Ah, but since it was Microsoft that copied the eyetoy concept, we're all supposed to forget that the original ever existed. I'd think Slashdotters would know how this works by now...;)
While I'm glad they came up with this new standard, I wish they wouldn't use the IEEE for this stuff. Now if someone wants to look at the standard they will be charged an outrageous price like $250. $250 for something that will be at most 50 pages, in other words they charge $5 per page.
Well, to be fair, it took them about 2 weeks to write each page.
I know this is slashdot, so if anything goes wrong we must blame any copyright protection schemes in place, but according to insiders, it's actually a problem with blu-ray's java, and the players that are having problems just need a firmware update. And according to people with ps3s and the movie, the ps3 plays them fine, note how the article says the load times are *up to* two minutes. Don't you just love it when people leave things nice and vague so you can make the situation sound much better/worse than it really is? Although I'm a blu-ray fan, I'm not really apologizing (problems are problems), I thought I'd clarify, especially the bit about the ps3.
I wouldn't know anything first hand, I don't like either movie, and Fox tends to charge too much for their blu-ray movies anyway.
Because it can be done from anywhere there's a wifi connection, not just at home? If someone really enjoys a game, it's a neat idea to be able to play it a little from work/school/coffee shops, or even friends houses. I'd suspect lag would make it largely unplayable for action games, but it's still a good way to show someone the game or get a quick fix.
In today's class, we'll look at how to tell who's losing a format war...
This is why Toshiba's having trouble getting other hardware manufacturers on board, with them selling at such a loss. Sure HD-DVD is supposed to be cheaper than blu-ray for disc pressing, but the players have pretty much the same specs, it can't be that much cheaper for Toshiba to build them.
Every time someone says motion controls for the Wii in a game with a sword or lightsaber, everyone thinks the lightsaber on-screen will follow their movements. So far, I have yet to see this happen. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wiggling the Wii controller back and forth has replaced hitting the 'x' button. Wiggle it up and down for the 'y' button.
I can see why, if watch one of the few games that actually tries to follow the remote, like the baseball bat in Wii Sports, the remote is terribly inaccurate and loses track of where it actually is unless it's pointed at the IR bar. It can only reliably sense broad gestures. I really think a lot of Wii sales are based on the promise of a lightsaber onscreen doing exactly what you do, and being able to get into real sword fights... it's why I wanted a Wii until I actually played one.
But if they can actually deliver on that promise, I'll be thrilled to buy a Wii.
For nearly all the gamers that actually watched it, this conference was a disaster. They didn't really reach out to hardcore gamers, they basically told them to shut up about online, and yes, the three or four games you already knew about are still coming out. Yay. The rest of the show was about how people who don't normally game were getting into the Wii and DS. That's great for Nintendo and the shareholders, people who would classify themselves as gamers were basically shoved over to the MS/Sony side of things.
Then they trot out Miyamoto, the genius that is the only reason Nintendo still exists, especially in the minds of regular gamers, and then reveal his amazing new project! Wii Fit. It's basically a two pad DDR pad that's pressure sensitive. There was even a horrible DDR-style step exercise program, it was pathetic. The only mildly entertaining thing in it was the Soccer headbutting mini-game. Good to kill a few minutes at a friend's house, but not something to replace, you know, a real game. Oh, it had a scale function too! Now THAT'S Next-Gen!! You can find out what your BMI is!!!! Nintendo is making Super Rub-A-Dub look like an epic. And this is what Miyamoto's doing now, coming up with new ways to disguise a gaming system to sell to people who don't want to play games?
For all the gamers I know, Wii Wept.
Yes, the RSX can't be used in ps3 linux, but the Cell can be, and Sony encourages the installation of linux on the ps3. All that's lacking are apps that take advantage of the cell fully, and I've been talking to people who are working on it. Several patches are available, just waiting to be included with various media players.
To all those people that complain about power usage in every single story about the ps3's folding@home, tell me, would it be more energy efficient to use a PC to do the same thing? Considering how much faster each ps3 is than a pc (excepting the GPU client, which is very limited to what kinds of calculations it can do), and the fact that the ps3 uses about the same amount of power as a low- to mid-range PC, I'd like to hear the real reason so many people are complaining about the power usage.
Or would you rather not let people use a technological resource to do some good at all?
Think of it as a very subtle opportunity to bash Sony by not mentioning what's coming out tomorrow on the PSN (Calling All Cars is slated, iirc). Now does Zonk's posting make sense?;)
I've long held that the biggest thing holding back modern consoles were the input methods, a simple controller obviously does not cut it anymore. Sony had a decent start with the Eyetoy, but had a lot of accuracy problems, and could only see motion in 2D. Obviously the Wii has taken a great step forward with sensing 3D motion, going beyond the Sixaxis. Sony has an HD Eyetoy and microphone on the way, are there any plans to use them in a big way beyond simple voice chat? Will it be able to sense motion in 3D? We know the PS3 already does simple face recognition, will the PS3 eventually recognize me and log me in to Home automatically? Are voice commands on the way?
That's a very fair assesment from the game developer's point of view. Sony is apparently giving out the good libraries to third-party developers now, but I suspect "good" is relative. However, if you're a hobbiest and want to play with several very fast vector processors for a limited scope but very demanding app, the PS3 is the cheapest and easiest way to go.
Yeah, everyone pissed all over the PS2 when it came out because of stupid Sony execs over hyping the console, but when it launched most games looked worse than Dreamcast games, but it was more expensive.
Everyone I know, from average gamers to low-level systems programmers WANT a PS3. Badly. The gamers because they love the PS2 and all the great exclusives it had, and expect the PS3 to do the same, but with far better graphics. They don't follow gaming news quite enough to hear stupid quotes from various Sony execs, they're too busy playing Oblivion. Only problem is they can't afford the stupid thing, which is too bad since I know they'd go apeshit over Home.
The programmers I know want to play with the Cell, myself included. From everything I've heard, it's living up to the hype, even if you only get to play with 6 of the vector units on the PS3. It's also living up to the "pain in the ass to program" stories too, but that just makes some of us want to take a shot at it even more. But that's still not enough motivation to spend $500 - $600 to screw around with it, even though the programmers could afford it.
The PS3 is getting more and more exclusives every day (LittleBigPlanet, God of War 3 just got announced), and that's all it really needs now that they announced Home (and rumble too, I guess). The price really is the sticking point. I have a good friend who's a huge God of War fan, but there's no way in hell he's getting a PS3 in the next four years, he only got the PS2 last year. They won't be able to drop the price fast enough over the PS3's lifespan for it to ever approach PS2 sales numbers, but it can compete with the Xbox 360.
Since you were very snotty to someone who replied to you, I'm posting the snotty version of my reply...
There is a point at which one must face facts. Since the AMD 64 line, AMD has had the superior cpu over the P4. The AMD line was, with few exceptions, cheaper, cooler, faster, and as stable, if not more so, and it did that while still including your precious protection against forgetting to put on the heatsink. Is that something you do often?
Yes, the Athlon line was neck-and-neck with the P3, the Athlon XP line did well against the P4 until the end, the 64 line, like I mentioned, kicked ass until the Core 2 Duo came out, something you might not be aware of since you're posting problems with AMD cpus that haven't been an issue since 2001. Yes, the Core 2 line is awesome, but for high-end server work (expensive stuff), the AMD architecture still has some very nice things going for it.
So, has anyone ever gotten Cinellera to run long enough to comment on usability? I've tried many, many times to compile the thing, and the prepackaged binaries I've found are hideously unstable. I've heard about a community version, but don't know how far along it is... hoping it's useful-ish. They've written their own widget libraries and codecs, so it's really not that flexible.
Similar story with Jashaka, very hard to get to compile, and when I did, I seem to recall it wasn't a video editor so much as an effects mixer for video. Thanks to this story I've discovered kino, which is happily packaged for Ubuntu... but so far, also doesn't work. Freezes up when I try to load a video file. I'll keep trying, but I've always been a little surprised at the sorry state of video editors on linux. I've also been annoyed that whenever the subject is brought up, there's always a bunch of "I've never used it, but there's cinelerra" posts. Yes, I know you haven't used it, that's why you're suggesting it.
All I really want is a simple video editor for making anime music videos, and for this, I currently have to boot Windows to use Premiere.
It's great when Blue Dragon sells 80,000 copies, but when you consider that there's only a grand total of 170,000 xbox 360s in Japan, well... don't expect Blue Dragon sales to hold up. *cough* There's already far more Wiis in Japan than 360s, the only reason Blue Dragon sells so quickly is it's the only game for 360 owners to buy.
It's like Halo here, the game practically came with the xbox1.
Last I checked, both systems had the same amount of memory. 512 MB. The Xbox 360 cpu and gpu have to share it, while in the ps3 the Cell gets 256 MB, and the gpu gets 256 MB. As simple as the math here is, this is the second time today I've seen someone post the "fact" that the 360 has twice the memory. Where is the 360 supposed to store geometry and textures?
The ps3 nvidia chip really isn't anything special compared to the 360's ATI chip... the only really interesting thing is that the Cell has easily twice the vector processing capabilities of the three-core xbox cpu. That probably won't translate into better graphics for at least a year, if ever. It could make for some interesting background applications, like enhanced physics processing or doing something interesting (read: Wii-like) with the HD eyetoy. We won't know for a while though.
I agree Sony needs the competition, but it's not as if Microsoft doesn't need to be taken down a couple notches also.
The Wiimote has a strap for a reason, as backup, as you mentioned. As simple and easy to accomplish as that task is, the strap has been failing at even doing that. I find it interesting that Nintendo was able to build a complicated multi-function remote that could survive getting tossed into TVs and walls, but failed at making a strap that could withstand an overhand throw from a gamer.
And I really, really look forward to someone accidentally letting go of their wiimote that's constantly criticizing others for being maniacs. It's called an accident, and unless you're the toolbox that's barely wiggling the wiimote in all the games, chances are you'll eventually slip up.
There's a hypervisor running between the kernel and the hardware, so I don't think it's going to be an easy task to hack the nvidia ppc macintosh drivers to run on this thing. I got the impression from the documentation that the accelerator was pretty much locked off, but even if it wasn't, we're pretty much stuck waiting for nvidia to cough up a binary driver blob.
Unless someone wants to port opengl to the cell spus. It couldn't be nearly as fast as the nvidia chip, geforce3 territory at best, but it could support any kind of shaders you throw at it.
Okay, the ad about viruses was a good one, but the first of this series of ads I saw, the PC was complaining about not being able to run anything other than business software, and the Apple could run games and a bunch of other stuff. I was thinking, eh? Mac runs more games than the PC? Hell, a PC running Linux can probably run more games than a Mac (winex, and so on).
It might be worth noting that in a video of the PS3 menu that engadget released, it showed an option for "Install other OS", and under it read something along the lines of "No partition was detected on the hard drive for alternate OS", and had some directions on how to go about creating one. So just grab a usb keyboard and mouse, plug PS3 into an HDTV (you were going to anyway, right?), and stuff in the YDL dvd. Even the Dreamcast and Xbox 1 weren't this easy to get linux running properly.
So not only will YDL run on the PS3, the PS3 actually encourages such things without having to mod the console. Terrasoft says you can even download the distro, so I look forward to seeing how lenient the native PS3 OS is about unsigned code running off a burned DVD. No more having to buy a $200 kit or digging up a crazy sync-on-green monitor either. It even looks like other distributions could be run on it, which would be nice since I have a deep-seated loathing for Red Hat based distros. But YDL comes with not only the full GCC toolchain, but the Cell sdk too so you can play with the fun parts. Only question I have left is if there will be proper 3d accelerated nvidia drivers included.
So no, it doesn't have linux pre-installed, but it's damn close. Don't really care, it's not like you have to pay $100 a year just to run your own programs on it (coughxbox360).
What's sad is I really want to play Neverball with the PS3 tilt controller. I wonder how far the hardware access goes in the PS3 linux...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but since it was Microsoft that copied the eyetoy concept, we're all supposed to forget that the original ever existed. I'd think Slashdotters would know how this works by now... ;)
While I'm glad they came up with this new standard, I wish they wouldn't use the IEEE for this stuff. Now if someone wants to look at the standard they will be charged an outrageous price like $250. $250 for something that will be at most 50 pages, in other words they charge $5 per page.
Well, to be fair, it took them about 2 weeks to write each page.
I know this is slashdot, so if anything goes wrong we must blame any copyright protection schemes in place, but according to insiders, it's actually a problem with blu-ray's java, and the players that are having problems just need a firmware update. And according to people with ps3s and the movie, the ps3 plays them fine, note how the article says the load times are *up to* two minutes. Don't you just love it when people leave things nice and vague so you can make the situation sound much better/worse than it really is? Although I'm a blu-ray fan, I'm not really apologizing (problems are problems), I thought I'd clarify, especially the bit about the ps3. I wouldn't know anything first hand, I don't like either movie, and Fox tends to charge too much for their blu-ray movies anyway.
Because it can be done from anywhere there's a wifi connection, not just at home? If someone really enjoys a game, it's a neat idea to be able to play it a little from work/school/coffee shops, or even friends houses. I'd suspect lag would make it largely unplayable for action games, but it's still a good way to show someone the game or get a quick fix.
This is why Toshiba's having trouble getting other hardware manufacturers on board, with them selling at such a loss. Sure HD-DVD is supposed to be cheaper than blu-ray for disc pressing, but the players have pretty much the same specs, it can't be that much cheaper for Toshiba to build them.
I can see why, if watch one of the few games that actually tries to follow the remote, like the baseball bat in Wii Sports, the remote is terribly inaccurate and loses track of where it actually is unless it's pointed at the IR bar. It can only reliably sense broad gestures. I really think a lot of Wii sales are based on the promise of a lightsaber onscreen doing exactly what you do, and being able to get into real sword fights... it's why I wanted a Wii until I actually played one. But if they can actually deliver on that promise, I'll be thrilled to buy a Wii.
For nearly all the gamers that actually watched it, this conference was a disaster. They didn't really reach out to hardcore gamers, they basically told them to shut up about online, and yes, the three or four games you already knew about are still coming out. Yay. The rest of the show was about how people who don't normally game were getting into the Wii and DS. That's great for Nintendo and the shareholders, people who would classify themselves as gamers were basically shoved over to the MS/Sony side of things. Then they trot out Miyamoto, the genius that is the only reason Nintendo still exists, especially in the minds of regular gamers, and then reveal his amazing new project! Wii Fit. It's basically a two pad DDR pad that's pressure sensitive. There was even a horrible DDR-style step exercise program, it was pathetic. The only mildly entertaining thing in it was the Soccer headbutting mini-game. Good to kill a few minutes at a friend's house, but not something to replace, you know, a real game. Oh, it had a scale function too! Now THAT'S Next-Gen!! You can find out what your BMI is!!!! Nintendo is making Super Rub-A-Dub look like an epic. And this is what Miyamoto's doing now, coming up with new ways to disguise a gaming system to sell to people who don't want to play games? For all the gamers I know, Wii Wept.
Yes, the RSX can't be used in ps3 linux, but the Cell can be, and Sony encourages the installation of linux on the ps3. All that's lacking are apps that take advantage of the cell fully, and I've been talking to people who are working on it. Several patches are available, just waiting to be included with various media players.
To all those people that complain about power usage in every single story about the ps3's folding@home, tell me, would it be more energy efficient to use a PC to do the same thing? Considering how much faster each ps3 is than a pc (excepting the GPU client, which is very limited to what kinds of calculations it can do), and the fact that the ps3 uses about the same amount of power as a low- to mid-range PC, I'd like to hear the real reason so many people are complaining about the power usage. Or would you rather not let people use a technological resource to do some good at all?
Think of it as a very subtle opportunity to bash Sony by not mentioning what's coming out tomorrow on the PSN (Calling All Cars is slated, iirc). Now does Zonk's posting make sense? ;)
I've long held that the biggest thing holding back modern consoles were the input methods, a simple controller obviously does not cut it anymore. Sony had a decent start with the Eyetoy, but had a lot of accuracy problems, and could only see motion in 2D. Obviously the Wii has taken a great step forward with sensing 3D motion, going beyond the Sixaxis. Sony has an HD Eyetoy and microphone on the way, are there any plans to use them in a big way beyond simple voice chat? Will it be able to sense motion in 3D? We know the PS3 already does simple face recognition, will the PS3 eventually recognize me and log me in to Home automatically? Are voice commands on the way?
That's a very fair assesment from the game developer's point of view. Sony is apparently giving out the good libraries to third-party developers now, but I suspect "good" is relative. However, if you're a hobbiest and want to play with several very fast vector processors for a limited scope but very demanding app, the PS3 is the cheapest and easiest way to go.
Yeah, everyone pissed all over the PS2 when it came out because of stupid Sony execs over hyping the console, but when it launched most games looked worse than Dreamcast games, but it was more expensive.
Everyone I know, from average gamers to low-level systems programmers WANT a PS3. Badly. The gamers because they love the PS2 and all the great exclusives it had, and expect the PS3 to do the same, but with far better graphics. They don't follow gaming news quite enough to hear stupid quotes from various Sony execs, they're too busy playing Oblivion. Only problem is they can't afford the stupid thing, which is too bad since I know they'd go apeshit over Home.
The programmers I know want to play with the Cell, myself included. From everything I've heard, it's living up to the hype, even if you only get to play with 6 of the vector units on the PS3. It's also living up to the "pain in the ass to program" stories too, but that just makes some of us want to take a shot at it even more. But that's still not enough motivation to spend $500 - $600 to screw around with it, even though the programmers could afford it.
The PS3 is getting more and more exclusives every day (LittleBigPlanet, God of War 3 just got announced), and that's all it really needs now that they announced Home (and rumble too, I guess). The price really is the sticking point. I have a good friend who's a huge God of War fan, but there's no way in hell he's getting a PS3 in the next four years, he only got the PS2 last year. They won't be able to drop the price fast enough over the PS3's lifespan for it to ever approach PS2 sales numbers, but it can compete with the Xbox 360.
You make it sound like PS2 games are now region-free on the US PS3 since a firmware update... if that were true, I'd buy one tonight.
Since you were very snotty to someone who replied to you, I'm posting the snotty version of my reply... There is a point at which one must face facts. Since the AMD 64 line, AMD has had the superior cpu over the P4. The AMD line was, with few exceptions, cheaper, cooler, faster, and as stable, if not more so, and it did that while still including your precious protection against forgetting to put on the heatsink. Is that something you do often? Yes, the Athlon line was neck-and-neck with the P3, the Athlon XP line did well against the P4 until the end, the 64 line, like I mentioned, kicked ass until the Core 2 Duo came out, something you might not be aware of since you're posting problems with AMD cpus that haven't been an issue since 2001. Yes, the Core 2 line is awesome, but for high-end server work (expensive stuff), the AMD architecture still has some very nice things going for it.
Wow, stereotype much?
All I really want is a simple video editor for making anime music videos, and for this, I currently have to boot Windows to use Premiere.
I personally don't predict a lot of RFID tagging in the military.
So? Last I checked the open-source codecs could handle even wmv9, so even your processor architecture shouldn't matter. Is it encrypted?
It's great when Blue Dragon sells 80,000 copies, but when you consider that there's only a grand total of 170,000 xbox 360s in Japan, well... don't expect Blue Dragon sales to hold up. *cough* There's already far more Wiis in Japan than 360s, the only reason Blue Dragon sells so quickly is it's the only game for 360 owners to buy. It's like Halo here, the game practically came with the xbox1.
Last I checked, both systems had the same amount of memory. 512 MB. The Xbox 360 cpu and gpu have to share it, while in the ps3 the Cell gets 256 MB, and the gpu gets 256 MB. As simple as the math here is, this is the second time today I've seen someone post the "fact" that the 360 has twice the memory. Where is the 360 supposed to store geometry and textures? The ps3 nvidia chip really isn't anything special compared to the 360's ATI chip... the only really interesting thing is that the Cell has easily twice the vector processing capabilities of the three-core xbox cpu. That probably won't translate into better graphics for at least a year, if ever. It could make for some interesting background applications, like enhanced physics processing or doing something interesting (read: Wii-like) with the HD eyetoy. We won't know for a while though. I agree Sony needs the competition, but it's not as if Microsoft doesn't need to be taken down a couple notches also.
The Wiimote has a strap for a reason, as backup, as you mentioned. As simple and easy to accomplish as that task is, the strap has been failing at even doing that. I find it interesting that Nintendo was able to build a complicated multi-function remote that could survive getting tossed into TVs and walls, but failed at making a strap that could withstand an overhand throw from a gamer. And I really, really look forward to someone accidentally letting go of their wiimote that's constantly criticizing others for being maniacs. It's called an accident, and unless you're the toolbox that's barely wiggling the wiimote in all the games, chances are you'll eventually slip up.
There's a hypervisor running between the kernel and the hardware, so I don't think it's going to be an easy task to hack the nvidia ppc macintosh drivers to run on this thing. I got the impression from the documentation that the accelerator was pretty much locked off, but even if it wasn't, we're pretty much stuck waiting for nvidia to cough up a binary driver blob. Unless someone wants to port opengl to the cell spus. It couldn't be nearly as fast as the nvidia chip, geforce3 territory at best, but it could support any kind of shaders you throw at it.
Okay, the ad about viruses was a good one, but the first of this series of ads I saw, the PC was complaining about not being able to run anything other than business software, and the Apple could run games and a bunch of other stuff. I was thinking, eh? Mac runs more games than the PC? Hell, a PC running Linux can probably run more games than a Mac (winex, and so on).
So not only will YDL run on the PS3, the PS3 actually encourages such things without having to mod the console. Terrasoft says you can even download the distro, so I look forward to seeing how lenient the native PS3 OS is about unsigned code running off a burned DVD. No more having to buy a $200 kit or digging up a crazy sync-on-green monitor either. It even looks like other distributions could be run on it, which would be nice since I have a deep-seated loathing for Red Hat based distros. But YDL comes with not only the full GCC toolchain, but the Cell sdk too so you can play with the fun parts. Only question I have left is if there will be proper 3d accelerated nvidia drivers included.
So no, it doesn't have linux pre-installed, but it's damn close. Don't really care, it's not like you have to pay $100 a year just to run your own programs on it (coughxbox360).
What's sad is I really want to play Neverball with the PS3 tilt controller. I wonder how far the hardware access goes in the PS3 linux...