Agreed. This is wonderful news! A company is funding open source hackers with no requirements on what that money should be used for. If the board acts responsibly and puts the money to good use, this'll help in making the next Firefox version even better.
In my opinion, they should focus on two completely separate subjects:
* Performance improvements, mostly in the form of memory usage reductions and removal of memory leaks. One suggestion I've heard a few times is to run all plugins in a separate process which would occasionally get replaced. * Hurry up tith the stack of next-generation tools for making it possible to create pages with advanced client-side logic without hacks like AJAX. XForms, a cleaned up JavaScript language, a much expanded JavaScript library including image creation and compression.
The article is about the development of a PS2 game. On consoles you don't have that kind of problem. You know from day one what your target system is like, and you can write for that one specific piece of hardware. (Not true for first gen titles, which is one of the reasons they look so much worse than later titles)
Right. And this power supply is actually designed to be used in a case with a case fan to help move the air. So while the PSU itself is silent, it is not really designed to be a part of a silent computer.
But it can be done. I own a Silvestone PSU, and I use it in a fanless case. I have connected the PSU to a Zalman Reserator, which is a fanless watercooling solution. I'm also using the Reserator to cool my GPU, CPU and Northbridge. In order to silence my HDD I built a really sturdy noise-proof box, and put the HDD in it, together with a water block connected to the Reserator.
The result? I've been running a nearly 100% silent system with reasonable performance (Athlon64 3000+, dual videocards, fast HDD) for about one year. The biggest downside is the maintainability. Changing a system component can take well over an hour, what with emptying the system of water, removing the tubing, etc..
The article isn't about the cost for companies from all the bandwidht used up by indexing your site. Nielsen argues that the high prices for Googles targeted web-ads are killing the internet sites. In my opinion, Nielsen is nuts. He doesn't grasp the concept of supply and demand at all.
He first argues that if a search engine ad will statistically give your company $4 in net profit from additional sales, your company will be willing to give a search engine $3.99 for every clickthrough. He then argues that almost any site can be improved to double sales, giving you $8 in net income per sale, and that therfore you will gladly pay $7.99 for every clickthrough. Finally he argues that your competitors will eventually catch up with you, reducing your profit margin to $4 again, at which point you'll loose $3.99 for every clickthrough.
Here are some reasons why Nielsen is completely wrong:
Since there are several competing search engine providers, including Google, MSN, Amazon and Yahoo, the search engine provider can't dictate the price. There is a supply/demand balance that will be met, meaning that the search engine providers and the B2B sites will share the profits, they won't all go to one part. The market can be a bit slow to adapt, and right now the search engine providers are raking in the profits, but this will balance out soon enough.
Even if we ignore the market equilibrium, You don't need to pay more for clickthroughs than just above what your competitors are willing to pay. Even if this really was purely a sellers market, if your competitors have a $4 profit margin, and you have $8 in profit margin, you can just price your ads at $4.01 and rake in the profits.
No one sane would pay more for clicks than they generate, so once your profit margin decreases, you'll stop paying insane amounts of money for clickthroughs. In other words, only an idiot would lose money from search engines. At worst, they won't generate any profit for you. But earning money for doing nothing at all is not considered a human right in most counties, so that's not a problem either.
You patent technologies, not languages. Since Parrot and Mono use the same kinds of algorithms internally, there is nothing that says Parrot has less patent problems than Mono. Gcj might be potentially safer than mono, but Parrot isn't.
Is it? Not to me, anyway. My computer is hidden behind the sofa, there is plenty of room for a cooling tower there as well. I can see that if you want to take your computer with you to a LAN party, it would be a problem, though.
I didn't have to make any _severe_ tradeoffs to make my computer silent. I use a Zalman Reserator to cool the whole computer, I have an AMD64-3000+ (slightly undervolted), two generic graphics cards (nvidia, don't remember type, but not suitable for high-end gaming), and a Seagate HDD and a fanless silverstone power supply. All of these components are connected to the Reserator, and I built a really thick, well isolated box that I keep the HDD in. Even at one foots distance, the noise from the computer is drowned by the noise of blood running through my ears. The noise from the HDD when it's seeking can be heard up to three feet away, though.
Took some time to build custom heatsinks for the power supply and for the HDD, but in the end I don't see what parts of the computer would be significantly different if I had allowed it to make noise. (I could have added better graphics cards, but there is no need for me, since I do all my gaming on consoles. Speaking of which, wonder how I can silence my 360...)
He wrote Fray. It's about a future slayer. I thought it was so-so, but my girlfriend (a huge Buffy fan and avid comics reader) thought it was great. Whedon has also written some X-men for Marvel, they're released under the name 'Astonishing X-men'. I liked the first arc, second one was a bit bleh. I think more X-men will be coming in 2006.
I think it's the other way around. OO is an advanced concept, one that shouldn't be introduced at once. I think that a struggling programer has his/her hands full just learning the language syntax. It's a much better idea to start using a language witha small, simple syntax like C or MATLAB.
And yes, writing any non-trivial program is a chore in C because it is so low level. But it really is a simple language.
There seem to be two claims in the article, though they are both kind of vauge.
The first one is that 720p is not true HD. 720p is 1280*720 @ 60Hz, which is roughly 5.3 higher than SD as used in DVDs, i.e. 720*480 @ 60/2 Hz. 1080p is 1920*1080 @ 60 Hz, another 2.2 times more than 720p. So the step between 720p and 1080p is much smaller than the one from 480i to 720p. It should also be noted that 720p and 1080i contain roughly the same amount of information. It is very unclear to what degree Sony will support 1080p. While the PS3 itself will support it, that does not mean all games will. Sony has made no such statements. Sonys consumer level projectors that are sold today use 720p resolution internally. Blu-ray will support both 720p and 1080p. While many movies will probably be released in 1080p, they are originally shot at 24 FPS, which means they will actually contain less information thatn a full 720p signal, i.e. less information than the 'not HD' Xbox 360. I don't know if there are any tv-series shot in higher resolution than 720p, but I'm sure there aren't many. So there will be very little content for Sony to release that can outperform what the Xbox 360 does today.
The second claim is even more vauge. You need three things for HD:
A HD compatible TV-set
Something that can generate an HD signal (like a HD reciever, PS3, a PC or a Xbox 360)
Some HD material (Like a game for the Xbox 360, a HD cable signal or a HD-resolution video file)
What Sony seems to be implying is that while there are lots and lots of different providers that can give you any one of the above, no single provider is currently providing all three. This is true. Sony is also saying that if you aren't using the same brand on all three parts, you aren't using HD. This is false.
By extension, that would imply that once the PS3 arrives, you won't be doing real HD unless you are playing a Sony game and using a Sony TV-set. So you best forget about playing Resident Evil or buying that Panasonic plasma. Otherwise you won't be doing HD. Says Sony.
No he shouldn't. Read what he actually said. His complaints are just as valid of OS X as of Gnome. He should use KDE or some other infinitely tweakable Linux desktop.
It's obvious that you are joking, but the problem is that this is exactly the solution that will be proposed, and in politics it is the preferred type of solution.
I've been toying around a bit with AJAX, and it really depends on what you are doing. Autocomplete should ideally be implemented using an indexed table of common words, or something like that, since if it does anything complex, it will be dog slow because of the large number of transactions. Also, client-side caching is good to make sure the amount of network trafic doesn't get out of hand. You can do some cool things with very little JavaScript, like my english to elvish interactive translator.
Other AJAX concepts actually make things faster. I've been implementing a forum that never reloads. When you write an entry and press the submit button, an XmlHTTP request is sent containing the new post and the id of the last recieved post. The reply contains all new posts, which are then appended to the innerHTML of the content div-tag. Less CPU-time is spent regenerating virtually identical pages over and over, and less data is sent over the network.
I seem to remember reading that Microsoft specifically designed the 360 hardware to make dynamically generated textures and models quick, that's the solution they are pushing. And I for one think it is the right solution.
I can't help but feel that the only reason for needing more than 9 GB for a game is huge amounts of laziness. What takes up all that space? Here's what I can come up with:
The game code. That should not be more than a few magabytes, obviously a neglectable part.
Sounds and music. Should compress very well. One gigabyte should give you something like 12 hours worth of high quality sounds, if properly compressed. I excpect that using lots of uncompressed sounds may be one of the causes for the huge amounts of used space.
Textures. No matter how many static textures you have, and how large they are, they will always end up looking repetitive. The only way to get truly good looking textures is to create them procedurally. You often need some data to generate good procedural textures, but not more than a few megabytes. I would guess that all the first-gen 360-titles used static textures, so this is probably the main culprit.
Models. Plygon models are dwarfed in size by textures.
FMV. While in-game cutscenes usually are preferable since they use the same visual style as in-game graphics, developers are lazy. I excpect this is one of the things that take up a lot of room.
Other stuff like background images, animated company logo FMV, trailers for other games, etc. Might take a bit of space, but most of it would probably get cut in order to save the cost of adding an extra disc, so this is probably not it.
My guess is that game developers will bite the bullet and learn how to use procedural textures to make smaller but better looking games, and in the end we will see huge games with great graphics that fit on a single DVD9.
DOA2 for the Dreamcast had antialiasing, they had to drop that for the PS2 version. First-gen titles usually look a bit like ass these days. The only re4ason I want to get my hands on a 360 now and not in 6 months is that I have a HDTV projector, so I really want the increased resolution.
You thought that those screenshots look fancy? My first thought on looking at those screenshots was 'How could they make such a butt ugly theme the default for Swing applications?'. It combines the worst apects of Motif and Windows95.
You're not seeing the big picture. Sure, this is not the be all, end all solution to the entire environment problem, but it might turn out to be a large piece of the puzzle. Other pieces might include finding a way to make cheap plastics and rubber-like materials out of something other than oil, somehow changing the suburban lifestyle in the U.S. so that public transport starts to make sense, creating environemnt friendly batteries or some other form of portable energy source, finding a way to control pests without using dangerous pesticides and finding a reliable way to free the mallocs.
Complaining that the potential solution to one of our biggest environmental problems will not make the entire problem go away is short-sighted and unproductive.
My hopes are kind of different. I though the single-player arcade mode of SSB, while obviously rushed and rather thin, was an awesome idea: Choose any of the classic Nintendo characres and play them in a world that contains levels taken from various classic Nintendo games. Try to play 'Ice climber' using Pikachu, or playing Zelda using Fox, etc. Given enough effort and polish, this could be a wonderful way to rediscover the magic of the older Nintendo titles. Even more fun would be a multiplayer co-op version of the arcade mode.
I don't know enough about the package databases to know if there is a simple way around your first problem, but the second one is only a trouble in cases of lazy packagers making bad dependancy specifications. Package dependancies should be to the relevant ABI version of the library, which is usually stable across minor version numbers.
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Agreed. This is wonderful news! A company is funding open source hackers with no requirements on what that money should be used for. If the board acts responsibly and puts the money to good use, this'll help in making the next Firefox version even better.
In my opinion, they should focus on two completely separate subjects:
* Performance improvements, mostly in the form of memory usage reductions and removal of memory leaks. One suggestion I've heard a few times is to run all plugins in a separate process which would occasionally get replaced.
* Hurry up tith the stack of next-generation tools for making it possible to create pages with advanced client-side logic without hacks like AJAX. XForms, a cleaned up JavaScript language, a much expanded JavaScript library including image creation and compression.
--
Axel
The article is about the development of a PS2 game. On consoles you don't have that kind of problem. You know from day one what your target system is like, and you can write for that one specific piece of hardware. (Not true for first gen titles, which is one of the reasons they look so much worse than later titles)
Right. And this power supply is actually designed to be used in a case with a case fan to help move the air. So while the PSU itself is silent, it is not really designed to be a part of a silent computer.
But it can be done. I own a Silvestone PSU, and I use it in a fanless case. I have connected the PSU to a Zalman Reserator, which is a fanless watercooling solution. I'm also using the Reserator to cool my GPU, CPU and Northbridge. In order to silence my HDD I built a really sturdy noise-proof box, and put the HDD in it, together with a water block connected to the Reserator.
The result? I've been running a nearly 100% silent system with reasonable performance (Athlon64 3000+, dual videocards, fast HDD) for about one year. The biggest downside is the maintainability. Changing a system component can take well over an hour, what with emptying the system of water, removing the tubing, etc..
The article isn't about the cost for companies from all the bandwidht used up by indexing your site. Nielsen argues that the high prices for Googles targeted web-ads are killing the internet sites. In my opinion, Nielsen is nuts. He doesn't grasp the concept of supply and demand at all.
He first argues that if a search engine ad will statistically give your company $4 in net profit from additional sales, your company will be willing to give a search engine $3.99 for every clickthrough. He then argues that almost any site can be improved to double sales, giving you $8 in net income per sale, and that therfore you will gladly pay $7.99 for every clickthrough. Finally he argues that your competitors will eventually catch up with you, reducing your profit margin to $4 again, at which point you'll loose $3.99 for every clickthrough.
Here are some reasons why Nielsen is completely wrong:
Since there are several competing search engine providers, including Google, MSN, Amazon and Yahoo, the search engine provider can't dictate the price. There is a supply/demand balance that will be met, meaning that the search engine providers and the B2B sites will share the profits, they won't all go to one part. The market can be a bit slow to adapt, and right now the search engine providers are raking in the profits, but this will balance out soon enough.
Even if we ignore the market equilibrium, You don't need to pay more for clickthroughs than just above what your competitors are willing to pay. Even if this really was purely a sellers market, if your competitors have a $4 profit margin, and you have $8 in profit margin, you can just price your ads at $4.01 and rake in the profits.
No one sane would pay more for clicks than they generate, so once your profit margin decreases, you'll stop paying insane amounts of money for clickthroughs. In other words, only an idiot would lose money from search engines. At worst, they won't generate any profit for you. But earning money for doing nothing at all is not considered a human right in most counties, so that's not a problem either.
You patent technologies, not languages. Since Parrot and Mono use the same kinds of algorithms internally, there is nothing that says Parrot has less patent problems than Mono. Gcj might be potentially safer than mono, but Parrot isn't.
Is it? Not to me, anyway. My computer is hidden behind the sofa, there is plenty of room for a cooling tower there as well. I can see that if you want to take your computer with you to a LAN party, it would be a problem, though.
I didn't have to make any _severe_ tradeoffs to make my computer silent. I use a Zalman Reserator to cool the whole computer, I have an AMD64-3000+ (slightly undervolted), two generic graphics cards (nvidia, don't remember type, but not suitable for high-end gaming), and a Seagate HDD and a fanless silverstone power supply. All of these components are connected to the Reserator, and I built a really thick, well isolated box that I keep the HDD in. Even at one foots distance, the noise from the computer is drowned by the noise of blood running through my ears. The noise from the HDD when it's seeking can be heard up to three feet away, though.
Took some time to build custom heatsinks for the power supply and for the HDD, but in the end I don't see what parts of the computer would be significantly different if I had allowed it to make noise. (I could have added better graphics cards, but there is no need for me, since I do all my gaming on consoles. Speaking of which, wonder how I can silence my 360...)
Does it run on a toaster?
Only if your toaster uses a Pentium4 heat element
Wonderfalls is wonderfull and I highly recommend it. But as a series it has very little to do with Firefly.
He wrote Fray. It's about a future slayer. I thought it was so-so, but my girlfriend (a huge Buffy fan and avid comics reader) thought it was great. Whedon has also written some X-men for Marvel, they're released under the name 'Astonishing X-men'. I liked the first arc, second one was a bit bleh. I think more X-men will be coming in 2006.
Yes. The fish.
I think it's the other way around. OO is an advanced concept, one that shouldn't be introduced at once. I think that a struggling programer has his/her hands full just learning the language syntax. It's a much better idea to start using a language witha small, simple syntax like C or MATLAB.
And yes, writing any non-trivial program is a chore in C because it is so low level. But it really is a simple language.
There seem to be two claims in the article, though they are both kind of vauge.
The first one is that 720p is not true HD. 720p is 1280*720 @ 60Hz, which is roughly 5.3 higher than SD as used in DVDs, i.e. 720*480 @ 60/2 Hz. 1080p is 1920*1080 @ 60 Hz, another 2.2 times more than 720p. So the step between 720p and 1080p is much smaller than the one from 480i to 720p. It should also be noted that 720p and 1080i contain roughly the same amount of information. It is very unclear to what degree Sony will support 1080p. While the PS3 itself will support it, that does not mean all games will. Sony has made no such statements. Sonys consumer level projectors that are sold today use 720p resolution internally. Blu-ray will support both 720p and 1080p. While many movies will probably be released in 1080p, they are originally shot at 24 FPS, which means they will actually contain less information thatn a full 720p signal, i.e. less information than the 'not HD' Xbox 360. I don't know if there are any tv-series shot in higher resolution than 720p, but I'm sure there aren't many. So there will be very little content for Sony to release that can outperform what the Xbox 360 does today.
The second claim is even more vauge. You need three things for HD:
What Sony seems to be implying is that while there are lots and lots of different providers that can give you any one of the above, no single provider is currently providing all three. This is true. Sony is also saying that if you aren't using the same brand on all three parts, you aren't using HD. This is false.
By extension, that would imply that once the PS3 arrives, you won't be doing real HD unless you are playing a Sony game and using a Sony TV-set. So you best forget about playing Resident Evil or buying that Panasonic plasma. Otherwise you won't be doing HD. Says Sony.
No he shouldn't. Read what he actually said. His complaints are just as valid of OS X as of Gnome. He should use KDE or some other infinitely tweakable Linux desktop.
It's obvious that you are joking, but the problem is that this is exactly the solution that will be proposed, and in politics it is the preferred type of solution.
Best. Post. Ever!
I've been toying around a bit with AJAX, and it really depends on what you are doing. Autocomplete should ideally be implemented using an indexed table of common words, or something like that, since if it does anything complex, it will be dog slow because of the large number of transactions. Also, client-side caching is good to make sure the amount of network trafic doesn't get out of hand. You can do some cool things with very little JavaScript, like my english to elvish interactive translator.
Other AJAX concepts actually make things faster. I've been implementing a forum that never reloads. When you write an entry and press the submit button, an XmlHTTP request is sent containing the new post and the id of the last recieved post. The reply contains all new posts, which are then appended to the innerHTML of the content div-tag. Less CPU-time is spent regenerating virtually identical pages over and over, and less data is sent over the network.
I seem to remember reading that Microsoft specifically designed the 360 hardware to make dynamically generated textures and models quick, that's the solution they are pushing. And I for one think it is the right solution.
My guess is that game developers will bite the bullet and learn how to use procedural textures to make smaller but better looking games, and in the end we will see huge games with great graphics that fit on a single DVD9.
What else is new?
DOA2 for the Dreamcast had antialiasing, they had to drop that for the PS2 version. First-gen titles usually look a bit like ass these days. The only re4ason I want to get my hands on a 360 now and not in 6 months is that I have a HDTV projector, so I really want the increased resolution.
Nope. There are only 23 different kinds of letters in the sentence. No q's for example.
You thought that those screenshots look fancy? My first thought on looking at those screenshots was 'How could they make such a butt ugly theme the default for Swing applications?'. It combines the worst apects of Motif and Windows95.
You're not seeing the big picture. Sure, this is not the be all, end all solution to the entire environment problem, but it might turn out to be a large piece of the puzzle. Other pieces might include finding a way to make cheap plastics and rubber-like materials out of something other than oil, somehow changing the suburban lifestyle in the U.S. so that public transport starts to make sense, creating environemnt friendly batteries or some other form of portable energy source, finding a way to control pests without using dangerous pesticides and finding a reliable way to free the mallocs.
Complaining that the potential solution to one of our biggest environmental problems will not make the entire problem go away is short-sighted and unproductive.
My hopes are kind of different. I though the single-player arcade mode of SSB, while obviously rushed and rather thin, was an awesome idea: Choose any of the classic Nintendo characres and play them in a world that contains levels taken from various classic Nintendo games. Try to play 'Ice climber' using Pikachu, or playing Zelda using Fox, etc. Given enough effort and polish, this could be a wonderful way to rediscover the magic of the older Nintendo titles. Even more fun would be a multiplayer co-op version of the arcade mode.
I don't know enough about the package databases to know if there is a simple way around your first problem, but the second one is only a trouble in cases of lazy packagers making bad dependancy specifications. Package dependancies should be to the relevant ABI version of the library, which is usually stable across minor version numbers.