I'm actually going to step out on a limb here and disagree with most of the hardcore RPG croud and say that most RPGs these days are TOO long. To be specific, I'm speaking about jRPGs like final fantasy rather than cRPGs like Diablo or Everwinter Nights.
The length of time one needs to invest in todays RPGs is more than I'm willing to commit to. Frankly, if I get part way through an RPG and then fall out of the habit for a month or two, due to external real-life events, I never feel like I can go back to it without starting over at the beginning, which is a dauntingly repetitious task for me.
Games like the first 6 Final Fantasys, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and the early Dragon Warrior games were only 20-40 hours in length and they were damn good, in fact about half of these would be in the running for Best jRPG of All Time. The good one's were chok full of fun, having little, if any, filler content. There were no long-winded cut-scenes, and no feeling of becoming stagnant in one area. You were always on the move, exploring, discovering new enemies, new party members and taking on new quests. For me, I've found that 30 hours is about the sweet-spot, and I'm willing to give 10 hours in either direction if the game is particularly good. Something like 70 hours becomes intolerable for me, even for something generally well-recieved such as FF7.
A game that doesn't entertain you the entire way through is not a game; it becomes a chore -- of which I have much more important ones to attend to in my non-working hours.
Heh. I'm familiar with the Propeller Chip. I was one of the Demo Coders for the Propeller based Hydra game console by Andre LaMothe. Some of the other demo coder's wrote GPU routines that used 4-6 of the pchip's cogs in unison;)
I've been following GPGPU stuff for awhile now, casually at first but much more closely now with the AMD/ATI merger and the release of nVidea's G80 architecture. Both of these represent the first big steps toward GPGPU technology (buzzword: stream computing) becoming reality.
The initial approach I suspect from the Fusion effort will basically be an R600-based, entry-level GPU tacked onto the CPU die. I'd imagine that this would have 4-8 quads (GPU 4-wide SIMD functional unit) as standard. This would mostly be targetted at the IGP market for laptops and small and/or cheap desktops. Its likely that CTM will enable this additional horsepower to be used for general clculations, but its primary purpose will be to replace other IGP solutions.
A little further out I see the new functional units being woven into the fabric of the CPU itself. This model likens closely to having many 128-bit-wide extended SSE units, likely to have automatic scheduling of SIMD tasks (eg - tell the CPU to multiply 2 large float arrays and the CPU balances the workload across the functional units automatically.) A software driver will be able to utilize these units as a GPU, but the focus is now much more on computation. It functions as a GPU for low-end users, and suppliments high-end users and gamers with discreete video cards by taking on additional calculations such as physics. Physics will benefit being on the system bus (even though PCIe x16 is relatively fast) because the latancy will be lower, and because the structures typically used to perform physics calculations reside in system memory.
Even further out I see computers very much becoming small grid computers unto themselves, though software will take a long time to catch up to what the hardware will be capable of. I see nVidea's CUDA initiative as the first step in this direction - Provide a "sea of processors" view to the machine and allow tight integration into standard code withought placing the burden of balancing the workload onto the programmer (which nVidea's CUDA C compiler attempts to do.) nVidea's G80 architecture goes one further by migrating away from the vector-based architecture in favor of a scalar one - rather than 32 4-wide vector ALUs, they provide 128 scalar ALUs. Threading takes care of translating those n-wide calls into n seperate scalar calls. Most scientific code does not lend itself well to the vector model, though over the years it has been shoe-horned into vector-centric algorithms because it was neccesary to get addequate performance. Even graphics shaders are becoming less and less vector-centric, as nVidea research shows, because many effects (or portions there-of) are better suited to scalar code.
Eventually, I think this model will grow such that the CPU will be replaced by, to coin a phrase, something called a CCU (Central Coordination Unit) who's only real responibility is to route instructions to the correct execution units. Execution units will vary by type and number from system to system depending on what chips/boards you've plugged into your CCU expansion bus. The CCU will accept both scalar and broad-stroke (vector) instructions such as "multiply the elements of this array by that array and store the results in this other array" which will be broken down into individual elements and assigned to available execution units.
There are plenty of good reasons.
On the Apple side:
Firstly, much of the reason that Apples machines were comparably expensive for so many years was that they had to do alot of design work on their own. Motherboards, Chipsets, etc. Intel provides them with all those things now as a package deal. Secondly, it helps to open up a wider spectrum of parts suppliers, there's nothing ruling out an AMD-based Mac if AMD can provide a compelling offer, for instance. Most importantly, was the future roadmap that IBM is planning for PPC; namely, the lack of laptop and desktop centric chips. When Apple went to IBM for the G5, they basically had to offer enough business to IBM to make it worth their while in modifying the Power4 architecture to be suitible for the desktop. Frankly, Apple didn't sell enough G5s for IBM to bother working with them going forward when they could allocate the same resources to make more money in other sectors by concentraiting on their embedded, server, and client-customized Power chips.
On the Microsoft Side:
Firstly, Microsoft decided that IBM could provide them the best bang for their buck. The fact that IBM's offer was PPC architecture was of little consequence. Because they were building the whole console, they could simply build the other components to order around whatever CPU they ended up with. The primary concern with consoles is being able to reduce the cost of components over time so that the hardware is profitable, or at least breaks even, before it's run is over. Mostly, the key here is to keep the die size small. An x86 design likely wouldn't have given the same performance / die size. The most important aspect of the IBM deal, though, was the fact that Microsoft essentially "owns" the Xenon CPU design for future use with respect to the xbox console. This means that they can take the design to other fabs if they can do it cheaper than IBM, or that they can integrate the CPU into silicon for the next system to help with backwards compatibility for instance (of course they'll still likely have to pay IBM an aditional liscense fee/royalties for new products.) The x86 companies hang on very tightly to their liscenses, and I dare say that it might have costed more to liscense x86 than to develop Xenon with IBM.
That said, Microsoft did look at the possibility of an x86 360 using both AMD and intel parts. The also looked at integrating an x86 into the PPC-based 360 as a secondary processor for backwards compatibility purposes. A design built around a lowish-speed (1.8-2.0 ghz) Core Duo, or Core 2 Duo would have been nice, but I don't think that Intel would match IBM's price (I've heard ~100 USD, give or take) and they certainly wouldn't have liscensed the design to microsoft or allowed non-intel fabs to produce it.
Granted its been awhile since the last major update, but there has been 1 or 2 updates since the console came out - I think there was a small one maybe 4-6 weeks ago actually. There's more on the way too, I have some friends on the testing team, and they're still employed. When I find out that the entire team was let off, then I'll worry that we've seen the last of the updates.
"Donate" your vote to a third party is one possible solution. Parties outside the big two usually need to show a certain level of support before they recieve state/federal money for their campaigns or are even allowed to enter the debates. Chances are that many of the people who feel uninformed feel that way because they are not engaged by either of the two major parties and hence, haven't felt a need to educate themselves on the major candidates. By donating a vote to a minor player you can contribute to the loosening of the two-party strangle-hold, which will hopefully lead to more choices to engage more people in the future.
Don't believe the bunk that having more than two parties means we'll never have majority rule either. dispite the fact that our winning candidates have won majority votes, you also have to keep in mind that a LARGE number of eligable voters simply don't vote - accounting for this, I dare-say that we've seldom - if ever - had a true majority leader.
Of course, should you choose to do this, you should pick a third party which is inline with what you stand for. It still is *your* vote, after all.
Valve is on the right track with Steam and it, as well as work-alikes, will become the primary way of distributing most games in the future. The reason behind this is simple; Money.
As game budgets continue to grow, often exponentially, developers will have to find ways to minimize costs while maximizing profits. Requirements are only getting larger, both in programming and art; the new consoles place higher demand on looks and features than ever before, and a AAA game can now easily reach 8 figures.
There are 3 primary ways to increase the return on investment ratio: 1) Streamline Development Processes (Increased productivity, better tools, use middleware, *sell* middleware.) 2) Streamline Distribution (Cut out the middle man for yourself, become the middle man for smaller shops.) 3) Charge the consumer a higher price (Higher box price, subscriptions, add-ons, "microtransactions.")
Of these, I'd be a lot happier if more of numbers 1 & 2 went on, rather than number 3. Steam solves #2 and Valve does a great deal with regards to #1. Considering the Half-life episodes as a seperate product (and really, it is. It will have comperable playing time for a price comperable to a boxed game) Valve doesn't do a whole lot of #3, in fact games are often cheaper through valve than they are in-store and often have a small discount for early buyers. Dispite the cheaper price and after all the bandwidth, hosting, and credit card handling costs, Valve *still* makes more money per game than under the traditional publisher model.
Valve is, in my oppinion, the most forward-looking development studio there is: They know when to license technology and when to build it, the technology they do build they spend a great deal of time on to get just right, they make great products and they know what their consumers want. Its a very well-run shop.
I think that Iwata was simply refering to the firmware being updatable via the internet. They've never had this ability until now, so it makes sense to mention it. Certainly the Wii has alot more built-in functionality (such as the 'Channels') but nothing that would require an OS to be intruduced (with all of it's complexity and overhead.) The author of the article clearly took what was said and added his own addendum. I believe the original report used the language "Reportedly a proprietary form of the Linux Kernel" which is interesting because its not often that someone misspells "I speculate" as "Reportedly" (well, actually that DOES happen quite often:) )
Besides, with a system that's only 1.5x as powerful as a gamecube, do you want to be eating into ANY of that additional power? Add too much OS and you're back at square-one, albeit with a fancy controller.
You have to understand that, much like Steve Jobs and his famous Reality Distortion Field, Sony executives live on a plane of existance that is ill-defined by the mere four dimensions we poor mortals are familiar with.
Post them immediately. If a student blows off class to play frisbee only to watch (which may or may not actually happen) the podcast at a later time then this is their fault. Speaking from experience, while painful, this is a very important life lesson. I blew off many classes during a single sememster of my college experience and ended up paying dearly for it -- with my time, with additional tuition to make up failed classes and with missed opportunities. I did, however, learn a valuable lessen from this mistake: You get out what you put in. In the two semesters post-slacker, I've only missed 3 or 4 classes, a number which I could (and did, many times) match in a single day before learning this lesson.
In short, its not a good argument to withold resources from good students in an effort to force bad students to shape up. Speaking as someone recently out of college, I've found many of my peers having no sense of accountability for their actions, even though I went to a school in which I would consider the student body to be more driven than most. Maturity and accountability are just as important to learn as any of their other courses.
It's honestly amazing to see what a group of Digipen Students can make. Consider the following: 1) A Digipen Project is completed in its entirety by a group of roughly 5 *students*, give or take. 2) Most projects are developed from concept to completion in roughtly 9 months. 3) During this 9 months, they are also balancing a truly murderous load of other coursework. 4) There is essentially no "budget" beyond what the team members are willing and able to chip in for tools or other needs. Through the school there is access to a fair selection of dev/art tools, but other than that you're on your own.
Honestly, its not the most polished demo to ever come out of digipen (There are several good examples of such polish, such as Bantago) but what was important was that they created a game with a truly fun and different mechanic. Others here have said that the 'portal' idea is really not all that original, what with teleportation devices common in games and all. But if the idea is truly such a commodity why, then, have we not seen any other games of this type? The answer is simple, they've taken a more basic and common technology and applied it in a novel way to a new problem. Its very much like the case of some of man's earliest machines (grade school science anyone?) the ramp and the screw. At first glance the two seem unrelated when, in fact, a screw is simply a ramp wrapped around a cylinder. This machine also applied existing technology in a novel way to an entire set of new problems. Today our world is, often quite literally, held together by screws. We use them as fasteners, to dig, to move things, to turn gears in parts of even greater machines... 'portal' gaming will not change our lives in the way that the screw has, but lets all give credit for innovation and originality where it is due.
The truth is that AMD needed to bring on a solid chipset and integrated GPU in-house. Intel has been moving in the direction of providing the whole package, most importantly CPU+Chipset+GPU that form the backbone of the system. By purchasing ATI, AMD has brought Chipsets and GPUs into their fold and can compete directly against intel's platform strategy.
ATI's Integrated GPUs are light years ahead of Intel's crap, Even though the specs look better on paper for intel's part, real world performance is another matter entirely. Game developers simply don't care whether or not their game even runs on intel's GPU, let alone at an acceptable rate. ATI, because their integrated chips are derived from their discreet parts, does not have this problem. ATI's current integrated chip is simply a two-pipelined version of the same architecture as its X800 GPU with their hyper-memory technology and, optionally, a 64bit bus to add dedicated graphics ram. It may not provide the best gaming experience, but it will run any modern title you throw at it.
I don't expect to see AMD integrating a GPU into their CPUs any time soon. It would add too much to the transistor count and the turnover in GPUs is too quick to be all that usefull. However, AMD has been pushing their multi-socket configuration as a strategy for the future and have opened up the hyper-transport spec to outside firms so that they can develop ASICs that plug directly into an AMD-based system. Its entirely possible that we may see a GPU in this form.
I'll let you know when I get back home. As far as usable vertical screen space, I recal it being an inch and a half more than the 20" CRT it replaced, a 20" CRT is generally recomended to have a 19" usable screen area so it would be a reasonable comparison. figure on it being 1-2 inches more usable vertical screen real estate.
You can get a 24" Sony Trinitron GDM-FW900 Widescreen CRT. I still dislike LCDs for their single native resolution (which is fine, if thats your intended resolution) and their generally poor response times, particularly on the larger ones unless its real expensive. I got one of these babies for $375 (with free shipping!) on Ebay in excelent shape and its a really excelent picture (They're inteded as high-end graphics and video editing monitors) They have integrated BNC and VGA style connections which can be switched on the fly. Once I get my Xbox 360, its PC through the BNC connectors and the 360 through the VGA.
Unfortunately it weighs ~95lbs, but that does give the added benefit of keeping Godzilla at a safe distance.
My question then becomes "Why would nintendo sell its American distribution arm?" followed by "What would anyone else do with Nintendo's American distribution arm?" It sounds like an awfull lot of trouble to go through just to distribute nintendo products, even if you would be THE american supplier. Nintendo would then have to set up a new office to handle all the other business that goes on there. What you seem to suggest is that someone "buy in" to nintendo almost like a franchise. They would have little or no control over nintendo, especially if it were an american company. There are easier ways to become an investor in Nintendo:) Perhaps, just perhaps, if they ever REALLY needed the money, they might consider it briefly. But I'd wager that even then they'd only sell to a group headed by current trusted high-level NOJ/NOA people-- Claude Comair for instance.
Of course, none of this will EVER happen because, dispite the gamecube being 3rd in America, the gamecube hardware itself is the most profitable of any console. If they only sell one game along with the unit (heck, 0 games, but who buys no games?) thats money in Nintendo's wallet. In the same situation Microsoft will have lost ~50$ on Xbox and Sony will have maybe broken even on the PS2. Then, there's the portable market, where nintendo is essentially its own competition (admittedly the PSP is doing well considering who their up against, but the big N still has better than 90% of the portable market) where again, Nintendo's hardware is profitable and the competition is roughly break-even at best. I may sound like a fanboy, quite the contrary, but even though the Cube is #3 in America, Nintendo is inarguably the #1 Console/Game company in the world.
While they may not come up with a ton of original game IP at NOA there is a strong development wing there, not to mention a strong portion of their technology department. Its also their base of operations for dealing with American publishers and developers, many of which are located in the greater Seattle/Redmond area. Probably a full 20-25 percent of all American gaming companies are in the area, and fully 50% on the west coast I'd estimate.
Fair enough that they do a lot of distribution as well, but its hardly all they do.
x86 was never a dominant processor in console game systems. In fact, if anyone holds a claim to most popular console architecture it'd probably be Power(Xbox 360, PS3, Revolution, Gamecube, and the 68k consoles, which power is sort of the logical continuation of, Sega Genesis, Amiga, and others) followed by the SuperH arch used in the Dreamcast, Saturn, and 32X. The number of x86 consoles are limited to the Xbox, Bandai's WonderSwan, and some x86-like archs NEC's turbographix-16(NEC V series, basically a modiefied x86 clone) and the original gameboy(modified z80, which is quite similar to x86)
Granted, most programmers learn on x86 machines, but the PC programming you did in college doesn't really translate to professional game development well.
Except that in graphics card terms each "pipeline" is essentially a "core." That is, the basic computing unit in PC terms is the core, while on a GPU its the pipeline. GPUs have been "multi-core" for years now.
I'd just like to point out that the 5.2 Terraflops of computing power they quote would place it at #70 on the top500 Supercomputer list! While I realize that its by now means a general processor, its still quite amazing that they've reached that kind of computing density, albeit in a well defined and inherantly paralizable problem domain.
It edges out Russia's Joint Supercomputer Center, which uses an MVS-15000BM, eServer BladeCenter JS20 containing 924 IBM PowerPC970 processors at 2.2 GHz for the #70 spot.
actually, putting my math skills to use, its roughly a 20" monitor at a distance of about 22" which is a pretty average distance one might sit from their monitor at their desk. Also, unless I'm looking at the wrong thing, the resolution is 800x600, which is plenty adequate to watch video or game, though I do shudder at the thought of an 800x600 desktop.
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I'm actually going to step out on a limb here and disagree with most of the hardcore RPG croud and say that most RPGs these days are TOO long. To be specific, I'm speaking about jRPGs like final fantasy rather than cRPGs like Diablo or Everwinter Nights.
The length of time one needs to invest in todays RPGs is more than I'm willing to commit to. Frankly, if I get part way through an RPG and then fall out of the habit for a month or two, due to external real-life events, I never feel like I can go back to it without starting over at the beginning, which is a dauntingly repetitious task for me.
Games like the first 6 Final Fantasys, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and the early Dragon Warrior games were only 20-40 hours in length and they were damn good, in fact about half of these would be in the running for Best jRPG of All Time. The good one's were chok full of fun, having little, if any, filler content. There were no long-winded cut-scenes, and no feeling of becoming stagnant in one area. You were always on the move, exploring, discovering new enemies, new party members and taking on new quests. For me, I've found that 30 hours is about the sweet-spot, and I'm willing to give 10 hours in either direction if the game is particularly good. Something like 70 hours becomes intolerable for me, even for something generally well-recieved such as FF7.
A game that doesn't entertain you the entire way through is not a game; it becomes a chore -- of which I have much more important ones to attend to in my non-working hours.
Heh. I'm familiar with the Propeller Chip. I was one of the Demo Coders for the Propeller based Hydra game console by Andre LaMothe. Some of the other demo coder's wrote GPU routines that used 4-6 of the pchip's cogs in unison ;)
I've been following GPGPU stuff for awhile now, casually at first but much more closely now with the AMD/ATI merger and the release of nVidea's G80 architecture. Both of these represent the first big steps toward GPGPU technology (buzzword: stream computing) becoming reality.
The initial approach I suspect from the Fusion effort will basically be an R600-based, entry-level GPU tacked onto the CPU die. I'd imagine that this would have 4-8 quads (GPU 4-wide SIMD functional unit) as standard. This would mostly be targetted at the IGP market for laptops and small and/or cheap desktops. Its likely that CTM will enable this additional horsepower to be used for general clculations, but its primary purpose will be to replace other IGP solutions.
A little further out I see the new functional units being woven into the fabric of the CPU itself. This model likens closely to having many 128-bit-wide extended SSE units, likely to have automatic scheduling of SIMD tasks (eg - tell the CPU to multiply 2 large float arrays and the CPU balances the workload across the functional units automatically.) A software driver will be able to utilize these units as a GPU, but the focus is now much more on computation. It functions as a GPU for low-end users, and suppliments high-end users and gamers with discreete video cards by taking on additional calculations such as physics. Physics will benefit being on the system bus (even though PCIe x16 is relatively fast) because the latancy will be lower, and because the structures typically used to perform physics calculations reside in system memory.
Even further out I see computers very much becoming small grid computers unto themselves, though software will take a long time to catch up to what the hardware will be capable of. I see nVidea's CUDA initiative as the first step in this direction - Provide a "sea of processors" view to the machine and allow tight integration into standard code withought placing the burden of balancing the workload onto the programmer (which nVidea's CUDA C compiler attempts to do.) nVidea's G80 architecture goes one further by migrating away from the vector-based architecture in favor of a scalar one - rather than 32 4-wide vector ALUs, they provide 128 scalar ALUs. Threading takes care of translating those n-wide calls into n seperate scalar calls. Most scientific code does not lend itself well to the vector model, though over the years it has been shoe-horned into vector-centric algorithms because it was neccesary to get addequate performance. Even graphics shaders are becoming less and less vector-centric, as nVidea research shows, because many effects (or portions there-of) are better suited to scalar code.
Eventually, I think this model will grow such that the CPU will be replaced by, to coin a phrase, something called a CCU (Central Coordination Unit) who's only real responibility is to route instructions to the correct execution units. Execution units will vary by type and number from system to system depending on what chips/boards you've plugged into your CCU expansion bus. The CCU will accept both scalar and broad-stroke (vector) instructions such as "multiply the elements of this array by that array and store the results in this other array" which will be broken down into individual elements and assigned to available execution units.
All of this IMHO of course.
There are plenty of good reasons. On the Apple side: Firstly, much of the reason that Apples machines were comparably expensive for so many years was that they had to do alot of design work on their own. Motherboards, Chipsets, etc. Intel provides them with all those things now as a package deal. Secondly, it helps to open up a wider spectrum of parts suppliers, there's nothing ruling out an AMD-based Mac if AMD can provide a compelling offer, for instance. Most importantly, was the future roadmap that IBM is planning for PPC; namely, the lack of laptop and desktop centric chips. When Apple went to IBM for the G5, they basically had to offer enough business to IBM to make it worth their while in modifying the Power4 architecture to be suitible for the desktop. Frankly, Apple didn't sell enough G5s for IBM to bother working with them going forward when they could allocate the same resources to make more money in other sectors by concentraiting on their embedded, server, and client-customized Power chips. On the Microsoft Side: Firstly, Microsoft decided that IBM could provide them the best bang for their buck. The fact that IBM's offer was PPC architecture was of little consequence. Because they were building the whole console, they could simply build the other components to order around whatever CPU they ended up with. The primary concern with consoles is being able to reduce the cost of components over time so that the hardware is profitable, or at least breaks even, before it's run is over. Mostly, the key here is to keep the die size small. An x86 design likely wouldn't have given the same performance / die size. The most important aspect of the IBM deal, though, was the fact that Microsoft essentially "owns" the Xenon CPU design for future use with respect to the xbox console. This means that they can take the design to other fabs if they can do it cheaper than IBM, or that they can integrate the CPU into silicon for the next system to help with backwards compatibility for instance (of course they'll still likely have to pay IBM an aditional liscense fee/royalties for new products.) The x86 companies hang on very tightly to their liscenses, and I dare say that it might have costed more to liscense x86 than to develop Xenon with IBM. That said, Microsoft did look at the possibility of an x86 360 using both AMD and intel parts. The also looked at integrating an x86 into the PPC-based 360 as a secondary processor for backwards compatibility purposes. A design built around a lowish-speed (1.8-2.0 ghz) Core Duo, or Core 2 Duo would have been nice, but I don't think that Intel would match IBM's price (I've heard ~100 USD, give or take) and they certainly wouldn't have liscensed the design to microsoft or allowed non-intel fabs to produce it.
Granted its been awhile since the last major update, but there has been 1 or 2 updates since the console came out - I think there was a small one maybe 4-6 weeks ago actually. There's more on the way too, I have some friends on the testing team, and they're still employed. When I find out that the entire team was let off, then I'll worry that we've seen the last of the updates.
"Donate" your vote to a third party is one possible solution. Parties outside the big two usually need to show a certain level of support before they recieve state/federal money for their campaigns or are even allowed to enter the debates. Chances are that many of the people who feel uninformed feel that way because they are not engaged by either of the two major parties and hence, haven't felt a need to educate themselves on the major candidates. By donating a vote to a minor player you can contribute to the loosening of the two-party strangle-hold, which will hopefully lead to more choices to engage more people in the future.
Don't believe the bunk that having more than two parties means we'll never have majority rule either. dispite the fact that our winning candidates have won majority votes, you also have to keep in mind that a LARGE number of eligable voters simply don't vote - accounting for this, I dare-say that we've seldom - if ever - had a true majority leader.
Of course, should you choose to do this, you should pick a third party which is inline with what you stand for. It still is *your* vote, after all.
Valve is on the right track with Steam and it, as well as work-alikes, will become the primary way of distributing most games in the future. The reason behind this is simple; Money.
As game budgets continue to grow, often exponentially, developers will have to find ways to minimize costs while maximizing profits. Requirements are only getting larger, both in programming and art; the new consoles place higher demand on looks and features than ever before, and a AAA game can now easily reach 8 figures.
There are 3 primary ways to increase the return on investment ratio:
1) Streamline Development Processes (Increased productivity, better tools, use middleware, *sell* middleware.)
2) Streamline Distribution (Cut out the middle man for yourself, become the middle man for smaller shops.)
3) Charge the consumer a higher price (Higher box price, subscriptions, add-ons, "microtransactions.")
Of these, I'd be a lot happier if more of numbers 1 & 2 went on, rather than number 3. Steam solves #2 and Valve does a great deal with regards to #1. Considering the Half-life episodes as a seperate product (and really, it is. It will have comperable playing time for a price comperable to a boxed game) Valve doesn't do a whole lot of #3, in fact games are often cheaper through valve than they are in-store and often have a small discount for early buyers. Dispite the cheaper price and after all the bandwidth, hosting, and credit card handling costs, Valve *still* makes more money per game than under the traditional publisher model.
Valve is, in my oppinion, the most forward-looking development studio there is: They know when to license technology and when to build it, the technology they do build they spend a great deal of time on to get just right, they make great products and they know what their consumers want. Its a very well-run shop.
I think that Iwata was simply refering to the firmware being updatable via the internet. They've never had this ability until now, so it makes sense to mention it. Certainly the Wii has alot more built-in functionality (such as the 'Channels') but nothing that would require an OS to be intruduced (with all of it's complexity and overhead.) The author of the article clearly took what was said and added his own addendum. I believe the original report used the language "Reportedly a proprietary form of the Linux Kernel" which is interesting because its not often that someone misspells "I speculate" as "Reportedly" (well, actually that DOES happen quite often :) )
Besides, with a system that's only 1.5x as powerful as a gamecube, do you want to be eating into ANY of that additional power? Add too much OS and you're back at square-one, albeit with a fancy controller.
You have to understand that, much like Steve Jobs and his famous Reality Distortion Field, Sony executives live on a plane of existance that is ill-defined by the mere four dimensions we poor mortals are familiar with.
The Horse's Mouth? You sure you don't have that horse backwards on this one?
Post them immediately. If a student blows off class to play frisbee only to watch (which may or may not actually happen) the podcast at a later time then this is their fault. Speaking from experience, while painful, this is a very important life lesson. I blew off many classes during a single sememster of my college experience and ended up paying dearly for it -- with my time, with additional tuition to make up failed classes and with missed opportunities. I did, however, learn a valuable lessen from this mistake: You get out what you put in. In the two semesters post-slacker, I've only missed 3 or 4 classes, a number which I could (and did, many times) match in a single day before learning this lesson.
In short, its not a good argument to withold resources from good students in an effort to force bad students to shape up. Speaking as someone recently out of college, I've found many of my peers having no sense of accountability for their actions, even though I went to a school in which I would consider the student body to be more driven than most. Maturity and accountability are just as important to learn as any of their other courses.
Then again, this is Sony we're talking about after all. Its not their fault your old PSP doesn't have that second thumbstick, its your fault.
[Upfront disclaimer: I'm a Digipen Grad]
It's honestly amazing to see what a group of Digipen Students can make. Consider the following: 1) A Digipen Project is completed in its entirety by a group of roughly 5 *students*, give or take. 2) Most projects are developed from concept to completion in roughtly 9 months. 3) During this 9 months, they are also balancing a truly murderous load of other coursework. 4) There is essentially no "budget" beyond what the team members are willing and able to chip in for tools or other needs. Through the school there is access to a fair selection of dev/art tools, but other than that you're on your own.
Honestly, its not the most polished demo to ever come out of digipen (There are several good examples of such polish, such as Bantago) but what was important was that they created a game with a truly fun and different mechanic. Others here have said that the 'portal' idea is really not all that original, what with teleportation devices common in games and all. But if the idea is truly such a commodity why, then, have we not seen any other games of this type? The answer is simple, they've taken a more basic and common technology and applied it in a novel way to a new problem. Its very much like the case of some of man's earliest machines (grade school science anyone?) the ramp and the screw. At first glance the two seem unrelated when, in fact, a screw is simply a ramp wrapped around a cylinder. This machine also applied existing technology in a novel way to an entire set of new problems. Today our world is, often quite literally, held together by screws. We use them as fasteners, to dig, to move things, to turn gears in parts of even greater machines... 'portal' gaming will not change our lives in the way that the screw has, but lets all give credit for innovation and originality where it is due.
The truth is that AMD needed to bring on a solid chipset and integrated GPU in-house. Intel has been moving in the direction of providing the whole package, most importantly CPU+Chipset+GPU that form the backbone of the system. By purchasing ATI, AMD has brought Chipsets and GPUs into their fold and can compete directly against intel's platform strategy.
ATI's Integrated GPUs are light years ahead of Intel's crap, Even though the specs look better on paper for intel's part, real world performance is another matter entirely. Game developers simply don't care whether or not their game even runs on intel's GPU, let alone at an acceptable rate. ATI, because their integrated chips are derived from their discreet parts, does not have this problem. ATI's current integrated chip is simply a two-pipelined version of the same architecture as its X800 GPU with their hyper-memory technology and, optionally, a 64bit bus to add dedicated graphics ram. It may not provide the best gaming experience, but it will run any modern title you throw at it.
I don't expect to see AMD integrating a GPU into their CPUs any time soon. It would add too much to the transistor count and the turnover in GPUs is too quick to be all that usefull. However, AMD has been pushing their multi-socket configuration as a strategy for the future and have opened up the hyper-transport spec to outside firms so that they can develop ASICs that plug directly into an AMD-based system. Its entirely possible that we may see a GPU in this form.
Wake me when it's Claude Comair!
The man in black who molested you in a child was a priest, not a ninja!
I'll let you know when I get back home. As far as usable vertical screen space, I recal it being an inch and a half more than the 20" CRT it replaced, a 20" CRT is generally recomended to have a 19" usable screen area so it would be a reasonable comparison. figure on it being 1-2 inches more usable vertical screen real estate.
You can get a 24" Sony Trinitron GDM-FW900 Widescreen CRT. I still dislike LCDs for their single native resolution (which is fine, if thats your intended resolution) and their generally poor response times, particularly on the larger ones unless its real expensive. I got one of these babies for $375 (with free shipping!) on Ebay in excelent shape and its a really excelent picture (They're inteded as high-end graphics and video editing monitors) They have integrated BNC and VGA style connections which can be switched on the fly. Once I get my Xbox 360, its PC through the BNC connectors and the 360 through the VGA.
Unfortunately it weighs ~95lbs, but that does give the added benefit of keeping Godzilla at a safe distance.
My question then becomes "Why would nintendo sell its American distribution arm?" followed by "What would anyone else do with Nintendo's American distribution arm?" It sounds like an awfull lot of trouble to go through just to distribute nintendo products, even if you would be THE american supplier. Nintendo would then have to set up a new office to handle all the other business that goes on there. What you seem to suggest is that someone "buy in" to nintendo almost like a franchise. They would have little or no control over nintendo, especially if it were an american company. There are easier ways to become an investor in Nintendo :) Perhaps, just perhaps, if they ever REALLY needed the money, they might consider it briefly. But I'd wager that even then they'd only sell to a group headed by current trusted high-level NOJ/NOA people-- Claude Comair for instance.
Of course, none of this will EVER happen because, dispite the gamecube being 3rd in America, the gamecube hardware itself is the most profitable of any console. If they only sell one game along with the unit (heck, 0 games, but who buys no games?) thats money in Nintendo's wallet. In the same situation Microsoft will have lost ~50$ on Xbox and Sony will have maybe broken even on the PS2. Then, there's the portable market, where nintendo is essentially its own competition (admittedly the PSP is doing well considering who their up against, but the big N still has better than 90% of the portable market) where again, Nintendo's hardware is profitable and the competition is roughly break-even at best. I may sound like a fanboy, quite the contrary, but even though the Cube is #3 in America, Nintendo is inarguably the #1 Console/Game company in the world.
While they may not come up with a ton of original game IP at NOA there is a strong development wing there, not to mention a strong portion of their technology department. Its also their base of operations for dealing with American publishers and developers, many of which are located in the greater Seattle/Redmond area. Probably a full 20-25 percent of all American gaming companies are in the area, and fully 50% on the west coast I'd estimate.
Fair enough that they do a lot of distribution as well, but its hardly all they do.
He might want to change that name. XFS is the filesystem used by Microsoft's Xbox and Xbox 360 game consoles and is based on NTFS.
x86 was never a dominant processor in console game systems. In fact, if anyone holds a claim to most popular console architecture it'd probably be Power(Xbox 360, PS3, Revolution, Gamecube, and the 68k consoles, which power is sort of the logical continuation of, Sega Genesis, Amiga, and others) followed by the SuperH arch used in the Dreamcast, Saturn, and 32X. The number of x86 consoles are limited to the Xbox, Bandai's WonderSwan, and some x86-like archs NEC's turbographix-16(NEC V series, basically a modiefied x86 clone) and the original gameboy(modified z80, which is quite similar to x86)
Granted, most programmers learn on x86 machines, but the PC programming you did in college doesn't really translate to professional game development well.
Except that in graphics card terms each "pipeline" is essentially a "core." That is, the basic computing unit in PC terms is the core, while on a GPU its the pipeline. GPUs have been "multi-core" for years now.
I'd just like to point out that the 5.2 Terraflops of computing power they quote would place it at #70 on the top500 Supercomputer list! While I realize that its by now means a general processor, its still quite amazing that they've reached that kind of computing density, albeit in a well defined and inherantly paralizable problem domain.
It edges out Russia's Joint Supercomputer Center, which uses an MVS-15000BM, eServer BladeCenter JS20 containing 924 IBM PowerPC970 processors at 2.2 GHz for the #70 spot.
actually, putting my math skills to use, its roughly a 20" monitor at a distance of about 22" which is a pretty average distance one might sit from their monitor at their desk. Also, unless I'm looking at the wrong thing, the resolution is 800x600, which is plenty adequate to watch video or game, though I do shudder at the thought of an 800x600 desktop.