Angus Thinks…

Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles.

This rather alarmist statement came out of a panel discussion at the Game Developers Conference. One of the panelists, Chris Hecker, suggested that the next generation consoles such as the XBox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 may be better at doing pretty graphics than current hardware but be worse at gameplay and AI code.

Why? The reasoning is that the graphics code is predictable, straight line code and the processors on the new systems are good at in order code execution. The AI code on the other hand is quite random which doesn’t suit the new processors at all. Currently out-of-order execution is used to speed things up, but the new chips have less capability in this area, so performance on this type of code is worse. This problem was, to some extent, predictable but it seems that the level of performance is much lower than expected with the development kits.

My guess is that the Sony hardware may prove worse at this than the Microsoft hardware, simply because Microsoft is running something closer to a standard PC on the XBox added to the fact that the PowerPC chip range has been fairly solid in terms of performance so far. The Sony cell processors are completely new, so this remains something of an unknown quantity.

Since the hardware hasn’t been released yet, this might be less of a problem than is anticipated, but given that this new information comes from people with direct experience of the hardware it seems unlikly to be wrong.

However I’m no expert in this area so I think it’s going to have to be a case of wait and see.

[Via Alice at Wonderland: Burn the house down (Link)] via [A Gamer's Manifesto]

I’ve been slightly concerned recently that the key labels are rubbing off the keyboard of my iBook.

But then I found this. A keyboard with no key labeling at all. 104 entirely black keys, no labels.

Interestingly it promises to offer faster speeds for the experienced typist and has differently weighted keys for different finger strengths. It sounds really interesting, especially as it promises compatibility with Linux and Mac OS X. (USB presumably)

I was reading a review on Amazon.com for a book (more on Amazon failings in some later post), when I came across two lines that perfectly describe a large number of the second rate novels being published:

“Recent Plot Chunk of On-Going Fantasy Story #62″ and “Loud Explosion Clumsy Info Dump Space Adventure #23″

The unfortunate thing really is how many books that I’ve read seem to fall into one of these two categories. Yet more are sitting on the shelves, virtual or otherwise, awaiting the unwary reader.

The modern publishing industry, at least in the SF category, seems to delight in offering enormously length series of books, often without any end in sight. The Wheel of Time series seems to offer up an extremely large and very heavy new volume each each year. Which may be great if the series is worthwhile, but is it? I don’t know. I’ve decided not to consider reading it until the last book is published in case the author gets hit by a car or decides to stop writing it (as has happened to one series that I really liked).

I have no idea whether the wheel of Time series is good or bad, I suspect that it probably better than average, because people continue to buy the books. But perhaps the publishing industry should move towards new ideas instead of ever lengthening series?

However despite that, there are several excellent series on my bookshelf that I would be very pleased to see more of, so perhaps it depends on the readers.

The trailer for Howl’s Moving Castle has appeared on the Apple trailers site. It looks, as ever for Studio Ghibli, most remarkable.

I just read that New Worlds bookstore in London is closing. This is really sad news because I often visited it when I lived in Cambridge. It had a quite amazing collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, especially US titles. But apparently the building is being demolished and the new premises aren’t large enough to take both it and the more profitable Murder One crime store as well.
Originally Murder One was on the ground floor and New Worlds was in the basement, now only Murder One will survive. It seems unfortunately appropriate that a Crime book store would survive.

I should really be working, not blogging today. (Since today is Monday).

Some old error messages from MPW (which was kind of like XCode for Mac before Mac OS X in one sense).

“String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that’s 3 more than ANSI said I should)”

“…And the lord said, `lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement’”

“a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program”

[From Buggin' My Life Away]

There is a story up at Wired about Spore [flash heavy site]. Although spore is a single player god type sim game it will have some kind of internet access facility along the lines of the sims, you can place your planet into an online universe. Whether your creatures can then interact with creatures created by other players is unclear but the idea does sound like lots of fun however it works.

Spore looks to be released sometime in 2006, presumably for PC. Hopefully a Mac version will come out at some point as well.

Retrofone is a fairly new company that sells older model mobile phones. It seems that this may be where some of the those traded in phones are actually going. The company has a whole range of old models for sale on their website. They have all of the old favourites including the Nokia 7110 and 6210. The 6210 being interesting because I still use a 6210 as my main mobile phone (it doesn’t even have a color screen). The prices seem reasonable and the service looks adaquate with a 30 day guarantee on purchases.

The site also offers some really old units including analogue units. I suppose these are useful today only as historical oddities, or possibly for use on some ancient network in a remote part of the world. Although is there anywhere that doesn’t have a GSM network these days?

[From The Guardian]

Robert X Cringely offered up a new view on where Google is going.

His view seems to be that Google will eventually be in control of much of the internet experience though their new google cache, Yahoo will probably win the online music price war, Napster will die and Apple will offer a new mac mini based movie experience using a wireless unit that plugs into the TV and decodes H.264 in hardware.

It sounds exciting, if slightly unexpected. I still don’t believe that people want subscription music. At least with iTunes, I know that I own the music that I buy. With subscription services I don’t own the music and I have to keep paying to listen whether I listen or not.

This is one of the reasons I cancelled my subscription to Screenselect. It’s a great service and works well, except that I just didn’t seem to watch the dvds. If I own something I can listen or watch it in the future. If I subscribe I have to watch it immediately. I think that represents a large barrier and I think eventually outright purchase will probably win. This is especially likely if content prices decline and producers realize that more money can be made by outright sale. The DVD market has been moving towards encouraging outright sale for some time. Warner Bros being the first major studio to deliberately reduce DVD prices to squeeze the rental market and encourage purchase of retail DVDs.

Who knows how it will turn out, but at the end of the day I want to own stuff, not rent it.

[link]

Well I feel stupid.

I was notified today that marilac.malcolmhardie.com (ie this server) was apparently hosting paypal login spoof web pages. Somebody managed to crack one of the user accounts on the system and place a few files in the public_html directory.

Fortunately the pages were only there for a few hours, but it shows how important it is to check the logs regularly.

This is really unfortunate, although at least at the moment it doesn’t look as if the cracker got root access.

What is particularly annoying is that, as far as I can see, I have all of my software patched to the latest versions.

I spent much of the afternoon checking the server to ensure that nothing else has been compromised. It may be necessary (or advisable) for me to wipe the whole machine and reinstall.

It does explain the previous email though. I just wish that I had understood what was happening earlier.

Today, one of the email accounts at malcolmhardie.com received a very strange email

just a line to let you know I have passed on you details to paypal and the police regards your scam emails trying to access my paypal account with bogus emails.

This was sent from what appears to be an AOL account. I won’t detail the sender for obvious reasons, but I was rather puzzled by it.

As I see it there are several possibilities for this:

1) Somebody has received spam email that appears to be from malcolmhardie.com and is thus trying (unsuccessfully) to report the culprit (which incorrectly appears to be someone at malcolmhardie.com)

2) A machine that is permitted to send email via malcolmhardie.com has been compromised and is sending out such mail. (unlikely, but possible)

3) The sender is actually some kind of spam harvester that is hoping legitmate recipients will send back letters complaining or, possibly, explaining the situation.

At the moment I’m tending towards option 1, since it seems most likely.

However I remain mystified by the whole thing.

One of the interesting things that seems to be happening with Cocoa is the addition of garbage collection. A finalize method has appeared in the documentation for NSObject. There is a curious warning attached to it stating that it isn’t available in 10.4 or earlier releases. This suggests that it may be available in 10.5 or possibly even in notional 10.4.x releases.

It may make Cocoa programming easier for people moving from Java. Although I do hope that Java support for cocoa apps continues (not least because SQLEditor needs it for JDBC interfacing)

If you’re in the UK, then today is Election Day.

Please vote if you haven’t already made a postal vote.

The inquirer has a preview of a new computer power supply that is rated at 850W with a peak of 950W. This is almost a whole kilowatt!

Who needs heating? Just install a few computers and you can have all of the heat you need and play Half life 2 (or probably 3 by that point) instead.

Technically the issue is the power draw from the graphics cards. This seems to be pushing upwards of 200W per card for high end products; and if you have more than one card in the machine the totals will be higher.

The key issue of course is whether such a monster PSU can be cooled efficiently and quietly enough for the consumer market. You would probably need quite a large fan to cool a 1kw PSU adaquately and that isn’t likely to be quiet.