In an article I read (TIME Magazine) they basically charge other sites for using their engine _per query_. Considering Yahoo is/has switched to them you gotta think that brings in some serious cash.
Just to add another voice. BSDs can do this rather easily as well. Between packages, ports, and cvsup you can completely update your system every night if you want. This means the entire system kernel and all. Kinda funny how much Debian and the BSds are alike in ways.
Well, it'a about attitudes. Linux has so many distributions and changes so rapidly that implementing time-consuming security audits might be seen as a waste of time. By the time you got a bunch of fixes done the 'next version' would be out and the whole deal of rolling in fixes might be a big enough hassle to discourage others. The best thing would be to have a security conscious distribution. Debian probably comes closest to this. They have the 'sit on it till it's ready' mindset that you would need with security being a primary goal. OpenBSD's fixes are listed on their site; I assume people are either ignorant or lazy concerning rolling security fixes into other products.
As the article notes, security is a mindset. You have to be a certain type of person with a certain outlook on life. I've setup some routers/firewalls for some friends and some of them could careless whether telnet is secure or not. I know others, mostly system admins, who cringe at the thought of even typing 'telnet'.
Oh, I dunno but maybe licensing conflicts might screw up some people. BSD's pretty liberal about usage but you never know about how others take that.
The Helios homepage has this stuff about "resetting your handheld" and "locked up applications". Coming from a Palm/Visor background that's sort of stunning. Should I expect this from my Palm device? Until now I've never considered (or had cause to consider) that my handheld would screw up and lockup forcing a 'reset'.
Hmm, maybe I should dig around with the Palm stuff...
I'd contend that being innovative has absoultely positively NOTHING to do with fun. Look at Trespasser. Look at Quake 3. (actually I dislike both but I'm going on majority 'opinion').
I loved War2, I loved C&C and I still love Starcraft. Being a sheep dyed in many colors isn't a bad thing as long as you still enjoy the game. I mean we play games in real life with balls all day long! Football, soccer, baseball, basketball, foosball, ping pong, etc. These are getting tiresome? No. They only get boring for people who live on quick fixes.
I suspect RTS's are more prone to 'get old' more quickly to these non-die hard players because of their repetitive nature. Instead of reveling in the intricacies of the gameplay and variety of offense and defense they merely see a battle to control resources and kill the other guy.
The Gamecenter editors are clearly playing favorites and trying to create controversy with their mentioning of the RTS and subsequent omission of FPSs. Playing 'god' editor is a pretty quick way to lose ALL respect from anyone who is a hardcore gamer at heart.
Doubtful. Apple seems to have a differnt market focus for many things. Being in big time corporate America doesn't seem to be it. Do you know of many corporations that like having translucent colored objects?
Apple's success in the 3D gaming market will rest largely on how ATI's 3D cards perform. That's been the bottleneck in the past. The Radeon looks good but obviously ATI and Apple are on thin ice right now.
I've never had a problem with them in terms of hardware or compatibility. I never had to do much tinkering with the networking and worked just fine as a workstation in a heterogenous environment (Win/Mac/*ix). I never had to make them work in en environment larger than 20 computers however. I do despise their OS though. OS X looks promissing if they can speed it up a ton.
Altivec can make huge diffrence for applications that it was designed for. ie, vetor based performance and large SIMD instructions (OSX's pdf thingy might take advantage of it). Things like FFTs and such should get a huge boost out of it. It's is also how the G4s have stayed 'up there' in terms of benchmarking.
But as others have mentioned you need to have compiled for it or hand tweaked the assembly. Not a big deal. They are good chips and Altivec would appear to blow the snot out of Intels SIMD offerings.
So yes, Altivec is a good move. It's definately a performance enhancer. Unless they keep switching the architecture every year it can't hurt them.
This is probably why a.com doesn't run a server. I think I use a@a.com at least once a day in order to download, preview, login, or register for producst and sites. I know I'm not the only one =)
I like what you do with the myhouse.com thing. Seems appropriate.
Unlike many technical jobs the game industry requires that your job *becomes* your _life_. Those people who can stay married and happy during that time are very lucky. I know several young people who have gone into the gaming idustry. Unless you have an undying passion for the work you will burn out and leave. Most will say that they work 'normal' work hours untill crunch time but the fact is most game developers can't leave work at work and have a life at home. It's a vicious job.
Quote from one of these people:
He: "I came home and my gf jumped all over me saying 'I'm horny, come to bed'"
Me: "Heh, neglecting your relationshp?"
He: "I was too tired to even think about it"
And frankly the payoffs are not very good. Unless you manage to get on board one of the few megahits you're playing bad odds on making any bonus or large royalties. Console gaming is better but not drastically so.
Ahh, but first we have the genetic revolution to go through. This will be the first truly evolutionary and revolutionary step in human physiology.
The bio-mechanical revolution I can see happening right now but only in minute quantities. These being for amputees mostly. These additions are mostly at the level of limb replacement right now. Robotics and mechanical engineering is still too primitive to do things as complicated as replacing organs and not have to perform very expensive maintenance on them. Currently replacements like this are only done because a biological couterpart cannot be found. When we reach the point where these replacements are superior to human parts then we'll see teh tip of the cyborg iceberg.
Contrast this with genetic engineering which seems ready to explode at any moment.
You are absolutely right about the key junction of mind, body, and mechanics. When the time comes when a human being's mind can be partially or completely replaced by metal. That will be a time when the ethical/religious debate will rage unlike ever before.
Of course, if machine sentience is ever achieved that's another can of worms.
For the record, I don't believe machines will ever be truly sentient. I believe man has something of a 'soul' which cannot be reproduced artificially. And regardless of whether I'm right or wrong, I don't think I'll live to see the day when you can take a human and machine and make them indistinguishable.
I tihnk I could write forever on this stuff but for me, it's kind of pointless. I doubt I'll see much more than the beginnings of any of the revolutionary things that have been listed. And even if I could participate it'll either be too expensive or too 'weird' for me (you older people know what I mean).
I completely agree with you that the chances are absurd. Thas said let me tell you what I heard from the project director of SETI@home.
Basically, they are going on the assumption that any inteligent life that they detect will be *actively* trying to be heard. That means detectable non-natural patterns that are transmitted at regular intervals for extended periods of time. This also assumes that these intelligent beings known that at some point radio waves are the simplest(I think) means of broadcasting long range space communication. This is why the project attempts to scan as much of the sky as possible at least 3 times. This ensures 'good enough' coverage of the sky in regards to area and time (based on their assumptions). This is a very brute force method of scanning. Other SETI projects try to focus on cantidate areas and scan those actively for more minute detail.
The chances are remote and everyone has conceded that. Many of us think the probability is zero of finding _intelligent_ life. However, for some the shot in the dark chance of us finding just one source of extraterrestial intelligence in motivation enough. No one is actually planning on immediately communicating with any contacts.
You forgot to mention 3dfx at all, but that's ok, you were just mentioning comapnies that have poor track records.
FWIW: My experience watching my brother try to play games back in the Riva 128/TNT days was *horrible* comapred to my expereince using 3dfx (V1/V2). Every other nVidia driver release would *break* some other game... why? Because people had to code around their bugs, they would introduce bugs, they would fix bugs that would break older games... endless loop.
It is only _now_ that nVidia has even come close to being good with drivers. Meanwhile I don't have a single problem with my 3dfx drivers/games, not one. Caveat: 3dfx had their own proprietary glide interface that also had to be upgraded every few months and they had little to no OpenGL support and I didn't like the D3D support.
I don't really mean to bash nVidia in favor of 3dfx since 3dfx was essentially living off a previous monopoly. What I do mean to say is that 3d video card drivers are crap across the board. To stay up with the newest coolest games and cards you have to be running full speed in the rat race of driver upgrades and patch downloads. It's stupid, I hate it, no one I know likes it... but we don't have a choice. If we want to game we are stuck with the situation.
I know, I know... time to market is *everything* in 3d consumer graphics, but it still sucks and I don't see or know of a solution.
According to one of the newsgroups (sorry don't remember the name) I lurked in for a while Sony laptops were excellent machines... until you had a problem. Then the almost universal opinion was that Sony's customer service 'sucked'. IBM on the other hand seemed to have both excellent products and very good service. Computers (and especially laptops) are NOT the same as a TV or monitor. With laptops you expose them to a great deal of potential jarring and abuse as oppose to a tv or monitor that may never move in the X years that you own it.
No, I don't have hard facts. Just reporting the general consensus that many of us base our buying decisions on. All of that said, I think Sony products are almost irresistably appealing once you get one in your hands.
Actually elements of VLIW have trickled into many CPUs. Many DSPs feature this as you have mentioned aas well as Transmetas chip. Also the AltiVec in the G4 is similar to a VLIW design (makes sense, no? Motorola also makes tons of DSPs). It's not the bulk of the chip but it hadnles the specialized instructions and that's where all of this 'G4 is twice as fast as a Pentium III' stuff comes from
That's true. I'm wondering that all these people with PC backgrounds going into the console market is going to result in either crappier games/os software or add the patching capability. MS has a history of 'upgrades/features release/bug fix' paths in their software. id's also patch crazy. Hopefully being homogenous will result in lower severe bug counts.
Also, while buggy programming can happen anywhere, it is much much rarer in the console market. Also, what was the recall for? I remember hearing stuff about faulty ram or having region locking disabled but nothing about the programming being particularly wrong.
I forgot to add this: in my observations the single greatest factor in teh success or failure of the console market (now developers have 'free' choice) is what games get released on what platforms. IIRC the N64 was/is a huge flop in Japan largely because Square (Final Fantasy) and a multitude of other developers didn't like Nintendo's dev kits and hardware. Popular belief seems to be that Nintendo-Japan is barely staying even while Pokemon has made Nintendo-USA profitable.
So, whether key developers flock to a platform is also key to the success of the console. Obviously Carmack/id is a key developer from the PC side of things but he's a very small fish in a large ocean in the console market.
I also wonder if standards will relax with the influx of PC developers turned console developers (or both) especially in light of MS's X-Box entry. I know a lot of people believe that MS can turn out a really good OS layer but I still have reservations (even with fixed hardware target).
An interesting point of view. It should be intersting to examine Sony which is the only major player to ship both console and pc units. Both are very cool and both have good visibility. I've heard that Sony is surviving on the strength of PS/PS2 sales but I wonder how they view their own pc products.
I went into a CompUSA to just browse and saw a whole row of slick Sony PC products (the firewire hds, flat screen units, ultra-portable laptops, etc). I think the X-Box will be the first really big push to 'compete' with pcs. These systems will probably look like net-appliances in terms of non-console functionality for a while but there's a key issue and that is "Do people who play console games _really want_ to be able to have their console be a pc?"
The other issue, of course, is platform stability. As others mentioned, as well as Carmack, once you start selling compatibility with generic interfaces (modems, usb, etc) you run into driver support issues. The develoeprs and consumers fall into the mess that PC gaming/hardware/drivers is in. The support costs for this for everyone involved (patches, tech support, downloads) will be large and may take away enough from the profit to kill support.
And then theres a item that the X-Box which really concerns many people: patching. With the introduction of built in hard-drives (not like the PS2's add on HD) you run into the potential to require patching. More importantly you have to condition the users and developers to accept patching... which leads us right back to where we are in PC gaming. Maybe it's just me but I'd _really_ like to avoid this issue completely.
I think convergence in this area will be avoided for a little longer, but that depends a lot on how well the X-Box does and how MS handles the consoles role. Again we play 'wait and see'.
Mayhaps you dislike the controls of the game you mention because most of them were *designed* for the PC with it's ubiquitous kb/mouse combination? Adaptations are rarely very good.
(For example, try playing tetris on a keyboard or a gamepad.)
Consoles *do* need a keyboard like device. I've been dying for one for a while. Basically a specially designed baord that has 'optimal' button/key placement and lots of them. At this point in console evolution I'd rather have a specialized device like this than a full keyboard.
Not to knock the rest of your comments but testing load times on Slashdot is a _very_ poor benchmark. I'm sure you're smart enough to know some reasons why but in my own experiences both seem nearly identical in speed.
Slashdot Mirror
In an article I read (TIME Magazine) they basically charge other sites for using their engine _per query_. Considering Yahoo is/has switched to them you gotta think that brings in some serious cash.
Just to add another voice. BSDs can do this rather easily as well. Between packages, ports, and cvsup you can completely update your system every night if you want. This means the entire system kernel and all. Kinda funny how much Debian and the BSds are alike in ways.
Well, it'a about attitudes. Linux has so many distributions and changes so rapidly that implementing time-consuming security audits might be seen as a waste of time. By the time you got a bunch of fixes done the 'next version' would be out and the whole deal of rolling in fixes might be a big enough hassle to discourage others. The best thing would be to have a security conscious distribution. Debian probably comes closest to this. They have the 'sit on it till it's ready' mindset that you would need with security being a primary goal. OpenBSD's fixes are listed on their site; I assume people are either ignorant or lazy concerning rolling security fixes into other products.
As the article notes, security is a mindset. You have to be a certain type of person with a certain outlook on life. I've setup some routers/firewalls for some friends and some of them could careless whether telnet is secure or not. I know others, mostly system admins, who cringe at the thought of even typing 'telnet'.
Oh, I dunno but maybe licensing conflicts might screw up some people. BSD's pretty liberal about usage but you never know about how others take that.
Just one thing.
The Helios homepage has this stuff about "resetting your handheld" and "locked up applications". Coming from a Palm/Visor background that's sort of stunning. Should I expect this from my Palm device? Until now I've never considered (or had cause to consider) that my handheld would screw up and lockup forcing a 'reset'.
Hmm, maybe I should dig around with the Palm stuff...
I'd contend that being innovative has absoultely positively NOTHING to do with fun. Look at Trespasser. Look at Quake 3. (actually I dislike both but I'm going on majority 'opinion').
I loved War2, I loved C&C and I still love Starcraft. Being a sheep dyed in many colors isn't a bad thing as long as you still enjoy the game. I mean we play games in real life with balls all day long! Football, soccer, baseball, basketball, foosball, ping pong, etc. These are getting tiresome? No. They only get boring for people who live on quick fixes.
I suspect RTS's are more prone to 'get old' more quickly to these non-die hard players because of their repetitive nature. Instead of reveling in the intricacies of the gameplay and variety of offense and defense they merely see a battle to control resources and kill the other guy.
The Gamecenter editors are clearly playing favorites and trying to create controversy with their mentioning of the RTS and subsequent omission of FPSs. Playing 'god' editor is a pretty quick way to lose ALL respect from anyone who is a hardcore gamer at heart.
You're right, but the article mentions it as 666. Just another thing piece of info that a legitimate source would not have said.
*sigh* I don't know what constitutes as trolling anymore. bummer. (in response to my previous post's moderation).
Doubtful. Apple seems to have a differnt market focus for many things. Being in big time corporate America doesn't seem to be it. Do you know of many corporations that like having translucent colored objects?
Apple's success in the 3D gaming market will rest largely on how ATI's 3D cards perform. That's been the bottleneck in the past. The Radeon looks good but obviously ATI and Apple are on thin ice right now.
I've never had a problem with them in terms of hardware or compatibility. I never had to do much tinkering with the networking and worked just fine as a workstation in a heterogenous environment (Win/Mac/*ix). I never had to make them work in en environment larger than 20 computers however. I do despise their OS though. OS X looks promissing if they can speed it up a ton.
Altivec can make huge diffrence for applications that it was designed for. ie, vetor based performance and large SIMD instructions (OSX's pdf thingy might take advantage of it). Things like FFTs and such should get a huge boost out of it. It's is also how the G4s have stayed 'up there' in terms of benchmarking.
But as others have mentioned you need to have compiled for it or hand tweaked the assembly. Not a big deal. They are good chips and Altivec would appear to blow the snot out of Intels SIMD offerings.
So yes, Altivec is a good move. It's definately a performance enhancer. Unless they keep switching the architecture every year it can't hurt them.
Heh, More points to add to your comment.
No marketing department in the Christian(and maybe elsewhere) world would *EVER* market a processor as 666 Mhz.
This is probably why a.com doesn't run a server. I think I use a@a.com at least once a day in order to download, preview, login, or register for producst and sites. I know I'm not the only one =)
I like what you do with the myhouse.com thing. Seems appropriate.
Unlike many technical jobs the game industry requires that your job *becomes* your _life_. Those people who can stay married and happy during that time are very lucky. I know several young people who have gone into the gaming idustry. Unless you have an undying passion for the work you will burn out and leave. Most will say that they work 'normal' work hours untill crunch time but the fact is most game developers can't leave work at work and have a life at home. It's a vicious job.
Quote from one of these people:
He: "I came home and my gf jumped all over me saying 'I'm horny, come to bed'"
Me: "Heh, neglecting your relationshp?"
He: "I was too tired to even think about it"
And frankly the payoffs are not very good. Unless you manage to get on board one of the few megahits you're playing bad odds on making any bonus or large royalties. Console gaming is better but not drastically so.
Ahh, but first we have the genetic revolution to go through. This will be the first truly evolutionary and revolutionary step in human physiology.
The bio-mechanical revolution I can see happening right now but only in minute quantities. These being for amputees mostly. These additions are mostly at the level of limb replacement right now. Robotics and mechanical engineering is still too primitive to do things as complicated as replacing organs and not have to perform very expensive maintenance on them. Currently replacements like this are only done because a biological couterpart cannot be found. When we reach the point where these replacements are superior to human parts then we'll see teh tip of the cyborg iceberg.
Contrast this with genetic engineering which seems ready to explode at any moment.
You are absolutely right about the key junction of mind, body, and mechanics. When the time comes when a human being's mind can be partially or completely replaced by metal. That will be a time when the ethical/religious debate will rage unlike ever before.
Of course, if machine sentience is ever achieved that's another can of worms.
For the record, I don't believe machines will ever be truly sentient. I believe man has something of a 'soul' which cannot be reproduced artificially. And regardless of whether I'm right or wrong, I don't think I'll live to see the day when you can take a human and machine and make them indistinguishable.
I tihnk I could write forever on this stuff but for me, it's kind of pointless. I doubt I'll see much more than the beginnings of any of the revolutionary things that have been listed. And even if I could participate it'll either be too expensive or too 'weird' for me (you older people know what I mean).
I completely agree with you that the chances are absurd. Thas said let me tell you what I heard from the project director of SETI@home.
Basically, they are going on the assumption that any inteligent life that they detect will be *actively* trying to be heard. That means detectable non-natural patterns that are transmitted at regular intervals for extended periods of time. This also assumes that these intelligent beings known that at some point radio waves are the simplest(I think) means of broadcasting long range space communication. This is why the project attempts to scan as much of the sky as possible at least 3 times. This ensures 'good enough' coverage of the sky in regards to area and time (based on their assumptions). This is a very brute force method of scanning. Other SETI projects try to focus on cantidate areas and scan those actively for more minute detail.
The chances are remote and everyone has conceded that. Many of us think the probability is zero of finding _intelligent_ life. However, for some the shot in the dark chance of us finding just one source of extraterrestial intelligence in motivation enough. No one is actually planning on immediately communicating with any contacts.
Me? I run rc5.
Oracle and MS SQL I believe.
I was refering to drivers. Why do people like to abuse the moderation system?
You forgot to mention 3dfx at all, but that's ok, you were just mentioning comapnies that have poor track records.
FWIW: My experience watching my brother try to play games back in the Riva 128/TNT days was *horrible* comapred to my expereince using 3dfx (V1/V2). Every other nVidia driver release would *break* some other game... why? Because people had to code around their bugs, they would introduce bugs, they would fix bugs that would break older games... endless loop.
It is only _now_ that nVidia has even come close to being good with drivers. Meanwhile I don't have a single problem with my 3dfx drivers/games, not one. Caveat: 3dfx had their own proprietary glide interface that also had to be upgraded every few months and they had little to no OpenGL support and I didn't like the D3D support.
I don't really mean to bash nVidia in favor of 3dfx since 3dfx was essentially living off a previous monopoly. What I do mean to say is that 3d video card drivers are crap across the board. To stay up with the newest coolest games and cards you have to be running full speed in the rat race of driver upgrades and patch downloads. It's stupid, I hate it, no one I know likes it... but we don't have a choice. If we want to game we are stuck with the situation.
I know, I know... time to market is *everything* in 3d consumer graphics, but it still sucks and I don't see or know of a solution.
According to one of the newsgroups (sorry don't remember the name) I lurked in for a while Sony laptops were excellent machines... until you had a problem. Then the almost universal opinion was that Sony's customer service 'sucked'. IBM on the other hand seemed to have both excellent products and very good service. Computers (and especially laptops) are NOT the same as a TV or monitor. With laptops you expose them to a great deal of potential jarring and abuse as oppose to a tv or monitor that may never move in the X years that you own it.
No, I don't have hard facts. Just reporting the general consensus that many of us base our buying decisions on. All of that said, I think Sony products are almost irresistably appealing once you get one in your hands.
I stand corrected
Actually elements of VLIW have trickled into many CPUs. Many DSPs feature this as you have mentioned aas well as Transmetas chip. Also the AltiVec in the G4 is similar to a VLIW design (makes sense, no? Motorola also makes tons of DSPs). It's not the bulk of the chip but it hadnles the specialized instructions and that's where all of this 'G4 is twice as fast as a Pentium III' stuff comes from
That's true. I'm wondering that all these people with PC backgrounds going into the console market is going to result in either crappier games/os software or add the patching capability. MS has a history of 'upgrades/features release/bug fix' paths in their software. id's also patch crazy. Hopefully being homogenous will result in lower severe bug counts.
Also, while buggy programming can happen anywhere, it is much much rarer in the console market. Also, what was the recall for? I remember hearing stuff about faulty ram or having region locking disabled but nothing about the programming being particularly wrong.
I forgot to add this: in my observations the single greatest factor in teh success or failure of the console market (now developers have 'free' choice) is what games get released on what platforms. IIRC the N64 was/is a huge flop in Japan largely because Square (Final Fantasy) and a multitude of other developers didn't like Nintendo's dev kits and hardware. Popular belief seems to be that Nintendo-Japan is barely staying even while Pokemon has made Nintendo-USA profitable.
So, whether key developers flock to a platform is also key to the success of the console. Obviously Carmack/id is a key developer from the PC side of things but he's a very small fish in a large ocean in the console market.
I also wonder if standards will relax with the influx of PC developers turned console developers (or both) especially in light of MS's X-Box entry. I know a lot of people believe that MS can turn out a really good OS layer but I still have reservations (even with fixed hardware target).
An interesting point of view. It should be intersting to examine Sony which is the only major player to ship both console and pc units. Both are very cool and both have good visibility. I've heard that Sony is surviving on the strength of PS/PS2 sales but I wonder how they view their own pc products.
I went into a CompUSA to just browse and saw a whole row of slick Sony PC products (the firewire hds, flat screen units, ultra-portable laptops, etc). I think the X-Box will be the first really big push to 'compete' with pcs. These systems will probably look like net-appliances in terms of non-console functionality for a while but there's a key issue and that is "Do people who play console games _really want_ to be able to have their console be a pc?"
The other issue, of course, is platform stability. As others mentioned, as well as Carmack, once you start selling compatibility with generic interfaces (modems, usb, etc) you run into driver support issues. The develoeprs and consumers fall into the mess that PC gaming/hardware/drivers is in. The support costs for this for everyone involved (patches, tech support, downloads) will be large and may take away enough from the profit to kill support.
And then theres a item that the X-Box which really concerns many people: patching. With the introduction of built in hard-drives (not like the PS2's add on HD) you run into the potential to require patching. More importantly you have to condition the users and developers to accept patching... which leads us right back to where we are in PC gaming. Maybe it's just me but I'd _really_ like to avoid this issue completely.
I think convergence in this area will be avoided for a little longer, but that depends a lot on how well the X-Box does and how MS handles the consoles role. Again we play 'wait and see'.
Mayhaps you dislike the controls of the game you mention because most of them were *designed* for the PC with it's ubiquitous kb/mouse combination? Adaptations are rarely very good.
(For example, try playing tetris on a keyboard or a gamepad.)
Consoles *do* need a keyboard like device. I've been dying for one for a while. Basically a specially designed baord that has 'optimal' button/key placement and lots of them. At this point in console evolution I'd rather have a specialized device like this than a full keyboard.
This was already posted on slashdot once. Seems even Hemos likes to have Katz on ignore ... ;P
Not to knock the rest of your comments but testing load times on Slashdot is a _very_ poor benchmark. I'm sure you're smart enough to know some reasons why but in my own experiences both seem nearly identical in speed.