of change we've had to make breakthroughs in microscopy, materials and physics, quantum mechanics and our understanding of chemistry. And while we've been improving all of that, we've also been developing new forms of logic and mathematics to describe how we talk to our machines, developed the first symbolic languages for communicating with machines which are capable of autonomously self-programming their hardware given a set of human-readable instructions, we've developed FPGAs - self-redesigning logic circuits, and we've put the power and knowledge of how to use all this wonderful crap into the hands of at least 50% of the developed world. According to the CIA world factbook, around 25% of the total world population has access to the Internet - and that number has doubled in the last 10 years.
None of this seems incredible or revolutionary because Star Trek and Popular Science taught us to expect more. We want our home robots, our flying cars, our pie-in-the-sky implausible and uneconomic dreams because that's what we were promised as children.
We've reached close to the limits of what scientific progress can afford us - we need social and economic progress to get the cheap multi-terabit access to every home. We need better and more compact energy sources and more accountability before we get our flying cars. Diamond microchips and optronic circuits are only a few years away, and if consumer demand for bigger, better, faster continues at its current rate, we'll get there. It's childish and petulant to complain we don't have it now just because Asimov told you you should have a robot.
You absolutely should apologize for your atrocities, if and when you commit one or more. Preferably immediately. Better yet, don't do it in the first place.
If, however, everybody who committed said atrocity are now dead, and everybody that it was done to or immediately effected by it are as well...
It's all a bit arrogant to say "hey, you who is a great great grandson of these people our people hurt during colonization, sorry about what people who we aren't even related to did to your ancestors," as if that undoes the crime in some way. It's just masturbation. And worse, it's public masturbation. Sure, it makes the government feel better, but it makes a mess and just embarrasses anybody who knows what's going on and has to watch it..
...to someone whose only complaint about Microsoft software is that it crashes a bit too often and thinks this is just the way computers are; to someone who thinks that Windows and Office is the "standard" software and that it's useful to use what everyone else uses... I don't agree with "the common man"'s interpretation...
I fail to see what's inaccurate about either of those. If you want to do business with companies, you'd better be able to speak their language - even if that language is Word....and that IS just the way that computers are. They're inherently no more stable than the environment they're in and the hardware they're made of. The average desktop PC won't be all that much more stable in Linux or FreeBSD than they are under OS X or Windows provided that the Windows or OS X aren't bogged down with buggy third-party crap.
Given that the majority of hardware manufacturers pack in a lot of third-party crap and cheap hardware has cheaper drivers, you get that instability. The crapware that people like HP and Dell pack in, the lousy audio and network hardware which tend to get put in reasonably-priced motherboards, the crappy drivers that video card, scanner and printer manufacturers provide - all of these are what makes Windows an unstable joke.
I've got a Debian box in my closet which needs rebooting fairly regularly as well - due to the crappy drivers for the NIC card. Worse yet, it used to work fine until I did a full reinstall to update to a newer version and discovered they'd fucked up the drivers. The only reason I'm stuck using that NIC is that the old one failed. The machine has one USB port which reboots the computer if you plug anything into it. The video card will occasionally freak out and go out of sync until the machine is power cycled.
We've been noticing a pronounced increase in failure rate in some 2-year-old Intel iMacs - enough so that we've lost 3 out of 25 within 3 months of each other at my office. Another routinely gives the kernel panic screen in all of its friendly multilingual glory for no apparent reason - its hardware and software are literally identical to the two next to it.
(Crappy hardware | Crappy drivers) == Crappy stability regardless of the OS. That is just the way computers are. Consumers don't spend enough time thinking about brand names of all the various components to know which ones are good and which ones are crap, so they buy from people whose names they trust: Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba. All of these manufacturers try to improve their bottom line by using shitty hardware and supply their own crapware which finishes the job of making the preinstalled Windows a laughingstock.
There's no reason to believe that if they'd installed some other commercial or free OS on those systems that they'd get any better performance. If you install leather seats on a Ford Pinto, you'll have the most comfortable flammable roadblock in your neighborhood.
Please step out of your IT basement and into your marketing department.
If you are located in Europe, please step out of your insular country for vacation and visit an American or British company.
Clippy wasn't an inherently bad idea - an assistive agent which used a library of tasks to try to accelerate common jobs and act as an interactive tutorial with options to skip. The problem with Clippy was that the fine lines between "helpful", "too helpful", and "really freaking annoying" move around with increased stupidity - and stupid agents are all we have to work with until somebody figures out strong AI.
Agents like Clippy are used all the time to train people how to play video games - quite successfully in Valve's "Left 4 Dead," which remembers not only which tutorial elements you've already been fed but which ones it believes you have mastered (and does so with more than a little success).
I think my biggest problem with Clippy was that its heavy-lidded expression always seemed condescending and kept saying I was "trying" to do things. Hey, Mister, you look like you're trying to write a résumé but can't, because you're a failure. Want me to do it for you and produce something completely unusable?
This new PS3 may be the first one they make a profit on the hardware with.
Whereas the PS2 process is streamlined enough that it seems that they're able to profit on each PS2 sold.
The PS2 is a more credible competitor for the Wii than the PS3, as the PS3 and Wii are not even close to in the same class of console. Wii has no non-streaming media support, no HD output (not even 480p), no digital audio and minimal internal storage. This puts it much closer to the same class of product as the PS2, which, although it plays DVDs, has optical digital audio output, also does not come with any substantial storage and outputs in standard def (though some games support 480p.)
If Sony is selling PS2s (and they are in large numbers), they are profitable, compare favorably in market price to the Nintendo Wii and developers are still producing games for the PS2 (they are,) there is no reason why Sony should cut the PS2.
The idea that the PS2 is cutting into potential PS3 sales is somewhat ludicrous when one realizes that the people buying PS2s are largely doing it for economic reasons - it's $300 cheaper and the games run around half to one quarter the cost. If the people who would have bought a PS2 were buying a PS3 instead, they'd spend far less money on software and accessories, thereby essentially making Sony less profit than if they'd bought the more expensive console.
I couldn't afford a decent connection in 1985. I had to learn everything I knew about computers from the 1970s books I found in the local libraries and messing with debug.com.
My first experience with BBS was on a 300 baud parallel port modem I bought for $40 from Boeing surplus.
Ah I miss the good old days when computer hardware cost a fortune, the only good deals you could get were at trade shows, everything was slow as treacle and the average human still believed that computers were sentient.
Not exactly. The N64 had hardware T&L, but it also had a far inferior available texture memory and bad texturing functions on board.
The GMA 950 is essentially not a 3d accelerator - it's a windowed graphics accelerator. You can push through a lot of OpenGL or DirectX quads pretty quickly with some decent texture resolution and a good fill rate, but with the lack of onboard transform and lighting it's totally unsuitable for applications wherein the entire scene changes every frame - whether that be a live preview in Maya or 3D Studio Max, or a modern video game.
Without T&L it's hard to compare it to the N64, as it'll have a vastly superior texture support but essentially the amount of polygons you can process per second is entirely tied to the power of the CPU. Considering that in most implementations using a GMA950 you're using shared memory as well, the performance is almost completely tied to the CPU and rambus speed.
Infinitely so, yes.
The Wii's GPU is favorably comparable to the low-to-mid Radeon X1000 line.
The GMA-950 is far closer in capabilities to the early pre-1999 cards which lacked hardware T&L, offloading geometry processing to the CPU, meaning it's practically a souped-up Voodoo3.
Also if you want multiplayer, you've got to worry about the differences in PSN, XBL, and whatever platform you decide to go for on PC and Mac.
Why not just "controller 1", "controller 2", "controller 3", and "controller 4"?
That's fine, if all your friends have nothing better to do than sit on your couch.
Consider texture size restraints, shader characteristics, differences in hardware across PC which make it MUCH harder to target the PC or Mac as a platform
Is it safe to target Intel GMA 950 as a minimum system requirement? If not, why not?
I don't think anybody who has any interest in doing anything in 3d would be satisfied with the GMA 950. It has absolutely no support for hardware T&L, which makes it unsuitable even for accelerated previews in rendering software, let alone any game made more recently than 2000.
Essentially targetting a GMA-950 is no different than targetting the Voodoo3.
Slashdot Mirror
That's good old fashioned ingenuity right there.
What if the point is to eventually get humans off of Earth and out into the broader universe? Can you send robots to colonize another planet?
Actually, you probably could, if you didn't mind having test tube babies from frozen embryos raised by machines as Earth's emissaries.
How about experience with the greed of American business coupled with the fact that although getting to the moon and back is rocket science, it's just rocket science. All it takes is money, good ground control, decent computers, good shielding, and a decent vehicle. All of which an American corporation would be willing to underwrite for a shot at 10-20 billion USD. Especially given the goodwill that being the first private industry on the moon would produce - and the promise that they could use the vehicles delivered for space tourism and paid experimental science if they can make it reusable.
Basically, is the United States willing to cede space to China and Russia?
More likely Japan, Europe and private industry.
The ESA and JAXA are doing impressive things. Bigelow Aerospace and SpaceX are both seemingly leading the private sector space industries and are doing so for a tiny fraction of the cost that NASA does things for. NASA needs to break free of its government contractor roots in order to ever do anything meaningful again with a sane budget.
I'd like to amplify that point by noting that vision in video games, even with the newer 3d display technology, is far from human quality. The dynamic range of the human eye is pretty impressive, and if you take an individual with good night vision and one with more average night vision, you'll have trouble finding a happy medium in rendering settings that won't leave the user feeling disoriented.
Leaving out peripheral vision, you still have the uncomfortable divorcing of visual and sound information from tactile feedback and the lack of proprioception breaking immersion. You get a sort of "uncanny valley"-like effect with existing VR which makes it very difficult for a person to ever be fully comfortable with the first person viewpoint (for instance, jumping, climbing, etc) in that the closer you get to reality, the more the user will miss those missing senses.
However, with third-person perspective, you lose a great deal of the expectations. People understand the concept of working through a proxy - my parents used me for a remote control when I was a kid to change the channels on our old TV. My mother could understand Super Mario Brothers, but wouldn't touch Doom. With a proxy you don't expect to feel their pain or feel the earth move under their feet or to know exactly what they're doing at all times. You're accustomed to being divorced from other people by exactly the kind of disconnect present in the player/videogame relationship. You have to make up with empathy and attentiveness what is missing in sensation.
By acting through a proxy you place the player in a position with which they are familiar (from television, movies, even novels) wherein they are an observer of what happens to the main character. This immediately gives the player something to sympathize with.
In addition, certain cinematic events which would not be as easy to convey in first person are immediately accessible in third person. Suspense is built when the player can see something that the proxy could not. An increased sense of competence on the part of the player is built when their proxy can intercept incoming attacks from a direction they weren't even looking, giving them the sort of Bruce Lee/Batman bad-ass sensation for little expenditure. By being able to see a majority of their proxy's body, they are more confident when attempting jumps because they can see where the proxy's feet are, how fast they're moving, and observe their stride length without breaking line of sight with the gap they're attempting to cross.
First-person perspective can be quite immersive and add that a kind of verisimilitude to the "everything's collapsing around you" scene that you feel less when you can see all around you (compare Half-Life 2: Episode 1 &2's environmental collapses to those of God of War or Super Metroid). First-person cameras can make reflex aiming extremely comfortable and provide an extremely believable scope/binocular experience. First-person cameras do make it a lot easier to look straight up. But they're not necessarily the best thing for immersion in all games.
Now? No.
As I originally said "if the cloud takes off" then yes.
Future PHBs all.
If the cloud takes off, the idea would be that there wouldn't be anywhere that was away from a Wi-Fi hotspot that is either public or something that everybody needs to buy into in order to keep up with the Joneses.
In other words, what sci-fi authors have been promising for decades.
People only think it's a bad idea now because of who is hosting the cloud and why.
Technological utopia or dystopia - the difference is how closely the providers (including Google) adhere to the Google slogan.
Consider dating.
Point taken. I lost a bit of efficiency when space requirements made me swap sides with my second display so that I can't close windows as quickly just by flicking the mouse to the upper right. As a result, I came to rely more on key combinations for closing windows (ctrl-w, alt-f4), but it's just not the same.
My mouse-fu degrades rapidly with age but they keep obligingly changing interface paradigms on me to accommodate my stately decay. By the time I'm old and shaky it will all be gestural anyway.
It takes me roughly a half second longer to target and acquire the title bar when maximized with all tabs open.
Then again, I play a lot of video games and work with Photoshop and InDesign a lot, so maybe I'm more accurate with mousing than the average user.
I recommend you watch James Burke's excellent series "Connections" for a bit of insight about how fast technology was actually moving in the 1950s and 1960s. He covers rather comprehensively the history of many of the core technologies of the 20th century (from the perspective of the 1970s), predicts a good deal of the change that was to come in the next 20 years, and shows that all of history has been incremental improvement. He traces the nuclear bomb back to the invention of the plow in a completely logical fashion.
The rate of change hasn't slowed - only how surprised we are by change. We who grew up in the US in the 70s and 80s (and to a lesser degree the 90s) are jaded by technological change. This is partly because our science fiction and people like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics showed us where they thought we'd be, assuming the Cold War spirit of unlimited funding for science and a sense of national pride in our scientific advancement continued at the rate it seemed that it was going to. It didn't.
We still have the industry giants dreaming up what the future will look like, but the long term is out of the vocabulary of most of the business world. If you can't show quarterly profits, you're wasting money. Government funding of scientific advancement is nowhere near Cold War levels because we're not racing anybody anymore.
We may not be making leaps and bounds in chemistry, material physics, energy production, etc because we may already have sufficient understanding of how things work that barring some as-yet-undiscovered loopholes, we may never see the technological change in energy production that occurred between, say, 1890 and 1950. Going from gunpowder and petrol to fission/fusion/fission bombs is one hell of a leap.
However, we've been literally doubling the number of transistors that can be cheaply placed on a single chip since 1958 - over 50 years. To sustain that rate of change we've had to make breakthroughs in microscopy, materials and physics, quantum mechanics and our understanding of chemistry. And while we've been improving all of that, we've also been developing new forms of logic and mathematics to describe how we talk to our machines, developed the first symbolic languages for communicating with machines which are capable of autonomously self-programming their hardware given a set of human-readable instructions, we've developed FPGAs - self-redesigning logic circuits, and we've put the power and knowledge of how to use all this wonderful crap into the hands of at least 50% of the developed world. According to the CIA world factbook, around 25% of the total world population has access to the Internet - and that number has doubled in the last 10 years.
None of this seems incredible or revolutionary because Star Trek and Popular Science taught us to expect more. We want our home robots, our flying cars, our pie-in-the-sky implausible and uneconomic dreams because that's what we were promised as children.
We've reached close to the limits of what scientific progress can afford us - we need social and economic progress to get the cheap multi-terabit access to every home. We need better and more compact energy sources and more accountability before we get our flying cars. Diamond microchips and optronic circuits are only a few years away, and if consumer demand for bigger, better, faster continues at its current rate, we'll get there. It's childish and petulant to complain we don't have it now just because Asimov told you you should have a robot.
The good ones are the ones who don't need a petition and signature campaign and heavy international political pressure to apologize for past wrongs.
You absolutely should apologize for your atrocities, if and when you commit one or more. Preferably immediately. Better yet, don't do it in the first place.
If, however, everybody who committed said atrocity are now dead, and everybody that it was done to or immediately effected by it are as well...
It's all a bit arrogant to say "hey, you who is a great great grandson of these people our people hurt during colonization, sorry about what people who we aren't even related to did to your ancestors," as if that undoes the crime in some way. It's just masturbation. And worse, it's public masturbation. Sure, it makes the government feel better, but it makes a mess and just embarrasses anybody who knows what's going on and has to watch it..
...to someone whose only complaint about Microsoft software is that it crashes a bit too often and thinks this is just the way computers are; to someone who thinks that Windows and Office is the "standard" software and that it's useful to use what everyone else uses ... I don't agree with "the common man"'s interpretation...
I fail to see what's inaccurate about either of those. If you want to do business with companies, you'd better be able to speak their language - even if that language is Word. ...and that IS just the way that computers are. They're inherently no more stable than the environment they're in and the hardware they're made of. The average desktop PC won't be all that much more stable in Linux or FreeBSD than they are under OS X or Windows provided that the Windows or OS X aren't bogged down with buggy third-party crap.
Given that the majority of hardware manufacturers pack in a lot of third-party crap and cheap hardware has cheaper drivers, you get that instability. The crapware that people like HP and Dell pack in, the lousy audio and network hardware which tend to get put in reasonably-priced motherboards, the crappy drivers that video card, scanner and printer manufacturers provide - all of these are what makes Windows an unstable joke.
I've got a Debian box in my closet which needs rebooting fairly regularly as well - due to the crappy drivers for the NIC card. Worse yet, it used to work fine until I did a full reinstall to update to a newer version and discovered they'd fucked up the drivers. The only reason I'm stuck using that NIC is that the old one failed. The machine has one USB port which reboots the computer if you plug anything into it. The video card will occasionally freak out and go out of sync until the machine is power cycled.
We've been noticing a pronounced increase in failure rate in some 2-year-old Intel iMacs - enough so that we've lost 3 out of 25 within 3 months of each other at my office. Another routinely gives the kernel panic screen in all of its friendly multilingual glory for no apparent reason - its hardware and software are literally identical to the two next to it.
(Crappy hardware | Crappy drivers) == Crappy stability regardless of the OS. That is just the way computers are. Consumers don't spend enough time thinking about brand names of all the various components to know which ones are good and which ones are crap, so they buy from people whose names they trust: Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba. All of these manufacturers try to improve their bottom line by using shitty hardware and supply their own crapware which finishes the job of making the preinstalled Windows a laughingstock.
There's no reason to believe that if they'd installed some other commercial or free OS on those systems that they'd get any better performance. If you install leather seats on a Ford Pinto, you'll have the most comfortable flammable roadblock in your neighborhood.
Please step out of your IT basement and into your marketing department.
If you are located in Europe, please step out of your insular country for vacation and visit an American or British company.
Clippy wasn't an inherently bad idea - an assistive agent which used a library of tasks to try to accelerate common jobs and act as an interactive tutorial with options to skip. The problem with Clippy was that the fine lines between "helpful", "too helpful", and "really freaking annoying" move around with increased stupidity - and stupid agents are all we have to work with until somebody figures out strong AI.
Agents like Clippy are used all the time to train people how to play video games - quite successfully in Valve's "Left 4 Dead," which remembers not only which tutorial elements you've already been fed but which ones it believes you have mastered (and does so with more than a little success).
I think my biggest problem with Clippy was that its heavy-lidded expression always seemed condescending and kept saying I was "trying" to do things. Hey, Mister, you look like you're trying to write a résumé but can't, because you're a failure. Want me to do it for you and produce something completely unusable?
This new PS3 may be the first one they make a profit on the hardware with.
Whereas the PS2 process is streamlined enough that it seems that they're able to profit on each PS2 sold.
The PS2 is a more credible competitor for the Wii than the PS3, as the PS3 and Wii are not even close to in the same class of console. Wii has no non-streaming media support, no HD output (not even 480p), no digital audio and minimal internal storage. This puts it much closer to the same class of product as the PS2, which, although it plays DVDs, has optical digital audio output, also does not come with any substantial storage and outputs in standard def (though some games support 480p.)
If Sony is selling PS2s (and they are in large numbers), they are profitable, compare favorably in market price to the Nintendo Wii and developers are still producing games for the PS2 (they are,) there is no reason why Sony should cut the PS2.
The idea that the PS2 is cutting into potential PS3 sales is somewhat ludicrous when one realizes that the people buying PS2s are largely doing it for economic reasons - it's $300 cheaper and the games run around half to one quarter the cost. If the people who would have bought a PS2 were buying a PS3 instead, they'd spend far less money on software and accessories, thereby essentially making Sony less profit than if they'd bought the more expensive console.
Make that 80 years
That really should have been "serial port." I have no idea how you'd communicate with a parallel port modem using any sane software.
Your lawn had posh grass.
I couldn't afford a decent connection in 1985. I had to learn everything I knew about computers from the 1970s books I found in the local libraries and messing with debug.com.
My first experience with BBS was on a 300 baud parallel port modem I bought for $40 from Boeing surplus.
Ah I miss the good old days when computer hardware cost a fortune, the only good deals you could get were at trade shows, everything was slow as treacle and the average human still believed that computers were sentient.
Wait, no I don't.
Not exactly. The N64 had hardware T&L, but it also had a far inferior available texture memory and bad texturing functions on board.
The GMA 950 is essentially not a 3d accelerator - it's a windowed graphics accelerator. You can push through a lot of OpenGL or DirectX quads pretty quickly with some decent texture resolution and a good fill rate, but with the lack of onboard transform and lighting it's totally unsuitable for applications wherein the entire scene changes every frame - whether that be a live preview in Maya or 3D Studio Max, or a modern video game.
Without T&L it's hard to compare it to the N64, as it'll have a vastly superior texture support but essentially the amount of polygons you can process per second is entirely tied to the power of the CPU. Considering that in most implementations using a GMA950 you're using shared memory as well, the performance is almost completely tied to the CPU and rambus speed.
Infinitely so, yes. The Wii's GPU is favorably comparable to the low-to-mid Radeon X1000 line.
The GMA-950 is far closer in capabilities to the early pre-1999 cards which lacked hardware T&L, offloading geometry processing to the CPU, meaning it's practically a souped-up Voodoo3.
Also if you want multiplayer, you've got to worry about the differences in PSN, XBL, and whatever platform you decide to go for on PC and Mac.
Why not just "controller 1", "controller 2", "controller 3", and "controller 4"?
That's fine, if all your friends have nothing better to do than sit on your couch.
Consider texture size restraints, shader characteristics, differences in hardware across PC which make it MUCH harder to target the PC or Mac as a platform
Is it safe to target Intel GMA 950 as a minimum system requirement? If not, why not?
I don't think anybody who has any interest in doing anything in 3d would be satisfied with the GMA 950. It has absolutely no support for hardware T&L, which makes it unsuitable even for accelerated previews in rendering software, let alone any game made more recently than 2000.
Essentially targetting a GMA-950 is no different than targetting the Voodoo3.