Recent Comments:
Sonic Classic Collection announced for DS {Joystiq}
Dec 1st 2009 9:21PM Genesis runs great on DS too. jEnesisDS is amazing actually. But I don't use it anymore, so I might get this... make it a DSiWare release and you've got a deal, Sega.
Japanese hardware sales, Nov. 9 - Nov. 15: New direction edition {Joystiq}
Nov 22nd 2009 10:48PM Yeah, I own a DSi and right now there's nothing amazing out on DSiWare. Mario vs DK is fun and that's probably the best thing on the service. I just bought it now to get the 1000 free points. But I think more interesting titles are starting to make their way onto DSiWare, and the nice thing is everything is much cheaper than on WiiWare. Plus it's just handy not to have to dig around for cartridges, but then you can already do that on PSP I assume and on DS with *cough* illicit* *cough* methods.
I wish some company would force their publishers to do dual digital/physical releases. Sony had the opportunity with the PSP Go but I'm not sure WTF they're thinking right now with that. All digital will be nicer overall for the consumer (besides the resale/used market which is kind of a shame) but if they priced digital versions lower it would be a much better situation. I'm looking forward to the next generation of handhelds where hopefully everything can be downloaded or stored on the system so that we don't have to carry around carts or disks anymore.
Sony Ericsson Pureness hands-on: Pacman edition {Engadget}
Nov 21st 2009 2:23AM Cool, I like how trolls disappear now. Fading to grey was kind of lame.
AT&T 'hits' back at Verizon's Map for That campaign with an 'ad' of its own {Engadget}
Nov 18th 2009 9:38PM Incidentally, it's not entirely true that CDMA doesn't support voice and data at the same time. There is EV-DV, but it's never going to be put into use since Verizon is going to LTE instead. So on a technical matter, CDMA does support voice and data at the same time, just not EV-DO, and just not on any actual networks.
Tales of Vesperia voice actor says game is coming to Wii [update: Oops! He meant Tales of Graces!] {Joystiq}
Nov 7th 2009 11:09PM Hmm, I played Tales of Phantasia a few years back and ever since have been wanting to play another Tales game. I assume the original Symphonia is pretty good, right? I need to find a copy of it some time and play it.
New York attorney general files antitrust lawsuit against Intel {Engadget}
Nov 4th 2009 9:58PM @th4threat: Do you have any idea how IA64 works? There's a good reason it never took off, and that's because of VLIW. In a VLIW architecture, a bunch of instructions that can be run independently get stuffed into one word (hence Very Long Instruction Word) and then executed by the CPU at once. The problem is, this requires the compiler to make optimal chunks of instructions, and that is difficult because most tasks are not nearly parallel enough for this to be efficient.
On the other hand, in a pipelined, multiple issue (superscalar) architecture like x86, the instructions are compiled one after another, but when the CPU gets them it determines whether there are any dependencies, and if there aren't any they are executed at the same time, roughly speaking. This obviously requires more complicated hardware, but the compiler doesn't have to even know that it's happening, although the compiler can try to do things to optimize this like for example unrolling loops that don't have strict data dependencies.
Intel always claimed that with a better compiler Itanium would perform much better than x86, but the fact of the matter is that it's easier to optimize existing x86 compilers than write a very good IA64 compiler. Basically, VLIW shifts the burden of instruction level parallelism from the hardware to the compiler, and in general it seems to be harder to do it in the compiler stage than at runtime.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLIW , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_level_parallelism for more info.
Firefox 3.6 has juicy Superbar integration with Windows 7 (and you can disable it) {Download Squad}
Nov 1st 2009 2:41PM Yeah, the developers have been trying to figure out what the problem is but they haven't been successful thus far. They're considering disabling it for the final release if it's still buggy, although I wonder how people would react to having a feature disabled that was enabled in the beta. Still unsure whether they're going to remove the code completely or just pref it away.
Disney Epic Mickey screens and art are suitably epic {Joystiq}
Oct 29th 2009 3:45AM Ouch, being called out as a sony fanboy by tmac of all people. I think you've reached the 8th circle of Joystiq comment hell.
Majesco publishing DSi augmented reality game 'Ghostwire' in late 2010 {Joystiq}
Oct 27th 2009 8:54PM It shouldn't be too hard, I've seen something similar on a really old Nokia smartphone type device and it was able to track the background moving fine.
Report: Nintendo updating DSi with bigger screens this year {Joystiq}
Oct 26th 2009 7:18PM Yeah, me too, meh. Well, even if one did come out this year (really? There's what, two months left in the year?) in Japan, it would probably be another year before it got to the US and it's not like it adds faster/more hardware like the DSi did. I mean, I'd be pissed if this were true but I think the DSi's screens are already big enough.
