NVidia SLI, ATi CrossFire, Logitech G5/G7 DPI buttons not working (although this might've been fixed by the unofficial drivers), Adaptec/Areca/etc... RAID cards, Aegia PhysX, and where do I get my grahpics drivers for the GeForce cards? Is it the BSD drivers? Or is it on Apple's site?
I mean, I'm not trying to bash Apple or something, and the (first) laptop I plan on getting (soon) will be a MacBook Pro, for sure (gonna wait for the Merom release). But let's face it, Apple hardware support just isn't up to par for anything sold outside their stores and their selection is quite limited. Being able to physically plug a device in is different from being able to use it. And no, it's not Apple's fault, but neither should I have to hunt around for a third party device driver either (although I wouldn't mind third party drivers linked to from some single "fan" site, which is, in turn, pointed to at apple.com).
I find your arguments to be quite funny. Spending $500 every 6 months on the newest graphics card has nothing to do with how expensive Macs are. The point is, these same people will still spend $500 every 6 months for the newest graphics card even if they somehow converted to Macs. At least when they buy their PCs instead of Macs, they wouldn't need to spend the extra $1000 on components they don't need or will throw out of the Macs as soon as possible (since Apple doesn't exactly offer top-of-the-line components -- the best video card available at the Apple store is a 7800 GT, not even a GTX/7900/SLI/512MB, and that's for the Power Mac G5, not the Intel Macs). And when you consider people like these: http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1029036827 &postcount=651, I doubt the entire aesthetics argument will fall on sound ears.
The only (I think) exception to my arguments are the ones who go out (or stay in, if you will) and buy things like fully decked-out Alienware or Falcon Northwest. If they complain about the price of Apple computers, then they need to be slapped (if they complain about the availability of top-end hardware, then that's different). However, I think the ones that really complain are the DIY crowd who tend to assemble their own computers. $1000 is still two upgrades worth of really good video cards (or one upgrade for SLI freaks).
When I was an undergrad, I knew this grad student whose research topic was asynchronous chips. Guess where he's at now? Yep, Intel, working along the same lines as what he did in grad school. So I'm pretty sure Intel's always been researching and working on these asynchronous chips (or bringing their benefits into their more "traditional" chips).
Uh...that's what one would think. But in reality, the readback performance is only between 450MB/s (OGL) and 900MB/s (DX), nowhere near the limit of the PCIE bus (you can check the GPGPU forums for these numbers). This is actually only about 2X faster than in the AGP 8X days.
IIRC, as it stands, uploading to the graphics card is about 4X as fast as downloading from the graphics card. So yes, GPU->CPU is still a performance killer, contrary to what you think or believe. (for your reference, here's a quick link to one of the posts, which is agreed upon from some of the site admins: http://www.gpgpu.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2092&h ighlight=read+bandwidth)
Actually, I vaguely remember that during the beta phase of World of Warcraft, this was actually one of methods implemented. But I think enough people complained about it that it eventually got converted to the current-day rest bonus.
As a Canadian too, I can see where you're coming from. You essentially have two arguments: 1. Cultural/Political relativism, and 2. the person might be jailed if he/she was found using this type of program to circumvent the great firewall.
For 2, I think people who're going to use this type of program will already know full well what the program's intended purpose is, and what the consequences could be. If they still choose to use it, then it is their freewill, and they (should) fully accept the consequences.
As for point 1, I can understand why people would agree with cultural (and thus, political) relativism. However, we know that what most people consider cultural/political relativism is really just bullshit. We know that treating women like second class citizens, sacrificing people to the gods, and censoring are not right, but the choice between eating your food with chopsticks vs forks+knives is perfectly fine. There is a line between right and wrong vs. culture. Gun control is relative, and so are drugs. But in this case, we know which side of the line censoring is on.
I wonder how long it'd be before someone releases a hack to override the check done by Skype and how popular the hack would be. Furthermore, I wonder how this will affect the entire anti-trust case against Intel from AMD (I have no clue about the implications, if there are any, since I'm not an anti-trust lawyer).
watching the recordings of the South Korean Starcraft: Brood War finals about 5 years ago. It's funny how not only are we behind in having the stations, but the news of South Koreans having these TV stations is so old itself. Of course, that's assuming we even care to have these channels....
Such as sending to (substitute user.name with my real e-mail address, of course) user.name@gmail.com, u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com, u.s.e..r.na.m.e@gmail.com, and username@gmail.com, when my real e-mail address was user.name@gmail.com. None of them worked except for user.name@gmail.com. So it seems like any e-mail other than the exact login name will not get forwarded to you. Of course, this could also be an exception case if there are more than one login name whose non-period versions map to the same name (for example, maybe before google patched their registration process, someone already registered username@gmail.com, as I never tried username@gmail.com to begin with, so I wouldn't know if that's been taken).
Yep. Just sent a piece of e-mail to my own gmail account, but without the period. I didn't get my own letter. I think Google basically patched the registration process after they found out about the bug, but not before some "duplicate" (identical accounts discounting the period) accounts were already made.
I understand your angle, but for me not every song I buy has the exact same rankings in my preferences. But how much I play them tends to indicate how much I like the songs, and this is data.
I'm not saying that Apple is my friend or I'm promoting these practices. But if done right, privacy can be ensured and introduce a level of service that can't be had without these information. For example, if a product never gets feedback, then how would the developers know how well it's doing? Similarily, Apple needs to know your "feedback" in order to know what you like or don't like. Similar to this, Amazon's recommendation system has more than once recommended to me something that I ended up liking (granted this is only based on what you're browsing), and I appreciate that (don't flame me, this is just my personal preference).
As for the giant warning, I agree that they should have warned the user, even if they turned on the data collection by default.
Not arguing with you, but I think the idea is that most users will not enable it, and it will be difficult to perform the statistical (as clarified now) data collection and analysis that Apple does. So Apple opted to enable the automatic collection and hope that people will accept their explanation (which, I think, most people will accept). If need be, Apple has information readily-available on how to disable it for people who're really protective of their privacy (if they believe it's violated).
Yeah...this low tech thing also reminds me of someone trying to use a sound card as an oscilloscope (through the mic)...or how someone used the sensor on a logitech trackball device to track how a fly walks (the fly walks on a light ball colored in such a way that the sensor could still read it).
Granted that the EULA is pretty much forgotten by the player, but I suppose this is how most (not all, since there's always Second Life) MMOs get away with tax laws: the company owns everything, and places no value on all goods. If need be, the game companies can just slap on an "instant death upon equipment" penalty on all goods and everything will all of a sudden be worth $0. In that case, the players will not be able to complain about anything (legally), since all goods are "owned" by the game developers/publishers (of course, this would pretty much alienate all players...but we're talking about taxes here).
On the other hand, it might be a much more complicated situation for Second Life (I'm assuming that the parent company of SL is based in the US, but the idea still stands) players, as the players actually own the properties. So, if anything, Second Life should be proving grounds for the IRS if they so choose to pursue this tax venue.
(This issue gets even weirder as one considers ownership... i.e. server software creates items, items yield market value, item sold by player that isn't supposed to sell the item, player pockets money, but developer still has ultimate ownership, and therefore are in possession of the goods, and hence should also be taxable. So, in some sense, the players are just some sort of agent of the company to find out the fair market value on these goods...and the price they sell their items is just the "commission"?)
I think another key factor to consider is how many more 360s are sold compared to the original XBox. This number will tell us how much inroads Microsoft has made into the Japanese market. It seems like the 360 is doing a whole lot better.
However, one may argue that with an early-adopter culture as that of Japanese, if the 360 doesn't get "adopted" early, this may show that the Japanese people don't care much for the 360.
As for the OP's arguments about the lack of killer games for the 360...well, there isn't a killer game here in NA either, but it's still selling like hotcakes. But then again, the Japanese taste for games doesn't just include sports and FPS rehash titles.
I don't know about you, but I had (he died to liver->lung cancer at 26) a friend who pitched his idea to Bell (Canada) in order to land a contract. He was "thanked" by Bell with a rejection and an immediate turnaround haste implementation of his idea. It's not as if these things don't happen. So declaring it nonsense right off the bat isn't exactly being objective, either.
In addtion, there is the defective PSP LCD screen and the tray in the back can pop open shooting the disc at someone (people would expect at least some sort of quality control). There's also the entire PS2 DVDROM thing that someone else mentioned earlier (DVD drive failing after even a year is hardly acceptable). I agree with you in that these events *are* news. Which is why the RMA/replacements for the PSPs and the class action suit against Sony were mentioned here on Slashdot.
I konw that Ragnarok Online has a metered payment method. You can buy 10 hours at a time for a set amount of money, and you can just play those hours any time. I don't think they expire either. This is the preferred method for mules, usually. Lot of other MMOs in Asia also offer these pay-by-hours set up...but I guess it's not very popular here, since people usually just accept (I mean, people eat the cost of the box in addition to the monthly fee anyways...so the publishers know they can get away with it).
Where did this come from? This is what the grandparent post is pointing at:
1st statement: I won't bother with this, since it's the topic at hand.
2nd: Iraq.
3rd: Softwood lumber "dispute" with Canada (there is no dispute, even Mexico agrees).
4th: Kyoto protocol and many others.
5th: Yeah, US pretty much just beats on anyone who doesn't listen.
So yeah, this is where everything's pulled from.
Wouldn't a better test be one where the parents are asked to rate the games themselves (and later compared to the actual ratings), instead of asking them whether or not the parents agree with the rating? (AFAIK, this shouldn't be the same as "rating on a 1 to 10 scale) I mean, I personally know quite a few people who'd agree with anything that was thrown at them if the source seemed credible.
Customers have to decide between the 360 with Halo 3, the PS3 with a potentially high price tag, and the Revolution, priced near current generation game consoles.
What, people who don't play FPSs are all of a sudden going to start running out and playing Halo 3? C'mon, not everyone is into the FPS genre (although I am, but I'm not everyone), especially the Japanese market that is dominated by RPGs and other genres. I mean, the quoted argument might be true about the non-Asian market (and Halo 3 would most definitely be a fine game), but it certainly holds little water otherwise. So the bottom line is, take the article with a bag of salt and just watch the show.
I agree with your post. Given that Bizzare had to use a lower resolution to get it to run at 30fps seems to indicate that it is a graphics card bottleneck. Specifically, it's a problem on the pixel shader end, since that's the only difference for varying resolutions. This means that the graphics capabilities aren't all that great on the XBox 360, and hence it can't really handle 1080i/p using various nice-looking effects (assuming that the current pixel shaders used are at least decently efficient). Furthermore, given that the 360 isn't streaming textures off the DVD in the middle of the game and assuming that the shader code are decently efficient (given that modern day GPUs are heavily piplined, then that means the throughput of pixels would remain constant for small (totally out of the hands of the programmers, and is purely a result of underpowered hardware.
On the other hand, this would mean that the PS3 wouldn't fare much better at all, since the difference between a (using an approximation here) GeForce 7800GTX and Radeon 1800XT is quite minimal. In addition, given that the CPU of either conoles doesn't do any pixel calculations, that means the Cell or the 3-core stripped-down PPC won't make a difference in terms of fill rates whatsoever, and hence can't be used to "solve" this problem.
Isn't the blog analyzer thing just an extension to the social network analysis that Kleinberg (of Cornell) researched and was posted on Slashdot a while back? That paper showed trends can be extracted from blogs and some such. So in theory, hit records can be predicted this way also. This just means that this new MIT program is just a hack on top of that research paper Kleinberg presented.
"I" would want the average Joe to use Linux, because then I can actually get the drivers to my XYZ card in the first place (which also has been the subject of discussions lately). No drivers -> no working hardware -> unhappy user who needs to go get new (or old) hardware that is actually supported in Linux. It's sad, but it's true that there are lots of hardware that Linux can't support because the manufacturer won't make the drivers for them. I think both yours and my arguments are valid...we just need some sort of middleground.
Slashdot Mirror
NVidia SLI, ATi CrossFire, Logitech G5/G7 DPI buttons not working (although this might've been fixed by the unofficial drivers), Adaptec/Areca/etc... RAID cards, Aegia PhysX, and where do I get my grahpics drivers for the GeForce cards? Is it the BSD drivers? Or is it on Apple's site?
I mean, I'm not trying to bash Apple or something, and the (first) laptop I plan on getting (soon) will be a MacBook Pro, for sure (gonna wait for the Merom release). But let's face it, Apple hardware support just isn't up to par for anything sold outside their stores and their selection is quite limited. Being able to physically plug a device in is different from being able to use it. And no, it's not Apple's fault, but neither should I have to hunt around for a third party device driver either (although I wouldn't mind third party drivers linked to from some single "fan" site, which is, in turn, pointed to at apple.com).
I find your arguments to be quite funny. Spending $500 every 6 months on the newest graphics card has nothing to do with how expensive Macs are. The point is, these same people will still spend $500 every 6 months for the newest graphics card even if they somehow converted to Macs. At least when they buy their PCs instead of Macs, they wouldn't need to spend the extra $1000 on components they don't need or will throw out of the Macs as soon as possible (since Apple doesn't exactly offer top-of-the-line components -- the best video card available at the Apple store is a 7800 GT, not even a GTX/7900/SLI/512MB, and that's for the Power Mac G5, not the Intel Macs). And when you consider people like these: http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1029036827 &postcount=651, I doubt the entire aesthetics argument will fall on sound ears.
The only (I think) exception to my arguments are the ones who go out (or stay in, if you will) and buy things like fully decked-out Alienware or Falcon Northwest. If they complain about the price of Apple computers, then they need to be slapped (if they complain about the availability of top-end hardware, then that's different). However, I think the ones that really complain are the DIY crowd who tend to assemble their own computers. $1000 is still two upgrades worth of really good video cards (or one upgrade for SLI freaks).
When I was an undergrad, I knew this grad student whose research topic was asynchronous chips. Guess where he's at now? Yep, Intel, working along the same lines as what he did in grad school. So I'm pretty sure Intel's always been researching and working on these asynchronous chips (or bringing their benefits into their more "traditional" chips).
Uh...that's what one would think. But in reality, the readback performance is only between 450MB/s (OGL) and 900MB/s (DX), nowhere near the limit of the PCIE bus (you can check the GPGPU forums for these numbers). This is actually only about 2X faster than in the AGP 8X days.
h ighlight=read+bandwidth)
IIRC, as it stands, uploading to the graphics card is about 4X as fast as downloading from the graphics card. So yes, GPU->CPU is still a performance killer, contrary to what you think or believe. (for your reference, here's a quick link to one of the posts, which is agreed upon from some of the site admins: http://www.gpgpu.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2092&
Actually, I vaguely remember that during the beta phase of World of Warcraft, this was actually one of methods implemented. But I think enough people complained about it that it eventually got converted to the current-day rest bonus.
As a Canadian too, I can see where you're coming from. You essentially have two arguments: 1. Cultural/Political relativism, and 2. the person might be jailed if he/she was found using this type of program to circumvent the great firewall.
For 2, I think people who're going to use this type of program will already know full well what the program's intended purpose is, and what the consequences could be. If they still choose to use it, then it is their freewill, and they (should) fully accept the consequences.
As for point 1, I can understand why people would agree with cultural (and thus, political) relativism. However, we know that what most people consider cultural/political relativism is really just bullshit. We know that treating women like second class citizens, sacrificing people to the gods, and censoring are not right, but the choice between eating your food with chopsticks vs forks+knives is perfectly fine. There is a line between right and wrong vs. culture. Gun control is relative, and so are drugs. But in this case, we know which side of the line censoring is on.
I wonder how long it'd be before someone releases a hack to override the check done by Skype and how popular the hack would be. Furthermore, I wonder how this will affect the entire anti-trust case against Intel from AMD (I have no clue about the implications, if there are any, since I'm not an anti-trust lawyer).
watching the recordings of the South Korean Starcraft: Brood War finals about 5 years ago. It's funny how not only are we behind in having the stations, but the news of South Koreans having these TV stations is so old itself. Of course, that's assuming we even care to have these channels....
Such as sending to (substitute user.name with my real e-mail address, of course) user.name@gmail.com, u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com, u.s.e..r.na.m.e@gmail.com, and username@gmail.com, when my real e-mail address was user.name@gmail.com. None of them worked except for user.name@gmail.com. So it seems like any e-mail other than the exact login name will not get forwarded to you. Of course, this could also be an exception case if there are more than one login name whose non-period versions map to the same name (for example, maybe before google patched their registration process, someone already registered username@gmail.com, as I never tried username@gmail.com to begin with, so I wouldn't know if that's been taken).
Yep. Just sent a piece of e-mail to my own gmail account, but without the period. I didn't get my own letter. I think Google basically patched the registration process after they found out about the bug, but not before some "duplicate" (identical accounts discounting the period) accounts were already made.
I understand your angle, but for me not every song I buy has the exact same rankings in my preferences. But how much I play them tends to indicate how much I like the songs, and this is data.
I'm not saying that Apple is my friend or I'm promoting these practices. But if done right, privacy can be ensured and introduce a level of service that can't be had without these information. For example, if a product never gets feedback, then how would the developers know how well it's doing? Similarily, Apple needs to know your "feedback" in order to know what you like or don't like. Similar to this, Amazon's recommendation system has more than once recommended to me something that I ended up liking (granted this is only based on what you're browsing), and I appreciate that (don't flame me, this is just my personal preference).
As for the giant warning, I agree that they should have warned the user, even if they turned on the data collection by default.
Not arguing with you, but I think the idea is that most users will not enable it, and it will be difficult to perform the statistical (as clarified now) data collection and analysis that Apple does. So Apple opted to enable the automatic collection and hope that people will accept their explanation (which, I think, most people will accept). If need be, Apple has information readily-available on how to disable it for people who're really protective of their privacy (if they believe it's violated).
Yeah...this low tech thing also reminds me of someone trying to use a sound card as an oscilloscope (through the mic)...or how someone used the sensor on a logitech trackball device to track how a fly walks (the fly walks on a light ball colored in such a way that the sensor could still read it).
Granted that the EULA is pretty much forgotten by the player, but I suppose this is how most (not all, since there's always Second Life) MMOs get away with tax laws: the company owns everything, and places no value on all goods. If need be, the game companies can just slap on an "instant death upon equipment" penalty on all goods and everything will all of a sudden be worth $0. In that case, the players will not be able to complain about anything (legally), since all goods are "owned" by the game developers/publishers (of course, this would pretty much alienate all players...but we're talking about taxes here).
On the other hand, it might be a much more complicated situation for Second Life (I'm assuming that the parent company of SL is based in the US, but the idea still stands) players, as the players actually own the properties. So, if anything, Second Life should be proving grounds for the IRS if they so choose to pursue this tax venue.
(This issue gets even weirder as one considers ownership... i.e. server software creates items, items yield market value, item sold by player that isn't supposed to sell the item, player pockets money, but developer still has ultimate ownership, and therefore are in possession of the goods, and hence should also be taxable. So, in some sense, the players are just some sort of agent of the company to find out the fair market value on these goods...and the price they sell their items is just the "commission"?)
Looks awfully familiar to that cereal box in Minority Report...of course, this probably is an old idea put into a movie.
I think another key factor to consider is how many more 360s are sold compared to the original XBox. This number will tell us how much inroads Microsoft has made into the Japanese market. It seems like the 360 is doing a whole lot better.
However, one may argue that with an early-adopter culture as that of Japanese, if the 360 doesn't get "adopted" early, this may show that the Japanese people don't care much for the 360.
As for the OP's arguments about the lack of killer games for the 360...well, there isn't a killer game here in NA either, but it's still selling like hotcakes. But then again, the Japanese taste for games doesn't just include sports and FPS rehash titles.
I don't know about you, but I had (he died to liver->lung cancer at 26) a friend who pitched his idea to Bell (Canada) in order to land a contract. He was "thanked" by Bell with a rejection and an immediate turnaround haste implementation of his idea. It's not as if these things don't happen. So declaring it nonsense right off the bat isn't exactly being objective, either.
In addtion, there is the defective PSP LCD screen and the tray in the back can pop open shooting the disc at someone (people would expect at least some sort of quality control). There's also the entire PS2 DVDROM thing that someone else mentioned earlier (DVD drive failing after even a year is hardly acceptable). I agree with you in that these events *are* news. Which is why the RMA/replacements for the PSPs and the class action suit against Sony were mentioned here on Slashdot.
I konw that Ragnarok Online has a metered payment method. You can buy 10 hours at a time for a set amount of money, and you can just play those hours any time. I don't think they expire either. This is the preferred method for mules, usually. Lot of other MMOs in Asia also offer these pay-by-hours set up...but I guess it's not very popular here, since people usually just accept (I mean, people eat the cost of the box in addition to the monthly fee anyways...so the publishers know they can get away with it).
Where did this come from? This is what the grandparent post is pointing at: 1st statement: I won't bother with this, since it's the topic at hand. 2nd: Iraq. 3rd: Softwood lumber "dispute" with Canada (there is no dispute, even Mexico agrees). 4th: Kyoto protocol and many others. 5th: Yeah, US pretty much just beats on anyone who doesn't listen. So yeah, this is where everything's pulled from.
Wouldn't a better test be one where the parents are asked to rate the games themselves (and later compared to the actual ratings), instead of asking them whether or not the parents agree with the rating? (AFAIK, this shouldn't be the same as "rating on a 1 to 10 scale) I mean, I personally know quite a few people who'd agree with anything that was thrown at them if the source seemed credible.
Customers have to decide between the 360 with Halo 3, the PS3 with a potentially high price tag, and the Revolution, priced near current generation game consoles.
What, people who don't play FPSs are all of a sudden going to start running out and playing Halo 3? C'mon, not everyone is into the FPS genre (although I am, but I'm not everyone), especially the Japanese market that is dominated by RPGs and other genres. I mean, the quoted argument might be true about the non-Asian market (and Halo 3 would most definitely be a fine game), but it certainly holds little water otherwise. So the bottom line is, take the article with a bag of salt and just watch the show.
I agree with your post. Given that Bizzare had to use a lower resolution to get it to run at 30fps seems to indicate that it is a graphics card bottleneck. Specifically, it's a problem on the pixel shader end, since that's the only difference for varying resolutions. This means that the graphics capabilities aren't all that great on the XBox 360, and hence it can't really handle 1080i/p using various nice-looking effects (assuming that the current pixel shaders used are at least decently efficient). Furthermore, given that the 360 isn't streaming textures off the DVD in the middle of the game and assuming that the shader code are decently efficient (given that modern day GPUs are heavily piplined, then that means the throughput of pixels would remain constant for small (totally out of the hands of the programmers, and is purely a result of underpowered hardware.
On the other hand, this would mean that the PS3 wouldn't fare much better at all, since the difference between a (using an approximation here) GeForce 7800GTX and Radeon 1800XT is quite minimal. In addition, given that the CPU of either conoles doesn't do any pixel calculations, that means the Cell or the 3-core stripped-down PPC won't make a difference in terms of fill rates whatsoever, and hence can't be used to "solve" this problem.
Isn't the blog analyzer thing just an extension to the social network analysis that Kleinberg (of Cornell) researched and was posted on Slashdot a while back? That paper showed trends can be extracted from blogs and some such. So in theory, hit records can be predicted this way also. This just means that this new MIT program is just a hack on top of that research paper Kleinberg presented.
"I" would want the average Joe to use Linux, because then I can actually get the drivers to my XYZ card in the first place (which also has been the subject of discussions lately). No drivers -> no working hardware -> unhappy user who needs to go get new (or old) hardware that is actually supported in Linux. It's sad, but it's true that there are lots of hardware that Linux can't support because the manufacturer won't make the drivers for them. I think both yours and my arguments are valid...we just need some sort of middleground.