You can already pick up GPS receivers for under $100, so I'm not quite sure what you're waiting for. If you mean with onboard mapping, colour display, etc, well that isn't costly because of GPS.
For you "oldtimers" out there these sorts of announcements must come with quite the sense of humor: Anyone remember BYTE magazine pronouncing the end of the line in advancement every 6 months or so back in the mid-late 80s? Each time stating that "Moore's law" would stop holding true and we've have to move to neural nets or analog computers for continued advancement. Quite humorous really.
Yup totally agree, and it really is lazy of them. If they offer up their PDF they should offer it as an option rather than the only choice for specific information. However nonetheless PDFs are coming close to being unnecessary (though they were a required stopgap in the interim) with a CSS2/HTML combo.
Hehe, the AcroRd32.exe should have clued you in that I am using Windows (though perhaps you intended to say the reverse of what you said). Acrobat's IE integration works properly about 40% of the time for me (standard 2000+IE6 combo) : The rest of the time it leaves me a zombied IE/acrord32.exe combot that I need to go in and kill. I've had a similar experience for years. Nonetheless if the information can be conveyed with HTML & CSS with equal impact then what is the point of another unnecessary format in there?
I really wish sites stopped using PDFs to present basic data that can be represented just fine using HTML & CSS. Jesus it's irritating having a bulky, often not working, not exiting properly instance of AcroRd32.exe just to look at some god damn specs. STOP USING PDFs FOR BASIC BLOODY INFO!
I can play any game I want at beyond playable frame rates at decent resolutions in the 1600*1200 range
You ever play Operation Flashpoint? It has a visibility of about 800m, and a pretty high polygon count due to forested areas, etc, and in many scenes and complex battles it'll bring the current best of the best video cards to a crawl. Already the visibility was several constricted because of the realistic limitations of the current crop of video cards, and on top of that there is no doubt that with the power buildings could be made dramatically better, landscapes could be improved, and there could be less "open grassland" areas that detract from reality.
I guess it comes down to this: The standard "running down a hall with some textures on it" FPS style of game was made because of hardware limitations, and when that same standard is used as the benchmark then perhaps that is misguided. Quake 3, which was really released over 2 years ago, was made when video cards were several magnitudes less powerful. The next Doom will be the real test.
I have never before written a lame "mod this up" message but this message is one of the most truthful, profound posts I've read on Slashdot in a long, long time.
The philosophy behind governing and certifications boards is a noble and reasonable approach presuming it was done right, but exactly as this message and the followup mentioned: How many times do you hear about an engineer being discredited, or a lawyer losing their license to practice law? How about doctors losing their license to practice medicine? The reality is that it is almost never (and only in the case of extreme negligence that is publicly known. For all of the talk of Engineers losing their certification I would love to see the numbers who actually have). These organizations exist to protect their members, not this absurdly ridiculous "protect the public" bullshit that hopeful PEOs are spouting on here.
Being trained as an Engineer makes you a good designer of systems, no matter what type of system you're designing.
Hooah! This is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. I have worked with a lot of extremely talented Professional Engineers, and a lot of them I have great respect for. I have also worked for horribly incompetent PEs that have IQs teetering on 100, and have a complete lack of attention for details or what's important. This idea that Engineers are some super discipline is absolutely proposterous: They're just students who took the 5-6 year option rather than the 4 year option, sometimes because they want to parade around going "I'm an Engineer and my title is legally protected".
Software quality is dictated by the process, not by the person. Tell me that your system is a CMM5 system using the IEEE 12207 standard in a 9002 (or whichever one applies) setting, and that you have code review, proper test cases, etc., and THAT tells me whether you have quality code. Telling me that the guy who typed in the initial lines is an Engineer is an absolutely racket and is absurd.
The whole "engineer" designation is nothing more than a protection racket (I'm saying this as a member of two of the groups that have come up during this discussions): It's a way to raise the barriers to entry to say "Oh that guy who has designed 4 fantastic, robust systems in less time than we sat around and scratched our asses sure can produce, but it's not engineering production!". It's job security for those who have gotten an engineering designation. It's absolutely, positively absurd. An individuals knowledge in software development, no matter what their designation, will always be a tiny iota of the industry whole knowledge, making this field totally unlike any other that has come before.
The IEEE rocks, but they should give up on personal certifications (unless they are "no barrier to entry" certifications. I want to know what someone can do, not how much they have martyred themselves) and stick to making standards that make better software quality through better processes and systems.
Re:By your silly definition, Mr. Editor,
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
true freedom would mean I can't be thrown in jail for murdering a bus full of kids
Kudos on a very insightful and reasonable post. The laws that stop people from committing crimes are totally artificial entities: I can't drive through stop lights because the law says I can't, regardless of the fact that I can slam the accelerator and technically I can drive through a stop light. I can't freely go into a tower and shoot at people not because it's hard to get a rifle into a tower, nor because the rifle magically stops working in said tower, but because the law doesn't look favourably on it, and society has mechanisms that prevent. Copyright laws are no less "real" than any of countless laws that allow society to function.
meaning that it's a mid-late beta that they want people to test for them for free. It's a marketing tool, a name given so that people think the product is "nearly ready" and don't go out and buy into the opposition for several months.
All software release terms are marketing arbitrary terms that have little real life meaning. ICQ is in perpetual "beta" (have they ever NOT been beta) because that's a disclaimer excusing incorrect-tab order, fatal faults, etc. The Java Jumpstart package is a hodgepodge mess of poorly integrated products, but it's a "final release". Visual Studio.Net RC1 is a very completely product, and most certainly if anything any changes to C# will be absolutely trivial. The changes during the RC phase are at most moving a dialog around or fixing spelling mistakes.
You should be a little less cynical
My karma whore comment was relating to the first post in this whole dirty thread, rather than yours.
Totally agree. Indeed I find it interesting that many of the features and benefits of the.NET platform have been available in J2EE for a while now, so it's weird hearing people promoting them as a revolution, when really is conceding the position of the other side was right all along. Having said that I think Microsoft did the right thing making C# so alike to Java (of course the standard disclaimer is that they're both derived from C++ so naturally that's going to happen) that Java programs can easily become cross-trained in both, ensuring that C# isn't such a transition that no one ever makes it.
An RC is a release candidate: Meaning that they're proposing that that is what they might actually release. That's closer to a real product than most products in the open source arena will ever be.
Having said that: Jesus Christ you zealots are a riot. I don't even really LIKE C#, nor am I sold on the ".NET" idea, nor have I advocated FOR it. I merely questioned what seemed to me to be a pure karma whore post because it obviously was written just to cater to the psycho zealots that frequent Slashdot.
And for all the dumb motherfuckers out there let me explain something: You "interoperate" (regardless of hilarious [sic] comments by trying-to-be-pretentious kids) with "properties" either via method, or via more abstract methods. I prefer the more abstract methods of Delphi, and also C#. It's amazing how many people will yap up their opinion on this when they have no clue.
Actually I'm hardly an MS advocate. For one I think they have a ridiculously lax attitude towards security (how many times do buffer overflows have to occur before someone says "Uh, maybe we should audit the IIS code where non-trivial stack variables are used....". I also am actually pushing at my company AGAINST a.NET initiative, or rather for at least seriously evaluating J2EE as a primary competitor.
Having said that regardless of my approach for them, I'm not a zealot. That means that I'm not an AC wanker running around trying to expose MS employees because someone says something good about MS (and regardless of your religious zealot opinion a lot of things MS does and has done ARE quite impressive).
BTW: I suspect you're just a Sun employee anyways.
Seriously though, have you? From your vague, unsubstantiated, no example posting it sounds like you use and know Java, therefore you can proclaim yourself knowledgable about C#. Your claims about the "bolted on" aspects of C# are particularly suspicious given the "hooks" into Windows are simply objects instantiatable from the.Net Framework (they're not "bolted on": Just like Java you include the unit and create objects from it). If anything C# takes some of the goofy aspects of Java, such as the interoperation with properties via methods, and cleans them up to make an abstract behind the scenes property handling system (ripped straight from Delphi's object pascal I would guess).
What's wrong wth scalping? It is a simple matter of supply and demand. If there is a demand for one at a price then it should be a right to sell it. By selling it at a price below what someone would pay you are depriving the product from the hands of someone who is willing to pay more for it but can't get to the store in time.
If it's simply "supply and demand" then why doesn't the store jack the price up to $500 if there isn't enough units? Would that simply be the fair thing to do? True "Supply and demand" in a capitalist society dictates that the supplier or demander are the ones who profit/lose based upon the supply/demand ratio, not some third party leach.
Oh get over yourself. There's a bit of a double standard in that you seem to find it perfectly reasonable that retailers constrict supply of these systems, preventing consumers from (theoretically) eliminating the middle man and getting a better price. Some of them even enforce bundling restrictions. So why are the scalpers evil?
Huh? How does some guy who heads down to Walmart and picks up 3, then putting the extra overhead of yet ANOTHER layer in there "eliminate the middleman"? That's absolutely preposterous. Having said that retailers don't artificially constrict the supply of these systems: They want to sell as many as they can! I've yet to see a store, ANYWHERE (in fact it is largely illegal here in Canada), saying "Well we only have 10 Gamecubes left so these ones are going for $999". They sell them for the same price whether they have 1 or 1,000,000.
You would find my other posts ironically humorous given that I am one of the biggest advocates of REAL capitalism (i.e. where people who produce get rewarded for their production), however I have a problem with bogus capitalism: That is the leaches that suck productivity from the rest of humanity, contributing nothing but imposing their tax. Someone buying some game machines and then reselling them offers absolutely no added value, but they impose their tax. It's a tragedy of the commons playing out in consumer electronics, and again I applaud Nintendo for flooding the market with Gamecubes ensuring a fair price for all.
Also, you assume that the families that buy these systems from resellers would be the ones to pick the system up from the store, were it not for the greedy bastards. This is absurd. For some families, people like this guy are the only way they'd ever get a system before Christmas. Their time is more valuable than their money. Get off your high horse.
I assume this is one of those funny "I only do it because everyone else does" sort of justifications: i.e. if he didn't buy a bunch up to scalp then damnit someone else would have. More realistically if there were no scalpers then yeah, probably 80% of them would be bought up by families for Christmas presents, etc. Instead 80% are bought up by scalpers. BTW: This "scalpers do a public service!" thing has played out regarding event tickets many times in the past, with scalpers claimer that without them the average joe couldn't get a ticket, but the reality being that the average joe can't get a ticket because of scalpers buying them up (under the pretense, of course, of doing a public service for the average Joe).
Same around this area: There is no problem finding either Xboxes or Gamecubes in local stores (or online stores for that matter), which is a very good thing. It seems that a lot of the game-scalpers got seriously jaded after last years PS2 fiasco: For every guy who made it big with his Ebayed PS2s, another 10 had a closet full that they probably still have sitting around.
I'm Sticking them on eBay soon as they are good and out of them and let the people who MUST have one get one.
No one must have a Gamecube, so don't pretend that you're pursuing a noble cause. Having said that I hope Nintendo absolutely swamps the market will millions, meaning that the most you'll ever get is retail (and it sounds like it will be like that as Nintendo has good production, meaning that I'd much rather pay retail than deal with the hassle of Ebay and some unknown person. I doubt anyone is going to profiteer off the Gamecube, or the Xbox for that matter. It was sweet after Christmas last year seeing hundreds of wankers trying to pawn PS2s at progressively lower prices, eventually taking a pretty heavy loss as the store prices dropped). The fact that scalpers such as yourself run and buy up all the stock just to rape families whose kids want a game to play really pisses me off, and I hope that you are left holding the bag on that.
How exactly does latency matter more than bandwidth for game consoles? Latency is only of greater concern when the reads/writes are generally random, which is exactly not the case with most games where it's "read a sprite/texture here, write it there". It's exactly the scenario where memory bandwidth is everything. The nvidia chipset includes full texture compression and all of that (at no cost) just as it does for the desktop boards.
In any case, while the xbox uses DDR DRAM SDRAM (which is already low latency and high bandwidth), the dual-memory channels ~halves the latency and doubles the bandwidth. The gamecubes marginal superiority in latency (if any in real world terms) is grossly outmatched in the bandwidth department.
I totally agree and honestly consider a Gamecube a likely candidate to purchase mostly for my wife, who loves the Zelda style of game (I like them myself but I'm pretty attached to my computer). I totally agree that Nintendo totally owns whole genres of games, and rightly so.
The funny thing is that I'm hardly an Xbox champion (I don't own one and I haven't ordered one, and I'm in a waiting and seeing pattern). Alas here goes.
There you can see that the final gamecube has a system floating point capability of 10.5 GFLOPs. Wow that's pretty impressive isn't it? Oh wait: read the fine print. That includes the H&L 3d hardware & the MPU. Suddenly it isn't all that impressive. A stock GeForce 3 has 76 GFLOPs of floating point power. Add that to the ~3 GFLOPs of floating point power in the P3 733 and you have ~80 GFLOPs of computational power, versus the all together 10.5 of the Gamecube. Of course Gamecube fanboys will compare the 10.5 number with the P3 733 processor itself, which is absurd as floating point generally only comes into play for 3D computations, which is all handled by the enormously powered GPU in the GeForce 3 (I don't have specifics because they're tight lipped, but apparently the Xbox has a Geforce 3+. I've read that the GF3+ in the XBox yields >100GFLOPs). Wow that 10 GFLOPS just doesn't look as impressive now does it (unless of course you foolishly compare it with the P3s throughput, despite the fact that the P3 is really just a master controller directing the GPU and sound hardware in what they should do). The main memory on the Xbox is 6.4GB/s versus 2.6GB/s on the Gamecube. Looks to me like there's a pretty clear champion from a technical perspective.
Like the other guy I mistakingly have been using the acronym GTA3 (always wondered what the 'A' was for...) for Gran Tourismo 3. It's GT3 that seems to be the killer PS2 game.
You might say that Halo is the greatest thing since bread, but the XBox doesn't have any other games (besides Halo) that are better than any of the above games I mentioned. And howcome if the XBox is sooooo superior, why is Project Gotham so inferior to GT3 (including graphics)?
I'm not saying that Halo is the best game: I've never played it, nor seen it in real life. However regardless there have always been games that manage to look like crap and make a platform look underwhelming (see most of the early PS2 games) so I don't think a sample of a genre that is done better on the PS2 really is relevant at this point. Give it 8 months.
Also, as any AMD freak would know, it's not always about MHz. Geez, the last system I can think of with 32 bit CPU before XBox was PS1!! I can assure you that the Gamecube and PS2 are quite capable of producing graphics on par with XBox.
Most claims of "64-bit processors" in the gaming world would be absolutely laughed at in the computer world, because usually they're bogus. "I have a 32-bit video processor, and a 32-bit CPU, so it's a 64-bit system!". Anyways I totally and absolutely agree that Mhz means next to nothing, but it's metrics like "lit, transformed polygons rendered per second" that matter, and it's in that realm that the Xbox is many factors higher than the other systems.
Slashdot Mirror
You can already pick up GPS receivers for under $100, so I'm not quite sure what you're waiting for. If you mean with onboard mapping, colour display, etc, well that isn't costly because of GPS.
For you "oldtimers" out there these sorts of announcements must come with quite the sense of humor: Anyone remember BYTE magazine pronouncing the end of the line in advancement every 6 months or so back in the mid-late 80s? Each time stating that "Moore's law" would stop holding true and we've have to move to neural nets or analog computers for continued advancement. Quite humorous really.
Yup totally agree, and it really is lazy of them. If they offer up their PDF they should offer it as an option rather than the only choice for specific information. However nonetheless PDFs are coming close to being unnecessary (though they were a required stopgap in the interim) with a CSS2/HTML combo.
Hehe, the AcroRd32.exe should have clued you in that I am using Windows (though perhaps you intended to say the reverse of what you said). Acrobat's IE integration works properly about 40% of the time for me (standard 2000+IE6 combo) : The rest of the time it leaves me a zombied IE/acrord32.exe combot that I need to go in and kill. I've had a similar experience for years. Nonetheless if the information can be conveyed with HTML & CSS with equal impact then what is the point of another unnecessary format in there?
I really wish sites stopped using PDFs to present basic data that can be represented just fine using HTML & CSS. Jesus it's irritating having a bulky, often not working, not exiting properly instance of AcroRd32.exe just to look at some god damn specs. STOP USING PDFs FOR BASIC BLOODY INFO!
I don't see any mention of this on their official site. Anyone have a link to the data sheets?
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/pda/pda_home.html. There you have 7 seconds to find it!
I can play any game I want at beyond playable frame rates at decent resolutions in the 1600*1200 range
You ever play Operation Flashpoint? It has a visibility of about 800m, and a pretty high polygon count due to forested areas, etc, and in many scenes and complex battles it'll bring the current best of the best video cards to a crawl. Already the visibility was several constricted because of the realistic limitations of the current crop of video cards, and on top of that there is no doubt that with the power buildings could be made dramatically better, landscapes could be improved, and there could be less "open grassland" areas that detract from reality.
I guess it comes down to this: The standard "running down a hall with some textures on it" FPS style of game was made because of hardware limitations, and when that same standard is used as the benchmark then perhaps that is misguided. Quake 3, which was really released over 2 years ago, was made when video cards were several magnitudes less powerful. The next Doom will be the real test.
Eric Leach is an intellectual property and business law attorney at the firm of Goodman and Leach.
Talk about an unfortunate name for a IP lawyer.
I have never before written a lame "mod this up" message but this message is one of the most truthful, profound posts I've read on Slashdot in a long, long time.
The philosophy behind governing and certifications boards is a noble and reasonable approach presuming it was done right, but exactly as this message and the followup mentioned: How many times do you hear about an engineer being discredited, or a lawyer losing their license to practice law? How about doctors losing their license to practice medicine? The reality is that it is almost never (and only in the case of extreme negligence that is publicly known. For all of the talk of Engineers losing their certification I would love to see the numbers who actually have). These organizations exist to protect their members, not this absurdly ridiculous "protect the public" bullshit that hopeful PEOs are spouting on here.
Being trained as an Engineer makes you a good designer of systems, no matter what type of system you're designing.
Hooah! This is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. I have worked with a lot of extremely talented Professional Engineers, and a lot of them I have great respect for. I have also worked for horribly incompetent PEs that have IQs teetering on 100, and have a complete lack of attention for details or what's important. This idea that Engineers are some super discipline is absolutely proposterous: They're just students who took the 5-6 year option rather than the 4 year option, sometimes because they want to parade around going "I'm an Engineer and my title is legally protected".
Software quality is dictated by the process, not by the person. Tell me that your system is a CMM5 system using the IEEE 12207 standard in a 9002 (or whichever one applies) setting, and that you have code review, proper test cases, etc., and THAT tells me whether you have quality code. Telling me that the guy who typed in the initial lines is an Engineer is an absolutely racket and is absurd.
The whole "engineer" designation is nothing more than a protection racket (I'm saying this as a member of two of the groups that have come up during this discussions): It's a way to raise the barriers to entry to say "Oh that guy who has designed 4 fantastic, robust systems in less time than we sat around and scratched our asses sure can produce, but it's not engineering production!". It's job security for those who have gotten an engineering designation. It's absolutely, positively absurd. An individuals knowledge in software development, no matter what their designation, will always be a tiny iota of the industry whole knowledge, making this field totally unlike any other that has come before.
The IEEE rocks, but they should give up on personal certifications (unless they are "no barrier to entry" certifications. I want to know what someone can do, not how much they have martyred themselves) and stick to making standards that make better software quality through better processes and systems.
true freedom would mean I can't be thrown in jail for murdering a bus full of kids
Kudos on a very insightful and reasonable post. The laws that stop people from committing crimes are totally artificial entities: I can't drive through stop lights because the law says I can't, regardless of the fact that I can slam the accelerator and technically I can drive through a stop light. I can't freely go into a tower and shoot at people not because it's hard to get a rifle into a tower, nor because the rifle magically stops working in said tower, but because the law doesn't look favourably on it, and society has mechanisms that prevent. Copyright laws are no less "real" than any of countless laws that allow society to function.
No, an RC is a "release candidate"
Is there an echo in here? :-)
meaning that it's a mid-late beta that they want people to test for them for free. It's a marketing tool, a name given so that people think the product is "nearly ready" and don't go out and buy into the opposition for several months.
All software release terms are marketing arbitrary terms that have little real life meaning. ICQ is in perpetual "beta" (have they ever NOT been beta) because that's a disclaimer excusing incorrect-tab order, fatal faults, etc. The Java Jumpstart package is a hodgepodge mess of poorly integrated products, but it's a "final release". Visual Studio.Net RC1 is a very completely product, and most certainly if anything any changes to C# will be absolutely trivial. The changes during the RC phase are at most moving a dialog around or fixing spelling mistakes.
You should be a little less cynical
My karma whore comment was relating to the first post in this whole dirty thread, rather than yours.
Totally agree. Indeed I find it interesting that many of the features and benefits of the .NET platform have been available in J2EE for a while now, so it's weird hearing people promoting them as a revolution, when really is conceding the position of the other side was right all along. Having said that I think Microsoft did the right thing making C# so alike to Java (of course the standard disclaimer is that they're both derived from C++ so naturally that's going to happen) that Java programs can easily become cross-trained in both, ensuring that C# isn't such a transition that no one ever makes it.
An RC is a release candidate: Meaning that they're proposing that that is what they might actually release. That's closer to a real product than most products in the open source arena will ever be.
Having said that: Jesus Christ you zealots are a riot. I don't even really LIKE C#, nor am I sold on the ".NET" idea, nor have I advocated FOR it. I merely questioned what seemed to me to be a pure karma whore post because it obviously was written just to cater to the psycho zealots that frequent Slashdot.
And for all the dumb motherfuckers out there let me explain something: You "interoperate" (regardless of hilarious [sic] comments by trying-to-be-pretentious kids) with "properties" either via method, or via more abstract methods. I prefer the more abstract methods of Delphi, and also C#. It's amazing how many people will yap up their opinion on this when they have no clue.
Actually I'm hardly an MS advocate. For one I think they have a ridiculously lax attitude towards security (how many times do buffer overflows have to occur before someone says "Uh, maybe we should audit the IIS code where non-trivial stack variables are used....". I also am actually pushing at my company AGAINST a .NET initiative, or rather for at least seriously evaluating J2EE as a primary competitor.
Having said that regardless of my approach for them, I'm not a zealot. That means that I'm not an AC wanker running around trying to expose MS employees because someone says something good about MS (and regardless of your religious zealot opinion a lot of things MS does and has done ARE quite impressive).
BTW: I suspect you're just a Sun employee anyways.
Well given that Beta 2 has been available for closing on a year now, and I've had RC1 on my machine for about a month now... That's how I use C#.
Seriously though, have you? From your vague, unsubstantiated, no example posting it sounds like you use and know Java, therefore you can proclaim yourself knowledgable about C#. Your claims about the "bolted on" aspects of C# are particularly suspicious given the "hooks" into Windows are simply objects instantiatable from the .Net Framework (they're not "bolted on": Just like Java you include the unit and create objects from it). If anything C# takes some of the goofy aspects of Java, such as the interoperation with properties via methods, and cleans them up to make an abstract behind the scenes property handling system (ripped straight from Delphi's object pascal I would guess).
What's wrong wth scalping? It is a simple matter of supply and demand. If there is a demand for one at a price then it should be a right to sell it. By selling it at a price below what someone would pay you are depriving the product from the hands of someone who is willing to pay more for it but can't get to the store in time.
If it's simply "supply and demand" then why doesn't the store jack the price up to $500 if there isn't enough units? Would that simply be the fair thing to do? True "Supply and demand" in a capitalist society dictates that the supplier or demander are the ones who profit/lose based upon the supply/demand ratio, not some third party leach.
Oh get over yourself. There's a bit of a double standard in that you seem to find it perfectly reasonable that retailers constrict supply of these systems, preventing consumers from (theoretically) eliminating the middle man and getting a better price. Some of them even enforce bundling restrictions. So why are the scalpers evil?
Huh? How does some guy who heads down to Walmart and picks up 3, then putting the extra overhead of yet ANOTHER layer in there "eliminate the middleman"? That's absolutely preposterous. Having said that retailers don't artificially constrict the supply of these systems: They want to sell as many as they can! I've yet to see a store, ANYWHERE (in fact it is largely illegal here in Canada), saying "Well we only have 10 Gamecubes left so these ones are going for $999". They sell them for the same price whether they have 1 or 1,000,000.
You would find my other posts ironically humorous given that I am one of the biggest advocates of REAL capitalism (i.e. where people who produce get rewarded for their production), however I have a problem with bogus capitalism: That is the leaches that suck productivity from the rest of humanity, contributing nothing but imposing their tax. Someone buying some game machines and then reselling them offers absolutely no added value, but they impose their tax. It's a tragedy of the commons playing out in consumer electronics, and again I applaud Nintendo for flooding the market with Gamecubes ensuring a fair price for all.
Also, you assume that the families that buy these systems from resellers would be the ones to pick the system up from the store, were it not for the greedy bastards. This is absurd. For some families, people like this guy are the only way they'd ever get a system before Christmas. Their time is more valuable than their money. Get off your high horse.
I assume this is one of those funny "I only do it because everyone else does" sort of justifications: i.e. if he didn't buy a bunch up to scalp then damnit someone else would have. More realistically if there were no scalpers then yeah, probably 80% of them would be bought up by families for Christmas presents, etc. Instead 80% are bought up by scalpers. BTW: This "scalpers do a public service!" thing has played out regarding event tickets many times in the past, with scalpers claimer that without them the average joe couldn't get a ticket, but the reality being that the average joe can't get a ticket because of scalpers buying them up (under the pretense, of course, of doing a public service for the average Joe).
Same around this area: There is no problem finding either Xboxes or Gamecubes in local stores (or online stores for that matter), which is a very good thing. It seems that a lot of the game-scalpers got seriously jaded after last years PS2 fiasco: For every guy who made it big with his Ebayed PS2s, another 10 had a closet full that they probably still have sitting around.
I'm Sticking them on eBay soon as they are good and out of them and let the people who MUST have one get one.
No one must have a Gamecube, so don't pretend that you're pursuing a noble cause. Having said that I hope Nintendo absolutely swamps the market will millions, meaning that the most you'll ever get is retail (and it sounds like it will be like that as Nintendo has good production, meaning that I'd much rather pay retail than deal with the hassle of Ebay and some unknown person. I doubt anyone is going to profiteer off the Gamecube, or the Xbox for that matter. It was sweet after Christmas last year seeing hundreds of wankers trying to pawn PS2s at progressively lower prices, eventually taking a pretty heavy loss as the store prices dropped). The fact that scalpers such as yourself run and buy up all the stock just to rape families whose kids want a game to play really pisses me off, and I hope that you are left holding the bag on that.
How exactly does latency matter more than bandwidth for game consoles? Latency is only of greater concern when the reads/writes are generally random, which is exactly not the case with most games where it's "read a sprite/texture here, write it there". It's exactly the scenario where memory bandwidth is everything. The nvidia chipset includes full texture compression and all of that (at no cost) just as it does for the desktop boards.
In any case, while the xbox uses DDR DRAM SDRAM (which is already low latency and high bandwidth), the dual-memory channels ~halves the latency and doubles the bandwidth. The gamecubes marginal superiority in latency (if any in real world terms) is grossly outmatched in the bandwidth department.
I totally agree and honestly consider a Gamecube a likely candidate to purchase mostly for my wife, who loves the Zelda style of game (I like them myself but I'm pretty attached to my computer). I totally agree that Nintendo totally owns whole genres of games, and rightly so.
The funny thing is that I'm hardly an Xbox champion (I don't own one and I haven't ordered one, and I'm in a waiting and seeing pattern). Alas here goes.
http://www.consolewire.com/articles/item.asp?sid=2 43
There you can see that the final gamecube has a system floating point capability of 10.5 GFLOPs. Wow that's pretty impressive isn't it? Oh wait: read the fine print. That includes the H&L 3d hardware & the MPU. Suddenly it isn't all that impressive. A stock GeForce 3 has 76 GFLOPs of floating point power. Add that to the ~3 GFLOPs of floating point power in the P3 733 and you have ~80 GFLOPs of computational power, versus the all together 10.5 of the Gamecube. Of course Gamecube fanboys will compare the 10.5 number with the P3 733 processor itself, which is absurd as floating point generally only comes into play for 3D computations, which is all handled by the enormously powered GPU in the GeForce 3 (I don't have specifics because they're tight lipped, but apparently the Xbox has a Geforce 3+. I've read that the GF3+ in the XBox yields >100GFLOPs). Wow that 10 GFLOPS just doesn't look as impressive now does it (unless of course you foolishly compare it with the P3s throughput, despite the fact that the P3 is really just a master controller directing the GPU and sound hardware in what they should do). The main memory on the Xbox is 6.4GB/s versus 2.6GB/s on the Gamecube. Looks to me like there's a pretty clear champion from a technical perspective.
Geez, anybody ever heard of Gran Turismo 3
Like the other guy I mistakingly have been using the acronym GTA3 (always wondered what the 'A' was for...) for Gran Tourismo 3. It's GT3 that seems to be the killer PS2 game.
You might say that Halo is the greatest thing since bread, but the XBox doesn't have any other games (besides Halo) that are better than any of the above games I mentioned. And howcome if the XBox is sooooo superior, why is Project Gotham so inferior to GT3 (including graphics)?
I'm not saying that Halo is the best game: I've never played it, nor seen it in real life. However regardless there have always been games that manage to look like crap and make a platform look underwhelming (see most of the early PS2 games) so I don't think a sample of a genre that is done better on the PS2 really is relevant at this point. Give it 8 months.
Also, as any AMD freak would know, it's not always about MHz. Geez, the last system I can think of with 32 bit CPU before XBox was PS1!! I can assure you that the Gamecube and PS2 are quite capable of producing graphics on par with XBox.
Most claims of "64-bit processors" in the gaming world would be absolutely laughed at in the computer world, because usually they're bogus. "I have a 32-bit video processor, and a 32-bit CPU, so it's a 64-bit system!". Anyways I totally and absolutely agree that Mhz means next to nothing, but it's metrics like "lit, transformed polygons rendered per second" that matter, and it's in that realm that the Xbox is many factors higher than the other systems.