If PS3's launch is like the PS2's then this whole debacle is going to be even more horrendous. Sony is in danger of getting "Beta'd" not only on its walkmans but on its consoles too.
I suppose if a market "owner" like Nintendo could get reduced to a bit player by a format dispute with industry players (playstation was supposed to be an add on for SNES) the same could happen to sony.
Maybe nintendo could regain its market share crown at the end of this round? 360 has nothing even remotely approaching a killer app and if Halo3 is as underwhelming a development as halo2 was this isnt going to change soon.
Nintendo need to court the big 3rd parties (EA) with their licensed ticklist shovelware that everyone seems to buy and then i think they could steal back a lot of market share, and maybe even become market leaders again. But then again, they seem to carry on undaunted even when they are marginalised so it won't matter if they dont.
So you could buy the cheapest ATI card or a 5700 then. I'm not trying to "big up" the 5200 in particular. The point is you CAN run modern games on nearly the cheapest available hardware. The fact you have to turn the graphics quality down isnt the point; the fact you CAN turn the graphics quality down to the abilities of your cheap card, thus allowing to play the game is the point.
Obviously if you want high res flashy graphics you need better hardware, but that is not in the control of the game developers. It's not like they could somehow rewrite the game to allow a cheap card to do full screen anti-aliasing in 1600x1200.
The point i was making is that panicking that games developers are going to obsolete your hardware and force you to spend hunderds of dollars on a new video card is not necessary. If you really need to play a new game, at worst every 3 years you may need to spend $100. And as an added bonus every time you do that, most of your old games suddenly get enhanced too; I only replaced my geforce3ti200 because it melted. The forced upgrade made all of my games a bit nicer to play, so that took the sting out of the $50 i shelled out for the FX5200. Incidentally the gf3 was a $50 replacement for my voodoo3 in order get warrior kings to run. I bought the the voodoo3 in 2000, the gf3 in 2002 and the FX5200 in 2005, so i've managed to stay playable on a very tight budget, using only the cheapest cards around.
I worked on some rather ambitiously complicated content management projects for a couple of years in PHP4 and i have to say it was a bit of a toy language.
I started designing an App framework for PHP5 (since it has rudimentary OO support) to eliminate wheel reinvention for even trivial requirements like data/type validation. But then Ruby on Rails came out and it looked like exactly what i was trying to do except on a better foundation and with someone else doing all the work;)
PHP4/5 seemed scrappy, but PHP5 was heading in the right direction. I'd be interested to see how PHP6 turns out. To be honest i think Ruby/Perl/Python are just much better alternatives to PHP full stop.
You have to remember that game developers don't want to exclude most of their audience. Yes, new games require full DX9 support cards, but even the cheapest $50 GeforceFX5200 is fully DX9 supporting.
As for CPUs, how much does an AthlonXP2000+ cost on ebay? $50, $60?
I have an AthlonXP1500 that only runs at 1100MHz due to my crap motherboard, and an FX5200 and i played HL2 all the way through on it.
By the time games require 2 GPUs, dual core GPU cards will be present throughout the market price range. This is inherent - if you release a game that requires only the richest users can run it, you will go out of business.
(incidentally this PCIe SLI thing is a fad; we already have one card with two GPUs on board; shortly there will be dual core GPUs, then quad, etc. It's just more efficient one both performance and price.)
What would happen if there was absolutely no gun control? Not a single jot. A teenager can buy a minigun, etc.
I'm genuinely curious; personally i have no agenda towards gun laws - here in the UK almost no one is allowed a gun. (Even the police until recently). I havent seen any problems caused by strict gun control. But then again i dont know what it would be like if anyone could buy one.
It's worth pointing out that i cant remember the last time a report of a shooting was on the news here. I suppose it's possible that since guns are outlawed here anyway there is no shit to stir by making everyone afraid of guns.
I think the focus of Ubuntu is more about integration than delivery of up to date package versions every six months.
It's kind of a "release early and often" mentality but applied to usability, integration and polish. Most of the focus takes place on the Gnome desktop and how easy it is to accomplish tasks in this environment, and how many things "just work".
That is why they are considering hanging the next release back a bit - they dont want any usability "regressions" for the sake of releasing on time, but they are still eager to output some kind of advancement on their regular schedule.
I kind of regard Ubuntu as a bit of a "Beta" at the moment; they still have "usability features" (ie instantly working video, easily configurable wifi) missing, so i think we are in a period of rapid turnover of feedback; i think therefore this justifies 6 month release schedules. Plus you are under no obligation to upgrade after 6 months; they support each release for 2 years.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that after "Dapper" the next version of ubuntu is going to be significant change, so maybe we'll be at the "Ubuntu 1.0" stage by then.
All motherboards can have a dipswitch/jumper that write protects the BIOS. Changing to read+write mode forces the PC to boot only from a ROM on the motherboard that can read a new BIOS image from a floppy/usb stick/cd/dvd.
The Bootable ROM checks the new BIOS image for a digital signature. To avoid "Trusted Computing" the Bootable ROM allows you to choose if you want to install only a properly signed BIOS image, or a custom one (although that option risks rootkits).
I was just thinking - if you can only run signed code on a trusted computer, does this mean people will need special registered dev kits to be able to write their own programs?
For example, right now we have say WinXP and C#.net whatever. So as an individual or a small company, i could write a.net app in C#.
Now on WinVista+1 with "Trusted computing" i decided to try the same thing, but find there is no Visual Studio 2010 becuase for that to even function, it would need to compile signed binaries, thus enabling joe sixpack to write a DeCSS program.
Three alternatives under trusted computing:
Visual Studio 2010 uploads your source to your registered developer account at compile.microsoft.com and you get your binaries back
WinVista+1 API is phenominally restrictive and only allows you to build high level Apps with only high level I/O controlled exclusively by MS approved DLLs (so you can't fopen("thing.xls") but you can getCell("thing.xls", "sheet1", G3)
There is a special "WinVista+1 Developer Edition" registered and strictly controlled by microsoft like the XBox XDK is.(maybe with a less restricted WV+1 Developer Pro Edition that only runs on $10000 MS hardware)
Personally I can't wait for MS/Intel to implement Trusted Computing. Then we just sit back and watch their grassroots developer base dwindle (developers,developers, developers; marginalised,marginalised,marginalised)
Then the OSS community just go about their regular business using open systems, totally unnaffected by TC. Because I think it's impossible to enforce Trusted Computing as mandatory; i dont see that threat coming to fruition. If they even attempt to put it in to action the resulting chaos would destroy the IT industry in America.
Nuclear power isn't being considered as a solution to power generation emissions, it is being pushed becuase it's the next energy cash cow.
Oil is shortly going to become unprofitable, so now the western military industrial complex need another rarity based power source to perpetuate the economy.
I've made a similar post before, but in short capitalism in a post industrial society inherently relies on and compulsively promotes massive amounts of needless waste.
Every time we waste something, someone makes a profit. We have to waste as much as we can to perpetuate this dangerously anachronistic resource allocation system that we haven't seen fit to revise in 500 years of drastic cultural and technological revolution.
There's little profit in commoditised energy that everyone has free access to, and unless someone finds a way to make it more profitable in comparison to wasteful energy it can't be promoted by our government/corporate system. That having been said it sounds a little like Windows vs Linux. If we could undermine the the artificial value of nuclear power by "giving away" wind turbines and solar panels to everyone, hardly anyone would buy grid electricity anymore and nuclear power would soon become a lot less prevalent, in the same way Windows is inevitably going to be massacred by a cost free equivalent.
Perhaps some kind of grass roots non profit movement to introduce solar power to as many homes as possible at the smallest cost possible.
Now that we are starting to be able to manipulate genetic material it shouldn't be long before we see a (comparitively) rapid explosion of deliberately triggered mutations in the human population. You would hope that most of these mutations would have had some selection criteria applied to them before they are instigated (ie. the "intelligent design" of the scientists that cook them up).
If widespread genetic engineering took place we would see a rapid acceleration in the influence of human preference selection on the gene pool, in that what humans consider advantageous traits would get a huge leg up over what the environment selects as well adapted traits.
The ramifications of this are similar to other widespread synthetic changes; disruption of the ecological balance between humans and the rest of the ecosystem (similar to agriculture, industrialisation) except this time i would imagine it would be an imbalance between humans and viruses/diseases, rather than wildlife/the atmosphere.
The trouble with a big clever brain is it can contrive modifications to its' surrounding environment a lot quicker than is safe to implement. Natural selection can't keep up with our tinkering and is about to be outcompeted. Then we truly have pissed in our own pond.
(of course, unless you believe in the supernatural, our brains and all their output are part of nature and therefore "synthetic" selection is just an arbitrary distinction so in reality natural selection killed the planet)
I have an athlon xp1500+ with a geforce fx5200 and 512MBs of RAM and i can play anything on the market as long as i turn the settings down to "my computer is a retard" levels.
even games that say they require faster CPUs dont.
My understanding was that the rasion detre of OOo was to be a free MSOffice clone, thereby eliminating a need to buy MSOffice (or the Windows to run it on).
So i would assume OOo was destined to get bloated and slow, and follow all the same UI mistakes that MSOffice has collected.
Isnt the idea of a monolithic office suite a bit 1990's anyway? I only use OOo to open/save MS documents.
The thing is, on Linux, all the interoperability/scripting stuff that is wedged into MSOffice is all doable at the system level. And (i would hope) the use of open document formats means you can pick and choose what (more appropriate) apps you use to do it.
the use of intelligence would be in figuring out what naturally occuring circumstances could generate this event.
you wouldnt be intelligently designing multicellular life. you would putting some single celled organisms in a particular environment and waiting for spontaneous evolution to multicelled organisms.
if that environment was one that can be shown to have occured naturally in the dim and distant past, you have demonstrated a convincing mechanism whereby single cells could have evolved into multi cellular organisms.
naturally, you wouldnt have proved that it DID happen, just that it isn't impossible, thus advancing the theory of evolution and eliminating the creationists' argument that its statistically impossible to have happened.
the safest path to freedom and ecological stabilty are the same thing:
education
If everyone was educated to understand the system we live in they would appreciate the fact it is governed entirely by meaningless profit, and they would be free to come to the obvious conclusion that they dont want a pathologically wasteful and dangerous capitalist system, thereby eliminating the need to torch billions of gallons of oil every day for the sake of letting some fat cat oil barons to live out the last 100 years of the earth's habitable lifespan in absurdly disproportionate luxury.
That will only happen when the installed bases of 98 ~ 2K ~ XP has dwindled enough that software / hardware developers feel comfortable excluding them.
Most games will be written for DX9 so that developers have largest possible customer base. Real high profile games will have DX10 support too.
This won't change till hardly anyone runs 2K/XP anymore, but by then who cares? and how long will that be? 98 is 8 years old and only recently has support for it started to dwindle.
i think its important to point out that this is all coming from the media rule-book not the "gay rule-book".
media targetting of youngsters with gay imagery is not at the behest of the homosexual community.
its the sign of true paranoia when you lump all your enemies into one conspiratorial mass.
How many gay people do you think even consider themselves part of a nationwide "gay community", let alone actively participate in one? And is this pink mafia in control of the "liberal" media? What about all the loony-lefty democrat drug addicts, or are they one and the same?
All you aids-riddled gay drug addicts, stop targetting my kids with your degenerate depictions of sex and violence all day and all night on the TV and internet!
The roadmap for Ubuntu is guided by lots of use-cases. Thats why i find the project exciting; they are trying to correct or at least smooth over this lack of end-user regard that is prevalent in lots of FOSS software.
Admittedly ubuntu is just a distribution so these use-cases are more directed at integration and desktop interface but it's an important first step.
Maybe what we need is a similar organisation that singles out lacking sectors of the FOSS software world and invests resources in the acheivement use-case oriented milestones in those sectors, whether it be by improving existing software or building new stuff from scratch.
also, power station chimney stacks don't vent directly into the personal space of the general population of a city. (you'd hope.)
Plus an electric car could be augmented with it's own solar panels. The surface area of panels on all those cars would be a heck of a lot. If you covered the equivalent area of land there would be uproar.
"Damn Small Linux" is the least cluttered desktop linux distro to my knowledge. It's fairly basic though, but i think it can install anything in from debian so it would seem it's as extensible as you'd need.
I found Ubuntu to be a revelation in terms of easily configurable and usable linux. It is also based on debian so there are TONS of packages available.
You can do a "server" install of Ubuntu and all that installs is enough to get a bash prompt and networking up. Then you can use the absurdly simple package manager to install whatever you see fit. It has KDE and Gnome desktop packages if you dont mind trading resources for features, but also has an Xfce desktop package (known as "xubuntu") that is lighter on the megs.
If you do "go nuts" and install the default Gnome desktop setup, the system is extremely elegant and well integrated; adding and removing software is really really simple.
They have a new release every 6 months and reading the roadmap it seems like it is going to keep improving really quickly. By the time Vista comes out i'm sure it will be more than worth checking out.
by the way; damn small linux and ubuntu have "live cd" versions so you can try them out.
I write C code in my head, and compile it by reading the source code of GCC out loud while counting on my fingers. Then i settle down with nice cup of earl grey and stare blankly out of the window as i hand optimise bottlenecks in the compiled binary. This involves imagining a virtual machine layer that allows me to run a virtual 386, PowerPC, etc in my brain.
I remember reading somewhere that other than price, the thing that wiped out Beta was the fact the blank tapes only lasted an hour so you couldnt tape a whole film on one. (i beleive they later extending running time but it was too little too late).
I wonder if Blu-Ray being higher capacity than HD DVD will be a factor in domestic purchasing? That said, running time does not equal capacity since they can alter the bit-rate to set the running time at whatever they feel like, so i suppose it's all moot.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it's software and hardware. In which case the software would be one of the limiting factors.
I suppose if a market "owner" like Nintendo could get reduced to a bit player by a format dispute with industry players (playstation was supposed to be an add on for SNES) the same could happen to sony.
Maybe nintendo could regain its market share crown at the end of this round? 360 has nothing even remotely approaching a killer app and if Halo3 is as underwhelming a development as halo2 was this isnt going to change soon.
Nintendo need to court the big 3rd parties (EA) with their licensed ticklist shovelware that everyone seems to buy and then i think they could steal back a lot of market share, and maybe even become market leaders again. But then again, they seem to carry on undaunted even when they are marginalised so it won't matter if they dont.
Obviously if you want high res flashy graphics you need better hardware, but that is not in the control of the game developers. It's not like they could somehow rewrite the game to allow a cheap card to do full screen anti-aliasing in 1600x1200.
The point i was making is that panicking that games developers are going to obsolete your hardware and force you to spend hunderds of dollars on a new video card is not necessary. If you really need to play a new game, at worst every 3 years you may need to spend $100. And as an added bonus every time you do that, most of your old games suddenly get enhanced too; I only replaced my geforce3ti200 because it melted. The forced upgrade made all of my games a bit nicer to play, so that took the sting out of the $50 i shelled out for the FX5200. Incidentally the gf3 was a $50 replacement for my voodoo3 in order get warrior kings to run. I bought the the voodoo3 in 2000, the gf3 in 2002 and the FX5200 in 2005, so i've managed to stay playable on a very tight budget, using only the cheapest cards around.
I started designing an App framework for PHP5 (since it has rudimentary OO support) to eliminate wheel reinvention for even trivial requirements like data/type validation. But then Ruby on Rails came out and it looked like exactly what i was trying to do except on a better foundation and with someone else doing all the work ;)
PHP4/5 seemed scrappy, but PHP5 was heading in the right direction. I'd be interested to see how PHP6 turns out. To be honest i think Ruby/Perl/Python are just much better alternatives to PHP full stop.
As for CPUs, how much does an AthlonXP2000+ cost on ebay? $50, $60?
I have an AthlonXP1500 that only runs at 1100MHz due to my crap motherboard, and an FX5200 and i played HL2 all the way through on it.
By the time games require 2 GPUs, dual core GPU cards will be present throughout the market price range. This is inherent - if you release a game that requires only the richest users can run it, you will go out of business.
(incidentally this PCIe SLI thing is a fad; we already have one card with two GPUs on board; shortly there will be dual core GPUs, then quad, etc. It's just more efficient one both performance and price.)
Graaaarrgh! I am OCTOHEAD, the man with the broadest shoulders in the universe!!!
I'm genuinely curious; personally i have no agenda towards gun laws - here in the UK almost no one is allowed a gun. (Even the police until recently). I havent seen any problems caused by strict gun control. But then again i dont know what it would be like if anyone could buy one.
It's worth pointing out that i cant remember the last time a report of a shooting was on the news here. I suppose it's possible that since guns are outlawed here anyway there is no shit to stir by making everyone afraid of guns.
It's kind of a "release early and often" mentality but applied to usability, integration and polish. Most of the focus takes place on the Gnome desktop and how easy it is to accomplish tasks in this environment, and how many things "just work".
That is why they are considering hanging the next release back a bit - they dont want any usability "regressions" for the sake of releasing on time, but they are still eager to output some kind of advancement on their regular schedule.
I kind of regard Ubuntu as a bit of a "Beta" at the moment; they still have "usability features" (ie instantly working video, easily configurable wifi) missing, so i think we are in a period of rapid turnover of feedback; i think therefore this justifies 6 month release schedules. Plus you are under no obligation to upgrade after 6 months; they support each release for 2 years.
Mark Shuttleworth has said that after "Dapper" the next version of ubuntu is going to be significant change, so maybe we'll be at the "Ubuntu 1.0" stage by then.
The Bootable ROM checks the new BIOS image for a digital signature. To avoid "Trusted Computing" the Bootable ROM allows you to choose if you want to install only a properly signed BIOS image, or a custom one (although that option risks rootkits).
For example, right now we have say WinXP and C# .net whatever. So as an individual or a small company, i could write a .net app in C#.
Now on WinVista+1 with "Trusted computing" i decided to try the same thing, but find there is no Visual Studio 2010 becuase for that to even function, it would need to compile signed binaries, thus enabling joe sixpack to write a DeCSS program.
Three alternatives under trusted computing:
- Visual Studio 2010 uploads your source to your registered developer account at compile.microsoft.com and you get your binaries back
- WinVista+1 API is phenominally restrictive and only allows you to build high level Apps with only high level I/O controlled exclusively by MS approved DLLs (so you can't fopen("thing.xls") but you can getCell("thing.xls", "sheet1", G3)
- There is a special "WinVista+1 Developer Edition" registered and strictly controlled by microsoft like the XBox XDK is.(maybe with a less restricted WV+1 Developer Pro Edition that only runs on $10000 MS hardware)
Personally I can't wait for MS/Intel to implement Trusted Computing. Then we just sit back and watch their grassroots developer base dwindle (developers,developers, developers; marginalised,marginalised,marginalised)Then the OSS community just go about their regular business using open systems, totally unnaffected by TC. Because I think it's impossible to enforce Trusted Computing as mandatory; i dont see that threat coming to fruition. If they even attempt to put it in to action the resulting chaos would destroy the IT industry in America.
why do i drain my life reading this junk.....?
hopefully this means AMD will revert to trying to compete on price and so i can afford to get a modern setup ;)
Oil is shortly going to become unprofitable, so now the western military industrial complex need another rarity based power source to perpetuate the economy.
I've made a similar post before, but in short capitalism in a post industrial society inherently relies on and compulsively promotes massive amounts of needless waste.
Every time we waste something, someone makes a profit. We have to waste as much as we can to perpetuate this dangerously anachronistic resource allocation system that we haven't seen fit to revise in 500 years of drastic cultural and technological revolution.
There's little profit in commoditised energy that everyone has free access to, and unless someone finds a way to make it more profitable in comparison to wasteful energy it can't be promoted by our government/corporate system. That having been said it sounds a little like Windows vs Linux. If we could undermine the the artificial value of nuclear power by "giving away" wind turbines and solar panels to everyone, hardly anyone would buy grid electricity anymore and nuclear power would soon become a lot less prevalent, in the same way Windows is inevitably going to be massacred by a cost free equivalent.
Perhaps some kind of grass roots non profit movement to introduce solar power to as many homes as possible at the smallest cost possible.
If widespread genetic engineering took place we would see a rapid acceleration in the influence of human preference selection on the gene pool, in that what humans consider advantageous traits would get a huge leg up over what the environment selects as well adapted traits.
The ramifications of this are similar to other widespread synthetic changes; disruption of the ecological balance between humans and the rest of the ecosystem (similar to agriculture, industrialisation) except this time i would imagine it would be an imbalance between humans and viruses/diseases, rather than wildlife/the atmosphere.
The trouble with a big clever brain is it can contrive modifications to its' surrounding environment a lot quicker than is safe to implement. Natural selection can't keep up with our tinkering and is about to be outcompeted. Then we truly have pissed in our own pond.
(of course, unless you believe in the supernatural, our brains and all their output are part of nature and therefore "synthetic" selection is just an arbitrary distinction so in reality natural selection killed the planet)
even games that say they require faster CPUs dont.
So i would assume OOo was destined to get bloated and slow, and follow all the same UI mistakes that MSOffice has collected.
Isnt the idea of a monolithic office suite a bit 1990's anyway? I only use OOo to open/save MS documents.
The thing is, on Linux, all the interoperability/scripting stuff that is wedged into MSOffice is all doable at the system level. And (i would hope) the use of open document formats means you can pick and choose what (more appropriate) apps you use to do it.
you wouldnt be intelligently designing multicellular life. you would putting some single celled organisms in a particular environment and waiting for spontaneous evolution to multicelled organisms.
if that environment was one that can be shown to have occured naturally in the dim and distant past, you have demonstrated a convincing mechanism whereby single cells could have evolved into multi cellular organisms.
naturally, you wouldnt have proved that it DID happen, just that it isn't impossible, thus advancing the theory of evolution and eliminating the creationists' argument that its statistically impossible to have happened.
education
If everyone was educated to understand the system we live in they would appreciate the fact it is governed entirely by meaningless profit, and they would be free to come to the obvious conclusion that they dont want a pathologically wasteful and dangerous capitalist system, thereby eliminating the need to torch billions of gallons of oil every day for the sake of letting some fat cat oil barons to live out the last 100 years of the earth's habitable lifespan in absurdly disproportionate luxury.
Most games will be written for DX9 so that developers have largest possible customer base. Real high profile games will have DX10 support too.
This won't change till hardly anyone runs 2K/XP anymore, but by then who cares? and how long will that be? 98 is 8 years old and only recently has support for it started to dwindle.
media targetting of youngsters with gay imagery is not at the behest of the homosexual community.
its the sign of true paranoia when you lump all your enemies into one conspiratorial mass.
How many gay people do you think even consider themselves part of a nationwide "gay community", let alone actively participate in one? And is this pink mafia in control of the "liberal" media? What about all the loony-lefty democrat drug addicts, or are they one and the same?
All you aids-riddled gay drug addicts, stop targetting my kids with your degenerate depictions of sex and violence all day and all night on the TV and internet!
Admittedly ubuntu is just a distribution so these use-cases are more directed at integration and desktop interface but it's an important first step.
Maybe what we need is a similar organisation that singles out lacking sectors of the FOSS software world and invests resources in the acheivement use-case oriented milestones in those sectors, whether it be by improving existing software or building new stuff from scratch.
Plus an electric car could be augmented with it's own solar panels. The surface area of panels on all those cars would be a heck of a lot. If you covered the equivalent area of land there would be uproar.
I found Ubuntu to be a revelation in terms of easily configurable and usable linux. It is also based on debian so there are TONS of packages available.
You can do a "server" install of Ubuntu and all that installs is enough to get a bash prompt and networking up. Then you can use the absurdly simple package manager to install whatever you see fit. It has KDE and Gnome desktop packages if you dont mind trading resources for features, but also has an Xfce desktop package (known as "xubuntu") that is lighter on the megs.
If you do "go nuts" and install the default Gnome desktop setup, the system is extremely elegant and well integrated; adding and removing software is really really simple.
They have a new release every 6 months and reading the roadmap it seems like it is going to keep improving really quickly. By the time Vista comes out i'm sure it will be more than worth checking out.
by the way; damn small linux and ubuntu have "live cd" versions so you can try them out.
I write C code in my head, and compile it by reading the source code of GCC out loud while counting on my fingers. Then i settle down with nice cup of earl grey and stare blankly out of the window as i hand optimise bottlenecks in the compiled binary. This involves imagining a virtual machine layer that allows me to run a virtual 386, PowerPC, etc in my brain.
I remember reading somewhere that other than price, the thing that wiped out Beta was the fact the blank tapes only lasted an hour so you couldnt tape a whole film on one. (i beleive they later extending running time but it was too little too late). I wonder if Blu-Ray being higher capacity than HD DVD will be a factor in domestic purchasing? That said, running time does not equal capacity since they can alter the bit-rate to set the running time at whatever they feel like, so i suppose it's all moot.