I spent HS and college in Wright's backyard, Madison WI. My folsk still live there.
They sent me an interesting article a few years back. It seems some archietcture professors ahve been doing some digging into Wright's more ntoeable failures. ity turns out his design in every case was correct-- it was contractors cheating on the quality of the materails that caused the problems.
(It was fairly common at the time for less then honest concrete contractors for inatance to water down their concrete mix feeling this was "good enough". Over the entier course of s tructure they could shave a fair bit of additional revenue.)
As to your "what Wright would say", I noticed no quotation marks. Is this conversation in your minds eye or do you have a direct Wright quote and attribution for it?
"If you open the gate to making Virtual Kiddie Porn legal (and the state of Kiddie Porn Technology (TM) advances to the point where it's photoreal), then suddenly, you have a huge enforcement problem"
Sorry, thats a very dangerous precedant.
If I see a black young man in a nice car, how do I know he didn't steal it? Should black males under the age of 30 be disallowed from owning cars so we can easily tell if one has been stolen?
Enforcement requires active proof. You cannot arbitrarily constrain freedom just to make law enforcement easier-- thats whats known as a "police state" and we aren't suppsoed to have one.
When discussing child porn you need to seperate the issues.
Child porn is illegal not because it is "sick" or "disgusting". It is illegal because by definition the creation of it requires a (heinous) illegal act-- the sexual abuse of children.
Looking at it this way, whatever else it is, CG pornoggraphy is definately NOT "child porn" any more then, say, porn with a 25 year old actress in pig-tails is. "No children were hurt or abused in the making of this pornography."
Once you have deal with that, all that is left is the issue of whether pornography should be illegal. Frankly, I don't see a good argument for that. So it offends you. So what? Bad movies and football both offend me, should they be illegal to protect my delicate sensabilities?
I disagree on peformance unless you are talking specificly memory footprint. In terms of memory footprint C++ still has a real advantage today.
In terms of actual number crunching though Java and C++ are roughly on a par today. In some things, such as arraya cces, C++ stil comes out in front, in other things, like inlining of recursion and monomorphic virtual methods or allocation/deallocation of short-lived objects, Java beats C++ handily.
IMO man will never discover alien intelligence in the heavens because he doesn't really want to fidn it. If he did, he wouldn't dismiss the examples right here on earth.
It took 10 years of fighting to get much of the scientific community admit thatour higher ape relatives (chimps, gorillas, and such) possess all the fundemental intellectual capability of about a 5 year old human child. The fight over ape-signing being communication was the focal point of the debate and at the same time the defining exampel of this humanocentric bias.
Even more amazing, wild porpises have shown all the same basic behaviro patterns as humans (including social touchign and recreational sex, as an aside.) There have alsoi beene xperiments with porpises that **stringly** suggest they have their own fairly sophisticated language.
To admit we aren't alone woudl be to admit we aren't unique. That we are just one of countless natural variations on life, no better or worse then any other. This last bit of humano-centricity, that somehow we are "not animals" is a hard thing for many people to accept, even many "objective" scientists.
The FRY's here is running a PS2 next to a Dreamcast running equivelent 3D fighting games.
The Dreamcast looks a whole lot better.
Fry's is selling a LOT of Dreamcasts.
The failure to include a low-pass filter (generally referred to as "full screen anti-aliasing") in hardware really cost Sony in market perception. Yes, it can be done in software but not without eating up a lot of system resources
Add to that the market opportunity they created for SEGA by Sony's failure to meet the market demand they created and you have, basically, a disaster.
Mu guess is that Sony has mreo or less given up on this round and is pinning their hopes on getting ahead of SEGA in the next one.
You can do many things with extra polys. For instance real reflections (not reflection maps) can be done by rendering the scene again from the POV of the reflecting poly. Shadow volumes can be created by a trick involving the stencil buffer, the z buffer, and a render from the POV of the light.
There will ALWAYS be a way to use the abiltiy to transform and render extra polys, no matter how many you have:)
Abrash gave the light side. Now I'd like to give you the dark side of the games industry:
(1) Game coders are expected to work burn-out hours. The 60+- horu week si a NORMAL week. It gets worse at push tiems like ebfore shows.
(2) Game coders get periodically pulled off of realwork to code "demos" that mean neothign but are apprently just vital to show at trade shows.
(3) Game coders are, by sotfware industry standards, highly underpaid. this i particualrly sad in that the ones who survive are by and large very fine, if sometiems not formally trained, engineers. Some game companies hav held out royalties as a compensatio nbut generally you only get thsoe as long as you continue to work for the same company. (See tabiulity commenst to follow.)
(4) The game industry is highly unstable. Combine the fact that it is a boom/bust busienss with the fact that management is generally fairly incompetant and what you have is an industry where companies go from being industry darlings to out of business in 2 to 3 years. (Anyone remember looking glass? Thats just a recent example.)
(5) Typical coding siutation: you have no control over budget, you have no control over schedule, you have no control over functionality and you are totally responsible for the success of the engineering effort. In point of fact, when a proejct fails, it is typical game company behavior not to ask why but just to fire everyoen associated with it. (Ironicly the one palce the fault msotlikel lies-- upper management, aren';t the oens who get canned.)
(6) Viewable/playable milestones. Because management is fudnementally incompetant they are afraid to commit to decisons. Theya re also afrid of their own judgement in people, and thus do not trsut their engineering team to deliver. The result is a schedule that forces the engioneers to get little tiny peices of functionality working and "playable" at a time.
As any good engineer knows this is a recipe for disaster in the form of monolithic, redundant, bug laden code.
(7) Design changes. Again, thanks to managemetns inabilti to commit, once they start playing with thsoe peices likely as not they will start doubting and changing their minds. They will make snap decisions that "this isn't fun" before enough of the game is there to tell anything. And then they wil lstar tchanging your spec... without changing your budget or delivery dates.
SO if you enjoy working too hard for too little money in a situation where you are forced to work in ways that make no engineering sense and upon which, at the end of the day, your job depends. The game industry is it.
Abrasj hasn't really experienced tyhe game industry. he's experienced workign in one, ver special place-- ID. I'm sure if we coudl al work for John Carmack game programming woudl be a dream-- but we can't.
Some flavor of C == Java
on
Antitrust
·
· Score: 3
"The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME) and programmers have real code on their screens (it looks like some flavor of C). "
Actually over on Java lobby the've identified the piece of code in the still on the Antiturst website as a fragment of Java Web Server, which was open sourced.
Does this mean if I contact the producers they have to send me the complete Java Web Server source?;)
And yes I think its a threat. its what I want. A decent desktop Unix without the weight of X on its shoulders.
There are runors Apple has an Intel port in the labs. Wonder if they'l get rbave enough thsi time to release it. If they did, IMo they could be in a position to be the next big OS company.
My brother, a *great* (if I say so myself) building hacker from MIT back in the 80's woudl probably be offended at the "gateway drug" refernce. (He ran and led the MIT off-limit undergread tour for many years.)
He's a scrupulously honest person who wouldn't trespass on places he didn't have a close familial relationship with.
Which is a good thing since building hacking , as theyc all it at MIT, did get him inetrested in security to the point now where as a hobby he's a professionally trained security expert and knwos hiw way around most locks and security systems:)
In msot of these other countries peoep lpay for services we Americans expect to be 'free'. They pay per minute communciation charges. They pay for a license to recieve off-air TV, the list is huge. They pay large taxes to supprot large government infrastructures to address (amogn other things0 some of Jon Katz's favorite issues
Americans always want everything for nothing. Slashdot is particularly good at this behavior. If you don't want the companies whsoe services you use making money off of the generated inforation, be prepared to make it up out of your own pocket.
The Linux Documentation project web pulishes any good Linux text.
O'Riely then prints LDP books for general distribution.
I can't see the need for your service. Ofcourse as an author who gets PAID to publish, and the son of similar authors, I've always felt "vanity publishing" was basicly a crock living off silly people's egos.
Keep in mind that a decision has already been rendered. The DOJ culd totally drop persuing it and it still doesnt mean the courts woudl find reason to over-turn it.
Besides I really don't think Bush's cronies want the polticial heat they'll get by suddenly dropping this.
He has a history as a conservative, business friendly jurist and no fan of anti-trust actions. When it first was evident he would get the case he called Microsoft an "engine of the US economy" and said he was "loathe to damage it."
So yes he was biased, TOWARD Microsoft. The fact taht even he was convined they were a predatory monopoly that needed controlling by the end says a lot and will be hard for MS to overturn using this tact.
They might do better in their PR battle with this line, though. The 2 minute memory of the American people never ceases to amaze me.
Slashdot Mirror
I spent HS and college in Wright's backyard, Madison WI. My folsk still live there.
They sent me an interesting article a few years back. It seems some archietcture professors ahve been doing some digging into Wright's more ntoeable failures. ity turns out his design in every case was correct-- it was contractors cheating on the quality of the materails that caused the problems.
(It was fairly common at the time for less then honest concrete contractors for inatance to water down their concrete mix feeling this was "good enough". Over the entier course of s tructure they could shave a fair bit of additional revenue.)
As to your "what Wright would say", I noticed no quotation marks. Is this conversation in your minds eye or do you have a direct Wright quote and attribution for it?
"If you open the gate to making Virtual Kiddie Porn legal (and the state of Kiddie Porn Technology (TM) advances to the point where it's photoreal), then suddenly, you have a huge enforcement problem" Sorry, thats a very dangerous precedant. If I see a black young man in a nice car, how do I know he didn't steal it? Should black males under the age of 30 be disallowed from owning cars so we can easily tell if one has been stolen? Enforcement requires active proof. You cannot arbitrarily constrain freedom just to make law enforcement easier-- thats whats known as a "police state" and we aren't suppsoed to have one.
When discussing child porn you need to seperate the issues.
Child porn is illegal not because it is "sick" or "disgusting". It is illegal because by definition the creation of it requires a (heinous) illegal act-- the sexual abuse of children.
Looking at it this way, whatever else it is, CG pornoggraphy is definately NOT "child porn" any more then, say, porn with a 25 year old actress in pig-tails is. "No children were hurt or abused in the making of this pornography."
Once you have deal with that, all that is left is the issue of whether pornography should be illegal. Frankly, I don't see a good argument for that. So it offends you. So what? Bad movies and football both offend me, should they be illegal to protect my delicate sensabilities?
I agree on generics.
I disagree on peformance unless you are talking specificly memory footprint. In terms of memory footprint C++ still has a real advantage today.
In terms of actual number crunching though Java and C++ are roughly on a par today. In some things, such as arraya cces, C++ stil comes out in front, in other things, like inlining of recursion and monomorphic virtual methods or allocation/deallocation of short-lived objects, Java beats C++ handily.
I live in California where there's no power anyway.
I think I'll take up reading by candelight for recreation....
Fomr the posts here I get the feeling some folks don't udnerstadn the economics of the platform market.
SEGA loses money on the Dreamcast
SONY loses monry on the PS/2
MS will certainly lsoe money on the X-Box.
The console is what is referredto in busiens sas a "loss leader". They sell it at a loss to gain incremental revenue. What is this revenue you ask?
Game liscensing. For every copy of every game sold for one of these boxes, the console manufacturer gets a license fee from the game publisher.
THATS why you want the market and give awya your hardware to get it. The revenues from license fees for the most successful game console are enormous.
JAVA
No wild pointers. No memory over-flows. Stronger OOP design structures.
I fiddn I spend a much much smaller amount of time debugging Java programs, with more stable results, then I ever got in C or C++.
If youa ctually read the Yahoo article-- its a third hand report. They are reporting that someone else reported....
a _d enies_rumor_of_dreamcast_s_demise_1.html
very sloppy, bad jounralism.
And SEGA has already denied it. This link
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/cn/20010123/tc/seg
is useful for the denial though the rest of the article is filled with similar sloppy/bad reporting as Yahoo tries to cover their first error...
IMO man will never discover alien intelligence in the heavens because he doesn't really want to fidn it. If he did, he wouldn't dismiss the examples right here on earth.
It took 10 years of fighting to get much of the scientific community admit thatour higher ape relatives (chimps, gorillas, and such) possess all the fundemental intellectual capability of about a 5 year old human child. The fight over ape-signing being communication was the focal point of the debate and at the same time the defining exampel of this humanocentric bias.
Even more amazing, wild porpises have shown all the same basic behaviro patterns as humans (including social touchign and recreational sex, as an aside.) There have alsoi beene xperiments with porpises that **stringly** suggest they have their own fairly sophisticated language.
To admit we aren't alone woudl be to admit we aren't unique. That we are just one of countless natural variations on life, no better or worse then any other. This last bit of humano-centricity, that somehow we are "not animals" is a hard thing for many people to accept, even many "objective" scientists.
'nuff said
You guys ARE kidding aren't you?
Otherwise here's a news falsh for ya-- you can't trademark a single letter of the alphabet.
(If you could I'd trademark E and sue everyone!)
The anti-trust suit was brought by the DOJ, which is funded diretly out of all of our taxes.
Eactly how do you think Sun is funding it? Outside of paying a reasonably large amoutn of coporate taxes due to their excellent sales, I see no link.
The FRY's here is running a PS2 next to a Dreamcast running equivelent 3D fighting games.
The Dreamcast looks a whole lot better.
Fry's is selling a LOT of Dreamcasts.
The failure to include a low-pass filter (generally referred to as "full screen anti-aliasing") in hardware really cost Sony in market perception. Yes, it can be done in software but not without eating up a lot of system resources
Add to that the market opportunity they created for SEGA by Sony's failure to meet the market demand they created and you have, basically, a disaster.
Mu guess is that Sony has mreo or less given up on this round and is pinning their hopes on getting ahead of SEGA in the next one.
In re polys.
:)
You can do many things with extra polys. For instance real reflections (not reflection maps) can be done by rendering the scene again from the POV of the reflecting poly. Shadow volumes can be created by a trick involving the stencil buffer, the z buffer, and a render from the POV of the light.
There will ALWAYS be a way to use the abiltiy to transform and render extra polys, no matter how many you have
Um. Where is the PS3 info?
"Please Sir, to be giving me that large expensive computer around your waist, or else I be blowing your head off with my handgun."
Abrash didn't write Doom.
Doom was Carmack and Compnay. ID's first game after Wolfenstien3D. Abrash joined ID just for Quake3. Before then he was a writer.
I enjoyed his Zen of optimization and he made man ygood points. Mode X was interesting but ultimately not all that useful.
His attempt at "fast" 3D in Dr. Dobbs though was pretty pitiful. Nowhere near as fast as rend386 on my old 386.
Abrash gave the light side. Now I'd like to give you the dark side of the games industry:
(1) Game coders are expected to work burn-out hours. The 60+- horu week si a NORMAL week. It gets worse at push tiems like ebfore shows.
(2) Game coders get periodically pulled off of realwork to code "demos" that mean neothign but are apprently just vital to show at trade shows.
(3) Game coders are, by sotfware industry standards, highly underpaid. this i particualrly sad in that the ones who survive are by and large very fine, if sometiems not formally trained, engineers. Some game companies hav held out royalties as a compensatio nbut generally you only get thsoe as long as you continue to work for the same company. (See tabiulity commenst to follow.)
(4) The game industry is highly unstable. Combine the fact that it is a boom/bust busienss with the fact that management is generally fairly incompetant and what you have is an industry where companies go from being industry darlings to out of business in 2 to 3 years. (Anyone remember looking glass? Thats just a recent example.)
(5) Typical coding siutation: you have no control over budget, you have no control over schedule, you have no control over functionality and you are totally responsible for the success of the engineering effort. In point of fact, when a proejct fails, it is typical game company behavior not to ask why but just to fire everyoen associated with it. (Ironicly the one palce the fault msotlikel lies-- upper management, aren';t the oens who get canned.)
(6) Viewable/playable milestones. Because management is fudnementally incompetant they are afraid to commit to decisons. Theya re also afrid of their own judgement in people, and thus do not trsut their engineering team to deliver. The result is a schedule that forces the engioneers to get little tiny peices of functionality working and "playable" at a time.
As any good engineer knows this is a recipe for disaster in the form of monolithic, redundant, bug laden code.
(7) Design changes. Again, thanks to managemetns inabilti to commit, once they start playing with thsoe peices likely as not they will start doubting and changing their minds. They will make snap decisions that "this isn't fun" before enough of the game is there to tell anything. And then they wil lstar tchanging your spec... without changing your budget or delivery dates.
SO if you enjoy working too hard for too little money in a situation where you are forced to work in ways that make no engineering sense and upon which, at the end of the day, your job depends. The game industry is it.
Abrasj hasn't really experienced tyhe game industry. he's experienced workign in one, ver special place-- ID. I'm sure if we coudl al work for John Carmack game programming woudl be a dream-- but we can't.
"The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME) and programmers have real code on their screens (it looks like some flavor of C). "
;)
Actually over on Java lobby the've identified the piece of code in the still on the Antiturst website as a fragment of Java Web Server, which was open sourced.
Does this mean if I contact the producers they have to send me the complete Java Web Server source?
And forgive me if ist been pointed out ebfore...
MacOSX is basically FreeBSD udner the hood.
And yes I think its a threat. its what I want. A decent desktop Unix without the weight of X on its shoulders.
There are runors Apple has an Intel port in the labs. Wonder if they'l get rbave enough thsi time to release it. If they did, IMo they could be in a position to be the next big OS company.
Should have expected that from Salon.
:)
My brother, a *great* (if I say so myself) building hacker from MIT back in the 80's woudl probably be offended at the "gateway drug" refernce. (He ran and led the MIT off-limit undergread tour for many years.)
He's a scrupulously honest person who wouldn't trespass on places he didn't have a close familial relationship with.
Which is a good thing since building hacking , as theyc all it at MIT, did get him inetrested in security to the point now where as a hobby he's a professionally trained security expert and knwos hiw way around most locks and security systems
In msot of these other countries peoep lpay for services we Americans expect to be 'free'. They pay per minute communciation charges. They pay for a license to recieve off-air TV, the list is huge. They pay large taxes to supprot large government infrastructures to address (amogn other things0 some of Jon Katz's favorite issues
Americans always want everything for nothing. Slashdot is particularly good at this behavior. If you don't want the companies whsoe services you use making money off of the generated inforation, be prepared to make it up out of your own pocket.
Thats life as an adult, folks.
The Linux Documentation project web pulishes any good Linux text.
O'Riely then prints LDP books for general distribution.
I can't see the need for your service. Ofcourse as an author who gets PAID to publish, and the son of similar authors, I've always felt "vanity publishing" was basicly a crock living off silly people's egos.
Keep in mind that a decision has already been rendered. The DOJ culd totally drop persuing it and it still doesnt mean the courts woudl find reason to over-turn it.
Besides I really don't think Bush's cronies want the polticial heat they'll get by suddenly dropping this.
He has a history as a conservative, business friendly jurist and no fan of anti-trust actions. When it first was evident he would get the case he called Microsoft an "engine of the US economy" and said he was "loathe to damage it."
So yes he was biased, TOWARD Microsoft. The fact taht even he was convined they were a predatory monopoly that needed controlling by the end says a lot and will be hard for MS to overturn using this tact.
They might do better in their PR battle with this line, though. The 2 minute memory of the American people never ceases to amaze me.