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The Courts

Judge Berates Prosecutors In Xbox Modding Trial 285

mrbongo writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Opening statements in the first-of-its-kind Xbox 360 criminal hacking trial were delayed here Wednesday after a federal judge unleashed a 30-minute tirade at prosecutors in open court, saying he had 'serious concerns about the government's case.' ... Gutierrez slammed the prosecution over everything from alleged unlawful behavior by government witnesses, to proposed jury instructions harmful to the defense. When the verbal assault finally subsided, federal prosecutors asked for a recess to determine whether they would offer the defendant a deal, dismiss or move forward with the case that was slated to become the first jury trial of its type. A jury was seated Tuesday."

Comment Re:Don't blame the platform (Score 2, Informative) 412

The majority of developers are going to make their games cross-platform to maximize sales. Without anything to differentiate it, the PS3 and 360 just get the same games (with a very limited number of exclusives).

That said, speaking as a developer for both platforms, you're massively overstating the performance of both consoles there. The PS3 has around 200 GFLOPS of cpu performance, the 360 has around 100. Theoretically, if every single CPU instruction is a multiply-add (hahahahaha). In practice, the PS3 is very hard to program for because you have to shift everything to SPU programs to get any performance out of it at all, and the 360 will run ordinary multi-threaded code, so it evens out. Graphics-wise, the PS3 has around 200 GFLOPS of shader power (note that this only totals 400 GFLOPS, not 2 TFLOPS. Sony did a slide claiming 2 TFLOPS once, they were including texture samplers or something, not only programmable FLOPS), and the 360 has about 240 GFLOPS of shader power.
Overall that's 400 GFLOPS for PS3 and 340 GFLOPS for 360. They're actually quite close.

Comment Re:Awesome (Score 2, Interesting) 188

Did you forget that AMD was selling Athlon XP and Athlon MP chips at wildly different prices, even though you could enable MP on the Athlon XP by drawing on them with a pencil?

Done that. It ups the heat output of the chip from "lots" to "ow my fingerprints"...

I suspect that the chips actually sold as MP were from the higher-end binnings so that they produced less heat (the same bins that the highest performance and the laptop versions of the chips also come from). The "midrange" chips often can't be clocked to the same speed as the top-end chips, because they are physically inferior.

Incidentally the Athlon XP-M chips used less power and put out less heat than the normal ones, and oddly were left with MP enabled. Unfortunately unless you have an MP board capable of manually altering the CPU multiplier (mine didn't) or you cut a bunch of traces on the chip, they'll only run at 4x the fsb (600MHz in my case). Seeing how things freak out when you have one 2GHz cpu and one 600MHz cpu in SMP was interesting though.

Comment Re:News For Nerds Please (Score 1) 89

These days "data" is usually used as an uncountable, which doesn't have a singular or plural. You have to add measuring terms, e.g. kilobytes of data, or on its own it means data in general (which being an uncountable, uses the singular).

So all of these would be technically correct:
A datum does not process or analyse itself. (generic singular)
Data do not process or analyse themselves. (generic plural)
Data does not process or analyse itself. (uncountable)

The original quote is still wrong though.

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