Prachett's popularity has definitely not translated as well to the US. His books do sell, and he is well respected. But I don't know if his sales are all that exceptional here. If he's #2 or #3 the bar must be somewhat low.
Note that if ZRAM works, it would let AMD put something like 4X as much cache on their chips in the same die area. This indeed would be quite a competitive advantage.
But why do people assume this will work? There's a couple companies trying to do this stuff (T-RAM is another) and none have succeeded yet.
It has proven to be difficult to get this kind of technology working in production chips. The main difficulty is that process control becomes very very important. Your yields drop through the floor.
Additionally, note that any 1T transistor technology is inherently a stored charge device (like EPROM, EEPROM or flash memory but different). The problem is that transistors on chips are getting so small that they have less than 100 electrons in the gate of a transistor. So your insulating ability becomes very important. Your chip is designed for electron mobility that electrons can flow around a fairly long loop (the instruction execution path) 1 million times in 1 millisecond. And now you have to make sure that 100 electrons sitting in one place don't leak out in that same time.
It's a challenge. It might be possible. I don't see any particular reason to think that AMD is going to be the one to do it though. Intel are wizards at process technology, as evidenced by their movement to 65nm before AMD. They don't happen to use SOI though, that's about the only advantage AMD has in this situation that I can see.
Anyway, I do like AMD (I'm typing this post on one), but them licensing some unproven technology from a 3rd party is no kind of condemnation of Intel or Apple's choice of Intel.
Well, they're accessed like static RAM (no precharge time). That's why they are useable as caches. In reality though, it would seem like they would have to be refreshed from time to time.
To answer the GP (GGP's?) question also, this technology could not be used in system RAM because system RAM cannot be SOI. Well, it can be SOI I suppose, but since the gates in system RAM are vertical within the chip instead of horizontal, the gate of the transistor would not be located particularly near the insulator and so and effects of SOI helping the gate maintain a floating charge just wouldn't be there.
Google and Yahoo are viewed as doing similar things. Yahoo had a bad quarter, so Google was traded down.
Alternately it could be because their P/E was over 100 and people started to wonder if they really were worth that much.
Additionally, I also heard that people are concerned about click fraud. Something like 30% of ad click-throughs are fradulent (I hear), and I guess there is concern that this will reduce the value of ad placements on the internet and thus impact Google's income.
Sony makes the CCDs for most cameras, including Canon.
They don't make them for Fuji though. Fuji makes their own.
Canon makes their own CMOS sensors, but not their own CCDs.
Sony has made the CCDs for Canon since before digital cameras even existed since Canon used Sony CCDs in their camcorders since at least the days of Hi-8 (did Canon even make camcorders before 8mm)?
Others have already covered the difficulties with turning the SPEs into general-purpose computing elements.
Additionally, even the PPC core in the Cell isn't good for workstations.
The reason is it doesn't have out of order execution (OOE). If a chip doesn't have out of order execution, it isn't good at hiding memory and execution latencies of instructions. So you have to do this in software, by making the compiler rearrange the emitted instructions to do this. This works very well.
But there is a problem with this. That is, when you a buy a workstation and buy apps for it, they usually come precompiled. You cannot rearrange (or even change them) to suit the processor in your machine.
So basically, you cannot make a family of processors run the same already-compiled binaries well using a non-OOE chip. This is not a problem with PS3 because all PS3s will have the same chip with the same latencies and the same memory with the same latencies.
Cell is a great processor for its purpose. It would not make a good Mac-family processor.
I'm pretty sure I remember from my materials science class that pure elements conduct electricy better than any alloy. This is because the alloys have more complex crystal lattices and thus always have a shorter mean free path for electrons, which means higher resistance.
Obviously it's not always true, as the high temperature superconductors are all composites, not pure elements. But at room temperature and high-flux levels (as in electrical transmission), I think it holds true.
Honestly, I've just come to accept the dupes and such pretty much. And I don't think they're in danger of bringing down the site or some such nonesense.
But removing commentary from your detractors is a pretty big turnoff, especially when they've just shown a good lesson of how they are probably right.
It's not racism or anything if you only group with those who you feel will help you most.
If you feel they'll snatch items, you won't group with them. If you feel communication will be a problem and so cause you to lose battles, you won't group with them.
It's just acting in one's own self-interest. I find that people do this all the time, and the insulating effect of sitting along in a room with "society" on the other end of an ethernet cable only increases it.
It's just tough luck here.
If I played on Chinese or Korean WoW servers, how would I make out?
I know this article doesn't explicitly people are being racist about this, but it seems to be the undercurrent. Just trying to nip that in the bud.
you've got it a bit wrong...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
The problem here isn't that Perl defines arrays or lists funny. The problem is in evaluation. In perl, ((1,2),(3,4)) isn't really equivalent to (1,2,3,4); but when the first is evaluated it becomes the second.
It was done to simplify passing arguments. If a function takes a variable number of arguments (like join or for the C folks, printf) you can pass a list and the members of the list will be expanded automatically as parameters.
Is it a good idea? Well, like many things in Perl that were done as convenience in one spot, it comes back to get you in other places sometimes.
As to it being intuitive, that's a strange argument. Computer programming isn't intuitive in any case.
I dug up an old review I did of Forza (esp. vs GT4), and reposted it. Here's a link.
On the Clarkson thing. I have to disagree, Forza did not get those things right. It got more right (see my review), but in Forza, turn 1 still doesn't exist, just like in GT4. Clarkson seems to refer to this. Now, in real life, I've never seen a vehicle that can ignore turn 1 on Laguna Seca. Even an underpowered car like a Spec Miata has to set up for turn 1 a little bit. I do feel that such a vehicle could perhaps exist. It would have to have slow acceleration and lots of lateral grip. In GT4 and Forza, you just drive right through (using the pit-out lane in Forza, you don't even have to do that in GT4).
Additionally, Clarkson is again right on with the area between turn 7 and 8 (8/8a is the Corkscrew, Clarkson refers to it as turn 7). In both games, you blast right over 7 (it's as much a bump as a turn), then do the braking after it. This is impractical in real life. First of all, as Clarkson alludes to, you'd simply fill your shorts. Cresting 7 at full bore, you'd have a wall about 300 feet ahead and a downhill zone to do your braking in. Additionally, most cars in the world just couldn't slow down in that short a distance in a downhill braking zone. Really, neither game gets good marks in this area.
Forza also for some reason has a very sticky turn 9. High-powered cars will drift out quite a bit in 9 in real life, and do somewhat in GT4. But not so in Forza. It's odd. Of course, in GT4, turn 10 is a real joke (like 6 is), so Forza still wins in this part of the course.
Referring to your comments about worthless cars being in GT4, often games do seem to bulk up on cars. None has an SUV race like PGR2 does though! I actually liked the SUV racing in PGR2, it was a change (like the Strana trucks in TOCA 2). But both are only gimmicks, I hope they don't expand upon them in the future. Drive PGR3 and you'll wish these shitboxes were back. PGR3 removes nearly every car any person could reasonably own from the game. I think the only ones left are the Mustang GT, Corvette C6 and Corvette ZR-1. I also know people who own Ferrari 355s (although not the F1 model) and Aston Martin DB9s, but I don't count those. The slowest car in the game is the Ferrari Testarossa. Annoying.
Lack of damage in GT4 doesn't bother me. Damage is mostly a hassle. Forza does try to keep the stupid AI mistakes from hurting your outcome, but it isn't completely successful. There's nothing worse than having to restart a race because the AI punched a hole in your car. This happened in TOCA 2 (most damage modelling yet), and it drove me nust. And TOCA 2 had fewer AI problems than Forza.
I do prefer that games try to keep you from driving on the wall and across the grass to reduce times, especially as online play becomes more important. Unfortunately, Forza didn't penalize you enough for hitting walls strategically, so it can be done to advantage. PGR3 adds slow-down penalties (like GT4 does in the rally races, but not as long) but left out the penalties for crossing the grass. So people cut several corners in the game. Very sad.
I don't feel GT4 feels a lot like GT3. Even GT4 Prologue had significant improvements over GT3. I'm not justifying their lack of online play or the zillion years it took to come out either, but to me it's quite a different game. Do you remember how bad GT3 was? It was greatly inferior to GT2 in game progression, because the removal of cars (and thus the removal of entry qualifications) made the game difficult and pointless at times.
I liked Forza, but as I mentioned in my review, there is plenty of room for improvement. I didn't finish Forza, the races become very difficult due to AI mauling at the high levels, and that's just not fun. And I didn't like the endurance racing in Forza. Despite the technological advancements of the Drivatar, it just didn't work for me.
In my opinion, it is certainly 960x540. Regular 1080i is 1920x1080 30 times a second (in two fields), this would be 960x540 60 times a second. You're right, the PS2 video hardware just can't do anything past 1024x768 (and that's 16-bit), so it has to be a lot lower than that. 960x540 may seem anemic, but the Xbox is only doing 640x480 (perhaps 720x480), so the PS2 scores a clear resolution victory.
It isn't really scaled up, since the signals have the same timings as as 1080i signal, your TV samples it at a higher rate than it is emitted. So it isn't scaled up anywhere, it is simply interpreted differently by the TV than it was emitted.
I did notice the zones in the replays. I figured they were just trying to simulate depth of field. Either way, it doesn't look all that good, does it?
I do agree the vehicle appearance is mixed. Some vehicles look better in Forza, for the most part, I would say the vehicle models are better in GT4. This is shown by the high-res snapshots you can take in the game. But it's clear the highest fidelity models aren't used in-game. In-game, I think that the cars virtually always look better in replays on GT4 than on Forza. While racing (in-car), it's a toss-up, as you say, some cars look better in GT4, some look better (a lot better) in Forza.
The big difference is beyond the cars.
The track looks like smeary crap in Forza. It's too bad, because it's actually better modelled, with dynamic tire skid marks and everything. But the colors are so muted that it just comes off as a muddy mess. The track walls come off the same way. A real shame.
In GT4, the track and track walls are very contrasty, which is likely not realistic. But it works very well in the game. It's important you can see where to turn, and on some tracks in Forza it is difficult to tell which way the track is turning and where.
Beyond the track walls, sometimes Forza looks good. The trees look good. But other things don't look as good.
The real clincher is this: both games have a downtown New York. And the city (the parts outside the track) look much better on GT4 than on Xbox.
All in all, a very impressive win for the aged PS2 over the more graphically capable Xbox.
I've played Forza in 720p on 360 in emulation mode. It doesn't look any better except for the trees. The car models and textures just aren't very high-res. The bad news is that the frame rate is terribly low. When driving down the esses in Road Atlanta, the frame rate drops to about 4 (I'm not kidding). I suppose this might be fixed some day, but right now it's a killer. Oh, and there's no way to use your own music in the game in emulation, so you have to put up with that awful built-in music. Whoops.
Of course, PGR3 looks great. It definitely has the best computer version of the N-ring I've played so far. Too bad the driving model isn't up to par. Don't get me wrong, it's very good for an arcade racer, but as a veteran of sim racers, the model doesn't pass muster.
It's good to see there's someone else out there who both likes racing games (I guess) and isn't completely polarized over this stuff.
Yeah, it did some 2D stuff better. I never saw Alpha blending done on Saturn. Every game I saw used stipples (patently obvious if you used the S-video output, but low-pass filtering on the composite output hid it). I know Alpha blending was possible because the Saturn had much more CPU power than the PS1. You could surely have gotten on of the SH-2s to do some blending.
Internal memory on the Saturn was not a good thing. It meant you couldn't take your save games over to a friend's place. It also meant when you filled up memory you were boned (although it did have a cartridge slot, did someone make backup memory for that?). It didn't even really save money at least in my case since Saturn cost $399 at launch. I could get a $299 PlayStation and a memory card and still have money left over.
I don't see the Live stuff as a problem for developers. Are you saying EA wouldn't be happier just integrating Call of Duty 2 into the PC gaming community instead of having to have a separate realm of 360 players whom are limited to 8 players/game by Live limitations?
Now, it might hurt Sony in the gamer community, we'll just have to see.
As to the PS3 docs being in English, I don't think there's much chance of that. Sony may be headed by a Brit, but they're still Sony.
You're saying the PS3 can't make "movie quality" games because it's leashed with a run-of-the-mill PC graphics chip. Then you say even the demos are overblown because they're shown on run-of-the-mill PC graphics chips.
I don't get your drift. The graphics chip in the PS3 is expected to be an NVidia 7800 equivalent. That's a lot of power. At 1280x720 and 1920x1080 this puppy should scream.
As to your comments about choked on bus bandwidth, that's all directly from the mouth of MS. MS added up the sum total of all the busses in their system and then compared to some figures from Sony and pronounced that the PS3 doesn't have as much bandwidth.
Throughput depends as much on design and interconnection of the busses as their rated burst speed. And summing busses is completely ridiculous. I mean, if you do that, a machine with SATA 3.0Gb/sec to its optical drive (which maxes out at about 240Mb/sec) looks far faster than one which has a PATA ATA/100 (800Mb/sec) interface even though neither can use that speed anyway.
We'll see some amazing things on screen. I think the hardware is definitely good enough on both platforms that it'll be difficult/expensive for developers to max out the hardware anyway.
So now select a product mix. I'd say the average iPod is probably just about $200. The 4GB nano is probably the biggest seller, but the Shuffle probably outsells the w/video, so we'll use $200.
How much is the average Mac selling for? Well, iMacs sell pretty well, I think Minis sell pretty well, and I know towers don't sell very well. So I'm just gonna select the 15" PB ($2000) as a representative price. It's probably too high, since the only thing dragging the price upwards is the 17" PB, since very few towers sell. But perhaps a few accessories are sold with the machines (base stations, extra RAM), so $2000 seems okay.
If these numbers are right, then iPod accounted for $2.8B in sales (before accessories) and the Mac accounted for $2.5B in sales (before add-ons and accessories).
That means iPod is Apple's biggest selling product in dollars or units, and they have a dominant market position in that product space.
I understand your P/E concerns. I say the same things about GOOG (P/E: 100).
But you have to understand these shares have run up with an expectation of higher future earnings. In the case of Apple, basically, next week's earnings numbers are already priced into the stock because Apple release the iPod and iMac sales numbers last week.
So yeah, Apple's P/E is too high right now (over 50), but next week, I expect you'll see it drop back to under 50 because the next quarter's earnings will be record earnings. If the P/E drops to something like 40, then it'll be in line with what it was two weeks ago.
As long as Apple keeps growing at this speed, they can sustain a P/E in the 40s. As soon as they stumble, it'll surely drop to a level more in line with Dell's P/E.
I do agree market cap isn't necessarily the best measure of the value of a company. Remember, AOL had such a high market cap one day that they bought Time-Warner. Which company really was worth more?
From a pedantic point of view, Sony has only released two consoles so far. How can you say they've lied out their ass about 3 consoles? Is it because you somehow know the new one doesn't measure up? Is it your special fanboy sixth sense that gives you the ability to know that?
Additionally, I don't remember PS1 being a disappointment at all. Toshinden was ready for PS1 at launch in JPN, and look great. It played well too, but it had 3-d fighters and 3-D backgrounds. By the time the US PS1 launch rolled around months later Battle Arena: Toshinden was ready with further improved graphics including use of transparency in the backgrounds (waterfall). Meanwhile on Saturn, they had Virtua Fighter which by the US release wasn't even texture mapped! Do you remember receiving your free "VF 1.5" CD in the mail from Sega? I do. And it still didn't look as good because the backgrounds were not 3-D and the platform itself couldn't even do transparency (it used stipples instead).
PS1 handily beat the competition on technical merit and games.
So I don't get your complaints there. Perhaps they are with PS2?
PS2 isn't as clear cut, but as a performance thing, I have to say it works for me, despite a truly bad architecture (very little VRAM) that could have sunk it. It is long in the tooth right now, but it is at the end of its life-cycle.
But is it a failure? Did Sony lie out their ass? Not that I noticed. Yea, they hyped it a bit. Who doesn't? There were references to Toy Story-graphics made, but Toy Story was the big thing at that time and MS made them also for Xbox. It was the first all-CG movie ever. Should I bitch at Bally-Midway because they made two TRON arcade games back when it was new, and neither was even 3D? That's a much more major failing at matching movies. Yes the two games were quite fun (one is a saught-after classic), so why complain?
I would note that except for Dolby Digital, PS2 has actually kept up with the times quite well. This was a platform that wasn't even advertised or planned to do 480p when it came out, and yet does 480p in a fair number of games now and even does 1080i in one (GT4)! It even bested Xbox in the Sim-racing graphics wars of 2005. GT4 definitely has better/fancier graphics than Forza (and has 1080i support while Forza maxes out at 480p), although Rallisport Challenge 2 is still the best looking racing game of its generation (maxes out at 480p, although it looks so good there's no way to complain). And the biggest/most fun racing game of 2005 turned out to be neither GT4 nor Forza but Burnout 3.
As to Sony claiming the CPU would be the new PC CPU, I don't remember that. I don't think Sony thought they would unseat x86. I do remember them saying the PS2 chipset (I'll call it the EE although it's really more than that) would be used in other things. For the most part this wasn't true, but they did ship a PVR using the EE in JPN (the PSX). They also attempted to license the chipset for use in TVs and set-top boxes, but no one took them up on it, probably wisely.
Sony also has plans to use the new (Cell) chipset in TVs/media devices again. Go back and find the Digital Reality Creation 2 announcement, it sounds a lot like it uses a Cell chipset.
Why they keep saying this stuff is basically because they partner with Toshiba to make a custom chipset for them (in this case they even built a new fab specifically for it). When you make that kind of investment, both companies tend to get thinking about how they could use the chip even more, thus making even more profit off a fixed asset (the fab). It is a Japanese tendency to wax poetic about the future of a significant new design/advance like this, and often it doesn't come true. I mean, you can't go buy an Asimo down at your Honda dealer, can you?
I like my 360. The games are almost universally awful, but the hardware is good. I have high hopes for it. But I also have high hopes for PS3. PS1 and PS2 have been very good consoles, and had plenty of titles worth buying the consoles for. So I expect PS3 will be good too. I have to say I find the $400-$500 price ridiculous, but then again, I did buy a 360 at that ridiculous price.
For the exact reasons you say. If they don't have some software to help, then the new games will be no better looking than PS2 games and it'll stunt the platform.
And Katamari Damacy would be made for exactly the reasons you state. Using all the power of the machine would entail too much development cost, so a fun but not technically magnificent game would be made.
This will happen a lot on both 360 and PS3 is my guess. 360 already is showcasing "microgames" like Geometry Wars.
I do think that all but the highest-line titles will not make the full effort to max out the machine on graphics (actually, this is the case on PS2 and 360 also) due to development costs. But Sony will do everything they can to make it possible for the average game to have better graphics and use the new hardware well, just like MS will.
The current generation has a lot to offer outside of what would be done on the specialized processors. Good wireless controllers and HDTV just might be enough to get people to buy a new console once it hits a reasonable price. And for some playing Blu-Ray discs helps too.
In that they didn't understand they couldn't always make the investements they wanted.
But you're wrong. Yes, they had serious problems with liquidity after things went bad. The market even conspired against them after they got in bad shape (that's even worse than no liquidity).
But the start of the problem was they made multiple wagers at the same time, assuming they couldn't all go south at once. They could survive one or even more going against them, but instead it turns out their bets were correlated and a large percentage did actually go south at once.
Since they were so highly leveraged that caused a serious problem with cash flow. They increased their leverage instead of unwinding their positions. Once they did decide to unwind their positions, they ran into liquidity problems (and worse).
So, their liquidity problems may have exacerbate their losses, but their foolishness was already shown by their monetary losses; they were already ruined.
I'm sure some people would reach a different conclusion, especially those who make their livings on Wall Street or hope to some day. But frankly, I think they're just deluding themselves too.
If you have unlimited capital and no betting limit, you cannot lose.
But LTCM didn't have unlimited capital and did have a betting limit (you can't make a bet larger than the rest of the world is willing to take the other side on).
LTCM was betting martingale. That they had two Nobel prize winners and 250 more years of advancement and still ended up with a system that only works as well as martingale is both in indication of the level of foolishness on Wall Street and a real indication of the difficulty (possibility?) of beating the market with a system.
Anyway, if you read the book (better yet, both), you can see that even if they had a few mathematical equations saying they were right, there's a lot more reasons they were actually wrong. The complexity of the markets is sufficient that you can make an equation showing how safe you are and still be wrong. Your equation is either built on incorrect assumptions or fails to include other factors that turn out to be important.
LTCM was wrong mainly because they were using far too much leverage and thought it was okay because they thought they had multiple independent "wagers" that thus lowered their risk, because the likelihood of two independent failures of their system was very low, and they figured they could survive 3 or more! The problem is their wagers were not really independent and so more than 3 went south at once. They fooled themselves. They were fools, not victims of circumstance.
Here's the one most importance in "When Genius Failed". LTCM's return on working capital was smaller than that of a savings account. Their real trick was being able to borrow capital at such low prices. If they had deposited their borrowed capital in savings accounts they would have made more money faster and not lost their butts either. What geniuses.
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein and Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone
Both speak of how Wall Street (and hedge funds in particular) use mathematicians. Both show how those legends you speak of really turned out. Both are very good books (one of them is great), although it sounds like you might be turned off by the general tone of them and the conclusions reached.
I have to warn you, the story isn't pretty. Frankly, I think the major thing Wall Street does is use mathematicians to devise systems (the 18th century France definition of system) to "make money" on the market. In reality, just like martingale, they're creating systems that appear to make money but in reality just yield tiny profits countered with the occasional enormous loss that is much larger than the profits. They're still losing money, it just appears they're not when the mathematical series hasn't run its course.
See the shapes on that power supply? The ones that say "pat. pend" on them? Look at your computer motherboard, right next to the CPU. You'll see those same shapes on there (they're wound inductors).
This is a 120W DC-DC power supply. If you have a 120W CPU, you already have a 120W DC-DC power supply on your motherboard. A very sophisticated one, too, as the supplies to your processor have to be digitally adjustable and hold their voltage very accurately at very high currents.
So it isn't really odd to see this thing. It's a good application of a very common technology.
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Even over the last 3 years with the movies out?
I'd be shocked.
Prachett's popularity has definitely not translated as well to the US. His books do sell, and he is well respected. But I don't know if his sales are all that exceptional here. If he's #2 or #3 the bar must be somewhat low.
Note that if ZRAM works, it would let AMD put something like 4X as much cache on their chips in the same die area. This indeed would be quite a competitive advantage.
But why do people assume this will work? There's a couple companies trying to do this stuff (T-RAM is another) and none have succeeded yet.
It has proven to be difficult to get this kind of technology working in production chips. The main difficulty is that process control becomes very very important. Your yields drop through the floor.
Additionally, note that any 1T transistor technology is inherently a stored charge device (like EPROM, EEPROM or flash memory but different). The problem is that transistors on chips are getting so small that they have less than 100 electrons in the gate of a transistor. So your insulating ability becomes very important. Your chip is designed for electron mobility that electrons can flow around a fairly long loop (the instruction execution path) 1 million times in 1 millisecond. And now you have to make sure that 100 electrons sitting in one place don't leak out in that same time.
It's a challenge. It might be possible. I don't see any particular reason to think that AMD is going to be the one to do it though. Intel are wizards at process technology, as evidenced by their movement to 65nm before AMD. They don't happen to use SOI though, that's about the only advantage AMD has in this situation that I can see.
Anyway, I do like AMD (I'm typing this post on one), but them licensing some unproven technology from a 3rd party is no kind of condemnation of Intel or Apple's choice of Intel.
Well, they're accessed like static RAM (no precharge time). That's why they are useable as caches. In reality though, it would seem like they would have to be refreshed from time to time.
To answer the GP (GGP's?) question also, this technology could not be used in system RAM because system RAM cannot be SOI. Well, it can be SOI I suppose, but since the gates in system RAM are vertical within the chip instead of horizontal, the gate of the transistor would not be located particularly near the insulator and so and effects of SOI helping the gate maintain a floating charge just wouldn't be there.
Google and Yahoo are viewed as doing similar things. Yahoo had a bad quarter, so Google was traded down.
Alternately it could be because their P/E was over 100 and people started to wonder if they really were worth that much.
Additionally, I also heard that people are concerned about click fraud. Something like 30% of ad click-throughs are fradulent (I hear), and I guess there is concern that this will reduce the value of ad placements on the internet and thus impact Google's income.
Sony makes the CCDs for most cameras, including Canon.
They don't make them for Fuji though. Fuji makes their own.
Canon makes their own CMOS sensors, but not their own CCDs.
Sony has made the CCDs for Canon since before digital cameras even existed since Canon used Sony CCDs in their camcorders since at least the days of Hi-8 (did Canon even make camcorders before 8mm)?
Others have already covered the difficulties with turning the SPEs into general-purpose computing elements.
Additionally, even the PPC core in the Cell isn't good for workstations.
The reason is it doesn't have out of order execution (OOE). If a chip doesn't have out of order execution, it isn't good at hiding memory and execution latencies of instructions. So you have to do this in software, by making the compiler rearrange the emitted instructions to do this. This works very well.
But there is a problem with this. That is, when you a buy a workstation and buy apps for it, they usually come precompiled. You cannot rearrange (or even change them) to suit the processor in your machine.
So basically, you cannot make a family of processors run the same already-compiled binaries well using a non-OOE chip. This is not a problem with PS3 because all PS3s will have the same chip with the same latencies and the same memory with the same latencies.
Cell is a great processor for its purpose. It would not make a good Mac-family processor.
I'm pretty sure I remember from my materials science class that pure elements conduct electricy better than any alloy. This is because the alloys have more complex crystal lattices and thus always have a shorter mean free path for electrons, which means higher resistance.
Obviously it's not always true, as the high temperature superconductors are all composites, not pure elements. But at room temperature and high-flux levels (as in electrical transmission), I think it holds true.
Am I wrong?
Honestly, I've just come to accept the dupes and such pretty much. And I don't think they're in danger of bringing down the site or some such nonesense.
But removing commentary from your detractors is a pretty big turnoff, especially when they've just shown a good lesson of how they are probably right.
It's not racism or anything if you only group with those who you feel will help you most.
If you feel they'll snatch items, you won't group with them.
If you feel communication will be a problem and so cause you to lose battles, you won't group with them.
It's just acting in one's own self-interest. I find that people do this all the time, and the insulating effect of sitting along in a room with "society" on the other end of an ethernet cable only increases it.
It's just tough luck here.
If I played on Chinese or Korean WoW servers, how would I make out?
I know this article doesn't explicitly people are being racist about this, but it seems to be the undercurrent. Just trying to nip that in the bud.
The problem here isn't that Perl defines arrays or lists funny. The problem is in evaluation. In perl, ((1,2),(3,4)) isn't really equivalent to (1,2,3,4); but when the first is evaluated it becomes the second.
It was done to simplify passing arguments. If a function takes a variable number of arguments (like join or for the C folks, printf) you can pass a list and the members of the list will be expanded automatically as parameters.
Is it a good idea? Well, like many things in Perl that were done as convenience in one spot, it comes back to get you in other places sometimes.
As to it being intuitive, that's a strange argument. Computer programming isn't intuitive in any case.
Are you saying those who invented/use the term "DRM" don't say it stands for anything?
You're just plain wrong. The earliest recorded uses of this term do indicate the middle "R" stands for "Rights".
Yeah, it's a doublespeak-type acronym, but it's equally Orwellian to try to change the perception of DRM simply by changing its name.
There's no doubt about that in my mind.
I dug up an old review I did of Forza (esp. vs GT4), and reposted it. Here's a link.
On the Clarkson thing. I have to disagree, Forza did not get those things right. It got more right (see my review), but in Forza, turn 1 still doesn't exist, just like in GT4. Clarkson seems to refer to this. Now, in real life, I've never seen a vehicle that can ignore turn 1 on Laguna Seca. Even an underpowered car like a Spec Miata has to set up for turn 1 a little bit. I do feel that such a vehicle could perhaps exist. It would have to have slow acceleration and lots of lateral grip. In GT4 and Forza, you just drive right through (using the pit-out lane in Forza, you don't even have to do that in GT4).
Additionally, Clarkson is again right on with the area between turn 7 and 8 (8/8a is the Corkscrew, Clarkson refers to it as turn 7). In both games, you blast right over 7 (it's as much a bump as a turn), then do the braking after it. This is impractical in real life. First of all, as Clarkson alludes to, you'd simply fill your shorts. Cresting 7 at full bore, you'd have a wall about 300 feet ahead and a downhill zone to do your braking in. Additionally, most cars in the world just couldn't slow down in that short a distance in a downhill braking zone. Really, neither game gets good marks in this area.
Forza also for some reason has a very sticky turn 9. High-powered cars will drift out quite a bit in 9 in real life, and do somewhat in GT4. But not so in Forza. It's odd. Of course, in GT4, turn 10 is a real joke (like 6 is), so Forza still wins in this part of the course.
Referring to your comments about worthless cars being in GT4, often games do seem to bulk up on cars. None has an SUV race like PGR2 does though! I actually liked the SUV racing in PGR2, it was a change (like the Strana trucks in TOCA 2). But both are only gimmicks, I hope they don't expand upon them in the future. Drive PGR3 and you'll wish these shitboxes were back. PGR3 removes nearly every car any person could reasonably own from the game. I think the only ones left are the Mustang GT, Corvette C6 and Corvette ZR-1. I also know people who own Ferrari 355s (although not the F1 model) and Aston Martin DB9s, but I don't count those. The slowest car in the game is the Ferrari Testarossa. Annoying.
Lack of damage in GT4 doesn't bother me. Damage is mostly a hassle. Forza does try to keep the stupid AI mistakes from hurting your outcome, but it isn't completely successful. There's nothing worse than having to restart a race because the AI punched a hole in your car. This happened in TOCA 2 (most damage modelling yet), and it drove me nust. And TOCA 2 had fewer AI problems than Forza.
I do prefer that games try to keep you from driving on the wall and across the grass to reduce times, especially as online play becomes more important. Unfortunately, Forza didn't penalize you enough for hitting walls strategically, so it can be done to advantage. PGR3 adds slow-down penalties (like GT4 does in the rally races, but not as long) but left out the penalties for crossing the grass. So people cut several corners in the game. Very sad.
I don't feel GT4 feels a lot like GT3. Even GT4 Prologue had significant improvements over GT3. I'm not justifying their lack of online play or the zillion years it took to come out either, but to me it's quite a different game. Do you remember how bad GT3 was? It was greatly inferior to GT2 in game progression, because the removal of cars (and thus the removal of entry qualifications) made the game difficult and pointless at times.
I liked Forza, but as I mentioned in my review, there is plenty of room for improvement. I didn't finish Forza, the races become very difficult due to AI mauling at the high levels, and that's just not fun. And I didn't like the endurance racing in Forza. Despite the technological advancements of the Drivatar, it just didn't work for me.
In my opinion, it is certainly 960x540. Regular 1080i is 1920x1080 30 times a second (in two fields), this would be 960x540 60 times a second. You're right, the PS2 video hardware just can't do anything past 1024x768 (and that's 16-bit), so it has to be a lot lower than that. 960x540 may seem anemic, but the Xbox is only doing 640x480 (perhaps 720x480), so the PS2 scores a clear resolution victory.
It isn't really scaled up, since the signals have the same timings as as 1080i signal, your TV samples it at a higher rate than it is emitted. So it isn't scaled up anywhere, it is simply interpreted differently by the TV than it was emitted.
I did notice the zones in the replays. I figured they were just trying to simulate depth of field. Either way, it doesn't look all that good, does it?
I do agree the vehicle appearance is mixed. Some vehicles look better in Forza, for the most part, I would say the vehicle models are better in GT4. This is shown by the high-res snapshots you can take in the game. But it's clear the highest fidelity models aren't used in-game. In-game, I think that the cars virtually always look better in replays on GT4 than on Forza. While racing (in-car), it's a toss-up, as you say, some cars look better in GT4, some look better (a lot better) in Forza.
The big difference is beyond the cars.
The track looks like smeary crap in Forza. It's too bad, because it's actually better modelled, with dynamic tire skid marks and everything. But the colors are so muted that it just comes off as a muddy mess. The track walls come off the same way. A real shame.
In GT4, the track and track walls are very contrasty, which is likely not realistic. But it works very well in the game. It's important you can see where to turn, and on some tracks in Forza it is difficult to tell which way the track is turning and where.
Beyond the track walls, sometimes Forza looks good. The trees look good. But other things don't look as good.
The real clincher is this: both games have a downtown New York. And the city (the parts outside the track) look much better on GT4 than on Xbox.
All in all, a very impressive win for the aged PS2 over the more graphically capable Xbox.
I've played Forza in 720p on 360 in emulation mode. It doesn't look any better except for the trees. The car models and textures just aren't very high-res. The bad news is that the frame rate is terribly low. When driving down the esses in Road Atlanta, the frame rate drops to about 4 (I'm not kidding). I suppose this might be fixed some day, but right now it's a killer. Oh, and there's no way to use your own music in the game in emulation, so you have to put up with that awful built-in music. Whoops.
Of course, PGR3 looks great. It definitely has the best computer version of the N-ring I've played so far. Too bad the driving model isn't up to par. Don't get me wrong, it's very good for an arcade racer, but as a veteran of sim racers, the model doesn't pass muster.
It's good to see there's someone else out there who both likes racing games (I guess) and isn't completely polarized over this stuff.
Yeah, it did some 2D stuff better. I never saw Alpha blending done on Saturn. Every game I saw used stipples (patently obvious if you used the S-video output, but low-pass filtering on the composite output hid it). I know Alpha blending was possible because the Saturn had much more CPU power than the PS1. You could surely have gotten on of the SH-2s to do some blending.
Internal memory on the Saturn was not a good thing. It meant you couldn't take your save games over to a friend's place. It also meant when you filled up memory you were boned (although it did have a cartridge slot, did someone make backup memory for that?). It didn't even really save money at least in my case since Saturn cost $399 at launch. I could get a $299 PlayStation and a memory card and still have money left over.
I don't see the Live stuff as a problem for developers. Are you saying EA wouldn't be happier just integrating Call of Duty 2 into the PC gaming community instead of having to have a separate realm of 360 players whom are limited to 8 players/game by Live limitations?
Now, it might hurt Sony in the gamer community, we'll just have to see.
As to the PS3 docs being in English, I don't think there's much chance of that. Sony may be headed by a Brit, but they're still Sony.
You're saying the PS3 can't make "movie quality" games because it's leashed with a run-of-the-mill PC graphics chip. Then you say even the demos are overblown because they're shown on run-of-the-mill PC graphics chips.
I don't get your drift. The graphics chip in the PS3 is expected to be an NVidia 7800 equivalent. That's a lot of power. At 1280x720 and 1920x1080 this puppy should scream.
As to your comments about choked on bus bandwidth, that's all directly from the mouth of MS. MS added up the sum total of all the busses in their system and then compared to some figures from Sony and pronounced that the PS3 doesn't have as much bandwidth.
Throughput depends as much on design and interconnection of the busses as their rated burst speed. And summing busses is completely ridiculous. I mean, if you do that, a machine with SATA 3.0Gb/sec to its optical drive (which maxes out at about 240Mb/sec) looks far faster than one which has a PATA ATA/100 (800Mb/sec) interface even though neither can use that speed anyway.
We'll see some amazing things on screen. I think the hardware is definitely good enough on both platforms that it'll be difficult/expensive for developers to max out the hardware anyway.
Today, you're right. Mac and iPod both accounted for about 40% of Apple's revenues (sales) last time out.
But this quarter Steve said Apple sold 14M iPods and 1.25M Macs.
Unless the average Mac sold for 10x the price of an average iPod, that means iPod now is Apple's biggest selling product.
iPods are:
$100/$130
$200/$250
$300/$400
Macs are:
$500
$1300/$1700 (iMac)
$1500/$2000/$2500 (PB G4)
$2000/$2500/$3300 (G5 tower)
So now select a product mix. I'd say the average iPod is probably just about $200. The 4GB nano is probably the biggest seller, but the Shuffle probably outsells the w/video, so we'll use $200.
How much is the average Mac selling for?
Well, iMacs sell pretty well, I think Minis sell pretty well, and I know towers don't sell very well. So I'm just gonna select the 15" PB ($2000) as a representative price. It's probably too high, since the only thing dragging the price upwards is the 17" PB, since very few towers sell. But perhaps a few accessories are sold with the machines (base stations, extra RAM), so $2000 seems okay.
If these numbers are right, then iPod accounted for $2.8B in sales (before accessories) and the Mac accounted for $2.5B in sales (before add-ons and accessories).
That means iPod is Apple's biggest selling product in dollars or units, and they have a dominant market position in that product space.
I understand your P/E concerns. I say the same things about GOOG (P/E: 100).
But you have to understand these shares have run up with an expectation of higher future earnings. In the case of Apple, basically, next week's earnings numbers are already priced into the stock because Apple release the iPod and iMac sales numbers last week.
So yeah, Apple's P/E is too high right now (over 50), but next week, I expect you'll see it drop back to under 50 because the next quarter's earnings will be record earnings. If the P/E drops to something like 40, then it'll be in line with what it was two weeks ago.
As long as Apple keeps growing at this speed, they can sustain a P/E in the 40s. As soon as they stumble, it'll surely drop to a level more in line with Dell's P/E.
I do agree market cap isn't necessarily the best measure of the value of a company. Remember, AOL had such a high market cap one day that they bought Time-Warner. Which company really was worth more?
From a pedantic point of view, Sony has only released two consoles so far. How can you say they've lied out their ass about 3 consoles? Is it because you somehow know the new one doesn't measure up? Is it your special fanboy sixth sense that gives you the ability to know that?
Additionally, I don't remember PS1 being a disappointment at all. Toshinden was ready for PS1 at launch in JPN, and look great. It played well too, but it had 3-d fighters and 3-D backgrounds. By the time the US PS1 launch rolled around months later Battle Arena: Toshinden was ready with further improved graphics including use of transparency in the backgrounds (waterfall). Meanwhile on Saturn, they had Virtua Fighter which by the US release wasn't even texture mapped! Do you remember receiving your free "VF 1.5" CD in the mail from Sega? I do. And it still didn't look as good because the backgrounds were not 3-D and the platform itself couldn't even do transparency (it used stipples instead).
PS1 handily beat the competition on technical merit and games.
So I don't get your complaints there. Perhaps they are with PS2?
PS2 isn't as clear cut, but as a performance thing, I have to say it works for me, despite a truly bad architecture (very little VRAM) that could have sunk it. It is long in the tooth right now, but it is at the end of its life-cycle.
But is it a failure? Did Sony lie out their ass? Not that I noticed. Yea, they hyped it a bit. Who doesn't? There were references to Toy Story-graphics made, but Toy Story was the big thing at that time and MS made them also for Xbox. It was the first all-CG movie ever. Should I bitch at Bally-Midway because they made two TRON arcade games back when it was new, and neither was even 3D? That's a much more major failing at matching movies. Yes the two games were quite fun (one is a saught-after classic), so why complain?
I would note that except for Dolby Digital, PS2 has actually kept up with the times quite well. This was a platform that wasn't even advertised or planned to do 480p when it came out, and yet does 480p in a fair number of games now and even does 1080i in one (GT4)! It even bested Xbox in the Sim-racing graphics wars of 2005. GT4 definitely has better/fancier graphics than Forza (and has 1080i support while Forza maxes out at 480p), although Rallisport Challenge 2 is still the best looking racing game of its generation (maxes out at 480p, although it looks so good there's no way to complain). And the biggest/most fun racing game of 2005 turned out to be neither GT4 nor Forza but Burnout 3.
As to Sony claiming the CPU would be the new PC CPU, I don't remember that. I don't think Sony thought they would unseat x86. I do remember them saying the PS2 chipset (I'll call it the EE although it's really more than that) would be used in other things. For the most part this wasn't true, but they did ship a PVR using the EE in JPN (the PSX). They also attempted to license the chipset for use in TVs and set-top boxes, but no one took them up on it, probably wisely.
Sony also has plans to use the new (Cell) chipset in TVs/media devices again. Go back and find the Digital Reality Creation 2 announcement, it sounds a lot like it uses a Cell chipset.
Why they keep saying this stuff is basically because they partner with Toshiba to make a custom chipset for them (in this case they even built a new fab specifically for it). When you make that kind of investment, both companies tend to get thinking about how they could use the chip even more, thus making even more profit off a fixed asset (the fab). It is a Japanese tendency to wax poetic about the future of a significant new design/advance like this, and often it doesn't come true. I mean, you can't go buy an Asimo down at your Honda dealer, can you?
I like my 360. The games are almost universally awful, but the hardware is good. I have high hopes for it. But I also have high hopes for PS3. PS1 and PS2 have been very good consoles, and had plenty of titles worth buying the consoles for. So I expect PS3 will be good too. I have to say I find the $400-$500 price ridiculous, but then again, I did buy a 360 at that ridiculous price.
For the exact reasons you say. If they don't have some software to help, then the new games will be no better looking than PS2 games and it'll stunt the platform.
And Katamari Damacy would be made for exactly the reasons you state. Using all the power of the machine would entail too much development cost, so a fun but not technically magnificent game would be made.
This will happen a lot on both 360 and PS3 is my guess. 360 already is showcasing "microgames" like Geometry Wars.
I do think that all but the highest-line titles will not make the full effort to max out the machine on graphics (actually, this is the case on PS2 and 360 also) due to development costs. But Sony will do everything they can to make it possible for the average game to have better graphics and use the new hardware well, just like MS will.
The current generation has a lot to offer outside of what would be done on the specialized processors. Good wireless controllers and HDTV just might be enough to get people to buy a new console once it hits a reasonable price. And for some playing Blu-Ray discs helps too.
In that they didn't understand they couldn't always make the investements they wanted.
But you're wrong. Yes, they had serious problems with liquidity after things went bad. The market even conspired against them after they got in bad shape (that's even worse than no liquidity).
But the start of the problem was they made multiple wagers at the same time, assuming they couldn't all go south at once. They could survive one or even more going against them, but instead it turns out their bets were correlated and a large percentage did actually go south at once.
Since they were so highly leveraged that caused a serious problem with cash flow. They increased their leverage instead of unwinding their positions. Once they did decide to unwind their positions, they ran into liquidity problems (and worse).
So, their liquidity problems may have exacerbate their losses, but their foolishness was already shown by their monetary losses; they were already ruined.
I'm sure some people would reach a different conclusion, especially those who make their livings on Wall Street or hope to some day. But frankly, I think they're just deluding themselves too.
If you have unlimited capital and no betting limit, you cannot lose.
But LTCM didn't have unlimited capital and did have a betting limit (you can't make a bet larger than the rest of the world is willing to take the other side on).
LTCM was betting martingale. That they had two Nobel prize winners and 250 more years of advancement and still ended up with a system that only works as well as martingale is both in indication of the level of foolishness on Wall Street and a real indication of the difficulty (possibility?) of beating the market with a system.
Anyway, if you read the book (better yet, both), you can see that even if they had a few mathematical equations saying they were right, there's a lot more reasons they were actually wrong. The complexity of the markets is sufficient that you can make an equation showing how safe you are and still be wrong. Your equation is either built on incorrect assumptions or fails to include other factors that turn out to be important.
LTCM was wrong mainly because they were using far too much leverage and thought it was okay because they thought they had multiple independent "wagers" that thus lowered their risk, because the likelihood of two independent failures of their system was very low, and they figured they could survive 3 or more! The problem is their wagers were not really independent and so more than 3 went south at once. They fooled themselves. They were fools, not victims of circumstance.
Here's the one most importance in "When Genius Failed". LTCM's return on working capital was smaller than that of a savings account. Their real trick was being able to borrow capital at such low prices. If they had deposited their borrowed capital in savings accounts they would have made more money faster and not lost their butts either. What geniuses.
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
and
Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone
Both speak of how Wall Street (and hedge funds in particular) use mathematicians. Both show how those legends you speak of really turned out. Both are very good books (one of them is great), although it sounds like you might be turned off by the general tone of them and the conclusions reached.
I have to warn you, the story isn't pretty. Frankly, I think the major thing Wall Street does is use mathematicians to devise systems (the 18th century France definition of system) to "make money" on the market. In reality, just like martingale, they're creating systems that appear to make money but in reality just yield tiny profits countered with the occasional enormous loss that is much larger than the profits. They're still losing money, it just appears they're not when the mathematical series hasn't run its course.
I and several others use the MLB streaming to listen to games on Macs. I doubt the QT plugin does streaming, and I was wondering what we would do.
How do I get the Real plugin to open those (associate to) streams automatically in Safari (or Firefox, I don't care)?
See the shapes on that power supply? The ones that say "pat. pend" on them? Look at your computer motherboard, right next to the CPU. You'll see those same shapes on there (they're wound inductors).
This is a 120W DC-DC power supply. If you have a 120W CPU, you already have a 120W DC-DC power supply on your motherboard. A very sophisticated one, too, as the supplies to your processor have to be digitally adjustable and hold their voltage very accurately at very high currents.
So it isn't really odd to see this thing. It's a good application of a very common technology.