Carmack doesn't fit into that category though - he is the one doing engine development. He's always been the one who seems to get the most out of whatever hardware is around. On a (technical) visual level at least, every Doom and Quake has been plenty ahead of the competition. Not necessarily the best artwork, but in terms of getting more polygons on screen while keeping the framerates up, nothing much else could compete.
I'm just surprised that multi core architecture is that much of a departure.
I'm still not entirely clear where the problem is with doing multi core stuff in games. It seems to me that there are multiple fairly independent tasks to work on. My work is writing C-based control systems that are very multi-threaded - typically a couple of dozen system processes plus however many processes are needed for user sessions.
The difficulties are locking between threads and sharing information between threads. Shared information just gets put into a shared memory segment, which isn't as convenient as just declaring on the stack/heap as necessary but isn't a huge problem. Locking could certainly be difficult but generally the better the design, the less locking you can get away with. Different states in the global data just mean a particular process has control of that data.
I'm a long way from an expert on games programming, but surely work on user input, rendering, physics and AI can all progress fairly independantly on separate cores. The AI results depend on user control and physics updates, but don't necessarily need to use 100% up to date information on this (kind of makes it more realistic if they take a fraction of a second to start reacting)
I'm often amazed these short timescale, personal effects don't have more impact on people believing in global warming. It's hardly scientific proof but that doesn't usually have the same level of impact on what people believe compared to their own experience. One day between Christmas and New Year, I was driving home at 11pm and the car thermometer said it was 14 C.
I've always lived in northern England, around the same latitude (~53 degrees). As a kid, 15-20 years ago, I remember almost every year there would be decent amounts of snow for a few weeks each winter. That just doesn't happen any more. There's a bit of slush around for a few weeks and probably never enough snow to make a snowman. Snowball fights would only be possible one or two days.
I couldn't find any records of how much snow fell per year, but I'm fairly sure that there's now substantially less snow than in my lifetime, and I'm only 26.
If that's a Motorola phone, I believe you can download some free software that will allow charging. Check their website. I had one a while back but various annoyances caused me to send it back within a couple of days and go back to Nokia.
I don't really think a wire to charge something is major hassle. However, having a wire for a Nokia 6233, another for an older Nokia, one for a Sony camera, one for a portable flash to HDD reader, one for an Icy Box portable HDD, etc. Yeah that's a bit tiresome.
Rather than some induction thing like this, I would rather have most devices chargeable from a standard connector - a USB-type standard for power. The new Nokia connector is tiny - I can't imagine any device it wouldn't fit. I'd just rather have everything use that or AA batteries. It's going to be more efficient than induction too.
You haven't mentioned with the house prices now in the UK, selection of children into the better schools is strongly driven by parents wealth. In many areas, a nice house in or out of a good catchment area is above £50,000 difference. Nice houses (suitable for a family) in such zones around my place start around £250,000 (still only for a 3 bed semi with a small garden), so unless you've already got plenty of money in a house, you'd need to be earning £75,000 ($150,000) to move to a nice catchment area with a mortgage.
There used to be a grammar school system here where children were ability tested in order to get into a good school, but that was considered to be unfair...
I rarely find the startup delay to be much of a problem, although it does exist on every bulb I've ever had (GE and Philips mainly). The biggest annoyance for me is that they are still quite big - many light fittings in the house take a smaller globe bulb and no small enough energy saving bulbs fit.
Therefore my dining room has 3x11W energy saving bulbs, while the living room has 3x60W standard ones. I actually prefer the light quality of the energy saving bulbs once they're up to full power (about 30s for mine). Also the wiring is a bit dodgy in the dining room - I got through 7 normal bulbs in a year before switching to energy saving ones. I've only lost one of those in the 18 months since the switch.
One question - I've seen a GE 38W (200W equivalent) bulb with a 4-pin socket - it's a flourescent tube type but twisted into a circle. Are adaptors available from a standard light fitting to the 4-pin?
Zune held the seventh spot on online retailer Amazon.com's top 10 best-selling MP3 players list, and it fell from that spot to 13 on the list only five days after launch
Still, getting 13th spot in a top 10 list isn't too bad going...
I started out in much the same way in my job, beginning on the aftermarket team and eventually moving to new development. It worked well because maintenance issues cropped up throughout the code base, forcing me to have looked at a lot of different areas.
It isn't common practice here though - I applied when the company wasn't really looking for new hires and I was lucky to get a non-existant job. Most of the new hires join a specific project when we're short of staff. That tends to mean that similar projects can have similar functionality implemented completely differently. It also means some people have no idea how large parts of the system work because they end up reimplementing the same stuff on various projects with similar requirements.
The CPU of the 360 is not a standard x86 design but it's still a fairly standard sort of design (Power PC) compared to what's in the Playstation. Other internals of the 360 include PCI-Express interconnects, DDR memory and a fairly standard PC GPU. PS3 by comparison is using RAMBUS XDR memory, proprietary interconnects (as far as I can make out), and a fairly standard PC GPU.
I'm quite amazed by the short lifespan of the original Xbox - we're already talking about forgetting it? Sales are down to a few thousand units a month, 5 years after launch and only a year after the 360 came out! (Sales Stats)
Production of the PSOne was only halted March this year, 11 years after the playstation launch, and 6 years after the launch of PS2. I get the feeling PS2 will continue long after the launch of PS3 also. As the PS3 has PS2 on a chip inside it, I'd guess we'll be soon seeing another further slimmed down and cut price PS2 released.
The vast majority of open source developers are of course in full-time paid employment. My modest contributions to open source programs have been because I used the product and wanted additional features / bug-fixes to problems I encountered - it's been for my own benefit as much as anyone else's.
Although stating this seems a bit redundant on Slashdot, I'm a geek at heart and quite enjoy solving these little problems - it's just a hobby. I earn plenty of money in my day job and don't need to be compensated for my work on OSS. I certainly don't consider it exploitation for other people to make money out of it, as at work I'll also make use of OSS & free software.
The way I see it is that OSS advances the field of computer software, improving the productivity of all in the field, and therefore indirectly boosting profitability and my own salary. Once plenty of people want something, the best way of developing in my opinion is the open source route. Open source gradually takes nibbles at the boxed software market, improving what can be done for 'free', while commercial IT must stay ahead providing solutions tailored more specifically to what customers want.
I'm from England but I'd say his native language could be English same as myself. 'Native' in this sense meaning his first language, as opposed to a French person speaking English as a second language.
PS2 and PS3 have both had unusual architectures that were inherently well suited to their purpose but not necessarily as easy to develop for. Both Xboxes are based closely on PC architectures so on release developers know how to get a result.
PS2 is way slower than Xbox, but actual graphics differences are very slight now that developers have fully worked it out. I remember PS2 game graphics getting better with every new generation of games for a few years after release. Xbox started with Halo and has never got much better than that.
PS3 has more raw processing power than Xbox 360 and in a couple of years I suspect games will be running nicer on PS3, but for now developers are still working out what to do with it.
Well you can upgrade stuff at the appropriate rate. If you've got an AGP motherboard it's most likely time to upgrade the whole MB/CPU/RAM/GPU if the performance is lacking. I did that a little under 3 years ago when S939/PCI-E was fairly new. Didn't waste money on top-end CPU / graphics, but did get the best motherboard, and nice PC4000 DDR.
Hopefully the basic system will last another few years, but yeah eventually the incremental upgradability will run out and I'll need to do another big upgrade.
Rivals are offering similar devices with more features at a lower price
This has been true for a long time though. Until last year I've used an assortment of cheap Taiwanese MP3 players. Then I got an Ipod Nano and have never missed the radio / voice recorder etc type of features that were missing. The Ipod is just much much better to use. I've had a look at some of the recent iRiver stuff and while it is undoubtedly better featured, it's just not as nice to use. I recently upgraded to the new 8GB model Nano.
Reading that, I originally was thinking wow, that is absolutely ridiculous; how can that be Canadian law? But overall, I'm not too sure how much difference there really is. In England, this is covered by Caveat Emptor (buyer beware). The seller didn't own the house so true ownership would be with the original owner. But the fraud would otherwise be the same and someone is still out of the same amount of money - it's just the buyer out of pocket instead of the seller.
If I bought my house here and it later turned out I didn't own if after all, I would have the same sort of story to tell.
Acutally that's not so far off:
UK - 244,820 sq km
US - 9,631,420 sq km
Therefore the US is about 40 times the size of the UK. To get to the same population density it would need to hit around 2.4 billion people.
NB CIA world factbook figures
Patents from the traditional 'physical world' protect a specific implementation. E.g. a 'better mousetrap' patent might be to use a trapdoor to keep the mouse in a box without killing it - I know these exist, not sure if there's a patent on it. The problem with the more nebulous business model and many software patents is that there is very little implementation detail and the patent often covers far too broad a range of implementations.
A lot of bad patents seem to simply cover implementing an idea in software, as though that was one specific way to implement the solution. In fact the patent can cover all software implementations of the idea. This doesn't seem like something that should be patentable. A particular program that implements the idea will be covered by copyright and so doesn't really need the patent.
This is because space itself is expanding - it is not an object within space moving outward. To use the standard analogy of a smiley face drawn on a baloon, as you inflate the baloon, the distance between the eyes increases, although the eyes are not 'moving'.
This does mean that our vantage point in the universe has a horizon, determined by the distance light can have travelled since the beginning of time. If it is 15.8 billion years old and due to expansion 180 billion light years wide, we can not see to the other side since light from there has not had time to travel the distance. This horizon does cause numerous problems with the standard big-bang theory for which inflationary theory is the current best resolution.
Absolutely agree with this one - I've used previous Operas but am now on Firefox - I generally have it set up to have just one bar at the top which contains everything I generally use. Particularly like the iFox theme for a compact interface, e.g. http://andycunningham.homeip.net/firefox.png
I also have this set up - all variants of my name were gone at hotmail when I joined so I use asc99c which was a standard format login from back at uni. Every day I get four or five spam emails from other addresses with asc99c somewhere in it. All these go straight to junk mail and it's probably the only 100% accurate rule
Slashdot Mirror
Carmack doesn't fit into that category though - he is the one doing engine development. He's always been the one who seems to get the most out of whatever hardware is around. On a (technical) visual level at least, every Doom and Quake has been plenty ahead of the competition. Not necessarily the best artwork, but in terms of getting more polygons on screen while keeping the framerates up, nothing much else could compete.
I'm just surprised that multi core architecture is that much of a departure.
I'm still not entirely clear where the problem is with doing multi core stuff in games. It seems to me that there are multiple fairly independent tasks to work on. My work is writing C-based control systems that are very multi-threaded - typically a couple of dozen system processes plus however many processes are needed for user sessions. The difficulties are locking between threads and sharing information between threads. Shared information just gets put into a shared memory segment, which isn't as convenient as just declaring on the stack/heap as necessary but isn't a huge problem. Locking could certainly be difficult but generally the better the design, the less locking you can get away with. Different states in the global data just mean a particular process has control of that data. I'm a long way from an expert on games programming, but surely work on user input, rendering, physics and AI can all progress fairly independantly on separate cores. The AI results depend on user control and physics updates, but don't necessarily need to use 100% up to date information on this (kind of makes it more realistic if they take a fraction of a second to start reacting)
I'm often amazed these short timescale, personal effects don't have more impact on people believing in global warming. It's hardly scientific proof but that doesn't usually have the same level of impact on what people believe compared to their own experience. One day between Christmas and New Year, I was driving home at 11pm and the car thermometer said it was 14 C.
I've always lived in northern England, around the same latitude (~53 degrees). As a kid, 15-20 years ago, I remember almost every year there would be decent amounts of snow for a few weeks each winter. That just doesn't happen any more. There's a bit of slush around for a few weeks and probably never enough snow to make a snowman. Snowball fights would only be possible one or two days.
I couldn't find any records of how much snow fell per year, but I'm fairly sure that there's now substantially less snow than in my lifetime, and I'm only 26.
If that's a Motorola phone, I believe you can download some free software that will allow charging. Check their website. I had one a while back but various annoyances caused me to send it back within a couple of days and go back to Nokia.
I don't really think a wire to charge something is major hassle. However, having a wire for a Nokia 6233, another for an older Nokia, one for a Sony camera, one for a portable flash to HDD reader, one for an Icy Box portable HDD, etc. Yeah that's a bit tiresome.
Rather than some induction thing like this, I would rather have most devices chargeable from a standard connector - a USB-type standard for power. The new Nokia connector is tiny - I can't imagine any device it wouldn't fit. I'd just rather have everything use that or AA batteries. It's going to be more efficient than induction too.
You haven't mentioned with the house prices now in the UK, selection of children into the better schools is strongly driven by parents wealth. In many areas, a nice house in or out of a good catchment area is above £50,000 difference. Nice houses (suitable for a family) in such zones around my place start around £250,000 (still only for a 3 bed semi with a small garden), so unless you've already got plenty of money in a house, you'd need to be earning £75,000 ($150,000) to move to a nice catchment area with a mortgage.
...
There used to be a grammar school system here where children were ability tested in order to get into a good school, but that was considered to be unfair
Sounds like you've got yourself a new salesman there! Those qualities aren't inherently bad for all work, just not the best traits for an engineer.
I rarely find the startup delay to be much of a problem, although it does exist on every bulb I've ever had (GE and Philips mainly). The biggest annoyance for me is that they are still quite big - many light fittings in the house take a smaller globe bulb and no small enough energy saving bulbs fit.
Therefore my dining room has 3x11W energy saving bulbs, while the living room has 3x60W standard ones. I actually prefer the light quality of the energy saving bulbs once they're up to full power (about 30s for mine). Also the wiring is a bit dodgy in the dining room - I got through 7 normal bulbs in a year before switching to energy saving ones. I've only lost one of those in the 18 months since the switch.
One question - I've seen a GE 38W (200W equivalent) bulb with a 4-pin socket - it's a flourescent tube type but twisted into a circle. Are adaptors available from a standard light fitting to the 4-pin?
Still, getting 13th spot in a top 10 list isn't too bad going...
I started out in much the same way in my job, beginning on the aftermarket team and eventually moving to new development. It worked well because maintenance issues cropped up throughout the code base, forcing me to have looked at a lot of different areas.
It isn't common practice here though - I applied when the company wasn't really looking for new hires and I was lucky to get a non-existant job. Most of the new hires join a specific project when we're short of staff. That tends to mean that similar projects can have similar functionality implemented completely differently. It also means some people have no idea how large parts of the system work because they end up reimplementing the same stuff on various projects with similar requirements.
The CPU of the 360 is not a standard x86 design but it's still a fairly standard sort of design (Power PC) compared to what's in the Playstation. Other internals of the 360 include PCI-Express interconnects, DDR memory and a fairly standard PC GPU. PS3 by comparison is using RAMBUS XDR memory, proprietary interconnects (as far as I can make out), and a fairly standard PC GPU.
Production of the PSOne was only halted March this year, 11 years after the playstation launch, and 6 years after the launch of PS2. I get the feeling PS2 will continue long after the launch of PS3 also. As the PS3 has PS2 on a chip inside it, I'd guess we'll be soon seeing another further slimmed down and cut price PS2 released.
The vast majority of open source developers are of course in full-time paid employment. My modest contributions to open source programs have been because I used the product and wanted additional features / bug-fixes to problems I encountered - it's been for my own benefit as much as anyone else's. Although stating this seems a bit redundant on Slashdot, I'm a geek at heart and quite enjoy solving these little problems - it's just a hobby. I earn plenty of money in my day job and don't need to be compensated for my work on OSS. I certainly don't consider it exploitation for other people to make money out of it, as at work I'll also make use of OSS & free software. The way I see it is that OSS advances the field of computer software, improving the productivity of all in the field, and therefore indirectly boosting profitability and my own salary. Once plenty of people want something, the best way of developing in my opinion is the open source route. Open source gradually takes nibbles at the boxed software market, improving what can be done for 'free', while commercial IT must stay ahead providing solutions tailored more specifically to what customers want.
I'm from England but I'd say his native language could be English same as myself. 'Native' in this sense meaning his first language, as opposed to a French person speaking English as a second language.
PS2 and PS3 have both had unusual architectures that were inherently well suited to their purpose but not necessarily as easy to develop for. Both Xboxes are based closely on PC architectures so on release developers know how to get a result.
PS2 is way slower than Xbox, but actual graphics differences are very slight now that developers have fully worked it out. I remember PS2 game graphics getting better with every new generation of games for a few years after release. Xbox started with Halo and has never got much better than that.
PS3 has more raw processing power than Xbox 360 and in a couple of years I suspect games will be running nicer on PS3, but for now developers are still working out what to do with it.
Well you can upgrade stuff at the appropriate rate. If you've got an AGP motherboard it's most likely time to upgrade the whole MB/CPU/RAM/GPU if the performance is lacking. I did that a little under 3 years ago when S939/PCI-E was fairly new. Didn't waste money on top-end CPU / graphics, but did get the best motherboard, and nice PC4000 DDR.
Hopefully the basic system will last another few years, but yeah eventually the incremental upgradability will run out and I'll need to do another big upgrade.
Rivals are offering similar devices with more features at a lower price
This has been true for a long time though. Until last year I've used an assortment of cheap Taiwanese MP3 players. Then I got an Ipod Nano and have never missed the radio / voice recorder etc type of features that were missing. The Ipod is just much much better to use. I've had a look at some of the recent iRiver stuff and while it is undoubtedly better featured, it's just not as nice to use. I recently upgraded to the new 8GB model Nano.
Reading that, I originally was thinking wow, that is absolutely ridiculous; how can that be Canadian law? But overall, I'm not too sure how much difference there really is. In England, this is covered by Caveat Emptor (buyer beware). The seller didn't own the house so true ownership would be with the original owner. But the fraud would otherwise be the same and someone is still out of the same amount of money - it's just the buyer out of pocket instead of the seller.
If I bought my house here and it later turned out I didn't own if after all, I would have the same sort of story to tell.
Acutally that's not so far off: UK - 244,820 sq km US - 9,631,420 sq km Therefore the US is about 40 times the size of the UK. To get to the same population density it would need to hit around 2.4 billion people. NB CIA world factbook figures
Patents from the traditional 'physical world' protect a specific implementation. E.g. a 'better mousetrap' patent might be to use a trapdoor to keep the mouse in a box without killing it - I know these exist, not sure if there's a patent on it. The problem with the more nebulous business model and many software patents is that there is very little implementation detail and the patent often covers far too broad a range of implementations.
A lot of bad patents seem to simply cover implementing an idea in software, as though that was one specific way to implement the solution. In fact the patent can cover all software implementations of the idea. This doesn't seem like something that should be patentable. A particular program that implements the idea will be covered by copyright and so doesn't really need the patent.
This is because space itself is expanding - it is not an object within space moving outward. To use the standard analogy of a smiley face drawn on a baloon, as you inflate the baloon, the distance between the eyes increases, although the eyes are not 'moving'.
This does mean that our vantage point in the universe has a horizon, determined by the distance light can have travelled since the beginning of time. If it is 15.8 billion years old and due to expansion 180 billion light years wide, we can not see to the other side since light from there has not had time to travel the distance. This horizon does cause numerous problems with the standard big-bang theory for which inflationary theory is the current best resolution.
Absolutely agree with this one - I've used previous Operas but am now on Firefox - I generally have it set up to have just one bar at the top which contains everything I generally use. Particularly like the iFox theme for a compact interface, e.g. http://andycunningham.homeip.net/firefox.png
I also have this set up - all variants of my name were gone at hotmail when I joined so I use asc99c which was a standard format login from back at uni. Every day I get four or five spam emails from other addresses with asc99c somewhere in it. All these go straight to junk mail and it's probably the only 100% accurate rule