I think its a bit more complicated then that. From what I understand (which is very little) there is a certain level of nationalism in Japan. There is going to be a certain segment of the population that don't like white westerners or their products. This is hardly unique to Japan, many people root for the home team.
If I was in charge of XBox Japan, the areas I would work on are:
1) Games. Lets face it, Japanese like and play different games then Americans (or Europeans)../ had a interesting acticle about converting Counter Strike to a Japanese friend game. I am too lazy to lookup the link, but it really illustrated teh differences between what Americans and Japanese like in a video game. The gritty, adveserial (SP?), player-against-player nature does not appeal to them. Anybody familiar with Japanese games written for the Japanese gamer would immediately notice the difference in game play, asthetics, and design. Looking at the current 360 titles, I don't see (to my eyes at least) a lot of titles that would appeal to mainstream Japan. I understand that Microsoft has some make by and for Japanese games in the pipeline, that should help things.
2) Image. Nintendo and Sony are household names. Microsoft either doesn't enjoy that level of name recognization or they have been pigeon-holed based on their past consoles and games. They need to work on that image.
3) Online. Online play is one of the strengths of the 360. It doesn't seem to be doing very well in Japan, They need to figure out why and/or do something about it!
This is unbelievable ignorant. I am a software engineer, the software I write belongs to myself or the people who paid me to write it. If I CHOOSE to make it free (provided its mine to begin with), that is my right NOT my responsibility. Nobody has any inherent right to the fruits of my labor. If I spend a year building a house, with materials/tools I own on my land, its my house. Following your logic, the house I built becomes *hug* humanities *hug* house. That might be fine with you, but thats your business. Alone that same line of thought, if I spend a year writing a piece of software, using my tools and my time, that software belongs to me.
BTW, the next time I am in England, I look fowardard to the right to ENJOY the use of your home without restriction, the right to STUDY how your home works, the right to SHARE your home with my neighbours to improve the lot of humanity as a whole and the right to ADAPT your home to my needs.
"Nevertheless, relatively few major corporations and manufacturing plants choose to operate in Kerala;[39] this is mitigated by remittances sent home by overseas Keralites, which contributes around 20% of state GDP.[40] Kerala's per capita GDP -- 11,819 INR[41] -- is significantly higher than the all-India average,[37] although it still lies far below the world average."cite
Seriously, the GDP of that country is less the MS makes in a year, why would they worry?
Also, "it's a total waste of time, money and effort to invest in Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco equipment and their closed-source zero-innovation ideologies for their computing needs".
That a stupid statment. You don't like their products, their prices, their business practices? Fine. However, you obviously arn't a student of history if you think they have 'zero-innovation'. Can they still innovate? Thats the important question.
Well, Mars anv Venus are closest. Unfortunately the atmosphere of Venus is very unfriendly to humans/machines.
Venus has an extremely thick atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. The pressure at the planet's surface is about 90 times that at Earth's surface--a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The enormously CO2-rich atmosphere generates a strong greenhouse effect that raises the surface temperature to over 400 C."cite.
The next closest planets are Mercury and Jupiter, you wouldn't want to visit them either. Mercury is basically a semi-molten ball of rock, Jupiter is no treat with its high gravity, high winds, and very little (if any) crust. The planets don't get any better the further you get away from the sun. Basically, Mars is the only planet close enough and similiar enough to Earth to have any hope of visiting (and staying) for any useful amount of time.
I agree, I think the problem is how Mac Users and Dell (etc) Users view their machines. I would hazard most Dell Users view their machines as a _tool_. I have a 1.5 year old Dell laptop, it has on more plane rides, car rides, business trips and meetings then I can count. I has scratches from my watch, scratches from travel and is missing a little paint in a few places. Thats all ok because its a TOOL that gets USED and replaced when it breaks.
(wild generalization alert)
A significant majority of the mac users I have know treat their mac as more then a simple tool. No idea why, maybe its the type of people why buy macs.
Amazing, you went to a lot of work to try and justify this individuals actions. He didn't play with contrast, exposure, etc. He used the important 'add smoke and more burning buildings to make the damage look more extensive' technique. Most of consider that disingenuous at best, a out and out lie at worse. BTW, your sig wiped out the rest of your credibility, at least in my book.
Even worse, its made by a agency that has trouble getting little satelites into orbit. How about they actually get a man/woman into space (and hopefully back) first... Somehow, I bet a manned moon base is a bit more difficult. In other news, a group of Florists claim they will finish the trans-atlantic interstate soon after!
Thanks for the condescending and uninformative remark. What I was not sure of was if the OS treated each SPE as a separate, autonomous core (i.e. SMP). I had assumed the context of my question made that clear. As it turns out, my assumption was correct.
"The PPE which is capable of running a conventional operating system has control over the SPEs and can start, stop, interrupt and schedule processes running on the SPEs. To this end the PPE has additional instructions relating to control of the SPEs. Despite having Turing complete architectures the SPEs are not fully autonomous and require the PPE to initiate them before they can do any useful work."
Courtesy of the cell wiki
In other words, the OS tasks the PPE which tasks the SPEs. This is a entirely different beast from 8 autonomous cores.
I also found an interesting article about programming the cell. Not all my assumptions survived *sigh*.
Thanks!
I seriously doubt they will write efficient programs in the lifetime of this console. The level of efficiency they will achieve depends on a lot of things. I didn't see it in TFA, but I am assuming you cannot treat each SPE as an individual processor.
First of all, their dream of a general 'octopiler' is pure fantasy. I have written massively parallel MPI and Shared Memory applications and can testify to their complexity. Mapping an arbitrary piece of code transparently to multiple processor is a extremely difficult task. If the source is carefully written, it is possible to parallelize certain sections. This requires careful forethought and detailed knowledge of how the compiler works. If I where to guess, I would say they would use some type of middleware (a la CORBA) or libraries (a la MPI) to extend a programming language. That way, the programmer could specify sections of code that can be executed in parallel. This would help the compiler immensely and make much more efficient code. It would be really cool if the SPEs had some type of identifier, allowing you to task specific SPEs! I haven't read much about the CELL, so this may or may not be possible.
Overall, I bet the vast majority of the parallel code will be in carefully crafted libraries of CPU intensive tasks. These libraries will grow over time, making utilization of the SPEs more and more efficient. Until then, the main CPU and one SPE will execute the majority of the game with occasional help from the other SPEs.
Rmax and Nmax are two measures of the capability of a supercomputer.
The first, Rmax, is the LINPACK benchmark. The LINPACK benchmark is a measure of floating point operations per second for the cluster. They usually include theoritical ((Max FLOPs for one CPU) * (number of CPUs) == Rpeak) along with the actual. Obviously, theoretical values will always be larger then actual due to wasted CPU cycles.
Nmax is the size of the problem (i.e. the dimension of the solved linear equation)
So, Rmax is the maximum performance obtained by the LINPACK benchmark during the test, Nmax is the size of the problem the best performance was achieved at.
Well, you have me there. I did assume a lot on very little details. My theory does fit the facts I read fairly well though. I am sure the coffee shop was annoyed, called the cops to get rid of him (911, guess they ever heard of the non-emergency #). Cops, at least in my experience, don't typically arrest people for no reason. So, its likely they showed up and there was a criminal intent or action.
[politician]
Or, Think of the children!!!!
[/politician]
C is good for number-crunching, but definitely not for anything touching strings.
Completely untrue. Ignorantly written C should not touch strings. For every unsafe strcpy(), there is either a safe version (strncpy()) or another better way to do it. It is very possible to write C that handles strings all day long without any possiblity of a leak. Unfortunately, the unsafe functions tend to be easer to use and the favorite of the novice C programmer. It boils down to a lack of/poor training and understanding of the language. C does not hold your hand.
Fortran is the best number-crunching language by far. The compiler uses many passes to optimize the code far beyond what C is capable.
I would imagine the terms of his parole/plea/whatever stipulate no contact with minors and possibly internet restrictions as well. So, he was using the anon wireless to circumvent his restrictions. That's why he was arrested (at least I am assuming). There can be a TOS on wireless access, my work has one for all of their WAPs. When you connect, an acceptable use and TOS pops up, you must accept before you can continue.
Maybe I need to RTFA, but this makes no sense. You have 6 words, you block one that means you let 83.33% through, block two you let 66.66%, and so on. How the hell do you get 97% and 78%? Unless you weight the words differently or it lets a partial through...
AC (aka Moron), in cased you haven't neither the PS3 nor the Wii has been released. Currently, its vaporware, which is easy to pump up. Its a bit early to assert they have free online or '%100 backwards computability'. That might be the claim, but Sony has occasionally lied before.... Given the wildly divergent architecture and hardware, I would bet a tidy sum that many games will not be playable. Also, blu-ray is not needed for today's games. If you can fit Oblivion on a DVD, the space crunch is over-hyped.
HD-DVD isn't a movie format. Its a marketing label applied to a optical storage format. HD-DVD, much like DVD and Blu-Ray, stores data on little disks that goes wiiiii. They can be used for movies, games, pr0n, music, etc. HD-DVD can easily be used for games.
Very convincing. You attack my statistics, not with statistics of your own, but a general insinuation that Boeing or I lied. Please come back and play when you have actual data, not your opinions.
Well, you are welcome to. I asked my friend Mr. Google about your biased and obviously informed 'facts', he seems to think differently. I found several places that had accident statistics, including one from Boeing. You might not believe the numbers they have, but some research on my part tells me the numbers are reasonable. If you can find reputable numbers that say otherwise please let me know.
The net result is that Airbus most certainly does not make the safest commercial airlines (I only included the lowest numbers):
Hull Loss Accidents 1959-2004 (loss per million departures)
767: 0.34
757: 0.34
737-400/400-500: 0.36
A320/319/321: 0.42
747-400: 0.75
A300-600: 1.06
727: 1.1
737-100/200: 1.31
A310: 1.60
A300: 1.68
So, Airbus certainly makes good dependable airframes, but 10-20% better then Boeing or other US made? Please, keep your FUD and rhetoric under control.
Ok..
The ps3 is more expensive.. However maybe MS should compair it to their xbox 360 premium (400$) + the unanounced price of there HD-DVD drive (say 200$) + cost of xbox live (which makes xbox "better" __$ x each month + additional stuff you can buy).
Most people are quite happy with DVD and feel no need for blu-ray. Both the PS2 and Xbox where only marginal DVD players, my samsung is substancially better a good TV. So, in this case, I am glad MS doesn't force people to buy a expensive unproven drive.
And MS can affort to loose more money on each box (windows/office cash cow), so the more they sell the more they loose. Plus the 360 isn't even backward compatible so you'll have to buy alot of your older xbox games again or keep both units.. Until the older one breaks.
The 360 is backwords compatable with several hundred original Xbox games. We will see how compatable the ps3 is with original games. Microsoft is ok with losing mone on each 360 because they want to make it back on live subscriptions and game sales.
PS3 is really expensive, but should come down in price in a year as those blu-ray drives get cheaper. Plus since all ps3s have hard drives they are probably more likely to be used by game developers (maybe blu-ray disk is slow in its first generation?). The larger blu-ray discs might be usefull for some games.
It took 19 months for the original to drop in price. I seriously doubt they will drop the price before 2 years, they are losing hundreds on each sale and the hardware is very new. So, in two years, it will cost what the 360 does now?
I'll probably get one when the price drops, as I have a number of ps2 games we like to play. That prior investment is a little of what Sony is banking on. Considering the radical change in hardware, I imagine they will have the same emulation issues the 360 had.
Slashdot Mirror
I think its a bit more complicated then that. From what I understand (which is very little) there is a certain level of nationalism in Japan. There is going to be a certain segment of the population that don't like white westerners or their products. This is hardly unique to Japan, many people root for the home team.
./ had a interesting acticle about converting Counter Strike to a Japanese friend game. I am too lazy to lookup the link, but it really illustrated teh differences between what Americans and Japanese like in a video game. The gritty, adveserial (SP?), player-against-player nature does not appeal to them. Anybody familiar with Japanese games written for the Japanese gamer would immediately notice the difference in game play, asthetics, and design. Looking at the current 360 titles, I don't see (to my eyes at least) a lot of titles that would appeal to mainstream Japan. I understand that Microsoft has some make by and for Japanese games in the pipeline, that should help things.
If I was in charge of XBox Japan, the areas I would work on are:
1) Games. Lets face it, Japanese like and play different games then Americans (or Europeans).
2) Image. Nintendo and Sony are household names. Microsoft either doesn't enjoy that level of name recognization or they have been pigeon-holed based on their past consoles and games. They need to work on that image.
3) Online. Online play is one of the strengths of the 360. It doesn't seem to be doing very well in Japan, They need to figure out why and/or do something about it!
my two cents!
~nate
Well, my guess is that they looked at their sales numbers. Guess what, USA sold the most PS2 units...
.
.
.
PS2 Units Shipped
2006/06/30 106.23 million units (Japan: 23.55 million/ USA: 42.97 million/ Europe: 39.71 million)
So, they decided to ship to themselves and their largest single market first. Surprise, surprise.
This is unbelievable ignorant. I am a software engineer, the software I write belongs to myself or the people who paid me to write it. If I CHOOSE to make it free (provided its mine to begin with), that is my right NOT my responsibility. Nobody has any inherent right to the fruits of my labor. If I spend a year building a house, with materials/tools I own on my land, its my house. Following your logic, the house I built becomes *hug* humanities *hug* house. That might be fine with you, but thats your business. Alone that same line of thought, if I spend a year writing a piece of software, using my tools and my time, that software belongs to me.
BTW, the next time I am in England, I look fowardard to the right to ENJOY the use of your home without restriction, the right to STUDY how your home works, the right to SHARE your home with my neighbours to improve the lot of humanity as a whole and the right to ADAPT your home to my needs.
Thanks!
~nate
God knows it worked well for them in the past...
"Nevertheless, relatively few major corporations and manufacturing plants choose to operate in Kerala;[39] this is mitigated by remittances sent home by overseas Keralites, which contributes around 20% of state GDP.[40] Kerala's per capita GDP -- 11,819 INR[41] -- is significantly higher than the all-India average,[37] although it still lies far below the world average." cite
Seriously, the GDP of that country is less the MS makes in a year, why would they worry?
Also, "it's a total waste of time, money and effort to invest in Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco equipment and their closed-source zero-innovation ideologies for their computing needs". That a stupid statment. You don't like their products, their prices, their business practices? Fine. However, you obviously arn't a student of history if you think they have 'zero-innovation'. Can they still innovate? Thats the important question.
~nate
Well, Mars anv Venus are closest. Unfortunately the atmosphere of Venus is very unfriendly to humans/machines.
Venus has an extremely thick atmosphere, which consists mainly of carbon dioxide and a small amount of nitrogen. The pressure at the planet's surface is about 90 times that at Earth's surface--a pressure equivalent to that at a depth of 1 kilometer under Earth's oceans. The enormously CO2-rich atmosphere generates a strong greenhouse effect that raises the surface temperature to over 400 C." cite.
The next closest planets are Mercury and Jupiter, you wouldn't want to visit them either. Mercury is basically a semi-molten ball of rock, Jupiter is no treat with its high gravity, high winds, and very little (if any) crust. The planets don't get any better the further you get away from the sun. Basically, Mars is the only planet close enough and similiar enough to Earth to have any hope of visiting (and staying) for any useful amount of time.
I agree, I think the problem is how Mac Users and Dell (etc) Users view their machines. I would hazard most Dell Users view their machines as a _tool_. I have a 1.5 year old Dell laptop, it has on more plane rides, car rides, business trips and meetings then I can count. I has scratches from my watch, scratches from travel and is missing a little paint in a few places. Thats all ok because its a TOOL that gets USED and replaced when it breaks.
(wild generalization alert)
A significant majority of the mac users I have know treat their mac as more then a simple tool. No idea why, maybe its the type of people why buy macs.
OMG SONY IS tEH SUX...
(click)
OMG NINTEDO IS tEH...
(click)
OMG CONSOLES IS tEH S...
(click)
OMG PC GAMIN IStEH...
(click)
0MFG!!!111one BOARD...
Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
(gdb) bt
(gdb) frame 3
#3 0x0432b031 in CalculateNewIQ() at IQ.cpp:1337
1337 CalculateNewIQ(pExperiencedSinceLast, pOldIQ)
(gdb) print pExperiencedSinceLast
$1 = 0x0
bastards.
Amazing, you went to a lot of work to try and justify this individuals actions. He didn't play with contrast, exposure, etc. He used the important 'add smoke and more burning buildings to make the damage look more extensive' technique. Most of consider that disingenuous at best, a out and out lie at worse. BTW, your sig wiped out the rest of your credibility, at least in my book.
Have the fun,
~nate
Even worse, its made by a agency that has trouble getting little satelites into orbit. How about they actually get a man/woman into space (and hopefully back) first... Somehow, I bet a manned moon base is a bit more difficult. In other news, a group of Florists claim they will finish the trans-atlantic interstate soon after!
I also helps that they got their pee-pee smacked last time they tried it. A couple of nukes will make a believer out of most people.
use a real language, hopefully one with a footprint smaller then Jabba the Hutt.
Thanks for the condescending and uninformative remark. What I was not sure of was if the OS treated each SPE as a separate, autonomous core (i.e. SMP). I had assumed the context of my question made that clear. As it turns out, my assumption was correct.
"The PPE which is capable of running a conventional operating system has control over the SPEs and can start, stop, interrupt and schedule processes running on the SPEs. To this end the PPE has additional instructions relating to control of the SPEs. Despite having Turing complete architectures the SPEs are not fully autonomous and require the PPE to initiate them before they can do any useful work." Courtesy of the cell wiki
In other words, the OS tasks the PPE which tasks the SPEs. This is a entirely different beast from 8 autonomous cores.
I also found an interesting article about programming the cell. Not all my assumptions survived *sigh*. Thanks!
~nate
I seriously doubt they will write efficient programs in the lifetime of this console. The level of efficiency they will achieve depends on a lot of things. I didn't see it in TFA, but I am assuming you cannot treat each SPE as an individual processor.
First of all, their dream of a general 'octopiler' is pure fantasy. I have written massively parallel MPI and Shared Memory applications and can testify to their complexity. Mapping an arbitrary piece of code transparently to multiple processor is a extremely difficult task. If the source is carefully written, it is possible to parallelize certain sections. This requires careful forethought and detailed knowledge of how the compiler works. If I where to guess, I would say they would use some type of middleware (a la CORBA) or libraries (a la MPI) to extend a programming language. That way, the programmer could specify sections of code that can be executed in parallel. This would help the compiler immensely and make much more efficient code. It would be really cool if the SPEs had some type of identifier, allowing you to task specific SPEs! I haven't read much about the CELL, so this may or may not be possible.
Overall, I bet the vast majority of the parallel code will be in carefully crafted libraries of CPU intensive tasks. These libraries will grow over time, making utilization of the SPEs more and more efficient. Until then, the main CPU and one SPE will execute the majority of the game with occasional help from the other SPEs.
~nate
There, no, just a little right... yes, thats it. You had some Sony goo at the corner of your mouth.
~nate
Rmax and Nmax are two measures of the capability of a supercomputer.
The first, Rmax, is the LINPACK benchmark. The LINPACK benchmark is a measure of floating point operations per second for the cluster. They usually include theoritical ((Max FLOPs for one CPU) * (number of CPUs) == Rpeak) along with the actual. Obviously, theoretical values will always be larger then actual due to wasted CPU cycles.
Nmax is the size of the problem (i.e. the dimension of the solved linear equation)
So, Rmax is the maximum performance obtained by the LINPACK benchmark during the test, Nmax is the size of the problem the best performance was achieved at.
~nate
Well, you have me there. I did assume a lot on very little details. My theory does fit the facts I read fairly well though. I am sure the coffee shop was annoyed, called the cops to get rid of him (911, guess they ever heard of the non-emergency #). Cops, at least in my experience, don't typically arrest people for no reason. So, its likely they showed up and there was a criminal intent or action.
[politician]
Or, Think of the children!!!!
[/politician]
~nate
C is good for number-crunching, but definitely not for anything touching strings.
Completely untrue. Ignorantly written C should not touch strings. For every unsafe strcpy(), there is either a safe version (strncpy()) or another better way to do it. It is very possible to write C that handles strings all day long without any possiblity of a leak. Unfortunately, the unsafe functions tend to be easer to use and the favorite of the novice C programmer. It boils down to a lack of/poor training and understanding of the language. C does not hold your hand.
Fortran is the best number-crunching language by far. The compiler uses many passes to optimize the code far beyond what C is capable.
~nate
I would imagine the terms of his parole/plea/whatever stipulate no contact with minors and possibly internet restrictions as well. So, he was using the anon wireless to circumvent his restrictions. That's why he was arrested (at least I am assuming). There can be a TOS on wireless access, my work has one for all of their WAPs. When you connect, an acceptable use and TOS pops up, you must accept before you can continue.
~nate
Maybe I need to RTFA, but this makes no sense. You have 6 words, you block one that means you let 83.33% through, block two you let 66.66%, and so on. How the hell do you get 97% and 78%? Unless you weight the words differently or it lets a partial through...
:/
Hey, its Friday, im tired of working
~nate
AC (aka Moron), in cased you haven't neither the PS3 nor the Wii has been released. Currently, its vaporware, which is easy to pump up. Its a bit early to assert they have free online or '%100 backwards computability'. That might be the claim, but Sony has occasionally lied before.... Given the wildly divergent architecture and hardware, I would bet a tidy sum that many games will not be playable. Also, blu-ray is not needed for today's games. If you can fit Oblivion on a DVD, the space crunch is over-hyped.
~nate
HD-DVD isn't a movie format. Its a marketing label applied to a optical storage format. HD-DVD, much like DVD and Blu-Ray, stores data on little disks that goes wiiiii. They can be used for movies, games, pr0n, music, etc. HD-DVD can easily be used for games.
~nate
Very convincing. You attack my statistics, not with statistics of your own, but a general insinuation that Boeing or I lied. Please come back and play when you have actual data, not your opinions.
~nate
Well, you are welcome to. I asked my friend Mr. Google about your biased and obviously informed 'facts', he seems to think differently. I found several places that had accident statistics, including one from Boeing. You might not believe the numbers they have, but some research on my part tells me the numbers are reasonable. If you can find reputable numbers that say otherwise please let me know.
The net result is that Airbus most certainly does not make the safest commercial airlines (I only included the lowest numbers):
Hull Loss Accidents 1959-2004 (loss per million departures)
767: 0.34
757: 0.34
737-400/400-500: 0.36
A320/319/321: 0.42
747-400: 0.75
A300-600: 1.06
727: 1.1
737-100/200: 1.31
A310: 1.60
A300: 1.68
So, Airbus certainly makes good dependable airframes, but 10-20% better then Boeing or other US made? Please, keep your FUD and rhetoric under control.
~nate
Ok.. The ps3 is more expensive.. However maybe MS should compair it to their xbox 360 premium (400$) + the unanounced price of there HD-DVD drive (say 200$) + cost of xbox live (which makes xbox "better" __$ x each month + additional stuff you can buy).
Most people are quite happy with DVD and feel no need for blu-ray. Both the PS2 and Xbox where only marginal DVD players, my samsung is substancially better a good TV. So, in this case, I am glad MS doesn't force people to buy a expensive unproven drive.
And MS can affort to loose more money on each box (windows/office cash cow), so the more they sell the more they loose. Plus the 360 isn't even backward compatible so you'll have to buy alot of your older xbox games again or keep both units.. Until the older one breaks.
The 360 is backwords compatable with several hundred original Xbox games. We will see how compatable the ps3 is with original games. Microsoft is ok with losing mone on each 360 because they want to make it back on live subscriptions and game sales.
PS3 is really expensive, but should come down in price in a year as those blu-ray drives get cheaper. Plus since all ps3s have hard drives they are probably more likely to be used by game developers (maybe blu-ray disk is slow in its first generation?). The larger blu-ray discs might be usefull for some games. It took 19 months for the original to drop in price. I seriously doubt they will drop the price before 2 years, they are losing hundreds on each sale and the hardware is very new. So, in two years, it will cost what the 360 does now?
I'll probably get one when the price drops, as I have a number of ps2 games we like to play. That prior investment is a little of what Sony is banking on.
Considering the radical change in hardware, I imagine they will have the same emulation issues the 360 had.
~nate
Wow, I snarfed coffee on my keyboard, thanks! I think the command phrase should be:
"Smile like a donut"
~nate