Look at the current spec required to emulate the PSX at full speed - a 300Mhx PII. The CPU that it emulates runs only at around 33Mhz (Or was it 37? - can't remember) To even get equal to the power ot the PSX2 CPU, you'd have to be running a PIII at well over 1 Gigahertz. You're gonna need another order of magnitude to emulate it... Sure, when it comes out some PC's may be able to match it, but it'll still be a few years before it becomes emulatable.
Well, I didn't say a 'low end pc', I said a 'low end PII'...
The graphics subsystem on the Dreamcast is very nice (if a little quirky) probably at least Voodoo II speed, but it is let down a little bit by the processor, which is only about as fast as a PII 233. We tended to find that we were limited by the processor most of the time, rather than the graphics card.
Actually, the one *really* nice thing that the Dreamcast has is on-the-fly texture decompression - it's got 8Mb of Framebuffer/Texture space, but you can compress the texures and use them without any speed hit, which allows you to have a whole load of really big textures.
Sorry, I don't have an URL - all of these comments come from actually programming the thing...;-)
The Sega Dreamcast has NOWHERE NEAR the power that the Playstation II has. I've just finished working on a Dreamcast game, and it's a nice system, but it has pretty much the power of a low-end PII (266Mhzish) with a good 3d graphics card. The PSX II is much more powerful than current Desktop PCs.
However, The Dreamcast will have been out for a year by the time the PSX will probably come out, so until then Sega still retain the crown for the most powerful games console.
It'll be quite a long time before before any PCs are capable of running any form of Playstation 2- - it's CPU (even at 300Mhz) beats the crap out of a PIII running at 500Mhz due to the two extra sets of floating point processors. The graphics ability is phenomenal as well, much more powerful than any of the PC cards out there at the moment. I saw the thing running when I was at GDC, and it's quite incredible.
Oh, and it is backwards compatible with the Playstation - it uses the same chip that the PSX uses for it's main CPU for handling it's I/O subsystem...
Firstly, reproducing films is a pretty expensive buisiness - 10,000 copies ain't cheap.
Secondly, A copy made from a first-generation film is still going to be pretty high quality - probably better than you'd get after a reel has gone through a projector 50 times.... Now, someone who has a first-generation copy can sell copies much cheaper than Lucasfilms can because they don't have to recoup any of the production costs.
Thirdly (And a bit of an aside, I admit) Digital Theatre Screens are almost upon us. Episode 1 is being used to debut the first one. Others are bound to follow. Episode II is going to be completely digital - they'll be using digital cameras throughout.
I don't think that the central idea behind Intellectual Property is that you can just have an idea, and then make money from it.
Rather, if you have an idea and spend your time and money on developing it - and someone else benefits from your hard work, then you deserve some recompense for it. That's why (In the UK, at least - I'm not entirely sure of the situation in the US) You can't patent an idea - rather you can only patent an *implementation* of an idea.
No, it's divided into people who want to learn *different things*
I first installed Linux becuase I'd enjoyed using Unix when I was at college - nice, stable environment, decent scripting, I liked XWindows etc...
However, when I installed it I realised that there was a whole side of it that I'd never really had to bother with before - installation and system administration, and frankly, I wasn't interested it it. - I don't want to *configure* a computer, I want to *use* it. Now I'm not saying that I'm adverse to a little bit of tweaking here and there, but I just found that with Linux it was complete pain in the butt. There is a whole lot of documentation that comes with it, but all the HOWTO's are very badly organised, and it can be quite time consuming trying to find the snippet of information that you want. Now, if I was a sys admin, obviously I'd be willing to spend the time looking for it, but all I wanted to do was try out Linux on my computer, to see if it was the kind of environment that I'd like to program in.
There's all kind of interesting things that I *want* to learn, but many of the arcane intracacies of Linux aren't among them.
But there are several companies making money from MP3 - diamond multimedia, for example.
The reason MP3 will eventually die is that another, substantially better format will come along - a format that is sufficiently good to make people want to make the effort tp convert/recompress all their mp3s....
It seems to me that you're confusing 'free software user' with 'free OS user'... Being a 'free software user' is not mutually exclusive with being a 'commercial software user' I use several pieces of free sofware at the same time as I user several pieces of commercial software. I would also argue that as the userbase of windows is larger than the userbase of linux, you isolate more users by choosing linux.
By trying to make free software only for free operating systems (but okay, we're basically talking linux here) you may be condemning free software to be used only my the minority of users who can cope with the complexities of linux, never to escape to brighten the lives of those can't.
PNG is a lossless compression format. It's similar to GIF, but patentless and can handle more than 256 colours (among other things). This makes it good for non-natural images, especially those that suffer under the hands of lossy compression formats like JPEG. However, with lossless compression, your're seldom gonna get the same kind of compression ratio, simply because (rather simply put) lossy compression algorithms throw away a lot of the data, so they don't actually have so much to compress.
So, I suggest in the future before you start insulting the/. readership in general, you use your brain and make sure you do actually know a little about what you're talking about.
The 128Kb of cache that the celeron has is on-chip and runs at the same speed as the chip, thereby ensuring that it's *very* fast. The L2 cache for your P90 will be on the motherboard and run much slower than the chip.
The thing with cache is that in most cases it follows the law of diminishing returns. You get much more performance increase going from 64Kb to 128Kb than you do from 128 to 256, and from 256 to 512 etc...
The alphas are obviously aimed at server applications, where large amounts of cache are more useful than in most consumer applications, due to the huge amount of data they are required to handle. The improvement in speed that you'd get from doubling the cache on a PIII is minimal for most consumer applications. Especially when you compare it to the increased cost.
Communism n. 1 a social system in which most property is publicly owned and each person works for the common benefit. b political theory advocating this.
a) OSS isn't a social system. It's a system of software development. b) Most software isn't OSS, but OSS still fits alongside closed-source software well.
communism \Com"mu*nism\, n. [F. communisme, fr. commun common.] A scheme of equalizing the social conditions of life; specifically, a scheme which contemplates the abolition of inequalities in the possession of property, as by distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all.
Now, let me get this straight - the system being proposed is a mechanism whereby those who wish to support the efforts of a programmer may do so easily.
Does it equalize the social conditions of life? No. Does it equalize the property ownership of those involved? No.
Doesn't look like communism to me.
Maybe if you stopped trying to relive the McCarthy witchhunts you might stop for a moment and actually look at the evidence in front of you. Judge it by it's merits and flaws, rather than the pathetic little box you've chosen to put it into.
There's more to CmdrTaco's glib comment than meets the eye - a letter to this week's New Scientist points out that as Microwave ovens use a frequency of about 2.4 Gigahertz, chips in the not-too distant future will be pumping out (albeit small quantaties of) raditation that could cook your food, even if you do have a good cooling system... Personally, though I'd be more worried by stray radiation from the oven buggering about with my computer...
If you want a lot of people to start seriously thinking about open source games, then the Windows platform might be a better choice - There are many more people who use it.
Of course, an even better idea might be to try and write a game that works on both...
I was under the impression that rather than MP4 standing for 'Mpeg audio layer 4' it's actually a MPEG 4 audio stream, which is a somewhat different thing...
I've read several articles claiming that there's actually only a shortage of young computer programmers, and in fact there's a whole load of experienced older programmers out there without a job.
Probably made up statistic: for every year you are over 22(?) it takes an extra 2 weeks to get a job...
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Hmmm. Played fine on my PII 266. Even when I made it play fullscreen (I run at 1600x1200)...
Just because he expresses an opposing view to many people here doesn't make it FUD....
Disk is cheap, but compactflash card for my Rio ain't...
Look at the current spec required to emulate the PSX at full speed - a 300Mhx PII. The CPU that it emulates runs only at around 33Mhz (Or was it 37? - can't remember) To even get equal to the power ot the PSX2 CPU, you'd have to be running a PIII at well over 1 Gigahertz. You're gonna need another order of magnitude to emulate it... Sure, when it comes out some PC's may be able to match it, but it'll still be a few years before it becomes emulatable.
Well, I didn't say a 'low end pc', I said a 'low end PII'...
;-)
The graphics subsystem on the Dreamcast is very nice (if a little quirky) probably at least Voodoo II speed, but it is let down a little bit by the processor, which is only about as fast as a PII 233. We tended to find that we were limited by the processor most of the time, rather than the graphics card.
Actually, the one *really* nice thing that the Dreamcast has is on-the-fly texture decompression - it's got 8Mb of Framebuffer/Texture space, but you can compress the texures and use them without any speed hit, which allows you to have a whole load of really big textures.
Sorry, I don't have an URL - all of these comments come from actually programming the thing...
The Sega Dreamcast has NOWHERE NEAR the power that the Playstation II has. I've just finished working on a Dreamcast game, and it's a nice system, but it has pretty much the power of a low-end PII (266Mhzish) with a good 3d graphics card. The PSX II is much more powerful than current Desktop PCs.
However, The Dreamcast will have been out for a year by the time the PSX will probably come out, so until then Sega still retain the crown for the most powerful games console.
It'll be quite a long time before before any PCs are capable of running any form of Playstation 2- - it's CPU (even at 300Mhz) beats the crap out of a PIII running at 500Mhz due to the two extra sets of floating point processors. The graphics ability is phenomenal as well, much more powerful than any of the PC cards out there at the moment. I saw the thing running when I was at GDC, and it's quite incredible.
Oh, and it is backwards compatible with the Playstation - it uses the same chip that the PSX uses for it's main CPU for handling it's I/O subsystem...
cheers,
Tim
No, I don't think *you* get it...
Firstly, reproducing films is a pretty expensive buisiness - 10,000 copies ain't cheap.
Secondly, A copy made from a first-generation film is still going to be pretty high quality - probably better than you'd get after a reel has gone through a projector 50 times.... Now, someone who has a first-generation copy can sell copies much cheaper than Lucasfilms can because they don't have to recoup any of the production costs.
Thirdly (And a bit of an aside, I admit) Digital Theatre Screens are almost upon us. Episode 1 is being used to debut the first one. Others are bound to follow. Episode II is going to be completely digital - they'll be using digital cameras throughout.
I don't think that the central idea behind Intellectual Property is that you can just have an idea, and then make money from it.
Rather, if you have an idea and spend your time and money on developing it - and someone else benefits from your hard work, then you deserve some recompense for it. That's why (In the UK, at least - I'm not entirely sure of the situation in the US) You can't patent an idea - rather you can only patent an *implementation* of an idea.
No, it's divided into people who want to learn *different things*
I first installed Linux becuase I'd enjoyed using Unix when I was at college - nice, stable environment, decent scripting, I liked XWindows etc...
However, when I installed it I realised that there was a whole side of it that I'd never really had to bother with before - installation and system administration, and frankly, I wasn't interested it it. - I don't want to *configure* a computer, I want to *use* it. Now I'm not saying that I'm adverse to a little bit of tweaking here and there, but I just found that with Linux it was complete pain in the butt. There is a whole lot of documentation that comes with it, but all the HOWTO's are very badly organised, and it can be quite time consuming trying to find the snippet of information that you want. Now, if I was a sys admin, obviously I'd be willing to spend the time looking for it, but all I wanted to do was try out Linux on my computer, to see if it was the kind of environment that I'd like to program in.
There's all kind of interesting things that I *want* to learn, but many of the arcane intracacies of Linux aren't among them.
cheers,
Tim
Please Rob, you just gotta have a box for BBC news headlines... (Especially as you often link to them...)
But there are several companies making money from MP3 - diamond multimedia, for example.
The reason MP3 will eventually die is that another, substantially better format will come along - a format that is sufficiently good to make people want to make the effort tp convert/recompress all their mp3s....
It seems to me that you're confusing 'free software user' with 'free OS user'... Being a 'free software user' is not mutually exclusive with being a 'commercial software user' I use several pieces of free sofware at the same time as I user several pieces of commercial software. I would also argue that as the userbase of windows is larger than the userbase of linux, you isolate more users by choosing linux.
By trying to make free software only for free operating systems (but okay, we're basically talking linux here) you may be condemning free software to be used only my the minority of users who can cope with the complexities of linux, never to escape to brighten the lives of those can't.
PNG is a lossless compression format. It's similar to GIF, but patentless and can handle more than 256 colours (among other things). This makes it good for non-natural images, especially those that suffer under the hands of lossy compression formats like JPEG. However, with lossless compression, your're seldom gonna get the same kind of compression ratio, simply because (rather simply put) lossy compression algorithms throw away a lot of the data, so they don't actually have so much to compress.
/. readership in general, you use your brain and make sure you do actually know a little about what you're talking about.
So, I suggest in the future before you start insulting the
cheers,
Tim
The 128Kb of cache that the celeron has is on-chip and runs at the same speed as the chip, thereby ensuring that it's *very* fast. The L2 cache for your P90 will be on the motherboard and run much slower than the chip.
The thing with cache is that in most cases it follows the law of diminishing returns. You get much more performance increase going from 64Kb to 128Kb than you do from 128 to 256, and from 256 to 512 etc...
The alphas are obviously aimed at server applications, where large amounts of cache are more useful than in most consumer applications, due to the huge amount of data they are required to handle. The improvement in speed that you'd get from doubling the cache on a PIII is minimal for most consumer applications. Especially when you compare it to the increased cost.
a) OSS isn't a social system. It's a system of software development.
b) Most software isn't OSS, but OSS still fits alongside closed-source software well.
Still doesn't look like communism to me ;-)
From Websters:
communism \Com"mu*nism\, n. [F. communisme, fr. commun common.] A scheme of equalizing the social conditions of life; specifically, a scheme which contemplates the abolition of inequalities in the possession of property, as by distributing all wealth equally to all, or by holding all wealth in common for the equal use and advantage of all.
Now, let me get this straight - the system being proposed is a mechanism whereby those who wish to support the efforts of a programmer may do so easily.
Does it equalize the social conditions of life? No.
Does it equalize the property ownership of those involved? No.
Doesn't look like communism to me.
Maybe if you stopped trying to relive the McCarthy witchhunts you might stop for a moment and actually look at the evidence in front of you. Judge it by it's merits and flaws, rather than the pathetic little box you've chosen to put it into.
Erm - I wasn't seriously suggesting tat you could cook with it, but that we may have problems with interferance...
If you want a lot of people to start seriously thinking about open source games, then the Windows platform might be a better choice - There are many more people who use it.
Of course, an even better idea might be to try and write a game that works on both...
They're just pretty fronts to very bog-standard cases... big deal!
I was under the impression that rather than MP4 standing for 'Mpeg audio layer 4' it's actually a MPEG 4 audio stream, which is a somewhat different thing...
I've read several articles claiming that there's actually only a shortage of young computer programmers, and in fact there's a whole load of experienced older programmers out there without a job.
Probably made up statistic: for every year you are over 22(?) it takes an extra 2 weeks to get a job...