Windows 10, Edge, Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud are BRILLIANT for your privacy. Nobody will ever know who you are or what you do online. Nobody. =)
It would have been nice if they had made the release date, but I'd rather play with a bug-free ArcaOS release than one where the installer fails midway or similar. This is OS/2 with a lot of modernization work done on it from the looks of it. Its going to be interesting to see what Blue Lion can run software wise.
Why can't you have tweets that are much longer - say 2000 words, or a whole magazine article? Why can't you have some layout options in your tweets? You know, like we used to with DTP (Desktop Publishing) 20+ years ago? I just don't understand Twitter's obsession with "short messages". What's so bad about longer tweets? Or are they no longer tweets then? Very confusing....
... different people have different preferences. One person may love to see Nolan's "Dunkirk" on a huge cinema screen, where the experience is probably quite overpowering. Another may prefer to pop the Dunkirk Bluray into his living room Bluray player and experience the film on a smaller screen in the comfort of his home.
Also, some people - like working adults with children - simply don't have the time for a 3+ hour trip to the local multiplex.
I used to love going to the cinema when I was 13 - 25 years old. I wanted to watch everything on the big screen.
These days I like watching Bluray's or streaming movies at home - some even on a laptop screen with headphones on.
The films still work. After the first 3 minutes, you forget what kind of screen you are watching on.
You cannot expect everybody, in this day and age, to prefer cinema over home viewing options.
Macromedia had two popular web plugin platforms in the early 2000s - Flash and ShockWave (for publishing Macromedia Director content online). Shockwave got a good 3D engine with built-in Havok physics (ShockWave3D, developed by Intel if I'm not mistaken), Flash didn't get a 3D engine, although many Flash devs asked for it. When Director was neglected, first by Macromedia and then very, very seriously by Adobe (which let Director die completely), ShockWave3D, which started as a very promising Web3D technology, failed. Flash never got a decent 3D engine - although you could embed Flash content inside Director/ShockWave and use ShockWave3D alongside a Flash UI for example. So Flash never had a good chance at going 3D - which might have saved it when people began tiring of 2D Flash. So that's basically it - ShockWave got 3D capability, Flash didn't.
So film enthusiasts are supposed to spend themselves silly on 4K TV sets, upconverting BluRay players, broadband internet or streaming setups, and then you can't view a film the day it is released because you need to be at the cinema for that? What is the difference between me "not going to the cinema and waiting 90 days for the rental" and "not going to the cinema and waiting 0 days for the rental"? People who WANT to go to cinema WILL go to the cinema. What's the point of keeping people who like to see films @home waiting for 20 - 90 days anyway?
"Promotes unsustainable ideals" you say. I see... So if a blatant injustice happens to someone, they shouldn't "scream out loud" or expect that injustice to be redressed in any way, because that would be "unsustainable ideals" at work. May I ask: Precisely WHAT are the ideals you hold dear, and how are THEY sustainable, while other ideals are not?
Have you considered that Mainstream movies - which are watched around the world - have a big impact on people who don't read or think much, or don't have a good education, or have been indoctrinated into holding socially destructive views? I have an education that steered me away from engaging in racism, intolerance, prejudice and so forth from a very young age. But there still is a shitload of racism, intolerance, prejudice, sexism and other nastiness in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people in different countries and communities around the world encounter it every day. THAT is what the "social justice" message in movies is all about. You are showing people who actively engage in injustice loud and clear that injustice isn't something good or tolerable. And you are sending a message to victims of injustice that they are not alone, that injustice can be fought if you stand up to it and fight it. I see nothing wrong with such a message. What I DO see as wrong is arguing that these themes should be removed from the movies - that the problems addressed will simply "fade away by themselves" if nobody talks about them or makes films about them. Problems don't "go away" if you stop talking about them or pretend they don't exist. In fact, injustice would quickly become "normalized" if you didn't address it in films, on television, in books and journalism. Anybody could do whatever they want to another person, and nobody would make films or TV programs about it, or report on it anymore. That isn't the kind of world I want to live in.
Excuse me for interrupting your "Leftist Hollywood Sucks Bad And Gen Z Rejects It" propaganda broadcast, but precisely WHAT is wrong with films having a "Social Justice" or "Social/Societal Progress" message woven into the narrative? Would you prefer films where all sorts of injustices happen, and those injustices are not corrected by a protagonist or an outraged society or a government? Films where people suffer racism, abuse, discrimination, violence and other injustices, and nobody does anything about it? I would also like you to explain to me what a "Social Justice Warrior" is, since I hear that term thrown around by righties here all the time, even though you haven't used it in your post. Somebody who sees injustice and speaks out or fights against it is a SJW? And that's a "bad thing thing to be" that Generation Z sees right through and won't let happen anymore? Is this your worldview? Do you dream of a world where a "very different" right-leaning Gen Z rejects "social justice" and "being progressive" as "just evil propaganda" and turns into a kind of Hitler-Youth where "might is right" and where if you are mistreated "that's your problem, not society's problem"?
Turkey is a country where you HAVE to go through airport-style metal detectors and X-ray machines every time you step into a fricking shopping center. You have to remove your keys, wallet, smartphone every time you enter a shopping center. If you are parking your car at a shopping center in Istanbul, security personnel makes you pop open the trunk of your car to check that there is nothing dangerous hidden in it. This is to keep shoppers safe from would-be attackers, because the country has suffered under terrorist attacks since the 1980s. What makes you think that in such a country, Istanbul airport has laxer screening than, say, JFK or Heathrow? Or that Istanbul doesn't have the latest X-Ray machines and other gear? I can understand being nervous about lax security at, say, Mogadishu airport. but Istanbul? Seriously?
So if you are travelling to the U.S. or the UK from "The Good Airports", nobody bothers you. Try to fly from Istanbul to New York or LA, though, and you are stripped of your electronics for the entire duration of the long flight? What if you are a businessperson who needs to work while on the plane? What if you have concerns about putting a 2,500 Dollar laptop full of your private data in your luggage, where it may break or become lost, rather than carrying it on your person? And what precisely can go into a Laptop or Smartphone that is sooo well hidden that airport X-Ray scanners don't see it? Plus: Wouldn't would-be attackers be smart enough to get on a plane from a "Good Airport" as opposed to a "Bad Airport" after such a ban? Am I missing something about the point of this ban?
I love the way in the 21st Century we keep reading news headlines that end in "... than previously thought". Its always science news, too. Something or the other is always..................... than previously thought. =) Of course updating what we "know" according to new data is a good thing. But its striking how often ".... than previously thought" appears in the news.
I had a 2 hour conversation last year with an IOT devices engineer who works for a multi-billion dollar Japanese Corporation. They guy didn't think Privacy was important or at risk at all through IOT devices. "Every home will have many of them soon" he said. He thought that realtime 3D face recognition - CCTV networks being able to identify you ANYWHERE IN PUBLIC with great accuracy even if you are not facing the camera, have grown a beard or are wearing a baseball cap - was a great step forward in human technological development. They guy kept talking about "new markets, new profits, a great future for our company". He literally DID NOT CARE what these technologies mean for people's Privacy. Every time I voiced even mild concerns about what these surveillance capable technologies might do to people's privacy, he acted terribly *shocked*. Apparently the corporation he works sees great profits in building IOT, face recog tech & other surveillance capable tech, and my bringing up concerns about them was something he was - wait for it - "uncomfortable with". =) This is what IOT is - faceless, nameless engineers crapping all over other people's lives because the companies that employ them expect a new XX Billion Dollar a year market from them.
In fact, MAME already seems to allow HLSL processing of games you are playing:
http://docs.mamedev.org/advanc...
The idea is simple - figure out the visual phenomena commonly seen on a CRT screen. Write a pixel shader in HLSL/GLSL that mimics those visual phenomena using realtime image processing operations. This might be a combination of visible scanlines, blurryness around pixels, some bloom, warping of the image and so forth. Even an old Nvidia 500 series GPU can comfortably do these effects in realtime at 30 FPS or more.
I don't listen to radio. I do watch MTV however. Almost all of the "hit songs" with "expensive music videos" rotating on MTV are simplistic compositions that are not the work of a "great artist". Music today is a far cry from the 20th Century - very manufactured, very simple, very made-for-money and very forgettable. Where are today's U2, Metallica, Pearl Jam and other great bands? Where are music albums with 10 tracks where 6 to 7 of those tracks are actually good? It seems to me that music has fallen victim to a "it has to make money from teens, it has to make money from teens, it has to make money from teens" mindset that produces only forgettable music tracks. Its the same thing that happened to movies - who in God's name needs to 30 same-feeling horror/comic book hero movies every year? The solution is simple - ALLOW GENUINE ARTISTS TO PRODUCE SOMETHING ACTUALLY GOOD. The rest is design-by-committee, made-for-quick-bucks trash that nobody will even remember in the 2020s. We had actually talented artists in the 20th Century. Now we have The Chainsmokers for music and film directors who can't pace a movie or frame a shot properly.
Turkey is very far along on the way to becoming both a non-Democracy and a repressive Theocracy. After the ruling AK party forcibly turned about 90% of the country's mainstream media outlets into its mouthpieces over the years, tens of millions of secular Turks flocked to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to be able to talk to each other, to be able to get "unfiltered news", to be able to express themselves freely and to also openly criticize the direction the country is being dragged in. Now THAT too is being cracked down on. VPNs are currently non-functional in Turkey. If a website is blocked, you're not gonna find a way to access it anymore. Well known websites get blocked or slowed down all the time (last week Youtube and Twitter were quite often slow or inacessible). This, unfortunately, is what Turkey's future looks like. Few rights for people, very little self expression allowed (at least not without consequences), many bans on the internet, ideological pressure on all media outlets and citizens. That is the overall picture in Turkey, and it doesn't look like it will change anytime soon.
Slashdot used to be a site once where actual nerds/geeks/science majors used to comment on science and technology news. You could learn a lot from their opinions and insights, whether they agreed with your viewpoint or not. Now every time someone posts a Global Warming related story on Slashdot, a 4 story building worth of paid-per-post anti-AGW Trolls, each likely operating 20 - 50 sock puppet accounts, seem to post crap that Global Warming "isn't happening" or "cannot caused by human activity". The mere fact that this happens on a once "free" discussion site like Slashdot leads me to believe that a) Global Warming must be getting VERY bad indeed and b) the Energy Industry is very concerned about financial liability issues arising from this. By this I mean that when AGW starts to cause early deaths, natural disasters, major economic and environmental damage, contagious disease outbreaks and similar trouble in different parts of the world, the industry wants to be able to pretend that "nobody is liable for this because AGW simply does not and cannot exist". For this you obviously need a few hundred million dollars worth of Internet Trolls who flood sites like Slashdot with "IT ISN'T US. IT ISN'T US. IT ISN'T US..." Sad. Very, very sad.
Autodesk bought Softimage XSI for cheap, and just killed it to remove competition from their flagship products 3DMAX and MAYA. There is a huge thread about this over on cgsociety.org: http://forums.cgsociety.org/sh......Basically, anybody who built their studio pipeline around Softimage XSI, including many indy game developers, is royally screwed. Softimage's most powerful feature "ICE" (a multithreaded, node-based visual programming language that lets even non-programmers build custom tools and functions inside Softimage) is being migrated to Autodesk Maya instead. Its going to be called "Bifrost", as it is the "second coming" of Softimage ICE. Many Softimage users are wondering what other 3D software they can migrate to. Many are considering migrating to SideFX's "Houdini" (http://www.sidefx.com/), which is a very powerful procedural-animation software used extensively in some of the most complex VFX shots you see in Hollywood films, like the character shatter effects in TRON LEGACY. Some are considering moving to the open-source Blender 3D software, to escape from Autodesk's business policies completely. Basically, Autodesk bought Softimage, slowly killed it, ripped out the best bits, and is now forcing Softimage users to migrate to either 3DMAX or Maya, which are Autodesk's cash cows in the Media & Entertainment division. A lot of people are very pissed off about this. But this is hardly the first time Autodesk has killed a successful product (e.g. the once-excellent Autodesk Combustion), because it didn't make enough money for Autodesk's profit hungry shareholders. A sad day for Softimage XSI users. It has powered films ranging from the first Jurrassic Park to the recent LEGO movie. It was particularly strong at pulling off complex character animation, including complex muscle-and-sliding-skin simulations (e.g. the all-CG primates in "Dawn Of The Planet Of The APES"). XSI was a good CG software. It will be sorely missed by many... If Blender can get its UI overhaul right in the next release, some XSI users may migrate to the open-source software.
Battlefield 3 was no fun to play. It was a real system hog, had unacceptably long map load times, had an external HTML-based server browser that sucked, and the gameplay pretty much consisted of you entering the game, and being mowed down by a higher ranking player with more unlocked gadgets in the first 20 seconds. Battlefield 2 was a lot of fun. Battlefield 2142 was also great (Scifi-themed) fun. Battlefield 3 sucked bad in terms of simple things like "overall enjoyment" and "fun gameplay". As for Battlefield 4, I personally have little hope that EA has learned anything from Battlefield 3's gameplay problems. I'm guessing that it will suck on the gameplay side like BF3 did, but that it will have prettier graphics (which of course will require a bang-up-to-date PC or laptop to enjoy properly). My 2 Cents...ü
I'm still trying to find a way to use the GPU for computations without having to jump through crazy hoops to do it. Also, multithreading in general is often a PITA to get right...
Not only is C# easy to learn, and easy to both read and write, it also runs at a fairly high speed when it is compiled. To make use of multiple CPU Cores, C# has a neat feature named PARALLEL.FOR. If your algorithm scans across a 2D Data Array using a FOR LOOP at all, Parallel.For will automatically break that array into smaller arrays, and have each calculated by a different CPU core, resulting in a much faster overall computation speed. I develop algorithms in C# and highly recommend it if you want a) a nice, readable code syntax and b) fast execution speed. I hope this helps...
Its very, very similar - a lot of shared DNA - but I think LibreOffice Write has some extra functionality - like the right-click Thesaurus - that isn't in OpenOffice Write. I could be wrong though since I don't have OO Write installed right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 10, Edge, Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud are BRILLIANT for your privacy. Nobody will ever know who you are or what you do online. Nobody. =)
It would have been nice if they had made the release date, but I'd rather play with a bug-free ArcaOS release than one where the installer fails midway or similar. This is OS/2 with a lot of modernization work done on it from the looks of it. Its going to be interesting to see what Blue Lion can run software wise.
Why can't you have tweets that are much longer - say 2000 words, or a whole magazine article? Why can't you have some layout options in your tweets? You know, like we used to with DTP (Desktop Publishing) 20+ years ago? I just don't understand Twitter's obsession with "short messages". What's so bad about longer tweets? Or are they no longer tweets then? Very confusing....
... different people have different preferences. One person may love to see Nolan's "Dunkirk" on a huge cinema screen, where the experience is probably quite overpowering. Another may prefer to pop the Dunkirk Bluray into his living room Bluray player and experience the film on a smaller screen in the comfort of his home. Also, some people - like working adults with children - simply don't have the time for a 3+ hour trip to the local multiplex. I used to love going to the cinema when I was 13 - 25 years old. I wanted to watch everything on the big screen. These days I like watching Bluray's or streaming movies at home - some even on a laptop screen with headphones on. The films still work. After the first 3 minutes, you forget what kind of screen you are watching on. You cannot expect everybody, in this day and age, to prefer cinema over home viewing options.
Macromedia had two popular web plugin platforms in the early 2000s - Flash and ShockWave (for publishing Macromedia Director content online). Shockwave got a good 3D engine with built-in Havok physics (ShockWave3D, developed by Intel if I'm not mistaken), Flash didn't get a 3D engine, although many Flash devs asked for it. When Director was neglected, first by Macromedia and then very, very seriously by Adobe (which let Director die completely), ShockWave3D, which started as a very promising Web3D technology, failed. Flash never got a decent 3D engine - although you could embed Flash content inside Director/ShockWave and use ShockWave3D alongside a Flash UI for example. So Flash never had a good chance at going 3D - which might have saved it when people began tiring of 2D Flash. So that's basically it - ShockWave got 3D capability, Flash didn't.
My cat has fallen in love with Windows 10. It makes her litter box run far more efficiently than OS/2 Warp did.
So film enthusiasts are supposed to spend themselves silly on 4K TV sets, upconverting BluRay players, broadband internet or streaming setups, and then you can't view a film the day it is released because you need to be at the cinema for that? What is the difference between me "not going to the cinema and waiting 90 days for the rental" and "not going to the cinema and waiting 0 days for the rental"? People who WANT to go to cinema WILL go to the cinema. What's the point of keeping people who like to see films @home waiting for 20 - 90 days anyway?
"Promotes unsustainable ideals" you say. I see... So if a blatant injustice happens to someone, they shouldn't "scream out loud" or expect that injustice to be redressed in any way, because that would be "unsustainable ideals" at work. May I ask: Precisely WHAT are the ideals you hold dear, and how are THEY sustainable, while other ideals are not?
Have you considered that Mainstream movies - which are watched around the world - have a big impact on people who don't read or think much, or don't have a good education, or have been indoctrinated into holding socially destructive views? I have an education that steered me away from engaging in racism, intolerance, prejudice and so forth from a very young age. But there still is a shitload of racism, intolerance, prejudice, sexism and other nastiness in the world. Hundreds of thousands of people in different countries and communities around the world encounter it every day. THAT is what the "social justice" message in movies is all about. You are showing people who actively engage in injustice loud and clear that injustice isn't something good or tolerable. And you are sending a message to victims of injustice that they are not alone, that injustice can be fought if you stand up to it and fight it. I see nothing wrong with such a message. What I DO see as wrong is arguing that these themes should be removed from the movies - that the problems addressed will simply "fade away by themselves" if nobody talks about them or makes films about them. Problems don't "go away" if you stop talking about them or pretend they don't exist. In fact, injustice would quickly become "normalized" if you didn't address it in films, on television, in books and journalism. Anybody could do whatever they want to another person, and nobody would make films or TV programs about it, or report on it anymore. That isn't the kind of world I want to live in.
Excuse me for interrupting your "Leftist Hollywood Sucks Bad And Gen Z Rejects It" propaganda broadcast, but precisely WHAT is wrong with films having a "Social Justice" or "Social/Societal Progress" message woven into the narrative? Would you prefer films where all sorts of injustices happen, and those injustices are not corrected by a protagonist or an outraged society or a government? Films where people suffer racism, abuse, discrimination, violence and other injustices, and nobody does anything about it? I would also like you to explain to me what a "Social Justice Warrior" is, since I hear that term thrown around by righties here all the time, even though you haven't used it in your post. Somebody who sees injustice and speaks out or fights against it is a SJW? And that's a "bad thing thing to be" that Generation Z sees right through and won't let happen anymore? Is this your worldview? Do you dream of a world where a "very different" right-leaning Gen Z rejects "social justice" and "being progressive" as "just evil propaganda" and turns into a kind of Hitler-Youth where "might is right" and where if you are mistreated "that's your problem, not society's problem"?
Turkey is a country where you HAVE to go through airport-style metal detectors and X-ray machines every time you step into a fricking shopping center. You have to remove your keys, wallet, smartphone every time you enter a shopping center. If you are parking your car at a shopping center in Istanbul, security personnel makes you pop open the trunk of your car to check that there is nothing dangerous hidden in it. This is to keep shoppers safe from would-be attackers, because the country has suffered under terrorist attacks since the 1980s. What makes you think that in such a country, Istanbul airport has laxer screening than, say, JFK or Heathrow? Or that Istanbul doesn't have the latest X-Ray machines and other gear? I can understand being nervous about lax security at, say, Mogadishu airport. but Istanbul? Seriously?
So if you are travelling to the U.S. or the UK from "The Good Airports", nobody bothers you. Try to fly from Istanbul to New York or LA, though, and you are stripped of your electronics for the entire duration of the long flight? What if you are a businessperson who needs to work while on the plane? What if you have concerns about putting a 2,500 Dollar laptop full of your private data in your luggage, where it may break or become lost, rather than carrying it on your person? And what precisely can go into a Laptop or Smartphone that is sooo well hidden that airport X-Ray scanners don't see it? Plus: Wouldn't would-be attackers be smart enough to get on a plane from a "Good Airport" as opposed to a "Bad Airport" after such a ban? Am I missing something about the point of this ban?
I love the way in the 21st Century we keep reading news headlines that end in "... than previously thought". Its always science news, too. Something or the other is always ..................... than previously thought. =) Of course updating what we "know" according to new data is a good thing. But its striking how often ".... than previously thought" appears in the news.
This looks like a lot of highly trained sharks will have to go into retirement now. =)
I had a 2 hour conversation last year with an IOT devices engineer who works for a multi-billion dollar Japanese Corporation. They guy didn't think Privacy was important or at risk at all through IOT devices. "Every home will have many of them soon" he said. He thought that realtime 3D face recognition - CCTV networks being able to identify you ANYWHERE IN PUBLIC with great accuracy even if you are not facing the camera, have grown a beard or are wearing a baseball cap - was a great step forward in human technological development. They guy kept talking about "new markets, new profits, a great future for our company". He literally DID NOT CARE what these technologies mean for people's Privacy. Every time I voiced even mild concerns about what these surveillance capable technologies might do to people's privacy, he acted terribly *shocked*. Apparently the corporation he works sees great profits in building IOT, face recog tech & other surveillance capable tech, and my bringing up concerns about them was something he was - wait for it - "uncomfortable with". =) This is what IOT is - faceless, nameless engineers crapping all over other people's lives because the companies that employ them expect a new XX Billion Dollar a year market from them.
Reminds me of this early 2000s internet gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In fact, MAME already seems to allow HLSL processing of games you are playing: http://docs.mamedev.org/advanc... The idea is simple - figure out the visual phenomena commonly seen on a CRT screen. Write a pixel shader in HLSL/GLSL that mimics those visual phenomena using realtime image processing operations. This might be a combination of visible scanlines, blurryness around pixels, some bloom, warping of the image and so forth. Even an old Nvidia 500 series GPU can comfortably do these effects in realtime at 30 FPS or more.
I don't listen to radio. I do watch MTV however. Almost all of the "hit songs" with "expensive music videos" rotating on MTV are simplistic compositions that are not the work of a "great artist". Music today is a far cry from the 20th Century - very manufactured, very simple, very made-for-money and very forgettable. Where are today's U2, Metallica, Pearl Jam and other great bands? Where are music albums with 10 tracks where 6 to 7 of those tracks are actually good? It seems to me that music has fallen victim to a "it has to make money from teens, it has to make money from teens, it has to make money from teens" mindset that produces only forgettable music tracks. Its the same thing that happened to movies - who in God's name needs to 30 same-feeling horror/comic book hero movies every year? The solution is simple - ALLOW GENUINE ARTISTS TO PRODUCE SOMETHING ACTUALLY GOOD. The rest is design-by-committee, made-for-quick-bucks trash that nobody will even remember in the 2020s. We had actually talented artists in the 20th Century. Now we have The Chainsmokers for music and film directors who can't pace a movie or frame a shot properly.
Turkey is very far along on the way to becoming both a non-Democracy and a repressive Theocracy. After the ruling AK party forcibly turned about 90% of the country's mainstream media outlets into its mouthpieces over the years, tens of millions of secular Turks flocked to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to be able to talk to each other, to be able to get "unfiltered news", to be able to express themselves freely and to also openly criticize the direction the country is being dragged in. Now THAT too is being cracked down on. VPNs are currently non-functional in Turkey. If a website is blocked, you're not gonna find a way to access it anymore. Well known websites get blocked or slowed down all the time (last week Youtube and Twitter were quite often slow or inacessible). This, unfortunately, is what Turkey's future looks like. Few rights for people, very little self expression allowed (at least not without consequences), many bans on the internet, ideological pressure on all media outlets and citizens. That is the overall picture in Turkey, and it doesn't look like it will change anytime soon.
Slashdot used to be a site once where actual nerds/geeks/science majors used to comment on science and technology news. You could learn a lot from their opinions and insights, whether they agreed with your viewpoint or not. Now every time someone posts a Global Warming related story on Slashdot, a 4 story building worth of paid-per-post anti-AGW Trolls, each likely operating 20 - 50 sock puppet accounts, seem to post crap that Global Warming "isn't happening" or "cannot caused by human activity". The mere fact that this happens on a once "free" discussion site like Slashdot leads me to believe that a) Global Warming must be getting VERY bad indeed and b) the Energy Industry is very concerned about financial liability issues arising from this. By this I mean that when AGW starts to cause early deaths, natural disasters, major economic and environmental damage, contagious disease outbreaks and similar trouble in different parts of the world, the industry wants to be able to pretend that "nobody is liable for this because AGW simply does not and cannot exist". For this you obviously need a few hundred million dollars worth of Internet Trolls who flood sites like Slashdot with "IT ISN'T US. IT ISN'T US. IT ISN'T US..." Sad. Very, very sad.
Autodesk bought Softimage XSI for cheap, and just killed it to remove competition from their flagship products 3DMAX and MAYA. There is a huge thread about this over on cgsociety.org: http://forums.cgsociety.org/sh... ...Basically, anybody who built their studio pipeline around Softimage XSI, including many indy game developers, is royally screwed. Softimage's most powerful feature "ICE" (a multithreaded, node-based visual programming language that lets even non-programmers build custom tools and functions inside Softimage) is being migrated to Autodesk Maya instead. Its going to be called "Bifrost", as it is the "second coming" of Softimage ICE. Many Softimage users are wondering what other 3D software they can migrate to. Many are considering migrating to SideFX's "Houdini" (http://www.sidefx.com/), which is a very powerful procedural-animation software used extensively in some of the most complex VFX shots you see in Hollywood films, like the character shatter effects in TRON LEGACY. Some are considering moving to the open-source Blender 3D software, to escape from Autodesk's business policies completely. Basically, Autodesk bought Softimage, slowly killed it, ripped out the best bits, and is now forcing Softimage users to migrate to either 3DMAX or Maya, which are Autodesk's cash cows in the Media & Entertainment division. A lot of people are very pissed off about this. But this is hardly the first time Autodesk has killed a successful product (e.g. the once-excellent Autodesk Combustion), because it didn't make enough money for Autodesk's profit hungry shareholders. A sad day for Softimage XSI users. It has powered films ranging from the first Jurrassic Park to the recent LEGO movie. It was particularly strong at pulling off complex character animation, including complex muscle-and-sliding-skin simulations (e.g. the all-CG primates in "Dawn Of The Planet Of The APES"). XSI was a good CG software. It will be sorely missed by many... If Blender can get its UI overhaul right in the next release, some XSI users may migrate to the open-source software.
Battlefield 3 was no fun to play. It was a real system hog, had unacceptably long map load times, had an external HTML-based server browser that sucked, and the gameplay pretty much consisted of you entering the game, and being mowed down by a higher ranking player with more unlocked gadgets in the first 20 seconds. Battlefield 2 was a lot of fun. Battlefield 2142 was also great (Scifi-themed) fun. Battlefield 3 sucked bad in terms of simple things like "overall enjoyment" and "fun gameplay". As for Battlefield 4, I personally have little hope that EA has learned anything from Battlefield 3's gameplay problems. I'm guessing that it will suck on the gameplay side like BF3 did, but that it will have prettier graphics (which of course will require a bang-up-to-date PC or laptop to enjoy properly). My 2 Cents...ü
I'm still trying to find a way to use the GPU for computations without having to jump through crazy hoops to do it. Also, multithreading in general is often a PITA to get right...
Not only is C# easy to learn, and easy to both read and write, it also runs at a fairly high speed when it is compiled. To make use of multiple CPU Cores, C# has a neat feature named PARALLEL.FOR. If your algorithm scans across a 2D Data Array using a FOR LOOP at all, Parallel.For will automatically break that array into smaller arrays, and have each calculated by a different CPU core, resulting in a much faster overall computation speed. I develop algorithms in C# and highly recommend it if you want a) a nice, readable code syntax and b) fast execution speed. I hope this helps...
Its very, very similar - a lot of shared DNA - but I think LibreOffice Write has some extra functionality - like the right-click Thesaurus - that isn't in OpenOffice Write. I could be wrong though since I don't have OO Write installed right now.