Recent Comments:
Tales of Vesperia voice actor says game is coming to Wii {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.
Firefox 3.6 reaches beta stage {Download Squad}
Oct 15th 2009 1:06AM Yeah, everyone always does this. Note the RC1 appended to the name... But uh, I've been running Firefox 3.6 nightlies for several months and it's been pretty good so far, the nightlies almost always feel faster than the stable branch and the recent landing of Windows 7 tab previews is awesome, although currently a bit buggy.
Samsung's solar Blue Earth launching in Sweden this month, elsewhere soon {Engadget}
Oct 14th 2009 2:19AM This is a cool idea, but I have to wonder how long during the day a phone is even outside. I mean, for me it's in my pocket 99% of the day and I don't think the 10-15 minutes max I'm actually using it are enough to charge it. But I guess maybe if you had something like this you'd wear it on a lanyard thing to make sure it got sunlight.
Firefox 3.6 to recognize if your computer is tilted {Download Squad}
Oct 13th 2009 8:32PM It was mainly for Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox, and they found that it was easy enough to add to the desktop versions so they did it.
NVIDIA Tegra to power next-gen Nintendo DS? {Engadget}
Oct 13th 2009 8:03PM @Fernando: Actually, the DSi is kind of like the GBA to the GBC. It does have more horsepower than the DS Lite so there must have been a reason for it other than to serve as a stopgap.
